YOU ARE THE WORLD CHAPTER 6 5TH FEBRUARY 1969 3RD PUBLIC TALK AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY AS WE WERE saying yesterday, we are not concerned with theories, with doctrines, or speculative philosophy. We are concerned with facts, with what actually is. And in understanding "what is", non-sentimentally, non-emotionally, we can go beyond, transcend it. What is important in all these talks is not the idea, or the negation of the idea, but rather to be involved in the complexities of life, in the sorrow, with hopelessness and the lack of passion. The root of the word passion means "sorrow". We are using that word not with the implication of sorrow, or of the energy that comes through anger, through hate, through resistance, but rather in the sense of passion that comes naturally without effort when there is love. This evening we would like to talk about death, life and love. We are not merely concerned with the description, with the explanation, but rather with the deep understanding of the problem, so that we are totally involved in it, so that it is the very breath of our life, not mere intellectualization. Can we look, understand and see what this whole problem of living is? Can we really come to grips with life, love and death - not analytically, not theoretically? To speculate about what lies beyond seems to me to be so vain, it has no value whatsoever. To understand the whole significance of life one has to examine what living is. Clever people throughout the world have sought a significance beyond the living. The religious people have said this life is only a means to an end; and those who are not religious say that life is meaningless, Then they proceed to invent some significance according to their intellect, their conditioning. We are not going to do that this evening. We are going to look at living as it is - not emotionally, nor sentimentally -but see actually what it is. And I think it is meaningful when one can look at the whole totality of living, not just at one fragment of it. Then perhaps, by not giving a meaning or a significance to life, we will see the beauty of living, the very vastness of it. And that beauty, the extraordinary quality of living, can only be understood, or felt deeply, if we examine profoundly what we call living, what we are actually doing. Without understanding what living is, we shall not be able to understand what dying is, nor what love is. One uses the words "love", "death", and "living" so loosely -every politician talks about,love" and every priest has that word on his lips. Love and death, both are of immense importance, and I say that without understanding what death is, there is no understanding of love. To understand what death is, one has to understand most profoundly, with great earnestness, what living is; one must examine freely, actually without any hope. It doesn't mean we must be in a state of despair to examine. A mind that is in despair becomes cynical; nor can a mind that is burdened with hope examine properly, it is already biased. So to examine what we call living, the daily act of living, needs clarity, not of thought, but clarity of perception: the clarity of seeing actually "what is". The seeing of "what is", that very act is passion! For most of us passion is always derived from hatred, from sorrow, anger, tension; or there is passion that is brought about through pleasure which becomes lust. Such passion is incapable of the energy that is required to understand this whole process of living. Understanding really is passion; without passion you can't do anything. Intellectual passion is not passion at all. But to examine the whole of living needs not only extraordinary clarity of perception, but also the intensity of passion. So what is it that we call living? Not what we would like it to be - that's just an idea, it has no reality, it's merely the opposite of "what is". The opposite of "what is" creates division and in that division there is conflict. In looking at what living is, we should utterly banish the idea of what "should be", for that is escaping into ideological seeing, which is totally unreal. We are only going to examine what living actually is; and the quality of examination is more important than the examination itself. Any clever person can examine, given a certain sharpness of mind, a certain sensitivity. But if the exploration is merely intellectual it loses that sensitivity which comes when there is a certain quality of compassion, affection, care. To have that quality of mind that looks very clearly, there must be this care, this quality of affection and compassion, which the intellect will deny. We must be alert to the prompting of the intellect in the examination of what is actually going on in our daily life - one needs some warning, if I may use that word, to know that the description is never the described, nor the word the thing. As we said, without understanding what living is, we shall never understand what dying is, and without understanding what death is, love merely becomes pleasure and therefore pain. What is it that we call living? As one observes in daily life, in every relationship with people, with ideas, with property, with things, there is great conflict. To us, all relationship has become a battlefield, a struggle. From the moment we are born till we die, living is a process of accumulating problems, never resolving them, of being burdened with all kinds of issues. Basically it is a field in which man is against man. So living is conflict. Nobody can deny that, we are all in conflict, whether we like it or not. We want to get away from this everlasting conflict, so we invent all kinds of escapes - from football to the image of God. Each of us knows not only the burden of that conflict, but also the sorrow, the loneliness, the despair, the anxiety, the ambition and the frustration, the utter boredom, the routine. There are occasional flashes of joy to which the mind immediately clings as something extraordinary and wants repeated; then that joy becomes a memory, ashes. That is what we call living. If we look at our own life -not verbally or intellectually, but actually as it is - we see "how empty it is. Think of spending forty, fifty years going to the office every day, to accumulate money to sustain a family and all the rest of it. That's what we call living - with disease, old age and death. And we try to escape from this misery through religion, through drink, through erudition, through sex, through every form of entertainment, religious or otherwise. That is our life despite our theories, ideals and philosophy; we live in conflict and sorrow. Our life has brought about a culture, a society, which has become the trap in which we are caught. The trap is built by us; for that trap each one of us is responsible. Though we may revolt against the established order, that order is what we have made, what we have built. And merely to revolt against it has very little meaning, because you will create another established order, another bureaucracy. All this, with the national, racial, religious differences, the wars and the shedding of blood and tears, is what we call living, and we don't know what to do. We are confronted with this. Not knowing what to do, we try to escape, or we try to find somebody who will tell us what to do, some authority, guru, teacher, someone who will say, "Look, this is the way". The teachers, the gurus, the mahatmas, the philosophers, have all led us astray, because actually we have not solved our problems, our lives are not different. We are the same miserable, unhappy, sorrow-laden people. So the first thing is never to follow another, including the speaker. Never try to find out from another how to behave, how to live. Because what another tells you is not your life. If you rely or depend on another you will be misled. But if you deny the authority of the guru, the philosopher, the theoretician - whether Communist or theological - then you can look at yourself, then you can find the answer. But as long as one relies and depends on another, however wise he may be, one is lost. The man who says he knows, does not know. So the first thing is never to follow another and that is very difficult because we don't know what to do; we have been so conditioned to believe, to follow. In examining this thing called "living", can we actually - not theoretically - put aside every form of psychological following, every urge to find somebody who will tell us what to do? How can a confused mind find somebody who will tell the truth? The confused mind will choose somebody according to its own confusion. So don't rely or depend on another. If we do, we carry a heavy burden, the burden of dependence on books, on all the theories of the world; that is a tremendous burden and if you can put it aside then you are free to observe, then you have no opinion, no ideology, no conclusion, but can actually see "what is". Then you can look, then you can say: "What is this conflict that one lives with? As one observes - and I hope you are also observing, not depending on the words of the speaker - you will see this conflict exists as long as there is contradiction in oneself, the contradiction of opposing desires; as long as there is the opposite, the "what is" and the "what should be". The "what" should be" is the opposite of "what is" and "what should be" is shaped by "what is". So the opposite is also "what is". Living is a process of conflict in which there is violence; that is "what is", the fact. The opposite is "nonviolence", a state in which there is no conflict, no violence. The man who is violent is trying to become non-violent. It may take him ten years, or it may take him all the rest of his life to become non-violent, but in the meantime he is sowing the seeds of violence. So there is the fact of violence and the non-fact, which is non-violence, which is the opposite. In this contradiction there is conflict: the man trying to become something. When you can banish the opposite, not try to become nonviolent, then you can actually face violence. Then you have energy which is not dissipated through conflict with the opposite. Then you have the energy, the passion, to find out "what is". Am I making this clear? You know, communication is quite arduous, but what is much more important than communication is communion: to commune together over this problem; that is, both of us at the same time, at the same level being intent to observe, to learn, to find out. Only then is there communion between two people, which goes beyond communication. We are trying to do both; we are not only establishing communication, but also at the same time we are trying to commune together over this problem. This is not propaganda, we are not trying to dominate you, or persuade you, or influence you, but merely ask you to observe. Now I see that to observe, to see actually "what is", is not possible when there is the opposite. The ideal is the cause of the contradiction and therefore of the conflict. When you are angry and you say "I should not be angry", the "should not" brings about a contradiction and therefore there is a division between anger and the pretence that one should not be angry. To admit your anger and to be aware, to see the significance of that anger, you need energy and that energy is dissipated through conflict and through the pursuit of the opposite. So can you leave the opposite altogether? This is very difficult, because the opposite is not only the ideal but also it is the process of measuring and comparing. When there is no comparison then there is no opposite. You know, we are trained and conditioned to compare, to measure ourselves against the hero, the saint, the big man. To observe "what is", the mind must be free of all comparison, of the ideal, of the opposite. Then you will see that what actually "is", is far more important than what "should be". Then you have the energy, the vitality, to put aside the contradiction which is brought about by the opposite. To be free of the process of comparison requires discipline and that discipline comes in the very act of understanding the futility of the opposite. To observe this closely, to see the whole structure and nature of this conflict, this very act of looking demands discipline; it is dis- cipline. Discipline means learning and we are learning - not suppressing, not trying to become something, not trying to imitate, to conform. This discipline is extraordinarily pliable, sensitive. Each one of us is examining this conflict. We said it arises through the opposite. The opposite is part of "what is". The opposite is also "what is". And as the mind cannot understand or resolve "what is", it escapes into "what should be". When you have put aside all that, then the mind is observing closely, what is", which is violence (we are taking that as an example). So what is this thing we call violence? When there is no opposite to violence, when you are actually faced with that fact of anger, the feeling of hatred - then is there violence, is there anger? Go into it, if I may suggest, you will see it in yourself. I can't go into it in too much detail because we have got to understand what death is, what love is; so we must proceed rather rapidly. What we call living is conflict and we see what that conflict is. When we understand that conflict, "what is" is the truth and it is the observation of the truth that frees the mind from "what is". There is also much sorrow in our life and we do not know how to end it. The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom. Without knowing what sorrow is and understanding its nature and structure, we shall not know what love is, because for us love is sorrow, pain, pleasure, jealousy. When a husband says to his wife that he loves her and at the same time is ambitious, has that love any meaning? Can an ambitious man love? Can a competitive man love? And yet we talk about love, about tenderness, about ending war, when we are competitive, ambitious, seeking our own personal position, advancement and so on. All this brings sorrow. Can sorrow end? It can only come to an end when you understand yourself, which is actually "what is". Then you understand why you have sorrow, whether that sorrow is self-pity, or the fear of being alone, or the emptiness of your own life, or the sorrow that comes about when you depend on another. And all this is part of our living. When we understand all this we come to a much greater problem, which is death. Please bear in mind that we are not talking about reincarnation, about what happens after death. We are not talking about that, or giving hope to those people who are afraid of death. Yesterday we went into the question of fear. When the mind is free of fear, then what is death? There is old age with all its troubles: disease, loss of memory, a thousand ailments, the fear of ageing. In this country all the old people are called young! A woman of about eighty is called a young lady! People are frightened and when there is fear there is no understanding; when there is self-pity there is no end to sorrow. So what is it to die? The organism comes to an end, obviously. Man lives for ninety years, and if the scientists discover some medicine he might live one hundred and fifty - and God knows why he wants to live to one hundred and fifty, the way we live! But even then, even if you live for one hundred years, the organism wears out, because we live so utterly wrongly: in conflict, fear, tension, killing animals and human beings. What a mess we make of our lives! So old age becomes a terrible thing. Yet there is always death - for the young, for the middle-aged or for the old. What do we mean by dying, apart from physical death, which is inevitable? There is a deeper meaning to death than merely the physical organism coming to an end; that is, psychologically coming to an end - the "me", the "you", coming abruptly to an end. The "me", the "you", that has accumulated knowledge, suffered, lived with memories pleasurable and aching, with all the travail of the known, with the psychological conflicts, the things that one has not understood, the things that one wanted to do and has not done. The psychological struggle, the memories, the pleasure, the pains - all that comes to an end. That is actually what one is afraid of, not what lies beyond death. One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end. The known being your house, your family, your wife, your chil- dren, your ideas, your furniture, your books, the things with which you have identified yourself. When that is gone you feel completely isolated, lonely, that is what you are afraid of. That is a form of death and that is the only death. Seeing that - not theoretically, but actually - seeing that one is afraid of losing everything that one has owned or created or worked for, one asks: "Is it not possible to die psychologically, every day, to everything that one has known?" Can one die every day, so that the mind is fresh, young and innocent each day? Actually do it and you will find out what extraordinary things happen. The mind then becomes innocent. An old mind, however experienced, is never innocent. Only a mind that has shed all its burdens every day, that has ended every problem every day, is an innocent mind. Then life has a different meaning altogether. Then one can find out what love is. Obviously love is not pleasure; as we said yesterday, pleasure brings pain because pleasure, like fear, is the process of thought. If love is the process of thought, then is it love? Most of us are jealous, envious, and yet we talk about love. Can an envious mind love? When one says one loves, is it love? Or is the mind protecting its own pleasure and therefore cultivating fear? Can love be cultivated when there is fear and pleasure, which is thought? And with it comes the problem of sex. (Laughter) Why do you laugh? I'm glad you laugh, but why? We have to explore this question, as we have explored fear and what living is. Why have we made sex into such a big issue. Why has sex become such a problem? Apparently everything revolves around it, not only now, but also in the past. It has become such an extraordinarily important thing Why? Would you please find out? We are not offering an opinion, we are examining. It has become so colossally important, first, because intellectually we are secondhand people. We know what others have done and do, we repeat others have said - the Buddha, Christ, and all the others - we theorize. That is not intellectual freedom, which is freedom from thought. We are bound by thought, and thought is always old, it is never new; so intellectually there is no freedom in the deep sense of that word, because thought can never bring about that freedom. Intellectually we are bound and emotionally we are shoddy, ugly, sentimental, false, hypocritical. So in life we have lost all freedom, except sex. That is probably the only free thing that you have. And with it goes pleasure, the image which thought has created about the act and we chew that image, that pleasure, like a cow chews the cud, over and over again. That is the only thing you have in which you are really free as a human being. Everywhere else you are not free, because we are slaves to propaganda whether it is Christian, Catholic, or Communist. Lacking freedom everywhere, there is only this freedom and that too is not freedom, because you are caught by pleasure and the responsibility of pleasure, which is the family. But if you really loved the family, the children, if you really loved with your heart, do you think you would have a single day of war? Your security is in pleasure and therefore in that security there is pain, sorrow and confusion; and so in everything, including sex, there is pain, torture, doubt, jealousy, dependence. The one thing you have in which you feel free has also become a bondage. So seeing all this - actually, not verbally, not carried away by description, because the description is never the thing that is described - seeing it with your eyes, with your heart, with your mind, with complete attention, you will know what love is. And also you will know what death is, and what living is. YOU ARE THE WORLD CHAPTER 7 6TH FEBRUARY 1969 4TH PUBLIC TALK AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY MAN IS SEARCHING for something more than the transient. Probably from time immemorial he has been asking himself if there is something sacred, something that is not worldly, that is not put together by thought, by the intel- lect. He has always asked if there is a reality, a timeless state not invented by the mind, not projected by thought, but a state of mind where time does actually not exist: if there is something "divine", "sacred", "holy" (if one can use those words), that is not perishable. Organized religions seem to have supplied the answer. They say there is a reality, there is a God, there is something which the mind cannot possibly measure. Then they begin to organize what they consider to be the real and man is led astray. You may remember the story about the devil who was walking down the street with a friend; they saw a man ahead stoop down and pick up something from the road. And as he picked it up and looked at it there was a great delight in his face; the friend of the devil asked what it was that he had picked up and the devil said, "It is truth". The friend said, "Isn't that a very bad business for you?" The devil answered, "Not at all, I am going to help him organize it,. (Laughter) The worship of an image made by the hand or by the mind and the dogmas and rituals of organized religion, with their sense of beauty, have become something very holy, very sacred. And so man, in his search for that which is beyond all measure, all time, has been caught, trapped, deceived, because he always hopes to find something which is not entirely of this world. After all, what actually have traditional, bureaucratic, capitalist, or Communist societies to offer? Very little except food, clothes and shelter. Perhaps one may have more opportunities for work or can make more money, but ultimately, as one observes, these societies have very little to offer; and the mind, if it is at all intelligent and aware, rejects it. Physiologically one needs food, clothes and shelter, that is absolutely essential. But when that becomes of the greatest importance, then life loses its marvellous meaning. So this evening it might be worthwhile spending some time to find out for ourselves if there really is something sacred, something which is not put together by thought, by circumstances, which is not the result of propaganda. It would be worthwhile, if we could, to go into this question, because unless one finds something that is not measurable by words, by thought, by any experience, life - that is, everyday living - becomes utterly superficial. Perhaps that is why (though maybe not) the present generation rejects this society and is looking for something beyond the everyday struggle, ugliness, brutality. Can we inquire into the question, "What is a religious mind? What is the state of the mind which can see what truth is? You may say "there is no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as God, God is dead, we must make the best of this world and get on with it. Why ask such questions when there is so much confusion, so much misery, starvation, ghettos, racial prejudices; let's be concerned with all that, let's bring about a humanitarian society". Even if this were done - and I hope it will be done - this question must still be asked. You may ask it at the end of ten, fifteen, fifty years, but this question will inevitably be asked. It must be asked: whether there is a state which puts an end to time. First of all there must be freedom to look, freedom to observe if there is such a state or not; we cannot possibly assume anything. So long as there is any assumption, any hope, any fear, then the mind is distorted, it cannot possibly see clearly. So freedom is absolutely necessary in order to find out. Even in a scientific laboratory you need freedom to observe; you may have an hypothesis, but if it interferes with the observation then you put it aside. It is only in freedom that you can discover something totally new. So if we are going to venture together, not only verbally but nonverbally, then there must be this freedom from any sense of personal demand, any sense of fear, hope or despair; we must have clear eyes, unspotted, unconditioned, so that we can observe out of freedom. That is the first thing. In the past three talks we have found that there is the question of fear and pleasure. If that is no clear and if one has not applied oneself to the question of fear, then it will not be possible to follow further into what we are going to explore. Obviously our minds are conditioned by beliefs - Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and so on. Unless there is complete freedom from belief of any kind, it is not possible to observe, to find out for oneself if there is a reality which cannot be corrupted by thought. And one must also be free from all social morality, because the morality of society is not moral. A mind that is not highly moral, a mind that is not embedded in righteousness, is not capable of being free. That's why it is important to understand oneself, to know oneself, to see the whole structure of oneself - the thoughts, the hopes, the fears, the anxieties, the ambitions, and the competitive, aggressive spirit. Unless one understands and deeply establishes righteous behaviour, there is no freedom, because the mind gets confused by its own uncertainty, by its own doubts, demands, pressures. So to enquire into this fundamental question as to what is the religious mind, and whether there is such a thing, there must be this freedom, not only at the conscious level, but also at the deeper levels of one's consciousness. Most of us have accepted that there is an unconscious, that it is something hidden, dark, unknown. Without understanding the totality of that unconscious, merely to scratch the surface by analytical examination has very little meaning, whether it is done by the professionals or through one's own enquiry. So one has to look into this also, into the conscious mind as well as into the mind that is deep down, secret, hidden, which has never been exposed to the light of intelligence, to the light of enquiry. Can we also go into the question whether the conscious mind - that is the everyday mind, the mind that has sharpened itself through competition, through so-called education -whether such a mind can examine the deeper, unconscious layers. What is this treasured unconscious which everybody talks about? Must one go through all the volumes written by the specialists to find out? Must one go to an expert to tell us what it is? Or can one find out for oneself - completely, not partially, not in fragments? It is said that you must dream, otherwise you will go mad, because dreams are the hints, the intimations of the unconscious and the secret, unexplored layers of the mind. Dreams therefore are an expression of these deeper layers, and in this way, if you or the analyst are capable of interpreting the dreams, then you can expose, empty the unconscious. No one has ever asked why one should dream at all. It is said that you must dream, that it is healthy, normal; but one can question the validity of that statement because one must doubt everything. (This doubt gives you energy, vitality, passion to find out.) We must ask why one should have dreams at all, because if the mind is working all the time, is endlessly in movement night and day, then it has no rest, it cannot refresh itself, it cannot make itself anew. It is like a machine that is constantly working; it wears itself out. So one asks, as we are doing now, "What is the need for dreams?" It may be possible not to dream. After asking that question we are going to find out if it is possible not to dream, because the unconscious is the storehouse of the past, the racial and family inheritance, the tradition of society, the various formulas, sanctions and motives, the inheritance from the animal - it is all there. Through dreams these are revealed bit by bit and one must be capable of interpreting them rightly. That, of course, is quite impossible. There are experts who will translate all those dreams - but according to their conditioning, according to their knowledge, according to the information which they have derived from others. So we are asking: is there a need for dreams? Is it possible not to dream? Consciousness is obviously not only of what is above, but also of what is below - the total thing. If during the waking day the content of the mind can be observed, watched, then when you sleep there will be no necessity for dreams. That is, if during the waking hours you are aware of your thoughts, of your feelings, of your reactions, your motives, the tradition, the inhibitions, the various forms of compulsion, the tensions - if you watch them, not correct them, not force them to be different, not translate them, but if you are actually choicelessly aware during the day - then the mind is so alert, so sensitive to every reaction, to every movement of thought, that the motives, the racial inheritance and all the rest of it are thrown up and exposed. Then you will see, if you do it seriously, with intensity, with a passion to find out, that your nights are peaceful, without a dream, so that the mind upon waking is fresh, clear, without distortion. The personal element is dissolved so that it can observe completely; this is possible, not by applying what the experts say, but through studying yourself as you watch yourself in the mirror when you shave, or when you comb your hair. Then you will find out that the whole of the unconscious is as petty, shallow, dull, as the superficial mind; there is nothing holy about the unconscious. Then the mind, being free from fear, from all the pain brought by pleasure, is not looking for pleasure. Bliss is not pleasure, bliss is something entirely different. Pleasure, as we pointed out, brings with it pain and therefore fear, but the mind is looking for pleasure - ultimate pleasure - because the pleasures that we have in this world are so worn out, they have become so dull and faded, and so one is always looking for new pleasures. But such a mind is always in a state of fear. A mind that is seeking everlasting pleasure, or wanting experiences that will assure great pleasure, such a mind is in darkness. You can observe this as a very simple fact. So the mind, without being free from fear and the search for the deepening and the widening of pleasure - which brings pain and anxiety and all the burden and travail of pleasure - such a mind is not free. And a mind which believes that there is a God, or that there is no God, is equally a conditioned, prejudiced mind. I hope you can do all that! The speaker is emphatic but don't be persuaded by him, for he has no authority at all. In this matter of finding out, there is no authority, there is no guru, there is no teacher. You are the teacher and the disciple yourself. If only one could put all authority aside, for that is the greatest difficulty - to be free and yet be established in righteousness, in virtue, because virtue is order. We live in great disorder; the society in which we live is in utter disorder, with social injustice, racial differences, economic, nationalistic divisions. As you observe in yourself, we are also in disorder, and the disordered mind cannot possibly be free. So order, which is virtue, is necessary; order, not according to some blueprint or according to the priests or those who say "We know and you don't know". Order is virtue and this order can only come about when we understand what is disorder. Through the negation of what is disorder, order comes into being. In denying the disorder of society there is order, because society encourages acquisitiveness, competition, envy, strife, brutality, violence. Look at the armies, the navies - that is disorder! When you deny - not society, but inwardly in yourself - fear, ambition, greed, envy, the search for pleasure and prestige - which breeds inward disorder -then in the total denial of that disorder there comes the order which is beauty, which is not merely the result of environmental pressures or environmental behaviour. There must be order and you will find that order is virtue. If one has done all this - and one must - then one can ask: "What is meditation?" It is only the meditative mind that can find out, not the curious mind, not the mind that is everlastingly searching. It is a peculiar thing, that when the mind is searching, it will find what it is searching for. But what; it searches for and finds is already known, because what it finds must be recognizable - mustn't it? Recognition is part of this search, and experience and recognition come from the past. So in the experience which comes through search in which recognition is involved, there is nothing new, it has already been known. That's why people take drugs of various kinds; this has been done in India for thousands of years, it is an old trick to bring about the sharpening of the mind, to have new experiences; but one has never examined what experience itself means. One says one must have new experience; new visions. When one has an experience, a new vision, say of Christ or of Buddha or Krishna, that vision is the projection of your own conditioning. The Communist, if he has visions at all, will see the perfect state all beautifully arranged where everything is bureaucratically laid down. Or if you are a Catholic, you will have your visions of Christ or the Virgin and so on; it all depends on your conditioning. And when you recognise that vision, you recognise it because it his already been experienced, already known. So there is nothing really new in the recognition of a vision. A mind that is influenced by drugs, Though it may temporarily become sharp and see something very clearly, what it sees is its own conditioning, its own pettiness, enlarged. If you have done all this - and I hope you have done it for your own sake - we are now ready to enter into something that demands a great sense of perception, beauty and sensitivity. The word "meditation" has been brought to this country from the East. The Christians have their own words, contemplation and so on, but "meditation" has now become very popular. It is said by the yogis and gurus that meditation is a means to discover, to go beyond, to experience the transcendental. But have you asked who is the experiencer? Is the experiencer different from the thing he experiences? Obviously not, because the experiencer is the past with all its memories and when he experiences, transcends through meditation, or through taking a drug, he projects from the past, recognizes it and says, "this is a marvellous vision". It is nothing of the kind, because a mind burdened with the past cannot possibly see what is new. We have now come to the point of finding out what meditation is. When you examine a method, a system, what is implied in it? Somebody says "Do these things, practise them day after day, for twelve, twenty, forty years and you will ultimately come to reality". That is, practise a method, whatever it is, but in practising a method what happens? Whatever you do as a routine every day, at a certain hour, sitting cross-legged, or in bed, or walking, if you repeat it day after day your mind becomes mechanical. So when you see the truth of that, you see that what is implied in all that is mechanical, traditional, repetitive, and that it means conflict, suppression, control. A mind made dull by a method cannot possibly be intelligent and free to observe. They have brought Mantra Yoga from India. And you also have it in the Catholic world - Ave Maria repeated a hundred times. This is done on a rosary and obviously for the time being quiets the mind. A dull mind can be made very quiet by the repetition of words and it does have strange experiences, but those experiences are utterly meaningless. A shallow mind, a mind that is frightened, ambitious, greedy for truth or for the wealth of this world, such a mind however much it may repeat some so-called sacred word remains shallow. If you have understood yourself deeply, learnt about yourself through choiceless awareness and have laid the foundation of righteousness, which is order, you are free and do not accept any so-called spiritual authority whatsoever (though obviously one must accept certain laws of society). Then you can find out what meditation is. In meditation there is great beauty, it is an extraordinary thing if you know what meditation is - not "how to meditate". The "how" implies a method, therefore never ask "how; there are people only too willing to offer a method. But meditation is the awareness of fear, of the implications and the structure and the nature of pleasure, the understanding of oneself, and therefore the laying of the foundation of order, which is virtue, in which there is that quality of discipline which is not suppression, nor control, nor imitation. Such a mind then is in a state of meditation. To meditate implies seeing very clearly and it is not possible to see clearly, or be totally involved in what is seen, when there is a space between the observer and the thing observed. That is, when you see a flower, the beauty of a face, or the lovely sky of an evening, or a bird on the wing, there is space - not only physically but psychologically - between you and the flower, between you and the cloud which is full of light and glory; there is space -psychologically. When there is that space, there is conflict, and that space is made by thought, which is the observer. Have you ever looked at a flower without space? Have you ever observed something very beautiful without the space between the observer and the thing observed, between you and the flower? We look at a flower through a screen of words, through the screen of thought, of like and dislike, wishing that flower were in our own garden, or saying "What a beautiful thing it is". In that observation, whilst you look, there is the division created by the word, by your feeling of liking, of pleasure, and so there is an inward division between you and the flower and there is no acute perception. But when there is no space, then you see the flower as you have never seen it before. When there is no thought, when there is no botanical information about that flower, when there is no like or dislike but only complete attention, then you will see that the space disappears and therefore you will be in complete relationship with that flower, with that bird on the wing, with the cloud, or with that face. And when there is such a quality of mind, in which the space between the observer and the thing observed disappears and therefore the thing is seen very clearly, passionately and intensely, then there is the quality of love; and with that love there is beauty. You know, when you love something greatly - not through the eyes of pleasure or pain - when you actually love, space disappears, both physically and psychologically. There is no me and you. When you come so far in this meditation, then you will find that quality of silence which is not the result of "thought seeking silence". They are two different things - aren't they? Thought can make itself quiet - I don't know if you have ever tried it. We struggle against thought because we see very well that unless it is quiet there is neither peace in the world nor inwardly -there is no bliss. So we try in various ways to quiet the mind through drugs, through tranquilizers, through the repetition of words. But the silence of the mind that is made quiet by thought is not comparable with the silence which freedom brings - freedom from all the things that we have talked about. In that silence, which is of quite a different quality than the silence brought about by thought, there is a different dimension. This is a different state which you have to find out for yourself; nobody can open the door for you, and no word, no description can measure that which is immeasurable. So unless one actually takes this long journey -which is not long at all, it is immediate - life has very little meaning. And when you do it you will find out for yourself what is sacred. Do you want to ask any questions? Isn't this silence better than questions? If you are inwardly quiet, isn't that better than any question and answer? If you are really quiet, then you have love and beauty - the beauty that is not in the building, in the face, in the cloud, in the wood, but in your heart. That beauty cannot be described, it is beyond expression. And when you have that, no question need ever be asked. YOU ARE THE WORLD CHAPTER 8 11TH FEBRUARY 1969 1ST PUBLIC TALK AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY IT IS BECOMING more and more difficult to live peacefully in this world without withdrawing into a monastery or some self-enclosing ideology. The world is in such disorder, and there have been so many theories and speculative suggestions on how to live and what to do. Philosophers have been at it for so long, spinning out their ideas of what man is and what he should do. As one travels throughout the world - not being a philosopher or a human being crowded in with many ideologies and having no belief whatsoever about anything - one asks oneself whether it is at all possible for human beings to change. When one asks that question (and I'm sure those of us who are somewhat thoughtful and serious do ask it), one hears it said that we should first change the world - that is, change the social structure with its economy - and that it must be a global change, a global revolution, not a change affecting only a part of the world. Then, it is said, there will be no need for the individual human being to set about changing at all: he will change naturally. Circumstances will then bring about right occupation, leisure, right relationship, consideration, love, understanding and so on. So there are those who, reasoning thus, advocate changing the environment - and it must be global - so that man, who is the creature of his environment, will also change, naturally. We have this division, then, between the inner and the outer, the outer being the environment, the society. Bring about a deep revolution in the latter, they say, and this will 98 result in changing the individual: the you and the me. This division has been maintained for thousands of years, the separation between what is called spirit, and that which is of the world, matter - the religious and the so-called worldly. And this division, in itself, is most destructive, because it breeds separateness and a series of conflicts: how the inner can adjust itself to the outer and the outer shape the inner. This has always been the problem. The whole Communist world denies the inner; they say, "do not bother about it, it will look after itself when everything is perfectly and bureaucratically organised". One observes also that man, with all his anxieties, violence, despair, fear, acquisitiveness, his incessant competitiveness, has produced a certain structure which we call society, with its morality and its violence. So, as a human being, one is responsible for whatever is happening in the world: the wars, the confusion, the conflict that is going on both within and without. Each one of us is responsible, but I doubt whether most of us feel that at all. Intellectually, verbally, perhaps, we may accept it; but do we feel actually responsible for the war that is going on in Vietnam or in the Middle East, for the starvation in the East, and all the misery, division and conflict? I doubt it. If we did, our whole educational system would be different. As we do not feel it, we obviously do not love our children. If we did, there would be no war at all tomorrow; we would see to it that a different culture, a different education, was brought about. So our question is whether a human being can be made to feel -not forcibly nor through sanctions and fear - that he must change completely. If he does not change, he will create a world (or, rather, perpetuate a world) in which there is misery, suffering, death and despair; and no amount of theory, theological speculation or bureaucratic sanctions are going to solve this problem. So what is one to do? Faced with all this confusion, strife, this antagonism, violence and brutality, what is a human being to do? How is he to act? I wonder if one asks this question seriously of oneself - not sentimentally, romantically, nor merely in an enthusiastic moment, but as a question constantly present in all its seriousness. And I wonder how we will answer? We might declare that it is not possible to change so deeply, immediately and fundamentally, as to create a new society. But the moment you say it is not possible, then it is settled: you have blocked yourself. If one says it is possible, then one is confronted with the question of how to bring about the psychological revolution in oneself. So, what is one to do? Escape by subscribing to some sectarian belief or by running away into a monastery where you practice Zen Buddhism? By joining a new cult or sect which promises everything you want? Seeing the extraordinary division of the world into nationalities and religions, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Christians, the Catholics and the divisions of races with all their prejudices; seeing that our minds are so heavily conditioned by the propaganda of the church, of the sacred books, of the philosophers and the theoreticians - facing all that - one asks oneself,"What am I, a single human being in relationship with the world, to do - what can I do?" When one puts that question to oneself, one must also ask, "What is action?" We ask "What am I to do and in relationship to what?" Must we deal with only a segment, a fragment of this total existence? Commit ourselves to only one part of this whole total existence, this whole life, and act according to that fragment as a specialist? Seeing this whole life - the life of human sorrow, the human confusion, the utter lack of relationship, the self-isolating process of thought, the violence, the brutality of our life with all the fears, anxieties, tears, death and utter lack of compassion -seeing all this shall I and shall you deal with the whole of that, or with only a part of it? To deal with the whole of that, to be totally involved, we must be aware of ourselves as we are - not as we should like to be; aware of our minds, aware that we are violent, brutal, acquisitive human beings, and ask whether that can be transformed immediately. The ideological state, which is non-violence, freedom, love, doesn't exist: that's just an idea. What exists is what is. Can "what is"be transformed? - but not by becoming "what should be". We are conditioned to pursue the "what should be",the ideal, and it seems to me such a waste of time to pursue the ideal, the perfect, the extraordinary state that one imagines. When you pursue the ideal, the "what should be", it is a waste of energy, an escape from "what is". So, can the mind, which has been so heavily conditioned to accept the ideal, discard it completely and face "what is"? Because when we discard that which is false, we have the energy of the truth of "what is". That is, man's nature, inherited from the animal, is aggressive, violent, angry, full of hate and jealousy, whereas the ideal is to be non-violent. This ideal, in turn, is put away at a great distance. And, if we are at all serious, we spend our time and energy in trying to become non-violent. One can observe in oneself how heavily conditioned one is. There is this conflict between "what is" and "what should be", as there is always conflict when there is any form of division or separateness. There is conflict in our relationships because each one is isolating himself in his activities. So, how is a mind that has been so heavily conditioned and which is now faced with "what is" - which is violence, hatred, anger and all the rest of it - how is that mind to be transformed? That, really, is the basic question affecting every one of us, psychologically. And how is this sense of separateness to end so that we can have real relationship? For it is only when there is no division that there will be no conflict. We see that in endeavouring to transform that which is, man has invented an outside agency. Knowing that he is violent, brutal, angry and jealous, and that it will take too long to become perfect, he does not know what to do. So he invents an outside agency full of authority: God, an ideal, a guru, a teacher and so on - someone who will tell him what to do so that he can live in great peace, without conflict. But, when one discards all authority - and one must, because authority implies fear - when one discards the guru, the teacher, the outside agency, one is left alone with oneself. And that is a most fearsome thing: to be alone with oneself-without becoming neurotic or having all kinds of emotional upsets. When one has discarded all authority - thus becoming a teacher and disciple to oneself and not to another - then where is one? When you have no ideals and have nobody to guide you - because all the people who have tried to guide have led man astray, leaving him still unhappy, still confused, anxious and frightened - when you have come that far, where are you? When one discards the guru, the teacher, the authority, the ideal - when you actually do not depend on somebody psychologically - then what is one to do? Is there anything one can do? You know, to communicate verbally is fairly easy. When we use the same language and give definite meanings to words, then it is fairly easy to communicate. But what is more important, it seems to me, is to commune with one another about these problems. Over this problem of life and living, therefore, there must not only be verbal communication but also, at the same time, a communion with one another. Then understanding becomes comparatively easy. There is this question of fear, which is surely one of the most complex and confusing issues in our life. However much one may explain the causes of fear, describe the structure of fear, we must know that the word is never the thing, the description never the thing described. And not to be caught by the word or by the description, but to actually come into contact with that which we call fear, or with that which we call violence, means really to have direct relationship with what is. So one has to go into this question of the relationship between the observer and the thing observed. Take fear: is the observer different from the thing he observes? When the observer is the observed, then relationship is direct and possesses an extraordinary vital quality which demands action. But when there is a division between the observer and the thing observed, then there is conflict. All our relationships with other human beings - whether intimate or not - are based on division and separateness. The husband has an image of the wife and the wife an image of the husband. These images have been put together over many years through pleasure and pain, through irritation and all the rest of it - you know, the relationship between a husband and wife. So the relationship between the husband and the wife is actually the relationship between the two images. Even sexually -except in the act - the image plays an important part. So when one observes oneself, one sees that one is constantly building images in relationship and therefore creating division. Hence there is actually no relationship at all. Although one may say one loves the family or the wife, it is the image, and therefore there is no actual relationship. Relationship means not only physical contact but also a state in which there is no division psychologically. Now when one understands that - not verbally but actually - then what is the relationship between the observer who says, "I'm afraid", and the thing called fear itself? Are they two different things? This brings us to the question as to whether fear can be wiped away through analysis. Does all this interest you? Audience: Yes. Krishnamurti: Because if it doesn't, I'll get up and go and you can go. To me this is dreadfully serious. I'm not a philosopher, not a lecturer, nor am I representing some ancient philosophy from India - God forbid! (Laughter) Having travelled the world over very often and talked to many people, one is confronted not only with the misery of the world but also with the utter irresponsibility of human beings, and one naturally becomes very, very serious. This does not mean to be without humour, but one does become extraordinarily serious and intense. And one has to be very serious and intense to solve these problems in oneself, because in oneself is the world, in oneself is the whole of mankind - costumes and customs. So, when one is serious, one is faced with the problem of whether the mind can actually be free of fear forever, and whether fear can be got rid of through analysis - through analysing oneself day after day, or going to the professional to be analysed, perhaps for the next ten years, paying out large sums if you have the money. Or is there a different way, a different approach to this problem, so that fear can end without analysis? Because in analysis there is always the observer and the thing observed; that is, the analyser and the thing analysed. And the analyser must be extraordinarily awake, unconditioned, without bias or distortion in order to analyse; if he is at all twisted in any way, then whatever he analyses will also be biased, twisted. So that is one problem in analysis. The other is that it will take a great deal of time, gradually and slowly, bit by bit, to remove all the causes of fear - by then one would be dead (Laughter). In the meantime one lives in darkness, miserable, neurotic, creating mischief in the world. And, even after you have discovered the cause (or causes) of fear, will it have any value? Can fear disappear when I know what I am afraid of? Is the intellectual search for the cause able to dissipate fear? All these problems are involved in analysis because, as we admit, there is this division between the analyser and the thing analysed. Therefore analysis is not the way - obviously not - because one has seen the way and why not, one has seen the falseness of it, that it takes time and one has no time. Psychologically speaking there is no tomorrow: we have invented it. And so, when you see the falseness of analysis, when you see the truth that the observer is actually the observed, then analysis comes to an end. You are faced with this fact that you are fear - not an observer who is afraid of fear. You are the observer and the observed; the analyser and the thing analysed. You know, when you see a tree, when you have actually looked at a tree - not verbally but actually -then you see that between you and the tree there is not only physical space but also psychological space. That space is created by the image you have of the tree, as "the oak", or whatever it is. So there is a separation between the observer and the observed, which is the tree. Can this separateness or space disappear? - not that you become the tree, that would be too absurd and have no meaning - but when the space between the observer and the tree disappears, then you see the tree entirely differently. I do not know if you have ever tried it. Questioner: What exactly do you mean by the space between you and the tree disappears? Krishnamurti: Just a minute, Sir, let me finish, and then you can ask me questions afterwards. I hope you will. Analysis implies this space, and therefore there is no direct contact or relationship between the analyser and the analysed. And it is only when there is immediate contact with the thing called fear, that there is totally different action. Look, Sir, when you observe another - your wife, friend, husband - is that observation based on your accumulated knowledge of the person concerned? If so, that knowledge makes for separateness, it divides: hence there is conflict and therefore no relationship. So, can you look at another - now of course you can look at the speaker because he is going away and has no direct relationship with you - but can you look without that space at your wife, your children, your neighbour or your politician? If you can do that, then you will see things entirely, differently. You know, I have been told by those who are fairly serious and who have taken certain drugs - not for amusement, excitement or visions, but who have taken them to see what actually takes place -they have told me that the space between those who have taken it and the vase of flowers on the table disappears, and that therefore, they see the flower, the colour, most intensely, and that there is a quality in that intensity which never existed before. We are not advocating - at least I am not - that you should take drugs, but, as we were saying, as long as there is space in relationship - whether between the analyser and the analysed, the observer and the observed, or the experiencer and the thing experienced - there must be conflict and there must be pain. So, when this thing is really understood - not as an idea, not as a verbal exchange but actually felt - you will see that violence, which was experienced before as between the observer and the thing observed, that feeling of anger and hatred, undergoes a tremendous change: it is not what it was, a constant conflict from childhood to death, an everlasting battlefield in relationship, whether in the office or in the family. Being in conflict without being able to resolve it, fear comes into being. Fear also exists where there is pleasure. We are ever in pursuit of pleasure: that is what we want, greater and greater pleasure. And when we pursue pleasure, inevitably there must be pain and fear. So our question this afternoon is whether the human mind can transform itself, not in time but out of time. That is, whether there can be a great psychological revolution inwardly without the idea of time. Thought, after all, is time, isn't it? Thought, which is the response of memory, knowledge, experience, is from the past. One can observe this for oneself as an actuality, not as a theory. Thought thinks about that of which it is afraid, or about that which has given pleasure, and the thinking about the pleasure and the pain lies within the field of time. Obviously. One experiences pleasure when one sees the sunset, or through various other forms of excitement and enjoyment, and so on. Thought thinks about that which has given excitement, enjoyment. Please do watch this: you can see it for yourself, it is so simple. Thinking about it gives continuity to that which one has enjoyed. Yesterday there was that lovely sunset. Instead of finishing with that sunset, which was over yesterday, we continue thinking about it, and the very activity of thought in regard to that incident breeds time. That is, I am hoping I shall have that pleasure again tomorrow. So thought breeds both pleasure and pain. Then, from this, arises a much deeper question: whether thought can be quiet at all. For it is only then that there is actual transformation. Now do you care to ask any questions? Questioner: You spoke about being responsible, but I may not be responsible for my thought. Any change I want to make must be made with thoughts and perhaps I'm not responsible for my thoughts. I cannot determine what I think. Krishnamurti: Sir, what do we mean by that word "responsible"? And is that feeling of responsibility the product of thought? Questioner: No, and at the same time, yes. Krishnamurti: Look, Sir, is love the result of thought? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: Ah, wait! Go slowly Sir (Laughter). Then, if you say no, what place has thought when you love? Questioner: This would presuppose my understanding love. Krishnamurti: Ah, wait, Sir! - that is why I asked if love was pleasure. If it is pleasure then it is a product of thought. Then pleasure can be cultivated indefinitely - which is what we are doing. But love cannot be cultivated. Therefore love is not the product of thought. And when there is love, what is responsibility? Please go slowly. When responsibility is based on thought and pleasure, then there is duty involved in it, and all the rest of it. But when love is not pleasure - and one has to go into this very, very carefully - then has love (if I may use that word), has love responsibility in the accepted sense of that word? I love my family, therefore I am responsible for my family. Is that love based on pleasure? If it is, then that word responsibility takes on quite a different meaning: then the family is mine, I possess it, I depend on it I must look after it. Then I am jealous, for wherever there is dependency, there is fear and jealousy. So we use this word "love" when we say, "I love my family, I'm responsible for it; but when you observe a little more closely, you find children being trained to kill, being educated in that peculiar way so that they are always able to earn a livelihood, get a job, as though that was the end of life. So is all that responsibility? Questioner: We can't really have will, because what we will is determined by our conditioning. Krishnamurti: Sir, what is will? Please see that these questions need a great deal of explanation, and everybody is getting bored or has to go away. We had better stop. Audience: They just have to leave - they are not bored. Family responsibilities! Krishnamurti: You are not responsible for the people leaving? (Laughter) Right! You see, Sirs, we have exercised will: I must, I must not; I should, I should not. You have exercised will to succeed, to achieve power, position, prestige. You have exercised will to dominate. Will has played a great part in our lives. And, as you say, that is the result of the society, the environment, the culture in which we live. But the culture in which we live is, in turn, made by human beings, and so we must ask whether will has any place at all? Because will implies conflict, struggle, the contradiction: "I am this and I must be that. And to become that, I must exercise will,. We are asking if there is not a different way of acting altogether, without will? Questioner: If you don't use will, must you not then exercise thought? Krishnamurti: Look, I'll show you something. When you see danger, is there the exercise of thought or will? There is immediate action. That action may be the result of past thought. When you see a precipice, a snake, a dangerous thing, you act instantly. That action may be the result of past conditioning. Right? You have been told that it is dangerous to approach a snake, and that has become memory, conditioning, and you act. Now when you see the danger of nationality - which breeds war, the nations with their separate governments, separate armies and all the rest of these terrible divisions which are going on in the world - when you see the actual danger of nationality - see it, that is, not intellectually or verbally but actually see the danger of it, the destructive nature of it - is there an action of will? Does perception - the seeing of something as false or as true - does that demand thought? Is goodness the result of thought - or beauty, or love? And can thought ever be new? - because love must be new, love cannot be something that goes on day after day between the family and in the family, as a sort of private possession. Thought, on the other hand, is always old. So, can we, without the exercise of will, see things so clearly that there is no confusion and that there is therefore complete action? Questioner: Complete action may be aesthetically pleasing. Krishnamurti: I don't know what you mean by "complete action". Why do we say aesthetically beautiful, while at other times it may also be very dangerous? What do we me by "complete action"? Sir, take a very simple thing: when there is comparative action - that is, comparing which course of action is better - then there is measurement and good comes to an end. Right? No? When there is comparison, the good comes to an end. And, to be good -note that we are not using that word in the bourgeois sense - to be good completely means giving complete attention; when your whole body - eyes, ears, heart, everything - is given to attention. Sir, when you love, there is no less or more. That is complete action. Questioner: Can I change my ideas or thought when, for example, every day when I go to the office they expect me to be ambitious, greedy and fearful. They put pressure on me to be that way and they show me that indeed I am petty, greedy, ambitious and fearful. Can I change if I see that this is not what I wish to be? Krishnamurti: Can I, belonging to a structure that demands that I be afraid, aggressive, acquisitive, can I go to the office without being ambitious? If I am not ambitious, if I am not greedy, completely - that is, actually and completely non-greedy, not just verbally - then nothing is going to make me greedy, because I have seen the truth and the falseness of greed. When I have seen that clearly, cannot I go to the office and not be destroyed? It is only when I am partially greedy (Laughter) that I am caught. That is why one has to be complete - that is, completely attentive, so that in that attention there is a goodness which is not comparative, not measurable. When the mind is not greedy, no structure is going to make it greedy. Questioner: How do I maintain attention in a painful situation, when instinctively my wish is to block out that painful incident? Krishnamurti: First of all, I do not want to block out anything. Neither pleasure nor pain. I want to understand it, look at it, go into it. To block out something is to resist; and where there is resistance, there is fear. The brain, the mind, has been conditioned to resist. So, can the mind see the truth that any resistance is a form of fear? Which means I must give attention to what is called resistance, be completely attentive to resistance: which is to block out, escape, take a drink, take drugs; any form of escape or resistance - be completely alert to it. Questioner: How long can you do that, Sir? Krishnamurti: It is not a question of duration, of time, of how long. Do you see? - you are still thinking in terms of how long. Questioner: My conditioning. Krishnamurti: Well, watch it, Madame, please do watch it. You flatter me or insult me: pleasurable or painful. I want the pleasurable and discard or resist the painful. But if I am attentive, I will be aware when the insult or the flattery is offered; I will see the thing very clearly. Then it is finished, isn't it? Next time you flatter me or insult me, it will not affect me. It's not a question of maintaining attention. When you desire to maintain attention, then you are maintaining inattention. Right? Do please go into it a little bit. An attentive mind does not ask, "How long will I be attentive?" (Laughter). It is only the inattentive mind that has known what it is to be attentive, which says, "Can I be attentive all the time?" So, what one has to be attentive to is inattention. Right? To be aware of inattention, not how to maintain attention. Just to be aware that I am inattentive, that I say things that I don't mean, that I am dishonest; just to be attentive. Inattention breeds mischief, not attention. So, when the mind is aware of inattention, it is already attentive - you do not have to do any more. Questioner: How can you tell when you have true perception of what you should do, when one line of action is going to hurt someone and yet will benefit others? Krishnamurti: When you see something clearly as being true -and clarity is always true - there is no other action but the action of clarity. Whether it hurts or doesn't hurt is irrelevant. Look, nationality is poison: it has bred, and will continue to breed, wars and hatred. Now to be no non-nationalistic will hurt a whole group of people: the military, the politician, the priest, all the flag-wavers of the world. And yet I know it is the most dreadful thing, I see it as poison. What am I to do? I myself will not touch it. In myself I have wiped out all nationality completely. But the military will say, "You are hurting us". When one sees that is false and what is true, and acts, then there is no question of hurting or pleasing anybody. If you see that organized religion is not religion, then what will you do? Go to church to please people? It might hurt my mother if I don't. Sir, what is important is not what hurts and what pleases, but to see what is true. And then that truth will operate, not you. YOU ARE THE WORLD CHAPTER 9 12TH FEBRUARY 1969 2ND PUBLIC TALK AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY WE WERE SAYING yesterday that all our life is a constant struggle. From the moment we are born until we die, our life is a battlefield. And one wonders, not in the abstract but actually, whether that strife can end and if one can live completely at peace not only inwardly but also outwardly. While in actual fact there is no such division as the inner and the outer - it is really a movement - this division is regarded as existing, not only as the world inside and outside the skin, but also as the division between me and you, we and they, the friend and the enemy, and so on. We draw a circle round ourselves: a circle around me and a circle around you. Having drawn the circle - whether it is the circle of me and you, or the family, or the nation, the formula of religious beliefs and dogmas, the circle of knowledge one weaves round oneself - these circles divide us and so there is this constant division which invariably brings about conflict. We never go beyond the circle, never look beyond it. We are afraid to leave our own little circle and discover the circle, the barrier, around another. And I think that therein begins the whole process, the structure and the nature of fear. One builds a barrier around oneself, enclosing a private world very carefully made up of formulas, concepts, words and convictions. Then, living within those walls, one is afraid to go outside. This division not only breeds various forms of neurotic behaviour, but also a great deal of conflict. And, if we abandon one circle, one wall, we build another wall around ourselves. So there is this constant, enduring resistance built of concepts, and one wonders whether it is at all possible not to have any division at all -to end all division and thus bring an end to all conflict. Our minds are conditioned by formulas: my experiences, my knowledge, my family, my country, like and dislike, hate jealousy, envy, sorrow, the fear of this and the fear of that. That is the circle, the wall behind which I live. And I am not only afraid of what is within, but even more so of what is beyond the wall. One can observe this fact very simply in oneself without having to read a great many books, study philosophy and all the rest of it. It may very well be because one reads so much of what others have said that one knows nothing about oneself, what one actually is, and what is actually taking place in oneself. If we looked in ourselves ignoring what we think we should be but seeing what we actually are, then, perhaps, we would discover for ourselves the existence of these formulas and concepts - which are really prejudices and bias - that divide man against man. And so, in all relationships between man and man, there is fear and conflict - not only the conflict of sexual rights, of territorial rights, but also the conflict between what has been, is and what should be. When one observes this fact in oneself - not as an idea not as something that you look in at from outside the window - but actually see in yourself, then one can find out whether it is at all possible to uncondition the mind of all formulas, of all beliefs, prejudices and fears and thereby, perhaps,live at peace. We see that man, both historically and in present times, has accepted war as a way of life. So how to end war not any particular war but all wars -how to live utterly at peace without any conflict, becomes a question not only for the intellect, but one that must be answered totally, not fragmentarily or in specialized fields. Can man - you and I - live completely at peace - which doesn't mean living a dull life, or one that has no active, driving energy - can we find out if such a peace is possible? Surely it must be possible, otherwise our life has very little meaning. The intellectuals throughout the world try to find a significance or assign a meaning to life. All the religious say that existence is only a means to an end, which is God - God being the real significance. If you happen not to be a religious person, then you will substitute the State for God, or invent some other theory out of despair. So our quest, really, is to find out if man can live at peace; actually live it, not theoretically, not as an idea, not as your formula according to which you are going to live peacefully. Such formulas again become walls - my formula and your formula, my concept and yours, with resulting division and everlasting battle. Can one live without a formula, without division, and therefore without conflict? I do not know if you have ever put that question to yourself in all seriousness: whether the mind can ever be free of these divisions of the me and the not me? The me, my family, my country, my God; or, if I have no God, the me, my family, the State; and if I have no State: me, my family, and an idea, an ideology. Is it possible to free oneself from all this, not eventually, but overnight? If we entertain the eventual theory we are not living at all: "eventually" we will be free, or "eventually" we will live at peace. Surely that is not good enough: when a man is hungry, he wants to be fed immediately. What, then, is the act that will free the mind from all conditioning - the act, not a series of acts? Here we have this self-centred activity which creates these divisions: the self-centred activity round a principle, an ideology, a country, a belief, round the family, and so on. This self-centred activity is separative and therefore causes conflict. Now, can this movement of the formula - which is the "me" with its memories, which is the centre around which the walls are built - can that "me", that separate entity with its self-centred activity, come to an end, not by a series of acts but by one act completely? You know, we try to break down the conflicts little by little, chopping the tree little by little and never getting at the root of it. So one asks if it is at all possible, by one act, to end this whole structure of division, the separateness, the self-centred activity - all breeding conflict, war and strife. Is it possible? When one asks that question in all seriousness, does one wait for an answer from another? After having that question put to you, are you waiting for an answer from the speaker? It is not that the speaker is avoiding answering, but are you waiting to be answered? If you are at all serious - and as we said yesterday, one must be because it is only a serious person that knows life, who knows what it is to live - will you wait for an answer? If you await an answer from the speaker, then the answer will be so many ashes, so many words, so many ideas, another series of formulas which, in themselves, will then become another cause for division: the Krishnamurti formula or somebody else's formula. But, if we do not wait for an answer from anybody - the speaker included - then we can take the journey together. Then it is your responsibility as well as the speaker's. Then you are not merely listening to words, to ideas. Then we are both walking together, which I think very important as we get rid of this division between the speaker and yourselves; we are together discovering, understanding, acting, living - not according to any formula. Then there is direct relationship between us in taking a journey, because we are both feeling our way into reality: the reality - not the words, the description, the explanation or the philosophies of the cunning mind. So, presuming that one is sufficiently serious, what is our problem? How to live our daily life here - not in a monastery or in some romantic dream world, not in some emotional, dogmatic, drug ridden world - but here and now, every day; how to live at great peace, with great intelligence, without any frustration or fear, to live so completely, so in a state of bliss - which, of course, implies meditation - that, really is the basic problem. And also whether it is possible to understand this whole life, not in fragments, but completely: be completely involved in it and not committed to any part of it; to be involved with the total process of living without any conflict, misery, confusion or sorrow. That is the real question. For only then can one bring about a different world. That is the real revolution, the inward psychological revolution from which springs an immediate outward revolution. Let us, then, take the journey together - and I mean together, not you sitting there and I sitting on the platform - to look together at this whole field of life so that we understand it; not for someone else to understand it and then tell us how to understand it. Then only will we be both teacher and disciple. We see that these divisions, these formulas of the "me" and the "not me", and the "we" and the "they", behind which we live, breed fear. And if one can be aware of this overall fear, this total fear, then one can understand a particular fear. Merely trying to understand a particular, silly little fear, however garnished, will have no meaning until you understand the entire question of fear. Fear destroys freedom. You may revolt, but it is not freedom. Fear perverts all thought. Fear in oneself destroys all relationship. Please, these are not just words: this is evident in one's whole life -fear from the beginning to the end. Fear of public opinion, fear of not being successful, fear of loneliness, fear of not being loved, the measuring of ourselves against the hero of what "should be" and thus breeding more fear. This fear, moreover, lies not only at the obvious level of the mind but it also runs deep down. And we ask whether this fear can come to an end - not gradually, not bit by bit, but completely. What is this fear? Why is one afraid? Is it because of what lies beyond the circle, or within the circle, or is it because of the circle? You follow what we mean? We are not trying to find out the particular cause of this fear, because, as we said yesterday, the discovery of the cause, the analytical process of understanding the cause and the effect, does not necessarily end fear - one has played that game for so long. But when one sees this fear - as one sees this microphone, actually what it is - is it within the wall, on the other side of the wall, or does it exist because of the wall? Surely it exists because of the wall, because of the division and not because you are within the wall or that you are afraid to look beyond the wall. It exists factually as it is, as you observe it; because of the wall. Now, how does this wall come into being? Here please remember that we are taking the journey together and that you are not waiting for an answer from the speaker. We are taking the journey together, holding hands, and there is no point in your suddenly separating, taking away your hand and saying, "You walk ahead of me and tell me all about it". In journeying together, our verbal communication becomes more than mere communication: it becomes a kind of communion where there is affection, com, passion and understanding because it is concerned with our common human problem. It is not that it was my problem and that I've resolved it and that therefore you have to accept my verdict. It is our problem. How, then, does this wall of resistance, division and separation come into being? In everything we do, in all our relationships however intimate they be, there is this division bringing confusion, misery and conflict. How has this barrier come into being? If one could really understand it - not verbally, not intellectually - but actually see it and feel it, then one would find that it comes to an end. Let us go into it. We asked how this wall has come into being. I wonder what you would say had you to answer that. Now each one of us has an opinion or will offer an opinion - my opinion being right and your opinion wrong. Dialectically we can examine it, but we are not concerned with dialectical examination and reaching a definite conclusion. Truth is not to be found in opinion or conclusion. Truth is something that is always new and therefore the mind cannot come to it with a conclusion, with an opinion, a judgment; it must be free. So when we ask this question as to how this wall of resistance has come into being, we are not asking for an opinion or for some clever, erudite person to tell us how - because there is no authority. We are watching it together, examining it together, feeling our way into it. Surely the wall has come into being through the mechanism of thought. No? Please do not reject it: just observe it: thought. If there were no thinking about death, you would not be afraid of death. If you were not brought up to be a Christian, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist or God knows what else: if you were not conditioned by propaganda, by words, by thought, you would have no barrier. And one can see how thought, as the "me" and the "you", brings this about. So thought not only creates this wall with its self-centred activities, but it also creates your own activity within your wall. So it is thought, in bringing about division, that creates fear. Thought is fear, as thought is pleasure. I see something very beautiful: a beautiful face, a lovely sunset, an enjoyable event of yesterday; thought thinks about it: how nice it was. Please do observe this: how lovely that experience, and thought, by the very act of thinking, gives to that experience the continuity of pleasure. So thought is not only responsible for fear but also for pleasure. That is fairly clear, obviously. Because you have enjoyed the meal this afternoon, you want it repeated; or you have had some sexual experience, and thought thinks about it, mulls over it, chews it over, creates the picture, the image, and wants it repeated. This is pleasure repeated, which you call love. And thought, having created this circle, the barrier, the resistance, the belief, is afraid lest it be broken down, letting in something from beyond the wall. So thought breeds both fear and pleasure. You cannot possibly have pleasure without fear; they both go together, because they are the children of thought. And thought is the barren child of a mind that is only concerned with pleasure and fear. Please do observe it. Again let me remind you that we are taking the journey together: you are examining yourself, watching yourself in the mirror of the words. So fear, pain and pleasure are the result of thought. And yet thought must function logically, sanely, healthily and objectively where it is needed in the technological world - not in human relationship, because the moment thought enters human relationship there is fear; then, in that, there is pleasure and pain. I am not saying anything crazy: you can see this for yourself. Thought is the response of memory, experience and knowledge and so is always old and therefore never free. There is "freedom of thought", certainly: that is, to say what you want. But thought itself is never free and can never bring about freedom. Thought can perpetuate either fear or pleasure but not freedom. And where there is fear and pleasure, love ceases to be. Love is neither thought nor pleasure. But to us love is pleasure and therefore fear. When one is aware of this whole business of life as it is - not as we would like it to be, not according to some philosopher or holy priest, but actually as it is - one asks whether thought can have its right place and yet not interfere at all in every relationship. This does not mean a division between the two states of thought and non-thought. You see, Sirs, one has to live in this world, earn a livelihood, unfortunately, and go to the office. If ever there should come about a decent government of one world, then perhaps we might have no need to work more than a day, thereafter leaving the computers to take over, allowing us some leisure. But as long as that doesn't happen, one has to earn a livelihood and earn it efficiently and fully. However, the moment that efficiency becomes ugly through, for example, greed, or through this terrible desire to succeed and become somebody, the barrier of the "me" and the "not me" springs into being, bringing about competition and conflict. Realizing all this, how are we to live decently, efficiently, without ruthlessness and yet in complete relationship, not only with nature but also with another human being, in which there is no shadow of the "me" and the "you" - the barrier created by thought? When one actually sees this thing that we are talking about - not verbally but actually - the very seeing, the actual seeing, is the act that brings down the wall of separation. When you see the danger of anything, such as a precipice or a wild animal and so on, there is action. Such action may well be the result of conditioning, but it is not the act of fear: is the act of intelligence. Similarly, to see intelligently this whole structure, the nature of this division, the conflict, strife, misery, the self-centeredness - to actually see the danger of it means the ending of it. There is no "how". So, what is important is to take the journey into all this -not led by another, for there is no guide - but seeing the world as it is: the extraordinary confusion, the unending sorrow of man, seeing it actually. Then the seeing of the whole structure of it is the ending of it. Perhaps, if you care to, we can talk the thing over by asking questions. Yes, Sir? Questioner: What does it mean to "actually" see something? Krishnamurti: Do you see your wife or your husband actually, or do you see them through an image, through a veil of opinions and conclusions - and therefore not at all? If so, no relationship can exist, for relationship means contact, to be related to. If the husband is ambitious, greedy, envious, seeking success, worried, beaten down, living in his own circle, and the wife also living in hers, where is the relation ship? And yet that is what we call relationship: my family opposed to the rest of the world. If I see that, see the actual image through which I look - not an invented image but the actual image as it is - that very act of seeing the truth dispels the image. You know, it is one of the most difficult things to ask a question. But we must ask questions, we must doubt everything on this earth: doubt our conclusions, our ideas, opinions, the judgments - doubt everything - and yet also know when not to doubt. As with a dog on a leash, you must let him go sometimes, because out of freedom alone one discovers the truth. But to ask a question, the right question, needs a great deal of alertness, intelligence and awareness of the problem. I can ask casually without really entering into the problem, casually seeking an answer, but if I enter into the problem with my whole heart and mind, not trying to escape from it, in the very looking into that problem lies the answer. And therefore, when one asks a question -which doesn't mean that the speaker is preventing you from asking a question - when one asks a question one must be responsible not only for the asking but also for the receiving of the answer. How you receive the answer is much more important than how you ask the question, because the answer may be such that you do not like it at all. You may reject it because it does not, for the time being, please you, or because you do not see the value of it, or that you are thinking in terms of profit. Questioner: I am not sure of the difference between thought, feeling, sensation and emotion. Krishnamurti: Sir, what is sensation? A stimulus. You see a beautiful face, a lovely colour. This perception is followed by sensation, then contact, then desire, with thought finally coming in and saying, "Ah! I wish I could have that!" There we have this whole movement of perception, sensation, contact, desire - which is strengthened by thought: "I want it", or "I do not want it; "it is mine" and "it is not mine". The question then arises as to whether there can be perception of a beautiful face or a lovely sunset, without the interference of thought, or, in other words, can there be a state of non-experience, but only perception - which is greater than all experiences. Have I explained it or am I saying something which sounds not very plausible and rather crazy? Look, Sir, there is the perception of a beautiful car, (laughs, joined by audience), -perhaps a beautiful face may be better, laughter) - then there is sensation: you want to touch it, look at it. Finally thought comes in and the whole machinery of pleasure and pain begins. Now, can there be observation that face without the interference of the pain and pleasure principle? You understand what I'm talking about? Sir, this really is a very interesting problem. We depend so much on others, psychologically. That dependence is based on fear and pleasure. Knowing the pain of dependence, one tries to cultivate freedom from dependence, but that very cultivation breeds other forms of fear, pain and conflict. One never asks why one depends, psychotically, on another. You depend on the milkman, the postman, and so on, but that is quite a different matter. But why this dependence psychologically, inwardly? Is it because one is lonely, that one has nothing in oneself, is insufficient to oneself? The very thing on which you depend is, is it not, the product of sensation and pleasure; therefore dependence is both the product and the cause of thought. Right? Which goes to show that experience is a complicated matter. And yet all of us are seeking greater and more meaningful experiences. We have never stopped to question the need, psychologically, of an experience. We have accepted, as we accept so many things, that experience is necessary for enlightenment, for understanding, for bliss, whereas, on the contrary, it is only a mind that is innocent that is capable of bliss - not a mind burdened with experiences. Moreover these experiences are based on this division of fear and pleasure, with every experience being discarded except those we like or dislike. Questioner: Does true love require growth? Krishnamurti: Is there a false love? (Laughter). Sirs,do not laugh - it is so easy to laugh about things that touch one deeply. By laughter we put it away. Do we know what love is? Or do we know only the pain, the pleasure, the jealousy, the travail of that which we call love? Can an ambitious man, a competitive man, can a man who has specialized, know what love is? Can the man who is afraid of being a failure, or is struggling to become a success, know what love is? Can you ever have love and jealousy at the same time? Can a man or a woman who loves ever be jealous, ever dominate, possess, hold, be dependent? Actually all that we know is the pleasure and the pain of what we call love, which is generally translated into sex. So sex becomes an extraordinary problem. Not that we are against it - it would be terrible to be against anything - but one sees it for what it is. You know only the pain and the pleasure of what we call love, and therefore it is not love. Love cannot be cultivated - if it could, it would be marvellous; to cultivate it like a plant, water it, nourish it, look after it. If you could do that with love it would be very simple, but unfortunately it does not work that way. To love is quite a different thing in which there is no pain or pleasure. Therefore one must understand this fear and pleasure and all the rest of it, so that there is no division. Questioner: The fact is that the world is in disorder and man in despair. That is the fact. What then can change man? Is it even possible? Krishnamurti: Sir, is the world separate from us? Are we not, each one of us, in disorder, confused - not merely superficially but in conflict: the conflicts of the opposites, the contradictions, the opposing desires? All that is disorder. And you ask whether it is worth changing all that. Is that the question? Questioner: No, not exactly. There is this desire to change, but, confronted with the fact of the disorder in the world, what can be the nature of the change? Krishnamurti: The nature of the change is the negation of disorder. Disorder cannot be made into order. But the denial of disorder is the nature of the change: the very denial is the change. The negation of disorder is the positive nature of change. That is, I see disorder in myself: anger, jealousy, brutality, violence, suspicion, guilt - you know what human beings are. I'm aware of it. The mind is totally aware of all this disorder. Can it completely negate it, put it away? When it does so, through negation, the nature of change is the positive order. The positive can only come through the negative. Look, Sir, I see nationalism, the division of religions, the separateness that belief brings about, all the conflict, the disorder: I see that actually, feel it in my blood. And I put it away, not verbally, but actually: in myself I belong to no country, to no religion, subscribe to no dogma, no belief. Then that negation of what is false, which is the nature of the change, is truth. Questioner: Doesn't this contradict what you said, that when you find jealousy within you, that you don't deny it, but that you become that jealousy? Krishnamurti: No, Madam. I said the observer is the observed. When there is the separateness on the part of the observer who says, "I am different from jealousy", then there is conflict between the observer and the thing observed. Let us go slowly. Like everything else, the human problem is really quite complex. So let us play with it a little bit and see it for ourselves. You know, when the wife is not me but is separate from me, there is no relationship. Then the "me" observes the wife as a separate entity, which division leads to conflict. That is clear. When the "me" is separate from its jealousy, there is conflict; such as: "how to get rid of it, it is right to be jealous, it is enjoyable to be jealous, it is part of love to be jealous", and all the rest of it. But when there is no division between the observer and the thing he calls jealousy, he is that. He does not become jealousy, he is it. Then what will you do? You understand the problem? Audience: That is what the lady is asking, Sir. She asks how can you negate that which you are. You said to negate disorder is change and the lady asks: "If I am the disorder, how can I negate it?" Krishnamurti: Ah! I will explain. How can I negate disorder if I am disorder? I am the nation, I am the belief, the disorder. If the "I" negates disorder, that very I, which is separate, will create yet another form of disorder. That is your question, Madam? Right. When you say"negate disorder", what do you mean by that? Who is there to negate disorder? Please follow this slowly, step by step. This disorder is the cause of thought: my belief and your belief, my God and your God, my formula and your formula, my prejudice opposed to your prejudice. So I am that disorder and thought is that disorder, because I am thought. Right? Thought is me and the "me" is disorder. So, when one negates this, one negates thought, not disorder: not "I" negate it. Look, I am disorder. This disorder is created by thought, which is me and which brings about separation. That's a fact. What, then is the negation of this fact? Who is it that is going to deny this disorder and put it aside? What is it that is going to change this? Is that clear? Now the negation of disorder is silence. Any movement of thought will only breed further disorder. Then you will ask, how thought is to come to an end, who is to bring to a stop this perpetual motion that is going on night and day? Thought itself must deny itself. Thought itself sees what it is doing - right? - and therefore thought itself realizes that it has to come of itself to an end. There is no other factor than itself. Therefore when thought realizes that whatever it does, any movement that it makes, is disorder (we are taking that as an example), then there is silence. The nature of the change from disorder is silence. I do not know if you've ever seen or felt the quality of silence: when the mind and the body are extraordinarily quiet. That is, when you want to see something very clearly, when you want to hear something that is being said with all your heart and mind, your body is quiet and your mind is quiet. It is not a trick. It is quiet. In the same way, disorder and the manner of change are resolved only when there is complete silence. it is silence that brings about order, not thought. Questioner: Does man always try to possess that which is pleasurable to him? Krishnamurti: Don't we all do that? Don't we all want to possess that which has given us pleasure - a picture on the wall, a building, a woman, a man? So, when we possess a piece of furniture that we like, we are the furniture. And pain is involved in that possession as it might get lost. That is why we cling to our husband, our wife, the family. The marvellous circle is woven around the family, bringing it into battle with the rest of the world. One asks whether the family could exist without the circle, without the wall. Those of you who have a family should try it and see what happens. You will see something totally different taking place. Then perhaps you will know what love is and see with your own eyes the nature of the change that love brings about. YOU ARE THE WORLD CHAPTER 10 13TH FEBRUARY 1969 3RD PUBLIC TALK AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY OF THE MANY things we might talk over together, one of the most obvious and important is about why we do not change. We may change a little bit, here and there, in patches, but why do we not fundamentally change our whole way of behaviour, our way of life, our daily nature? Technologically the world about us is advancing with extraordinary speed, while inwardly we remain more or less the same as we have been for centuries upon centuries. Caught as we are in this trap - and it is a dreadful trap -one wonders why we don't break through, why we remain heavy and stupid, empty, shallow-minded, superficial and rather dull. Is it because we do not know ourselves? Leaving aside the ideas of the various specialists, with their peculiar as- sertions and dogmas, we see that we have never really investigated ourselves, gone into ourselves deeply to find out what we actually are. Is that the reason why we do not change? Or is it that one has not got the energy? Or because we are bored - not only with ourselves but also with the world, a world which has very little to offer except motor cars, bigger bathrooms and all the rest of it? So we are bored outwardly and, probably, also with ourselves because we are caught in the trap and don't know how to get out of it. It is also likely that we are very lazy. Furthermore, in knowing ourselves there is no profit, no reward at the end of it, whereas most of us are conditioned by the profit-motive. These, then, may be some of the reasons why we do not change. We know what the trap is, we know what life is, and yet we go trudging along monotonously and wearily until we die. That seems to be our lot. And yet, is it so difficult to go into ourselves very deeply and transform ourselves? I wonder if one has ever looked at oneself, known oneself? From ancient times this has been reiterated over and over again: "Know thyself". In India it was postulated, the ancient Greeks repeated the advice, while modern philosophers are also attempting to say it, complicated only by their jargon and their theories. Can one know oneself - not only at the conscious level but also at the deeper, secret levels of the mind? Without self-knowledge, surely, one has no basis for any real, serious action, no foundation upon which to build clearly. If one doesn't know oneself, one lives such a superficial life. You may be very clever, you may know all the books in the world and be able to quote from them, but if you do not know yourself, how can you go beyond the superficial? Is it possible to know oneself so completely that, in the very observation of that total self, there is a release? Perhaps we can go into this question together this afternoon, and, in so doing, we may also come upon what love is and what death is. As human beings, I think we should be able to find out what death is while still living; and also what love is, because that is part of our life, our daily living. Can we inquire into ourselves without any fear or bias, without any formula or conclusion, to find out what we are? Such an inquiry demands freedom. One cannot inquire into oneself, or into the universe of which one is a part, unless there is freedom - freedom from hypotheses, theories and conclusions, freedom from bias. Moreover, to inquire one needs a sharp mind, a mind that has been made sensitive. But the mind is not sensitive if there is any form of bias, thus rendering it incapable of any real inquiry into this whole structure of the self. So let us go into this question together, not only through verbal communication but also non-verbally, which is much more exciting and which 129 demands a much greater energy of attention. When one is free to inquire, one has the energy. One has not got the energy, the drive, the necessary intensity, when one has already reached a conclusion, a formula. So, for the time being,can we put away all our formulas, conclusions and biases about ourselves - what we are, what we should and should not be and all the rest of it - put these aside and actually observe? One can only observe oneself in relationship. We have no other means of seeing ourselves because (except for those who are completely neurotic) we are not isolated human beings: on the contrary, we are related to everything about us. And in that relationship, through observing one's reactions, thoughts and motives, one can see, non-verbally, what we are. Now what is the instrument of observation, what is the thing that observes? About this we must also be very clear. Is it an observation from outside the window looking in, as at a shop window, or are you watching yourself from within and not from without? If you watch yourself from the outside, then you are not related to "what is". I think one should be very clear about this. One can observe oneself looking over the wall, as it were, in which case such observation is rather superficial, unrelated, inconsequential and not responsible. When one analyses oneself, there is always the analyser and the thing analysed. The analyser is the one looking over the wall, judging, evaluating, controlling, suppressing and so on. But can one watch oneself intimately, actually as one is? That is, can one watch oneself without the thinker, the observer? - the observer who is always outside, who is the censor, the entity that evaluates, saying, "this is right", "this is wrong", "this should be", "this should not be" - all of which renders one's observation very limited and merely according to the social, environmental and cultural conditioning. So we have this very real problem: how to observe - not as an outside observer who has already come to certain conclusions about himself - but merely to observe. To be choicelessly aware, without a directive, without deciding what one should or should not do, but merely to observe what is actually going on. To do that there must be freedom from every form of conclusion and commitment. So, to observe non-verbally, to observe without the barrier of an outsider who is looking in, there must be freedom from all fear and all sense of correction. If one has such an instrument, then one can proceed to find out. But, because one has already banished all the things that make for a centre from which an observer looks at the observed, what is there to find out? One wants to look at oneself with clear eyes, with unspotted eyes, without the interference of the conventional, respectable social morality - which is no morality at all. When one has put aside the conclusion and the formula, fear, any desire to be other than what one is, then what is there? What we are is a series of conclusions. What we are is actually a series of experiences based on pleasure and pain, memories, the past. We are the past; there is nothing new in us. When one thus observes oneself freely - and to be free, one has to have set aside all these things - what is one actually? I wonder if you have ever put that question to yourself? What is one's relationship with this whole business of what is called living? And what is living, as it is? One can, of course, readily see what it actually is: an everlasting struggle, a battlefield which we call living, conflict - not only with another but also within ourselves - pain, fleeting moments of great joy, fear, despair and a series of frustrations; the contradictions in ourselves both at the conscious and the deeper levels; a state of non-relationship; great sorrow - which is generally self-pity - loneliness and boredom. Then the escape from all this into religious beliefs: your God and my God. That is our life as it actually is. Going to the office for forty years - you know, so proud about all this; aggressive, competitive, brutal. That is our life and we call that living. And we don't know how to change it. We are eager to change the superficial structure of society - a new bureaucracy instead of the old one, and so on. However, the outward change has meaning only when there is deep inward revolution: then the outer and the inner are the same movement not two separate movements. So, seeing all this, the insanity of it, why do we not change it? I wonder if one really does see this, our living as it actually is; or does one see it only verbally - and here one must realize that the description, the explanation, is never that which is described or explained. Knowing all this, seeing all this vast confusion, misery and travail, why do we accept it, why do we go on with it? Do we look to another to help us out of it? There have been teachers, gurus, saviours - oh, an innumerable number of these - but here we still are. So one loses, or has lost, all faith in another. And I hope you have. This doesn't mean that one becomes cynical, bitter and hard, but that one sees the actual fact that, inwardly, no one can help us. Recognising all this, the actuality of life as we live it everyday, the torture and the aching misery of it, why doesn't one apply oneself completely and utterly to the understanding of it all and break through it? What is education for if we do not do this? What is the good of your becoming Ph.D.'s and all the rest of it, if all this is not fundamentally changed? We must now ask what is the nature of the energy that is required to break out of this trap, this vicious circle in which one is caught. What provides the necessary drive? Obviously it cannot be verbal, nor can it stem from the assertions or conclusions of another. The nature of this energy is freedom - the demand to be free. By freedom we do not mean doing what you like, licentiousness, revolt, undisciplined activity and so on. Freedom is not lack of discipline: on the contrary, freedom demands great discipline. Please note here that while the word "discipline" is an ugly word for most people, it actually means to learn. That is the root meaning of the word: to learn, not to conform; not to imitate but to learn; not to obey but to find out. Learning or finding out, in itself, brings its own discipline. Therefore discipline, which is to learn, is a constant movement and not mere conformity to some pattern. When one understands that - not verbally but actually, sees the truth of it, feeling it in your very bones then you will have the energy to break through this conditioning of fear, this anxiety, these aching sorrows. In the understanding of this whole psychological structure of ourselves, there are these two vital questions: what is living - which we have tried to find out - and also what are love and death. For that is part of our living, and the sanctity of living lies in the discovery of what love is and what death is. Such sanctity comes only of living in the now - not having lived or living in the future -and in that we can perhaps discover what love is and what death is. Then again, without knowing what love and death are, we cannot know what living is. What is death, of which most of us are so frightened? Can a living human being, sane, rational, healthy and not morbid, find out what dying means? - and here we do not mean when one is old and decrepit, diseased and on the point of slipping away unknowingly. Does this question have any interest at all? Not so much to the older generation, perhaps, as we have had most of our time, but it is a question that really applies to everybody - the young, the middle-aged, the aged and the dying. Just as we tried to find out what living is - and which, not being this battlefield, this conflict, this misery, becomes therefore something extraordinarily sacred (if I may use that word without your attempting to belittle it) - in the same way, to find out what death is. I wonder what your reaction is to this question. Either you are afraid, or you have theories, or you believe: believe in the life hereafter - reincarnation for example, which the whole of the East believes in. They believe in reincarnation, but they don't behave in this life; only it is a very comfortable theory in that you will have another chance. But putting that aside altogether, to understand the now, one must understand the past. You cannot say, "I'm going to live in the now" - it has no meaning because the now is the passageway of the past to the future. When you say to yourself, "I'm going to live in the present", the "you" who is going to live is the result of the past. You may draw a circle around yourself, saying, "this is the now or the present", but the entity that is living in the now is the result of the past: he is entirely the past. To live now, in the present - not ideologically, not from a conclusion nor as an assertion - but actually to live completely in the present, means that one must be unconditioned and free. Asking oneself what it means to die, what death is, is not a neurotic question: on the contrary, it shows that one is very healthy, sane and balanced, otherwise one wouldn't ask the question. It means that one is no longer frightened to find out. Obviously the body goes, the organism collapses through constant wear and tear. It can be made to last a little longer if one lives fairly sanely, without too much pressure, strain or excitement. Or the doctors and the scientists may invent a pill or something that will give you another forty or fifty years - although I do not see the point of living another fifty years in this trap. In asking what dying is, one must also ask what it means to actually live - if one can so live-without all the travail: that is, to end the way of living as we know it. Be- cause that is what is going to happen when one dies: the end of everything. The soul, or the Atman the Hindus call it, is just a word. One doesn't know if there is a soul, a permanent "something". Is there anything permanent in us, or do we only wish there were something permanent? When one observes oneself, there is nothing permanent: everything is in movement, in a state of flux. And when one dies, one dies to everything that one has known: the family, the children, the job, the books that one wanted to write or has written, the experiences, all the accumulations that one has piled up, and the responsibilities. There is the ending, psychologically as well as physically, of all that is known. That is death. I think most of us would agree to that. Now, can one die every day to everything that one knows -except, of course, the technological knowledge, the direction where your home is, and so on; that is, to end, psychologically, every day, so that the mind remains fresh, young and innocent? That is death. And to come to that there must be no shadow of fear. To give up without any argument, without any resistance. That is dying. Have you ever tried it? To give up without a murmur, without restraint, without resistance, the thing that gives you most pleasure (the things that are painful, of course, one wants to give up in any case). Actually to let go. Try it. Then, if you do it, you will see that the mind becomes extraordinarily alert, alive and sensitive, free and unburdened. Old age then takes on quite a different meaning, not something to be dreaded. One also has to find out for oneself what love is. That word is one of the most loaded of words; everybody uses it and its usage ranges from the most cunning to the most simple. But what is it actually? What is the state of the heart and the mind that loves? Is love pleasure? Please do ask these questions of yourself. Is love desire? If it is pleasure, then with it must go pain. If pleasure and pain are associated with love, then it is obviously not love. As you will recall, we saw that pleasure is the product of thought. Thinking about the sexual experience that you had - chewing it over, the building of the image - is to sustain the pleasure of that experience. Thought engenders pleasure and it also breeds fear; fear of tomorrow, fear of the past, thinking about what one did, thinking about the physical pain that one has experienced and fearing a recurrence. So thought breeds pleasure, fear and pain and are these to be called love? But that is all 135 we know. That is what we call love. I love my wife and when that wife, on whom I depend for sex, for cooking my meals and running the family, when she turns and looks at another. I am angry furious and jealous - and this is called love. Then man invents the love of a God - a God who doesn't demand anything, who doesn't turn his back on you. You have him in your pocket and are sure he is there protecting you in your jealousies, in your anxieties, leading you on to even greater cruelty. All this is called "love", but is it? Obviously not, because love is not something that is the product of thought. Love cannot be cultivated. Love cannot be bought through pleasure. How can an aggressive, ambitious, competitive man love? And if he wants to find out what it is - actually and not theoretically - he has to end his ambition, his greed, his hate of another, putting aside completely all that which is not love. But, you see, we play with all these things and then talk about love. We are really not very serious people, and because we are not serious, our life is what it is. So, without dying there is no love, for love is always new and not a routine matter of sex and pleasure. For most of us, throughout the world, sex has become an extraordinary problem, or, rather, a problem in which we delight. Do you never wonder why this is so? It would seem as though it has just been discovered for the first time, being featured in every magazine and all the rest of it. Why has it become such a persistent and continuing problem with which the word "love" is associated? Probably the clever ones will put up many arguments as to why man gets so excited about this one thing. But, leav- ing aside all the experts and the intellectual gurus, can one see why one is so caught up in this thing? You will have to answer this question; you cannot just brush it aside, because it is a part of our life, part of this thing called life which has become such a battle and such a misery. Why has sex become a problem? Or should we rather ask why it is apparently the only thing left to man in which he is free? Therein he loses himself totally: at that moment he is no longer all the miseries, all the memories, the tortures, the competition, the aggression, the violence and the battling. He simply is not there. So, because he is absent, it has become important; then there is no longer the division between "me" and "you", "we" and "they". Such division comes to an end, and at that moment perhaps you find great freedom. Probably it has become so extraordinarily important just because it is the only thing we have left in which we can find such freedom. In everything else, we are not free. Intellectually, emotionally and physically, we are constrained and restricted secondhand people, thoroughly moulded by our technological society. So, with no freedom except in sex, sex has become important and, because of that, a problem. We are not saying you should not have sex - that would be absurd. But can we cease to be slaves, secondhand human beings endlessly repeating what we have been told about things that actually do not matter very much, endlessly living in an ideological world - that is, living with formulas and therefore not actually living at all? Then, when one is free all round, both intellectually and in one's heart, perhaps this problem won't be so serious. Observing all this, from the beginning to the end and noting that we do not change at all, one must ask why one has not got the energy to change. We have the tremendous and extraordinary energy required to go to the moon but not enough, apparently, to change ourselves. And yet I assure you that it is one of the easiest things to do, and that it becomes easy when you know how to look. When you can actually see "what is", without trying to change it, suppress it, go beyond it or escape from it, then you will see that "what is, undergoes a tremendous change. That is, when the mind is completely silent in observation, then there is radical change. And the watching of all this, the observing of it deeply in oneself, brings us to one more question, which is: What is meditation? -because a mind which is not meditative cannot understand this whole structure and chain of our life. Perhaps we can discuss tomorrow the state of the mind which is religious, not belonging to some stupid organization but remaining free and therefore religious; that is, the state of the mind which is in the act of meditation. This is not an invitation for you to come tomorrow (Laughter). Perhaps, if you care to, we will now have some questions, Questioner: Why does each one of us have the "I" structure? What is its origin? Krishnamurti: The questioner asks why there is a separate "me". Why is there this peculiar entity that thinks it is so very different from the other entities? Why is there this "me" with all its problems, and the "you" with all your problems - which is also the "me"? The "me" is not different from the "you" because you have the same problems, only you clothe them in different words, using different ways of expressing them. But it is still the "me", expressing itself differently. I, born in India and educated abroad, and you here and educated here, with your problems; and if I have problems, what is the difference between you and me? - not physically, of course: you may have a bigger bank account, a bigger house and a nice car. You may have more abundance of things than the other, but, apart from a better superficial education and the chance of expressing it, a better job and all that, is there any basic difference? If there is no difference, why all this fuss about it - you and me, they and I, we and they, the black and the white, the yellow and the brown - why? There is great pleasure in being separate, all the vanity of it: I am original, unique, marvellous, and you say exactly the same thing, only putting it in a minor key. This vanity that each of us is so extraordinarily unique, gives great pleasure. Are we unique? You have sorrow and so has the other; you are as confused as the other; uncertain, anxious, aggressive, brutal, suspicious, guilty as is the other. So when we free ourselves from this basic division of the "I" and "you", the "we" and "they", is there then any division at all? Is not the observer then the observed, which is you? In that there is vast compassion. It is only when I have built a wall around myself and you have built a wall around yourself, leading to resistance, that the whole misery begins. The social structure, too, encourages this "me" and this "you". Can we not be free of this division in our thoughts and in our society, which our own vanity has cultivated? Then, if you have gone that far, you will probably find out what love is. Questioner: Would you say something about the effort that sometimes gets in the way when one tries to be aware? Krishnamurti: What is effort? Why should we make effort? I know it is the accepted tradition that you must make an effort, otherwise you will be a nobody, just a God-knows-what. So, at all costs, make an effort: that is the conditioning, the tradition, the accepted norm. Now, Sir, what is effort and why do we have to make an effort? This is a very important question. Is there any effort when there is no contradiction? PLease follow this. When the "me" is "you" - which really requires a tremendous depth of feeling and understanding: you cannot just state that the "me" is "you", as it would have no meaning - when they are one in relationship and thus without contradiction, what need is there for effort? There is no effort. There is effort only when there is a psychological contradiction, that is: the "what is" over and against the what should be", the opposite - which is the contradiction. The "what is" trying to become the "what should be", violence trying to become non-violent - in this lies the contradiction and therefore the effort, the endeavour to become something which is not. So, basically, effort implies contradiction: I am this but I will be that; I am a failure but, by Jove, I'm going to become a success; I am angry but I will cease being angry, and so on. A series of corridors of opposites and, hence, conflict. Speaking psychologically, is there an opposite? Or is there always only "what is"? Because the mind does not know how to deal with "what is", it invents the opposite, the "what should be". If it knew how to deal with "what is", there would be no conflict. If the mind could cease measuring itself against the hero, the perfect, the glorious and all that, it would be what it is. Then, free of all comparison, free of the opposite, the "what is" becomes something entirely different. In that there is no effort involved at all. Effort means distortion and effort is a part of will, which distorts. But to us will and effort are our bread and butter; we are brought up on it: you must be better than that boy in the examination - all that. And in being brought up like that lies great mischief and misery. So, to see "what is" and to be aware of that without any choice, frees the mind from the contradiction of the opposites. Questioner: You said yesterday that if one could get rid of the circle round the family, that an extraordinary thing would happen. I would like very much to understand that. Krishnamurti: First of all, is one aware - not verbally - that there is a wall around oneself? Each one of us has a wall round himself: a wall of resistance, of fear and anxiety. The "me" built around myself, thus making the wall; this "me" in the family, each member of which is also surrounded by his own wall. Then the whole family with a wall around itself and similarly, with the community and the society. Now is one aware of this? Do we not feel that living in this world, it is necessary, otherwise the "me" will be destroyed and so will the family? So we maintain the wall as the most sacred thing. Now if one is aware of it, what happens? If one removes altogether this wall round oneself, round the family, does the family end? What then happens to the competition between the "me", the family, and the rest of the world? We know very well what takes place when there is a wall - then we have resistance, conflict, everlasting battle and pain, because any separative movement, any self-centred activity, does breed conflict and pain. When there is an awareness of the whole nature and structure of this circle, this wall, and an understanding of how it has come into being - that is, the immediate realization of the whole thing - then what happens? When we remove the division between the "me" and the "you", the "we" and the "they", what happens? Only then and not before, can one perhaps use the word "love". And love is that most extraordinary thing that takes place when there is no "me" with its circle or wall. Questioner: When I try to observe myself, why do I find myself observing from the outside, as it were? Krishnamurti: Have you ever observed a cloud? If you have watched it, you will see that there is not only the physical separation from it, with distance and time, but also that inwardly there is a division. That is to say, your mind is so occupied with other things that you do not give real attention to it; you know all the words one uses, "how beautiful", how lovely", but all these verbal statements act as a barrier which prevents you from really looking at the cloud. Right? Now can one look at that cloud nonverbally, that is, without the image that one has about clouds? Since it is an objective thing over there, perhaps one may do it fairly easily, but can one look at oneself non-verbally? This means to remove the barriers of criticism, judgment and condemnation and just observe. With a mind free of condemnation and judgment and all the rest of it, then surely the space between you and the thing observed disappears: then you are not there, looking over the wall. You are that. And when you are that, there comes a difficulty. Before, you observed it as something separate from yourself, whereas now you observe it without that separation. But any movement you make with regard to that must still be a movement from the outside. But if you look at it without any movement - that is, look at it in complete silence - then that which is observed out of silence is not the same as it was when you looked at it over the wall. Questioner: (inaudible). Krishnamurti: A man who is poor and has to work ten hours a day is obviously conditioned, and although he may change slightly, there is no inward revolution because he is stamped by the society in which he lives. Now what is that man to do? Is that your question, Sir? Questioner: What am I to do in relation to that man? Krishnamurti: You ask what your relationship is to that man. May I put it differently? What is the relationship between you and me? I have talked, as I have done most of my life, and the day after tomorrow I go away. Now what is our relationship? Have we any relationship? You will obviously have an image of the speaker: what he said or didn't say, whether you agreed or disagreed, and so on. Is there any relationship at all? And is there actually any relationship between a man who is alive, alert, active, inwardly aflame and the man who says, "Please leave me alone, for God's sake, I am caught in the trap of society and cannot change". One's relationship to such a man can be either affectionate or compassionate - not patronizing. If one is alive and aware of all these things that are happening inside and outside, one does change oneself. And it is always the intelligent minority which, in turn, changes the structure of society and the world. Then, perhaps, there may be a chance for another. Questioner: This inward psychological revolution that you have talked about: it hasn't taken place in me or in any of my friends, nor, as far as I can see, in many people in history. When I try to look at "what is" and when I see "what is", it still doesn't happen. Yet you seem to hold out hope that it can happen and this hope of yours seems to me, therefore, to be in contradiction to "what is". Krishnamurti: I hope I am not offering anybody any hope (Laughter). That would be a most terrible thing. If you are looking for hope - from me or from another - then you are avoiding the despair which is what actually is. Do please follow this. Can you look at that despair, which is what actually is - not the hope which is merely a supposition, something you wish for - but actually look at the fear and despair? Can you look at it without hope and without condemnation? Can you see it actually as it is, be directly in contact with it? This means looking at it non-verbally, without any fear, without any distortion. Can you do it? If you can look at "what is" absolutely without any distortion, you will see that the whole thing undergoes a tremendous change: it is no longer despair, it is something entirely different. But, unfortunately, most of us are conditioned and we are always hoping for the ideal, which is an escape. Putting away all escapes, all hopes - not in bitterness or with cynicism but because you see that there is only this fear and despair - then you are left free to look. And when the mind is free, is there despair? Questioner: Is sex always an escape? Krishnamurti: I wouldn't know. (Laughter) Is it to you? You see, that's just it: it becomes an escape when it is the only thing wherein you feel free of your daily misery, effort and contradiction; and so it becomes a door through which you can escape. And if you do so escape, that very escape breeds fear. But if you are aware that it is an escape, then everything changes. YOU ARE THE WORLD CHAPTER 11 14TH FEBRUARY 1969 4TH PUBLIC TALK AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY THIS IS OUR last talk. Do you still wish the subject of meditation to be talked about, as was previously suggested? Audience: Yes. Krishnamurti: Before we go into it, I think we should consider the question of passion and beauty. The word "passion" is derived from a word meaning "to suffer", but we are using that word in a sense different from either sorrow or lust. Without passion one cannot do very much, and passion is necessary to go into this very complex question of what meditation is. In the sense we mean -and perhaps we may be giving it a different significance - passion comes when there is the total abandonment of the "me" and the "you", the "we" and the "they", and when, with that abandonment, there is a deep sense of austerity. We do not mean the austerity of the priest or the monk, whose austerity is harsh, directed and sustained through control and suppression. We are talking about a passion that is the outcome of an austerity which is not harsh. An austere mind is really a beautiful mind. Beauty, again, is rather a complex question. In our lives there is so little of it: we live here in a beautiful building surrounded by a lovely wood with marvellous old trees, with the skies blue and with lovely sunsets, but beauty is not the essence of experience. Beauty is not in the thing that man alone has created. To perceive what is deeply beautiful, there must not only be a silence of the mind but also great space in the mind. I hope all this does not sound rather absurd, but I think it will become intelligible as we go along. We have so very little space in ourselves. Our minds are limited, narrow, shallow, concerned about ourselves and committed to various forms of activities - social, personal, idealistic and so on. While there is a certain space between the observer and the thing observed and also around and within this wall of resistance which constitutes the "me", there is another space that is not bound by either the centre or by the wall of resistance. And that space, together with beauty and passion, is essential for an understanding of what meditation is. And, if you will, we will go into that. Now the West has its own word, "contemplation", but I do not see this as being the same as meditation as it is understood in the East. First of all, then, let us discard what is generally understood by the word meditation, that is, that through meditation one receives a great result, a great experience. Later we may examine the truth or falseness of that idea. The meaning of the word meditation is to ponder, think over, consider, examine in a deeper sense, to feel one's way into something not completely understood, to feel one's way into the mystery and the secret recesses of one's own unexplored mind and depths of feeling. Meditation then, in the real meaning of that word, has its own peculiar beauty, and we are also talking about it as quite one of the most extraordinary things in life - if one knows all that it means. Such meditation transcends all experience. It is not a mystical, romantic or sentimental affair; it needs, rather, a tremendous foundation of righteousness, of virtue and order. Also, one has to understand the whole question of experience. And so one has to go not only verbally into it, but also feel one's way into something that cannot be conveyed by mere words. It is not some visionary, mystical state induced by thought, but something that comes about naturally and easily when the foundation of righteous behaviour is laid. Without that foundation, meditation becomes merely an escape, a fantasy, a thing that one enjoys as a means to some fantastic measures and experiences. So we are going to go into this question of meditation. And one should, because it is as important as love, death and living -perhaps much more - because out of that meditative mind there comes an understanding of what truth is. Initially we should, I feel, be quite clear as to the falseness or truth of what is generally accepted about meditation both in the East and, lately, here in this country. In the East, it is generally understood as a practice in which there is control of thought, such control being based on a particular method or system. There are numbers of these systems in India and also in the Buddhist world, including Zen. Systems and methods are offered in the practising of which one comes to that state of silence in which reality is revealed. That, in general, is what is understood by the various forms of meditation. Are you interested in all this? I cannot think why because I am really not interested in it all (Laughter). There are systems invented by the swamis, yogis, maharishis and all the rest of them; meditations upon a series of words and their meanings, or on a phrase, a picture, an image or some quotation which is supposed to have great meaning. And there is also what is called "mantra yoga", which has been introduced into this country and in which you repeat certain Sanskrit words which the guru gives to the disciple in secrecy. These you repeat three or four times a day, or a hundred or a thousand times, whatever it is, thus quieting the mind and enabling you to transcend this world into a different world. Obviously the repetition of a series of words - whether in Sanskrit, Latin, English, or even, if you will, Greek or Chinese - would produce a certain quietness in the mind, a certain quality in the repetitive word tending to make a mind, which is already dull, even duller (Laughter). No, Sirs, please don't laugh; it is quite serious because this is one of the things, with variations, that is practised a great deal in the East, the idea being that a mind that wanders endlessly is made quiet by repetition. So then the word becomes very important, especially when it is in Sanskrit, because that is an extraordinary language, possessing a certain tonality and quality; and it is hoped that thereby you achieve something. Now you can repeat a word like "Coca-Cola" or "Pepsi-Cola, - whatever you will - and you will also have an extraordinary feeling (Laughter). So you can see that such repetition as is being done not only in the East, but also in the Catholic churches and monasteries, makes the mind rather shallow, empty and dull. It does not bring to it a sensitivity, a quality of perception. Again, the man who repeats, sees what he wants to see. So we can discard that particular form of what is called meditation - and discard it intelligently, not because someone says so, but because one can see that, by repetition, the mind obviously must become rather dull and insensitive. Please know that the speaker is in no way persuading you to any particular method or system - he doesn't believe in it; there is no method for meditation, as you will see presently, Then again, other systems lay down a whole series of postures, as a result of which, if you sit rightly, cross-legged and breathing deeply, you will silence the mind. There is a story of a great teacher who is pottering about in the garden when a disciple approaches and sits down, assuming the ordained posture, and looks to the master to instruct him further. So the master sits beside him and, as he sits, he watches the disciple who, by now, has closed his eyes and begun to breathe deeply. Whereupon the teacher asks, "What are you doing, my friend?" The disciple replies, "I am trying to reach the highest consciousness". Then the teacher picks up two pebbles and begins to rub them together. And as he rubs, the disciple, who is on the highest plane of consciousness, opens his eyes and, upon observing what the master is doing, asks, "Master, what are you doing?" The master replies, "I am rubbing two stones together to make one of them into a mirror". So the disciple laughs and says, "Master, you can do that for the next ten thousand years and you will never make a mirror out of a stone". Whereupon the master retorts, "You can sit like that for the next ten thousand years and you will never achieve what you want!" So there are these systems of breathing and right posture. It is obvious that, in sitting straight or lying down flat, the blood flows more easily to the head, whereas too much bending tends to restrict the flow - that is the idea of sitting straight. Breathing regularly does bring about more oxygen in the blood and therefore quieting the body, and we can gauge the importance or unimportance of it. The idea is that if you practise the method laid down by the guru, you will daily achieve a greater degree of understanding, or of silence, getting closer to heaven, closer to the greatest thing on earth or beyond the earth. The guru is supposed to be enlightened and knows more than the disciple. The word "guru" in Sanskrit means the one who points; like a signpost, he just points. He doesn't tell you what to do. He doesn't even take you by the hand and lead you: he just points the way, leaving you to do with it what you will. But that word has become corrupted by those who use it for themselves, because such gurus offer methods. Now, what is a method, a system? Please follow this closely because by discarding what is false - that is, through negation - one finds out what is true. That is what we are doing. Without negating totally that which is obviously false, one cannot arrive at any form of understanding. Those of you who have practised certain systems or forms of meditation can question it for yourselves. When you practise something regularly day after day, getting up at two and three in the morning as the monks do in the Catholic world, or sitting down quietly at certain times during the day, controlling yourself and shaping your thought according to the system or the method, you can ask yourself what you are achieving. You are, in fact, pursuing a method that promises a reward. And when you practise a method day after day, your mind obviously becomes mechanical. There is no freedom in it. A method implies that it is a way laid down by somebody who is supposed to know what he is doing. And - if I may say so - if you are not sufficiently intelligent to see through that, then you will be caught in a mechanical process. That is, the daily practising, the daily polishing, making your life into a routine so that gradually, ultimately - it may take five, ten or any number of years - you will be in a state to understand what truth is, what enlightenment and reality are and so on. Quite obviously no method can do that because method implies a practice; and a mind that practises something day after day becomes mechanical, loses its quality of sensitivity and its freshness. So again one can see the falseness of the systems offered. Then there are other systems, including Zen and the various occult systems wherein the methods are revealed only to the few. The speaker has met with some of those but discarded them right from the beginning as having no meaning. So, through close examination, understanding and intelligence, one can discard the mere repetition of words and one can discard altogether the guru - he who stands for authority, the one who knows as against the one who does not know. The guru or the man who says he knows, does not know. You cannot ever know what truth is because it is a living thing, whereas a method, a path, lays down the steps to be taken in order to reach truth - as though truth is something that is fixed and permanent, tied down for your convenience. So if you will discard authority completely - not partially but completely, including that of the speaker - then you will also discard, quite naturally, all systems and the mere repetition of words. Having discarded all that, perhaps we can now proceed to find out what the meditative mind is. As we pointed out, there must be a foundation of righteous behaviour, not as the pursuit of an idea which is considered righteous, the practising of which in daily life becomes mere respectability and therefore far from righteous. That which is respectable, accepted by society as moral, is not moral: it is unrighteous. Do you accept all this? Do you know, Sirs, what it means to be moral, to be virtuous? You may dislike those two words, but to be really moral is to end all respectability - the respectability which society recognizes as being moral. You can be ambitious, greedy, envious, jealous, full of violence, competitive, destructive, exhorted to kill, and society will consider all that moral and therefore very respectable. We, however, are talking of a different morality and virtue altogether, something which has nothing to do with social morality. Virtue is order, but not order according to a design or blueprint, something laid down by the church, by society or by your own ideological principles. Virtue means order. Order means the understanding of what disorder is and freeing the mind from that disorder - the disorder of resistance, of greed, envy, brutality and fear. And out of that comes a virtue which is not something cultivated by thought, as humility is something that cannot be cultivated by thought. A mind which is vain can endeavour to cultivate humility, hoping thereby to mask its own vanity, but such a mind has no humility. Similarly virtue is a living thing that is not the result of a practice, that is not dependent on environmental influence; it is a behaviour which is righteous, true and deeply honest. Most of us are dishonest. Those who have ideals and pursue them are essentially dishonest because they are not what they are pretending to be. So, one has to lay this foundation, and the manner in which it is laid is of greater importance than understanding what meditation is: indeed, this very manner of laying is meditation. If in that laying, there is any resistance, suppression or control, then it ceases to be righteous because in all that effort is involved; and effort, as we said yesterday, comes about only when there is contradiction in oneself. So, is it possible for the mind to recognise that the morality practised in the world is not really moral at all; and, in the understanding of that, the seeing of its envy, greed and acquisitiveness, to be free of it without effort? Do I make myself clear? That is, seeing the totality of envy, not just a particular form of it but the whole meaning of it, seeing it not only as an idea but in actuality, then that very act of seeing frees the mind from envy. And therefore, in that freedom, there is no conflict. Righteousness, then, cannot be the outcome of conflict and is not the result of a drilled mind. In a mind which understands what it is to learn (which is the understanding of "what is"), the learning itself brings about its own discipline; and such discipline is extraordinarily austere. So there it is: if you have laid the foundation in that manner, then we can proceed, but if you are not virtuous in that deep sense of the word, then meditation becomes an escape, a dishonest activity. Even a stupid mind, a dull mind, can make itself quiet through drugs or the repetition of words, but to be righteous demands a great sensitivity and therefore a great austerity - not of the ashes and loincloth variety, which again is a pretension and an outward show - but to be inwardly and deeply austere. Such austerity has great beauty: it is like fine steel. In the understanding of ourselves, obviously, lie the beginnings of meditation. This understanding of oneself is quite a complex affair. There is the conscious mind and the unconscious - the so-called deep or hidden mind. I don't know why such great importance has been given to the unconscious. It is the treasure of the past - if that can be called a treasure. The racial inheritance, the tradition, the memories, the motives, the concealed demands, urges, desires, pursuits and compulsions. The conscious mind obviously cannot, through analysis, explore all the unconscious, those deep, hidden, secret layers of the mind, because it would take many years. Moreover, a conscious mind that undertakes to examine the unconscious must itself be extraordinarily alert, unconditioned, sharp and of unbiased perception. So it becomes quite a problem. It is said that the unconscious reveals itself through dreams and intimations, and that you must dream, otherwise you would go mad. Does one ever ask why one should dream at all? We have accepted that we must dream. As you know, we are the most tradition-bound people; despite being very modern and greatly sophisticated, we accept tradition and are "yes-sayers". We never say "no", never doubt, never question. Some authority or specialist comes along and says this or that and we promptly agree, saying, "Right, Sir, you know better than we do". But we are going to question this whole matter of the unconscious, the conscious and dreams. Why should you dream at all? Obviously because during the day your conscious mind is so occupied with the job, with the quarrels, with the family, the various items of possible amusement. All the time it is chattering away endlessly, talking to itself, counting - you know all that it does. And so at night, when the brain is somewhat quieter, and the whole body more peaceful, the deeper layers are supposed to project their contents into the mind, giving hints and intimations of what it hopes you will understand, and so on. Have you ever tried, during the day, to be watchful without correction, aware without choice, watching your thought, your motives, what you are saying, how you are sitting, the manner of your usage of words, your gestures - watching? Have you ever tried? If, during the day, you have watched without attempting to correct, not saying to yourself, "What a terrible thought that is, I mustn't have it", but just watching, then you will see that having uncovered, during the day, your motives, demands and urges, when you come to sleep at night, your mind and your brain are quieter. And you will also find, as you go into it very deeply, that no dreams are possible. As a result, when it wakes up, the mind finds itself extraordinarily alive, active, fresh and innocent. I wonder if you will attempt to do all these things or whether all this is just a lot of words. Then there is the other problem. The mind, as we have it, is always calculating, comparing, pursuing, driven, endlessly chattering to itself or gossiping about somebody else -you know what it does every day and all day long. Such a mind cannot possibly see what is true or perceive what is false. Such perception is only possible when the mind is quiet. When you want to listen to what the speaker is saying - if you are interested - your mind is naturally quiet: It ceases to chatter or think about something else. If you want to see something very clearly - if you want to understand your wife or your husband, or to see the cloud in all its glory and beauty - you look, and the looking must be out of silence, otherwise you cannot see. So, can the mind, which is so endlessly moving, chattering, chasing and taking fright, ever be quiet? Not through drill, suppression or control, but just be quiet? The professional mediators tell us to control. Now control implies not only the one who controls but also the thing controlled. As you watch your mind, your thought wanders off and you pull it back; then it wanders again and again you pull it back. So this game goes on endlessly. And if, at the end of ten years or whatever it is, you can control so completely that your mind does not wander at all and has no thoughts whatever, then, it is said, you will have achieved a most extraordinary state. But actually, on the contrary, you will not have achieved anything at all. Control implies resistance. Please follow this a little. Concentration is a form of resistance, the narrowing down of thought to a particular point. And when the mind is being trained to concentrate completely on one thing, it loses its elasticity, its sensitivity, and becomes incapable of grasping the total field of life. Now is it possible for a mind to have this sense of concentration without exclusion, and yet without resorting to subjugation, conformity or suppression for purposes of control? It is very easy to concentrate; every schoolboy learns it - though he hates doing it, he is forced to try to concentrate. And when you do concentrate, you are surely resisting; your whole mind is focussed on something and if you train it day after day to concentrate on one thing, naturally it loses its sharpness, its width, its depth, and it has no space. So the problem then is: can the mind possess this quality of concentration - although that really isn't the word - this quality of paying attention to one thing without losing the total attention? By "total attention" we mean that attention which is given with your whole mind, in which there is no fear, no pain, no profit-motive, no pleasure - because you have already understood what the implications of pleasure are. So when the mind thus gives attention completely - that is, with your heart, your nerves, your eyes, your whole being - then such attention can also include attention given to one small item. When you wash dishes, you can give complete attention to it without this resistance, this narrowing down associated with ordinary concentration. So, having seen the necessity for laying the foundation naturally, without any distortion, without any effort and discarding all authority, we can now consider the search by the mind for experience. Most of us lead such a dull, routine life of obviously very little meaning, that, through various forms of stimuli including drugs, we constantly seek wider and deeper experiences. Now, when one has an ex- perience, the recognition of it as an experience shows that you must already have had it, otherwise you would not recognise it. So the Christian, conditioned as he is to the worship of a particular Saviour, when taking drugs or seeking some great experience through different ways, will obviously see something coloured by his own conditioning, and therefore what he sees will be his own projection. And although that may be most extraordinary, with great luminosity, depth and beauty, it will still be his own background being projected. Therefore the mind that seeks experience as a means of giving significance and meaning to life, is, in reality, projecting its own background, whereas the mind that is not seeking because it is free, has quite a different quality. Now all that has been observed, from the beginning of this talk until now, is part of meditation; to see the truth as we go along; to see the falseness of the guru, the authority, the system; to lay the foundation of a behaviour which is not the mere outcome of environment and in which there is no effort at all. All that implies a quality of meditation. When one is at that point, having understood this whole business of living in which there is no conflict at all, one can then proceed to inquire into what silence is. If you inquire without having done all the previous things, your silence will have no meaning whatsoever, for without a true understanding of beauty, of love, of death and of virtue, a mind must remain shallow, and any silence that it produces will be silence of death. But if you have taken the journey with the speaker this evening, as I hope you have, then we can proceed to ask, "What is silence, what is the quality of silence?" Remember that if one wants to see anything very clearly, without any effort and without any distortion, the mind must be quiet. If I want to see your face, if I want to listen to the beauty of your voice, if I want to see what kind of person you are, my mind must be quiet and not chatter. If it is chattering and wandering all over the place, then I am unable to see either your beauty or your ugliness. So silence is necessary for such seeing, as night is necessary for the day; also that silence is neither the product of noise nor of the cessation of noise. That silence comes naturally when all the other qualities have come being. You know, Sirs, in that silence there is space, but not the space that exists between the observer and the thing observed - as, for instance, between me and this microphone (without which I could not see it). A silent mind has great space not created by either the object or the observer. I do not know if you have ever watched what space is: there is space displaced by and around this microphone; there is space around the "me" and around the "you". Whenever we say "we" and "they", there is this space which we have created around ourselves. When you say you are Christian, Catholic, Protestant or Communist, there is space according to how you thus limit yourself, and that space inevitably breeds conflict because it is limited and because it divides. But when there is silence, there is not the space of division, but quite a different quality of space. And there must be such space, as only then can come that which is not measurable by thought - that immensity, that which is supreme and which cannot be invited. A petty mind, practising indefinitely, still remains petty. Most people who are seeking truth are actually inviting truth, but truth cannot be invited. The mind has not enough space and is not sufficiently quiet. So meditation is from the beginning to the end, and in meditation lies the skill in action. So, all this is meditation. If you can do this, the door is open, and it is for you to come to it. What lies beyond is not something romantic or emotional, something that you wish for, something to which you can escape. But you come to it with a full mind which is intelligent, sensitive and without any distortion. You come to it with great love, otherwise meditation has no meaning. Questioner: In the middle of your talk you mentioned that although meditation wasn't what you wanted to talk about, it was necessary to talk about it. Was there some other subject? Krishnamurti; Sir, what didn't interest me was the explanation of the obvious, the obvious being the methods, the systems, the repetition of words, the gurus - all so obvious. What is important is not to follow anybody but to under- stand oneself. If you go into yourself without effort, fear, without any sense of restraint, and really delve deeply, you will find extraordinary things; and you don't have to read a single book. The speaker has not read a single book about any of these things: philosophy, psychology, sacred books. In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open, except yourself. Questioner: Is there a reason for being? Krishnamurti: Why do you want a reason for being? (Laughter). You are here. And because you are here and don't understand yourself, you want to invent a reason. You know, Sir, when you look at a tree or the clouds, the light on the water, when you know what it means to love, you will require no reason for being: you are, there is. Then all the museums in the world and all the concerts will have only secondary importance. Beauty is there for you to see, if you have the mind and the heart to look - not out there in the cloud, in the tree, in the water, in the thing, but in yourself. YOU ARE THE WORLD CHAPTER 12 19TH FEBRUARY 1969 3RD PUBLIC TALK AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THIS EVENING I would like to talk about several things which are all related, just as all human problems are also related. One cannot take one problem separately and try to solve it by itself; each problem contains all the other problems, if one knows how to go into it deeply and comprehensively. I would, first of all, like to ask what is going to become of all of us, the young and the old, what will we make of our lives? Are we going to allow ourselves to be sucked into this maelstrom of accepted respectability with its social and economic morality, and become part of the so-called cultural society with all its problems, its confusion and contradiction, or are we going to make something entirely different of our life? That is the problem which faces most people. One is educated, not to understand life as a whole, but to play a particular role in this totality of existence. We are so heavily conditioned from childhood to achieve something in this society, to be successful and to become a complete bourgeois; and the more sensitive intellectual generally revolts against such a pattern of existence. In his revolt, he does various things: either he becomes antisocial, anti-political, takes to drugs and pursues some narrow, sectarian, religious belief, following some guru, some teacher or philosopher, or he becomes an activist, a Communist, or he gives himself over entirely to some exotic religion like Buddhism or Hinduism. And by becoming a sociologist, a scientist, an artist, a writer or, if one has the capacity, a philosopher and, thereby, enclosing oneself in a circle, we think we have solved the problem. We then imagine we have understood the whole of life and we dictate to others what life should be according to our own particular tendency, our own particular idiosyncrasy, and from our own specialized knowledge. When one observes what life is with its enormous complexity and intricacy, not only in the economic and social spheres, but also in the psychological sphere, one must ask oneself, if one is at all serious, what part one is to play in all this. What shall I do as a human being living in this world and not escaping into some fantasy existence or a monastery? Seeing this whole pattern very clearly, what is one to do, what is one to make of one's life? This question is always there, whether we are well placed in the establishment or just about to enter into it. So, it seems to me, one must inevitably ask this question: What is the purpose of life and as a fairly healthy human being psychologically, who is not totally neurotic and who is alive and active, what part shall I play in all this? Which role or which part am I attracted to? And, if I am attracted to a particular fragment or section, then I must be aware of the danger in such an attraction, because we are back again in the same old division which breeds effort, contradiction and war. Can I then take part in the whole of life and not in just one particular segment of it? To take part in the whole of life obviously does not mean to have a complete knowledge of science, sociology, philosophy, mathematics, and so on; that would be impossible unless one were a genius. Can one, therefore, bring about psychologically, inwardly, a totally different way of living? This obviously means that one takes an interest in all the outward things, but that the fundamental, radical revolution is in the psychological realm. What can one do to bring about such a change deeply within oneself? For oneself is the society, is the world, is all the content of the past. So the problem is: How can we, you and I, take part in the totality of life and not merely in one segment of it? That's one problem; there are also the problems of conduct, behaviour and virtue and the problem of love - what love is, and what death is. Whether we are young or old, we must ask ourselves these questions, because they are part of life, part of our existence; and together, if you are agreeable, we must talk over these problems this evening. We are going into these problems together; you are not outside of all this, merely a spectator, a listener observing with curiosity and taking a casual interest. Whether we like it or not, we are all involved in this inquiry - what to make of our life, what is righteous behaviour, what is love (if there is such a thing), what is the meaning of that extraordinary thing called death, which most people won't even discuss. So, seeing the whole of this, one must ask what is the purpose of all existence. The life that we lead at present has actually very little meaning, passing a few examinations, getting a degree, finding a good job and struggling for the rest of our life until we die. And to invent a meaning to this utter disorder is equally disastrous. Now what is possible for us, seeing all this and knowing that there must be a deep, psychological revolution to bring about a different order, a different society, and at the same time not depending on anyone to give us enlightenment or clarity - so what is possible? To find out what is possible, one must, first of all, find out what is impossible. Now what is impossible or appears to be impossible? It appears impossible for a complete change, a complete psychological revolution to take place immediately, that is, tomorrow you wake up and you are completely different, your way of looking, thinking, feeling is so new, so alive, so passionate, so true, that in it there is no longer a shadow of conflict or hypocrisy. You say that is impossible because you have accepted or become accustomed to the idea of psychological evolution, a gradual change which may take fifty years; so time is necessary, not only chronological time but psychological time. That is the accepted, traditional way of thinking; to change, to bring about a radical, psychological revolution, time is necessary. If one suggests, as the speaker does, that it is possible to change completely by tomorrow, you would say that is impossible, wouldn't you? So, for you, that is the impossible; now from knowing what is impossible, you can find out what is possible. The possibility then is not the same as it was before: it's entirely different. Are we following each other? When we say this is possible, that is impossible, the possibility is measurable, but when we realize something which is impossible, then we see in relation to the impossible what is possible; and that possibility then is entirely different from what was possible before. Please, listen carefully, don't compare this with what somebody else has said, just watch it in yourself and you will see an extraordinary thing takes place. The possibility now, as we are, is very small; it is possible to go to the moon, to become a rich man or a professor, whatever it is, but that possibility is very trivial. Now when you are confronted with an issue such as this, that you must change completely by tomorrow and therefore become a totally different human being, then you are faced with the impossible. When you realize the impossibility of that, then in relation to the impossible, you will find out what is possible, which is something entirely different; therefore quite a different possibility takes place in your mind. And it is this possibility that we are talking about, not the trivial possibility, So, bearing all this in mind, the impossible and the possible in relationship to the impossible, and seeing this whole pattern of existence, what can I do? The impossible is to love without a shadow of jealousy and hate. Most of us, I am afraid, are terribly jealous, envious and possessive. When you love somebody, your girlfriend, your wife or your husband, you are determined to hold them for the rest of your life; at least you try to. And you call that "love" - he or she is "mine". And when "the mine" looks away or looks at another, becomes somewhat independent, then there is fury, jealousy and anxiety, then all the misery of what is called love begins. Now, what is it to love without a shadow of all that? No doubt, you would consider it impossible, you would consider it inhuman, in fact superhuman - so, to you it is impossible. If you see the impossibility of that, then you will find out what is possible in relationship. I hope I am making myself clear. That is the first point. Secondly, our life, as it is now, is struggle, pain, pleasure, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, despair, war, hatred - you know what our everyday living actually is, the competition, the destruction, the disorder. This is actually what is taking place, not what "should be" or what "ought to be; we are only concerned with what is. So, seeing all this, we say to ourselves: "It's too awful, I must escape from it! I want a wider, deeper, more extensive vision. I want "to become more sensitive." Therefore we take drugs. This question of drugs is very old; they have been taking drugs in India for thousands of years. At one time it was called soma, now it is hashish and pan; they haven't yet reached the highly sophisticated level of LSD, but they probably will very soon now. People take hashish and pan in order to become less sensitive; they get lost in the perfume of it, in the different visions it produces and accentuates. These drugs are generally taken by the labourers, the manual workers (here you do not have "untouchables" as they are called in India). They take drugs because their lives are dreadfully dull; they have not much food, so they haven't much energy. The only two things they have are sex and drugs. The truly religious man, the man who really wants to find out what truth is, what life is - not from books, not from religious entertainers, not from philosophers who only stimulate intellectually - such a man will have nothing whatever to do with drugs, because he knows full well that they distort the mind, making it incapable of finding out what truth is. Here in the Western world many people are resorting to drugs. There are the serious ones who have taken it experimentally for perhaps a couple of years, some of whom have come to see me. They have said: "We have had experiences which appear - from what we have read in books - to resemble the ultimate reality, to be a shadow of the real." And because they are serious people, as the speaker is, they have discussed this problem deeply; ultimately they have been forced to admit that the experience is very spurious, that it has nothing whatever to do with the ultimate reality, with all the beauty of that immensity. Unless a mind is clear, wholesome and completely healthy, it cannot possibly be in the state of religious meditation which is absolutely essential to discover that thing which is beyond all thought, beyond all desire. Any form of psychological dependence, any kind of escape, through drink, through drugs, in an attempt to make the mind more sensitive merely dulls and distorts it. When you discard all that - as one must if one is at all serious -you are faced with living inwardly alone. Then you are not depending on anything or anybody, on any drug, on any book, or on any belief. Only then is the mind unafraid, only then can you ask what is the purpose of life. And if you have come to that point, would you ask such a question? The purpose of life is to live - not in the utter chaos and confusion that we call living - but to live in an entirely different way, to live a life that is full, to live a life that is complete, to live that way today. That is the true meaning of life - to live, not heroically, but to live so complete inwardly, without fear, without struggle and without all the rest of the misery. It is possible only when you know what is impossible; you must, therefore, see whether you can change immediately, say, with regard to anger, hate and jealousy, so that you are no longer jealous, which is, of course, envious; envy being a comparison between yourself and another. Now, is it possible to change so completely that envy doesn't touch you at all? This is only possible when you are aware of the envy without this division of the observer and the observed, so that you are envy, you are that: not you and envy as something separate from you. Therefore, when you see this whole thing completely, there is no possibility of doing any- thing about it; and when there is this complete state of envy, in which there is no division and no conflict, then it is no longer envy; it is something entirely different. One can then ask: What is love? Is love pleasure? Is love desire? Is love the product of thought, as pleasure is and fear is? Can love be cultivated and will love come about through time? And, if I don't know what love is, can I come upon it? Love is obviously not sentimentality or emotionalism, so they can be brushed aside immediately, because sentimentality and emotionalism are romantic, and love is not romanticism. Now pleasure and fear are the movement of thought and for most of us pleasure is the greatest thing in life; sexual pleasure and the memory of it, the thought of having had that pleasure, thinking about it over and over again and wanting it tomorrow - the morality of society is based on pleasure. So, if pleasure is not love, then what is love? Please follow this, because you have to answer these questions; you can't just wait for the speaker or somebody else to tell you. This is a fundamental, human question that must be answered by each one of us, not by some guru or philosopher who says this is love, that is not love. Love is not jealousy or envy, is it? You are all very silent! Can you love and at the same time be greedy, ambitious, competitive? Can you love when you kill not only animals but also other human beings? Through the negation of what love is not - it is not jealousy, envy, hate, the self-centred activity of the "me" and the "you", the ugly competition, the brutality and the violence of everyday life - you will know what love is. When you put all these things aside, not intellectually but actually, with your heart, with your mind, with your... I was going to say guts, because obviously all this is not love, then you will come upon love. When you know love, when you have love, then you are free to do what is right; and whatever you do is righteous. But to come to that state, to have that sense of beauty and compassion which love brings, there must also be the death of yesterday. The death of yesterday means to die to everything inwardly, to all ambition and everything that psychologically one has accumulated. After all, when death comes, that's what is going to happen anyway; you are going to leave your family, your house, your goods, your valuables, all the things you possess. You are going to leave all the books from which you have derived so much knowledge, as well as the books you wanted to write and have not written, and the pictures you wanted to paint. When you die to all that, then the mind is completely new, fresh and innocent. I suppose you will say it is impossible. When you say it is impossible, then you begin to invent theories; there must be a life after death; according to the Christians there is resurrection, while the whole of Asia believes in reincarnation. The Hindus maintain that it is impossible to die to everything while one still has life and health and beauty; so fearing death, they give hope by inventing this wonderful thing called reincarnation, which means that the next life will be better. However, the better has a string attached to it; to be better in my next life, I must be good in this one, therefore I must behave myself. I must live righteously; I must not hurt another; there must be no anxiety, no violence. But unfortunately these believers in reincarnation do not live that way; on the contrary, they are aggressive, as full of violence as everyone else, so their belief is as worthless as the dead yesterdays. The important thing is what you are now, and not whether you believe or don't believe, whether your experiences are psychedelic or merely ordinary. What matters is to live at the height of virtue (I know you don't like that word). Those two words "virtue" and "righteousness" have been terribly abused, every priest uses them, every moralist or idealist employs them. But virtue is entirely different from something which is practised as virtue and therein lies its beauty; if you try to practise it, then it is no longer virtue. Virtue is not of time, so it cannot be practised and behaviour is not dependent on environment; environmental behaviour is all right in its way but it has no virtue. Virtue means to love, to have no fear, to live at the highest level of existence, which is to die to everything, inwardly, to die to the past, so that the mind is clear and innocent. And it is only such a mind that can come upon this extraordinary immensity which is not your own invention, nor that of some philosopher or guru. Questioner: Will you please explain the difference between thought and insight? Krishnamurti: Do you mean by "insight" understanding? To see something very clearly, to have no confusion, no choice? I want to understand in what way you are using that word "insight". Is that correct, Sir? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: What is thinking? Please, let's go into this! When I ask you that question "What is thinking?", what takes place in your mind? Questioner: Thought. Krishnamurti: Go slowly, Sir, step by step, don't rush at it! What takes place? I ask you a question. I ask you where you live or what's your name. Your answer is immediate isn't it? Why? Questioner: Because you are dealing with something in the past. Krishnamurti: Please, don't complicate the thing, just look at it! We'll complicate it presently but, first of all, just look at it. (Laughter). I ask you your name, your address, where you live and so on. The answer is immediate because you are familiar with it, you don't have to think about it. Probably you thought about it at first, but you've been brought up since childhood to know your name. There is no thought process involved in that. Now, next time I ask you something a little more difficult and there is a time-lag between the question and your answer. What takes place in that interval? Go slowly, don,t answer me but find out for yourself. All right, I'll ask you a question: What is the distance from here to the moon, to Mars or to New York? In that interval what takes place? Questioner: Searching. Krishnamurti: You're searching, aren't you? Searching where? Questioner: My memory. Krishnamurti: You're searching your memory, that is, somebody has told you or you have read about it, so you are looking in your "cupboard". (Laughter). And then you come up with the answer. To the first question there was an immediate answer, but you are uncertain about the second question, so you take more time. In that interval you are thinking, probing, investigating and eventually you find the right answer. Now, if you are asked a very complex question like "What is God?"... Questioner: 1. God is love. Questioner: 2. God is everything. Questioner: 3. The answer isn't in my memory. Krishnamurti: Just listen! "God is love, God is everything..." Questioner: God is the big furniture remover. (Laughter) Krishnamurti: And so on. Now watch it, just look what's happened. You never said we don't know which is the right answer. Please, follow this! It is very important. Not knowing, you believe! Look what has happened, thought has betrayed you. First, a familiar question, then a more difficult one, and finally a question to which the mind says I've been conditioned to believe in God, so I have an answer. And if you were a Communist you would say, "What are you talking about? Don't be silly, there's no such thing as God. It's a bourgeois belief invented by the priests!" (Laughter). Now, we are talking about thought. First of all, to find out if there is or there is not God (and we must find out, otherwise we are not total human beings), to find that out, all belief, that is, all conditioning brought about by human thought, which arises out of fear must come to an end. We then see what thinking is: thinking is the response of memory, which is your accumulated knowledge, experience and background, and when you are asked a question, certain vibrations are set up, and from that memory you respond. That is thought. Please, watch it in yourself! And thought is always old, obviously, because it responds from the past, therefore thought can never be free. (Pause). You don't go along with that, do you? (Laughter) "Freedom of thought". Please, look at it very carefully, don't laugh it off! We worship thought, don't we? Thought is the greatest thing in life, the intellectuals adore it, but when you look very closely at the whole process of thought - however reasonable, however logical - it is still the response of memory which is always old, so thought itself is old and can never bring about freedom. Please don't accept what the speaker says about anything! So, thought then brings confusion. The question was: What is the difference between thought and insight which, we agreed, was the same as understanding, seeing things very clearly, without any confusion. When you see something very clearly - we are talking psychologically - then there is no choice; there is only choice when there is confusion. We say there is freedom to choose which really means there is freedom to be confused, because if you are not confused, if you see something instantly and very clearly, then where is the need to choose? And when there is no choice, there is clarity. Clarity, insight or understanding are only possible when thought is in abeyance, when the mind is still. Then only can you see very clearly, then you can say you have really understood what we are talking about, then you have direct perception, because your mind is no longer confused. Confusion implies choice and choice is the product of thought. Shall I do this or that - the "me" and the "not-me", the "you" and the "not you", "we" and "they", and so on, all that is implied by thought. And out of this arises confusion and from that confusion we choose; we choose our political leaders, our gurus, and so many other things, but when there is clarity, then there is direct perception. And to be clear, the mind must be completely quiet, completely still, then there is real understanding and therefore that understanding is action. It isn't the other way around. Questioner: How do people become neurotic? Krishnamurti: How do I know they are neurotic? Please, this is a very serious question, so do listen! How do I know they are neurotic? Am I also neurotic because I recognise that they are neurotic? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Don't say "yes" so quickly! Just look at it, listen to it! Neurotic, what does that mean? A little odd, not clear, confused, slightly off balance? And unfortunately most of us are slightly off balance. No? You aren't quite sure! (Laughter). Aren't you off balance if you are a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist or a Communist? Aren't you neurotic when you enclose yourself with your problems, build a wall around yourself because you think you are much better than somebody else? Aren't you off balance when your life is full of resistance - the "me" and "you", the "we" and "they" and all the other divisions? Aren't you neurotic in the office when you want to go one better than the other fellow? So, how does one become neurotic? Does society make you neurotic? That is the simplest explanation - my father, my mother, my neighbour, the government, the army, everybody makes me neurotic. They are all responsible for my being off balance. And when I go to the analyst for help, poor chap, he's also neurotic like me. (Laughter). Please, don't laugh! This is exactly what is happening in the world. Now why do I become neurotic? Everything in the world as it exists now, the society, the family, the parents, the children - they have no love. Do you think there would be wars if they had love? Do you think there would be governments that consider it is perfectly all right for you to be killed? Such a society would never exist if your mother and father really loved you, cared for you, looked after you and taught you how to be kind to people, how to live and how to love. These are the outer pressures and demands that bring about this neurotic society; there are also the inner compulsions and urges within ourselves, our innate violence inherited from the past, which help to make up this neurosis, this imbalance. So this is the fact - most of us are slightly off balance, or more, and it's no use blaming anybody. The fact is that one is not balanced psychologically, mentally, or sexually; in every way we are off balance. Now the important thing is to become aware of it, to know that one is not balanced, not how to become balanced. A neurotic mind cannot become balanced, but if it has not gone to the extremes of neurosis, if it has still retained some balance, it can watch itself. One can then become aware of what one does, of what one says, of what one thinks, how one moves, how one sits, how one eats, watching all the time but not correcting. And if you watch in such a manner, without any choice, then out of that deep watching will come a balanced, sane, human being; then you will no longer be neurotic. A balanced mind is a mind that is wise, not made up of judgments and opinions. Questioner: Where does thought end and silence begin? Krishnamurti: Have you ever noticed a gap between two thoughts? Or are you thinking all the time without an interval? Do you understand the question? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: Is there an interval between two thoughts? Is the question clear? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Or is this the first time you have been asked such a question! I want to find out, Sir, what silence is. Is silence the cessation of noise? Is it like the peace which exists between two wars? Or is it the interval between two thoughts? Or has it nothing whatever to do with any of this? If silence is the cessation of thought, the cessation of noise, then it is fairly easy to suppress noise, that is, noise being chatter - you stop chattering. Is that silence? Or is silence a state of mind that is no longer confused, no longer afraid. So where does silence begin? Does it begin when thought ends? Have you ever tried to end thought? Questioner: When the mind radically changes speed, it is a quiet mind. Krishnamurti: Yes, Sir, but have you ever tried stopping thought? Questioner: How do you do it? Krishnamurti: I don't know, but have you ever tried it? First of all, who is the entity who is trying to stop it? Questioner: The thinker. Krishnamurti: It's another thought, isn't it? Thought is trying to stop itself, so there is a battle between the thinker and the thought. Please, watch this conflict very carefully. Thought says, "I must stop thinking because then I shall experience a marvellous state", or whatever the motive may be, so you try to suppress thought. Now the entity that is trying to suppress thought is still part of thought, isn't it? One thought is trying to suppress another thought, so there is conflict, a battle is going on. When I see this as a fact -see it totally, understand it completely, have an insight into it, in the sense that gentleman used the word - then the mind is quiet. This comes about naturally and easily when the mind is quiet to watch, to look, to see. Questioner: When self-centred activity ceases, what motivates action? Krishnamurti: Find out first what happens when self-centred activity comes to an end, then you won't ask the question, then you will see the beauty of action in itself, then you won't need a motive, because motive is part of self-centred activity; when that self-centred activity is not, action has no motive and is therefore true, righteous and free. Preface by Pupul Jayakar And Sunanda Patwardhan - New Delhi, 1970 - Dialogue 1 - THE FLAME OF SORROW Dialogue 2 - ALCHEMY AND MUTATION Dialogue 3 - THE CONTAINMENT OF EVIL Dialogue 4 - THE AWAKENING OF ENERGY Dialogue 5 - THE FIRST STEP IS THE LAST STEP Dialogue 6 - ENERGY AND TRANSFORMATION Dialogue 7 - THE OBSERVER AND WHAT IS Dialogue 8 - THE BACKWARD FLOWING MOVEMENT Dialogue 9 - TIME AND DETERIORATION Dialogue 10 - DYING AND LIVING Dialogue 11 - BEAUTY AND PERCEPTION - Madras, 1971 - Dialogue 12 - THE PARADOX OF CAUSATION Dialogue 13 - TRADITION AND KNOWLEDGE Dialogue 14 - CONFLICT AND CONSCIOUSNESS Dialogue 15 - THE NATURE OF EXPLORATION Dialogue 16 - ORDER AND IDEATION Dialogue 17 - OBJECT, KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTION Dialogue 18 - ENERGY AND FRAGMENTATION Dialogue 19 - FREEDOM AND THE FIELD - Rishi Valley, 1971 - Dialogue 20 - THE MATRIX OF TRADITION Dialogue 21 - THE GURU, TRADITION AND FREEDOM Dialogue 22 - FREEDOM AND THE PRISON Dialogue 23 - STABILITY AND KNOWLEDGE - Bombay, 1971 - Dialogue 24 - THE BRAIN-CELLS AND MUTATION Dialogue 25 - GOD Dialogue 26 - ENERGY, ENTROPY AND LIFE Dialogue 27 - INTELLIGENCE AND THE INSTRUMENT Dialogue 28 - RIGHT COMMUNICATION Dialogue 29 - BIOLOGICAL SURVIVAL AND INTELLIGENCE Dialogue 30 - THE MIND AND THE HEART TRADITION AND REVOLUTION PREFACE BY PUPUL JAYAKAR AND SUNANDA PATWARDHAN NEW DELHI 11TH MAY 1972 Since 1947 J. Krishnamurti, while in India, has been regularly meeting and holding dialogues with a group of people drawn from a variety of cultural backgrounds and disciplines - intellectuals, politicians, artists, sannyasis. During these years, the methodology of investigation has richened and taken shape. What is revealed in these dialogues, as if through a microscope, is the extraordinarily fluid, vast and subtle mind of Krishnamurti and the operational process of perception. These dialogues are, however, not questions and answers. They are an investigation into the structure and nature of consciousness, an exploration of the mind, its movements, its frontiers and that which lies beyond. It is also an approach to the way of mutation. There has been in these dialogues a coming together of several totally varied and conditioned minds. There has been a deep challenging of the mind of Krishnamurti, a relentless questioning that has opened up the depths of man's psyche. One is a witness not only to the expanding and deepening of the "limitless" but also to its impact on the limited mind. This very enquiry leaves the mind flexible, freeing it from the immediate past and from the grooves of centuries of conditioning. In these dialogues Krishnamurti starts questioning from a totally tentative position, from a state of "not-knowing", and in a sense, therefore, he starts at the same level as the participants. During the discussion, various analytical enquiries are made; tentative and exploratory. There is a questioning without seeking immediate solution: a step by step observation of the processes of thought and its unfoldment - a movement of penetration and withdrawal, every movement plunging attention deeper and deeper into the recesses of the mind. A delicate wordless communication takes place; an exposure of the movement of negation as it meets the positive movement of thought. There is the "seeing" of fact, of "what is", and the mutation of "what is". This is again perceived from various directions to examine its validity. The nature of duality and non-duality are revealed in simple language. In that state of questioning, a state when the questioner, the experiencer has ceased, in a flash, "truth" is revealed. It is a state of total non-thought. The mind which is the vessel of movement, when that movement has no form, no "me", no vision, no image, it is completely quiet - In it there is no memory. Then the brain cells undergo a change - The brain cells are used to movement in time. They are the residue of time and time is movement; a movement within the space which it creates as it moves - When there is no movement, there is tremendous focus of energy - So mutation is the understanding of movement, and the ending of movement in the brain cells themselves." The revelation of the instant of mutation, of "what is", provides a totally new dimension to the whole field of intellectual and religious enquiry. There may be repetitions in the dialogues but they have not been eliminated, because to do so would have inhibited the understanding of the nature of consciousness and the method of enquiry. We feel that these discussions will be of major significance and of assistance to those seeking a clue to the understanding of the self and of life. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 1 NEW DELHI 12TH DECEMBER 1970 'THE FLAME OF SORROW' We were walking in the open gardens near a huge hotel. There was a golden blue in the western sky and the noise of the buses, cars went by. There were young plants full of promise, watered daily. They were still building, creating the gardens and a bird was hovering in the sky, fluttering its wings rapidly before it plunged to the earth; and in the east, there was the nearing of the full moon. What was beautiful was none of these things but the vast emptiness that seemed to hold the earth. What was beautiful was the poor man with his head down, carrying a small bottle of oil. Krishnamurti: What does sorrow mean in this country? How do the people in this country meet sorrow? Do they escape from sorrow through the explanation of karma? How does the mind in India operate when it meets sorrow? The Buddhist meets it in one way, the Christian in another way. How does the Hindu mind meet it? Does it resist sorrow, or escape from it? Or does the Hindu mind rationalize it? Questioner P: Are there really many ways of meeting sorrow? Sorrow is pain - the pain of someone dying, the pain of separation. Is it possible to meet this pain in various ways? Krishnamurti: There are various ways of escape but there is only one way of meeting sorrow. The escapes with which we are all familiar are really the ways of avoiding the greatness of sorrow. You see, we use explanations to meet sorrow but these explanations do not answer the question. The only way to meet sorrow is to be without any resistance, to be without any movement away from sorrow, outwardly or inwardly, to remain totally with sorrow, without wanting to go beyond it. P: What is the nature of sorrow? Krishnamurti: There is personal sorrow, the sorrow that comes with the loss of someone you love, the loneliness, the separation, the anxiety for the other. With death there is also the feeling that the other has ceased to be, and there was so much that he wanted to do. All this is personal sorrow. Then there is that man, ill-clad, dirty, with his head down; he is ignorant, ignorant not merely of book knowledge, but deeply, really ignorant. The feeling that one has for the man is not self-pity, nor is there an identification with that man; it is not that you are placed in a better position than he is and so you feel pity for him, but there is within one the sense of the timeless weight of sorrow in man. This sorrow has nothing personal about it. It exists. P: While you have been speaking, the movement of sorrow has been operating within me. There is no immediate cause for this sorrow but it seems like a shadow, always with man. He lives, he loves, he forms attachments and everything ends. Whatever the truth of what you say, in this there is such an infinitude of sorrow. How is it to end? There appears to be no answer. The other day you said in sorrow is the whole movement of passion. What does it mean? Krishnamurti: Is there a relationship between sorrow and passion? I wonder what sorrow is. Is there such a thing as sorrow without cause? We know the sorrow which is cause and effect. My son dies; in that is involved my identification with my son, my wanting him to be something which I am not, my seeking continuity through him; and when he dies all that is denied and I find myself completely emptied of all hope. In that there is self-pity, fear; in that there is pain which is the cause of sorrow. This is the lot of everyone. This is what we mean by sorrow. Then also there is the sorrow of time, the sorrow of ignorance, not the ignorance of knowledge but the ignorance of one's own destructive conditioning; the sorrow of not knowing oneself; the sorrow of not knowing the beauty that lies at the depth of one's being and the going beyond. Do we see that when we escape from sorrow through various forms of explanation, we are really frittering away an extraordinary happening? P: Then what does one do? Krishnamurti: You have not answered my question, "Is there, a sorrow without cause and effect?" We know sorrow and the movement away from sorrow. P: You have talked of sorrow free of cause and effect. Is there such a state? Krishnamurti: Man has lived with sorrow from immemorial times. He has never known how to deal with it. So he has either worshipped it or run away from it. They are both the same movement. My mind does not do either, nor does it use sorrow as a means of awakening. Then what takes place? P: All other things are the products of our senses. Sorrow is more than that. It is a movement of the heart. Krishnamurti: I am asking you what is the relationship between sorrow and love. P: They are both movements of the heart. Krishnamurti: What is love and what is sorrow? P: Both are movements of the heart, the one is identified as joy and the other as pain. Krishnamurti: Is love pleasure? Would you say joy and pleasure are the same? Without understanding the nature of pleasure, there is no depth to joy. You cannot invite joy. Joy happens. The happening can be turned into pleasure. When that pleasure is denied, there is the beginning of sorrow. P: At one level it is so, but it is not so at another level. Krishnamurti: As we said, joy is not a thing to be invited. It happens. Pleasure I can invite, pleasure I can pursue. If pleasure is love, then love can be cultivated. P: We know pleasure is not love. Pleasure may be one manifestation of love but it is not love. Both sorrow and love emerge from the same source. Krishnamurti: I asked what is the relationship between sorrow and love? Can there be love if there is sorrow - sorrow being all the things that we have talked about? P: I would say "yes". Krishnamurti: In sorrow, there is a factor of separation, of fragmentation. Is there not a great deal of self-pity in sorrow? What is the relationship of all this to love? Has love dependency? Has love the quality of the "me" and the "you"? P: But you talked of passion...... Krishnamurti: When there is no movement of escape from sorrow then love is. Passion is the flame of sorrow and that flame can only be awakened when there is no escape, no resistance. Which means what? - Which means, sorrow has in it no quality of division. P: In that sense, is that state of sorrow any different from the state of love? Sorrow is pain. You say when in that pain there is no resistance, no movement away from pain, the flame of passion emerges. Strangely in the ancient texts, kama (love), agni (fire), and yama (death) are said to be the same; they are placed on the same level; they are all identical; they create, purify and destroy to create again. There has to be an ending. Krishnamurti: You see, that is just it. What is the relationship of a mind which has understood sorrow and therefore the ending of sorrow? What is the quality of the mind that is no longer afraid of ending, which is death? When energy is not dissipated through escape, then that energy becomes the flame of passion. Compassion means passion for all. Compassion is passion for all. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 2 NEW DELHI 14TH DECEMBER 1970 'ALCHEMY AND MUTATION' Questioner P: I was considering whether it would be worthwhile to discuss the ancient Indian attitude to alchemy and mutation and to see whether the findings of alchemy have any relevance to what you are saying. It is significant that Nagarjuna, one of the great propounders of Buddhist thought, was himself an alchemist Master. The search of the alchemist in India was not directed so much to turning base metal into gold, as to an investigation into certain psychophysical and chemical processes in which, through mutation the body and mind could be made free of the ravages of time and the processes of decay. The field of investigation included mastery of breath, the partaking of an elixir brewed in the laboratory, a substance wherein mercury played a vital part, and a triggering of an explosion in consciousness. The action of the three leads to a mutation of body and mind. The symbolism used by the alchemist was sexual; mercury was the male seed of Shiva, mica the seed of the goddess; the union of the two, not only physically and in the crucibles of the laboratory but in consciousness itself, brought into being a mutation; a state that was free of time and the processes of ageing, a state that was unrelated to the two constituents that in total union had triggered the mutation. Has this any relevance to what you are saying? Krishnamurti: You are asking about the state of consciousness which is out of time. P: In every individual one can see the male and female element in operation. The alchemist saw the need of union, of balance. Is there any validity in this? Krishnamurti: I think one can observe this in oneself. I have often observed that in each one of us there are the male and female elements. Either they are in perfect balance or in a state of imbalance. When there is this complete balance between the male and the female, then the physical organism never really falls ill; there may be superficial illness but deep within there is no disease which destroys the organism. This is probably what the ancients must have sought - identifying it with mercury and mica, the male and the female and through meditation, study, and perhaps through some form of medicine tried to bring about this perfect harmony. One can see very clearly in oneself the operation of the male and female going on. When one or the other gets exaggerated, the imbalance creates disease; not superficial ailments but disease at the depths. I have noticed personally within myself under different situations and climates, with different people who are aggressive, violent, the female takes over and becomes more prominent. This prominence, the other uses to assert himself. But when there is too much femininity around one, the male does not become aggressive but withdraws without any resistance. S: What are the male and female elements? Krishnamurti: The male is generally aggressive, violent, dominating and the female is the quiet, which is taken for submissiveness and then exploited by man. But submissiveness which is taken to be the quality of the female, is really gentleness which gradually conquers the other. When the female and the male are in complete harmony, the quality of both changes. It is no longer male or female. It is something totally different, in relation to what is considered as male and female. The male and the female as the positive and negative because of their very nature are dualistic, whereas the complete balance, a harmony of the two has a different quality. May I say something? It is like the quality of the earth in which everything lives but is not of it. I have noticed this operating very often. When the whole mind withdraws from the physical and the environment, it is as though it is very far away; far away not in space and time, but a state which nothing can touch. This state is not an abstraction nor a withdrawal but an inward, absolute, non-being. When this perfect harmony takes place, because there is no conflict, it has its own vitality. It does not destroy the other. So conflict is not only in the outer but also in the inner and when this conflict completely comes to an end, there is a mutation which is not touched by time. P: The alchemist called this the birth of Kumara, of the magical child - he who never grows old, he who is completely innocent. Krishnamurti: It is very interesting - but alchemy has become synonymous with so much phony magic. P: But the alchemists, the Masters who were known as rasa siddhas - the holders of the essence - maintained that what they described they had seen with their own eyes, that what they recorded was not from hearsay nor from the dictation of a teacher. There is another factor of interest. A great deal of attention was paid in alchemy to the instrument, the vessel. The science of metallurgy developed out of this - one of the vessels or yantras was known as the garbha yantra, the womb vessel. It is a key word in alchemy. Is there such a thing as preparing the womb of the mind? in which time is involved. P: The alchemists were also conscious that at the point of mutation, of the fixation of mercury, of the birth of the timeless, time was not involved. Krishnamurti: Do not use the word preparation. Let us put it this way. Is there a necessary state, a necessary background, a necessary vessel which can contain this? I should say no, because when they found the boy Krishnamurti, the people who were supposedly clairvoyant for the time being, saw that he had no quality of selfishness and therefore he was worthy of being the vessel and I think that has remained right through. S: That may be so, but what about ordinary people like us? Is this a privilege given only to a very very few, one in a thousand years or more, or can this happen to people who are concerned with all this, who are committed to all this, who are really serious in this enquiry? Krishnamurti: To answer this question certain physical factors and psychological states are necessary. Physically there must be sensitivity. Physical sensitivity cannot possibly take place when there is smoking, drinking, eating meat. The sensitivity of the body must be maintained. That is absolutely essential. Traditionally such a body generally remains in one place supported by disciples, by the family. The body is not shocked or exposed. Can a man who is very serious in all this, can he with a body which has gone through the normal brutalizing effects, can he make that body highly sensitive? And also the psyche that has been wounded through experience, can it throw off all the wounds and marks and renew itself so that there is a state in which there is no hurt? These two are essential - sensitivity and the psyche not having a mark. I think this can be achieved by any person who is really serious. You see the womb is always ready to conceive. It renews itself. P: Like the earth, the womb has that inbuilt quality of renewal. Krishnamurti: I think the mind has exactly the same quality. P: The earth is dormant, the womb is quiet and in both there is this inbuilt capacity for renewal. Krishnamurti: The earth, the womb and the mind are of the same quality. When the earth lies fallow and the womb is empty and the mind without any movement, then renewal takes place. When the mind is completely empty, it is like the womb; it is pure to renew, receive. P: This then is the vessel, the receptacle. Krishnamurti: Yes, this is the vessel, but when you use the word vessel and receptacle, you must be exceedingly careful. This inbuilt quality of the mind to renew itself can be called eternal youth. P: It is known as kumara vidya. Krishnamurti: So what makes the mind old? Obviously the movement of the self makes the mind old. P: Does the self wear away the cells? Krishnamurti: The womb is always ready to receive. It has a quality of purifying itself all the time, but the mind which is burdened with the self - friction is self - has no space to renew itself. When the self is so occupied with itself and its activities, the mind has no space in which to renew itself. So space is necessary, both for the physical and the psyche. How does this go with alchemy? P: The language they use is different. They talk of mutation through union. Krishnamurti: All that implies effort, friction. P: How does one know? Krishnamurti: If it implies any form of process, any form of achievement, it implies effort. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 3 NEW DELHI 15TH DECEMBER 1970 'THE CONTAINMENT OF EVIL' Questioner P: One of the most vital problems that has concerned man is the necessity of containing evil. It appears as if at certain times in history, because of various circumstances, evil has had a wider field within which to operate. The manifestations of evil are so wide, the problems of evil so complex that the individual does not know how to deal with them. What would you say is the way of dealing with evil? Is there such a thing as evil independent of good? Krishnamurti: I wonder what you mean. The bush with so many thorns - do you call that evil? Do you call a serpent with poison, evil? No savage animal is evil - neither the shark nor the tiger. So what do you mean by the word evil? Something harmful? Something that can bring tremendous grief, something that can bring great pain, something that can destroy or prevent the light of understanding? Would you call war evil? Would you call the generals, the rulers, the admirals evil because they help to bring about war, destruction? P: That which thwarts the nature of things can be called evil. Krishnamurti: Man is brutal, is he evil? P: If he is thwarting, if he through malignant intention makes certain things deviate.... Krishnamurti: I was just wondering what that word evil means. What does evil mean to an intelligent mind; a mind that is aware of all the horrors in the world? P: Evil is that which diminishes consciousness, that which brings darkness. Krishnamurti: Fear, sorrow, pain do that. Would you say that evil is the encouragement of fear? Is evil a means to further sorrow? Is evil social or environmental conditioning which perpetuates war? All these limit consciousness and create darkness and sorrow. Evil, according to the Christian idea, is the devil. Does the Hindu have any idea of evil? If he has an idea of evil, what would it be? Personally I never think of evil. Would you say that in the flowering of goodness, there is no evil at all? That this state does not know evil? Or is evil an invention of the mind which breeds fear and creates the good? P: May I say something? If you go deep down into the recesses of the human mind, into the history of mankind, there has always been the sorcerer, the witch who subverts the laws of nature, who brings fear and darkness. It is one of the strangest elements in the human mind. It is because of this terrible fear of the unknown, that darkness without limit, without end, that prevails through the history of man, that the human being has cried out for protection; a cry that echoes through human consciousness. It is this which is the unknown, un-named matrix of fear. It is not enough to suggest that it is fear. It is all that and more. Krishnamurti:Are you saying that deep in man, in the inner recesses of the mind, there is the fear of the unknown, of something that man cannot touch or imagine? Being afraid so deeply, he demands protection of the gods and anything that brings an awakening of that danger, any intimation of that hidden thing, he calls evil? P:This darkness exists deep in human consciousness all the time. Krishnamurti:Is evil the opposite of the good, or is it totally dependent of the good? P:It is independent of the good. Krishnamurti:You are saying it is independent. So, is evil something that is in itself unrelated to the beautiful, to love? Against evil, man has always sought protection, as he would against an animal. There is this hidden dark danger. Man is aware of it, he is frightened and seeks through incantations, rituals, prayers and so on to put it away and be guarded. The bush that is so full of thorns protects itself against the animal and the animal would call that evil as it cannot get at the leaves. Is there such a force, such an embodiment of evil which is totally apart from the good, the beautiful? There is this whole idea that evil is fighting good. This evil is seen as embodied in people and evil is always fighting the good and the gentle. I am asking, is evil totally independent of the good? You must be very careful not to become superstitious. P: "Fear" of something is opposed to goodness. But the darkest fears are not "of anything". S: It is not only protection and fear and the fear involved in evil, but protection in order to move forward. P: The demand for protection, the mantras as spells, the mandalas as magical diagrams and the mudras as magical gestures were intended to provide protection against evil. Krishnamurti: You see when you go deeply into consciousness, you reach a point where the unknown appears as the dark, and there you stop, because you get frightened. The mind penetrates deeply up to a point, and below that point there is this feeling of dark emptiness. Because of the darkness, you have prayers, incantations, and because of the fear of the dark, you ask for protection. Can the mind go through the darkness, which means can the mind not be afraid? Can it operate so that the darkness becomes light? Can you penetrate the darkness of which you are afraid, which you have named "evil"? Can you penetrate that so completely that darkness does not exist? Then, what is evil? P: When the ritual mandala is drawn, the entry into the mandala is through spell and mudra. In this entry into the darkness, what is the spell which will open the gates? Krishnamurti: Consciousness as thought, investigates itself - its depth. As it enters it comes upon this darkness. This investigation is not a process of time. And you are asking what is the spell or energy that will penetrate to the very bottom of the darkness, what is that energy and how is it to come into being? The very energy which started investigating is still there, more heavy, vital as it enters, penetrates. Why do you ask whether there is need of greater energy? P: Because energy dries up. We penetrate up to a point and do not go further. Krishnamurti: Because of fear, because of apprehension of something we do not know, we dissipate energy instead of bringing it into focus. I want to penetrate into myself. I see entering into myself is the same movement as the outer. It is entering into space. In entering into space, there is a certain demand, a certain energy. That energy must be without any effort, without any distortion. As it enters, it gathers momentum. If it has no passage through which it can escape, it is not distorted. It becomes deeper, wider, stronger. Then you reach a point where there is darkness. And how does one enter that darkness with this tremendous energy? (pause) P: The first question with which we started was how is evil to be contained. You have said as one penetrates the sea of darkness, darkness is not; light is. But when there is evil in human beings, in certain situations, in certain happenings, is there any action which can contain this evil? Krishnamurti: I would not put it that way. Resistance to evil strengthens evil. So, if the mind is living in goodness, then there is no resistance and evil cannot touch it. Therefore there is no containing of evil. P: Is there only goodness then? Krishnamurti: We have to go back to something else - the mind has gone into darkness and it is finished with darkness. But is there evil which is independent of all that? Or is evil part of goodness? You see in nature there is the big living on the little, the bigger on the big. I would not call that evil. The deliberate desire to hurt another; is that part of evil? I want to hurt another; is that part of evil? I want to hurt you because you have done something to me; is that evil? P: That is part of evil. Krishnamurti: Then that implies will. You hurt me, and, because I am proud, I want to retaliate. Wanting to retaliate is an action of will. Whether it is the will to react or to do good, both are evil. P: Again coming back to the mandala; evil can enter when the gateways are not protected. Here, your eyes and ears are the gateways. Krishnamurti: So you are saying when the eyes see clearly, ears hear clearly, then evil cannot enter. To go back, the deliberate intention, the collection of intentions, the thinking it over, which is all the deep intention to hurt, is part of will. I think that is where evil is - the deliberate act to hurt. You hurt me, I hurt you; I apologize and it is finished. But if I hold, retain, strengthen deliberately, follow a policy to hurt you, which is part of the will in man to do harm or good, then there is evil. So is there a way of living without will? The moment I resist, evil must be on one side, and the good on the other and there is relationship between the two. When there is no resistance, there is no relationship between the two. And love then is an open space, without any words, without any resistance. Love is action out of emptiness. As we had been discussing yesterday, when the male elements deliberately become assertive, demanding, possessive, dominating, man invites evil. And the female, yielding, yielding, yielding and deliberately yielding in order to dominate, also invites evil. So, where there is the cunning pursuit of domination, which is the operation of will, there is the beginning of evil. You see against that evil we try to protect ourselves. We are ourselves creating evil and yet we draw a circle a diagram round the doorstep of the house to seek protection from evil, and inwardly the serpent of evil is operating. Keep your house clean. Forget all the mantras; nothing can touch you. We ask protection of the gods whom we have created. It is really quite fantastic. All these wars, all the racial hatreds, all the accumulated hatreds which man has been storing up, that must have a collected hatred, a gathered evil. The Hitlers, the Mussolinis, the Stalins, the concentration camps, the Atillas; all that must be stored, must have a body somewhere. So also, the feeling of "do not kill, be kind, be gentle, be compassionate" - that also must be stored somewhere. When people try to protect themselves against the one, the evil, they are protecting themselves against the good too, because man has created these two. So, can the mind enter into darkness and the very entrance into it, is the dispelling of darkness? TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 4 NEW DELHI 16TH DECEMBER 1970 'THE AWAKENING OF ENERGY' Questioner P: You have said when we were discussing Tantra, that there is a way of awakening energy. The Tantrics concentrate on certain psychic centres, and thereby release the dormant energy in those centres. Would you say there is any validity in this? What is the way of awakening energy? Krishnamurti: What you said just now, concentrating on the various physio-psychical centres, implies, does it not, a process of time? So I would like to ask, can that energy be awakened without a process of time? P: In this whole process, the traditional way demands correct posture and an equilibrium of breath. If the body does not know how to sit erect, and how to breathe rightly, there can be no ending of thought. To bring body and breath to an equilibrium, a process of time becomes inevitable. Krishnamurti: There may be a totally different approach to this problem. Tradition starts from the psychosomatic, the posture, the breath control and gradually through various forms of concentration to the full awakening of energy. That is the accepted way. Is there not an awakening of this energy without going through all these practices? P: It is like the Zen-Masters who say the real master is one who puts aside effort, and yet in Zen to master archery a tremendous mastery over technique is necessary. It is only when there is total mastery that effort drops away. Krishnamurti: You are beginning at this end rather than at the other - this end being time, control, energy, perfection, perfect balance. All this seems to me like dealing with a very small part of a very vast field. Tradition gives great importance to the past, to breathing, to the right posture. All these are limited to a corner of the field and through that corner you hope to have enlightenment. The corner then becomes a trick. Through some kind of psychosomatic acrobatics, it is hoped that you will capture the light, the whole universe. I do not think enlightenment is there - not through one corner. It is like seeing the sky through a small window and never going outside to look at the sky. I feel that way is an absurd way of approaching something totally vast, timeless. P: Even you would admit that correct posture and right breathing strengthen the structure of the mind. Krishnamurti: I want to approach all this quite differently. In approaching it entirely differently, it is necessary to throw out all that has been said. I see the corner is like a candle in sunshine. The candle is being lit very carefully in brilliant sunshine. You are not concerned with sunshine, but work away at lighting the candle. There are other things involved; there is the awakening of energy which has been dissipated so far. To centralize energy, to gather the whole of it, attention is involved, and the elimination of time altogether. I think there are these major factors - time, attention which is not forced, which is not concentration, which is not centred round a part, and the gathering of energy. I think these are the fundamental things one has to understand because enlightenment must be and is the comprehension and understanding of this vast life - life being living, dying, loving; the whole travail and going beyond it. The traditional Masters would also agree that you have to have attention to go beyond time. But they are the worshippers of the corner. They use time to go beyond time. P: How Sir? I take a posture and direct my attention. What is the time involved in this? Krishnamurti: Is attention the result of time? P: No. You ask a question and there is immediate attention. Is this attention the product of time? Krishnamurti: No, certainly not. P: Your question and my attention being there, is there time involved? If you would regard this as so, the self-knowing process which is going on all the time also involves time. My mind twenty years ago would not have known the present quality. This state had no existence then. Krishnamurti: Let us go slowly. We are trying to understand something which is out of time. P: The tradition says prepare the body and mind. Krishnamurti: Through time you prepare the body and mind to receive, to comprehend, to be free of time. Through time can you do this? P: The tradition also posits that through time you cannot go beyond time. Krishnamurti: I am asking, when you say through time you perfect the instrument, is it so? I question that. Through time can you perfect the instrument? Now first of all who is it that is perfecting the instrument? Is it thought? P: It would be invalid to say only thought. There are many other factors involved. Krishnamurti: Thought, the knowing of thought, intelligence, are all maintained by thought. To say thought must end and intelligence must come into being is again an action of thought. The statement, thinker and thought are one, is again an action of thought. You are saying perfect the instrument through thought. To me the traditional approach to perfect the instrument through thought and so to go beyond, and the act of cultivating intelligence and the going beyond time - all these are still in the area of thought. That is so. Therefore in that very thought there is the thinker. That thinker says this must happen, this must not happen. That thinker has become the will of achievement. The will to perfect the instrument is part of thought. P: In this circle which you are talking; about, in that which you are describing just now, is also implied the questioning of the very instrument which is thought. Krishnamurti: But the questioner is part of thought; the whole structure is part of thought. You can divide, subdivide, change, but it is all within the field of thought, and that is time. Thought is memory, thought is material; the material is memory. We are still functioning within the area of the known and the man who is cultivating thought says he will go to the unknown through the known, perfect the known and get enlightenment. Again all this is thought. P: If everything is thought, it must then be necessary to give birth to a new instrument. Krishnamurti: When thought says it must become silent and becomes silent it is still thought. What the traditionalists do is to work within the field of thought which is the corner of the field. But it is still the result of thought. Atman is the result of thought. The brahman to which man looks up, is the result of thought. The man who experienced it had nothing to do with thought. It just happened, whereas his disciples came along and said do this, do that. It is all within the field of thought. P: Then there is no proceeding. Krishnamurti: See how thought plays tricks upon itself - I must have balance, I must have the right posture in order that the life energy flows through. Right? I say thought is of the past. Thought can create the most marvellous instrument - it can go to the moon, to Venus; but thought can never possibly touch "the other" because thought is never free, thought is old, thought is conditioned. Thought is the whole structure of the known. P: What do you mean by "the other"? Krishnamurti: That is not it. P: That is not what? Krishnamurti: This is within the field of time; thought which is time. That is within the field of silence. Therefore find out if sorrow can end. Come out of the corner. Find out what life is, what death means, what it means to end sorrow. If you have not come upon this, playing tricks upon thought has no meaning. You can awaken all the kundalinis, but to what purpose? Therefore a man teaching how to awaken the kundalinis or making man proficient in archery in the Zen way or in the practice of the various forms of Tantra are all within the bondage of time, which is thought. I see that and I see that it is going round in circles. The circle may be higher but it is still a circle, a bondage, which is time. So I would not touch it. I would not touch it because I see the nature, structure and order of this corner. The corner has no meaning to me. When there is the marvellous sun, all the siddhis and powers are like many candles. Can the mind, listening to this, wipe it away? The very listening is the wiping away. Then you have it. Then there is attention, love; everything is there. You see, logically, this holds whereas the other does not. The exercise of the brain is to find the truth and the false; to see the false as the false. You see when the boy Krishnamurti saw the truth, it was over. He gave up all organizations, etc. He had no training "to see". P: But you had training. You were put through a vigorous training of the body. Krishnamurti: So they tell us. Because the body was neglected. And so they said if he was not looked after he would fall ill. P: But Sir, apart from physical discipline, there were instructions as to how to bring up that boy. Krishnamurti: It was like combing the hair, doing asanas, pranayama; it was all at that level. B: It is very subtle. I am not saying that what happened had any relationship to the illumination, but it is necessary to look after the body. Krishnamurti: Yes, it is necessary to keep the body healthy. P: Sir, if I may say so, you have the way of the yogi, you look like a yogi, your body takes the pose of a yogi. You have been doing asanas, pranayama, every day for so many years. Why? Krishnamurti: That is not important. It is like keeping my nails clean. I am saying the other is so childish; spending years in perfecting the instrument. All that you have to do is "to look". P: But if one is born blind, only when a person like you comes and says, look, something happens. Most people would not understand what you are talking about. Krishnamurti: Most people would not listen to all this. They would brush it aside. B: The other is easier. It gives something whereas this gives nothing. Krishnamurti: This gives everything if you touch it. B: But the other is easier. Krishnamurti: You see I am terribly interested in this. How has the mind of Krishnamurti maintained this state of innocence? P: What you are saying is not relevant. You may be an exception. How did the boy Krishnamurti come to it? He had money, organization, everything and yet he left everything. If I were to take my grand-daughter and leave her with you and she had no other companion but you, even then she would not have it. Krishnamurti: No, she would not have it. (pause) Wipe out all this. P: When you say that, it is like the Zen koan; the goose being out of the bottle. Did you have a centre to wipe away? Krishnamurti: No. P: So you had no centre to wipe away? You are unique and therefore you are a phenomenon, and so you cannot tell us you did this and so it happened. You can only tell us "This is not it" and whether we drown or not, no one else can tell us. We see this. We may not be enlightened, but we are not unenlightened. Krishnamurti: I think it is tremendously interesting - to see that anything that thought touches is not the real. Thought is time. Thought is memory. Thought cannot touch the real. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 5 NEW DELHI 19TH DECEMBER 1970 'THE FIRST STEP IS THE LAST STEP' Questioner P: Yesterday, while you were on a walk, you said the first step is the last step. To understand that statement, I think we should investigate the problem of time and whether there is such a thing as a final state of enlightenment. The confusion arises because our minds are conditioned to think of illumination as the final state. Is understanding or illumination a final state? Krishnamurti: You know, when we said that the first step is the last step, were we not thinking of time as a horizontal or a vertical movement? Were we not thinking of movement along a plane? We were saying yesterday, when we were walking, if we could put aside height, the vertical and the horizontal altogether, and observe this fact that wherever we are, at whatever level of conditioning, of being, the perceiving of truth, of the fact, is at that moment the last step. I am a clerk in a little office, with all the misery involved in it; the clerk listens and perceives. The man listens and at that moment really sees. That seeing and that perception is the first and the last step. Because, at that moment he has touched truth and he sees something very clearly. But what happens afterwards is that he wants to cultivate that state. The perception, the liberation and the very perception bringing about liberation; he wants to perpetuate, to turn it into a process. And therefore he gets caught and loses the quality of perception entirely. So, what we are saying is that any process involves finality. It is a movement from the horizontal to the vertical; the vertical leading to a finality. And therefore we think that perception, liberation is a finality; a point which has no movement. After all, the methods, the practices, the systems imply a process towards a finality. If there were no conceptual idea of finality, there would be no process. P: The whole structure of thought is built on a horizontal movement and therefore any postulation of eternity has to be on the horizontal plane. Krishnamurti: We are used to reading a book horizontally. Everything is horizontal - all our books. P: Everything has a beginning and an ending. Krishnamurti: And we think the first chapter must inevitably lead to the last chapter. We feel all the practices lead to a finality; to an unfoldment. It is all horizontal reading. Our minds, eyes and attitudes are conditioned to function on the horizontal and at the end, there is a finality. The book is over. You ask if truth or enlightenment is a final achievement; a final point beyond which there is nothing? P: From which there can be no slipping back. I might for an instant perceive, and the quality of that, I understand. A little later, thought arises again. I say to myself "I am back in the old state". I question whether that "touching" had any validity at all. I put a distance, a block between myself and that state - I say, if that were true, thought would not arise. Krishnamurti: I see; I perceive something that is extraordinary; something that is true. I want to perpetuate that perception; give it a continuity so that perception - action continues throughout my daily life. I think that is where the mistake lies. The mind has seen something true. That is enough. That mind is a clear, innocent mind, which has not been hurt. Thought wants to carry on that perception through the daily acts. The mind has seen something very clearly. Leave it there. The next step is the final step. The leaving of it is the next final step. Because my mind is already fresh to take the next final step. In the daily movement of life, it does not carry over. The perception has not become knowledge. P: The self as the doer in relation to thought or seeing has to cease. Krishnamurti: Die to the thing that is true. Otherwise it becomes memory, which then becomes thought, and thought says how am I to perpetuate that state. If the mind sees clearly, and it can only see clearly when the seeing is the ending of it, then the mind can start a movement where the first step is the last step. In this there is no process involved at all. There is no element of time. Time enters when, having seen it clearly, having perceived it, there is a carrying over and the applying of it to the next incident. P: The carrying over is the not seeing or perceiving. Krishnamurti: So, all the traditional approaches which offer a process must have a point, a conclusion, a finality and anything that has a finality, a final point, is not a living thing at all. It is like saying there are many roads to the station. The station is fixed. Is truth a finality that once you have achieved it, everything is over - your anxieties, your fears and so on? Or does it work totally differently? Does it mean that once I am on the train, nothing can happen to me? Does it mean that I expect the train will carry me to my destination? All these are horizontal movements. So a process implies a fixed point. Systems, methods, practices all offer a fixed point and promise man that when he achieves it, all his troubles are over. Is there something which is really timeless? A fixed point is in time. It is in time because you have postulated it. Because there has been thinking over of the final point, and the thinking of it is time. Can one come upon this thing which must have no time, no process, no system, no method, no way? Can this mind which is so conditioned horizontally, can this mind, knowing that it lives horizontally, perceive that which is neither horizontal nor vertical? Can it perceive for an instant? Can it perceive that the seeing has cleansed and end it? In this is the first and the last step because it has seen anew. Your question is, is such a mind ever free of trouble? I think it is a wrong question. You are still thinking in terms of finality, when you put that question. You have already come to a conclusion, and so are back again into the horizontal process. P: The subtlety of it is that the mind has to ask fundamental questions but never the "how". Krishnamurti: Absolutely. I see very clearly; I perceive. Perception is light. I want to carry it over as memory, as thought, and apply it to daily living and therefore I introduce duality, conflict, contradiction. So I say how am I to go beyond it? All systems offer a process, a fixed point and the ending of all trouble. Perceiving is light to this mind. It is not concerned with perception any more because if it is concerned, it becomes memory. Can the mind, seeing something very clearly, end that perception? Then, here the very first step is the last step. The mind is fresh to look. To such a mind, is there an end to all troubles? It does not ask such a question. When it happens, it will see. See what takes place. When I ask the question "Will this end all trouble?" I am already thinking of the future and therefore I am caught in time. But I am not concerned. I perceive. It is over. I see something very clearly - the clarity of perception. Perception is light. It is over. Therefore the mind is never caught in time. Because I have taken the first step, I have also taken the last step each time. So we see that all the processes, all the systems, must be totally denied because they perpetuate time. Through time you hope to arrive at the timeless. P: I see that the instruments used in what you are saying are the fact of seeing and listening. These are sensory movements. It is through sensory movements that conditioning also comes into being. What is it that makes one movement totally dissolve conditioning and another to strengthen it? Krishnamurti: How do I listen to that question? First of all, I do not know. I am going to learn. If I learn in order to acquire knowledge, from which I am going to act, that action becomes mechanical. But when I learn without accumulating - which means perceiving, hearing, without acquiring - the mind is always empty. Then what is the question? Can the mind which is empty ever be conditioned and why does it get conditioned? A mind which is really listening, can it ever be conditioned? It is always learning, it is always in movement. It is not a movement from something towards something. A movement cannot have a beginning and an ending. It is something which is alive, never conditioned. A mind that acquires knowledge to function is conditioned by its own knowledge. P: Is it the same instrument which is operating in both? Krishnamurti: I do not know. I really do not know. The mind which is crowded with knowledge sees according to that knowledge, according to that conditioning. P: Sir, seeing is like switching on light. It has no conditioning in itself. Krishnamurti: The mind is full of images, words, symbols. Through that, it thinks, it sees. P: Does it see? Krishnamurti: No. I have an image of you and I look through that image. That is distortion. The image is my conditioning. It is still the same vessel with all the things in it, and it is the same vessel which has nothing in it. The content of the vessel is the vessel. When there is no content, the vessel has no form. P: So it can receive "what is". Krishnamurti: Perception is only possible when there is no image. That is very simple. You see, to go back, perception is only possible when there is no image - no symbol, no idea, word, form, which are all the image. Then perception is light. It is not that I see light. There is light. Perception is light. So perception is action. And a mind which is full of images cannot perceive. It sees through images and so is distorted. What we have said is true. It is logically so. I have listened to this. In the factor of listening there is no "I". In the factor of carrying it over, there is the "I". The "I" is time' TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 6 NEW DELHI 21ST DECEMBER 1970 'ENERGY AND TRANSFORMATION' Questioner P: Science and yoga both maintain that when a living organism is exposed to tremendous energy there is a mutation. This happens when there is excessive exposure to radiation - it may lead to a mutation in the genes. It also happens according to yoga, when thought is placed in consciousness before the fire of energy. Do you think this has meaning in terms of what you are teaching? B: Radiation brings deformity. There can be destructive mutation. A laser beam pierces steel and flesh. It has the power to destroy as well as to heal. Krishnamurti: What would you say is human energy? What is energy in human beings? Let us keep it very simple. P: Energy is that which makes movement possible. B: Energy is at different levels. There is the energy at the physical level. Then the brain itself is a source of energy; it sends out electrical impulses. Krishnamurti: All movement, radiation, any movement of thought, any action is energy. When does it become intense? When can it do the most astonishing things? When can it be directed to do incredible things? P: When it is not dissipated. When it is brought into focus. Krishnamurti: When does that happen? Does it happen in anger, hatred, violence? Does it happen when there is ambition, when there is tremendous desire? Or does it happen when a poet has the urge, the vitality, the energy to write? P: Such energy crystallizes and becomes static. Krishnamurti: We know this form of energy. But the energy we know does not bring about a change in the human mind. Why? This energy becomes intense when there is fulfilment in action. When does it move to a different dimension? An artist or a scientist, using his talent, intensifies energy and gives expression to it. But the quality of his mind, of his being, is not transformed by this energy. P. We are missing something in all this. Krishnamurti: You are asking whether there is a quality of energy which transforms the human mind? That is your question. Now, why does it not take place in the artist, in the musician, in the writer? P.: I think it is because their energy is one-dimensional. Krishnamurti: The artist still remains ambitious, greedy, a bourgeois. S: Why do you say that greed would come in the way of energy operating? Man may be ambitious but he is also good. These are the elements which structure his self. Krishnamurti: We are asking why, when man has that energy, that energy does not bring about a radical change? P: Man has energy to operate in his environment. But there are large areas of his being where there is no movement of energy. Krishnamurti: Man uses energy, operates fully in one direction, and in the other he is dormant. Energy is dormant in one part of his existence, and in the other part it is active. P: Even man's sensory instruments are utilized partially. Krishnamurti: He is a fragmentary human being. Why does this division take place? One fragment is tremendously active, the other does not function at all. One fragment is ordinary, bourgeois, petty. When do these two fragments coalesce to become harmonious energy? An energy which is not fragmented? An energy which does not function fully at one level while at another level its voltage is low?, P: When the sensory instruments operate fully. Krishnamurti: When does this take place? Do they operate completely when there is a tremendous crisis? P: Not always, Sir. The action of crisis can also be partial; you can jump when you see a snake but you can jump into a bush of thorns. Krishnamurti: When does the fragment cease to be a fragment? Are we not thinking in terms of movement, in terms of action, in terms of change? We have accepted the movement to be, the movement of becoming. We have accepted fragmentation. The movement of becoming is always a movement in fragments. Is there a movement which does not belong to these categories? See what happens if there is no movement at all. P: I have always found it difficult to understand this question of yours. The nature of the very question suggests the other, the opposite. S: One really does not know the dormant movement. Krishnamurti: At the beginning we said there was fragmentation. One fragment is very alive and the other is not alive. B: The energy of the artist, the whole of his being, operates one-dimensionally. There is non-awareness. Krishnamurti: I am not at all sure. One fragment is alive. You are saying the other fragment is not aware of itself at all. P: The artist paints, he also has an affair with a woman. He does not see these actions as fragments. Krishnamurti: We have gone beyond that. We see he is fragmented. He operates in fragments - one is active and the other is dormant. In that dor- mancy there is action going on. One is very active and the other is action in a minor key. We see this. Now the question is, can this energy heighten to bring about a mutation in the brain cells? P: Can it take the sluggish part along and alter its very structure so that there is a transformation in both? Krishnamurti: I may be a great sculptor. A part of me is dormant. You ask, can there be a mutation not only in the dormant but also in that energy which goes into the making of the sculptor? The question is, am I willing to accept that I may cease to be a sculptor? Because that may happen. When I go into this problem of a change in the very brain cells themselves, it is possible I may never be a sculptor. But it is very important for me to be a sculptor. I do not want to let that go. P: Let us leave the sculptor. Here we are in front of you and you say, look, this change in the structure of the brain cells may be the ending of all the talent, of all significant action. We accept what you say. Krishnamurti: That is right. If you are prepared to let go, then what takes place? Which means, you let go the talent, the fulfilment, the perpetuation of the "me". Now when does this mutation in the brain cells through energy take place? You see, where energy is being dissipated through talent and through other channels, energy is not completely held. When this energy has no movement at all, then I think something happens, then it must explode. I think then the quality of the brain-cell itself changes. That is why I asked why we are always thinking in terms of movement? When there is no movement inwardly or outwardly, when there is no demand for experience, no awakening, no seeking, no movement of any kind, then energy is at its height. Which means, one must negate all movement. When that takes place, energy is completely quiet, which is silence. As we said the other day, when there is silence, then the mind is transforming itself. When it is completely fallow, when nobody is cultivating it, then it is quiet like the womb. The mind which is the vessel of movement, when that movement has no form, no "me", no vision, no image, it is completely quiet. In it there is no memory. Then the brain cells undergo a change. The brain cells are used to movement in time. They are the residue of time and time is movement; a movement within the space which it creates as it moves. When the mind sees this, when it sees the futility of all movement in the sense of time, then all movement ends. So when the mind denies totally all movement, therefore all time, all thought, all memory, there is absolute quietness, not relative quietness. Therefore, the question is not how to bring about mutation, but to enquire into the structure of the brain cells. The realization that any movement from the brain cells gives continuity to time itself, puts an end to all movement. Movement is always in the past or in the future - movement from the past through the present to the future. That is all we know and we want change in this movement. We want the movement, and yet we want change in this movement, and therefore the brain cells continue. (Pause) It is amazingly simple. I do not know if you see this. We all want to complicate it. Any effort to stop movement is contradiction and therefore, time, and therefore no change at all. The seekers have all talked of a higher movement, the hierarchical movement. The question is, can the mind deny to itself all movement? You see, as you watch your brain, there is the centre which is completely quiet and yet listening to everything that is going on -the bus, the birds. We want to stop the noise outside but keep on with the inner noise. We want to stop outer movement but carry on with the inner movement. When there is no movement, there is tremendous focus of energy. So mutation is the understanding of movement and the ending of movement in the brain cells themselves. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 7 NEW DELHI 25TH DECEMBER 1970 'THE OBSERVER AND"WHAT IS"' Questioner P: The problem of duality and its ending cannot be understood unless we go into the nature of the thinker and thought. Can we discuss this? Krishnamurti: How do the Hindu thinkers, the Advaita philosophers deal with this problem? P: Patanjali's Yoga-sutras postulate a state of liberation which has anchors, and a state of liberation which is without anchors. In the one, the thinker is the prop; it is a state where the thinker has not ceased. In the other, there is a state where everything including the thinker has ceased. The Buddhist talk of kshana vada, time as instant, total and complete in itself where the thinker has no continuity. The Advaita philosophers talk of the cessation of duality and the attainment of non-duality. They go through a dualistic process to attain this non-dual state. Sankara approaches this state of non-duality through negation (neti, neti). Nagarjuna, the Buddhist philosopher's negation is absolute; if you say there is God, he negates it; if you say there is no God, he negates it. Every statement is negated. B: Buddha says what exists is the "Solitude of Reality". You are the result of your thoughts. P: They have all talked about non-duality - the Buddha, Sankara, Nagarjuna. But non-duality has become a concept. It has not affected the structure of the mind itself. In India for centuries the negative approach has been discussed, but it has not affected the human mind. The brain cells have remained dualistic; they operate in time and are caught in time. Though negation and the non-dual have been posited, there is no clue to apprehend these states. Why has non-duality not affected the mind of man? Can we go into it to see whether we can discover that which will trigger the non-dual state? B: All other developments - scientific, technological - have affected the minds of people. Man has discovered the non-dualistic state but it has not affected his mind nor his life. S: If every experience leaves a mark on the brain cells, what is the impact of the state of non-duality, of oneness? Why is a mutation not taking place in the relationship between the thinker and the thought? P: Is the mechanism which records the technological, the same mechanism which "sees, perceives"? Krishnamurti: The technological cell, the recording cell and the perceptive cell - P: And they seem to form the "ego". Krishnamurti: The technological and the recording fragment -these two make up the ego. Not the perceptive. P: I am including "perceiving" also. The recording is concerned with both - the technological and perception. Krishnamurti: It may be a verbal explanation. P: The core of man never seems to get affected. The basic essential duality between the thinker and thought continues. Krishnamurti: Do you think there is basically a duality or only "what is", the fact? P: When you, Sir, ask a question like that, the mind stands still and one says "yes, it is so". Then the query starts - am I not separate from S, from B? Though the mind says "yes", it also queries a split second later. The moment you asked the question, my mind became still. Krishnamurti: Why not stay there? P: The query arises. Krishnamurti: Why? Is it habit, tradition, the very nature of the operation of the self, the conditioning? All that may be due to the cultural imposition to survive, to function and so on. Why bring that in when we are looking at the fact - whether there is duality which is basic? P: You say it may be a reflex action of the brain cells? Krishnamurti: We are the result of our environment, of our society, We are the result of all our interactions. That is a fact also. I am asking myself is there a basic duality at the very core, or does duality arise when I move away from "what is"? When I do not move away from the basic non-dualistic quality of the mind, the thinker there, has he a duality? He thinks. Does the thinker create a duality when he is completely with "what is"? I never think when I look at a tree. When I look at you, there is no division as the "me" and "you". Words are used for linguistic and communicative purposes. The "me" and "you" are somehow not rooted in me. So, where does the thinker arise separate from thought? Mind remains in "what is". It remains with pain. There is no thinking of non-pain. There is the sense of suffering. That is "what is". There is no feeling of wanting to be out of it. Where does duality arise? Duality arises when the mind says, "I must be rid of pain. I have known states of non-pain and I want to be in a state of non-pain" (Pause). You are a man and I am a woman. That is a biological fact. But is there a psychological dualism? Is there a basically dualistic state or only when the mind moves away from "what is"? There is sorrow. My son is dead. I do not move away. Where is the duality? It is only when I say I have lost my companion, my son, that duality comes into being. I wonder if this is right? I have pain - physical or psychological grief. They are all included in pain. A movement away from it, is duality. The thinker is the movement away. The thinker then says this should not be; he also says there should not be duality. First see the fact that the movement away from "what is", is the movement of the thinker who brings in duality. In observing the fact of pain, why should there be a thinker in that observation? The thinker arises when there is a movement, either backwards or forwards. The thought that I had no pain yesterday - in that duality arises. Can the mind remain with the pain, without any movement away from it, which brings in the thinker? The mind is asking itself how this dualistic attitude towards life arises? It is not asking for an explanation of how to go beyond it. I have had pleasure yesterday. It is finished. (Pause). Is it not as simple as that? P: Not really. Krishnamurti: I think it is. You see, this implies non-comparative observation. Comparison is dualistic. Measurement is dualistic. There is pain today, there is the comparison with the non-pain of tomorrow. But there is only one fact: the pain which the mind is going through now. Nothing else exists. Why have we complicated this? Why have we built tremendous philosophies round al1 this? Are we missing something? Is it that the mind does not know what to do and therefore moves away from the fact and brings duality into being? If it knew, would it bring about duality? Is the "what to do" itself a dualistic process? Do you understand? Let us look at it again. There is pain - physical or psychological. When the mind does not know what to do in the non-dualistic sense, it escapes. Can the mind caught in the trap, the backward and the forward movement, can it deal with "what is" in a non-dualistic way? Do you understand? So we are asking, can pain, the "what is", be transformed without dualistic activity? Can there be a state of non-thinking, in which the thinker does not come into being at all; the thinker who says "I had no pain yesterday and I will not have it tomorrow"? P: See what happens to us. What you say is right. But there is a lack of something within us; it may be strength, energy. When there is a crisis, the weight of that crisis is sufficient to plunge us into a state where there is no movement away from the crisis; but in everyday life, we have "little" challenges. Krishnamurti: If you really understood this, you would meet these little challenges. P: In everyday life, we have the chattering, erratic movement of the thinker operating with its demands. What does one do with that? Krishnamurti: I do not think you can do anything with it. That is the denial. It is irrelevant. P: But that is very very important. That is what our minds are -the erratic part. One does not have the capacity to negate that. Krishnamurti: Listen, there is noise outside. I cannot do anything about it. P: When there is a crisis, there is contact. In normal living there is no contact. I go out. I can look at a tree and there is no duality. I can see colour without duality. But there is the other, the non-stopping, erratic no-sense part that is continuously chattering. The thinker starts operating on it when it sees it functioning. The great negation is to let it alone. Krishnamurti: Settle the primary factor - to observe pain without moving away from it - that is the only non-dualistic state. P: Let us speak of the chattering mind instead of pain, because that is the fact at this moment. The noise of that horn, the chattering mind, that is "what is". Krishnamurti: You prefer this and do not prefer that and thereby begins the whole circle. P: The central point is the observation of "what is" without moving away. The moving away creates the thinker. Krishnamurti: Because the noise, the chattering which was the "what is", has gone, has faded away but the pain remains. Pain has not gone. To go beyond pain non-dualistically; that is the question. How is it to be done? Any movement away from "what is", is dualistic because in that there is the thinker operating on "what is", which is the dualistic. Now can one observe "what is", which is the dualistic? To observe "what is", without the dualistic movement taking place, will that transform "what is"? Do you understand my question? P: Is it not really a dissolution of "what is"? That which was created? Krishnamurti: I know only "what is", nothing else. Not the cause. P: That is so. One can see that when there is no movement away from pain, there is a dissolution of pain. Krishnamurti: How does this happen? Why has man not come to this? Why has he fought pain with a dualistic movement? Why has he never understood or delved into pain without the dualistic movement? What happens when there is no movement away from pain? Not what happens to the dissolution of pain but what happens to the mechanism that operates? It is simple. Pain is the movement away. There is no pain where there is only listening. There is pain only when I move from the fact and say this is pleasurable, this is not pleasurable. My son dies. That is an absolute, irrevocable fact. Why is there pain? P: Because I loved him. Krishnamurti: Look what has already happened unconsciously. I loved him. He has gone. The pain is the remembrance of my love for him. And he is no more. But the absolute fact is he is gone. Remain with that fact. There is pain only when I say he is no more, which is when the thinker comes into being and says, "my son is no longer there, he was my companion," and all the rest of it. S: It is not merely the memory of my son who is dead which is pain. There is loneliness now. Krishnamurti: My son is dead. That is a fact. Then there is the thought of loneliness. Then there is my identification with him. All that is a process of thought and the thinker. But I have only one fact. My son is gone, loneliness, the lack of companionship, despair, are all the result of thought, which creates duality; a movement away from "what is". It does not need strength or determination not to move. The determination is dualistic. There is only one thing, which is the fact and my movement away from the fact, from "what is". It is this that breeds bitterness, callousness, lack of love, indifference, which are all the product of thinking. The fact is my son is gone. The complete non-perception of "what is" breeds the thinker, which is dualistic action; and when the mind falls again into the trap of dualistic action, that is "what is; remain with that - for any movement away from that is another dualistic action. The mind is always dealing with "what is" as noise, no noise. And "what is", the fact, needs no transformation because it is already "the beyond". Anger is "what is". The dualistic movement of non-anger is away from "what is". The non-movement from "what is", is no longer anger. Therefore, the mind - once it has perceived, once it has had non-dualistic perception - when anger arises again, does not act from memory. The next time anger arises, that is "what is". Mind is always dealing with "what is". Therefore, the dualistic concept is totally wrong, fallacious. P: This is tremendous action. The dualistic action is non-action. Krishnamurti: You have to be simple. It is the mind that is not clever, that is not cunning, that is not trying to find substitutes for dualistic action, that can understand. Our minds are not simple enough. Though we all talk of simplicity, that simplicity is of the loincloth. The non-dual means really the art of listening. You hear that dog barking - listen to it, without a movement away from it. Remain with "what is". (Pause) The man who remains with "what is" and never moves away from it, has no marks. P: And when marks take place, to see that they take place. One act of perception removes the mark. Krishnamurti: Quite right. That is the way to live. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 8 NEW DELHI 26TH DECEMBER 1970 'THE BACKWARD FLOWING MOVEMENT' Questioner P: I would like to ask you about the backward flowing movement, a state in which there is a drawing in of sight, hearing and the energies of sex. In the Yoga-sutra, there is a word 'parivritti', which denotes the state where thought turns back upon itself. Is there such a state as the drawing in of the outward flowing senses and of thought turning back on itself? Krishnamurti: Like a glove taken inside out? Are you saying that thought looking at itself, or swallowing itself, is the backward flowing movement? P: What is meant by the word, the content of the word, is a matter of experience. Krishnamurti: You are asking, is there a state in which hearing, seeing and the sensual energies draw themselves into one and there is a moving backwards? What do you mean by backwards? Are you saying that the hearing, the seeing and the sensual energies are with drawing without outer propelling? P: The normal movement of the eyes, ears and the sensual energies is an outer movement, linked with object. Can there be a freeing of the senses from object and a drawing-in of the senses? Krishnamurti: I wonder if in the drawing in, the no hearing, no seeing and the sensual energy not expanding, there is not a state where there is the hearing of sound, the seeing everything and yet a state of total quiet, a state of being withdrawn, a state where there is no desire. P: It is not suppression of desire. Krishnamurti: Is there a state where there is the hearing of sound, the eyes seeing, objects existing, and yet there is no sensuous desire? I think there is such a state. A state where there is sensation, yet there is no desire. Not that one has become old, lost vitality but there is no desire - desire being the seeing, touching, sensation and out of that sensation, the wanting to possess. P: What happens to the process of hearing when there is no naming? Krishnamurti: Do you hear that siren? There is the vibration of sound and the interpretation that takes place when you hear the siren. Now can you listen to it without any movement of memory as thought? Can you hear only the sound? Can there be no image, no naming, no interpretation? Can there be only sound? That is all. And the sound is out of silence. Because the activity of thought has come to an end, there is a hearing of sound out of emptiness. And in the same way can there be a seeing out of emptiness? I see you, I see that bottle; there is no image, no association or movement of thought because there is no image formation. So out of real emptiness, quietness, there is a seeing. Is that what you mean by withdrawing the senses? P: I am questioning out of the texts. In China and in India, the withdrawing was considered important. Krishnamurti: It is simple. Are you asking, can you look at a woman or a man or a beautiful object without desire, fulfilment or reaction? It is easy. P: It is easy for you. See our difficulty. Krishnamurti: I see a beautiful woman, car, child, furniture and so on. Can it be observed without any movement for acquiring or discarding? It is very simple. It is the same for seeing and listening. I think they are one movement, not separate movements. Though the instruments of perception and hearing are separate, they are all one movement. P: Desire existed before God; even before man came into being. The biological urge, the impetus is based on desire. How can you take desire which has its own propelling force and say it has no existence? Krishnamurti: Let us be clear. I see a beautiful car, a really beautiful car - P: Let us say I fall passionately in love. I am torn, ravaged by that desire. Can I see that person without desire operating? Krishnamurti: What is it you are trying to ask? P: Is there an actual withdrawal of sensory perception? Krishnamurti: I wonder if we mean the same thing? P: The car and may be even the woman can be looked at without naming. But we are loaded with questions, with problems of naming. It is not simple. Krishnamurti: I wonder if the problem of naming is not related to knowledge. P: Sir, a child is not exposed to knowledge and yet naming is a natural reaction. I am questioning the nature of this inward movement. Krishnamurti: I am not sure I understand what you are trying to say. There is withdrawing of sensory desires and fulfilment. Why do you use the word "inward"? P: There are practices to delve deep. With eyes and ears closed, you can delve deep inwardly. Is there any validity to delving? Krishnamurti: Yes definitely. What you call delving in is to shut your eyes, to shut your ears; in that state is there a delving or is there a cessation of all movement, which appears as though you were delving in? When you really close your eyes and ears, there is no movement within or without, as desire demanding fulfilment with all its frustrations; when that does not take place, there is complete quietness. The moment you use the word "delving in", that implies duality. P: You hear that horn. To you is there no sound at all in it? Krishnamurti: No. P: It is quite extraordinary. To you there is no sound. When you close your ears, is there no inner sound, separate from you? We hear an inner sound, a volume of it which is within us. Do you not hear it? (Krishnamurti closes his eyes and ears.) Krishnamurti: No. But one must be clear. When the eyes are closed, one generally sees spots. If one observes those spots, they disappear. P: Is there not an expansion, a contraction? Krishnamurti: Nothing. When I close my eyes, there is absolutely no movement of any kind. P: That means your whole consciousness is different. When I close my eyes, so many patterns are there. To you there is no movement of sound or pattern. Krishnamurti: That is why I want to go into this question of knowledge. This person has not read the Yoga-sutras and the religious books, and to him there is only a complete emptiness. P: It is not because he has not read any religious books. Krishnamurti: There is no interference of knowledge. P: The same phenomenon will not happen to anyone who is ignorant of religious literature. It cannot happen to a communist. Krishnamurti: It is knowledge as pattern that interferes. Pattern is created by knowledge, experience. When there is no retention of knowledge, then what is there? There is absolute quietness - eyes, ears and desire - no movement. Why do you make this out as something special? The man who is caught in association, idea, thoughts, in patterns, such a man does not have an empty mind. P: What you say is valid. There are many times when what you say is valid within me. Krishnamurti: My point is, those people who spoke of inward movement, were they aware of its dualistic nature? P: They must have been aware. The Yoga-Sutras say that the seer is nothing more than the instrument of seeing. They make an absolute statement like that. Krishnamurti: Probably the man who saw, perceived the reality said the seer and the seeing are one. Then the followers came along and made theories without experiencing the state. I cannot separate the observer from the observed. When I close my eyes, there is no observer at all. Therefore, there is no inward movement as opposed to the outward movement. P: Do you see yourself as a person? Krishnamurti: If you mean the body - yes. As an ego, as a person talking on the platform, walking, climbing the hill - no. P: The sense of existence, the sense of "I am; does it operate in you? Krishnamurti: One of the things I have never had is the sense of the "I". Never. P: "I exist" is the central core in all of us. It is the very fabric of our existence. Krishnamurti: The peripheral expressions of Krishnamurti appear to be a person. But at the centre there is no person. I really do not know what it means. You are asking, is there in you a centre, the "I am", the sense of "I am". No. The feeling of "I am" is not true. P: It is not as obvious as that. But the sense of existence, the core of the ego within us, is unexplored. There is something which holds it together and as long as it remains, what you are saying -the no centre - has no validity for us. Krishnamurti: There is no movement of the past as the "me" in the centre, in the person. One has to go into this very carefully. As we said the other day, the first step is the last step. The first perception is the last perception and the ending of the first perception is the new perception. Therefore, there is a total gap between the first perception and the second perception. In that interval, there is no movement of thought. There would be the movement of thought when the memory of the first perception remains, not when it is over. Can the mind not empty itself of every perception? Can it not die to every expression, and when it does, where is the root of the "I am"? When the mind is that, is there any movement of pattern taking place? When eyes, ears and desire are non-existent as movement towards or away from something, then why should the mind have any pattern? The seeing is the seer, in that there is no duality, but those who make that statement into an axiom do not experience it and therefore it remains a theory. P: The Sutras say there are many types of liberation. Liberation is by birth. Some men are born that way. That is the highest form of liberation. Then there is liberation by drugs which is part of witchcraft; then liberation through the asanas, then liberation through breath control, then liberation by understanding. I have always felt that you have never been able to explain to us how liberation happened to you. Was your mind like ours and it underwent mutation? If so, then there is a possibility of seeing for oneself and transforming the self. But even that is not relevant. I see that another's seeing cannot help me to see. What I see is my own. One has to leave it there. One cannot probe further. Krishnamurti: As you said, liberation is divided between those born liberated and those liberated through drugs, through yoga, through breath control and understanding. These are just explanations of a very simple fact. P: Your mind is not like ours, that is a simple fact. Krishnamurti: There are all these categories - drugs, breathing and the enormous effort involved in understanding - but I do not think it works that way at all. P: I am not concerned with what the books say. I am very concerned when my mind chatters. In the moment of perceiving, I see that a certain withering away has taken place in me. But I am not free of the desire to end this chattering. Krishnamurti: Do you really want to end it? P: Yes. Krishnamurti: Why does it not end? You see, it is very interesting. There is no ending to chattering. P: That is what my mind refuses to see; that there is no action to end it. Krishnamurti: Why? Do you want to go into it? P: Yes. Krishnamurti: First, why do you object if your mind chatters? If you want to end chattering, then the problem starts. Duality is the desire to end "what is". Why do you object to it? Noises are going on, buses are passing, crows are cawing. Let chattering go on. I am not going to resist it. I am not going to be interested in it. It is there. It means nothing. P: This is your magnitude. If you ask me what is the greatest thing in your teaching, it is this. To say to oneself, to the chattering mind, leave it there. No teacher has said this before. Krishnamurti: Which means the peripheral influence has no meaning at the centre. P: All teachers have talked of putting an end to chattering, to the peripheral influence. Krishnamurti: Do you not see when chattering does not matter, it is finished? It is strange how it works. I think this is the central thing which the professionals have missed. Would you say from the point of view of the guru that he is concerned only with the peripheral change? P: No. He is concerned with the central change. To you there is no difference between the centre and the periphery. Within the so-called centre there is the first and the last step. The gurus would say get rid of the peripheral chattering. Krishnamurti: When the sun is shining, you cannot do anything about it. When it is not there, what are we to do? (Pause) We do not see. (Pause) What will man make of the statement "let it chatter"? The fact is there is no duality and the observer is the observed at all times. The noise of the periphery is the noise of the observer. When the observer is not, the noise is not. When there is resistance, the observer comes into existence. Can one really see that the seer is the seeing and not accept that statement as an axiom, as an interpretation? But we see that the professionals have made that into a slogan. Is there liberation for the man who takes drugs, who takes to breathing in and out, for years? It may lead to a distorted mind. And the man who analyses and wants to understand, do you think he will find liberation? So if you deny all that, it is there on a silver platter. It is offered. Never repeat anything. Never say anything you do not know, which you have not lived. That brings a tremendous aloneness which is pure, crystal clear. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 9 NEW DELHI 27TH DECEMBER 1970 'TIME AND DETERIORATION' Questioner P: The key to your teachings appears to be in the understanding of time. The human mind, the structure of the brain cells have come to their present state with an in-built sense of time - as the yesterday, the today and the tomorrow. It is along this axis that the mind sustains itself. You appear to explode this process, to break through and therefore give the mind a new state of time. How is the time cycle to end? (Pause) What is your concept of time? The Buddha talks of the endless cycle of births and deaths, which is the yesterday, the today and the tomorrow, and the liberation from this cycle. Krishnamurti: What is time to you? Is it the movement of the past through the present to the future; not only in space and time, but also inwardly from the yesterday, to today and tomorrow? Or is time that which is invo1ved in covering physical or psychological distance; the time to achieve, to fulfil, to arrive? Or is time an ending as death? Or is time the memory of a pleasant or unpleasant happening; time to learn a technique or time to forget? All these involve time. Time is not a concept. P: We know time as a sense of duration, as clock time. Krishnamurti: Time as duration, a process, a continuity and an ending. There is not only physical time by the watch but also the psychological inward time. Time by the watch is very clear - going to the moon requires clock time. Is there any other time? P: We see time by the clock, the sun setting and rising. Psychological time is not different from that. If physical time has validity, my stating that I shall be tomorrow also has validity, not only physically but psychologically. All becoming is related to the tomorrow. Krishnamurti: All becoming is not only clock time but also the desire to become. P: The latter is possible only because there is tomorrow. Krishnamurti: That means, you think if there was no physical time, there would be no psychological time. P: I question the distinction you draw between the two - the physical and psychological time. Krishnamurti: I go to Madras; that needs time as today and the tomorrow. We can also see that because there is time - as yesterday, today and tomorrow - one will be different, one will change one's character, one will become so-called perfect. P: It is easy to see that time does not bring perfection. But the nature of the movement of thought, the sprouting, is a projection in time. I question the distinction you make. Krishnamurti: I know that physical time exists. Even if I do not think about tomorrow, there would be tomorrow. Why am I sure that there will be a tomorrow apart from the chronological time? It is fairly clear. This evening I will be going for a walk and between now and the walk there is an interval of ten hours. In the same way I am something and I want to be something else. In that also there is time involved. I am asking myself if there is such time at all. If I do not think about the walk, or about my becoming something else, is there time? P: Certain measurements have to be made. Krishnamurti: I need only physical measurement, no psychological measurement. I do not have to say I will become that; I will fulfil; I will achieve my ideal. All that involves time. If it does not enter my consciousness, where is time? It is only when I want to change this into that, there is time. I have no such desire. P: So long as there is desire for improvement, a change for the better, which to me is a fact, there is validity to the sense of time. Krishnamurti: That is, two years ago, I did not do my exercises properly. In two years, I have learnt, improved. I apply the same kind of argument to an inward process, which is, I say I am this and I will improve in two years time. I know only physical time and I do not know any other time. And why do you have any other time except the physical; any other time except the chronological? Why? You see, what is really involved is movement - the movement of improvement; the putting together involves time, both physical and psychological. Is there any other movement except the movement of thought? And thought is time - thought which says I have been and I will become. If thought functioned only in the movement of the physical, is there any other time? If there is no psychological being, psychological ending, is there time? We always associate physical time with psychological time, and therefore say: "I will be". The verb "to be" is time. Now what happens when you do not want to do anything, one way or the other? P: What would have happened if man did not have this movement of becoming as time? Krishnamurti: He would have been destroyed. So the movement of becoming was a movement of protection. P: Then the movement of protection as time is necessary. krishnamurti: Agreed, protection against fire. But is there any other form of protection? P: Once you admit protection against fire, the other protection is of the same nature. Krishnamurti: If the psychological is non-existent, is there need for protection? P: What you say is true. If the other is non-existent there is nothing to protect. But we see that there is the other. Krishnamurti: You accept that there is the other. You take it for granted that there is. But is there the "other"? I need only physical protection - food, clothes and shelter. Physical protection is absolutely necessary. And nothing else. Physical protection involves time. But why should there be protection about something which may not exist at all? How can you protect me psychologically? And that is what we are doing. We are doing something to protect that which does not exist and we therefore invent time. So, psychologically there is no tomorrow but there is tomorrow because I need food. P: If one sees that, in that is there the ending of time? Krishnamurti: This is it. (Pause.) Shall we investigate further? Consciousness is made up of content. Content makes consciousness. They are not separate. The content is made up of time. Consciousness is time and that we are trying to protect. And we are using time to shield time as a conditioned state. We are trying to protect that which has no existence. If we look at the content of consciousness, we find memories, fears, anxieties, the "I believe", the "I do not believe`', which are all the product of time. And thought says this is the only thing I have, I must protect it, shield it against every possible danger. What is it that thought is trying to protect? Is it words? Dead memories? Is it a formula or a movement; the formula which encourages movement; which makes it move from here to there? Is there such movement except as an invention of thought? The movement of thought which is born of memory, though it thinks of freedom is still of the past. Therefore, it cannot bring about radical change. Therefore, it is deceiving itself all the time. When you see that, is there time at all which needs self-protection? If one really understood this, then one's whole activity would be entirely different. Then I would protect only the physical and not the psychological. P: Would that not mean a state of emptiness inside; a meaningless emptiness inside? Krishnamurti: If I only protect the physical and nothing else, obviously it is like a glass which is being protected. Therefore, one is frightened of being empty, of meaningless emptiness. But if one sees the whole thing, there is an emptiness which is tremendously significant. S: Does time have a point at all, at which there is an impact? How does one know the texture of time? Krishnamurti: We live between regret and hope. If there is no movement, psychological movement backwards or forwards, then what is time? Is it height, which again means measurement? If there is no measurement, no movement, no backward or forward movement, no height and depth, actually no movement at all, is there time? And also, why do we give such extraordinary importance to time? P: Because time is age, decay, deterioration. Krishnamurti: Follow it up. Time is decay. I see this body, young and healthy, getting older, dying, the whole mechanism unwinding. That is all I know. Nothing else. P: The mind also deteriorates. Krishnamurti: Why not? It is part of the decaying process. I brutalize the mind to achieve, to succeed, which are all factors of unnatural deterioration. Then what have I left? The body grows old. I have regrets - I cannot walk up the hill any more. The whole psychological struggle comes to an end and I am frightened. So I say "I must have a next life." P: Does age diminish the capacity to see, to perceive? Krishnamurti: No, if you have not spoilt it by scars, memories, quarrels. P: If not? Krishnamurti: Then you are going to pay for it. P: Then there is no redemption. Krishnamurti: At any point the first step is the last step. P: So time can be wiped out at any point. Krishnamurti: Anyone who says let me be aware of this whole movement and perceives totally for one second, the mind becomes young again for that second. Then the mind carries that over and again deteriorates. P: The carrying over is karma,karma is also time. Krishnamurti: There is past action, present action and future action. Cause is never a static thing. There are so many things happening. The effect becomes the cause. So there is a constant movement undergoing change all the time. P: Karma in itself has validity. Krishnamurti: I plant the seed, it will grow up. I plant the seed in the woman and the child grows. P: So psychological time has existed as karma. It has reality. Krishnamurti: No. Is it the real? When you look, it ceases. Let us look at this question of cause and effect. I plant a seed in the earth and it grows. If I plant an acorn, it cannot grow to be anything but the oak. P: I do a certain action. The seed is already planted. That will have its effect. Krishnamurti: There I can change the effect. I plant the seed. What the seed is, the bush will be, or the tree will be. I cannot change that. S: Can the effect be changed in psychological action? Krishnamurti: Yes, of course. You have hit me for whatever reason - either hit physically or used words. Now, what is the response from me? If I hit you back, the movement continues. But if I do not react when you hit me, then what happens? Because there is observing, watching, I am out of it. P: I understand at that level. I set a movement in motion. I observe. The process has ended. That act affects another. It is going to affect others. Krishnamurti: It will affect your family, the world around you, and others. P: The causation, action and reaction arising out of that action are in a sense independent of my action. Krishnamurti: The wave goes on. P: If that is so, that is karma. A certain energy has been released. It will work itself out unless it meets other minds which quench it. Krishnamurti: The wave can only end when both of us see it at the same level at the same time with the same intensity. This means love. Otherwise you cannot end it. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 10 NEW DELHI 28TH DECEMBER 1970 'DYING AND LIVING' Questioner P: There must be a way of learning how to die. To know how to die is of tremendous importance to each one of us. Krishnamurti: How do the traditionalists and the professionals -and by the professionals I mean the gurus, the Sankaracharyas, the Adi Sankaracharyas, the yogis - how do they answer this question? P: Tradition divides life into various stages. There is Brahmacharya, a stage of celibacy, when as a student, the boy learns from a guru. The second stage is that of Grihastha, where man gets married, has children, seeks accumulation of wealth and so on. He also supports the sannyasi and the children and thereby supports society. In the third stage, the Vanaprastha, man walks out of the pursuit of worldly things and faces the stage of preparation for the final one which is Sannyasa, in which there is a giving up of name-home identity - a symbolic donning of the saffron robe. There is also a belief that at the moment of death, all man's past comes into focus. If his karma as actions within this life have been good, then that which is the last thought which remains with him at the time of death, continues. That is carried over into the next life. They also speak of the essential need for the mind to be quiet at the time of death, for the quenching of karma, for the mind to be fully awake at the moment of death. Krishnamurti: Will a traditional man go through all this or is it just a lot of words? P: Generally, Sir, the orthodox Hindu has the Gita chanted at the time of death so that his mind cuts itself away from the immediacy of family, fear, wealth, etc. This does not answer my question. How is the individual to learn how to die? Krishnamurti: Take a leaf in the spring - how delicate it is and yet it has extraordinary strength to stand the wind; in summer it matures and in autumn it turns yellow and then it dies. It is one of the most beautiful things to see. The whole thing is a movement of beauty, of the vulnerable. The leaf that is very very tender, becomes rich, takes shape, meets summer and then when autumn comes it turns gold. There is never any sense of ugliness, never a withering away in mid summer. It is a perpetual movement from beauty to beauty. There is fullness in the spring leaf as well as in the dying leaf. I do not know if you see that. Why cannot man live and die that way? What is the thing that is destroying him from the beginning till the end? Look at a boy of ten or twelve or thirteen - how full of laughter he is. By forty he becomes tough and hard, his whole manner and face change. He is caught in a pattern. How does one learn to live and die, not just learn to die. How does one learn to live a life in which death is a part; in which the ending, the dying, is an innate part of living? P: How is dying an innate part of life? Dying is something in the future, in time. Krishnamurti: That is just it. We put death beyond the walls, beyond the movement of life. It is something to avoid, to evade, not to think about. The question is what is living and what is dying. The two must be together, not separate. Why have we separated the two? P: Because death is a totally different experience from life. One does not know death. Krishnamurti: Is it? My question is why have we separated the two; why is there this vast gulf between the two? What is the reason why human beings divide the two? P: Because in death, that which is manifest becomes non-manifest. Because both in birth and in death there is an essential mystery; an appearance and a disappearance. Krishnamurti: Is that why we separate the two - the appearance of the child and the disappearance of the old man? Is that the reason why man has separated life from death? The organism biologically comes to an end - birth, adolescence and death - the young appearing and the old disappearing. Is that the reason? You are saying the reason for division is because there is a beginning and an ending; there is birth, childhood, maturity and death. Is that the basic reason for the fear of death? There is obviously a beginning and an ending. I was born, I will die tomorrow - there is a beginning and an ending. Why do I not accept that? P: In death is involved the cessation of the "me" - of all that I have experienced. The final cessation of the "me" takes place. Krishnamurti: Is that the reason for the inward division? That does not seem to be the entire reason why man has divided life from death. P: Is it because of fear? Krishnamurti: Is it fear that makes me divide the living and the dying? Do I know what living is and what dying is? P: Yes. Krishnami1rti: Do I know the joy, the pleasure, that is life and do I regard dying as the ending of that? Is that the reason why we divide a movement called living and the movement called death? The movement which we call living, is it living? Or is it merely a series of sorrows, pleasures, despairs? Is that what we call living? P: Why do you give it special meaning? Krishnamurti: Is there any other form of living? This is the lot of every human being. Man is afraid that this with which he had identified himself will come to an end. So he wants a continuity of this thing called life, never of ending. He wants a continuity of his sorrows, of his pleasures, miseries, confusions, conflicts. He wants the same thing to go on, that there never be an ending. And the ending of all that, he calls death. So now what is the mind doing in this? The mind is confused; it is in conflict, in despair. It is caught in pleasure, in sorrow. The mind calls that living and the mind does not want it to come to an end because it does not know what would happen if it ended. Therefore it is frightened of death. I am asking myself, is this living? Living must have quite a different meaning than this. P: Why? Why should it have a different meaning? Krishnamurti: Living is fulfilment, frustration, and all that is going on. My mind is used to that and has never questioned whether that is living. My mind has never said to itself why do I call this living? Is it a habit? P: I really do not understand your question. Krishnamurti: After all I must ask the question. P: Why should I ask? Krishnamurti: My life, from the time I am born till I die is one eternal struggle. P: Living is acting, seeing, being: the whole of that is there. Krishnamurti: I see beauty, the sky, a lovely child. I also see conflict with my child, with my neighbours; life is a movement in conflict and pleasure. P: Why should I question that? The mind questions only when there is sorrow, when there is a lot of pain. Krishnamurti: Why not ask when you have pleasure? When there is no pleasure there is pain. P: Sir, life is not a series of crises. Crises of pain are few. They are rare occasions. Krishnamurti: But I see this is happening in life. I see it happening and therefore question this division of living and dying. P: You do but others do not. We see there is a division; it is a fact to us. Krishnamurti: At what level, at what depth, with what significance are you making this statement? Of course it is a fact. I am born and I will die. Then there is nothing more to be said. P: It is not enough. The very fact we have asked how to learn to die........ Krishnamurti: I say learn also how to live. P: And I have listened. I have not asked that question to myself. Krishnamurti: Learn how to live. Then what happens? If I learn how to live, I also learn how to die. I want to learn how to live. I want to learn about sorrow, pleasure, pain, beauty. I learn. Because I am learning about life I am learning about death. Learning is an act of purification, not the acquiring of knowledge. Learning is purgation. I cannot learn if my mind is full. The mind must purgate itself to learn. Therefore the mind when it wants to learn has to empty itself of everything that it has known, then it can learn. So there is the living which we all know. There has to be first of all a learning about this daily living. Now, is the mind capable of learning, not accumulating? Without understanding what is implied in the first act of learning, can it learn? What is implied? When I do not know, then my mind, not knowing, is capable of learning. Can the mind not know so that it can learn about living - living in which there is sorrow, agony, confusion, struggle? Can it come to it in a state of not knowing and so learn? Such a mind capable of learning about life is also capable of learning about death. What is important is not the learning about something, but the act of learning. The mind can only learn when it does not know. We approach life with knowledge of life - with knowledge of cause, effect, karma. We come to life with the sense of the "I know", with conclusions and formulas and with these we fill the mind. But I do not know about death. So I want to learn about death. But I cannot learn about death. It is only when I know learning that I will understand death. Death is the emptying of the mind, of the knowledge which I have accumulated. P: There can be learning of living in the learning about death. Deep down in human consciousness there is this nameless fear of ceasing to be. Krishnamurti: The nameless fear of not being. The being is the knowing that I am this, that I am happy, that I had a marvellous time. In the same way I want to know death. I do not want to learn, I want to know. I want to know what it means to die. P: So that I am free of fear. Krishnamurti: If I do not know how to drive a car, I am frightened. The moment I know, it is over. Therefore my knowing about death is in terms of the past. Knowledge is the past, so I say I must know what it means to die so that I can live. Do you see the game you are playing upon yourself, the game which the mind is playing upon itself? The act of learning is something different from the act of knowing. You see, knowing is never in the active present. Learning is always in the active present. The learning about death - I really do not know what it means. There is no theory, no speculation that will satisfy me. I am going to find out, I am going to learn in which there is no theory, no conclusion, no hope, no speculation, but only the act of learning; therefore there is no fear of death. To find out what it means to die, learn. In the same way I really want to know what living is. So I must come to living with a fresh mind, without the burden of knowledge. The moment the mind acknowledges it knows absolutely nothing, it is free to learn. But there is noth- ing to learn. There is absolutely nothing to learn except the technological learning how to go to the moon. Freedom of learning about what -the thing that I have called living, the thing that I have called death. I do not know what it means. Therefore there is living and dying all the time. There is no death when the mind is completely free of the known - the known being the beliefs, the experiences, the conclusions, knowledge, the saying I have suffered and so on. Intellectually we have carved life out beautifully according to our conditioning. To achieve God "I must bc celibate", "I must help the poor," "I must take a vow of poverty." Death says you cannot touch me. But I want to touch death; I want to shape it into my pattern. Death says you cannot touch me, you cannot play tricks upon me. The mind is used to tricks - the carving something out of experience. Death says you cannot experience me. Death is an original experience in the sense that it is a state I really do not know. I can invent formulas about death - the last thought is that which manifests itself - but they are other people`s thoughts. I really do not know. So I am starkly frightened. Therefore can I learn of living and therefore of dying? So deny knowing - see what takes place. In that there is real beauty, real love, the real thing takes place. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 11 NEW DELHI 29TH DECEMBER 1970 'BEAUTY AND PERCEPTION' Questioner P: Where is the resting place of beauty? Where does it reside? Obviously, the outer manifestations of beauty are observable; the right relationship between space, form and colour and between human beings. But what is the essence of beauty? In Sanskrit texts three factors are equated - the Truth, the Good, the Beautiful - Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram. Krishnamurti: What are you trying to find out? Do you want to find out the nature of beauty? What do the professionals say? P: Traditionalists would say - Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram. The artist today would not differentiate between the seemingly ugly and the seemingly beautiful, but would regard the creative act as the expression of a moment, of a perception that gets transformed within the individual and finds expression in the action of the artist. Krishnamurti: You are asking what is beauty, what is the expression of beauty, and how does the individual fulfil himself through beauty? What is beauty? If you started as though you knew nothing about it, what would your reaction be? This is a universal problem with the Greeks, the Romans and with modern people. So what is beauty? Does it lie in the sunset, in a lovely morning, in human relationship, in the mother and the child, husband and wife, man and woman? Does it lie in the beauty of an extraordinarily subtle movement of thought and the beauty of clear perception? Is that what you call beauty? P: Can there be beauty also in the terrible, the ugly? Krishnamurti: In murder, in butchery, in throwing bombs, in violence, in mutilation, torture, anger, in the brutal, violent, aggressive pursuit of an idea, in wanting to be greater than somebody - is there beauty in that? P: In all these acts there is no beauty. Krishnamurti: What is beauty if a man hits another? P: In the creative act of the artist who interprets the terrible, like the Guernica of Picasso, is there beauty? Krishnamurti: So we have to ask what is expression, what is creativeness. You are asking what is beauty? It lies in a sunset, in the clear light of the morning, the evening, the light on the water, relationship and so on. And does beauty lie in any form of violence, including competitive achievement? Is there beauty per se: and not in how the artist expresses himself? A child tortured can be expressed by the artist, but is it beauty? P: Beauty is a relative thing. Krishnamurti: The "I" which sees is relative, conditioned and is demanding self-fulfilment. First of all, what is beauty? Is it good taste? Or has beauty nothing whatsoever to do with all this? Does beauty lie in expression and therefore fulfilment? Therefore the artist says I must fulfil myself through expression. An artist would be lost without expression which is part of beauty and self-fulfilment. So before we go into all that, what is the inwardness, the feeling, the subtlety of the word `beauty', so that beauty is truth and truth is beauty? Somehow through expression we try to find beauty in architecture, in a marvellous bridge - the San Francisco Golden Bridge or the bridge over the Seine - in the modern buildings of glass and steel and the gentleness of a fountain. We seek beauty in museums, in a symphony. We are always seeking beauty in the expression of other people. What is amiss in a man who is seeking beauty? P: The expressions of other people are the only sources of beauty that are available to us. Krishnamurti: Which means what? P: In seeing the bridge a certain quality arises within me which we call beauty. It is only in the perception of something beautiful that the quality of beauty arises in many individuals. Krishnamurti: I understand that. I am asking, is beauty in self-expression? P: One has to start with what exists. Krishnamurti: Which is other people's expression. Not having the perceptive eye, the strange inward feeling of beauty, I say how beautiful that picture is, that poem, that symphony. Remove all that, the individual knows no beauty. Therefore he relies for his appreciation of beauty on expression, on object, on a bridge or a good chair. Does beauty demand expression, especially self-expression? P: Can it exist independent of expression? Krishnamurti: Perception of beauty is its expression; the two are not separate. Perception, seeing, acting - perceiving is expressing. In that there is no time interval at all. Seeing is doing, acting. There is no gap between seeing and doing. I want to see the mind that sees, where seeing is acting; I want to observe the nature of the mind that has this quality of seeing and doing. What is this mind? It is essentially not concerned with expression. Expression may come but it is not concerned. Because expression takes time - to build a bridge, to write a poem - but the mind which sees, the mind to which perceiving is doing, to such a mind there is no time at all, and such a mind is a sensitive mind. Such a mind is the most intelligent mind. And without that intelligence there beauty? P: What is the place of the heart in this? Krishnamurti: Do you mean the feeling of love? P: The word "love`' is a loaded term. If you are still, there is a strange feeling; a movement takes place from this region of the heart. What is this? Is this necessary or is it a hindrance? Krishnamurti: This is the most essential part of it. There is no perception without that. Mere intellectual perception is no perception. Mere action of intellectual perception is fragmentary, whereas intelligence implies affection, the heart. Otherwise you are not sensitive. You cannot possibly perceive. Perceiving is acting. Perceiving, acting without time is beauty. P: Do the eyes, heart, do they operate at the same time in the act of perception? Krishnamurti: Perception implies complete attention - the nerves, the ears, the brain, the heart, everything, is at the highest quality. Otherwise there is no perceiving. P: The quality, the fragmentary nature of sensory action is that the whole organism does not operate at the same time. Krishnamurti: The whole thing - the brain, the heart, nerves, eyes, ears, are never completely in attention. If they are not, you cannot perceive. So what is beauty? Does it lie in expression, in fragmentary action? I may be an artist, an engineer, a poet. The poet, engineer, artist, scientist, are fragmentary human beings. One fragment becomes extraordinarily perceptive, sensitive and its action may express something marvellous, but it is still a fragmentary action. P: When the organism perceives violence, terror or ugliness, what is that state? Krishnamurti: Let us take violence in its multifarious forms, but why are you asking that question? P: It is necessary to investigate this. Krishnamurti: Is violence part of beauty, is that what you are asking? P: I will not put it that way. Krishnamurti: You see violence. What is the response of a perceptive mind in the sense in which we are using the word "perceptive" to every form of destruction, which is part of violence? (Pause). I got it. Is violence an act which is totally perceptive, or is it a fragmentary action? P: It is not clear; it is not that. Krishnamurti: You brought in violence. I want to investigate violence. Is violence the act of a totally harmonious perception? P: No. Krishnamurti: So you are saying it is a fragmentary action, and fragmentary action must deny beauty. P: You have inverted the situation. Krishnamurti: What is the response of a perceptive mind when it sees violence? It looks at it, investigates it and sees it as a fragmentary action, and therefore it is not an act of beauty. What happens to a perceptive mind when it sees a violent act? It sees "what is". P: As such, to you the nature of the mind does not change? Krishnamurti: Why should it change? It sees "what is". Go a step further. P: The seeing of "what is", does it change the nature of "what is"? There is perceiving. There is violence which is fragmentary. The perceiving of that, does it change the nature of violence? Krishnamurti: Wait a minute. You are asking what is the effect of the perceiving mind when it observes violence? P: You said it sees "what is". Does it alter "what is"? The perceiving mind, observing violence and seeing "what is", the very act of seeing, does it act on violence, changing its nature? Krishnamurti: Are you asking whether the perceiving mind seeing the act of violence, of "what is" asks what shall I do? Is that it? P: Such a mind does not do, but there must be action from the perceiving mind changing the nature of the act of the other. Krishnamurti: The perceiving mind sees a violent act. Such an act is fragmentary. What action can there be by the perceiving mind? P: The perceiving mind sees violence on the part of X. Seeing is acting. Krishnamurti: But what can it do? P: I would say if the perceiving mind acts, it must change the violence in X. Krishnamurti: Let us get this clear. The perceiving mind sees another acting violently. To the perceiving mind, the very seeing is the doing. That is one fact. Perception is doing. This perceiving mind sees X in violence. What is the action involved in that seeing - stop violence? P: All those are peripheral actions. I am saying that when a perceiving mind is confronted with an act of violence, the very act of perceiving will alter the action of violence. Krishnamurti: There are several things involved. The perceiving mind as it walks along sees an act of violence. The man who is acting violently may respond non-violently, because the perceiving mind is near him, close to him, and suddenly this happens, P: One comes to you with a problem - jealousy. What happens in an interview with you when a person comes to you who is confused? In the very act of perceiving, the confusion is not. Krishnamurti: Obviously it happens because of contact. You have taken the trouble to discuss violence and something happens because of direct sharing together of the problem. There is communication, sharing. That is simple. You see a man far away acting with violence. What is the action of the perceiving mind there? P: There must be tremendous energy from a perceiving mind. That must have some action. Krishnamurti: It may act. You cannot be certain of that as you can be close- ness. The other may wake up in the middle of the night, he may be aware of the strange response coming later, depending upon his sensitivity. It may be due to the perceiving mind and its impact, whereas this close communication is different. It does change. Let us come back. You were asking what beauty is. I think we can say the mind which is not fragmentary in itself, which is not broken up, has this beauty. P: Has it any relationship to sensory perception if you close your eyes, your ears...... Krishnamurti: It is independent of that. When you close your ears, eyes, there is no fragmentation and so it has this quality of beauty, of sensitivity. It is not dependent on external beauty. Put the instrument of such a mind in the middle of the noisiest city. What takes place? Physically it gets affected but not the quality of the mind, which is not fragmented. It is independent of the surroundings, therefore does not concern itself with expression. P: That is the aloneness of it. Krishnamurti: Therefore beauty is aloneness. Why is there this craving for self-expression? Is that craving part of beauty, whether it is the craving of a woman for a baby, a husband for sexuality in that moment of tenderness, or the artist craving for expression? Does the perceptive mind demand any form of expression? It does not, because perceiving is expressing, is doing. The artist, the painter, the builder finds self-expression. It is fragmentary and therefore its expression is not beauty. A mind that is conditioned, which is fragmentary, expresses that feeling of beauty, but it is conditioned. Is that beauty? Therefore, the self which is the conditioned mind, can never see beauty, and whatever it expresses must be of its quality. P: You have still not answered one aspect of the question. There is such a thing as creative talent; the ability to put together things in a manner which gives joy. Krishnamurti: The housewife baking bread, but "not in order to". The moment you do that you are lost. P: Creating joy. Krishnamurti: Not because of something else. The speaker does not sit on the platform and speak because he gets joy. The source of water is never empty. It is always bubbling, whether there is pollution or the worship of water; it is bubbling, it is there. Most people who are concerned with self-expression have self-interest. It is the self which makes for fragmentation. In the absence of self, there is perception. Perception is doing and that is beauty. I am sure the sculptor who carved the Mahesha Murti at Elephanta created it out of his meditation. Before you put your hand to a stone or a poem, the state must be of meditation. The inspiration must not be from the self. P: The tradition of the Indian sculptor was that. Krishnamurti: And the petty, the little, the big painter are all of that category - of self-expression. Beauty is total self-abandonment and with total absence of the self there is "that". We are trying to catch "that" without the absence of the self and creation then becomes a tawdry affair. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 12 MADRAS 3RD JANUARY 1971 'THE PARADOX OF CAUSATION' Questioner S: In physics we have certain unsolved problems. If the world is fully causal, then you cannot change anything. If the world is not fully causal, you cannot find any laws for such a world. Either the world is causal or not. Of course, if you think of cause and effect as one single entity, if all the world is one and there is no separation into pieces, then of course there is no cause and effect. If the whole universe is physical and suffers physical laws, then you have no choice. In a purely physical thing, there is no option. Even if the soul or whatever it is, is different from the kind of things that we are talking about, it still has no special significance if it is subject to physical laws. You cannot say that there is no cause-effect relationship because it is not natural. You cannot also accept cause and effect because there is no control over it and so what is the point in saying it? This is the paradox. What is the way out of this paradox? Krishnamurti: Are you talking of karma? S: No. The physical universe is closed. There is no movement here at all. Krishnamurti: All this implies time, does it not? That is, anything put together, horizontal or vertical, is time. Cause and effect are in time. Cause becoming effect and the effect being the cause, are all within the field of time. Whether I move my hand up this way or that, whether the movement is linear or vertical - all these are in within the field of time. Are you asking, Sir, can we move out of time? S: No. The experience of a physical law is within time. One does not ask questions within that law and what option does one have? Krishnamurti: None at all. Within the prison you can operate, but it is always within the field of time, cause-effect and effect-cause are within the field of time. Memory, experience, knowledge are within time and thought is the response of all that. If I have no memory, I cannot think; I will be in a state of amnesia. And thought is the response of memory. Thinking is within the field of time because it is put together through experience, knowledge, memory and memory is part of the brain cells. So thought can never move out of the field of time, because thought is never free. Thought is always old. Between the intervals of two thoughts, one may come upon something new and translate it in terms of time. There is a gap between two thoughts. In that interval there might be a different perception and the translation of that perception is time, but the perception itself is not of time. S: I have several questions to ask here. Krishnamurti: Go slow. Otherwise living in time there is nothing new. Living in time, thought which is put together, when thought tries to investigate something beyond time, it is still thought. So, as long as thought and time are within the field, it is a prison; I can think it is freedom but it would be merely a conception, a formula. It is like a man who is violent and pretends he is non-violent, and the whole ideological conception in this country of being non-violent and violent at the same time is a pretension. So, as far as thought functions, it must function within the field of time. There is no escape from it at all. I can pretend I am thinking outside time, but it is still within time. Thought is old, whether it is the atman, the super ego, it is all part of thought. S: Where is the way out of the paradox? Krishnamurti: The intellect, thought functions there. And we are trying to find an answer here as a physicist, biologist, mathematician, as a bourgeois or as a sannyasi. S: But there are laws in physics. Krishnamurti: Of course there are. This is anyhow a madhouse and we are trying to find an answer within this. This is a fact. I have to accept it as it is. Then my question is, is there an action which is not of this? Here all action is fragmentary. You are a religious man, I am a scientist. In this everything is in a state of fragmentation. S: Fragmentation carries laws. Krishnamurti: Of course, but these laws have not solved human problems. Apart from physics you are a human being. Take the problem as it is, that human beings live in fragments, that society is broken up. There is fragmentation. And thought is responsible for this. S: Thought is also responsible for all the other things. Krishnamurti: Surely. The priests, the inventions, the discoveries, the Gods, the yogis, everything. So that is what actually is. The problem is how we live here and find something else. You cannot. The question is not how to integrate the various fragments, but how is it possible to live without fragmentation? S: To the extent to which it is possible, you have no questions. At that point it ceases to be physics. At that level I am no longer a physicist. Krishnamurti: Of course. You are first a human being, a nonfragmentary human being. Your action can then be a nonfragmentary action. S: For the non-fragmented person physics does not exist. Krishnamurti: What is the importance of an artist? S: He transports people into states which they themselves are not able to reach. Still fragmentary, but different. Krishnamurti: Being fragmented, he needs self-expression and the self is part of the fragmentation. So would you deny the artist his function? Now the physicist is important. But he does not come before the universe, the human heart, the human mind. He is as important or not important as the artist. S: There is a difference in the quality. The artist is usually non-clear. Krishnamurti: The artist is clear in his feeling, but the expression goes wrong because he is conditioned to objectivism, non-objectivism and all that. So, can I live in this world non-fragmentarily; not as a Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, communist, but as a human being? S: Why not just live; why the word "human"? Krishnamurti: The way we live is not human at all. It is a battle - country, wife, children, the boss - we live that way. We are at war with each other. If you call that living, I say that is not it. This perpetual struggle is not living. S: Life is not a perpetual struggle all the time. Krishnamurti: But most of the time it is. The window is closed. S: But why the word "human"? Krishnamurti: Sir, I did not use the word "individual". You know the meaning of the word "individual" - one who is indivisible. Man is not. So one realizes this fact of fragmentation, time and the constant battle for position, power, prestige, success, domination and the effort to escape from all this to reach enlightenment through the mantra, through yoga. How is this everlasting chattering, that is going on all the time, to come to an end? Is it at all possible not to be fragmented? How is it possible for the brain cells themselves to be quiet, because that is the mechanism of time, because that is being put together slowly over years. That is what we call evolution. That is the central question. S: And that is rightly so. You bring the problem back to physics, because physics talks about the external universe but it does not talk about brain cells. If you had only a fragment of reality, then you do not accept it as consistent. If it is consistent, then it is fiction. Could the fragment be self-consistent? Krishnamurti: I would put it this way. I would suggest, is it possible for a human being to be a physicist and be self-consistent without fragmenting himself? I see time is the central factor. Thought is the response of memory, thought is time. S.: For the experiencer... Krishnamurti: The experiencer is the experienced, the observer is the observed. The observer is over there and looks at it. There is space and time. The observer separates himself through conclusions, images, formulas, etc., and so creates space and time, and this is one of the major fragmentations. Can the observer look without the observed who is the maker of time, space, distance? After all, Sir, how do you discover anything, say, as a physicist? S: I am peculiar, I invent them. Krishnamurti: There must be a period in which the inventor is silent. S: Yes. Krishnamurti: If he is constantly in movement, there is continuity. There must be a break. In that he sees something new. The observer sees through the image and it is continued in time. And so he cannot see anything new. If I look at my wife with the image of years, and I call that relationship, there is nothing new in that. So is it possible to see something new without the observer? The observer is time. Can I look at "what is", the fragmented without the observer that is time? Can there be a perception without the perceiver? S: There is no perception without the perceiver, but the perceived is sort of waiting to be perceived. Krishnamurti: The tree is there all the time without the perceiver, and the perceiver is looking at it through fragmentation, through the censor. Can the censor be absent and yet be observed? S: Certainly not. Perception is a single act. There is no possibility of breaking it up. Krishnamurti: Who is the censor? Who is the perceiver? Who is using the verb "to perceive"? S: When you are perceiving, you do not talk about the perceiver. Krishnamurti: I look at the tree with knowledge. Can the observer observe without the past? Who is the thinker, the examiner? S: When you perceive, you do not need all this. Krishnamurti: There is the tree. Can I look at it without the observer? S.: Yes. Krishnamurti: There is only that. Then the perceiver comes into operation. So the image-maker can look without the image. Otherwise you cannot invent. S: We were talking about communication. If time itself is the product of thinking, then how can thinking be imprisoned in time? Then what makes time common to all people? M: Different people have the same notion of time. Krishnamurti: I wonder if they do. M: Can it be answered? Krishnamurti: Why do you want a concept of time? You look at the watch, you have no concept about it. S: The idea of time as movement is associated with the watch. Krishnamurti: Within the rising and setting of the sun, there is numerical time, but is there any other psychological, inward time? S: There is another time when you think of action in the future. Krishnamurti: So time is the movement of the past through the present to the future. That is time. S: Time is part of thought. Krishnamurti: Time is thought. Time is sorrow. S: How can thought transcend itself? What is the significance of saying that thought cannot transcend itself? Krishnamurti: But it is all the time trying it. Let me put it this way. What is the validity of time? I have to go from here to there, from this house to the other house, from one continent to another continent; I will be a manager of this factory - all that involves time, which is being put together, in sequence or not in sequence. S: There is a great limitation to this. Time is single but experiences are not single. Time is one dimensional: one string with beads collected on it. Experience connected together gives you an impression of time, but time itself is one dimension, a single string. You can think of different strands and scales of time. They are a string of time. The connectivity of things can be complex. We do not experience the multiple connectivity of it. We can, of course, experience several things together; for example, I am listening to you, part of my mind may be thinking of something else, I may be shaking my toe; because my understanding is functioning, I watch all that. I see a series of pictures but I do not live anything. Krishnamurti: That means the self is absent. S: There is no single self. Krishnamurti: That is, there is no centre. S: There is no centre which has time in it. Krishnamurti: That means in oneself there is no fragmentation at all. At the very core of one's being, there is no fragmentation. S: Put that way, one sees there is a state in which there is no fragmentation. Krishnamurti: Can one find out a quality in which there is no fragmentation, which means the ending of thought; thought breeds fragmentation, which is time? Look, Sir, when you go through the world there are separate actions - social, political, communal, the hippy action - all fragmented. Is there an action which is not fragmented but which will cover all that? S: When you use the word "action", action is associated with time. Krishnamurti: I mean the active present. S: Yes, it is. Krishnamurti: It means there is a quality of mind in which there is no fragmentation at all. It is active present all the time. What relationship has all this with love? What is the relationship between me, you and the artist? I think that is the core of relationship. Love has been reduced to sex and all the morality round it. If love is not there, fragmentation will go on. You will be a physicist, I will be something and we will communicate, discuss, but they are mere words. S: How do you communicate? There has been some communication after you have talked. How do I understand that? How is it that I understand it? Krishnamurti: What does the word "communication" mean? You and I have something in common. Common implies sharing. S: How is it possible to share? Krishnamurti: Wait, we are using time to communicate. "Common" implies that both of us want to understand, examine, share an issue together. I am not giving, you are not receiving. We are sharing. So a relationship of sharing is established. You are not sitting on the platform and I on the ground. What really happens when you share a problem like sorrow in human beings? It is tremendous. S: At the time you are sharing sorrow, after a while you do not see the person. I can understand that with deep personal emotions, but with an idea it is not possible. Krishnamurti: What is the point of sharing ideas? S: We share insights. Krishnamurti: Which is understanding. But ideas are not understanding. On the contrary, formulas about understanding prevent understanding. Sir, when you share together, what takes place? Both of us have the same intensity, at the same time, at the same level. That is love. Otherwise there is no sharing. After all, Sir, to understand something together, I must forget all my experiences, prejudices, and so must you. Otherwise we cannot share. Have you ever discussed with a Communist, with a Catholic? S: I try to understand him. Krishnamurti: But he will not understand you. That is simple. Take Chardin. He may have travelled extensively, covered a wide canvas, but he was fixed as a Catholic. You cannot share with a man who is fixed. Sharing implies love. Can a man who is fixed in a certain attitude, can he love? S: He can have mystical experiences. Krishnamurti: Because he is conditioned. He sees Krishna, Christ. He sees what he wants to. The question is whether the mind can uncondition itself? Not through time, for when the mind uses time to undo time, it is still within time. Real understanding is out of time. There is so little of love, of sharing, but of the other there is plenty. (Pause) Sir, here we ask the question what is meditation? Whether the mind can be free of all its content because consciousness is made up of the content? M: Most often when you talk of understanding you think of one individual. To have communication you must have two minds. Also there are some thoughts which occur to me. I may later on find out it has already occurred to other people, but are there thoughts which arise only when two people are together? S: M says there are situations when two people have ideas together which neither could have got independently. Krishnamurti: When two people come together, what takes place? You express something verbally. I hear it, translate it and answer it; that is verbal communication. And in that process certain other factors enter. You do not quite know what you are saying. I hear it, partially understand and partially answer. So communication remains broken. If you say something very clearly and I listen to you without any reaction, there is immediate communication. May I put it this way? Because I do not know what love is, I want you to love me. I know what love is and, therefore, I can communicate with you. I do not want anything. But you are asking a further question and that is, is there a necessity at all for communication; necessity in the sense that through communication I uncover something more, I discover something new. Like a man who plays the violin, uses the instrument for himself or uses the instrument and there is nothing beyond it. S: Neither for good nor evil. Krishnamurti: Yes, like a flower - take it or leave it, because through communication we discover something together, and without communication can I discover something without verbalizing? When you and I have a common interest, and intensity at the same level and at the same time, then communion is possible nonverbally. I do not have to tell you "I love you". I think we are caught so much in words, in linguistic, semantic enquiry. The word is not the thing. The description is not the described. S: And since this high level of communication is not a technique or a skill, the question arises, how does one learn anything? A child is able to learn. Krishnamurti: Is learning a process of accumulation? That is what we do. I learn Italian, store up the words, then I speak. This is what we call learning. Is there learning which is non-accumulation? The two are totally different actions. S: May I ask something? It may be totally irrelevant, but you will understand. Is there "the other"? Are there "other" people? Krishnamurti: It all depends upon what you mean by "the other", "the other people". S: Most times there is multiplicity - but there is also aloneness. Krishnamurti: Obviously. S: Since aloneness is real.................. Krishnamurti: Why do you call aloneness real and the other unreal? We know loneliness, resistance, the dual movement of action, defensive or aggressive action, being caught in thought, and that brings greater isolation - we and they, my party and yours. Now can the mind go beyond isolation, beyond resistance which means can it be completely alone? Not in the sense of isolation. It is only then that I discover something new, that which is real. S: I have experience of that state, but you caught me at that point when you asked me, "why do you divide". There are two situations. There are states when I do not see multiplicity and there are states in which I see multiplicity. I have a feeling that the states in which I see multiplicity are falling off. Krishnamurti: Be careful, Sir. You are caught. Falling off - what do you mean, that is time. Anything that you can get rid of slowly is time, whereas the other does not involve time at all. So do not get caught, Sir. (Pause) So is there a perception and action without time? I see danger, physical, and there is instant action. I do not say I will gradually withdraw from danger. So is there a perception of this sense of loneliness, resistance? Is there a perception, a seeing the danger of it completely, and the very seeing is the getting rid of it? S: If you see the whole thing completely, there is no falling off. It is not there. M: That is, there is no preparing for it. S: This statement is at variance with my experience. I have experienced timeless moments. I loved it. I have a memory of it. Krishnamurti: Leave it alone, Sir. S: When I hold it, then it is pleasure. Krishnamurti: That is what it is. Pleasure is the one main ruling principle. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 13 MADRAS 4TH JANUARY 1971 'TRADITION AND KNOWLEDGE' Questioner A: I was in the self-preparation group of the Theosophical Society in 1923-24. In that group, there was a preparation for understanding - viveka, vairagya and love. It was a traditional approach. A change came about when you said let us break away from organizations, from all disciplines. In the work At the Feet of the Master, shama is translated as control of the mind and dama as control of the body. In the traditional approach, shama seems to have been neglected. Less attention seems to have been given to the meaning and implication of shama and more than due stress laid on dama. Shanti has become a one word symbol of inner peace and it is the past-passive participle of the verb shama. So if shama is not understood, shanti is also not understood. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by the word "sadhana"? J: Sadhana means discipline; to acquire. A: You neglect shama, the process by which arising of impulses and the subsiding of them takes place. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by the word `process' - from here to there, to proceed, a movement from here to there. A movement from here to there necessitates "sadhana". Process implies time. A: This process of observing the ways of the mind involves time. Krishnamurti: Time is involved in process, in discipline, in order to arrive. All that implies time, time that includes space - from here to there - and that space can be covered through time. J: Ramana says it is pathless, free of process, free of time. A: Even when we realize that it is not good to suppress the arising and ending of desire, that realization is still a process, and is in time. Krishnamurti: When we say we live in time, what do we mean by that? What does living in time mean? A: The mind is geared to yesterday, today and tomorrow. Krishnamurti: Not only the mind, but the numerical time - I come here at such and such a time. Living is within this numerical time, chronological time. Is that all my life? Is there any other time? A: There is psychological time which is created by the mind. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by time as created by the mind? A: The mind has a way of prolonging pleasure. My movement in chronological time is influenced by my mind. Krishnamurti: What is this mind? A: Memory. Krishnamurti: What is memory? You were in Bangalore and today you are in Madras. You remember Bangalore. Remembrance of a past experience or occurrence is memory. That leaves a mark. What is the substance on which the mark is left? There was an experience yesterday. It has left a mark, pain or pleasure, that is irrelevant. It has left a mark. On what has it left a mark? Why has it left a mark? What does the word experience mean? Experience means to go through, to propel, to throw out. When that experience is not completely washed out, it leaves a mark. On what does it leave the mark? There is a substance on which the mark has to be left. What is the substance? A: The censor. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by the censor? I see yesterday's experience has left a mark. On what has it left a mark? J: On mind which is consciousness. Krishnamurti: Which consciousness? The content of consciousness is consciousness. Without the content, there is no consciousness. Content is consciousness. The two are not separate. Find out on what memory leaves a mark. A: That part of the mind, the brain which carries the residue. Krishnamurti: Residue is experience. Marks are left on the brain cells themselves. See what it has done; experience unfinished, leaves a mark on the brain cells which hold memory. Memory is matter. Otherwise it cannot hold and leave a mark on the brain cells which are also matter. See what happens, Sir. Every incomplete experience, leaves a mark which becomes knowledge. The weight makes the mind dull. The brain as accumulated knowledge has received information, which is knowledge. A: How does one cope with a challenge? Krishnamurti: What is coping with a challenge? If you respond according to past information, you do not know how to deal with the new problem. So, experience leaves a residue as memory on the brain cells, which becomes the storehouse of knowledge. Knowledge is always the past. So the brain cells act, respond, function according to the information, knowledge, residue of the past. Brain is being put together through time which is the past. And so, a mind crowded with knowledge is not a free mind. J: Because its responses are arising out of the known. A: At a certain level, it is essential. Krishnamurti: Of course, half our life is that. We see that this brain, which is put together through millennia, lives with the experience of the present and the past, the racial past, the familial, the personal past, and they are all weighted down there. We call this progress. We know technological progress, from the bullock to the jet. And the brain says that is the only way it can function with its memories; and thought says it wants to get out of the prison; so thought moves to the future - which is enlightenment, which again is a movement of thought. See what we are doing. A: We apply the same principle of the bullock cart and the jet -that the mind through acquired knowledge, through discipline, through control of all desires, can move to freedom. Krishnamurti: I do not think we are still clear. We accumulate knowledge, which is experience, memory, and through knowledge we try to find a way out. A: Yes. Krishnamurti: The traditional approach is through knowledge. And can knowledge bring about freedom? If it can, then discipline, control, sublimation, suppression are all necessary, because that is all we know. That is tradition; tradition means to carry over. A: I see clearly it is not possible. Then why does it not stop? Krishnamurti: I see clearly that this is a fact. It is not an assumption, a theory. I see knowledge, which is the accumulation of centuries, is a prison and yet the mind cannot drop it. A: This knowledge is verbal. My knowledge is based on words. Krishnamurti: Is it verbal? I hit you. You hit me. Pain is there. The memory of that pain is there. You hit me; I have physical pain. The remembrance of the pain is verbal but the pain is not verbal. Why has the mind translated the pain into words? Watch it, Sir. A: Communication. Krishnamurti: Watch it. You hit me. I have pain. That is a physical fact. Then I remember it. The remembrance is the word. Why has the fact become a word? J: To give continuity. Krishnamurti: Is it to give continuity to pain? Or continuity to the man who has given pain? A: He has to reap the consequences. J: It gives continuity to the man who receives the pain. Krishnamurti: Look. You hit me. There is physical pain. That is all. Why do I not end it? Why does the brain say "A has hit me"? It has already translated the pain into words. Why? Because it wants to hit back. If it did not do that, it could say, "Yes, A has hit me" -full stop. But the brain remembers not only pain which becomes the psychological mark but also the man who causes the hurt. R: Who remembers? Krishnamurti: The cell. A: The "I" process. J: What is getting recorded in the cell is the image of the man who hit. Krishnamurti: Why should I remember the man? J: Even if I forgive him, it is the same. Krishnamurti: What happens is: I translate the fact into words, "You hit me". The moment you hit, there is pain and the "I" which says, "A has hit me, how could he, what have I done." All these are waves of words. So your traditional approach to this problem is through knowledge; that you must have knowledge to arrive, to achieve freedom. And your knowledge is verbal. And I say, is that so? The experience of being hit is knowledge. Now what is the traditional approach to this whole problem of pain, suffering, of being hurt? What is the traditional response? Why has tradition maintained that knowledge is necessary as a means to enlightenment? A: This is oversimplification. Verbalizing of pain is one part, but the entire field of knowledge is racial. The word is the essence of knowledge. Krishnamurti: Is it? J: It is not so. Krishnamurti: So we have to see what knowledge is (which comes from the word "to know"). Is it knowing, the active present, or the having known? The active present of the word "to know" is knowing, not having known. A: When we talk of knowledge, it presupposes having known. Krishnamurti: Tradition says having knowledge is essential to freedom, enlightenment. Why has this been maintained? There must have been people who must have questioned knowledge. Why have the Gita, the gurus not questioned? Why did they not see that knowledge means the past, that the past cannot possibly bring enlightenment? Why did the traditionalists not see that discipline, sadhana have all come from knowledge? J: 1s it because people felt that memory must be maintained? Krishnamurti: Why did the professionals not see that knowledge is the self? They talked everlastingly about wiping away the self. A: So long as communication is verbal, you cannot wipe away the self. Krishnamurti: Do you mean to say that the professionals can never look at anything without the word? A: The word is compulsive, non-volitional. Krishnamurti: You hit me. There is pain. I see that. Why should that be built up as memory? You are not answering my question. Why did the professionals not see the simple fact that accumulated knowledge can never lead to freedom? A: Some of them did see. Krishnamurti: Why did they not act? The professionals are you, the professionals whom you have read; therefore why cannot you drop it? Which means you have not dropped tradition. Personally, I see a very simple fact. You hit me. There is pain. That is all. A: What about pleasure? Krishnamurti: The same thing. A: It involves an effort to drop. Krishnamurti: Then you enter the same circus - naming, the word, which means to strengthen the knowledge that you hit me. I do not stop there. You hit me that is a fact. My son is dead. That is a fact. To become cynical, bitter, to say "I loved him and he is gone" - all that is verbalization. A: So long as the chattering of the mind goes on - Krishnamurti: Let it chatter. Look. Fact is one thing and the description is another. We are caught in description, in explanation but not with the fact. Why does that take place first of all? When the house burns, I act and I must. What is action here? You have hit me. Here there is only complete inaction, which means no verbalization. A: This happened to me when my brother died. Krishnamurti: Then what takes place? Why do we get caught in knowledge and make it so extraordinarily important? The capacity to reason, argue; why has it become so important? The computers are taking over that function. Why have the professionals been caught in this trap? So, can the brain cells, put together through time as knowledge, function in knowledge when necessary, and yet be completely free of knowledge? A: I have pleasure. I say "How nice, wonderful; I do not drop pleasure. Krishnamurti: I have had an affair. Pleasure is involved in it. Then thought comes along and says I would like to repeat it. Which is what? Affair, memory, reaction of memory as thought, thought building images, demanding images which is part of tradition, carrying over. I have had a pleasurable experience yesterday. Carrying over to tomorrow is tradition. A.: Also joy. Krishnamurti: The moment you reduce it to pleasure, it is gone. A: Is there only pleasure and pain or is there more in knowledge? Krishnamurti: We cannot answer that unless we understand pain, pleasure and knowledge. The professionals have been blind and they have made millions of people blind. The monstrosity of it! The whole of this country, the Christian world, all over it is the same. The next question arises, whether the brain cells can function at one level with complete objectivity, with sane knowledge, without bringing the pleasure principle into it, pleasure through prestige, status and all that? And can the brain cells also realize that freedom is not in knowledge? That realization is freedom. How does this happen? J: One point here - when thought craves to die, it continues. Krishnamurti: What would be the professional's answer to this question? Why does thought cling? J: Samadhi. I stay in samadhi and come back. Krishnamurti: There is no meaning in that. Do the brain cells see themselves as a repository of knowledge? Does the brain cell realize it for itself? Not as a superimposed realization, but that when the principle of pleasure acts, then the mischief begins? Then there is fear, violence, aggression, everything follows. A: When the field of knowledge is distorted by pain and pleasure, then the whole mischief starts. Krishnamurti: Why did the traditionalists, the professionals, the scriptures, the spiritual leaders not see this? Was it because authority was tremendously important - the authority of the Gita, the experience, the scriptures. Why? Why did they not see this? Because, man is the result of all this. And so you have the man who says I have read the Gita, I am the authority. Authority of what? Of somebody else's words, of knowledge? A: We can know the various systems without being involved in them. The tradition does bring you a certain clarity. We know how the professionals worked and how you work. You say knowledge is entirely of the past. Krishnamurti: Obviously. If I am tethered to a post, I cannot move. A: Then why did the professionals not see it? Krishnamurti: They were after power. A: You do not understand. When you say they wanted power, that is not so. Krishnamurti: Look. What is taking place in each person? We see something very clearly for a moment. The perception is translated into experience as knowledge. There it is. I have seen it. It is finished. I do not have to carry it with me. The next minute I am watching. J: Why is there a watcher? Krishnamurti: Look, why does the brain insist on a continuity in knowledge? Why does the brain continue in the multiplicity of knowledge? Why does it keep on adding, multiplying, "I did this yesterday, she was so kind; why is this going on and on? Look Sir, the brain cannot function healthily, sanely, if it is not completely secure. Security means order. Without order the brain cannot function, it becomes neurotic. Like a child it needs complete security. When the child is secure, feels at home, it is not frightened, then it grows up as a marvellous human being. So the brain needs security and it has found security in knowledge. That is the only thing it can be secure in - experience as knowledge which acts as the future guide. So it needs security and it finds it in knowledge, in belief, in family. A: The traditionalists provided that security through knowledge. Krishnamurti: The mind wants security. If the professional said I really do not I know, he would not be a professional. A: Yet security at a certain level is essential. Krishnamurti: One has to negate the Gita, the Bible, the guru, the whole thing. One has to negate totally all the constructions that thought has put together, to wipe away and say "I do not know, I do not know a thing." One has to say "I will not say a thing, I do not know. I will not repeat a thing which somebody else has said." Then you begin. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 14 MADRAS 5TH JANUARY 1971 'CONFLICT AND CONSCIOUSNESS' Questioner A: When you say that memory is the function of the brain cells, do the brain cells as a source of intellect have any valid part to play in their own silencing? Krishnamurti: We were talking yesterday of why knowledge has been made important as a way of enlightenment. Apparently every religious teacher has insisted on knowledge, not only in the East but also in the West. And as tradition is so strong in this country, it is really necessary to find out what part this whole systematized thinking plays in attaining enlightenment. What part does the environmental conditioning play in enlightenment? How does culture, the conditioning by culture come into being? You must cover the whole field. Take a traditional outlook like that of Nagarjuna or Sankara. Approach it from there. A: The traditionalists say, all action, activity, arises from causes, and these causes are known. Krishnamurti: You are making an incorrect statement. You are stating from cause to effect. There is no such thing. A: It starts with this sutra: "All these manifestations of behaviour, it is the Buddha who has given you the source of all these manifestations. If you know the cause, you can eliminate the cause." This is the statement of the Buddha. By understanding the cause you get rid of it and he has told you the cause. All manifested thought, behaviour, is within the field of cause-effect. Krishnamurti: I question this. We also see that what was cause becomes the effect and effect becomes the cause. There is no fixed cause, there is no fixed effect. If there is a fixed cause, everything is fixed. Then there is no explanation enquiry, movement possible. The acorn will produce an oak tree. On this principle, we think karma operates. Now is there a fixed point at all or is there a constant movement which the mind and brain are incapable of following, living? And so the mind says there is cause and effect and it is held in that pattern. A: Is there such a thing as cause and effect? If there is a chain of cause-effect, at any point you can hold it. At the cause point where effect becomes the cause, that is the key to this. Krishnamurti: Who is to hold it? A: Where the effect becomes the cause, that is the point. Krishnamurti: You insulted me yesterday, that is the cause. The insult may have been the result of my previous insult to you, and in reacting again there are a series of actions, modifications going on all the time. You insult me; at that moment, if I am totally aware, if the mind is totally aware, there is no cause-effect at all. You insult me. The response to that insult is from the old brain that has divided itself, that has been functioning in a pattern. At the moment of insult, for the old brain not to respond can only happen when there is complete attention. In that moment of attention there is no cause-effect. A: If there is no attention, it becomes the cause of another chain. Therefore, where an effect germinates itself into a new cause, it is there that action comes which is different. Krishnamurti: I do not think so. I insult you. That may be the result of my unconscious neglect of you. It has hurt you and you want to hurt me. The cause is my not greeting you, and the cause is I was interested in the birds, in the movement of their wings. I am an artist. I want to look at a bird in all its movements. Where is cause and where is effect? I see a movement of the leaves in the breeze, and I do not greet you. You are an old friend and you get insulted. J: The cause is in oneself. Krishnamurti: The observation of the movement is not in oneself. J: Insult arises within me, not within you. Krishnamurti: I have unintentionally given a cause to insult you. J: What makes me feel insulted is within me. Cause and effect are within me. Krishnamurti: You are saying, though I did not greet you, the very fact of that insult was born in you, not given to you. I am not at all sure. A: I have affection for you and I see you watching the bird, I will understand, but if I do not have affection, then I will blame you. So causation is always within. Krishnamurti: I see very clearly what you say. A: It is not always a one to one relationship. Instead of saying this cause arises with this person, the general law is as follows: "Thus the whole thing arises with a matrix of not-knowing -avidya. You come to the focus of "I". In avidya is samskara, all that man has done. From that is consciousness, out of consciousness comes naming. These lead to the body and the six senses: then you see." Cause is used in a broad cosmic sense. But you start from the point of "I see" and start only from there. J: Sankara says you cannot say how ignorance began and he denied causation. Cause-effect can be ended. Before you go any further you have to exhaust the intellect. Krishnamurti: Is this part of Zen? A: No, Sir, it is not. Awakening of intelligence is not sui generis. J: You cannot bypass the intellect. We do not know how the process began, but we can end it. Krishnamurti: From the seed, multiple cell, till man appeared. From unitary cell it moves on. A: The biologist does not go beyond manifestation. To assume it is a wrong thing. Krishnamurti: There is ignorance and there is always perception, sensation. A: Samskara is that which is put together. Krishnamurti: Put together in time which means evolution. A: Then you come to the next point, vijnana, which is consciousness. Krishnamurti: Is consciousness different from samskara? That which has been put together is consciousness. A: No Sir, it is the matrix. Within that comes your consciousness, my consciousness. Krishnamurti: Let us find out. A: The matrix is common to all of us. Krishnamurti: Samskara, you say, means put together. A: Literally it means tendencies. Krishnamurti: I am asking what is consciousness. Consciousness is made of content. Without the content, is there consciousness at all? The content of consciousness is consciousness. Content has been going on for centuries. A: Is content all or is it a segment? Krishnamurti: I see all my conditioning makes for consciousness. A: Man has existed for many, many years. Before his consciousness came into being, the matrix was already there. Krishnamurti: Thought began with the unitary cell. Man has lived for more than thirty-five thousand years; during that time he has collected all kinds of experiences. All that is consciousness. A: Out of this has come consciousness. Krishnamurti: I do not separate the two. There is no separation of the two. If there is no content, there is no consciousness. In consciousness there are many fragments, and it is not one solid content. There are different levels, activities, attitudes, characteristics; all that is total consciousness. One part of that total consciousness, a fragment of that assumes importance. Then it says "I am consciousness" or "I am not consciousness", "I am this", "I am not this". A: You have made a distinction between consciousness which has different levels and that point at which it says "I am different". At that point it becomes different. R: "I" and the "not I", the division is there. A: Then there is a difference between the matrix and the self. Krishnamurti: Look, the content of consciousness is consciousness. Without the content there is no consciousness. The content is made up of various divisions - my family, your family, and all that; it is made up of fragmentation. One of the fragments assumes importance over all other fragments. R: The classical way of saying this is, the reflection imagines it is the prototype. A: The moment there is the focus, the individualization starts. Krishnamurti: Be careful. This is very important. When you use the word "individual" it means indivisible, in himself, no fragment. So one fragment assumes the authority, the power to criticize, the censor - all within the area which we call consciousness. A: In the case of consciousness as the not-identified, what happens? Krishnamurti: I do not know a thing about identification. A: The moment identification starts the significance is that I identify myself with the part. That is the point of separation. Krishnamurti: Do not assert anything. The content of consciousness is consciousness. When there is no content there is no consciousness. In that content are tremendous factors of conflict, of fragmentation. One fragment assumes authority, one fragment does not identify itself with other fragments. It feels insecure - there are such vast conflicts there. It does not identify with any fragment, it does that only when it says "I like this, I do not like this". R: What is that "I"? A: It is my own past. J: "I" is the fragment. A: Buddha said it is the totality of all impressions, the complex of impressions, which has created an identity for itself but which has no true identity. R: There is consciousness and it has immense diversity. Krishnamurti: There are many fragments. How is it that one fragment becomes important, and the importance then goes on? (Pause) I see something. There is the whole field of fragmentation, which is consciousness. When does the "I" come into being? A: Is it not implied in the field of consciousness itself? The "I" which comes out of it is latent in it. Krishnamurti: There are all these fragments. Why does the mind not leave it alone? I see my consciousness is made up of various fragments. Why does it not leave it alone? What takes place? A: Identification. Krishnamurti: There is fragmentation, contradiction, there is conflict. That is all that takes place. Conflict takes place. Within that conflict is the desire to end conflict. A: Where there is conflict, if I am not identified, it does not affect me. At that point it does not become conflict. Krishnamurti: There is only conflict, opposition, contradiction in consciousness. There is this field of consciousness which we have described. Where there is opposition, contradiction, that is the field of conflict. There may be fragments. Each fragment being fragmentary will produce conflict, pain, pleasure, sorrow, agony, despair. That is the field. Then what takes place? A: I want to end it. Krishnamurti: Here this whole structure of consciousness is a battlefield. A: Why do you say so? Consciousness is full of irreconcilables. The moment I use the word "conflict" I have identified myself. Krishnamurti: This field of consciousness being divided is the source of conflict - India and Pakistan. I am a Hindu and you are a Muslim. The fact is, division inevitably brings conflict. A: That is so till you come to the point of naming; naming changes the quality. Krishnamurti: Look at the field of conflict. There is division. Where there is division there must inevitably be conflict - my family, your family, my God, your God. A: Does every divided fragment become aware? Krishnamurti: I see the fact that where there is division there must be conflict. In this consciousness where there are so many fragments, there must be conflict. In the phenomenal world he is a Hindu and I am a Muslim, and that is breeding war and hatred. This is a simple, straight phenomenon. We all talk of unity and keep on with our divisions. See, Sir, what takes place. In this field there is conflict, contradiction, fragmentation, division; when the conflict becomes acute then comes the "me" and "you". Otherwise I leave it alone. I float along in this conflict, but the moment conflict becomes acute - there is war, the Hindu-Muslim war, then I am a Hindu and you are a Muslim; identification takes place with something which I think is greater - with God, nation, idea. So long as the conflict is mild, I leave it alone. My point is, as long as there is no conflict, there is no"I". There is no "I" if there is no conflict. We are saying, therefore, conflict is the measure of the "I". There was no conflict yesterday, there is conflict today, and I hope there will not be conflict tomorrow. This movement is the "I". This is the essence of the "I". A: There are many other facets. Krishnamurti: Is the tree different from the branches? It may have ten hundred branches. The structure of consciousness is based on this conflict. We are not discussing how to end conflict. R: The traditional view is, division is the "I" and the separation from the conflict is also "I". A: As long as conflict is not observed, is hidden, "I" is not. R: Does this all begin here or does the arising of "I" go deeper? Krishnamurti: Is there a self, the "I", which is to be studied, or is the "I" a movement? A: You say the "I" begins as a movement in consciousness. Krishnamurti: No. There is an assumption that the "I" is static. Is it so? Is the "I" something to be learnt about? Or is the "I" a movement? Do I learn about something or do I learn in movement? The former is non-existent. It is fallacious, it is an invention. So the central fact is division. It is the source of all conflict. That conflict may take different shapes, levels, but it is the same. Conflict may be pleasant, I may like to be bullied, beaten by my wife, but it is a part of the structure of conflict. R: The nature of consciousness is conflict. Krishnamurti: It is not its nature. Consciousness is conflict. If I have no conflict, what happens to me? A: You say there is no "I" if there is no conflict. Does that mean the state of non-conflict is non-consciousness? R: The state of non-conflict is beyond conflict. The dimension in which we live is conflict. A: Sir, I said intensification of conflict includes naming. Krishnamurti: Naming is all included in this. The average man swims along till a conflict becomes acute. A: When conflict becomes acute, then naming starts. Krishnamurti: What is naming? Why do we need naming at all? Why do I say "my wife", why? Investigate it. A: At one level it is for communication, at another level it is subtle. Krishnamurti: Why do I say "She is my wife?" R: We want to prolong that "which is". A: Because I want a continuity in that. Krishnamurti: Sir, I say "my wife; why? A: Security, I want to hold on to her. Krishnamurti: Look, I say the word is not the thing. It never is. The word is only a means of communication. The fact is not the word. The fact that she is "my wife" is legally true, but what have I done when I say it? Why have I named it? To give continuity, to strengthen the image I have built? I possess her or she possesses me, for sex, for comfort and so on. All these strengthen the image about her. The image is there to establish her as mine. In the meanwhile, she is changing; is looking at another man. I do not acknowledge her freedom, and I do not acknowledge freedom at all, for myself. So what have I done when I say she is my wife? A: You are saying we do not like movement, we like everything static. Krishnamurti: I want to possess her, and that is why I need her. The brain cells establish a pattern of habit and refuse to leave habit. A: The entire consciousness is words, knowledge. I want to understand this, what you are saying. Krishnamurti: Knowledge is put together. Knowledge horizontally or vertically is put together. Knowledge is a process. Process implies time. Time implies thought. So through thought, through knowledge, through time, you are trying to find something which is out of time, which is not knowledge, which is not thought. You cannot. A: The whole process which we have described must also be non-verbal. Krishnamurti: The use of words is to communicate, to share together something common between two people. The common factor between human beings is despair, agony, sorrow. Can this be dispelled through time or can they be dispelled instantly?-Is this process to be ended with words or without words? The word is not the thing. You may describe the most marvellous food, but the description is not the food. A: Use of words demands a complete understanding of the field of knowledge. Krishnamurti: Words are necessary to communicate. Communication means sharing together common problems. The word is not the thing, but we have to use the word in order to understand the thing. Why do we make words so important? Words are meant to communicate. We have to be precise. A: In order that communication takes place there have to be words. Krishnamurti: When does communication take place - the sharing together of a common problem? A: It can take place non-verbally. Krishnamurti: To me communication means sharing together, thinking together, creating together, understanding. When are we together? Surely, not on the verbal level alone. We are together to share the problem, when we are tremendously vital, passionate, at the same level with the same intensity. When does this happen? It happens when you love something. When you love, it is finished. I kiss you, and I hold your hand, it is finished. When we lack that thing, we spin around with words. I am sure all the professionals miss that. So our problem is how to meet, to come together at the same time, at the same level, with the same intensity. That is the real question. We do that when there is sex which we call love. Otherwise you battle for yourself and I battle for myself. This is the problem. Can I, who am in sorrow, say, "Let us come together, let us talk it over", and not talk of what Nagarjuna, Sankara and others say. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 15 MADRAS 7TH JANUARY 1971 'THE NATURE OF EXPLORATION' Questioner A: All our lives we have been thinking in terms of cause and operating on cause. Our whole life is living with cause, finding out the cause and trying to control the cause. Even when we know the cause we cannot operate on it. This is also a part of our experience. Buddha discovered the cause of suffering and was liberated from suffering. You say cause is effect and effect is cause, and you also point out that in this cause and effect, time is inescapable. Even after listening to you, the impact of cause and the operating on cause has become an integral part of one's thinking. Can we go into it? Krishnamurti: What is the question? A: To explore the validity of the cause-effect sequence in respect of understanding. Krishnamurti: What does it mean - to explore? What is the state of the mind which explores rather than the fact of exploration? You say all action has a cause and that cause affects action and without understanding cause, do what you will with action, it will always be limited. So explore the cause, understand the cause and thereby bring about a mutation in action. I do not know the cause of my action. There may be obvious causes and other causes which are undiscoverable by the conscious mind. I can see the superficial causes for action; but these superficial causes have very deep roots in the recesses of one's own being. Now, can the conscious mind not only examine the superficial but also uncover the deeper? Can the conscious mind ever examine the deeper layers? And what is the state of the mind which explores? These three questions are important. Otherwise discovering the cause has no meaning. R: You explore when you do not know. Krishnamurti: First we asked what is the quality of the mind which is exploring? What is it exploring - the superficial or the causes which are so deeply hidden? So before I begin to explore, I must find out the state of the mind which explores. Now, what is the state of the mind, the quality of the mind that can explore? You say the Buddha said this, somebody said that, and so on, but what is the quality of the mind that has the capacity, that can explore? What is the `I' which explores - is it crooked, myopic, far-sighted? I must see the quality of the mind which looks at the carpet before I can see anything. Obviously, it must be a free mind. Have you a mind that is free from any conclusion? Otherwise you cannot explore. A: We have unconfessed postulates and we see and drop them. Krishnamurti: What you are doing is analysis. You are analysing step by step. When you analyse, what takes place? There is the analyser and the thing analysed. The analyser must be extremely clear-sighted to analyse, and if this analysis is in any way twisted, it is not worth anything. The analytical, intellectual process implies time. By the time you have enquired through analysis, through time, other factors enter which distort the cause. So the way of analysis is entirely wrong. So, there has to be a dropping of analysis. J: I am confused. Krishnamurti: Yes, it is a fact we are confused. We do not know what to do and we begin to analyse. A: The process of analysis is to us something concrete. You said while you operate on cause, some other factors enter. Does it mean the analysis of the problem becomes inconsequential? Krishnamurti: I think the whole process is wrong. I am concerned with action which is put together by a series of analytical examinations, analytical implications in which time is involved. By the time I find what I sought, I am exhausted, dead. It is difficult with the conscious mind to analyse, to examine the hidden layers. So I feel this whole intellectual process is wrong. I say this without any disrespect. A: We have only that tool - the intellect, as a means of examination. Is the intellect capable of examination except to collect, recollect, foresee, analyse? Intellect is capable of that. It is only a fragment. Therefore, the examination by a fragment can only bring about a fragmentary understanding. What do we do? R: I cannot do anything. Krishnamurti: You say the intellect is the only instrument one has which has the capacity to examine. Has it? Has the intellect the capacity to examine or does it examine only partially? I see the truth of that, not as a conclusion, not as an opinion, but the fact that the intellect being partial can examine only partially and therefore I no longer use the intellect. A: Such a mind can lapse into belief. You are saying the mind senses this. Krishnamurti: The drug-taking, the whole of that, is part of the same phenomenon. A: When the mind superficially turns away from analysis, it falls into other traps; so this has to be done rigorously with the intellect. Krishnamurti: Analysis is not the way. A: With what instrument do we explore? Our reason must corroborate what you say. J: You arrive there by some path which is not analytical. We see the logic of it. Krishnamurti: I tell you analysis is not the way of understanding. I give you the logical sequences using reason. That is only an explanation. Why don't you see the truth that analysis is not the way? A: When you say "I examine and this is so", it is pure logic. Krishnamurti: What you have done is to come to a conclusion through logic, but we are not talking of logic. Logic has led you to analysis. Somebody says your logic is false, because your logic is based on the fact of intellect, which is partial; therefore partial examination is no examination at all. A: It is partial analysis. Krishnamurti: It is like saying that I love my wife partially. A: In the effort to understand environment, nature, outer phenomenon man has developed certain instruments and here too we use the same instruments; but they are inadequate. Krishnamurti: They are not inadequate. They are not adequate. Analysis, process, involves time. As it involves time, it must be partial. The partial is brought about by the intellect, because the intellect is part of the whole structure. A: What is the instrument which explores when you put the question? When we put the question, we go back to the intellect. Krishnamurti: You began by saying that the intellect is the only instrument of examination. I say the intellect is partial and, therefore, your examination will be lopsided. Therefore your examination is invalid. A: It is very clear that the intellect is partial and cannot see, but it starts working through habit. Krishnamurti: "A" began by telling of cause-effect, effect-cause - those are processes of analysis. Analysis implies time and in such analysis there is the analyser and the analysed. The analyser must be free from past accretions, otherwise he cannot analyse. As he cannot be free of the past, analysis has no validity. Seeing that, I say it is finished. Therefore, I am looking for another way. A: This is the shortest summary - with logic, logic is wiped out. Krishnamurti: I see analysis is not the way. That frees the mind from a false process altogether. So the mind is much more vital. It is like a man walking with a heavy burden and the heavy burden is removed. A: But with us the burden comes back. Krishnamurti: The moment you perceive something to be true, how can it return? The moment you see that the snake is dangerous, you do not go back to the snake. A: Nagarjuna says "if you see what I am saying as a concept, you are finished." J: Is there some other way? A: You say something. The moment you say something, the instrument stops operating, because that instrument is not going to say anything more. Krishnamurti: But that instrument is very sharp, very clear; it abstains from any partial action taking place. A: It is constantly watching, it can operate. Krishnamurti: No, Sir, the whole analytical process is finished. A: When we have gone through this.... Krishnamurti: No, we are not exploring. I am showing you how to explore. What you have done is you have used intellect, the partial instrument and thought that was the complete answer. See how the mind has deceived itself, how it says "I have analysed all this", but it has not seen how partial it is, and therefore it is valueless. The intellect itself has become valueless as an instrument apart from other factors. I am asking myself if intellect is not the instrument of examination, then what takes place? A: One comes to believe in the need for support or for the help of some prop, when one comes to this point. Krishnamurti: The factor is, intellect is an incomplete instrument and cannot understand a total factor, a total movement. Then what is examination? If the intellect cannot explore, what is the instrument that can explore? What do Sankara, Nagarjuna, Buddha say about this? Find out. Do any of them deny the intellect? A: They say explore with the help of the terra firma. Krishnamurti: That is with partial vitality, energy, explore the whole energy. How can it? Why have they said this? R: The Vedantic concept is that with the intellect you cannot see, but with the Self or the atman, which is of the very nature of perception, you can see. A: As our minds have been heavily conditioned, when we get a support, we hold on. Krishnamurti: What we want to find out is, analysis and the way of the intellect is not exploration at all. It is like saying "I go partly into the tunnel." What is the quality of the mind if the intellect is not the instrument"? A: When the intellect is totally put aside, then the mind has nothing of the past in it. Krishnamurti: Who is it that has to put it aside? Then you are back again into the dualistic principle. A: We see the intellect is partial. Krishnamurti: Therefore, we are asking: What is the quality of the mind that can explore - mind being not only the intellect but the brain cells, the biological, the physical, the nerves, the whole thing, the total, the complete. What is the quality of the mind that can explore? I see that any partial movement is incomplete and, therefore, does not get anywhere. I see that partial seeing is no seeing at all, and therefore I am finished with it. It is completely over. The mind then asks what the nature of perception is that is total. And it is only such a total perception that can examine. And it may not need to examine at all, because that which has to be examined is of the partial field - division, analysis, exploration. I am asking what total perception is, what is the quality of total perception? A.: Movement of any kind cannot be total perception. Krishnamurti: What is total perception? R: It seems as if there is no instrument because the instrument belongs to something. Krishnamurti: What is the difficulty? When you look out of the window and see these bushes, how do you look at them? You are usually thinking about something and at the same time looking. I say you have to look, that is all. What is the difficulty? We never look. If I look at a picture, I look. I do not say this painter is so and so, this painter is better than somebody else. I have no measure. I do not verbalize. We said just now partial looking is no looking at all, therefore, the mind has finished with the partial, so when I do look, I look. R: The element of habit is so strong. Krishnamurti: Therefore, the mind which is caught in habit cannot explore. So we have to examine the mind which is caught in habit and not exploration. We have to understand habit. Forget exploration, causation, analysis. Forget all that. Can the mind understand habit? Let us tackle that. A: Whatever you say with the intellect is partial. Krishnamurti: See the truth of it, not the 1ogic of it. You can supply the logic later. What you thought was the door is not the door. You will not move towards that once you see it, but you do not see it. R: What is the difference between perception and recognition? For us perception is only there in the form of recognition. Krishnamurti: You recognize through association. Recognition is part of the habit of association. So I am saying you cannot examine, explore with a mind which is used to habit. Therefore, find out the mechanism of habit. Do not find out how to examine, but find out what is habit. A: Habits are grooves. Krishnamurti: How have habits been formed? That is the door. I am going through that door, now why does the mind fall into habit? What is habit? How is it that the mind falls into habit? I am going to analyse it. We use analysis which is partial, which is not total understanding. Knowing that it is valueless, we still continue - why does the mind fall into habit? Is it because it is the easiest way to function? To get up at six, to go to bed at seven. There is no friction; I do not have to think about it. A: I look at a tree. I do not have to think about it. And yet the mind says it is a tree. Krishnamurti: It is a habit. Why does the mind fall into habit? It is the easiest way to live; it is easy to live mechanically. Sexually and in every other way it is easy to live that way. I can live life without effort, change, because in that I find complete security. In habit there is no examination, searching, asking. R: I live within the field of habit. Krishnamurti: So habit can only function within a very small field. Like a professor who is marvellous but functions in a very small field; like a monk who operates within a very small cell. The mind wanting safety, security, no change, lives in patterns. That is a partial examination. But it does not free the mind from patterns. So what shall I do? A: Having seen this, knowing that partial understanding is no understanding, how does the mind free itself totally from habit? Krishnamurti: I am going to show you. A: We have examined habit, but the mind does not get out of it. Krishnamurti: You will never go back to the analysis of habit. You are no longer going to examine the causes of habit. So the mind is free of the burden of analysis which is part of habit. So you have got rid of it. R: Yes, yes - Krishnamurti: No. It must go. Not merely verbally. Habit is not only symptomatic, but psychosomatic. When we have examined habit as we have done, it is over. A: We are not free of habit. Krishnamurti: Because you are still insisting the door is there. We started out saying "I know". There is a certain sense of arrogance. You do not say "I want to find out." Then what is total perception when the mind is free from habit? Habit implies conclusions, formulas, ideas, principles. All these are habits. Habit is the essence of the observer. R: It is all that we know of the "I". Krishnamurti: To find this out, I go to a book. That is where the damage is done, the damage which the other people have established, the Sankaras, the Buddhas and all the others. I prefer this one, I prefer the other one, and so on. I will not let go because that is my vanity. I argue. You know the cartoon which says "My guru has more enlightenment than yours". That is about all. Therefore, Sir, humility is necessary. I know absolutely nothing and I am not going to repeat a word which I have myself not found. I really do not want to know. I know this is not the way. I do not want to know anything more. That is all. The door which I thought was real is not the door. What happens later? I do not move in that direction, I will find out. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 16 MADRAS 8TH JANUARY 1971 'ORDER AND IDEATION' Questioner A: The greatest hindrance to perception is idea. What is the difference between fact and the idea about a fact? Krishnamurti: How do the professionals regard perception, the seeing, the fact? R: In Vedanta, it is said that consciousness acts through the sense organs. It sees an object. Consciousness takes the form of the object. It is like water taking the shape of the vessel. That is perception. Krishnamurti: What is perception, the seeing, to you? You see the chest of drawers; you have the image of the chest of drawers, therefore, recognize it as the chest of drawers. When you see that piece of furniture, do you have the image first or do you see first, have the image and then recognize? R: Instantaneously the image arises, then we call it a chest of drawers. A: There is seeing, and the immediate naming. Krishnamurti: So I do not have the image first. There is seeing, association, recognition, naming. I do not start with the naming, the image. That is fairly easy. I see you this morning. I saw you yesterday and, therefore, there is an image of you. So that image is you. Is there a difference between the physical object of perception and the mental image of perception? A: There is a difference between the two. One is purely an image of a shape as in the case of an object, the other is an image created by reactions, which are not merely form and shape. Krishnamurti: Take a simple thing. You see a snake. The brain cells are conditioned to snakes; they know that snakes are dangerous. The brain is conditioned from childhood to the danger of a snake and so it reacts. The child, not knowing the danger, may not react, but the mother comes along and tells it. The chest of drawers, the picture, the naming of it, has formed a picture in the brain cells. So I say it is a chest of drawers. The brain cells have been conditioned by a particular environment to call it a chest of drawers. A: The question is, therefore, before seeing the fact, the idea about the fact arises which may not necessarily be factual. Krishnamurti: Are you saying that there is violence, one feels angry, then the naming of the feeling and the naming is to strengthen the past? A: I meet my brother. He has quarrelled with me and I am on my guard when I meet him next. So I am unable to see him at all. I am only seeing the idea. R: The brain cells carry the image of the hurt. Krishnamurti: There is violence, anger. At the moment of anger, there is no naming. A second later, I call it anger. The naming of that feeling as anger is to record that fact and strengthen the past, the memory, which has recognized that feeling as anger. R: This is something which is different from naming. Krishnamurti: We are coming to that. There is the chest of drawers, there is the person, then all the emotional reactions. One is angry; at the moment of anger there is no naming, a second later there is naming. Why do we name? Why do we say "I am angry"? Why is there the need to put it into words? Or is it merely habit; an instant response? A: A defence mechanism starts. The recognition itself is creating a situation which says "I do not want to get into conflict." Krishnamurti: That is one part of it - naming as a process of self-defence. Why does one name a particular reaction? R: Otherwise, one would not feel that one was existing. Krishnamurti: Why do we name it, why do I name? You have hurt me and I name it and form a certain self-defence. A: If I did not name, there would not be continuity. Krishnamurti: Why does the mind give it a continuity? R: To feel that it exists. Krishnamurti: What exists - feeling, anger? Why has naming become so important? I name my house, my wife, my child. Naming strengthens the me. If I did not name, what would happen? Anger would be over. Why should there be continuity? Why does the brain, the mind, operate in continuity? Why is there this verbalization all the time? A: Verbalization establishes that there is some residue. Krishnamurti: Why do we do this? It may be a habit, a form of giving continuity to a sense of anger and the not ending of it. All that indicates that the mind needs occupation. Now, why is the mind demanding to be occupied with sex, God, with money? Why? A: The mind gets stimulated all the time. If there were no stimulus, the mind would fall asleep. Krishnamurti: Is it so? Is this very occupation not putting the mind to sleep? A: Why does the mind slacken when it is not occupied? Krishnamurti: On the contrary, the moment we begin to enquire why there is this necessity for any kind of occupation, the mind is already alive. A: Mere absence of occupation is not enough. Krishnamurti: Of course, there are many who get duller and duller every day without any occupation. But the question is why does your mind want to be occupied? Will it go to sleep if it is not? Or is it fear of emptiness that makes the mind want to be occupied? I am enquiring. In enquiry the mind will not go to sleep. It is only the mind that is not occupied which can enquire. So most of us fall into habits which prevent looking. I am a Hindu and for the rest of my life I am a Hindu. You are a Muslim and for the rest of your life you are a Muslim. But if I ask myself why I am a Hindu, I open the door to enquiry. So naming may be part of this fear of not knowing what to do. A: Fear of leaving the shore of the known. Krishnamurti: That is all. So, can the mind, the brain cells, can they observe the reaction called anger, not name it and so be finished with it? If it does that, there is no carrying over. When next time the reaction arises, which I have named as fear, it has quite a different meaning, a different quality. A: Our difficulty is that we meet anger with idea. Krishnamurti: Why have we ideas, formulas? Let us begin again - we know anger, the naming, the conditioned response. Now, we see naming is a factor which gives continuity to anger. I see the truth that by naming we give continuity. So I do not name. As I see the danger of the snake and do not touch it, I do not touch this also. I see that the naming of the fact gives continuity to something which I have called anger and so naming gives duration. So naming is finished. Therefore, anger undergoes a change. R: It seems as if during the moment when we are capable of observing anger, anger disappears, and anger exists in the moment when we are not capable of observing. Krishnamurti: No. You call me a fool. I get angry. I do not like your calling me a fool. I see that. I see the falsity of naming. So where is the response? This instantly happens. Instead of naming, this happens and therefore, there is no hurt at all. "A"'s question is why do we have formulas at all. We have ideas first and then perception, action. A: Instead of one act of perception we have our deep conditioning. All these together, the cultural, the sociological, the anthropological - are a ready frame of reference which give us a sense of security. Krishnamurti: Why do you do this, Sir? R: We have been brought up that way. Krishnamurti: That is not good enough. Do you not know why we do this? We know economically and sociologically it is beneficial. Tribalism still persists. It is tremendously important. Step out of the formulas, patterns of Hinduism, Islam, you will then see what happens. Personally, I have no formula. Why do you have it? Find out. Formulations, which are patterns, give you safe conduct in action. We lay down the line according to which we act and in that there is safety. So fear of insecurity must be one of the reasons why we have formulas, ideas. The mind wants to be certain. The brain cells function perfectly only when there is complete security. I do not know if you have noticed it in yourself. The brain cells function only when there is perfect order. And there is perfect order in a formula. A: You mean physiologically, we have an inbuilt desire for order. Krishnamurti: Even physiologically, if I do not have a certain type of order, the organism rebels. Order is absolutely necessary, essential. Formulas are the safest way to have order. Have you not noticed that before you go to sleep, the brain cells establish order? "I should not have done this, I should not have said this." And when going to sleep, unless you establish order, it creates its own order. These are all facts. The brain cells demand order which is security. And formulas are one of the safest ways of conducting one's life without disorder. It is much safer to follow a guru. Formulas are necessary for a mind that wants order, that hopes to find order. What happens? As it hopes to find order in tribalism - the Brahmin tribe, the Hindu tribe, the national tribe -and if you step out of that, there is danger. So to call oneself an Indian is to be safe. To belong to Jehovah, is to be treated as one belonging to that group. As long as I belong to some sect, some guru, I am safe. Now what happens when you have a formula? You have your formulas and I have my formulas. You have your security, and I who have no time, accept it. What happens to me when I accept your formula? Do you not know what happens when I am a Hindu? There is division, therefore insecurity. The brain cells demand order, because they want to have harmony. They use formulas as a means to order. The brain cells demand order, demand security, otherwise they cannot function properly. Seeking order through formula creates division, disorder. Once I see the real danger, then what happens? Then I do not seek safety in formula, then I enquire whether there is safety in any other direction, whether there is such a thing as safety. A: But the brain needs safety. Krishnamurti: The brain must have order. A: Order is not safety. Krishnamurti: Order is safety, order is harmony, but the very search for order ends in disorder. So, seeing this, I drop all formulas. I am no longer a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim. Drop all this. Dropping is intelligence. In the very dropping the mind has become very intelligent. Intelligence is order. I do not know if you see this. In enlightenment there is order. Therefore, the brain can function in perfect condition. Then relationship has quite a different meaning. The brain cells are seeking order in disorder. They do not see the nature of disorder. They do not understand what is disorder. It is when the brain cells reject tribalism, formulas, that in the very rejection is inte1ligence, which is order. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 17 MADRAS 11TH JANUARY 1971 'OBJECT, KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTION' Questioner A: I think we should go into the question of perception of beauty. You said the other day that the tradition had ignored the field of beauty. We need to explore into this. Krishnamurti: So what is the question? What is beauty? You mean perception and then beauty? Surely it is not perception and beauty, but perception. What would be the traditional approach to this? R: One source of tradition maintains that beauty is the sense of happiness which comes when there is the ending of desire or thirst for experience. Krishnamurti: Is this a theory or a reality? R: The writer expressed what he felt; after all, he wrote a long time ago and only fragments of his writings remain. A: Kalidasa says that the experience of beauty is new every moment. R: Both in India and Greece there was this feeling that ultimate perceptions are perceptions of beauty, truth and goodness. Krishnamurti: Are we discussing beauty or perception? We will discuss perception. What is the traditional approach to perception? R: They talk about it at length and there are many contradictory viewpoints. A: Perception is 'pratyaksham', perception is seeing the self-nature of things, the essential quality of things. Krishnamurti: Seeing the essence of something is perception, is that it? I am talking not of what you see but the act of seeing. Do they talk about the act of seeing and not what is seen? R: They talk of what is valid knowledge and what is not valid knowledge. Krishnamurti: Seeing is one thing and seeing something is another. Which is it they are talking about? Seeing per se or seeing something, which is it? A: I think seeing. They are concerned with the constant danger of seeing wrongly. Krishnamurti: No. We are not talking of seeing rightly or wrongly, but what is perception; not what you see - the chair, the rope, the snake, A: Is there a difference between seeing and knowing? Krishnamurti: Seeing, knowing and seeing the object; seeing through knowledge the object, the image, the symbol; and seeing -these are entirely different. What do they say about seeing? R: They do not discuss it this way. Krishnamurti: Like hunger is in itself: it is not related to food. You have food because you are hungry, but the nature of hunger is hunger. What is seeing, perceiving to you? Not seeing the object, but the quality of the mind that perceives? Seeing the object with the eyes is one thing, seeing with knowledge is another. I am talking about seeing in itself. Is there a seeing without knowledge, without the object? I see that cupboard. Seeing that is with word and knowledge, the word being associated with the cupboard. Is there a seeing without the image, without the object? Seeing the object through knowledge, through image, symbol, the word, the intellect; and seeing without knowledge and image, a seeing without object. A: What is seeing without object? One can see without knowledge. As you say, there is a cupboard without the image but still we know it is a cupboard, which means it is an object. Krishnamurti: There is the little bush, and whether I see it or not, it will grow into a tree. It is independent of my seeing. I can call it mango and, therefore, associate it with the species mango, and the mango will grow even if I do not see it. R: The existence of it has nothing to do with seeing...... A: The object exists without our seeing, but such a perception may exist without the object. Krishnamurti: That tree continues to exist. A: In the Buddhist meditation they have referred to sky when they ta1k about perception without object. The sky is an object and yet not an object. Krishnamurti: The dictionary meaning of the word "perception" is to become aware of, to apprehend. That is, you see the cupboard, you have a preconception of it; that is not perception. Is there seeing without preconception? Only the mind that has no conclusion, such a mind can see. The other cannot. If I have previous knowledge of that cupboard, the mind identifies it as cupboard. To look at that cupboard without the previous accumulation of prejudices or hurts, is to look. If I have previous hurts, memories, pain, pleasure, displeasure, I have not looked. Is there a looking without object, without the knowledge of the object? Of course, there is. Can you look at that tree, without the knowledge of the bush, the image, the symbol, and all the rest of it? Just look. Someone came to see me. He was a movie director. He had taken LSD, and they had tape recorded it. He was sitting back in a chair and waited for the effect. Nothing happened. He waited and moved his position a little. Immediately the space between him and the object disappeared. The observer before had space between himself and the thing he observed, which happened to be a flower. The moment space disappeared, it was not the flower, it was something extraordinary. That was an effect of the drug. But here it is different. The space between the observer and observed is not; the observer is the holder of the knowledge and it is knowledge that recognizes the cupboard. It is the observer who sees the cupboard. First see what happens. The observer with his knowledge recognizes the cupboard. Recognition implies previous knowledge. So the observer is knowledge as the past. Now we are asking, is there perception without the observer, that is knowledge, which is the past? Perception for itself, not for or about something. R: If the knowledge of the past is not there, the observer is not there. If the observer is not there, knowledge of the past is not there. Krishnamurti: Therefore, it is possib1e to see without the observer. I am saying "possible". The possibility becomes a theory, therefore we should not deal with theories but see that the observer is the residue of the past. So the observer cannot possibly see. He can see only through the screen of the past. There fore, his seeing is partial. If there is to be perception, the observer must not be there. Is that possible? R: What happens to an artist? He perceives obviously with a perception which is not the ordinary perception which we have. Krishnamurti: Now wait a minute. Is perception intellectual? R: No, the intellect is the past. Krishnamurti: Therefore, it is not the seeing of an artist or the non-artist, but the seeing without the past. That is really the problem. The artist may see for a moment without the past but he translates it. R.: It is a momentary perception. Krishnamurti: Is there an act of perception, without the observer? Act means immediate action, not a continuous action? And the word itself, "act", means doing, not having done or will do. So, perception is an action, not in terms of knowledge; not the action of the actor with his knowledge. So the professionals are not concerned with action, are they? They are concerned with knowledge and action. Is that right? R: I do not know. There are some texts in which they have said that the perception of beauty is that moment when time, name, form and space do not exist. Krishnamurti: We are not talking of beauty. Perception implies action. I know what action is when the observer acts. The observer, having learnt a particular language or technology, having acquired knowledge, acts. A: Does perception mean direct contact between organ and object, between the sense-organ and object? R: Traditionalists talk about mediate and immediate perception. Mediate perception is through the instrument, through a medium, whereas immediate perception does not require the sense-organ with which to see. Perhaps immediate perception is nearer to what you are talking about. Krishnamurti: You see the perception of knowledge and action, is action from the past. That is one thing. Perception, action is another. A: Perception itself is action, so there is no time. Krishnamurti: The time interval comes to an end between action and knowledge, knowledge as the observer. That knowledge and action is time-binding and the other is not. So this is clear. Then what is beauty in relation to perception? R: It is the ending of the desire for experience. This is what the traditionalists. Krishnamurti: The seeing of goodness, beauty, love, truth, put all that aside. Now what is beauty? What is necessary for the perceiving of beauty? R: It is not mere perception, because perception can be of everything, even of that which is not beautiful. Krishnamurti: Do not bring in the ugly. Perception is acting, perceiving is acting - leave that. We are talking of beauty. You have said what the professionals have said. Now, what is beauty? Let us forget what others have said. I want to find out what is beauty. We say that building is beautiful, that poem is beautiful, that woman is beautiful. The feeling of a certain quality is beauty -the expression becoming the means of recognition of beauty. I see a building, and say how marvellous. So through the object we recognize beauty. There are various expressions of beauty. Through the object we say that is beautiful. Through the object, we recognize what beauty is. Now put that aside. Beauty is not expression. Beauty is not the object. What is beauty then? Is it in the beholder? The beholder is the observer. The observer with his past knowledge recognizes something to be beautiful, because his culture has told him it is beautiful, his culture has conditioned him. A: The woman who gives pleasure is beautiful, and when she does not give pleasure, she is no longer beautiful. Krishnamurti: I discard expression, I discard the object created and I discard the perceiver seeing beauty in the object. I discard all these. Then what is the quality of the mind that has discarded them? I have discarded everything that man has said about beauty because I see it is not in anything that has been said. What has happened to the mind which has discarded thought, thought which has created the object? What is the quality of the mind which has discarded all the structures put together by man who has said this is beautiful, this is not beautiful: Obviously the mind is very sensitive, because it was carrying a burden before and now it is lighter. Therefore, it is sensitive, alert, awake. R: You said you have discarded the object and the thought which has created the object. A: Thought is knowledge. Krishnamurti: Thought is knowledge, which has accumulated through knowledge, through culture which says beauty is this. Thought is the response of memory which has created the object. I have discarded all that, the idea of beauty as truth, goodness, love. Perception of that is action and the action is the putting away, not "I am putting away", but the putting away. So the mind is now free. Freedom implies not freedom from something, but freedom. It is highly sensitive. Then what takes place? The mind is free, highly sensitive, is no longer burdened by the past; which means in that mind there is no observer at all; which means there is no "me" observing, because the "me" observing is a very, very limited affair. The "me", the past, is the observer, the "me" is the past. See what we have done. There is object, knowledge and perception; through knowledge we recognize the object; and we are asking the question, is there perception without knowledge, without the observer? So we discard the two: object and knowledge. In perceiving there is the action of discarding. Again we ask what is beauty? Beauty is generally associated with object; the object created by thought, feeling, thinking. And we discard that. Then I ask myself what is the quality of the mind that has discarded. It is really free. Freedom implies a mind that is highly sensitive. In the action of discarding, it has brought about its own sensitivity, which means there is no centre in that activity. Therefore, it is a sensitivity without time, without a centre as the observer, which means a state of mind that is intensely passionate. R: When the object and the knowledge of the object are gone, there is no focus. Krishnamurti: Do not use the word focus. The mind discarding what "it is not", is free. The act of perceiving what "it is not" has released the mind and the mind is free. It is not free from it, it is not free from the object, but it is free. A: The act of perceiving and discarding of that knowledge are instantaneous and simultaneous. Krishnamurti: That is freedom. The act of perceiving has brought about freedom, not from something. When the mind is sensitive, there is no centre, there is no "me" in it, there is the total abandonment of the self as the observer. Then the mind is full of energy because it is no longer caught in the division of sorrow, pain and pleasure. It is intensely passionate and it is such a mind that sees what is beautiful. I see something: which is, suffering is a partial activity of energy. It is a fragmentary energy. Energy is pleasure, energy is pain; to go to the office, to learn is energy. Human beings have divided this energy into fragments. Everything is a part, is a fragment of the various other fragments of energy. When there is no activity of the fragment, there is complete focussing of all energy. I hate somebody and I love somebody. Both are energy -fragmentary energy acting in opposite directions - which breed conflict. Suffering is a form of energy; a fragment which we call suffering. So all our ways of 1iving are fragmented. Each is fighting the other. If there is a harmonious whole, that energy is passion. So that energy is this, is the mind that is free, sensitive, in which the "me" as the past is completely dissolved and, therefore, such a mind is full of energy and passion, and therefore that is beauty. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 18 MADRAS 14TH JANUARY 1971 'ENERGY AND FRAGMENTATION' Questioner A: After listening to yesterday's talk, I wonder what is meant by energy? We only know fragmentary energy. Krishnamurti: Would you put it differently? Would you say that all energy is fragmented? A: If I hear your talk and I look at all the fields of my activity, I seem to know nothing but fragmentary energy. Krishnamurti: That is energy which is fragmented. A: In observation I see that I know only fragmented energy and I do not know what you are talking about. Krishnamurti: There is physical energy, intellectual energy, emotional energy, there is the energy of anger, of greed; they are all various forms of energy, like human energy and cosmic energy. They are all divided, but they are energy. A: I listen to you, but I never seem to come upon what you say. Krishnamurti: Traditionally it has been said sexual energy must be controlled. A: Traditionalists hold that unless all dissipations of energy are halted, one will never know the "other". It does not seem to be that way. Between suppression and the negation you speak about, there is no relationship. The truth is I only know fragmented energy. Krishnamurti: It may be the traditional approach that holds us to a particular pattern, to that energy which is fragmentary. A: It may be because every form of energy we know is destructive. Our intellectual energy creates systems and patterns; our emotional energy is reaction against individuals. Krishnamurti: Yesterday did the speaker not say that all energy springs from one source of energy? A: What you are saying comes from a different source. And you say that the function of the intellect is to see that intellect itself is fragmentary and, therefore, it is inadequate. When the intellect sees its inadequacy, that is the highest truth the intellect can perceive. It is only when you come to this that there is the "other". All that we seem to know is the fragmentary, and you speak of something else. Krishnamurti: Then what will you do? How do you stop the fragmentation of energy? A: I would not say how, because that action itself is a becoming process. Krishnamurti: Then what will you do? How do the professionals, the traditionalists, approach this problem - the problem of various forms of energy contradicting each other and one form of energy assuming the dictatorship of the rest, trying to control, to suppress? Does this happen by introducing the atman? A: It is shunyata, voidness. Having eliminated, this is a void. In the void is everything. Did you come to this spontaneously? Krishnamurti: What do the professionals say? A: Sankara says: "Acquire learning and the prestige that goes with it, so what? Acquire wealth and the power that goes with it, so what? Visit many countries, feed and entertain your friends, help the poor and the sick, bathe in the Ganga, give alms in vast quantities, repeat mantras by the million, etc., so what? All these are of no avail unless the Self is realized." And Sankara ends by saying that only he who discovers that all these forms of prestigious action are bereft of significance for self-knowledge, he alone is capable of self-realization. Krishnamurti: I cannot imagine that this question has not been tackled by the professionals. A: They call it chitta and chaitanya. The common "root" is "chit". N: Chit is consciousness. A: Do they go into the fragmentary nature of the mind or do they say that the mind's activities are unreal? Krishnamurti: So, what is the question, what is it that we are trying to discuss, explore? A: We only know the various fragmented expressions of energy. Is it possible to see the entire field? Or is it a wrong question? Krishnamurti: If one fragment or many fragments exist, who is the entity that is going to observe the totality of energy? Are our minds so conditioned that we cannot break ourselves from the conditioning? A: We are so conditioned. R: The other day at the discussion you said that someone slaps me. I feel hurt, etc., but if attention is given at that moment, then I do not feel hurt. There is no recording of it. But the fact is, reaction is instantaneous. I react to that hurt instantaneously. How is it possible to give attention at that moment? Krishnamurti: What is the problem? I have been seeing only this fragment (pointing to a portion of the carpet) and you say this fragment would not exist if there was no total carpet. There is this little bit of carpet which is part of this whole carpet. I am saying in this fragment there are many other fragments. My whole life has been spent in observing the fragment. You come along and say this is part of the whole, this would not exist if the other did not exist. But I cannot take my eyes off this fragment. I agree that this can only exist because of the whole carpet but I have never, never looked at the whole carpet. I have never moved away from this. This fragment exists because of the whole carpet. My attention has been fixed on this little bit of carpet. And I do not know how to remove my eyes and look at the whole carpet. If I can do that, there is no contradiction. If I can remove my eyes and look at the whole carpet, I see there is no contradiction, no duality. But if I say I must suppress the fragment in order to see the whole, there is duality. R: It is intellectually clear. Krishnamurti: It is a very good exercise. Then what do you do? The intellect is also a part. It is one of the fragments within the carpet. I am still not looking at the carpet. If intellect sees, perception is back to the fragment. First, intellectually I have to understand what is being said. This is part of the whole. And as long as perception is focused on the fragment, there is no perception of the whole carpet. You say I understand this intellectually. So, you have already moved away. You also see that intellect is a fragment. You are looking at the whole with different parts. R: What is looking is also a fragment. Krishnamurti: Therefore, deny the fragment. (Pause) You see, we are used to reading in straight lines. Therefore, we are always thinking in straight lines. If we were used to reading, like the Chinese, vertically, then our whole thinking would be vertical. So thinking itself is a linear thinking. All that is a form of fragmentation. So, what is the question? Form your question. (Pause) Is there a perception which is not linear nor vertical, and, therefore, non-fragmentary? How do you see something totally? What is the capacity of perception that sees the whole structure of human life, the whole field, at a glance? I think I see something. Look, there is the whole field of life, the physical, the emotional, the intellectual, the psychosomatic existence; and in that there are various contradictions - sorrows, anxieties, guilts, ambitions, humility, pride, sex, non-sex, God, no-God, communism - this is the whole fie1d of existence. Now, how does the mind see the whole of this field? If it does not see the whole field, but merely tackles one problem, it will create more mischief. A: It comes to this, this whole process, the seventy-five thousand years of the history of man, the entire past produces this and dies. This is "what is", there is no going back. But even this is arrived at without any movement. Krishnamurti: First listen. There is this whole field of existence, all that we have described. There are other factors also. Now, how do I look at this whole map with all the little bridges, hamlets, towns, all that at one glance? I cannot go up in an aeroplane. The atman is the aeroplane invented by thought. You come and tell me, look, if you try to answer the whole of existence through one of the fragments, you will only create more confusion. Therefore you say, the whole of it. You say that and disappear. It is my job to find out. How do I set about it? I do not know what this total perception is. I see the beauty, logic, the sanity of it. I say, how am I to proceed? A: There is very great intensity, passion in this because I also feel this is the precipice. There is no sluggishness left. It is all there at this moment. Krishnamurti: You have this problem, this baby left in your lap. What are you going to do? You must answer. What is it that prevents total perception? A: I see intellectually that I cannot see the whole of it. Krishnamurti: Leave it there. What is it that prevents total perception of this vast complex, existence? Have you an answer? I have got it. Find out. (Pause) When I enter the room, one object catches my eye. The lovely bedspread, and I casually look at other things. I say that is rather beautiful, the colouring, the design and it gives great pleasure. So, what has happened? There is this whole field of existence. The eye catches the one thing. What is it that prevents the seeing of other things; that which makes other things shadowy, distant? Just listen. R: The observer. Krishnamurti: Go slow. That is beautiful but my observation of the other is still vague. This is clear. It watches this very clearly. The other is rather cloudy. Now, in this vast field of existence, I catch one thing and the rest recedes, becomes very vague. Why is it that one thing becomes important? Or why has perception focused on that? Why is the eye, why is perception attracted to this only? R: It is pleasant. Krishnamurti: Which means what? The element of pleasure. There is this whole field and one thing only attracts me. So what happens? I translate the whole of the field of existence into pleasure. I enter this room, I look at the bedspread and I say I like it and there it is. And there is this vast existence and in it, the one thing that attracts me is the maintenance of pleasure at any price. A: For most people life is painful. Krishnamurti: It is painful because we are thinking in terms of pleasure. Pleasure is the principle, is the factor which is preventing me from seeing the whole. A: I was investigating this morning. Sankara says fear of pain is the thorn in the bush. K: I see this whole field of life only in terms of pursuing pleasure. I see the whole of this, with all the complexities, in terms of pleasure or wanting pleasure. Does that prevent total perception? R: It is very complex. Here is the fragment which is part of the whole. Then our attention is on this fragment. What is giving attention is a fragment. What is wanting pleasure out of this is a fragment. Krishnamurti: We have said all this. R: So, pleasure is a fragment. Krishnamurti: No, no. I want pleasure throughout life. There is no other thing I want. Money, sex, position, prestige, god, virtue, ideas - this is understood - pleasure through everything. And I do not see pleasure is the thorn. I do not see that. So, in perception there is one guiding factor, and if that is the guiding factor, how can I see the whole field which pleasure has brought about? I want pleasure; therefore, I create a society which will give me pleasure. My drive is pleasure. And that society has its morality, and that morality is always based on the principle of pleasure. How can the mind see the whole of the field when there is only the search for pleasure? What is the factor of pleasure? It must always be personal - it must be mine, not yours. I will sacrifice my pleasure for the greater pleasure in collective work, but it is still pleasure. Pleasure is always personal. So, look what I have done, life then becomes a movement of pleasure. A: The validity of everything is pleasure. Krishnamurti: So, as long as the mind is pursuing pleasure as the "me", how can I see this whole thing? I must understand pleasure, not suppress it, not deny it. So, it is important to see the whole, not the particular and the particular must always exist when there is the pursuit of pleasure. And there must be understanding of pleasure, not the cutting it off by the intellect. A: It cannot be cut off. Krishnamurti: What man has done, what religions have taught is to cut off with the intellect. What tortures the saints go through, the burning, the mutilating. That is the traditional way. So, I see the central factor that when one thing becomes all-important, then I do not see the whole of life. Why is there this pursuit of pleasure? A: The pleasure principle is too strong. Krishnamurti: What do the professionals say about this pursuit of pleasure? A: They say that every pleasure leads to pain; man contemplates pain but it still leads to fragmentation. To concentrate on pain instead of pleasure is the same thing. Krishnamurti: Why has man pursued pleasure at any cost? A: Biological needs are so deeply ingrained in us. Krishnamurti: There is nothing wrong in that - we need good, clean food. What is wrong with that? A clean floor to sleep on, what is wrong? But see what happens - I must have it tomorrow. That means today's biological need has been made into tomorrow's pleasure; which is, thought has taken over. So thinking is the factor one has to understand, not pleasure. A: We have come to see that pleasure is transferred in thought. Krishnamurti: Now you have got it. So, before you do anything with pleasure, understand thinking. Before you strengthen pleasure, before you nourish it, first find out what is thinking. A: The movement of thought as pleasure has to be understood. Krishnamurti: No, it is thought itself which sustains this. What shall I do with thinking? How do I stop thinking about sex or food, how? A: We started with energy. At this point it becomes fragmented. Krishnamurti: Thought in essence is the maker of fragments. Tradition has always talked of the suppression of thought. Act and forget it completely and do not carry it over. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 19 MADRAS 16TH JANUARY 1971 'FREEDOM AND THE FIELD' Questioner A: You were saying the brain cells themselves are conditioned by the past, the biological and historical past, and you said the structure of the brain cells could change. Could we go into that? The brain cells seem to have an activity of their own? Krishnamurti: I was going to ask this morning whether the professionals have ever talked of the brain cells. R: The Indian philosophers do not mention the brain cells. Krishnamurti: Why? Is it because when they speak of the mind, they include the brain cells? A: They say the mind is matter. They do not go further. Krishnamurti: Everything is recorded in the brain cells. Every incident, every impression is imprinted in the brain; one can observe the vast number of impressions in oneself. You are asking how it is possible to go beyond, to make the brain cells quiet? A: Normally you would think that the brain would be an instrument of the intellect. Krishnamurti: But is not the intellect the instrument of the brain rather than the other way? A: Is it? Krishnamurti: Let us investigate it. The capacity to reason, to compare, to weigh, to judge, to understand, to investigate, to rationalize and to act is all part of memory. The intellect formulates ideas and from that there is action. A: The materialistic view is that thought is to the brain what bile is to the liver and that the phenomenal manifestation is the result of the movement of the non-phenomenal. What the traditionalists say is that at death there is the complete cessation of the brain, but the complete cessation of the brain leaves, in a subtle way, a residue. Krishnamurti: A thought? A: The residue exists independently of the brain which has become dead. Therefore, it creates another focus. Out of its activity, something new emerges. Krishnamurti: The brain cells are the repository of memory. The reaction of memory is thought. Thought can be independent of memory. It is like throwing a stone which is independent of the hand which throws it. Whether that thought incarnates is another matter. A: I have a mug full of water; I pour the water into the bucket and then I take out the water again. It is not the same water I threw in. It is much more than what I put in. Krishnamurti: This is fairly simple. What are you trying to say? R: The brain cells and their activity are not the ultimate source of all this false movement. A: You bring us to action. Now, we are all the time involved in activity. In discussing with you, we see activity leads to mischief. To see this is the beginning of action. Are we going to take it at the level of the brain cells or at the level of the residue; the residue which triggers the brain activity? R: The traditional description is: I eat with my hands. There is a smell of food. I wash my hand, the odour remains. So the experience during life leaves a residue impression. The body dies but some kind of odour of experience remains which seeks more experience. A: You were saying the intellect itself is the result of the activity of the brain. But with the intellect I see what effect the accumulations of the past, as memory, have left on me. Even when the intellect sees this, the activity of the brain cells is in motion. Krishnamurti: Are you trying to say that the brain cells are receiving all the time; they are recording all the time, in the state of sleeping and in the state of waking. That recording is an independent movement. That independent movement creates the capacity to think, to rationalize. The intellect can then observe the operation of the movement of thought. It can observe how thought has created itself. And that is again part of the whole structure of the brain cells. What is the question? A: How is the structure of the brain cells to change? Krishnamurti: That is quite a different matter. The brain cells are recording all the time - perception, design, colour, everything is being registered. One element assumes a tremendous importance. And these brain cells, receiving impressions all the time, consciously or unconsciously, are building the capacity to think, to rationalize. The instrument of this rationalization is the intellect. The two are not separate. A: Without the intellect, would there be rationalization? Krishnamurti: Is the intellect independent of the brain cells? Is the capacity to rationalize independent of the brain cells or being a part of them can it ever be independent? You cannot rationalize independently, because the brain cells and the intellect are part of cause-effect. And can the intellect observe the background of memory, which is the brain? I believe modern scientists are trying to isolate the various cells which contain memories and to explore the cells, to investigate biologically. You can do that under the microscope and if the intellect is the product of the brain, the intellect must always be conditioned by memory, by knowledge. It can project very far but it is still tethered. The intellect can seek freedom, it can never find it. It can be free only within the radius of its own tether; in itself it is limited. And freedom must be beyond this intellectual capacity, must be something outside the field. Now, what is it that is aware of this whole phenomenon that the intellect can never be free? It can think it is free and it can project an idea, but it is not freedom because it is the product of the brain cells which are the residue of memory. What is it that is aware that the intellect cannot go beyond the range of its own radius? I do not know if you understand the question. A: The intellect itself can be aware of this. Krishnamurti: I do not know. I am asking. R: The intellect is a fragment. Krishnamurti: There is no freedom within the field. Therefore the intellect says there must be freedom outside the field. It is still rationalization, and therefore its search outside is still within the field. Then what is it that is aware of the whole field? Is it still rationalization? A: No. Krishnamurti: Why not? Is it not still rationalization? It was said that the brain cells are the recording machine. They are recording everything. That record has created an instrument which is the capacity to investigate, to explore, to criticize, which you can call the intellect. Then the intellect seeks freedom outside itself. It sees that there can be no freedom within the field and that freedom is outside. So it thinks it moves outside the field of itself. After having stated that, what happens? It sees that whatever movement it makes is within the field. Whatever movement springs from it is within the field; extend the field horizontally or vertically but it is still within the field. Therefore it is always within a prison. The intellect sees that, observes that, explores that. You are now asking how the brain cells are to change? Proceed. This is the movement man has been caught in. And not knowing how to get out of it, he has invented the atman. A: The Buddhists say this process which has come into existence with a cause, has an end and the perception of it is a dead-end. Buddhism maintains that the perception of the dead-end (they use the word pudgala) is to see, that in this there is no permanency, and that rebirth is the rebirth of the ignorance of this process. So when you observe this process as impermanent, then it must create absolutely no attachment to this process. All that is given to you is to see the impermanence, and seeing this, there is no attachment to this: and this is the dead-end. Contemplate this. The Buddha saw only once - disease, old age and death. Seeing it once, he never turned back. The boy Krishnamurti also never looked back. The Buddha said, see the impermanency of it, in that, there is no effort at all. Krishnamurti says just "see". Krishnamurti: Then what is the question? How are these recording instruments with their own capacity, their own movements, how are they to switch off and enter a different dimension, even for a short period? You cannot go back to the Upanishads. In that is authority. A: We come to the point where the intellect realizes that whatever it does is within the field and therefore, what? Krishnamurti: You see, the dead-end man has said that and stops there. But another dead-end man says I must have something more; and so the atman comes in. A: The Buddhists said there is no soul. That which putrefies will end. It will terminate. Do not get attached. That is all that you can do. It leads to the void, or shunyata. R: The Vedantins also said the same thing. A: They invented maya. It absorbed the whole of their reasoning. Krishnamurti: The distinction between the two is non-existent. The intellect itself says, this movement is within this field. Is there any other movement? It does not say there is or there is not. It cannot rationalize, because if it says there is, it is back in the same field - the positive or negative. The question then is, is there a movement other than this movement? Otherwise there is no freedom. A thing that functions from a centre within its own radius, however wide, is never free. (Pause) What is freedom? A: When it asks is there another movement, I cannot know. Krishnamurti: I know this is prison. I do not know what freedom is. A: You have taken away one confusion, that all is maya. Tradition has made that a conclusion. Krishnamurti: My question is, is there freedom at all? Tradition would say yes, there is moksha. It is all immature. A: Faced with this question, I have absolutely no instrument now to deal with this. Krishnamurti: No, you have the instrument of rationalization, the intellect. Is there no validity in this enquiry? I am asking, if there is no freedom within this field, then what is freedom? A: The intellect can never know. Krishnamurti: Do not say it cannot know. Intellect can only know freedom within the field, like a man knowing freedom within a prison. It then asks what is freedom? If this is not "it", then what is freedom? Is there such a thing at all? And if there is no such thing, let us make the best of this - more toilets, more hangers, more rooms, make the interior perfect. So man can never be free. The intellect rejects that there can be no freedom because it is inconceivable that there is no way out of this prison. The clever brains invent maya, atman, brahman. Now, I am asking myself, if there is no freedom, is the mind everlastingly condemned to live within this field? What is the point of it all? The communists, the materialists say you cannot get out. (Pause) I have got it: I am not concerned whether the brain cells change or not. I see that this concern about freedom, freedom which is not a formula, which is not a conclusion, is not freedom. Right? Then the mind says if this is not, then what is freedom? Then it says I do not know. It sees that in that non-knowing, there is an expectation to know. When I say I do not know what freedom is, there is a waiting and an expectation to find out. That means the mind does not say it does not know, but is waiting for something to happen. I see that and I discard that. (Pause) So I really do not know. I am not waiting, expecting. I am not hoping something will happen, some answer will come from an outside agency. I am not expecting a thing. There it is. There is the clue. I know this is not "it". There is no freedom here. There is reformation, but not freedom. Reformation can never bring freedom. Man revolts against the whole idea that he can never be free, that he is condemned to live in this world. It is not intellect that revolts, but the whole organism, the whole perception. Right? Therefore it says that as this is not "it", I do not know what freedom is. I do not expect a thing, I do not hope or try to find what freedom is. I really do not know. That not-knowing is freedom. Knowing is prison. This is logically right. I do not know what is going to happen tomorrow. Therefore I am free of the past, free of this field. The knowing of the field is the prison, the not-knowing of the field is also the prison. Sir, look, I know yesterday. I know what happened yesterday. The knowing of what happened yesterday is the prison. So, the mind that lives in a state of not-knowing is a free mind. Right? The traditionalists went wrong when they said do not be attached. You see, they denied all relationships. They could not solve the problem of relationships, but they said do not be attached and so broke away from all relationships. They said "Be detached", therefore they withdrew into isolation. To live with the knowledge of this field is prison. And not to know the prison is also not freedom. And so a mind that lives in the known, is always in prison. That is all. Can the mind say I do not know, which means the yesterday has ended? It is the knowledge of continuity which is the prison. A: To pursue this requires ruthlessness. Krishnamurti: Do not use the word ruthlessness. It requires tremendous delicacy. When I said I really do not know, I really do not know. Full stop. See what it does. It means a real humility, a sense of austerity. Then, yesterday has ended. So the man who has ended yesterday is really beginning again. Therefore he has to be austere. I really do not know; what a marvellous thing that is. I do not know if I may die tomorrow. Therefore there is no possibility of having any conclusion at any time, which means, never to have any burden. The burden is the knowing. A: Can one come to this point and stay there? Krishnamurti: You do not have to stay. A: The mind has a way of switching back. Words take you only to a point. There is no room for switching back. Krishnamurti: Go slow. Do not put it that way. We see this. We see the man who speaks of detachment, we see the man who invents the atman. We come along and say, look, both are wrong. In this field there is no freedom. Then we ask, is there freedom at all? I say I really do not know. It does not mean I have forgotten the past. In the "I do not know" there is no inclusion of the past nor a discarding of the past, nor a utilization of the past. All that it says is, in the past there is no freedom. The past is knowledge, the past is accumulation, the past is the intellect. In that there is no freedom. In asking is there freedom at all, man says "I really do not know". He is free of the known. R: But the structure of the brain cells remains. Krishnamurti: They become extraordinarily flexible. Being flexible they can reject, accept; there is movement. A: We see something as action. So far we only know activity. We can never reject activity. It goes on. In laying down bare activity, it ceases to be a barrier to action. The normal day to day living is a process which goes on. Krishnamurti: Are you asking what is action? What is action to a man who does not know? The man who knows is acting from knowledge and his action, his activity is always within the prison, projecting that prison into the future. It is always within the field of the known. What is action to the man who says I do not know? He does not even ask, because he is acting. You are missing something, which is, not to know whether tomorrow is there. Can you go into that? I will have my meal in the afternoon, I will go for a walk; apart from that all action to a man who knows is total inaction; his action is always mischievous. The activist is always committed, involved. You see action is relationship in the field of the known. It is there in detachment, in attachment, in dominance, in subservience. Life is relationship. Have the professionals talked about relationship? R: No. Krishnamurti: To them relationship meant attachment and therefore they talked of detachment. But I have to live in this world. Even in the Himalayas, I need food. There is relationship. That may be the reason why the whole Indian movement of detachment has made the mind so stupid, repetitive. A: The Buddha in his first sermon said that both detachment and attachment are ignoble. The two represented the Hindu idea of running away from the world. Krishnamurti: Why did they not consider relationship? When the sannyasi renounces the world he cannot renounce relationship. He may not sleep with a woman but he cannot renounce relationship. I am asking myself, if you deny relationship, action becomes meaningless. What is action without relationship? Is it doing something mechanical? A: Action is relationship. Krishnamurti: Relationship is the primary thing. Otherwise what exists? If my father did not sleep with my mother, I would not exist. So relationship is the basic movement of life. Relationship within the field of knowledge is deadly, destructive, corrupt. That is the worldly. So, what is action? We have separated action from relationships: as social action, political action, you follow? We have not solved this problem of relationship. We discard it because it is too deadly to discuss relationship, because I know I have a wife and something may happen. So I do not want to discuss it. All that I say is I must be detached. If you accept all living is relationship, then what is action? There is one kind of action of technology, of mechanical action, but every other action is non-mechanical. Otherwise I reduce relationship into turning the wheel. That is why we have denied love. A: Can we examine our relationship with nature? Krishnamurti: What is my relationship with nature - the birds, sky, trees, flowers, the moving waters? That is my life. It is not just relationship between man and woman, but al1 this is part of my life. I am talking of relationship to everything. How can I be attached to the forest, to the river? I can be attached to the word, but not to the waters. You see, we miss the whole thing because we confuse the word with the thing. A: Is it a question of re-awakening sensitivity? Krishnamurti: No. The question is what is relationship? Be related to everything. Relationship means care; care means attention; attention means love. That is why relationship is the basis of everything. If you miss that, you miss the whole thing. Yes, Sir, this is the prison. To know is the prison and to live in the knowing is also the prison. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 20 RISHI VALLEY 21ST JANUARY 1971 'THE MATRIX OF TRADITION' Questioner B: In Buddhism they mention three categories of people in the world: the ordinary worldly man who has his pleasures, pain, etc; the path-winner, the person who has a glimpse of the direction; then the arhat. The worldly man might perform rituals but he is still a worldly man till he has an experience, a glimpse of the direction. The path-winner wanders away but always comes back, till such time when there is no more going back to the first stage. Krishnamurti: A man who is of the world has a glimpse of the path - how does he have it? And once he is on the path he may wander back and forth, wander and come back to the path and finally settle down and reach the state of being an arhat. Are you asking how the worldly man is to have a glimpse? Questioner C: What is sadhana? sadhana means to attain, to prepare that by which you attain siddhi. siddhi means goal. Krishnamurti: That through which you attain a goal - a system, a method, a process; that means time. C: Does it imply time? It does not necessarily imply time. Krishnamurti: If I have to go through the gate to attain, going through the gate to attain is time. That is a process of time. Sadhana implies a process of time. C: Tradition also says sadhanas are useless. Krishnamurti: Most people insist on sadhana, though they say it is not necessary. It has become part of the tradition. B: They say it is better to go through sadhana, but they do not guarantee that you will reach through sadhana. Krishnamurti: The word sadhana implies a process and process means things put together, and the putting together means time. Even the most scientific concept of time is things put together in a horizontal or vertical position. So sadhana means time. Though you may say it is not necessary, the word implies time. So, what is the question, Sir; what does tradition say? B: The Buddhist tradition says that a man in sorrow has a glimpse of this. Then he is the path-winner and then he works out his salvation and becomes an arhat. What kind of operation or movement is involved in the second stage? C: They say when you get into the non-dual state, there is no going back. Krishnamurti: How do you come to it? C: Since it is not a process, they do not say how you come to it. They say you cannot come to it by hearing people, by studying, by rituals and sadhana. They put it negatively. Krishnamurti: It is a question of duality. Being in the world implies duality, then there is a getting a glimpse of a non-dualistic state and the getting back to the dualistic state; is that it? C: They say there is no duality at all, but on account of the intellectual process you create duality. Once you realize the non-duality, then there is no question of worldliness creeping into it. Krishnamurti: Living in a dualistic state as human beings do, by negating rituals, will that get you to a non-dualistic state? You may say that there is no dualistic mould or level; a dimension in which there is no duality at all. The mind caught in the dualistic state, by negating beliefs, rituals, etc., will it come to the "other"? Is that what the tradition says? Shall we approach this problem in a simple way, which is: one lives in a dualistic state. That is a fact. One lives in the dualistic state in which there is pain, sorrow, conflict and all that. And man says, how am I to get out of it? The non-dualistic state is merely a theory. Man does not know it. He does not know in the sense he might have read about it, but it is secondhand information. It has no value. Disregard what others have said about it. I only know a dualistic state in which there is sorrow, pain. That is a fact. That is from where I start. C: Some people have conflict and misery and realize that the dualistic state is the cause of the trouble. So they want to get rid of it. Some do not start from this, but they feel discontented and read, and having read, they start imagining the non-dual state. Krishnamurti: It is a theory. The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another. We are not concerned with the man who supplies a conclusion derived by a specialist. We are only discussing about a man who is in conflict and is discontented with that conflict. How does he get out of it? C: The traditional way is to explore through books. Man attains by negating and resolves by knowledge. Krishnamurti: Proceed step by step. I am in conflict. Now, how do I resolve it? You say by knowledge. What is knowledge? C: The realization of conflict is knowledge. Krishnamurti: I do not have to realize it, I am in conflict. I know I am in conflict, in pain, in sorrow. What do you mean by knowledge and what do you mean by conflict? To know that I am in conflict, is that knowledge? Or do you call knowledge what I should do about that conflict? When you use the word "knowledge", what do you mean by that? What is the sanskrit equivalent of that word? C: Jnana. Krishnamurti: What does that mean? Knowledge about what? Is it the know- ledge about the cause of conflict? C: Jnana will also apply to the nature of conflict and how it arises. Krishnamurti: How does it come into being and how does it work? What is the nature and structure of it? To know the cause is to know the structure and the nature of pain. Do you call that knowledge? C: Sir, jnana has been divided as that which pertains to the phenomenal world and that which refers to the non-phenomenal world. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by conflict? C: Conflict is duality. Krishnamurti: We know what the word "knowledge" is. What do you mean by the word "conflict"? C: Dwandva - conflict between the two - hot and cold, pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow. Krishnamurti: So let us proceed: I am in conflict. I want to go out and I want to stay here; I am unhappy and I want to do something which makes for happiness. I acquire knowledge about it by seeing the cause, the nature, the structure of this conflict. The understanding of the cause, the nature, the structure of this conflict is knowledge: And knowing that, having this knowledge, will it free the mind from conflict? So you are saying knowledge will free the mind from conflict, right, Sir? Now, I know that I am jealous because my wife looks at another man or you have a better job than me. I know why I am jealous. I know the nature and structure of jealousy, which is: I would like to be in your place. I would like my wife not to look at you: I know the cause, I know the effect; the reaction of it is I am jealous. I see the full structure of it as an engineer sees a structure, and the knowing of it, does it free me from it? Obviously it does not. C: Knowledge which will resolve conflict is the kind of knowledge in which there is no duality: Krishnamurti: How do you know - because somebody else has said it? C: By looking into why jealousy arises. Why should I be jealous? Krishnamurti: That is analysis. Does analysis free the mind from conflict? C: Analysis alone will not. Krishnamurti: Knowledge is the result of analysis. I analyse. I see why I am jealous. I was angry with my wife and so on, and she has left me. Does this knowledge free me from the fear of living alone without her? C: The feeling of jealousy does cease. Krishnamurti: How do you propose to end jealousy? I have analysed myself till I am sick, and the next minute I am jealous again. C: That means by analysis you have not ended jealousy. Krishnamurti: Analysis is part of knowledge. I have accumulated knowledge because I have analysed. I am jealous because I have tried to possess her. The realization of this is knowledge; and I possess her because I am afraid to live alone -and this is part of knowledge. And you are saying, through analysis there is accumulation of know1edge, and that knowledge is going to free you from jealousy. Does it? C: No, Sir. I may analyse jealousy, as she is my wife and she has gone to another man; I may also say that there is no difference at all, what does it matter if she goes? It all depends on the individual. Krishnamurti: That is all intellection. Intellection is part of analysis. As long as there is the intellect, knowledge, you are not free. So all knowledge is intellectual. C: Jnana is not that intellectua1 process. The intellectual process ends with manas and buddhi. Krishnamurti: So you are saying there is another factor which is beyond intellect, knowledge. Analysis, accumulation of knowledge through analysis is one kind of knowledge, and there is another, some other factor beyond that. C: Which enables the buddhi to see, to discriminate. B: How is knowledge acquired? Let us take the first step. Krishnamurti: I have been on that road many times and I have acquired knowledge. I have seen that person often and I have talked to him. He has been friendly, non-friendly. All that is knowledge. I have accumulated through experience, through analysis, through incidents, information, which is called knowledge. C: What makes that knowledge possible? What makes experience possible? Krishnamurti: Experience is possible only when there is the experiencer. You hurt me, that is experience. You say something which I do not like, and that hurts me. That is an experience, then that experience becomes knowledge. Will that knowledge end conflict? C: No. Krishnamurti: Then what will end conflict? Do they say it is that entity which realizes the experiencer, who has gathered this knowledge that will end conflict? If so then there is a superior entity. C: There is a principle through which all these several experiences, all the disparate experiences of the individual are made possible. How do I know I am the experiencer? Krishnamurti: Because I have experienced before. I know I am the experiencer because you have hurt me before. The knowledge, the previous knowledge makes me the experiencer. B: I see sunlight; sunrise, I fee1 that is my experience of having seen the sun...... Krishnamurti: Having seen the sunset once and seeing it day after day, the accumulation of that knowledge makes the experiencer. C: They postulate an entity which does not experience. Krishnamurti: The postulated entity is another opinion which I have acquired from somebody else. It is fairly simple and clear. First I am aware, I get to know I am in conflict. I analyse it. Through analysis I have acquired knowledge that I am jealous; that is simple. Analysis, observation, watching, have given me information why I am jealous, which is knowledge: And that knowledge apparently cannot get rid of jealousy. Then what will get rid of it? Do not invent another superior seLf: I know nothing about it: I know only conflict, analysis, knowledge and I see knowledge does not get rid of conflict. B: What is the sub-stratum of all experience? What is that out of which all experiences arise? What is the matrix? Krishnamurti: Is it an accumulation of experience? The matrix is things put together. The matrix of the carpet is the warp and woof. The matrix of experience is experience. Are you asking, Sir, what is the thread that makes experience or are you asking what the matter is upon which the experience leaves a pattern? C: Traditionalists consider that knowledge as gathering of experience, memory, belongs to the realm of manas and buddhi, and this is made possible by the atman which sheds light, and without atman, the manas cannot function. Krishnamurti: What is the material upon which experience leaves a mark? Is there such material? Now what is it on which any experience leaves a mark? Obviously, it is the brain. The fact is, the brain is the material; the cells are the material on which every incident leaves a mark, every experience, conscious or unconscious. All the time the brain is receiving. I see that flower, it has already registered; I see you, it has already registered. Constant recording is going on. It is there. The racial inheritance, personal inheritance; all this is leaving a mark on the brain. B: The function of the mind is energy. Krishnamurti: The registration of the brain is part of energy. The whole thing is energy. So brain is the repository of all recording - sensory, non-sensory. That is the tape which has been collected for centuries. That is knowledge. If you did not know where you lived, you could not go there. Because you have been there, you know it. Knowledge does not necessarily free the mind from conflict. Right? We see that. Then what will free the mind without the introduction of the atman which is part of the tradition, knowledge which I have acquired? Though I may call it atman, it is the same field of knowledge. C: How does it come within the field of knowledge? Krishnamurti: Unless I think about it, there is no atman. C: Thinking about it is not realizing it. It is not within the comprehension of thought. Krishnamurti: Thinking about something is still within the field of thought. A man who thinks about atman is still within the field of thought. C: The man who talked of atman never thought he realized that. The only experience which they cite is that you have a sound deep sleep and you wake up. How do you remember that you had a sound sleep? In deep sleep the mind does not work. Krishnamurti: How do you know when it does not work? The brain cells are working day and night. Only when you get up the next morning do you know that you are tired or you have had a good sleep, etc. They are all the functions of the brain. So atman is within the field of thought. It must be. Otherwise, you would not use that word. We are saying atman is part of the brain. Thought says it cannot solve the problem through thought and, therefore, there must be the atman. C: But they have said the atman is outside experience. B: Explain the material of experience. Krishnamurti: I see the flower, I name it. There is a naming of it, the form, the verbalization; verbalization is the memory, because the brain has seen and says that is a flower. B: Does it operate if I close my eyes? Krishnamurti: Of course, shut your eyes, close your ears, you can still think. The moment I say there is God, the thinking about it is within the field of thought. The man who has not thought at all, to him there is no God. The ancient ones thinking about something superior, wanting something greater, said there was God. That was the product of thought. So that was within the field of knowledge. C: Not much importance is given to God in the Upanishads. According to their conception God and brahman are the same. Krishnamurti: You see, someone comes along who is not a Hindu and says God, Jesus. What is the difference? He has been brought up in his culture, and you in this culture say atman. C: We say both. God is personal, atman is not personal. Krishnamurti: They are all the product of thought. Look, how deceptive the mind has become, caught in words. I have accumulated knowledge about suffering and suffering does not end, and not knowing how to end it, thought says there must be some other factor. So it invents the atman. It thinks about it. Other wise the atman would not have come into existence. So atman does not end it either, because it is part of knowledge. Knowledge about suffering has not ended suffering. The atman does not end suffering either. C: But they themselves have said that thought will not solve the problem. Krishnamurti: But atman is the product of thought. C: But atman is experienced by them. It is their personal experience. Krishnamurti: When they say they experience atman, what does it mean? C: They say it cannot be described. Krishnamurti: Of course it cannot be, but it is part of thought. C: To them it was not part of thought. They realized it. Krishnamurti: How do I realize anything? I must recognize it, must I not? What do I recognize? C: Recognition means seeing a thing without the process of thought. Krishnamurti: I recognize you because I have met you yesterday. If I did not, I would not know you. C: That is not the process by which you recognize brahman. Krishnamurti: Be simple. Let us talk logically. I must recognize a new experience. What is the process of recognition? I must have known it already, like the flower, the yellow flower - I could not recognize it if I had not seen it. So recognition of an experience is, that it has already been experienced. Therefore, atman has already been experienced to recognize it. It is, therefore, within the field of experience. So when they say you cannot experience it, what do they mean by it? The fact is, I suffer; I say "I want to end suffering". So, why do I bring in the atman? It has no value at all. It is like a man who is hungry and you describe food to him. C: I agree that whatever they have said does not help. Krishnamurti: On the contrary, they have destroyed the mind by introducing a factor which does not help. C: Yes. Krishnamurti: See it. Say, I will never talk about the atman, it does not mean a thing. So, how do I face this? How can the mind resolve the factor of sorrow? Not through atman. That is too childish. It can only resolve it, not through knowledge, but by looking at it without knowledge. C: Is this possible? Krishnamurti: Do not introduce atman. Try it. Test it out. The other you cannot test. Put it away completely. Then what happens? Then how do I look at suffering - with knowledge or without knowledge? Do I look at it with past eyes? Do I look with eyes which are filled with the past, therefore, translate everything in terms of the past? B: We cannot use the past as a means to free ourselves from suffering. Krishnamurti: When you say that you see what suffering is, you are directly in relationship with suffering, not the observer observing suffering. I look at suffering without the image and the image is the past. The image of the past may be the atman. Of course, it is. Test it. Test the image as you would test it in the laboratory. In the same way you can test this. The other you cannot. The atman which I see is part of thought. There is no testing there at all. Here there is testing. I am looking at this sorrow with past experience. My past experience divides the past as the past and the present. There is duality. The present is sorrow and I am looking at the present through the past, and translating it in terms of the past. If the mind can look at it without the past, there must be a different meaning altogether. So, I have to test it. Can the mind look without past memory? Can I look at that flower without past knowledge? Test it; you can do it or not do it. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 21 RISHI VALLEY 23RD JANUARY 1971 'THE GURU, TRADITION AND FREEDOM' Krishnamurti: Cou1d we enquire - not only from the traditional point of view but also relate the who1e field of tradition to what we have been talking about, to see the divergence, the contradictions, the similarities and dissimilarities? And a1so see if there is anything new in what we are saying. Let us discuss this; question it back and forth. A: We might start with the four purusharthas - dharma, artha, kama and moksha. If we examine the traditional approach to living, we see that tradition begins with the fact that human existence has these four aspects and each of them is vital, essential for the development of understanding. Krishnamurti: Should we not begin with the meaning of it all? A: The fundamentalists started with the meaning of it all, with the four aspects. Krishnamurti: Should we not enquire what it all means - human existence, human sorrow, conflict? What does it all mean? How do the professionals answer this question? SW: In the tradition, we find two clear directions. The orthodox direction which goes by verbal interpretation of facts and the breakaway tradition, as seen in Dattatreya and the yoga vasishtha. The seers who broke away, said "no guru", "We have discovered it for ourselves", "I will not swear by the Vedas", "the whole of nature, the whole world is my guru", "observe and understand the world". In Buddha also, there was a breaking away. His teaching represents the core of the breakaway pattern. Those who broke away were closely linked with life. If you read the yoga vasishtha, it says that the mind is full of thoughts, conflicts; and these conflicts arise because of desire and fear; unless you are able to resolve them, you cannot understand. It talks of negative thinking. Max Mueller and some others misinterpreted the word nirodha. The word does not mean suppression, it means negation. A great deal is said about gurus. The yoga vasishtha says that giving initiation and such other actions are meaningless. Awakening of the disciple is in right understanding and in awareness. That alone is the most primary responsible fact. These essentials are the core of the breakaway tradition. R: And yet there are many places in the yoga vasishtha where it says without a guru, you cannot find anything. A: Breakaway from what? If it is a breakaway from the social system, the breakaway tradition also continues the social system. SW: To the problem of understanding, tradition gives a formal verbal approach. In the breakaway tradition, this is not so. The breakaway is not from society. Both these traditions exist. In the mathas or monasteries, they talked of the Vedas but what they said had nothing to do with life; there were others who related all that they understood to life. But whatever was said had nothing to do with the society. R: How is it that the guru tradition has become so important? Krishnamurti: Shall we discuss this question of guru? Shall we begin with that? What does the word "guru" mean? SW: "Desika" is the right word, not guru. Desika means one who helps to awaken the disciple; one who helps the seeker to understand. The word means one who learns. R: The disciple is called shishya. Shishya is one who is capable of learning. SW: Guru means vast, beyond, great. Krishnamurti: The guru is one who is great, beyond, one who is profound, then what relationship has he to a disciple? SW: In the Upanishads, it is one of love and compassion. The Upanishads maintain that compassion is the contact between the guru and the disciple. Krishnamurti: How has the tradition now become authoritarian? How has a sense of discipline, of following, of acceptance of whatever the guru says, how has that been introduced into the relationship? The authoritarian, compulsive, destructive relationship comes in the way of real thinking, it destroys initiative. How has this relationship come into being? SW: It is difficult to say. The two approaches must have existed for a long time. In one tradition, the guru is taken as a friend, as a person the disciple loves; in that the guru is not authoritarian at all. The other tradition exploits. It wants authority, followers. A: Swamiji's main point is that there has not been a homogenous stream. There is the outsider and the conformist. A non-conformist is one who rejects society; he is outside society. R: We come back again to your first question - what is it all about, apart from the question of gurus what is the fundamental answer to life? Krishnamurti: I wonder if we could find out. Could you dig into it? Could you dig everything out of me? You understand what I mean? You come to a well and you get water according to the size of your bucket; whatever vessel you carry, that amount of water you get. You have read a great deal of the ancient literature, you have practised, you have read what we have talked about. You are well-equipped from the traditional point of view, and you know what is happening in the world. Now, you and I meet. Dig out of me as much as you can. Question me about everything, from the beginning to the end. Ques- tion deeply as the conformist and as the non-conformist, as a guru, as a non-guru, as a disciple and as a non-disciple. It is like going to a well with tremendous thirst, wanting to find out everything. Do it that way, Sir. Then I think it will be profitable. SW: Then can I be absolutely free? Krishnamurti: Break all the windows, because I feel wisdom is infinite. It has no limits, and because it has no frontiers, it is totally impersonal. So with all your experience, knowledge and understanding of tradition and the breakaway pattern which also becomes tradition, with what you know and what you have understood, from your own meditations, from your own life, you come to me. Do not be satisfied by just a few words. Dig deep. SW: I would like to know, how you came to it yourself? Krishnamurti: You want to know how this person came upon it? I could not tell you. You see, Sir, he apparently never went through any practice, discipline, jealousy, envy, ambition, competition, wanting power, position, prestige, fame. He did not want any of them. And therefore there was never any question of giving up. So when I say I really do not know, I think that would be the truth. Most of the traditional teachers go through, give up, practice, sacrifice, control; they sit under a tree and come upon clarity. SW: Then, another thing I would like to ask is, in your teachings, sensitivity, understanding, passive awareness, are factors that must saturate one's living. How did you come upon this? A: You may have had nothing to give up and therefore no discipline, no sadhana, but what about people who have something to give up? Krishnamurti: You are asking how I came upon this? I really could not tell you. Why do you bother about it? What importance is it how I got it? SW: It is curiosity, it is joy. Krishnamurti: Let us go beyond that. SW: The moment you say awareness, attention, sensitivity, one is so full of wonder, appreciation. How did you come to this? How is it that this man is able to talk like this? And when we analyse what you say, it is so scientific, rational and so full of meaning. Krishnamurti: You know the story of how the boy was picked up; he was born in the most orthodox Brahmin family; he was not conditioned by the tradition nor by any other factors through life -as a Hindu, as a theosophist. It did not touch him. First of all, I do not know why it did not touch him. A: This question which he asks may be put in another idiom. How did it happen that a person who was in the midst of an environment which laid maximum stress on phenomenal life did not get caught in that life? SW: K came by it. He is not able to explain but he talks and he uses certain terms and the whole logic of it is there; and it is a wonder to the listener how without anything he has come to it and yet there is logic. Krishnamurti: How is it that a man like K, not having read the sacred books, the scriptures of the east or west, how is it that not having experienced, given up, sacrificed, gone through the gamut of all this, how does he say these things? I really could not say, Sir. A: You gave the answer a minute ago; you said wisdom is not personal. Krishnamurti: But he says how is it that you got the wisdom without all this? SW: I am not asking how he came by it but in his talk there is such cogency, rationality, such perfect logical sequences. It comes and the listener finds beauty, joy. It is in his heart. Krishnamurti: When you say it has come because it is in his heart, I do not know how to put it. It comes. I do not know how; not from the heart or from the mind, but it comes. Or would you say, Sir, that it would come to any person who is really non-selfish? SW: Perfectly, yes. Krishnamurti: I think it would be the most logical answer. SW: Or is it that you saw the misery of mankind and then got it? Krishnamurti: No. To answer this question really properly, completely, one has to go into the whole question - there was that boy who was picked up; he went through all kinds of things - he was proclaimed the Messiah, he was worshipped, enormous amounts of property were given to him, he had a great following. All that did not touch him. He gave up land as he accepted land. There was that boy and he had never read philosophy, psychology, the sacred books and he never practised anything. And there was the quality of speaking from emptiness. SW: Yes, yes. Krishnamurti: You understand, Sir, there is never any accumulation from which he speaks. So when you ask such a question, "How do you say these things?," that involves a much greater question, which is, whether wisdom or whatever you would like to call it, can be contained in any particular consciousness or it lies beyond all particular consciousness? Sir, look at this valley, the hills, the trees, the rocks - the valley is all that. Without the content of the valley, there is no valley. Now, if there is no content in consciousness, there is no consciousness - in the sense of the limited. When you ask a question, "How is it that he says these things?" I really do not know. But it can be answered, that when it happens, the mind is completely empty. This does not mean that you become a medium. SW: I derive from this, that infinity is beauty, rationality, logic. It is full of symmetry in its expression. Krishnamurti: Sir, having said that which we just now said, what do you want to find out? You have capacity, you have read a great deal, you have knowledge, experience, you have practised and meditated - from there, ask. SW: Consciousness is bondage. Only from emptiness can one have entry into it. Krishnamurti: So you are asking how can a human being empty the mind? SW: There is a traditional idea of the adhikari, the person who can learn. And the traditional idea is that there are levels or differences in the persons who can receive or learn. What he can learn, depends on that difference. There are three levels. In the orthodox texts, they are mentioned as sattva, rajas and tamas. Those who belong to the first category - sattva - can have understanding by listening to a teacher, of understanding. The rajas category have to listen and recollect when they face a problem of life. The tamas ones cannot learn because their minds are too gross. In order to make the mind subtle, there are many methods, upasanas. Yoga starts with breath-control, meditation, the standing on the head. Even then, they say the asanas are only meant as a cleansing. It is said, whatever you do, be passive, observe "what is". Krishnamurti: You say, as human beings are constituted, there are levels, gradations of receptivity. They are not through with the becoming process and for such people, is it possible to come upon this? SW: That is one part of it. The other is that with most people, there are moments of understanding. But they slip away. It is a constant struggle. What does one do? Krishnamurti: What is the question? SW: What is such a person to do? Krishnamurti: Knowing there are levels, is it possible to cut across these levels? A: Is that a question of time? SW: Can we cut across these levels or are there processes by which we can transcend the levels? R: Tradition says that a long process of time is necessary. SW: I do not agree with that. R: One must have the competence to understand. A: I say my life is a life of becoming. When I come and sit with you, you say time is irrelevant. I say "yes" because it is clear, but I am back again in the field of time, effort, etc., and this thing which I feel I understand, slips away. Krishnamurti: The question is fairly clear. The question is that when I listen, I seem to understand and when I go away it is gone. And the other point is, how is one who is not bright, who is not rational, to break through his conditioning and come upon it? What is your answer to this? SW: My answer from experience, the traditional answer, let man do some type of meditation by which the mind is made much more alert. Krishnamurti: That is, do certain practices, do certain exercises, breathing, etc., till the mind is capable of understanding. And the other who says when I listen to you, I understand but it slips away. These are the two problems. First of all take a mind that has no capacity; now, how is it capable of seeing? How is such a mind capable of seeing, understanding, without practice, without the time process? Time implies process, right? Without time, how is such a mind to come upon this? My mind is dull. My mind has not the clarity to understand this thing immediately. So you tell me to practice, to breathe, to eat less, you ask me to practice all the methods and systems which will help to make my mind sharp, clear sensitive. All that involves time and when you allow time, there are other factors which enter into the mind. If I have to go from here to there, to cover that distance takes time. In covering that distance there are other factors entering during the voyage so that I never reach there. Before I reach there I see something beautiful and I am carried away. The way is not a straight, narrow path on which I walk. Innumerable factors are happening. These incidents, happenings, impressions are going to change the movement of direction. And that thing which I am trying to understand is not a fixed point either. A: The point that it is not a fixed thing should be explored. Krishnamurti: I say my mind is confused, is disturbed, I do not understand. You tell me to understand by doing these things. So you have established understanding as a fixed point, and it is not a fixed point. SW: It is not a fixed point. Krishnamurti Obviously. If it is a fixed point, and I am going towards it, there are other factors which enter in my journey towards it and these factors are going to influence me much more than the end. A: That end is a projection of the unknowing mind. Krishnamurti: That way is not the way at all. First see it. It is not a fixed point, and it can never be a fixed point; therefore, I say that is a false thing altogether. Then as it is not the way, since you are denying the whole thing, you have wiped away a tremendous field - all practices, all meditations, all knowledge. Then what have I left? I am left with the fact that I am confused, that I am dull. Now, how do I know I am dull, how do I know I am confused? Only through comparison, because I see that you are very perceptive and I say, through comparison, through measurement, I am dull. I do not compare and I see what I have done through comparison. I have reduced myself to a state which I call dull through comparison, and I see that is not the way either. So I reject comparison. Am I dull then, if I do not compare? So I have rejected the system, a process, a fixed end which you have evolved as a means of enlightenment through time. I say comparison is not the way. Measurement means distance. SW: Does it mean, that this understanding is not a matter vitally connected with capacity at all? We started with capacity. Krishnamurti: I say I listen to you Swamiji but I do not understand. I do not know what it is that I do not understand, but you show me - time, process, fixed point, etc. You show it to me, and I deny them. So what has happened to my mind? In the very rejection, denial, the mind has become less dull. The rejection of the false makes the mind clear; and the rejection of comparison which is also false, makes the mind sharp. So, what have I left now? I know I am dull only in comparison with you. Dullness exists in my measuring myself with what is called brightness and I say I will not measure. Therefore, am I dull? I have completely rejected comparison and comparison means conformity. What have I left? The thing I have called dull is not dull. It is "what it is". What have I left at the end of all this? All that I have left is, I will not compare any more. I will not measure myself with somebody who is superior to me and I will not tread this path which is beautifully laid down for me. So I reject all the structures which man has imposed upon me to achieve enlightenment. So, where am I? I start from the beginning. I know nothing about enlightenment, understanding, process, comparison, becoming. I have thrown them away. I do not know. Knowledge is the means of getting hurt and tradition is the instrument by which I get hurt. I do not want that instrument and, therefore, I am not hurt. I start with complete innocence. Innocence means a mind that is incapable of being hurt. Now, I say to myself, why did they not see this simple fact that there is no fixed point. Why? Why did they pile all this on the human mind so that I have to wade through all this, to discard all this? It is very interesting, Sir. Why go through all this process if I have to discard it? Why did you not tell me do not compare; truth is not a fixed point? Do I flower in goodness through comparison? Can humility be gained through time, practice? Obviously not. And yet you have insisted on practice, why? When you insist on practice, you think that you are going to a fixed point. So you have deceived yourself and you are deceiving me. You do not say to me: you know nothing and I know nothing, let us find out if what all the things human beings have imposed on other human beings are true or false. They have said enlightenment is something to be achieved through time, through discipline, through the guru. Let us find out, search it out. Why have human beings imposed upon human beings something which is not true? Human beings have tortured themselves, castigated themselves to get enlightenment as though enlightenment was a fixed point. And they end up blind. I think that is why, Sir, the so-called man of error is much nearer the truth than the man who practises to reach the truth. A man who practises truth becomes impure, unchaste. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 22 RISHI VALLEY 24TH JANUARY 1971 'FREEDOM AND THE PRISON' Krishnamurti: I wonder if we could discuss this morning what perception means. Apart from what the traditionalists and the professionals and the commentaries have said, what does perception mean? What is it to perceive? Is it a mere intellectual process or is it visual perception or is it a combination of both? Is it a psychosomatic state or is it something entirely different? The mind takes in much more than the eye does. So when we talk about perception, what do we mean by that word? Is it an intellectual perception, a verbal conclusion, a verbal comprehension? Does the eye see in a linear or horizontal dimension? Questioner B: You mean the eye as the sense-organ here? Krishnamurti: Yes. SW: Is the perception of the eye, the visual, sensory perception of the eye not uniform? We come to this room, I see the design of the carpet. Very soon I am seeing and not seeing. The physical eye is also not seeing all in a uniform state. There must be some factor other than the contact of the object and the senses in the awareness of "I see". The first awareness of inattention comes to me that way. Krishnamurti: I have not come to that point. I am trying to understand what that word perception conveys. I am not speaking of attention and inattention. All that I know is that I see. There is visual perception. There is sensory perception. I see you sitting there. Then there is the image which sensory perception plus the intellectual capacity of thought holds. That is what we generally call perception, is it not? A: What is the meaning of the word "perception"? Krishnamurti: To perceive: where does inattention or attention come into this? A: I see an object. Then there is an image of that object. Then there is the memory of that image. Then I see something else and again the whole process begins. Krishnamurti: All the sensory impressions, the impressions that are recorded, the conscious and the unconscious, the various images, conclusions, prejudices, all that is involved in perception. Look, there is visual perception and the various images that perception, asso- ciation, prejudices, have built up. And I see you and I have another series of images, and so thousands and thousands of images are recorded, taped and held in the brain cells. And when I meet you I turn on attention and the images emerge. This is what we call perception, is it not? This is the machinery that is in operation in the word "perception-' is it not? This is the ordinary operational process of perception. I want to see. That is all I know. Where does the trouble begin? Now, what is wrong with it? A: The factor of sensitivity and the varying degrees of sensitivity, are they not a vital element in perception? My perception of squalor is different from that of yours. Can you separate perception from the degrees of sensitivity? Perception is not the same to you and me. Krishnamurti: When I have all these accumulated images, conscious or unconscious, my mind is loaded with them. Where is the place for sensitivity? A: Perception is not a passive act of memory. There is always something new which is there with every new perception. With every new response, which I call perception, the factor of degree is inherent. I do not understand why and from where the degree comes, because ignorance is imponderable. B: Even this seeing is like a camera; it sees its shutters, not the object. A: I look through the idea; then there is no perception. Krishnamurti: The mind which is crowded with impressions and information about the object, sees. The mind, the brain, the whole structure is never empty. It is full and through this burden it looks. It looks at you with its associations, with jealousy, pleasure, pain. What is wrong with that? R: I am never face to face. I see there is sensory perception, then the images, then the like, dislike; those are facts also. They are facts which I do not realize. Krishnamurti: They are facts, as much as the fact that you are sitting here. Then what takes place? Each time I see you through a screen. What is wrong with that? Is it not a natural process? SW: In that state I do not see at all. Krishnamurti: First I want to be clear about this. There are thousands of impressions, thousands of sensory perceptions, thousands of conclusions - let us cover the whole of that by the word "conclusions". Through these conclusions I look, and by looking through these conclusions, they thicken or become faint; they never disappear. Each succeeding sensory perception thickens the same perception. This is the process which is going on all the time, all through life. So image-making and conclusion are of the past. Perception is immediate. Sensory perception is immediate and the conclusion becomes the past. So, I am looking at you through the eyes of the past. That is what we are doing. That is a fact. What is wrong with it, Sir? Why should I not look at you that way? What started with perception is not perception at all. Do not condemn it yet. That is what we are doing all the time. I want to be sure before we go any further. Go slow. So, all visual perception is translated in terms of conclusions. Now, what takes place? That is a fact which we all know. That is tradition, is it not? That is experience. Experience, knowledge, tradition, all that is contained in the word "past" and the word "conclusion; and that is the structure and the nature of the brain cells. The brain cells are the past: They retain the memory of the past because in that there is safety - in the biological processes as well as in the psychological accumulations. In that there is tremendous safety. SW: How is there safety? Am I really safe? Krishnamurti: Do not question it yet. Look at it. Otherwise you would not know your name, you would not know how to go to Bangalore, recognize your husband or wife. In that tradition, knowledge, experience, conclusions, there is nothing new, therefore there is nothing disturbing, therefore there is the feeling of complete safety. That is absolutely right. SW: There is nothing to disturb. Krishnamurti: Anything new is disturbing and as the brain cells need order they find order in the past. A: But to come back to your question, what is wrong with that? Krishnamurti: There is nothing wrong in that. I am enquiring into the nature of sensory, visual perception, into the operations of the brain, the mechanism of thought, and how the mind operates; there is safety in sensory perception, image, conclusion, the past. All that is tradition. In tradition there is safety: In the past there is complete security. SW: Security implies struggle. Krishnamurti: Security implies the sense of not wanting to be disturbed. I do not know if you have noticed it: the brain needs order. It may establish order in disorder which is neurosis. It needs order and therefore it will find order in disorder and become neurotic. See this? The brain demands order because in order there is security. SW: That is perfectly clear. Krishnamurti: In tradition there is order. In continuity there is order. The brain seeking order creates security, a harbour where it feels safe. And K comes along with revolutionary ideas and tells you, this is not order, and so there is conflict between you and him. You reduce the new in terms of the old and there find safety, security. Why does the mind do this? The Russian revolution and the French revolution upset the whole established structure but soon the brain created order out of disorder, and there was an end to revolution. A: We have discovered something - that the moment I see something new which creates a disturbance, perception is the instrument by which I convert the new into the old. Krishnamurti: That is the biological process of the brain. It is a biological necessity for the brain, because in that it finds the most efficient way of working. A: Will you examine the inbuilt incapacity of the brain to see and distort the new? Krishnamurti: Wait, Sir. Unless I see that the brain cells themselves under- stand the danger of the past, the danger of seeking security in the past, the brain cells will not see anything new. If they see something new they will translate it in terms of the old. Therefore, the brain cells themselves have to see the immense danger of what they consider security in the past. A: Which means a total change. Krishnamurti: I do not know a thing. I only see sensory perception, images, conclusions, safety in conclusions. It may be a new conclusion, a disorderly conclusion, but there is safety there; however neurotic it is, in that neuroticism there is safety: See the beauty of it. This is the truth and that is why it is beautiful. How is the brain which is insistently demanding security, how is that brain to see that in the past there is no security, but always in the new? The brain cells are seeking security, both in disorder and in order. If you offer a system, a methodological order, the brain accepts it. That is the whole biological process. That is the whole traditional process - security in the past, never in the future, never in the present, but the absolute security in the past. Absolute. And that is knowledge: biological knowledge, technological knowledge and the knowledge which has been gathered through experience. In knowledge there is security and knowledge is the past. So what is the next question? SW: There is a modified continuity in this process. This creates a feeling of progress. Krishnamurti: The moment you have knowledge it can be continued, modified, but it is still within the field of knowledge; the whole thing is there. What is wrong with this? SW: All that you say is fact. However, there is another factor. This is not the whole thing: There is something radically wanting in this. Krishnamurti: What is wanting in this? Go step by step. This is the structure. What is the something which is not quite right? Find out. I will show it to you. SW: There is no permanency. Krishnamurti: What are you saying? Knowledge is the most permanent thing. I see knowledge is necessary, and knowledge is the past and thought is the response of the past and so the mind is always living in the past. So the mind is always a prisoner. (Pause) What does a prisoner talk about? Freedom? Why did you not see it? Being in prison he talks about freedom, moksha, nirvana. He knows his prison is not freedom, but he wants freedom, because in freedom there is joy, there is beauty, there is something happening. His present life is a repetitive, mechanical continuity. So, he has to invent an ideal, he has to invent a moksha, a heaven. There is safety also in the future. Right? So he invents god, he pursues god, truth, enlightenment, but as he invents, he is always anchored to the past. This anchorage is necessary - biologically it is necessary. Can the brain see that knowledge is essential and can the brain see the danger of knowledge which brings about division? Does knowledge bring division? Can it, Sir? Is knowledge the factor that divides? SW: Yes, of course. Krishnamurti: Do not agree. "See." Can the brain cells seek security in knowledge, and know that in knowledge there is danger of division? A: Knowing that knowledge is necessary here.... Krishnamurti: And also knowledge is danger because it divides. SW: To see both at the same time is difficult. Krishnamurti: "See" it at the same time. Otherwise you will not "see" it. A: Knowledge divides what? Krishnamurti: Knowledge in itself is divisive. The known and the unknown. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. Yesterday, which is the past, the today is modified from yesterday and tomorrow is also modified. In that there is division. Knowledge is the "I know you; in that is the image, the conclusion. But you, in the meantime, have changed. My image of you divides us: Knowledge is security; and can the brain cells seeking security in knowledge know that knowledge at one level is necessary and at another level is divisive and therefore dangerous? The factor of dividing is the building of the image. So can the brain cells see that knowledge is necessary to be physically secure? And can the brain cells see that knowledge based on image derived from conclusion is divisive? Then what next? SW: There are two types of image-making. In technological knowledge also there is a recording, and that is also a form of image-making. A: I think we were using the word "image-making" where there is some emotional content. In the other it is not so. As an escape out of this, the projection of freedom comes. Krishnamurti: It knows in this there is no freedom and therefore it has to invent a freedom outside the prison. When you see the whole structure of knowledge, then it is all understood. A: There is a question which I want to ask: Is it that the mind has a capacity to verbalize something which it does not experience, but would like to experience? Krishnamurti: We have not yet finished, Sir. Psychological, technological, biological knowledge is included in the word "knowledge". I see, the mind sees, knowledge is divisive and unifying. In this is the bondage of time. But, the brain cells also know that in this there is no freedom, and they want freedom. In freedom may be the super-security. And that is why man has from immemorial times talked of freedom. But as freedom is not within the prison, man has always thought of freedom outside. And we are saying freedom is here, not outside, right? SW: Desire for freedom, is it a biological characteristic? The desire for super-security is it also not biological? Krishnamurti: So, is there freedom in all the things which thought has built including the thought of freedom? Look at it. In this it cannot find freedom. So it says because thought has constructed this freedom within the prison, therefore freedom must be outside. SW: In other words is there freedom in knowledge? Krishnamurti: Is there freedom in the past? Knowledge is the past. Knowledge is the accumulation of a million years of experience. Does experience give freedom? Obviously not. So is there such a thing as freedom? SW: I do not know. I see freedom is not outside. It is a projection. And yet there is no freedom inside. Krishnamurti: I do not know. I have always thought of freedom outside. All the religious books, practices, have thought of it over there. There may be absolute freedom here. I have got it: I know, the brain knows, thought is aware that it has created this prison. All that thought knows is that demanding security, it has created the prison. And it must have security, otherwise it cannot function. So thought enquires where is freedom? It seeks it somewhere where it is perceivable, where it is not projected, not formulated, not invented, where it is not the projection of the past which is still knowledge. Freedom must be somewhere. A: Is it an act of perception? Krishnamurti: This is an act of perception. Visually I perceive you. Visual perception has created all this. It is this knowledge that has created all this. Knowledge and non-knowledge are still projections of thought. R: What is non-knowledge? A: We say all knowledge, the past is the present and we are thinking of the unknown as freedom. Krishnamurti: Therefore the unknown is the known. It is very simple now. This is the structure of the brain cells with their memories which are responsible for thought. This is the structure of thought. Thought says knowledge is necessary. Thought says, because you have questioned it, there is no freedom either. So what is freedom? Is there such a thing at all? A: We only see that whatever thought produces is not freedom. Krishnamurti: So, what does it say? Is there security in thought? Thought has created all this. Is there security in the very thinking itself? SW: It is thinking which has done all this. Krishnamurti: Therefore, is there security? I have assumed security. I have said I must have knowledge, but is that security? I see wars, divisions, the yours and the mine, the we and the they, my family, your family - is there security in all this? See what I have found? In knowledge there is security, but not in this which is the result of knowledge. So thought says to itself, is there security in the very structure of thinking itself? Right? Is there security in the past? Is there security in tradition? Is there security in knowledge? The brain cells have sought security in that, but is there security? The brain cells have to see for themselves that there is no security there. So what happens? (Pause.) I see there is no security there. It is a tremendous discovery for me. So thought says, what next? I must kill myself, I must destroy myself, because I am the greatest danger. And now, who is the "I" who is going to destroy itself? So, thought again says, "I must not divide". SW: Slay the slayer. Krishnamurti: The prison and the prisoner, the slayer and the slain. So, is there an ending of "myself" without division? Division means contradiction. Is there an ending of myself without effort? And in that is the quality of sensitivity. To come through all this and to come to the point requires tremendous subtlety, which is sensitivity. So can thought end by itself? All this has needed great attention, great awareness; the moving step by step, never missing a thing, that has its own discipline, its own order. The brain now is completely orderly, because it has followed step by step, seeing its own logical attitudes, searching into things that have no security, seeing that it has sought security in division. Now it sees that in division there is no security, therefore, every step is a step in order and that order is its own security. So, order is perception of things as they are. Perception of what you are, not my conclusion of what you are. I say perception is seeing things as they are and I cannot see things as they are if I have a conclusion. In conclusion, therefore, there is disorder. Thought has sought security in conclusion which has spread disorder. Therefore it rejects conclusion immediately, because, it wants security. Therefore, thought functions only in knowledge where it is necessary but nowhere else because everywhere else the function of thought is to create conclusions, images. There fore, thought comes to an end. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 23 RISHI VALLEY 28TH JANUARY 1971 'STABILITY AND KNOWLEDGE' Questioner SW: I perceive a tree. Then an idea arises from memory which says this is a mango tree. This idea comes in the way of my looking at the tree and so I am not able to see the fact of the tree. This screen of ideas interferes with the present and there is no real perception. Krishnamurti: Are you asking, Sir, what is relationship? What is the relationship between the observed and the observer? What does it mean to be related, to be in contact with? Relationship means to be related: the relationship between two people; the relationship between the concept, the ideal and the conceiver, the maker of the ideal; the relationship of the one with the many; the relationship between one thought and another thought and with the interval between thoughts; the relationship between the present and the future as death; the relationship between the world and myself; all that is involved in relationship, is it not? I may renounce the world, I may live in a cave but I am still related to my whole background and the background is "me". I think relationship implies all that. (Pause) A: We always think of relationship in isolation, not as a part of the whole. Relationship is always with something. Krishnamurti: Can there be a relationship if there is a centre and an observer to which you are related? When the centre feels it is related to something, is that relationship? A: It has been pointed out that it is only because I feel related to something that the "I" as the centre is strengthened. The centre assumes a cohesive character only through its fragmented parts. Krishnamurti: How do we discuss this? Let us see. Where do we begin with this vast subject? A: Would you start with belief, because belief is the basis of all relationship? Krishnamurti: What does relationship mean to you? A: To be in communication. Krishnamurti: What does relationship mean to you? When you look at me, at her, in what way are you related to me, to her? Are you related? A: I think so. Krishnamurti: Let us examine it. I look at you, you look at me. What is our relationship? Is there relationship at all except a verbal relationship? R: There is a feeling of relationship when there is a movement towards something. Krishnamurti: If both of us are moving towards an ideal, going together to a point, is that relationship? Can there be relationship when each one is in isolation? SW: The first question you asked was, can there be relationship if there is a centre? Krishnamurti: If I have built a wall around myself, consciously or unconsciously, a wall of resistance, of self-protection in order to be secure, in order not to get hurt, to be safe, is there any relationship at all? Do look at this. I am afraid, because I have been hurt physically as well as psychologically and my whole being is wounded and I do not want to be hurt any more. I build a wall around myself, of resistance, of defence, of "I know, you do not know", to feel completely safe from being further hurt. In that what is my relationship to you? Is there any relationship? A: What do you mean by relationship in our daily normal life? Krishnamurti: Why do you ask me? Look at yourself. In your normal, daily life, what takes place? There is the going to the office, being bullied, insulted by someone at the top. That is your relationship. With your wounded pride you come home and your wife says you are this, you are that, and you further withdraw and you sleep with her - have you any relationship? A: That means when the centre is there, there is no relationship at all. R: But there is ordinary goodwill. Krishnamurti: But is there goodwill if I have got this wall of resistance, this enclosure within which I live? What is my goodwill towards you? I am polite. I keep a distance. I am always inside the wall. SW: Even in the life of an ordinary man, there are some relationships which are not always from behind a wall. A: You say there is no relationship. The fact is I am related in this way because of a feeling of commitment. There is commitment to one another. I am not acting in self-interest, but only in the interest of the other. Krishnamurti: You say I am acting in the interest of the other; is that so? I follow the leader who hopes to revolutionize society, inwardly and outwardly, and I follow him and obey. I commit myself to a course of action, which both the leader and I have agreed as necessary. Is there a relationship between me and the leader who is working for the same end? What does relationship mean: to be in contact with, to be in close proximity? A: The crux of this relationship is utility. Krishnamurti: Our relationship is based on a utilitarian relationship. R: I see if you apply this test, that there is no relationship. Krishnamurti: You are not answering the deeper issue, which is, as long as there is the observer who is committing himself to a course of action, is there a relationship between you and me? A: Is relationship then only an idea? Krishnamurti: An idea, a formula, a pattern, a goal, a principle, an utopia we both agree upon, but is there a relationship? A: Is there no relationship between two people? Krishnamurti: It is really an enormous problem. As I said, what is relationship between one thought and another, one action and another? Or is action a continuous movement, and therefore in action there is no linking and, therefore, one action is not related to another? Look, Sir, am I related when I look at that tree? Relationship is a distance between me as the observer and the tree. The distance may be 5'-2" or a 100 yards, but where there is the distance between the observer and the observed, is there any possibility of relationship? I am married and I have built an image of my wife and she has built an image of me. The image is the factor of distance. Is there any relationship with my wife except the physical? All of us co-operate in order to do something. To do something brings us together but I have my own worries, she has her own agonies - we are working together in that but are we related, though we are working together for an idea? A: Sir, this point of working together has been understood but not the other. Krishnamurti: Just a minute. To build the rocket, I believe, it took three hundred thousand people, each man technologically working to create the perfect mechanism. They built a perfect rocket and each man put aside his idiosyncracies and there was what is called co-operation. Is that co-operation? You and I work in order to build a house. We both have a common motive, but you and I are separate human beings. Is that co-operation? When I look at a tree, there is distance between me and the tree and I am not in relationship with the tree. That distance is created, not by physical space, but the distance created by knowledge. Therefore, what is relationship, what is co-operation, what is the factor of division? SW: Images in one form or another divide. Krishnamurti: Go slow. There is that tree. I look at it. The physical distance between me and that tree may be a few yards, but the actual distance between me and that tree is vast. Though I look at it, my eyes, mind, heart, everything is very very far away. That distance is incalculable. In the same way, I look at my wife and I am very far away. In the same way I am very far away in co-operative action. SW: Is the word, the image, interfering in all this? Krishnamurti: We are going to find out. There is the word, the image, and the goal towards which both are co-operating. What is dividing is the goal. What is dividing you and me is the goal. SW: But there is no goal with regard to the tree. Krishnamurti: Just stay there. Do not jump. We think working for a goal together has brought us in contact. In fact the goal is separating us. A: No. How can you say the goal is dividing us? Krishnamurti: I do not know. I may be wrong. We are investigating. You and I have a goal; we work together. SW: Is it a question of becoming? Krishnamurti: Do look at it. I say goals divide people. A goal does not bring people together. Your goal and my goal are separate; they have divided us. The goal itself has divided us, not co-operation, which is irrelevant to the goal. SW: I see one thing, where two people come together for the joy of something, that is different. Krishnamurti: No. When two people come together out of affection, love, joy, then what is action which is not divisible, which does not divide? I love you, you love me and what is action out of that love? Not a goal? What is action between two people who love? A: When two people come together in affection it may produce a result but they are not coming together for the result. Therefore, in any such coming together there is no division. Whereas if two people come together with a goal, that is a divisive factor. Krishnamurti: We have discovered something. Do go into it. I see that when people come together with affection when there is no goal, no purpose, no utopia - then there is no division. Then all status disappears and there is only function - then I will sweep the garden because it is part of the needs of the place. R: Love of the place.... Krishnamurti: No, love. Not love of the place. You see what we are missing. Goals divide people; a goal being a formula, a goal being an ideal. I want to see what is involved. I see what is involved. I see as long as I have a goal, a purpose, a principle, an utopia, I see that very goal, that very principle divides people. Therefore, it is finished. Then I ask myself how I am to live, to work with you and without a goal? I see that relationship means to be in close contact so that there is no distance between the two. Right? And I see that in the relationship to the tree and myself, the flower and myself, my wife and myself, there is a physical distance and there is a vast psychological distance. Therefore, I see I am not related at all. So what am I going to do? So I say identify with the tree. Commit yourself with the family; give yourself over; de-own yourself in the goal and work together. All the intellectuals say the goal is more important than you, the whole is greater than you, so give yourself over, be completely involved with your wife, with the tree, with the world. What am I doing? I love nature. I commit myself to the world of nature, to the family and to an idea that we must all work together, for an end. What is happening, what am I doing in all this? SW: Isolating myself. Krishnamurti: No, Sir, look at what is happening. A: The fact is I am not related. I struggle to build a relationship, to bridge the gap between thought and thought. I have got to build this bridge between thought and thought because unless I do this, I feel absolutely isolated. I feel lost. Krishnamurti: That is only a part of it. Go into it a little more. What is happening to my mind, when my mind is struggling to commit itself to everything - to family, to nature, to beauty, to working together? SW: There is a lot of conflict there, Sir. Krishnamurti: I realize as "A" has pointed out, I am not related to anything. I have come to that point. Then, not being related to anything, I want to be related, therefore, I commit myself, therefore, I involve myself in action and yet the isolation goes on. So, what is going on in my mind? SW: Death. R: There is a constant struggle. Krishnamurti: You see you have not moved away from that point. I am not related and then I try to be related. I try to identify myself through action. Now what is taking place in the mind? (Pause.) I am moving into peripheral commitment. What happens to my mind when it moves on the outside all the time? SW: The mind gets strengthened. A: I am escaping from myself. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Do look at it. Nature becomes very important, the family becomes very important, the action to which I have completely given myself over becomes all important and what has happened to me? It has completely externalized everything. Now, what has happened to the mind that has externalized the whole movement of relationship? What happens to your mind when it is occupied with the external, with the periphery? SW: It has lost all sensitivity. Krishnamurti: Do look at what happens inside you. In reaction to the externalization, you withdraw, you become a monk. What happens to the mind when it withdraws? SW: I am incapable of spontaneity. Krishnamurti: You will find the answer. Look in there. (Pause) What happens to your mind when you withdraw or when you are committed? What happens when you withdraw into your own conclusions? It is another world. Instead of one world, you create another world which you call the inner world. SW: The mind is not free. Krishnamurti: Is that what is happening to your mind? A: It is always committed. Krishnamurti: The mind is committed to the outward phenomena and the reaction to that is the inward commitment, the withdrawal. The inward commit- ment is the reaction of your own world of imagination, of mystical experience. What happens to the mind that is doing this? R: It is occupied. Krishnamurti: Is that what is going on? She says it is occupied, is that all? Put your guts into it. The mind externalizes its activity and then withdraws and acts. What happens to the quality of the mind, to the brain which is withdrawing and externalizing? A: It does not face the fact. R: There is a great fear. It becomes dull. SW: It is not free to look. Krishnamurti: Have you watched your mind when it is externalizing all action outwardly and all action inwardly? It is the same movement - the outer and inner. It is like a tide going out and coming in. It is so simple is it not? What happens to the mind going out, coming in? A: It becomes mechanical. Krishnamurti: It is a mind that is completely without any bearing, completely unstable, a mind that has no order. It becomes neurotic, unbalanced, disproportionate, inharmonious, destructive, because there is no stability in the whole movement. A: It is restless. Krishnamurti: Therefore, there is no stability. Therefore what happens? It invents another outside action or withdraws. And the brain needs order, order means stability. It tries to find order out there in relationship and does not find it; so it withdraws and tries to find order within and again is caught in the same process. Is this a fact? (Pause) The mind tries to find stability in co-operative action about something. The mind tries to find stability in the family, in commitment and does not find it and so translates, seeks relationship with nature, becomes imaginative, romantic which again breeds instability. It withdraws into a world of infinite conclusions, utopias, hopes and again there is no stability and, therefore, it invents an order in that. The mind being unstable, narrow, not rooted in anything, gets lost. Is that what is happening to you? R: That explains the cult of the beautiful. Krishnamurti: Cult of beautiful, cult of the ugly, cult of the hippies. Is that what is happening to your mind? Be there. Do not accept what I am saying. So, a mind that is not stable, in the sense of firm, deeply rooted in order, not an invented order - for an invented order must be death; such a mind is the most destructive mind. It goes from communism to the guru, to Yoga Vashista, to Ramana Maharishi and back again. It is caught in the cult of the beautiful, the cult of the ugly, the cult of devotion, of meditation and so on. How is the mind to be completely still? From that stillness, action is entirely different. See the beauty of it, Sir. A: That is the dead-end of the mind. Krishnamurti: No, Sir. I am asking myself, how is this mind to be completely still? Not stability in the sense of hardness, but a stability that is flexible. A mind that is completely stable, firm, deep, has its roots in infinity. How is that possible? Then what is the relationship with the tree, with the family, with the committee? I realize my mind is unstable and I understand what it means. I know now for myself, I have understood for myself that this movement is born of instability. I know that and so I negate that. And I ask what is stability? I know instability with all its activity, with all its destruction and when I put that away completely, what is stability? I sought stability in family, in work, and I have also inwardly sought stability in withdrawal, in experience, in knowledge, in my capacity, in God. I see I do not know what stability is. The not knowing is the stable. The man who says "I know" and therefore, "I am stable" has led us to this chaos. The people who say we are the chosen ones, the vast number of teachers, gurus have said "I know". Rejecting all that, rely on yourself. Have confidence in yourself. And when the mind puts away all this, when it has understood what is not stable and that it cannot know what is true stability, then there is a movement of flexibility, of harmony, because the mind does not know. The truth of not-knowing is the only factor from which one can move. The truth of that is the stable. A mind that does not know is in a state of learning. The moment I say I have learnt, I have stopped learning and that stopping is the stability of division. So, "I do not know". The truth is "I do not know". That is all. And that gives you a quality of learning and in learning there is stability. Stability is in the "I am learning, not I have learnt". See what it does to the mind. It completely unburdens the mind and that is freedom; the freedom of not-knowing. See the beauty of it -the not-knowing, therefore, freedom. Now what happens to the brain which functions in knowledge? That is its function, is it not? To function from memory to memory. In knowledge the mind has found tremendous security and biologically that security is necessary. Otherwise it cannot survive. Now, what happens to the brain that says I really do not know anything except the biological knowledge of survival? What happens to the rest of the brain? The rest of the brain before was tethered. Now it is not occupied. It will act but it is not occupied. That brain has never been touched. It is no longer capable of being hurt. There is a new brain born or the old brain is purged of its occupations. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 24 BOMBAY 6TH FEBRUARY 1971 'THE BRAIN-CELLS AND MUTATION' Questioner P: We have not dealt so far with what seems to be the essence of your teaching and that is the problem of time, the silencing of the brain cells and what happened to the processes that operated in Krishnamurti. I am putting the three together because as one observes the horizontal movement of time, that is the life of K, one sees the boy born with his tradition of Brahminism, going through a certain preparation in the Theosophical Society, being initiated, writing certain books like The Search and The Path; books in which enlightenment is looked upon as an end, as a fixed point. In all these earlier books there is presumed to be a state which has to be reached and there is a great struggle through centuries towards it. Suddenly a change takes place in K; he negates salvation, eternity as a fixed point and so destroys the horizontal movement of time as such. Now what exactly took place? If we could understand and see as if through a microscope what happened to Krishnamurti, if we could examine what happened to his brain cells which contained this horizontal movement of time, it might be possible for us to understand time and mutation in relation to the brain cells. Krishnamurti: I understand. Do you understand, Sir? D: Yes Sir. A very important question. Krishnamurti: I wonder if that so-called horizontal movement was not a very conditioned and superficial movement? The young man, repeated what he was taught and at a given moment, there was a break. You follow? P: No, I do not. What is meant by a superficial movement of conditioning? Krishnamurti: That is, the boy accepted, repeated, walked along the path laid down traditionally and theosophically. He accepted it. P: All of us do just that. Krishnamurti: All of us do it in varying degrees. The question is why did he pursue that journey? P: No. The question is what was it that triggered that which suddenly made him say that there is no fixed point? Krishnamurti: Look at it as if "K" is not here. He is dead. How would you answer this question. I am here and so may answer you or may not, but if I were not here how would you answer it? P: One way of doing so would be to examine what you have said, along with the influences which have operated on you, at the time, to see at what point the break took place and what were the crises, inward or outward, that have been recorded, to produce that break. Krishnamurti: But suppose you knew nothing of all that, and yet you had to answer the question seriously now, what would you do? What you say would take time, investigation. How would you find out now? How would you find out if you were faced with this problem that there was a young man who followed the traditional path, the idea of a fixed point, the fixed goal, using time, evolution, and at a given point he broke away. How would you unravel it? D: It is like this. We boil water under heat. Up to a hundred degrees it is uniform and then there is complete transformation. Krishnamurti: But to come to that point takes time. P: If I did not have the historical background, the only way of investigation would be to see whether this process is possible within my consciousness. D: I was driving at something else. The traditionalist would say there is a process which, like the boiling point of water, leads to transformation. Tradition only helps to take you up to the boiling point. You can negate tradition but the necessity of tradition up to a point is there. P: If the historical data were not available of "K" being put through various sadhanas and one were just given the fact of this phenomenon of "K", the only way to investigate would be through self-knowing. D: How would you explain the phenomenon? F: You seem to be creating a relationship between the former state of development and the present state of being. Is there a relationship between the two? You say one leads to another, one before another and you are arranging it in time. P: The phenomenon of "K" is that he was born of Brahmin parents...the whole history we know. I look at his background, I notice that up to a point K talked of time, of salvation as a final point and suddenly the whole thing was negated. Krishnamurti: "F" says why do you relate this movement, the horizontal movement to the vertical movement? There is no relationship between the two. Therefore keep the two separate. P: When I look at "K", I look at the whole background. Krishnamurti: Look but do not relate the two. P: The question is if what you say has to be meaningful, it is essential to under stand this process of time and the freedom from it. I therefore ask the question: What triggered it in you? If you tell me it happened, I will say all right. If it happens, it happens, if it does not, it does not. I will continue my life. F: There is no trigger. P: A certain brain made certain noises and suddenly started making other noises and "K" has been saying the brain cells themselves are time. Do not let us get away from that. So the brain cells of "K" which were time, underwent some kind of mutation. Krishnamurti: I will show you very simply. The cultivation of a brain, of any brain takes time. Experience, knowledge and memories are stored up in the brain cells. This is a biological fact. The brain is the result of time. Now this man at a point breaks the movement. A totally different movement takes place, which means, the brain cells themselves undergo mutation. And "P" says you must answer and say what took place; otherwise what happened was merely chance. D: If it is chance, then we will accept it. B: An answer by Krishnaji may help us to bring about a mutation in ourselves. S: Two explanations are possible. One is the theosophical explanation that the Masters were looking after "K" and so he was untouched by experience. Another explanation is that of reincarnation. D: When "K" says that the boy K was not touched by experience, how does he know? The boy wrote The Path, The Search; I will not go into the end product where he was not touched. Krishnamurti: Just leave that for the moment. How did it happen? What is your answer? Given these facts, faced with them, how do you answer this? B: Sir, how can we answer the change in you which took place in 1927? Mrs Besant has said that the two consciousnesses would not be merged. We do not know. You alone can say what took place. We have no personal knowledge nor the capacity to know. Krishnamurti: Let us investigate it together. F: I will put it this way. The man woke up into another state. If you posit a causal link between the past and the present then what you say is so. One does no lead to another. There is no connection. P: I say the brain cells themselves cannot comprehend time which is not a horizontal movement. Unless this is understood, we cannot explore at very great depth into the problem of time. Krishnamurti: Let us explore. First of all, is there time involved at all? If you ask me how did this happen to me, I really do not know. You understand? But I think we can investigate it together. If you ask me "did you go for a walk last night?" I would say yes. Whereas if you ask me "how did this happen to you?", I really could not say how. What is wrong with that? P: In itself, it is all right. But we are trying to comprehend the essential nature of this time movement and non-time movement -leave yourself out of it, it is important that we investigate into the nature of time, not at the level of chronological time and psychological time for we have gone into that sufficiently. Krishnamurti: Begin with perception; is seeing involved with time? P: What happens to the brain cells in the process of seeing? Krishnamurti: The brain cells in the process of seeing, either respond in old terms or are held back in abeyance; they hold themselves back in abeyance without the past. P: You say that in perception which is instantaneous, the brain cells hold back. If they are not operating, do they exist? Krishnamurti: They do, as the storehouse of knowledge which is the past. The brain cells, we all agree, are the storehouse of memories, experience, knowledge which is the past. That is the old brain. In perception, the old brain does not respond. P: Where is it? Krishnamurti: It is there. It is not dead. It is there because I have to use knowledge to think. The brain cells have to be used. P: What operates then? If the brain cells are not operating, what is operating? Krishnamurti: A totally new brain. The old brain is full of images, memories, responses and we are used to responding with the old brain. You say perception is not related to the old brain. Perception is the interval between the old response and the response which is new, which the old does not yet know. In that interval there is no time. F: There is a contradiction. In psychology, sensation is itself direct. In the interval between sensation and perception, memories jump in and distort. So sensation is timeless but the interval is time. Krishnamurti: Let us get this clear. You ask me a question. The old brain responds according to its information, according to knowledge; if the old brain has no knowledge, no information, there is an interval between the question and answer. F: The interval is due to the sluggishness of the brain cells. Krishnamurti: No. F: Memory traces continue in the brain. Krishnamurti: You ask me what the distance is between here and Delhi. I would not know. No amount of my thinking with the brain cells would help. The fact is not registered. If it were, I would then think about it and answer. But there is no knowing. In that no-knowing, there is a state in which time does not exist. D: No amount of waiting will make me know. Krishnamurti: The moment I know, the knowing is time. P: You have said two or three things; you have talked of a new mind. The question is what has happened to the old brain? Krishnamurti: The old is quiet. P: Has it existence? Krishnamurti: Of course it has; otherwise I cannot speak the language. P: The problem is of time as a horizontal movement which has continuity - I am asking the question; the moment you say the other continues to exist - Krishnamurti: Otherwise, I cannot function. P: When the new exists, the other, the old, does not. Krishnamurti: Perfectly right. Hold on for a moment. Let us call it for convenience sake, the old and the new brain. The old brain has, through centuries, collected all kinds of memories, registered every experience and it will function on that level all the time. It has its continuity in time. If it has no continuity, then it becomes neurotic, schizophrenic, imbalanced. It must have sane, rational continuity. Now that is the old brain with all its stored-up memories. Such continuity can never find anything new because it is only when something ends, that there is something new. F: Continuity of what? When you say continuity, it has a movement. Krishnamurti: It is adding, taking away, adjusting; it is not static. D: There is a circular movement; it is a continuity. Krishnamurti: First let me see this continuity, the circular movement, as a repetition of the old. At a given point of time I call it the new, but it is still the old. I hanker for the new and invent the new within the circle. P: There is the new which is a rearrangement of the old and there is the "new', which is not a rearrangement of the old. What is the other new which is not the invention of the old? Is it recognizable, is it perceivable? Krishnamurti: It is perceivable but not recognizable. P: So it is not an experience? Krishnamurti: It is a perception without the observer. D: But not in terms of the past. Krishnamurti: Perception means something new. F: Sensation is without the past. Sensation is not loaded. It is direct. Krishnamurti: The mind which has become mechanical craves for something new. But the new is always within the field of the known. You may call the movement within the field, horizontal, circular, infinity, but it is always within that field: I want the new in terms of the old. "P"'s question was about the brain, which is the result of time, experience, knowledge; what happens to that brain when there is a perception which is new, in which there is no experience, no observer; in which perception is not an experience to be stored up and remembered and therefore to become knowledge. F: The brain does not respond: Krishnamurti: What makes it not respond? How does this happen? P: We should leave everything and remain here, because something of vital significance is happening here. We have still not got the feeling of it. I am listening to you. I am attentive. In that state of attention there is nothing else but sound and movement. Can I understand in that state what has happened to the whole weight of the past? Krishnamurti: It is fairly simple. I understand the question. The past is in continuous operation; it is registering every incident, every experience, the conscious and the unconscious: Everything is pouring in, the sound, the seeing: P: The brain cells are acting independent of whether I am conscious or unconscious. Krishnamurti: Yes. Now when that brain is in operation, it is always acting from the past. First of all, what is wrong with it? P: If you observe it, it is like ripples being thrown up, thought as ripples, and suddenly I am attentive and there are no ripples. Krishnamurti: In that state of attention, there is perception. That state of attention is perception. D: When I see the fact that my brain is registering everything and I suddenly realize that it is going on without the observer, that annihilates me. If it goes on without me then I am finished. Krishnamurti: It is like a recording machine that is registering everything: D: Why do I need to call it a machine? It is a wondrous thing. And I do not know the why and how of it. Krishnamurti: You have heard that noise of the horn blowing. The brain cells have registered it. There is no resistance or acceptance. D: There is more to it. Krishnamurti: Go slow: This brain is a machine which registers. It is a tape-recorder that is registering everything all the time. You come along and challenge the brain. It will respond in terms of like, of dislike, you are a danger and she is not a danger. In that instant is born the "me". It is the function of the brain to register: D: That is a partial statement. That it registers is a fact but there may be something more to it. Krishnamurti: You are jumping ahead. The function of the brain is to register, to record. Every experience, whether conscious or unconscious, every sound, word, every nuance, is going on irrespective of the thinker as a separate entity. Resisting that noise which is unpleasant, listening to some flattery, to some insult, wanting more or less - out of this registration emerges the "me". P: When the registration takes place, I am conscious of the sound. Krishnamurti: Which is what? That it is pleasant or unpleasant. At the moment of experiencing, there is no "I" in it at all. P: There is a state with the sound and there is a state without the sound: Krishnamurti: Now comes the new action. I register that noise -the hideous noise, the ugly noise - there is no response to it. The moment there is response, that response is the "I". That response increases or decreases according to pleasure, pain, suffering. Now, "P"s question was how is that brain which is doing all this automatically, mechanically, all the time, how is that old brain whether it is running horizontally or in circles, how is that brain ever to see without the registerer or registration? P: We have gone over this. I want to take it further from there. We listen. Sound passes through us. There is attention. In that state, for a second, horizontal movement has come to an end. What has happened to the old brain? Krishnamurti: But it is still there. P: What do you mean it is still there? Krishnamurti: Look at it. See what has happened. There is that child crying. The sound is being registered, the child's cry, why the mother does not look after it, all the rest of it. P: Do you record all that? Krishnamurti. No. I am purely listening. There is complete listening. Now what happens in that listening? What has happened to the old brain in that listening? Have you understood the question? We are taking the journey together. (Pause) Let me put it differently. What is the essential need of a brain? (Pause) Must it not feel safe, secure, to function? One sees the brain needs security. Then some event happens and the brain sees the fact that to have presumed that there was security, comfort is not true. D: The brain cannot see it. F: We take the brain as an accumulation of impressions and storehouse of memories and so on, but the storehouse of memories is outside the brain and the brain is only a lens. P: Why do we not observe our own minds at this moment, instead of talking of the brain in the abstract? Krishnamurti: Listen - your brain demands security; it needs a great sense of protection, both physical and psychological. That is all I am saying. That is its function. That is the essential point. D: What is the basic query? P: The basic query is that when there is this horizontal movement of the mind as time, as memory, as brain cells operating, what is it that makes the "other" possible and what takes place when the "other" is? Krishnamurti: I will tell you. The brain cells need security, protection, safety to survive. They have survived for millions of years. Now what takes place? In order to survive, the brain cells say I must have nationalities, which brings disaster. So in its search for security, the mind is always experimenting and gets stuck - the guru, nationalism, socialism - it gets stuck and has to be rooted out. Because the basic thing is that it wants safety and survival and therefore it has invented a time sequence of survival - horizontal or circular. When the basic necessity is granted, what happens? Is the perception in terms of security not entirely different? D: It is the demand for security that resists the question you are asking. Krishnamurti. No, I have got my security. So far for seventy years it has not been damaged because it says survival, not at the price of illusion. It says do not invent beliefs or ideas for in them there is no security at all. Wipe them out because they are illusory. Therefore it is completely secure; not in anything, but in itself it is secure. Before it sought security through something - through family, through god, egotism, competition, through seeking. Security through something is the greatest insecurity. It discards that. Therefore it can perceive. Because it has no illusions, motives, formulas, it can perceive. Because it does not seek any security, it is completely secure. The mind is then free of illusions; illusion not in the sense of Sankara, but just the illusion that I will find security in family, in God, in knowledge which is the past. Now what is there to perceive? "It" is perceiving. F: We are as we are made; we know we are at the mercy of the psychosomatic body and there we are very insecure. And there has to be a different approach to this. It is something very vulnerable because our bodies are so fragile. Krishnamurti: So I will protect the body. There is no egotism involved in it. F: Vulnerability is connected with ego. Krishnamurti: I will protect the body without the ego. I will wash it, look after it. We think we protect the body through the "I". Once we grant deeply the necessity for complete survival, for protection, for safety for the brain, we will solve all the other problems. Let us put it in this way: Is perception related to the brain cells which demand security, survival at any price? P: My mind does not function in this way. Therefore I find it very difficult to listen. I am trying to work at a microscopic examination of the mind to see whether it is possible to arrive at a point when actually the brain cells cease functioning. Questions of security or of non-security have no relevance. At this moment if I raise these questions I am lost. Here I am before you and I want to understand this movement of time which is horizontal, to see whether there can be a state of the brain cells ceasing to function. Any queries, questions, answers, away from this will only lead to confusion. Krishnamurti: Are you saying, having finished with what we have said, my brain cells are in perpetual movement in one form or another? P: I say I am listening to you. There is no movement in my mind. Krishnamurti: Why? Because you are listening with attention, attention in which there is no centre to attend, a state in which you are just attending? P: Now I ask in that state, where is the weight of the past? I am asking that question to understand the problem of time, and not anything else. Krishnamurti: When you say I am attending, giving complete attention, is there time in that? P: Because there is no response, how do I measure? Krishnamurti: When there is attention, there is no time, because there is no movement at all. Movement means measurement, comparison; from here to there and so on. In attention there is no ripple, there is no centre, there is no measurement. The next question is, what has happened to the old brain? Keep it there. It is your question. What has happened? (Pause.) I have got it. What has happened? Attention is not disassociated from the brain. Attention is the whole body. The psychosomatic organism is attentive, which is also the brain cells. Therefore, the brain cells are exceedingly quiet, alive, not responding with the old. Otherwise you could not be attentive. There is the answer. And in that attention the brain can function. That attention is silence, is emptiness; call it what you like. Out of that silence, innocence, emptiness, the brain can operate; but not the thinker in terms of seeking security in something. P: Does it mean the whole brain has undergone a transformation? Krishnamurti: No. What has taken place is mutation. The observer is not. P: But the brain cells are the same. Krishnamurti: Watch it. Do not put it that way; then you are lost. Watch it in yourself. Attention means complete attention -body, psyche, the cells; everything is there with life, alive. In that state, there is no centre, there is no time, there is no observer as the "me". There is no time in terms of the past but yet the past exists because I speak the language. I have to go to the room. Right? Then what happens to the brain cells? They are registering but there is no "me". Therefore the "me" which is part of the brain cells is wiped out. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 25 BOMBAY 9TH FEBRUARY 1971 'GOD' Questioner P: Krishnaji, at one level, your teaching is very materialistic because it refuses to accept anything which does not have a referent. It is based on "what is". You have even gone so far as to say that consciousness is the brain cells and that nothing else exists. And that thought is matter, and nothing else exists. Now in terms of this, what is your attitude to God? Krishnamurti: I do not know what you mean by materialistic and God? P: You have said, thought is matter, the brain cells themselves are consciousness. Now these are material things, measurable, and in that sense yours would be part of a materialistic position, in the tradition of the"Lokayatas". In terms of your teaching what place has God? Is God matter? Krishnamurti: Do you understand clearly the word "material"? P: Material is that which is measurable. F: There is no such thing as the material, "P". P: Brain is matter. F: No, it is energy. Everything is energy but that energy is not observable. You can only see the effects of energy which you call matter. The effects of energy appear as matter. D: When she says matter, she probably means energy. Energy and matter are convertible, but still measurable. Krishnamurti: That is, you are saying matter is energy and energy is matter. You cannot divide them to say this is pure energy and this is pure matter. D: The material is the expression or appearance of energy. F: What we call matter is nothing but energy. It is only energy as apprehended by the senses of perception. There is no such thing as matter. It is only a way of talking. D: Energy is E equal to Mc2. P: You see Krishnaji, if we go into any aspect of your teaching, it is based on that which is observable. The instruments of hearing, of seeing, are within the field of sensory apprehension. Even though you may talk of not naming, that which is observable is through the instruments of seeing, listening. The instruments of the senses are the only instruments we have with which to observe. Krishnamurti: We know sensory seeing, sensory hearing, sensory touching and the intellect which is part of the whole structure. Now what is the question? P: In that sense, the teaching is materialistic as opposed to the metaphysical. Your position is a materialistic position. F: If you want to stick to facts, the only instrument we have is the brain. Now, is the brain everything or is it an instrument in the hands of somebody else? If you say there is only brain, it will be a materialistic position. If you say the instrument is materialistic then the teaching is not materialistic. P: The Tantrik position and the ancient alchemist position are in one sense similar to Krishnaji's position. Everything has to be observed. There is nothing that has to be accepted that has not been seen with the eyes of the seer. Seeing this I now ask, "what is your view of God". I feel it is a very legitimate question. F: Can you explain what God is? Krishnamurti: What do you mean by God? We have explained energy and matter and now you ask what we mean by God? I never use the word "God" to indicate something which is not God. What thought has invented is not God. If it is invented by thought, it is still within the field of time, within the field of the material. P: Thought says I cannot go further. Krishnamurti: But it may invent God because it cannot go further. Thought knows its limitations. Therefore, knowing its limitations, it tries to invent the limitless which it calls God. That is the position. P: When thought sees its limitations, it is still aware of an existence beyond itself. Krishnamurti: Thought has invented it. It can only go beyond when thought comes to an end. P: Seeing the limitations of thought is not the knowing of thought. Krishnamurti: So we must go into the knowing of thought and not God. D: When thought sees its own limitation, it practically debunks it. Krishnamurti: When you say limitation, does thought realize it is limited or does the thinker realize that thought is limited? You see the point. Or does the thinker who is the product of thought realize it? P: Why do you draw the distinction? Krishnamurti: Thought has created the thinker. If thought did not exist, there would be no thinker. Does the thinker, observing the limitations, say "I am limited" or does thought itself realize its limitations which are two different positions. Let us be clear in all this. We are exploring. There are the two - the thought and thinker. The thinker, observing thought, sees through reasoning which is the material, which is energy, that energy is limited. In the realm of thought, the thinker thinks this. D: When the thinker says thought is limited, both the thought and the thinker become question-marks. Krishnamurti: No, not yet. Thought is memory, thought is the response of knowledge. Thought has brought about this thing called the thinker. The thinker then becomes separate from thought; at least it thinks it is separate from thought. The thinker, looking at reasoning, at the intellect, at the capacity to rationalize, sees that it is very very limited. Therefore, the thinker condemns reason; the thinker says thought is very limited, which is condemnation. Then he says there must be something more than thought, something beyond this limited field. That is what we are doing. We are taking things as they are. Does the thinker think that thought is limited or does thought itself realize it is limited? I do not know if you see the difference. F: Thought is prior to the thinker. P: Thought can end. Thought can never feel it is limited. Thought can end - through what reason, do not ask. There is no real reason but thought can end. But how does thought feel it is limited? Krishnamurti: That is my point. Does the thinker see he is limited or does thought say, I cannot go any further? You see the point? F: Why do you separate the thinker from the thought? There are many thoughts out of which the thinker is also another thought. The thinker is the guide, helper, censor; he is the most dominant thing. Krishnamurti: Thought has gone through all this and established a centre from which there is the observer, and the observer looking at thought says thought is limited. D: In fact, it can only say "I do not know". Krishnamurti: It does not say that. You are introducing a non-observable fact. First of all, thought is the response of knowledge, thought has not yet realized that it is very limited. What it has done in order to have security, is to put together various thoughts which have become the observer, the thinker, the experiencer. Then we are asking the question: Does the thinker realize that it is limited, or thought itself realizes it is limited? The two are entirely different. F: We know only a state of thinker thinking thought. Krishnamurti: That is all we know. Therefore, the thinker invariably says we must go beyond thought; therefore it questions: Can one kill the mind? Does God exist? F: You are giving existence to the thinker instead of thought. Krishnamurti: The thinker is modifying, adding. The thinker is not a permanent entity as thought is not permanent, but the thinker is adjusting, modifying. This is important. I may be mistaken. It is important to find out whether the thinker sees it is limited or whether thought as idea -idea being organized thought - thinks it is limited. Now, who says it? If the thinker says it is limited, then the thinker says there must be something more. Then the thinker says there must be God, there must be something beyond thinking. Right? If thought itself realizes it cannot go beyond its own tether, beyond its own rooted brain cells, the brain cells as the material, as the root of thinking; if thought realizes that, then what takes place? P: You see, Sir, that is the whole point. If you were to leave your teaching at this point, I would understand. If you were to leave it at this point, that thought itself sees this, the brain cells themselves see it and leave it, then there is a total consistency and logic; but you are always moving, going beyond this and you cannot use any words. Thereafter call it what you like, but the feeling of God is introduced. Krishnamurti: I won't accept the word "God". P: You take us by reason, by logic to a point. You do not leave it there. Krishnamurti: Of course not. P: That is the real paradox. Krishnamurti: I refuse to accept it as a paradox. F: The material of something and the meaning cannot be interchanged. "P" is mixing up the two. Krishnamurti: It is fairly simple what she says: The thinker and the thought - we can see the whole logic of that, of what you say, but you do not leave it there. You push it further. P: Into an abstraction. I say that thought and the thinker being essentially one, man has separated them for his own safety, permanency, security. We are asking the question whether the thinker thinks thought is limited and therefore posits something beyond, because he must have security; or does thought say that whatever movement however subtle, however obvious, reasonable, thought is still limited. But K does not say that. K goes further into abstractions. Krishnamurti: I realize that thought and the thinker are very very limited and I do not stop there. To do so would be a purely materialistic philosophy. That is what many intellectuals in the east and west have come to. But they are always tethered, and being tethered, they expand but remain tied to a pole which is their experience, their belief. Now, if I can answer the question - does thought itself realize the limitations of itself, then what takes place? Knowing thought is energy, thought is memory, thought is the past, thought is time, suffering, then what takes place? It realizes that any movement of thought is consciousness, is the content of consciousness, and without the content there is no consciousness. Now what takes place? Is that observable or not? I do not invent God. P: I do not say that. I never said you invent God. I say up to this point your position is material, rational, logical; suddenly you introduce another element. Krishnamurti: No. Look at it. Thought itself realizes - not the thinker who thinks it cannot and therefore posits superconsciousness, a higher self, God or whatever it will - but thought itself realizes that any movement it makes is within the field of time. Then what happens? Then thought becomes completely silent - this is an observable, testable fact. The silence is not the result of discipline. Then what happens? P: Sir, let me ask you a question. In that state the registering of all noise goes on, the machine which registers, what is that thing? Krishnamurti: The brain. P: The brain is the material. So this registering goes on. Krishnamurti: It goes on all the time, whether I am conscious or unconscious. P: You may not name it but the sense of existence goes on. Krishnamurti: No, you are using the word "existence" but recording goes on. I want to make the difference here. P: Let us not move away. It is not that all existence is wiped out. It would be if thought ends. Krishnamurti: On the contrary. P: Existence; the sense of existence "is". Krishnamurti: Life goes on but without the "me" as the observer. Life goes on, the registration goes on, memory goes on, but the "me" which thought has brought about, which is the content of consciousness, that "me" disappears; obviously because that "me" is the limited. Therefore thought as the "me" says "I am limited". It does not mean the body does not go on, but the centre, which is the activity as the self, as the "me", is not. Again that is logical because thought says I am limited. I will not create the "me" which is further limitation. It realizes it and it drops away. P: Having said that thought creating the "me" is the limitation...... Krishnamurti: Thought creating the "me" and the "me" realizing it is limited and therefore the "me" is not. F: When this happens, why should I name what is going on as thought at all? Krishnamurti: I am not naming anything. I realize that thought is the response of the past. The "me" is made up of various additions of thought which have created the "me", which is the past. The "me" is the past. The "me" projects the future. Now the whole phenomenon is a very small affair. That is all. Now what is the next question? F: What has the state of this hopelessness to do with God? Krishnamurti: It is not a state of hopelessness. On the contrary, you have introduced the quality of hopelessness because thought has said it cannot go beyond itself and therefore it is in despair. Thought realizes that whatever movement it makes it is still within the field of time, whether it calls it despair, fulfilment, pleasure, fear. F: So the realization of the limitations is a state of despair. Krishnamurti: No, you are introducing despair. I am only saying despair is part of thought. Hope is part of thought and that thought says any movement I make, whether it is despair, pleasure, fear, attachment, detachment, is a move- ment of thought. When thought realizes all this is a movement of itself in different forms, it stops. Now let us proceed further. P: I want to ask you a question. You said existence goes on without the "me". What or who proceeds further? Krishnamurti: We have moved away from the word "God". P: If my using the word "God" is very much within the field of thought, I have put it aside. Now I am moving with that. Therefore I am saying if thought as the "me" has ended, what is the instrument of investigation? Krishnamurti: We have come to a point where there is no movement of thought. Investigating into itself so profoundly as we are doing now, so completely, so logically, thought has ended. It is now asking what is the new factor that comes into being which is going to investigate or what is the new instrument of investigation. What is the instrument? It is not the old instrument. Right? The intellect, its sharpness of thought, the quality of thought, the objectivity, thought that has created tremendous confusion; all that has been denied. P: Thought is word and meaning. If in consciousness, there is movement where there is no word and meaning, there is something else operating. What is this? Krishnamurti: We have said thought is the past, thought is the word, thought is meaning, thought is the result of suffering. And thought says I have tried to investigate and my investigation has led me to see my own limitations. Now what is the next question? What is investigation then? If you see clearly the limitations, then what is happening? P: Only the seeing. Krishnamurti: No, seeing is visual and the sensory seeing depends on the word, the meaning. P: After what we have said, there is only seeing which operates. Krishnamurti: I want to be clear. The seeing with sensory perception, you say, is there. We have gone beyond that. P: When you use the word seeing, is it a state where all the instruments are functioning? Krishnamurti: Absolutely. P: If there is one instrument functioning at a time, then it is tethered to thought. When there is seeing and no listening, it is tethered to thought. But when all the sensory instruments are functioning, then there is nothing to be tethered to. That is the only thing one can know. That is existence. Otherwise there would be death. Krishnamurti. We agree, then what is the next question? What is perception then? What is investigation there? What is there to investigate? What is there to explore? Right? What have you to say; you have all become silent? P: When thought has come to an end there is nothing more to investigate. Krishnamurti: When thought comes to an end, then what more is there to investigate? Then who is the investigator? And what is the result of investiga- tion? Now which is it? What is there to investigate, or who is the instrument or what is the instrument that investigates? P: One has always regarded investigation as moving towards a point. Krishnamurti: Is it a forward movement? P: We are trying to investigate God, truth, but as thought has ended, there is no point towards which there can be movement. Krishnamurti: Go slow; do not say anything categorically. All that you can say is that there is no movement, no forward movement. Forward movement implies thought and time. That is all I am trying to get at. When you really deny that, you deny movement, outward or inward, then what takes place? Now begins an investigation of a totally different kind. First of all, the mind, the brain realizes it wants order, security, safety to function sanely, happily, easily. That is its basic demand. Now the brain realizes that any movement from itself is within the field of time and therefore, within the field of thought; then is there a movement at all? Or is there a totally different kind of movement, qualitatively different, which is not related to time, to process, to the forward or backward movements? Now we are asking, is there any other movement? Is there something which is not related to time? Any movement as far as the brain is concerned, is within the field of time, outwardly or inwardly. I see that. The brain realizes that though it may think that it is extended infinitely, it is still very small. Now, is there a movement which is not related to thought? This question is put by the brain, not by some super-entity. The brain realizes that any movement in time is sorrow. So it abstains from any movement, naturally. Then it is asking itself if there is any other movement which it really does not know, which it has never tasted? That means one has to go back to the question of energy. There is human energy and cosmic energy. We have separated energy as human and cosmic. I have always been looking at human energy as separate, limited, incomplete within its limited field. Now the battle is over. Do you follow what I mean? Do you see it? I have always regarded the movement of energy as being within the limited field and separated it from cosmic, universal energy. Now thought has realized its limitation and therefore, human energy has become something entirely different. The division - the cosmic and the human - is created by thought. The division ceases and another factor has entered. To a mind which is not centred within itself, there is no division. Then what is there to investigate or what is the instrument of investigation? There is investigation but not the investigation to which I am used - the exercising of intellect, of reason, and all the rest of it. And this investigation is not intuition. Now, the brain realizes that in itself there is no division. Therefore, the brain is not divided in itself as cosmic, human, sexual, scientific, business. Energy has no division. Then what takes place? We started by asking if thought is materialistic? Thought is material, because brain is matter; thought is the result of the material; thought may be abstract but it is the result of the material. Obviously it is. Few have gone beyond. F: The meaning of the body is consciousness; literally what is the meaning of existence? Krishnamurti: What is the meaning of this room? Let us begin. Emptiness, because emptiness is created by the four walls and in that emptiness, I can put a chair and use the room. F: The room has meaning because "P" lives there. Krishnamurti: Furnishes, lives, fears, hopes, quarrels. F: What is consciousness and you say the content, but I am asking more. What is the meaning, not the description? D: The question of meaning is only for meaning. Krishnamurti: "F" means something more. The meaning of my existence. None at all...... F: Is there no question of your wanting to have meaning? What is the meaning of Krishnamurti? Can you negate the self? Then you are guillotined. The individual within, the censor, existence, consciousness, body; there is the more - the abstract soul; ultimately a soul around which everything impinges. Can you negate that? Krishnamurti: The soul is the "me". P: It is that which is the difficulty. There is a validity in "F"'s question because the self is the most difficult thing to negate. If you attempt to negate the "ego" and the self you never will. But if you proceed as we have just done, that is all that is necessary. F: What is the meaning of all this? Why should the "me" end? The meaning of the atoms is organism, the meaning of organism is consciousness. Why should it stop there? Krishnamurti: It does not stop there. It stops there only when thought realizes its limitations. Let us come back. What is the instrument that is going to investigate, in which there is no separation, in which there is no investigator and the investigated? I see thought has really no meaning. It has meaning only within its small field. Now it asks what there is to discover - not as a discoverer discovering something. What is the movement which is neither inward nor outward? Is it death? Is it the total negation of everything? Then what takes place? What is investigation? When thought ends, we include everything in it; we include the meaning, consciousness, the content of consciousness, despair, failure, success. It is all within that field. When that ends, then what takes place? The brain exists, the recording - the part which is registering. The registering goes on. It must go on, otherwise, it would become insane, but there is the whole, which is totally quiet. Thought is no more involved. Thought does not enter into that field at all. Thought enters into a very small field of the brain. P: It is a fact that we use only a millionth part of our brain. Krishnamurti: There is the other part. F: There is no reason to suppose that the remnants of the brain which are not used, can become anything more than other parts of consciousness. Krishnamurti: No, do look at it. F: Even biologically, you are not correct. The size of the brain which is usable, determines the extent of consciousness If you use more, consciousness will be greater. Krishnamurti: The old brain is very limited. The entire brain is the new which has not been used. The entire quality of the brain is new; thought which is limited, functions in a limited field. The old brain is not active because the limited has ceased. P: You know what you are saying? If you see a little part of the brain as limited, limitation ends. Krishnamurti: No, limitation goes on. P: But because it does not take over the whole part, nor limit itself to itself the rest of the brain, which is not used, becomes operable. Then this is again a totally materialist position. Krishnamurti: Agreed. Carry on further. P: That is all, there is nothing more to discuss. F: I have an objection. Even if the entire brain is used fully, it will still only be consciousness; it will be a tremendously enlarged consciousness. Krishnamurti: Depending if there is a centre. D: If there is a centre, then you are not using the other. F: We have been operating only within the limited. Now if you move into the other, how do you know that that consciousness has not a focalizing tendency? Krishnamurti: Focalizing takes place when thought operates as pain, despair, success, when thought operates as the "me". When the "me" is silent, where is consciousness? F: After that, it all becomes conjecture. You presume the only factor that can project the centre is disappointment, hurt. Thought is limited. And therefore, it projects itself. Why should focalization depend upon limitation? Krishnamurti: Focalization takes place when thought is functioning. P: If thought ceases with its meaning and word, if thought ceases, whatever becomes operable is not recognizable as word and meaning. F: You are becoming very narrow. I am still legitimately questioning the point that frustration is the only point of focalization. Krishnamurti: I included everything, not only frustration but everything in the field of time. Now I see that the brain cells have operated in a very small field and that small field with its limited energy has created all the mischief. The old brain becomes quiet. What we have called quietness is limitation becoming quiet. The noise of that has ended and that is the silence of limita- tion. When thought realizes that, then the brain itself, the whole brain, becomes quiet. P: Yet it registers. Krishnamurti: Of course. Noise is going on. P: Existence continues. Krishnamurti: Existence without any continuance. Then what? The whole brain becomes quiet, not the limited part. F: It is the same thing to us. P: If you do not know the other, and the other is not operable, what becomes quiet for us is only limitation. Krishnamurti: Therefore, that quietness is not quietness. P: This is something new which you are introducing. D: What makes you say we are not using the whole brain? F: I am saying my total brain is functioning but I am not conscious because I am enclosing myself within the limited field. Krishnamurti: Please stop first the movement of thought, then see what happens. D: When the movement of thought stops, things happen on their own and then is the enquiry of what happens necessary? P: I want to ask one question here. You have said that the ending of the limitation of "me" as thought, is not silence. Krishnamurti: That is the beauty of it. P: Let me get the feeling of it. Please say it again. Krishnamurti: I said when thought with its limitations says it is silent, it is not silent. Silence is when the total quality of the brain is still; the total thing, not just part of it. F: Why should the total brain become silent? Krishnamurti: The total brain has always been quiet. What I have called silence is the ending of the "me; the thought which is rattling around. The rattling around is thought. The chattering around has stopped completely. When the chattering comes to an end, then there is a feeling of silence but that is not silence. Silence is when the total mind, the brain, though registering, is completely quiet, because energy is quiet. It may explode but the basis of energy is quiet. (Pause) Now, there is passion only when sorrow has no movement. Have you understood what I have said? Sorrow is energy. When there is sorrow there is the movement of escape by understanding it, by suppressing it, but when there is no movement at all in sorrow there is an explosion into passion. Now the same thing takes place when there is no movement - outward or inward; when there is no movement of silence which the limited "me" has created for itself in order to achieve something more. When there is absolute silent, total silence, therefore no movement of any kind, when it is completely quiet, there is a totally different kind of explosion which is...... P: Which is God. Krishnamurti: I refuse to use the word "God" but this state is not an invention. It is not a thing put together by cunning thought because thought is completely without movement. That is why it is important to explore thought and not the "other". TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 26 BOMBAY 11TH FEBRUARY 1971 'ENERGY, ENTROPY AND LIFE' Questioner D: The other day we discussed God. We also discussed energy and you spoke of human energy and cosmic energy. I will state the scientific position. Scientists have measured energy and have arrived at an equation: E=Mc2, a fantastic figure. This is material energy and biologists have also proved that life-energy is anti-entropic, which means that while material energy dissipates itself, life energy does not. So this movement of anti-entropy is against the material flow of energy which dissipates and ends in dead uniformity. The human being generally moves with entropic energy and, therefore, decays. Scientists have measured even the time span of this energy. The problem is therefore: How can man, being aware of this, be part of the movement of energy that is anti-entropic? Krishnamurti: One can see quite simply, that that which is mechanical wears itself out, given a certain time. D: What is measurable can be manipulated by the mind, by man and that is the why of the atom bomb. This energy, this movement of entropy, dominates the world today. How do we get out of its grip? P: This is a very important point. If there is a movement of energy which does not dissipate itself, which does not end, decay, then from the point of view of the scientist as well as man, it is probably the answer to all the problems of the world. Krishnamurti: So what are you asking? How is man who is caught in the movement of this mechanical decay - it may take a million years or ten million years - how can that decay be put to an end? Or is there a contrary movement? D: And the nature of that contrary movement? Krishnamurti: Let us put that question again simply. Man is caught in material energy, in mechanical energy; he is caught by technology, by the movement of thought - you get the key to it? D: No. Krishnamurti: There is the whole field of technological knowledge and the movement in that knowledge; that is the field in which man lives, which has tremendous influence on him, which is really taking him over, absorbing him; the scientists and the biologists have all measured the energy of that movement and that energy is an energy of decay, an energy of waste. Scientists also say that there is a contrary movement of energy in the opposite direction which is creative energy; the real human energy which is non-mechanical, non-technological. Now, what is the question? D: The modern biologists - Huxley, Chardin - say the species has developed up to man from the smallest cell and in man there is an emergence of consciousness; man as an entity can be conscious of the whole evolutionary process. P: From this another very interesting fact emerges. Chardin says that the next leap forward will come by "a process of seeing" which is the same as the traditional pashyanti. I think it is important to explore this verb which has such a loaded traditional meaning in India. Krishnamurti: We will come to that if we can examine the decaying processes; the energy which is mechanical, which is entropic. We are also trying to find that life-energy, which is non-mechanical energy. What is this energy? D: Biologists say it lies in cultural development, in the destiny of man, not in a new species emerging. A: This question faces modern man at many levels. After the satellites went up, there was a new measurement of the cosmos. We call that the measurable infinite. But man also knows there is the immeasurable infinite. It comes to modern man the moment he gets out of the immediate and gets to an understanding of the environment in the widest sense. Krishnamurti: Quite. They have measured thought. They have measured memory. D: If you flow with material energy you are doomed. It is only inviting the entropic movement. F: You said something - that they have measured thought. Do you think thought is measurable ? Krishnamurti: Yes. F: In what sense do you mean this? Krishnamurti: In the sense that the electrical impulses of thought are measured. F: Thought is the measure of entropy. P: Only that which has a beginning and an end can be measured. Krishnamurti: So there is a movement which ultimately, in its very motion, leads to decay. F: It also leads to radiance and that is the end of entropy. There are those two movements - there is a mechanical movement and an anti-mechanical movement. A: The biologist's approach is very tentative when he comes to consciousness. Whenever he speaks of life-energy, he does not speak with the same precision as the other. There is a recognition that the anti-entropic is the unknown, the un-definable. After having said that there is "the other", "the other" is still unknown. D: One fact is certain. That the life-energy does not move in the direction in which the entropic energy moves. A: Let us take the movement of life-energy as something unknown to us We cannot manipulate it. In the measure that man becomes conscious of the entire evolutionary process in himself, he becomes aware of consciousness. P: I think we are going round in circles. The observable thing is, man is born, lives and dies. The phenomenon of a cyclic movement of beginning and ending of energy is visible and deeply structured in our consciousness - the thing emerging and disappearing, the two manifestations of energy. Is there energy which is not concerned with emerging or disappearing? Krishnamurti: It is the same thing. Do we accept this that there is a beginning and ending of energy? F: Individuals may begin and end, but life does not. It creates. Krishnamurti: Do not bring in the individual yet. There is a movement of energy which is mechanical, which is measurable, which may end, and there is life-energy which you cannot manipulate; it goes on infinitely. We see that in one case there is wastage of energy and in the other there is non-wastage of energy. F: I do not see the other as a fact. Krishnamurti: All right. Let us see the movement of energy which can reach a height and decline. Is there any other form of energy which can never end, which is not related to the energy which begins, continues and withers away? F: That is a legitimate question. D: Is there any form of energy that will not decay? Krishnamurti: Now how are we going to find out? I have got it. What is energy that decays? F: What is the cause of energy you cannot answer. Krishnamurti: What is energy that decays? I did not say what is the cause of energy. P: Material energy decays. Why does it decay? By friction? D: By pressure? Krishnamurti: Is there any other form of energy which does not decay? One decays through friction. Is there any other form which does not decay? P: Not only does it decay but it is friction. I am positing it. Let us investigate. Its very nature is friction. F: No. I do not understand your method. The fact is that there is energy overcoming friction, and energy dissipating in friction. P: You say there is an energy which decays in friction through friction. I say its very nature is friction. All that movement which we call energy, in itself is friction. Show me why it is not so? F: What is friction? P: Friction is contradiction, resistance. F: Why should energy be identified with resistance? P: We say the nature of this which we call energy is friction. D: Energy is the capacity, biological capacity, to overcome resistance, but it dissipates itself in this process. Krishnamurti: Like in a machine. P: So it is manifest as friction. Krishnamurti: So is there an energy which has no resistance at all, and therefore.... P: No. When you say that it does not touch resistance, it is not so. Life is full of resistance. How can you say this? Krishnamurti: Let us go into this. Any energy that meets resistance wears itself out. A car going up the hill without enough power; the energy created by the machine will wear out. Is there an energy which can never wear out, whether you go uphill, downhill, parallel, vertical? Is there an energy which has no friction in itself? And if it meets resistance, it does not recognize resistance, it does not recognize friction. There is another factor to it. Energy also comes into being through resistance, through manipulation. P: The moment energy crystallizes...... Krishnamurti: Do not say that. P: Why, Sir, the human organism is a crystallization. Krishnamurti: The human organism is a field of energy, but do not use the word crystallization. I am keeping it very simple. There is energy that meets resistance and wears itself out. In that whole field, there is the energy brought about through resistance, through conflict, through violence, through growth and decay, through the process of time. Now we are asking, is there any other energy which is not of time, which does not belong to this field? A: Tradition calls it the timeless arrow. F: You are asking whether there is energy which is irresistible? Krishnamurti: No. I only know energy which is in the field of time. It may have a span of ten million years, but it is still in the field of time. That is all we human beings know. And as human beings we are enquiring if there is an energy which is not in the field of time? F: Do you mean, it is energy that does not undergo any transformation? Krishnamurti: Look. I know energy, the cause of energy, the ending of energy. I know energy as the overcoming of resistance, I know the energy of sorrow, the energy of conflict, of hope, of despair; they are within the field of time. And that is the whole of my consciousness. I am asking, is there an energy which is not time-bound, which is not within the field of time at all? Is there energy which may go through the field of time and yet not be touched by time? It is very interesting. Man must have asked this question for centuries upon centuries, and not being able to find an answer he said there was God and put God outside the field of time. (Pause) But putting God outside the field of time is to invite God into the field of time. And therefore all that is part of consciousness. And that decays. It decays, if I may use that word, because it is of time, it is divisible. And my mind which is divisible, wanting to find a timeless energy, proceeds to formulate an energy which it calls God and worships that. All that is within the field of time. So I ask, is there any other energy which is not of time? You understand? D: Yes. Krishnamurti: How do I find out? I reject God, because God is within the field of time. I reject the super-self, the atman, the brahman, the soul, heaven, for they are all within the field of time. Now I ask, is there energy which is timeless? Yes, Sir. There is. Shall we go into it? D: Yes, Sir. Krishnamurti: How do I find out? Consciousness must empty itself of its content. Must it not? D: The question is, I am sitting on a chair, which is my condition of existence. I cannot throw away the chair. Krishnamurti: You cannot throw away the chair, but you can throw away the content which time has created which one calls consciousness. D: The question is, if time is consciousness then there has to be something else. Krishnamurti: Wait. The content makes consciousness; otherwise there is no consciousness. P: May I ask something. Is the total emptying of consciousness not the same as seeing the totality of consciousness? Krishnamurti: It is. Agreed. I do not think I have made myself clear. There is the fact of totally emptying consciousness; there is another fact which is seeing with the totality, with all the content. Seeing the field of time as a total state, seeing the whole field of time - now what does that seeing mean? Is that seeing different from the field of time or has that seeing separated itself from the field of time and then thinks it is free and looks at the field of time which is what we call perception? D: Right, Sir. This perception presupposes a perceiver. Krishnamurti: We go back to the same thing. So the question arises what is total seeing? I see logically, verbally; I comprehend the whole consciousness of man, the whole of it. The whole of it is the content of it and the content of it has been accumulated through time, which is culture, religion, knowledge. Whether it expands or contracts, it is still within the field of time. When it expands, it includes God, not-God, nationalism or no-nationalism. It is the whole movement of consciousness within the field of time. It is time itself. What do you say "D", consciousness is time? D: I have no other instrument but consciousness. Krishnamurti: I am aware of that. I see consciousness is time because the content of it is consciousness and the content has been accumulated through centuries upon centuries. D: Consciousness is conflict, friction. Krishnamurti: We know that. How can my mind look at this total field of time and not be of the field? That is the question. Otherwise, it cannot look. Total perception must be free of time. Is there a perception and seeing which is not of time? What do you say? D: That is our question. Krishnamurti: And if it is not of time, then perception is the life-movement. Perception itself is the life-movement. D: Logically that would be so. A: Can we say perception itself is the life-movement? I do not know anything about it. Krishnamurti: Can my mind, which is of time, which is the content of consciousness - content is the accumulated impressions, the experience, the knowledge in time - can my mind being totally of time, disassociate itself from the total field? Or is there a perception which is not of time and therefore sees the totality? P: What I would say is I just cannot posit the "other". "A" is correct. A: The moment I posit it, it becomes the God of the Upanishads. When you say it, I listen. Krishnamurti: I have not yet said anything. A: All I can say is that seeing that all consciousness is within the field of time, I can remain with it. I am "it". Krishnamurti: You are "it". Somebody comes along and says that movement within the field of time is measurable and he asks is there a perception - he does not say there is or there is not - is there a perception which sees the totality of consciousness which is time? Is there such a perception? That is a legitimate question. P: May I say something? I see you. I see this room. I see the interiority of my consciousness. There is no more than that. I can see. It is a concrete thing. Seeing is concrete. Krishnamurti: Are we wasting time? P: We are not. We have to be concrete. This is seeing. Krishnamurti: I understand "P", Here I am sitting in this room. I see the content of the room and myself in it. Myself is the observer who is conscious of the room, the proportion of room, the space of the room, and I see this through the consciousness which is made up of time. P: I have taken a step back. Because I am seeing not only the length and breadth of the room, I see X as separate from Y; I am seeing. All this is the content of this room. Krishnamurti: That is right. The observer and the observed are within the field of time. That is all. When the observer invents something, that is still within the field of time. So any movement is within the field of time. That is all I know. That is a fact. But knowing that, somebody comes along and asks: Is there a movement which is not of time? And that is a legitimate question. P: I do not know. Krishnamurti: You can put it to yourself. Therefore, it is legitimate, because the very putting of it is legitimate. It may be a wrong question. P: Putting it makes it a fact, not legitimate. D: But it is a question. Question implies something more than a fact. Krishnamurti: Which means, can the mind - I am proceeding from the question - see the totality of itself? Have you understood my question? Can the mind see itself as the field of time - not as an observer seeing the field of time? Can the mind itself become totally aware so that it sees consciousness as time? It is fairly simple. P: I do not see that. What is involved in seeing consciousness as time? We started with this. There is a seeing of this room, the interiority of the self, the not dividing the two, the outer and the inner; that is the totality of time. There is no other totality. A: Seeing the transitoriness is the seeing. P: Where is the transitoriness? That is a loaded word. I just see. D: If you just see then you do not see. The mind is part of time. F: It is so clear. She only sees a section of me. P: You are accepting too easily what Krishnaji is saying. Krishnamurti: I only know one thing: I am the totality of consciousness. P: The totality of consciousness at this moment is the perceiving of the room and the interiority within me. That is all. F: That is not all. P: What else is there? A: The other is seeing me not only as a person but as a vast process. D: When you say "I see", is it a static movement you see or do you see movement as flux? P: I see that. (Pointing) I see you talking the next minute. Where is flux in it? A: Do you mean that the totality of what you perceive is in time? P: I do not say that. I say where does time arise? A: Is it seeing as static or as movement? B: It will not do for us to conceptualize it. P: When I am observing thought, I see it as flux. I see movement. I see thought as movement; I wake up to a thought having been, then again of thought having been, then again of thought having been. And I put these together and say there is movement. When Krishnaji says "perceive this room", I perceive the room, the interiority; there is no perception of time. It is the active present. Krishnamurti: What is it that you are trying to say, "P"? P: Your statement of the perception of consciousness as a movement of time is not valid. If we do not get the concreteness of seeing, we move into the field of the conceptual. Krishnamurti: What you are saying, are you not, is that you perceive when you enter the room, the proportion, the space, the colour, and you perceive consciousness with the same tactile feel? P: Then "A" speaks and I perceive that. Then I connect the two, and thought brings in time. There is no time apart from the connection. Krishnamurti: If there is perception, there is no time. I look and there is no time. P: You asked a question, "Do you see consciousness as the whole content of time?" I questioned that statement - I want to examine it with a microscope. Krishnamurti: My mind is the result of time - memory, experience, knowledge. My consciousness is within the field of time. How can I see that the whole content is within the field of time? P: Because of memory, of thought. Krishnamurti: How can I see that the whole content is within the field of time? Is it a conclusion which we have arrived at just now or is it an actual perception? Let us go slowly. We have said verbally that my mind, the brain, the whole of it is the result of time. Is that a conclusion, or do I see it as a fact and not as a conclusion? Right, Sirs? P: How would you distinguish the two? Krishnamurti: One is a formula, a conclusion, a statement, the other I am finding out. P: I find it very difficult. You know what you are trying to do, Sir? Can there be a perception of an abstraction? The moment thought is not, "what is" is an abstraction. Krishnamurti: Wait. You have drawn your conclusions. I have not come to any. When you say it is an abstraction, it is a conclusion. P: I ask myself, when I say that consciousness is the product of time, is it a statement or is it something I can see? Krishnamurti: Is it a statement with verbal meaning, which I accept, and therefore it becomes a conclusion, or is it an actual fact as this room, an actual fact that the whole of my brain, the whole of my consciousness is this enormous field of time? Is it as concrete as that? P: How can it be as concrete as the other? Krishnamurti: I will show it to you in a minute. I see a conclusion is not a fact, because thought has entered into it and heard this statement and accepts it and makes it a formula and remains with that formula. That is an abstraction. A formula is an abstraction created by thought and therefore it is the cause of conflict. It is the very nature of conflict. I see that very clearly. Now, is there a perception which is not of thought, of the total field of time as the mind? Formulas are the most deadly things. Formulas and concepts are products of thought and, therefore, are all within the field of time. P: Why is it necessary to make this absolute statement at all? Why is it necessary to make an absolute, finite, statement? Krishnamurti. I will show you in a minute. I am enquiring into the field of time. Time, we said, is consciousness. Time is the result of centuries upon centuries of experience. That is my consciousness, and the consciousness is made up of all the content. I hear you state that and thought picks it up and makes a formula of it. I see that the very formula is within the field of time, that very formula is the factor of friction. So I do not touch it. I have negated it. I am now asking myself; have I negated it? Or am I still thinking, feeling that I have negated it? Am I still trying to find a fact which is not within the field of time? (Pause) I am finding something - when thought operates, it must operate within the field of time, it must come to a conclusion and conclusion is part of consciousness; that is all. I now ask myself, is there any movement of thought or am I pretending to myself that there is no movement of thought and only perception? When I come to this room, I see. There is no movement of thought. I just see. The moment thought comes in, it comes into the field of time. Now I am asking, is the mind deceiving itself by saying "I have no formula", but is entrenched in formula; formula being thought, which is consciousness? Or is there a perception which has nothing whatsoever to do with thought? I only know that all consciousness is within the field of time and thought is consciousness. Therefore, I am enquiring - I do not want to deceive myself, I do not want to pretend that I have got something which I have not got. I see whenever thought comes into being, it must create a formula, and the formula is within the field of time. The whole of consciousness is time. I hear you say this. Now is it a formula which I have accepted or is it a fact - the fact being there is a perception of the total movement of thought? P: You see, Sir, these are words which you use - the total movement of thought - what is meant by those words? When you ask whether we have accepted it as a formula, I have neither accepted it as a formula nor is it a fact. It is neither of these. Krishnamurti: But by listening, by examining, by investigating, you say this is so. It is not a question of accepting. Now, move a step further. Is that "it is so", an acceptance of an idea, intellectual and therefore still within the field of time? P: I will never answer that question to you or to myself. Krishnamurti: I am asking it. P: What do I answer? Krishnamurti: You are not asking that question. You know nothing about it. I want to find out whether the mind that is the result of time, hearing that statement, does it accept it as a statement, as a formula, and therefore remains in time, or it sees the truth, it sees the fact. Then what takes place? It is a fact. Nothing more can be said when thought does not arise. I see the room, but the moment thought says it has proportion, colour, beauty, time enters - you follow? In the same way this whole field of time exists only when thought operates. Now am I pretending that this operation is a formula or is it a fact which is realizable, which we can be aware of? Or is thought completely absent, and only aware of time and nothing more? Then what takes place? I am aware of this room without any interference of time. P: At this moment, this instant what are you aware of? Krishnamurti: The mind which is the result of time, hearing what you are saying, that the whole of consciousness is time, accepts that as a formula and says, "yes". the statement "yes" is the perception of a conclusion which is the operation of thought. Therefore, I see that there is still time operating in that sense. So is there an operation of perception without thought? What takes place then? P: What are you perceiving at this moment? (Pause) Krishnamurti: (Makes a gesture brushing one hand over the other) Nothing. That is it. It is logically right. A: When we come, when we hear, the next moment it has become a memory. Krishnamurti: I am not concerned about you at all. Forgive me. I am not concerned whether you see or do not see. I said to you I am going to investigate. I am investigating. You are not investigating. You are merely remaining with the formula. I see this fact. Am I perceiving the formula with a formula, or perceiving without a movement of thought without a formula? Then "P" asks me, in that state what is there to perceive? Absolutely nothing, because it is not of time. That is the factor of life-energy. F: The state which you are just now describing can be called entropy of thought, a state where no movement is possible any more. Krishnamurti: You are not investigating. F: It has not ended here. You are ending it. P: I want to ask another question. You say that there is nothing. Is there movement? Krishnamurti: What do you mean by movement, before I say yes or no? P: From here to there. Krishnamurti: Measurable, comparable. Measurable means movement. The movement, when it is measured, is within the field of time. Right? And you are asking me whether in that nothingness, there is movement? To you movement is measurable and if I say there is, you will then tell me it is measurable and therefore it is in time. P: There is movement in nothingness. Krishnamurti: Which means what? The movement of time is one thing and the movement of nothingness is not of time, therefore not measurable. But it has its own movement which you cannot possibly understand unless you leave the movement of time. And that is infinite and that movement is infinite. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 27 BOMBAY 15TH FEBRUARY 1971 'INTELLIGENCE AND THE INSTRUMENT' Questioner P: I wanted to ask you Krishnaji, if there is one question which needs to be asked by the individual, which would open the door to reality. Can all questions be reduced to the one question? F: Is there such a thing as a door? We cannot ask a question about that, for which there can be no metaphor. Krishnamurti: I think she asks, in the sense of a door, an opening, a breakthrough. F: From your own experience what would you say is breaking-through? There is no point of reference. Krishnamurti: What is the question? P: There are many things which we have discussed during the last few days. Can all these questions converge into one question? Krishnamurti: I think so. F: I would not put it that way. I come to you because in you there is an imponderable quality, a tiny seed of something which makes you entirely different. I do not look for differences in manifestation, but there is in you a tiny little touch of something, that "elseness" of yours - now is there a key to that? Is there a question which opens that up? B: If I may ask, what is it that prevents one from seeing? The difficulty is with us. Last evening when we heard Krishnaji's talk we felt that there was nothing which we would not be prepared to do, if it was in us to do it. Can all that you say be held in one question? To you it is a very simple thing. You have an amazing capacity of converting diversity into a single thing. This convergence has not taken place in us. Could there be some action which would make all questions melt into one question? P: I would further ask, if it were not possible to simplify all questions into one question, is there an instrument and what is that instrument which will make this possible? There is one interesting fact that I have observed in what Krishnaji has been saying in the last few days, and that is, he does not say thought is totally unnecessary. He says thought has a place and thought has no place. There is a region where thought is necessary and there is a region where thought has no function. The mechanism which makes it possible for thought to operate only where it should and not where it should not, without any evaluation, with- out the operation of will, without a doer, without a director, without a trick; that instrument, that mechanism is the essential thing. How does it happen that thought arises only where it legitimately should function and does not impinge into areas where it should not function, because there thought has investment in illusion? Krishnamurti: Now what is the question? P: What is the instrument? How does this happen? We have examined our minds with a microscope. Now we ask under whose command do the brain cells function? What happens to them if there is no one to direct, to command? Krishnamurti: I thought "K" explained yesterday that it is intelligence. D: It is the same thing. Intelligence means instrument. Krishnamurti: Let us keep to the word "intelligence". D: How does it happen? Intelligence functions in different dimensions. The artist, the philosopher use intelligence, but that is not intelligence. Krishnamurti: Intelligence is that quality of mind which can use knowledge, all the vast field of knowledge, but not use knowledge in another field. F: The difference that exists between me and you, is it in the degree of intelligence or is there another factor operating in you? Krishnamurti: "P" asked a question, which is, what is the essential demand in life? And she goes on further to ask whether thought can operate sanely, efficiently in the whole field of knowledge where it is necessary and not operate in another field where it brings chaos, misery? Now what is the thing that can prevent thought from operating so that it does not create misery? Can we tackle this question differently? Can the mind, the totality of the mind, empty itself of everything, of knowledge and non-knowledge; the knowledge of science and language and also the mechanism of thought that functions all the time? Can the mind empty itself of all that? I do not know if I am making myself clear. Can the mind empty itself not only at the conscious level but at the deeper secret chambers of the mind? From that emptiness can knowledge operate and not operate? B: The question then would be emptiness? Krishnamurti: Let us see. Can the mind empty the whole content of itself as the past, so that it has no motive? Can it empty itself and can that emptiness use knowledge, pick it up, use it and drop it, but always remain empty? Emptiness in the sense of the mind being nothing; emptiness which has its own movement, which is not measurable in terms of time. A movement which is in emptiness, which is not the movement of time, that movement can operate in the field of knowledge and there is no other operation. That movement can only operate in the field of knowledge and nowhere else. P: Are they two movements? Krishnamurti: That is why I said that movement can operate only in knowledge; it has no two movements. Please follow. I am just investigating. You are asking a question, which is, that from what you have observed in your talks here, "K" has divided knowledge and freedom from knowledge. Knowledge operating in the field of science in which there must be a certain will, a certain direction, an operative function, a design; and knowledge not operating where there is no place for thought and therefore of will. B: You mean not even thought which is more than will? Krishnamurti: Of course. Let us get the question clear. I am a little bit doubtful of the question. F: It seems sometimes we operate deliberately and sometimes non-deliberately. I can see I do something of which I know nothing, and yet I operate. So there are these two operations: mental and non-mental. The movement of the two are not separate. Krishnamurti: Watch your own mind, "F". You see thought operating always within the field of knowledge. The knowledge brings pain and that knowledge helps man to live more comfortably environmentally. Right? - and that thought also brings misery, confusion. That is a fact. F: I object to the "always". Krishnamurti: Wait. Then you and I ask, is thought necessary? Why does it create misery? Is it possible for thought not to create misery? That is all. Keep it as simple as this. F: My answer to that is the roots of misery are not known to me. The promptings which create misery, I do not know. Krishnamurti: We began with the superficial layers. Now we will go into the secret chambers of the mind. P: Surely we are not positing a state of consciousness where thought will operate at the technological level and at the day-to-day level of action where necessary, and if by some kind of trick, electric shock, all other consciousness as thought were to be wiped away, it would be enough? We are not postulating that surely. Krishnamurti: Of course not. P: But look Sir, the moment you speak of a place where thought can operate legitimately and a place where thought has no legitimate place you are postulating the other - a state which is non-thought. If consciousness is only content, then what is the other? D: I can go into a state of constant euphoria. Is that enough? This can happen through lobotomy. Krishnamurti: Then you become a vegetable. D: Then if that is not so, what else is there in consciousness? F: When you said that thought is consciousness, it is there that I put a question mark? Is thought the entirety of consciousness? Can we say that consciousness is nothing beyond thought? I would question this. Krishnamurti: So we have to go into the question of consciousness. B: We are going back. You used the word "intelligence" in a different way. That word is the key, if we know what it is. P: But this also a very valid question-if content is thought, if all consciousness is content and it is legitimate for thought to function in the field of technology, and all impinging of thought in the psychological direction is pain, then cutting thought away, will it solve the problem? Krishnamurti: No. P: Then what is the "other"? F: Intelligence is different from consciousness. We must distinguish between the two. Intelligence is much vaster than consciousness. We can have unconscious intelligence. P: What is consciousness? Krishnamurti: What is consciousness? There is a waking consciousness, there is hidden consciousness; consciousness of certain parts of me, of the superficial mind, and a lack of total awareness of the deeper layers of consciousness. P: I would say, Krishnaji, that there is a consciousness in which thought operates, then there is a consciousness where attention is and where there is seeing; and a consciousness which is unconscious of thought. I see these three states as they operate in me. Krishnamurti: Three states which are the memory, -P: Being awake when thought is not, - Krishnamurti: Wait, wait. The memory, the operation of memory as thought, as action; then attention, a state of attention where there is no thinker. P: And a state of being asleep when you are not aware of thought nor of attention. Krishnamurti: So you are saying there is the operation of thought, memory, having been and will be. Then there is a state of attention and there is a state in which there is neither attention nor thought, but a sense of being half asleep. P: Half awake, half asleep. Krishnamurti: All this is what you would call consciousness. Right? P: In all these states whether consciously or unconsciously, sensory perceptions are in operation. F: Do not bring in the unconscious. Do not call the unconscious a form of consciousness. D: I wanted to ask whether we cannot include dreams also into it; that is the unconscious part. F: Dreams are dreams because they become conscious. P: The state in which one spends a large part of the day, one goes out, images come and go; that is still consciousness. F: This is a patchy thing. The point is consciousness is not a continuous phenomenon. Krishnamurti: Can we start this way? I am just being tentative -there is consciousness, wide or narrow, deep or shallow. As long as there is a centre which is conscious of itself, that centre may expand or contract. That centre says I am aware or not aware. That centre can attempt to go beyond the limitations which it has placed around itself. That centre has its deep roots in the cave and superficially operates. All that is consciousness. In all that there must be a centre. P: May I ask you a question? Let us be very careful. Would you say there is no operation of consciousness in you? Krishnamurti: We will come to that presently. That is not the point. A: I wanted to ask whether there is such a thing as the matrix in which there is not even a centre, because it is out of that the centre is formed? Krishnamurti: Matrix? A: Matrix is thought; the matrix of temporality. P: Consciousness is that which registers. It is the only thing which distinguishes life from a state of death. As long as there is registering there is no death. Krishnamurti: Are we speculating? Look, let us begin very simply. When are you actually conscious? P: When I am awake, when I am aware. Krishnamurti: I would begin very simply. When am I conscious? P: I am conscious of this discussion. Krishnamurti: Let us keep it simple. When am I conscious? Either through sensory reaction, through a sensory shock, a sensory resistance, a sensory danger, a conflict in which there is pain-pleasure. It is only in those moments that I say I am conscious. I am aware of that lamp, the design; I perceive that there is a reaction and I say it is ugly or beautiful. Is not that the basis of all this? I do not want to speculate. I ask myself "when am I conscious?" When I am challenged, when there is an impact, conflict, pain, pleasure, then I am conscious. D: But there may be no focus at all. Krishnamurti: Wait Sir. I want to start here; otherwise we get lost in theory. This whole phenomenon is going on, whether there is a deliberate awareness or not, this thing is operating all the time. That is what we call consciousness. F: The response to impact. P: You mean there is no photographic consciousness. I see a dust-bin.... Krishnamurti: But you are seeing it. The mind is registering it. That is, the brain cells are receiving all these impacts. F: And in that is there no classification as pain, pleasure? Krishnamurti: Impact as pleasure, pain, conflict, sorrow, conscious, or unconscious, is going on all the time and there may be an awareness of all that at one moment, and at other moments there may not be. But it is going on all the time. So what is the next question? P: This process itself is consciousness and the centre that observes is also part of consciousness. Krishnamurti: What is the next question? B: What is the nature of the unconscious? Krishnamurti: It is still the same. Only it is the deeper layer. B: Why are we unconscious of the deeper layer? Krishnamurti: Because superficially we are very active all the time. B: So the density of the superficial layer prevents our being conscious of the deeper layers. Krishnamurti: I am making noises on the surface. It is like swimming on the surface. So what is my next question? B: Is it possible to integrate the various layers? Krishnamurti: No. P: What is the relationship of thought to consciousness? Krishnamurti: I do not understand this question because thought is consciousness. P: Is there anything else but thought? Krishnamurti: Why do you put that question? P: Because we started with the question that I observed you speak of a region where thought has a legitimate place and a region where thought has no legitimate place - and yet you say thought is consciousness. Krishnamurti: Slowly. Let us stop here. The first question was, is thought part of this whole thing? What is its relationship to consciousness? Consciousness is thought - pain, conflict, registration, memory, remembrance. When the superficial consciousness is making a lot of noise, you come and ask what is the relationship between thought and all that? Thought is all that. P: You have said something just now - thought is part of all that. Then what is the rest? A. All this is consciousness. Thought comes into operation when the "I" wants to localize. Krishnamurti: That is right. F: When the brain is cut off then there is no thought. Krishnamurti: Which is the memory squeezed, held and paralysed. All that we have described, memory, everything, is consciousness. Now thought comes into operation when I am interested in a part of this. The scientist is interested in the material phenomena, the psychologist in his area, because he has limited the field of investigation. Then thought comes as a systematizer. F. Is thought the non-self-consciousness? Krishnamurti: When "P" asks what is the relationship between thought and consciousness, I think that is a wrong question. P: Why? Krishnamurti: There is no relationship between the two because there are no two. Thought is not something separate from all this. P: Is thought part of it or is thought all? Krishnamurti. Go slow. I do not want to say something which is untrue. F: Thought is co-extensive with consciousness. Let us not subdivide. Krishnamurti: "P" asks "F", a very simple question. What is the relationship between thought and all this? F: Which is the "other". She has no business to speak of the two as separate. P: I won't accept this so easily because in everything "K" says the "other is posited. Thought has a legitimate place in the field of technology and it has no legitimate place in the other field and if you were to perform an operation and wipe out thought, it is not enough. Therefore the "other" is posited. A: What I am trying to say is, is there in consciousness space which is not covered by thought? P: Quite right. Krishnamurti: I am not at all sure. I do not say you are not right. So go on. A: I say there is space in consciousness which is not thought and that is part of the human heritage. It is there. Krishnamurti: I do not think in consciousness there is any space. P: I want to put another question to you. When I perceive you and listen to the whole thing operating, there is no movement of thought, but I am totally conscious. I cannot say - Krishnamurti: Why do you call that consciousness? Wait, go slow. "A" says there is space in consciousness. We have to answer that question. P: Whenever you make a statement like that, you immediately come to this that wherever there is space there is a boundary. A: I may be using the wrong word. Krishnamurti: You have used the right word. But we do not see that space cannot be contained in a frontier, in a boundary, in a circle. A: It is not space, if it is held within a circle, a square, a rectangle. In one sense, of course, it is space. Krishnamurti: Where there is a border there is no space. D: According to the scientists, time and space are bound together. Krishnamurti: But when we say consciousness has space, then consciousness has time. Do not call that space. Space exists only when there is time. Time is limitation. Space in the sense in which we use the word does not exist in consciousness. That space is something else. Leave that for the moment. Now what is the next question? P: If we can take it from this point, I ask what is the relationship of thought to consciousness. Is thought contained in consciousness? Krishnamurti: Do not use the word relationship. That means the two; thought means all that. Thought is consciousness. Do not put it in any other way. P: Yes. Thought is consciousness, listening is consciousness, learning is consciousness. If thought is consciousness, is thought not related to seeing as consciousness? Krishnamurti: Put the question this way. Is there a state of mind when there is no learning at all? You see the question? P: You have left us far behind now. F: There are fields in which we operate without consciousness. Most of our relationships are beyond the reach of consciousness. I operate unconsciously. Krishnamurti: I want to go slowly, please. Thought is consciousness, listening is consciousness and learning is consciousness. Listening, seeing, learning, hearing, is part of all this, and memorizing and reacting to that memory is part of all this. P: When any one of these is operating, there is no other. What you then say is understandable. Then there is no duality. Now we take the next step. When each of these operates, it is consciousness. Krishnamurti: And it is not a dualistic consciousness. P: Is it the part operating? Krishnamurti: I would not use the word part. It is the focalizing of consciousness. It is not the whole of consciousness. Look, I say a few words in French or Italian; at that moment there is just that. P: What about the English? Krishnamurti: It is still there. When thought is operating in that specific field, there is no duality. When thought compares that particular operation to another then there is duality. Right? I say how marvellous that lamp is. It is finished. But when thought says I wish I had it in my room, then there is duality. See what has been found, when there is the simple functioning of thought without any motive, there is no duality. P: This again is very difficult - thought is motive. Krishnamurti: No. What is thought? I have a memory of that sunset - I see that sunset. It is recorded at that moment, it is finished. But thought comes along and says.... P: I am saying thought is motive, not the registration, because thought is word, word is loaded, word is meaning. Krishnamurti: There is memory of that sunset, then thought says, I wish it would happen again. In that, motive operates. D: Yes Sir. When you look at that sunset, motive is irrelevant. P: Sunset is an impersonal thing, let us not take that. I am jealous. There is a movement of jealousy as thought. You see Krishnaji, this is in some subtle way connected with the problem of containing - space - time - Krishnamurti: "P", you just now said jealousy. Jealousy is the factor of duality - that is, my wife looks at another man, and I feel jealous because I possess her, she is mine. But if I observe, if I am aware that she is not mine from the beginning, then the factor of jealousy does not enter. She is a free human being as I am a free human being. I allow her freedom. P: I understand that. But we are talking about the structure of thought. Thought arises in consciousness. In itself there is no duality. Krishnamurti: There is duality only when there is the operation of motive, measurement, comparison. In the observation of a lovely sunset, in seeing the light, the shadow, there is no duality. The word "beautiful" may be dualistic in terms of the ugly, but I am using the word without comparison. The moment I say I wish I had it again, begins the dualistic process. That is all. P: We have somehow moved away. Krishnamurti: I will come back, which is, consciousness is perception, hearing, seeing, listening, learning and the memory of all that and the responding according to that memory. All that is consciousness, whether or not focalized. In that consciousness is time; time which creates space because it is enclosed. Let us stop there. In that there is duality, non-duality, the conflicts - I must, I must not - the whole of that field is consciousness. All that is consciousness. And in that there is no space at all because it has boundaries, frontiers, which are limitations. A: There is another factor which I would like to have included. There are the perceptions of various peoples of the world - of the African Continent, of the Latin American Continent; there is some kind of movement constantly going on; there are the findings of the physicists, the biologists - the perceptions and experiences of the world are syphoning into my consciousness. How can we ignore all that? If we only take the "I" and see the source of it, it is not enough: What is this process by which that thing is syphoning into me? The movement of the "I" as thought is something that is constantly being fed and renewed by that. Unless I see this process, I do not understand. Krishnamurti: We said, Sir, the whole of this field of consciousness is the movement of contraction and expansion, a movement of information, knowledge, registration of knowledge, motivation, change, the political theme, what is going on in the Middle East, all that is happening in the environment, is part of me: I am the environment and the environment is the me. In that whole field there is the movement of the me. I like the Arabs and I do not like the Jews - within this consciousness, this comes up - A: I question that. I say when I see all that, I am not even taking sides because there are the African tribes liberated and then caught up in militarism and all that. Krishnamurti: See what happens. Colonialism, freedom from colonialism, the tribe, then the identification with the tribe as the me who belongs to the tribe. A: In this wide canvas we see thought is syphoning into this focus which we call consciousness. Krishnamurti: All that is consciousness. Consciousness creates the mischief by saying, "I like", "I do not like". I see that, I am a witness to this "I like" and "I do not like" also, because that is part of this movement over which I have no control at all. A: I would say that may be so. But that is not the problem. The problem is the identification which gives this weightage to the "I like" and "I don't like", that it builds around it. Krishnamurti: Here I am born in India, with all the environment, all the superstitions, the riches and poverty, the sky, the hills, the economic, the social, the whole of that is me. A: Something more. Krishnamurti: Include the more. A: The more is the entire historical and the pre-historical past. If you include all that, then choice disappears. Krishnamurti: Wait, Sir, I am all that, the past and the present and the projected future; I am born in India with all the culture of 5000 years. That is all my point. That is what I call consciousness. A: It is wider; it includes America, the whole world - Krishnamurti: But choice arises when you say you are a Hindu and I am a Muslim; when there is focalization through identification, there is then choice. P: Let us come back to what we were saying. All this is consciousness and the other is also a fact that when thought operates, thought is consciousness, listening, seeing is consciousness, and I ask the question "what is the relation between thought and consciousness?" Krishnamurti: It is a wrong question. P: All right. We say consciousness is thought, seeing is consciousness, listening is consciousness, thought is consciousness. Krishnamurti: All the heritage which "A" brought in is also consciousness, past, ancient, present and all that. P: You have been stating that it is legitimate for thought to operate in fields where knowledge is necessary and when it operates in other fields then it brings sorrow, pain, duality. The question is: Does the other state which you are talking about, is it also consciousness? Krishnamurti: Let us examine that. Stick to that question. What do you say? P: I say it is consciousness because seeing is consciousness. Krishnamurti: Seeing that light is consciousness. P: That is the first question. Krishnamurti: Stick to that question for the moment. Thought has a legitimate field of operation and if it impinges into other fields then it brings pain, suffering. That which operates in this area, is it still consciousness - consciousness as we know it with all the things we have put into it? The other is not. P: The other is not what? Krishnamurti: It is not thought. P: But is it consciousness? I will open it out a little more. The sensory perceptions operate. Seeing, listening operates, therefore why do you say it is not consciousness? Krishnamurti: I am saying consciousness in the sense that there is no conflict. P: There is no conflict in consciousness. There is only conflict when consciousness operates as thought in the field where it has no legitimate place. Why should there be conflict in consciousness when thought is not operating? Krishnamurti: There is no conflict at all there. Let us go slowly. P: Then what is it that operates there? Krishnamurti: Is intelligence consciousness? Intelligence is not consciousness. P: Now we are just listening. Now we come to a stage where we just listen. Krishnamurti: My mind has followed all this. It has seen as "A" pointed out, the whole content of consciousness as the past Indian tradition, the whole human heritage and that I am all that. Consciousness is all that. Heritage is consciousness. And that consciousness as we know it, is conflict. And my chief concern is to end that conflict, conflict being sorrow, pain. In examining that, there is a discovery that it is all a process of thought. There is pain and pleasure and from that the mind says it must operate in the field of knowledge and not here. Legitimately it operates in one, but not here. What has happened to my mind? It has become pliable, soft, alive. It sees, it hears. It does not have the quality of conflict in it, and that is intelligence. And that is not consciousness. Intelligence is not heritage whereas consciousness is heritage. Do not translate intelligence as God. Now that intelligence can use knowledge, that intelligence can use thought to operate in the field of knowledge and therefore its operation is never dualistic. D: The language of intelligence must be different from the language of thought. Krishnamurti: Intelligence has no language, but it can use language. The moment it has language it is back again in the field. That intelligence having no language is not personal. It is not mine or yours. P: It may not be personal but is it focalized? Krishnamurti: No, it appears to focalize. P: When it moves, does it focalize? Krishnamurti: Of course, it must, but it is never in focalization. P: It is never held? Krishnamurti: It is like holding the sea in the fist: it is part of the sea, but it is not the sea. BOMBAY 16TH FEBRUARY 1971 'RIGHT COMMUNICATION' Questioner A: Sir, we have been listening to you with all the attention of which we are capable, with our minds and with all our analytical capacities. We have covered every inch of the ground and we no longer accept anything we do not understand. Between you and us there has been verbal communication and there has been communication beyond words. By ourselves we have not been able to penetrate the verbal barrier and reach that understanding which comes beyond words. When I sit by myself, I find that all communication with myself remains at the verbal level. I wonder whether we could take up for discussion the problem of communication. Tradition has classified communication into four different states vaikhari, madhyama, pashyanti and BOMBAY 18TH FEBRUARY 1971 'BIOLOGICAL SURVIVAL AND INTELLIGENCE' Questioner P: There was something which Krishnaji said in his talk yesterday. I do not know whether it will bear discussion. It was a very startling statement. The question he posed was whether the brain cells could strip themselves of everything except the movement of survival, the pure biological necessity which alone makes the organism exist? Krishnaji seemed to suggest that before any movement in the new dimension could take place, this total stripping to the bare bedrock was essential. In a sense he was totally back to the materialistic position. D: If you have survival as the dimension of existence, there is no other dimension. Can this bear investigation? Is such stripping of every element of consciousness as we have understood it, possible? We have always claimed that the human being is more than the urge for survival. F: Are the brain cells not the repository of culture? P: If you strip man of every psychological element except the urge for physical survival, how is he different from the animal? Krishnamurti: We know both biological and psychological survival. The biological exists on survival, but psychological factors have made that survival almost impossible. F: You are now bringing in other elements. Krishnamurti: There are these two elements - the biological and the psychological. Psychological elements like nationalism are preventing man from surviving. Psychological fragmentation is destroying the beauty of survival. Can one strip man of all the psychological factors? P: Apart from the biological and psychological, is there anything else? You spoke of stripping yourself of all factors, not psychological. I am asking you is there any other element excepting the biological and the psychological? Krishnamurti: As far as we know these are the only two factors that operate in man. F: Is there not such a factor as psychological survival, apart from the physiological? Krishnamurti: Which means the survival of the psyche. The psyche that is the result of environment, of heritage. Last evening when we used the word "con- sciousness", we said the whole of consciousness is the content of consciousness. The content of consciousness is conflict, pain; the whole of that is consciousness. D: You said also that intelligence is more than consciousness. Krishnamurti: Wait. We said in understanding the fact of consciousness and going beyond it, is intelligence. You cannot come to that intelligence if this consciousness is in conflict. Now all that we know is biological survival and the survival of psychological consciousness. What is the next question? P: You said or implied yesterday that there was a necessity to strip so that nothing existed but biological survival. Krishnamurti: Can you not strip the whole content of consciousness which is psychological? In stripping, that intelligence is in operation. There is the biological and intelligence - there is no other. P: You did not speak of intelligence yesterday. You said when there is this total stripping and no other thing, that operation is the biological movement of survival and that perceives. Is there such a seeing? Krishnamurti: Then the mind is not merely the survival element, but there is another quality in it which perceives. P: What is that quality? Krishnamurti: What did "K" say yesterday? P: He said there is a stripping and there is only the movement of survival and that silence sees Krishnamurti: Perfectly true. Now what is silence? What is the nature of silence? P: That seeing is something which we can affirm. But there was this other thing said, so that we cannot help asking if man is stripped of everything which we consider the elements of the human..... Krishnamurti: Which is conflict, pain. P: Not only that, compassion - B: We consider that man is human as opposed to the animal. What are the things which differentiate man - intelligence, the capacity to analyse, speech - D: Man is a language animal. Language and man are co-related. And that is the mark of man that distinguishes him from the rest of the animal world. What language does to man is to enable him to say "I am I". And the moment he goes beyond it, he speculates, projects; he says "I am I" and in that "I" you can bring in the whole cosmology. There is no language for the other. B: And one more thing. Because of language, man has been able to evolve culture and he cannot go back to the biological stage. D: In twenty-five thousand years of evolution, of thinking, of speaking and so on, there is very little change in man; the environment has changed, but fundamentally there is very little change in man. Krishnamurti: Yes. P: One says right, or I accept what "B" or "D" says, but still I am aware "I am". That statement is where it is. Krishnamurti: "B" is saying very simply: strip man of all the psychological factors and what is the difference between animal and man? Oh, there is a vast difference. P: The moment you posit a difference, then you are investigating something else. B: Man is aware of himself and the animal is not; that is the only distinction. Krishnamurti: Let us go back. There is psychological survival. We want to survive psychologically and also biologically. D: I say there is something else. Krishnamurti: We will have to find out. Merely to posit that there is something else has no meaning. D: But you say all other aspects of the human being have ended. Krishnamurti: When conflict, misery, pain have ended...... P: As also the fantasy, the wonder, imagination; that which has made man reach out, reach in. Krishnamurti: "K" said both the outer and the inner. P: It is the same movement. When you say all this is to be stripped, what happens? Is that legitimate to ask? Can we, in discussion, can we in going through this, get the feeling of that stripping, that seeing? Krishnamurti: We have said intelligence is beyond consciousness and when the mind is stripped of the psychological elements, in the very stripping there is the uncovering of this intelligence. Or intelligence comes into being in the very stripping. There is the biological survival and intelligence. That is all. Intelligence has no heritage. Consciousness has heritage. We are caught in the becoming within the field of consciousness. Within the fie]d of consciousness we are trying to become. Strip all that. Empty all that. Let the mind empty itself of all that. In the very emptying comes intelligence. Therefore there are only two things left: the highest form of intelligence and survival which is entirely different from animal survival. Man is not merely the animal because he is able to think, design, construct. P: Do you mean to say there is intelligence which manifests itself in stripping? Krishnamurti: Listen carefully. My consciousness is all the time trying to become, change, modify, struggle, etc. That is all I know. Biological survival and that. Everybody operates within these two. And within that struggle we project something beyond consciousness which is still within consciousness because it is projected. The mind that really wants to be free from the wrangle, the back-chattering asks, can the mind strip "itself" of all the content of "itself"? That is all. (Pause.) And in that, intelligence comes to be. P: Is stripping, emptying an endless process? Krishnamurti: Certainly not. Because then I am caught in the same phenomenon. P: Let us pause here. Is it not an endless process? Krishnamurti: It is not an endless process. P: You mean, once it is done, it is done? Krishnamurti: Let us go slowly. You must first understand this verbally. My consciousness is made up of all that we have talked about. P: Is the emptying of it, does it take time or is it free of time? Is it piecemeal? Or is it an emptying of the whole? Krishnamurti: Is that the question? The piecemeal and the whole? Is that the question? P: You see, putting the question as the piecemeal and the whole is the query. What is revealed is the whole which contains the piece. B: Stripping has to be a joint process. Krishnamurti: Discuss it. P: What is it that one strips? Or what is it that one perceives? Or is there dissolution of that which emerges? There cannot be dissolution of anything else. What emerges is thought. D: If all these go what remains? P: When you say all goes, what does it mean? B: Only awareness remains. Is complete awareness the whole? P: Yes. Krishnamurti: She says Yes. What is the question? P: Is the awareness of a point of consciousness - such as jealousy - is the awareness of that one thing, the totality of all consciousness? Krishnamurti: When you use the word "aware", what do you mean by that word "aware"? If you mean aware of the implications in which there is no choice, no will, no compulsion, no resistance obviously it is so. P: So at any point this is possible? Krishnamurti: Of course. P: Yes, because that is the door; the door of dissolution. Krishnamurti: No. Hold it a minute. P: I used that word "door" deliberately. Krishnamurti: Hold on. Let us begin slowly because I want to go step by step. My consciousness is made up of all this. My consciousness is part of the whole, both at the superficial and at the deeper level and you are asking, is there any awareness which is so penetrating that in that very awareness the whole is present? Or is it bit by bit? Is there a search, is there a looking in, an analysing? D: The yogic position is that nature is a flowing river. In that flow, man's organism comes into being. As soon as it comes into being, it has also the capacity to choose and the moment it chooses, it separates itself from the now, from the river. This is a process of separation from the flow and the only thing which brings this into being is choice. Therefore, they say the dissolution of choice may bring you to total emptiness and in that emptiness you see. Krishnamurti: Right sir, that is one point. "P"s question was, is this awareness, this process of stripping bit by bit? Is this awareness in which there is no choice, the total? Does it empty the whole of consciousness? Does it go beyond consciousness? F: Supposing I cease to choose, is that stripping? P: Is there an end to stripping? Krishnamurti: Or is it a constant process? P: And the second question was where there is intelligence is there stripping? Krishnamurti: Let us start with the first question which is good enough. What do you say? Discuss it. P: It is one of those extraordinary questions where you can neither say "Yes" nor "No". D: It hangs on time or no time. If it is invited, it is time. P: If you say it is not a question of time then it is not a process. five minutes later it will emerge again. So this question cannot be answered. Krishnamurti: I am not sure. Let us begin again. My consciousness is made up of all this. My consciousness is used to the process of time, my consciousness thinks in terms of gradualness, my consciousness is practice and through practice to achieve, which is time. My consciousness is a process of time. Now I am asking that consciousness, can it go beyond this? Can we, who are caught in the movement of time, go beyond time? That question, consciousness cannot answer. Consciousness does not know what it means, because it can only think in terms of time and when questioned whether this process can end in which there is no time, it cannot answer, can it? Now as consciousness cannot answer the question, we say let us see what is awareness and investigate whether that awareness can bring about a timeless state? But this brings in new elements. What is awareness? Is it within the field of time, is it outside the field of time? Now what is awareness? Is there in awareness any choice, explanation, justification, or condemnation? Or is there the observer, the chooser? And if there is, is that awareness? So is there an awareness in which there is no observer at all? Obviously. I am aware of that lamp and I do not have to choose when I am aware of that lamp. Is there an awareness in which the observer is totally absent? Not a continuous state of awareness in which the observer is absent, which again is a fallacious statement. A: The word is swarupa shunyata. The observer becomes empty. He is stripped. Krishnamurti: Now is that awareness to be cultivated which implies time? How does this awareness come into being in which there is no observer? Are we meeting each other? How is this awareness to come about? Is it the result of time? If it is, then it is part of consciousness in which choice exists. And you say awareness is not choice. It is observation in which there is no observer. Now how is that to come about without consciousness interfering? Or does it come out of consciousness? Does it flower out of consciousness? Or is it free of consciousness? D: It is free of consciousness. P: I want to ask two things. Does it come about when I ask the question "who am I? Krishnamurti: All the traditionalists have asked that question. P: But it is an essential question. When I really try to investigate the source of the ego itself, that is the one question. Or does awareness come about when one tries to discover the observer? Krishnamurti: No. The moment you try, you are in time. P: It is a question of language, of semantics. You can strip at any point. Where is the observer? We are taking for granted that the observer "is". Krishnamurti: Let us begin slowly. One sees what consciousness is. Any movement within that field, any movement is still a process of time. It may try to be or not to be, it may try to go beyond, it may try to invent something beyond consciousness, but it is still part of time. So I am stuck. P: I want to use words which are not your words. So I have rejected all your words. I have to use my own instruments. What is the element in me which seems to me the most potent and powerful: It is the sense of the "I". Krishnamurti: Which is the past. P: I will not use your language. It is very interesting not to use your language. I say the most potent thing is the sense of the "I"? Now can there be a perception of the "I"? F: That is a wrong question. I will tell you why. You ask can I perceive the "I"? Now the "I" is nothing but an insatiable hunger for experience. Krishnamurti: "P" began by asking "who am I?" Is the "me", the "I" an action of consciousness? P: So I say let us look, let us investigate. Krishnamurti: When I ask myself "who am I?", is that the central factor in consciousness? P: It seems so. And then I say let me see the "I", let me find it, perceive it, touch it. Krishnamurti: So you are asking, is this central factor perceivable sensorily? Is the central factor tactable, to be felt, to be tasted? Or is that central factor, the "I", something which the senses have invented. P: That comes later. First of all, I see whether it is tactable. Krishnamurti: When I have asked the question, "who am I?", one must also question who is investigating, who is asking the question "who am I?". P: I do not ask that question. I have asked that question over and over again. I have discussed awareness endlessly. I leave it, because the one thing which you have said is, do not accept one word which is not your own. I start looking. Is this "I" which is the central core of myself, is it tactable? I observe it in the surface layers, in the depth layers of my consciousness, in the hidden darkness and as I unfold it what takes place is a light within, an explosion, an extension within. Another factor that operates is that which has been exclusive becomes inclusive. So far I have been exclusive, now the world movement flows in. Krishnamurti: We see that. P: And I find this is not something which can be touched, perceived. What can be perceived is that which has been, which is a manifestation of this "I". I see I had a thought of this "I`' in action, but it is already over. Then I explore - from where does thought emerge? Can I find the springs of thought? Or where does thought go? Can I pursue a thought? How far can I go with a thought? How far can I hold a thought? Can thought be held in consciousness? These are tangible things which I think the individual has to completely feel for himself. Krishnamurti: We have gone through this. I thought we had done all this. F: I say all this is awareness. Krishnamurti: Let us be simple. When I ask "who am I?", who is asking the question? And one finds on investigation that the "I" is not observable, touchable, hearable, and so on. And so, is the "I" within the field of the senses? Or have the senses created the "I"? P: The very fact that it is not within the field of the senses...... Krishnamurti: Do not move away from that. Is it not also within the field of the senses? We jump too quickly. Is perceiving a visual perception or something else? D: We are going into the nature of awareness. Now how does awareness arise? P: I want to put aside everything Krishnaji has said and I find that the very enquiry, that the very investigation into the "I" creates light, intelligence. Krishnamurti: You are saying, the very enquiry brings about awareness. Obviously I did not say it did not. P: And in the enquiry one can only use certain instruments which are the senses. Whether the enquiry is outside or within, the only instruments which can be used are the senses, because that is all we know - the seeing, listening, feeling - and the field is illuminated. The field of the without and the field of the within is illuminated. Now in this state of illumination, you suddenly find that there has been a thought, but that it is already over. Krishnamurti: Thought exists in the field of relationship and observation. It does not exist by itself. It exists in observing relationship - the lamp. P: In this, if you ask is there a partial or total stripping, the question is irrelevant. It has no meaning. Krishnamurti: Wait a minute. I am not sure. Is perception partial? I have investigated through the senses, the senses creating the "I", investigating the "I". The activity brings a lightness, clarity. Not entire clarity, but some clarity. P: I will not use the word some clarity, but clarity. Krishnamurti: It brings clarity. We will stick to that. Is that clarity expandable? P: The nature of seeing is such, I can see here, and I can see there, depending on the power of the eye. Krishnamurti: We said perception is not only visual but also non-visual. We said perception is that which illuminates. P: Here I would like to ask something. You have said that seeing is not only visual but non-visual. What is the nature of this non-visual seeing? Krishnamurti: It is non-visual which is non-thinkable. It does not pertain to the word. It does not pertain to thought. That is all. Is visual perception non-verbal perception? The non-visual perception is the perception without the meaning, the expression, the thought. Is there a perception without thought? Now proceed. P: And that also is not such a difficult thing. I see there is such perception. Now that perception can see close, can see far. Krishnamurti: Wait. Perception. We are talking only of perception. Not the duration, length, size or breadth of perception, but perception which is non-visual which is not deep perception or shallow perception. Shallow perception or deep perception comes only when thought interferes. P: Now in that is there partial stripping or total stripping? We started with that. Krishnamurti: When there is non-verbal perception, what are you asking? What are you asking further? F: She is asking, in every perception, there is the non-verbal element of mere perception. Then there is the psychological superimposition. The stripping refers only to the psychological superimposition. Is there a state of mind in which superimposition does not occur and there is no stripping? P: That is right. Perception is perception. We are asking is there a perception in which stripping is not necessary? Krishnamurti: There is no such thing as an everlasting perception. Is it identical with what you call intelligence? Krishnamurti: I do not know. Why are you asking that? P: Because it is timeless. Krishnamurti: Timeless means timeless. Why do you ask? Is perception which is non-verbal, is it not also non-time, non-thought? If you have answered this question you have answered that. F: There is the momentary time of the "now". And there is another timeless in which one moves and lives. Krishnamurti: I do not understand what you say. F: Still, perception can be sensory. Krishnamurti: Now is there perception that is non-verbal and therefore not per- taining to thought? Then what is the question? A mind that is perceiving is not asking this question, it is perceiving. And each perception is perception. It is not carrying over perception. Where does the question of stripping or not stripping arise? P: I say even in perception which is not linked with thought, perception is never carried into another thought. I see that lamp. The seeing has not been carried. Thought is only being carried. Krishnamurti: That is obvious. My consciousness is my mind, is my brain cells, is the result of my sensory perceptions. That is my consciousness. That is all consciousness. That consciousness is the result of time, evolution, growth. It is expandable, contractable and so on. And thought is part of that. Now somebody comes along and asks "who am I?". Is the "I" the permanent entity in this consciousness? D: It cannot be. Krishnamurti: This "I" - is it consciousness? D: It is not permanent. Krishnamurti: Consciousness is heritage. Of course it is. F: We are mixing the concept of consciousness, with the experience of consciousness. Krishnamurti: This is very clear. "I" is that consciousness. P: "I" has a great reality for me till I investigate. Krishnamurti: Of course. The fact is after looking, observing, I see I am the whole of this consciousness. This is not a verbal statement. I am all that. I am the heritage. And is that "I" touchable, observable? Can it be felt, twisted? Is it the result of perception, of heritage? F: It is not the result. It is the inherited. Krishnamurti: And then she asks who is that "I"? Is that "I" part of consciousness, part of thought? I say yes. Thought is part of it. Thought is the "I", except where thought is functioning technologically, where there is no "I". The moment you move away from the scientific field, you come to the "I" which is part of the biological heritage. F: The "I" is the centre of perception, a working centre of perception, an ad hoc centre and the other is an effective centre. Krishnamurti: Be simple. We see consciousness is the "I". The whole of that field is the "I". In the field, the "I" is the centre. P: I want to put aside everything and tackle it in a new way. I see that the most important element in me is the "I". Now what is the "I"? What is its nature? One investigates that and in the very process of observation there is clarity. Krishnamurti: Full stop. P: Clarity being not eternal.,.... Krishnamurti: But it can pick it up again. P: I say, maybe. Krishnamurti: Because I have an idea that perception is whole. P: Is it a question which legitimately arises in this state? Krishnamurti: In the state of perception it does not arise. It only arises, exists when I ask, is this process eternal, everlasting? P: And what would you say? Krishnamurti: You are being asked. Answer. Wait. You have to answer this question. At the moment of perception the question does not arise. The next moment I do not perceive so clearly. P: If I am alert to see that I am not perceiving so clearly, I will investigate that. Krishnamurti: So what am I doing? There is perception. That is all. P: The doorway is in the question. The "key" of the doorway is in that question. Krishnamurti: Let us be simple about this. There is perception. In that perception there is no question of duration. There is only perception. The next minute I do not see clearly. There is no clear perception. It is muddled. There is investigation of pollution and so clarity. Right? And again perception; move again; cover and uncover - and this goes on. This is going on. F: Is it a movement of time? P: A very interesting thing takes place. The very nature of this awareness is that it operates on the "other". Krishnamurti: What do you mean by the "other"? P: Inattention. Krishnamurti: Wait. Attention and inattention. Then be aware of inattention which becomes attention. This balancing is going on all the time. P: I observe the very nature of attention. It has its own action on inattention. Now if I make a statement "it lessens inattention" it would be an incorrect thing for me to say. The only thing I can observe is that there is an action of attention on inattention. Krishnamurti: Does that action on inattention wipe away inattention so that inattention does not come again? D: It is attentive to the inattentive. P: I am going further than being attentive to the inattentive. I say the nature of this attention is such that it operates on the brain cells. I am very very hesitant when I say this. It is the nature of attention to operate on the brain cells. That which is dormant in the brain-cells - which re-emerges when it is exposed to attention, the very nature of the dormancy undergoes a change. I would like this area to be investigated. Krishnamurti: Let us begin again. Awareness - if there is choice in that awareness we are back again in consciousness. Awareness is non-verbal. Awareness has no relationship to thought. That awareness we call attention. What takes place when there is inattention: there is inattention. Why do you mix the two? I am inattentive; there is no attention; that is all. In that inattention there are certain actions going on. And those activities bring further misery, confusion, trouble. So I say to myself, I must be attentive all the time so as to prevent this disturbance taking place and I say I have to cultivate attention and therefore that very cultivation becomes inattention. The seeing of that inattention brings attention. Attention affects the brain cells. Look what has happened. There is attention, and then inattention. In inattention there is confusion, misery, and all the rest of it. Now what takes place? D: Dispelling of inattention has gone down in the unconscious. P: Is it not really that you can do nothing about it? Krishnamurti: I agree "P; hold on a minute. Do not say there is nothing. We will find out. We are investigating. There is attention and there is inattention. in inattention everything is confusion. Why do I want to put the two together? When there is the urge to put the two together, then there is an action of will which is choice. I prefer attention; I do not prefer inattention - so I am back again in the field of consciousness. So what is the action where the two are never brought together? I want to explore it a little bit. When there is attention, thought as memory does not operate. There is no thinking process in attention. There is only attention. I am only aware that I have been inattentive when the action produces discomfort, misery or danger. Then I say to myself, I have been inattentive and as attention has left a mark on the brain I am concerned with the misery which inattention has brought about. Then in investigating that misery, attention comes again leaving no mark. So what is taking place? Actually what is taking place? Each time there is inattention there is quick, instant perception of inattention. Therefore perception is not of duration, of time. Perception and attention leave no mark. The immediacy of perception is always taking place. TRADITION AND REVOLUTION DIALOGUE 30 BOMBAY 19TH FEBRUARY 1971 'THE MIND AND THE HEART' Questioner P: We have talked several times, and so far the discussions have been related to the mind and its problems. What we have not discussed is the movement of the heart. Krishnamurti: I am glad you have raised that. P: Is the movement of the heart a different movement from the movement of the mind? Are they one movement or two movements? And if they are two movements, what are the elements which make these two movements different? I use the words mind and heart, because these are the two focal points around which certain sensory responses appear to focus. Are the two movements in fact one movement? Krishnamurti: Let us begin. What do you mean by movement? P: Any kind of emotional response which we call love, affection, goodwill, compassion, seems to ripple, to move from a focal point which we identify as the region of the heart. These ripples affect the heart, make it physically beat faster. Krishnamurti: Which is the physical, the physiological movement of the brain cells? D: Or is it the nerves which have an impact on the heart? Krishnamurti: It is a response of the nerves, the heart, the brain, the whole organism, the psychosomatic organism. Now, is the movement of the mind separate from the movement which is generally called the heart? We are not speaking of the physical heart, but of the emotions, the sentiments, the angers, the jealousy, the feeling of guilt - all the emotions that make the heart throb and beat faster. Are the movements of the mind and heart separate? Let us discuss it. P: What we have been saying all along is that if one can strip oneself till nothing remains but the movement of survival, the only factor which distinguishes man is this strange movement of the heart. Krishnamurti: I think this division is artificial. First of all, we should not start that way. P: While we have been discussing with you, there has been a silencing of the brain cells, there has been tremendous clarity, yet there has been no response from the heart; there have been no ripples. Krishnamurti: So you are separating the two. There is the movement of the mind and the movement of the heart: let us question whether they are separate? And if they are not separate, then when the mind is empty of consciousness in the sense in which we have used that word, what is the quality of the mind that is compassion - that is love, empathy? Let us begin by asking whether the movement of the heart is separate. Is any movement separate? P: What identity has anger with the movement of affection? Krishnamurti: I am asking, is any movement separate? P: Separate from what? Krishnamurti: Is all movement unitary, like all energy is unitary, though we may divide it up, fragment it? All movement is one; a unitary movement. One has broken movement up as the movement of the heart, the movement of different categories; but we are asking, "Is the movement of the heart separate from the movement of the mind?" Is there such a movement of the heart separate from the mind, mind being the brain? I do not know if I can verbalize this - the mind, the heart, the brain, are they one unit? And from that unit, movement flows; a movement which is unitary. But we divide emotions, sentiments, devotion, tenderness, compassion, enthusiasm from their opposites. P: As also evil, cruelty, vanity. There is a pure intellectual movement which is neither one nor the other; the pure technological movement. Krishnamurti: Is the technological movement different from the movement of the mind? P: I think thought has its own technology. It has its own momentum, it has its own reason for existence, its own direction, its own speed at which it operates, its own motives and its own energy. F: You cannot measure thought. Do not call it technology. D: Thought-waves have been measured. Technology means measurable. Krishnamurti: We said just now that compassion, love, tenderness, care, consideration and politeness are one movement. The opposite movement is contrary to that - it is violence and all that. So there is the movement of the mind, the movement of affection, love and compassion; and the movement of violence. So there are now three movements. Then there is another movement which says this must be or this must not be; has the assertion that this must be or this must not be, anything whatsoever to do with the mental movement? D: Then there is the movement of the coordinator apart from the three. Krishnamurti: Now we have the fourth movement - the coordinator. The movement of affection as the movement of the heart, then the movement of violence, callousness, depression, vulgarity and all that; then the mental, intellectual movement and the movement of the coordinator. So there are now four movements and every one of these movements has its own subdivisions. See how complex it becomes, and each subdivision is in contradiction with its opposite. So it becomes multiple. This psychosomatic organism has got dozens of con- tradictions, not just mental movements, intellectual movements, emotional movements, etc. There are simultaneous and contradictory movements, multitudinous movements and there is the coordinator trying to arrange things so that he can operate. F: Is there not a selective mechanism, which picks up and calls it thought, mind, heart and so on? Is that not the coordinator? Krishnamurti: Coordinator, chooser, integrater, selecter, call it what you will, they are all in contradiction with each other. F: Why do you say they are in contradiction, because each one is an independent movement? D: But as one lives they seem to be in contradiction. F: But each one is moving in its own. P: As "F" says, at any given point if one is, the other is not. F: Then there cannot be contradiction. Krishnamurti: When one is, the other is not. But the coordinator weighs these two - I want this and I do not want that. F: That is the whole movement of life. P: We started by saying that so far we have gone into the movement of the mind. Is there such a thing as the movement of the heart? B: Is it a nourishing movement? Is it a movement of sustenance - this which we call the movement of the heart? Is this not necessary in order to see that the movement of the brain does not remain sterile? D: We are not in the field of contradiction at all. Krishnamurti: Contradiction is not when one is, and the other is not, but when the coordinator says I would rather not have this but have that; then begins the contradiction, the opposition as choice. A: If I am full of hate, etc., I cannot take two steps beyond. The question is, is the movement of the heart distinct from that of the mind? Or does it have its own quality? Krishnamurti: That is what "P" is saying. There is the movement of the mind, the intellectual, technological movement; there is the movement of the heart and there is the movement of violence. Then there are several multitudinous movements in us and the coordinator selects one or two to sustain himself. From there what is the next question? P: Are these movements parallel to each other? Ultimately they are either the one movement or the other. Krishnamurti: I am not sure. P: Is the movement of the brain basically that which excites emotions? A: Though one may not have personal hate or anger, when I read about Bengal, certain emotions come and they are social responses. I do not do a thing about it, whereas to have love, affection is a definite quality of enrichment; a sustenance; which the mind cannot give you. D: We have already agreed that the perception of the brain is thought. Krishnamurti: Let us get the meaning of the words clear. The response to various forms of stimuli we call emotion. Is perception an emotion? Now what is the next question? You ask, are there two movements with their subdivisions; are they parallel? P: Parallel means separate; they never meet. Krishnamurti: Or are they really one which we do not know? P: Take desire. Which category would you put it in - emotion or thought? B: Desire is from the heart. P: Take the arising of desire. After a while it becomes thought. Where will you put it? A: It arises only as a thought. F: The arising of desire as an immediate emotional response of the heart, is not separate from thought. With the word "anger", the heart beats faster. All that is one movement. Krishnamurti: Desire, hate, love, we say, are emotive and mental movements. Therefore there are these two movements. You ask, are they parallel and therefore separate or is it all one movement? I am not saying it is or it is not so. P: I think that is not a valid question. The valid question is if they are two separate movements, is it impossible for them ever to come together? Or is it the very cause of the misfortune that we have kept them separate? F: That which perceives the pattern is thought. That which perceives without the pattern is emotion. P: The moment you make such a statement either this is so to us and therefore the duality has ceased, or otherwise it is a theory. Krishnamurti: It is a theory. Conclusions, formulas mean nothing. I say I do not know. I know only these two movements the one the thinking, the intellectual, the rational movement; the second the feeling of kindliness, gentleness, that is all. Are they two separate movements? Or because we have treated them as two separate movements, our whole misfortune, our confusion arises. You see, "P", you can see we have till now divided the body and the soul. The whole religious tendency in the west as well as in the east has been this division of the soul and the body and we have maintained that and the scriptures have maintained that. It is really a psychosomatic state, not one or the other, but it is a psychosomatic movement which invents the soul, etc. And so the question is, are they two movements or have we accustomed ourselves to the thought that the two are separate - the body and the soul - till somebody says it is a psychosomatic state and I say "yes", I understand. P: But how can you neglect the fact that an emotional intensity brings a new quality of being, a complete experience of what the other person feels; a sense of unspoken understanding? Krishnamurti: Do not bring that in yet. We are asking, are these two movements separate? Or because we are so habit-ridden we have accepted that they are two separate movements? If they are not, what is the one unitary movement that includes thought as the movement of the brain and the movement of the heart? How do you investigate this question? I can only investigate it from fact to fact. I can have no theories about it. I see the fact of perception. I see the fact of the movement of thought. And I ask when there is no movement of thought, is there a movement which is nonverbal? Have I explained myself? If there is complete cessation of thinking which is movement, is there a movement which is an emotive movement as love, devotion, tenderness, care? Is there a movement separate from thought; thought being verbal meaning, explanation, description, etc? Or when the movement of thought comes to an end without any compulsion, is there not a totally different movement which is not that or this? P: That is so, Sir, and I am saying this very very hesitantly. There is a state when it is as if an elixir is released, when one is overflowing; a state in which the heart is the only thing that is there - I am using metaphors - and there can be action in that state, doing in it, thinking in it, and everything in it, and there is a state when thought has ceased and the mind is very clear and alert, but the elixir is not present. Krishnamurti: Let us stick to one thing. Just what is the factor of division? P: What divides is an actual tactile sense. Here it is not something which is mental. There is a certain ripple; a ripple is very real. Krishnamurti: I am not talking about that. What is the factor in us that divides one as the emotive movement and the other as the intellectual-thought movement? Why is there the soul and the body? D: Would you admit that the very faculty of intellect sees that there is a movement which emerges from thought and another that emerges from the heart. It is observable. Krishnamurti: I say, why is there a division? D: The hand is different from the leg. Krishnamurti: They have different functions. D: There is the function of the brain and there is the function of the heart. A: As far as my experience goes, when the verbal movement ceases, there is an awareness of the entire body in which emotional content is and it is pure feeling. It is no more thinking, but pure feeling. P: In the tradition there is a word called Rasa. It is very close to what Krishnaji says. But rasa is a word which needs to be investigated. Rasa is essence, it is that which fills. The tradition differentiates different types of rasa but rasa is essence; that which fills, that which permeates. D: It is emotion. P: It is much more; rasa is essence. Krishnamurti: Keep to that word essence, perfume. Essence means what it is. Now what happens? In observing the whole movement of thought, in observing the content of consciousness, the essence comes out of it. And in observing the movement of the heart, in that perception, there is the essence. Essence is the same whether it is this or that. A: That is what the Buddhists also say. Krishnamurti: When you use the word "essence", it is the essence of all the flowers that makes the perfume and the quality. In perceiving the whole movement of thought as consciousness - consciousness with its content which is consciousness - and in observing that, in that very observation is the external refinement which is the essence. Right? In the same way there is the perception of the whole movement of the body, love, joy. When you perceive all that, there is the essence and in that there are no two essences. Essence has to come into being. Now how do you produce it? Distil it? When the flowers are distilled, the essence of the flowers is the perfume. D: When the pollution goes, it is essence. F: There is the essence of friendship, of affection. Krishnamurti: No, no, I would not use essence of friendship, essence of jealousy. No, no. F: What do you mean by essence? Krishnamurti: Just look. I have watched what we have been doing during these discussions. We have observed the movement of thought as consciousness; the whole of it and the content of the movement is consciousness. There is perception of that. The perception is the distillation of that and that we call essence which is pure intelligence. It is not my intelligence or your intelligence but it is intelligence, it is essence. And when we observe the movement of love, hate, pleasure, fear, which are all emotive, there is perception and, as you perceive, the essence comes out of that. There are no two essences. D: Here comes my question. What is the relationship between essence as you perceive it and uniqueness? I think they are interchangeable. Krishnamurti: I think I would rather use the word essence. P: The great masters of alchemy were called rasa-siddhas. D: They who are established in rasa, that is, those who have attained, who have their being in that. Krishnamurti: During these days and before, one has watched the movement of thought. One has watched it, and watched it without any choice and in that is the essence; out of that choiceless observation comes the essence of the one and the essence of the other. Therefore what is this essence? Is it a refinement of emotions, or is it totally unrelated? And yet it is related because it has been observed. Right? P: So energy which is attention.... Krishnamurti: Energy is essence. P: Though operating on matter, essence is unrelated to both. Krishnamurti: Let us begin again slowly with essence. Is it unrelated to consciousness? I am taking it that one has observed consciousness. There has been a perception of movement as consciousness, as thought and the content of that consciousness which is time and the very observation of that, the flame of observation distils. Right? In the same way the flame of perception brings the essence of emotive movement. Now having this essence, what relationship has it to that and to this? I do not know if you see this. That was your question. Right? None whatsoever. Essence has nothing to do with the flower. Right. Though it is part of the flower, the essence is not of it. F: Even grammatically it is not all right: although it is part of the flower it is not of the flower. Krishnamurti: Look, Sir, the other day I saw they were taking the bark of a tree to produce some kind of alcohol; that essence is not the bark. F: But it is in the bark. D: It is realized because of the heat. Krishnamurti: Heat of perception produces essence. So what is the question? Is essence related to consciousness? Obviously not. So the whole point in this is the flame of perception and the flame of perception is the essence. D: It creates the essence and it is the essence. Krishnamurti: It is the essence. P: Is perception creation, the moment of creation? D: Do we create what we perceive? P: Is perception creation? Krishnamurti: I do not know what you mean by creation. P: Bringing into being something which is not there. Krishnamurti: Is perception creation? What do you mean by creation? I know what perception means. Let us stick to that word. I do not know what the meaning of creation is. Producing a baby? Baking bread? D: No, I would not say that. Moving from here to there is also producing. Krishnamurti: Do not reduce everything to creation. Going to office is not creation. You are asking what is creation? To create, to produce, to create something which has not existed before. When we use the word "creation', to create something different, to create a statue, to bring into being, what does that mean? Is it essence? To bring into being what? It can bring into being only two things: thought or emotion. D: Bringing into being means, essence manifest. Krishnamurti: I ask of you what is meant by creation? I do not know. Bringing into being something new or bringing into being in the mould of the known. P: Creation must be bringing into being the new, not the old. Krishnamurti: Therefore let us be clear. Bringing into being something totally new. At what level? Watch it. At the sensory level, at the intellectual level, at the memory level; where? Bringing into being something new; where? So that you see it, so that you can visualize it? The man who produced the jet because he was familiar with the piston, the internal combustion engine, was that totally new? So when you say bringing into being something totally new, at what level? P: At the sensory level. Krishnamurti: At the sensory? Can you paint a new picture which is non-verbal? Can you paint something that is totally new? Which is, can you bring into being something which is not self-expression? It is not new if it is self-expression. P: If creation is something entirely new which is unrelated to any self-expression, then probably all self-expression ceases, all manifestation ceases. Krishnamurti: Wait, wait. P: I will say that because there does not exist anything which is not self-expression........ Krishnamurti: That is what I want to get at. The man who discovered the jet - at the moment when he discovered it, there was no self-expression. He translated it into self-expression. It is something discovered, then it is put into a formula. I only know that the flame of perception has brought about the essence, and now the question is, has that essence any expression? Does it create anything new? D: It creates a new perception. Krishnamurti: No. There is no new perception. The flame is the perception. Flame is flame all the time. One moment pure flame of perception, then forgotten, and again pure flame of perception, then forgotten. Each time the flame is new. D: Perception touches matter, and there is an explosion and there is mutation. Now that which emerges out of it, you cannot postulate. It is the discovery of the jet engine. Krishnamurti: Let us put it this way. In that essence when there is action, that essence is not concerned with self-expression. It is concerned with action. Action then is total, not partial. P: I want to ask one more question. The manifestation of this...... Krishnamurti: Which is action. P: It has contact with matter. Krishnamurti: There is action. A: Up to perception we go with you. Krishnamurti: No, Sir. You have gone further. There is a perception which is flame, which has distilled the essence. You cannot say I have got it. There is only essence. Now that essence acts or may not act. If it acts, it has no frontiers at all. There is no "me" acting. Obviously. P: That itself is creation. Creation is not something apart from that. Krishnamurti: The very expression of that essence is creation in action, not new action or old action. The essence is expression. P: Then is perception also action? Krishnamurti: Of course. See the beauty of it. Forget action. See what has taken place in you. Perception without any qualification is a flame. It distils whatever it perceives. Whatever it perceives it distils because it is the flame. It is not a sensory perception. When there is that perception which distils at every minute, when you say I am a fool, to perceive that - and in that perception there is the essence - that essence acts or it does not act, depending upon the environment, depending upon where it is; but in that action there is no "me", there is no motive at all. BOMBAY 19th February, l971 Awareness Is There A God? Fear How To Live In This World Relationship Conflict The Religious Life Seeing The Whole Morality Suicide Discipline What is The Seeker Organisation Love And Sex Perception Suffering The Heart And The Mind Beauty And The Artist Dependence Belief Dreams Tradition Conditioning Happiness Learning Self-Expression Passion Order The Individual And The Community Meditation And Energy Ending Thought The New Human Being THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'AWARENESS' Questioner: I should like to know what you mean by awareness because you have often said that awareness is really what your teaching is about. I've tried to understand it by listening to your talks and reading your books, but I don't seem to get very far. I know it is not a practice, and I understand why you so emphatically repudiate any kind of practice, drill, system, discipline or routine. I see the importance of that, for otherwise it becomes mechanical, and at the end of it the mind has become dull and stupid. I should like, if I may, to explore with you to the very end this question of what it means to be aware. You seem to give some extra, deeper meaning to this word, and yet it seems to me that we are aware of what's going on all the time. When I'm angry I know it, when I'm sad I know it and when I'm happy I know it. Krishnamurti: I wonder if we really are aware of anger, sadness, happiness? Or are we aware of these things only when they are all over? Let us begin as though we know nothing about it at all and start from scratch. Let us not make any assertions, dogmatic or subtle, but let us explore this question which, if one really went into it very deeply, would reveal an extraordinary state that the mind had probably never touched, a dimension not touched by superficial awareness. Let us start from the superficial and work through. We see with our eyes, we perceive with our senses the things about us - the colour of the flower, the humming bird over the flower the light of this Californian sun, the thousand sounds of different qualities and subtleties, the depth and the height, the shadow of the tree and the tree itself. We feel in the same way our own bodies, which are the instruments of these different kinds of superficial, sensory perceptions. If these perceptions remained at the superficial level there would be no confusion at all. That flower, that pansy, that rose, are there, and that's all there is to it. There is no preference, no comparison, no like and dislike, only the thing before us without any psychological involvement. Is all this superficial sensory perception or awareness quite clear? It can be expanded to the stars, to the depth of the seas, and to the ultimate frontiers of scientific observation, using all the instruments of modern technology. Questioner: Yes, I think I understand that. Krishnamurti: So you see that the rose and all the universe and the people in it, your own wife if you have one, the stars, the seas, the mountains, the microbes, the atoms, the neutrons, this room, the door, really are there. Now, the next step; what you think about these things, or what you feel about them, is your psychological response to them. And this we call thought or emotion. So the superficial awareness is a very simple matter: the door is there. But the description of the door is not the door, and when you get emotionally involved in the description you don't see the door. This description might be a word or a scientific treatise or a strong emotional response; none of these is the door itself. This is very important to understand right from the beginning. If we don't understand this we shall get more and more confused. The description is never the described. Though we are describing something even now, and we have to, the thing we are describing is not our description of it, so please bear this in mind right through our talk. Never confuse the word with the thing it describes. The word is never the real, and we are easily carried away when we come to the next stage of awareness where it becomes personal and we get emotional through the word. So there is the superficial awareness of the tree, the bird, the door, and there is the response to that, which is thought, feeling, emotion. Now when we become aware of this response, we might call it a second depth of awareness. There is the awareness of the rose, and the awareness of the response to the rose. Often we are unaware of this response to the rose. In reality it is the same awareness which sees the rose and which sees the response. It is one movement and it is wrong to speak of the outer and inner awareness. When there is a visual awareness of the tree without any psychological involvement there is no division in relationship. But when there is a psychological response to the tree, the response is a conditioned response, it is the response of past memory, past experiences, and the response is a division in relationship. This response is the birth of what we shall call the "me" in relationship and the "non-me". This is how you place yourself in relationship to the world. This is how you create the individual and the community. The world is seen not as it is, but in its various relationships to the "me" of memory. This division is the life and the flourishing of everything we call our psychological being, and from this arises all contradiction and division. Are you very clear that you perceive this? When there is the awareness of the tree there is no evaluation. But when there is a response to the tree, when the tree is judged with like and dislike, then a division takes place in this awareness as the "me" and the "non-me", the "me" who is different from the thing observed. This "me" is the response, in relationship, of past memory, past experiences. Now can there be an awareness, an observation of the tree, without any judgement, and can there be an observation of the response, the reactions, without any judgement? In this way we eradicate the principle of division, the principle of "me" and "non-me", both in looking at the tree and in looking at ourselves. Questioner: I'm trying to follow you. Let's see if I have got it right. There is an awareness of the tree, that I understand. There is a psychological response to the tree, that I understand also. The psychological response is made up of past memories and past experiences, it is like and dislike, it is the division into the tree and the "me". Yes, I think I understand all that. Krishnamurti: Is this as clear as the tree itself, or is it simply the clarity of description? Remember, as we have already said, the described is not the description. What have you got, the thing or its description? Questioner: I think it is the thing. Krishnamurti: Therefore there is no "me" who is the description in the seeing of this fact. In the seeing of any fact there is no "me". There is either the "me" or the seeing, there can't be both. "Me" is non-seeing. The "me" cannot see, cannot be aware. Questioner: May I stop here? I think I've got the feeling of it, but I must let it sink in. May I come again tomorrow? * * * Questioner: I think I have really understood, non-verbally, what you said yesterday. There is the awareness of the tree, there is the conditioned response to the tree, and this conditioned response is conflict, it is the action of memory and past experiences, it is like and dislike, it is prejudice. I also understand that this response of prejudice is the birth of what we call the "me" or the censor. I see clearly that the "me", the "I", exists in all relationships. Now is there an "I" outside of relationships? Krishnamurti: We have seen how heavily conditioned our responses are. When you ask if there is a "me" outside of relationship, it becomes a speculative question as long as there is no freedom from these conditioned responses. Do you see that? So our first question is not whether there is a "me" or not outside of conditioned responses, but rather, can the mind, in which is included all our feelings, be free of this conditioning, which is the past? The past is the "me". There is no "me" in the present. As long as the mind is operating in the past there is the "me", and the mind is this past, the mind is this "me". You can't say there is the mind and there is the past, whether it is the past of a few days ago or of ten thousand years ago. So we are asking: can the mind free itself from yesterday? Now there are several things involved, aren't there? First of all there is a superficial awareness. Then there is the awareness of the conditioned response. Then there is the realization that the mind is the past, the mind is this conditioned response. Then there is the question whether this mind can free itself of the past. And all this is one unitary action of awareness because in this there are no conclusions. When we say the mind is the past, this realization is not a verbal conclusion but an actual perception of fact. The French have a word for such a perception of a fact, they call it "constatation". When we ask whether the mind can be free of the past is this question being asked by the censor, the "me", who is that very past? Questioner: Can the mind be free of the past. Krishnamurti: Who is putting that question? Is it the entity who is the result of a great many conflicts, memories and experiences -is it he who is asking - or does this question arise of itself, out of the perception of the fact? If it is the observer who is putting the question, then he is trying to escape from the fact of himself, because, he says, I have lived so long in pain, in trouble, in sorrow, I should like to go beyond this constant struggle. If he asks the question from that motive his answer will be a taking refuge in some escape. One either turns away from a fact or one faces it. And the word and the symbol are a turning away from it. In fact, just to ask this question at all is already an act of escape, is it not? Let us be aware whether this question is or is not an act of escape. If it is, it is noise. If there is no observer, then there is silence, a complete negation of the whole past. Questioner: Here I am lost. How can I wipe away the past in a few seconds? Krishnamurti: Let us bear in mind that we are discussing awareness. We are talking over together this question of awareness. There is the tree, and the conditioned response to the tree, which is the "me" in relationship, the "me" who is the very centre of conflict. Now is it this "me" who is asking the question? - this "me" who, as we have said, is the very structure of the past? If the question is not asked from the structure of the past, if the question is not asked by the "me", then there is no structure of the past. When the structure is asking the question it is operating in relationship to the fact of itself, it is frightened of itself and it acts to escape from itself. When this structure does not ask the question, it is not acting in relationship to itself. To recapitulate: there is the tree, there is the word, the response to the tree, which is the censor, or the "me", which comes from the past; and then there is the question: can I escape from all this turmoil and agony? If the "me" is asking this question it is perpetuating itself. Now, being aware of that, it doesn't ask the question! Being aware and seeing all the implications of it, the question cannot be asked. It does not ask the question at all because it sees the trap. Now do you see that all this awareness is superficial? It is the same as the awareness which sees the tree. Questioner: Is there any other kind of awareness? Is there any other dimension to awareness? Krishnamurti: Again let's be careful, let's be very clear that we are not asking this question with any motive. If there is a motive we are back in the trap of conditioned response. When the observer is wholly silent, not made silent, there is surely a different quality of awareness coming into being? Questioner: What action could there possibly be in any circumstances without the observer - what question or what action? Krishnamurti: Again, are you asking this question from this side of the river, or is it from the other bank? If you are on the other bank, you will not ask this question; if you are on that bank, your action will be from that bank. So there is an awareness of this bank, with all its structure, its nature and all its traps, and to try to escape from the trap is to fall into another trap. And what deadly monotony there is in all that! Awareness has shown us the nature of the trap, and therefore there is the negation of all traps; so the mind is now empty. It is empty of the "me" and of the trap. This mind has a different quality, a different dimension of awareness. This awareness is not aware that it is aware. Questioner: My God, this is too difficult. You are saying things that seem true, that sound true, but I'm not there yet. Can you put it differently? Can you push me out of my trap? Krishnamurti: Nobody can push you out of your trap - no guru, no drug, no mantra, nobody, including myself - nobody, especially myself. All that you have to do is to be aware from the beginning to the end, not become inattentive in the middle of it. This new quality of awareness is attention, and in this attention there is no frontier made by the "me". This attention is the highest form of virtue, therefore it is love. It is supreme intelligence, and there cannot be attention if you are not sensitive to the structure and the nature of these man-made traps. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'IS THERE A GOD?' Questioner: I really would like to know if there is a god. If there isn't life has no meaning. Not knowing god, man has invented him in a thousand beliefs and images. The division and the fear bred by all these beliefs have divided him from his fellow men. To escape the pain and the mischief of this division he creates yet more beliefs, and the mounting misery and confusion have engulfed him. Not knowing, we believe. Can I know god? I've asked this question of many saints both in India and here and they've all emphasized belief. "Believe and then you will know; without belief you can never know." What do you think? Krishnamurti: Is belief necessary to find out? To learn is far more important than to know. Learning about belief is the end of belief. When the mind is free of belief then it can look. It is belief, or disbelief, that binds; for disbelief and belief are the same: they are the opposite sides of the same coin. So we can completely put aside positive or negative belief; the believer and the non-believer are the same. When this actually takes place then the question, "Is there a god?" has quite a different meaning. The word god with all its tradition, its memory, its intellectual and sentimental connotations - all this is not god. The word is not the real. So can the mind be free of the word? Questioner: I don't know what that means. Krishnamurti: The word is the tradition, the hope, the desire to find the absolute, the striving after the ultimate, the movement which gives vitality to existence. So the word itself becomes the ultimate, yet we can see that the word is not the thing. The mind is the word, and the word is thought. Questioner: And you're asking me to strip myself of the word? How can I do that? The word is the past; it is memory. The wife is the word, and the house is the word. In the beginning was the word. Also the word is the means of communication, identification. Your name is not you, and yet without your name I can't ask about you. And you're asking me if the mind can be free of the word -that is, can the mind be free of its own activity? Krishnamurti: In the case of the tree the object is before our eyes, and the word refers to the tree by universal agreement. Now with the word god there is nothing to which it refers, so each man can create his own image of that for which there is no reference. The theologian does it in one way, the intellectual in another, and the believer and the non-believer in their own different ways. Hope generates this belief, and then seeking. This hope is the outcome of despair - the despair of all we see around us in the world. From despair hope is born, they also are two sides of the same coin. When there is no hope there is hell, and this fear of hell gives us the vitality of hope. Then illusion begins. So the word has led us to illusion and not to god at all. God is the illusion which we worship; and the non-believer creates the illusion of another god which he worships - the State, or some utopia, or some book which he thinks contains all truth. So we are asking you whether you can be free of the word with its illusion. Questioner: I must meditate on this. Krishnamurti: If there is no illusion, what is left? Questioner: Only what is. Krishnamurti: The "what is" is the most holy. Questioner: If the "what is" is the most holy then war is most holy, and hatred, disorder, pain, avarice and plunder. Then we must not speak of any change at all. If "what is" is sacred, then every murderer and plunderer and exploiter can say, "Don't touch me, what I'm doing is sacred". Krishnamurti: The very simplicity of that statement, " `what is' is the most sacred", leads to great misunderstanding, because we don't see the truth of it. If you see that what is is sacred, you do not murder, you do not make war, you do not hope, you do not exploit. Having done these things you cannot claim immunity from a truth which you have violated. The white man who says to the black rioter, "What is is sacred, do not interfere, do not burn", has not seen, for if he had, the Negro would be sacred to him, and there would be no need to burn. So if each one of us sees this truth there must be change. This seeing of the truth is change. Questioner: I came here to find out if there is god, and you have completely confused me. Krishnamurti: You came to ask if there is god. We said: the word leads to illusion which we worship, and for this illusion we destroy each other willingly. When there is no illusion the "what is" is most sacred. Now let's look at what actually is. At a given moment the "what is" may be fear, or utter despair, or a fleeting joy. These things are constantly changing. And also there is the observer who says, "These things all change around me, but I remain permanent". Is that a fact, is that what really is? Is he not also changing, adding to and taking away from himself, modifying, adjusting himself, becoming or not becoming? So both the observer and the observed are constantly changing. What is is change. That is a fact. That is what is. Questioner: Then is love changeable? If everything is a movement of change, isn't love also part of that movement? And if love is changeable, then I can love one woman today and sleep with another tomorrow. Krishnamurti: Is that love? Or are you saying that love is different from its expression? Or are you giving to expression greater importance than to love, and therefore making a contradiction and a conflict. Can love ever be caught in the wheel of change? If so then it can also be hate; then love is hate. It is only when there is no illusion that "what is" is most sacred. When there is no illusion "what is" is god or any other name that can be used. So god, or whatever name you give it, is when you are not. When you are, it is not. When you are not, love is. When you are, love is not. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'FEAR' Questioner: I used to take drugs but now I am free of them. Why am I so frightened of everything? I wake up in the mornings paralysed with fear. I can hardly move out of bed. I'm frightened of going outside, and I'm frightened of being inside. Suddenly as I drive along this fear comes upon me, and I spend a whole day sweating, nervous, apprehensive, and at the end of the day I'm completely exhausted. Sometimes, though very rarely, in the company of a few intimate friends or at the house of my parents, I lose this fear; I feel quiet, happy, completely relaxed. As I came along in my car today, I was frightened of coming to see you, but as I came up the drive and walked to the door I suddenly lost this fear, and now as I sit here in this nice quiet room I feel so happy that I wonder what I was ever frightened about. Now I have no fear. I can smile and truthfully say: I'm very glad to see you! But I can't stay here for ever, and I know that when I leave here the cloud of fear will engulf me again. That is what I'm faced with. I've been to ever so many psychiatrists and analysts, here and abroad, but they merely delve into my memories of childhood - and I'm fed up with it because the fear hasn't gone at all. Krishnamurti: Let's forget childhood memories and all that nonsense, and come to the present. Here you are, and you say you are not frightened now; you're happy for the moment and can hardly imagine the fear you were in. Why have you no fear now? Is it the quiet, clear, well-proportioned room, furnished with good taste, and this sense of welcoming warmth which you feel? Is that why you are not frightened now? Questioner: That's part of it. Also perhaps it is you. I heard you talk in Switzerland, and I've heard you here, and I feel a kind of deep friendship for you. But I don't want to depend on nice houses, welcoming atmospheres and good friends in order not to be afraid. When I go to my parents I have this same feeling of warmth. But it is deadly at home; all families are deadly with their little enclosed activities, their quarrels, and the vulgarity of all that loud talk about nothing, and their hypocrisy. I'm fed up with it all. And yet, when I go to them and there is this certain warmth, I do feel, for a while, free of this fear. The psychiatrists can't tell me what my fear is about. They call it a "floating fear". It's a black, bottomless, ghastly pit. I've spent a great deal of money and time on being analysed and it really hasn't helped at all. So what am I to do? Krishnamurti: Is it that being sensitive you need a certain shelter, a certain security, and not being able to find it, you are frightened of the ugly world? Are you sensitive? Questioner: Yes, I think so. Perhaps not in the way you mean, but I am sensitive. I don't like the noise, the bustle, the vulgarity of this modern existence and the way they throw sex at you everywhere you go today, and the whole business of fighting your way to some beastly little position. I am really frightened of all this - not that I can't fight and get a position for myself, but it makes me sick with fear. Krishnamurti: Most people who are sensitive need a quiet shelter and a warm friendly atmosphere. Either they create it for themselves or depend on others who can give it to them - the family the wife, the husband, the friend. Have you got such a friend? Questioner: No. I'm frightened of having such a friend. I'm frightened of being dependent on him. Krishnamurti: So there is this issue; being sensitive, demanding a certain shelter, and depending on others to give you that shelter. There is sensitivity, and dependence; the two often go together. And to depend on another is to fear losing him. So you depend more and more, and then the fear increases in proportion to your dependence. It is a vicious circle. Have you enquired why you depend? We depend on the postman, on physical comfort and so on; that's quite simple. We depend on people and things for our physical well-being and survival; it is quite natural and normal. We have to depend on what we may call the organizational side of society. But we also depend psychologically, and this dependence, though comforting, breeds fear. Why do we depend psychologically? Questioner: You're talking to me about dependence now, but I came here to discuss fear. Krishnamurti: Let's examine them both because they are interrelated as we shall see. Do you mind if we discuss them both? We were talking about dependence. What is dependence? Why does one psychologically depend on another? Isn't dependence the denial of freedom? Take away the house, the husband, the children, the possessions - what is a man if all these are removed? In himself he is insufficient, empty, lost. So out of this emptiness, of which he is afraid, he depends on property, on people and beliefs. You may be so sure of all the things you depend on that you can't imagine ever losing them - the love of your family, and the comfort. Yet fear continues. So we must be clear that any form of psychological dependence must inevitably breed fear, though the things you depend on may seem almost indestructible. Fear arises out of this inner insufficiency, poverty and emptiness. So now, do you see, we have three issues - sensitivity, dependence and fear? The three are interrelated. Take sensitivity: the more sensitive you are (unless you understand how to remain sensitive without dependence, how to be vulnerable without agony), the more you depend. Then take dependence: the more you depend, the more there is disgust and the demand to be free. This demand for freedom encourages fear, for this demand is a reaction, not freedom from dependence. Questioner: Are you dependent on anything? Krishnamurti: Of course I'm dependent physically on food, clothes and shelter, but psychologically, inwardly, I'm not dependent on anything - not on gods, not on social morality, not on belief, not on people. But it is irrelevant whether or not I am dependent. So, to continue: fear is the awareness of our inner emptiness, loneliness and poverty, and of not being able to do anything about it. We are concerned only with this fear which breeds dependence, and which is again increased by dependence. If we understand fear we also understand dependence. So to understand fear there must be sensitivity to discover, to understand how it comes into being. If one is at all sensitive one becomes conscious of one's own extraordinary emptiness - a bottomless pit which cannot be filled by the vulgar entertainment of drugs nor by the entertainment of the churches, nor the amusements of society: nothing can ever fill it. Knowing this the fear increases. This drives you to depend, and this dependence makes you more and more insensitive. And knowing this is so, you are frightened of it. So our question now is: how is one to go beyond this emptiness, this loneliness - not how is one to be self-sufficient, not how is one to camouflage this emptiness permanently? Questioner: Why do you say it is not a question of becoming self-sufficient? Krishnamurti: Because if you are self-sufficient you are no longer sensitive; you become smug and callous, indifferent and enclosed. To be without dependence, to go beyond dependence, doesn't mean to become self-sufficient. Can the mind face and live with this emptiness, and not escape in any direction? Questioner: It would drive me mad to think I had to live with it for ever. Krishnamurti: Any movement away from this emptiness is an escape. And this flight away from something, away from "what is," is fear. Fear is flight away from something. What is is not the fear; it is the flight which is the fear, and this will drive you mad, not the emptiness itself. So what is this emptiness, this loneliness? How does it come about? Surely it comes through comparison and measurement, doesn't it? I compare myself with the saint, the master, the great musician, the man who knows, the man who has arrived. In this comparison I find myself wanting and insufficient: I have no talent, I am inferior, I have not "realised; I am not, and that man is. So out of measurement and comparison comes the enormous cavity of emptiness and nothingness. And the flight from this cavity is fear. And the fear stops us from understanding this bottomless pit. It is a neurosis which feeds upon itself. And again, this measurement, this comparison, is the very essence of dependence. So we are back again at dependence, a vicious circle. Questioner: We have come a long way in this discussion and things are clearer. There is dependence; is it possible not to depend? Yes, I think it is possible. Then we have the fear; is it possible not to run away from emptiness at all, which means, not to escape through fear? Yes, I think it is possible. That means we are left with the emptiness. Is it possible then to face this emptiness since we have stopped running away from it through fear? Yes, I think it is possible. Is it possible finally, not to measure, not to compare? For if we have come this far, and I think we have, only this emptiness remains, and one sees that this emptiness is the outcome of comparison. And one sees that dependence and fear are the outcome of this emptiness. So there is comparison, emptiness, fear, dependence. Can I really live a life without comparison, without measurement? Krishnamurti: Of course you have to measure to put a carpet on the floor! Questioner: Yes. I mean can I live without psychological comparison? Krishnamurti: Do you know what it means to live without psychological comparison when all your life you have been conditioned to compare - at school, at games, at the university and in the office? Everything is comparison. To live without comparison! Do you know what it means? It means no dependence, no self-sufficiency, no seeking, no asking; therefore it means to love. Love has no comparison, and so love has no fear. Love is not aware of itself as love, for the word is not the thing. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'HOW TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD' Questioner: Please, sir, could you tell me how I am to live in this world? I don't want to be part of it yet I have to live in it, I have to have a house and earn my own living. And my neighbours are of this world; my children play with theirs, and so one becomes a part of this ugly mess, whether one wants to or not. I want to find out how to live in this world without escaping from it, without going into a monastery or around the world in a sailing boat. I want to educate my children differently, but first I want to know how to live surrounded by so much violence, greed, hypocrisy, competition and brutality. Krishnamurti: Don't let's make a problem of it. When anything becomes a problem we are caught in the solution of it, and then the problem becomes a cage, a barrier to further exploration and understanding. So don't let us reduce all life to a vast and complex problem. If the question is put in order to overcome the society in which we live, or to find a substitute for that society, or to try to escape from it though living in it, it must inevitably lead to a contradictory and hypocritical life. This question also implies, doesn't it, the complete denial of ideology? If you are really enquiring you cannot start with a conclusion, and all ideologies are a conclusion. So we must begin by finding out what you mean by living. Questioner: Please, sir, let's go step by step. Krishnamurti: I am very glad that we can go into this step by step, patiently, with an enquiring mind and heart. Now what do you mean by living? Questioner: I've never tried to put it into words. I'm bewildered, I don't know what to do, how to live. I've lost faith in everything -religions, philosophies and political utopias. There is war between individuals and between nations. In this permissive society everything is allowed - killing, riots, the cynical oppression of one country by another, and nobody does anything about it because interference might mean world war. I am faced with all this and I don't know what to do; I don't know how to live at all. I don't want to live in the midst of such confusion. Krishnamurti: What is it you are asking for - a different life, or for a new life which comes about with the understanding of the old life? If you want to live a different life without understanding what has brought about this confusion, you will always be in contradiction, in conflict, in confusion. And that of course is not a new life at all. So are you asking for a new life or for a modified continuity of the old one, or to understand the old one? Questioner: I'm not at all sure what I want but I am beginning to see what I don't want. Krishnamurti: Is what you don't want based on your free understanding or on your pleasure and pain? Are you judging out of your revolt, or do you see the causation of this conflict and misery, and, because you see it, reject it? Questioner: You're asking me too many things. All I know is that I want to live a different kind of life. I don't know what it means; I don't know why I'm seeking it; and, as I said, I'm utterly bewildered by it all. Krishnamurti: Your basic question is, isn't it, how are you to live in this world? Before you find out let us first see what this world is. The world is not only all that surrounds us, it is also our relationship to all these things and people, to ourselves, to ideas. That is, our relationship to property, to people, to concepts - in fact our relationship to the stream of events which we call life. This is the world. We see division into nationalities, into religious, economic, political, social and ethnical groups; the whole world is broken up and is as fragmented outwardly as its human beings are inwardly. In fact, this outer fragmentation is the manifestation of the human being's inner division. Questioner: Yes, I see this fragmentation very clearly, and I am also beginning to see that the human being is responsible. Krishnamurti:You are the human being! Questioner: Then can I live differently from what I am myself? I'm suddenly realizing that if I am to live in a totally different way there must be a new birth in me, a new mind and heart, new eyes. And I realize also that this hasn't happened. I live the way I am, and the way I am has made life as it is. But where does one go from there? Krishnamurti: You don't go anywhere from there! There is no going anywhere. The going, or the searching for the ideal, for what we think is better, gives us a feeling that we are progressing, that we are moving towards a better world. But this movement is no movement at all because the end has been projected out of our misery, confusion, greed and envy. So this end, which is supposed to be the opposite of what is, is really the same as what is, it is engendered by what is. Therefore it creates the conflict between what is and what should be. This is where our basic confusion and conflict arises. The end is not over there, not on the other side of the wall; the beginning and the end are here. Questioner: Wait a minute, sir, please; I don't understand this at all. Are you telling me that the ideal of what should be is the result of not understanding what is? Are you telling me that what should be is what is, and that this movement from what is to what should be isn't really a movement at all? Krishnamurti: It is an idea; it is fiction. If you understand what is, what need is there for what should be? Questioner: Is that so? I understand what is. I understand the bestiality of war, the horror of killing, and because I understand it I have this ideal of not killing. The ideal is born out of my understanding of what is, therefore it is not an escape. Krishnamurti: If you understand that killing is terrible do you have to have an ideal in order not to kill? Perhaps we are not clear about the word understanding. When we say we understand something, in that is implied, isn't it, that we have learnt all it has to say? We have explored it and discovered the truth or the falseness of it. This implies also, doesn't it, that this understanding is not an intellectual affair, but that one has felt it deeply in one's heart? There is understanding only when the mind and the heart are in perfect harmony. Then one says "I have understood this, and finished with it", and it no longer has the vitality to breed further conflict. Do we both give the same meaning to that word understand? Questioner: I hadn't before, but now I see that what you are saying is true. Yet I honestly don't understand, in that way, the total disorder of the world, which, as you so rightly pointed out, is my own disorder. How can I understand it? How can I completely learn about the disorder, the entire disorder and confusion of the world, and of myself? Krishnamurti: Do not use the word how, please. Questioner: Why not? Krishnamurti: The how implies that somebody is going to give you a method, a recipe, which, if you practise it, will bring about understanding. Can understanding ever come about through a method? Understanding means love and the sanity of the mind. And love cannot be practised or taught. The sanity of the mind can only come about when there is clear perception, seeing things as they are unemotionally, not sentimentally. Neither of these two things can be taught by another, nor by a system invented by yourself or by another. Questioner: You are too persuasive, sir, or is it perhaps that you are too logical? Are you trying to influence me to see things as you see them? Krishnamurti: God forbid! Influence in any form is destructive of love. Propaganda to make the mind sensitive, alert, will only make it dull and insensitive. So we are in no way trying to influence you or persuade you, or make you depend. We are only pointing out, exploring together. And to explore together you must be free, both of me and of your own prejudices and fears. Otherwise you go round and round in circles. So we must go back to our original question: how am I to live in this world? To live in this world we must deny the world. By that we mean: deny the ideal, the war, the fragmentation, the competition, the envy and so on. We don't mean deny the world as a schoolboy revolts against his parents. We mean deny it because we understand it. This understanding is negation. Questioner: I am out of my depth. Krishnamurti: You said you do not want to live in the confusion, the dishonesty and ugliness of this world. So you deny it. But from what background do you deny it, why do you deny it? Do you deny it because you want to live a peaceful life, a life of complete security and enclosure, or do you deny it because you see what it actually is? Questioner: I think I deny it because I see around me what is taking place. Of course my prejudices and fear are all involved. So it is a mixture of what is actually taking place and my own anxiety. Krishnamurti: Which predominates, your own anxiety or the actual seeing of what is around you? If fear predominates, then you can't see what is actually going on around you, because fear is darkness, and in darkness you can see absolutely nothing. If you realize that, then you can see the world actually as it is, then you can see yourself actually as you are. Because you are the world, and the world is you; they are not two separate entities. Questioner: Would you please explain more fully what you mean by the world is me and I am the world? Krishnamurti: Does this really need explaining? Do you want me to describe in detail what you are and show you that it is the same as what the world is? Will this description convince you that you are the world? Will you be convinced by a logical, sequential explanation showing you the cause and the effect? If you are convinced by careful description, will that give you understanding? Will it make you feel that you are the world, make you feel responsible for the world? It seems so clear that our human greed, envy, aggression and violence have brought about the society in which we live, a legalized acceptance of what we are. I think this is really sufficiently clear and let's not spend any more time on this issue. You see, we don't feel this, we don't love, therefore there is this division between me and the world. Questioner: May I come back again tomorrow? * * * He came back the next day eagerly, and there was the bright light of enquiry in his eyes. Questioner: I want, if you are willing, to go further into this question of how I am to live in this world. I do now understand, with my heart and my mind, as you explained yesterday, the utter importance of ideals. I had quite a long struggle with it and have come to see the triviality of ideals. You are saying, aren't you, that when there are no ideals or escapes there is only the past, the thousand yesterdays which make up the "me"? So when I ask: How am I to live in this world?" I have not only put a wrong question, but I have also made a contradictory statement, for I have placed the world and the "me" in opposition to each other. And this contradiction is what I call living. So when I ask the question, "How am I to live in this world?" I am really trying to improve this contradiction, to justify it, to modify it, because that's all I know; I don't know anything else. Krishnamurti: This then is the question we have now: must living always be in the past, must all activity spring from the past, is all relationship the outcome of the past, is living the complex memory of the past? That is all we know - the past modifying the present. And the future is the outcome of this past acting through the present. So the past, the present and the future are all the past. And this past is what we call living. The mind is the past, the brain is the past, the feelings are the past, and action coming from these is the positive activity of the known. This whole process is your life and all the relationship and activity that you know. So when you ask how you are to live in this world you are asking for a change of prisons. Questioner: I don't mean that. What I mean is: I see very clearly that my process of thinking and doing is the past working through the present to the future. This is all I know, and that's a fact. And I realize that unless there is a change in this structure I am caught in it, I am of it. From this the question inevitably arises: how am I to change? Krishnamurti: To live in this world sanely there must be a radical change of the mind and of the heart. Questioner: Yes, but what do you mean by change? How am I to change if whatever I do is the movement of the past? I can only change myself, nobody else can change me. And I don't see what it means - to change. Krishnamurti: So the question "How am I to live in this world?" has now become "How am I to change?" - bearing in mind that the how doesn't mean a method, but is an enquiry to understand. What is change? Is there any change at all? Or can you ask whether there is any change at all only after there has been a total change and revolution? Let's begin again to find out what this word means. Change implies a movement from what is to something different. Is this something different merely an opposite, or does it belong to a different order altogether? If it is merely an opposite then it is not different at all, because all opposites are mutually dependent, like hot and cold, high and low. The opposite is contained within, and determined by, its opposite; it exists only in comparison, and things that are comparative have different measures of the same quality, and therefore they are similar. So change to an opposite is no change at all. Even if this going towards what seems different gives you the feeling that you are really doing something, it is an illusion. Questioner: Let me absorb this for a moment. Krishnamurti: So what are we concerned with now? Is it possible to bring about in ourselves the birth of a new order altogether that is not related to the past? The past is irrelevant to this enquiry, and trivial, because it is irrelevant to the new order. Questioner: How can you say it is trivial and irrelevant? We've been saying all along that the past is the issue, and now you say it is irrelevant. Krishnamurti: The past seems to be the only issue because it is the only thing that holds our minds and hearts. It alone is important to us. But why do we give importance to it? Why is this little space all-important? If you are totally immersed in it, utterly committed to it, then you will never listen to change. The man who is not wholly committed is the only one capable of listening, enquiring and asking. Only then will he be able to see the triviality of this little space. So, are you completely immersed, or is your head above the water? If your head is above the water then you can see that this little thing is trivial. Then you have room to look around. How deeply are you immersed? Nobody can answer this for you except yourself. in the very asking of this question there is already freedom and, therefore, one is not afraid. Then your vision is extensive. When this pattern of the past holds you completely by the throat, then you acquiesce, accept, obey, follow, believe. It is only when you are aware that this is not freedom that you are starting to climb out of it. So we are again asking: what is change, what is revolution? Change is not a movement from the known to the known, and all political revolutions are that. This kind of change is not what we are talking about. To progress from being a sinner to being a saint is to progress from one illusion to another. So now we are free of change as a movement from this to that. Questioner: Have I really understood this? What am I to do with anger, violence and fear when they arise in me? Am I to give them free reign? How am I to deal with them? There must be change there, otherwise I am what I was before. Krishnamurti: Is it clear to you that these things cannot be overcome by their opposites? If so, you have only the violence, the envy, the anger, the greed. The feeling arises as the result of a challenge, and then it is named. This naming of the feeling re-establishes it in the old pattern. If you do not name it, which means you do not identify yourself with it, then the feeling is new and it will go away by itself. The naming of it strengthens it and gives it a continuity which is the whole process of thought. Questioner: I am being driven into a comer where I see myself actually as I am, and I see how trivial I am. From there what comes next? Krishnamurti: Any movement from what I am strengthens what I am. So change is no movement at all. Change is the denial of change, and now only can I put this question: is there a change at all? This question can be put only when all movement of thought has come to an end, for thought must be denied for the beauty of non-change. In the total negation of all movement of thought away from what is, is the ending of what is. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'RELATIONSHIP' Questioner: I have come a long way to see you. Although I am married and have children I have been away from them, wandering, meditating, as a mendicant. I have puzzled greatly over this very complicated problem of relationship. When I go into a village and they give me food, I am related to the giver, as I am related to my wife and children. In another village when somebody gives me clothes I am related to the whole factory that produced them. I am related to the earth on which I walk, to the tree under which I take shelter, to everything. And yet I am alone, isolated. When I am with my wife, I am separate even during sex - it is an act of separation. When I go into a temple it is still the worshipper being related to the thing he worships: separation again. So in all relationships, as I see it, there is this separation, duality, and behind or through it, or around it, there is a peculiar sense of unity. When I see the beggar it hurts me, for I am like him and I feel as he feels -lonely, desperate, sick, hungry. I feel for him, and with him, for his meaningless existence. Some rich man comes along in his big motor car and gives me a lift, but I feel uncomfortable in his company, yet at the same time I feel for him and am related to him. So I have meditated upon this strange phenomenon of relationship. Can we on this lovely morning, overlooking this deep valley, talk over together this question? Krishnamurti: Is all relationship out of this isolation? Can there be relationship as long as there is any separateness, division? Can there be relationship if there is no contact, not only physical but at every level of our being, with another? One may hold the hand of another and yet be miles away, wrapped in one's own thoughts and problems. One may be in a group and yet be painfully alone. So one asks: can there be any kind of relationship with the tree, the flower, the human being, or with the skies and the lovely sunset, when the mind in its activities is isolating itself? And can there be any contact ever, with anything at all, even when the mind is not isolating itself? Questioner: Everything and everybody has its own existence. Everything and everybody is shrouded in its own existence. I can never penetrate this enclosure of another's being. However much I love someone, his existence is separate from mine. I can perhaps touch him from the outside, mentally or physically, but his existence is his own, and mine is for ever on the outside of it. Similarly he cannot reach me. Must we always remain two separate entities, each in his own world, with his own limitations, within the prison of his own consciousness? Krishnamurti: Each lives within his own tissue, you in yours, he in his. And is there any possibility, ever, of breaking through this tissue? Is this tissue - this shroud, this envelope - the word? Is it made up of your concern with yourself and his with himself, your desires opposed to his? Is this capsule the past? It is all of this, isn't it? It isn't one particular thing but a whole bundle which the mind carries about. You have your burden, another has his. Can these burdens ever be dropped so that the mind meets the mind, the heart meets the heart? That is really the question, isn't it? Questioner: Even if all these burdens are dropped, if that were possible, even then he remains in his skin with his thoughts, and I in mine with my thoughts. Sometimes the gap is narrow, sometimes it is wide, but we are always two separate islands. The gap seems to be widest when we care most about it and try to bridge it. Krishnamurti: You can identify yourself with that villager or with that flaming bougainvillaea - which is a mental trick to pretend unity. Identification with something is one of the most hypocritical states - to identify oneself with a nation, with a belief and yet remain alone is a favourite trick to cheat loneliness. Or you identify yourself so completely with your belief that you are that belief, and this is a neurotic state. Now let's put away this urge to be identified with a person or an idea or a thing. That way there is no harmony, unity or love. So our next question is: can you tear through the envelope so that there is no more envelope? Then only would there be a possibility of total contact. How is one to tear through the envelope? The "how" doesn't mean a method, but rather an enquiry which might open the door. Questioner: Yes, no other contact can be called relationship at all, though we say it is. Krishnamurti: Do we tear the envelope bit by bit or cut through it immediately? If we tear it bit by bit, which is what analysts sometimes claim to do, the job is never done. It is not through time that you can break down this separation. Questioner: Can I enter into the envelope of another? And isn't his envelope his very existence, his heartbeats and his blood, his feelings and his memories? Krishnamurti: Are you not the very envelope itself? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: The very movement to tear through the other envelope, or extend outside of your own, is the very affirmation and the action of your own envelope: you are the envelope. So you are the observer of the envelope, and you are also the envelope itself. In this case you are the observer and the observed: so is he, and that's how we remain. And you try to reach him and he tries to reach you. Is this possible? You are the island surrounded by seas, and he is also the island surrounded by seas. You see that you are both the island and the sea; there is no division between them; you are the entire earth with the sea. Therefore there is no division as the island and the sea. The other person doesn't see this. He is the island surrounded by sea; he tries to reach you, or, if you are foolish enough, you may try to reach him. Is that possible? How can there be a contact between a man who is free and another who is bound? Since you are the observer and the observed, you are the whole movement of the earth and the sea. But the other, who doesn't understand this, is still the island surrounded by water. He tries to reach you and is everlastingly failing because he maintains his insularity. It is only when he leaves it and is, like you, open to the movement of the skies, the earth, and the sea, that there can be contact. The one who sees that the barrier is himself can no longer have a barrier. Therefore he, in himself, is not separate at all. The other has not seen that the barrier is himself and so maintains the belief in his separateness. How can this man reach the other? It is not possible. * * * Questioner: If we may I should like to continue from where we left off yesterday. You were saying that the mind is the maker of the envelope around itself, and that this envelope is the mind. I really don't understand this. Intellectually I can agree, but the nature of perception eludes me. I should like very much to understand it - not verbally but actually feel it - so that there is no conflict in my life. Krishnamurti: There is the space between what the mind calls the envelope which it has made, and itself. There is the space between the ideal and the action. In these different fragmentations of space between the observer and the observed, or between different things it observes, is all conflict and struggle, and all the problems of life. There is the separation between this envelope around me and the envelope around another. In that space is all our existence, all our relationship and battle. Questioner: When you talk of the division between the observer and the observed do you mean these fragmentations of space in our thinking and in our daily actions? Krishnamurti What is this space? There is space between you and your envelope, the space between him and his envelope, and there is the space between the two envelopes. These spaces all appear to the observer. What are these spaces made of? How do they come into being? What is the quality and the nature of these divided spaces? If we could remove these fragmentary spaces what would happen? Questioner: There would then be true contact on all levels of one's being. Krishnamurti: Is that all? Questioner: There would be no more conflict, for all conflict is relationship across these spaces. Krishnamurti: Is that all? When this space actually disappears -not verbally or intellectually - but actually disappears - there is complete harmony, unity, between you and him, between you and another. In this harmony you and he cease and there is only this vast space which can never be broken up. The small structure of the mind comes to an end, for the mind is fragmentation. Questioner: I really can't understand this at all, though I have a deep feeling within me that it is so. I can see that when there is love this actually takes place, but I don't know that love. It's not with me all the time. It is not in my heart. I see it only as if through a misty glass. I can't honestly grasp it with all my being. Could we, as you suggested, consider what these spaces are made of, how they come into being? Krishnamurti: Let's be quite sure that we both understand the same thing when we use the word space. There is the physical space between people and things, and there is the psychological space between people and things. Then there is also the space between the idea and the actual. So all this, the physical and psychological, is space, more or less limited and defined. We are not now talking of the physical space. We are talking of the psychological space between people and the psychological space in the human being himself, in his thoughts and activities. How does this space come about? Is it fictitious, illusory, or is it real? Feel it, be aware of it, make sure you haven't just got a mental image of it, bear in mind that the description is never the thing. Be quite sure that you know what we are talking about. Be quite aware that this limited space, this division, exists in you: don't move from there if you don't understand. Now how does this space come about? Questioner: We see the physical space between things.... Krishnamurti: Don't explain anything; just feel your way into it. We are asking how this space has come into being. Don't give an explanation or a cause, but remain with this space and feel it. Then the cause and the description will have very little meaning and no value. This space has come into being because of thought, which is the "me", the word - which is the whole division. Thought itself is this distance, this division. Thought is always breaking itself up into fragments and creating division. Thought always cuts up what it observes into fragments within space - as you and me, yours and mine, me and my thoughts, and so on. This space, which thought has created between what it observes, has become real; and it is this space that divides. Then thought tries to build a bridge over this division, thus playing a trick upon itself all the time, deceiving itself and hoping for unity. Questioner: That reminds me of the old statement about thought: it is a thief disguising himself as a policeman in order to catch the thief. Krishnamurti: Don't bother to quote, sir, however ancient it is. We are considering what actually is going on. In seeing the truth of the nature of thought and its activities, thought becomes quiet. Thought being quiet, not made quiet, is there space? Questioner: It is thought itself which now rushes in to answer this question. Krishnamurti: Exactly! Therefore we do not even ask the question. The mind now is completely harmonious, without fragmentation; the little space has ceased and there is only space. When the mind is completely quiet there is the vastness of space and silence. Questioner: So I begin to see that my relationship to another is between thought and thought; whatever I answer is the noise of thought, and realizing it, I am silent. Krishnamurti: This silence is the benediction. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'CONFLICT' Questioner: I find myself in a great deal of conflict with everything about me; and also everything within me is in conflict. People have spoken of divine order; nature is harmonious; it seems that man is the only animal who violates this order, making so much misery for others and for himself. When I wake up in the morning I see from my window little birds fighting with each other, but they soon separate and fly away, whereas I carry this war with myself and with others inside me all the time; there is no escaping it. I wonder if I can ever be at peace with myself. I must say I should like to find myself in complete harmony with everything about me and with myself. As one sees from this window the quiet sea and the light on the water, one has a feeling deep within oneself that there must be a way of living without these endless quarrels with oneself and with the world. Is there any harmony at all, anywhere? Or is there only everlasting disorder? If there is harmony, at what level can it exist? Or does it only exist on the top of some mountain which the burning valleys can never know? Krishnamurti: Can one go from one to the other? Can one change that which is to that which is not? Can disharmony be transformed into harmony? Questioner: Is conflict necessary then? It may perhaps, after all, be the natural order of things. Krishnamurti: If one accepted that, one would have to accept everything society stands for: wars, ambitious competition, an aggressive way of life - all the brutal violence of men, inside and outside of his so-called holy places. Is this natural? Will this bring about any unity? Wouldn't it be better for us to consider these two facts - the fact of conflict with all its complicated struggles, and the fact of the mind demanding order, harmony, peace, beauty, love? Questioner: I know nothing about harmony. I see it in the heavens, in the seasons, in the mathematical order of the universe. But that doesn't give me order in my own heart and mind; the absolute order of mathematics is not my order. I have no order, I am in deep disorder. I know there are different theories of gradual evolution towards the so-called perfection of political utopias and religious heavens, but this leaves me where I actually am. The world may perhaps be perfect in ten thousand years from now, but in the meantime I'm having hell. Krishnamurti: We see the disorder in ourselves and in society. Both are very complex. There are really no answers. One can examine all this very carefully, analyse it closely, look for causes of disorder in oneself and in society, expose them to the light and perhaps believe that one will free the mind from them. This analytical process is what most people are doing, intelligently or unintelligently, and it doesn't get anybody very far. Man has analysed himself for thousands of years, and produced no result but literature! The many saints have paralysed themselves in concepts and ideological prisons; they too are in conflict. The cause of our conflict is this everlasting duality of desire: the endless corridor of the opposites creating envy greed ambition aggression, fear, and all the rest of it. Now I wonder if there isn't an altogether different approach to this problem? The acceptance of this struggle and all our efforts to get out of it have become traditional. The whole approach is traditional. In this traditional approach the mind operates but, as we see, the traditional approach of the mind creates more disorder. So the problem is not how to end disorder, but rather whether the mind can look at it freed from tradition. And then perhaps there may be no problem at all. Questioner: I don't follow you at all. Krishnamurti: There is this fact of disorder. There is no doubt about it: it is an actual fact. The traditional approach to this fact is to analyse it, to try to discover the cause of it and overcome the cause, or else to invent its opposite and battle towards that. This is the traditional approach with its disciplines, drills, controls, suppressions, sublimations. Man has done this for thousands upon thousands of years; it has led nowhere. Can we abandon this approach completely and look at the problem entirely differently -that is, not try to go beyond it, or to resolve it, or to overcome it, or to escape from it? Can the mind do this. Questioner: Perhaps.... Krishnamurti: Don't answer so quickly! This is a tremendous thing I am asking you. From the beginning of time man has tried to deal with all his problems, either by going beyond them, resolving them, overcoming them or escaping from them. Please do not think you can push all that aside so lightly, simply with a verbal agreement. It makes up the very structure of everybody's mind. Can the mind now, understanding all this non-verbally, actually free itself from the tradition? This traditional way of dealing with the conflict never solves it, but only adds more conflict: being violent, which is conflict, I add the additional conflict of trying to become non-violent. All social morality and all religious prescriptions are that. Are we together? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Then do you see how far we have come? Having, through understanding, repudiated all these traditional approaches, what is the actual state of the mind now? Because the state of the mind is far more important than the conflict itself. Questioner: I really don't know. Krishnamurti: Why don't you know? Why aren't you aware, if you have really abandoned the traditional approach, of the state of your mind? Why don't you know? Either you have abandoned it or you haven't. If you have, you would know it. If you have, then your mind is made innocent to look at the problem. You can look at the problem as though for the first time. And if you do this, is there a problem of conflict at all? Because you look at the problem with the old eyes it is not only strengthened but also moves in its well-worn path. So what is important is how you look at the problem -whether you look at it with new eyes or old eyes. The new eyes are freed from the conditioned responses to the problem. Even to name the problem through recognition is to approach it in the traditional way. Justification, condemnation, or translation of the problem in terms of pleasure and pain, are all involved in this habitual traditional approach of doing something about it. This is generally called positive action with regard to the problem. But when the mind brushes all that aside as being ineffectual, unintelligent, then it has become highly sensitive, highly ordered, and free. Questioner: You're asking too much of me, I can't do it. I'm incapable of it. You're asking me to be superhuman ! Krishnamurti: You're making difficulties for yourself, blocking yourself, when you say you must become superhuman. It's nothing of the kind. You keep on looking at things with eyes that want to interfere, that want to do something about what they see. Stop doing anything about it, for whatever you do belongs to the traditional approach. That's all. Be simple. This is the miracle of perception - to perceive with a heart and mind that are completely cleansed of the past. Negation is the most positive action. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'THE RELIGIOUS LIFE' Questioner: I should like to know what a religious life is. I have stayed in monasteries for several months, meditated, led a disciplined life, read a great deal. I've been to various temples, churches and mosques. I've tried to lead a very simple, harmless life, trying not to hurt people or animals. This surely isn't all there is to a religious life? I've practised yoga, studied Zen and followed many religious disciples. I am, and have always been, a vegetarian. As you see, I'm getting old now, and I've lived with some of the saints in different parts of the world, but somehow I feel that all this is only the outskirts of the real thing. So I wonder if we can discuss today what to you is a religious life. Krishnamurti: A sannyasi came to see me one day and he was sad. He said he had taken a vow of celibacy and left the world to become a mendicant, wandering from village to village, but his sexual desires were so imperious that one morning he decided to have his sexual organs surgically removed. For many months he was in constant pain, but somehow it healed, and after many years he fully realized what he had done. And so he came to see me and in that little room he asked me what he could do now, having mutilated himself, to become normal again - not physically, of course, but inwardly. He had done this thing because sexual activity was considered contrary to a religious life. It was considered mundane, belonging to the world of pleasure, which a real sannyasi must at all costs avoid. He said, "Here I am, feeling completely lost, deprived of my manhood. I struggled so hard against my sexual desires, trying to control them, and ultimately this terrible thing took place. Now what am I to do? I know that what I did was wrong. My energy has almost gone and I seem to be ending my life in darkness." He held my hand, and we sat silently for some time. Is this a religious life? Is the denial of pleasure or beauty a way that leads to a religious life? To deny the beauty of the skies and the hills and the human form, will that lead to a religious life? But that is what most saints and monks believe. They torture themselves in that belief. Can a tortured, twisted, distorted mind ever find what is a religious life? Yet all religions assert that the only way to reality or to God, or whatever they call it, is through this torture, this distortion. They all make the distinction between what they call a spiritual or religious life and what they call a worldly life. A man who lives only for pleasure, with occasional flashes of sorrow and piety, whose whole life is given to amusement and entertainment is, of course, a worldly man, although he may also be very clever, very scholarly, and fill his life with other people's thoughts or his own. And a man who has a gift and exercises it for the benefit of society, or for his own pleasure, and who achieves fame in the fulfilment of that gift, such a man, surely, is also worldly. But it is also worldly to go to church, or to the temple or the mosque, to pray, steeped in prejudice, bigotry, utterly unaware of the brutality that this implies. It is worldly to be patriotic, nationalistic, idealistic. The man who shuts himself up in a monastery - getting up at regular hours with a book in hand, reading and praying - is surely also worldly. And the man who goes out to do good works, whether he is a social reformer or a missionary, is just like the politician in his concern with the world. The division between the religious life and the world is the very essence of worldliness. The minds of all these people - monks, saints, reformers - are not very different from the minds of those who are only concerned with the things that give pleasure. So it is important not to divide life into the worldly and the non-worldly. It is important not to make the distinction between the worldly and the so-called religious. Without the world of matter, the material world, we wouldn't be here. Without the beauty of the sky and the single tree on the hill, without that woman going by and that man riding the horse, life wouldn't be possible. We are concerned with the totality of life not a particular part of it which is considered religious in opposition to the rest. So one begins to see that a religious life is concerned with the whole and not with the particular. Questioner: I understand what you say. We have to deal with the totality of living; we can't separate the world from the so-called spirit. So the question is: in what way can we act religiously with regard to all the things in life? Krishnamurti: What do we mean by acting religiously? Don't you mean a way of life in which there is no division - division between the worldly and the religious, between what should be and what shouldn't be, between me and you, between like and dislike? This division is conflict. A life of conflict is not a religious life. A religious life is only possible when we deeply understand conflict. This understanding is intelligence. It is this intelligence that acts rightly. What most people call intelligence is merely deftness in some technical activity, or cunning in business or political chicanery. Questioner: So my question really means how is one to live without conflict, and bring about that feeling of true sanctity which is not simply emotional piety conditioned by some religious cage - no matter how old and venerated that cage is? Krishnamurti: A man living without too much conflict in a village, or dreaming in a cave on a "sacred" hillside, is surely not living the religious life that we are talking about. To end conflict is one of the most complex things. It needs self-observation and the sensitivity of awareness of the outer as well as of the inner. Conflict can only end where there is the understanding of the contradiction in oneself. This contradiction will always exist if there is no freedom from the known, which is the past. Freedom from the past means living in the now which is not of time, in which there is only this movement of freedom, untouched by the past, by the known. Questioner: What do you mean by freedom from the past? Krishnamurti: The past is all our accumulated memories. These memories act in the present and create our hopes and fears of the future. These hopes and fears are the psychological future: without them there is no future. So the present is the action of the past, and the mind is this movement of the past. The past acting in the present creates what we call the future. This response of the past is involuntary, it is not summoned or invited, it is upon us before we know it. Questioner: In that case, how are we going to be free of it? Krishnamurti: To be aware of this movement without choice - because choice again is more of this same movement of the past - is to observe the past in action: such observation is not a movement of the past. To observe without the image of thought is action in which the past has ended. To observe the tree without thought is action without the past. To observe the action of the past is again action without the past. The state of seeing is more important than what is seen. To be aware of the past in that choiceless observation is not only to act differently, but to be different. In this awareness memory acts without impediment, and efficiently. To be religious is to be so choicelessly aware that there is freedom from the known even whilst the known acts wherever it has to. Questioner: But the known, the past, still sometimes acts even when it should not; it still acts to cause conflict. Krishnamurti: To be aware of this is also to be in a state of inaction with regard to the past which is acting. So freedom from the known is truly the religious life. That doesn't mean to wipe out the known but to enter a different dimension altogether from which the known is observed. This action of seeing choicelessly is the action of love. The religious life is this action, and all living is this action, and the religious mind is this action. So religion, and the mind, and life, and love, are one. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'SEEING THE WHOLE' Questioner: When I listen to you I seem to understand what you are talking about, not only verbally, but at a much deeper level. I am part of it; I fully grasp with my whole being the truth of what you say. My hearing is sharpened, and the very seeing of the flowers, the trees, and those mountains with snow, makes me feel I am part of them. In this awareness I have no conflict, no contradiction. it is as though I could do anything, and that whatever I did would be true, would not bring either conflict or pain. But unfortunately that state doesn't last. Perhaps it lasts for an hour or two while I'm listening to you. When I leave the talks it all seems to evaporate and I'm back where I was. I try to be aware of myself; I keep remembering the state I was in when I listened to your talks, keep trying to reach it, hold on to it, and this becomes a struggle. You have said, "Be aware of your conflict, listen to your conflict, see the causes of your conflict, your conflict is yourself". I am aware of my conflict, my pain, my sorrow, my confusion, but this awareness in no way resolves these things. On the contrary, being aware of them seems to give them vitality and duration. You talk of choiceless awareness, which again breeds another battle in me, for I am full of choice, decisions and opinions. I have applied this awareness to a particular habit I have, and it has not gone. When you are aware of some conflict or strain, this same awareness keeps looking to see if it has already gone. And this seems to remind you of it, and you never shake it off. Krishnamurti: Awareness is not a commitment to something. Awareness is an observation, both outer and inner, in which direction has stopped. You are aware, but the thing of which you are aware is not being encouraged or nourished. Awareness is not concentration on something. It is not an action of the will choosing what it will be aware of, and analysing it to bring about a certain result. When awareness is deliberately focused on a particular object, as a conflict, that is the action of will which is concentration. When you concentrate - that is, put all your energy and thought within your chosen frontiers, whether reading a book or watching your anger - then, in this exclusion, the thing you are concentrating upon is strengthened, nourished. So here we have to understand the nature of awareness: We have to understand what we are talking about when we use the word awareness. Now, you can either be aware of a particular thing, or be aware of that particular as part of the total. The particular by itself has very little meaning, but when you see the total, then that particular has a relationship to the whole. Only in this relationship does the particular have its right meaning; it doesn't become all-important, it is not exaggerated. So the real question is: does one see the total process of life or is one concentrated on the particular, thus missing the whole field of life? To be aware of the whole field is to see also the particular, but, at the same time, to understand its relationship to the whole. If you are angry and are concerned with ending that anger, then you focus your attention on the anger and the whole escapes you and the anger is strengthened. But anger is interrelated to the whole. So when we separate the particular from the whole, the particular breeds its own problems. Questioner: What do you mean by seeing the whole? What is this totality you talk about, this extensive awareness in which the particular is a detail? Is it some mysterious, mystical experience? If so then we are lost completely. Or is this perhaps what you are saying, that there is a whole field of existence, of which anger is a part, and that to be concerned with the part is to block out the extensive perception? But what is this extensive perception? I can only see the whole through all its particulars. And what whole do you mean? Are you talking about the whole of the mind, or the whole of existence, or the whole of myself, or the whole of life? What whole do you mean, and how can I see it? Krishnamurti: The whole field of life: the mind, love, everything which is in life. Questioner: How can I possibly see all that! I can understand that everything I see is partial, and that all my awareness is awareness of the particular, and that this strengthens the particular. Krishnamurti: Let's put it this way: do you perceive with your mind and your heart separately, or do you see, hear, feel, think, all together, not fragmentarily? Questioner: I don't know what you mean. Krishnamurti: You hear a word, your mind tells you it is an insult, your feelings tell you you don't like it, your mind again intervenes to control or justify, and so on. Once again feeling takes over where the mind has concluded. In this way an event unleashes a chain-reaction of different parts of your being. What you hear had been broken up, made fragmentary, and if you concentrate on one of those fragments, you miss the total process of that hearing. Hearing can be fragmentary or it can be done with all your being, totally. So, by perception of the whole we mean perception with your eyes, your ears, your heart, your mind; not perception with each separately. It is giving your complete attention. In that attention, the particular, such as anger, has a different meaning since it is interrelated to many other issues. Questioner: So when you say seeing the whole, you mean seeing with the whole of your being; it is a question of quality not quantity. Is that correct? Krishnamurti: Yes, precisely. But do you see totally in this way or are you merely verbalizing it? Do you see anger with your heart, mind, ears and eyes? Or do you see anger as something unrelated to the rest of you, and therefore of great importance? When you give importance to the whole you do not forget the particular. Questioner: But what happens to the particular, to anger? Krishnamurti: You are aware of anger with your whole being. If you are, is there anger? Inattention is anger, not attention. So attention with your entire being is seeing the whole, and inattention is seeing the particular. To be aware of the whole, and of the particular, and of the relationship between the two, is the whole problem. We divide the particular from the rest and try to solve it. And so conflict increases and there is no way out. Questioner: When you speak then of seeing only the particular, as anger, do you mean looking at it with only one part of your being? Krishnamurti: When you look at the particular with a fragment of your being, the division between that particular and the fragment which is looking at it grows, and so conflict increases. When there is no division there is no conflict. Questioner: Are you saying that there is no division between this anger and me when I look at it with all my being? Krishnamurti: Exactly. Is this what you actually are doing, or are you merely following the words? What is actually taking place? This is far more important than your question. Questioner: You ask me what is taking place. I am simply trying to understand you. Krishnamurti: Are you trying to understand me or are you seeing the truth of what we are talking about, which is independent of me? If you actually see the truth of what we are talking about, then you are your own guru and your own disciple, which is to understand yourself. This understanding cannot be learnt from another. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'MORALITY' Questioner: What is it to be virtuous? What makes one act righteously? What is the foundation of morality? How do I know virtue without struggling for it? Is it an end in itself? Krishnamurti: Can we discard the morality of society which is really quite immoral? Its morality has become respectable, approved by religious sanctions; and the morality of counter-revolution also soon becomes as immoral and respectable as that of well-established society. This morality is to go to war, to kill, to be aggressive, to seek power, to give hate its place; it is all the cruelty and injustice of established authority. This is not moral. But can one actually say that it is not moral? Because we are part of this society, whether we are conscious of it or not. Social morality is our morality, and can we easily put it aside? The ease with which we put it aside is the sign of our morality - not the effort it costs us to put it aside, not the reward, not the punishment for this effort but the consummate ease with which we discard it. If our behaviour is directed by the environment in which we live, controlled and shaped by it, then it is mechanical and heavily conditioned. And if our behaviour is the outcome of our own conditioned response, is it moral? If your action is based on fear and reward, is it righteous? If you behave rightly according to some ideological concept or principle, can that action be regarded as virtuous? So we must begin to find out how deeply we have discarded the morality of authority, imitation, conformity and obed- ience. Isn't fear the basis of our morality? Unless these questions are fundamentally answered for oneself one cannot know what it is to be truly virtuous. As we said, with what ease you come out of this hypocrisy is of the greatest importance. If you merely disregard it, it doesn't indicate that you are moral: you might be merely psychopathic. If you live a life of routine and contentment that is not morality either. The morality of the saint who conforms and follows the well-established tradition of sainthood is obviously not morality. So one can see that any conformity to a pattern, whether or not it is sanctioned by tradition, is not righteous behaviour. Only out of freedom can come virtue. Can one free oneself with great skill from this network of what is considered moral? Skill in action comes with freedom, and so virtue. Questioner: Can I free myself from social morality without fear, with the intelligence which is skill? I'm frightened at the very idea of being considered immoral by society. The young can do it, but I am middle-aged, and I have a family, and in my very blood there is respectability, the essence of the bourgeois. It is there, and I am frightened. Krishnamurti: Either you accept social morality or reject it. You can't have it both ways. You can't have one foot in hell and the other in heaven. Questioner: So what am I to do? I see now what morality is, and yet I'm being immoral all the time. The older I grow the more hypocritical I become. I despise the social morality, and yet I want its benefits, its comfort, its security, psychological and material, and the elegance of a good address. That is my actual, deplorable state. What am I to do? Krishnamurti: You can't do anything but carry on as you are. It is much better to stop trying to be moral, stop trying to be concerned with virtue. Questioner: But I can't, I want the other! I see the beauty and the vigour of it, the cleanliness of it. What I am holding on to is dirty and ugly, but I can't let it go. Krishnamurti: Then there is no issue. You can't have virtue and respectability. Virtue is freedom. Freedom is not an idea, a concept. When there is freedom there is attention, and only in this attention can goodness flower. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'SUICIDE' Questioner: I would like to talk about suicide - not because of any crisis in my own life, nor because I have any reason for suicide, but because the subject is bound to come up when one sees the tragedy of old age - the tragedy of physical disintegration, the breaking up of the body, and the loss of real life in people when this happens. Is there any reason to prolong life when one reaches that state, to go on with the remnants of it? Would it not perhaps be an act of intelligence to recognise when the usefulness of life is over? Krishnamurti: If it was intelligence that prompted you to end life that very intelligence would have forbidden your body to deteriorate prematurely. Questioner: But is there not a moment when even the intelligence of the mind cannot prevent this deterioration? Eventually the body wears out - how does one recognise that time when it comes? Krishnamurti: We ought to go into this rather deeply. There are several things involved in it, aren't there? The deterioration of the body, of the organism, the senility of the mind, and the utter incapacity that breeds resistance. We abuse the body endlessly through custom, taste and negligence. Taste dictates - and the pleasure of it controls and shapes the activity of the organism. When this takes place, the natural intelligence of the body is destroyed. In magazines one sees an extraordinary variety of food, beautifully coloured, appealing to your pleasures of taste, not to what is beneficial for the body. So from youth onwards you gradually deaden and destroy the instrument which should be highly sensitive, active, functioning like a perfect machine. That is part of it, and then there is the mind which for twenty, thirty or eighty years has lived in constant battle and resistance. It knows only contradiction and conflict - emotional or intellectual. Every form of conflict is not only a distortion but brings with it destruction. These then are some of the basic inner and outer factors of deterioration - the perpetually sell-centred activity with its isolating processes. Naturally there is the physical wearing out of the body as well as the unnatural wearing out. The body loses its capacities and memories, and senility gradually takes over. You ask, should not such a person commit suicide, take a pill that will put him out? Who is asking the question - the senile, or those who are watching the senility with sorrow, with despair and fear of their own deterioration? Questioner: Well, obviously the question from my point of view is motivated by distress at seeing senility in other people, for it has not presumably set in in myself yet. But isn't there also some action of intelligence which sees ahead into a possible breakdown of the body and asks the question whether it is not simply a waste to go on once the organism is no longer capable of intelligent life? Krishnamurti: Will the doctors allow euthanasia, will the doctors or the government permit the patient to commit suicide? Questioner: That surely is a legal, sociological or in some people's minds, a moral question, but that isn't what we are discussing here, is it? Aren't we asking whether the individual has the right to end his own life, not whether society will permit it? Krishnamurti: You are asking whether one has the right to take one's own life - not only when one is senile or has become aware of the approach of senility, but whether it is morally right to commit suicide at any time? Questioner: I hesitate to bring morality into it because that is a conditioned thing. I was attempting to ask the question on a straight issue of intelligence. Fortunately at the moment the issue does not confront me personally so I am able to look at it, I think, fairly dispassionately; but as an exercise in human intelligence, what is the answer? Krishnamurti: You are saying, can an intelligent man commit suicide? Is that it? Questioner: Or, can suicide be the action of an intelligent man, given certain circumstances? Krishnamurti: It is the same thing. Suicide comes, after all, either from complete despair, brought about through deep frustration, or from insoluble fear, or from the awareness of the meaninglessness of a certain way of living. Questioner: May I interrupt to say that this is generally so, but I am trying to ask the question outside any motivation. When one arrives at the point of despair then there is a tremendous motive involved and it is hard to separate the emotion from the intelligence; I am trying to stay within the realm of pure intelligence, without emotion. Krishnamurti: You are saying, does intelligence allow any form of suicide? Obviously not. Questioner: Why not? Krishnamurti: Really one has to understand this word intelligence. Is it intelligence to allow the body to deteriorate through custom, through indulgence, through the cultivation of taste, pleasure and so on? Is that intelligence, is that the action of intelligence? Questioner: No; but if one has arrived at a point in life where there may have been a certain amount of unintelligent use of the body which has not yet had any effect on it, one can't go back and re-live one's life. Krishnamurti: Therefore, become aware of the destructive nature of the way we live and put an end to it immediately, not at some future date. The act of immediacy in front of danger is an act of sanity, of intelligence; and the postponement as well as the pursuit of pleasure indicate lack of intelligence. Questioner: I see that. Krishnamurti: But don't you also see something quite factual and true, that this isolating process of thought with its self-centred activity is a form of suicide? Isolation is suicide, whether it is the isolation of a nation or of a religious organization, of a family or of a community. You are already caught in that trap which will ultimately lead to suicide. Questioner: Do you mean the individual or the group? Krishnamurti: The individual as well as the group. You are already caught in the pattern. Questioner: Which will ultimately lead to suicide? But everybody doesn't commit suicide! Krishnamurti: Quite right, but the element of the desire to escape is already there - to escape from facing facts, from facing "what is", and this escape is a form of suicide. Questioner: This, I think, is the crux of what I am trying to ask, because it would seem from what you have just said that suicide is an escape. Obviously it is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, but can there not also be - and this is my question - can there not also be a suicide that is not an escape, that is not an avoidance of what you call the "what is", but is on the contrary a response of intelligence to "what is"? One can say that many kinds of neurosis are forms of suicide; what I am trying to ask is whether suicide can ever be other than a neurotic response? Cannot it also be the response of facing a fact, of human intelligence acting on an untenable human condition? Krishnamurti: When you use the words "intelligence" and "untenable condition" it is a contradiction. The two are in contradiction. Questioner: You have said that if one is facing a precipice, or a deadly snake about to strike, intelligence dictates a certain action, which is an action of avoidance. Krishnamurti: Is it an action of avoidance or an act of intelligence? Questioner: Can they not be the same sometimes? If a car comes at me on the highway and I avoid it.... Krishnamurti: That is an act of intelligence. Questioner: But it is also an act of avoiding the car. Krishnamurti: But that is the act of intelligence. Questioner: Exactly. Therefore, is there not a corollary in living when the thing confronting you is insoluble and deadly? Krishnamurti: Then you leave it, as you leave the precipice: step away from it. Questioner: In that case the stepping away implies suicide. Krishnamurti: No, the suicide is an act of unintelligence. Questioner: Why? Krishnamurti: I am showing it to you. Questioner: Are you saying that an act of suicide is categorically, inevitably, a neurotic response to life? Krishnamurti: Obviously. It is an act of unintelligence; it is an act which obviously means you have come to a point where you are so completely isolated that you don't see any way out. Questioner: But I am trying for the purpose of this discussion to assume that there is no way out of the predicament, that one is not acting out of the motive of avoidance of suffering, that it is not stepping aside from reality. Krishnamurti: Is there in life an occurrence, a relationship, an incident from which you cannot step aside? Questioner: Of course, there are many. Krishnamurti: Many? But why do you insist that suicide is the only way out? Questioner: If one has a deadly disease there is no escaping it. Krishnamurti: Be careful now, be careful of what we are saying. If I have cancer, and it is going to finish me, and the doctor says, "Well, my friend, you have got to live with it", what am I to do -commit suicide? Questioner: Possibly. Krishnamurti: We are discussing this theoretically. If I personally had terminal cancer, then I would decide, I would consider what to do. It wouldn't be a theoretical question. I would then find out what was the most intelligent thing to do. Questioner: Are you saying that I may not ask this question theoretically, but only if I am actually in that position? Krishnamurti: That is right. Then you will act according to your conditioning, according to your intelligence, according to your way of life. If your way of life has been avoidance and escape, a neurotic business, then obviously you take a neurotic attitude and action. But if you have led a life of real intelligence, in the total meaning of that word, then that intelligence will operate when there is terminal cancer. Then I may put up with it; then I may say that I will live the few more months or years left to me. Questioner: Or you may not say that. Krishnamurti: Or I may not say that; but don't let us say that suicide is inevitable. Questioner: I never said that; I asked if under certain stringent circumstances, such as terminal cancer, suicide could possibly be an intelligent response to the situation. Krishnamurti: You see, there is something extraordinary in this; life has brought you great happiness, life has brought you extraordinary beauty, life has brought you great benefits, and you went with it all. Equally, when you were unhappy you went with it, which is part of intelligence: now you come to terminal cancer and you say, "I cannot bear it any longer, I must put an end to life." Why don't you move with it, live with it, find out about it as you go along? Questioner: In other words, there is no reply to this question until you are in the situation. Krishnamurti: Obviously. But you see that is why it is very important, I feel, that we should face the fact, face "what is", from moment to moment, not theorize about it. If someone is ill, desperately ill with cancer, or has become completely senile - what is the most intelligent thing to do, not for a mere observer like me, but for the doctor, the wife or the daughter? Questioner: One cannot really answer that, because it is a problem for another human being. Krishnamurti: That's just it, that is just what I am saying. Questioner: And one hasn't the right, it would seem to me, to decide about the life or death of another human being. Krishnamurti: But we do. All the tyrannies do. And tradition does; tradition says you must live this way, you mustn't live that way. Questioner: And it is also becoming a tradition to keep people alive beyond the point where nature would have given in. Through medical skill people are kept alive - well, it's hard to define what is a natural condition - but it seems most unnatural to survive for as long as many people do today. But that is a different question. Krishnamurti: Yes, an entirely different question. The real question is, will intelligence allow suicide - even though doctors have said one has an incurable disease? One cannot possibly tell another what to do in this matter. It is for the human being who has the incurable disease to act according to his intelligence. If he is at all intelligent - which means that he has lived a life in which there has been love, care, sensitivity and gentleness - then such a person, at the moment when it arises, will act according to the intelligence which has operated in the past. Questioner: Then this whole conversation is in a way meaningless because that is what would have happened anyway -because people would inevitably act according to what has happened in the past. They will either blow their brains out or sit and suffer until they die, or something in between. Krishnamurti: No, it hasn't been meaningless. Listen to this; we have discovered several things - primarily that to live with intelligence is the most important thing. To live a way of life which is supremely intelligent demands an extraordinary alertness of mind and body, and we've destroyed the alertness of the body by unnatural ways of living. We are also destroying the mind, the brain, through conflict, through constant repression, constant explosion and violence. So if one lives a way of life that is a negation of all this, then that life, that intelligence, when confronted with incurable disease will act in the moment rightly. Questioner: I see that I have asked you a question about suicide and have been given an answer on how to live rightly. Krishnamurti: It is the only way. A man jumping over the bridge doesn't ask, "Shall I commit suicide?" He is doing it; it is finished. Whereas we, sitting in a safe house or in a laboratory, asking whether a man should or should not commit suicide, has no meaning. Questioner: So it is a question one cannot ask. Krishnamurti: No, it must be asked - whether one should or should not commit suicide. It must be asked, but find out what is behind the question, what is prompting the questioner, what is making him want to commit suicide. We know a man who has never committed suicide, although he is always threatening to do so, because he is completely lazy. He doesn't want to do a thing, he wants everybody to support him; such a man has already committed suicide. The man who is obstinate, suspicious, greedy for power and position, has also inwardly committed suicide. He lives behind a wall of images. So any man who lives with an image of himself, of his environment, his ecology, his political power or religion, is already finished. Questioner: It would seem to me that what you are saying is that any life that is not lived directly.... Krishnamurti: Directly and intelligently. Questioner: Outside the shadows of images, of conditioning, of thinking.... Unless one lives that way, one's life is a kind of low-key existence. Krishnamurti: Of course it is. Look at most people; they are living behind a wall - the wall of their knowledge, their desires, their ambitious drives. They are already in a state of neurosis and that neurosis gives them a certain security, which is the security of suicide. Questioner: The security of suicide! Krishnamurti: Like a singer, for example; to him the voice is the greatest security, and when that fails he is ready to commit suicide. What is really exciting and true is to find out for oneself a way of life that is highly sensitive and supremely intelligent; and this is not possible if there is fear, anxiety, greed, envy, the building of images or the living in religious isolation. That isolation is what all religions have supplied: the believer is definitely on the threshold of suicide. Because he has put all his faith in a belief, when that belief is questioned he is afraid and is ready to take on another belief, another image, commit another religious suicide. So, can a man live without any image, without any pattern, without any time-sense? I don't mean living in such a way as not to care what happens tomorrow or what happened yesterday, That is not living. There are those who say, "Take the present and make the best of it; that is also an act of despair. Really one should not ask whether or not it is right to commit suicide; one should ask what brings about the state of mind that has no hope - though hope is the wrong word because hope implies a future; one should ask rather, how does a life come about that is without time? To live without time is really to have this sense of great love, because love is not of time, love is not something that was or will be; to explore this and live with it is the real question. Whether to commit suicide or not is the question of a man who is already partially dead. Hope is the most dreadful thing. Wasn't it Dante who said, "Leave hope behind when you enter the Inferno"? To him, paradise was hope, that's horrible. Questioner: Yes, hope is its own inferno. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'DISCIPLINE' Questioner: I've been brought up in a very restricted environment, in strict discipline, not only as to outward behaviour but also I was taught to discipline myself, to control my thoughts and appetites and to do certain things regularly. The result is that I find myself so hedged about that I can't do anything easily, freely and happily. When I see what is going on around me in this permissive society -the sloppiness, the dirt, the casual behaviour, the indifference to manners - I'm shocked, although at the same time I secretly desire to do some of these things myself. Discipline imposed certain values though; it brought with it frustrations and distortions, but surely some discipline is necessary - for instance, to sit decently, to eat properly, to speak with care? Without discipline one can't perceive the beauties of music or literature or painting. Good manners and training reveal a great many nuances in daily social commerce. When I observe the modern generation they have the beauty of youth, but without discipline it will soon fade away and they will become rather tiresome old men and women. There is a tragedy in all this. You see a young man, supple, eager, beautiful with clear eyes and a lovely smile, and a few years later you see him again and he is almost unrecognizable - sloppy, callous, indifferent, full of platitudes, highly respectable, hard, ugly, closed and sentimental. Surely discipline would have saved him. I, who have been disciplined almost out of existence, often wonder where the middle way is between this permissive society and the culture in which I was brought up. Isn't there a way to live without the distortion and suppression of discipline, yet to be highly disciplined within oneself? Krishnamurti: Discipline means to learn, not to conform, not to suppress, not to imitate the pattern of what accepted authority considers noble. This is a very complex question for in it are involved several things: to learn, to be austere, to be free, to be sensitive, and to see the beauty of love. In learning there is no accumulation. Knowledge is different from learning. Knowledge is accumulation, conclusions, formulas, but learning is a constant movement, a movement without a centre, without a beginning or an end. To learn about oneself there must be no accumulation in one's learning: if there is, it is not learning about oneself but merely adding to one's accumulated knowledge of oneself. Learning is the freedom of perception, of seeing. And you cannot learn if you are not free. So this very learning is its own discipline - you don't have to discipline yourself and then learn. Therefore discipline is freedom. This denies all conformity and control, for control is the imitation of a pattern. A pattern is suppression, suppression of "what is", and the learning about "what is" is denied when there is a formula of what is good and what is bad. The learning about "what is" is the freedom from "what is". So learning is the highest form of discipline. Learning demands intelligence and sensitivity. The austerity of the priest and the monk is harsh. They deny certain of their appetites but not others which custom has condoned. The saint is the triumph of harsh violence. Austerity is generally identified with self-denial through the brutality of discipline, drill and conformity. The saint is trying to break a record like the athlete. To see the falseness of this brings about its own austerity. The saint is stupid and shoddy. To see this is intelligence. Such intelligence will not go off the deep end to the opposite extreme. Intelligence is the sensitivity which understands, and therefore avoids, the extremes. But it is not the prudent mediocrity of remaining half-way between the two. To perceive all this clearly is to learn about it. To learn about it there must be freedom from all conclusions and bias. Such conclusions and bias are observation from a centre, the self, which wills and directs. Questioner: Aren't you simply saying that to look properly you must be objective? Krishnamurti: Yes, but the word objective is not enough. What we are talking about is not the harsh objectiveness of the microscope, but a state in which there is compassion, sensitivity and depth. Discipline, as we said, is learning, and learning about austerity does not bring about violence to oneself or to another. Discipline, as it is generally understood, is the act of will, which is violence. People throughout the world seem to think that freedom is the fruit of prolonged discipline. To see clearly is its own discipline. To see clearly there must be freedom, not a controlled vision. So freedom is not at the end of discipline, but the understanding of freedom is its own discipline. The two go together inseparably: when you separate them there is conflict. To overcome that conflict, the action of will comes into being and breeds more conflict. This is an endless chain. So freedom is at the beginning and not at the end: the beginning is the end. To learn about all this is its own discipline. Learning itself demands sensitivity. If you are not sensitive to yourself - to your environment, to your relationships - if you are not sensitive to what is happening round you, in the kitchen or in the world, then however much you discipline yourself you only become more and more insensitive, more and more self-centred - and this breeds innumerable problems. To learn is to be sensitive to yourself and to the world outside you, for the world outside is you. If you are sensitive to yourself you are bound to be sensitive to the world. This sensitivity is the highest form of intelligence. It is not the sensitivity of a specialist - the doctor, the scientist or the artist. Such fragmentation does not bring sensitivity. How can one love if there is no sensitivity? Sentimentality and emotionalism deny sensitivity because they are terribly cruel; they are responsible for wars. So discipline is not the drill of the sergeant - whether in the parade-ground or in yourself - which is the will. Learning all day long, and during sleep, has its own extraordinary discipline which is as gentle as the new spring leaf and as swift as the light. In this there is love. Love has its own discipline, and the beauty of it escapes a mind that is drilled, shaped, controlled, tortured. Without such a discipline the mind cannot go very far. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'WHAT IS' Questioner: I have read a great deal of philosophy, psychology, religion and politics, all of which to a greater or lesser degree are concerned with human relationships. I have also read your books which all deal with thought and ideas, and somehow I'm fed up with it all. I have swum in an ocean of words, and wherever I go there are more words - and actions derived from those words are offered to me: advice, exhortations, promises, theories, analyses, remedies. Of course one sets all these aside - you yourself have really done so; but for most of those who have read you, or heard you, what you say is just words. There may be people for whom all this is more than words, for whom it is utterly real, but I'm talking about the rest of us. I'd like to go beyond the word, beyond the idea, and live in total relationship to all things. For after all, that is life. You have said that one has to be a teacher and a pupil to oneself. Can I live in the greatest simplicity, without principles, beliefs, and ideals? Can I live freely, knowing that I am enslaved by the world? Crises don't knock on the door before they appear: challenges of everyday life are there before you are aware of them. Knowing all this, having been involved in many of these things, chasing various phantoms, I ask myself how I can live rightly and with love, clarity and effortless joy. I'm not asking how to live, but to live: the how denies the actual living itself. The nobility of life is not practising nobility. Krishnamurti: After stating all this, where are you? Do you really want to live with benediction, with love? If you do, then where is the problem? Questioner: I do want to, but that doesn't get me anywhere. I've wanted to live that way for years, but I can't. Krishnamurti: So though you deny the ideal, the belief, the directive, you are very subtly and deviously asking the same thing which everybody asks: this is the conflict between the "what is" and the "what should be". Questioner: Even without the "what should be", I see that the "what is" is hideous. To deceive myself into not seeing it would be much worse still. Krishnamurti: If you see "what is" then you see the universe, and denying "what is" is the origin of conflict. The beauty of the universe is in the "what is; and to live with "what is" without effort is virtue. Questioner: The "what is" also includes confusion, violence, every form of human aberration. To live with that is what you call virtue. But isn't it callousness and insanity? Perfection doesn't consist simply in dropping all ideals! Life itself demands that I live it beautifully, like the eagle in the sky: to live the miracle of life with anything less than total beauty is unacceptable. Krishnamurti: Then live it! Questioner: I can't, and I don't. Krishnamurti: If you can't, then live in confusion; don't battle with it. Knowing the whole misery of it, live with it: that is "what is". And to live with it without conflict frees us from it. Questioner: Are you saying that our only fault is to be self-critical? Krishnamurti: Not at all. You are not sufficiently critical. You go only so far in your self-criticism. The very entity that criticizes must be criticized, must be examined. If the examination is comparative, examination by yardstick, then that yardstick is the ideal. If there is no yardstick at all - in other words, if there is no mind that is always comparing and measuring - you can observe the "what is", and then the "what is" is no longer the same. Questioner: I observe myself without a yardstick, and I'm still ugly. Krishnamurti: All examination means there is a yardstick. But is it possible to observe so that there is only observation, seeing, and nothing else - so that there is only perception without a perceiver? Questioner: What do you mean? Krishnamurti: There is looking. The assessment of the looking is interference, distortion in the looking: that is not looking; instead it is evaluation of looking - the two are as different as chalk and cheese. Is there a perception of yourself without distortion, only an absolute perception of yourself as you are? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: In that perception is there ugliness? Questioner: There is no ugliness in the perception, only in what is perceived. Krishnamurti: The way you perceive is what you are. Righteousness is in purely looking, which is attention without the distortion of measure and idea. You came to enquire how to live beautifully, with love. To look without distortion is love, and the action of that perception is the action of virtue. That clarity of perception will act all the time in living. That is living like the eagle in the sky; that is living beauty and living love. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'THE SEEKER' Questioner: What is it I'm seeking? I really don't know, but there is a tremendous longing in me for something much more than comfort, pleasure and the satisfaction of fulfilment. I happen to have had all these things, but this is something much more -something at an unfathomable depth that is crying to be released, trying to tell me something. I've had this feeling for many years but when I examine it I don't seem to be able to touch it. Yet it is always there, this longing to go beyond the mountains and the skies to find something. But perhaps this thing is there right in front of me, only I don't see it. Don't tell me how to look: I've read many of your writings and I know what you mean. I want to reach out my hand and take this thing very simply, knowing very well that I cannot hold the wind in my fist. It is said that if you operate on a tumour neatly you can pluck it out in one pocket, intact. In the same way I should like to take this whole earth, the heavens and the skies and the seas in one movement, and come upon that blessedness on the instant. Is this at all possible? How am I to cross to the other shore without taking a boat and rowing across the waters? I feel that's the only way. Krishnamurti: Yes, that's the only way - to find oneself strangely and unaccountably on the other shore, and from there to live, act and do everything that one does in daily life. Questioner: Is it only for the few? Is it for me? I really don't know what to do. I've sat silent; I've studied, examined, disciplined myself, rather intelligently I think, and of course I've long ago discarded the temples, the shrines and the priests. I refuse to go from one system to another; it is all too futile. So you see I have come here with complete simplicity. Krishnamurti: I wonder if you really are so simple as you think! From what depth are you asking this question, and with what love and beauty? Can your mind and heart receive this? Are they sensitive to the slightest whisper of something that comes unexpectedly? Questioner: If it is as subtle as all that, how true is it, and how real? Intimations of such subtlety are usually fleeting and unimportant. Krishnamurti: Are they? Must everything be written out on the blackboard? Please, sir, let us find out whether our minds and hearts are really capable of receiving immensity, and not just the word. Questioner: I really don't know, that's my problem. I've done almost everything fairly intelligently, putting aside all the obvious stupidities of nationality, organized religion, belief - this endless passage of nothings. I think I have compassion, and I think my mind can grasp the subtleties of life, but that surely is not enough? So what is needed? What have I to do or not to do? Krishnamurti: Doing nothing is far more important than doing something. Can the mind be completely inactive, and thereby be supremely active? Love is not the activity of thought; it is not the action of good behaviour or social righteousness. As you cannot cultivate it, you can do nothing about love. Questioner: I understand what you mean when you say that inaction is the highest form of action - which doesn't mean to do nothing. But somehow I cannot grasp it with my heart. Is it perhaps only because my heart is empty, tired of all action, that inaction seems to have an appeal? No. I come back to my original feeling that there is this thing of love, and I know, too, that it is the only thing. But my hand is still empty after I have said that. Krishnamurti: Does this mean that you are no longer seeking, no longer saying to yourself secretly: "I must reach, attain, there is something beyond the furthest hills?" Questioner: You mean I must give up this feeling I have had for so long that there is something beyond all the hills? Krishnamurti: It is not a question of giving up anything, but, as we said just now, there are only these two things: love, and the mind that is empty of thought. If you really have finished, if you really have shut the door on all the stupidities which man in his search for something has put together, if you really have finished with all these, then, are these things - love and the empty mind -just two more words, no different from any other ideas? Questioner: I have a deep feeling that they are not, but I am not sure of it. So again I ask what I am to do. Krishnamurti: Do you know what it means to commune with what we have just said about love and the mind? Questioner: Yes, I think so. Krishnamurti: I wonder if you do. If there is communion with these two things then there is nothing more to be said. If there is communion with these two things then all action will be from there. Questioner: The trouble is that I still think there is something to be discovered which will put everything else in its right place, in its right order. Krishnamurti: Without these two things there is no possibility of going further. And there may be no going anywhere at all! Questioner: Can I be in communion with it all the time? I can see that when we are together I can be somewhat in communion with it. But can I maintain it? Krishnamurti: To desire to maintain it is the noise, and therefore the losing of it. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'ORGANISATION' Questioner: I have belonged to many organizations, religious, business and political. Obviously we must have some kind of organization; without it life couldn't continue, so I've been wondering, after listening to you, what relationship there is between freedom and organization. Where does freedom begin and organization end? What is the relationship between religious organizations and Moksha or liberation? Krishnamurti: As human beings living in a very complex society, organizations are needed to communicate, to travel, to bring food, clothes and shelter, for all the business of living together whether in cities or in the country. Now this must be organized efficiently and humanely, not only for the benefit of the few but for everyone, without the divisions of nationality, race or class. This earth is ours, not yours or mine. To live happily, physically, there must be sane, rational, efficient organizations. Now there is disorder because there is division. Millions go hungry while there is vast prosperity. There are wars, conflicts and every form of brutality. Then there is the organization of belief - the organization of religions, which again breeds disunity and war. The morality which man has pursued has led to this disorder and chaos. This is the actual state of the world. And when you ask what is the relationship between organization and freedom, are you not separating freedom from everyday existence? When you separate it in this way as being something entirely different from life, isn't this, in itself, conflict and disorder? So really the question is: is it possible to live in freedom and to organize life from this freedom, in this freedom? Questioner: Then there would be no problem. But the organization of life isn't made by yourself: others make it for you -the government and others send you to war or determine your job. So you cannot simply organize for yourself out of freedom. The whole point of my question is that the organization imposed on us by the government, by society, by morality, is not freedom. And if we reject it we find ourselves in the midst of a revolution, or some sociological reformation, which is a way of starting the same old cycle all over again. Inwardly and outwardly we are born into organization, which limits freedom. We either submit or revolt. We are caught in this trap. So there seems to be no question of organizing anything out of freedom. Krishnamurti: We do not realize that we have created society, this disorder, these walls; each one of us is responsible for it all. What we are, society is. Society is not different from us. If we are in conflict, avaricious, envious, fearful, we bring about such a society. Questioner: There is a difference between the individual and society. I am a vegetarian; society slaughters animals. I don't want to go to war; society will force me to do so. Are you telling me that this war,is my doing? Krishnamurti: Yes, it's your responsibility. You have brought it about by your nationality, your greed, envy and hate. You are responsible for war as long as you have those things in your heart, as long as you belong to any nationality, creed or race. It is only those who are free of those things who can say that they have not created this society. There- fore our responsibility is to see that we change, and to help others to change, without violence and bloodshed. Questioner: That means organized religion. Krishnamurti: Certainly not. Organized religion is based on belief and authority. Questioner: Where does this get us in our original question regarding the relationship between freedom and organization? Organization is always imposed or inherited from the environment, and freedom is always from the inside, and these two clash. Krishnamurti: Where are you going to start? You must start from freedom. Where there is freedom there is love. This freedom and love will show you when to co-operate and when not to cooperate. This is not an act of choice, because choice is the result of confusion. Love and freedom are intelligence. So what we are concerned with is not the division between organization and freedom but whether we can live in this world without division at all. It is division which denies freedom and love, not organization. When organization divides, it leads to war. Belief in any form, ideals, however noble or effective, breed division. Organized religion is the cause of division, just like nationality and power-groups. So be concerned with those things which divide, those things which bring about division between man and man, whether they be individual or collective. The family, the church, and the State bring about such division. What is important is the movement of thought which divides. Thought itself is always divisive, so all action based on an idea or an ideology is division. Thought cultivates prejudice, opinion, judgement. Man in himself, being divided, seeks freedom out of this division. Not being able to find it he hopes to integrate the various divisions, and of course this is not possible. You cannot integrate two prejudices. To live in this world in freedom means to live with love, eschewing every form of division. When there is freedom and love, then this intelligence will act in co-operation, and will also know when not to cooperate. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'LOVE AND SEX' Questioner: I'm a married man with several children. I've lived rather a dissipated life in search of pleasure, but a fairly civilized life too, and I've made a success of it financially. But now I'm middle-aged and am feeling concerned, not only about my family but also about the way the world is going. I'm not given to brutality or violent feelings, and I have always considered that forgiveness and compassion are the most important things in life. Without these man becomes subhuman. So if I may I should like to ask you what love is. Is there really such a thing? Compassion must be part of it, but I always feel that love is something much vaster, and if we could explore it together perhaps I should then make my life into something worthwhile before it is too late. I have really come to ask this one thing - what is love? Krishnamurti: Before we begin to go into this we must be very clear that the word is not the thing, the description is not the described, because any amount of explanation, however subtle and clever, will not open the heart to the immensity of love. This we must understand, and not merely stick to words: words are useful for communication, but in talking about something that is really non-verbal we must establish a communion between us, so that both of us feel and realize the same thing at the same time, with a fullness of mind and heart. Otherwise we will be playing with words. How can one approach this really very subtle thing that cannot be touched by the mind? We must go rather hesitatingly. Shall we first see what it is not, and then perhaps we may be able to see what it is? Through negation we may come upon the positive, but merely to pursue the positive leads to assumptions and conclusions which bring about division. You are asking what love is. We are saying we may come upon it when we know what it is not. Anything that brings about a division, a separation, is not love, for in that there is conflict, strife and brutality. Questioner: What do you mean by a division, a separation that brings about strife - what do you mean by it? Krishnamurti: Thought in its very nature is divisive. It is thought that seeks pleasure and holds it. It is thought that cultivates desire. Questioner: Will you go into desire a bit more? Krishnamurti: There is the seeing of a house, the sensation that it is lovely, then there is the desire to own it and to have pleasure from it, then there is the effort to get it. All this constitutes the centre, and this centre is the cause of division. This centre is the feeling of a "me", which is the cause of division, because this very feeling of "me`' is the feeling of separation. People have called this the ego and all kinds of other names - the "lower self" as opposed to some idea of a "higher self" - but there is no need to be complicated about it; it is very simple. Where there is the centre, which is the feeling of "me", which in its activities isolates itself, there is division and resistance. And all this is the process of thought. So when you ask what is love, it is not of this centre. Love is not pleasure and pain, nor hate nor violence in any form. Questioner: Therefore in this love you speak of there can be no sex because there cannot be desire? Krishnamurti: Don't, please, come to any conclusion. We are investigating, exploring. Any conclusion or assumption prevents further enquiry. To answer this question we have also to look at the energy of thought. Thought, as we have said, sustains pleasure by thinking about something that has been pleasurable, cultivating the image, the picture. Thought engenders pleasure. Thinking about the sexual act becomes lust, which is entirely different from the act of sex. What most people are concerned with is the passion of lust. Craving before and after sex is lust. This craving is thought. Thought is not love. Questioner: Can there be sex without this desire of thought? Krishnamurti: You have to find out for yourself. Sex plays an extraordinarily important part in our lives because it is perhaps the only deep, firsthand experience we have. Intellectually and emotionally we conform, imitate, follow, obey. There is pain and strife in all our relationships, except in the act of sex. This act, being so different and beautiful, we become addicted to, so it in turn becomes a bondage. The bondage is the demand for its continuation - again the action of the centre which is divisive. One is so hedged about - intellectually, in the family, in the community, through social morality, through religious sanctions - so hedged about that there is only this one relationship left in which there is freedom and intensity. Therefore we give tremendous importance to it. But if there were freedom all around then this would not be such a craving and such a problem. We make it a problem because we can't get enough of it, or because we feel guilty at having got it, or because in getting it we break the rules which society has laid down. It is the old society which calls the new society permissive because for the new society sex is a part of life. In freeing the mind from the bondage of imitation, authority, conformity and religious prescriptions, sex has its own place, but it won't be all-consuming. From this one can see that freedom is essential for love - not the freedom of revolt, not the freedom of doing what one likes nor of indulging openly or secretly one's cravings, but rather the freedom which comes in the understanding of this whole structure and nature of the centre. Then freedom is love. Questioner: So freedom is not licence? Krishnamurti: No. Licence is bondage. Love is not hate, nor jealousy, nor ambition, nor the competitive spirit with its fear of failure. It is not the love of god nor the love of man - which again is a division. Love is not of the one or of the many. When there is love it is personal and impersonal, with and without an object. It is like the perfume of a flower; one or many can smell it: what matters is the perfume, not to whom it belongs. Questioner: Where does forgiveness come in all this? Krishnamurti: When there is love there can be no forgiveness. Forgiveness comes only after you have accumulated rancour; forgiveness is resentment. Where there is no wound there is no need for healing. It is inattention that breeds resentment and hate, and you become aware of them and then forgive. Forgiveness encourages division. When you are conscious that you are forgiving, then you are sinning. When you are conscious that you are tolerant, then you are intolerant. When you are conscious that you are silent, then there is no silence. When you deliberately set about to love, then you are violent. As long as there is an observer who says, "I am" or "I am not", love cannot be. Questioner: What place has fear in love? Krishnamurti: How can you ask such a question? Where one is, the other is not. When there is love you can do what you will. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'PERCEPTION' Questioner: You use different words for perception. You sometimes say "perception", but also "observe", "see", "understand", "be aware of". I suppose you use all these words to mean the same thing: to see clearly, completely, wholly. Can one see anything totally? We're not talking of physical or technical things, but psychologically can you perceive or understand anything totally? Isn't there always something concealed so that you only see partially? I'd be most obliged if you could go into this matter rather extensively. I feel this is an important question because it may perhaps be a clue to a great many things in life. If I could understand myself totally then perhaps I would have all my problems solved and be a happy superhuman being. When I talk about it I feel rather excited at the possibility of going beyond my little world with its problems and agonies. So what do you mean by perceiving, seeing? Can one see oneself completely? Krishnamurti: We always look at things partially. Firstly because we are inattentive and secondly because we look at things from prejudices, from verbal and psychological images about what we see. So we never see anything completely. Even to look objectively at nature is quite arduous. To look at a flower without any image, without any botanical knowledge - just to observe it -becomes quite difficult because our mind is wandering, uninterested. And even if it is interested it looks at the flower with certain appreciations and verbal descriptions which seem to give the observer a feeling that he has really looked at it. Deliberate looking is not looking. So we really never look at the flower. We look at it through the image. Perhaps it is fairly easy to look at something that doesn't deeply touch us, as when we go to the cinema and see something which stirs us for the moment but which we soon forget. But to observe ourselves without the image - which is the past, our accumulated experience and knowledge - happens very rarely. We have an image about ourselves. We think we ought to be this and not that. We have built a previous idea about ourselves and through it we look at ourselves. We think we are noble or ignoble and seeing what we actually are either depresses us or frightens us. So we cannot look at ourselves; and when we do, it is partial~ observation, and anything that is partial or incomplete doesn't bring understanding. It is only when we can look at ourselves totally that there is a possibility of being free from what we observe. Our perception is not only with the eyes, with the senses, but also with the mind, and obviously the mind is heavily conditioned. So intellectual perception is only partial perception, yet perceiving with the intellect seems to satisfy most of us, and we think we understand. A fragmentary understanding is the most dangerous and destructive thing. And that is exactly what is happening all over the world. The politician, the priest, the businessman, the technician; even the artist - all of them see only partially. And therefore they are really very destructive people. As they play a great part in the world their partial perception becomes the accepted norm, and man is caught in this. Each of us is at the same time the priest, the politician, the businessman, the artist, and many other fragmentary entities. And each of us is Questioner: I see this clearly. I'm using the word see intellectually, of course. Krishnamurti: If you see this totally, not intellectually or verbally or emotionally, then you will act and live quite a different kind of life. When you see a dangerous precipice or are faced by a dangerous animal there is no partial understanding or partial action; there is complete action. Questioner: But we are not faced with such dangerous crises every moment of our lives. Krishnamurti: We are faced with such dangerous crises all the time. You have become accustomed to them, or are indifferent to them, or you leave it to others to solve the problems; and these others are equally blind and lopsided. Questioner: But how am I to be aware of these crises all the time, and why do you say there is a crisis all the time? Krishnamurti: The whole of life is in each moment. Each moment is a challenge. To meet this challenge inadequately is a crisis in living. We don't want to see that these are crises, and we shut our eyes to escape from them. So we become blinder, and the crises augment. Questioner: But how am I to perceive totally? I'm beginning to understand that I see only partially, and also to understand the importance of looking at myself and the world with complete perception, but there is so much going on in me that it is difficult to decide what to look at. My mind is like a great cage full of restless monkeys. Krishnamurti: If you see one movement totally, in that totality every other movement is included. If you understand one problem completely, then you understand all human problems, for they are all interrelated. So the question is: can one understand, or perceive, or see, one problem so completely that in the very understanding of it one has understood the rest? This problem must be seen while it is happening, not after or before, as memory or as an example. For instance, it is no good now for us to go into anger or fear; the thing to do is to observe them as they arise. Perception is instantaneous: you understand something instantly or not at all: seeing, hearing, understanding are instantaneous. Listening and looking have duration. Questioner: My problem goes on. It exists in a span of time. You are saying that seeing is instantaneous and therefore out of time. What gives jealousy or any other habit, or any other problem, duration? Krishnamurti: Don't they go on because you have not looked at them with sensitivity, choiceless awareness, intelligence? You have looked partially and therefore allowed them to continue. And in addition, wanting to get rid of them is another problem with duration. The incapacity to deal with something makes of it a problem with duration, and gives it life. Questioner: But how am I to see that whole thing instantly? How am I to understand so that it never comes back? Krishnamurti: Are you laying emphasis on never or on understanding? If you lay emphasis on never it means you want to escape from it permanently, and this means the creation of a second problem. So we have only one question, which is how to see the problem so completely that one is free of it. Perception can only be out of silence, not out of a chattering mind. The chattering may be the wanting to get rid of it, reduce it, escape from it, suppress it or find a substitute for it, but it is only a quiet mind that sees. Questioner: How am I to have a quiet mind? Krishnamurti: You don't see the truth that only a quiet mind sees. How to get a quiet mind doesn't arise. It is the truth that the mind must be quiet, and seeing the truth of this frees the mind from chattering. Perception, which is intelligence, is then operating, not the assumption that you must be silent in order to see. Assumption can also operate but that is a partial, fragmentary operation. There is no relationship between the partial and the total; the partial cannot grow into the total. Therefore seeing is of the greatest importance. Seeing is attention, and it is only inattention that gives rise to a problem. Questioner: How can I be attentive all the time? It's impossible! Krishnamurti: That's quite right, it is impossible. But to be aware of your inattention is of the greatest importance, not how to be attentive all the time. It is greed that asks the question, "How can I be attentive all the time?" One gets lost in the practice of being attentive. The practice of being attentive is inattention. You cannot practice to be beautiful, or to love. When hate ceases the other is. Hate can cease only when you give your whole attention to it, when you learn and do not accumulate knowledge about it. Begin very simply. Questioner: What is the point of your talking if there is nothing we can practise after having heard you? Krishnamurti: The hearing is of the greatest importance, not what you practise afterwards. The hearing is the instantaneous action. The practice gives duration to problems. Practice is total inattention. Never practise: you can only practise mistakes. Learning is always new. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'SUFFERING' Questioner: I seem to have suffered a great deal all my life, not physically, but through death and loneliness and the utter futility of my existence. I had a son whom I greatly loved. He died in an accident. My wife left me, and that caused a great deal of pain. I suppose I am like thousands of other middle-class people with sufficient money and a steady job. I'm not complaining of my circumstances but I want to understand what sorrow means, why it comes at all. One has been told that wisdom comes through sorrow, but I have found quite the contrary. Krishnamurti: I wonder what you have learnt from suffering? Have you learnt anything at all? What has sorrow taught you? Questioner: It has certainly taught me never to be attached to people, and a certain bitterness, a certain aloofness and not to allow my feelings to run away with me. It has taught me to be very careful not to get hurt again. Krishnamurti: So, as you say, it hasn't taught you wisdom; on the contrary it has made you more cunning, more insensitive. Does sorrow teach one anything at all except the obvious self-protective reactions? Questioner: I have always accepted suffering as part of my life, but I feel now, somehow, that I'd like to be free of it, free of all the tawdry bitterness and indifference without again going through all the pain of attachment. My life is so pointless and empty, utterly self-enclosed and insignificant. It's a life of mediocrity, and perhaps that mediocrity is the greatest sorrow of all. Krishnamurti: There is the personal sorrow and the sorrow of the world. There is the sorrow of ignorance and the sorrow of time. This ignorance is the lack of knowing oneself, and the sorrow of time is the deception that time can cure, heal and change. Most people are caught in that deception and either worship sorrow or explain it away. But in either case it continues, and one never asks oneself if it can come to an end. Questioner: But I am asking now if it can come to an end, and how? How am I to end it? I understand that it's no good running away from it, or resisting it with bitterness and cynicism. What am I to do to end the grief which I have carried for so long? Krishnamurti: Self-pity is one of the elements of sorrow. Another element is being attached to someone and encouraging or fostering his attachment to you. Sorrow is not only there when attachment fails you but its seed is in the very beginning of that attachment. In all this the trouble is the utter lack of knowing oneself. Knowing oneself is the ending of sorrow. We are afraid to know ourselves because we have divided ourselves into the good and the bad, the evil and the noble, the pure and the impure. The good is always judging the bad, and these fragments are at war with each other. This war is sorrow. To end sorrow is to see the fact and not invent its opposite, for the opposites contain each other. Walking in this corridor of opposites is sorrow. This fragmentation of life into the high and the low, the noble and the ignoble, God and the Devil, breeds conflict and pain. When there is sorrow, there is no love. Love and sorrow cannot live together. Questioner: Ah! But love can inflict sorrow on another. I may love another and yet bring him sorrow. Krishnamurti: Do you bring it, if you love, or does he? If another is attached to you, with or without encouragement, and you turn away from him and he suffers, is it you or he who has brought about his suffering? Questioner: You mean I am not responsible for someone else's sorrow, even if it is on my account? How does sorrow ever end then? Krishnamurti: As we have said, it is only in knowing oneself completely that sorrow ends. Do you know yourself at a glance, or hope to after a long analysis? Through analysis you cannot know yourself. You can only know yourself without accumulation, in relationship, from moment to moment. This means that one must be aware, without any choice, of what is actually taking place. It means to see oneself as one is, without the opposite, the ideal, without the knowledge of what one has been. If you look at yourself with the eyes of resentment or rancour then what you see is coloured by the past. The shedding of the past all the time when you see yourself is the freedom from the past. Sorrow ends only when there is the light of understanding, and this light is not lit by one experience or by one flash of understanding; this understanding is lighting itself all the time. Nobody can give it to you - no book, trick, teacher or saviour. The understanding of yourself is the ending of sorrow. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'THE HEART AND THE MIND' Questioner: Why is it that man has divided his being into different compartments - the intellect and the emotions? Each seems to exist independently of the other. These two driving forces in life are often so contradictory that they seem to tear apart the very fabric of our being. To bring them together so that man can act as a total entity has always been one of the principle aims of life. And added to these two things within man there is a third which is his changing environment. So these two contradictory things within him are further in opposition to the third which appears to be outside himself. Here is a problem so confusing, so contradictory, so vast that the intellect invents an outside agency called God to bring them together, and this further complicates the whole business. There is only this one problem in life. Krishnamurti: You seem to be carried away by your own words. Is this really a problem to you or are you inventing it in order to have a good discussion? If it is for a discussion then it has no real content. But if it is a real problem then we can go into it deeply. Here we have a very complex situation, the inner dividing itself into compartments and further separating itself from its environment. And still further, it separates the environment, which it calls society, into classes, races and economic, national and geographic groups. This seems to be what is actually going on in the world and we call it living. Being unable to solve this problem we invent a super-entity, an agency that we hope will bring about a harmony and a binding quality in ourselves and between us. This binding quality which we call religion brings about another factor of division in its turn. So the question becomes: what will bring about a complete harmony of living in which there are no divisions but a state in which the intellect and the heart are both the expression of a total entity? That entity is not a fragment. Questioner: I agree with you, but how is this to be brought about? This is what man has always longed for and has sought through all religions and all political and social utopias. Krishnamurti: You ask how. The "how" is the great mistake. It is the separating factor. There is your "how" and my "how" and somebody else's "how". So if we never used that word we would be really enquiring and not seeking a method to achieve a determined result. So can you put away altogether this idea of a recipe, a result? If you can define a result you already know it and therefore it is conditioned and not free. If we put away the recipe then we are both capable of enquiring if it is at all possible to bring about a harmonious whole without inventing an outside agency, for all outside agencies, whether they are environmental or superenvironmental, only increase the problem. First of all, it is the mind that divides itself as feeling, intellect and environment; it is the mind that invents the outside agency; it is the mind that creates the problem. Questioner: This division is not only in the mind. It is even stronger in the feelings. The Muslims and Hindus do not think themselves separate, they feel themselves separate, and it is this feeling that actually makes them separate and makes them destroy each other. Krishnamurti: Exactly: the thinking and the feeling are one; they have been one from the beginning and that is exactly what we are saying. So our problem is not the integration of the different fragments but the understanding of this mind and heart which are one. Our problem is not how to get rid of classes or how to build better utopias or breed better political leaders or new religious teachers. Our problem is the mind. To come to this point not theoretically but to see it actually is the highest form of intelligence. For then you do not belong to any class or religious group; then you are not a Muslim, a Hindu, a jew or a Christian. So we now have only one issue: why does the mind of man divide? It not only divides its own functions into feelings and thoughts but separates itself as the "I" from the "you", and the "we" from the "they". The mind and the heart are one. Don't let us forget it. Remember it when we use the word "mind". So our problem is, why does the mind divide? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: The mind is thought. All the activity of thought is separation, fragmentation. Thought is the response of memory which is the brain. The brain must respond when it sees a danger. This is intelligence, but this same brain has somehow been conditioned not to see the danger of division. Its actions are valid and necessary when they deal with facts. Equally, it will act when it sees the fact that division and fragmentation are dangerous to it. This is not an idea or an ideology or a principle or a concept - all of which are idiotic and separative: it is a fact. To see danger the brain has to be very alert and awake, all of it, not just a segment of it. Questioner: How is it possible to keep the whole brain awake? Krishnamurti: As we said, there is no "how" but only seeing the danger, that is the whole point. The seeing is not the result of propaganda or conditioning; the seeing is with the whole brain. When the brain is completely awake then the mind becomes quiet. When the brain is completely awake there is no fragmentation, no separation, no duality. The quality of this quietness is of the highest importance. You can make the mind quiet by drugs and all kinds of tricks but such deceptions breed various other forms of illusion and contradiction. This quietness is the highest form of intelligence which is never personal or impersonal, never yours or mine. Being anonymous, it is whole and immaculate. It defies description for it has no quality. This is awareness, this is attention, this is love, this is the highest. The brain must be completely awake, that's all. As the man in the jungle must keep terribly awake to survive, so the man in the jungle of the world must keep terribly awake to live completely. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'BEAUTY AND THE ARTIST' Questioner: I wonder what an artist is? There on the banks of the Ganges, in a dark little room, a man sits weaving a most beautiful sari in silk and gold, and in Paris in his atelier another man is painting a picture which he hopes will bring him fame. Somewhere there is a writer cunningly spinning out stories stating the old, old problem of man and woman; then there is the scientist in his laboratory and the technician putting together a million parts so that a rocket may go to the moon. And in India a musician is living a life of great austerity in order to transmit faithfully the distilled beauty of his music. There is the housewife preparing a meal, and the poet walking alone in the woods. Aren't these all artists in their own way? I feel that beauty is in the hands of everybody, but they don't know it. The man who makes beautiful clothes or excellent shoes, the woman who arranged those flowers on your table, all of them seem to work with beauty. I often wonder why it is that the painter, the sculptor, the composer, the writer - the so-called creative artists - have such extraordinary importance in this world and not the shoemaker or the cook. Aren't they creative too? When you consider all the varieties of expression which people consider beautiful, then what place has a true artist in life, and who is the true artist? It is said that beauty is the very essence of all life. Is that building over there, which is considered to be so beautiful, the expression of that essence? I should greatly appreciate it if you would go into this whole question of beauty and the artist. Krishnamurti: Surely the artist is one who is skilled in action? This action is in life and not outside of life. Therefore if it is living skilfully that truly makes an artist. This skill can operate for a few hours in the day when he is playing an instrument, writing poems or painting pictures, or it can operate a bit more if he is skilled in many such fragments - like those great men of the Renaissance who worked in several different media. But the few hours of music or writing may contradict the rest of his living which is in disorder and confusion. So is such a man an artist at all? The man who plays the violin with artistry and keeps his eye on his fame isn't interested in the violin, he is only exploiting it to be famous, the "me" is far more important than the music, and so it is with the writer or the painter with an eye on fame. The musician identifies his "me" with what he considers to be beautiful music, and the religious man identifies his "me" with what he considers to be the sublime. All these are skilled in their particular little fields but the rest of the vast field of life is disregarded. So we have to find out what is skill in action, in living, not only in painting or in writing or in technology, but how one can live the whole of life with skill and beauty. Are skill and beauty the same? Can a human being -whether he be an artist or not - live the whole of his life with skill and beauty? Living is action and when that action breeds sorrow it ceases to be skilful. So can a man live without sorrow, without friction, without jealousy and greed, without conflict of any kind? The issue is not who is an artist and who is not an artist but whether a human being, you or another, can live without torture and distortion. Of course it is profane to belittle great music, great sculpture, great poetry or dancing, or to sneer at it; that is to be unskilled in one's own life. But the artistry and beauty which is skill in action should operate throughout the day, not just during a few hours of the day. This is the real challenge, not just playing the piano beautifully. You must play it beautifully if you touch it at all, but that is not enough. It is like cultivating a small corner of a huge field. We are concerned with the whole field and that field is life. What we always do is to neglect the whole field and concentrate on fragments, our own or other people's. Artistry is to be completely awake and therefore to be skilful in action in the whole of life, and this is beauty. Questioner: What about the factory worker or the office employee? Is he an artist? Doesn't his work preclude skill in action and so deaden him that he has no skill in anything else either? Is he not conditioned by his work? Krishnamurti: Of course he is. But if he wakes up he will either leave his work or so transform it that it becomes artistry. What is important is not the work but the waking up to the work. What is important is not the conditioning of the work but to wake up. Questioner: What do you mean, wake up? Krishnamurti: Are you awakened only by circumstances, by challenges, by some disaster or joy? Or is there a state of being awake without any cause? If you are awakened by an event, a cause, then you depend on it, and when you any dependence is the end of skill, the end of artistry. Questioner: What is this other awakened state that has no cause? You are talking about a state in which there is neither a cause nor an effect. Can there be a state of mind that is not the result of some cause? I don't understand that because surely everything we think and everything we are is the result of a cause? There is the endless chain of cause and effect. Krishnamurti: This chain of cause and effect is endless because the effect becomes the cause and the cause begets further effects, and so on. Questioner: Then what action is there outside this chain? Krishnamurti: All we know is action with a cause, a motive, action which is a result. All action is in relationship. If relationship is based on cause it is cunning adaptation, and therefore inevitably leads to another form of dullness. Love is the only thing that is causeless, that is free; it is beauty, it is skill, it is art. Without love there is no art. When the artist is playing beautifully there is no "me; there is love and beauty, and this is art. This is skill in action. Skill in action is the absence of the "me". Art is the absence of the "me". But when you neglect the whole field of life and concentrate only on a little part - however much the "me" may then be absent, you are still living unskilfully and therefore you are not an artist of life. The absence of "me" in living is love and beauty, which brings its own skill. This is the greatest art: living skilfully in the whole field of Life. Questioner: Oh Lord! How am I to do that? I see it and feel it in my heart but how can I maintain it? Krishnamurti: There is no way to maintain it, there is no way to nourish it, there is no practising of it; there is only the seeing of it. Seeing is the greatest of all skills. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'DEPENDENCE' Questioner: I should like to understand the nature of dependence. I have found myself depending on so many things - on women, on different kinds of amusement, on good wine, on my wife and children, on my friends, on what people say. Fortunately I no longer depend on religious entertainment, but I depend on the books I read to stimulate me and on good conversation. I see that the young are also dependent, perhaps not so much as I am, but they have their own particular forms of dependence. I have been to the East and have seen how there they depend on the guru and the family. Tradition there has greater importance and is more deeply rooted than it is here in Europe, and, of course, very much more so than in America. But we all seem to depend on something to sustain us, not only physically but, much more, inwardly. So I am wondering whether it is at all possible to be really free of dependence, and should one be free of it? Krishnamurti: I take it you are concerned with the psychological inward attachments. The more one is attached the greater the dependence. The attachment is not only to persons but to ideas and to things. One is attached to a particular environment, to a particular country and so on. And from this springs dependence and therefore resistance. Questioner: Why resistance? Krishnamurti: The object of my attachment is my territorial or my sexual domain. This I protect, resisting any form of encroachment on it from others. I also limit the freedom of the person to whom I am attached and limit my own freedom. So attachment is resistance. I am attached to something or somebody. That attachment is possessiveness; possessiveness is resistance, so attachment is resistance. Questioner: Yes, I see that. Krishnamurti: Any form of encroachment on my possessions leads to violence, legally or psychologically. So attachment is violence, resistance, imprisonment - the imprisonment of oneself and of the object of attachment. Attachment means this is mine and not yours; keep off! So this relationship is resistance against others. The whole world is divided into mine and yours: my opinion, my judgement, my advice, my God, my country - an infinity of such nonsense. Seeing all this taking place, not in abstraction but actually in our daily life, we can ask why there is this attachment to people, things and ideas. Why does one depend? All being is relationship and all relationship is in this dependence with its violence, resistance and domination. We have made the whole world into this. Where one possesses one must dominate. We meet beauty, love springs up, and immediately it turns to attachment and all this misery begins and the love has gone out of the window. Then we ask, "What has happened to our great love?" This is actually what is happening in our daily life. And, seeing all this, we can now ask: why is man invariably attached, not only to that which is lovely, but also to every form of illusion and to so many idiotic fancies? Freedom is not a state of non-dependence; it is a positive state in which there isn't any dependence. But it is not a result, it has no cause. This must be understood very clearly before we can go into the question of why man depends or falls into the trap of attachment with all its miseries. Being attached we try to cultivate a state of independence - which is another form of resistance. Questioner: So what is freedom? You say it is not the negation of dependence or the ending of dependence; you say it is not freedom from something, but just freedom. So what is it? Is it an abstraction or an actuality? Krishnamurti: It is not an abstraction. It is the state of mind in which there is no form of resistance whatsoever. It is not like a river accommodating itself to boulders here and there, going round or over them. In this freedom there are no boulders at all, only the movement of the water. Questioner: But the boulder of attachment is there, in this river of life. You can't just speak about another river in which there are no boulders. Krishnamurti: We are not avoiding the boulder or saying it doesn't exist. We must first understand freedom. It is not the same river as the one in which there are the boulders. Questioner: I have still got my river with its boulders, and that's what I came to ask about, not about some other unknown river without boulders. That's no good to me. Krishnamurti: Quite right. But you must understand what freedom is in order to understand your boulders. But don't let us flog this simile to death. We must consider both freedom and attachment. Questioner: What has my attachment to do with freedom or freedom with my attachment? Krishnamurti: In your attachment there is pain. You want to be rid of this pain, so you cultivate detachment which is another form of resistance. In the opposite there is no freedom. These two opposites are identical and mutually strengthen each other. What you are concerned with is how to have the pleasures of attachment without its miseries. You cannot. That is why it is important to understand that freedom does not lie in detachment. In the process of understanding attachment there is freedom, not in running away from attachment. So our question now is, why are human beings attached, dependent? Being nothing, being a desert in oneself, one hopes through another to find water. Being empty, poor, wretched, insufficient, devoid of interest or importance, one hopes through another to be enriched. Through the love of another one hopes to forget oneself. Through the beauty of another one hopes to acquire beauty. Through the family, through the nation, through the lover, through some fantastic belief, one hopes to cover this desert with flowers. And God is the ultimate lover. So one puts hooks into all these things. In this there is pain and uncertainty, and the desert seems more arid than ever before. Of course it is neither more nor less arid; it is what it was, only one has avoided looking at it while escaping through some form of attachment with its pain, and then escaping from that pain into detachment. But one remains arid and empty as before. So instead of trying to escape, either through attachment or through detachment, can we not become aware of this fact, of this deep inward poverty and inadequacy, this dull, hollow isolation? That is the only thing that matters, not attachment or detachment. Can you look at it without any sense of condemnation or evaluation? When you do,are you looking at it as an observer who looks at the observed, or without the observer? Questioner: What do you mean, the observer? Krishnamurti: Are you looking at it from a centre with all its conclusions of like and dislike, opinion, judgement, the desire to be free of this emptiness and so on - are you looking at this aridness with the eyes of conclusion - or are you looking with eyes that are completely free? When you look at it with completely free eyes there is no observer. If there is no observer, is there the thing observed as loneliness, emptiness, wretchedness? Questioner: Do you mean to say that that tree doesn't exist if I look at it without conclusions, without a centre which is the observer? Krishnamurti: Of course the tree exists. Questioner: Why does loneliness disappear but not the tree when I look without the observer? Krishnamurti: Because the tree is not created by the centre, by the mind of the "me". But the mind of the "me', in all its self-centred activity has created this emptiness, this isolation. And when that mind, without the centre, looks, the self-centred activity ends. So the loneliness is not. Then the mind functions in freedom. Looking at the whole structure of attachment and detachment, and the movement of pain and pleasure, we see how the mind of the "me" builds its own desert and its own escapes. When the mind of the "me" is still, then there is no desert and there is no escape. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'BELIEF' Questioner: I am one of those people who really believe in God. In India I followed one of the great modern saints who, because he believed in God, brought about great political changes there. In India the whole country throbs to the beat of God. I have heard you talk against belief so probably you don't believe in God. But you are a religious person and therefore there must be in you some kind of feeling of the Supreme. I have been all over India and through many parts of Europe, visiting monasteries, churches and mosques, and everywhere I have found this very strong, compelling belief in God whom one hopes shapes one's life. Now since you don't believe in God, although you are a religious person, what exactly is your position with regard to this question? Why don't you believe? Are you an atheist? As you know, in Hinduism you can be an atheist or a theist and yet be equally well a Hindu. Of course it's different with the Christians. If you don't believe in God you can't be a Christian. But that's beside the point. The point is that I have come to ask you to explain your position and demonstrate to me its validity. People follow you and therefore you have a responsibility, and therefore I am challenging you in this way. Krishnamurti: Let us first of all clear up this last point. There are no followers, and I have no responsibility to you or to the people who listen to my talks. Also I am not a Hindu or anything else, for I don't belong to any group, religious or otherwise. Each one must be a light to himself. Therefore there is no teacher, no disciple. This must be clearly understood from the very beginning otherwise one is influenced, one becomes a slave to propaganda and persuasions. Therefore anything that is being said now is not dogma or creed or persuasion: we either meet together in understanding or we don't. Now, you said most emphatically that you believe in God and you probably want through that belief to experience what one might call the godhead. Belief involves many things. There is belief in facts that you may not have seen but can verify, like the existence of New York or the Eiffel Tower. Then you may believe that your wife is faithful though you don't actually know it. She might be unfaithful in thought yet you believe she is faithful because you don't actually see her going off with someone else; she may deceive you in daily thought, and you most certainly have done the same too. You believe in reincarnation, don't you, though there is no certainty that there is any such thing? However, that belief has no validity in your life, has it? All Christians believe that they must love but they do not love - like everyone else they go about killing, physically or psychologically. There are those who do not believe in God and yet do good. There are those who believe in God and kill for that belief; those who prepare for war because they claim they want peace, and so on. So one has to ask oneself what need there is to believe at all in anything, though this doesn't deny the extraordinary mystery of life. But belief is one thing and "what is" is another. Belief is a word, a thought, and this is not the thing, any more than your name is actually you. Through experience you hope to touch the truth of your belief, to prove it to yourself, but this belief conditions your experience. It isn't that the experience comes to prove the belief, but rather that the belief begets the experience. Your belief in God will give you the experience of what you call God. You will always experience what you believe and nothing else. And this invalidates your experience. The Christian will see virgins, angels and Christ, and the Hindu will see similar deities in extravagant plurality. The Muslim, the Buddhist, the Jew and the Communist are the same. Belief conditions its own supposed proof. What is important is not what you believe but only why you believe at all. Why do you believe? And what difference does it make to what actually is whether you believe one thing or another? Facts are not influenced by belief or disbelief. So one has to ask why one believes at all in anything; what is the basis of belief? Is it fear, is it the uncertainty of life - the fear of the unknown the lack of security in this everchanging world? Is it the insecurity of relationship, or is it that faced with the immensity of life, and not understanding it, one encloses oneself in the refuge of belief? So, if I may ask you, if you had no fear at all, would you have any belief? Questioner: I am not at all sure that I am afraid, but I love God, and it is this love that makes me believe in Him. Krishnamurti: Do you mean to say you are devoid of fear? And therefore know what love is? Questioner: I have replaced fear with love and so to me fear is non-existent, and therefore my belief is not based on fear. Krishnamurti: Can you substitute love for fear? Is that not an act of thought which is afraid and therefore covers up the fear with the word called love, again a belief? You have covered up that fear with a word and you cling to the word, hoping to dissipate fear. Questioner: What you are saying disturbs me greatly. I am not at all sure I want to go on with this, because my belief and my love have sustained me and helped me to lead a decent life. This questioning of my belief brings about a sense of disorder of which, quite frankly, I am afraid. Krishnamurti: So there is fear, which you are beginning to discover for yourself. This disturbs you. Belief comes from fear and is the most destructive thing. One must be free of fear and of belief. Belief divides people, makes them hard, makes them hate each other and cultivate war. In a roundabout way, unwillingly, you are admitting that fear begets belief. Freedom from belief is necessary to face the fact of fear. Belief like any other ideal is an escape from "what is". When there is no fear then the mind is in quite a different dimension. Only then can you ask the question whether there is a God or not. A mind clouded by fear or belief is incapable of any kind of understanding, any realization of what truth is. Such a mind lives in illusion and can obviously not come upon that which is Supreme. The Supreme has nothing to do with your or anybody else's belief, opinion or conclusion. Not knowing, you believe, but to know is not to know. To know is within the tiny field of time and the mind that says, "I know" is bound by time and so cannot possibly understand that which is. After all, when you say, "I know my wife and my friend", you know only the image or the memory, and this is the past. Therefore you can never actually know anybody or anything. You cannot know a living thing, only a dead thing. When you see this you will no longer think of relationship in terms of knowing. So one can never say, "There is no God", or "I know God". Both these are a blasphemy. To understand that which is there must be freedom, not only from the known but also from the fear of the known and from the fear of the unknown. Questioner: You speak of understanding that which "is" and yet you deny the validity of knowing. What is this understanding if it is not knowing? Krishnamurti: The two are quite different. Knowing is always related to the past and therefore it binds you to the past. Unlike knowing understanding is not a conclusion, not accumulation. If you have listened you have understood. Understanding is attention. When you attend completely you understand. So the understanding of fear is the ending of fear. Your belief can therefore no longer be the predominant factor; the understanding of fear is predominant. When there is no fear there is freedom. It is only then that one can find what is true. When that which "is" is not distorted by fear then that which "is" is true. It is not the word. You cannot measure truth with words. Love is not a word nor a belief nor something that you can capture and say, "It is mine". Without love and beauty, that which you call God is nothing at all. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'DREAMS' Questioner: I have been told by professionals that dreaming is as vital as daytime thinking and activity, and that I would find my daily living under great stress and strain if I did not dream. They insist, and here I'm using not their jargon but my own words, that during certain periods of sleep the movement of the eyelids indicates refreshing dreams and that these bring a certain clarity to the brain. I am wondering whether the stillness of the mind which you have often spoken about might not bring greater harmony to living than the equilibrium brought about by patterns of dreams. I should also like to ask why the language of dreams is one of symbols. Krishnamurti: Language itself is a symbol, and we are used to symbols: we see the tree through the image which is the symbol of the tree, we see our neighbour through the image we have about him. Apparently it is one of the most difficult things for a human being to look at anything directly, not through images, opinions, conclusions, which are all symbols. And so in dreams symbols play a large part and in this there is great deception and danger. The meaning of a dream is not always clear to us, although we realize it is in symbols and try to decipher them. When we see something, we speak of it so spontaneously that we do not recognise that words are also symbols. All this indicates, doesn't it, that there is direct communication in technical matters but seldom in human relationships and understanding? You don't need symbols when somebody hits you. That is a direct communication. This is a very interesting point: the mind refuses to see things directly, to be aware of itself without the word and the symbol. You say the sky is blue. The listener then deciphers this according to his own reference of blueness and transmits it to you in his own cipher. So we live in symbols, and dreams are a part of this symbolic process. We are incapable of direct and immediate perception without the symbols, the words, the prejudices and conclusions. The reason for this is also quite apparent: it is part of the self-centred activity with its defences, resistances, escapes and fears. There is a ciphered response in the activity of the brain, and dreams must naturally be symbolic because during the waking hours we are incapable of direct response or perception. Questioner: It seems to me that this then is an inherent function of the brain. Krishnamurti: Inherent means something permanent, inevitable and lasting. Surely any psychological state can be changed. Only the deep, constant demand of the brain for the physical security of the organism is inherent. Symbols are a device of the brain to protect the psyche; this is the whole process of thought. The "me" is a symbol, not an actuality. Having created the symbol of the "me", thought identifies itself with its conclusion, with the formula, and then defends it: all misery and sorrow come from this. Questioner: Then how do I get around it? Krishnamurti: When you ask how to get around it, you are still holding on to the symbol of the "me", which is fictitious; you become something separate from what you see, and so duality arises. Questioner: May I come back another day to continue this? * * * Questioner: You were good enough to let me come back, and I should like to continue where we left off. We were talking about symbols in dreams and you pointed out that we live by symbols, deciphering them according to our gratification. We do this not only in dreams but in everyday life; it is our usual behaviour. Most of our actions are based on the interpretation of the symbols or images that we have. Strangely, after having talked with you the other day, my dreams have taken a peculiar turn. I have had very disturbing dreams and the interpretation of those dreams took place as they were happening within the dreams. It was a simultaneous process; the dream was being interpreted by the dreamer. This has never happened to me before. Krishnamurti: During our waking hours, there is always the observer, different from the observed, the actor, separate from his action. In the same way there is the dreamer separate from his dream. He thinks it is separate from himself and therefore in need of interpretation. But is the dream separate from the dreamer, and is there any need to interpret it? When the observer is the observed what need is there to interpret, to judge, to evaluate? This need would exist only if the observer were different from the thing observed. This is very important to understand. We have separated the thing observed from the observer and from this arises not only the problem of interpretation but also conflict, and the many problems connected with it. This division is an illusion. This division between groups, races, nationalities, is fictitious. We are beings, undivided by names, by labels. When the labels become all important, division takes place, and then wars and all other struggles come into being. Questioner: How then do I understand the content of the dream? It must have significance. Is it an accident that I dream of some particular event or person? Krishnamurti: We should really look at this quite differently. Is there anything to understand? When the observer thinks he is different from the thing observed there is an attempt to understand that which is outside himself. The same process goes on within him. There is the observer wishing to understand the thing he observes, which is himself. But when the observer is the observed, there is no question of understanding; there is only observation. You say that there is something to understand in the dream, otherwise there would be no dream, you say that the dream is a hint of something unresolved that one should understand. You use the word "understand", and in that very word is the dualistic process. You think there is an "I", and a thing to be understood, whereas in reality these two entities are one and the same. Therefore your search for a meaning in the dream is the action of conflict. Questioner: Would you say the dream is an expression of something in the mind? Krishnamurti: Obviously it is. Questioner: I do not understand how it is possible to regard a dream in the way you are describing it. If it has no significance, why does it exist? Krishnamurti: The "I" is the dreamer, and the dreamer wants to see significance in the dream which he has invented or projected, so both are dreams, both are unreal. This unreality has become real to the dreamer, to the observer who thinks of himself as separate. The whole problem of dream interpretation arises out of this separation, this division between the actor and the action. Questioner: I am getting more and more confused, so may we go over it again differently? I can see that a dream is the product of my mind and not separate from it, but dreams seem to come from levels of the mind which have not been explored, and so they seem to be intimations of something alive in the mind. Krishnamurti: It is not your particular mind in which there are hidden things. Your mind is the mind of man; your consciousness is the whole of man. But when you particularize it as your mind, you limit its activity, and because of this limitation, dreams arise. During waking hours observe without the observer, who is the expression of limitation. Any division is a limitation. Having divided itself into a "me" and a "not me", the "me", the observer, the dreamer, has many problems - among them dreams and the interpretation of dreams. In any case, you will see the significance or the value of a dream only in a limited way because the observer is always limited. The dreamer perpetuates his own limitation, therefore the dream is always the expression of the incomplete, never of the whole. Questioner: Pieces are brought back from the moon in order to understand the composition of the moon. In the same way we try to understand human thinking by bringing back pieces from our dreams, and examining what they express. Krishnamurti: The expressions of the mind are the fragments of the mind. Each fragment expresses itself in its own way and contradicts other fragments. A dream may contradict another dream, one action another action, one desire another desire. The mind lives in this confusion. A part of the mind says it must understand another part, such as a dream, an action or a desire. So each fragment has its own observer, its own activity; then a super-observer tries to bring them all into harmony. The super-observer is also a fragment of the mind. It is these contradictions, these divisions, that breed dreams. So the real question is not the interpretation or the understanding of a particular dream; it is the perception that these many fragments are contained in the whole. Then you see yourself as a whole and not as a fragment of a whole. Questioner: Are you saying, sir, that one should be aware during the day of the whole movement of life, not just one's family life, or business life, or any other individual aspect of life? Krishnamurti: Consciousness is the whole of man and does not belong to a particular man. When there is the consciousness of one particular man there is the complex problem of fragmentation, contradiction and war. When there is awareness of the total movement of life in a human being during the waking hours, what need is there for dreams at all? This total awareness, this attention, puts an end to fragmentation and to division. When there is no conflict whatsoever the mind has no need for dreams. Questioner: This certainly opens a door through which I see many things. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'TRADITION' Questioner: Can one really be free of tradition? Can one be free of anything at all? Or is it a matter of sidestepping it and not being concerned with any of it? You talk a great deal about the past and its conditioning - but can I be really free of this whole background of my life? Or can I merely modify the background according to the various outward demands and challenges, adjust myself to it rather than become free of it? It seems to me that this is one of the most important things, and I'd like to understand it because I always feel that I am carrying a burden, the weight of the past. I would like to put it down and walk away from it, never come back to it. Is that possible? Krishnamurti: Doesn't tradition mean carrying the past over to the present? The past is not only one's particular set of inheritances but also the weight of all the collective thought of a particular group of people who have lived in a particular culture and tradition. One carries the accumulated knowledge and experience of the race and the family. All this is the past - the carrying over from the known to the present - which shapes the future. Is not the teaching of all history a form of tradition? You are asking if one can be free of all this. First of all, why does one want to be free? Why does one want to put down this burden? Why? Questioner: I think it's fairly simple. I don't want to be the past -I want to be myself; I want to be cleansed of this whole tradition so that I can be a new human being. I think in most of us there is this feeling of wanting to be born anew. Krishnamurti: You cannot possibly be the new just by wishing for it. Or by struggling to be new. You have not only to understand the past but also you have to find out who you are. Are you not the past? Are you not the continuation of what has been, modified by the present? Questioner: My actions and my thoughts are, but my existence isn't. Krishnamurti: Can you separate the two, action and thought, from existence? Are not thought, action, existence, living and relationship all one? This fragmentation into "me" and "not-me" is part of this tradition. Questioner: Do you mean that when I am not thinking, when the past is not operating, I am obliterated, that I have ceased to exist? Krishnamurti: Don't let us ask too many questions, but consider what we began with. Can one be free of the past - not only the recent but the immemorial, the collective, the racial, the human, the animal? You are all that, you are not separate from that. And you are asking whether you can put all that aside and be born anew. The "you" is that, and when you wish to be reborn as a new entity, the new entity you imagine is a projection of the old, covered over with the word "new". But underneath, you are the past. So the question is, can the past be put aside or does a modified form of tradition continue for ever, changing, accumulating, discarding, but always the past in different combinations? The past is the cause and the present is the effect, and today, which is the effect of yesterday, becomes the cause of tomorrow. This chain is the way of thought, for thought is the past. You are asking whether one can stop this movement of yesterday into today. Can one look at the past to examine it, or is that not possible at all? To look at it the observer must be outside it - and he isn't. So here arises another issue. If the observer himself is the past then how can the past be isolated for observation? Questioner: I can look at something objectively.... Krishnamurti: But you, who are the observer, are the past trying to look at itself. You can objectify yourself only as an image which you have put together through the years in every form of relationship, and so the "you" which you objectify is memory and imagination, the past. You are trying to look at yourself as though you were a different entity from the one who is looking, but you are the past, with its old judgements, evaluations and so on. The action of the past is looking at the memory of the past. Therefore there is never relief from the past. The continuous examination of the past by the past perpetuates the past; this is the very action of the past, and this is the very essence of tradition. Questioner: Then what action is possible? If I am the past - and I can see that I am - then whatever I do to chisel away the past is adding to it. So I am left helpless! What can I do? I can't pray because the invention of a god is again the action of the past. I can't look to another, for the other is also the creation of my despair. I can't run away from it all because at the end of it I am still there with my past. I can't identify myself with some image which is not of the past because that image is my own projection too. Seeing all this, I am really left helpless, and in despair. Krishnamurti: Why do you call it helplessness and despair? Aren't you translating what you see as the past into an emotional anxiety because you cannot achieve a certain result? in so doing you are again making the past act. Now, can you look at all this movement of the past, with all its traditions, without wanting to be free of it, change it, modify it or run away from it - simply observe it without any reaction? Questioner: But as we have been saying all through this conversation, how can I observe the past if I am the past? I can't look at it at all! Krishnamurti: Can you look at yourself, who are the past, without any movement of thought, which is the past? If you can look without thinking, evaluating, liking, disliking, judging, then there is a looking with eyes that are not touched by the past. It is to look in silence, without the noise of thought. In this silence there is neither the observer nor the thing which he is looking at as the past. Questioner: Are you saying that when you look without evaluation or judgement the past has disappeared? But it hasn't -there are still the thousands of thoughts and actions and all the pettiness which were rampant only a moment ago. I look at them and they are still there. How can you say that the past has disappeared? It may momentarily have stopped acting.... Krishnamurti: When the mind is silent that silence is a new dimension, and when there is any rampant pettiness it is instantly dissolved, because the mind has now a different quality of energy which is not the energy engendered by the past. This is what matters: to have that energy that dispels the carrying over of the past. The carrying over of the past is a different kind of energy. The silence wipes the other out, the greater absorbs the lesser and remains untouched. It is like the sea, receiving the dirty river and remaining pure. This is what matters. It is only this energy that can wipe away the past. Either there is silence or the noise of the past. In this silence the noise ceases and the new is this silence. It is not that you are made new. This silence is infinite and the past is limited. The conditioning of the past breaks down in the fullness of silence. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'CONDITIONING' Questioner: You have talked a great deal about conditioning and have said that one must be free of this bondage, otherwise one remains imprisoned always. A statement of this kind seems so outrageous and unacceptable! Most of us are very deeply conditioned and we hear this statement and throw up our hands and run away from such extravagant expression, but I have taken you seriously - for, after all, you have more or less given your life to this kind of thing, not as a hobby but with deep seriousness - and therefore I should like to discuss it with you to see how far the human being can uncondition himself. Is it really possible, and if so, what does it mean? Is it possible for me, having lived in a world of habits, traditions and the acceptance of orthodox notions in so many matters - is it possible for me really to throw off this deep-rooted conditioning? What exactly do you mean by conditioning, and what do you mean by freedom from conditioning? Krishnamurti: Let us take the first question first. We are conditioned - physically, nervously, mentally - by the climate we live in and the food we eat, by the culture in which we live, by the whole of our social, religious and economic environment, by our experience, by education and by family pressures and influences. All these are the factors which condition us. Our conscious and unconscious responses to all the challenges of our environment -intellectual, emotional, outward and inward - all these are the action of conditioning. Language is conditioning; all thought is the action, the response of conditioning. Knowing that we are conditioned we invent a divine agency which we piously hope will get us out of this mechanical state. We either postulate its existence outside or inside ourselves - as the atman, the soul, the Kingdom of Heaven which is within, and who knows what else! To these beliefs we cling desperately, not seeing that they themselves are part of the conditioning factor which they are supposed to destroy or redeem. So not being able to uncondition ourselves in this world, and not even seeing that conditioning is the problem, we think that freedom is in Heaven, in Moksha, in Nirvana. In the Christian myth of original sin and in the whole eastern doctrine of Samsara, one sees that the factor of conditioning has been felt, though rather obscurely. If it had been clearly seen, naturally these doctrines and myths would not have arisen. Nowadays the psychologists also try to get to grips with this problem, and in doing so condition us still further. Thus the religious specialists have conditioned us, the social order has conditioned us, the family which is part of it has conditioned us. All this is the past which makes up the open as well as the hidden layers of the mind. En passant it is interesting to note that the so-called individual doesn't exist at all, for his mind draws on the common reservoir of conditioning which he shares with everybody else, so the division between the community and the individual is false: there is only conditioning. This conditioning is action in all relationships - to things, people and ideas. Questioner: Then what am I to do to free myself from it all? To live in this mechanical state is not living at all, and yet all action, all will, all judgements are conditioned - so there is apparently nothing I can do about conditioning which isn't conditioned! I am tied hand and foot. Krishnamurti: The very factor of conditioning in the past, in the present and in the future, is the "me" which thinks in terms of time, the "me" which exerts itself; and now it exerts itself in the demand to be free; so the root of all conditioning,is the thought which is the "me". The "me" is the very essence of the past, the "me" is time, the "me" is sorrow - the "me" endeavours to free itself from itself, the "me" makes efforts, struggles to achieve, to deny, to become. This struggle to become is time in which there is confusion and the greed for the more and the better. The "me" seeks security and not finding it transfers the search to heaven; the very "me" that identifies itself with something greater in which it hopes to lose itself - whether that be the nation, the ideal or some god - is the factor of conditioning. Questioner: You have taken everything away from me. What am I without this "me"? Krishnamurti: If there is no "me" you are unconditioned, which means you are nothing. Questioner: Can the "me" end without the effort of the "me"? Krishnamurti: The effort to become something is the response, the action, of conditioning. Questioner: How can the action of the "me" stop? Krishnamurti: It can stop only if you see this whole thing, the whole business of it. If you see it in action, which is in relationship, the seeing is the ending of the "me". Not only is this seeing an action which is not conditioned but also it acts upon conditioning. Questioner: Do you mean to say that the brain - which is the result of vast evolution with its infinite conditioning - can free itself? Krishnamurti: The brain is the result of time; it is conditioned to protect itself physically, but when it tries to protect itself psychologically then the "me" begins, and all our misery starts. It is this effort to protect itself psychologically that is the affirmation of the "me". The brain can learn, can acquire knowledge technologically, but when it acquires knowledge psychologically then that knowledge asserts itself in relationship as the "me" with its experiences, its will and its violence. This is what brings division, conflict and sorrow to relationship. Questioner: Can this brain be still and only operate when it has to work technologically - only operate when knowledge is demanded in action, as for example in learning a language, driving a car or building a house? Krishnamurti: The danger in this is the dividing of the brain into the psychological and the technological. This again becomes a contradiction, a conditioning, a theory. The real question is whether the brain, the whole of it, can be still, quiet, and respond efficiently only when it has to in technology or in living. So we are not concerned with the psychological or the technological; we ask only, can this whole mind be completely still and function only when it has to? We say it can and this is the understanding of what meditation is. * * * Questioner: If I may I should like to continue where we left off yesterday. You may remember that I asked two questions: I asked what is conditioning and what is freedom from conditioning, and you said let us take the first question first. We hadn't time to go into the second question, so I should like to ask today, what is the state of the mind that is free from all its conditioning? After talking with you yesterday it became very clear to me how deeply and strongly I am conditioned, and I saw - at least I think I saw - an opening, a crack in this structure of conditioning. I talked the matter over with a friend and in taking certain factual instances of conditioning I saw very clearly how deeply and venomously one's actions are affected by it. As you said at the end, meditation is the emptying of the mind of all conditioning so that there is no distortion or illusion. How s one to be free of all distortion, all illusion? What is illusion? Krishnamurti: It is so easy to deceive oneself, so easy to convince oneself of anything at all. The feeling that one must be something is the beginning of deception, and, of course, this idealistic attitude leads to various forms of hypocrisy. What makes illusion? Well, one of the factors is this constant comparison between what is and what should be, or what might be, this measurement between the good and the bad - thought trying to improve itself, the memory of pleasure, trying to get more pleasure, and so on. It is this desire for more, this dissatisfaction, which makes one accept or have faith in something, and this must inevitably lead to every form of deception and illusion. It is desire and fear, hope and despair, that project the goal, the conclusion to be experienced. Therefore this experience has no reality. All so-called religious experiences follow this pattern. The very desire for enlightenment must also breed the acceptance of authority, and this is the opposite of enlightenment. Desire, dissatisfaction, fear, pleasure, wanting more, wanting to change, all of which is measurement - this is the way of illusion. Questioner: Do you really have no illusion at all about anything? Krishnamurti: I am not all the time measuring myself or others. This freedom from measurement comes about when you are really living with what is - neither wishing to change it nor judging it in terms of good and bad. Living with something is not the acceptance of it: it is there whether you accept it or not. Living with something is not identifying yourself with it either. Questioner: Can we go back to the question of what this freedom is that one really wants? This desire for freedom expresses itself in everybody, sometimes in the stupidest ways, but I think one can say that in the human heart there is always this deep longing for freedom which is never realized; there is this incessant struggle to be free. I know I am not free; I am caught in so many wants. How am I to be free, and what does it mean to be really honestly free? Krishnamurti: Perhaps this may help us to understand it: total negation is that freedom. To negate everything we consider to be positive, to negate the total social morality, to negate all inward acceptance of authority, to negate everything one has said or concluded about reality, to negate all tradition, all teaching, all knowledge except technological knowledge, to negate all experience, to negate all the drives which stem from remembered or forgotten pleasures, to negate all fulfilment, to negate all commitments to act in a particular way, to negate all ideas, all principles, all theories. Such negation is the most positive action, therefore it is freedom. Questioner: If I chisel away at this, bit by bit, I shall go on for ever and that itself will be my bondage. Can it all all wither away in a flash, can I negate the whole human deception, all the values and aspiration and standards, immediately? Is it really possible? Doesn't it require enormous capacity, which I lack, enormous understanding, to see all this in a flash and leave it exposed to the light, to that intelligence you have talked about? I wonder, sir, if you know what this entails. To ask me, an ordinary man with an ordinary education, to plunge into something which seems like an incredible nothingness.... Can I do it? I don't even know what it means to jump into it! It's like asking me to become all of a sudden the most beautiful, innocent, lovely human being. You see I am really frightened now, not the way I was frightened before, I am faced now with something which I know is true, and yet my utter incapacity to do it binds me. I see the beauty of this thing, to be really completely nothing, but.... Krishnamurti: You know, it is only when there is emptiness in oneself, not the emptiness of a shallow mind but the emptiness that comes with the total negation of everything one has been and should be and will be - it is only in this emptiness that there is creation; it is only in this emptiness that something new can take place. Fear is the thought of the unknown, so you are really frightened of leaving the known, the attachments, the satisfactions, the pleasurable memories, the continuity and security which give comfort. Thought is comparing this with what it thinks is emptiness. This imagination of emptiness is fear, so fear is thought. To come back to your question - can the mind negate everything it has known, the total content of its own conscious and unconscious self, which is the very essence of yourself? Can you negate yourself completely? If not, there is no freedom. Freedom is not freedom from something - that is only a reaction; freedom comes in total denial. Questioner: But what is the good of having such freedom? You are asking me to die, aren't you? Krishnamurti: Of course! I wonder how you are using the word "good" when you say what is the good of this freedom? Good in terms of what? The known? Freedom is the absolute good and its action is the beauty of everyday life. In this freedom alone there is living, and without it how can there be love? Everything exists and has its being in this freedom. It is everywhere and nowhere. It has no frontiers. Can you die now to everything you know and not wait for tomorrow to die? This freedom is eternity and ecstasy and love. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'HAPPINESS' Questioner: What is happiness? I have always tried to find it but somehow it hasn't come my way. I see people enjoying themselves in so many different ways and many of the things they do seem so immature and childish. I suppose they are happy in their own way, but I want a different kind of happiness. I have had rare intimations that it might be possible to get it, but somehow it has always eluded me. I wonder what I can do to feel really completely happy? Krishnamurti: Do you think happiness is an end in itself? Or does it come as a secondary thing in living intelligently? Questioner: I think it is an end in itself because if there is happiness then whatever you do will be harmonious; then you will do things effortlessly, easily, without any friction. I am sure that whatever you do out of this happiness will be right. Krishnamurti: But is this so? Is happiness an end in itself? Virtue is not an end in itself. If it is, then it becomes a very small affair. Can you seek happiness? If you do then probably you will find an imitation of it in all sorts of distractions and indulgences. This is pleasure. What is the relationship between pleasure and happiness? Questioner. I have never asked myself. Krishnamurti: Pleasure which we pursue is mistakenly called happiness, but can you pursue happiness, as you pursue pleasure? Surely we must be very clear as to whether pleasure is happiness. Pleasure is gratification, satisfaction, indulgence, entertainment, stimulation. Most of us think pleasure is happiness, and the greatest pleasure we consider to be the greatest happiness. And is happiness the opposite of unhappiness? Are you trying to be happy because you are unhappy and dissatisfied? Has happiness got an opposite at all? Has love got an opposite? Is your question about happiness the result of being unhappy? Questioner: I am unhappy like the rest of the world and naturally I don't want to be, and that is what is driving me to seek happiness. Krishnamurti: So happiness to you is the opposite of unhappiness. If you were happy you wouldn't seek it. So what is important is not happiness but whether unhappiness can end. That is the real problem, isn't it? You are asking about happiness because you are unhappy and you ask this question without finding out whether happiness is the opposite of unhappiness. Questioner: If you put it that way, I accept it. So my concern is how to be free from the misery I am in. Krishnamurti: Which is more important - to understand unhappiness or to pursue happiness? If you pursue happiness it becomes an escape from unhappiness and therefore it will always remain, covered over perhaps, hidden, but always there, festering inside. So what is your question now? Questioner: My question now is why am I miserable? You have very neatly pointed out to me my real state, rather than given me the answer I want, so now I am faced with this question, how am I to get rid of the misery I am in? Krishnamurti: Can an outside agency help you to get rid of your own misery, whether that outside agency be God, a master, a drug or a saviour? Or can one have the intelligence to understand the nature of unhappiness and deal with it immediately? Questioner: I have come to you because I thought you might help me, so you could call yourself an outside agency. I want help and I don't care who gives it to me. Krishnamurti: In accepting or giving help several things are involved. If you accept it blindly you will be caught in the trap of one authority or another, which brings with it various other problems, such as obedience and fear. So if you start off wanting help, not only do you not get help - because nobody can help you anyway - but in addition you get a whole series of new problems; you are deeper in the mire than ever before. Questioner: I think I understand and accept that. I have never thought it out clearly before. How then can I develop the intelligence to deal with unhappiness on my own, and immediately? If I had this intelligence surely I wouldn't be here now, I wouldn't be asking you to help me. So my question now is, can I get this intelligence in order to solve the problem of unhappiness and thereby attain happiness? Krishnamurti: You are saying that this intelligence is separate from its action. The action of this intelligence is the seeing and the understanding of the problem,itself. The two are not separate and successive; you don't first get intelligence and then use it on the problem like a tool. it is one of the sicknesses of thinking to say that one should have the capacity first and then use it, the idea or the principle first and then apply it. This itself is the very absence of intelligence and the origin of problems. This is fragmentation. We live this way and so we speak of happiness and unhappiness, hate and love, and so on. Questioner: Perhaps this is inherent in the structure of language. Krishnamurti: Perhaps it is but let's not make too much fuss about it here and wander away from the issue. We are saying that intelligence, and the action of that intelligence - which is seeing the problem of unhappiness - are one indivisibly. Also that this is not separate from ending unhappiness or getting happiness. Questioner: How am I to get that intelligence? Krishnamurti: Have you understood what we have been saying? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: But if you have understood you have seen that this seeing is intelligence. The only thing you can do is to see; you cannot cultivate intelligence in order to see. Seeing is not the cultivation of intelligence. Seeing is more important than intelligence, or happiness, or unhappiness. There is only seeing or not seeing. All the rest - happiness, unhappiness and intelligence -are just words. Questioner: What is it, then, to see? Krishnamurti: To see means to understand how thought creates the opposites. What thought creates is not real. To see means to understand the nature of thought, memory, conflict, ideas; to see all this as a total process is to understand. This is intelligence; seeing totally is intelligence; seeing fragmentarily is the lack of intelligence. Questioner: I am a bit bewildered. I think I understand, but it is rather tenuous; I must go slowly. What you are saying is, see and listen completely. You say this attention is intelligence and you say that it must be immediate. One can only see now. I wonder if I really see now, or am I going home to think over what you have said, hoping to see later? Krishnamurti: Then you will never see; in thinking about it you will never see it because thinking prevents seeing. Both of us have understood what it means to see. This seeing is not an essence or an abstraction or an idea. You cannot see if there is nothing to see. Now you have a problem of unhappiness. See it completely, including your wanting to be happy and how thought creates the opposite. See the search for happiness and the seeking help in order to get happiness. See disappointment, hope, fear. All of this must be seen comple- tely, as a whole, not separately. See all this now, give your whole attention to it. Questioner: I am still bewildered. I don't know whether I have got the essence of it, the whole point. I want to close my eyes and go into myself to see if I have really understood this thing. If I have then I have solved my problem. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'LEARNING' Questioner: You have often talked about learning. I don't quite know what you mean by it. We are taught to learn at school and at the University, and life also teaches us many things - to adjust ourselves to environment and to our neighbours, to our wife or husband, to our children. We seem to learn from almost everything, but I am sure that when you speak about learning this isn't quite what you mean because you also seem to deny experience as a teacher. But when you deny experience aren't you denying all learning? After all, through experience, both in technology and in human everyday living, we learn everything we know. So could we go into this question? Krishnamurti: Learning through experience is one thing - it is the accumulation of conditioning - and learning all the time, not only about objective things but also about oneself, is something quite different. There is the accumulation which brings about conditioning - this we know - and there is the learning which we speak about. This learning is observation - to observe without accumulation, to observe in freedom. This observation is not directed from the past. Let us keep those two things clear. What do we learn from experience? We learn things like languages, agriculture, manners, going to the moon, medicine, mathematics. But have we learnt about war through making war? We have learnt to make war more deadly, more efficient, but we haven't learnt not to make war. Our experience in warfare endangers the survival of the human race. Is this learning? You may build a better house, but has experience taught you how to live more nobly inside it? We have learnt through experience that fire burns and that has become our conditioning but we have also learnt through our conditioning that nationalism is good. Yet experience should also teach us that nationalism is deadly. All the evidence is there. The religious experience, as based on our conditioning, has separated man from man. Experience has taught us to have better food, clothes and shelter, but it has not taught us that social injustice prevents the right relationship between man and man. So experience conditions and strengthens our prejudices, our peculiar tendencies and our particular dogmas and beliefs. We do not learn what stupid nonsense all this is; we do not learn to live in the right relationship with other men. This right relationship is love. Experience teaches me to strengthen the family as a unit opposed to society and to other families. This brings about strife and division, which makes it ever more important to strengthen the family protectively, and so the vicious circle continues. We accumulate, and call this "learning through experience", but more and more this learning brings about fragmentation, narrowness and specialization. Questioner: Are you making out a case against technological learning and experience, against science and all accumulated knowledge? If we turn our backs on that we shall go back to savagery. Krishnamurti: No, I am not making out such a case at all. I think we are misunderstanding each other. We said that there are two kinds of learning: accumulation through experience, and acting from that accumulation, which is the past, and which is absolutely necessary wherever the action of knowledge is necessary. We are not against this; that would be too absurd! Questioner: Gandhi tried to keep the machine out of life and started all that business which they call "Home industries" or "Cottage industries" in India. Yet he used modern mechanized transport. This shows the inconsistency and hypocrisy of his position. Krishnamurti: Let's leave other people out of this. We are saying that there are two kinds of learning - one, acting through the accumulation of knowledge and experience, and the other, learning without accumulation, but learning all the time in the very act of living. The former is absolutely necessary in all technical matters, but relationship, behaviour, are not technical matters, they are living things and you have to learn about them all the time. If you act from what you have learnt about behaviour, then it becomes mechanical and therefore relationship becomes routine. Then there is another very important point: in all the learning which is accumulation and experience, profit is the criterion that determines the efficiency of the learning. And when the motive of profit operates in human relationships then it destroys those relationships because it brings about isolation and division. When the learning of experience and accumulation enters the domain of human behaviour, the psychological domain, then it must inevitably destroy. Enlightened self-interest on the one hand is advancement, but on the other hand it is the very seat of mischief, misery and confusion. Relationship cannot flower where there is self-interest of any kind, and that is why relationship cannot flower where it is guided by experience or memory. Questioner: I see this, but isn't religious experience something different? I am talking about the experience gathered and passed on in religious matters - the experiences of the saints and gurus, the experience of the philosophers. Isn't this kind of experience beneficial to us in our ignorance? Krishnamurti: Not at all! The saint must be recognised by society and always conforms to society's notions of sainthood -otherwise he wouldn't be called a saint. Equally the guru must be recognised as such by his followers who are conditioned by tradition. So both the guru and the disciple are part of the cultural and religious conditioning of the particular society in which they live. When they assert that they have come into contact with reality, that they know, then you may be quite sure that what they know is not reality. What they know is their own projection from the past. So the man who says he knows, does not know. in all these so-called religious experiences a cognitive process of recognition is inherent. You can only recognise something you have known before, therefore it is of the past, therefore it is time-binding and not timeless. So-called religious experience does not bring benefit but merely conditions you according to your particular tradition, inclination, tendency and desire, and therefore encourages every form of illusion and isolation. Questioner: Do you mean to say that you cannot experience reality? Krishnamurti: To experience implies that there must be an experiencer and the experiencer is the essence of all conditioning. What he experiences is the already-known. Questioner: What do you mean when you talk about the experiencer? If there is no experiencer do you mean you disappear? Krishnamurti: Of course. The "you" is the past and as long as the "you" remains or the "me" remains, that which is immense cannot be. The "me" with his shallow little mind, experience and knowledge, with his heart burdened with jealousies and anxieties -how can such an entity understand that which has no beginning and no ending, that which is ecstasy? So the beginning of wisdom is to understand yourself. Begin understanding yourself. Questioner: Is the experiencer different from that which he experiences, is the challenge different from the reaction to the challenge? Krishnamurti: The experiencer is the experienced, otherwise he could not recognise the experience and would not call it an experience; the experience is already in him before he recognises it. So the past is always operating and recognising itself; the new becomes swallowed up by the old. Similarly it is the reaction which determines the challenge; the challenge is the reaction, the two are not separate; without a reaction there would be no challenge. So the experience of an experiencer, or the reaction to a challenge which comes from the experiencer, are old, for they are determined by the experiencer. If you come to think of it, the word "experience" means to go through something and finish with it and not store it up, but when we talk about experience we actually mean the opposite. Every time you speak of experience you speak of something stored from which action takes place, you speak of something which you have enjoyed and demand to have again, or have disliked and fear to have repeated. So really to live is to learn without the cumulative process. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'SELF-EXPRESSION' Questioner: Expression seems to me so important. I must express myself as an artist otherwise I feel stifled and deeply frustrated. Expression is part of one's existence. As an artist it is as natural that I should give myself to it as that a man should express his love for a woman in words and gestures. But through all this expression there is a sort of pain which I don't quite understand. I think most artists would agree with me that there is deep conflict in expressing one's deepest feelings on canvas, or in any other medium. I wonder if one can ever be free of this pain, or does expression always bring pain? Krishnamurti: What is the need of expression, and where does the suffering come into all this? Isn't one always trying to express more and more deeply, extravagantly, fully, and is one ever satisfied with what one has expressed? The deep feeling and the expression of it are not the same thing; there is a vast difference between the two, and there is always frustration when the expression doesn't correspond to the strong feeling. Probably this is one of the causes of pain, this discontent with the inadequacy of the utterance which the artist gives to his feeling. In this there is conflict and the conflict is a waste of energy. An artist has a strong feeling which is fairly authentic; he expresses it on canvas. This expression pleases some people and they buy his work; he gets money and reputation. His expression has been noticed and becomes fashionable. He refines it, pursues it, develops it, and is all the time imitating himself. This expression becomes habitual and stylized; the expression becomes more and more important and finally more important than the feeling; the feeling eventually evaporates. The artist is not left with the social consequences of being a successful painter: the market place of the salon and the gallery, the connoisseur, the critics; he is enslaved by the society for which he paints. The feeling has long since disappeared, the expression is an empty shell remaining. Consequently even this expression eventually loses its attraction because it had nothing to express; it is a gesture, a word without a meaning. This is part of the destructive process of society. This is the destruction of the good. Questioner: Can't the feeling remain, without getting lost in expression? Krishnamurti: When expression becomes all-important because it is pleasurable, satisfying or profitable, then there is a cleavage between expression and feeling. When the feeling is the expression then the conflict doesn't arise, and in this there is no contradiction and hence no conflict. But when profit and thought intervene, then this feeling is lost through greed. The passion of feeling is entirely different from the passion of expression, and most people are caught in the passion of expression. So there is always this division between the good and the pleasurable. Questioner: Can I live without being caught in this current of greed? Krishnamurti: If it is the feeling which is important you will never ask about expression. Either you have got the feeling or you haven't. If you ask about the expression, you are not asking about artistry but about profit. Artistry is that which is never taken into account: it is the living. Questioner: So what is it, to live? What is it to be, and to have that feeling which is complete in itself? I have now understood that expression is beside the point. Krishnamurti: It is living without conflict. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'PASSION' Questioner: What is passion? You've talked about it and apparently you give it a special meaning. I don't think I know that meaning. Like every man I have sexual passion and passions for superficial things like fast driving or cultivating a beautiful garden. Most of us indulge in some form of passionate activity. Talk about his special passion and you see a man's eyes sparkle. We know the word passion comes from the Greek word for suffering, but the feeling I get when you use this word is not one of suffering but rather of some driving quality like that of the wind which comes roaring out of the west, chasing the clouds and the rubbish before it. I'd like to possess that passion. How does one come by it? What is it passionate about? What is the passion you mean? Krishnamurti: I think we should be clear that lust and passion are two different things. Lust is sustained by thought, driven by thought, it grows and gathers substance in thought until it explodes - sexually, or, if it is the lust for power, in its own violent forms of fulfilment. Passion is something entirely different; it is not the product of thought nor the remembrance of a past event; it is not driven by any motive of fulfilment; it is not sorrow either. Questioner: Is all sexual passion lust? Sexual response is not always the result of thought; it may be contact as when you suddenly meet somebody whose loveliness overpowers you. Krishnamurti: Wherever thought builds up the image of pleasure it must inevitably be lust and not the freedom of passion. If pleasure is the main drive then it is lust. When sexual feeling is born out of pleasure it is lust. If it is born out of love it is not lust, even though great delight may then be present. Here we must be clear and find out for ourselves whether love excludes pleasure and enjoyment. When you see a cloud and delight in its vastness and the light on it, there is of course pleasure, but there is a great deal more than pleasure. We are not condemning this at all. If you keep returning to the cloud in thought, or in fact, for a stimulation, then you are indulging in an imaginative flight of fancy, and obviously here pleasure and thought are the incentives operating. When you first looked at that cloud and saw its beauty there was no such incentive of pleasure operating. The beauty in sex is the absence of the "me", the ego, but the thought of sex is the affirmation of this ego, and that is pleasure. This ego is all the time either seeking pleasure or avoiding pain, wanting fulfilment and thereby inviting frustration. In all this the feeling of passion is sustained and pursued by thought, and therefore it is no longer passion but pleasure. The hope, the pursuit, of remembered passion is pleasure. Questioner: What is passion itself, then? Krishnamurti: It has to do with joy and ecstasy, which is not pleasure. In pleasure there is always a subtle form of effort - a seeing, striving, demanding, struggling to keep it, to get it, In passion there is no demand and therefore no struggle. In passion there is not the slightest shadow of fulfilment, therefore there can be neither frustration nor pain, Passion is the freedom from the "me", which is the centre of all fulfilment and pain. Passion does not demand because it is, and I am not speaking of something static. Passion is the austerity of self-abnegation in which the "you" and the "me" is not; therefore passion is the essence of life. It is this that moves and lives. But when thought brings in all the problems of having and holding, then passion ceases. Without passion creation is not possible. Questioner: What do you mean by creation? Krishnamurti: Freedom. Questioner: What freedom? Krishnamurti: Freedom from the "me" which depends on environment and is the product of environment - the me which is put together by society and thought. This freedom is clarity, the light that is not lit from the past. Passion is only the present. Questioner: This has fired me with a strange new feeling. Krishnamurti: That is the passion of learning. Questioner: What particular action in my daily living will ensure that this passion is burning and operating? Krishnamurti: Nothing will ensure it except the attention of learning, which is action, which is now. In this there is the beauty of passion, which is the total abandonment of the "me" and its time. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'ORDER' Questioner: In your teaching there are a thousand details. in my living I must be able to resolve them all into one action, now, which permeates all I do, because in my living I have only the one moment right before me in which to act. What is that one action in daily living which will bring all the details of your teaching to one point, like a pyramid inverted on its point? Krishnamurti: ...dangerously! Questioner: Or, to put it differently, what is the one action which will bring the total intelligence of living into focus in one instant in the present? Krishnamurti: I think the question to ask is how to live a really intelligent, balanced, active life, in harmonious relationship with other human beings, without confusion, adjustment and misery. What is the one act that will summon this intelligence to operate in whatever you are doing? There is so much misery, poverty and sorrow in the world. What are you, as a human being, to do facing all these human problems? If you use the opportunity to help others for your own fulfilment, then it is exploitation and mischief. So we can put that aside from the beginning. The question really is, how are we to live a highly intelligent, orderly life without any kind of effort? It seems that we always approach this problem from the outside, asking ourselves, "What am I to do, confronted with all the many problems of mankind - economic, social, human?" We want to work this out in terms of the outer. Questioner: No, I am not asking you how I can tackle or solve the problems of the world, economic, social or political. That would be too absurd! All I want to know is how to live righteously in this world exactly as it is, because it is as it is now, right here before me, and I can't will it into any other shape. I must live now in this world as it is, and in these circumstances solve all the problems of living. I am asking how to make this living a life of Dharma, which is that virtue that is not imposed from without, that does not conform to any precept, is not cultivated by any thought. Krishnamurti: Do you mean you want to find yourself immediately, suddenly, in a state of grace which is great intelligence, innocency, love - to find yourself in this state without having a past or a future, and to act from this state? Questioner: Yes! That is it exactly. Krishnamurti: This has nothing to do with achievement, success or failure. There must surely be only one way to live: what is it? Questioner: That is my question. Krishnamurti: To have inside you that light that has no beginning and no ending, that is not lit by your desire, that is not yours or someone else's. When there is this inward light, whatever you do will always be right and true. Questioner: How do you get that light, now, without all the struggle, the search, the longing, the questioning? Krishnamurti: It is only possible when you really die to the past completely, and this can be done only when there is complete order in the brain. The brain cannot stand disorder. If there is disorder all its activities will be contradictory, confused, miserable and it will bring about mischief in itself and around itself. This order is not the design of thought, the design of obedience to a principle, to authority, or to some form of imagined goodness. It is disorder in the brain that brings about conflict; then all the various resistances cultivated by thought to escape from this disorder arise - religious and otherwise. Questioner: How can this order be brought about to a brain that is disorderly, contradictory, in itself? Krishnamurti: It can be done by watchfulness throughout the day, and then, before sleeping, by putting everything that has been done during the day in order. In that way the brain does not go to sleep in disorder. This does not mean that the brain hypnotizes itself into a state of order when there is really disorder in and about it. There must be order during the day, and the summing up of this order before sleeping is the harmonious ending of the day. It is like a man who keeps accounts and balances them properly every evening so that he starts afresh the next day, so that when he goes to sleep his mind is quiet, empty, not worried, confused, anxious or fearful. When he wakes up there is this light which is not the product of thought or of pleasure. This light is intelligence and love. It is the negation of the disorder of the morality in which we have been brought up. Questioner: Can I have this light immediately? That is the question I asked right at the beginning, only I put it differently. Krishnamurti: You can have it immediately when the "me" is not. The "me" comes to an end when it sees for itself that it must end; the seeing is the light of understanding. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COMMUNITY' Questioner: I don't quite know how to ask this question but I have a strong feeling that relationship between the individual and the community, these two opposing entities, has been a long history of mischief. The history of the world, of thought, of civilization, is, after all, the history of the relationship between these two opposing entities. In all societies the individual is more or less suppressed; he must conform and fit into the pattern which the theorists have determined. The individual is always trying to break out of these patterns, and continuous battle between the two is the result. Religions talk about the individual soul as something separate from the collective soul. They emphasize the individual. In modern society - which has become so mechanical, standardized and collectively active - the individual is trying to identify himself, enquiring what he is, asserting himself. All struggle leads nowhere. My question is, what is wrong with all this? Krishnamurti: The only thing that really matters is that there be an action of goodness, love and intelligence in living. Is goodness individual or collective, is love personal or impersonal, is intelligence yours, mine or somebody else's? If it is yours or mine then it is not intelligence, or love, or goodness. If goodness is an affair of the individual or of the collective, according to one's particular preference or decision, then it is no longer goodness. Goodness is not in the backyard of the individual nor in the open field of the collective; goodness flowers only in freedom from both. When there is this goodness, love and intelligence, then action is not in terms of the individual or the collective. Lacking goodness, we divide the world into the individual and the collective, and further divide the collective into innumerable groups according to religion, nationality and class. Having created these divisions we try to bridge them by forming new groups which are again divided from other groups. We see that every great religion supposedly exists to bring about the brotherhood of man and, in actual fact, prevents it. We always try to reform that which is already corrupt. We don't eradicate corruption fundamentally but simply rearrange it. Questioner: Are you saying that we need not waste time in these endless bargainings between the individual and the collective, or try to prove that they are different or that they are similar? Are you saying that only goodness, love and intelligence are the issue, and that these lie beyond the individual or the collective? Krishnamurti: Yes. Questioner: So the real question seems to be how love, goodness and intelligence can act in daily living. Krishnamurti: If these act, then the question of the individual and the collective is academic. Questioner: How are they to act? Krishnamurti: They can act only in relationship: all existence is in relationship. So the first thing is to become aware of one's relationship to everything and everybody, and to see how in this relationship the "me" is born and acts. This "me" that is both the collective and the individual; it is the "me" that separates; it is the "me" that acts collectively or individually, the "me" that creates heaven and hell. To be aware of this is to understand it. And the understanding of it is the ending of it. The ending of it is goodness, love and intelligence. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'MEDITATION AND ENERGY' Questioner: This morning I should like to go into the deeper meaning, or deeper sense, of meditation. I have practised many forms of it, including a little Zen. There are various schools which teach awareness but they all seem rather superficial, so can we leave all that aside and go into it more deeply? Krishnamurti: We must also set aside the whole meaning of authority, because in meditation any form of authority, either one's own or the authority of another, becomes an impediment and prevents freedom - prevents a freshness, a newness. So authority, conformity and imitation must be set aside completely. Otherwise you merely imitate, follow what has been said, and that makes the mind very dull and stupid. In that there is no freedom. Your past experience may guide, direct or establish a new path, and so even that must go. Then only can one go into this very deep and extraordinarily important thing called meditation. Meditation is the essence of energy. Questioner: For many years I have tried to see that I do not become a slave to the authority of someone else or to a pattern. Of course there is a danger of deceiving myself but as we go along I shall probably find out. But when you say that meditation is the essence of energy, what do you mean by the words energy and meditation? Krishnamurti: Every movement of thought every action demands energy. Whatever you do or think needs energy, and this energy can be dissipated through conflict, through various forms of unnecessary thought, emotional pursuits and sentimental activities. Energy is wasted in conflict which arises in duality, in the "me" and the "not-me", in the division between the observer and the observed, the thinker and the thought. When this wastage is no longer taking place there is a quality of energy which can be called an awareness - an awareness in which there is no evaluation, judgement, condemnation or comparison but merely an attentive observation, a seeing of things exactly as they are, both inwardly and outwardly, without the interference of thought, which is the past. Questioner: This I find very difficult to understand. If there were no thought at all, would it be possible to recognise a tree, or my wife or neighbour? Recognition is necessary, isn't it, when you look at a tree or the woman next door? Krishnamurti: When you observe a tree is recognition necessary? When you look at that tree, do you say it is a tree or do you just look? If you begin to recognise it as an elm, an oak or a mango tree then the past interferes with direct observation. In the same way, when you look at your wife, if you look with memories of annoyances or pleasures you are not really looking at her but at the image which you have in your mind about her. That prevents direct perception: direct perception does not need recognition. Outward recognition of your wife, your children, your house or your neighbour is, of course necessary, but why should there be an interference of the past in the eyes, the mind and the heart? Doesn't it prevent you from seeing clearly? When you condemn or have an opinion about something, that opinion or prejudice distorts observation. Questioner: Yes, I see that. That subtle form of recognition does distort, I see that. You say all these interferences of thought are a waste of energy. You say observe without any form of recognition, condemnation, judgement; observe without naming, for that naming, recognition, condemnation are a waste of energy. That can be logically and actually understood. Then there is the next point which is the division, the separateness, or, rather, as you have often put it in your talks, the space that exists between the observer and the observed which creates duality; you say that this also is a waste of energy and brings about conflict. I find everything you say logical but I find it extraordinarily difficult to remove that space, to bring about harmony between the observer and the observed. How is this to be done? Krishnamurti: There is no how. The how means a system, a method, a practice which becomes mechanical. Again we have to be rid of the significance of the word "how". Questioner: Is it possible? I know the word possible implies a future, an effort, a striving to bring about harmony, but one must use certain words. I hope we can go beyond those words, so is it possible to bring about a union between the observer and the observed? Krishnamurti: The observer is always casting its shadow on the thing it observes. So one must understand the structure and the nature of the observer, not how to bring about a union between the two. One must understand the movement of the observer and in that understanding perhaps the observer comes to an end. We must examine what the observer is: it is the past with all its memories, conscious and unconscious, its racial inheritance, its accumulated experience which is called knowledge, its reactions. The observer is really the conditioned entity. He is the one who asserts that he is, and I am. In protecting himself, he resists, dominates, seeking comfort and security. The observer then sets himself apart as something different from that which he observes, inwardly or outwardly. This brings about a duality and from this duality there is conflict, which is the wastage of energy. To be aware of the observer, his movement, his self-centred activity, his assertions, his prejudices, one must be aware of all these unconscious movements which build the separatist feeling that he is different. It must be observed without any form of evaluation, without like and dislike; just observe it in daily life, in its relationships. When this observation is clear, isn't there then a freedom from the observer? Questioner: You are saying, sir, that the observer is really the ego; you are saying that as long as the ego exists, he must resist, divide, separate, for in this separation, this division, he feels alive. It gives him vitality to resist, to fight, and he has become accustomed to that battle; it is his way of living. Are you not saying that this ego, this "I", must dissolve through an observation in which there is no sense of like or dislike, no opinion or judgement, but only the observing of this "I" in action? But can such a thing really take place? Can I look at myself so completely, so truly, without distortion? You say that when I do look at myself so clearly then the "I" has no movement at all. And you say this is part of meditation? Krishnamurti: Of course. This is meditation. Questioner: This observation surely demands extraordinary self-discipline. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by self-discipline? Do you mean disciplining the self by putting him in a strait-jacket, or do you mean learning about the self, the self that asserts, that dominates, that is ambitious, violent and so on - learning about it? The learning is, in itself, discipline. The word discipline means to learn and when there is learning, not accumulating, when there is actual learning, which needs attention, that learning brings about its own responsibility, its own activity, its own dimensions: so there is no discipline as something imposed upon it. Where there is learning there is no imitation, no conformity, no authority. If this is what you mean by the word discipline, then surely there is freedom to learn? Questioner: You are taking me too far and perhaps too deeply, and I can't quite go with you where this learning is concerned. I see very clearly that the self as the observer must come to an end. It is logically so, and there must be no conflict: that is very clear. But you are saying that this very observation is learning and in learning there is always accumulation; this accumulation becomes the past. Learning is an additive process, but you are apparently giving it a different meaning altogether. From what I have understood you are saying that learning is a constant movement without accumulation. Is that so? Can learning be without accumulation? Krishnamurti: Learning is its own action. What generally happens is that having learnt - we act upon what we have learnt. So there is division between the past and action, and hence there is a conflict between what should be and what is, or what has been and what is. We are saying that there can be action in the very movement of learning: that is, learning is doing; it is not a question of having learnt and then acting. This is very important to understand because having learnt, and acting from that accumulation, is the very nature of the "me", the "I", the ego or whatever name one likes to give it. The "I" is the very essence of the past and the past impinges on the present and so on into the future. In this there is constant division. Where there is learning there is a constant movement; there is no accumulation which can become the "I". Questioner: But in the technological field there must be accumulated knowledge. One can't fly the Atlantic or run a car, or even do most of the ordinary daily things without knowledge. Krishnamurti: Of course not, sir; such knowledge is absolutely necessary. But we are talking about the psychological field in which the "I" operates. The "I" can use technological knowledge in order to achieve something, a position or prestige; the "I" can use that knowledge to function, but if in functioning the "I" interferes, things begin to go wrong, for the "I", through technical means, seeks status. So the "I" is not concerned merely with knowledge in scientific fields; it is using it to achieve something else. It is like a musician who uses the piano to become famous. What he is concerned with is fame and not the beauty of the music in itself or for itself. We are not saying that we must get rid of technological knowledge; on the contrary, the more technological knowledge there is the better living conditions will be. But the moment the "I" uses it, things begin to go wrong. Questioner: I think I begin to understand what you are saying. You are giving quite a different meaning and dimension to the word learning, which is marvellous. I am beginning to grasp it. You are saying that meditation is a movement of learning and in that there is freedom to learn about everything, not only about meditation, but about the way one lives, drives, eats, talks, everything. Krishnamurti: As we said, the essence of energy is meditation. To put it differently - so long as there is a meditator there is no meditation. If he attempts to achieve a state described by others, or some flash of experience.... Questioner: If I may interrupt you, sir, are you saying that learning must be constant, a flow, a line without any break, so that learning and action are one, or a constant movement? I don't know what word to use, but I am sure you understand what I mean. The moment there is a break between learning, action and meditation, that break is a disharmony, that break is conflict. In that break there is the observer and the observed and hence the whole wastage of energy; is that what you are saying? Krishnamurti: Yes, that is what we mean. Meditation is not a state; it is a movement, as action is a movement. And as we said just now, when we separate action from learning, then the observer comes between the learning and the action; then he becomes important; then he uses action and learning for ulterior motives. When this is very clearly understood as one harmonious movement of acting, of learning, of meditation, there is no wastage of energy and this is the beauty of meditation. There is only one movement. Learning is far more important than meditation or action. To learn there must be complete freedom, not only consciously but deeply, inwardly - a total freedom. And in freedom there is this movement of learning, acting, meditating as a harmonious whole. The word whole not only means health but holy. So learning is holy, acting is holy, meditation is holy. This is really a sacred thing and the beauty is in itself and not beyond it. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'ENDING THOUGHT' Questioner: I wonder what you really mean by ending thought. I talked to a friend about it and he said it is some kind of oriental nonsense. To him thought is the highest form of intelligence and action, the very salt of life, indispensable. It has created civilization, and all relationship is based on it. All of us accept this, from the greatest thinker to the humblest labourer. When we don't think we sleep, vegetate or daydream; we are vacant, dull and unproductive, whereas when we are awake we are thinking, doing, living, quarrelling: these are the only two states we know. You say, be beyond both - beyond thought and vacant inactivity. What do you mean by this? Krishnamurti: Very simply put, thought is the response of memory, the past. The past is an infinity or a second ago. When thought acts it is this past which is acting as memory, as experience, as knowledge, as opportunity. All will is desire based on this past and directed towards pleasure or the avoidance of pain. When thought is functioning it is the past, therefore there is no new living at all; it is the past living in the present, modifying itself and the present. So there is nothing new in life that way, and when something new is to be found there must be the absence of the past, the mind must not be cluttered up with thought, fear, pleasure, and everything else. Only when the mind is uncluttered can the new come into being, and for this reason we say that thought must be still, operating only when it has to - objectively, efficiently. All continuity is thought; when there is continuity there is nothing new. Do you see how important this is? It's really a question of life itself. Either you live in the past, or you live totally differently: that is the whole point. Questioner: I think I do see what you mean, but how in the world is one to end this thought? When I listen to the blackbird there is thought telling me instantly it is the blackbird; when I walk down the street thought tells me I am walking down the street and tells me all I recognise and see; when I play with the notion of not thinking it is again thought that plays this game. All meaning and understanding and communication are thought. Even when I am not communicating with someone else I am doing so with myself. When I am awake, I think, when I am asleep I think. The whole structure of my being is thought. Its roots lie far deeper than I know. All I think and do and all I am is thought, thought creating pleasure and pain, appetites, longings, resolutions, conclusions, hopes, fears and questions. Thought commits murder and thought forgives. So how can one go beyond it? Isn't it thought again which seeks to go beyond it? Krishnamurti: We both said, when thought is still, something new can be. We both saw that point clearly and to understand it clearly is the ending of thought. Questioner: But that understanding is also thought. Krishnamurti: Is it? You assume that it is thought, but is it, actually? Questioner: It is a mental movement with meaning, a communication to oneself. Krishnamurti: If it is a communication to oneself it is thought. But is understanding a mental movement with meaning? Questioner: Yes it is. Krishnamurti: The meaning of the word and the understanding of that meaning is thought. That is necessary in life. There thought must function efficiently. It is a technological matter. But you are not asking that. You are asking how thought, which is the very movement of life as you know it, can come to an end. Can it only end when you die? That is really your question, isn't it? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: That is the right question. Die! Die to the past, to tradition. Questioner: But how? Krishnamurti: The brain is the source of thought. The brain is matter and thought is matter. Can the brain - with all its reactions and its immediate responses to every challenge and demand - can that brain be very still? It is not a question of ending thought, but of whether the brain can be completely still. Can it act with full capacity when necessary and otherwise be still? This stillness is not physical death. See what happens when the brain is completely still. See what happens. Questioner: In that space there was a blackbird, the green tree, the blue sky, the man hammering next door, the sound of the wind in the trees and my own heartbeat, the total quietness of the body. That is all. Krishnamurti: If there was recognition of the blackbird singing, then the brain was active, was interpreting. It was not still. This really demands tremendous alertness and discipline, the watching that brings its own discipline, not imposed or brought about by your unconscious desire to achieve a result or a pleasurable new experience. Therefore during the day thought must operate effectively, sanely, and also watch itself. Questioner: That is easy, but what about going beyond it? Krishnamurti: Who is asking this question? Is it the desire to experience something new or is it the enquiry? If it is the enquiry, then you must enquire and investigate the whole business of thinking and be completely familiar with it, know all its tricks and subtleties. If you have done this you will know that the question of going beyond thought is an empty one. Going beyond thought is knowing what thought is. THE URGENCY OF CHANGE 'THE NEW HUMAN BEING' Questioner: I am a reformer, a social worker. Seeing the extraordinary injustice there is in the world my whole life has been dedicated to reform. I used to be a Communist but I can't go along with Communism any more, it has ended in tyranny. Nevertheless, I am still dedicated to reforming society so that man can live in dignity, beauty and freedom, and realize the potential which nature seems to have given him, and which he himself seems always to have stolen from his fellow man. In America there is a certain kind of freedom, and yet standardization and propaganda are very strong there - all the mass media exert a tremendous pressure on the mind. It seems that the power of television, this mechanical thing that man has invented, has developed its own personality, its own will, its own momentum; and though probably nobody - perhaps not even any one group - is deliberately using it to influence society, its trend shapes the very souls of our children. And this is the same in varying degrees in all democracies. In China there seems to be no hope at all for the dignity or freedom of man, while in India the government is weak, corrupt and inefficient. It seems to me that all the social injustice in the world absolutely must be changed. I want passionately to do something about it, yet I don't know where to begin to tackle it. Krishnamurti: Reform needs further reform, and this is an endless process. So let us look at it differently. Let us put aside the whole thought of reform; let us wipe it out of our blood. Let us completely forget this idea of wanting to reform the world. Then let us see actually what is happening, right throughout the world. Political parties always have a limited programme which, even if fulfilled, invariably brings about mischief, which then has to be corrected once again. We are always talking about political action as being a most important action, but political action is not the way. Let us put it out of our minds. All social and economic reforms come under this category. Then there is the religious formula of action based on belief, idealism, dogmatism, conformity to some so-called divine recipe. In this is involved authority and acceptance, obedience and the utter denial of freedom. Though religions talk of peace on earth they contribute to the disorder because they are a factor of division. Also the churches have always taken some political stand in times of crisis, so they are really political bodies, and we have seen that all political action is divisive. The churches have never really denied war: on the contrary they have waged war. So when one puts aside the religious recipes, as one puts aside the political formulas - what is left, and what is one to do? Naturally civic order must be maintained: you have to have water in the taps. If you destroy civic order you have to start again from the beginning. So, what is one to do? Questioner: That is what I am actually asking you. Krishnamurti: Be concerned with radical change, with total revolution. The only revolution is the revolution between man and man, between human beings. That is our only concern. In this revolution there are no blueprints, no ideologies, no conceptual utopias. We must take the fact of the actual relationship between men and change that radically. That is the real thing. And this revolution must be immediate, it must not take time. It is not achieved through evolution, which is time. Questioner: What do you mean? All historical changes have taken place in time; none of them has been immediate. You are proposing something quite inconceivable. Krishnamurti: If you take time to change, do you suppose that life is in suspension during the time it takes to change? It isn't in suspension. Everything you are trying to change is being modified and perpetuated by the environment, by life itself. So there is no end to it. It is like trying to clean the water in a tank which is constantly being refilled with dirty water. So time is out. Now, what is to bring about this change? It cannot be will, or determination, or choice, or desire, because all these are part of the entity that has to be changed. So we must ask what actually is possible, without the action of will and assertiveness which is always the action of conflict. Questioner: Is there any action which is not the action of will and assertiveness? Krishnamurti: Instead of asking this question let us go much deeper. Let us see that actually it is only the action of will and assertiveness that needs to be changed at all, because the only mischief in relationship is conflict, between individuals or within individuals, and conflict is will and assertiveness. Living without such action does not mean that we live like vegetables. Conflict is our main concern. All the social maladies you mentioned are the projection of this conflict in the heart of each human being. The only possible change is a radical transformation of yourself in all your relationships, not in some vague future, but now. Questioner: But how can I completely eradicate this conflict in myself, this contradiction, this resistance, this conditioning? I understand what you mean intellectually, but I can only change when I feel it passionately, and I don't feel it passionately. It is merely an idea to me; I don't see it with my heart. If I try to act on this intellectual understanding I am in conflict with another, deeper, part of myself. Krishnamurti: If you really see this contradiction passionately, then that very perception is the revolution. If you see in yourself this division between the mind and the heart, actually see it, not conceive of it theoretically, but see it, then the problem comes to an end. A man who is passionate about the world and the necessity for change, must be free from political activity, religious conformity and tradition - which means, free from the weight of time, free from the burden of the past, free from all the action of will: this is the new human being. This only is the social, psychological, and even the political revolution. - Part 1, Public Talks Saanen 1970 - Chapter 1 - The Act Of Looking Chapter 2 - Freedom Chapter 3 - Analysis Chapter 4 - Fragmentation Chapter 5 - Fear And Pleasure Chapter 6 - The Mechanical Activity Of Thought Chapter 7 - Religion - Part 2, Public Dialogues Saanen 1970 - Chapter 1 - 1st Public Dialogue Chapter 2 - 2nd Public Dialogue Chapter 3 - 3rd Public Dialogue Chapter 4 - 4th Public Dialogue Chapter 5 - 6th Public Dialogue Chapter 6 - 7th Public Dialogue Chapter 7 - 8th Public Dialogue IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART I CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 16TH JULY 1970 'THE ACT OF LOOKING' In a world that is so utterly confused and violent, where there is every form of revolt and a thousand explanations for these revolts, it is hoped that there will be social reformation, different realities and greater freedom for man. In every country, in every clime, under the banner of peace, there is violence; in the name of truth there is exploitation, misery; there are the starving millions; there is suppression under great tyrannies, there is much social injustice. There is war, conscription and the evasion of conscription. There is really great confusion and terrible violence; hatred is justified; escapism in every form is accepted as the norm of life. When one is aware of all this, one is confused, uncertain as to what to do, what to think, what part to play. What is one to do? join the activists or escape into some kind of inward isolation? Go back to the old religious ideas? Start a new sect, or carry on with one's own prejudices and inclinations? Seeing all this, one naturally wants to know for oneself what to do, what to think, how to live a different kind of life. If during these talks and discussions we can find a light in ourselves, a way of living in which there is no violence whatsoever, a way of life which is utterly religious and therefore without fear a life that is inwardly stable, which cannot be touched outward events, then I think they will be eminently worthwhile. Can we give complete and sensitive attention to what we are going to discuss? We are working together to find out how to live in peace. It is not that the speaker tells you what to do, what to think -he has no authority, no `philosophy'. There is the difficulty that one's brain functions in old habits, like a gramophone record playing the same tune over and over again. While the noise of that tune, of that habit is going on, one is not capable of listening to anything new. The brain has been conditioned to think in a certain way, to respond according to our culture, tradition and education; that same brain tries to listen to something new and is not capable of it. That is where our difficulty is going to lie. A talk recorded on a tape can be wiped out and begun again; unfortunately the recording on the tape of the brain has been impressed on it for so long that it is very difficult to wipe it out and begin again. We repeat the same pattern, the same ideas and physical habits, over and over again, so we never catch anything fresh. I assure you one can put aside the old tape, the old way of thinking, feeling, reacting, the innumerable habits that one has. One can do it if one really gives attention. If the thing one is listening to is deadly serious, tremendously important, then one is bound to listen so that the very act of listening will wipe out the old. Do try it - or rather do it. You are deeply interested, otherwise you would not be here. Do listen with full attention, so that in the very act of listening the old memories, the old habits, the accumulated tradition, will all be wiped away. One has to be serious when confronted with the chaos in the world, the uncertainty, warfare and destruction, where every value has been thrown away in a society which is completely permissive, sexually and economically. There is no morality, no religion; everything is being thrown away and one has to be utterly, deeply serious; if you have that seriousness in your heart, you will listen. It depends on you, not on the speaker, whether you are sufficiently serious to listen so completely as to find out for yourself a light that can never be put out, a way of living that does not depend on any idea, on any circumstance, a way of life that is always free, new, young, vital. If you have the quality of mind that wants to find out at any price, then you and the speaker can work together and come upon this strange thing that will solve all our problems -whether they be the problems of the daily monotony of life or problems of the most serious nature. Now how do we go about it? I feel there is only one way, that is: through negation to come to the positive; through understanding what it is not, to find out what it is. To see what one actually is and go beyond that. Start looking at the world and all the events of the world, at the things that are going on; see if one's relation to that is either with or without separation. One can look at the world's events as though they did not concern one as an individual, yet try to shape them, try to do something about them. In that way, there is a division between oneself and the world. One can look that way with one's experience and knowledge, with one's particular idiosyncrasies, prejudices and so on; but it is looking as one separated from the world. One has to find out how to look so that one sees all the things that are happening, outside or inside oneself, as a unitary process, as a total movement. Either one looks at the world from a particular point of view - taking a stand verbally, ideologically, committed to a particular action and therefore isolated from the rest - or one looks at this whole phenomenon as a living, moving process, a total movement of which one is a part and from which one is not divided. What one is, is the result of culture, religion, education, propaganda, climate, food - one is the world and the world is oneself. Can one see the totality of this not what one should do about it? Does one have this feeling of the wholeness of mankind? It is not a question of identifying oneself with the world, because one is the world. War is the result of oneself. The violence, the prejudice, the appalling brutality that is going on, is part of oneself. It depends on how you look at this phenomenon, both inwardly and outwardly, and also on how serious you are. If you are really serious, then when you look, the old momentum - the repetition of the old patterns, the old ways of thinking, living and acting - come to an end. Are you serious to find out a way of life in which all this turmoil, this misery and sorrow does not exist? For most of us the difficulty lies in being free of the old habits of thought: `I am something', `I want to fulfil myself', `I want to become',`I believe in my opinions', `This is the way', `I belong to this particular sect'. The moment you take a stand you have separated yourself and have therefore become incapable of looking at the total process. As long as there is the fragmentation of life, both outwardly and inwardly, there must be confusion and war. Do please see this with your heart. Look at the war that is going on in the Middle East. You know all this; there are volumes written explaining it all. We are caught by the explanations - as though any explanation is ever going to solve anything. It is essential to realize that one must not be caught in explanations, it does not matter who gives them. When you see `what is' it does not demand an explanation; the man who does not see `what is, is lost in explanations. Please do see this; understand this so fundamentally that you are not caught by words. In India it is the custom to take their sacred book, the Gita, and explain everything according to that. Thousands upon thousands listen to the explanations as to how you should live, what you should do, how God is this or that - they listen enchanted and yet carry on with their usual life. Explanations blind you, they prevent you from actually seeing `what is'. It is vitally important to find out for yourself how you look at this problem of existence. Do you do so from an explanation, from a particular point of view, or do you look non-fragmentarily? Do find out. Go for a walk by yourself and find out, put your heart into finding out how you look at all these phenomena. Then we can work out the details together; and we will go into the most infinite details to find out, to understand. But before we do that you must be very clear that you are free from fragmentation, that you are no longer an Englishman, an Ameri- can, a Jew - you follow? - that you are free from your conditioning in a particular religion or culture, which tethers you, according to which you have your experiences, which only lead to further conditioning. Look at this whole movement of life as one thing; there is great beauty in that and immense possibility; then action is extraordinarily complete and there is freedom. And a mind must be free to find out what reality is, not a reality which is invented imagined. There must be total freedom in which there is no fragmentation. That can only happen if you are really completely serious - not according to somebody who says `This is the way to be serious; throw that all away, do not listen to it. Find out for yourself, it does not matter whether you are old or young. Would you like to ask questions? Before you ask, see why you are asking and from whom you expect the answer. In asking are you satisfied merely with the explanation which may be the answer? If one asks a question - and one must enquire always about everything - is one asking it because in that very asking one is beginning; to enquire and therefore share, move, experience together, create together? Questioner: If there is someone, say a madman, loose and killing people, and it is within one's power to stop him by killing him, what should one do? Krishnamurti: So let us kill all the Presidents, all the rulers, all the tyrants, all the neighbours, and yourself! (Laughter) No, no, do not laugh. We are part of all this. We have contributed by our own violence to the state the world is in. We don't see this clearly. We think that by getting rid of a few people by pushing aside the establishment, we are going to solve the whole problem. Every physical revolution has been based on this, the French, the Communist and so on and they have ended up in bureaucracy or tyranny. So my friends, to bring about a different way of living is to bring it about not for others but for oneself; because the `other' is oneself, there is no `we' and `they', there is only ourselves. If one really sees this, not verbally, not intellectually, but with one's heart, then one will see there can be a total action having a completely different kind of result, so there will be a new social structure, not the throwing out of one establishment and the creating of another. One must have patience to enquire; young people do not have patience, they want instant results - instant coffee, instant tea, instant meditation - which means that they have never understood the whole process of living. If one understands the totality of living there is an action which is instantaneous, which is quite different from the instant action of impatience. Look, see what is going on in America, the racial riots, the poverty, the ghettos, the utter meaninglessness of education as it is - look at the division in Europe, and how long it takes to bring about a Federated Europe. And look at what is happening in India, Asia, Russia and China. When one looks at all that and the various divisions of religion, there is only one answer, one action, a total action, not a partial or fragmentary action. That total action is not to kill another but to see the divisions that have brought about this destruction of man. When one really seriously and sensitively sees that, there will be quite a different action. Questioner: For someone who is born in a country where there is complete tyranny so that he is totally suppressed, having no opportunity of doing anything himself - I feel most people here cannot imagine it - he is born in this situation and so were his parents, what has he done to create the chaos in this world? Krishnamurti: Probably he has not done anything. What has the poor man done who lives in the wilds of India, or in a small village in Africa, or in some happy little valley, not knowing anything that is happening in the rest of the world? In what ways has he contributed to this monstrous structure? Probably he has not done anything, poor fellow, what can he do? Questioner: What does it mean to be serious? I have the feeling that I am not serious. Krishnamurti: Let us find out together. What does it mean to be serious - so that you are completely dedicated to something, to some vocation, that you want to go right to the end of it. I am not defining it, do not accept any definition. One wants to find out how to live quite a different kind of life, a life in which there is no violence, in which there is complete inward freedom; one wants to find out and intends giving time, energy, thought, everything, to that. I would call such a person a serious person. He is not easily put off - he may amuse himself, but his course is set. This does not mean that he is dogmatic or obstinate, that he does not adjust. He will listen to others, consider, examine, observe. He may in his seriousness become self-centred; that very self-centredness will prevent him from examining; but, he has got to listen to others, he has got to examine, to question constantly; which means that he has to be highly sensitive. He has to find out how and to whom he listens. So he is all the time listening, pursuing, enquiring; he is discovering and with a sensitive brain, a sensitive mind, a sensitive heart they are not separate things - he is enquiring with the totality and the sensitivity of all that. Find out if the body is sensitive; be aware of its gestures, its peculiar habits. You cannot be sensitive physically if you overeat, nor can you become sensitive through starvation or fasting. One has to have regard for what one eats. One has to have a brain that is sensitive; that means a brain that is not functioning in habits, pursuing its own particular little pleasure, sexual or otherwise. Questioner: You have told us not to listen to explanations. What is the difference between your talks and explanations? Krishnamurti: What do you think? Is there any difference or is it just the same verbiage going on? Questioner: Words are words. Krishnamurti: We explain, giving the description of the cause and the effect, saying, for example: man has inherited brutality from the animal. Someone points that out; but if in the very pointing out you act, you cease to be violent, is there not a difference? Action is what is demanded; but will action come about through explanations, through words? Or does this total action come about only when you are sensitive enough to observe, see the whole movement of life, the whole of it? What are we trying to do here? Give explanations of `why' and the cause of `why'? Or are we trying to live so that our life is not based on words but on the discovery of what actually is - which is not dependent on words. There is a vast difference between the two - even though I point it out. It is like a man who is hungry; you can explain to him the nature and the taste of food, show him the menu, show him through the window the display of food. But what he wants is actual food; and explanations do not give him that. That is the difference. 16th July 1970 IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART I CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 19TH JULY 1970 'FREEDOM' There are many things we have to talk over, but first, it seems to me, we have to consider very deeply what freedom is. Without understanding freedom, not only outwardly, but specially inwardly, deeply and seriously - not merely intellectually, but actually feeling it - whatever we talk about will have very little meaning. The other day we were considering the nature of the mind. It is the serious mind that really lives and enjoys life - not the mind that is merely seeking entertainment, some particular gratification or fulfilment. Freedom implies the total abnegation and denial of all inward psychological authority. The younger generation thinks freedom is to spit in the face of the policeman, to do whatever it wants. But the denial of outward authority does not mean complete freedom from all inward, psychological authority. When we understand inward authority, the mind and heart are wholly and completely free; then we will be able to understand the action of freedom outwardly. Freedom of action outwardly, depends entirely on a mind that is free from inward authority. This requires a great deal of patient enquiry and deliberation. It is a matter of primary importance; if it is understood, then we will approach other things which are involved in life and daily living with quite a different quality of mind. According to the dictionary the meaning of the word `authority' is: `one who starts an original idea', `the author of something entirely new'. He sets up a pattern, a system based on his ideation; others follow it, finding some gratification in it. Or he starts a religious mode of life which others follow blindly, or intellectually. So patterns, or ways of life, of conduct are set up, politically or psychologically, outwardly and inwardly. The mind, which is generally very lazy and indolent, finds it easy to follow what somebody else has said. The follower accepts `authority' as a means to achieve what is promised by the particular system of philosophy or ideation; he clings to it, depends on it and thereby confirms the `authority'. A follower then, is a secondhand human being; and most people are completely secondhand. They may think they have some original ideas with regard to painting, writing and so on, but essentially, because they are conditioned to follow, to imitate, to conform, they have become secondhand, absurd human beings. That is one aspect of the destructive nature of authority. As a human being, do you follow somebody psychologically? We are not talking of outward obedience, the following of the law -but inwardly, psychologically, do you follow? If you do, then you are essentially secondhand; you may do good works, you may lead a very good life, but it all has very little meaning. There is also the authority of tradition. Tradition means: `to carry over from the past to the present' - the religious tradition, the family tradition, or the racial tradition. And there is the tradition of memory. One can see that to follow tradition at certain levels has value; at other levels it has no value at all. Good manners, politeness, consideration born out of the alertness of the mind that is watching, can gradually become tradition; the pattern having been set, the mind repeats it. One opens the door for someone, is punctual for meals, and so on. But it has become tradition and is no longer born out of alertness, sharpness and clearness. The mind which has cultivated memory, functions from tradition like a computer - repeating things over and over again. It can never receive anything new, it can never listen to anything in a totally different way. Our brains are like tape recorders: certain memories have been cultivated through centuries and we keep on repeating them. Through the noise of that repetition one is unable to listen to something new. So one asks: `What am I to do?' `How am I to get rid of the old machinery, the old tape?'. The new can be heard only when the old tape becomes completely silent without any effort, when one is serious to listen, to find out, and can give one's attention. So there is the authority of another on whom we are dependent, the authority of tradition, and the authority of past experience as memory, as knowledge. There is also the authority of the immediate experience, which is recognized from one's past accumulated knowledge; and being recognized, it is no longer something new. How can a mind, a brain, which is so conditioned by authority, imitation, conformity and adjustment, listen to anything completely new? How can one see the beauty of the day, when the mind and the heart and brain are so clouded by the past as authority. If one can actually perceive the fact that the mind is burdened by the past and conditioned by various forms of authority, that it is not free and therefore incapable of seeing completely, then the past is set aside without effort. Freedom implies the complete cessation of all inward authority. From that quality of mind comes an outward freedom - something which is entirely different from the reaction of opposing or resisting. What we are saying is really quite simple and it is because of its very simplicity that you will miss it. The mind, the brain, is conditioned through authority through imitation and conformity - that is a fact. The mind that is actually free, has no inward authority whatsoever; it knows what it means to love and to meditate. In understanding freedom one understands also what discipline is This may seem rather contradictory because we generally think freedom means freedom from all discipline. What is the quality of mind that is highly disciplined? Freedom cannot exist without discipline; which does not mean that you must first be disciplined and then you will have freedom. Freedom and disci- pline go together, they are not two separate things. So what does `discipline' mean? According to the dictionary, the meaning of the word `discipline' is `to learn' - not a mind that forces itself into a certain pattern of action according to an ideology or a belief. A mind that is capable of learning is entirely different from a mind which is capable only of conforming. A mind that is learning, that is observing, seeing actually `what is', is not interpreting `what is, according to its own desires, its own conditioning, its own particular pleasures. Discipline does not mean suppression and control, nor is it adjustment to a pattern or an ideology; it means a mind that sees `what is' and learns from `what is'. Such a mind has to be extraordinarily alert, aware. In the ordinary sense, `to discipline oneself' implies that there is an entity that is disciplining itself according to something. There is a dualistic process: I say to myself, `I must get up early in the morning and not be lazy" or `I must not be angry'. That involves a dualistic process. There is the one who with his will tries to control what he should do, as opposed to what he actually does. In that state there is conflict. The discipline laid down by parents, by society, by religious organizations means conformity. And there is revolt against conformity - the parent wanting one to do certain things, and the revolt against that, and so on. It is a life based on obedience and conformity; and there is the opposite of it, denying conformity and to do what one likes. So we are going to find out what the quality of the mind is that does not conform, does not imitate, follow and obey, yet has a quality in itself which is highly disciplined - `disciplined' in the sense of constantly learning. Discipline is learning, not conforming. Conformity implies comparing myself with another, measuring myself as to what I am, or think I should be, against the hero, the saint, and so on. Where there is conformity there must be comparison - please see this. Find out whether you can live without comparison, which means, not to conform. We are conditioned from childhood to compare - `You must by like your brother, or your great-aunt; `You must by like the saint', or `Follow Mao'. We compare in our education, in schools there is the giving of marks and the passing of examinations. We do not know what it means to live without comparison and without competition, therefore non-aggressively, non-competitively, non-violently. Comparing yourself with another is a form of aggression and a form of violence. Violence is not only killing or hitting somebody, it is in this comparative spirit, `I must be like somebody else', or `I must perfect myself'. Self-improvement is the very antithesis of freedom and learning. Find out for yourself how to live a life without comparing, and you will see what an extraordinary thing happens. If you really &come aware, choicelessly, you will see what it means to live without comparison, never using the words `I will be'. We are slaves to the verb `to be', which implies: `I will be somebody sometime in the future'. Comparison and conformity go together; they breed nothing but suppression, conflict and endless pain. So it is important to find a way of daily living in which there is no comparison. Do it, and you will see what an extraordinary thing it is; it frees you from so many burdens. The awareness of that brings about a quality of mind that is highly sensitive and therefore disciplined, constantly learning - not what it wants to learn, or what is pleasurable, gratifying to learn, but learning. So you become aware of inward conditioning resulting from authority, conformity to a pattern, to tradition, to propaganda, to what other people have said, and of your own accumulated experience and that of the race and the family. All of that has become the authority. Where there is authority, the mind can never be free to discover whatever there is to be discovered - something timeless, entirely new. A mind that is sensitive is not limited by any set pattern; it is constantly moving, flowing like a river, and in that constant movement there is no suppression, no conformity, no desire to fulfil. It is very important to understand clearly, seriously and deeply, the nature of a mind that is free and therefore truly religious. A mind that is free sees that dependency on something - on people, on friends, on husband or wife, on ideation, authority and so on - breeds fear; there is the source of fear. If I depend on you for my comfort, as an escape from my own loneliness and ugliness, from shallowness and pettiness, then that dependence breeds fear. Dependence on any form of subjective imagination, fantasy, or knowledge, breeds fear and destroys freedom. When you see what it all implies - how there is no freedom when there is dependence inwardly and therefore fear, and how it is only a confused and unclear mind that depends - you say: `How am I to be free from dependency?' Which is again another cause of conflict. Whereas, if you observe that a mind that depends must be confused, if you know the truth, that a mind that depends inwardly on any authority only creates confusion - if you see that, without asking how to be free of confusion - then you will cease to depend. Then your mind becomes extraordinarily sensitive and therefore capable of learning and it disciplines itself without any form of compulsion or conformity. Is all this somewhat clear - not verbally but actually? I can imagine, or think that I see very clearly, but that clarity is very short-lived. The real quality of clear perception comes only when there is no dependency, and therefore not that confusion which arises when there is fear. Can you honestly, seriously, bring your. self to find out whether you are free from authority? It needs tremendous enquiry into yourself, great awareness. From that clarity comes a totally different kind of action, an action that is not fragmentary, that is not divided politically or religiously - it is a total action. Questioner: From what you have said, it seems that an action which at one point can be thought to be a reaction to some outward authority, can be a total action at another point, by another individual. Krishnamurti: Intellectually, verbally, we can compete with each other, explain each other away, but that does not mean a thing; what to you may be a complete action may appear to me as incomplete action - that is not the point. The point is whether your mind, as that of a human being, acts completely. A human being of the world - you understand? - is not an individual. `Individual' means indivisible. An individual is one who is undivided in himself, who is non-fragmentary, who is whole, sane, healthy; also `whole' means holy. When you say `I am an individual', you are nothing of the kind. Live a life of no authority, of no comparison, and you will find out what an extraordinary thing it is; you have tremendous energy when you are not competing, not comparing and not suppressing; you are really alive, sane, whole and therefore sacred. Questioner: What you are saying is not very clear to me. What can I do? Krishnamurti: Either what is said is not very clear in itself or you may not understand English properly, or you are not sustaining attention all the time. It is very difficult to sustain attention for an hour and ten minutes; there are moments when you are not giving complete attention and then you say, `I have not quite understood what you are talking about'. Find out whether you are sustaining attention, listening, watching, or if you go wandering off, vagabonding. Which is it? Questioner: Do you think it is possible to learn all the time? Krishnamurti: When you ask that question of yourself, you have already made it difficult. By putting a question of that kind you are preventing yourself from learning - you see the point? I am not concerned with whether I am going to learn all the time, I'll find out. What I am concerned with is: am I learning? If I am learning, I am not concerned as to whether it is `all the time' - I don't make a problem of it. The question becomes irrelevant if I am learning. Questioner: You can learn from anything. Krishnamurti: That is, if you are aware that you are learning. This is very complex: may I go into it a little? `Can I learn all the time'? Which factor is important here? `Learning', or `all the time'? - obviously it is `learning'. When I am learning I am not concerned with `the rest of the time', the time interval and so on. I am only concerned with what I am learning. Naturally the mind wanders off, it Gets tired, it becomes inattentive. Being inattentive, it does all kinds of stupid things. So it is not a question of how to make the inattentive mind attentive. What is important is for the inattentive mind to become aware that it is inattentive. I am aware, watching everything, the movement of the trees, the flow of the water, and I am watching myself - not correcting, not saying this should be or this should not be - just watching. When the mind that is watching gets tired and becomes inattentive, suddenly it becomes aware of this, and tries to force itself to become attentive; so there is a conflict between inattention and attention. I say: do not do that, but become aware that you are inattentive - that is all. Questioner: Could you describe how you are aware that you are inattentive? Krishnamurti: I am learning about myself - not according to some psychologist or specialist - I am watching and I see something in myself; but I do not condemn it, I do not judge it, I do not push it aside - I just watch it. I see that I am proud - let us take that as an example. I do not say, `I must put it aside, how ugly to be proud' - but I just watch it. As I am watching I am learning. Watching means learning what pride involves, how it has come into being. I cannot watch it for more than five or six minutes - if one can, that is a great deal - the next moment I become inattentive. Having been attentive and knowing what inattention is, I struggle to make inattention attentive. Do not do that, but watch inattention, become aware that you are inattentive - that is all. Stop there. Do not say, `I must spend all my time being attentive', but just watch when you are inattentive. To go any further into this would be really quite complex. There is a quality of mind that is awake and watChing all the time, watching though there is nothing to learn. That means a mind that is extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily silent. What has a silent, clear mind to learn? Questioner: Could not communicating with words, with ideas, become a habit, a tradition? Krishnamurti: They become a habit, a tradition, only when they become important as words. There must be verbal communication, which is to share whatever we are looking at together - like fear; that means you and the speaker are both at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity, observing, co-operating, sharing. That brings about a non-verbal communion which is not habit. Questioner: How is it possible for a total, whole, sane individual, who is not fragmented but indivisible, to love another? How can a whole human being love a fragmented human being? Further, how can a whole individual love another whole individual? Krishnamurti: You cannot be whole if you do not know what love is. If you are whole - in the sense we are talking about - then there is no question of loving another. Have you ever watched a flower by the roadside. It exists, it lives in the sun, in the wind, in the beauty of light and colour, it does not say to you: `Come and smell me, enjoy me, look at me' - it lives and its very action of living is love. 19th July 1970 IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART I CHAPTER 3 3RD PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 21ST JULY 1970 'ANALYSIS' It is really quite important to understand the whole problem of living: from the moment we are born till we die, we are always in conflict. There is always a struggle, not only within ourselves, but outwardly in all our relationships, there is strain and strife; there is constant division, and a sense of the separate individual existence in opposition to the community. In the most intimate relationships, each one is seeking his own pleasure, secretly or openly; each one is pursuing his own ambition and fulfilment, thereby generating frustration. What we call living, is turmoil. In this turmoil we try to be creative. If one is gifted one writes a book or a poem, composes a picture and so on, but all within the pattern of strife, grief and despair; yet this is what is considered creative living. In going to the moon, living under the sea, waging wars, there is this constant bitter strife of man against man. This is our life. It seems to me that we should go into this matter very seriously, very deeply, and if we can, feel our way into a quality of mind where there is no strife whatsoever, both at the conscious level and also in the layers that lie below the conscious. Beauty is not the result of conflict. When you see the beauty of a mountain or of swift running water, in that immediate reception there is no sense of striving. In our lives there is not much beauty because of the battle that is going on. To find a quality of mind that is essentially beautiful and clear, that has never been touched by strife, is of the greatest importance; in the understanding of that - not merely verbally or intellectually, but in actually living it in daily life - we may have some kind of peace within ourselves and in the world. Perhaps this morning we shall be able, hesistantly and with sensitive watchfulness, to understand this battle we live in, and be free of it. What is the root cause of this conflict and contradiction? Ask this question of yourself. Do not try to put into words an explanation, but simply enquire non-verbally, if you can, into the basis of this contradiction and division, this strife and conflict. Either you enquire analytically or you perceive immediately the root of it. Analytically, you may unravel bit by bit and come upon the nature, the structure, the cause and effect of this strife within ourselves, between the individual and the State. Or you may perceive the cause of it instantly. In this way we may find out factually the cause of all this conflict and perceive the truth of it instantly. Let us understand what it means to analyse, to attempt to discover intellectually, verbally, the cause of this conflict. Because once you understand the analytical process - see the truth or the falseness of it - you will be completely free of it for ever; which implies an understanding in which your eyes, your mind, and your heart perceive immediately the truth of the matter. We are used to, conditioned to, the analytical process and the philosophical and psychological approach to the various specialists; it has become a habit. We are conditioned to trying to understand this whole complex process of living analytically, intellectually. This is not to advocate its opposite - emotional sentimentality. But if you understand very clearly the nature and the structure of the analytical process, then you will have quite a different outlook; you will be able to direct the energy which had been given to analysis in a totally different direction. Analysis implies division. There is the analyser and that which is to be analysed. Whether you analyse yourself, or it is done by a specialist, there is division, therefore there is already the beginning of conflict. We can do tremendous things only when there is great passion, great energy, and it is only this passion that can create a totally different kind of life in ourselves and in the world. That is why it is very important to understand this process of analysis in which the human mind has been caught for centuries. Of the many fragments into which we are divided, one assumes the authority of the analyser; the thing that is to be analysed is another. That analyser becomes the censor; he, with his accumulated knowledge, evaluates the good and the bad, what is right and what is wrong, what should or should not be suppressed, and so on. Also, the analyser must make every analysis complete, otherwise his evaluation, his conclusion, will be partial. The analyser must examine every thought - everything which he thinks should be analysed, and that will take time. You may spend a whole lifetime analysing - if you have the money and the inclination, or if you can find an analyst with whom you are in love, and all the rest of it. You can spend all your days analysing and at the end of it you are where you were, with still more to be analysed. We see that in analysis there is the division between the analyser and the analysed, and also that the analyser must analyse accurately, completely, or his conclusions will impede the next analysis. We see that the analytical process takes an infinite time and during that time many other things may happen. So when you see the whole structure of analysis, then that seeing is actually a denial, a negation of it; seeing what is involved in it, there is the negation of that action - which is complete action. Questioner: What do you mean by action? Krishnamurti: Action according to an idea, an ideology, one's accumulated experience. Action is always approximating itself to the ideal, to the prototype, so there is a division between action and ideal. Such action is never complete, analysis is never complete; the negation of that incomplete action is total action. When the mind has seen the futility, the meaninglessness of analysis, with all the problems which are involved, it will never touch it; the mind will never seek to understand `true' analysis. The mind that has looked into the process of analysis has become very sharp, alive, sensitive, because it has rejected that which we had considered to be the way and means of understanding. If you see very clearly for yourself - not forced or compelled by the argument and reasoning of another - the falseness or the truth of analysis, then your mind is free and has the energy to look in another direction. What is the `other direction'? It is the immediacy of perception that is total action. As we said, there is division between the analyser and the thing to be analysed, division between the observer and the thing observed: this is the root cause of conflict. When you observe, you always do so from a centre, from the background of experience and knowledge; the `me' as the Catholic, the Communist, the `specialist, and so on, is observing. So there is a division between `me' and the thing observed. This does not require a great deal of understanding, it is an obvious fact. When you look at a tree, at your husband, or wife, there is this division. It exists between yourself and the community. So there is this observer and the thing observed: in that division there is inevitably contradiction. That contradiction is the root of all strife. If that is the root cause of conflict, then the next question is: can you observe without the `me', the censor, without all the accumulated experiences of misery, conflict, brutality vanity pride, despair, which are the `me'? Can you observe without the past - the past memories, conclusions and hopes, without all the background? That background - as the `me', the `observer' - divides you from the observed. Have you ever observed without the background? Do it now, please. Play with it. Look at the outward things objectively; listen to the noise of the river, look at the lines of the mountains, the beauty, the clarity of it all. That is fairly easy to do without the `me', as the past, observing. But can you look at yourself inwardly, without the observer? Do, please, look at yourself, your conditioning, your education, your way of thinking, your conclusions, your prejudices, without any kind of condemnation or explanation or justification - just observe. When you so observe there is no `observer' and there. fore no conflict. That way of living is totally different from the other - it is not the opposite, not a reaction to the other, it is entirely different. And in it there is tremendous freedom and an abundance of energy and passion. It is total observation, complete action. When you have completely seen and understood, your action will always be clear. It is like looking at the total extent of the map, not the detail of where you want to go. So one finds out for oneself, as a human being, that it is possible to live without any kind of conflict. This implies an enormous revolution in oneself. That is the only revolution. Every form of physical, outward revolution - political, economic, social - always ends up in dictatorship, either of the bureaucrats or of the idealist or of some conqueror. Whereas this inward, complete and total revolution, which is the outcome of the understanding of all conflict, which is caused by the division between the observer and the observed, brings about a totally different kind of living. Now please let us go into it further, if you will, by asking questions about it. Questioner: How can one divorce oneself from problems, when one lives in a world full of problems? Krishnamurti: Are you different from the world? You are the world - are you not? Questioner: I am just a person who lives in the world. Krishnamurti: `Just a person who lives in the world' - dis- associated, unrelated to all the events that are taking place in the world? Questioner: No, I am part of that. But how can I divorce myself from it? Krishnamurti: You cannot possibly divorce yourself from the world: you are the world. If you live in Christendom, you are conditioned by the culture, by the religion, by the education, by the industrialization, by all the conflicts of its wars. You cannot possibly separate yourself from that world. The monks have tried to withdraw from the world, enclosing themselves in a monastery, but nevertheless, they are the result of the world in which they live; they want to escape from that culture by withdrawing from it, by devoting themselves to what they consider to be the truth, to the ideal of Jesus and so on. Questioner: How can I look into myself with all the worries that are on my mind, with making money, buying a house, and so on? Krishnamurti: How do you look at your job? How do you consider it? Questioner: I consider it as a means to survive in the world. Krishnamurti: `I must have a livelihood in order to survive., The whole structure of society, whether here, or in Russia, is based on survival at any price, doing something which society has set up. How can one survive safely, lastingly, when there is division between ourselves? When you are a European and I am an Asian, when there is division between ourselves, each one competing to be secure, to survive, therefore battling with each other individually and collectively, how can there be survival? A temporary survival? So the real question is, not that of survival, but whether it is possible to live in this world without division; when there is no division we shall survive, completely, without fear. There have been religious wars; there have been appalling wars between the Catholics and the Protestants - each saying,'We must survive'. They never said to themselves, `Look, how absurd this division is, one believing this and the other believing that; they never saw the absurdity of their conditioning. Can we put the whole energy of our thinking, our feeling, our passion, into finding out whether it is possible to live without this division, so that we shall live fully, in complete security? But you are not interested in all that. You just want to survive. You don't your survival is in spite of non-survival. Look Sirs, sovereign governments, each with their own army, have divided the world and are at each other,s throats, maintaining prestige and economic survival. Computers, without the politicians, in the hands of good men, can alter the whole structure of this world. But we are not interested in the unity of mankind. Yet, politically, that is the only problem. That can only be solved when there are no politicians, when there are no sovereign governments, when there are no separate religious sects - and you, who are listening to this, you are the people to do it. Questioner: Does it not need conscious analysis to arrive at that conclusion? Krishnamurti: Is it a conclusion, resulting from analysis? You just observe this fact. Look at how the world is divided by sovereign governments and religions; you can see it - is that analysis? Questioner: Don't you think that in order to change all that, we also need an outward revolution? Krishnamurti: An inward and an outward revolution at the same time. Not first one and then the other; it must be simultaneous. It must be an instant inward and outward revolution without emphasizing one or the other. How can that take place? Only when you see the complete truth, that the inward revolution is the outward revolution. When you see that, then it takes place - and not intellectually, verbally, ideally. But is there in you a complete inward revolution? If there is not and you want outer revolution, then you are going to bring chaos into the world. And there is chaos in the world. Questioner: You speak of Governments, and Churches, and Nationalism,they have what we consider to be the power. Krishnamurti: The bureaucrats want power and they have it. Don't you want power - over your wife or your husband? In your conclusions as to what you think is right, there is power; every human being wants some kind of power. So don't attack the power that is vested in others, but be free of the demand for power in yourself; then your action will be totally different. We want to attack the outward power, tear that power away from the hands of those who have it and give it to somebody else; we do not say to ourselves, `Let us be free of all dominance and possession'. If you actually applied your whole mind to be free of every kind of power - which means to function without status - then you would bring about quite a different society. Questioner: If you are hungry you can't even begin to deal with these questions. Krishnamurti: If you were really hungry you would not be here! We are not hungry and therefore we have time to listen, time to observe. You may say, we are a small group of people, a drop in the ocean, what can we do? Is that a valid question when we are confronted with this enormously complex problem of the world in which we live? As a human being, a simple individual, what can I do? If you were really confronted with the problem would you put that question? You would just be working - you understand Sir? When you say,'What can I do?', in that is already a note of despair. Questioner: A lot of people are hungry, they have to take immediate steps to survive. What does all this mean to them? Krishnamurti: Nothing. When I am hungry Sir, I want food -and all this has very little meaning. So what is your question? Questioner: We are a minority, a small group. The vast majority, in India, in Asia, in parts of Europe and America, are really hungry. How can what we are saying here, affect all these people? Krishnamurti: It depends on you, on what you do, even as the small minority. An enormous revolution in the world is created because a minority in themselves have changed. You are concerned with the misery of the world, the poverty, the degradation, the starvation, and you say,'What can I do?' Either you thoughtlessly join an outward revolution, try to break it all up and create a new kind of social structure - and in the process of that you will again establish the same misery or you will consider a total revolution, not partial, not merely physical, in which the inward structure of the psyche will act in an entirely different relationship with society. Questioner: You speak as though inward revolution happens suddenly - does it really take place that way? Krishnamurti: Is the inward revolution a matter of time, of gradual inward change? This is a very complex question. We are conditioned to accept that through gradual inward revolution there will be a change. Does it take place step by step, or does it happen instantly when you see the truth of the matter? When you see instant danger there is instant action is there not? Then your action is not gradual or analytical; when there is danger, there is immediate action. We are pointing out the dangers - the dangers of analysis, the danger of power, of postponement, of division. When you see the real danger of it not verbally, but actually, physically and psychologically - then there is instant action, the action of an instant revolution. To see these psychological dangers you need a sensitive, alert, watchful mind. If you say, `How am I to have a watchful, a sensitive mind?' you are again caught in gradualness. But when you see the necessity as when confronted by danger -and society is danger, all the things you are involved in are dangerous - then there is a total action. 21st July, 1970. IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART I CHAPTER 4 4TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 23RD JULY 1970 'FRAGMENTATION' Krishnamurti: When we face our innumerable problems we are inclined to try to solve each problem by itself. If it is a sexual problem, we treat it as though it were something totally unrelated to other problems. Equally with the problem of violence or starvation, which we try to solve politically, economically or socially. I wonder why we try to solve each problem by itself. The world is ridden with violence; the various powers that be try to solve each problem as though it were something apart from the rest of life. We do not consider these problems as a whole, seeing each problem related to other problems and not in isolation. Violence, as one can see in oneself, is part of our animal inheritance. A great part of us is animal, and without understanding the structure of ourselves as whole human beings, merely trying to solve violence by itself only leads to further violence. I think this must be clearly understood by each of us. There are thousands of problems which appear to be separate, which we never seem to see as interrelated, but no problem can be solved in isolation by itself. We have to deal with life as a continuous movement of problems and crises, great or small. Let us go into this very carefully, because unless it is clearly understood when we discuss the questions of fear, love, death, meditation and reality, we shall not understand how they are all interrelated. For the beauty of life, the ecstasy, the thing that is immeasurably vast, is not separate from our daily problems. If you say,`I am only concerned with meditation and with truth', you will never find it, but do understand how all problems are interrelated. For instance starvation, which cannot be stopped by itself, for it is a problem involving the national, political, economic, social, religious and psychological divisions between man and man. And we have the problem of personal relationship, the problem of suffering - not only physical but psychological suffering - problems of intense sorrow, not only personal sorrow but the sorrow of the world, its misery and confusion. If we try to find an answer to each particular problem, then we only bring about further division, further conflict. If you are at all serious and mature you must have asked why the mind tries to solve each problem as though it were unrelated to other problems. Why does the human mind, the brain, always divide as `me' and `mine','we' and 'they', religion and politics and so on? Why is there this constant division with all the effort to solve each problem by itself in isolation? To answer that question we have to enquire into the function of thought, its meaning, substance and structure; because it may be that thought itself divides, and that the very process of trying to find an answer through thinking, through reasoning, causes separation. People want a physical revolution in order to bring about a better order, forgetting all the implications of physical revolution, forgetting the whole psychological nature of man. So one has to ask this question. And what is the response? Is it the response of thought, or is it the response of understanding the totality of this vast structure of human life? We want to find out why this division exists. We went into it the other day, as the `observer' and the `observed'. Let us put that aside and approach it differently. Does thought create this division? If we find it does, it is because thought tries to find an answer to a particular problem separated from other problems. Do not, please, agree with me; it is not a question of agreement, it is a question of seeing for yourself the truth or the falseness of it. Under no circumstances accept what the speaker says at any time. There is no authority, neither you nor the speaker have authority; both of us are investigating, observing, looking, learning. If thought, by its very nature and structure, divides life into many problems, trying to find an answer through thought will only lead to an isolated answer, therefore we see that it breeds further confusion, further misery. One has to find out for oneself, freely, without any bias, without any conclusion, if thought operates this way. Most of us try to find an answer intellectually or emotionally, or say we do so intuitively. One must bc very careful of that word `intuition; in that word lies great deception, because one can have intuition dictated by one's own hopes, fears, bitterness, wishes and so on. We try to find an answer intellectually or emotionally, as though the intellect were something separate from emotion and emotion something separate from the physical response. Our education and culture together with all our philosophical concepts are based on this intellectual approach to life; our social structure and our morality are based on this division. So if thought divides, how does it divide? If you actually observe it in yourself you will see what an extraordinary thing you will discover. You will be a light to yourself, you will be an integrated human being, not looking to somebody else to tell you what to do, what to think and how to think. Thought can be extraordinarily reasonable; it must reason consecutively, logically, objectively, sanely; it must function perfectly, like a computer ticking over without any hindrance, without any conflict. Reasoning is necessary; sanity is part of the reasoning capacity. Can thought ever be new, fresh? Every human problem - not the technical and scientific problem - but every human problem is always new and thought tries to understand it, tries to alter it, tries to translate it, tries to do something about it. If we deeply feel love for each other - not verbally but really then all this division would come to an end. That can only take place when there is no conditioning, when there is no centre as the `me' and the 'you'. But thought, which is the activity of the brain, of the intellect, cannot possibly love. Thought has to be understood and we ask whether thought can see anything new; or is it that the `new' thought is always old, so that when it faces a problem of life which is always new - it cannot see the newness of it because it tries to translate it in terms of its own conditioning. Thought is necessary, yet we see that thought divides, as the `me' and `not me; it tries to solve the problem of violence in isolation, unrelated to all other problems of existence. Thought is always of the past: if we had not the brain, which like a tape-recorder has accumulated all kinds of information and experience, we would not be able to think or respond. Thought, meeting a new issue, must translate it in its own terms of the past and therefore creates division. Leave everything aside for the moment and observe your thinking: it is the response of the past. If you had no thought there would be no past, there would be a state of amnesia. Thought inevitably divides life into the past, present and future. As long as there is thought, as the past, life must be divided into time. If I want to understand the problem of violence completely, totally, so that the mind is altogether free from violence, I can only understand it by understanding the structure of thought. It is thought that breeds violence: `my' house, `my' wife, `my, country, `my' belief, which is utter nonsense. Who is the everlasting `me' opposed to the rest? What causes it? Is it education, society, the establishment, the church? They are all doing it and I am part of all that. Thought is matter; it is in the very structure, in the very cells of the brain so when the brain operates whether psychologically, socially, or religiously - it must invariably operate in terms of its past conditioning. We see that thought is essential and must function absolutely logically, ob- jectively, impersonally, and yet we see how thought divides. I am not pushing you to agree, but do you see that thought must inevitably divide? Look what has happened: thought sees that nationalism has led to all kinds of war and mischief, so it says, `Let us all be united, form a league of nations'. But thought is still operating, still maintaining the separation - you, as an Italian, keeping your Italian sovereignty and so on. There is talk about brotherhood yet the maintaining of separation, which is hypocrisy. It is characteristic of thought to play double games within itself. So thought is not the way out - which does not mean kill the mind. What then is it that sees every problem as it arises in its totality? A sexual problem is a total problem, related to culture, to character, to the various issues of life - not a fragment of the problem. What mind is it that sees each problem totally? Questioner: I have understood, but still there remains a question. Krishnamurti: When you have understood what thought does, at the highest and at the lowest level, yet when you say there is still another question, who is it that is asking that question? When the brain, the whole nervous system, the mind - which covers all of that - says, `I have understood the nature of thought', then the next step is: one sees whether this mind can look at the entirety of life with all its vastness and complexity, with its apparently unending sorrow. That is the only question and thought is not putting that question. The mind has observed the whole structure of thought and knows its relative value; can this mind look with an eye that is never spotted by the past? This is really a very serious question, not just an entertainment. One must give one's energy, passion, one's life to find out; because this is the only way out of this terrible brutality, sorrow, degradation, everything that is corrupt. Can the mind, the brain which is itself corrupt through time be quiet, so that it can see life as a whole and therefore without problems? A problem only arises when life is seen fragmentarily. Do see the beauty of that. When you see life as a whole then there is no problem whatsoever. It is only a mind and a heart that is broken up in fragments that creates problems. The centre of the fragment is the `me'. The `me' is brought about through thought; it has no reality by itself. The`me' - `my, house, `my' disappointment,`my' desire to become somebody - that `me' is the product of thought which divides. Can the mind look without the `me'? Not being able to do this, that very `me' says: `I will dedicate myself to Jesus' - `to Buddha, to this, to that' -you understand? - `I will become a Communist who will be concerned with the whole of the world'. The 'me' identifying itself with what it considers to be greater, is still the 'me'. So the question arises: can the mind, the brain, the heart, the whole being, observe without the `me'. The `me' is of the past; there is no `me' in the present. The present is not of time. Can the mind be free of the `me' to look at the whole vastness of life? It can, completely, utterly, when you have fundamentally, with all your being, understood the nature of thinking. If you have not given your attention, everything you have, to find out what thinking is, you will never be able to find out if it is possible to observe without the `me'. If you cannot observe without the `me' the problems will go on - one problem opposing another. And all these problems will come to an end, I assure you, when man lives a different life altogether, when the mind can look at the world as a total movement. Questioner: At the beginning of the talk you were asking what made us try to solve problems separately. Is not urgency one of the reasons which cause us to try to solve problems separately? Krishnamurti: If you see danger you act. In that action there is no question of urgency, no impatience - you act. The ur- gency and the demand for immediate action, takes place only when see the danger as a danger to the `me' as thought. When you see the total danger of thought dividing the world, that seeing is the urgency and the action. When you really see starvation, such as there is in India, and see how the starvation has been brought about, the callousness of people, of governments, the inefficiency of the politicians, what do you do? Tackle one area of starvation by itself? Or do you say `This whole thing is a psychological issue, it is centred in the `me' which is brought about by thought'? If that starvation in all its forms is completely, totally, understood - not only physical starvation, but the human starvation of having no love - you will find the right action. The very change is urgency; it is not that change will come about through urgency. Questioner: You seem to say that thought has to function, at the same time you say it cannot. Krishnamurti: Thought must function logically, non-personally and yet thought must be quiet. How can this take place? Do you actually see, or understand, the nature of thinking - not according; to me or to a specialist - do you yourself see how thought works? Look Sir: when you are asked a question on a matter which is utterly familiar to you, your response is immediate, is it not? When you are asked a little more complicated question you take more time. If the brain is asked a question to which it cannot find an answer having searched all its memories ind books it says, `I do not know'. Has it used thought to say `I do not know'? When you say, `I do not know', your mind is not seeking, not waiting, not expecting; the mind which says `I do not know' is entirely different from the mind which operates with knowledge. So can the mind remain completely free of knowledge and yet operate functionally in the field of the known? The two are not divided. When you want to discover something new you have to put the past aside. The new can take place only when there is freedom from the known. That freedom can be constant; which means that the mind lives in complete silence, in nothingness. This nothingness and silence is vast, and out of that, knowledge -technical knowledge - can be used to work things out. Also, out of that silence can be observed the whole of life without the `me'. Questioner: You were saying in the beginning of the talk, that to want to change things from the outside, would lead to the dictatorship of a group or person. Don't you think that we are now living under the dictatorship of money and industry? Krishnamurti: Of course. Where there is authority there is dictatorship. To bring about a social, a religious or a human change, there must be first understanding of the whole structure of thought as the `me', which is seeking power - whether it is I, or the other who is seeking power. Can the mind live without seeking power? Answer this, Sir. Questioner: Is it not natural to seek power? Krishnamurti: Of course it is so-called natural. So is the dog seeking power over other dogs. But we are supposed to be cultured, educated, intelligent. Apparently after millennia we have not learnt to live without power. Questioner: I wonder whether the mind can ever put a question about itself to which it does not already know the answer. Krishnamurti: When the mind, as the `me', as the separate thought, puts to itself a question about itself, it has already found the answer, because it is talking about itself; it is ringing the same bell with a different hammer, but it is the same bell. Questioner: Can we act without a `me'? - do we not then live in contemplation? Krishnamurti: Can you live in isolation, in contemplation? Who is going to give you your food, your clothes? The monks and the various tricksters of religions have done all this. There are people in India who say, `I live in contemplation, feed me, clothe me, bathe me, I am so disconnected' it is all so utterly immature. You cannot possibly isolate yourself, for you are always in relationship with the past or with the things around you. To live in isolation, calling it contemplation, is mere escape, self-deception. 23rd July, 1970 IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART I CHAPTER 5 5TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 26TH JULY 1970 'FEAR AND PLEASURE' The last time we met we were talking about the structure of thought and its activities, about how thought divides and thereby brings about great conflict in human relationship. I think this morning we should consider - not intellectually or verbally - the nature of pleasure and fear, and whether it is at all possible to be totally free of sorrow. Enquiring into that, we have to examine very carefully the whole question of time. It is one of the most difficult things to convey something, which not only demands the accurate use of words, but also an accuracy of perception that lies beyond those words, and a feeling, a sense, of intimate contact with a reality. In listening to the speaker, if you merely interpret the words according to your personal like and dislike, without being aware of your own tendencies of interpretation, then the word becomes a prison in which most of us, unfortunately, are caught. But if one is aware of the meaning of the word and of what lies behind the word, then communication becomes possible. Communication implies not only a verbal comprehension, but also going together, examining together, sharing together, creating together. This is very important, especially when we are talking about sorrow, time, and the nature of pleasure and fear. These are very complex questions. Every human problem is quite complex and needs a certain austerity, a simplicity, for its perception. By the word `austere' is not meant harshness, which is the usual meaning given to that word, not the sense of dryness of discipline and control. We mean the austere simplicity that there must be in the examination and in the understanding of what we are going to talk about. The mind must be really sensitive. Sensitivity implies intelligence which is beyond the interpretation of the intellect, beyond emotionalism and enthusiasm. In examining, in listening, in looking, in learning about time, pleasure, fear and sorrow, one has to have this quality of sensitivity which gives the immediate perception of something as true or false. That is not possible if the intellect, in its activity of thought, divides, interprets. I hope you understood, the last time we talked here, how thought, by its nature, divides human relationship - though thought is necessary, as reason, as sane, clear, objective thinking. For most of us, fear is a constant companion; whether one is aware of it or not, it is there, hidden in some dark recess of one's mind; and we are asking if it is at all possible for the mind to be completely and totally free of this burden. The speaker may suggest this question, but it is you who must answer it, it is your problem; therefore you have to be sufficiently persistent, and sufficiently subtle, to see what it is and to pursue it to the very end, so that the mind - when you leave this tent this morning is literally free of fear. Perhaps that is asking a great deal, but it can be done. For a mind that has been conditioned in the culture of fear, with all the neurotic, complicated consequences of its actions, to even put the question of the possibility of being completely, absolutely, free of fear, is in itself a problem. A problem exists only when it is not solvable, when you cannot go through with it and it keeps on recurring. You think you have solved this question of fear, but it keeps on repeating in different forms. If you say, `It is impossible" you have already blocked yourself. One has to be very careful not to block oneself, not to prevent oneself from going into this question of fear and its complete resolution. Any sense of fear generates all kinds of mischievous activity, not only psychologically and neurotically, but outwardly. The whole problem of security comes into being, both physical and psychological security. Do follow all this, because we are going to go into something which requires attention; not your agreement, not your interpretation, but your perception, your seeing the thing as it is. You do not need an interpreter; examine for yourself, find out for yourself. Most of us have had physical fears, either fear of an illness, with all its anxiety and the boredom of pain, or when facing physical danger. When you face physical danger of any kind, is there fear? Walking in wild parts, of India or Africa or America, one may meet a bear, a snake or a tiger; then there is immediate action, not conscious deliberate action, but instinctive action. Now is that action from fear, or is that intelligence? We are trying to find an action that is intelligent, as compared with action which is born of fear. When you meet a snake, there is only instant physical response, you run away, you sweat, you try to do something about it; that is a conditioned response, because you have been told for generations to be careful of snakes, of wild animals. The brain, the nervous system, responds instinctively to protect itself; that is a natural intelligent response. To protect the physical organism is necessary; the snake is a danger and to respond to it in the sense of protection is an intelligent action. Now look at physical pain. You have had pain previously and you are afraid that it might return. The fear is caused by thought, by thinking about something which happened a year ago, or yesterday, and which might happen again tomorrow. Go into it, watch your own responses and what your own activities have been. There, fear is the product of conscious or unconscious thought -thought as time, not chronological time, but thought as time thinking about what has happened and generating the fear of it happening again in the future. So thought is time. And thought produces fear: `I might die tomorrow', `I might be exposed about something I have done in the past; the thinking about that breeds fear. You have done something which you do not want exposed, or you want to do something which you do not want exposed, or you want to do something in the future which you will not be able to do; all that is the product of thought as time. Can this movement of thought, which breeds fear in time, and as time, come to an end? Have you understood my question? There is the intelligent action of protection, of self-preservation, the physical necessity to survive, which is a natural, intelligent, response. There is the other: thought, thinking about something and projecting the possibility of it occurring, or not occurring in the future, and so breeding fear. So, the question is: can this movement of thought, so immediate, so insistent, so persuasive, naturally come to an end? Not through opposition; if you oppose it, it is still the product of thought. If you exercise your will to stop it, it is still the product of thought. If you say, `I will not allow myself to think that way', who is the entity who says, `I will not'? It is still thought hoping by stopping that movement, to achieve something else, which is still the product of thought. Thought may project it and may not be able to achieve it; therefore again there is fear involved. So we are asking whether the whole activity of thought, which has produced psychological fear not just one fear, but many, many fears can it come to an end naturally, easily, without effort. If you make any effort it is still thought and therefore productive of fear and it is still of time. One has to find a way in which thought will naturally come to an end and so no longer create fear. Are we communicating with each other, not merely verbally? Perhaps you have seen the idea clearly, but we are not concerned with verbally understanding the idea, but with your involvement in fear in your daily life. We are not concerned with the description of your life; that which is described is not the actual, the explanation is not that which is explained, the word is not the thing. Your life, your fear, is not exposed by the speaker's words; but in listening, it is you who have to expose that which is fear, and see how thought creates that fear. We are asking whether the activity of thought -which engenders, breeds, sustains and nourishes fear - can come to an end naturally without any resistance. Before we can discover the true answer, we have also to enquire into the pursuit of pleasure; because again it is thought that sustains pleasure. You may have had a lovely moment, as when you looked at the marvellous sunset yesterday, you took a great delight in it; then thought steps in and says, `how beautiful it was, I would like to have that experience repeated again tomorrow'. It is the same whether it is a sunset, or whether somebody flatters you, whether it is a sexual experience, or if you have achieved something which you must maintain, which gives you pleasure. There is a pleasure which you derive through achievement, through being a success, the pleasure in the anticipation of what you are going to do tomorrow, from the repetition of something which you have experienced, sexually, or artistically. Social morality is based on pleasure and therefore it is no morality at all: social morality is immorality. One finds that out; but it does not mean that by revolting against the social morality, one is going to become moral - doing what one likes, sleeping with whom one likes. If one is going to understand and be free of fear, one should also understand pleasure; they are interrelated. Which does not mean that one must give up pleasure. All the organized religions - and they have been the bane of civilisation - have said, one must have no pleasure, no sex, one must approach God as a tortured human being. They have said one must not look at a woman, or anything which might remind one of sex and so on. Saying that one must not have pleasure, means one must not have desire. So one picks up the Bible when desire arises and loses it in that; or one repeats some words from the Gita - which is nonsense. Fear and pleasure are the two sides of a coin: you cannot be free of one without being free of the other also. You want to have pleasure all your life and yet be free of fear - that is all you are concerned about. But you do not see that you feel frustrated if tomorrow's pleasure is denied, you feel unfulfilled, angry, anxious and guilty, and all the psychological miseries arise. So you have to look at fear and pleasure together. In understanding pleasure you also have to understand what joy is. Is pleasure joy? Is not the delight of existence something totally different from pleasure? We were asking whether thought, with all its activities which breed and sustain fear and pleasure, can come naturally to an end, without effort. There are the unconscious fears which play a much greater part in one's life than the fears of which one is aware. How are you going to uncover these unconscious fears expose them to the light? By analysis? If you say, `I will analyse my fears,' then who is the analyser? Is he not a part, a fragment of fear? His analysis of his own fears will therefore have no value at all. Or if you go to an analyst he, like you, is also conditioned, by Freud, Jung or Adler: he analyses according to his conditioning, therefore he does not help you to be free of fear. As we said previously, analysis is a negation of action. Knowing analysis has no value, how are you going to uncover the unconscious fear? If you say, `I will examine my dreams', again the same problem arises. Who is the entity that is going to examine the dreams - one fragment of the many fragments? So you must ask a quite different question which is: `why do I dream at all'? Dreams are merely the continuation of the daily activity; there is always action going on, of some kind or another. How can that activity be understood and come to an end? That is, can the mind during the daytime be so alert as to watch all its motivations, all its urges, all its complexities, its prides, its ambitions and frustrations, its demand to fulfil, to be somebody, and so on? Can all that movement of thought during the day be watched without `the observer'? Because if there is `the observer' who is watching, that observer is part of thought, which has separated itself from the rest and assumed the authority to observe. If you observe during the day the whole movement of your activities, your thoughts and feelings without interpretation, then you will see that dreams have very little meaning. Then you will hardly ever dream. If you are awake during the daytime, and not half asleep, if you are not caught in your beliefs, your prejudices, your absurd little vanities, in your petty knowledge, you will see that there will not only be the end to dreams, but also that thought itself begins to subside. Thought is always seeking, or sustaining, or avoiding fear; it is also producing pleasure, continuing to nourish that which has been pleasurable. Being caught in fear and pleasure - which produce sorrow - how can it all come to an end? How can the machinery of thought - which produces all this movement of pleasure and fear -naturally come to an end? That is the problem. What will one do with it? Give it up, or go on as one has been, living in pleasure and pain - which is the very nature of the bourgeois mind - though you may have long hair, sleep on the bridge, revolt, throw bombs, cry `peace' yet fight your favourite war? Do what you will, it is of the very nature of the bourgeois mind to be caught in fear and pleasure. Face it! How will you resolve this problem? You must resolve it if you want a totally different kind of life, a different kind of society, a different kind of morality; you must solve this problem. If you are young, you may say, `It is not important', `I will have "instant" pleasure, "instant" fear.' But all the same, it builds up and then one fine day you find yourself caught. It is your problem, and no authority can solve it for you. You have had authorities - -the priests and the psychological authorities and they have not been able to solve it; they have given you escapes, like drugs, beliefs, rituals and all the circus that goes on in the name of religion; they have offered all this to you but the basic question of fear and pleasure they have never solved. You have got to solve it. How? What are you going to do? put your mind to this - knowing that nobody is going to solve it for you. In the realization that nobody is going to solve it for you, you are already beginning to be free of the bourgeois world. Unless you solve this problem of fear and pleasure, sorrow is inevitable - not only your personal sorrows, but the sorrow of the world. Do you know what the sorrow of the world is? Do you know what is happening in the world? Not outwardly - all the wars, all the mischief of the politicians and so on - but inwardly, the enormous loneliness of man, the deep frustrations, the utter lack of love in this vast, uncompassionate, callous world. Unless you resolve this problem, sorrow is inevitable. And time will not solve it. You cannot say, ` I will think about it tomorrow" `I will have my "instant" pleasure and all the fear that comes out of it,' `I will put up with it.' Who is going to answer you? After raising this question, seeing all the complexity of it, seeing that nobody on earth, or any divine force such as we have relied on before, is going to resolve this essential problem, how do you respond to it? What do you say, Sirs? You have no answer, have you? If you are really honest, not playing the hypocrite, or trying to avoid it, not trying to side-step when you are faced with this problem, which is the crucial problem, you have no answer. So, how are you going to find out how it can naturally come to an end? - without method, for obviously method implies time. If somebody gives you a method, a system, and you practice it, it will make your mind more and more mechanical, bring more and more conflict between `what is' and that system. The system promises something, but the fact is you have fear; by practising the system you are moving further and further away from `what is; and so conflict increases, consciously or unconsciously. So what will you do? Now, what has happened to the mind, to the brain, that has listened to all this - not merely heard a few words, but actually listened, shared, communicated, learnt? What has happened to your mind that has listened with tremendous attention to the complexity of the problem, with awareness of its own fears, and has seen how thought breeds and sustains fear as well as pleasure? What has happened to the quality of the mind that has so listened? Is the quality of this mind entirely different from the moment when we began this morning, or is it the same repetitive mind, caught in pleasure and fear? Is there a new quality? Is it a mind that is not saying, `One must put an end to fear or pleasure', but a mind that is learning by observing? Has your mind not become a little more sensitive? Before, you were just carrying this burden of fear and pleasure. By learning about the weight of the burden, have you not slightly put it aside? Have you not dropped it - and therefore you are now walking very carefully? If you have really followed this merely by observing - not through determination or effort - your mind has become sensitive and therefore very intelligent. Next time fear arises - as it will intelligence will respond to it, but not in terms of pleasure, of suppressing or escaping. This intelligence and sensitivity has come about by looking at this burden and putting it aside. It has become astonishingly alive; it can ask quite a different question, which is: if pleasure is not the way of life, as it has been for most of us, then is life barren? Does it mean I can never enjoy life? Is there not a difference between pleasure and joy? You lived before in terms of pleasure and fear - the `instant' pleasure of sex, drink, killing an animal and stuffing yourself with its meat, and all the rest of that `pleasure'. That has been your way of life and you suddenly discover, by examining, that pleasure is not the way at all, because it leads to fear, to frustration, to misery, to sorrow, to sociological and personal disturbances and so on. So you ask quite a different question now: `Is there joy which is untouched by thought and pleasure?' For if it is touched by thought, it again becomes pleasure and therefore fear. So having understood pleasure and fear, is there a way of daily living which is joyous -not the carrying over of pleasure and fear from day to day? To look at those mountains, the beauty of the valley, the light on the hills, the trees and the flowing river and to enjoy them! But not when you say, `How marvellous it is,' not when thought is using it as a means of pleasure. You can look at that mountain, the movement of a tree, or the face of a woman, or a man, and take tremendous delight in it. When you have done that, it is finished. But if you carry it over in thought, then pain and pleasure begin. Can you so look and finish with it? Be very careful, watchful, of this. Can you look at that mountain and the delight in it is enough? Not carry it over in thought to tomorrow; which means you see the danger of that. You may have some great pleasure and say, `It is over; yet, is it over? Is not the mind, consciously or unconsciously, thinking about it, wishing it to happen again? So one sees that thought has nothing whatsoever to do with joy. This is a tremendous discovery for yourself not something you have been told, not something to write about, interpreting it for somebody to read. There is a vast difference between delight, joy and bliss, on the one hand, and pleasure on the other. I do not know if you have noticed, that the early religious pictures in the Western world avoid any kind of sensuous pleasure; there is no scenery at all, only the human body being tortured, or the Virgin Mary and so on. There is no landscape because that was pleasure, and might distract you from being concerned with the figure and its symbolism. Only much later was there the introduction of scenery, which in China and India was always part of life. You can observe all this and find the beauty of living in which there is no effort, of living with great ecstasy, in which pleasure and thought and fear do not enter at all. Questioner: When I dream, I sometimes see something happening in the future, which is accurate. I dreamt that I saw you come into this meeting and put the brown coat there and adjust the microphone; this was definitely a dream of what was going to happen the next morning. Krishnamurti: How do you account for that? First of all: why do you give such tremendous importance to what is going to happen in the future? Why? The astrologers, the fortune tellers, the palmists, what marvellous things they say are going to happen to you! Why are you so concerned? Why are you not concerned with the actual daily living, which contains all the treasures - you do not see it! You know, when the mind, because you have been listening here, has become somewhat sensitive - I do not say completely sensitive, but somewhat sensitive - naturally it observes more, whether of tomorrow or today. It is like looking down from an aeroplane and seeing two boats approaching from opposite directions on the same river; one sees that they are going to meet at a certain point - and that is the future. The mind, being somewhat more sensitive, becomes aware of certain things which may happen tomorrow, as well as of those which are happening now. Most of us give so much more importance to what is going to happen tomorrow and so little to what is actually happening now. And you will find, if you go into this very deeply, that nothing `happens' at all: any `happening' is part of life. Why do you want `experience' at all? A mind that is sensitive, alive, full of clarity, does it need to have `experience' at all? Please answer that question yourself. Questioner: You tell us to observe our actions in daily life but what is the entity that decides what to observe and when? Who decides if one should observe? Krishnamurti: Do you decide to observe? Or do you merely observe? Do you decide and say, `I am going to observe and learn'? For then there is the question: `Who is deciding?' Is it will that says, `I must'? And when it fails, it chastises itself further and says, `I must, must, must; in that there is conflict; therefore the state of mind that has decided to observe is not observation at all. You are walking down the road, somebody passes you by, you observe and you may say to yourself, `How ugly he is; how he smells; I wish he would not do this or that'. You are aware of your responses to that passer-by, you are aware that you are judging, condemning or justifying; you are observing. You do not say, `I must not judge, I must not justify'. In being aware of your responses, there is no decision at all. You see somebody who insulted you yesterday. Immediately all your hackles are up, you become nervous or anxious, you begin to dislike; be aware of your dislike, be aware of all that, do not `decide' to be aware. Observe, and in that observation there is neither the `observer' nor the `observed' - there is only observation taking place. The `observer' exists only when you accumulate in the observation; when you say, `He is my friend because he has flattered me', or, `He is not my friend, because he has said something ugly about me, or something true which I do not like,. That is accumulation through observation and that accumulation is the observer. When you observe without accumulation, then there is no judgement. You can do this all the time; in that observation naturally certain definite decisions are made, but the decisions are natural results, not decisions made by the observer who has accumulated. Questioner: You said in the beginning, that the instinctive response of self-protection against a wild animal is intelligence and not fear, and that the thought which breeds fear is entirely different. Krishnamurti: Are they not different? Do you not observe the difference between thought which breeds and sustains fear, and intelligence which says `Be careful'? Thought has created nationalism, racial prejudice, the acceptance of certain moral values; but thought does not see the danger of that. If it saw the danger, then there would be the response not of fear, but of intelligence, which would be the same as meeting the snake. In meeting the snake there is a natural self-protecting response; when meeting nationalism, which is the product of thought, which divides people and is one of the causes of war, thought does not see the danger. 26th July, 1970. IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART I CHAPTER 6 6TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 28TH JULY 1970 'THE MECHANICAL ACTIVITY OF THOUGHT' We were talking of the importance of thought and yet of its unimportance; of how thought has a great deal of action and within its own field only limited freedom. We spoke of a state of mind that is totally unconditioned. This morning we can go into this question of conditioning; not only the superficial, cultural conditioning, but also why conditioning takes place. We can enquire about the quality of mind that is not conditioned, that has gone beyond conditioning. We have to go into this matter very deeply to find out what love is. And in understanding what love is, perhaps we shall be able to comprehend the full significance of death. So, first we will find out whether the mind can be totally and completely free of conditioning. It is fairly obvious how we are superficially conditioned by the culture, the society, the propaganda around us, and also by nationality, by a particular religion, by education and through environmental influences. I think it is fairly clear and fairly simple to see how most human beings, of whatever country or race, are conditioned by the particular culture or religion to which they belong. They are moulded, held within a particular pattern. One can fairly easily put aside such conditioning. Then there is the deeper conditioning, such as an aggressive attitude towards life. Aggression implies a sense of dominance, of seeking power, possessions, prestige. One has to go very deeply to be completely free of that, because it is very subtle, taking many different forms. One may think one is not aggres- sive, but when one has an ideal, an opinion, an evaluation, verbal and non-verbal, there is a sense of assertiveness which gradually becomes aggressive and violent. One can see this in oneself. Behind the very word `aggression' though you may say it very gently - there is a kick, there is a furtive, dominant, compulsive action which becomes cruel and violent. That aggressive conditioning one has to discover, whether one has derived it from the animal, or has become aggressive in one's own self-assertive pleasure. Is one aggressive in the total sense of that word, which means `stepping forward'? Another form of conditioning is that of comparison. One compares oneself with what one thinks is noble or heroic, with whit one would like to be, as opposed to what one is. The comparative pursuit is a form of conditioning; again, it is extraordinarily subtle. I compare myself with somebody who is a little more intelligent or more beautiful physically. Secretly or openly, there is a constant soliloquy, talking to oneself in terms of comparison. Observe this in yourself. Where there is comparison there is a form of aggression in the feeling of achievement; or, when you cannot achieve, there is a sense of frustration and a feeling of inferiority. From childhood we are educated to compare. Our educational system is based on comparison, on the giving of marks, on examinations. In comparing yourself with somebody who is cleverer, there is envy, jealousy, and all the conflict that ensues. Comparison implies measurement; I am measuring myself against something I think is better or nobler. One asks: `Can the mind ever be free of this social and cultural conditioning, of the mind measuring and comparing, the conditioning of fear and pleasure, of reward and punishment?' The whole of our moral and religious structures are based on this. Why is it that we are conditioned? We see the outward influences which are conditioning us and the inward voluntary demand to be conditioned. Why do we accept this conditioning? Why has the mind allowed itself to be conditioned? What is the factor behind it all? Why do I, born in a certain country and culture, calling myself a Hindu, with all the superstition and tradition imposed by the family, the society, accept such conditioning? What is the urge that lies behind this? What is the factor that is constantly demanding and acquiescing, yielding to or resisting this conditioning? One can see that one wants to be safe and secure in the community which is following a certain pattern. If one does not follow that pattern one may lose one's job, be without money, not be regarded as a respectable human being. There is a revolt against that, and that revolt forms its own conditioning - which all the young people are going through now. One must find out what is the urge that makes one conform. Unless one discovers it for oneself, one will always be conditioned one way or the other, positively or negatively. From the moment one is born until one dies, the process goes on. One may revolt against it, one may try to escape into another conditioning, withdrawing into a monastery as do the people who devote their life to contemplation, to philosophy, but it is the same movement right through. What is the machinery that is in constant movement, adjusting itself to various forms of conditioning? Thought is everlastingly conditioned, because it is the response of the past as memory. Thought is always mechanical; it falls very easily into a pattern, into a groove, and then you consider you are being tremendously active, whether you are confined to the Communist groove, the Catholic groove, or whatever it is. It is the easiest, the most mechanical thing to do - and we think we are living! So although thought has a certain limited freedom in its field, everything it does is mechanical. After all, to go to the moon is quite mechanical, it is the outcome of the accumulated knowledge of centuries. The pursuit of technical thinking takes you to the moon, or under the sea and so on. The mind wants to follow a groove, wants to be mechanical and that way there is safety, security, there is no disturbance. To live mechanically is not only encouraged by society, but also by each one of us, because that is the easiest way to live. So thought being a mechanical, repetitive pursuit, accepts any form of conditioning which enables it to continue in its mechanical activity. A philosopher invents a new theory, an economist a new system, and we accept that groove and follow it. Our society, our culture, our religious prompting, everything seems to function mechanically; yet in that there is a certain sense of stimulation. When you go to Mass, there is a certain excitement, emotion, and that becomes the pattern. I do not know if this is something you have ever tried - do it once and you will see the fun of it: take a piece of stick or a stone, any odd piece with a little shape to it, put it on the mantlepiece and put a flower beside it every morning. Within a month you will see that it has become a habit, as a religious symbol, and you have begun to identify yourself with that. Thought is the response of the past. If one has been taught engineering as a profession, one adds to and adjusts that knowledge, but one is set in that line; similarly if you are a doctor and so on. Thought is somewhat free within a certain field, but it is still within the limits of mechanical functioning. Do you see that, not only verbally and intellectually, but actually? Are you as aware of it as when you hear that train? Sound of passing train.) Can the mind free itself from the habits it has cultivated, from certain opinions, judgments, attitudes and values? Which means, can the mind be free of thought? If this is not completely understood, then the next thing which I am going to talk, about will have no meaning. The understanding of this leads to the next question, which is inevitable, if you go into it. If thought is mechanical, if it inevitably conforms to the conditioning of the mind, then what is love? Is love the product of thought? Is love nurtured, cultivated by thought, dependent on thought? What is love? - bearing in mind that the description is not the described, the word is not the thing. Can the mind be free of the mechanical activity of thought so as to find out what love is? For most of us love is associated, or equated, with sex. That is a form of conditioning. When you are enquiring into this really very complex, intricate and extraordinarily beautiful thing, you must find out how that word `sex' has conditioned the mind. We say we will not kill - we will not go to Vietnam or some other place to kill, but we do not mind killing animals. If you yourself had to kill the animal which you eat, and saw the ugliness of it, would you eat that animal? I doubt it very much. But you do not mind the butcher killing it for you to eat; in that there is a great deal of hypocrisy. So one asks not only what love is, but also what is compassion. In the Christian culture the animals have no soul, they are put on earth by God for you to eat; that is the Christian conditioning. In certain parts of India to kill is wrong, whether to kill a fly, an animal or anything else. So they do not kill the least thing, they go to the extreme of exaggeration; again, that is their conditioning. And there are people who support antivivisection, yet wear marvellous furs: such hypocrisy goes on! What does it mean to be compassionate? Not merely verbally, but actually to be compassionate? Is compassion a matter of habit, of thought, a matter of the mechanical repetition of being kind, polite, gentle, tender? Can the mind which is caught in the activity of thought with its conditioning, its mechanical repetition, be compassionate at all? It can talk about it, it can encourage social reform, be kind to the poor heathen and so on; but is that compassion? When thought dictates, when thought is active, can there be any place for compassion? Compassion being action without motive, without self-interest, without any sense of fear, without any sense of pleasure. So one asks: `Is love pleasure?, - sex is pleasure, of course. We take pleasure in violence, we take pleasure in achievement, in assertion, in aggression. Also we take pleasure in being somebody. And all that is the product of thought, the product of measurement - `I was that' and `I will be this'. Is pleasure, in the sense in which we have been speaking, is that love? How can a mind which is caught in habit, in measurement and comparison, know what love is? One may say, love is this or that but that is all the product of thought. From that observation arises the question: what is death? Whit does it mean, to die? It must be the most marvellous experience! It must imply something that has completely come to an end. The movement that has been set going the strife, struggle, turmoil, all the despairs and frustrations - all that suddenly comes to in end. The man who is trying to become famous, who is assertive, violent, brutal - that activity is cut off! Have you noticed how anything that continues psychologically becomes mechanical, repetitive. It is only when psychological continuance comes to an end, that there is something totally new - you can see this in yourself. Creation is not the continuation of what is, or what was, but the ending of that. So psychologically can one die? You understand my question? Can one die to the known, die to what has been - not in order to become something else - which is the ending of and the freedom from the known? After all, that is what death is. The physical organism will die, naturally; it has been abused, kicked around, frustrated; it has eaten and drunk all kinds of things. You know how you live and you go on that way till it dies. The body, through accident, through old age, through some disease, through the strain of constant emotional battle within and without, becomes twisted, ugly, and it dies. There is self pity in this dying and also pity for oneself when somebody else dies. When somebody dies whom we consider we love, is there not in that sorrow a great deal of care? For you are left alone, you are exposed to yourself, you have nobody to rely on, nobody to give you comfort. Our sorrow is tinged with this self-pity and fear and naturally in this uncertainty one accepts every form of belief. The whole of Asia believes in reincarnation, in being reborn in another life. When you enquire what it is that is going to be born in the next life, you come up against difficulties. What is it? Yourself? What are you? a lot of words, a lot of opinions, attachments to your possessions, to your furniture, to your conditioning. Is all that, which you call the soul, going to be reborn in the next life? Reincarnation implies that what you are today determines what you will be again in the next life. Therefore behave! - not tomorrow, but today, because what you do today you are going to pay for in the next life. people who believe in reincarnation do not bother about behavior;t all; it is just a matter of belief, which has no value. Incarnate today, afresh not in the next life! Change it now completely, change with great passion, let the mind strip itself of everything, of every conditioning, every knowledge, of everything it thinks is `right' - empty it. Then you will know what dying means; and then you will know what love is. For love is not something of the past, of thought, of culture; it is not pleasure. A mind that has understood the whole movement of thought becomes extraordinarily quiet, absolutely silent. That silence is the beginning of the new. Questioner: Sir, can love have an object? Krishnamurti: Who is asking the question? Thought or love? Love is not asking this question. When you love, you love! - you do not ask, `Is there an object, or no object, is it personal or impersonal?'. Oh, you do not know what is means, the beauty of it! Our love, as it is, is such a trial; our relationship with each other is such a conflict. Our love is based on your image of me and my image of you. Look at it very carefully, at the relationship between these two isolated images which say to each other, `We love'. The images are the product of the past, of memories, memories of what you said to me and I said to you; and this relationship between the two images must inevitably be an isolating process. That is what we call relationship. To be related means to be in contact not merely physically which is not possible when there is an image, when there is the self-isolating process of thought, which is the `me', and the`you'. We say: `Has love an object? Or is love divine or profane?, - you follow? Sir, when you love, you are neither giving nor receiving. Questioner: When one goes behind these words, `beauty' and `love', don't all these divisions disappear? Krishnamurti: Have you ever sat, not day-dreaming, but very quietly, completely aware? In that awareness there is no verbalization, no choice, no restraint or direction. When the body is completely relaxed, have you noticed the silence that comes into being? That requires a great de;l of investigation, because our minds are never still but endlessly chattering and therefore divided. We divide living into fragments. Can all this fragmentation come to an end? Knowing that thought is responsible for this fragmentation, we ask: `Can thought be completely silent yet respond when it is necessary, without violence, objectively, sanely, rationally - still let this silence pervade?' That is the only way: to find for oneself this quality of the mind that has no fragments, that is not broken up as the `you' and the `me'. Questioner: Sir, is the killing of a fly on the same level as the killing of an animal or a human being? Krishnamurti: Where will you begin the comprehension of killing? You say you will not go to war, kill a human being ( I do not know if you say it or not, it is up to you), but you do not mind taking sides your group and my group. You do not mind believing in something and standing by what you believe. You do not mind killing people with a word, with a gesture - and you will be careful not to kill a fly! Some years ago the speaker was in a country where Buddhism is the accepted religion. If you are a practising Buddhist, it is one of the accepted principles not to kill. Two people came to see the speaker and said, `We have a problem: we do not want to kill. We are ardent Buddhists, we have been brought up not to kill; but we like eggs and we do not want to kill a fertile egg - so what are we to do?' You understand? Unless inwardly you are very clear as to what killing implies - not only with a gun, but by a word, by gesture, by division, by saying `my country', `your country', `my God', `your God" there will inevitably be killing in some form. Do not make a lot of ado about killing a fly and then go and `kill' your neighbour with a word. The speaker has never eaten meat in his life, does not know what it tastes like even, and yet he puts on leather shoes. One his to live,and although in your heart you do not want to kill anything, hurt anybody - and you really mean it - yet you have to `kill' the vegetable which you eat; for if you do not eat anything you come very quickly to an end. One has to find out for oneself very clearly without any choice, without any prejudice, one has to be highly sensitive and intelligent and then let that intelligence act - not say, `I will not kill flies', yet say something brutal about one's husband. 28th July, 1970. IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART I CHAPTER 7 7TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 30TH JULY 1970 'RELIGION' I think this morning we should talk over together the problem of religion. Many people do not like that word, they think it is rather old fashioned and has very little meaning in this modern world. And there are those who are religious at the weekend; they turn out well dressed on Sunday morning and do all the mischief they can during the week. But when we use the word `religion' we are not in any way concerned with organized religions, churches, dogmas, rituals, or the authority of saviours, representatives of God and all the rest. We are talking about something quite different. Human beings, in the past, as in the present, have always asked if there is something transcendental, much more real than the everyday existence with all its tiresome routine, its violence, despairs and sorrow. But not being able to find it, they have worshipped a symbol, giving it great significance. To find out if there is something really true and sacred I am using that word rather hesitantly - we must look for something not put together by desire and hope, by fear and longing; not dependent on environment, culture and education, but something that thought has never touched, something that is totally and incomprehensibly new. Perhaps this morning we can spend some time in enquiring into this, trying to find out whether there is a vastness, an ecstasy, a life that is unquenchable; without finding that, however virtuous, however orderly, however non-violent one is, life in itself has very little meaning. Religion in the sense in which we are using that word, where there is no kind of fear or belief - is the quality that makes for a life in which there is no fragmentation whatsoever. If we are going to enquire into that, we must not only be free of all belief, but also we must be very clear about the distorting factor of all effort, direction and purpose. Do see the importance of this; if you are at all serious in this matter it is very important to understand how any form of effort distorts direct perception. And any form of suppression obviously also distorts, as does any form of direction born of choice, of established purpose, created by one's own desire; all these things make the mind utterly incapable of seeing things as they are. When we are enquiring into this question of what truth is, whether there is such a thing as enlightenment, if there is something that is not of time at all, a reality that is not dependent on one's own demand, there must be freedom, and a certain quality of order. We generally associate order with discipline, discipline being conformity, imitation, adjustment, suppression and so on; forcing the mind to follow a certain course, a pattern that it considers to be moral. But order has nothing whatsoever to do with such discipline; order comes about naturally and inevitably when we understand all the disturbing factors, the disorders and conflicts going on both within ourselves and outwardly. When we are aware of this disorder, look at all the mischief, the hate, the pursuit of comparison - when we understand it then there comes order; which has nothing whatsoever to do with discipline. You must have order; after all, order is virtue (you may not like that word). Virtue is not something to be cultivated; if it is a thing of thought, of will, the result of suppression, it is no longer virtue. But if you understand the disorder of your life, the confusion, the utter meaninglessness of our existence, when you see all that very clearly, not merely intellectually and verbally, but not condemning it, not running away from it, but observing it in life, then out of that awareness and observation comes order, naturally which is virtue. This virtue is entirely different from the virtue of society, with its respectability, the sanctions of the religions with their hypocrisy; it is entirely different from one's own self-imposed discipline. Order must exist if we are to find out if there is or is not - a reality that is not of time, something incorruptible, not depending on anything. If you are really serious about this, in the sense that it is a part of life as important as earning one's livelihood, as seeking pleasure, that it is something tremendously vital, then you will realize that it can only be found through meditation. The dictionary meaning of that word is to ponder over, to think over, to enquire; it means to have a mind that is capable of looking, that is intelligent, that is sane, not perverted or neurotic, not wishing for something from somewhere. Is there any method, any system, any path which you can pursue and come to the understanding of what meditation, or the perception of reality, is? Unfortunately people come from the East with their systems, methods and so on; they say `Do this' and `Don't do that'. `Practice Zen and you will find enlightenment.' Some of you may have gone to India or Japan and spent years studying, disciplining yourself, trying to become aware of your toe or your nose, practising endlessly. Or you may have repeated certain words in order to calm the mind, so that in that calmness there will be the perception of something beyond thought. These tricks can be practised by a very stupid, dull mind. I am using the word stupid in the sense of a mind that is stupefied. A stupefied mind can practise any of these tricks. You may not be interested in all this, but you have to find out. After you have listened very carefully you may go out into the world and teach people, that may be your vocation and I hope it is. You have to know the whole substance, the meaning, the fullness, the beauty, the ecstasy of all this. A dull mind, a mind that has been stupefied by `practising', cannot under any circumstances whatsoever understand what reality is. One must be completely, totally, free of thought. One needs a mind that is not distorted, that is very clear, that is not blunted, that is no longer pursuing a direction, a purpose. You will ask: `Is it possible to have this state of mind in which there is no experiencing?' To `experience' implies an entity who is experiencing; therefore, there is duality: the experiencer and the thing experienced. the observer and the thing observed. Most of us want some kind of deep, marvellous and mystical experience; our own daily experiences are so trivial, so banal, so superficial, we want something electrifying. In that bizarre thought of a marvellous experience, there is this duality of the experiencer and the experience. As long as this duality exists there must be distortion; because the experiencer is the accumulated past with all his knowledge, his memories. Being dissatisfied with that, he wants something much greater, therefore he projects it as idea, and finds that projection; in that there is still duality and distortion. Truth is not something to be experienced. Truth is not something that you can seek out and find. It is beyond time. And thought, which is of time, cannot possibly search it out and grasp it. So one must understand very deeply this question of wanting experience. Do please see this tremendously important a thing. Any form of effort, of wanting, of seeking out truth, demanding experience, is the observer wanting something transcendental and making effort; therefore the mind is not clear, pristine, non-mechanical. A mind seeking an experience, however marvellous, implies that the `me' is seeking it - the `me' which is the past, with all its frustrations, miseries and hopes. Observe for yourself how the brain operates. It is the storehouse of memory, of the past. This memory is responding all the time, as like and dislike, justifying, condemning and so on; it is responding according; to its conditioning, according to the culture, religion, education, which it has stored. That storehouse of memory, from which thought arises, guides most of our life. It is directing and shaping our lives every minute of every day, consciously or unconsciously; it is generating thought, the `me', which is the very essence of thought and words. Can that brain, with its content of the old, be completely quiet - only wakened when it is necessary to operate, to function, to speak, to act, but the rest of the time completely sterile? Meditation is to find out whether the brain, with all its activities, all its experiences, can be absolutely quiet. Not forced, because the moment you force, there again is duality, the entity that says, `I would like to have marvellous experiences, therefore I must force my brain to be quiet' - you will never do it. But if you begin to enquire, watch, observe, listen to all the movements of thought, its conditioning, its pursuits, its fears, its pleasures, watch how the brain operates, then you will see that the brain becomes extraordinarily quiet; that quietness is not sleep but is tremendously active and therefore quiet. A big dynamo that is working perfectly, hardly makes a sound; it is only when there is friction that there is noise. One has to find out whether one's body can sit or lie completely still, without any movement, not forced. Can the body and the brain be still? - for they are interrelated psychosomatically. There are various practices to make the body still, but again they imply suppression; the body wants to get up and walk, you insist that it must sit quietly, and the battle begins - wanting to go out and wanting to sit still. The word `yoga' means `to join together'. The very words `join together' are wrong, they imply duality. Probably yoga as a particular series of exercises and breathing was invented in India many thousands of years ago. Its intent is to keep the glands, the nerves and the whole system functioning healthily, without medicine, and highly sensitive. The body needs to be sensitive, otherwise you cannot have a clear brain. You can see the simple fact, that one needs to have a very healthy, sensitive, alert body, and a brain that functions very clearly, non-emotionally, not personally; such a brain can be absolutely quiet. Now, how is this to be brought about? How can the brain, which is so tremendously active - not only during the day-time, but when you go to sleep - be so completely relaxed and completely quiet? Obviously no method will do it, a method implies mech- anical repetition, which stupefies and makes the brain dull; and in that dullness you think you have marvellous experiences! How can the brain, which is always chattering to itself, or with others, always judging, evaluating, liking and disliking, turning over all the time - how can that brain be completely still? Do you, for yourself, see the extraordinary importance that the brain should be completely quiet? For the moment it acts it is response of the past, in terms of thought. It is only a brain that is completely still that can observe a cloud, a tree, a flowing river. You can see the extraordinary light on those mountains, yet the brain can be completely still you have noticed this, have you not? How has that happened? The mind, facing something of extraordinary magnitude, like very complex machinery, a marvellous computer, or a magnificent sunset, becomes completely quiet even if only for a split second. You have noticed when you give a child a toy, how the toy absorbs the child, the child is so concerned with it. In the same way, by their greatness, the mountains, the beauty of a tree, the flowing waters, absorb the mind and make it still. But in that case the brain is made still by something. Can the brain be quiet without an outside factor entering into it? Not `finding a way'. people hope for the Grace of God, they pray, have faith, become absorbed in Jesus, in this or in that. We see that this absorption by something outside occurs to a dull, a stupefied mind. The brain is active from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep; and even then the activity of the brain is still going on. That activity in the form of dreams is the same movement of the day carried on during sleep. The brain has never a moment's rest, never does it say, `I have finished'. It has carried over the problems which it accumulated during the day into sleep; when you wake up those problems still go on - it is a vicious circle. A brain that is to be quiet must have no dreams at all; when the brain is quiet during sleep there is a totally different quality entering into the mind. How does it happen that the brain which is so tremendously, enthusiastically active, can naturally, easily, be quiet without any effort or suppression? I will show it to you. As we said, during the day it is endlessly active. You wake up, you look out of the window and say to yourself, `Oh, awful rain', or`It is a marvellous day, but too hot' you have started! So at that moment, when you look out of the window, don't say a word; not suppressing words but simply realizing that by saying, `What a lovely morning', or `A horrible day', the brain has started. But if you watch, looking out of the window and not saying a word to yourself - which does not mean you suppress the word just observing without the activity of the brain rushing in, there you have the clue, there you have the key. When the old brain does not respond, there is a quality of the new brain coming into being. You can observe the mountains, the river, the valleys, the shadows, the lovely trees and the marvellous clouds full of light beyond the mountains you can look without a word, without comparing. But it becomes much more difficult when you look at another person; there already you have established images. But just to observe! You will see when you so observe, when you see clearly, that action becomes extraordinarily vital; it becomes a complete action which is not carried over to the next minute. You understand? One has problems, deep or superficial, not sleeping well, quarrelling with one's wife, and one carries these problems on from day to day. Dreams are the repetition of these problems, the repetition of fear and pleasure over and over again. That obviously stupefies the mind and makes the brain dull. Now is it possible to end each problem as it arises? - not carrying it over. Take j problem: somebody has insulted me, told me I am a fool; at that moment the old brain responds instantly, saying `So are you'. If, before the brain responds, I am completely aware of what has been said something unpleasant - I have an interval, a gap, so that the brain does not immediately jump into the battle. So if you watch the movement of thought in action during the day, you realize that it is breeding problems, and that problems are things which are incomplete, which have to e carried over. But if you watch with a brain that is fairly quiet, en you will see that action becomes complete, instantaneous; there is no carrying over of a problem, no carrying over of the insult or the praise - it is finished. Then, during sleep, the brain no longer carrying on the old activities of the day, it has complete rest. And as the brain is quiet in sleep, there takes place a rejuvenation of its whole structure. A quality of innocency comes into being - and the innocent mind can see what is true; not the complicated mind, not that of the philosopher, or the priest. The innocent mind implies that whole in which are the body, the heart, the brain and the mind. This innocent mind which is never touched by thought, can see what truth is, what reality is, it can see if there is something beyond measure. That is meditation. To come upon this extraordinary beauty of truth, with its ecstasy, you must lay the foundations. The foundation is the understanding of thought, which breeds fear and sustains pleasure, and the understanding of order and therefore virtue; so that there is freedom from all conflict, aggression, brutality and violence. Once one has laid this foundation of freedom, there is a sensitivity which is supreme intelligence, and the whole of the life one leads becomes entirely different. Questioner: I think that understanding you is very important to our understanding of what you say. I was surprised to hear what you said about Yoga, how you practise it regularly two hours a day. To me this sounds like a definite form of discipline. More important than that though, is the question of innocence - I am interested in the innocence of your mind. Krishnamurti: To see the innocency of the mind, whether it is yours or mine, you must first be innocent. I am not turning the tables on you, Sir. To see the innocency of the mind you need to be free, you need to have no fear and a quality that comes with a brain that is functioning without any effort. Is practising Yoga regularly every day for two hours, not a form of discipline? You know the body tells you when it is tired; the body says to you, `Don't do it this morning'. When we have abused the body by driving it in all kinds of ways, spoiling its own intelligence - by wrong food, smoking, drink, all the rest of it - the body becomes insensitive. And thought says, `I must force it'. Such driving of the body, forcing it, compelling it, becomes a discipline. Whereas, when you do these things regularly, easily, without any effort, the regularity of it depends on the sensitivity of the body. You do it one day and the next day the body may be tired and you say, `All right, I won't do it'. It is not a mechanical regularity. All this requires a certain intelligence, not only of the mind, but of the body, and that intelligence will tell you what to do and what not to do. Questioner: We may want our minds to be quiet, but sometimes we have to take decisions,. this makes for difficulty and causes problems. Krishnamurti: If the mind cannot decide clearly, then problems arise; the very decision is a problem. When you decide, you make a decision between this and that - which means choice. When there is choice there is conflict; from that arise problems. But when you see very clearly, there is no choice, therefore there is no decision. You know the way from here to where you happen to live very well; you follow the road which is very clear. You have been on that road a hundred times, therefore there is no choice, although you may find a short cut which you may take next time. That is something mechanical there is no problem. The brain wants the same thing to happen again so that it may function automatically, mechanically, so that problems do not arise. The brain demands that it operate mechanically. Therefore it says, `I will discipline myself to function mechanically', `I must have a belief, a purpose, a direction, so that I can set a path and follow it; and it follows that groove. What happens? Life will not allow that, there are all kinds of things happening; so thought resists, builds a wall of belief and this very resistance creates problems. When you have to decide between this and that, it means there is confusion: `should I, or should I not do this?, I only put that question to myself when I do not see clearly what is to be done. We choose out of confusion, not out of clarity. The moment you are clear your action is complete. Questioner: But it cannot always be complete, Krishnamurti: Why not? Questioner: Often it is a complex choice and you have to take time you have to look at it. Krishnamurti: Yes Sir, take time, have patience to look at it. You have to compare; compare what? Compare two materials, blue and white; you question whether you like this colour or that colour, whether you should go up this hill or that hill. You decide. `I prefer to go up this hill today and tomorrow I'll go up the other'. The problem arises when one is dealing with the psyche, what to do within oneself. First watch what decision implies. To decide to do this or that, what is that decision based on? On choice, obviously. Should I do this, or should I do that? I realize that when there is choice there is confusion. So I see the truth of this, the fact, the `what is', which is: where there is choice there must be confusion. Now why am I confused? Because I don't know, or because I prefer one thing as opposed to another which is more pleasant, it may produce better results, greater fortune, or whatever it is. So I choose that. But in following that, I realize there is also frustration in it, which is pain. So I am caught again between fear and pleasure. Seeing I am caught in this, I ask, `Can I act without choice?' That means: I have to be aware of all the implications of confusion and all the implications of decision; fur there is duality, the `decider' and the thing decided upon. And therefore there is conflict and perpetuation of confusion. You will say, to be aware of all the intricacies of this movement will take time. Will it take time? Or can it be seen instantly and therefore there is instant action? It only takes time when I am not aware of it. My brain, being conditioned, says, `I must decide' decide according to the past; that is its habit. `I must decide what is right, what is wrong, what is duty, what is responsibility, what is love'. The decisions of the brain breed more conflict which is what the politicians throughout the world are doing. Now, can that brain be quiet, so that it sees the problem of confusion instantly, and acts because it is clear? Then there is no decision at all. Questioner: Can we learn from experience? Krishnamurti: Certainly not. Learning implies freedom, curiosity, enquiry. When a child learns something, he is curious about it, he wants to know, it is a free momentum; not a momentum of having acquired and of moving from that acquisition. We have innumerable experiences; we have had five thousand years of wars. We have not learnt a thing from them except to invent more deadly machinery with which to kill each other. We have had many experiences with our friends, with our wives, with our husbands, with our nation - we have not learnt. Learning, in fact, can only take place when there is freedom from experience. When you discover something new, your mind must be free of the old, obviously. For this reason, meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known as experience; because truth is not something that you invent, it is something totally new, it is not in terms of the past `known'. Its newness is not the opposite of the old; it is something incredibly new: a mind that comes to it with experience cannot see it. 30th July, 1970. IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART II CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 2ND AUGUST 1970 Krishnamurti: We are going to have seven discussions here, in which each one of us shares. It is not merely a matter of hearing a few words from each other and holding onto our opinions and judgments; but in discussing, in talking things over together, we will begin to find out for ourselves how we think, from what point of view we look at life, how formulas and conclusions sway or control our minds. During these seven discussions we can go into many problems, taking each morning a particular subject and going into it as completely and as thoroughly as possible so that both of us understand it entirely, not only verbally, intellectually (which of course is not understanding) and go beyond it. So what shall we take this morning? Questioner (1): Shall we talk about the roots and origin of thought? Questioner(2): Could we go into the difference between the mind and the brain? Questioner (3): Can one find a system of meditation in oneself or is it a method? Questioner (4): Do we make the right use of our personal faculties and capacities? Questioner (5): Could you say something about relationship between people? Questioner (6): Could we discuss letting go and giving up all conditioning? Questioner (7): What is enlightenment? Questioner (8): Why is it so difficult for us to attain a state of bliss based on truth and beauty? Krishnamurti: Can we put all these questions together? I think if we could discuss what self-knowledge is, wouldn't all these questions be answered? Such questions as: what is meditation - is it a system? What is the difference between the mind and the brain? Why is it so difficult to attain or understand what is enlightenment? Why is it that most of us have to struggle in various forms? Could we take self-knowing in which all this would be included? Is there a method or system by which one can know oneself? Is there a way of finding out for oneself the answer to all the questions that we have put this morning without asking anybody? That is possible only if I know for myself the mechanism of thought, how the brain works, how the mind is caught in conditioning, how it is attached, how it wants to free itself. There is a constant struggle within oneself and also outwardly. So to answer all the questions that one puts to oneself and to solve the problems that exist outwardly, is it not important to understand oneself? Could we discuss this? First of all how do I observe myself? Do I look at myself according to what authorities, the specialists, the psychologists have said, which has obviously conditioned my mind? I may not like Freud, Jung, Adler and the more recent psychologists and analysts, but as their very statements have penetrated into my mind, I am looking at myself with their eyes. Can I look at myself objectively without any emotional reaction, just to see what I am? And to see what I am, is analysis necessary? All these questions are involved when I say that I must know myself; without knowing myself completely I have no basis for any action. If I don't know myself and am confused, whatever action I take must lead to further confusion. So I must know myself. I must profoundly find out the structure of my nature. I have to see the scaffold of my activities, the patterns in which I function, the lines which I follow, the directions which I have established for myself or society. I have to understand this drive which makes me do things consistently or contradictorily. To understand all these problems about whether there is a God, whether there is truth, what meditation is, who is the meditator which is much more important than meditation I must know myself completely. Do you see the importance of knowing for yourself what you are? Because without knowing yourself, whatever you do will be done in ignorance, therefore in illusion, in contradiction: so there will be confusion, sorrow and all the rest of it. Is that clear? One must know oneself not only at the conscious level but in the deep layers of oneself. This must be clear and you must know it for yourself not because I say so. Now, how shall I know myself? What is the procedure? Shall I follow the authorities, the specialists who apparently have investigated and have come to certain conclusions which later psychologists or philosophers may alter or strengthen? Don't say `No'. If I don't, how shall I understand myself? All the investigations of the past philosophers and teachers - the Indian mind has gone into this at great depth as well as of the modern ones is imprinted on my mind, consciously or unconsciously. So shall I follow because I am just beginning and they have gone ahead of me and then go further than they have gone? Or won't I follow anybody but look at myself? If I can look at myself as `what is', then I am looking at myself who is the result of all the sayings of these philosophers, teachers and saviours. Therefore I don't have to follow anybody. Is this clear? Do see this, please, don't come back to it later. My mind is the result of what they have said. It has not only been accepted; these things have flowed in like a wave, not only from the present but also from the past and through a great many teachers. I am the result of all that. So all that I have to do is to observe myself, read the book which is myself. How am I to read, how am I to observe so clearly that there is no impediment? I may have coloured glasses, I may have certain prejudices, certain conclusions which will prevent me from looking at myself and seeing all that is implied in looking at myself. So what shall I do? As I am conditioned I cannot look at myself in complete freedom, therefore I must be aware of my conditioning. So I have to ask: What is it to be aware? Now let's proceed. I cannot look at myself wholly in freedom because my mind isn't free. I have a dozen opinions and conclusions, an infinite number of experiences, I have had an education all that is part of my conditioning; therefore I must be aware of these conditionings which are part of me. So first I must know, I must understand, what it means to be aware. What does it mean to you to be aware? The other day the speaker said `Don't take notes, please' you heard that and several people went on taking notes. Is that to be aware? Questioner: I know already that I can't be aware for more than two minutes and then disorder begins. Krishnamurti: We will come to whether this awareness can be extended or is only possible for a very short period. But before we answer that question let's find out what it means to be aware. Am I aware of the noise of that stream? Am I aware of all the different colours the men and women wear in this tent? Am I aware of the structure and shape of the tent? Am I aware of the space around the tent, the hills, the trees, the clouds, the heat - am I objectively, outwardly aware of all these things? How are you aware? Questioner: We are aware inwardly and outwardly at the same time. Krishnamurti: Please go step by step. Are you aware of this tent, of the various colours of the people's dresses, are you aware of the hills, the trees, the meadows? Are you aware in the sense of being conscious of it? You are aren't you? Questioner: When I put my attention on it I am aware of it. Krishnamurti: When you put your attention on it you are aware. Therefore you are not aware when you are inattentive. So only when you pay attention, are you aware. Please follow this closely. Questioner: When I pay attention to one thing, I am absorbed, I cannot pay attention to the other things around me. Krishnamurti: You become absorbed in one particular thing and the rest fades away. Are you aware that when you are looking attentively at the tent, the trees, the mountains, that you are shaping into words what you see? You say, `That's a tree, that's a cloud, that's a tent, I like this colour, I don't like that colour' - right? Please take a little trouble over this - don't get bored. Because if you go into this very deeply, when you leave the tent you will see something for yourself. So when you watch, are you aware of your reactions? Questioner: It seems as if attention expands. Krishnamurti: I am asking something and you reply to something else. I am aware of that dress. My reaction says, `How nice' or `How ugly'. I am asking: when you look at that red colour are you aware of your reactions? Not of a dozen reactions, but of that particular reaction when you see a red colour? Why not? Isn't that part of awareness? Questioner: When you put a name to a thing you are not aware. Krishnamurti: I am going to find out Sir, what it means. You don't bite into this! I want to be aware and I know I am not aware. Occasionally I am attentive, but most of the time I am half asleep. I am thinking about something else whilst I am looking at a tree or a colour. As I have said, I want to know myself completely because I see that if I don't know myself I have no basis to do anything. So I must know myself. How do I become aware, how do I observe myself? In observing I shall learn. So learning is part of awareness. Am I going to learn about myself according to somebody else? -according to the philosophers, the teachers, the saviours, the priests? Is that learning? If I learn according to what others have said I have stopped learning about myself, haven't I? So the first thing is, I have to learn about myself. Now what does this learning about myself mean? Investigate it, go into it, find out what it means to learn about oneself. Questioner: Seeing my reaction. Krishnamurti: No, Madame, I don't mean that. What does it mean to learn? Questioner: It seems that one desperately looks for a practical system to come to such an awareness. At one time I thought we could try to educate ourselves by writing down all our thoughts and afterwards when reading them, see them like a film. Maybe in this way we could learn something. Krishnamurti: The questioner says, we see the reason for knowing ourselves, we are desperate to find out how to do this, but out of this desperation we want a system, to find some method, because we don't know what to do with ourselves. So we want somebody to tell us, `Do these things and you will know yourself'. Now Sirs, please do listen to me. Here I am: I am the result of the society, of the culture in which I live, of religions, the business world, the economic world, the climate, the food - I am the result of all that, of the infinite past and of the present. I want to know myself, that is, I want to learn about myself. What does the word `learn' mean? See the difficulty in this. I don't know German, which means I have to learn the meaning of words, memorize the verbs, and learn the syntax. That is, I have to accumulate knowledge of words and all the rest of it and then I may be able to speak German. I accumulate and then act, verbally or in any other way; there learning meant accumulation. Now what happens if I learn about myself? I see something about myself and I say, `I have learnt that'. I have seen `that is so', I have learnt about it. That has left a residue of knowledge and with that knowledge I examine the next incident. And that again adds further accumulation. So the more I observe myself and learn about myself, the more I am accumulating knowledge about myself. Right? Questioner: I am changing. Krishnamurti: I am accumulating knowledge and in the process I am changing. But I am accumulating knowledge and experience by observing. Now what happens? With that knowledge I look at myself. So knowledge is preventing fresh observation. I don't know if you see this? For instance you have said something to hurt me. That is my knowledge, and the next time I see you, that knowledge of having been hurt comes forward to meet you. The past comes to meet the present. So knowledge is the past and with the eyes of the past I am looking at the present - do you understand? Now, to learn about myself, to look at myself, there must be freedom from past knowledge. That is, the learning about myself must be constantly fresh. Do you see the difficulty? Questioner: I would say there are constants in life which don't change. Krishnamurti: We'll come to the problem of change later. I am watching, I want to learn about myself. `Myself' is movement, `myself' is not static, it's living, active, going in different directions. So if I learn with the mind and the brain that is the past, that prevents me from learning about myself. If you once see that, then the next question is: how is the mind to free itself from the past so as to learn about itself, which is constantly new? See the beauty of it, the excitement of it! I want to learn about myself and `myself' is a living thing, not something dead. I think this way one day, and the next day I want something else; this is a living constant, moving thing. And to observe, to learn about it, the mind must be free. Therefore if it is burdened with the past it cannot observe. So what is it to do? Questioner: It is not a question of amnesia, but of being free from the effects of the past. Krishnamurti: Yes Sir, that is what we mean. Now what shall I do? I see this happen: I see that red colour and I say, `I don't like it'. That is, the past responds. The past acts immediately and therefore stops learning. So what is one to do? Questioner: One must forget how to think - not have thoughts. Krishnamurti: You are not following what I am saying. You have come to a conclusion when you say `not to have thoughts'. You are not really learning. Questioner: We have to empty ourselves. Krishnamurti: That is another conclusion. How do you empty yourself? Who is the entity that is going to empty the mind? Questioner: You have to empty that too. You must empty everything. Krishnamurti: Who is going to empty it? You see Sir, you are not listening to what is being said - if you will forgive me for saying so. I said I want to learn about myself. I cannot learn about myself if the past interferes. Learning implies the active present of the word to learn; `learning' means active in the present; and that is not possible when the mind, when the brain, is burdened with all the past. Now tell me what to do.' Questioner: I have to be attentive. Krishnamurti: You see! How am I to be attentive? Questioner: I have to live in the present. Krishnamurti: How am I to live in the present when my past is burdening me? Questioner: By being aware of the process that is taking place. Krishnamurti: Which means what? To be aware that the past is interfering and therefore preventing the brain from learning? Go slowly, Sir. Are you aware of this movement as we are talking? Then, if you are aware of it as we are talking, what takes place? Don't guess! Don't say `should be', `should not be' that has no meaning. What is actually taking place when you are aware of this movement, which is the past interfering with the present and therefore preventing learning in the sense we are using that word? When you are aware of this whole process going on what takes place then? Questioner: You see yourself as the effect of the past. Krishnamurti: We see that is a fact. We have asked what is the outcome, what happens when you are aware that you are the effect of the past and that is preventing you from learning in the present? Don't guess. What takes place in you, when you are aware of this process? Questioner (1): The movement stops. Questioner (2): There is no more thought. Questioner (3): There is fear. Krishnamurti: One says there is no more thought, another says there is silence, yet another says there is fear. Questioner: There seems to be nothing but the present. Krishnamurti: Now which of these statements is true? Questioner: We arc confused. Krishnamurti: That's right, we are confused. Questioner (1): You are aware. Questioner (2): You learn. Questioner (3): I feel that there is a contradiction which has to be destroyed by direct action. Krishnamurti: Look Sirs, I beg of you, don't come to any conclusion, because conclusions will prevent you from learning. And if you say, `Direct action must happen' that is a conclusion. We are learning. I see that I am the effect of the past. The past may be yesterday or the last second that has left a mark as knowledge. That knowledge, which is the past, is preventing me from learning in the present; it is a momentum, it is happening all the time. Now when I am aware of this movement, what takes place? I don't want your conclusions. If I accept your conclusions, you will be the new philosopher! I don't want any new philosopher! I want to learn; therefore what I have to see is what actually takes place when the brain is aware of this movement. Can the brain be aware of this movement or is it frightened to be aware of something new? Questioner: The movement will stop. Krishnamurti: Then what? Have I learnt? Is there a learning? Questioner: If I am quiet enough I think I can see what I perceive and what comes out from myself. Krishnamurti: Yes Sir, please do observe this. I want to learn about this movement; to learn I must have curiosity. If I merely come to a conclusion my curiosity stops. So there must be curiosity to learn; there must be passion, and there must be energy. Without this I can't learn. If I have fear I have no passion. So I have to leave that alone and ask: why am I frightened to learn about something that may be new? I have to investigate fear. I have left the momentum of the past and am now going to learn about fear. Are you following all this? Now, why am I frightened? Questioner: We are afraid to lose the image of ourselves. Krishnamurti: I am afraid to lose the image which I have built about myself - who is full of knowledge, who is a dead entity. No Sir. Don't give me the explanation. I realize I am frightened - why? Is it because I see that I am dead? I am living in the past and I don't know what it means to observe and live in the present; therefore this is something totally new and I am frightened to do anything new. Which means what? That my brain and my mind have followed the old pattern, the old method, the old way of thinking, living and working. But to learn, the mind must be free from the past - we have established that as the truth. Now, look what has happened. I have established the fact as truth that there is no learning if the past interferes. And also I realize that I am frightened. So there is a contradiction between the realization that to learn, the mind must be free of the past, and that at the same time I am frightened to do so. In this there is duality. I see, and I am afraid to see. Questioner: Are we always afraid to see new things? Krishnamurti: Aren't we? Aren't we afraid of change? Questioner: The new is the unknown. We are afraid of the unknown. Krishnamurti: So we cling to the old and this will inevitably breed fear because life is changing; there are social upheavals, there is rioting, there are wars. So there is fear. Now how am I to learn about fear? We have moved away from the previous movement; now we want to learn about the movement of fear. What is the movement of fear? Are you aware that you are afraid? Are you aware that you have fears? Questioner: Not always. Krishnamurti; Sir, do you know now, are you aware of your fears now? You can resuscitate them, bring them out and say, `I am afraid of what people might say about me'. So are you aware that you are frightened about death, about losing money, about losing your wife? Are you aware of those fears? Also of physical fears -that you might have pain tomorrow and so on. If you are aware, what is the movement in it? What takes place when you are aware that you are afraid? Questioner: I try to get rid of it. Krishnamurti: When you try to get rid of it, what takes place? Questioner: You repress it. Krishnamurti: Either you repress it or escape from it; there is a conflict between fear and wanting to get rid of it - isn't there? So there is either repression or escape; and in trying to get rid of it there is conflict which only increases fear. Questioner: May I ask a question? Isn't the `me' the brain itself? The brain gets tired of always seeking new experiences and wants relaxation. Krishnamurti: Are you saying that the brain itself is frightened to let go and is the cause of fear? Look Sir, I want to learn about fear; that means I must be curious, I must be passionate. First of all I must be curious and I cannot be curious if I form a conclusion. So to learn about fear I mustn't be distracted by running away from it; there mustn't be a movement of repression, which again means a distraction from fear. There mustn't be the feeling `I must get rid of it'. If I have these feelings I cannot learn. Now have I these feelings when I see there is fear? I am not saying you shouldn't have these feelings - they are there. If I am aware of them what shall I do? My fears are so strong that I want to run away from them. And the very movement away from them breeds more fear - are you following all this? Do I see the truth and the fact that moving away from fear increases fear? Therefore there is no movement away from it -right? Questioner: I don't understand this, because I feel that if I have a fear and I move away from it, I am moving towards something that is going to end that fear, towards something that will see me through it. Krishnamurti: What are you afraid of? Questioner: Money. Krishnamurti: You are afraid of losing money, not of money. The more the merrier! But you are afraid of losing it - right? Therefore what do you do? You make quite sure that your money is well placed, but the fear continues. It may not be safe in this changing world, the bank may go bankrupt and so on. Even though you have plenty of money there is always this fear. Running away from that fear doesn't solve it, nor suppressing it, saying, `I won't think about it: for the next second you are thinking about it. So running away from it, avoiding it, doing anything about it continues fear. That is a fact. Now we have established two facts: that to learn there must be curiosity and there must be no pressure of the past. And to learn about fear there must be no running away from fear. That is a fact; that is the truth. Therefore you don't run away. Now when I don't run away from it what takes place? Questioner: I stop being identified with it. Krishnamurti: Is that what learning is? You have stopped. Questioner: I don't know what you mean. Krishnamurti: Stopping is not learning. Because of the desire not to have fear, you want to escape from it. Just see the subtlety of it. I am afraid, and I want to learn about it. I don't know what is going to happen, I want to learn the movement of fear. So what takes place? I am not running away, I am not suppressing, I am not avoiding it: I want to learn about it. Questioner: I think about how to get rid of it. Krishnamurti: If you want to get rid of it as I have just explained who is the person who is going to get rid of it? You want to get rid of it, which means you resist it therefore fear increases. If you don't see the fact of that, I am sorry I can't help you. Questioner: We must accept fear. Krishnamurti: I don't accept fear who is the entity who is accepting fear? Questioner: If one cannot escape, one must accept. Krishnamurti: To escape from it, to avoid it, to pick up a novel and read what other people are doing, to look at television, go to the temple or to church all that is still avoidance of fear, and any avoidance of it only increases and strengthens fear. That is a fact. After establishing that fact I won't run away, I won't suppress. I am learning not running away. Therefore what takes place when there's an awareness of fear? Questioner: Understanding of the process of fear. Krishnamurti,We are doing it. I am understanding the process, I am watching it, I am learning about it. I am afraid and I am not running away from it now what takes place? Questioner: You are face to face with fear. Krishnamurti: What takes place then? Questioner: There is no movement in any direction. Krishnamurti: Don't you ask this question? Please just listen to me for two minutes. I am not running away, I am not suppressing, I am not avoiding, I am not resisting it. There it is, I am watching it. The natural question arising out of that is: who is watching this fear? Please don't guess. When you say, `I am watching fear, I am learning about fear', who is the entity that is watching it? Questioner: Fear itself. Krishnamurti: Is fear itself watching itself? Please don't guess. Don't come to any conclusion, find out. The mind isn't escaping from fear, not building a wall against fear through courage and all the rest of it. What takes place when I watch? I ask myself naturally: who is watching the thing called fear? Don't answer me please. I have raised the question, not you. Sir, find out who is watching this fear: another fragment of me? Questioner: The entity who is watching cannot be the result of the past, it must be fresh something that happens at this moment Krishnamurti: I am not talking about whether the watching is the result of the past. I am watching, I am aware of fear, I am aware that I am frightened of losing money, of becoming ill, of my wife leaving me and God knows what else. And I want to learn about it, therefore I am watching and my natural question is: who is watching this fear? Questioner: My image of myself. Krishnamurti: When I ask the question: `who is watching', what takes place? in the very question there is a division, isn't there? That is a fact. When I say, `Who is watching,' it means the thing is there and I am watching, therefore there is a division. Now why is there a division? You answer me this, don't guess, don't repeat what somebody else has said, including myself. Find out why this division exists at the moment when you ask the question: `who is watching'? Find out. Questioner: There is a desire on my part to watch. Krishnamurti: Which means the desire says, `Watch in order to escape' - you follow? You said before, `I have understood that I mustn't escape', and now you find that desire is making you escape subtly; therefore you are still watching fear as an outsider. See the importance of this. You are watching with an intention to get rid of fear. And we said a few minutes ago, to try to get rid of fear means first censoring fear. So your watching implies trying to get rid of fear; therefore there is a division which only strengthens fear. So I am again asking the question: who is watching fear? Questioner: Isn't there also another point: who is asking the question `who is watching fear'? Krishnamurti: I am asking that question Sir. Questioner: But who is asking the question? Krishnamurti: The same thing, only you push it further back. Now please listen: this is the most practical way of going about it. You will see if you follow this very carefully that the mind will be free of fear, but you are not doing it. I am frightened of losing money and therefore what do I do? I escape by avoiding thinking about it. So I realize how silly it is to avoid it, because the more I resist it the more I am afraid. I am watching it and the question arises: who is watching it? Is it the desire that wants to get rid of it, go beyond it, be free of it, that is watching? It is. And I know watching it that way only divides and therefore strengthens fear. So I see the truth of that, therefore desire to get rid of it has gone - you follow me? It's like seeing a poisonous snake: the desire to touch it is finished with. The desire to take drugs is finished when I see the real danger of them; I won't touch them. As long as I don't see the danger of it, I'll go on. In the same way, as long as I don't see that running away from fear strengthens fear, I'll go on running away. The moment I see it I won't run. Then what happens? Questioner: How can a person look who is afraid of being involved? One is scared. Krishnamurti: I am pointing it out to you. The moment you are scared of looking at fear, you won't learn about it, and if you want to learn about fear, don't be scared. It is as simple as that. If I don't know how to swim I won't plunge into the river. When I know that fear cannot possibly be ended if I am afraid to look and if I really want to look - I'll say, `I don't care, I'll look'. Questioner: It was said, it is desire to get away from fear thaI constantly breeds more fear. When I'm afraid I want to get away from it, so what I always do is to let it be relative so that I can identify with it, so that I can unify myself. Krishnamurti: You see that! It is all these tricks that we are playing on ourselves. Do listen Sir. Who is saying all this? You make an effort to identify yourself with fear. Questioner: I am that fear. Krishnamurti: Ah! Wait. If you are that fear, as you say you are, then what happens? Questioner: When I come to terms with it, it begins to diminish. Krishnamurti: No. Not coming to terms! When you say that you are fear, fear is not something separate from you. What takes place? I am brown. I am afraid to be brown, but I say, 'Yes, I am brown' and that's the end of it, isn't it? I am not running away from it. What takes place then? Questioner: Acceptance. Krishnamurti: Do I accept it? On the contrary, I forget that I am brown. You don't even know all this, you are just guessing. I want to learn about myself. I must know myself completely, passionately, because that is the foundation of all action; without that I'll lead a life of utter confusion. To learn about myself I cannot follow anybody. If I follow anybody I am not learning. Learning implies that the past does not interfere, because `myself' is something extraordinary, vital, moving, dynamic; so I must look at it afresh with a new mind. There is no new mind if the past is always operating. That is a fact, I see that. Then in seeing that I realize I am frightened. I don't know what will happen. So I want to learn about fear - you follow? I am moving all the time in the movement of learning. I want to know about myself and I realize something - a profound truth. I am going to learn about fear, which means I mustn't run away from it at any price. I mustn't have a subtle form of desire to run away from it. So what happens to a mind that is capable of looking at fear without division? The division being, trying to get rid of it, subtle forms of escape, suppression and so on; what happens to the mind when it is confronted with fear and there is no question of running away from it? Please find out, give your mind to it. 2nd August, 1970 IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART II CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 3RD AUGUST 1970 Krishnamurti: Yesterday we were talking about fear and the necessity of knowing oneself. I don't know if one sees the great importance of understanding the nature and structure of oneself. As we said, if there is no comprehension, not intellectual or verbal, but an actual understanding of what one is and the possibility of going beyond it, we must inevitably bring about confusion and contradiction in ourselves, with activities that will lead to a great deal of mischief and sorrow. So it is absolutely essential that one should understand, not only the superficial layers of oneself, but the total entity, all the hidden parts. - And I hope in communicating with each other, in understanding this whole problem together, we shall be able to see, actually, not theoretically, if through self-knowledge the mind can go beyond its own conditioning, its own habits, its own prejudices and so on. We were also talking about learning about oneself. Learning implies a non-accumulative movement; there is no movement if there is accumulation. If the flowing river ends up in a lake there is no movement. There is movement only when there is a constant flow, a strong current. And learning implies that; learning not only about outward things and scientific facts, but also learning about oneself, because `oneself' is a constantly changing, dynamic, volatile being. To learn about it past experiences in no way help; on the contrary, the past puts an end to learning and therefore to any complete action. I hope we saw this very clearly: that we are dealing with a constantly living movement of life, a movement which is the `me'. To understand what `me', which is so very subtle, there needs to be an intense curiosity, a persistent awareness, a sense of non-accumulative comprehension. I hope we are able to communicate with each other about this whole question of learning. That is where our trouble is going to be, because our mind likes to function in grooves, in patterns, from a fixed conclusion or a prejudice, or from knowledge. The mind is tethered to a particular belief and from there it tries to understand this extraordinary movement of the `me'. Therefore there is a contradiction between the`me' and the observer. We were also talking about fear, which is part of this total movement of the `me; the `me' which breaks up life as a movement, the `me' which separates itself as the `you' and the `me' We asked, `What is fear?' We are going to learn non-accumulatively about fear; the very word `fear' prevents coming into contact with that feeling of danger which we call fear. Look, Sirs, maturity implies a total, natural development of a human being; natural in the sense of non-contradictory, harmonious -which has nothing to do with age. And the factor of fear prevents this natural, total development of the mind. I'll go on a little and then we will discuss all this. When one is afraid, not only of physical things, but also of psychological factors, in that fear what takes place? I am afraid; not only of physically falling ill, of dying, of darkness - you know the innumerable fears one has, both biological as well as psychological. What does that fear do to the mind, the mind which has created these fears? Do you understand my question? Don't answer me immediately, look at yourselves. What is the effect of fear on the mind, on one's whole life? Or are we so used to fear, have we accustomed ourselves to fear, which has become a habit, that we are unaware of its effect? If I have accustomed myself to the national feeling of the Hindu, to the dogma, to the beliefs, I am enclosed in this conditioning and totally unaware of what the effects of it are. I only see the feeling that is aroused in me, the nationalism, and I am satisfied with that. I identify myself with the country, with the belief and all the rest of it. But we don't see the effect of such a conditioning all around. In the same way, we don't see what fear does - psychosomatically, as well as psychologically. What does it do? Sirs, this is a discussion, you have to take part in it! Questioner: I become involved in trying to stop this thing from happening. Krishnamurti: It stops or immobilizes action. Is one aware of that? Are you? Don't generalize. We are having all these discussions in order to see what is actually happening within us; otherwise these dialogues have no meaning. In talking over what fear does and becoming conscious of it, it might be possible to go beyond it. So if I am at all serious I must see the effects of fear. Do I know the effects of it? Or do I only know them verbally? Do I know them as something which has happened in the past, which remains a memory and that memory says: `These are the effects of it'? So that memory sees the effects of it, but the mind doesn't see the actual effect. I don,t know if you see this? I have said something which is really quite important. Questioner: Could you say it again? Krishnamurti: When I say I know the effects of fear, what does that mean? Either I know it verbally, that is intellectually, and I know it as a memory, as something that has happened in the past, and I say: `This did happen'. So the past tells me what the effects are. But I don't see the effects of it at the actual moment. Therefore it is something remembered and not real. Whereas `knowing' implies non-accumulative seeing - not recognition - but seeing the fact. Have I conveyed this? When I say `I am hungry', is it the remembrance of having been hungry yesterday which tells me, or is it the actual fact of -- Page 1OO -- hunger now? The actual awareness that I am hungry now, is entirely different from the response of a memory which tells me I have been hungry and therefore I may be hungry now. Is the past telling you the effects of fear, or are you aware of the actual happening of the effects of fear? The actions of the two are entirely different - aren't they? The one, being completely aware of the effects of fear now, acts instantly. But if memory tells me these are the effects, then the action is different. Have I made myself clear? Now, which is it? Questioner: Can you distinguish between a particular fear and actually being aware of the effects of fear as such - apart from remembering the effects of a fear? Krishnamurti: That's what I was trying to explain. The action of the two are entirely different. Do you see that? Please, if you don't see it don't say `yes', don't let's play games with each other. It is very important to understand this. Is the past telling you the effects of fear, or is there a direct perception or awareness of the effects of fear now? If the past is telling you the effects of fear, the action is incomplete and therefore contradictory; it brings conflict. But if one is completely aware of the effects of fear now, the action is total. Questioner: As I am sitting in the tent now I have no fear because I am listening to what you are talking about, so I am not afraid. But this fear may come up as I leave the tent. Krishnamurti: But can't you, sitting here in this tent, see fear, which you may have had yesterday, can't you invoke it, invite it? Questioner: It may be life fears. Krishnamurti: Whatever the fear may be, need you say, `I have no fears now, but when I go outside I'll have them'. They are there! Questioner: You can invoke it - as you say - you can remember it. But this is the point you made about bringing in memory, the thought about fear. Krishnamurti: I am asking: need I wait until I leave the tent to find out what my fears are? Or, sitting here, can I be aware of them? I am not afraid at this moment of what someone might say to me. But when I meet the man who is going to say these things, that will frighten me. Can't I see the actual fact of that now? Questioner: If you do that, you are already making a practice of it. Krishnamurti: No, it is not a practice. You see, you are so afraid of doing anything which might become a practice! Sir, aren't you afraid of losing your job? Aren't you afraid of death? Aren't you afraid of not being able to fulfil? Aren't you afraid of being lonely? Aren't you afraid of not being loved? Don't you have some form of fear? Questioner: Only if there is a challenge. Krishnamurti: But I am challenging you! I can,t understand this mentality! Questioner: If there is an impulse you act, you have to do something. Krishnamurti: No! You are making it so complicated. It is as natural as hearing that train roar by. Either you can remember the noise of that train, or listen actually to that noise. Don't complicate it, please. Questioner: Aren't you in a way complicating it by talking about invoking fear? I don't have to invoke any of my fears - just being here I can survey my reaction. Krishnamurti: That's all I am saying. Questioner: In order to communicate here we must know the difference between the brain and the mind. Krishnamurti: We have discussed that before. We are now trying to find out what fear is, learn about it. Is the mind free to learn about fear? Learning being watching the movement of fear. You can only watch the movement of fear, when you are not remembering past fears and watching with those memories. Do you see the difference? I can watch the movement. Are you learning about what is actually taking place when there is fear? We are boiling with fear all the time. We don't seem to be able to get rid of it. When you had fears in the past and were aware of them, what effect had those fears on you and on your environment? What happened? Weren't you cut off from others? Weren't the effects of those fears isolating you? Questioner: It crippled me. Krishnamurti: It made you feel desperate, you didn't know what to do, Now, when there was this isolation, what happened to action? Questioner: It was fragmentary. Krishnamurti: Do listen to this carefully please. I have had fear in the past and the effects of those fears were to isolate me, to cripple me, to make me feel desperate. There was a feeling of running away, of seeking comfort in something. All that we will call for the moment isolating oneself from all relationship. The effect of that isolation in action is to bring about fragmentation. Didn't this happen to you? When you were frightened you didn't know what to do, you ran away from it, or tried to suppress it, or reason it away. And when you had to act you were acting from a fear which is in itself isolating. So an action born out of that fear must be fragmentary. Fragmentation being contradictory, there was a great deal of struggle, pain, anxiety no? Questioner: Sir, as a crippled person walks on crutches, so a person who is numbed, crippled by fear, uses various kinds of crutches. Krishnamurti: That's what we are saying. That's right. Now you are very clear about the effect of past fear: it produces fragmentary actions. What is the difference between that and the action of fear without the response of memory? When you meet physical danger what takes place? Questioner: Spontaneous action. Krishnamurti: It is called spontaneous action - is it spontaneous? Please do enquire, we are trying to find out something. You are in the woods by yourself, in some wild part and suddenly you come upon a bear with cubs - what happens then? Knowing the bear is a dangerous animal what happens to you? Questioner: The adrenalin is increased. Krishnamurti: Yes, now what is the action that takes place? Questioner: You see the danger of transmitting your own fear to the bear. Krishnamurti: No, what happens to you? Of course if you are afraid you transmit it to the bear and the bear gets frightened and attacks you. This is all very simple, you are missing the whole point. Have you ever faced a bear in the woods? Questioner: There is someone here who has. Krishnamurti: I have. That gentleman and I have had many of these experiences during certain years. But what takes place? There is a bear a few feet away from you. There are all the bodily reactions, the flow of adrenalin and so on; you stop instantly and you turn away and run. What has happened there? What was the response? A conditioned response, wasn't it? People have told you generation after generation, `Be careful of wild animals'. If you get frightened you will transmit that fear to the animal and then he will attack you. The whole thing is gone through instantly. Is that the functioning of fear - or is it intelligence? What is operating? Is it fear that has been aroused by the repetition of: `be careful of the wild animals', which has been your conditioning from childhood? Or is it intelligence? The conditioned response to that animal and the action of that conditioned response is one thing. The operation of intelligence and the action of intelligence is different; the two are entirely different. Are you meeting this? A bus is rushing by, you don't throw yourself in front of it; your intelligence says, `Don't do it'. This is not fear - unless you are neurotic or have taken drugs. Your intelligence, not fear, prevents you. Questioner: Sir, when you meet a wild animal don't you have to have both intelligence and a conditioned response? Krishnamurti: No Sir. See it. The moment it is a conditioned response there is fear involved in it and that is transmitted to the animal; but not if it is intelligence. So find out for yourself which is operating. If it is fear then its action is incomplete and therefore there is a danger from the animal; but in the action of intelligence there is no fear at all. Questioner (1): You are saying that if I watch the bear with this intelligence, I can be killed by the bear without experiencing fear. Questioner (2): If I hadn't met a bear before, I wouldn't even know it was a bear. Krishnamurti: You are all making such complications. This is so simple. Now leave the animals alone. Let us start with ourselves; we are partly animals too. The effects of fear and its actions based on past memories are destructive, contradictory and paralysing. Do we see that? - not verbally but actually; that when you are afraid you are completely isolated and any action that takes place from that isolation must be fragmentary and therefore contradictory, therefore there is struggle, pain and all the rest of it. Now, an action of awareness of fear without all the responses of memory is a complete action. Try it! Do it! Become aware as you are walking alone when you go home; your old fears will come up. Then watch, be aware whether those fears are actual fears, or projected by thought as memory. As the fear arises watch whether you are watching from the response of thought, or whether you are merely watching. What we are talking about is action, because life is action. We are not saying only one part of life is action. The whole of living is action and that action is broken up; the breaking up of action is this process of memory with its thoughts and isolation, Is that clear? Questioner: You mean the idea is to experience totally every split second, without memory entering? Krishnamurti: Sir, when you put a question like that, you have to investigate the question of memory. You have to have memory, the clearer, the more definite, the better. If you are to function technologically, or even if you want to get home, you have to have memory. But thought as the response of memory, and projecting fear out of that memory, is an action which is entirely different. Now, what is fear? How does it happen that there is fear? How do these fears take place? Would you tell me please? Questioner: In me it is the attachment to the past. Krishnamurti: Let's take that one thing. What do you mean that word `attachment'? Questioner: The mind is holding on to something. Krishnamurti: That is, the mind is holding on to some memory. `When I was young, how lovely everything was.' Or, I am holding on to something that might happen; so I have cultivated a belief which will protect me. I am attached to a memory, I am attached to a piece of furniture, I am attached to what I am writing because through writing I will become famous. I am attached to a name, to a family, to a house, to various memories and so on. I have identified myself with all that. Why does this attachment take place? Questioner: Isn't it because fear is the very basis of our civilization? Krishnamurti: No Sir; why are you attached? What does that word attachment signify? I depend upon something. I depend on you all attending, so that I can talk to you; I am depending on you and therefore I am attached to you, because through that attachment I gain a certain energy, a certain elan, and all the rest of that rubbish! So I am attached - which means what? I depend on you; I depend on the furniture. In being attached to the furniture, to a belief, to a book, to the family, to a wife, I am dependent on that to give me comfort, to give me prestige, social position. So dependence is a form of attachment. Now why do I depend? Don't answer me, look at it in yourself. You depend on something, don't you? On your country, on your gods, on your beliefs, on the drugs you take, on drink! Questioner: It is part of social conditioning. Krishnamurti: Is it social conditioning that makes you depend? Which means you are part of society; society is not independent of you. You have made society which is corrupt, you have put it together. In that cage you are caught, you are part of it. So don't blame society. Do you see the implications of dependency? What is involved? Why are you depending? Questioner: So as not to feel lonely. Krishnamurti: Wait, listen quietly. I depend on something because that something fills my emptiness. I depend on knowledge, on books, because that covers my emptiness, my shallowness, my stupidity; so knowledge becomes extraordinarily important. I talk about the beauty of pictures because in myself I depend on that. So dependence indicates my emptiness, my loneliness, my insufficiency and that makes me depend on you. That is a fact isn't it? Don't theorize, don't argue with it, it is so. If I were not empty, if I were not insufficient, I wouldn't care what you said or did. I wouldn't depend on anything. Because I am empty and lonely I don't know what to do with my life. I write a stupid book and that fills my vanity. So I depend, which means I am afraid of being lonely, I am afraid of my emptiness. Therefore I fill it with material things or with ideas, or with persons. Aren't you afraid of uncovering your loneliness? Have you uncovered your loneliness, your insufficiency, your emptiness? That is taking place now, isn't it? Therefore you are afraid of that emptiness now. What are you going to do? What is taking place? Before, you were attached to people, to ideas, to all kinds of things and you see that dependence covers your emptiness, your shallowness. When you see that, you are free aren't you? Now what is the response? Is that fear the response of memory? Or is that fear actual do you see it? I work hard for you, don't I? (Laughter) There was a cartoon yesterday morning: a little boy says to another boy, `When I grow up I am going to be a great prophet, I am going to speak of profound truths but nobody will listen'. And the other little boy says, `Then why will you talk, if nobody is going to listen?' `Ah', he said, `us prophets are very obstinate'. (Laughter) So now you have uncovered your fear through attachment, which is dependency. When you look into it you see your emptiness, your shallowness, your pettiness and you are frightened of it. What takes place then? See it Sirs? Questioner: I try to escape. Krishnamurti: You try to escape through attachment, through dependency. Therefore you are back again in the old pattern. But if you see the truth that attachment and dependency cover your emptiness, you won't escape, will you? If you don't see the fact of that, you are bound to run away. You will try to fill that emptiness in other ways. Before, you filled it with drugs, now you fill it with sex or with something else. So when you see the fact of that, what has happened? Proceed Sirs, go on with it! I have been attached to the house, to my wife, to books, to my writing, to becoming famous; I see fear arises because I don't know what to do with my emptiness and therefore I depend, therefore I am attached. What do I do when I get this feeling of great emptiness in me? Questioner: There is a strong feeling. Krishnamurti: Which is fear. I discover I am frightened, therefore I am attached. Is that fear the response of memory, or is that fear an actual discovery? Discovery is something entirely different from the response of the past. Now which is it with you? Is it the actual discovery? Or the response of the past? Don't answer me. Find out, Sir, dig into yourself. Questioner: Sir, in that emptiness surely there is openness towards the world? Krishnamurti: No, I am asking something entirely different. The fear of emptiness, of loneliness and all that insufficiency which you have not been able to understand sufficiently to go through with it and finish it has brought about fear. Is it your discovery now, here in the tent? Or is it recognition of the past? Have you discovered that you are attached because you depend, and that you depend because of fear of emptiness? Are you aware of your emptiness and of the process this implies? Becoming aware of that emptiness, is there fear involved in it or are you merely empty? Do you merely see the fact that you are lonely? Questioner: If you can see that, you are not alone any more. Krishnamurti: We'll go step by step if you don't mind. Do you see that? Or are you going back to the old dependency, the old attachment, to the regular pattern being repeated over and over again? What is going to take place? Questioner: Sir, isn't this the whole human predicament I don't think I am as well off as a small dog, who hasn't got all these problems. Krishnamurti: Unfortunately we are not dogs. I am asking something which you don't answer. Have you discovered for yourself the fear that takes place when you see your emptiness, your shallowness, your isolation? Or, having discovered it are you going to run away, get attached to something? If you don't run away through dependency and attachment, then what takes place when there is this emptiness? Questioner: Freedom. Krishnamurti: Do look at it, it's quite a complex problem, don't say it is freedom. Before, I was attached and I covered -- Page 11O -- up my fear. Now, by asking that question, I discover this attachment was an escape from the fear which came into being when I was aware of my emptiness for a split second. Now I have finished with running away. Then what takes place? Questioner: I was going to say that after that split second there is another escape. Krishnamurti: Which means you don't see the futility of escapes. Therefore you keep on escaping. But if you do see, if you are aware of your emptiness, what takes place? If you are watching very carefully, what generally takes place is, you ask: `who is aware of this emptiness?'. Questioner: The mind. Krishnamurti: please don't jump into it. Go step by step. Who is aware of it? The mind? A part of the mind is aware of another part which is lonely? Do you see my question? I have suddenly become aware that I am lonely. Is it a fragment of my mind which says `I am lonely?' In that there is a division. As long as there is a division there is an escape. You don't see this! Questioner: What happens when you experience the emptiness? When you experience this loneliness, you are no longer aware of it. Krishnamurti: Look sir. Please listen. You need here a persistent observation, not any conclusion, or anything that you think should be. That is, I am aware of my emptiness. Before, I have covered it up, now it has been stripped and I am aware. Who is aware of this emptiness? A separate segment of my mind? If it is, then there is a division between emptiness and the thing that is aware that it is empty; then what takes place in that emptiness in that division? I can't do anything about it. I want to do something about it and I say, `I must bring it together', `I must experience this emptiness', `I must act'. As long as there is a division between the observer and the observed, there is contradiction and therefore there is conflict. Is that what you are doing? A separate segment of the mind watching an emptiness which is not part of itself? Which is it? Sirs, you have to answer this! If it is a part that is watching, then what is that part? Questioner: Is it intelligence born out of energy? Krishnamurti: Don't complicate it, it is complex enough. Don't bring in other words. My question is very simple. I asked: when you are aware of this emptiness from which you have escaped through attachment, and you are no longer running away from it, who is aware? It is for you to find out. Questioner: This awareness that you are empty is another escape and you see you are nothing else but all these things put together. Krishnamurti: When you say, "I am aware of my emptiness', it is another form of escape and we are caught in a network of escapes. That's our life. If you realize that attachment is an escape, then you drop that escape. Are you going from one escape to another? Or do you see one factor of escape and there. fore you have understood all the factors of escape? Sirs, you cannot possibly sustain a continuous watchfulness for more than ten minutes and we have talked for an hour and fifty minutes. So we had better stop. We will continue with the same thing tomorrow, until it becomes real to you not because I say so; it's your life. 3rd August 1970. IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART II CHAPTER 3 3RD PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 4TH AUGUST 1970 Krishnamurti: Yesterday we were talking about dependency, its attachments and fear. I think this may be an important issue in our life, so we should really go into it rather deeply. After all, one can see that freedom cannot possibly exist when there is any form of dependency. There is physiological and psychological dependence, the biological dependence on food, clothes and shelter, which is a natural dependency. But there is an attachment that arises through the biological necessity, like having a house to which one is psychologically attached; or one is attached to certain forms of food, or to compulsive eating, because of other factors of fear which have not been discovered, - and so on. There are physical dependencies of which one can fairly easily be aware, like depending on smoking, on drugs, on drink, on various forms of physical stimulations on which one depends psychologically. Then there are the psychological dependencies. One has to watch this very carefully, because they flow into each other, they are interrelated. There is dependence on a person, or a belief, or on an established relationship, on a psychological habit of thought. I think one can be aware of all this fairly easily. And because there is dependence and attachment, both physical or psychological, the fear of losing that to which one is attached brings about fear. One may depend on belief, or on an experience, or on a conclusion attached to a particular prejudice; how deeply does this attachment go? I do not know if you have observed it in yourself. We were watching it all throughout the day, to find out if there is any form of attachment coming here regularly, living in a particular chalet going to one country after another, talking addressing people, being looked up to, criticized, exposed. If one has watched throughout the day one discovers naturally how deeply one is attached to something, or to someone, or not at all. If there is any form of attachment - it doesn't matter what it is - to a book, to a particular diet, to a particular pattern of thought, to a certain social responsibility - such attachment invariably breeds fear. And a mind that is frightened, though it may not know it is because it is attached, obviously is not free and must therefore live in a constant state of conflict. One may have a particular gift, like a musician, who is tremendously attached to his instrument or to the cultivation of his voice. And when the instrument or the voice fails, he is completely lost, his days are ended. He may insure his hands or his fiddle, or he can become a conductor, but he knows through attachment the inevitable darkness of fear is waiting. I wonder if each one of us - if we are at all serious - has gone into this question, because freedom means freedom from all attachment and therefore from all dependency. A mind that is attached is not objective, not clear, cannot think sanely and observe directly. There are the superficial, psychological attachments and there are deep layers in which there may be some form of attachment. How do you discover those? How does the mind, which may consciously observe its many attachments and realize the nature of those attachments, see the truth and the implications of that truth? It may have other forms of hidden attachments. How are you going to uncover those concealed, secret attachments? A mind that is attached goes through the conflict of realizing it must be detached, otherwise it suffers pain and then gets attached to something else and so on. This is our life. I find I am attached to my wife and I may see all the consequences of it, Being attached to her I realize there must inevitably be fear involved in it. Therefore there is the conflict of detachment and the trial of relationship, the conflict in relationship. That is fairly easy to observe clearly and expose to oneself. Our question is, how deeply is one attached to some form of tradition in the hidden recesses of one's mind, whatever it is. Please follow, because you will see freedom implies complete freedom from all this, otherwise there must be fear. And a mind that is burdened with fear is incapable of understanding, of seeing things as they are and going beyond them. How does one observe the hidden attachments? I may be stubborn, thinking I am not attached; I may have come to the conclusion that I am not depending on anything. That conclusion makes for stubbornness. But if one is learning, seeking, watching, then in that act of learning there is no conclusion. Most of us are attached to some form of conclusion and according to that conclusion we function. Can the mind be free from forming conclusions? - all the time, not just occasionally. `I like long hair, I don't like long hair', `I like this, I don't like that'. Intellectually, or through some experience, you have come to a way of thinking, whatever it is. Can the mind act without conclusion? That is one point. Secondly can the mind reveal to itself the hidden attachments, patterns and dependencies? And thirdly, seeing the nature and structure of attachment, can the mind move within a way of life which is not isolating but highly active and yet not fixed at any point. We'll go into it. First of all, are we aware that we are biologically, physically and psychologically attached. Are you aware that you are physically attached to things? And are you also aware of the implications of those attachments? If you are attached to smoking, see how extraordinarily difficult it is to give it up. For the people who smoke - to whom it has become a habit it is incredibly difficult; not only does it act as a stimulant, a social habit, but there is the attachment to it. Is one aware of the attachment to drinks, to drugs, to various forms of stimuli? If you are, can you drop it instantly? Suppose I am attached to whiskey and I am aware of that. It has become a tremendous habit, the body demands it, it has got used to it, it can't do without it. And you have come to the conclusion that you mustn't drink, it is bad for you, the doctors have asked you to cut it down. But the body and the mind have fallen into the habit of it. Watching this habit, can the mind drop it completely, immediately? See what is involved in it. The body demands it because it has got into the habit, and the mind has said, `I must give it up'. So there is a battle between the bodily demands and the decision of the mind. What are you going to do? Instead of whiskey, take your own habits; perhaps you don't drink whiskey, but you have other physiological habits, like frowning, watching with your mouth open, fiddling with your fingers. Please, Sir, let's discuss this. The body is attached to drink and the mind says, `I must be free of it; and also you realize that when there is conflict between the body and the mind it becomes a problem, a struggle. What will you do? Please, Sirs, come on! You must be extraordinarily free of all habits, if you can't discuss this! Questioner: Either you stop it or you go on drinking. Krishnamurti: What do you actually do? Please don't play with this, because if you once understand it, you will see how extraordinarily vital it becomes, how important it becomes to act, to be without any form of effort, which means, without any distortion. Questioner: I realize that I am my habit. Krishnamurti: Yes. Then what will you do? I realize I am my habit, my habit is me. Questioner (1): Must we not go to the roots of these habits? Questioner (2): We must begin by stopping resistance to it. Krishnamurti: Sir, may I say something? Don't let's theorize, don't let's speculate. Don't tell me what to do, but let us find out, let us learn not only how to look, but how from that very looking action takes place. I have a particular habit of scratching my head, fiddling with my fingers, watching things with my mouth open, very physical things. Now how do I bring it to an end without the least effort? We are discussing habits to which we are attached, consciously or unconsciously. I am taking the most trivial habits, like scratching my head, or pulling my ears, or fiddling with my fingers. How does the mind stop it without any kind of effort, knowing that effort implies duality, implies resistance, condemnation, a desire to go beyond it - when I either suppress or escape, verbally or non- verbally. So bearing all that in mind, understanding those facts, how do I stop a physical habit without effort? Questioner: You observe it in its entirely. Krishnamurti: Wait, Sir, that statement may answer all our questions. You observe it in its entirety. What does that mean? Not just one habit, like scratching, or fiddling with your fingers, but the whole mechanism of habits. The whole of it, not a fragment of it. Now, how does the mind watch the whole of the habits in which it lives? Questioner: With passive awareness or passive observation. Krishnamurti: You are quoting the speaker. I'm afraid that won't do. Don't quote anybody, Sir! Questioner: Is it the mind forming the habit? Krishnamurti: Do look, Sir, that question is really quite important, if you go into it. Can the mind watch, not only a particular little habit, but be aware of this whole mechanism of forming habits. Please don't say yes, don't come to any conclusion. Look what is implied in this question. There are not only small habits like fiddling with one's fingers, but also sexual habits, habits of patterns of thought, various activities. I think this, I conclude this, and that has become a habit. I live in habits, my whole life is a structure of habits. How is the mind to be aware of the entire mechanism of habit? One has a thousand and one habits, the way you brush your teeth, comb your hair, the way you read, the way you walk. One of the habits is wanting to become famous, wanting to become important. How is the mind to become aware of all these habits? Is it to become aware of one habit after another? Do you know how long that would take? I could spend the rest of my days watching each habit and yet not solve it. I'm going to learn about it, I'm going to find out, I'm not going to leave it. I am asking, is it possible for the mind to see the whole network of habits? How is it to do it? Don't guess, don't come to a conclusion, don't offer an explanation - I'm not interested, it doesn't mean a thing to say, `Go and do something'. I want to learn about it now. What do I do? Questioner: Can one be aware of the waste of energy in pursuing a particular pattern of habit - or many patterns - and thereby liberate oneself? Krishnamurti: I've come to all of you and I say: Please help me to find this out. I'm hungry, don't give me a menu, but give me food! I am asking: what will you do? Questioner: Understand one habit, totally, then possibly one could discard all habits. Krishnamurti: How do I watch one habit, which is twiddling my fingers, and see all the other habits? Is that possible with such a small affair? I know I do it because of tension. I can,t get on with my wife, and so I develop this peculiar habit, or I do it because I am nervous, shy, or this or that. But I want to learn about the whole network of habits. Am I to do it bit by bit, or is there a way of looking at this whole network instantly? Please answer me. Questioner: The structure of habits consists of two parts.... Krishnamurti: There are two parts, the habits, and the observer who is concerned with those habits. And the observer is also a habit. So both are habits. I fiddle with my fingers and the observation comes from an entity which is also the result of habits. Obviously! So it is all habits. Please, Sirs, how will you help me, teach me, to learn about it? Questioner: My whole life is habit, my mind is a habit, it is the state of mind that I have to change. Krishnamurti: Who is the `I' that is going to change it? The `I' is also a habit, the `I' is a series of words and memories and knowledge, which is the past, which is a habit. Questioner: As we are all caught in habits, we obviously don't know. Krishnamurti: Therefore why don't you say, `I don't know', instead of throwing in a lot of words? If you don't know, then let's learn together. But first be clear that you don't know; and don't quote anybody. Are we in the position to say, `I really don't know'? Questioner: But why do we have these habits? Krishnamurti: It's fairly simple. If I have a dozen habits, get up every morning at eight o'clock, go to the office, come back home at six o'clock, take a drink, and so on, I don't have to think very much, be alive very much. The mind likes to function in grooves, in habits: it is safe, secure. That doesn't need a great deal of explanation. Now how is the mind to observe this whole network of habits? Questioner: Maybe we can pay attention every moment, as far as our energies allow. Krishnamurti: You see, that is just an idea. I am not interested. Sir, you made a statement, which was: can the mind see the whole structure and nature of the mechanism of habit and when it sees the totality, there may be a different action. That's what we are enquiring into - may I go into it now? We are going to find out together. How is the mind, including the brain, to see something totally? not only habit, but see anything totally. We see things fragmentarily, don't we? Business, family, community, individuals, my opinion and your opinion, my God, your God we see everything in fragments. Isn't that a fact? Are you aware of it? If the seeing is fragmentary, then you cannot see the totality. If I see life in fragments because my mind is conditioned, then obviously it cannot see the totality of the human being. If I separate myself through my ambition, through my particular prejudices, I cannot see the whole. Am I aware that I am looking at life partially - the `me' and the `not-me', `we' and`they'? Do I look at life that way? If I do, then obviously I can't see anything totally. Then arises my question: how is the mind, which is so caught up in this habit of a fragmentary outlook and activity, to see the whole? Obviously it can't. If I am concerned with my particular fulfilment, ambition, competition and my desire to achieve, I can't see the whole of mankind. So what am I to do? Wanting to fulfil, wanting to be somebody, wanting to achieve something is a habit: a social habit as well as a habit that gives me pleasure. When I go down the street people look at me and say, `There he goes'. That gives me great pleasure. As long as the mind is operating in that field of fragmentation, obviously it can't see the whole. Now my question is: what is the mind to do, functioning in fragments and realizing that it cannot possibly see the whole? Is it to break down every fragment, understand every fragment? That would take a long time. Are you waiting for an answer from the speaker? Questioner: There must be total silence. Krishnamurti: Oh, he is quoting somebody. Questioner: If we could see all our habits right now, as they ar are really happening and see the process which is preventing us from seeing this actually now... Krishnamurti: We are doing that, aren't we? You don't go any further, you go back over and over again. I am caught in a habit now; I fiddle with my fingers, I listen to what is being said with my mouth open and I see that it is habit; my question is: can I understand this whole machinery of habit now. You don't pay attention. Look, Sir, a mind that is in fragments cannot possibly see the whole. So I take one habit and through learning about that one habit, I see the whole mechanism of all habits. What habit shall I take? Questioner: Smoking.... Krishnamurti: All right. I am not analysing: do you understand the difference between analysis and observation? Analysis implies the one who analyses and the thing to be analysed. The thing to be analysed is smoking and to analyse that, there must be an analyser. The difference between analysis and observation is this: observation is seeing directly, without analysis, seeing without the observer, seeing the red, pink, or black dress as it is, without saying I don't like it. Do you follow? In seeing there is no observer. I see the colour red and there is no like or dislike, there is observation. Analysis implies, `I don't like red because my mother who quarrelled with my father...' taking it back to my childhood. So analysis implies an analyser. Please realize that there is a division between the analyser and the thing analysed. In observation there is no division. There is obser- vation without the censor, without saying, `I like', `I don't like',`this is beautiful',`this is not beautiful', `this is mine', `this is not mine'. You have to do this, not just theorize about it, then you'll find out. As I said, we are not analysing, we are merely observing the habit of smoking. In observing, what is revealed? not your interpretation of what it shows. Do you see the difference? There is no interpretation, there is no translation, no justification, no condemnation. What does the habit of smoking reveal? Questioner: It reveals that you are drawing smoke into your lungs. Krishnamurti: That is one fact. Second, what does it tell you? It is going to tell you the history of smoking, if you don't interpret. If you can listen, if you can watch smoking, the picture is going to tell you all it wants. Now what does it tell you? - that you are drawing a lot of smoke into your lungs? What else? Questioner: That you are dependent. Krishnamurti: Is shows you that you are dependent on a weed. Questioner: That inside you are empty. Krishnamurti: That is your translation. What does it tell you? Questioner: I see that it is just a mechanical thing, I don't think much about it I just do it. Krishnamurti: It tells you that you are doing something mechanically. It tells you that when you first smoked it made you sick; it was not pleasant, but as other people did it, so you did it. Now it has become a habit. Questioner: Doesn't it tell you that it tranquilizes you to a certain extent? Krishnamurti: It tells you that it puts you to sleep, helps you to drug your self, it quietens your nerves, cuts your appetite, so that you don't get fat. Questioner: It tells you are bored with life. Krishnamurti: It tells you that it makes you relax when you meet others and feel nervous. It has told you a lot. Questioner: It tells me that I am inattentive. Krishnamurti: That is your translation - it is not telling you that you are inattentive. Questioner: It gives me a certain satisfaction, especially after supper. Krishnamurti: Yes, it helps you, it is telling you all this. And why are you doing it? Just listen, Sir - don't answer me so quickly please. Why are you accepting all that it has revealed to you? Television tells you what to do, what kind of soap to buy and all the rest of it. You have all seen those commercials! You are being told all the time - why do you accept it? The sacred books tell you what you should do and what you should not do. Why do you accept the propaganda of churches or politicians? Questioner: Because it is easier to follow a system. Krishnamurti: Why do you follow it? Is it for the sake of security? To feel companionship with others? To be like the rest of the people? Which means, you are frightened not to be like other people. You want to be like everybody else, because in that there is perfect safety. If you are a non-Catholic in a Catholic country you find it very difficult. If you are in a Communist country and don't follow the party-line, you'll find it difficult. Now look what the picture of that weed has revealed and why I am caught in the habit. It is the interrelationship between the cigarette and me. This is habit, this is the way my whole mind is working: I do something because it is safe. I get into a habit - trivial or important because I don't have to think about it any more. So my mind feels that it is safe to function in habits. I see the whole mechanism of this habit-formation. Through the one habit of smoking, I have discovered the whole pattern; I have discovered the machinery that is producing habits. Questioner: I didn't quite understand how through listening to one habit you can see the whole mechanism of habit. Krishnamurti: I've shown it to you, Sir. Habit implies functioning mechanically and from the observation of the mechanical habit of smoking, I see how the mind functions in habits. Questioner: But are all habits mechanical? Krishnamurti: They must be - the moment you use the word habit, it must be mechanical. Questioner: Aren't there deeper dependencies than just mechanical habits? Krishnamurti: The moment we use the word habit, it implies mechanical repetition - establishing a habit which means doing the same thing over and over again. So there is no good or bad habit: we are concerned only with habit. Questioner: If I have the habit of power, or the habit of comfort for instance, or the habit of property, isn't that something deeper than just a mechanical habit? Krishnamurti: The habit of power, the demand for power, position, domination, aggression, violence - all that is implied in the desire for power. To do what one wants to do, like a child, or like a grown-up man; that has become a habit. Questioner: Or wanting security... Krishnamurti: I said it gives you safety and so on. In examining that one habit I have seen that all the other habits are based on that. Since habits are mechanical, repetitive, when I say, `I would like to be a great man', then I become caught because in that habit I find security and I pursue that. Deep down - we are not discussing good or bad habits, only habit - all habits are mechanical. Anything that I do repetitively, which is doing something from yesterday to today to tomorrow, must be function a little more smoothly, but it is still habit, is still repetitive - that's obvious. Questioner: Would you say that certain creative efforts are habits? Krishnamurti: Let's answer that question. Would you say creativeness is a habit? Questioner: Creativity implies freshness. One can't make an effort to be creative. Krishnamurti: Are you saying all this because you are creative or are you just guessing at it? One has to ask what you mean by creativeness. This is a tremendous question - and you brush it aside. You paint a picture; either you do it because you love painting, or because it brings you money, or you want to find some original way of painting and so on. What does it mean to be creative? A man who writes a poem because he can't get on with his wife or with society, is he creative? The man who is attached to his violin and makes a lot of money out of it, is he creative? And the man who is in great tension in himself, and out of that tension produces plays of which the world says,`How marvellous' - would you call that creative? The man who drinks and out of that writes a marvellous poem full of rhythm - is he creative? Questioner: How can you judge? Krishnamurti: I am not judging. Questioner: But that is the question you pose. If I say someone is or isn't creative, I am judging. Krishnamurti: I am not judging, Sir, I am asking, I am learning, I look at all the people who write books, who write poems or plays, who play the violin. I see this in front of me, I don't say: this is good, this is bad; I say: what is creativeness? The moment I say, `This is right' I am finished, then I can't learn. And I want to learn, I want to find out what it means to be creative. Questioner: Perhaps it is to have an innocent universality... Krishnamurti: I don't know perhaps I want to find out, I want to learn. Questioner: It is to be alive. Krishnamurti: I go to a museum and see all those pictures, admire them, compare them and I say, `What marvellously creative people they are'. So I want to find out what it is to be creative. Must I write a poem, paint a picture, write a play, to be creative? Which means, does creativeness demand expression? Please listen carefully. Is the woman who bakes bread in a hot kitchen creative? Questioner: We generally call these activities creative. Krishnamurti: I am questioning it. I don't say they are not - I don't know. I want to learn. Questioner: If I make bread and I have never done it before - I'm creative. Krishnamurti: I am asking you, Sir, what is creativeness. Questioner: We are creative at this moment. Krishnamurti: No, no. Observing all the things man has called creative I ask myself, what is creativeness? Must it have an expression? - like baking bread, painting a picture, writing a play, making money. Does it demand expression? Questioner: Yes, I think we are being creative now. Krishnamurti: That is not my point. My point is, whether you are creative or merely listening to somebody who points out all this. Questioner: I think you create when you observe uncritically. Krishnamurti: Not `I think'. You see, Sir, I passionately want to find out. Questioner: The moment you see that you are attached, in that very moment you see and act. That is the moment of creation. Krishnamurti: Therefore you are saying, seeing is acting and at that moment there is creation. That is a definition. Questioner: Is not creativity one's harmony with Nature. Krishnamurti: Are you in harmony with nature? You miss the point. I want to find out, I am hungry, I have observed all the great painters, I have seen all the great plays and so on. I ask what is creation? What is it to be creative? Do not give a definition, I want to learn! Questioner: Doing something new is creative. Krishnamurti: What does that mean? Something totally new and fresh, without a decision? That means the past must end. Has it ended with you? Or are you just talking about creation as you talk about a book. If you are, I don't want to play a part in it. I want to learn, I am passionate, I want to shed tears over it! One can live creatively without doing any of these things, neither baking bread, painting a picture, or writing a poem. You can only do that when the mind is non-fragmentary, when there is no fear, when the mind is free of all the implications of the past, when the mind is free of the known. Questioner: For me, creativity isn't a thing, it's a movement. Krishnamurti: Not for you, Sir, nor for me - you are all making it personal. It is not an opinion. I am hungry and you feed me with a lot of words. Which means, you are not hungry. Yesterday, after talking about attachment, I was watching it; the mind was watching all day, whether it was attached to anything, to sitting on a platform, talking, wanting to tell people, writing something, or being attached to a person, to ideas, to a chair. One has to find out and in finding out one discovers enormous things, the beauty of freedom and the love that comes out of that freedom. When we are talking of creation, it means a mind that has no aggression. So to find out about the machinery, the network of habit, one has to be aware, go into it, let it flow through you, like that river which is moving. Let this enquiry carry you all day and you will discover enormous things. 4th August 1970. IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART II CHAPTER 4 4TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 5TH AUGUST 1970 Krishnamurti: We have been talking about attachment, which inevitably leads to fear. And we talked about the various forms of fear; both the conscious and the unconscious fear one has. We are asking whether one can see the whole network of fears and escapes without analysis but rather observe them without any analytical process at all. I think we ought to go into this matter very deeply because a mind that is not free from fear and the different forms of escape from that fear will inevitably be crippled, made unintelligent, even though it may follow various systems of meditation and so on, which is utterly childish and immature, as long as there is not complete freedom from fear. So could we go into it much more deeply and find out and learn about the mind? Not only about the superficial layers but also penetrate the deep, hidden layers of the mind in which there are fears. As most people are attached to something or other, that attachment indicates an escape from one's own loneliness, one's own frustrations, emptiness and shallowness. Now when one is aware of this whole movement of fear which is a movement away from the fact of emptiness - can one see this total process as a whole and not partially? That is what we are talking about. To see something whole, the fragmentary process of the mind that seeks success must come to an end. `I want to be free from fear in order to achieve something else', or `I will follow certain systems of meditation in order to arrive at enlightenment; `I will discipline, control, shape myself in order to see something most extraordinary.' Such a way of thinking, living and acting is fragmentary. I don't know if we see all that clearly. Can we look at the network of fear from which our whole being runs away, and the various escapes from it? Can we see these complicated, very subtle forms of escapes which are the very nature of fear? Can we see that to act from any form of conclusion is fragmentary, because it stops further learning; you may have started to learn, but the moment there is a conclusion from that learning it becomes fragmentary. What makes for fragmentation? We have discussed fear when we find ourselves attached to something and the cultivation of detachment in order to overcome fear. That is fragmentary thinking. What is it that makes for fragmentation in our life? Please Sirs, don't draw any conclusions from what you hear. I really want to communicate with you to tell you that one can become completely, r, totally and utterly free of fear; not only of the biological, physical fears, but of the deep down psychological fears. Fear is a form of fragmentation. Attachment is a form of fragmentation. And seeing attachment, the attempt to be detached is a movement in fragmentation. I am attached to my family; then I discover that causes pain or pleasure. If it is painful I want to detach myself from it and fight attachment. So it is a movement in fragmentation and therefore there is no resolution in that fragmentation. What is the basis, the mechanism, of this fragmentation in life? Not only inwardly but outwardly - this breaking up into different nationalities, religions, practices? Through one of these fragments one hopes to arrive at a synthesis, at a completeness, at enlightenment whatever you like to call it. That is, through fragmentation you hope to achieve nonfragmentary mind. Is that possible? The yogis, the rishis and the various gurus promise all these things. So one has to find out why fragmentation comes into being, what its mechanism is. Not conclude verbally or intellectually, what the process of it is, but actually see the whole mechanism of it non-analytically. I don't know if I am conveying this to you? If I am not, please let's stop and discuss it. Questioner: These wise men, these rishis as you call them, aren't they enlightened men? Krishnamurti: What do you think? You are asking my opinion? Only fools give opinions! (Laughter) How do you know who is enlightened? You never ask that. I may sit on the platform and say I am the wisest, most enlightened, most divine human being, but how do you know? This is what is happening in the world. A man comes and makes these assertions, says do certain things and you will have enlightenment. `I have got it, I will give it to you.' How do you know whether he is enlightened? Why do you bother about who is enlightened or who is not enlightened? Questioner: You can experience yourself if you do certain things, you can have a method. Krishnamurti: No, Sir, there is no method. We are not showing you a method at all, we are learning. Learning is not a method; you can learn through a method, but it only conditions the mind to that particular system. If you are learning, you observe. If you observe that one system conditions the mind and makes it mechanical, then all systems are the same; you learn what a system does. Through some system you can have a most extraordinary experience, but it is still a very limited experience this is so obvious. Questioner: Couldn't it be that to start off with, you could use a system, just to get an idea of it, even if it is only partial, and then from there go on to get the big thing. Krishnamurti: Wouldn't it be helpful to begin with the crutches and later on throw them off? Our question is, why do you hold on to any strings when you can observe, learn from watching yourself the whole phenomenon of existence and go beyond it? Sir, you want to be helped; if I may point out most respectfully that is the greatest impediment. You have the idea somebody can teach you, therefore you begin right off with a fragmentation; this division is a fragmentation - you and the teacher, you and the enlightened being - obviously there is a division. Questioner: But aren't you teaching? Krishnamurti: Am I? From the beginning the speaker has said there is no teacher and no disciple. He has been saying this for forty-five years, not out of foolishness or as a reaction, but because he perceived the truth that nobody can teach enlightenment to another through any system, nor through meditation, nor through any discipline. One saw that forty-five years ago. And you ask: are you a teacher or not? I've shown it to you. A teacher implies one who has accumulated knowledge and transmits it to another; like a professor and a student. We are not in that relationship here at all. We are learning together, we have made that very clear. All communication means learning together, creating together, watching together. If that is understood then our communication is entirely different. But if you have a feeling that because the speaker sits on the platform he knows better, he is the enlightened one, I say: please don't attribute things to the person who is sitting on the platform. You know nothing about enlightenment. If you knew it or if you understood it, lived it, you wouldn't be here. It is one of the most extraordinary things to find out, to learn about; not `to be taught' - you don't pay a hundred dollars to be taught this. Just to think - paying money to learn the truth! What are you all doing? So, Sirs, we are trying to find out, to learn what is implied in fragmentation. The teacher and the disciple - that is a fragmentation. The higher self and the lower self, the soul and the body, this constant division. Questioner: Thought is only capable of giving attention to one thing at a time. Are you saying that thought is the cause of fragmentation? If thought can only give attention to that and discard all the rest, then thought must breed fragmentation; the very process of thinking is fragmentation. Krishnamurti: We are going to learn about it - please don,t draw a conclusion. I am asking why we live in fragmentation, how does it happen? And what is behind the demand for this fragmentation? Let's take a very simple fact. You are the teacher and I am the disciple; why is there this division between you and me? Do I want to learn, or do I want to follow the authority which you represent, which you have invested in yourself? You say you know, you are enlightened. And I want to have that, I am greedy, I want something that will give me happiness. So I follow you, the teacher, as the disciple; fragmentation exists when I follow you. I have never asked why I follow you. What is the reason, what is the basis of accepting you as my authority? You may be a crazy neurotic, you may have had some little experiences which you have blown up to be a tremendous thing, and I am incapable of judging because you fascinate me by your beard or your eyes, or whatever it is, and I just follow. Whereas I want to learn, I won't accept you as the authority, because the moment you become the authority you have already brought about fragmentation. Please do see that. It doesn't matter whether it is the spiritual, or the political, or the military authority. The moment there is the assumption of authority - the assumption that you know and I don't know - there is fragmentation. And that will inevitably lead to conflict between you, the teacher, and me. Is this clear? So that means I will never follow anybody. Questioner: If he does good to you, Sir, why shouldn't you do it? Isn't it better to have something fragmentary than nothing? Krishnamurti: The teacher tells me something and I do it and in the doing of it I have great delight, great pleasure; I have understood. What is implied in that? My craving for experience, my craving to understand - not myself, but what the guru is saying. If the guru said, `Understand yourself" that is far more important than anything else. Don't try to understand me, but understand yourself. You would rather follow than understand yourself! So why is there this fragmentation? Questioner: Because we are made of fragmentary processes, our faculties are fragmentary. Each faculty has a partial activity. Krishnamurti: You have a faculty for engineering. Why should fragmentation arise from that faculty? I have a faculty for playing the piano. Why should that bring about a fragmentation? Aren't you putting the cart before the horse? Is it the faculty that brings about fragmentation, or is the mind broken up and using one of the fragments, one of the faculties and therefore further strengthening the division? Do you understand what I am saying? I want to learn about this fragmentation. If I could once solve that, my action would be altogether different, it would be nonfragmentary; so I must find out. I am not going to come to any conclusion or start with any conclusion. There is fragmentation -the teacher and the disciple, the authority, the follower, the man who says he is enlightened, the man who says, `I don,t know', the Communist, the Socialist why? How does it happen? If I could really understand it, learn all about it, I would be finished with it. Then my relationship with another will be entirely different, then my activities will be total each time. So I must learn about it. What do you say, Sirs? Questioner: We live in expectation and desire. Krishnamurti: We live in expectation, and that very expectation is a form of fragmentation. What are you expecting? Is that the real reason for fragmentation? It is one of the effects of fragmentation, like wanting success. Is wanting success the effect of my fragmentation? That is tremendously important. I want success -through painting or writing, through this or that. So what is the basis of this fragmentation? Questioner: It is because each of our faculties is limited, our view is limited, our senses and our intelligence are limited; one has not the possibility of seeing the whole at once. Krishnamurti: My view is in one direction only, if I had eyes at the back of my head I would see the whole thing. Is that what we are discussing? And saying my view is limited? Of course my physical view is limited, I can't see the whole Alpine range -perhaps I could if I went up in an aeroplane. But surely that is not what we are discussing? We are discussing why the mind, the brain, divides. Questioner: It is not possible to think of the whole world at once. Krishnamurti: So you are saying, fragmentation exists as long as there is thought, which cannot think about the whole thing at once; that is the cause of fragmentation. Questioner: Yes, our communication with other people is also fragmentary; right now we are thinking about self-knowledge and not about mountain climbing. You can't put everything together. Krishnamurti: Now let's be clear what we are talking about. Not climbing the mountain - as you point out, Sir - or having eyes at the back of the head. But we are talking of our mind, of our ways of thinking, looking, listening, coming to conclusions. Why is there this process which inevitably brings about fragmentation? That is what we are discussing. Questioner: Discussing all this is already fragmentary. Krishnamurti: So discussing this very issue is a fragmentation. But we are asking why this fragmentation exists. Why can't I communicate with you completely and you convey to me completely? Let's find out, let's go into this slowly. What is the process, the mechanism, the cause of this fragmentation? Questioner: Because we cling to our ideas about ourselves and to our ideas about certain things. Krishnamurti: Yes, we cling to a conclusion, and that is the reason of fragmentation. Why do we cling to a conclusion? Questioner: I still think it is due to communication. For instance, at school you receive lessons in French and English and Geography. From the beginning education is fragmentary. Krishnamurti: You are saying, our education is fragmentary and therefore our mind is already conditioned from childhood by this fragmentation. Questioner: The process of thinking is to form conclusions; you can't think without forming a conclusion. Krishnamurti: So you are all saying, in more or less different words, that thought is the source of all fragmentation. Questioner: Thought is a fragment of ourselves. Krishnamurti: Yes, thought, which is thinking, is fragmentary. It is a fragment of ourselves. Questioner: The result of all our thinking our conclusions, must result in further fragmentation. Krishnamurti: That's right, Sir. So you are saying to me, who am learning as you are learning, that thought is the source of all fragmentation. Find out, don't say yes or no. Thought is the result, or the response of memory and memory is the past. And that memory of the past is always divided - obviously. The past, today and tomorrow; the past experience, the present experience and the future. The past that says, `I haven't learnt, I don't know, and I am going to learn from you'. Isn't that the of cause of fragmentation? What do you say, Sirs? Questioner: You already said so when you were speaking about time. The awareness of time is taking our attention away from the present so it divides. Krishnamurti: Time divides surely. What is time? Find out, Sir. There is chronological time: I have to go to the station to catch a train which goes at a certain time. And there is time as achievement, as success, as `you know', `I don't know', `I'm going to learn'. All that involves psychological time. That is, thought says, `I am going to learn step by step'. Gradually I am to climb all the steps and eventually come to that marvellous state; so there is a division created by thought which wants success. The success not being money this time, but enlightenment or faith. So are you saying that thought is the mechanism that brings about this fragmentation? The thought that has said, `You are a Hindu', `You are a Catholic', `You are brown', `You are black', and `You are pink'. Thought has conditioned the values of a particular society and culture, which says everybody who does not belong to that culture is a barbarian. This is all clear, isn't it? If thought is responsible for this fragmentation, what are you going to do about it? I have to earn a livelihood - I have to in order to live, I have a family. And also there is `me', with my problems, with my ambitions, with my successes. So there is the livelihood, there is the family, there is the function and the desire to derive status from that functioning and the me - all fragmented. Now what am I to do? I see thought is responsible for all this. Is that so or not? We are learning if the speaker is wrong, tell him, find out! Questioner: But we are thinking all the time, we are thinking at this very moment. Krishnamurti: Wait, we are going to find out. That is the whole point. We are thinking and we say, `I have to earn a livelihood, there is the family, enjoyment, success, wanting to find enlightenment, the guru, authority, all that,. And there is me muddling through all this. And you tell me that thought is responsible for this. I have thoughts which have brought about a certain culture and that culture has conditioned me. Thought has done this and thought also has to earn a livelihood. Thought says you must earn money for your family, for your children. So thought is responsible for it. Are you sure you are right? Don't say afterwards it is not like that be quite sure, learn. Questioner: One has the feeling that there is something even behind thought. Krishnamurti: We'll come to that. First see what we are dealing with. But you can't come to what is behind thought without understanding the whole machinery of thought; otherwise you'll be merely escaping from thought. Now is that the truth not your truth or my truth, not my personal opinion or your opinion is it the fact, that thought divides? Thought divides the living now and dying tomorrow. I will die tomorrow, but thought says, `You'll die', `You'll get frightened!' Or thought says, `That was a marvellous pleasure, I must have more of it'. And thought says, `I am frightened of what I have done, be careful, don't let it occur again don't let it be discovered'. So thought is breeding fear, pain and pleasure. Thought divides. That is the truth, whether you see it or not. So knowing thought brings about fragmentation and therefore sustains division - what are you going to do? Questioner: Does thought itself divide, or is it the way we use our thoughts? Krishnamurti: Who is the `we'? Who is the `I' that uses thought which divides? Don't come to any conclusion, first listen to what the speaker is saying. Livelihood has to be earned so thought must be employed there. I come back home and thought says, `my family', `my responsibility'. Or it says, `I have great pleasure in sex', `I am in great pain my wife may run away'. Thought is in operation all the time, breeding fragmentation - the teacher, the disciple, the success. What are you going to do, knowing that thought brings about fragmentation, which means fear, which means conflict? Fragmentation means that there will be no peace whatsoever. You may talk about peace, join an organization that promises peace, but there will be no peace as long as there is fragmentation by thought. So faced with that fact, what is going to happen? Questioner: I identify myself with the thought. Krishnamurti: Who is the `I' who identifies itself with thought? Has not thought created the `I'? The `I' being my experiences, my knowledge, my success - which is all the product of thought. And if you say it is the higher self, God, it is still thought; you have thought about God. So what will you do? Questioner: Thought must end. Krishnamurti: How is it to end? Listen, Sir, thought must operate when you do something mechanical, even to drive a car. You say thought must end altogether. Then you can't earn a livelihood, you can't go home, you won't be able to speak. Sir, watch yourself, find out, learn about this! Thought must be used and thought also sees that it breeds fragmentation. So what is thought to do? Questioner: It seems that we come to this point in almost every discussion. My question is: is that a question that can be answered? Krishnamurti: We're going to find out. Questioner: I become afraid, because I see the deadlock of it. Krishnamurti: Now knowing that you don't know what to do, will you learn Sir? Questioner: If it is possible. Krishnamurti: Why do you say `if it is possible'? My question is not whether it is possible or not, but I said, `Will you learn about this?' To learn - what does it imply? Curiosity doesn't it? Don't disagree casually. Are you eager, passionate to learn about this? Because this may solve all our problems. Therefore you must be intense, curious, passionate to find out. Are you? Or are you going to say, `I am going to wait, so far I have functioned with conclusions, I'll form another conclusion and act from that'. If you want to learn, these three things are absolutely necessary: curiosity, eagerness and you must have energy; that energy gives you the passion to find out, to learn. Do you have these things? Or do you just want to talk about this casually? Questioner: Is it one-pointedness? Krishnamurti: No Sir, learning is not one-pointed learning. Learning means to have a mind that wants to learn, that wants to find out; like a child that says, `I want to know what the mountain is made of'. Questioner: I may become attached to learning. Krishnamurti: Sir, why do you translate what has been said into your own words? I said one must have a great deal of energy, one must be curious to find out, and one must be persistent; not just one minute be full of curiosity and the next say, `Sorry, I'm too tired, I'm bored, I want to go out and smoke'. Then you can't learn. Questioner: I have a need for certainty. I am afraid if I have no certainty. Krishnamurti: Listen to that question: `I will learn if it guarantees me complete certainty for the rest of my life'. Questioner: This fragmentation gives me a feeling of security and I need this illusion. Krishnamurti: And you come along and disturb my security! I am therefore frightened, I don't want to learn. This is what you are all doing! I have found great delight in writing a book and I know I function from fragmentation, but that book gives me fame, money, position. Don't talk to me, the house is burning, but don't disturb me! Let's proceed from this. If thought is the source of all fragmentation and yet thought has to be used, what is to take place? How is thought not to function and yet to function? Thought is responsible for fragmentation and all conclusions are fragmentations. Please see that. `I must be secure', `I am frightened of uncertainty'. But there may be a way of living which will give you physical security - which is what you want - yet psychological freedom. That freedom will bring about complete physical security, but you don't see this; so we are going to learn. If thought is responsible for fragmentation and yet thought must function in order to survive, then what is thought to do? Do you understand my question? If you don't understand it, please let's go into this question itself. I must use thought to go from here to where I live, to earn money, to go to my job and function there properly. And yet thought itself sees that it is the cause of fragmentation and therefore conflict. Thought sees it must function, and thought sees itself bringing about fragmentation. Questioner: Is seeing the fragmentation actually a linkage between the fragments? Krishnamurti: No Sir, it is not a linkage, you cannot put fragments together and make them a whole. The many spokes of the wheel don't make the wheel it's how you put the spokes together that makes the wheel. Questioner: As we have to use thought, and as we don't want fragmentation, can't we just become conscious of the tendency of thought to produce this fragmentation? Krishnamurti: If you are conscious that thought brings about fragmentation, the very consciousness of this whole precess brings about a different quality altogether. Is that what you are saying? Is that what is happening to you? Be careful Sir, go very slowly into this. Thought must be exercised, and thought also realizes that it breeds fragmentation and therefore conflict and fear and all the misery in the world. Yet thought itself you are suggesting - must be conscious of this whole process. Now see what happens. We said thought is the basis of fragmentation; therefore when thought becomes conscious of itself and how it breeds fragmentation, thought divides itself into this and into that. Questioner: We must use thought and must be conscious of the sort of thought which is causing fragmentation. Krishnamurti: Go into this slowly. What do you mean by that word `conscious'? Questioner: To see. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by `seeing'? Do you see this process mechanically? Because you have heard the words, you have intellectually understood, and you see with the intention of applying these words and the intellectual conclusion to seeing. Be careful, don't say `no'. Are you seeing with a conclusion or are you merely seeing? Have you understood? Questioner: At the point where you were asking this question, were you yourself actually asking the question? Because it seems to me, that if there is a question at this point, it is again a fragmentation. Krishnamurti: The lady suggests, if you are asking the question, then you are again beginning a fragmentation. Questioner: And if so, what has this whole investigation been? What validity has it had? Krishnamurti: I'll explain it to you. You come to this point and ask the question. And the lady says, `Who is asking this question?' Is it thought that is asking the question? If it is, then it is again a fragmentation. I am asking it because you are not learning. Therefore I am going to find out. I have this picture - the mind sees that much - how thought has fragmented; thought must function and sees this. If you really see this completely, there is no more question. You can only see this if there is no conclusion, no desire to solve it, to go beyond it. Only when you see this whole mechanism of thought completely how it operates, how it functions, what is behind all this - then the problem is solved. Then you are functioning all the time non-fragmentarily; even though you go to the office, it is a non-fragmentary action if you see the whole of it. If you don't then you divide into the office, the family, the you, the me. Now, do you see the whole of it? Questioner: Sir, are you suggesting it is possible to carry on a non-dualistic life and still function in society? Krishnamurti: I am showing it to you, Sir, if you see this whole mechanism of thought, not just one part of it, the whole nature and structure and the movement of it. Questioner: How can you learn it more quickly? Krishnamurti: By listening now! You see, again there is the desire to achieve! That means you are not listening at all; your eyes, your ears, are fixed on getting somewhere. So, Sir, my question then is, asking as a friend, do you see this whole thing? And the friend says: `You must see it, otherwise you're going to live a terrible, miserable existence you'll have wars, you'll have such sorrow - for God's sake see this!, And why don't you? What is preventing you? Your ambition? Your laziness? The innumerable conclusions that you have? Now, who is going to answer it? Questioner (1): Why answer it? Just do it. Questioner (2): I know I have conclusions, but I can't get rid of them, they go on. Questioner (3): How can we ever be secure? Krishnamurti: It is the same old question. Tell me how to be secure; that is the everlasting question of man. Questioner: Maybe it is good to become more aware that we are living now and not yesterday or last year. A lot of our attention is taken away by living in the past and dreaming of the future. Krishnamurti: Can you live in the present? Which means living a life that has no time. Questioner: Physically, I am alive. Krishnamurti: I am asking you, Sir, can one live in the present? To live in the present there must be no time, no past, no future, no success, no ambition. Can you do it? Questioner: Just a bit. (Laughter) The very process of building something, let's say a house, means there must be a programme. Krishnamurti: Of course, Sir. To build a house you must have an architect, the architect makes a design, and the contractor builds according to that plan. In the same way, we want a plan. You are the architect, give me the plan and I will function according to that plan. Questioner: I wasn't saying that. I said we want to build a house which is a concrete thing to do. We must plan certain things... Krishnamurti: So you use thought. Questioner: So we cannot live only in the present. Krishnamurti: I never said that, Sir. When you look at this question really carefully, you will never ask, `How am I to live in the present?'. If you see the nature and the structure of thought very clearly, then you will find that you can function from a state of mind that is always free from all thought, and yet use thought. That is real meditation, Sir, not all the phoney stuff. Now the mind is so crowded with the known, which is the product of thought. The mind is filled with past knowledge, past experience, the whole of memory which is part of the brain - it is filled with the known. I may translate the known in terms of the future or in terms of the present, but it is always from the known. It is this known that divides, `knowing the past', `I don't know', `I shall know'. This past, with all its reservoir of memory says, `Do this, don't do that', `This will give you certainty, that will give you uncertainty'. So when this whole mind, including the brain, is empty of the known, then you will use the known when it is necessary, but functioning always from the unknown - from the mind that is free of the known. Sir, this happens, it's not as difficult as it sounds. If you have a problem, you think about it for a day or two, you mull it over, and you get tired of it, you don't know what to do, you go to sleep. The next morning, if you are sensitive, you have found the answer. That is, you have tried to answer this problem in terms of what is beneficial, what is successful, what will bring you certainty, in terms of the known, which is thought. And after exercising every thought, thought says, `I'm tired'. And next morning you've found the answer. That is, you have exercised the mind, used thought to its fullest extent, and dropped it. Then you see something totally new. But if you keep on exercising thought all the time, form conclusion after conclusion - which is the known - then obviously, you never see anything new. This demands a tremendous inward awareness, an inward sense of order; not disorder, but order. Questioner: Is there not a method of procedure? Krishnamurti: Look, Sir - I get up, walk a few paces and go down the steps. Is that a method of procedure? I just get up and do it naturally, I don't invent a method first and follow it - I see it. You can't reduce everything to a method! Questioner: Can you ever empty this storehouse of impressions which you have had? Krishnamurti: You've put a wrong question. It is a wrong question because you say `Can you ever'. Who is the `you' and what do you mean by `ever'? Which means: is it possible? Sirs, look, we never put the impossible question - we are always putting the question of what is possible. If you put an impossible question, your mind then has to find the answer in terms of the impossible - not of what is possible. All the great scientific discoveries are based on this, the impossible. It was impossible to go to the moon. But if you say, `It is possible' then you drop it. Because it was impossible, three hundred thousand people cooperated and worked at it, night and day - they put their mind to it and went to the moon. But we never put the impossible question! The impossible question is this: can the mind empty itself of the known? - itself, not you empty the mind. That is an impossible question. If you put it with tremendous earnestness, with seriousness, with passion, you'll find out. But if you say, `Oh, it is possible', then you are stuck. 5th August 1970. IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART II CHAPTER 5 6TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 7TH AUGUST 1970 Krishnamurti: We are going to talk over together this morning what lies below the conscious. I do not know if you have enquired into it at all, or have merely accepted what the analysts and the psychologists have said. But if you go into it fairly deeply - as I hope we shall this morning - one or two major fundamental questions have to be asked. One has to discover, explore, learn for oneself, the whole content of consciousness. Why does one divide the unconscious and the conscious? Is it an artificial division brought about by the analysts, the psychologists, the philosophers? Is there a division at all? If one is to enquire into the whole structure and the nature of consciousness, who is it that is going to enquire? A fragment of the many fragments? Or is there an entity, an agency, that is beyond all this which looks into consciousness? Can the conscious mind, the daily operative mind, observe the contents of the unconscious or deeper layers? And what are the frontiers of consciousness? What are the limits? This is a very serious subject. I think in the understanding of it most human problems will be resolved. It isn't a thing that you take up as a hobby to study for a couple of weeks superficially and then drop it to go on with your daily life. If one is to go into this deeply, it is a way of life. It is not that you understand that and leave it there. You can only understand the whole content of consciousness and the limits of consciousness if it is a daily concern. It isn't a thing you can play with. It must be your whole life, your whole calling, your vocation. Because we are enquiring into the very depths of the human mind, not according to your opinion, or the speaker's opinion, but learning the fullness of it and seeing what lies beyond it - not just scratching the surface and thinking you have understood it. It isn't a thing that you learn from a book, or from another. Please do let us realize this: it isn't a thing that you acquire as knowledge from books and then apply it. If you do that it will have no value, it will be secondhand. And if you merely treat it as a form of intellectual, spiritual or emotional entertainment, then equally it will have no effect at all in your life. We are concerned with the fundamental revolution of the mind, of the whole structure of oneself - for the mind to free itself of all its conditioning. So that we are not just educated and sophisticated, but real, mature, deep human beings. This morning we are going to learn together, if we can, what is below the conscious, and seeing the many layers (or the one layer) to discover for ourselves the content of consciousness: whether that content makes up the conscious, or whether the conscious with its frontier contains `what is'. Does the content of consciousness make up consciousness? Do you follow? Or do all these things exist in the content? Do you see the difference? I am just investigating, I am moving slowly, so let us travel together. Don't ask me afterwards `Please repeat what you said' - I can,t. First, why is there this division between the conscious and the so-called unconscious or the deeper layers? Are you aware of this division? Or does this division exist because we have got so many divisions in our life? Which is it? Is the conscious movement a separate movement and have the deeper layers their own movement, or is this whole thing an undivided movement? This is very important for us to find out, because we have trained the conscious mind, we have drilled it, educated it, forced it, shaped it, according to the demands of society and according to our own impulses, our own aggression and so on. Is the unconscious, the deeper layer, uneducated? We have educated the superficial layers; are we educating the deeper layer? Or are the deeper layers utterly untouched. What do you say? In the deeper layers there may be the source and means of finding out new things, because the superficial layers have become mechanical, they are conditioned, repetitive, imitative; there is no freedom to find out, to move, to fly, to take to the wind! And in the deeper layers, which are not educated, which are unsophisticated and therefore extraordinarily primitive - primitive, not savage there may be the source of something new. I do not know what you feel, what you have discovered. Is the superficial mind so heavily conditioned that it has become mechanical? If I am a Hindu or Christian I function as a Hindu or Christian, or whatever it is. And below that, is there a layer which education has not touched? Or has it, and therefore the whole content of consciousness is mechanical? Are you following? Questioner: Sir, how can we know about the unconscious? Krishnamurti: All right Sir, let's begin. When we use the word `know', what do we mean by that? I am not being merely verbal, but we must move into this very carefully. What do you mean when you say, `I want to know'? Questioner: I haven't any experience of it. Krishnamurti: Keep to that one word, go into it, don't introduce other words. What do you mean by that word `know'?, When you use that word, what does it mean? `I know something that has happened yesterday.' All knowledge is the past isn't it? Don't agree please, just see. I know you because I met you yesterday. I didn't meet the whole of you, I only met you when you were saying something; therefore knowing implies within a certain period of time. So knowledge always implies the past. When I say, `I know that is an aeroplane flying', though the flying is taking place at this moment, the knowledge that it is an aeroplane is of the past. How can the superficial mind learn about the deeper layers? How can that superficial mind learn about the other? Questioner: Keep the superficial mind still, then it can learn about the deeper levels. Krishnamurti: What is there to learn in the deeper layers? You assume there is something to learn; are you actually aware of the operations of the conscious mind? How it is ticking over? What its responses are? Is there an awareness of the conscious mind? Find out how extraordinarily difficult this is. The mind has to watch this entire movement very closely. You say in the unconscious there are many things. That's what all the professionals say - are there? The moment you divide the conscious from the deeper layers, the question arises: how is this superficial mind to enquire into the other? If there is no division at all, it is a total movement in which one is only aware of a fragmentary movement. This fragmentary movement asks: what are the contents of the unconscious? If it is a total movement you won't ask this question. Is the speaker making this clear? Be quite sure, not verbally but actually. The moment you divide consciousness into fragments, one fragment says: `what are the other fragments?' But if it is a total movement then there is no fragmentation, therefore the question doesn't arise. This is really important to find out about. Then you go beyond all the specialists. Do you see consciousness as a whole, or do you see with one fragment which examines the other fragments? Do you see it partially, or wholly as a total movement, like a river that is moving? You can dig a ditch along the bank and call it the river - it isn't. In the river there is the whole movement. Then what is this movement? How is one to observe without fragmentation? Questioner: May I say something please? You speak about an unconscious mind. But is there an unconscious mind? You cannot speak about something which is not. But we can speak about the conscious. Please define conscious and unconscious. The question is: are we now unconscious? Krishnamurti: We asked this question earlier: are we aware of the frontiers of consciousness? Or are we aware of the many fragments that compose the conscious? Does one fragment become aware of the many other fragments? Or are you aware of the total movement of consciousness without any division? Questioner: Both ways are conscious. Intellectually we are dividing ourselves into parts. Krishnamurti: Please see we are not analysing. Where there is analysis there is the analyser and the thing analysed - one fragment assuming the authority of analysis and examining the other part. And in this division arise the conscious and the unconscious. Then we put the question: can the conscious mind examine the unconscious? - which implies that the conscious mind is separate from the rest. We say that from this false question you can answer this through dreams, through various forms of intimations and hints. All arising from a false assumption that the superficial mind is separate from the other; which means we have never seen or felt or learnt about the movement of consciousness as a whole. If you do, this question doesn't arise at all. I don't know if you see this? Questioner: Obviously some people are suffering from neurosis without knowing the origin of it. Isn't that in the unconscious? Krishnamurti: Do you suffer from a neurosis? Please, this is not a silly question. Are you aware that you are neurotic in some form or another? Questioner: Who decides if one is neurotic? Krishnamurti: Don't you know when you are neurotic? Has somebody got to tell you that you are neurotic? Do please listen to this. When there is any exaggeration of any fragment then neurosis takes place. When you are highly intellectual that is a form of neurosis, though the highly intellectual is greatly regarded. Holding on to certain beliefs, Christian, Buddhist, Communist, attachment to any belief, is a form of neurosis. Sir, look at it, go slowly. Hold on to your question. Any fear is a form of neurosis, any conformity is a form of neurosis, and any form of comparing yourself with something else is neurotic. Aren't you doing all this? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Therefore you are neurotic! ( Laughter) No, no, please Sir, this is very serious. We have learned something from this. Any exaggeration of any fragment of the whole consciousness as we see it - which contains many fragments - any emphasis on any fragment is a form of neurosis. Sirs, get it into your hearts, feel it, move, take time, get involved in it, apply it to yourself, and you will see the next question. As we are, we have divided consciousness; in this division there are many fragmentations, many divisions: the intellectual, emotional and so on; and any emphasis on that division is neurotic. Which means that a mind emphasizing a fragment not see clearly. Therefore the emphasis of a fragment brings about confusion. I am asking you to see for yourself whether there is not a fragmentation in you; that fragmentation laying emphasis on one thing, on its issues, on its problems, and disregarding the other fragments leads not only to conflict but to great confusion, because each fragment demands an expression, each demands an emphasis, and when you emphasize the one the others are clamouring. This clamour is confusion and out of that confusion come neurotic impulses, all forms of desire to fulfil, to become, to achieve. Questioner: Sometimes what you suffer from is not the apparent thing. If somebody doesn't dare to cross a square, it is obviously not the square he is frightened of. Or if one is afraid to be alone, it may be something in the unconscious which causes the fear. Krishnamurti: Yes. The neurosis is only a symptom, the cause could be in the unconscious. Obviously this could be so and probably is. Then what is the question? Questioner: It's a neurosis. Krishnamurti: When we have understood this whole structure, then we can go into the particular; but to start with the particular will lead nowhere. Do you see that any emphasis on the fragment is a form of neurosis? There is the intellectual, the emotional, the physical, the psychosomatic; most of us have laid stress on one aspect of the many fragments. Out of that exaggeration, out of that disharmony, other factors of disharmony arise. Such as: `I can't cross a street', or `I am frightened in the dark; and the explanation is that in my childhood my mother didn't treat me properly! Now our question is not why I can't cross the street, which I shall answer without going to the analyst, if I understand the fragmentation of consciousness. The moment I have understood that, then the problem of crossing the street doesn't exist at all. Are we meeting each other? When we see the greater, the totality, the immensity, the lesser disappears. But if we keep on emphasizing the little, then the little brings about its own little problems. Questioner: But when you talk about seeing the totality of consciousness, what does `seeing' mean? For instance, sometimes I know something but I don't know how I know it. Krishnamurti: No Sir, just look. Do you listen to the movement of that river totally? Just do it Sir. Don't speculate. Listen to that river and find out if you are listening completely, without any movement in any direction. Then after having listened, what do you say? Questioner: Recognition plays no part in it. Krishnamurti: That's right. Recognition plays no part in it. You don't say, `That is the stream to which I am listening; nor are you as an entity listening to the stream; there is only the listening to the sound. You don't say, `I know it is a river'. So let's go back. I want to go into this so much, please, let's move together. Questioner: Is the emphasis on fragmentation the essence of neurosis, or is it the symptom? Krishnamurti: It is the very essence and the symptom. Questioner: Being intellectual is the essence as well as the symptom? Krishnamurti: Isn't it? Look Sir. I emphasize my intellectual capacity. I think it is marvellous, I can beat everybody at an argument, I have read so much, I can correlate all that I have read, and I write wonderfully clever books. Isn't that the very cause and the symptom of my neurosis? Questioner: It seems to be a symptom of our deeper disturbance. Krishnamurti: Is it? You are saying that is a symptom, not the cause. I say, let's look. Is the mind whole, undivided, and therefore are the cause and the effect the same? See it, Sir. What was the cause becomes the effect, and the effect becomes the cause of the next movement; there is no definite demarcation between cause and effect. What was cause yesterday has become the effect, and the effect of today becomes the cause tomorrow. It is a movement, it is a chain. Questioner: But isn't it essential to see this whole process, rather than just cause and effect? Krishnamurti: That's what we are doing and that is not possible if you emphasize the intellectual, the emotional, the physical, the spiritual, and so on. So my question, which was the first question, is: why have we divided the mind? Is it artificial, or necessary? Is it just the invention of the specialist to which we have become slaves, which we have accepted, as we accept most things so easily? We say, `Great people say this' and we swallow it and repeat it. But when we see the fragmentation and the emphasis on this fragmentation; and when we see out of that arises the whole cause-effect chain and that it is a form of neurosis, then the mind sees the totality of the movement without division. Well Sir, do you see it? Questioner: When there is no identification with the fragment. Krishnamurti: Yes. If you identify yourself with any one of the fragments, obviously it is the same process. That is, the process of being identified with the one, and disregarding the rest, is a form of neurosis, a contradiction. Now put the next question. Can you identify yourself with the rest of the fragments? You, a fragment, identifying with the many other fragments. Do you see the tricks we are playing with this question of identification? Questioner: I can only say that after the identification with one fragment; because then I feel that I am incomplete... Krishnamurti: That's right. You feel you are incomplete, therefore you try to identify yourself with many other fragments. Now who is the entity that is trying to identify itself with the many? It is one of the fragments, therefore it is a trick - you follow? And we are doing this all the time: `I must identify myself'. Questioner: Isn't it better to identify yourself with many fragments so that you are more complete? Krishnamurti: No, not better. Look Sir, first let me explain it again. There are many fragments of which I am. One of the fragments says it brings about confusion to identify myself with a single fragment. So it says: `I'll identify myself with the many other fragments'. And it makes a tremendous effort to identify itself with the many fragments. Who is this entity that tries to identify itself with the other fragments? It is also a fragment, isn't it? Therefore it is only playing a game by itself. This is so simple! Now let's proceed, there is so much in this, we are just remaining on the very surface of it all. We see there is no actual division at all. I see it non-verbally. I feel it that the observer is a fragment which separates itself from the rest of the fragments and is observing. In that observation there is a division, as the observer and the observed, there is conflict, there is confusion. When the mind realizes this fragmentation and the futility of separating itself, then it sees the movement as a whole. If you cannot do this you cannot possibly put the next question, which is: what is beyond the conscious? What is below, above, beside? - it doesn't matter how you put it. So if you are serious, you have to find out what consciousness is and when you are aware that you are conscious. Do you understand my question? I am doing all the work! Sir, look, you have to learn about all this and when you learn you help others to learn. So learn now, for God's sake! That is your vocation. We are asking what is this thing called consciousness? When do you say, `I am conscious?' Questioner: When there is thought. Krishnamurti: Come nearer. Questioner: When there is duality. Krishnamurti: What do you mean? Come closer. You begin too far away. Questioner: When you are in fragmentation. Krishnamurti: Sir, just listen. When are you at all aware that you are conscious? Is this so very difficult? Questioner: When I am in pain. Krishnamurti: The lady suggests you are conscious when there is pain, when there is conflict, when you have a problem, when you are resisting; otherwise you are flowing smoothly, evenly, harmoniously. Living without any contradiction, are you conscious at all? Are you conscious when you are supremely happy? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Yes? Questioner: What does that word `being conscious' mean? Krishnamurti: You don t have to ask me, you'll find out. The moment you are conscious that you are happy, is happiness there? The moment you say, `How joyous I am', it has already moved away from you. Can you ever say that? Questioner: You are then conscious of that. Krishnamurti: Which is the past! So you are only conscious of something that has happened, or when there is some conflict, some pain, when there is the actual awareness that you are confused. Any disturbance in this movement is to be conscious and all our life is a disturbance against which we are resisting. If there were no discord at all in life would you say, `I am conscious'? When you are walking, moving, living without any friction, without any resistance, without any battle, you don't say `I am'. It is only when you say, `I will become, or,I am being', then you are conscious. Questioner: Isn't this state that you are talking about still a process of identification with the tree... Krishnamurti: No Sir. I explained identification. When I see a tree I don't mistake it for a woman or for the church: it is a tree. Which doesn't mean identification. Look Sir, we have discovered something, we have learned something. There is consciousness only when there is `becoming', or trying `to be something'. Becoming implies conflict: `I will be'. Which means conflict exists as long as the mind is caught in the verb `to be' please see that. Our whole culture is based on that word `to be'. `I will be a success', `I am a failure', `I must achieve', `This book is mine, it is going to change the world'. You follow? So as long as there is a movement of becoming, there is conflict and that conflict makes the mind aware that it is conscious. Or the mind says, `I must be good' not `I will be good'. To be good. Also it is a form of resistance: being good. Being and becoming are the same. Questioner: Can one be conscious of conflict? Krishnamurti: Of course Sir, otherwise you wouldn't be conscious. Questioner: Can't you be so caught up in conflict that you don't see that you are in conflict? Krishnamurti: Of course, it is a form of neurosis. Sir, look. Have you ever been to a mental hospital, any of you? I wasn't there as a patient, I was taken by an analyst, and all the patients from the top floor, where the most violent ones are caged in, down to the lowest floor where they are more or less peaceful, they are all in conflict an exaggerated conflict do you understand? Only they are inside the building and we are outside - that's all. Questioner: I am trying to distinguish between consciousness and awareness. Krishnamurti: Both are the same. Being aware implies awareness of division. To be aware without division and choice is not to be caught in the movement of becoming or being. Have you understood? The whole movement of consciousness is either to become or to be: becoming famous, becoming a social worker, helping the world. After looking at the fragmentation, after looking at the movement of consciousness as a whole, you find that this whole movement is based on that: `to become', or `to be'. You have learned it, Sir - not by agreeing with me. Then you ask a totally different question, which is: what is beyond this movement of `becoming' and `to be'? You are not asking that question. But I am asking it. Do you understand my question Sir? Looking at this problem of consciousness, both from the analytical and the philosophical point of view, I have realized that division has been created through `becoming', or `to be'. I want to be a Hindu, because it promises me not only outward success but also spiritual achievements. If I reject that, I say I must `be' something else: I am going `to be myself', identify myself with myself. Again this is the same process. So I observe, I see that the total movement of consciousness is this movement of being something, or becoming, or `not to be', or `not to become'. Now how do I see this? Do I see it as something outside myself, or do I see it without the centre, as the `me', which observes the `becoming' and the `not becoming'? Have you understood my question? No, I don't think so. I realize that all consciousness is this movement. When I say `I realize it', am I realizing it as something that I have seen outside of me, like looking at a picture hanging on the wall, spread out before me; or do I see this movement as part of me, as the very essence of me? Do I see this movement from a centre? Or do I see it without the centre? If I see it from a centre, that centre is the self, the `me', who is the very essence of fragmentation. Therefore when there is an observation from the centre, I am only observing this movement as a fragment, as something outside of me, which I must understand, which I must try to grasp, which I must struggle with and all the rest. But if there is no centre, which means there is no `me', but merely an observing of this whole movement, then that observation will lead to the next question. So which is it you are doing? Please this is not group therapy, this is not a weekend entertainment, this isn't a thing you go to learn from somebody, like `how to become sensitive', or `how to learn creative living; put all that aside. This is hard work, this needs deep enquiry. Now, how are you observing? If you don't understand this, life becomes a torture, a battlefield. In that battlefield you want to improve the cannon, you want to bring about brotherhood and yet keep to your isolation. We have played that game for so long! Therefore you have to answer this question if you are really profoundly serious. Are you watching this whole movement of consciousness, as we have seen it, as an outsider, unrelated to that which he is watching? Or is there no centre at all from which you are watching? And when you watch that way, what takes place? May we sidestep a little? All of you dream a great deal, don't you? Have you ever asked why? Not how to interpret dreams, that is an irrelevant question which we'll answer presently. But have you ever asked a relevant question, which is: why do we dream at all? Questioner: Because we are in conflict. Krishnamurti: No Sir, don't be so quick. Look at it. Why do you dream? The next question is: is there a sleep without any dream at all? Don't say `Yes', Sir. You all dream; what are those dreams, why do you dream? Dreams, as we said the other day, are the continuing movement of the daily activity, symbolized, put into various categories, but it is the same movement. Isn't that so? Don't agree or disagree, find out! It is so obvious. If dreams are a continuing movement of the daily action, then what happens to the brain if there is constant activity, constant chattering? Questioner: It never rests. Krishnamurti: What happens to it? Questioner: It gets exhausted. It wears out. Krishnamurti: It wears itself out, there is no rest, there is no seeing of anything new. The brain doesn't make itself young. All these things are implied when there is a continuous movement of daily activity, which goes on in the brain during sleep. You may foretell what might happen in the future, because while you sleep there is a little more sensitivity, a little more perception and so on; but it is the same movement. Now, can this movement, which goes on during the day, end with the day? Not be carried over when you sleep? That is, when you go to bed the whole thing is ended. Don't answer my question yet. We are going to go into it. Doesn't it happen to you when you go to bed, that you take stock of what you have done during the day? Or do you just flop into bed and go to sleep? Don't you review the day and say, this should have been done, this should not have been done? And ask yourself the meaning of this or that? Follow this very carefully. You are bringing order. The brain demands order, because otherwise it can't function efficiently. If you dream, if the movement of the daily activity goes on in your sleep, there is no order. As the brain demands order, the brain instinctively brings about order while you are asleep. You wake up a little fresher because you have a little more order. The brain cannot function efficiently if there is any form of conflict, any form of disorder. Questioner: Aren't there other kinds of dreams in which communications of a different kind are transmitted? Krishnamurti: First listen to this. Understand order. The movement of daily life continues through sleep because in this daily movement there is contradiction, there is disorder, disharmony. And during sleep, through dreams, through various forms of non-dreams, the brain tries to bring order into its own chaos. If you make order during the day, the brain does not need to put things in order during sleep. See the importance of this. Therefore the brain becomes rested, quiet, alive, fresh. I do not know if you have noticed that when you have a problem and you go on thinking it out during the day, and it is still going on during the night, you worry about it and you wake up the next morning weary of the problem; and during the next day you still worry about that problem, like a dog biting a bone. You are at it all day and still when you go to bed again; until the brain is exhausted. Then perhaps in that exhaustion you see something fresh. What we are saying is something entirely different. It is this: to end the problem as it arises, not to carry it over to the next day or to the next minute - end it! Somebody has insulted you, hurt you -end it! Somebody has deceived you, somebody has said unkind things about you. Look at it, don't carry it over, don't bear it as a burden. End it as it is being said, not afterwards. Disorder is a neurotic state of the brain and ends up by producing a mental case. Order implies the ending of the problem as it arises, and therefore the movement of the daytime through the night ends and there are no dreams, because you have solved everything as you are moving. I don't know if you see the importance of this. Because then you can ask the next question, which is: what is beyond all this? We will deal with that tomorrow. 7th August 1970. IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART II CHAPTER 6 7TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 8TH AUGUST 1970 Krishnamurti: We'll go on where we left off yesterday when we were considering the nature and the structure of consciousness. One realizes that if there is to be a radical change in the human mind, and therefore in society, we have to consider this question. We have to delve deeply into it to find out whether there is a possibility of this consciousness undergoing a metamorphosis, a complete change in itself. Because one can see that all our actions, superficial or profound, serious or flippant, are the outcome of, or born out of this consciousness. And we were saying within this consciousness there are many fragments; each fragment assuming dominance at one time or another. If one does not understand the content of consciousness - and the possibility of going beyond it any action, however significant it may be, must produce confusion without the understanding of the fragmentary nature of our consciousness. I think this must be very clear. It's like giving a great deal of attention to one fragment, like the intellect, or a belief, or the body, and so on. These fragmentations, which compose our consciousness, from which all action takes place, must inevitably bring about contradiction and misery. Is this clear at least verbally? To say to oneself, all these fragments must be put together or integrated has no meaning, because then the problem arises of who is to integrate them, and the effort of integration. So there must be a way of looking at this whole fragmentation with a mind that is not fragmented. And that is what we are going to discuss this morning. I realize that my mind, including the brain, all the physiological nervous responses, the whole of that consciousness is fragmentary, is broken up, conditioned by the culture in which one lives. That culture has been created by past generations and the coming generation. And any action, or the emphasis on one fragment over the others, will inevitably bring about immense confusion. Giving emphasis to social activity, to a religious belief, or intellectual concept, or Utopia, must inevitably be contradictory and therefore bring about confusion. Do we see this? So one asks the question: is there an action which is not fragmentary and which does not contradict another action which is going to take place in the next minute?, We see that thought plays an extraordinary part in this consciousness. Thought being not only the response of the past, but of all our feeling, all our neurological responses, the future hopes, fears, pleasures, sorrows - they are all in this. So does the content of consciousness make for the structure of consciousness? Or is consciousness free from its content? If consciousness is made up of my despair, my anxiety, fears, pleasures, the innumerable hopes, guilts and the vast experience of the past, then any action springing from that consciousness can never free this consciousness from its limitations. Don't agree with this, it isn't just schoolboy stuff! Please share it with me which means work, observe it in yourself - and then we can proceed further. I'm just talking as an introduction. My consciousness is the result of the culture in which I have lived. That culture has encouraged, and discouraged various activities, various pursuits of pleasure, fear, hopes and beliefs that consciousness is the `me'. Any action springing from that consciousness which is conditioned, must inevitably be fragmentary and therefore contradictory, confusing. If you are born in a Communist or a Socialist or a Catholic world, the culture in which that particular mind brain - is born, is conditioned by this culture, by the standards, the values, the aspirations of that society. And any action born from this consciousness must inevitably be fragmentary. Don't ask me any questions yet just watch yourself. First listen to what the speaker has to say, don't bring in your questions or your thoughts. Then after having listened very quietly, then you can begin to put questions, then you can say, `You're wrong, you're right', and so on. But if that questioning is going on in your mind, then you are not listening. Therefore our communication comes to an end, we are not sharing together, and as the thing into which we are enquiring is a very complex, subtle problem, you first have to listen. We are trying to find out what is consciousness. Is it made up of the many things that it contains, or is it something free of its content? If it is free of its content, then the action of that freedom is not dictated by the content. If it is not free, then the content dictates all action; that is simple. Now we're going to learn about it. I realize, watching in myself, that I am the result of the past, the present, the hopes of the future. The whole throbbing quality of consciousness is all this, with all its fragmentations. Any action born of this content must inevitably be not only fragmentary, but through that there is no freedom whatsoever. So can this consciousness empty itself and find out if there is a consciousness which is free, from which a totally different kind of action takes place? Am I conveying to you what I am talking about? All the content of consciousness is like a shallow, muddy little pool, and a little frog is making an awful noise in it. That little frog says: `I'm going to find out'. And that little frog is trying to go beyond itself. But it is still a frog in the muddy pool. Can this muddy pool empty all the content of itself? My little muddy pool is the culture in which I have lived and the little `me', the frog, is battling against the culture, saying `I must get out'. But even if it gets out, it is a little frog and whatever it gets out into, is still a little muddy pool which it will create. Please see this. The mind realizes that all the activity it indulges in, or is forced into, is the movement within the consciousness with its content. Realizing this, what is the mind to do? Can it ever go beyond this limited consciousness? That is one point. The second point is: this little pool with the little frog may expand and widen. The space it creates is still within the borders of a certain dimension. That little frog - or better, that little monkey -can acquire a great deal of knowledge, information and experience. This knowledge and experience may give it a certain space to expand; but that space has always the little monkey at its centre. So the space in consciousness is always limited by the centre. If you have a centre, the circumference of consciousness, or the frontier of consciousness, is always limited, however it may expand. The little monkey may meditate, may follow many systems, but that monkey will always remain; and therefore the space it will create for itself will always be limited and shallow. That is the second question- The third is: what is space without a centre? We are going to find this out. Questioner: Can this consciousness with its limitations go beyond itself? Krishnamurti: Can the monkey with all its intentions and aspirations, with all its vitality, free itself from its conditioning and go beyond the frontiers of consciousness which it has created? To put it differently, can the `me', which is the monkey, by doing all kinds of things meditating, suppressing, conforming, or not conforming being everlastingly active, can its movement take it beyond itself. That is, does the content of consciousness allow the `me' - and therefore the attempt on the part of the monkey - to free itself from the limitation of the pool? So my question is: can the monkey be completely quiet to see the extent of its own frontiers? And is it at all possible to go beyond them? Questioner: At the centre there is always the monkey, so there is not empty space, no space for freedom. Krishnamurti: Sir, do you notice for yourself that you are always acting from a centre? The centre may be a motive, the centre may be fear, may be ambition - you are always acting from a centre, aren't you? `I love you', `I hate you', `I want to be powerful' - all action as we know it, is from a centre. Whether that centre identifies with the community or with a philosophy, it is still the centre; the thing identified with becomes the centre. Are you aware of this action always going on, or are there moments when the centre is not active? It happens - suddenly you are looking, living, feeling without a centre. And that is a totally different dimension. Then thought begins to say, `What a marvellous thing that was, I'd like to continue with it?' Then that becomes the centre. The remembrance of something which happened a few seconds ago becomes the centre through thought. Are we aware of the space that centre creates round itself? - the isolation, resistance, escapes. As long as there is a centre, there is the space which the centre has created and we want to expand this space, because we feel the expansion of space is necessary to live extensively. But in that expansive consciousness there is always the centre, therefore the space is always limited, however expanded. Observe it in yourself, don't listen to me, watch it in yourself, you will discover these things very simply. And the battle in relationship is between two centres: each centre wanting to expand, assert, dominate - the monkeys at work! So I want to learn about this. The mind says, `I see that very clearly; the mind is learning. How does that centre come into being? Is it the result of the society, the culture, or is it a divine centre - forgive me for using that word `divine' - which has always been covered up by society, by the culture? The Hindus and others call it the Atman, the Great Thing inside which is always being smothered. Therefore you have to free the mind from being smothered, so that the real thing, the real monkey can come out. Obviously the centre is created by the culture one lives in, by one's own conditioned memories and experiences, by the fragmentation of oneself. So it is not only the society which creates the centre, but also the centre is propelling itself. Can this centre go beyond the frontiers which it has created? By silencing itself, by controlling itself, by meditating, by following someone, can that centre explode and go beyond? Obviously it can't. The more it conforms to the pattern, the stronger it gets, though it imagines that it is becoming free. Enlightenment, surely, is that state, that quality of mind in which the monkey never operates. How is the monkey to end these activities? Not through imitation, not through conformity, not through saying, `Somebody has attained enlightenment, I'll go and learn from him' - all those are monkey tricks. Does the monkey see the tricks it plays upon itself by saying, `I'm ready to help, to alter society, I am concerned with social values and righteous behaviour and social justice'. You answer this, Sir! Don't you think it is a trick that it plays upon itself? It is so clear, there is no question about it. If you're not sure, Sir, please let's discuss, let's talk it over. Questioner: You talk sometimes as if helping society, doing social service, was something done for somebody else. But I have the feeling that I'm not different from society, so working in social service is working for myself; it's the same thing, I don't make a distinction. Krishnamurti: But if you don't make the distinction - I'm not being personal, Sir - I'm asking, does the centre remain? Questioner: It should not. Krishnamurti: Not `should not'. Then we enter into quite a different field `should, should not, must, must not' - then it becomes theoretical. The actual fact is, though I recognise that `me' and society are one, is the centre, the `me', the monkey, still operating? My question is: I see that as long as there is any movement on the part of the monkey, that movement must lead to some kind of fragmentation, illusion and chaos. To put it much more simply: that centre is the self, it is the selfishness that is always operating; whether I am godly, whether I am concerned with society and say, `I am society' is that centre operating? If it is, then it is meaningless. The next question is: how is that centre to fade away? Through determination, through will, through practice, through various forms of neurotic compulsion, dedication, identification? All such movement is still part of the monkey, therefore, consciousness is within the reach of the monkey and the space within that consciousness is still within arm's length of the monkey. Therefore there is no freedom. So the mind says, `I see this very clearly' `seeing' in the sense of a perception, like seeing the microphone, without any condemnation, just seeing it. Then what takes place? To see, to listen to anything, there must be complete attention, mustn't there? If I want to understand what you are saying, I must give all my attention to it. In that attention is the monkey operative? Please find out. I want to listen to you. You are saying something important, or unimportant, and to find out what you are saying, I must give my attention, which means my mind, my heart, my body, my nerves, everything must be in harmony to attend. The mind is not separate from the body, the heart is not separate from the mind and so on; it must be a complete harmonious whole that is attentive. That is attention. Does the mind attend with such complete attention to the activity of the monkey? - not condemning it, not saying `This is right or wrong', just watching the tricks of the monkey. In this watching there is no analysis. This is really important Sirs, put your teeth into it! The moment it analyses one of the fragments, the monkey is in operation. So does the mind watch in this way, with such complete attention to all the movements of the monkey? What takes place when there is such complete attention? Are you doing it? Do you know what it means to attend? When you are listening completely to that rain there is no resistance against it, there is no impatience. Now when you are so listening, is there a centre with the monkey operating? Find out, Sir, don't wait for me to tell you -find out! Are you listening to the speaker with complete attention? Which means, not interpreting what he is saying, not agreeing or disagreeing, not comparing or translating what he is saying to suit your own particular mind; when any such activity takes place there is no attention. To attend completely means the mind is completely still to listen. Are you doing that? Are you listening to the speaker now with that attention? If you are, is there a centre there? Questioner: We are passive. Krishnamurti: I don't care whether you are passive or active. I said, Sir, are you listening? Listening means being attentive. And in that attention is the monkey working? Don't say yes or no - find out, learn about it. And what is the quality of that attention in which there is no centre, in which the monkey isn't playing tricks? Questioner: Is it thoughtless? Krishnamurti: I don't know, Sir, don't put it into words like `thoughtless', `empty'. Find out, learn, which means sustained attention - not a fleeting attention - to find out the quality of the mind that is so completely attentive. Questioner: The moment you say the mind is not there, it is there. Krishnamurti: No, Sir - when you say it is not there to communicate through words, then the memory is there. But I am asking: when you are so completely attentive, is there a centre? Sir, surely this is simple! When you are watching something that is really amusing and makes you laugh, is there a centre? If there is something that interests you, and if you are not taking sides and are just watching, in that watching is there a centre, which is the monkey? If there is no centre, then the question is, can this attention flow, move - not just one moment and then become inattentive - but flow naturally, easily, without effort? Effort implies the monkey coming into being. Do you follow all this? The monkey has to come in if there is some functional work to be done. But does that operation on the part of the monkey spring from attention, or is that monkey separate from attention? Going to the office and working in the office, is that a movement of attention, or is it the movement of the monkey which has taken over, the monkey who says, `I must be better than the others, I must make more money, I must work harder, I must compete, I must become the manager' - whatever it is. Go into it, Sir. Which is it in your life? A movement of attention, and therefore much more efficient, much more alive; or is the monkey taking over? Answer it Sir, for yourself. If the monkey takes over and makes some kind of mischief - and monkeys do make mischief - can that mischief be wiped away and not leave a mark? Go on, Sirs, you don't see the beauty of all this! Yesterday somebody said something to me which was not true. Did the monkey come into operation and want to say, `You're a liar'? Or was it the movement of that attention in which the monkey is not operating? - then that statement which is not true doesn't leave a mark. When the monkey responds, then it leaves a mark. So I am asking: can this attention flow? Not, `how can I have continuous attention', because then it is the monkey who is asking. But when there is a movement of attention all the time, the mind just moves with it. You must answer this; it is really an extraordinarily important question. We only know the movement of the monkey and only occasionally do we have this attention in which the monkey doesn't appear at all. Then the monkey says, `I want that attention; then it goes to Japan to meditate, or to India to sit at someone's feet, and so on. We are asking: is this movement of attention totally unrelated to consciousness as we know it? Obviously it is. Can this attention, as a movement, flow as all movements must flow? And when the monkey becomes active, can the monkey itself become aware that it is active and so not interfere with the flow of attention? Somebody insulted me yesterday and the monkey was awake to reply; and because it has become aware of itself and all the implications of the monkey tricks, it subsides and lets the attention flow. Not, `how to maintain the flow' - this is really important - the moment you say `I must maintain it', that is the activity of the monkey. So the monkey knows when it is active and the sensitivity of its awareness immediately makes it quiet. Questioner: In this movement of attention there is no self interest, therefore there is no resistance, no waste of energy. Krishnamurti: Sir, attention means the height of energy, doesn't it? In attention all the energy is there, not fragmented. The moment it is fragmented and action takes place, then the monkey is at work. And when the monkey, which is also learning, has become sensitive, has become aware, it realizes the waste of energy and therefore, naturally, becomes quiet. It i s not `the monkey' and `attention' it is not a division between the monkey and attention. If there is a division the attention then becomes the `higher self' you know all the tricks the monkeys have invented - but attention is a total movement, It is a total action, not opposed to attention. Unfortunately the monkey also has its own life and wakes up. Now, when there is no centre, when there is the complete apogee of attention, will you tell me what there is? What has happened to the mind that is so highly attentive, with not a breath of energy wasted. What takes place? Come on Sirs - I am talking all the time! Questioner: There is total silence. There is no self-identification... Krishnamurti: No monkey tricks! What has happened? Not only to the intellect, to the brain, but to the body. I have talked but you don't learn! If the speaker doesn't come any more, if he dies, what is going to happen? How are you going to learn? Will you learn from some yogi? No, Sir, therefore learn now! What has happened to a mind that has become highly attentive, in which all the energy is there what has happened to the quality of the intellect? Questioner: It sees. Krishnamurti: No, you don't know! Please don't guess. Questioner: It is totally quiet. Krishnamurti: Look, Sir the brain which has been operating, working, which has invented the monkey - doesn't that brain become extraordinarily sensitive? If you don't know, please don't guess. And there is your body when you have got such tremendous energy, unspoiled, unwasted, what has happened to the whole organism, to the whole structure of the human being? That is what I am asking. Questioner: It wakes up and it becomes alive, it learns... Krishnamurti: No. Sir, it has to become alive to learn, otherwise you can't learn. If you're asleep and say, `I believe in my prejudice, I like my prejudice, my conditioning is marvellous, - -then you're asleep, you are not awake. But the moment you question, begin to learn, you are beginning to be alive. That is not my question. What has happened to the body, to the brain? Questioner: There is complete interaction, there is no division, but total awareness. Krishnamurti: Sir, if you are not wasting energy fiddling, what has happened to the machinery of the brain, which is purely a mechanical thing? Questioner: It is alive. Krishnamurti: Please, sir - do watch yourself. Pay attention to something so completely, with your heart, with your body, with your mind, with everything in you, with every particle, every cell and see what takes place. Questioner: At that time you don't exist. Krishnamurti: Yes, Sir. But what has happened to the brain, not to you? I agree the centre doesn't exist, but the body is there, the brain is there what has happened to the brain? Questioner: It rests, it regenerates. Krishnamurti: What is the function of the brain? Questioner: Order. Krishnamurti: Don't repeat after me, for God's sake! What is the brain? it has evolved in time, it is the storehouse of memory, it is matter, it is highly active, recognising, protecting, resisting, thinking, not thinking, frightened, seeking security and yet being uncertain, it is that brain with all its memories - not just yesterday's memories, but centuries of memories, the racial memories, the family memory, the tradition - that whole content is there. Now what has happened to that brain when there is this extraordinary attention? Questioner: It is new... Krishnamurti: I don t want to be rude, but is your brain new? Or is it just a word you are saying? Please, what has happened to this brain that has become so mechanical; don't say it has become non-mechanical. The brain is purely mechanical, responding according to its conditioning, background, fears, pleasure and so on. What has happened to this mechanical brain when there is no wastage of energy at all? Questioner: It is getting creative... Krishnamurti: We'll leave it till tomorrow. 8th August 1970. IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION PART II CHAPTER 7 8TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 9TH AUGUST 1970 Krishnamurti: During the last five weeks that we have met here, we have been discussing and talking over together the many problems which touch our lives, the problems we create for ourselves and the society that creates them for us. We also saw that we and the society are not two different entities - they are a interrelated movement. If any person seriously concerned with and actively involved in social change - its pattern, its values, its morality is not aware of his own conditioning, then this conditioning makes for fragmentation in action; and therefore there will be more conflict, more misery, more confusion. We went into that pretty thoroughly. We were also discussing what fear is, and whether the mind can ever be completely and utterly free of this burden, both superficially and deeply. And we discussed the nature of pleasure, which is entirely and wholly different from joy, from delight. We also went into the question of the many fragmentations which make up our structure, our being. We saw in our discussion that these fragmentations divide and keep separate all human relationship, that one fragment assumes the authority and becomes the analyser, the censor of the other fragments. Yesterday in talking over together the nature of consciousness we went into the question of what is attention. We said, this quality of attention is a state of mind in which all energy is highly concentrated; and in that attention there is no observer, there is no centre as the `me' who is aware. Now we are going to find out, learn together, what happens to the mind, to the brain, to the whole psychosomatic being, when the mind is tremendously attentive. To understand that very clearly, or find out about it for oneself, one must first see that the description is not the described. One can describe this tent, everything that is involved, but the description is not the tent. The word is not the thing, and we must be absolutely clear from the beginning that the explanation is not the explained. To be caught in description, in explanation is the most childish form of living, and I'm afraid most of us are. We are satisfied with the description, with the explanation, with saying, `that is the cause' and just float along. Whereas what we are going to do this morning, is to find out for ourselves what has happened to the mind the mind being the brain, as well as the whole psychosomatic structure when there is this extraordinary attention, when there is no centre as the observer or as the censor. To understand that, to really learn about it, not merely to be satisfied with the speaker's explanation of it, to find out, one has to begin with the understanding of `what is'. Not what `should be', or what `has been', but `what is'. Please go with me, let's travel together, it is great fun if we move together in learning. Obviously there must be tremendous changes in the world and in ourselves. The ways of our thought and our action have become utterly immature, so contradictory, so diabolical - if one can say so. You invent a machine to kill and then there is an anti-machine to kill that machine. That's what they are doing in the world; not only socially but also mechanically. And a mind that is really concerned, involved in the seriousness of psychological as well as outward change, must go into this problem of the human being with his consciousness, with his despairs, with his appalling fears, with his ambitions, with his anxieties, with his desire to fulfil in some form or another. So to understand all this we must begin with seeing `what is'. `What is' is not only what is in front of you, but what is beyond. To see what is in front of you, you must have a very clear perception, uncontaminated, not prejudiced, not involved in the desire to go beyond it, but just to observe it. Not only to observe `what is', but what has been - which is also what is. The `what is' is the past, is the present, and is the future. Do see this! So the `what is' is not static, it is a movement. And to keep with the movement of `what is', you need to have a very clear mind, you need to have an unprejudiced, not a distorted mind. That means, there is distortion the moment there is an effort. The mind can't see `what is', and go beyond it, if the mind is in any way concerned with the changing of `what is', or trying to go beyond it, or trying to suppress it. To observe `what is', you need energy. To observe anything attentively you need energy. To listen to what you are saying I need energy, that is, I need energy when I really, desperately want to understand what you are saying. But if I am not interested, but just listen casually, then one only needs a very slight energy that soon dissipates. So to understand `what is' you need energy. Now, these fragmentations, of which we are, are the division of these energies. `I' and the `not I', `anger' and `not anger', `violence' and `not violence' they are all fragmentations of energy. And when one fragment assumes authority over the other fragments, it is an energy that functions in fragments. Are we communicating? Communicating means learning together, working together, creating together, seeing together, understanding together; not just that I speak and you listen, and saying `intellectually I grasp it; that is not understanding. The whole thing is a movement in learning and therefore in action. So the mind sees that all fragmentations, as my God, your God, my belief and your belief, are fragmentations of energy. There is only energy and fragmentation. This energy is fragmented by thought and thought is the way of conditioning - which we won't go into again now, because we must move further. So consciousness is the totality of these fragmentations of energy. And we said, one of those fragments is the observer, is the `me', is the monkey who is incessantly active. Bear in mind that the description is not the described, that you are watching yourself through the words of the speaker. But the words are not the thing, therefore the speaker is of very little importance. What becomes important is your observation of yourself, of how this energy has been fragmented. Can you see that - which is `what is' without the fragment of the observer? Can the mind see these many fragmentations which make up the whole of consciousness? These fragments are the fragmentations of energy. Can the mind see this, without an observer who is part of the many fragments? It is important to understand this. If the mind cannot see the many fragments without looking through the eyes of another fragment, then you will never understand what attention is. Are we meeting each other? The mind sees what fragmentation does outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly the sovereign governments, with their arms race and all the rest of it, the division of nationalities, beliefs, religious dogmas. The division in social and political action the Labour party, the Conservatives, the Communists, the Capitalists -is all created by the desire of thought which says, `I must be secure'. Thought thinks it will be secure through fragmentation and so creates more fragmentation. Do you see this? Not verbally, but actually as a fact. The young and the old, the rich and the poor, death and living - do you see this constant division, this movement of fragmentation by thought, which is caught in the conditioning of these fragments? Does the mind see this whole movement without a centre that says, `I see it'. Because the moment you have a centre, that centre becomes the factor of division. `Me' and `not me' which is you. Thought has put together this `me' through the desire, or through the impulse, to find security, safety. And in its desire to find safety it has divided the energy as `the me' and the `not me', therefore bringing to itself insecurity. Can the mind see this as a whole? It cannot, if there is a fragment which observes. We are asking: what is the quality of the mind that is highly attentive, in which there is no fragmentation? That is where we left off yesterday. I don't know if you have enquired, or learned from yesterday; the speaker is not a professor teaching you or giving you information. To find that out, there must be no fragmentation - -obviously - which means, no effort. Effort means distortion, and as most of our minds are distorted, you cannot possibly understand what it is to be completely attentive and find out what has happened to a mind that is so utterly aware, utterly attentive. There is a difference between security and stability. We said it is the monkey which is the everlasting `me' with its thoughts, with its problems, with its anxieties, fears and so on. This restless thought - the monkey - is always seeking security, because it is afraid to be uncertain in its activity, in its thoughts, in its relationships. It wants everything mechanical, which is secure. So it translates security in terms of mechanical certainty. Is stability different not opposite - but in a different dimension from security? We have to understand this. A mind that is restless and seeking security, in that restlessness it can never find stability. To be stable - firm is not the word to be unshakeable, immoveable, and yet to have the quality of great mobility! The mind that is seeking security cannot be stable in the sense of being mobile, swift, and yet immensely immovable. Do you see the difference? Which is it you are doing in your life, in your everyday life? Is thought the monkey, seeking in its restlessness to find security, and not finding it in one direction, going off in another direction, which is the movement of restlessness? In this restlessness, it wants to find security; therefore it can never find it. It can say, `There is God', which is still the invention of thought, the image brought about through centuries of conditioning. Or it is conditioned in the Communist world which says: `there is no such thing', which is equally conditioning. So what is it that you are doing - seeking security in your restlessness? The desire to be secure is one of the most curious things. And that security must be recognised by the world; I don't know whether you see this. I write a book and in the book I find my security. But that book must be recognised by the world, otherwise there is no security. So look what I've done - my security lies in the opinion of the world! `My books sell by the thousand', and I have created the value of the world. In seeking security through a book - through whatever it is I am depending on the world which I have created. So it means I am deceiving myself constantly. If you saw this! So the desire for thought to be secure is the way of uncertainty, is the way of insecurity. When there is complete attention in which there is no centre, what has happened to the mind that is so intensely aware? Is there security in it? Is there any sense of restlessness in it? Please don't agree - it is a tremendous thing to find this out. You see, Sirs, most of us are seeking a solution for the misery of the world, a solution for the social morality - which is immoral. We are trying to find out a way of organizing a society in which there will be no social injustice. Man has sought God, truth, whatever it is, throughout centuries, never coming upon it, but believing in it. But when you believe in it, you naturally have experiences according to your belief, which are false. So man in his restlessness, in his desire for safety, for security, to feel at ease, has invented all these imaginary securities projected by thought. When you become aware of all this fragmentation of energy - and energy is therefore no more fragmented what has taken place in the mind that has sought security? Because it was restless, it was moving from one fear to another? Then what do you do, what is your answer? Questioner: One is not isolated, there is no fear. Krishnamurti: We've been through all this, Sir. Unless it really is so with you, don't say anything, because it has no meaning. You can invent, you can say, `I feel this' - but if you are really serious, if you want to learn about this, then you have to go into it, it is your vocation, it is your life - not just for this morning. You know, as we were going through the village, all the people were going to church - weekend religion. This is not a weekend religion. This is a way of life, a way of living in which this energy is not broken up. If you once understood this thing, you would have an extraordinary sense of action. Questioner: Sir, the moment you say, `what do you do with this', the monkey within us starts up. It triggers off the question and the question triggers off the monkey. Krishnamurti: I am only putting that question to see where you are. Questioner: Only one fragment acts. Krishnamurti: Yes. So there is one of the fragments of this broken up energy restlessly seeking security - that is actually `what is'. That is what we are all doing. That restlessness, and that constant search and enquiry, joining one society, then taking up another society - the monkey goes on endlessly - all that indicates a mind that is pursuing a way of life in which it is only concerned with security. Now when that is seen very clearly, what has happened to the mind that is no longer concerned with security? Obviously it has no fear. That becomes very trivial when you see how thought has fragmented the energy, or fragmented itself, and because of this fragmentation there is fear. And when you see the activity of thought in its fragmentation, then you meet fear, you act. So we are asking, what has happened to the mind that has become extraordinarily attentive? Is there any movement of search at all? Please, find out. Questioner: The mechanical activity stops completely. Krishnamurti: Do you understand my question? When you are so attentive, is the mind still seeking? Seeking experience, seeking to understand itself, seeking to go beyond itself, seeking to find out right action, wrong action, seeking a permanency on which it can depend permanency in relationship, or in belief, or in some conclusion? Is that still going on, when you are so completely aware? Questioner: The mind does not seek anything any longer. Krishnamurti: Do you know what that means, when you make a statement of that kind so easily? Not to seek anything - which means what? Questioner: It is already to receive something new that it cannot imagine. Krishnamurti: No, madam, you really have not understood. My question is, the mind has seen the activity of the monkey in its restlessness. This activity - which is still energy thought has broken up in its desire to find a permanent security, a certainty, safety. And so it has divided the world as the `me' and the `not me', `we' and `they', and is seeking truth as a way of security. When one has observed all this, is the mind seeking anything at all any more? Seeking implies restlessness I haven't found security here, and I go there, and I haven't found it there so I go elsewhere. Questioner: The mind then is not concerned with search. Krishnamurti: A mind which is without a centre is not concerned with search. But is it taking place with you? Questioner: At the moment you are attentive it is taking place. Krishnamurti: No, Sir. Questioner: All sorts of things happen to the mind when it stops striving. Krishnamurti: Have you ever known, walking or sitting quietly, what it means to be completely empty? Not isolated, not withdrawn, not building a wall around yourself and finding you have no relationship with anything - I don't mean that. When the mind is completely empty, it does not mean that it has no memory, the memories are there, because you are walking to your house, or are going to your office. But I mean the emptiness of a mind that has finished with all the movement of search. Questioner: All is and I am. What is `I am'? Who is `I am'? Who is this `I` that says `am'? The monkey? Krishnamurti: Don't repeat what the propagandists have said, what the religions have said, what the psychologists have said. Who says, `I am'? - the Italian, the Frenchman, the Russian, the believer, the dogma, the fears, the past, the seeker, and the one who seeks and finds? Or the one who is identified with the house, with the husband, with the money, with the name, with the family -which are all words! No, you don't see this. But it is so! If you see that you are a bundle of memories and words, the restless monkey comes to an end. Questioner: If your mind is completely empty when you are walking to the office, why are you walking to the office? Why are you still doing this? Krishnamurti: You have to earn a livelihood, you have to go to your home, you will be going out of this tent. Questioner: Surely the question is, how can I be empty if memory is operating. Krishnamurti: Now look, Sir, I want to tell you a very simple thing: there is no such thing as security. This restless demand for security is the part of the observer, the centre, the monkey. And this restless monkey - which is thought has broken up this world and has made a frightful mess of it, it has brought such misery, such agony! And thought cannot solve this, however intelligent, however clever, erudite, capable of efficient thinking, thought cannot possibly bring order out of this chaos. There must be a way out of it which is not thought. I want to convey to you that in that state of attention, in that movement of attention, all sense of security has gone, because there is stability. That stability has nothing whatsoever to do with security when thought seeks security it makes it into something permanent, immovable, and therefore it becomes mechanical. Thought seeks security in relationship. In that relationship thought creates an image. That image becomes the permanent and breaks up the relationship - you have your image and I have mine. In that image thought has established and identified itself as the permanent thing. Outwardly this is what we have done: your country, my country, and so on. When the mind has left all that, left it in the sense that it has seen the utter futility, the mischief of it, it has finished with it. Then what takes place in the mind which has completely finished with the whole concept of security? What happens to that mind which is so attentive that it is completely stable, so that thought is no longer seeking security in any form and sees that there is no such thing as the permanent? I'm pointing it out to you; the description is not the described. See the importance of this; the brain has evolved with the idea of being completely secure. The mind, the brain wants security, otherwise it can't function. Without order it will function illogically, neurotically, inefficiently, therefore the brain is always wanting order and it has translated having order in terms of security. If that brain is still functioning, it is still seeking order through security. So when there is attention, is the brain still seeking security? Questioner: Sir, there is only the present. Krishnamurti: Sir, I am trying to convey something to you. I may be totally wrong. I may be talking complete nonsense, but you have to find out for yourself if I am talking nonsense. Questioner: I get the sensation that at the moment I am attentive, I am not seeking. But that attention may cease; then I am seeking again. Krishnamurti: Never! That's the whole point. If thought sees that there is no such thing as permanency, thought will never seek it again. That is, the brain, with its memories of security, its cultivation in a society depending on security, with all its ideas and its morality based on security, that brain has become completely empty of all movements towards security. Have you ever gone into this question of meditation, any of you? Meditation is not concerned with meditation but with the meditator - do you see the difference? Most of you are concerned with meditation, what to do about it, how to meditate step by step and so on - that is not the question at all. The meditator is the meditation. To understand the meditator is meditation. Now if you have gone into this question of meditation, the meditator must come to an end, by understanding, not by suppressing, not by killing thought. That is, to understand oneself is to understand the movement of thought; thought being the movement of the brain with all its memories - the movement of thought seeking security, and all the rest of it. Now the meditator is asking, can this brain become completely quiet? Which is, can thought be completely still, and yet operate out of this stillness not as an end in itself. Probably all this is too complicated for you it's really quite simple. So the mind that is highly attentive has no fragmentation of energy. Please see that; there is no fragmentation of energy, it is complete energy. And that energy operates without fragmentation when you go to the office. Questioner: Maybe a real understanding could be arrived at without the help of the word; it's a kind of direct contact with the thing you are trying to understand. And consequently there is no need for words, which are an escape. Krishnamurti: That's it. Can you communicate without words? Because words hinder. Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Look, Sir, can I communicate with you without words about the quality of the mind that is so extraordinarily attentive, and yet functions in the world without breaking the energy into fragments? You've understood my question? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Now, can I communicate that to you without the word? How do you know I can? What are you all talking about! Questioner: I think you can. Krishnamurti: Look, one has talked for nearly five weeks, explained everything, gone into it in detail, poured one's heart into it. Have you understood it verbally even? And you want to understand something non-verbally! It can be done if your mind is in contact with the speaker with the same intensity, with the same passion, at the same time, at the same level, then you will communicate. Are you? Now listen to that train! Without the word communication has been established, because we are both of us listening to the rattle of that train, at the same moment, with the same intensity, with the same passion. Only then is there direct communion. Are you intense about this at the same time as the speaker? Of course not. Sir, when you hold the hand of another, you can hold it out of habit or custom. Or you can hold it and communication can take place without a word, because both are at the given moment intense. But we are not intense, not passionate and concerned. Questioner: Not all the time. Krishnamurti: Don't say that, not even for a minute! Questioner: How do you know? Krishnamurti: I don't know. If you are, then you will know what it means to be aware, to be attentive, and therefore no longer seeking security; therefore you are no longer acting or thinking in terms of fragmentation. Look what has happened to a mind that has gone through all the things which we have been talking about, all the discussions and exchange of words. What has happened to the mind that has really listened to this? First of all, it has become sensitive, not only mentally but physically, It has given up smoking, drinking, drugs. And when we have talked over this question of attention, you'll see that the mind is no longer seeking anything at all, or asserting anything. And such a mind is completely mobile and yet wholly stable. Out of that stability and sensitivity it can act without breaking life or energy up into fragments. What does such a mind find, apart from action, apart from stability? Man has always sought what he considered to be God, truth; he has always striven after it out of fear, out of his hopelessness, out of his despair and disorder. He sought it and he thought he found it. And the discovery of that he began to organize. So that which is stable, highly mobile, sensitive, is not seeking; it sees something which has never been found, which means, time for such a mind does not exist at all - which does not mean one is going to miss a train. So there is a state which is timeless and therefore incredibly vast. This is something most marvellous if you come upon it. I can go into it, but the description is not the described. It's for you to learn all this by looking at yourself - no book, no teacher can teach you about this don't depend on anyone, don't join spiritual organizations, one has to learn all this out of oneself. And there the mind will discover things that are incredible. But for that, there must be no fragmentation and therefore immense stability, swiftness, mobility. To such a mind there is no time and therefore this whole concept of death and living has quite a different meaning. 9th August 1970. - Sydney 1970 - 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk 5th Public Talk 1st Public Dialogue 2nd Public Dialogue ABC Television Interview TALKS AND DIALOGUES SYDNEY 1970 1ST PUBLIC TALK 21ST NOVEMBER, 1970 I THINK IT quite important that we understand each other, because we are not concerned with any Oriental philosophy or with any theory; we are not indulging in speculation, any form of theoretical assumptions. We will be concerned only with things as they are and to see if the human mind can radically bring about a change in things as they are. Therefore it is necessary to observe very clearly without any prejudice, without any conclusion what actually is going on in the world; not according to the Asiatic outlook or the Western or the communist or the capitalist but observe the various happenings that are taking place in the world. First of all, one sees right through the world a great deal of violence, incredible brutality, destruction, a meaningless kind of violence and revolt, revolt against the established order, revolt against war, revolt against all the social moralities. Obviously social morality is immorality. One observes the division, the fragmentation that's going on, not only at the physical level but also at the religious level. physically, geographically, there is division between nationalities, sovereign governments with their armies, defence, and so on; there is the economic division, the division between black and white and among the coloured people. There is also division among the religious people, so-called religious people. There is the Catholic against the Protestant, the Hindu against the Muslim and so on. Right through the world there is fragmentation, the businessman and the artist, the scientist and the layman, the technician and the ordinary person. This is a fact and one sees what incredible conflict exists between human beings. Religions, that is organized beliefs based on propaganda, have not solved this problem at all. Politicians haven't solved it. On the contrary, religions have separated man against man, politicians keep the country, the people apart and you can see both outwardly and inwardly there is fragmentation, division. The very nature of division is to bring about conflict and man has tried many, many ways to bridge this conflict, through ideals, through revolt, through revolution - physical revolution - through every form of assertion, aggression, violence to see if man can live at peace, not only within himself but also outwardly. And this has been going on for millions of years - man fighting man, outwardly and inwardly. When we are confronted with such a problem, what is the response? knowing that man has tried so many ways to get rid of this problem, through physical revolution which ends in tyranny, bureaucracy, dictatorship and he has tried religiously in belief -worshipping one God or one idea, one set of symbols, and again all that has failed, completely failed because man is still at war. Within the last 5,000 years I believe there have been 15,000 wars and we have never been able to solve any of our human problems. We know how to escape from them, through amusement, through every form of deception, hypocrisy, negligence, indifference, callousness. It is only the very serious people that live, not the people who want to be entertained, want to be amused; and I hope during these five talks, that those who are here are really serious people. This is not an entertainment, either philosophical or intellectual. We are concerned, in observing all this, how to bring about a radical change in man, how to bring about a total revolution, not the revolution of bloodshed, physical revolution; that doesn't lead anywhere, as one has observed in the various kinds of revolution that have existed before. Physical revolution has no meaning; there is only one revolution, psychological, inward revolution because the human being - you - is the society. You have built this society and in that society, in that culture you're caught; therefore, you are the world and the world is you, not verbally, theoretically or intellectually, but actually. You are the world and the world is you and if you are confused, if you are disturbed, if you are neurotic, unbalanced, whatever structure you create as social morality, as law, as ethics or as religion must equally be confused. So, do please understand this very clearly from the very beginning of these talks. We are concerned in bringing about a radical revolution in the human mind because the human mind creates the social, economic, religious structure out of its despair, out of its fear, out of its loneliness, misery, sorrow. Unless the human being, you, radically, fundamentally change, there is no possibility of having a different kind of world. When we say `you', you are not opposed to the community, you are the community, you are the collective. When we are concerned with a change of the human being, we are concerned with the radical revolution of the mind, not opposed to the collective mind. The collective mind is your mind, you are part of the culture in which you have been brought up, in which you have been educated, you're not separate from the society, from the world, so, unless you as a human being radically change there is very little hope for a peaceful, religious society. To bring about this change, man has tried everything. He has taken drugs, has joined innumerable cults, organized beliefs, worshipped this god and that god, joined various schools of meditation, read infinitely, but he remains exactly as he was before, slightly modified but essentially self-centred, aggressive, violent, concerned about himself. These are facts not assumptions, not theories. This you can observe if you are at all aware not only of yourself but also about what is happening in the world. So, seeing this, what is one to do? There are the activists who say you must act, do something, commit yourself, get involved. But getting involved, identifying yourself in a particular group or a particular structure of thought, philosophy, doesn't solve the problem. Seeing all this both outwardly and inwardly, what shall we do? We must act, we must bring about a revolution in ourselves. How can this revolution take place? We cannot possibly go on as we are going, because our life is very superficial. The life that one leads has no meaning, spending years in the office, living a shallow, empty life, living a secondhand existence and everlastingly fighting, both inwardly and outwardly. What can one do? Action implies, not in the future, or in the past; action is the creative moment in the present. So, what shall I as a human being, living in this world, do? First of all, I must negate everything that man has psychologically built in himself. That is, through negation I shall find out what is the positive; you understand? You know one of the most difficult things in life is to communicate. The word communicating means to think together, to feel together, to create together, share together. That's what we are going to do, share together. You're not just going to listen to the speaker, but share what the speaker has to say. You can only share if you neither disagree nor agree, but actually listen to find out. Listening is one of the most difficult things to do. Listening implies attention, and you cannot attend if your mind is chattering, if what is being said you compare with what you already know. The art of listening is very important and the art of listening is to communicate. First of all, attempting to see things as they are, both outwardly and inwardly, man has tried several things. He thinks through analysis he can bring about change, analysis of what actually is going on, and through analysis to find the cause and bring about change in the cause. But analysis prevents action, that is, analysis implies time. Please, do listen to this, don't accept it or reject it, but listen to it, find out if the speaker is saying something false or true; find out, investigate, don't oppose it, or accept it, because we have to learn. We have accepted analysis as a way of resolution of our problems and the speaker says that way you'll never solve anything, and he's going to explain the reason why analysis is futile. First of all, analysis implies time; to analyse day after day, week after week, examining, observing; analysing inevitably takes a very long time. Analysis implies the analyser and the analysed. And also that every analysis must be complete and true and finished, otherwise what the analyser has analysed he remembers and carries it over, which will prevent him from examining and analysing anew, right? You are following all this? Probably you have not heard all this before, it may seem rather strange to you, but if you have observed, if you have analysed yourself, you will find that there is the analyser, examining, investigating, questioning; so there is the division between the analyser and the analysed. Questioner: ...Interruption. At the end of the talk you can ask questions, we can discuss, but you have first to find out what the speaker has to say. You may know your own thoughts very well, be familiar with your own ideas, opinions, but we are not dealing with opinions, with ideas. We are dealing with actually what is, and the actual fact is that man throughout the ages has thought that he could resolve his problems through analysis. We are showing that analysis does not solve the problem at all. We want to show you a different way of looking, not through analysis. When you understand the nature and the structure of analysis you totally discard it, and therefore your mind is free to observe anew. So you have to understand what is implied in analysis. You have to learn all about it, be familiar with it, then you can put it aside. We are saying that analysis prevents action because it involves time. Analysis implies, also, the division between the analyser and the analysed, and hence the conflict between the analyser and the analysed. In analysis is implied the conscious and the unconscious. Why is there this division at all? It has been the fashion in recent years to talk a great deal about the unconscious. The unconscious is as trivial as the conscious; the unconscious is the residue of all the racial memories, the family memories, the religious, the cultural memories. We have divided it. We think that the unconscious is richer, nobler, wider, more significant; but, when you examine the unconscious - and you can examine it only when you are aware of what is going on, not only at the superficial level of thinking, but deeply - when you observe it, you can see all the motives, the violence, the anxieties, the fears and so on. Analysis implies all this, and, as it involves time, action is not possible, action being total action. Is that clear, at least for the time being? We have to act; action means in the present, psychological revolution is only possible now, not at some future date. Therefore, analysis is not possible, is not the way; nor is will. Will implies contradiction, suppression, control, and we have done all that. We have suppressed, we have controlled, we have denied and yet there is no radical change in ourselves; so, analysis is not the way, nor is the exercise of will. One can see that any form of analysis is postponement of action; so what is one to do if analysis is not the way and exercise of will is not the way, will implying suppression, conformity, conflict, adjustment? If that has not produced a radical revolution in human beings then what is the way which is not any of this? I do not know if you ever asked this question of yourself. Man has tried several ways: identifying himself with the greater, with a principle, with an ideal, hoping thereby to dissolve his own anxieties, his own fears, his own misery, and he has not succeeded. Therefore, one must find a totally different way, a totally different perception and that's what we're going to do. We are going to find out, together. You are not learning from the speaker, the speaker is not your teacher, is not your authority. We are going to learn together. Therefore, you as a human being, are your own teacher, your own disciple; therefore, there is no outside authority beyond your own intelligence. It is your own intelligence, your own understanding, that is going to bring about a radical revolution. Please, do not listen, accepting a thing. We are learning together. One of our difficulties, perhaps a major difficulty, is that we are all conformists. We conform very easily. Those who are in revolt against society are conformists. They reject one form of conformity and accept another form of conformity. They reject authority outside and accept another kind of authority. Where there is authority, there must be conformity; therefore, there is no freedom. Freedom exists only when we understand the whole structure and the nature of ourselves. Without freedom there is no creation, there is no life, there is no beauty. So, freedom is absolutely essential: freedom from authority, not to do what you like. One has to investigate and under- stand the whole nature of conformity, why human beings conform. We conform not only superficially but deeply. We conform to the latest fashion whether it's long hair, mini skirt or midi skirt. We conform to the social pattern, we conform to the morality which society has established, which, when you observe it, is actually immoral, and yet we conform -why? Why is it that the human mind accepts authority so easily? Obviously, fear, fear of going wrong, fear of getting hurt, both physically and psychologically, fear of not doing the right thing, fear of losing a job. If one lives in a Communist world, one accepts communism; if one lives in a Catholic world a Protestant finds it extremely difficult. So, we're all conformists, we obey. Authority, apart from the legal authority, and we're talking about psychological acceptance of authority, makes the mind shallow, makes our life empty. We become secondhand human beings, which we are. The word individuality means indivisible. An individual means an entity who is indivisible, not fragmented but whole. And we're not. We're not individuals at all. This is the result, partly, of authority, conformity and accepting. You observe all this in life, everyday life, not life at the moment of great crisis, but every day you see this going on, both within and outwardly, and when you reject analysis, when you reject authority, when you are no longer conforming - except superficially - what is the quality of the mind? What is the quality of the mind that has rejected all this, these things which haven't helped man? Hasn't it become extraordinarily sensitive, alive, free to look? Most of us - all of us - are conditioned by the culture in which we live. You are conditioned as Australians with a lovely climate and all the rest of it, by the education, by the belief, by the religious structure in which you're caught, so you are conditioned. And a conditioned mind thinks it can solve the human problem. It cannot. It must be free of that conditioning. If I, born in India, remain a Hindu and want to resolve the whole human structure, human problem, human misery according to the conditioned mind in that particular culture, it will be impossible. To solve the human problem the mind must be entirely unconditioned, that is, it has to become aware of its own conditioning, aware to observe without any choice, without any distortion and that's why it's very important to understand conflict. Every form of conflict distorts the mind. We are saying there is a way of living which is not the way of analysis, the way of will, the way of conformity, but to observe, to see things actually as they are. I wonder if you have ever observed anything, that is, to see things actually as they are, not as you wish them to be, or you hope they should be, but actually as they are? Have you ever observed a cloud? Have you ever observed your wife, or your husband or your friend, to see actually what is? It is not possible to observe clearly if you have a formula, if you have ideals, if you have images, if you assume you know. You can only observe with clarity, without distortion, when there is no image at all; when you look at a cloud, to look at it without the word. Do it sometime and you will see what happens when you look at something, a cloud, without a single word, or look at your wife or your husband or your friend without the image which you have built during 30 or 40 years or 10 days; just to observe. In observation there is direct relationship, but when you have an image about her or him you are not in relationship. Surely, love is that relationship in which there is no image. So the question is, is it possible to observe oneself and the world without any distortion, without any symbol, without any formula? If you can observe it that way, then you will find action is immediate, because such observation implies that there is no division between the observer and the observed; then you are directly in relationship. To look at a tree without the botanical knowledge, without the word, then, what takes place? The word, the knowledge about that tree, separates you from the tree. There is a distance, not only physical but psychological distance, and when the psychological distance disappears there is no identity with the tree but complete cessation of this distance. After all, that is love, isn't it? When you say to somebody `I love you', what does it mean? Is it your loving the image that you have built about her or him? All the troubles, all the misery, jealousies, irritations, pleasure - sexual and otherwise - is that what you call love? What we are saying is our human problems are so complex, yet so extraordinarily simple if we know how to look at them, if we know how to look at the problem, whether there is God or not, whether there is truth or not, to understand the problem of death, the problem of life, love, to be able to look without the image -which means to look without fear. We can go into this question of fear later because most human minds, consciously as well as unconsciously, are frightened. We are frightened human beings. Out of that fear we do the most extraordinary things, cruel, brutal, aggressive things. To look with eyes that are not confused; and there will be confusion when there is the division between the observer and the observed, and this division takes place when there is the image, the formula, the concept, the ideal. Therefore, self knowing, knowing oneself as one is, is the beginning of wisdom. It cannot possibly be bought in books. One has to observe oneself, not by analysing, but observing oneself in relationship. In relationship all your reactions come out, your antagonisms, your fears, your anxieties, your bitterness, your loneliness. Without under- standing all that to try to find out if there is something beyond all human thought, if there is something real, true, is not possible. Therefore, we must lay the foundation and to lay the foundation one must observe one's life, daily, without any distortion. Now perhaps, if you will, you can ask questions. You know one of the most difficult things is to ask the right question. The right question implies that you have thought a great deal, that you have enquired; and, we must ask questions, not only of ourselves, but about everything. We must doubt, question, to find out. Doubt is necessary, but also doubt becomes a danger. Doubt must always be held in leash. To ask questions is necessary, but if you ask a question and wait for somebody else to reply, then your questioning will have very little value, but if you question in order to discover, in order to communicate, in order to find out, asking together, investigating together, then such questions have value. To ask a question you must be intense, you must be passionate. What we are saying is that to question is to expose oneself. By questioning you are discovering yourself. This doesn't mean that the speaker is trying to prevent you from asking questions. All that he is saying is observe from what motive, what purpose, with what intention, with what passion, you're asking that question. Knowing from what depth you're asking that question, then, you'll have the answer corresponding to that depth. Questioner: Do you say that there are cosmic laws? Krishnamurti: Which is more important, to find out if there are cosmic laws or how to bring about order in our own lives? I'm asking sir, just asking. Which is more important? We're not children, we are supposed to be grown up. We are supposed to find out, aren't we, living in this world where there is so much disorder, so much confusion, so much sorrow; how to live without all this, how to live in order, not whether there is cosmic law. We'll find out afterwards if there is cosmic law and order if we have order and law in our own daily lives. Our lives are so disorderly, so confused, we are so miserable, suffering, physically as well as psychologically. What is important is to find out how to live peacefully with order, with beauty, and not escape into some cosmic theories, laws and assumptions. The beauty that is beyond our thinking can only be found when we know how to live properly. To enquire into the cosmic dimension is an escape from our daily lives. First we must know how to walk, we must know how to build before we can reach up to heaven. We don't know what love is, we are so frightened. You know what we are, and without bringing order, beauty into our lives, we want to escape into some kind of symbolic nonsense. Questioner: Is it possible to live in this world without bringing about an outward change and yet live in this world, free? Krishnamurti: You're asking is it possible to live in this structure, in this society, and yet be free? Is it possible to live in this world, this world being the economic, social, the religious, cultural world and yet be free of that structure? Questioner: Is it possible to become free while that structure still remains, and if so, how? Krishnamurti: The same thing, sir. First of all, the social structure, the ethical, cultural structure in which is included economics, social, racial prejudices, religious beliefs, all that structure is me. I am part of that structure. I don't separate myself from that structure, I am the result of that structure. I am that culture. I am conditioned by the culture in which I have lived. Therefore, I am not separate from the culture. How am I, who am part of this culture to be free? If I am the social, economic, cultural structure, and there is no division between me and it, I am the world, the world is me. This is not a theory, this is not a speculation, this is what is basically true. Then what am I, a human being living in this structure of which I am, what am I to do? How am I to free myself from that structure? Shall I destroy that structure, physically, throwing bombs and all the rest of it? Or, do I see the fact that I am that culture and that culture is me? I see that in me I am confused, that I don't know what to do? To bring about a change in the structure I must change myself radically, because I am that culture. Is it possible for me who is part of the world, part of that structure, part of the establishment, to radically change myself? What is this structure? What is the `me' who is the result of that structure? The structure is based on envy, greed, worship of success, power, position, prestige, the desire to be completely, isolatedly secure. All the wars, nationalities, divisions of religions, the family opposed to another family, all that is me. And can I in myself change all that, stop completely being competitive, imitative, conforming, violent? Obviously one can. And one must, if one wants to bring about a radical revolution both inwardly and outwardly. It must begin with the mind that is free from the conditioning which the culture has imposed upon it. And you ask how? The `how' is to observe, to become aware, be passionate to find out, not to be caught in a series of systems, which means you have to observe, learn and be intense and passionate to change. Not to change the world but change the world which is me. Questioner: Do you accept a counter culture opposed to the present culture? Krishnamurti: You've understood the question? Counter culture opposed to what is creates another culture. Which means what? A counter culture implies a contrary to what is and, therefore, a division. Where there is a division of any kind between you and me there must be conflict. Counter culture is to produce another series of conflicts, like belonging to Catholicism and inventing a new religion to which to belong; which is another form of division. This is much more fundamental than the division of religions or economics and so on. We are saying that where there is contradiction in oneself and in society of which I am, there must be conflict. Therefore I must understand the whole structure of division, contradiction, why human beings live in contradictions. Questioner: Marx explained it for you. Krishnamurti: Explanation, it doesn't matter who explains, has very little meaning. A dozen people have explained, including Marx, why human beings live in contradiction. Apparently we are satisfied by explanations, whether Marx explains it, or the capitalists explain it, or the psychologists explain it, or the religious people explain it. Explanation is not the explained. The description is not the described. What is important is to find out for yourself, not be told by Marx, by philosophers, by psychologists, but find out for yourself why you live in contradiction. You can find out very easily, and when you do, it will be yours, not Marx's, not somebody else's philosophy- You see what happens to us? We read all these books and are capable of explaining what others have said but we don't know a thing about ourselves. But when you accept, when you see the radical fact that you are the world, then you have to have the passion, the intensity to learn about yourself. Then you become creative, something extraordinary; you put aside all books because you are the history of the world. Aren't you interested to find out why man is so aggressive, so violent, and whether that aggression and violence can ever end? Aren't you really interested in it? Probably not, because we enjoy being aggressive, being violent. Do you really want to go into this question of violence which seems to be such a pervading thing throughout the world and which is destroying man? Aren't you really interested to find out for yourself whether you can live absolutely, not relatively, but absolutely at peace with yourself? You see, you don't ask those questions. You ask questions about the cosmos, you ask questions about what Marx said or what somebody else has said, you never wish to find out for yourself with your heart, whether the human being, you, can live at peace. Questioner: What is the significance of dreams? And is there something beyond dreams? Krishnamurti: What is the whole process of dreaming? Shall we go into it now or shall we go into it next time? Questioner: Let's sleep on it. Krishnamurti: You would like to sleep on it? (Laughter) Shall we discuss it tomorrow when we meet? TALKS AND DIALOGUES SYDNEY 1970 2ND PUBLIC TALK 22ND NOVEMBER, 1970 SHALL WE CONTINUE with what we were talking about yesterday afternoon? We are so afraid to use reason, to be objective. To think very clearly seems to be out of fashion. We are afraid of the mind and the capacity of the mind. We want to kill thought or we want to follow somebody - either Marx or St. John or some other philosopher, who, according to his own particular tendency, idiosyncrasy and conditioning, theorizes about life - what it should be. We forget, it seems to me, that life is a vast field - very complex and demands a great deal of enquiry. It is very subtle and yet at the same time extraordinarily simple. We are apt to take one segment, one part of this vast complex and commit ourselves to that particular part, whatever it be - economic, historical, scientific or technological; neglecting the rest of the field. Either we approach this whole problem of existence through religious belief, superstition, tradition, propaganda, or we treat the whole of life as a matter of superficial existence. Control the environment and everything will come right. We have seen in recent years that when one is committed to a particular section of this vast complex existence, you gather around yourself or around the party or the theory a great many people and then you can't let go. You're frightened to let go because it's become a habit. There are the Marxists, the Maoists - so many political divisions collecting groups around themselves and each one asserting that it is the right way. There is so much contradiction and this contradiction is bound to exist if we don't take life as a harmonious whole - neither neglecting one nor the other part of the field. We have to take this extraordinary thing called life as a whole, not in fragmentation but as a whole, and if we do, then we shall be committed to the whole and not to the particular. When we are committed, involved in the particular - whether it is political, national, economic or a particular religious insanity, then there must be division, then there must be contradiction, then there must be conflict between each other. I think that is clear when one observes what is going on in the world. A serious man, who is really deeply concerned with the human existence with all the travail, the misery, the conflict, the despair, the utter sense of hopelessness has to take life as a whole. That is what we are going to do, if we can, during these talks: not be committed to any particular section or involved in a particular corner of the field but being completely and totally involved in the whole problem of existence which includes religion, death, love, daily existence, relationship, meditation and trying to find out for ourselves if there is such a thing as reality - such a thing that is beyond thought, which man through centuries has been seeking. We are involved in all of that, not in one particular expression of it, so let us be clear from the beginning that we are not talking about a particular panacea, a particular solution, a particular philosophy. Philosophy means the love of truth; not the theory of truth, not the speculation about what truth is, which any intellectual person can spin endlessly. It means to discover for ourselves what truth is actually in our life, in our daily living - the beauty of it, a quality of timelessness. All this involves that the mind must look at life non-fragmentarily, not be wholly absorbed in sex or in amusement, or in a particular form of belief, or completely lost in nationalism. We are concerned, surely, with the understanding of this whole existence; therefore a mind that wishes to understand it must be free to observe non-fragmentarily. It can't be a Marxist, it can't be a Communist or a Socialist or a Catholic or a Protestant, or a Hindu or a Buddhist, or just be concerned with Zen, and so on. If this is clear between us that we must be totally involved with the whole problem of existence, from the moment we're born till we die, with all the things that are involved in it, and to be committed to them wholly - if that is established between us then we can go into all the many problems because every problem is interrelated. There is no problem by itself, they are all interrelated. You cannot solve one particular problem, whether it be an economic problem, a technological problem or the problem of pollution by itself. They are all dreadfully and intricately related, and to try to solve one problem at one level, discarding or neglecting the other levels, is utterly, if one may use the word, stupid. It doesn't bring about understanding, a solution. If that is completely clear between us, then we can go into the question we were talking about yesterday, which is dreams. We are going to discuss that and we're going to go into the question of fear and so on. We are not discussing dreams by themselves but in relation to the whole of our daily existence with its fears, ambitions, competition, conformity, pleasure, fear and so on. In relation to all that, we are investigating what dreams are. If we neglect all the rest of it and be concerned only with dreams then it's as though you're playing with a toy; it has no value. I don't know quite where to begin this question of dreams, but we'll begin somehow and see where it leads. Most people dream either fantastic or subtle or crude forms of dreams. We have never questioned why we dream at all. We have accepted dreams as we have accepted so many things, as part of daily life. We have accepted nationalism, we have accepted drugs, we have accepted alcohol, we have accepted smoking, we have accepted religious beliefs and all the rest. We accept, we fall into habits, and we drift along; whereas, we must question very fundamentally why do we dream at all? Is it necessary? Some psychologists say it is. I'm not an expert, nor have I read psychological books. I don't read books at all, except weekly magazines and detective stories; I really mean it. One can find in one's self if one knows how to observe one's self, the whole history of man, past and present. You investigate it in yourself, because yourself is the world, yourself is the division, the contradiction, the misery, the confusion, the aching loneliness and the suffering, and if you know how to look then you need not read any book because the whole history, the whole life, is there; and you are your own teacher and your own disciple. You become a light to yourself and therefore do not depend on anybody. So why do we dream and what are dreams? In dreams, if one observes and, if you have tried it, put down on a piece of paper every morning the dreams that you have, just for fun, you will find there is a consecutive relationship between each dream. You will find that these dreams are the continuation of your daily life, only in symbolic form, with scenes, variations, with various forms of subtlety but it is the continuation of our daily life - the daily struggles, the daily conflicts, the daily irritations, the daily fears, pleasures. It is the same movement but in words, in scenes, in symbols. I think most people would agree, except of course the neurotics to whom dreams mean so much. Through dreams one hopes to find some kind of mysterious universe, but it is really a movement of our daily life. So what takes place? As the speaker is putting this into words, use him as a mirror, if you will, to observe yourself. He is not saying anything new, or rather, nothing ideological, nothing that can be put into categories. If you are listening and observing in the mirror, then you will see for yourself, without agreeing or disagreeing, that what he says is what you actually are. Dreams are the continuation of our daily life and our daily life is occupied, busy with constant chattering, gossiping, having opinions about this and that, judging, condemning, justifying. It is aggressive, violent; that's our daily life, and that goes on when we are asleep. The brain, which is the residue of memory, both the conscious as well as the unconscious, continues like a machine and therefore the brain has never any rest. It's like any motor that's constantly running, all day and all night, endlessly. So, what takes place? Such a brain becomes tired, acts erratically, erroneously, gets caught in illusion; it has no vitality, no energy. Dreams become unnecessary if you know how to observe the movement of life during the day, if you are aware fully what you are doing during the day. Then, the brain becomes extraordinarily active, sensitive, awake to every movement of thought. You discover all the motives, all the hidden, subtle drives, complexities. You are awake during the day fully. The words you use, the gestures, the contempt, the disrespect, the violence, the brutality, the competition, the vulgarity, you become aware of all that during the day, so the brain, the whole structure of the nerves, the body, the organism, being alert during the day, when it goes to sleep becomes very quiet. It has expended itself during the day, understanding what has been going on. Then the brain, when it sleeps doesn't have to bring about order in itself. You see most of our brains are disorderly. We function with only a very small part of that brain and we have a great many disorders and much confusion. Yet the brain can only function properly, sanely, when there is order. If you have observed, as you go to sleep, the brain tries to bring about order just before it goes to sleep; have you noticed that? You try to look over what has happened during the day, in retrospect and say, `well, I should do this - I should have done that'... `I should not have done that'... `I must have...' `this is right, this is wrong'. It tries to bring about some order and as you have not brought order during the day, at night the brain brings about order. These are facts, you can experiment with yourself and you'll find out. There is nothing mysterious about it. This bringing order during sleep is dreams. To bring about order during the day there must be order in your relationships, not order theoretically, abstractly, but order in your daily relationships - with the conductor on a bus, with your boss, with your wife, with your children, with your neighbour. Otherwise the brain tries to bring it about while the body is at rest, during sleep. This is a waste of energy. If you bring about order during the day, the brain becomes quiet at night, it refreshes itself, makes itself new, functions more smoothly. Therefore, when you wake up, you have energy. Dreams then are merely the continuation of one's daily life and if that daily life is contradictory, confusing, disorderly, the brain spends the night bringing about some kind of order, but it is not complete order. Unless you have complete order, the brain is slightly distorted all the time. Our question is - how to bring about order in our life, order, not according to some blueprint, not the order according to Marx or some philosopher? All the teachers have blueprints of what order should be, and we poor monkeys imitate them, which brings about more disorder. To find out what order is, not according to any philosopher, to any book, to any social structure, one sees that there is no division between oneself and the world, that the world is oneself. In order to bring about order in the world which is so chaotic, there must be order in oneself. If you want to transform the society while being yourself disorderly, confused, messy, how can you do such a thing? It's impossible. You have to have order in yourself as a human being; not disassociated from the community because you are the community. So the question is - how to bring about order, that is, order without effort. The moment you make an effort that very effort brings disorder. Please understand this deeply, this question. Every form of effort is distortion. Have you ever played with archery? The slightest movement sends the arrow crookedly. The whole body must be completely harmonious, relaxed to let the arrow fly smoothly. In golf, in cricket, everything must function smoothly. Effort implies contradiction, opposition, restriction, conformity. A mind that would understand order and live in order must observe and learn what is disorder; not how to bring about order. Are we meeting with each other? You know, communication implies sharing together, learning together, building together. The word communication comes from the word common, a common relationship. When we are discussing these subtle things there needs to be hesitancy, sensitivity. Unless you are also doing the same thing, being sensitive, watching, learning, communication comes to an end. What we are saying is: order is not a blueprint, it is not to be copied, imitated, something to which you conform, but rather it comes about naturally, easily, without any effort, if you understand what is disorder. Through negation you come to the positive, not through the positive. If you are pursuing the positive, you will create disorder. We are trying to learn, observe, and through that observation we begin to find out what the subtlety of order is. We live in disorder, that's a fact, which means we live in contradiction. If there were no contradiction at all, we would be orderly naturally, so we have to find out for ourselves why this disorder exists and why there is this contradiction in us. Why is there contradiction in each human being? not according to Marx, not according to religious people, not according to some psychologist or philosopher. We discard all those people. We can't learn from others, we have to learn from ourselves because we are the others. We have to find out for ourselves why there is this contradiction in ourselves and why out of this contradiction there is disorder. You have understood my question? Why is there this contradiction in our lives? Contradiction implies saying one thing, doing something else, thinking something else. We become hypocrites, not only to ourselves but to others. One can see why there is contradiction in ourselves. First of all, we have ideals, various forms of principles, ideals about what should be. That is one of the major causes of contradiction. We human beings are violent human beings, aggressive, competitive, and so on, and we have ideals of non-violence, that we should not be violent. Immediately there is contradiction; the violent man having ideals about not being violent, brings contradiction into his life. Why does he do it? Why does he have ideals? Because he doesn't know how to deal with violence, with actually what is, and also he may not want to deal with violence because it gives him some peculiar neurotic pleasure. Therefore he invents an ideal and that ideal is always in the distance, and in the meantime he is sowing the seeds of violence. He pretends to be non-violent, he has ideals, he practises idealism and yet he is being violent all the time. One of the major causes of contradiction is ideals. Are you free of the ideals now as we are talking? You're not are you? You still have your ideals, you're still living in contradiction, which means you like contradiction. You are afraid to break down the ideals, you are afraid of what you might do if you had no ideals. You don't see what ideals do. They bring about contradiction in our life because you avoid completely the actual fact of what is. Therefore the idealist is a hypocrite. All the young generation are supposed to be idealists because they want to change the world, and this young generation is as confused as the older generation. This duality exists because of ideals and this duality, this contradiction exists because we are always conforming. From childhood, through education, through propaganda, through the social, economic, political, religious structure, the culture in which we have been brought up demands that you comply, conform. Aren't you conforming? We are not talking about conforming superficially; when the speaker goes to India he puts on Indian clothes. If he put on Indian clothes here it would be too much of a good thing. It would become a circus, therefore one has to conform outwardly. But the speaker is asking why do we conform inwardly to anything. Why conform to what society, culture may have given you or you yourself have projected from yourself, the what should be: not what actually is but what should be, or what has been? Conformity, imitation brings about a contradiction in ourselves; and can the mind not conform at all? Conformity implies adjustment to a pattern of memory. Doesn't it? Do follow this because it is very interesting if you go into it: whether the mind can be free from all conformity. Can the mind function without the pattern which memory has created? Because then only can it be free. Technologically, there must be accumulation of knowledge. All science, all engineering, all mathematics is the accumulation of continuous knowledge which sets its own pattern. There is a form of conformity here and you must, if you want to go to the moon or live under the sea, you must then have technological knowledge, and conform to that knowledge, adding or taking away. Technologically there must be knowledge, but can the mind be free from conformity to the past? We are the past. You are the past, aren't you? You have memories, you remember certain things, pleasant, unpleasant. You are living in your youth, in your yesterdays, all the memories and the pleasures and the fears of yesterday. You are the past. Or, you project the past into the future, modified but it's still a continuation of the past. Can the mind be free to observe, and therefore act, without the pattern which memory creates? Now, to find that out, to find out if the mind can be free from all conformity you have to know, understand the whole nature and the structure of thought. We said, that to understand the nature of a mind that is not conforming except in the technological world, one has to investigate the whole structure of thought. What is thought? When you are asked that question, what is your answer? What is thinking? Not what you think, but what is thinking in itself? Thinking is the response of memory, isn't it? This is very simple if you go step by step. You are dealing with a very complex problem and to deal with a complex problem you must move millimetre by millimetre, patiently. So we're asking whether the mind can be free from all conformity, and to find that out you have to investigate, question the nature of thought. Thought is the response of memory; memory is knowledge; knowledge is experience. If you had no memory, you couldn't think. You wouldn't know where to go - you wouldn't know where your home was, so response of memory is thought. Memory is stored in the brain cells themselves. It's part of the brain structure. So thought which is the response of memory which is the past can never be new. Please do understand this basic thing; thought can never be new, so thought can never be free. It may invent or it may talk about freedom, explain what freedom is, write innumerable volumes about freedom, but the thought which can write volumes is the response of its memories and therefore thought is never, never new and therefore never free. Thought can only conform, modify, adjust, bring about certain changes, but it's still within the realm of the past which is memory. This is not an opinion, it's not my opinion or my understanding, this is a fact. So, can the mind not conform, yet use thought whenever it is necessary, like going home, driving a car, performing the technological activities, yet inwardly, be free from any sense of response from the past? This becomes immensely complex and difficult if you haven't done it, if you haven't gone into yourself, taken time to observe. You have plenty of time, you have plenty of time to observe. You take plenty of time to amuse yourself, don't you? To go walking, sailing, watching other people play cricket, to sit in front of the radio, television, you have plenty of time. Give some of that time to look at these problems; the nature and the structure of thought. Don't learn from others. What you learn from others is not yours, it is theirs, and if you learn from others you remain secondhand; whereas if you learn from yourself by observing, a totally different kind of activity, life begins - at a different dimension altogether. Thought, when it's conforming, brings contradiction. Contradiction implies, as we said, ideals, conformity, and there is contradiction when there is obedience, obedience to authority. The more civilized we are the more we reject outward authority. We are using the word civilized in the sense - not primitive, not responding to things violently. The response of violence is the most primitive form of action. I don't understand something, therefore kill it -throw a bomb against it, that's what's happening in the world. We must destroy this structure, therefore bomb it out. There is contradiction when there are ideals, conformity and obedience. You know the word obedience, the root meaning of that word obedience means to hear. When you hear constantly that you are a Catholic, you must have your son baptized, you must go to the confession, you must do this and do that every day, hear, hear, hear, you obey. Or you hear - `This is the greatest country, the noblest people, the marvellous politicians; this is the greatest religion' - repeat, repeat, repeat, and you just follow the propaganda. Where there is obedience to authority, whether it is the authority which you have selected, the authority which is imposed on you, or the authority of your own experience, then there is contradiction. A mind that can live without contradiction has to understand all this, understand the nature and the structure of thought; and from that we can go on to the question of fear. When we are talking about fear, we are not describing fear, we are not explaining because description, explanation is not the thing described, explained. You have to feel it, you have to live with it, find out, put your teeth into it; which means you must have great intensity, passion to find out, not just calmly sit back and lazily investigate. You must give your life to this thing. Shall we go into this question of fear? Probably sitting here in this hall for the moment you have no fear. At this actual moment you have no fear. If you think about it you can remember the fear and look at the past fear. That is, we are investigating what fear is and at the moment we are not afraid, so it is difficult to examine fear, understand it without inviting it, bringing it out. So, we are going to look at fear through one of the means which brings about fear, which is psychological dependency. Actually you depend on somebody, psychologically you depend, don't you? On your wife, on your husband, on your children, on what people will say. And, do you know you depend? You depend don't you? Depend on a book, depend on the priest, on the politician, depend on your wife or husband, because they give you comfort, security, position, safety? And if anything happens to that on which you depend you feel lost, you get frightened, you become jealous, angry, hating, don't you? So one of the forms of fear is dependency. Why does one depend? Not depend on the milkman, on the postman or all that, but psychologically, inwardly, why do you depend? You depend because you are frightened of yourself, you are frightened what might happen if you didn't depend on somebody or on something. The mind must be occupied, it doesn't matter with what; with the kitchen or with God, with sex or with amusement. It must be occupied. Have you ever asked yourself why this happens, why should it be occupied? If it were not occupied, what would happen? Then you have to face, look at what actually is going on. You have to observe, you are thrown upon yourself to see what's going on, which is: you're frightened of your own emptiness, of your own insufficiency. You are afraid to be alone, not isolated. To be alone is entirely different from isolation. You see the difference? One is afraid to be alone, therefore the mind must be occupied -or, is it occupied because in oneself one is so empty, shallow, one's life is so meaningless? You may have a good house, nice husband, wife, children, a pleasant lawn and blue skies, yet one's life is very shallow and therefore you try to fill it with occupations and when there is no occupation you're frightened. We are showing how fear comes about. You are afraid of death which is in the future, and afraid of the things that you have done in the past, so fear is in relation to something either in the past or in the future but never actually at the moment. You know, the speaker is working very hard. I hope you are working too. You have to work, put all your energy and passion into this, otherwise you will never be free of fear and a mind that is frightened lives in darkness, its actions are neurotic. It escapes, creates so much mischief in the world, it's like living in darkness and trying to do the right action. To a mind that is frightened there is no beauty. It can visit museums, listen to concerts, but such a mind which is frightened becomes an ugly mind in action, a brutal mind, a violent mind. One has to understand and be completely free of fear, not only at the conscious level but at the deeper levels. We are going to go into it to see if it is at all possible. I say it is possible. It is not possible to you unless you do it. We are going to examine this question of fear thoroughly and, in examining fear, we are also examining pleasure. We can't leave out one and take the other. If you want to investigate, understand, to be free of fear, you have to understand, pleasure completely. You can't say - I will divide the two and keep the pleasure and discard fear; they go together; you can't divorce them, they are the two sides of one coin. It demands a great deal of energy to understand the deeper layers of the mind in which pleasure and fear are rooted. All our actions, activities, are based on the principle of pleasure, aren't they? Our gods are based on pleasure, our morality is based on pleasure, our relationship is based on pleasure. Subtly and deeply the current of pleasure runs through all our activity, of like and dislike. We pursue that relentlessly and we avoid at any cost, fear; run away from it, suppress it, escape from it, distort it, because we don,t know how to deal with fear. We know what to do with pleasure, the more the better, and we know the channels in which we can find it. And we have cultivated them so marvellously. Also we have cultivated all the innumerable escapes from fear. To understand all this demands a mind that is really, deeply, profoundly serious; because in the understanding of it, you live a totally different kind of life, and, as you are the society and you are the world, you bring about a radical change in the world. Perhaps it may be better if we continue when we next meet, because this requires really deep investigation, not just a casual look at the end of an hour and a quarter, listening to something that you think will help you to get rid of fear. The question to be discussed is - is it possible to come upon the great energy needed to understand what is? If you think it is not possible, then you have no energy. Yet the impossible becomes the possible when you are deeply concerned with it. So to find out the roots of fear which lie not only in heaven but very close to the earth, to find that out one has to go into this at the deeper layers, the hidden recesses of one's own mind. Therefore one must be capable of exposing one's self, not to others but to one's self, so that there is no hidden corner. I don't know if you've ever asked yourself whether you are honest, completely, totally honest to yourself, which means to find out if you are dependent on anything, on anybody. Am I dependent on you? You are there, a large audience, are you feeding my vanity? Am I dependent on what people say about me? Am I dependent on the company, the friends, and so on, am I dependent? If I am dependent I am afraid, then I am dishonest, basically, deeply; then I become a hypocrite, then there is conflict, then there is duality, division, contradiction. A mind that depends and finds out whether it can be free from all fear, both physical as well as psychological, must have the capacity, have the intensity to expose itself completely to itself. We are going to do this on Wednesday. TALKS AND DIALOGUES SYDNEY 1970 3RD PUBLIC TALK 25TH NOVEMBER, 1970 I DON'T KNOW why you clap. What we are talking about is not something that needs your approval. What it demands is that you listen to what the speaker has to say and find out for yourself the truth of the matter; not your opinion, not your conclusion, not your information but rather to consider what the speaker has to say and see for yourself whether it corresponds with what you yourself actually feel and think. The speaker is not saying or putting forward a new philosophy, a new series of ideas and conclusions, but rather we are going to investigate together the whole question of fear, pleasure and joy. Before we go into that, I think we should be clear that we are so capable of self deception, we so easily deceive ourselves that we have to be extremely watchful when we discuss together this question. It is complex and needs a great deal of attention. We are going to discuss fear, pleasure and joy and whether the mind can ever be free of fear, not only the conscious mind but also the deeper layers that lie below the conscious; whether one can expose all the content of that and whether fear which is so deeply rooted and to which one has become so accustomed can be totally understood and therefore completely and absolutely freed. Fear in its various forms destroys the capacity to see clearly, to think logically and to perceive actually what is. Fear distorts all of our conduct. After all, behaviour is righteousness and any form of fear, perceived or not perceived, makes every behaviour into a contradiction. So, as we discuss this evening, together, the question of fear, we have to be very watchful that we don't slip into some form of formula that will help us to cover up our fears. What we are going to concern ourselves with is not only fear but the necessity of being free from it, completely. Otherwise, human conduct, behaviour, cannot possibly undergo a radical revolution. We are concerned with that revolution, not physical revolution but psychological revolution, the conditioning which has been brought about through fear. Until we really, deeply understand fear, pleasure and joy, there cannot be a radical change in the very structure of our life, and the very structure of our thinking and action cannot possibly undergo a mutation. So, it is absolutely essential that we understand this very complex problem of fear. We have to look at it, not at the description but rather at the fact. We are going to look at it both analytically and non-analytically, verbally and non-verbally. Therefore, when we are examining what fear is, we mustn't get stuck with mere explanation or mere words. One has to be aware of one's own fear; actually. You may not have that fear at this moment sitting in this hall but the indication of that fear as dependency on another, attachment, the fear of not being, of not becoming, the fear that lies behind all our activity. One has to be aware of it, to look at it. One of our difficulties is going to be that we are apt to escape through the word, and through the habit which we have cultivated for so long, which is to escape, fly away from what actually is. As we said the other day, we cannot possibly understand what fear is unless we understand what pleasure is and also, in understanding pleasure, to know what joy is and ecstasy. They're all interrelated and we cannot possibly separate one from the other and hold on to one and avoid the other. They are all interrelated, complex, and this needs a great deal of enquiry, observation and learning. We are using those words, 'to learn' perhaps in a peculiar way. Learning implies an observation which is not acquisition; to observe without acquiring. When we use the words 'to learn', we generally mean to accumulate knowledge, to pile up knowledge so that according to that knowledge we will act. That's what we generally mean by learning. Having learnt Italian, Greek, whatever it is, one can speak that language. Having learnt mathematics, then one can become an engineer or what you will. The accumulation of knowledge through learning is one thing and learning without accumulation is another. Learning and acquiring knowledge; action from that becomes routine, automatic. It's like a man in a factory, having learned a few movements, he can keep on repeating and repeating and repeating. Having learned a particular language, acquired the words, the verbs, the irregular verbs and so on, and having accumulated knowledge, he can then speak. That's one thing. Whereas, learning without accumulation is a constant movement of observation. I hope this point is somewhat clear, because there have been experiments, I've been told, in American factories where the worker is allowed to learn as he goes along and he produces more; whereas, the man who has learnt and keeps on repeating, to him it becomes a bore, therefore he doesn't produce so much. What we are concerned with is learning. Accumulation of knowledge is necessary, otherwise we couldn't go home, speak English, or Italian or what you will, but when we are looking, examining this factor which guides, shapes most of our life, which is fear, one has to learn about it. Therefore, we must come to it afresh, not with a conclusion, not with condemnation or justification. justification and condemna- tion are born out of knowledge which is the past and therefore there is the cessation of learning anew. So, we are going to learn, together, about this whole thing called fear and pleasure and joy; learn together, not hear what the speaker has to say, or learn some technique from him and then apply it. Then you won't be able to understand or deal afresh with the factor of fear. One can be totally and completely free of fear. Physical fear is one thing and psychological fear is another; and most of our fears are psychological, inward, not physical fears. We don't live in the wild, we are not attacked by another in a so-called civilized society. Physical fears we can deal with and we know what to do when we meet a wild animal or a snake or this or that - we know what to do. But we don't know what to do with psychological fears which are much more complex, so we have to learn about them; not learn from the speaker, as knowledge, and apply what you have learnt to the fear that you may have in the future. I don't know if we are communicating together over this question. So, we are sharing together, not knowledge, but the act of learning and therefore, the awareness, the intention and the intensity to observe. It's not through the description of what the speaker is saying, but in observing your own fear. As we said, there must be, not only socially and environmentally, radical change in the social structure. Appalling things are happening, violence, brutality, wars, and a man who is at least civilized and thoughtful and wants to live completely at peace must understand this question - why human beings are so violent in all their relationships. And in understanding this question of fear you will understand the nature of violence. So, what is fear? Obviously, it doesn't exist by itself, it exists in relation to something, either in the past or in the future: fear of loneliness, fear of frustration, fear of not being identified with something, fear of not succeeding, fear of being completely isolated, fear of death, which is fear of not being, and also the fear of not becoming. Fear is always in relation to something. It doesn't exist by itself. When we enquire into the unconscious where there are a great many fears stored up, how are you going to look into it? You understand my question? How is the conscious mind to look into the so-called hidden parts of the mind? I don't know why we call it the unconscious, it's really a misnomer; the unconscious is very conscious, only we are not aware of it, that's all. My question is, please follow this - how can your conscious mind, the mind that thinks, observes, watches, looks, how can that mind look into something that is unknown, hidden, where most of our fears lie? You understand my question? We are sharing together, please listen to what the speaker has to say, we are sharing together, we are not teaching. I am not your teacher or your philosopher, or your authority; that would be terrible. We are sharing together to find out whether it is at all possible for the mind to be totally and completely free of fear. If there is any shadow of fear lurking it distorts all thought, all life, it destroys affection, love, therefore one has to really understand it. My question is, and I am sure you must have put this question to yourself also, and if you have not, please put it now: how can the conscious mind, the mind that is daily active, how can that mind enquire or look into the hidden parts of itself? Because that's where all our subtle forms of fear are; our attachments, our demands for success, the competitive aggression, anxiety, guilt - it is all there. Merely to say `I must get rid of fear' or suppress fear, has no meaning. The question is: how can such a mind which is daily active, occupied with daily things, enquire into something which is hidden, deep? Does it lie through analysis? Can you, can the conscious mind analyse the hidden fears, hidden motives, all that goes on below, or must the conscious mind be completely still, so that its very silence and its observation reveal the whole content of the hidden? You follow my point? As we said the other day, analysis doesn't reveal a thing. On the contrary, it prevents observation and direct action. Whereas, if there is no analysis at all but only observation, then the mind, the daily active mind (to observe all the hidden layers and their content) must be completely still. You know, if I want to listen to a concert, to a symphony, I must listen to it silently. Don't you do that, when you are listening to some piece of beautiful music, Bach or whatever you will, don't you listen completely, quietly? Your body, your mind, your whole nervous organism is completely quiet. You are listening. You are not comparing the previous symphony which was played in another part of the world, you are listening without comparing, actually completely absorbed. Now if you are absorbed by the music, if the music takes over, takes you over, it's like a child with a toy. He's completely absorbed and when he has finished with the toy he's back again. So it is not absorption that is required but attention, and therefore you have to observe with a clarity of mind that is completely quiet. Are you doing this as we are talking? You understand what we are trying to explain, knowing that the explanation is not that which is explained? We are saying that if you would understand the deep content of the mind, the deep layers of the me, the self, with all its fears, anxieties, troubles and agonies, you can observe it only when the mind, the superficial mind, is extremely quiet; not make the mind quiet; but see the truth of it; and when you see the truth of it, it happens. You are getting all this? Are we following each other? When you look with that quality of mind that is very quiet, there is no verbalization, there is no comparison, there is no justification or condemnation, just watching. To watch, the mind, the daily activity of the mind must completely end. To understand anything, the mind must be completely still, especially when you are observing yourself, when you are observing your own fears, anxieties, loneliness, despair, demands for pleasure and all the rest of it; to observe that completely, really at great depth, the superficial mind must be completely still. You have to see the reason of it. It's fairly simple, a chattering mind can't see, can't listen, can't observe, can't do anything. See actually for yourself, the truth: that to observe yourself and the content of yourself, the superficial mind must be still. If you are doing that as the speaker is going into it, then what is there in the so-called hidden layers? There are many things involved, and we are only dealing with fear and nothing else for the moment. Either that fear is associated with the past, or with the future; what might happen or what has happened. Fear is the outcome of the past or of the future. You're watching your own fear, not my fear. What gives a continuity to fear? I've had physical pain a week ago, a bad pain and it's gone but I am afraid that it might return, that is, the past and the future. What sustains this fear? I've had a bad pain a week ago, it is finished, but yet thought goes on with it, carries on that it might come back. Thought which is the response of memory, of the pain that it had a week ago, that memory, with its thought says, it might come back. Thought sustains fear, gives nourishment to fear, gives a continuity to fear, thinking about what happened a week ago or thinking of what might happen tomorrow; thinking breeds fear. Then the next question is: how will you stop thinking? Do you follow me? An incident took place yesterday which gave me pain; it is finished; it's over but thought goes on, thinking, thinking, thinking about it, and so sustains the fear. Watch it a minute. Let's examine what is pleasure. What is pleasure, on which all our social morality is based, all our search, all our activity? All this demand, the searching for truth and all that nonsense is based on pleasure. Your gods are based on pleasure, your virtue is based on pleasure, your morality is based on pleasure; so what is pleasure, which every human being demands? What is pleasure? Again, there was an incident yesterday which was a great delight. It filled your whole mind, your whole heart; you looked at the cloud, the water, at the sailing ships, it was a great delight. But thought comes in and says, I would like that to be repeated it was so pleasurable I must have it. Right? There is the pleasure of sex. Thought builds the image, all the stimuli are sustained by thought, and the fulfilment of it tomorrow. So, thought sustains fear and gives continuity to pleasure. You don't finish with that incident of yesterday whether it is pleasurable or painful. It is finished; but thought goes on living with it. Right? We are learning, please, I am not teaching. We are learning together. So thought is responsible for pleasure and pain, which is the sustaining of pleasure and continuing of fear. The next question is, how can one not think about this? It was so beautiful yesterday, so marvellous, and there is the thinking about it. It was so painful and that pain is over, but, thought thinks about it. So one asks, is there a possibility for thought not to think about it at all, not to think about the pain or the pleasure? How is this to be done? Joy is not pleasure. You can't think about joy, you can think about it and reduce it to pleasure, but the thing that is called joy, ecstasy, is not the product of thought. Haven't you noticed when there is a great burst of joy you can't think about it the next day; and, if you do, it has already become pleasure? So, fear and pleasure are sustained by thought, given continuity by thought. How is one to look at great beauty, the beauty of a cloudless sky, the beauty of a sunset, the beauty of a face, the beauty of truth; to look at it and end it, and not think about it? Are you following? How is this to be done? Do you understand my question? If it is not clear, it must be made clear because one can see that fear continues by thinking about it, as you do with pleasure. Pleasure we want, the more of it the better, therefore we think about it; but we don't want fear, yet thought thinks about it, what might happen. Is it possible for an incident, whether it is painful or pleasurable, to end and not leave a mark on the brain? The mark on the brain is the memory and then the memory responds, which is thought. So, can the mind observe the sunset, the beauty of the landscape, the curve of a wave, observe it and end it, and not carry it over? How is this to be done? Please bear in mind what we are discussing. We are saying there must be a radical change in the human mind and heart, a total revolution. When there is that radical revolution in the human being then you will create a totally different kind of society, there will be a totally different kind of relationship between human beings. The miseries and the misfortune and the violence that comes in the human mind spring from fear; and as long as fear doesn't completely and absolutely end, man will be violent, and so there is no radical revolution. Our concern is the understanding of fear, a total, absolute understanding and being free, completely, of fear. And we say that it is possible, not theoretically, not in abstraction, but actually, to be aware of that incident of beauty or that incident of grief, of danger, which causes fear, to be aware of it and end it as it arises. Is this possible? Can the mind not keep a record of the incident that gave great delight or a happening which gave pain? Not keep a record, that is, for that incident not to leave a mark as memory in the brain? How is this possible? It is really quite simple. You know we are so frightened to be simple. We want things to be complicated and the more things are complicated the more we think we are intellectual. We are never simple, we don't know how to look at things simply. When you can look at things simply, you are beyond all the intellectual words, then you see something real, it's yours, it's not cooked up by the brain. There was that incident of the beautiful sunset; as you looked at it there was great delight. You observed it, the colours, the light on the water, the various shades of light in the cloud, you observed it. Can you observe it without the word? The moment you use the word, that word has associations and that association is part of this memory. When you say how extraordinarily beautiful it is, you have already gone away from looking, from observing, from seeing the sunset. So, can you look at that sunset without the word? Which means to look at that sunset completely, with complete attention, not comparing with the sunset you saw in California or in another part of the world, or say to your friends how lovely it is, but just to look, without the word. That means look with complete attention. Then you will find if you so look, that very perception prevents a memory being formed about that sunset. Which doesn't mean that you haven't any joy, delight in the sunset. You've had pain a week ago. The pain has left a memory and that memory responds and therefore you think about it. Whereas, if you observe that pain completely, attentively, wholly, not saying I must go to the doctor, I'm frightened, you know all the chatter that goes on when you have pain, just to observe it, totally with complete attention, then you will see you are finished with it, therefore thought doesn't pick it up and carry it over. You have understood this? If I may go into this in a different way: There were two monks walking from village to village, preaching. They had taken vows of poverty, celibacy, charity and all that business. When you take a vow, then you are lost, then you are in battle with yourself, but when you understand everything, then you don't take a vow, you simply live it without effort. These two monks were going from village to village, preaching. One morning as they were walking along they came to a river and they saw by the side of the river a girl, weeping. One of them said to her, `Sister what are you crying for?' And she said `This morning early, I waded across the river and my home is on the other side and there is no boat and I can't wade it now because the river has swollen and I don't know what to do and that's why I am crying.' One of the monks said, `Don't cry, it's quite simple'. He picks her up, wades across, leaves her on the other bank and goes on. The two monks walk on and after two hours the other monk says `Brother, we have taken a vow never to touch a woman. Brother, what did it feel like to carry that woman, didn't you get excited, didn't you feel extraordinary things happening to you?' And the other replies `I left her two hours ago and you are still carrying her'. That's what we do. We carry our pleasures and our fears. As a human being, you, the self, the me, is the burden of the fear and the pleasure. And you are afraid to lose that burden. A mind that understands the nature and the structure of thought is free of fear. And because it understands fear, it understands, also, pleasure, which doesn't mean that you cannot have pleasure. When you look at a cloud and a leaf it is a pleasure to look, the beauty of anything is a pleasure, but to carry it to the next day, then pain begins. Joy is something entirely different from pleasure. You can invite pleasure, you can think about it, sustain it, nourish it, seek it out, pursue it, hold it; but you cannot with joy, with ecstasy. And that happens naturally, easily, without any invitation, this ecstasy, when you understand fear and pleasure. A mind that is really free of this, or rather understands it, then such a mind which is with ecstasy, is never violent, is never ambitious, never seeking position, prestige and all the rest of that nonsense. You will find also that love is not pleasure and, one asks, what is love? We all talk about it, the politician, the admiral, the butcher; everyone talks about it, the priest. What does it mean? You know, to find out what it is, you must totally deny what it is not. Through negation of what it is not, it is. One has to find out if pleasure is love. Is desire love? Love is associated with sex, and sex has become extraordinarily important, hasn't it? You see it everywhere, pick up any magazine, walk down any street, endlessly, this `love'. Why has sex become so colossally important, and with it is associated what we call `love'. Why? Have you ever asked this question? Why? Go right through the world, it doesn't matter where it is, perhaps in the Asiatic world it is hidden but it is there, whereas in the western world it is all open, completely permissive. Why has sex with which is associated love become so extraordinarily the only thing in life, apparently? Have you noticed how our lives are mechanical, repetitive? Going to the office day after day for 40, 50, 60 years, living with ourselves, with our anxieties, problems, with our routine, with the problems that go on, repeating, repeating, repeating? Have you noticed how mechanically our minds work? Please watch it. You repeat what you have read, what you have heard. You are a Catholic because for 2000 years it has been repeated that you are a Catholic. You must believe, the only saviour; and in India for 5000 years or less they have repeated their stories. Our lives are routine, habitual. You smoke because others smoke; you drink, it's habit, it's mechanical. Haven't you noticed this, that our lives are utterly meaningless? We can invent a meaning. We can give a significance to life, intellectually, but actually, our lives have no meaning whatsoever; the way we live. It is a constant repetition in conflict. Our lives are mechanical, secondhand, we are secondhand human beings. Our education is mechanical. This is obvious. So, sex becomes important because it is not mechanical. You can make it mechanical by thinking about it, as pleasure. Pleasure inevitably becomes mechanical. Through sex you hope to find heaven, some extraordinary, illuminating experience, something beyond the routine, the mechanical. Your whole life, from birth till you die, has become mechanical and the one thing you hope you have that is non-mechanical, sex, you soon reduce to a mechanical thing. That's why sex has become all important. That you call love. With it goes tenderness, jealousy, anxiety, anger, bitterness, hate. All that you call love. So, can you deny all that, not verbally but actually put it out completely? That is, not to be jealous, not to be competitive, because an ambitious man doesn't know what love is. How can he? A man who is seeking success, position, prestige, does he know what love is? He will know what pleasure is in the fulfilment of his ambition. Can you as a human being, caught in the thing called love with all its agony, suspicion, hatred, can you, actually, happily, put all this aside? Otherwise, you are caught in a trap, the trap which is the moral social structure. A mind that enquires into this question of pleasure, fear and the beauty of ecstasy must find out what it is to love, what it means, not intellectually, but what it actually means to love. You know, when you say you love your wife or your husband or your friend and at the same time are concerned with your own particular little problems, your own particular fears and anxieties and ambitions, how can you love another? All these isolate. These are self-centred activities and how can such a mind and heart love? If you really loved, would you have wars? Would you allow your sons and daughters to be killed? Would you allow it? You don't love your children. You may love them as toys when they are very young, but as they grow older you let them go. You educate them, and part of this education is to destroy your neighbour. All this you call love. So, as you don't love here, in this world, then you must love God. Do you understand? And there, too, you are competitive. All the saints are competitive. They are record-breakers. Don't laugh please. We are not saying anything funny, this is dreadfully serious. All our life we say one thing and do another. We are hypocrites. We will always be hypocrites if we have fear and if we are merely pursuing pleasure, therefore love is not pleasure. If you loved you would educate your children totally differently, you would end wars, instantly. But you are not interested in all that, you want your own particular little security, the security of your own pleasures, not the mind that wants a totally different kind of existence, a different way of living. There is a different way of living that can only come about when you have really deeply, radically understood these things. Do you want to ask any questions? Questioner: What is your approach to life after death? Krishnamurti: Do you want to discuss that this evening? Perhaps we will go into it on Saturday afternoon. Have you any questions on what we have been talking about? Questioner: Can one observe without effort and if you observe without effort will this observation dissolve fears? Krishnamurti: I have been talking about it the whole evening. Can you observe without effort? Now, can you observe with effort? (audience - no...) Don't yell sir, find out, can you observe anything with effort? If I want to see you, must I make an effort to see you? Can't I see you because I am interested in seeing you? We have made everything into an effort. To get up is an effort, to go to bed is an effort, everything has become an effort. Why? Why is it we can't do anything simply, easily, happily, why? Why has all of life, the way we live, become a constant struggle, conflict and effort? First, let us look at it very simply. You make effort because you are comparing. You are comparing yourself with another, yourself with an idea, yourself as you think you should be. You are comparing. In education when you are a little boy the teacher compares you with the other boy who is still more clever. The mother compares herself with another woman, so, where there is measurement, comparison, there must be effort. Can you live without comparing? Never to compare, that means never to have an ideal, never to have a hero, by which you measure yourself with another. When you see a man riding in a big car, you look at it and you compare. You compare yourself with a man who is clever, bright, and you say, `I am dull'. Therefore, recognising through comparison you are dull, you make an effort to be bright. Please see this, the truth of it, that when you compare yourself with another or identify yourself with another, which is a form of comparison, there must be conflict. Can you live without comparison at all, which means seeing what is, and never comparing what is with what should be? You have understood? Never to compare, which means when you don't compare, you have to observe yourself and therefore through observation you become a light to yourself. Light doesn't compare itself with anything, it is light. When you are tremendously joyous, there is no comparison; but when you are comparing, when there is comparison you say, I had pleasure yesterday and I want more of it. To wipe out in our vocabulary in our thinking, the `better', the `more'. The better is the enemy of the good. If there is conformity there must be effort, if you are conforming to the social pattern, to what people say, conforming to an ideal, conforming to the past image of yourself or the future image of yourself, there is constant comparison, constant conformity. You train the child to conform. That is what the Stalins, Hitlers and all the tyrannical rulers of the world have done; conform. All the religious people have conformed and that's why there are saints. Can the mind not compare, not conform? That you can only find out by being aware, every day, seeing how you are comparing, how you are conforming, deeply, not at a superficial level, putting on these trousers or some other trousers, but deeply, inwardly conforming, comparing. Then you can live a life without conflict, when there is no comparison and there is no conformity, because then life is intelligence and that intelligence is not yours or mine, but intelligence, which is wisdom. TALKS AND DIALOGUES SYDNEY 1970 4TH PUBLIC TALK 28TH NOVEMBER, 1970 I THINK WE were going to talk over together the question of death. Before we go into that we ought to consider habit, time, and what we call living. Death and living are not two separate things though we have divided them, though we have through our fear of death put it far away from our minds and from our hearts, from our daily activity. We ought to be concerned with the totality of life, not a particular part of it - what we call living - and try to put away from us this question of death. We are so easily gullible, we take things for granted, we accept so easily, we never question, we don't seem to have fundamental questions at all. We never ask, and if we do we expect someone else to answer. We never search out in ourselves, deeply, to find the right answer to most fundamental questions. One of the fundamental questions is death, as is love, as living is. We have made living into a habit. There is nothing new in our lives. There's a great deal of excitement, entertainment, escape either through the church or through watching football. We have never, unfortunately, questioned the whole implication of habit and whether; caught in many habits, not only superficial habits but deeply rooted habits, whether one can be free of them, not gradually but instantly, immediately. We have never questioned for ourselves, deeply, inwardly, what time is. When we do begin to enquire into the question of habits, both superficial and deep, we don't seem to be able to be free of them. One of the accepted habits is that gradually, psychologically we will change, slowly, step by step. We have developed a sense of gradualness. One can see that in the technological world, in the scientific world gradually one accumulates knowledge about space, all the outward effects of life; one must have time there, to accumulate knowledge, slowly, carefully, painstakingly, not with a personal attitude but with a logical, sane pursuit of knowledge. And one asks if there is psychologically any progress at all, or is it also a peculiar habit that we have cultivated that says there will tomorrow: that at the end of many tomorrows I will change. That allows time, a gradual process of achieving. Now is there, psychologically, tomorrow at all? Please don't, if we may suggest, accept anything, especially what the speaker is saying. Let us investigate together, enquire together, actually share the enquiry, the understanding, together. We are asking if there is, psychologically, tomorrow at all. We have fallen into the habit of thinking that there is a tomorrow. Chronologically there is tomorrow; by the watch. You have to make arrangements for tomorrow, for the various complications and projects of tomorrow. But inwardly, is there a tomorrow at all? Or, are we caught in the habit of becoming: becoming gradually wise, gradually enlightened, gradually be free to investigate, to observe, gradually wade through this confusion and sorrow. This gradual acceptance, the acceptance of gradual process, is there any validity in that at all? We see outwardly a building can't be put up immediately, therefore there must be a gradual structure of that building. And psychologically, inwardly, we also think it is a gradual process to bring about a radical change. Is it so? This is one of the most fundamental questions that you must ask. It's like a man who is terribly violent, has an ideal of nonviolence, and is going to achieve it someday. In the mean- time, he is sowing the seeds of violence, he is being violent while he is pretending to follow the ideal. Isn't it a trick of the mind, this idea that you'll gradually, slowly change? We have so many habits, physical as well as psychological. A particular habit, like smoking or eating meat, after all, is a habit. Can that habit be dropped immediately, a particular habit, or must it be done gradually? One has to enquire, go into this question of time. Is there a living, is there an action which is total, which is not involved in the gradual process of achievement? When we talk about time, and, most of us are concerned with time, time as getting old, time to realize, to understand, to accomplish, to fulfil, to be free and so on. One must go into this question of time altogether totally. We are sharing this question together, you are not merely, if I may point out, listening to the speaker. What he says has very little importance, but what you discover through what he is saying has tremendous importance; what you discover, what you find out. But if you're merely trying to understand what the speaker is saying, then you'll be lost in words. If you employ the words of the speaker to find out, to investigate, to discover for yourself, then it's yours. Then we shall be sharing together. And it's much more vital, and much more fun, if one can use that word. There is chronological time. There is time by the watch, and we depend a great deal on that to do anything, to go from here to your house or travel, anything involves chronological time, time as yesterday, today and tomorrow. How,inwardly, psychologically is there time at all? Is there tomorrow at all? That means one has to find out what it means to become, because most of us are concerned in becoming. Aren't we? We are slaves to the verb `to be'. That's one of our peculiar, consistent slaveries to a word. To be, to become, this shall be and what has been. That word conditions the mind; do follow this a little bit because we are slaves to words. `Australian', that means a tremendous lot to you, and the word `Hindu' means a great deal to those who live in India and the word `Arab' means something tremendous to the Arab. The verb `to be' has extraordinary significance in our life. That verb has conditioned our thinking, and when you observe yourself you will see, if you have not already done so, that we are always postponing, that we are always caught in the habit of becoming. Therefore the negation of becoming is `not being'. Therefore we are afraid of `not being'. To explore together this question of what is death and what lies beyond, if there is something beyond, one has to learn very deeply the question of time. Is it possible to change instantly and not be concerned with time at all? When you are concerned with time it involves gradualness; and when a change is to take place, psychologically, inwardly through time there are many factors which will prevent the radical change. A human being is violent; for various reasons which we won't go into now, because that's not what we're concerned with. Human beings throughout the world are aggressive, brutal, ready to kill, violent. They've destroyed so many species of animals, they're making the earth almost uninhabitable. They're violent. Can this violence be completely set aside, not gradually, but immediately? If you introduce time into this between what you want to achieve and what actually is, there is an interval, there is a gap, a lag of time. In that interval a great many other factors happen, a great many other causes, influences take place and therefore you can never possibly be free of total violence. Human beings, you and I, must radically change, because we are the society and the society is us. We are the community, and to bring about a change in the social structure which is so ugly, we ourselves have to change, because we are part of that structure, we have created that structure; and to bring about this change shall we depend on time, the many tomorrows? Or,is it possible for the human mind to change instantly? Probably you have not put this question to yourself, ever, because we are caught in the habit of gradualness which is quite terrible really. We see evolution in the species, and we see things evolving like a motor car; a bullock cart evolving into a jet. We think we human beings can also do that, gradually. Gradually we shall be happy people. We shall love each other, we shall live in harmony and all the rest of it. I think that is totally absurd. It is a lie. What has validity, vitality, passion is to find out if it is possible for the human mind to change instantly. We say it is possible. Don't accept it. We are going to look into it. You know, first of all, one must put away, altogether, the idea of gradualness; it has no meaning. When you have pain, a really serious pain, you don't think it will gradually disappear. You do something instantly. When you see the danger of nationalism, or the danger of division between human beings, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hindu, not only the division between human beings outwardly, when you see the effect of division, the danger of it, if you actually see the danger of it as you see the danger of a snake, of a precipice, you act instantly. If you see the danger of this division between human beings then there is instant action. So the problem is, why don't we see the psychological dangers that we have cultivated for so long? Why is it that we don't see the world and living as a total unit, as a whole movement; not a separate movement as the individual and the collective. The word `individual' means indivisible. The human being who is not fragmented in himself is the true individual. But we're not individuals, we are fragmented, we are contradictory, we are not harmonious, complete; therefore, to call oneself an individual has no meaning. Yet we have fallen into the habit of it. Why is it that we don,t see the danger of our psychological habits, like belonging to a particular nation, accepting a particular organization such as Catholicism or Hinduism and so on? We don't see the danger of it. Why? If you see the danger you would act instantly. What makes the mind dull? You know this fact, an absolute fact, that any kind of division between human beings will inevitably bring about conflict, war, hatred, jew against Arab and so on. Intellectually we think we see that division creates harm. Verbally we agree, but apparently we don't feel, deeply, the danger of this division. Why? In asking that question, why, we're not going to analyse, that is, through analysis discover the cause of why the human mind is so appallingly dull. In analysing why human beings don't see the danger, the psychological danger, in analysis time is involved. And that is going to prevent you from acting. In asking why, we're not analytically, intellectually examining. We can, afterwards, if we wish, but in asking `why' you are confronted with your own mind which has become terribly dull to danger. Are you, if I may ask, are you aware of the danger of division? Are you aware, conscious, not just intellectually saying I understand what you mean, but actually understand? The word understand; what does it mean to understand something? There is no understanding if it's mere verbal comprehension. Surely, that's not understanding. A verbal agreement or disagreement, that's not understanding. Understanding implies, doesn't it, not only hearing the word, recognising the meaning of that word, but also going beyond the word; that is, you understand something when you listen to it totally, which is non-verbally, non-intellectually, but totally. So, we put the question, why the human mind through so many centuries has accepted this division and perceives the danger of this division and yet doesn't end the division. Is it that it doesn't actually see the danger? To see the danger one must not verbalize or escape through the word but actually be in contact with your heart and your mind with the question. I want to know why my mind, this mind, accepts the psychological dangers and lives in that terrible state of not perceiving what is really most destructive. Why? When I ask that question of myself, am I asking the question because you have asked me? Or, am I asking that question because it is an important question to myself? You know, to be told that you are hungry is one thing, and to feel hungry is another. Which is it? You're being told that your mind is dull because you don't see the danger. You are told; or, do you realize that your mind is dull because you don't see the danger? And, therefore no one is instructing you of the danger, you yourself have discovered the danger. And therefore, that discovery is the instant action. The perception of danger is immediate action. If I perceive the danger of smoking which is habit, nervousness, accepted by society, the result of propaganda and also perceive that it stimulates or dulls - you know what cigarettes do, tobacco does - see the danger of it, not of smoking, but the danger of habit, see it, totally; then you will find that in dropping smoking there's no conflict at all. You do it and you'll find out for yourself. After considering what time is, we'll have to consider now what living is. Not what living should be or the ideal of living but what actually is living, the living that we do every day. What is it? It's a series of efforts, battles, a series of - you know what life is don't you, need I describe it: confusion, misery, anxiety, guilt, an appalling sense of loneliness, ugliness, old age, all the fear of disease, fear of insecurity, clinging on, depending on someone. This is what we call living. We want to find in this living, a meaning, a significance, and if you are very clever you invent a significance as all the churches of the world have, as the philosophers have. We try to find something outside this frightful confusion and mess. And, not being able to find something beyond it, we cling to what we have. We cling to our sorrows, cling to our problems, our fears, our anxieties, and our miseries. And that's what we call living, an everlasting battle from the moment we are born till we die, with an occasional flare of something. We have divorced from this living what is called death, put it away as far as possible. Knowing that it is inevitable we begin to speculate on what is beyond death, or accept as truth what others say lies beyond. So, we believe. Belief implies accepting as true what we don't know. You never believe in the rising sun, it is there. Our belief is the acceptance of something being true. We're going to find out whether we can change totally what we call living, not gradually but completely, put aside all our miseries, all our problems. What is a problem? It is something that has not been resolved which you carried over to the next day. It is not resolved because you want that particular problem solved in your particular way, according to your conditioning, your particular prejudice or pleasure, or fear. You never face the problem. You don't finish it as it arises, and to finish it as it arises is to be totally aware of that problem. You cannot be aware if you are condemning it, judging it or wanting it resolved in a particular way. The thing that we call living is actually a terrible affair. We don't know what to do and we escape through so many ways. One of the ways is to believe in something. To face this confusion completely, not move away from it, to be totally aware of this confusion which means to give all our attention (not to trying to find out the cause of it, that again is very simple to explain) but to be aware that we are completely in confusion, which we are. The man who is confused, trying to seek reality, trying to find out what is the right action will only further increase his confusion. Out of this confusion, when he chooses, his choice is also confused. Be aware completely without any distortion of this confusion; when you see the danger of it there is a totally different kind of action. We're going to find out, together, what death means. What is it that dies? This is a complex question. People have written volumes about it. One has to put aside everything other people have said. That's the first truth. One has to find out for oneself, absolutely, otherwise you live always in the shadow of fear. The organism grows old, grows unnecessarily decrepit, senile, has many diseases, because we have abused the organism. The organism is mechanical, is a machine and we have misused it. And, naturally, it dies. We know that. That isn't what is causing deep fear, there is something else. We are afraid not only of the unknown, but also afraid of letting go the known. Letting go your furniture, you know, actually your furniture which you have cherished, which you have polished every day. You have bought it and given so much attention to the beastly thing, however beautiful it is, and you're part of that furniture. You are the furniture. Do observe it, you're part of that house, which you have bought through so much difficulty. You've identified yourself with a particular community, with a particular family; so, you are the community, you are the family, you are the book, whether that book is the red book of China or the black book or the red book of some other country. You are what you have identified yourself with, whether it is the image that you have identified yourself with, or the image which you have built about yourself. You're that, and you're also this terrible confusion, mess, misery, torture of living. You're all that. All that is the word and the memory of association, association which has its memories. This is a fact. It is not what you and I wish, but it is so. Then we see the impermanency of the furniture, the impermanency of ourselves, so thought begins to invent the soul, as the permanent. The Hindus have done this beautifully. They've had time, 10,000 or 5,000 years, so they have invented this extraordinary structure; the higher self, the Atman, the ultimate and the physical. Gradually through birth after birth, reincarnation, all the rest of it, you'll ultimately reach whatever that is you're going to reach. You have also, in the Christian world, this whole idea of resurrection; only it's not so complicated. The Hindus have a very cunning mind and they have invented extraordinary things, but the Christian mind is a little more unsophisticated. They accept so easily. They're as superstitious as anybody else. So, you're all that. That's an absolute, psychological fact. That is what is. You say to yourself, when I die I hope something of me will continue. What is this me that, according to the whole Asiatic world believing in reincarnation, is to be reborn again? What is that thing that you call the `me' which is the permanent, which is going to be reborn... you follow?.. if you believe in that. What is that `me'? What are you? If you look at yourself, what are you? Not only the physical appearance, the few clothes and the house and all the rest of it. What are you, actually, inwardly? Unless you look and not be afraid to discover what you are, you'll avoid this question very cleverly. What are you? You are a series of memories, experiences, knowledge that you have acquired, a conditioned mind that is shaped according to the particular culture in which it is born. If you were born in the Communist world you don't believe in God; that, they say, is silly, bourgeois. If you were born in the Western world, brought up in the particular culture, you believe, which is the same as being conditioned in the Communist world where you do not believe. You are the result of your culture, of your conditioning. That's a fact also. Don't escape from this. You say you also have looked at it and you say there must be something much more fundamental; much more permanent, real, which will, when we die, perhaps continue. You have lived an unfortunate life, not really beautiful, rather shoddy, superficial, joined this and that cult, believed in this or that; lived a superficial life and when the inevitable comes, off you go. If you really want to find out while living, living, not diseased, not neurotic, actually to find out what it means to die you have to ask this question. The question is: Is there anything permanent in you? Or,is the you a series of bundles of memories with all its associations? To believe in reincarnation; in that is involved something that is going to be reborn next life, something that you, now have which is not transient, which is going to take shape again on earth. When you believe in reincarnation, you believe you are going to be better next life; that is, if you are a poor, unfortunate person, next life you'll be the most beautiful person. If you believe that, then what you do matters infinitely, because what you do now is going to shape your future. Those people who believe in reincarnation don't care a pin what happens now, what they do now. They gossip, they butcher, they are violent, they are ugly, superficial, stupid, and yet they believe. When you are concerned with right conduct which is righteousness, when you are behaving totally, completely rightly, then it doesn't matter where you are, whether you are born next life or you die. This is not only physical, obviously, but also psychological, the dying to all things that you have cherished including the piece of furniture, and furniture I'm afraid does play a tremendous part in our life. Eventually you're going to die to the furniture, so find out if you can die to your furniture now; not to be attached to anything. Not to be attached doesn't mean indifference, it doesn't mean callousness; on the contrary, when you are not attached you have tremendous vitality. There is tremendous passion, there is great energy and that energy, then, can act totally. Is it possible to die every day to everything, to your image, to your memories, to your various dogmas, beliefs, hopes, fears? Die to everything, so that your mind is fresh, young, innocent? The word innocence means not to hurt, not to have the capacity to hurt or be hurt. Can your mind find a way of living where it is never hurt. Not by resistance, not through isolation, but by dying to all identification, to all attachment, dependency, inwardly, because inevitably that's what is going to happen. When death comes you're either diseased, `ga-ga' or unconscious. Whereas now, having full vitality, not neurotic, but sane, balanced, capable of reason, with energy; to die to all these things that one has accumulated in oneself. Otherwise there is no freedom. Dying every day is to love. One cannot love if there is no freedom. There is no freedom if there is the `me' which is the accumulation, the images, the movement of identification and detachment; that `me' prevents love. One has to die every day to know what love is. Then you'll bring a different kind of world into being. Would you like to ask any questions about all that we have talked this afternoon? Questioner: If nobody cares for their furniture isn't the world going to be rather flat? Krishnamurti: Do you mean to say the furniture makes the world beautiful? What is beauty? Is beauty in the architecture, in the structure of a building, in the painting, in music, in the word? What is beauty? You know, we are enquiring, therefore we must share it together. Don't just sit there and listen to my enquiry. Share with it. Questioner: Beauty is working among the poor. Love is beautiful. Krishnamurti: If I may say so, don't assert anything. Don't say love, beauty is this, that. We're questioning, enquiring, we'll find out sir, give it a chance, have patience. You see, we find beauty in nature, we find beauty in the building, in a poem, in a boat that is sailing in the wind, we see beauty out there, in the tree, in the cloud, in the movement of the water, in the flight of a bird, in the leaf trembling in the breeze. Is it out there? Go slowly. Where is it? In your heart, in your mind? Is it there? Or is it in the tree, in the picture that you see in the museum, in the Velasquez which has just been bought for five million pounds, or whatever? Where is beauty, and what does beauty mean? You know, as long as there is a division, the observer and the observed, you the observer looking at the picture and saying how beautiful it is,is there beauty? Go slow, please, just enquire, don't answer me. As long as there is a division between the onlooker and the thing that he looks upon is there beauty? As long as there is a division of any kind between you and the cloud, between you and the child with the smiling face, is there beauty? Not that you identify yourself with the child, or with the cloud, or with the flutter of the sail; when you identify, again there is a duality; you identifying yourself with another. So, one discovers that there is no beauty at all when there is any kind of division or identification. I identify myself with the beautiful blue sky or with the beauty of my wife or husband. In that identification there is division. So one discovers that there is no beauty if there is any kind of division and distance, a time interval. Can this division between you and the light on that water end, in the sense that there is no division, there is no space, no time interval? For that to happen there must be no observer; there must be no me. The `me' must be abandoned. The `me' creates the division, as the observer. For that to end there must be passion; if you have no passion (not lust) there's no beauty. You can visit all the museums in the world, compare Michelangelo with da Vinci and so on; in that there is no beauty. Beauty implies total self-abandonment and with passion so that there is no division. After all, that is love. When there is that quality of mind that has no division, and therefore loves, that is beauty. Questioner: Does the insanity of violence bring about the privilege of death? Krishnamurti: Why can't we be simple about all this? Life is very complex. It's terribly complex. All our relationships are complex. Society is getting more and more and more complex. And apparently we can't be simple enough to look at all this with clear, simple eyes. What I said was, there is no new life unless you die to yesterday. That's all. That's a simple fact. If you want to discover something totally new, you have to abandon all the old. Questioner: In a book that you wrote previously you said you had spoken to your brother after he died, you'd seen him. Doesn't this prove to you there's life after death? Krishnamurti: In a book you wrote, you saw your brother when he died, and how do you explain that? That was the question wasn't it? Questioner: That's right. Krishnamurti: Did you hear the previous answer which I talked about, which is to live a simple life? Or were you occupied with some other question? Apparently, you're asking whether when the speaker's brother died about 45 years ago, he saw him. How do you explain that? That's the question. Are you interested in it? Yes? Good Lord. You see, you're really not interested in the real things. You're really not interested to find out how to live a different kind of life, deeply, beautifully. All right, sir. First of all, it may be imagination. That's a tremendous possibility, isn't it? When you love or so-called love your brother and he's gone, there is great sorrow, there is a great feeling of apartness, and in that state you see all kinds of things, don't you? You see yourself lonely; I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about the human being. You see yourself as lonely, deprived of companionship, things that had meaning, gone; and what you could have done and didn't do, the regrets, the pleasures, you see so many things, don't you? Both the past and the future. And among those you see perhaps through imagination or the thought, the form of a thought, you understand? You see that. You know, all these things exist. There is thought transference, you know it, don't you? When you are very close to somebody, husband, wife, the wife hasn't to say a thing, and you do it, or you think it, there is immediate transference. There is also extra-sensory perception, all kinds of powers as you begin to investigate yourself deeply. All kinds of capacities come, so-called clairvoyance and other kinds of powers. But a wise man puts aside all those because they are irrelevant. But, people who want excitement, power, position, use those as a means of exploiting. A wise man avoids all this and moves away from all this. I'm sure I haven't answered your question. We want comfort and therefore we want the solace that we find in the companion who has gone. Therefore the mind can do all kinds of tricks, caught in all kinds of illusion; and that doesn't lead to clarity, to truth. The mind must be free of every form of deception. Questioner: If there is no God what does it matter what we do or think? Krishnamurti: Because you have God does it matter what you do and think? Does it? Because you believe in God, do you think what you do matters? If it does, what matters is what you do, not what you believe in; what you do for itself, not because of something else. This question of God we can't go into today, we'll go into it tomorrow. This is one of the questions, a part of our life, God, death, beauty, love, pain, suffering, it's all one. One has to understand all of it, not just God and something else, apart from that. It's a total movement of life and not a fragmentary movement in which there is God and the other fragments in which there is no God. To go into this question, whether there is or there is not, and not according to your conditioning or the speaker's conditioning - if he is conditioned - but to find out, actually, not verbally but deeply to find out if there is such a thing as something immortal, something timeless, something that is not measured by thought; to find that out requires not just an afternoon or an hour, an hour of controversy or discussion or dialogue, but requires your whole life, the way you live it. We'll go into that if you don't mind, tomorrow morning. TALKS AND DIALOGUES SYDNEY 1970 5TH PUBLIC TALK 29TH NOVEMBER, 1970 I SEE MANY of you have no coats. May I take my coat off too? We were going to talk about religion and if there is such a thing as God - if there is or if there is not; to find out the truth, which doesn't depend on any organized belief. Obviously, no religion as it exists, right throughout the world, can honestly and truly claim to understand what truth is. This morning, if we may, we will go into this whole question, rather deeply, and find out through perception, through seeing, what is and what is not truth. First of all, one has to find out what action is, an action that would be total, complete, non-fragmentary, because our life, as it is now, is fragmented. There is the action of the business man apart from the artist and the artist apart from the scientist and the scientist apart from the so-called religious man and the religious man apart from the labourer and so on. There are the various fragmentations of religions, the fragmentations of political, national division, economic, moral. The morality which society sustains is no morality at all, it is really, actually, immoral. So one has to find out for oneself an action that covers all this; non-fragmentary, but something complete, total, non-contradictory, that will apply both to the artist and the businessman, that will be true, consistent, constant and alive. We have to find such an action, because all our life is a movement in action. All living is relationship in action and if that action is contradictory, broken up, it must inevitably breed conflict, pain, sorrow, a great deal of mischief and antagonism. So one has really, basically to find out if there is an action that will be whole, total, never contradictory. I think that is one of the primary issues, if one really wants to find out what religion is. First, the religion that one has - a vast machinery of propaganda, is no religion at all; it's merely a mass hypnotism, an instrument of very clever, cunning propaganda, insisting on its tradition, on rituals, on authority, on the hierarchical principle. I do not know if you have noticed all this. Whatever religion that exists on this earth at this moment is based on repetition, rituals, authority, hierarchical outlook, sustaining a morality which is not moral at all. Whether it is in India or Asia or in Europe or in America or here in Australia, it's a religion that says one thing and does another. It says `love your neighbour' and sustains the machinery of war. Probably one of the few religions in the world that has not shed blood is Buddhism and perhaps after it Hinduism, but the rest have brought about a great many wars and destruction; and most of these religions are based on belief. Please let us be clear that we are not attacking any of these so-called religions. We are merely stating what actually is taking place, merely observing the actual facts; not stating what religions should be, that's an abstraction and, therefore, no value at all. We are only examining what actually is and therefore it's not an attack. It's not an assertion of another system of religious thought. It is only pointing out - and the speaker is not pointing out but all of us observing that throughout the world there can be seen this plain and simple fact; authority, propaganda, hypnotism, a repetitive ritual stimulus and belief. Belief is the acceptance of things that may be true, accepting things that may be. A man who would really go into the question of what actually, religion is, to find out deeply, not according to his temperament or his idiosyncrasy or his culture, his conditioning, but actually to find out if there is such a thing as God, as truth, such a man must set aside all belief, obviously, and all rituals, because they are merely repetitive, meaningless stimuli, as any other stimuli. He must set aside, also, all the authoritarian hierarchical outlook. To find out, all this must be totally, completely set aside, because the mind must be free. Freedom is absolutely necessary. Without a free mind, a mind that's not distorted, that's not crippled by the cultural conditioning, without such a mind which is free, one cannot possibly perceive what is truth. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that a mind be free to enquire, to observe and to understand. There is freedom from something; freedom from anger, freedom from competitive, aggressive drive. Freedom `from' is one thing, and freedom is another. Freedom `from' something is a reaction, a contradiction, pursuing the opposite; whereas, there is such a thing as freedom, not `from' something. This may be rather difficult to comprehend but we have to understand it. We are always thinking in terms of freedom from something, freedom from tyranny, freedom from attachment, and so on. Actually, if you go into it, you will see that that is not freedom at all. In that there is always suppression, conformity or adjustment, because the opposite always contains its own opposite, whereas freedom is something entirely different. Freedom has no opposite. If I want to see something very clearly, the mind must be totally free to observe and that freedom is not a reaction or response from what is. In trying to find out what religion is one must understand the nature of belief, authority, conformity and the utter inanity of rituals. In understanding these there is, naturally, freedom; not freedom `from' rituals. We are trying to find out if there is an action which is not contradictory in itself an action that is always consistent, has no hypocrisy involved in it, an action that covers the whole movement of life, like a thread running through a necklace. If we don't find such an action, our actions will be contradictory, hypocritical and therefore involved with various forms of strains, distortions; such a mind cannot possibly be free. Then, there is the question of search, seeking, seeking truth. Search implies: searching `for' something that you can find. What you can find is what is recognizable. You set out to find out what truth is and you seek, you ask, you enquire into the various structures and organizations which believe in religion and so on. You are seeking. Seeking implies that you will find and what you find must be known, must be recognizable; that is so. If you can recognise something it is already known. Therefore it is not new. Therefore it's not true. This is rather an important question. Why do we seek at all? If life, the living, were something extraordinarily beautiful, or something in which there was no pain, no sorrow, if the thing in itself were profound, you wouldn't seek. Because we are shallow, rather empty, lead a rather sordid life, we want to seek something more. The more is what we call the truth and when you seek and you hope to find, what you hope to find must already have been experienced, otherwise you can't recognise it. Therefore, a mind that seeks will never find truth. I hope we are sharing this together, not agreeing or disagreeing but seeing the validity, the reason, the logic of this, because we must use reason, not your reason or my reason but reason. A mind that is moving away from itself is a movement towards what it considers is bigger, nobler or truer. This movement away from itself is what is called searching. Therefore, search becomes an escape from what is; but in the understanding of what is, you enter into quite a different movement, not away from. There are two different kinds of movement - the movement away, leading away, and the movement that is not away but entering in itself, entering into what is. It is not an inward look opposed to the outward look. The outward look is the extrovert look, going away, outward, and the introvert is looking within which is merely the opposite of the outward. But this, what we are talking about, is neither of these, it is a movement that understands the outer, that understands the opposite which is the inward and therefore it is entirely different. You see, the speaker doesn't prepare these talks, therefore he comes to it fresh, he's enquiring, he's going into it with you and if you don't follow, if you don't share it it's no fun. One must understand this question of seeking. Then you will ask, can a mind that doesn't seek and therefore has no challenge (challenge which depends on seeking, questioning, demanding, enquiring), can such a mind keep awake? Most of us need challenges, challenges in different forms and if we have no challenge most of us will go to sleep; and when there is a challenge we respond inadequately because we are so living in the past and the past responds to challenge which is always new and so the response must inevitably be inadequate and contradictory. We depend on challenge. That's what is happening in the world, everybody is questioning the value, the truth of Catholicism, Protestantism, the social structure, the immorality of the social order, questioning everything. But, this challenge has to be answered with a mind that is new, not a mind that is steeped, living in the past. Searching implies challenge also, so can a mind be totally awake without challenge? We will go into that. We'll come to it presently if we have time. We are asking: what is religion? What is action that is whole, complete? What is a mind that has actually set aside, intelligently because it understands, belief, the hierarchical outlook, authority, the inanities of rituals and so on, completely set aside all that? Belief implies acceptance of something as being true. We accept because our own life is rather uncertain, confused, and if we have belief in something, it doesn't matter what it is, how true or false, a belief in something, accepting something as true, gives us a certain quality of stability. This means we are frightened, we are lost without a belief an ideal. When you have a belief, an ideal, it must be contrary to what is. All your ideals, obviously, are the opposite of what is, and therefore inevitably there is conflict which leads to hypocrisy. That's one thing; then we have to enquire into the whole question of what meditation is. Meditation is a word that has been used recently in the West and has become rather fashionable, unfortunately. There are various exponents of what meditation is and each exponent offers a system, a system that will lead to enlightenment. One has to find out the significance of system, not of any particular system or method, but system. They say by practising a certain system day after day you will come to that state of mind that will receive, whatever it will receive. System implies repetition, repeating over and over and over that which somebody has said is the system, and you follow it, hoping to achieve. This means the mind becomes repetitive, mechanical. How can a mechanical mind see something which is non-mechanical, which is something extraordinarily alive, which is constantly in movement? If you see the truth of this fact, that any system, whether in the scientific or in the technological world or in the world of meditation, must make the mind dull, must make the mind so insensitive, so, if I may use the word - stupid -(it's only the stupid mind that accepts systems) - if you see the truth of that, then your mind is no longer pursuing a practice but becomes constantly aware, constantly alive, non-mechanical. There are the Zen systems - you know Zen? Do you know about all this? What a waste of time, isn't it? Because they all offer systems and when once you have seen the truth of a system you'll never touch it - it doesn't matter who offers it. Then there is, again, a recent fashion of so-called transcendental meditation, which is absolute nonsense because - need I go into all this? You know, a dull mind repeating a certain word, hoping it will achieve some extraordinary state, will still remain a dull mind. No? You know, there is this whole system in India, and I assure you when I go to India I have to battle with all these stupidities - there is a system in India called Mantra Yoga which is the repetition of a secret word given unto the disciple and he repeats that word 10,000 times a day, or whatever it is. Through that repetitive word he hopes to achieve a tremendous experience. Now that has been brought to this country - and elsewhere, and one of the odd things about it is that you pay for it. The more secret it is the more expensive it is. Don't laugh, please. See, the church has done this too. We are so eager to be exploited. There are two things involved in this. First of all, a repetition of a word, it doesn't matter what word it is, Sydney, Sydney, Sydney would do just as well as another word. If you repeat that word; do it yourself, it's rather fun sometimes, play with it a little bit, the repetition creates a certain sound. The tonality of that sound without the word becomes vibrant, and that sense of vibrancy gives you a certain quality of intoxication. That intoxication is as good as taking whisky; any stimulus is as good as another. You hope to achieve an experience. One has to understand that word `experience'. We all want deeper, wider, nobler, vaster experiences. That is all we are craving. Everybody wants a transcendental, marvellous experience, because our own life, the daily life, is so petty, so small, so shallow, so meaningless. Therefore we want deep experiences, and when you do experience something, unless you recognise it as an experience, it has no validity. The moment you recognise it, it's already the old, therefore it's not really, basically an experience in freedom. Have you heard that word Yoga? The word Yoga in Sanskrit means something, which we needn't go into and I think it is a wrong interpretation. Yoga is a form of exercise. Through that exercise you hope to achieve all kinds of states, but a stupid mind practising yoga will still remain stupid. We were travelling once in India on a train and it stopped at a station. Just outside the window a man was doing yoga on the ground. Marvellously it was done, with such grace, with such ease, with such perfection, and people were throwing coins to him. He was a beggar. You see the significance of it? No? That's all. You see we give importance to things that are not important at all. And also in the question of this meditation and experience is involved drugs, LSD, marijuana, various forms of `Speeds' and so on. It has been going on in India and in Asia for thousands of years, taking drugs, and now it is relegated to the lowest social strata. The poorest, the uneducated - you've no idea, because taking drugs brings about nostalgic remembrances of things that have happened, of psychedelic states. But it's all chemical formula which has no validity at all. A dull, cunning, stupid mind taking drugs, being conditioned, will experience a great many things, but when the drug wears off he's back to his own backyard. So, a man who is enquiring into the question of what is a religious mind must be free of all this, completely; free of drugs, alcohol, any form of stimulus, so that his mind remains clear, without any distortion. Then one can ask, what is meditation? You understand, we are enquiring into what is religion, what is action which is total, whole, complete, without any distortion, without the trivialities that man has invented, the various systems in order to achieve a quality of mind which is religious. Such a mind must be free of all the things that make it dull, because you need a very clear mind, a mind that is capable of reason and you cannot possibly reason if there is any form of prejudice, if your reason is not objective, or is personal. A mind must be completely sane, which means healthy. Then we can proceed to enquire. We have laid the foundation. The mind can then proceed to enquire, what is discipline, what is virtue? Discipline, the word, means to learn, not to conform, not to imitate, not go through the drill. To learn what is disorder. It is not discipline imposed upon you by society or by yourself or by your culture or by your guru, by your teacher. All that is really a form of suppression, therefore contradiction and therefore conflict. Such disciplines make the mind dull, insensitive. Whereas, we are going to enquire into the very meaning of that word discipline, it means to learn, and we are going to learn what virtue is. Do we know what disorder is? There is disorder, not only outwardly but also inwardly. There is confusion outwardly, confusion inwardly. Watch yourself, if you care to and you will see how disorderly your thinking is, your activity is, how contradictory, how confusing. In the understanding of this disorder, by observing it, not bringing a blueprint to correct the disorder, but watching it, being aware of it, becoming sensitive to it, then out of this disorder comes order, which is virtue; not the practising of some stupid quality, but simply becoming aware, highly sensitive to the disorder: the political, economic, social, the religious disorder, outwardly; and the disorder within oneself, the contradictions, the miseries, the confusion, the ambitions, the whole drive from a self-centred activity. All that is disorder and in becoming aware of all that you will find there is a different kind of order, and that it's a living order, not an order which is imposed through compulsion. Virtue, like humility is not something you learn, it's not something you practise, but you see that vanity, pride, all that creates disorder, and in the observing of that disorder comes real humility. Do it, please, as you go along, you will see. After laying the foundation, which is order, virtue, and setting aside all the trivial inventions that man has built in himself and around himself as a religious structure, which is no religious structure at all, we can ask and find out together now, what is meditation. You know it is one of the most extraordinary things if you know what meditation is. First of all we have to understand what awareness is: to be aware, aware outwardly, the colours, the proportions of this hall, aware of the various colours that you have on, aware without any choice, just to watch. And also to be inwardly aware of all the movement of thought, the movement of your gestures, the way you walk, the things you eat, the habits you have formed, again without choice - merely to observe attentively. You cannot be aware if there is a division between the observer and the observed, because that division creates a contradiction. You also have to understand what attention is. I do not know if you have ever given complete attention to anything. To attend means to give your mind, your heart, your nerves, completely. In that attention there is no observer, there is no me. When we are completely attentive the `me' doesn't exist at all. The `me' is the censor which is the past. So, there is a quality of attention which is completely different from concentration because concentration implies exclusion, building a barrier, a wall, putting away everything and concentrating on one thing. That`s fairly simple and fairly easy to achieve, every schoolboy does that. But attention implies the understanding of concentration and attending so that in that attention there are no borders, no frontiers because there is no centre from which you are attending. Meditation implies a quality of mind that can completely attend, therefore, a mind that can be completely still. The mind is always chattering, always talking, either to itself, within itself or to somebody, always in movement. How can such a mind which is everlastingly chattering, how can it perceive anything? Only a mind that is completely attentive has the total energy to observe: because you need tremendous energy to observe. The religious monks and others say that you cannot waste energy, therefore no sex if you want to be a saint. And when you become a celibate and have taken vows of celibacy there is havoc in you, because you are denying the whole biological system and there is a wastage of energy, you're battling, battling, battling. Or you go to the other extreme, indulge, which is another form of wasting energy. Whereas, if you are attentive it is the greatest form of all summation of energy. It means intensity, passion, and you cannot be passionate if you are wasting. Without any effort the mind can become completely quiet and therefore full of energy without any distortion. That is the beginning or rather that is the continuation of meditation which we began this morning. We began by asking what is religion. We began by asking if there is an action that is so complete, that is never contradictory, and therefore a life that is totally harmonious and we discarded the various systems because systems mean, as I explained, repetition. The mind, observing from the beginning of this talk till now, becomes extraordinarily sensitive. Being sensitive implies great intelligence, totally attentive and therefore completely quiet. Meditation is a movement of understanding of every action, a mind that is truly religious, that has no belief, that doesn't belong to any group, to any community, that stands completely alone. There is a difference between aloneness and isolation. Isolation leads to neuroticism, various forms of it, because in isolation there is exclusion, separateness, but a mind that is completely attentive, is completely alone, is therefore, capable of seeing what is true. So far one can verbalize, put into words, but after that nothing can be said. The man who says `I know' does not know. He does not know that which lies beyond, that which is not put together by thought, by our conditioning. Meditation is just opening the door. What lies beyond it can never be expressed in words and anybody who expresses it in words is not aware, does not know. The mind is a religious mind that has compassion, love, that has no fear, that is capable of standing completely alone. Therefore, it finds a reality which is not measurable. If you want to, ask any questions about all this. Questioner: You said yesterday that `When we perceive danger, physical danger, there is immediate action'. In that action is there any violence involved? And, if we see psychological dangers and there is instant action is there not also in that instant action violence? Krishnamurti: What is violence? Resistance is a form of violence isn't it? Conformity is a form of violence. Denying what is, but conforming, is violence. Fear does breed violence. There is violence in a crowded city because there is no space. Man requires space both outwardly and inwardly and when the outward space is denied, which is being denied more and more through overpopulation, there must be violence, especially in cities. So you ask: if one sees psychological danger, is there not violence, an action which is violent? Is it violence if you see danger and act? Bearing in mind that any form of resistance is violence, any form of conformity is violence, that fear breeds violence: when you really understand that completely, and when you see danger, the psychological, inward danger of greed, the danger of nationalism, the danger of division between people, is there violence in that action at all? Obviously not. Now, I hear that siren. Listen to it. Either you listen to it with no resistance at all, or you listen to it with resistance. If you resist that noise then there is violence. But if there is no resistance at all, but complete attention to that siren, listening to it completely, is that violence? Obviously not. Questioner: Why not silence? Krishnamurti: Why not silence? I don't know why not. Do you know what silence means? Is silence between two noises? Is silence between two thoughts? Is silence the result of control, suppression? Does silence come about because you have drilled yourself to be silent? Or is silence natural? Silent; to be completely quiet, not only physically but inwardly without any movement of thought. You know you can speak out of silence; that is, an action which is total, complete, non-fragmentary, non-contradictory, comes about out of complete emptiness of silence. But, we don't know really what it means to be silent. Questioner: You didn't answer the question. Krishnamurti: I am answering it sir. We are not silent. You mean to say, sir, that we can sit here quietly for an hour and a quarter, silently? Have you ever sat quietly for a few minutes without a movement of your eyes, without movement of thought? When you ask `Why not silence?', it's very simple to answer, because you are noisy. [Applause] Krishnamurti: Please.... Questioner: Why not renunciation? Krishnamurti: I beg of you, don't applaud. It has no meaning at all. If it releases your energy by clapping, do it when we are not here. The gentleman asked `why not complete renunciation?' What do you mean by that word renunciation? To renounce, to give up? Have you ever given up, renounced, one pleasure? Have you? Have you ever completely, easily put away something? Renunciation implies, doesn't it, that you give up something with pain, as a sacrifice, as something you have to do. Surely, that is not renunciation at all. Questioner: Please answer the question. Krishnamurti: I am answering it sir. You ask why not renunciation? Questioner: Why don't you renounce? Krishnamurti: Who? Are you asking me, why don't you renounce? Is that it? What have I to renounce? Look at it quietly. What have I to renounce and what have you to renounce? The gentleman asked why don't you renounce, which is me, the speaker. What have I to renounce? Property - because I haven't got any. Questioner: Words. Krishnamurti: I'm coming to that, sir.... patience. Have I to renounce publicity? Have I to renounce you sitting there and I sitting here? It doesn't mean to me whether I talk or don't talk because I've gone through that. There's nothing to renounce. And you say 'renounce words'. It is very easy to renounce words, put aside words. Then we must communicate in silence. You understand? How? We can communicate in silence, which means that you must be completely silent. We have done this for 45 years and more, it isn't just one day's idea of something we pick up. To communicate implies not only verbally but non-verbally. Now after verbalizing, if you are silent, completely attentive, then there is a communion which is not verbal. Questioner: If you do not carry over the past, would there be any creative action as dance, as painting? Krishnamurti; What does that word mean, creative, to create? When the housewife bakes bread is it creation? Why not? When the painter draws something on a canvas and says he is creative, what does that mean? That he is fulfilling himself on the canvas? Can there be creativity? As long as there is no self-fulfilment, me fulfilling, me acting, me wanting to be silent, me wanting to renounce; as long as there is not that movement, then there is creation. Questioner: As one uses a crutch when one is lame, when one is weak, just beginning, should not one use this mantra yoga - that is, repetition of a word? Krishnamurti: Who tells you that you are weak, that you are lame? Who tells you, sir? Or, have you found yourself that you are weak? And therefore, you need a crutch, therefore you need a mantra which is a repetition of a word Why do you assume that you are weak and therefore you need this which will ultimately lead you to strength, and therefore freedom? Do you follow what's involved in this?.... a gradualness: I am stupid now but gradually I will become intelligent, and while I am stupid I will use all the things that will make me still more stupid. The yoga, mantra yoga, repetition of words, rituals. Really what we want is to find pleasure. What we want is pleasure. We don't say we want pleasure, we say we want to achieve some noble thing, but when you repeat a word hoping that it will lead you to some extraordinary state, what you are seeking is pleasure. You have been hypnotized for so many generations and now you are also being hypnotized by this word mantra yoga, the repetition of a word. Sir, why do you make so much of it? Repeat a word like 'pepsi cola' or 'coca cola', that's good enough, you don't have to pay thirty or one hundred dollars. Pick up any word, 'ava maria' or any other word and repeat it and you will see what happens to your mind. Do it, sir. And also some time pick up a piece of stone with some shape to it or a piece of stick with some curve in it, put it on the mantelpiece, put flowers to it every day, with some respect, and you will see at the end of a month you are completely hypnotized by that stick, because you have given your devotion, your reverence, your love to that piece of stone and that becomes a habit and you are hypnotized. It's a form of self-hypnosis with which most of us are familiar, though we're unconscious of it. Questioner: You are using words to hypnotize us. Krishnamurti: Am I? Questioner: To de-hypnotise us. Krishnamurti: Oh, I'm using words to de-hypnotise you? I'm not sir. I'm neither hypnotizing you nor de-hypnotising you. The speaker is not interested in doing anything to you. All that he says is, observe yourself, know yourself, observe what happening around you, look at yourself, the misery, the tortures, the agonies that you go through. Learn about yourself, not from somebody, including the speaker, but learn about yourself by watching yourself. There's great beauty in that. Then you will find out in watching what it means to be aware, to be attentive, and a mind that is so attentive is a religious mind, is a clear mind and from that you can act totally. That's all he is saying. Do what you want, and you are inevitably going to do what you want, but be aware of what you want to do, for in that awareness your mind becomes sensitive, intelligent and from that intelligence there is an action which is total. TALKS AND DIALOGUES SYDNEY 1970 1ST PUBLIC DIALOGUE 17TH NOVEMBER, 1970 THIS IS SUPPOSED to be a discussion, or rather, a dialogue to talk things over together and understand and perhaps resolve the problems that one has. You know, the more one goes through the world, not only in this country but in India, Europe and America -there are so many conflicting problems, so much confusion and brutality, such a desperate violence; human beings don't seem to change very much. We have many problems not only the physical problems of environment, ecology, but also the deeper inward problems, problems of relationship, problems of conflict, despair, loneliness, misery, confusion and sorrow. We have accepted these and live with them as though it is part of our life. Perhaps we could this morning go into any one of these issues deeply, not theoretically, not in abstraction but actually, go into them in detail and also to get the general picture. Then perhaps it might be worthwhile if we could take one issue, whatever it is that you wish, and talk it over together so that we understand it completely. And when we leave this place, this hall, then perhaps we will be able to be free of it. So, what would you like to talk over? Questioner: Could we speak of death? Questioner: Hate? Questioner: Can we talk of self-doubt? Can we go beyond doubting ourselves? Krishnamurti: Can we talk over together this question of self- doubt, having no confidence in oneself and go beyond it? Questioner: Fear? Questioner: Can one actually live what you speak of and raise a family in this world of conflict? Krishnamurti: Can one live in this terrible, mad world sanely and at the same time earn a livelihood raising a family and so on? Is that the question, Madam? Questioner: Can we bring in sensitivity? Krishnamurti: Can we bring in sensitivity? We can bring a lot of things. (Laughter.) Questioner: Can we talk about how to see properly, how to see clearly? Krishnamurti: Shall we take up that question and then we can include all the other questions in it: fear, self doubt. I've forgotten the rest. The question is, now can one see things very clearly without prejudice, without bringing our own particular opinion, conclusions, our own form of conditioning? Without all that is it possible to see, totally, the whole vast spectrum of life? To see. What does that mean? To see clearly, now what does that word imply? Seeing, observing, to see without any image, to see things actually as they are without any form of conclusion; is that possible at all? I want to see not only outwardly what's going on: the wars, the contradictions of nationalities, the linguistic differences, the fragmentation caused by religions. I want to see all that very clearly, the outward phenomena; and, also I want to see very clearly what's going on within myself, within the skin, without any distortion. Distortion comes when there is any kind of effort. Are we following each other? We'll discuss this, we'll talk it over; I'm just explaining perhaps what it means to see, to observe, to observe clearly without any distortion what is actually taking place, not translating what I see in terms of my own conclusion, prejudice, fears and so on. Is that at all possible? Can we discuss this? Do you think that will be worthwhile? We have so many prejudices, conclusions, opinions, we have knowledge about so many factors, and these obviously prevent perception. I want to understand what you are talking about. I must listen, and to listen implies that there must be no interpretation but I must actually listen. That implies while I am listening there must be no comparison with what I have already learnt because you may be saying something entirely different. So, I must have the capacity and the art of listening, otherwise I can't understand what you are talking about. In the same way to observe clearly what is going on outwardly and inwardly, without any image; is that possible? Which means really to observe without any conditioning as a Christian, Communist, a hippie, a square and all the rest of it; to listen so completely, to see without any form of distortion. Now is that possible? It is only possible, surely, when I know all my prejudices, the formulas that I have, the conclusions, the opinions that I have gathered; becoming aware of those and putting them aside. Then I can listen. Then I can observe. Is that possible? Is it possible for me to put aside my particular form of conclusion, my prejudice, my conditioning as a Communist, as a Hindu, as a Christian or whatever? Questioner: Just because you become aware of a certain conditioning doesn't automatically mean that you conquer it. Krishnamurti: I'm going to show it to you in a minute. Go slowly, have a little patience please. I said be aware of one's conditioning. How, what does this awareness mean? To be aware. What do you think it means? Questioner: To be conscious. Krishnamurti: To be aware, to be conscious, to be sensitive; what does it imply? Questioner: To be identified with the things as they really are. Krishnamurti: To be aware, you say, is to identify oneself with the thing you are aware of. Questioner: You are the thing you are aware of Krishnamurti: Look Sir, follow this step by step, go into it because if we could understand this one thing we would resolve a great many problems. When you say you identify yourself with the thing you are aware of, who is the entity that identifies itself? Let us just look. We are trying to find out what it means to be aware, aware of this hall, the proportions of it, the colour of it, the steel beams, the cross-beams, the bricks, the windows and aware of the people sitting in it, the coats, the colour - to be aware. Now are you aware of all this if you begin to say `I don't like that colour', `I don't like that particular dress, mini or midi or whatever it is'? The moment there is a certain kind of prejudice stepping in you are not aware. Right? I have learnt one thing. This is a process of learning, isn't it? I've learnt that there is no awareness if any form of interference as knowledge, as prejudice, as like and dislike comes in. We are learning not theorizing. To be aware implies to be conscious without any choice, without any distortion or prejudice. Are you doing it? I am aware of my conditioning, as a Hindu, Christian, Communist, a hippie, or whatever it is. To be aware of my conditioning without any distortion, without any choice, just to see what that conditioning is. Questioner: But, Sir, we don't see it. Krishnamurti: Why don't we - why don't we see our conditioning? Questioner: Because if we could see it, it would have a hold over us. Krishnamurti: No Sir, no, no, why don't we see our conditioning as a Christian or whatever it is? Questioner: It's a protection. Krishnamurti: Which means what? That you don't want to see that you are conditioned? that if you saw it there might be certain action which might lead to danger? Therefore you don't want to see, therefore you are not aware. Don't let us talk theoretically of being aware which is mere pretension and hypocrisy. I see that in this world there are divisions as Christians, Communists, Socialists, Capitalists, Hindus - division. That division has created such havoc, such misery and as a human being I am part of this. I must be aware of this conditioning, of this division in myself, if I want to understand the structure and the nature of the society in which I live. If there is to be a radical revolution the mind must be free from its conditioning. Why isn't one aware of one's conditioning? Is it danger? Is it fear? Go slowly, is it fear, or is it a great indolence, laziness, indifference, letting things drift? After all we have lived with this confusion, war and misery for so many millennia, what does it matter one more life? Is that it - laziness, indifference, laisser-aller and fear? Or, is it also the fear of what might happen if I become suddenly aware how silly it all is? Aware that I'm the result of vast propaganda, whether it is the propaganda of the Christians, the Communists or the Hindus; that I'm caught in the trap and I'm too frightened to leave that trap? Which is it, please, not theoretically, actually when you look at yourself, which is it? Why aren't you aware of your conditioning? Is it fear? Questioner: Fear of being alone. Krishnamurti: Fear of being alone. Is that the fear? Questioner: Is it because we imagine there are things coming from outside ourselves? Krishnamurti: Is it that we imagine that it is outside of ourselves? Look Madam, you are conditioned aren't you? We are all conditioned terribly by the environment, by the society in which we live, and we are part of that conditioning, part of that society. When we are aware of what is happening in the whole world - the appalling brutality, the violence, the destruction, the misery, don't we feel we have to act? The house is on fire you can't say `I'm too lazy to put it out. I'm afraid to get burnt'. All that indicates a mind that demands a kind of isolated security. To be aware of all that. Now when one becomes aware of one's conditioning what takes place? I am aware that I am conditioned as a stupid Hindu or a clever Hindu, conditioned as a Hindu through centuries of propaganda and tradition. Now, what takes place when I am aware that I am conditioned? Questioner: You really don't see it. Krishnamurti: Don't I? I say I am seeing it. Sir, it's so simple. Why do you complicate it? Questioner: You get out of it. Krishnamurti: Madam, don't get out of it. We are going to examine, we are going to learn and find out. Questioner: When you become aware in this sense you have to become involved and when you become involved it's painful, arduous; only a little bit joyful. Krishnamurti: You are already coming to a conclusion. I don't think it is arduous at all. It is very simple. Please go with me a little, you will see what is involved in it. I become aware of my conditioning as a Catholic, as a Communist. That conditioning has taken place through centuries of propaganda - that there is God or there is no God, that there is a Saviour, that there is no Saviour, you follow? Conditioned according to the culture in which you have lived. I become aware of it, then what takes place? Questioner: You start seeing your conditioning, you see yourself as a Catholic, you see your limitations. Krishnamurti: You see that and what takes place? Questioner: You see it as limited. It's incomplete. Krishnamurti: That's only a conclusion. What actually takes place? Questioner: You are free. Krishnamurti: You are not learning from observation. Please, to observe means to learn, doesn't it? To find out, to enquire, to push through, to find out whether the mind can really be free of its conditioning, not to say yes it can be or cannot be, but to find out, to learn. So what takes place when I am aware that I am conditioned as a Hindu? Watch it Sir, find out. Questioner: There is an emptiness within the mind. Krishnamurti: There is an emptiness within the mind. Is that so? I am aware of my conditioning. I am aware that I am a Hindu with all its prejudices, superstitions, with its tradition and all the rest of it. Now, go slowly, who is it that is aware of this conditioning? Questioner: The conditioning. Questioner: The conditioned. Krishnamurti: Don't guess, please. Questioner: I see the conditioning in my mind. Krishnamurti: Who is it that sees the conditioning? Questioner: The 'I'. Krishnamurti: Who is the `I'? Will you allow me to speak just two minutes. I am aware of my conditioning; in that awareness there is a division isn't there? The observer and the observed, the 'I' that observes that he is conditioned. There is a division between the observer and the thing observed. Are you quite sure? Questioner: Yes. Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: Learn Sir. Don't say yes, no. Let's find out. Don't come to any conclusion. That prevents you from learning, from observing. I want to see what happens when I become aware that I am conditioned. Do I want to be free of that conditioning? Who is the entity who says that I must be free or the entity that says I must conquer it, I must escape from it, or I'm afraid of it? Who is this entity, who is this censor, the observer that says: this must be, this must not be? Questioner: The thing created by the conditioning. Krishnamurti: Created by the conditioning? Who is the censor? Therefore, you see, there is a division between the censor and the thing he condemns or approves. There is a division. Why is there this division? Let's leave that for the moment and look at something else. When you look at somebody, a tree, a mountain, the sea, or a face or a person, you look with an image, don't you? The image as knowledge. When you see a tree you say that is a Chestnut and the word itself becomes the barrier of perception. Questioner: Sir, when you identify it, isn't that the next stage after just seeing a tree? Krishnamurti: You want to go so fast. Go step by step, please. You look at things with an image, with a conclusion. And what happens? The image looks. There is no looking, but looking through an image. And perception is distorted the moment there is an image. I look at my conditioning and there is a division between the observer and the thing observed. I say to myself why does this division exist at all, because if that division doesn't exist then the whole problem is changed. It's because of that division there is conflict, isn't there? I see I am conditioned, there is a division, then the I, the observer, the censor, the thinker says - I must get rid of it, I'm afraid of it, I must change it, I must suppress it, I must do something about it because the has separated itself from the thing observed. The division brings about conflict. Are you learning this with me? You are probably not used to this kind of enquiry. Questioner: Is it the same thing as seeing blind? Krishnamurti: As seeing? Questioner: He isn't interpreting anything, he is seeing blind. Krishnamurti: Not quite Sir. I want to learn about this thing called conditioning. I don't know anything about it. I see I am conditioned. I want to learn all about it therefore I must observe it. I must be curious about it. I must be passionate about it, otherwise I can't learn. I must have intensity, I must have passion otherwise I can't learn. In observing I see there is a division and I see that division brings about conflict, because if there is only the thing observed without the observer then there is no problem. Questioner: Does that mean to concentrate on the problem? Krishnamurti: Who is it that is going to concentrate? Have you tried to concentrate on anything? What is involved in this concentration? Questioner: The experiencer. Krishnamurti: Who is the experiencer? Who is the thinker? Is there a thinker apart from thought? Questioner: The thinker is distilled memory. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Thought - which means there is no thinker if there is no thought. You are not used to this. Questioner: There is no thinker with no thought, but there is consciousness without thinking. Krishnamurti: When you say consciousness, is it made up of the content or separate from the content? Now, I want to learn about this conditioning in which every human being is trapped. To learn I must observe and in observing I see there is a division between the observer and the thing observed. This is really the root of the matter, if you could understand this deeply you will have solved the whole works. I'll show it. You see where there is a division there must be conflict, as an Englishman and a Frenchman, there is conflict. As an Englishman and a German - conflict, you follow? the conflict between the division as a Catholic and a Protestant, the Baptist and the Arab. As long as there is any kind of division there must be conflict. National division produces inevitably conflict. You have to learn this, you have to see it. The mind that wants to live completely at peace must have no division as the black as the white and all the rest of it. So, I see the root of all division in human beings is the division in himself as the observer and the observed, we and they, my party and your party, my God, your God and all the rest of it. Can this division disappear altogether? Otherwise we shall live in conflict. Questioner: There is such fear at the thought of losing our centre, our control. Krishnamurti: I am coming to that, Madam. You are not doing this, you are not learning, not following this tremendously important thing. Questioner: We must relax and become aware there is nothing to fear. Krishnamurti: Alright, Sir, fear. Do you want to discuss fear? Questioner: Let's finish this. Krishnamurti: If we could understand what is happening in the world, outwardly, which is the constant fragmentation, the businessman and the scientist, the religious man and the layman, the yogi, the guru and the disciple, the teacher and the follower; the division, you understand, the Pope and the poor chap, the rich man - division. Because this division exists there is bound to be conflict of various kinds. A mind in conflict, whatever it does, must distort. Obviously. I have to learn about it, how to live in this world without conflict, when everything around me is in conflict, when everything sustains this division. How? This is an imperative necessity, it is not just a theory. As a human being which has evolved through thousands of years, living like a savage, fighting, fighting, fighting, within himself and outside, how can this conflict come to an end? This conflict comes to an end only when there is no division inside myself, because I am part of the society - part of the culture which I have bred. I am the world, the world is not separate from me. I observe this conditioning going on; so I must learn totally about the whole thing. I see this division in myself as the observer and the observed. Why does this division exist? I must learn, find out, enquire why this division in me exists. What is this division? This division is contradiction. Questioner: Is it not the residue of the past? Krishnamurti: It is, but that doesn't solve the problem. Why is there this contradiction in me and in you, this hypocrisy, why? Contradiction - weekend religion and the rest of the week butcher people. We talk about internationalism and hold on to beastly nationalism. This contradiction; private life and public life. Why this contradiction? Questioner: We want to be the best, important. Krishnamurti: Is that it? We want to be important? Questioner: We move away from what we are to what we think we should be. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Questioner: That we are in contradiction. Krishnamurti: Go into it a little deeper. Why is there this contradiction? One of the major reasons for this contradiction is non-acceptance of what is. Which is, I have an ideal of what should be. That's one factor. The other is, I'm always living in comparison, comparing myself with somebody else or with a principle or with an ideal. This means I never accept the fact of what is. I am angry. Immediately I say I must not be angry. I am jealous, eaten up with ambition and I say no. You follow? Why don't I accept, why don't I see the fact, as it is, and not compare, not say it will be different tomorrow? Look, I see I am jealous, envious, brutal and what happens? The mind, thought says I must suppress it, that it is not right, that I should not be jealous, that jealousy is very painful, leads to hatred and all the misery it involves, I must avoid it, and so there is a duality. Now, can the mind observe jealousy and not get away from it? I am jealous, now what does that mean? What is involved in it? I don't want to suppress it, run away from it or change it. The fact is that I am jealous. Questioner: If you see this then you have to be as jealous as you are. Krishnamurti: Madam, please observe simple things. You are jealous aren't you? You know what that means jolly well, don't you? Most people do unfortunately. This is not to have a reaction about it - but observe it. Questioner: As soon as you start observing you are separated from it. Krishnamurti: When you are observing, when you are giving attention to the thing you are observing, is there a duality? You don't do these things, you are just playing with it. Look Sirs, have you ever given attention to something completely? Do you know what it means to give attention? Questioner: In this case there is none. Krishnamurti: Have you done it, Sir? Questioner: I have tried. Krishnamurti: You can try. Have you ever given attention completely, totally to something? Are you giving attention completely now, to what is being said? Are you? Obviously not. To give attention means to give your mind, your heart, your whole being to find out, not from books and somebody else, but to find out for yourself. Because you see, unless this takes place, unless the mind is completely free of all distortion which is all form of effort, what is truth can never be found out. And a man who lives superficially cannot possibly live fully. When one is aware there is this duality one asks why this duality exists. This duality exists because we have ideals, we have formulas, principles, according to which we live and therefore we never observe actually what is. Then what takes place? Am I explaining myself? Personally I have no ideals - they are too silly no beliefs, no conclusions, only actually what is. That way you avoid all hypocrisy. Then what takes place? I see actually I am angry. Then what takes place? You see one of the difficulties is, we think that it is not possible to change human beings. We have come to the conclusion that it is not possible, human beings cannot be changed I cannot change myself. You understand? Don't you say that? Is it possible to change what is? I've come to the point when I see actually that I'm not moving away from what is, neither verbally nor intellectually nor in any ideological sense. I remain actually with what is. Then what takes place? Questioner: I disappear. Questioner: Then I am the present. Krishnamurti: No, no. When you say I am - who is the I? You are that anger, you are that jealousy, you are that brutality, that violence. Then what happens? Questioner: It changes. Questioner: The confusion goes away. Krishnamurti: What takes place when you don't move away in any direction from what is, it doesn't matter what it is? Questioner: You become the observer. Questioner: No reaction. Krishnamurti: No Sirs, watch it. Let me approach it differently. I have never looked at my conditioning. I've accepted it. I have lived with it. I've been a Hindu for 80 years or 10 years and I have lived with it. You come along and point out to me that I am conditioned and I begin to realize the implications of that conditioning; what it does, how it destroys, how it separates. In observing, the mind has become sensitive, hasn't it? The mind has become sensitive which means intelligent; observing not from books, not from Freud or this and that but by merely observing itself in relation with the world it has become extraordinarily sensitive. Right? The mind through observation becomes intelligent and therefore extraordinarily sensitive, doesn't it? That sensitivity and that intelligence is not personal; intelligence is never personal, it's not my intelligence. I don't know if you are following. The moment it is personal, limited, it ceases to be intelligent; therefore, the mind through observing all its conditioning has learnt the implications of that conditioning, has remained with what is, not tried to run away from it or to suppress it, but it has remained with it and wants to find out what takes place next. It can only find out if the mind is extraordinarily alert and sensitive, otherwise it comes to another conclusion. Look, Sirs, what is happening in the world? There is a revolt against the establishment; perhaps a little in this country, tremendous in America and in certain parts of Europe and very little in India. Who are the people who are in revolt against, who want to alter the structure of society? They, if you talk to them, are as confused as the people who are caught in the establishment. Out of their confusion of which they are unaware they are going to create a new society. So, confusion is going to breed more confusion. When there is an awareness of this confusion and there is light, then the creative activity of an enlightened mind is entirely different from the action of revolt. So, we come back. Can the mind remain without distortion with what is? Do you understand the implications of that - to observe without the word. The word is not the thing. The description is not the described. Can the mind look at what is without the word; jealousy, anger? The word is the thought. This isn't an entertainment. This is tremendous work. The word is the thought. Right? Questioner: We can't feel it. Krishnamurti: What is feeling it? Questioner: Being aware. Krishnamurti: Are you aware with feeling? You are aware with your mind, with your heart. You are aware. You don't say I am aware with my feeling, or aware with my intellect. That's only another division. You're aware totally. If you want to learn, look. Can you look at what is without the word? Can you look at jealousy without the word jealousy? You understand? The word is anchored in the past. The word is the past and the word prevents you from looking at what is. So can the mind look at what is without the word and therefore not calling it jealousy at all? The moment you say `I'm going to remain with what is', which is jealousy, then you have identified the thing that is happening with the past. Therefore, it is not new. Therefore, your mind always lives in the past. Can you look at what is without the word? If you can look without the word, the word being the thought, thought being the response of memory which is the past, then you look without the past. Then what happens? Questioner: You are seeing. Krishnamurti: You are just guessing, for the love of Pete! Questioner: It really is what is. Krishnamurti: Look carefully, Sir, please do observe it. I have looked at what is with the word - jealousy - jealousy is a word of association with the past. That's simple. So I am looking at what is with the eyes of the past. Questioner: Now - what's now? Krishnamurti: The now is only possible when you can look without the word - without the past. I am greedy. That's a fact. Can I look at that fact without the word, without the word greedy, because the word greedy has innumerable associations, of virtue, of non-virtue, it should or should not be. The word with its associations is rooted in the past. When I say I'm greedy I am really looking at something which is new with the eyes of the old. Can I look without the eyes of the past, without the word? You do it. You will see what takes place. To put it round the other way, can you look at your wife or husband or your friend without the image you have built through thirty years or ten days about that person? Can you look without the image? You can't can you - why not? I have lived with my wife for thirty years, she has nagged me, bullied me, I have dominated her and we have built images about each other in our relationship. Can I look at her or him without an image? Then what is my relationship with my wife? Is it a relationship between two images which we call love, relationship? The image is the past and that image has been built through constant repetition - adding, adding -you know what takes place. That relationship, the image, is always based on the past therefore it is not a relationship at all. Therefore, I see now that what is, can be understood only when one can look without the image, without the word, without the symbol. Then the mind meets the new with a freshness. The feeling of greed which arises is new but the thought says that it is greedy. The word establishes it in the past. Therefore I say I cannot do anything about greed. I say I can only suppress it, fight it and so on, but, when the mind can look at that greed without the word then the mind is a fresh mind, then it can deal with whatever there is. I'll put the problem differently. There is a challenge in this world that there must be a different order of things because there is tremendous social injustice, there is brutality, such appalling violence. That's the challenge. You have to meet it. Challenges are always new. Obviously, otherwise it's not challenge; but, the mind meets it with the old mind. So the response to the challenge is inadequate and therefore there is conflict. Whereas if the mind can look at the challenge without the response of the past there is a totally different kind of action. Questioner: Isn't it making a problem when I say I have to look at something as it is now? Krishnamurti: There is no problem if you are learning. There is no problem at all if the mind is in the act of learning. If I am learning about violence it's not a problem, but if I come to it with a decision that there must be no violence, or violence is justified, that brings a problem. But if I see human minds are violent - and I see human beings are violent, aggressive - I want to learn, I don't make a problem of it. Questioner: What is a problem? Krishnamurti: A thing that you cannot solve. You carry it over the next day, you carry the burden with you. Whereas, if you say I will learn what is involved, learning simply means to observe. Observation is not possible when there is any form of distortion. Follow it, Sir. Distortion exists when there is a division between the observer and the observed. I must understand why this division arises. This division arises because of ideals, principles, ideas, conclusions -this should be, this should not be. And so the mind which began out of confusion now becomes clear. It is learning, not following anybody, it is learning through observation. The mind becomes highly sensitive which means the body also becomes sensitive. The human mind is so heavily conditioned: believing in God, or, like the Communists, not believing in God; it is the same, because they are both conditioned through propaganda. One says, don't talk such nonsense, there is no such thing as God and the other says, there is God. believe, believe, beat the drum until you are deaf. And one or the other you accept. Now, to be aware of all that and to find out if there is such a thing as God, some reality, or if there is not, to find out, to learn, the mind must be totally free from all belief - which means the mind must be entirely free from all fear. Is it possible for a human mind which has lived on fear, to be free of fear, completely, not only at the conscious level but at the deeper level? Questioner: Could we consider the things you say in a radically different context, such as in adversity? Krishnamurti: You are saying, here we are and for an hour we have talked, we have understood somewhat, we go outside and in 10 minutes we forget all about it and we are again caught in the trap. Is that it? What is one to do? What is the response? You listened here for an hour. Have you listened to the speaker or have you listened to yourself, to what is going on in yourself? Which is it? Have you listened to the speaker or have you listened to your own mutterings, to your own processes? Have you looked at the activity of yourself, or have you been forced to look, by the speaker, at the activity? Questioner: It is the activity - but I have tried to participate in it. Krishnamurti: Is the activity your own or imposed by another? Is the speaker imposing these things or are you watching your own activity? If you are watching your own activity when you go outside you will still be watching it, you will still be learning about it. But if you say: I've only been forced to listen to that speaker for an hour, then it is not yours, then you are caught in the trap. If it is yours, not another's, then you cannot lose it, you become a light to yourself and not the light of somebody else. TALKS AND DIALOGUES SYDNEY 1970 2ND PUBLIC DIALOGUE 19TH NOVEMBER, 1970 WHAT SHALL WE talk over this morning together? Questioner: I would like to talk about education, not education only for the young but for the old as well; and, about religion, not my religion or their religion but religion, God, the truth, and about the dignity of man, to be one with life, all life. Krishnamurti: The questioner would like to talk over education, not only of the young but of the older generation, and also religion, not the organized religion, and so on. Is that what we all want to discuss? Questioner: Could we bring self-knowledge into that? Krishnamurti: I think we can begin with what is self-knowledge and go into this question of religion and education and so on. Would that be all right? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: You know, I believe the Greeks started, and before them the Asiatics, to find out what is knowledge and what is the self. When we are considering knowledge, what do we mean by that word to `know'? To know implies a time sequence; that is, all knowledge is always in the past. You can add to it or take away from it but knowledge is in the field of the past. When I say `I know you', I know you because I met you yesterday, so I have an image of you and that image is the past. And I meet you with that image today. I say I know you, but you might have changed, and I come to see you with the image of the past, so, I really don't meet you at all. Knowledge is, in a certain direction, absolutely necessary, as in the scientific technological field but knowledge becomes a hindrance in relationship. This is not a talk by me but a discussion where we are talking over together, so if we don't understand each other, let us interrupt and discuss, talk over together. When we say self-knowledge, is it that we understand something which we call the self - a self which is the permanent - or is it learning about the movement of the self? There are two things involved in this. One, to study something that is there, like the microphone; I can study it, I can learn about it and it is there. Now, is the self there, or is it a movement, is it a thing that is constantly in motion, therefore nothing permanent? One has to find out, is the self something that endures, that is permanent or is it something that is constantly in motion, constantly changing. So when we say self-knowledge, is it the knowledge of the self, which is the permanent, or the understanding of what the self is? I don't know if I am making the question clear. I don't know which it is to you. Is the self something static, permanent, enduring or is it something that has to be understood? Questioner: What do you mean by self? Krishnamurti: We are going to find out, not what I mean, we are going to find out together. You know, as we said yesterday, communication implies understanding together, learning together, sharing together, otherwise there is no communication. The very word in itself means that: to communicate, to look at something together, learn together, create together. It's not that I communicate something which I have to you, or you have to me. Together we are learning. That is what is implied in the very word to communicate. So, it is not what I mean, but let us find out together what we mean by the self. What is the self? The self-centred activity, the self that is always asserting, the self that demands fulfilment, the self that perpetuates itself through identification, the self that is constantly in action and creating its own centre and therefore isolating itself. What is this self? When you say I, me, what is that `me', the `I'? Is it according to the Christians - the soul; according to the Hindus -the atman, and so on? When we talk about the self what do we mean by that word, the 'me'? Questioner: Where do we actually look to find out? What do we watch to find out? Krishnamurti: What is it that we watch, examine, to find out the truth of that word `self'? Is that it? We can look that word up in the dictionary and there is a definition. We know the word is not the thing, the description is not the described. To find out what the self is one has to watch its activity, actually its action, in relationship, otherwise you cannot examine it. Living is relationship, otherwise there is no living. You can live in isolation but that isolation brings about constant conflict in relationship. One can find out what the self is only in relationship. We are doing it together, its no fun if I do all the work and you just listen. So, what is relationship? What does it mean to be related? Questioner: To be in communication with other people and the environment. Krishnamurti: To be in communication with other people and with the environment: to be in contact, to be related, to respond to any kind of challenge, is part of relationship also. Questioner: Involvement? Krishnamurti: Involvement implies a different thing. Let us go slowly. What is relationship? I am related to my wife, to my husband, to my family. There is a relationship, that is, I am in contact not only physically but also psychologically. Questioner: Does relationship imply understanding? Krishnamurti: Not yet, surely. Let us think together, not you think something and I think something, let's together walk; don't go ahead or behind me, but together walk and find out. I'm related to my wife and my children and my neighbour, to the environment. Relationship means contact, being together. Am I related in contact? Apart from physical contact with my wife, with my husband, with my children, am I related? Are you? Contact, you understand what I mean? Questioner: On rare occasions. Krishnamurti: On rare occasions. Then you are not related to your wife or children or neighbours except on rare occasions. Is that so? Questioner: Not always, sometimes it's bad and sometimes good. Krishnamurti: We are not evaluating the bad and the good in relationship. We are asking if we are directly in contact not only physically but psychologically with the family, with the wife... Questioner: We don't seem to be sensitive. We don't seem to get into their skin and feel what they feel. Krishnamurti: Madam, let's be simple about all this. I am married - I'm not, thank the Lord - I'm married and I am supposed to be in relationship with my wife. Apart from the physical contact, sexual and so on, what is my relationship with her? Questioner: Is it a question of attitudes? Krishnamurti: We are not talking about attitudes. We haven't come to that yet, Madam. We are trying to find out what is relationship. Questioner: We are related to everyone and everything simply by being among these things. Krishnamurti: I am married. Am I related to my wife? Apart from the physical contact is there any relationship at all? Don't assert, don't say yes or no, find out. Questioner: Is it a series of habits? Questioner: Isn't the relationship just conditioning? Krishnamurti: I go to the office, I am ambitious, competitive, and worshipping success. And my wife also pursues her own ambitions, her own greeds and all the rest of it. We may meet physically but psychologically we are isolated, aren't we? Except when I say: I love you. Then, what is the relationship, the actuality, not what you think it should be? The actual. Then we can do something about it. If you theorize then you will be lost. Look what happens. I have lived with my wife for twenty years or ten days. During that time I have built an image about her. She has responded in a certain way, nagged me, got angry, this or that and I have built an image about her and she has built an image about me. These two images have relationship; not me and her, but the images. Questioner: I don't know, because I don't know, myself Krishnamurti: But, the fact is you have an image, isn't that so? Is not that image the `me'? Questioner: It must be. Krishnamurti: We are asking; please don't say should or should not. I have an image about her and I have an image about myself. Questioner: Is the image necessarily entirely wrong? Krishnamurti: I don't say it is right or wrong. It is a fact. Questioner: Is it incorrect? Krishnamurti: I won't say it is incorrect or say it is right or wrong, good or beautiful. The fact is I have an image which I have built about myself, and she has built an image about herself. This image is the me; identified with the furniture, with the house, with various memories, experiences. And she does the same. Questioner: Are you forgetting affinity? Krishnamurti: Affinity, love, tenderness, goodness, that is the outcome of this interaction between the two images. We don't go step by step taking facts as they are, so that we can then move further. If we refuse to face the fact then we wander off into a kind of abstraction. Questioner: Isn't this on the personality level, whereas we can look at ourselves in terms of the higher self and the lower self? Krishnamurti: Wait a minute, the higher self and the lower self the soul and the body, the atman, you know, the supreme and me, we'll come to that. The `me' is a bundle of images, memories, which has been built through centuries. The `me'. The father says the `me'. The mother says the `me'. And the child also says the 'me'. The `me' is a bundle of memories; the memories which respond to any challenge. The `me' is a bundle of memories from which thought responds, thought reacts. The reaction to that memory is thought. Right? Is that simple or not? I have memory, a bundle of memories as a Hindu, a Catholic, a Communist. Those memories have been built from childhood through tradition, through family and so that response is thought. When we say `self-knowledge' there is the learning about what the self is, how it has come into being, knowing the self, knowing oneself. Questioner: Does the self perpetuate itself? Krishnamurti: Does the self perpetuate? The self perpetuates through identification, doesn't it? My son, my wife, my house, my furniture. Questioner: My troubles. Krishnamurti: My troubles, my anxieties, me, and all the rest of it. The identification with something perpetuates the `me'. I identify myself with the furniture; because my furniture is very old, 14th century, I love it, I keep it very carefully, polish it, look after it, I value it because one day I will sell it and I will get lots of money. So, the furniture has become more important than the `me'. Right? See the tricks which we are playing on ourselves and each other. Through identification with that, that becomes important, not the `me' which identifies itself. I identify myself with my country, with my nationality, with my God. The country, the nationality, the God becomes all important. We never enquire why this identification takes place. Why do I want to identify? I am asking the question - you have to ask the question. Questioner: Does this mean then that the search for truth equates with a constant review of the images? Krishnamurti: Obviously. Questioner: We identify because we are afraid to look at that which we are, we feel safe in possessions. Krishnamurti: We are learning about ourselves aren't we? Are you learning about yourself as you are talking, watching yourself, watching how you respond, how you identify, why there is this division between me and you, we and they, why all this battle all through life? Questioner: If we didn't have images there'd be no self. Krishnamurti: No, Madam, it really isn't a question of not having an image. This is what is going on in our life, isn't it? Why does this happen, who is responsible for this? Questioner: What gives life to the image? Krishnamurti: What do you think? Questioner: It's all a process of the me, a device whereby if we have a success, we want to repeat it. Krishnamurti: So, Sir, I want to understand myself. I don't know what I am; I really don't know. I must find out. I must learn. I must learn about myself not according to what others say, the experts, the psychologists, the analysts, the Freudians, the Jungians, all the rest of them. I must learn about myself, and not according to somebody else. Do please see the importance of that. Not according to the professionals; they may be wrong or they may be right. I am not concerned with them. I am concerned to learn about myself. To learn means I must observe, I must not come to it with any conclusion, with any prejudice, with any kind of hope. I must learn, find out what it is. Will you do that? Or, you have read what the self is. You are going to learn what the self is. I don't know. People have said so many things about it. I discard everything the others have said. Will you do that? Discard completely what others have said. Questioner: Is it possible to discard what we have heard, when we have listened and found out? Krishnamurti: I am not interested at all what others have said. I have never read books on what the others have said, fortunately. I want to find out, so I look, I observe, I can observe that only in relationship; how I react, anger, jealousy, hate, envy, violence, domination, suppression; you know, the whole movement, I watch. So, it is important to find out how I watch, not what I watch. The manner of watching, the art of observing is much more important than the thing you observe. The art of seeing is much more important than that which you look at. Now, how do you look? Please apply yourselves, don't just listen to what the speaker is saying. Find out how you look. Questioner: Be open to what you see. Krishnamurti: No, Sir, how do you look? Let's begin very simply. How do you look at a tree? Have you looked at a tree? You have, haven't you? How do you look at a tree? Questioner: I am the tree without thinking. I don't think: isn't that beautiful. It just is. Krishnamurti: Just find out. How do you observe a tree? Do you look at it with the word? Do you look at the tree with the word, that it is an oak tree, a eucalyptus tree, that it's beautiful? Watch it. Go slowly. probably you are not interested in a tree. If you are interested you look at it with botanical knowledge, don't you? Questioner: No, for enjoyment. Krishnamurti: Wait Sir, go slow. We are coming to something much more complicated - you will see presently how complex it becomes. The tree doesn't affect you. Psychologically it doesn't touch you. You can observe it casually. You can observe it without the word, without botanical knowledge, you can look at it without thought. Questioner: I can't. When I look at a tree, I am part of that tree, because to me it is something alive and it is something that I am part of Krishnamurti: You say you are part of that tree. Do you know what that means? What does that mean? Questioner: How can I describe that which is a state of being wondrous? Krishnamurti: I will show you. We will share together. When you look at something, at a tree or a cloud, a mountain or water, you look at it with space, space between you and it. There is not only physical space but space divided by thought. That tree is in my garden. There is this division. Can you look at that tree without that division? This doesn't mean you identify yourself with the tree, you don't become the tree. You observe it and in that observation if there is no space between the observer and the observed it is not identification but a totally different kind of relationship. You do it sometime. To look at an object, it doesn't matter what it is, without the intervening space then there is a direct contact. You can do that with a tree fairly easily. But, to do it with your husband, with your friend, with your wife then it becomes very difficult. Can you look at your wife, husband, neighbour, your politicians; can you look with eyes that have not this intervening space as created by the image? Can you look at yourself without condemning or justifying? The justification and condemnation is the censor. The censor is the conditioned entity. The conditioned entity is the `me', the, 'me' that says I must be more successful, the `me' that says I must have more pleasure. So can you look at yourself without any distraction of thought? Are you following all of this? Have you done it? Questioner: It is something quite new. Krishnamurti: It is not a question of something new, Madam, but to do it. Questioner: I mean it is new in the doing. Krishnamurti: There is nothing new in doing. Doing is action, not you think out and then act. Questioner: Is this the case when someone is totally absorbed in something? Krishnamurti: What does that mean? A child is absorbed in a toy, totally absorbed, if you give him a new toy he plays with it for the rest of the day and there is no mischief. He is completely absorbed in it till the toy breaks and he becomes mischievous or whatever he does. Most of us do the same, we want to be absorbed in something whether the absorption is in the country, in an idea, in a belief, in a series of actions; which is commitment; to be absorbed as the religious person is supposed to be when he is absorbed in the idea of Jesus, Saviour, Christ, God. He is absorbed but he doesn't know anything about himself, and that is a very easy trick, to be absorbed in something so as to forget yourself. Questioner: Isn't that good to forget yourself? Krishnamurti: Can you forget yourself, though you have identified yourself with something? That very identification is the continuance of the self. I identify myself with India. Myself has become the idea of India. And if you say anything about India I get hurt; as long as you flatter it I am pleased. I identify myself with a belief and I will fight to the death any attempt to destroy that identification, because the moment I don't identify with something I am forced to look at myself. I don't want to look at myself because I am frightened to look at myself. Questioner: I meant by absorption, not to have thought coming in when I look at a tree. Krishnamurti: You see, Sir, a whole question is involved in that. When the observer separates himself from the thing observed that division brings conflict. People have tried centuries ago taking drugs, a form of drug that destroys the time and the distance -space - so that there is immediate perception. Now they are taking LSD and various forms of psychedelic drugs. You know all about it? You do? You read about it? I am glad! I haven't touched it because it's not necessary. We have discussed this question with a great many people who have taken it; doctors, psychologists, prominent ones, not crazy ones. What happens in that, is that a chemical change takes place in the whole organism, that makes for clarity. I see things, then, very clearly. Every colour becomes extraordinarily clear. The ordinary leaf that I look at as I pass by becomes a leaf with such colour, such potency, such beauty, such vitality, and that's tremendously absorbing because the division between the observer and the observed disappears. You are directly in contact. That same thing can happen but with much greater reality when you understand this whole process of building images. Self-knowledge is necessary because without understanding the whole movement of thought with all its reason, fallacy, deception; without understanding it, how it is constructed, what is its nature, we cannot go very far. So it is absolutely necessary, if you are really serious to find out. Thought is the response of memory. Obviously, if you had no memory at all you wouldn't be able to think. Questioner: Could you think without memory? Krishnamurti: You cannot Sir. Amnesia. You couldn't go home if you didn't think, if you had no memory. You would just be wandering about. Questioner: If you say one plus one equals two, which is a thought, you have still got to remember the one to put the other one to it. Krishnamurti: Sir, thought is the response of memory. Thought is never new. So, thought is never free, obviously. And every challenge is new, and thought responds to the challenge and thought is old. Therefore there is inadequacy between the response and the challenge, therefore conflict. Questioner: Can there be consciousness without thought? Krishnamurti: What is consciousness? Is it made up of the content or is it independent of the content? My consciousness, your consciousness: is it the content, the thoughts, the anxieties, the miseries, the suffering, the ambition, the violence, that makes up consciousness or is consciousness empty of all that? The content makes the consciousness, obviously. Let's leave that for now. Thought is the response of memory. And thought is always old. It is a hard pill to swallow, because we think thought can solve all our problems. It can't. If you go into it I will show you something. Thought being old cannot respond to the new, and life is new. All this which is happening around us is totally new, and thought is always responding in terms of the past. Look Sir, revolution is necessary. Not physical revolution, because that doesn't solve anything. Physical revolution brings about dictatorship, bureaucratic tyranny or the tyranny of the few. Psychological revolution is absolutely necessary, because we have to change, we have to bring about a totally different way of living. And thought says I'll find out, how to live differently. Thought, which is old, which is memory, which is the result of experience, knowledge, which is the past; thought, the past tries to understand the present. The past tries to solve all these problems and has never succeeded. Go into this seriously to find out how to act, without the past. Scientifically, objectively, technologically, I must have knowledge to function; to go to the moon requires tremendous scientific knowledge. The mind also sees that to act when there is challenge, thought must be quiet. Otherwise it cannot respond completely to the challenge. So that is the problem: to push it ultimately. I hope you are following all this. It's up to you. That's our crisis. The intellectuals throughout the world are responding to the crisis in terms of the old, in terms of thought, and their answers must inevitably be coloured by the past, however intellectual they are. And so-called religious people are also like that. One has to find a way of acting which at the same time demands absolute objective, rational, sane, technological action in one direction, and, in the other, for the mind to function without the impediment of thought. You don't know the beauty of all this. So the question then is -and now we are coming to quite a different problem - what is meditation? Are you interested in all this? It is deadly serious. Questioner: I'd like you to go back to thought as being a barrier. Krishnamurti: Right. Memory is in the very cells of the brain. You can watch it in yourself. Memory remains in the brain. It is part of the brain cells. The brain cells can function only in complete security. Where there is insecurity there is distortion, neurosis. So the brain demands that it functions all the time in complete security. That is why you have invented all the modern culture. You follow? Wars, battleships, to be safe, and that very desire for safety is destroying safety; nationality, division, each country having its own army, all the rest of it. The brain cells themselves are the residue of memory. And memory is necessary otherwise you can't get home, drive a car, you can't speak. But, that very memory becomes an impediment to acting completely in the present. Action implies the doing now, not tomorrow or yesterday. But when action is shaped by thought, by the past, then action becomes incomplete and therefore it has to be repeated over and over again. Therefore, incompleteness continues. Can that brain function at its highest level technologically, objectively, sanely, and at the same time can that brain function without all the impediment of the past, which is the psyche, which is the me? This is where the so-called meditation comes in. You know this word is a dangerous word. From India a great many people have come to this country and other parts of the world talking and teaching meditation, which is all tricks. Meditation is something entirely different, a quality of mind that sees the whole totality of life, not fragments of life, the whole totality. There is no division between the artist and the business man, between the politician and the crook - probably they are the same! So you see this, a complete understanding of life. Can the brain be completely still? I won't go into all that because you have never gone into this question at all and probably you don't know what it implies. Let's stick to something we can actually do. Which is, can you be free of your image? You can only be free of your image if you understand what the machinery is that builds the image. Now, what is the machinery that builds images? Questioner: Thought? Memory? Krishnamurti: Thought, memory; how does that operate? Let's be simple. You tell me what a marvellous person I am. I like it. I have already built an image and you are my friend. You say something which I don't like, I have formed another image. So, the image pattern is built through pleasure and pain; of liking you because you say something pleasant and of not liking you because you are not nice to me, which is based on the pleasure principle. Watch it in yourself. I have built an image because you have said something pleasurable or not pleasurable. I carry that image when I meet you next. I am that image. Next time I meet you, you are my friend and so on. Can this machinery stop? That is, when you insult me, to be completely attentive at that moment, attentive in the sense that I listen to you totally, without any reaction, neither accepting nor rejecting your insult, just listening completely, which means complete attention. And the same when you flatter me, to listen so fully that nothing leaves a mark on the mind, so that the machinery that builds the image has no vitality, no juice. The mind listening to the insult and to the flattery doesn't leave a mark, therefore no image, and therefore it is a mind that is so sensitive, alert, watchful that the me doesn't exist, because the me is the image. Questioner: We have used the word conflict. Does this necessarily mean a negative state or can it be a positive one? Krishnamurti: Can conflict be positive or negative? I don't quite understand what those two words mean; but conflict means conflict. Don't you have conflicts, hundreds of them? Have you ever gone into this question of conflict? And why it exists in human beings? Why does it exist? In the office, at home, when you are playing golf, when you are doing anything there is this battle going on, and from that battle, neurosis; you know, the whole pattern of modern existence; quarrels between husband and wife, the constant striving, struggling, conflict, battle - why? First of all, one has accepted it as a natural thing. You have lived with it for so long that you have accepted it. You don't say to yourself I must find out, why? Why should I live this way? I will show you why you do it, the mechanism of it. Please bear in mind, the description is not the described. The word is not the thing. Therefore, when we talk about it you are watching yourself not listening to the speaker. Conflict exists because there is duality. That is simple isn't it? Duality is contradiction. I must be. I must not be. Conflict exists because you have an ideal, the possibility of what you will be and the fear of what you might be. Conflict exists because of contradiction, ideals, conformity, obedience, the desire to be something better, comparative. We are always comparing with somebody who has a bigger car, bigger house, better jewels. All our life is comparing. So there it is: comparison, ideals, principles, formulas. All these create a duality. So you never see actually what is. I see I am stupid, I don't say I must become clever. Through comparison I have found I am stupid and then I struggle not to be stupid. Am I stupid if there is no comparison at all? I am what I am. I don't call it stupid. I don't call it clever, or beautiful, or ugly. It is there. Then I can do something about it. Then I can go beyond it. I cannot go beyond it if I am trying to become clever. But once the mind is free from all comparison, which means imitation, conformity, obedience to a principle, to an idea and so on, then the mind observes actually what is. To observe actually what is... am I looking at it through a word? Am I looking at myself with the image which the word has created, that I am dull? Am I looking at myself with a series of associations, a series of words, a series of conclusions, or am I looking at myself without any of these? All this demands tremendous attention which is discipline. The word discipline means to learn, not to conform, not to obey, not to imitate. Discipline, the word in Latin means: to learn. Therefore, the mind that is learning has no imposed discipline. It has order, not conformity. Learning becomes all important to a mind that is enquiring into this whole question of relationship between human beings. The relationship between human beings is society. That relationship between human beings has created the structure which we call society, with its Gods, with its laws, with its ambitions and all the rest of it. Society is the me. I am the society. To change society I must change myself. And we don't want to do that. We will do anything to alter the structure of society and we hope thereby we shall be happy. We shan't. The Communists have tried it. They have said environment is all important, give the right environment and you'll produce the right monkey. They haven't done it, on the contrary. The religious people have also played with this. To bring about a radical revolution we must begin here, not out there, because out there is here. Are there any more questions or shall we stop? Questioner: Are impulsive feelings a direct response to living? Krishnamurti: What do you mean by impulsive? You mean spontaneous? Are we ever spontaneous or are we always responding to our conditioning, though we may call it spontaneity? The other day I met somebody who came to see me, and that person said: I am free at last, I have gone into this question of freedom greatly, studied it, and I am free, and therefore I have become a Catholic. (Laughter) No. You may laugh, but that person was very serious and he is spreading what he thinks is truth. He thinks that it is spontaneous because he is free. So to understand what is freedom, and therefore action in freedom, one has to go into this question of the conditioning of the mind, the whole conditioned mind, how the mind is conditioned by propaganda of ten thousand years: the religious, the political, the propaganda of the family. we are slaves to propaganda. Can the mind observe all this propaganda and be free of it? Then only, can you talk about freedom in action. Questioner: Listening is the hardest thing, I've found. Krishnamurti: I wonder why. Do you ever listen? Or do you listen partially? There are two things involved aren't there? There is hearing and listening. When you hear you either agree or disagree, you say - I agree with him, because I like it or I don't like it, he is convincing or he is not convincing. But when you are actually listening, that means giving your complete attention, what takes place? What takes place when you are giving your whole attention, attention being your mind, your heart, your nerves, your body, everything... listening? Your mind is completely quiet isn't it? Not arguing, agreeing, disagreeing, opposing or forming any opinion. It is an act of complete listening. In that act of listening there is actual communion, isn't there? Communion, in the sense of complete relationship. There is no misunderstanding. And we never do this. We never give our whole attention to anything. We only have learnt what it is to concentrate. To concentrate means exclusion. Therefore, concentration is not attention. In attention there are no borders. TALKS AND DIALOGUES SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA A.B.C. TELEVISION INTERVIEW 20TH NOVEMBER, 1970 THE INTERVIEW BEGAN with the reading of a passage from a Krishnamurti publication, `The Penguin Reader'. Interviewer: `Our problem then, as I see it, is that we are bound, weighed down by belief, by knowledge. And is it possible for a mind to be free from yesterday and from the beliefs that have been acquired through the process of yesterday? Is it possible for me, as an individual, and you as an individual to live in this society and yet be free from the belief in which we have been brought up? Is it possible for the mind to be free from all that knowledge, all that authority? Krishnamurti: Are you saying here that it is wrong to believe in what you have found to be true? Krishnamurti: Sir, is belief necessary at all? Why do we have beliefs? Probably you believe in something because you don't actually see what is. If you see actually what is - what is, in the sense, what is actually going on, both outwardly in the outward phenomenon and inwardly - then what is the necessity for a belief at all? You don't believe the sun is rising. It is there, you have seen it. The whole problem of beliefs seems to be so utterly erroneous. It has no place for a person who is actually observing the whole structure and the nature of thinking, living, suffering, the agony of existence, the sorrow and all the rest of it. Belief appears as a means of escape from the reality of what is. To understand what is, one has to be rid of all these extraneous beliefs and fears and hopes, and be able to look actually, not theoretically, not abstractly, but actually to look at what is taking place: first in the world outside with all the racial conflicts, with wars, the division between religions, the Catholic and Protestant, the Hindu, the Moslem, all the divisions that have created such havoc in the world. And by observing all that one sees actually how this has come about; because, in oneself, one is conditioned by society, by the culture one lives in. If you live in India you become a Hindu or a Moslem, if you live in Europe you're a Catholic or a Protestant. It's the environment that conditions, the culture that shapes the mind; the culture being the knowledge, the tradition, the various beliefs. And surely a mind that is conditioned as a Communist or as a Catholic, as a Hindu or what you will, is incapable of being free to observe. The mind must be free to observe the extraordinarily complex structure of society and also the still more complex psychological structure of oneself; because oneself is the world. We have created the world, and the world is me and you. We cannot separate the two, and so, to understand the world one has to understand oneself. To change the social structure which obviously needs colossal change, one has to change oneself because one is part of this society. The change must begin with the human being, not with the outward structure. The human being is confused, the human being is conditioned. He believes, and therefore there is a contradiction in himself. He is really, deeply confused and if he wants to change the social structure, the change from confusion only breeds more confusion. Whereas, if he could bring about clarity within himself, and from that clarity act, then such an action is really a deep psychological revolution. That revolution is absolutely necessary. Interviewer: This means, doesn't it, a completely different view of education? For, after all, education is implanting belief. Krishnamurti: Obviously. Education as it now is, is really the cultivation of a corner of a vast field. We are concerned with that little corner, with its technological knowledge, conditioning the mind with information and neglecting the whole field; and therefore there is an imbalance. Technologically we have gone very far, and psychologically we are very primitive. We are still at the stage of tribal conflict with our beliefs, with our gods, our separate nationalities, and armies and all the rest of it, which is really a continuation of the tribal existence. Apparently we don't see in education that it's immensely important to cultivate, to understand the whole field and not just one corner of it. Interviewer: The other thing about this, Krishnamurti, is how can an individual who is part of the system get outside the system in order to observe it and himself? Krishnamurti: You know, Sir, the word `individuality', the individual, means indivisible, an entity who is in himself indivisible; which means non-contradictory in himself. But the individual human being is contradictory in himself, he is not an individual, he is broken up, he is fragmented. And being contradictory, being divided in himself, his activity, his social structure, his morality, is obviously fragmentary, contradictory. Therefore he becomes a hypocrite. So, the problem is how to change the individual? Can the human being, who is part of this vast structure, which he himself has created, can that human being radically, psychologically change? Not change the society; the society is the relationship between individuals. Can the human mind, which is so conditioned after so many centuries, can it uncondition itself completely? Be free from being a Catholic, a Hindu, a Communist, a Socialist, and see that he is part of this human structure, part of the world, and not the Catholic world or the Communist world. Interviewer: How can we do this, If we can see this, how can we do it? Krishnamurti: That's the problem. How can one see? First of all one has to be aware of what is going on both outwardly and inwardly; aware, not theoretically, not intellectually, or aware according to some philosopher or psychologist; then he is aware according to their ideas, to their conditioning. One has to be aware of what he is, actually: his problems, his misery, his sufferings, his extraordinary sense of brutality, and violence: to be aware of all that; and from that awareness comes clarity. That means he must be tremendously interested in life, not in some awful, absurd theories; whether it be the theory of the Catholics or the Hindus. Interviewer: Well then, how do you get people to be aware in your sense? Krishnamurti: I don't think you can get people to be aware. If they are interested they will be. But if you force them to be interested, through propaganda, then propaganda becomes all-important, not the people. After all, all religions have done that. They are instruments of propaganda. Christianity, with its belief with its Saviour, with its Virgin and Saints is the result of 2000 years of propaganda, dinning into people every day believe, believe, believe. You are saved, you are this, you are that. The other day when I was in Rome, I speak Italian, the priest was absolutely mesmerizing the people, by repeating, repeating, repeating; it went on for a half an hour. Naturally the people are mesmerized into belief. All that has to be set aside, which means facing the fear, fear to stand alone. Fear to discard all this absurdity, all this, if I may use the word, circus which has become religion. To discard all that implies that a man must be aware, and so be - very sensitive and very alert, and therefore intelligent. It is that intelligence that is going to change society, not his throwing a bomb at it. The response to a challenge as violence is a most primitive form of response. Therefore, the question really is whether the human mind as it is, living in this world, with wars, with the economic inequalities, with the immorality of society - and society is immoral - whether it can, whether he can be totally good; good in the sense, being free from violence, free of aggression. And violence is a form, is an outward expression of fear. I don't know if you have noticed that when whole cities are crowded as they are now, overpopulated, the lack of space makes people violent. The very lack of space is making everything violent. I think one has to really go into all this, not as an idea, not as a belief, but one has to search, to understand all this in oneself; one must have tremendous passion to find out. For self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom you can't buy in a book, or from another. Interviewer: In your travels round the world, Krishnamurti, have you found that the younger generation have got this kind of thirst for awareness and self-knowledge? Krishnamurti: I think, from what one has observed in America and Europe and India there is a sense of a revolt, which most young people have. It is a revolt because... what has society to offer them, actually, except going to business, or joining the army, or going to the moon or where you will? But actually, what has society, the culture to offer? Nothing, if you look at it. Therefore the more intelligent, the more sensitive, the more alert say, `This is all wrong. We must change the very fabric of education.' The vested interests won't have it. The vested interest says, `We must go slow.'... You know the old business. Therefore there is this conflict. After all, the human mind does seek more than bread and butter. It wants something beyond, which has meaning, which has significance, which has depth, and passion and interest. But society, the culture says you need to become a businessman, or a professor, or become a soldier. And therefore the revolt, all through the world. The young may not express it at such depth, but there are indications. But unfortunately they want to change society by throwing bombs and violence. Any physical revolution, as one has observed, must lead inevitably to tyranny, to dictatorship, either of the few or of the bureaucracy. So, this psychological revolution of which we are talking is the most important thing, that will bring about a change in the world. Interviewer: You've been rather critical of religions. You yourself must have a religious view of life. Could you tell me your own particular outlook on religion? Krishnamurti: Sir, what is religion? Actually, what is religion? First of all to find out what is religion we must negate what it is not. What it is not; then it is. It's like seeing what is not love. Love is not hate, love is not jealousy, love is not ambition, love is not violence. When you negate all that, the other is, which is compassion. In the same way if you negate what is not religion then you find out what is true religion; that is, what is the truly religious mind. Belief is not religion, and the authority which the churches, the organized religions assume, is not religion. In that there is all the sense of obedience, conformity, acceptance, the hierarchical approach to life. The division between the Protestant, the Catholic, the Hindu, the Moslem, that's not religion. When you negate all that, which means you are no longer a Hindu, no longer a Catholic, no longer belonging to any sectarian outlook, then your mind questions, asks what is true religion? This is free from their ritual, without their masters, without their Saviour; all that is not religion. When the mind discards that, intelligently, because it has seen that it's not religion, then it can ask what is religion. Religion is not what I think, but religion is the sense of comprehension of the totality of existence, in which there is no division between you and me. Then if there is that quality of goodness which is virtue, real virtue not the phony virtue of society, but real virtue, then the mind can go beyond and find out, through meditation, through a deep, quiet silence, if there is such a thing as reality. Therefore a religious mind is a mind that is constantly aware, sensitive, attentive, so that it goes beyond itself into a dimension where there is no time at all. Interviewer: What you are saying, Krishnamurti, seems to be that man has no need of any power outside of himself Krishnamurti: Obviously not, Sir. The power of the outside agency is self-created. I can't live properly in this world and I hope somebody outside is going to help me. But as a human being I have created the social structure, the misery, the confusion, the enormous suffering. We have created this, and unless we change it, no outside agency is going to change it, either the Communist outside agency, the Politbureau, or the Hindu centre, or the Catholic centre. One has to have the clarity to observe all this. Interviewer: And what do you make of death? Krishnamurti: Sir, that is an immense question. You see, we have made life - living - into a hideous thing. Life has become a battle, which is an obvious fact, the constant fight, fight, fight. And we have divorced that living from death. We separate death as something horrible, something to be frightened about. And this living, which is misery, we accept. If we don't accept this existence as misery then life and death are the same movement. Like love, death and living are one. One must totally die to find what love is. To go into this question of what is death, what lies beyond death, whether there is reincarnation, whether there is resurrection; all that becomes rather meaningless if you don't know how to live. If the human being knows how to live in this world without conflict, then death has quite a different meaning. To understand death really, one has to go into the question: what is it that dies? The physical organism obviously is going to end. We have misused it, we have really destroyed the intelligence of the organism itself. And to us death is something to be avoided. But, as it exists we believe in something beyond. There is something beyond far greater than any of our beliefs. There is something tremendously great which the mind, which is in such chaos, which is in such contradiction, cannot possibly grasp. Interviewer: Krishnamurti, way back in 1919, that's forty odd years ago now, you dissolved the Order of the Star of the East and I would like to read the words, some of the words, you said at that time. You said, `I maintain that truth is a pathless land and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. I do not want followers' you said, `I mean this. If there are only five people who will listen, who will live, who have their faces turned towards eternity it will be sufficient. Or what use is it to have thousands who do not understand, who are fully embalmed in prejudice, who do not want the new but would rather translate the new to suit their own sterile, stagnant souls?' You said, `I desire those who seek to understand me to be free, not to follow me, not to make out of me a cage which will become a religion, a sect, but rather they should be free from all fears, from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spirituality, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself Forty-one years later how would you summarize your aims. Krishnamurti: I think that's true! Human beings, whether they live in India or America or in the West are really unhappy beings. They are frustrated, they feel life has very little meaning. The more intellectual you are the more you see it has no meaning at all. Therefore they begin to invent meanings. Whereas if one really understood oneself which is so conditioned, oneself which is so small, petty, bourgeois, then out of that understanding flowers goodness. Interviewer: So you're not setting yourself up as a great teacher. Krishnamurti: No, no, Sir. On the contrary, I say: be your own teacher. Be your own light. Don't look to somebody else. Interviewer: And where do you find truth? Krishnamurti: Only when a mind, and not only a mind, a life is completely harmonious, not contradictory. It's only such a mind which is religious that can find truth, can observe truth. Truth isn't something abstract, it's there. Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 - Alternative Versions - Chapter 7 Chapter 11 KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC TALK NEW DELHI 10TH DECEMBER 1970 One of the most difficult things is to learn about communication. The word implies that we share together a common factor, that we think together about a problem. The word implies all that - taking a common factor that all of us have and examining it closely in communication, which means sharing together. So we are going to talk over together, which means you are sharing the problem, not merely receiving, not merely arguing, agreeing or disagreeing but examining together. Therefore it is as much your responsibility as that of the speaker. The problem is the question of change. Everywhere you see, as you go around the world, you observe one common thing, that there must be a tremendous revolution - not the physical revolution, not throwing bombs, shedding blood, not revolt -because every physical revolution inevitably ends in bureaucratic dictatorship or the tyranny of the few. This is historical fact we don't even have to discuss; but what we have to talk about together is this question of inward revolution. There must be vast, profound changes not only in the outward structure of society but also inwardly, because the society in which we live, the culture in which we have been brought up is part of us. The social structure, the culture is what we have created. So we are the culture and the culture is us. We are the world and the world is us. If you are born in a particular culture, you represent that culture. You are part of it and to change the structure of that culture, you have to change yourself. A confused mind, a mind that is ideologically inclined or has deep convictions cannot possibly alter or bring about a change in the social structure. I think that's fairly clear. That is, you are the world, not in abstraction, not as an idea but in actuality. If you change the social structure, out of your confusion, out of your bigotry, out of your petty, narrow limited ideals and convictions what you will produce is further chaos, further misery. So our problem is, is it possible for the human mind to undergo a radical change, a change that demands not an analytical process, not time, but rather an instantaneous change? Is it possible for the human mind to bring about the psychological revolution inwardly, and that's what we are going to examine, and that is what we are going to share together Sharing implies that there is no teacher and disciple. We are not your authority, we are not pointing out what to do, but what we are concerned with is the examination and bringing about an understanding of this immense, complex problem. There must be a social change, because society is terribly corrupt There is vast injustice, war, every kind of brutality, violence, and the human beings who live in a particular culture, in a particular society are part of that; and to bring about this radical change there must be a revolution in the psyche, in oneself. So we together are going to consider this question, knowing that there must be a radical, psychological revolution, deeply, which will then affect the society in which we live. It must begin with the human mind, not with the structure which the human mind has created, whether it is the communist society or so called democratic society, or the capitalist or the Maoist society. So first we are asking whether this human mind, which is the result of time, of so-called evolution, which has lived through thousands of experiences, this mind that you have - the mind includes the brain, the heart, the whole being, the whole structure of the human being - whether that mind can radically change itself and not depend on its environment for change. Please see the importance of this. If you depend on the environment for change, the environment which is created by you, and therefore when you depend on the structure of a society for you to change, then you are deceiving yourself, you are living in an illusion, because you have created this society. So how is this possible for the human mind that is so conditioned? If you observe your own mind, you will see that it is heavily conditioned as a Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, communist, Maoist or whatever it is. This mind which is the result of conditioning - and the conditioning is the past - how can such a mind bring about in itself a total change? And that is what we are going to consider right through these talks. Is it possible to change through analytical process? You understand? Is it possible for this conditioned mind to change itself through the analytical process, that is, analyse, examine and discover through analysis a way to bring about this revolution in the psyche? Now Sirs, in listening to a talk of this kind, you are listening not to acquire knowledge but rather listening so that you will observe clearly. That is, there are two movements in learning. One movement is the accumulative movement - you study a language and acquire knowledge and that knowledge is the past, and according to that knowledge you act; that is, you act according to what you have learnt, and what you have learnt is the past. Right? That is one way we learn, accumulate knowledge and act according to that, whereas there is another kind of learning which is not accumulating but moving, going along as we learn. We were asking if the mind can change through analysis? Analysis implies an observer (the analyser) and the thing analysed. please observe it in yourself, don't listen to the speaker casually, superficially. We are saying where there is analysis, there is the observer (the analyser) and the thing to be analysed. In that there is division. Now, wherever there is division there must be conflict not only physically but psychologically. When there is a division between the Hindu and the Muslim there must be conflict. And when there is a division between the analyser and the thing analysed there must be conflict. Then the analyser, in analysing the thing he has observed in himself begins to correct, dominate it, suppress it. All our religious, sociological training, conditioning, is to analyse step by step, is to progress slowly. That is our upbringing, and I assure you, that will never bring about a change. Analysis is a postponement of action. So will analysis, which is this dualistic examination by the analyser, will that bring about a deep fundamental change? And who is the analyser? Is the analyser different from the thing analysed? All our life is an action in fragmentation. We are fragmented human beings outwardly as well as inwardly. Look at what is happening in India and in the world -the South against the North, East against the West, the anti-Brahmins - you know what is going on in this country. Fragmentation is going on all the time, not only in the country, but in religion - the Catholic against the Protestant, the Hindu against the Muslim, and so on, in private life and in public life. In private life you are one thing, in public you are another. So you live in fragmentation. Please observe this. You are not being taught by me. You can see this happening right through the world and inwardly also this takes place, this fragmentation, which is the observer and the observed, the analyser and the thing he analyses. Now, is the analyser different from the thing he analyses? The analyser examines his anger, his jealousy, his ambition, his greed, his brutality, in order to get over it or in order to suppress it or in order to resist it. He examines in order to produce a result negatively or positively. Who is the examiner and the thing examined? You are following all this? Who is the examiner, who is the analyser? Is he not one of the fragments of the many fragments? He may call himself the superfragment, he may call himself the mind, the intelligence, but he is still a fragment. He may call himself the Atman or whatever you like to call it. It is still a super-fragment. Is that clear? It is not a question of agreement or disagreement, but observing what goes on in your lives, because you have to change your life, your living - not your ideas, your conclusions, your convictions. So is the observer, the analyser, different from the analysed? Or are they not both the same? please, it is important that we understand this very clearly and deeply, because if they are both the same, then conflict comes to an end. You follow this? Look, from the moment we are born till we die, we are in conflict. We are struggling and we have never been able to solve that problem, and we say that as long as there is division between the analyser and the thing analysed there must inevitably be in conflict, because the analyser is the past. He has acquired knowledge through various experiences, through various influences; he is the past, he is the censor who judges, says this is right, this is wrong, this should be, this should not be. Right? And the censor then dictates to that thing which he observes, what it should do, what it should not do; how he should suppress it, go beyond it according to his past conditioning. Probably you are not used to this kind of examination. Unfortunately, you have too many gurus in this country. They have told you what to do, what to think, what to practise. They are the dictators, and therefore, you have stopped thinking clearly. Gurus destroy, not create. If you really saw that, you would drop all spiritual authority completely, you wouldn't follow anybody including the speaker; you would really observe with your heart, with your mind, find out, examine, because it is you who have to change, not your guru. The moment he asserts he is a guru, he ceases to understand; he is no longer a man of truth. So the past, which is the censor, which is the analyser, examines. So the past creates the division. And also, analysis implies time. It involves time, that is, you will take days, months, years in analysing, examining, and therefore there is no complete action. Please do understand this - a mind that is introspective, a mind that merely follows, a mind that functions according to the past, the analyser, his action is always incomplete and therefore always confusing and therefore bringing misery. So, you see for yourself the truth that analysis is not the way, that it is introspective, finding out the cause-all that implies time, taking many days, many months. And before you know where you are, you are already dead. So if you see the truth of it, that analysis is not the way for freedom, for a mind to become completely free of its conditioning, then you will drop the analytical process completely. If you see the danger of analysis as you see the danger of a serpent, actually see the danger of it, then you will never touch it. The mind is free from the idea of analysis. Therefore it has already a different quality, it is capable then of looking in another direction, because the old direction, the old tradition, the methods, the systems that you have, that the gurus offer and the books offer is this gradual process which is a form of analysis. When you see the truth of it, you are completely out of that. Therefore your mind has become much sharper, much clearer. Truth is not something far away. It is there, only you must know how to look. A mind that is prejudiced, a mind that is burdened with conclusions, with beliefs, cannot possibly see, and one of our great prejudices is this analytical process. You see, and therefore you drop it. Then if you have dropped it, it no longer captures you; you are no longer thinking in terms of advancement, of suppression, resistance, because all that is implied in analysis. Then if analysis is not the way to bring about a radical, psychological revolution, then is there another way, that is, is there another method, another system by which the conditioning can be put aside totally so that the mind is free? The mind can never be free as long as there is any kind of effort, because all our lives we are used to making effort - "I must be this, I shall be that, I shall achieve, I shall become" - and in that process tremendous effort is involved. Effort implies either suppression or adjustment or resistance. Are you following all this? That is, we are slaves to the verb "to be". I do not know if you have noticed it in yourself, how you think that you will be something, that you will achieve, that you will be free. That verb "to be" conditions the mind, you follow? That is, the verb "to be" implies the past, the present and the future - "having been", "will be" or "I am". Watch it in yourself, please - that is one of our major conditionings. Now can the mind be free of that whole movement, because psychologically, is there a tomorrow? You understand my question? You understand there is tomorrow by the watch, but is there a tomorrow inwardly, psychologically and actually, not the thought which creates tomorrow psychologically? There is a tomorrow which is "I will be" psychologically only when there is this conditioning of the mind caught in the trap of becoming. You know, one of our miseries in this country is that we have stopped thinking, reasoning. We've been fed by others, we have become secondhand human beings and that is why it is so difficult to talk freely to somebody. This needs clear thinking on both our parts, because this is a tremendous problem which we must resolve, that is, as long as there is this movement of becoming, the movement of - "I will be good, I will be noble, I will become nonviolent, I will achieve" as long as there is this conditioning of becoming, there must be conflict. That is a fact, isn't it? So in becoming, there is conflict, isn't there? So conflict distorts the mind. Every form of conflict must inevitably twist the mind, and can the mind function healthily, sanely, with great expanse, with great beauty, with great intelligence without any effort? Do you understand my question? Look, Sir, your mind, now, if I may point out not critically, not in any way derogatorily, your mind, if you watch it carefully, is all the time thinking in terms of the future or the past, what it will become. As in an office, you think of becoming the manager -climbing, climbing till you reach - the director. In the same way, you think inwardly, that is, you will eventually be perfect, eventually become non-violent, eventually live at perfect peace. That is your habit, that is your tradition, that is what you have been brought up on. And you are being challenged now to look at it entirely differently, and you will find it very difficult. You say to yourself, how can I possibly live in this mad world without effort? How can I live with myself, in myself, without the least movement of effort? Don't you ask that? Isn't that your life -this constant battle not only outwardly for security and all the rest of it but inwardly also this battle going on to become, to be, to change, to achieve? And where there is any form of effort there must be distortion, mustn't there? So we are going to find out whether it is possible for the mind to live without effort at all and yet function, not vegetate. You have understood my question? You are putting this question to yourself, I am not putting it to you. All that you have known is effort, resistance, suppression, or following somebody - that is all you have known. And we are asking whether the mind that has accepted this system, this tradition, this way of living, can that mind cease to make effort altogether? Please understand, examine it together - you are not learning from me. You are not learning it from the speaker at all, you are learning through observation, therefore it is yours, not mine. Is that clear? Effort exists when there is duality. Duality means contradiction - "I am, I should be" - contradictory desires, contradictory purposes, contradictory ideas. Most human beings are violent. Now they have brought about the idea of not being violent, so that there is a contradiction - the fact and the ideal. Right? The fact is that human beings are violent, and the non-fact is the idea of nonviolence. If there was no ideal at all, then you would deal with the fact, wouldn't you? Can you put away the ideal altogether and face "what is"? Can you be aware of your convictions, your formulas, your ideals and your hopes? Because, they prevent you from observing what is, which is violence. We do not know what to do with violence, therefore we have ideals. Now, as we are speaking have you put away your ideals? No, you haven't; you have your convictions, which means you live on ideas and words. When a man says "I am convinced of something", he is really not facing facts, he is not observing "what is", and if a man would change radically he must observe "what is." You see, that is one of the reasons why you have no energy, why you have no flame, because you are living in some vague abstraction. So, can the mind be free of the future, the future being what you will be? The future is the verb "to be". So if you put away the future, you are then concerned with "what is". Then the problem arises, how to observe "what is"? Then your mind is clear to look. Your mind is not clear to look when you are looking somewhere in the future. Right? So the idealists are the most hypocritical people in the world. If I want to change, I must face "what is", not be concerned with what I should be; I mustn't be crippled with conclusions, convictions, formulas, systems; I must know "what is" and how to deal with it. Now arises the question, how am I to observe "what is?" You understand? You see, `what should be' becomes the authority. The mind that is free of `what should be' has no authority, therefore it is free from any kind of supposition which breeds authority, therefore the mind is free to observe actually "what is." Now how does it observe? What is the relationship between the observer and the thing it observes? You see the mind is now free from all ideals, from all conclusions, from all authority. Authority exists when there is a becoming, when the guru says to you or the book says to you "You will achieve, if you follow this system; do this and you will get that" - always in the future - avoidance of the present in contrast to the mind that is free from authority, free from every kind of concept. And then the question arises, how is the mind to observe actually "what is"? What is, is that human beings are violent. We can explain, give causes, find out the causes why human beings have become violent. That's fairly simple, and one can easily observe it. We can see it in the animal, and as we have come from the animal, and so on, we are aggressive, we are violent, partly by the culture in which we live, for which we are responsible. So we are in fact violent. Now how does the mind observe this fact which is violence? How do you observe it? You are angry, you are jealous, you are envious, brutal, how do you observe that fact? Do you observe it as an observer and the thing observed? If you do, that is division. Is there an observer observing violence? How do you observe it, or is your observation a complete unitary process? That is, a process in which there is no division between the observer and the observed. What is it? Do you observe the fact that you are violent or greedy, envious, whatever it is, separating yourself from the fact of fear, anger, and the observer saying "I am different from the thing observed?" Or do you see that the anger, jealousy or violence is part of the observer also? Therefore the observer is the observed. Do you see that? If you see that there is no division between the thing observed and the observer; that anger or jealousy is part of the observer, the observer is jealousy, if you see that without the division, conflict comes to an end. Conflict exists as long as there is division - when you are a Hindu and there is another as a Muslim. When you are a Christian, there is Catholic and there is Protestant; when you are an Indian nationalist and somebody else is of another nation. When there is division of any kind between you and another there must be conflict, and that outward division also goes inward. There is the division between me and my activity, me that observes, "me" that says "I will become". So in that division there is conflict. A mind in conflict is never free, a mind in conflict is always distorted. When you use the word "understand", not intellectually, since that has no value at all, but actually, you know you are with it completely; now that is part of meditation. This is meditation - to discover a way of living in which there is no conflict, no escape, no effort to go off to some fantastic mystical experiences but actually find out in daily life, the way of living in which the mind has never been touched by conflict; and that can only be when you understand, actually see, with your heart, with your mind, with your reason, with everything that you have, see that as long as there is a division inwardly in the psyche, which must exist when you try to become something, when you are trying to become noble, when you are trying to become better, there must be conflict which prevents you from looking at "what is". You know, goodness can never become something else. You cannot become better in goodness. You understand this? Goodness is now, it flowers now, not in the future. So is it possible for the mind which is so conditioned by the past, by culture, to radically change when the mind completely sees the truth and the falseness of ideologies, sees the falseness of following, obeying? You obey in order to achieve. Right? So you put away altogether all authority. To understand this question of authority deeply, you have to understand, haven't you, not only the authority of law but the authority which comes inwardly through obedience. The word "obedience" comes from Latin, which means to hear. Now when you hear over and over again that you must have a guru - otherwise you can't possibly understand life or achieve enlightenment - you must follow somebody. When you hear that constantly repeated, you inevitably obey. So obedience implies following, which means authority, and a mind that is ridden with authority as yours is, can never live in freedom and therefore without any effort. Question: You, are using the words "you" and "your mind." Are they synonymous? Krishnamurti: Now, is that the question? You and your mind, aren't they one? You, are you separate from your mind, are you the super-soul which is using the mind, are you the Atman using the mind? Now if you are the Atman, that is one of your conditionings, because in the New World they do not believe in any of that, they have been brought up not to believe in all that, you have been brought up to believe in the Atman. That is all. You have been brought up to believe in God, and there are millions of people conditioned not to believe in God. Both are conditioned, you who believe in God, and the men who don't believe in God. You are conditioned, you can never find out what truth is if you are conditioned. You must drop your belief to find out. So the question is, are you your mind? Aren't you what you think you are, when you think you are a Sikh, a Buddhist, a Catholic, Communist? When you think that you will achieve heaven, that is your idea of what you are. So why do you separate yourself from what you are? Question: You say when the mind ceases, nothing remains. Krishnamurti: The speaker is supposed to have said that when the mind ceases nothing remains. Did the speaker say that? I am afraid he did not say that. Question: Do you believe if there is anything beyond man? Krishnamurti: You know the speaker has been saying, "Don't believe, find out, examine, discover for yourself" and at the end of an hour and a quarter, you ask the speaker, "Do you believe?" You want beliefs and you think you have solved the problem by having beliefs. You believe that there is something beyond. You don't know a thing about it, but you believe. You assume something as being real, accept something as being real, about which you know absolutely nothing. How can a confused mind, a mind in sorrow, a mind which is bitter, angry, how can such a mind find out if there is something beyond? But you believe readily, because that is one of your escapes about which you can quarrel endlessly. Question: Would you share with us what you call reality? Krishnamurti: What I call reality? Sir, reality is not an opinion. It is not through opinions that you come to reality, it is not through beliefs that you come to reality. The mind must be completely empty to discover what reality is, and you cannot share when your mind is not equally intense, passionate, free to look. How can you share something of which you know nothing? But what we do know together is confusion, is sorrow, is our petty lives. Instead of understanding that, freeing ourselves from all that, you want to know what truth is. The truth is where you are, which is, when the mind is free from conflict. It is there for you to see it. Question: I see that my mind is fragmented. I see very clearly that there is a division, there is the observer and the observed and there is conflict. I can't see how these two can come together. Krishnamurti: Now we are going to share this question together. How do you observe a tree? How do you observe it? Do you see it through an image, the image being your knowledge of a particular tree, that is a mango or whatever it is? Do you look at that tree with an image that you have about the tree, which is the knowledge that you have? You understand my question? Do you look at your neighbour or at your wife or husband with the knowledge that you have, with the image that you have? You do, don't you? Someone looks at a communist because he has an idea, an image of what a communist is, or he looks at a Protestant with Catholic eyes or a Hindu with Hindu eyes at a Muslim; that is he looks through an image. So the image divides. If I am married and I have loved my wife or a friend for twenty years, naturally I have an image about that person built up - nagging, friendship, companionship, sex, pleasure, all that is involved - and that becomes the image through which I look. So the image divides. Now the observer and the observed: the observer is the image, is the knowledge of the past, and he looks with that image at the thing he is observing. Therefore, there is a division. Now, can the mind be free of that image? Of all images? You understand my question - can the mind which is in the habit of building images, can that mind be free of image-building? That is, the machinery which builds the image, can that come to an end? Now what is that machinery. Please, we are sharing the problem together. I am not instructing you. We are asking each other. What is this image, how is this image produced and what is it that sustains this image? Now the machinery that builds the image is inattention. You understand, Sir? You insult me or flatter me. When you insult me, I react and that reaction builds the image. The reaction comes about when there is no attention. You follow? When I am not attending completely to your insult, this inattention breeds the image. When you call me an idiot, I react, which is, I am not fully attentive to what you are saying, and therefore the image is formed. But when I am completely attentive to what you are saying, there is no image forming. When you flatter me, I listen completely, with complete attention, which is to attend without any choice, to be aware without any choice, then there is no image-forming at all. After all, image-forming is a way of not getting hurt. We won't go into that, because that leads to something else. So when somebody flatters or insults, you give complete attention at that moment, then you will see that there is no image, and having no image there is then no division between the observer and the observed. Question: When there is anger there is no observer nor the observed, there is only that reaction of anger, and when I use the word "anger" that very verbal description of that feeling brings about the observer who is different from the observed. Krishnamurti: Right, you see all this? Or are you getting tired? When you are angry, at that second, there is neither the observer nor the observed, "I must not be angry" or "I am not justified in being angry." Then there is the division between the observer and the observed but not at the moment of anger. Now at the moment of any crisis there is neither the observer nor the observed, because the thing is demanding and we cannot live at that heightened intensity all the time. Therefore we resort to the observer and the observed. From that arises a whole question, which is, can a mind live without any challenge whatsoever; most of us need challenges, otherwise we would go to sleep. Challenge means you are asked, pushed, demanded. So can you find out whether a man can live without any challenge at all, that is to have a mind that is completely awake? Question: When you are attentive, then you form images, it is only when you are inattentive, you have no images. Krishnamurti: Look, Sir, you insult me. I react to your insult. When you say I am an idiot, I say you are another - what takes place? You have left, by your insult, a mark on my mind, a mark, memory. When next time I meet you, you are not my friend. Right? It has left a mark. If you flatter me, that has also left a mark, and next time I meet you, you are my friend. That is, any imprint on the mind is the formation of an image, and we are pointing out that when the mind is crowded with images, it is not free, and therefore must live in conflict. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC TALK NEW DELHI 13TH DECEMBER 1970 Most of us do not ask fundamental questions and if we do, we expect others to answer them. We are going this evening if we may, to consider several problems, and I think they are fundamental ones. One of them is to observe the many fragments of life, the various activities, opposing each other, contradicting and bringing about a great deal of confusion. One asks if there is an action which can cover totally all these divergent, contradictory, fragmentary activities, because one observes in one's own life how we are broken up - politically, religiously, artistically, scientifically, commercially, and so on - all opposing each other, contradicting each other. Is there an action which can respond totally to every demand of life without being contradictory in itself? I do not know if you have ever even asked such a question. Most of us live in our own particular little activity and try to make the best of it. If you are a politician - and I hope you aren't -then your world is very dependent on votes and you know all the rest of the nonsense that goes on in the name of politics; and if you are a religious person, you will have a number of beliefs, a way of meditation contradicting everything in your daily life; if you are an artist, you live totally apart from all this, absorbed in your own particular fancy, in your own beauty, in your own perception, and so on; and if you are a scientist, you live in the laboratory and just a normal human being outside, rather shoddy, competitive and all the rest of it; so seeing all this with which most of us must be quite familiar, what is the action which can respond totally to every demand and yet remain non-contradictory, whole? Now, if you put that question to yourself, as we are doing now, what would be your answer? Because as we said the other day when we met here, we are sharing together the problem of our life, not intellectually, not verbally, but actually. And that is the meaning of communication -to consider together the common issue, the common issue being this question: is there an action, a way of living every day which can answer, whether you are an artist, scientist, businessman and so on - the question whether your life can be whole, so that there is no fragmentation and therefore no contradictory action? If the question is clear, then how shall we find out such an action? By what method, by what system? If we are trying to find a method, a way of living by a system, according to a certain pattern, then that very pattern, that very system is contradictory. Please do understand this clearly. If I follow a particular system in order to bring about an action which will be whole, complete, full, rich and beautiful, such a system, such a method, becomes mechanical. My actions will be mechanical and therefore totally incomplete. Therefore I must set aside all idea of following, of mechanical repetitive activity. And also I must find out whether thought can help to bring about such an action. You understand my question? You live a fragmentary life - you are different in the office and at home, you have private thoughts and public thoughts, and you see this wide gulf, this contradiction, this fragmentation and ask if thought can bridge all these various fragments, if thought can bring about an integration between all these factor? Can it? So we have to find out what is the nature and the structure of thought. Can thought, the thinking, the intellectual process of reasoning, can such thought bring about a harmonious life? To find out, one has to investigate, examine carefully, the nature and structure of thought, which means we are going together to examine your thinking, not the description or the explanation of the speaker, because the description is never the described, the explanation is not the explained. So don't let us be caught in the explanation or in the description, but together investigate, find out how thought works, and whether thought can really, deeply bring about a way of living that is totally harmonious, non-contradictory, complete in every action. This is very important to find out, because if we want a world that is totally changed, where there is no corruption, a way of living that has significance in itself, we have to ask this question. Not only this but also what sorrow is -and whether sorrow can ever end - what pain, fear, love death is. We must find out for ourselves the meaning of all this, not according to some book, not what some other person has said. That has no meaning whatsoever. You know knowledge has great meaning, has significance. If you want to go to the moon you must have extraordinary technological knowledge; to do anything efficiently, clearly, you must have a great deal of knowledge. But that very knowledge becomes an impediment when you are trying to find out a way of living that is totally harmonious, because knowledge is of the past. Knowledge is the past and if you live according to the past, obviously there is contradiction, the past in conflict with the present. So one has to be aware of this fact that knowledge is necessary and yet knowledge becomes a great hindrance. Like tradition, it may be useful at a certain level, but tradition, which responds to the present responsibility, brings about confusion, contradiction. So one has to enquire very, very seriously into the nature of thought. You know it is only the serious people that live, not the others, because the man who is very serious can apply, can consistently pursue, and not drop it when it suits him, pursue it till the very end till he finds out. He will not be distracted, not be carried away by some enthusiasm or some emotional reaction. That is why a serious man lives fully, and enquires into this question of what is thought, whether there is the possibility of ending sorrow, fear, the meaning of death, and life, and also finds out for himself, not according to anybody else, not according to the speaker - least of all according to the speaker. He finds out for himself a way of living that is harmonious, highly intelligent and sensitive and that has the depth of beauty. And to find out, one has to enquire into the nature of thought. So what is thinking? Please put yourself this question, what is thinking? We must understand the deep significance of thought because we live by thought. Whatever we do is either reasoned out or examined, investigated or we do it mechanically according to yesterday's pattern, the tradition. So one has to be very clear about what the function of thought is. If you observe very carefully in yourself, don't you find that thought is the response of memory, memory which is experience, which is knowledge? If you had no knowledge, no experience, no memory, there would be no thinking. You would live in a state of amnesia. So thought is the response of memory, and memory is conditioned by the culture in which you have lived, according to your education, according to the religious propaganda in which you have been caught. So thought is the response of memory with its knowledge and experience - and you need knowledge, you need memory; otherwise you can't get home, otherwise we couldn't speak to each other. But thought, because it is the response of memory, is never free, is always old. You are following all this? And to find a way of living which is totally harmonious and clear, a way of life that has no distortion, can thought find a way, thought which is the response of the old, which is memory? And yet we use thought to find a way, thought being - if you are objective - rational, clear, sane. We say "I shall think it over and find a way of living harmoniously". And thought is the response of the past, of our conditioning; therefore, thought cannot possibly find a harmonious way of living. You are following all this? Thought can never find it, and yet we use thought to find it; and yet we know thought is necessary to go home, to earn a livelihood, to do anything; thought at a certain level is absolutely necessary, but thought becomes an impediment to find a way of living which is totally different from the past, which is disharmony. When you see the truth that thought will not find the way, however reasonable, however logical, however sane or clear, then what is the state of your mind that sees the truth of it? You are following all this? Are you also working as much as the speaker is, or are you merely listening to a few ideas? You understand my question? I hope you are also working as deeply and passionately, otherwise you won't be able to find out, otherwise you will never find out a way of living which is so extraordinarily harmonious and beautiful, and one has to find it in this insane world. So if thought will not bring about a way of life which is totally harmonious, and if you see the truth of it - not the verbal explanation but the truth of it - what is the quality of the mind, your mind, that has seen this? What is the quality of the mind that sees the truth of something? Don't answer me, please. You see you are too quick with words and explanations, you don't let it soak into you. You don't stay with it, you immediately jump to words, to explain something or other, and you know very well the explanation isn't the real thing. So we are asking, what is the quality of the mind that sees the necessity of thought and sees also that thought - do what it will -cannot possibly bring about the beauty of a life that is completely, fully harmonious? You see this is one of the most difficult things to convey or talk about, because we have lived all our lives on somebody else's experiences, we have no direct perception, we are afraid to have direct perception, and when you are faced with this challenge, you are apt to escape, escape into words, explanations -and one has to put aside all explanations. So what is the quality of the mind, that is, what is the nature of the mind that sees the truth? We will leave it there for the moment, because we haven't time to go into too many details, because we have to touch so many things. We are coming back to it. All of us know what sorrow is, physical pain and psychological grief. All of us know this. If you are a Hindu, you will explain it away through karma, if you are a Christian, you have various forms of rationalization. Please follow all this, not the speaker, but yourself, watch your own sorrow. We are asking whether that sorrow can ever end, and we are going to find out. Either you explain it away in your own way, according to the particular culture in which you have been brought up, that is, the pain, the sorrow, the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of isolation, the sorrow of not achieving something or other, the sorrow of losing somebody whom you think you love - the sorrow not personal, but the sorrow of the world that has lived for so many millennia, that goes on killing, destroying its own species, with man being appalling towards man. When you see all that, the man walking across the park, lonely, with torn clothes, dirty and no happiness -he can never be Prime Minister, he can never enjoy life - when you see all that, there is great sorrow, not for yourself, but that such human beings exist in the world. You understand all this, and that society has brought about such conditions. And then there is the sorrow of one's own loss, neurological pain, and in the face of it, one escapes, one doesn't know what to do. So words, theories, explanations and beliefs act as a way of escape. Have you noticed this? Do please watch it in yourself. If my son dies, I have a dozen explanations. I escape through my fear of loneliness. So what happens? I go back to sleep again, because sorrow is a way of challenge, asking "Look, what has happened to you, observe." And we don't, we run away. Now, when you remain with sorrow without running away, without escaping, without verbalizing, completely remain with it, without any outward or inward movement, what happens? Have you ever done this - remained with the sorrow, not resisting, not trying to run away from it, not trifling with it but seeing what has happened? If you remain with it completely, what takes place? When you remain completely with it, without any movement of thought you recognise the whole structure of what sorrow is; then what takes place? Out of that sorrow comes passion. The meaning of that word "passion" has its root in suffering. You see the connection? If you remain with the fact of anything, specially with the fact of sorrow and don't let thought wander away or explain it away, but you identify yourself with it, completely with it, then there is tremendous energy, and out of that energy there is the flame of passion. Sorrow brings passion, not lust, and passion you need to find out. So there is an ending of sorrow, which doesn't mean that you become indifferent, callous. There is an ending of sorrow when there is no escape from it and that very sorrow becomes the flame of passion, and passion is compassion. Compassion means passion for all. You can only find out through this flame of sorrow. Then with that intensity, with that passion, one can find out what is the quality of the mind that sees truth. Because then you have passion, you have intensity, you have energy. Then also you have to find out for yourself whether fear can come to an end, not only fear of physical pain but also the psychological, inward fears that one has. Find the truth of it - not just the verbal explanation. Find out for yourself passionately and therefore seriously to the very end, so that the mind is free from fear. So one has to ask what fear is. Is it the product of thought? Obviously it is the product of thought - that is, you think about something that has given you pain, physical or otherwise, that happened last year or yesterday, you think about it. That very thought sustains and continues that fear. Right? And thought also projects that fear into the future - I may lose my job, I may lose my position, my prestige, my fame - you follow? Thinking about the past or about the future brings fear. So one asks, can thought come to an end? And also one can see how thought sustains pleasure: the marvellous sunset, what happened yesterday, that which was so beautiful, so lovely, so exciting, so sensuous, so sexual, and all the rest of it; and you think about it, and thought sustains that pleasure. So there is sorrow, fear, pleasure and joy. Is joy totally different from pleasure? I do not know if it has happened to you. It happens. Joy comes suddenly. You don't know why, but thought picks it up, thinks about it, reduces it to pleasure and says, "I would like to have that joy again". So thought sustains and nourishes pleasure, fear, and the very avoidance of sorrow is the continuity of sorrow. You see all this? Then there is the fear of death, which is the ultimate fear which man has. We will deal with that presently. So there it is. Pain, grief, sorrow and whether they can end at all, and fear, not only the superficial fears but the deep unconscious fears that are embedded in the recesses of one's own mind, of which one is not aware. How is one to bring all that out so that one is totally, completely free of all fear? Now after putting all these questions, what is the quality of the mind that sees the truth of all this, the truth that thought perpetuates pleasure and fear - the truth, not the explanation - the truth that the avoidance of fear through various forms of escape does distort the mind and therefore renders it incapable of comprehending fear totally, completely. What is the quality of the mind that doesn't invite joy, and when the joy happens, it happens and leaves it alone? So what is the quality of the mind that is aware when thought is necessary, when thought must be employed logically, objectively, sanely, and also sees that thought, which is the response of knowledge, which is the past, becomes a hindrance, blocks a way of living which is non-contradictory? What is the quality of your mind when you say "I understand something"? Your mind is completely empty and silent. You understand? Isn't it? You can only see something very clearly when there is no choice. When there is choice, there is confusion; it is only the confused mind that chooses, that discriminates between the essential and the non-essential, but the man who sees very clearly has no choice. There it is. So there is an action which comes when the mind is completely empty of any movement of thought except the movement of thought which is necessary when it has to function. Now, can such a mind deal with the everyday facts of life? Which means, can it function if you are a Muslim, a Sikh, a Hindu, a Buddhist, can it ever function when there is conditioning of the mind, which is, can such a mind function through a Hindu who is conditioned according to his background? Obviously not. Therefore, if you see the truth of this, you will not be a Hindu, you will not be a Muslim, Sikh, Christian. You will be something entirely different. Now do you see the truth of this, and do you cease to be a Hindu, Sikh, Muslim? Not at some future time, but actually at the moment, completely emptied of all the nonsense that goes into this. Otherwise you will never see what truth is. You may talk endlessly about it, read all the books in the world, but you will never come upon the beauty and the vitality and the passion of it. So a mind that is enquiring, putting fundamental questions, also questions whether society can be radically, fundamentally, changed, not the economic but the psychological structure. Because if the psyche is not changed inwardly, what you produce outwardly will be the same, only modified and continuing in the same pattern. So one has to ask this fundamental question, and there is nobody to answer except yourself. You cannot possibly rely on any one. Therefore you have to observe, learn to watch, which means, can the mind be completely awake, observant, to see the actual truth of anything because when you see the truth you will act. It is like seeing danger. When you see danger, you act instantly. So in the same way, when you see the truth of something completely, there is complete action. Question: What happens to the mind after the body disintegrates ? Krishnamurti: Why do you dissociate the body from the mind? Is there something separate as the mind apart from the body? Psychosomatically, is there a division? Look, Sir, you have been brought up in this country, in this culture, as a Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or God knows what else. Your conditioning is the result of the society in which you live, which you have created, the society is not different from you. You have created it, your parents have created it, and the rest of the past have created the culture in which you live and you are part of that. Now can you divide yourself from that culture? You can only divide yourself, break away from that culture when you are not of that culture. Right? Isn't that simple? In the same way, why do you divide? I am not going to ask this question, but we will go into it. Why do you divide the body and the mind? Because you have been told - the Atman, the higher self, the soul - do you know anything about it, or do you repeat what other people have said? How do you know that what others have said is true? It doesn't matter who it is. How do you know? So why do you accept? So to find out whether the mind is something totally different from the organism, to find out, you have to have a mind that sees very clearly, a mind that has no distortion, a mind that is not confused, a mind that is not conforming. Have you got such a mind, a mind that is not conforming? Which means, when you conform, when you compare, when you compare yourself with somebody, you are conforming. To find out whether you can live without conforming is to find out whether you can live without comparison. Comparing yourself with what you were yesterday or what you will be tomorrow, or comparing yourself with the rich man, the poor man, with the saint, with your hero, the ideal, comparing, which means measuring yourself with somebody or with an idea. Find out what it means to have no comparison. Then you are free, then the mind is completely free of its conditioning. Question: The fundamental question in philosophy is whether mind and body are separate or not. Krishnamurti: I have no philosophy. Question: I want your opinion. Krishnamurti: I have no opinion. Question: I want to be enlightened. Krishnamurti: You are going to be enlightened, Sir, if you listen. Sir, to find the truth of this matter, we must not follow anybody. Philosophy means the love of truth, not the love of theories, not the love of speculations, not the love beliefs, but the love of truth, and truth isn't yours or mine, and therefore you cannot follow anybody. When once you realize this basic fact that truth cannot be found through another, but you have to have eyes to see it, it may be there with a dead leaf, but you have to see it. And to offer an opinion about it, is ridiculous. Only fools offer opinions. We are not dealing with opinions, we are concerned with this fact, which is, whether the mind has a quality, has a state or an inwardness which is not touched by the physical. Do you understand my question? Which is the question you are putting me - whether the mind is independent of the body, whether the mind is beyond all the petty, nationalistic, religious limitations? To find that out, you have to be extraordinarily alert and watchful. You have to become aware, sensitive. If you are very sensitive, which means intelligent, you will find out if you go into it very, very deeply, that there is something which is never touched by thought or by the past. You know thought is matter, thought is the response of memory, memory is in the brain cells themselves, it is matter, and whether the brain cells can be so completely quiet, then only you will find out; but to say that there is or there is not, has no meaning. But to find out, to give your life to this, as you give your life to earning a livelihood - and here, where you need tremendous energy, a great passion to find out, you drink at other people's fountains which are dry. Therefore you have to be a light to yourself, therefore in that there is freedom. Question: Do you believe in evolution? Krishnamurti: It is very simple, Sir, I will answer. There is the evolution from the bullock cart to the jet. Going to the moon is evolution. Probably human beings have reached their height biologically but is there an inward evolution? You are following my question? Will I evolve, become marvellous? Now before you put that question "Will I evolve?". You have to find out what the "I" is, not say "I will evolve". That has no meaning. But what is the "I"? The "I" is your furniture, your house, the books that you have collected, the memories that you have had, the remembrance of pleasure, pain - the "I" is a bundle of memories. Is there anything more than the "I"? You say the "I" is spiritual, the "I" has a spiritual quality in it. How do you know? Is that an invention of thought? Therefore you have to enquire why thought invents such things. Don't accept a thing, including your own self, because to find truth the mind must be free of the self, not the higher self. The higher self is part of the lower self, that is just another invention of duality. So you have to find out, Sir, if there is evolution. There is obviously evolution, biologically ; but we are talking psychologically, inwardly, the thing that is continually striving to become and to find out what it is that is becoming. Question: How can the lower mind find the higher mind? Krishnamurti: How can the lower mind find the higher mind? Apparently at the end of an hour and a quarter we are still talking about fragmentation, we have talked about the higher self and the lower self which is part of this division. We have talked for about an hour, and still you get up and say, "what is the lower mind and the higher mind?" Question: I mean there is the parent element.... Krishnamurti: See what the gentleman says. You have translated what you have said into your own Sanskrit terminology, and therefore you are stuck. But you have to say "I know nothing, I want to find out". Don't you want to find out a way of living that is really beautiful, without any pain, without any fear, that is completely harmonious, don't you? And if you do it, Sir, you have to drop all your slogans, what other people have said, you have to find out. This means you have to have tremendous energy ; and you waste your energy by repeating words that have no meaning except for those who have invented them. Question: What is the relationship between the "me", the "I" and ego, and the mind that sees truth. Krishnamurti: What is the relationship between the "me", the ego, and a mind that sees, that is empty, that is whole, that perceives truth? What is the relationship between the two? What is the self, the "you"? What is the "you"? When you say "I" - I am a politician, I am a saint, I am this or that, what does that mean? You identify yourself, don't you, with your family, with your furniture, with your book, with your money, with your position, with your prestige, your memories. Isn't the "I" all that? The "I" is also the higher self, the Atman. But the identification with the higher self is still part of thinking, that thought which says there must be something permanent, because life must be permanent. Is there anything permanent? You are asking what is the relationship between the "I" and that marvellous state of perception that is true. None whatsoever. There is no relationship between the two. The one is the result of conflict, misery, agony, pain, and the other is empty of all this. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 3 3RD PUBLIC TALK NEW DELHI 17TH DECEMBER 1970 I think before we go into the rather complex subject of death, we ought to consider what time is, and in relation to time we should also examine what space is, because they are interrelated. No problem, however complex it is, is isolated. Every problem is related to other problems, so we cannot possibly separate one problem, one issue, and discard the others. In understanding it completely, going to the very end of it with reason, logic, sanity, objectivity, we will be able to solve all other problems. When one considers what is happening in the world and also in this country - the confusion, the deterioration, the corruption, the division, the great suffering - it behoves that all of us should change, should bring about a different world, should create a totally different social structure, not only here in India, but in the world, because we are part of the world. And in seeing the utter chaos, the great confusion and misery, it seems to me, we must not take politics by itself or the economic situation of a particular culture, or separate all this from science, but take the whole movement of life, whether it is in the laboratory or in the field of economics, or in the so-called religious field. It should all be taken as a whole, and that is our problem - not to fragment it, not to divide it, but to take the whole movement of life as a unit and deal with it. And in this movement of life there is time, space, love and death. We are apt to separate death from life and life from love, as though it was something apart from time. So to understand what death is one must also understand the question of time and love and that is what we are going to do this evening. We must together examine, understand, communicate, talk it over, share together, which means that you must be equally intense, passionate, try to find out and not depend on the speaker. When we are considering this problem, which is very complex and needs all our attention and naturally our passion - because without passion you cannot possibly understand anything - and as we said, passion comes out of the flame of sorrow, and without understanding the meaning, the depth of sorrow, one will not have the energy, the vitality, the passion to investigate and find out for ourselves what love is and what death is. We are going first to consider what time is. There is the time by the watch, but is there any other time at all? Time involves process, the gradual becoming, the changing "what is" into what should be. The traditional approach to change involves time, does it not? I am this and I must change to that, or become that - and that involves time, gradualness. And is there such a thing as psychological becoming, psychological evolution at all? Time involves the whole process of thought. Thought is time, and as we pointed out the other day, thought breeds, sustains fear. To understand that extraordinary thing called death, the ending, of which we are so frightened, we must really comprehend for ourselves what time is, why thought has invented time apart from chronological time. Is there a psychological inward becoming, transforming, changing? If you are a part of time, a sequence, a process, then you will have to accept time as a means of achievement. And what then is change, is psychological change? We are not talking about the biological evolution. As we pointed out earlier, from the bullock cart to the jet plane there is a tremendous evolutionary process, a vast accumulated knowledge, and to accumulate knowledge involves time. Apart from that, is there a process, a gradualness, a continuity of change or is there a psychological revolution in which time does not exist at all? The moment you admit process, gradualness, you will have to have time, as on that all our traditions are based - the practice, the method, the becoming and not becoming. The whole of that structure involves time, promising at the end of it you will have enlightenment, understanding. Can there be understanding through time at all, or is it a perception which is immediate and is therefore immediate change? Is it possible to break the chain of continuity, the movement from "what is" to what should be? Or is there a total mutation of "what is", not involving time? To find that out one must totally discard all the traditional approach, which is through gradualness, through practice, through sustained effort, because all that involves conflict. Please do understand this very simple factor: where there is conflict there is division, the division between the thinker and the thought, between the observer and the thing he wishes to observe, which is the observed. In that division there must inevitably be conflict because there are other factors involved in it, there are other pressures, other happenings which change what was cause into effect and the effect becomes the cause. Do you follow? So all that involves time. When you go to your guru - if you have one - he will tell you what to do, which involves time, and you accept it, because you are so greedy, you want to find something which through time you hope to find. You accept and you are caught in this field of time which is bondage. Now we are investigating this fact that where there is psychological time there is a movement from "what is" to what should be, which involves conflict, and where there is conflict, the mind must be distorted, and a mind that is distorted can never find what is true. That is a simple fact. If I want to see very clearly, I must have an eyesight that is clear, unclouded without any distortion; and there is distortion when there is effort, and effort means time. This is not logic, it may sound logical, reasonable, healthy, sane, but it is not logic; it is direct perception of what is false, because after all the function of the brain is to perceive clearly, to see what is false, and when you see this whole traditional approach of gradual becoming as a process, when you see that it is totally false, then your mind has clarity. Now, can the mind see directly the falseness of this idea of gradualness, see it, as you see this microphone, see clearly, so that the mind will never touch it at all? That is, in the seeing of the danger of an animal, of a serpent, of a dangerous, savage beast, the very seeing of it is instant action. Do you follow all this? So perception involves a mind that is not caught in the bondage of time. Do please understand this. Once you understand this fact, your whole structure of thought changes. Perception and understanding do not involve time at all. What is involved is seeing clearly, and to see clearly you must have space, space not only outwardly but inward space. That means space in the mind. You know when a man is chattering, he is filled with knowledge, knowledge being the past, apart from the technological knowledge which is necessary. When the mind is crowded with the knowledge of the events of yesterday, the pain of yesterday, the various remembrances of yesterday when the mind is crowded, there is no space, and where there is no space, there is conflict. You know, one of the factors of violence in the world is overpopulation, like in a crowded city when every street is full of people there is no space, and man needs space outwardly. Scientists have made experiments - I have been told by a friend -on rats, on mice. When many of them had been put in a very small space, then they fight each other, the mother destroys the baby, there is complete disorientation. And that is what is happening in the world, that is what is happening in every large town, overcrowded, over-populated ; and one of the factors is this lack of space outwardly. And the other factor is when the mind and the brain also are burdened with so many memories, so many experiences, which is knowledge, there is no space at all. So you need space so that conflict ends inwardly, and we ask why is there not space at all? Have you ever watched your own mind objectively, looked at it, how restless, chattering, remembering, how crowded and confused it is? How does this happen? Why is the mind never empty, therefore full of space and the beauty of space? You know when you look from a hilltop you see the whole horizon, the vast sky, the beauty of it and the stillness of it. Why has the mind no space at all? You are asking this question, I am not asking you to ask it. You know isolation creates the space. Isolation is a form of resistance, and where there is resistance, there is a limited space. I resist a new idea, a new way of living, I resist any disparagement of tradition, I resist my beliefs. So within that resistance, within that wall, there is a very small limited space. Have you not noticed it? And this resistance is part of will - "I must do this, I should not do that, I want this." Will is the factor of resistance, and willis part of thought which says there must be an achievement, there must be change, 1 must become something. So the factor of not having space is this isolating process of thought as the "me". The activity of thought as the "me" creates a very small space within a very limited area and this small area is time-binding, and because it is a small area it must chatter, it must act, it must move, tremble. Any activity of resistance which is the action of will must limit and isolate the space in which the "me", the "I", the self-centred action is going on. Do you see this? Therefore there is a duality, the "me" and the "not-me", what is beyond the wall of resistance and what is inside the wall which is the "me". And there is the will in the sense of assertion, dominance, ambition to be, the desire for power, position, prestige, which each one wants. Not only the politician, but also you want it, otherwise you wouldn't elect the politician. So if you see that - not intellectually, not verbally or logically - see how the mind is limited, small, enclosed in an action of a very small area, and as long as that area is very limited, there must be conflict, and therefore, there is no space. So, can there be action without will? Traditionally you are brought up on the action of will - "I must, I must not" - and therefore, the "must" and "must not", the "do" and the "don't" is a form of resistance, and therefore, the action is born of will and therefore limited. Now look at it. You have a habit of smoking, if you smoke. If you resist it, say "I will not smoke", then there is conflict. Can you drop it, the habit, without any resistance? And you will only drop it if you understand the whole nature and machinery of habit-forming, which we won't go into now. That is not the point involved. So when there is space in which time does not exist at all, which is time in the sense psychologically, then there is no conflict whatsoever, but out of that space you can act without the action of resistance and will. You see, one must find out a new way of living, a new way of acting, and the old traditional way does not lead to a new action. It is a repetitive action, and to find and to act in a totally different way, one must have this quality of mind in which there is complete freedom of space. So time is thought and time is sorrow. Now with that understanding let us find out what death is. Or shall we talk first what love is? Because, if you do not know what love is, you do not know what death is. What is love, Sir? Is love pleasure, is love desire, is love associated with sex, what is this thing that we call love? Is it part of hate? In it is there jealousy, anxiety? Can a man who is ambitious, seeking power, position, can he ever know what love is? When you say "I love my family, husband, wife or the girl or the boy", what does it mean? And without finding out for yourself really deeply what that word means, how can you ever find out the meaning and depth of death? Is love a matter of time, something to be cultivated, something to be practised? Do you think it is to be practised, something your guru will tell you what to do, at the end of which will achieve love? Is it the result of thought, time, a process? And why have human beings throughout the world given such tremendous significance to sex, which they call love? Have you noticed in your own life why sex has become such an all-consuming and important thing, why? Well, Sirs, do answer it. To find out, you have to ask why your life, the daily living with all its conflict, suffering, the agony, the everyday brutality, why your daily life has become mechanical? Isn't your life very mechanical - going to the office every day, following the tradition every day, establishing certain patterns of activity and going on with them for the rest of your life? God or no God or higher self, lower self - you know all that. You know it would be a marvellous thing if you said to yourself "I will never repeat anything I do not know" that you yourself have not completely understood - not repeat what somebody has said, not the Gita, the Koran, the Bible, or your favourite sacred book. Because that has become a habit, a routine. Do find out what happens if you say to yourself "I will never repeat a word that I have not myself understood, that I have not heard from another." So when you observe you will see that your life has become extraordinarily mechanical. Do you see that? There is nothing to be ashamed about. It is a fact whether you like it or not, sex is the only thing that you have, which, is free, which soon becomes also a habit; and all this thing you call love, love of God, devotion to your guru, to your idol, the hero, is it love? The truth of that beauty will be found only when you have completely dropped everything that is mechanical. Have we time to go into this question of death now? We have talked for fifty minutes. Shall we go into it now? What is death of which we are so dreadfully frightened? What is it? Simply put: coming to an end. I have lived for forty, fifty, twenty, eight years, I have accumulated so much, so many things, so much money, I have indulged in certain activities, ugly and beautiful, I have gathered so much experience, I have cultivated virtue, I have identified myself with my family. And I cry when I leave, not knowing what is going to happen to me. I am afraid of my own loneliness. And you want to find out if this ends, is there something after, that is, this movement of life, which is not living at all - this endless battle which you call life, living, struggle - and will that continue next life? Or you say to yourself "this is permanent, there is something permanent in me, the Atman, the super-ego, whatever you like to call it, there is something permanent". Please listen to this carefully, because that is part of your tradition, not only here, but right through the world, this tradition that there is a permanent something inside you which will take shape next life. So is there anything permanent? Thought has put all this together, hasn't it, thought saying "I am frightened, I am anxious, I love, I am full of fear, I may lose my job, I want a bigger house, more furniture, more applause, I must have power, position, prestige"? All that is the product of thought, it is created by thought, of everyday activity, the image which thought has put together. Now is there anything permanent. The moment you think about there being a permanent thing like the Atman - whatever you like to call it - the moment you think about it, it is already the product of thought. And thought is not permanent. Thought is old, it is never free, thought is never new, because thought is the response of memory and that's all you have - memory, words, the recognition, the association, the identification, that is all you are. Do face it, look at it, you are your furniture, you are your bank account, you are your memories, your pleasures, your hurts, your anxieties, you are all that, and you don't know how to solve it, how to be free of it. Therefore you begin to say there must be some permanent thing which is beyond all this, that must be there. And so thought, thinking about it creates the permanent, the Atman, and what it thinks about, it can produce and thought is of that. If there is something real, something which is beyond time, time must never touch it. That is, thought can never touch it. So when you state one of your traditions, one of your beliefs - your belief in reincarnation, which is karma, past life, future life, and all the rest of it, if you really believe in reincarnation - it means that you must behave now. You must be righteous now, not tomorrow. You must have rectitude now not next life, which means that you have to pay tremendous attention to what you are doing now. Because if you don't, and yet you believe in that, you are going to pay for it. And it is just a comforting idea - this everlasting talking about what will happen in next life - is there something permanent?' Will I continue in next reincarnation? So you are not religious, you are just verbalizing in order to have some comfort, because you don't know how to meet death. See all the deceptions, all the hypocrisies you live through because of fear. See the falseness of all your ways, which is time that says "I will believe in next life, I will be good, I will cultivate virtue, I will be less brutal, less violent." All that involves time. You are frightened of this thing called death, the ending of the things that you have called living - the living which is your anxiety, your fears, your furniture, your petty little things that you have collected as the Hindu, the Sikh, the Muslim, the Christian. That is what you have collected, words, words, because in that you seek shelter and comfort. You do not know how to face this enormous, thing called death, which is the ending of the things known - not something unknown, because one is never frightened of the unknown. You don't know what the unknown is. What you are really frightened of is the ending of the known. Do look at it, please. It is your life, not the speaker's - your customs, your habits, the traditions, the accumulation of your memories, the so-called love of the family. You really do not love the family, you do not love your children.. If you did love them with your heart and with your brain, then you would have a different kind of education, you would not offer them what you are offering now. What are you offering for the young generation, what have you to offer them, have you ever considered what you, the older generation, have to offer the younger? Your beliefs? And they watch how hypocritical you are. Your office, going day after day, routine - is that what you are offering to the younger generation? Business, politics, army, your social morality which is utterly immoral, is that what you are offering to them? And any intelligent boy, any student watching all this says "I won't touch it". You understand, Sir? So what you are frightened of is the ending of your memories -words, the word "God", the word "Atman", words like reality, of which you know absolutely nothing, because you merely repeat what somebody has written in some book, and you think that book is sacred because people have said it is sacred. But if you say "I will never say a word which I do not know, I will never repeat something which I have not lived", it means the ending of everything that you know - death is that - the ending. When you end, there can be a new thing. When there is a continuity of time as the "me", as "my habits, my agonies, my despairs", which I call living and want that to continue, then there is fear of death. But I know if the mind is aware that it can end the anxiety - not how, there is no "how", then you will know what it means to die every day, so that every day is a new day. The mind then is completely fresh. So love has no time. It is not to be cultivated; pleasure can be, and that is what you are doing, and the ending of pleasure is your fear. And, therefore, your highest form of pleasure is not only sexual but also the highest is to imagine that there is something, God, to which you are devoted. Do you understand? So to find out the beauty of love and death, you have to die every day to every memory that you have. Try it, do it, die to the memory of your pleasure. Take one pleasure that you have had, drop it instantly. That is what death is going to do. You are not going to argue with death. You cannot say "But leave me some few remembrances, Please". So you can die every day. You will know what the beauty of that thing is, because out of that ending there is a newness, totally, entirely different. But you cannot possibly come upon it unless you know what it means to live without a breath of effort. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 4 4TH PUBLIC TALK NEW DELHI 20TH DECEMBER 1970 We are going to talk over together not merely about religion and the religious mind, but also about reality, meditation, and the quality of the mind that can perceive what is true. The difficulty that is going to take place is that each one of us is going to translate according to his peculiar conditioning, to his particular culture, anything that is being said. To find out, one must discard totally everything that man has put together intellectually, emotionally, and be completely and totally free of all that. One must totally negate all that man has put together in his desire to find reality, and that is going to be our difficulty. First of all, what is religion? What is the quality of the mind that is asking this question? Religion has played an extremely important part in our lives. Probably it is the foundation of our lives, and without really enquiring into the structure and the nature of a religious mind, merely bringing about a social outward revolution will have very little meaning. You see, to understand the quality of a mind that is religious, one has to first of all enquire into this whole problem of search, seeking, what is implied in search, what is implied in that word, what is the significance that is in the word? Why do we seek at all, and what is it that we are trying to find? In seeking, there is the seeker and the thing he searches after. There is the entity that is seeking, looking, observing, finding out, and the thing he is going to find out. In that there is duality, the "me" that is seeking, wanting to find out, and if he can find out, what is it he is going to find? He will find, in his search, according to his conditioning. If you are a Christian, you are going to find what your culture has taught you, the propaganda of your culture; if you are a Hindu what your Hindu culture has taught you, and so on. So according to your culture, according to your conditioning, according to your knowledge, you are going to find that which you call truth, happiness what you will. So the past is going to seek something in the future, and the past is going to dictate what it will find in the future. Therefore, it will not be truth at all. It will be something according to the past, which is knowledge, experience and memory. So a mind that would perceive what truth is must be free of the past, of its conditioning. That is, if you are a Hindu you must be totally free from all conceptual conditioning or from all your tradition. Otherwise you are going to find what your tradition has dictated, what your tradition has told you to find. So a mind that would perceive what truth is must be free of all its conditioning, of any particular culture, which means, free of any belief. Right? For belief is based on the desire for comfort, for security, or on fear. You don't believe that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. You know it will rise. It is only the mind that is uncertain, confused, seeking security, comfort, that believes. So one must be totally free of all belief, which is, all conclusions, all ideals. As you are listening, observing this fact, that a mind that is clouded by a belief, which is based on the desire for comfort, security, which is the outcome of fear, such a mind cannot possibly see what truth is, though it may thirst for it. Do you see the truth of it? If you see the truth of it, then it is finished, your mind is then free to observe. Are you, when you are listening, observing your own belief, your own conclusion? If you would perceive clearly, a mind must be totally free of belief, of your God or my God. As you listen, are you free of it? Or you are so heavily conditioned that without belief you feel lost and therefore frightened and, therefore, attached to your beliefs? Such a mind is obviously an irreligious mind. A mind that is seeking will never find the truth, and all your conditioning is to seek. So can the mind observe the truth that search implies a dualistic conflict and a mind in conflict is always distorted, and therefore it cannot possibly see? And obviously, a mind caught in rituals is not a religious mind at all. It is after stimuli, sensation, every form of excitement. So can the mind which is really enquiring seriously, passionate to find out, can it put aside totally all rituals, all beliefs, the whole movement of seeking, because we have explained how these things prevent perception? So are you listening, free of all this division? You are no longer a Hindu at all, are you? I am afraid you are, for the simple reason that you are not serious. You accept life as it is and you don't find the danger of this living, the misery, the confusion, the agony, and so you act mechanically. If you are serious - and you must be serious - life demands it, life is a battle, a misery, a confusion, and if there is to be a different kind of world, one must be very, very serious, and in our so-called search we get caught by so-called gurus. They offer systems, methods, how to reach enlightenment, how to reach something which they call God or whatever it is. Now, when you have a system, a method, a practice, doesn't it imply that there is a fixed end? Do these things and you will achieve that. The end is already known and fixed. So there are many, many systems to reach enlightenment, truth, as though truth or whatever you might like to call that, is a fixed state. Once you have achieved, all the troubles are over, and therefore practise, do this and you will get that. Are you following all this? First of all, will a system lead you to reality? Think it out logically first. System implies a method, a practice, a process. Through a process you will come there. Process implies time. A process implies a mechanical cultivation of habit and therefore constant conflict with "what is" and what should be. Process implies distorting the mind, not understanding the whole structure and the nature of the mind, which is thought. Right? That is, we think through a process, through time, gradually we will arrive at something that is already there, fixed. Now, is truth something that is permanent, that is there for you to capture, or is it something that is living, therefore, without a path, therefore demanding a constant observation, perception of everything that is happening inwardly, which is non-mechanical? You know, there are many roads to the station, and the station is a permanently fixed thing un- less, of course, there is an earthquake or a bomb or something. It is there and the many systems offer a way to get to the station, and people are so gullible, so greedy, that they want the thing which they call truth without enquiring deeply whether there is a static thing as truth. The religious mind is free from all practice, from all systems, from all organized thought. One day a man was walking along the street and instead of looking at the beautiful sky he was watching the pavement as he went along. Then he saw in the distance something very brilliant. He went rapidly towards it, picked it up and looked at this extraordinary thing, and he was in a state of beatitude, because it was extraordinarily beautiful. So he looked at it and put it in his pocket. Behind were two people, also walking. One of them says to the other "What was it that he picked up? Did you see his expression, what an ecstasy he was in by the very act of looking at it?" And the other - who happened to be the devil - said, "What he picked up was truth." And the friend said "That is a very bad business for you that he has found it". He said "Not at all. I am going to help him to organize it." And that is what we have done - we have the systems, the methods, the practices of the gurus. And so a mind that is enquiring into the nature of truth must be free totally from all organized pursuit, all organized practice, all organized enquiry. Then there is the question - a religious mind must find out what beauty is, because if there is no beauty, there is no love. And what is beauty? When you perceive what beauty is, then you will know what love is, and the religious mind has this quality of beauty and love. Otherwise it is not a religious mind at all. So what is beauty? You know most religions have denied beauty. The monks, the sannyasis are afraid of beauty. Beauty is associated with sensual desire, and of course if you are seeking reality, God, you must deny all sense of desire, all sense of perception of the beautiful. Therefore you take a vow of various kinds, and when you take a vow, what happens to you? You are everlastingly, inwardly in conflict. Therefore your mind is distorted, neurotic, incapable of perceiving what is true. So what is beauty? Do ask this question, be passionate to find out, do not sit there just waiting to be told. What is beauty? Is it something in the architecture, in the building, something that is in the museum, something in a book, in the poem, something carved by the hand or by the mind? And does beauty demand expression? Must it be put into words, into a stone, into a building? Or is it something entirely different? And to find that out, to find out what beauty is, and therefore what love is, there must be the understanding of the self, the understanding of oneself, the knowing of oneself, not according to any pattern, not according to any system, but just learning about oneself as one actually is. Do you see it? Wait, let me explain. One thinks there is a permanent self about which one is going to learn. Right? That is an assumption. Is there a permanent self at all about which you are going to learn, or is the self, the "me" a living thing, constantly changing, constantly moving? To enquire into it is something quite different from learning about something which is there as a living thing. So there must be the understanding of oneself, not according to any system, not according to any philosopher or any analyst, but watching oneself, because where there is this self, there is division from the other self. Right? And where there is division, there must be conflict, and where there is conflict, there is no beauty, and therefore no love. So a mind that is enquiring into this question of what is a religious mind must be aware, must know the extraordinary state of what beauty is, and it can only see what beauty is when there is total abandonment of the "me", and therefore in that abandonment there is intensity, there is passion, otherwise love does not exist at all. Love is not pleasure, desire, lust. It is not merely associated with sex. And a religious mind is a mind that knows the movement of virtue and discipline. We are going to enquire into this whole problem of discipline. You know the word "discipline" means to learn. Please listen to this. If you can listen completely, then you will see the truth of it, and you will see that out of that you have the most extraordinary perception of reality, which does not mean that the speaker is hypnotizing you. The word "discipline" itself means "learn" and not conform, imitate, obey, but to learn; and you cannot possibly learn if you are accumulating. Accumulation as knowledge is necessary, otherwise you could not possibly go home, you could not do anything. Knowledge is necessary, that is, you acquire through learning a language, a technique; that is necessary if you would be an engineer, a scientist, what you will. That is, one learns Italian or French and there is the accumulation of words, knowledge and speech. That is learning to acquire, and the acquiring is the past which is knowledge. Knowledge is always the past and the knowledge which is the past acts when necessary. Now there is another kind of learning altogether, which is not acquiring. In learning to observe, there is no acquisition at all; that is, to learn what order is, there should be no accumulation of knowledge, of what order should be, or what order should be according to your particular design. So you are learning about order, not what order should be or a design according to your particular prophet or saint but what order is. Now, how are you going to learn about what order is? Please listen to this. You live in disorder, that's all you know. You live in contradiction, you live in confusion, you live in this constant battle. This is disorder. Now in observing disorder, in learning all about disorder, there is order, and that is discipline. You get it? You have to observe what disorder is, not to bring order out of disorder, but just to observe what disorder is, negating all positive action, but watching disorder which is what we consider the positive. So what is disorder? Observe it, observe it within oneself, how disorderly you are, contradictory, pruning this and that, conforming, measuring, comparing, and therefore never free at all. You are confused about everything inwardly, because you no longer trust your guru, you won't ever trust your guru any more, no book, no priest. That means no authority, and when you reject authority altogether, except the authority of the law, when you reject all sense of inward spiritual authority altogether, because the moment you obey, there is no freedom, and a mind must be totally free to enquire. When such a mind rejects authority, it faces its own loneliness, its own despair, its own confusion. This is the disorder in us. Now, what does a mind which is learning about confusion see? When one is confused, one wants to act, doesn't one? When you are confused, you don't know what to do, and you want to do something. You don't look at that, you don't observe it, you don't study it, you don't learn about it, but you want to "do something about", therefore, you get more and more confused. But you have to watch it, not escape from it. Why is there confusion? That is, a mind that does not know what to do - which direction to go, whether to become a communist, socialist, an activist, contemplative, or withdraw altogether from this ugly, beastly world - is confused. Why is there confusion? There is confusion because there is conformity. Conformity implies measurement, measuring myself - what I am with what I should be. Please do follow this. Once you see this, really see the truth of this, confusion is finished. There is confusion, because the mind, through education, through all kinds of circumstances, stresses, strains, through various forms of compulsions and so on, is always measuring itself, what it is with what it should be, the ideal. And that is one reason for this confusion: comparing, conforming, obeying. Now, why do you conform, why do you measure, why do you obey? You conform because from childhood you have been taught to compare yourselves with another. Watch it, Sir, watch it in yourself, comparing - which means what you are is not important, what you should be is important. Right? So there is a contradiction, the denial of "what is", but the acceptance of what should be, the hero, the image that you have projected from what you are. Now if you do not compare at all, you know what you are, and what you are then is totally different from what, through comparison, you thought you were. You get it? That is, I compare myself with you -you are very clever, bright, intelligent, awake, and comparing with you, I say to myself "I am dull". But if there is no comparison at all, am I dull? I am what I am. I don't call it dull. Then I can do, act, change, go beyond "what is", but if I compare myself with another, I cannot go beyond. You understand? And why do we obey at all? I don't know if you have ever gone into this problem why you obey anybody. You know the word "obey", its root is "to hear". When you hear over and over and over again that you are a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Christian, a communist, you know what it does? It conditions your mind, doesn't it? You repeat and you instinctly follow, obey. You have been told in this country -and now it is unfortunately spreading in other countries - that you need a guru. That is your tradition, repeated over and over again and you follow what it says. And look what you have done to yourself, what has been done to the mind. A mind that obeys, that conforms, that compares is not a religious mind at all. See the logic of it, see the reason of it first. You see, Sir, we have to learn what virtue is, which is order. Virtue is order. Virtue is order, not the thing which you practise. You cannot practise humility. When you understand vanity, humility is naturally there. And we have also to go into the question of meditation. What is the meditation of a religious mind? We said the religious mind is free of all belief. It has completely set aside all systems, all authority, all practice. It is in a state of mind that is free of all this which is all part of meditation. Question: Could we establish a way of understanding each other, a common understanding? Krishnamurti: You know what is the meaning of that word, not according to the dictionary, what it means "to understand?" When do you understand anything? Is it an intellectual process? Is it an emotional enthusiasm? You understand only when your mind is attentive and completely silent. If I am chattering when you are talking, how can I understand what you are talking about? If I am comparing what you are saying with what I have already read or known or experienced, how can there be communication? I must listen to you with attention, care, with affection. And out of that care, out of that affection, out of that silence there is understanding, not only verbal understanding but non-verbal. That is the common foundation. And to go into this question of what meditation is, it cannot possibly be done in a few minutes, because this is really an immensely complicated subject, about which we are going to learn, not be instructed by the speaker how to meditate. The moment you put the `how" you are wrong. Never, if I may most respectfully suggest, never ask of anybody the "how". They are all only too eager to give you a method, but if you see the mischief of the "how", that very perception is enough. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 5 5TH PUBLIC TALK NEW DELHI 24TH DECEMBER 1970 ONE thing is fairly obvious, and that is, we must totally change the way we are living. There must be a deep radical revolution in our lives, a revolution not merely superficial, economic or social, an upsetting of the establishment to put in its place a new one, but we have to be concerned with how the human mind which is so conditioned can undergo a radical transformation, how it can live, act and function at a totally different dimension? Can there be a mutation in the very brain cells themselves? That is one problem and I think that is the major problem, because we are responding to every challenge with the old brain, the old brain which is traditional, habitual, mechanical, which has been conditioned for millennia. Life is a constant challenge to which we are responding with the old brain. The response is mechanical, egoistic, a self-centred response and when we are asking the question whether these brain cells themselves can undergo a radical transformation, a mutation, we have to enquire into the quality of the mind that can perceive without any kind of effort, without any suppression, imitation, conformity. Now as we said, we are sharing the problem together. There is no authority to tell you what to do, no new system of meditation. When you have a system of meditation, it is no longer meditation. It is just a mechanical repetition, and that is utterly futile and has no meaning whatsoever. Most people, especially in Asia, including this country, have a concept of what meditation is. They have been told how to meditate, what to do, and all the rest of it. You see, the speaker has not read any books about all this, he has no system; he had to find it out for himself, he had to wipe away everything that he had been told. Nothing must be repeated which he has not himself perceived, which he himself has not lived, never must he repeat in life anything another has said with regard to meditation and with regard to any spiritual matters, never to repeat what he has heard or been told. And if you are going to do the same thing, that is never repeat what you yourself have not perceived, never assert or formulate what others have said about it, then we can communicate together, share together this problem. To find out what truth is, the mind must be totally free of all imitation, conformity, fear, and then only can it see, perceive "what is". So to understand what meditation is, we must find out what it is not. Because by negating that which is not, that which is false, you find out for yourself what is true. But if you merely accept what others have said - it does not matter who it is, including the speaker - then you are merely conforming, and you are conforming, because you hope through conformity, through obedience, through certain practices, you will experience some fantastic thing, have some vision, great powers, and so on. But if you are serious then we can share together our examination, our investigation to come upon a state of mind, a quality of mind that is utterly free, a mind that is non-mechanical, non-repetitive, a mind that is completely quiet without any form of suppression, without any effort, without any practice. To find out what is not meditation, first, there must be an understanding or learning about the self, the "me; the "me" with all its memories, anxieties, fears, ambitions, with its joys, sexual pleasures, the "me" that separates itself from the "you", and the "you" with your "me" that separates itself from another. It must be an understanding of oneself, not according to anybody, not according to any philosopher, any psychologist. And you cannot possibly understand yourself if there is any form of condemnation, any form of justification. To learn about yourself, to see yourself as you are, not as you would like to be, there must be perception. It is absolutely necessary that one understands oneself, because without that understanding of oneself there is no foundation for enquiry. The understanding of yourself is not the understanding of the self which is permanent, the so-called soul, Atman and the superself. The understanding of yourself means the understanding of your daily life, the way you talk, the motives, the ambitions, the fears, the anxiety, desire for power, position, the various conflicts. That is the "you". You have to understand that because out of that understanding comes righteous action, and without that righteous action, without that true foundation, meditation becomes a self-hypnosis. That is absolutely necessary, not because the speaker says so, but you can see logically why it is necessary that you understand yourself, because if there is any form of contradiction in yourself, any form of fear, any quality of ambition, competitiveness, envy, how can such a mind discover or come upon something that is not of itself? You see, reason, logic tells you that you must understand yourself first and not escape from yourself. You must know yourself, and therein lies one of our difficulties, which is, when one is learning about oneself, observing one's thoughts, not controlling them, not suppressing them, the question arises as to who is the observer? If we are going into this question of meditation and the question of how to live without sorrow, without conflict, how to live a life that is abundant, rich, that has meaning in itself, you have to understand this question, which is : who is the observer that is learning? I am watching myself - I am watching my speech, the way I talk, my gestures, my brutality, my violence, my kindliness -this whole battle of existence, I am watching. Now is the watcher different from the thing he is watching? That is, the watcher who says, "I am learning about myself", is he different, an outsider, watching what is happening? You understand the question? Is the watcher different from the thing he watches, or are they both the same? Is the watcher, the censor, the person who says, "I am watching myself", is that entity different from the thing he watches, or is the observer the observed? You will find, as you watch, the observer is the observed, the two are not separate; therefore, there is no sense of contradiction; therefore there is no sense of suppression, control. Both are one. Again this is reasonable, logical. You do not have to accept this from anybody, you can see this for yourself. There is no higher self watching the lower self. When you examine this whole observation in which there is learning, you will find the observer is the observed. The man who is angry is anger itself, the entity that says there is a soul, there is Atman, there is a superself, is part of thought. So what is important is to learn about oneself without the censor. When you, the censor says, "Do this, don't do that, this is wrong, that is not wrong", then you are watching. It is your previous conditioning, your tradition, your previous memory interfering with observation. Do you see this simple fact? And you have to learn about yourself; otherwise you have no basis whatsoever for clear perception. Then out of this arises the question of discipline. From what people have said, it is asserted that you must discipline yourself, control yourself, hold yourself. You know that is what we are trained to do from childhood, from the books that you read and so on that you must control, discipline, shape yourself according to a pattern. Now "discipline" means to learn, the word itself means to learn not to conform, not to obey. The very act of learning is discipline. If I am to learn about myself without the observer, then that very observation brings its own order. After all, order is necessary and that has been translated into discipline. So order is necessary and this order cannot be brought about by any form of compulsion, by following a pattern. Order can only come about when you have observed what is disorder. That is, you live in disorder, your life is in disorder, your life is in contradiction, messy, confused. Now, by learning about yourself you bring about order. Therefore you have to find for yourself how to observe yourself, observe without the observer, the observer being the entity that condemns, that judges, that evaluates, that denies; he is the censor which is the past. So you have to observe without the past. That is, when you look at a rose, you have to look at it without the image that you have about it, or the word that you have which is "the rose". That prevents you from looking at the rose. Can you observe without the word? Then, what is meditation? What is the quality of the mind that is in a state of meditation? We are going to share together; that does not mean we are going to meditate together, which is again sheer nonsense. First of all, you have to understand this question. just listen, without judging, agreeing or disagreeing, without wishing to understand what is being said, just give your attention completely to what is said. If you give your attention completely to what is going to be said, that very state of attention is meditation. You understand? We will go into it. Just listen. The speaker is not mesmerizing you, the speaker is not telling you what to do, the speaker is trying to point out certain facts, not according to his opinion, his judgement, facts which you and the speaker can discover, not at some future date, hut now, by using your reason, logic, You know it is one of the most difficult things to put into words, because you see one has to understand the nature and the structure of thought. That is part of meditation. Understand it, because if you don't understand what thought is, then you are constantly in conflict with thought. I really do not know where to begin this whole business, because it is a very complex thing which we are going to look into together. You see, whether you understand or not what the speaker is going to say, just listen. The first step is the last step. The first step is the step of clear perception, and that act of clear perception is the last act. When you see danger, a serpent, that very perception is the complete action. Do you follow? Now we said the first step is the last step. The first step is to perceive, perceive what you are thinking, perceive your ambition, perceive your anxiety, your loneliness, your despair, this extraordinary sense of sorrow, perceive it, without any condemnation, justification, without wishing it to be different. Just to perceive it, as it is. When you perceive it as it is, then there is a totally different kind of action taking place, and that action is the final action. Right? That is, when you perceive something as being false or as being true, that perception is the final action, which is the final step. Right? Now listen to it. I perceive the falseness of following somebody else, somebody else's instruction - Krishna, Buddha, Christ, it does not matter who it is. I see there is the perception or the truth that following somebody is utterly false. Right? Because your reason, your logic and everything points out how absurd it is to follow somebody. Now that perception is the final step, and when you have perceived, you leave it, forget it, because the next minute you have to perceive anew, which is again the final step. If you do not drop what you have learnt, what you have perceived, then there is a continuity of the movement of thought; and the movement and continuity of thought is time. And when the mind is caught in the movement of time, it is in bondage. So that is one of the major problems, whether the mind can be free of the past, the past regrets, the past pleasures, the memories, remembrances, incidents and experiences, all the things that one has built up, the past, which is also the "me". The "me" is the past. Now, thought gives continuity to something which has been perceived clearly, and not being able to put it aside gives it a continuity which becomes the means of perpetuating thought. You had a happy incident yesterday. You don't forget it, you do not drop it, you take it over with you, you think about it. The very thinking about something which is of the past gives continuity to the past. Therefore there is no ending to the past. You are following all this? But if you perceive that you had a most extraordinary, happy incident yesterday, see it, perceive it, and completely end it, do not carry it over, then there is no continuity as the past which thought has built. Therefore every step is the last step. Do you get it? So we have to go into this question whether thought which is giving a continuity to memory as memory - and memory is the past - whether thought can ever come to an end. Because that is part of meditation. It is part of a total mutation of the brain cells themselves, because if there is a continuity of the movement of thought, it is the repetition of the old, because thought is memory, thought is the response of memory, thought is experience, thought is knowledge. So our question is: thought is always perpetuating itself through experience, through the constant repetition of certain memories. Knowledge is always in the past, and when you act according to knowledge, you are giving continuity to thought, but you must have knowledge to act technologically. See the difficulty. If you did not use thought, you could not go home, you could not work in an office. You must have knowledge, but also see the importance, the danger of a mind that is caught in the perpetual movement of thought, and therefore never seeing anything new. Thought is always old, thought is always conditioned, never free, because it is acting according to the past. So the question is, how can this movement of thought which at one level is absolutely necessary to function logically, sanely, healthily, how can this movement of thought come to an end, for a man to perceive something totally new, to live totally differently? The traditional approach to this question is control it, hold it, or learn to concentrate. Right? Which again is absurd because who is the controller? Is not the controller part of the thought, part of the knowledge which says you must control? That is, you have been taught to control. So there is a way of observing thought without any control, without giving it a continuity, but observing so that it ends. You have understood my question? Because if thought continues, the mind is never quiet, and it is only when the mind is completely quiet, that there is the possibility of perception. See the logic of it, that is, if my mind is chattering, comparing, judging, saying this is right, this is wrong, I am not listening to you. To listen to you, to understand what you are saying, I must give my attention, and to give one's attention completely, that attention itself is silence. Right? One sees very clearly that silence is completely necessary, not only at the superficial level, but at the most deep level, at the very root of our being there must be complete silence. How is this to happen? It cannot possibly happen if there is any form of control, because then there is conflict, because then there is the man who says, "I must control", and there is the thing to be controlled. In that there is division, in that division there is conflict. Therefore, is it possible for the mind to be completely empty and quiet, not continuously but each second? That is the first perception, that the mind must be completely quiet, the perception, the truth of it and the seeing of the truth of it is the first and last step, and then that perception must be ended; otherwise you carry it over. Therefore the mind must observe, must be aware choicelessly of every perception and there must be the ending of that perception instantly, seeing and ending. You are following all this? So the mind is not living with thought which is the response of the past and giving to that thought a continuity into the future which may be the next minute, the next second. And thought is the response of memory which is the very structure of the brain cells themselves. If you have observed yourself, you will see that in the brain cells themselves is the material of memory, and that memory responds, which is thought. To bring about a total mutation in the quality of the cell itself, there must be an ending of every perception, understanding, seeing, acting and moving away from it, so that the mind is always perceiving and dying, perceiving the falsity of the truth and ending it and moving on without carrying the memory. Right? You know all this demands tremendous perception, tremendous vitality, energy. To go into this step by step as we have been doing, not missing a thing, requires tremendous energy. Now let us find how this energy comes into being. You understand my question: We need energy. For you to come here and sit here for a whole hour and listen, demands energy. To do anything requires energy, and this energy can be dissipated, used in all kinds of ways. So the question is, can this ordinary everyday energy - going to the office, quarrelling, nagging, fighting, sexual - can this energy be heightened, can this energy be completely held without any form of distortion? You see, our energy is dissipated in conflict, conflict between two nations, conflict between two opinions, conflict between the husband and the wife and the children, conflict between trying to see God and suppressing all your instincts. That is also conflict, that is distortion. How does one have this complete energy without distortion? Now let us find out, by investigating what is distraction, dissipation of energy. We said conflict in every form is a dissipation of energy - conflict between the observer and the observed, between the ideal and the fact, between the "what is" and `what should be'. Conforming to what has been and trying to carry out what has been in the present or in the future, that is part of conflict. So that is a distortion of energy, every form of conflict dissipates energy. Right? And the religious people throughout the world, the monks; the sannyasis, the yogis, and the rest of them, they all say "you must control, you must be celibate, you must take a vow of poverty." What does that imply? - Conflict, more and more conflict, suppression, conformity, and you think through conformity, suppression, every form of battle with yourself or with another politically, religiously or theoretically, you will have some kind of tremendous experience. So when you see the truth, when you perceive the truth that every form of conflict is a distortion, that very perception is the ending of conflict at that moment; then forget it, begin again. Do not say "I have seen it once and I am going to hold on." You follow? That means you give continuity to thought, which is memory - of what you perceived a few minutes ago - and so strengthen the brain cells to carry on with this memory of the past and therefore there is no radical change in the structure of the memory, in the structure of the brain cells. And there is this question of seeking experience. They all say you must experience something fantastic, something transcendental. Now first of all, why do you want to experience something beyond the ordinary? Why do you want to experience something extraordinary? Because for a very simple reason you are tired of your daily experiences, you are bored: the daily experience of sex or no sex, the daily experience of anger and so on. You are bored with all that, and you say, "By jove, there must be some other kind of experience." Now that very word "experience" means "to go through", finish with it, not carry it over. Right? And who is it that is seeking experience - the entity that says, "I am tired of all these superficial things and I want something more?" That entity is part of the desire to have more and that entity projects what it wants. You being a Hindu, a Muslim or a Christian, or God knows what else, you being conditioned, you want to experience Christ or Buddha or Krishna or whatever it is; and you will, because what you are going to experience, is projected from your past, because you are conditioned as a Hindu. So your nirvana, your heaven, your experience, your future is according to your ugly little past. And a mind that seeks experience, that wants more has not understood totally "what is", which is the "me" that is craving for all this. A mind that seeks experience is bound to time, is bound to sorrow; for thought is time, for time is sorrow. Now can the mind be totally awake without any question of challenge, experience? Because, most of us need to be challenged, otherwise we will go to sleep. Right? If you are not challenged every day, questioned, criticized, you will naturally go off to sleep. So can the mind keep so totally awake that it needs no experience at all? You follow? And that can only happen when the mind has understood the whole structure and the nature of thought. There are so many things to talk about in this. The traditional people say, "Sit straight, breathe this way and that way, stand on your head for twenty minutes." What does it all mean? You can sit in the right posture, with your back straight, breathing correctly - pranayama and all the rest of it - for the next ten thousand years, and you will be nowhere near perceiving what truth is, because you have not understood yourself at all, the way you think, the way you live, you have not ended your sorrow; and yet you want to find enlightenment. So one has to drop all that. You know there are powers, siddhis, as they are called, that seem to entice people. If you can levitate, if you can read thought, if you can do all kinds of twists and turns with your body, it seems to fascinate people, because that way you get some power and prestige. Now all these powers are like candles in the sun. They are like candlelight when the brilliant sun is shining. Therefore, they are utterly valueless. They have a therapeutic physical value, nothing else. How does a mind without following any system, without following any compulsion, without any comparison, how can a mind which has been so long conditioned, be completely empty of the past? You understand my question? To empty completely so that it sees clearly, and what it is seeing clearly end it, so that it is always renewing itself in emptiness, that is, renewing itself in innocence. Now the word "innocence" means an innocent mind, means a mind that can never be hurt. The word "innocence" comes from a Latin word which means incapable of being hurt, and most of us are hurt, hurt with all the memories which we have accumulated round those hurts, our remorses, our longings, our loneliness. Our fears are part of this sense of being hurt. From childhood we are hurt consciously or unconsciously. How to empty all that hurt, not taking time, you understand, not saying "Gradually I will get rid of this hurt?" When you do that, you will never end it, you are dead by the end of it. So the question is whether the mind can empty itself completely, not only at the superficial level, but also at the very depth of its being, at its very roots. Because otherwise one lives in a prison, one lives in the prison of cause and effect in this world of change. So you must ask this question, put this question to yourself, whether your mind can be empty of all its past and yet retain the technological knowledge, your engineering knowledge, your linguistic knowledge, the memory of all that, and yet function from a mind that is completely empty. The emptying of that mind comes about naturally, sweetly without bidding, when you understand yourself, when you understand what you are. What you are is the memory, bundle of memories, experiences, thoughts. When you understand that, look at it, observe it; and when you observe it, see in that observation that there is no duality between the observer and the observed; then when you see that, you will see that your mind can be completely empty, attentive, and in that attention you can act wholly, without any fragmentation. All that is part of meditation - not just sitting in a corner for five minutes a day and going off to some idiotic conflict with yourself, not twisting your head or your breathing - these are all too infantile. They are exactly like candlelight in the sun. And the next question is whether you understand totally the whole fragmentation of yourself - not integration - understand how this fragmentation and its contradiction arise, not how to bring it together. You cannot do that. To bring it together implies a duality - the one who is bringing it, bringing about integration and all that. Then when you really, deeply, profoundly understand about yourself, learn about yourself, then you can understand the meaning of time, the time that binds, holds, that brings sorrow. If you have gone that far, and that means you have not gone far in the distance, far verbally, not measurably far, if you have gone that far, not in height or depth, if you have gone to that height of understanding, with that fullness, then you will find out for yourself a dimension which has no description, which has no word, which is not something to be bought through sacrifice, which is not in any book, which no guru can ever experience. He wants to teach you about it, how to reach it, therefore, when he says, "I have experienced that and I know what that is", he has not experienced it, he does not know what it is. The man who says he knows does not know. So a mind must be free of the word, the image, the past, and that is the first step and the last step, KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 6 1ST PUBLIC TALK MADRAS 6TH JANUARY 1971 FIRST of all, I would like to say how important it is to find out for oneself what learning is. It is quite an art, because most of us have our own opinions, conclusions, points of view, dogmatic beliefs and assertions; we have our own peculiar little experiences, our knowledge which will obviously prevent us from actually listening to each other, because all these opinions and judgements, all this information will crowd in and hinder the act of listening. Can one listen without any conclusion, without any comparison and judgement, just listen, as you would listen to music, to something which you really feel that you love? Then you not only listen with your mind, your intellect, but also you listen with your heart, listen with care, objectively, sanely, listen with attention to find out. You know what you think, you have your own experiences, your own conclusion, your own knowledge. For the moment at least put them aside. Otherwise we cannot investigate, learn together; and we are going to learn together, because, after all, the word "communication" means to have something in common with which we can co-operate, think over together, share together, create together, understand together, not the speaker explaining and you merely listening. Together we must understand this whole question of what truth is, what living is, this complex problem of daily activity, of what is actually going on, both outwardly in the world and inwardly. To investigate and learn together implies that there is no authority. When you perceive what actually is, then you can do something about it, but if you observe "what is" with a series of conclusions, a series of opinions, judgements, formula, you will never understand "what is". If you observe the world as a Hindu or as a Muslim or as a Christian, then obviously you cannot see clearly; and we have to see together, very clearly, objectively, sanely. So, if one can observe very clearly - which in itself is a form of discipline - what is happening inwardly and what is happening outwardly, one can see that this is a unitary movement, not a separate movement. What is actually happening outwardly, not only in this country, but all over the world? This is a simple, obvious fact: sociologically, economically, culturally, there is disintegration. Politicians have not been able to solve any problem. On the contrary, they are increasing them. Countries are divided as affluent societies and the so-called undeveloped countries. There is poverty, war, conflict of every kind. There is no morality. That is gone too. All the religious organizations with their beliefs, with their rituals, with their dogmas, are really separating people. If you are a Hindu and I am a Muslim we must be against each other. We may tolerate each other for a few days outwardly, but basically, inwardly, we are against each other. So while there is division, there must be conflict, not only outwardly but inwardly. So our problem is, can all this be radically changed? Can there be an inward and therefore an outward, psychological revolution? We cannot possibly go on with our old habits, with our old traditions, with our old ways of thinking. Our very structure of thought must change, our very brain cells themselves must undergo a transformation to bring about order, not only within ourselves but inwardly. The mind has been put together through time. The brain cells which have evolved through millennia, through centuries upon centuries, put together, have acquired tremendous knowledge, experience, have collected a great deal of scientific, objective knowledge. These brain cells which are the result of time have produced this monstrous world, this world of war, injustice, poverty, the appalling misery that is going on in the world, the division of people, racially, culturally, religiously: and all this has been produced by the intellect, by thought; and any reconstruction by thought is still within the same field. First of all, thought has produced this division among people for economic, social and cultural reasons, both linguistically and ideologically. Do follow this. If you observe, you will see for yourself very clearly that the intellect, with all its cunning reason, both objective and non-objective, that thought has brought about this condition, this state, both inwardly and outwardly. You are conditioned by the past, and you think along these lines - and that very same thought tries to find a way out of this confusion; and that confusion has been created by thought. This is not what I say, what the speaker says, it is what you have discovered for yourselves. Are you listening with passion to find out? We have got to change. We cannot go on as we are, lazily, satisfied with little things, accepting certain doctrines as truths, believing in something about which we know absolutely nothing, following somebody, hoping that he will lead us to enlightenment. All this has been produced by thought; and thought is the response of memory. If you had no memory, you could not think. Memory is knowledge, memory is gathered experience, and thought is the response of the past. And we are trying to solve an immense, complex problem of human relationship in terms of the past, which is thought. Do you get this? So the question is how can thought, which has brought about this culture, whether the Hindu, Christian, communist, or what you will - and that thought which is the response of memory, which is knowledge, and that thought which has created such confusion, misery, sorrow in the world - how can thought, the very brain cells which contain the memory, undergo a radical mutation? Knowledge is necessary, otherwise you cannot go home, otherwise you could not write a letter. Scientific knowledge, technological knowledge, is absolutely necessary for us to function. One must have knowledge, which is the accumulation and the product of thought. So there is a contradiction in the very functioning of thought. On the one side it divides, separates, psychologically as well as outwardly, and on the other, thought has gathered extraordinary knowledge, created knowledge. So the question is, can thought, though it must function within the field of knowledge, can that very thought cease to create separation? Basically, fundamentally, that is the problem. Thought is old, because memory is of yesterday. Thought is never free, because it can only function within the field of knowledge. This thought is the response of memory, and that memory is within the very structure of the brain cells. Now is there a perception in which the very seeing is the acting? Have you understood my question? You see, you are not used to investigating, you are not used to observing yourself, you are accustomed to reading what other people say and repeating whether it be Sankara, Buddha, whoever it is. You know it would be marvellous if you never said a word that was not your own discovery. Never say anything that you yourself do not know, which means, you will put away all your gurus, your sacred books, religious books, theories, what the philosophers have said, though of course you will have to keep your scientific, technological books. Never say anything that you do not understand, that you have not discovered yourself. And you will see then the whole activity of the mind undergoes a tremendous change. Now we are secondhand human beings and we are trying to find out a way of living which is really timeless, because thought is time, because time is putting things together - a process - and process implies time. To get from here to there requires time, because you have to cover space. Thought thinks in terms of time, thinks of life as a process - getting from here to there. Now we are enquiring whether there is a way of living in which time does not exist at all. What we are concerned with is change, a revolution, a total mutation of the very structure of the brain cells; otherwise you cannot produce a new culture, a new way of living, a living in a different dimension altogether. So is there an action of perception in which thought does not enter except technologically? Look, one has lived in the same old pattern, in a corner of this vast field of life, in a small corner, and in that corner there is extraordinary division, that very corner creates division, and we are living in that state. One observes this, not through books, not through newspapers, not through what somebody else says. One actually observes this fact and one asks if this can be radically changed. We think of change in terms of time - "I will be different tomorrow." We are caught in the verb "to be" - "I have been" "I am", "I shall be" - caught in the trap of that word "to be". The word "to be" is time. Time does not seem to bring about radical change. "I will be tomorrow what I have been" - modified, slightly different - but it is the same movement of what has been and that is a process in time, and in that there is no mutation, there is no transformation, and how is this mutation to take place from which there will be a different way of living, a different culture, a different creation altogether? That is the question, you understand -to perceive and act, not perception and later on action. I see in myself a great deal of suffering, a great deal of confusion, ambition, anger, brutality, violence. All the things that man has put together are in me, are in you - the sexual pleasures, the ideological pleasures, the fears, the agonies, the competitive drive, aggression - that is what we are. Can that be changed instantly? We think we know a way of bringing about a radical change in that through time - gradually I will evolve, gradually I will get rid of my anger and all the rest of it - that means time. And one sees time does not change at all. It may modify but radically it does not change, because you perceive yourself as you are and you say "I will be that, I should be that". In that interval between what you are - what is - and what should be, is space, is time; and when you are moving from "what is" to what should be, there are other factors coming in and therefore you will never come to what you should be. I am violent and I say to myself, "I must not be violent." The "must not be violent" implies time, and between now and next week I am sowing the seeds of violence. Therefore I have not stopped being violent. Therefore I ask myself, is there a way, is there a perception which is free from time and therefore involves instant action? Is there a perception of violence which will end that violence instantly? I want to see if violence can end instantly and not gradually, because when you say "gradually", it will never end. Do you see that? Therefore, is it possible to perceive with a perception that is itself action? Shall we go on from there? Now what prevents this perception? To perceive - perception as action - as when you see a snake you act instantly. There is no saying, "I will act next week". There is immediate response, because there is danger. Now what prevents the mind, and therefore the brain, from this instant action of perception? What do you think prevents it? Why do you not see that time is a barrier, time does not bring freedom because time as thought is putting things horizontally and vertically together; and that time will not bring about a different perception of life in a different dimension? So what is it that prevents perception? Why do you not see things clearly and act instantly? Why do you not see this division, the psychological division of you as a Parsee, a Hindu, a communist, a socialist, a Muslim? That division creates tremendous conflict - do you see that? How do you see it, verbally, or as an actual fact of danger? Do you see that as long as you are a Hindu, a communist, the very fact must bring about division, and division is conflict. Intellectually, I recognise it, I say "Yes, that is so." And there I stop. But action does not come from it. I do not completely cease to be a Hindu, which means all the tradition, all the conditioning, the culture; that does not cease, because I am intellectually hearing the words without relating the words to perception. Why is there no perception of the sort there is in danger when you perceive and act instantly? Because you say you know what is happening in the world - black against white, communist against capitalist, labour against somebody, the Catholic against the Protestant, though both worship what they call Jesus Christ, and so on. Here too there is division, linguistic, national, cultural. You have your guru and I have my little guru, I have my guru's system, my system to Nirvana, to heaven, and you have yours. So there is division, there is conflict, and out of this conflict there is war, both inwardly and outwardly. A man who is really serious, who wants to find a way of living where there is no conflict at all at the very root of his being, has to find out not merely intellectually, not verbally, but actually find out for himself if there is an action which is not of time. Now I will go into it. Now we begin at the very objective level, whether you can see anything, to see a tree without the image, without the knowledge, without thought coming in between the observer and the observed and saying, "That is a mango tree". Have you ever done it? You have always observed, through an image, haven't you? Now you must see without verbalization. The verbalization is the process of thinking. Can you observe a tree, your neighbour, your wife or your boy or girl friend without the image, can you? You can't, can you? Can you observe your wife, which is a little more difficult than observing a tree? You can observe a tree fairly easily without the image, without the word, without thought. When you observe the tree without the whole mechanism of thought coming into operation, then the space between you and the tree which is time - disappears. This does not mean that you become the tree or you identify yourself with the tree. You see the tree completely, not partially. There is only the tree without the observer. You understand this? You have never done it. Do it, not try to do it, do it. That is, observe a flower, the cloud, the bird, the light on the water, the movement of the breeze among the leaves, just watch it, without any image. Then you will see there is a relationship which has never existed before between what is observed and the observer, because then the observer comes totally to an end. Now observe your wife or your friend without the image. Do it. You have the image of your wife, haven't you? - or the husband or somebody? That image has been built through time. You have lived with her sexually, she has nagged you, you have bullied her -you know all these things that happen in family life. You have built up through years images about her and she about you; and you look at each other through those images, don't you? Now that image separates people, the image of you as a Hindu and a Muslim. That image prevents, divides, and if I have an image about my wife, the image that she has and the one that I have obviously must divide. Now, how is this image to come to an end, the image as a Hindu, as a Muslim, as a communist, as a socialist, the image that one has built about oneself and the image that one has built about another? If that image disappears, then there is a totally different kind of relationship. This is because the image is the past, the image is the memory, the memory is the various markings on the brain cells which have taken place through a number of years -such as the conditioning of the brain cells as a Hindu - and that image remains. Now the question is, can that image come to an end, not through time, not gradually but instantly? To answer that question, one has to go into what the machinery is that builds images. Are you also working, or are you merely learning from the speaker? Don't learn from the speaker, because the speaker has nothing to teach you. He has absolutely nothing to teach you, because he does not accept the teacher-disciple relationship because that breeds authority; and where there is authority there is division - the one who knows and the one who does not know. And the man who says he knows, does not know. So you are not learning from me, from the speaker. You are learning by observing yourself, by watching. Therefore you are free to learn. Therefore freedom is absolutely necessary to learning. So learn from observing; and you are observing yourself, you are observing that you have your own image about another, that you have an image of yourself as a Hindu, as a Buddhist, communist, Christian, Protestant, as a hippy, and so on and on. You see that image in yourself. Now you say to yourself, "I know how that image has come into being, because I have been brought up as a Christian, as a Hindu, as a Muslim. I am born there, I am conditioned, and that image remains and that image divides people." Where there is division there must be conflict, outwardly and inwardly. Then you are learning from your own observation; you are asking yourself, "Can this image come to an end?" When you ask that question, you are also asking the question, "What is the machinery that builds this image?" Now what is the machinery that puts together this image? Just observe it, don't try to translate it and act upon it; just observe what the speaker is saying, listen to it, and observe the action of perception on yourself. You tell me I am a fool. The word with its associations has set in operation memory in the brain cells. The word "fool" has its associations, which is the memory, which is the old brain. The old brain says, "You are another; you call me a fool and I call you another". So the response is the response of the old memory. Now the machinery operates as you observe when the wife or husband nags, when at the moment of nagging there is no attention. When there is attention at the moment of nagging there is no operation of the machine. Do you see this? You call me an idiot. If I am completely aware at that moment, then the machinery has no fuel to act. Right? At the moment of inattention, when there is no attention, then the machinery is in operation. You can see this yourself. At the moment of attention, you can say what you like. The machinery does not function. At the moment when you are completely aware, and you call yourself a Hindu, you see all the significance, all the meaning - division, conflict, battle, separation. That perception takes place only when you are completely attentive. At that moment the machinery of Hinduism, which is the conditioning, comes to an end. Then the next question arises, how can this mind keep so attentive all the time? Is that the question you are asking? You see, at the moment of attention all the conditioning disappears, all the image-building comes to an end; it is only when you are not attentive that the whole thing begins - you are a Hindu, Muslim, Christian, communist. And then the next question is, can this attention be sustained, which means, can this attention continue? Please follow this. Can this attention continue all the time, which means, can this attention endure? That involves time, does it not? You are putting a wrong question, when you say, "Can this attention endure, can I keep this attention all the time, what is the system what is the method to sustain this attention?" The moment you ask, "How is it to continue?", you are inviting time, therefore time is inattention. When you are completely attentive, there is no time, and when there is this attention and you have perceived and acted, it is over. Do not say "I must carry it with me". Do you understand, do you follow this? That is, at the moment of attention you have seen and acted - perception, action - but thought says, "How extraordinary: I wish I could continue that attention all the time, as I see in it a way of acting without all this conflict". And so thought wants to cultivate attention. Any form of cultivation implies time. So attention cannot be cultivated through time. Therefore, perception, action and end there, forget it, begin again, so that the mind, the brain cells, are fresh each time, not burdened with yesterday's perception. Have you got it? So the mind then is always fresh and young and innocent, not carrying all the burdens of yesterday, and the word "innocence" means a mind that can never be hurt. A mind that has no markings of ever being hurt, that is real innocence. And most of us are hurt from childhood, we are beaten, we are crippled, we are tortured, we have scars on the brain, and we are struggling through these scars to find some state of mind in which there is no hurt. An innocent mind is a mind that has never been hurt, that means a mind that never carries the hurt over to the next day. So there is neither forgiveness, nor remembrance. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 7 2ND PUBLIC TALK MADRAS 10TH JANUARY 1971 THIS evening I think we ought to go into many problems, such as the importance for a human being to change himself when the environment, the society, the culture is so corrupt, so disintegrating. One sees the necessity of changing the environment - the environment being the society, the religion, the culture and so on - and what importance that has when the whole social structure, the community, the world about us, when that cannot be changed by an individual, by one human being. What significance has one individual, one human being transforming himself when around him there is so much chaos, so much misery, such confusion, such madness? I think that question is wrong because the human being is the result of the culture in which he lives. He has built the culture, the society, the environment, and in changing himself is changing the environment. He is the world and the world around him is himself. There is no division between himself and the world. I think one must clearly understand, right from the beginning, that there is no division, as between the individual and the community. The word "individual" means an entity who in himself is indivisible. Most human beings are divisible, are fragmented, which is partly the result of society, and the culture in which they live. So I think it is important that we understand this fact that human beings are the result of the environment in which they live. You are born in this country, you are a Hindu or a Muslim, this or that. If you are born abroad in the West, you are a Christian, a Catholic, Protestant, and all the divisions of Catholicism or Protestantism. Now one may logically, intellectually accept this as an idea, as something which appeals to reason, but there it stops, because we seem to be incapable of really putting that fact into action. And we are going, if we can this evening, not only to discuss the conflict in man and therefore in the world, the conflict within himself and in his relationship with the world, the conflict between the various factors of fragmentation - each fragment in opposition to the other fragment of which the human being is made up - but also whether it is possible for the human mind to be totally free from all conflict, because then only is it possible to know what it means to love and also then perhaps we shall comprehend the full meaning of death and what living is. So first it is necessary that we should understand what conflict does to the human mind. Human beings right throughout the world, are in conflict and themselves, with their neighbours, with the world, with the environment of which they are part. And until we understand this problem and find out for ourselves whether there is a possibility of completely ending conflict - totally - we shall never be able to live at peace with ourselves and also with society. It is only a mind that is completely peaceful, not asleep, which does not mesmerize itself into a state of what it considers peace but which actually lives at peace, it is only such a mind that can find what truth is, what it means to live, what it means to die, what is the depth and width of love. We are going first to enquire together why man lives in conflict, why you live in conflict. I do not know if you are aware of it, first within yourself, how you are fragmented, broken up. You are a businessman and house-holder. You are an artist and at the same time as a human being you are greedy, envious, seeking power, prestige, fame. You are a scientist and an ordinary, rather shoddy little human being. As human beings we are fragmented, broken up in ourselves, and unless you are aware that you are actually fragmented, unless that is totally understood, your minds are incapable of perception. It is only a mind that is not tortured, that is not distorted, that is very clear, that has no markings of any kind of conflict, it is only such a mind that can see what truth is, and therefore can live. Now one must be aware of this issue not only within oneself but socially - the wars, the demand for peace, the way of the politician, the way of the saints, this diversified conflict. What is the root cause of all this? Is it the fault of the environment, the education that one has, the culture in which one lives - which is the environment? Is it the fault of the environment that you are constantly in conflict not only during the day but also when you sleep, from the moment you are born till you die? If you are really aware of it, if you are aware that in yourself you are fragmented, are broken up, contradictory, then you must have asked why does man live in this state. And it is you who have created the environment, society in which you live, the religions and gods which you have accepted. Your gods are your projections. So you are responsible for the conflict and for the environment and for the society in which you live, the beliefs, the dogmas, the rituals. You are completely, utterly responsible for the environment and for the society in which you live. So when you are aware of it, that is, aware intensely, passionately, not just verbally, when you actually feel it, that you are the world and the world is you, then what happens? I do not know if you have asked this question of why conflict exists in man, in yourself. If you have, what is your answer? Do you refer to what somebody has said about why you live in conflict - Sankara or the Buddha - do you refer to some authority? Do you do that when you ask yourself this question why you, as a human being, responsible for the whole structure of the environment in which you live and of which you are a part, why there is this conflict in you? Can anybody answer this question for you? If they do answer it, it will be merely a description, an explanation. But the explanation and the description are not the explained nor the described. So you have to totally disregard authority. You have to find out why you are in conflict. Now to find out you need energy. You need a great deal of energy to find out for yourself the cause why man, you, live in conflict. Now when you enquire into the cause of it, you are using the intellect as an instrument of analysis, aren't you? You are using intellect as an instrument of analysis with which you hope to find the cause. The intellect is partial, is a fragment of the total. You hope to find the cause of a tremendous question, why man is in conflict, through a fragmentary thing called the intellect, which is the only instrument you have. So when you begin to enquire into the cause through the intellect, your answer will be partial, because your intellect is partial, and therefore, that is not the instrument. Which means you must now discard the instrument and find out a different kind of instrument. Up to now we have used the intellect as an analytical means to find out why man suffers, why man is in conflict; and the intellect is a fragment of the total. Man is not just his intellect. There is all his nervous organism, the emotions - the whole structure - and you take one part of it and try to use that one part to find the cause. When you examine through a partial instrument, your understanding will always be partial and therefore incomplete. And you have to see that you need energy, don't you? Now, the energy we have is divided, is again fragmented. There is the energy of fragmentation. In these fragments there is energy, just as in heat there is energy; and in the control of that energy, there is also energy. So we have divided energy into fragments, whereas human energy, cosmic energy, every kind of energy is a unitary movement. So one has to have energy to understand the structure and the nature of conflict and the ending of conflict. You must have intense energy and not fragmented energy, the fragmented energy is that which says, "I must get rid of conflict". Who is the "I" that says I must get rid of conflict or suppress it? It is one part of energy describing another part of energy. So energies are in conflict. We are asking what is the reason of this conflict. One can observe it very simply as the observer and the observed. There is in you the observer, the observer watches that tree with all his knowledge, his past conditioning, and he looks at that tree as something separate from himself. The observer says, "Do this, do not do that." The observer has certain values, certain judgements, he is really the censor, who is always watching, denying, controlling, separating himself from that which he is watching. When you are angry or jealous or not generous, if you observe it very closely, there is the observer who says "I am jealous, I am angry" The naming of the reaction, which he calls anger, separates him from anger. Can you look at that tree without naming, without the interference of thought which is the response of memory, but just observe? We talked about it briefly the other day, which is, you look at that tree through the image which you have about that tree, which means you are not really looking at that tree. In the same way, when you have an image about your wife or your husband or a friend, you are looking at the friend through the image you have. So there is duality. This division between the observer and the observed is the very essence of conflict, of division. When I am angry, at the moment of anger, there is no observer. Please follow this, I am going to go into it step by step. Follow it by observing yourself and not what the speaker is pointing out. Observe what takes place yourself, in yourself. When you are angry, at the moment of experiencing that anger or any other experience, in that second, there is no observer; a second later the observer comes and says, "I have been angry". He has separated himself from anger. He has named it, named the feeling as anger. He has named it, in order to strengthen his memory. His memory says "you have been angry". The memory is the censor, the memory says, "You should not have been angry", "be kind, don't hit him back, turn the other cheek." So the response of memory as thought becomes the observer and so there is a division between the observer and the observed, when he says "I am angry, I am jealous; I am envious. Then the conflict begins, because he wants to suppress envy or enlarge it, take delight in it. So where there is the observer and the observed, there is the root of conflict. Now is there an observation of anger without the observer? That is the next question. At the moment of anger or pleasure there is no observer, then a second later comes the observer, the observer is the censor, is the recorder, is the memory, is the brain cells in which these memories are held, and hence that observer says, "I should not or I should, I want more, I want less." So one asks then, can there be an observation without the observer? You understand? This is a tremendous question. We are conditioned to this conflict which arises when there is an observer different from the thing observed. That is our tradition, that is our condition, that is the result of our culture. And when we function from habit, it is a waste of energy. And when we immediately respond, that is, when the observer immediately responds to an emotion or a reaction, the response is always the old, it is the old brain which responds. So we are asking whether there is an observation without the observer. To end any habit, any tradition, without conflict, needs energy. Look, let us make it simple. I am angry; at the moment of anger there is no observer as "I" who says I am angry. A second later, the entity as the observer comes into being. He is the censor, who says "I must not be angry." The response of the observer is tradition, is the habit, is the old brain responding, and that response of the old brain is a waste of energy, and you need energy totally to observe without the observer. Are you following this? Let us put the question differently. What is your life, the daily life, not the ideological life, not the life you would like to lead, not the life you hope to have, but the actual daily "what is"? What is your life? It is a battle, is it not, with occasional flashes of pleasure, whether it be sexual or other forms of sensuous pleasure? Your life is a constant battle. Can that battle end? Now, to end that battle, you must look at the whole field of existence, not partially but totally - "total" meaning the sorrows, the physical pain, the insults, the fears, the hopes, the anxieties, the ambitions, the regrets, the competitive, aggressive, brutal existence - see the whole of it. We are used to seeing parts of it, not taking the whole field and looking. We are not capable, as we are, of observing the whole field as one, because we have divided life into business life, family life, religious life and so on, and each division has its own activity of energy, and therefore each fragment is against the other fragment, and these fragmentary energies are wasting our total energy. Is it possible to look at this whole field, this complex existence, the economic side, the social side, the family side, the personal, the communal - the whole of it as one - to perceive it totally? To perceive it totally, you must have a mind that is non-frag- mented. How do you come by that? How does a mind that is so fragmented throw away all the fragments and have a perception that is total? Have you understood my question? I cannot see the whole complex existence through a little hole which I call the intellect. I cannot see it, because the intellect is a part and you cannot use the part to understand the whole. That is a simple fact. There must be a different kind of perception, and that quality of perception exists only when the observer is absent, when you can look at that tree without the image, when you can look at your wife or your husband without any image whatsoever, when you can look at a Muslim, and a Muslim can look at you without the image. These images are produced by the observer, and if you see the truth of it, not merely the logical sequence of it, but see the fact of it, the truth of it - as you would see the danger of a snake and you act instantly. So when you see the truth that conflict exists as long as there is an observer - and the observer is the producer of images, he is the tradition, he is the conditioned being, he is the censor, - if you see that, not as an idea but actually, then you will observe without the observer, then you will see the totality of existence. Therefore, a mind that sees this has tremendous energy, because energy then is not dissipated. We dissipate energy through control. Have you ever watched a sannyasi or a monk who has taken vows of celibacy, poverty? What tortures he goes through, because he has got the image that truth, or whatever that sublime thing is, can be found only if he is celibate, because he says that otherwise there is a wastage of energy, sexual wastage of energy. You must have complete energy to find reality; but in himself he is in battle. Right, you have understood this? So he has an image that he should be a celibate, and that image creates a division between himself and actually "what is". Now if you can observe actually "what is" without a censor, there is a transformation of "what is". One is violent - that is apparently the normal human condition - to be violent. I am violent. At the moment of violence there is no observer, then a few seconds later the observer comes into being. He says "I should not be violent" because he has an image of non- violence, an ideal of non-violence which prevents him from observing violence. So he says, I say to myself "I will be every day less and less violent, I will ultimately reach a state of non-violence day by day." Now what is implied in that simple fact that I am violent and I will be no-violent one day? First there is the observer and the observed, second he is sowing the seeds of violence in the meantime, before he arrives at the state of non-violence. Then there is the factor of time before he can be completely non-violent, that is, the space between violence and non-violence; in that myself "I will be every day less and less violent, I will ultimately reach a state of nonviolence day by day." Now what is implied in that simple fact that I am violent and I will be no-violent one day? First there is the observer and the observed, second he is sowing the seeds of violence in the meantime, before he arrives at the state of nonviolence. Then there is the factor of time before he can be completely non-violent, that is, the space between violence and non-violence; in that observe "what is". Now, how do you observe "what is"? Do you observe it with your conditioned mind, saying "I must not be violent" with the image which you have about violence? Or is there an observation without the word, without the image? To observe without the image requires tremendous energy. Then you are not wasting energy by suppressing violence or transforming violence or pursuing an ideal of non-violence. That is all wastage of energy. Now in the same way, let us look at this whole problem of what is called love. We have looked at what we consider living, which is a shoddy affair, a battle, and by investigating we have seen that it is possible - not intellectually-actually to be free of that conflict. Now let us enquire deeply into this question of what love is - not your opinion, somebody's opinion or conclusion - but what actually it is now. What is love? Is it pleasure, is it desire, is it sex, is it jealousy, possessiveness, domination, dependency? If you depend, then you are caught in fear. Right? If I depend on my wife, because she gives me pleasure sexually, if I depend on her for comfort, companionship, that dependency breeds fear, that dependency breeds jealousy, hatred, antagonism, possessiveness, the desire to dominate. Is all that love? Question, go into it, find out. And is pleasure associated with sex, is it love? And why has sex become so extremely important in life? Why, Sirs, why in the modern world and also in the ancient world, why have we made sex into such a colossal affair? Why have we said that you cannot possibly attain reality, enlightenment, if you are sexual? Let us find out. First of all, you have to enquire into what is pleasure. You see a beautiful tree, a lovely cloud, the face of a child that is enchanting, the face of a man or woman that is beautiful. You see it, then what takes place? You see the lovely moonlight on the water, sparkling with such beauty, you perceive it. Then, at that moment of tremendous experience, thought comes along and says, "How lovely that was, I want to repeat it tomorrow." Are you following all this? Thought, which is the response of memory, which has the experience of seeing that moonlight on the water, the beauty of it, that thought says, "I must repeat that thing again." At the moment of perception of that light on the water there was nothing, there was neither pleasure nor the demand that it must happen tomorrow. There was absolute realization of that beauty. Then thought comes and says, "Let us repeat it; go tomorrow and look at that water again." So that is pleasure - the repetition of an event which thought has reduced to pleasure and so thought can continue and give strength to pleasure. You have to understand this. There has been physical pain, a bad toothache last week. You are frightened that it will come back again tomorrow, next week, which is the action of thought. Thought sustains both pleasure and fear. So thought has built this whole structure round love as pleasure. And therefore all the saints, religions say, "Do not look at a woman, suppress, control", which is what takes place. That is a battle. Therefore, you are wasting energy. So what is love? Is it pleasure, fear? Fear is jealousy, violence. When you possess your wife as "my wife" is that not violence, and is that love? And we are asking, why is it human beings have made sex into an extraordinary affair? Have you ever thought about it? Have you observed why, in your own life, that has become of such significant importance? Have you noticed how your life is mechanical - going to the office every day, repeat, repeat. How extraordinarily mechanical you are, when you quote your religious books, the rituals, when you call yourself a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a communist, and God knows what else. It is a mechanical habit, a repetition. When you name yourself as a bureaucrat, as a politician, as a sociologist, and so on, it is a habit, a mechanical acquisition of knowledge which you can repeat. So you have only one thing which is not competitive, non-repetitive, which you can reduce to repetitiveness, which is sex. So that becomes your relief from the mechanical life. You have made love into a mechanical, pleasurable affair. And is that love? You know, to find out what it is, you have to deny completely what it is not. You have to deny - the denial is the understanding of what pleasure, fear is. The understanding of it, not the saying of "I must not have pleasure", which is like a man saying "I must have no desire" - that is what you are trained to, that is what you accept by your tradition, that desire is completely wrong, that you must go beyond it. You know, when you look at a tree, the beauty of a leaf, the shadow, the movement of the leaf, to look at it is a delight. What is wrong with it? Because you have denied beauty, your life has become mechanical. You never look at a tree, on the contrary, you are cutting down trees; you never look at the sky, the clouds, the beauty of the land, because you have an idea at the back of your mind that, to be a really religious man, you must never look at anything beautiful, because beauty might remind you of a woman. And that is what you call religion, and that is the way you are going to find God. It is such infantilism, because you torture the mind to find God. To find reality, you must have a free mind, not a tortured mind, there must be this sense of love, not with all its jealousies, fears. You do not know what it means to love, the beauty of it, because you do not know what it means to live a beautiful live, a life without conflict; you only know a life which is committed to some pattern or another, and therefore broken up. You have broken up living from dying. See what is involved in it. There is death far away. You may put it away from you, but you know it is going to come one of these days, so you invent theories -reincarnation. Is there a next life? If you really believed in reincarnation, really believed in it, that is, that you will be born next life according to what you do in this life, then this life matters much more than the next life, which means what you do now matters, how you behave now matters. But you really do not believe in it. It means absolutely nothing; it is just a theory because it gives you a temporary comfort. But if you really believed in it, then every minute of the day would count, every action would have significance. Therefore, now is the moment of righteousness, not next life. I do not know if you understand all this. And you have got innumerable theories about death. And you have never faced it. So, find out the nature of death, while living, full of vitality, energy, not when you are diseased, unconscious, in pain, misery. Then that is not the moment to find out what death is - but while you are capable of looking, walking, observing being aware of the world, outside and inside, when you have understood what living is and what it means to love. So what is death? The old people put this question out of fear because they are going to die. The old generation offers you nothing but theories about death. They have nothing to offer you either traditionally or actually. What have they offered you culturally, socially, economically? Do look at it, Sir, what have they given you - a social structure that is so corrupt, so full of injustice, a structure that breeds war, nationalism and all the rest. And any intelligent man discards it totally, including their morality. So what have they to offer you, the older generation who are frightened of death? Nothing except a lot of words and fear. So do not accept what another man says about death. Let us find out what it means. What does it mean to die, not of old age, crippled and diseased or by an accident, but sitting here, conscious, aware, listening with a mind that is really serious? Now we are asking what it is to die, having no fear. You know only what it means to end, not what it means to die, that is, the ending of what you know, your accumulated knowledge, your insults, your hopes, your family, your wife, your children, whom you think you love. If you really loved your children, you would have a different world. So what does it mean to die? You are afraid of the ending of the known, you are not afraid of death, because of that you know nothing. So what is it that you are frightened of, frightened of ending the known, and what is the known? All your memories, the collection of your worries, the furniture, the house, the accumulated insults and worries and conflicts and sorrows, and you hold on to that and say, "Please, I do not want to die". Is that what you are afraid of -afraid of letting go the known - not of death? Now let go of the known, let go of some memory that you have, let go, completely, of the pleasures that you have, the accumulated memories, the regrets, the anxieties, die to it, completely so that your mind is totally fresh. That is what it means to die, so that you don't carry over all the memories, the shoddy experiences or the pleasurable experiences. Live each day without accumulation, and you will know what it means to die so completely that your mind is fresh tomorrow, young and innocent and full of that energy. Without that, do what you will, without love, without the understanding of the beauty of this dying, you will never come near to that which is un-nameable. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 8 3RD PUBLIC TALK MADRAS 13TH JANUARY 1971 As we have talked about so many other things like fear, pleasure, and the ending of sorrow, I think we ought to talk over together the question of meditation. That word is loaded, specially in the East. One has all kinds of ideas of what meditation is, what systems to follow, what methods, what practices, what disciplines, and I think we ought to consider this, because it is part of life like death, love, and this sense of great beauty. Meditation also is not only a part but perhaps covers the whole field of life. I do not quite know how to begin, because it is rather a complex thing and we ought to begin, I think, by considering that one must change radically, totally one's way of living, not only outwardly in our relationships, in our attitudes and activities, but also inwardly, most profoundly. There must be really a marvellous change so that our minds are entirely different. Yet as man, centuries upon centuries, has sought a way of life that is not worldly and so has escaped from life, he has denied living and created his own idea of what a religious life is and if we are going into this question of meditation and what a religious life, what a religious mind is, we must turn our back upon everything that man has thought about what meditation is or what a religious life is. We have totally to abnegate, deny all that. So we will begin by seeing what is not meditation, and through negation come to the positive. You must negate not merely verbally, or intellectually, theoretically, but actually negate every thing that man has said. One has to find out for oneself, because truth is something not to be bought through another. It is not something fixed, something that you can repeatedly add to in order to discover it. Please do realize that if one is really serious, one must totally negate all the propaganda, for religion is a continuous propaganda. You are told what to do, what to think, either for over 5000 years or for 2000 years. So you must, if you are serious, totally put aside all that and find out for yourself what truth is, if there is such a thing. So it is important to understand yourself, not what others say about yourself. If you followed a psychologist or a philosopher or an analytical, intellectual person, or one of the ancient teachers, however ancient, respected and all the rest of it, you are merely following what they are telling you about yourself. Therefore, you have to deny all that, and then you begin to find out what you are. And meditation is part of this, because without knowing yourself, not only superficially but at the very depths of your being, you have no basis for any action, you have no foundation whatsoever on which you can build a house that is stable, orderly. So it is absolutely necessary if you would really take this extraordinary journey, and that is what we are going to do: journey together into this enormous, complex problem of understanding oneself. Please see the absolute, essential necessity of it, that nobody can teach you about yourself except yourself, so you have to be the guru, the disciple yourself, the teacher yourself, and learn from yourself. What you learn from another is not true. So you have to find out for yourself what you are and to learn how to observe yourself. You know it is one of the most arduous tasks to go into this. It is like taking a journey together. You know when you walk together you must be friends, you must love walking together, and that is one of the most difficult things. To learn about oneself is not to accumulate knowledge about oneself. To learn about myself I have to observe myself. If I learn about myself through the accumulation of knowledge, I don~t learn about myself. There are two ways of learning: to learn in order to accumulate knowledge and from knowledge observe, observe through the screen of the past. I learn about myself, observe myself, having experience and accumulating knowledge from those experiences and looking at myself through those experiences. That is, I look at myself through the past, for knowledge is the past. That is one way of looking at oneself. The other is to observe and watch the movement of all the thoughts, of all the motives, and never accumulate. Therefore, learning is a constant process. I see this needs further explanation. I see myself being violent, and I have condemned it or justified it, and I have learnt from it that there should be no violence. I have learnt from it. Next time I observe myself being violent, I respond according to my knowledge of what I have learnt. And, therefore, there is no fresh observation. I am looking at the new experience of violence with old eyes, with previous knowledge. Therefore I am not learning. Learning implies a constant movement, not from the past, but a movement from moment to moment so that there is no accumulation. We are the result of thousands of accumulations, we are accumulating, and if you would understand that accumulation, you have to learn about it and not further accumulate. So there must be an observation which is a constant learning without accumulation. Accumulation is the centre, is the "me", the ego; and to learn about it one must be free of accumulation and not accumulate at another level in a different direction. So there must be learning about oneself by watching, not condemning, not justifying, but just watching, the way you walk, the way you talk, the words you use, the motives, the purposes, the intentions - to be totally aware without any choice. And that awareness is not a matter of accumulation but of being aware from moment to moment. When you are not aware, do not bother. Begin again, so that your mind is always fresh. Therefore the learning about oneself is not only at the conscious level, superficial level, but also at the deeper level: the so-called unconscious, the hidden. How are you going to learn about something that is very deeply rooted, hidden, not open? Our whole consciousness is both superficial and hidden; and one has to learn the content of all that consciousness, because the content makes up the consciousness. The two are not separate, the content is the consciousness. Therefore, to understand the content there must be an observation without the observer. You know this is one of the most fascinating things in life, to find out how to look anew at life. To observe the hidden, one has to have eyes that are not conditioned by the past as a Hindu, Christian, and all the rest of it. One must look at oneself as though for the first time, each time and therefore never accumulate. If you can so observe yourself in action in the office, with the family, with the children, when you are sexual, when you are greedy, ambitious, observe without condemning it, without justifying it, just observe, then you will see that in that observation there is no conflict whatsoever. And a mind that comes with a tortured, with a distorted mind, can never possibly find out what truth is. And most of our minds are distorted, tortured, made small by control, by discipline, by fear. Psychologists say that you must dream, otherwise you go mad. There must be dreams when you sleep, there must take place dreams. Please be interested in this, because you dream in life every night. When you sleep, some kind of dream, activity, goes on; and they say that it is essential for human sanity that you must dream. Now we are going to question it, going to find out whether it is absolutely necessary to dream at all. So we have to discard what the professionals have said and find out for ourselves. We have to ask ourselves what dreams are. Are not dreams the continuation of the activity of daily life, only in symbolic form? Please do not agree or disagree. We are enquiring together, taking the journey together, therefore, there is no agreement or disagreement. We are both of us observing, we are asking whether it is necessary to dream at all. And what are dreams? Are they not the movement of daily life, the daily observations, the daily wrangles, all the misfortunes, violence, bitterness, anger, the movement of all that continuing while you are asleep, only taking a symbolic, visual or a verbal form? You find out. If you have observed you will see that the brain needs order, otherwise it cannot function rationally. Have you noticed before you go to asleep that you review the day, and you say to yourself, "I should have said that differently, I should have done that in a different way, I should not have said that, I wish it had not happened, I must correct it tomorrow?" Haven't you noticed that you review the day just before you go off to sleep? Why? Because if you do not do it consciously, while you are asleep the mind is spending its energy to bring order within itself. Are you following all this? Look, order is necessary in daily life not only when you are asleep. The brain demands that you have an orderly, sane life, otherwise it cannot function efficiently.. And order is virtue, because if you are not virtuous, if you are disorderly, how can the brain function? It can only operate excellently when it is secure, when it has order within itself. Haven't you noticed all these things? So while you are asleep, while the body is asleep, the dream is bringing about order in itself, because next day it has to face disorder again; therefore it must have some capacity to bring order out of disorder, and the bringing about of order is a form of dream. But if you in the waking hours establish order, then the brain, while the physical body is asleep, can live a totally different kind of life. Look, this is part of meditation. A mind that has no order, that is disorderly, doing one thing, saying another, acting another way, as we do, such a mind cannot possibly understand what meditation is. There must be order. Now, how do you establish, how does the mind, the brain establish order during the day, order being virtue? We are not talking of social morality but of a virtue that is orderly. Now order is not a blueprint established by the Gita, the Bible, by the teacher. Order is a living thing; it is not a blueprint. If you have a blueprint, then there is disorder between what you are and what you should be. Therefore, in that there is contradiction, there is conflict. Conflict indicates disorder. So you can only find out what order is if you learn what disorder is. In the understanding of what disorder is, you have order. Our daily life as we live is disorderly, is it not? Would you say, your life, if you are honest to yourself, was very orderly, very sane, balanced, harmonious? Obviously not. If it was, you would not be sitting here. You would be free human beings, marvellous human beings, establishing a different kind of society; but we are disorderly human beings, contradictory. So observe without denying, justifying, just observe your disorder, how contradictory you are, how frightened you are, how envious you are, seeking prestige, position, bullied by your wife or husband, a slave to what your neighbour thinks of you - a constant conflict, struggle. Observe that without justifying or condemning. Learn all about that disorder and you will see that out of that comes an extraordinarily sweet order with a movement, with a life, with a vigour. Then you will see that during the day you have established complete order in your life, a mathematically precise order. And to understand that, you have to understand fear, you have to understand pleasure - which we went into briefly the other day. And by being aware of them choicelessly, you will see that when you go to sleep your mind then has no dreams at all. Therefore such a mind, such a brain is made fresh during sleep, renews itself, and therefore, the next morning you will find the brain has an extraordinary capacity. And that is part of understanding oneself. You must love this, you must give your life to this, because it is your life, you must give your life to understand your life, because you are the world and the world is you. If you change, you change the world. This is not merely an intellectual idea, you must burn with this, you must have passion. And meditation is the release of tremendous energy. You know, to change the environment there must be a system, a method, A method, system, is to act efficiently. Just follow this. If you want to change the environment round here, there must be a planning of what to do. If you want to build a house, you have to plan. And when you establish a system, what takes place? Outwardly what takes place? There must be a few who will be capable of running that system. Then what happens to the people who run the system? They become much more important than the system or the consideration of changing the environment. Haven't you noticed all this? They are the bosses, they are the people who use the system in order to become important themselves, like politicians the world over. Please follow this. To bring about an environmental change, there needs to be an efficient group of people with a system. But the efficient people are human beings, they are angry, jealous, envious, they want a position. You have seen all this, haven't you? Therefore they use the system and forget the whole business. Now we want a system to meditate. See the relationship between the two. We think we could be efficient in our meditation, in our thinking, in our enquiry, if there was a system. Now what does the system imply? Please bear in mind very clearly the distinction between the two. If you want to change the physical environment, there must be a group of people who are efficient to carry out that system, they must be impersonal, not egotistic, not lining their own pockets metaphorically and physically. Therefore human beings matter more than the system. Do you see the importance of it? We say the same thing about bringing about a change in ourselves, that only through a system we can change, only through a system we can learn what meditation is. Because that appears to offer efficiency. Does it? You know every little guru in India and elsewhere has a system of meditation. Now systems imply a repetition, a practice, following a method. If you follow a method, a system, a practice, it becomes a routine; then there is an escape through sex or through different forms. Therefore, at all costs, avoid any system of meditation because a mechanical mind can never possibly find out what truth is. The mechanical mind can become very disciplined, orderly, but that orderliness is contradictory to the order which we are talking about, because in that orderliness which is so-called repetition, there is contradiction between what you are and what you should be, the ideal. So there is contradiction in that; and where there is contradiction there is distortion and a tortured mind can never find out anything new. So do not belong to any system, do not follow any guru. You know once a very famous guru came to see us. It was a rather amusing incident. Some of us were sitting on a little mattress, as big as this, and out of politeness we got up and we asked the important man to sit on the mattress. He sat. He had a stick. He put the stick in front of him, sat very dignified, and he became the guru, because he was on a little mattress. He was telling us all what we should do, because out of politeness we offered the little seat which was an inch higher. Vanity and the demand for power and position and followers - such people will never find out what truth is. They will find what they want, which is their own gratification. There is no system, but if you understand there is no system, then your mind becomes alive, sharp, to find out. Now what is it that you are going to find out? We want, most of us, to experience something other than the daily experiences. We want to experience a transcendental state, an experience of enlightenment. The word "experience" means to go through, and when you demand to have greater experiences, that indicates that you are bored with daily living. All the people who take drugs think that through drugs they will have extraordinary experiences. They do take a trip. Their trips, their experiences are the expressions of their own conditioning. It gives them a certain vitality, a certain clarity, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with enlightenment. So through drugs you cannot possibly come upon it. So what is it that we are seeking? What is it that man wants? He sees what his life is, a boredom, a routine, a battlefield, a fight, a constant struggle - never a moment of peace except perhaps occasionally, sexually or otherwise. So he says life is transient, life is changing, there must be something extraordinarily permanent, and he wants that permanence, something other than the mere physical, the daily routine and experience, and he calls that God. So he believes in God; and all the images, rituals are based on belief. Belief is the outcome of fear. If there is no fear, you can see the leaf, the tree, the beautiful sky, the light on the birds - there is beauty, and where there is beauty there is goodness, where there is goodness there is truth. So one must understand the daily living. We must understand why our lives have become mechanical, why we follow others, why we believe, not-believe, fight. We know what is going on in daily life and we want to escape from it. Therefore, we want wider, deeper experiences. And books, gurus, teachers promise enlightenment, that extraordinary thing. And systems offer you that, that is, "Do these things and you will get there, follow this path and you will find yourself there"......as though truth is like a station fixed and all the roads leading to it. There is no road, there is no path, there is no fixed truth; and therefore you must have a mind that is extraordinarily alive, watching, learning. Then there is this whole question of concentration. I do not know who tells you these things that you must concentrate, learn to control thought, that you must suppress desires, you must be this, never look at a woman, never look at a man. I do not know why you ever listen to this. Have you ever concentrated, that is, fixed your attention on something? A school boy, when he wants to look out of the window and see the movement of the leaves, the tree or the passer-by, and the teacher says "Look at the book, do not look out of the window: that is concentration; that is, focus your attention and build a wall round yourself so that you are not disturbed. Concentration becomes exclusion, resistance. Do you see this? And in that concentration there is a battle. You want to concentrate and your mind goes off, your thought chases something or other, so there is conflict, whereas if you give attention, if you are attentive during the day, even for a few minutes at a time, completely attentive - giving your mind, your body, your heart, your eyes, your cars, your brain - completely, totally attentive, then you will see there is no border to attention, there is not a resistance. In that state of attention there is no contradiction. Be attentive and then forget it, begin again, pick it up each time, so that this attention is fresh each time, and then you will know when you are not attentive. Then in that state of non-attention is conflict, then observe that conflict, be aware of that conflict, give your total attention to that conflict, so that the mind becomes extraordinarily alive, non-mechanical. That is part of meditation. Then you are being told that you must acquire a silent mind, aren't you? Even the speaker has told you that. Forget what the speaker has said, but see for yourself why your mind must be quiet, must be silent, see it for yourself. To see anything clearly, your mind must not chatter. If I want to listen to what you are saying, my mind must be quiet, mustn't it? If I want to understand what you are saying, I must listen to you. When I am listening to you, if I am thinking about something, I cannot listen. You see the point? Therefore, to listen, to observe, the mind must be quiet. That is all. Now you ask, how is the mind to be quiet when it is chattering all the time about something or other? If you try to stop the chattering, then that becomes a conflict. The mind has got into the habit of chattering, talking to itself or talking with somebody else, endlessly, using words, words. And if you try to stop that by the action of will, then that is a contradiction. Therefore, find out why your mind chatters, enquire into it, understand it. It does not matter very much if it chatters. Why does it chatter? Because it must be occupied with something. You know people say, "You must be committed to something, to some activity, you must be totally involved", and the mind is totally involved in chattering. And why does it chatter? Because it has to be occupied. Why does it demand to be occupied? I am asking it for you, but find out, ask what would happen if it did not chatter, if it was not occupied.If your mind was not occupied, what would happen? It would face emptiness, wouldn't it? If the habit stops suddenly, you feel lost. And this emptiness is the fear of your own loneliness and you try to escape from this loneliness, from this fear, from this emptiness by chattering, or by being occupied with this or that. So, go deep into the very depth of this loneliness, not trying to suppress it or escape from it, but just to observe it. And you can only observe it if your mind is quiet, because the moment you condemn it, the moment you say, "I must not chatter", then you have conflict. But if you merely observe your own loneliness, then you will find that your mind facing this emptiness becomes completely alone. There is a difference between loneliness and aloneness. Loneliness is isolation, total isolation, which is what we are doing all the time in daily life. During the daily activity you are isolating yourself - you may be married, you may sleep with your wife or not, but what takes place? You have your own ambitions, greed, problems, and she has her own problems; you are trying to establish a relationship between various problems; so this self-centred activity is loneliness. The self-centred activity is isolating, and therefore there is this sense of appalling, frightening loneliness. And when you understand this, you have that aloneness which comes when the mind and the brain cells have understood this whole problem, which is, the denial of all authority - of all spiritual authority, the authority of another or the authority of your own accumulated knowledge as experience, which is the past. When you discard totally in yourself all authority, when you are no longer following any system and when you have understood fear, pleasure, then in that understanding of fear and pleasure, there is joy. Joy has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure. You may have a moment of great joy, but thinking about it reduces it to pleasure. Order is not a blueprint; it comes with the understanding of disorder - that is your life. Virtue is a living thing like humility; you cannot cultivate humility. So when all this is done the mind becomes extraordinarily clear, unconfused, and therefore it is alone. Out of this aloneness comes a quality of silence, which is not the result of practice, which is not the opposite of noise. That silence is without cause, and therefore it has no beginning and no end. And to such a mind, absolutely orderly, and therefore completely alone, and therefore innocent - which means that it can never be hurt - comes a marvellous silence. What happens in that silence, there are no words to describe. If you describe what happens, then those words are not the thing -what is described. The description is not the described. Therefore, truth, that blessedness, that extraordinary silence. and the movement of that silence has no words, and if you have gone that far, then you are enlightened, you do not seek anything, you do not want any experience, then you are a light, and that is the beginning and the ending of all meditation. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 9 4TH PUBLIC TALK MADRAS 17TH JANUARY 1971 WE seem to think that the moment we have acquired some technical knowledge at a University or an institution like this we have fulfilled all responsibility. Yet having neglected the vast field of life with all its complexities, merely cultivating a particular knowledge apparently has not solved any of our human problems. One may be able to go to the moon or create marvellous superstructures or live under the sea and so on, but the human relationship with its problems has not been solved. And education, one hoped, would not only build a technological world where man would be freed from the machine to do other things, but also he would lead a different kind of life, a different kind of existence, bringing about a different society, a different culture, a totally different religion. Education has not fulfilled that, nor science, nor government, nor communism, nor any other kind of theoretical, ideological utopia. So we are faced with the problem of human relationship, how to bring about in that relationship a radical change, because human relationship is society, is the structure, the nature of society. If one is at all serious in a world that is so chaotic, so mad, so brutal, so meaningless, one has not only to transform the outward structure but also the inward psychological states of our mind and our consciousness. We are not separate from the world, we are the world. We have created, the past generation has created, this mad, stupid world; and the younger generation, if they are not careful, if they are not alert, not watchful, will also join the older generation in a few years and bring about another mad, stupid society. So it is a tremendous responsibility not only on the part of the educator but also on the part of the student to consider what kind of world we are going to live in - not a world of utopia or a perfect technological world, but a world of human relationship where we can live and function at peace with each other. I think that is the tremendous problem that is facing the world at the present time. One sees what is actually happening - revolt, destruction, brutality, war, disruption, anarchy. If we are at all observant, if we are aware at all of what is going on - the utter, mad chaos - then it behoves us as human beings to see what our minds, our hearts can do about this transformation of the human mind. Philosophers have not done that. Philosophers have spun innumerable theories, marvellous, sociological or religious theories, or a world of higher mathematics; but actually they have not changed the world. No philosophy has ever changed the world. Philosophy means the love of truth, not the truth of yours or that of the speaker, but actually what is. It means finding out "what is", the actual, not the theoretical, not the abstract, whether the actual, the "what is" can be totally changed. That is what we are concerned with or should be concerned with. When the house is on fire, not to indulge in talking about the theories of combustion. We are confronted with a world that is aflame, that is chaotic, that is so utterly confused. So it comes as a responsibility on the part of each one of us to see what one can as a human being, do in this chaos. And there is no question whatsoever about this chaos, the political divisions, the national divisions, the regional divisions and also the religious - the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim - the varieties of division that organized religions have created throughout the world. When you have observed all this, not from reading a newspaper, sitting in a comfortable chair or as a professor in a university theorizing about it, but actually facing the problem, confronting what the human responsibility is with regard to this problem, you will ask how the human mind which has been put together through millennia, through so-called evolution, that mind so heavily conditioned as a Hindu, Buddhist, communist and so on, how can that mind, which is the intellect, ever bring about a radical revolution? It can probably bring a physical revolution - the Communist, the French and other forms of revolution. The intellect can theorize and force people to conform to a particular pattern of society, which is what is happening in certain parts of the world. So when you observe all this, you ask what is the human being to do? You cannot escape from it - either religiously, economically or inwardly withdraw. You cannot possibly escape from this chaos, because we are related to it. We have bred this chaos, we have brought it into being by our daily life. So seeing this, what can one do? As a human being, confronted with this enormous problem, being related to that problem, not as an observer but as one who takes part in it, who is contributing to it, what can he do? How can he as a human being, transform both outwardly and inwardly, psychologically and socially? What can he do? I do not know if you are interested in this question at all. Most of us are not, because we have certain formulas, certain ideals, concepts through which we hope to resolve these problems, and we hope through the particular system, a particular method - whether it is the communist or other systems - we are going to change the world. Systems are created by human beings, by you, by the clever people; and one hopes, one desires that through the system a particular change can be brought about. But to run the system, human beings are necessary. That is, you and I are necessary to run the system; and we as human beings remain unchanged. We try to run the system, and therefore become not only slaves to the system but seek power through the system, which again is what is obviously happening in the world. So again, what is one to do? You understand my question, you sitting here, educated in this place, or having been educated elsewhere, taken some degrees and having a job - if you can get it - and having settled down comfortably in a little house with a family and wife, children, with your particular idiosyncrasies, religious doctrine? and beliefs, stuck in a little corner, cultivating a very small part of a vast field of existence, what can you do? This question is not a rhetorical question. It is not just put because one has to say something. It is put because we have to share the problem together, because it is your problem, it is your daily problem, whether you are occupied, whether you have a profession; whether you are unemployed, whether you are a Naxalite or a Communist or what you will. It is your problem and whether that problem can be solved at all is what we are going to try to find out this evening: to communicate, to share together, not intellectually, not verbally but actually. We are going to see how, if it is at all possible, to bring about a change, a psychological revolution, because if you merely bring about a physical revolution through violence, inevitably as history has pointed out, you will end up either having a dictatorship, or the dictatorship of a bureaucracy. So physical revolution is the most primitive, meaningless revolution, because the same pattern is repeated -modified perhaps - but again and again repeated. So what is necessary is a psychological revolution, an inward revolution. Then the question is, how is this possible? How is a mind with its brain cells which have been conditioned as a Hindu, as a Protestant, and all the rest of that, how is that mind to undergo a radical change psychologically to bring about a revolution in ourselves, and therefore bring about a totally different kind of world? If we cannot do that, all education has no meaning whatsoever. It might give you a job in a competitive world but you have not solved the problem at all. The problem is so vast, one has to apply not only the capacity of the intellect but also all other faculties which we have. The capacity of the intellect is to reason, collect data, as the computer does, objectively, explore sanely. And a good intellect does not come to a conclusion. It examines, it explores, but if the intellect is conditioned by personal demands, by personal prejudices, conditioned by the culture in which it lives, it is incapable of exploring, it is incapable of understanding. The intellect will not find the answer. That is obvious,is it not? You can go to the moon - intellect is efficient enough - or do the most fantastic things it is doing in the world, build the whole structure of an army that is ready to destroy. But the intellect divides people. The division between private life and public life, the division of nationalities, linguistic and all the rest of the various forms of division are brought about by the intellect, which is one of the functions of the intellect. And, probably the major function is to think, and thought, right throughout the world, both religious thought and worldly thought, has brought about this division, And thought tries to solve this problem, the problem of human relationship. So one has to understand the whole structure and the nature of thinking, not according to any philosopher or psychologist but actually observe one's own thinking. Perhaps what I am going to say may be heretical, because you have all read so many books, you are full of knowledge of what other people have said, including the Gita, the Upanishads and all the rest of it. But you do not know what your own original thinking is because you are secondhand human beings, piled up with knowledge of other people and other things, and you don't know a thing for yourselves. So here is a problem which we both share together and we have to find out the truth of the matter. One sees what is actually happening in the world, the division, the conflict, the contradiction, the political corruption. We do not have to go into all that because the description is never the described, and we are concerned not with the description but with what is described, with what is explained, which is "what is", and this thought has brought about, thought which is the response of memory, experience, knowledge. Even those birds agree with us, if you are listening to those birds, and I hope you are, because listening to those birds completely, with complete attention, and hearing the beauty of a sound, not resisting it, not translating it into pleasure but merely listening to the beauty of a cuckoo or seeing the light of the sunset on the palm trees, just to observe - from that observation we learn, and what we learn is not what other people have taught us. We are saying that thought, your thinking, is the response of memory, the memory that you or your ancestors or race have accumulated through millennia. It is stored there consciously or unconsciously, and that storehouse is the brain, is the brain cells, you can observe it in yourself. It is much more important to learn about oneself by observing oneself, which is self-knowing; for when you begin to know yourself, wisdom comes from it, and also when you begin to know the whole structure of yourself, then sorrow ends. So you have to observe yourself, the way you talk, the words you use, your behaviour, then you will see that your own mind - which is also the brain cells - is the repository of all experience, not only personal, immediate experience but all the racial, the past experiences collected there. Those brain cells hold all the memory, conscious, hidden and open. And any response from that memory is thinking. If you had no memory, you would not be able to think at all. So thought is the response of the past, which is knowledge, and so thought can never be free, thought is always old. This is again an absolute fact. And we try to solve all our problems, not technological problems, through the only instrument we think we have, which is, intellect, which is thought, and we also see that thought has divided people as the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian and so on. Thought has done this, and thought not being able to solve this problem, this human problem of relationship, has constructed a super-ego the super Atman, which we think is going to solve our problem. But that idea of the super-self is part of thinking, and so thought, which is time, which is the result of time, and the super-Atman, the Brahman, the soul, whatever you like to call it, is part of time and therefore not real. It is real only in the sense that thought has constructed it. So we have this problem now : that this world, the society, the culture, the human relationship, divisions - all this has been brought about by thought, by your thinking. I think that is obvious and real; it is not just a conclusion supported by facts and so on, but when one observes it, studies it, explores deeply -interested in this problem of human existence and human suffering, chaos, misery, in which man is caught - one can see that thought has brought about this division, conflict, misery. So thought as the intellect, however capable of reasoning, cannot possibly solve this problem. Your thinking, however subtle, however shallow, is the result of the past. The past has been put together. What has been put together literally, horizontally or vertically, is time. Anything that has been put together demands time like any machine. Like the brain cells, all the collection of memories are the result of time, and we hope through time - which is thinking - to solve our human problems; and one can see that it can never be solved through thought, that thought is time,-that thought breeds fear and pleasure. Can thought - the everyday operation of thinking - can that solve any of our human problems? Obviously it cannot. So then, what else is there that can solve this? So to answer that question, one has to go into the problem of perception, seeing. You know a mind is incapable of seeing clearly when it has any form of conclusion, prejudice. When you, as a Hindu or a Muslim or God knows what else, when you look at the whole world, this world of existence, through a particular little hole called Hinduism, communism or what you will, how can you see the totality of anything? So one has to be free of this conditioning to understand this marvellous, complex human relationship. And one has to understand this principle of pleasure, because for most of us, however lofty our thinking may be - thinking that is the response of the past and therefore conditioned - most of our morality and activity and our search and our striving are based on the principle of pleasure, is it not? Observe it, you can see it for yourself. Our ambitions, the desire for success, the competitive pursuit, the aggression, the violence, the relationship between people, is based on this principle of pleasure, and without understanding pleasure and fear we shall never know what love is. A mind that perceives can understand what pleasure is, what fear is, what love is, and also that immense problem of death, and if there is a reality at all. So you have to understand all this, and to understand it you must be able to perceive, to look, not through the eyes of another, not what the analysts or the psychologists or the professors or the philosophers say, but look with your own eyes. So we have to examine what pleasure is, and that is a very important question, because if you understand it, in the understanding of that, you will understand what love is, if there is or if there is not something beyond the things that thoughts have put together. So let us briefly enquire together what pleasure is. Is pleasure love? Is pleasure desire? What is pleasure? Actually observe yourself, your own pleasures, observe your own pleasurable demands, observe the pursuits of your own pleasures. Watch them and find out, though the speaker is going to describe, realize that the description is never the described, never. The word is never the thing. What is pleasure, which every human being pursues in most subtle forms and most crudely, sexually, in so many ways, what is that thing that man pursues endlessly? Have you observed when you see a lovely sunset, when the whole sky is filled with a roseate glow, as it is now in the west with the setting sun, you are experiencing a great delight, if you at all look and if you have the time to look? That is an experience. That experience has given a great delight, and you pass on to other things, but the mind, the brain cells have registered that delight and there is the demand for the repetition of that delight. Please watch it in yourself, the repetition of that delight when you saw the sunset - it may have been two minutes ago - and you want that repeated, that is, the memory of that sunset has been registered and that thinking about the incident, the experience, the happening, that thinking about it gives a continuity to pleasure. You have had sexual experience or other kinds of experiences, you think about it, you chew over it, image after image, which is thought thinking about a past event - pleasurable or painful - and it gives continuity to what is called pleasure. So thought creates both, gives continuity, nourishment to pleasure and to fear. That is - you have had pain, a physical discomfort, a suffering both physical and psychological. It has happened several days ago, last month or last week, and you think about it hoping that it will not happen again. So thinking about something, which you do not want to happen and may happen, is the beginning of fear. So thought sustains pleasure and fear and, if you observe, joy, ecstasy, an immense sense of delight has nothing whatsoever to do with thought. It happens when you are not occupied, when your whole mind is not chattering, suddenly you find there is a great sense of delight, of beauty and a great joy. Then thought comes along and says, "I would like that joy to be repeated", and then that joy which is so natural and unexpected becomes pleasure. So thought is the response of the past - memory which means thought - is the response of knowledge. And there is the response, challenge of death, and you respond according to the memory of the known. The known is of yesterday, what you know, your experiences, the images of your family, the knowledge that you have accumulated, all that you have collected, that is the past. Therefore you are frightened of what may happen tomorrow, the unknown death. You see all this, you see how thought has divided people linguistically, nationally, racially, and thought pursuing everlastingly pleasure and always avoiding fear. You see all this, which is the result of thought, the result of both rational intelligence and irrational intelligence, the intellect -rational, capable, efficient - and the intellect also being irrational, neurotic, conditioned, illogical, has created not only the social structure with all its morality, with all its economic divisions, injustice, all that but also thought has created in us this battle, this everlasting conflict. So when you see all that and realize what thought has done, then what are you going to do? What are you? You are educated - whatever that word may mean - which is merely cultivating a little corner of the vast field of existence. From that little corner you think you are going to solve all the problems, disregarding the rest of the field. I do not know if you have observed it in yourself, and if you have not, do please observe it now. You have technological knowledge, you are living in a little corner, hoping to understand the whole field, and when you are functioning from a little corner, obviously you must live a life of contradiction. If you are a communist, if you are a Maoist, from that little corner you can only look at the world through Communist or Maoist eyes. So one has to look at life with eyes that are not conditioned. And that is the whole problem - whether the mind with its brain cells can free itself completely from the past and look anew. Knowledge is necessary, otherwise you could not get from here to over there, you could not function, you could not get to be a good technician, you would not be able to talk English or Tamil or whatever you talk, you would not be able to recognize your wife or your friends. So knowledge is necessary but it becomes a total hindrance when thought, functioning from the past, which is, the past being the knowledge, operates. While seeing that knowledge with all its complexity is absolutely necessary to you as a scientist, as an engineer, that you cannot put knowledge aside and become a primitive and go back to tribalism, you also see that know- ledge in human relationship creates conflict. Look, it is very simple. If one is married or if one has a friend with whom one lives during a number of years or a few days or a few weeks, one has built an image of each other. You have put together an image about her or him. That image has been put together through various insults, pleasure, dominance, disregard -you know what relationship is especially between a husband and wife - you have an image of each other. That image is the past and the understanding between those two images you call relationship -you leading your own private life and she leading her own private life, you with your ambitions and she with hers - and the past is preventing actual relationship. The past destroys all relationship, human relationship. Now, having disowned the picture, knowing thought has its limited function, the question is, how can there be a radical, psychological change which is not touched by thought? Thought obviously cannot change the pattern which it has built or will build, because that is the past. So, is there a movement, a psychological movement, which is not of the past? Because you see, to find out if there is God or no God, if you would seriously give your heart and mind to find out totally if there is such a thing as God or not, you have to put aside all belief, you have to put aside totally every form of fear, every form of conflict, you have to totally understand what pleasure is. If you do not, you have no basis for order, because order is virtue. Virtue is not something you cultivate, not something that you practise. Order comes into being only when there is understanding of disorder, the disorder in which one lives, the actual disorder, the hypocrisy, the conflict, the agony, the despair, the confusion that one lives in. There is disorder, and when you begin to understand that disorder, not correct it, not say it must not be or must be, but what you actually observe in your daily life, out of that comes order, which is living. When you have this absolute order which is righteousness, which is action, in which there is this sense of non-division, then you have the foundation for meditation, and then there is a possibility of finding out whether there is or there is not something beyond time. Question: Is it possible to observe the psychological movement without thought, without the movement of thought? Krishnamurti: Look, I want to know myself, I want to know what I am, not according to any religion, according to any teacher, any philosopher, any analyst or psychologist. I want to know myself as I am, not as I should be. So I have to look at myself, I have to look at myself as I am without any interpretation, without saying that it is good, it is bad, it is ugly, I must change, I must not change. I must look, I cannot change the sunset. I have to look, I cannot do anything about it. In the same way I have to watch myself, just observe. Now, is that observation a movement of thought? That is, can thought look at the movement which thought has created - which is the "me"? The "me" is a bundle of memories, conditioned, put together through time, through experience, through knowledge; that "me" is the result of time, is the result of thought, whether that "me" is the super "me", the super - Atman moved to a higher level. All that is the "me", the "I", the ego, the self-centred activity. Now, can that be observed by thought, by the movement of thought, that which it has created? You understand the question? Look, Sir, put it differently. I am all this bundle, collected through centuries upon centuries, which does not mean reincarnation. It has been collected through environment, through race, through knowledge, through time - evolved. Now that "me" is the observer, the censor, who says, "This is right, that is wrong, this should be done, this should not be done." That observer looks and what he looks at is the psychological movement of which he is a part. I don't know if you understand this. Look, Sir, let us put it this way - one is envious. You know what it is to be envious - comparing yourself with somebody who has got more - that is envy. Now, there is that response which is verbalized, named as envy. At the moment of that response, when you are envious, there is no observer at all, there is only a state of envy. A few seconds later the observer comes along - which is the thinker - and says, "I should not be greedy", or gives explanations, reasons why he should not be greedy. So he separates himself from greed, so he becomes the censor, the observer, and then controls or suppresses or goes beyond the greed. So there is the observer and the observed. In that there is division; and that division is the source of all conflict, not only outwardly but inwardly. Now, is there an observation without the observer? There is that palm tree. Can you look at it without the observer, the observer who names that as a palm tree - the observer of likes and dislikes -can you just look without the observer? You may be able to look at that palm tree objectively because it does not affect you. But can you look at your wife, at your husband, the man who insulted you, without the censor, just observe, without the past records? If you can so observe, then that observation is not the movement of thought. Question: When you used the words "modern society is corrupt", your own mind has come to the conclusion and therefore it presupposes that society is corrupt. You have no right to make such an opinion. Krishnamurti: Sir, I do not think it is an opinion, I do not think it is a conclusion. You observe this. You observe how man is confused, you observe the division in the world, you observe the division between the communist and the capitalist, between the Catholic and the Protestant, the Hindu, the Muslim - you know the division. And this division does breed conflict, and that saying that division brings conflict is not a conclusion, it is a fact, as factual as this microphone is there. You have had two wars between the Muslim and Hindu. That is a fact. Division breeds antagonism, resistance, fight, conflict and when you observe this you say that division brings conflict. That is not a conclusion. You are merely stating a fact. Question: Why do you talk at all? Krishnamurti: I see, why do I talk at all? I really do not know. Sir, do you ask a flower, "Why do you flower?" Do not clap. Sir, do listen to it. This is not being clever. When you see something beautiful, do you say, "Why are you beautiful?" One talks generally with a motive, either to convert, or by addressing a large audience like this, one derives a great encouragement or terrible importance or derives from talking, a great deal of energy, as the politicians do. If there is a motive for talking, then you know it is exploitation. I have no motive for talking. If you want, listen; if you don't, don't. You neither encourage the speaker nor discourage. Take it or leave it. It is your life, your misery, your sorrow that we are concerned with and if you don't want to end your sorrow, your confusion, your agony, your torture of life, don't listen. Nobody is asking you to listen, forcing you to listen. This is not propaganda. We are concerned with changing "what is; and as you don't ask a flower why it blooms, don't ask the speaker why he speaks. Question: Would you please talk or explain why there is so much difficulty in communication between individuals? Krishnamurti: Sir, we are not individuals at all. We think we are individuals - that is merely a word, which has very little meaning. When you examine that word in the dictionary, not the opinion or theory of what an individual should be, you will find that it derives from the Latin word "indivisible" - not capable of being divided, broken up. How can two human beings who are broken up in themselves communicate with each other, to "communicate" being to care, to co-operate, to work, to create together? There is a possibility of communication when both human beings share a common problem and are deeply concerned with the solution or the understanding of that problem. When you are deeply concerned, you can commune both verbally and non-verbally; but if one human being has certain opinions, conclusions, ideas and the other has opposing ideas, how can there be communication between the two? If you are a Hindu and I am a Muslim, how can we communicate? There is a possibility of communion only when you and I are both free of our petty little ambitions and tyrannies, that means when we are really individuals, indivisible. Then communion is possible. That means, when there is love between us - not opinion, not conclusions -when we really care dispassionately, intensely, then there is a possibility of communing with each other. Question: How do you bring about order when there is so much disorder? How do you bring about an attitude which is indivisible, an attitude that is not broken up Krishnamurti: First of all, do we know that we live a disorderly life? Do you know that you live a disorderly life, a contradictory life, a public life and a private life, wanting this and wanting that, having ideals there and living a life without any meaning or relation to the ideal? You have the ideal of non-violence, and actually you are living a violent life. So this contradiction, this dual existence brings conflict, that is, disorder. Are you aware of your life as disorder? Look at it, Sir, look at your own life and find out. You think one thing, say another, do another. This hypocritical existence, that is, having an ideal and living something entirely different from that ideal - that leads to hypocrisy, and that is disorder, isn't it? You see how silent you are? And you say, "You have just a theory." just listen to find out for yourself the truth of what is being said, or the falseness of what is being said. Find out, become aware of your disorder, the disorder of your life, not only outwardly but inwardly, and what has brought about this disorder - the cause. Now when you say, "What has brought about this disorder," you are looking for a cause, aren't you? To analyse and to find out what the cause is takes time, doesn't it? I am in disorder and I want to find out how this has come into being. I know I can easily, very quickly find out the "why" of my culture, the society, the family, the tradition, the racial factors and all that - these are all the causes, the deeper causes. Now to examine all the causes which have brought about this disorder requires time, requires days, doesn't it? Do you see that, Sir? Now while you are examining, taking time to find out the cause, your life is still in disorder. So there is disorder and it is a waste of time, waste of energy, to find out what has brought this about. What you can do is to observe that disorder, observe without trying to bring about order, without saying to yourself "I must bring order or I must suppress this disorder." just observe it, as you have observed that sunset, and you cannot do anything about that sunset. In the same way, observe that disorder without any choice, be aware of the disorder; and you will see that you are really aware of it. Then out of that awareness comes an order, which is an extraordinary living thing. That order is not according to blueprint, it is not a mechanical order. Therefore, look at this disorder, listen to it, observe it in yourself, and the observer is the cause of disorder, the observer is part of that disorder. Therefore you must look without the observer, and then you will see what comes out of it. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 10 1ST PUBLIC TALK BANGALORE 30TH JANUARY 1971 We have so many problems, such complex issues, that in order to understand them completely, one has to take a journey over the whole earth, see the various cultures objectively, sanely, rationally, and consider seriously the many conflicts: what actually is going on in the world, not only in the far world but also in this country. We must see actually, not theoretically, what is going on. We must see these conflicts as they are, not through the eyes of a Hindu, a communist or an extreme Maoist, we must be able to observe very clearly facts, not ideals, not what you think should be or what ought to be, but actually what is going on. One has to observe what is happening in the world, the division, the conflict, the injustice, the wars, the national, linguistic, religious divisions, violence and immense sorrow. This is a fact, this one can observe, how religions have divided people, as the Hindu with his beliefs, the Christian with his doctrines, the Muslims with their faith. One can observe how religions, which are organized beliefs, propaganda, with their rituals, with their sacred books, with their teachers and saviours, have separated and brought about fragmentation in the human mind. Then there is division of nationality, the Indian, the Pakistani, the German, the Russian, Vietnamese, and so on; and there is the revolt of the young against the established order. In this country it has not taken a very violent form, but in other countries it is rampant there is a great deal of social injustice in this country, there is poverty, there is brutality, violence. And when we observe all this rationally, without any prejudice. without coming to any conclusion, but just observing it, we see very clearly that human beings have created this monstrous, decadent, corrupt society, not only in this country but in the rest of the world. That again is a fact. You are the world, the world is you. You are the society, the culture in which you have been born and brought up. That culture, that society is the result of your efforts, of your greed, your brutality, your violence. So you are the world, you are the community, you are the society, the culture. Do please realize that in this country where there is so much corruption, disorder, callousness, brutality, total indifference, you are responsible, each one, because you are India. You have brought about, put together through time the social structure with its divisions, you have put together the religions, the beliefs, the innumerable gods, and you have built this society. So the world is you and you are the world. Do realize this deeply, feel it with your heart, not with your petty little, cunning, insensitive mind, because that is the fact, and that fact is not a theory, is not an idea. The explanation is not the explained, the description is not what is described. To bring about a vast, radical revolution - and that radical revolution is necessary not merely outwardly but in oneself unless you change, unless you cease completely to be a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Christian a Communist, merely bringing about a superficial reformation - altering a few patterns here and there, is not going to bring about peace to man at all. So it is your responsibility: it is the way you lead your life, the way you think, your activity, your daily corrupting ways, unless there is a psychological, inward revolution in that, there is no possibility of really deep, profound, social changes. One may, as one observes again, see what is happening -violence: though every religion has said, "Do not kill", "don't go to war", "don't hurt another", "be kind, generous, be tender, open your heart to another". The books have said it, but they have had no value at all. What is relevant is what you are. The world, the community, the society, the culture in which you have been brought up, are built through time by man. You are the result of that, and to bring about a change in the outward structure of the established, corrupt order, you must change yourself inwardly, completely. This is a logical, sane, observable fact. Violence is considered as a means of changing society. It appears that through violence a quick change can be brought and therefore violence in certain parts of the world, as in this country, is justified. One can see that violence may bring about a superficial change in the social order, but that revolution, physical revolution, either invariably ends in dictatorship or bureaucracy or chaos, which in turn brings about tyranny. Again that is an observable fact. So a man who is aware of all these facts takes only one resolution, which is that he, as a human being, who is the result of time, result of his environment, to bring about a change, must himself radically, deeply change. So the question is, can this inward revolution, this psychological mutation actually take place now, and not in some distant future? We are going to investigate and see if there is a possibility of a total change in the very brain structure itself; and for this one must share together the investigation, the enquiry. Communication means sharing together, thinking together, learning together, not agreeing or disagreeing. Both of us, both you and the speaker have to take the journey together. And communication means having something common between you and the speaker. That communication is not merely verbal. Of course, there must be a verbal understanding, that is, you understand English and the speaker understands English. But communication also means sharing, and you cannot possibly share if you remain with your particular prejudices, beliefs, dogmas, conclusions. So we are taking a journey together into the very complex problem of existence. We are going to enquire into human relationship. We are going to examine together this whole question of violence, understand together fear, pleasure, whether sorrow can ever end, what it means to love and what it means to die, and the beauty and truth of meditation, the quality of a mind that is truly religious. A mind that is crowded with the authority of others' experience is not a religious mind. A mind that is filled with the knowledge of what others have said is not a religious mind. The mind with beliefs, the mind that has dogmas, conclusions, that plays with rituals, is not a religious mind. Part of investigation together is to listen together; but you cannot possibly listen if you are comparing what is being said with what you already know; you cannot possibly listen if you are agreeing or disagreeing. If you are merely listening to the words and not relating the words to the fact of yourself and if you are listening with your conclusions, with your hopes, with your problems, with your sorrows, with your agonies, then you are not listening. Only by listening together shall we be able to solve all our problems completely, totally. So the mind that is capable of listening, not only to what the speaker is saying but also listening to the reactions, to the responses, to your own mutterings, will then share it, together. We are going to understand these immense, complex human problems, not how to change your government or how immediately to feed the poor, not how immediately to stop this appalling callousness and corruption, but by seeing the totality of the problem. Life is not only going to the office but understanding yourself, your wife, your family, understanding this extraordinary thing called sex and human conflict, both within and without. It is understanding together whether it is at all possible to live at peace in this world, not in retirement, not by becoming a monk or a sannyasi, but how to live in this marvellous world which is ours. No book can teach you about yourself, no Gita, no Upanishad, none of the professors, philosophers can teach you about yourself. What they can teach you is what they think you are or what they think you should be, that is, their opinion, which is not yours. You have for centuries upon centuries accepted the authority of others, of your guru, or your tradition, what other people have said and that is why you have no energy, that is why you are so dull, insensitive, that is why you are secondhand human beings. So we are going to observe together what actually we have become, not what we should be, because there is no ideal, there is no goal, there is no purpose, but only "what is". If you have a goal, a purpose, an end, you are not capable of seeing actually what is going on. When you have an ideal of what you should be or what you should become, or what you must be, then you create conflict between what you are and what you should be. It leads to hypocrisy and those who have ideals become hypocrites. You are hypocrites because you say one thing, do another, think another, and you talk everlastingly about ideals. So you have to put away from your mind totally this dualistic attitude of what you are and what you should be. The very essence of conflict is the division between the observer and the observed. A man who is concerned with truth has no ideals; for truth is in "what is" and going beyond it. So we must understand "what is", what we are. What are we? What are you: Not according to any book, any authority, or any psychologist. If you say what you are according to them, you are repeating what they say, but you are not learning, you are not observing yourself. When you do observe yourself, when you are aware of yourself, you see that man throughout the world is caught up in pleasure and in fear. You can observe that our religious, social structure and morality are all based on pleasure and fear. The fact is you are greedy, envious, acquisitive, fearful, ambitious, with an occasional flair of what you call love. One has to understand basically these two issues, fear and pleasure. To understand means to be free, to be free to look, to observe what pleasure means, where it has led us, what is involved in it, how it has brought about the extraordinary division between the observer and the observed, the division into religions, into nationalities and so on, and to observe the fragmentation which has been brought about through pleasure. And also one must understand deeply, not verbally, not theoretically, the whole complex question of fear. Where a mind is afraid, it cannot possibly see what truth is. It lives in darkness. Haven't you noticed for yourselves when you are afraid of your neighbour, of your government, of your wife, husband or the policeman, how dull your mind becomes, how incapable of thinking rationally the mind becomes? So, to understand fear and pleasure, one has to observe it in oneself. We are together going to investigate these two issues upon which all our actions are based. They may be superficial actions, hidden actions, conscious or unconscious actions but all our motives are based on these two fundamental principles of pleasure and fear. When you say you are seeking truth, what you are seeking is the permanent establishment of the thing you call pleasure. Observe it in your own life when the mind is frightened. Fear divides people. It makes people violent, disorderly. They may discipline themselves endlessly, but if there is fear, there is distortion, there is corruption, there is violence, there is mischief. The house is burning - not your particular little house - but the fire is in the world. There is destruction in the world, there is murder, chaos, and that house is burning. So, when we are really profoundly serious, we are not concerned with how to avoid fear, run away from fear, suppress fear or overcome fear; not how to further pleasure or expand pleasure but understand them. To understand them you need a sensitive, observing, delicate mind, capable of looking; not coming to any conclusions, because a mind that has conclusions cannot function sanely. Why has pleasure become so extraordinarily important? You know it expresses itself in so many subtle ways: self-importance, prestige, fame, success, knowledge, erudition, all that lies along the path of pleasure. Though you may go to temples and hear all the temple bells ringing, what you really worship is pleasure and money. What is fear? Fear doesn't exist by itself. It exists in relation to something, to public opinion, what people might say about you. There is fear of death, there is fear of the unknown, there is fear of the known, fear of insecurity, fear of losing a job, fear of your wife who may do something which you oppose. Fear breeds violence. In a country that is becoming overpopulated, with every year more and more millions added, naturally there must be a growth of fear because of unemployment, lack of food, the insoluble poverty, the corrupt government. When you see all this, you are bound to be afraid not only for your own security but also for the security of the coming generations, your sons and your daughters. Somebody has hurt you and there is again fear in that hurt, and fear breeds violence. So unless you are really free of fear, you are bound to create chaos in the world, and fear cannot be suppressed by an ideal, by the ideal of courage. You are afraid, and you have an idea that by developing courage you can get rid of fear, which is avoiding "what is", and hoping through courage to get rid of fear. So you have an ideal that acts as an impediment to the understanding of "what is". You as a human being are violent, aggressive. That is a fact and specially in this country for the last centuries upon centuries, you have had the ideal of non-violence. You are pursuing the ideal and in the meantime you are sowing the seeds of violence. You say, "I am trying to be non-violent; I'll one day achieve a state in which there is non-violence, and therefore become a hypocrite. All idealists are essentially hypocrites. We are not dealing with the ideal of courage or how to get rid of fear or how to suppress it, but how to understand it. The moment you understand something, you are free of it. Freedom does not come through ideals. Freedom and the beauty of freedom come when you understand actually "what is", when you really understand your own confusion, your own callousness, your own brutality. Out of that awareness, with care, with real attention, comes the beauty of that freedom. So, what we need to do is to observe and learn and be aware of our own fear. We can only do that when it occurs; perhaps we can take a thing like attachment and observe. You are all attached to your family, to your jobs, to your conclusions, aren't you? Watch what you are attached to, may be your wife, may be your children, or the things you have invented as gods. When you are attached to something, in that there is the desire to dominate, to hold, to possess, either the wife, the husband, the child, or an opinion or a judgement. So where there is attachment, there must be uncertainty. The attachment may die, or the person to whom you are attached may turn to another and there will be jealousy. Where there is attachment there must be fear. And being attached you say, "I must get detached", and you pursue detachment, and then you ask yourself, "how am I to be detached?" Then that becomes a problem. They will tell you, don't do this, do that, meditate and gradually get detached, become a saint. Whereas, if you understood, observed the implications of attachment, you would see that there is fear. But instead of understanding fear, you cultivate detachment, which is deadly. When you cultivate detachment what takes place? You become callous, you become indifferent, you withdraw, you resist. You never look at the beauty of a tree or the sky or the lovely sunset because all that means attachment. So by your philosophy by your detachment you have become an ugly human being. Look at your fear yourself, learn about it, the fact, not the cause of fear. What is fear? One is afraid of death. Let us take that as an instance. What is that fear of suddenly coming to an end, suddenly getting detached from your moorings. What causes fear? What is the process of fear? You had physical pain last year. You think about that pain, hoping that it won't come back again. Thinking about a past event, which has caused physical pain, results in not wanting it now or tomorrow. So thought is responsible for the continuity of fear. I have done something wrong. It happened, let us say, yesterday or two weeks ago, and I am afraid that you might get to know it, So thought - thinking about the pain and thinking about what has happened - gives a continuity to fear. It is not a question of how to end fear but what gives continuity to fear. What happened two weeks ago is over, but the brain has recorded that pain, and thinking about it, is afraid that it might happen again. One can easily observe and learn without being a specialist or a psychologist that thought, which is the response of memory, of an incident, physical or psychological, is recorded in the brain cells. The brain cells hold this memory and therefore the brain cells say, "Be careful, do not have pain any more." Thought does not want it; therefore thought breeds fear. Now what is pleasure? You see a beautiful tree or a lovely sunset with marvellous colours. You see on that pond the light of an evening or the morning, the beauty of it, the stillness of it, the extraordinary depth of light and shade - it happens, you are there -and you say how marvellous it is. The brain cells have recorded it, and the thought says, "I wish I could have that experience again tomorrow, it was so lovely, so beautiful, so enchanting." Thought gives continuity to an incident of a sunset and wants it repeated. Yesterday you had sexual pleasure. That has been recorded and thought goes over it, thinks about it, chews the cud, builds images and thought says I must have it again. So thought breeds fear, and thought gives continuity to pleasure. You must not have detachment from pleasure, not desirelessness. If you are seeking desirelessness as a way to truth, then you have a mind that is tortured, fighting your own instincts, your own demands, your own longings. Your mind becomes twisted, and a mind that is twisted cannot possibly see what truth is. Then one asks what the function of thought is, knowing that fear and pleasure are the two sides of the same coin. What is thinking? Surely, thinking is a response of your collected experience, which is knowledge. If you had no knowledge at all, you could not think. If you had no knowledge of your name, or of language, you couldn't speak, you would be in a state of amnesia. So thinking is the response of collected memory, both of the particular human being and collective human beings, the tradition, accumulated knowledge from which every thought is a response. Then what is the function of thinking or thought? You must have knowledge: scientific, psychological, human knowledge, knowledge that is the accumulated experience of man, science, the experience of using words, how to play a piano and so on. You must have complete knowledge, you cannot do without technical knowledge. And you also see what knowledge has done. You have accumulated knowledge as an as an experience of the thing that happened yesterday. You want that experience repeated and it may not happen, therefore there is pain. Knowledge is necessary in one direction, and knowledge breeds fear and pain in the other. When you had that experience of sunset yesterday, it was new, fresh, full of joy, something incredible. The light, the texture, the feel of it that has been recorded, that has become knowledge, and therefore, that is already old. The old says "I must have new experience", and the new experience is translated in terms of pleasure. So you see what thought does, that thought must function logically, sanely, effectively, objectively, in the technological world, and you also see the danger of thought. The question arises: what is the entity that holds the thought, the thought as pleasure, as pain? What is it that holds this memory as a centre from which it operates? Have you observed that there is in you an observer and the thing observed? The observer is the censor, is the accumulated knowledge as a Christian, as a Hindu, as a Communist, and so on. The observer is the centre, he is the ego, the "me". That "me", that ego, invents a super-ego, the atman, but it is still part of thought. So there is a duality in you as the observer and the observed, the "me" and the "you", we the Hindus and they, the Muslims. This division is the cause of all conflicts. The observer is the holder of all memory from which all thought aries, so thought is never new. It is never free. It can think or invent freedom. How does one observe without the observer, the observer being the past, the observer being the image? You have built up an image about your wife or husband through time - forty or ten years or one month or one day - that image has been built up. The image-maker is the observer, and we are asking, whether you can observe your wife, the tree, or the husband, without the image, without the observed. To find that out, you must find out the machinery of image-building. What is it that creates images? If you understand that, you will never create an image and you can observe the observer. We are asking whether the image-maker, the machinery of this image-making, can ever come to an end. I will show you how it comes to an end. First of all, you have to enquire what is awareness, what it is to be aware, aware of the trees, of your neighbour, of the shape of the hall, aware of the colour of the various saris, shirts, aware outwardly and aware inwardly, to be aware choicelessly. You insult me, and at that moment of insult, if there is total awareness, there is no recording, I do not want to hit you back I do not want to call you a name, I am passively aware of the insult or the flattery and therefore there is no image-making. Next time somebody insults you or flatters you, be totally aware, then you will see that the old structure of the brain becomes quiet, doesn't instantly operate. The recording does not record, because you are totally aware. Please see this when you go out next time, look at a tree, just observe it, see the beauty of it, the branches of it, the strength of the trunk, the curve of the branch, the delicate leaves, the shape of it, without the image, the image being the previous knowledge of your having seen that tree. So you look at it without the observer, look at your wife or your husband, as though you are seeing her for the first time, that is, without the image. This seeing is true relationship, not the relationship between image and image. Therefore a mind that is capable of observing so clearly is capable of observing what truth is. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 11 2ND PUBLIC TALK BANGALORE 31ST JANUARY 1971 What is important is that we should radically change out lives,not according to any particular plan or ideology, or to fit into some kind of utopia. When we see how extraordinarily violent, brutal and laden with an enormous amount of sorrow the world is, it obviously becomes the responsibility of each one of us to change our lives, the ways of our thinking, the ways of our behaviour, the attitudes and the impulses that we have. We are going to talk over together what actually life is and what love is and what the meaning of death is and find out for ourselves what a religious life is and whether such a religious life is compatible with the modern world. We are also going to talk over together what time and space are, and what meditation is. There are so many things to talk over, and probably most of you have already acquired a great deal of knowledge about all these things, knowledge that others have given you, what your books, your gurus, your systems, your culture, have imposed upon you. That is not knowledge, that is merely a repetition of what other people have said, whether it is the greatest of teachers or your local guru.And in understanding daily life, we need not have any guru, any authority or teacher. All that we have to do is to observe, to be aware of what we are doing, what we are thinking, what our motives are, and whether it is at all possible totally to change our human ways, beliefs and despairs. So first let us see actually what our life is - our daily life- because if we do not understand it, if we do not bring order into it, if we merely slur over our daily activities, or escape into some ideology, or are just superficially be satisfied with things as they are, then we have no basis for a life, a way of thinking, a way of action, which will be right, which will be true. Order is virtue. Without order one must live in confusion and without understanding that order, which is virtue, all morality becomes superficial, merely influenced by the environment, by the culture in which one lives. One must find out for oneself what order is, whether this order is a pattern, a design, a thing that has been put together by man through various forms of compulsion, conformity and imitation, or whether order is a living thing and therefore can never possibly be made into a pattern, into a conformity. What is our daily living? One can see that in that living there is a great deal of confusion, there is a great deal of conformity and contradiction, with every man at another man, with a business world where you are ready to cut one another's throats. Politically, sociologically and morally there is a great deal of confusion; and when you look at your own life, you see that the moment you are born till you die, it is a series of conflicts. Life has become a battlefield. And not being able to understand it, or resolve it, or go beyond it, we escape from it into some ideology, into the ideology of ancient philosophers, ancient teachers, ancient wisdom and we think by escaping from the actual we have solved everything. And that is why philosophy, ideals, all the various forms of networks of escape, have not in any way resolved our problems. We are just as we were five thousand years ago or more, dull, repetitive, bitter angry, violent, aggressive, with an occasional flash of some beauty or happiness, and always frightened of that one thing which we call death. Our daily life has no beauty, because again our religious teachers, our books have said, "Do not have any desires, be desireless, do not look at a woman as you might be tempted, and to find God, truth, you must be celibate." But our daily life is contrary to all the sayings of the teachers. We are actually what we are: very petty, small, narrow-minded, frightened human beings. Without changing that, any amount of your seeking truth or talking valiantly or most scholarly or interpreting your Gita and the innumerable books has no value at all. So you might just as well throw away all the sacred books and start all over again, because with their interpreters, their teachers their gurus, they have not brought enlightenment to you. Their authority, their compulsive discipline, their sanctions have no meaning at all. So is it possible to change our lives? Our lives are in disorder, our lives are in fragmentation. We are one thing at the office, another while going to the temple, entirely different in the family, and in front of a big official you become a frightened, sycophantic human being. Without changing our daily life, our asking, what truth is, whether there is a God or not, has no meaning whatsoever. We are fragmented human beings - broken up - and till we are a total human entity, whole, complete. there is no possibility of coming upon that something which is timeless. So first we must look at our lives. That is, we must observe. Now what does that word "observe" mean? There is the sensory perception with the eye: you see this bougainvillaea. then as you observe that colour, you have an image, you make an image. You have already an image; you have a name for it. You like or dislike it, you have a preference through the image you see. So you do not actually see. We not only look at nature with the eyes that have accumulated knowledge about nature and therefore with an image, but we also look at human beings with our various forms of conclusions, opinions, judgements and values. So when you look, when you observe yourself, your life, you observe it through the image, through the conclusions that you have already formed. You say this is good or this is bad, or this should be and that should not be. You are not actually looking at life. So when you are doing that you are not directly in relationship with what you see. You see that you are looking with your past knowledge, with all the images, the tradition, the accumulation of all human experiences which prevents you from looking. This is a fact which must be realized that actually to observe your life you must look at it afresh, that is, look at it without any condemnation, without any ideal, without any desire to suppress it or change it, just observe. Are you doing this? Are you using the speaker as a mirror in which you are seeing your own life? And because you are seeing it with eyes of conclusions, it prevents you from looking at it directly, being in contact with it. Are you doing it? Look at the sky, look at that tree, look at the beauty of the light, look at the clouds with their curves, with their delicacy. If you look at them without any image, you have understood your own life. But you are looking at yourself, at your life as an observer and your life as something to be observed, there is a division between the observer and the observed. This division is the essence of all conflict, essence of all the struggle, pain, fear, despair. Where there is a division between human beings, division of nationalities, division of religion, social division, wherever there is a division, there must be conflict. There is Pakistan on one side and India on the other battling with each other. You are a Brahmin and another is a non-Brahmin, and there is hate, division. Now,that externalized division with all its conflict is the same as the inward division, as the observer the observed. A mind that is in conflict cannot possibly ever understand what truth is. A mind in conflict is a tortured mind, a twisted mind. How can it be free to observe the beauty of the earth or a child or a beautiful woman or man or the beauty of extreme sensitivity and all that is involved in it? Now, we are going to find out for ourselves - not from the speaker - whether it is possible to end this division between the observer and the observed. Are you following all this? Please, this is important if you are really to move any further. You are going to go into the question of what love is, what death is, what the beauty of truth is, what meditation is, and a mind that is completely and totally still; and to understand all this, one must begin with the ending of conflict, and this conflict exists wherever there is the observer and the observed. The next question is: what is this observer, the observer who has separated himself from the observed? We see that when we are angry, at the moment of anger, there is no observer. At the moment of experiencing anything there is no observer. When you look at a sunset, that sunset is something immense, when you look at it, there is no observer saying, "I am seeing the sunset." A second later comes the observer. Supposing you are angry, at the moment of anger there is no observer, no experiencer, there is only a state of anger. A second later comes the observer who says, "I should not have been angry", or "I was justified in getting angry". This is the beginning of division. How does this happen? Why, at the moment of experience, is there a total absence of the observer, and how does it happen that a second later the observer comes into being? When you look at this flower, at the moment you observe it closely, there is no observer, there is only a looking. Then you begin to name the flower. Then you say, "I wish I had it in my garden or in my house," then you have already begun to build an image about that flower. The image and the image-maker are the observer, and the observer is the past, the "me' as the observer is the past, the "me" is the knowledge which I have accumulated, the knowledge of pain, sorrow, agony, suffering, despair, loneliness, jealousy. The observer looks at that flower with the eyes of the past. You do not know how to look without the observer and therefore you bring about conflict. Now our question is, can you look not only at the flower but at your life, at your agony, at your despair, at your sorrow, without naming it, without saying to yourself, "I must go beyond it, I must suppress it"? Can you look at it without the observer? Take your particular form or particular tendency, or take what most people are: envious. You know what envy is. You are very familiar with that. Envy is comparison, the measurement of thought, a comparing of what you are with what you should be or what you would like to become. When you are envious of your neighbour -he has got a bigger car, a better house and all the rest of it - you certainly feel envy, that is, you compare yourself with him and envy him more. Now can you look at that feeling without saying it is right or wrong, without naming it? Can you look at it without an image? Then you go beyond it. Instead of struggling with envy and trying to suppress it, observe your anger, your envy, without naming it. The naming is the movement of the past memory while it justifies or condemns. If you can look at it without naming, then you will see you go beyond it. The moment you know the possibility of going beyond "what is", you are full of energy. The man who does not know how to go beyond "what is", because he does not know how to deal with it, is afraid, he wants to escape. Such a person loses energy. If you have a problem and you can solve it, then you have energy. A man who has a thousand problems and does not know what to do with them, loses his energy. So in the same way, look at your life, in which there is what you call love. What is love? We are not discussing the theories of what love should be. We are observing what we call love. Is love pleasure? Is love jealousy? Can a man who is ambitious, love? Can a man who is competitive love? - and you are all competitive. You want a better job, better position, better house, an image of yourself. Can you love when you go through all this tyranny, when you dominate your husband, your wife, your children? When you are seeking power, is there a possibility of love? In negating what is not love, there is love, You have to negate everything which is not love, that is, no ambition, no competition, no aggression, no violence either in speech, in act or in thought. When you negate that which is not love, then you know what love is. And love is something that is intense, that you feel strongly, love is not pleasure. Therefore one must understand pleasure, and not attempt to love somebody. When you see what your life is, there is no love in it, there is no beauty, there is no freedom, and actually how barren your life is, you ought to shed tears. This barren life is the result of your culture, of your sacred books, because they have said, "Do not look at the sky because there is beauty, and that beauty might be transferred to the woman. If you are to be a religious man, withdraw from the world, deny the world, the world is a Maya, an illusion, escape from it", and you have escaped from it because your life shows it. If you observe your life, you can find out for yourself what love is, because in that lies great passion. The root meaning of that word "passion" is sorrow. Do you know what it means to suffer, not how to escape from suffering, or what to do about suffering, but to suffer, to have great pain inwardly? When there is no movement of escape from that sorrow, out of that comes great passion, which is compassion. You must also find out what death is, not at the last minute, not when you are sick, unconscious, diseased, incapable of clarity -that happens to everybody: old age, disease and death - but while you are young, fresh, active, while you are going to an office every day returning to your particular little prison of a family. The organism could last longer, depending on the kind of life one leads. If one's life is a battlefield from the moment one is born till one dies, then one's body is worn out quicker. The heart goes through tension. This is an established fact. To find out what death is there must be no fear, and most of us are frightened of death, frightened of leaving the things that we have known, frightened of leaving our family, frightened of letting go the things that we have accumulated, of leaving our knowledge, our books. Not knowing what is going to happen when we die, the mind - that is thought -says there must be a different kind of life. Life must continue somehow, your individual life. Then you have the whole structure of belief - reincarnation. What is it that is to be reborn in the next life, all the accumulations of your knowledge, all your thoughts, all the activities, all the goodness or the evil or the ugly things that you have done? If you really believe in all this karma, then what matters is what you do now, how you behave now, because in your next life you are going to pay for it. So if you are really caught in the network of this belief, then you must pay complete attention to your life now. To find out what it means to die, not physically - that is inevitable but to die to everything that is known, to die to your family, to your attachment, to all the things that you have accumulated, the known pleasures, the known fears, every minute, will show you a mind made young, fresh, and therefore innocent. So there is incarnation of the next life the next day. To incarnate the next day is far more important than in the future. This will give you a mind that is astonishingly innocent. The word "innocence, means a mind that is incapable of being hurt. Therefore, a mind that is being hurt must die to the hurt every day, so that it comes the next morning with a fresh, clear, unspotted mind which has no scar. That is the way to live. A mind that is without effort - you have understood how effort comes into being when there is conflict, conflict between the observer and the observed - such a mind brings order. Order comes when you have understood what disorder is. When you understand it, not intellectually but actually, out of that comes order, and that order is virtue, that order is rectitude, that order is a living thing. A man who is vain tries-to become humble, to have humility. In that attempt to become humble there is a conflict, whereas if I face the fact that I am vain - and to understand that and go beyond it, there must be understanding of oneself completely - there must be this order which is not habit, which is not practice, which is not the cultivation of some virtue. Virtue comes into being like a flower of goodness, when you understand. Then you can begin to enquire what it is that man has sought throughout the centuries. He has been asking for it, trying to discover it. You cannot possibly understand it or come upon it if you have not laid the foundation in your daily life. And then we can ask what meditation is, not how to meditate or what steps to take to meditate, or what systems and methods to follow to meditate. All systems, all methods make the mind mechanical. If I follow a particular system, however carefully worked out by the greatest guru you can possibly imagine, that system, that method makes the mind mechanical, and a mechanical mind is a dead mind. "Tell me how to meditate", that is your first question, "because if you will tell me, I will practice it and do it day after day, I will get up early morning, and repeat, repeat." You know what kind of mind you will have at the end of a year - a dull, stupid mind, a mind that can escape, that can hypnotize itself. And that is not meditation. Meditation is a marvellous thing, if you know the meaning of a mind that is "in meditation", and not "how to meditate". We will see what meditation is not, then we will know what meditation is. Through negation you come upon the positive, but if you pursue the positive, it leads you to a dead end. We say meditation is not the practice of any system. Machines can do that. So systems cannot reveal the beauty and the depth and the marvellous thing called meditation. Nor is meditation concentration. When you concentrate or attempt to concentrate, in that concentration there is the observer and the observed, there is the one who says, "I must concentrate, I must force myself to concentrate", and concentration becomes conflict. When you do learn to concentrate like a schoolboy, that concentration becomes a process of exclusion, a building of walls against thought and movement of thoughts. There must be complete self-knowledge. So there must be no system, no method, no concentration - and a mind that has understood all this through negation, such a mind then becomes naturally very quiet. In this, there is no observer who has achieved some kind of silence. In this silence there is the emptying of the mind of all the past. Unless you do this in your daily life, you won't understand the marvellous beauty, the subtlety of it. When the mind has complete order, mathematical order, and when that order has come into being naturally, through the understanding of the disorder in your daily life, then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet. This quiet has vast space, not the quiet of a little room. It is not the quiet or the silence of the ending of noise. A mind that has understood the whole problem of existence - love, death, living, beauty - when you have understood all this, then you will know what happens in that silence. Nobody can describe it. Anybody who describes it does not know what it is. It is for you to find out. It is right to ask questions. You must ask questions, not only of the speaker but of yourselves. It is far more important to ask yourselves why you believe, why you follow, why you accept authority, why you are corrupt, why you get angry, jealous. Question those, and find out the answer. Sirs, you have to stand alone, completely alone, which does not mean you become isolated. If you are alone, then you will know what it means to live purely. Therefore you must ask questions endlessly of yourselves. The more you ask yourselves, not find an answer but to ask and look, the more you understand. When you ask there must be care, love in your asking; and do not beat yourselves with questions. Question: When you say "The one who says he knows does not know", what do you mean by that? Must you not know yourself to say that? Krishnamurti: You have to find out what the word know, means, what is involved in the word "know". When you say "I know" my wife or my husband, what do you mean by that word? Do you know her, or do you know him, or do you know the image that you have about her? The image you have about her is the past. So to know is to know something that is over, something that is gone, something that you have experienced. Now when you say "I know", you are looking at the present with the knowledge of the past. Now I want to know myself, understand myself, myself which is a very living thing. It is not a static thing, it is changing all the time, adding, subtracting, taking on, putting off......I must come to it each time as though I am learning about it for the first time. I look at myself, and in looking at myself I find I am ugly, or extraordinarily sensitive, or this or that. And translating what I am looking at becomes the knowledge, and with that knowledge I look at myself next minute. So what I see will not be fresh, it will be with the eyes of the known. So to learn about myself there must be the ending of knowing myself each time, so that each time I am learning, there is a learning about myself afresh. Now the one who says he knows does not know. Have you understood now? The man who says, "I have experienced God; I know what it means to be enlightened", means simply, "I know the way to the station", because the station is a fixed place. There are many paths to the station, there are many gurus for each path and they all say, "We know, we have experienced" - which means what? They have known something, and hold on to something that has been experienced, dead. There is no path to truth, because truth is a living thing, it is not a fixed, static, dead thing. Like you, Sir, what are you? Are you static? Aren't you changing every day, for worse or better? So I can never say I know you. It is a most stupid form of saying "I know". It is a kind of consolation, it is a kind of security for myself. When you understand this one question completely, you have understood so many things. So distrust any man who says "I know", any man who says, "I will lead you to enlighten- ment; do these things and you will achieve." Have nothing to do with such people, they are dead people, because they are living in the past, with things they do not know - enlightenment, truth. Truth is a timeless state, you cannot come by it through time. Knowledge is time. So, as we said, die to every knowledge that you have every day. Die, and be fresh next morning. Such a mind never says "I know", because it is always flowering, it is always new. Question: You do not want us to read Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the great epics. What is wrong with them? Why are you so hostile towards our great saints? Krishnamurti: First of all, I do not know your great saints. I do not want to know them. I do not see the point of knowing them. They are probably conditioned by their culture, by their society, by the religion they are born in. If I want to know, I want to learn about myself, not about them. A Christian saint is not accepted here as a saint. Will you as a Hindu, accept a Christian saint as your saint? Of course not. Your saints are conditioned by the culture in which they have lived. I am not hostile to them. I am just stating facts. They are tortured human beings, they detach themselves, or they are tremendously devoted to God (whatever that word may mean), to their visions, to their own ideas, to their own culture which has brought them to believe in God. If they were born in Communist Russia, they won't believe. There they would be no saints, they will be Marxists. Now, Sir, I do not read Mahabharata, Ramayana and Gita, I do not read these books. Why do you read them? Do you read them for literature, for the beauty of the language, or do you read them as sacred thing, to be read in order to achieve Nirvana or heaven or whatever it is? Why do you read them? Question: Mahatma Gandhi read the Gita, and he was a great man. Krishnamurti: The gentleman says Mahatma Gandhi, and the greatest men have read the Gita, and so on. I do not know why you call them great. Because they have read the Gita? You call them great because they fit into your pattern. Question: No, for the love of mankind. Krishnamurti: For the love of mankind? They loved mankind and therefore you love them? Which means you love mankind? No, Sir, be honest about all these things. If you read the book of yourself - you understand, Sir? - the book of yourself, that is far more important than any other book, because your book, the book which is you, contains the whole of mankind - all the agonies it has been through, the misery, the love, the pain, the joy, the suffering, the anxiety. There is a book in you, and you go and waste your time reading somebody else's book. And that you call love of mankind. Question: What is the reason for the grievances that sex has brought to the world in spite of the fact that it is the greatest energy of man. Krishnamurti: Have you noticed throughout the world, and therefore in your own life, how sex has become extraordinarily important? Have you noticed it? You are all very strangely silent. Talk about Ramayana and Gita, and you burst with energy. Talk about your daily life, you subside. Why has sex - the act, the pleasure - why has that become such a colossal thing in your life? -not only in your life but the life of everybody? In the west they put it out, open. Here they all hide it, they are ashamed of it. You are embarrassed, you are shy, you are nervous, guilty - which all shows that it has become tremendously important in your life. Why? Intellectually you have no energy, because you repeat what others have said, you are prisoners to theories, to speculations, and therefore you have no capacity to reason, to observe. You have got mechanical minds, you go to schools where you mug up facts and repeat the facts. And your life, the daily life, going to the office day after day is a mechanical life. So there is no intellectual freedom; and freedom means energy, vitality, intensity, because that gives you a tremendous energy. And that you deny totally because you accept authority, not only the authority of the professor but the authority of your spiritual leaders, and they are not spiritual when they become your leaders. So you are not free intellectually; and emotionally you are sentimental, devoted to some god, some person. That does not give you energy, because in that there is fear. Energy comes only when you completely lose yourself, when there is total absence of yourself, and that takes place when you have sex. For a second everything ends. And you have the pleasure of it. Then thought picks it up, images - wanting it more and more - repetition. Therefore, that becomes the extraordinarily important factor in your life, because you have nothing else. You are confused, miserable, unhappy human beings. You are not intense, you have no passion, intellectually, to stand alone, to see clearly and stand by it. You are frightened; and what have you left? - sex. All your religions say do not have sex. So you battle. "To find God you must not have sex." And you try not to be sexual. Full of sex, you battle with yourself. The more you battle, the more important it becomes. So you see your life, what it is. You have no love, but pleasure. And when you have pleasure, you are frightened of losing it. Therefore, you are never free, though you may write volumes about freedom. So, when you understand all this - not intellectually, but daily in your life - you will see what you have reduced mankind to through your Mahabharatas, Gitas and gurus. You will see that you have reduced yourself to a mechanical entity, an unhappy, shoddy little entity; and with this little mind you want to capture the vast timeless space of truth. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 12 1ST PUBLIC TALK BOMBAY 7TH FEBRUARY 1971 I think one should have a good look at not only what is going on in the world, but also more rigorously look at ourselves. To look clearly without any distortion, there must be a quality of perception, a quality of mind that sees, not resisting, not prejudiced, not caught in any particular formula, but which merely observes. And in perceiving "what is" actually, not theoretically, we shall come upon what is truth. Therefore it is very important to understand the word "perception", the seeing, because we are going to go into the very complex problem of living, not merely outwardly but inwardly, and one must be very capable of looking at exactly what is going on. To perceive "what is", is the basis of truth, and you cannot possibly perceive or see if you are bigoted, narrow, frightened, or belonging to any particular sect, group or community. So what we are going to do is together observe, together find out, not only how to bring about a radical revolution in ourselves and therefore in society, but also find out for ourselves a way of living in which there will be no conflict whatsoever. And to understand all this, to understand our sorrows, our confusion, our great many contradictory way of thought and activities, we have to look, we have to see exactly what is going on, not interpret it, not try to translate it, not try to escape from it, nor translate it according to our particular like and dislike, but observe and that is where it is going to be difficult - to see exactly what is going on. What we are going to talk about during these four meetings here, is not a question of agreement or disagreement. We are both of us, going to observe, understand together the immense problem of living, of existence, which is, understand together your life, your problems, the complex relationship between man and man, because without laying the right foundation in relationship, in our daily relationship with other human beings, without having a right basis, we cannot possibly go beyond. As men who are really serious, you must inevitably lay the foundation of understanding, of relationship between man and man, not based on an idea or conclusion or the authority of your scriptures or your gurus, but what you yourselves understand as the meaning and the significance of relationship. Now you know what is happening in the world, not only in the faraway world of America or Russia or China, but also near at home. There are wars, there are riots, there is despair, great sorrow, confusion, a fragmentation which is going on, fragmentation not only nationally, religiously but also inwardly in ourselves. If you observe yourself, you will see how contradictory you are. You say one thing, you think another, do something else. Nationally, you are divided: the Hindu and the Muslim, Pakistan and India, Germany, Russia and America. You know the division - political, national divisions with all their conflicts, with all their ambitions, competition. If you observe you will see there is the Catholic and Protestant, the Hindu and the Muslim, the Buddhist and somebody else. The world around us is broken up, fragmented socially, morally and ethically. Both outwardly and inwardly we are fragmented people, broken up. And when there is division of any kind, there must be conflict, as between Pakistan and India, the Hindu and the Muslim, between ourselves the observer and ourselves the observed, and between the thinker and the thought. So where there is division there must be conflict. And a mind in conflict must inevitably be distorted, and therefore it cannot possibly see clearly what truth is. So there is this fact that human beings right throughout the world have created a society, a culture, a morality that is no longer moral, a culture that is corrupt, a society that is disintegrating. Again this is a fact with which you can neither agree or disagree, because it is so. And you observe in this country what is going on: the decadence, the immorality of society, the various divisions -linguistic, tribal, religious. If you observe very closely and clearly, you see you have thousands of gurus, each having his system, his method to truth, to enlightenment, to bliss. If you observe closely again, you see how tradition has distorted your minds, how you accept the religious books as though they were complete truth. Now these are all facts: that there is a division, that the very fact that religion should bring people together has brought about division, separation, conflict, misery. Now seeing all this, not from the description of the speaker but actually seeing it in your own life, what can you do, what is the right action? There is this great sorrow, misery, poverty in the world. Seeing this, not only outwardly but inwardly, that inwardly we are contradictory, inwardly there is division, there is a struggle, what can one as a human being do? Because you are the world and the world is you. You are the result of your culture, of your society, of your religion; and the society, the culture which you have built, in that you have been nurtured, and therefore you are part of that, you are not separate from the culture, from the society, from the community. Again this is a fact - you or the majority of you probably believe in God. I do not know why, but you do. Because you have been brought up in a society, in a culture that believes in God; and if you are born in Russia or in a communist society, you would not believe in God. There you would be conditioned not to believe, as you are conditioned here to believe. You are following all this? So you are the result of the society in which you live and that society you have made, your grandfathers, the past generations have made it. So you, as a human being, facing all this, of which you are a part, you must inevitably ask what is one to do and what is the right action. First of all, can you as a human being follow what another says? You understand the question? We need a total change, a deep, psychological revolution, the inward revolution, without which you cannot possibly create a new society. You are really interested in being told what you should do. You are really interested in finding a safe path, because you have never exercised your own brain to find out how to live rightly. You repeat, and from now on if there is one thing that you can really do, it is never to repeat what you do not know, never to do anything that you do not understand but only what you yourself understand. You know what would happen to you? You would no longer be secondhand human beings. Then you would put aside all the gurus, all the religious books, you would never follow anybody. Because then you would be acting with facts, not with suppositions, not with formulas. Do try it, do it one day, never to repeat anything which you do not understand logically, sanely, never to do something that you yourself have not directly tested. Then you will see that you would be faced with actualities, not with ideals, not with formulas, not with conclusions, but actually with "what is, which is yourself. So when you see all this, how you a human being living in this country, supposed to be very spiritual because there are so many gurus, when you see all the contradictions in yourselves and in the world, when you observe in yourself the great sorrow that you have, the despair, the agony, the suffering, the loneliness, the utter lack of love, the callousness, the brutality, the violence, then you ask what are you to do. The question what to do is not important at all. What is important is how you observe these facts, how you look at these facts, how you as a human being look at this tremendously complex problem of existence, the complex society, the immorality of this present structure of society. You cannot act before you have understood, before you have seen. So first you must see, you must observe, you must perceive. Now, how do you perceive? If you look at the world as a Hindu, then you are not looking at the facts, but you are looking with the prejudice of a Hindu, therefore you are incapable of looking. Right? If I look at the world as a communist, I am only looking at the world from a particular point of view, from a particular conclusion. Therefore I am incapable of looking at this immense problem. If I am a Muslim and I look at this extraordinary thing called living from a particular narrow point of view as a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist, I cannot possibly see the extraordinary beauty of life with its complexity. So how do you look at this? Do you look at it from your traditional point of view or do you look at it as a scientist, as an engineer, or a follower of a particular sect, how do you look at it? You see the absurdity of being a Hindu. When the house is burning, the whole world is burning, you want to put the fire out as a Hindu or as a Muslim, Parsee, God knows what else. So what is most important before you say "What can I do as a human being with regard to this madness that exists in the world?" You must understand what it means to look, to look at the world. In looking at this whole problem of existence, you drop away all division, you are concerned with the understanding of the problem, not as a Hindu. You have understood? If you don't, you are going to remain a Hindu, a Parsee, a Buddhist, a follower of some guru, because in that way you maintain division; therefore you maintain conflict. Therefore, where there is conflict, there must be pain, suffering and in that there is no love. Right, is this clear? Verbally at least? That is, intellectually you may observe this fact, intellectually, verbally, you may say "I understand that division in any form must bring about misery", but intellectual comprehension does not do anything. Intellectually saying, "I agree with that or disagree with that" has no meaning, but to see the truth that any division must inevitably bring about conflict, if you really see it, then action follows. Then you are concerned to eliminate in yourself and in the society every form of division. Look, Sir, in you, when you observe yourself, there is the observer and the observed - isn't there? - you the censor and the thing that is condemned or justified. If you look at the world as an observer or look at yourself condemning, justifying, explaining, in that there is division, and therefore conflict, and therefore misery. So, is it possible to observe, to perceive without the observer? You understand my question? The observer, the thinker, the entity that perceives is the result of the past. You who observe your anger, your jealousy, your ambition, your desire to succeed, and all the rest of it, you who are struggling are the result of the past. The past is the observer, the me. Now, can you look without the observer, that is, without the past? When you are angry, at the moment of anger or jealousy or envy, at that precise moment there is no observer. The observer comes in a little later. Then he either condemns anger or accepts it. So the observer is the past, the observer is the censor. Now can you look at this vast field of life without the observer? Then only you will see the totality of life. Now I am going to show it to you. We will begin with the simplest thing. When you look at a tree, how do you look at it, how do you see it? You see it, not only with sensory perception, but also you see it with your mind. Your mind has created the image of the tree. You say, "That is a palm tree, that is a mango tree." So your knowledge of the tree, which is the past, interferes from looking at the tree. Right? This is very simple. Knowledge of the tree prevents you from looking at the tree. Looking at the tree means to be in contact with it, not identifying with the tree but to observe it completely and you cannot observe it completely if the past interferes. Do you see that? The next step is to observe yourself in relation with another. You can observe the tree very easily because it does not interfere with your happiness, with your desires, all the rest of it. It is purely a tree, objective. So if you do not understand how to look at a tree, without naming the tree, without the knowledge of the tree, the botanical knowledge - which is all the past - then you cannot possibly see the beauty, the truth, the wholeness of the tree. The next step is to look at your wife, your husband or your friend without the observer, that is, without the image that you have created about your wife or your friend. You are following all this? Because all this is going to lead to an action in which there is not a sense of contradiction, to an action that will be total, complete and unless you understand this, your action will inevitably be contradictory and therefore conflicting. So you have an image about your wife and she has an image about your friend and your friend has an image about you. That is obvious. Now, how are these images formed? What is the mechanism of this image-building? You have an image about your wife or your husband. That image has been built through many years or through one day. You have an image of your wife giving you sexual pleasures, the nagging, the brutality - you know all that goes on between husband and wife - the domination, the bullying, the irritation. You know much better than I do what goes on. How are these images formed? Please observe this within yourself, do not bother with the explanation that the speaker gives, but watch it in yourself, use the speaker as a mirror in which you are seeing yourself. The brain cells are recording all the time, every incident, every influence. It is a recording machine. When the wife nags you, it is recorded; when you demand something of her and she gets angry, that is recorded. So the brain is a machine that is recording all the time consciously. Right? You do not have to study biology or psychology or any scientific book if you can observe yourself. You have the marvellous book of yourself in which you can learn infinitely. So when you, through years or through days have recorded these memories, these memories are the images. She has her image and you have your image about her. The relationship between these two images is what you call husband and wife. Right? Therefore it is not relationship at all. Relationship means direct contact, direct perception, direct understanding, sharing together. See how the machinery comes into operation, that is, when you get angry with your wife or when she nags you, the image is formed immediately, and that image is stored up, gets stronger and stronger, and that image is the factor of division. Therefore there is conflict between you and her. Now, can this machinery, the building of the image come to an end, so that you are really in contact with the world, not through an idea? When there is an image about the world or about yourself or about your neighbour, your wife, there must be division. The image is not only anger and nagging, but formulas, concepts, beliefs. When you say, "I am an Indian", that is an image. That image divides when another person says, "I am a Muslim, I am a Pakistani." You follow? This image is not merely between two people but also between these formulas that have created these images. So you see that belief divides people. You believe in God, or you believe in reincarnation and somebody believes quite the opposite - which are all images. So images, formulas, concepts, beliefs, divide people. And that is the basic reason for conflict outwardly and inwardly. Do you understand this - not intellectually up here but in your heart? Then you will do something when it is real, when you see the truth of it, and beauty of it, then you will act entirely differently. So our question is, how are these images formed and can the image-building come to an end? I have shown you how they are formed, that the brain which has so many other faculties, which is capable of such extraordinary things - going to the moon, inventing extraordinary technological things - this very brain has the quality of recording every instinct, every hurt, every flattery, every nuance of every action. Now, can this recording take place without interfering with action? You have understood this question? See first the logic and you will see the beauty of it afterwards. You have insulted me or flattered me. The person who has insulted me, I have an image about that person, I do not like him; but the man who has flattered me, I like him, he is my friend, the image has been formed instantly. Now, can this forming of image come to an end instantly? Not afterwards, because once it is formed it is difficult to get rid of it. I am going to go into both: the prevention and the cure. First of all, the prevention, which is never to form an image about anything. When you insult me, at that moment, to be totally aware - you understand? So one must understand what it means to be totally attentive at the moment of insult, at the moment of flattery. What does it mean to be aware, to be aware of the colours of the various saris, dresses about you objectively, outwardly? When you are aware of blue, red or pink, whatever the colours are, and say, "I do not like it, I like it", you are limiting the awareness. To be aware without limitation of like or dislike, condemning or justifying, is to be aware without any motive, without any choice, so that you are aware of the whole thing. Right? Now when you are insulted or flattered, at that moment if you give complete attention, which is complete awareness, then you will see that there is no image forming at all. Because what takes place then? Attention means there is no observer at all, there is no censor who says "I like, I dislike." You are merely attentive. Right? Attention is not concentration - I won't go into the whole problem of concentration. When you are so attentive, in which there is no choice, in which there is no observer, then there is no image-making at all. Now, please just listen. Are you attentive totally to what is being said? Are you listening with complete attention, or are you listening partially? Or are you listening completely, with your heart, with your mind, with your nerve, with your whole organism, psychosomatically, completely? Then if you are so listening, you will see you have no image of the speaker at all. You understand? Now when the next time your wife or your friend says something pleasant or unpleasant, give complete attention to it, so prevent the image forming, because the mind then becomes free. Freedom means seeing things clearly, purely, without any distortion. It is only such a mind that can see the truth, not the images that you have built about truth. So that is one thing you can do instantly. Then what will you do with all the images. that you have collected about your country, about your leaders - political, religious - about your theories? You know how your mind is burdened with formulas, theories, opinions, judgments. What will you do about them? You see, you have not gone into it, you have not thought about any of these things at all. You will read the Gita, the Upanishads or repeat or go to some meetings where commentaries are made on the Gita and the Upanishads. just think of spending your lives on somebody else's words. Now what will you do with all the collection of images, beliefs, formulas, what will you do with them all? Because that is what you are, you understand? You are the formula. You think you are great or small, that you are the Atman, or this or that. So you are the past, you understand? The past is directing you, the past images, the past knowledge. So we come upon something very interesting, which is, all knowledge is the past, all technological knowledge is the knowledge of the past. That is a fact. What you know is the past, and the past projects, modified by the present into the future. So you, as an entity, are the past, the past being your memories, your traditions, your experiences. So you, the "me", the "I", the ego, the super-ego, the, super-self, the Atman is still the past. Now knowledge is the past, to which you can add or take away. All scientific knowledge, technological knowledge is the past. Of course you can add more to it, alter it, but the basis is the past. So the knowledge about yourself is the past. You are the past. Therefore being the past, there is division between the past, present and the future - what you have been, what you are, what you will be, all in terms of knowing, which means your God is already known, otherwise you would not have God. Do you see this? Knowledge is absolutely necessary, otherwise you could not go home, otherwise we could not talk English and understand each other. Knowledge is the past, and knowledge is the memory which the brain has accumulated through centuries, through experiences. So knowledge is necessary and knowledge also becomes an impediment in relationship, in relationship between human beings -you as a Christian, Buddhist, Hindu. You see the problem, the beauty of the problem, that you need knowledge, otherwise you could not function, and you also see how knowledge is the past -the image you have built - prevents relationship. So we are asking the question, how is it possible that knowledge is absolutely necessary and how is it possible that very knowledge, which the brain has accumulated through centuries, does not interfere with relationships? Because relationship is the most important thing. On that, all our social behaviour, society, morality, everything is based on relationship and there is no relationship if there is no image - which is knowledge. What will you do, knowing that you need knowledge, knowing that knowledge interferes with relationship? Now if you have come to this point - if you have followed it all along from the very beginning - you will see that your mind has become extraordinarily sensitive, and being sensitive, it has become intelligent. And it is that intelligence that will prevent the image interfering in the relationship, not your decision, not your saying, "I must, I must not." It is the understanding of this whole process, as we have gone into not verbally, not intellectually, but really understanding it with your heart, with your brain, with your whole capacity, that will make you see the truth of it. When you see the truth that knowledge is necessary and that knowledge interferes in relationship, because knowledge is the image, then the mind has become extraordinarily pliable, extraordinarily sensitive, and it is the sensitivity, which is the highest form of intelligence, which will prevent the interference of images as knowledge in relationship. Right, you have got it? Do get this, please, then you will see you will lead quite a different kind of life. Then you will banish away for ever the division that man has brought about between himself and another. So the whole problem of the past, which is knowledge, which is the accumulated experience, is absolutely necessary, and any other image, any other knowledge in relationship becomes totally irrelevant. Surely love is not an idea, love is not an image, love is not the cultivation of memory of a person whom you think you love. Love is something totally new, every minute, because it is not cultivable, it is not the result of effort, strain, conflict. Look, Sir, if you listen to what is being said attentively, that attention is love. Otherwise there must be a division in this attention, therefore that brings conflict. When there is love, there is no conflict, because love is not a structure of the image-builder. So a man who would live at peace with himself and with the world must understand this whole structure of knowledge, knowledge about himself and the world, knowledge which is the past, and a mind that lives in the past, is no mind at all. It is a dead, static mind. That is what has happened in this country. You are living on other people's experiences, and the Gita and the Upanishads and your guru are your destroyers. Please do see this, because you have not exercised that marvellous instrument which is the brain. And you use it technologically when you become an engineer, when you are fighting for a job, when you are cheating your neighbour in business, but refuse to use the brain in understanding human relationship, upon which all our social behaviour is based. Unless you do this with your heart, with your whole being, your seeking God, your wanting truth has no meaning whatsoever. You can go hunting after each guru and will never find truth, you will never come across it. For you must learn, you must have a mind that is sensitive, clear, objective, healthy, that has no fear. Do you want to ask any questions? It is rather late. Question: What is love? Krishnamurti: What is love? Love is not something to be described. Now Sir, do listen, do sit down two minutes and I will stop. You know you must ask questions not only of the speaker but of about yourself, which is much more important why you believe, why you have formulas, why you follow your guru, your books, your leaders, why you believe in God, why you have become so dull, find out why you have become callous, indifferent to everything, except your own personal vanity or acquisition of money. Unless you ask questions of yourselves and find the right answer for yourselves, asking the speaker questions has very little meaning. But when you ask the questions of the speaker, share the question with him, go into it. Then whatever understanding comes is not your understanding, it is understanding, not personal understanding. Intelligence is not personal, and that is the beauty of intelligence. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 13 2ND PUBLIC TALK BOMBAY 10TH FEBRUARY 1971 THERE are several things we should talk over together. One of the things is freedom, It is really a very important subject and needs a great deal of exploration, a great deal of enquiry to find out whether the mind can ever be free or is always time-bound. Is it possible for the mind, living in this world, functioning as it should with all the daily problems - with the many conflicting desires, opposing elements, influences,and various contradictions that one lives in, with all the tortures, with passing joys - whether such a mind can ever be free, not only superficially but profoundly, at the very root of its existence. And so we have asked this question, whether man living in this extraordinarily.complex society, where he has to earn a livelihood, perhaps have a family, live in competition and acquisition" whether he can go beyond all that, not into abstraction, not into an idea or formula or a concept of freedom, but actually be free. "Freedom from" is an abstraction, but freedom is in observing "what is" and going beyond it. Do not look puzzled. But first, if I may suggest, just listen, not accepting or denying, just have the sensitivity to listen, and not draw any conclusion or assume any defensive reaction or resist or translate what we are saying into your own, particular language. You listen as you listen to those crows - noisy, flying about, trying to find a tree for the night where they will be unmolested, and be quiet - you listen to them, and you cannot do anything about it, you cannot ask them to stop calling to each other. You just listen. But if you resist the noises they make, that very resistance denies the freedom to listen to the crows. And if you resist, because you say, "I want to listen to what is being said and they are making an awful lot of noise", that very resistance is an act that prevents you from listening and therefore denies the freedom to listen. Now, if you will, listen, not just merely to the words or the meaning of the words only, but try to comprehend the whole meaning, the inwardness of this word "freedom". That is, we are together going to share this question, travel together, investigate together, understand together, what this freedom implies, whether a mind - that is your mind - that has been nurtured in time, a brain that has evolved through time, that has accumulated thousands of experiences, that has been conditioned in various cultures, whether such a mind can be free, not in some utopian, religious sense of freedom, but actually living in this confused, contradictory world. We are going to ask whether this mind, your mind, as you know it, as you have observed it, whether it can ever be completely, both on the surface and deep inwardly, free. Because if we do not answer this question for ourselves, we shall always be living in the prison of time, time being the past, time being thought, time being sorrow. Therefore unless we really see the truth of this, we shall always live in conflict, in sorrow, in the prison of thought. I do not know how you regard this question, not what your religious teachers have said, not the Gita, the Upanishads, your gurus, your social structure, your economic condition, but what you think, what you say, which is far more important than all the books put together. It means that you yourself have to find the truth of this. And never repeat what others have said but first find out for yourself, test it out for yourself, testing what you think, what you see, not test what others have said. Therefore you are free from authority. Right? As I said, please listen. As you are listening, act, that is, as you listen, see the truth of it. We have to rely on scientific knowledge, other people's experiments, other people's accumulation of mathematical, geographical, scientific, biological knowledge. That is inevitable. If you would become an engineer, you have to have the accumulated knowledge of those who have gathered knowledge about mathematics, structure, strain and so on. But if you would find out for yourself what truth is - if there is such a thing - you cannot possibly accept the accumulated knowledge of what others have said, which is what you have done. You are full of knowledge of the Gita, the Upanishads. What matters is what you think, how you live. And to find out how you live, how you act, what you do, you have to discard totally all the experts' knowledge, the professionals who have given you instructions on how you should live. Please do understand this. Freedom is not permissiveness. Freedom is necessary for the human mind, so that it can function healthily, normally, sanely. As I said, freedom from something - like freedom from anger, freedom from jealousy, freedom from aggression - is an abstraction and therefore not real. A man who says to himself, "I must be free from anger or from jealousy", is not free; but the man who says, "I must observe the fact of anger, actually what it is and learn the whole structure of anger," through observation directly for himself, and through that observation there is freedom, not through the cultivation of the opposite. To cultivate bravery when one is not brave is not freedom, but to understand the nature and the structure of what is cowardice and remain with it not trying to suppress it or go beyond it, but remain with it, look at it, learn all about it, perceive the truth of it instantly, such a mind is free from cowardice and bravery. You are getting this? That is, direct perception is freedom, not the cultivation of the opposite. The cultivation of the opposite implies time. I am greedy, sensitive, ambitious, competitive, and being greedy my cultural response is not to be greedy, because the books have said it, and gurus have said it. So my response is not to be greedy, to strive after not being greedy. I am and I must not. The "must not" involves time, and the factor between "what is" - which is "greedy" - and what you should be is a time interval. In that time interval, a great many factors come in, therefore the mind is never free from greed, whereas direct perception of the fact of greed, not the cause of it, not the explanation or the justification or the denial of it, just the observation without any movement of thought, is freedom from greed. Look, Sir, you live with formulas, don't you, concepts, principles, beliefs, ideals? You demand a purpose, a goal, something you want to attain, reach, don't you? Observe it in yourself. You have beliefs, goals, purposes, conclusions. Now, you are in a confused world living a confused life, living a contradictory life, and you say there must be clarity, there must be enlightenment, there must be hope. So there is a time interval between what you are and what you are trying to achieve. Right? Between what you are and the principles, the conclusions, the concepts that you have, is a time interval. In that time interval other factors, other influences, other incidents happen. Therefore you never can achieve that, and therefore there is no freedom in the future. Therefore, when you deny or when you see the truth that conclusions, formulas, beliefs, ideals are the factors of time, and therefore they are binding and they do not bring freedom, then you completely wipe all that away. Then you have only what is left, which is your greed. Now to look at it completely, totally, is to never suppress it, never to give explanations, never to justify, but just to observe. As you listen to those crows, you do not do anything about it. In the same way listen, observe completely the fact that there is greed and remain with it - which means that the observer is the observed, the observer is greed and not separate from the thing he calls greed - and see that totally. In that perception there is total freedom. The observer is the past, the observer is the accumulated knowledge who says you must not be greedy or, justifies greed. So can this mind observe without the observer? When it so observes, perceives, there is a total comprehension of freedom. Look, without a mind being free, you cannot live in order. You live in disorder - not only outwardly but inwardly. You try to bring about order, but that which you try to bring about, which you call order, is within the area of disorder. So a mind has to have order, and total order is total freedom. I am going to go into this question, of order. Please do listen, give, your heart to this, because it is your life. First, seeing actually, not theoretically, that your life is disorderly, contradictory, a putting on of masks in front of your guru and in front of your politician, in front of your superior, pretending, hypocritical, without any sense of love, consideration, beauty - that is your life. In that life in which you live there is great disorder, and the mind, the brain realizes that it must live in order, whether that order is neurotic or not, in that very neurosis it tries to find order. Sir, have you noticed that when you have learnt something mechanical, technological, your mind, your brain functions very easily, almost mechanically, which means the brain needs to function in perfect order. You see that, don't you? The brain needs protection, order, it must be completely secure, to function properly. It thinks it will function properly if it has a conclusion, because it sees round itself great disorder, and it needs to have a belief, a principle, a conclusion, in which it hopes to have order, safety. So it is all the time striving to find order, whether in illusion, in authority, in somebody else's experience, in a conclusion. It is trying to find order; but that discovery or trying to find order in illusion creates conflict and therefore it runs away from that conflict into another conclusion. So the mind, the brain is constantly seeking order, because in order there is security. The more precise the order, the greater the security, the greater is the capacity to function. And it has tried to find order in nationality which brings disaster; because it brings wars, it has tried to find order in authority, obedience, following, and to create thereby conflict between "what is" and "what should be". And it tries to find order in morality, social morality, and that two brings disorder, which is contradiction. It tries to find order in knowledge, and knowledge is always the past, so the past becomes tremendously important, or the future, which is a concept, a principle, an ideal. So the brain is constantly seeking order and at the same time creating disorder, because it has not found order. That is what you want - don't you - security, order? There is complete disorder politically, religiously, in the family, in every way. And the mind, the brain escapes from this disorder into what it calls the ideal, or the promise of some guru who gives you enlightenment. So order can only be found, order comes naturally, easily by itself when you understand disorder. The understanding of the disorder of your life, not how to go beyond it, not how to suppress it, but to understand the nature of it, the structure of it, then out of that comes order, which is living. So freedom is order, complete order, and that order has come into being through the understanding of disorder, not through seizing order. If you seize order, it becomes a principle, an idea a formula, but if you actually understood totally the disorder of your life, of everyday life, if you do not run away from it, try to cover it up, suppress it but observe it, look at it with your whole heart and mind, then out of that comes an extraordinary sense of order which is living, moving, and has a quality of vitality, vigour. I do not know if you have noticed that before you go to sleep, if you are at all sensitive, you review the day, don't you? Do you do it? That is, you review - you say I should have done that, I should not have said that, it would have been better if I had put it that way. You review the day, you look over the whole day, and the mind does it, because it tries to bring order before it goes to sleep. As I said, both in one's life and outwardly order is essential in relationship, and the brain is always trying to find order in various directions, always moving out or moving inward, and as you observe before you sleep, if the mind is at all sensitive, it reviews the day and looks over it and says, "This is a mistake, that is the right thing", looking, observing, trying to bring order. And when you go to sleep, it tries to establish order through dreams because it demands absolute order, because in order there is protection, safety. So when the mind during the day, not artificially, not with determination, not with will, observes totally the confusion, the untruth, the hypocrisy, the contradiction and brings order there, and then when it goes to sleep, the mind, the brain then, because it has brought order during the day by observing the disorder it lives in, then that brain has a quality of total freedom to observe. So if you observe your life as it is, see the beauty of it and the destructive nature of confusion, with a mind that has no formula, that has no principles, that is free to observe and so listen, then there is freedom, which is order, a freedom that is complete, living in this world; and it is only such a mind that is free, that knows what love is, what beauty is, and it is only such a mind that being free, can perceive what truth is. Now would you like to ask questions? Before you ask them, please, you are asking the question of yourself, and we will together answer the question. You ask the question and do not wait for the speaker to answer it, but in the very asking of this question we are both of us going to share the question. That is affection, that is care, that is love, not the waiting for some authority to answer it. When the authority answers it, whether it is the book, the guru or anybody, you are not seeking truth. You want confirmation, assurance, but if you ask the question, does not matter how trivial, and you are asking it of yourself, and in the very asking of it aloud, then we share it together. Then it is a common problem. What is common is communicable. Therefore we can share it together and in that sharing there is great beauty, there is great affection. That is love - to share. Question: I have no energy to be aware of my problems and deal with them. Krishnamurti: Now, how do you have energy? That is the question, is it not, Sir? Now we are sharing it together, you understand. Again this is really a very, very complex problem. First of all, one has to understand what energy is. We have broken it up into many fragments: the energy that needs to do business, the energy that needs to write a poem, the energy that needs to be a good, first class, non-governmental scientist. You need energy to understand, and that understanding has been broken up too, as into intellectual understanding, verbal understanding. You have broken up your energy into sexual energy and moral energy. Your energy is broken up. So man has broken up this energy, human energy and cosmic energy. That is a fact, if you observe it in your life. You are one thing in the office and another at home. You say one thing which you do not mean and do something else. If you are rich, you want to be flattered, if you are poor you are frightened. So that goes on. So there is constant breaking up of energy. When you break up energy, there is conflict. Observe this, Sir, in yourself. There is conflict when you break up your life as a religious life, as a business life, as a scientist, as a politician, as a cook, or whatever it is. When you break it up there must be conflict. And where there is conflict there is the ending of energy, there is a wastage of energy. When you resist that is a wastage of energy; when you run away from "what is" that is a wastage of energy. when you follow your guru who tells you what to do and between what should be and what you are, there is conflict, and where there is conflict it means there is division and therefore struggle, pain, fear. So where there is conflict there is wastage of energy, and this conflict will inevitably arise when there is the breaking up of energy. When you do not live a totally harmonious life, there is a wastage of energy. When you say to find God, truth, you must lead a celibate life - and there is a battle in you: the desire, the sexual urges, the lust, being suppressed, held back, disciplined, controlled - in that, between what you think is the way to reality and what actually is, there is a contradiction. In that contradiction there is conflict and the very conflict is a total wastage of energy. So one has to find a way of living which is both chaste, non-corrupt, in which there is no conflict whatsoever. Then you are full of energy. Sir, look, most of us have had sorrow, not only the physical pain but devastating sorrows in our lives, deep, biting sorrows, tears, aching hearts, despair. The thing called sorrow, we have all had it, you all know it. And you run away from it, you say it is my past karma, or you try to find the cause of it, or you try to escape from it through going to the temples, churches, prayers, meetings - you know all the things we do to run away from this terrible thing called sorrow. So what happens? Sorrow is there and you escape from it through radio, sex, god, whatever it is, and in that escape, in that running away, from "What is", there is contradiction, and therefore there is conflict. In that there is wastage of energy, whereas if the mind remained alone with sorrow, not trying to run away, not trying to resist, remained completely alone, then you would see out of that lone perception comes that tremendous energy that transforms that sorrow into passion - not lust - into intensity, into a tremendous energy, which no book no guru, no teacher can give. Therefore you have to learn, observe from yourself and you have an energy that is unending. Question: Can we see God through observation? Krishnamurti: I do not know what it means, the meaning of that word, but I think the gentleman means, can we seek God or can we, through observation of nature, of man, of the beauty of the earth, the beauty of a cloud, the beauty of a face, the laughter of a child, through observing all this marvel of life, can we find God? Is that the question, Sir? You will never find it if you seek it. You understand the answer? You will never find it if you run after it. You will never find it if your intention is in seeing the beauty of the earth, in seeing the light on the water, in seeing the perfect line of a mountain, and you hope through seeing, to find that. You will never find it because you cannot find that through anything, through your sacrifice, through your worship, through your meditation, through your virtue, You will never come upon it because your motive is all wrong, because you want to find that, not in living, but somewhere else. You must establish right relationship with man first, which means you must know what it means to love, what it means to be compassionate, what it means to be generous when you have a great deal, what it means to share with another the little that you have, to establish this marvellous order in living, daily living. Then if you have established that order, which is freedom, then there is no seeking. When you use the word "seek", there are several things involved in that word, in the meaning of that word. When you are seeking, you hope to find something, and how do you know when you have found something? You are all seekers after truth or experimenters of truth. You are always talking about seeking. Please listen to this. In seeking there are several things involved -there is the seeker and the thing that he seeks after. When the seeker finds what he thinks is truth, is God, is enlightenment, he must be able to recognise it. He must recognise it. Right? "Recognition" implies previous knowledge, otherwise you cannot recognise. I cannot recognise you if I had not met you yesterday. Therefore when I say this is truth, I have already known it and therefore it is not truth. So a man who is seeking truth lives a life of hypocrisy, because his truth is the projection of his memory, of his desires, of his intention to find something other than "what is", a formula. So seeking implies duality - the one who seeks and the thing sought after - and where there is duality there is conflict. That is wastage of energy. So you can never find it, you can never invite it. The God that you call God which is your invention, that is not God. The thing made by hand in the temple, in an image, is not God, or the thing made by your thought is not God, is not truth, and that is what you are living on - the image made by the hand or the mind - and if you really enquire into this, if there is or if there is not something which is timeless, not within the field of thought, then you must understand the whole nature of thought. But merely asking, "Will I find God?", you will find him, because what you want you will find, but it won't be true, it won't be the real. So what is important is to understand "what is", which is your life, this shoddy, narrow, petty life that you lead, the life of your own vanity. If you bring order in that then you will have freedom, complete, total freedom, and it is only such a mind that can see "what is". KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 14 3RD PUBLIC TALK BOMBAY 14TH FEBRUARY 1971 I think there is only one fundamental question, which is, how to live in this world with intelligence, sanity, with great affection, beauty, in spite of all our complications; how to live a life that has depth, that in the very living there is significance, a life that is without conflict, a sane, healthy life with freedom and great intelligence. If we could answer this question, not merely verbally or intellectually, if we could put this question to ourselves and find out for ourselves a way of living, that, it seems to me, would be the most important thing. Having right relationship with man, a harmonious, rational, balanced life in relationship, understanding that and living it - not merely becoming a sannyasi, following the latest craze, doing some kind of penance, a singing and dancing and all that kind of business that goes on - if we could find out a way of living where there is really a great deal of love, intelligence, beauty, then perhaps we would be able to find out for ourselves, not through somebody else, if there is something beyond time, something which is not within the field of everyday strife. And this evening, we might perhaps devote this whole hour to finding out for ourselves how to live, how to live with real understanding, with a great sense of beauty, with a great sense of human understanding in which there is no conflict in relationship. If we could spend some time on that, then perhaps we could go on from there to find out for ourselves what meditation is, if there is such a thing as truth, as a reality. But first we must lay the foundation, not the foundation of another, however wise or however caught up in illusion or full of his own experience, but if we could lay this foundation in our own lives, in the life of our daily existence, if we could do that we would have a world - not a utopian world, not an ideological world - a world of sanity, a world in which there is no war, no division between those who know and those who do not know, those who pretend that they have attained enlighten- ment and those who are seeking enlightenment, those who assert that there is and those who assert that there is not. So, if you will, let us find out if we can change entirely our way of living. First of all, we must look at this whole existence which we call living, in which is included the earning of a livelihood, in which there is this problem of conflict, physical pain and the psychological, mounting sorrow, the thing that we call love, joy, pleasure, fear, anxiety and understand what it means to die - living and dying - the whole of that, not just one fragment of it. That is why we must look, observe the whole field of our existence, not just one corner of it; not just how to earn a livelihood or just escape from this into some illusion, but to consider together this whole phenomenon of existence in which all the things are included. As we now are, we are composed of many fragments, the good, the bad, the greedy, the ambitious, the one that is in sorrow and the one that is seeking an understanding and escaping from sorrow. There is this fragmentation not only inwardly but outwardly. We are all that, because we are the world and the world is us: the society is made, put together by us, and though we are caught in it, we are part of it, we have constructed it, and we have to understand this whole phenomenon of existence. So let us look first at our lives, your life, not the life or any saint, not the life described in any book, not the life of your favourite guru, not the life that you want to live, but the actual daily life, the monotony of it, the boredom of it, the loneliness of it, the fear of it, the aggression, the violence, the sexual pleasures, the fear, the joy, the unthinking acceptance, imitation conformity - all that is our daily life. And that is what we have to understand and in the very process of understanding, see if we can bring about a radical change in all that, whether it is possible to end all sorrow in our life, to be free from all fear, to find out for ourselves what it means to love, and to consider the thing that so many are afraid of, which is death. All that is our life. So we have to look first at what actually is and not get frightened about it, or feel there is no hope or that there is hope. We have to first look at it. Can you look at your life? Do please listen to what is being said. Look at your own life, and if you do look, one finds a great sense of striving, of insufficiency, conformity, fear, the pursuit of pleasure. Don't you find this, that your life as it is lived, whether you are aware of it or not, is bound with fear, with anxiety, a great sense of loneliness and utter boredom? Don't you find that not being able to solve this you run away from it, you run away to temples, read the Gita or listen to the commentaries made by the professionals on the Gita or accept what your gurus say? So that is your life. And is it possible to change it all, not only the outward circumstances but the inner structure which has created the outer? Is it possible radically to change the psychological nature of yourselves? If it is not possible, then you have no energy, do you understand? If it is possible, you are full of energy. We have concluded that it is not possible, that we cannot possibly, totally change. We have got into the habit of living with fear, living with sorrow, hiding ourselves from our own secret miseries. And so we have made life into something which we think is not possible to change, and therefore we escape from that central issue. We are going to find out, if we can this evening, whether it is possible, whatever we are - intellectual or emotional, leading a bourgeois existence, having a middle-class outlook on the whole of life - whether it is possible to change at all. We are going to investigate together, you understand that word, the meaning of that word? When we are exploring together, it means you must also share, you must also be very serious to find out for yourself whether it is possible to change, and this change cannot take place except in relationship. You cannot go away into isolation and try to dissolve all your troubles. It can only be solved in relationship, because it is only in relationship that you discover all your troubles, all your miseries, all your confusion. So we must do it together, you and I, because it is our problem, it is our misery, as this is our life to live on, to be happy, to enjoy the beauty of nature, of life, not everlastingly live in sorrow, confusion, misery. So together we have to solve this. "Together" means relationship. Don't you find when you observe in yourselves that there are two active principles, one fear and the other is pleasure? Don't you find that pleasure is in different forms, whether that pleasure is to seek God or to become a great person politically, this way or that? And don't you find in yourselves the active principle of fear going on? These two things exist. We want more of the one, which is pleasure, and less of the other, which is fear. Right? Now sitting like that there you are really not frightened at this present moment. You have no fear at this actual moment, you may have that fear when you go back; but sitting there listening, you have no fear. Though it is always there in the background, you cannot possibly invite that fear and observe it. You cannot say, "I am going to be frightened and let me look." But you can, through understanding attachment, come upon what it means to be afraid. As we said, fear and pleasure are our main movements, contradictory movements in life, and being afraid, unconscious of fear, not being aware that we are afraid, we attach ourselves, we depend on people, on ideals, on our guru or on our wife or husband. Don't you find that, that you depend on people - not the postman, not the milkman - depend on people round you or depend on somebody in whom you think you have confidence? So, what is involved in this dependence? First of all, there is no freedom when you depend on somebody, whether it is your wife or your guru. And when you depend on somebody psychologically, inwardly, you are seeking comfort, sustenance and when you depend on that person you must possess that person, you must dominate that person or submit yourself to that person. And when you are observing that you are dependent, you see that the source of this dependence is fear, fear of not being able to stand alone, fear of making a mistake, fear of not following the straight path -fear of not having comfort, not having somebody as a companion, not being able to depend on somebody. So through dependence, as you are sitting now, you discover that you are really frightened. Without inviting fear you discover that basically you are frightened. Are we communicating with each other? "Communication", as we said the other day, is to share together a common problem. This is our common problem. And when you depend on a person, there must be inevitably not only fear but jealousy, anxiety. So all that is involved in dependence; and can a mind be free of this dependence? Because, people like to be possessed by another. Haven't you noticed it? They like to belong to somebody, belong to a group, commit themselves to a certain pattern of action, a sense that they are leading a kind of righteous life. So when you look at it very carefully, you will see for yourself the basis of all this is fear. Then arises the question, is it possible to be free of that fear, not only the superficial fear in relationship and dependency but the deep-rooted fear? Are you asking this question with me? That is, can you as a human being be completely free of fear because when you are afraid, you do the most extraordinarily stupid things. When you are afraid, you are almost unbalanced, neurotic, you cannot think clearly, observe truly. Haven't you noticed your life become dark, heavy? It becomes a burden, a torture. And not knowing how to resolve this fear, you run away from it. You run away doing the most absurd things. There is the fear of physical pain. You have had pain, physical pain, years ago or a few days ago, agonizing pain or superficial pain, and that pain has left a mark on the brain, which is the memory of that pain which you have had two days ago or two years ago, and you do not want that pain to be repeated. What takes place then? Having had physical pain, you do not want it to be repeated and there is the idea that it might come back. In that idea, there is fear. You think about the pain which you had yesterday or two days ago and you do not want it repeated. Thought, which is the response of memory, says "I do not want that pain again." So physically you cannot forget it, it is there, and as long as you think about it, you intensify the memory of that pain and therefore thinking about it increases the fear of that pain. You see that, don't you? Talking about the past pain sustains that pain and you may have that pain tomorrow, which is still thinking about pain, and so thought says, "I must not have pain." So there is fear. So thought breeds fear. I may lose my job - the `may' is in the future - I think about it, so I get frightened. I think about death and thinking about it makes me afraid. So thought breeds fear, not only the fear of the past but also fear of the future. Unless you follow this very carefully, you won't be free of fear. Together we are going to see if you cannot totally be free of it. Then you will be a free man and you can then put away all your gurus. You will then be able to think, see, live very clearly, in an ecstatic state. So we must together understand this question basically. So thought sustains, gives a continuity to psychological pain as well as physical pain. Right? Wait there, leave it there. You have had a great pleasure yesterday, sensory pleasure, sexual pleasure, or the pleasure of seeing a beautiful tree or the lovely sunset, the shape, the beauty and the dignity and the strength of a marvellous tree - the pleasure that you have had. All that is recorded. When you see a sunset, if you have ever taken the trouble to look, when you have looked, it is recorded in your brain, and when after seeing, at that moment there is no sense of, "I want it to be repeated." There is just the experiencing of it, then a second later you say, "How beautiful that is, I want it to be repeated." The desire to have it repeated is the beginning of pleasure. You understand this? The desire to have the repetition of an event which has given a delight, the pursuit of it, the demanding further experiencing of it is pleasure, which again is thought. That is, seeing the sunset, then thinking about it and wanting to be repeated, that is pleasure, isn't it? This is what you do when you have sexual pleasure, the repetition, the image, the thinking about it, chewing and wanting it again. So thought, thinking, breeds fear as well as pleasure. Right? Thought gives continuity to fear and a continuity to pleasure; but when you had physical pain yesterday or two years ago, to have it, to finish with it, not record it, then there is no continuity of it, the continuity brought about by thinking about it. I am going to go into that. Please listen to this. Because, you see, Sirs, we are human beings, not merely animals. We have to live intelligently. We have to live a marvellous, beautiful life, and if one lives in fear, it is anxiety, guilt, sense of failure, fear of the dark, fear of death, fear of losing your money, fear of not becoming a great man and fear expresses itself in different ways. So thought nourishes, sustains, gives continuity to fear and pleasure. The question then is, why does thought which has created such marvellous things in the world - technology, all the marvellous medicines, science, you know, what thought has done - that very thought breeds fear and sustains fear and pleasure? So what is thought and where should thought function completely, totally, rationally, sanely, and where should thought be completely quiet? Thought is the response of memory, knowledge, experience stored up in the brain, and that memory, response, is thought. The memory, the intelligence, the knowledge has created the rocket which went to the moon, which has created the most marvellous technological things, the aeroplane, the most extraordinary things, and yet that very thought gives continuity to fear, and that very thought seeks pleasure, and that very pleasure becomes fear. You see the difficulty? You need thought to function rationally, objectively, sanely, reasonably, logically and also you see how thought continues to go with fear. So we must find out why it is that thought always interferes - if I can use that word "interfere" - when there is an experience of pleasure or pain; why thought, when it is experiencing something, either physical pain or psychological pain, why thought comes in and holds it. Why? Are you asking the question too? You understand the problem, do you? To be able to speak English, I must have a great deal of knowledge of English, memory and all the rest of it and thought is using the words in order to convey something. Thought is using knowledge, and thought also uses knowledge which breeds fear, knowledge of pain of yesterday, knowledge of the pleasure of yesterday. So the question is, why does thought always avoid the one which is fear and hold on to pleasure? That is one question. Why does thought interfere when there is an experience? You understand? I have an experience of the sunset and at that moment there is nothing to think at all; I am just looking at the beauty of that light. Then thought comes along and says, "I want that repeated again tomorrow, which is, knowledge as experience, which is pleasure, wants it to be repeated again. I have had pain, which is the remembrance of that pain which is knowledge, and according to that knowledge or depending upon that knowledge, thought says, "I do not want it." You follow? Thought is doing that all the time, functioning between pleasure and pain. And thought is responsible for both. Right? So knowledge on the one hand is essential, otherwise you cannot go home, otherwise you cannot talk your language, you cannot invent, you cannot construct if you are an engineer, and so on. Knowledge is essential, and also the knowledge of the pain of yesterday breeds fear. Right? So you have to find out for yourselves what it is that acts when thought is absent. If you have followed from the beginning, observed all this, your mind has become sensitive, very alert, aware of the whole problem, you can look at it immediately and understand it instantly, not through analysis, but see it immediately. When you observe this, you find, don't you, that you have a mind that is learning and therefore it has become somewhat intelligent, because it has become sensitive about the problem, which before it has evaded? Now you are sensitive to the problem of fear and pleasure, therefore you are learning about it. The mind that is learning about fear and pleasure has not learnt the thing before, it is learning now. You follow, I want to convey this to you with my heart, you understand, Sir, so that you get up from this place as a human being, living, not eternally frightened. See, when you are learning about something, say, like the Italian or Russian language, you do not know about it, you are learning, therefore you come to it afresh. You do not know it, you will only know it as you accumulate knowledge about Italian or Russian, but when you start, you know nothing. Now you think you know about fear, you think you know about pleasure, whereas you do not really know about it. So you are learning now - you see the difference? Therefore a mind that is learning is an intelligent mind, not the mind that says "I have learnt" or "I know what fear is". That is, a mind that is learning is an intelligent mind, not the mind that says, "Tell me all about it, you are my guru. I will follow, stand on my head, dance, do what you tell me, I will do all that in order to go to heaven." Such a mind is a stupid mind, it cannot learn, it is a dead mind, it is a neurotic mind, but a mind that is learning is the mind that says "I do not know, I am going to look at fear for the first time, I am going to look at attachment for the first time, I am going to find out for the first time what real pleasure is." So you see when you are learning, your mind is awake. A mind that is awake is an intelligent mind, and it is this intelligence that says when you should use knowledge and when not. Look, Sir, I wish you were sitting up here and I was there, because you see, Sir, the speaker has not read a book about all this, neither the Gita, the Upanishad, nor any books - philosophical, psychological - books that pertain to the psyche of man. And one has to find the truth of this for oneself. Truth is not secondhand. You cannot get it through a guru, through a book. You have to learn about it, you understand Sir, learn; and the beauty of that learning is that you do not know. You do not know what truth is. Do not pretend, do not quote somebody. You really do not know, therefore learn about it, and to learn about it one must come with a passion, an intensity to find out. So a mind that is learning is an intelligent mind, not the mind that repeats or is caught in a habit, "I am caught in fear. I do not know what to do about it", or a mind that says "I must have pleasure, more and more pleasure". So learning brings intelligence, as you have intelligence when you are a first-class engineer, or a first-class non-governmental scientist. Then such a person has intelligence. So if you are really learning, not from me, then you have this extraordinary quality of intelligence which you cannot get from any book. Now we are going to learn together what love is - learn. You have used that word, you have repeated that word and loaded it with all kinds of formula - love is godly, love is sacred, love is not profane - and you think you have understood it. Do you know what love is, do you? If you are really honest, not hypocritical, you will say, "I do not know, I only know what jealousy is, I know what sexual pleasure is - which I call love - I know all the agony that one goes through in what one calls love." But the nature of it, the beauty of it you really do not know. So what is love? Do not form an opinion about it, do not have a formula. If you have, then you have stopped learning. Do you understand what love is? We are going to find out. I have to learn verbally what it means, which is not love at all. What is love? Is it pleasure, is it desire, is it the product of thought, is it the love of God and the hate of man? That is what you do - love God and kick your fellow man. You love the politician, not the politician perhaps - but you love your boss, you love your wife. Do you really love your wife? Yes? What does it mean? When you love something, you care for it. Sir, do you love your children - which means that you care for them, not only when they are little babies but when they grow older, to see that they have the right education. When you love them you will see that you are not merely concerned that they should have a safe job, get married and settle down to follow the pattern of your generation. So love is not jealousy, right? An ambitious man, an aggressive man can never understand what love is, can he? A violent man, can he understand what love is? And you are violent, aggressive, ambitious, competitive. What you call love is pleasure. You say you love your family. Do you know what it means to love somebody? It means no division, not your family, you understand, Sir? Your family is a deadly, inclusive, corrupt thing. That is all you know, that the family is against everybody else. How can you love your wife or your children when you are ambitious, when you in your office you are cheating, wanting a bigger position, playing up to the big man, how can you love? Therefore, to find out what love is, approach it negatively -negatively means do not be ambitious. You say if I am not ambitious I will be destroyed by this world. Be destroyed by this world. It is a stupid world anyhow, it is a monstrous, immoral world. If you really want to find out the beauty, the real quality of love, you must deny all the virtue which man has cultivated. What you have cultivated is ambition, is greed, envy, competition, holding on to your little self and your little family. Your family is yourself. You have identified yourself with the family, which means you love yourself, not the family, not your children. If you really love your children, the world would be different; you would have no wars, Sir. So to find out what love is, you must put aside what it is not. Will you do it? You see you will do anything but that; you will go to the temples, you will go to the guru, you will read endless sacred books, repeat mantras, play tricks upon yourselves, and you will talk about love of God, your devotion to your guru. You won't do the one thing, which is just to say, find out what it means to love, find out for yourself what it means to be aggressive. So a man who has not love, but the things made by thought in his heart, will make a monstrous world, will construct, put together a society that is totally immoral. That is what you have done. So to find out, you must undo everything that you have done, not through time, not saying "I'll gradually undo it." That is another trick of your mind. Then you say it is my karma. When you really understand aggression, how terrible it is, in a little way or a big way, you drop it instantly, and in that dropping there is great beauty. And also one has to find out what it means to die. You have seen death, you have seen people dying, carried to the grave, you know all that. You don't know what it means to die, do you? You have theories about death, you have beliefs about death, or you say, "I believe in reincarnation, what will happen after death." You all believe in reincarnation, don't you? Voices: We do. You know what that means - reincarnation? Listen to it very quietly; that you will be born next life, incarnate. You have assumed that you will be born, and you believe in that. What is "You"? The bank account? The house? The job? The memories? The quarrels? The anxiety? The pain? The fear? Is not that all "you"? Do you deny all that is you or do you say the "me" is something greater than that? If you say the "me" is not the furniture, not my family, not my job, but something far superior than all this, who says it, and how do you know that there is something far superior? It is still thought that says that there is something far superior than this. So the thing that is far superior, the super-ego, the Atman, is still within the field of time, is still within the field of thought, and thought is you, your furniture, your bank account, your attachment to your family, to your nation, to your books, to your unfulfilled desires. And you say, "when I die all this rubbish goes back and I am born next life." And if you really believed actually with your heart, not with your shoddy little mind, if you thought that in your next life you would incarnate, it means that you would live today completely, because what you do today, you are going to pay for it tomorrow, next life. When you die you are going to lose your bank account, you cannot take it with you, you may have it till the last minute - and most people want it till the last minute - it is quite funny, isn't it? So you really know nothing about death. So let us learn about it, not repeat what the speaker says because you will find if you repeat what the speaker says it is nothing, just words. The physical organism dies, obviously. The scientist may give it another fifty years longer, and at the end of it dies, because it is being constantly used and misused. It has great many strains, pressures. It has been abused through drink, drugs, wrong eating, the constant battle. And that has put a tension on it - the heart failures, and the disease. The body will die and what else will die with the body? Your furniture, your knowledge, all your hopes, despairs, your fulfilment - is that going to die? So what is death? Please learn. We are learning together. To find out what it means, you must die, must not you? You with your ambitions, you must die, die to your ambition, die to your desire for power, position, prestige, die to our habits, your traditions, you understand? Do not argue, you cannot argue with death, you cannot just say, "Give me few more days, I have not finished my book. I want another child." You cannot argue, so do not argue, do not justify. Die to one thing so completely, to your vanity to your aspirations, to your images about yourself or about your guru, about your life, end it then you will see what it means to die, then you will know what a mind is that is dead to the past. It is only such a mind that ends every day, it is only such a mind that goes beyond time. Now, Sirs, you have listened. You have listened and therefore learnt what fear is, what pleasure is, and if you have learnt about these two, then you will know what love is, and love is the quality of mind - mind means the brain, the heart, the whole thing - in which there is no division, which means there is no fragmentation in oneself. So when you have done this, you will have a marvellous mind, a clear heart, and when you leave here this evening, learn all that you have learnt today and die to it. You understand? Die to everything that you have learnt this evening, so that tomorrow morning you are fresh again. Otherwise if you carry all the burden of today to tomorrow, then you give continuity to fear. So end each day and you will know the beauty of life, the beauty of truth, then you will have nothing to learn from anybody, because you are learning. KRISHNAMURTI IN INDIA 1970-71 CHAPTER 15 4TH PUBLIC TALK BOMBAY 17TH FEBRUARY 1971 WE have during the past few talks touched upon various problems and in talking over these problems together, I hope that at least some of you have seen how to observe your own intimate problems, not only personal but also the world issues. We are going to talk about meditation. That word like "love", "discipline", is heavily loaded. Specially in the east, in this country, all of you. verbally understand what is implied in meditation. I doubt very much whether you really know what meditation means. You have been told what to do, you have followed various systems, so your mind is not free to observe, investigate, to go into this extraordinary question. You have already filled your mind and your heart with other people's experiences, other people's conclusions, other people's assertions, and as in everything else you accept because in yourselves you do not know, you are uncertain, unhappy, confused. And somebody comes along and tells you that if you do these things - meditate, shut your eyes, breathe - then you would have a peaceful mind. When you accept all this, you are not free to investigate, to really find out for yourselves what meditation is which has nothing whatsoever to do with any system, which has nothing whatsoever to do with any movement of will. It has certainly nothing whatsoever to do with conformity because method, system implies a practice leading you to a certain fixed conclusion or a state. System, method implies a mechanical practising of a certain formula, repeating it over and over again, hoping thereby that you will experience what your gurus, your teachers, your books have told you. When you practise something over and over again, you not only become mechanical, insensitive, but your mind becomes dull. You are always asking the "how", "How am I to meditate?" That is one of the childish questions you can ask about something which is so immense, to ask somebody "Tell me what to do, tell me how to hold the earth in one's hand, tell me how to hold the sea or the air in one's fist." And if you observe, that is what you all want. You want to experience something through a method. A method implies not only conformity not only measurement of achievement, but a method implies a system or a path to a fixed point, doesn't it? It is there, all that you do is to practice. It is most illogical, irrational, without any meaning whatsoever, because if you observe in your life, there is nothing stable, nothing permanent. You may want it, you may want a permanent relationship with your wife, with your children with your neighbour, with your society. You cannot have anything permanent. Even your bank account is not permanent. No relationship is permanent. Everything is in a flux, is in movement, and realizing this consciously or unconsciously, we want something permanent, something that we can hold on to. And that we call truth, God, or what you like. So if you really understand, see the fact, see the truth that reality has no resting place, it is like being in an uncharted sea, you have to find your way to it - not your way or somebody else's way - but you have to find it. And when you have a path leading to a reality, in, that is implied time. To reach from here to there you require time, many days to travel, to cross the distance. And in that lag of time between here and there, there are other factors coming in. Therefore you say "Let me concentrate", think on that one thing and reject everything else, subjugate everything else to that one factor. The mechanical process of system brings about insensitivity, suppression, resistance against what you are actually, imposing on what you are something you think what ought to be, and there is conflict, battle. You want to control, you want to suppress, you discipline, force yourself to sit quietly, to breathe rightly, do all those fantastic things, hoping that you will eventually reach something about which you know absolutely nothing. So a wise man rejects the whole system, the whole idea, concept of systems altogether, because they don't lead anywhere. Then also you are burdened with this idea that you can experience truth, that you can achieve enlightenment, that you can find reality. Have not you heard your gurus, your people who teach you how to meditate say that they have experienced? The other day someone came and said "I have experienced reality. I know what truth is, I know. "You know that is one of the most stupid things you can ever say. Listen, Sir, when a man says he knows, what does he know? When I say I know, I know something which is already over. Right? I know only something that is over, that is in the past, which means I live in the past. Please observe it for yourself, watch it in your own life. When I say "I know you" I only know the image of you and that image is the past. So a man who says he knows what truth is, does not know. He knows that which is dead, over, finished. Have you ever examined that word, the word "experience". It means to go through. When you go through something, it is over; but if you do not complete the whole movement, then it is recorded in the mind, then that becomes a memory. And what you are experiencing then is the past. When you are actually experiencing something - anger, sex, violence - at that moment there is no experience at all. Have you noticed this? When you are very angry or very envious, there is a total absence of the "me", the "you", the experiencer. Only a little later comes the experiencer, saying, "I have been angry." So those who say they know, they do not know. Those who say they have experienced reality, they have never experienced it, because to experience implies not only going through, but to experience something you must be able to recognise it. Otherwise you cannot experience. If I did not recognise you, which is an experience, I would not know you. Right? So when they use the word "experience", in that is implied recognition. To recognise implies that you have already known. Therefore that which you already know is not the real. So put aside systems completely. Anybody who says, "I have experienced" or anyone who says, "I know", beware of them. Do not get caught in that trap. That is their means of exploiting you. And they have told you that you must concentrate, you must learn concentration, have they not? Have you ever investigated what concentration implies? There is in that an action of will, which is to resist every other thought and focus your energy, your thought on something, on a sentence or a word, or on a phrase, the repetition of some word which you call mantra - repeat, repeat. Concentration implies resistance. You resist every other thought from seeping in or control your thoughts from wandering. So concentration is a form of will, resistance and suppression, whereas we need a free mind, a mind that is alive, full of energy. A mind that has been through conflict or is in constant conflict, wastes energy and you need energy. You need energy to go to your office, everything you do needs energy. So if you can put aside your favourite systems, if you can see the truth that concentration is merely a resistance and therefore constant conflict and wastage of energy, then you can find out for yourselves what are the requirements, what is necessary for a mind that is in a state of meditation. Now let us investigate together, may we? We are not meditating together. That is one of the tricks - a group meditation - collecting a lot of people and all of them shutting their eyes and trying to meditate on something or other. We are investigating together what meditation is, not together meditating, because you do not know what it means, you only know what other people have said. Distrust completely what others say, including the speaker, because you are very easily persuaded. You are persuaded because you are greedy to experience something which you think is marvellous, so do not be influenced by the speaker. Let us find out what are the implications of a mind that has the quality of meditation. We said you have to reject systems, methods, the desire to experience, because we explained what it means: the desire and the urge behind the desire to experience. So you have to put all that aside and also you have to put aside all the things that go in the name of meditation - breathing, dancing, becoming emotional, sentimental. So what is involved in this thing called meditation? You are going to discover it, you are going to find out, not how to meditate, but the nature and the structure of a mind that is totally free, that does not function, that has no movement of will at all, for will is resistance. You are not learning from the speaker. You are your own guru and your own disciple, because you yourself have to come upon this. You have to learn and not imitate, not conform to any authority. So the first thing is you must understand yourself, because otherwise you have no rational basis of any thought, of any structure. If you do not understand yourself, how can you understand anything else, let alone something which may not exist? So the first movement is to understand yourself, understand yourself actually as you are, not what you would like to be. Understand yourself - the ugliness, the brutality, the violence, the greed, the envy, the agonizing loneliness, despair - that's what you are. And because you have not been able to solve it, because you have not been able to go beyond it, you introduce the super-self, the Atman. That is one of your tricks too. So you have a conflict between what you are and what you should be, or your Atman tells you what you should be. So you play a game. That does not help you to understand yourself. To understand yourself, you have to look at yourself. If I want to look at that tree, or that bird, I have to look. And I have to look at myself. I don't know what I am. I must learn about myself, not according to any philosopher or any psychologist or any book or any guide or guru. Let us find out what we are. We are the bank account, we are envious, we are ambitious, corrupt, we say one thing and do another, we are hypocrites, we put on masks, pretend and through all this, there is this sense of sorrow, pain, anxiety, tears, the ache of loneliness. That's what we are. And if you do not understand that and go beyond it, how can you understand something that is so extraordinarily beautiful. So you have to learn about yourself and here comes a great difficulty: because one's self is in constant movement, one's self is changing, one's self is not permanently greedy or permanently violent or permanently sexual, there is a constant change, moving, living. One has to learn about the living thing. To learn about the living thing, you have to watch it anew each minute. You see the difficulty? To learn about myself who am a living entity, not a dead thing, this living thing has to be observed, and what you have learnt about it in one minute must be dropped and picked up again the next minute. So you are learning about a living thing all the time anew, not that you have learnt and then from that knowledge you observe what is a living thing. If you really do it, this is one of the most fascinating things, because your mind then retains very little, contains the essential technological knowledge and nothing else. So your mind watches this movement of the "me" which is such a complex entity, not only at the superficial level but at the deeper level. I do not know if one has the time to go into all this. I will put it very briefly, please listen to it. You may be conscious, watch yourself and learn each minute anew, every minute superficially. How are you going to learn about the secret of your mind, the hidden motives, the complex heritage? You know it is all there, hidden. How are you going to learn about it? To learn about it is not to analyse it, but to watch it during the day: all the movement and the intimations and the hints of the secret desires. Watch it, be open to discover the motives, the intention, the tradition, the heritage. So when you watch it all day and when you go to sleep, the mind then is completely quiet. There are no dreams, because dreams are merely a continuation in symbolic form of the daily contradictory conflicts; but if you have understood the daily movement of your life, your greeds, your envies, your angers, all that, then you will see that you are emptying the mind of everything of the past. So there must be self-knowing all the time. Knowing implies the active present. Then you need discipline. We have suppressed, controlled, conformed, imitated, and that's what we call discipline like a soldier disciplined. Have you watched soldiers, what they are like? You know what they are, so they don't have to be described. And that is what we have reduced discipline to: a practice. And in that kind of discipline which you have, which all your gurus and the rest of them do, in that there is no freedom. There is decay, deterioration, whereas learning about oneself, learning all the time - not "having learnt" - brings about its own order. If I am learning about this whole process of living, that very learning brings its own order, and order is its own virtue. The thing that you cultivate is not virtue. So there must be knowing oneself, there must be this order, which is discipline, and there must be no action of will. We will go into that a little bit. What is will? When you say "I will, I won't, I must, I should", what does that mean - the assertion, the decision, the statement of a desire "to be" - "I will do that"? In the action of will there is choice - I will not do this but I will do that. You are following all this? Do please. Because you see, unless you learn all this from yourselves you will have a miserable life. You can escape from it by fighting. That is what you all know, only these two things: to resist, to escape. Resist means fight. Escape, you know, going to the temples, gurus, taking drugs, marijuana, drink, sex, the whole gamut of escapes. And will is implied in all this. Can one lead a daily life without the movement and the action of will, which means a life in which there is no choice at all? When you have choice, you have contradiction. Choice exists when you are confused, doesn't it? When I do not know what to do, I am confused, and out of confusion comes choice and out of choice the action of will. Why are you confused? Most people are, why? It is because you do not accept what actually is. You try to alter what is to something else. And the moment you do that, there is conflict and out of that conflict, confusion. So the action of will is the outcome of confusion. Meditation is a movement in which there is no action of will whatsoever. If you have done all this or you are doing all this, then you have a question, which is : what is the brain concerned with? The brain is the result of the past. The brain structure - the cells - is the result of centuries upon centuries of evolution. It has collected tremendous knowledge to survive. That is all it is concerned with -to survive - and finding physical survival becoming more and more difficult, because of the explosion of population, national divisions - the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian, the German - it tries belief. The brain demanding security, safety, survival, tries one thing after the other. It has hopes in nationalism, in the family, in the bank account. And not being able to find it, then it hopes to find that permanency, that security in some belief, in some God, in some kind of illusion. And that illusion becomes tremendously important, and that is what you are doing. Your nationalism is an illusion, your Gods are an illusion, you have invented them. Your gurus, your systems of morality - in that there is no safety. So the brain demands, needs complete security to function rationally, healthily, and the brain finds that there is no security in thought. Previously it had sought security in thought. Thought is the only instrument you have, and thought is the past, is reaction to the past. Thought is not free, it is as old as the hills, because thought is the response of memory. So neither in belief nor in your Gods nor in your political systems, in your religious organizations, in your idols, temples, in your gurus, is there any safety, because they are all the inventions of thought. You understand? See the truth of it, not the word, the meaning, the description or the explanation, but see the truth of it. So what happens? The brain cells are only concerned with survival, and with nothing else, not with Gods, not with illusion. There is only physical survival and that you would say is not spiritual at all; merely to survive, that is not spiritual, and you think spirituality is the invention of thought with all its illusions. It is only when the brain is concerned with physical survival alone that the rest of the brain is totally empty. That means the brain then is completely quiet, you understand? Sirs, you know consciousness is heritage - you know what that means? Consciousness is the result of time, consciousness is the content of itself, which is time, sorrow, confusion, misery; and intelligence has no heritage. Then you see, when the mind sees the importance of total survival and nothing else, there is intelligence. Then it will organize society entirely differently, then its morality will be real order. We are asking what is a mind that is completely silent, because it is only when the mind, the brain is completely quiet that it can perceive. If I want to listen to what you are saying, I must listen completely quietly, mustn't I? When you say to me, "I love you", I must listen with my heart which has no movement of contradiction. The mind must listen, and therefore it is necessary for a mind to observe that it must be completely quiet. Just to see the truth of it, not how to make the mind quiet. If you ask how to make the mind quiet, you are back in your old trap. And there are thousands of gurus to tell you how to keep your mind quiet. But if you see that to perceive the tree, the cloud with the light of the setting sun on it, to see the light on the water, on a stretch of water, just to see it, the beauty of it, your mind must be completely quiet. If you are listening to somebody who threatens your life, you have to listen, haven't you? You listen to your bosses very, very carefully, don't you? You may not like it, you may resent it, but you have got to listen, because your life depends on it, your livelihood, your money, so at that moment you are very quiet. In the same way listen, observe the truth that to see and hear anything, both sensory and non-verbal, the mind must be quiet. That's a truth, that is sane, but a man who has beliefs, who is steeped in tradition, who calls himself a Hindu, a Buddhist, will never perceive that which is true. Therefore, for a mind to be completely quiet is very simple, really so simple, because it is only in that quiet state that you perceive the beauty of the earth, the beauty of the tree, the beauty of a bird or a face, and without beauty you will never come upon what is truth, you will never see what is truth. You know what beauty means? Not architecture, not the design in space, not the painting, not the beautiful face or the beautiful sari, the colour, but that beauty which comes when there is no movement of the "me", when there is no movement of the will, when there is no movement of time, reaching out, moving outwardly or inwardly. In that there is no beauty. There is beauty only when there is total absence of will, the "me". Then there is passion and in that passion there is great beauty. So a mind that is in meditation is concerned only with meditation, not with the meditator. The meditator is the observer, the censor, the thinker, the experiencer. And when there is the experiencer, the thinker, then he is concerned with reaching out, gaining, experiencing; and that thing which is timeless cannot be experienced. There is no experience at all. There is only that which is not nameable. Look, Sirs, because the mind is quiet, the body becomes still, not the other way round. You force your body to sit still. You do all kinds of things to come upon this strange beauty of silence. Do not do it, just observe. Look, Sirs, you know in all this are various powers of clairvoyance, reading somebody's thought. There are various powers, you know what I am talking about, don't you? You call them siddhis, don't you? Do you know all these things are like candles - candlelight in the sun? When there is no sun, there is darkness, and then the light of the candle is very important; but when there is the sun, the light, the beauty, the clarity, then all these powers, these siddhis, are like candlelight. They have no value at all. and when you have the light, there is nothing else -developing various centres, the chakras, kundalinis, you know all that business. You need a sane, logical, reasoning mind, not a stupid mind. A mind that is dull can sit for centuries breathing, concentrating on its various chakras, and you know all that playing with kundalinis, - it can never come upon that which is timeless, that which is real beauty, truth and love. So put aside the candlelight which all the gurus and the books offer you. And do not repeat a word that you yourself have not seen the truth of, which you yourself have not tested. MADRAS 2ND PUBLIC TALK 10TH JANUARY 1971 'THE OBSERVER AND THE OBSERVED' Shall we go on with what we were talking about the other day when we met here? We were saying, weren't we, how very important it is that the human mind, which has been cultivated through time, through various experiences and knowledge, which are all the same, such a mind should undergo a total transformation. And we more or less pointed out the way of thought, its limitation, and only when there is freedom from the known, from knowledge, is there a possibility of total revolution. That's what we were more or less talking about. This evening I think we ought to go into many other problems. Which is, what importance is it for a human being to change himself when the environment, the society, the culture, is so corrupt, so disintegrating? And one sees the necessity of changing the environment, the environment being the society, the religion, the culture and so on. And what importance is it when the whole social structure, the community, the world about us, when that cannot be changed by an individual, by one human being, what significance has one individual, one human being transforming himself when around him there is so much chaos, so much misery, such confusion, such madness - if we can use that word, I think validly. I think that question is wrong because the human being is the result of the culture in which he lives. He has built the culture, the society, the environment. And in changing the human being he is changing his environment because he is the world, and the world around him is himself. There is no division between himself and the world. I think this one must very clearly understand right from the beginning: that there is no division as the individual and the community. The word 'individual' means an entity who in himself is indivisible, not dividable, not divisible. And most human beings are divisible, are fragmented, which is partly the result of society, the culture in which he lives. And so I think it is important that we understand this question, that the human being, as we are now, we are the result of the environment in which we live. I think that is fairly clear. If you are born in this country you are a Hindu, or a Muslim, or this or that. If you are born abroad, in the west, you are a Christian, a Catholic, Protestant and all the divisions of Catholicism and Protestantism. So the human being is the world, and the world is the human being. One may logically, intellectually accept this as an idea, as a something which appeals to reason. But there it stops because we seem to be incapable of really putting that fact into action. And we are going to, if we may this evening, not only discuss the conflict in man, and therefore in the world, conflict within himself and in his relationship with the world, conflict between the various factors of fragmentation, each fragment in opposition to other fragments of which he is made up, and whether it is possible for the human mind to be totally free from all conflict. Because then only is it possible to know what it means to love. Amd also then perhaps we shall also comprehend fully the full meaning of death and what living is. So first it is necessary that we should understand what conflict does to the human mind. Please, as we said the other day, we are sharing the common problem together. This is our problem, yours and if happens to be anothers, it is so, between you and the speaker we are going to share together the problem: whether the mind can ever end its conflict. When we share together, the sharing implies partaking, not merely sharing a few set of ideas or words, but actually sharing together, investigating, exploring together. And therefore you have to take tremendous interest in it because it is your problem. And if you are not concerned with this problem there is something very wrong with you. It is like a house burning and you watching it, not doing anything about it. Man, you, human beings right throughout the world, are in conflict, in battle with himself, with his neighbour, with the world, with the environment, of which he is part. And until we understand this problem and find out for ourselves whether there is a possibility of completely ending conflict totally then we shall never be able to live at peace with ourselves and so with society. It is only a mind that is completely peaceful, not asleep, which has not mesmerized itself into a state of what it considers peace, but actually live at peace, it is only such a mind that can find what truth is, what it means to live, what it means to die, what is the depth and the width of love. So we are going first to enqurie together why man lives in conflict, why you live in conflict. I don't know if you are aware of it, first, within yourself. How you are fragmented, broken up, which is a fact. You are a businessman, and you are a householder, the two opposites. You are an artist and at the same time as a human being you are greedy, envious, seeking power, position, prestige, fame. You are a scientists and an ordinary rather shoddy little human being. So as human beings we are fragmented. You know what that word means, broken up in ourselves. And if one is aware of this, that one is actually fragmented, god, soul, man, virtue and non virtue, hate and love, you know, all the fragmentation, the various dualities in which we live, unless that is totally understood, not intellectually, until conflict ends our minds are incapable of perception. It is only a mind that is not tortured, that is not distorted, that is very clear, which has no markings of any kind of conflict. It is only such a mind that can see what truth is, and therefore such a mind can live. Now if one is aware of this issue, not only within himself but socially, wars, demanding peace, the way of the politician, the way of the saints, this diversified conflict. If one is aware of it - and I hope you are, as we are talking about it now - what is the root cause of this? Is it the fault of the environment, the education that one has, the culture in which one lives, which is the environment -let's call it that. Is it the fault of the environment that man, you, are in constamt battle, not only during the day but also during the night when you sleep, from the moment you are born until you die, this battle? If you are really aware of it, not intellectually, to be aware intellectually is merely to be aware of certain ideas, words. And that has no value at all. But if you are actually aware, feel that in yourself you are fragmented, broken up, contradictory, you must have asked, why? Why does man, you, live in this state? And you have created the environment, the society in which you live, the religions which you have, which you accept, the gods and all the rest of it, you have created it. Right? Your gods are your projections, or your grandfather's projections, of which you are a part. So you are responsible for the conflict and for the environment, and for the society in which you live, and all the absurdities of religion - the beliefs, the dogma, the rituals, all the immature mind that goes into all this. You are completely, utterly responsible for the environment and for the society in which you live. So when you are aware of it - that is aware intensely, passionately, not just verbally, actually feel it, that you are the world and the world is you, then why does this conflict exist in man? You are following all this? Are we communicating with each other? I'll go on, if you don't it's up to you. I don't know if you have asked this question of yourself, if you have, what is your answer. Do you refer to what somebody has said, why you live in conflict, either according to Marx, or to Shankaracharya, or the Buddha, defer to some authority? Do you do that when you ask yourself this question: why you, as a human being, responsible for the whole structure of the environment in which you live, of which you are a part, why there is this conflict in you? Can anybody answer this question? If they do answer it, it will be merely a description, an explanation. You are following all this? But the explanation and the description are not the described, nor the explained. Right? So you have to totally disregard authority. Right? You have to find out why you are in conflict, not according to somebody. Then if you do find out according to somebody, then you will find the answer according to that person, not the answer for yourself. Right? Is that clear? Therefore we are going together to find out why man is in conflict, and whether that conflict can ever end totally, not at different layers. You may have an extraordinarily peaceful household, but you are at war with your neighbour, and so on. Now to find out you need energy, don't you? You need a great deal of energy to find out for yourself the cause of this conflict. Please listen carefully, the cause. Right? Why man, you, live in conflict. Now when you enquire into the cause of it you are employing the intellect as an instrument of analysis, aren't you? Right? Are you following all this? You are using intellect as an instrument of analysis with which you hope to find the cause. You understand? The intellect is partial, is a fragment of the total. You hope to find the cause of a tremendous question like, why man is in conflict, through a fragmentary thing called the intellect which is the only instrument you have. Right? And so when you begin to enquire into the cause through the intellect your answer will be partial. Right? Because your intellect is partial, and therefore that is not the instrument. Right? Are you following all this? Which means you must now discard the instrument to find out a different kind of instrument. Up to now we have used the intellect as an analytical means to find out why man suffers, why man is in conflict. The intellect. And the intellect is a fragment of the total. Man isn't just an intellect, there are all his nervous organisms, his emotions, his - you know the whole structure, and you take one part of it and try to use that part to find a cause. Therefore when you examine through a partial instrument your understanding will always be partial and therefore incomplete. Right? I don't know if you understand all this? And to see that you need energy, don't you? Now energy we have divided, again fragmented. You follow? There is the energy of fragmentation. In the fragments there is energy, like hate has its own energy, and the control of that energy is also energy. Right? So we have divided energy into fragments. Whereas energy, the human energy, the cosmic energy, every kind of energy is a unitary movement. So one has to have that energy to understand the structure and the nature of conflict, and the ending of conflict. You must have intense energy, and not fragmentary energy. The fragmentary energy is to say, "I must get rid of it. I must get rid of conflict". Who is the 'I' who says, "I must get rid of it", or suppress it? It is one part of that energy discarding another part of energy. So energies are in conflict. You are following? So we are asking what is the reason of this conflict. One can observe it very simply as the observer and the observed. Right? There is in you the observer, and you observe. Right? You observe the tree as an observer. The observer watches that tree with all his knowledge, his past conditioning. He looks at that tree as something separate from himself. Right? Just listen to it, don't agree, or disagree. You haven't gone into this question at all, so you have to first find out what the speaker has to say, and when you are listening to what the speaker is saying watch yourself. Don't merely listen to the speaker, that is absolutely useless. But use the speaker to watch yourself. Then you will see in yourself there is the observer and the observed always. The observer says, "Do this, don't do that". The observer has certain values, certain judgements, he is really the censor who is always watching, denying, controlling, separating himself from that which he is watching. Right? When you are angry, or jealous, or not generous, which most people are, in that, if you observe it very closely there is the observer who says, "I am jealous; I am angry". Right? The naming of the reaction which he calls anger separates him. Right? Which is, can you look at that tree without naming, without the interference of thought, which is the response of memory, just to observe? We talked about it briefly the other day. Which is, you look at that tree through the image which you have about that tree, which means you are not really looking at the tree. Right? In the same way when you have an image about your wife or husband or your friend, you are not looking at the friend but looking at the friend through the image that you have. So there is duality. Right? This division between the observer and the observed is the very essence of conflict. The division. You haven't understood, I'll show it to you. It is all rather infantile all this, one has finished with all this but one has to go through it. When I am angry, at the moment of anger there is no observer. Please follow this. I am going to go into it step by step. Follow it by observing yourself, not what the speaker is pointing out, then you are outside and not inside. So observe yourself, what takes place? When you are angry, at the moment of experiencing that anger, or any other experience, at that second there is no observer. A second later the observer comes and says, "I have been angry". Right? He has separated himself from anger. He has named it, named the feeling as anger. He has named it to strengthen his memory. Please follow this. Because his memory says, you have been angry. The memory is the censor. The memory says, you should not have been angry, be kind, don't hit him back, turn the other cheek. So the response of memory as thought becomes the observer, and so there is a division between the observer and the observed. When he says, "I am angry, I am jealous, I am envious", then the conflict begins because he wants to suppress envy, or enlarge it, take delight in it. So where there is the observer and the observed there is the root of conflict. Right? So is there an observation of anger without the observer? That is the next question. You follow, that is the next question. Because that is our habit. At the moment of anger, or of any pleasure, there is no observer. Then a second later comes the observer. The observer is the censor, is the recorder, is the memory, is the brain cells in which these memories are held. And hence that observer says, "I should not", or "I should", "I want more", "I want less". You have understood this? So one asks then, can there be an observation without the observer? You understand, this is a tremendous question, please follow this up. Because we are used, we are conditioned to this conflict which arises when there is an observer different from the thing observed. That's our tradition, that's our conditioning, that's the result of our culture - god and man, you follow, all that, division. And when we function from habit it is a waste of energy. I don't know if you are following all this. And when we immediately respond, that is when the observer immediatley responds to an emotional, or a reaction, the response is always the old. Right? It is the old brain responding. So we are asking whether there is an observation without the observer. Now to end any habit, any tradition, without conflict needs energy. You are following this? Look, sirs, let's make it simple. I am angry, at the moment of anger there is no observer as the I who says, "I am angry". A second later the entity as the observer comes into being, who is the censor, who says, "I must not be angry". The response of the observer is tradional, is the habit, is the old brain responding. And that constant response of the old brain is a waste of energy. And you need energy totally to observe without the observer. Are you doing all this? Are you sharing, are we sharing together what we are talking about? All right. Let's put the whole question differently, because I see you are not following this at all. Look, sir, what is our life? The daily life, not the ideological life, not the life you would like to lead, not the life that you hope to have, not in the future, but the actual daily 'what is'. What is your life? It is a battle, isn't it, with occasional flashes of pleasure, whether it be sexual or other forms of sensuous pleasures. Our life is a constant battle. Can that battle end? Because what we are we make up the world. Now to end that battle you must look at the whole field of existence, not partially, but totally. You understand? Totally meaning the sorrow, the physical pain, the insults, the fears, the hopes, the anxieties, the ambitions, the regrets, the ambitions, the competitive aggressive brutal existence. See the whole of it, not just parts of it. Right? We are used to seeing parts of it, not take the whole field and look. We are not capable, as we are, to observe this whole field as one, because we have divided life into business, family life and religious life, you know the division that goes on. And each division has its own activity of energy. And therefore each fragment is against the other fragment. And these fragmentary energies are wasting our total energy. Right? Now is it possible to look at this whole field, this complex existence, the economic side, the social side, the family side, the personal, the communal, you know, the whole of it, as one, perceiving it totally? To perceive it totally you must have a mind that is non-fragmented. Right? Now how do you come about a mind that is so fragmented, to throw away all the fragments and have a perception that is total? You have understood my question? I cannot see the whole complex existence through a little hole which I call the intellect. I cannot see it because the intellect is a part, and you cannot use the part to understand the whole. That is a simple, logical, fact. There must be a different kind of perception. Right? And that quality of perception exists only when the observer is absent. When you can look at that tree without the image, when you can look at your wife and your husband, and all the rest of it, without any image whatsoever. Then you can look at a Muslim, and the Muslim can look at you, without the image. And these images are the reason for conflict. These images are produced by the observer. Now if you see the truth of it, not the logical sequence of it, but see the fact of it, the truth of it, like when you see the danger of a snake you act instantly. So when you see the truth that conflict exists as long as there is an observer, and the observer is the producer of images, he is the tradition, he is the conditioned being, he is the censor. If you see that, not as an idea, but actually, then you will observe without the observer, then you will see the totality of existence. And therefore a mind that sees this has tremendous energy. Because energy then is not dissipated. Right, you are following it? We dissipate energy through control. Have you ever watched a sannyasi, or a monk who has taken vows of celibacy, poverty, have you ever watched him, talked to him? What tortures he goes through. Right? Because he has got the image that only truth, or whatever that sublime thing is, can be found if he is celibate. Because he says, that is a wastage of energy, sexual wastage of energy, therefore you must have complete energy to find reality. But in himself he is in battle. Right, you have understood this? Oh lord, come on sirs. So he has an image that he should be a celibate, and the image creates a division between himself and actually 'what is'. Now if you can observe actually 'what is', without a censor, there is a transformation of 'what is'. I'll show it to you. One is violent. That is apparently the normal human factor, to be violent. I am violent. At the moment of violence there is no observer. Then a few second later the observer comes into being, he says, "I should not be violent". Follow this please, follow it carefully. "I should not be violent", because he has an image of non-violence, an ideal of non-violence which prevents him from observing violence. Right? So I say to myself, "I will be everyday less and less violent". Right? "I will ultimately reach a state of nonviolence, day by day". Now what is implied in that simple fact? That is, I am violent, and I will be non-violent one day. What is implied in that? First there is the observer and the observed. Second he is sowing the seeds of violence, in the meantime before he arrives at the state of non-violence - right, you are following this? - he is sowing the seeds of violence. Then there is the factor of time before he can be completely non-violent. That is, the space between violence and non-violence, in that space several other factors happen. So he is never free of violence. You can see this. People who talk endlessly about non-violence are really extraordinarily violent people, because they are always pretending eventually they will come to non-violence. In the meantime there are violent. So the fact is violence. The 'what is' is violence. And I can observe it - there is an observation only when the mind isn't pursuing the ideal of non-violence. Right? You are following this? It can then observe 'what is'. Now how do you observe 'what is'? Do you observe it with your conditioned mind, as saying "I must not be violent", with the image which you have about violence? Or is there an observation without the word, without the image? To observe without the image requires tremendous energy. Right? Then you are not wasting energy by suppressing violence, or transforming violence, or pursuing an ideal of non-violence. That is all a wastage of energy. Right? Now in the same way let us look at this whole problem of what is called love. That is, we have looked at what we considered living, which is a shoddy affair, a battle. And by investigating we have seen that it is possible, not intellectually, actually, to be free of battle, conflict. Now let us enquire deeply into this question of what is love. Not your opinion, or somebody's opinion, or conclusion. What actually it is now. What is love? Is it pleasure? Is it desire? Is it sex? Is it jealousy, possessiveness, domination, dependency? Is it? If you depend then you are caught in fear. Right? If I depend on my wife because she gives me pleasure, sexual or otherwise, if I depend on her for comfort, companionship, that dependency breeds fear, that dependency breeds jealousy, hatred, antagonism, possessiveness, the desire to dominate. Is all that love? Question it sirs, go into it, find out. And is pleasure associated with sex, is it love? And why has sex become so extraordinarily important in life? Why, sirs? Why in the modern world, and also in the ancient world, why have we made sex into such a colossal affair? Why have we said that you cannot possibly attain reality, enlightenment, if you are sexual? No answer. Let's find out. First of all you have to enquire into what is pleasure. You see a beautiful tree, a lovely cloud, the face of a child that is enchanting, a face of a man or a woman that is beautiful, you see it. Then what takes place? You see a lovely moonlight on the water, sparkling, with such beauty. You perceive it. Then at that moment of tremendous experience thought comes along and says, "How lovely that was, I want it repeated tomorrow". Are you following all this? Thought, which is the response of a memory, which is the experience of seeing that moonlight on the water, the beauty of it, that has been recorded, and thought says, "I must repeat that thing again". You are following all this? Which means at that moment of perception of that light on the water there was nothing, there was neither pleasure, nor the demand that it must happen tomorrow. There was absolute realization of that beauty. Then thought comes in and says, "Let's repeat it. Go back tomorrow evening, and look at that water again." So that is pleasure. The repetition of an event which thought has reduced to pleasure. And so thought can continue and give strength to pleasure. You have to understand this, please. You follow? There has been physical pain, bad toothache, pain, last week. You are frightened that it comes back again tomorrow, next week. Which is the action of thought. You follow? Thought sustains both pleasure and fear. So thought has built this whole structure round love as pleasure. And therefore all the edicts, the sanctions of religions which say, don't look at a woman, therefore suppress, control, which is what takes place? That's a battle. You follow? That is wasting energy much more. So what is love? Is it pleasure? Is it fear? Fear is jealousy, violence. When you possess your wife, as my wife, is that not violent? And is that love? And as we asked, why is it human beings have made sex into an extraordinary affair? Must not, or must. Have you ever thought about it? When you observe why in your own life that has become of such significant importance. So let's go into it. Have you noticed how your life is mechanical? Go to the office everyday, for the next forty years, repeat, repeat, how extraordinarily mechanical you are. When you quote your religious books, the rituals, when you call yourself a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, and god knows what else, a communist, it is a mechanical habit, a routine, a repetition. When you name yourself as a beaurocrat, as a politician, as a sociologist and so on, it is a habit, a mechanical acquisition of knowledge which you can repeat, repeat. Isn't your life mechanical? Haven't you noticed it? So what have you? Your life, your thinking, your ways of acting, are all mechanical, repetitive. So you have only one thing which is non-repetitive, which you can release through repetitiveness, which is sex. So that becomes your release from the mechanical way of life. Right? Come on sirs. Do enquire. Don't bother who is going. You are so interested in who is going, for god's sake. So you have made love into a mechanical, pleasurable affair, and is that love? You know to find out what it is you have to deny completely what it is not. You have to deny - the denial is the understanding of what pleasure and fear is. The understanding of it, not saying, "Well, I mustn't have pleasure", which is sheer nonsense. It is like a man saying, "I must have no desire". That's what you are trained to do, that is what you accept by your tradition. That denial is completely wrong, you must go beyond it. You know when you look at a tree, the beauty of a leaf, the shadow, the movment of the leaf, to look at it is a delight. What is wrong with it? Because you have denied beauty your life has become mechanical. You never look at a tree, on the contrary you are cutting down trees. You never look at the sky, the clouds, the beauty of the land because you have an idea at the back of your mind that to be a really religious man you must never look at anything beautiful, because beauty might remind you of the woman. It is so disgusting, so childish. And that is what you call religion. And that is the way you are going to find god. It is such infantilism, because you torture the mind to find god. Think of that! To find reality you must have a free mind, not a tortured mind. There must be this sense of love, not with all its jealousies, fears, pleasures - you follow? You don't know what it means to love, the beauty of it. Because you don't know what it means to live a beautiful life, a life without conflict. You only know a life which is committed to some form or another, and therefore broken up - as you have broken up living from dying. Right? See what is involved in it. There is death far away, put it away from you, and you jolly well know it is going to come one of these days. So you invent theories, reincarnation. You follow? Is there next life? If you really believe in reincarnation, really believe in it, that is, that you will be born next life according to what you do this life. Right? Therefore this life matters much more than next life, which means what you do now matters, how you behave now matters - if you believe in reincarnation. But you really don't believe in it. It means absolutely nothing, it is just a theory, because it gives you temporary comfort, and you say, that must be so. If you really in your heart of hearts believed in the thing, then every minute of the day counts. Every action has significance. Therefore now is the moment of righteousness, not next life. I don't know if you understand all this. You have got innumerable shoddy theories about death, and you have never faced it. So we are going to look at it to find out the nature of death, while living, full of vitality, energy, not when you are diseased, unconscious, in pain, in misery, crippled up, then that is not the moment to find out what death is. While you are capable of walking, looking, observing, being aware of the world outside and inside, when you have understood what living is, and what it means to love. It doesn't matter whether it is a tree, or a dog, or a woman, or a beautiful sky of an evening. So what is death? You know this question. The old people put this question out of fear because they are going to die. The old generation offer you nothing but theories about death. They have nothing to offer you, either traditionally or actually. What have they offered you culturally, socially, economically, what have they offered you? Do look at it, sir. What have they given you? A social structure that is so corrupt, so full of injustice, a structure that breeds war, nationalism, and all the rest of the things the older generation have offered you. And any intelligent man, sensitive, alive, young, discards it totally. Their morality also. So what have they to offer you, the old generation, who are so frightened of death? Nothing, except a lot of words and fear. So don't accept what another says about death. Let's find out what it means. What does it mean to die? Not in old age, crippled and diseased, or by an accident, sitting here, conscious, aware, listening, with a mind that is really serious, as it was serious when it enquired into what love is, and what living is? Now we are asking what it is to die, having no fear, because you don't know what it means to die. You only know what it means to end. You understand? To end, not what it means to die. That is, the ending of what you know, your accumulated knowledge, your insults, your hopes, your family, your wife, your children, whom you think you love, whom you don't really. If you really loved your children you would have a different world. So what does it mean to die? Not the ending of the known, which causes fear, because that is all what you are afraid of, ending the known, not of death of which you know nothing. So what is it that you are frightened of? Frightened of ending the known, and what is the known? Please go with me a little bit. What is the known? All your memories, the collection of your worries, the furniture, the house, the accumulated insults and worries and conflicts and sorrow, and you hold on to that and say, "Please, I don't want to die". Isn't that what you are afraid of? Afraid of letting go the known, not of death. Now if you let go of the known, that is, let go of some memory that you have, let go completely the pleasures that you had, the accumulated memories, the regrets, the anxiety, die to it completely, so that your mind is totally fresh. That's what it means to die. So that you don't carry over all the memories, the shoddy experiences, all the pleasurable experiences, end each day with every accumulation. And you will know what it means to die so completely that your mind is fresh tomorrow, young and innocent, and full of that energy. Without that, do what you will, without love, without the understanding of the beauty of this dying you will never come near that which is unnameable. BANGALORE 2ND PUBLIC TALK 31ST JANUARY 1971 'MIND IN MEDITATION' What is our daily living? If you can bear to look at it, if you can observe it, what is actually our everyday life? One can see that in that living there is a great deal of confusion, there is a great deal of conformity, contradiction, where every man is against another man, where in the business world you are ready to cut another's throat. Politically, sociologically, morally there is a great deal of confusion. And when you look at your own life you see that from the moment you are born until you die, it is a series of conflicts. Life has become a battlefield. Please observe it, not that you must agree with the speaker, or disagree with him, but just observe it. Just watch your actual daily living. And when you do so observe, you cannot help seeing what actually is going on: how one is in despair, lonely, unhappy, in conflict, caught in a series of competitions, aggressions, brutality, violence - that is actually our daily life. And that we call living. And not being able to understand it, or resolve it, or go beyond it, we escape from it into some ideology, into the ideology of some ancient philosophers, ancient teachers, ancient wisdom, and we think by escaping from the actual we have solved everything. And that is why philosophy, ideals, all the various forms of networks of escapes have not in any way resolved our problems; we are just as we were five thousand years ago or more, dull, repetitive, bitter, angry, violent, aggressive, with occasional flash of some beauty, happiness, and always frightened of that one thing which we call death. And our daily life has no beauty, because again your religious teachers, your books, have said, "Don't have any desires, be desireless, don't look at a woman - because you might be tempted. And to find god, truth, you must be a celibate". And our daily life is contrary to all the sayings of the teachers; we are actually what we are - very petty, small, narrow minded, frightened human beings. And without changing that any amount of your seeking truth, or talking valiantly and most scholarly, or interpreting your Gita and the innumerable sacred books, has no value at all. So you might just as well throw away all the sacred books and start all over again, because they with their interpreters, their teachers, their gurus, have not brought enlightenment to you. Their authority, their compulsive discipline, their sanctions have no meaning at all. So you might just as well put them all aside and learn from yourself, for therein lies truth, not the truth of another. So first is it possible to change our lives? Because our lives are in disorder, our lives are in fragmentation - being something at the office, go to the temple, if you are still inclined that way, something entirely different with the family, and in front of a big official you become, god knows, a frightened, desperate, sycophantic human being. And can we change all this? Because without changing our daily life, your asking what truth is, if there is a god or not, has no meaning whatsoever, because we are fragmented human beings, broken up; and until we are a total human entity, whole, complete, then only is there a possibility of coming upon that something which is timeless. So first we must look at our life. Now how do you look at your life? Please follow this a little bit. We will make it as simple as possible because this is a very, very complex problem. And a very complex problem of existence must be approached very simply, not with all your theories, opinions and judgements because they have not helped at all. All your religious conclusions have no meaning. So we must be able to look at this life which one leads every day, able to see it exactly as it is. And that is going to be our difficulty, that is to observe. Now what does that word 'observe' mean? There is not only the sensory perception with the eye. You see this bougainvillaea, sensory perception, then - please follow this step by step - then as you observe that colour then you make an image, you have already an image, you have a name for it, you like it or dislike it, you have preference. So the images that you have about that flower, that is, through that image you see it, you don't actually see it but your mind sees it more than the eye. Right? Please do understand this very simple fact, that we look not only at nature, which is being destroyed by human beings, pollution and all the rest of it that is going on in this terrible world, we not only look at nature with the eyes that have accumulated knowledge about nature, and therefore with an image, we also look at human beings with our various forms of conclusions, opinions, judgements and values. That is, you are a Hindu, another is a Pakistan, Muslim. You are a Catholic, another is a Protestant, Communist and so on and on and on - the division. So when you look, when you observe yourself, your life, you observe it through the image, through the conclusions that you have already formed. You say, "This is good", or "This is bad"? or "This should be" and "That should not be". You are following all this? So you are looking, observing with the images, conclusions that you have formed, and therefore you are not actually looking at life. You understand this very simple fact? So in order to look at our life as it is there must be freedom of observation. You must not look at it as a Hindu, as a bureaucrat, as a family man, as a - god knows what else! You must look at it with freedom. You understand? And that is the difficulty. You look at your life, the despair, the agony, the sorrow, this vast struggle, you look at it all with eyes that have said, and ears that have said, "This must change into something else", "This must be transformed in order to make it more beautiful". So actually when you are doing that you are not directly in relationship with what you see. Right? Are you following this? Not the explanation which the speaker is giving but actually observing your life, actually observing how you look at it. Whether you look at it with your image, with your conclusions and therefore not looking at it but looking through the past images and therefore not coming directly in contact with it. Right? So when you look at life, that is, the life of your daily existence, not the theoretical life, not the abstract life which says, "All human beings are one, all love" - you know, all that tommy rot! But actually when you observe it you see that you are looking with your past knowledge, with all the images, the traditions, the accumulation of all human experience which prevents you from looking. That is a fact which must be realized, that to observe actually your life you must look at it afresh. That is to look at it without any condemnation, without any ideals, without any desire to suppress it or change it, just to observe it. Are you doing this? Are you using the speaker as a mirror in which you are seeing your own life? And because you are seeing it with conclusions it prevents you from looking at it directly, being in contact with it. Right? Are you doing it? Not that you will do it when you go home, because if you don't do it now you won't do it later. If you are not doing it then don't bother to listen. Look at the sky, look at that tree, look at the beauty of the light, look at the clouds with their curve, with their delicacy. If you look at it without any image you have understood your own life. So that is, you are looking at yourself, at your life as an observer and your life as something to be observed. Right? There is a division between the observer and the observed. Isn't that simple? That is, you are looking at your life. You as an observer, something separate from your life. Right? So there is a division between the observer and the observed. Now this division is the essence of all conflict, essence of all struggle, pain, fear, despair. That is, where there is a division between human beings, the division of nationalities, the division of religions, social divisions, wherever there is a division there must be conflict. This is law, this is reason, logic. There is Pakistan on one side and India on the other, battling with each other; you are a Brahmin and another is a non-Brahmin and hate, division. So that externalized division with all its conflict is the same as the inward division, as the observer and the observed. You have understood this? If you don't understand this, you can't go much further because a mind that is in conflict cannot possibly ever understand what truth is. Because a mind n conflict is a tortured mind, a twisted mind, a distorted mind and how can such a mind be free to observe the beauty of the earth, or the beauty of the sky, the tree, the beauty of a child or a beautiful woman or a man; and the beauty of extreme sensitivity and all that is involved in it. So without understanding this basic principle, not as an ideal, as a fact that you are inevitably going to have conflict. And so the question is, the next question: what is this observer? - you understand? The observer who has separated himself from the observed. Please this is not a philosophy, an intellectual affair, a thing which you can discuss, deny, agree or disagree; it is something that you see yourself, and therefore it is yours, not the speaker's. We see that when you are angry, at the moment of anger there is no observer, at the moment of experiencing anything there is no observer. When you look at that sunset, and that sunset is something immense, when you look at it at that moment there is no observer who says, "I am seeing the sunset". A second later comes the observer. That is, you are angry, at the moment of anger there is no observer, no experiencer, there is only that state of anger; a second later comes the observer who says, "I should not have been angry", or the observer says, "I was justified in being angry" - a second later not at the moment of anger, then is the beginning of division. You understand? So how does this happen? At the moment of experience there is the total absence of the observer, and how does it happen that a second later the observer comes into being. Right? You are putting the question, not I, not the speaker, put it for yourself and you will find the answer. You understand sir, you have got to work. Because this is your life, and if you say, "Well I have learned something from the speaker", then you have learned absolutely nothing. You have just collected a few words and those few words put together becomes the idea. Ordered thought is idea, and we are not talking about ideas, we are not talking about a new philosophy. Philosophy means the love of truth in daily life, not the truth of some philosophical mind that invents. So how does this observer come into being? That is, sir, when you look at this flower, at the moment you observe it closely there is no observer, there is only a looking; then you begin to name that flower. Right? Then you say, "I wish I had it in my garden, or in my house". Then you have already begun to build an image about that flower. So the image-maker is the observer. Right? Are you following all this? Watch it in yourself please. So the image and the image-maker is the observer, and the observer is the past, the 'me' as the observer is the past, the 'me' is the knowledge which I have accumulated, knowledge of pain, sorrow, suffering, agony, despair, loneliness, jealousy, the tremendous anxiety that one goes through, that is all the 'me', which is the accumulated knowledge of the observer, which is the past. Right? So when you observe, the observer looks at that flower with the eyes of the past. And you don't know how to look without the observer and therefore you bring about conflict. So our question is: can you look, not only at the flower, but at your life, at your agony, at your despair, your sorrow, can you look at it without naming it, without saying to yourself, "I must go beyond it", "I must suppress it" - just to look at it without the observer. Do it please as we are talking now. That is, take your particular form, or particular tendency, or take, which most people are, envy. All right, let's take that. You know what envy is, don't you, very well? You are very familiar with that. Envy is comparison. The measurement of thought comparing what you are with what should be, or with what you want to become. So you know what envy is. So just look, take it. Now when that reaction comes into being, that is you are envious of your neighbour who has got a bigger car, better house, is an awful politician - you know, all the rest of it. And you look at that and you suddenly feel envious. That is, you have compared yourself with him, and envy is born. Now you have that envy, you know what that feeling is. Now can you look at that feeling without saying, "That is right", or wrong, without naming it? Without saying that it is envy. To look at it without any image, then you go beyond it. You have understood? Instead of struggling with envy, that you should or should not, that you must suppress it, and so on, without going through all that struggle and nonsense, without any meaning, observe your anger, your envy, without naming it, because the naming is the movement of the past memory which justifies or condemns. But if you can look at it without naming then you will see that you go beyond it. So the moment you know the possibility of going beyond 'what is', you are full of energy. Right? It is the man who doesn't know how to go beyond 'what is', because he doesn't know how to deal with it, therefore he is afraid, he escapes. Then seeing the impossibility of it, such a person loses energy. You understand this sirs? If you have a problem and can solve it, then you have energy. A man who has a thousand problems and doesn't know what to do with them, he loses his energy. So in the same way, look at your life, what it is, ugly, petty, shallow, extraordinarily violent. These are all words to describe what is actually going on, not only the violence in sex but violence that abides with power, position, prestige. Now look at it with eyes that don't immediately jump with images. Now that is your life. And look at your life in which there is what you call love. What is love? We are not discussing the theories of what love should be. We are observing what we call love. I love my wife. I love my - I don't know what you love. I doubt if you love anything at all. You know what it means to love? Is love pleasure? Is love jealousy? Can a man love who is ambitious? He may sleep with his wife, beget a few children; and the man who is struggling politically to become an important person, or in the business world, or in the religious world also, you understand, when he wants to become a saint, when he wants to become desireless. Now all that is part of ambition, aggression, desire. Can a man who is competitive love? And you are all competitive, aren't you? Better job, better position, better house, more noble ideas, more perfect images of yourself - you know all that business you go through and is that love? Can you love when you are going through all this tyranny, when you can dominate your wife, or your husband, or your children, when you are seeking power, is there a possibility of love? So in negating what is not love, there is love. You understand? You understand sirs? You have to negate everything which is not love, which is, no ambition, no competition, no aggression, no violence, either in speech, or in act, or in thought. Now when you negate that which is not love, then you will know what love is. And love is something that is intense, that you feel very strongly; love is not pleasure, therefore one must understand pleasure, not one's aim to love somebody, understand pleasure. So if you can observe your life you will find out for yourself what love is because in that lies great passion, not love, passion. The word 'passion' comes from sorrow, the root meaning of that word 'passion' is sorrow. You know what it means to suffer? Not how to escape from suffering, or what to do about suffering, but to suffer, to have great pain inwardly. You understand? Then when there is no movement of escape from that sorrow out of that comes great passion, which is compassion. And you must also find out what death is, not at the last minute, not when you are sick, unconscious, diseased, incapable of clarity, observing; that happens to everybody, old age, disease and death. But while you are young, fresh, active, going to your beastly offices every day, returning to your particular little prison of a family, to find out while you are active, alive, what death means. The organism does go away, wear out, like old age, it is natural. It can last longer depending on the kind of life one leads, depending whether your life is a battlefield from the moment you are born until you die, then your body is worn out quicker, your heart goes through tension, through emotional tension the heart becomes weaker. This is an established fact. And while one is active to find out what the meaning and the significance of death means. And to find that out there must be no fear. And most of us are frightened of death, frightened of leaving the things that we have known. Please do listen to all this. Frightened of leaving your family, frightened of the things you have accumulated, of letting them go, your knowledge, your books, your office, you know what you have collected. And not knowing what is going to happen when you die the mind then, which is thought, says there must be a different kind of life, life must continue somehow, my life, your individual life. And you have then the whole structure of belief, reincarnation, you call it, don't you? Have you ever looked at what it is to incarnate. That is, next life. You understand? What is it that is to be reborn next life? All your accumulations of your knowledge. Right? All your thoughts. All the activities. All the goodness, or the evil or the ugly things that you have done because what you do now that is going to react next life. Right? You all believe that most hopefully, don't you? Which means, if you really believe it then that matter is what you do now, how you behave now, what your conduct is now, because next life you are going to pay for it. That is if you believe in all this - karma. So if you are really caught in the network of this belief then you must pay complete attention to your life now, what you do, what you think, how you treat another. But you don't believe so vastly, so deeply. That is just a comfort, an escape, a worthless word. And to find out what it means to die, not physically that is inevitable, but to die. That is, to die to everything that is known, to die to your family, to your attachments, to all the things that you have accumulated, the known, the known pleasures, the known fears, die to it every minute and you will see what it means to die so that the mind is made fresh, young and therefore innocent. So that in you there is the incarnation of the next life, but the next day. You understand? To incarnate the next day is far more important than in the future. So that your mind is astonishingly innocent. Innocent, the word 'innocence' means a mind that is incapable of being hurt. You understand sir, the beauty of it: a mind that can never be hurt. And such a mind is an innocent mind. Therefore a mind that has been hurt must die to the hurts everyday so that it comes the next morning with a fresh clear unspotted mind, it has no scars. That is the way to live. That is not a theory, it is for you to do it. So there must be the understanding of oneself completely. There must be this order which is not habit, which is not practice, which is not the cultivation of some virtue. Virtue comes into being like a flower of goodness when you understand disorder in your life. Out of disorder comes order. Then you can begin to enquire: what is that which man has sought throughout the centuries upon centuries, he has been asking for it, trying to discover it? You cannot possibly understand it, or come upon it if you have not laid the foundation in your daily life. And then we can ask: what is meditation? Not how to meditate or what steps to take to meditate, or what systems and methods to follow to meditate, because all systems, all systems, all methods make the mind mechanical. You understand sir? Meditation is the most marvellous thing if you know the meaning of a mind that is in meditation, not how to meditate. We will see what is not meditation - you understand - then you will know what meditation is. What it is not, through negation you come upon the positive. But if you pursue the positive it leads you to a dead end. We say meditation is not the practice of any system; you know people who sit and become aware of their toes, of their bodies, of their movements, you know practise, practise, practise. A machine can do that. So systems cannot reveal the beauty and the depth and the marvellous thing called meditation. Nor is meditation concentration. When you concentrate, or attempt to concentrate, in that concentration there is the observer and the observed. So no system, no method, no concentration and a mind that has understood all this through negation. Such a mind then becomes very quiet naturally. In that there is no observer who has achieved some kind of silence. In that silence there is the emptying of the mind of all the past. Unless you do this in your daily life you won't understand the marvellous subtleties, the beauty, the extraordinary thing of it, unless you do it. Merely to repeat what the speaker says, don't do it. If you repeat it becomes a propaganda, which is a lie. So when the mind has this complete order, mathematical order, and that order has come into being naturally through the understanding of the disorder of our daily life, then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet. This quiet has vast space, not the quiet of a little room, it is not the quiet, the silence of the ending of noise, but a mind that has understood this whole problem of existence, love and death and the living, the beauty of the skies, the trees, the people, the beauty, which all your religious gurus have denied, and that is why you destroy your trees, your nature. When you have understood all this then you will know what happens in that silence. Nobody can describe it. Anybody who describes it doesn't know what it is. It is for you to find out. Part 1, Conversations With Jacob Needleman - Chapter 1 - The Role Of The Teacher Chapter 2 - On Inner Space; On Tradition And Dependence - Part 2, New York 1971- Chapter 1 - Inner Revolution Chapter 2 - Relationship Chapter 3 - Religious Experience. Meditation - Part 3, Conversations With Alain Naude - Chapter 1 - The Circus Of Man's Struggle Chapter 2 - On Good And Evil Part 4, Conversations With Swami Venkatesananda - Chapter 1 - The Guru And Search Chapter 2 - Four Mahavakyas From The Upanishads Communication The Bodhisattva Ideal Vedanta The Ending Of Knowledge Part 5, Public Talks Madras 1968 - Chapter 1 - The Art Of Seeing Chapter 2 - Freedom Chapter 3 - The Sacred - Part 6, Public Dialogues Madras 1968 - Chapter 1 - Conflict Chapter 2 - The Pursuit Of Pleasure Chapter 3 - Time, Space And The Centre Chapter 4 - A Fundamental Question - Part 7, Public Talks Saanen 1971 - Chapter 1 - What Is Your Over-Riding Interest Chapter 2 - Order Chapter 3 - Can We Understand Ourselves Chapter 4 - Loneliness Chapter 5 - Thought And The Immeasurable Chapter 6 - The Action Of Will And The Energy Needed For Radical Change Chapter 7 - Thought, Intelligence, And The Immeasurable - Part 8, Public Dialogues Saanen 1971 - Chapter 1 - The Fragmentation Of Consciousness Chapter 2 - Is Intelligence Awake Chapter 3 - Fear Chapter 4 - Fear, Time And The Image Chapter 5 - Intelligence And The Religious Life - Part 9, Brockwood Park 1971 - Chapter 1 - The Relationship To Awareness Of Thought And The Image Chapter 2 - The Meditative Mind And The Impossible Question - Part 10, Brockwood Park 1970 - A Discussion With A Small Group - 'Violence And The Me' - Part 11, Conversation With Professor David Bohm - On Intelligence - Longer, Unedited Versions - Part 1 - Chapter 1 Part 1 - Chapter 2 Part 4 - Chapter 1 Part 7 - Chapter 1 Part 7 - Chapter 2 Part 7 - Chapter 3 Part 7 - Chapter 4 Part 7 - Chapter 5 Part 7 - Chapter 6 Part 7 - Chapter 7 Part 8 - Chapter 1 Part 8 - Chapter 2 Part 8 - Chapter 3 Part 8 - Chapter 4 Part 8 - Chapter 5 Part 9 - Chapter 1 Part 9 - Chapter 2 Part 11 THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART I CHAPTER 1 1ST CONVERSATION WITH JACOB NEEDLEMAN MALIBU CALIFORNIA 26TH MARCH 1971 'THE ROLE OF THE TEACHER' Needleman: There is much talk of a spiritual revolution among young people, particularly here in California. Do you see in this very mixed phenomenon any hope of a new flowering for modern civilization, a new possibility of growth? Krishnamurti: For a new possibility of growth, don't you think, Sir, that one has to be rather serious, and not merely jump from one spectacular amusement to another? If one has looked at all the religions of the world and seen their organized futility, and out of that perception seen something real and clear, perhaps then there could be something new in California, or in the world. But as far as I have seen, I am afraid there is not a quality of seriousness in all this. I may be mistaken, because I see only these so-called young people in the distance, among the audience, and occasionally here; and by their questions, by their laughter, by their applause, they don't strike me as being very serious, mature, with great intent. I may be mistaken, naturally. Needleman: I understand what you are saying. My question only is: perhaps we can't very well expect young people to be serious. Krishnamurti: That is why I don't think it is applicable to the young people. I don't know why one has made such an extraordinary thing out of young people, why it has become such an important thing. In a few years they will be the old people in their turn. Needleman: As a phenomenon, apart from what is underneath it all, this interest in transcending experience - or whatever one wants to call it - seems to be a kind of seed-ground from which certain unusual people aside from all the phoneyness and all the deceivers, certain Masters perhaps, may spring up. Krishnamurti: But I am not sure, Sir, that all the deceivers and exploiters are not covering this up. "Krishna-consciousness" and Transcendental Meditation and all this nonsense that is going on -they are caught in all that. It is a form of exhibitionism, a form of amusement and entertainment. For something new to take place there must be a nucleus of really devoted, serious people, who go through to the very end. After going through all these things, they say, "Here is something I am going to pursue to the end." Needleman: A serious person would be someone who would have to become disillusioned with everything else. Krishnamurti: I would not call it disillusioned but a form of seriousness. Needleman: But a precondition for it? Krishnamurti: No, I wouldn't call it disillusionment at all, that leads to despair and cynicism. I mean the examination of all the things that are so-called religious, so-called spiritual: to examine, to find out what is the truth in all this, whether there is any truth in it. Or to discard the whole thing and start anew, and not go through all the trappings, all the mess of it. Needleman: I think that is what I tried to say, but this expresses it better. People who have tried something and it has failed for them. Krishnamurti: Not "other people". I mean one has to discard all the promises, all the experiences, all the mystical assertions. I think one has to start as though one knew absolutely nothing. Needleman: That is very hard. Krishnamurti: No, Sir, I don't think that is hard. I think it is hard only for those people who have filled themselves with other people's knowledge. Needleman: Isn't that most of us? I was speaking to my class yesterday at San Francisco State, and I said I was going to interview Krishnamurti and what question would you like me to ask him. They had many questions, but the one that touched me most was what one young man said: "I have read his books over and over again and I can't do what he says." There was something so clear about that, it rang a bell. It seems in a certain subtle sense to begin in this way. To be a beginner, fresh! Krishnamurti: I don't think that we question enough. Do you know what I mean? Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: We accept, we are gullible, we are greedy for new experiences. People swallow what is said by anybody with a beard, with promises, saying you will have a marvellous experience if you do certain things! I think one has to say: "I know nothing." Obviously I can't rely on others. If there were no books, no gurus, what would you do? Needleman: But one is so easily deceived. Krishnamurti: You are deceived when you want something. Needleman: Yes, I understand that. Krishnamurti: So you say, I am going to find out, I am going to enquire step by step. I don't want to deceive myself" Deception arises when I want, when I am greedy, when I say, "All experience is shallow, I want something mysterious" - then I am caught. Needleman: To me you are speaking about a state, an attitude, an approach, which is itself very far along in understanding for a man. I feel very far from that myself,and I know my students do. And so they feel, rightly or wrongly, a need for help. They probably misunderstand what help is, but is there such a thing as help? Krishnamurti: Would you say: "Why do you ask for help?" Needleman: Let me put it like this. You sort of smell yourself deceiving yourself, you don't exactly know... Krishnamurti: It is fairly simple. I don't want to deceive myself - right? So I find out what is the movement, what is the thing that brings deception. Obviously it is when I am greedy, when I want something, when I am dissatisfied. So instead of attacking greed, want, dissatisfaction, I want something more. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: So I have to understand my greed. What am I greedy for? Is it because I am fed up with this world, I have had women, I have had cars, I have had money and I want something more? Needleman: I think one is greedy because one desires stimulation, to be taken out of oneself,so that one doesn't see the poverty of oneself. But what I am trying to ask - I know you have answered this question many times in your talks, but it keeps recurring, almost unavoidably - the great traditions of the world, aside from what has become of them (they have become distorted and misinterpreted and deceptive) always speak directly or indirectly of help. They say "The guru is yourself too", but at the same time there is help. Krishnamurti: Sir, you know what that word "guru" means? Needleman: No, not exactly. Krishnamurti: The one who points. That is one meaning. Another meaning is the one who brings enlightenment, lifts your burden. But instead of lifting your burden they impose their burden on you. Needleman: I am afraid so. Krishnamurti: Guru also means one who helps you to cross over - and so on, there are various meanings. The moment the guru says he knows, then you may be sure he doesn't know. Because what he knows is something past, obviously. Knowledge is the past. And when he says he knows, he is thinking of some experience which he has had, which he has been able to recognise as something great, and that recognition is born out of his previous knowledge, otherwise he couldn't recognise it, and therefore his experience has its roots in the past. Therefore it is not real. Needleman: Well, I think that most knowledge is that. Krishnamurti: So why do we want any form of ancient or modern tradition in all this? Look, Sir, I don't read any religious, philosophical, psychological books: one can go into oneself at tremendous depths and find out everything. To go into oneself is the problem, how to do it. Not being able to do it one asks, "Would you please help me?" Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: And the other fellow says, "I'll help you" and pushes you off somewhere else. Needleman: Well, it sort of answers the question. I was reading a book the other day which spoke of something called "Sat-san". Krishnamurti: Do you know what it means? Needleman: Association with the wise. Krishnamurti: No, with good people. Needleman: With good people, Ah! Krishnamurti: Being good you are wise. Not, being wise you are good. Needleman: I understand that. Krishnamurti: Because you are good, you are wise. Needleman: I am not trying to pin this down to something, but I find my students and I myself,speaking for myself, when we read, when we hear you, we say, "Ah! I need no one, I need to be with no one" - and there is a tremendous deception in this too. Krishnamurti: Naturally, because you are being influenced by the speaker. Needleman: Yes. That is true. (Laughter.) Krishnamurti: Sir, look, let's be very simple. Suppose, if there were no book, no guru, no teacher, what would you do? One is in turmoil, confusion, agony, what would you do? With nobody to help you, no drugs, no tranquillisers, no organized religions, what would you do? Needleman: I can't imagine what I would do. Krishnamurti: That's it. Needleman: Perhaps there would be a moment of urgency there. Krishnamurti: That's it. We haven't the urgency because we say, "Well, somebody is going to help me." Needleman: But most people would be driven insane by that situation. Krishnamurti: I am not sure, Sir. Needleman: I'm not sure either. Krishnamurti: No, I am not at all sure. Because what have we done up to now? The people on whom we have relied, the religions, the churches, education, they have led us to this awful mess. We aren't free of sorrow, we aren't free of our beastliness, our ugliness, our vanities. Needleman: Can one say that of all of them? There are differences. For every thousand deceivers there is one Buddha. Krishnamurti: But that is not my concern, Sir, if we say that it leads to such deception. No, no. Needleman: Then let me ask you this. We know that without hard work the body may get ill, and this hard work is what we call effort. Is there another effort for what we might call the spirit? You speak against effort, but does not the growth and well-being of all sides of man demand something like hard work of one sort or another? Krishnamurti: I wonder what you mean by hard work! Physical hard work? Needleman: That is what we usually mean by hard work. Or going against desires. Krishnamurti: You see, there we are! Our conditioning, our culture, is built around this "going against". Erecting a wall of resistance. So when we say "hard work", what do we mean? Laziness? Why have I to make an effort about anything? Why? Needleman: Because I wish for something. Krishnamurti: No. Why is there this cult of effort? Why have I to make effort to reach God, enlightenment, truth? Needleman: There are many possible answers, but I can only answer for myself. Krishnamurti: It may be just there, only I don't know how to look. Needleman: But then there must be am obstacle. Krishnamurti: How to look! It may be just round the comer, under the flower, it may be anywhere. So first I have to learn to look, not make an effort to look. I must find out what it means to look. Needleman: Yes, but don't you admit that there may be a resistance to that looking? Krishnamurti: Then don't bother to look! If somebody comes along and says, "I don't want to look", how are you going to force him to look? Needleman: No. I am speaking about myself now. I want to look. Krishnamurti: If you want to look, what do you mean by looking? You must find out what it means to look before you make an effort to look. Right, Sir? Needleman: That would be, to me, an effort. Krishnamurti: No. Needleman: To do it in that delicate, subtle way. I wish to look, but I don't wish to find out what it means to look. I agree this is much more to me the basic thing. But this wish to do it quickly, to get it over, is this not resistance? Krishnamurti: Quick medicine to get it over. Needleman: Is there something in me that I have to study, that resists this subtle, much more delicate thing you are speaking about? Is this not work, what you are saying? Isn't it work to ask the question so quietly, so subtly? It seems to me it is work to not listen to that part that wants to do it... Krishnamurti: Quickly. Needleman: For us particularly in the West, or maybe for all men. Krishnamurti: I am afraid it is all over the world the same. "Tell me how to get there quickly." Needleman: And yet you say it is in a moment. Krishnamurti: It is, obviously. Needleman: Yes, I understand. Krishnamurti: Sir, what is effort? To get out of bed in the morning, when you don't want to get up, is an effort. What brings on that laziness? Lack of sleep, overeating, over-indulging and all the rest of it; and next morning you say, "Oh, what a bore, I have to get up!" Now wait a minute, Sir, follow it. What is laziness? Is it physical laziness, or is thought itself lazy? Needleman: That I don't understand. I need another word. "Thought is lazy?" I find that thought is always the same. Krishnamurti: No Sir. I am lazy, I don't want to get up and so I force myself to get up. In that is so-called effort. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: I want that, but I shouldn't have it, I resist it. The resistance is effort. I get angry and I mustn't be angry: resistance, effort. What has made me lazy? Needleman: The thought that I ought to be getting up. Krishnamurti: That's it. Krishnamurti: So I really have to go into this whole question of thought. Not make out that the body is lazy, force the body out of bed, because the body has its own intelligence, it knows when it is tired and should rest. This morning I was tired; I had prepared the mat and everything to do yoga exercises and the body said "No, sorry". And I said, "All right". That is not laziness. The body said, "Leave me alone because you talked yesterday, you saw many people, you are tired." Thought then says, "You must get up and do the exercises because it is good for you, you have done it every day, it has become a habit, don't relax, you will get lazy, keep at it." Which means: thought is making me lazy, not the body is making me lazy. Needleman: I understand that. So there is an effort with regard to thought. Krishnamurti: So no effort! Why is thought so mechanical? And is all thought mechanical? Needleman: Yes, all right, one puts that question. Krishnamurti: Isn't it? Needleman: I can't say that I have verified that. Krishnamurti: But we can, Sir. That is fairly simple to see. Isn't all thought mechanical? The non-mechanical state is the absence of thought; not the neglect of thought but the absence of it. Needleman: How can I find that out? Krishnamurti: Do it now, it is simple enough. You can do it now if you wish to. Thought is mechanical. Needleman: Let's assume that. Krishnamurti: Not assume. Don't assume anything. Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical, isn't it? - because it is repetitive, conforming, comparing. Needleman: That part I see, the comparing. But my experience is that not all thought is of the same quality. There are qualities of thought. Krishnamurti: Are there? Needleman: In my experience there are. Krishnamurti: Let's find out. What is thought, thinking? Needleman: There seems to be thought that is very shallow, very repetitive, very mechanical, it has a certain taste to it. There seems to be another kind of thought which is connected more with my body, with my whole self, it resonates in another way. Krishnamurti: That is what, Sir? Thought is the response of memory. Needleman: All right, this is a definition. Krishnamurti: No, no, I can see it in myself. I have to go to that house this evening - the memory, the distance, the design - all that is memory, isn't it? Needleman: Yes, that is memory. Krishnamurti: I have been there before and so the memory is well established and from that there is either instant thought, or thought which takes a little time. So I am asking myself: is all thought similar, mechanical, or is there thought which is non-mechanical, which is non-verbal? Needleman: Yes, that's right. Krishnamurti: Is there thought if there is no word? Needleman: There is understanding. Krishnamurti: Wait, Sir. How does this understanding take place? Does it happen when thought is functioning rapidly, or when thought is quiet? Needleman: When thought is quiet, yes. Krishnamurti: Understanding is nothing to do with thought. You may reason, which is the process of thinking, logic, till you say, "I don't understand it; then you become silent, and you say, "Ah! I see it, I understand it." That understanding is not a result of thought. Needleman: You speak of an energy which seems to be uncaused. We experience the energy of cause and effect, which shapes our lives, but what is this other energy's relationship to the energy we are familiar with? What is energy? Krishnamurti: First of all: is energy divisible? Needleman: I don't know. Go on. Krishnamurti: It can be divided. Physical energy, the energy of anger and so on, cosmic energy, human energy, it can all be divided. But it is all one energy, isn't it? Needleman: Logically, I say yes. I don't understand energy. Sometimes I experience the thing which I call energy. Krishnamurti: Why do we divide energy at all, that is what I want to get at; then we can come to it differently. Sexual energy, physical energy, mental energy, psychological energy, cosmic energy, the energy of the businessman who goes to the office and so on - why do we divide it? What is the reason for this division? Needleman: There seem to be many parts of oneself which are separate; and we divide life, it seems to me, because of that. Krishnamurti: Why? We have divided the world into Communist, Socialist, Imperialist, and Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, and nationalities, linguistic divisions, the whole thing is fragmentation. Why has the mind fragmented the whole of life? Needleman: I don't know the answer. I see the ocean and I see a tree: there is a division. Krishnamurti: No. There is a difference between the sea and the tree - I hope so! But that is not a division. Needleman: No. It is a difference, not a division. Krishnamurti: But we are asking why the division exists, not only outwardly but in us. Needleman: It is in us, that is the most interesting question. Krishnamurti: Because it is in us we extend it outwards. Now why is there this division in me? The "me" and the "not me". You follow? The higher and the lower, the Atman and the lower self. Why this division? Needleman: Maybe it was done, at least in the beginning, to help men to question themselves. To make them question whether they really know what they think they know. Krishnamurti: Through division will they find out? Needleman: Maybe through the idea that there is something that I don't understand. Krishnamurti: In a human being there is a division - why? What is the "raison d'etre", what is the structure of this division? I see there is a thinker and thought - right? Needleman: I don't see that. Krishnamurti: There is a thinker who says, "I must control that thought, I must not think this, I must think that". So there is a thinker who says, "I must", or "I must not". Needleman: Right. Krishnamurti: There is the division. "I should be this", and "I should not be that". If I can understand why this division in me exists - Oh look, look! Look at those hills! Marvellous, isn't it? Needleman: Beautiful! Krishnamurti: Now, Sir, do you look at it with a division? Needleman: No. Krishnamurti: Why not? Needleman: There wasn't the "me" to do anything with it. Krishnamurti: That's all. You can't do anything about it. Here, with thought, I think I can do something. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: So I want to change "what is". I can't change "what is" there, but I think I can change "what is" in me. Not knowing how to change it I have become desperate, lost, in despair. I say, "I can't change", and therefore I have no energy to change. Needleman: That's what one says. Krishnamurti: So first, before I change "what is", I must know who is the changer, who it is that changes. Needleman: There are moments when one knows that, for a moment. Those moments are lost. There are moments when one knows who sees "what is" in oneself. Krishnamurti: No Sir. Sorry. just to see "what is" is enough, not to change it. Needleman: I agree. I agree with that. Krishnamurti: I can see "what is" only when the observer is not. When you looked at those hills the observer was not. Needleman: I agree, yes. Krishnamurti: The observer only came into being when you wanted to change "what is". You say: I don't like "what is", it must be changed, so there is instantly a duality. Can the mind observe "what is" without the observer? It took place when you looked at those hills with that marvellous light on them. Needleman: This truth is absolute truth. The moment one experiences it one says, "Yes!" But one's experience is also that one forgets this. Krishnamurti: Forget! Needleman: By that I mean one continually tries to change it. Krishnamurti: Forget it, and pick it up again. Needleman: But in this discussion - whatever you intend - there is help coming from this discussion. I know, as much as I know anything, it could not happen without the help that is between us. I could look at those hills and maybe have this non-judging, but it wouldn't be important to me; I wouldn't know that that is the way I must look for salvation. And this, I think, is a question one always wants to bring. Maybe this is the mind again wanting to grab and hold on to something, but nevertheless it seems that the human condition... Krishnamurti: Sir, we looked at those hills, you couldn't change that, you just looked; and you looked inwardly and the battle began. For a moment you looked without that battle, without that strife, and all the rest of it. Then you remembered the beauty of that moment, of that second, and you wanted to capture that beauty again. Wait Sir! Proceed. So what happens? It sets up another conflict: the thing you had and you would like to have again, and you don't know how to get it again. You know, if you think about it, it is not the same, it is not that. So you strive, battle. "I must control, I mustn't want" - right? Whereas if you say, "All right, it is over, finished", that moment is over. Needleman: I have to learn that. Krishnamurti: No, no. Needleman: I have to learn, don't I? Krishnamurti: What is there to learn? Needleman: I have to learn the futility of this conflict. Krishnamurti: No. What is there to learn? You yourself see that that moment of beauty becomes a memory, then the memory says, "It was so beautiful I must have it again." You are not concerned with beauty, you are concerned with the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure and beauty don't go together. So if you see that, it is finished. Like a dangerous snake, you won't go near it again. Needleman: (Laughs) Perhaps I haven't seen it, so I can't say. Krishnamurti: That is the question. Needleman: Yes, I think that must be so, because one keeps going back again and again. Krishnamurti: No. This is the real thing. If I see the beauty of that light, and it is really extraordinarily beautiful, I just see it. Now with that same quality of attention I want to see myself. There is a moment of perception which is as beautiful as that. Then what happens? Needleman: Then I wish for it. Krishnamurti: Then I want to capture it, I want to cultivate it, I want to pursue it. Needleman: And how to see that? Krishnamurti: Just to see that is taking place is enough. Needleman: That's what I forget! Krishnamurti: It is not a question of forgetting. Needleman: Well, that is what I don't understand deeply enough. That just the seeing is enough. Krishnamurti: Look, Sir. When you see a snake what takes place? Needleman: I am afraid. Krishnamurti: No. What takes place? You run, kill it, do something. Why? Because you know it is dangerous. You are aware of the danger of it. A cliff, better take a cliff, an abyss. You know the danger of it. Nobody has to tell you. You see directly what would happen. Needleman: Right. Krishnamurti: Now, if you see directly that the beauty of that moment of perception cannot be repeated, it is over. But thought says, "No, it's not over, the memory of it remains." So what are you doing now? You are pursuing the dead memory of it, not the living beauty of it - right? Now if you see that, the truth of it - not the verbal statement, the truth of it - it is finished. Needleman: Then this seeing is much rarer than we think. Krishnamurti: If I see the beauty of that minute, it is over. I don't want to pursue it. If I pursue it, it becomes a pleasure. Then if I can't get it, it brings despair, pain and all the rest of it. So I say, "All right, finished." Then what takes place? Needleman: From my experience, I'm afraid that what takes place is that the monster is born again. It has a thousand lives. (Laughter.) Krishnamurti: No Sir. When did that beauty take placer. Needleman: The place when I saw without trying to change. Krishnamurti: When the mind was completely quiet. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: Wasn't it? Right? Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: When you looked at that, your mind was quiet, it didn't say, "I wish I could change it, copy it and photograph it, this, that, and the other" - you just looked. The mind wasn't in operation. Or rather, thought wasn't in operation. But thought comes immediately into operation. Now one has asked, "How can thought be quiet? How can one exercise thought when necessary, and not exercise it when it is not necessary?" Needleman: Yes, that question is intensely interesting to me, Sir. Krishnamurti: That is, why do we worship thought? Why has thought become so extraordinarily important? Needleman: It seems able to satisfy our desires; through thought we believe we can satisfy. Krishnamurti: No, not from satisfaction. Why has thought in all cultures with most people become of such vital concern? Needleman: One usually identifies oneself as thought, as one's thoughts. If I think about myself I think about what I think, what kind of ideas I have, what I believe. Is this what you mean? Krishnamurti: Not quite. Apart from identification with the "me", or with "not me", why is thought always active? Needleman: Ah, I see. Krishnamurti: Thought is always operating in knowledge, isn't it? If there was no knowledge, thought would not be. Thought is always operating in the field of the known. Whether mechanical, non-verbal and so on, it is always working in the past. So my life is the past, because it is based on past knowledge, past experience, past memories, pleasure, pain, fear and so on - it is all the past. And the future I project from the past, thought projects from the past. So thought is fluctuating between the past and the future. All the time it says, "I should do this, I should not do that, I should have behaved." Why is it doing all this? Needleman: I don't know. Habit? Krishnamurti: Habit. All right. Go on. Let's find out. Habit? Needleman: Habit brings what I call pleasure. Krishnamurti: Habit, pleasure, pain. Needleman: To protect me. Pain, yes pain. Krishnamurti: It is always working within that field. Why? Needleman: Because it doesn't know any better. Krishnamurti: No. No. Can thought work in any other field? Needleman: That sort of thought, no. Krishnamurti: No, not any thought. Can thought work in any other field except in the field of the known? Needleman: No. Krishnamurti: Obviously not. It can't work in something I don't know; it can only work in this field. Now why does it work in this? There it is, Sir - why? It is the only thing I know. In that there is security, there is protection, there is safety. That is all I know. So thought can only function in the field of the known. And when it gets tired of that, as it does, then it seeks something outside. Then what it seeks is still the known. Its gods, its visions, its spiritual states - all projected out of the known past into the future known. So thought always works in this field. Needleman: Yes, I see. Krishnamurti: Therefore thought is always working in a prison. It can call it freedom, it can call it beauty, it can call it what is likes! But it is always within the limitations of the barbed wire fence. Now I want to find out whether thought has any place except in there. Thought has no place when I say, "I don't know." "I really don't know." Right? Needleman: For the moment. Krishnamurti: I really don't know. I only know this, and I really don't know whether thought can function in any field at all, except this. I really don't know. When I say, "I don't know", which doesn't mean I am expecting to know, when I say I really don't know -what happens? I climb down the ladder. I become, the mind becomes, completely humble. Now that state of "not knowing" is intelligence. Then it can operate in the field of the known and be free to work somewhere else if it wants to. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART I CHAPTER 2 2ND CONVERSATION WITH JACOB NEEDLEMAN MALIBU CALIFORNIA 26TH MARCH 1971 'ON INNER SPACE; ON TRADITION AND DEPENDENCE' Needleman: In your talks you have given a fresh meaning to the necessity for man to become his own authority. Yet cannot this assertion easily be turned into a form of humanistic psychology without reference to the sacred, transcendent dimension of human life on earth in the midst of a vast intelligent Cosmos? Must we not only try to see ourselves in the moment, but also as creatures of the Cosmos? What I am trying to ask about is this question of cosmic dimension. Krishnamurti: As soon as we use that word "dimension", it implies space, otherwise there is no dimension, there is no space. Are we talking about space, outward space, endless space? Needleman: No. Krishnamurti: Or the dimension of space in us? Needleman: It would have to be the latter, but not totally without the former, I think. Krishnamurti: Is there a difference between the outer space, which is limitless, and the space in us? Or is there no space in us at all and we only know the outer space? We know the space in us as a centre and circumference. The dimension of that centre, and the radius from that centre, is what we generally call that space. Needleman: Inner space, yes. Krishnamurti: Yes, inner space. Now if there is a centre, the space must always be limited and therefore we divide the inner space from the outer space. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: We only know this very limited space but we think we would like to reach the other space, have immense space. This house exists in space, otherwise there could be no house, and the four walls of this room make its space. And the space in me is the space which the centre has created round itself. Like that microphone... Needleman: Yes, centre of interest. Krishnamurti: Not only centre of interest, it has its own space, otherwise it couldn't exist. Needleman: Yes, right. Krishnamurti: In the same way, human beings may have a centre and from that centre they create a space, the centre creates a space round itself. And that space is always limited, it must be; because of the centre, the space is limited. Needleman: It is defined, it is a defined space, yes. Krishnamurti: When you use the words "cosmic space"... Needleman: I didn't use the words "cosmic space; I said cosmic, the dimension of the Cosmos. I wasn't asking about outer space and trips to the planets. Krishnamurti: So we are talking of the space which the centre creates round itself, and also a space between two thoughts; there is a space, an interval between two thoughts. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: And the centre having created that space round itself, there is the space outside the limit. There is a space between thinking, between thoughts; and also a space round the centre itself, and the space beyond the barbed wire. Now what is the question, Sir? How to expand space? How to enter a different dimension of space? Needleman: Not how to but... Krishnamurti: ...not how to. Is there a different dimension of space except the space round the centre? Needleman: Or a different dimension of reality? Krishnamurti: Space, we are talking about that for the moment, we can use that word. First I must see very clearly the space between two thoughts. Needleman: The interval. Krishnamurti: This interval between two thoughts. Interval means space. And what takes place in this interval? Needleman: Well, I confess I don't know because my thoughts overlap all the time. I know there are intervals, there are moments when this interval appears, and I see it, and there is freedom there for a moment. Krishnamurti: Let's go into this a bit, shall we? There is space between two thoughts. And there is space which the centre creates round itself, which is the space of isolation. Needleman: All right, yes. That is a cold word. Krishnamurti: It is cutting itself off. I consider myself important, with my ambition, with my frustrations, with my anger, with my sexuality, my growth, my meditation, my reaching Nirvana. Needleman: Yes, that is isolation. Krishnamurti: It is isolation. My relation with you is the image of that isolation, which is that space. Then having created that space there is space outside the barbed wire. Now is there a space of a totally different dimension? That is the question. Needleman: Yes, that embraces the question. Krishnamurti: How shall we find out if the space round me, round the centre, exists? And how can I find out the other? I can speculate about the other, I can invent any space I like - but that is too abstract, too silly! Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: So is it possible to be free of the centre, so that the centre doesn't create space round itself build a wall round itself, isolation, a prison - and call that space? Can that centre cease to be? Otherwise I can't go beyond it; the mind cannot go beyond that limitation. Needleman: Yes, I see what you mean. It's logical, reasonable. Krishnamurti: That is, what is that centre? That centre is the "me" and "non-me", that centre is the observer, the thinker, the experiencer, and in that centre is also the observed. The centre says, "That is the barbed wire I have created round myself." Needleman: So that centre is limited there too. Krishnamurti: Yes. Therefore it separates itself from the barbed wire fence. So that becomes the observed. The centre is the observer. So there is space between the observer and the observed -right Sir? Needleman: Yes, I see that. Krishnamurti: And that space it tries to bridge over. That is what we are doing. Needleman: It tries to bridge it over. Krishnamurti: It says, "This must be changed, that must not be, this is narrow, that is wide, I must be better than that." All that is the movement in the space between the observer and the observed. Needleman: I follow that, yes. Krishnamurti: And hence there is conflict between the observer and the observed. Because the observed is the barbed wire which must be jumped over, and so the battle begins. Now can the observer - who is the centre, who is the thinker, who is the knower, who is experience, who is knowledge - can that centre be still? Needleman: Why should it wish to? Krishnamurti: If it is not still, the space is always limited. Needleman: But the centre, the observer, doesn't know that it is limited in this way. Krishnamurti: But you can see it, look. The centre is the observer, let's call him the observer for the moment -the thinker, the experiencer, the knower, the struggler, the searcher, the one who says, "I know, and you don't know." Right? Where there is a centre it must have a space round itself. Needleman: Yes, I follow. Krishnamurti: And when it observes, it observes through that space. When I observe those mountains there is space between me and the mountains. And when I observe myself there is space between me and the thing I observe in myself. When I observe my wife, I observe her from the centre of my image about her, and she observes me with the image which she has about me. So there is always this division and space. Needleman: Changing the approach to the subject entirely, there is something called the sacred. Sacred teachings, sacred ideas, the sacred, which for a moment seems to show me that this centre and this space you speak about is an illusion. Krishnamurti: Wait. One has learnt this from somebody else. Are we going to find out what is the sacred, then? Are we looking because somebody has told me, "That is sacred", or that there is a sacred thing? Or is it my imagination, because I want something holy? Needleman: Very often it is that but there is... Krishnamurti: Now which is it? The desire for something holy? The imposition on my mind by others who have said, "This is sacred?" Or my own desire, because everything is unholy and I want something holy, sacred? All this springs from the centre. Needleman: Yes. Nevertheless... Krishnamurti: Wait. We will find this out, what is sacred. But I don't want to accept tradition, or what somebody has said about the sacred. Sir, I don't know if you have experimented? Some years ago, for fun, I took a piece of rock from the garden and put it on the mantelpiece and played with it, brought flowers to it every day. At the end of a month it became terribly sacred! Needleman: I know what you mean. Krishnamurti: I don't want that kind of phoney sacredness. Needleman: It's a fetish. Krishnamurti: Sacredness is a fetish. Needleman: Granted. Most of it is. Krishnamurti: So I won't accept anything that anybody says about what is sacred. Tradition! As a Brahmin one was brought up in a tradition which would beat anybody's tradition, I assure you! What I am saying is: I want to find out what is holy, not man-made holiness. I can only find out when the mind has immense space. And it cannot have that immense space if there is a centre. When the centre is not in operation, then there is vast space. In that space, which is part of meditation, there is something really sacred, not invented by my foolish little centre. There is something immeasurably sacred, which you can never find out if there is a centre. And to imagine that sacredness is folly - you follow what I mean? Can the mind be free of this centre - with its terribly limited yardage of space - which can be measured and expanded and contracted and all the rest of it? Can it? Man has said it can't, and therefore God has become another centre. So my real concern is this: whether the centre can be completely empty? That centre is consciousness. That centre is the content of consciousness, the content is consciousness; there is no consciousness if there is no content. You must work this out... Needleman: Certainly what we ordinarily mean by it, yes. Krishnamurti: There is no house if there are no walls and no roof. The content is consciousness but we like to separate them, theorize about it, measure the yardage of our consciousness. Whereas the centre is consciousness, the content of consciousness, and the content is consciousness. Without the content, where is consciousness? And that is the space. Needleman: I follow a little bit of what you say. I find myself wanting to say: well, what do you value here? What is the important thing here? Krishnamurti: I'll put that question after I have found out whether the mind can be empty of the content. Needleman: All right. Krishnamurti: Then there is something else that will operate, which will function within the field of the known. But without finding that merely to say... Needleman: No, no, this is so. Krishnamurti: Let's proceed. Space is between two thoughts, between two factors of time, two periods of time, because thought is time. Yes? Needleman: All right, yes. Krishnamurti: You can have a dozen periods of time but it is still thought, there is that space. Then there is the space round the centre, and the space beyond the self,beyond the barbed wire, beyond the wall of the centre. The space between the observer and the observed is the space which thought has created as the image of my wife and the image which she has about me. You follow, Sir? Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: All that is manufactured by the centre. To speculate about what is beyond all that has no meaning to me personally, it's the philosopher's amusement. Needleman: The philosopher's amusement... Krishnamurti: I am not interested. Needleman: I agree. I am not interested sometimes, at my better moments, but nevertheless... Krishnamurti: I am sorry, because you are a philosopher! Needleman: No, no, why should you remember that, please. Krishnamurti: So my question is: "Can the centre be still, or can the centre fade away?" Because if it doesn't fade away, or lie very quiet, then the content of consciousness is going to create space within consciousness and call it the vast space. In that there lies deception and I don't want to deceive myself. I don't say I am not brown when I am brown. So can that centre be absorbed? Which means, can there be no image, because it is the image that separates? Needleman: Yes, that is the space. Krishnamurti: That image talks about love, but the love of the image is not love. Therefore I must find out whether the centre can be completely absorbed, dissolved, or lie as a vague fragment in the distance. If there is no possibility of that, then I must accept prison. Needleman: I agree. Krishnamurti: I must accept there is no freedom. Then I can decorate my prison for ever. Needleman: But now this possibility that you are speaking about, without searching for it consciously... Krishnamurti: No, don't search for it! Needleman: I say, without searching for it consciously, life or something suddenly shows me it is possible. Krishnamurti: It is there! Life hasn't shown me. It has shown me, when I look at that mountain, that there is an image in me; when I look at my wife I see that there is an image in me. That is a fact. It isn't that I have to wait for ten years to find out about the image! I know it is there, therefore I say: "Is it possible to look without the image?" The image is the centre, the observer, the thinker and all the rest of it. Needleman: I am beginning to see the answer to my question. I begin to see - I am speaking to myself - I am beginning to see that there is no distinction between humanism and sacred teachings. There is just truth, or non-truth. Krishnamurti: That's all. False and true. Needleman: So much for that. (Laughter) Krishnamurti: We are asking: "Can the consciousness empty itself of its content?" Not somebody else do it. Needleman: That is the question, yes. Krishnamurti: Not divine grace, the super-self, some fictitious outside agency. Can the consciousness empty itself of all this content? First see the beauty of it, Sir. Needleman: I see it. Krishnamurti: Because it must empty itself without an effort. The moment there is an effort, there is the observer who is making the effort to change the content, which is part of consciousness. I don't know if you see that? Needleman: I follow. This emptying has to be effortless, instantaneous. Krishnamurti: It must be without an agent who is operating on it, whether an outside agent, or an inner agent. Now can this be done without any effort, any directive - which says, "I will change the content"? This means the emptying of consciousness of all will, "to be" or "not to be". Sir, look what takes place. Needleman: I am watching. Krishnamurti: I have put that question to myself. Nobody has put it to me. Because it is a problem of life, a problem of existence in this world. It is a problem which my mind has to solve. Can the mind, with all its content, empty itself and yet remain mind - not just float about? Needleman: It is not suicide. Krishnamurti: No. Needleman: There is some kind of subtle... Krishnamurti: No, Sir, that is too immature. I have put the question. My answer is: I really don't know. Needleman: That is the truth. Krishnamurti: I really don't know. But I am going to find out, in the sense of not waiting to find out. The content of my consciousness is my unhappiness, my misery, my struggles, my sorrows, the images which I have collected through life, my gods, the frustrations, the pleasures, the fears, the agonies, the hatreds -that is my consciousness. Can all that be completely emptied? Not only at the superficial level but right through? - the so-called unconscious. If it is not possible, then I must live a life of misery, I must live in endless, unending sorrow. There Is neither hope, nor despair, I am in prison. So the mind must find out how to empty itself of all the content of itself, and yet live in this world, not become a moron, but have a brain that functions efficiently. Now how is this to be done? Can it ever be done? Or is there no escape for man? Needleman: I follow. Krishnamurti: Because I don't see how to get beyond this I invent all the gods, temples, philosophies, rituals - you understand? Needleman: I understand. Krishnamurti: This is meditation, real meditation, not all the phoney stuff. To see whether the mind - with the brain which has evolved through time, which is the result of thousands of experiences, the brain that functions efficiently only in complete security - whether the mind can empty itself and yet have a brain that functions as a marvellous machine. Also, it sees love is not pleasure; love is not desire. When there is love there is no image; but I don't know what that love is. I only want love as pleasure, sex and all the rest of it. There must be a relationship between the emptying of consciousness and the thing called love; between the unknown and the known, which is the content of consciousness. Needleman: I am following you. There must be this relationship. Krishnamurti: The two must be in harmony. The emptying and love must be in harmony. And it may be only love that is necessary and nothing else. Needleman: This emptying is another word for love, is that what you are saying? Krishnamurti: I am only asking what is love. Is love within the field of consciousness? Needleman: No, it couldn't be. Krishnamurti: Don't stipulate. Don't ever say yes or no; find out! Love within the content of consciousness is pleasure, ambition and all that. Then what is love? I really don't know. I won't pretend any more about anything. I don't know. There is some factor in this which I must find out. Whether the emptying of consciousness with its content is love, which is the unknown? What is the relationship between the unknown and the known? -not the mysterious unknown, God or whatever name you give it. We will come to God if we go through this. The relationship between the unknown, which I don't know, which may be called love, and the content of consciousness, which I know, (it may be unconscious, but I can open it up and find out) - what is the relationship between the known and the unknown? To move between the known and the unknown is harmony, is intelligence, isn't it? Needleman: Absolutely. Krishnamurti: So I must find out, the mind must find out, how to empty its content. That is, have no image, therefore no observer. The image means the past, or the image which is taking place now, or the image which I shall project into the future. So no image - no formula, idea, ideal, principle - all that implies image. Can there be no formation of image at all? You hurt me or you give me pleasure and therefore I have an image of you. So no image formation when you hurt me or give me pleasure. Needleman: Is it possible? Krishnamurti: Of course it is. Otherwise I am doomed. Needleman: You are doomed. In other words I am doomed. Krishnamurti: We are doomed. Is it possible when you insult me to be completely watchful, attentive, so that it doesn't leave a mark? Needleman: I know what you mean. Krishnamurti: When you flatter me - no mark. Then there is no image. So I have done it, the mind has done it: which is, no formation of image at all. If you don't form an image now, the past images have no place. Needleman: I don't follow that. "If I don't form an image now..?" Krishnamurti: The past images have no place. If you form an image, then you are related to it. Needleman: You are connected to the past images. That is right. Krishnamurti: But if you don't form any? Needleman: Then you are free from the past. Krishnamurti: See it! See it! Needleman: Very clear. Krishnamurti: So the mind can empty itself of images by not forming an image now. If I form an image now, then I relate it with past images. So consciousness, the mind, can empty itself of all the images by not forming an image now. Then there is space, not space round the centre. And if one delves, goes into it much further, then there is something sacred, not invented by thought, which has nothing to do with any religion. Needleman: Thank you. . . . Needleman: I have another question which I wanted to ask you. We see the stupidity of so many traditions which people hallow today, but aren't there some traditions transmitted from generation to generation which are valuable and necessary, and without which we would lose the little humanity that we now have? Aren't there traditions that are based on something real, which are handed down? Krishnamurti: Handed down... Needleman: Ways of living, even if only in an external sense. Krishnamurti: If I hadn't been taught from childhood not to run in front of a car... Needleman: That would be the simplest example. Krishnamurti: Or to be careful of fire, be careful of irritating the dog which might bite you, and so on. That is also tradition. Needleman: Yes, that certainly is. Krishnamurti: The other kind of tradition is that you must love. Needleman: That is the other extreme. Krishnamurti: And the tradition of the weavers in India and other places. You know, they can weave without a pattern and yet they weave in a tradition which is so deeply rooted that they don't even have to think about it. It comes out with their hands. I don't know if you have ever seen it? In India they have a tremendous tradition and they produce marvellous things. Also there is the tradition of the scientist, the biologist, the anthropologist, which is tradition as the accumulation of knowledge, handed over by one scientist to another scientist, by a doctor to another doctor, learning. Obviously that kind of tradition is essential. I wouldn't call that tradition, would you? Needleman: No, that is not what I had in mind. What I meant by tradition was a way of living. Krishnamurti: I wouldn't call that tradition. Don't we mean by tradition some other factor? Is goodness a factor of tradition? Needleman: No, but perhaps there are good traditions. Krishnamurti: Good traditions, conditioned by the culture in which one lives. Good tradition among the Brahmins used to be not to kill any human being or animal. They accepted that and functioned. We are saying: "Is goodness traditional? Can goodness function, blossom in tradition?" Needleman: What I am asking then is: are there traditions which are formed by an intelligence either single, or collective, which understands human nature? Krishnamurti: Is intelligence traditional? Needleman: No. But can intelligence form, or shape a way of living which can help other men more readily to find themselves? I know that this is a self-initiated thing that you speak of but are there not men of great intelligence who can shape the external conditions for me, so that I will not have quite as difficult a time to come to what you have seen? Krishnamurti: That means what, Sir? You say you know. Needleman: I don't say I know. Krishnamurti: I am taking that. Suppose you are the great person of tremendous intelligence and you say, "My dear son, live this way." Needleman: Well I don't have to say it. Krishnamurti: You exude your atmosphere, your aura, and then I say, "I'll try it - he has got it, I haven't got it." Can goodness flower in your ambience? Can goodness grow under your shadow? Needleman: No, but then I wouldn't be intelligent if I made those my conditions. Krishnamurti: Therefore you are stating that goodness cannot operate, function, flower in any environment. Needleman: No, I didn't say that. I was asking, are there environments which can be conducive to liberation? Krishnamurti: We will go into this. A man who goes to a factory every day, day after day, and finds release in drink and all the rest of it... Needleman: This is the example of a poor environment, a bad tradition. Krishnamurti: So what does the man who is intelligent, who is concerned with changing the environment, do for that man? Needleman: Perhaps he is changing the environment for himself. But he understands something about man in general. I am talking now about a great teacher, whatever that is. He helps, he presents a way of life to us which we don't understand, which we haven't verified ourselves, but which somehow acts on something in us to bring us a little together. Krishnamurti: That is satsun, which is the company of the good. It is nice to be in the company of the good because we won't then quarrel, we won't fight each other, we won't be violent; it is good. Needleman: All right. But maybe the company of the good means that I will quarrel, but I'll see it more, I'll suffer it more, I'll understand it better. Krishnamurti: So you want the company of the good in order to see yourself more clearly? Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: Which means you depend on the environment to see yourself. Needleman: Well perhaps in the beginning. Krishnamurti: The beginning is the first step and the last step. Needleman: I don't agree. Krishnamurti: Let's go into it a little bit. See what has happened. I go with good men because in that ambience, in that atmosphere I see myself more clearly, because they are good I see my idiocies. Needleman: Sometimes it happens that way. Krishnamurti: I am taking this. Needleman: That is one example, right? Krishnamurti: Or I am also good, therefore I live with them. Then I don't need them. Needleman: No we don't need them then. All right. Krishnamurti: If I am good I don't need them. But if when I am not good and come into their presence, then I can see myself clearly. Then to see myself clearly I must have them. This is what generally takes place. They become important, not my goodness. This happens every day. Needleman: But is there not such a thing as weaning the baby by blackening the breast? It happens that I do need these men, maybe in the beginning. Krishnamurti: I am going to question it, I want to find out. First of all, if I am good I don't need them. I am like those hills and birds which have no need. Needleman: Right. We can rule that out. Krishnamurti: When I am not good I need their company, because in their company I see myself clearly; I feel a breath of freshness. Needleman: Or how bad I am. Krishnamurti: The moment I have a horror of myself, in the largest sense of the word, I am merely comparing myself with them. Needleman: No, not always. I can expose the image I have of myself as a lie. Krishnamurti: Now I am questioning whether you need them to expose yourself as a liar. Needleman: In principle, no. Krishnamurti: No, not in principle. Either it is so, or it is not. Needleman: That is the question. Krishnamurti: Which means if I need them, then I am lost. Then I will for ever hang on to them. Sir, this has happened since human relationships began. Needleman: Yes it has. But it also happens that I hang on for a while and then I right it. Krishnamurti: Therefore why don't you, the good man, tell me: "Look, begin, you don't need me. You can watch yourself now clearly." Needleman: Maybe if I told you that, you would take it utterly wrongly and misunderstand me completely! Krishnamurti: Then what shall I do? Go on hanging onto you, run after you? Needleman: Not what shall you do, but what do you do? Krishnamurti: What they generally do is run after him. Needleman: They generally do, yes. Krishnamurti: And hold on to his skirts. Needleman: But that is perhaps because the teacher is not intelligent. Krishnamurti: No. He says, "Look, I can't teach you my friend, I have nothing to teach. If I am really good I have nothing to teach. I can only show." Needleman: But he doesn't say it, he does it. Krishnamurti: I say, "Look I don't want to teach you, you can learn from yourself." Needleman: Yes, all right. Suppose he says that. Krishnamurti: Yes, he says learn from yourself. Don't depend. That means you, being good, are helping me to look at myself. Needleman: Attracting you. Krishnamurti: No. You are putting me in a corner so that I can't escape. Needleman: I see what you are saying. But it is the easiest thing in the world to escape. Krishnamurti: I don't want to. Sir, you tell me, "Don't depend, for goodness has no dependency." If you want to be good you cannot depend on anything. Needleman: Anything external, yes all right. Krishnamurti: On anything, external or inward. Don't depend on anything. It doesn't mean just don't depend on the postman, it means inwardly don't depend, Needleman: Right. Krishnamurti: That means what? I depend. He has told me one thing: "Don't depend on me or on anybody, wife, husband, daughter, politician, don't depend." That's all. He goes away. He leaves me with that. What shall I do? Needleman: Find out if he is right. Krishnamurti: But I do depend. Needleman: That's what I mean. Krishnamurti: I do depend on my wife, on the priest, on some psycho-analyst - I do depend. Then I begin. Because he tells me the truth - you follow, Sir? It is there, I have to work it out. So I have to find out if it is the truth, or if it is a falsehood. Which means I must exercise my reason, my capacity, my intelligence. I must work. I can't just say, "Well he has gone". I depend on my cook! So I have to find out, I have to see the truth and the false. I have seen it. That doesn't depend on anybody. Needleman: Right. Krishnamurti: Even the company of the good doesn't teach me what is good and what is false, or true. I have to see it. Needleman: Absolutely. Krishnamurti: So I don't depend on anybody to find what is true and what is false. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART II CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC TALK IN NEW YORK 18TH APRIL 1971 'INNER REVOLUTION' Krishnamurti: We are going to examine together the question of what is hidden in the consciousness, in the deeper layers of the mind - which is generally called the unconscious. We are concerned with bringing about a radical revolution in ourselves and so in society. The physical revolution which is advocated all over the world at the present time does not bring about a fundamental change in man. In a corrupt society, such as this, in Europe, India and elsewhere, there must be fundamental changes in the very structure of society. And if man remains corrupt in himself, in his activity, he will overcome whatever the structure be, however perfect; therefore it is imperative, absolutely essential that he change. Is this change to be brought about through the process of time, through gradual achievement, through gradual change? Or does the change take place only in the instant? That is what we are going to examine together. One sees that there must be change in oneself - the more sensitive, the more alert and intelligent one is, the more one is aware that there must be a deep, abiding, living change. The content of consciousness is consciousness - the two are not separate. What is implanted in consciousness makes up consciousness. And to bring about a change in consciousness -both in the obvious and in the hidden - does it depend on analysis, on time, on environmental pressure? Or is the change to take place totally independent of any pressure, of any compulsion? You know, this question is going to bc rather difficult to go into, because it is quite complex and I hope we shall be able to share what is being said. Unless one goes into this matter very seriously, really taking trouble, with deep interest, with passion, I am afraid one will not be able to go very far; far in the sense not of time or space, but very deeply within oneself. One needs a great deal of passion, great energy and most of us waste our energies in conflict. And when we are examining this whole business of existence, we need energy. Energy comes with the possibility of change; if there is no possibility of change, then energy wastes away. We think we cannot possibly change. We accept things as they are and thereby become rather dispirited, depressed, uncertain and confused. It is possible to change radically and that is what we are going to examine. If you will - do not follow exactly what the speaker is saying, but use his words as a mirror to observe yourself and enquire with passion, with interest, with vitality and a great deal of energy. Then perhaps we can come to a point where it will be obvious that without any kind of effort, without any kind of motive, the radical change takes place. There is not only the superficial knowledge of ourselves, but there is also the deep, hidden content of our consciousness. How is one to examine it, how is one to expose the whole content of it? Is it to be done bit by bit, slowly gradually? - or is it to be exposed totally and understood instantly, and thereby the whole analytical process comes to an end? Now we are going to go into this question of analysis. To the speaker, analysis is the denial of action; action being always in the active present. Action means not "having done" or "will do", but doing. Analysis prevents that action in the present, because in analysis there is involved time, a gradual peeling off, as it were, layer after layer, and examining each layer, analysing the content of each layer. And if the analysis is not perfect, complete, true, then that analysis being incomplete, must leave a knowledge which is not total. And the next analysis springs from that which is not complete. Look, I examine myself, analyse myself and if my analysis is not complete, then what I have analysed becomes the knowledge with which I proceed to analyse the next layer. So in that process each analysis becomes incomplete and leads to further conflict, and so to inaction. And in analysis there is the analyser and the analysed, whether the analyser is the professional, or yourself, the layman; there is this duality, the analyser analysing something which he thinks is different from himself. But the analyser, what is he? He is the past, he is the accumulated knowledge of all the things he has analysed. And with that knowledge - which is the past - he analyses the present. So in that process there is conflict, there is the struggle to conform, or to force that which he analyses. Also there is this whole process of dreaming. I don't know whether you have gone into all this yourself, or probably you have read other people's books, which is most unfortunate; because then you merely repeat what other people have said, however famous they are. But if you don't read all those books - as the speaker does not - then you have to investigate yourself, then it becomes much more fascinating, much more original, much more direct and true. In the process of analysis there is this world of dreams. We accept dreams as necessary, because the professionals say, "You must dream, otherwise you go mad", and there is some truth in that. We are enquiring into all this because we are trying to find out whether it is possible to change radically, when there is so much confusion, so much misery, such hatred and brutality in the world; there is no compassion. One must, if one is at all serious, enquire into all this. We are enquiring not merely for intellectual entertainment but actually trying to find out if it is possible to change. And when we see the possibility of change, whatever we are, however shallow, however superficial, repetitive, imitative, if we see that there is a possibility of radical change, then we have the energy to do so. If we say it is not possible, then that energy is dissipated. So we are enquiring into this question, whether analysis does produce a radical change at all, or whether it is merely an intellectual entertainment, an avoidance of action. As we were saying, analysis implies entering into the world of dreams. What are dreams, how do they come into being? I don't know if you have gone into this; if you have, you will see that dreams are the continuation of our daily life. What you are doing during the day, all the mischief, the corruption, the hatred, the passing pleasures, the ambition, the guilt and so on, all that is continued in the world of dreams, only in symbols, in pictures and images. These pictures and images have to be interpreted and all the fuss and unreality of all that comes into being. One never asks why should one dream at all. One has accepted dreams as essential, as part of life. Now we are asking ourselves (if you are with me) why we dream at all. Is it possible when you go to sleep to have a mind that is completely quiet? Because it is only in that quiet state that it renews itself, empties itself of all its content, so that it is made fresh, young, decisive, not confused. If dreams are the continuation of our daily life, of our daily turmoil, anxiety, the desire for security, attachment, then inevitably, dreams in their symbolic form must take place. That is clear, isn't it? So one asks, "Why should one dream at all?" Can the brain cells be quiet, not carry on all the business of the day? One has to find that out experimentally, not accepting what the speaker says - and for goodness sake don't ever do that, because we are sharing together, investigating together. You can test it out by being totally aware during the day, watching your thoughts, your motives, your speech, the way you walk and talk. When you are so aware there are the intimations of the unconscious, of the deeper layers, because then you are exposing, inviting the hidden motives, the anxieties, the content of the unconscious to come into the open. So when you go to sleep, you will find that your mind, including the brain, is extraordinarily quiet. It is really resting, because you have finished what you have been doing during the day. If you take stock of the day, as you go to bed and lie down -don't you do this? - saying, "I should have done this, I should not have done that", "It would have been better that way, I wish I hadn't said this" - when you take stock of the things that have happened during the day, then you are trying to bring about order before you go to sleep. And if you don't make order before you go to sleep, the brain tries to do it when you are asleep. Because the brain functions perfectly only in order, not in disorder. It functions most efficiently when there is complete order, whether that order is neurotic or rational; because in neurosis, in imbalance, there is order, and the brain accepts that order. So, if you take stock of everything that has been happening during the day before you go to sleep, then you are trying to bring about order, and therefore the brain does not have to bring order while you are asleep: you have done it during the day. You can bring about that order every minute during the day, that is if you are aware of everything that's happening, outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly in the sense of being aware of the disorder about you, the cruelty, the indifference, the callousness, the dirt, the squalor, the quarrels, the politicians and their chicanery - all that is happening. And your relationship with your husband, your wife, with your girl or boyfriend, be aware of ill that during the day, without correcting it, just be aware of it. The moment you try to correct it, you are bringing disorder. But if you merely observe actually what is, then what is, is order. It is only when you try to change "what is" that there is disorder; because you want to change according to the knowledge which you have acquired. That knowledge is the past and you are trying to change "what is" - which is not the past - according to what you have learnt. Therefore there is a contradiction, therefore there is a distortion, therefore this is disorder. So during the day, if you are aware of the ways of your thoughts, your motives, the hypocrisy, the double-talk - doing one thing, saying another, thinking another - the mask that you put on, the varieties of deception that one has so readily to hand, if you are aware of all that during the day, you don't have to take stock at all when you go to sleep, you are bringing order each minute. So when you do go to sleep you will find that your brain cells, which have recorded and hold the past, become totally quiet, and your sleep then becomes something entirely different. When we use the word "mind", we include in that the brain, the whole nervous organism, the affections, all the human structure; we mean all that, not something separate. In that is included the intellect, the heart, the whole nervous organism. When you go to sleep then, the process has totally come to an end, and when you wake up you see things exactly as they are, not your interpretation of them or the desire to change them. So analysis, for the speaker, prevents action. And action is absolutely essential in order to bring about this radical change. So analysis is not the way. Don't accept, please, what the speaker is saying, but observe it for yourself, learn about it, not from me, but learn by watching all these implications of analysis: time, the analyser and the analysed - the analyser is the analysed - and each analysis must be complete, otherwise it distorts the next analysis. So to see that the whole process of analyses, whether it is introspective or intellectual analysis, is totally wrong! It is not the way out - maybe it is necessary for those who are somewhat, or greatly, unbalanced; and perhaps most of us are unbalanced. We must find a way of observing the whole content of consciousness without the analyser. It is great fun if you go into this, because you have then rejected totally everything that man has said. Because then you stand alone; when you find out for yourself, it will be authentic, real, true, not dependent on any professor, any psychologist, any analyst and so on. So one must find a way of observing without analysis. I'm going to go into that - I hope you don't mind my doing all this, do you? This is not group therapy! (Laughter) This is not an open confession, it is not that the speaker is analysing you, or making you change and become marvellous human beings! You have to do this yourself, and as most of us are secondhand or third-hand human beings, it is going to be very difficult to put away totally all that has been imposed on your minds by the professionals, whether by religious or scientific professionals. We have to find out for ourselves. If analysis is not the way - and it is not, as far as the speaker is concerned, as he has explained - then how is one to examine or to observe the total content of consciousness? What is the content of consciousness? Please don't repeat what somebody else has said. What is your total content? Have you ever looked at it, considered it? If you have, is it not the various recorded incidents, happenings, pleasurable and non-pleasurable, various beliefs, traditions, the various individual recollections and memories, the racial and family memories, the culture in which one has been brought up -all that is the content, isn't it? And the incidents that take place every day, the memories, the various pains, the unhappiness, the insults, all that is recorded. And that content is your consciousness you, as a Catholic, or Protestant, living in this western world with the search for more and more and more, the world of great pleasure, entertainment, wealth, incessant noise of the television, the brutality - all that is you, that's your content. How is all that to be exposed? - and in the exposing of it, is each incident, each happening, each tradition, each hurt, each pain to be examined one by one? Or is it to be looked at totally? If it is to be examined bit by bit, one by one, you are entering into the world of analysis and there is no end to that, you will die analysing and giving a great deal of money to those who analyse, if that's your pleasure. Now we're going to find out how to look at these various fragments, which are the content of consciousness, totally - not analytically. We are going to find out how to observe without any analysis at all. That is, we have looked at everything - at the tree, at the cloud, at the wife and the husband, at the girl and the boy - as the observer and the observed. Please do give a little attention to this. You have observed your anger, your greed or your jealousy, whatever it is, as an observer looking at greed. The observer is greed, but you have separated the observer because your mind is conditioned to the analytical process; therefore you are always looking at the tree, at the cloud, at everything in life as an observer and the thing observed. Have you noticed it? You look at your wife through the image which you have of her; that image is the observer, it is the past, that image has been put together through time. And the observer is the time, is the past, is the accumulated knowledge of the various incidents, accidents, happenings, experiences and so on. That observer is the past, and he looks at the thing observed as though he were not of it, but separate from it. Now can you look without the observer? Can you look at the tree without the past as the observer? That is, when there is the observer, then there is space between the observer and the observed - the tree. That space is time, because there is a distance. That time is the quality of the observer, who is the past, who is the accumulated knowledge, who says, "That is the tree", or "That is the image of my wife." Can you look, not only at the tree, but at your wife or your husband, without the image? You know, this requires tremendous discipline. I am going to show you something: discipline generally implies conformity, drill, imitation, conflict between what is and what should be. And so in discipline there is conflict: suppressing, overcoming, the exercise of will and so on - all that is implied in that word. But that word means to learn - not to conform, not to suppress, but to learn. And the quality of the mind that learns has its own order which is discipline. We are learning now to observe, without the observer, without the past, without the image. When you so observe, the actual "what is", is a living thing, not a thing looked upon as dead, recognizable by the past event, by past knowledge. Look, Sirs, let's make it much simpler than this. You say something to me which hurts me, and the pain of that hurt is recorded. The memory of that continues and when there is further pain, it is recorded again. So the hurt is being strengthened from childhood on. Whereas, if I observe it completely, when you say something which is painful to me, then it is not recorded as a hurt. The moment you record it as a hurt, that recording is continued and for the rest of your life you are being hurt, because you are adding to that hurt. Whereas to observe the pain completely without recording it, is to give your total attention at the moment of the pain. Are you doing all this? Look, when you go out, when you walk in these streets, there are all kinds of noise, all kinds of shouting, vulgarity, brutality, this noise is pouring in. That is very destructive - the more sensitive you are the more destructive it becomes, it hurts your organism. You resist that hurt and therefore you build a wall. And when you build a wall you are isolating yourself. Therefore you are strengthening the isolation, by which you will get more and more hurt. Whereas if you are observing that noise, are attentive to that noise, then you will see that your organism is never hurt. If you understand this one radical principle, you will have understood something immense: that where there is an observer separating himself from the thing he observes, there must be conflict. Do what you will, as long as there is a division between the observer and the observed, there must be conflict. As long as there is division between the Muslim and the Hindu, between the Catholic and the Protestant, between the Black and the White, there must be conflict; you may tolerate each other, which is an intellectual covering of intolerance. As long as there is division between you and your wife, there must be conflict. This division exists fundamentally, basically, as long as there is the observer separate from the thing observed. As long as I say, "Anger is different from me, I must control anger, I must change, I must control my thoughts", in that there is division, therefore there is conflict. Conflict implies suppression, conformity, imitation, all that is involved in it. If you really see the beauty of this, that the observer is the observed, that the two are not separate, then you can observe the totality of consciousness without analysis. Then you see the whole content of it instantly. The observer is the thinker. We have given such tremendous importance to the thinker, haven't we? We live by thought, we do things by thought, we plan our life by thought, our action is motivated by thought. And thought is worshipped throughout the world as the most extraordinarily important thing, which is part of the intellect. And thought has separated itself as the thinker. The thinker says, "These thoughts are no good", "These are better", he says, "This ideal is better than that ideal", "This belief is better than that belief". It is all the product of thought - thought which has made itself separate, fragmented itself as the thinker, as the experiencer. Thought has separated itself as the higher self and the lower self -in India it is called the atman, the higher. Here you call it the soul, or this or that. But it is still thought in operation. That's clear, isn't it? I mean, this is logical, it is not irrational. Now I am going to show you the irrationality of it. All our books, all our literature, everything is thought. And our relationship is based on thought - just think of it! My wife is the image which I have created by thinking. That thinking has been put together by nagging, by all the things which go on between husband and wife - pleasure, sex, the irritations, the exclusions, all the separative instincts that go on. Our thought is the result of our relationship. Now what is thought? You are asked that question, "What is thought?" Please don't repeat somebody else - find out for yourself. Surely thought is the response of memory, isn't it? -memory as knowledge, memory as experience which has been accumulated, stored up in the brain cells. So the brain cells themselves are the cells of memory. But if you did not think at all, you would be in a state of amnesia, you would not be able to get to your house. Thought is the response of the accumulated memory as knowledge, as experience - whether it is yours, or the inherited, the communal experience and so on. So thought is the response of the past, which may project itself into the future, going through the present, modifying it as the future. But it is still the past. So thought is never free - how can it be? It can imagine what is freedom, it can idealize what freedom should be, create a Utopia of freedom. But thought itself, in itself, is of the past and therefore it is not free, it is always old. Please, it is not a question of your agreeing with the speaker, it is a fact. Thought organises our life, based on the past. That thought, based on the past, projects what should be tomorrow and so there is conflict. From that arises a question, which is, for most of us, thought has given a great deal of pleasure. Pleasure is a guiding principle in our life. We are not saying that it is wrong or right, we are examining it. Pleasure is the thing that we want most. Here in this world and in the spiritual world, in heaven - if you have a heaven -we want pleasure in any form - religious entertainment, going to Mass, all the circus that goes on in the name of religion. And the pleasure of any incident, whether it is of a sunset, or sexual, or any sensory pleasure, is recorded and thought over. So thought as pleasure plays a tremendous part in our life. Something happened yesterday which was a most lovely thing, a most happy event, it is recorded; thought comes upon it, chews it and keeps on thinking about it and wants it repeated tomorrow, whether it be sexual or otherwise. So thought gives vitality to an incident that is over. The very process of recording is knowledge, which is the past, and thought is the past. So thought, as pleasure, is sustained. If you have noticed, pleasure is always in the past; or the imagined pleasure of tomorrow is still the recollection projected into the future, from the past. You can also observe that where there is pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure, there is also the nourishing of fear. Haven't you noticed it? Fear of the thing I have done yesterday, fear of the physical pain which I had a week ago; thinking about it sustains the fear. There is no ending of that pain when it's over. It is finished, but I carry it over by thinking about it. So thought sustains and gives nourishment to pleasure as well as to fear. Thought is responsible for this. There is fear of the present, of the future, fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of not fulfilling, fear of not being loved, wanting to be loved - there are so many fears, all created by the machinery of thought. So there is the rationality of thought and the irrationality of thought. There must be the exercise of thought in doing things. Technologically, in the office, when you cook, when you wash dishes - knowledge must function perfectly. There is the rationality, the logic of thought in action, in doing. But also thought becomes totally irrational when it sustains pleasure or fear. And yet thought says, "I cannot let go of my pleasure; yet thought knows, if it is at all sensitive or aware, that there is pain coming with it. So to be aware of all the machinery of thought, of the complicated, subtle movement of thought! This is really not at all difficult once you say, "I must find out a way of living that is totally different, a way of life in which there is no conflict." If that is your real, your insistent, passionate demand - as is your demand for pleasure - to live a life, inwardly and outwardly in which there is no conflict whatsoever - then you will see the possibility of it. Because, as we have explained, conflict exists only when there is division between "me" and "not me". Then if you see that, not verbally or intellectually - because that is not seeing - but when you actually realize that there is no division between the observer and the observed, between the thinker and the thought, then you see, then you observe actually "what is". And when you see actually "what is", you are already beyond it. You don't stay with "what is", you stay with "what is" only when the observer is different from the "what is". Are you getting this? So when there is this complete cessation of division between the observer and the observed, then "what is" is no longer what is. The mind has gone beyond it. Questioner: How can I change this identification of the observer with the observed? I can't just agree with you and say " Yes, it's true", but have to do something about it. Krishnamurti: Quite right. Sir, there is no identification at all. When you identify yourself with the observed, it is still the pattern of thought, isn't it? Questioner: Precisely, but how do I get out of that? Krishnamurti: You don't get out of it, I'll show it to you, Sir. Do you see the truth that the observer is the observed? - the fact of it, the logic of it. Do you see that? Or don't you? Questioner: It is still only a comment which arises; the truth does not exist. Krishnamurti: The fact does not exist? Questioner: No, a comment of agreement arises. Krishnamurti: But you see that fact, don't you? Don't agree or disagree, this is a very serious thing; I wish I could talk about meditation, but not now, for this is implied in it. Sir, see the importance of this. The truth is that "I am anger" - not "I" am different from anger. That is the truth, that is a fact, isn't it? I am anger; not "I" separate from anger. When I am jealous, I am jealousy; not "I" am different from jealousy. I make myself separate from jealousy because I want to do something about it, sustain it or get rid of it or rationalize it, whatever it is. But the fact is, the "me" is jealous, isn't it? Now how am I to act when I am jealous, when "me" is jealousy? Before, I thought "I" could act when I separated myself from jealousy, I thought I could do something about it, suppress it, rationalize it, or run away from it - do various things. I thought I was doing something. Here, I feel I am not doing anything. That is, when I say "I am jealousy", I feel I can't move. Isn't that right, Sir? Look at the two varieties of activity, at the action which takes place when you are different from jealousy, which is the non-ending of jealousy. You may run away from it, you may suppress it, you may transcend it, you may escape, but it will come back, it will be there always, because there is the division between you and jealousy. Now there is a totally different kind of action when there is no division, because in that the observer is the observed, he cannot do anything about it. Before, he was able to do something about it, now he feels he is powerless, he is frustrated, he can't do anything. If the observer is the observed, then there is no saying, "I can or can't do anything about it" - he is what he is. He is jealousy. Now, when he is jealousy, what takes place? Go on, Sir! Questioner: He understands... Krishnamurti: Do look at it, take time. When I think I am different from my jealousy, then I feel I can do something about it and in the doing of it there is conflict. Here on the other hand, when I realize the truth of it, that I am jealousy, that "I", the observer, am the observed, then what takes place? Questioner: There is no conflict. Krishnamurti: The element of conflict ceases. There conflict exists, here conflict does not exist. So conflict is jealousy. Have you got it? There has been complete action, an action in which there has been no effort at all, therefore it is complete, total, it will never come back. Questioner: You said analysis is the deadly tool to thought or consciousness. I perfectly agree with you and you were about to say that you would develop the argument that there are fragments in the brain or in thought or in consciousness which will be anti-analysis. I should be grateful, Sir, if you would continue to develop that part of the argument. Krishnamurti: Of what, Sir? Questioner: You mentioned the fragments will not constitute any conflict or struggle, they will be anti-analytical. Krishnamurti: I just explained, Sir, there must be fragmentation when there is the observer and the observed, as two different things. Sir, look, this is not an argument, there is nothing to develop. I have gone into it fairly thoroughly, we can spend of course lots more time, because the more deeply you go into it the more there is. We have broken up our life into many fragments, haven't we? - the scientist, the businessman, the artist, the housewife and so on. What is the basis, what is the root of this fragmentation? The root of this fragmentation is the observer being separate from the observed. He breaks up life: I am a Hindu and you are a Catholic, I am a Communist, you are a bourgeois. So there is this division going on all the time. And I say, "Why is there this division, what causes this division?" - not only in the external, economic, social structure, but much more deeply. This division is brought about by the "me" and the "not me" - the me that wants to be superior, famous, greater - whereas "you" are different. So the "me" is the observer, the "me" is the past, which divides the present as the past and the future. So as long as there is the observer, the experiencer, the thinker, there must be division. Where the observer is the observed, conflict ceases and therefore jealousy ceases. Because jealousy is conflict, isn't it? Questioner: Is jealousy human nature? Krishnamurti: Is violence human nature? Is greed human nature? Questioner: I wanted to ask you another question, if I may. Am I right or wrong, according to what you've been telling us, to say, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he? So we must watch our thoughts and profit from experience. Krishnamurti: That's just it. As you think, what you think, you are. You think you are greater than somebody else, that you are inferior to somebody else, that you are perfect, that you are beautiful or not beautiful, that you are angry - what you think you are. That's simple enough, isn't it? One has to find out whether it is possible to live a life where thought has its rational function, and see where thought becomes irrational. We'll go into that tomorrow. Questioner: To continue with jealousy: when the jealousy is "me", and "me" is the jealousy, the conflict ends, because I know it's the jealousy and it disappears. But when I listen to the noises in the street and the "me" is the noise, and the noises are "me", how can conflict end when that noise will go on for ever. Krishnamurti: It's fairly simple, Madam. I walk down the street and that noise is terrible. And when I say that noise is "me", the noise does not end, it goes on. Isn't that the question? But I don't say the noise is me, I don't say the cloud is me, or the tree is me, why should I say the noise is me? We pointed out just now, that if you observe, if you say, "I listen to that noise", listen completely, not with resistance, then that noise may go on for ever, it does not affect you. The moment you resist, you are separate from the noise - not identify yourself with the noise - I don't know if you see the difference. The noise goes on, I can cut myself off from it by resisting it, putting a wall between myself and that noise. Then what takes place, when I resist something? There is conflict, isn't there? Now can I listen to that noise without any resistance whatsoever? Questioner: Yes, if you know that the noise might stop in an hour! Krishnamurti: No that is still part of your resistance. Questioner: That means that I can listen to the noise in the street for the rest of my life with the possibility I might become deaf. Krishnamurti: No, listen, Madam, I am saying something entirely different. We are saying, as long as there is resistance, there must be conflict. Whether I resist my wife, or my husband, whether I resist the noise of a dog barking, or the noise in the street, there must be conflict. Now, how is one to listen to the noise without conflict - not whether it will go on indefinitely, or hoping it will come to an end - but how to listen to the noise without any conflict? That is what we are talking about. You can listen to the noise when the mind is completely free of any form of resistance -not only to that noise, but to everything in life - to your husband, to your wife, to your children, to the politician. Therefore what takes place? Your listening becomes much more acute, you become much more sensitive, and therefore noise is only a part, it isn't the whole world. The very act of listening is more important than the noise, so listening becomes the important thing and not the noise. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART II CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC TALK IN NEW YORK 24TH APRIL 1971 'RELATIONSHIP' Krishnamurti: I would like to talk about relationship, about what love is, about human existence in which is involved our daily living, the problems one has, the conflicts, the pleasures and the fears, and that most extraordinary thing one calls death. I think one has to understand, not as a theory, not as a speculative, entertaining concept, but rather as an actual fact - that we are the world and the world is us. The world is each one of us; to feel that, to be really committed to it and to nothing else, brings about a feeling of great responsibility and an action that must not be fragmentary, but whole. I think we are apt to forget that our society, the culture in which we live, which has conditioned us, is the result of human endeavour, conflict, human misery and suffering. Each one of us is that culture; the community is each one of us - we are not separate from it. To feel this, not as an intellectual idea or a concept, but to actually feel the reality of this, one has to go into the question of what is relationship; because our life, our existence, is based on relationship. Life is a movement in relationship. If we do not understand what is implied in relationship, we inevitably not only isolate ourselves, but create a society in which human beings are divided, not only nationally, religiously, but also in themselves and therefore they project what they are into the outer world. I do not know if you have gone into this question deeply for yourself, to find out if one can live with another in total harmony, in complete accord, so that there is no barrier, no division, but a feeling of complete unity. Because relationship means to be related - not in action, not in some project, not in an ideology - but to be totally united in the sense that the division, the fragmentation between individuals, between two human beings, does not exist at all at any level. Unless one finds this relationship, it seems to me that when we try to bring order in the world, theoretically or technologically, we are bound to create not only deep divisions between man and man, but also we shall be unable to prevent corruption. Corruption begins in the lack of relationship; I think that is the root of corruption. Relationship as we know it now is the continuation of division between individuals. The root meaning of that word individual means "indivisible". A human being who is in himself not divided, not fragmented, is really an individual. But most of us are not individuals; we think we are, and therefore there is the opposition of the individual to the community. One has to understand not only the meaning of that word individuality in the dictionary sense, but in that deep sense in which there is no fragmentation at all. That means perfect harmony between the mind, the heart and the physical organism. Only then an individuality exists. If we examine our present relationship with each other closely, be it intimate or superficial, deep or passing, we see is fragmented. Wife or husband, boy or girl, each lives in his own ambition, in personal and egotistic pursuits, in his own cocoon. All these contribute to the factor of bringing about an image in himself and therefore his relationship with another is through that image, therefore there is no actual relationship. I do not know if you are aware of the structure and the nature of this image that one has built around oneself and in oneself. Each person is doing this all the time, and how can there be a relationship with another, if there is that personal drive, envy, competition, greed and all the rest of those things which are sustained and exaggerated in modern society? How can there be relationship with another, if each one of us is pursuing his own personal achievement, his own personal success? I do not know if one is at all aware of this. We are so conditioned that we accept it as the norm, as the pattern of life, that each one must pursue his own particular idiosyncrasy or tendency, and yet try to establish a relationship with another in spite of this. Isn't that what we are all doing? You may be married and you go to the office or to the factory; whatever you are doing during the whole of the day, you pursue that. And your wife is in her house, with her own troubles, with her own vanities, with all that happens. Where is the relationship between those two human beings? Is it in bed, in sex? Is a relationship so superficial, so limited, so circumscribed, not in itself corruption? One may ask: how then are you to live, if you do not go to the office, pursue your own particular ambition, your own desire to achieve and to attain? If one does not do any of this, what is one to do? I think that is a wrong question altogether, don't you? Because we are concerned, are we not, in bringing about a radical change in the whole structure of the mind. The crisis is not in the outer world, but in consciousness itself. And until we understand this crisis, not superficially, not according to some philosopher, but actually deeply understand it for ourselves by looking into it and examining it, we shall not be able to bring about a change. We are concerned with psychological revolution and this revolution can only take place when there is the right kind of relationship between human beings. How is such a relationship to be brought about? The problem is clear, isn't it? Please, share this problem with me, will you? It's your problem, not my problem; it's your life, not my life, it's your sorrow, your trouble, your anxiety, your guilt. This battle is one's life. If you listen merely to a description, then you will find that you are only, swimming on the surface and not resolving any problem at all. It is actually your problem, and the speaker is merely describing it - knowing that the description is not the described. Let us share this problem together, which is: how can human beings, you and I, find a right relationship in all this turmoil, hatred, destruction, pollution, and among these terrible things which are going on in the world? To find that out, it seems to me, one must examine what is taking place, see what actually "is". Not what we should like to think it should be, or try to change our relationship to a future concept, but actually observe what it is now. In observing the fact, the truth, the actuality of it, there is a possibility of changing it. As we said the other day, when there is a possibility then there is great energy. What dissipates energy is the idea that it is not possible to change. So we must look at our relationship as it is actually now, every day; and in observing what it is, we shall discover how to bring about a change in that actuality. So we are describing what actually is, which is: each one lives in his own world, in his world of ambition, greed, fear, the desire to succeed and all the rest of it -you know what is going on. If I am married, I have responsibilities, children, and all the rest of it. I go to the office, or some place of work, and we meet each other, husband and wife, boy and a girl, in bed. And that's what we call love, leading separate lives, isolated, building a wall of resistance round ourselves, pursuing a self-centred activity; each one is seeking security psychologically, each one is depending on the other for comfort, for pleasure, for companionship; because each one is so deeply lonely, each demands to be loved, to be cherished, each one is trying to dominate the other. You can see this for yourself, if you observe yourself. Is there any kind of relationship at all? There is no relationship between two human beings, though they may have children, a house, actually they are not related. If they have a common project, that project sustains them, holds them together, but that's not relationship. Realizing all this, one sees that if there is no relationship between two human beings, then corruption begins - not in the outward structure of society, in the outer phenomenon of pollution, but inner pollution, corruption, destruction begins, when human beings have actually no relationship at all, as you haven't. You may hold the hand of another, kiss each other, sleep together, but actually, when you observe very closely, is there any relationship at all? To be related means not to be dependent on each other, not to escape from your loneliness through another, not to try to find comfort, companionship, through another. When you seek comfort through another, are dependent and all the rest of it, can there be any kind of relationship? Or are you then using each other? We are not being cynical, but actually observing what is: that is not cynicism. So to find out what it actually means to be related to another, one must understand this question of loneliness, because most of us are terribly lonely; the older we grow the more lonely we become, especially in this country. Have you noticed the old people, what they are like? Have you noticed their escapes, their amusements? They have worked all their lives and they want to escape into some kind of entertainment. Seeing this, can we find a way of living in which we don't use another? - psychologically, emotionally, not depend on another, not use another as a means of escape from our own tortures, from our own despairs, from our own loneliness. To understand this is to understand what it means to be lonely. Have you ever been lonely? Do you know what it means? - that you have no relationship with another, are completely isolated. You may be with your family, in a crowd, in the office, wherever you are, when this complete sense of utter loneliness with its despair suddenly comes upon you. Till you solve that completely, your relationship becomes a means of escape and therefore it leads to corruption, to misery. How is one to understand this loneliness, this sense of complete isolation? To understand it, one has to look at one's own life. Is not your every action a self-centred activity? You may occasionally be charitable, generous, do something without any motive - those are rare occasions. This despair can never be dissolved through escape, but by observing it. So we have come back to this question, which is: how to observe? How to observe ourselves, so that in that observation there is no conflict at all? Because conflict is corruption, is waste of energy, it is the battle of our life, from the moment we are born till we die. Is it possible to live without a single moment of conflict? To do that, to find that out for ourselves, one has to learn how to observe our whole movement. There is observation which becomes harmonious, which is true, when the observer is not, but only observation. We went into that the other day. When there is no relationship can there be love? We talk about it, and love, as we know it, is related to sex and pleasure, isn't it? Some of you say "No". When you say "No", then you must be without ambition, then there must be no competition, no division -as you and me, we and they. There must be no division of nationality, or the division brought about by belief, by knowledge. Then, only, can you say you love. But for most people love is related to sex and pleasure and all the travail that comes with it: jealousy, envy, antagonism, you know what happens between man and woman. When that relationship is not true, real, deep, completely harmonious, then how can you have peace in the world? How can there be an end to war? So relationship is one of the most, or rather the most important thing in life. That means that one has to understand what love is. Surely, one comes upon it, strangely, without asking for it. When you find out for yourself what love is not, then you know what love is - not theoretically, not verbally - but when you realize actually what it is not, which is: not to have a mind that is competitive, ambitious, a mind that is striving, comparing, imitating; such a mind cannot possibly love. So can you, living in this world, live completely without ambition, completely without ever comparing yourself with another? Because the moment you compare, then there is conflict, there is envy, there is the desire to achieve, to go beyond the other. Can a mind and a heart that remembers the hurts, the insults, the things that have made it insensitive and dull - can such a mind and heart know what love is? Is love pleasure? And yet that is what we are pursuing, consciously or unconsciously. Our gods are the result of our pleasure. Our beliefs, our social structure, the morality of society - which is essentially immoral - is the result of our pursuit of pleasure. And when you say, "I love somebody", is it love? That means: no separation, no domination, no self-centred activity. To find out what it is, one must deny all this - deny it in the sense of seeing the falseness of it. When you once see something as false -which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human - then you can never go back to it; when you see a dangerous snake, or a dangerous animal, you never play with it, you never come near it. Similarly, when you actually see that love is none of these things, feel it, observe it, chew it, live with it, are totally committed to it, then you will know what love is, what compassion is - which means passion for everyone. We have no passion; we have lust, we have pleasure. The root meaning of the word passion is sorrow. We have all had sorrow of some kind or another, losing somebody, the sorrow of self-pity, the sorrow of the human race, both collective and personal. We know what sorrow is, the death of someone whom you consider you have loved. When we remain with that sorrow totally, without trying to rationalize it, without trying to escape from it in any form through words or through action, when you remain with it completely, without any movement of thought, then you will find, out of that sorrow comes passion. That passion has the quality of love, and love has no sorrow. One has to understand this whole question of existence, the conflicts, the battles: you know the life that one leads, so empty, so meaningless. The intellectuals try to give it a meaning and we also want to find significance to life, because life has no meaning as it is lived. Has it? The constant struggle, the endless work, the misery, the suffering, the travail that one goes through in life, all that has actually no meaning - we go through it as a habit. But to find out what the significance is, one must also understand the significance of death; because living and dying go together, they are not two separate things. So one must enquire what it means to die, because that is part of our living. Not something in the distant future, to be avoided, only to be faced when one is desperately ill, in old age or in an accident, or on a battlefield. As it is part of our daily life to live without a single breath of conflict, so it is part of our life to find out what it means to love. That is also part of our existence, and one must understand it. How do we understand what death is? When you are dying, at the last moment, can you understand the way you have lived? - the strains, the emotional struggles, the ambitions, the drive; you are probably unconscious and that makes you incapable of clear perception. Then there is the deterioration of the mind in old age and all the rest of it. So one has to understand what death is now, not tomorrow. As you observe, thought does not want to think about it. It thinks about all the things it will do tomorrow - how to make new inventions, better bathrooms, all the things that thought can think about. But it does not want to think about death, because it does not know what it means. Is the meaning of death to be found through the process of thought? Please do share this. When we share it, then we will begin to see the beauty of all this, but if you sit there and let the speaker go on, merely listening to his words, then we don't share together. Sharing together implies a certain quality of care, attention, affection, love. Death is a tremendous problem. The young people may say: why do you bother about it? But it is part of their life, as it is part of their life to understand celibacy. Don't just say, "Why do you talk about celibacy, that's for the old fogeys, that's for the stupid monks." What it means to be celibate has also been a problem for human beings, that also is part of life. Can the mind be completely chaste? Not being able to find out how to live a chaste life, one takes vows of celibacy and goes through tortures. That is not celibacy. Celibacy is something entirely different. It is to have a mind that is free from all images, from all knowledge; which means understanding the whole process of pleasure and fear. Similarly, one has to understand thus thing called death. How do you proceed to understand something of which you are terribly frightened? Aren't we frightened of death? Or we say, "Thank God I'm going to die, I've had enough of this life with all the misery of it, the confusion, the shoddiness, the brutality, the mechanical things by which one is caught, thank God all this will end!" That is not an answer; nor is it to rationalize death, or to believe in some reincarnation, as the whole Asiatic world does. To find out what reincarnation means, which is to be born in a future existence, you must find out what you are now. If you believe in reincarnation, what are you now? - a lot of words, a lot of experience, of knowledge; you are conditioned by various cultures, you are all the identifications of your life, your furniture, your house, your bank account, your experiences of pleasure and pain. That's what you are, aren't you? The remembrance of the failures, the hopes, the despairs, all that you are now, and that is going to be born in the next life - a lovely idea, isn't it! Or you think there is a permanent soul, a permanent entity. Is there anything permanent in you? The moment you say there is a permanent soul, a permanent entity, that entity is the result of your thinking, or the result of your hopes, because there is so much insecurity, everything is transient, in a flux, in a movement. So when you say there is something permanent, that permanency is the result of your thinking. And thought is of the past, thought is never free - it can invent anything it likes! So if you believe in a future birth, then you must know that the future is conditioned by the way you live now, what you do now, what you think, what your acts are, your ethics. So what you are now, what you do now, matters tremendously. But those people who believe in a future birth don't give a pin about what happens now, it's just a matter of belief. So, how do you find out what death means, when you are living with vitality, with energy, full of health? Not when you are unbalanced, or ill, not at the last moment, but now, knowing the organism must inevitably wear out, like every machinery. Unfortunately we use our machinery so disrespectfully, don't we? Knowing the physical organism comes to an end, have you ever thought about what it means to die? You can't think about it. Have you ever experimented to find out what it means to die psychologically, inwardly? - not how to find immortality, because eternity, that which is timeless, is now, not in some distant future. To enquire into that, one must understand the whole problem of time; not only chronological time, by the watch, but the time that thought has invented as a gradual process of change. How does one find out about this strange thing that we all have to meet one day or another? Can you die psychologically today, die to everything that you have known? For instance: to die to your pleasure, to your attachment, your dependence, to end it without arguing, without rationalizing, without trying to find ways and means of avoiding it. Do you know what it means to die, not physically, but psychologically, inwardly? Which means to put an end to that which has continuity; to put an end to your ambition, because that's what's going to happen when you die, isn't it? You can't carry it over and sit next to God! (Laughter) When you actually die, you have to end so many things without any argument. You can't say to death, "Let me finish my job, let me finish my book, all the things I have not done, let me heal the hurts which I have given others" - you have no time. So can you find out how to live a life now, today, in which there is always an ending to everything that you began? Not in your office of course, but inwardly to end all the knowledge that you have gathered - knowledge being your experiences, your memories, your hurts, the comparative way of living, comparing yourself always with somebody else. To end all that every day, so that the next day your mind is fresh and young. Such a mind can never be hurt, and that is innocence. One has to find out for oneself what it means to die; then there is no fear, therefore every day is a new day - and I really mean this, one can do this - so that your mind and your eyes see life as something totally new. That is eternity. That is the quality of the mind that has come upon this timeless state, because it has known what it means to die every day to everything it has collected during the day. Surely, in that there is love. Love is something totally new every day, but pleasure is not, pleasure has continuity. Love is always new and therefore it is its own eternity. Do you want to ask any questions? Questioner: Supposing, Sir, that through complete, objective, self-observation I find that I am greedy, sensual, selfish and all that. Then how can I know whether this kind of living is good or bad, unless I have already some preconceptions of the good? If I have these preconceptions, they can only derive from self-observation. Krishnamurti: Quite, Sir. Questioner: I also find another difficulty. You seem to believe in sharing, but at the same time you say that two lovers, or husband and wife, cannot base their love, shouldn't base their love, on comforting each other. I don't see anything wrong in comforting each other - that is sharing. Krishnamurti: The gentleman says, "One must have a concept of the good, otherwise, why should one give up all this ambition, greed, envy and all the rest of it?" You can have a formula or a concept of what is better, but can you have a concept of what is good? Questioner: Yes, I think so. Krishnamurti: Can thought produce what is good? Questioner: No, I meant the conception of such good. Krishnamurti: Yes Sir. The conception of good is the product of thought; otherwise how can you conceive what is good? Questioner: The conceptions can only be derived from our self-observation. Krishnamurti: I'm just pointing that out, Sir. Why should you have a concept of the good at all? Questioner: Otherwise how do I know whether my life is good or bad? Krishnamurti: Just listen to the question. Don't we know what conflict is? Do I have to have a concept of non-conflict before I am aware of conflict? I know what conflict is - the struggle, the pain. Don't I know that, without knowing a state when there is no conflict? When I formulate what is good, I will formulate it according to my conditioning, according to my way of thinking, feeling, my particular idiosyncrasy and all the rest of my cultural conditioning. Is the good to be projected by thought? - and will thought then tell me what is good and bad in my life? Or has goodness nothing whatsoever to do with thought, or with a formula? Where does goodness flower? - do tell me. In a concept? In some idea, in some ideal that lies in the future? A concept means a future, a tomorrow. It may be very far away, or very close, but it is still in time. And when you have a concept, projected by thought - thought being the response of memory, the response of accumulated knowledge depending on the culture in which you have lived - do you find that goodness in the future, created by thought? Or do you find it when you begin to understand conflict, pain and sorrow? So in the understanding of "what is" - not by comparing "what is" with "what should be" - in that understanding flowers goodness. Surely, goodness has nothing whatsoever to do with thought - has it? Has love got anything to do with thought? Can you cultivate love by formulating it and saying "My ideal of love is that"? Do you know what happens when you cultivate love? You are not loving. You think you will have love at some future date; in the meantime you are violent. So is goodness the product of thought? Is love the product of experience, of knowledge? What was the second question, Sir? Questioner: The second question was about sharing. Krishnamurti: What do you share? What are we sharing now? We talked about death, we talked about love, about the necessity of total revolution, about complete psychological change, not to live in the old pattern of formulas, of struggle, pain, imitation, conformity and all the rest of those things man has lived for through millennia and has produced this marvellous, messy world! We have talked about death. How do we share that together? -share the understanding of it, not the verbal statement, not the description, not the explanations of it? What does sharing mean? -to share the understanding, to share the truth which comes with the understanding. And what does understanding mean? You tell me something which i serious, which is vital, which is relevant, important, and I listen to it completely, because it is vital to me. To listen vitally, my mind must be quiet, mustn't it? If I am chattering, if I am looking somewhere else, if I am comparing what you are saying with what I know, my mind is not quiet. It is only when my mind is quiet and listens completely, that there is understanding of the truth of the thing. That we share together, otherwise we can't share; we can't share the words - we can only share the truth of something. You and I can only see the truth of something when the mind is totally committed to the observation. To see the beauty of a sunset, the lovely hills, the shadows and the moonlight - how do you share it with a friend? By telling him, "Do look at that marvellous hill"? You may say it, but is that sharing? When you actually share something with another, it means you must both have the same intensity, at the same time, at the same level. Otherwise you can't share, can you? You must both have a common interest, at the same level, with the same passion -otherwise how can you share something? You can share a piece of bread - but that's not what we are talking about. To see together - which is sharing together - we must both of us see; not agree or disagree, but see together what actually is; not interpret it according to my conditioning or your conditioning, but see together what it is. And to see together one must be free to observe, one must be free to listen. That means to have no prejudice. Then only, with that quality of love, is there sharing. Questioner: How can one quieten, or free the mind, from interruptions by the past? Krishnamurti: You cannot quieten the mind: full stop! Those are tricks. You can take a pill and make the mind quiet - you absolutely cannot make the mind quiet, because you are the mind. You can't say, "I will make my mind quiet". Therefore one has to understand what meditation is - actually, not what other people say it is. One has to find out whether the mind can ever be quiet; not: how to make the mind quiet. So one has to go into this whole question of knowledge, and whether the mind, the brain cells, which are loaded with all the past memories, can be absolutely quiet and come into function when necessary; and when it is not necessary, be completely and wholly quiet. Questioner: Sir, when you speak of relationships, you speak always of a man and a woman or a girl and a bay. Will the same things you say about relationships also apply to a man and a man, or a woman and a woman? Krishnamurti : Homosexuality? Questioner: If you wish to give it that name, Sir, yes. Krishnamurti: You see, when we are talking of love, whether it is of man and man, woman and woman, or man and woman, we are not talking of a particular kind of relationship, we are talking about the whole movement, the whole sense of relationship, not a relationship with one, or two. Don't you know what it means to be related to the world? - when you feel you are the world. Not as an idea - that's appalling - but actually to feel that you are responsible, that you are committed to this responsibility. That is the only commitment; not to be committed through bombs, or committed to a particular activity, but to feel that you are the world and the world is you. Unless you change completely, radically, and bring about a total mutation in yourself do what you will outwardly, there will be no peace for man. If you feel that in your blood, then your questions will be related entirely to the present and to bringing about a change in the present, not to some speculative ideals. Questioner: The last time we were together, you were telling us that if someone has a painful experience and it is not fully faced, or is avoided, it goes into the unconscious as a fragment. How are we to free ourselves from these fragments of painful and fearful experiences, so that the past won't have a grip on us? Krishnamurti: Yes, Sir, that is conditioning. How does one free oneself from this conditioning? How do I free myself from my conditioning of the culture in which I was born? First, I must be aware that I am conditioned - not somebody telling me that I am conditioned. You understand the difference? If somebody tells me I am hungry, that's something different from actually being hungry. So I must be aware of my conditioning, which means, I must be aware of it not only superficially, but at the deeper levels. That is, I must be aware totally. To be so aware, means that I am not trying to go beyond the conditioning, not trying to be free of the conditioning. I must see it as it actually is, not bring in another element, such as: wanting to be free of it, because that is an escape from actuality. I must be aware. What does that mean? To be aware of my conditioning totally, not partially, means my mind must be highly sensitive, mustn't it? Otherwise I can't be aware. To be sensitive means to observe everything very, very closely - the colours, the quality of people, all the things around me. I must also be aware of what actually is without any choice. Can you do that? -not trying to interpret it, not trying to change it, not trying to go beyond it or trying to be free of it - just to be totally aware of it. When you observe a tree, between you and the tree there is time and space, isn't there? And there is also the botanical knowledge about it, the distance between you and the tree - which is time - and the separation which comes through knowledge of the tree. To look at that tree without knowledge, without the time-quality, does not mean identifying yourself with the tree, but to observe the tree so attentively, that the boundaries of time don't come into it at all; the boundaries of time come in only when you have knowledge about the tree. Can you look at your wife, or your friend, or whatever it is without the image? The image is the past, which has been put together by thought, as nagging, bullying, dominating, as pleasure, companionship and all that. It is the image that separates; it is the image that creates distance and time. Look at that tree, or the flower, the cloud, or the wife or the husband, without the image! If you can do that, then you can observe your conditioning totally; then you can look at it with a mind that is not spotted by the past, and therefore the mind itself is free of conditioning. To look at myself - as we generally do - I look as an observer looking at the observed: myself as the observed and the observer looking at it. The observer is the knowledge, is the past, is time, the accumulated experiences - he separates himself from the thing observed. Now, to look without the observer! You do this when you are completely attentive. Do you know what it means to be attentive? Don't go to school to learn to be attentive! To be attentive means to listen without any interpretation, without any judgement - just to listen. When you are so listening there is no boundary, there is no "you" listening. There is only a state of listening. So when you observe your conditioning, the conditioning exists only in the observer, not in the observed. When you look without the observer, without the "me" - his fears, his anxieties and all the rest of it - then you will see, you enter into a totally different dimension. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART II CHAPTER 3 3RD PUBLIC TALK IN NEW YORK 25TH APRIL 1971 'RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. MEDITATION' Krishnamurti: We said that we would talk over together a very complex problem, which is: is there a religious experience, and what are the implications of meditation? If one observes, it appears that throughout the world man has always been seeking something beyond his own death, beyond his own problems, something that will be enduring, true and timeless. He has called it God, he has given it many names; and most of us believe in something of that kind, without ever actually experiencing it. Various religions have promised that if you believe in certain forms of rituals, dogmas, saviours, you might, if you lead a certain kind of life, come upon this strange thing, whatever name one likes to give to it. And those who have directly experienced it, have done it according to their conditioning, to their belief to their environmental and cultural influences. Apparently religion has lost its meaning, because there have been religious wars; religion does not answer all our problems, religions have separated peoples. They have brought about some kind of civilising influence, but they have not changed man radically. When one begins to enquire if there is such a thing as religious experience and what that experience is, why one calls it "religious", obviously one must first have a great deal of honesty. It is not to be honest according to a principle or a belief, or to some form of commitment, but to honestly see things exactly as they are, without any distortion, not only outwardly, but also inwardly: never to deceive oneself. For deception is quite easy if one craves for some kind of experience, call it religious or otherwise - if one takes a trip and so on. Then you are bound to be caught in some kind of illusion. One has to find out for oneself, if one can, what religious experience is. One needs a great sense of humility and honesty, which means never to ask for experience, never to demand for oneself a reality or an achievement. So one has to look very closely at one's own desires, attachments and fears and understand them wholly, if one can, so that the mind is in no way distorted, so that there will be no illusion, no deception. And one has to ask also: what does it mean to experience? I do not know if you have gone into that question at all. Most of us are bored with the usual experiences of every day. We are tired of them all, and the more one is sophisticated, intellectual, the more one wants to live only in the present - whatever that may mean - and invent a philosophy of the present. The word experience means to go through, to go right to the end and finish with it. But unfortunately for most of us, every experience leaves a scar, a memory, pleasant or unpleasant, and we want to retain only the pleasant ones. When we are asking for any kind of spiritual, religious, or transcendental experience, we must try to find out first of all whether there is such an experience, and also what experience itself means. If you experience something and you cannot recognise it, then that experience ceases to be. One of the essential meanings of experience is recognition. And when there is recognition, it has already been known, has already been experienced, otherwise you could not recognise it. So when they talk about religious, spiritual, or transcendental experience - that word is so misused - you must already have known it, to be able to recognise that you are experiencing something other than an ordinary experience. It seems logical and true that the mind must be able to recognise the experience, and recognition implies something you have already known, therefore it is not new. When you want experience in the religious field, you want it because you have not solved your problems, your daily anxieties, despairs, fears and sorrows, therefore you want something more. In that demand for more lies deception. That is fairly logical and true, I think. Not that logic is always true, but when one uses logic and reason healthily, sanely, one knows the limitations of reason. The demand for wider, deeper, more fundamental experiences only leads to a further extension of the path of the known. I think that is clear, and I hope we are communicating, sharing with each other. Then also in this religious enquiry one is seeking to find out what truth is, if there is a reality, if there is such a thing as a state of mind that is beyond time. Search again implies a seeker - doesn't it? And what is he seeking? How will he know that what he has found in his search is true? Again, if he finds what is true - at least what he thinks is true - that depends on his conditioning, on his knowledge, on his past experiences; search then merely becomes a further projection of his own past hopes, fears and longings. A mind that is enquiring - not seeking - must be totally free of these two, that is, of the demand for experience and the search for truth. One can see why, because when you are seeking, you go to various teachers, read various books, join various cults, follow various gurus and all the rest of it, like window-shopping. Such a search has no meaning whatsoever. So when you are enquiring into this question, "What is a religious mind, and what is the quality of mind that is no longer experiencing anything at all?" - you must find out if the mind can be free from the demand for experience and can completely end all seeking. One has to investigate without any motive, without any purpose, the facts of time and if there is a timeless state. To enquire into that means to have no belief whatsoever, not to be committed to any religion, to any so-called spiritual organization, not to follow any guru, and therefore to have no authority whatsoever -including that of the speaker especially. Because you are very easily influenced, you are terribly gullible, though you may be sophisticated, may know a great deal; but you are always eager, always wanting, and therefore are gullible. So a mind that is enquiring into the question of what is religion, must be entirely free of any form of belief, any form of fear; because fear, as we explained the other day, is a distorting factor, bringing about violence and aggression. Therefore the mind that is enquiring into the quality of the religious state and movement, must be free of this. That demands great honesty and a great sense of humility. For most of us, vanity is one of the major impediments. Because we think we know, because we have read a great deal, because we have committed ourselves, have practised this or that system, followed some guru peddling his philosophy, we think we know, at least a little bit, and that's the beginning of vanity. When you are enquiring into such an extraordinary question, there must be the freedom of actually not knowing a thing about it. You really don't know, do you? You don't know what truth is, what God is - if there is such a thing - or what is a truly religious mind. You have read about it, people have talked about it for millennia, have built monasteries, but actually they are living on other people's knowledge, experience and propaganda. To find out, surely one must put aside all that completely, and therefore the enquiry into all this is a very serious matter. If you want to play with it, there are all kinds of so-called spiritual, religious entertainments, but they have no value whatsoever to a serious mind. To enquire into what is a religious mind, we must be free of our conditioning, of our Christianity, of our Buddhism, with all the propaganda of thousands of years, so that the mind is really free to observe. That is very difficult because we are afraid to be alone, to stand alone. We want security, both outwardly and inwardly; therefore we depend on people, whether it is the priest, or the leader, or the guru who says: "I have experienced, that is why I know." One has to stand completely alone - not isolated. There is a vast difference between isolation and being completely alone, integral. Isolation is a state of mind in which relationship ceases, when in your daily life and activity you have actually built a wall around yourself, consciously or unconsciously, so as not to be hurt. That isolation obviously prevents every form of relationship. Aloneness implies a mind that does not depend on another psychologically, is not attached to any person; which does not mean that there is no love - love is not attachment. Aloneness implies a mind that is deeply, inwardly without any sense of fear and therefore without any sense of conflict. If you go as far as that, then we can proceed to find out what discipline means. For most of us discipline is a form of drill, of repetition; either overcoming an obstacle, or resisting or suppressing, controlling, shaping, conforming - all that is implied in the word discipline. The root meaning of that word is to learn; a mind that is willing to learn - not to conform - must be curious, must have great interest, and a mind that already knows, cannot possibly learn. So discipline means to learn why one controls, why one suppresses, why there is fear, why one conforms, compares, and is therefore in conflict. That very learning brings about order; not order according to a design or pattern, but in the very enquiry into the confusion, into the disorder, there is order. Most of us are confused for a dozen reasons, which we needn't go into for the moment. One has to learn about confusion, about the disorderly life one leads; not try to bring order into the confusion, or into the disorder, but to learn about it. Then, as you are learning, order comes into being. Order is a living thing, not mechanical, and order surely is virtue. A mind that is confused, conforming, imitating, is not orderly - it is in conflict. And a mind that is in conflict is disorderly and therefore such a mind has no virtue. Out of this enquiry, out of learning, comes order, and order is virtue. Please observe it in yourself, see how disordered one is in one's life, so confused, so mechanical. In that state one tries to find a moral way of living, which will be orderly and sane. How can a mind that is confused, conforming, imitative, have any kind of order, any kind of virtue? The social morality, as you observe, is totally immoral; it may be respectable, but what is respectable is generally disorderly. Order is necessary, because only out of order can there be a total action and action is life. But our action brings disorder; there is political action, religious action, business action, family action -they are fragmentary actions. And naturally such action is contradictory. You are a businessman and at home you are a kindly human being - at least you pretend to be; there is contradiction and therefore there is disorder. A mind that is in disorder cannot possibly understand what virtue is. And nowadays, when there is permissiveness of every kind, virtue and order are denied. The religious mind must have this order, not according to a pattern, or a design laid down by you or by another. But that order, that sense of moral rectitude, comes only when you understand the disorder, the confusion, the mess that one lives in. Now all this is to lay the foundation for meditation. If you don't lay the foundations, meditation then becomes an escape. You can play with that kind of meditation endlessly. And that is what most people are doing - leading ordinary, confused, messy lives and somehow finding a corner to bring about a quiet mind. And there are all these people who promise to give you a quiet mind, whatever that may mean. So for a serious mind - and it is a very serious thing, not a game - one must have this freedom from all belief, from all commitments, because one is committed to the whole of life, not to one fragment of it. Most of us are committed to physical or political revolution, or to a religious activity, to some kind of religious, monastic life and so on. Those are all fragmentary commitments. We are talking of freedom, so that you can commit your whole being, your whole energy, vitality and passion to the whole of life, not to one part of it. Then we can proceed to find out what it means to meditate. I don't know if you have gone into this at all. Probably some of you have played with it, have tried to control your thoughts, followed various systems, but that is not meditation. One has to dispose of the systems one has been offered: Zen, Transcendental Meditation, the various things that have been brought over from India and Asia, in which people are caught. One has to go into this question of systems, of methods, and I hope you will; we are sharing this problem together. When you have a system to follow, what happens to the mind? What do systems and methods imply - a guru? I don't know why they call themselves gurus - I can't find a strong enough word to deny that whole world of gurus, of their authority, because they think they know. A man who says "I know", such a man does not know. Or if a man says, "I have experienced truth", distrust him completely. These are the people who offer systems. A system implies practice, following, repetition, changing "what actually is" and therefore increasing your conflict. Systems make the mind mechanical, they don't give you freedom, they may promise freedom at the end, but freedom is at the beginning, not at the end. To enquire into the truth of any system, if you have no freedom at the beginning, then you are bound to end up with a system and therefore with a mind which is incapable of subtlety, swiftness and sensitivity. So one can dispose entirely of all systems. What is important is not controlling thought, but under, standing it, understanding the origin, the beginning of thought, which is in yourself. That is, the brain stores up memories - you can observe this yourself, you don't have to read books about it. If it had not stored up memories it would not be able to think at all. That memory is the result of experience, of knowledge - yours, or of the community, of the family, of the race and so on. Thought springs from that storehouse of memory. So thought is never free, it is always old, there is no such thing as freedom of thought. Thought can never be free in itself, it can talk about freedom, but in itself it is the result of past memories, experiences and knowledge; therefore it is old. Yet one must have this accumulation of knowledge, otherwise one could not function, one could not speak to another, could not go home, and so on. Knowledge is essential. In meditation one has to find out whether there is an end to knowledge and so to freedom from the known. If meditation is a continuation of knowledge, is the continuation of everything that man has accumulated, then there is no freedom. There is freedom only when there is an understanding of the function of knowledge and therefore freedom from the known. We are enquiring into the field of knowledge, where it has its function and where it becomes an impediment to further enquiry. While the brain cells continue to operate, they can only operate in the field of knowledge. That is the only thing the brain can do, to function in the field of experience, of knowledge in the field of time - which is the past. Meditation is to find out if there is a field which is not already contaminated by the known. If I meditate and continue with what I have already learnt, with what I already know, then I am living in the past, within the field of my conditioning. In that there is no freedom. I may decorate the prison in which I live, I may do all kinds of things in that prison, but there is still a limitation, a barrier. So the mind has to find out whether the brain cells, which have developed through millennia, can be totally quiet, and respond to a dimension they do not know. Which means, can the mind be totally still? This has been the problem of all religious people throughout the centuries; they realize that you must have a very quiet mind, because then only can you see. If you are chattering, if your mind is constantly in movement, rushing all over the place, obviously it cannot look, it cannot listen totally. So they say, "Control it, hold it, put it in a prison; they have not found a way of bringing about a mind that is completely and utterly quiet. They say, "Don't yield to any desire, don't look at a woman, don't look at the beautiful hills, the trees and the beauty of the earth, because if you do, it might remind you of a woman, or a man. Therefore control, hold on, and concentrate." When you do all that, you are in conflict, and therefore there has to be more control, more subjugation. This has been going on for millennia, because they realize they must have a quiet mind. Now, how does the mind become quiet? - without effort, without control, without giving it a frontier? The moment you ask "how" you are introducing a system. Therefore there is no "how". Can the mind become quiet? I don't know what you are going to do about it when you see the problem, when you see the necessity, the truth of having this delicate, subtle mind, which is absolutely quiet. How is it to happen? This is the problem of meditation, because only such a mind is a religious mind. It is only such a mind that sees the whole of life as a unit, as a unitary movement, not fragmented. Therefore such a mind acts totally, not fragmentarily, because it acts out of complete stillness. The foundation is a life of complete relationship, a life that is orderly and therefore virtuous, a life that is extraordinarily simple inwardly, and therefore totally austere - the austerity of deep simplicity, which means that the mind is not in conflict. When you have laid that foundation, easily, without any effort - because the moment you introduce effort there is conflict - you see the truth of it. Therefore it is the perception of "what is" that brings about a radical change. It is only the still mind that understands that in a quiet mind there is a movement that is totally different, that is of a different dimension, of a different quality. That can never be put into words, because it is indescribable. What can be described is what comes up to this point, the point when you have laid the foundation and seen the necessity, the truth, and the beauty of a still mind. For most of us, beauty is in something, in a building, in a cloud, in the shape of a tree, in a beautiful face. Is beauty "out there", or is it a quality of mind that has no self-centred activity? Because like joy, the understanding of beauty is essential in meditation. Beauty is really the total abandonment of the "me", and the eyes that have abandoned the "me" can see the trees, the beauty of it all, and the loveliness of the cloud; that happens when there is no centre as the "me". It happens to each one of us, doesn't it? - when you see a lovely mountain, when you come upon it suddenly, there it is! Everything has been pushed aside except the majesty of that hill. That mountain, that tree, absorbs you completely. It is like a child with a toy - the toy absorbs the child, and when the toy is destroyed the child is back again in whatever he is doing, in his mischief, in his crying. Likewise with us: when you see the mountain, or the single tree on a hill top, it absorbs you. And we want to be absorbed by something, by an idea, by an activity, by a commitment, by a belief, or we want to be absorbed by another; which is like the child with a toy. So beauty means sensitivity - a body that is sensitive, which means the right diet, the right way of living, and you have all this, if you have gone that far. I hope you will, or are doing it now; then the mind will inevitably and naturally, unknowingly, become quiet. You can't make the mind quiet, because you are the mischief maker, you are yourself disturbed, anxious, confused - how can you make the mind quiet? But when you understand what quietness is, when you understand what confusion is, what sorrow is and whether sorrow can ever end, and when you understand pleasure, then out of that comes an extraordinarily quiet mind; you don't have to seek it. You must begin at the beginning and the first step is the last step, and this is meditation. Questioner: When you make the analogy of the mountain, the hills, the beautiful sky - that's wrong for these people, that's not the analogy for them - the analogy is the dirt. Krishnamurti: Right, take that - the analogy of the dirty streets of New York, the analogy of squalor, poverty, the ghettos, the wars to which each one of us has contributed. You don't feel that way, because you have separated yourself, isolated yourself; therefore, having no relationship with another, you become corrupt and allow corruption to spread in the world. That's why this corruption, this pollution, these wars, this hatred, cannot be stopped by a political or religious system, or by any organization. You have to change. Don't you see this? You have to cease completely to be what you are. Not through will - meditation is the emptying of the mind of will then a totally different action takes place. Questioner: If one can have the privilege of becoming totally aware, how can we then help those who are conditioned, who have a deep resentment in them? Krishnamurti: Why, if I may ask, do you use the word privilege? What is there sacred or privileged about being aware? That's a natural thing, isn't it, to be aware? If you are aware of your own conditioning, of the turmoil, the dirt, the squalor, the war, the hatred, if you are aware of all that, you will establish a relationship with another so complete, that you are related to every other human being in the world. You understand this? If I am related to somebody completely, totally - not as an idea or an image - then I am related to every human being in the world. Then I will see I will not hurt another - they are hurting themselves. Then go, preach, talk about it - not with the desire to help another, you understand? - that's the most terrible thing to say, "I want to help another". Who are you to help another? - including the speaker. Sir, look, the beauty of the tree or the flower doesn't want to help you, it is there; it is for you to look at the squalor or at the beauty, and if you are incapable of looking at it, then find out why you have become so indifferent, so callous, so shallow and empty. If you find out that, then you are in a state where the waters of life flow, you don't have to do anything. Questioner: What is the relationship between seeing things exactly as they are and consciousness? Krishnamurti: You only know consciousness by its content, and its content is what is happening in the world, of which you are a part. To empty all that is not to have no consciousness, but a totally different dimension. You cannot speculate about that dimension -leave that to the scientists, to the philosophers. What we can do is to find out whether it is possible to uncondition the mind by becoming aware, by becoming totally attentive. Questioner: I don't know myself what love is or what truth is, or what God is, but you describe it as, "Love is God", instead of "Love is love". Can you explain why you say "Love is God"? Krishnamurti: I didn't say love is God. Questioner: I read one of your books... Krishnamurti: I'm sorry, don't read books! (Laughter) That word has been used so much, is so loaded by man's despairs and hopes. You have your God, the Communists have their gods. So find out, if I may suggest, what love is. You can only find out what love is, by knowing what it is not. Not knowing intellectually, but actually in life putting aside what it is not - jealousy, ambition and greed, all the division that goes on in life, the me and the you, we and they, the black and the white. Unfortunately you won't do it because it needs energy, and energy comes only when you observe actually what is and don't run away from it. When you see actually what is, then in the observing of it, you have the energy to go beyond it. You cannot go beyond it if you are trying to escape from it, to translate it, or to overcome it. Just observe actually what is, then you have abundance of energy, then you can find out what love is. Love is not pleasure, and to really find that out, inwardly, for yourself, do you know what that means? It means that there is no fear, that there is no attachment, no dependency, but a relationship in which there is no division. Questioner: Could you talk about the role of the artist in society - does he serve a function beyond his own? Krishnamurti: Who is an artist? Someone who paints a pic- ture, writes a poem, who wants to express himself through painting or through writing a book or a play? Why do we divide the artist from the rest of us? - or the intellectual from the rest of us? We have placed the intellectual at one level, the artist perhaps at a higher level, and the scientist at a still higher level. And then we say, "What is their role in society?" The question is not, what is their role, but what is your role in society; because you have created this mess. What is your role? Find out, Sir. That is, find out why you live within this world of squalor, hatred and misery; apparently it does not touch you. Look, you have listened to these talks, shared some of the things together, understood, let's hope, a great deal. Then you become a centre of right relationship and therefore it is your responsibility to change this terrible, corrupt, destructive society. Questioner: Sir, could you go into psychological time.) Krishnamurti: Time is old age, time is sorrow, time doesn't heed. There is chronological time by the watch. That must exist, otherwise you won't be able to catch your bus, cook a meal, and all the rest of it. But there is another kind of time, which we have accepted. That is, "Tomorrow I will be, tomorrow I will change, tomorrow I will become; psychologically we have created time -tomorrow. Is there a tomorrow, psychologically? That question fills us with dread to ask seriously. Because we want tomorrow: "I shall have the pleasure of meeting you tomorrow, I am going to understand tomorrow, my life will be different tomorrow, I will realize enlightenment tomorrow." Therefore tomorrow becomes the most important thing in our life. You have had sex yesterday, all the pleasures, all the agonies - whatever it is - and you want it tomorrow, because you want that same pleasure repeated. Put that question to yourself and find out the truth of it. "Is there a tomorrow at all?" - except in thought which projects tomorrow. So tomorrow is the invention of thought as time, and if there is no tomorrow psychologically, what happens in life today? Then there is a tremendous revolution, isn't there? Then your whole action undergoes a radical change, doesn't it? Then you are completely whole now, not projecting from the past, through the present, into the future. That means to live, dying every day. Do it, and you will find out what it means to live completely today. Isn't that what love is? You don't say, "I will love tomorrow", do you? You love or you don't love. Love has no time, only sorrow has time - sorrow being thought, as in pleasure. So one has to find out for oneself what time is, and find out if there is a "no tomorrow". That is to live, then there is a life which is eternal, because eternity has no time. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART III CHAPTER 1 1ST CONVERSATION WITH ALAIN NAUDE MALIBU CALIFORNIA 27TH MARCH 1971 'THE CIRCUS OF MAN'S STRUGGLE' Naude: You speak about the whole of life. When we look about us there is so much disorder everywhere; it seems that people are so confused. In the world we see that there is war, ecological disorder, political and social disorder, crime, and all the evils of indusrialization and overpopulation. And it seems that the more people try to solve these problems the more they augment. Then there is man himself, who is full of problems. He has not only the problems of the world about him, but is full of problems inwardly -loneliness, despair, jealousy, anger - all this we may call confusion. And presently he dies. Now we have always been told that there is something else, which has variously been called God, eternity, creation. And about this man knows nothing. He has tried to live for this, in relation to this; but it has again made problems. It seems from what you have said so many times that one must find a way of dealing with these three sets of problems, these three aspects of life at the same time, because these are the problems confronting man. Is there a way to ask the question properly so that it will answer these three sets of problems at the same time? Krishnamurti: First of all, Sir, why do we make this division? Or is there only one movement which must be taken on the wave itself? So first let's find out why we have divided this whole existence into the world outside of me, the world inside of me, and something beyond me. Does this division exist because of the chaos outwardly and are we only concerned with the outer chaos, and totally neglect the inner chaos? Not finding a solution for the outer, or for the inner, we then try to find a solution in a belief, in the divine? Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: So in asking a question of this kind, are we dealing with the three things separately, or as a total movement? Naude: How can we make them into a unitary movement? How are they related? What is the action in man which will make them the same? Krishnamurti: I wouldn't come to that yet. I would ask: why has man divided the world, his whole existence, into these three categories? Why? - and from there move. Now why have I, as a human being, divided the world outside of me from the world inside me, and from the world which I am trying to grasp - of which I know nothing - and to which I give all my despairing hope? Naude: Right. Krishnamurti: Now why do I do this? Tentatively we are asking: is it that we have not been able to solve the outer with its chaos, confusion, destruction, brutality, violence and all the horrors that are going on, and therefore we turn to the inner and hope thereby to solve the outer? And not being able to solve the inner chaos, the inner insufficiency, the inner brutality, violence and all the rest of it, not being able to solve anything there either, then we move away from both, the outer and the inner, to some other dimension? Naude: Yes, it is like that. That is what we do. Krishnamurti: That is what is happening all the time around us and in us. Naude: Yes. There are the problems outside which engender the problems inside. Not being able to deal with either, or both, we create the hope of some other, some third state, which we call God. Krishnamurti: Yes, an outside agency. Naude: An outside agency which will be the consolation, the final solution. But it is also a fact that there are things which are really outer problems: the roof leaks, the sky is full of pollution, the rivers are drying up, there are such problems. And there are wars - they are visible outer problems. There are also problems which we think to be inner problems, our secret and closed longings, fears and worries. Krishnamurti: Yes. Naude: There is the world, and there is man's reaction to it, man's living in it. And so there are these two entities - at least in a practical sort of way we can say there are. And so probably the trying to solve practical problems overflows into the inner state of man and engenders problems there. Krishnamurti: That means we are still keeping the outer and the inner as two separate movements. Naude: Yes, we are. We do. Krishnamurti: And I feel that is a totally wrong approach. The roof does leak and the world is overpopulated, there is pollution, there are wars, there is every kind of mischief going on. And not being able to solve that we turn inward; not being able to solve the inward issues we turn to something outer, still further away from all this. Whereas if we could treat the whole of this existence as one unitary movement, then perhaps we would be able to solve all these problems intelligently and reasonably and in order. Naude: Yes. It seems that is what you speak about. Would you mind telling us how these three problems are really one thing? Krishnamurti: I am coming to that, I am coming to it. The world outside of me is created by me - not the trees, not the clouds, the bees and the beauty of the landscape - but human existence in relationship, which is called society, that is created by you and by me. So the world is me and I am the world. I think that is the first thing that must be established: not as an intellectual or an abstract fact, but in actual feeling, in actual realization. This is a fact, not a supposition, not an intellectual concept, but it is a fact that the world is me and I am the world. The world being the society in which I live, with its culture, morality, inequality, all the chaos that is going on in society, that is myself in action. And the culture is what I have created and what I am caught in. I think that is an irrevocable and an absolute fact. Naude: Yes. How is it that people don't see this enough? We have politicians, we have ecologists, we have economists, we have soldiers all trying to solve the outside problems simply as outer problems. Krishnamurti: Probably because of a lack of the right kind of education: specialization, the desire to conquer and go to the moon and play golf there, and so on and so on! We always want to alter the outer hoping thereby to change the inner. "Create the right environment" - the communists have said it a hundred times - "then the human mind will change according to that." Naude: That is what they say. In fact, every great university, with all its departments, with all its specialists, one could almost say that these great universities are founded and built on the belief that the world can be changed by a certain amount of specialized knowledge in different departments. Krishnamurti: Yes. I think we miss this basic thing, which is: the world is me and I am the world. I think that feeling, not as an idea, that feeling brings a totally different way of looking at this whole problem. Naude: It is an enormous revolution. To see the problem as one problem, the problem of man and not the problem of his environment, that is an enormous step, which people will not take. Krishnamurti: People won't take any step. They are used to this outward organization and disregard totally what is happening inwardly. So when one realizes that the world is me and I am the world, then my action is not separative, is not the individual opposed to the community; nor the importance of the individual and his salvation. When one realizes that the world is me and I am the world, then whatever action takes place, whatever change takes place, that will change the whole of the consciousness of man. Naude: Would you like to explain that? Krishnamurti: I, as a human being, realize that the world is me and I am the world: realize, feel deeply committed, am passionately aware of this fact. Naude: Yes, that my action is in fact the world; my behaviour is the only world there is, because the events in the world are behaviour. And behaviour is the inner. So the inner and the outer are one because the events of history, the events of life, are in fact this point of contact between the inner and the outer. It is in fact the behaviour of man. Krishnamurti: So the consciousness of the world is my consciousness. Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: My consciousness is the world. Now the crisis is in this consciousness, not in organization, not in bettering the roads - tearing down the hills to build more roads. Naude: Bigger tanks, intercontinental missiles. Krishnamurti: My consciousness is the world and the consciousness of the world is me. When there is a change in this consciousness it affects the whole consciousness of the world. I don't know if you see that? Naude: It is an extraordinary fact. Krishnamurti: It is a fact. Naude: It is consciousness that is in disorder; there is no disorder anywhere else. Krishnamurti: Obviously! Naude: Therefore the ills of the world are the ills of human consciousness, and the ills of human consciousness are my ills, my malady, my disorder. Krishnamurti: Now when I realize that my consciousness is the consciousness of the world, and the consciousness of the world is me, whatever change that takes place in me affects the whole of consciousness. Naude: To this people always say: that's all very well, I may change, but there will still be a war in Indo-China! Krishnamurti: Quite right, there will be. Naude: And ghettos and overpopulation. Krishnamurti: Of course, there will be. But if each one of us saw the truth of this, that the consciousness of the world is mine, and mine is the world's; and if each one of us felt the responsibility of that - the politician, the scientist, the engineer, the bureaucrat, the business man - if everybody felt that, what then? And it is our job to make them feel this; that is the function of the religious man, surely? Naude: This is an enormous thing. Krishnamurti: Wait, let me go on. So then it is one movement. It is not an individual movement and his salvation. It is the salvation, if you like to use that word, of the whole of man's consciousness. Naude: The wholeness, and the health of consciousness itself, which is one thing and in which is contained what appears to be the outer, and what appears to be the inner. Krishnamurti: That's right. Let's keep to that one point. Naude: So what you are speaking about is in fact that health, that sanity, and that wholeness of consciousness, which always has been in fact an indivisible entity. Krishnamurti: Yes, that's right. Now when the people who want to create a different kind of world, the educators, the writers, the organisers, when they realize the world as it is now is their responsibility, then the whole of the consciousness of man begins to change. Which is what is happening in another direction, only they are emphasizing organization, division; they are doing exactly the same thing. Naude: In a negative way. Krishnamurti: In a destructive way. So from that the question arises: can this human consciousness, which is me - which is the community, which is the society, which is the culture, which is all the horrors that are produced by me in the context of the society, in the culture which is me - can this consciousness undergo a radical change? That is the question. Not escape into the supposed divine, not escape. Because when we understand this change in consciousness the divine is there, you don't have to seek it. Naude: Would you please explain what this change in consciousness consists of? Krishnamurti: That's what we are going to talk about now. Naude: And then perhaps we can ask about the divine if it arises. Krishnamurti: (Pause) First of all, is there any possibility of a change in consciousness? Or is any change made consciously no change at all? To talk about a change in consciousness implies changing from this to that. Naude: And both this and that are within consciousness. Krishnamurti: That is what I want to establish first. That when we say there must be a change in consciousness, it is still within the field of consciousness. Naude: The way we see the trouble, and the way we see the solution, which we call change - that is all within the same area. Krishnamurti: All within the same area and therefore no change at all. That is, the content of consciousness is consciousness and the two are not separate. Let's be clear on that point too. Consciousness is made up of all the things that have been collected by man as experience, as knowledge, as misery, confusion, destruction, violence - all that is consciousness. Naude: Plus so-called solutions. Krishnamurti: God, no-God, various theories about God, all that is consciousness. When we talk about change in consciousness we are still changing the pieces from one corner to the other. Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: Moving one quality into another corner of the field. Naude: Juggling with the contents of this huge box. Krishnamurti: Yes, juggling with the contents. And therefore... Naude: We are changing variables in the same set of things. Krishnamurti: That's right. You have put it perfectly, better than I have. When we talk about changing, we are really thinking of juggling with the contents - right? Now that implies a juggler and the thing with which he is juggling. But it is still within the field of consciousness. Naude: There are two questions which arise. Are you saying that there is no consciousness at all outside of the content of consciousness? And secondly, that there is no entity at all to juggle there is no entity called `me' outside of this content of consciousness? Krishnamurti: Obviously not. Naude: These are two big statements, Sir. Would you be kind enough to explain them? Krishnamurti: What is the first question? Naude: The first thing you are saying, if I have understood correctly, is: that this consciousness which we are discussing, which is all we are and all we have, and which we have seen is the problem itself, you are saying that this consciousness is its very content, and that there is nothing to be called consciousness outside of the content of consciousness? Krishnamurti: Absolutely right. Naude: Are you saying, outside of man's problems, outside of his misery, outside of his thinking, outside of the formulations of his mind, there is nothing at all we call consciousness? Krishnamurti: Absolutely right. Naude: This is a big statement. Would you explain this? We all think - and this has been postulated by Indian religions since the beginning of time - that there is a super-consciousness outside of this shell which is the consciousness we are talking about. Krishnamurti: To find out if there is something beyond this consciousness, I must understand the content of this consciousness. The mind must go beyond itself. Then I shall find out if there is something other than this or not. But to stipulate that there is has no meaning, it is just a speculation. Naude: So are you saying that what we commonly call consciousness, and what we are talking about, is the very content oF this consciousness? The container and contained are an indivisible thing? Krishnamurti: That's right. Naude: And the second point you are making is: that there is no entity to decide, to will, and to juggle, when the contents to be juggled are absent. Krishnamurti: That is, my consciousness is the consciousness of the world, and the consciousness of the world is me. This is a truth, not just my invention or dependent on your acceptance. It is an absolute truth. Also the content is consciousness: without the content there is no consciousness. Now when we want to change the content we are juggling. Naude: The content is juggling itself, because you have a third point, that there is nobody outside of this content to do any juggling at all. Krishnamurti: Quite right. Naude: So the juggler and the content are one, and the container and the content are one. Krishnamurti: The thinker who within this consciousness says that he must change, is consciousness trying to change. I think that is fairly clear. Naude: So that the world, the consciousness and the entity who supposedly will change it, are all the same entity, masquerading, as it were in three different roles. Krishnamurti: If that is so, then what is a human being to do to bring about a total emptying of the content of consciousness? How is this particular consciousness, which is me and the world with all its miseries, how is that to undergo complete change? How is the mind - which is consciousness, with all its content, with the accumulated knowledge of the past - how is that mind to empty itself of all its content? Naude: But people will say, hearing what you have said, understanding it imperfectly, they will say: can that consciousness be emptied, and when that consciousness is emptied, supposing this were possible, doesn't that reduce one to a state of considerable vagueness and inertia? Krishnamurti: On the contrary. To have come to this point requires a great deal of enquiry, a great deal of reason, logic, and with it comes intelligence. Naude: Because some people may think that the empty consciousness, which you speak about, is something like the consciousness of the child at birth. Krishnamurti: No, Sir, not at all. Let's go slowly at this, step by step. Let's begin again. My consciousness is the consciousness of the world. The world is me and the content of my consciousness is the content of the world. The content of consciousness is consciousness itself. Naude: And also that is the entity who says he is conscious. Krishnamurti: Now I am asking myself, realizing I am that, what is then changed? Naude: What is changed which will solve these three sets of problems that are really one? Krishnamurti: What is implied by change? What is implied by revolution? - not physical revolution. Naude: We have gone beyond that. Krishnamurti: Physical revolution is the most absurd, primitive, unintelligent destruction. Naude: It is fragmentation in this consciousness. Krishnamurti: Yes. Naude: Are you asking what it is which will restore order to this consciousness? - an order which is whole. Krishnamurti: Can there be order within this consciousness? Naude: Is that the next step? Krishnamurti: That is what you are asking. Naude: Yes. Since we see that the disorder, which is the sorrow and the suffering, is the disorder in this indivisible consciousness, the next question must be: what are we going to do about it? Krishnamurti: Yes. Naude: And since there is no entity who can do something about it... Krishnamurti: Wait, don't jump to that immediately. Naude: Because we have seen that the disorder is the entity. Krishnamurti: Do we realize that? No. Do we realize that the thinker is part of this consciousness and is not a separate entity outside this consciousness? Do we realize that the observer, seeing the content, examining, analysing, looking at it all, is the content itself? That the observer is the content? Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: But stating a truth is one thing, the realization of it is another. Naude: That's right. I think we do not fully understand that there is no entity separate from this thing we are trying to change. Krishnamurti: When we talk of change it seems to imply that there is an entity separate within the consciousness, who can bring about a transformation. Naude: We think that somehow we can step aside from the mess and look at it and juggle with it. We always tell ourselves, "Well, I'm still here to do something about it." And so we juggle more and more. Krishnamurti: More mess, more confusion. Naude: A change of decor and things get worse. Krishnamurti: The consciousness of the world is my consciousness. In that consciousness is all the content of human endeavour, human misery, human cruelty, mischief, all human activities are within that consciousness. Within that consciousness man has brought about this entity which says, "I am separate from my consciousness." The observer there says, "I am different from the thing observed." The thinker says, "My thoughts are different from me." First, is that so? Naude: We all believe that the two entities are different. We say to ourselves, "I must not be angry, I must not be sorrowful, I must improve, I must change myself." We are saying this either tacitly or consciously all the time. Krishnamurti: Because we think these two are separate. Now we are trying to point out that they are not separate, that they are one, because if there is no thought at all there is no thinker. Naude: That is right. Krishnamurti: If there is nothing observed there is no observer. Naude: There are a hundred observers and a hundred thinkers during the course of the day. Krishnamurti: I am just saying: is that so? I observe that red-tailed hawk flying by. I see it. When I observe that bird, am I observing with the image I have about that bird, or am I merely observing? Is there only mere observation? If there is an image, which is words, memory and all the rest of it, then there is an observer watching the bird go by. If there is only observation, then there is no observer. Naude: Would you explain why there is an observer when I look at the bird with an image? Krishnamurti: Because the observer is the past. The observer is the censor, is the accumulated knowledge, experience, memory; that is the observer, with that he observes the world. His accumulated knowledge is different from your accumulated knowledge. Naude: Are you saying that this total consciousness which is the problem, is not different from the observer who is going to deal with it, and this would seem to bring us to a deadlock, because the thing we are trying to change is the person trying to change it? And the question is: what then? Krishnamurti: That is just it. If the observer is the observed, what is the nature of change in consciousness? That is what we are trying to find out. We realize that there must be a radical revolution in consciousness. How is this to take place? Is it to take place through the observer? When the observer is separate from the observed, then this change is merely juggling with the various contents of consciousness. Naude: That's right. Krishnamurti: Now let's go slowly. One realizes that the observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought, that is a fact. Let's stop there a minute. Naude: Are you saying that the thinker is the totality of all these thoughts which create the confusion? Krishnamurti: The thinker is the thought, whether it is many, or one. Naude: But there is a difference, because the thinker thinks of himself as some sort of crystallized concrete entity. Even through this discussion, the thinker sees himself as the concrete entity to whom all these thoughts, all this confusion belongs. Krishnamurti: That concrete entity, as you say, is the result of thought. Naude: That concrete entity is... Krishnamurti: ...put together by thought. Naude: Put together by his thoughts. Krishnamurti: By thought, not "his", by thought. Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: And thought sees that there must be a change. This concrete entity, which is the result of thought, hopes to change the content. Naude: Itself. Krishnamurti: And so there is a battle between the observer and the observed. The battle consists of trying to control, change, shape, suppress, give a new shape, all that, that is the battle that goes on all the time in our life. But when the mind understands the truth that the observer, the experiencer, the thinker, is the thought, is the experience, is the observed, then what takes place? -knowing that there must be a radical change. Naude: That is a fact. Krishnamurti: And when the observer, who wants to change, realizes he is part of what has to be changed? Naude: That he is in fact a thief pretending to be a policeman to catch himself. Krishnamurti: Right. So what takes place? Naude: You see, Sir, people don't believe this; they say, "By exercising will I have stopped smoking, by exercising will I have got up earlier, I have lost weight and I have learnt languages; they say, "I am the master of my destiny, I can change" - everybody really believes this. Everybody believes that he is capable somehow of exercising will upon his own life, upon his own behaviour, and his own thinking. Krishnamurti: Which means, one has to understand the meaning of effort. What it is, why effort exists at all. Is that the way to bring about a transformation in consciousness? Through effort, through will? Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Change through conflict. When there is the operation of will, it is a form of resistance; to overcome, to suppress, to deny, to escape - all that is will in action. That means life is then a constant battle. Naude: Are you saying that simply one element in this consciousness is dominating another? Krishnamurti: Obviously. One fragment dominates another fragment. Naude: And that there is still conflict? There is still disorder by that very fact. Yes, this is clear. Krishnamurti: So, the central fact still remains. There must be a radical transformation in consciousness and of consciousness. Now, how is this to be brought about? That is the real question. Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: We have approached it by thinking that one fragment is superior to the rest, to the other fragments within the field of consciousness. Naude: Indeed we have. Krishnamurti: Now that fragment which we call superior, intelligence, intellect, reason, logic, is the product of the many other fragments. One fragment has assumed authority over other fragments. But it is still a fragment and therefore there is a battle between it and the many other fragments. So is it possible to see that this fragmentation does not solve our problems? Naude: Because it causes the division and the conflict, which right from the start was our problem. Krishnamurti: That is, when there is division between man and woman there is conflict. When there is a division between Germany and England or Russia, there is conflict. Naude: And all this is division within consciousness itself. Also, the exercise of will upon consciousness is again a division within consciousness. Krishnamurti: So one has to be free of the idea that through will you can change the content. That is important to understand. Naude: Yes, that the exercise of will is simply the tyranny of one fragment over another. Krishnamurti: That's simple. One also realizes that to be free of will is to be free of this fragmentation. Naude: But religions in the world have always called upon will to come in and do something. Krishnamurti: Yes. But we are denying the whole of that. Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: So what is a mind to do, or not to do, when it sees will is not the way, when it sees that one fragment taking charge over another fragment is still fragmentation and therefore conflict? - and therefore still within the field of misery. Then what is such a mind to do? Naude: Yes, this is really the question. Krishnamurti: Now, for such a mind is there anything to do? Naude: When you say that, one says, "If there is nothing to do then the circus goes on." Krishnamurti: No, Sir. Look! The circus goes on only when there is the exercise of will. Naude: Are you saying that the circus that we have been discussing and trying to change, is in fact made up of will? Krishnamurti: My will against your will, and so on. Naude: My will against another part of me. Krishnamurti: And so on. Naude: My desire to smoke... Krishnamurti: That's just it. A mind which starts by saying, "I must change," realizes that one fragment asserting it must change is still in conflict with another fragment, which is part of consciousness. It realizes that. Therefore it also realizes that will, to which man has become accustomed, which he takes for granted is the only way to bring about change... Naude:...is not the factor of change. Krishnamurti: Is not the factor of change. Therefore such a mind has come to quite a different height. Naude: It has cleared up a great deal. Krishnamurti: A vast quantity of rubbish. Naude: It has cleared up the division between the inner and the outer; the division between consciousness and its content. It has cleared up also the division between the conscious entity and the consciousness belonging to him and the various fragments. And it has cleared up the division between different fragments in that consciousness. Krishnamurti: So what has happened? What has happened to the mind that has seen all this? Not theoretically but actually felt it and says, "No more will in my life". Which means no more resistance in my life. Naude: This is so extraordinary it is like finding the sky at the bottom, one day. It is such a great change, it is difficult to say what the extent of that change is. Krishnamurti: It has already taken place! That is my point. Naude: You are saying that there is no more will, there is no more effort, there is no more division between the outside and the inside... Krishnamurti: ...no more fragmentation within consciousness. Naude: No more fragmentation. Krishnamurti: That is very important to understand, Sir. Naude: No more observer separate from what he has observed. Krishnamurti: Which means what? No fragmentation within consciousness. Which means consciousness only exists when there is conflict between fragments. Naude: I am not sure that I have understood that. Consciousess is its fragments? Krishnamurti: Consciousness is its fragments and consciousness is the battle between the fragments. Naude: Are you saying that there are only fragments because they are in conflict, in battle? When they are not battling together they are not fragments, because they are not acting as parts. The acting of one part on another ceases. That is what it means when you say fragmentation. That is what fragmentation Krishnamurti: See what has taken place! Naude: The fragments disappear when they are not acting against each other. Krishnamurti: Naturally! When Pakistan and India... Naude: ...are no longer fighting, there is no more Pakistan and India. Krishnamurti: Naturally. Naude: Are you saying that that is the change? Krishnamurti: Wait, I don't know yet. We'll go into it. A human mind has realized that the world is "me" and I am the world, my consciousness is the consciousness of the world, and the world's consciousness is me. The content of consciousness with all its miseries and so on is consciousness. And within that consciousness there are a thousand fragmentations. One fragment of those many fragments becomes the authority, the censor, the observer, the examiner, the thinker. Naude: The boss. Krishnamurti: The boss. And so he maintains fragmentation. See the importance of this! The moment he assumes the authority, he must maintain fragmentation. Naude: Yes, obviously. Because it is a part of consciousness acting on the rest of consciousness. Krishnamurti: Therefore he must maintain conflict. And conflict is consciousness. Naude: You have said that the fragments are consciousness; and are you now saying that the fragments are in fact the content? Krishnamurti: Of course. Naude: Fragments are conflict. There is no fragment without conflict? Krishnamurti: When is consciousness active? Naude: When it is in conflict. Krishnamurti: Obviously. Otherwise there is freedom, free- dom to observe. So radical revolution in consciousness, and of consciousness, takes place when there is no conflict at all. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART III CHAPTER 2 2ND CONVERSATION WITH ALAIN NAUDE MALIBU CALIFORNIA 28TH MARCH 1971 'ON GOOD AND EVIL' Naude: Do good and evil really exist, or are they simply conditioned points of view? Is there such a thing as evil and if so what is it? Is there such a thing as sin? And is there such a thing as goodness? And what is it to be really and deeply good? Krishnamurti: I was thinking this morning on the same theme as your questions imply, whether there is an absolute good and absolute evil: as the Christian idea of sin and the Asiatic idea of Karma - as action which breeds more misery and more sorrow and yet out of that conflict of sorrow and pain a goodness is born. I was thinking about it the other day when I saw on the television some men killing baby seals. It is a terrible thing, I turned my head away quickly. Killing has always been wrong, not only human beings but animals. And religious people, not the people who believe in religion, but the really religious mind, has always shunned every form of killing. Of course, when you eat a vegetable you are killing - a vegetable - but that is the least form of killing and the simplest form of survival: I wouldn't call that killing. One has watched in India, in Europe, and in America the acceptance of killing in war, in organized murder, which war is. Also "killing" people with words, with a gesture, with a look, with contempt: this form of killing has also been decried by religious people. But in spite of it all, killing has been going on - killing, violence, brutality, arrogance, aggressiveness - all ultimately leading, in action or in thought, to hurting, to brutalizing others. Also one has seen those ancient caves in North Africa and in the South of France where man is shown fighting animals, where perhaps fighting evil is understood. Or is it fighting as a form of amusement, to kill something, to overcome? So when one looks at all this, one asks if there is such a thing as evil in itself, totally devoid of the good; and what is the distance between evil and good. Is evil the diminution of good, slowly ending in evil? Or is good the diminution of evil, gradually becoming good? That is, through the time interval, moving from goodness to evil, and from evil to good? Naude: You mean are they two ends of the same stick? Krishnamurti: Two ends of the same stick - or are they two wholly separate things? So what is evil and what is good? The Christian world, the Inquisition, used to burn people for heresy, considering that was good. Naude: The Communists do the same. Krishnamurti: The Communists do it in their own way: for the good of the community, for the good of society, for the good of an economic well-being for the whole of man, and so on. In Asia too they have done all this kind of thing in various forms. But there has always been a group, until recently, where killing in any form was considered evil. Now all that is slowly disappearing, for economic and cultural reasons. Naude: You mean the group that avoids killing... Krishnamurti: ...is gradually disappearing. So there it is. Now is there such a thing as absolute good, and absolute evil? is it a gradation: relative goodness and relative evil? Naude: And do they exist as facts outside of conditioned points view? For instance, for the Frenchman during the war the invading German was evil; and similarly for the German, the German soldier was good, he represented protection. Now is re a good and an evil, absolutely? Or is it simply the result conditioned point of view? Krishnamurti: Is goodness dependent on the environment, on culture, on economic conditions? And if it is, is it good? Can goodness flower as an environmental, cultural conditionAnd is evil also the result of environmental culture? Does it function within that frame, or does it function outside it? these questions are implied when we ask: is there an absolute goodness and absolute evil? Naude: Right. Krishnamurti: First of all, what is goodness? Isn't the word "goodness" related to the word "God"? God being the highest form of the good, truth, excellence, and the capacity to express in relationship that quality of godliness, which is goodness; and anything opposite that is considered evil. If goodness is related to God, then evil is related to the devil. The devil being the ugly, the dark, the... Naude: ...the twisted... Krishnamurti: ...the distorted, the purposefully directed harmful, such as the desire to hurt - all that is contrary to the good; that is, the idea of God being good and the devil being the evil - right? Now I think we have more or less indicated what is good and what is evil. So we are asking if there is such a thing as absolute good and absolute, irrevocable evil. Naude: Evil as a fact, as a thing. Krishnamurti: Therefore let us first examine if there is absolute good. Not in the sense of goodness being related to God, or approximating itself to the idea of God, because then that goodness becomes merely speculative. Because God to most people is really a pretence of a belief in something - something excellent, noble. Naude: Felicity? Krishnamurti: Felicity and so on. Now what is good? I feel goodness is total order. Not only outwardly, but especially inwardly. I think that order can be absolute, as in mathematics I believe there is complete order. And it is disorder that leads to chaos, to destruction, to anarchy, to the so-called evil. Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: Whereas total order in one's being, order in the mind, order in one's heart, order in one's physical activities - the harmony between the three is goodness. Naude: The Greeks used to say that perfected man had attuned in total harmony his mind, his heart and his body. Krishnamurti: Quite. So we shall say for the moment that goodness is absolute order. And as most human beings live in disorder they contribute to every form of mischief, which ultimately leads to destruction, to brutality, to violence, to various injuries, both psychic and physical. For all that one word may be used: "evil". But I don't like that word "evil" because it is loaded with Christian meaning, with condemnation and prejudice. Naude: Conditioning. Krishnamurti: That's right. In India and in Asia the words "evil", "sin", are always loaded - as "goodness" is always loaded. So could we brush away all the accumulations around these words and look at it as though anew. That is: is there absolute order in oneself? Can this absolute order be brought about in oneself and therefore in the outer world? Because the world is me, and I am the world; my consciousness is the consciousness of the world, and the consciousness of the world is me. So when there is order within the human being then there is order in the world. Now can this order, right through, be absolute? Which means: order in the mind, in the heart and in the bodily activities. That is, complete harmony. How can this be brought about? That is one point. Then the other point is: is order something to be copied according to a design? Is order pre-established by thought, by the intellect, and copied in action by the heart? Or in relationship? So is order a blueprint? How is this order to be brought about? Naude: Right. Krishnamurti: Order is virtue. And disorder is non-virtue, is harmful, is destructive, is impure - if we can use that word. Naude: One thinks of the Sanskrit word "Adharma". Krishnamurti: Adharma, yes. So is order something put together according to a design drawn by knowledge, thought? Or is order outside the field of thought and knowledge? One feels there is absolute goodness, not as an emotional concept, but one knows, if one has gone into oneself deeply, that there is such a thing: complete, absolute, irrevocable goodness, or order. And this order is not a thing put together by thought; if it is, then it is according to a blueprint, but if it is imitated then the imitation leads to disorder, or to conformity. Conformity, imitation, and the denial of what is, is the beginning of disorder, leading ultimately to what may be called evil. So we are asking: is goodness, which is (as we said) order and virtue, is it the product of thought? Which means can it be cultivated by thought? Can virtue ever be cultivated? To cultivate implies to bring slowly into being which means time. Naude: Mental synthesis. Krishnamurti: Yes. Now is virtue the result of time? And is order therefore a matter of evolution? And so is absolute order, absolute goodness, a matter of slow growth, cultivation, all involving time? As we said the other day thought is the response of memory knowledge, and experience, which is the past which is stored up in the brain. In the brain cells themselves the past is. So does virtue lie in the past and is it therefore cultivatable, to be pushed forward? Or is virtue, order, only i the now? The now is not related to the past. Naude: You are saying that goodness is order and that order is not the product of thought; but order, if it exists at all, must exist in behaviour, behaviour in the world and in relationship. People always think that proper behaviour in relationship, in the world must be planned, that order is always the result of planning. And quite often people get the idea, when they have listened to you, that awareness, the state of being you speak about in which there is no room for the action of thought, they get the feeling that this is a sort of disincarnate energy, which can have no action and no relationship to the world of men and events and behaviour. They think that therefore it has no real value, and not what you might call a temporal and historical significance. Krishnamurti: Right, Sir. Naude: You are saying that goodness is order and order is not planned. Krishnamurti: When we talk about order, don't we mean order in behaviour, in relationship, not an abstract order, not a goodness in heaven, but order, goodness in relationship and action in the now. When we talk about planning, obviously there must be planning at a certain level. Naude: Architecture. Krishnamurti: Architecture, building railways, going to the moon and so on there must be a design, a planning, a very coordinated intelligent operation taking place. We are surely not mixing up the two: there must be planning, order, co-operation, the carrying out together of certain plans, a well laid-out city, a community - all that demands planning. We are talking of something entirely different. We are asking if there is absolute order in human behaviour, if there is absolute goodness, as order, in oneself and therefore in the world. And we said order is not planned, can never be planned. If it is planned, then the mind is seeking security, because the brain demands security; seeking security it will suppress, or destroy, or pervert what is and try to conform, imitate. This very imitation and conformity is disorder, from which all the mischief begins, the neuroses and various distortions of the mind and the heart. Planning implies knowledge. Naude: Thinking. Krishnamurti: Knowledge, thinking and ordering the thought as ideas. So we are asking: is virtue the outcome of planning? Obviously it is not. The moment your life is planned according to a pattern then you are not living, you are merely conforming to a certain standard and therefore that conformity leads to contradiction in oneself. The "what is" and the "what should be" that breeds contradiction and therefore conflict. That very conflict is the source of disorder. So order, virtue, goodness is in the moment of the now. And therefore it is free of the past. That freedom can be relative. Naude: How do you mean? Krishnamurti: One may be conditioned by the culture in which one lives, by the environment and so on. One either frees oneself totally from all the conditioning and therefore is absolutely free; or there may be partial unconditioning. Naude: Yes, get rid of one set of conditions... Krishnamurti: ...and fall into another. Naude: Or just discard one set like Christianity and it taboos. Krishnamurti: So that slow discarding may appear orderly, but it is not; because the slow peeling off of conditioning may temporarily give the appearance of freedom, but is not absolute freedom. Naude: Are you saying that freedom is not the result of particular operation with regard to one conditioning o another? Krishnamurti: That's right. Naude: You have said that freedom is at the beginning and not at the end. Is that what you mean? Krishnamurti: Yes, that's it. Freedom is now, not in the future. So freedom, order, or goodness, is now, which expresses itself in behaviour. Naude: Yes, else it has no meaning. Krishnamurti: Otherwise it has no meaning at all. Behaviour in relationship not only with a particular individual, who is close to you, but behaviour with everybody. Naude: In the absence of all those elements of the past which make most people behave, what will make us behave? This freedom seems to so many people such a disincarnate thing, such a bleak sky, such an immaterial thing. What is it in that freedom which will make us behave in the world of people an events with order? Krishnamurti: Sir, look. We said in the last conversation that I am the world and the world is me. We said the consciousness of the world is my consciousness. My consciousness is the world's consciousness. When you make a statement of that kind either it is purely verbal and therefore has no meaning at all or it is something actual, living, vital. When one realizes that it is vital, in that realization is compassion - real compassion, not for one or two, but compassion for everybody, for everything. Freedom is this compassion, which is not disincarnate as an idea. Naude: As a state of withdrawal. Krishnamurti: My relationship is only in the now, not in the past, because if my relationship is rooted in the past I am not related now. So freedom is compassion, and that comes when there is the real deep realization that I am the world, the world is me. Freedom, compassion, order, virtue, goodness are one; and that is absolute. Now what relationship has non-goodness - which has been called evil, sin, original sin - what relationship has that with this marvellous sense of order? Naude: Which is not the product of thinking, of civilization, of culture. Krishnamurti: What is the relationship between the two? There is none. So when we move away from this order - move away in the sense of misbehave - does one enter into the field of evil, if we can use that word? Or is evil something totally apart from the good? Naude: Whether deviation from the order of goodness is already an entry into the field of evil, or can these two not even touch at all? Krishnamurti: That's right. I may misbehave. I may tell a lie. I may consciously or unconsciously hurt another, but I can clear it. I can wipe it away by apologizing, by saying "forgive me". It can be done immediately. Naude: It can be ended. Krishnamurti: So I am finding out something, which is: the non-ending of it, carrying it over in one's mind day after day, as hate, as a grudge... Naude: ...guilt, fear... Krishnamurti: ...does that nourish the evil? You follow? Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: If I continue with it, keep within my mind the grudge which I bear against you, carry it on day after day, the grudge which involves hate, envy, jealousy, antagonism - all that is violence. So what is the relationship of violence to evil and goodness? We are using the word "evil" very... Naude: ...cautiously. Krishnamurti: Cautiously. Because I don't like that word at all. So what is the relationship between violence and goodness? Obviously none at all! But the violence which I have cultivated -whether it is the product of society, the product of the culture, the environment, or inherited from the animal - that violence, by becoming aware of it, can be wiped away. Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: Not a gradual wiping away; wipe it away as you wipe out a clean... Naude: ...take a mark off the wall. Krishnamurti: Then you are always in that goodness. Naude: Are you saying that goodness is a wholly negative affair then? Krishnamurti: Yes, it must be. Naude: And in that way the negative is not related at all to the positive, because it is not the result of a gradual decline or accumulation of the positive. The negative exists when the positive is wholly absent. Krishnamurti: Yes; put it round the other way. The negation of the grudge, the negation of violence and the negation of the continuity of the violence, that negation of it is the good. Naude: Is the emptying. Krishnamurti: The emptying of violence is the richness of the good. Naude: Therefore the good is always intact. Krishnamurti: Yes, it is never broken up, not fragmented. Sir, wait! So is there such a thing as absolute evil? I don't know if you have ever considered this: I have seen in India little statues made of clay in which needles, or thorns, have been put; I have seen it very often. The image is supposed to represent a person whom you want to hurt. In India there are very long thorns, you have seen them, from bushes, and they are stuck into these clay statuettes. Naude: I didn't know they did that in India. Krishnamurti: I have seen it. Now there is a determined action to produce evil in another, to hurt another. Naude: An intent. Krishnamurti: The intent, the ugly, deep, hatred. Naude: Deliberate. This must be evil, Sir. Krishnamurti: What is its relationship to good - good being all that we have said? This is a real intent to hurt people. Naude: Organized disorder, one might say. Krishnamurti: Organized disorder, which is the organized disorder of a society that rejects the good. Because the society is me. I am the society; if I don't change, society cannot change. And here is the deliberate intention to hurt another, whether it is organized as war or not. Naude: In fact, organized war is the group manifestation of the phenomenon you are speaking about in India, putting the thorns through the little statues. Krishnamurti: This is well known, this is as old as the hills. So I am saying this desire to hurt, consciously or unconsciously, and yielding to it, and giving it sustenance, is what? Would you call that evil? Naude: Of course. Krishnamurti: Then we shall have to say that will is evil. Naude: Aggression is evil. Violence is evil. Krishnamurti: Wait, see it! Will is evil, because I want to hurt you. Naude: Someone might say though: the will to do you good -is that will also evil? Krishnamurti: You cannot will to do good. Either you are good, or not good, you can't will goodness. Will being the concentration of thought as resistance. Naude: Yes, you said that goodness is the absence of a blueprint. Krishnamurti: So I am asking: is evil related to the good, or are the two things totally apart? And is there such a thing as absolute evil? There is absolute good, but absolute evil cannot exist. Right? Naude: Yes, because evil is always cumulative, it is always to some degree or another. Krishnamurti: Yes. So a man with the deep intention to hurt another - some incident, some accident, some affection or care, might change the whole thing. But to say that there is an absolute sin, absolute evil, is the most terrible thing to say. That is evil. Naude: The Christians have personified evil as Satan and as an almost immutable force, almost equal to the good, almost equal to God. The Christians have enthroned evil almost eternally. Krishnamurti: Look, Sir. You have seen those bushes in India, they have got long thorns, nearly two inches long. Naude: Yes. Krishnamurti: There are snakes which are poisonous, deadly poisonous, there are other things which are frighteningly cruel in nature, like the white shark, that appalling thing we saw the other day. Is that evil? Naude: No. Krishnamurti: No? Naude: No, Sir. Krishnamurti: It is protecting itself: the thorn is protecting itself against the animal so that the leaves are not eaten. Naude: Yes and so is the snake. Krishnamurti: So is the snake. Naude: And the shark is following its nature. Krishnamurti: So see what it means. Anything that is self- protective in the physical sense is not evil. But protecting oneself psychologically, resisting any movement, leads to disorder. Naude: If I may interrupt here. This is the argument which many people use about war. They say that building up an army and using it, for instance, in South East Asia is the kind of physical protection which the shark... Krishnamurti: That is too absurd an argument. The whole world is divided up for psychological reasons as "my country" and "your country", "my God" and "your God" - that and economic reasons are the cause of war, surely? But I am trying to get at something different. Nature is terrible in certain ways. Naude: Ruthless. Krishnamurti: We human beings looking at it say, "That's evil, how terrible". Naude: Lightning. Krishnamurti: Earthquakes which destroy a thousand people in a few seconds. So the moment we assert that there is absolute evil, that very assertion is the denial of the good. Goodness implies total abnegation of the self. Because the "me" is always separative. The "me", "my family", the self, the person, the ego, is the centre of disorder, because it is a divisive factor. The "me" is the mind, is thought. And we have never been able to move away from this egocentric activity. To move completely away from it is complete order, freedom, goodness. And to remain in the circle of self-centred movement breeds disorder; there is always conflict there. And we attribute this conflict to evil, to the devil, to bad karma, to environment, to society; but the society is me and I have built this society. So unless this me is totally transformed I am always contributing to a major extent or to a minor extent to disorder. Order means behaviour in freedom. And freedom means love and not pleasure. When one observes all this one sees very clearly that there is a marvellous sense of absolute order. SAANEN 1ST CONVERSATION WITH SWAMI VENKATESANANDA 25TH JULY 1969 Swami Venkatesananda: Krishnaji, I come as a humble speaker to a guru, not in the sense of hero worship but in its literal sense, as the remover of darkness of ignorance, which the word guru stands for. 'Gu' stands for the darkness of ignorance and 'ru' stands for the remover, the dispeller. Hence guru is the light that dispels the darkness of ignorance and you are that light for me now. We sit in the tent listening to you, and I cannot help visualizing similar scenes. For instance, Buddha addressing the Bhikshus, or Vasishta instructing Rama in the royal court of Dasaratha. We have a few examples of these gurus in the Upanishads; first there was Varuna, the guru, he is very much like you. He merely prods his disciple with the words 'Tapasa Brahma... Tapo Brahmeti'. What is Brahman? Don't ask me. Tapo Brahman, tapas, austerity or discipline or as you yourself often say, 'Find out'. And the disciple himself discovers the truth, though by stages. Yajnyavalkya and Uddhalaka adopted a more direct approach. Yajnyavalkya instructing his wife Maitreyi, used the neti-neti method. You cannot describe Brahman positively, but when you eliminate al the others, it is there. As you said the other day, love cannot be described, "this is it", but only by eliminating what is not love. Uddhalaka used several analogies to enable his disciples to see the truth and then nailed it with the famous expression Tat-Twam-Asi. Dakshinamurti instructed his disciples by silence and Chinmudra. It is said that the Sanatkumaras went to him for instruction. When I read the descriptions of what Krishnamurti was when he was a young age, I am often reminded of that. These old sages went to him and Dakshinamurti just kept silent and showed the Chinmudra and the disciples looked at him and got enlightened. It is believed that one cannot realize the truth without the help, or whatever you call it, of a guru. Obviously even those people who regularly come to Saanen are greatly helped in their quest. Now, what according to you is the role of a guru, a preceptor or an awakener? Krishnaji: Sir, if you are using the word guru in the classical sense, which is the dispeller of darkness, of ignorance, can another, whatever he be, enlightened or stupid, really help to dispel this darkness in oneself? Suppose 'A' is ignorant and you are his guru -guru in the accepted sense, one who dispels darkness and one who carries the burden for another, one who points out - can such a guru help another? Or rather can the guru dispel the darkness of another? - not theoretically but actually. Can you, if you are the guru of so and so, can you dispel the darkness of another, for another? Knowing that he is unhappy, confused, has not enough brain matter, has not enough love, or sorrow, can you dispel that? Or has he to work tremendously on himself? You may point out, you may say, 'Look, go through that door,' but he has to do the work entirely from the beginning to the end. Therefore, you are not a guru in the accepted sense of that word, if you say that another cannot help. Swamiji: It is just this: the 'if' and 'but'. The door is there. I have to go through. But there is this ignorance of where the door is. You, by pointing out, remove that ignorance. Krishnaji: But I have to walk there. Sir, you are the guru and you point out the door. You have finished your job. Swamiji: So darkness of ignorance is removed. Krishnaji: No, your job is finished and it is now for me to get up, walk, and see what is involved in walking. I have to do all that. Swamiji: That is perfect. Krishnaji: Therefore you do not dispel my darkness. Swamiji: I am sorry. Now I do not know how to get out of this room. I am ignorant of the existence of a door in a certain direction and the guru removes the darkness of that ignorance. And then I take the necessary steps to get out. Krishnaji: Sir, let us be clear. Ignorance is lack of understanding, or the lack of understanding of oneself, not the big self or the little self. The door is the 'me' through which I have to go. It is not outside of 'me'. It is not a factual door as that painted door. It is a door in me through which I have to go. You say, 'Do that.' Swamiji: Exactly. Krishnaji: You, as a guru, have finished. You do not become important. I do not put garlands around your head. I have to do all the work, all the work. You have not dispelled the darkness of ignorance. You have, rather, pointed out to me that, "You are the door through which you yourself have to go." Swamiji: But would you, Krishnaji, accept that that pointing out was necessary? Krishnaji: Yes, of course. I point out, I do that. We all do that. I ask a man on the road, "Will you please tell me which is the way to Saanen", and he tells me; but I do not spend time and devotion and love and say, "My God, you are the greatest of men." That is too childish! Swamiji: Thank you, sir. Closely related to what the guru is, there is the question of what discipline is. The disciple is discipline which you defined as learning. Vedanta classifies the seekers according to their qualifications, or maturity, and prescribes suitable methods of learning. The disciple with the keenest perception is given instruction in silence, or a brief awakening word like Tat-Twam-Asi. He is called Uttamadhikari. The disciple with the mediocre ability is given more elaborate treatment; he is called Madhyamadhikari. The dull-witted is entertained with stories, rituals, etc., hoping for greater maturity; he is called Adhamadhikari. Perhaps you will comment on this? Krishnaji: Yes, the top, the middle and bottom. That implies, sir, that we have to find out what we mean by maturity. Swamiji: May I explain that? You said the other day, "The whole world is burning, you must realize the seriousness of it." And that hit me like a bolt - even to grasp that truth. But there may be millions who just do not bother; they are not interested. Those we shall call the Adhama, the lowest. There are others like the Hippies and so on who play with it, who may be entertained with stories and who say, "We are unhappy," or who tell you, "We know society is a mess, we will take L.S.D.", and so on. And there may be others who respond to that idea, that the world is burning, and that immediately sparks them. We find them everywhere. How does one handle them? Krishnaji: How to handle the people who are utterly immature, those who are partially mature, and those who consider themselves mature? Swamiji: Correct. Krishnaji: To do that, what do we mean by maturity? What do you think is maturity? Does it depend on age, time? Swamiji: No. Krishnaji: So we can remove that. Time, age is not an indication of maturity. Then there is the maturity of the very learned man, the man who is highly, intellectually capable. Swamiji: No he may twist and turn the words. Krishnaji: So we will consider him not mature. Whom would you consider as a mature, ripe man? Swamiji: The man who is able to observe. Krishnaji: Wait. Obviously the man who goes to churches, to temples, to mosques is not; the obvious things are not. So what would one consider a mature man? Not the intellectual, the religious and the emotional, not who plays intellectually and all the rest of it. We should say, if we eliminate all that, maturity consists in being not self-centred - not 'me' first and everybody else second, or my emotions first. So maturity implies the absence of the 'me'. Swamiji: Absence of fragmentation, to use a better word. Krishnaji: The 'me' which creates the fragments. Now, how would you appeal to that man? And to the man who is half one and half, 'me' and 'not me', who plays with both? And the other one who is completely 'me', who enjoys himself? How do you appeal to these three? Swamiji: How do you awaken these three in other words. That is the trouble. Krishnaji: Wait! The man who is completely 'me', there is no awakening in him. He is not interested. He won't even listen to you. He will listen to you if you promise him something, heaven, hell, fear or more profit in the world, more money; but he will do it in order to gain. So the man who wishes to gain, achieve, is immature. Swamiji: Quite right. Krishnaji: Whether Nirvana, Heaven, Moksha, attainment, or enlightenment, he is immature. Now, what will you do with such a man? Swamiji: Tell him stories. Krishnaji: No, why should I tell him stories, befuddle him more by my stories or by your stories? Why not leave him alone? He would not listen. Swamiji: It is cruel. Krishnaji: Cruel on whose part? He won't listen to you. Let us be factual. You come to me. I am the total 'me'. I am not concerned with anything but 'me', and you say "Look, you are making a mess of the world, you are creating such misery for man", and he says, please go away. Put it any way you like; put it in stories, cover it with pills, sweet pills, but he is not going to change the 'me'. If he does, he comes to the middle - the 'me' and the 'not me'. This is called evolution. The man who is the lowest reaches the middle. Swamiji: How? Krishnaji: By knocking. Life forces him, teaches him. There is war, hatred; he is destroyed. Or he goes into a church. The church is a trap to him. It does not enlighten him, it does not say, "For God's sake break through," but it says it will give him what he wants - entertainment, whether Jesus entertainment, or Hindu entertainment, or Buddhist, or Muslim or whatever it is - it will give him entertainment, only in the name of God. So they keep him at the same level, with little modifications, a little bit of polish, better culture, better clothes, eat properly, consider a little bit, not too much, others. That is what is happening. He probably makes up (as you said just now) eighty per cent of the world, more perhaps, ninety per cent. And you have the churches, the temples, the mosques, the shrines and so on. Swamiji: What can you do? Krishnaji: I won't add to it, I won't tell him stories, I won't entertain him; because there are others who are already entertaining him. Swamiji: Thank you. Krishnaji: So why should I join that group? Then there is the middle one, the 'me' and the 'not-me', who does social reforms, a little bit of good here and there, but always the 'me' operating. Socially, politically, religiously, in every way, the 'me' is operating. But a little more quietly, with a little more polish. Now to him you can talk a little bit, say, "Look, a social reform is all right in its place but it leads you nowhere," and so on. You can talk to him. Perhaps he will listen to you. The other one will not listen to you at all. This chap will listen to you, pay a little attention and say, well, this is too serious, this requires too much work, and slips back into his old pattern. We shall talk to him and leave him. What he wants to do is up to him. Now, there is the other one who is getting out of the 'me', who is stepping out of the circle of the 'me'. There, you can talk to him. He will pay attention to you. So one talks to all the three, not distinguishing between those who are mature and those who are not mature. We will talk to all the three categories, the three types, and leave it to them. Swamiji: The one who is not interested, he will walk out. Krishnaji: He will walk out of the tent, he will walk out of the room. That is his affair. He goes to his church, football, entertainment or whatever it is. But the moment you say "you are immature and I will teach you more", he becomes... Swamiji: Boosted up. Krishnaji: The seed of poison is always there. Sir, if the soil is right, the grain will take root. But to say, 'You are mature, and you are not mature', that is totally wrong. Who am I to tell somebody that he is immature? It is for him to find out. Swamiji: But can a fool find out that he is a fool? Krishnaji: If he is a fool he won't even listen to you. You see, sir, we start out with the idea of wanting to help. Swamiji: That is what we are basing our whole discussion upon. Krishnaji: I think that approach is not valid, except in the medical world or in the technological world it is necessary. I may go to the doctor to be cured. Here, psychologically, if I am asleep, I won't listen to you. If I am half awake, I will listen to you according to my vacant state, according to my moods. Therefore, to the one man who says, "I really want to keep awake, keep psychologically awake", to him you can talk. So we talk to all of them. Swamiji: Thank you. That clears up a big misunderstanding. When sitting alone, I reflected over what you had said earlier in the day. I cannot help the spontaneous feeling. "Ah, the Buddha said so", or "Vasishtha said so", though immediately I endeavour to cut through the imagery of the words to find the meaning. You help us find the meaning, though perhaps that is not your intention. So did Vasishtha and the Buddha. People come here as they went to those great ones. Why? What is there in human nature that seeks, that gropes and grasps for a crutch? Again, not to help them may be a cruelty, but to spoon-feed them may be greater cruelty. What does one do? Krishnaji: The question being, why do people need crutches? Swamiji: Yes, and whether to help them or not. Krishnaji: That is it: whether you should give them crutches to lean on. Two questions are involved. Why do people need crutches? And whether you are the person to give them the crutches? Swamiji: Should one or should one not? Krishnaji: Should one or should one not, and whether you are capable of giving them help? Those two questions are involved. Why do people want crutches, why do people want to depend on others, whether it is Jesus, Buddha, or ancient saints, why? Swamiji: First of all, there is something that is seeking. The seeking itself seems to be good. Krishnaji: Is it? Or is it their fear of not achieving something which the saints, the great people, have pointed out? Or the fear of going wrong, of not being happy, of not getting enlightenment, understanding, or whatever you call it? Swamiji: May I quote a beautiful expression from the Bhagvad-gita? Krishna said: four types of people come to me. The one who is in distress; he comes to me for the removal of distress. Then there is the one who is a curious man; he just wants to know what is this God, truth, and whether there is heaven and hell? The third one wants some money. He also comes to God and prays to get more money, let me become a millionaire, a multi millionaire. And the Gyani, the wise man, also comes. All of them are good, because they are all, somehow or the other, seeking God. But of all these, I think the Gyani is the best one. So the seeking may be due to all sorts of reasons. Krishnaji: Yes, sir. There are these two questions. First of all, why do we seek? Then, why does humanity demand crutches? Now, why does one seek, why should one seek at all? Swamiji: Why should one seek? Krishnaji: Why does one seek and why should one seek at all? Swamiji: Why should one seek? Because one finds something missing. Krishnaji: Which means what? I am unhappy and I want happiness. That is a form of seeking. I do not know what enlightenment is. I have read about it in books and it appeals to me and I seek it. Also I seek a better job, because there is more money, more profit, more enjoyment and so on. In all these there is seeking, searching, wanting. I can understand the man wanting a better job, because society is so monstrously arranged, as it is, that makes him seek more money, a better job. But psychologically, inwardly, what am I seeking? And when I do find it, in my search, how do I know that what I find is true? Swamiji: Perhaps the seeking drops. Krishnaji: Wait, sir. How do I know? In my search, how do I know that this is the truth? How do I know? Can I ever say "This is the truth"? Therefore why should I seek it? So what makes me seek? What makes one seek is a much more fundamental question than the search, and saying, "This is the truth." If I say, "This is the truth", I must know it already. If I know it already, it is not truth. It is something dead, past, which tells me that is the truth. A dead thing cannot tell me what is truth. So why do I seek? Because, deeply I am unhappy, deeply I am confused, deeply there is great sorrow in me and I want to find a way out of it. You come along as the guru, as an enlightened man, or as a professor and say, 'Look, this is the way out.' The basic reason for my search is to escape from this agony and I posit that I can escape, and that enlightenment is over there, or in myself. Can I escape from it? I cannot in the sense of avoiding it, resisting it, running away from it; it is there. Wherever I go, it is still there. So what I have to do is to find out in myself why sorrow has come into being, why I am suffering. Then, is that a search? No. When I want to find out why I am suffering, that is not searching. It is not even a quest. It is like going to a doctor and saying I have tummy ache, and he says you have eaten the wrong kind of food. So I will avoid wrong food. If the cause of my misery is in myself not necessarily created by the environment in which I live, then I have to find out how to be free from it for myself. You may, as the guru, point out that that is the door, but as soon as you have pointed it out, your job is over. Then I have to work, then I have to find out what to do, how to live, how to think, how to feel this way of living in which there is no suffering. Swamiji: Then to that extent the helping, the pointing out, is justified. Krishnaji: Not justified, but you do it naturally. Swamiji: Supposing the other man gets stuck somewhere, that as he goes there, in going there he knocks against this table... Krishnaji: He must learn that the table is there. He must learn that when he is going towards the door there is an obstacle in the way. If he is enquiring, he will find out. But if you come along and say, "There is the door, there is the table don't knock against it", you are treating him just like a child leading him to the door. There is no meaning to it. Swamiji: So that much of help, the pointing out, is justified? Krishnaji: Any decent man with a decent heart will say, look, don't go there, there is a precipice. I once met a very well-known guru in India. He came to see me. And it was quite an odd performance he put up. There was a mattress on the floor and we said to him politely, please sit on the mattress. He quietly sat on the mattress, assumed the position of the guru, put his stick in front of him and began to discuss. nd he said: we need gurus because we know better than the layman; why should he go through all the danger alone? We will help him. It was impossible to discuss with him because he had assumed that he knew and everybody else was in ignorance. At the end of ten minutes he left, rather annoyed. Swamiji: That is one of the things for which Krishnaji is famous in India! Next, while you rightly point out the utter futility of blindly accepting formulas and dogmas, you will not ask for their summary rejection. While tradition can be a deadly block, it is perhaps worth understanding it and its origin; else we might destroy one tradition and an equally pernicious one might spring up. Krishnaji: Quite right. Swamiji: Hence may I offer a few traditional beliefs for your scrutiny so that we may discover where and how what you called 'good intentions' veered towards hell - the shell that imprisons us? Each branch of Yoga prescribed its own disciplines in the firm conviction that if one pursued them in the right spirit one would end sorrow. I shall enumerate them for your comments. Karma Yoga: it demanded Dharma, or a virtuous life, which was often extended to include the much abused Varnashrama Dharma. Krishna's dictum 'Swadharme... Bhayavaha', seems to have indicated that if a man voluntarily submitted himself to certain rules of conduct, his mind would be free to observe and learn with the help of certain Bhavanas. Would you comment on this? The concept of Dharma and rules and regulations: 'do this', 'that is right', 'that is wrong. ' Krishnaji: Which means really, you lay down what is right conduct. Swamiji: And I voluntarily adopt it. Krishnaji: There is a teacher who lays down what is righteous behaviour, and I come along and voluntarily, to use your word, take to it, accept it. Is there such a thing as voluntary acceptance? And should you lay down what is right conduct, should the teacher lay down what is right conduct, which means he has set the pattern, the mould, the conditioning? You follow the danger of it? He has laid down the conditioning which produces right behaviour, which will lead one to heaven. Swamiji: That is one aspect of it. The other aspect in which I am more interested, is if that is accepted, then the psychological apparatus is free to observe. Krishnaji: I understand. No, sir. Why should I accept it? You are the teacher. You lay down the mode of conduct. How do I know that you are right? You may be wrong. And I won't accept your authority. Because I see the authority of the gurus, the authority of the priest, the authority of the Church, they have all failed. Therefore, with a new teacher laying down a new law, I would say, "For God's sake you are playing the same game; I do not accept it." But if I voluntarily accept it, is there such a thing as voluntary acceptance, free acceptance? Or am I already influenced, because you are a teacher, you are the great one, and you promise me a reward at the end of it, unconsciously or consciously, which leads me to 'voluntarily' accept it? I do not accept it freely. If I am free, I do not accept it at all. I live. I live righteously. Swamiji: So righteousness must come from within? Krishnaji: Obviously, what else, sir? Look at what is going on in the study of behaviour. They say outward circumstances, environment, culture, produce certain types of behaviour. That is, if I live in a communist environment with its domination, with its threats, exposure, going to the concentration camps, all that will make me behave in a certain way; I put on a mask, frightened, and I behave in a certain way. In a society which is more or less free, where there are not so many rules, because nobody believes in rules, where everything is permitted, there I play. Swamiji: Now, which one is more acceptable from the spiritual point of view? Krishnaji: Neither. Because behaviour, virtue, is something which cannot be cultivated by me or by society. I have to find out how to live rightly. Virtue is something which is not an acceptance of patterns, or following a deadly pattern of routine. Goodness is not routine, surely? If I am good because my teacher says I am good, it is meaningless. Therefore there is no such thing as voluntary acceptance of the righteous behaviour which is laid down by a guru, by a teacher. Swamiji: One has to find it. Krishnaji: Therefore I have to begin to enquire. I begin to look, to find out how to live. I can only live when there is no fear. Swamiji: Perhaps I should have explained this. According to Sankara it is meant only for the lower. Krishnaji: What is low and high? The mature and the immature? Sankara or X Y Z says, "Lay down the rule for the low and for the high" and they don't do it. They read the books of Sankara, or some pundit reads it to them, and they say how marvellous it is and go back and live their own life. This is an obvious fact. You see it in Italy. They listen to the Pope, and nobody cares either - they listen earnestly for two or three minutes and then go on with their daily life; t does not make any difference. That is why I want to ask, why the so-called Sankaras, Gurus, lay down laws about what is behaviour. Swamiji: Otherwise they think there will be chaos. Krishnaji: There is chaos anyhow. There is terrible chaos. In India they have read Sankara and all the teachers for ten thousand, or five thousand years. Look at them! Swamiji: Perhaps, according to them, the alternative is impossible. Krishnaji: What is the alternative? Confusion? And that is what they are living in. Why not understand the confusion in which they are living instead of studying Sankara? If they understand confusion, they can change it. Swamiji: Perhaps that leads us on to this question of Bhavana where a bit of psychology is involved. Coming to the Sadhana of Karma Yoga, the Bhagavad Gita prescribes among other things a Nimitta Bhavana. Bhavana is undoubtedly Being and Nimitta Bhavana is being an egoless instrument in the hands of God or the Infinite Being. But it is also taken to mean an attitude or a feeling in the hope that it will help a beginner to observe himself and thus the Bhavana will fill his being. Perhaps it is indispensable for the people of little understanding; perhaps it will permanently distract them by self-deception. How shall we make this work? Krishnaji: What is the question you are asking, sir? Swamiji: There is the technique of Bkawana. Krishnaji: That implies a system, a method, by the practice of which, you ultimately reach enlightenment. You practise in order to come to God or whatever it is. The moment you practise a method, what happens? I practise day after day the method laid down by you. What happens to me? Swamiji: There is a famous saying, "As you think so you become". Krishnaji: I think that by the practice of this method I will reach enlightenment. So what do I do? Every day I practise it. I become more and more mechanical. Swamiji: But there is a feeling. Krishnaji: The mechanical routine is going on with the feeling added, "I like it", "I don"t like it", "it is a bore" - you know, there is a battle going on. So anything I practise, any discipline, any practice in the accepted sense of the word makes my mind more and more narrow, limited and dull, and you are promising at the end of it, heaven. So you are saying, become dull to achieve heaven. I say it is like soldiers being trained day after day - drill, drill - till they are nothing but instruments of the commanding officer or sergeant. Give them a little initiative. So I am questioning the whole approach of system and method towards enlightenment. Even in factories a man who merely moves a button or pushes this or that does not produce as much as the man who is free to learn as he goes along. Swamiji: Can you put that into Bhavana? Krishnaji: Why not? Swamiji: So it works? Krishnaji: This is the only way. That is real Bhavana: Learn as you go along. Therefore no method. Therefore keep awake. Learn as you go along, therefore be alert as you go along. If I take a walk and I have a system, a method of walking, that is all I am concerned with: I shall not see the birds, the trees, the marvellous light on the leaf, nothing. And why should I accept the teacher who gives me the method, the mode? He may be as peculiar as I am, and there are teachers who are very odd. So I reject all that. Swamiji: The problem again is that of the beginner. Krishnaji: Who is the beginner? The immature one? Swamiji: Probably. Krishnaji: Therefore you are giving him a toy to play with? Swamiji: Some sort of opening. Krishnaji: Yes a toy and he enjoys that toy. He says, I am practising all day, and his mind remains very small. Swamiji: Perhaps that is your answer to this Bhakti Yoga question too. Again, somehow they wanted these people to break through. Krishnaji: I am not at all sure, sir. Swamiji: I will discuss this Bhakti. Coming to Bhakti Yoga, the Bhakta is encouraged to worship God even in temples and images, feeling the Divine presence within. In quite a number of mantras, it is repeated again and again, "You are the All Pervading... you are the Omnipresent", etc. Krishna asks the devotees to see God in the objects of nature and then as the 'All'. At the same time through japa, or the repetition of mantra with the corresponding awareness of its significance, the devotee is asked to perceive that the divine presence outside is identical with the indwelling presence. Thus the individual realized his oneness with the collective. Is there anything fundamentally wrong with that system? Krishnaji: Oh! Yes, sir. The Communist block does not believe in God at all. They don't believe in that at all. They are selfish, they are frightened, but there is no God, no mantras, etc. Another does not believe in any of that, mantras, japa, repetition but he says, "I want to find out what truth is. I want to find out if there is a God at all. There may be no such thing." And the Gita and all of them assume that there is. They assume there is God. Who are they to tell me there is or there is not, including Krishna or X, Y, Z? I say it may be your own conditioning; you are born in that peculiar climate and with that peculiar tradition, with that peculiar attitude and you just believe in that. And then you lay down rules. But if I reject all authority, including the Communists, including the Western and the Asiatic authorities all authority, then where am I? Then I have to find out, because I am unhappy, I am miserable. Swamiji: But I might be free from conditioning. Krishnaji: That is my business, to be free. Otherwise I cannot learn. If I remain a Hindu for the rest of my life, I am finished. The Catholic remains a Catholic and the Communist is equally dead. But is it possible - that is really the question - to reject all conditioning which accepts authority? Can I really reject all authority and stand alone to find out? And I must be alone. Otherwise, if I am not alone in the deeper sense of that word, I am just repeating what Sankara, Buddha, or X, Y, Z said. What is the point of it, knowing very well that repetition is not the real? So, must not I - mature, or immature, or half mature - must not they all learn to stand alone? It is painful because they say, "My God, how can I stand alone?" - to be without the children, to be without God, to be without the Commissar? There is fear. Swamiji: Do you think that every one can work out this? Krishnaji: Why not, sir? If you cannot, then you are caught in it. Then no amount of Gods, and mantras, and tricks will help you. They may cover it up. They may bottle it up. They may suppress it and put it in the refrigerator. But it is always there. Swamiji: Now there is the other method, that of standing alone: Raja Yoga. The student here is again asked to cultivate certain virtuous qualities which, on the one hand, make of him a good citizen and on the other, remove possible psychological barriers. This Sadhana, which is mainly awareness of thought which includes memory, imagination and sleep, seems to be close to your own teaching. Asana and Pranayama are auxiliaries, perhaps. And even the Dhyana of Yoga is not intended to bring about self-realization, which is admittedly not the end product of a series of actions. Krishna clearly says that Yoga clarifies perception: 'Atma Shuddhaye'. Do you approve of this approach? There is not much of help involved here; even Iswara is only 'Purusha Visheshaha'. It is a sort of a guru, invisible in the indwelling process. Do you approve of this approach: there is this method of sitting in meditation and trying to delve deeper and deeper. Krishnaji: Now wait. One has to go into the question of meditation. Swamiji: And Patanjali defines meditation as, "The absence of all world idea or any extraneous idea." That is the 'Bhakti Sunyam'. Krishnaji: Look, sir, I have not read anything. Now here I am: I know nothing. I only know that I am in sorrow and that I have got a fairly good mind. I have no authority - Sankara, Krishna, Patanjali, nobody - I am absolutely alone. I have got to face my life and I have got to be a good citizen - not according to the Communists, Capitalists, or Socialists. Good citizenship means behaviour, which is not one thing in the office and different at home. First, I want to find out how to be free of this sorrow. Then being free, I shall find out if there is such a thing as God or whatever it is. So how am I to learn to be free of this enormous burden? That is my first question. I can only understand it in relationship with another. I cannot sit by myself and dig into it because I may pervert it; my mind is too silly, prejudiced. So, I have to find out in relationship - with nature, with human beings -what is this fear, this sorrow; in relationship only, because if I sit by myself I can deceive myself very well. But by being awake in relationship, I can spot it immediately. Swamiji: If you are alert. Krishnaji: That is the point. If I am alert, watchful, I shall find out; and that does not take time. Swamiji: But if one is not? Krishnaji: Therefore, the problem is to be awake, to be aware, alert. Is there a method for it? Follow it, sir. If there is a method which will help me to be aware, I shall practise it; but is that awareness? Because in that is involved routine, acceptance of authority, repeating, repeating, repeating, which is gradually making my alertness dull. So I reject that: the practice of alertness. I say I can only understand sorrow in relationship and that understanding comes only through alertness. Therefore, I must be alert. I am alert because my demand is to end sorrow. Therefore I must be alert. If I am hungry, I want food and I go after food. In the same way, I discover the enormous burden of sorrow in me and I discover it through relationship - how I behave with you, how I talk to people. In that process of relationship, this thing is revealed. Swamiji: In that relationship you are alI the time self-aware, if I may put it that way. Krishnaji: Yes I am aware, alert, watching. Swamiji: Is it so easy for an ordinary person? Krishnaji: It is, if the man is serious and says, "I want to find out." The ordinary man, eighty to ninety per cent of them, says, I am not really interested, what are you talking about. Go away, I want to be entertained, by the Gita, by the church, by Jesus, by Buddha. I want to be entertained, football. But the man who is serious, he says, "I shall find out - I want to see if the mind can be free from sorrow." And it is only possible to discover it in relationship. I cannot invent sorrow. In relationship sorrow comes. Swamiji: The sorrow is within. Krishnaji: Naturally, sir, it is a psychological phenomenon. Swamiji: You would not want man to sit and meditate and try to sharpen? Krishnaji: So let us come back to the question of meditation. What is meditation? - not according to what Patanjali and others say because they may be totally mistaken. And I might be mistaken when I say I know how to meditate. So I have to find out, I have to say, "Now what is meditation?" Is meditation sitting quiet, concentrating, controlling thought? Swamiji: Watching, perhaps. Krishnaji: You can watch when you are walking. Swamiji: It is difficult. Krishnaji: You watch while eating, when you are listening to people, when somebody says something that hurts you, flatters you. That means, you have to be alert all the time - when you are exaggerating, when you are telling half-truths. You follow? To watch, you need a very quiet mind. That is meditation. The whole of that is meditation. Swamiji: To me it looks as though Patanjali evolved an exercise for quietening the mind, not on the battlefield of life, but to start it when you are alone and then extend it to relationship. Krishnaji: But if you escape from the battle... Swamiji: For a little while... Krishnaji: If you escape from the battle you have not understood the battle. The battle is you. How can you escape from yourself? You can take a drug, you can pretend that you have escaped, you can repeat mantras, japas and do all kinds of things, but the battle is going on. You say, "Get away quietly from it and then come back to it." That is a fragmentation. We are suggesting: "Look at the battle you are involved in; you are caught in it: you are it." Swamiji: That leads us to the last discipline: you are it. Krishnaji: You are the battle. Swamiji: You are it, you are the battle, you are the fighter, you are away from it, you are everything. That is perhaps what is implied in Gnana Yoga. According to Gnana Yoga, the seeker is asked to equip himself with the four means: Viveka, seeking the real and discarding the false; Vairagya, not seeking pleasure; Shat Satsampath, which meant in effect living a life conducive to the practice of this yoga; and Mumukshutva, a total dedication to the search of Truth. The disciple then approached a guru and his Sadhana consisted of Shravana (hearing), Manana (reflection) and Nisyudhyajna (assimilation), which all of us do here. The guru adopted various means to enlighten the student, which usually implied the realization of the All or the Whole Being. Sankara describes it thus: "The infinite alone is real, the world is unreal. The individual is non-different from the infinite," So there is no fragmentation there. Sankara said that the world is Maya by which he meant that the world-appearance is not the real, which one has to investigate and discover. The Upanishads envisaged the Truth in the following: consciousness is the Infinite. I am the Infinite. Or, I is the Infinite. Thou are That, the self is Infinite. Even these should lead to Cosmic Consciousness, or Realization. Everything is the All, All is Infinite. The Infinite is Infinite. And its active manifestaion in daily life which Krishna describes thus in the Gita: "The yogi is then aware that the action, the doer of the action, the instruments involved, and the object towards which the action is directed, are all one whole and thus fragmentation is overcome." How do you react to this Gnana Yoga method? First there is this Sadhana Chaturdhyaya, for which the disciple prepares himself. Then he goes to the guru and sits and hears the Truth from the guru and reflects over it and assimilates the truth, till it becomes one with him; and the truth is usually said in terms of these formulas. But these formulas that we repeat are supposed to be realized. Has this perhaps some validity? Krishnaji: Sir, if you have read none of these - Patanjali, Sankara, Chan Upanishads, Raja Yoga, Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Gnana Yoga, nothing - what would you do? Swamiji: I shall have to find out. Krishnaji: What would you do? Swamiji: Struggle. Krishnaji: Which you are doing anyhow. What would you do? Where would you start? - knowing nothing about what others have said, including what the Communist leaders have said - Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin. I haven't read a thing, I don't want to. I am here, an ordinary human being. Where am I to begin? I have to work, Karma Yoga, in a garden, as a cook, in a factory, an office, I have to work. And also there are the wife and children: I love, I hate, am a sexual addict, because that is the only escape offered to me in life. Here I am. That is my map of life and I start from here. I cannot start from over there; I start here and I ask myself what it is all about. I know nothing about God. They can invent, pretend: I have a horror of pretending. If I do not know, I do not know. I am not going to quote Sankara, Buddha, or anybody. So I say: this is where I start. Can I bring about order in my life? - order, not invented by me or by them, but order that is virtue. Can I bring it about? And to be virtuous there must be no battle, no conflict in me or outside. Therefore, there must be no aggressiveness, no violence, no hate, no animosity. I start from there. And I find out I am afraid. I must be free of fear. To be conscious of it is to be aware of all this, aware of where I am; from there I will move, I shall work. And then I find out I can be alone - not carry all the burdens of memory, of Sankaras, of Buddhas, Marx, Engels. You follow? I can be alone because I have understood order in my life; and I have understood order because I have denied disorder, because I have learnt about disorder. Disorder means conflict, acceptance of authority, complying, imitation, all that. That is disorder, the social morality is disorder. Out of that I will bring order in myself; not myself as a petty little human being in a backyard, but as a Human Being. Swamiji: How do you explain it? Krishnaji: It is a human being who is going through this hell. Every human being is going through this hell. So if I, as a human being, understand this, I have discovered something which all human beings can discover. Swamiji: But how does one know that one is not deceiving oneself? Krishnaji: Very simple. First, humility: I do not want to achieve anything. Swamiji: I do not know if you have come across people who say, "I am the humblest person in the world." Krishnaji: I know. That is all too silly. Not to desire achievement is not. Swamiji: When one is in it, in the soup, how does one know? Krishnaji: Of course you will know. When your desire says, "I must be like Mr Smith who is the Prime Minister, the General, or the Executive Officer", then there is the beginning of arrogance, pride, achievement. I know when I want to be like the hero, when I want to become like the Buddha, when I want to reach enlightenment, when desire says, "Be something." Desire says in being something there is tremendous pleasure. Swamiji: But have we still tackled the root of the problem in all this? Krishnaji: Of course we have. 'Me' is the root of the problem. Self-centredness is the root of the problem. Swamiji: But what is it? What does it mean? Krishnaji: Self-centredness? I am more important than you, my house, my property, my achievement, 'me' first. Swamiji: But the martyr may say, "I am nothing; I can be shot." Krishnaji: Who? No, they don't. They are silly to be shot. Swamiji: They may say they are completely unselfish, selfless. Krishnaji: No sir, I am not interested in what somebody else says. Swamiji: He may be bluffing himself. Krishnaji: As long as I am quite clear in myself, I am not deceiving myself. I can deceive myself the moment I have a measure. When I compare myself with the man with a Rolls-Royce, or with the Buddha, or with Marx. Comparing myself with somebody is the beginning of illusion. When I do not compare, why should I, I move from there. Swamiji: To be the Self? Krishnaji: Whatever I am; which is: I am ugly, I am full of anger, deception, fear, this and that. I start from there and see if it is at all possible to be free of all this. Without that my thinking about God is like thinking about climbing those hills, which I never will. Swamiji: But even so you said something very interesting the other day: the individual and the collective are one. How does the individual realize that unity with the collective? Krishnaji: But that is a fact. Here I am living in Gstaad; somebody is living in India, he has the same problem, the same anxiety, the same fear, only different expressions but the root of the thing is the same. That is one point. Second, the environment has produced this individuality and the individuality has created the environment. My greed has created this rotten society. My anger, my hatred, the fragmentation of my life has created the nation and all this mess. So I am the world, the world is me. Logically, intellectually, verbally, it is so. Swamiji: But how does one feel it? Krishnaji: That comes only when you change. When you change, you are no longer a national. You do not belong to anything. Swamiji: Mentally I may say I am not a Hindu, or I am not an Indian. Krishnaji: But, sir, that is just a trick. You must feel it in your blood. Swamiji: Please explain what that means. Krishnaji: It means, sir, when you see the danger of nationalism, you are out of it. When you see the danger of fragmentation, you no longer belong to the fragment. We do not see the danger of it. That is all. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART IV CHAPTER 2 2ND CONVERSATION WITH SWAMI VENKATESANANDA SAANEN 26TH JULY 1969 FOUR"MAHAVAKYAS"FROM THE UPANISHADS DISCUSSED. COMMUNICATION AND THE BODHISATTVA IDEAL. VEDANTA AND THE ENDING OF KNOWLEDGE Swami Venkatesananda: Krishnaji, we are sitting near each other and enquiring, listening and learning. Even so did the sage and the seeker, and that is the origin they say of the Upanishads. These Upanishads contain what are known as Mahavakyas, Great Sayings, which perhaps had the same effect upon the seeker then as your words have upon me now. May I beg of you to say what you think of them, are they still valid, or do they need revision or renewal? The Upanishads envisaged the Truth in the following Mahavakyas: Prajnanam Brahma: "Consciousness is infinite, the absolute, the highest Truth." Aham Brahmasmi: "I am that infinite", or "I is that infinite" -because the "I" here does not refer to the ego. Tat Tvam-asi: "Thou art that". Ayam Atma Brahma: "The self is the infinite", or "the individual is the infinite." These were the four Mahavakyas used by the ancient sage to bring home the message to the student, and they were also sitting just like us, face to face, the guru and the disciple, the sage and the seeker. Krishnaji: Yes, what is the question, Sir? Swamiji: What do you think of them? Are these Mahavakyas valid now? Do they need a revision or a renewal? Krishnaji: These sayings, like "I am that", "Tat Tvam-asi" and "Ayam Atma Brahma"? Swamiji: That is, "Consciousness is Brahman". Krishnaji: Isn't there a danger, Sir, of repeating something not knowing what it means? "I am that." What does it actually mean? Swamiji: "Thou are that." Krishnaji: Thou art that." What does that mean? One can say, "I am the river". That river that has got tremendous volume behind it, moving, restless, pushing on and on, through many countries. I can say, "I am that river." That would be equally valid as, "I am Brahman." Swamiji: Yes. Yes. Krishnaji: Why do we say, "I am that"? And not "I am the river", nor "I am the poor man", the man that has no capacity, no intelligence, who is dull - this dullness brought about by heredity, by poverty, by degradation, all that! Why don't we say, "I am that also"? Why do we always attach ourselves to something which we suppose to be the highest? Swamiji: "That", perhaps, only means that which is unconditioned. YO VAI BHUMA TATSUKHAM That which is unconditioned. Krishnaji: Unconditioned, yes. Swamiji: So, since there is in us this urge to break through all conditioning, we look for the unconditioned. Krishnaji: Can a conditioned mind, can a mind that is small, petty, narrow, living on superficial entertainments, can that know or conceive, or understand, or feel, or observe the unconditioned? Swamiji: No. But it can uncondition itself. Krishnaji: That is all it can do. Swamiji: Yes. Krishnaji: Not say, "There is the unconditioned, I am going to think about it", or "I am that". My point is, why is it that we always associate ourselves with what we think is the highest? Not what we think is the lowest? Swamiji: Perhaps in Brahman there is no division between the highest and the lowest, that which is unconditioned. Krishnaji: That's the point. When you say, "I am that", or "Thou are that", there is a statement of a supposed fact.... Swamiji: Yes. Krishnaji: ...which may not be a fact at all. Swamiji: Perhaps I should explain here again that the sage who uttered the Mahavakyas was believed to have had a direct experience of it. Krishnaji: Now, if he had the experience of it, could he convey it to another? Swamiji: (Laughs) Krishnaji: And the question also arises, can one actually experience something which is not experienceable? We use the word "experience" so easily - "realise", "experience", "attain", "self-realisation", all these things - can one actually experience the feeling of supreme ecstasy? Let's take that for the moment, that word. Can one experience it? Swamiji: The infinite? Krishnaji: Can one experience the infinite? This is really quite a fundamental question, not only here but in life. We can experience something which we have already known. I experience meeting you. That's an experience, meeting you, or you meeting me, or my meeting X. And when I meet you next time I recognise you, don't I? I say, "Yes, I met him at Gstaad." So there is in experience the factor of recognition. Swamiji: Yes. That is objective experience. Krishnaji: If I hadn't met you, I should pass you by - you would pass me by. There is in all experiencing, isn't there, a factor of recognition? Swamiji: Possibly. Krishnaji: Otherwise it is not an experience. I meet you - is that an experience? Swamiji: Objective experience. Krishnaji: It can be an experience, can't it? I meet you for the first time. Then what takes place in that first meeting of two people. What takes place? Swamiji: An impression, impression of like. Krishnaji: An impression of like or dislike, such as, "He's a very intelligent man", or "He's a stupid man", or "He should be this or that". It is all based on my background of judgment, on my values, on my prejudices, likes and dislikes, on my bias, on my conditioning. That background meets you and judges you. The judgment, the evaluation, is what we call experience. Swamiji: But isn't there, Krishnaji, another... ? Krishnaji: Wait, Sir, let me finish this. Experience is after all the response to a challenge, isn't it? The reaction to a challenge. I meet you and I react. If I didn't react at all, with any sense of like, dislike, prejudice, what would take place? Swamiji: Yes? Krishnaji: What would happen in a relationship in which the one - you, perhaps - have no prejudice, no reaction; you are living in quite a different state and you meet me. Then what takes place? Swamiji: Peace. Krishnaji: I must recognise that peace in you, that quality in you, otherwise I just pass you by. So when we say, "Experience the highest", can the mind, which is conditioned, which is prejudiced, frightened, experience the highest? Swamiji: Obviously not. Krishnaji: Obviously not. And the fear, the prejudice, the excitement, the stupidity is the entity that says, "I am going to experience the highest." When that stupidity, fear, anxiety, conditioning ceases, is there experiencing of the highest at all? Swamiji: Experiencing of "that". Krishnaji: No, I haven't made myself clear. If the entity - which is the fear, the anxiety, the guilt and all the rest of it - if that entity has dissolved itself, discarded the fear and so on, what is there to experience? Swamiji: Now that beautiful question was actually put in just so many words. He asked the very same question: VIJNATARAM ARE KENA VIJANIYAT "You are the knower, how can you know the knower?" "You are the experiences!" But there is one suggestion that Vedanta gives and that is: we have so far been talking about an objective experience: PAROKSANUBHUTI Isn't there another experience? Not my meeting X Y Z, but the feeling "I am", which is not because I encountered desire somewhere, or because I was confronted with some desire. I don't go and ask a doctor or somebody to certify that "I am". But there is this feeling, there is this knowledge, "I am". This experience seems to be totally different from objective experience. Krishnaji: Sir, what is the purpose of experience? Swamiji: Exactly what you have been saying: to get rid of the fears, and get rid of all the complexes, all the conditioning. To see what I am, in truth, when I am not conditioned. Krishnaji: No, Sir. I mean: I am dull. Swamiji: Am I dull? Krishnaji: I am dull; and because I see you, or X Y Z, who is very bright, very intelligent..? Swamiji: There is comparison. Krishnaji: Comparison: through comparing, I find that I am very dull. And I say, "Yes, I am dull, what am I to do?", and just remain in my dullness. Life comes along, an incident takes place, which shakes me up. I wake up for a moment and struggle -struggle not to be dull, to be more intelligent, and so on. So experience generally has the significance of waking you up, giving you a challenge to which you have to respond. Either you respond to it adequately, or inadequately. If it is inadequate, the response then becomes a medium of pain, struggle, conflict. But if you respond to it adequately, that is fully, you are the challenge. You are the challenge, not the challenged, but you are that. Therefore you need no challenge at all, if you are adequately responding all the time to everything. Swamiji: That is beautiful, but (laughing) how does one get there? Krishnaji: Ah, wait, Sir. Just let us see the need for experience at all. I think it is really extraordinary, if you can go into it. Why do human beings demand not only objective experience, which one can understand - in going to the moon they have collected a lot of information, a lot of data... Swamiji: ...rocks... Krishnaji: That kind of experience is perhaps necessary, because it furthers knowledge, knowledge of factual, objective things. Now apart from that kind of experience, is there any necessity for experience at all? Swamiji: Subjectively? Krishnaji: Yes. I don't like to use "subjective" and "objective". Is there the need of experience at all? We have said: experience is the response to a challenge. I challenge you, I ask, "Why?" You may respond to it, and say, "Yes, perfectly right, I am with you." "Why?" But the moment there is any kind of resistance to that question, "Why?", you are already responding inadequately. And therefore there is conflict between us, between the challenge and the response. Now, that's one thing. And there is a desire to experience, let's say God, something Supreme, the highest; or the highest happiness, the highest ecstasy, bliss, a sense of peace, whatever you like. Can the mind experience it at all? Swamiji: No. Krishnaji: Then what does experience it? Swamiji: Do you want us to enquire what the mind is? Krishnaji: No. Swamiji: What the "I" is? Krishnaji: No! Why does the "I", me or you, demand experience? - that is my point - demand the experience of the highest, which promises happiness, or ecstasy, bliss or peace? Swamiji: Obviously because in the present state we feel inadequate. Krishnaji: That's all. That's all. Swamiji: Correct. Krishnaji: Being in a state in which there is no peace, we want to experience a state which is absolute, permanent, eternal peace. Swamiji: It is not so much that I am restless, and there is a state of peace; I want to know what is this feeling, "I am restless". Is the "I" restless, or is the "I" dull? Am I dull, or is dullness only a condition which I can shake off? Krishnaji: Now who is the entity that shakes it off? Swamiji: Wakes up. The "I" wakes up. Krishnaji: No, Sir. That's the difficulty. Let's finish this first. I am unhappy, miserable, laden with sorrow. And I want to experience something where there is no sorrow. That is my craving. I have an ideal, a goal, and by struggling towards it I will ultimately get that. That's my craving. I want to experience that and hold on to that experience. That is what human beings want - apart from all the clever sayings, clever talk. Swamiji: Yes, yes; and that is perhaps the reason why another very great South Indian sage said (in Tamil: ASAI ARUMIN ASAI ARUMIN ISANODAYINUM ASAI ARUMIN It's very good really. Krishnaji: What's that? Swamiji: "Cut down all these cravings. Even the craving to be one with God, cut it down", he says. Krishnaji: Yes, I understand. Now look, Sir. If I - if the mind -can free itself from this agony, then what is the need of asking for an experience of the Supreme? There won't be. Swamiji: No. Certainly. Krishnaji: It is no longer caught in its own conditioning. Therefore it is something else; it is living in a different dimension. Therefore the desire to experience the highest is essentially wrong. Swamiji: If it is a desire. Krishnaji: Whatever it is! How do I know the highest? Because the sages have talked of it? I don't accept the sages. They might be caught in illusion, they might be talking sense or nonsense. I don't know; I am not interested. I find that as long as the mind is in a state of fear, it wants to escape from it, and it projects an idea of the Supreme, and wants to experience that. But if it frees itself from its own agony, then it is altogether in a different state. It doesn't even ask for the experience because it is at a different level. Swamiji: Quite, quite. Krishnaji: Now, why do the sages, according to what you have said, say, "You must experience that, you must be that, you must realize that"? Swamiji: They didn't say, "You must"... Krishnaji: Put it any way you like. Why should they say all these things? Would it not be better to say, "Look here, my friends, get rid of your fear. Get rid of your beastly antagonism, get rid of your childishness, and when you have done that..." Swamiji: ...nothing more remains. Krishnaji: Nothing more. You'll find out the beauty of it. You don't have to ask, then. Swamiji: Fantastic, fantastic! Krishnaji: You see, Sir, the other way is such a hypocritical state; it leads to hypocrisy. "I am seeking God", but I am all the time kicking people. (Laughs) Swamiji: Yes, that could be hypocrisy. Krishnaji: It is, it is. Swamiji: That leads me on to the last and perhaps very impertinent question. Krishnaji: No, Sir, there is no impertinence. Swamiji: I am neither flattering you, nor insulting you, Krishnaji, when I say that it is a great experience to sit near you and talk to you like this. Your message is great, and you have been talking for over forty years of things you have considered very important to man. Now three questions. Do you think a man can communicate it to another man? Do you think that others can communicate it to still others? If so, how? Krishnaji: Communicate what, Sir? Swamiji: This message, that you have dedicated your life to. What would you call it? - You may call it message. Krishnaji: Yes, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Am I - the person who is speaking, is he conveying a message, telling you a message? Swamiji: No. You may call it an awakening, a questioning... Krishnaji: No no. I am asking, Sir. Just look at it. Swamiji: I guess we feel so, the listeners... Krishnaji: What is he saying? He says, "Look, look at yourself." Swamiji: Exactly. Krishnaji: Nothing more. Swamiji: Nothing more is necessary. Krishnaji: Nothing more is necessary. Look at yourself. Observe yourself. Go into yourself, because in this state as we are, we will create a monstrous world. You may go to the Moon, you may go further, to Venus, Mars and all the rest of it, but you will always carry yourself over there. Change yourself first! Change yourself - not first - change yourself. Therefore to change, look at yourself, go into yourself - observe, listen, learn. That's not a message. You can do it yourself if you want to. Swamiji: But somebody has to tell... Krishnaji: I am telling you. I say, "Look, look at this marvellous tree; look at this beautiful African flower." Swamiji: Till you said that, I hadn't looked at it. Krishnaji: Ah! Why? Swamiji: (Laughs) Krishnaji: Why? It is there, round you. Swamiji: Yes. Krishnaji: Why didn't you look? Swamiji: There could be a thousand answers. Krishnaji: No, no. I asked you to look at that flower. By my asking you to look at that flower, do you look at that flower? Swamiji: I have the opportunity, yes. Krishnaji: No. Do you really look at that flower because somebody asks you to look? Swamiji: No. Krishnaji : No, you can't. That's just it. I say to you, You are hungry." Are you hungry because I say it? Swamiji: No. Krishnaji: You know when you are hungry, and yet you want somebody to tell you to look at the flower. Swamiji: I may know when I am hungry, but it is the mother that tells me where the food is. Krishnaji: No, no. We're not talking about where the food is, but we are saying "hunger". You know when you're hungry. But why should somebody tell you to look at a flower? Swamiji: Because I am not hungry to look at the flower. Krishnaji: Why not? Swamiji: I am satisfied with something else. Krishnaji: No. Why aren't you looking at that flower? I think first of all nature has no value at all for most of us. We say, "Well, I can see the tree any time I want to." That's one thing. Also, we are so concentrated upon our own worries, our own hopes, our own desires and experiences, that we shut ourselves in a cage of our own thinking; and we don't look beyond it. He says, "Don't do that. Look at everything and through looking at everything you'll discover your cage." That's all. Swamiji: Isn't that a message? Krishnaji: It is not a message in the sense... Swamiji: No. Krishnaji: It doesn't matter what you call it - call it a message. All right. I tell you that. You play with it, or take it very seriously. And if it is very serious for you, you naturally tell it to somebody else. You don't have to say, "I am going to make propaganda about it..." Swamiji: No, no. Krishnaji: You will say, "Look at the beauty of those flowers." Swamiji: Yes. Krishnaji: You say that. And the person doesn't listen to you. And there it is - finished! So is propaganda necessary? Swamiji: Propagation, Sir. Krishnaji: Yes, propagation, that is the word - propagate. Swamiji: Yes. We are talking about these forty years of talking... Krishnaji: ...more than forty years... Swamiji: Yes, millions of people have been talking for centuries, wasting their... Krishnaji: We have been talking, yes. We have been propagating... Swamiji: ...something which is extremely important, which I'm sure you consider is extremely important. Krishnaji: Otherwise I wouldn't go on. Swamiji: I have read some of the books you have published, but this experience of sitting and talking to you... Krishnaji: ...is different from reading a book. Swamiji: Completely, completely, different! Krishnaji: I agree. Swamiji: Last night I read one and there was a little more meaning. How does one bring that about? Krishnaji: You are a serious person, and the other person being serious there is a contact, there is a relationship, there is a coming together in seriousness. But if you're not serious, you will just say, "Well, it's very nice talking about all these things, but what's it all about?" - and walk off. Swamiji: Yes. Krishnaji: Surely, Sir, with any kind of relationship that has meaning there must be a meeting at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity, otherwise there is no communication, there is no relationship. And perhaps that's what takes place when we are sitting together here. Because one feels the urgency of something and the intensity of it, there is a relationship established which is quite different from reading a book. Swamiji: A book has no life. Krishnaji: Printed words have no life, but you can give life to the printed word if you are serious. Swamiji: So how does it go on from there? Krishnaji: From there you say, is it possible to convey to others this quality of urgency, this quality of intensity, and action which takes place now? Swamiji: ...really now... Krishnaji: Yes, not tomorrow or yesterday. Swamiji: Action, which means observation at the same level. Krishnaji: And is always functioning - seeing and acting, seeing, acting, seeing, acting. Swamiji: Yes. Krishnaji: How is this to take place? First of all, Sir, most people, as we said yesterday, are not interested in all this. They play with it. There are very, very few really serious people. Ninety-five per cent say, "Well, if you are entertaining it's all right, but if you are not, you're not welcome" - entertainment, according to their idea of entertainment. Then what will you do? Knowing there are only very, very few people in the world who are really desperately serious, what will you do? You talk to them, and you talk to the people who want to be entertained. But you don't care whether they listen to you or don't listen. Swamiji: Thank you. Thank you. Krishnaji: I don't say, "To the people who need crutches, offer crutches!" Swamiji: No. Krishnaji: Nor to the people who want comfort, an avenue of escape, "Go away somewhere else..." Swamiji: ...to the Palace Hotel!... Krishnaji: I think, Sir, that is perhaps what has taken place in all these religions, all the so-called teachers. They have said, "I must help this man, that man, that other man.', Swamiji: Yes? Krishnaji: The ignorant, the semi-ignorant, and the very intelligent. Each must have his particular form of food. They may have said that; I am not concerned. I just offer the flower, let them smell it, let them destroy it, let them cook it, let them tear it to pieces. I have nothing to do with it. Swamiji: Well, they glorify that other attitude, the Bodhisattva ideal. Krishnaji: Again, the Bodhisattva ideal - is it not an invention of our own, the desperate hope, desire for some kind of solace? The Maitreya Bodhisattva, the idea that He has relinquished the ultimate in life, enlightenment, and is waiting for all humanity... Swamiji: Thank you. * * * Krishnaji: What is Vedanta? Swamiji: The word means, "The end of the Vedas".... Not in the manner of "full stop". Krishnaji: The end of all knowledge. Swamiji: Quite right, quite right. Yes, the end of knowledge; where knowledge matters no more. Krishnaji: Therefore, leave it. Swamiji: Yes. Krishnaji: Why proceed from there to describe what it is not? Swamiji: As I've been sitting and listening to you, I've thought of another sage who is reported to have gone to another greater one. And he says, "Look my mind is restless; please tell me what must I do." And the older man says, "Give me a list of what you know already, so that I can proceed from there." He replies, "Oh, it will take a long time, because I have all the formulas, all the shastras, all of that." The sage answers, "But that's only a set of words. All those words are contained in the dictionary, it means nothing. Now what do you know?" He says, "That is what I know. I don't know anything else." Krishnaji: Vedanta, as it says, means the end of knowledge. Swamiji: Yes, it's wonderful, I never heard it put that way before. "The end of knowledge." Krishnaji: Freedom from knowledge. Swamiji: Yes indeed. Krishnaji: Then why have they not kept to that? Swamiji: Their contention is that you have to pass through it in order to come out of it. Krishnaji: Pass through what? Swamiji: Through all this knowledge, all this muck, and then discard it. PARIVEDYA LOKAN LOKAJITAN BRAHMANO NIRVEDAMAYAT That is, "After examining all these things and finding that they are of no use to you, then you must step out of it." Krishnaji: Then why must I acquire it? If Vedanta means the end of knowledge, which the word itself means, the ending of Vedas, which is knowledge - then why should I go through all the laborious process of acquiring knowledge, and then discarding it? Swamiji: Otherwise you wouldn't be in Vedanta. The end of knowledge is, having acquired this knowledge, coming to the end of it. Krishnaji: Why should I acquire it? Swamiji: Well, so that it can be ended. Krishnaji: No, no. Why should I acquire it? Why should not I, from the very beginning, see what knowledge is and discard it? Swamiji: See what knowledge is? Krishnaji: And discard, discard all that: never accumulate. Vedanta means the end of accumulating knowledge. Swamiji: That's it. That's correct. Krishnaji: Then why should I accumulate? Swamiji: Pass through, perhaps. Krishnaji: Pass through? Why should I? I know fire burns. I know when I am hungry, when I must eat. I know I mustn't hit you; I don't hit you. I don't go through the process of hitting you, acquiring the knowledge that I'll be hurt again. So each day I discard. I free myself from what I have learnt, every minute. So every minute is the end of knowledge. Swamiji: Yes, right. Krishnaji: Now you and I accept that, that is a fact, that's the only way to live - otherwise you can't live. Then why have they said, "You must go through all the knowledge, through all this?" Why don't they tell me, "Look my friend, as you live from day to day acquiring knowledge, end it each day"? Not "Vedanta says so and so". Swamiji: No, no. Krishnaji: Live it! Swamiji: Quite right. Again this division, classification. Krishnaji: That's just it. We are back again. Swamiji: Back again. Krishnaji: We're back again to a fragment - a fragmentation of life. Swamiji: Yes. But I'm too dull, I can't get there; so I'd rather acquire all this... Krishnaji: Yes, and then discard it. Swamiji: In the religious or spiritual history of India, there have been sages who were born sages: the Ramana Maharishi, the Shuka Maharishi, etc. etc. Well, they were allowed to discard knowledge even before acquiring it. And in their cases of course, the usual argument was that they had done it all... Krishnaji: In their past lives. Swamiji: Past lives. Krishnaji: No, Sir, apart from the acquiring of knowledge and the ending of knowledge, what does Vedanta say? Swamiji: Vedanta describes the relationship between the individual and the Cosmic. Krishnaji: The Eternal. Swamiji: The Cosmic, or the Infinite, or whatever it is. It starts well: ISAVASYAM IDAM SARVAM YAT KIMCHA JAGATYAM JAGAT "Till the whole universe is pervaded by that one..." Krishnaji: That one thing... Swamiji: ...and so on. And then it's mostly this, a dialogue between a master and his disciple. Krishnaji: Sir, isn't it extraordinary, there has always been in India this teacher and disciple, teacher and disciple? Swamiji: Yes - Guru. Krishnaji: But they never said, "You are the teacher as well as the pupil." Swamiji: Occasionally they did. Krishnaji: But always with hesitation, with apprehension. But why? - if the fact is, you are the teacher and you are the pupil. Otherwise you are lost, if you depend on anybody else. That's one fact. And also I would like to ask why, in songs, in Hindu literature, they have praised the beauty of nature, the trees, the flowers, the rivers, the birds. Why is it most people in India have no feeling for all that? Swamiji: Because they are dead? Krishnaji: Why? And yet they talk about the beauty, the literature, they quote Sanskrit, and Sanskrit itself is the most beautiful language. Swamiji: They have no feeling for... Krishnaji: And they have no feeling for the poor man. Swamiji: Yes, that is the worst tragedy of all. Krishnaji: Nor for the squalor, the dirt. Swamiji: And heaven knows from where they got this idea because it is not found in any of the scriptures. That means we are repeating the scriptures without realizing their meaning. Krishnaji: That's it. Swamiji: Krishna: Ishwara SARVABHUTANAM HRIDDESSERJUNA TISTHATI "I am seated in the hearts of all beings." Nobody bothers about the hearts of all beings. What would you think is the cause? They repeat it daily, every morning they are asked to repeat a chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishnaji: Every morning they do Puja and the repetition of things. Swamiji: Now why have they lost the meaning? Obviously great meaning was put into those words by the authors. We are even asked to repeat them every day in order that we might keep them... Krishnaji: Alive. Swamiji: Keep them alive. When and how did I kill the spirit? How was it possible? How to prevent it? Krishnaji: What do you think is the reason, Sir? No, you know India better. Swamiji: I am shocked at it. Krishnaji: Why do you think it happens? Is it over population? Swamiji: No, overpopulation is a result, not the cause. Krishnaji: Yes. Is it that they have accepted this tradition, this authority... Swamiji: But the tradition says something good. Krishnaji: But they have accepted it. They never questioned it. Sir, I have seen M.A.s and B.A.s in India, who have passed degrees, are clever, brainy - but they wouldn't know how to put a flower on a table. They know nothing but memory, memory, the cultivation of memory. Isn't that one of the causes? Swamiji: Perhaps. Mere memorizing. Krishnaji: Memorizing everything. Swamiji: Without thinking. Why does man refuse to think? Krishnaji: Oh, that's different - indolence, fear, wanting always to tread in the traditional path so that he doesn't go wrong. Swamiji: But we have discarded the tradition which they say didn't suit us. Krishnaji: Of course. But we find a new tradition that suits us -we are safe. Swamiji: We never felt that the healthy tradition is a good tradition to keep. Krishnaji: Throw out all tradition! Let's find out, Sir, whether these teachers and gurus and sages, have really helped people. Has Marx really helped people? Swamiji: No. Krishnaji: They have imposed their ideas on them. Swamiji: And others have used the same ideas... Krishnaji: Therefore I question this whole thing, because they are really not concerned with people's happiness. Swamiji: Though they say so. Krishnaji: If the Marxists and all those Soviet leaders are really interested in the people then there would be no concentration camps. There would be freedom. There would be no repressive measures. Swamiji: But I suppose they think, we have to imprison the lunatics... Krishnaji: That's it. The lunatic is a man who questions my authority. Swamiji: Yesterday's ruler might be today's lunatic. Krishnaji: That always happens, that's inevitable, that's why I'm asking, whether it's not important to make man, a human being, realize that he's solely responsible. Swamiji: Each one. Krishnaji: Absolutely! For what he does, what he thinks, how he acts. Otherwise we end up in this memorizing, and complete blindness. Swamiji: That is your message. And how to nail it? Krishnaji: By driving it in every day (laughs). And driving it into oneself. Because man is so eager to put his responsibility on others. The army is the safest escape - you're told what to do. You don't have any responsibility. It's all been thought out, what you should do, how you should think, act, carry your gun, how you should shoot -and finished! They provide you with a meal, sleeping-quarters, and for sex you can go to the village. That's the end of it. And strangely they talk about Karma. Swamiji: That is Karma. PRARABDHA KARMA Krishnaji: They insist on Karma. Swamiji: That is Karma - I was a Brahmin, and I know what happened. We played with that Karma and then it came back on us. Krishnaji: Playing havoc now in India. Swamiji: We toyed with the idea of Karma and we said: it's your Karma, you must suffer. My Karma is good and so I'm divorced from it all; I'm the landlord. And now they have turned the tables. Krishnaji: Quite. Swamiji: A vegetarian - she's a fanatical vegetarian - asked me, "Is pure vegetarianism necessary for yoga practice?" I said, "Not so important. Let's talk about something else." And she was horrified. She came back to me and said, "How can you say that? You can't say that vegetarianism is of secondary value. You must say it's of primary value." I replied, "Forgive me - I said something, but it doesn't matter." I then asked her, "Do you believe in war, defence forces, defending your country and so on?" "Yes," she said, "otherwise how can we live - we have to." I replied, "If I call you a cannibal, how do you react to that? This man kills a small animal to sustain his life, but you are willing to kill people to sustain yours. Like a cannibal." She didn't like that - but I think she saw the point later. Krishnaji: Good. Swamiji: It's so fantastic. People don't want to think. And I suppose with you, Krishnaji, if you say the truth, you become very unpopular. A priest said: APRIYASYA TU PATHYASYA VAKTA Shrota NA VIDYATE Very beautiful! "People love to hear pleasant things; pleasant to say and pleasant to hear." THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART V CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC TALK MADRAS 3RD JANUARY 1968 'THE ART OF SEEING' WE WERE SAYING the other day how very important it is to observe. It is quite an art to which one must give a great deal of attention. We only see very partially, we never see anything completely, with the totality of our mind, or with the fullness of our heart. And unless we learn this extraordinary art, it seems to me that we shall be functioning, living, through a very small part of our mind, through a small segment of the brain. We never see anything completely, for various reasons, because we are so concerned with our own problems, or we are so conditioned, so heavily burdened with belief, with tradition, with the past, that this actually prevents us from seeing or listening. We never see a tree, we see the tree through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Here one is surrounded by a great many trees, fortunately, and if you look around you, as the speaker is going on with the subject of seeing, if you actually look at it, you will find how extraordinary difficult it is to see it all, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. Please do this, don't watch me - look at the tree, find out whether you can see it completely. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it, because what we are going to go into this evening demands such observation, such seeing. Unless you actually do this (not theorize, intellectualise or bring up various issues which are irrelevant) I am afraid you will not be able to follow closely what we are going to go over together. We never see, or actually hear, what another is saying; we are either emotional, sentimental or very intellectual - which, obviously prevents us from actually seeing the colour, the beauty of the light, the trees, the birds, and from listening to those crows; we never are in direct relationship with any of this. And I doubt very much if we are in relationship with anything, even with our own ideas, thoughts, motives, impressions; there is always the image which is observing, even when we observe ourselves. So it is very important to understand that the act of seeing is the only truth; there is nothing else. If I know how to see a tree, or a bird, or a lovely face, or the smile of a child - there it is, I don't have to do anything more. But that seeing of the bird, of the leaf, listening to the noise of birds, becomes almost impossible because of the image that one has built, not only about nature but also about others. And these images actually prevent us from seeing and feeling; feeling being entirely different from sentimentality and emotion. And, as we said, we see everything fragmentarily and we are trained from childhood to look, to observe, to learn, to live in a fragment. And there is the vast expanse of the mind which we never touch or know; that mind is vast, immeasurable, but we never touch it, we don't know the quality of it because we have never looked at anything completely, with the totality of our mind, of our heart, of our nerves, of our eyes, of our ears. To us the word, the concept is extraordinarily important, not the acts of seeing and doing. But having the concept, which is a belief, an idea - having this - conceptual living, prevents us from actually seeing, doing; and therefore we say we have problems of action, of what to do or not to do, and the conflict that arises between the act and the concept. Do please observe what I am talking about, not merely hear the words of the speaker, but observe yourselves, using the speaker as a mirror in which you can see yourself. What the speaker has to say is of very little importance, and the speaker himself is of no importance whatsoever, but what you gather out of observing yourself is important. It is so because there must be a total revolution, a complete mutation in our minds, in our way of living, in our feeling, in the activities of our daily life. And to bring about such fundamental, deep revolution is only possible when we know how to look; because when you do look, you are not only looking with your eyes but you are also looking with your mind. I do not know if you have ever driven a car; if you have, you are not only visually aware of the approaching car, but your mind is far ahead watching the bend of the road, the side road, other cars coming and going. And this seeing is not only seeing through your eyes and nerves, but seeing with your heart, with your mind, and you cannot see completely in this way if you are living, functioning, thinking, acting within a fragment of the total mind. Look what is happening in the world - we are being conditioned by society, by the culture in which we live, and that culture is the product of man - there is nothing holy, or divine, or eternal about culture. Culture, society, books, radios, all that we listen to and see, the many influences of which we are either conscious or unconscious, all these encourage us to live within a very small fragment of the vast field of the mind. You go through school, college, and learn a technique to earn a living; for the next forty or fifty years you spend your life, your time, your energy, your thought, in that specialized little field. And there is the vast field of the mind. Unless we bring about a radical change in this fragmentation there can be no revolution at all; there will be modifications, economic, social and so-called cultural but man will go on suffering, will go on in conflict, in war, in misery, in sorrow and in despair. I do not know if you read some time ago how one of the Marshals of the Russian army reporting to the Polit Bureau, said that in the army they were training soldiers under hypnosis - you know what that means? You are put under hypnosis and taught how to kill, how to obey completely, function with complete independence, but within a pattern, under the authority of a superior. Now culture and society are doing exactly the same thing to each one of us. Culture and society have hypnotized you. Do please listen to this very carefully, it is not only being done in the army in Russia, but it is being done all over the world. When you read the Gita endlessly, or the Koran, or repeat some mantram, some endlessly repeated words, you are doing exactly the same thing. When you say, "I am a Hindu", "I am a Buddhist", "I am a Muslim", "I am a Catholic", the same pattern is being repeated, you have been mesmerized, hypnotized; and technology is doing exactly the same thing. You can be a clever lawyer, a first-class engineer, or an artist, or a great scientist, but always within a fragment of the whole. I do not know if you see this, not because I describe it, but actually see what is taking place. The Communists are doing it, the Capitalists are doing it, everybody, parents, schools, education, they are all shaping the mind to function within a certain pattern, a certain fragment. And we are always concerned with bringing about a change within the pattern, within the fragment. So, how is one to realize this, not theoretically, not as a mere idea, but see the actuality of it - you understand, see the actual? The actual being what is everyday taking place and is spoken of in newspapers, by politicians, through culture and tradition, in the family, making you call yourselves Indians, or whatever you think you are. Then when you see, you must question yourself (I am sure you would if you saw it), and that is why it is very important to understand how you see. If you really saw it, then the question would be, "How can the total mind act?" (I do not mean the fragment, not the conditioned mind, nor the educated, sophisticated mind, the mind that is afraid, the mind that says, "there is God" or "there is no God", "there is my family, your family, my nation, your nation".) Then you will ask, "How can this totality of the mind be, how can it function completely, even while learning a technique?" Though it has to learn a technique and to live in relationship with others, in our present disordered society - bearing that in mind, one must ask this question, which is a fundamental one: "How can this totality of the mind be made completely sensitive, so that even the fragment becomes sensitive?" I don't know if you have understood my question, we shall come to it in another way. At present we are not sensitive; there are spots in this field that are sensitive, sensitive when our particular personality, our particular idiosyncracy, or our particular pleasures are denied - then there is a battle. We are sensitive in fragments, in spots, but we are not sensitive completely; so the question is, "How can the fragment, which is part of the total, which is being made dull every day by repetition, how can that part also be made sensitive as well as the total?" Is this question fairly clear? Do tell me. Perhaps this is a new question to you, probably you have never asked yourself about it. Because we are all satisfied to live with as little trouble and conflict as possible, in that little part of that field which is our life, appraising the marvellous culture of that little part as opposed to other cultures, Western, ancient or any other. We are not even aware what the implications of this are - of living in a tiny fragment, a corner of a very vast field. We don't see for ourselves how deeply we are concerned with the little part, and we are trying to find answers to the problem within that fragment, within that little corner of this vast life. We ask ourselves, how can the mind (which is now half asleep in this vast field, because we are only concerned with the little part), how can we become totally aware of this whole thing, become completely sensitive? Now, first of all there is no method. Because any method, system, repetition or habit, is essentially part of the corner of that field. (Are we travelling together, taking a journey together, or are you falling behind?) The first thing is to see the actual fact of the little corner and what its demands are. Then we can put the question, "How can we make the whole field completely sensitive?", because in that lies the only true revolution. When there is total sensitivity of the whole of the mind, then we will act differently; our thinking, feeling, will be wholly of a different dimension. But there is no method. Don't say, "How am I to arrive, achieve, become sensitive?" - you can't go to college to become sensitive, you can't read books or be told what to do to become sensitive. This is what you have been doing within that corner of the field, and it has made you more and more insensitive, which can be seen in your daily life, with its callousness, brutality, and violence. (I do not know if you have seen the pictures in magazines of the American and Vietnamese soldiers being wounded. You may see it and say, "I am so sorry", but it has not happened to you, not to your family, not to your son.) So we become callous because we are functioning, living, acting, within the small petty little corner of a distorted field. There is no method. Please do realize this, because when you realize it, you are free of the enormous weight of all authority, and so free of the past. I don't know if you see this. The past is implicit in our culture, which we think is so wonderful (the tradition, the beliefs, the memories, the obedience to it), and all that is put aside completely, forever, when you realize there is no method of any kind to bring freedom from the "little corner". But you have to learn all about the little corner. Then you are free of the burden which makes you insensitive. Soldiers are trained to kill, practise day after day, day after day, ruthlessly, so that they have no human feeling left at all. And that is the type of thing which is being done to each one of us every day, all the time, by newspapers, by political leaders, by the gurus, by the Pope, by the bishops, everywhere, all over the world. Now, as there is no method, what is one to do? Method implies practice, dependence, your method, my method, his path and another's path, my guru who knows a little better, this guru who is phoney, that guru who is not (but all gurus are phoney, you can take that for granted right from the beginning, whether they are Tibetan Lamas or Catholics, or Hindus) - all of them are phoney because they are still functioning in a very small part of a field that has been spat on and trodden upon and destroyed. What is one to do? You understand my question now? The problem is this: we don't know the depth and the immensity of the mind. You can read about it, you can read the modern psychologists, or the ancient teachers who have talked about it -distrust them because it is you yourself who have to find out, not according to somebody else. We don't know it - the mind - you don't know it, so you cannot have any concept about it. You understand what we are saying? You can't have any ideas, any opinions, any knowledge about it. So you are free from any supposition, from any theology. So once again, what is one to do? All that one has to do is to see. See the corner, the little house that one has built in a corner of a vast, an immeasurable field; and living there, fighting, quarrelling, improving (you know all that is going on there), see it. And that is why it is very important to understand what it means to see, because the moment there is conflict you belong to that isolated corner. Where there is seeing there is no conflict. That is why one has to learn from the very beginning - no, not the beginning, but now - to see. Not tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow - it is only search for pleasure, or fear, or pain that invents "tomorrow". Actually there is no tomorrow psychologically, but the brain, the mind, has invented time; but we shall go into this later. So what one has to do is to see. You cannot see, if you are not sensitive, and you are not sensitive if you have an image between you and the thing seen. Do you understand? So seeing is the act of love. You know what makes the total mind sensitive? - only love. You can learn a technique and yet love; but if you have technique and no love you are going to destroy the world. Do watch it in yourselves, Sirs, do go into it in your own minds and hearts and you will see it for yourselves. Seeing, observing, listening, these are the greatest acts, because you cannot see if you are looking out from that little corner, you cannot see what is happening in the world, the despair, the anxiety, the aching loneliness, the tears of the mothers, wives, lovers, of those people who have been killed. But you have to see all this, not emotionally, nor sentimentally, not saying, "Well! I am against war" or, "I am for war", as that sentimentality and emotionalism are the most destructive things -they avoid facts and so avoid what is. So, the seeing is all important. The seeing is the understanding; you cannot understand through the mind, through the intellect, or understand through a fragment. There is understanding only when the mind is completely quiet, which means when there is no image. Seeing destroys all barriers. Look, Sirs, as long as there is separation between you and the tree, between you and me, and between you and your neighbour (that "neighbour" being a thousand miles away or next door), there must be conflict. Separation means conflict, that is very simple. And we have lived in conflict, we are used to conflict and to separation. You see India as a unit - geographical, political, economical, social, cultural, and the same goes for Europe, and America, and Russia: separate units, each against the other, and all this separation is bound to breed war. This doesn't mean that we must all agree, or if we disagree that I am doing battle with you; there is no disagreement whatsoever, or agreement, when you see something as it is. It is only when you have opinions about what you see, that there is disagreement and that there is separation. When you and I see that it is the moon, then there is no disagreement, it is the moon. But if you think it is something, and I think it is something else, then there must be division and hence conflict. So in seeing a tree, when you actually see it, there is no division between you and the tree, there is no observer seeing the tree. We were talking one day to a very learned doctor, who had taken a drug called L.S.D., a minute dosage, and there were two doctors beside him with a tape recorder registering what he was saying. After a few seconds he saw the flowers on the table in front of him, and between those flowers and himself there was no space. It doesn't mean he identified himself with those flowers, but there was no space, which means that there was no observer. We are not advocating that you should take L.S.D., because it has its own deleterious effects; and also when you take such things you become a slave to them. But there is a much simpler, more direct, more natural way, which is to observe for yourself a tree, a flower, the face of a person; to look at any one of them, and so look that the space between you and them is non-existent. And you can only look that way when there is love - that word which has been so misused. We will not go into the question of love for the time being, but when you have this sense of real observation, real seeing, then that seeing brings with it this extraordinary elimination of time and space which comes about when there is love. And you cannot have love without recognising beauty. You may talk about beauty, write, design, but if you have no love nothing is beautiful. Being without love means that you are not totally sensitive. And because you are not totally sensitive you are degenerating. This country is degenerating. Don't say, "Aren't other countries degenerating too?" - of course they are, but you are degenerating, though technically you may be an extraordinarily good engineer, a marvellous lawyer, technician, know how to run computers; but you are degenerating because you are not sensitive to the whole process of living. Our fundamental problem then is - not how to stop wars, not which god is better than another god, not which political system or economic system is better, not which party is worth voting for (they are all crooked anyhow), but the most fundamental problem for the human being, whether he is in America, India, Russia, or anywhere else, is this question of freedom from "the little corner". And that little corner is ourselves, that little corner is your shoddy little mind. We have made that little corner, because our own little minds are fragmented and therefore incapable of being sensitive to the whole; we want that little part to be made safe, peaceful, quiet, satisfying, pleasurable, thereby avoiding all pain, because, fundamentally, we are seeking pleasure. And if you have examined pleasure, your own pleasure, have observed it, watched it, gone into it, you will see that where there is pleasure, there is pain. You cannot have one without the other; and we are always demanding more pleasure and therefore inviting more pain. And on that we have built this part, which we call human life. Seeing is to be intimately in contact with it and you cannot be intimately, actually in contact with it if you have concepts, beliefs, dogmas, or opinions. So what is important is not to learn but to see and to listen. Listen to the birds, listen to your wife's voice, however imtating, beautiful or ugly, listen to it and listen to your own voice however beautiful, ugly, or impatient it may be. Then out of this listening you will find that all separation between the observer and the observed comes to an end. Therefore no conflict exists and you observe so carefully that the very observation is discipline; you don't have to impose discipline. And that is the beauty, Sirs (if you only realize it), that is the beauty of seeing. If you can see, you have nothing else to do, because in that seeing there is all discipline, all virtue, which is attention. And in that seeing there is all beauty, and with beauty there is love. Then when there is love you have nothing more to do. Then where you are, you have heaven; then all seeking comes to an end. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART V CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC TALK MADRAS 10TH JANUARY 1968 'FREEDOM' IT WOULD BE rather interesting and worth while if we could share together a mind that is not tortured, that is fundamentally free, that has no barriers, that sees things as they are, that sees that an interval of time separates man from nature and from other human beings, that sees the meaning of dreadful, frightening time and space, that knows what is really the quality of love. If we could share this - not intellectually, not in a most cunning, elaborate, philosophical, metaphysical way, but actually partake of it, if we could do that I think all our problems would end. But this sharing is not with another, one must have it first. Then when you have it you have it in abundance. And when there is this abundance the one and the many are the same, like a tree that is full of leaves of which one leaf is perfect and is part of the whole tree. If we could, this evening, share this quality, not with the speaker, but by having it and then sharing it. Then the question of sharing it would no longer arise. It is like a flower full of scent which doesn't share, but is always there for any passer-by to delight in. And whether anyone is very near in the garden, or very far away, it is all the same to the flower, because it is full of that perfume, and so it is sharing with everything. If one could come upon this, it is really a mysterious flower. It only seems mysterious because we are so full of emotion and sentiment, and sentiment, in that emotional sense, has very little meaning; one can have sympathy, be generous, be very kind, gentle and extremely polite but the quality of which I have been speaking is entirely different from all this. And don't you wonder (not in abstract terms, nor according to something to be gained by a system, by a philosophy or by following some guru), don't you wonder why it is that human beings lack this thing? They beget children, they enjoy sex, tenderness, a quality of sharing something together in companionship, in friendship, in fellowship, but this thing - why is it that we haven't got it? For, when it is, then all problems whatever they may be, come to an end. And haven't you wondered lazily, on occasion, when you were walking by yourself in a filthy street, or sitting in a bus, or when you were on a holiday by the seaside, or in a wood with a lot of birds, trees, streams and wild animals, hasn't it ever come upon you to ask - why is it that man, who has lived for millions of years, why is it that he hasn't got this thing, this extraordinarily unfading flower? If you have asked this question, even out of casual curiosity, you must have had an inkling, an intimation, a hint. But, probably, you have not asked it. We live such a monotonous, dull, sloppy life within the field of our own problems and anxieties that we have never even asked this question. And if we were to ask this question of ourselves (as we are going to do now, sitting under this tree on a quiet evening, with the noise of the crows), I wonder what would be our reply. What would each one of us honestly give as a direct answer, without equivocation or cunning, what would be the answer if you put this question to yourself? Why do we go through all this excruciating torture, with so many problems, with multitudinous fears piling up, yet this one thing seems to go by, seems to have no place at all. And if you were to ask why, why one has not found this quality, I wonder what would be your answer? Your answer would be according to your own intensity in asking that question, and its urgency. But we are neither intense nor urgent and we are not urgent or intense because we haven't got the energy. To look at anything, a bird, a crow sitting on a branch preening itself, to look at it with all your being, with all your eyes, ears, nerves, mind and heart, to look at it completely, requires energy, but not the shoddy energy of a dissipated mind that has struggled, that has tortured itself, that is full of innumerable burdens. And most minds, ninety-nine point nine per cent recurring of minds have this terrible burden, this tortured existence. And so they have no energy, energy being passion. And you can't find any truth without passion. That word "passion" is derived from the Latin word for suffering which again derives from Greek and so on; from this "suffering" the whole of Christendom worships sorrow, not passion. And they have given "passion" a special significance. I don't know what significance you give to it, the feeling of complete passion, with a fury behind it, with total energy, that passion in which there is no hidden want. And if we were to ask, not just with curiosity but with all the passion we have, then what would be the answer? But probably you are afraid of passion, because for most people passion is lust, passion that is derived from sex and all that. Or it may come from the passion that is felt through identification with the country to which we belong, or passion for some mean little god, made by the hand or by the mind; and so to us, passion is rather a frightening thing because if we have such a passion, we do not know where it will take us. And so we are very careful to canalise it, to build a hedge around it through philosophical concepts, ideals, so that energy, which is demanded in order to solve this extraordinary question (and it is quite extraordinary if you put it to yourself honestly, directly), why we human beings, who live in families with children, surrounded by all the turmoil and violence of the world, why, when there is one thing that could cover all this, why it is that we haven't got it? I wonder, is it because we really don't want to find out? Because to find out anything there must be freedom, to find out what I think, what I feel, what are my motives, to find out, not merely to analyse intellectually, but to find out, there must be freedom to look. To look at that tree you must be free from worry, from anxiety, from guilt. To look you must be free from knowledge; freedom is a quality of mind that cannot be got through renunciation nor sacrifice. Are you following all this, or am I talking to the winds and the trees? Freedom is a quality of mind that is essential for seeing. It is not freedom from something. If you are free from something that is not freedom, it is only a reaction. If you smoke and you give up smoking, and you say,"I am free", you are really not free although you may be free from that particular habit. Freedom concerns the whole habit-forming machinery, and to understand this whole problem of habit-forming one must be free to look at its mechanism. Perhaps we are afraid of that freedom too; and therefore we put freedom far away from us, in some heaven. So fear is perhaps the reason why we have not the energy of that passion to find out for ourselves why that quality of love is lacking in us. We have everything else, greed, envy, superstition, fear, the ugliness of a shoddy little life, the routine of going to an office every day for the next forty, fifty years - not that one shouldn't go to an office, one has to, unfortunately, but it becomes a routine, and that routine, that going to the office, doing the same thing day after day, day after day, for forty years, shapes the mind, makes it dull, stupid, or clever in only one direction. It may be, probably it is, that each one of us is so frightened of life, because without understanding this whole process of living, we can never possibly understand what it is not to live. You understand? What we call living, the daily boredom, the daily struggle, the daily conflict within oneself and outside of oneself, the hidden demands, the hidden wants, the ambitions, the cruelties, and the enormous burden of conscious or unconscious sorrow - that is what we call living - don't we? We may try to escape from it, go to the temple, or the club, follow a new guru, or become a hippy or take to drink, or join some society which promises us something -anything to escape. In fear lies the major problem of what we call living (fear of not being, fear of being attached, with all the great pain it brings - how to be detached - whether there is physical, emotional, psychological, security - the fear of that - the fear of the unknown, fear of tomorrow, the fear of your wife leaving you, the fear of having no belief and being isolated, lonely, in despair at every moment, deep down), this is what we call living, a battle, a tortured existence with barren thoughts. We live like this because that is our life, with occasional moments of sanity, occasional moments of clarity to which we cling furiously. Please, Sirs, don't merely listen to words and don't be carried away by them; explanations, definitions, descriptions, are not the fact. The fact is your life, the fact is whether you are aware of it, and you cannot be aware of it through the speaker's words, which merely describe your condition and if you are caught up in the description, in the words, then you are certainly lost forever. And that is what we are - we are lost, we are forlorn because we have accepted words, words, words. So don't please, I beg of you, be caught in words, but watch yourself, watch your life, your daily life which you call living, which consists of going to the office, passing examinations, getting a job, not having a job, fear, family and social pressure, tradition, the torture of not arriving, the uncertainty of life, the utter deep boredom of life that has no meaning whatsoever. You may give significance to life, you can invent as philosophers and theoreticians do, as religious people do - invent the significance of life, that is their job. But this is feeding on words when you need substance; you are fed with words, and you are satisfied with words. So to understand this living we have to look at it: to come intimately into contact with it, not have the space and time interval between yourself and it. You don't have this time-space interval when you have deep physical pain, you act, you don't theorize, you don't quarrel about whether there is Atman or no Atman, soul or no soul, you don't begin to quote the Gita, the Upanishads, the Koran, or the Bible or some saint. Then you are face to face with actual life. Life is that movement which is active, the doing, the thinking, the feeling, the fears, the guilt, the despair -that is life. And one has to be intimately in contact with it. And one cannot be intensely, passionately, vitally, in contact, if there is fear. Fear is what makes us believe, whether our belief is in the ideological community of the Communist, or the theocratical idea of a clergyman or a priest. All these things are born out of fear; obviously all gods, all, are the outcome of our agony; and when we worship them we are worshipping our agony, our loneliness, despair, misery and sorrow. Do please listen to all this - it is your life, not my life. You have to face this and so you have to understand fear. And you cannot understand fear if you don't understand life. You have to understand the jealousy that you have, the envy - envy and jealousy which are merely the indications of fear. And you can understand totally (not intellectually, there is no such thing as understanding intellectually, there is only understanding totally), you can understand totally and it is like looking at that sunset with your mind, with your heart, with your eyes, with your nerves; it is then you understand. And to understand jealousy, envy, ambition, cruelty, violence (to understand them and give your complete attention at the moment anything happens, at the moment you feel envious, angry, jealous or full of hate, or feel dishonest in yourself), then, if you understand that, you will understand fear. But you can't take fear as an abstraction. After all fear exists in relation to something. Are you not afraid of your neighbour, of the government, of your wife, or your husband, afraid of death, and so on? You have to observe, not fear, but enquire as to what has brought this about. Now we are going to examine what living is, to which we cling so desperately, the living of our daily, monotonous, tragic life - the life of the bourgeois, the mediocre, the down-trodden - because we are all downtrodden by society, by culture, by religions, by priests, by leaders, by saints, and unless you understand this you will never understand fear; so we are going to understand this living and also that enormous source of fear, which is called death. And to understand it you have to have tremendous energy, passion. You know how we waste our energy (I don't mean through sex, that is a very small affair, don't make that into something unnecessarily tremendous), but one must enquire directly, not according to Shankara or any of those people, who have invented their own particular form of escape from life. To find out what living is, we must not only have energy but also the quality of passion that is sustained, and intellect cannot possibly sustain passion. And to have that passion one has to enquire into the wastage of energy. One can see that it is a waste of energy to follow anybody - you understand? - to have a leader, to have a guru, because when you follow you are imitating, you are copying, you are obeying, you are establishing authority and your energy is therefore diffused. Do observe this; please do so. Don't go back to your gurus, to your societies, to your authorities, drop them like hot potatoes. You can also see how you waste your energy when there is compromise. You know what compromise is? There is compromise only when there is comparison. And we, from childhood, are trained to compare between what we are and what the head of the class in our school is; compare ourselves with what we were yesterday, noble or ignoble, with the happiness that we felt yesterday, that came upon us without warning, suddenly it came, the delight of looking at a tree, at flowers, at the face of a lovely woman, a child or a man, and then we compare what is today with what was yesterday. This comparison, this measurement, is the beginning of compromise. Do please look at this for yourself. Find out the truth of it, that the moment you have a measure, which is comparison, you are already compromising with what is. When you say that man is an I.C.S., he earns so much, he is the head of this or that, you are comparing, judging, placing people as important, not as human beings, but according to their degrees, their qualities, their earning capacity, their job, their Ph.D.s and the whole lot of alphabets after their names; and so you are comparing, comparing yourself with another, whether "the other" is a saint, a hero, a god, an idea, or an ideology - comparing, measuring - and all this breeds compromise which is a tremendous wastage of energy. This is not a question of when you are sexual and the tradition behind that. So, one sees how this is a waste of energy and the energy is wasted when you indulge in ideation, in theories: whether there is a soul or no soul, whether there is an Atman, or no Atman - isn't it a waste of time, a waste of energy? When you read or listen to some saint endlessly, or some sannyasi, making commentaries on the Gita, or the Upanishadsjust think of it! - the absurdity of it! - the childishness of it! Somebody explains some book which in itself is dead, written by some dead poet, giving to it a tremendous significance. All this shows that immaturity is essentially a waste of energy. The immature mind compares itself with what is and what should be, but it is only the immature mind that compares. The mature mind has no comparison, the mature mind has no measure. I don't know if you have ever looked into yourself and watched how you compare yourself with another, saying, "He is so beautiful, so intelligent, so clever, so prominent; and I am nobody, I would like to be like him." Or, "She is so beautiful, has a good figure, has a nice mind, intelligent, bright, better." We think and function in this comparative, measuring world. And if you have ever questioned and observed maybe you have said, "No more comparison, no more comparison with anybody, not with the most beautiful actress." You know that beauty is not in the actress, beauty is something total, not in the face, in the figure, in the smile, but where there is a quality of total comprehension, the totality of one's being; when that is what looks, there is beauty. Do watch it in yourself, please, try it, or rather do it - when you use the word "try", you know how such a mind is the most deplorable, foolish mind; when it says, "I am doing my best, I am trying", this indicates a mind that is essentially bourgeois, capable of measuring, which is doing better every day; so, find out for yourself whether you can live, not theoretically but actually, without comparison, measure, never using the words "better" or "more". See what happens. It is only such a mature mind that is not wasting energy, only such a mind can live a very simple life, I mean a life of real simplicity, not the so-called simplicity of the man who has one meal, or one loincloth - that's exhibitionism - but the mind that has no measure and is therefore not wasting energy. So to come to the point. We are wasting energy and you need this energy to understand this monstrous way of living. And we must understand it, that is the only thing we have, not gods, Bibles, Gitas, or ideals; what you have is this thing - the daily torture, the daily anxiety. And to understand it, be in contact with it, is to have no space between yourself as the observer and the thing as despair, and for this you must have tremendous, driving energy. To have that energy, it cannot be dissipated - when this occurs you will understand what living is. Then there is no fear of life, of the movement of life. You know what a movement is? A movement has no end and no beginning, and therefore the movement in itself is the beauty, the glory. Are you following this? So life is this movement and to understand it there must be freedom, there must be energy. And to understand death is to understand something which is closely related to life. You know, beauty (not in pictures, not in a person, not in the tree or in the cloud or in the sunset) beauty cannot be divorced from love. And where there is love and beauty there is life and also there is death. You cannot separate one from the other. The moment you separate there is conflict, there is no relationship. So we have looked, not in great detail or widely, perhaps, but we have looked at life. Now let us consider, go into, this question of death. Have you asked why you are frightened of death? Apparently most people are. Some don't want even to know about it, or if they do, they want to glorify it. Or some invent a theory, a belief, an escape - an escape such as resurrection, or reincarnation. The majority of the people who live in the East believe in reincarnation - you all do, probably. That is, a permanent entity, or a collective memory, is reborn again in the next life - isn't it? That is what you all believe; to have a better opportunity, to live more fully, to perfect yourself, because this life is so short, this life can't give you all the experience, all the joy, all the knowledge, therefore - let's have a next life! You want a next life where you will have time and space to perfect yourself, so you have that belief. This is escape from the fact - we are not concerned with whether there is or there is not reincarnation, or whether there is continuity or no continuity. That requires quite a different analysis. We can see briefly how that which has continuity is that which has been, that which has been yesterday will continue today, through today to tomorrow. And such a continuity is within time and space. This is not intellectual, you can observe it very simply for yourself. And we are frightened of this thing called death. We are not only frightened of living but we are also frightened of this unknown thing. Are we frightened of the unknown, or frightened of the known, of losing the known? That is, the family, your experiences, your daily monotonous existence - the known - the house, the garden, the smile to which you are accustomed, the food which you have eaten for thirty years, the same food, the same climate, the same books, the same tradition - you are frightened of losing that, aren't you? How can you be frightened of something you don't know? So thought is frightened not only of losing the known but also thought is frightened of something which it calls death, unknown. As we said, fear cannot be got rid of, but it can be understood only when the things that produce the fear, like death, are understood. Now man throughout time has pushed death far away; the ancient Egyptians for instance lived to die. Death is something in the distance, that time-space interval between life and that which we call death. Thought, which has divided this, divided the living from the dying, thought keeps it apart. Do go into it, Sirs, it is very simple if you do so. Thought keeps it separate because thought has said, "I don't know what the future is; I can have a lot of theories if I believe in reincarnation, it means I must behave, work, act, now -if I believe that. What you do now matters when you die - but you don't believe that way. You believe in reincarnation as an idea, a comforting idea, but rather vague, so you don't care what you do now. You really don't believe in karma although you talk a great deal about it. If you really, actually, vitally, believed in it, as you believe in earning money, in sexual experience, then every word, every gesture, every movement of your being would matter, because you are going to pay for it in the next life. So that belief would bring tremendous discipline - but you don't believe, it is an escape, you are frightened because you don't want to let go. And what are you letting go? Look at it. When you say, "I am afraid to let go" - what are you afraid of? Letting go what? Do look at it very closely. Your family, your mother, your wife, your child? Were you ever in relation with them? Or were you related to an idea, to an image? And when you say, "I am afraid to let go, to be detached" - what are you thinking of being detached from? Memories? Surely memories, memories of sexual pleasure, memories of your becoming a big man, or a little man climbing up the ladder, memories of your character, memories of your friendship - just memories. And you are afraid to let those memories go. However pleasant or unpleasant they may be, what are memories? They have no substance whatsoever. So you are frightened of letting go something which has no value at all, memory being that which has continuity, the bundle of memories, a unit, a centre. So when one understands living, that is, when one understands jealousy, anxiety, guilt and despair and when one is beyond and above them, then life and death are very close together. Then living is dying. You know if you live according to memories, traditions, and what you "should be", you are not living. But if you put away all that, which means dying to all that you know - freedom from the known - this is death, and then you are living. You are living, not in some fantastic world of concepts but actually living, not according to the Vedas, the Upanishads which have no validity; what has validity is the life that you lead every day, that is the only life you have, and without understanding it, you will never understand either love, beauty, or death. We come back to that original thing, which is: why there is not this flame in our heart. Because if you have examined very closely what has been said (not verbally, intellectually, but examined it in your own mind, in your own heart), then you will know why you haven't got it. If you know why you haven't got it, if you feel it and live with it, if you are passionate in your search for why you haven't got it, then you will find that you have it. Through complete negation, that thing which alone is the positive, which is love, comes into being. Like humility, you cannot cultivate love. Humility comes into being when there is total ending of conceit, vanity, but then you will never know what it is to be humble. For a man who knows what it is to have humility is a vain man. In the same way when you give your mind and your heart, your nerves, your eyes, your whole being to find out the way of life, to see what actually "is" and go beyond it, and deny completely, totally, the life that is lived now, in that very denial of the ugly, brutal, in its complete denial, the other comes into being. But you will never know it either. A man who knows that he is silent, or knows that he loves, doesn't know what love is, nor what silence is. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART V CHAPTER 3 3RD PUBLIC TALK MADRAS 14TH JANUARY 1968 'THE SACRED' ONE CAN GO on endlessly reading, discussing, piling up words upon words, without ever doing anything about it. It is like a man that is always ploughing, never sowing, and therefore never reaping. Most of us are in that position. And words, ideas, theories, have become much more important than actual living, which is acting, doing. I do not know if you have ever wondered why, throughout the world, ideas, formulas, concepts, have tremendous significance, not only scientifically but also theologically. I wonder why? Is it an escape from actuality, from daily, monotonous life? Or, is it that we think ideas and theories will help us to live more -will give us greater vision, greater depth to life? Because we say that without ideas, without having a significance, an objective in life, life is very shallow, empty and has no meaning at all. That may be one of the reasons. Or, is it because we find living, the daily grind, the routine, the boredom, lacking in a quality of sensitivity that we hope to derive from ideation? Life as we live it is obviously very brutal, and makes us insensitive, dull, heavy, stupid, and so we may hope through ideas, through ideational mentation, to bring about a certain quality of sensitivity. Because we notice that our life inevitably is a repetitive affair (sex, office, eating, the endless chatter about things that really don't matter, the constant friction in relationship), all this does make for crudeness, for brutality, for hardness. And being aware of that (perhaps not consciously but deep down), one may think that ideas, ideals, theories about God, the hereafter, may give a quality of refinement, may perhaps bring to this dull, aching life, a meaning, a significance, a purpose; perhaps we think it may polish our minds, give them sharpness, give them a quality that the ordinary daily worker in the field or in the factory does not have. So perhaps that is one of the reasons why we indulge in this peculiar game. But even when we are sharpened and quickened intellectually by argument, by discussion, by reading, this does not actually bring about that quality of sensitivity. And you know all those people who are erudite, who read, who theorize, who can discuss brilliantly, are extraordinarily dull people. So I think sensitivity, which destroys mediocrity, is very important to understand. Because most of us are becoming, I am afraid, more and more mediocre. We are not using that word in any derogative sense at all, but merely observing the fact of mediocrity in the sense of being average, fairly well educated, earning a livelihood and perhaps capable of clever discussion; but this leaves us still bourgeois, mediocre, not only in our attitudes but in our activities. And maturity does not bring about a mutation, a change, a revolution in mediocrity (this can be observed very clearly), although one may have an old body, mediocrity in different forms continues. Perhaps we could go into this question of sensitivity (not mere physical refinement, which is obviously necessary), but into the question of sensitivity, the highest form of sensitivity which is the highest intelligence; without being sensitive you are not intelligent. To listen to that crow, to be aware of it, to feel its movement, to have no space between that and yourself (which doesn't mean identity with the crow, as this would be too absurd), but that quality of a mind that is highly sharpened, attentive, in which the observer, which is the centre, the censor, with his accumulated memories and tradition, is not. It is after all a question of constant habit, the way we think, the food that we eat, the way we choose our friends, who obviously are our friends because they don't contradict, they don't disturb us too much. So life becomes not only repetitive but also habitual, routine. So sensitivity needs attention. You know concentration is a most deadly thing. You accept it, do you? I am saying, the speaker is saying something totally contradictory to what you all feel is necessary. So don't accept it, nor deny it, but look at it. Feel your way into what is true and what is false. What the speaker is saying may be utterly stupid and nonsensical, or it may be true. But to accept or to deny makes you remain as you are, dull, heavy, habit-ridden, insensitive. But in what we are going to say in a moment and even now, do not accept or compare with what you already know or what you have been told or read, but listen in order to find out for yourself what is true. And to give attention, to listen, you have to give your total attention. You cannot give your total attention if you are merely learning to concentrate, or if you are trying to concentrate on a few words, or on the meaning of words, or what you have already heard. But give your attention, and this means listening without any barrier, without any interference or comparison, or condemnation; that is giving total attention; then you will find out for yourself what is true or false without being told. But this is one of the most difficult things to do - to give attention. Attention does not demand any quality of will or desire. We function within the pattern of desire, which is will. That is, we say, "I will pay attention, I will try to listen without the barriers, without all the screens between the speaker and myself." But the exercise of will is not attention. Will is the most destructive thing that man has cultivated. Do you again accept that? To accept, or to deny, is not to find the truth of it; but to find the truth of it you have to give attention to it, to what the speaker is saying. Will is, after all, the culmination of desire - I want something, I desire something, I want it and I pursue it. The desire may be a very thin thread, but it is strengthened by constant repetition, and this becomes the will - "I will" and "I will not". And on that assertive level (which can also be negative), we function, we operate and we approach life. "I will succeed, I will become, I will be noble" - all very strong desires. And we are now saying that to be attentive has nothing whatsoever to do with desire or will. Then, how is one to be attentive? Please follow this. Knowing one is not attentive (knowing one has a certain amount of concentration, which is an exercise of will which excludes and resists, knowing that any form of effort, which again is will, is not attention), how is one to attend? Because if you can give total attention to everything that you do (and you therefore do very little), what you do, you do completely with your heart, with your mind, with your nerves, with everything you have. And how is this attention to come about, naturally, without any effort, with no exercise of the will, without using attention as a means to something else? I hope you are following all this. You know, you are going to find it awfully difficult if you don't follow this step by step, as you are probably not used to it; you are used to being told what to do, which you do repetitively, and you think you have understood it. But what we are trying to say is something entirely different. This attention then comes about naturally, easily, when you know you are inattentive - right? When you are aware that you are inattentive, not giving attention, being aware of that fact is being attentive, and you have nothing else to do. Do you understand? Through negation you come to the positive, but not through the pursuit of the positive. When you do things without this action you do things in a state of inattention, and to be aware of action in a state of inattention, is attention. This makes the mind very subtle, makes the mind tremendously alert, because then there is no wastage of energy. Whereas the exercise of will is wastage of energy, just as concentration is. We said that this attention is necessary - don't say, "Define what you mean by attention", you might just as well look it up in a dictionary. We are not going to define it, what we are trying to do is, by denying what is not, to come upon it by yourself. We are saying, this attention is necessary for sensitivity, which is intelligence at the deeper level. Again, these words are difficult because there is no measurement - when you say, "deeper", "more", you are comparing, and comparison is a waste of energy. So, if that is understood, we can use words to convey a meaning which is not comparative but actual. This sensitivity implies intelligence and we need great intelligence to live, to live our daily life, because it is only intelligence that can possibly bring about a total revolution in our psyche, in the very core of our being. And such a mutation is necessary, because man has lived for millions of years in agony, in despair, always battling with himself and with the world. He has invented a peace which is not peace at all; such peace is between two wars, between two conflicts. And as society is getting more and more complex, disorderly, competitive, there must be radical change, not in society, but in the human being who has created society. The human being, as he is, is a very disorderly person, he is very confused; he believes, he doesn't believe, he has theories and so on and so on; he lives in a state of contradiction. And he has built a society, a culture which is contradictory, with its rich and its poor. There is disorder, not only in our life, but also outwardly in society. And order is completely necessary. You know what is happening in the world - here in India - look at it! What is happening? Colleges are closed, a whole generation of young people is without education; they will be destroyed by politicians quarrelling over some silly division of language. Then there is the Vietnamese war in which human beings are being destroyed for an idea. There are the racial riots in America, terribly destructive things. And in China there is civil war; in Russia, tyranny, suppression of freedom, at best slow liberalisation - there is division between nationalities, separation due to religions, all of which indicate complete disorder. And this disorder is brought about by each one of us; we are responsible. Do please see the responsibility of it. The older generation has made a mess of the world, you have made a terrible mess of the world with your pujas, your gurus, with your gods, with your nationalities, because you are only concerned with earning a livelihood and cultivating part of the brain, the rest you neglect, you discard. Each human being is responsible for this disorder within himself and in the society in which he lives; Communism and other forms of tyranny are not going to bring order, on the contrary they are going to bring about more disorder, because man needs to be free. So there is disorder. And order is necessary, otherwise there can be no peace at all. And it is only in peace, in quietness, in beauty, that goodness can flower. Order is virtue, not the cultivated virtue of a cunning mind. Order is virtue, and order is a living thing,just as virtue is a living thing. So virtue cannot be practised as things are. We are going to go into this, listen to it. You cannot practise it any more than you can practise humility, or have a method to find out what love is. So order in this sense has the same pattern as mathematics; in the highest mathematics is the highest order, absolute order. And that absolute order, one must have it in oneself. And as virtue cannot be cultivated, put together, so order cannot be engendered, put together by the mind; but what the mind can do is to find out what disorder is. You are following this? You know what is disorder - living in the way we live is total disorder. As things are, each man is out for himself, there is no co-operation, there is no love, there is complete callousness as to what happens in Vietnam or in China, or at your next door neighbour's. Be aware of this disorder, and out of the understanding of this disorder understand how it has come about, the cause of it, so that when you understand the causes, the forces that are at work bringing about this disorder, understand it truly, not merely intellectually; then out of that understanding will come order. Now let us try to understand disorder, which is our daily life, understand it, not intellectually or verbally, but observe it, how one has been separated from others by being a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian (the Christian with his god, with his ideals and the Hindu with his ideals, the Muslim with his own ideals peculiar to him, and so on), observe it, come closely into contact with it, do not have prejudices, otherwise you cannot come directly into contact with another human being. So, out of disorder comes order, and it comes about naturally, freely, easily, with great beauty and vitality, when you are directly in contact with disorder in yourself. You are not in contact with this disorder directly, with yourself, if you do not know how to look at yourself. How to see yourself (we have gone into this question of seeing), how to look at a tree, a flower - because as we said the other day, the act of seeing is the act of love? The act of seeing is action. We will go into this a little bit because this is really very important. When you give your attention completely, that is, with your mind, with your eyes, with your heart, with your nerves - when you give complete attention, you will find there is no centre at all, there is no observer and therefore there is no division between the observed and the observer, and you eradicate conflict totally, this conflict brought about by separation, by division. It only seems difficult because you are not used to this way of looking at life. It is really quite simple. It is really very simple if you know how to look at a tree, if you know how to see anew the tree, your wife, your husband, your neighbour, if you look anew at the sky with its stars, with its silent depth - look, see and listen, then you have solved the whole problem of understanding, because then there is no "understanding" at all, then there is only a state of mind that has no division, and therefore no conflict. To come upon this naturally, easily, fully, there must be attention. This attention can only come about easily when you know how to look, how to listen - how to look at a tree, or your wife, or your neighbour, or at the stars, or even at your boss, without any image. The image is, after all, the past - the past, which has been accumulated through experience, pleasant or unpleasant; and with that image you look at your wife, your children, your neighbour, the world; you look with that image at nature. So what is in contact is your memory, the image which has been put together by memory. And that image looks and therefore there is no direct contact. You know when you have pain there is no image, there is only pain, and therefore there is immediate action. You may postpone going to the doctor, but action is involved. In the same way when you look and listen, you know the beauty of immediate action in which there is no conflict whatsoever. That is why it is important to know the art of looking, which is very simple - to look with complete attention, with your heart and with your mind. And attention means love, because you cannot look at that sky and be extraordinarily sensitive if there is a division between yourself and the beauty of that sunset. This order can only come about when we see, that is actually come into contact with disorder, which is in ourselves, which is us. We are not in disorder - "we" is a state of disorder. Now when you look at yourself without any image about yourself, actually at what you are (not what Shankara, Buddha, Freud, Jung, or X Y Z says, because then you are looking at yourself according to their image), you look at the disorder in yourself, the anger, the brutality, the violence, the stupidity, the indifference, the callousness, the constant drive of ambition with its peculiar cruelty - if you can be aware of that without any image, without any word, and look at it, then you are directly in contact with it. And when there is direct contact there is immediate action. There is immediate action when you have intense pain, and when there is great danger there is instant action. And this instant action is life, not the thing that we have hitherto called life, which is a battlefield, an agony in that battlefield, despair, hidden wants and so on; that is what we have called life. Please do observe this in yourself. Use the speaker as a mirror in which you see yourself now. What the speaker is saying is merely exposing yourself to yourself. And therefore look at this, listen to it and become completely in contact with it, be totally with it, and, if you are, you will see that there is immediate action. The past is then destroyed. You know the past is the unconscious. You know what the unconscious is? Don't go back to Freud, Jung or all the rest of those people, but look at it for yourself and find out, not through empiricism, but actually observe it. The past in you is your tradition, the books that you have read, the racial inheritance as the Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, and all the rest of it, and the culture in which you have lived, the temples, the beliefs that have been handed down from generation to generation. This constitutes the propaganda to which you have been subjected, your propaganda; you are slaves to the propaganda of five thousand years. And the Christian is a slave to propaganda of two thousand years. He believes in Jesus Christ and you believe in Krishna, or whatever you do believe in, as the Communist believes in something else. We are the result of propaganda. Do you realize what it means? - words, the influence of others; so there is nothing whatsoever original. And to find out the origin of anything we must have order. Order that can only come about when there is the cessation of total disorder in oneself. Because all of us, at least those who are a little serious and thoughtful and earnest, must have asked whether there is anything sacred at all, anything holy. Of course the answer is that the temple, the mosque, or the church is not holy, is not sacred, nor the images therein. I do not know if you have experimented with yourself. Take a piece of stick, put it on the mantelpiece and every day put a flower in front of it - give it a flower - put in front of it a flower and repeat some words - "Coca-cola", "Amen", "Om", it doesn't matter what word - any word you like - listen, don't laugh it off - do it and you will find out. If you do it, after a month you will see how holy it has become. You have identified yourself with that stick, with that piece of stone or with that piece of idea and you have made it into something sacred, holy. But it is not. You have given it a sense of holiness out of your fear, out of the constant habit of this tradition, giving yourself over, surrendering yourself to something, which you consider holy. The image in the temple is no more holy than a piece of rock by the roadside. So it is very important to find out what is really sacred, what is really holy, if there is such a thing at all. You know, man has spoken of this throughout the centuries, seeking something that is imperishable, that is not created by the mind, that is holy in itself, something that is never touched by the past. Man is always seeking that. And man, seeking that, not finding it, has invented religion, organized belief. A serious man has to find out, not through some rock, temple or idea, but he has to find what is really, truly, everlastingly sacred. If you cannot find it, you will always be cruel, you will always be in conflict. And if you will, this evening, listen, perhaps you may come upon it, not through the speaker, not through his words, not through his statements, but you may come upon it when there is discipline through the understanding of disorder. When you watch, see what is disorder; the very seeing of disorder demands attention. Please do follow this. You know, for most of us, discipline is a drill, as it is for the soldier, drill, drill from morning until night so that there is nothing but slavery to a habit. And that is what we call discipline; suppression, control - that is deadly, that is not discipline at all. Discipline is a living thing, it has its own beauty, its own freedom. And this discipline comes naturally, when you know how to look at a tree, how to look at the face of your wife, your husband, when you can see the beauty of a tree or a sunset. To see, to look at that sky, the glow of it, the beauty of the leaves against that glow, the orange colour, the depth of that colour, the swiftness of that colour-see it! To see it you must give your whole attention to it. And to give your whole attention has its own discipline, you don't want any other discipline. So that thing that attention is a living thing, moving and vital. This attention itself is virtue. You need no other ethical standard, no morality (anyhow you have no morality, except on the one hand the morality that the society which you have built tells you, and on the other hand what you want to do, and neither has anything whatsoever to do with virtue). Virtue is beauty and beauty is love, and without love you have no virtue and therefore no order. So again, if you have done it now, as the speaker is talking about it, looking at that sky with your whole being, that very act of looking has its own discipline and therefore its own virtue, its own order. Then the mind reaches the highest point of absolute order and therefore because it is absolutely orderly, it itself becomes the sacred. I do not know if you understand this. You know, when you love the tree, the bird, the light on the water, when you love your neighbour, your wife, your husband, without jealousy, that love that has never been touched by hate, when there is that love, that love itself is sacred, you have no other thing that can be more so. So there is that sacred thing, not in the things that man has put together, but which comes into being when man cuts himself off entirely from the past, which is memory. This does not mean that man becomes absent-minded, he must have memory in a certain direction, but that memory will be found to be part of this whole state in which there is no relation with the past. And that cessation of the past can only be when you see things as they are and come directly in contact with them - as with that marvellous sunset. Then out of this order, discipline, virtue, there comes into being love. Love is tremendously passionate and therefore it acts immediately. It has no time interval between the seeing and the doing. And when you have that love you can put away all your sacred books, all your gods. And you have to put away your sacred books, your gods, your everyday ambitions, to come upon that love. That is the only sacred thing there is. And to come upon it, goodness must flower. Goodness - you understand, Sirs? - goodness can only flower in freedom, not in tradition. The world needs change, you need tremendous revolution in yourself; the world needs this tremendous revolution (not economic, Communist, bloody revolution that man has tried throughout history, that has only led him to more misery). But we do need fundamental, psychological, revolution, and this revolution is order. And order is peace; and this order, with its virtue and peace, can only come about when you come directly into contact with disorder in your daily life. Then out of that blossoms goodness and then there will be no seeking any more. For that which is, is sacred. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VI CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC DIALOGUE MADRAS 2ND JANUARY 1968 'CONFLICT' Krishnamurti: I think that these should not really be called "Discussions", but rather conversations between two people or between many of us - conversations about serious matters in which most of us are not merely interested but seriously concerned with deep intention to understand the problems involved. And so the conversations become not only objective but also very intimate. It is like two people talking things over together amicably, easily -exposing themselves to each other. Otherwise I do not see the point of such conversations. What we are trying to do, aren't we, is to understand (not intellectually or verbally or theoretically but actually) what are the imperative necessities in life, and in what way one can resolve the deep fundamental problems that every human being is concerned with. So is that very clear - that we are conversing together as two friends making themselves known to each other, not merely dialectically giving their opinions, but actually investigating, thinking over their problems together? Now if that is clear, what shall we talk about together? Questioner: The other day you were talking about the observer and the observed, and resolving the conflict between... Krishnamurti: Is that what you want to discuss? Please Sir, let us all find out what each one of us wants to discuss and then put it all together and see what happens. Questioner: Why do you say that studying Indian culture and art and Indian philosophies is violence? Questioner: What are the steps to take to uncondition ourselves? Questioner: The mind produces images, but what is seen by the mind is not true. Krishnamurti: Is that what we are all concerned about in our daily life? Sirs, are we reducing, this morning, this gathering to a mere intellectual, verbal exchange of ideas? Questioner: What is meant by clear thinking? Questioner: What is the "actual"... Questioner: Do you suggest that violence and non-violence are two extremes? Questioner: Can we not guide our lives by certain principles? Krishnamurti: Haven't we got enough questions? What do you think, Sirs, is the most important question of all these? Questioner: What is it to pay attention? Krishnamurti: Sirs, what do you think is the most important thing to discuss? Can we take this question of observation and thinking? Shall we? That is - what is it to observe, to listen, and who is it that listens, who is it that thinks? We shall relate it to daily living and not to some abstract concepts, because this country - like every other country in the world - functions at the conceptual level, except technologically. What do we mean by seeing? What do you think? Questioner: Observing a little more attentively. Krishnamurti: Why do you say "a little more"? Sir, when we use the words "I see a tree", "I see you", "I see or understand what you are saying" - what do we mean by the word "seeing"? Let us go slowly if you do not mind - step by step. When you see a tree, what do you mean by that? Questioner: We only look superficially. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by "superficially" looking at it? When you see a tree, what do you mean by "seeing"? Do please stick to that one word. Questioner: Catching a glimpse of it. Krishnamurti: First of all, Sirs, have you looked at a tree? If you have looked, what do you see through your "seeing" eyes, the image of the tree or the tree? Questioner: The image of the tree. Krishnamurti: Do be careful, please, Sirs. Do you see the image in the sense of the mental construction or the concept of that tree, or do you actually see the tree? Questioner: The physical existence of the tree. Krishnamurti: Do you actually see that? Sirs, there is a tree... You must be able to see a tree or a leaf out of that window as I see it. When you see it what do you actually see? Do you see only the image of that tree or do you actually see the tree itself, without the image? Questioner: We see the tree itself. Questioner: We come to understand it. Krishnamurti: Before we come to understand it, when I say "I see a tree" do I actually see the tree or the image I have about that tree? When you look at your wife or your husband, do you see her or him or the image you have about him or her? (Pause) When you look at your wife you see her through your memories, through your experience of her and her ways, and through those images you see her. And do we do the same with regard to the tree? Questioner: When I look at a tree I just see a tree. Krishnamurti: Ah, you are not a botanist, you are a lawyer and therefore you look at that tree actually as a tree, but if you were a botanist, if you were really interested in the tree, how it grows, what it is like, the aliveness, the quality of it, then you would have images, you would have pictures, you would compare it with other trees, and so on. You are looking at it aren't you, with a comparative look, with botanical knowledge, seeing whether you like it or not, whether it gives shade or not,`whether it is beautiful or not, and so on and so on. So, when you have all those images, associations, memories with regard to that tree, are you then actually looking at that tree? Are you directly looking at that tree or have you a screen between that tree and the visual perception of it? Questioner: I tell myself what kind of a tree it is. Krishnamurti: As a symbol. So you do not actually look at that tree. But this is simple, isn't it? Questioner: A tree is a tree. Krishnamurti: The "tree", Sirs, I see is rather difficult. Let us look at it differently. Do you look at your wife or your husband through the image you have built about her or him? Or your friend? You have created an impression, and the impression has left an image, an idea, a memory, isn't that so? Questioner: My impressions of my wife have accumulated... Krishnamurti: Yes, they have solidified, thickened, grown solid. So when you look at your wife or husband you are looking at him or her through the image you have built. Right. This is simple, isn't it? This is what we are all doing. Now, are we really looking at her or at the symbol, the memories? - is this the screen through which we look? Questioner: How can we prevent that? Krishnamurti: It is not a question of preventing. Let us see first what is actually taking place. Questioner: When you look for the first time at a woman or a man you have no previous impression. Krishnamurti: Naturally not. Questioner: Are we not then looking at the woman or the man? Krishnamurti: Of course you are. Why do you make it into such an abstraction? What actually takes place in daily life? You are married, or you live with a person, there is sex, pleasure, pain, insults, annoyance, boredom, indifference, nagging, bullying, domination, obeying and all the rest of it - all that has created an image in you about the other person and through that image you look at each other. Right? So are we looking at the woman or at the man, or are the images looking at each other? Questioner: The image is the person. Krishnamurti: No, no. There is a vast difference between them. Is there not a difference? Questioner: We don't know any other way. Krishnamurti: That is the only method of seeing you know. Questioner: We alter our impression... Krishnamurti: It is all part of that image, Sir - adding and subtracting. Look, Sir. Have you an image of the speaker? You have an image of the speaker and the image is based on his reputation, on what he has said previously, on what he condemns or what he approves, and so on. You have built an image. And through that image you listen or look. Right? That image either increases or decreases according to your pleasure or pain. And that image is obviously interpreting what the speaker is saying. Questioner: We feel a strong impulse to come to your talks... Krishnamurti: No, no, Sir. You may like my "blue eyes" or something! All that is included, Sir. The stimulation, the inspiration, the drive - you can add lots of things to that image! Questioner: We don't know of any other way of looking. Krishnamurti: We are going to find out, Sir. We not only look at people or trees in that way, but also we look at concepts, don't we -at the Communist ideology, the Socialist ideology, and so on. We look at everything through concepts. Right? Concepts, beliefs, ideas, knowledge or experience, or what appeals to us. Communism appeals to one person and does not appeal to the other; one person believes in God and another does not believe in God. These are all concepts, Utopias, and on that level we live. Now, are they of any value? Being on an abstract level, conceptual, have they any value? Have they any significance in daily life? Life means living: living means relationship; relationship means contact; contact means co-operation. Have concepts of any kind any significance, in that sense, in relationship? But the only relationship we have is conceptual. Right? Questioner: Then we have to find a right relationship. Krishnamurti: No, it is not a question of right relationship, Sir. We are just examining. Do please understand this, Sirs. Let us go into it slowly. Don't let us jump. We live in concepts, our life is conceptual. We know what we mean by "conceptual" so we do not have to analyse that word. And so there is an actual daily living and a conceptual living. Or, is all living conceptual? Do I live according to my concepts? One person believes, let us suppose, that one must be non-violent. Questioner: I have not met anyone who actually believes in violence. Krishnamurti: All right, Sir. My question is: Is all living conceptual? Questioner: The building of a concept is due to habit and becomes a habit. Krishnamurti: Perhaps we shall be able to come to that question later, if we can tackle this problem first. Our question is: Is all my living conceptual? Questioner: Is there no such thing as spontaneous living? Krishnamurti: There is conceptual living and spontaneous living, but do I know what spontaneous living is when I am so conditioned, when I have inherited so many traditions? - is there and spontaneity left? Whether you have one con- cept or a dozen, it is still a question of concepts. Please Sirs, do hold to this for a minute. Is all life, all living, all relationship merely conceptual? Questioner: How can that be? Krishnamurti: Have you not an idea, Sir, that you should live this way and not that way? Therefore when you say "I must do this and I must not do that" - it is conceptual. So, is all living conceptual or is there a difference between nonconceptual living and conceptual living - and hence a conflict between the two? Questioner: I would say that we have a concept, but after experience the concept is modified. Krishnamurti: Yes Sir, Concepts are modified, obviously -modified, changed a little; but is conceptual living different from daily living or... Questioner: It is different. Krishnamurti: Wait Sir, wait Sir! I want to analyse this a little more. Is conceptual living different from daily living, or is there a gap between the two? I say there is a gap. What is this gap? Why should there be a gap? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: That's it. My concept is different from the actuality that is taking place now. Right? So there is an interval, a gap between what is, and what should be, or the concept. I am still sticking to the word "concept". Questioner: When you talk about "the actuality", that, to me, is the concept. Krishnamurti: No Sir. When you have toothache it is not a concept. When I have toothache it is not a concept. It is an actuality. When I am hungry, it is not a concept. When I have sexual desire, it is not a concept. But the next moment I say "No, I must not" or "I must", "It is evil", or "It is good". So there is a division between the actual, and what is, and the conceptual. So there is a duality. Right? Questioner: If I am hungry it is not just a concept. Krishnamurti: That is what we are saying, Sir. The primary urges, hunger, sex and so on, are actual, but we also have concepts about them. Concepts of class division, and so on. So, we are trying to find out why this gap exists and if it is possible to live without this gap, to live only with what is. Right? That is what we are trying to find out. Questioner: Animals just eat when they are hungry. Krishnamurti: But you and I are not animals. We may be at moments, but actually, now, we are not animals. So do not let us go back to animals, babies and previous generations; let us stick to ourselves. So there is the actual moment of living and the ideational, conceptual, non-factual living. Right Sirs? I believe in something, but that belief has nothing to do with the actuality, though the actuality may have produced the belief; the actual is not related to that belief. "I believe in universal brotherhood." God knows who can believe it, but I say, "I believe in universal brotherhood" - but actually I am competing with you. So the actuality of competition with you is entirely different from the conceptual. Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: We have made it fairly clear up to now. The actual is, "what is" - the factual. There is hunger in this country, poverty, overpopulation, corruption, inefficiency, brutality, and all the rest of it. That is the fact, but the ideation is that we should not be that. Right? In our daily life the "actual", the "what is", the "factual" is something entirely different from the real fact; it is the conceptual. Right? Questioner: But what you call the actual is just another concept, surely. Krishnamurti: No. I am hungry - that is not a concept, I am hungry. It is not born out of a memory of yesterday's hunger. If it is born out of yesterday's hunger it is not actual. Take sex - you do not mind my talking about sex do you? We all... but never mind. (Laughter) The sexual urge may or may not be there, but it is stimulated into being by the image which is fictional, not actual. So I am asking why do we have the conceptual at all? Questioner: Perhaps it is... Krishnamurti: No, no, Sir. Don t just answer me but find out if you have a concept at all. Why do I have a concept at all? Questioner: There are some things like anger which are psychological... Krishnamurti: All that is related, Sir. When I am angry, when there is irritation - it is a fact. It is there. But the moment I say, "It must not be there" it becomes conceptual. If you say "Well, the Indian starvation can only be solved by a particular political party," then it is conceptual - then you are not dealing with the fact. The Communist, the Socialist, the Congressman - whatever the parties are, they all think they will solve the problem of starvation if you follow their method - which is sheer nonsense, of course. Starvation is the fact and the conceptual is the idea, the method, the system. So I am asking myself, why do I have concepts at all? (Don't answer me, Sirs. Ask yourself that question.) Why do you believe in the Masters, the Gurus, in God, in the perfect state? Why? Questioner: I wonder if... Krishnamurti: Listen to what the first gentleman says. He says that by having a concept I reform myself. Everybody thinks that, not only you. By having an ideal, a goal, a principle, a hero, and so on, you think you will be helped to improve yourself. Now, what does this do actually, does it improve you or does it create conflict, conflict between what is and what should be? Questioner: We are afraid, and therefore we retreat into these concepts. Krishnamurti: All right. Now, can we live without concepts? Please let us go on, step by step. Can you live without a belief - follow this slowly - without a concept, without hope or despair? Questioner: Surely we must have some beliefs... Krishnamurti: Go into it, find out. Find out why you have concepts, first. Is it because you are afraid? Questioner: One has to battle with others for the primary needs of life. Krishnamurti: You say one has to battle. Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: You haven't answered the other gentleman's question. You have no respect for each other in this questioning! Let us find out what the other chap wants. You know there are two theories about this, one concerns "the survival of the fittest", which implies everlasting battle, wars, the superior race, the perfect concept, and so on. Then there is the other, that through violence there can be no change at all - in the most fundamental sense of that word. I do not know why you have any belief about this, one way or the other. The actual fact is that to survive at all in the world you have to battle, either very cunningly, cleverly, brutally or very subtly exploiting people in a nice gentle way. That is the fact. And why do we have a concept about it or about anything else? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: (Wait, wait Sir. Go slowly. You are much too quick. Go slowly.) First there is, as one observes in one's daily life, the non-conceptual and the conceptual, and I ask myself - and I hope you are asking yourself too - why do I have concepts at all -belief that Communism or Capitalism is the most wonderful way of life? Why? Or the concept that there is God or there is no God. Why do we have concepts at all, including concepts of Rama and Sita? Questioner: Without concepts we would be in a state of vacuum. Krishnamurti: Have you found that out? Is that a fact? Is that so? You are really not being very serious in going into this question. You have to be very precise and very clear, and not just jump from one concept to another. You are not answering the question. Why do you have, if you do have, any concept at all? You want to escape from the actual, from the "what is", don't you? (That is what that gentleman says, Sir... Let us understand that question first. "To escape from what is.") Why do you want to escape from what is? You would not want to escape from what is if it were pleasurable. You only want to escape from what is when it is painful. Questioner: We do not exactly know "what is", and we are trying to understand. Krishnamurti: Don t you know what is? And what do you mean by trying? Don't you have stomachache? Don't you get angry? Aren't you frightened, aren't you miserable, aren't you confused? Those are actual facts, Sir, there is nothing that requires you "to try" about them. Do consider all this, Sirs. If it were only a case of pleasure we would not have concepts at all. We would just say "Give me everything that will give me pleasure and don't bother about anything else." But if it is painful we want to escape from what is, into a concept. This is our daily life, Sirs. There is nothing to argue about. So your Gods, your beliefs, your ideals, principles are an escape from the daily misery, daily fears, daily anxieties. So, to understand something, cannot we ask: "Are concepts necessary?" You understand, Sir? I am afraid, and I see the absurdity of escaping from that into something which is a concept, a belief in the Masters, in God, in the Hereafter, into leading a perfect life - you know, all that stuff. Why can't I look at that fear? Why do I have to have concepts at all? And do not concepts prevent me from looking at that fear? Right Sirs? So concepts are a barrier; they act as a barrier which prevents you from looking. Questioner: Please clarify what you have said. Krishnamurti: Clarify what? Questioner: Please make a clearer analysis. Krishnamurti: A clearer analysis? Perhaps you would do it yourself, Sir. Questioner: You do it better than I. Krishnamurti: What does it matter, who does it better or worse? What is important is whether we understand this thing clearly. It is fairly simple, Sirs. My life is very dull. I live in a shoddy little house with an ugly little wife and I am miserable, anxious, and I want satisfaction, I want happiness, I want a glimpse, a moment of inexpressible bliss, and so I escape to something which I can call X. That is the whole principle, isn't it? That does not need further explanation, does it? And I live there, in an ideological world, a world which I have conceived, or inherited, or been told about. And thinking and living in that abstraction gives me a great delight. It is an escape from the actual daily boredom of life. Right? Then I say to myself, "Why do I have to escape?" Why can't I live and understand this terrible boredom? Why do I waste my energies in escaping?.. You are all silent about this! Questioner: You are conceiving a different form of existence from anything we know. Krishnamurti: I am not conceiving anything. I say, look. And I am looking at this fact that I have escaped, that I am escaping, and I see how absurd it is. I have to deal with what is, and to deal with what is I need energy. Therefore I will not escape. Escape is a waste of energy. So, I will have nothing whatsoever to do with beliefs, Gods, concepts. I will have no concept at all. (Of course not, Sir, of course not.) If you burn your finger, and the pain creates a concept that you must never put your finger in the fire, then that concept has value, doesn't it? You have also had wars, thousands of wars. Why haven't you learnt from that not to have any more wars? (Come off it, Sir. You know very well what I mean.) We don't have to analyse all this every step as we go along. I burn my finger, and I say to myself I must be careful hereafter. Or, you tread on my toe, both metaphorically and physically, and I get angry physically, and I boil inwardly. I have learnt something from that, and I say, "I must not", or "I must". (It is the same thing. Avoid, build a resistance. I understand those things very clearly. They are necessary.) Questioner: When someone makes me angry I remember it and when I meet him next time I am ready for him. Krishnamurti: That's it, Sir! That's just it! Can I meet him without the concept next time? He might have changed, but if I meet him with my concept, that he has trodden on my toe, I have no relationship with him. Therefore, is it possible, though you have had some sort of experience, is it possible to be without the concept? So we must come back to the question - "Is it possible to live in this world without any concept?" Questioner: I don't think so. Krishnamurti: Do not let us say it is possible or it is not possible. Let us find out. You have separated yourselves from others, Sirs, as Hindus. This is a concept. (Yes, you are! My God, you are.) Would you marry your daughter to a Muslim? Let us be clear. I am taking an instance, Sir. You hurt me, and that hurt remains in my memory. I try to avoid you if I can. But unfortunately as you live in the same house or the same street I have to meet you every day. And I have an image, the crystallized image, thickened memory, which is meeting you every day. Hence there is a battle going on between us two. And so I say to myself, is it possible to live without that image, so that I really meet you? You might have changed or you might not have changed, but I will not have the image. Can I not find out how to live without the image, so that my mind is not cluttered up with images? Do you follow, Sirs. So that my mind is free, free to look, to enjoy, to live. Questioner: That's an idea. Krishnamurti: Oh no! To you it is an idea, but not to me. I say, "He has hurt me, but why should I carry on that burden?" Questioner: I just take care next time. Krishnamurti: Yes, but I won't keep on repeating, "I must be careful", which only thickens the memory. I say that is no way to live, but I only say so for me, not for you. I don't want that image and to be carrying it with me all the time. That is not freedom. You may have changed, and also I like to be without an image. Not as an idea, but it is an actual fact that I do not want it. It is absurd for me to have an image about anybody. So let us come back to the other things. Questioner: If I meet a good man, is it not a good thing to have a memory, an impression that he is a good man? Krishnamurti: A bad impression or a good impression is still an impression. There is no "good image" and "bad image". (Inaudible remark) (For bad eyesight you must go to a better oculist.) This division between the conceptual and the actual breeds conflict. And a man who wants to investigate and go beyond the actual must have all his energy. That energy cannot be wasted through conflict. So I say to myself - and I am not telling you what to do - I say to myself, "It is absurd to live with concepts at all." I will deal with facts, with what. is, all the time, and will never be immersed in the concept. So then I am faced with the question, "How do I look at the fact, at what is?" I am not concerned with the conceptual at all. I am only concerned in the observation of actually what is. Right? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: (Yes, but you take things as they come with a series of habits. Habits of which you may be conscious or unconscious... Sirs, we keep going away from the main issue.) So the question is, "Can I live with what is, without creating conflict?" Do you follow? I am angry. That is a fact. I am jealous. I like and dislike. That is a fact. Can I live with that, with what is, without making a problem, a conflict out of it? Questioner: It is not a very happy thought for me! I am at a loss... (inaudible) Krishnamurti: The gentleman says he is at a loss because he is at a certain level and his wife, children and neighbour are at another level - higher or inferior. And so, he says, there is no co-operation. I carry on and they carry on. That is what we are all doing, Sir. So then, what?.. You see, we will not come to the central issue, which is, "Can I live, without conflict, with what is?" And not go to sleep, because conflict, apparently does keep one half-awake. I am asking, "Is it possible to live with what is, without conflict, and to go beyond it?" I am jealous. That is a fact. I see that in my life. I am jealous of my wife, jealous of the man who has more, more of worldly goods and of intellect - I am envious. I know how envy comes. It comes through comparison - but I do not have to analyse how envy arises. Now can I live with that, understand it, not have concepts about it? So that after looking at it, so that by understanding it, studying its structure and nature I have really understood it and so can go beyond it, so that envy never touches the mind again? You see, you are not interested in it. You really are not interested in it, are you? Questioner: Yes we are. If we were not interested we would not be here, but we are not in contact with you. Krishnamurti: Why? Why are you not in contact with the speaker and what he is saying? He has questioned very clearly, whether it is possible to live without concepts? And he took the example of envy. We know the nature and the structure of envy. Now can you live with it, and go beyond it, without conflict? So why are you not in contact with what the speaker is saying? If you are not in contact (not you, not you personally Sir), it may be because you like envy. (Inaudible) Look, Sirs - what happens? I am envious. That envy arises through measurement. I have little and you have more, or I am dull and you are very clever. I have a low position and you have a high position, you have a car and I have no car. So, through comparison, through measurement this envy arises. Right? Is not that clear? So, can I live without measurement? This is not a concept. Questioner: It is a question of reconciling ourselves to the fact that there is inequality. Krishnamurti: You are not reconciling, Sir. I am asking you a question and you are talking about a reconciliation between black and white. Then you only produce grey. (Laughter) I am asking quite a different question. Do please listen, Sir. Can you live your daily life at the office, at home, without any measurement, without any comparison? No? Why do you have comparison? Because you have been conditioned from childhood to compare. Follow this, Sirs. It has become a habit, and you keep on repeating that habit. And though that habit creates misery, confusion and all the rest of it, you don't care. You carry on with the habit. Now, what will make you aware of the nature of this habit of comparison? Somebody forcing you to be aware of the habit? If the Government were to say, "You must not be envious", you would then find other ways of being envious, more subtle ones. Religions have tried this, but you have overcome all religions. So by forcing you to be non-envious you will revolt against it, and the revolt is violence. You understand, Sirs? If I force you into a corner and say, "You must do this", then you will kick me. But if you become aware of the habit you have cultivated for forty, twenty or ten years of comparing yourself with another, then what takes place? You see, you are not interested in this. I have lost you. Because you are not interested in breaking down your habits. The Communist has his habits, and the non-Communist has his habits, and those two are going to battle with each other. That is what is going on in the world. You have your habit in believing in something, and I have no habit in belief. So, what is our relationship? None at all! So we come back to a very simple thing, and God knows why you sit here and listen. Is this becoming a habit? Questioner: We hope so. Krishnamurti: You hope it will become a habit! Questioner: We hope to get illumination. Krishnamurti: You won't. Sir, to get illumination you must have a clear mind, you must be able to look. Questioner: You said... (inaudible) Krishnamurti: No Sir, I did not say that. I did not say that. I will not go back through all that again - it is useless. You see you will not face the actuality, the "what is"! You want to live in concepts, and I do not want to live in concepts. For Heaven's sake: love is not a concept. And because you have no love, you live in concepts. (And you all shake your heads and agree and go on with your habits.) So why do you listen, why do you come here, because when we talk about these real things you are off - away at some tangent! Unfortunately, or fortunately, the speaker has talked for forty-two years. And when it comes to the point - which is to live without envy - you are not there! Questioner: The truth is we don't want to be disturbed. Krishnamurti: Then don't be disturbed. Go away! Why do you come? You are not going to get any "poonyum" out of this, poonyum being merit. Here is a fundamental issue, and please do listen. It is a fundamental issue - to live without conflict, but not go to sleep. To live without the concept requires extraordinary intelligence and a great deal of energy. And I say that when you live in concepts you are wasting energy. And you say, "Oh, that's a very nice idea", and you still live there in concepts. You say, "I am a Communist, I believe in God, I don't believe in God and so on." And so I say to myself, "What is wrong?" Questioner: There is an urge to know more. Krishnamurti: Then pick up an encyclopedia or a dictionary and you will know more. To know more truly, means to know more about oneself. Otherwise there is only ignorance. You may be technologically brilliant, but if you do not know about yourself you are an ignorant person. Here I am, and I say, "I must know why I live in concepts. I want to analyse it, to understand it." Not that I must or must not live in concepts, but I want to know why. And when I look I know why. Because my life is so shoddy, mediocre, petty, and to escape from that I go off into concepts - and I have lovely concepts, immense concepts, concepts invented by Lenin, or Trotsky or Nehru or Gandhi, it does not matter who. I escape into those but I am still angry, I am still envious, I am still bored. So, why should I live in concepts at all? So I say,"I won't, because it is stupid." I will not do it! But you don't say that. Questioner: Do we understand the meaning of the word? Krishnamurti: I'm afraid we do not understand about anything. So we will have to re-start. Too bad! Questioner: It is something which needs going into and we must think about it. Krishnamurti: Really! If I hit you, you will know about that! If you are insulted, or have pain, you do not say you will think about it. This is all so obvious, but you quote a platitude and think you have understood it. So we lose contact with each other when we are not talking about concepts. When we talk about concepts, we are in contact. When we talked about God (if I was foolish enough to talk about God), then we were both in contact. But when you come down to an actual fact - of greed, envy - then we lose contact. Do you know, Sirs, what is happening in the world? The world being India also. How India is degenerating, don't you know it? Not only here, but in the world. And probably you cannot do anything about it. At least, there can be a few who will keep the light burning. That is all. But that is up to you, Sirs. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VI CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC DIALOGUE MADRAS 5TH JANUARY 1968 'THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE' Krishnamurti: What shall we talk over together this morning? (Pause). Questioner: May we pursue what we talked about last time we met here, with regard to concepts? Can we live without concepts, beliefs? Krishnamurti: Do you not think that before we can go into that or any other question it is important to question, to question critically, not only someone else, but, what is much more important, to be critically self-aware. It seems to me much more important to question one's own motives, one's attitudes, beliefs, ways of life, habits, traditions, the way one thinks and why one thinks in that way. Because I do not see how we can have sanity if we are not aware of our own reasoning or non-reasoning, if we are not aware of our own emotional attitudes and our narrow or wide beliefs. I do not see how we can bring about any kind of sanity in our lives (sanity being a way of living which is fairly healthy) unless we are critically aware of what we are talking about, and therefore questioning everything, not accepting a thing about ourselves or others. I think if we could start from that - which does not mean that we must be sceptical about everything as this would be another form of insanity. But if we can question, then I think what we shall discover, talking it over together this morning, will have some value. Questioner: Can we continue with what you have just said? Questioner: Will you take up the subject of space and time? Questioner: Will you explain about the doctor who took L.S.D. and destroyed a space within himself, in terms of the observer and the observed? Questioner: Could we discuss envy, and its activities? Krishnamurti: Sir, if I may ask you a question - What is your deep, fundamental, lasting interest in life? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: Is that your deep fundamental interest, Sir? Rather feeble isn't it? If you skipped all these double, indirect, oblique questions which are beside the point and if you dealt with one question directly and honestly, would you know what is your fundamental, lasting, total interest? Questioner: To be free. Questioner: We want to be happy. Questioner: I am really interested in myself... Krishnamurti: ...as most of us are, interested in my progress, interested in my job, interested in my little family, getting a better position, more prestige, more power, dominating others, and so on and so on. I think it would be logical, would it not, to admit to yourselves that that is what most of us are interested in - me first, and everyone else second. Questioner: And that is very wrong. Krishnamurti: I do not think it is wrong. What is there wrong about it? You see, Sir, that is what we are doing all the time. Now let us take that fact. Most of us are interested, in the little corner in which we live, not only outwardly but inwardly. We are interested in it, but we never decently, honestly, admit that to ourselves. If we do, we are rather ashamed of it and so we add such comments as: "I do not think it is right", "It is wrong", "It does not help mankind", and all that blaa. So there it is. One is interested in oneself fundamentally and one thinks it is wrong (for various reasons, ideologically, traditionally, and so on). The actual daily fact is that one is interested in oneself, and you think it is wrong. But what you think is irrelevant, it has no validity at all. Why introduce that factor? Why say "It is wrong"? That is an idea, is it not? - it is a concept. What is is the fact, which is that one is interested in oneself. Questioner: I don't know if it's all right to ask a question. Krishnamurti: Quite right. Go ahead, Sir. Questioner: When I do something for others I feel more satisfied. I see that to be so self-concerned is not satisfactory, but to work in a school or to help another is more satisfactory than to think about oneself, which is not quite so satisfying. Krishnamurti: What is the difference? You want satisfaction -which is self-concern. Follow this out, Sir, for yourself. If you are seeking satisfaction in helping others and therefore that gives greater satisfaction, you are still concerned about yourself, about what will give you greater satisfaction. Why bring any ideological concept into it? One wants freedom because it is much more satisfying and to live a petty little life is not so satisfactory. So why have this double thinking? Why say one is satisfactory and the other is not. You understand, Sir? Why not say - I really want satisfaction, whether it is in sex, in freedom, or helping others, in becoming a great saint, or politician, or engineer, or lawyer. It is all the same process, is it not? Satisfaction in many ways, both subtle and obvious, that is what we want. Right? When we say we want freedom we want it because we think perhaps it may be terribly satisfying; and the ultimate satisfaction, of course, is this peculiar idea of self-realization. Questioner: So we must get rid of this search for satisfaction. Krishnamurti: Ah, no Sir. Wait Sir. To get rid of satisfaction is not freedom. Freedom is something entirely different; not something to be had from something. If I get rid of or free myself from satisfaction, I am freeing myself from it because I seek a much greater satisfaction. No? So why not find out why we want satisfaction? Not that "we should not", that is only a concept, a formula, and hence there is contradiction, and therefore conflict. So let us take this one thing. Most of us want, desire, search for, crave for satisfaction. Right? Questioner: I don't think so. Krishnamurti: You don't think so. Why not, Sir? Questioner: I am not interested specially in satisfaction, but I would like to know why I am dissatisfied. Krishnamurti: (Oh! my lord!) How do you know that you are dissatisfied. Because you have known satisfaction! (Laughter) Don't laugh Sirs, for goodness sake, don't laugh. This is not a clever weaving of argument, please. Why am I dissatisfied? Because I am married and that does not give me satisfaction; because I go to the temple and that does not give me satisfaction; (follow all this). I go to meetings and that means nothing; I look at trees and feel nothing; and so gradually I am dissatisfied with everything I see, or have or have felt. Which means, what? I am seeking a satisfaction in which there is no dissatisfaction at all! No? This is not a clever statement; it is obvious, isn't it? No, Sir? Look, each one of us is seeking satisfaction although he is dissatisfied. Right? Now, why do we seek satisfaction? - Not that it is right or it is wrong, but what is the mechanism of this search? (Long pause.) Do you expect me to analyse it for you? Questioner: In some spheres we have to seek satisfaction to live. Krishnamurti: Yes Sir, of course there are basic necessities; but wait, Sir, before we come to that, can we find out why we seek satisfaction? Go into it, Sir. What is satisfaction? Questioner: I think we need some of that awareness of which you speak in order to distinguish for ourselves what will give us permanent happiness. Krishnamurti: Don't just use words, but think it out a little bit, just think it out. I do not know anything about awareness - out it goes, if I may suggest it. We are not discussing that, Sir, nor are we talking about the permanent or the impermanent. We want to find out why we human beings are always seeking satisfaction. Questioner: ( The audience suggested many reasons but they were almost inaudible.) We seek satisfaction because we want to change. Krishnamurti: Wait a minute, Sirs, just a minute, Sir. Food satisfies you, doesn't it - having a good meal? Why? Because I'm hungry, and it is good to get rid of the empty feeling. Move a little higher, up to sex. Very satisfying, apparently. You are all silent! Then, having a position in which you can dominate others, that is also very satisfying, isn't it? You feel powerful, you feel you are in a position to order others to do things, and so that is very satisfactory. One seeks different ways of finding gratification -through food, sex, position, through various virtues, and so on. Why? One can understand when you want food that you feel gratified when you eat it, but why move to another level for satisfaction; and is there such a thing? I feel satisfied with food, I want varieties of food, and, if I have the money and appetite for it I get it. I also want a good position in society, a respected position, which is very gratifying because there I am secure, with a big house, a policeman at the gate, and all the rest of it. After that, I want some more of it - a bigger house and two more policemen, and so on. Now, what is this craving for gratification? You understand, Sirs, the craving, what is it? I have a craving for food and I eat it - if I can get it. But the craving for position - let us take that one thing. Most of us want position - as the best engineer, or the best lawyer, or the President of some society, or this or that. Why? Apart from the money it gives, apart from the comfort, why this craving? Questioner: I want to show to others what I can do. Krishnamurti: Which is, to make the neighbours feel envious! Questioner: (Several interjections. Inaudible) Krishnamurti: (Is that it? Wait Sir - you have not heard that other gentleman, Sir.) If you had not your position you would be nobody. Strip the Pope of his robes, or the Sannyasi of his tamasha and he would be nobody. Is that it? So are we afraid of being nobody, and that is why we want position? To be considered a great scholar, a philosopher, a teacher? If you find yourself in that position it is very gratifying - to have your name printed in the newspaper, and people coming to you and all the rest of it. Is that why we do all this? That is, inwardly we are just ordinary people with aching sorrows, conflict, fighting in the family, bitterness, anxiety and fear which is there constantly. And to have an outward position where I am regarded as a terribly respectable citizen, that is very satisfactory. Right? Why do I want this outward position, I ask, and you say "I want it because in my daily life I am just a sorry little human being." Right? Is that it? (Long pause). Questions: (Several inaudible suggestions.) Krishnamurti: What is actually taking place? We have come to a certain point, Sir, let us pursue it; this point is that one finds that one wants a position which will be gratifying because inwardly one is... just a shoddy little man. But to have a policeman at the gate gives me tremendous importance. Right? This is obvious, isn't it? We don't have to go into all that, do we? Questioner: We have to expose ourselves, Sir. Krishnamurti: I am exposing you now! You may not want to be exposed but that is the fact! - I am a sorry little entity inside, with all sorts of dogmas, beliefs in God, rituals and all that - a whirlpool of mischief and misery inwardly, and outwardly I want the policeman at the gate! Now why do I have this craving for outward position? You understand? Why? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: No Sir. Please go into it. Why do we want? What is the reason? Don't reduce it to the word "selfishness", Sir. Questioner: (Long inaudible contribution.) Krishnamurti: Sir, Sir. Look, Sir! Don't you have a craving fur position, fur power, fur prestige, to be recognised as a great man, have fame, notoriety, and so on? Have you not got this desire? Questioner: (Inaudible remark.) Krishnamurti: You see how you are escaping from this! Have you not got this desire, Sir? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: At last! Now why? Go into it, Sir. Why? Why do you crave fur a position? Don't say it is due to circumstances, that I have been put in that position by society, that I have been conditioned that way. Questioner: I desire position in the same way as when I am hungry I want food. Krishnamurti: Oh no, Sir! Oh no! You see we can't face this thing at all! Questioner: Further suggestions. (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: Do let us be serious. Throwing in all these words is so silly. You are not really thinking at all. Sir, here is a very simple question. Everybody throughout the world wants a position - whether in society, in the family, or to sit next to God, "on the right-hand of the Father". Everybody wants a position. There is a craving fur it. Why? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: No Sir! Don't throw out words. Analyse it, Sir, don't just answer! Why do you want it? Questioner: It is natural. Krishnamurti: It is natural? Oh Sir! You say one thing and then go on to another. Have you ever noticed animals, Sir? You've got a chicken yard; have you ever noticed that there is always one chicken pecking another? There is an order of pecking. So we have perhaps inherited this thing - to dominate, to be aggressive, to seek a position is a form of aggression. No? Of course it is. I mean the saint who seeks a position with regard to his saintliness is as aggressive as the chicken pecking in the yard! I don't know if you follow all this. You don't. Perhaps we have inherited this aggressive urge to dominate, that is, to have a position. Right? And what does this involve, this aggression, to have a position in society (a position which must be recognised by others, otherwise it is no position at all)? I must always sit on the platform. Why? (Pause) Do please go on with it, Sirs. I am doing all the work. Why do you have this aggression? (Audience suggests something.) No Sir. It is not a question of something lacking. Oh, how are we going to discuss with a group of people who never want to go into anything. Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: That is one of the reasons, Sir. But, let us look at this, Sir. There is aggression. Right? When I want a position in society, which is recognised by society, it is a form of aggression. Now, why am I aggressive? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: You see, you do not apply it to yourself. You do not find out, in yourself, why you are aggressive. Forget the "position in society" we have analysed that now. Why are we aggressive? Questioner: To reach what we want, what we aim at. Krishnamurti: And what do you aim at? (We have said that, Sir. We have moved away from that.) The question now is, why are we aggressive? Please go into it, Sir. The politician is aggressive, the big shots are aggressive, whether in business or in religion they are aggressive - why? Questioner: Aggressiveness arises from fear. Krishnamurti: Is that so? Maybe! Find out for yourself, Sir. You are aggressive in the family. Why? In the office, in the bus, and so on. Why are you aggressive? Don't explain it, Sir. Just find out why you are. Questioner: Why am I afraid to be nothing? Krishnamurti: Look! As the gentleman said just now, fear may be the cause of this aggression because society is so constructed that a citizen who has a position of respect is treated with great courtesy, whereas a man who has no position at all is kicked around - sent into the army and to Vietnam, to be killed. So why are we aggressive? Is it because we are frightened of being nobodies? Don't answer it, Sirs, go into it! Go into it in yourselves! Or, we are frightened because it has become a habit. Seeking a position has become a habit. We are not really frightened, but it has become a habit. I don't know if you are following this. If it is fear that makes us aggressive, that is one thing. But it may be the momentum of society that is making you aggressive. You know Sirs, they have made an experiment, putting rats, thousands of rats, in a very small room. And when they are there they lose all sense of proportion. The mother who is about to have babies, the mother rat, does not care, because the pressure of space, absence of space, the fact of so many rats living together makes them crazy. Follow this. In the same way, if people live in a very, very crowded city and have no space, it makes them also very aggressive, makes them violent. Animals do need space to hunt in; they have territorial rights, like the birds. They establish their territory and they will hunt any other animal that comes into that territory. So they have territorial rights, and sexual rights - all animals have this. And sexual rights do not have such a great importance as territorial rights. Right? Of course some of you may know all about this. So we may be aggressive because we have not enough space around us physically. Are you following all this? And this may be one of the reasons why we are aggressive. A family living in a small room, or a small house with ten of you in it, you explode, get angry about nothing. So man must have space, and because he has not enough physical space, that may be one of the reasons for aggression. And also one may be aggressive because one is frightened. Now to which category do you belong? Are you aggressive because you are frightened? Questioner: (Suggestion inaudible.) Krishnamurti: So, you are saying, guarantee my physical security and then I will not be aggressive. But is there such a thing as guaranteed security in life? And so that may be the basic reason why we are frightened - knowing that there is no such lasting security. In Vietnam there is no security. You may have a little security here but where there is war there is no security and, when an earthquake comes, it destroys everything - and so on. So, go into this yourselves, Sirs, and find out whether your aggression is born of fear, or of the fact that you are enclosed tightly, both outwardly and inwardly. Inwardly you have no freedom -intellectually you are not free, you repeat what others have said. Technological inventions, society, the community, all that is felt constantly as a pressure on you which you are not capable of meeting and therefore you explode, you feel frustrated. Now, which is it - to which category do you belong? Find out, Sirs. (Long pause.) If you are frightened, and therefore you are aggressive, how are you going to deal with fear? And if you are free of fear will you lose the pleasure of being aggressive? And knowing that you will lose the pleasure of being aggressive, you do not mind being afraid. Right? Do you follow this? (Pause.) Fear is unpleasant and aggressiveness is more pleasant. Right? And so I do not mind being a little bit afraid because aggressiveness with its pleasure balances fear. Questioner: I am aware of the difficulties of the situation. Krishnamurti: Ah, I don't know what you are aware of, Sir. Go into it. I am just asking you. So you may prefer to be aggressive, but at the same time be afraid. So you really don't mind being afraid or being aggressive. Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: Sirs, this is a Very difficult question because each one will interpret aggressiveness in his own way. But if we could face this question of fear and see if we can understand fear and see whether there is a possibility of being free from fear, then when that is gone through, then would there be aggressiveness -your kind, my kind, his kind or her kind? You follow Sir? So let us take that one thing. Is fear causing aggressiveness? Obviously it is. I am afraid of not having any belief and therefore I am aggressive about the belief I have. So fear has produced aggressiveness with regard to belief! That is simple. Right? (Are you all having an early-morning sleep, or what!) So, is it possible to be free of fear? (At last!) One only puts that question when one really wants to be free of fear. Is it possible to live without fear? It is a very complex problem. It is not a matter of saying, "Yes, we must live without fear" and make a lot of platitudes about it. But can one live without fear? What does it mean? Physically, what does it mean? We will go step by step. What does it mean physically to live without fear? Is it possible, in this society as it is constructed, in a culture of this kind, whether the culture is Communist or the present culture, or an ancient culture, is it possible to live in a society without fear? Questioner: It is not possible. Krishnamurti: Why? Most extraordinary, Sirs! When one comes to basic questions you are all very silent. Questioner: I'm only thinking of what would happen to my life. Krishnamurti: Are you afraid that if you had lasting security in a stable society, you would have no fear. (Inaudible) (Yes Sir. That is understood, Sir.) So, you will not be afraid if you can have a guarantee that the life, the daily existence you are used to will not be disturbed from the pattern you are used to. Right? And on that basis we build a society. Obviously. That is what the Communists have done. So you say it is not possible to live in a society without fear. Is that so? No? Questioner: I think it must be possible but I don't know how to do it. Krishnamurti: Ah! If you think it must be possible, that is only a concept. The fact is that one is afraid to live in a society as it is, without fear. Right? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: (We are doing that, Sir. That is what we are discussing, Sir.) One of our fears is that to live in a society one has to be aggressive. Let us for the moment accept that - that to live in a society of any kind, Communist, Capitalist, or Hindu or Moslem you have to be aggressive and therefore frightened in order to survive at all. Leave it there. Now at what other level of our existence are we afraid? I can understand that I am afraid that I may not have enough food for tomorrow and therefore I lay up stores for a month or for two days and I am going to guard it and to see that nobody steals it. And I'm afraid that the Government will come along and do something or other, and so I am afraid. I can understand that. Now are we only aggressive there, at that level. Are we only afraid at that level? Questioner: Inwardly we are also the same. Krishnamurti: What do we mean by "inwardly"? What does that mean Sir? Questioner: (Inaudible. Several comments.) Krishnamurti: So there is fear at another level. It is suggested that there is fear in relationship, and therefore we are aggressive in relationship. Now why are we afraid in relationship? (I don't know what "truthful" means, Sir.) Why are we afraid in relationship? Are you afraid of your wife, or your husband, or your neighbour, or your boss? I know it's a rather awful thing to admit that you are afraid of your wife! One is afraid in every kind of relationship. Why? Questioner: (inaudible) Krishnamurti: Why am I afraid? Please do be simple about it because it becomes very complex presently and if we are not simple at the beginning we shall not understand anything. Why am I afraid of my wife or my neighbour, or my boss (which is relationship) - why? Questioner: (Several comments, inaudible.) Krishnamurti: My dear chap you're not married! So leave it for the moment. Your calamity will come presently! Questioner: There is fear in relationship because "he" or "she" or "my boss" can withhold something from me. (Further comment inaudible.) Krishnamurti: How are you going to discuss this when you won't go step by step! Don't jump, don't conclude. Are you afraid of your neighbour, of your boss? Fear - you know. He might take away your job. He might not give you a rise, he might not encourage you. And also you are maybe afraid of your wife because she dominates, she nags, she bullies, she is not pretty. So one is afraid. Why? Because one yearns for continuity. Let us go slower than that. I am sorry to insist on going very slowly, step by step. I am afraid of my wife, why? I am afraid because - it is very simple - she bullies me and I don't like to be bullied. I am fairly sensitive and she is aggressive, and I'm tied to her through ceremony, through marriage, through children. And so I am frightened. She dominates me and I don't like it. Right Sirs? I am frightened for that reason, because I am fairly sensitive and I like to do things differently. I like to look at trees, I like to play with the children, I like to go to the office late, or do this or that, and she bullies me, and I don't like to be bullied. So I have the beginning of fear of her. Right? And also, if I retaliate and say "Don't bully me" she will withhold her sexual pleasure, my pleasure with her. So I am frightened of that. Right Sirs? Still you are all very silent about this! You are an extraordinary generation! I am frightened because she wants to pick a quarrel with me, and so on. So what shall I do? I am frightened and I am supposed to be related to her. She dominates me, she bullies me, and she orders me about, she has contempt for me. And, if I am a strong man, I have contempt for her. You know! So what shall I do? I am frightened. Do I acknowledge that fact, or do I cover it up and say "It's my karma", "It's my conditioning", you know - you complain against society and your environment. Questioner: I suppose one has to suffer in silence. Krishnamurti: Suffer in silence! You do that anyhow. Questioner: Divorce her! Krishnamurti: Divorce is rather expensive and takes too long, so what will you do? Questioner: Put up with it. Krishnamurti: Now what takes place? Follow it, Sirs. What takes place? You are frightened and you put up with it. So what is happening to you? You are frightened and you get used to this fear. You get used to the bullying, used to the environment, so gradually you become duller and duller. Gradually you lose all sensitivity. You don't look at trees which you looked at before, you never smile. So gradually you become dull. That is exactly what has happened with you gentlemen and ladies. Because you have got used to it. You have got used to this rotten society, to the filthy streets. You look neither at the filthy streets nor at the lovely sky of an evening. So, fear (your not having understood it) reduces you to dullness. What will you do, Sirs! Don't just say "Yes, you're perfectly right". The doctor has diagnosed your disease and he asks what you are going to do? You have got used to the Upanishads, the Gita, the dirt, the squalor, the bullying of the wife, the bullying of the politicians, you have become totally insensitive, dull. You may cleverly give lectures, and read and quote and all that, but inwardly you are dull. So what will you do? (Pause) No answer? Questioner: Get rid of it all. Krishnamurti: How? With a lovely gesture? Questioner: Get rid of the relationship. Krishnamurti: Walk out on her, and on the children? And fall into another trap? So what will you do, Sir? Questioner: Find out why she bullies me. Krishnamurti: She won t tell me. She has her own miseries. She has God knows what problems. She is unsatisfied, perhaps, sexually. Perhaps she is ill - Oh, a dozen things there may be. You know, she feels she must have a rest, have a holiday, have some time without her husband, away from him, take a holiday. So I can't find out from her why she bullies me. I have to deal with myself, first. Gosh. You people are so... So, what shall I do? Questioner: Resist her. Krishnamurti: I can't do that. Questioner: Try to reconcile. Krishnamurti: Oh my God! She keeps to her character and I keep to mine. So what shall I do? Questioner: You become indifferent. Krishnamurti: That is what you have already done. You are completely indifferent to everything - to the trees, to the beauty, to the rain, to the clouds, to the dirt, to the wife, to the children. You are completely indifferent. Questioner: Maybe we have to doubt everything that we have accepted up to now. Krishnamurti: Look Sir, it's a much more serious problem than just this verbal exchange. Because you have become indifferent, callous - through fear, through bullying by the Gods, the Upanishads, the Gita, by the politician, by the wife. You have become dull, haven't you? So how do you awaken to this dullness and throw it out? You understand my question? I have been made dull by my wife, by the repetitions of the blasted sacred books, by the society in which I live, I have become completely indifferent. I don't care what happens to me or what happens to others. I have become callous, hard. I recognise that. That is a fact. You may not recognise it. You may say, "Well I may have little spots here and there which are fairly sensitive". Those little spots have no value at all, when the major field is dull. So, what shall I do? I recognise that as a fact. And the question is not how to get rid of it! I don't condemn it. I say, "That is a fact." So what shall I do? Well, Sirs. What shall I do? Questioner: I feel helpless. Krishnamurti: Then you cannot do anything, and then you have the whole state of India as it is! Now I want to do something; I really do. You, your Gods, your religious books, society, the culture in which you have grown up, all these have made me incredibly callous and indifferent. So what shall I do? Well, Sirs. What shall I do? Questioner: Break with the whole thing. Krishnamurti: Break? I'm afraid to break, am I not? First of all, am I conscious, am I aware that I am indifferent? Are you, Sirs? (What a generation you are!) (Long pause.) All right, Sirs, I will go through it. I have become callous, and I see the reasons for this in my wife, my family, overpopulation, the enormous weight of ten thousand years of traditions, the endless rituals, the squalor inside the house and outside the house, and so on. I see the reasons why the mind has been made dull, through education and so on. That's a fact. Now what shall I do? First of all, I do not want to live that way. Right? I cannot live that way. It is worse than an animal. (Oh! you are not interested.) Questioner: Please go on. Krishnamurti: So first I see the cause, and the effect, and I see it is impossible to live that way. Now what makes me say, It is impossible to live that way"? Please follow all this. (Sirs, please don't cough.) This requires great attention. What makes me say, "I must not live that way"? (Long pause.) I am insensitive. If it is painful and I want to change, then I am changing because I think something else will give me greater pleasure. (Oh! you don't see all this!)I want to change because I see that a mind that is so dull is really not existing and there must be change. If I change because it is painful - follow this, please - if I change because it is painful then I am pursuing pleasure. Right? And the pursuit of pleasure has been the cause of this indifference. This indifference has been caused because I have sought pleasure -pleasure in the family, in the Gods, in the Upanishads, Koran, Bible, in the Establishment. And all that has reduced me to this -indifference. The origin of the movement was pleasure, and if I revolt against this it will again be the pursuit of pleasure! Are you following all this? I have realized something! I have realized that if I change with a motive of pleasure I shall be back in the same circle. Please, Sirs, do understand this - with your hearts, not with your silly little minds. Understand this with your hearts -that when you have started to seek pleasure you must end up in catastrophe, which is dullness. If you break away from that dullness because you want a different kind of pleasure then you are back in the same circle. So I say, "Look what I'm doing!" So I have to be very watchful of pleasure. I'm not going to deny it, because if I deny it I am seeking another, greater pleasure. So I see that pleasure reduces the mind to habits which bring about complete dullness. I hang up that picture on the wall because it has given me great pleasure. I have looked at it in the museum or in the gallery and I say, "What a lovely picture that is!" I buy it, if I have the money, and hang it up in my room. I look at it every day - and say "How nice". Then I get used to it. You understand? So the pleasure of looking at it every day has brought about a habit which now prevents me from looking. I don't know if you see this. Like sex! So habit, getting used to something, is the beginning of indifference. Are you following all this? You get used to the squalor of the next village as you pass it every day. The little boys and the little girls making messes on the road - the dirt, the squalor, the filth. You get used to it, and then you have got used to it. In the same way you have got used to the beauty of a tree, you simply do not see it any more. So, I have discovered that where I pursue pleasure there must be, deeply in it, the root of indifference. Oh! do please see this! There are no roots of heaven in pleasure, there are only roots of indifference and pain. So what shall I do if I see that very clearly? Pleasure is such an enticing thing! You understand? I look at the tree: it is a great delight. To see a dark cloud full of rain and a rainbow, and this seems a tremendous thing. That is a pleasure, that is a delight, that is a tremendous enjoyment. Why can't I leave it there. You understand? Why do I have to say, "I must store it up"? (I don't know if you are following all this.) Then when I see the next day the dark cloud, full of rain, and the leaves dancing in the wind, the memory of yesterday spoils the sight of it. I have become dull. So what shall I do? I cannot deny pleasure, but this does not mean I indulge in pleasure. So I understand now that pleasure inevitably breeds indifference I see it. I see it as a fact as I see the microphone - not as an idea, not as a theory, not as a concept, but as an actual fact. Right? So now I am watching the operation of pleasure. You follow? The process of pleasure is what I am watching. As, "I like you" and "I do not like someone else", which is again in the same pattern. All my judgments are based on likes and dislikes. I like you because you are respectable. I do not like you because you are not respectable. You are a Muslim, or a Hindu, or you have sexual perversions and I prefer the other perversions - and so on. You follow? Like and dislike. So I watch it. And like and dislike is again a habit, which I have cultivated through pleasure. The mind now is watching the whole movement of pleasure, and you cannot watch it if you condemn it. Are you following this? So what has happened to my mind? Watch it, Sir. What has happened to my mind? (Oh! you just throw out words. You don't know what you are saying.) (That's right, Sir.) It has become much more sensitive. Right? Therefore muchmore intelligent. Now that intelligence is operating - not my intelligence or your intelligence, just intelligence. I do not know if you are following this. Before, there was indifference and I did not care. The mind did not care two pins whether I lived like a pig or not. And I realized I must change. And I see that to change to a greater pleasure is to come back to the same filth. So the mind has realized something, seen something. Not because somebody has spoken of it - but it has seen something very clearly - that where there is the pursuit of pleasure, this must inevitably breed indifference. So the mind has sharpened. And it is watching pleasure in every movement. And you can only watch anything freely, without reservation, condemnation, or judgment. So the mind is watching. And it says "What is wrong with me, why can't I look at a tree, why can't I see the beautiful face of a child or a woman?" I can't shut my eyes - blindly go running away to the Himalayas. It is there. Right? So what shall I do? Not look? Turn my head when I pass a woman? (Which the Sannyasis do, they know all the old tricks and all that.) So what shall I do? So I look. You understand? I look. I look at that tree, the beauty of the branch, the beauty of the curve of the tree. I look at a beautiful face, well proportioned, the smile, the eyes. I look. Follow this. When I look, there is no pleasure. Have you noticed it? Have you got it? Have you understood what we are talking about? When I look, where is there room for pleasure? I don't look with fear, saying "My God! Am I caught in the trap of pleasure!" But I look, whether it is at the tree, the rainbow, the fly, or a beautiful woman, or the man. I look. In that look there is no pleasure. The pleasure only arises when thought comes in. Now without understanding this whole process - the saints, the ugly, immature human beings called saints, the Rishis, the writers, they have condemned this. Don't look, they say. And so - look. And when you see very clearly there is neither pleasure nor displeasure. It is there. The beauty of the face, the walk, the dress, the beauty of the tree. A second later thought comes in and says, "That was a beautiful woman". And all the imagery, sex, intimations, thrills, begin. Are you following all this, Sirs, and what are you going to do about it? What happens? Thought comes in, and what is important now is not pleasure, because that is understood, there is noth- ing to it. Look what has happened. The mind has become extraordinarily sensitive, and therefore highly disciplined, highly disciplined but not through an imposed discipline. By watching that I am callous, indifferent - watching it, and watching it - the mind has become sensitive. Watching is the discipline. I wonder if you have got this! In this kind of discipline there is no suppression; there is no suppression in the discipline that is necessary in order to see. So the mind has become highly sensitive, highly disciplined, and therefore austere - not the austerity in regard to clothes and food, all that is too immature and childish. And the mind now says it is watching pleasure and it sees that the continuity of pleasure is created by thought. Right? So I have entered into a totally different dimension. You understand? A dimension in which I have to work very hard and which nobody is going to tell me about. I can tell you, but you have to work for yourself. So I say - "Why does thought come into this at all?" I look at that tree, I look at a woman, I see that man going by in a rich car, a nice car, driven by a chauffeur, and I say "All right". But why does thought come in? Why? (Long pause) (Audience makes a suggestion.) No Sir, no Sir. I haven't learnt the art of looking. Do listen to this. I haven't learnt it. When I said "I see indifference, callousness" I had not really seen it. Seeing it - not changing callousness, but just to see it. So now, I am asking myself, "Why does thought come into the picture at all?" Why can't I just look at that tree, or that woman, or that car? Why? Why does thought come into this? Questioner: Memory comes as a barrier. Krishnamurti: Ask yourself the question, Sir, and don't just say "Memory comes as a barrier". You have just heard somebody else say that. You heard me say that a dozen times, and you repeat and throw back those words at me. They have no meaning to me any more. I am asking quite a different question. I am asking why thought comes into it at all. (Suggestion from audience.) Ask yourself, Sir, and find out the answer. Why this constant interference of thought? You understand Sir? It is very interesting if you go into it for yourself. At present you cannot look at anything without thought, without an image, without a symbol. Why? (Long pause) Do you want me to answer it? The gentleman sits very comfortably and says "Yes". "Please answer it, will you?" And it's not going to make a pennyworth of difference to him. (That's right, and it has become a habit. For the last fifty years, doing whatever you have done.) If it is a habit, then what shall I do? Do I see the habit as an idea or actually as habit - Do you see the difference? If you do then you must find out. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VI CHAPTER 3 3RD PUBLIC DIALOGUE MADRAS 9TH JANUARY 1968 'TIME, SPACE AND THE CENTRE' Krishnamurti: What shall we consider together this morning? Questioner: What is psychological memory, and how is it imprinted on the brain? Questioner: Will you go into the subject of pleasure and thought? Questioner: What is the concept of life, and of this world? Krishnamurti: Do you want to discuss that? "What is the concept of life and of this world?" And also, what is the thinker, and thought... What do you say, Sirs, I don't mind what we discuss. Questioner: Fan we continue talking about thought? The last talk ended with the problem of time and space. Questioner: Could we talk a little more, explain more, about time, space and the centre, which we were talking about the other day? Questioner: Why is it we want to discuss something from "the other day"? That is over. Krishnamurti: Perhaps if we discuss this question of a concept of life, and living, we shall come upon the question of time, space and the centre. I think that all the other questions will be included in that. What is the concept of life? What do we mean by concept, the word? To conceive, to imagine, to bring out. A conceptual world is a world of ideas, formulas, a world of theories, a world of imaginative ideological formation. That is what we mean, don't we, when we talk about concepts? A conceptual world, an ideological world. First of all, what is its place in our relations with others, in the context of living? What is the relation between the conceptual world, which we have more or less described or verbally explained, what is the relationship between that, and actual daily living? Is there any relationship at all? I have toothache; that is an obvious fact. And the concept of not having toothache is an unreality. The fact is, I have it. The other is a fictitious thing, an idea. Now what relationship has the reality, the "what is", the actual daily living, to the formula, the concept? Has it any relationship? You believe, at least some of you, the Hindus, believe that there is the Atman. (We are on a touchy subject.) That there is something permanent. That is an idea, a theory, a concept, is it not? No? Shankara or the Vedantas or some bird said that there is this Atman, or whatever it is, the spiritual entity. That is just an idea, isn't it? Questioner: Much more than that. Krishnamurti: Much more? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: It is said that there is some permanent thing... Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: (I do not assume, Sir.) There is this theory, Sir, the concept that there is a permanent state, a reality within each one, God, or whatever you like to call it. The Christians, the Muslims all say so, and different people use different words. Here you use a series of words. Now, is that not a concept which has no reality whatsoever? Questioner: Now it is a concept, but in the course of time we hope to discover that thing for ourselves. Krishnamurti: When you postulate that there is a certain thing, a something, then you will inevitably discover it! Psychologically, the process is very simple. But why state anything at all? Questioner: I am in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, but I have never seen her. Although I have not seen her it is a fact that she is beautiful. Krishnamurti: Oh, come off it, Sir. It's not a bit like that. This will lead to cuckoodom. We have ideologies, concepts - the ideal of perfect man, the ideal of what should be, how the liberated person should act, think, feel, live and so on. But these are all concepts, aren't they? Questioner: Surely what you call "what is" is also a concept! Krishnamurti: Is it? When you have actual toothache, is that a concept: when you are actually miserable because you have no job, no food, is that a concept? When someone dies whom you love and you are in great sorrow, is that a concept? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: What! A toothache is unreal? Where do you all live? When death comes in old age, or through an accident you break a leg, or whatever it is - is that theoretical, problematical? Is it a concept? Sir, we are dealing now with concepts. A concept of life. Why do you want concepts? Questioner: To qualify life. Krishnamurti: Why should I qualify life? I live, I suffer. Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: That's just it. "How do you go about it, to conceive life?" Why do you want to conceive life; about what things should be like? What is the reality about life, you ask. The reality of life is there, it is misery. There is pain, there is pleasure, there is despair, there is agony. Questioner: They are only apparent. Krishnamurti: What do you mean, "only apparent"? Oh, you mean it is an illusion! You mean that there is nothing like pleasure, pain, war? That this is a lovely world? (Laughter). When they take away your job you say there is no such thing, do you! When you have no food, you say that that is an illusion, do you? No? Then what are you talking about? You say it is not real? What do you mean? You say a concept is a means to an end? Really this is a most extraordinary world. What are we all talking about! We very carefully analysed that word "concept", what it means. Right? The gentleman says many people need the concept. Well keep it, Sir, keep it. Questioner: I did not say that. I said many people need to understand the word "concept". Krishnamurti: We explained it just now. So let us get on with it. We asked what relationship the concept has with daily living. Daily living is the daily grind of going to the office, the daily grind of the torture of loneliness, misery and so on. What relationship has that, which is the actual, which is what is, which is what is going on every day in our lives, what has that to do with the concept? Questioner: Can I say something? Krishnamurti: Delighted, Sir. You take the field. Questioner: (Long speech. Inaudible.) Krishnamurti: Ah! He says if we really understood the concept, life would be different, and he quoted some other gentleman, I do not know whom. Why should I understand concepts? When I am full of misery, when I have no food, when my son has died, when I am deaf, dumb, stupid - what has the concept got to do with all that? Concept being the word, the idea, the theory. What has that to do with my aching loneliness? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: What Sir, what Sir! I think we must get on with it, otherwise we shall get nowhere. We are unwilling to face facts and we spin around with a lot of words. Reality is not a concept; reality is my daily life. Right? The reality is that I am in torture, and pain is not a theory, is not a concept, it is an actual process in life. So I say to myself - why do I have concepts about pain? It is such a waste to have concepts about pain. So I do not want concepts, I want to understand pain. Right? The problem then is - what is pain? There is physical pain, such as toothache, stomachache, headache, and disease, and also there is pain at a different level, at the psychological level. Now, how am I to be free of that? Free of inward pain. I can go to a doctor to be cured of physical pain. But there is psychological pain in the sense that I suffer. What do I suffer? What does one have pain about, Sir? Questioner: Loneliness and fear. Krishnamurti: Right! Loneliness and fear. And I want to be free of it, because this loneliness and fear are always a burden, they darken my thinking, my outlook, my vision, my way of acting. So, my problem is how to be free from fear, not from any theory; that has gone overboard. I do not accept any theory about anything. So, how do I get rid of fear? Will a concept help me to get rid of fear? It is what you were saying earlier, Sir; but will having a concept about fear help me to get rid of that fear? You say "Yes", you say "it is a scientific thought", "it is a basis for reality", it is a "logical conclusion". Do take a simple example, Sir, and work it out for yourself. Don't introduce scientific, logical and biological facts. There is fear; will a concept of no-fear help you get rid of fear? Sir, don't theorize about it. You have a fear, haven't you? No? Don't just throw words about. You have fear, don't you? Will a concept help you to get rid of that fear? Do think it out, Sir; go into it. Don't go back into some theory, Sir. Do please stick to one thing. There is fear. You are afraid of your wife; you are afraid of death, afraid you might lose your job. Will any theory, concept, help you to get rid of those fears? You can escape from them. If you are afraid of death you can escape from that fear by believing in reincarnation, but fear is still there. You don't want to die, though you may believe in all kinds of stuff, the fact is that fear is still there. Concepts do not help to get rid of fear. Questioner: They may gradually help us to be free. Krishnamurti: Gradually? By that time you will be dead. Sirs, don't theorize, for God's sake. These useless brains that theorize! Questioner: Is it not escaping also to try and get rid of fear? Krishnamurti: Oh, how childish we are! You can escape from your wife, but your wife is still at home. Questioner: You can change your way of life. Krishnamurti: Sirs, do please let us be simple about this, you know what fear is, don't you? You know what violence is, don't you? Will a theory of non-violence help you to get rid of violence? Take that one simple fact. You are violent; that is a reality. In your daily life you are violent, and will that violence be understood through a concept, the concept of non-violence? (Long pause.) Questioner: (Inaudible long speech.) Krishnamurti: What are you saying, Sir! We are speaking English! Do you understand English, Sir? We are talking about violence. Have you ever been violent, Sir? Questioner: Sometimes. Krishnamurti: Good. Now did you get rid of violence by a concept? Questioner: Seeing that one is violent one tells oneself to be calm. Krishnamurti: I wonder if we are talking the same language. I give it up! You go on, Sir. Questioner: (Continues inaudible statement.) Krishnamurti: All right, Sir. You win. Questioner: (Further inaudible speech.) Krishnamurti: Thank God, Sir, you don't rule the world. You are losing time. You are wasting time. You are living in a world which is so unreal. Questioner: (Continues to harangue. Inaudible.) Krishnamurti: That is what we are saying, Sir. Face the fact itself. And you can only face the fact if you have no theories about the fact. Right? And apparently you gentlemen of the older generation do not want to face the fact. You like to live in a world of concepts. Please live there, Sirs. Now let us proceed. The question is, is it possible for the mind to be free of fear? Now what is fear? We feel afraid. (We are coming back to your question, Sir.) (Not your question, Sir. You want to live in a world of theories; live there. I am answering this other gentleman.) You ask who is the entity or the being that says "I am afraid"? You have been jealous, haven't you, envious? And who is the person who says "I am envious"? Questioner: The ego. There is a sense of the ego. Krishnamurti: Now who is the ego? Sir, do analyse it. You know what analysis is? Go into it, step by step. Who is it? Think it out Sir, and don't quote Shankara, Buddha or X Y Z ! When you say "I am afraid", who is the "I"? Questioner: (Several inaudible suggestions.) Krishnamurti: Don't quote. Do think it out, Sirs. Questioner: Is it not thought that conceives of itself as being permanent at the moment it is envious? Krishnamurti: Now, what is that moment when that thought regards itself as permanent? I am envious. I am conscious that I am envious. Now who is that entity, that thought which says "I am envious"? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: Oh please, Sir! You do not analyse it; you just make a statement! Do go into it, Sir. You say that at that moment, when that thought makes the statement "I am jealous", that thought, for the time being, thinks itself permanent. Right? Now, why does that thought think it is permanent? Is it not that the thought has recognised a similar feeling which it has had before? Go slowly, step by step. I am envious. You know what envy is - I become aware that I am envious, now I am asking - "Who is the entity that has become aware? And how does that entity or that thought know that it is `envy'?" That thought knows that it is envy because it has felt envy. The memory of previous envy comes up and the person who feels it says, "Here it is again." Right? Here is the envy which I have had before. Otherwise you would think of it quite differently. Because thought was able to recognise the feeling, it was able to call it "envy". It had experienced the same feeling before. So it says ("it" being thought)... (Interruption from audience.) Sirs, I know it is very complex so we must go slowly step by step. (Sirs, would you mind getting the coughing over - all of you at once.) (Laughter) This is a very difficult question to go into and u jess you give it your fall attention you cannot understand its very intricate and subtle nature. We say - first of all there is envy; one becomes conscious of that envy; then thought says, "I have had that feeling before." Otherwise you would not be able to recognise that feeling which you have called "envy". What one has had as an experience before is given permanency, continuity through recognition of what is taking place now. So, thought has continuity because thought is the response of memory. Right? That thought, which is the outcome of yesterday's memory says, "Here it is again; it is envy". By calling it "envy" and recognising it, it has given it greater vitality. Thought is the response of the bundle of memories which constitute tradition, knowledge, experience and so on, and that thought recognises the feeling which it has now, "envy". So, thought is the centre, or the memory is the centre! Right? (Pause) Sirs, your centre says "It is my house, I live there, it belongs to me legally" and so on. You have certain memories, pleasurable and painful memories. The whole bundle of them is the centre, isn't it? The centre being violence, ignorance, ambition and greed - it has pain, despair and so on. That centre creates space around itself. Does it not? No? (Interruption). (Go slowly, Sirs... An interval?... Ah, the gentleman wants me to repeat what I have said. Sorry, Sir, I cannot repeat it, I cannot remember what I said.) We will put it differently. There is this microphone. Round it there is space. That is the centre, and it has space around it, and it exists in space; as this room has space within it. But also this room has space outside it. So the centre has a little space in itself, and also it has space outside it. (I am not talking of creation. Just listen quietly.) Please observe this, Sir, please go into it, please observe it completely, not merely intellectually. It is more fun if you actually go into it. But if you theorize about it then the discussion can go on indefinitely and it leads nowhere. Here is the centre, and the centre is a bundle of memories. (It is so fascinating, Sirs. Please go into it.) The centre is a bundle of memories, a bundle of traditions, and the centre has been brought about by tension, through pressure, through influence. The centre is the result of time, within the field of culture - Hindu culture, Muslim culture, and so on. So that is the centre. Now that centre, because it is a centre, has space outside it, obviously. And because of the movement, it has space in itself. If it had no movement it would have no space. It would be nonexistent. Anything that is capable of movement must have space. So there is space, outside the centre and in it. And the centre is always seeking wider space, to move more widely. To put it differently, the centre is consciousness. That is, the centre has the borders which it recognises as "the me". As long as there is a centre, it must have a circumference. Of course. And it tries to extend the area of the circumference - by drugs, which is now called the "psychedelic expansion of the mind" - through meditation, through various forms of will, and so o-n. It tries to extend the space it is aware of as consciousness, to make it grow wider and wider and wider. But, as long as it is a centre its space must always be limited. Right? So as long as there is a centre, space must always be confined - like a prisoner living in a prison. He has freedom to walk in the yard but he is always a prisoner. He may get a larger yard, he may get a better building, more comfortable rooms, with bathrooms and all the rest of it, but he is still limited. As long as there is a centre, there must be the limitation of space, and therefore the centre can never be free! It is like a prisoner saying "I am free", within the prison walls. He is not free. Many people may realize unconsciously that there is no such thing as freedom within the field of consciousness, with a centre, and therefore they ask whether it is possible to extend consciousness, expand consciousness - by literature, by music, by art, by drugs, by various processes. But as long as there is a centre, the observer, the thinker, the watcher, whatever he does will be within the prison walls. Right Sir? Please don't say "Yes". Because there is distance between the border and the centre, time comes in, because he wants to go beyond it, transcend it, push it farther away. I don't know if you follow this? Sir, we are not dealing with theories, but if you do this actually inside yourself you will see the beauty of this thing. Questioner: Would you go into the tendency to expand. Krishnamurti: You know what it means, to expand. A rubber band, you can stretch it, but if you stretch it beyond a certain point, it breaks. (Yes Sir. It will break beyond a certain point). I feel, living in Madras in a little house, that there is no space there. With my family, with my worries, with my office, my traditions - it is too deadly petty, and I want to break through it. There again is the desire to expand. And when society presses me in, drives me into a certain corner, I explode - which is again a revolt in order to expand. And when one lives in a small flat in a very crowded street and there is no open country to breathe in and no opportunity to go there, I become violent. The animals do this. They have territorial rights because they want space in which to hunt, and they prevent anyone else coming into that area. Right, Sir? So, everything demands expansion - trade, insects, animals and human beings, they all must have space. Not only outwardly, but inwardly. And the centre says, "I can expand by taking a drug." But you don't have to take a drug to have an experience of this kind of expansion. I don't have to take a drink to know what drunkenness is! I know what drunkenness is, I see it! I don't have to take a drink! Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: No Sir, please Sir, don't bring in other things. This is very complex Sir. If you go slowly into it, you will understand it. The centre, being the prisoner of its own limitation, wants expansion. It seeks expansion through identification - with God, with an idea, with an ideal, with a formula, with a concept. Please follow this, Sir! And it thinks it can live differently, at a different level, though it is living in a miserable prison. So concepts become extraordinarily important to a prisoner, because he knows he cannot escape. And the centre being thought - we examined that - then thought tries to expand by identification with something - with the nation, with the family, with the group, with culture - you know, expand, expand. But it is still living in prison! As long as there is a centre there is no freedom: right? (Don't agree Sir. For you all it is just a theory, and one theory is as good as another.) So, see what it does! It invents time as a means of escape. I will gradually escape from this prison. Right? I will practise, I will meditate, I will do this and won't do that. Gradually, tomorrow, tomorrow, next life, the future. It has not only created space which is limited, but also it has created time! And it has become a slave to a space and a time of its own. Ah! Do you see this, Sirs? Questioner: How does memory... (inaudible) Krishnamurti: It is very simple, Sir. You asked that question before. It is very simple if you look at it for yourself. Somebody hits you, insults you, and you have a memory of that. I hit you, and you are hurt, you are insulted, you are made little and you dislike it, and that remains in your brain, in your consciousness, the memory of me insulting you or flattering you. So the memory remains and the next time you meet me you say to yourself, "That man insulted me", "That man flattered me". The memory responds when you meet me again. That's all, it's very simple. Don't waste time on it. Questioner: Where are we, after these discussions and talks? Krishnamurti: I'm afraid I cannot tell you. If you understand what is being said and live it then you will be in a totally different world. But if you don't live it, daily, then you will just be living as you are. That's all. So first the problem is that as long as there is a centre, and we know what we mean by "the centre", there must be time and limited space. That is a fact, as you can observe it in your daily life. You are bound to your house, to your family, to your wife, and then to the community, to society, and then to your culture and so on and so on. So this whole thing is the centre - the culture, the family, the nation - that has created a boundary, which is consciousness, which is always limited. And it tries to expand the boundary, to widen the walls, but the whole is still within the prison. So that is the first thing, that is what is taking place actually, in our daily life. Then the question arises (please listen, don't answer theoretically because that has no value), is it possible not to have a centre and live in the world? That is the real problem. Is it possible not to have a centre and yet live completely, fully, in this world? What do you say? Questioner: One could be just a point. Krishnamurti: But a point is still a centre! No, Madame, don't answer this question. If you just answer it means you have not gone into it. Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: That's it. I knew you'd say that, Sir; but you are still within the circumference. You don't... You keep on... Sir, have you ever been to prison? Not you, Sir, personally. Have you just visited a prison? If you have visited a prison you will have seen that they are expanding the walls. Bigger rooms, bigger prisons, more and more. But you are still within a prison. And we are like that. We live within the prison of our own thinking. With our misery, our culture, saying "I'm a Brahmin, a non-Brahmin, I hate this, I like this and I do not like that, I love this and not that", and so on. We live within this prison, I may expand it a little bit but it's still a prison. So this question arises (please don't answer, because this is a very fundamental question, which you cannot possibly answer glibly by a few words) you have to find out in life, in daily living. So we are asking: "Is it possible to live in this world, completely doing your job, doing everything with tremendous vitality, without a centre, knowing what the centre is, and knowing that to live in this world you need memory?" You see this, Sir? You need memory to go to the office, to function there. If you are a merchant you need a memory to cheat others or not, whatever you do. You need memory, and yet to be free of the memory which creates the centre. See the difficulty?.. So what will you do? (Interjection.) Sir, please don't answer, you're back to theories. When I've got a toothache, stomachache, or I'm hungry and I come to your house, what do you give me? Theories? Or chase me out? Here is a tremendous problem. It is not for India alone. It's a problem round the world, a problem of every human being. Now, is there a method to get rid of the centre? You follow? A method? Is there? Method belongs to time, obviously, and therefore a method is no good, whether it is the method of Shankara, Buddha, your pet Guru, or no Guru, or you invent it. Time has no value and yet, if you are not free from that centre you are not free. Therefore you must always suffer. So a man who says, "Is there an ending to sorrow?" must find the answer to this - not in a book, not in some theory. One must find, see it. Right? So if there is no method, no system, no leader, no guru, no saviour - all introducing time - then, what will happen, what will you do? To have come to this point, what has happened to your mind? What has happened to your mind which has investigated this, very carefully, not jumped to conclusions, nor theories, nor saying "It is marvellous; but when it has done this, actually, step by step, has come to this point, put this question, what has happened to such a mind? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: Oh no. Please Sir. What has happened to your mind, if you have done this? No, no. It is something that has happened to it. No you're only guessing, Sir. Don't guess. It's not a guessing game. Your mind has become highly active, hasn't it? Because to analyse so carefully, never missing, a point, logically, step by step, you have to exercise your brain, you have to exercise logic, you have to exercise discipline. So the mind has become extraordinarily sensitive, hasn't it? The mind, by observing what it is doing, what it has done, which is building up the centre, by merely observing, the mind has become extraordinarily alert. Right? You have done nothing to make it alert, but by merely watching the movement of thought, step by step, it has become extraordinarily clear. So, being clear, it puts the question, "How is the centre to disappear?" When it has put that question it is already seeing the whole structure of the centre. Seeing, actually visually, as I see that tree, I also see this. Questioner: What is the entity which sees the action? Krishnamurti: Sir, I said the mind... You go back to something, Sir, I'm awfully sorry but we can't go back. It is no good going back to something which you have not actually lived as we went along. You are inactive but think you have become active by putting a question like, "Who is the entity that sees?" But you haven't actually understood, observed, how the centre is formed -through memory, through tradition, through the culture one lives in, including religion and all the rest of it. The centre has been formed through economic pressures, and so on. That centre creates space, consciousness, and it tries to expand. That centre is saying to itself (nobody else is asking it) "I realize I am living in a prison, and obviously to be free from pain, sorrow, there must be no centre." It sees this. The centre itself sees it - not somebody else above or below telling the centre. So the centre says, seeing itself, "Is it possible for me not to be?" (Long pause.) That means that we have to go back to this question of seeing. Unless you understand that, you can't come to it. Questioner: (Inaudible suggestion.) Krishnamurti: Ah, no, no, no. Seeing, without emotionalism, sentimentality, like and dislike. Which does not mean that you see something without feeling. Questioner: (Inaudible interjection.) Krishnamurti: That is what you all do, Sir. You see that dirt on the road every day - and I have been here for the last twenty or thirty years, and I see that squalor every day. Of course you see it without feeling. If you felt, you would do something about it. If you felt the rottenness of the corruption in this country you would do something. But you don't. If you saw the inefficiency of the Government, if you saw all the linguistic divisions which are destroying this country, if you felt it, if you were passionate about it, you would do something. You don't. Which means you don't see it at all. Questioner: (Inaudible interjection.) Krishnamurti: Ah, no, no. "You see the bigger life" - what's the "bigger life"? You see how you want to twist everything to something else! You can't look at anything in a straight way, simply, honestly. So, unless you do it, we can sit here and discuss until Doomsday. What is seeing, is it this, is it that? But if you really saw the tree, without space and time, and therefore without the centre, then, when there is no centre and you look at the tree, there is vast space, immeasurable space. But first, one must learn, or watch, or hear how to look. But you won't do it. You won't begin the very complex thing called life, very simply. Your simplicity is to put on a loin cloth and travel third class and do so-called meditation, or whatever you do. But that is not simplicity. Simplicity is to look at things as they are - to look. To look at the tree, without the centre. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VI CHAPTER 4 4TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE MADRAS 12TH JANUARY 1968 'A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION' Krishnamurti: What shall we talk over this morning together? Questioner: Is not love a method? Questioner: Am I right in assuming, Sir, that time and spaceare one of our problems? Questioner: What is the relation between memory and thought? Questioner: We must have memory in order to function in daily existence, technological developments and so on, but is memory not also an impediment? Krishnamurti: I don't know if you have heard the previous questions - I had better repeat them. First, has love a method? Questioner: Is not love a method? Krishnamurti: Is not love a method? - a lovely idea isn't it? What was the other? Questioner: The relation between thought and memory. Krishnamurti: And your question, Madame, was - memory is necessary in daily existence, in technological development and so on, but is not memory also an impediment? Any more things that you want to throw in? Questioner: We want to be aware of every thought, feeling and action, but thought, feeling and action go on being coloured and then are suppressed when the mind is silent. How can that take place? Krishnamurti: Is that really what you are all interested in? Questioner: We have disorder in our daily life - how are we to go about bringing order? Krishnamurti: We have disorder in daily life, how are we to set about bringing order? Is that right, Sir? Questioner: Or do we have to wait for a change to come of its own accord? Questioner: What is clear thinking? Krishnamurti: All right. Let's take that up - shall we? And we can answer your questions and bring them all in. Is that all right? What is clear thinking? Shall we discuss that? And relate it, if we can, to our daily living. What is clear thinking? Is thinking ever clear? We had better not go too quickly. First of all, let's find out what we mean by clarity, and what we mean by thinking. What do we mean by clarity? Clear - when you look through the water on a lake and see the bottom of that lake you see everything very clearly, the pebbles, the fish, the ripples on the water and so on. And you see very clearly, in bright light, the shape of the tree, the leaf, the branch, the flower - what do we mean by clarity? Questioner: A direct impression. Krishnamurti: Oh! no. A definite outlined impression, is that it? Questioner: Complete understanding. Krishnamurti: Clarity means complete understanding. We haven't come to that level yet. We are talking about what we mean by that word "clear"? Questioner: Free of any obstruction. Questioner: To see things as they are, actually see things as they are. Questioner: To see without space. Questioner: Sir, sometimes we don't get clarity if we look at the moon and a cloud at the same time we see the moon moving and not the clouds. Krishnamurti: Sir, we are talking about a word, the meaning of that word, its semantics. Questioner: More details. Questioner: I think it has something to do with light, Sir, seeing. Krishnamurti: Sir, would you mind just waiting a minute to examine this before we say anything else. What do we mean by the word "clear"? I see you clearly. I see the trees, the stars of an evening, very clearly. Questioner: Without obstruction. Krishnamurti: Without obstruction. When the eye can see everything very, very clearly. The seeing - that is what we mean, when there is no obstruction, no barrier, no screen, no fog, and if your eyes are short-sighted you put on glasses to see more clearly into the distance and so on. Clarity - right - is that clear? I think we are clear as to the meaning of that word. Then what do we mean by thinking? Questioner: Reasoning. Krishnamurti: Thinking Sir, what does it mean? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: Sir, look. The speaker is asking you a question. What is thinking? (Interruption from audience) Krishnamurti: The speaker is asking you a question: what is thinking? (More interruptions) Krishnamurti: The speaker is asking you: what is thinking? And you don't even give space and time to find out what thinking is. A question is being put to you, it is a challenge to you. And you bubble over! You don't say, "Now how am I to find out what thinking is? How does thinking take place? What is the origin or the beginning of thinking?" It is a chal- lenge and you have to respond to it. And to respond to it you have to (if you want to respond to it adequately) you have to examine what thinking is, how it happens. The speaker asks you - what is thinking? And what does the mind do when it receives this challenge? Do you search? Questioner: What we are doing now. Krishnamurti: Do listen for a minute. You will have your chance, Sir. Give the poor speaker a chance. When that question is put to you what is the operation that your mind goes through? Where do you find the answer to that question? Questioner: Mind. Krishnamurti: Sir, watch it, think it out, go into it. I ask you where you live or what your name is - your response is immediate, isn't it? Why is it immediate? Because you have repeated your name umpteen times, thousands of times, and you know where you live. So between the questioning and the answer, there is no time interval - right? It is immediate. I ask you what is the distance between Madras and Delhi or New York, and there is a hesitation -right? So you look into memory, into what you have learnt or what you have read and you say, "Well the distance is so many miles". So you have taken time between the question and the answer, there is a lag of time - right, Sirs? Now what happens when there is the question, "What is thinking?" How do you find that out? Questioner: It takes one's mind to bring all the answers. Krishnamurti: What do you do, Sir? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: You probe into the memory and what do you get out of it? What is the answer? Questioner: We study it a little more and more and then try to gather these extracts together. Krishnamurti: Sir look, I am asking you now, this morning, don't wait until the day after tomorrow until you and I have gone, or are dead, but I am asking you now - what is thinking? And you -either you find out or you don't know - right? Which is it? Questioner: It is the process of a mind giving an answer. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by the process of the mind? Questioner: Sir, what are you aiming at? - I don't understand. Krishnamurti: What am I aiming at? Just a minute Sir, you have asked a question. What am I aiming at? What I am aiming at is very simple. I want to know, when that question is put, "What is thinking?", I want to find out what it is. (Interruptions from audience.) Sir, give the other fellow a chance, don't answer so readily. I want to find out what thinking is - how does it come about, what is the beginning of it? Right? It is very simple, Sir. Now what is it, how does it come about? That is, you asked me a question - say, "What is thinking?" - and I really don't know -right? Or I do know, I know the whole process of it - how it operates, how it begins, what is its mechanism - right? No? Questioner: One feels how it operates but I am unable to explain. Krishnamurti: One feels how it operates but one is not capable of explanation. Look, take a very simple thing, Sir. I ask you what your name is. You hear the words and then what happens? Questioner: You really just answer. ( Various comments - inaudible.) Krishnamurti: You reply, don't you? Say your name is so and so. What has taken place there? Questioner: I have referred to my memory and my memory responds. Krishnamurti: That's right, Sir, that's all. The question - to that question your memory responds and replies - right? Now I ask you - what is thinking? - and why doesn't your memory respond? Questioner: Because... (inaudible). Krishnamurti: It may be, Sir, go into it, find out - why don't you reply what thinking is? Whether you know or you don't know. If you know, you will say, if you don't know you will say, "Sorry I don't know". Which is it? Questioner: I don't know. Krishnamurti: The gentleman doesn't know. We are trying to answer the question, "What is clear thinking?" We more or less understood the meaning of the words clarity, clearness, clear. And we are finding it rather difficult to find out what thinking is. We say it is the response of memory to a challenge - right? And that response comes from accumulated memories, knowledge, experience. This is simple, Sir. You learn a language after having heard it from childhood, you can repeat it because you have stored up the words, the meaning of that word, the word in relation to the thing and so on, and you can speak because you have stored up the vocabulary, words, the structure and so on. Memory responds and the response of memory is thinking. Now what is the origin of thinking, the beginning of thinking? We know that after accumulating memory we respond and the response is thought. Now I want to find out also - that is, in order to find out what clear thinking is - I want to find out what is the beginning of memory? Or is that too difficult, too abstract? Questioner: It is our conditioning. Krishnamurti: No, I am afraid I am going too fast. Sorry. All right, Sirs. I won't go into it. What is thinking - we know now! So when you respond, when thought is the response of memory and memory is the past (the accumulated experience, knowledge, tradition, and so on) that response is what we call thinking, whether it be logical, illogical, balanced, unbalanced, sane, healthy, it is still thinking. Now, please follow the next thing, can thought be clear? Questioner: No, it is always conditioned. Krishnamurti: No, do please find out. Can thought be clear? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: You see you are just supposing. You live on abstraction and that is why you cannot be practical. You live on concepts, ideas and theories and when you move out of that field you are completely lost: when you have to answer something directly, of yourself, you muddle along. We asked, "Can thinking, which is the outcome of memory (memory is always the past, there is no living memory) can thinking, which is of the past, ever be clear?" This is a very interesting question, Sirs. Can the past produce clear action? Because action is thought - right? Questioner: Yes, that is a fact. Krishnamurti: Sirs, have we understood the question? We have more or less analysed the word "clear", and we have more or less analysed what thinking is. So the next thing we are asking is, can thinking (which is the outcome of a long past, which is not living, and is therefore always old) can that thing which is old, the past, ever be clear? You understand, Sir? If I do anything out of tradition, (which is the past, however noble, ignoble, or stupid) - if I do anything out of tradition, can that action be clear? Questioner: It cannot because memory and tradition belong to the past... Krishnamurti: I am asking, Sir, can action born out of the past, the doing, which is always in the present, the doing, not "having done" or "I will do", but the actual doing - can it ever be clear? Questioner: The word action and the word clear have nothing to do with each other. "Clear" applies to seeing everything... Krishnamurti: All right. Can that action be fresh, new, direct, as direct as when you meet fire and you move away. So I am asking, "When we live and function in the shadow of the past, is there any clarity?" Leave action out because that disturbs you - I know why it disturbs you - because you are never used to acting, you are used to conceptual thinking. And when you are faced with action, you get confused, because your life is confused, and that's your affair. So, when you act from the past, from tradition, is it action, is it something living? Questioner: Why should there be any difference between clarity and action? Krishnamurti: Oh! we can discuss this ad nauseam. But I am just asking, Sir. You are all tradition-ridden, aren't you? -traditionalists. You say this or that is sacred, or repeat some shloka, or, if you don't do any of that, you have your own tradition, your own experience, which you go on repeating. Now does this repetition bring understanding, clarity, freshness, newness? Questioner: It is an aid to understanding the present situation. Krishnamurti: Is the past an aid to understanding the present? Questioner: Things break down. Krishnamurti: Wait Sir, wait Sir. Look at it. Does the past help you to understand the present? Questioner: The past is... Krishnamurti: Just listen, Sir, what she has said. You have had thousands and thousands of wars, does it help you to prevent all wars? You have had class division - Brahmin and non-Brahmin and all the hate involved - does the past help you now to be free of all caste? Questioner: It should. Krishnamurti: It should - then we are lost! When you say, "It should" it is an idea, it is not an action. You will still be a Brahmin, you will still be superstitious, you will still be violent. Questioner: People don't want to be free of the past. Krishnamurti: It doesn't matter if you are free or not - don't be free of it, live in your misery. But if you want to understand this thing called clear thinking and going beyond it, you have to face certain things. If you say "Well, I don't want to change my traditions"... Questioner: Can you not help us to at least make a... ? Krishnamurti: We are doing that, Sir, we are doing that. Look Sir, if the past is a help, if tradition is a help, if culture is a help, to live now, fully, clearly, happily, sanely and flower in goodness, the past then has a value - but has it? Do you, with all your tradition, live happily? Questioner: The past is like looking through smoked glass. Krishnamurti: That's right. So the past doesn't really help you. Questioner: A little bit. Krishnamurti: Don't say "No", because you are only speaking of another idea; unless you do it, cut yourself from the past, you can't say "Yes, it is no good". Questioner: We have the chance to understand you because we have listened to you for years. A child has no such chance. Krishnamurti: "We have the chance to understand you because we have listened to you for forty years - a child hasn't - and all the rest of it!" Why do you bother to listen to the speaker at all? Even for a day or, worse, for forty years? How tragic it all is! I don't know where you people live. And so let's get back. When I am always looking over my shoulder to the past, I can never see anything clearly in the present, obviously. I need two eyes to look, but if I am looking over my shoulder all the time, I can't see the present. What I need to do is to look at the present, and I am not capable of looking at the present because I am burdened with the past, with my tradition. Tradition says to me "It is terrible to have a divorced wife; or my respectability says to me "That person is terrible because he is not moral", (whatever that may mean). We all do this. So what happens to my affection, to my kindliness towards that person? My prejudice, which is tradition, prevents me from being kind or affectionate to that person. The past may help in the field of technology, but it does not help in the field of life. I know this is theory now and you will repeat that ad nauseam and think you have understood it. So the question arises: as thought is of the past and I have to live completely in the present to understand the present, how is the past to be put aside and yet be useful? That is what your question was. You understood my question? I have to live, to live in this world, and I need technological knowledge to go to the office - you know all that is involved in it, science, bureaucracy; this is the case if you are a professor or even if you are a labourer. And I see also - I have understood something this morning - that to live completely, fully, the past must not interfere; so I say to myself, "How is this possible? How is it possible for me to live in the technological world most efficiently, logically, with more and more technology, and yet live at another level, or even at the same level, without the interference of the past?" In the technological field I must have the past, in the other field of life - no past. Do we see this? Questioner: Yes, now we have an understanding. Krishnamurti: Ah, good! And I ask myself (don't laugh, Sir) - now I ask myself how this is possible. Questioner: Is a double life possible? Krishnamurti: No, you see, what you are leading is a "double life". You go to the temple, put on ashes; you know the set-up, ringing of bells and all the jingles. And at the same time you live at the technological level. You are leading a double life, and you say, "Is it possible?" Of course it is possible because you are leading it. We are not talking about a double life. Examine the complexity of this problem, that one has to have technological knowledge and that there must also be freedom from knowledge, from the past. Now, how is this possible? The double life which you are leading now is in existence, and therefore you are making a hideous mess of life, you go to the temple and at the same time run a machine. You put on ashes, or whatever you do, and go to the office. It is a form of insanity. Now, how is this possible? Have you understood my question, Sirs? You tell me how it is possible. Do you say it is not a double life? Questioner: To use the technological knowledge only when it is necessary and not in other ways. Krishnamurti: But you have to use such knowledge all the time - to go to your office, to go to your home, to follow the road, when you look at a tree, when you do the bureaucratic job, and so on; this mental operation is functioning all the time. People don't see this. You can't divide it, can you? Go slow, go slow. You can't divide life into technological life and non-technological life. That is what you have done and therefore you are leading a double life. So we are asking,"Is it possible to live so completely that the part is included in the whole?" Right? Are you getting it? Now we lead a double life, the part, we keep it separate, going to the office, learning a technology, all that, and going to church or the temple and ringing bells. So you have divided life and therefore there is conflict in your life between the two. And we are asking for quite a different thing, to live so that there is no division at all. I don't know if you see this? Questioner: You want us to... Krishnamurti: No, no, I don't want you to do anything. Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: Oh no, Sir. You are not meeting the question - please understand what the speaker is trying to convey. Don't go back to something he has said about psychological memory and all the rest of it. That is a set of words you have learnt. Find out what the speaker is trying to explain now. Can I live a life in which there is no division at all (sex, God, technology, getting angry) - you follow? A life in which there is no division, no fragments? Questioner: The moment there is an end to these things... Krishnamurti: Sir - please Sir, don't just throw out words. Now to continue: How am I, who live in fragments, many fragments not just two (my whole life as I live it is a fragmentary existence, which is a result of the past, which is the result of my saying, "This is right, that is wrong", "This is sacred, that is not sacred" or "Technology and all that doesn't really matter, one has to earn, but going to some temple is endlessly important") - how can I live without fragmentation? You understand the question, Sir, now? How? (Not "according to what method", because the moment you have introduced method you have introduced fragmentation). "How am I to do it?" is the question, but you say immediately, "Tell me the method" and "the method" means: a method which you practise as opposed to something else and therefore the whole thing is back where we started. So there is no method. But the question of "How" is merely asking, finding out, not searching for a method. Now, how is it possible so to live that there is no fragmentation at all? You understand my question, Sir? That means no fragmentation at all at any level of my being, of my existence. Questioner: What is being, Sir? Krishnamurti: What is being? - I am sorry we are not discussing that, Sir. You see you are not even paying attention. You pick up a word like "being" or a phrase like "what is the purpose of life", and off you go. But that is not what we are talking about. Look, Sir, how am I to live so that there is no fragmentation at all? I don't say, "Well, I'll go and meditate" - which becomes another fragmentation, or "I must not be angry", "I must be this or that; these sentences all involve fragmentation. Can I live without any fragments, without being torn apart? Right, Sir? Have you understood the question? Now who is going to answer you? Will you go back to memory? What the Gita said, what the Upanishads said, what Freud said, or somebody else said? If you went back and tried to find out what they said about living without fragmentation, then that would be another fragment, wouldn't it? Questioner: What of those who don't seek their aid? Krishnamurti: If you do not seek their aid, then where are you? How do you find this out? How do you find out how to live so that there is no fragmentation at all? Oh, Sirs, you don't see the beauty of this. Questioner: By integration. Krishnamurti: I knew you'd give that answer. (Laughter) The questioner says, "By integration" - integrating with what? Integrating all the fragments together? Or putting all the pieces together? And who is the entity that is putting all the pieces together? Is it the Higher Atman or the Cosmos or God or the Soul or Jesus Christ or Krishna? All that is fragmentation - you follow? So you have this challenge, and how do you respond to it, that is of the first importance - you understand? You are challenged, how do you respond to it? Questioner: You work it out in life so that you become harmonious. Krishnamurti: Ah, lovely! When? (Laughter). Questioner: Every day. Krishnamurti: There is no day, every day. Questioner: Every morning. Krishnamurti: Now, look what you are doing. You are just adjusting yourself to the challenge. You are not answering it. (Laughter) How do you answer this, Sir? Questioner: It is not a question of answering at all because we are trying to meet you with the word. Krishnamurti: Find out, Sir, what you are doing. Find out. Here is a challenge and you can't go back to any books - right? You can't go back to your authority, the Gita and all that rubbish. So what will you do? You see I can go on explaining, Sir, but you will just accept it, as you have accepted so many things, and carry on. So let's look at it. Here is a new challenge. The challenge being that I have lived in fragments all my life (the past, the present and the future, God and the devil, evil and good, happiness and unhappiness, ambition and no ambition, violence and non-violence, hate, love and jealousy) these are all fragments; all my life I have lived that way. Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: We have been through all that, Sir. Give the speakers two minutes, will you kindly? Now, what is the answer? I have lived a fragmentary, destructive, broken life and now I have to live - now the challenge put to me has been: "Can I live without any fragmentation?" That is my challenge. Now how do I respond to it? I respond to it by saying, "I really don't know" - right? I really don't know. I don't pretend to know. I don't pretend tO say "Yes, here is the answer". When a challenge is put to you, a new challenge, the instinctive response - I do not mean instinctive - the right response is humility: "I don't know." Right? But you don't say that. Can you honestly say you don't know? You can, good. Then what do you mean by that feeling, "I don't know"? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: Don't answer it too quickly, find out. Use your brain cells. Questioner: The recognition of fact, Sir. Krishnamurti: I have recognised the fact, otherwise I wouldn't even answer it. Questioner: I have no means of finding out. I do not know and I don't know the means of finding out. Krishnamurti: Now wait. I don't know - right? Now what is the state of the mind - please follow it, listen quietly - what is the state of the mind that says "I really don't know"? Questioner: Lack of... ? Krishnamurti: Oh, there we are! You people are so dull. Questioner: I do not know. ( Various comments - inaudible.) Krishnamurti: Oh, you are so immature, like children in a class! This is a very serious question we are asking and you just throw in a lot of words, you haven't even the humility to listen and find out for yourselves. Questioner: It is not easy, I don't know. Krishnamurti: When we say, when you say, as that gentleman said just now, he doesn't know, what is the state of mind that has replied "I don't know"? Questioner: Waiting. Krishnamurti: You are - Sir, how old are you? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: Oh, Sir. When I say "I don't know", I really don't know. But am I waiting to find out, or waiting for somebody to tell me - right? I am waiting. Therefore when I say "I don't know", it isn't an actual fact that I don't know, because I hope that somebody is going to tell me, or that I'll find out. Do you follow this? Right. Then you are waiting, aren't you? Why are you waiting? Who is going to tell you? Your memory? If your memory is going to tell you, you are back again in the same old rut. So what are you waiting for? So you say "I won't wait" - you follow, Sir? - there is no waiting. There is no "in the meantime" - you follow this? I wonder if you do. So when you say "I don't know", it means nobody knows - right? Because if anybody tells me, he will tell me out of fragmentation - no? So I don't know, therefore there is no waiting, there is no answer - right? So I don't know. Then I find out what is the state of the mind that says "I don't know" - are you following it? It is not waiting, not expecting an answer, not looking to some memory, authority, it ceases - all that has stopped. Right? So the mind - follow it step by step - so the mind is silent in the face of a new challenge. It is silent because it can't answer the new challenge. I don't know if you are meeting this; right, Sirs? (No. No. You don't understand?) You know when you see a marvellous mountain, the beauty, the height of it, the dignity, the purity of it, it forces you to be silent, doesn't it? - this may last a second but the very grandeur of it makes you silent. And a second later all the reactions begin. Now if you see the challenge in the same way - but you don't because your mind is chattering - so you don't see the importance or the magnitude of this question, which is: can I live (living meaning now, not tomorrow or yesterday, or a second after, or a second before) can I live without fragmentation? It is an immense question - right? Why aren't you silent? Questioner: Because I want to live without fragmentation. Krishnamurti: Ah - which means what? Questioner: I want to be out of it. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Go into it. You don't see the immensity of the question. All that you want to do is to get into another state, therefore you don't see the magnitude of the question. Why don't you? Pursue it. You do see it, when you see a marvellous mountain, sparkling with snow in the clear blue sky with great, deep shadows, and absolute silence. Why don't you see this in the same way? Because you want to live in the old way. You are not concerned with seeing the full meaning of that question, but you say, "For God's sake tell me quickly how to get there". Questioner: I am already seeking the solution of how to get there. Krishnamurti: That's right. So you are more concerned with the solution than with the question. Which means what? Questioner: I won't get it. Krishnamurti: No. Which means what? Look at it, look at it, don't answer it yet - which means what? Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: No, Madame, stick to it. Questioner: (Inaudible) Krishnamurti: You have understood the question? You don't see the magnitude of this question because you want to reach it, get it, you are greedy. So your greed is preventing you from seeing the immensity of it. So what is important? (Follow it step by step.) Not the immensity but your greed. Why are you greedy - about something which you don't understand at all? (You don't mind, Sir, my pursuing what your daughter says like that?) Questioner: Satisfaction! Krishnamurti: Now, see why. Why are you greedy, when you haven't even understood what is involved in it? So you say, "How stupid of me to be greedy about something when I don't know what it means" - right? So what I have to do is not, not to be greedy, but to find out the implications, the beauty, the truth, the loveliness of that thing. Why don't you do that, instead of saying "I must get it"? So you respond to a new question, a new challenge, invariably from the old. Greed is from the old. Therefore is it possible to cut off the past entirely? You understand? It is the past that is fragmentary, that is bringing about fragmentation, breaking up life. So my question is: is it possible to be free of the past totally so that I can live technologically? I don't know if you follow this? Can I be free from the past, can I be free from being a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or anything else? Not "can I be; I must be. It is stupid for me to belong to any caste, to any religion, to any group. Out it goes. There is no time to think about it as you suggested. Out it has gone - you follow? So it is possible to cut the past completely; if you can do it in one direction you can do it totally. Right? (Oh, no, you don't see.) So, can you, from this moment, be free completely of your nationality, of your tradition, of your culture, of your past? If you can't, you live in fragmentation, and therefore everlastingly life becomes a battlefield. And nobody is going to help you in this. No guru, no Communist, nobody is going to help you do it. And in your heart of hearts you know this jolly well. Well, Sirs? So thought is always old - right? Discover this for yourselves, don't repeat after me - discover it. And you see what an extraordinary thing you have discovered. So if you discover this - that thought is really old - then all the past - the Shankaras, the Buddhas, the Christ, the whole past is gone. No? But you don't discover it. You won't make the effort to discover it; you don't want to discover it. Questioner: No Sir, there is the fear of being lost. Krishnamurti: Well, be lost, you are lost anyhow! Questioner: Not completely lost. Krishnamurti: But you are lost, Sirs. What are you talking about? You are terribly lost. It is only a lost man that is everlastingly in conflict. You are lost, but you don't recognise that you are lost. So thought is always old; then, what is it - that is too difficult to go into now - I'll just put it forward and you will see for yourselves - what is it then that sees something new? You understand, Sirs? Thought is always old - follow it carefully - when the Adi Shankara, that old bird, said something, his thought was already old - do you understand? Therefore what he said was never new, he repeated in his own coinage of words something which he had heard, and you repeat it after him. So thought is never new and can never be new, and living now, every day, is something which is the active present; it is always active, in the present. Therefore when you try to understand activity in the present, with the past, which is thought, then you don't understand it at all; then there is fragmentation, and life becomes a conflict. So can you live so completely that there is only the active present now? And you cannot live that way if you haven't understood and thereby cut yourself off completely from the past, because you yourself are the past. You see you will unfortunately go on just listening - if I happen to come next year you will repeat the same old stuff. Questioner: Sir, if we are not in the past, but in the present, does that not also become the past and the future - how are we to know that we are right? Krishnamurti: You don't have to be sure you are right - be wrong! Why are you frightened about being right or wrong? But your question has no validity at all because you are just talking, you are just theorizing. You are saying, "If this happens, that would happen". But if you put it into action then you would know there is no such thing as "going wrong". Questioner: Sir, when we go back home we see our children and the past comes in. Questioner: Shankara may go. Krishnamurti: I hope it has gone. Shankara may go but the children remain. (Laughter) Are the children the past? They are in one sense. And as they are living human beings, can you educate them to live completely, in the way we are talking about? Questioner: Right Sir, you have answered it, sorry. Krishnamurti: That means I have to help them to be intelligent, I have to help them to be sensitive, because sensitivity, highest sensitivity is the highest intelligence. Therefore if there are no schools around you, you have to help them at home to be sensitive, to look at the trees, to look at the flowers, to listen to the birds, to plant a tree if you have a little yard - or if you have no yard to have a tree in a pot and to look at it, to cherish it, to water it, not to tear its leaves. And as the schools do not want them to be sensitive, educated, intelligent (schools only exist to pass exams and get a job) you have to help them at home, to help them to discuss with you, why you go to a temple, why you do this ceremony, why you read the Bible, the Gita - you follow? - so that they are questioning you all the time, so that neither you nor anyone else becomes an authority. But I am afraid you won't do any of this because the climate, the food, the tradition is too much for you, so you slip back and lead a monstrously ugly life. But I think, if you have the energy, the drive, the passion, that is the only way to live. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VII CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 18TH JULY 1971 'WHAT IS YOUR OVERRIDING INTEREST?' WHAT IS YOUR primary interest, your deep, abiding intention? I think one should discover that for oneself. You must find that out and relate it to all the activities of daily life. One may be deeply concerned with the world as it is, with the violence, the appalling chaos, the political divisions, and the corruption - which is death, not only outwardly but also inwardly. In discovering one's deep interest for oneself, one will be able to find out one's relationship with another, according to that interest. If that interest is vague, superficial, depending on surroundings and the wind that blows in any direction, then our activities, both outwardly and inwardly, will be rather casual, without any significance. During these talks and discussions, could you find out what is your major interest, whether you are really concerned with the world and your place in the world, with your relationship to another human being, your relationships politically, economically, socially and religiously? What is your deep, major interest in life? Is it acquiring money, prestige, security? Please listen to this carefully. If that is your real, vital, sustained interest, then you must see the consequences of such an interest. Or is your interest, considering the world and your relationship with it, not only to change yourself but also to change the world about you? Then you must also see the implications of this. Or is it that you want to establish a personal relationship with another so completely, so wholly, that there is no conflict: then also you must realize the consequences of this. Perhaps your interest is something more difficult: trying to find out what is the place of thought, as the measurable and the immeasurable. To discover in which direction our interest lies, we must be willing to dedicate ourselves completely to it, and not just play with it, casually accepting or rejecting it according to circumstances, according to environmental influences and our own likes and dislikes. If we are prepared to go into this completely, then we can establish a relationship between ourselves - ? relationship with the world, with our neighbour and with our intimate friend. That is what we intend to do during these weeks, to find out where our major capacity and interest lies, and whether that interest is isolated, or is related to all human beings. If it is isolated and you are seeking your own particular enjoyment, your own particular salvation, your own particular safety, a good position in the world, then in talking this over together, we shall be able to find out whether such an interest has any validity, whether it has any significance at all. But your interest, your deep purpose may be to find out how to live a totally different life. Seeing things as they are, the violence, the brutality, the enmity and hatred, the corruption and the utter chaos, your aim may be to find out whether the human mind, your mind, the mind of each one of us, is capable of completely changing, so that, as a human being, you not only bring about a radical revolution in yourself but also outwardly - although the outward revolution and the inward revolution are not separate. We are not talking of physical revolution: violence, bombs, killing people in the name of peace. That is no revolution at all; it is merely childish destruction. I do not know if you have observed the violence all over the world. The younger generation were at first giving flowers to everybody, living in a world of "beauty" and imagination; when that did not work, they took to drugs, they became violent, and we are now living in a world of complete violence. You can see this in India, in the Middle East, in America. As we grow older our capacities are dulled, the world is too much for us. Therefore, it behoves each one of us to find out our purpose, our intention, our major interest. Once we have discovered this we can discuss it, then we can take a journey together, providing that your interest and the speaker's are the same, because the speaker knows exactly his intention, his drive, his interest, and if your interest is something quite different, then our relationship becomes difficult. If, however, your interest is to understand this world in which we live as human beings - not as technicians - then we can establish a relationship and together we can talk things over - together we can take a journey. Otherwise these talks and discussions will have very little meaning. Please bear this in mind, although you are here for a holiday amongst the mountains, the hills and the streams, and the tourist entertainments, in spite of all that, we have an opportunity of sitting together for a whole hour. You know, that is quite interesting, to sit together for an hour and talk over our problems without any pretence, without any hypocrisy, and without assuming some ridiculous facade. To have a whole hour together is really extraordinary, because so rarely do we sit and discuss serious matters with anybody for a whole hour. You may go to the office for a whole day, but it has far greater meaning to spend sixty minutes or more together in order to investigate, to seriously examine our human problems hesitantly, tentatively and with great affection, without trying to impose one opinion upon another; because we are not dealing with opinions, ideas, or theories. We are concerned with establishing a relationship between one another, and that can only be done if we know our mutual interests, and how deep those interests lie, and what energy we have to resolve the major problems of our life. Our life is not different from the rest of the world: we are the world. I don't think any of us realize, deeply and continuously, that we are the world and the world is us. This must be deeply rooted within us. We have made this social structure, this violence, according to our desires, according to our ambition, greed and envy, and if we would change society we must first change ourselves; that seems such a simple, radical approach to the whole problem. But we think that by changing the outer structure of society, by throwing bombs, making political divisions and the like, we shall by some miracle all become perfect human beings; I am afraid that never works. And to realize that we are the world, not as a verbal statement or a theory, but to actually feel it in our hearts, is very difficult, because our education, our culture, has laid emphasis on our being separate from the world; that as individuals we have a responsibility to ourselves and not to the rest of the world, that as individuals we are free to do as we like, within reason. But we are not individuals at all; we are the result of the culture in which we live. An individual means an entity who is not fragmented, who is whole; we are not that. We are broken up, fragmented, in a state of contradiction within ourselves, therefore we are not individuals. So, seeing all this, what is our major interest in life? You must give yourself time to think it over. Let us sit together quietly and find out. Is it that you have so many problems, economic, social, the problem of personal relationship and you would like to solve them all wholly and completely? Is it that you have sexual problems which you have not been able to solve, so the solving of that becomes your major interest? Is it that you want to live peacefully in a world that is noisy, corrupt and violent? Or does your interest lie in the direction of social reform and to that you are dedicated? And if you are, then what is your relationship to that society? Or are you interested in finding out the limitations of thought? Thought is limited, however logical, however capable it may be; thought is also inventive and experimental, producing marvellous things technologically, but it is still limited. Do you want to find out if there is something more, something beyond thought-the measurable and the immeasurable? You have to look at all these problems. Questioner: I don't understand what you mean when you say, " We are the world" and " The world is us". Krishnamurti: Is that your major problem? Don't bother about what I say. What is your problem, what is your major interest, and have you the energy, the capacity, the intensity, to solve that problem? It is really very important for you to find out. Don't concern yourself with what the speaker says; that is irrelevant. But find out for yourself what your interest is and see how much energy, passion and vitality you are prepared to give pursuing that interest; because if you have no passion, no intensity to pursue that interest then - if I may point out - corruption has set in and where there is corruption, there is death. Then from which end shall we begin? Can this total movement of living, this whole human existence be split up in this way? Don't agree or disagree, just listen. Do you first of all establish a physical relationship of order, giving social and economic security, and after laying the foundations, build a complete house and then move from there to the other, or is it one total unitary movement, indivisible, non-fragmented, wherever you begin, because the two are related, the two are inseparable. We want complete physical order, and we must have order in our life inwardly as well as outwardly. We must have order, not military order, not the order of the older generation nor the order of the younger generation - the permissive society is disorder, it is corruption and decay; and the so-called order of the older people is really disorder, with its wars, its violence, its division and snobbery - it is also corruption. So, seeing both the permissive disorder of the young and the "ordered" disorder of the old, observing both, one realizes that there must be a different kind of order. And that order must assure physical security for everybody, not just for a few rich people, or for those who are well placed and have capacity. There must be physical security for everybody. As you know, over six million people from the East have crossed the border into India. Do you realize what that means, not only for the refugees but also for the country that itself is already impoverished? How can you establish order there? And the young people have created total disorder with the so-called permissive society. They say the older generation have created disorder and they want to have nothing to do with it; they want a different way of living, so they do just as they like. But that too is disorder; both are disorder. I wish you could see this! One realizes that there must be physical order, physical security, for every human being in the world. This has always been the dream of the revolutionaries, of the idealists and the philosophers; they believed that through physical revolution they could achieve their ambition. But it has never succeeded. There have been so many revolutions and it has never happened. Look at the Communists with their divisions, their armies and the totalitarian state, and look at all the horrors that go on in the rest of the world; there is no order anywhere. One realizes that there must be physical order. Now does that order depend on the administration of the law, on the authority of society according to its culture and environment? Or does it depend entirely on the human being, on each one of us, the way we live, the way we think, the way we act in our relationships with one another? So, let's begin there. That is, living as a human being in a destructive, chaotic, violent world, how am I, or how are you, going to bring about order? Does that order depend on you or on the politician? Does that order depend on you, or on the priest, or on the philosopher, or on an utopian ideal? If you depend on the priest, on the politician, on a theory, on a belief, or on an ideal, see what takes place! You are then conforming to a pattern set by the politician, by the theorist, by an utopian ideal; hence there is a conflict between what you are and what you think should be. And that conflict is part of this violence, this disorder. So can you perceive that order in society can be brought about only by you and by nobody else? We are responsible for that order by our conduct, by our thoughts, by our way of life -the whole of it. And is that your real, deep, abiding interest, to discover what that order is? One must live when the world is in confusion and chaos, with its suffering and destruction - and to understand this confusion, one must live in total, complete order. If you are interested, if you are prepared to give your energy, your capacity, your passion to finding out what that order is, then we can go into it, then we can share this thing together; you won't be just an outsider looking in, because it's your problem and you must put your teeth into it! If that is your real, deep interest, then you must be passionate. I'm not talking about lust, about physical passion or sexual passion. I'm talking of that passion which comes when there is deep interest. Say, for instance, one is deeply interested in finding out if sorrow can ever end (deeply interested, not superficially because it brings a reward, but because you really want to find out)-sorrow, the grief, the pain, the anxiety, the fear, which we all feel. If that sorrow can ever come to an end, then you will find that only then comes real passion, real intensity. So, is it your intention to discover for yourselves whether, living in this world, whether it is possible to bring about such order within yourselves? - because you are the world, and the world is you. Questioner: You said you must have passion, but earlier on you stated that as we grow older our passion is dulled: so what are we to do? Krishnamurti: Do our passions become dull as we grow older? Perhaps our physical passions do, because our glands are not working so efficiently, but we are not talking about the passion of the young or of the old and the dissipation of that passion. We are talking about having an interest, a vital interest, a major issue with which you, as a human being, are concerned - not a gift, a technique, a capacity. If you have such a deep interest and you live with it, then out of that comes passion. And that passion doesn't disappear just because you have grey hair. Questioner: What happens when you have this deep interest, but also you have the desire for pleasure? Krishnamurti: You have pleasure on the one hand and a vital, abiding interest on the other. please just listen to it! Is there a contradiction between pleasure and a vital interest? If I am vitally interested in bringing about order within myself and in the world around me, then that becomes my most profound pleasure. I may have a nice car, I may look at a girl, or at the hills and all the rest of it; but they are all passing, trivial things which will in no way contradict my vital interest which is my pleasure. You see, we divide pleasure in ourselves; we say it would be nice to have a lovely car or listen to beautiful music. There is great delight in listening to music; it may quieten and pacify your nerves by its rhythm and quality of sound; it may carry you away to distant places, far away, and in that there is great pleasure. But that pleasure does not detract from your vital interest; on the contrary. When you have a tremendous interest in something, then that very interest becomes the major pleasure in your life; and all other pleasures become secondary and trivial; in that there is no contradiction. But when we are not sure of our major interest in life, then we are pulled in different directions by various pleasures and objects; and then there is a contradiction. So one has to find out, and I hope you will find out during these coming weeks, what is your major interest in which passion and pleasure exist. Questioner: Do you not think that this order can only come about by giving to God the place he should hold in our lives? All the chaos that exists in the world today is because we live without the idea of God? Krishnamurti: To bring about this order in our lives, should we give first place to God? If we have no knowledge of God, no feeling for God, no understanding of that thing called God, then order becomes mechanical, superficial, and changeable. God is the most important thing, the questioner says, and then out of that will come order. Now, we are trying to investigate; we are not going to deny or to assert; we are trying to find out, to enquire. Our main difficulty is that we all interpret, or imagine what God is, according to our own culture, according to our own background, our fears, our pleasures, our sense of security and so on. Surely that is obvious. And if we don't know this ultimate reality and have no knowledge of it, can that bring about order? We are enquiring, trying to find out. Or must you have physical order first, which is measurable, and then having established that order, find out the immeasurable, in which order is something entirely different? This has been the point of view of all the religious people throughout the world: concern yourselves with God and then you will have perfect order. And each religion, each sect, translates what God is according to its own beliefs and, brought up in that belief, we accept that interpretation. But if you really want to find out if there is such a thing as God, something that cannot possibly be put into words, something which is unnameable, if that really is the major interest in your life, then that very interest does bring about order. To find that reality, one must live differently: there must be austerity without harshness; there must be love. And love cannot exist if there is fear, or the mind is pursuing pleasure. So, to find that reality one must understand oneself, the structure and the nature of the self; and the structure and the nature of oneself is measurable by thought. It is measurable in the sense that thought can perceive its own activities, thought can see what it has created, what it has denied, what it has accepted; and when one realizes the limitations of thought, then perhaps one can go into that which lies beyond thought. Questioner: The problem of the parent is what to teach our children. Krishnamurti: First of all, what is our relationship with our children? please bear in mind that we are investigating together. If you are the father, you go to the office and come home late in the evening. If you are the mother, you have your own ambitions and drives, your own loneliness and miseries, your own worries about being loved or not being loved; the children have to be looked after and there is the cooking and the washing-up; and if there is not enough money, you also probably go off to earn a living. Then what is your relationship with your children? Have you any relationship? We are investigating, we are enquiring. I am not saying you don't have any relationship. Then, as they grow up you hand them over to a school where they are taught how to read and write; there they form gangs with other children who are also imitating and conforming and who are equally lost. You have the problem not only of your own children but also of other children who are bullying gangsters. Then what is your relationship with your child? You have children and you want to educate them rightly. Now, if that is really your deep, vital interest, you have to find out what is the meaning of education. Is it merely for children to acquire a particular kind of technological knowledge, so that they can earn a livelihood in a world that is becoming more and more competitive, because there are more and more people and therefore less and less jobs? You must face all this. The world is divided by nationalities, with their sovereign governments, their armies and their navies, and all the butchery that goes with them. And if you are only concerned with the development of technological knowledge, then see the consequences of all that; the mind becomes more and more mechanical and you neglect the whole field of life. When the children grow up, if they are lucky they are sent to a university, where they are shaped more and more, forced to conform and put in a cage. Is that your interest? Is that your responsibility? And because they don't want to be put into a cage, they are in revolt. Please, see all this. And when that revolt proves to be ineffective, there is violence. How are you, as a parent, going to educate your children to be different? Can you form a new kind of educational system, or can you, with the help of others, start a school which will be totally different? To do that you must have money and a group of people who are really dedicated. If you are a parent, is it not your responsibility to see that such schools are created? So you must work for it; you know, life isn't a plaything. Now, is this your deep, vital interest or, as a parent, are you only concerned with your own ambitions, greed, envy, with your position at the office, getting higher pay, a larger house, a bigger car and so on? You have to look at all this. Therefore, where does education begin? Does it start at school or with you? That means, are you, as a parent, as a human being, re-educating yourself all the time? Questioner: Is there any meaning in education, or will our children finish up just like us? Krishnamurti: I was told that Socrates complained about the youth of his day. He said that they had no manners and no respect for their elders, that they were becoming permissive, and all the rest of it; and that was in Athens in the fourth century B.C. And we are still complaining about our children. So we are asking: does the education of children consist in training them to be like us, like other monkeys, or should education include not only technological instruction but also a deep understanding of the whole neglected field of life? The whole of life, not just one fragment of it, because the way we live we neglect all that, we are concerned only with one fragment; therefore there is chaos and violence in the world. Questioner: Are you saying that we should only have one main interest? Should we not be interested in many things, in war, in pollution, and so on? Surely you have to be aware of these things, haven't you? Krishnamurti: Sir, when there is a major interest in your life, then you are aware of everything. When you are interested in order, it is not only order in yourself but order in the world. You don't want wars; you feel for those people because they have no order. You know what is happening, therefore, you are very concerned with pollution, poverty and war. Wars are created by nationalities, by governments, by politicians, by dividing religion into sects and all the rest of it. in observing all that, I want order, not only order in myself, but in the world. And in wanting order, I have to find order in everything around me, which means I must work for order, `be dedicated to order, be passionate about order. That means I have no nationality, do you follow, Sir? Disorder is violence, therefore I must find out how to end completely all violence within myself. Questioner: Do you believe in demonstrations? Krishnamurti: You go up and down the street with a group of people demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. Do you want to end the war in Vietnam or do you want to end all wars? Can you demonstrate to end all wars or can you only demonstrate to end a particular war? Do think about this, give your heart to it. I can demonstrate against a particular war, but when I am concerned with the ending of all wars, not only outwardly but in myself, how can I demonstrate with a group of people? Do you also want to end all wars as I do? Do you understand? It means no nationality, no frontiers, no linguistic differences, no religious divisions - all that. No, Sir, you can't demonstrate, you have to live it. And when you live it, that in itself is a demonstration. Questioner: Do not love and truth bring about order? Krishnamurti: But do you know what love is, Sir? Do you know what truth is? Can you love if you are jealous, greedy, ambitious? And is truth something fixed, static, or is it living, vital, moving, without any path to it. You have to find all this out for yourself. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VII CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 20TH JULY 1971 'ORDER' WE WERE TALKING about order. In a world that is so utterly confused and divided, in a world that is so violent and brutal, one would have thought that our main interest in life would be to bring about this order, not only in ourselves but also outwardly. Order is not habit; habit becomes automatic and loses all its vitality when human beings merely become orderly in the mechanical sense. Order, as we were saying, covers not only our own particular life but also all the life about us, outwardly, in the world, and deeply inwardly. Now, being aware of this disorder, this confusion, how is one to bring about order in oneself without any conflict and without it becoming merely habitual, a routine, mechanical and neurotic? One has observed those people who are very orderly; they have a certain rigidity, they have no pliability; they are not quick and have become rather hard, self-centred, because they are following a particular pattern which they consider to be order; and gradually that becomes a neurotic state. So being aware that this kind of order (which is disorder) becomes mechanical and leads to neurosis, nevertheless one realizes that one must have order in one's life. Then how is this to come about? That is what we are going to consider together this morning. One must have physical order. It is essential to have a well-disciplined, sensitive, alert body, because that reacts on the mind. And how is one to have a highly sensitive organism that doesn't become rigid, hard, forced into a particular pattern or design - which the mind thinks is orderly and so forces the body to conform to. This is one of the problems. Then there must be order in the whole totality of the mind, of the brain. The mind is the capacity to understand, the ability to observe logically, sanely, to function totally, all round, not fragmentarily, not to be caught in contradictory desires, purposes and intentions. How is this whole quality of mind to have total order, psychosomatic order without conformity, without the enforcement of a thought-up discipline? See our difficulty first, what is involved in all this. One has to have order; this is absolutely essential. We are going to investigate together what we mean by that order. There is the order of the older generation, which is really total disorder as one observes its activities throughout the world, in business, in religion, in the economic field, amongst nations and everywhere else; there is total disorder. In reaction to that there is the permissive society, the younger generation, who do quite the opposite to the older generation, which is also disorder - isn't it? A reaction is disorder. And how is the mind, with all its subtleties of thought, with all the images thought has built, the images that it has built about another, and the images about itself, the images of the "what is" and the "what should be" (therefore living in a state of contradiction), how is such a mind to have complete, total order within itself, so that there is no fragmentation, no reaction to a pattern and no contradiction of the opposites out of which arises violence? Now, seeing all this, how is the mind, your mind, to have complete, total order in action and in thought, in every movement both psychologically and physiologically? The religious people have said that you can only have order through belief in a higher life, through belief in God, belief in something outside, and that you must conform, adjust, imitate according to that belief; that through discipline you must force your whole nature and change the structure of the psyche, as well as your physiological state. They have said all this. And there is a group of behaviourists who say that environment forces you to behave; if you don't behave properly then it destroys you. And people live that way, according to their own particular belief, whether it be the Communist belief, some religious belief or a sociological, economic belief. In spite of this division in the world, the contradiction in ourselves as well as in society, and the counter culture against the existing culture, they all say that there must be order in the world; the military say it and so do the priests. And is order mechanical? Can order be brought about through discipline? Can order be brought about through conformity, imitation and control? Or, is there an order that has nothing whatever to do with control, with discipline as we know it, that has nothing whatever to do with conformity, with adjustment and so on? Let us look at this whole idea of control and find out whether it does bring order (which doesn't mean we are talking against control). We are trying to understand; and if we understand, we may discover something entirely different. I hope you are following all this and that you are as interested in it and as passionate about it as I am. It is utterly useless to listen casually to some theoretical idea; we are not discussing theories or hypotheses; we are observing actually what is going on, seeing what is false. The very perception of seeing what is false is the truth. Do you understand? Now what is implied in control? All our culture, all our education and the upbringing of our children is based on that; and in ourselves there is this urge to control. Now what is implied in that? We have never asked ourselves why we should control at all? Now, let us go into this question. Control implies, does it not, a controller and the thing to be controlled. Please give your attention to this. I am angry and I must control my anger; and where there is control, there is conflict; "I must" and "I must not". And conflict obviously distorts the mind. A mind is healthy when it has no conflict at all; then it can function without any friction and such a mind is a sane, clear mind, but control denies that, because in control there is conflict and contradiction, there is the desire to imitate and to conform to a pattern - the thing you think you ought to do. Is this clear? So control is not order. This is very important to understand. One can never have order through control, because order implies functioning clearly, seeing wholly, without any distortion; but where there is conflict, there must be distortion. Control also implies suppression, conformity, adjustment and the division between the observer and the observed. We are going to find out what it is to act or bring about order without control. Not that we are denying the whole structure of control, but we are seeing the falseness of it and, therefore, out of that comes the truth of order. Are we following each other, not verbally but actually doing it as we go along, because we are trying to create an entirely different world, a different culture, to bring about a human being who lives without friction? It is only such a mind which is capable of living without distortion that knows what love is. And control in any form does breed distortion, conflict and an unhealthy mind. The old culture has said that you must discipline, and this discipline begins with children at home, then in schools and colleges and right the way through life. Now that word "discipline" means to learn; it does not mean drilling, conforming, suppressing and so on. And a mind that is learning all the time, is actually in a state of order, but the mind that is not learning, which says "I have learnt", such a mind brings disorder. The mind itself resists being drilled, becoming mechanical, conforming and suppressing, which is all implied by discipline. And yet we said there must be order. How is this order to come into being without discipline in the accepted sense of that word? Seeing the problem, which is very complex, what is your answer? If you are exercising your mind, if you are really deeply interested in this question of order, not only inwardly in yourself but also outwardly, what is your response to it? How do you find an answer to this urge for order, which does not depend on control, on discipline, on conformity and that totally denies all authority -which is freedom, isn't it? If there is any form of authority, then in the acceptance of that authority there is conformity, there is a following; and that breeds contradiction and therefore disorder. So, no control, in the usual meaning of that word "discipline", and a total denial of the whole structure and nature of authority, which negates freedom. And yet there must be order; see the complications of it. There is the authority of law, of the policeman, the civil authority that one must abide by; but there must be freedom from the authority of the elders with their beliefs, and the authority of one's own demands, experience, knowledge; because all that denies freedom. Seeing the actual state of the world as it is, observing our culture, social, economic and religious, our educational system and the family relationship, we see that they are all based on this authority. And it has caused utter confusion, great suffering, wars and the fragmentation of the world, as well as the division of man. Observing this, how is one to bring about order? That is your problem - you understand? How will you answer that question if you are really deeply, passionately, interested in trying to bring order to your life, as well as outwardly? What will your answer be? Will you turn to books, to the priests, to the philosophers, to the gurus, to the latest person who says, "I am enlightened, come and I'll tell you all about it?" To whom will you turn - to find out how to live a life that is totally orderly, denying all conformity, all authority, all discipline and control? You have to answer this question. We are coming to the problem afresh, that is, afresh in the sense that we don't know how to bring order out of this chaos. If you say, order should be this or that, then you are reacting to "what is", you are stating something which is in opposition to "what is", a reaction that has no validity whatever. So we are approaching the problem anew; we have so far only examined the actual fact of what is going on in the world and in ourselves, the actual fact. Now, we are going to find out together what order is. You are not accepting anything the speaker says, be quite sure about this, because if you do, then our relationship changes entirely. But if we are examining together, being totally interested in this issue, which is, that realizing the state of confusion in the world, and seeing the disorder in ourselves, in all our lives, how tawdry they are, realizing the actual fact of this, then we need intensity and passion to discover what is order. We are going to find out, first of all, what it means to learn by observing "What is" and learning from that. Learning means the active present of that verb to learn, which is a constant movement of learning, not having learnt and then applying that knowledge, which is something quite different from learning all the time. Do you see the difference? We are learning together; we are not storing up knowledge and then acting according to that knowledge; in that there is contradiction and therefore control, whereas a mind that is constantly learning has no authority, no contradiction, no control, no discipline, but the very learning itself demands order. Please observe yourself. Are you in a state of learning - or waiting to be told what order is? Do watch yourself. If you are waiting to find out from another what order is, then you are dependent on that person, or on that book, or on that priest, or on that structure and so on. So we are learning together. Is that your state of mind, that you have understood control and all its implications, understood the full significance of discipline and also you are completely aware of what authority entails? If you have understood, then you are free; otherwise you cannot learn. Learning means a mind that is curious, that doesn't know, that is eager to find out, interested. Is your mind like that, interested? Are you saying I don't know what order is but I am going to find out? Are you very curious, passionate and deeply interested, is your mind like that and, therefore, willing to learn, not from another but to learn for yourself by the act of observation? Control and authority, which to you mean discipline, prevent observation. Do you see this? A mind can only learn when it is free, when it doesn't know, otherwise you cannot learn. So, is your mind free to observe the world and observe yourself? You cannot observe if you are saying "This is right" and "This is wrong", "I must control", "I must suppress", "I must obey", "I must disobey" - you follow? And, if you are saying that I must live a permissive life, then you are not free to learn; if you are conforming, you are not free to learn. Are you conforming when you have long hair? Am I conforming because I put on a shirt and trousers? please find out. Conformity is not merely to a national pattern, to a particular structure of a society or to a belief, but there is conformity in little things. And such a mind is incapable of learning, because behind this conformity there is this enormous sense of fear; the young have it as well as the old and that is why they conform. If all that is going on, you are not free to learn. And there must be order, something living and beautiful, not a mechanical thing - the order of the universe, the order that exists in mathematics, the order that exists in nature, in the relationship between various animals, an order that human beings have totally denied, because in ourselves we are in disorder, which means that we are fragmentary, contradictory, frightened and all the rest of it. Now, I am asking myself, and you are asking yourself, whether the mind is capable of learning, because it doesn't know what order is. It knows reaction to disorder, but the mind must discover whether it is actually capable of learning without reaction and can therefore be free to observe. In other words, is your mind aware of the problem of control, of discipline, of authority and the constant response of reaction - are you aware of that whole structure? Are you aware of all this in yourself as you live from day to day? Or are you only aware when it is pointed out to you? please see the difference. If you are aware of this whole problem of confusion, discipline, control and suppression, which is conformity, because you have been observing, living, and watching, then it is your own; the other is secondhand. Now which is it? For most of us, it is secondhand, because we are secondhand people, aren't we? All our knowledge is secondhand, our traditions are secondhand; there may perhaps be a few activities that are totally our own and not of another. So, are we aware that it is our own direct perception, and not secondhand knowledge learnt from another? Now, if it is learnt from another, one has to discard that totally, hasn't one? You have to discard all that has been said just now by the speaker about the implications of control, discipline, authority and so on; then you become aware that what has been pointed out to you must be totally rejected in order to learn. If you have rejected what others, including the speaker, have said, then you are actually learning, aren't you? Now, let's find out together what order means. How do you find out what order is when you don't know anything about it? You can only do this by enquiring into the state of the mind that is trying to find out what order is. I only know what disorder is, I am completely familiar with it, the whole culture of disorder in this present society; I know it very well. But I don't know what order is; I can imagine what order is; I can theorize about it, but theories, imagination, speculation are not order; therefore I discard all that. So, I really don't know what order is. My mind knows what disorder is, how it has come into being through the culture and the conditioning of that culture and of the human beings; I am aware of all that which is total disorder. Now I really don't know what order is, so what is the state of the mind that says I don't know? What is the state of your own mind that says, "I really don't know?" Is that state of mind waiting for an answer, waiting to be told, expecting to find order? If it is waiting, expecting to be told, then it is not the state which we are talking about, the state of not knowing. The state of "not knowing" is not waiting to be told, it is not expecting an answer; it is terribly alive, active, but it does not know; it knows what is disorder and therefore rejects it completely. When such a mind says, `I do not know, then it is totally free. It has denied the disorder and because it is free, it has found order. Do you understand this? It is really marvellous if you go into it for yourself. I don't know what order is and I am not waiting for anybody to tell me. And because my mind has denied everything that is disorder, totally, without holding back a thing, has emptied the cupboard completely, it is free; so it is capable of learning. And when the mind is totally free, which means non-fragmented, then it is in a state of order. Have you understood this? Now, is your mind in total order, otherwise don't go any further. Nobody, no teacher, no guru, no saviour, no philosopher, can teach you what order is; in denying totally all authority, you are free from fear, and therefore you can find out what order is. Now, are you aware of your mind, of yourself, of your life - not the holiday life sitting here for an hour listening to a talk - but aware of your daily life, of your family life, of your relationship with each other? And in that life are you aware of the daily routine, the monotony, the boredom of going to the office? Are you aware of the quarrels, of the brutalities, of the nagging and the violence, of everything which is the result of a culture that is total disorder, which is your life? You can't pick and choose out of that disorder what you think is order. Are you aware that your life is disorderly and if you haven't got the interest, the passion, the intensity, the flame to find order, then you will pick and choose what you think is order out of the disorder. Can you observe yourself with great honesty, without any sense of hypocrisy or double talk, know for yourself that your life is disorderly, and can you put all that aside to find out what order is? You know, putting aside disorder is not so very difficult; we dramatise it, make much of it. But when you see something very dangerous, a precipice, a wild animal, or a man with a gun, you avoid it instantly, don't you? There is no arguing, no hesitation, no temporising, there is immediate action. In the same way, when you see the danger of disorder, there is instant action which is the total denial of the whole culture which has brought about disorder, which is yourself. Questioner: Is not the problem how to look? Krishnamurti: We have been asking, "Is one free to look?" You don't want to look, do you? Do you really want to look at all the things that you value, that you cherish, the beliefs which you think are important and which are surrounded by a great deal of confusion? Are you capable of looking at all that? Come on, Sirs, it is not my problem. Are you capable of looking at yourself without any distortion? Have you ever looked at yourself without one image looking at a lot of other images? Questioner: Aren't we conforming to a certain pattern now? You speak for an hour and then we ask questions. Isn't that a pattern too? Krishnamurti: Is this a pattern? You can make anything into a pattern; sitting on a chair is a pattern, sitting on the ground becomes a pattern. But is this a pattern? If it is, then let us break it up. You see, I am asking a question which is: have you ever looked at yourself? I am not talking about looking at your face in the mirror. But do you know what it means to look at yourself actually as you really are? Does that frighten you? You are frightened because you have an image about yourself, haven't you? You think: I am better than that, I am more noble than that; or how dreadfully ugly, how old I am, how decrepit, how diseased, how silly I am. All that prevents you from looking, doesn't it? I just want to see myself as I am. I don't want to pick and choose out of what I see; I just want to look. Does that take a great deal of courage? My interest, my passion to observe what I actually am makes me look, not my fear of finding out what I am I don't know if you are meeting this point I am vitally tremendously interested in seeing what I am, whatever it is - are you? In my relationships, I want to see whether I lie or tell the truth, or whether I am frightened; I want to see if I am greedy or ambitious, I want to watch all the subtle movements that creep in and out of my life. Now, how do I look at myself? Is my mind capable of looking at itself? Does that mean one thought separating itself to look at other thoughts? The one thought that has separated itself from the other thought then says: this is right, this is wrong, this is good, this is bad, this I shall keep, this I won't keep, how frightened I am, how ugly - you follow? Now, is that looking? When one thought separates itself from the other thoughts, is such a thought capable of looking? Or can you look at yourself only when there is no fragmentation of thought? Have you ever looked at yourself - the way you behave, why you behave like that, how you walk, how you talk, how you listen? Are you aware of what your body is doing, watching your nervous reactions like the twitching of your fingers? Are you aware of yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, of your inner motives, your inner drives and urges - are you completely aware of all this, not correcting it, but observing, watching looking? Questioner: It is very difficult not to analyse. Krishnamurti: When you are analysing, you are not looking. Questioner: I know. Krishnamurti: You don't know otherwise you wouldn't analyse. Look, I want to see what is in the cupboard of my mind, what is stored up there; I want to read all the things it contains because the content of the mind is the mind. I want to see what I am during the waking hours, walking, talking, making gestures, when I am at the office, when I am angry, in the fleeting moments of pleasure and sex, and the delight of seeing the hills, the streams, the trees, the birds and the clouds. But I also want to see myself when I am asleep, be aware of what is going on. Don't you want to see yourself, awake and asleep? You think you do. Do you know what it means to learn about yourself? It means hard work, daily observation, watching, watching, watching, but not self-centred watching, just watching, like you watch a bird, or the movement of a cloud; you can't change the movement of the cloud, so just watch in the same way. And the next question is: can the mind be watchful of what it is doing when it is asleep? We haven't time to go into that now, perhaps another day. Questioner: I would like to examine the relationship between you and us. You say you are not a guru, but you talk and we listen; we ask questions and you answer them, so could we look at this relationship? Krishnamurti: Are we taking a journey together? Or are you merely following? It is for you to tell me, not for me to tell you. What is it you are doing? Are we journeying together or are you being led - which is it? If you are being led, if you are following, there is no relationship, because the speaker says, "Don't follow." He is neither your authority nor your guru; if you insist on following, if you insist on listening in order to learn what he is saying, then there is no relationship. But if you say, "I want to learn," we are taking a journey together into the extraordinary world in which we live, and that world is "me" and I want to penetrate into that "me", I want to learn; then we are together, then we have a relationship. Questioner: But is it really together you sit up there and we are down here? Krishnamurti: I happen to sit on the platform because it is more convenient, because you can see me and I can see you. It is of no account whether you are sitting up here or down there - we are taking a journey together into a world in which there is neither height nor depth; it is that world which we are trying to understand. So I come back to my question which is: have you ever looked at yourself? Have you ever looked at yourself for any length of time, as you look at yourself in a mirror when you are shaving, or brushing your hair, or when you make-up? Have you ever spent ten minutes, as you do at a mirror, watching yourself, without any choice, without any sense of judgment or evaluation, just watching yourself? That is the main issue. -- Page 318 -- THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VII CHAPTER 3 3RD PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 22ND JULY 1971 'CAN WE UNDERSTAND OURSELVES?' Most of us live a very superficial life and are content to lead such a life, meeting all our problems superficially and thereby increasing them, because our problems are extraordinarily complex, very subtle and need deep penetration and understanding. Most of us like to treat our problems at a superficial level according to the old tradition, or we try to adjust ourselves to a modern tendency, so we never resolve totally and completely any of our problems, such as war, conflict, violence and so on. We also tend to look only on the surface, not knowing how to penetrate deeply;within ourselves; either we observe ourselves with a certain disgust, with a certain foregone conclusion, or we look at ourselves hoping to change what we see. I think it is important, that we should understand ourselves totally, completely, because as we said the other day, we are the world and the world is us. This is an absolute fact; it is not merely a verbal statement or a theory, but something that one feels deeply, with all the agony of it, the suffering, the pain, the brutality, the fragmentation, the division of nationalities and religions. And one can never solve any of these problems without really understanding oneself, because the world is oneself; and if I understand myself there is a living at a totally different dimension. Is it possible for each one of us to under- stand ourselves, not only at the superficial level of our minds, but also to penetrate the deep levels of our being? That is what we are going to talk over together this morning; when we say we are going to talk it over together, it doesn't mean that I talk and you listen - we are going to share it together. How is one to look at oneself? Is it possible to look at oneself completely without the division of the conscious and the deeper layers of consciousness, of which we are perhaps completely unaware? Is it possible to observe, see the whole movement of the "me", the self, the "what I am", with a non-analytical mind, so that in the very observation itself there is instantly a total understanding? That is what we are going to investigate; it is a very important problem, to discover whether one can go beyond oneself and find reality, to come upon something that is not measurable by the mind, to live without any illusion. This has been the major aim of every religion throughout the world; and in the process of this search to go beyond oneself, they have been caught in various myths, the Christian myth, the Hindu myth, the whole culture of myths which is unnecessary and totally irrelevant. Now is it possible to look at ourselves non-analytically and therefore observe without the "me" observing? I want to understand myself and I know the "me" is very complex; it is a living thing, not something dead; it is a living, vital, moving thing, it is not just an accumulation of memories, experiences, and knowledge. It is a living thing as society is a living thing, because we have created it. Now, is it possible to look without the observer looking at the thing called the observed? If there is the observer looking, then he must look through fragmentation, through division and where there is division, both in myself and outwardly, there must be conflict. Outwardly, the national conflicts, the religious conflicts, the economic conflicts, and inwardly there is this vast field, not only superficially but a wide area about which we know almost nothing. So, if in looking there is this division as the "I" and the "not I", as the observer and the observed, as the thinker and the thought, as the experiencer and the experience, then there must be conflict. One asks whether it is possible - I am not saying it is, or it is not; we are going to find out for ourselves - to observe oneself without this division. And to find that out, we hope to come to that state of perception which is without division, but not through analysis - when there is a division between the analyser and the thing analysed. In observing myself, there is the actual fact of this division. When I observe myself I say, "This is good, This is bad", "This is right, this is wrong", "This has value, this has no value", "This has relevancy and that has not". Therefore, when I look at myself, the observer is conditioned by the culture in which he has lived; so the observer is the memory, the observer is the entity that is conditioned - the "me". According to that conditioned background of the "me", I judge, I evaluate; I observe myself according to that culture, and according to my conditioning I hope to bring about a change in the observed. This is what we are doing all the time: hoping to change what is observed through analysis, through control, through reformation and so on. That is a fact. And I want to find out why this division exists, so I begin to analyse to discover the cause. The analysis is not only to find the cause, but one also hopes to go beyond it. I am angry, greedy, envious, brutal, violent, neurotic, or whatever it is, and I begin to analyse the cause of this neurotic state. Analysis is part of our culture because we have been trained from childhood to analyse, hoping that in this way we shall solve all our problems. Volumes have been written on it; the psychologists hope to find the cause of neurosis, understand it and go beyond. Now what is involved in analysis? It implies time, doesn't it? I need a great deal of time to analyse myself. I must very carefully examine every reaction, every incident, every thought and trace it to its source; all that takes time. Meanwhile other incidents are going on, other happenings, other reactions, which I am incapable of immediately understanding. That is one point: it takes time. And analysis also implies that everything that is analysed must be final and complete, and if it is not (which it can't be), then that finding is incorrect, and with this faulty analysis I proceed to examine the next experience, the next incident, the next bit of the puzzle. So, all the time I am working from a false premise, consequently my judgments and evaluations are wrong and I am increasing the margin of error. Analysis, by its very nature, implies an analyser and the person or thing analysed, whether the analyser is the analyst, the psychologist, or you yourself; and the analyser in his examination nourishes and sustains the division, and therefore increases the conflict. Analysis implies all these things: time, evaluation of every experience and of every thought completely (which is not possible), and the division between the observer and the observed that increases conflict. Now I can analyse my surface mind, its superficial daily activity, but how am I to understand, to investigate the much deeper layers, because I want to understand myself totally, right through? I don't want to leave any corner or dark spot unexamined; I want to analyse everything, so that nothing remains which the mind has not completely understood. If there is a corner that has not been examined, then that corner distorts all thought, all action. But analysis implies the postponement of action. When I am analysing myself, I am not acting; I am waiting until my analysis is over, then perhaps I shall act rightly; therefore analysis is the denial of action. Action means now, not tomorrow. Seeing all this, how can the mind understand its deep, hidden layers completely? All this is implied in understanding myself. Can understanding come through dreams? That is, is it possible during sleep for dreams to reveal the deep layers of the unconscious, or the thing that is hidden? The specialists say that you must dream and that if you do not, it indicates a certain kind of neurosis. They also say that dreams help you to understand all the activities of the hidden mind. So one must enquire into the meaning of dreams and whether we should dream at all. Or are dreams merely in a symbolic form the continuation of our daily life? During the day the mind is occupied with all the trivialities of daily life - office work, domesticity, the quarrels and the irritations of relationship, image fighting image, and so on. Then, just before you go to sleep, there is a taking stock of everything that has happened throughout the day. Doesn't this happen to you just before you fall asleep? You relive everything: "You should have done this, you ought to have said that or said it differently; you go over the whole period of the day, all your thoughts, all your activities, how you were angry, jealous and all the rest of it. Now, why does the mind do this? Why does it take stock of the day's happenings and events? Is it not because the mind wants to establish order? The mind goes over the day's activities because it wants to bring everything into order; otherwise when you fall asleep, the brain goes on working and tries to bring order in itself, because the brain can only function normally, healthily, in complete order. So if there is no order during the day, the brain tries to establish order while the body is quiet, is asleep, and the establishment of that order is part of the dreams. Do you accept all that the speaker is saying? Audience: No. Krishnamurti: No? I am delighted. (Laughter.) Don't agree or disagree. Find out for yourself, not according to some philosopher, to some analyst, or psychologist, but find out for yourself. As long as there is disorder in your daily life, the brain must establish order otherwise it cannot function healthily, normally and efficiently. And when there is disorder, dreams are necessary to bring about order either deep down or at a superficial level. Examining all this one asks is it necessary to dream at all because it is very important not to dream; it is very important to have a mind that is completely quiet when you are asleep, then the whole mind, the whole brain, the whole body can rejuvenate itself. But if the brain goes on working, working while you are asleep, then it becomes exhausted, therefore neurotic, overstrained and all the rest of it. So is it possible not to dream at all? I am asking all these questions because I want to understand myself: it is part of understanding myself. We are not merely investigating dreams, assessing the importance or non-importance of dreaming. Unless there is a deep understanding of oneself, all action becomes superficial and contradictory and creates more and more problems. The old tradition says that to understand myself I must analyse, introspect; but I see the falseness of all this. I reject it because it is false although most of the psychologists say the opposite. And in observing oneself one asks: why does one dream at all and is it possible for the whole mind to be completely quiet when one is asleep? I am not asking this question, you are. I am only suggesting it to you;you have to find out. Now, how are you going to find out? I realize that when the organism is quiet, completely still, the body is able,to gather energy and is capable of functioning more efficiently. When the body has no rest, is driven from morning until night without a pause, it soon wears out, breaks down; but if the body can rest for ten or twenty minutes during the day, then it has more energy. The mind is very active, watching, observing, criticizing, evaluating, struggling and all the rest of it. And when it goes to sleep, the same momentum is kept going. So I am asking myself whether during sleep the mind can be absolutely quiet. Just see the beauty of the question, not the answer yet. Unless the body is extraordinarily still, without any movement, without any gestures or nervous twitches, and all the things that one does, unless it is absolutely quiet (not forced to be quiet) and relaxed, it cannot recuperate, it cannot gather energy. Therefore I want to find out whether the mind can be absolutely quiet during the night when it is asleep; and I see it can only be quiet if every incident, every happening during the day is understood instantly, not carried over. If I carry over a problem from one day to the next, the mind is continuously engaged; but if the mind can solve the problem immediately, today, then it is finished. Is it possible for the mind each day to be so totally aware that problems no longer exist? By the evening, you have a clear, clean slate. If you do this, not just play with it, actually work at it, you will find that when the brain needs rest, it becomes very quiet, completely still; even ten minutes rest is enough. And if you pursue this very deeply, you will find that dreams become totally unnecessary because there is nothing to dream about; you are not concerned with your future, whether you are going to be a great doctor, a great scientist, or a brilliant writer, or whether you are going to reach enlightenment the day after tomorrow; you are not concerned with the future at all. I am afraid you don't see the beauty of all this! The mind is no longer projecting anything in time. Now, having stated all that, can the mind, which is really the observer (not only the visual observer, the eyes and so on), can the mind observe without division? You understand the question? Can the mind observe without the division between the observer and the observed, because there is only the observed, not the observer. Let us examine what the observer is. Surely the observer is the past, be it the past of a few seconds ago, of yesterday, or of many, many years, living as a conditioned entity in a particular culture. The observer is the sum total of past experiences. The observer is also knowledge. The observer is within the field of time. When he says I will be "that", he has projected "that" from his past knowledge - whether it be pleasure, pain, suffering, fear, delight and so on - he says I must become that. The past therefore is going through the present, which is modified and which he calls the future, but it is really a projection of the past: so the observer is the past. You live in the past, don't you? Just think of it. You are the past, you live in the past and that is your life. Past memories, past delights, past remembrances, the things that gave you pleasure and displeasure, the failures, the disappointments, the lack of fulfilment and the misery, everything is in the past. And through the eyes of the observer you judge the present, which is living, moving, not a static, dead thing. When I look at myself, I am looking with the eyes of the past; so I condemn, judge, evaluate, "This is right", "This is wrong", good or bad according to my particular culture and tradition, according to the knowledge and experience which I have gathered. Therefore it prevents observation of the living thing, which is the "me". And that "me" may not be "me" at all, because I only know the "me" as the past. When the Muslim says that he is a Muslim, he is the past, conditioned by the culture in which he has been brought up; it is the same with the Catholic or the Communist. So when we talk about living, we are talking about living in the past and there is conflict between the past and the present, because-I am conditioned. I cannot meet the living present unless I break down my conditioning, and my conditioning is deliberately brought about by my parents, my grandparents, to keep me in the narrow line of their belief, of their tradition, to continue with their mischief and their misery. We are doing that all the time; we live in the past, not only through our conditioning, through the culture in which we have lived, but also through every experience, incident and happening in our life. I see a beautiful sunset and I think how marvellous it is with the light, the shadows, the rays of the sun on the distant hills, and it has already been stored up as memory and tomorrow I say I must look at that sunset again and see its beauty. Then I struggle to find it, and when I can't, I go to a museum and the whole circus begins. Now, can I look at myself with eyes that have never been touched by time? Time involves analysis, time involves holding on to the past, time involves this whole process of dreaming, recollecting, gathering the past and holding it, all that. Can I look at myself without the eyes of time? put that question to yourself. Don't say you can or cannot. You don't know. And when you look at yourself without the eyes of time, what or who is there to look? Don't answer me, please. Do you understand my question? I have looked at myself with the quality, the nature and the structure of time, the past. I have looked at myself through the eyes of the past; I have no other eyes to look. I have looked at myself as a Catholic, or something else, which is the past? so my eyes are incapable of looking at "what is" without time, which is the past. Now I am asking a question, which is: can the eyes observe without the past? Let me put it differently. I have an image of myself, created and imposed upon me by the culture in which I have lived; I also have my own particular image of myself, what I should be and what I am not. In fact, we have a great many images; I have an image about you, about my wife, my children, my political leader, my priest, and so on; so I have dozens of images. Don't you have them? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Now, how can you look without an image, because if you look with an image, it is obviously a distortion? You were angry with me yesterday, so I have created an image about you, that you are no longer my friend, that you are ugly and all the rest of it. If I look at you with that image next time I meet you, that image will distort my perception. That image is of the past, as are all my images, and I dare not get rid of any of those images because I don't know what it would be like to look without an image, so I cling to images. The mind depends on an image for its survival. I wonder if you are following all this. So can the mind observe without any image, without the image of the tree, cloud, hills, without the image of my wife my children, my husband? Can the mind be without any image in relationship? It is the image that brings conflict in relationship. I cannot get on with my wife because she has bullied me; that image has been built up, day after day, and it prevents any kind of relationship; we may sleep together but that is irrelevant; so there is conflict. Can the mind look, observe without any image what has been put together by time? That means, can the mind observe without any image? Can it observe without the observer, which is the past, which is the `me"? Can I look at you without the interference of the conditioned entity, which is the `me"? What do you say? "Impossible!" How do you know it is impossible? The moment you say it is not possible, then you have blocked yourself and if you say it is possible, it is also blocking you; but if you say let's find out, let's examine, let's go into it, then you will discover that the mind can observe without the eyes of time. And when it so observes, then what is there to be observed? I started out learning about myself; I have explored all the possibilities of analysis, and I see that the observer is the past. The observer is much more complex; one can go much deeper into it. I see that the observer is the past, and the mind lives in the past because the brain has evolved through time which is the past. And in the past there is security - my house, my wife, my belief, my status, my position, my fame, my shoddy little self; in that there is great safety and security. So I am asking if the mind can observe without any of that, and if it can, what is there to see except the hills, the flowers, the colours, the people - you follow? Is there anything in me to be observed? Therefore, the mind is totally free. You may ask what is the point of the mind being free. The point is that such a mind has no conflict, such a mind is completely quiet and peaceful, not violent, and it is only this quality of mind that can create a new culture, a new culture resolving this terrible thing called loneliness. Don't you know all this? Therefore not knowing how to resolve it, I attach myself to people, to ideas, to groups, to activities, to demonstrations, to climbing the mountains and all the rest of it. If only I could resolve totally this problem of loneliness so that it doesn't exist at all. How am I to be beyond this loneliness which man has inwardly fought at all times? He feels lonely, empty, insufficient, incomplete and he says there is God, there is this, there is that; he projects an outside agency. How can the mind free itself from this terrible burden of what it calls loneliness? Have you ever realized what horrors we commit out of this feeling of loneliness? We will go into this next time. -- Page 332 -- THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VII CHAPTER 4 4TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 25TH JULY 1971 'LONELINESS' MOST OF US realize, when we dare look at it, that we are terribly lonely, isolated human beings. Whether we are consciously or unconsciously aware of it, we want to escape from it, because we do not know what lies behind and beyond it; being frightened, we run away from it through attachment, through activity and every form of religious or worldly entertainment. This is fairly obvious when one observes it in oneself. We isolate ourselves by our everyday activities, by our attitude and our way of thinking; although we may have an intimate relationship with somebody, we are always thinking about ourselves. The result of this is more isolation, more loneliness, a greater dependence on outward things, greater attachments and the resultant suffering which arises from it. I do not know if you are aware of all this. Perhaps as we are sitting here, we could become aware of this thing called loneliness and of the isolation, dependency and suffering it brings. This is going on in ourselves all the time. If one is observant one can see that our whole activity is self-centred. We are thinking about ourselves endlessly: about our health, that we must meditate, that we must change; we want a better job with more money, a better relationship. `I want to attain enlightenment; "I must achieve something in this life" - "me" and "my life", my worries, my problems. This eternal preoccupation with oneself is going on all the time; we are devoted to ourselves. That is an obvious fact. And whether we go to an office or to a factory, do social work or are concerned with the welfare of the world, our self-concern motivates all our activities; it is always "me" first. This self preoccupation which operates in daily life and relationship does bring about isolation. This again is fairly obvious, and if one goes into it very deeply one discovers that this isolation is an awareness of being completely alone, cut off, not having a relationship with anybody or anything. You may be amongst a crowd, or sitting with a friend, when suddenly this sense of utter isolation, of being completely cut off from everybody comes upon you. I do not know if you have noticed this or if it is something you have never experienced. When we become aware of this loneliness, then we try to escape by being occupied through domestic strife, or various forms of entertainment, by trying to mediate, and so on. Surely, all this indicates that the mind, whether it is shallow or deep, superficial or merely caught in technological knowledge, must cut itself off from every form of relationship if it is constantly occupied with itself. Relationship is the most important thing in life, because if you don't have a right relationship with the one, you cannot possibly have it with any other human being. You can imagine that you will have a better relationship with another, but it is merely at the verbal level and therefore illusory. If you understand that relationship between two human beings is the same as relationship with the rest of the world, then isolation, loneliness, has quite a different meaning. So what is relationship? We are trying to find out whyhuman beings are so desperately lonely. Not having love, but wanting to be loved they cut themselves off, physically and psychologically and thereby become neurotic. Most people are neurotic, slightly unbalanced, caught in some particular idiosyncracy. It seems, if you examine it closely, that all this arises from the utter lack of relationship. So before we can understand how to bring an end to this loneliness and suffering, to this ache and anxiety of human existence, we must first of all go into this question of relationship -what it means to be related. Are we related at all with another? Thought asserts that we are related, but actually we may not be, even though one human being may have an intimate, a sexual relationship with another. Unless one deeply understands the truth about relationship, it appears that human beings must inevitably end in sorrow, in confusion and in conflict. They may accept various forms of belief, or do social work, but all that has no value, unless they have established between themselves a relationship in which there is no conflict whatever. Is that possible? Can you and I be related? Perhaps you could have a very good relationship with me, because soon I am going away and then it is finished. Can there be a relationship between two human beings if each one is occupied with himself? -if each one is concerned with his own ambitions and worries, his opposition in the world and all the absurdity that human beings go through? When a human being is caught in that net, can he have any relationship with another? Please, follow all this. Can there be any relationship between a man and a woman when one is a Catholic and the other is a Protestant, when one is a Hindu and the other is a Buddhist? What then is relationship? It seems to me that it is one of the most important things in life, because living is relationship. If there is no relationship, there is no living at all; then life merely becomes a series of conflicts, ending in separation or in divorce, in loneliness, with all the fears, anxieties, problems of attachment, and all the things that are involved in this sense of being completely isolated. I am sure you know all this. One observes how extraordinarily vital relationship is in life, and how very few human beings have broken down the barrier that exists between themselves and another. To break down this barrier with all implications - not just the physical barrier - one has to go deeply into this question of action. What is action? Action is not future or past action, but acting. Is it the result of,a conclusion and acting according to that conclusion? Or is it based on some belief and acting according to the belief? Is it based on some experience and acting according to that experience or knowledge? If it is, then action is always in the past, our relationship is always in the past, never in the present. If I have a relationship with another - and relationship obviously is action - throughout the days, weeks or years of that relationship I have built an image and I act according to that image, and the other acts according to the image which he has; so the relationship is not between us but between these two images. Please do observe your own minds, your own activity in relationship, and you will soon find out the truth and validity of this statement. Our relationship is based on images, and how can there be a relationship with another, if it is merely the relationship of these images? I am concerned with having a relationship in which there is no conflict whatsoever, in which I am not using or exploiting another, either sexually, for reasons of pleasure, or for the sake of companionship. I see very clearly that conflict destroys any form of relationship, so I must resolve that conflict at the very centre, not at the periphery. And I can only put an end to conflict by understanding action, not only in relationship but in daily life. I want to find out if all my activities are isolating, in the sense that I have built a wall round myself; the wall being myself concerned with myself, with my future, my happiness, my health, my God, with my belief, my success, my misery - you follow? Or is it that relationship has nothing whatsoever to do with me or myself? Myself is the centre, and all the activities that are concerned with my happiness, my satisfaction, my glory must isolate. Where there is isolation there must be attachment and dependency; when there is uncertainty in that attachment and dependency then there is suffering, and suffering implies isolation in any relationship. I see all this very clearly, not verbally but actually - it is a fact. For many years I have built images about myself and about another; I have isolated myself through my activities, through my beliefs and so on. So my first question is - how am I to be free of these images? - the images of my God, my conditioning, that I must achieve fame or enlightenment (which is the same thing), that I must achieve success and so I am afraid of being a failure. I have so many images about myself and about you. How am I to be free of them? Can I end the building of images through the analytical process? Obviously not. Then what am I to do? It is a problem and I must end it, not carry it over to the next day. If I do not end it today, then the problem creates disorder, a disturbance, and the brain needs order to function healthily, normally, not neurotically. I must establish order now, during the day, otherwise the mind worries about it, has dreams and is incapable of being fresh the next morning; so I must end this problem. How am I to prevent this building of images? By not creating a super-image - obviously. I have many images and not being able to be free of them the mind unfortunately invents a super. image, the higher self, the Atman; or it introduces some outside agency, either spiritual or the "Big Brother" of the communist world. So without creating a higher, nobler image, there must be the ending of all the images which I have created. I see that if I have one single image, there is no possibility of any relationship, because images separate and where there is separation there must be conflict, not only nationally but between human beings; that is clear. Then how am I to be rid of every image which I have gathered, so that the mind is completely free, fresh and young, so that it can observe anew the whole movement of life? First of all, I must find out non-analytically how the images come into being. That is, I must learn to observe. Is observation based on analysis? I observe, I see - is that the result of analysis, of practice, of time? Or is it an act outside of time? Zan has always tried to go beyond time by various tricks and they have all failed. Suspecting that perhaps he is incapable of getting rid of these innumerable images, he has created a super-image, and to that image he has become a slave, therefore he is not free. Whether that super-image is the soul, the higher self, the State or anything else, it is still not freedom: it is another image. Therefore I am vitally interested in ending all images, because then only is there a possibility of having a relationship with another; my concern is to find out if it is at all possible to end the images instantly, not chase one image after another. That will obviously lead nowhere. So I must find out if I can break the mechanism of the mind which builds images and at the same time go into the question of what it is to be aware; because that may solve my problem, which is the ending of all images. That gives freedom, and when there is freedom then only is there a possibility of having a true relationship in which every form of conflict has come to an end. What does this awareness mean? It implies an attention in which there is no choice whatsoever. I can't choose one image instead of the other, then there is no ending of that image. So I must find out what it is to be aware, in which there is no choice at all, but only pure observation, pure seeing. Now, what is seeing? How do I look at a tree, or a mountain, at the hills, the moon, the flowing waters? There is not only visual observation, but also the mind has an image about the tree, the cloud and the river. That river has a name; it makes a sound which is pleasant or unpleasant. I am always observing, am aware of things, in terms of like and dislike, in terms of comparison. Is it possible to observe, to listen to that river without any choice, any resistance and attachment, without any verbalization? please do this as we are talking - it is your morning-exercise! Can I listen to that river without any sense of the past? Can I observe these various images without any choice? - which means without condemning any one of them, or being attached to them, but just observe without any preference. You can't do it, can you? Why not? Is it because my mind has become used to prejudices and preferences? Is it because it is lazy and has not sufficient energy? Or is it that my mind does not really want to be free of images and wants to hold on to one particular image? So it means that the mind refuses to see the fact that all existence is relationship, and when there is conflict in that relationship, then life becomes a misery and loneliness and confusion follow. Does the mind see the truth nonverbally, that where there is conflict there is no relationship? How can one be free of the images that one has? First of all I must find out how these images come into being, what is the mechanism that creates them. You can see that at the moment of actual relationship, that is when you are talking, when there are arguments, when there are insults and brutality, if you are not completely attentive at that moment, then the mechanism of building an image starts. That is, when the mind is not completely attentive at the moment of action, then the mechanism of building images is set in motion. When you say something to me which I do not like - or which I like - if at that moment I am not completely attentive, then the mechanism starts. If I am attentive, aware, then there is no building of images. When the mind is fully awake at that actual moment, not distracted, not frightened, not rejecting what is being said, then there is no possibility of building an image. Try this - do it during the day. So I have found how to prevent the building of images; but what happens to all the images that I have gathered? You are following the problem? Apparently this is not your problem, because if it were the real, deep, vital problem in your life, you would have solved it for yourself instead of sitting here waiting for me to find the answer for you. Now, what happens to all the images which you have collected? Do you know you have many images hidden away in the cupboard of your mind? Can you resolve them all, bit by bit, or would that take an infinite time? While you are dissolving one image, you are already creating others, so there is no ending to the gradual process of getting rid of one image after another. So you have discovered a truth, which is, that you cannot get rid of the images one by one; therefore the mind that really sees the truth of this is totally aware when it is creating an image. In that attention all the other images go away. I wonder if you see this. Images, then, are formed when the mind is not attentive; and most of our minds are inattentive. Occasionally we give attention, but for the rest of the time we are inattentive. When you are aware of one image attentively, and you are also attentively aware of the whole mechanism of the building of images and how it operates, then in that attention the building of all images comes to an end; whether they be of the past, the present or of the future. What matters is the state of attention, not how many images you have. Do, please, try and understand this, because it is most important. If you can really grasp this, then you have understood completely all the machinery of the mind. Most of us, unfortunately, have not been able to solve our problems; we don't know how to deal with them, so we live with them, they become our habit and they are like impenetrable armour. If you have a problem which has not been resolved, you have no energy; the energy that you have is taken up by the problem; if you have no energy, that too becomes a habit. So if you are at all serious, if you really want to live a life in which there is no conflict whatsoever, then you have to find out how to end a human problem instantly, immediately; which means that you give complete attention to the problem and that you are not seeking an answer to it. Because if you are trying to find an answer, then you are looking beyond the problem, whereas if you remain with the problem and are completely attentive, then in the problem itself -not beyond it - is the answer. Let me put it differently. We all know what suffering is, both physical and psychological, that is inwardly. One can deal with physical pain by various remedies and also by not allowing the memory of that pain to remain. If you are aware of the pain, and in that very awareness you see the memory of the xxZastZ then the pain disappears; therefore you have energy to meet the next pain, when it comes. We all have suffered psychologically in various ways, either with great intensity or to a lesser degree - we have all had suffering of one kind or another. When we suffer, instinctively we want to run away from it - through religion, through entertainment, reading books, through anything to get away from the suffering. Now if the mind is attentive and does not move away from suffering at all, then you will see that out of total attention comes not only energy - which means passion - but also that suffering comes to an end. In the same way, all images can end instantly when there is no preference for any image; this is very important. When you have no preference, you have no prejudice. Then you are attentive, then you can look. In that observation there is not only the understanding of the building of images, but also the ending of all images. So I see the importance of relationship, and there can be a relationship without any conflict, which means love. Love is not an image; it is not pleasure; it is not desire. Love is not something that can be cultivated; it is not dependent on memory. Can I live a daily life without any kind of self-concern, because the self-concern is my major image? Can I live without that major image? Then action does not bring loneliness, isolation and suffering. Questioner: When one looks within and seems to experience a deep unmotivated passion to understand, with a bit of candour one finds that this feeling is actually a wish to experience reality. Can the self, which is all we know, have this unmotivated passion and see the essential difference between these two feelings? Krishnamurti: First of all, what is the self, the "me"? Surely, that "me" is the result of our education, of our conflicts, of our culture, of our relationship with the rest of the world; that "me" is the result of the propaganda which we have been subjected to for five thousand years. It is that "me" which is attached to our furniture, our wives or husbands and so on. It is that "me" which says "I want to be happy. I must be successful, I have achieved". It is that "me" which says I am a Christian, a communist or a Hindu. There are all those terrible divisions - the "me" is all that, isn't it? Can that "me" which is isolated, which by its very structure and nature is limited and therefore creates division, can that "me" have any passion at all? Obviously not. It can have the passion of pleasure, which is something quite different from the passion live are talking about. Only with the ending of the "me" is there passion; it is only a mind that is free from all prejudices, opinions, judgments and all conditioning, that can have passion, energy and intensity, because it is able to see "what is". You agree and say "Yes". Is that merely a verbal statement, or have you really seen the truth of it and are free? Questioner: Do these images we have waste our energy? Krishnamurti: It is obvious, isn't it? If I have an image about myself and that is in opposition to your image, there must be conflict, therefore it must waste energy, isn't that so? Questioner: Can a person who is free from problems have a relationship with someone who is full of problems? (Laughter). Krishnamurti: Well, you have answered it, haven't you? If you are really free of problems - not just in your imagination - but actually free of every problem that human beings have, such as sorrow, fear, death, love and pleasure, can I have a relationship with you if I have problems? Obviously I can't. Please listen to this: you have no problems and I have problems, then what do I do? Either I shun you, avoid you, or I begin to worship you. I put you on a pedestal and say, "What an extraordinary man you are, because you have no problems." I begin to listen to whatever you say in the hope that you will be able to resolve my problems. And that means I am going to destroy you with my problems. First I pushed you away; now I accept you, worship you, which means I will kill you with my problems. Questioner: Is there any hope for us? (Laughter). Krishnamurti: It all depends on you! If you are really serious, if you are deeply interested in resolving your problems completely, then you will have the intensity and vitality to resolve them, but it is no use if you play with them one day and the next day forget about them. Questioner: What can we do to prevent others from taking drugs? Krishnamurti: Do you take drugs? Questioner: No, but I drink coffee and alcohol. Isn't that the same? Krishnamurti: We drink coffee, we take alcohol, we smoke, and some take drugs. Why do you take them? Coffee and tea are stimulants, aren't they? I don't take them myself, but I know about them. Physiologically you may need some form of stimulant; some people do. Are alcohol and tobacco the same as taking drugs? Go on, answer it. Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: You say taking alcohol is the same as taking drugs. (General disagreement.) Krishnamurti: Don't take sides, please. One says, "No", somebody else says "Yes". Then where are we? I am simply asking why you take any of these things at all. Do you need a stimulant, do you need something to pep you up, to encourage you? Please answer this question. Do you need constant stimulation and entertainment, must you have tea, tobacco, drugs and all the rest of it? Why do you need them? Questioner: To escape. Krishnamurti: To escape, to take the easy way out. You drink a glass of wine and you are happy, it is done quickly! Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: So you need stimulants in various forms. Are you being stimulated now by the speaker? Questioner: Yes. (Laughter). Krishnamurti: Please pay a little attention. You say "No" and this gentleman says "Yes". Please investigate. Are you being stimulated at this moment? If you are, then the speaker is just as good as a drug. Then you depend on the speaker as you are dependent on tea, coffee, alcohol or drugs, whatever it is. I am asking why you depend, not whether it is right or wrong, whether you should or should not. Why do you depend on any of these stimulants? Questioner: We can see what action it has on us, but we don't need to be dependent on it. Krishnamurti: But you are dependent! When the effect wears off you need more stimulants, which means you are dependent. I may take LSD one morning and get a kick out of it, and when it lets me down I need some more; the day after tomorrow I am dependent on it. Now I am asking why the human mind depends -why does it depend on sex, on drugs, on alcohol, on any form of outward stimulation? This is psychological, isn't it? There is a physiological need for tea and coffee because we eat wrongly, we live wrongly, because we overindulge and so on. But why do we want to be stimulated psychologically? Is it because we are so poor in ourselves? Is it because we have not the brain, not the capacity to be something entirely different, that we depend on stimulants? Questioner: Doesn't alcohol destroy the brain as well as drugs? Krishnamurti: Alcohol may do it gradually, it may take a number of years, but drugs are very dangerous because they affect future generations, your children. So if you say, "I don't care what happens to my grandson, I am going to take drugs", then that is the end of the argument. But I am asking: what happens to your mind when you depend on anything, whatever it is, whether it's tea, coffee, sex, drugs or nationalism? Questioner: I lose my freedom. Krishnamurti: You say these things, but you don't live it, do you? When you depend on anything it destroys freedom, doesn't it? It makes you a slave - to alcohol, for instance: you must have your drink, your dry Martini or whatever it is. So gradually your mind becomes dull through dependency. It was established a long time ago in India, that any man who is really religious will never touch any of these things. But you don't care; you say, "I need stimulation". I once met a man who took LSD and he said that when he went to a museum after taking it, he could see all the colours more brightly, everything stood out more vividly, more sharply, there was great beauty. He may see the lovely light of a sunset more brilliantly, but his mind is gradually being destroyed and after a year or two he becomes just a useless entity. If you think it is worth it, that's up to you. But if you don't, then have nothing whatever to do with it. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VII CHAPTER 5 5TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 27TH JULY 1971 'THOUGHT AND THE IMMEASURABLE' Some of us feel that the world is so chaotic that if it had been organized by a madman it could not be worse thaii it is at this present moment. Many feel that there must be environmental, economic and political changes to stop wars, the pollution of the air, and to end the material inequality of the very rich and the very poor. Many consider that these things must be changed first, that if there is an environmental, peripheral transformation, then man will be capable of dealing with himself more reasonably and wisely. I think the problem goes much deeper, is more complex, and that merely to change things outwardly will have little effect. Having observed the events in the world, the permissive society of the young and the terrible hypocrisy of the older generation, an educated and mature mind is fully aware that the problem is profound and that it demands a totally different way of dealing with it. One also observes that most believe that all human endeavour can be achieved by thought, whether outwardly going to the moon, or inwardly transforming one's mind and heart. We have given tremendous importance to the functioning of thought. Thought, whether it be logical and objective, or irrational and neurotic, has always played an extraordinarily important role throughout the ages. Thought is measure; and in bringing about order and change in society thought has shown itself very limited. It has apparently not succeeded - it may have done so superficially but not fundamentally. The whole machinery of thinking is responsible for the present cohdition of the world; there is no denying that. We think that thought can change not only the outward events and happenings - the pollution, the violence and all the rest of it - but that also by careful and skilful usage it can transform human conditioning, the human way of action and our mode of living. It is obvious that organized thought is necessary; that it requires organized thought, applied objectively and sanely, to change the environment with its pollution and to overcome poverty. The whole technological world in which we live is based on thought with its measurement; and thought can only function when there is space. Thought creates its own space, as time, the distance from here to there. On that the whole modern world is built. Measurement, with its space, which is the very nature of tliinking, is obviously limited, because thought is conditioned. Thought is the response of memory, which is the past; the response of thought when challenged is the past. And thought apparently has not put an end to wars; on the contrary, thought has created wars, it has bred division - religious, economic, social and so on. Thought in itself is also the cause of fragmentation. So one asks: what is the function of thought which is the response of knowledge? Knowledge is always rooted in the past and out of that thought projects the future, which is really a modification of the activities of the present. So through its knowledge, thought can project the future, what the world "should be; but apparently the "should be" is never realized. Every philosopher, every so-called religious teacher, has projected a world of the future based upon knowledge of the past; he has projected its opposite, or something which is a response to the past. So thought has never united man. In fact, thought has divided man, because it can only function in knowledge and knowledge is measurable. So thought can never bring about a true relationship between people. Therefore, I am asking: what is the function of knowledge, which is the known, the past? What is the function of the response to that past, which is thought, in daily life? Have you ever put that question to yourself? One lives and acts by thought; all our calculations, our relationships, our behaviour, are based on thought, on knowledge. That knowledge is more or less measurable; and knowledge is always in the field of the known. So can you and I realize the importance of knowledge yet see its limitations and go beyond it? This is what I want to find niir I see that if you are always functioning in the field of knowledge, you will always be a prisoner; you will always be limited within either expansive or narrow borders which are measurable. Therefore the mind will be held within the frontiers of knowledge. I am asking myself whether that knowledge, which is experience, gathered in the last few days or through many centuries, can free man so that he can function wholly, differently, so that he is not always living in the past, which is knowledge. This question has been put differently by many serious people, specially in the religious world; the scholars, the pundits and gurus who have talked with me have always asked whether man can go beyond time. Action in the field of knowledge is measurable, so unless man is free of that field, he will always be a slave. He may do all kinds of things within that field, but he will always live within the limitations which are time, measure and knowledge. Please put this question to yourself. Must man always be bound to the past? If he is, then he cannot ever be free; he will always be conditioned. He may project an idea of freedom, of heaven, and escape from the actual fact of time by projecting a belief, a concept, or escape into an illusion - but it is still an illusion. So I want to find out if man can be free of time and yet still function in this world. Obviously there is chronological time -today, tomorrow, next year and so on. If there were no chronological time I should miss my train, so I realize that there must be time in order to function, but that time is always measurable. The action of time, which is knowledge, is absolutely necessary. But if that is the only way in which I can live and function then I am entirely bound, I am a slave. My mind observes, looks, enquires and wants to find out if it can ever free itself from the shackles of time. The mind rebels against the idea of being a slave to time; being caught in this trap, it rebels against the idea ofliving in a culture which is based on thought, time and knowledge. Now the mind wants to find out whether it is possible to go beyond time. Can it enter into the immeasurable - which has its own space - and live in that world, free of time and yet function with time, with knowledge and all the technological achievements which thought has brought about? This is a very important question. Can the mind enquire into the quality and nature of the immeasurable? - knowing that any projection by thought, any form of illusion, is still within the field of rime, hence of knowledge. Therefore the mind must be entirely free from any movement which might create illusion. It is very easy to imagine one is in a timeless world, to have all kinds of illusions and think one has caught God by the right hand. What is it that creates a fragmentary, neurotic mind which breeds deception, and illusion? What makes for such a state, and what is the factor of illusion? One has to go into this question very carefully. First, you have to be watchful never to deceive yourself under any circumstances, never to be a hypocrite and have double standards - the private standard and the public standard; saying one thing and doing another; thinking one thing and saying something else. That requires tremendous honesty, which means I must find out what is the factor in the mind which brings about this deception and hypocrisy, this double talk, the various illusions and neurotic distortions; unless the mind is free of any distortion, it car,not possibly enquire into the immeasurable. What do you think is the cause of illusions? - the illusion of grandeur, the illusion that you have achieved reality and reached enlightenment. One must see for oneself very clearly, without analysis, where distortion takes place; distortion is hypocrisy, it is the use of imagination where it has no place at all. Imagination may be in place when you are painting a picture, writing a poem or a book, but if imagination says "That exists", then you are caught. So I must not only find out the factor of illusion and distortion, but be completely free of it. I wonder if you have ever asked yourself whether the mind can be completely free of this distorting factor which governs our every action. The factor of distortion is thought; thought cultivates fear, as thought cultivates pleasure. Thought says, "I must enter into that timeless state because it promises freedom." It wants to achieve, it wants to gain, it wants a greater experience. VVhen thought, which is knowledge, functions rationally, objectively, sanely, it is not a distorting factor. The major factors of distortion are fear and the demand for pleasure through gratification, so the mind must be completely free of fear. Can it? Don't say "Yes" or "No", you do not know. Let's investigate - please, see the importance of this. The factor of distortion is fear, it is the demand for pleasure, gratification, enjoyment - not the pleasure itself, but the demand for pleasure. All our moral and religious structure is based on this. So I am asking myself whether the human mind can be completely free of fear. If it cannot be free of fear then distortion takes place. There is physical feir, the fear of darkness, the fear of the unknown, of losing what one has, the fear of death and of not being loved, the fear of not achieving, of not fulfilling, the fear of loneliness and of having no relationship - the small physical fears and the much more complex and subtle psychological fears. Can the mind be free of all fears, not only at the conscious level but at the deep, psychological levels? The mind must be completely merciless to find this out, otherwise one enters a world of illusion and distortion. We all know physical pain through ill health and disease. Those pains leave a memory and that memory which is thought, says: you must not have that pain again, take great care. Thought, thinking about the past pain, projects the future pain and therefore is afraid of the future. Now when physical pain occurs, live with it and end it - do not carry it over. If you do not end it instantly, then fear comes in. That is, I have had great pain and I see the importance of not having fear. That is my vital, intense demand, that there must be no fear. When the pain comes you do not identify yourself with it and carry it over, but you go through with it completely and end it. To end that pain, you have to live with it, not say, "How can I get out of it as quickly as possible." When you have pain, can you live with it without self-pity and not complain? You do whatever is necessary to end the pain - but when it has gone it is finished. You do not carry it over as memory. It is thought that carries it over; the pain has gone, but thought - which is the response of memory - has established that memory and says "you must not have that pain again". So when you have pain, is it possible not to build a memory of it? Do you know what this means? It means to be completely aware when you have pain, to be completely attentive, so that the pain is not carried over as memory. Do it, if you are interested in it. Then there are all the psychological fears which are mucli more complex; again the complexity is brought about through thought. "I want to be a great man and I am not" - so there is the pain of not achieving. Or I have compared myself with somebody who I think is superior, therefore I feel inferior and I suffer from that. All this is the measurement of thought. And I am afraid of death and the ending of everything I possess. There is the whole psychological complexity of thought. Thought is always wanting to be sure and always frightened of uncertainty, always wanting to achieve, knowing it may fail. There is a battle between the action of thought and thought tself. So can fear end completely? Sitting here listening to the speaker, at this present moment, you are not afraid; there is no fear because you are listening. And you can't evoke fear, which would be artificial. But you can see that when you are attached or dependent, this is based on fear. You can see your attachments, your psychological dependency on your wife, your husband, your books, or whatever it is. If you watch closely you will discover that the root of that attachment is fear. Not being able to be alone, you want companionship; feeling inadequate, empty, you depend on somebody else. In that you see the whole structure of fear. Being dependent and attached, can you see the involvement of fear in it? And can you be psychologically independent of anyone? Now comes the test. We can play with words, with ideas, but when it comes to the actual fact, we withdraw. When you withdraw and do not face the fact, you are not concerned with the understanding of illusion; you would rather live in an illusion than go beyond it. Don't be a hypocrite: you love to live in an illusion, in deception, so face it. Then you will come upon fear; remain with it, don't fight it. The more you fight it, the more there is fear. But if you understand the whole nature of fear, then, as you observe, you are not only aware of the superficial, conscious fears, but also you penetrate deeply into the inner recesses of your mind. Then fear completely comes to an end and the factor of distortion ends. If you are pursuing or demanding pleasure, that also is a factor of distortion: "I don't like this guru, but I like that one"; "My guru is wiser than your guru; "I will go to the remote corners of the earth to find truth" - but truth isjust around the corner, here! When there is a demand for pleasure, in any form, this must be a distorting factor. Enjoyment is right, isn't it? It is beautiful to enjoy the sky, the moon, the clouds, the hills, the shadows - there are lovely things on earth. But the mind, thought, says, "I must have more and more, I must repeat this pleasure tomorrow." On this demand is based the whole habit of drink and drugs, which again is the activity of thought. You see the mountains in the evening light, the snow peaks and the shadows in the dark valley, you enjoy the beauty, the loveliness of it tremendously. Then thought says, "I must see that again tomorrow, it was so beautiful." So thought, demanding pleasure, pursues the experience of the sunset on those hills and sustains this memory; and the next time you see the sunset that memory is strengthened. Can the mind see that sunset, live with it completely at that moment and finish with it - and begin afresh tomorrow? So that the mind is always free from the known. There is a freedom which is not measurable. You can never say, "I am free" - you understand? It is an abomination. All you can do is to enquire into the function of thought and discover for yourself if there is an action which is not measurable, which is not in the field of the known. A mind that is constantly learning has no fear and perhaps such a mind can then enquire into the immeasurable. Questioner: Can one obsewe without any evaluation, without any judgment, without any prejudice? Is that at all possible, or is it just another trick of the mind, a deception? You see a mountain and you recognise that it is a mountaian, not an elephant. To differentiate in this way, surely, there must be judgment and evaluation? Krishnamurti: You see the mountain, you recognise it and the recognition is oaly possible when a memory of the mountain has been established. Obviously, otherwise you can't recognise it. Questioner: I remember when I came to Switzerland as a small child and I saw a mountainfor thefirst time, it was without any remembrance. It was very beautiful. Krishnamurti: Yes, Sir, when you see it for the first time you don't say, "It is a mountain". Then somebody tells you that it is a mountain and the next time you recognise it as such. Now, when you observe, there is the whole process of recognition. You don't confuse the mountain with a house or an elephant, it is a mountain. Then the difficult problem arises: to observe it non-verbally. "That is a mountain", "I like it or I don't like it", "I wish I could live up there", and so on. It is fairly easy just to observe it, because the mountains do not affect your life. But your husband, your wife, your neighbour, your son or daughter, they affect you; therefore, you cannot observe them without evaluation, without the image. This is where the problem arises - can you look at the mountain and at your wife or your husband, without a single image? See what happens! If you can observe without an image, then you are looking at them for the first time, aren't you? Then you are looking at the earth, the stars, the mountains, or the politician, for the first time. That means your eyes are clear, not dimmed with the burden of past memories. That is all. Go into it. Work at it. You will find out the enormous beauty that is in this. Questioner: If you look at a factory that way, without being aware of what it does to the environment, you cannot act. Krishnamurti: On the contrary, you see that is polluting the air, belchmg forth smoke, so you want to do something. Don't confuse it, keep it simple. Do it, and you will,see what action comes out of it. Questioner: Is perception` something totally, and is it gradual or instantaneous? Krishnamurti: Can I observe all of myself totally, all the reactions, the fears, the enjoyments and the pursuit of pleasure, all that, at a glance? Or do I have to do it gradually? What do you think? If I do it little by little, look one day at one part of myself, the next day at another part, can it be done that way? Today I look at a fragment of myself and tomorrow at another; what is the relationship of the first fragment to the second one? And in the interval between the perception of the first and the second fragment, other factors have come into being. So this fragmentary examination, observing little by little, leads to a great deal of complexity; in fact, it has no value. My question then is: can I observe non-fragmentarily, totally, on the instant? I have been conditioned to look at myself, to look at the world fragmentarily - as a Christian, a Communist, a Hindu. I have been brought up in this culture to look at the world fragmentarily. Being conditioned by this culture, I cannot possibly take a total view. My chief concern then is to be free of this culture, this education, and not whether I can see completely or not. To free the mind from fragmentation, not to be a Catholic or a Protestant - to wipe away all that! I can wipe away all that instantly when I see the truth of it; I cannot see the truth of it if I love being a Hindu, because that gives me a certain position. I wear a turban and impress a lot of silly people. And I take pleasure in the past, because tradition says, "We are one of the most ancient races; that gives me great delight. But I can only see the truth when I see the falseness of all that. The truth is in the falseness. Questioner: You have been using words to describe a non- verbal state of mind. Is not this a contradiction? Krishnamurti: The description is never the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain. There is no contradiction. Please be very careful. I did not describe the immeasur. able, I said: you cannot enquire into that - whatever it is - unless the mind understands the whole process of thought. So I only described the functioning of thought in action with regard to time and knowledge; to describe the other is impossible. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VII CHAPTER 6 6TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 29TH JULY 1971 'THE ACTION OF WILL AND THE ENERGY NEEDED FOR RADICAL CHANGE' ONE NEEDS A great deal of energy, vitality, interest to bring about a radical change in oneself. If we are interested in outward phenomena, we have to see what we can do with the rest of the world in the process of changing ourselves; and also we must see not only how to conserve energy, but how to increase it. We dissipate enejgy endlessly, by useless talk, by having innumerable opinions about everything, by living in a world of concepts, formulas, and by the everlasting conflict in ourselves. I think all this wastes energy. But beyond that, there is a much deeper cause that dissipates the vital energy that is necessary not only to bring about a change in ourselves, but also to penetrate very deeply beyond the confines of our own thought. The ancients said, control sex, hold your senses on a tight rein, take vows so that you don't dissipate your energy: you must concentrate your energy on God, or whatever it is. All such disciplines are also a wastage of energy, because when you take a vow, it is a form of resistance. It needs energy not only for a superficial external change, but also to bring about a deep, inward transformation or revolution. One must have an extraordinary sense of energy which has no cause, which has no motive, which has the capacity to be utterly quiet, and this very quietness has its own explosive quality. We are going to go into all that. One sees how human beings waste their energy, in quarrels, in jealousies, in a tremendous sense of anxiety, in the everlasting pursuit of pleasure and in the demand for it; it is fairly obvious that this is a wastage of energy. And is it not also a wastage of energy to have innumerable opinions and beliefs about everything? - how another should behave, what another should do and so on. Is it not a waste of energy to have formulas and concepts? In this culture we are encouraged to have concepts according to which we live. Don't you have formulas and concepts in the sense of having images of how you should be, what should happen? - in the sense of thought which rejects "what is" and formulates "what should be"? All such endeavour is a waste of energy and I hope we can proceed from there. What is the basic reason behind dissipation of energy? Apart from the cultural patterns that one has acquired of wasting energy, there is a much deeper question, which is: can one function, and carry on daily life without any form of resistance? Resistance is will. I know you are all brought up to use will, to control, in the sense of "you must, you must not, you should, you should not". Will is independent of the fact. Will is the assertion of the self, of the "me", independent of "what is". Will is desire; the manifestation of desire is will. We function superficially, or at great depth, in this assertion of the resistance of desire as will, which is unrelated to the "fact" but dependent on the desire of the "me", of the self. Knowing what will is, I am asking: is it possible to live in this world without the operation of will at all? Will is a form of resistance, a form of division. "I will" against something "I will not", "I must" against "I must not". So will is building a wall in action against every other form of action. We only know action either as conforming to a formula, to a concept, or as approximating according to an ideal and acting in relationship to that ideal, to that pattern. That is what we call action and in that there is conflict. There is imitation of what "should be", which we have projected as an ideal according to which we act; therefore there is a conflict between the act and the ideal, because in that there is always an approximation, imitation, conformity. I feel that is a total wastage of energy and I am going to show why. I hope we are watching our own activities, our own minds, to see how we exercise will in action. To repeat, will is independent of the fact, of "what is; it depends on the self, on what it wants -not on "what is", but on what it wants. And that want is depending on circumstances, on the environment, the culture and so on; it is divorced from the fact. Therefore there is contradiction and resistance against "what is", and that is a wastage of energy. Action means the doing now - not tomorrow, not having acted. Action is in the present. Can there be action without an idea, without a formula, without a concept? - an action in which there is no resistance as will. If there is will there is contradiction, resistance and effort, which is a wastage of energy. So I want to find out if there is an action without any will as the assertion of the "me" in resistance. You see, we are slaves to the present culture, we are the culture, and if there is to be a different kind of action, a different kind of life and so a different kind of culture altogether - not the counter-culture, but something entirely different - one must understand this whole question of will. Will belongs to the old culture in which is involved ambition and drive, the whole assertion and aggression of the "me". If there is to be a totally different way of living, one has to understand the central issue, which is: can there be action without formula, concept, ideal, or belief? An action based on knowledge, which is the past, which is conditioned, is not action. Being conditioned and dependent on the past, it must inevitably create discord and therefore conflict. So I want to find out if there is an action in which there is no will at all and choice does not enter. We said the other day, where there is confusion there must be choice. A man who sees things very clearly (not neurotically or obstinately) does not choose. So choice, will, resistance - the "me" in action - a wastage of energy. Is there an action unrelated to all this so that the mind lives in this world, functioning in the field of knowledge and yet free to act without the impedi- ment of the limitation of knowledge? The speaker says there is an action in which there is no resistance, no interference of the past, no response of the "me". That action is instantaneous because it is not in the field of time - time being yesterday, with all the knowledge and experience which acts today, so that the future is already established by the past. There is an action which is instantaneous and therefore complete, in which will does not operate at all. To find that out the mind must learn how to observe, how to see. If the mind sees according to a formula of what you should be, or what I should be, then the action is of the past. Now I am asking: is there an action which is not motivated, which is in the present and which does not bring contradiction, anxiety and conflict? As I said, a mind which has been trained in a culture which believes and functions and acts with will, such a mind obviously cannot act in the sense we are talking about, because it is conditioned. So can the mind - your mind - see this conditioning and be free of it so as to act differently? If my mind is trained through education to function with will, then it cannot possibly understand what it is to act without will. Therefore my concern is not to find out how to act without will, but rather to find out if my mind can be free of its conditioning, which is the conditioning of will. That is my concern, and I see, as I look into myself, that everything I do has a secret motive, is the outcome of some anxiety, of some fear, of the demand for pleasure and so on. Now can that mind free itself instantly to act differently? So the mind must learn how to look. That, for me, is the central problem. Can this mind, which is the result of time, of various cultures, experiences and knowledge, look with eyes that are not conditioned? That is, can it operate instantly, being free of its conditioning? So I must learn to look at my conditioning without any desire to change, to transform, to go beyond it. I must be capableof looking at it as it is. If I want to change it, then I bring about the action of will again. If I want to escape from it, there is again a resistance. If I keep one part and reject others, again it means choice. And choice, as we pointed out, is confusion. So can I, can this mind, look without any resistance, without any choice? Can I look at the mountains, the trees, my neighbour, my family, the politicians, the priests, without any image? The image is the past. So the mind must be able to look. When I look at "what is" in myself and in the world, without resistance, then out of that observation there is instant action which is not the result of will. Do you understand? I want to find out how to live and act in this world; not go offinto a monastery, or escape to some Nirvana asserted by some guru who promises, "If you do this, you will get that" - all that is nonsense. Putting that aside, I want to find out how to live in this world without any resistance, without any will. I also want to find out what love is. So my mind which has been conditioned to the demand of pleasure, of gratification, of satisfaction and therefore of resistance, sees all that is not love. So what is love? You know, to find out what is, one must deny, put aside totally what is not. Through negation come to the positive; do not seek the positive, but come to it by understanding what it is not. That is, if I want to find out whilt truth is, not knowing what it is, I must be able to see what is false. If I do not have the capacity to perceive what is false, I cannot see what truth is. So I must find out what is false. What is false? Everything else that thought has put together -psychologically not technologically. That is, thought has put together the "me", the self with its memories, with its aggression, with its separativeness, with its ambitions, competitiveness, imitation, fear and past memories; all that has been put together by thought. And thought has put together the most extraordinary things mechanically. So thought, as the me, which has in essence no reality whatsoever, is the false. When the mind understands what is false, then the truth is there. Similarly, when the mind really enquires deeply into what is love, without saying "it is this", "it is that", but enquires, then it must see what it is not and completely drop it; otherwise you can't find the real. Is one capable of doing that? To say for instance, "Love is not ambition". A mind that is ambitious, wanting to achieve, wanting to become powerful, that is aggressive, competitive, imitative, such a mind cannot possibly understand what love is - we see that, don't we? Now can the mind see the falseness of it? Can it see that a mind that is ambitious cannot possibly love and drop it instantly because it is false? Only when you deny the false completely, then the other is. So can we see very clearly that a mind seeking gain, or achievement, either in the world, or in the so-called spiritual seeking of enlightenment, cannot love? The drive to find out, to achieve is ambition. Therefore can the mind see the falseness of it and completely drop it instantly? Otherwise you won't find out "what is", and you will never find out what love is. Love is not jealousy, is it? Love is not possessiveness, it is not dependency. Do you see that? Do not carry it over with you to the next day but drop it instantly. The dropping of it instantly does not depend on will. It depends on whether you actually see the falseness of it. When you drop that which is false, that which is not, the other is. Now it becomes a little more difficult. Is love pleasure? Is love fulfilment? If you really want to have a mind that has love you have to go into it very deeply. We are asking: is love pleasure, gratification, fulfilment? We said that the demand for pleasure is the continuity of thought, which pursues pleasure as desire and will, separate from "what is". We have associated love with sex, and because there is pleasure in it we have made an extraordinary thing of it. Sex has become the most important thing in life. We have tied to find some deep meaning in it, a deep reality, a sense of great union, oneness, and other transcendental things. Why has sex such significance in our life? Probably we have nothing else; maybe in every other field we are mechanical. There is nothing original in ourselves, nothing creative - not "creative" in the sense of producing pictures, songs and poems, that is a very superficial part of what is really a sense of creativeness. As we are more or less secondhand people, sex and pleasure have become extraordinarily important. That is why we call it love, and behind that mask we do all kinds of mischievous things. So can we find out what love is? This has been a question man has always asked. Not being able to find out this he says, "Love God", "Love an idea", "Love the State", "Love your neighbour". Not that you shouldn't love your neighbour, but this has become merely a social operation; it is not the love that is always new. So love is not the product of thought, which is pleasure. As we said: thought is old, not free, it is the response of the past, and so love has no real relationship with thought. As we know, most of our life is a battle, the strain, the anxiety the guilt the despair, the immense sense of loneliness and sorrow that is our life. That is actually "what is" and we are unwilling to face it. When you face it without choice and resistance, what takes place? Can you face it? - not try to overcome fear, jealousy, this or that, but actually look at it without any sense of wanting to change it, conquer it, control it, just to observe it totally, and give your whole attention to it. When you look at our daily life of travail, our daily bourgeois or non-bourgeois life, what takes place? Haven't you then tremendous energy? Energy has been dissipated in resistance, in overcoming, in going beyond it, trying to understand it, trying to change it. So when you do look at this life as it is, is there not then a transformation of "what is"? That transformation takes place only when you have this energy in which the operation of will does not exist at all. You know, we like explanations, we like theories, we indulge in speculative philosophy and we are carried away by all that which is so obviously such a waste of time and energy. We must face what actually is: the misery, the poverty, the pollution, the wretched division of peoples and nations, the wars which we human beings have created - they haven't come into existence miraculously, each one of us is responsible for all this - we must face what actually is. And also we must face one of the most important things in life, which is death. That is one of the things that man avoids all the time. Ancient as well as modern civilizations have tried to go beyond that, to somehow conquer it, to imagine there is immortality, a life after death - anything but face it. Can my mind face something of which it knows absolutely nothing? Most of you, unfortunately, if I may say so, have read so much about these things. You have probably read what Indian philosophers and teachers have said; or you have read other philosophers and had your Christian training. You are full of other people's knowledge, assertions and opinions. You are bound to be, although you may not consciously acknowledge it, it is there in the blood because you were brought up in this civilization and culture. And here is something of which you know absolutely nothing. All you know is that you are frightened of coming to an end. And that is what death is. Fear prevents you from looking at it, as fear has prevented you from living without anxiety, sorrow, guilt - you know all that brutal business. Fear has prevented you from living and fear prevents you from looking at what death is. Fear demands comfort and so there is the idea of reincarnation, the renewal in another life and so on. We won't go into this because what we are concerned with is, whether your mind can face the reality of an ending. That is what is going to happen, whethcr you are healthy, or a cripple, or fairly well off, anytliing cJn happen - old age, disease, or accident. Can the mind look at this enormous unknown question? Can you look at it as though for the first time? - having nobody to tell you what to do, knowing that to find comfort is an escape from the fact. So can you, as though for the first time, face something which is inevitable? What is the state of mind that is capable of looking at something of which it knows absolutely nothing - except that there is organic death? The organism comes to an end through heart failure, through tension, through disease, and so on. But the psychological question is: can the mind face something, realizing it knows absolutely nothing about it, look at it, live with it and understand it completely? Which means, can it look at it without any sense of fear? The moment you have fear you have choice, there is will, there is resistance, and that is a wastage of energy. The ending of energy as the "me" is the capacity to look at death. To face something of which I know absolutely nothing demands great energy, doesn't it? I can only do that when there is no will, no resistance, no choice, no wastage of energy. To face something unknown, there must be the highest form of energy, and when there is that total energy, is there a fear of death? Or is there a fear of continuity? It is only when I have lived a life of resistance, will and choice that there is fear of not being, or of not living. When the mind is faced with the unknown, and all these things have gone, there is tremendous energy. And when there is that supreme energy, which is intelligence, is there death? Find out. Questioner: Sir, this morning you have questioned what the religions say, which prompts me to ask: how is it that I can understand what you say on an intellectual level. It seems to be sensible, it seems to be reasonable, and yet I lack the passion. Krishnamurti: The questioner says: what you say makes some sense intellectually, verbally, but somehow it does not penetrate, it does not go very deep, it does not touch the source of things; so that I can break through. It does not bring that sense of driving vitality, that sense of living with it. I am afraid that is the case with most people. (Interruption.) Krishnamurti: Please don't answer. Let us examine. The gentleman says: what you say is logical, intellectually I accept it, but I don't feel it deep in my heart so as to bring about a change, a revolution in myself and to live a totally different kind of life. And I say: that is the case with most of us. We go part of the way, take the journey a little distance and then drop out. We keep up the interest for ten minutes and the rest of the time think about something else. You go away after the talk and carry on with your daily life. Now why does this happen? Intellectually, verbally, logically, you understand; but apparently it does not touch you deeply, so that you will burn out the old, like a fire. Why doesn't this happen? Is it lack of interest? Is it a sense of deep laziness, of indolence? Examine it, Sir, don't answer me. If it is lack of interest, why aren't you interested? When the house is burning - your house - when your children are going to grow up to get killed, why aren't you interested? Are you blind, insensitive, indifferent, callous? Or deep down haven't you got the energy and are therefore lazy? Examine it, don't agree or disagree. Have you become so insensitive because you have your own problems? You want to fulfil, you are inferior, you are superior, you are anxious, you have a great sense of fear - there is all that; and your problems are smothering you, therefore you are not interested in anything unless you solve your problems first. But your problems are the other man's problems, your problems are the result of this culture in which you live. So what is it? Total indifference, insensitivity, callousness? Or is it that your whole culture and training has been intellectual, verbal? Your philosophies are verbal, your theories are the product of tremendously cunning brains and you have been brought up in that. Your whole education is based on it. Is it that thought has been given such extraordinary importance? - the clever, cunning, capable, technological mind, the mind that can measure, construct, fight and organize. You have been trained in that and you respond on that level. You say, "Yes, I agree with you intellectually, verbally, I see the logic, the sequence of it." But you cannot go beyond it because your mind is caught in the operations of thought which is measurement. Thought cannot measure depth or height, but only on its own level. So this is really an important question for everybody, because most of us agree with all this verbally, intellectually, but somehow the fire doesn't get lit. Questioner: I think there is no change because the important things are not on the intellectual level but on another plane. Krishnamurti: That is what we said, Sir. There is no change, the gentleman says, because psychologically, economically, socially, in education, we are conditioned. We are the result of the culture in which we live. And he says as long as that is not changed in us we won't take any deep interest. So what is going to make you interested? I am asking: why is it that though you listen to all this logically, and I hope with a healthy mind, this does not light a fire so that you burn with it? Please ask yourselves, find out why you agree logically, verbally, superficially, yet it does not touch you deeply. If your money or your sex is taken away it will touch you. If your sense of importance is taken away, then you will struggle. If your gods, your nationalism, your petty bourgeois life is taken away, you will fight like cats and dogs. Which all indicates that intellectually we are capable of anything. Technologically, going to the moon, we live on the level of thought, but thought cannot possibly ignite the flame which changes man. What changes man is to face all this, to look at it and not always live on that very superficial level. Questioner: You said this morning that whenyou are capable of looking at death as the absolute unknown, that includes thatyou are also capable of looking at life as it is, and thatyou are capable of action. Krishnamurti: Yes, Sir. "When you are capable." The word "capable" is a difficult word. Capacity means working, or to have capacity for something. You can cultivate capacity. I can cultivate the capacity to play golf or tennis, or to put machinery together. Now we are not using the word "capacity" in the sense of time -you understand? Capacity involves time, doesn't it? That is, I am not capable now, but give me a year and I'll be capable of speaking Italian, French or English. If you have understood capacity as time, it is not what I mean. I mean: observe the unknown without any fear, live with it. That does not need capacity. I said you will do it, if you know what is false and reject that. Questioner: Is it not a question of not knowing how to listen? You have said that to listen is one of the hardest things to do. Krishnamurti: Yes, it is one of the hardest things to do, to listen. Do you mean to say that a man who is committed to social activity and has put all his life into it, is he ever going to listen to any of this? Or a man who says, "I have taken a vow of celibacy" - will he listen to all this? No, Sir. Listening is quite an art. Questioner: You were saying that the difficulty is on the intellectual level and that we do not allow ourfeelings and our emotions to come into our relations with other people. But I have the impression it is exactly the contrary. I think that the trouble in the world is caused hy uncontrolled emotions and passions, probably born out of lack of understanding, but they are passions. We live a violent life. Krishnamurti: Violent, of course, that's understood. Now, do you live an emotional life which needs conquering? Emotional, excited, the enthusiasms of pleasure and sentiment - do you live in that world? And when you do live in that world and when it gets disorderly, then the intellect comes in and you begin to control it, saying "I must not; but the intellect always dominates. Questioner: Or it justifies. Krishnamurti: It justifies or condemns. I may be greatly emotional but the intellect comes along and says: look, be careful, try to control yourself. Intellect always dominates - which is thought - doesn't it? In my relationship with another I get angry, irritated, emotional. Then what happens? That leads to trouble, a quarrel takes place between two human beings. Then I try to control it - which is thought; because it has established a pattern for itself of what it should do, or what it should not do, saying, "I must control". So we say, "There must be control," otherwise relationship breaks down. Isn't all that a process of thinking, of intellection? The intellect plays a tremendous part in our life, that is all we are pointing out. We are not saying emotions are wrong or right, or true or false, but thought with its measurement is always judging, evaluating, controlling, overcoming, and therefore thought prevents you from looking. -- Page 366 -- THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VII CHAPTER 7 7TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 1ST AUGUST 1971 'THOUGHT, INTELLIGENCE, AND THE IMMEASURABLE' WE HAVE BEEN talking about the various contradictory states of the world, outside our skin as it were, about the tortures of the refugees, and the horrors of war, about poverty, the religious and national separations of people, and the economic and social injustice. These are not merely verbal statements but actual facts of what is going on in the world: violence, terrible disorder, hatreds and every form of corruption. And in ourselves the same phenomenon is going on; we are at war with ourselves, unhappy, dissatisfied, seeking something which we don't know about, violent, aggressive, corrupt, astonishingly miserable and lonely and suffering a great deal. Somehow we don't seem to be able to get out of this, to be free of these conditionings. We have tried every form of behaviour and therapy, of religious sanctions and their pursuits, the monastic life, a life of sacrifice, denial, suppression and blindly seeking, going from one book to another, or from one religious guru to another; or we try political reforms, and make revolutions. We have tried so many things and yet somehow we don't seem to be able to free ourselves from this terrible mess inside ourselves as well as outwardly. We follow the latest guru who offers some system, a panacea, some way to crawl out of our own misery, and that again does not seem to resolve any of our problems. I think the average person here asks: I know I am caught in the trap of civilization, miserable, sorrowful, and leading rather a small, narrow life. I have tried this and that, but somehow all this chaos is still in me. What am I to do? How am I to get out of all this confusion? During these talks we have gone into various things: order, fear, pain, love, death and sorrow. But at the end of these meetings most of us are where we began, with slight peripheral changes, but at the very root of our being our whole structure and nature more or less remains as it was. How is all that to be really jolted, so that when you leave this place, at least for one day, for one hour, there will be something totally new, a life that really has significance, has meaning, depth and width? I don't know if you have noticed the mountains this morning the river and the changing shadows, the pine trees dark against the blue sky, and those extraordinary hills full of light and shade. On a morning like this, sitting in a tent to talk about serious things seems rather absurd, when everything about us is crying with great joy, shouting to the heavens the beauty of the earth and the misery of man. But since we are here, I would like to approach the whole problem in a different way. Just listen to it and not only to the meaning of the words, not only to the description, because the description is never the described - as when you describe the hills, the trees, the rivers and the shadows, if you don't see them for yourselves, with your heart and your mind, the description has very little meaning. It is like describing food to a hungry man; he must have food, not just words and the smell of food. I don't quite know how to put all this differently, but I would like to explore - if you will do it with me - a different way of looking at all this, to look from a totally different dimension. Not the usual dimension of "me and you", "we and they", "my problems", "their problems", "how to end this and how to get that", how to become more intelligent, noble, but rather to see together if we can observe all these phenomena from a different dimension. Perhaps some of us are not used to that dimension, we don't know if there is actually a different dimension; we may speculate about it, we may imagine, but speculation and imagination are not the fact. So as we are only dealing with facts and not with speculations, it behoves us I think not only to listen to what the speaker is going to say, but also to try to go beyond the words and the explanations. It means you must also be sufficiently attentive and interested, sufficiently aware of the meaning of a dimension which we have probably not touched at all, to ask: can I look at that dimension this morning, not with my eyes, but with the eyes of objective intelligence and beauty and interest? I do not know if you have ever thought about space. Where there is space there is silence. Not the space created by thought, but a space that has no frontiers at all, a space that is not measurable, that cannot be connived at by thought, a space that is really quite unimaginable. Because when man has space, real space, width and depth and an immeasurable sense of extension, not of his consciousness - which is merely another form of thought extending itself with its measurement from a centre - but that sense of space which is not conceived by thought, when there is that kind of space there is absolute silence. With the overcrowding of cities, the noise, the exploding population, outwardly there is more and more restriction, there is less and less space. I do not know if you have noticed in this valley know new buildings are going up, there are more people, more and more cars polluting the air. Outwardly there is less and less space; if you go into any street in a crowded town you will notice this, especially in the East. In India you see thousands of people sleeping and living on the overcrowded pavement. And take any big town, London, New York, or where you will, there is hardly any space; the houses are small, people are living enclosed, trapped, and where there is no space there is violence. We have no space either ecologically, socially, or in our own mind; this is partly responsible for the violence, that we have no space. In our own minds the space we create is isolation, a world built around ourselves. Please do observe this in yourselves and not only because the speaker is talking about it. Our space is a space of isolation and withdrawal. We don't want to be hurt any more, we have been hurt when we were young and the marks of hurt remain; so we withdraw, we resist, we build a wall around ourselves and around those whom we think we like, or love, and that gives a very limited space. It is like looking over the wall into another person's garden, or into another person's mind, but the wall is still there and in that world there is very little space. From that narrow, small, rather shoddy space we act, we think, we love, we function, and from that centre we try to reform the world, joining this or that party. Or from that narrow hold, we try to find a new guru who will teach us the latest way to enlightenment. And in our chattering minds, crowded with knowledge, rumours and opinions, there is hardly any space at all. I do not know if you have noticed it, but if one has been observant, aware of the things around one and in oneself, has not just lived to earn money and have a bank account, this and that, one must have seen how little space one has, how crowded it is in ourselves. please watch it in yourself. Being isolated in that little space, with enormous thick walls of resistance, of ideas and of aggression, how is one to have space that is really immeasurable? As we said the other day, thought is measurable, thought is measure. And any form of self-improvement is measurable; obviously, self-improvement is the most callous form of isolation. One sees that thought cannot bring about the vast space in which there is complete and utter silence? Thought cannot bring it, thought can only progress, evolve, in ratio to the end it projects, which is measurable. That space which thought creates, imaginatively, or of necessity, can never enter a dimension in which there is space which is not of thought. Through centuries thought has built a space that is very limited, narrow, isolated, and because of this very isolation, it creates division; where there is division there is conflict, nationally, religiously, politically, in relationship, in every way. Conflict is measurable - less conflict or more conflict, and so on. Now the question is: how can thought enter into the other? Or can thought never enter it? I am the result of thought. All my activities, logical, illogical and neurotic, or highly educated and scientific are based on thought. "I" am the result of all that, and it has space within the walls of resistance. How is the mind to change that and discover something which is of a totally different dimension? Have you understood my question? Can the two come together? - the freedom in which there is complete silence and therefore vast space, and the walls of resistance which thought has created with its narrow little space. Can the two come together, flow together? This has been the problem of man religiously when he enquires at great depth. Can I hold on to my little ego, to my little space, to the things that I have collected, to my knowledge, experiences, hopes and pleasures, and move into a different dimension where the two can operate? I want to sit on the right hand of God and yet I want to be free of God! I want to live a life of great delight, pleasure and beauty, and also I want to have joy which is not measurable, which cannot be caught by thought. I want pleasure and joy. I know the movement, the demand, the pursuit of pleasure with all its fears, travails, sorrow, agony and anxiety. And I also know that joy which is totally uninvited, which thought can never capture; if it does capture it, it again becomes pleasure and then the old routine begins. So I want to have both -the things of this world and the other world. I think this is the problem for most of us - isn't it? To have a wonderful time in this world - why not? - and avoid all pain, all sorrow, because I also know other moments when there is great joy which cannot be touched, which is not corrupt. I want both, and that is what we are seeking: to carry all our burden and yet to seek freedom. Can I do this through will? You remember what we said the other day about will? Will has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual, with "what is". But will is the expression of desire as "me". We think somehow through will we shall come upon the other, so we say to ourselves, "I must control thought, I must discipline thought". When the "I" says, "I must control and discipline thought", it is thought which has separated itself as the "I" and controls thought as something separate. It is still thought: the "I" and the "not I". And one realises - thought being measurable, noisy, chattering, running all over the place - that thought has created the space of a little rat, a monkey that chases its own tail. So one says: how is thought to become quiet? Thought has created the technological world of chaos, of war, of national divisions, religious separations; thought has brought about misery, confusion and sorrow. Thought is time, so time is sorrow. And you see all this if you have gone deeply, not at the instruction of another, but merely by observing this in the world and in yourself. Then the question arises: can thought be completely silent and only function when necessary - when one has to use technical knowledge, in the office, when one is talking and so on - and the rest of the time be absolutely quiet? The more there is space and silence, the more it can function logically, sanely, healthily with knowledge. Otherwise knowledge becomes an end in itself and brings about chaos. Do not agree with me, see it for yourself? Thought, which is the response of memory, of knowledge, experience and time, is the content of consciousness; thought must function with knowledge, but it can only function with the highest intelligence when there is space and silence - when it functions from there. There must be vast space and silence, because when there is that space and silence, beauty comes, there is love. Not the beauty put together by man, architecture, tapestries, porcelain, paintings, or poems, but that sense of beauty, of vast space and silence. And yet thought must act, must function. There is no living there, and then coming down. So that is our problem - I am making it a problem so that we can investigate together, so that both you and I discover something in this which is totally new. Because each time one investigates without knowing, one discovers something. But if you investigate with knowing, then you will never discover anything. So that is what we are doing. Can thought become silent? Can that thought, which must function in the field of knowledge totally, completely, objectively and sanely, can that thought end itself? That is, can thought which is the past, which is memory, which is a thousand yesterdays, can all that past, all that conditioning come totally to an end? - so that there is silence, there is space, there is a sense of extraordinary dimension. I am asking myself and you are asking it with me: how is thought to end and not in the very ending of it get perverted, go offinto some imaginative state and become rather lopsided, neurotic and vague? How is that thought, which must function with great energy and vitality, to be at the same time completely motionless? Have you understood my question? This has been the problem of every serious religious man - not the man who belongs to some sect based on organized belief and propaganda and therefore not religious at all. Can the two operate together, can they move together - not coalesce, not join together - but move together? They can only move together if thought does not separate itself as the observer and the observed. You see, life is a movement in relationship, constantly moving and changing. That movement can sustain itself, move freely, when there is no division between the thinker and the thought. That is, when thought does not divide itself as the "me" and the "not me", as the observer, the experiencer, and the observed, the experienced; because in that there is division and therefore conflict. When thought sees the truth of that, then it is not seeking experience, then it is moving in experiencing. Aren't you doing this now? Just now I said thought with all its knowledge, which is always accumulating, is something living; it is not a dead thing, therefore the vast space can move together with thought. When thought separates itself as the thinker, as the experiencer causing division and conflict, then that experiencer, observer, thinker, becomes the past which is stationary and therefore cannot move. The mind sees in this examination that where there is division in thought, movement is not possible. Where there is division the past comes in and the past becomes stationary, the immovable centre. The immovable centre can be modified and added to, but it is an immovable state and therefore it has no free movement. So my next question to myself and so to you is: does thought see this, or is perception something entirely different from thought? One sees division in the world, national, religious, economic, social and all the rest of it; in this division there is conflict, that is clear. And when there is division and fragmentation in myself, there must be conflict. Then I am divided in myself as the observer and the observed, the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experience. That very division is created by thought, which is the result of the past - I see the truth of this. Now my question is: does thought see this, or does some other factor see it? Or is the new factor intelligence and not thought? Now what is the relationship between thought and intelligence? Do you understand my question? I am terribly interested in this personally, you can come with me or not. It is extraordinary to go into this. Thought has created this division: the past, the present, the future. Thought is time. And thought says to itself: I see this division outwardly and inwardly, I see this division is the factor of conflict. It is not capable to go beyond it, therefore it says: I am where I began, I am still with my conflicts, because thought says, "I see the truth of division and conflict." Now does thought see that, or does a new factor of intelligence see it? If it is intelligence that sees it, what is the relationship between thought and intelligence? Is intelligence personal? Is intelligence the result of book knowledge, logic, experience? Or is intelligence the freedom from the division of thought? - the division which thought has created. Seeing that logically and not being able to go beyond it, it remains with it; it does not try to struggle with it or to overcome it. Out of that comes intelligence. You see, we are asking: what is intelligence? Can intelligence be cultivated? Is intelligence innate? Does thought see the truth of conflict, of division and all the rest of it, or is it the quality of mind that sees the fact and is completely quiet with the fact? -completely silent, not trying to go beyond it, to overcome it, to change it, but is completely still with the fact. It is that stillness that is intelligence. Intelligence is not thought. Intelligence is this silence and is therefore totally impersonal. It does not belong to any group, to any person, to any race, to any culture. So my mind has found that there is a silence, not something put together by thought, discipline, practice and all that horror, but a seeing thought cannot possibly go beyond itself; because thought is the result of the past and where the past is functioning it must create division and therefore conflicts. Can one see that and remain still with it? You know, it is like being completely still with sorrow. When somebody dies for whom you care, whom you have looked after, cherished, loved and been concerned with, there is the shock of loneliness, of despair, a sense of isolation, everything falls around you; can one remain with that sorrow not seeking explanations and the cause, thinking, "Why should he go and not I?" To remain completely still with it is intelligence. That intelligence can then operate in thought, using knowledge, and that knowledge and thought will not create division. So the question arises: how is the mind, your mind, which is endlessly chattering, endlessly bourgeois - caught in a trap, struggling, seeking, following a guru and using discipline - how is that mind to be completely still? Harmony is stillness. There is harmony between the body, the heart and the mind, complete harmony, not discord. That means the body must not be imposed upon, not disciplined by the mind. When it likes a certain kind of food, or tobacco, or drugs and the excitement of all that, to be controlled by the mind is an imposition. Whereas the body has its own intelligence when it is sensitive, alive and not spoilt; it has its own intelligence. One must have such a body, which is alive, active, not drugged. And also one must have a heart - not excitement, not sentiment, not emotion, not enthusiasm, but that sense of fulness, of depth, quality, vigour, that can only be when there is love. And one must have a mind that has immense space. Then there is harmony. Now how is the mind to come upon this? I am sure you are all asking this, perhaps not whilst you are sitting here, but when you go home, when you walk, you will ask: how can one have this sense of complete integrity, of unity of body, heart and mind without any sense of distortion, division or fragmentation? How do you think you can have it? You see the fact of this, don't you? You see the truth ofit, that you must have complete harmony in yourself, in the mind, the heart and the body. It is like having a clear window, without any scratch, unsullied; then, as you look out through the window you can see things without any distortion. How can you have that? Now, who sees this truth? Who sees the truth that there must be this complete harmony? As we said, when there is harmony there is silence. When the mind, the heart and the organism are completely in harmony there is silence; but when one of the three becomes distorted, there is noise. Who sees this fact? Do you see it as an idea, as a theory, as something you "should have"? If you do, then it is all the function of thought. Then you will say: tell me what kind of system I must practise to get this, I will renounce, I will discipline - all that is the activity of thought. But when you see the truth of this - the truth, not what "should be" - when you see that is the fact, then it is intelligence that sees it. Therefore it is intelligence that will function and bring about this state. Thought is of time, intelligence is not of time. Intelligence is immeasurable - not the scientific intelligence, not the intelligence of a technician, or of a housewife, or of a man who knows a great deal. Those are all within the field of thought and knowledge. It is only when the mind is completely still - and it can be still, you don't have to practise or control, it can be completely still - then there is harmony, there is vast space and silence. And only then the Immeasurable is. Questioner: I have been listening to you for fifty years. You have said one has to die every moment. This is more real to me now than it has ever been. Krishnamurti:I understand, Sir. Must you listen to the speaker for fifty years and at the end of it you understand what he says? Does it take time? Or do you see the beauty of something instantly and therefore it is? Now why do you and others take time over all this? Why must you have many years to understand a very simple thing? And it is very simple, I assure you. It only becomes complex in explanation, but the fact is extraordinarily simple. Why doesn't one see the simplicity and the truth and the beauty ofit instantly -and then the whole phenomenon of life changes? Why? Is it because we are so heavily conditioned? And if you are so heavily conditioned, can't you see that conditioning instantly, or must you peel it off like an onion, layer after layer? Is it that one is lazy, indolent, indifferent, caught in one's own problem? If you are caught in one problem, that problem is not separate from the rest of the problems, they are all interrelated. If you take one problem whether it is sex, relationship, or loneliness, whatever it is - go to the very end of it. But because you can't do it, you have to listen to somebody for fifty years! Are you going to say it takes you fifty years to look at those mountains? Questioner: I would like to know about Hatha Yoga. I know many people who practise it but they betray themselves; they live obviously in imagination. Krishnamurti: I was told that Hatha Yoga and all the complications of it was invented about three thousand years ago. I was told this by a man who had studied the whole thing very carefully. At that time the rulers of the land had to keep their brains and their thoughts very clear and so they chewed some kind of leaf from the Himalayan mountains. As time went on the plant died out, and so they had to invent a method by which the various glands in the human system could be kept healthy and vigorous. So they invented Yoga exercises to keep the body healthy and thereby to have a very active, clear mind. The practice of certain exercises -asanas and so on - does keep the glands healthy and active. They also found that the right kind of breathing helps - not to achieve enlightenment, but to keep the mind, the brain cells, supplied with sufficient air, so that they function well. Then all the exploiters came along and said: if you do all these things then you will have a quiet, silent mind. Their silence is the silence of thought, which is corruption and therefore death. They said: this way you will awaken various centres and you will experience enlightenment. Of course our minds are so eager, so greedy, wanting more experiences, wanting to be better than somebody else, better looking, to have a better body, so we full into that trap. The speaker does various exercises, about two hours a day; don't copy him, you know nothing about it! So long as one has imagination, which is the function of thought, do what you will, the mind can never be quiet, peaceful, with a sense of great inward beauty and sufficiency. Questioner: In this harmonious, integrated state, when the mindfunctions strictly in a technological way, is there then this separation of the observer and the observed? Krishnamurti: I understand the question. What do you think? When there is complete harmony - real, not imaginary harmony -when the body, the heart and the mind are completely harmonious and integrated, when there is that sense of intelligence which is harmony, and that intelligence is using thought, then will there be the division of the observer and the observed? Obviously not. When there is no harmony there is fragmentation, then thought creates the division as the "me" and the "not me", the observer and the observed. This is so simple. Questioner: You said inyour second talk that one should be aware not only when awake but also during sleep. Krishnamurti: Is there an awareness when you are asleep as well as when you are awake? Do you understand the question? That is, during the day one is superficially or deeply aware of everything that is going on inwardly; one is aware of all the movements of thought, the division, the conflict, the misery, the loneliness, one's demand for pleasure, the pursuit of ambition, greed, anxiety, one is aware of the whole of that. When you are so aware during the day, does that awareness continue during the night in the form of dreams? Or are there no dreams but only an awareness? Please listen to this: am I, are you, aware during the day of every movement of thought? Be honest, be simple: you are not. You are aware in patches. I am aware for two minutes, then there is a great blank and then again a few minutes, or half an hour later, I realize I have forgotten myself and pick it up again. There are gaps in our awareness - we are never aware continuously and we think we ought to be aware all the time. Now first of all, there are great spaces between awareness, aren't there? There is awareness, then unawareness, then awareness and so on, during the day. Which is important? To be continuously aware? Or to be aware for short periods? What is one to do with the long periods when one is not aware? Amongst those three, what do you think is important? I know what is important for me. I am not bothered about being aware for a short period, or wanting to have awareness continuously. I am only concerned with when I am not aware, when I am inattentive. I say I am very interested in why I am inattentive, and what I am to do about that inattention, that unawareness. That is my problem - not to have constant awareness. You would go crazy unless you had really gone into this very, very deeply. So my concern is: why am I inattentive and what happens in that period of inattention? I know what happens when I am aware. When I am aware nothing happens. I am alive, moving, living, vital; in that nothing can happen because there is no choice for something to happen. Now, when I am inattentive, not aware, then things happen. Then I say things which are not true, then I am nervous, anxious, caught, I fall back into my despair. So why does this happen? Are you getting my point? Is that what you are doing? Or are you concerned with being totally aware and trying, practising to be aware all the time? I see I am not aware, and I am going to watch what happens in that state when I am not aware. To be aware that I am not aware is awareness. I know when I am aware; when there is an awareness it is something entirely different. And I know when I am not aware, I get nervous, I twitch my hands, I do all kinds of stupid things. When there is attention in that unawareness the whole thing is over. When at that moment of unawareness I am aware that I am not aware, then it is finished; because then I don't have to struggle nor say, "I must be aware all the time, please tell me a method to be aware, I must practise and so on" - becoming more and more stupid. So you see when there is no awareness and I know I am not aware, then the whole movement changes. Now, what happens during sleep? Is there an awareness when you are asleep? Ifyou are aware during the day-time in patches, then that continues while you are asleep - obviously. But when you are aware, and also aware that you are inattentive, a totally different movement takes place. Then when you sleep there is an awareness of complete quietness. The mind is aware of itself. I won't go into all this, it is not a mystery, it is not something that is extraordinary. You see, when the mind is deeply aware during the day, that awareness in depth brings about a quality of mind during sleep that is absolutely quiet. During the day you have observed, you have been aware, either in patches, or you have been aware of your inattention; then as you go through the day the activity of the brain has established order when you sleep. The brain demands order, even if that order is in some neurotic belief, in nationalism, or in this or that - but in that it finds an order which inevitably brings about disorder. But when you are aware during the day, and aware of your unawareness, then at the end of the day there is order; then the brain does not have to struggle during the night to bring about order. Therefore the brain becomes rested, it is quiet. And the next morning the brain is extraordinarily alive, not a dead, corrupt, drugged thing. -- Page 383 -- THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VIII CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 4TH AUGUST 1971 'THE FRAGMENTATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS' Krishnamurti: Could we in these dialogues work out one problem each morning, go into it thoroughly, so that we really understand it? This is a friendly conversation between us in which we can go into a problem together and see if we cannot resolve the problem that we take each morning. A dialogue is different from a dialectical argument; it is not seeking truth through opinion, or discussion, which means reasoning, logic, argument; that will not lead us very far. Can we take one problem this morning and go into it completely, not deviating from it but go into it step by step, in detail, hesitatingly, not offering an opinion - because then it is your opinion, your argument, against somebody else's - and also not indulging in ideologies, not quoting others, but take a problem that is vital to each one of us and work it out together? That would be worthwhile, I feel. Shall we do that? Questioner (1): Could we discuss order? Questioner (2): Ifind that in spite of allyou have said I am still left with my inner emptiness. The urge to escapefrom it prevents mefrom looking - I am alwoys escaping. Questioner (3): I wonder if the method we use together really makes it possiblefor us to make a radical and lasting transformation? Because this method is on the conscious level and theforces which bind us are on the unconscious level. How can we really be liberated from the unconscious conditioning and motives? For instance, if I moy give an example, I know lots ofpeople who have been followingyou for many years, they don't judge from the point of view of nationalities any more, but they judge the hippies, which is the same thing. Questioner (4): I have a problem in understanding awareness. My mind is aware when it is going through something, it labels it, and then I become separate from the experience. When I become aware, there is a separation between the obseved and the observer. Questioner (5): What is it to look at life completely? Questioner (6) :You said, "I am the world and the world is me." What are the simple reasonsfor that assertion? Krishnamurti: Which one of these problems shall we take this morning, so that when you and I leave the tent we have really understood it? Questioner: Do you look at life as good or evil? Krishnamurti: How do you actually look at life? Don't pretend. Don't let us become theoretical, hypothetical, and thereby slightly dishonest. Do you look at life as a whole, or do you look at life in fragments? - all broken up. Is it possible to look at this whole movement as a unitary process? And can I, who have been brought up in a certain culture which conditions me, consciously or unconsciously, to look at God and the Devil - the physical and the non-physical - can I consider this whole movement oflife, or do I break it up? And when you do break it up then, out of that, comes disorder. Now, how do you actually look at life? Questioner: In most of the discussions I have heard you start with the premise of disorder, not from the point of view of order. Krishnamurti: I don't posit order, I start with disorder. We are in disorder, that is clear. There is war, the division of nationalities, there is man and woman fighting each other. We are at war with each other and in ourselves, that is disorder. This is the fact. It would be absurd to posit order - there is no order! Questioner: Is there not order in natural life? Krishnamurti: probably there is, in nature. But that is not my question. Our question is: can you and I look at this whole phenomenon of existence as one unitary movement, not broken up as the conscious and the unconscious? Questioner: But that would be order. Krishnamurti: We are discussing that, I don't know where it is going to lead us. We are trying to find out through conversation whether our minds are capable of looking at life as a whole, as one unitary movement and therefore without ontradiction. Questioner: But isn't the definition of the unconscious that I am unable to look at it? Krishnamurti: We must go into this slowly. Now suppose I cannot look at life as a whole. Am I aware that I look at life fragmentarily? Let us begin with that. Are you aware, do you know that you divide life? Questioner (1): No. Questioner (2): Is not "life as a whole" an abstract concept? Krishnamurti: If we posit life as a unitary process, as an idea, then it is a concept. But if we realize that we live in fragments and ask whether that fragmentary division can be changed, then we may find out the other. Questioner: It appears to me that I have to find out what I am first, before I can begin to change. I don't like hippies, and that's what I am! Possibly I can change it, if I first become what I am. Krishnamurti: Look, Sir, we are not talking about change. This morning we are trying to go into the question: how do I consider life? Questioner: If I am fragmented I can't see it as a whole. Krishnamurti: That's it. Are we fragmented? Let's begin with that. Questioner: Maybe fragmentation is not at the conscious level, as you said, as an artist, a scientist, a priest. The fragmentation is in the , unconscious. Krishnamurti; First of all be absolutely sure that you have discarded the superficial; that you are no longer caught in the various religioG and nationalistic fragmentary approaches to life. Be quite sure you have discarded all that completely; it is one of the most difficult things to do. But let's go deeper. Questioner: If these dioisions do exist on the conscious level, isn't that a.. fragmentation in itself, to discard them? Krishnamurti: We'll come to that. By going into the conscious and seeing how fragmentary it is, we will naturally come upon the other. Then they will come together, because we have divided life as the conscious and the unconscious, the hidden, and the open. That is the psychoanalytical, the psychological point of view. To me personally that does not exist. I don't divide into conscious and unconscious. But apparently for most of us there is this division. Now, how are you going to examine the unconscious? You have said there is this division between the conscious and the unconscious, and one may be superficially free of the divisions that culture has brought about. How are you going to examine the unconscious with all its fragmentations? Questioner (1): Hadn't we better examine whether there is a conscious and an unconscious, andfind out whether or not they exist? Questioner (2): What is the definition of the unconscious? Krishnamurti:Apparently the definition of the unconscious is it is what we don't know about. We think we know what superficial consciousness is, but we don't know what the unconscious is. Just listen to what that gentleman said: we have made this division but is that a fact? Questioner: If the unconscious is not afact, after one talk at Saanen we would be liberated! Krishnamurti:There is the conscious and the unconscious. I don't say the division exists, but that's what we have taken. Do you know your conscious mind - what you think, how you think, why you think? Are you conscious of what you are doing and what you are not doing? You think you understand the conscious but you may not actually understand it. Which is the fact? Do you really know the conscious? Do you know the content of the conscious mind? Questioner: Isn't the conscious mind, what we understand, by definition? Krishnamurti: You may understand one thing and you may not understand another. You may understand one part of the content of the conscious and another part you may not know anything about at all. So do you know the content of your conscious mind? Questioner: If we knew it there wouldn't be this chaos in the world. Krishnamurti: Of course, naturally. Questioner: But we don't know it. Krishnamurti: That's my point. We think we know it. We think we know the operations of the conscious mind, because there is a set of habits: going to the office, doing this and that. And we think we understand the content of the superficial mind. But I question it, and I also question very much whether the unconscious can ever be investigated by the conscious. If I don't know the content of the conscious mind, how can I examine the unconscious with its content? So there must be a different approach to it altogether. Questioner (1): How do we know the unconscious exists? Questioner (2): By its manifestations. Krishnamurti: You say, By its manifestations." That is, consciously you may be doing something, but unconsciously the motive may be entirely different from the conscious urge. Questioner: Negative action. Krishnamurti: Of course. Please let us try to understand each other. If the content of the conscious cannot be known completely, how can that conscious, which is superficial, which does not know itself, examine the unconscious with all its hidden content? Now you have only one means of examination, which is: to look at the unconscious consciously. Please see the importance of this. Questioner: Isn't it true that for any inward conscious manifestation there is also a parallel outward manifestation? Krishnamurti: Obviously. Can we put it this way: do I know the content of my consciousness? Am I aware of it, do I understand it, have I observed without prejudice, without any kind of formula? Questioner: I think the problem is deeper. What you know, what you are aware of, that is your conscious, everything you are not aware of, don't know about, that is your unconscious. Krishnamurti: I understand; that is what he said just now. Please give a few minutes thought to what somebody else has said, which is: if I don't know the content of my superficial consciousness, can that consciousness, which is not complete in the understanding of its superficiality, examine the unconscious? That is what you are doing now, aren't you? You are trying to observe the unconscious consciously. No? Questioner (1): This is impossible. We cannot do it. Questioner (2): There is no frontier between consciousness and the unconscious. Krishnamurti: Therefore what will you do? Don't indulge in theories. Look, I have been brought up with a highly traditional Brahmanical background; the tradition of it is ruthless. From morning until night you are told what to do, what not to do, what to think. From the moment you are born you are conditioned. It is done consciously every day, by the Temple, by the mother, by the father, by the environment, by the culture which is Brahmanic. Then you move to another conditioning, and again to another conditioning. There is conditioning after conditioning. All this is laid upon you by society, by civilization, by accident, or by intention. Now, how are you going to divide this and that? - they are all interrelated. I may reject the Brahmanical tradition very quickly, or I may not, or I may think I have done it, yet still be caught in it. How am I to understand this whole content? Questioner: I am that content. Krishnamurti: Of course, consciousness is its content! Please see that. My consciousness is made up of the Brahmanical tradition, the theosophical tradition, the World Teacher - all that; the content of all this consciousness is that. Now can I look at this whole content as one, or do I have to look at it fragmentarily? Wait, see the difficulty first. Is there a content so deep down that I don't know it? Can I forever only know the superficial content? That is the problem. Now how am I to uncondition the mind which has such a content? Questioner: You said thatyou were taking the example ofa Brahmanical conditioning, which is still looking at itfragmentarily. Butyour relationship with a father, or a mother, or with somebody who was awfully nervous, or who frustratedyou - this would be even more important. If you ask, "How do I uncondition the mind, or how do I uncondition myself", I would say: how do I change? Krishnamurti: It is the same thing, Sir. Questioner: For instance, I believe that first you must become what you are. Krishnamurti: What are you? You are all that conditioning. Are you aware of all your conditioning? Before we talk about change, first we must ask: am I aware of my conditioning? Not only superficially but in the deep down layers. As the gentleman pointed out, I may be caught in a Christian, Communist, or Brahmanical tradition; but also I have lived in a family where the mother may have been brutal or nervous. Fortunately in the family in which this person grew up, there were thirteen children and nobody cared! Questioner: I have the feeling that I am unconditioning myself by listening toyou. Krishnamurti:That's it, just listen, that is what I want to get at. Let's move! Questioner: Attention must uncondition the mind. Krishnamurti: No, Madam. That is speculation. Just let us follow this please. I am all my content: the content is my consciousness, the content is experience, knowledge, tradition, upbringing, the nervous father, the brutal or the nagging mother. All that is the content which is "me". Now am I aware of this content? Don't shrug your shoulders and say "I don't know; otherwise you can't move forwards. If you are not aware - I am afraid you are not, if I may point out - then how do we proceed? Questioner: The mind is aware that it is conditioned. It sees the conditioning. Krishnamurti: I understand. Look, I can see part of my conditioning; I can see I am conditioned as a Communist or a Muslim, but there are other parts of this. Can I investigate consciously the various fragments which compose the "me", the content of my consciousness? Can I consciously look at all this? Questioner: But we are not separate from it. Krishnamurti: I understand. How am I to look at the various contents of my consciousness? Or is that a totally wrong process? Questioner: It must be. Krishnamurti: We are going to find out, don't say, "It must be." Questioner: I don't see how one can envisage all of these parts. It seems that if one can hold oneself to what one is seeing actually around one in theforeground of one's sight, withoutjudgment or preconception as to how one should look at it, then one begins to see even the subconscious. Krishnamurti: I understand. But you have not yet answered my question, which is: can you look at the content of your consciousness? - you being part of that content. If you cannot know the content of your consciousness, how can you say, "I am right", or "I am wrong", "I loathe this or that", "This is good", or "That is bad", "The hippies are nice", "The hippies are not nice"? You are not in a position to judge at all. So, can you know the content of your own consciousness? Questioner: What is aware of the conditioning? That is the important thing, surely. Krishnamurti: So let's go on a little bit. Does one realize one's consciousness is its content? Do you understand my statement? The content makes up consciousness. So consciousness is not separate from its content; the content is consciousness. Is that absolutely clear? Now, what do you do then? The fact is, the content makes up your consciousness; being a Communist, a Christian, a Buddhist, the influence of the father, the mother, the pressures of civilization, whatever it is, all that is the content. Do you say, "That is a fact"? Begin with that. Keep to it. Then what do you do? Questioner: I see that the usual process of my trying to act on what I see, is in itself a fragmentation; and when that is seen clearly, I stop acting on what I see. Krishnamurti: No, you are missing my point. Questioner: We cannot do anything - there is nothing to be done. Krishnamurti:Wait: don't move from there. Questioner: This process must lead to the world order. Krishnamurti: That's just it. The world order, or disorder, is the content of my consciousness, which is in disorder. Therefore I said, "I am the world, the world is me." The "me" is made up of all the different parts of the content, and so is the world. The fact is, the content of my consciousness is consciousness. How do I proceed from there to unravel the various contents, examine them, throw out some, keep some. Who is the entity that is examining? That entity, which seems separate, is part of my consciousness, which is the result of the culture in which I have been brought up. The second fact is: if there is an entity which examines each fragment of that content, then that examiner is part of the content, and that examiner has separated himself from the content for various psychological reasons of security, safety, protection; and also it is part of the culture. So on examination I find that I am playing a trick I am deceiving myself. Do you see this? The division as the examiner, as the observer, separating himself from the content, analysing, rejecting or keeping - all that is also the result of the content. Do I see this very clearly? If I do, then what is action? I am faced with this problem. I am tremendously conditioned, and part of this conditioning is the desire to be secure. A child needs to be secure; the brain needs to be completely secure so as to function healthily. But that brain, wanting to be secure, may find security in some neurotic belief or in some neurotic action. So it has found security in tradition and holds on to it. And it has found security in this division as the observer and the observed, because that is part of the tradition; because if I reject the observer I am lost! So I am now faced with the fact that division as the observer and the observed, or whatever movement I make, is part of the content. Are you clear on this? Then what is there to be done? We are not discussing the conscious or the unconscious, because it is part of this. We say the conscious mind observes at a certain level but there are deeper motives, deeper intentions, deeper vitalities, and the whole of that is the content of my consciousness, which is the world consciousness. So what am I to do? My mind realizes that it must be free from conditioning, otherwise I am a slave to that; I see there will be wars, there will be antagonism, there will be division. So the mind, being intelligent, says it must uncondition itself at any price. How is this to be done without the division as the analyser and the analysed? - knowing the content is consciousness, and that any effort I make to get out of it is still part of that content. Do you understand? Then what is one to do, faced with this? Questioner: Either accept the world as it is, or totally reject it -we can't accept it as it is. Krishnamurti: Who are you to accept it? Why should you accept it or reject it? It is a fact. There is the sun. Do you accept it or reject it? It is there! You are faced with this and if you reject it, who is the person who is rejecting it? The person is part of that consciousness he is rejecting; only it is a part that does not suit him. And if he accepts, he will accept the part that suits him. Questioner: But it is even more difficult than that; because ifyou are only conditioned to be a Hindu,you might not even know it. To go back to what you said bef ore about a neurotic pattern: one may be fixed in a neurotic pattern and not know it. Krishnamurti:That's why I am going to show you something, Sir. Questioner: How can I reject it? Krishnamurti: You can't reject anything. There it is! Now what is the action that takes place when you observe that you can't do anything? Questioner: You stop. You feel that all this consciousness is not really it, andyou might be a monster. And getting thefeeling thatyou are this, you stop. But the process goes on, you can't help it. Krishnamurti: No. The process goes on only when I have not understood the content of my consciousness: whether it is neurotic, or not, whether it is homosexual or not - the content - all that is implied. And if I choose one part and hold on to it, that is the very essence of neurosis. So any action on my part - which is part of the content of my consciousness - cannot be unconditioned; it cannot be done that way. Then what am I to do? Have you got it? I will not reject or accept it. That is a fact. Questioner: Everything you do only strengthens the division. Krishnamurti: Therefore, what do you do? Questioner: You can't do any thing. Krishnamurti: Wait, you are too quick! You don't know what it means not to do a thing! Questioner: May Ijust say what Freud said: you must bring what is the unconscious into the conscious. Krishnamurti: I am not interested in what Freud says. Questioner: I am. Krishnamurti: Why? Questioner: Because it is a fact. You can see it in nature. Krishnamurti:Are you quoting Freud, or have you observed it yourself? Is it your own experience when you say that the unconscious pops up and acts, or that the unconscious prevents action? You are still thinking in terms of division - the conscious and the unconscious. I am not thinking in those terms at all. Questioner: There isn't really a division. Krishnamurti: But you still say: the unconscious pops up. Questioner: It'sjust a word - like "will". Krishnamurti: Oh no, when we use the word "unconscious" we are using it with the definite meaning that there is something which is not conscious. To me that is a statement of fragmentation. So if you know that you are fragmented that way, why do you hold on to it? Questioner: Our unconscious works! Krishnamurti: Of course it does. Someone says he is heterosexual; deep down he is probably homosexual. We are always contradicting ourselves, always hypocrites. So I say all this is part of consciousness: tradition, Freud, holding on to it, not holding on to it, dislike of the hippies and liking the squares - it is all the same. So I am saying to you, the whole of the content is my consciousness. I will not choose one part, and not the other; not hold on to one part because that pleases me, or because I am conditioned that way. Questioner: But when you say "the religious mind" - you talk about that... Krishnamurti: I am afraid I do. Questioner: ...you also make a division. Krishnamurti:Ah, no, I say when there is no division of any kind, not only superficially, but in the content of consciousness itself, as the observer and the observed, when there is nothing of that, then there is the quality of the religious mind. That has been made very clear. Now please just listen. When we say the content makes up consciousness - whether Freudian philosophy, or your particular experience - everything is included in that. The poor man in India has never heard of Freud, or Christ, but the man who has been brought up with the mythology of Christ, says: that is a fact. And the poor villager with his God, says: that is a fact. Both are the content of one's consciousness. Surely Sir? Questioner: It is not clear. Krishnamurti:You see, you refuse to let go of the particular fragment to which you are holding on. This is what I have to fight when I go to India, because for centuries they have been brought up with the idea that there is an Atman and Brahman, God. And they believe most fundamentally that enlightenment is only possible when these two come together. And I say it is nonsense, both are invented by thought. Now I have come to this point: I see for myself that any movement within that content is still part of the content. I know it completely, it is as clear as that sunshine, it is an absolute fact. Then I say to myself: now, how is the mind to free itself from its conditioning? Questioner: You will have to go beyond the conditioning. Krishnamurti: No, to "go beyond" means still being part of it. Questioner: But you can go beyondyourself when you are listening. Krishnamurti: Yes, quite right. Questioner: Because Ifeel that you have lost your conditioning, I am going to listen to you, actually listen. Krishnamurti: I understand, Sir. You don't know me, please don't say, "you are unconditioned; you don't know what it means, so please don't judge. Questioner: We don't want to get rid of our conditioning. Krishnamurti: Keep it and live with it, be in turmoil, be in misery, have wars! If you like it, hold on to it. And that is what is happening! The Arab holds on to his conditioning and that is why he is fighting the Israelis. And the Israelis hold on to theirs. That is the world. I have my particular anchor and won't let go. So knowing all this, what is the mind to do? Questioner: I become very quiet. I don't do anything. Krishnamurti:Do you follow the statement? He says: when I am faced with this fact that I am wholly conditioned, I become silent. I can play tricks upon myself and say I am unconditioning myself -which is part of my training, which is part of the content. He says, "I become silent". Is that so? Questioner: I can't help bringing in the "I". Krishnamurti: That's just it. He means really that it is a means of saying "I". Now what happens when you are faced with something about which you can't do anything? Until now you have thought, because of your conditioning, that you could do something, that you could change, that you could manipulate, that you could alter things; but it is still part of the same field, moving from one corner of the field to another. When you realize that any movement within that field is a conditioned movement, what takes place? When the Arab and the Israeli say: look, I am conditioned and you are conditioned, what takes place? Go on, Sir, what takes place? Questioner: Then it is possible to live. Krishnamurti:I realize I am totally conditioned and that any tricks I can play upon myself are part of my conditioning. Changing from being a Catholic to becoming a Hindu, from being a Hindu to Communism, then back to Zen, and from Zen to Krishnamurti and so on (Laughter) - it is part of my conditioning, it is part of this whole content. What happens when I realize this? Questioner: The process stops itself. Krishnamurti: Has it stopped with you? Don't theorize! Questioner: It is a fact. It stops by itself. Krishnamurti: It is much more complex than that. You are too quick, you are not going with it. You want a result. Questioner: The mind that sees this, is not the same mind that started the enquiry. Krishnamurti: That's it. Go slowly, Sir. What has taken place to a mind that started enquiring into its content and has discovered the extraordinary divisions, the contradictions, the fragmentation, the assertions, the aggression, all that; what happens to such a mind? Questioner: It becomes very clear. It wins space, it is in another state. Krishnamurti: Then Sir, I will put you a different question. What is your action in daily life - notjust in a crisis - when you realize this fact? Questioner: Maybe we don't realize this. Krishnamurti: That's my point. Either you realize this as a fact, and that fact fundamentally changes the whole structure of your consciousness, or you don't realize it. If you don't realize it - as apparently you don't - and merely say, "I understand", it means nothing. When you are confronted with this fact, what is your action in daily life? Relate the two, then you will get the answer. That is: I realize that I am conditioned as a Hindu. I realize that I have been brought up in peculiar circumstances - the world teacher - the devotion, candles, worship, all that; facing the world, property, money, position, prestige - and I see all that is part of the content, part of "me', What is the relationship of that perception to my daily life? Unless I relate it, it remains verbal, theoretical, nonsensical. So I must relate it. If you can't answer it, then you have not realized it, then you are playing with words. Questioner: It appears to me that every timeyou ask a question, there is a problem of everyone trying to find the answer. In the question should be the realization thatyou can't answer. Krishnamurti: Of Course not, Sir. I am asking it because you have to ask that question. Questioner: That's right. It's the person who asks the question who always looks for the answer. Krishnamurti: That is what I am saying. Whether you are attached to one neurosis or another, when you realize all this, conditioning, what does that realization do to your daily activities? Questioner: Does all effort on the part of the self cease? Krishnamurti: You are going to find out. When you say, "I have understood it", if there is a division between that realization and your daily action, then there is conflict. That conflict is disorder, in which we live, both the world and you and another. So what takes place when there is a real perception of the truth, like "fire burns", "poison kills"? When you realize this fact as vitally as that, then what is your action in that realization in your daily life? Questioner: This realization keeps me aware in daily life - that is all that is needed. Krishnamurti: Oh no, Madam. It is nothing of the kind. Questioner: It must totally change my way of living. Krishnamurti: Find out, Sir. Of course it does. I am not being patronizing, I am just asking you: do you realize it, in the sense that when you have toothache there is an absolute realization of pain - you do something about it? You don't theorize about it, you go to the nearest drugstore, or to the dentist, there is action. In the same way, when the mind realizes totally that you are conditioned, that your consciousness is its content - and that any movement you make is still part of that consciousness - trying to get out of it, accepting it, or rejecting it, is still part of it - then how does the realization of that truth affect your life? The realization of the truth of that fact is going to act. You understand? And that truth, being highly intelligent, will act according to the moment. Questioner: But can you realize that, when you are still caught in your fears and your desires? Krishnamurti: You can't. You are trying to overcome one fragment which is fear, by another fragment. That way you cannot get rid of it, so there must be a different approach to that fragment which you call fear. And the approach is this: to do absolutely nothing about fear. Can you? I can't do anything about the noise of that train going by, therefore I listen to it. I cannot do a thing about the roar of that train. Therefore I don't put up a resistance to it, I listen. There is noise but it does not affect me. In the same way when I realize that I am neurotic, that I am holding on to a particular way of belief, a particular way of action, that I am homosexual, or whatever it is, that I have tremendous prejudices, I just listen to it totally. I do not resist it, I listen to it totally, completely, with my heart. We started out by asking if I can look at the whole movement of life as a unitary process. The killing, the refugees, the war in the Middle East, the Catholics, the Protestants, the scientists, the artists, the businessmen, private life, public life, my family, your family - there is endless division. This division has brought about such disorder in the world and in myself. Can I look at all this as a marvellous single movement? I can't, that is a fact. I can't, because I am fragmented in myself. I am conditioned in myself. So my concern then is, not to find out how to live a unitary life, but to see if the fragmentation can come to an end. And that fragmentation only comes to an end when I realize that all my consciousness is made up of these fragments. My consciousness is the fragmentation. And when I say, "There must be integration, it must be brought together", it is still part of that trick I am playing upon myself. So I realize that. I realize it as a truth, like fire burns, you can't deceive me, it is a fact, and I am left with it. And I have to find out how it operates in my daily life - not guess, play, theorize. Because I have seen the truth of it, that truth is going to act. If I don't see it and pretend I have seen it, then I am going to make a hideous mess of my life. -- Page 401 -- THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VIII CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 5TH AUGUST 1971 'IS INTELLIGENCE AWAKE?' Krishnamurti: We were discussing the question of the conscious and the unconscious, and the content of consciousness. Shall we go on with that, or would you like to discuss another problem this morning? Questioner (1): Go on with that. Questioner (2): I would like to discuss more about the relationship between intelligence and thought, and between silence and death. Questioner (3): I don't know if we have finished with what we discussed yesterday, and if we really went to the bottom of the question of motivation in one's life. Krishnamurti: I wonder if we cannot discuss this question of consciousness more deeply by considering what is the relationship between intelligence and thought; and perhaps we can also go into the problem of silence and its relationship to death. But before we go into that, there are several things involved in what we were discussing yesterday. I do not know if you have gone deeply into it yourself: what you have understood, how much of it is a reality? We said yesterday, that most of us are conditioned by the culture, by the environment, by food, clothes, religion and so on. The conditioning is the content of consciousness and consciousness is the conditioning. What relationship has thought to that conditioning? Can there be intelligence where there is conditioning? If one has examined and observed oneself objectively, not with any kind of condemnation or judgment, one realizes that one is conditioned superficially and in great depth. There is deep conditioning, which may be the result of the family, the racial accumulation, the influences which have not been obvious but nevertheless have penetrated very deeply. Is it at all possible for the mind ever to be free of all that? When it is conditioned, can the mind uncondition itself totally? Or can the mind prevent itself - not through resistance - from ever being conditioned? There are these two things which we have to examine this morning in relation to thought and intelligence, and also with regard to silence and death. If we can, we shall go into this, cover this whole field. Why does the mind ever get conditioned? Is it so sensitive, so capable of being hurt? It is a tender, delicate thing, and in relationship it gets invariably hurt, invariably conditioned. Is it possible for that conditioning ever to be washed away? One realizes the mind, the brain itself, is conditioned, evolved through centuries upon centuries and the brain is the storehouse of memories. You can watch it yourself, you don't have to read philosophical or psychological books - at least I don't, though you may. The brain which has evolved through timewhich is the past, which is the accumulation of memory, experience, knowledge -responds instantly to any challenge according to its conditioning, superficially or in depth. I think this is clear. Now can that response from the past be delayed so that there is an interval between the challenge and the response? I am taking a very superficial conditioning: one has been brought up in a particular culture, in a particular belief or pattern, and when that is questioned there is an instant response according to the background of the particular person. You tell me I am a fool. My response is immediate, saying, "You are another", or getting angry with you, or this or that. Now when you call me a fool, can there be an interval, a space, before I respond? So that the brain is quiet enough to respond in a different way. Questioner: Or to observe its own response. Krishnamurti: The brain responds all the time according to its conditioning, according to various forms of stimuli: it is always active. The brain is the response of time, of memory; in the brain the whole past is contained. If the brain can hold itself and not respond immediately, then there is a possibility of a new response. The brain operates in the old habits established by the culture we live in, by the past racial inheritance and so on; that responds all the time, to any stimulus - judging, evaluating, believing, not believing, discussing, protecting, denying and so on. The brain cannot be denied its past knowledge; it must have that, otherwise it can't function. So I am asking whether that brain - which is the old - will allow itself to be quiet so that a new part can operate. When you flatter me, the old brain says, "How lovely." But can the old brain listen to what you say and not respond, so that perhaps a new movement can take place? That new movement can only take place when there is silence, when the machinery is not operating in terms of the past. Is that clear - clear in the sense of watching yourself, otherwise it is no fun? I am not explaining this for myself, we are working together. I find, when one examines one's activities, that the old brain is always responding according to its limited knowledge, to its tradition, its racial inheritance, and when that is operating nothing new can come about. Now I want to find out whether that old brain can be quiet so that a new movement can take place. I can do that when I am in relationship with another, watching the old brain in operation, and when it understands the truth that it must be quiet in order that a new operation can take place. The brain is not forcing itself to be quiet. If it is forcing itself to be quiet then it is still the operation of the past. In that there is division, there is conflict, there is discipline and all the rest of it. But if the old brain understands, or sees the truth - that as long as it is in constant response to any stimulus, it must operate along the old lines - if the old brain sees the truth of that, then it becomes quiet. It is the truth that brings about quietness - not the intention to be quiet. You see, this question is very interesting because one finds there are certain brains that are never conditioned. You may say, how do you know? I only know because it has happened to the speaker. You may believe it, or disbelieve it! Just take the fact. I am asking why the brain must always function in this old pattern. Ifit does not fanction in its old pattern, it sets up a new pattern according to its memories in opposition to the old. We only use a very small part of the brain and that small part is the past. There is a part of the brain which has not functioned at all, which is open, empty, new. Do you know anything about it? Don't agree to this. You only know the old brain in operation, when you are at all conscious of it. Now I am asking whether that old brain can be still to stimuli, so that a new response can come. And the next question is: how can that brain, which has been so conditioned, hold back a little? Can I go on? Questioner: It is very clear. Krishnamurti: And one finds the brain does hold back when, there is the necessity, the urgency, when this question is vital - so that a new quality of mind, of the brain, which has never been touched, operates. This happens, this is not only my experience. Any top-level scientist who is free from the desire for success, or position, must have asked this question, because how does he discover new things? If the old brain is in operation all the time it can't discover anything new. So it is only when the old brain is quiet that something new is seen, and in that quiet state something new is discovered. This is a fact. Now, without forcing the brain, how can that quietness come and the brain be voluntarily quiet? It can discover something new only when it sees the truth that the old cannot find anything new and therefore the old becomes quiet. The truth makes it quiet; it does not wish to be quiet. Is that very clear? Then, can that quietness operate all the time? - and the old conditioning with its knowledge operate only when it is necessary. Have you understood my question? Questioner: You say, "Operate all the time"? Will that not bring conflict? Krishnamurti: Please listen, Sir. I want to find out, I am enquiring, I am not saying, "It must be quiet". I see the old brain must operate, otherwise I can't speak English, drive a car, or recognise you. The old brain must operate functionally. But, also, as long as it is not quiet, no new thing can be seen. Are you following? Audience: Yes. Krishnamurti: I am asking myself: what is the relationship between the new quality of the brain, which functions in quietness, and the old? The old is thought - right? The old is the collection of memories and any response according to these memories is thought. That thought must function, otherwise you can't do anything. Questioner: Aren'tyou making a division? Krishnamurti: No, it is not a division. It is like a house, it is a whole, but there are divisions in it. We have discovered two things. That the old brain - we'll call it that for the moment - is the conditioned brain which has accumulated knowledge through centuries upon centuries. We are not dividing it as the old and the new, we just want to convey the meaning that there is this whole structure of the brain, one part of which is the old - which doesn't mean it is separate from the new -it is different. Now I am saying to myself: I see that if the old brain is in operation nothing new can be discovered. The new can be discovered only when the old is quiet. And the old can only be quiet when it sees the truth that the new cannot be discovered by the old. Now we have this fact: the old must naturally be quiet to discover something new. Questioner (1): Is the discovery made by the new or the old? Questioner (2): By neither of them. Krishnamurti: Answer it, Sirs! My brain says, "I really don't know, I am going to find out." You have asked a question, which is: does the old brain recognise the new, or does the new use the old? The old brain is quiet because it has understood completely that it can never discover anything new. We won't even use the word "discover". No new movement can take place if the old is constantly in operation. The old sees the fact of that and is quiet. And a new movement, a new happening takes place. Is that happening recognised by the old, or does it open the door for the new to utilize it? Look Sirs, this is really quite important, even though you don't follow it, because I want to find a totally new way of living. I realize the old way of living is terrible, ugly, brutal. I must find a new dimension which is unrelated to the old. Any movement on the part of the old to discover a different dimension is not possible. Realizing this, it becomes quiet. Now what takes place in that quietness? Let's proceed along that way. What takes place when the old brain has understood that it cannot find a new dimension? Questioner: The unknown? Krishnamurti: No, don't invent. Unless you experience this, don't guess. Questioner: There is space. Krishnamurti: Now wait a minute. When the old brain is quiet, the gentleman says, there is space. Let's examine it. What do you mean by space? Questioner: Emptiness. Krishnamurti: Please don't invent, don't guess, observe. Is your old brain quiet? Questioner (1): No. Questioner (2): If the old brain is quiet, canyou ask that question? Krishnamurti: I am asking you. It may be a wrong question, but we must find out. Questioner: The part of the brain which is not used starts operating. Krishnamurti: Just listen to what he is saying. When the old brain is quiet, perhaps a new part of the brain which has not been used comes into operation. That is, we are only functioning with a very small part of our brain and when that small part of the brain is quiet, the rest of the brain may be active. Or, it has been active all the time but we don't know it because that one part which has accumulated knowledge, tradition, time, is always super-active, and therefore we don't know the other part at all; it may have its own activity. Are you following this? This is really a very interesting question. Please give your minds to this a little bit; don't say, "I don't understand" and just drop it. Apply yourselves! You see, having used the old brain so much we have never considered any other part of the brain, and what that part is, which may have a quality of a different dimension. I say that quality of a different dimension can be discovered when the old brain is really quiet. That's my point. You follow? When the old brain is completely quiet, not made quiet, but has naturally understood that it must be quiet and therefore is quiet, then we can find out what takes place. Now, I am going to investigate - not you - because your old brain is not quiet. Would you agree to that? It has not understood the necessity of being completely quiet under any stimulus, except of course physical stimuli - that is, if you put a pin into my leg it will respond. But as nobody is pricking my leg with a pin the old brain can be quiet. I want to find out what is the quality of the new brain - that quality which the old brain cannot recognise? Because the old brain cannot recognise anything which it has not experienced, which is not the outcome of memory. Therefore what the old brain recognises is still the old. Is that clear? So I am asking: what is the new? The old brain does not know anything about it, therefore it can only say: I really don't know. Let's proceed from there - do some of you follow this? The old brain says, "I can't touch this and I really don't know." Because I cannot touch it, because I cannot recognise it, I am not going to be deceived by it. I know absolutely nothing about the new dimensions of this new brain. When the old brain is quiet and incapable of recognition, it can only say, "I really don't know." Can the old brain remain in that state of not knowing? It has said, "All my life I have functioned with knowledge and recognition." In functioning that way it has said, "I know" in terms of what I do not know, of that which I will learn, but always within the pattern of knowing. Now it says, "I really don't know", because something new is taking place. The new cannot be recognised, therefore I have no relationship to it yet. I am going to find out. Now what is the nature of not knowing? Is there fear when there is a state of not knowing? - which is death. You follow, Sirs? When the old brain actually says, "I don't know", it has relinquished all knowing. It has relinquished altogether the intention of knowing, of wanting to know. So there is a field in which the old brain cannot function, because it does not know. Now what is that field? Can it ever be described? It can be described only when the old brain recognises and verbalises it to communicate. So there is a field in which the old brain cannot possibly enter; this is not an invention, this is not a theory, this is a fact when the old brain says, "I really don't know anything about this." Which means there is no intention to learn about the new. You see the difference, Sirs? So now I want to find out non-verbally, because the moment I use a word I am back in the old. Therefore is there an understanding of something new non-verbally? - in the sense of not inventing a new word, or intending to describe it so as to capture it and hold it. So I am just enquiring, the mind is looking at something which it does not know at all. Is that possible? It has always looked in terms of learning about it, resisting it, avoiding it, escaping from it, or overcoming it. Now it is doing nothing of the kind. Do you understand? If this is not possible you cannot understand the other. What is the something which the old brain cannot understand and therefore cannot possibly know or acquire knowledge about? Is there such a thing? Or is itjust an invention of the old brain wanting something new to happen? If it is the old brain wanting something new to happen, it is still part of the old brain. Now I have examined it completely, so that the old brain has understood its structure and nature and therefore is absolutely still, not wanting to know. That is where the difficulty lies. Is there something real, not imagined, not invented, which is not a theory? Something which the old brain cannot possibly understand, or recognise, or want to understand? Is there anything like that? For the speaker there is - but that has no value, he may be deluding himself. It has value only in the sense that it is for you to discover it. So you have to find out what is the relationship of the new - if you see the new -to the old, which must operate in life objectively, sanely, non- personally, therefore efficiently. Does the old capture the new so that there is a different life? Or does the new operate in a way that the old cannot possibly recognise, and that operation is the new way of living? Go slowly, take time, look! This old brain, with its consciousness, has lived for thousands of years; the consciousness of this old brain is its content. Its content may have been acquired superficially or in depth and that is the old brain with all the knowledge, with all the experience of centuries of human endeavour, of evolution. When it is functioning within that field of consciousness it can never discover anything new. That is an absolute fact, not a theory. We know nothing about freedom, about what love is, what death is; we know nothing exceptjealousy, envy, fear, which are all part of the old content. Then this old brain, realizing its utter limitation, becomes quiet, because it has found it has no freedom. And because it has found no freedom, a new part of the brain is in operation. I don't know if you see that? Look! I have been going South, thinking I was going North, and suddenly I discover that. At the moment of discovery there is a total reversion - not of the old, it is a complete reversal. The movement is neither to the North nor South, it is in a totally different direction. That is, at that moment of discovery there is a totally different movement, which is freedom. Questioner: Could you discuss the difference between the intensity to find out, and the desire of the oldfor the new. Krishnamurti:The desire of the old for the new is still the old; therefore the desire for the new, or the experience of the new - call it enlightenment, God, what you like - is still part of the old; therefore that's out. Questioner (1): Krishnaji, do you realize thatyou have been speaking of the highest philosophy and that we, here in this tent, are not even able to have the smallest relationship with each other. Questioner (2): Who are we? Krishnamurti:We have been through that - we are monkeys! Look, Sir, this is not talking of the "highest philosophy", it is the pure thing. Do you realize actually, not theoretically, that you have no relationship one with another, that your relationship with another cannot exist as long as the old brain is in operation, because the old brain functions in images, pictures, past incidents; when the past happenings, images, knowledge, are strong, then relationship comes to an end - obviously. If I have built an image about you - who are my wife, or my friend, my girl or whatever it is - that image, that knowledge, which is the past, obviously prevents relationship. Relationship means direct contact immediately in the present, at the same level, with the same intensity, with the same passion. And that passion, that intensity at the same level, cannot exist if I have an image about you and you have an image about me. So it is for you to see if you have an image about somebody else. Obviously you have; therefore apply yourself, work to find out - that is, if you really want a relationship with another, which I doubt. We are all so terribly selfish, enclosed; if you really want a relationship with another, you have to understand this whole structure of the past - which is what we have been doing. And when that is gone, you have a relationship which is totally new all the time. And that new relationship is love - not the old, beating the drum! Now what is the relationship of that quality, of that dimension which is the new, which is not known, which cannot be captured by the old, to my daily life? I have discovered that dimension, it has happened because I have seen that the old brain can never be free and so is incapable of finding out what truth is. Therefore the old brain says: my whole structure is of time and I function only with regard to that which has time - machinery, language, all the rest of it - so that part will be completely still. So what is the relationship between the two? Has the old any relationship with freedom, love, the unknown? If it has relationship with the unknown, then it is part of the old - you follow? But if the unknown has relationship with the old, then it is quite a different proposition. I don't know if you see that? My question is: what is the relationship between these two, and who wants relationship? Who is demanding this relationship? Is the old demanding it? If the old demands it, then it is part of the old, therefore it has no relationship with the other. I don't know if you see the beauty of this. The old has no relationship with freedom, with love, with this dimension. But that new dimension, love, can have a relationship with the old, but not the other way round. Do you see it, Sirs? So the next step then is: what is the action in daily life, when the old has no relationship with the new, but the new is establishing relationship as it moves in life. The mind has discovered something new. How is the new going to operate in the field of the known, in which functions the old brain with all its activities? Questioner: Would that be where intelligence comes in? Krishnamurti: Now wait Sir, perhaps you are right. When the old brain sees that it can never understand what freedom is; when it sees that it is incapable of discovering something new, that very perception is the seed of intelligence, isn't it? That is intelligence: "I cannot do." I thought I could do a lot of things, and I can, in a certain direction, but in a totally new direction I cannot do anything. The discovery of that is intelligence, obviously. Now what is the relationship of that intelligence to the other? Is the other part of this extraordinary sense of intelligence? I want to find out what we mean by that word "intelligence; the mind must not be caught by words. Obviously the old brain, all these centuries, thought it could have its God, its freedom, it could do everything it wanted. And suddenly it discovers that any movement of the old brain is still part of the old; therefore intelligence is the understanding that it can only function within the field of the known. The discovery of that is intelligence, we say. Now what is that intelligence? What is its relationship to life, to a dimension which the old brain does not know? You see, intelligence is not personal, is not the outcome of argument, belief, opinion or reason. Intelligence comes into being when the brain discovers its fallibility, when it discovers what it is capable of, and what not. Now what is the relationship of that intelligence with this new dimension? I would rather not use the word "relationship". The different dimension can only operate through intelligence; if there is not that intelligence it cannot operate. So in daily life it can only operate where intelligence is functioning. Intelligence cannot function when the old brain is active, when there is any form of belief and adherence to any particular fragment of the brain. All that is lack of intelligence. The man who believes in God, the man who says, "There is only one Saviour", is not intelligent. The man who says, "I belong to this group", is not intelligent. When one discovers the limitation of the old, the very discovery of that is intelligence, and only when that intelligence is functioning can the new dimension operate through it. Full stop. Have you got it? Questioner: May Iput another question? I don't completely agree with you. Whatyou say about intelligence applies only to primary intelligence. But we need also secondary intelligence; that is, the ability to integrate what is new with the old. Krishnamurti: That is what takes place when there is not intelligence. I won't use the word "integrate; the new operates when there is that intelligence which is not only primary but fundamental. Questioner: Butyou see, inyour talk today I always heard the word "primary". I think whatyou call "new", is in a certain sense primary. If I play a game, throwing a coin, I cannot predict what will appear and one says one's game here is a random event. I want to know what you think about the relation of whatyou call "completely new" with what is random in the sense I have explained it. Krishnamurti: I understand. The professor asks, what is the relationship of randomness, ofchance, to something totally new. There are events in one's life that appear to happen by chance, events that occur at random. Is that happening new, totally unexpected? Or is it the result of unexamined, hidden, unconscious events? I happen to meet you by chance. Is that chance at all, or has it happened because certain unconscious, unknown, events have brought us together? We may consider this chance, but it is not chance at all. I meet you, I did not know you existed, and in the meeting something has taken place between us. That may be the result of a great many other events of which we are not conscious, and we may then say, "This is a random event, this is an unexpected chance, this is totally new." It may not be that. Is there chance in life at all? - a happening which has not a cause. Or have all events in life their basic, deep, causes, which we may not know and therefore we say, "Our meeting happens by chance, it is a random event." The cause undergoes a change when there is an effect. The effect becomes a cause. There is the cause and the effect which becomes the cause of the next effect. So cause-effect is a constant chain; it is not one cause, one effect, it is undergoing constant change. Each cause, each effect, changes the next cause, the next effect. So as this is going on in life, is there anything which is unexpected, chance, a random event? What do you say? Questioner: The very concept of randomness is based on causality. Krishnamurti: Causality? I don't think life works that way. The cause becomes effect and the effect becomes cause - you can see in this life. So we can never say, "Cause and effect" there it is! The professor asked about the relationship of the unknown - not in the sense of a new dimension - to a chance event. Questioner: The unknown is outside the world of relativity. Krishnamurti: You can discuss it. I know nothing about all this, I am talking about human relationships, human beings, not mathematical problems and chance events and mathematical order. All that does not seem to affect our daily living. Here we are concerned to bring about a change in that daily living - the way we behave. And if our behaviour is based on that past it still brings conflict and misery; that is what we are talking about. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VIII CHAPTER 3 4TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 7TH AUGUST 1971 'FEAR' Questioner (1): I would like to discuss fear and death and their relationship to intelligence and thought. Questioner (2): Couldyou go into the statement: the world is me and am the world? Questioner (3): Could we discuss - but not theorise - about what happens after death if it in actually possible to die to things known? Krishnamurti: Fear is a complex problem and we have to enquire into it, not come with any preconceived ideas, but really penetrate into this whole question of fear. Now first of all, in enquiring into this problem, we are not trying to deal with it as collective fear, nor are we discussing it as group therapy to get rid of fear. We are going to find out what fear means and what are its nature and structure; whether the fear deep down at the very root of our being can be understood, and whether the mind can ever be free from fear. How do you approach this problem? Have you got any kind of fear - physical or psychological? If you have psychological fears - we shall come back to the physical fears a little later - how do you deal with them? Suppose I am afraid that I shall lose my position, my prestige: I depend on an audience, on you, to bolster me up, I depend on you to give me vitality by talking. I am afraid, as I grow older, I may become senile. I will be faced with nothing and I am afraid. What is this fear? Or I am afraid that I depend on you - a man or a woman - and that dependency makes me attached to you, so I am afraid to lose you. Or I am afraid because I have done something in the past, which I regret or am ashamed of, and I don't want you to know; so I am afraid of your knowing it and I feel guilty. Or I feel terribly anxious about death, about living, about what people say, or don't say, how they look at me. I have a deep sense of foreboding, anxiety, a sense of inferiority. And in this anxiety about death, living a life that has no meaning, I seek assurance from somebody through human relationship. Or out of my anxiety I seek a sense of security in a certain belief, a certain ideology, in God, and so on. Also I am afraid that I shan't be able to do everything I want to do in this life. I have not the capacity nor the intelligence, but I am tremendously ambitious to achieve something; so I am frightened of that too. And of course I am afraid of death; and I am afraid of being lonely, of not being loved; so I want to establish a relationship with another in which this fear, this anxiety, this sense of loneliness, this separation, does not exist. Also I am afraid of the dark, of the elevator - innumerable neurotic fears! What is this fear? Why are you, why is anybody, afraid? Is it based on not wanting to be hurt? Or is it that one wants complete security, and not being able to find it - this sense of complete safety, of protection, physically, emotionally, psychologically - one becomes terribly anxious about living! - so there is this sense of uncertainty. Now why is there fear? One of our major problems is fear, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we run away from it or try to overcome it, try to withstand it, develop courage and all the rest of it, there is still fear. I am asking myself, I am asking you, whether the mind is so delicate, so sensitive, that from childhood on it does not want to be hurt. And not wanting to be hurt one builds a wall. One is very shy, or aggressive; before you attack I am ready to attack you verbally, or with thought. I have been hurt so much in my life, everybody hurts me - everybody treads on one's toes - and I don't want to be hurt. Is that one of the reasons why fear exists? You have been hurt, haven't you? And out of that hurt you do all kinds of things. We resist a great deal, we don't want to be disturbed; out of that feeling of hurt we cling to something which we hope will protect us. Therefore we become aggressive towards anything that attacks what we are holding on to for protection. As a human being sitting here, wanting to resolve this problem of fear, what is it that you are frightened of? Is it physical fear -fear of physical pain? Or a psychological fear of danger, of uncertainty, of being hurt again? Or of not being able to find total, complete security? Is it fear of being dominated, and yet we are dominated? So what is it that you are frightened of? Are you aware of your fear? Questioner: I fear the unknown. Krishnamurti: Now listen to that question. Why should one be afraid of the unknown, when you know nothing about it? Please enquire into it. Questioner: I have an image of what has happened to me and there is the fear that it might happen again. Krishnamurti: But is it the fear of letting go the known? Or fear of the unknown? You understand? Fear of letting go the things I have gathered - my property, my wife, my name, my books, my furniture, my good looks, my capacities - to let go the things that I know, that I have experienced: is that the fear? Or is it fear of the future, the unknown? Questioner: I find that my fear generally is of what will happen, not of what is happening. Krishnamurti: Shall we go into that? Questioner: It isn't that one is frightened of what might happen tomorrow, but of losing one's own recognitions, one's satisfactions, today. Krishnamurti: Look, the gentleman asked a question which was: "I am not frightened of yesterday or of today, but I am frightened of what might happen tomorrow, in the future." Tomorrow may be twenty-four hours away or a year, but I am frightened of that. Questioner: But the future is the result of all the expectations one has because of the past. Krishnamurti: I am frightened of the future, how shall I deal with this? Don't explain it to me, I want to find out what to do with this fear. I am frightened what might happen: I might get ill, I might lose my job, a dozen things might happen to me, I may go insane, lose all the things which I have stored up. Now please enquire. Questioner: I think perhaps it is not the future that we fear but rather the uncertainty of the future, new events which cannot be predicted. If the future were predictable there would be no fear, we should know what would happen. Fear is a sort of defence of the body against something completely new, against the whole uncertainty of what life is. Krishnamurti: I am afraid of the future because the future is uncertain." I don't know how to deal with this uncertainty, with my whole being, therefore I am afraid. Fear is an indication of this uncertainty of the future, is that it? Questioner: That's only a part of it. There are otherfears too. Krishnamurti: Sir, we are taking one fear; we will discuss various forms of fears presently. The gentleman says, "I am not really frightened of anything except of the future. The future is so uncertain, I don't know how to meet it. I havxx the capacity to understand not only the present but also the future." So it is this sense of uncertainty that indicates fear. Whatever the explanation be, the fact is I am frightened of tomorrow. Now how shall I deal with it? How shall I be free of that fear? Questioner: Looking at one's response to the uncertainty of thefuture it seems it might be inadequate. Krishnamurti: I am frightened of tomorrow, of what might happen. The whole future is uncertain, there might be an atomic war, there might be an ice age - I am frightened of all that. How am I to deal with it? Help me, don't theorize about it, don't give me explanations! Questioner (1): Need uncertainty breedfear? Questioner (2): We are frightened because we are pretending, playing games, and we are afraid, of being exposed. Krishnamurti: But you are not helping me! Aren't you frightened of the future, Sir? - stick to this. Questioner: Yes, perhaps. Krishnamurti: Now, how are you going to deal with it? Questioner: By living in the present. Krishnamurti: I don t know what that means. Questioner (1): For me it has been helpful to realize what I have been afraid of in the past, and why I have been afraid, and to submit this to examination. This helps me to face the future. Questioner (2): First of all we have got to understand what we mean by the future. Krishnamurti: That's what I am trying to find out. Questioner: The first thing we have to do is not to be afraid of being frightened. Krishnamurti: Oh, that is a cliche, that doesn't help me! Questioner: One has to realize you can't help me out: fear is always there. One has to understand fear is going to be a life companion. Krishnamurti: Sir, you have not fed me. You have given me a lot of words, ashes. I am still frightened of tomorrow. Questioner (1): That is just the problem. You can't help anyone. Questioner (2): Can'tyou waitfor tomorrow and let things come, see what happens? Questioner (3): I know the necessity for physical security, but I want to understand my need for psychological security. Krishnamurti: He means that, Sir. He probably has some security physically, but psychologically he is frightened of tomorrow. He has got a little bank account, a little house and all the rest of it, he is not frightened about that; he is frightened of what might happen in the future. Questioner (1): Is it possible to live with your uncertainty? Questioner (2): If we knew what was going to happen, we should not be afraid. Questioner (3): Sitting here I am not afraid, but thinking about tomorrow I get frightened. Krishnamurti: Thought does it. Questioner: Thought does it. When we are frightened now, it is afact. If we accept the fact and if we live totally in the present, we forget the future. Krishnamurti: Right, let's look. I want to find out what causes this fear of tomorrow. What is tomorrow? Why does tomorrow exist at all? You understand? I am going to answer it. I want to find out how thought arises, how fear arises. I think about tomorrow, and the past has given me a sense of security; though there may have been a great many uncertainties in the past, on the whole I have survived. Up to now I am fairly safe, but tomorrow is very uncertain and I am frightened. So I am going to find out what causes this fear of tomorrow. The response of my whole being to that insecurity of tomorrow being uncertain, is fear. So I want to find out why fear arises when I think about the future. Which mean the future may be all right, but my thinking abou the uncertainty. I don't know the future, it may be marvellous, or it may be deadly, it may be terrible, or most beautiful, I don't know; thought is not certain about the future. So thought, which has always been seeking certainty, is suddenly faced with this uncertainty. So why does thought create fear? You follow? Questioner: Because thought divides and creates a distance between past andfuture, andfear enters into this space. Krishnamurti: The questioner says, "Thought separates the future from the past and divides what might be. This separation of `what is' and `what might be' is part of this fear." If I did not think about tomorrow, there would be no fear, I would not know the future, I would not even care. Because I think about the future - the future which I don't know, the future which is so uncertain - my whole response, psychologically as well as physically, is to say, "My God, what is going to happen?" So thought breeds fear. Questioner: Is thought the only psychological function that is able to bring aboutfear? There are some other irrationalfunctions likefeeling; that might bring aboutfear as well. Krishnamurti: I am taking that one particular thing, there are other factors too. Questioner (1): There is fear of the unknown, fear of tomorrow; it is based on attachment to a belief, or someformula. Thefear can be understood if I see why I am attached to a particular convention or belief. Questioner (2): What aboutfear of existence? Krishnamurti: All these are involved, are they not? The attachment to a belief, to a formula, to a certain ideological concept which I have built for myself, all these are part of this fear. Now I want to find out by seeing what is fear. I said to you earlier I have done something in the past of which I am ashamed, or of which I am frightened: I don't want it to recur. Thinking about what I have done in the past breeds fear, doesn't it? Thinking about what might happen in the future also breeds fear. So I see - I may be wrong - that thought is responsible for the fear, both of the past and of the future. And thought is also responsible for fear by projecting an ideal, a belief, and holding on to that belief and wanting certainty out of that belief; it is all the operation of thought, isn't it? So I have to understand why thought thinks about the future, why thought goes back to some event which has brought fear. Why does thought do this? Questioner: Thought can help itself by imagining all the possibilities of terrible things that could happen in the future, so it can make some plans to prevent these things happening. It tries to protect itself by imagining. Krishnamurti: Thought also helps you to protect yourself, through insurance, through building a house, avoiding wars; thought cultivates fear and also protects, doesn't it? We are talking about thought creating fear, not how it protects. I am asking why thought breeds this fear; thought also breeds pleasure, doesn't it? -sexual pleasure, the pleasure of the sunset which happened yesterday and so on. So thought gives a continuity to pleasure and also to fear. Questioner: Man, seeking pleasure, follows the choice of his thoughts by discriminating. " This would be good" and " That would be bad". And fear seems to come directly from what man does to make the good things happen and to avoid the bad. Krishnamurti: Surely the whole process is based on thought, isn't it? Questioner: Fear comes from the discriminating aspect of thought. Krishnamurti: Yes, but it is still thought, saying, "This is good, this I will keep, this reject." The whole movement of thought is the demand for pleasure and discrimination in that, saying, "This will give me pleasure, that will not." So the whole movement of fear and pleasure, the demand, and the continuity of both, depends on thought, doesn't it? Questioner: But how can you be free from it? Krishnamurti: Wait, first let's get this thing going. Questioner: Thought is fear. Krishnamurti: We are going to find out. I am safe today. I know I am going to have my meals, there is a house, there is a room; but I don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. Yesterday I had a great deal of pleasure in various forms, and I want those pleasures repeated tomorrow. So thought both sustains fear and gives a continuity to the pleasure which I had yesterday. Then my question is: how am I going to prevent the continuity of fear, but yet let pleasure continue? I want pleasure, want it as much as possible, all the time in the fu ture; and also I have had fears, I want to get rid of them and I don't want future fears. So thought is working in both directions. Sir, this is your job, not mine, look at it! Questioner: This gives thought a kind of energy. Krishnamurti: Thought is energy. Questioner: This gives thought a different kind of energy. Krishnamurti: Go into it, it is both. Questioner: It is accumulating memories. Krishnamurti: The memories that have been pleasurable I hold on to, and the memories that have been painful - which are fear - I want to throw out. But I don't see the root of all this is thought. Questioner (1): Thought seems to resist its termination - fear and pleasure seem to be somewhat similar - but that state where thought doesn't exist eludes me. Questioner (2): Do what you are doing so totally, that you think about the thing that is giving you pleasure while it is happening, and don't think about the things which may not happen. Krishnamurti: Don't say: not to think about those things which might not happen. How am I to prevent myself from thinking about them? Questioner: Think about what is happening, rejoice! Krishnamurti: So I force myself to think about things that are happening and not about things that don't happen? Questioner: Think about what is happening. Krishnamurti:But my mind is always watching what might happen. Doesn't this happen to you? Let's be quite simple and honest. We want to think about the things that are happening but thought also keeps an eye on what might happen. And when I am not thinking about this, that pops up! Questioner: Sir, the feeling "I am" has nothing to do with pleasure and nothing to do withfear and thought. I think only "I am". I don't havefear. Thisfeeling "I am" has nothing at all to do with thought. Krishnamurti: When you say "I am" - what do you mean by those words? Questioner: Thefeeling to be present, to be sitting here, and there is no fear in it. Krishnamurti: That is not the problem, Sir. Questioner: First of all we must find out if certainty exists, then there won't be fear. Krishnamurti: How shall I find out? Questioner: I see the whole process of thought as a trap. Krishnamurti: Go into it; each person pursues something else. Let me state what I feel the problem is. I am frightened of tomorrow because tomorrow is uncertain. So far I have been fairly certain in my life; though there have been occasions on which I have been frightened, somehow I have got over them. But the sense of fear of tomorrow, which is so uncertain - atomic war, the casual wars that might explode into all kinds of horrors, losing money - I am in a state of convulsion about the future. Now what am I to do? I want to be free, if I can, of the fear both of the past and the future, of the fears deep down and the superficial fears. Don't give me explanations, "Do this", "Don't do that." I want to find out what fear is; whether it is fear of darkness, of uncertainty, whether it is the fear of attachment, holding on to something, or to some person or idea. I want to find out what is the root ofit, how to escape from it, not how to smother it. I want to see the structure of fear. If I can understand that, then something else can take place. So I am going to investigate what fear is. Let me go on a little while, may I? Fear exists for me because I am thinking about tomorrow; despite your assurance that tomorrow is perfectly all right, I still feel fear. Now why am I thinking about tomorrow? Is it because the past has been so good, has given me a great deal of knowledge and this has become my security, and I have no knowledge about the future? If I could understand the future and reduce that to my knowledge, then I would not be frightened. Can I understand the future as knowledge, as experience, so that it becomes part of my knowledge, of which I shan't be frightened? I see also, that I want a great deal of pleasure, sexual pleasure, the pleasure of achieving, fulfilling, of being somebody. I want those pleasures, which I have had, repeated. And when I get bored with them I want wider, deeper pleasures. My principle drive is pleasure - in every direction. So I want to avoid fear and I want more pleasure. This is what we all xxs pleasure separate from fear? Or are they the two sides of the same coin? I must find out, not say "Yes" or "No", I must put my teeth into it and find out whether pleasure does breed fear and whether fear is the result of my demand for pleasure. You have understood my question? Questioner: But pleasure could be something else, a learning process. Krishnamurti: No, that pleasure is also painful; but I will overcome that in order to have more pleasure. Haven't you noticed this in your life, how we want pleasure? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: That's all I am talking of. We are demanding, pursuing, pleasure; everything is based on this. And when that is not fulfilled, I become uncertain. So I am asking myself whether pleasure and fear don't go together. I never question pleasure, I never say, "Should I have so much pleasure?" "Where does it lead?" but I want more of it, in heaven, on earth, in my family, in sex - it is driving me in everything. And fear is there also. Look at it please, don't slick to your particular opinion, for God's sake move from it! Find out! So follow this: I want certainty of tomorrow, and certainty can only exist where there is knowledge, when I say,"I know". Can I know anything except the past? The moment I say "I know" it is already the past. When I say "I know my wife", I know her in terms of the past. In the past there is certainty and in the future there is uncertainty. So I want to draw the future into the past so that I will be completely safe. I see fear arises where thought is operating; if I did not think about tomorrow there would be no fear. Questioner: Fear seems to me to be something instinctive. Ifeel that fear is an energy, that someforce is there. Krishnamurti: You see, each of us has an opinion. Each of us is quite sure we know how to deal with fear. We explain it, we give causes, we think we understand it, and yet at the end of it we are frightened. I want to go behind all that and find out why fear exists at all. Is it the result of thought thinking about the future? Because the future is very uncertain and thought is based on the memory of the past. Thought is the response of memory, accumulated as knowledge, as centuries of experience, and out of that comes thought. Thought says, "Knowledge is my security". And now you are telling me to be free of tomorrow, which is uncertain; if I know what tomorrow is, there will be no fear. What I am craving for is certainty of knowledge. I know my past, I know what I did ten years or two days ago. I can analyse it, understand it, live with it; but I don't know tomorrow and therefore not knowing it makes me afraid. Not knowing means: not having knowledge of. Now can thought have knowledge about something which it does not know? So there is fear. Thought trying to find out the future, and not knowing what its content is, it is afraid. Why is thought thinking of tomorrow, about which it knows nothing? It wants certainty, but there may be no certainty. Please answer my question, not your question. Questioner: The living system needs to think about tomorrow, this is a fundamental rule of life: it needs some sort of prediction. Krishnamurti: I said that, Sir. Questioner: We must follow this rule of life. There are psychological disturbances due to imagination which project awful fears, as you say, but it is impossible to prevent human beingsfrom thinking in a logical fashion. Krishnamurti: If I may say so, we did say thought is necessary to protect physical survival. That is part of our life, that is what we are doing all the time. Questioner: I don't agree, I think thought is not necessaryfor survival. Animals have the instinctfor survival without thefear which is our trouble. Krishnamurti: Madam, we are mixing up two things. Please, we tried to explain this at the beginning. Questioner: She's right; human thought replaces instinct. Krishnamurti: I agree with you. One must know that tomorrow the house will be there. Physical sumival and planning for the future are essential, aren't they? Without that we can't survive. Questioner (1): Whenyou see it all so clearly, fear has no time. Questioner (2): Thought thinks of living in the present, and must also think of tomorrow. Krishnamurti: The weather is hot, I must plan to buy some trousers that will be cool. That means planning for tomorrow. I have to go to India in the winter. I shall plan, which is the future. We are not denying that, on the contrary. What we are talking about is the fear of uncertainty. Questioner: We have no confidence in ourselves. Krishnamurti: That I really don't understand. Who is "yourself" for you to have confidence in? Are you such a marvellous human being to have confidence in yourself? Questioner: Why not? Krishnamurti: What is yourself? Questioner: Humanity. Krishnamurti: What is humanity? The good and the bad, the wars - we have been through all that. We are concerned with fear. We must use thought to survive. But to survive, thought has divided the world as my country, your country, my government, your government, my God, your God, my guru and your guru: thought has created this. Though it wants to plan to survive, thought has divided the world which destroys itself, of which I am part. So I have to understand the nature of thought, where it is necessary, and where it is diabolical, where it is destructive and where it creates fear - that is my problem. I said thought must function, otherwise you can't survive; but in the desire to survive it has divided and is therefore destructive. I see thought must function clearly, objectively, without any distortion. So my question is: why does thought think about tomorrow? It has to think about tomorrow in one direction, but why does thought think about the future and breed fear? Questioner: To be safe. Krishnamurti: You see, thought must think about tomorrow in order to be safe, that is clear. And also you see that thought, thinking about tomorrow, creates fear. Now why? Questioner (1): Because we want to continue. Questioner (1): Because we are tied to pleasure. Krishnamurti: We haven't solved this problem because we refuse to leave our particular little opinions, judgments and conclusions. Let's abolish them and think anew. For me it is very simple. Thought must create fear because thought cannot ever find security in the future. Thought has security in time; tomorrow has no time. Tomorrow exists in the mind as time, but tomorrow may not exist at all, psychologically. And because of that uncertainty, thought projects what it wants for tomorrow: safety, what I have acquired, what I have achieved, what I possess, all that. And that too is completely uncertain. So can thought be quiet about the future? That's my point. Can thought be quiet, which means: function where it is necessary for physical protection; and therefore no divisions into nationalities, no separate Gods, no warmongers. Let thought be quiet so that time as tomorrow does not exist. Therefore I have to understand what it is to live now. I don't understand what it is to live now, nor have I understood what it is to live in the past, therefore I want to live in the future, which I don't know, as I don't know what the present is. So I am asking, can I live completely, wholly, today? I can only do that when I have understood the whole machinery and the functioning of thought, and in the very understanding of the reality of thought there is silence. And where the mind is quiet there is no future, no time. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VIII CHAPTER 4 5TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 8TH AUGUST 1971 'FEAR, TIME AND THE IMAGE' Questioner (1): You have covered enough ground, couldn't we consolidate? I am not quite sure in myself about the relation between thought and fear; could we discuss this some more? Questioner (2): When thought meets the unknown, it doesn't know what to do. Now if you have thought without time, if there is no time, then there is no fear. Krishnamurti: Would you like to talk about that? Audience: Yes. Krishnamurti: What is time? I had to be here this morning in spite of the bad weather at half past ten and I was. If I did not come on time, I would keep you all waiting. There is time by the watch -yesterday, today and tomorrow. There is time to cover a certain distance - between here and the moon, to go from here to Montreux, and so on. There is also time to cover the distance between the image of myself - or the image I have projected of myself - and what "I should be", and the distance between what "I am" and what "I should like to be", between fear and the ending of fear. We must understand this. Questioner: Can you give practical examples as you go along? Krishnamurti: I am not good at giving practical examples. What I am saying is fairly simple. I am not a philosopher, I don't spin theories. So there is time as yesterday, today and tomorrow; and there is time - at least we think there is time - between what I am and what I should be, between the fact of fear and the eventual ending of fear. Both are time, aren't they? - chronological time, and time as invented by thought. "I am this" and "I should change to that" and to cover that distance between what I am and what I should be I need time. That also is time. It will take me many days, or many weeks, to do certain exercises properly, to loosen up my muscles -to do that I need time; I shall take perhaps three days, or a week: that's time. So when we talk about time, let us be clear what we are talking about. There is chronological time, as yesterday, today and tomorrow; and there is the time which we think is necessary to achieve an ending to fear. Time is part of fear, isn't it? I am afraid of the future - not of what might happen in the future but of the idea of the future, the idea of tomorrow. So there is psychological time and chronological time. We are not talking about chronological time, time by the watch. What we are talking about is, "I am all right now, but I am afraid of the fu ture, of tomorrow." Let's call that psychological time. Now I am asking, is there such a thing as psychological time at all, or is it merely an invention of thought? "I shall meet you tomorrow, under a tree, near the bridge" - that is chronological time. "I am afr aid of tomorrow and I don't know how to meet that fear of tomorrow" - that is psychological time, isn't it? Questioner: How about if I say, " Why must this beautiful thing come to an end?" Krishnamurti: That is also psychological time, isn't it? I feel a particular relationship to something beautiful and I don't want it to end. There is the idea that it might come to an end and I won't like it to end, and I am afraid of it. So that's one part of the structure of fear. The other is, I have known security, certainty, and tomorrow is uncertain and I am afraid of that - that is psychological time, isn't it? I have lived a life of quasi-security, but tomorrow is dreadfully uncertain and I am frightened of it. Then arises my problem: how am I not to be afraid? All that is involved, surely, is it not, in psychological time? The knowledge of yesterday, of many thousand yesterdays, has given to the brain a certain sense of security, knowledge being experience, remembrance, memories. In the past there has been security for the brain; tomorrow there may be no security at all, I might be killed. Knowledge as time gives to the brain a sense of security. So knowledge is of time. But I have no knowledge of tomorrow, therefore I am afr aid. If I had knowledge of tomorrow I would not be afr aid. So knowledge breeds fear, and yet I must have knowledge. You are following? I must have knowledge to go from here to the station, I must have knowledge to speak English, or French, or whatever it is; I must have knowledge to carry out any kind of function. I have accumulated knowledge about myself as the experiencer, and yet that experiencer is frightened of tomorrow because he does not know tomorrow. Questioner: What about repetition? Krishnamurti: It is the same thing, it is mechanical. After all, knowledge is repetitive. I add to it or take away from it, but it's a machinery of accumulation. Questioner: What about the people who have terrible tragedies, who have seen people slaughtered and tortured? Krishnamurti: What has that got to do with what we are talking about? Questioner: Well, you see, they remain with that fear. Krishnamurti: We are talking about the relationship between thought and fear. Questioner: But even so, people have been telling me how their fear remains in them and they can't get rid of it because for them man is a beast. Krishnamurti: It is the same problem, surely. That is, I have been hurt, by a snake or by a human being. That hurt has left a deep mark on my brain and I am afraid of snakes or of human beings - which is the past. Also I am afraid of tomorrow. It is the same problem, isn't it? - only one is in the past, the other is in the future. Questioner: It's only difficult when you say, "Knowledge ofyesterday has given security." Some people find the knowledge ofyesterday has given them insecurity. Krishnamurti: Knowledge gives security and it also gives insecurity, doesn't it? I have been hurt by human beings in the past - that's knowledge. That remains deeply rooted and I loathe human beings, I am frightened of them. Questioner: One isn't speaking of psychological knowledge but of physical torture. Krishnamurti: Yes, physical torture which is again in the past. Questioner: But you know that in the present people go on doing it. Krishnamurti: You are mixing up two facts. We are talking about fear and its relationship to thought. There are physical tortures going on in the world, people are extraordinarily brutal and I like to think about it and get terribly excjted. I feel morally righteous about it and I can't do anything, can I? Sitting in this tent I can't do anything about what is happening in another place. But I like to get neurotically excited about it, and to say, "It's terrible what human beings are doing." No? What can I actually do? Join a group that is going to stop this torture of human beings? Make a demonstration in front of somebody? - and yet the torture will go on. What I am concerned with is how to change the human mind so that it will not torture human beings physically or psychologically in any way. But if I am neurotic I like to keep on thinking, "How terrible this world is." Now let's come back. I am afraid of what human beings have done to me, or to another human being, and that knowledge is a scar in the brain. That is, knowledge of the past not only gives certainty but also uncertainty, that I may be hurt tomorrow, therefore I am afraid. Now why does the brain retain the memory of that hurt of yesterday? In order to protect itself from future hurts? Let's think it out. That means, I am always facing the world with that hurt and therefore I have no relationship with another human bring, because the hurt is so deep. And I resist every human relationship because I might get hurt again. Therefore there is fear. Knowledge of the past hurt brings fear of fu ture hurt. So knowledge brings fear - yet I must have knowledge. Knowledge has been accumulated through time. Scientific, -- Page -- technological knowledge, knowledge of a language and so on need time. Knowledge, which is the product of time, must exist, otherwise I can't do anything, I can't communicate with you. But also I see that knowledge of a past hurt says, "Be careful not to be hurt in the future." So I am afraid of the future. So how am I, who have been scarred very deeply, how am I to be free of that and not project that knowledge into the future, saying, "I am afraid of the future." There are two problems involved, aren't there? There is the scar of pain, Can the mind be free of that scar? Now let's examine that. I am sure most of us have some kind of psychological scars. Haven't you? - of course. We are not talking about the physical scars which affect the brain - we can leave that aside for the moment. There are the psychological scars of hurt. How is the mind, the brain, to be fr ee of them? Must it be free of them? Is not the memory of being hurt a protection against the future? Verbally, in many ways you have hurt me; there is a memory of it. If I forget that, I come innocently to you next morning and you hurt me again. So what am I to do? Think it out, Sirs, go on. Questioner: Isn't it important for me to find out why I am psychologically capable of being hurt? Krishnamurti: It is fairly simple. We are very sensitive, there are a dozen reasons. I have an image about myself and I don't want you to hurt that image. I think I am a great man, you come along and put a pin into it and it hurts me. Or I feel terribly inferior and I meet you, who feel extraordinarily superior, and I get hurt. You are clever, I am not - I get hurt. You are beautiful, I am not. The knowledge of being hurt, not only physically but psychologically, inwardly, has left a mark on the brain as memory. Memory is knowledge. Why should I be free of that knowledge? If I am free, you are going to hurt me again. Therefore that knowledge acts as a resistance, as a wall. And what happens in relationship between human beings when there is this wall between you and me? Questioner: We can't meet. Krishnamurti: Exactly. So what do we do? Go on Sir, pursue it! Questioner: Take away the wall. Krishnamurti: But you are going to hurt me. Questioner: It's only the image that is hurt. Krishnamurti: No, Sir. Look, I come to you quite innocently. The root meaning of that word "innocent" is that you cannot be hurt. So I come to you open, friendly, and you say something to me which hurts me. Doesn't this happen to all of you? And what takes place? That leaves a mark - that's knowledge. What is wrong with that knowledge? That knowledge acts as a wall between you and me. Of course! Therefore what shall I do? Questioner: You've got to break through. Krishnamurti: First look at it, don't say, "Break through" - just look at it. You've hurt me and the knowledge of that remains. If I have no knowledge of it, you will hurt me again; and if I have that knowledge strengthened, it acts as a wall between you and me. Therefore between you and me there is no relationship. So knowledge of the past prevents a relationship between you and me. What shall I do? Questioner: Examine it. Krishnamurti: I have examined it, I have taken ten minutes in the examination of it and I see that examination, that analysis is totally useless. Questioner: Is this where time comes in? Krishnamurti: I have taken ten minutes - analysis implied ten minutes - and that ten minutes is a waste. Questioner: If there were no time... Krishnamurti: I have used time. Don't say there is no time. Questioner: But if there were no time. Krishnamurti: I don't know, that's a supposition. I have ten minutes to see why I am hurt, to examine the hurt, to see the necessity of keeping that hurt as knowledge. I have asked myself: if I remove that hurt, won't you hurt me again? And I see, as long as that hurt remains, there is no relationship between you and me. All that has taken more than a quarter of an hour. And I see I have achieved nothing at the end of it. So I have found analysis has no value at all. What shall I do, having been hurt and remembering that hurt prevents all relationship? Questioner: We have to accept being hurt. Krishnamurti: No, I'm neither accepting nor rejecting, I'm looking. I don't accept or reject anything. My question then is, "Why am I hurt?" What is this thing that is being hurt? Questioner: The knowledge of being afool in fact. Krishnamurti: Sir, say something that's actual, don't imagine and then verbalize. First find out what it is that is being hurt. When I say I am hurt because you call me a fool, what is it that is being hurt? Questioner: Your pride. The knowledge of being a fool is there. Krishnamurti: No, Madam, it is not only that, please look at it, it is much deeper than that. I am hurt because you called me a fool. Why should I be hurt? Questioner: Because of the image I have of myself. Krishnamurti: Which means I have an image of myself as not being a fool. And when you call me a fool, or a blackguard, or a whatever it is, I get hurt because of my image. Why do I have an image about myself? As long as I have an image about myself I'm going to be hurt. Questioner: Why do I have to care about the image that the other has of me, whatever that be? Krishnamurti: The other has an image of me as a fool, or he has the image of me as a great intellect - it's the same thing, you follow? Now why do I have an image about myself? Questioner: Because I don't like what I am. Krishnamurti: No, first why do you have it? Because you don't like yourself as you are? What are you? Have you looked at yourself without an image? Let's be simple. I have an image about you as being very clever, bright, intelligent, awake, enlightened - a tremendous image. And comparing myself with you I am dull. Measuring myself against you I find I am inferior - obviously. That makes me feel I am very dull, very stupid, and from that feeling of inferiority, of stupidity, I have many other problems. Now why do I compare myself with you at all? Is it that we have been brought up from childhood to compare? In schools we compare, through the giving of marks, through examinations. The mother says, "Be as bright as your elder brother." There is this terrible comparison going on all the time throughout life. And if I don't compare, where am I? Am I dull? I don't know. I have called myself dull in comparing myself with you, who are not dull, but if I don't compare, what happens? Questioner: I become myself. Krishnamurti: What is yourself"? Just see the cycle we go through, repeating these things over and over again without understanding them. So I come back to this: why do I have to have an image about myself - good, bad, noble, ignoble, ugly or dull. Why do I have an image about anything? Questioner: It's a means of conscious acting. A man who is conscious and aware must automatically become involved in comparison. Krishnamurti: Sir, I am asking: why do I compare? Comparison implies not only conflict but imitation, doesn't it? Questioner: But surely it is necessary to evaluate. Krishnamurti: Watch it please - comparison implies conflict and imitation, doesn't it? That's one side of it. In comparing myself with you I feel I am dull, therefore I must struggle to be as clever as you are. There is conflict and I then imitate what you are. That's implied in comparison: conflict and imitation. But also I see I must compare between this cloth and that cloth, this house and that house, measure whether you are tall or short, measure the distance between here and another place. You follow? But why do I have an image about myself? Because if I have an image about myself it's going to be hurt. Questioner: Perhaps this image doesn't exist at all. Krishnamurti: That's right, go on, investigate it. Why do I have an image about myself as something or nothing? Questioner: I want to be secure, that depends on how secure the image is. Krishnamurti: You are saying that you are seeking security in an image. Is that it? That image has been put toget thought. So you find security in the image which thought has built, and in that image thought is seeking security. Thought has created an image because it wants security in that image, so thought is seeking security in itself. Which is: thought is seeking security in the image which it has built, and that image is the product of thought; thought is memory, which is the past. So thought has built this image about itself? No? Questioner: Sir, may I ask what to do with education? Because even parents start to compare their own children and say, "This child is cleverer." Krishnamurti: I know. Parents are the most dangerous human beings! (Laughter) They destroy their children, because they are uneducated. So the image is built by thought and thought is seeking security; so thought has invented an image in which it finds security, but it is still thought and thought is the response of memory, of yesterday. What has happened? Knowledge of yesterday has created this image. How am I not to be hurt? Not being hurt implies not having any kind of image - obviously. Now, how am I to prevent images? - images of the future, of which I am going to be frightened. Thought is time, thought is fear of the image of tomorrow in which there is no certainty. How is the mind, or the brain, not to have images at all and yet not be hurt? The moment it is hurt, it ixx to have an image. And being hurt, it protects itself with another image. So my question is: apart from the physical aspect, where it has to protect itself against danger, polluted air, wars, etc., where protection is necessary - can the brain not be hurt at all? Which means, not to have any kind of image. Not to be hurt implies having no resistance. Having no resistance means having no image. Not to be hurt means vitality, energy, and that energy is dissipated when I have images. That energy is dissipated when I compare myself with you, compare my image with your image. That energy is dissipated in conflict, in trying to become your image, which I have projected for myself. That energy is wasted when I am imitating the image which I have projected about you. So the dissipation of energy is this factor. And when I am energetic, which can only take place when there is attention, I am not hurt. I don't know whether you are following all this? Let's understand it differently. One observes that one is hurt. One is hurt because basically one has an image about oneself. That image has been built through the various forms of culture, education, civilization, tradition, nationality, economic conditions and social injustice. That image is the past and therefore knowledge. Thought -whether it is my thought or the collective thought - has imprinted on the brain this sense of comparing an image with another image. The mother, the schoolteacher, the politician does it, as well as the mythology of the Christians; the whole civilization is based on building this image. And there it is, in the brain, which is thought. Now one discovers, one understands, that as long as one has an image, there must be hurt. Questioner: The image is the hurt, isn't it? Krishnamurti: So can the brain be free of all images and therefore never be hurt? That means to be fr ee of the knowledge of the past as image. Knowledge of the past is essential to speak a language; but as long as there is knowledge as an image, put together by thought, which is the "me" - which is the greatest image - and as long as I have the greatest image in "me", you have a perfect right to put pins into it. And you do! So can the brain never be hurt? Sirs, to find this out for yourselves and live a life in which the brain is never hurt! Then only can you have relationship. But if in the relationship you are hurting me and I am hurting you, it comes to an end. And if in that relationship between you and me there is hurt and that relationship comes to an end, then I go to find another relationship - divorce you and join somebody else. And again there is going to be hurt. We think by changing a relationship we are going to be completely invulnerable. But all the time we are being hurt. Questioner: If the images are gone, between what is the relationship? Relationship means a relevant word, and if the images are gone, what is the relationship between man and wife? Krishnamurti: Why are you asking me? Find out if your image has gone, not because you want to ask me a question which I should answer. Find out if the images, which you have, have gone; then you will find out what your relationship is with another. But if I say, "It is love", it is just a theory. Throw it out, that has no meaning. But if you said: "I know I am hurt, all my life I have been hurt." Don't you know this? - a series of inward tears, a series of anxieties. These images exist! Our question is: can the brain nevcr be hurt at all? And that you have to apply yourself to, not just talk about it. Go after it, say, "Have I got an image?" Obviously you have, otherwise you and I wouldn't be sitting here. And if you have an image, examine it, go into it and see the futility of analysis, because that prevents you from action. Whereas if you say now,"I move with the image", to move with the image means xxe thought that is building this; and thought is knowledge. So can the brain be full of knowledge in one direction and have no knowledge in the other? That mcans complete silence. You understand, Sir? To be completely silent, and out of that silence to use knowledge. You won't see this. Questioner: What place is there for established relationship? Is there such a thing? Krishnamurti: Go to the Registrar and get married. That establishes legally a relationship, and what goes on, my God! And what goes on also not legally! So it's your torture. To come back, what is the relationship of thought to fear? We said, thought springs from knowledge of the past, knowledge is the past. In that knowledge thought has found security: I know my house, I know you, I am this, I am conditioned or not conditioned. I have asserted what I am in knowledge. But tomorrow I don't know, I am afraid of tomorrow. And also I am afraid of the knowledge which I have of the past, because I see there is also tremendous insecurity. If I live in the past, as most of us do, I am already dead and that feeling of living in the past is suffocating, and I don't know how to get rid of it and I am fr ightened of that, as I am frightened of tomorrow. So I am frightened of living and I am frightened of dying. What am I to do with the fears I have? Or is there only one fear. Apart from the physical fears and psychosomatic fears, is there only one fear, taking different forms? Questioner: Is it thefear of nothingness, of the void? Krishnamurti: Is it the fear of not being? The fear of not having any image: the being is the image, isn't it? Let's apply our minds and see actually whether the mind can be free of fear, both of the physical fears and the psychological fears which are much deeper, more neurotic. Let's apply ourselves, put our teeth into it, because one sees that when there is fear of any kind it is the most appalling thing. One lives in darkness, in a sense of void, disassociated, having no relationship, everything becomes ugly. Haven't you fear? - not only of the past, but also of the future; not only the fears of which one is conscious, but deep down. Now when you look at this whole phenomenon of fear, at the various forms of fear, physical and psychological, with all their divisions, in all their varieties, when you see the whole structure of fear, what is the root of it all? Unless I discover the root of it, I shall go on manipulating the parts, modifying the parts. So I must find the root of it. What do you think is the root of all fears? - not just of one particular form of fear. Please don't answer me. Be sure for yourself, what is the root of it, discover it, unfold it, look at it. Questioner: Sir, I would like to say that as an exercise we should hurt each other. I would like to hurt you, andyou should hurt these people; because of the conditions here - Ifeel the whole atmosphere is polite - you don't want to hurt these people. Krishnamurti: The gentleman says, this atmosphere is polite, a bore. r don't want to hurt you and you don't want to hurt me; therefore it's a form of politeness and it doesn't amount to anything. Is that so? I don't mind your hurting me. Questioner (1): I think relationship is not just sitting here and listening ! to you. I think if I hurt you, there would be a relationship between you and me, because then I have destrayed part of the image. Questioner (2): That's nonsense! Is it possible for you to continue, as we have so little time? Krishnamurti: You see, Sir, it's not a reaction, he is telling you something, he says, look: we have been through all this. We have examined the images - you having one, I having one, you hurting and I hurting, we've been through all that; it's not politeness. Questioner: But you described images and we did not look into the images. Krishnamurti: You were supposed to. How do you know? Questioner: Maybe the others did. Krishnamurti: How do you know? You see, how do I know that you have not washed away your images? It's my conceit which says you have not. Who am I to tell you whether you have, or not. It's up to you. So let's go back. I want to find out about fear - not the parts of the various fears -but I really want to find out the root of it. Is it "not being"? - which is the "becoming", you follow? That is, "I am becoming something", "I want to be something". I have been hurt and I want to be free of hurts. All our life is this process of "becoming". Aggression is part of this becoming. And the "not becoming" is an immense fear; "not being" is a fear, isn't it? Is that the root of it? Questioner: Sir, I try to find out the root offear. I see I can't think about the fear, so the mind becomes silent so that I can justfeel that fear; and then all Ifeel is a deep, inner tension; but I can't get beyond that point. Krishnamurti: But why is one tense about it? I just want to find out. Why should I have any tension about it? Because if there is tension I want to go beyond it, I am so eager, so greedy! Sir, just look. We think, don't we, each one of us, in terms of becoming -becoming enlightened, breaking down the images: "You don't listen to my image", "I don't listen to your image" - you follow? This whole process is a form of "becoming" or "being". When the "being" is threatened - which is "not becoming" - there is fear. Right? What is there to become? I can understand that I can become healthier, I can grow my hair longer, but psychologically, what is there to become? What is becoming? Changing images? Changing one image for another image? - obviously. But if I have no image at all and I see the reason for not having one logically, I also see the truth, that images prevent relationship, whether it is the hurt image, or a pleasant image - it is both, obviously. If I have a pleasant image about you, you are my friend, if I have an unpleasant image about you, you are my enemy. So not to have images at all! Work this out, apply it, not just accept it, but actually apply it. Enquire and apply and live it. Then one finds - if you do apply, do work at it - there is a mind, there is a brain, that can never be hurt, because there is nothing to be hurt. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART VIII CHAPTER 5 7TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE SAANEN 10TH AUGUST 1971 'INTELLIGENCE AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE' Questioner (1): Can we discuss the observer and the observed and their relation to awareness? Questioner (2): May we discuss what it really means to lead a religious life? Questioner (3): Could we talk about intelligence and meditation? Krishnamurti; Now what is a religious life? In talking that over, we shall come upon this question of the observer and the observed, intelligence and meditation and the rest of it. I don't know if it interests you at all to find out what religion means. Not the accepted meaning of that word, the belief in some saviour, in some form of God, in some ritual and so on, which is all propaganda and for me has no value whatsoever - that is not a religious life. Are you quite sure we all see that fact? You may not belong to any sect or group, or any community that believes - or doesn't believe - in God. That belief - or unbelief - in God is another form of fear: the mind wanting some kind of security, certainty; because our life is so uncertain, so confused, so meaningless, we want something to believe in. So can we also put aside the hope that something outside, a superior agency, exists? To enquire, all that must obviously be put aside. Thought can imagine anything - gods or no gods, angels or no angels - it can produce every form of neurotic perception, idea and conclusion. Knowing that intelligently, man then says: how can thought be quiet, so that the mind is free to enquire? Thought is capable of inventing, or imagining every form of conclusion, of projecting an image in which the human mind finds security; that security, that image, becomes an illusion - the Saviour, the Brahma, the Atman, the experiences you have through various forms of discipline and so on. So the problem is: can thought become completely still? Some say you can make it still only through a system which a teacher has invented through discipline and control. Can a system, discipline, conformity, make the mind really quiet? Or doesn't following a system, practising day after day, make the mind mechanical? - and being mechanical, then you can control it like any other machine. But the brain is not quiet, it has been shaped and conditioned by the system which it has practised. Such a brain, being mechanical, can be controlled and thinks such control is quietness, stillness. Obviously it is not. Please don't just accept what the speaker is saying. But do we all see the necessity of having a completely quiet mind? For when the mind is quiet it can see and hear much more, see things as they are - not invent, not imagine. So can the mind become completely still without coercion, without compulsion, without discipline? - discipline being will, resistance, suppression, conformity, fitting into a pre-established pattern. If you do that, you are forcing the mind through conflict to conform to the pattern established by the system. So discipline in the ordinary sense of the word is out. The word discipline means to learn; not to conform, not to suppress,not to control, but to learn. Can the whole structure of the brain and the mind be completely quiet without any form of distortion by will, by desire, by thought? That is the problem and knowing it, people have said, "It is not possible." Therefore they went in the other direction, used control, and discipline, did all kinds of tricks. In Zen meditation they sit, paying attention, watching and if they go to sleep they are struck to keep awake. This kind of tremendous discipline is mechanical and therefore controllable; it is done in the hope of achieving an experience which will be true. In his search for some super-transcendental experience man has said: the mind must be absolutely quiet to receive something which it has never experienced before; he has never tasted the smell, the quality of it, therefore the mind must be still. And they have said there is only one way of making the mind still: to force it. When there is the operation of will in bringing about a quiet mind, there is distortion. A mind which is distorted cannot possibly see "what is". Are we doing this? - that is, not exercising will, not forcing the mind to be mechanical through any form of discipline or system, in which are included all the tricks of Yoga - which is totally wrong. Those people who teach physical exercises make it into a perfect racket. So seeing all that, can the mind become completely still - the mind and the brain, because it is very important that the brain be completely quiet. The brain, which is the result of time, with all its knowledge, experience and so on, is always active to every stimulus, responding to every impression, to every influence, and can that brain also be quiet? Questioner: Why should it be quiet? It has a lot of different functions. Krishnamurti: It must be active within the field of knowledge, because that is its function. If I did not know that a cobra was a most poisonous snake I would play with it and get killed. The knowledge that it is poisonous is self-protection, therefore knowledge must exist - technologically, in every way. That knowledge has been acquired, but we are not interfering with it, we don't say, "You must not have knowledge", on the contrary, you must have knowledge of the world, of the facts. But that knowledge has to be used impersonally. So the brain has to be quiet; if it makes any movement, its movement will be in the direction of security, because it can only function in security, whether that security be neurotic, rational, or irrational. The brain has to have that quality of sensitivity so that it can function in knowledge, fully, completely, efficiently, sanely, healthily, and not from the point of view of "My country", "For my people", "For my family", "For me". But also there must be that quality of sensitivity which makes the brain completely quiet - that is the problem. I have explained, described the problem, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact. The fact is whether you, listening to this, have put aside every form of organized belief, every form of wanting more and more experience. Because if you are desirous of wanting more experience, then the desire is in operation, which is will. So the fact is, if you are interested in pursuing a religious life, you have to do this, which means leading a really serious life - no drugs, all that is out. And also there must be no seeking or demanding experience. Because when you are seeking experience -transcendental, or whatever you like to call it - you are seeking because you are bored with the daily experiences of life and you want to have an experience which is beyond this. And when you are experiencing what one calls a transcendental, or a different level of experience, in that there is the experiencer and the experienced; there is the observer who is experiencing and the observed which is the experience. So there is division, there is conflict: you want more and more experience. That also must be completely set aside, because when you are enquiring, experience has no place. One sees clearly that it is absolutely necessary that the brain, the mind, the whole system, the organism, must be quiet. As you can see, if you want to listen to something like music, your body, your mind is still - you are listening. And if you are listening to somebody who is talking, your body becomes quiet. When you want to understand something, the mind, the brain, the body, the whole organism, become quiet naturally. Look how you are all sitting quietly! You are not forcing yourself to sit quietly, because you are interested to find out. That very interest is the flame that makes the mind, the brain, the body, quiet. Now what relationship has meditation to a quiet mind? The word meditation means to measure: that is the root meaning of it. Thought alone can measure, thought is measurement. Please, this is important to understand. One really should not use the word "meditation" at all. Thought is based on measure, and the cultivation of thought is the action of measurement -technologically and in life. Without measurement there could be no modern civilization. To go to the moon you must have the infinite capacity to measure. Although measurement is essential, is obviously necessary, how can thought - which is measurable, which is measure - not enter? Let us put it round the other way. When there is this absolute quietness of the mind, of the whole organism, including the brain, measurement as thought ceases. Then one can enquire if there is such a thing as the immeasurable. The measurable is thought, and as long as thought is functioning the immeasurable cannot be understood. Therefore it has been said: control, beat down thought. And the whole Asiatic world went into the immeasurable, neglecting the measurable. You are following this? Still using the word "meditation", what relationship has that to a very still mind? Can thought be really quiet, which means for the body, the mind and the heart to be in complete harmony? - yet seeing the truth that thought is measurable and that all the knowledge which thought has produced is essential. And also seeing the truth that thought, which is measurable, can never understand the immeasurable. So if one has gone as far as that, then what relationship has this quality of the immeasurable with daily life? Are you all asleep? Are you all being mesmerized by the speaker? We know thought is measure, we know all the mischief that thought has done in human life, the misery, the confusion, the division between people. "You believe and I don't believe," "Your God is not my God: thought has brought about havoc in the world. Thought is also knowledge, so thought is necessary. To see the truth of that, and that thought can never investigate the immeasurable, is to see that thought can never experience it as an experiencer and the experienced. So when thought is absolutely quiet, then there is a state, or a dimension, in which the immeasurable has its own movement. Now what relationship has that to daily life? Because if it has no relationship, then I shall live a life very carefully measuring my morality, my activity, according to the measurement of thought, but it will be very limited. So what is the relationship of the unknown to the known? What is the relationship between the measurable and that which is not measurable? There must be a liaison: and that is intelligence. Intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with thought. You may be very clever, very good at arguing, very learned. You may have experienced, lived a tremendous life, been all over the world, investigating, searching, looking, accumulating a great deal of knowledge, practised Zen or Hindu meditation. But all that has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence. Intelligence comes into being when the mind, the heart, and the body are really harmonious. Therefore - follow this, Sirs - the body must be highly sensitive. Not gross, not overindulging in eating, drinking, sex, and all the rest that makes the body coarse, dull, heavy. You have to understand all that. The very seeing the fact of that makes you eat less, gives the body its own intelligence. If there is an awareness of the body, which is not being forced, then the body becomes very, very sensitive, like a beautiful instrument. The same with the heart; that is, it is never hurt and can never hurt another. Not to hurt and not to be hurt, that is the innocency of the heart. A mind which has no fear, which demands no pleasure - not that you cannot enjoy the beauty of life, the beauty of trees, of a beautiful face, looking at children, at the flow of water, at the mountains and the green pastures - there is great delight in that. But that delight, when pursued by thought, becomes pleasure. The mind has to be empty to see clearly. So the relationship between the immeasurable, the unknown and the known, is this intelligence, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Buddhism, with Zen, with me or with you; it has absolutely nothing to do with authority or tradition. Have you got that intelligence? That is the only point that matters. That intelligence will operate in this world morally. Morality then is order, which is virtue. Not the virtue or the morality of society, which is totally immoral. So that intelligence brings about order, which is virtue, a thing that is living, that is not mechanical. Therefore you can never practise being good, you can never practise trying to become humble. When there is that intelligence, it naturally brings about order and the beauty of order. This is a religious life, not all the fooling around with it. Listening to the speaker have you understood this? - not verbally or intellectually, but actually seen the truth of this? If you see the truth of it, it will act. If you see the truth that a snake is dangerous, you act. If you see the danger of a precipice, the fact, the truth of it, you act. If you see the truth of arsenic, of poison, you act. So do you see this, or do you still live in the world of ideas? If you live in the world of ideas, of conclusions, then that's not truth, that's just a projection of thought. So that is the real question: listening to this, as you have for the last three weeks, in which we have talked about all the varieties of human existence, of suffering, pain and pleasure, of sex and immorality, social injustice, national divisions, wars, and all the rest - do you see the truth of this, and therefore is there that intelligence which operates? - not "me" operating. When you say, "I must be myself", which is the slogan or the cliche of the modern generation, when you examine these words, "I must be myself", what is myself? A lot of words, a lot of conclusions, traditions, reactions, memories, a bundle of the past; and yet you say, "I want to be myself", which is too childish. So having listened to all this, is there the awakening of that intelligence? And if there is that awakening of intelligence, then it will operate, then you don't have to say, "What am I to do?" Perhaps there have been a thousand persons here during these three weeks who have listened. If they really live that, do you know what is going to happen? We should change the world. We shall be the salt of the earth. Questioner: Do I understand correctly, that for thought to cease the mind has to see deeply the truth of the poison of seeking security. Is that what you said? Krishnamurti: Partly, Sir. Questioner:The difficulty seems to be, that this part doesn't see, so the mind doesn't see it, and in order for the mind to see something there has to be quiet - it seems like a vicious circle. The difficulty is that it has not seen it. Krishnamurti: No, Sir. First of all, why should a mind be quiet, why shouldn't it go on chattering? When the mind is chattering, you can't see anything very clearly, can you? You can't listen to anybody clearly. If you are looking at a mountain, seeing its beauty, your mind naturally has to be quiet; which means you have to give attention to that moment, to seeing. That's all. That is, if you listen to the fact that thought is measure, that thought has divided human beings, that thought has brought about wars - if you see the truth of it - not the explanation, the justification - you just see the fact of what thought has done. Obviously to see that fact your mind must be quiet. So it is not a vicious circle at all, Sir. Questioner: May I ask you a question? You often talk about the beauty of the mountains and the stillness of the mind when looking at the beauty of a cloud. Can the mind be still when looking at something horrible? Krishnamurti: Just listen carefully, observe the dark and the light, the slum and the non-slum. Can you watch that? Can there be an awareness in which these divisions don't exist? Is there an awareness in which the division between poverty and riches does not exist? Not the fact that there is not the division, with all its injustice, immorality, all that - but an awareness in which this division doesn't exist? That is, can the mind observe the beauty of the hill and the squalor, and not prefer, or incline to one, opposed to the other? That means an awareness in which choice doesn't exist. You can do this. Not that poverty should go on - you would do something, politically, socially and so on; but the mind could be freed from division, from this classical division between the rich and the poor, between beauty and ugliness, from the opposites and all the rest of it. Questioner: I should like to ask you, is there a difference for you between thought and speculation? Krishnamurti: Why should there be a difference between thought and speculation? Who is speculating - isn't thought speculating? Isn't thought theorizing that there is God, that there is no God, about how many angels can sit on a pinhead, and so on? It is the whole business ofthought to speculate - there is no difference, it is the same. Questioner: One can be aware objectively of a tree, of a Fountain, of a person. Can thought observe its own movement? Is there awareness of itself, and is one aware of being aware? Krishnamurti: Yes: is there an awareness of thought watching itself? Questioner: I don't like the word "watch". Krishnamurti: All right: an awareness of itself. Now wait a minute, just look. Have you understood the question? You can be aware of the tree, of the hill, of your sitting there; there is an awareness of that. Is there an awareness of being aware? You can be aware of the tree, the cloud, the colour of your shirt, and you can be aware objectively. You can also be aware of how your thought is operating. But is there an awareness of being aware? When you are aware of a tree, as an observer, is that awareness? The tree is there and you are aware of that tree. You then become the observer and that becomes the observed, and you say, "That's not it." In that there is a division, as the observer and the observed. It is the same with the cloud, the same with you sitting there, and the person speaking, sitting on a platform and observing. In that too there is a division. In this too there is the observer watching you, the observed; in that there is division. One can be aware of thought. I am going step by step. Being aware of thought, in that also there is a division; the one who is aware separating himself from thought. Now you are asking a question, which is: does awareness know, or is it aware of itself, without an observer? Of course not, the moment there is no observer, there is no awareness of being aware. Obviously, Sir, that's the whole point! The moment I am aware that I am aware, I'm not aware. Remain with it, Sir, for two minutes remain with it! The moment I am aware that I am humble, humility is not. The moment I am aware that I am happy, happiness is not. So if I am aware that I am aware, then that is not awareness; in that there is division between the observer and the observed. Now you are asking a question, which is: is there an awareness in which division as the observer and the observed comes to an end? Obviously awareness means that - awareness means that the observer is not. Questioner: Can one be aware of the tree without the observer, without that space? Krishnamurti: Look at it. When you look at a tree, there is space between you and the tree. Wait Sir, we are going step by step. When you look at that tree, there is a distance between you and the tree, there is the space, there is division. That division takes place when there is the observer who has an image of that tree as the oak, or the pine. So the knowledge, the image, separates the observer fr om the observed, from the tree. Please look at it. Can you look at that tree without the image? If you look at that tree without the image, without saying, "That is an oak", "That is beautiful or not beautiful", without like or dislike, then what takes place? What takes place when there is no observer, but only the observed? Go on, Sir, tell me what takes place - I'm not going to tell you! Questioner (1): There comes about union. Questioner (2): Oneness. Krishnamurti; Oneness means the same thing. Questioner: Awareness. Krishnamurti: No don't invent, don't speculate. Questioner: When I am aware of the tree I have a feeling... Krishnamurti: I'm coming to that, Sir. Please listen to it step by step. I said to you: when you look ordinarily at a tree, there is the division between you and the tree. You are the observer and the tree is the observed. That's a fact. You, with your image, with your prejudices, with your hopes and all the rest of it - that is the observer. Therefore as long as that exists as the observer, there must be division between you and the tree. When the observer is not, but only the object, what takes place? - don't imagine, do it! Questioner (1): There is stillness... thought does not work any more. Questioner (2): We become the tree. Krishnamurti: You become the tree - my God, I hope not! Become the elephant! (Laughter) Do please listen. Do it. Look at a tree and see if you can look at it without any image. That is fairly easy. But to look at yourself without an image, to look at yourself without the observer, that's much more difficult. Because what you see is unpleasant or pleasant, you want to change it, you want to control it, you want to shape it, you want to do something about it. So can you look at yourself without the observer, as you can if you look at the tree? Which means to look at yourself with complete attention. When there is complete attention there is no image. It is only when your mind is thinking, "I wish I had a better `me"', or "I am going to do so and so" - then when you are looking, there is inattention. Questioner: Am I wrong if I say that we are in a state of awareness all the time? It's thought that invents the division. Krishnamurti: Oh, no! That is another speculation of thought, that we are aware all the time. We are in a state of awareness only at moments, then we go off to sleep. The moments when we go off to sleep, the moments when we are inattentive, that is what is important, not when we are aware. Questioner: Are we aware of the infinite affection you express when you translate intelligence into human life? Krishnamurti: It's up to you, Sir! Questioner: When I am aware of my image, and my image goes, then isn't that awareness in itself? Krishnamurti: When I am aware of my image, does the image exist? It doesn't. Questioner: Then that is awareness in itself. Krishnamurti: That's right, awareness in itself without any choice. Sir, what is important in all this, is not what one has heard, but what one is learning. Learning is not accumulation of knowledge. When you go away from here, you will have various ideas about awareness, love, truth, fear and all the rest of it. Those very ideas are going to prevent learning. But if you are aware a little bit, then you are learning and then intelligence can operate through learning in daily life. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART IX CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 4TH SEPTEMBER 1971 THE RELATIONSHIP TO AWARENESS OF THOUGHT AND THE IMAGE I THINK IT would be worth while to talk over together the question of violence, which is becoming worse and spreading right through the world; this really a part of the whole human conditioning. Can man ever be free either of the superficial social conditioning of a particular culture, or of the much deeper conditioning, which is the whole collective sorrow, the violence, the destructive despairs and their activities of which most of us are unconscious? It is like a cloud which one has inherited, in which one lives. Apparently one finds it tremendously difficult to free oneself from it all. Wherever one goes, all over the world, one observes that the superficial cultures don't penetrate very deeply into human consciousness. But the great clouds of sorrow - I don't like to use the word "evil" - that destructive violence, the antagonisms and conflicts seem to be deeply rooted in all of us. Can one be utterly free of this? If that is essential, then how is one to set about it? Superficially we may be highly cultured, polite, slightly indifferent, but deep down I think most of us are unaware that there is a great inheritance of this vast, complex conflict, misery and fear. If one is at all conscious of it one asks: is it possible to be entirely free of it, so that the mind is a totally different kind of instrument? I do not know if you have thought about this at all - or perhaps it seems that the superficial conditioning is so important that one is always struggling against it. If one has been through that and has put it away then there are all these deep layers which are for the most part unconscious. How is one to become aware of those? Is it at all possible to be completely rid of them? Perhaps we could discuss how to be aware of these terrible things which man has inherited or cultivated. Whatever the explanations be, the fact is that we are deeply violent, that we are caught in sorrow. There is this cloud of fear and obviously this brings about a great deal of mischief and confusion in action. I think that is fairly obvious. How is one to be aware of all this, and is it possible to go beyond it? The organized religions throughout the world have laid down certain rules, disciplines, attitudes and beliefs. But have they resolved human suffering and the deep-rooted anxieties, guilts and all the rest of it? So we can put aside all religious beliefs, hopes and fears. One is aware of what is taking place in the world, of the nature of religious oganizations with their heads, gurus and saviours and all their mythology. If one has set aside all that, because one has understood it and seen the futility, the falseness of it and is free of it, then certain facts remain: sorrow, violence, fear and great anxiety. If I am conscious of all that, how am I to be free of it, so that I have a different kind of brain, a different kind of action, a different attitude towards life, a different way of living? The more intelligent, enquiring and intellectually aware one is of this, the more serious one becomes and there is also the demand that the mind must be totally free of all this mess that human beings have created and carry about with them endlessly. I think that is the basic problem; not that there is not social injustice and poverty, wars, violence, the division between nationalities and so on. All that can be solved, I feel, when human beings really understand this whole problem of existence. Then they can tackle all the confusion and wars from a different dimension. The human mind wants to find that dimension. It has to find it to solve all this misery. If you are serious, not playing with words, speculating or indulging in theoretical suppositions, ideas and hypotheses, but are actually confronted not only with your own, but with this human suffering, how are you to end all this? The demand for constant security is much more a demand for psychological security, which is much deeper than physiological security; because we want psychological security, to give over all our thoughts and hope to some teacher, to some saviour, to some belief. How shall I, knowing all this, understand and be free of this constant effort, struggle and misery ? How are we to be aware of all that? What does this awareness or perception mean? How do I know that I am in sorrow? - not only I, but every human being in the world, of which I am part; how do I know that there is this sorrow? Is it a verbal recognition or is it an acceptance of an idea that there is sorrow of which I am part? Or is there a conscious awareness that sorrow is a fact? When I say to myself: there is tremendous sorrow in the world, of which I am part - as I am the world and the world is me - that is a fact. It is not an idea, not a sentiment, not an emotional assertion; it is an absolute fact that I am the world and the world is me. Because we have made this world we are responsible for it. All my thoughts, my activities, my fears, my hopes, are the hopes and fears of the world. There is no division between the world and me. The community is me, the culture is me and I am that culture; so there is no division. I don't know if you see and feel that? Knowing that I am the world and that there must be a radical revolution in the world - not through bombs, that leads nowhere - I realize there must be a revolution in the very psyche and in the mind itself. So that one lives differently, thinks differently, acts in a totally different manner altogether. How am I to free the mind that is responsible for all this? - the mind being thought. It is thought that has brought about the division between people, the wars, the structure of religious belief. And thought has also put together the technology that makes for the convenience of everyday existence: electricity, the railway, the technological knowledge that enables one to go to the moon; it is thought that has done all this. This thought which has gathered so much information, so much knowledge, how is it to be free from the whole structure and nature of sorrow and fear? - and yet function efficiently, with sanity, in the field of knowledge without bringing about division and antagonism between man and man. You see the problem? How then is thought to prevent this division? Because where there is division there is conflict, not only outwardly but inwardly. Am I making the problem clear? - it's your problem, it's the problem of human being. One sees what thought has done, being cunning, extraordinarily capable, it has gathered technological knowledge which cannot possibly be put aside; thought must be exercised to function at all. And yet thought has brought about violence, and thought is not love. So one has to have the clarity of thought in function, and yet be aware that thought does breed all the misery in the world. How can we be aware of the whole implication of thought - which is the measurable - and also of a dimension in which thought as the measurable does not exist at all? First, is it clear what thought has done in the world, both beneficial and destructive? How is thought to function efficiently, healthily and not create division between people? The collective memory of man responds as thought - which is the past. It may project into the future, but it still has its roots in the past and from there it functions. We see that in operation and we say that is necessary. But why does thought divide people? Why should I be conditioned as a Muslim - which is the result of thought - and you be conditioned as a Communist, also as a result of thought? Some people think that only violence can produce a sociological change, and others say: that is not the way. So thought is always creating divisions and where there is division there is conflict. So what is the function of thought? Knowing that thought can only function in the field of knowledge, can thought invent or come upon a different dimension in which there is no division created by thought? Personally, I am very interested in this, because I have seen all over the world that thought has created such marvellous things and yet has brought about such misery, such confusion, such an enormous amount of sorrow. Can thought completely operate in one direction and be totally silent in another, so that it does not create a division? After having put that question to myself - and I hope you are putting it to yourself - is it possible for thought to say, "I won't go beyond the technological world, knowledge and daily existence", and not enter into that dimension in which there is no division? Is it possible for thought to separate itself like that or are we putting the wrong question altogether? Can thought see its own limitations and bring about a different intelligence? If thought sees its own limitation, is there not a different kind of intelligence in operation? Then is there not an awakening of intelligence which is above and beyond thought? Questioner: When thought is seeing itself, that must not be thinking. Krishnamurti: I don t know, Sir. Questioner: Hasn't thought come up with systems to destroy itself? Krishnamurti: First see our difficulty, don't let's find an easy answer, see the enormous implications in this. Man has lived by thought. We exercise thought every day, every minute. We must have thought; without it there is no action, you can't live. You can't destroy thought. To destroy thought implies a thought which is superior and says "I must destroy my lower thought" - it is all within the field of thought. This is what the Indians have done. They have said: thought is very limited, there is a superior thought, the Atman, the Brahman, the thing above; keep thought silent and then the other will operate. The very assertion of that is thought, isn't it? Here you say "The soul" - it is still part of thought. So thought has produced this extraordinary world of technology, which thought uses for the convenience of human beings and for their destruction. It is thought that has invented the saviours, the myths, the gods; it is thought that has produced violence, that becomes jealous, anxious, fearful. So is there a field which is not measurable by thought? Can that field operate within the field of thought, without thought breaking up into fragmentations? If thought is operating all the time, then the mind is functioning with the knowledge which is the past. Knowledge is the past - I can't have knowledge of tomorrow, and knowledge is thought. If the only way to live is always within the field of thought, then the mind can never be free and man must always live in sorrow, in fear, in division, therefore in conflict. Realizing that, man has said there must be an outside agency - as God - who will help me to overcome all this fragmentation of thought. But that God, that Atman - or other forms of hope - is still the invention of thought not finding security in this world, which invents or believes or projects an idea which it calls God, which is secure. I see this. If thought is to be the only field in which human beings can live, then they are doomed. This is not my invention, this is what is actually going on. Have I made the problem clear? The human mind demands freedom from guilt, suffering, confusion, of these endless wars and violence, and thought cannot produce freedom. It can invent the idea of freedom, but that is not freedom. So the human mind must find the answer. It can only do that when it has understood the nature of thinking and has seen its capacity and has found a state of the immeasurable in which thought does not function at all. This is what is called meditation. People have done this; but again, their meditation is part of the furthering of thought. They say "I must sit quietly, my thoughts must be controlled." Knowing the limitation of thought, they say "I must discipline it", "I must hold it in check, not let it wander". They discipline themselves tremendously, but they have not got that other dimension, because thought cannot enter into that. The really serious people have enquired deeply into this. And yet, thought has been their major instrument and therefore they have never solved this problem. They have invented things, they have speculated. And poor fools like us accept these speculations, the philosophies, the teachers, the whole gamut of it. Obviously there must be a different kind of meditation, a different kind of perception, that is seeing and not evaluating. To see the operations of thought, all its inward and outward movement without giving it any direction or forcing it in any way, just to observe it completely without any choice, that is a different kind of perception. We see, but we always give it a direction. We say "This must not be", "This should be", "I shall overcome it". All that is the old way of responding to any action, feeling or idea. But to observe without any direction, without any pressure, without any distortion - is that possible at all? If I can see myself as I am without any condemnation or saying "I'll keep this and I'll reject that", then perception has a different quality. Then it becomes a living thing, not the repetitive pattern of the past. So in the very act of listening, as you are doing now, you see the truth that to really perceive there must be no directive or persuasion or compulsion. In that observation, you will see that thought does not enter at all. Which means, in that perception, in that seeing, there is complete attention. Where there is no attention there is a distortion. Now w. hen you are listening to this, if you see the truth of it, that acts. Questioner: Sir, in that state one sees oneself absolutely powerless and also amoral, and thought always feels and knows its own power. Thought always enters where there is interest, fear and anxiety. Krishnamurti: Sir, isn't fear and anxiety the result of thought? -thought has produced fear! Questioner: Sometimes it comes unexpectedly. Krishnamurti: That may be, but whether it is unexpected or not, it's thought that has produced fear - no? Thought has produced this immense sorrow. Questioner: What about children's fears? Krishnamurti: Surely, isn't that based on their lack of security? Children need complete security and the parents cannot give it because they are interested in their own little selves. They are quarrelling, they are ambitious, so they cannot give the security the child demands - which is love. So we come back to the same question. Thought has produced fear, there is no question about it. Thought has produced the aching loneliness in oneself, thought has said "I must fulfil, I must be, I am little, I must be big". Thought has brought about jealousy, anxiety, guilt. Thought is that guilt. Not: thought makes for guilt, thought is guilt. How can I observe myself and the world, of which I am part, without any interference of thought in that observation, so that out of the observation a different action can come which does not produce fear, regrets and all the rest of it. So I must learn to observe myself and the world and my actions quite differently. There must be a learning of observation in which thought does not interfere at all because the moment thought interferes it leads to distortion, it becomes biased. Perception is m the present; you can't perceive tomorrow. You perceive now, and when thought interferes in that perception - thought being the response of the past - it must distort the present; this is logical. Questioner: Surely, to be aware we have to think. Krishnamurti: Wait, look at it. What does awareness mean? I am aware that you are sitting there and that I am sitting up here, I am aware that I am sitting on a chair etc. Then thought says "I am a better person than somebody who is sitting below, because I am talking". Thought gives me prestige - do you follow? Is that awareness, or is it merely the continuous movement of thought? Can you see a tree without the operation of thought, without the image of the tree? - the image being thought that says: that is an oak. In observing a tree what takes place? There is the space between the observer and the tree, there is distance; then there is the botanical knowledge, the like or dislike of that tree. I have an image of a tree and that image looks at that tree; is there a perception without the image? The image is thought; thought is the knowledge of that tree. When there is perception with an image, there is no direct perception of the tree. Is itpossible to look at the tree without the image? That is fairly simple, but it becomes much more complex when I look at myself without any image about myself. Can there be an observation of myself without any image? I am full of my images. I am this, I am not that, I should be this, I should not be that, I must become, I must not become - do you follow? Those are all images and I am looking at myself with one of the images - not with the whole group of images. So what is looking? If there is no image then what is seeing? If I have no images at all about myself - which one has to go into very deeply - then what is there to see? There is absolutely nothing to see, and one is frightened of that. That is: one is absolutely nothing. But we can't face that, therefore we have those images about ourselves. The human mind demands freedom. Freedom is essential, it is even demanded politically, but you don't demand freedom from all images. Thought has created these images for various sociological, economic and cultural resows. These images are measurable: the greater, the lesser. One asks: can thought observe without distortion? Obviously it can't. There is a distorting factor in thought, because thought is the response of the past. Is there an observation without the interference of thought? - that means without the interference of any image. You can find this out; it's not a question of just accepting or believing. You can look at your wife or your husband, the tree, the cloud, or the person sitting next to you, without any image. Questioner: Is there such a thing as an unconscious image one might not be aware of? Krishnamurti: Yes, there is, of course. Please listen to my question: how am I to be aware of the many unconscious images that I have stored up? Questioner: Krishnaji, as long as one is trying to be aware, one creates things to be aware of. Krishnamurti: That is what I am saying. You cannot try to be aware, you cannot determine to be aware; to be aware is not the result of exercising will. Either you see or you don't see, either you listen to what we are talking about now, or you don't listen. But if you listen with your image, then of course you don't listen at all. The question is really very interesting. I can understand the conscious images, the superficial knowledge that I have, that is fairly simple and clear. But how am I to be aware of the deep, hidden images which have such a powerful influence on the whole way of life? Questioner: We find out by how we behave, by how these images come up, sometimes in sleep. Krishnamurti: Which means: through my behaviour I begin to discover the unconscious images that have been stored up - one image after the other, you follow? I behave towards you differently than towards another, because you are more powerful, you have greater prestige than the other man. Therefore my image of you is greater and I despise the other; so it means going through one image after another. Is there a central fact that creates these images consciously as well as deeply? If I can find that out, then I don't have to go through image after image, or discover the images through dreams. Through my behaviour I discover my unconscious images; that's a form of analysis, isn't it? Will analysis resolve these images? These images are created by thought, and analysis is thought. Through thought I hope to destroy the images that thought has created, so I am caught in a vicious circle. How do I deal with this? Are your images revealed through dreams? Isn't that another form of analysis? Why should you dream at all? Dreams are a continuation of my daily activity, aren't they? I lead rather a confused life - uncertain, miserable, lonely, frightened, comparing myself with somebody else who is more beautiful, more intelligent; that is my life during the waking hours and when I sleep, all that goes on. I dream of all the things I have been through; it is the continuation of how I have been living during the daytime. If there is a revelation of myself through dreams, that is a form of analysis. Therefore I am depending on dreams to reveal the hidden images, and the dependence on dreams makes me less and less awake during the waking hours - no? Questioner: Thought and sub-thought create images and these are useful on a certain level. Krishnamurti: We have said that, there are useful images which must function, which we must have, there are highly dangerous images which one must totally abolish - obviously. That is what this whole discussion is about. Questioner: Is there not only one question? - not whether thought can be silent when necessary but: can there be only silence? Krishnamurti: That means, Sir: can there be silence from which thought can operate, doesn't it? Questioner: It is not a question whether thought can operate or not, but can there be only silence? Krishnamurti: Can thought be completely silent? Who is putting that question? Is thought putting that question? Questioner: Obviously. Krishnamurti: So thought is asking itself whether it can be quiet. How will it find out? Can it do anything to be silent? It can't, can it? Can thought say to itself: I must be quiet? That is not being quiet! Then what is silence which is not the product of thought? Is there a silence which is not the result of thought? Which means, can thought come to an end by itself, without asking to come to an end? Isn't that what is implied when you listen to something, when you see clearly? When you are completely attentive, in that attention there is silence, isn't there? Complete attention means your body, your nerves, everything is attentive. Then in that attention the observer as thought does not exist. Questioner: That only happens in moments of great danger. Krishnamurti: You mean to say when there is a crisis. Must one live in crises all the time? What an appalling idea, isn't it? In order to be quiet I must have a series of crises and thereby hope to be silent. That's too complicated! Questioner: May I say that silence happens from within. Krishnamurti: How does it happen? Can one function from silence - you follow? Please put that question: first of all, what is silence? How does it come? Is there a functioning, that is living a daily life out of silence? I can't assert that there is an awareness all the time, I don't know, you don't know. Questioner: But it seems to be there, it just changes all the time. Krishnamurti: We only know one thing: that thought is perpetually in operation. And when thought is in operation there is no silence, there is no awareness, as we pointed out. Awareness, or perception, implies a state of seeing in which there is no image whatsoever. Until I find out that it is possible to see without any image, I can't state anything else. I can't state that there is an awareness, there is a silence. Is it possible for me, in daily life, to observe my wife, my child, everything around me, without a shadow of an image? Find out. Then out of that attention there is silence. That attention is silence. And it is not the result of practice, which is again thought. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART IX CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 12TH SEPTEMBER 1971 'THE MEDITATIVE MIND AND THE IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION' AS ONE TRAVELS over the world and observes the appalling conditions of poverty and the ugliness of man's relationship to man, it becomes obvious that there must be a total revolution. A different kind of culture must come into being. The old culture is almost dead and yet we are clinging to it. Those who are young revolt against it, but unfortunately have not found a way, or a means, of transforming the essential quality of the human being, which is the mind. Unless there is a deep psychological revolution, mere reformation on the periphery will have little effect. This psychological revolution - which I think is the only revolution - is possible through meditation. Meditation is the total release of energy, and that is what we are going to talk over together this morning. The root meaning of that word is to measure. The whole Western world is based on the idea of measurement, but in the East they have said, "Measurement is maya, illusion, therefore one must find the immeasurable." So the two drifted apart culturally, socially, intellectually and religiously. Meditation is quite a complex problem, we have to go into it slowly and approach it from different angles, bearing in mind all the time that a psychological revolution is absolutely necessary for a different kind of world, a different kind of society, to come into being. I do know how strongly you feel about this. Probably most of us, being bourgeois, comfortable with our little incomes, our family and so on, would rather remain as we are and not be disturbed. But events, technology, and all those things that are happening in the world, are producing great changes outwardly. Yet inwardly most of us remain more or less as we have been for centuries. That revolution can only take place at the very centre of our being and requires a great abundance of energy; meditation is the release of that total energy and we are going to talk that over. We have got a great many ideas about what meditation is and what it should be; we import it from the East, or interpret it according to our own particular religious inclination, as contemplation, acceptance, prayer, keeping the mind still or open -we have all kinds of fanciful ideas about it. And especially lately, people have come from India propagating meditations of various forms. First of all, how is one to have this quality of energy which is without friction? We know mechanical energy, which is friction mechanically, and the friction in us which produces energy through conflict, through resistance, through control and all the rest of it. So there is a kind of energy caused by mechanical friction. Is there another kind of energy which has no friction whatsoever and is therefore completely free and immeasurable? I think meditation is the discovery of that. Unless one has great abundance of energy, not only physically but much more so psychologically, our action will never be complete, it will always produce friction, conflict and struggle. Seeing the various forms of meditation, of Zen, of Yoga brought over from India, and the various contemplative groups of monks and so on, in all that, there is the idea of control, acceptance of a system, practising a repetition of words, which is called mantra, and various forms of breathing, hatha yoga and so on. I suppose you know all this. So first of all let us dispose of them altogether by investigating. Not accepting what they say, but investigating it, seeing the truth or the falseness of it. There is this repetition of words, of sentences, mantras, a set of phrases given by a guru, being initiated, paying money to learn a peculiar phrase to be repeated by you secretly. Probably some of you have done that and you know a great deal about it. That is called mantra yoga, and is brought over from India. I don't know why you pay a single penny to repeat certain words from somebody who says, "If you do this you will achieve enlightenment, you will have a quiet mind." When you repeat a series of words constantly, whether it is Ave Maria or various Sanskrit words, obviously your mind becomes rather dull and you have a peculiar sense of unity, of quietness, and you think that will help to bring about clarity. You can see the absurdity of it, because why should you accept what anybody says about these matters - including myself? Why should you accept any authority about the inward movement of life? We reject authority outwardly; if you are at all intellectually aware and observant politically you reject these things. But apparently we accept the authority of somebody who says, "I know, I have achieved, I have realised." The man who says he knows, he does not know. The moment you say you know, you don't know. What is it you know? Some experience which you have had, some kind of vision, some kind of enlightenment? I dislike to use that word "enlightenment". Once you have experienced that, you think you have attained some extraordinary state; but that is past, you can only know something which is over and therefore dead. When these people come over and say they have realized, "Do this" or "Do that" for so much money, this is obviously absurd. So we can dispose of that. We can also dispose of this whole idea of practising a system, a method. When you practise a method in order to achieve enlightenment, or bliss, or to have a quiet mind, or to achieve a state of tranquility, whatever it is, it obviously makes the mind mechanical, you repeat over and over again. This not only implies suppression of your own movement and understanding, but also conformity and the endless conflict involved in practising a particular system. The mind likes to conform to a system because then it gets crystallized and it is easy to live that way. So can we dispose, now, of all systems of meditation? But you won't, because our whole structure of habit is based on that demand to find a method, so that we can just follow and live a monotonous, dull life of routine; not to be disturbed, that is what we want, and so we accept authority. One has to find out for oneself, not through anybody. We have had the authority of the priest for centuries upon centuries, the authority of teachers, saviours and masters. If you really want to find out what meditation is, you have to set aside all authority completely and totally; not the authority of law, of the policeman -law, legislation, you may understand later, when your own mind is orderly and clear. Now what is meditation? Is it control of thought? And if it is, who is the controller of thought? It is thought itself, isn't it? Our whole culture, both in the East and in the West, is based on control of thought and concentration, in which only one thought can be pursued to the end. Why,should one control at all? Control implies imitation, conformity, it implies the acceptance of a pattern as the authority, according to which you are trying to live. That pattern is set by the society, by the culture, by somebody who you think has knowledge, enlightenment and so on. According to that pattern one tries to live, suppressing all one's own feelings and ideas, trying to conform. In that there is conflict, and conflict is essentially a wastage of energy. So concentration, which so many advocate in meditation, is totally wrong. Are you accepting all this, or are you just listening out of boredom? Because we must go into this question, whether thought can function where necessary, without any form of control. Can thought function when necessary as knowledge, in action, and be completely still at other times? That is the real issue. The mind which is cluttered up with so many activities of thought and is therefore uncertain, is trying to find clarity in that confusion, forcing itself to control, to conform to an idea; it therefore brings about more and more confusion within itself. I want to find out whether the mind can be quiet and only function when necessary. Control, because it implies conflict, is a great waste of energy; that is important to understand, because I feel meditation must be a releasing of energy in which there is not the slightest friction. How is a mind to do this? How is it to have such energy in which every form of friction comes to an end? In enquiring into that, one must understand oneself completely, there must be total self-knowing -not according to any psychologist, philosopher or teacher, or the pattern set by a particular culture - but to know oneself right through, both at the conscious level as well as at the deeper levels, is that possible? When there is complete understanding of oneself, then there is the ending of conflict - and that is meditation. Now, how am I to know myself? I can only know myself in relationship; the observation of myself takes place only when there is response and reaction in relationship; there is no such thing as isolation. The mind is isolating itself all the time in all its activities, building a wall round itself in order not to be hurt, not to have any discomfort, unhappiness, or trouble; it is isolating itself all the time in its self-centred activity. I want to know "myself" as I want to know how to get from here to a particular town; that is, clearly, watching everything that is involved in myself, my feelings, my thoughts, my motives, conscious or unconscious. How is that possible? The Greeks, the Hindus, the Buddhists have said: know yourself. But apparently that is one of the most difficult things to do. We are going to find out this morning how to look at ourselves; because once you know yourself completely, that prevents all friction, and therefore out of that comes this quality of energy which is totally different. So to find out how to observe oneself, one must understand what is meant by observing. When we observe objective things like trees, clouds, the things outside of us, there is not only the space between the observer and the observed - the physical space - there is also the space of time. When we look at a tree there is not only physical distance, but there is also psychological distance. There is the distance between you and the tree, the distance created by the image as knowledge: that is an oak tree, or an elm. That image between you and the tree separates you. But when the quality of the mind of the observer is without the image, which is imagination, then there is quite a different relationship between the observer and the observed. Have you ever looked at a tree without a single word of like or dislike, without a single image? Have you noticed what then takes place? Then, for the first time, you see the tree as it is and you see the beauty of it, the colour, the depth, the vitality of it. A tree, or even another person, is fairly easy to observe; but to observe oneself that way -that is to observe without the observer - is much more difficult. So one must find out who is the observer. I want to watch myself, I want to know myself as deeply as possible. What is the nature, the structure of that observer who is watching? That observer is the past, isn't it? - the past knowledge which he has collected and stored up; the past being the culture, the conditioning. That is the observer who says, "This is right, this is wrong, this must be, this must not be, this is good, this is bad." So the observer is the past and with those eyes of the past we try to see what we are. Then we say, "I don't like this, I am ugly", or "This I will keep". All these discriminations and condemnations take place. Can I look at myself without the eyes of the past? Can I watch myself in action, which is in relationship, without any movement of the past? Have you ever tried this? (I don't suppose you have.) When there is no observer then there is only the observed. Please see this: I am envious, or I overeat, I am greedy. The normal reaction is, "I must not overeat", "I must not be greedy", "I must suppress", you know all that follows. In that there is the observer trying to control his greed, or his envy. Now when there is an awareness of greed without the observer, what takes place? Can I observe that greed without giving it a name, as "greed"? The moment I name it I have already fixed it as greed in my memory which says: I must get over it, I must control. So is there an observation of greed without the word, without justifying it, without condemning it? Which means, can I observe this thing called greed without any reaction whatsoever? To so observe is a form of discipline, isn't it? Not imposing any particular pattern, which means conformity, suppression and all the rest of it, but to observe the whole series of actions without condemning, justifying or naming just to observe. Then you will see the mind is no longer wasting energy. It is then aware and therefore it has energy to deal with that which it is observing. Questioner: May I ask, Sir, whether the "me" observing the "me" without naming it as the "me", is the same as observing the past, also without naming it as the past? Krishnamurti: Quite right, Sir, that's it. But once you understand the whole mechanism it does not become difficult. Once you see the truth of it, then that truth, that fact, acts. One can do that at the conscious level. There are a great many unconscious responses, motives, inclinations, tendencies, inhibitions and fears. How is one to deal with all that? Must one go through analysing layer after layer of hidden accumulations, exposing all that through dreams? How is all that to be exposed totally so that knowing oneself becomes complete? Apparently it cannot be done by the conscious mind. I can't investigate consciously the unconscious, the hidden. Can you? Don't say "no" - sec the difficulty of it, because I don't know what is hidden, and the hidden may intimate through dreams, but the dreams need to be interpreted and that will take a lot of time, won't it? Questioner: I think it is possible under certain drugs to know myself - there is no conflict. Krishnamurti: Does any drug really expose the totality of the content of consciousness, or does it bring about chemically a certain state of mind, which is totally different from the understanding of oneself? I have watched many people in India taking drugs and I have also watched students at universities in America, and others, who have been taking psychedelic drugs. These drugs do affect the mind, the brain cells themselves - they destroy the brain. If you have talked to those who have taken drugs, you see they can't reason, they can't pursue a logical sequence of thought. I am not asking you not to take drugs, it's up to you; but you can see the effect of it on people. They have no sense of responsibility, they think they can do anything they like -and how many hospitals are full of people who are mentally unbalanced through drugs. We are talking of something which is non-chemical. If LSD, or any other drug, could bring about a state of mind in which there is no conflict, and at the same time one could maintain complete responsibility and a logical sequence of thought and action, that would be marvellous. We are asking: how is one to expose the whole hidden content at one glance? Not through a series of dreams, not through analysis, all that implies time and wastage of energy. This is an important question because I want to understand myself - myself being all my past, the experiences, the hurts, the anxieties, the guilt, the various fears. How am I to comprehend all that immediately? To understand all that immediately gives immense energy. Now how do you do that? Is that an impossibility? We have to ask the impossible question to find a way out of it. Unless we ask the most impossible question we shall always be dealing with what is possible, and what is possible is very little. So I am asking the most impossible question, which is: to have this whole content of consciousness exposed and understand it, see it totally, without time - which means without analysis, exploration and seeing layer after layer, which is an expenditure of time. How is the mind to observe this whole content with one look? If that question is put to you, as it is being put now, if you are really listening to that question, what is your response? You obviously say "I can't do it". You really don't know how to do it. Are you waiting for somebody to tell you? If I say to myself, "I don't know", am I waiting for somebody to inform me - am I expecting an answer? When I am expecting an answer, then I already know. Are you following this? When I say, "I don't know, I really don't know" - I am not waiting for anybody to tell me, I am not expecting anything because nobody can answer it. So I actually don't know, What is the state of the mind that says "I really don't know"?, I can't find it in any book, I can't ask anybody, I can't go to any teacher or priest, I really don't know. When the mind says "I do not know", what is the state of the mind? Please, don't answer me. Do look at it, because we always say we know. I know my wife, I know mathematics, I know this, 1 know that. We never say, "I really don't know". I am asking; what is the state of the mind that honestly says, "I don't know"? Don't verbalize immediately. When I really mean I don't know, the mind has no answer. It is not expecting anything from anybody. It is not waiting, it is not expecting. So what happens? Is it not completely alone? It is not isolated - isolation and aloneness are two different things. In that quality of aloneness there is no influence, there is no resistance, it has shed itself from all the past, it says, "I really don't know." Therefore the mind has emptied itself of all its content. Have you understood this? I have asked the impossible question and I have said, "I don't know." Therefore the mind empties itself of everything, of every suggestion, every probability, every possibility; so the mind is completely active and empty of all the past - which is time, analysis, the authority of somebody. So it has exposed all the content of itself by denying the content. Do you understand now? As we said, meditation can only begin with the total understanding of myself; that is part of the beginning of meditation. Without understanding myself the mind can deceive itself, it can have illusions according to its particular conditioning. When you know your conditioning and are free of it, then there is no possibility of any kind of illusion, and that is absolutely essential because we can deceive ourselves so easily. So when I investigate into myself, I see that consciousness is emptying itself of all its content through knowing itself, not by denying anything, but by understanding the whole content; that brings about great energy, which is necessary, because that energy transforms completely all my activity. It is no longer self-centred and therefore the cause of friction. Meditation is a way of putting aside altogether everything that man has conceived of himself and of the world. So he has a totally different kind of mind. Meditation also means awareness, both of the world and of the whole movement of oneself, to see exactly what is, without any choice, without any distortion. Distortion takes place the moment you bring in thought. Yet thought has to function, but when there is an observation and thought interferes with that observation as image, then there is distortion and illusion. So to observe actually what is, in oneself and in the world, without any distortion, a quiet, very still mind is necessary. One knows that it is necessary to have a quiet mind, therefore there are various systems to help you to control it, and all that means friction. If you want to observe passionately, with intensity, the mind inevitably becomes quiet. You don't have to force it - the moment you force it, it is not quiet, it is dead. Can you see this truth, that to perceive anything you must look? - and if you look with prejudice you cannot see. If you see that, your mind is quiet. Now what takes place in a quiet mind? We are enquiring not only into that quality of energy in which there is no friction, but also into how to bring about a radical change within oneself. One's self is the world and the world is oneself - the world is not the fruit separate from me: I am the world. It is not just an idea, but an actual fact, that I am the world and the world is "me". So there is a radical revolution, a change in me that will inevitably affect the world, because I am part of the world. In this enquiry into what meditation is, I see that any wastage of energy is caused by friction in my relationship with another. Is it possible to have a relationship with another in which there is no friction whatsoever? That is possible only when I understand what love is, and the understanding of what love is, is the denial of what love is not. Jealousy, ambition, greed, self-centred activity, obviously all that is not love. When in the understanding of myself there is the total setting aside of all that which is not love, then it is. The observation takes a second, the explanation and the description takes a long time, but the act of observation is instantaneous. In this observation I have found no system, no authority, no self-centred activity, therefore there is no conformity, no comparison of myself with another; to observe all this the mind must be extraordinarily quiet. If you want to listen to what is being said just now, you have to give attention, haven't you? You can't listen if you are thinking about something else. If you are bored with this, I can get up and go, but to force yourself to listen is absurd. If you are really interested in it passionately, intensely, then you listen completely, and to listen completely the mind must be quiet - this is very simple. All this is meditation; not just sitting for five minutes by yourself, cross-legged, breathing properly - that is not meditation, that is self-hypnosis. I want to find out what is the quality of the mind that is completely still and also what takes place when it is still. I have observed, I have recorded, I have understood and I have finished with that. But there is another enquiry: what is the state of the mind, of the brain cells themselves? The brain cells store up the memories that are useful, that are necessary for their self-protection, memories of what might lead to danger. Haven't you noticed this? I suppose you read a lot of books? Personally I don't, therefore I can look into myself and find out, watch myself, not according to somebody - but just watch. I am asking myself what is the quality of such a mind, what has happened to the brain? The brain records, that is its function. It functions only through memory which protects it, otherwise it can't function. The brain may find security in some neurosis; it has found security in nationalism, in a belief in the family, in having possessions, which are all various forms of neurosis. The brain must be secure to function and it may choose to find that security in something that is False, unreal, illusory, neurotic. When I have examined myself thoroughly, all this disappears. There is no neurosis, no belief, no nationality, no desire to hurt anybody, nor to recall all the hurts. So the brain then is a recording instrument, without thought using it as the "me" in operation. So meditation implies not only the body being still but also the brain being quiet. Have you ever watched your brain in operation? Why you think certain things. Why you react to others, why you feel desperately lonely, unloved, with nothing to rely on, no hope - you know this tremendous sense of loneliness? Though you may be married, have children and live in a group, there is this feeling of complete emptiness. Seeing it, one tries to escape from it, but if you remain with it, do not escape from it, just look at it completely without condemning it or trying to overcome it, but observe it actually as-it is, then you will see that what you considered to be`loneliness ceases to be. So the brain cells record, and thought as the "me" - my ambitions, my greed, my purposes, my fulfilment - comes to an end. Therefore the brain and the mind become extraordinarily quiet and only function when necessary. Therefore your brain, your mind, enters into quite a different dimension of which there is no description; because the description is not the described. What we have done this morning is description, explanation, but the word is not the thing, when one realizes that then one is free of the word. The quiet mind then enters into the immeasurable. All our life is based on thought which is measurable. It measures God, it measures its relationship with another through the image. It tries to improve itself according to what it thinks it should be. So unnecessarily we live in a world of measurement, and with that world we want to enter into a world in which there is no measurement at all. Meditation isthe seeing of what is and going beyond it - seeing the measure and going beyond the measure. What takes place when the brain, the mind and the body are really quiet and harmonious - when the mind, the body and the heart are completely one? Then one lives a totally different kind of life. Questioner: What is intuition? Krishnamurti: One has to be very careful of that word. Because I like something unconsciously, I say I have an intuition about it. Don't you know all the tricks one plays upon oneself through that word? When you see things as they are, why do you want intuition? Why do you want any form of hunch, of intimation? We are talking of understanding oneself. Questioner: When one is aware of one's sexual appetites, they seem to disappear. Can that awareness, that attention, be maintained all the time? Krishnamurti: Watch the danger of this question. "When I am aware of my sexual desires they seem to disappear." So awareness is a trick which will help me to make things, which I don't like, disappear. I don't like anger, therefore I am going to be aware of it and perhaps it will disappear. But I do like my fulfilment, I want to become a great man, and I won't be aware of that. I believe in God and I worship the State, but I won't be aware of all the dangers involved in that, although it separates, it destroys, it tortures people. So I am going to be aware of the things that are most unpleasant, but unaware of all those things which I want to keep. Awareness is not a trick, it is not something that will help me to dissolve the things we don't want. Awareness means to observe the whole movement of like and dislike, of your suppressions. If you are old-fashioned you don't talk about sex, you suppress it, but you go on thinking about it - one has to be aware of all that. Questioner: Sir, can we by understanding our minds, be aware when we are asleep? Krishnamurti: This is really a complex question. How am I to be aware that I am asleep? Is there an awareness of what is going on during sleep? Am I aware during the day of all the movements that are going on within me, of all the reactions? If I am not aware during the day, how am I going to be aware at at night when I sleep? If you are aware during the day, watching, attentive to how much you eat, what you say, what you think, of your motives, then have you anything to be aware of during the night? Please find out. If you are not aware, except of that which is going on as a recording in the brain, what takes place? I have spent my day actively, being aware, watching what I eat, what I think, what I feel, how I talk to others. Jealousy, envy, greed, violence - I have been completely aware of all that; which means I have brought order there, not according to any plan. I have lived a disordered life of not being aware; when I become aware of all this, there is order. So when the body goes to sleep, what takes place? Generally the brain tries to bring about order while you are asleep, because during the conscious waking hours you have lived a disordered life and the brain needs order. I don't know if you have watched it - the brain cannot function properly, healthily if there is no order. So if during the day there has been order, the brain is not trying to bring about order when you sleep, through dreams, through intimations and so on - it becomes quiet. It may record, but it is quiet and so there is a possibility of renewal, a possibility of a mind no longer fighting and struggling; therefore the mind becomes extraordinarily young, fresh and innocent, in the sense that it won't hurt and will not be hurt. Questioner: When a man has a message, the relationship between that man and his followers is usually that of a teacher. The teacher often has powers, and his message is a system. Why don't you consider yourself a teacher and your message a system? Krishnamurti: I have made this fairly clear, haven't I? Don't follow anybody and don't accept anybody as a teacher, except when you yourself become your own teacher and disciple. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART X A DISCUSSION WITH A SMALL GROUP AT BROCKWOOD PARK 6TH JUNE 1970 'VIOLENCE AND THE"ME"' Krishnamurti: When we go into any problem or issue we ought to go into it completely and thoroughly, taking one thing at a time, not vaguely talk about many things. So if we could take one real human problem and talk it over together completely and seriously, I think it would be worthwhile. So what shall we talk about? Questioner (1): Education. Questioner (2): Our lack of awareness. Questioner (3): Love. Questioner (4): Sir, sometimes, due to nervous fatigue, the mind seems to lose its sensitivity. I was wondering what we could do to cope with such a situation. Krishnamurti: Could we take a problem like violence? It seems to me it is spreading all over the world; could we see what the implications are, and whether the human mind can really solve the social and also the inward problems, without any kind of violence? As one observes, in every part of the world there are revolts and revolutions in order to change the social structure. Obviously the structure has to be changed; is it possible to change it without violence? - because violence begets violence. Through revolt one party can assume the power of government, and having achieved this, it will maintain itself in power through violence. It is fairly obvious that this is what is happening throughout the world. So we are asking whether there is a way of bringing about a change in the world and in ourselves which does not breed violence. I should have thought this would be a very serious problem for each one of us. Would you like to discuss this? What do you say? Questioner: Yes, let's discuss violence. Krishnamurti: But let us go into it really deeply, not just superficially, because in talking this over we should bear in mind that it must also alter our ways of life. I do not know if you want to go so deeply into this. My question is, whether the outside world, the social structure, the injustice, the divisions, the appalling brutality, wars, revolts and all the rest of it, can be changed, as well as the inward struggle that is going on perpetually. Can all that be changed without violence, without conflict, without opposition, without forming one party as opposed to another party, not only outwardly, but also without the inward division? - bearing in mind that division is the source of conflict and of violence. How is one to bring about this change, both outwardly and inwardly? I should have thought that would be the most important issue that we have to face. What do you say, Sirs? How do we discuss this? Questioner: Shall we start with violence in a small child? Krishnamurti: Shall we start with the children? With the student, or with the educator? - which is ourselves. Let us talk it over together, don't let me do all the talking. Questioner (1): We should start with the educator. Questioner (2): With ourselves. I see violence in ourselves every day. Krishnamurti: Where would you begin to resolve this problem? In all parts of the world, even in Russia where some of the intellectuals and writers are revolting against the tyranny, revolts are going on; they want freedom, they want to stop wars. Where would you start with this problem? Stopping wars in Vietnam, or in the Middle East? Where does one begin to understand this problem? At the periphery, or at the centre? Questioner: In oneself, in one's life. Krishnamurti: Where would you begin? With oneself, with one's own home, or out there? Questioner: Why not in both places? If one can bring about some superficial change, that may resolve a certain superficial problem. I see no reason why that shouldn't take place, as well as individual enquiry. Krishnamurti: Are we concerned with superficial changes, with a superficial reformation? And therefore - which may be necessary - put our energies, thought, affection and care in outward, superficial reformation? Or do we begin at a wholly different level? - not as the opposite of it. Questioner: Are the two exclusive? Krishnamurti: I did not say they were exclusive. I said they were not opposite. Questioner: I don't see it being a case of either one thing or the other. One can see very clearly that one can achieve saving a hundred lives by some superficial action. I see no contradiction. Krishnamurti: I agree. There are many people who are pursuing superficial activities, thousands of them! Do we exclude that and entirely concern ourselves with our own house, or, in the very concern for our house, is the other included too? It is not an exclusion, or an opposition, or the avoidance of the one, and laying emphasis on the other. Questioner: Well, Sir, I won't persist, but it does seem that very often people listen to you - myself included - who have thought that individual enquiry was extremely important to resolve the immediate problem to the exclusion of, say, political action, which at its own level may resolve some particular issues, though not fundamental ones. But I see no reason why they shouldn't go on in parallel. Krishnamurti: I quite agree, Sir. Do we deal with the fundamental issues? Questioner: It is obviously the important thing. Krishnamurti: So, where shall we begin? Which is the fundamental issue? Questioner: The individual. The mass is the extension of the individual. Krishnamurti: It is very clear, isn't it? We want change, both outwardly and inwardly, superficially and deeply. One does not exclude the other: I must have food in order to think! Without dividing, what is the fundamental issue? Where shall we tackle it? Where shall we put our teeth into it? Questioner: What is the cause of violence? Krishnamurti: Shall we discuss that? Questioner: Why do we want to change? Krishnamurti: That is a good question, too. Why should we change at all? Another Questioner: Because we don't seem to be getting any where in our present state. Krishnamurti: And even if you got somewhere in your present state wouldn't you want to change? Now, please, let us come back. Questioner: In our present state we seem to have very little possibility of moving; we are caught in our own individual ways, by some event, over and over again. There is this lack of movement in which we are always caught in life in some way or another and therefore violence arises. Krishnamurti: Shall we find out what are the causes of violence? Each one will have a different opinion; even the experts disagree on the causes of violence, volumes have been written about it! Shall we go on explaining the causes, or see violence as it is - as a fundamental issue in human relationship. And find out whether it should perpetuate itself, or be changed, or modified. What is the fundamental issue involved in violence? Questioner: We are apparently issued with a sort of animal brain, that is the main cause, I think we are naturally violent unless we can jump out of it. Half the time politicians are behaving just like chickens in a farmyard. Krishnamurti: I know! (Laughter) Questioner: Is it possible to look at the individual state of mind to find out whether we are intrinsically violent within ourselves, in the very mode of mental activity - whether this dualistic movement is itself violent? Krishnamurti: So, Sir, what would you consider to be violence? Questioner (1): I think it is self-involvement, selfishness. Questioner (2): Separation. Questioner (3): Reaction to fear. Krishnamurti: We have been educated to be violent. Our animal nature and the activity of the human brain etc. are violent and dividing; we all know this. Self-centred activities, to be aggressive, opposing, resisting, asserting, all that makes for violence. Questioner: There is also part of oneself that is repelled by violence and another part which likes it, thrives on it. Krishnamurti: Yes. There is part of oneself which resists violence, is appalled by violence. Then, where are we? Questioner: The desire to go into the problem of violence is only a partial seeing. I mean, one does not totally want to resolve the problem of violence. Krishnamurti: Doesn't one? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: Let's find out. Is it possible to resolve the question of violence totally? Questioner (1): Isn't rebelling against violence a kind of violence? I should think it could be very destructive. Questioner (2): If the mind, with its conditioning, is violent to start with, then the outcome is bound to be violence. Krishnamurti: So, what shall we do then, Sir? Questioner: Would it be wise to just watch the violence without splitting, or separating? Krishnamurti: The gentleman raised the question: do we really want to be free of all violence? Answer that question. Do we? Which means to have no conflict, no dualistic activity within oneself, no resistance, no opposition, no aggression, no ambition to be somebody, not to assert one's opinion and oppose other opinions. All that implies a form of violence. Not only the violence of self-discipline, but also the violence that makes me twist my particular desires in order to conform to a pattern, to make it moral, or whatever it is; all these are forms of violence. Will is violence. Do we want to be free of all this? And can a human being live, being free from it? Questioner: It seems that in the process we call our life, tension is necessary. We have to distinguish, it seems, between tension and violence. I am reminded of the story of the languishing herrings who didn't really come to life until some dog-fish were put into the tank. When does normal tension as a process of life cease, and violence begin? Do we make a distinction here? Krishnamurti: So you see tension is necessary? Questioner: In everything there is polarity. Krishnamurti: Please, Sir, let us find out. Does a human being -us here - want to be free of all violence? Questioner (1): This seems to me a very difficult question because there are such a lot of contradictions in us. One says at this moment that one does not want violence; the scene changes, and in an hour's time one is violent, one is caught. One is broken up into so many facets. Questioner (2): Someone may seriously attempt to bring attention to violence within, but how does such a person react when he is confronted with violence outside? Krishnamurti: Wait, Sir, that is a later question. Do we here see the importance of being totally free of all violence? Or would we like to keep certain parts of it? Is it possible to be completely free of all violence? - that means to be free of all irritation, all anger, of any form of anxiety, and of resistance to anything. Questioner: I think there is a difference between you positing that question and an individual saying "I want to be free of all violence". Because the one is a dispassionate looking at the question, the other one is a movement - again a violent movement. Krishnamurti: That is just it! Questioner: It seems to me to be a real thing, or a reasonable thing, to look at the question rather than try to resolve violence. To me they are two different things. Krishnamurti: Then, what is the question, sir? Questioner: Is it possible to be completely free of violence? Krishnamurti: That is all. Questioner: It is quite different from seeking to be free of violence. Krishnamurti: Quite! Then what do I do? - is it possible? Questioner (1): If one sees the pattern of one's daily life, one sees that it seems that without some form of violence - or maybe what this gentleman calls tension - one could perhaps never carry through one distinct job in the face of the pressures and difficulties that often surround one in society. We talk about freedom from violence when we are angry, or afraid, as if we were trapped, but I feel that perhaps there is always some violence in our lives. It is difficult to conceive living, doing some job and so on, without some kind of drive which I feel is violence. Questioner (2): Isn't there a difference between tension and violence? It seems that violence being resistance and aggression, is deadening; it tries to stop something. Whilst tension is moving with what you are doing. It seems to me we have to have an understanding of the difference between violence and tension. Krishnamurti: Sir, can we pursue that question: is it possible for a human being to be completely free of violence? We have understood what we mean by violence, more or less. Questioner (1): I don't think we have. If there is no difference between violence and energy, then I wouldn't want to be free of violence. Questioner (2): If we could see our violence the whole time, there would be no violence. Krishnamurti: No, Sir. before we come to that point, as a human being, have I said to myself: is it possible to live without violence? Questioner: One obviously does not know. Krishnamurti: So let us enquire, Sir, let us find out. Another Questioner: Wouldn't the only way to find out be to do it? Krishnamurti: Not only do it, but enquire, go into it, watch it, be aware of this whole movement of resistance. Knowing the danger of violence, seeing the outward effects of it, the divisions, the horrors, and so on, I ask myself: is it possible for me to be free of all violence? I really don't know. So I am going to enquire, I want to find out, not verbally, but passionately! Human beings have lived with violence for thousands of years and I want to find out whether it is possible to live without violence. Now where shall I begin? Questioner: Would you first try to understand what violence is? Krishnamurti: I know very well what it is: anger, jealousy, brutality, revolt, resistance, ambition, all the rest of it. We don't have to define endlessly what violence is. Questioner: I don't really see ambition as violence. Krishnamurti: No? Another Questioner: Is it possible to see how it arises in oneself, when it comes up, when it reaches the surface? Krishnamurti: Sir, must I wait till anger comes up, and then be aware of that anger and say, "I am violent"? Is that what you propose, Sir? Questioner: The movement leading up to it is very rarely caught by us. Another Questioner: Should we understand thought? - the sudden thoughts? Krishnamurti: Sir, it is such a vast problem, don't let us take little bits of it, let us observe it at the very core. What makes the mind violent in me, in this human body, in this person? What is the source of this violence? Watch it in yourself. Another Questioner: Is it my desire to achieve something, to gain something, to be something? I want to look and see how much of the violence that I knew I had, I could give up - and still survive within acceptable limits. That would be my first step. Krishnamurti: Within acceptable limits - and that may also be violent. Questioner: Yes, I would expect I should still have a degree of violence. Krishnamurti: I am asking myself whether it is possible to live without violence and I say: what is the root of this? If I could understand that, perhaps I would know how to live without violence. What is the root of it? Questioner: The feeling of revolution, of separation. Krishnamurti: You say the root of this violence is separation, division, the "me". Can the mind live without the "me"? Please go on, let us enquire. Questioner: Is it true that as long as there is an objective, or desire of any kind, there is the seed of violence? Krishnamurti: Of Course! That is the whole point. We must go step by step into this. Please, Sirs, go on! Questioner: Does not this pose the question: is it possible to live without any objective? Krishnamurti: Yes. Is it possible to live without any objective, without any principle, without any aim, without any purpose? Questioner: The purpose is life. Krishnamurti: The opposite of that is to drift. Therefore we must be careful that we don't think in terms of the opposite. If I have no objective, then I am just drifting. So I must be very careful when I say, "To have an objective is a form of violence; to have no objective may be to drift. Questioner: But this is irrelevant, Sir, because whether one drifts or not isn't the question. The question is: is it possible to live without violence? Krishnamurti: I'm only warning, Sir, not to go into the opposite. Now, is it possible to live without direction? Direction means resistance, means no distraction, no distortion, it means a continuous drive towards a goal. Why do I want a purpose, an end? And that end, the goal, the purpose, the principle, the ideal - is it true? Or is it a thing which the mind has invented because it is conditioned, because it is afraid, because it is seeking security, both outwardly and inwardly and therefore invents something and pursues that, hoping to have security? Another Questioner: At times one has perhaps had intimations of this other thing and those intimations seem to give a drive. Krishnamurti: Yes, one may have an intimation of it, but that isn't good enough for me. I'm going to find out whether it is possible to live without violence, and that is a passionate thing. It is not just an ideological fancy, I really want to find out. Questioner: The trouble is, I don't really feel this question. Krishnamurti: You don't feel it? Questioner: Not enough to reach out, to go towards it. Krishnamurti: Why don't you? Why not? The whole issue of existence is this! Questioner: I think this is a problem for most of us. Krishnamurti: Good God! They are burning, they are destroying, and you say, "I am sorry, it doesn't really interest me!" Questioner (1): If the question of violence interests you, I think you are already assisting the burning and enjoying it. I think if you didn't have violence in yourself, you wouldn't be really interested. Questioner (2): Sir, what is the meaning of the word "violence"? Would you include things such as enthusiasm for something, drive, pep? Would you call these things violence? Krishnamurti: Not what would I call it, Sir - what do you call it? Questioner: I don't know... Krishnamurti: I am not an oracle, let us find out. Let us stick to this question. Is it possible for me to live completely without violence? Questioner: We are caught in a terrible trap. Krishnamurti: We are caught in it; do we remain in it? Questioner: No, but we have a body and a self to preserve. It is very difficult. Krishnamurti: What shall I do? - please, answer my question! To me this is of tremendous importance. The world is burning. Don't say, "My body is weak, this is difficult, it is not possible, I must be a vegetarian, I must not kill." I am asking: is it possible? And to find that out, I must find out what the source of this violence is. Questioner: I think it is being divided. If I am divided I must be violent. I feel I will be destroyed, therefore I am afraid. Krishnamurti: Therefore we accept violence? Questioner: No, but we want to destroy the thing we are afraid of. Krishnamurti: Sir, would you put it this way: if you could find the source, the root of this violence, and if that root could wither away, you might live a totally different kind of life. So, wouldn't it be worthwhile to find out what is the root of it, and whether it can wither away? Questioner: Probably it is connected with fear. Krishnamurti: I am not interested in fear. I want to end violence because I see violence begets violence. This violence is an endless process. You know what is happening in the world. So I ask myself: is it possible to end violence? Before I can answer that question, I must find out what is the root of all these innumerable branches. Another Questioner: But we can't do it by thinking about it. Krishnamurti: We are going to find out. We are going to think about it and see the futility of thought, and then go outwards. But we must exercise our intelligence, our thought. Questioner: So long as I want to do anything, there is violence to a greater or lesser degree. Krishnamurti: I understand this. I just said, look: is it possible to live without violence? And to find that out, there must be an enquiry into the root of it. Questioner: What I am trying to say is, that the whole structure of life as we know it, is wanting to do this, wanting to do that -everything involves violence. Krishnamurti: Of course, Sir, that's agreed. Questioner: Paradoxically, might one consider self- preservation? Krishnamurti: You see, you are all not bringing up the main, fundamental issue. Questioner: Sir,you keep talking about the root, but living in a town, the way life is at the moment, violence in human society is just like the air one has to breathe, it is like a fog that envelops everything. The question about the root of it doesn't spring to my mind. One sees violence in an animal-like way, one knows of people being frightened and behaving in a certain way, but one is only aware of a series of reactions. Krishnamurti: I understand all that, Sir. I am asking you: what is the root of this? Questioner: The self. Krishnamurti: The self! All right. If the "me" is the root of all this, what shall I do? Having discovered the "me" wanting this, not wanting that, the "me" wanting a purpose and running after it, the "me" that resists, that has a battle with itself, if that is the root of violence - which for me is the root - then what shall I do with it? Questioner: You cannot do anything. Krishnamurti: Wait, Sir! Do I accept it? Do I live in this battle, with this violence? Questioner: I feel, Sir, that if you say, "I am violent", you haven't got to the root of the problem. Krishnamurti: No, you haven't. Quite right. Questioner: Because one can go on saying "I am violent" endlessly. Krishnamurti: Agreed. I see the "me" with all its branches is the cause of violence; it is the "me" that separates: you and me, we and they; the Blacks and the Whites, the Arabs and the Israelis, and so on. Questioner: Rationally, you could say: eliminate the "me". Krishnamurti: How is the mind to eliminate its own structure, which is based on the "me"? Sir, do look at the issue. The "me" is the root of all this; the "me" is identified with a particular nation, with a particular community, with a particular ideology or religious fancy. The "me" identifies itself with a certain prejudice, the "me" says "I must fulfil; and when it feels frustrated, there is anger and bitterness. It is the "me" that says, "I must reach my goal, I must be successful", that wants and doesn't want, that says "I must live peacefully", and it is the "me" that gets violent. Questioner: Though it seems to be an entity, to me it is more of an action, or an activity. Is this word not misleading us? Krishnamurti: No, it isn't. It does not mean it is something solid, like the trunk of a tree. It is a movement, it is a living thing. One day it feels marvellous, the next day it is in great depression. One day it is passionate, lustful, the next day it is worn out and says, "Let me have some peace." It is a constantly moving, active thing. How is this movement to transform itself into another movement, without becoming violent? First, let us get the question right. We said: this is a movement, it is a living thing, it is not static, it is not something dead, it is adding to itself all the time, and taking away from itself all the time. This is the "me". And when the "me" says, "I must get rid of the `me'," wanting to have another "me", it is still violent; the "me" that says: "I am a pacifist, I live peacefully", the me that seeks truth, the me that says "I must live beautifully, non-violently", is still the "me" which is the cause of violence. What will the mind do with this living thing? And the mind itself is the "me". Do you understand the question? Any movement on the part of the "me" to get rid of itself, to say "I must wither away", "I must destroy myself", "I must gradually get rid of myself", is still that same movement of the "me", is still the "me" which is the root of violence. Do we realize that? Do we really see that? Not theoretically, but actually realize the truth of it, that any movement of the "me" in any direction, is the action of violence. Do I actually, sensuously, intelligently, see the truth of it, know the feel of it? If the mind does not, it can go on playing with words for ever. Questioner: Does the mind consist only of the "me"? Are they identical? Krishnamurti: When the mind is not occupied with the "me", it is not the "me". But most of us are occupied with the "me", consciously or unconsciously. Questioner: We seem to be able to give up all kinds of thoughts and as the "me" is put together by thought, why can't we discard it? Krishnamurti: No, Sir, it is impossible to discard anything, except perhaps smoking cigarettes. Please, let us stick to this one thing: do I actually see that in the action of the "me", negative or positive, there is a form of violence. It is violence. If I don't see it, why not? What is wrong with my eyesight, with my feeling? Is it that I am afraid what will happen if I see it? Or am I bored with the whole thing? Please, come on, Sirs! Questioner: Sometimes one is carried away, and therefore... Krishnamurti: No, Sir, no. It is not a question of being carried away. Not to be violent - I want to find this out! Another Questioner: We can't rake up the energy to keep the mind on the subject. Krishnamurti: No, Sir. If you say you haven't the energy, the collecting of that energy is again a form of the "me", which says "I must have more energy in order to tackle this". Any movement of the "me", which is thought, conscious or unconscious, is still the "me". Do I really see the truth of this? Questioner: Is there something behind the "me" which in essence is not of thought? Krishnamurti: Do listen to that question; don't say, "We don't know or we do." Is there anything behind the "me" which is not of the me? Questioner: If there is, and we think about it, it is yet again part of the "me". Krishnamurti: Who is putting this question? Surely it is the "me"! Questioner: Why not? Thought is a tool, why not use it? Krishnamurti: No, you can t say "Why not" - it is still the movement of the "me". Questioner: You have asked: do we really see that any movement of the "me" is violence? I think the only reason that we can't see it, is because we reject violence. Krishnamurti: Oh, no. Either you see it or you don't see it. It isn't a question of something that prevents you from seeing. I don't see my affection for my dog, or for my wife, or husband, for the beauty of it is part of me; because I think that is a most marvellous state. Questioner: Sir, by definition you have virtually said that life is violence, movement, change. Krishnamurti: As we live now, life, living, is a form of violence. Questioner: Is life possible without change, without movement? Krishnamurti: That's what we are asking. The life we lead is a life of violence, which is caused by the "me", and we are saying: do we see that any movement of the "me" in any direction, conscious, or unconscious, is a form of violence? If I don't see it, why don't I see it? What is wrong? Questioner: It seems to me it is the "me" that is seeing it. Krishnamurti: Wait. Is it the "me" that sees it? Questioner: Is it intelligence? Krishnamurti: I don't know, you find out! What is it that sees that the "me" is the root of all mischief? Sir, please watch it. Who sees it? Questioner: I don't see it. I'm afraid to give up everything I've ever known. Krishnamurti: So you don't want to see that the "me" is responsible for this hideous mess. Because one says: I don't care if the world goes bust, but I want to have my little corner. Therefore I don't see the "me", the root of all mischief. Questioner: Would you soy there is another "me", other than the thinking process with an object in view? When I think towards something, towards an object, to me this is the "me", and there is no other "me" except that process. Krishnamurti: Obviously. Questioner: But you said it isn't the thing that sees the significance of the question. Krishnamurti: No. We said, this "me" is a living thing, a movement. All the time it is adding to itself and taking away from itself. And this "me", this movement, is the root of all violence. Not only this "me" as something static which invents the soul, which invents God, Heaven and punishment - it is the whole of that. We are asking: does the mind realize that the "me" is the cause of this mischief? The mind - use the word intelligence if you like -which sees the whole map of violence, all the intricacies, sees it by observing, this mind says: that is the root of all evil. So the mind now asks: is it possible to live without the "me"? Questioner: The process of seeing is different from the process of moving in a certain direction towards something. Krishnamurti: Right. The process of seeing is entirely different. It is not a process. I won't use that word. The seeing is seeing now; it is not a process of seeing. Seeing is acting. Now, does the mind see this whole map of violence and the root of it? And what is it that sees? If the "me" sees it, then it is afraid to live differently, then the "me" says "I must protect myself, I must resist this, I am afraid". Therefore the "me" refuses to see the map. But the seeing is not the "me". Questioner: Seeing has no purpose, has it? Krishnamurti: There is no purpose in seeing the map; it just sees. Questioner: But, immediately I say that I see it... Krishnamurti: Wait! Do we realize that the mind which is observing this entire map is entirely different from the "me" which sees it and is afraid to break from it? There are two different observations: the "me" seeing, and "seeing". The "me" seeing must inevitably be afraid, and must therefore resist and say, "How shall I live?" What shall I do? Must I give this up? Must I hold on?" and so on. We said: any movement of the "me" is violence. But there is a mere seeing of the map, which is entirely different. Is this clear? Now, which is it that you are doing? Questioner: The "me" is seeing. Krishnamurti: You say the "me" is seeing - therefore it is afraid. Another Questioner: Of course, it is afraid. Krishnamurti: What will you do, knowing any movement of the "me" is still furthering that fear? Questioner: I don't know. Krishnamurti: Ah! What do you mean by, "You don't know"? Questioner: To me, the "me" is all I know. Krishnamurti: No, Sir, we have made it very clear. Do listen to this. There are two actions of seeing. Seeing the map non-directionally, non-purposively, just seeing, and the "me" seeing -the "me" with its purpose, with its drive, with its directive, with its resistances. It sees and is afraid to do this, or that. Questioner: Are you using the word "see" now in the way in which you normally speak of being aware? Krishnamurti: I am just using the word "seeing" for a change, that's all. Questioner: Sir,you tell me there is a state in which you can see without the "me", but I have never experienced this. Krishnamurti: Do it now, Sir! I am showing it to you! There is the "me" that looks at this whole map of violence and therefore is afraid and resists. And there is another seeing which is not of the "me", which just observes, non-objectively, non-purposively, and says, "I just see it". But this is simple, isn't it? I see you have got a green shirt; I don't say, "I like it" or "I dislike it", I just see it. But the moment I say, "I like it", it is already the "me" saying "I like it; and therefore all the rest of it follows. This is sufficiently clear - verbally at least. Questioner: Could we go into the question of why this looking without the "me" is so very difficult and happens so rarely. Krishnamurti: I don't think it is difficult. Don't say it is difficult; then you are stuck, then you have blocked yourself. Questioner: Could one summarize this by saying that in one case there is a seeing without purpose, and in the other case purpose is involved? Krishnamurti: Yes, that's all. Can I look without direction? When I look with a direction, it is the "me". What is the difficulty in this, may I ask? Another Questioner: Usually we have the illusion that looking, with a direction is looking. Krishnamurti: Looking with a direction is not looking obviously. Questioner: There is a difference between looking and seeing. If one is looking, one is involved. Krishnamurti: Don't let's complicate it. We said: does the mind see the whole map, without any direction? Questioner: The map is selected from both directions. Krishnamurti: No, no. Just look. This whole structure of the "me" is violence; the structure being the way I live, the way I think, the way I feel, my whole reaction to everything is a form of violence which is the "me". That is all in the category of time. The "seeing" has no time - you are seeing it. The moment I see with time there is fear. Questioner: There is seeing, and the thing seen. When once you have seen something is it the old mind that has seen? Krishnamurti: Yes. Now do find out, Sir, how do you see? Do you see non-purposively, or purposively? Do you see in terms of time? That is, do you say, "It is too difficult, it is too complex, what am I to do?" Or do you see without time? If you say, "I don't see it without time," the next question is, "Why? What is the difficulty?" Is it physical blindness, or is it psychological disinclination to look at anything as it is? Is it because we have never looked at anything directly, are always trying to avoid, to escape? Therefore, if we are escaping, let us see that - not try to find out how to resist escape. THE AWAKENING OF INTELLIGENCE PART XI CONVERSATION WITH PROFESSOR DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 7TH OCTOBER 1972 'ON INTELLIGENCE' Professor Bohm: About intelligence, I always like to look up the origin of a word as well as its meaning. It is very interesting; it comes from inter and legere which means "To read between',. So it seems to me that you could say that thought is like the information in a book and that intelligence has to read it, the meaning of it. I think this gives a rather good notion of intelligence. Krishnamurti: To read between the lines. Bohm: Yes, to see what it means. There is also another relevant meaning given in the dictionary which is: mental alertness. Krishnamurti: Yes, mental alertness. Bohm: Well, this is very different from what people have in mind when they measure intelligence. Now, considering many of the things you have said, you would say intelligence is not thought. You say thought takes place in the old brain, it is a physical process, electrochemical; it has been amply proved by science that all thought is essentially a physical, chemical process. Then we could say perhaps that intelligence is not of the same order, it is not of the order of time at all. Krishnamurti: Intelligence. Bohm: Yes, intelligence reads "between the lines" of thought, sees the meaning of it. There is one more point before we start on this question: if you say thought is physical, then the mind or intelligence or whatever you want to call it, seems different, it is of a different order. Would you say there is a real difference between the physical and intelligence? Krishnamurti: Yes. Are we saying that thought is matter? Let us put it differently. Bohm: Matter? I would rather call it a material process. Krishnamurti: All right; thought is a material process, and what is the relationship between that and intelligence? Is intelligence the product of thought? Bohm: I think that we can take for granted that it is not. Krishnamurti: Why do we take it for granted? Bohm: Simply because thought is mechanical. Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical, that is right. Bohm: Intelligence is not. Krishnamurti: So thought is measurable; intelligence is not. And how does it happen that this intelligence comes into existence? If thought has no relationship with intelligence, then is the cessation of thought the awakening of intelligence? Or is it that intelligence, being independent of thought, not of time, therefore exists always? Bohm: That raises many difficult questions. Krishnamurti: I know. Bohm: I would like to put this in a framework of thinking that one could connect with any scientific views that may exist. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: Either to show that it fits or doesn't fit. So you say intelligence may be there always. Krishnamurti: I am asking - is it there always? Bohm: It may or may not be. Or it is possible that something interferes with intelligence? Krishnamurti: You see the Hindus have the theory that intelligence, or Brahman, exists always and is covered over by illusion, by matter, by stupidity, by all kinds of mischievous things created by thought. I don't know if you would go as far as that. Bohm: Well, yes; we don't actually see the eternal existence of intelligence. Krishnamurti: They say peel all this off, that thing is there. So their assumption is that it existed always. Bohm: There is a difficulty in that, in the word "always". Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: Because "always" implies time. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: And that is just the trouble. Time is thought - I would like to put it that thought is of the order of time - or perhaps it is the other way round - that time is of the order of thought. In other words thought has invented time, and in fact thought is time. The way I see it is, that thought may sweep over the whole of time in one moment; but then thought is always changing without noticing that it is changing physically - for physical reasons, that is. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: Not rational reasons. Krishnamurti: No. Bohm: The reasons do not have to do with something total, but they have to do with some physical movement in the brain; therefore... Krishnamurti: ...they depend on environment and all kinds of things. Bohm: So as thought changes with time its meaning is no longer consistent, it becomes contradictory, it changes in an arbitrary way. Krishnamurti: Yes, I'll follow that. Bohm: Then you begin to think, everything is changing, everything changes, and one realizes "I am in time". When time is extended it becomes vast, the past before I was, farther and further back and also forward in the future, so you begin to say time is the essence of all, time conquers everything. First the child may think, "I am eternal; then he begins to understand that he is in time. The general view that we get to is, that time is the essence of existence. This I think is not only the common sense view but also the scientific view. It is very hard to give up such a view because it is an intense conditioning. It is stronger even than the conditioning of the observer and the observed. Krishnamurti: Yes, quite. Are we saying that thought is of time, thought is measurable, thought can change, modify, expand? And intelligence is of a different quality altogether? Bohm: Yes, different order, different quality. And I get an interesting impression of this thought with regard to time. If we think of the past and the future, we think of the past as becoming the future; but you can see that that can't be, that it is just thought. Yet one gets the impression that past and future are present together and there is movement in another way; that the whole pattern is moving. Krishnamurti: The whole pattern is moving. Bohm: But I can't picture how it moves. In some sense it is moving in a perpendicular direction to the direction between past and future. That whole movement - then I begin to think that movement is in another time. Krishnamurti: Quite, quite. Bohm: But that gets you back into the paradox. Krishnamurti: Yes, that is it. Is intelligence out of time and therefore not related to thought, which is a movement of time? Bohm: But thought must be related to it. Krishnamurti: Is it? I am asking. I think it is unrelated. Bohm: Unrelated? But there seems to be some relation in the sense that you distinguish between intelligent thought and unintelligent thought. Krishnamurti: Yes, but that requires intelligence: to recognise unintelligent thought. Bohm: But when intelligence reads thought, what is the relationship? Krishnamurti: Let us go slowly... Bohm: And does thought respond to intelligence? Doesn't thought change? Krishnamurti: Let us be simple. Thought is time. Thought is movement in time. Thought is measurable and thought functions in the field of time, all moving, changing, transforming. Is intelligence within the field of time? Bohm: Well, we've seen that in one sense it can't be. But the thing is not clear. First of all, thought is mechanical. Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical, that is clear. Bohm: Secondly, in some sense there is a movement which is of a different direction. Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical; being mechanical it can move in different directions and all the rest of it. Is intelligence mechanical? Let's put it that way. Bohm: I would like to ask the question, what does mechanicalness mean? Krishnamurti: All right: repetitive, measurable, comparative. Bohm: I would say also dependent. Krishnamurti: Dependent, yes. Bohm: Intelligence - let us get it clear - intelligence cannot be dependent on conditions for its truth. Nevertheless, it seems that in some sense intelligence doesn't operate if the brain is not healthy. Krishnamurti: Obviously. Bohm: In that sense intelligence seems to depend on the brain. Krishnamurti: Or is it the quietness of the brain? Bohm: All right, it depends on the quietness of the brain. Krishnamurti: Not on the activity of the brain. Bohm: There is still some relation between intelligence and the brain. We once discussed this question many years ago, when I raised the idea that in physics you could use a measuring instrument in two ways, the positive and the negative. For example, you can measure an electric current by the swing of the needle in the instrument, or you can use the same instrument in what is called the Wheatstone bridge, where the reading you look for is a null reading; a null reading indicates harmony, balance of the two sides of the whole system as it were. So if you are using the instrument negatively, then the non-movement of the instrument is the sign that it is working right. Could we say the brain may have used thought positively to make an image of the world... Krishnamurti: ...which is the function of thought - one of the functions. Bohm: The other function of thought is negative, which is by its movement to indicate non-harmony. Krishnamurti: Yes, non-harmony. Let us proceed from there. Is intelligence dependent on the brain - have we come to that point? Or when we use the word "dependent" what do we mean by that? Bohm: It has several possible meanings. There may be simple mechanical dependence. But there is another kind: that one can't exist without the other. If I say, "I depend on food to exist", it doesn't mean that everything I think is determined by what I eat. Krishnamurti: Yes, quite. Bohm: So I propose that intelligence depends for its existence on this brain, which can indicate non-harmony, but the brain does not have anything to do with the content of intelligence. Krishnamurti: So if the brain is not harmonious, can intelligence function? Bohm: That is the question. Krishnamurti: That is what we are saving. It cannot function if the brain is hurt. Bohm: If the intelligence doesn't function, is there intelligence? Therefore it seems that intelligence requires the brain in order to exist. Krishnamurti: But the brain is only an instrument. Bohm: Which indicates this harmony or disharmony. Krishnamurti: But it is not the creator of the other. Bohm: No. Krishnamurti: Let us go into this slowly. Bohm: The brain doesn't create intelligence but it is an instrument which helps intelligence to function. That is it. Krishnamurti: That's it. Now if the brain is functioning within the field of time, up and down, negatively, positively, can intelligence operate in that movement of time? Or must that instrument be quiet for the intelligence to operate? Bohm: Yes. I would put it possibly slightly differently. The quietness of the instrument is the operation of intelligence. Krishnamurti: Yes, that is right. The two are not separate. Bohm: They are one and the same. The non-quietness of the instrument is the failure of the intelligence. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: But I think it would be useful to go back into questions which tend to be raised in the whole of scientific and philosophical thinking. We would ask the question: is there some sense in which intelligence exists independently of matter? You see that some people have thought that mind and matter have some separate kind of existence. This is one question that comes up. It may not be relevant, but I think the question should be considered in order to help to make the mind quiet. The consideration of questions that cannot be clearly answered is one of the things that disturbs the mind. Krishnamurti: But you see, Sir, when you say, "Help to make the mind quiet", will thought help the awakening of intelligence? It means that, doesn't it? Thought and matter and the exercise of thought and the movement of thought, or thought saying to itself, "I will be quiet in order to help the awakening of intelligence". Any movement of thought is time, any move- ment, because it is measurable, it is functioning positively or negatively, harmoniously, or disharmoniously, in this field. And realizing that thought may say unconsciously, or unknowingly, that "I would be quiet in order to have this or that", then that is still within the field of time. Bohm: Yes. It is still projecting. Krishnamurti: It is projecting it to capture it. So how does this intelligence take place - not how - when does it awaken? Bohm: Once again the question is in time. Krishnamurti: That is why I don't want to use the words "when", "how". Bohm: You might perhaps say the condition for it to awaken is the non-operation of thought. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: But that is the same as the awakening, it is not merely the condition. You can't even ask if there are conditions for intelligence to awaken. Even to talk about a condition is a form of thought. Krishnamurti: Yes. Let us agree, any movement of thought in any direction, vertical, horizontal, in action or non-action, is still in time - any movement of thought. Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: Then what is the relationship of that movement to this intelligence which is not a movement, which is not of time, which is not the product of thought? Where can the two meet? Bohm: They don't meet. But there is still a relation. Krishnamurti: That is what we are trying to find out. Is there any relationship at all, first? One thinks there is a relationship, one hopes there is a relationship, one projects a relationship. Is there a relationship at all? Bohm: That depends what you mean by relationship? Krishnamurti: Relationship: being in contact with, recognition, a feeling of being in touch with. Bohm: Well, the word relationship might mean something else. Krishnamurti:What other meaning has it? Bohm: For example there is a parallel, isn't there? The harmony of the two. That is, two things may be related without contact, but by simply being in harmony. Krishnamurti: Does harmony mean a movement of both in the same direction? Bohm: It might also mean in some way keeping in the same order. Krishnamurti: In the same order: same direction, same depth, same intensity - all that is harmony. But can thought ever be harmonious? - thought as movement, not static thought. Bohm: I understand. There is that thought which you abstract as static, in geometry let us say, that may have some harmony; but thought as it actually moves is always contradictory. Krishnamurti: Therefore it has no harmony in itself. But intelligence has harmony in itself. Bohm: I think I see the source of the confusion. We have the static products of thought that seem to have a certain relative harmony. But that harmony is really the result of intelligence, at least it seems so to me. In mathematics we may get a certain relative harmony of the product of thought, even though the actual movement of thought of a mathematician is not necessarily in harmony, generally won't be in harmony. Now that harmony which appears in mathematics is the result of intelligence, isn't it? Krishnamurti: Proceed, Sir. Bohm: It is not perfect harmony because every form of mathematics has been proved to have some limit; that is why I call it only relative. Krishnamurti: Yes. Now, in the movement of thought is there harmony? If there is, then it has relationship with intelligence. If there is no harmony but contradictions and all the rest of it, then thought has no relationship with the other. Bohm: Then would you say that we could do entirely without thought? Krishnamurti: I would put it round the other way. Intelligence uses thought. Bohm: All right. But how can it use something which is disharmonious? Krishnamurti: Expression, communication, using thought which is contradictory, which is not harmonious, to create things in the world. Bohm: But still, there must be harmony in some other sense, in what is done with thought, in what we have just described. Krishnamurti: Let us go slowly in this. Can we first put into words, negatively or positively, what is intelligence, what is not intelligence? Or is that impossible because words are thought, time, measure and so on? Bohm: We can't put it in words. We are trying to point. Can we say that thought can function as the pointer to intelligence, and then its contradiction doesn't matter. Krishnamurti: That is right. That is right. Bohm: Because we are not using it for its content, or its meaning, but rather as a pointer which points beyond the domain of time. Krishnamurti: So thought is a pointer. The content is intelligence. Bohm: The content which it points to. Krishnamurti: Yes. Can we put this thing entirely differently? May we say, thought is barren? Bohm: Yes. When it moves by itself, yes. Krishnamurti: Which is mechanical and all the rest of it. Thought is a pointer, but without intelligence the pointer has no value. Bohm: Could we say that intelligence reads the pointer? If the pointer has nobody to see it then the pointer doesn't point. Krishnamurti: Quite. So intelligence is necessary. Without it thought has no meaning at all. Bohm: But could we now say: that if thought is not intelligent it points in a very confused way? Krishnamurti: Yes, in an irrelevant way. Bohm: Irrelevant, meaningless and so on. Then with intelligence it begins to point in another way. But then somehow thought and intelligence seem to fuse in a common function. Krishnamurti: Yes. So we can ask: what is action in relationship to intelligence? Right? Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: What is action in relation to intelligence, and in the carrying out of that action is thought necessary? Bohm: Yes; well, thought is necessary and this thought points obviously towards matter. But it seems to point both ways - back towards intelligence as well. One of the questions which always comes up is: should we say that intelligence and matter are merely a distinction within the same thing, or are they different? Are they really separate? Krishnamurti: I think they are separate, they are distinct. Bohm: They are distinct, but are they actually separate? Krishnamurti: What do you mean by the word "separate"? Not related, not connected, with no common source? Bohm: Yes. Do they have a common source? Krishnamurti: That is just it. Thought, matter and intelligence, have they a common source? (Long pause.) I think they have. Bohm: Otherwise there could be no harmony, of course. Krishnamurti: But you see thought has conquered the world. You understand? - conquered. Bohm: Dominates the world. Krishnamurti: Thought, the intellect, dominates the world. And therefore intelligence has very little place here. When one thing dominates, the other must be subservient. Bohm: One asks, I don't know if it is relevant, how that came about. Krishnamurti: That is fairly simple. Bohm: What would you say? Krishnamurti: Thought must have security; it is seeking security in all its movement. Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: But intelligence is not seeking security. It has no security. The idea of security doesn't exist in intelligence. Intelligence itself is secure, not, "It seeks security." Bohm: Yes, but how did it come about that intelligence allowed itself to be dominated? Krishnamurti: Oh, that is fairly clear. Pleasure, comfort, physical security, first of all physical security: security in relationship, security in action, security... Bohm: But that is the illusion of security. Krishnamurti: Illusion of security, of course. Bohm: You could say that thought got out of hand and ceased to allow itself to be orderly, ordered in general by intelligence, or at least to stay in harmony with intelligence, and began to move on its own accord. Krishnamurti: On its own accord. Bohm: Seeking security and pleasure and so on. Krishnamurti: As we were saying the other day when we were talking together, the whole Western world is based on measure; and the Eastern world tried to go beyond that. But they used thought to go beyond it. Bohm: Tried to anyway. Krishnamurti: Tried to go beyond the measure by exercising thought; therefore they were caught in thought. Now security, physical security, is necessary and therefore physical existence, physical pleasures, physical well-being became tremendously important. Bohm: Yes, I was thinking about that a little. If you go back to the animal, then there is instinctive response towards pleasure and towards security: that would be right. But now when thought comes in, it can dazzle the instinct and produce all sorts of glamour, more pleasure, more security. And the instincts are not intelligent enough to deal with the complexity of thought, therefore thought went wrong, because it excited the instincts and the instincts demanded more. Krishnamurti: So thought really created a world of illusion, miasma, confusion, and put away intelligence. Bohm: Well, as we said before, that has made the brain very chaotic and noisy and intelligence is the silence of the brain; therefore the noisy brain is not intelligent. Krishnamurti: The noisy brain is not intelligent, of course! Bohm: Well that more or less explains the origin of the thing. Krishnamurti: We are trying to find out what is the relationship, in action, of thought and intelligence. Everything is action or inaction. And what is the relationship of that to intelligence? Thought does produce chaotic action, fragmentary action. Bohm: When it is not ordered by intelligence. Krishnamurti: And it is not ordered by intelligence in the way we all live. Bohm: That is because of what we have just said. Krishnamurti: It is fragmented activity; it is not an activity of a wholeness. The activity of wholeness is intelligence. Bohm: Intelligence also has to understand the activity of thought. Krishnamurti: Yes, we said that. Bohm: Now would you say that when intelligence understands the activity of thought, then thought is different in its operation? Krishnamurti: Yes, obviously. That is, if thought has created nationalism as a means of security and then one sees the fallacy of it, the seeing of the fallacy of it is intelligence. Thought then creates a different kind of world in which nationalism doesn't exist. Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: And also division, war, conflict and all the rest. Bohm: That is very clear. Intelligence sees the falseness of what is going on. When thought is free of this falseness it is different. Then it begins to be a parallel to intelligence. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: That is, it begins to carry out the implication of intelligence. Krishnamurti: Therefore thought has a place. Bohm: That is very interesting because thought is never actually controlled or dominated by intelligence, thought always moves on its own. But in the light of intelligence, when the falseness is seen, then thought moves parallel or in harmony with intelligence. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: But there is never anything that forces thought to do anything. That would suggest that intelligence and thought have this common origin or substance, and that they are two ways of calling attention to a greater whole. Krishnamurti: Yes. One can see how politically, religiously, psychologically, thought has created a world of tremendous contradiction, fragmentation, and the intelligence that is the product of this confusion then tries to bring order in this confusion. It is not that intelligence which sees the falseness of all this. I don't know if I am making myself clear. You see, one can be terribly intelligent although one is chaotic. Bohm: Well, in some ways. Krishnamurti: That is what is happening in the world. Bohm: But I suppose it is rather hard to understand that at this moment. You could say that in some limited sphere it seems that intelligence is able to operate, but outside it doesn't. Krishnamurti: We are, after all, concerned with living, not with theories. One is concerned with a life in which intelligence operates. Intelligence which is not of time, which is not of measure, which is not the product or the movement of thought, or of the order of thought. Now a human being wants to live a different kind of life. He is dominated by thought, his thought is always functioning in measurement, in comparison, in conflict. He asks, "How am I to be free of all this in order to be intelligent?" "How can the `me', how can `I' be the instrument of this intelligence?" Bohm: Obviously it can't be. Krishnamurti: That is just it! Bohm: Because this thought in time is the essence of unintelligence. Krishnamurti: But one is thinking in terms of that all the time. Bohm: Yes. That is thought projecting some sort of phantasy of what intelligence is, and trying to achieve it. Krishnamurti: Therefore I would say that thought must be completely still for the awakening of intelligence. There can't be a movement of thought and yet the awakening of that. Bohm: That is clear on one level. We consider thought to be actually mechanical and this may be seen on one level - but still the mechanism continues. Krishnamurti: Continues, yes... Bohm: ...through instincts and pleasure and fear and so on. The intelligence has to come to grips with this question of the pleasures, the fears, the desires, which make thought continue. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: And you see there is always a trap: this is our concept or image of it, which is partial. Krishnamurti: So as a human being I would be concerned only with this central issue. I know how confused, contradictory, disharmonious one's life is. Is it possible to change that so that intelligence can function in my life, so that I live without disharmony, so that the pointer, the direction is guided by intelligence? That is perhaps why the religious people, instead of using the word intelligence, have used the word God. Bohm: What is the advantage of that? Krishnamurti: I don't know what the advantage is. Bohm: But why use such a word? Krishnamurti: It came from primitive fear, fear of nature, and gradually out of that grew the idea that there is a super-father. Bohm: But that is still thought functioning on its own, without intelligence. Krishnamurti: Of course. I am just recalling that. They said trust God, have faith in God, then God will operate through you. Bohm: God is perhaps a metaphor for intelligence - but people didn't generally take it as a metaphor. Krishnamurti: Of course not, it is a terrific image. Bohm: Yes. You could say that if God means that which is immeasurable, beyond thought... Krishnamurti:... it is unnameable, it is immeasurable, therefore don't have an image. Bohm: Then that will operate within the measurable. Krishnamurti: Yes. What I am trying to convey is, that the desire for this intelligence, through time, has created this image of God. And through the image of God, Jesus, Krishna, or whatever it is, by having faith in that - which is still the movement of thought -one hopes that there will be harmony in one's life. Bohm: And this sort of image because it is so total produces an overriding desire, urge; that is, it overrides rationality... everything. Krishnamurti: You heard the other day what the archbishops and bishops were saying, that only Jesus matters, nothing else matters. Bohm: But it is the same movement whereby pleasure overrides rationality. Krishnamurti: Fear and pleasure. Bohm: They override; no proportion can be established. Krishnamurti: Yes, what I am trying to say is: you see the whole world is conditioned this way. Bohm: Yes, but the question is what you have hinted at: what is this world which is conditioned this way? If we take this world as existing independently of thought, then we have fallen into the same trap. Krishnamurti: Of course, of course. Bohm: That is, the whole conditional world is the result of this way of thinking, it is both the cause and the effect of this way of thinking. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: And this way of thinking is disharmony and chaos and unintelligence and so on. Krishnamurti: I was listening to the Labour Party Conference at Blackpool - how clever, some of them very serious, double talk and all that, thinking in terms of Labour party and Conservative Party. They don't say, "Let all of us get together and see what is the best thing for human beings." Bohm: They are not capable. Krishnamurti: That is it, but they are exercising their intelligence! Bohm: Well, in that limited framework. That is what our trouble has always been; people have developed technology and other things in terms of some limited intelligence, which is serving highly unintelligent purposes. Krishnamurti: Yes, that is just it. Bohm: For thousands of years that has been going on. Then of course the reactions arise: the problems are much too big, too vast. Krishnamurti: But it is really very simple, extraordinarily simple, this sense of harmony. Because it is so simple it can function in the most complex field. Krishnamurti: Let us go back. We said the source is common to both thought and intelligence... Bohm: Yes, we got that far. Krishnamurti: What is that source? It is generally attributed to some philosophical concept, or they say that source is God - I am just using that word for the moment - or Brahman. That source is common, is the central movement which divides itself into matter and intelligence. But that is just a verbal statement, it is just an idea, which is still thought. You can't find it through thought. Bohm: That raises the question: if you find it then what are "you"? Krishnamurti: "You" don't exist. "You" can't exist when you are asking what is the source. "You" are time, movement, environmental conditioning - you are all that. Bohm: In that question the whole of this division is put aside. Krishnamurti: Absolutely. That is the point, isn't it? Bohm: There is no time... Krishnamurti: Yet we still say, "I am not going to exercise thought." When the "me" enters it means division: so understanding the whole of this - what we have been talking about - I put away the "me" altogether. Bohm: But that sounds like a contradiction. Krishnamurti: I know. I can't put it away. It takes place. Then what is the source? Can it ever be named? For instance the Jewish religious feeling is that it is not nameable: you don't name it, you can't talk about it, you can't touch it. You can only look. And the Hindus and others say the same thing in a different way. The Christians have trapped themselves up over this word Jesus, this image, they have never gone to the source of it. Bohm: That is a complex question; it may be that they were trying to synthesize several philosophies, Hebrew, Greek, and Oriental. Krishnamurti: Now I want to get at this: what is the source? Can thought find it? And yet thought is born from that source; and also intelligence. It is like two streams moving in different directions. Bohm: Would you say matter is also born from that source more generally? Krishnamurti: Of course. Bohm: I mean the whole universe. But then the source is beyond the universe. Krishnamurti: Of course. Could we put it this way? Thought is energy, so is intelligence. Bohm: So is matter. Krishnamurti: Thought, matter, the mechanical, is energy. Intelligence is also energy. Thought is confused, polluted, dividing itself, fragmenting itself. Bohm: Yes, it is multiple. Krishnamurti: And the other is not. It is not polluted. It cannot divide itself as "my intelligence" and "your intelligence". It is intelligence, it is not divisible. Now it has sprung from a source of energy which has divided itself. Bohm: Why has it divided itself? Krishnamurti: For physical reasons, for comfort... Bohm: To maintain physical existence. So a part of intelligence has been changed in such a way as to help to maintain physical existence. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: It has developed in a certain way. Krishnamurti: And gone on in that way. Both are energy. There is only one energy. Bohm: Yes, they are different forms of energy. There are many analogies to this, although it is on a much more limited scale. In physics you could say light is ordinarily a very complex wave motion, but in the laser it can be made to move all together in a very simple and harmonious way. Krishnamurti: Yes. I was reading about the laser. What monstrous things they are going to do with it. Bohm: Yes, using it destructively. Thought may get something good but then it always gets used in a broader way that is destructive. Krishnamurti: So there is only energy, which is the source. Bohm: Would you say energy is a kind of movement? Krishnamurti: No, it is energy. The moment it is a movement it goes off into this field of thought. Bohm: We have to clarify this notion of energy. I have also looked up this word. You see, it is based on the notion of work; energy means, "To work within." Krishnamurti: Work within, yes. Bohm: But now you say there is an energy which works, but no movement. Krishnamurti: Yes. I was thinking about this yesterday - not thinking - I realized the source is there, uncontaminated, non-movement, untouched by thought, it is there. From that these two are born. Why are they born at all? Bohm: One was necessary for survival. Krishnamurti: That is all. In survival this - in its totality, in its wholeness - has been denied, or put aside. What I am trying to get at is this, Sir. I want to find out, as a human being living in this world with all the chaos and suffering, can the human mind touch that source in which the two divisions don't exist? - and because it has touched this source, which has no divisions, it can operate without the sense of division. I don't know if I am conveying this? Bohm: But how is it possible for the human mind not to touch the source? Why does it not touch the source? Krishnamurti: Because we are consumed by thought, by the cleverness of thought, by the movement of thought. All their gods, their meditations - everything is that. Bohm: Yes. I think this brings us to the question of life and death. This relates to survival; because that is one of the things that gets in the way. Krishnamurti: Thought and its field of security, its desire for security, has created death as something separate from itself. Bohm: Yes, that may be the key point. Krishnamurti: It is. Bohm: You can look at it this way. Thought has constructed itself as an instrument for survival. Now therefore... Krishnamurti: ...it has created immortality in Jesus, or in this or that. Bohm: Thought cannot possibly contemplate its own death. So if it tries to do so, it always projects something else, some other broader point of view from which it seems to look at it. If anybody tries to imagine that he is dead, then he is still imagining that he is alive and looking at himself as dead. You can always complicate this in all sorts of religious notions; but it seems to be built into thought that it cannot possibly consider death properly. Krishnamurti: It cannot. It means ending itself. Bohm: That is very interesting. Suppose we take the death of the body, which we see outwardly; the organism dies, it loses its energy and therefore it falls apart. Krishnamurti: It is really that the body is the instrument of the energy. Bohm: So let us say the energy ceases to imbue the body and therefore the body no longer has any wholeness. You could say that with thought also; the energy in some ways goes to thought, as to the body - is that so? Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: You and other people have often used the phrase: "The F mind dies to the whole of thought." That way of putting it is puzzling at first, because you would think it was thought that should die. Krishnamurti: Quite, quite. Bohm: But now you are saying that it is the mind that dies, or the energy that dies to thought. The nearest I can see to what that means is, that when thought is working it is invested with a certain energy by the mind or the intelligence; and when thought is no longer relevant, then the energy goes and thought, as to the body-is that so? Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: Now it is very hard for the mind to accept this. The comparison between thought and the organism seems so poor, because thought is insubstantial and the organism is substantial. So the death of the organism appears to be something far more than the death of thought. Now this is a point that is not clear. Would you say that in the death of thought we have the essence of the death of the organism as well? Krishnamurti: Obviously. Bohm: Although it is on a small scale, as it were, it is of the same nature? Krishnamurti: As we said, there is energy in both, and thought in its movement is of this energy, and thought cannot see itself die. Bohm: It has no way of imagining, or projecting, or conceiving its own death. Krishnamurti: Therefore it escapes from death. Bohm: Well, it gives itself the illusion. Krishnamurti: Illusion of course. And it has created the illusion of immortality or a state beyond death, a projection of its own desire for its own continuity. Bohm: Well, that is one thing, that thought may have begun by desiring the continuity of the organism. Krishnamurti: Yes, that is right, and then gone on beyond it. Bohm: Gone beyond that, to desire its own continuity. That was the mistake, that was where it went wrong. It regarded itself as an extension, not merely an extension, but the essence of the organism. At first thought is functioning merely in the organism and then thought begins to present itself as the essence of the organism. Krishnamurti: That's right. Bohm: Then thought begins to desire its own immortality. Krishnamurti: And thought itself knows, is very well aware that it is not immortal. Bohm: It knows it only outwardly, though. I mean, it knows it as an outward fact. Krishnamurti: Therefore it creates immortality in pictures, images. Krishnamurti: I listen to all this as an outsider and I say to myself, "This is perfectly true, so clear, logical, sane; we see it very clearly, both psychologically and physically." Now my question, observing all this, is: can the mind keep the purity of the original source? The original pristine clarity of that energy which is not touched by the corruption of thought? I don't know if I am conveying it? Bohm: The question is clear. Krishnamurti: Can the mind do it? Can the mind ever discover that? Bohm: What is the mind? Krishnamurti: The mind, as we now say, or organism, thought, the brain with all its memories, experiences and all that, which is all of time. And the mind says, "Can I come to this?" It cannot. Then I say to myself, "As it cannot, I will be quiet." You see the tricks it has played. Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: I will learn how to be quiet; I will learn how to meditate in order to be quiet. I see the importance of having a mind that is free of time, free of the mechanism of thought, I will control it, subjugate it, put away thought. But it is still the operation of thought. That is very clear. Then what is it to do? Because a human being lives in this disharmony, he must enquire into this. And that is what we are doing. As we begin to enquire into it, or in enquiring, we come to this source. Is it a perception, an insight, and has that insight nothing whatsoever to do with thought? Is insight the result of thought? The conclusion of an insight is thought, but insight itself is not thought. So I have got a key to it. Then what is insight? Can I invite it, cultivate it? Bohm: You can't do any of that. But there is a kind of energy that is needed. Krishnamurti: That is just it. I can't do any of that. When I cultivate it, it is desire. When I say I will do this or that, it is the same. So insight is not the product of thought. It is not in the order of thought. Now, how does one come upon this insight? (Pause) We have come upon it because we denied all that. Bohm: Yes, it is there. You can never answer that question, how you come upon anything. Krishnamurti: No. I think it is fairly clear, Sir. You come upon it when you see the whole thing. So insight is the perception of the whole. A fragment cannot see this, but the "I" sees the fragments and the "I" seeing the fragments sees the whole, and the quality of a mind that sees the whole is not touched by thought; therefore there is perception, there is insight. Bohm: Perhaps we will go over that more slowly. We see all the fragments: could we say the actual energy, activity, which sees those fragments is whole? Krishnamurti: Yes, yes. Bohm: We don't manage ever to see the whole because... Krishnamurti: ...we are educated - and all the rest of it. Bohm: But I mean, we wouldn't anyway see the whole as something. Rather, wholeness is freedom in seeing all the fragments. Krishnamurti: That is right. Freedom to see. The freedom doesn't exist when there are fragments. Bohm: That makes a paradox. Krishnamurti: Of course. Bohm: But the whole does not start from the fragments. Once the whole operates then there are no fragments. So the paradox comes from supposing that the fragments are real, that they exist independently of thought. Then you would say, I suppose, that the fragments are there with me in my thoughts, and then I must somehow do something about them - that would be a paradox. The whole starts from the insight that these fragments are in a way nothing. That is the way it seems to me. They are not substantial. They are very insubstantial. Krishnamurti: Insubstantial, yes. Bohm: And therefore they don't prevent wholeness. Krishnamurti: Quite. Bohm: You see, one of the things that often causes confusion is that, when you put it in terms of thought, it seems that you are presented with the fragments that are real, substantial reality. Then you have to see them, and nevertheless you say, as long as the fragments are there, there is no wholeness so that you can't see them. But that all comes back to the one thing, the one source. Krishnamurti: I am sure, Sir, really serious people have asked this question. They have asked it and tried to find an answer through thought. Bohm: Yes, well it seems natural. Krishnamurti: And they never saw that they were caught in thought. Bohm: That is always the trouble. Everybody gets into this trouble: that he seems to be looking at everything, at his problems, saying, "Those are my problems, I am looking." But that looking is only thinking, but it is confused with looking. This is one of the confusions that arises. If you say, don't think but look, that person feels he is already looking. Krishnamurti: Quite. So you see, this question has arisen and they say, "All right, then I must control thought, I must subjugate thought and I must make my mind quiet so that it becomes whole, then I can see the parts, all the fragments, then I'll touch the source." But it is still the operation of thought all the time. Bohm: Yes, that means the operation of thought is unconscious for the most part and therefore one doesn't know it is going on. We may say consciously we have realized that all this has to be changed, it has to be different. Krishnamurti: But it is still going on unconsciously. So can you talk to my unconscious, knowing my conscious brain is going to resist you? Because you are telling me something which is revolutionary, you are telling me something which shatters my whole house which I have built so carefully, and I won't listen to you - you follow? In my instinctive reactions I push you away. So you realize that and say, "Look, all right, old friend, just don't bother to listen to me. I am going to talk to your unconscious. I am going to talk to your unconscious and make that unconscious see that whatever movement it does is still within the field of time and so on." So your conscious mind is never in operation. When it operates it must inevitably either resist, or say, "I will accept; therefore it creates a conflict in itself. So can you talk to my unconscious? Bohm: You can always ask how. Krishnamurti: No, no. You can say to a friend, "Don't resist, don't think about it, but I am going to talk to you." "We two are communicating with each other without the conscious mind listening." Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: I think this is what really takes place. When you were talking to me - I was noticing it - I was not listening to your words so much. I was listening to you. I was open to you, not to your words, as you explained and so on. I said to myself, all right, leave all that, I am listening to you, not to the words which you use, but to the meaning, to the inward quality of your feeling that you want to communicate to me. Bohm: I understand. Krishnamurti: That changes me, not all this verbalization. So can you talk to me about my idiocies, my illusions, my peculiar tendencies, without the conscious mind interfering and saying, "Please don't touch all this, leave me alone!" They have tried subliminal propaganda in advertising, so that whilst you don't really pay attention, your unconscious does, so you buy that particular soap! We are not doing that, it would be deadly. What I am saying is: don't listen to me with your conscious ears but listen to me with the ears that hear much deeper. That is how I listened to you this morning because I am terribly interested in the source, as you are. You follow, Sir? I am really interested in that one thing. All this is the explicable, easily understood - but to come to that thing together, feel it together! You follow? I think that is the way to break a conditioning, a habit, an image which has been cultivated. You talk about it at a level where the conscious mind is not totally interested. It sounds silly, but you understand what I mean? Say for instance I have a conditioning; you can point it out a dozen times, argue, show the fallacy of it, the stupidity - but I still go on. I resist, I say what it should be, what shall I do in this world otherwise, and all the rest of it. But you see the truth, that as long as the mind is conditioned there must be conflict. So you penetrate or push aside my resistance and get to that, get the unconscious to listen to you, because the unconscious is much more subtle, much quicker. It may be frightened, but it sees the danger of fear much quicker than the conscious mind does. As when I was walking in California high in the mountains: I was looking at birds and trees and watching, and I heard a rattler and I jumped. It was the unconscious that made the body jump; I saw the rattler when I jumped, it was two or three feet away, it could have struck me very easily. If the conscious brain had been operating it would have taken several seconds. Bohm: To reach the unconscious you have to have an action which doesn't directly appeal to the conscious. Krishnamurti: Yes. That is affection, that is love. When you talk to my waking consciousness, it is hard, clever, subtle, brittle. And you penetrate that, penetrate it with your look, with your affection, with all the feeling you have. That operates, not anything else. J. KRISHNAMURTI AND PROFESSOR J. NEEDLEMAN MALIBU, CALIFORNIA 1ST CONVERSATION 26TH MARCH 1971 Needleman: Well, I'll repeat the first question that I wanted to put to you: there is much talk of a spiritual revolution among young people, particularly here in California. Do you see in this very mixed phenomenon any hope of a new flowering for modern civilization, a new possibility of growth? Krishnamurti: For a new possibility of growth, don't you think, sir, that one has to be rather serious, and not merely jump from one spectacular amusement to another? Or if one is not creative in the sense that one has looked at all the religions of the world and seen their organized futility, and out of that perception they themselves see something real and clear, perhaps then there could be something new in California, or in the world. But as far as I have seen, I am afraid there is not a quality of seriousness in all this. I may be mistaken, because I see only these so-called young people in the distance, among the audience, and I see them occasionally here; and by their questions, by their laughter, by their applause, they don't strike me as being very serious, mature, with great intent. I may be mistaken, naturally. Needleman: I understand what you are saying. My question only is: perhaps we can't very well expect young people to be serious. Krishnamurti: That is why I don't think it is applicable to the young people. I don't know why one has made such an extraordinary thing out of young people, why it has become such an important thing. In a few years they will be the old people in their turn. Needleman: Well, it seems as a surface phenomenon, aside from what is underneath it all, this interest in the religious, or in transcending experience - or whatever one wants to call it - seems to be on the surface a kind of seed-ground from which certain unusual people, certain Masters perhaps, aside from all the phoneyness and all the deceivers, may spring up. Krishnamurti: But I am not sure, sir, that all the deceivers and exploiters are not covering this up. 'Krishna-consciousness' and Transcendental Meditation and all this nonsense that is going on -they are caught in all that. It is a form of exhibitionism, a form of amusement and entertainment. For something new to take place there must be a nucleus of really devoted, grave, serious people, who go through to the very end of it. After going through all these things, they say, "Here is something I am going to pursue". Needleman: A serious person would be someone who would have to become disillusioned with everything else. Krishnamurti: I would not call disillusionment a form of seriousness. Needleman: But a precondition for it? Krishnamurti: No, I wouldn't call it disillusionment at all, that leads to despair and cynicism. I mean the examination of all the things that are so-called religious, so-called spiritual: to examine, to find out what is the truth in all this, if there is any truth in it. Or to discard the whole thing and start anew, and not go through all the trappings, all the mess of it. Needleman: I think that is what I tried to say, but this expresses it better. People who have tried something and it has failed for them. Krishnamurti: Not 'other people'. I mean one has to discard all this, all the promises, all the experiences, all the mystical assertions. I think one has to start as though one knew absolutely nothing. Needleman: That is very hard. Krishnamurti: No, sir, I don't think that is hard. I think it is hard only for those people who have filled themselves with other people's knowledge. Needleman: Isn't that most of us? I was speaking to my class yesterday at San Francisco State, and I said I was going to interview Krishnamurti and what question would you like me to ask him. They had many questions, but the one that touched me most was what one young man said: "I have read his books over and over again and I can't do what he says." There was something so clear about that, it rang a bell. It seems in a certain subtle sense to begin in this way. To be a beginner, fresh! Krishnamurti: I don't think that we question enough. Do you know what I mean? Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: We accept, we are gullible, we are greedy for new experiences. And so anybody with a beard, or no beard, with a promise, saying you will have a marvellous experience if you do certain things, people swallow it! I think one has to say: "I know nothing." Obviously I can't rely on others and I am going to find out. If there were no books, no gurus, what would you do? Needleman: But one is so easily deceived. Krishnamurti: You are deceived when you want something. Needleman: Yes, I understand that. Krishnamurti: So you say, I am going to find out, I am going to enquire step by step. I don't want to deceive myself. Deception arises when I want, or I am greedy, when I say, "All experience is shallow; I want something mysterious" - then I am caught. Needleman: To me you are speaking about a state, an attitude, an approach, which is itself very far along in understanding for a man. I feel very far from that myself, and I know my students do. And so they feel, rightly or wrongly, a need for help. They probably misunderstand what help is, but is there such a thing as help? Krishnamurti: Would you say: "Why do you ask for help?" Needleman: Let me put it in a stupid way. You sort of smell yourself deceiving yourself, you don't exactly know... Krishnamurti: It is fairly simple. I don't want to deceive myself - right? So I find out what is the movement that brings deception, what is the thing that brings deception. Obviously it is when I am greedy, when I want something, when I am dissatisfied. So instead of attacking dissatisfaction, wanting, greed, I want something more. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: So I have to understand my greed. What am I greedy for? Is it because I am fed up with this world, I have had cars, I have had women, I have had money and I want something more? Needleman: I think one is greedy because one desires stimulation, to be taken out of oneself, so that one doesn't see the poverty of oneself. But what I am trying to ask - I know you have answered this question many times in your talks, but it keeps recurring, almost unavoidably - the great traditions of the world, aside from what has become of them (they have become distorted and misinterpreted and full of deceptions) always speak directly or indirectly of help. And always say "The guru is yourself too", but at the same time there is help. Krishnamurti: Sir, you know what that word 'guru' means? Needleman: No, not exactly. Krishnamurti: The one who points. That is one meaning. Another meaning is the one who brings enlightenment, lifts your burden. But instead of lifting your burden they impose their burden on you. Needleman: I am afraid so. Krishnamurti: Guru also means one who helps you to cross over, and so on, there are various meanings. The moment the guru says he knows, then you may be sure he doesn't know. Because what he knows is something past, obviously. Knowledge is the past. And when he says he knows, he is thinking of some experience which he has had, which he has been able to recognize as something great, and that recognition is born out of his previous knowledge, otherwise he couldn't recognize it, and therefore his experience has its roots in the past. Therefore it is not real. Needleman: Well, I think that most knowledge is that. Krishnamurti: Therefore why do we want any form of ancient or modern tradition in all this? Look, sir, I don't read any books, no religious, philosophical, psychological books: one can go into oneself at tremendous depths and find out everything. To go into oneself is the problem, how to do it. Not being able to do it one says, please, help me. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: And the other fellow says, "I'll help you" and pushes you off somewhere else. Needleman: Well, it sort of answers the question. I was reading a book the other day which spoke of something called 'Sat-san'. Krishnamurti: Do you know what it means? Needleman: Association with the wise. Krishnamurti: No, with good people. Needleman: With good people, Ah! Krishnamurti: Being good you are wise. Not, being wise you are good. Needleman: I understand that. Krishnamurti: Because you are good, you are wise. Needleman: I am not trying to pin this down to something, but I find my students and I myself, speaking for myself, when we read, when we hear you, we say, "Ah! I need no one, I need to be with no one", and there is a tremendous deception in this, I think too. Krishnamurti: Naturally, because you are being influenced by the speaker. Needleman: Yes. That is true. Krishnamurti: Sir, look, let's be very simple. Suppose, if there were no book, no guru, no teacher, what would you do? One is in turmoil, mess, confusion, agony, what would you do? And nobody to help you, no drugs, no tranquilizers, no organized religions, and all the rest of that nonsense, what would you do? Needleman: I can't imagine what I would do. Krishnamurti: That's it. Needleman: Perhaps there would be a moment of urgency there. Krishnamurti: That's just it. We haven't the urgency because we say, "Well, somebody is going to help me." Needleman: But most people would be driven insane by that situation. Krishnamurti: I am not sure, sir. Needleman: I'm not sure either. Krishnamurti: No, I am not at all sure. Because what have we done up to now? The people on whom we have relied, the religions, the churches, the rituals, education, they have led us to this awful mess. We aren't free of sorrow, we aren't free of our beastliness, our ugliness, our vanities. Needleman: Can one say that of all of them? There are differences. For every thousand deceivers there is one Buddha. Krishnamurti: But that is not my concern, sir, if we say that it leads to such deception. I can't understand what you are saying but I want to help those who - etc., etc. No, no. Needleman: Then let me ask you this. We know that without hard work the body may get ill, and this hard work is what we call effort. Is there another hard work which is necessary for what we might call the spirit? You speak against effort, but does not the growth and well-being of all sides of man demand something like hard work of one sort or another? Krishnamurti: I wonder what you mean by hard work! Physical hard work? Needleman: That is what we usually mean by hard work. Or going against desires. Krishnamurti: You see, there we are! Our conditioning, our culture, is built around this 'going against', erecting a wall of resistance. So when we say 'hard work', what do we mean? Laziness? Why have I to make an effort about anything? Why? Needleman: Because I wish for something. Krishnamurti: No. Why is there this cult of effort? Why have I to make effort to reach God, enlightenment, truth? Needleman: There are many possible answers, but I can only answer for myself. Krishnamurti: It may be just there, only I don't know how to look. Needleman: But then there must be am obstacle. Krishnamurti: How to look! It may be just round the comer, under the flower, it may be anywhere. So first I have to learn to look, not make an effort to look. I must find out what it means to look. Needleman: Yes, but don't you admit that there may be a resistance to that looking? Krishnamurti: Then don't bother to look! If somebody comes along and says, "I don't want to look", how are you going to force him to look? Needleman: No. I am speaking about myself now. I want to look. Krishnamurti: If you want to look, what do you mean by looking? You must find out what it means to look before you make an effort to look. Right, sir? Needleman: That would be, to me, an effort. Krishnamurti: No. Needleman: To do it in that delicate, subtle way. I wish to look, but I don't wish to find out what it means to look. I agree this is much more to me the basic thing. But this wish to do it quickly, to get it all done is this not resistance? Krishnamurti: Quick medicine to get it over. Needleman: Is there something in me that I have to study, that resists this subtle, much more delicate thing you are speaking about? Is this not work, what you are saying? Isn't it work to ask the question so quietly, so subtly? It seems to me it is work to not listen to that part that wants to do it... Krishnamurti: Quickly. Needleman: For us particularly in the West, or maybe for all men. Krishnamurti: I am afraid it is all over the world the same. "Tell me how to get there quickly." Needleman: And yet you say it is in a moment. Krishnamurti: It is, obviously. Needleman: Yes, I understand. Krishnamurti: Sir, what is effort? To get out of bed in the morning, when you don't want to get up, is an effort. What brings on that laziness? Lack of sleep, overeating, over-indulging and all the rest of it; and next morning you say, "Oh, what a bore, I have to get up!" Now wait a minute, sir, follow it. What is laziness? Is it physical laziness, or is thought itself lazy? Needleman: That I don't understand. I need another word. "Thought is lazy?" I find that thought is always the same. Krishnamurti: No sir. Let's find out. I am lazy, I don't want to get up and so I force myself to get up. In that is so-called effort. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: I want that, but I shouldn't have it, I resist it. The resistance is effort. I get angry and I mustn't be angry: resistance, effort. What has made me lazy? Needleman: The thought that I ought to be getting up. Krishnamurti: That's it. Needleman: All right. Krishnamurti: So I really have to go into this whole question of thought. Not make the body lazy, force the body out of bed, because the body has its own intelligence, it knows when it is tired and should rest. This morning, I generally do two hours of yoga every day, this morning I was tired; I had prepared the mat and everything to do yoga exercises and the body said "No, sorry". And I said, "All right" and went to bed. That is not laziness. The body said, "Leave me alone because you talked yesterday, you saw many people, you walked yesterday, you are tired." Thought then says, "You must get up and do the exercises because it is good for you, you have done it every day, it has become a habit, don't relax, you will get lazy, keep at it." Which means: thought is making me lazy, not the body is making me lazy. Needleman: I understand that. So there is an effort with regard to thought. Krishnamurti: So no effort! Why is thought so mechanical? And is all thought mechanical? Needleman: Yes, all right, one puts that question. Krishnamurti: Isn't it? Needleman: I can't say that I have verified that. Krishnamurti: But we can, sir. That is fairly simple to verify. Isn't all thought mechanical? The non-mechanical state is the absence of thought; not the neglect of thought but the absence of it. Needleman: How can I find that out? Krishnamurti: Do it now, it is simple enough. You can do it now if you wish to, it's very clear. Thought is mechanical. Needleman: Let's assume that. Krishnamurti: Not assume. Don't assume anything. Needleman: All right. Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical, isn't it? - because it is repetitive, conforming, comparing. Needleman: That part I see, the comparing. But my experience is that not all thought is of the same quality. There are qualities of thought. Krishnamurti: Are there? Needleman: In my experience there are. Krishnamurti: Let's find out. What is thought, thinking? Needleman: There seems to be thought that is very shallow, very repetitive, very mechanical, it has a certain taste to it. There seems to be another kind of thought which is connected more with my body, with my whole self, it resonates in another way. Krishnamurti: That is what, sir? Thought is memory, the response of memory. Needleman: All right, this is a definition. Krishnamurti: No, no, I can see it in myself. I have to go to that house this evening - the memory, the distance, the design - all that is memory, isn't it? Needleman: Yes, that is memory. Krishnamurti: I have been there before and so the memory is well established and from that there is either instant thought, or thought which takes a little time. So I am asking myself: is all thought similar, mechanical, or is there thought which is non-mechanical, which is non-verbal? Needleman: Yes, that's right. Krishnamurti: Is there thought if there is no word? Needleman: There is understanding. Krishnamurti: Wait, sir. How does this understanding take place? Does it happen when thought is functioning rapidly, or when thought is quiet? Needleman: When thought is quiet, yes. Krishnamurti: Understanding is nothing to do with thought. You may reason, which is the process of thinking, logic, till you say, "I don't understand it", then you become silent, and you say, "By Jove, I see it, I understand it." That understanding is not a result of thought. Needleman: You speak of an energy which seems to be uncaused. We experience the energy of cause and effect, which shapes our lives, but what is this other energy's relationship to the energy we are familiar with? What is energy? Krishnamurti: What is energy? Right, sir? First of all: is energy divisible? Needleman: I don't know. Go on. Krishnamurti: It can be divided. Physical energy, the energy of anger and so on, cosmic energy, human energy, it can all be divided. But it is all one energy, isn't it? Needleman: Logically, I say yes. I don't understand energy. I experience something which I call energy, sometimes. Krishnamurti: Why do we divide energy at all, that is what I want to get at; then we can come to it differently. Sexual energy, physical energy, mental energy, psychological energy, cosmic energy, the businessman who goes to the office, with his energy, and so on - why do we divide it? Why do we divide life as the business life, scientific life, the professor's life, and life of the housewife, why do we divide it all? What is the reason for this division? Needleman: There seem to be many parts of oneself which are separate; and we divide life, it seems to me, because of that. Krishnamurti: Why? We have divided the world into Communist, Socialist, Imperialist, and we have divided the Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, and we have divided nationalities, linguistic divisions, the whole thing is fragmentation. Why? Why has the mind fragmented the whole of life? Needleman: I don't know the answer. I see the ocean and I see a tree: there is a division. Krishnamurti: No. There is a division. There is a difference between the sea and the tree - I hope so! But that is not a division. Needleman: No. It is a difference, not a division. Krishnamurti: But we are asking why the division exists, not only outwardly but in us. Needleman: It is in us, that is the most interesting question. Krishnamurti: Because it is in us we extend it outwards. Now why is there this division in me? The 'me' and the 'not me'. You follow? The higher and the lower. The Hindus have done it very cleverly, the Atman and the lower self. Why this division? Needleman: Maybe it was done, at least in the beginning, to help men to question themselves. To make them question whether they really know what they think they know. Krishnamurti: Through division will they find out? Needleman: Maybe through the idea that there is something that I don't understand. Krishnamurti: In me there is a division. In a human being there is a division - why? What is the 'raison d'etre', what is the structure of this division? I see there is the thinker and thought - right? Needleman: I don't see that. Krishnamurti: There is a thinker who says, "I must control that anger, I must not think this, I must think that". So there is a thinker who says, "I must", or "I must not". Needleman: Right. Krishnamurti: There is the division. "I should be", and "I should not be". If I can understand why this division in me exists - Oh look, look! Look at those hills! Marvellous, isn't it? Needleman: Beautiful! Krishnamurti: Now, sir, do you look at it with a division? Needleman: No. Krishnamurti: Why not? Needleman: There wasn't the 'me' to do anything with it. Krishnamurti: That's all. You can't do anything about it. Here, with thought, I think I can do something. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: So I want to change 'what is'. I can't change 'what is' there, but I think I can change 'what is' in me. Not knowing how to change it I have become lost, in despair. I say, "I can't change", and therefore I have no energy to change. Needleman: That's what one says. Krishnamurti: So first, before I change 'what is', I must know who is the changer, who it is that changes. Needleman: There are moments when one knows that, for a moment. Those moments are lost. There are moments when one knows who sees 'what is' in oneself. Krishnamurti: No sir. Sorry. Just to see 'what is' is enough, not to change it. Needleman: I agree. I agree with that. Krishnamurti: To se 'what is: I can see 'what is' only when the observer is not. When you looked at those hills the observer was not. Needleman: I agree, yes. Krishnamurti: The observer only came into being when you wanted to change 'what is'. Because you say: I don't like 'what is', it must be changed, so there is instantly a duality. Can the mind observe 'what is' without the observer? It took place when you looked at those hills with that marvellous light on them. Needleman: This truth is absolute truth. The moment one experiences it one says, "Yes!" But one's experience is also that one forgets this. Krishnamurti: Forget it! Needleman: By that I mean one continually tries to change it. Krishnamurti: Forget it, and pick it up again. Needleman: But in this discussion, whatever you intend, there is help coming from this discussion. I know, as much as I know anything, it could not happen, or I know fairly well, I', not sure, that it could not happen without the help that is between us. I could look at those hills and maybe have this non-judging, but it wouldn't be important to me; I wouldn't know that that is the way I must look for salvation, if you like, or for help, unless there was this. And this, I think, is a question one always wants to bring. Maybe this is the mind again wanting to grab and hold on to something, but nevertheless it seems that the human condition... Krishnamurti: Sir, we looked at those hills, you couldn't change that, you just looked; and you looked inwardly and the battle began. For a moment you looked without that battle, without that strife, effort, and all the rest of it. Then you remembered the beauty of that moment, of that second, and you wanted to capture that beauty again. Wait sir! Proceed. So what happens? It sets up another conflict: the thing you had and you would like to have again, and you don't know how to get it again. You know, if you think about it, it is not that, so you battle. "I must control, I mustn't want" - right? Whereas if you say, "All right, it is over, finished", that moment of beauty is over. Needleman: I have to learn that. Krishnamurti: No, no. Needleman: I have to learn, don't I? Krishnamurti: What is there to learn? Needleman: I have to learn the futility of this conflict. Krishnamurti: No. What is there to learn? You yourself see that that moment of beauty becomes a memory, then the memory says, "It was so beautiful I must have it again." You are not concerned with beauty, you are concerned with the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure and beauty don't go together. So if you see that, it is finished. Like a dangerous snake, you won't go near it again. Needleman: (Laughs) Perhaps I haven't seen it, so I can't say. Krishnamurti: That is the question. Needleman: Yes, I think that must be so, because one keeps going back again and again. Krishnamurti: No. This is the real thing. If I see the beauty of that light, and it is really extraordinarily beautiful, I don't know if you see it, you can't do anything, you just see it. Now with that same quality of attention I want to see myself. There is a moment of perception which is as beautiful as that. Then what happens? Needleman: Then I wish for it. Krishnamurti: Then I want to capture it, I want to cultivate it, I want to pursue it. Needleman: And how to see that? Krishnamurti: Just to see that is taking place is enough. Needleman: That's what I forget! Krishnamurti: It is not a question of forgetting. Needleman: Well, that is what I don't understand deeply enough. That just the seeing is enough. Krishnamurti: Look, sir. When you see a snake what takes place? Needleman: I am afraid. Krishnamurti: No. What takes place? You run, kill it, do something. Why? Because you know it is dangerous. Either you know the danger of it through tradition, through being told, don't go near a snake. So you know. You are aware of the danger of it. A cliff, better take a cliff, an abyss. You know the danger of it. Nobody has to tell you. You see directly what would happen. Needleman: Right. Krishnamurti: Now, if you see directly that the beauty of that moment of perception cannot be repeated, it is over. But thought says, "No, it's not over, the memory of it remains." So what are you doing now? You are pursuing the dead memory of it, not the living beauty of it - right? Now if you see that, the truth of it, not the verbal statement, the truth of it, it is finished. Needleman: Then this seeing is much rarer than we think. Krishnamurti: No, wait. If I see the beauty of that minute, it is over. I don't want to pursue it. If I pursue it, it becomes a pleasure. Then if I can't get it, it brings despair, pain and all the rest of it. So I say, "All right, finished." Then what takes place? Needleman: From my experience, I'm afraid that what takes place is that the monster is born again. It has a thousand lives. (Laughter.) Krishnamurti: No sir. When did that beauty take place? Needleman: The place when I saw without trying to change. Krishnamurti: When the mind was completely quiet. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: Wasn't it? Right? Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: When you looked at that, your mind was quiet, it didn't say, "I wish I could change it, copy it and photograph it, this, that, and the other" - you just looked. The mind wasn't in operation. Or rather, thought wasn't in operation. Here thought comes immediately into operation. So one has to say, "Now can thought be quiet? How can one exercise thought when necessary, and not exercise it when it is not necessary?" Needleman: Yes, that question is intensely interesting to me, sir. Krishnamurti: Sir, why do we worship thought? Why has thought become so extraordinarily important? Needleman: It seems able to satisfy our desires; through thought we believe we can satisfy. Krishnamurti: No, not from satisfaction. Why has thought in all cultures with most people become of such vital concern? Needleman: One usually identifies oneself as thought, as one's thoughts. If I think about myself I think about what I think, what kind of ideas I have, what I believe. Is this what you mean? Krishnamurti: Not quite. Apart from identification with the 'me', or with 'not me', why is thought always active? Needleman: Ah, I see. Krishnamurti: Thought is always operating in knowledge, isn't it? If there was no knowledge, thought would not be. Thought is always operating in the field of the known; mechanical, non-verbal and so on, it is always working in the past. So my life is the past, because it is based on past knowledge, past experience, past memories, pleasure, pain, fear and so on, it is all the past. And the future I project from the past, thought projects from the past. So thought is fluctuating between the past and the future. All the time it says; "I should do this; I should not do that; I should have behaved." Why is it doing all this? Needleman: I don't know. Habit? Krishnamurti: Habit. All right. Go on. Let's find out. Habit? Needleman: Habit brings what I call pleasure. Krishnamurti: Habit, pleasure, pain. Needleman: To protect me. Pain, yes pain. Krishnamurti: It is always working within that field. Why? Needleman: Because it doesn't know any better. Krishnamurti: No. No. Can thought work in any other field? Needleman: That sort of thought, no. Krishnamurti: No, not any thought. Can thought work in any other field except in the field of the known? Needleman: No. Krishnamurti: Obviously not. It can't work in something I don't know; it can only work in this field. Now why does it work in this? There it is, sir - why? It is the only thing I know. In that there is security, there is protection, there is safety. That is all I know. So thought can only function in the field of the known. And when it gets tired of that, as it does, then it seeks something outside. Then what it seeks is still the known. Its gods, its visions, its spiritual states - all projected out of the known past into the future known. So thought always works in this. Needleman: Yes, I see. Krishnamurti: Therefore thought is always working in a prison. It can call it freedom, it can call it beauty, it can call it what is likes! But it is always within the limitations of the barbed wire fence. Now I want to find out whether thought has any place except in there. Thought has no place when I say, "I don't know." "I really don't know." Right? Needleman: For the moment. Krishnamurti: I really don't know. I only know this, and I really don't know whether thought can function in any field at all, except this. I really don't know. When I say, "I don't know", which doesn't mean I am expecting to know, when I see I really don't know -what happens? I climb down the ladder. I become, the mind becomes completely humble. Now that state of 'not knowing' is intelligence. Then it can operate in the field of the known and be free to work somewhere else if it wants to. J. KRISHNAMURTI AND PROF. J. NEEDLEMAN MALIBU, CALIFORNIA 2ND CONVERSATION 26TH MARCH 1971 Needleman: In your talks you have given an utterly fresh meaning to the necessity for man to become his own authority. Yet cannot this necessity easily be turned into a form of humanistic psychology without reference to the sacred, transcendent dimension of human life on earth in the midst of a vast intelligent Cosmos? Must we not only try to see ourselves in the moment, but also as creatures of the Cosmos? What I am trying to ask about is this question of cosmic dimension. Krishnamurti: As soon as we use that word 'dimension', which implies space, otherwise there is no dimension, there is no space. Are we talking about space, outward space, endless space? Needleman: No, not that. Krishnamurti: Or the dimension of space in us? Needleman: It would have to be the latter, but not totally without the former, I think. Krishnamurti: Is there a difference between the outer space, which is limitless, and the space in us? Is there a difference? Or is there no space in us at all and we only know the outer space? We know the space in us as a centre and circumference. The dimension of that centre, and the radiation from that centre, is what we generally have, and call that space. Needleman: Inner space, yes. Krishnamurti: Yes, inner space. Now if there is a centre, the space must always be limited and therefore we divide the inner space from the outer space. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: We only know this very limited space and we think we would like to reach the other space, immense space. This house exists in space, otherwise there could be no house, and the four walls of this room make space. And the space in me is the space which the centre has created round itself. Like that microphone space exists because of... Needleman: Yes, centre of interest. Krishnamurti: Not only centre of interest, it has its own space, otherwise it couldn't exist. Needleman: Yes, right. Krishnamurti: In the same way, human beings may have a centre and from that centre they create a space, the centre creates a space round itself. And that space is always limited, it must be; because of the centre, the space is limited. Needleman: It is defined, it is a defined space, yes, which is limited. Krishnamurti: When you use the words 'cosmic space'... Needleman: I didn't use the words 'cosmic space', I said cosmic, the dimension of the Cosmos. I wasn't asking about outer space and trips to the planets. Krishnamurti: No, I don't mean that. So we are talking of the space either between two thoughts. there is a space, an interval between two thoughts. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: And the space which the centre creates round itself. Needleman: All right. Krishnamurti: And having created that space round itself, there is the space outside the limit. There is a space between thinking, a centre round itself and the space beyond the barbed wire. Now what is the question, sir? How to expand space? How to enter a different dimension of space? Needleman: Not how to but... Krishnamurti: ...not how to. Is there a different dimension of space except the space round the centre? Needleman: Or a different dimension of reality? Krishnamurti: Space, we are talking about that for the moment, we can use that word. First I must see very clearly the space between two thoughts. Needleman: The interval. Krishnamurti: This interval between two thoughts. Interval means space. And what takes place in this interval? Needleman: Well, I confess I don't know because my thoughts overlap. I know there are intervals, there are moments when this interval appears, and I see it, and there is freedom there for a moment. Krishnamurti: Let's go into this a bit, shall we? There is space between two thoughts. And there is space which the centre creates round itself, which is the space of isolation. Needleman: All right, yes. That is a cold word. Krishnamurti: It is cutting itself off. When I become important, I consider myself as important, with my ambition, with my frustrations, with my anger, with my sexuality, my growth, my meditation, my reaching Nirvana. Needleman: Yes, that is isolation. Krishnamurti: It is isolation. My relation with you is the image of that isolation, which is that space. Then having created that space there is space outside the barbed wire. Now is there a space of a totally different dimension? That is the question. Needleman: Yes, that embraces the question. Krishnamurti: How shall we find out if the space round me, round the centre, exists? And how can I find out the other? I can speculate about the other - but that is too abstract, too silly! I can invent any space I like, god, you know. Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: So is it possible to be free of the centre, so that the centre doesn't create space round itself and build a wall round itself, isolation, a prison - and call that space? Can that centre cease to be? Otherwise I can't go beyond it - I don't mean I - the mind cannot go beyond that limitation unless that centre goes. Needleman: Yes, I see what you mean. It's logical, reasonable. Krishnamurti: That is, what is that centre? That centre is the 'me' and the 'non-me', that centre is the observer, the thinker, the experiencer, and in that centre is also the observed. The centre says, "That is the barbed wire I have created round myself." Needleman: So that centre is limited there too. Krishnamurti: Yes. Therefore it separates itself from the barbed wire fence. So that becomes the observed. The centre is the observer. So there is space between the observer and the observed -right sir? Needleman: Yes, I see that. Krishnamurti: And that space it tries to bridge over. That is what we are doing. Needleman: It tries to bridge it over, but it doesn't. Krishnamurti: It says, "This must be changed, that must not be, this is narrow, that is wide, I must be better than that." That is the movement is between the space, between the observer and the observed. Needleman: I follow that, yes. Krishnamurti: And hence conflict between the observer and the observed. Because the observed is the barbed wire which must be jumped over, and so the battle begins. Now can the observer, who is the centre, who is the thinker, who is the knower, who is experience, who is knowledge, can that centre be still? Needleman: Why should it wish to? Krishnamurti: If it is not still, my space is always limited. Needleman: But the centre, the observer, doesn't know that it is limited in this way. Krishnamurti: But you can see it, look. The centre is the observer, let's call him the observer for the moment - the thinker, the experiencer, the knower, the struggler, the searcher, the one who says, "I know, and you don't know", is the centre. Right? Where there is a centre it must have a space round itself. Needleman: Yes, I follow. Krishnamurti: And when it observes, it observes through the space. When I observe those mountains there is space between me and the mountains. And when I observe myself there is space between me and the thing I observed in myself. When I observe my wife, I observe her with the centre of my image about her, and she observes me with the image which she has about me. So there is always this division and space. Needleman: Changing the subject entirely, there is something called the sacred. Sacred teachings, sacred ideas, the sacred, which for a moment seems to show me that this centre and this space you speak about is an illusion. Krishnamurti: Wait. I has learnt this from somebody else. Are we going to find out what is the sacred, then? Are we looking because somebody has told me, "Sacred is that", or that there is a sacred thing? Or is it my imagination, because I want something holy? Needleman: Very often it is that but there is... Krishnamurti: So which is it? The desire for something holy? The imposition on my mind by others who have said, "This is sacred?" And my own desire, because everything is unholy and I want something holy, sacred? All this springs from the centre. Needleman: Yes. Nevertheless... Krishnamurti: Wait. We will find out what is sacred. But I don't want to accept tradition, or what somebody has said about the sacred. Sir, I don't know if you have experimented? Once some years ago, for fun, I took a piece of rock from the garden and put it on the mantelpiece and played with it, put flowers to it every day. At the end of a month it became terribly sacred! Needleman: I know what you mean. Krishnamurti: I don't want that kind of phoney sacredness. Needleman: It's a fetish. Krishnamurti: Our sacredness is a fetish. Needleman: Granted. Most of it is. Krishnamurti: Therefore I want to find out. I won't accept anything that anybody says about what is sacred. Tradition! Sir, we were brought up in a tradition which would beat anybody's tradition, as Brahmins, I assure you! What I am saying is: If I want to find out what is holy, not man-made holiness, Jesus, I want to find out, how do I find out? I can only find out when the mind has immense space. Right sir? Immense space. And it cannot have that if there is a centre. When the centre is not in operation, then there is a vast space. In that space, which is part of meditation and all that, there is something really sacred, not invented by my foolish little centre. There is something immeasurably sacred, which you can never find out if there is a centre. And to imagine that sacredness is folly. You follow what I mean? It's too cheap. Can the mind be free of this centre, with its terribly limited space of yardage, which can be measured and expanded and contracted and all the rest of it? Can it? Man has said it can't, and therefore God who became the other centre. So my real concern is this: whether that centre can be completely empty? That centre is consciousness. That centre is the content of consciousness, the content is consciousness; there is no consciousness if there is no content. You must work this out. Needleman: Certainly what we ordinarily mean by it, yes. Krishnamurti: There is no house if there are no walls and no roof. The content is consciousness and we like to separate them, theorize about it, measure the yardage of our consciousness. Whereas the centre is consciousness, the centre is the content of consciousness, and the content is consciousness. Without the content, where is consciousness? And that is the space. Needleman: I follow a little bit of what you say. I find myself wanting to say: well, what do you value here? What is the important thing here? Krishnamurti: I'll put that question after I have found out whether the mind can be empty of the content. Needleman: All right. Krishnamurti: Then there is something else that will operate, which will use this, which will function within the field of the known. But without finding that merely to say... Needleman: No, no, this is so. What you said now is clear. Krishnamurti: Sir may I proceed a little bit? Let's begin. Space is between two thoughts, obviously, between two factors of time, two periods of time, because thought is time. Yes? Needleman: All right, yes. Krishnamurti: You can have a dozen periods of time but it is still thought, there is that space. Then there is the space round the centre, and the space beyond the self, beyond the barbed wire, the wall of the centre. The space between the observer and the observed, the mountain, space between the observer and my wife, the space which thought as my wife has created the image, and the image which she has about me, the space. You follow, sir? Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: All that is manufactured by the centre. To speculate what is beyond all that - at least I can't do it, it has no meaning to me personally, it's the philosopher's amusement. Needleman: The philosopher's amusement, I agree. Krishnamurti: I am not interested. Needleman: I agree. I am not interested sometimes, at my better moments, but nevertheless... Krishnamurti: I am sorry, you are a philosopher! Needleman: No, no, I don't want to interrupt you, please go on Krishnamurti: I forgot you are a philosopher, sorry. Needleman: No, why should you remember that! Krishnamurti: So my question is: can the centre be still, or can the centre fade away? Because if it doesn't fade away, or lie very quiet, then the content of consciousness is going to create space within consciousness and call it the vast space. In that there lies deception and I don't want to deceive myself. I don't say I am not brown when I am brown. So can that centre be absorbed? Which means, can there be no image, because it is the image that separates? Needleman: Yes, that is the space. Krishnamurti: That image talks about love, but the love of the image is not love. Therefore I must find out whether the centre can be completely absorbed, dissolved, or lie as a vague fragment in the distance. If there is no possibility of that, then I accept prison. Needleman: I agree. Krishnamurti: I accept, no freedom. Then I can decorate my bathroom for ever. Needleman: But now this possibility that you are speaking about, without searching for it consciously... Krishnamurti: No, don't search for it! Needleman: I say, without searching for it consciously, life or something suddenly shows me it is possible. Krishnamurti: It is there! Life hasn't to show me. It has shown me now. It has shown me, when I look at that mountain, that there is an image in me; when I look at my wife I see that there is an image in me. That is a fact. It isn't that I have to wait for ten years to find out a beastly little image! I know it is there, therefore I say: "Is it possible to look without the image?" The image is the centre, the observer, the thinker and all the rest of it. Needleman: I am beginning to see the answer to my question. I begin to see. I am speaking to myself, I am beginning to see that there is no distinction between humanism and sacred teachings. There is just truth, or not truth. Krishnamurti: That's all. False and true. Needleman: So much for that. (Laughter) Krishnamurti: I am asking myself whether the content of consciousness which makes up consciousness, obviously, without the content there is no consciousness, that's an absolute fact. Needleman: All right, yes. Krishnamurti: Agree? Without the four walls and a roof there is no house. Can the consciousness empty itself of its content? Not somebody else do it. Needleman: That is the question, yes. Krishnamurti: Not divine grace, the super-self, some fictitious outside agency. Can the consciousness empty itself of all this content? First see the beauty of it, sir. Needleman: I see it. Krishnamurti: Because it must empty itself without an effort. The moment there is an effort, there is an observer who is making the effort to change the content, which is part of consciousness. I don't know if you see that? Needleman: I follow. This emptying has to be effortless, instantaneous. Krishnamurti: It must be without an agent who is operating on it, whether an outside agent, or an inner agent. Now can this be done without any effort, any directive, which says, "I will change the content"? This means the emptying of consciousness of all will, 'to be' or 'not to be'. Sir, look what takes place. Needleman: I am watching. Krishnamurti: I have put that question to myself. Nobody has put it to me. Because it is a problem of life, a problem of existence in this world. It is a problem which my mind has to solve. Can the mind, with all its content, empty itself and yet remain mind, not just float about? Needleman: It is not suicide. Krishnamurti: No. Needleman: There is some kind of subtle... Krishnamurti: No, sir, that is too immature, childish. I have put the question. My answer is: I really don't know. Needleman: That is the truth. Krishnamurti: I really don't know. But I am going to find out, in the sense of not wait for me to find out. The content of my consciousness is my unhappiness, my misery, my struggle, my sorrow, the images which I have collected through life, the frustrations, the pleasures, the fear, the agony, the hatred - that is my consciousness, my gods. Can all that be completely emptied? Not only at the superficial level but right through the so-called unconscious. The unconscious, the hidden, through dreams, you follow, all that completely emptied. If it is not possible, then I must live a life of misery, I must live in endless, unending sorrow. That means there is neither hope, nor despair, I am in prison. I can invent a hope - oh, that's too childish. So the mind must find out how to empty itself of all the content of itself, and yet live in this world, not become a cuckoo, and have a brain that functions efficiently. Now how is this to be done? Can it ever be done? Or is there no escape for man? Needleman: I follow. Krishnamurti: Because I don't see how to get beyond this I invent all the gods, temples, philosophies, rituals. You follow? All the entertainment, all the muck comes in. Sorry! So I must find out. You understand, sir? Needleman: I understand. Krishnamurti: This is meditation, real meditation, not all the phoney stuff. To see whether the mind, with its brain, the brain which has evolved through time, the brain which is the result of thousands of experiences, the brain that functions only in complete security efficiently, the brain that collected, you know, wounded, hurt, all that, empty itself, and yet have a brain that functions like a marvellous machine. Also it sees love is not pleasure; love is not desire. When there is love there is no image; but I don't know what that love is. I only want love as pleasure, sex and all the rest of it. There must be a relationship between the emptying of consciousness and the thing called love; the love, the unknown, and the known, which is the content of consciousness. Needleman: I am following you. There must be this relationship. Krishnamurti: The two must be in harmony. The emptying and love must be in harmony. And it may be only love that is necessary and nothing else. Needleman: This emptying is another word for love, is what you are saying. Krishnamurti: I am only asking what is love. Is love within the field of consciousness? Needleman: No, it couldn't be. Krishnamurti: Don't stipulate. Don't ever say yes or no; find out! Love within the content is pleasure, sexual, ambitious you know, all that business. Then what is love? I really don't know. I won't pretend any more about anything. I don't know. There is some factor in this which I must find out. Whether the emptying of consciousness with its content is love, which is the unknown? What is the relationship between the unknown and the known? -not the mysterious unknown, God and a that business. We will come to God afterwards, if we go through all this. The relationship between the unknown, which I don't know, which may be called love, and the content of consciousness, which I know, (I may be unconscious of it, but I know, I can open it up and find out non-analytically) - so what is the relationship between the known and the unknown? To move between the known and the unknown in harmony, is intelligence, isn't it? Needleman: Absolutely. Krishnamurti: So I must find out, the mind must find out, how to empty its content. That is, have no image, therefore no observer. The image means the past, or the image which is taking place now, or the image which I shall project into the future. So no image, which mean formula, idea, ideal, principle, all that implies image. Can there be no formation of image at all? You hurt me, and therefore I have an image of you, or you give me pleasure. So no image formation when you hurt me or give me pleasure. Needleman: Is it possible? Krishnamurti: Of course it is. Otherwise I am doomed. Needleman: You are doomed. In other words I am doomed. Krishnamurti: We are doomed. Is it possible when you insult me to be completely watchful, attentive, so that it doesn't leave a mark? Needleman: I know what you mean. Krishnamurti: When you flatter me, or whatever, not leave a mark. Then there is no image. So I have done it, the mind has done it: which is, no formatting of image at all. If you don't form an image now, the past images have no place. Needleman: I don't follow that, that sounds just beyond my grasp. If I don't form an image now? Krishnamurti: The past images have no place. If you form an image, then you are related to it. Needleman: You are connected to the past images. That is right. Krishnamurti: But if you don't form any? Needleman: Then you are free from the past. Krishnamurti: See it! See it! Needleman: Very clear. Krishnamurti: So the mind can empty itself of images by not forming an image now. If I form an image now, then I relate it to the past images. So consciousness, the mind, can empty itself of all the images by not forming an image now. So there is space, not space round the centre. And if one delves, goes into it much further, then there is something sacred, obviously, not invented by thought, which has nothing to do with any religion. Needleman: Very clear. I have another question which I wanted to ask you. We see the stupidity of so many traditions which so many people hallow today, but aren't there some traditions transmitted from generation to generation which are valuable and necessary, and without which we would lose the little humanity that we now have? Aren't there traditions that are based on something real, which are handed down? Krishnamurti: Tradition being, handed over. Needleman: Ways of living, even if only in an external sense. Krishnamurti: If I hadn't been taught from childhood not to run in front of a car... Needleman: That would be the simplest example. Krishnamurti: Or to be careful of fire, be careful of irritating the dog which might bite you, the cat, and so on. That is also tradition. Needleman: Yes, that certainly is. Krishnamurti: The other kind of tradition is that you must love. Needleman: That is the other extreme. Krishnamurti: And the tradition of the weavers in India and other parts, have their own tradition. You know, they can weave without a pattern and yet they weave in a tradition which is so deeply rooted that they don't even have to think about it. It comes out with their hands. I don't know if you have ever seen it? In India they have a tremendous tradition and they produce marvellous things. And there is the tradition of the scientist, the biologist, the anthropologist; which is, tradition as the accumulation of knowledge, handed over by one scientist to another scientist, by a doctor to another doctor, learning. Obviously that kind of tradition is essential. I wouldn't call that tradition, would you? Needleman: No, that is not what I had in mind. What I meant by tradition was a way of living. Krishnamurti: I wouldn't call that tradition. They wouldn't generally call that tradition. We mean by tradition some other factor? Is goodness a factor of tradition? Needleman: No, but perhaps there are good traditions. Krishnamurti: Good traditions is, conditioned by the culture in which one lives. Good tradition, in India, among the Brahmins used to be not to kill any human being or animal. They accepted that and functioned. We are saying: is goodness traditional? Can goodness function, blossom in tradition? Needleman: What I am asking then is: are there traditions which are formed by an intelligence either single, or collective, which understands human nature? Krishnamurti: Is intelligence traditional? Needleman: No. But does intelligence which is not traditional, can it form, shape a way of living which can help other men more readily to find themselves? I know that this is a self-initiated thing that you speak of but are there not men of great intelligence who can shape the external conditions for me, so that I will not have quite as difficult a time to come to what you have seen? Krishnamurti: That means what, sir? You say you know. Needleman: I don't say I know. Krishnamurti: I am taking that. Suppose you are the great person of tremendous intelligence and you say, "My dear son, live this way." Needleman: Well I don't have to say it. Krishnamurti: You exude, your ambience, your feeling, your atmosphere, your aura, and then I say, "I'll try it. He has got it, I haven't got it." Can goodness flower in your ambience? Can goodness grow under your shadow? Needleman: No, but then I wouldn't be intelligent if I made those my conditions. Krishnamurti: Therefore you are stating that goodness cannot operate, function, flower in any environment. Needleman: No, I didn't say that. I was asking, are there environments which can be conducive to liberation? Krishnamurti: We will go into this. A man who goes to a factory every day, day after day, and finds release in drink and all the rest of it... Needleman: This is the example of a poor environment, a bad tradition. Krishnamurti: So what does the man who is intelligent, who is concerned with changing the environment, do for that man? Needleman: Perhaps he is changing the environment for himself. But he understands something about man in general. I am talking now about a great teacher, whatever that is, who helps, who presents a way of life to us which we don't understand, which we haven't verified ourselves, but which somehow acts on something in me to bring me together a little. Krishnamurti: That is satsun - back to that - which is the company of the good. It is nice to be in the company of the good because we won't then quarrel, we won't fight each other, we won't be violent; it is good. Needleman: All right. But maybe being in the company of the good means that I will quarrel, but I'll see it more, I'll suffer it more, I'll understand it better. Krishnamurti: So you want the company of the good in order to see yourself more clearly? Needleman: Yes. Krishnamurti: Which means you depend on the environment to see yourself. Needleman: Well perhaps in the beginning. Krishnamurti: The beginning is the first step and the last step. Needleman: I don't agree. Krishnamurti: Let's go into it a little bit. See what has happened. I go with good men because in that ambience, in that atmosphere I see myself more clearly, because they are so good I see my idiocies. Needleman: Sometimes it happens that way. Krishnamurti: I am taking this. Needleman: That is one example, right? Krishnamurti: Or I am also good, therefore I live with them. Then I don't need them. Needleman: No we don't need them then. All right. Krishnamurti: If I am good I don't need them. But if it's only when I am not good and come into their presence, then I can see myself clearly. Then to see myself clearly I must have them. This is what generally takes place. They become important, not my goodness. This happens every day. Needleman: But is there not such a thing as weaning the baby by blackening the breast? It happens that I do need this man, maybe from the beginning. Krishnamurti: I am going to question it, I want to find out. First of all, if I am good I don't need them. I am like those hills and birds, I don't need them. Needleman: Right. We can rule that out. Krishnamurti: When I am not good I need their company, because in their company I see myself clearly; I feel a breath of freshness. Needleman: Or how bad I am. Krishnamurti: The moment I have a horror of myself, in the largest sense of the word, I am merely comparing myself with them. Needleman: No, not always. I can expose the image I have of myself as a lie. Krishnamurti: Now I am questioning whether you need them to expose yourself as a liar. Needleman: In principle, no. Krishnamurti: No, not in principle. Either it is so, or it is not. Needleman: That is the question. Krishnamurti: Which means if I need them, then I am lost. Then I will for ever hang on to them. Sir, this has happened since human relationships began. Needleman: Yes it has. But it also happens that I hang on for a while and then I right it. Krishnamurti: Therefore why don't you, the good man, tell me: "Look, begin, you don't need me. You can watch yourself now clearly." Needleman: Maybe if I told you that, you would take it utterly wrongly and misunderstand me completely! Krishnamurti: Then what shall I do? Go on hanging onto you, run after you? Needleman: Not what shall you do, but what do you do? Krishnamurti: What people generally do is run after them. Needleman: They generally do, yes. Krishnamurti: And hold on to their skirts. Needleman: But that is perhaps because the teacher is not intelligent. Krishnamurti: No. He says, "Look, I can't teach you my friend, I have nothing to teach." If I am really good I have nothing to teach. I can only show. Needleman: But he doesn't say it, he does it. Krishnamurti: I say, "Look I don't want to teach you, you can learn from yourself." Needleman: Yes, all right. Suppose he says that. Krishnamurti: Yes, he says learn from yourself. Don't depend. That means you, being good, are forcing me to look at myself - not forcing, I won't use that word, I withdraw that. Needleman: Attracting you. Krishnamurti: No. You are putting me in a corner so that I can't escape. Needleman: I see what you are saying. But it is the easiest thing in the world to escape. Krishnamurti: I don't want to. Sir, you tell me, "Don't depend, for goodness has no dependency." If you want to be good you cannot depend on anything. Needleman: Anything external, yes all right. Krishnamurti: On anything, external or inward. Don't depend on anything. It doesn't mean just don't depend on the postman, it means also inwardly don't depend. Needleman: Right. Krishnamurti: That means what? I depend. He has told me one thing: "Don't depend on me or on anybody, your wife, husband, daughter, politician, don't depend." That's all. He goes away. He leaves me with that. What shall I do? Needleman: Find out if he is right. Krishnamurti: But I do depend. Needleman: That's what I mean. Krishnamurti: I do depend on my wife, on the priest, on some psycho-analyst - I do depend. Then I begin. Because he tells me the truth - you follow, sir? It is there, I have to work it out. So I have to find out if it is the truth, or if it is a falsehood. Which means I must exercise my reason, my capacity, my intelligence. I must work. I can't just say, "Well he has gone. I depend on my cook!" So I have to find out, I have to see the truth and the false. I have to see it. That doesn't depend on anybody. Needleman: Right. Krishnamurti: Even the company of the good doesn't teach me what is good and what is false, or true. I have to see it. Needleman: Absolutely. Krishnamurti: So I don't depend on anybody to find what is true and what is false. SAANEN 1ST PUBLIC TALK 18TH JULY 1971. As we are going to have many talks and discussions we should, I think, take things very easily, relax, and apply our minds to what we are going to talk over together and to discuss. First of all, I'm not at all sure what you, as an individual, as a human being, are really interested in. I think one should find that out. What is your primary interest, deep abiding intention, and in the discovery of it relate that discovery to all the activities of one's life. One may be interested, deeply concerned, with the world as it is - with the violence, the appalling chaos, the political divisions, and the corruption which is absolute death, not only outwardly but also inwardly. In discovering for ourselves our major deep interest we shall then find out for ourselves our relationship with each other according to that interest. If that interest is rather vague, superfluous, superficial, depending on the environment and on the wind that blows in any direction, then our activities, both outwardly and inwardly, will be casual, will have no deep abiding significance. But if we could, during these coming talks and discussions, find out what is our major interest. Sitting there as you are, listening to what is being said, if you are really concerned with the world and your place in the world, your relationship with another human being, your relationship, politically, economically, religiously, and socially, if you are really concerned - as you must be - what is your real deep interest in life? Is it acquiring money -please listen to all this very carefully - money, position, safety, security? If that is your real, vital, continuous interest, then one must see the consequences of such interest. And if it is your interest, your really major drive - considering what the world is and your relationship with the world - whether your interest is not only to change yourself but also the world about you, and see all the implications of that interest. If it is your interest that you want to establish a personal relationship with another so completely, wholly, so that there is no conflict, then also you must realize the consequences of that. And if your interest is - and this is much more difficult - to find out what is the place of thought, as measure, and the immeasurable. In trying to find out in which direction our interest lies, each one of us - not the general interest but your particular interest - and whether you are prepared to be completely dedicated to that interest, not play with it, not casually accept it or reject it according to circumstances, according to your own likes and dislikes, and environmental influence. So, if we are prepared, during these four weeks to go into this so completely, knowing your interest, then we can establish a relationship between yourselves and the speaker; and thereby also establish your relationship with the world, and with your neighbour, and with your intimate friend. So that is what we are going to do during these weeks: find out whether you are prepared to find out definitely where your major capacity and interest lies. And whether that interest is isolated or that interest is related to all human beings. If it is isolated, that is, you are seeking your own particular enjoyment, your own particular salvation, your own particular safety, a position in the world, then in talking it over together we shall find out the validity of such interest, whether it has any significance at all; and, if your interest, if your deep purpose is to find out how to live a different life altogether. Accepting things as they are, the violence, the brutality, the chaos, the corruption, the hatreds, the enmities, seeing all that, whether the human mind, your mind, each one's mind, is capable of completely changing so that as a human being you not only bring about a radical revolution in yourself but also outwardly. The outward revolution and the inward revolution are not separate. We are talking of revolution - not the physical violence of throwing bombs, killing others in the name of peace, destroying. That is no revolution at all, it is merely childish destruction. I do not know if you have not observed all over the world - first the younger generation were all giving flowers, living in a world of beauty, imagination, then as that did not flower fully, then they take to other kind of drugs and all the rest of it; and when that didn't work they became violent. And we are now in a world of complete violence. I do not know if you have been pursuing the events in the East, in the Middle East and in America and elsewhere. So one has to find out, if you are at all serious - and I hope you are, because if you're not serious then it is not worth your sitting down here for an hour, much better go for a walk, look at the mountains, trees, and play around - but if you are very serious, and I hope you are, then you have to find out, because we are getting older, our days are becoming shorter, our capacities are becoming more dulled as we grow older, and the world is becoming too much for us. So it behoves each one of us to find out what your purpose, your intention, your interest, the major one in life, is. Then if you know we can discuss, we can then take a journey together. Because the speaker knows exactly what his intention, his drive, his interest is; and if your interest is quite different then our relationship becomes difficult. But if your interest is to understand this whole phenomenon of the world in which we, as human beings live - not as technicians - then we can talk over together, then we can establish our relationship together, then we can take a journey together. Otherwise these talks and discussions will have very little meaning. Please do bear this in mind, though you are here for a holiday in the mountains and the hills and the streams and all the tourist entertainments, in spite of all that, we have an opportunity to sit together for a whole hour. You know that is quite interesting, to sit together for a whole hour to talk over our problems together, without any hypocrisy, without any pretence, without posing some absurd facade. To have a whole hour together is an extraordinary thing if you come to think of it, because we so rarely sit together to talk over serious things with anybody for a whole hour. You may go to the office for a whole day, but to spend together sixty minutes and more to investigate, to examine, seriously, all our human problems, with hesitancy, tentatively, with great affection -not trying to impose an opinion over another, because we are not dealing with opinions, ideas, or theories. What we are concerned with is to establish a relationship with each other, and that can only be done if we know our mutual interests, and how deep those interests are, and what energy you have to apply to discover the resolution of the major problems of our life. Because our life is not different from the rest of the world. We are the world. I don't think many of us realize, deeply, continuously, that we are the world, and the world is us. I think this must be deeply, abidingly rooted in us. Because we have made the social structure according to our desires, according to our ambitions, greed, envy, violence, and if we would change that society we must change ourself. That means a simple, radical approach to the whole problem. But unfortunately we think that by changing the outer structure - throwing bombs, political divisions, and all the rest of it - that by some miracle we shall all become perfect human beings. I'm afraid that will never work. Therefore, realizing that we are the world, really feeling it, not as a verbal statement or a theory but actually feeling it in your heart, and that is very difficult because our education, our culture, has laid emphasis that you are separate from the world, that you as an individual have a responsibility to yourself, and not to the rest of the world; that you as an individual are free to do what you like, in the limited sense. But we are not individuals at all, we are the result of the culture in which we live. Individuality means the individual, an entity who is not fragmented, who is whole. And we are not that. We are broken up, fragmented, contradictory in ourselves, therefore we are not individuals. So, seeing all that, what is our major interest in life? Take time to think it over, give it a few minutes. We can sit together quietly, to find that out. Is it that you have sexual problems and you have not been able to solve them, and therefore that becomes the major problem? Is it that you want to live peacefully, in a world that is so noisy, corrupt and violent? Is it that you have many, many problems - economic, social, personal relationships - and you would like to solve all those problems completely, wholly? Or, does your interest lie in the direction of social reformation, and you are dedicated to that, to the reform of society? And if you are, then what is your relationship to that society? And if you are interested to find out the limitation of thought - and thought is limited, however capable, logical, experimental and technical, having the capacity to invent, to bring about a marvellous technological world, again this is a very limited issue - if you want to find out if there is something more beyond thought - the measurable and the immeasurable. So, you have to look at all these problems. So where shall we begin? You understand my question? Where shall we - you and I -begin to discuss our problems? Shall we begin at that end, which is, the measurable and the immeasurable, or, shall we begin to discuss, to bring about change, at this end, which is, the physical environmental change - with all its pollution, corruption, decay, deterioration? So where shall we start? It's up to you! Q: Sir, I am not sure that we are the world, and the world is us. K: Is that your major problem? Don't bother about what I say. Cut that our! What is your problem, what is your major interest, and have you the energy, the capacity, the interest, the intensity, to solve that problem? Don't ask questions now, please, we'll have question time presently. Do you follow? Let us now sit together, spend a couple of minutes, to find out what your major interest in life is. This is really very important to find out - not what the speaker says, that is totally irrelevant, but what your interest is, and how far you are going to give your energies to pursue that interest; how deeply, how passionately, intensely - because if you have no passion, no interest, no vitality, then - if I may point out - corruption has set in, and where there is corruption there is absolute death. So, from which end shall we begin - at that end, or this end? Or can this be divided that way? Please listen to it carefully. Can this whole movement of living, this whole existence of human beings, be so easily divided? Please listen. Don't agree or disagree. Just listen. First I will establish a physical security, a physical relationship, complete order physically, socially, economically, and after laying the foundation, building a complete house there, and then move from there to the other. You are following? Or, is it a total movement, indivisible, total, non-fragmented, but a complete movement. Wherever you begin, the two are related. You see we want complete physical order, and we must have order - in our life as well as outwardly. Please listen to this. We must have order. Not the military order, not the order of the older generation, nor the disorder of the younger generation - the permissive society is disorder, and therefore it is corruption, decay - and the old order is also corruption and decay, with all their violence, wars, snobbishness, division and all that. But seeing both disorders, the permissive disorder and the ordered disorder of the older generation, seeing both, one realizes that there must be a different kind of order. Right? You are following? We are meeting each other? Please, we are communicating with each other? And that order must involve physical security for everybody. Right? Not just for the few rich people or for a few people who are well placed or have capacity, and so on, there must be physical security for everybody. You understand? Over six million people from the east have entered India. You understand what that means - not only for the refugees but also for the poor country that is already poor! And how can you establish order there? And that order - which is total disorder - has been brought about by the older generation, with their political divisions, their national and religious divisions. You are following all this? And the disorder or the so-called permissive thing that is going on with the younger people - because they say that is disorder, we have nothing to do with the older people, we want a different kind of order, and therefore we'll do what we like. That's not order! Both are disorder. I wish you would see this. And realizing that, one sees that there must be physical order, physical security, for all human beings in the world. You know this has been the dream of the revolutionaries, of the idealists, of the philosophers, and they thought through physical revolution they could establish it; and it has not succeeded - they have had umpteen revolutions and it hasn't happened. Look at the Communist world, with their divisions, with their armies, with their totalitarianism and all the rest of the horror that is going on in the rest of the world - and there is no order there either. So, first one realizes through seeing all this that one must have physical order. And does that order depend on law, on the reorganization of the social environmental culture and influence -or does that order depend entirely upon the human being, on each one of us - the way we live, the way we think, the way we act in our relationships with each other? Now, if we begin with that - that is, living in a world that is so destructive, so chaotic, so violent and all the rest of it, how am I, as a human being, you, as a human being, to bring about order in this world? Does that order depend on you or on the politician? Does that order depend on you, or on the priest, on you or the philosopher, on you and an Utopian ideal? Are you following all this? On what does that order depend? Are we moving together? If you depend on the priest, or on the politician, or on a theory, or on a belief, an ideal - then see what takes place! Then you are conforming to the pattern set by the politician, or by the theorist, or by an Utopian ideal, and hence there is a conflict between yourself and what you think should be. Please is that clear? And that conflict is part of this violence. So are you prepared, is it your deep, real interest, to see, perceive and understand that this order in society can only be brought about by you, and by nobody else. We are responsible for that order - by our conduct, by our way of life, our thoughts, the whole of it - and is that your interest? Because one must live, when the world is in such destruction and chaos, misery and suffering, one must live - if you want to understand all this confusion - one must live in total, complete order. And if you are interested, if you give your energy, your capacity, your passion to find out what that order is - then we can discuss. You have understood my point? Then we can go into it. Then we shall share the thing together. Then you won't be just an outsider looking in; then it's your problem and you can put your teeth into it! Now, shall we proceed from there, right? Shall we go from there? What do you say? Q: Yes, yes. K: Oh good! When you say 'yes' - stick to it. Don't change tomorrow because you fall in love with a girl or a boy, or you see a new motor car. There are beautiful motor cars, I've seen one! So if that is your real, deep interest, then you must be passionate. Right? Do you know what passion is? I'm not talking about lust. I'm not talking about physical passion, sexual passion, I'm talking of that passion which comes when there is deep interest. Say, for instance, if one is deeply interested, not superficially, not because it brings a reward, but really to find out if sorrow can end. Sorrow - you know, the grief, the pain the anxiety, the fear - if that can ever come to an end, then you will find that out of that comes real passion, intensity. So now, if it is your intention to find out for yourselves whether it is possible, living in this world, to bring such order in yourselves, because you are the world, and the world is you. Right? Now, let's proceed to ask questions. I've talked for forty five minutes, I think. So let's proceed. Q: You have said that you must have passion, but earlier you said as you get older your passion becomes dull, so what must one do? K: Do our passions become dull as we grow older. Perhaps your physical passions do, your glands don't work so efficiently. But we are not talking about the passion of the young, or of the old, or about the dissipation of that passion. We are talking when there is an interest, you understand sir, an interest, a vital issue with which you are concerned, as a human being - not with your technique, with your gift, with your capacity - I'm not talking about that. If you have an interest, and you live with that, then out of that life of deep interest comes passion, which doesn't disappear because you have got grey hair. Q: What happens when you have this deep interest but also you have the desire for pleasure? K: I see. You have deep interest for something, and also you are attracted by pleasure. Then there is conflict between the two, so what is one to do? Is that the question? Pleasure on the one hand and abiding, deep vital interest on the other. Please, just wait - listen to it. Pleasure, and vital interest - do they vary, is there a contradiction then? If I am vitally interested in bringing about order in myself, and therefore in the world around me, that becomes my deepest and most profound pleasure. I may have a car, I may look at a girl, I may look at the hills and all the rest of it - but they are all passing, trivial things which will not contradict my abiding, vital interest which is my only pleasure. You see we divide pleasure in ourselves: we say how lovely it would be to have a marvellous car - or whatever it is. Sorry I must not go back to cars! How lovely to hear music. There is great delight in hearing music; it may pacify your nerves, it may quieten you by its rhythm, beauty, its quality of sound may carry you away to distant places and far away - and in that there is great pleasure. But that pleasure does not deteriorate or diminish your vital pleasure. On the contrary. When you have something of tremendous importance in your life, and that very importance becomes the pleasure, then all other pleasure becomes secondary. In that there is no contradiction. But when we are not sure of our major interest in life, then we are pulled in different directions by different pleasures and objects, and then there is a contradiction. So one has to find out - and I hope you will, during these days -what is your major interest in which all abiding passion and pleasure exist. But if you are not interested in it, if you don't take tremendous pleasure in it, if you are not completely immersed in it, passionately, vitally, intensely, then you are distracted by other interests and then there is a contradiction. Is that clear? Q: Do you not think that this order in the world can only come by giving to God the place he should have in our lives? All the chaos that exists in the world today is because we live without the idea of God? K: The gentleman says, if I have understood him rightly, that to bring about this order should we give first place to god. Is that right, sir? Now, wait a minute. You have all understood the question? That if we have no knowledge of god, the feeling for god, the understanding of that thing called god, then order becomes mechanical, superficial, and therefore changeable. Right, sir? The first importance, the questioner says, is god, and order then will come out of that. Right? Now, please, sir, we are trying to investigate the question, we are not trying to deny or to assert. We are trying to find out. We are trying to enquire. Our difficulty is that we all of us interpret according to our culture, our background, our fear, pleasure, sense of security, and so on and so on. We try to interpret or imagine what god is according to our background. That is obvious. No? And the ultimate reality, not knowing it, not having knowledge of it, can that bring order? Or, you must have physical order first, which is measurable, and having established that order then we can find out the immeasurable, in which order is something entirely different. You understand the question? Are we meeting each other, or have you forgotten the question! You know, this has been the point of view of all the religious people in the world. They say: concern yourselves with god, and then you will have perfect order in the world. And each religion, each sect, translates what that god is. And brought up in the culture of belief, we accept that. Whereas if one really wants to find out what god is, if there is such a thing, or something that is not nameable, that cannot possibly be put into words, if that is the major interest of your life, that very interest does bring order. Which means that to find that reality I must live deeply differently. There must be austerity without harshness; there must be tremendous love. And love cannot exist if there is fear, or if my mind is pursuing pleasure. So, to find that reality I must understand myself, and the structure and nature of myself. And the structure and nature of myself is measurable by thought. It is measurable in the sense that thought can perceive its activity, what is has created, what it has denied, what it has accepted. An when one realizes the limitations of thought, then perhaps we can go into that which lies beyond thought. Q: The problem of parents is, what have we to teach to our children? K: Is this your question, sir - what have we to say to our children? I'm sorry you have children. What have you to say to your children in this chaotic world. Right? My Lord! Just a minute, just a minute, let's go into it. First of all, what is our relationship to our children? Please bear in mind that we are investigating together. What is our relationship to our children? You go off to the office if you are a man, and come back late in the evening. If you are the mother you have your own ambitions, your own drives, your own loneliness, your own miseries, being loved and not loved, and all the rest of it, cooking, washing dishes, and the children have to be looked after, and there is not enough money, and so you also go off to earn. Right? The Women's Lib - you know what that is, the liberation of women. Then what is your relationship with the children - have you any? Please, we are investigating, I'm not saying you don't have it; we are enquiring. And, as they grow, you hand them over to the school, right, where there are other children, equally lost, equally imitative, conforming, forming gangs. And they enter this school to be taught how to read and how to write. Enquire, please go into it. You have the problem not only of your own children but also the other children, who are gangsters, all together, imitating, conforming, bullying. Right? What is your relationship with your child? Now if you are really deeply interested in this one question: which is, you have children, and you have to educate them rightly -if that is your deep interest then you have to find out what is the meaning of all education. Is it only to develop a particular kind of technological knowledge so that they will earn a livelihood in a world that is becoming more and more competitive, because there are more and more people in the world and therefore less and less jobs? For god's sake face all this. The world divided by nationality, sovereign governments with their armies, navies, butcheries - if you're only concerned with the development of technological knowledge, then see all the consequences of that. The mind becomes more and more mechanical, and when you lay emphasis on the mechanical technological knowledge you neglect the whole field of life. And as they grow older they enter college if they are lucky - or unlucky - go to universities, and they are being more and more shaped, conforming, put into a cage. Is that your interest? Is that your responsibility? And because they don't want to be put into a cage there is a revolt. And when that revolt does not produce any results, there is violence. So how are you, as a parent, to educate your children to be different. Right? Can you form, or build a new kind of educational system; or can you, with the help of others start a school which will be totally different? That means that you have to have money, people interested in the same thing, a group of people who are really dedicated to it. And, if you are a parent, is it not your responsibility to see that such schools are created. Which means you must work for it. You understand, sirs, life isn't a plaything. Is this your interest? If you are a parent, is this your interest? Or, are you concerned, as a father, with your own ambitions, greeds, envies, position, your office, your work, getting higher pay, more refrigerators, and - carry on? You have to look at all this. So, where does education begin - in the school, or with you? That means, are you re-educating yourself all the time - as a parent, as a human being? Q: Is there anything in education, or are the children just going to be what we are? K: Is there such a thing as education or are our children going to be exactly as we are? You know, I was told, Socrates, in Athens, complained about the youth of his time. He said they had no manners, no respect for their elders, they were becoming permissive, and all the rest of it. That complaint was 300 or 400 BC. And we are still complaining about our children! So we are asking: does education of the children consist in training them to be like us, like other monkeys, or, does education mean not only the understanding of the technological side of life but also the whole neglected field of life - the whole of it, not just one fragment of it, which means to include the psyche, all the emotions, you follow, the whole business of existence? Because we neglect all that and are only concerned with one fragment, then there is chaos and violence in the world. Q: Are you saying that we should have only one main interest? Should we not be interested in many things, in war, in pollution. You have to be aware of these things, don't you? K: Sir, when there is a major interest, then you are interested in everything. Q: Everything is one. K: Everything is one, I've said that. When I'm interested in order, it is not only order in myself but order in the world. I don't want wars. I feel for those people, because they have no order. You know what is happening? Therefore I'm concerned with pollution and poverty, war. Wars are created by nationalities, by governments, politicians, the divisions of religious groups and all the rest of it. In considering all that, I want order, not order for myself. In wanting order I have to find order in everything around me. Which means I work for order, I am dedicated to order, and I am passionate for order. That means I have no nationality, no... you follow, sir? Disorder is violence, therefore I must find out in myself how not to be violent, to completely end all violence. Q: Do you believe in demonstration? K: Do you demonstrate, do you go up and down the street demonstrating with a group of people who want to end the Vietnamese war? War in Vietnam, or do you want to end all wars? Right? Can you demonstrate to end all wars? Or can you only demonstrate to end a particular war? Please do think about this, give your heart to this. I can demonstrate for ending a war in the Middle East or a particular war, but when I am concerned with the ending of all wars, not only in myself but outwardly, how can I demonstrate with a group of people? Can I? Do you also want to end war, as I want to end war? You understand? It means no nationality, no linguistic differences, no religious differences, and all the rest of it. No my friends, you can't demonstrate for it, but you have to live it. And when you live it, in that itself is a demonstration. Q: Do not love and truth bring about order? K: But do we know what love is? Do we know what truth is? Can you love if you are jealous? If you are ambitious? If you are greedy? And is truth something fixed, established, or is it a thing that is living, moving, vital, you follow? - and therefore no path to it. You have to find this out. I have talked for an hour and a quarter - we have - isn't that enough for the first morning? We are going to have fourteen mornings like this, so for the first, it's enough. You have enough substance to chew over. Give your day to it until we meet the day after tomorrow. SAANEN 2ND PUBLIC TALK 20TH JULY 1971. Shall we go on talking about what we were saying yesterday? We were talking about order, and in a world that is so utterly confused, divided, in a world that is so violent and brutal, observing this one should have thought that our main interest in life would be to bring about order, not only in ourselves but also outwardly. Order is not habit. Habit becomes mechanical and loses all vitality, when human beings become merely orderly in a mechanical sense of that word. And order, as we were saying yesterday, covers not only our own particular life but also all the life about us, in the world outwardly and deeply inwardly. How is one, being aware of this disorder, this confusion, how is one to bring about order in oneself, without any conflict - please listen to all this - without any conflict and not make it merely habitual, routine, mechanical and neurotic? Right? Because one has observed those people who are very orderly, they have a certain rigidity, they have no pliability, they are not quick, they have become rather hard, self-centred because they are following a particular pattern which they consider is order, and gradually that becomes neurotic; being aware of that, that order becomes mechanical, neurotic, and yet one must have order in one's life. How is this to come about? That is what we are going to consider together this morning. I hope you have thought about some of the things that we were discussing the day before yesterday, and you are fairly alive with it. First of all one has to have physical order, doesn't one? A highly sensitive, if I may use the word 'discipline' - we will go into that word - highly disciplined, sensitive, alive, not a sloppy body, because that reacts on the mind. And how is one to have a highly sensitive organism that doesn't become rigid, hard, forced into a particular pattern which the mind thinks is orderly, and so forces the body to conform to a pattern, or to a design set by the mind. Right? We are following this? That is one of the problems, we will come back to it. Then also there must be order in the whole totality of the mind -the mind being the brain; and the mind being the capacity to understand, to observe logically, sanely, not to be caught in contradictory desires, purposes, intentions. And this whole quality of mind, how is it to have total disorder, the psychosomatic order, without conformity, without the enforcement of a discipline thought up by the mind, and a mind that can observe very clearly, logically, sanely, and function totally, all round, not fragmentarily? See our difficulty first, what is involved in all this. One has to have order, that is absolutely essential. That we all agree to. Right? What that order is we are going to investigate together, because in the world there is the order of the older generation, which is really total disorder as one observes in its activity in the world, in the business world, in the religious world, in the economic world, in the national world and so on, total disorder. And in reaction to that there is the permissive society, permissive generation that does quite the opposite to the older generation, which is also disorder -isn't it? Please observe this. A reaction is a disorder. Right? And how is the mind, with all the subtleties of thought, with all the images thought has built about itself, the images that it has built not only about another and what it should be, and therefore living in a contradiction - the 'should be' and 'what is' - how is such a mind to have complete, total order so that there is no fragmentation, no reaction to a pattern which it thinks is right and therefore contradictory, opposing, and out of that opposition arises violence? Now, seeing all that, how is the mind, your mind, to have complete, total order in action, in thought, in every movement both psychologically as well as physiologically. Right? I hope you see the question first, you understand the question, see how extraordinarily complex it is. And the religious people throughout the world have said that you can have order only through a belief in a higher life, belief in god, belief in something outside, and according to that belief conform, adjust, imitate, force through discipline your whole nature and structure of the psyche as well as the physiological state. Right? And there is a whole group of behaviourists who say that the environment forces you to behave, if you don't behave properly it destroys you. And there is a whole set of people who believe and conform to that belief, whether it is the Communist belief, religious belief or a sociological, economic belief. So seeing all this, the division, the contradiction in us as well as in society, in the world, and the counter culture against the culture, the existing culture, all saying that there must be order in the world. The military say this, there must be order; the priests say there must be order and so on - you see it, there must be order. And is order mechanical? Can order be brought about through discipline? Can order be brought about through conformity, imitation, control? Or order, about which we will talk, has nothing whatsoever to do with all that; which is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with control, with discipline in the ordinary accepted sense of that word, it has nothing whatsoever to do with conformity, with adjustment and so on. Now let us look at this whole idea of control, whether it does bring order - which doesn't mean we are talking against control, we are trying to understand and because we understand we discover something entirely different. You are following all this? Am I going too fast? I hope you are as interested in it as I am, and as passionate about it too, not just casually listen to a theoretical idea, we are not discussing theories at all, or hypothesis, we are observing actually what is going on, actually. And seeing what is false, and the very perception of seeing what is false is the truth. Right? Do you get it? You understand? I mustn't say the word 'get it'. Right? Shall we go on? So first what is implied in control? Because that is what all our culture is based on, all our education, all the upbringing of children, and in ourselves the urge to control. Now what is implied in that? We have never asked why should we control at all? Now we are going to go into that whole question. Control implies, doesn't it, a controller and the thing controlled. Right? Please do give your attention to this. Controller and the thing controlled. I am angry, I must control anger. And where there is control there is conflict - I must and I must not. And conflict obviously distorts the mind. Right? A mind is healthy, clear, sane when it has no conflict whatsoever, so that it functions without any friction. Then such a mind is a sane, healthy mind. And control denies that. Right? Because in control there is conflict, there is contradiction, there is the desire to imitate and to conform to the pattern, which you think you must do. Right? Is this clear? Shall we go on from there? So control is not order. Please you understand? This is very important to understand. Through control one can never have order, because order implies to function clearly, seeing wholly, without any distortion; but where there is conflict there must be distortion, and control implies suppression, conformity, adjustment and the division between the observer and the observed. Right? Now please as you listen to what is being said the mind must be freeing itself from the old culture of control. Right? Are you doing it? We are going to find out what it is to act or bring about order without control - not that we are denying the whole structure of control. We are, but we are seeing the falseness of it and therefore out of that comes the truth of order. Have you got it? Are we following each other? Yes? Following not verbally but actually, doing it as we go along. Because what we are trying to do is to bring about a different world altogether, a different culture altogether, a human being who lives without any friction, and it is only such a mind that is capable of living without any distortion that knows what love is. Control in any form does breed distortion, conflict and an unhealthy mind. And the old culture has said you must discipline. And this discipline begins with children in schools, in colleges, in families, all the way right through. Now that word 'discipline' means not drilling, not conforming, not suppressing, but that word means 'to learn'. You are following? The word 'discipline' means to learn. A mind that is learning all the time, all the time, is actually in a state of order. You are following all this? It is the mind that is not learning that says, "I have learnt", then such a mind brings disorder. Right? Are we going together? You know I have never disciplined myself, never, about anything. And the mind rejects being drilled, being mechanical, conforming, suppressing - all that is implied in discipline. And yet we said there must be order. Right? And how is this order to come into being without the accepted meaning of that word discipline? Right? I hope you are also working - are we? I am not the only worker here this morning, am I? We are asking: how is the mind to have order, total order, psychosomatically, both physiologically as well as psychologically, without control, without the accepted meaning of that word discipline, and to be completely free without any sense of conformity and imitation? Are we going along together? Right. Seeing the problem, which is very complex, as we have seen, what is your answer to this? If you are exercising your mind, if you are really deeply interested in this question of order, not only in yourself inwardly but also outwardly, what is your response to it, how do you find an answer to this urge for order, which doesn't lie in control, in the accepted sense of the word discipline, conformity and also the total denial of authority, which is freedom. Right? Because when you have authority then in that acceptance of that authority there is conformity, there is a following and that breeds contradiction, and therefore that does breed disorder. You are following? So no control in the accepted sense of that word discipline, and the whole structure and nature of authority, which denies freedom. And yet there must be order. Right? You know authority in the sense of being imposed upon; the acceptance of your own experience which then becomes the authority of your particular knowledge or the knowledge of another. See the complications of it. There is the authority of the law, the policeman, the civilized law and so on. And the freedom from authority of the elders, belief, the authority of one's own demands, experiences, knowledge, all that denies freedom. So how is one, seeing all this, not verbally only, but seeing the actual state as it is, and that is what the world is, that is what our education is, that is what our culture is - religious, economic, social, family relationship, all are based on this, which has led to utter confusion, to great suffering, wars, fragmentation of the world and human beings. Now seeing all this, how is one to bring order? That is your problem. You understand? How will you answer that problem if you are really deeply passionately interested in trying to bring about order in your life, as well as outwardly, what is your answer? Will you turn to books, priests, philosophers, gurus, the latest person who says, "I am enlightened, come and I will tell you all about it"? Whom will you turn to find out how to live a life that is totally orderly, denying all this, all the conformity, authority, discipline, control and so on? Please you have to answer this question. Right? Now can we together, because the speaker is not your guru, absolutely not. I won't have it. Please realize this. Because I abhor followers, they are the most destructive people. And you are not learning anything from the speaker, nothing, therefore he is not your authority. Right? So together, because you don't know, you have only observed 'what is', and you don't know how to bring out of 'what is' order. Right? You are following this? We have only explained, observed together the fact of what is actually going on, and you don't know what will be the outcome of this examination. Right? And the speaker also comes to it afresh. So we are both of us coming to the problem afresh - afresh in the sense you don't know how to bring order out of this chaos. Because if you say, "order should be that", then you are reacting to 'what is', in opposition to 'what is' you are stating something which is a reaction which has no validity at all. Right? So both of us are approaching the problem anew. We have only examined the actual fact of what is going on in the world and in ourselves, the actual fact. Now we are going to find out together what order is. You are not accepting anything the speaker says, please be quite sure. Then, if you do accept it, our relationship changes entirely. But if we are together examining, being totally interested in this issue, which is that, realizing the state of confusion, disorder in the world, and in ourselves, in our lives, how tawdry, disorderly it is, seeing the actual fact and the intensity and the passion to find out what is order. So we are going to find out together - together. Therefore we are going to find out what it means to learn. Right? Not from me, but by observing 'what is' and learning from that. Right? Learning, which means it is an active present of that verb to learn, which is a constant movement of learning, not having learnt - having learnt apply, which is quite different from learning all the time. You see the difference? We are learning together. We are not storing up knowledge and then acting according to that knowledge, then that becomes contradiction. Then in that there is control and all the rest of it begins. Whereas a mind that is constantly learning has no authority, no control, no discipline, but the very learning demands order. Right? Are you, please observe yourself, are you in a state of learning, or waiting to be told? Please do watch yourself. Learning or waiting for somebody like me to come and tell you what order is? If you are waiting to find out from another what order is, then you are dependent on that person, or on that book, or on that priest, or on that structure and so on. So we are learning together. Is that your state of mind, that you have understood control and all the implications of that word, understood and therefore are free? Understood what is implied in the full significance of that word 'discipline' and also are completely aware of the meaning of that word 'authority'? Otherwise you can't learn, can you? Learning implies a mind that is curious, that doesn't know, that is eager to find out, terribly interested - is your mind like that, interested, says, "I don't know what order is, I am going to find out"? Very curious and passionate, deeply interested - is your mind like that, and therefore willing to learn - not from another but learn, the act of observation? Because control in the accepted sense of that word discipline , authority prevents observation. Do you see that? Do we see it? A mind can only learn when it is free, when it doesn't know. Otherwise you can't learn. So is your mind free to observe, to observe the world and observe yourself? And you cannot observe if you are saying, "This is right and this is wrong", "I must control, I must suppress, I must obey, I must disobey" - you follow? All that is going on so you are not free to learn. If you are saying, "I must live a permissive life", then you are not free to learn. If you are conforming, you are not free to learn. Right? Are you conforming when you have long hair, beards? Am I conforming because I put on a shirt and trousers? Short hair? Please find out. Conformity is not merely to a particular pattern, to a particular structure of society, or a belief; but in little things conforming. And such a mind is incapable of learning because behind this conformity there is this whole sense of fear, which the young have and the old have, and that is why they conform. So to find out what order is, and there must be order, a living thing not a mechanical thing, a beautiful thing, you understand, the order of the universe, the order that exists in mathematics, the order that exists in nature, in the relationship between various animals in nature, order, which we human beings have totally denied because we in ourselves are totally in disorder, which means contradictory, fragmentary, frightened, and all the rest of it. Now I am asking myself, and you, whether my mind is capable of learning because it doesn't know what order is. It knows the reaction to disorder, but without reaction to find out our whether it is actually capable of learning, and therefore free to observe. That is, is your mind aware of all these problems - of control, discipline, authority and the constant response of reaction, the structure - are you aware of all this? Are you aware of all this in yourself as you live from day to day? Or you are only aware when it is pointed out to you? Please see the difference. You are only aware when it is pointed out to you, or you are aware without it being pointed out, you see it? Now which is it? Do please go into it. Which is it? Because it has been pointed out to you, therefore you become aware, which has its own other problems involved? Or are you aware of this whole problem of confusion, discipline, control, suppression - you know - conformity, all that because you have been observing, living, watching. Then it is your own, whereas the other is secondhand. Now which is it? For most of us it is secondhand because we are secondhand people, aren't we? All our knowledge is secondhand, our traditions are secondhand. Perhaps only one or two activities are totally our own, or not of another. So is one aware, are you and I aware, are we aware that it is our own direct perception and not learnt from another? Now if it is learnt from another one has to discard that totally hasn't one? Right? You have to discard if somebody has told you now, as it happened just now, that the implications of control, discipline, authority and so on, then you become aware of all that because it has been pointed out to you, that you must totally reject in order to learn. Are you following all this? So if you have rejected what others have said then you are actually learning, aren't you? Now let's find out together what order means - right? Now how do you find out what order is when you don't know anything about it - you understand? Are you following? Oh Lord, don't look so blank, please! When you don't know anything about it, what order is, how do you find out? You can only find out by enquiring what the state of your mind is that is enquiring into order. You get what I am getting at? You understand what I am explaining? Look - I don't know what order is, I know what disorder is. I am completely familiar with what disorder is, the whole culture of disorder of this present society, I know it very well; but I don't know what order is. I can imagine what order is, I can theorize about what order is, but theories, imaginations, speculations are not order, therefore I discard that. Right? So I really don't know what order is. Right? My mind - please listen to this very carefully - my mind knows what disorder is, how it has come about, what the culture, the conditioning of that culture and the human beings, I know all that, I am aware of all that, and that is total disorder. Now I really don't know what order is. Now what is the state of the mind that says, "I don't know"? You are following this? What is the state of your mind that says, "I really don't know"? Is that state of mind waiting for an answer, waiting to be told, expecting to find order? If it is expecting to find order, if it is waiting to be told, then it is in a state of not knowing. Right? Are you following this? I really don't know. It is not waiting to be told, it is not waiting for an answer. It is terribly alive, active, but it doesn't know. But it knows what is disorder completely, and therefore rejects all that. Therefore the mind, such a mind says, 'I don't know' is completely free. Therefore because it has denied the disorder, because it is free it has found order. Do you understand this? I am afraid you don't! It is really marvellous if you go into this. Do please. First of all we started out by saying there must be order in this world. And we said order has been established by the older generation with their culture, through control, through discipline, through conformity, through suppression, through authority, imposition, fear, domination, heaven and hell. And in observing that closely because all that is oneself, one sees there is total disorder both outwardly and inwardly, except occasional patches of clarity, that is not order, they are just patches. And the interest, the passion, the intensity to have order denies all the culture which has brought about disorder. You are following all this? It has denied it. That is not order. Nor is it order, the permissive society, that is not order either, with their violence, with their peculiar - and all the rest of it. And I don't know what order is and I am not waiting for somebody to tell me what order is. And my mind, because it has denied everything that is disorder, totally without holding back a thing, it has emptied the cupboard completely, therefore it is free, therefore it is capable of learning. And because it is so totally free, which means non-fragmented, it is in a state of order. Have you understood this? Now is your mind in order? Totally? Otherwise don't go any further. Nobody, no teacher, no guru, no saviour, no ancient philosophers or moderns, nobody can teach you what order is, therefore you deny all authority, therefore you are free from fear to find out what order is. Now are you aware of your mind, are you aware of yourself, your life, not the holiday life, not the life of sitting here for an hour listening to a talk, but your daily life, your family life, the life of your relationship with each other. Are you aware in that life, the daily life, the monotony, the boredom, the routine, the office, the quarrels, the nagging, the brutalities, the violence - are you aware of all that as the result of a culture that is totally disorder - your life? And being aware you can't out of that disorder pick and choose what you think is order. Right? So are you aware that one's life is disorderly. And the interest, the passion, the intensity to find order, the flame of it, if you haven't got that flame then you will pick and choose what you think is order out of disorder. So can you honestly observing yourself - you know with great honesty, without any sense of hypocrisy, double talk - know for yourself that your life is disorderly, and can you put all that aside to find out what order is? You know putting aside disorder is not so very difficult. I know we make a lot of tragedy and a lot of excitement and all the rest of it. You know when you see something very dangerous, a precipice, an animal, or a man who is dangerous, you avoid it instantly, don't you, don't you? There is no arguing, there is no hesitation, there is no temporizing, there is immediate action. In the same way when you see the danger, complete danger of disorder, there is instant action which is the denial, total denial, of the whole culture which has brought about this disorder, which is yourself. Right? I had better stop. Now perhaps you would ask questions about all this. Q: Is it a problem of how to look because we are not free? K: The questioner says, is it not a question of how to look. Isn't that right sir? Is that it? Are you, is one free to look? That is what we have been saying. We are not free to look. You don't want to look, do you? Do you really want to look at all the things which you hold, which you cherish, which you think is important, which is also surrounded by a lot of confusion, are you capable of looking at all that? Come on sirs, it is not my problem. Are you capable of looking at yourself without any distortion? Have you ever looked at yourself, not with one image looking at other images? You are following? Q: Aren't we here conforming to a certain pattern? You speaking for one hour and then us asking a few questions. Is that a pattern too? K: Is that a pattern? I talk for a hour, people ask questions, is that a pattern too? You can make anything into a pattern. Sitting on a chair is a pattern, sitting on the ground becomes a pattern. But is this a pattern? If it is a pattern let's break it up. Shall I sit on the platform, would that make any difference, and you talk for an hour and I'll listen? (Laughter) No I am not joking, please. You see I am asking a question, which is: have you ever looked at yourself? Not in the mirror, your face, your make-up and all the rest of it, have you ever looked at yourself? Do you know what it means to look at yourself? To look at yourself actually as you are? Does that frighten you? You are frightened because you have an image about yourself, haven't you? You think, I am better than that, I am more noble than that, or how dreadfully ugly I am, how old, how decrepit, how diseased, how silly I am. All this prevents you from looking, doesn't it? No? I just want to see myself as I am. I don't want to pick and choose out of what I see. I just want to look. Does that take a great deal of courage? No, sorry. My interest to observe what I am makes me look, not my fear of finding out what I am. I don't know if you are meeting this. I am really vitally, tremendously interested in seeing what I am, whatever it is - are you? My relationships, whether I lie or tell the truth, whether I am frightened, whether I am greedy, ambitious, you know all the subtle movements that creep in and out of my life. Now how do I look at myself? Is my mind capable of looking at itself? That means, does one thought, separating itself, look at various other thoughts? Then that one thought that has separated itself from other thoughts, then that thought says, "this is right", "this is wrong", "this is good", "this is bad", "this I shall keep," "this I won't keep", "how frightened I am", "how ugly" - you follow? Now is that looking? When one thought separates itself from the rest of the other thoughts, is such a thought capable of looking? Or you can only look at yourself when there is no fragmentation of thought? Is all this becoming too difficult? Yes? I don't know why. Q: May I ask a question? K: Yes. Q: Is operation on the fact one of the ways of avoiding a crisis? K: Is the operation on a fact, wanting to do something about the fact, is that one of the ways of avoiding the crisis. Just hold a minute sir, we'll answer that but first just listen to this. Have you ever looked at yourself? Your face, how you behave, why you behave in a certain way, your nervous reactions, the twitching of your fingers of which you are not aware at all, unconscious of what your body is doing, are you aware of all that? How you walk, how you talk, how you listen? And are you aware of yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, your inner motives, completely aware? Just observing, not correcting, just to look. Q: It is very difficult not to analyse. K: When you are analysing you are not looking. Q: I know. K: You don't know otherwise you wouldn't analyse. Look, I want to see what is in the cupboard of my mind, what is stored up there, I want to read all the things it contains because the content of the mind is the mind. Right? Are you following this? Is this becoming too difficult? I want to see what I am, not only during the waking hours - walking, talking, gestures, making gestures, office, sex, anger, pleasure, the delight of seeing the hills, the streams, trees, the birds, the clouds, in the waking hours - but also I want to see myself when I am asleep, what is going on. Don't you? Don't you? Oh, no you don't! You think you do. Do you know what it means when you want to learn about yourself? It means hard work, daily observation, watching, watching, watching. Which doesn't mean self-centred watching, just watching, like watching a bird, the movement of a cloud, you can't change the movement of a cloud. So in the same way watch. And the next question is: can the mind be watchful of what it is doing when it is asleep? I won't go into that, that is too - we'll go into that later if you want to. Q: I would like to look at our relationship - you to us. You say you are not a guru but you talk and we listen. We ask questions and you answer them. So could we look at our relationship? K: Could we look at our relationship. You talk, we listen and we seem to absorb what you are saying and so could we discuss our relationship? Right sir? Are we together taking a journey, together? Or are you merely following? It is for you to tell me, not for me to tell you. What is it that you are doing? Together or being led? Which is it? If you are being led, if you are following, there is no relationship, because he says, "Don't follow". He is not your authority, your guru. But if you insist on following, if you insist on listening in order to learn what he is saying, then we have no relationship, have we? But if you say, "Look, I want to learn, we are together, taking a journey together into this extraordinary world in which we live, in the world which is me, and I want to penetrate into that me, I want to learn", then we are together, we have a relationship. Right? Q: Is it really together if the physical situation is so. You sit above here and we are sitting down there. K: Doesn't it make a difference when you sit on a platform and we sit down below. I happen to sit on a platform because it is more convenient, because you can see the poor chap and he can see you. If I sat down there none of them could see me. Surely height doesn't make any difference, does it, when we are talking of taking a journey together whether you are tall, short, or whether you are broad or wide or sitting - we are taking a journey together into a world in which there is neither height nor depth, not breadth. It is the world that we are trying to understand. So I'll come back to this question, which is: have you ever looked at yourself? Have you ever looked at yourself for any length of time, as you look at yourself in the mirror when you shave, when you brush your hair, when you make-up and all the rest of it? Have you ever spent ten minutes, as you do at a mirror, watching yourself, without any choice, without any sense of judgement or evaluation, just watch yourself? Shall we go into all that the day after tomorrow? SAANEN 3RD PUBLIC TALK 22ND JULY 1971. We said that we would be talking over together this problem of looking at ourselves. I wish some of you would go into this instead of me. First of all, I feel, most of us live rather a superficial life and are content to lead such a life, and meet all the problems of our existence superficially and thereby increase our problems because our problems are very complex, rather deep and need a great deal of penetration and understanding. But most of us would like to treat all problems rather superficially according to the old tradition, or adjust ourselves to a modern tendency and never resolve totally and completely any of our problems, such as war, conflict, violence and so on. And we are also apt to look at ourselves rather superficially, not knowing how to penetrate deeply into ourselves. Either we observe ourselves with a certain disgust, with a certain conclusion already made up, or look at ourselves hoping to change what we are. I think it is important, don't you, that we should understand ourselves totally, completely, because as we said the other day, we are the world, and the world is us. This is an absolute fact, and it is not a mere verbal statement, or a theory, but something that one feels deeply, with all the agony of it, the suffering, the pleasure, the brutality, the fragmentation of nationalities, religions. And one can never solve any of these problems without really understanding ourselves, because ourselves is the world. And if I understand myself there is a living at a totally different dimension. And to really penetrate, not only at the conscious level of our being, but also at depth; and is it possible for each one of us to understand ourselves, not only the superficial structure of our minds but also at the deep, not conscious level? And as we said the day before yesterday that is what we are going to talk over together. When we say: we are going to talk over together, it doesn't mean that I talk and you listen, but we are going to share together. I really mean it - share it. Otherwise it will be no fun at all, for you or for me. And how am I, or you, how is one to look at oneself? Is it possible to look at oneself completely, without the division of the conscious and the deeper layers of the conscious of which we are totally, perhaps, unaware? Is it possible to observe, see the whole movement of the 'me', the self, the what I am, with a non-analytical mind, so that in the very observation of it there is a total understanding instantly? That is what we are going to go into. So please, as we said, we are going to share it together. You are going to work as hard as I am going to. It is rather hot but let us sweat it out because this is a very important question. This has been the problem right through the religious life, throughout the various cultures, whether one can go beyond oneself to find reality, to find something that is not measurable by the mind, without any illusion? And in the process of this search to go beyond oneself, one has been caught in various forms of myths, the Christian myth, the Hindu myth, the whole mythological world, which becomes totally unnecessary and irrelevant. So is it possible to look at ourselves non-analytically and therefore observe without the 'me' observing? We will go into all this. I want to understand myself and I know myself is very complex, it is a living thing, not a dead series of memories, accidents, experiences, knowledge; it is a living, moving, vital thing. You can't say, "I am static" - it is impossible. It is a living thing, as society is a living thing, because we have created it. Now, is it possible to look without the observer looking at the thing called the observed? Do you understand my question? Because if there is the observer looking, he looks invariably through fragmentation, through division, and therefore wherever there is division, both in myself and outwardly, there must be conflict - the national conflicts outwardly, the religious conflicts outwardly, the economic and so on. And inwardly there is this vast field, not only superficially observed, but a wide area about which we know almost nothing. So where there is an observation in which there is division as the 'I' and the 'not I', or the observer and the observed, or as the thinker and the thought, or the experiencer and the experience, in which there is a division, then there is conflict. Please let us be clear on this point, all of us, not just you and I, one of us, all of us. When I look at myself as an outsider observing within then there is division, obviously. You as a Christian, and if I happen to be a Communist, then there is a battle between us. You a Hindu, Muslin and all that, there is conflict. Similarly when there is a division in our observation, that I different from the thing I look at, then invariably there must be conflict - right? Please it is not a verbal communication, this is an actual fact. And do you see this fact as actual, not as a theory? So, is it possible - I am not saying it is, or it is not, we are going to find out for ourselves - is it possible to observe without this division? And to find that out we hope to come to that perception in which there is no division through analysis. Right? That is, I analyse myself as the observer and the thing analysed. Is this getting a little bit too complex? First of all, in observing myself, there is the actual fact of this division. When I observe myself I say, "this is good, this is bad", "this is right, this is wrong", "this has value, this has no value", "this has relevance and that has not". So when I look at myself, the observer is conditioned by the culture in which he has lived, so the observer is the memory, is the entity that is conditioned, the observer is the 'me'. And according to that background of the 'me' he judges, he evaluates; if I am a Communist, Hindu, Buddhist and all the rest of it, I observe myself according to my conditioning and hope to bring about a change in the observed according to my conditioning. That is a fact. That is what we are doing all the time, hoping to change what is observed through analysis, through control, through reformation and so on. Again that is a fact. Then I want to find out why this division exists. And I begin to analyse to find out the cause. After all, all analysis is not only to find the cause but also to go beyond. Right? I am angry or greedy, envious, brutal, or whatever it is, violent, neurotic, and I begin to analyse the cause of this violence, the cause of this neurotic state and so on and so on and so on. Now in analysis what is involved? Please follow this. This is part of our culture, because we are trained from childhood to analyse, thinking that is going to solve all our problems; volumes are written on it, all the psychologists, all that business, is to find the cause, to understand the cause and go beyond. Now analysis implies, doesn't it, time? I need a great deal of time to analyse myself. Right? I must analyse, examine, very carefully every reaction, every incident, every thought, trace it to the cause and all that takes time. Right? And in the mean time other incidents are going on, other happenings, other reactions, which I am incapable of quickly understanding. Right? That is one point, it takes time. And analysis implies also that everything that is analysed must be complete, otherwise if it is not analysed properly, the examination is incorrect, and with that thing which is not correct I am going to examine the next experience, next incident. So I am all the time examining with incorrect ideas, values and so increasing the knowledge of incorrection. I don't know if I am conveying it rightly. I may be using the wrong words, but we will correct the words. And analysis implies also the analyser and the analysed, whether the analyser is the professor, the analyst, the psychologist, or you yourself, or your friend. The analyser examining and sustaining the division, nourishing the division, and therefore increasing conflict. All these things, and more, are implied in analysis - time, evaluation of every experience, every thought, completely, which is not possible, and the division created by the observer and therefore increase in conflict. One sees that, not only intellectually, but actually, it is so. And the other question is: I can examine my mind, the superficial daily activity of the mind, but how am I to understand, examine the deeper layers - you understand? Are you following all this? Is it fun? Because I want to understand myself completely, right through, I don't want to leave a single corner, a dark spot unexamined. I want everything in me exposed so that there isn't a single thing which the mind hasn't completely understood. Because if there is a corner which has not been examined then that corner distorts all thought, all action. And analysis also implies the postponement of action. Right? Because when I am analysing myself I am not acting, I am waiting until my analysis is over, then perhaps I will act rightly: which means inaction. So analysis is the denial of action. You are following all this? See what is involved: time, understanding everything completely in each analysis, which is not possible; then the division between the analyser and the analysed and therefore conflict; and analysis is the total denial of action - action means now, not tomorrow. Seeing all this, can the mind understand the hidden corners totally? And, is it possible to understand it through dreams? Because all this is implied in understanding myself. That is, is it possible through dreams, and the intimation of the unconscious, or the thing that is hidden, during sleep. The specialists say that you must dream. If you do not dream it is an indication of a certain kind of neurotic state. And it helps you through dreams to understand all the activities of the hidden mind. There is so much about all this -all right, I'll go on. Now what is the meaning of dreams? Should we dream at all? Or dreams are merely in a symbolic form the continuation of our daily life? You are following all this? We are keeping together on our journey? I hope you are ahead of me, that is all! If you examine closely your own dreams don't you find - not according to the professionals, the specialists, leave those birds alone, but examine it for yourself - during the day you are occupied with all the trivialities of life - cooking, office, you know all the rest of it, the quarrels, the irritations that go on in daily existence and relationship, image fighting image. And as you go to sleep, just before you go to sleep you are taking stock of everything that has happened during the day. Haven't you ever done it? No? Oh lord! Doesn't this happen to you that just before you go off to sleep, or lie down, you go over the day - that you should have done this, you should have said that, I wish you had put it differently, you got angry, jealous, you know, you go over the whole period of the day, your thoughts, your activities, now why does the mind do that? Please follow this carefully. Why does the mind do it - taking stock of the day's happenings and events? Doesn't the mind do it because it wants to establish order? Right? You are following this? Doesn't it? Don't you think so? Don't agree with me, because I am not interested. The mind goes over the day because it wants to bring everything in order, otherwise when you sleep the brain works and tries to bring order in itself. Right? Because the brain can function only normally, healthily, in complete order. Right? So, if there is not order during the day, it tries to establish order while the body is asleep, is quiet, and the establishment of that order is part of the dream. You are following all this? Do you accept all this, what the speaker is saying, I hope not! Audience: No. K: No. I am delighted. Don't agree or disagree. Find out. Find out for yourself, not according to some philosopher, analyst, psychologist but for yourself find out that a disordered day, a disordered life, must establish order and then only the brain can function healthily, efficiently, normally. And when there is disorder, dreams are necessary to bring about order, whether that order is deep down or superficial. So one asks, examining all this: is it necessary to dream at all? Because it is very important not to dream, to have a mind that is completely quiet when you are asleep, then the whole brain, the whole mind, the whole body can rejuvenate itself. But if it is working, working, working while you are asleep it gets exhausted, and it becomes neurotic, overstrained and all the rest of it. So: is it possible not to dream at all? Please I am asking all these questions because I want to understand myself. It is part of understanding myself, not merely investigating dreams, or seeing the importance or non-importance of dreams, but as there is the fact that unless there is an understanding of oneself completely, all action becomes contradictory, superficial and creating more and more and more problems. In understanding myself the old tradition says: analyse, introspect. And I see the falseness of it. I reject it because it is false, though all the psychologists say the opposite, or some of them do. And in observing oneself one says: why does one dream at all? Is it possible to have a mind that is completely quiet when it is asleep? You are asking this question, I am not. I am only suggesting it to you. I have to find out. Now how am I going to find out? That is: how am I going to find out because I realize that when the mechanism is still, is quiet, it is capable of gathering more energy and therefore functioning more efficiently. Right? That is sirs, look: if the body has no rest, is going on being driven from morning until night it soon wears out, it breaks down. So if the body can rest, ten minutes, twenty minutes a day, you know break it up during the day, it has more energy. In the same way, during the day the mind is extraordinary active, watching, observing, looking, criticizing, judging, and being jealous, envious, you know, struggling, fighting, ambitious - all the rest of it. And when it goes to sleep the same momentum is kept going. So I am asking myself whether the mind during sleep can be absolutely quiet. Just see the beauty of the question, not the answer yet. Because unless the body is extraordinarily quiet, without gesturing, nervous twitching, you know all the things that one does, absolutely quiet, relaxed, not forced to be quiet, then it recuperates, then it gathers energy. So I want to find out whether the mind can be absolutely quiet during the night when it is asleep. And I see it can only be quiet if every incident, happening during the day time is understood instantly, not carried over. You are following all this? If I carry over a problem from today to the next day the mind is at it. But if the mind can solve the problem immediately, today, it is finished. It may meet another problem and finish it. So is it possible for the mind to be so totally aware each day that problems don't exist, by the evening you have a clear, clean slate? You are following all this? Then you will find, if you do this, not just play with it, actually work at it, then you will find the brain, because it needs rest, becomes very quiet - even ten minutes quiet is enough. And if you pursue that very, very deeply, dreams become totally unnecessary, because there is nothing to dream about. You are not concerned with your future. Please follow this. With your future, because whether you are going to be a great doctor, or a great scientist, or a marvellous beautiful writer, or going to achieve enlightenment the day after tomorrow, we are not concerned with the future at all. You don't see the beauty of it. Therefore the mind is no longer projecting anything in time. Now having stated all that, can I, can the mind, which is really the observer, not only the visual observer, the eyes and so on, but can the mind observe without division? You understand now? Are you following? Without division? That is, the observer and the observed. Because there is only the observed, not the observer. I wonder if you see all this? Now let us examine what the observer is - if you have the energy to go on with this. What is the observer? Surely the observer is the past - the past, be it yesterday or a few seconds ago, or the past of many, many, many years, many years as a cultured conditioned entity, living in a particular culture. Right? The observer is the past. The observer is the total sum of past experiences. The observer is knowledge - isn't it? When I say, "I know you because I met you yesterday", when I say, "I am a Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, Communist, Muslim" - it is the past, I have been conditioned in the culture in which I have been brought up. So the observer is the past. Right? This is obvious, isn't it? Do you dispute this fact? The observer is within the field of time - to make it a little more complex. The observer is the past, which through the present modified the future. And the future is still the observer. No? When he says, "I will be that", he has projected 'that' from the past knowledge, either pleasure, pain, suffering or delight, fear and so on, and says, "I must become that". That is, the past going through the present which becomes modified, the future, which is a projection of the past. Right? So the observer is the past. That is, you live in the past - don't you? Just think of it. You are the past and you live in the past. And that is your life. Right? Past memories, past delights, past remembrances, the things that you enjoyed - and the failures, the lack of fulfilment, the misery, everything is in the past. And through the eyes of the observer you begin to judge the present, the thing that is living, moving. Right? Are we going together? So, when I look at myself I am looking with the eyes of the past, and therefore I condemn, judge, evaluate, and say, "this is right, wrong, good, bad" according to the culture, the tradition, the knowledge, the experience which the observer has gathered. Therefore it prevents the observation of the living thing, which is the 'me'. And that 'me' may not be me at all. I only know the 'me' as the past. I don't know if you are following this? When the Muslim says he is a Muslim, he is the past, conditioned by the culture in which he has been brought up. Or the Catholic, Communist. You follow? The whole thing is based on this. So when we talk about living we are talking about living in the past. And therefore there is conflict between the past and the present, because I am conditioned as a Muslim, or god knows what, and I cannot meet the living present, which demands that I break down my conditioning. And my conditioning is deliberately brought about by my father, grandfathers, you know, keep me in the narrow line of their belief, of their tradition, of their mischief, of their misery. Right? This is what we are doing all the time, not only the conditioning by the past, the culture in which we have lived, but also by every incident, experience, happening, we live in the past. I see a beautiful sunset and I say, "How marvellous that is, look at the light, the shadows, the rays of the sun, the green light, the hills" - and it has been stored up and that memory acts tomorrow, says, "I must look at that sun again, find out that beauty". And therefore I can't find it, struggle to find it - go to a museum - you follow? The whole circus begins. Now can I look at myself with the eyes that have never been touched by time? Time involves analysis, time involves holding on to the past, time involves this whole process of dreaming, recollection, gathering the past and holding it - all that. Can I look at myself without the eyes of time? Put that question to yourself. Don't say you can, or you cannot. You don't know. And when you look at yourself without the eyes of time, what is there then to look? Don't answer me please. Do you understand my question? I have looked at myself with the quality, the nature and the structure of time, the past. I have looked at myself through the eyes of the past. I have no other eyes to look with. I have looked at myself as a Catholic, or something else, which is the past. So my eyes are incapable of looking at itself, at 'what is', without time, which is the past. Right? Now I am asking a question, which is: can the eyes observe without the past? Now let me put it differently: I have an image about myself, not only created by the culture in which I have lived but also I have my own particular image of myself, apart from the culture, haven't we? We have a great many images. I have an image about you, I have an image about my wife, my children, my political leader, my priest, and I have an image about what I should be, what I am not, and I have an image which culture has imposed on me. So I have quantities of images. Don't you have them? No? Audience: Yes. K: Delighted! Now how can you look without an image? Because if you look with an image it is a distortion - obviously. Isn't it? If I look at you with the image which I have of you, which has been put together because you were angry with me yesterday. You were angry with me yesterday and that has created an image about you. Right? That you are not my friend anymore, you are ugly, you are this or that. Now that image distorts the perception when I meet you next time. Right? So that image is the past, and all my images are the past. And I daren't get rid of any of those images because I don't know what it would be without an image. So I cling to one or two images. So the mind depends on an image for its survival. I wonder if you are following all this? So can the mind observe without any image - without the image of the tree, the cloud, the hills, the flowing waters, the image of my wife, my children, my husband, my aunt, not to have any image in relationship. It is the image that brings conflict in relationship. Right? I cannot get on with my wife because she has bullied me. That has been built up day after day, that image, that image prevents any kind of relationship; perhaps we sleep together, that is irrelevant. And there is a fight. So, can the mind look, observe without any image of time, any image that has been put together by time? That means can the mind observe without any image? Which means to observe without the observer, which is the past, which is the 'me'? Can I look at you without the 'me' as the conditioned entity? You are following all this? Q: It's impossible. K: Impossible? How do you know it is impossible? The moment you say it is not possible then you have blocked yourself. And if you say it is possible, it is also blocking yourself. But if you say, let's find out, let's examine, let's go into it, then you will find the mind can observe without the eyes of time. And when it so observes then what is there to be observed? I started out learning about myself - I have explored all the possibilities, analysis, all that, and I see the observer is the past. This is much more complex, the observer - one can go more into it, but this is enough. I see the observer is the past, and the mind lives in the past, because the brain is evolved in time, which is the past. And in the past there is security. Right? My house, my wife, my belief, my status, my position, my fame, my blasted little self - in that there is great safety, security. And I am asking, can the mind observe without any of that? And if it observes what is there to see, except the hills, the flowers, the colours, the people - you follow? Is there anything in me to be observed? Therefore the mind is totally free. And you say, what is the point of that being free? The point is: such a mind has no conflict. And such a mind is completely quiet and peaceful, not violent. And such a mind can create a new culture - a new culture, not a counter culture of the old, but a totally different thing altogether, where we shall have no conflict at all. That one has discovered, not as a theory, as a verbal statement, but as an actual fact within oneself that the mind can observe totally and therefore without the eyes of the past and therefore the mind is something totally different. Now would you like to discuss this question which we have talked about? Q: I think we all see the danger of these images. But at certain times some images are necessary - if somebody runs against you with a knife this image will help you because it will save your life. So how can we choose between these useful and useless images? K: The questioner says we all live with images. Some are useful maybe necessary, protective, others are not. The image of a tiger, when you are in the woods, is rather protective. And the image you have about your friend, wife, children, or whatever it is, that destroys relationship. Now how is one to choose between the two? Which are necessary images to keep, and which are not necessary to keep? You have got it? You have understood the question? What are the images I should keep, and what are the images I should discard? The images, the questioner says, some of them are self-protective, protect one, others are destructive. Now how am I to choose? Right? I don't know. We shall find out. First of all, why do you choose at all? Listen to my question please. Why do we choose? What is the structure, nature of choice? I choose only when I am uncertain. Right? When there is confusion, when the there is uncertainty, when there is no clarity. Then I say, "I don't know what to do, perhaps I will do this". Right? When you see something very clearly there is no choice. Right? It is only the confused mind that chooses. And we have made choice the most extraordinary important thing in life. We call that freedom, to choose - choose your politicians - you follow - to choose this or that. And I say to myself, why do I choose at all? I am coming to the question, sir, go into this carefully with me. Why do I choose at all? I choose between two stuffs, two materials, but that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about choice which is the outcome of uncertainty, not clarity, confusion, then I have to choose, which indicates a mind that is very clear has no choice. Right? Now isn't your mind confused? I am coming to the question sir. Go into it step by step. Is your mind confused? Obviously it is, otherwise you wouldn't all be sitting here. And out of that confusion you choose and therefore increase the confusion. So you say, I have so many images, some are protective, others are not necessary. Is there any choice there? Listen carefully. Is choice necessary there at all? You understand my question? I have many, many, many images about everything, opinions, judgements, evaluations, the more I have opinions the greater I think my mind is clear. And images I have galore. And I say which of these images is important, relevant, and which are not? Now why do I have to choose? Choice arises only when I am uncertain which images I have to keep, which images I have to discard. You are following all this? Follow it, carefully follow this. I choose when I do not know which images I have to get rid of. Now who is the entity that is choosing? Surely knowledge. Knowledge is the past. Follow this. The past that has created the images, dozens of them, chooses which it shall keep and which it shall discard. So you are choosing according to the past, and therefore your choice invariably must be confused. Therefore don't choose! Wait! Wait! See it. See it. Don't choose. Then what happens if you don't choose? You won't be run over by the bus obviously. It is the very choice that sustains the images. I don't know if you see this? Yes sir? Q: You mentioned that we are all confused otherwise we wouldn't be here. K: That's it partly sir. Carry on. Q: How, if I am confused, how can I possibly listen to you without evaluating everything you are saying? K: That's just it, sir. That's what we are afraid of. The questioner says, if I am confused, which I am, how can I listen to you clearly -right? But you are not listening! Are you? Q: Sometimes. K: Wait. Wait. Sometimes. We are not talking about sometimes, we are saying: are you listening now? When you are listening with attention, you know, with affection, with care, you know, when you are listening, are you confused? It is only when you are not listening and you want to listen, then confusion arises. But at the moment of listening - you know - where is the confusion? And remembering that moment when you have listened so completely, then you say to yourself, "I wish to goodness I could get back to that". Wait! Then you have conflict. Right? Then you say, "How am I to get back to that state of listening?" See what has happened. The memory of that state of listening remains and the actual fact has gone, so your memory then says, "I must listen more carefully". So there is contradiction. Whereas if you listen completely, at that moment of listening entirely wholly, there is no confusion. That moment is enough. Don't try to get back to it. Pick it up again ten minutes later. But be aware during those ten minutes that you have been inattentive. Right? Do you get all this? Yes Sir? Q: This culture that is emerging from the still mind, will it be peaceful? K: I don't know, sir. That is supposition. The gentleman asks the question: if the mind of all of us is peaceful then we will have a new culture which will be a culture of complete peace. You see how our minds work. Q: I haven't finished it. K: Oh, I beg your pardon. Q: Well, if.. K: Not if! Q: Will people be in conflict with the present day structure of society? K: Will people be in conflict with the present structure of society? If I am peaceful would I be in conflict with the structure of society? And what do I mean by "conflict with the structure"? Go on, investigate sir, don't wait for me to do it. Q: Will there be competition? K: Competition. I want to establish myself, my ideas, my - you follow? That is exactly what they are doing. No? Q: Sir, if somebody says, 'Take this gun and shoot' - then you say, 'No', you are in conflict. K: If somebody asks me to take a gun and shoot somebody else - I won't. What is the question? Q: If you say, "I won't" you are in conflict. K: Certainly not. They will put me in prison? All right. But I am not in conflict with them. If the drug culture says you must take drugs and I say, 'I am sorry I don't want to take drugs' - are they in conflict, or am I in conflict? I am not. They are! What is the point of all this? Q: There are two sides to conflict. K: No. There are no two sides. I don't want to have conflict. I, as a human being, I have investigated into this whole question of conflict, outwardly and inwardly, and I have gone into it pretty thoroughly and I say - suppose, if I have eliminated completely all sense of violence in me - if you are in conflict what am I to do? If you beat me, if you ask me to take a gun and shoot somebody, if you get violent, it is your problem, not my problem. Q: Sir, if the man who asks you to shoot somebody else, you can say: he is in conflict with me, I am not in conflict with him. K: But I am not in conflict with him, why should I shoot him? Wait, wait! Is somebody offering me a gun here, now? You are not offering me a gun, are you? To shoot somebody? Why does the problem arise? You see the problem arises because we are now beginning to speculate. What will you do if you are peaceful. Find out how to live peacefully first, and then that question will be answered later. Q: Does conflict come from imagination? K: When two people quarrel, does it come from imagination? Look! Look at it. I am attached to you. Attached, depend on you. Right? Depend emotionally, psychologically, physically, sexually, economically, I depend on you. And one beautiful morning you say, "Go" to me. "I like somebody else". Then conflict arises. Right? Is that imagination? It is a fact because I am dependent on you for companionship and so on and so on. And when you turn against me I am lost. That is not imagination. That is an actual fact. Then I begin to find out why I am dependent on you. I want to find out. That is again I want to find out because it is part of self-knowledge, you understand, why I am dependent on you at all. Wait! Aren't you all dependent on somebody? Psychologically, inwardly? Can you stand completely alone? Sir, inwardly? You can't stand alone because you need the milkman, the postman, the railway, etc., etc., but inwardly completely alone, not be dependent. So I have to find out why I am dependent. Why? First of all, I am lonely. I don't know how to go beyond this loneliness. I am frightened of it. Deep down I have no answer how to resolve this terrible thing called loneliness. Don't you know all this? So, not knowing how to resolve it I attach myself to people, to ideas, to groups, to activities, you know, to demonstrations, to climbing the mountains and all the rest of it. If I could resolve this problem of loneliness totally so that the idea doesn't exist at all. Now how am I to be beyond this terrible thing of which man has fought inwardly at all times, because being lonely, insufficient, incomplete, he says, there is god, there is this, there is that, projects an outside agency. Then how am I to be free of this loneliness? Do you want to go into it? Aren't you tired, it is a quarter to twelve. We had better stop. I think this is too complex a problem. That is, how the mind can free itself from this terrible burden of what it calls loneliness. Have you ever realized what we do out of this loneliness? What horrors we commit? SAANEN 4TH PUBLIC TALK 24TH JULY 1971. May we go on talking over together where we left off the other day? We were talking together about order. I think we went into it pretty thoroughly. And then we went into the question of order within ourselves, not only outwardly but also inwardly. There can be no order inwardly, and outwardly naturally, if there is no self-knowing. And we went into that the last time that we met here. We were talking about loneliness, and I think it is important to understand the whole business of it. I think most of us realize that we are, when we dare face it, terribly lonely, isolated human beings. And if we are consciously, or unconsciously, aware of it, we want to escape from it because we don't know what is behind it, what lies through it and beyond it. And being frightened we run away from it through attachment, through activity, through every form of religious or worldly entertainment. I think this is fairly obvious when one observes this in oneself. We, by our very everyday activity, by our attitudes and way of thinking, we isolate ourselves, though we may have intimate relationship we are always working, thinking about ourselves. And the result of it is - if you can examine it, as we shall presently - much more isolation, loneliness, greater dependency on outward things, greater attachment and the subsequent suffering from it. I do not know if you are aware of all this at all. And perhaps this morning, as we are sitting here for an hour or more, we could become aware, if you will, of this thing called loneliness, isolation in our relationships, attachments, dependency and suffering. This is what is going on all the time, if one is observant, in ourselves endlessly. Our activity is self-centred. We are thinking about ourselves endlessly, how healthy we are, or unhealthy, that we must meditate, sit rightly, that we must make progress, we must change, we must have a better job, more money, better relationship - me and my - you follow? The eternal circle, a vicious circle that is going on all the time. Me sitting next to god - on the right hand side of course! And me attaining enlightenment. I must achieve in this life something or other. We are always concerned and devoted to ourselves. And again that is an obvious daily fact. And from that concern our activities, whether we go to the office, factory, whatever activity we do, social, concerned with the welfare of the world - it is always me and the world. This self-concern does produce through its daily occupation, daily travail, daily relationship, an isolating process. I think this again is fairly obvious. And this isolation ends up, if one goes into it pretty deeply and thoroughly, into an awareness of loneliness, being completely alone, isolated, not having any relationship with anything, though you may be in a crowd, or sitting next to your friend, suddenly it comes upon you this sense of isolation, this sense of completely being cut off from all relationship. I do not know if you have not noticed it. Have you? Or is this something of which you have no knowledge of? If you are aware of it, and becoming aware of it knowing it, it is there, we try to escape from it, don't we - occupation, nagging, thinking about meditation as an escape. All this, doesn't it, indicates that the mind, whatever it is, shallow, or deep, or superficial, or merely caught in technological knowledge, the mind being occupied with itself all the time must cut itself off from every form of relationship. And relationship is the most important thing in life, because if we have not right relationship with one -please listen to this - if we have not right relationship with the one, you cannot possibly have right relationship with any other human being. You can imagine you'll have better relationship with another, but it is just a verbal imaginative relationship. But if you understand what relationship is, relationship between two human beings and therefore with the rest of the world, then isolation, loneliness with all its suffering, has quite a different meaning. So what is relationship? We are going back after establishing what is relationship, to try to find out why human beings are so desperately lonely, wanting to be loved, not having love, cutting themselves off, both physically, psychologically, and thereby becoming neurotic. Don't you know so many people that are so extraordinarily neurotic? Including ourselves of course, not others! Slightly unbalanced, fixed on some particular idiosyncracy. All this arises, it seems to me, if you examine it closely and go into it, from the utter lack of right relationship. So before we begin to understand how to bring an end to this loneliness, to this suffering, to this ache and anxiety of human existence, one must go into this question of relationship. What it means to be related. Are we related at all with another? Or we think we are, thought asserts that we are related but actually you may not be related because unless - again it appears - unless we find that a human being can live with another, intimately or not, sexually or not, unless one finds deeply the truth of relationship, it appears human beings must inevitably end in sorrow, in confusion and in conflict, whether they go to church, whether they believe in god, whether they do social work or whether they accept various forms of belief and all the rest of it, that has utterly no value at all unless human beings have established between themselves a relationship in which there is no conflict whatsoever. And is that possible? Can you and I, perhaps you could have a very good relationship with me, because I am going next week or the week after, and it's finished. But whether you have a right relationship -perhaps we shouldn't use the word 'right' - a relationship at all with another, and what does this relationship mean? Can there be a relationship between two human beings if each one is occupied with himself, if each one is concerned with his own ambitions, worries, anxieties, his position in the world, his fame - you know all the rest of that absurdity that human beings go through? When a human being is caught in that net can he have any relationship at all with another? Please examine it and let's go into it because we are sharing this thing together, we are not just listening to a morning sermon. You know talking of sermons, one day a teacher who had been giving sermons for many years before a small and elect audience, one day as he got onto the platform, he saw a little bird come and sit on the window sill, and it began to sing; and it sang for several minutes. At the end of it, it flew away, and the teacher said, "This morning's sermon is over". I wish we could do the same here now! That would be lovely, wouldn't it? At least it would be for me. So what is relationship? Can there be a relationship when each human being has a problem, however trivial, however complex, can there be a relationship when each one is pursuing his own particular aggrandizement? Can there be a relationship when each one pursues his own particular little tendency? Can there be a relationship when there is ambition, greed, envy, when each one has a belief - please follow all this - a belief to which he clings? Can there be any relationship between a man and a woman when one is a Catholic and the other is a Protestant, or a Hindu or a Buddhist, practising not just casually? So what is relationship? Because it seems to me that it is one of the most important things in life, because living is relationship. If there is no right relationship there is no living at all, it is then merely a series of conflicts, either ending up in divorce, or just separation, or isolation with all its anxieties, attachments, fears and all the things that are involved in this sense of being completely isolated. I am sure you know all this. The older one grows, not merely in age but in observation one realizes - I must be careful here, observation is not a matter of time, I must withdraw that. One observes in life how extraordinarily vital relationship is. And apparently very few human beings have broken down the barrier that exists between themselves and another. And to break down this barrier, with all the implications in it, not just the physical barrier, one has to go deeply into this question of action. Right? Are we following each other? What is action? Action is not the future action, or the past action, but action - the acting. Is it the result of a conclusion and acting according to that conclusion? Or is it based on some belief and acting according to that belief? Is it based on some experience and acting according to that experience or knowledge? And if it is, then action is always in the past. No? And so our relationship is always in the past, not the present. Are we meeting each other? Look: if I have a relationship with another, in that relationship -and relationship is action, obviously - in that relationship I have built up through many days, years, or a week, an image about her, or him. And according to that image I have I act. And she acts according to that image which she has. And this image is the relationship between her and me, or him and you. Right? Are you following all this? Please do observe your own minds, your own activity in relationship and you will soon find out the truth and validity of this statement. Our relationship is based on image. Right? And how can there be a relationship with another if it is merely a relationship of images? You understand? No? All right I'll go on. Tant pis! If you don't understand then you don't understand it. It's up to you. Because I am concerned in life in having right relationship, in a relationship in which there is no conflict whatsoever, and a relationship in which I am not using another, and not exploiting another, either sexually, for reasons of pleasure, or companionship. And I see to have such a relationship in which there is absolutely no conflict, because to have a conflict destroys any form of relationship, because I must resolve that conflict at the very centre, not at the periphery. And I can only put an end to that conflict by understanding action, not only in relationship but in daily life. I want to find out whether my activity is isolating, building a wall round myself, the wall being myself concerned with myself, with my future, with my happiness, with my health, with my god, with my belief, with my success, with my misery - you follow? Or my relationship has nothing whatsoever to do with myself? You are following? Myself being the centre, and acting according to me, to my satisfaction, to my glory, to my happiness, it must isolate. And where there is isolation there must be attachment, dependency. And when there is a doubt in that attachment and dependency, then there is suffering, and suffering implies isolation in any relationship. I see that very clearly, which is not verbal, or intellectual, but actual - an actual fact. So how am I, who have built for many years images about myself, and images about another, having isolated myself through action, through belief and so on, how am I to be free of these images? That is my first question. Images of my god, my religion, my conditioning, the images that I must achieve fame, or achieve enlightenment, which is the same thing, achieve success and therefore frightened of being a failure. You are following all this? So I have many, many images about myself and about you, now how am I to be free of them? Does it lie through analysis? We went into it the other day. Does the ending of images, the building up of images, does it come to an end through the analytical process? Obviously not, which we went into the other day, and I'm not going back into it. Then what am I to do? It is a problem - you understand - it is a problem and I must end that problem, not take it over the next day. I went into that too. Because if I do not end my problem today, the problem creates disorder, disturbance, and a brain needs order to function healthily and normally, non-neurotically. I must establish order now, during the day, otherwise the mind worries about it, has dreams and all the rest of it, and is incapable of being fresh the next morning. We went into that again some time ago. So I must end this problem of building and preventing images. Right? Now how is this to be done? By not creating a super-image, obviously. Right? I have many images - suppose I have, I haven't got any, thank god - suppose I have many images, the tendency is, not being able to solve them, to be free of these images, the mind creates a super-image - the higher self, the Atman, the various forms of outside agencies, whether the outside agencies be spiritual or the elder brother of the Communist world, or the religious world; without creating a higher image, there must be the ending of all the images which I have collected. Now how is this to be done? I hope you are interested in this. Because if I have any single image there is no possibility of having good relationship; because images separate, and where there is separation there must be conflict, not only nationally but between human beings. That is clear. So how am I to be free of all the images I have gathered in my life, so that the mind is completely free and fresh, and young so that it can observe anew the whole movement of life? Right? Now first of all I must find out how the images come into being, non-analytically. Right? That is, I must learn to observe. Now is observation based on analysis? I observe, I see. Is that the result of time, of analysis, of practise? Or is it an act outside of time? I give it up! I'm awfully interested in this because, you see man has tried to go beyond time by various tricks, and they have always failed. Man has tried, knowing that perhaps he is not capable of getting rid of these innumerable images so he has created a super-image, and to that image he becomes a slave and therefore he is not free, whether that super-image is the state or anything else, it is still not freedom, it is another image. Please follow this carefully. And being vitally concerned with the ending of images, because then only is there a possibility of having right relationship with another, my concern then is to find out if I can end all the images instantly -not go chasing one image after another, that will lead nowhere, obviously. So I must find out if it is at all possible to break the mechanism of the mind which builds images. So I must go into the question of what it is to be aware - sorry it makes it a little complicated, but it doesn't matter. Because that may solve my problem. My problem being the ending of all images, because that gives freedom, and where there is freedom then only there is a possibility of having right relationship, a true relationship, in which every form of conflict has come to an end. So what does this awareness mean? Awareness implies an attention in which there is no choice whatsoever. I can't choose one image over the other. Then there is no ending of that image. So I must find out what it is to be aware in which there is no choice at all but only pure observation, pure seeing. Are we going along? Now what is seeing? How do I look at a tree, or a mountain, the hills, the moon, the flowing waters, how do I look at it? There is not only visual observation but also the mind has an image about the tree, the cloud, the mountain, the river. That river has a name, that river makes a sound which is pleasant, or unpleasant. I am always observing, being aware of things, in terms of like and dislike, in terms of comparison. And is it possible to observe, to listen to that river without any choice? To listen without any resistance, without any attachment, without any verbalization? You do this please as we are talking. It is your morning exercise. Can I listen to that river without any sense of the past? Can I observe these various images without any choice, which means without condemning any one of them, or being attached to any one of them, without any preference, just to observe? Can you do it? You can't, can you? Why? Why can't I - please put yourself that question -why can't I observe all the images which I have, without any prejudice, without any preference, why? Why can't I do it? Is it my mind has become used to prejudices, preferences? Or is it lazy, has not sufficient energy? Or is it that it doesn't really want to be free of any image but hold to one particular little image? Which means the mind refuses to see the truth, the fact that all existence is relationship, and when there is conflict in that relationship then life becomes a misery, a confusion, loneliness, you know all the rest of it follows. So does the mind see the truth that where there is conflict there is no relationship - the truth of it, the fact of it? - seeing being nonverbally. Now how do you, how does one be free of the images that one has? First of all I must find out how these images come into being, how they happen, what is the mechanism of it. You can see that when you are not paying attention at the moment of actual relationship, that is, when you are talking, when there is nagging, when there is brutality, when there is an insult, at that moment when you are not completely attentive, then the mechanism of building an image starts. Right? That is, when the mind is not completely attentive at the moment of action, then the machinery of building images starts. Right? That is, when you say something to me which I don't like, or I like, and if at that moment I am not completely attentive, then the machinery starts. If I am attentive, aware, then there is no building of images. Right? Right? Which means that the moment when the mind is fully awake, not distracted, not being frightened, or rejecting what is being said, at that moment when the mind is completely awake, then there is no possibility of having an image. You try this, do it during the day. Then what happens to all the images that one has collected? I have found now how to prevent the building of images, but what happens to all the images that I have gathered? You are following the problem? What do you do with them? I hope you are working as hard as I am doing - are you? I doubt it! Apparently this is not your problem, because if this were your real, deep, vital, intense problem of your life, you would have found the answer, you wouldn't be sitting there waiting for me to find the answer and then you to copy it. Now what happens to all the images that you have collected? Do you know you have many images, hidden away in your cupboard of the mind? And can you resolve them all bit by bit, one image after the other? And that would take an infinite time, wouldn't it? While you are dissolving one image you are already creating another, so there is no ending to the gradual process of gradually getting rid of one image after another. So you have found a truth, which is: that you cannot get rid of the images bit by bit, one by one; therefore there must be a mind, because it has seen that it is not possible to get rid of the images one by one, because it has seen that, the truth of it, then the mind, when it is aware of creating the one image, in that attention all the other images go away. I wonder if you see? Have you got it? No. As we said just now, images are formed when the mind is not attentive. Please bear that in mind. When the mind is not attentive then the images are formed. And most of our minds are inattentive, have no attention. Occasionally you have attention, the rest of the period you are inattentive. In those periods of inattention images are built up. And when you are aware of one image attentively and aware attentively how the machinery operates, then in that attention all images come to an end, all images, both the past and the present building of the images. What matters is the state of attention. Right? Not how many images you have. I wonder if you see? Please do get this. Do understand this because this is a most important thing. I'll sit here for five hours until you understand it! Because if you can really grasp this once you will have understood the whole machinery of the mind. You see most of us have not been able to solve our problems. We don't know how to solve them. And therefore we live with them, and they become our habit, they become like an armour through which you cannot penetrate. And when you have a problem which has not been resolved then you have no energy, the energy that you have is taken up by the problem. And so you have no energy. And having no energy you fall into the habit of it. So you have to find out, if you are at all serious, if you really want to live a life in which there is no conflict whatsoever, you have to find out how to end a problem instantly, immediately, a human problem. Which means give complete attention to that problem, that is, not seek an answer to the problem - please follow this - not seek an answer to the problem because if you are seeking an answer then you are going beyond the problem, whereas if you remain with the problem completely attentively, then in the problem itself is the answer, not outside the problem. Look sirs, let me put it differently. We all know what suffering is, both physically and psychologically, inwardly. Physically the pain, one can deal with that by various remedies and not allowing the memory of that pain to remain. Do you follow? Now if you are aware of that pain, and in that very awareness you will see the memory of the past pain disappears. And therefore you have energy to meet the next pain, if you have it, physical pain. Psychologically we have all suffered in various degrees, with greater intensity, or lesser, we have all been through suffering of one kind or another. When we suffer instinctively we want to run away from it - church, amusement, god, football, you know, anything to get away from it, read books - I won't go into all the absurdities we do. Now if the mind is attentive, and does not move away from suffering at all, then you will see out of that complete attention there is not only energy, which means passion, but also the ending of suffering. In the same way all images can come to an end instantly when there is no preference for any image. This is very important: when there is no preference for any image. Because you have no preference you have no prejudice, then you are attentive, then you look. In that observation there is not only the understanding of building up images but also the ending of all images. If you haven't got it, tant pis, I must go on. So I see the importance of relationship, and there can be a relationship without any conflict, which means love. Love is not image. Love is not pleasure. Love is not desire. Love is not something to be cultivated, it is not dependent on memory. And can I live a life, daily life, without any sense of self-concern? The self-concern is my major image. Right? Can I live without that major image, and therefore action, which does not bring isolation, loneliness and suffering? Right. Now do you want to talk, discuss? Yes sir? Q: When one looks within and seems to experience a deep passion to understand, unmotivated, but with a bit of candour you find that actually this feeling is a wish for the experience of reality and as a result can the self, which is all we know today, experience this seemingless essential unmotivated passion and see the essential difference between those feelings? K: Will you give me a breather? I'll translate it in a minute. I'll repeat what the question is. Let's take a rest a bit, shall we, if you don't mind. The questioner asks - please correct me it I am not repeating it rightly - the questioner asks: the self, the me, wants to experience something real, something beyond the self. The questioner asks: can the self, the me, experience the real? Right sir? That is one part of the question, isn't it? Q: Can we have the unmotivated passion that is necessary to perceive the truth? K: Can the self have - I am repeating the question - unmotivated passion, which alone can bring about the perception of the truth? Right? Can the self have that intense passion, which is necessary, that intense passion, energy, vitality, drive, to understand, perceive that which is not of the self - right? Now first of all, what is the self? When you say the 'me', when you say: 'the "me", can I experience the real, the extraordinary thing', what is that 'me'? What do you think is that 'me'? That 'me' is the result of your education, that 'me' is the result of your conflicts, your cultures, your relationship with the rest of the world, the propaganda which has been shoved down your mind for two thousand or ten thousand years, that 'me' which is attached to your furniture, to your wife, to your husband - right - that 'me' that says, "I want to be happy", "I have achieved" - all that. It is the 'me', isn't it? No? The 'me' that says, "I am a Christian", the 'me' that says, "I am a Communist" - Muslim, Hindu and all the terrible divisions. Now can that 'me', which is isolated, which is by its very structure and nature limited, and therefore creating division, can that 'me' have any passion at all? It can have passion of pleasure, which is different from the passion of which we are talking about? Obviously not. So only with the ending of the 'me' is there passion. And it is only a mind that is free from all the prejudices, opinions, judgements, what 'you should' - conditioned - it is only such a mind that can have passion, intensity, and therefore be able to see that which is. Q: Yes. K: You say, yes. Is that merely a verbal statement, or you really see the truth of it and therefore you are free? Q: (Inaudible) K: Of course, sir. That is right. Just a minute sir. I have understood a little Spanish, now he is going to destroy it! Q: (Continues in Spanish - inaudible) K: Have you got it sir? Q: These images that are within ourselves waste energy. K: Obviously. Yes sir, that is right. Oh Lord! The question is: do not these images that one has, one or many, don't they waste energy? And therefore all the rest of it. What do you say? Obviously. If I have an image about myself and that is opposite to your image, there must be conflict, and therefore it must be a wastage of energy, isn't that so? Don't waste time on this. Q: Can a person who is free from any problems have relationship with people who are full of problems? K: Right. Can a person who is free of all problems, can he have any relationship with another who is full of problems? Well you have answered it. Haven't you answered the question? Can he? If you are free of problems, really not just imaginatively, actually free of every problem that human beings have - death, love, sorrow, fear, pleasure - you know, problems - can I have any relationship with you if I have many of my problems? Obviously not. Then what do I do? You have no problems - listen to this - and I have problems, then what do I do? I either throw you out, push you away, or I begin to worship you. Right? I put you on a pedestal and say, "By Jove, what an extraordinary man he is. What an extraordinary man he is, he has no problems". And I have, so I begin to worship you, I begin to follow you, I begin to listen to whatever you say, hoping I will resolve my problems by following you. Which means what? I am going to destroy you with my problems. Because I threw you out, now I accept you by worshipping you, which means I will also kill you. Q: Is there any hope for us? K: It all depends on you. If you are serious. If you really deeply are interested in resolving your problems completely, then you have the intensity and the vitality to resolve them. Not if you play with them one day and pick it up the next. Yes, madame? Q: (In French) K: Yes. The lady says: we seem to look at everything from a distance, through a passage, through a narrow vision. Right? That is it madame? Q: May I ask a question? K: Yes sir. Q: Krishnaji, when you were last in Amsterdam in May, at the end of the very first talk, there was a boy got up with a problem. The problem was drugs and you said - I won't put an end to you taking drugs - and you demonstrated this way......... And the whole hall of a few thousand people were silent and nobody said a word after that. One's own question is: is there anything else we can do to help the youth? K: The gentleman asks: what can we do to prevent others from taking drugs? Do you take drugs here? Q: No. K: I understand your question sir. Q: We drink coffee, we drink alcohol. K: Wait sir. Wait. We drink coffee, we take alcohol, we smoke, we do all kinds of things, including taking drugs, marijuana, grass, hashish, opium and heroin - right? Now do you want to go into this? Q: Yes. K: Delighted! Why do you take them? Coffee - please listen to this - coffee, tea, marijuana, heroin, alcohol - why? Coffee, tea are stimulants, aren't they? No? Audience: Yes. K: I know. I know. I don't take them but I know. Coffee, tea are stimulants. Physiologically you may need some form of stimulant. Right? Some people need them. And is alcohol, tobacco the same as taking drugs? Go on answer it. Audience: Yes. K: Wait. Alcohol you say is the same as taking drugs. Q: No. Q: Yes. K: Wait, wait. Don't take sides please. One says, no, and somebody else says, yes. Then where are we? I am asking: why do you take any of these things at all? Is it that you need stimulants? You need to be pushed, encouraged, stimulated? Go on answer. You were so quick saying, yes, now answer this. Football, stimulating. Alcohol, stimulating. Tea, tobacco, heroin, all the rest of it. Why do you need them? Q: To escape. K: To escape. Take a glass of wine and you are happy, therefore it is quickly done! Q: Yes. K: Wait, wait. Wait. So you need stimulants in various forms. Are you being stimulated here by me? Q: Yes. K: Wait. (Laughter). Do please pay a little attention. Are you being stimulated by the speaker? Don't say, no, and this gentleman says, yes. Please. Investigate it please. Are you being stimulated? If you are then the speaker is as good as a drug. Then you depend on the speaker, as you depend on the drug or coffee, tea, marijuana and all the rest of it. I am asking why you depend, not whether it is right or wrong, or should, should not. Why do you depend on any of these stimulants? Q: We don't answer in defence. We can see it has such and such action on us, but we don't need to be dependent. K: He says, we can see its action but we need not be dependent. But you are dependent when that stimulation wears out and you need more stimulant, which means you are dependent. I may take LSD one morning and get a kick out of it, take a trip or whatever it is, and it let's me down and I have to pick it up again the day after tomorrow. So I depend on it. Now I am asking why the human mind depends - listen to this please - depends on sex, on drugs, on alcohol, or on any form of stimulation outwardly. This is all psychological - right? Coffee, tea may be physiological because we eat wrongly, we live wrongly, we overindulge and so on and so on, we need certain forms of stimulation. But why do we want to be stimulated in any other way, psychologically? Is it because in ourselves we are so poor? Yes? Is that it? Because we have not the brains, the capacity to be something entirely different, and not depend on all this? Then if you are dependent, alcohol, coffee, tea, drugs - drugs are much more serious than alcohol, or tea, or coffee, because drugs, from what I have been told by doctors who have gone into this pretty thoroughly, that it destroys the brain cells. Q: Doesn't alcohol? K: Wait. It destroys brain cells, alcohol may do it gradually, take a number of years, but the drugs are very, very serious because it affects your future generation, your children. So if you say, "Well I don't mind what happens to my grandson, I want to indulge in drugs" - that is the end of the argument. But I am saying, what happens to your mind when you depend on something, whether it be coffee, tea, sex, anything you like, waving a flag? Q: I loose my freedom. K: You not only - you see you say these things but you don't live it. Do you? Does it destroy freedom? Doesn't it, when you depend on something, doesn't it make you a slave to alcohol, you must have your drink, you martini, whatever you take. So gradually your mind becomes dull through dependency. And therefore it has been established, long ago, in India, that any religious man who is really religious will never touch any of this. But sir, you don't care. You say, "I need stimulation". You know I met a man once who took a lot of drugs, LSD and he said I go to the museum after taking LSD and I see colours more brightly, everything stands out more sharply, there is beauty. But his mind becomes gradually destroyed, he may see the lovely light of a sunset, but his mind is going, gone, finished, after a year or two he is just a thoughtless entity. Now if you like all that kind of stuff, go to it. But if you don't like it, put it completely away from you. I think that is enough, don't you? SAANEN 5TH PUBLIC TALK 27TH JULY 1971. I hope you are prepared this morning to go into something that requires a great deal of consideration, and not only verbal, intellectual, penetration, but also non-verbal. I don't know quite where to begin because I want personally to go into something that seems to me to have a great deal of interest and importance, and needs very clear thinking sanely, rationally, objectively. And I hope you are prepared for that. I don't know what is going to be the outcome of it, but we'll try. Most of us feel that the world is so chaotic - if you allowed a madman to organize the world he couldn't do better than what it is now. And many feel that there must be environmental change -political, economic, polluting the air, stopping wars, a great deal of poverty and at the same time enormous wealth, maldistribution and so on. Most of us consider that these must be changed first -change the environmental, peripheral transformation and then man will be capable of dealing with himself much more reasonably, wisely. But I think the problem is much more deep, much more complex than merely the change in the outward circumstances. I think most mature and educated minds - I mean by that word 'educated' not in the ordinary sense of the word but a mind that has observed the events in the world, the permissive action of the young people and the desperate hypocrisy of the older generation -any so-called educated and mature mind is aware that the problem is much more profound, more complex, needs altogether a different approach to that which you are accustomed. I don't quite know where to begin. I think that is a fact. And one observes also that all this human endeavour, outwardly as well as inwardly - going to the moon, and the transformation of oneself, one's mind and one's heart - we think it can all be done by thought. We have given tremendous importance to the functioning of thought - logically, objectively, or irrationally, or neurotically. Thought throughout the ages, as one observes, has played an extraordinary important role. Thought is measure and this measurement by thought to bring about order and change is very limited, and apparently has not succeeded - superficially it has but not fundamentally. Thought, the whole machinery of thinking, has played a role that has brought about the present condition of this world, and I think there is no denying of that. And we think thought can change, not only the outward events and happenings, and pollution and all the rest of it, but also one thinks that by the careful usage of thought one can transform the human conditioning, the human way of action, way of living. And again that is fairly obvious: that thought is necessary in bringing about order in the world. That is, organized thought, carefully worked out, objectively, healthily, we think can change the environment; and the environment with its pollution, poverty and all the rest of it needs vast changes. I think again that is very clear. And the whole technological world in which we live is based on thought with its measurement. And thought can only function when there is space. Thought creates its own space - space being time, the distance from here to there, the measurement. And on that the whole modern world is built. Right? Can I go on? And measurement, which is the very nature of thinking, with its space, is obviously very, very limited, because thought is conditioned. Thought is the response of total memory, which is the past; the response to the past when it is challenged is thought. All right? Are you coming with me? I am not going off by myself, am I? And thought apparently has not put an end to war. On the contrary thought has bred wars, division, both religious, economic, social and so on. Thought in itself is the cause of fragmentation. And what is the function of thought - thought being the response of knowledge, and knowledge is always in the past? Out of that knowledge thought can project the future, modifying through the activities of the present. Right? And thought can project, because of its knowledge, a future of what the world should be. But apparently what the world should be never takes place. Every philosopher, so-called religious teachers, have projected a world in the future, based upon our knowledge of the past, and projecting something out of the past which will be the opposite or modified response of the past, and so thought has never brought man together. Again that is a fact. On the contrary thought desiring to function in knowledge, and it can only function in knowledge, and knowledge being measurable, thought can never bring about true relationship between man and man. Right? So I am asking myself: what is the function of knowledge, which is the known, which is the past, what is the function of the response to that past, which is thought, in daily life? Right? Do you put this question ever? One lives by thought, one acts by thought. All our calculations, all our relationships, all our behaviour is based on thought, which is knowledge, and that knowledge is measurable, more or less, a great deal or wide, it is measurable. And knowledge is always in the field of the known. And can man, can you and I, realize the importance of knowledge and see its limitations and go beyond it? That is my problem - you understand? That is what I want to find out. Because I see if you are always functioning in the field of knowledge, you will always be prisoners, very limited with certain expansive or narrow borders, which are always measurable. And therefore the mind will always be held within the frontiers of knowledge. Right? I am asking myself whether knowledge, which is experience, whether gathered in the last few days, or in the many, many centuries, whether that knowledge can free man so that he can function wholly differently, so that he is not living always in the past, which is knowledge? Are we meeting? You know this question has been put quite differently by many people, who are really quite serious, specially in the religious world: whether man is always time-bound, which is knowledge? That is, bound to the past, the present and the future. And they have always asked this question - at least those great scholars and pundits and gurus who have talked with me - they have always asked me whether man can go beyond time - not science fiction time - you are following? - but actually not be a slave to time, because time is measurable, knowledge is measurable, action in the field of knowledge is measurable, and therefore man unless he frees himself from that field will always be a slave. You may decorate the field, you may do all kinds of things within the field, make it beautiful, unpolluted - you know - no poverty and all the rest of it, but he will always live within the limitation of that field, which is time, measure, knowledge. Right? Will you ask that question of yourself? Please do! That is: is man always bound to the past with its knowledge, experience and action? If he is he can never possibly be free. Right? He will always be conditioned and out of that conditioning he may project an idea of freedom, a heaven in which he will be sitting on the right hand of god - or on the left hand, it depends on what kind of religious beliefs you have. And thereby escape from the actual fact of time, by projecting an idea, belief, a concept, he can escape into an illusion which may be timeless, but is still an illusion. Right? Now I want to find out whether man can function at all in this world, being free of time. There is the chronological time - today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, next week, next month, next year. If I have no chronological time I shall miss my train, the bus. And I realize that time must exist absolutely to function, to do anything. And that time is measurable. Time is always measurable. And the action of time, which is knowledge, is necessary otherwise I couldn't speak English, I wouldn't be able to find out where I live, or take the train, go to the office, work in a factory and so on. Knowledge as time and action is necessary. And if that is the only thing in which I live and function and move, I am entirely bound, I am a slave. And my mind observes, looks, asks, and wants to find out if it can ever be free from this chain of time? Right? That is, I see knowledge is essential - to write a letter, to do anything I must have knowledge. And I also see that knowledge, being measurable, is always limited. And the mind rebels against the idea of being a slave to time - time being tradition, the older generation, the younger generation, the gap between the old and the young, the whole of that is time. And being caught in that the mind rebels against this whole idea of living in a culture which is based on thought, and time, and knowledge. Right? I think I have explained it enough. Now I want to find out - the mind wants to find out whether it is possible to go beyond time? That is, enter into the immeasurable, which has its own space, and live in that world and function with knowledge? Live in a world which is completely immeasurable, free of time, and yet function with time, with knowledge, with all the technological achievement which thought has brought about? You are getting my point? No? This is a very important question to ask. And the religious people, not being able to enter into something which is not measurable, have invented a concept of freedom, which is an illusion because that concept is the result of thought, and therefore still within the field of time and knowledge. Now can I, can this mind enquire into the quality and the nature of the immeasurable, knowing very clearly that any form of illusion, a projection by thought, is still within the field of time and therefore knowledge? Therefore the mind must be entirely free from any movement which might create illusion. Are you meeting this? Because it is very easy to imagine one is in a timeless world and go nuts over it, get neurotic, have tremendous illusions, and think you have got god by the right hand! All that is illusion. So what makes for illusion? You are following? What creates illusion? Deception, a neurotic fragmentary, schizophrenic mind. Right? What creates such an illusion? What is the factor of illusion? Are we following each other? May I go on? I know, I know, you want me to go on and you just listen. Please, don't do that, it's no fun. Because you must do this, you know, actually do it, that is know for yourself very well the limitation, the slavery, to knowledge. And knowing that is absolutely essential, otherwise you can't do a thing. And also becoming aware, conscious, that one can deceive oneself most extraordinarily, imagine that you have extraordinary visions and all that stupid stuff. So one has to go into this question very, very carefully. First not to deceive oneself under any circumstances, not to be a hypocrite, not have double standards, the private standard and the public standard, saying one thing and doing something else, thinking something and talking about something else. That requires tremendous honesty, which means I must find out what is the factor that creates, brings about, in the mind the deception, the hypocrisy, the double talk, the illusion, the various neurotic distortions. Unless the mind is very clear of any distortion it cannot possibly enquire into the immeasurable. Right? So what do you think brings illusions - illusions of grandeur, illusions of a great sense that you have achieved reality, that you have gathered in your fist all enlightenment - you know - the things, the neurotic processes one has? What is the cause, without analysis, to see for oneself very clearly where distortion takes place? Distortion is hypocrisy, distortion is imagination, where imagination shouldn't enter at all. It may be all right, imagination when you are painting a picture, writing a poem, writing a book, a novel, a detective story, but if you use imagination and say 'That exists', then you are caught. Right? So I must find out the factor of illusion, distortion - not only find out but be completely free of it. Right? Have you put this question to yourself? No double standards, personal life and public life, double talk, believe in one thing and do something else, be a Christian with all the ideas and mythology of Jesus and all that, and at the same time - you know -be violent, cruel, bestial and all the rest of it, talk about brotherhood and be devoted to nationalism, to divisions. So all these are the indications of distortion. And I want to find out if the mind can be completely free of any distorting factor? Right? Now what distorts the mind? May I go into it? The factor of distortion is thought. That is, thought cultivates fear, as thought cultivates pleasure. Thought says, 'I must enter into that timeless state because it promises freedom and perhaps there is something more to it'. It wants to achieve, it wants to gain, because perhaps you have greater experience there. Right? So thought, which is knowledge, when it functions rationally, objectively, sanely is not a distorting factor. Right? To go to the moon - if you are neurotic you can't go to the moon, if you are a neurotic technician in technology you can't put the thing together. But when you get to the moon you are still Russian or American, which is neuroticism, and there you plant a flag or do all the stupid, childish things, which is still the action of thought. You are following all this? So the major factor - please listen to this - factor of distortion is fear and the demand for pleasure through gratification. Right? So the mind must completely be free of fear. Can it be? Don't say yes or no, you know nothing. Let's investigate. Please see the importance of this. The factor of distortion is fear. The factor of distortion is the demand for pleasure, gratification, enjoyment, the demand - not the pleasure itself but the demand for pleasure - you are following all this - on which all our moral religious structure is based. So I am asking myself: can this mind, the human mind, the human mind which is the result of time, which is with its brain the whole content of memory, extensive or small, narrow or wide, measurable, can this mind be free of fear completely, otherwise distortion takes place? Now there is physical fear - fear of snakes, darkness, wild animals, not only in the jungle but in civilization, fear of the unknown, fear of losing what one has, fear of death, fear of not being loved, fear of not achieving, not fulfilling, not becoming, fear of loneliness, fear of having no relationships - you follow? -fear. The very, very small fears, physical fears, and the more and more and more complex fears, the psychological; beginning with the physical and gradually entering into the more complex fears. Can the mind be free of all fears, not only at the conscious level but at the deep level? Right? I must find this out. The mind must be completely merciless to find this out, otherwise I enter into a world of illusion, distortion. Physical fears, that is, physical pain, disease, ill health, we all know the physical pains, and those physical pains leave a memory, don't they? Right? Last week I had bad toothache, or whatever it is, and that pain has left a mark on the brain and the memory of it -please follow this - and that memory, which is thought, says, "I must not have that pain tomorrow or next week. For god's sake be careful. Do the right thing, eat rightly, be watchful". Thought thinking about the past pain projects the future pain, and thereby is afraid of the future. Right? Are you following this? It is very simple. Now when the physical pain occurs, happens, to live with it and end it and not carry it over. If you do, then fear comes in. Right? That is, I had deep ugly pain a few days ago, or a month ago, and I see the importance of not having fear. That is my vital, intense demand, that there must be no fear, bearing that - you know watching it. When the pain happens to end it, go through with it completely - not be identified with it and carry it over, but to end it. And to end that pain which has passed, you have to live with it, haven't you, not say, "For god's sake how quickly can I get out of it?" Self pity - you know all the nonsense that goes around pain. Can you do all this? No. Can you, when you have pain, live with it, not complaining, do whatever is necessary to end the pain, and when it has gone it is finished, not carry it over. Thought carries it over, not the pain. The pain is over but the thought, which is the response of memory, that memory has been established when you have pain and says you mustn't have it, when you have pain can it not build memory? Right? Can you do it? Do you know what this means? To be completely aware when you have pain. Complete attention and not let it go over. Right? Do it if you are interested in it. So you know how to deal with physical fears. It doesn't matter how excruciating that pain is. Then there are all the psychological fears which are much more complex. Again the complexity is brought about through thought. I want to be a great man and I am not a great man. And there is the pain of not being great. I feel terribly inferior because I have compared myself with somebody whom I think is superior and I feel I am inferior, and therefore I suffer from that, which is all the measurement of thought. Right? And I am afraid of death, ending all the things I possess. We'll go into that another time, the whole problem of that. You know this whole psychological complexity of thought - thought always wanting to be sure and always frightened of the uncertainty, always wanting to achieve, knowing it may fail. And so there is a battle between the action of thought and thought itself - you are following all this. So can fear end completely? Sitting here listening to the speaker, at this present moment you are not frightened, there is no fear because you are listening. And you can't evoke fear, which would be artificial. But you can see that when you are attached or dependent, this dependency and attachment is based on fear. So you can realize your attachments, obviously, your dependencies, psychologically depending on your wife, husband, book whatever it is. And if you observe that attachment closely, watch it, then you will find out in that attachment there is the root of it, which is fear, not being able to be alone, wanting companionship - you know all the business of it, feeling poverty, insufficiency, you know, depending on somebody. There you see the whole structure of fear. Now can you, being dependent, attached, can you see the involvement of fear in it and not be attached, not be dependent psychologically? Can you? Now comes the test. We can play with words, with ideas, but when it comes down to actual fact we withdraw. So when you withdraw and don 't face the fact you are not concerned with the understanding of illusion, therefore you prefer to live in an illusion than to go beyond it. Right? So don't be a hypocrite. I love this, I love to live in an illusion, in deception. Face it. Then you will come upon fear and then you can escape from it, you can play all kinds of tricks and get more and more neurotic, but if you like that - remain in it, don't fight it. You understand? The more you fight it the more fear is. But if you understand the whole nature of fear which is dependency, and all that, and face it, look at it, then as you observe you not only are aware of the superficial conscious fears, but also as you observe you penetrate deeply into the recesses of your mind. Are you doing this? So the fear comes to an end completely, and therefore the factor of distortion ends. And if you are pursuing or demanding pleasure that is also a factor of delusion. I don't like this guru, but I like that guru. Right? My guru is greater than your guru. I will go to the remote corners of the world - India, Japan whatever it is - and find truth, truth is round the corner, here, not in that. So when there is the demand for pleasure - you understand? -sexually, in any form, this must be a distorting factor. Because pleasure, pleasure, you know, enjoyment, is right, isn't it? It is lovely, it is beautiful to enjoy the sky, the moon, the clouds, the hills, the shadows - you know - there are beautiful things, the earth. But the mind, thought says, "I must have it more and more and more. I must repeat this pleasure, this enjoyment, tomorrow I must have it". And on this is based all the habits of drugs, drink - you know - the whole of that. Which is again the activity of thought. Seeing the mountain in the evening light, the snow peaks and the shadows in the dark valley, and enjoying it tremendously, the beauty, the loveliness of it, the soft light, then thought says, "I must have that again tomorrow. It was so beautiful". So thought demanding pleasure, pursues that experience of that sunset on those hills, and sustains the memory. And the next time you see the sunset that memory is strengthened. So fear and pleasure are the distorting factors - the demands of pleasure and the fear are the distorting factors. Right? Can the mind see that sunset, live with it completely at that moment, and finish with it and begin again tomorrow? You follow? So that the mind is always free from the known. You are following all this? Though the known must be used but it is always free. Right? So there is a freedom, which is not measurable. You can never say, "I am free" - you understand, that is an abomination. All that you can enquire into is the function of thought in knowledge and is there any action which is not measurable, which is not in the field of the known? You are constantly learning. A mind that is constantly learning has no fear and therefore perhaps such a mind can then enquire into the immeasurable. Would you like to ask any questions? Q: (Inaudible) K: Yes sir. Yes sir. I have understood the question. May I go into it? The question is: can one observe without any evaluation, without any judgement, without any prejudice, is that at all possible, or is that just another of the tricks of the mind, a deception? You see a mountain and you recognize that it is a mountain, it is not an elephant. Q: You see it. K: You see it. Just a minute sir. You see it but you recognize it as a mountain. But you don't say, "That is an elephant". It is a mountain. Now wait a minute. You see it, you recognize it and the recognition is only possible when there has been memory established as the mountain. Of course, otherwise you can't see it. Q: I remember as a small child when I came to Switzerland, I saw the first time a mountain without any remembrance. It was very, very beautiful. K: Yes sir. When you see it for the first time you don't say it is a mountain. Somebody has told you it is a mountain. And the next time you see it you recognize it as a mountain. Q: I prefer it to ugly things. K: Wait. Of course sir. You prefer that mountain to the ugly building. It doesn't matter what it is. But when you observe there is the whole process of recognition. You don't confuse it with a house, with an elephant, with a crocodile, it is a mountain. Now: then the difficult problem comes in: to observe non-verbally. That is a mountain. I like it. I don't like it. I wish I had a house on that hill - you follow - all the rest of it. Just to observe it. There, it is fairly easy, isn't it? Because the mountains don't affect your life. But your husband, your wife, your politician, your priest, your neighbour, your man, girl, that affects you. Therefore you cannot look at your friend, or girl, or boy without evaluation, without the image. That is where the problem arises. Right? Can you look at the mountain, and at your wife, husband, girl or whatever it is, without a single image? See what happens! If you can look without an image then you are looking for the first time. Aren't you? Then you are looking at the earth, the stars, the mountains, the ugly politicians and all the rest of it, for the first time. And that means your eyes are clear, not burdened with the memories of the past. That is all. Can you look at that tree without an image of that tree? You understand? Go into it. Work at it. You will find out the enormous beauty that is in this. Q: If you look at it that way, just like you look at the mountain, without being aware of what a factory does to its environment, you cannot act. K: Oh yes you do. When you look at a factory that way, can you do anything at all? On the contrary, it is polluting the air, all that belching of that smoke, you know, you want to do something. No sir, don't confuse it. Keep it simple. Do it and you will see what action comes out of it. Q: (Inaudible) K: Is perception - I am translating this sir - is perception, seeing something totally, is it gradual or instantaneous? Isn't that it? Is that your question, sir? You understand the question? Can I observe myself totally, all of myself, all the reactions, fears, the enjoyments, the pursuit of pleasure - you know, all that - at a glance, or have I to do little by little? Right? What do you think? If I do it little by little, one day look at part of myself, the next day another part of myself - you follow - little by little, is that possible at all? What happens? Today I look at a fragment of myself and when I pick up another fragment of myself tomorrow, what is the relationship of the first fragment to the second fragment? And in the interval between the perception of that first fragment and the second fragment other factors have come into being. And so this fragmentary examination and approach, and observation, leads to a great deal of complexity, it has no value. So my question then is: can I, can this mind observe totally on the instant? Right? Q: When you observe totally on the instant, there is nothing. Is that then myself? K: Wait a minute madame, let's finish a little. So can I look at myself non-fragmentarily - you understand sir? I have been educated, conditioned to look at myself fragmentarily, look at the world fragmentarily - Christian, Communist, Socialist, Methodist, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Zen - you follow - I have been brought up, educated in this culture, which is to look at the world fragmentarily, as a Jew, as an Englishman, as a Catholic - you know - all the blasted lot! So being conditioned in this culture I cannot possible take a total view. Right? Therefore my chief concern then is, to be free of this fragmentary education - isn't it? Not whether I can see completely or not, but to free the mind from fragmentation. Right? Not to be Catholic, not to be Protestant - you know all the rest of it. To wipe away all that. I can only wipe away all that instantly when I see the truth of it. Right? I cannot see the truth of it if I say, "I love being a Hindu", because being a Hindu gives me a certain position, I put on a turban and impress a lot of silly asses! And I take pleasure in the past because tradition says we are one of the old ancient races, and that gives me great delight. But if I see the falseness of all that, see the truth of it, I can see the truth only when I see the falseness - the truth is in the falseness. Q: You have been using words to describe a non-verbal state of mind. Is this not a contradiction? K: You have been using words to describe the indescribable; and isn't there a contradiction in that? Right sir? You have been using words to describe the indescribable and isn't that a contradiction? Now wait a minute. The description is not the described. Right? Right sir? I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain. But if you get caught in the description, as most people do, then you will never see the mountain. There is no contradiction in that. And please be very careful. I didn't describe the immeasurable - right? I said you cannot enquire into that factor, whatever it is, if it is, if the mind doesn't understand the whole business of thought. Right? I didn't describe it. I only described the whole functioning of thought in action with regard to knowledge and time. We went into that, the other is impossible. I think that is enough for today, isn't it? SAANEN 6TH PUBLIC TALK 29TH JULY 1971. I would like this morning, if I may, to go into many things because we are going to have only one more talk and the rest of the time will be discussions. It is obvious I think that one needs a great deal of energy -energy, vitality, interest, intensity and passion to bring about a radical change in ourselves, but also, if you are interested in the outward phenomenon, to see what we can do in the process of changing ourselves with the rest of the world. Not only how to conserve energy, but also how to increase it. We dissipate energy so endlessly - useless talk, having innumerable opinions about everything, living in a world of concepts and formulas, and everlasting conflict with ourselves. All these indicate a wastage of energy - conflict, opinions, conclusions, images, formulas and so on - these, I think, waste energy. But beyond that there is a much deeper cause that dissipates the deep energy that is necessary not only to change, to bring about a change in ourselves but also to penetrate very, very deeply beyond the confines of our own thought. We need an astonishing amount of energy. And the ancients have said you must control sex, hold your senses in tight rein, take up various vows so that you don't dissipate your energy, concentrate your energy to god or whatever it is. All such forms are also a wastage of energy because obviously when you take a vow it is a form of resistance. Seeing all that, one needs an energy not only to bring about a superficial change externally, but also a deep inward transformation or revolution, and to go beyond that one needs to have an extraordinary sense of energy which has no cause, which has no motive, which has the capacity to be so utterly quiet that that very quietness has its own explosive quality. We are going to go into all that. I don't know if you are interested in it but if you are not, tant pis, I am going on! First one sees how human beings waste their energy - quarrels, jealousies, this tremendous sense of anxiety and the everlasting pursuit of pleasure, demanding it, fear and so on - that's fairly obvious, that's a wastage of energy. And also is it not a wastage of energy to have innumerable opinions and beliefs about everything -how another should behave, what another should do and so on? And is it not a wastage of energy to have formulas, concepts? And in this culture we are encouraged to have concepts, to have formulas according to which we live. Don't you have formulas, concepts in the sense of having images, how you should be, what should happen, the sense of thought which rejects 'what is' and formulates 'what should be'? All such endeavour is a waste of energy. And I hope we can proceed from there. And what is the basic reason which dissipates a great deal of energy? We both of us are enquiring, we are sharing the enquiry together. I want to find out, apart from the usual cultural heritage that one has acquired, how we waste energy, there is a much deeper question, which is: can life function, living, carry on daily life, without any form of resistance? A resistance is obviously will. I know you are all brought up on will in the sense that you must, you must not, should, should not, control - you know - will. Will is independent of the fact. Will is the assertion of the self - please follow all this - of the 'me' independent of 'what is'. Right? Will is desire, the manifestation of desire is will. And we function superficially or at great depth in this assertion of resistance of desire as will, which is unrelated to the fact, depending on the desire of the 'me', the self. Right? Are we meeting with each other. Right. So I am asking: is it possible to live in this world without the operation of will at all, knowing what will is? Will is a form of resistance. Will is a form of division, I will against something I will not, I must against something I must not. So will is building a wall in action against every other form of action. Are we meeting? Right? I don't want to run by myself. We only know action either conforming to a formula, to a concept, or approximating according to an ideal, and acting in relationship to that ideal, to that pattern, to that formula. That is what we call action. And in that there is conflict. There is not only imitation of 'what should be' which we have projected as an ideal, and according to that act, and therefore there is a conflict between the act and the ideal. Right? Because in that there is always an approximation, imitation, conformity. I hope we are watching our own activities, our own minds, how we exercise will in action. And I feel that is a total wastage of energy. And I am going to show why. As we said, will is independent of the fact, of 'what is' and depending on the self, what it wants, not what it is but what it wants. And that want, depending on its circumstances, environment, culture and so on, divorced from the fact - therefore there is contradiction. Therefore there is a resistance against 'what is' and that is a wastage of energy. And action means the doing now, not tomorrow or having acted, action is in the present. Now can there be action without the idea, without the formula, without the concept, an action in which there is no resistance as the will, and therefore if there is will there is contradiction and resistance and effort, which is a wastage of energy? So I want to find out if there is an action without any will which is the assertion of the 'me' as resistance? Are you interested in all this? Audience: Yes. K: Good luck to you! I doubt it, but it's all right, I'll go on. Because you see we are slaves to the present culture. We are the culture and if there is to be a different kind of action, a different kind of life and so a different kind of culture altogether, not the counter culture but something entirely different, one must understand this whole question of will. Will belongs to the old culture, in which is involved ambition, drive - you know - the whole assertion and the aggression of the 'me'. And if there is to be a totally different way of living one has to understand the central issue, that is: can there be action without a formula, a concept, an ideal, a belief, an action based on knowledge which is the past and therefore not action - follow all this - therefore conditioned, and being conditioned if it is dependent on the past, it must inevitably create discord and therefore conflict? So I want to find out - both of us, we are enquiring - if there is an action in which will doesn't enter at all and therefore choice? We said the other day, where there is confusion there must be choice. A man who sees things very clearly, neither neurotically nor obstinately, he doesn't choose. So choice, will, resistance, the 'me' in action, is wastage of energy. And is there action unrelated to all this, so that the mind lives in this world, functioning in the field of knowledge, and yet be free to act without the impediment of the limitation of knowledge? You know it is awfully difficult to convey all this verbally, especially to so many people. With two or three of us sitting together we could go into this very quickly, we would have direct contact, direct communion, which is, communion being sharing together as we go along very quickly, not only at the verbal level but also at a deeper level, non-verbally. We say, I say, the speaker says there is such action - an action in which there is no resistance, no interference of the past, no response of the 'me'. Now that action is instantaneous because it is not in the field of time - time being yesterday, with all the knowledge, experience, which acts today and the future is already established by the past. There is an action which is instantaneous and therefore complete, in which will doesn't operate at all. And to find that out my mind must learn how to observe, how to see. If the mind sees according to the formula, what you should be, or what I should be, then action is of the past. Right? Now I am asking: is there an action which is not motivated, which is in the present and which doesn't bring contradiction, anxiety, conflict? As I said, the mind which has been trained, brought up in a culture which believes and functions and acts with will, such a mind obviously cannot act in the sense we are talking about, because it is conditioned and therefore it cannot. So can the mind, your mind, see this conditioning and be free of it so as to act differently? Right? If I, if my mind is trained, held in education, the whole business, to function with will, then it cannot possibly understand what it is to act without will. Therefore my concern is not how to find out how to act without will, but rather to find out if my mind can be free of its conditioning, which is the conditioning of will. Right? That is my concern. And I see, as I look into myself, that everything I do has a secret motive, is the outcome of some anxiety, fear, the demand for pleasure and so on. Now can that mind free itself instantly to act differently? Right? You are getting what I am talking about? So I must learn, the mind must learn how to look. That is the central problem for me. This mind, which is the result of time, the result of various cultures, experience, knowledge, can it look with eyes that are not conditioned? That is, can it operate instantly being free of its conditioning? So I must learn to look at my conditioning without any desire to change, to transform and to go beyond it. Right? I must be capable of looking at it as it is. Right? If I want to change it then I bring about again the action of will. If I want to escape from it, again a resistance. If I keep some and reject others, it is again choice. And choice, as we pointed out, is confusion. So can I, can this mind, look without any resistance, without any choice? Can I look at the mountains, hills, trees, my neighbour, my wife, my husband, my children, the politicians, the priests, without any image? The image is the past. Right? So I must be able, the mind must be able to look. So when I look at 'what is' in myself and in the world, actually 'what is' without resistance, then out of that observation there is instant action which is not the result of will. Got it? Now we are going to go into something from this, which is: I want to find out how to live a life in this world acting, not going off into a monastery, not escaping to some Nirvana or some guru's assertions that if you do this you will get that - all that silly nonsense. Putting all that aside, I want to find out how to live in this world without any resistance, without any will - which we have gone into a little bit. And I want to find out also what love is. So my mind, which has been conditioned to the demand of pleasure, to the demand of gratification, satisfaction, and therefore resistance, all that is not love. Right? So what is love? You know to find out 'what is', one must deny, put aside totally, what it is not. Through negation come to the positive, not seek the positive but come to it understanding what it is not. Right? That is, if I want to find out what truth is, not knowing what it is, I must be able to see what is false. If I haven't the capacity to perceive what is false, I can't see what is truth. Right? So I must find out what is false. What is false? Everything that thought has put together, except technologically, is false. That is, thought has put together the 'me'. Right? The 'me', the self with its memories, with its aggression, with its separativeness, with its ambitions, competitiveness, imitation, fear, and the past memories, all that has been put together by thought, as thought has put together the extraordinary things mechanically. So thought, as the 'me', which has in essence no reality whatsoever, is the false. So when the mind understands that it is false then the truth is there. Similarly when the mind really enquires deeply into what is love, enquires, not say "it is this", "it is that", enquires - then it must see what it is not and completely drop it, otherwise you can't find the real, obviously. Right? Is one capable of doing that? Say for instance, love is not ambition. Right? Do you follow? You all agree to that, don't you? Don't we? A mind that is ambitious, wanting to achieve, wanting to become powerful, aggressive, competitive, imitative, such a mind cannot possible understand what love is. We see that, don't we? Is there any doubt about that? Oh lord! Well if you have doubts you carry on. Now can the mind see the falseness of it, that a mind that is ambitious cannot possibly love, and drop it instantly because it is false? Right? Because only when you deny completely that which is false then the other is. So we see very clearly, perhaps verbally, intellectually, but not actually, that a mind seeking gain, achievement either in the world, or so-called spiritually, sitting next to god, seeking enlightenment, you know, the drive to find out, to achieve is ambition. Therefore can the mind see the falseness of it and completely drop it instantly? Otherwise you won't find out what is. Otherwise you will never find out what love is. And love is not jealousy, is it? Love is not possessiveness. Love is not dependency. Right? Do you see that? Not carry it over with you to the next day but drop it instantly. The dropping of it instantly doesn't depend on will. It depends on whether you actually see the falseness of it. Right? Do you? And therefore when you drop that which is false, which is not, the other is. Now is love pleasure? It become a little more difficult. Is love fulfilment? Sir look: one has to go into this rather deeply if you really want to have a mind that has love. You have to go into it very, very deeply. We are asking, is pleasure, gratification, fulfilment, love? We went into it the other day that the demand for pleasure is the continuity of thought, which pursues pleasure as desire and will separate from 'what is'? We have associated love with sex; and because there is pleasure in that we have made an extraordinary thing of it, it has become the most important thing in life. No? Not for us old people! But we have made sex one of the greatest things in life. And in that we have tried to find some deep meaning, a deep reality, a sense of great union, oneness, and other transcendental things. It has become important because we have nothing else in life. Knowledge becomes rather boring, imitation, following somebody, becomes rather trivial, pursuit of money is all right but without money you can't have the other. So sex and pleasure have become the most astonishing thing in civilization. And that is what we call love. So is pleasure love? And also why has sex such significance in our life? Probably we have nothing else. Probably in every other field we are mechanical. There is nothing original in ourselves, there is nothing creative, not in the sense of producing pictures and songs, poems, that is a very superficial part of that which is really a sense of creativeness. So as we are more or less secondhand people sex becomes extraordinarily important and therefore pleasure. And that is why we call it love and behind that mask do all kinds of mischievous things. So can we find out what love is? You know this has been an everlasting question, it is not just put now. Man has asked this and not being able to find it, he says, "Love god", "Love an idea", "Love the State", "Love your neighbour" - not that you shouldn't love your neighbour, but these have become merely a social operation, not love that really is always new. So love is not the product of thought, which is pleasure. As we said thought is old, not free, it is the response of the past. And so love has no relationship with thought. And most of one's life is a battle, as we know - the strain, the anxiety, the guilt, the despair, the immense sense of loneliness, sorrow, that is our life. That is actually 'what is'. And we are unwilling to face that. Now can the mind face all that, not resist it? And when you face all that without choice and resistance, what takes place? When you face it, not try to overcome fear, overcome jealousy, this or that, but actually look at it without any sense of wanting to change it, conquer it, control it, just to observe it totally, give your whole attention to it - which is our life, our daily life of travail, our daily life of the bourgeois, including the non-bourgeois. To look at it. What takes place? Haven't you then tremendous energy, because energy has been dissipated in resisting it, in overcoming it, in going beyond it, trying to understand it, trying to change it? So when you do look at this life as it is, then is there not a transformation of 'what is'? And that transformation takes place only when you have this energy in which the operation of will doesn't exist at all. You know we like explanations, we like theories, we indulge in speculative philosophy and we are carried away by all that - which is obviously such a waste of time and energy. And now when one observes the life as it is, the misery, the poverty, the pollution, the wretched division of peoples and nations, the wars, as it is, which each human being has created, it hasn't come into existence miraculously, each one of us is responsible for all this. And to change all this we must face what actually is. And also we must face one of the most important things in life, death. No? That is one of the things that man has avoided all the time. The ancient civilizations and the modern civilizations have tried to go beyond that, somehow conquer it, imagine there is immortality, life after death, anything but face it. Now can the mind face something of which it knows absolutely nothing? You know most of you unfortunately, if I may say so, have read so much about all these things. You have read probably what Indian philosophers, teachers, have told us, have said, or you have read other philosophers, and your own Christian training. You are full of other people's knowledge, assertions and opinions. You are bound to be although you may not consciously acknowledge it, it is there in the blood, because you were brought up in this civilization, in this culture. And here is something of which you know absolutely nothing. All that you know is that you are frightened. That is all you know. Frightened of coming to an end - and that is what death is. Fear prevents you from looking at it, because fear has prevented you from living - you understand - not living with anxiety, pain, sorrow, guilt ambition - you know all that brutal business. So fear has prevented you from living, and fear prevents you from looking at what death is. And so fear must have comfort. So there is the whole sense of incarnation, the renewal of another life and so on and so on - which we won't go into because what we are concerned with is to face this thing: whether your mind can face the reality of an ending, because that is what is going to happen, logically or illogically, while you are healthy or unhealthy, crippled or fairly well off, old age, disease, accident, anything can happen. Can the mind look at this enormous unknown question? Can you look at it as though for the first time? You understand my question? For the first time, having nobody to tell you what to do, knowing that to find comfort is an escape from the fact. So can you as though for the first time face something which is inevitable? So what is the mind that is capable of looking at something of which it knows absolutely nothing except that there is organic death, the organism coming to an end? Right? Through heart failure, through tension, through emotions, etc., etc., disease and so on. But the question, the psychological question which is: can the mind face something knowing it knows absolutely nothing about it and look at it, live with it, understand it completely? Which means, can it look at it without any sense of fear, the moment you have fear you have choice, the moment you have fear there is will, there is resistance, and that is a wastage of energy. The ending of energy as the 'me' is the incapacity to look at death. Now to face something I don't know at all demands great energy, doesn't it? Not demands, to face something of which I know absolutely nothing, I can only do that when there is no will, no resistance, no choice - you follow - no wastage of energy. To face something unknown there must be the highest form of energy. And when there is that total energy, is there death? Is there a fear of death? Or is there a fear of continuity? It is only there is fear of not being, or being, living, or not living, only when I have lived a life of resistance, will and choice. And when the mind is faced with the unknown and all these things have gone - the wastage - there is tremendous energy. And when there is that supreme energy, which is intelligence, is there death? You find out. Now would you like to ask questions please? Q: Sir, you have questioned this morning the religions, and what they say, which prompts me to ask: how is it that I can understand on an intellectual level that which you say, it seems to be sensible, it seems to be reasonable, it has sense and yet I lack the passion. K: What you say intellectually, verbally, makes some kind of sense. I see, the questioner says, the logic of it, but somehow it doesn't penetrate, it doesn't go very deep, it doesn't touch the source of things so that I can break through - right sir? You have understood the question? I accept intellectually, verbally, what you talk about but it leaves me rather cold, it doesn't bring that sense of driving vitality, interest, that stirring of - not emotion, not sentiment, not excitement, not enthusiasm, all that is kind of silly stuff - but the complete sense of living with it. Right sir? I am afraid that is the case with most people. Q: Most people don't fear death but suffering. K: Please don't answer, explain. Let us examine. The gentleman says that what you say is logical, intellectually I accept and so on, but I don't feel it deep in my heart and therefore don't bring about a change, a revolution in myself and live totally a different kind of life. And I say that is the case with most of us. We go part of the way, take the journey together a little distance and draw back. Keep up the interest for ten minutes and the rest of the hour think about something else. Go away after the talk and carry on with your daily - you know - sordid, or beautiful, or noble, or ignoble life. Now why does this happen? Why does this happen that you intellectually, verbally, logically, understand and apparently it doesn't touch you deeply so that you will, like a fire, burn out the old? Wait sir, listen, slowly, slowly. Why doesn't this happen? Is it lack of interest? Is it a sense of deep laziness, indolence? Examine it sir, examine it. Don't answer me. Examine it. Lack of interest? If it is lack of interest, why? Why aren't you interested? When the house is burning - your house, your children are going to grow up, killed - you follow? - all the monstrous things that are going to happen - why aren't you interested? Are you blind, insensitive, indifferent, callous? Or deeply you haven't the energy and therefore you are lazy, indolent, don't care - you know? Wait sir, examine it, don't agree - please sirs, don't agree or disagree, examine it. Or you have become so insensitive because you have your own problems -you know - you want to fulfil, you are inferior, you are superior, you are anxious, you have a great sense of fear - all that. Your problems are smothering you therefore you are not interested in anything else unless you solve your problems first. But your problems are the other man's problems, your problems are the result of this culture in which we live. Please sirs do listen. So which is it? Total indifference, insensitivity, callousness? Or your whole culture, training, has been intellectual, verbal, your philosophies are verbal, theories, the product of tremendously cunning brains? And you have been brought up in that. Your whole education is based on that. Is it that - please listen to this - is it that thought has been given such extraordinary importance, the mind, clever, cunning, capable, efficient, technological mind, the mind that can measure, construct, fight, organize, and you have been trained in that, and you respond on that level, say, "Yes, I agree with you intellectually, verbally, I see the logic of it, the sequence of it," and you can't go beyond it because your mind is caught in the operations of thought which is measurement. It can measure, thought can measure, not depth or height, but on its own level - I won't go into all that. So this is really an important question for everybody because most of us agree with all this, verbally, intellectually, but somehow the fire doesn't get lit. Yes sir? Q: I think there is no change because the important things are not actually on the intellectual level but on another level which is that of the interest, that of the class, that of the psychological things which condition us. K: That is what we said sir. That is what I said sir. There is no change, the gentleman says, because psychologically, economically, socially, in education we are conditioned. We are the result of the culture in which we live. And he says as long as that is not changed in us we won't take any deep interest. That is exactly what we are saying sir. So I am asking why is it that though you listen to all this logically and I hope with a healthy mind, why doesn't this light a fire so that you burn with all this? Please ask yourselves. Yes sir? Q: I wonder if argument and wars are consequences of culture, or lack of culture? K: You can use the word 'culture' in different ways. Is it lack of culture that produces war or is it the culture which produced the war? You can play with words. Sir please, go into this, find out: do you agree logically, verbally, superficially, why is it that deeply it doesn't touch you? Take away your money, it will touch you. Take away your sex, it will touch you. Take away your sense of importance, then you will battle. Take away your gods, your nationalism, your petty bourgeois, and all the rest of it, you will fight like dogs and cats. Which all indicates that intellectually we are capable of anything -going to the moon and all the rest of it, technologically. We live on the level of thought, and thought cannot possibly ignite the flame, which changes man. What changes man is to face all this, look at it, and not always live on that very, very superficial level. Q: You said this morning that when you are capable of looking at death as the absolute unknown, that includes that you also are capable of looking at life as it is and also including that you are capable of action. K: Yes sir, yes sir. Q: That you are in a state of now. K: That's right, sir. He says when you are capable - now wait a minute, the word 'capable' is a difficult word. Capacity means working, to have capacity for something - again a difficult meaning of that word - you know you can cultivate capacity. Right? I can cultivate the capacity to play golf, tennis, to put machinery together. Now we are not using the word 'capacity' in the sense of time. You understand? Capacity involves time, doesn't it? That is, I am not capable now but give me a year and I'll be capable of speaking Italian, French or putting machinery together - capacity implies time. If you have understood capacity as time, I don't mean that. I mean observe the unknown without any fear, observe, live with it. That doesn't need capacity. I said you will do it if you know what is false, and the rejection of all that. Yes sir? Q: Is it not a question of we don't know how to listen. K: We don't know how to listen. Q: You have said that it is one of the hardest things to do, to listen. K: Yes sir. It is one of the hardest things to do, to listen. Do you mean to say a man, who is committed to social activity and has put all his life into it, and for various psychological reasons is ever going to listen to any of this? Or a man who says, "I have taken a vow of celibacy" - will he listen to all this? No sir. Listening is quite an art. Right. Isn't that enough for today. Yes, sir? Q: You were saying that the difficulty is on the intellectual level and that we do not allow our feelings and our emotions to come into our relations with other people. But I have the impression it is exactly the contrary. I think that most of the trouble in the world is caused by uncontrolled emotions and passions, probably born out of lack of understanding. But they are passions. K: The gentleman says: we don't live on the intellectual level, we live with shoddy emotions, with our petty little anxieties and worries and angers and jealousies - emotions. Since we don't know how to conquer those we lead a miserable life - right sir? Q: Violent. K: Violent, of course, that's understood. Now do you live an emotional life, a sentimental life, which needs conquering? Emotionally, that is, you know, excitement, pleasure and all that enthusiasm, sentimentality, do you live in that world? And when you do live in that world, and when it gets rather disorderly then the intellect comes in and then you begin to control it, say, "I mustn't" but intellect always dominates. Q: Or it justifies. K: Of course sir, justifies or condemns. But I may be greatly emotional but intellect comes along and says, look, be careful, try to control yourself. So intellect always dominates, which is thought. No? Oh lord! Right sir, let's go into it. Look, in my relationship with another I get angry, irritated, emotional, in my relationship. Then what happens? That leads to trouble. There is a quarrel that takes place with two human beings. Then I try to control it, which is thought, because it has established a pattern for itself, what it should not, or what it should, says, "I must control". Right? So then we say, there must be control otherwise relationship breaks down. Isn't all that a process of thinking? An intellectual process? And intellect plays a tremendous part in our life, that is all that we are pointing out. We are not saying emotions are wrong or right, or true, but thought with its measurement is always judging, evaluating, controlling, overcoming and therefore thought prevents you from looking. That's all sirs. We meet the day after tomorrow. SAANEN 7TH PUBLIC TALK 1ST AUGUST 1971. You know we have talking about the various contradictory states of the world, outside our skin as it were - the refugees, their torture, and the horrors of war, poverty, the national division, and the religious separations of people, and the economic and social injustice. It is not merely verbal statements but actual facts of what is going on in the world - violence, terrible mess, hatred and every form of corruption. And in ourselves the same phenomenon is going on, we are at war with ourselves, unhappy, dissatisfied, seeking something which we don't know about but we are seeking, we are violent, aggressive, corrupt and astonishingly miserable, lonely and with a great deal of suffering. And somehow we don't seem to be able to get out, to be free of these conditionings. We have tried every form of behavioural therapy, religious sanctions and their pursuits, the monastic life, a life of sacrifice, denial, suppression, and blindly seeking, going from one book to another, or one religious guru to another, political reforms, revolutions. We have tried so many things, and yet somehow we don't seem to be able to free ourselves from this terrible mess, in ourselves, as well as outwardly. And we follow the latest guru who offers some system, panacea, some way to crawl out of our own misery, and that again doesn't seem to resolve any of our problems. And I think the average person here asks: I know I am all this, caught in a trap of civilization, miserable, rather a small narrow life and sorrowful; I have tried this and that but somehow all this chaos is in me still, what am I to do, how am I to get out of all this confusion? We have talked, taking various things during these seven talks, of order, fear, pain, love and death, sorrow, and at the end of the day, at the end of these meetings, for most of us we are where we began, perhaps slightly modified, slight peripheral changes, but at the very root of our being, our whole structure and nature more or less remains as it was. And how is all that to be really jolted, break out so that when you do leave this place at least for one day, for one hour, there will be something totally new, a life that really has significance, has a meaning, has depth and width. I would like, if I may this morning, a rather lovely morning, I don't know if you have noticed the hills, the mountains, the river and the lengthening shadows of the morning and the pine trees dark against the blue sky, and those extraordinary hills full of light and shade - on a morning like this, sitting in a tent to talk about serious things seems rather absurd when everything about us is crying with great joy, shouting to the heavens the beauty of the earth and the misery of man. But since we are here, fortunately or unfortunately, I would like this morning to approach the whole problem in a different way. You just listen to it, not only the meaning of the words, not only the descriptions, because the description, as we said the other day, is never the described, when you describe the hills, the trees, the rivers, the shadows, but if you don't see them for yourselves, with your heart and your mind, the description has very little meaning. It is like describing good food to a hungry man, he must have food and not just words and the smell of words. I don't quite know how to put all this differently. I am going to try. I don't know quite where it is going to lead, I haven't come prepared, logically thought out and come here and spurt it out, but I would like to explore - if you will together with me - a different way of looking at all this, from a totally different dimension. Not the usual dimension of me and you, and we and they, and my problems and their problems, how to end this and how to get that, how to become more beautiful, intelligent, lovely and noble, but rather see together if we can observe all this phenomenon from a different dimension. And perhaps some of us are not used to that dimension, we don't know if there actually is a different dimension, we may speculate about it, we may imagine, but the speculation and the imagination are not the fact. So as we are only dealing with facts and not with speculations, beliefs, ideologies, it behoves us, I think, to not only listen to what the speaker is going to say, but also try to go beyond the words and the explanations. Which means you must also be sufficiently attentive, and interested, sufficiently aware of the meaning of a dimension which we have probably not touched at all. And if I can this morning look at that dimension, not with my eyes but the eyes of objective intelligence and beauty and interest. I do not know if you have ever thought about space. Where there is space there is silence. Not the space created by thought but a space that has no frontiers at all, a space that is not measurable, that cannot be connived at, put together, a space that is really quite unimaginable. Because when man has space, real space, width and depth and immeasurable sense of extension, not of his consciousness, which is merely another form of thought extending itself with measurement, from a centre - but that sense of space which is not conceived by thought. Now when there is that kind of space there is absolute silence. And with the over crowding of cities, the noise, the contradictory preachers and their gurus, the exploding population, outwardly there is more and more restriction, there is less and less space. I do not know if you have not noticed in this valley how new buildings are going up, more people, more and more cars polluting, all the horrors that go on with over crowded cities. So outwardly there is less and less space, you go into any street in a crowded town and you will notice this, especially in the East. If you ever go there you will see thousands of people sleeping on the pavement, over crowded, living on the pavement. And take any big town, New York, London or what you will, Paris, there is hardly space, the houses are small, they are living in kinds of drawers, enclosed, trapped in. And where there is no space there is violence - no space economically, socially, or space in our own mind; and therefore we are partly responsible for this violence because we have no space. And in our own minds the space that we create is isolation, a wall built around ourselves. Please do observe this in yourselves and not because the speaker is talking about it, just observe it. Our space is a space of isolation and withdrawal, we don't want to be hurt anymore, we have been hurt when we were young and the marks of the hurt remain, and so we withdraw, we resist, we build a wall around ourselves and around those whom we think we like or love, and that has a very limited space. It is like looking over the wall into another person's garden, or into another person's mind, but still the wall is there. And in that world there is very little space. In that space, narrow, small, rather shoddy little space, from there we act, we think, we love, we function. And from that centre we try to reform the world, joining this or that party. Or from that little narrow hole, which is certainly in space, we try to find a new guru that will teach us the latest way to enlightenment. And in our minds crowded with knowledge, rumours, opinions, chattering, there is hardly any space at all. I do not know if you have not noticed this extraordinary phenomenon, that the longer we live in observation, in awareness, not just live earning money and putting away a little bank account, you know, sex and all this and that, which is part of life, but if one has been observant, aware of the things around one and in oneself, one must have noticed what a little space one has. How crowded it is in ourselves. Please watch it in yourself. And how is one, being isolated in that little space, with enormous thick walls of resistance, of ideas and of aggression, how is one to have space that is really immeasurable? As we said the other day, thought is measurable, thought is measure. And any form of self-improvement is measure, and obviously self-improvement is the most callous form of isolation. And one sees that thought cannot bring about the vast space in which there is complete and utter silence. You are following. Thought cannot bring it. Thought can only progress, evolve, in ratio to the end it projects, which is measurable. And that space, which thought creates, imaginatively, or of necessity, can never enter or come into a dimension in which there is space which is not of thought. You understand my question? Thought has built, through centuries, a space that is very, very limited, narrow, isolated, and because of this very isolation, narrowness, it creates division, and where there is division there is conflict, nationally, religiously, politically, in every way, in relationship and so on. That conflict is measure - the less conflict and the more conflict and so on. Now the question is: how can thought enter into the other; or the other is not - thought can never enter it - you have understood? I am the result of thought, all my activities are based on thought -logic, illogic, neurotic, or highly educated, sophisticated, rational, scientific, technological. I am the result of all that. And that has space within the walls of resistance. Now how is the mind to change all that and discover something which is a totally different dimension? You have understood my question? Are we meeting each other? Can the two come together? The freedom in which there is complete silence and therefore vast space, and the walls of resistance which thought has created, with its narrow little space -can the two come together and flow together? Right? This has been the problem of man, religiously, when he enquires at great depth this is the problem. Can I hold on to my little ego, to my little space, to the things that I have collected, knowledge, the experiences, the hopes, the pleasures and move into a different dimension where the two can operate? I want to sit at the right hand of god and yet I want to be free of god. I want to live a life of great delight and pleasure and beauty, and also I want to have joy which is not measurable, which cannot be caught by thought. You are following? I want pleasure and joy. I know the movement of pleasure, the demands of pleasure, the pursuit of pleasure, with all its fears, travails, sorrow, agony, anxiety. And also I know that joy which is totally uninvited, which thought can never capture - if it does capture it becomes pleasure and then the old routine begins. So I want to have both - the things of the world and the other world. I think this is the problem with most of us - isn't it? To have a thumping good time in this world - why not? - and avoid all pain, all sorrow because I also know other moments when there is great joy which cannot be touched, which is not corrupt: I want both. And that is what we are seeking. Carry all our burden and yet seeking freedom. And can I do this? Can I, through will - you understand what we said the other day about will, will has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual, 'what is', but will is the expression of desire as 'me', and we think somehow through will we shall come upon the other. And so we say to ourselves, "I must control thought, I must discipline thought". When the 'I' says, I must control, discipline thought, it is still thought separating itself as the 'I' and thought as something separate, but it is still thought, the 'I' and the 'not I'. And thought, one realizes, being measurable, being noisy, chattering, running all over the place, has created the space of a little rat, a monkey that chases its own tail. So one says, how is thought to become quiet? Because thought has created the technological world and the world of chaos, the world of war, the national divisions, the religious separations; thought has brought about misery, confusion, sorrow; thought is time. So time is sorrow. And one sees all this - if you have gone very, very deeply, not at the instruction of another, but merely observing this in the world and in yourself. Then the question arises: can thought be completely silent and only function when necessary? Do you follow? When necessary, when it has to use knowledge, technology, going to the office, talking and all the rest of it; and the rest of the time absolutely quiet. The more there is that space and silence the more it can function logically, sanely, healthily, with knowledge. Otherwise knowledge becomes an end in itself and brings about chaos. Are you following all this? Not agreeing with me, you see it for yourself. So the question is: thought, which is the response of memory, knowledge, experience, time, and thought is the content of consciousness, knowing thought must function with knowledge, and it can only function with the highest intelligence only when there is space and silence, and from there function. Am I making myself clear? Have I? Have I sir? Do tell me. Encourage me! No, I don't want your encouragement, sorry! So that is my problem. That is, there must be vast space and silence because when there is that space and silence beauty comes, love then is. Not the beauty put together by man, the architecture, the tapestry, the porcelain, the painting, the poems, the line of the architecture, of the architect, but that sense of beauty of vast space and silence. And yet thought must act, function. There is no living there and then coming down. So that is my problem - not my problem really because - you understand? I am making it a problem so that we can investigate it together, so that both you and I discover something in this totally new. Because each time one investigates, not knowing, one discovers something. But if you investigate with knowing then you will never discover anything. And that is what we are doing. Can thought become silent? And can that thought, which must function in the field of knowledge, totally, completely objectively, sanely, healthily, rationally, can that thought end itself? That is, can thought which is the past, which is memory, which is a thousand yesterdays, can all that past come totally to an end, which is all that conditioning so that there is silence, there is space, there is a sense of extraordinary dimension? So I am asking myself and you are asking it with me, how is thought to end, and not in the very ending of it pervert it and go off into some imaginative state and become rather lopsided, neurotic and vague? Thought must function with great vitality, great energy, logically, sanely. And so I am asking how is that thought, which must function, and at the same time to be completely motionless? You have got it? You have got my question? This has been the problem of every serious religious man - not the man who belongs to some sect, whether Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever it is, which are based on organized belief and propaganda and therefore not religion at all, this has been the problem. As one digs very, very deeply, can the two operate together? You understand? Can the two move together, not coalesce, not join together, move together? And they can only move together if thought doesn't separate itself as the observer and the observed. You are getting it? Do you follow? I want to spin ahead! You see life is a movement in relationship, constantly moving, changing, and that movement can sustain itself, move freely when there is no division between the thinker and the thought. That is, when thought doesn't divide itself as the 'me' and the 'not me', when thought doesn't divide itself as the observer, the experiencer, and the observed and the experienced. Because in that there is division and therefore conflict. When thought sees the truth of that, then it is not seeking experience, then it is moving in experiencing. Are you getting this? Aren't you doing this now? Look sir, I said just now thought with all the knowledge, always accumulating, is a living thing, not a dead thing, therefore the vast space can move together with thought. And when thought separates itself as the thinker, as the experiencer then the experiencer, the observer, the thinker becomes the past and therefore there is a division, and conflict, and the past which is stationary - right? - and therefore cannot move. Are you getting this? Am I talking to myself, or are we sharing this together? I see in this examination, the mind sees that where there is division in thought, movement is not possible. Movement. Where there is division the past comes in, and therefore the past becomes stationary, the centre, the immovable centre, the immovable centre can be modified, added, but it is an immovable state and therefore it has no free movement. So my next question is, to myself and therefore to you: does thought see this, or is perception something entirely different from thought? Look: one sees division in the world, national, religious, economic, social and all the rest of it, class, and in this division there is conflict. That is clear. And - just listen to this, I have got it - and when there is division in myself, fragmentation, there must be conflict. Then in myself I am divided as the observer and the observed, the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experience, that very division is created by thought, and thought, which is the result of the past. Now I see the truth of this. My question is: does thought see this, or some other factor sees this? Are you meeting me? When I say I see this, the truth of this, does thought see the truth or some other factor sees the truth? Or the new factor is intelligence and not thought? So what is the relationship between thought and intelligence? Do you understand my question? I am terribly interested in this personally, you can come with me or not. It is extraordinary to go into this. Thought has created this division, the past, the present, the future. Thought is time. And thought says to itself, I see this division outwardly and inwardly. And I see this division is the factor of conflict. And it is not capable to go beyond it. Therefore it says, I am where I began, I am still with my conflicts, because thought says, I see the truth of division and conflict. Now does thought see that, or a new factor of intelligence sees that? Right? Now if it is intelligence that sees that, then what is the relationship between thought and intelligence? Is intelligence personal? Is intelligence the result of book knowledge, logic, living, experience? Or is intelligence the freedom from the division which thought has created and logically seeing that and not being able to go beyond it, remains with it, not trying to struggle with it, and not trying to overcome it, out of that comes intelligence? Right sir? Am I making myself clear? You see we are asking: what is intelligence? Is intelligence cultivatable, is intelligence innate? And does thought see the truth of conflict, division and all the rest of it, or is it the quality of mind that sees the fact and is completely quiet with the fact, completely silent with the fact, not trying to go beyond it, overcome it, change it, but completely still with the fact? It is that stillness that is intelligence. So intelligence is not thought. Intelligence is this silence, and therefore totally impersonal. It doesn't belong to any group, to any person, to any race, to any culture. So I have found, my mind has found that where there is silence, not put together by thought and disciplined, practice and all that terrible horror, but seeing, seeing that thought cannot possibly go beyond itself because thought is the result of the past, and where the past is functioning it must create division, and therefore conflicts and all the rest of it, seeing that and remaining completely still with that. You know it is like being completely still with sorrow. You know somebody whom you love or for whom you care, whom you have looked after, cherished, loved, been concerned with, when that person dies there is the shock of loneliness, despair, sense of isolation, everything falls round you, in that sorrow to remain with it, not seeking explanations, the cause, why should he go and why not I, to remain completely still with it. To remain with it completely still is intelligence. And that intelligence then can operate in thought, using knowledge and that knowledge and thought will not create division. I have got it. So the question arises from that: how is the mind, your mind, which is so endlessly chattering - listen to this please, listen to it -which is so endlessly bourgeois, caught in a trap, struggling, seeking, going after the masters and you know gurus, and discipline, how is that mind to be completely still? Now: you know harmony is stillness - harmony, not discord -harmony between the body, the heart and the mind. Complete harmony. That means the body, your body, must not be imposed upon by the mind, disciplined by the mind, disciplined by the mind when it likes a certain kind of food, tobacco, drugs - you follow -the excitement of all that, being controlled by the mind, then it is an imposition. Whereas the body when it is sensitive, alive, has its own intelligence, not spoilt. One must have such a body, terribly alive, sensitive, active, not drugged. And also one must have a heart - you understand - not excitement, not sentiment, not emotion, not enthusiasm but that sense of fullness - you know -depth, quality, vigour. That can only be when there is love. And a mind that has immense space, then there is harmony. Now how is the mind - listen to this - to come upon this? I am sure you are all asking this, perhaps not sitting there but when you go home, when you walk, how can one have this sense of complete unity, integrity without any sense of distortion, division, fragmentation - the body, the heart and the mind - how do you think you can have it? Now you see the fact of this, don't you? You see the truth of it that you must have complete harmony in yourself, the mind, the heart, the body. It is like having a clear window, unspotted, without any scratches, unsullied, then as you look out through the window you can see the thing without any distortion. Now how can you have that? Now who sees this truth? You are following? Who sees the truth that there must be this harmony, complete harmony? As we said, when there is harmony there is silence. When one of the three become distorted there is trouble, there is noise. But when the mind, the heart and the organ are completely in harmony there is silence. Now who sees this fact? You understand my question? Do you see it as an idea, as a theory, as something you 'should have'? If you do then it is all the function of thought, then you will say, tell me what the system is, what kind of system I must have to get this, I will practise, I will deny, I will discipline, I will cook myself brown. All that is the activity of thought. But when you see the truth of this - the truth not what 'should be' - when you see that is the fact, it is so, then it is intelligence that sees it. Therefore it is intelligence that will function and therefore bring about this state. You get it? Not thought. I can't do any more. So thought is of time. Intelligence is not of time. So intelligence is immeasurable - not the scientific intelligence, not the intelligence of a technician, not the intelligence of a housewife, not the intelligence of a man who knows a tremendous lot. Those are all within the field of thought and knowledge. And it is only when the mind is completely still - and it can be still, you don't have to practise, control, it can be completely still - and when it is, there is harmony, there is vast space and silence. And it is only then the immeasurable is. Right sirs. Q: (Inaudible) K: The gentleman says that he has been listening to the speaker for fifty years, and it is more real now than it has ever been, it is more factual, real in his life, than it has ever been. And he wants corroboration from others - whether others who have listened to the speaker for fifty years feel the same. Don't please reply. This is not a confession. Q: To die every moment. K: To die every moment. Yes. To die every minute. I have been saying that, and he says that is more real than ever. Must you listen to the speaker for fifty years? And at the end of fifty years you will get it, you will understand it? Does it take time? Or you see the beauty of something instantly and therefore it is? Now why do people, anybody, you and others, why do you take time over all this? You understand my question? Why must you take many years to understand a very simple thing? And it is very simple, I assure you. It only becomes complex in explanation. But the fact is extraordinarily simple. Why doesn't one see that simplicity and the truth and the beauty of it instantly and therefore the whole phenomena of life changes? Why? Is it that we are so heavily conditioned? And if you are so heavily conditioned can't you see that conditioning instantly, or must you peel it off like an onion, layer after layer? Is it that one is lazy, indolent, indifferent, caught with one's own problems? If you are caught in your own problem, one problem, and that problem is not separated from the rest of the problems, they are all interrelated, if you took one problem and went to the very end of it - whether it is sex, whether it is relationship, whether it is loneliness, whatever it is - go to the very end of it. And because you can't do it, therefore you have to listen to somebody for fifty years! Are you going to say it takes you fifty years to look at those mountains? Q: Can you answer this question that I have written? K: No sir, just ask. (Krishnamurti reads the question.) Oh lord! This is such a long question sir. Can't you make it short? Q: The working of the imagination. K: The question says: I know many persons through practising Hatha Yoga only betray themselves, they live obviously in imagination. Do you know anything about yoga? Do you want me to tell you about it? Yes? Too bad! I was told Hatha Yoga and all the complications of it - I'll go into it briefly - was invented about three thousand years ago - I was told, I haven't read it - I was told by a man who has studied the whole thing very carefully. At that time the rulers of the land had to keep their brains and their thought very clear. And so they chewed some kind of leaf from the Himalayan mountains - don't search for it, it is dead!. (Laughter.) And as time went on the plant died and so they had to invent a method by which the various glands in the human system could be kept healthy and vigorous. And they invented yoga, practices to keep the body very healthy, not young, don't get lost in all that foolery. To keep it alive, keep it healthy and therefore the mind very active, clear. And the practice of certain exercises, asanas and so on, do keep the glands, certain glands doing certain exercises, very healthy, active. And they also found that the right kind of breathing, inhalation, helps, not to achieve enlightenment, but to keep the mind, the brain cells, supplied with sufficient air, so that it can function. Then came along all the exploiters, who said, if you do all these things then you will get - you know - you will have a quiet silent mind. Their silence is the silence of thought, which is corruption and therefore death. And they said, this way you will awaken various centres, kundalini and all that kind of stuff and you will have marvellous enlightenment. And of course our minds are so eager, so greedy, wanting more experiences, being better than somebody else, better looking, better body, better this and better that, we fall into the trap of that. But one can see this kind of yoga, Hatha Yoga, doing the various exercises, which the speaker does about two hours a day, don't copy him, you know nothing about it. You see when one has imagination, which is all the function of thought, do what you will, the mind can never be quiet, peaceful, with a sense of great inward beauty and sufficiency. Q: In this harmonious, integrated state, when the mind functions strictly in a technological way, is there then this separation of the observer of the observed? When harmony exists does the separation exist when the mind must function in a technological realm - is there then the separation? K: Yes I understand. I understand the question. The questioner asks: when there is this sense of harmony, then when thought functions, then is there the division between the thinker and the thought. What do you think? You understand the question? When there is complete harmony, not imaginative harmony and all the rest of it, real, the body, the heart and the mind completely harmonious, integrated, not fragmentary, no one to integrate it - the word integration is rather difficult - then when there is that sense of intelligence which is harmony, that intelligence using thought, then will there be the observer and the observed, the division? Obviously not. Right? When there is no harmony then there is fragmentation, there is disharmony, then thought creates the division as the 'me' and the 'not me', the observer and the observed. This is so simple. Right? Q: You said in your second talk that one should be aware not only in the waking time but also during sleep. K: Do you want me to go into it? This is the last question. The questioner says: at your second talk, do you remember, I don't, at your second talk you said: there is an awareness when you are asleep as well as there is an awareness when you are awake. You didn't go further into it - is that it sir? You understand the question? That is, during the day one is aware superficially or deeply, aware, aware of everything that is going on inwardly, all the movements of thought, the division, the conflict, the misery, the loneliness, the awareness of one's demand for pleasure, the pursuit of ambition, greeds, anxiety, you know the whole of that -aware. When you are so aware during the day, does that awareness continue during the night in the form of dreams? That's right sir? Or there are no dreams but only an awareness. Right. Now am I during the day - please listen to this - am I, are you, aware during the day of every movement of thought? You are not, are you? Be honest, be simple. You are not. You are aware in patches. I am aware for two minutes, and then a great blank, and then again a few minutes later, or half an hour later, I say, "By Jove, I have forgotten myself" and pick it up again. There are gaps in our awareness. We are never aware continuously, and we think we have to be aware continuously, all the time. Now first of all, there are great spaces between awareness -aren't there? Awareness, then unawareness, then awareness and so on during the day. Which is important? Please, which is important the awareness for a few minutes and the non-awareness and the awareness, and the continuity of awareness? Which is important -to be continuously aware; or be aware for short periods; and what to do with the long periods when you are not aware? Amongst those three, what is important? What do you think is important? I know for me what is important. I am not bothered about being aware for a short period, or wanting to have awareness continuously. I am only concerned when I am not aware. Do you understand? That is my question. You understand? When I am inattentive, I say, I am very interested, not when I am aware, but why am I inattentive and what am I to do about that inattention, the unawareness? That is my problem. Not to have constant awareness you know - you would go cuckoo unless you have really gone into this very, very deeply. So my concern is: why am I inattentive and what happens in that period of inattention? That's my question. You understand? I know what happens when I am aware. When I am aware - you know - nothing happens. I am alive, moving, living, vital, in that nothing can happen because there is no choice for something to happen. Now when I am inattentive, not aware, then things happen. Then I say things that are not true, then I am nervous, I am - you know - anxious, caught, I fall back into my despair. So why does this happen? You are getting my point? Is that what you are doing? Or are you concerned with being totally aware all the time? And trying, practising to be aware all the time? I don't know, it's up to you. Now I see I am not aware and I am going to watch what happens in that state when I am not aware. Now to be aware that I am not aware is awareness. No don't laugh, do please do listen to this. It is not a matter of laughter. I know when I am aware. When there is an awareness it is something entirely different. And I know when I am not aware, I get nervous, I twitch my hands - you know, do all kinds of stupid things. When there is an attention in that unawareness the whole thing is over - you are following what I am saying? At that moment of unawareness I am aware that I am not aware, then it is finished. Have you got it? Because then I don't have to struggle, to say well I must be aware all the time, please tell me a method to be aware, please practise - you know - tighten, tighten, become more and more stupid. But when there is no awareness and I know I am not aware then you see the whole movement changes. Now what happens during sleep? Is there an awareness when you are asleep as you are aware during the day time? If you are aware during the day time in patches, then that continues while you are asleep, obviously. But when you are aware, and also aware that you are inattentive, a totally different movement takes place. Then when you sleep there is an awareness of complete quietness. The mind is aware of itself. I won't go into all this because it is not a mystery. It is not something that is extraordinary, have incense. You see the mind when it is aware during the day, deeply, that awareness in depth brings about a quality of mind during sleep when it is absolutely quiet because during the day you have observed, you have been aware, either in patches or aware of your inattention, then as you go through the day, and when you sleep the activity of the brain has established order during the day. And the brain demands order, whether that order is in some neurotic belief or in nationalism, or in this or that, in that it finds order, which inevitably brings about disorder. But when you are aware during the day and aware of your unawareness, then at the end of the day there is an order. Then the brain does not have to struggle during the night to bring about order. Therefore the brain becomes rested. It is quiet. And therefore the brain next morning is extraordinarily alive, not a dead, corrupt drugged thing. Right sirs. SAANEN 1ST PUBLIC DIALOGUE 4TH AUGUST, 1971 If we could during these seven mornings take one problem and work that problem out each morning, go into it completely, thoroughly, deeply so that we really understand it. This is really a dialogue, a conversation between you and the speaker, between us. A friendly conversation in which we can together go into a problem in detail and in depth and see if we cannot resolve that problem, any problem that we take, every morning - whether it is personal or impersonal it is the same. Because if we can discuss a problem quite impersonally, objectively, then in the very talking over together the personal element will come in. And a dialogue is different from a discussion, or from dialectical argument, opinion, seeking truth through opinion, which is dialectic, or discussion, which is through reason, through logic, through argument and that will not lead us very far. But if we could talk over together, converse, on any particular problem you wish and during this morning take one problem and go into it completely, not deviate from it, and go into it step by step, in detail, hesitatingly, not offering an opinion because then we go off, your opinion against somebody else's, your argument against somebody else, but in conversing not indulge in ideologies, opinions, or quote others, but take a problem that is vital to each one of us and work it out together. That would be worthwhile, I feel, shall we do that? Right? Then what would you like this morning, and the seven mornings - one problem after another right through? And I believe we are going to have two discussions, or dialogues with young people, it comes to the same thing, more or less. So we have seven mornings and seven problems we are going to take and discuss and go into completely. Please bear in mind, not deviate from them, if you start one problem stick to that, and not bring in death and something else. If you want to discuss death we will go into it. Please, I know you all want to ask questions - wait, wait, wait, patience! And don't, if I may suggest, take a problem which you don't feel strongly about, which doesn't touch your heart. Now what shall we take this morning for the first time? Q: Sir. K: My lord! What is it madame? Q: Order. K: The lady would like to discuss order. Q: I find that in spite of all you said in your second talk I am still left with my own inner emptiness. K: Though I have listened to the seven talks I still feel at the end of it an inner desolation, inner emptiness, inner insufficiency, and I seem to escape from it. Is that it? Yes sir? Q: I wonder if the method we use together really makes it possible for us to make a radical and drastic transformation? Because the method we use is on the conscious level and the forces which bind us probably are on the conscious level whether we really ignore them, or we want to ignore them. So how can this matter be liberated from the unconscious? K: How can this dialogue or conversation liberate the unconscious motives and problems and things that bind us rather than talk over the superficial things? How can one release the unconscious conditioning? Q: Do you think that real love is possible between man and wife. I mean real love in freedom without sexual or other greeds, without pleasure and so on. Do you know if this love is possible? K: Now! The gentleman asks: can there be real love between husband and wife or man and woman without the pleasure of sexuality and all the complications that arise in that relationship between man and woman. And could we go into the question of what love is in relationship between man and woman. Right sir? Now which of these shall we take? Which of these shall we take? Order, or unconscious release, releasing the unconscious because... Yes sir? Q: That is the same thing to be considered in sex. K: Yes, slowly. I am trying to take them. Order, release of the unconscious, awareness. Q: May I ask a question? K: No sir, just a minute. Just a minute. Awareness, love between man and woman, to look at life as a whole, totally, completely. That's enough. And inner insufficiency. You understand? Order, release of the unconscious, inner insufficiency, to look at the total whole movement of life as one, non-fragmentally and what is love, can it exist between man and woman when there is sexual pleasure, complications and all the rest of it? Now which of these shall we take this morning? Wait. Which of these shall we take this morning and go into it completely, thoroughly so that when you and I leave this tent we have got it, that we have really understood it. Audience: The last question. Order. You decide. K: I decide. No, sorry. I am not the chairman. It is proposed, many people want: what is relationship between man and woman, is it based on sexual pleasure and when there is that pleasure can there be love, order? And the release of the unconscious, insufficiency, seeing the totality of life as a whole, not man, woman, order, unconsciousness, insufficiency but seeing the whole of this. What do you say? Q: I see that all these subjects are so interrelated, so why not take order, that would embody everything. K: As each problem is interrelated, why not take one problem, such as order, and perhaps that could cover many of the questions that have been raised this morning. Q: Have you not already talked about order? K: We have already talked about order, the lady says, so why the dickens begin all over again! Q: What about awareness, sir? It covers everything. K: Could we consider, is it possible to see the whole movement of life totally and not fragmentarily. Order, insufficiency, awareness, relationship with the man and the woman, all that. Can we take this thing. That is, how to look at life as a whole movement, not as a fragmentary movement? Would that cover this? A: Yes. Q: One question would cover all that but would it cover the unknown? K: I think it would. We will bring it in. The questioner says: would the unconscious be covered when we discuss the whole total process of life? I said I thought it would. So can we take that up? Right. Q: (Inaudible) K: Do you consider, or do you look at the world as being good and evil. A particular evil and a particular good. Of course, good, bad, all that, you know. Q: I think the world is good. K: According to the rules of god, good, and evil is against god. Now let us enquire. Q: Not many thousand gods but one god. K: Not many thousand gods but one god. We'll go into that. How do you consider, how do you look at life? Do we look at it fragmentarily as good and bad, as the will of god and so on, or do you take life, which is immense - you follow? - in which is involved love, awareness, beauty, death, strife, misery, conflict, old age, disease, altogether? Or look at it in fragments, as the physical, the emotional - you know - love and intellect? How do you consider life? Q: Altogether. K: Wait, wait madame. Now how do you consider it? How do you look at life actually, don't let us pretend, don't let us become theoretical or hypothetical and thereby slightly dishonest. We must take it as we are. How do you look at life without any fragmentation, or do you look at life in fragments - business, the artist, the scientist, the philosopher, the religious man, the woman, the man, love, you follow, all broken up. And is it possible at all to look at this whole movement as a unitary process? And can I, please just listen, can I, who have been educated, brought up in a certain culture which conditions me to look at god and the devil, the physical and the escape from the physical - you follow? - do I, being conditioned, consciously or unconsciously, consider this whole movement of life broken up? And when you do break it up -the business man, the religious man, the artist, the hippie, you know - divide it - then out of that is disorder. Right? Now how do you actually consider it, look at life? Q: By love. I don't want them to be hippies because (inaudible) K: No, madame. Now please just listen. You have understood my question sirs? How do you regard it sirs? Q: In most of the discussions I have heard you start with an assumption - well not an assumption - but you start with a premise - it is order. Where do you go from there? K: I don't posit order. On the contrary I start with the disorder. We are in disorder. That is clear. We are in disorder, there is war, there are the hippies, the division of nationalities, there is man and woman fighting each other, sexually, we are at war with each other in ourselves, that is disorder. That is a fact. It would be absurd to posit order, there is no order. Q: Is there not order in natural life? K: Is there not order in natural life? Probably there is, in nature. But that is not my question, please don't let's go back. Our question is: can you and I look at this whole phenomenon of existence as one unitary movement, not broken up as the conscious or the unconscious. Q: But that would be order. K: Sir we are discussing that. I don't know where it is going to lead us. We are trying to find out through conversation whether our minds are capable of looking at life as a whole, as one unitary movement and therefore no contradiction. Q: But isn't it the definition of the unconscious that I am unable to look at it? K: I want to go into it. Please. We must go slowly into this. All right. I cannot look at life as one unitary movement - suppose I cannot - for me personally it is something - I look at it quite differently, not with division. Now suppose I cannot look at life as a whole. Am I aware that I look at life fragmentarily. Let us begin with that. Are you aware, conscious, know, that you divide life as the scientist, the philosopher, the religious man, the god, the good, the devil, the man, the woman, unconscious, conscious - you know, divide, the hippie, the non-hippie. Q: No. K: The gentleman says, no. Q: Is not life as a whole an abstract concept? K: Is not life as a whole an abstract concept. If we posit life as a unitary process, as an idea then it is a concept. But if we realize that we live in fragments and whether that fragmentary division can be changed, then we will find out the other. Q: It appears to me that I have to become what I am first, find out what I am before I can begin to change. K: Before I begin to change I must know what I am. Q: All those hippies, that's it, I don't like hippies and that's what I am. I can possibly change it if I first become what I am. K: Therefore I must become what I am. Look sir, we are not talking about change. We are trying to consider this morning, this question: how do I consider life? Q: If I am fragmented I can't see the whole. K: That's it. If I am fragmented I can't see life as a whole. Are we fragmented? Let's begin with that. Are we fragmented? Q: Sir, maybe fragmentation is not at the conscious level, like you said, an artist, a scientist, a priest. This fragmentation is in the unconscious. K: I am coming to that sir. I am coming. Q: I find it impossible to give the answers you want. K: It is not what I want sir. Q: I know you are coming to something. K: I don't know what I am coming to. Forgive me. I said this morning, we are going to talk over together a particular problem. And altogether we said, let us talk over together this question of fragmentation and the unity of life. And I said we don't know what the unity of life is, there may be, but let us consider whether each one of us looks at life in fragments, not only at the conscious level but also at the deep unconscious level. So you may not, the gentleman pointed out, consider the superficial fragmentation, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Christian and so on - the Communist, the hippie, the non-hippie and all that - superficially you may discard all that because you may say, well I have listened to you for umpteen years and I am out of that. But deep down we may still live in a world of fragmentation. That is what we have come to now. You understand? That is, after observing intelligently, seeing what the facts are outwardly - wars, division of nationalities, division of religions and subdivision of religions all over the world, there is the guru, the follower, all that is involved -superficially observing all this, you say, how stupid all that is. And you may by observing reject the superficiality of it, but inwardly, deeply, you may live in fragments. Now let us stick to that. You understand? Shall we go on from there? A: Yes. K: Thank the lord! First of all be quite sure, absolutely sure, that you have discarded the superficial. That you are no longer caught in the various religious fragmentary approaches to life - the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian, and the divisions in the Christians, the Baptists, Methodists - you know. And also nationalities. You are quite sure you have discarded all that completely. It is one of the most difficult things to do - but it doesn't matter. Let's go deeper. Q: If these divisions do exist, to discard them - isn't that a fragmentation itself. K: Ah! Isn't that a fragmentation itself to superficially discard. Discard at the conscious level, and that very discarding is it not also fragmentary. We'll come to that. By going into the unconscious and seeing how fragmentary it is there, we will naturally then come upon the other. Then we will come together because we have divided life as conscious and the unconscious, the hidden and the open. That is the whole psychoanalytical, psychological point of view. To me that doesn't exist personally -conscious and unconscious - finished. But apparently for most of us there is this division. And now we are going together to talk over whether we are deep down conditioned in fragmentation. Right, is that clear? Now how are you going to examine the unconscious? It is what you have said, not what I have said. You have said there is this division between the conscious and the unconscious - slowly sir - and one may be superficially free of the divisions that culture has brought about. Culture - Christian, Hindu, whatever it is, the Atman and all the rest of it. How are you going to examine the unconscious with all its fragmentation? Q: Sir, hadn't we better find out whether there is conscious and unconscious, then we would examine that they don't exist. K: So the gentleman says, why do you examine one of the divisions, conscious and unconscious. He says it is not. The definition, apparently, of the unconscious is: it is what we want to know about. We think we know about the conscious, we think we know superficially what conscious, superficial consciousness is. But we don't know what the unconscious is. But the gentleman says - just listen to what he says - he says we have divided this but is that a fact. Or is it a means of investigating this unconscious? Right. Now. Let's begin. There is conscious and the unconscious. I don't say the division exists. That's what we have taken. I look at it personally entirely differently, which I'll come to later. Now do I know, do you know your conscious mind - what you think, how you think, why you think, consciously what you are doing and what you are not doing? And you think you understand the conscious. You think but you may not really actually understand it. Which is the fact? Which is the fact, now I am asking you: do you know the conscious very well? Q: No. We only state opinions. K: We are not taking opinions. No, madame. Listen. We are not indulging in opinions. We are not quoting some psychologist. We are looking at ourselves without any prejudice, without any previous concept, we are just looking. Therefore I am asking: am I looking at my conscious mind and do I know the content of that, the conscious mind? Q: Isn't our conscious mind going towards what we understand? K: Is conscious mind, the definition of the conscious mind, is it not, what we understand. You may understand one thing, and you may not understand the other. You may understand one part of the content of the conscious and the other part you may not know anything about at all. So do you know the content of your conscious mind? Conscious mind? Q: If we knew this content there wouldn't be this chaos in the world. K: Of course sir, naturally. Q: But we don't know it. K: That's my point. We think we know it. We think we know the operations of the conscious mind because there is a habit set about - go to the office, go, do this, do that - you follow? And I think I understand the content of the superficial mind. But I question it. And I also question very much whether the unconscious can ever be investigated by the conscious. You follow sir? If I don't know the conscious mind, its content, how can I examine the unconscious with its content? Right? Right sir? So there must be a different approach to the thing altogether. You understand sirs? Q: The unconscious - how do we know it exists? K: How do we know the unconscious exists. Q: By its manifestation. K: You say, by its manifestation. That is, consciously you may be doing something, unconsciously the motive is to frighten - you follow - the motive may be entirely different from the conscious urge. Q: Negative action. K: Of course. So - you follow what I am trying to say? Please let us try to understand each other. If the content of the conscious cannot be known completely, how can that consciousness which is superficial, which doesn't know itself completely, examine the unconscious with all its content, which is hidden? And you have only one means of examination, now. Which is: to look at the unconscious consciously. Go slowly, please. Please see the importance of this. This is fun. Q: Isn't it true that for any inward conscious manifestation there is also a parallel outward manifestation? K: Obviously sir. Sir, can we put it this way? Do I know the content of my consciousness? Know, aware, understand, have I observed without any prejudice, without any kind of formula, prejudice, have I observed the content of my consciousness, superficial, hidden? Q: I think the problem is deeper. What you know, what you are aware of, that you are conscious of; everything you are not aware about, you don't know, that is your unconscious. K: That is what he has said sir. I understand sir, that is what he said, just now. You are saying, what I know I am aware of is conscious. What I am not aware of is the unconscious. Q: (Inaudible) K: But do I know, please give a few minutes thought to what somebody else says, what somebody else is saying now is me, so please give it two minutes thought. Which is: if I don't know the content of my consciousness, superficial, can that consciousness which is not complete in its understanding of its own superficiality, can that conscious mind examine the unconscious? That is what we are doing now, aren't we? We are trying to observe the unconscious consciously. No? Q: Impossible. K: You can't do it. Q: We don't know. K: We don't know. Q: There is no frontier between consciousness and unconsciousness. K: Therefore what will you do sir? Don't indulge in theories. Look: I have been brought from about nine years or eight years, in a highly traditional Brahmanical background, of which tradition -you know nothing about it - it is ruthless. From morning until night you are told what to do, what not to do, what to think, don't hurt, you are a Brahmin don't touch a non-Brahmin - you have no idea. From the moment you are born until like myself, nine or eight, you are conditioned in a tremendous tradition. Consciously it is being done, every day by the temple, by the mother, by the father, by the environment, by the culture - it is tremendously heavy. You are brought up there. Now wait, go slowly. And you move to another conditioning. And again to another conditioning. College, student -you follow? Condition after condition. All these are laid upon you, by society, by culture, by the civilization, by accident, by intention, all this is laid, one after the other. Now how are you going to divide this and that? They are all interrelated. Right? I may reject the Brahmanical tradition very quickly, or may not, or I may think I have done it but still caught in it. How am I to understand this whole content? Q: I am that content. K: Therefore what does that mean? Of course, consciousness is its content. Right? Please see that. My consciousness is made up of the Brahmanical tradition, the philosophical, theosophical, the world teacher, all that, the content of all this consciousness is that. Consciousness is its content. Right? Consciousness is its content. Now can I look at this whole content as one, or do I have to look at it fragmentarily? Wait sir - see the difficulty first. Or is the content so deep, of which I don't know? Or I can only know the superficial content for ever? That is my problem. That is your problem. Right? How am I to uncondition the mind, which has such content? Q: May I ask one little thing? K: Yes, sir. Q: You said for instance that you were taking the example of the Brahmanical tradition. This is still a fragmentary tradition but you had a relationship with a father or with a mother or somebody who protected you with love or god knows what. K: Yes, yes. But you see... Q: Sir, let's stick to the point. The point was made clear. Can we stick to that? K: I am sticking to it sir. I won't budge from it. Q: If you ask how do I uncondition the mind, or how do I uncondition me? I would say: how do I change? K: It is the same thing, sir. Q: For instance, I believe that first you must become what you are. K: What am I. You keep on repeating that sir. You said first I must become what I am. What are you? You are all that conditioning. Q: Right. K: And if you say first I must become all that, know all that conditioning, that is what I am saying. Are you aware of all your conditioning, which you want to be, which you are? Before we change, or talk about change, first am I aware of my conditioning? Not only superficially but the deep, deep layers: as the gentleman pointed out I may be caught in a Christian, Communist, Brahmanical tradition but I have lived with a family, the mother may have been brutal, nervous - but fortunately in the family in which this person grew up there were thirteen children and nobody cared. Q: Sir, I have the feeling that I am unconditioning myself by listening to you. K: That's it sir. Just listen. That is what I want to get at. For god's sake move, let's move. Q: The content of consciousness. Q: I am nothing. K: No, no, no, madame. That is speculation. Just let us follow this please. I am all my content. The content is my consciousness. The content is experience, knowledge, the tradition, the upbringing, the nervous father, the brutal mother, or the nagging mother - you follow all that has been the content which is me. Now am I aware of this content? Don't shrug your shoulders and say, I don't know, otherwise you can't move forwards. If you are not - I am afraid you are not, if I may point out - then how do we proceed? Q: Sir the mind is aware that it is conditioned. It sees the conditioning. K: I understand sir. Look. I can see part of my conditioning. You follow sir? I can see I am conditioned as a Communist or a Muslim, but there are other parts to this. Now can I investigate consciously the various fragments which compose the 'me', the content of my consciousness? Can I consciously look at all this? Q: But we are not separate from it. K: I understand that. I understand that. How am I to look at the various contents of my consciousness? Or is that a totally wrong process? Q: It must be. K: You are going to find out, don't say, it must be. Q: I don't see how one can. It seems that if one can hold oneself to what one is seeing in the foreground, and without judgement and without a preconceived look as to how one should look at it, then one begins to see even the subconscious because... K: I understand madame. That is fairly clear what you are saying. The lady says: if I can hold what I see without judgement, without evaluation, then that very perception without any judgement reveals not only the unconscious, the whole movement. Now just a minute. My question you have not yet answered. My question is, I am asking you: can you look at the content of your consciousness - you being part of that content? If you cannot know the content of your consciousness how can you say that I am right or that I am wrong? I loathe this or that. This is good, or that is bad. The hippies are nice, the hippies are not nice. You are not in such a position to judge at all. So can you know the content of your own consciousness? Q: I know right at this moment, but I am aware of you, I am ecstatic with what you are doing. You can show me that I am right with you. I don't fully understand this in the sense of your questions. I find I am excited, by heart is beating, I want to get into more of what you are talking about. I am aware of the seat I am sitting on, that I am shaking. I can see my consciousness at this moment. K: No. Q: Sir, one is aware of the conditioning, that is the important thing surely. That is the experiencing. K: First of all sir, let me hold a minute. May I go on a little bit? Does one realize our consciousness is its content - do you understand my statement? The content makes up consciousness. So consciousness is not separate from its content. Is that absolutely clear? The content and consciousness are not separate. The content is consciousness. Right? Now what do you do then? Q: Look at the contents. K: Listen to it sir. What do you do then? There is a fact. The fact is the content makes up your consciousness. The content being a Communist, Socialist, a Christian, a Buddhist - you follow, whatever it isthe father, the mother, the pressures of civilization, the culture - all that is the content. And do you say, yes, that is a fact? Begin with that. That is a fact, irrefutable fact. If you are born in India, in a family which is Brahmanical you will be conditioned to that. And if you are born in a family of Catholics, you will be Catholics. So the content is consciousness. Right. Keep to that. I realize that. Then what do I do? Q: I see that the usual process of my trying to act on what I see is in itself a fragmentation and when that is seen clearly I stop acting on what I see. K: No, you are missing my point sir. If you will forgive me for a minute. Q: You cannot do anything. K: Wait, wait. Hold a minute. Don't move from there. Q: This word order is the content of my consciousness. K: That's just it. The word order or disorder is the content of my consciousness which is in disorder. Therefore I said I am the world, the world is me. Right? The 'me' is the content of all the parts made up, as the world is. Right? Now that is a fact. Now just listen. The fact is the content of my consciousness is consciousness. Now how do I proceed from there? Please do listen for two minutes. How do I proceed to unravel, take out piece by piece the various contents, examine them, throw out, keep, and who is the entity that is examining? The entity which is separate that is examining, is part of my consciousness, which is the result of the culture in which I have been brought up, saying you are different from what you see, you are a Brahmin, therefore you must approach life from a particular traditional idea. And that is so. One fact: the content of consciousness is consciousness. Then the second fact: if there is an entity which examines its fragmentation of that content, then that examiner is part of the content. And that examiner has separated himself from the content for various psychological reasons of security, safety, protection and also it is part of the culture. So that is the second fact. So the first fact is: that if I examine I am playing a trick. Right? I am deceiving myself. Do you see this? Q: Yes. K: Let me go on, don't please say yes. Fact one is, content. Fact two is, the division as the examiner, as the observer, separating himself from the content, analysing it and putting away or keeping. All that is the result of the content also. And the third factor is: do I see this very clearly? If I do then what is then action? You are following? I am faced with this problem. I am conditioned, tremendously, and part of this conditioning is the desire to be secure. A child needs to be secure. The brain needs to be completely secure so as to function healthily. But that brain wants to be secure and it may find security in some neurotic belief, in some neurotic action, there is its security. So it has found security in tradition and holds on to it. And it has found security in this division as the observer and the observed, because that is part of the tradition. Because if I reject the observer I am lost! So I am now faced with the fact that the content, division, as the observer and the observed, and whatever movement I do is part of the content. Right? Are you clear on this? Then what is there to be done? We are not discussing conscious or unconscious because it is part of this. We say the conscious mind observes at a certain level, there are deeper motives, deeper intentions, deeper vitalities. And the whole of that is the content of my consciousness, which is the world consciousness. Right sir? So what am I to do? My mind realizes that it must be free from conditioning. I must be free from being a Hindu, otherwise I am a slave to that, otherwise there will be wars, there will be antagonism, there will be division. So the mind says at any price being intelligent it must uncondition itself. Now how is this to be done? Without - bear in mind - without the division as the analyser and the analysed, knowing the content is consciousness, any effort I make is still part of that content, to get out of it. Right? Have you understood? Then what is one to do, faced with this? Q: Either accept the world as it is, or totally reject it. K: Wait. We are going to come to that. Now when you say reject it... Q: I mean we can't accept it as it is. K: Who are you to accept it? Why should you accept it, or reject it? It is a fact. There is the sun, why do you accept it or reject it? It is there. Right? So - wait, let me finish. You are faced with this and if you reject it who is the person who is to reject it? The person is part of that consciousness, he is rejecting only a part that doesn't suit him. Right? And if he accepts it he will accept the part that suits him. Q: To go back to what you said before about the sequence of the neurotic pattern. I don't know it. K: That's why. I am going to show you something sir. Q: How can I reject it? K: You can't reject anything. There it is. Now what is the action that takes place when you observe you can't do anything? Wait. Q: To start with you might feel that all this consciousness is not really it and you might be a monkey. And getting the feeling that you are this, you stop but the process goes on when you can't help it. K: No sir. No sir. The process goes on only when I have not understood the content of my consciousness, whether it is neurotic or not neurotic, whether it is homosexual or not homosexual, whether it is heterosexual - you follow, the content, all that is implied in that. And if I choose one part and hold on to it that is the very essence of neuroticism. If I say I am a Hindu and hold on to it, and I am also technologically most advanced - I become a first class engineer and inwardly I am a beastly little Brahmin. You follow? And so on and so on. So any action on my part - please listen to this - any action on my part, which is part of the content, it cannot be unconditioned that way: then what am I to do? You have got it sir? I will not reject or accept it. It is a fact. Q: You can't do anything. Everything you do only strengthens the division. K: Therefore, what do you do? Q: You can't do anything. K: Wait, wait. You are too quick! Then you don't know what it means not to do a thing. Just a minute sir. Listen. Q: (Inaudible) K: No, no. I don't know what Freud says, I am not interested in what Freud says. Q: I am. K: You are interested in what Freud says - why? Q: Because it is a fact. It is deep in the nature. K: Wait a minute sir. Are you quoting Freud, or have you observed yourself? Therefore it is your own experience and you say the unconscious pops up, and acts. Or the unconscious prevents action. So you are still thinking in terms of division - of course. The conscious and the unconscious. I am not thinking in those terms at all. I refuse to think in division. Q: But there isn't really a division. K: But to you still the unconscious pops up. Q: It's a word, like will or... K: Oh no, no. When we use the word unconscious you are already using it with a definite meaning that it is not conscious. Therefore there is consciousness and the thing which is not conscious. To me that is a statement of fragmentation. So if you know that you are fragmented that way, why do you hold on to it? Q: Our contents work. K: Of course it works. Of course. I say I am heterosexual, probably deeply I am the other. I am always contradicting myself and becoming a hypocrite, a dreadful entity. So I am saying all this is part of my consciousness - Freud and holding on to Freud, holding on to not Freud, to my Brahmanical tremendous tradition, which is the same, disliking the hippies and liking the squares, it is the same. So I am saying to you, the whole of my content is my consciousness. I will not use one part against the other, hold on to one part because that pleases me, or that I am conditioned that way. Q: But when you say the religious mind, you talk about that. K: I am afraid I do. Q: You also make a division between... K: Ah, no, no. I say when there is no division of any kind, it makes it very clear, when there is no division of any kind, not only superficially but in the content of consciousness itself as the observer and the observed, when there is nothing of that, then there is the quality of the religious mind. So we won't go into that. Now please just listen. You see. Please, when we say the content makes up consciousness, Freudian philosophy, your particular experience, everything is included in that, everything. Right? The poor man in India has never heard of Freud, he has never heard of Christ. And the man who has been brought up for two centuries with the mythology of Christ, he says that is a fact, and the poor little villager with his little god, he says that is a fact. Both are the content of consciousness. Surely sir? Q: It's not clear. K: You see you refuse to let go your particular fragment to which you are holding. This is what I have - when I go to India - I have to fight this, because they believe most fundamentally, for centuries they have been brought up in the idea that there is an Atman and Brahman, which is the Atman and Brahman god. And it is only possible when these two come together. And I say it is sheer nonsense. One is invented, both are invented by thought. That is my game with them. So don't enter it! K: So I say to myself... Q: You aren't denying the word I, it is just an identification. K: I am just using it as a means of communication. Let's cut it out. Now I have come to this point. I see for myself any movement within that content is still part of the content, any movement. If I say, this is good, and hold on to it, that is part of it - if I say that is bad, or if I say there is god or no god, it is still. So what am I to do knowing the mind is conditioned that way - know it - I know it completely - it is as clear as that sunshine - if there is sunshine. And that is an absolute fact. Then I say to myself: now how is the mind to free itself from its conditioning? Q: I believe that you will have to go beyond the conditioning. K: No, no. To go beyond means still part of it. Q: But you can go beyond yourself when you are listening. K: Yes sir, quite right. Quite right. Q: But because I feel that you have lost your conditioning, I am going to listen to you, actually listen so that iI lose my conditioning. K: I understand sir. You don't know me and please sir don't say, you are unconditioned, you don't know what it means so please don't judge. Q: Sir, what has happened is that we don't want to get rid of our conditioning. K: Keep it! Keep it and live with it. Be in turmoil, be in misery -you follow - wars. Don't move out of it. If you like it hold to it and that is what is happening sir. Do you follow? The Muslim holds on to his conditioning and that is why he is fighting the Israelis. And the Israelis hold on to theirs. Right? And that is the world. And I have my particular anchor, I won't let go. So knowing all this, what is the mind to do? Q: I become quiet. I don't do anything. K: The gentleman says, I become quiet - you follow the statement? When I am faced with this fact that I am wholly conditioned, I can play tricks upon myself and say I am unconditioning myself, which is part of my training, which is part of the content. You follow? He says, I become silent. Is that so? Q: I can't help bringing in the I. K: That's just it. He means really that it is just a means of saying. Now what happens sir, do look at it, when you are faced with something about which you can't do a thing - you understand -you have thought by your conditions that you could do something -right - that you could change, that you could manipulate, that you could alter this but it is still part of the same field, moving from one stone to another, one corner to another corner of the field, it is still within that field, when you realize that any movement within that field is conditioning movement - what takes place? Just don't answer me. What takes place? Sir, what takes place when the Arab and the Israelis say, look, I am conditioned, you are conditioned, what takes place? Go on sir, what takes place? Q: Then it is possible to live. K: Then it is possible to live. If I realize I am totally conditioned, and any tricks I can play upon myself is part of my conditioning - from being a Catholic becoming a Hindu, from a Hindu to Communism, from Communism to Maoism, from Maoism rush back to Zen, and from Zen to Krishnamurti and so on and so on, it is part of my conditioning, it is part of this whole content. What happens when I realize this? Q: This process stops itself. It falls down. K: Has it fallen with you sir? Don't theorize for god's sake. Q: It is a fact. It falls down by itself. K: Sir it is much more complex than that. You are too quick. You are not going with it. You want a result. Q: Sir the mind that sees this is not the same mind that started the enquiry. K: That's it. Now what has taken place? Go slowly sir. What has taken place to a mind that started enquiring into its content and discovering the extraordinary divisions, the contradictions, the fragmentation, the assertions, the aggression, you follow, discovered all that, what happens to such a mind? Q: It becomes very clear. It has space. It is in another state. K: Then sir, I will put you a different question. What is your action in daily life - listen to this - what is your action in daily life, not just action of a crisis, your daily life when you realize this fact? Q: You take decisions. K: You haven't even listened to my question. How can you say you take decisions. Q: Maybe we don't realize this sir. K: That's my point sir. Either you realize this as a fact, and that fact fundamentally changes the whole structure of your... Q: ...life. K: Wait. Or you don't realize it. If you don't realize it - you follow, as apparently you don't, you merely say, yes, I understand it, which means nothing - when you are confronted with this fact, what is your action in daily life - relate it to the two, then you will get the answer. Do you understand? Do you understand sir? That is - wait, listen to me - I realize that I am a Hindu, conditioned. I realize that I have been brought up in peculiar circumstances -world teacher, all - you have no idea of it, the whole devotion, candles, worship, all that, facing the world, property, money, position, prestige, and I see all that is part of the content, part of me. And what is the relationship of that perception to my daily life? Unless I relate it, it remains verbal, theoretical, nonsensical. So I must relate it. So I am saying: what is my relationship when I realize the conditioning, what is my action in daily life, knowing that? If you can't answer it, then you have not realized it, then you are playing with words. Q: It appears to me that every time you ask a question, there is a problem of everyone trying to find the answer. In the question, if it is real there is no answer. K: Of course not sir. I am asking it because you have to ask that question. Q: That's right. It's the person who asks the question always looks for the answer. K: That is what I am saying. I realize - I won't use I. There is the realization of this conditioning, how does that realization act in daily life? Q: There is no reaction. K: Madame, don't say anything. Put that question to yourself first, I am not asking you, to answer it, put it to yourself. Then how does the realization of this absolute fact, whether you are attached to neuroticism or to some other neuroticism, when you realize all this what does that realization do to your daily activities? Q: (Inaudible) K: You are going to find out. If there is a division between - see what he has said just now - if there is a division between that realization and your daily action, if there is a division, then there is conflict. That conflict is disorder in which we live, both the world and you and another. So what takes place when there is a real perception of this, the truth of it. When you really see the truth like fire burns, tiger hurts, poison kills you, when you realize that fact as vitality as that, then what is your action in that realization in your daily life. Put that question - you know. Q: This realization gives me awareness in daily life - is that the quality? K: Oh no madame. Don't, it is nothing of that. Q: (Inaudible) K: Find out sir. Of course it does. Q: (Inaudible) K: No sirs, please sirs. I am asking you which is: do you realize - I am not being patronizing or insulting, I am just asking you - do you realize in the sense you have a pain, when you have a tooth that hurts, there is pain, that is an absolute realization of pain, you do something about it. You don't say, well I'll theorize about it -you follow - you go to the nearest drug store, or chemist, or go to the dentist, there is action. In the same way when the mind realizes totally that you are conditioned, the content of your consciousness is its content - go slowly - and any movement that you do is still part of that consciousness - try to get out of it, or accept it, or reject it, it is still part of it - then what is the realization of the truth of that, how does it affect your life? You can't answer it because I'll show you why. The realization of that fact is going to act. You understand? The realization, the truth of that fact is going to act, and that truth being so highly intelligent will act according to the moment. Q: But can you realize that? But can you realize that when you are caught in your fear. K: You can't, can't. Therefore - we come back to the question - one fragment which is fear, you are trying to overcome by another fragment. Right? And that way you cannot get rid of it. Right? So there must be a different approach to that fragment which you call fear. Right? And the approach is this: to do absolutely nothing about fear. Right? Can you? I can't do anything about that train going by, the noise, therefore I listen to it. You understand? Please listen to what I am saying. I cannot do a thing about the rattle, the noise, the roar of that train. Therefore I don't put up a resistance to it, therefore I listen. When I listen there is no noise. There is noise but it doesn't affect me. In the same way when I realize I am neurotic, realize it, I am holding on to a particular belief, a particular way of action, I am homosexual or whatever it is, that I have tremendous prejudices, god exists, god doesn't exist. You follow? When I realize that I am attached to one thing, just to listen to it, completely with my heart, not resist it, listen to it totally. Is this clear this discussion, this morning? That is, we started out by asking, if I can look at the whole movement of life as a unitary process - the killing, the refugees, seven and a half million of them in India, which is already poor, tremendous business, the war in the Middle East, the Catholics, the Protestants, the scientists, the artists, the businessman, the private life, the public life, my family, your family - division, division, division. And this division has brought about such disorder in the world and in myself, can I look at all this as a marvellous single movement? I can't? That is a fact. Right? I can't because I am fragmented in myself. I am conditioned in myself. So my concern then is not to find out how to live a unitary life but to see if the fragmentation can come to an end. And that fragmentation comes to an end only when I realize all my consciousness is made up of these fragments. My consciousness is the fragmentation. And when I says there must be integrity, brought together, it is still part of that trick I am playing upon myself. So I realize that. I realize is as truth as fire burns. You can't deceive me, it is a fact, and I am left with it. And I have to find how it operates in my daily life. I have to find it out, not guess, play, theorize, because I have seen the truth of it that truth is going to act. If I don't see it and pretend I have seen it then I am going to make a hideous mess of my life. Right sir. SAANEN 2ND PUBLIC DIALOGUE 5TH AUGUST, 1971 K: We were talking over together yesterday the question of the unconscious, conscious, and the content of consciousness and what to do about it. Shall we go on with that? Or would you like to discuss another problem this morning? Q: Go on with that. K: You are sure? Q: Well, I would like to discuss a bit more about intelligence and thought. The relationship between them and silence and death. K: Now let us get the question clear. The gentleman is asking: what is the relationship between intelligence and thought, silence and death. Do you want to discuss that? Q: Could we go into the question of freedom. And can freedom exist in a modern society. K: I would like to discuss, he says, what is freedom and whether freedom can exist in a modern society. Q: I don't really know if we have completely finished with the question of yesterday and if we really went to the very bottom of it. K: The questioner says, I don't think we have gone sufficiently deeply into the question of the motive, the deep down intention and so on. I wonder if we cannot discuss this question of consciousness more deeply by considering what is intelligence and thought, the relationship between intelligence and thought, and perhaps if we can then go into silence and its relationship to death. But before we go into that there are several things involved in what we were discussing yesterday. And I do not know if you have gone deeply into it yourself and what you understood, or how much of it is a reality. We said yesterday, that most of us are conditioned by the culture, by the environment, by the food, the clothes, and so on, we are conditioned. The conditioning is the content of consciousness and consciousness is the conditioning. What relationship is thought to that conditioning? And can there be intelligence where there is conditioning? Right sir? One is aware if one has sufficiently examined oneself quite objectively, not with any kind of condemnation or judgement, if one has observed oneself one realizes one is conditioned, superficially or in great depth. And is it at all possible not only to be free of the deep conditioning, which may be the result of the family, the whole racial accumulation, the influences which have not been obvious but nevertheless have penetrated very deeply, whether the mind can ever be free of all that? That is one question. And if it is conditioned can the mind uncondition itself totally? Or - this may be a relevant question - can the mind prevent itself, not through resistance, from being conditioned ever? You follow? There are these two things which you have to examine this morning. In relation to thought and intelligence, and what is said also with regard to silence and death. We'll go into all this, if we can, we'll cover this whole field. Why does the mind ever get conditioned? Is it so sensitive, so capable of being hurt, it is like a tender delicate thing, and in relationship it gets invariably hurt, invariably conditioned, and can that conditioning ever possibly be washed away. So one realizes the mind is conditioned, the brain itself is conditioned - time evolved through centuries upon centuries, and the brain is the store house of memory, you can watch it yourself, you don't have to read philosophical or psychological books, at least I don't, though you may. And it is always responding, the brain which has evolved through time, which is the past, which is the accumulation of memory, experience, knowledge, responds to any challenge instantly according to its conditioning, superficially or in depth. I think this is clear. Now can that response from the past be delayed so that there is an interval between the challenge and the response? It is not so difficult, is it? That is, one has been brought up - I am taking a very, very superficial conditioning - in a particular culture, in a particular belief or pattern, and when that belief or pattern is questioned there is instant response according to the background of the person. I am asking: can that response be delayed so that there is an interval between the challenge and the response. That is fairly simple, isn't it, no? You tell me I am a fool - my response is immediate, calling you another, or getting angry with you, or this or that. Now when you call me a fool, can there be an interval between you calling me and my responding, a space - right - so that the brain is quiet enough to respond in a different way? Am I making myself clear? Q: (Inaudible) K: Hold on a minute sir, hold on, one moment. The brain responds all the time according to its conditioning, according to various forms of stimuli, it is always active. The brain is the response of time, memory, it is the content of it. Right? In the brain the whole past is contained. If the brain can hold itself and not respond immediately then there is a possibility of a new response. Right? Q: But this time itself is responsive. K: No sir, you are missing my point. Don't pick me up in words, just look at the meaning for the moment. The brain operates in the old habits established by the culture I live in, or by the past racial inheritance and so on, that responds all the time, judging, evaluating, believing, not believing, discussing, getting angry, violent, prejudiced, that is its response all the time to any stimuli, protecting, denying and so on. I am asking myself whether that brain can momentarily be in abeyance and not respond instantly? Right? I am asking, I don't know, I am going to find out. The brain cannot be denied of its past knowledge, it must have past knowledge - I don't know if you are meeting all this -otherwise it can't function. So I am asking myself whether that brain which is the old, will allow itself to be quiet so that a new part can operate? Right? When you flatter me the old brain says, how lovely. But can the old brain listen to what you say, the flattery, and not respond so that perhaps a new movement can take place? Right? Right sir? That new movement can only take place when there is silence, not the machinery operating in terms of the past. Is that clear? Clear in the sense of watch yourself sir, otherwise it is no fun. I am not explaining for myself, we are working together. I find when one examines one's activities, the old brain is always responding as a Catholic, as a Protestant or whatever it is, or according to its limited knowledge, to its tradition, to its racial inheritance and when that is operating nothing new can take place. Right? Now I want to find out whether that brain can be quiet, the old brain, so that a new movement can take place. Right? I want to find out. I can only find out when in relationship with another, watching the old brain in operation, and the old brain understands the truth that it must be quiet in order that a new operation can take place. The brain is not forcing itself to be quiet. If it is forcing itself to be quiet then it is the operation of the past still. In that there is division, there is conflict, there is discipline and all the rest of it. But if the old brain understands or sees the fact, the truth as long as it is in constant response to any stimuli it must operate along the old lines. If the old brain sees the truth of that then that old brain becomes quiet. It is the truth that brings about the quietness, not the intention to be quiet. Do you get this? Because you see sirs, it is a very interesting question, because one finds there are certain brains that are never conditioned. You may say, how do you know? Naturally. I only know it because it has happened to the speaker. You may not believe it, or believe it. Just take the fact. I am asking why the brain must always be functioning in this old pattern. If it does not function in its old pattern it sets a new pattern according to its memories and setting a new pattern in opposition to the old. Right? Aren't you following all this? No? Q: How do you know that you have not been conditioned? K: Oh lord! You see, I ought not to have brought that in. I thought you couldn't get it. Never mind, leave it for the moment, we'll come to it. You see we only use a very, very small part of the brain - right - and that small part is the past. There must be and there is parts of the brain which has not functioned at all, which are open, empty, new. Right? Do you know anything about it? Don't agree to this. We only know the old brain in operation, when you are at all conscious of it. Now I am asking whether that old brain can be still to a stimuli so that a new response can come out? That's my question. I know - one knows the old brain, either superficially or in depth, is conditioned. Right? There is no question about that -right? Is there any doubt? Q: How can you speak of conditioning if you say you are not conditioned? K: Don't bother about me sir. I said leave it, throw it out in the wastepaper basket. Let's start. You see you are going back to something which you haven't understood. You will understand perhaps. Don't bring that in. If I brought that in, I am sorry. Forget it! I am asking myself why the old brain is constantly active, and responding according to its background, which is conditioning. And the next question is: how can that brain, which has been so conditioned, not always respond to any stimuli, hold back a little? Right? Hold back a little - can I go on? You seem to be so lost. Q: It is very clear. K: Very clear? Q: Yes. K: Thank god! And one finds when there is the necessity, the urgency, and the importance of this question is vital, the brain does hold back. Right? The old brain so that a new quality of the mind, of the brain which has never been touched, operates. This has happened, this is not only my experience. Any top scientist - top scientist, not a scientist who is a slave to governments - but top scientists free from governments and environments, and the desire for success, for position, those are not scientists at all, they are merchants; but the scientist who is free of governments and the demands of governments and so on, he must have asked this question, because how does he discover new things? If the old brain is in operation all the time it can't discover anything new. So it is only when the old brain is quiet that something new is seen. Right? Like the man who invented the jet, though he had tremendous knowledge of the piston, internal combustion machinery, though he knew it all he had to find something new, and therefore the old brain said, all right I'll keep quiet with all my knowledge I have acquired, I am going to look, which means the old brain must be quiet. And in that quiet state something new is discovered. This is a fact, you don't have to fight with me. Now without forcing the brain how can that quietness come, and the brain voluntarily is quiet? You have understood sir? I want to find out whether the brain sees the truth that as long as it functions in the old pattern it can never discover anything new. It can discover something new only when it sees the truth that the old cannot find anything new and therefore the old becomes quiet. The truth makes it quiet not it wishes to be quiet. Right? If that is very clear, then can that quietness operate all the time and not the old conditioning, and the old conditioning with its knowledge operates only when it is necessary? Have you got my question rightly? Have you got my question? Q: You say operate all the time sir? K: All the time. Please just listen sir. I don't say it must, I want to find out. I am enquiring. I am not saying it must be quiet. I see the old brain must operate. Right? Otherwise I can't go home, otherwise I can't speak English, drive a car, recognize you. Right? The old brain must operate, function. And as long as the old brain is not quiet no new thing can be seen. Obviously, I have explained. Right? Have you gone to sleep? You are following? Q: Yes. K: I am asking myself: what is the relationship between the new quality of the brain which functions in quietness and its relationship with the old? The old is thought. Right? The old is the collection of memories and any response according to that memory is thought, and that thought must function, otherwise you can't do anything. Q: Sir, aren't you making divisions? K: No, it is not. No. No. No it is not division. It is like a house, it is like the tent. The tent is a whole thing but there are divisions in it. Q: (Inaudible) K: No, no. You are wrong sir. You are missing the whole point. You haven't moved. Oh lord! Have you got it sir? Q: Give some examples. K: I don't give examples sir. I am lost with examples. I have found two things sir. We have discovered two things. That the old brain is the conditioned brain, which has accumulated knowledge through centuries upon centuries. That is the old brain we'll call that for the moment. It is just giving it a name, nothing more, just giving it a name, not dividing as the old and the new, just to convey the meaning that there is this whole structure of brain, one part of that is the old, which doesn't mean it is separate from the new. It is different. Q: But yesterday you said that we are conscious... K: Wait sir. We come back to that. We'll come back to the whole business of consciousness. I am not contradicting myself. If I am contradicting myself from what I said yesterday - I will tell you I am contradicting. I am not such a silly person. I will go into it. Now I am saying to myself: I see this factor, that if the old brain is in operation nothing new can be discovered. The new can only be discovered when the old is quiet. And the old can only be quiet when it sees the truth that the new cannot be discovered by the old. Right? When the old sees the truth of that then it is quiet. Right? Are we together? Now it has been proved by scientists, by others, that a new thing can be discovered only when the old is silent. Right? That is when the old knows all the knowledge of internal combustion machinery, when it wants to discover something new the old must obviously be quiet. Now we have discovered this fact: the old must be naturally quiet to discover something new. Right sir? Q: Is the discovery made by the new or the old? K: Is the discovery made by the new or the old. Q: By neither of them. K: Answer it sir. My brain - you see - now wait a minute! My brain says, I really don't know whether it comes or not, I am going to find out. Right? You have asked a question, which is, does the old brain recognize the new - right madame - or does the new use the old? You follow that sir? Please sir, you don't enter into this because you haven't followed. Be quiet. You haven't entered into it at all. The old brain is quiet because it has understood completely that it can never discover anything new, no new thing can happen. We won't even use the word 'discover'. No new movement can take place if the old is constantly in operation. The old sees the fact of that and is quiet. And a new movement, a new happening takes place. That happening, is it recognized by the old, or that very happening opens the door for the old to utilize it. (Oh lord, you are stuck in here, all of you, aren't you?) Look sir, this is really quite important. It is really quite important, if you will forgive me saying so, even if you don't follow it, it is really quite important because I want to find a new way of living, a totally new way of living. And I realize the old way of living is terrible, ugly, brutal, violent and all the rest of it, the old way. I must find a new way - not a way, a new dimension which is unrelated to the old. Right? Any movement on the part of the old to discover a different dimension is not possible. So that old realizes this, any movement from it cannot possibly discover a new dimension, so it becomes quiet. Right? Now what takes place in that quietness? Let's proceed along that way. What takes place when the old brain has understood that it cannot find a new dimension, what takes place when it has realized that? Right? What takes place? I am asking: what takes place sir? You talk so much, you tell me? Q: The old brain rests its memory. K: No sir. No sir. All that is memory, word, response, trying to capture the new is still part of the old. And I said when the old has understood that no new thing can it discover, it naturally becomes quiet. That is a fact. Right? That is a fact, not an invention. Now what takes place when the old brain is absolutely quiet? That is my next question. Q: Would it be alone? K: No, don't invent sir. Unless you experience this don't guess. Q: Action. K: The gentleman says, action. I don't know what you mean? Q: There is space when it is quiet. K: Now wait a minute. When the old brain is quiet, the gentleman says there is space. Let's examine it. What do you mean by space? Q: Emptiness. K: Emptiness. Right? When the old brain is completely quiet, we are asking what takes place. Right? Sir, please don't invent, guess, observe. Is your old brain quiet? Q: No. K: I'm going off. Q: But can you ask that question? If the old brain is quiet, can you ask that question? K: I am asking you. It may be a wrong question but we must find out. Q: Surely it cannot ask that question because... K: Sir I am asking. Q: Which part of the brain is not used. K: He is saying - just listen to what he is saying. When the old brain is quiet perhaps a new part of the brain which has not been used comes into operation. Just listen to it. Right? That is, we are only functioning with a very small part of our brain. And when that small part of the brain is quiet the rest of the brain may be active. Or it has been active all the time but we don't know that it is active because one part which has accumulated knowledge, tradition, time, that is always active, super-active and therefore we don't know the other part at all - which may also have its own activity. Right? Are you following this? This is really a very interesting question. Please give your minds to this little bit, don't go off and say I don't understand and just drop it. Apply. You see having used the old brain so much we have never considered any other part of that brain. And what is that part which may have a quality of a different dimension? And I say that quality of a different dimension can be discovered when the old brain is really quiet. That's all my point. You follow? When the old brain is completely quiet, not made quiet, but naturally it has understood that it must be quiet and therefore it is quiet, when it has understood that, then we can find out what takes place when the old brain is absolutely quiet. Right sir? Now I am going to investigate, not you. Right? Because your old brain is not quiet. Right? Would you agree to that? You don't know. It has not understood the necessity of being completely quiet under any stimuli, except of course physical stimuli, that is if you put a pin into my leg it will respond, naturally. But as nobody is putting a pin into my leg the old brain can be quiet. Right? Now I want to find out what is the quality of the new brain. Right? The quality that the old brain cannot recognize. Right? If it is able to recognize the new then it is part of the old. Right? Because if the old brain cannot recognize anything which it has not experienced, which is not the outcome of memory. Right? Therefore when the old brain recognizes then it is still the old. Right? Is that clear? So I am asking: what is the new? The old brain doesn't know anything about it, therefore it can only say, I really don't know. Right? Let's proceed from there - do some of you follow this? The old brain says, I really can't touch this and I really don't know. Because I cannot touch it, because I cannot recognize it, I am not going to be deceived by it I know nothing about it. Right? I absolutely know nothing about the new dimension of this new brain. Right? So when the old brain is quiet and is incapable of recognition and therefore it can only say, I really don't know. Right? Can the old brain remain in that state of not knowing? Right sir? Because it has said, all my life I have functioned with knowledge and recognition, all my life in functioning that way I have said I know in terms of what I do not know, which I will learn. But always within the pattern of knowing. Now it says, I really don't know because something new is taking place, I really don't know. The new cannot be recognized. Therefore I have no relationship to it yet, I am going to find out. Is this so far clear? Can we go on a little bit? Now what is the brain that says, I do not know, the nature of not knowing - you follow sir? The nature of not knowing, what is that? When there is a state of not knowing is there fear in it? Which is death. You follow sir? When the old brain actually says, I don't know, it has relinquished all knowing. Right? Q: Yes. K: All knowing - don't say, yes, madame. It has relinquished altogether the intention of knowing, of wanting to know. So there is a field in which the old brain cannot function because it doesn't know. Right? Now what is that field? Right? Can that field ever be described? It can be described only when the old brain recognizes it and verbalizes it, to communicate. Right sir? So there is a field in which the old brain cannot possibly enter and this is not an invention, this is not a theory, this is a fact when the old brain says, I really don't know a thing about all this. Which means there is no intention to learn about the new thing. You see the difference sir? So: now I want to find out, non-verbally, because the moment I use a word I am back in the old. Therefore is there an understanding of something new non-verbally? Do you follow? Non-verbally in the sense of not inventing a new word, or the intention to describe it so as to capture it and hold it. So I am just enquiring, the mind is looking at it, looking at something of which it does not know at all. Right? Is that possible? You understand my question? I have always looked at something in terms of learning about it, resisting it, avoiding it, escaping from it, or overcoming it. Now it is doing nothing of that kind. Is that possible? You understand? If it is not possible you cannot possibly understand the other. Right sir? What is the something which the brain - which the old brain cannot possibly understand and therefore the old brain cannot possibly know or acquire knowledge about - is there such a thing? Or is it still an invention of the old brain wanting something new to happen? Right? If it is the old brain wanting something to happen, it is still part of the old brain. Now I have examined it completely so that the old brain had understood its structure and nature and therefore is absolutely still, not wanting to know. That is where the difficulty lies. Q: Sir I think that this is only love. K: Don't sir, don't use words. You are missing the whole thing. I am so sorry. This should really be discussed with really very, very few who can go into this. It doesn't matter. We will go on. You see, when you disturb it breaks. Is there something real, not imagined, not invented, not a theory, something which the old brain cannot possibly understand, or recognize, or want to understand? Is there anything like that? For the speaker there is, and therefore that has no value. Right? He may be deluding himself, wanting to sit on the platform - it has no value. But it has value in the sense only for you to discover it. Right? Therefore you have to find out what is the relationship - please listen - what is the relationship of the new, if you see the new, to the old and as the old must operate in life, objectively, sanely, non-personally therefore efficiently, what is the relationship of the new to the old? Does the old capture the new and therefore live a different life? Or the new operates in a way that the old cannot possibly recognize and that operation is the new way of living? You have got it sir? Just a minute sir. Go slowly. Take time, look. This brain has lived for thousands of years, this old brain, with its consciousness; the consciousness of the old brain is its content. Its content may have been acquired superficially or in depth, and that is the old brain, with all the knowledge, with all the experience of centuries upon centuries of human endeavour, evolution. And when it is functioning within that field of consciousness it can never discover anything new. That is an absolute fact, not a theory. And so any enquiry into freedom, into what love is, into what death is - do you follow - of which we know nothing, except jealousy, envy, fear, which are all part of the old content. This old brain then realizing its utter limitation, becomes quiet because it has found there is no freedom in it. Right? And because it has found no freedom in it a new part of the brain is in operation. I don't know if you see that. Look sir, I have been going south, thinking I am going north, and suddenly one discovers south is not north at all. At the moment of discovery, there is a total reversion. The reversion is not of the old, it is completely reversed. Right? It is neither going north or south, it is moving totally in a different direction. That is when it discovers that its movement can never bring about freedom, at the moment of discovery there is a totally different movement, which is freedom. I don't know if you get it. I don't know how much you have understood. I am awfully sorry. Q: Sir, could you discuss the difference between the intensity to find out and the desire of the old for the new. K: That we have gone into sir. The desire of the old for the new is still the old, therefore the desire for the new or the experience for the new - call it enlightenment, god, what you like, it is still part of the old, therefore that's out. Q: Krishnaji, do you realize that you have been speaking of the most high philosophy, and we are not even able to have the small relationship with each other. K: Do you realize that you have been talking of the highest philosophy and at the same time do you know that we have hardly any relationship with each other. Q: Who are we? K: We have been through that sir. We are monkeys! Look, sir, look at what you say, you are talking of the highest philosophy -no, it is not talking of the highest philosophy, it is the pure thing, but that doesn't matter - and you say you are talking of the highest philosophy and yet do you realize that we have no relationship with each other. If you realize that you have actually no relationship with each other, actually not theoretically, that your relationship with another cannot exist as long as the old brain is in operation - right - because the old brain functions in images, pictures, past incidences; and when the past incidences, happenings, images, knowledge, is strong then relationship comes to an end, obviously - no? If I have built an image about you, who are my wife, or my friend, my girl or whatever it is, and that image, that knowledge, which is the past, obviously prevents relationship. Relationship means direct contact, immediately at the present, at the same level, with the same intensity, with the same passion. And that passion, intensity, at the same level, cannot exist if I have an image about you and you have an image about me. Full stop. It is for you to see if you have an image about somebody else. Obviously you have. Therefore apply, work to find out. That is if you really want a relationship with another - which I doubt anybody does - we are all so terribly selfish, enclosed and if you really want a relationship with another you have to understand this whole structure of the past, which is what we have been doing. And when that is gone you have a relationship which is totally new all the time. And that new relationship is love, not the old, you know beating the drum. Now: you see sir, what is the relationship of love, which is the new, which is the different dimension, which is not known, which cannot be captured by the old, what is the relationship of that in daily life? Right? That's my question, hold to it. What is the relationship of that quality of that dimension to my everyday life? I have discovered that dimension, it has happened, because I have said the old brain can never be free, therefore the old brain is incapable of finding out what truth is. Therefore the old brain says, my whole structure is of time therefore I function only with regard to that which has time - machinery, language, all the rest of it, but the other part I will be completely still. Right? And what is the relationship between the two? Has the old any relationship with freedom, love, the unknown? Right? If it has relationship - please listen - if it has relationship with the unknown then it is part of the old - if it has relationship - you follow? But if the unknown has relationship with the old then it is quite a different proposition - I don't know if you see that? Are we meeting each other somewhere? My question is: what is the relationship between these two? And who wants relationship? You are following? Who is demanding this relationship? Is the old demanding the relationship. Right? If the old is demanding it, then it is part of the old, therefore it has no relationship with the other. Right? I don't know whether you see the beauty of this. The old has no relationship with freedom, with love, with this dimension. But the dimension, love, that new, can have a relationship with it, but not the other way round. See it sir, do you? So my question then is, the next step then is: what is the action in life, daily life, when the old has no relationship with the new but the new is establishing relationship as it moves in life? You have understood my question? I have - the mind has discovered something new. How is that new going to operate in the field of the known? Right? In the field of the known is the old brain with all its activities - you follow? - how is that going to operate? Q: Would that be where intelligence comes in? K: He says that is where intelligence comes in. Now wait a minute sir, perhaps you are right. When the old brain sees that it can never understand what freedom is - right - when it sees that it is incapable of discovering something new, that very perception that it cannot is the seed of intelligence, isn't it? Right? That is intelligence. I can't do, I thought I could do a lot of things and I can in a certain direction but in a totally new direction I can't do anything. The discovery of that, the seeing of that, is intelligence, obviously. Now, what is the relationship of that intelligence to the other? Is the other part of this extraordinary sense of intelligence? Right? Now I want to find out what we mean by that word 'intelligence' -the mind mustn't be caught by words, or the root meaning of that word 'intelligence'. So I am just enquiring. Obviously the old brain, all these centuries, thought it could do it, it could have its god, its freedom, everything it wanted. And suddenly discovers that any movement of the old is still part of the old, therefore intelligence is the understanding that it can only function within the field of the known. The discovery of that is intelligence, we say. Now what is that intelligence, what is its relationship to life, to a dimension of which the old brain doesn't know? Have you got it? You see, intelligence is not personal, isn't the outcome of argument, belief, opinion, reason, intelligence comes into being when the brain discovers its fallibility, when it discovers what it is capable of and what it is not capable of. The discovery of its capacity and incapacity is intelligence. Now what is the relationship between that intelligence and this new dimension? Right? The relationship - its relationship - wait I have got it. Just give me a minute, will you. I would not use the word 'relationship'. The new dimension, the different dimension can only operate through intelligence. Right? If there is not that intelligence it cannot operate. Right sir. So in daily life - I have got it, see how it works out sir, beautifully - so in daily life it can only operate where intelligence is functioning. Intelligence cannot function when there is the old operation, the old brain is active. When there is any form of neurotic or non-neurotic belief and adherence to any particular fragment of the brain. Right? All that is lack of intelligence. The man who believes in god is not intelligent. The man who says there is only one saviour, is not intelligent. The man who says I belong to this group, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, is not intelligent, and therefore that cannot operate. It is only the man that discovers the limitation of the old and the very discovery of that is intelligence, and only when that intelligence is functioning, can the new dimension operate through it. Full stop. Good morning. Got it? (Clapping) No, don't clap please. Don't. This isn't fun. Have you got some of it? Q: May I put another question? I don't agree completely with you. (Inaudible) K: Sir that is what takes place when there is that intelligence. The new - I won't use the word 'integrate' - the new operates when there is that intelligence which is not only primary but which is fundamental. Q: (Inaudible) K: I understand sir. The professor says, random, the happening, the chance, what is that, what is its relationship to something totally new? That is what he is asking, if I have understood it rightly. The mathematical chance, the possibilities, the random, the unexpected happening, like tossing a coin, head or tails, not knowing, he says, what is that and what is its relationship to something which is totally new? That's right sir? I don't know. That is, there are events in one's life, happenings, that appear to be a chance, happen by chance. Events that occur at random, you know, not knowing, it happens. Is that happening new, totally unexpected, or is that happening the result of unexamined, hidden, unconscious events? Just a minute. I happen to meet you, by chance. Is that chance at all, or it has happened because certain unconscious, unknown, events have brought us together? Which we may consider chance but it is not chance at all. I meet you. I didn't know you existed. And in the meeting something has taken place between us. And that may be the result of a great many other events of which we are not conscious and we may then say, this is a random event, this is a chance, unexpected, this is totally new. I don't think, it may not be that at all. And is there chance in life at all, a happening which hasn't a cause? Or have all events in life have their basic deep cause, of which we may not know, and therefore we may say our meeting is by chance, it is a random event. And the cause undergoes a change when there is an effect. The effect becomes the cause. Right? There is the cause, the effect and the effect becomes the cause of the next effect. So cause/effect is a constant chain, it is not one cause, one effect. It is undergoing constant change. Each cause, each effect changes its next cause, next effect. Right? So as this is going on in life, is there anything which is unexpected, chance, an event at random? What do you say sirs? Q: The whole thing is based on causality. K: I don't think life works that way. The cause sir becomes the effect, and the effect becomes the cause - you can see this is life. So we can never say, cause, effect and there it is. The doctor, the professor said, what is the relationship of the unknown, not the sense of new dimension, to this chance event? Q: (Inaudible) K: He and you discuss sir, but I know nothing at all about all this. I am talking about my human relationship. Human beings. Not mathematical problems and chances and events, and the mathematical order - and mathematics is order - all that doesn't seem to affect our daily life. We are concerned about our daily living and to bring about a change in that daily living: the way we behave and if our behaviour is based on the past it still brings conflict, misery, that is all we are talking about. SAANEN 4TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE 7TH AUGUST, 1971 What shall we talk over together this morning? Q: I would like to discuss fear and death and their relationship to intelligence and thought. K: Right, sir. You would like to discuss fear and death, and what is the relationship between thought and intelligence. Q: Could we set aside one morning to talk about the educational process? K: Should we set a morning apart to discuss or talk over what is education. Q: May I repeat a question which it is not necessary to answer this morning: I would like to find out whether real love between man and woman is possible because I think I know by now what love is not. And also I am aware that I cannot love. K: The gentleman wants to discuss, perhaps not this morning he says but another morning, the relationship between man and woman and whether there can exist love between them and so on. Q: Could you go into that statement: the world is me and I am the world? K: Could you go into this question of the world is me and I am the world. Q: Could we discuss death, but not theorizing what happens after but is it actually possible to die to things known? K: Yes. Shall we discuss this morning this question of fear and death? Shall we? Audience: Yes. K: And then sir perhaps we will answer your question and various other questions involved in it. Shall we go into it rather deeply? That means you have to keep a sustained interest in it, a continuous enquiry, not just go off in the middle of it to sleep, or think about something else, but pursue one thing, like fear, completely to the end, shall we? And then death, everything else will come into it. May we do that? Q: We asked about humour and laughter. Can we bring that in? K: Can we tie humour and laughter in with fear. (laughter) We have tied it in now, haven't we? You know fear is such a complex problem and we have to enquire into it, not come with any preconceived ideas and so on - you know, really enquire, really penetrate into this whole question of fear. Now first of all when we are enquiring into this rather complex problem, issue, we are not trying to deal with it as a group, as a collective fear or in discussing a group therapy to get rid of fear. We are just going to find out what fear means and what is its whole structure, nature, whether that fear deep down in the very root of our being can be understood and whether the mind can ever be free from fear? Right? How do you approach this problem? Have you fears? Have you any kind of fear, physical or psychological? So if one has psychological fears, we will come back to the physical fears a little later, how do you deal with them? I am afraid - suppose - I am afraid that I shall lose my position, my prestige, I depend on the audience, on you, to bolster me up. I depend on you to give me vitality by talking. And I am afraid if I grow older, become senile, I will be faced with nothing and I am afraid. Right? You are following this? Are you? So I am afraid. What is this fear? Or I am afraid that I depend on you, man, woman, and that dependency makes me attached to you, and I am afraid to loose you. You are following all this? I am afraid I have done something in the past, of which I regret or I am ashamed off, and I don't want you to know, so I am afraid of that, of your knowing it. You are following all this? And I feel guilty. Or I feel terribly anxious, anxiety about death, living, what people say, what people don't say, how they look at me, the deep sense of foreboding, anxiety, a sense of inferiority. And this anxiety, death, living a life that has no meaning, or out of my anxiety I seek some assurance from somebody in human relationship, or I seek a sense of security out of my anxiety in a certain belief, ideology, in god and so on. And also I am afraid that I shan't be able to do everything I want to do in this life. I haven't the capacity, or the intelligence but I am tremendously ambitious to achieve something. And so I am frightened of that too. You are following all this? And, of course, I am afraid of death, and I am afraid of being lonely, not being loved and so I want to establish a relationship with another in which this fear doesn't exist, this anxiety, this sense of loneliness, this separation. And also I am afraid of the dark, the lift and the innumerable neurotic fears that one has. Right? Now what is this fear? Why is one, you, I or anybody, why is there this fear? Is it based on not being hurt, not to be hurt? Or is it that one wants complete security and not being able to find it, physically, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, not being able to find this sense of complete safety, security, protection, one becomes terribly anxious about living, life, this sense of uncertainty. Right? Now why is there fear? Please this is a dialogue, I am not making a speech, please. This is a dialogue, talking over together our problems. One of our major problems is fear, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we run away from it, or try to overcome it, try to withstand it, develop courage and all the rest of it, there is still fear. I am asking you whether the mind is so delicate, you understand, so sensitive that it doesn't want to be hurt, from childhood on. And so not wanting to be hurt one builds a wall, one is very shy, or aggressive, before you attack I am ready to attack you, verbally, with thought, because I am so sensitive, I have been hurt so much in my life, in my childhood, everybody hurts, in the office - you follow - in the factory, the foreman, the boss, everybody treads on each other's toes, and I don't want to be hurt. Is that one of the reasons why fear exists? You have been hurt, haven't you? No? And out of that hurt we do all kinds of things, we resist a great deal, we don't want to be disturbed, out of that feeling of hurt we cling to something which we hope will protect us. And therefore anything that attacks that which I am holding on to as protection, towards that I become aggressive. So what is it that you, as a human being sitting here, wanting to resolve this problem of fear, what is it that you are frightened of? Is it a physical fear? Fear not to have any more pain, physical pain? Is it physical fear? Or a psychological fear of danger? Of uncertainty? Of being further hurt? Of not being able to find total complete security, certainty? Fear of not wanting to be dominated and yet we are dominated? So what is it that you, as a human being sitting here, are frightened of? Are you aware of your fear? Q: The unknown. K: Fear of the unknown. Is it? Now listen to that question. Fear of the unknown. Why should one be afraid of the unknown, when you know nothing about it? Please enquire into it. Q: I don't believe that. I have an image of what will happen to me when I try to be free. K: But is it the fear of letting go the known, not the fear of the unknown? You understand? Fear of the things I have gathered and letting them go - my property, my wife, my name, my books, my furniture, my good looks, or bad looks, my capacity, the things that I know, have experienced - and letting them go, is that fear? Or the fear of the future, the unknown? Q: I find that my fear generally exists on what will happen and not what is happening. K: So your fear is of what will happen in the future, what might happen tomorrow. Right? Shall we go into that? You are not afraid of today, or what happened yesterday, but you are frightened of what might happen tomorrow. Tomorrow in the future. Q: It isn't that one is frightened of what might happen tomorrow but of losing that existence of now. K: Look sir, the gentleman asked a question which is: he says I am not frightened of yesterday or today, but I am frightened of what might happen tomorrow, the future. Tomorrow may be twenty four hours later or a year later, but the future, I am frightened of that. Q: But the future is the result of all the expectations one has from the past. K: Expectations one has because of the past. Now how will you - please don't explain it - I am frightened of the future. Right? How shall I deal with this? Don't explain it to me. I want to find out what to do with this fear. I am frightened what might happen - I might get ill, I might lose my job, a dozen things might happen to me - I might go insane, I might lose everything, the things which I have stored up. So the future. Go on please, enquire. Q: I think it is not perhaps the future that we fear but rather the uncertainty of the future. K: That's right sir. Q: (Inaudible) K: Yes, he says, fear is the uncertainty and the total response of our whole being, about the uncertainty of what life is, what might happen. Q: (Inaudible) K: Is it, I am afraid of the future because the future is uncertain. And this uncertainty, I don't know how to deal with it, with my whole being, therefore I am afraid. Fear is an indication of this uncertainty of the future, isn't it? Q: That's only a part. Q: There are other fears too. K: Sir, we are taking that one fear. We will take various forms of fear presently. We are asking, the gentleman asks, I am really not frightened of anything except of the future. The future is so uncertain, I don't know how to meet it. I haven't the capacity to understand, not only the present but also the future. So it is this sense of uncertainty that indicates fear. Now how am I - whatever the explanation be, the fact is I am frightened of tomorrow - now how shall I deal with it? How shall I be free of that fear of tomorrow? Q: It seems that looking at one's response to the uncertainty that.. K: Sir, please help me. You understand? Don't theorize. I am frightened of tomorrow, of what might happen, the whole future is uncertain, there might be atomic war, there might be - you know, god knows what, ice age, they say there is going to be an ice age in fifty years - I am frightened of all this. How am I to deal with it. Help me, don't theorize about it, don't give me explanations. I am pretty good at explanations. Q: Sir need uncertainty breed fear? K: My darling sir, I am frightened of tomorrow, how are you going to help me? Q: Sir we are frightened because we are playing games and we are afraid of being exposed. K: I am frightened because I am playing a game and I am frightened because I don't want to be exposed. But you are not helping me! Q: Well if you are playing a game you can stop playing that game. K: Aren't you frightened of the future sir? Don't - stick to this. Aren't you frightened of the future? Q: Yes, perhaps. K: Yes, when you come down to it. Now how are you going to deal with it? Q: Living in the present. K: Living in the present. I don't know what that means. Q: I have to realize what I have been afraid of in the past and why I have been afraid and examine them. K: The lady says, let me understand the things I was frightened of in the past, examine them and perhaps then I shall be able to understand the uncertainty of the future. Q: First of all we have got to understand what we mean by the future. K: That's what I am trying to find out sir. Q: One thing we have to do, the first thing is not to be afraid of being frightened. K: Oh, that is a cliche, that doesn't help me. Q: (Inaudible) K: All this and you haven't fed me. You have given me a lot of words, ashes. I am still frightened of tomorrow. Q: That is the problem. I can't help someone, I can only deal with my own fear. Q: Can't you wait for tomorrow and see what happens? Q: Sir, I used to be worried about security, not physical security.. K: The gentleman means that sir. He probably has some security physically, but psychologically he is frightened of tomorrow. That is all. That is all what he is talking about. He has got a little bank account, a little house, and all the rest of it, but he is not frightened about that, he is frightened of what might happen in the future. Q: Is it possible to live with your uncertainty? K: Is it possible to live with uncertainty. Q: If we know what was going to happen.. K: Wait please. Q: Sitting here I am not afraid but thinking about tomorrow I am afraid. Q: Thought. When we are frightened now it is a fact. If we accept the fact and we are totally afraid now, to live in the present, and if we live totally in the present we forget the future. K: Right sir. Now let me look. I want to find out what causes this fear of tomorrow. What is tomorrow? Why tomorrow exists at all? You understand sir. I am going to answer you. I want to find out how thought arises, how fear arises thinking about tomorrow. Right sir? I think about tomorrow and the past has given me a sense of security, though there have been a great many uncertainties in the past but on the whole I have survived. And up to now I am fairly safe. Right? And tomorrow is very uncertain and I am frightened. In the past, though I have had fears, I have somehow survived them. And tomorrow is total uncertainty. Now I am frightened of that. So I am going to find out what causes this fear of tomorrow. Right? Tomorrow being uncertainty, insecurity, the response to that insecurity with my whole being, which is fear. You are following sir? So I want to find out why fear arises when I think about the future. Right? Which means the future may be all right but my thinking about it makes it uncertain. I don't know the future. Right? It may be marvellous, or it may be deadly, it may be terrible or most beautiful, I don't know. But thought is not certain about the future. So thought, which has been certain, which has always been seeking certainty, is suddenly faced with this uncertainty. Right? So why does thought create fear? You follow sir? Why? Q: Thought separates from the past and divides what might be. K: This separation of 'what is' and 'what might be' is part of this fear. Now I want to find out why thought creates this fear. If I didn't think about tomorrow there would be no fear. Right? I would not know the future. I wouldn't even care. Because I think about the future, the future which I don't know, the future which is so uncertain and my whole response, psychologically as well as physiologically, is to say, "My god, what is going to happen". Right? So thought breeds fear. Q: (Inaudible) K: Sir, just a minute, I am taking that one particular thing, there are other factors too. Q: Sir, I understand there is fear of the unknown, fear of tomorrow, that can be understood if I understand what I am attached to a particular form of belief. K: Sir, fear of the future, the gentleman says, can be understood if I understand why I am attached to a particular form of belief, to a particular convention, to a particular formula and so on. Q: What about fear of existence? K: Fear of living. Sir all these are involved, are they not? The attachment to a belief, to a formula, to a certain ideological concept which I have built for myself, all these are part of this fear. Right? Now I want to find out by seeing, what is fear. I said that to you earlier sir, I have done something in the past of which I am ashamed, or of which I am frightened, I don't want it to recur, I am frightened of something that has happened in the past. Or I am frightened of something that might happen in the future. Thinking about what I have done in the past breeds fear doesn't it? Thinking about the past. Are you following this? Thinking about the future, what might happen, also breeds fear. So I see, I may be wrong, we are examining, that thought is responsible for this fear, both of the past and of the future. Right? And thought is also responsible for fear by projecting an ideal, a belief and holding on to that belief and wanting certainty out of that belief, it is all the operation of thought, isn't it. Right sir? So I have to understand why thought thinks about the future, why thought goes back to some event, a happening which brought fear. Now why does thought do this? Q: Thought, can thought help itself by imagining all the possibilities and terrible things that could happen in the future, it can make some plans to prevent these things happening. Try to protect itself. K: Sir, and also thought helps you to protect yourself, doesn't it, through insurance, through building a house, avoiding wars, thought cultivates fear and also protects, doesn't it? So we are talking about thought creating fear, not how it protects. Come on please, may I go on? I can go on but will you go on with me? Will you also go into this by yourselves with me? That is, I am asking why thought breeds this fear, as thought also breeds pleasure, doesn't it? No? Sexual pleasure, the pleasure of the sunset which happened yesterday and so on and so on. So thought gives a continuity to pleasure - right - and also to fear. Q: Sir, man from pleasure tries to destroy human thought, discrimination, this is good and that would be bad. And fear seems to come directly from that, for the good thing happening and avoidance of the bad. K: Sir, surely the whole process is based on thought, isn't it? Q: The discriminate thought aspect. K: Yes sir but it is still thought, saying this is good, I'll keep it, this I won't, reject. But the whole movement of thought is the demand for pleasure - right sir - and discriminating in that, saying this will give me pleasure, that will not give me pleasure. So the whole movement of fear and pleasure, the demand and the continuity of both, depends on thought, doesn't it? Q: But how can you be free from it? K: Wait, wait. First let's get this thing going. Q: Thought is fear. K: We are going to find out, sir. I am safe today. I know I am going to have my meals today, there is a house, a room there -today I am quite sure; but I don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. I had a great deal of pleasure yesterday in various forms, and I want those pleasures repeated tomorrow. You follow? So thought both sustains fear and gives a continuity to pleasure, which I have had yesterday. No? Come on sirs! Then my question is: how am I, not only to prevent the continuity of fear, but also I want pleasure to continue, don't I? You are following this? No? I want pleasure on one side and I want as much as possible, all the time - tomorrow, the day after, all the time, in the future; and also I have had fears and I want to get rid of them and also I don't want future fears. Right? So thought is working in both directions. Right? No? Sir this is your job, not mine, look at it! Q: This gives thought a kind of energy. K: Thought is energy. Q: This gives thought a different kind of energy. K: Sir, go into it. Q: It is accumulating memories. K: Accumulating memories. The memories that have been pleasurable I hold on to, and the memories that have been painful, which are fear, I want to throw out. Right? But I don't see the root of all this is thought. Q: Perhaps when you are doing something so totally that you think about the thing that is giving you pleasure while it is happening and don't think about these things which may not happen because.. K: So how am I to say, don't think about those things which might not happen - how am I to prevent myself thinking about it? Q: Thinking about what is happening today, rejoice. K: So I force myself to think about things that are happening and not about things that don't happen. Q: Think about what is happening. K: What is happening. But my mind is always watching what might happen. Q: How does thought come into being? K: Doesn't this happen to you? Q: No. Yes, but.. K: Let's be quite simple and honest. We want to think about the things that are happening but my thought also keeps an eye on what might not. Q: It does but still.. K: Yes it is there. And when I am not thinking about this that pops up! Look Madam, do let's be simple. Q: (Inaudible) K: I want to go into it sir but you prevent it. Q: Sir the feeling 'I am' has nothing to do with fear and nothing to do with thought. I think only 'I am'. I don't have fear. This feeling 'I am' has nothing at all to do with thought. K: Sir, when you say 'I am' - what do you mean by that word 'I am'? Q: A feeling to be present, to be sitting here, and there is no fear in it sir. K: Sir, that is not the problem. Q: To find out if there is certainty, or not. Then you won't be afraid. K: How shall I find out? Q: I see the whole process of thought in this sense as a trap. K: Sir you won't go into it. Each person pursues something else. Look. Let me state what I feel, what the problem is. I am frightened of tomorrow, because tomorrow is uncertain. And I have been so far fairly certain in my life, though there have been occasions in which I have been frightened, somehow I have got over them. But the sense of fear, of tomorrow, which is so uncertain - war, atomic war, the casual wars that might explode into all kinds of horrors, you know, losing money, Nixon making a move and the stock market going down, I am in a state of convulsion about the future. Now what am I to do? I want to be free, if I can, of fear of both the past and of the future, both fear deep down and the superficial fears - what am I to do? Don't give me explanations, do this, don't do that. That's nothing. I want to find out what fear is, whether it is of darkness, whether it is of uncertainty, whether it is the fear of attachment, holding on to some person, ideas, fear. You follow? I want to find out what is the root of it, not how to escape from it, not how to smother it. I want to see the structure of fear. If I can understand that then something else can take place. So I am going to investigate to find out what that fear is. Let me go on a little while. Right? May I? Now for me fear exists because I am thinking about tomorrow because tomorrow is so uncertain, any amount of your assurance that tomorrow is perfectly all right, but I still feel fear. Now why am I thinking about tomorrow? Is it because the past has been so good, the past has given me a great deal of knowledge and this knowledge has become my security, and I have no knowledge about the future. So if I could understand the future and reduce that to my knowledge then I won't be frightened. And can I understand the future as knowledge, as experience - you are following this - so that I have understood it, so that it becomes part of my knowledge of which I shan't be frightened? Right? I'll go on. So I see also that I want a great deal of pleasure - sexual pleasure, the pleasure of achieving, fulfilling, being somebody, being very clever and the pleasure which I have had, I want those pleasures repeated, repeated, repeated. Or when I get bored with those pleasures I want wider, deeper pleasures. So I want to avoid fear and I want more pleasure. Right? This is what we all want. And are these two separate? Is pleasure separate from fear? Or are they two sides of the same coin? I must find out. Not say yes or no, I must find out, get my teeth into it, find out whether pleasure does breed fear and whether fear is the result of my demand for pleasure. You have understood my question? My principle drive is pleasure - pleasure in every direction. I want to be fed tomorrow because it gives me great pleasure, assurance, certainty. Q: That pleasure could be something else.. K: No, but that pleasure is also painful, but I'll overcome it in order to have more pleasure. Haven't you noticed this in your life? How we want more pleasure? Q: Yes. K: That's all I am talking of. First, we are demanding, pursuing pleasure, primarily, in our looks, the dress we wear - you follow -everything is based on this. And when that is not fulfilled then I become uncertain. So I am asking myself whether pleasure and fear don't go together? And I am frightened, I never question pleasure - you understand - never say, by Jove, should I have so much pleasure, where does this pleasure lead but I want more of it, in heaven, on earth, in my family, in sex, everything, it is driving me. And fear is there also. Look at it please, madam. Don't stick to your particular opinion, for god's sake move away from it. Find out. And also I fear tomorrow, I don't know what tomorrow is. And if I could reduce tomorrow in terms of my knowledge then I shan't be frightened. So - follow this - I want certainty of tomorrow, and certainty can only exist when there is knowledge. This I say "I know". Right? Now can I know anything except the past? The moment I say "I know", it is already the past. When I say, "I know my wife", I know my wife in terms of the past. So in the past there is certainty. And in the future there is uncertainty. So I want to draw the future into the past so that I will be completely safe. So I see fear arises where thought is operating, if I didn't think about tomorrow there would be no fear. Q: I am not afraid of the future, what I am afraid of is now. When I am afraid it is now, not of the future, or of the past. K: Yes sir. But sir, fear now, how does it come? Q: (Inaudible) K: I don't know how to deal with this thing. You see each of us has an opinion. Each of us is quite sure we know how to deal with fear. We will explain it, we give causes, we think we understand it, and yet at the end of it we are frightened. So I say to myself,look, keep your opinions, hold on to them, suffocate yourself with those opinions, but still you will be afraid at the end of it. I want to go behind all that and find out why fear exists at all. Is it the result of thought? Thinking about the future? Because the future is very uncertain and thought is based on the memory of the past. Right? Thought is the response of memory, accumulated as knowledge, as experience for centuries and out of that comes thought. Then thought says knowledge is my security, knowledge. And now you are telling me to be free of tomorrow. I am uncertain, if I knew what tomorrow is there will be no fear. Right? What I am craving for is certainty of knowledge. I know my past, I know what I did ten years ago, or two days ago. It is very clear, I can analyse, understand, live with it; but tomorrow I don't know and therefore not knowing makes me afraid, and not knowing means not having knowledge of. Now can thought have knowledge about something which it does not know? You are following this? So there is fear: thought trying to find out the future, and not knowing what its content is, is afraid. So then I say to myself, why is thought thinking about tomorrow, about which it knows nothing, it wants certainty but there may be no certainty? Right? But yet why does thought think about tomorrow? Right sir? Why? Please answer my question, not your question. Q: (Inaudible) K: Sir, we said that. I said that sir. Q: (Inaudible) K: Sir, if I may say so, we did say thought is necessary to protect physically its survival. Right? That is part of out life, that is what we are doing all the time. Q: (Inaudible) K: Madam, we are mixing up two things. Please, we tried to explain at the beginning of this. Q: She's right. She's right. K: I agree with her. Q: (Inaudible) K: Sir, I agree with you. One must know that tomorrow that house will be there, tomorrow I have to have my meals. Physical survival and the planning for the future is essential, isn't it? Without that I can't survive. Q: (Inaudible) K: It is hot weather, I need cooler trousers; I must plan to buy some trousers that will be cool. That means planning for tomorrow. I must plan. I have to go to India in the winter. I will plan, which is in the future. We are not denying that, on the contrary. What we are talking about is the fear of uncertainty. Q: We have no confidence in ourselves. K: That really I don't understand. Who is yourself for you to have confidence in? You are such a marvellous human being to have confidence in yourself? Q: Why not? K: What in yourself? Q: Humanity. K: What is humanity? Oh Madam. What is humanity? The good and the bad, the war - we have been through all that. So we are concerned with fear, not use thought to survive, I am not saying that. We must use thought to survive. But to survive thought has divided the world. Right? As my country, your country, my government, your government, my god, your god, my beastly guru and your beastly guru - you follow? My opinion - we have divided, and thought has created this. Though it wants to plan to survive thought has divided the world, which destroys itself, of which I am part. So I have to understand the nature of thought, where it is necessary and where it is diabolical, where it is destructive, where it creates fear - that is all my problem. I said thought must function otherwise you can't survive but in the very desire to survive it has divided and is therefore destroying itself. Right? You can see this so simply. So I see thought must function clearly, objectively without any distortion as mine, yours, my god, your god. You follow? And also I see very clearly thought produces fear. So my question is: why does thought think about tomorrow? It has to think about tomorrow in one direction; why does thought think about the future and breed fear? Q: (Inaudible) K: No you are not answering madam. Q: (Inaudible) K: Why do you think about tomorrow sir? Q: To be safe. K: You see thought must think about tomorrow in order to be safe. That is clear. And also you see why thought thinking about tomorrow creates fear. Now why? Q: Because we want to continue. K: Look! It is now eighteen minutes to twelve and we have got three more minutes and we haven't solved this problem because we refuse to leave our particular little opinions, judgements, conclusions, we say, let's abolish them and think anew. For me it is very simple. Thought must create fear because thought cannot ever find security in the future. Thought has security in time. Tomorrow has no time. Right? Tomorrow exists in the mind as time but tomorrow may not exist at all psychologically. And because of that uncertainty thought projects what it wants for tomorrow, safety, what I have acquired, what I have achieved, what I possess, all that. And that too is completely uncertain. So can I, can thought be quiet about the future? That's all my point. Can thought be quiet, which is function where it is necessary to protect physically - you follow - and therefore no nationalities, no divisions, no separate gods, no warmongers. And can thought be quiet so that time as tomorrow doesn't exist. Yes sirs. Therefore I have to understand what it is to live now. Right? I don't understand what it is to live now, nor have I understood what it is to live in the past and therefore I want to live in the future, which I don't know, which I don't know what the present is. So I am asking can I live completely, wholly, today? I can only do that when I have understood the whole machinery and the functioning of thought, and in the very understanding of the reality of thought there is silence. And where the mind is quiet there is no future, no time. SAANEN 5TH PUBLIC DIALOGUE 8TH AUGUST, 1971 K: What shall we talk about this morning? Q: Sir, haven't you covered enough ground, I'd like to consolidate in myself what you've been speaking about already -but I don't want to go over the hills. I want to find out more about death. And I'm not quite sure in myself whether I have got this relation between thought and fear. K: Shall we discuss that? The gentleman asks, he doesn't want to climb the hills and reach the top, but he wants to understand the relationship between thought and fear. Q: Sir, can you tell me if I have my facts right so far - you said that thought is something of the past, that was dead, decayed and buried - thought. And you said that when we live tomorrow, tomorrow is the unknown. Am I right so far? K: Little bit, yes. Q: Now when thought meets the unknown, it doesn't know what to do. Now if we can have thought without time, if there's no time, then there's no fear. K: We'll go into that, sir. Would you like to talk about that? Q: Yes. K: What is time - we'll come to that sir. What is time? I had to be here this morning, in spite of this bad weather, at half past ten. And I was. And if I didn't come on time, I'd keep you all waiting and it would be rather unfortunate. There is the time by the watch. There is time to cover a certain distance, between here and the moon, time to go from here to Montreux, and so on, to cover the distance, whether that distance be between my image of myself or the image I have projected of myself and what I should be - the distance between what I am and what I should like to be, between fear, and the ending of fear. So there is time by the watch, yesterday, today and tomorrow -please, we must understand this. Q: Can you give practical examples as you go along? K: I'm not good at giving practical examples - we'll get into it, sir. It's fairly simple, what I'm saying. I'm not a philosopher, for god's sake, I don't spin theories. There is time as yesterday, today and tomorrow. And there is time, at least we think there is time, between what I am and what I should be, between the fact of fear and the eventual ending of fear. Both are time, aren't they? No? The chronological time and time as invented by thought - I am this and I should change to that. And to cover that distance I need time, between what I am and what I should be. Right, sir? That is time also. No? It'll take me many days or many weeks to do certain exercises, properly, to loosen up my muscles; to completely do a proper exercise I need physical time, that is, I'll take perhaps three days or a week - that's time. Now - so let us be clear when we talk about time what we are talking about - there is the chronological time, as yesterday, today and tomorrow, and the time which is, at least we think it is, necessary to achieve an ending to fear. Right? No? I'm sorry - be patient, because other people don't understand - you may understand it - please. Time is part of fear, isn't it? I am afraid of the future, not what might happen in the future but the idea of the future, the idea of tomorrow. Right? So there is psychological time and the chronological time. Now we are talking all the time, not chronological time by the watch, and so on, but we are talking of time as the past, present and the future. That is, I am all right now but I am afraid of the future, tomorrow. Right. Now that is the psychological time. Right, sir? Let's call that psychological time - we'll change the name but it doesn't matter. Now I am asking, is there such a thing as psychological time at all. Or is it merely an invention of thought? I shall meet you tomorrow, under a tree, near the bridge - that is chronological time. I am afraid of tomorrow and I don't know how to meet that fear of tomorrow. That is psychological time, isn't it. Q: You mean thought is tomorrow now. K: Don't mix it up yet, we'll work up slowly into this. Q: Sir, how about if I say, why must this beautiful thing come to an end? K: Why must this beautiful thing come to an end. That's also psychological time, isn't it? I hold a particular relationship as beautiful, and I don't want it to end. That is, the idea that it might come to an end, and I'm afraid I won't like it to come to an end, and I'm afraid of it. Right. So that's one part of this structure of fear. The other is, I have known security, certainty. And tomorrow is uncertain and I'm afraid of that - that is psychological time, isn't it? I have known and lived a life of semi-quasi-certainty, security, but tomorrow is so dreadfully uncertain, and I'm frightened of it. Then arises my problem, how am I not to be afraid. All that is involved, surely is it not, in psychological time. Right? And the knowledge of yesterday, our many thousand yesterdays, has given me, has given to the brain a certain sense of security. Right - are we following - no, sir? Knowledge, has given security to the mind, knowledge being experience, remembrance, memories. That is, in the past there has been security, for the brain. Tomorrow there may be no security at all, I might be killed. So knowledge as time gives to the brain a sense of security. No? Got it? So knowledge is time. And I am afraid I have no knowledge of tomorrow, therefore I am afraid. So if I had knowledge of tomorrow I wouldn't be afraid. So knowledge breeds fear. And yet I must have knowledge. Is it getting too much? You are following? I must have knowledge to go from here to the station, I must have knowledge to speak English, or French, or Italian or whatever it is, I must have knowledge to do any kind of function. And yet knowledge, which I have accumulated about myself as an experiencer, and that experiencer is frightened of tomorrow because he doesn't know tomorrow. Right? Q: Sir, what about repetition? K: What about repetition - it is the same thing, mechanical. After all, knowledge is repetitive. I add to it or take away from it but its a machinery of accumulation. Come on, sirs. Q: Sir, what about the people that have terrible tragedies, with people being slaughtered? K: What has that got to do with what we are talking about. Q: Well, you see, included in that is fear. K: Wait a minute, we are talking about what is the relationship between thought and fear. Q: But even so, people have been telling me their problems, telling me how their fear remains in them and they can't get rid of it because for them man is a beast, he is not a human being at all, and therefore... K: People have had most unpleasant experiences in relationship with man. That relationship has brought great torture, great pain, great horror and that fear of human beings and what they have done remains. What is one to do with that - it is the same problem, surely. No? That is, I have been hurt, by a snake or a human being. I have been hurt. And that hurt has left a deep mark on my brain. And I am afraid of snakes and I'm afraid of human beings, which is the past. And also I am afraid of tomorrow. Right, sirs? It's the same problem, isn't it, only one is in the past, the other is in the future. No? Q: It's only difficult when you say, knowledge gives security -they find it difficult because they find the knowledge of yesterday has given them insecurity. K: Wait, wait. Knowledge also gives insecurity, doesn't it? And also knowledge gives security. I have been hurt by human beings in the past - that's knowledge. That remains deep, deeply rooted, and I loathe human beings. I am frightened of them, which is knowledge. Q: One isn't speaking of psychological knowledge but physical torture. K: Yes, physical torture, which is again in the past. Q: Yes, but you know that in the present people are going on doing it. K: In the present, people are going on doing it. In East Pakistan, in I don't know, in Russia, in China or in the prison, they are doing it. You see, you are mixing up two facts. We are talking - what are we talking about may I ask? Fear, isn't it? Fear and its relationship to thought. There are tortures, physical tortures going on in the world, people are extraordinarily brutal in the world now, physically. And I like to think about it and get terribly excited. Right? And feel morally righteous about it, and I can't do anything, can I, sitting in this room or hall or tent, can't do anything about what is happening in another place. But I like to kind of get excited about it, neurotically get excited, say, well, it's terrible what the human beings are doing. No? What can I do actually? Join a group that's going to stop this torture of human beings? Make a demonstration in front of somebody - and yet the torture will go on. So what am I concerned about, how to change the human mind that will not torture human beings, physically, psychologically, in any way? But if I am neurotic I like to keep on thinking, oh, how terrible all this world is. Now let's come back. All right, sir? Now, I am afraid what human beings have done to me or to another human being, and that knowledge is in the brain, a scar. That is, knowledge of the past not only gives uncertainty but also the certainty that I may be hurt tomorrow. The same - therefore I am afraid. Now why does the brain retain the memory of that hurt of yesterday? In order to protect itself? From the future hurts? Let's think it out, sir. That means, I am always facing the world with that hurt. Right? And therefore I have no relationship with another human being, because this hurt is so deep. Right? And I resist every human relationship because I might get hurt again. Therefore there is fear. Knowledge of the past hurt and the fear of future hurt, brings fear. But yet I must have knowledge. So, knowledge has been accumulated through time - scientific knowledge, technological knowledge, knowledge of a language and so on. To learn a language you need time. To learn any technology I must have time and so on and so on. Knowledge, which is the product of time, must exist, otherwise I can't do anything, I can't talk to you, I can't communicate with you. But also I see that knowledge of the past, as being hurt, that very knowledge says, "Be careful not to be hurt in the future." So I'm afraid of the future. You follow, sir? So how am I who have been hurt very deeply, scarred, how am I to be free of that and not project that knowledge into the future and say, "I am afraid of the future." There are two problems involved, aren't they? There is the scar of pain, hurt, and the knowledge of it makes me afraid of tomorrow. I have the scar, can the mind be free of that scar? Now let's examine that. I'm sure most of us have some kind of psychological scars, hurts - haven't you? Of course. And also we're not talking about the physical scars which affect the brain and all the rest of that - we leave that aside for the moment. There are the psychological scars of hurt. How is the mind, the brain, to be free of them? Must it be free of them? Is not the memory of it, of being hurt, a protection against the future? You have hurt me, verbally, in many ways you have hurt me. There is a memory of it. If I forget that - please follow it - I come innocently to you next morning, you hurt me again. Right? So what am I to do? Go on, think it out, sir. Go on. Q: Sir, isn't it important for me to find out why I am psychologically capable of being hurt? K: Why am I psychologically capable of being hurt? It's fairly simple - we are very sensitive, you know, there are dozens of reasons. I have an image about myself, and I don't want you to hurt that image. I think I am a great extraordinary man and you come along and put a pin into it; and it hurts me. I feel terribly inferior and I meet you who feel extraordinarily superior and I feel, my lord - I get hurt. You are clever, I am not - I get hurt. You are beautiful, I am not - you follow. Q: Sir, I'm somewhat confused, the word 'brain' and the word 'mind' as synonyms. Are you using them in the same context? K: Little bit, sir, little bit. We'll come to that. Q: It confuses me sometimes in understanding something. K: Right, right. The knowledge of being hurt, not only physically but psychologically, inwardly, has left a mark on the brain as memory. Memory is knowledge. Right? And why should I be free of that knowledge? If I am free, you're going to hurt me again. Therefore that knowledge acts as a resistance, as a wall. And what happens in relationship between human beings when there is this wall between you and me? Q: We can't meet. K: Exactly. So what do we do? Go on, sir pursue it. Q: Take away the wall. K: But you're going to hurt me. Q: Only the image. K: No, sir. Look, I come to you quite innocently - you know, the word 'innocence' means the incapacity of being hurt. That word, the root meaning of that word, 'innocent' is that you cannot be hurt. You look in the dictionary you'll see it. But let's go on with it. So I come to you open, friendly and you say something to me which hurts me. Doesn't this happen to all of you? And what takes place? That left a mark, that's knowledge. What is wrong with that knowledge? That knowledge acts as a wall between you and me. Right? Of course. You're doubtful of that? Therefore what shall I do? You've hurt me, many times. Q: Break through the wall... K: Wait, wait - look at it first, don't say break through or - just look at it. You've hurt me and the knowledge of that remains. If I have no knowledge of it, you will hurt me again. And if I have that knowledge strengthened, it acts as a wall between you and me. Therefore between you and me there is no relationship. So knowledge of the past prevents a relationship between you and me. Right? So what shall I do? Go on, sirs, what shall I do? Q: See if it's true, examine it. K: I've examined it, I've taken ten minutes in the examination of it. And I see that examination, that analysis is totally useless. Q: Is this where time comes in? K: I've taken ten minutes - analysis implies ten minutes. And that ten minutes is a waste. Q: But you have used time. K: I'm going to show you - I've used time. Don't say there is no time. Q: But if there wasn't any time. K: I don't know, that's just a supposition. I have taken ten minutes to see why I'm hurt, to examine the hurt, see the necessity of keeping that hurt as knowledge. And I've asked myself, if I remove that hurt, won't you hurt me again? And I see, as long as that hurt remains, there is no relationship between you and me. All that has taken more then a quarter of an hour. And I see, by Jove, what have I achieved at the end of it - nothing. So I've found analysis has no value at all. I mustn't go into that -you'll get lost. So, what shall I do, having hurt, having been hurt and remembering that hurt prevents all relationship? Q: We have to accept being hurt. K: No, I'm neither accepting nor rejecting, I'm looking, I'm analysing, I don't accept anything, or reject anything. So my question then is, "Why am I hurt?" Right? What is this thing that is being hurt? Q: (Inaudible) K: Sir, say something that's actual, don't imagine, don't, you know, and then don't verbalize. First find out what it is that is being hurt. Q: The knowledge of what is being hurt. K: When I say I am hurt, because you call me a fool, what is it that's being hurt? Q: Pride. K: Pride? Q: It's the knowledge of being a fool is there. K: No, madam, it is not that - please look at it - not only that, much deeper than that. Q: (Inaudible) K: No, don't - please look at it. I am hurt, because you called me a fool. Why should I be hurt because you called me a fool? Q: Surely it's the image I have of myself. K: Which means, so I have an image of myself as not being a fool. And when you call me a fool or a blackguard or a whatever it is, I get hurt, because my image is that. Right. Now I say to myself, why do I have an image about myself. So as long as I have an image about myself I'm going to be hurt. Q: Why do I have to care about the image that the other has about me? K: Of course, sir, the other has an image of me as a fool. Or the image of me as a great intellect - it's the same thing, you follow -image. Now why do I have an image about myself. Q: Because I don't like what I am. K: Wait, no. First why do you have it, sir, because you don't like yourself as you are? Wait. What are you? Have you looked at yourself, without image? Sir, look, let's be simple. I have an image about you as being very clever, bright, intelligent, awake, enlightened, sitting on the top of a hill. Tremendous image. Because of that image I have of you I say you are very clever. And in comparison with myself I am dull. Comparing myself with you I am dull. Right? Measuring myself with you I find I'm inferior. Come on. Obviously. And that makes me feel I'm very dull, very stupid, inferior. And from all that feeling of dullness, inferiority, stupidity, I have many other problems. Now why do I compare myself with you at all? Is it that we have been brought up from childhood to compare? In schools we compare, you are not as bright as your brother or the boy, top boy - we compare through marks, giving of marks, through examinations, the mother saying, "Be as bright as your elder brother." You know, this terrible business of comparison all the time throughout life. And if I don't compare, where am I? Am I dull? No, I don't know. I've called myself dull in comparing myself with you, who are not dull. But if I don't compare, what happens? Q: I become myself. K: What is yourself? Just see, sir, the cycle we go through, say, repeating these things over and over again without understanding them. So I come back, why do I have to have an image about myself, good, bad, noble, ignoble, ugly or dull, bright, why do I have an image? About anything, about myself. Q: It's a means of contact with others. K: It's a means of contact or relationship with others - is that so? Q: A man that is conscious and aware must automatically become involved to compare... K: Sir, I'm asking why should, why do I compare. Comparison implies not only conflict but imitation, doesn't it? Q: It is necessary to evaluate... K: Wait. So again look at it, watch it, please. Comparison implies conflict and imitation, doesn't it? That's one side of it. No? In comparing myself with you I feel I'm dull, therefore I must struggle to be as clever as you are - conflict. And I then imitate what you are. That's implied in that, conflict and imitation. But also I see I must compare between this cloth and that cloth, materials, this house and that house. No? Compare, measure, whether you are tall or short, compare, measure, the distance between here - and so on. You follow? So why do I have an image about myself, because if I have an image about myself it's going to be hurt. Q: Perhaps this image doesn't exist at all. K: Go on, sir, investigate it. Why do I have an image about myself as something or nothing. Q: I want to be secure. K: That means you're saying that you're seeking, taking security in an image. Is that it? Which is what? That image has been put together by thought. So you are taking security in the image which thought has built and in that image thought is seeking security. Thought has created an image because it wants security in that image. So thought is seeking security in itself. Right? Which is, thought is seeking security in the image which it has built and that image is the product of thought, thought is memory, which is the past. Come on. So thought has built this image about myself, about itself - not myself, about itself. No? Q: Sir, may I ask you something? K: Please stick to this point. Q: Yes, I am, it is to do with education, I suppose, because even when one starts to compare one's own child and say to this child, you are more clever than... K: I know, sir, I said so, we said so. Parents are the most dangerous human beings. They destroy their children, because they are uneducated. So, image is built by thought and thought is seeking security, and so thought has invented an image in which it finds security, but it is still thought. And thought is the response of memory, yesterday. So what has happened? Knowledge of yesterday has created this image. Come on, sir. So how am I not to be hurt? Not to be hurt implies not having any kind of image, obviously. Now how am I to prevent images - image of the future, of which I'm going to be frightened? Thought is time, thought is fear of the image of tomorrow, in which there is no certainty. So how am I, how is the mind or the brain not to have images at all, and yet not be hurt? Please just listen. Not to have an image at all and not to be hurt. The moment it is hurt it's going to have an image. And being hurt it protects itself with another image. So my question is, can the brain, apart from the physical aspect of it, where it has to protect itself against rain, you follow, danger, precipice, snakes, polluted air, wars, etc., etc., - apart from physical danger where protection is necessary, can the brain not be hurt at all? Which means, not to have any kind of image. Q: The energy, sir. K: Sir, if you don't mind, don't bring in another word, because we've got enough words as it is, so let's stick to these few words which we've fairly well understood. Sir, look at it the other way, not to be hurt implies having no resistance; having no resistance means no image; not to be hurt means, you know, vitality, energy. And that energy is dissipated when I have images. That energy is dissipated when I compare myself with you, my image with your image, that energy is dissipated in conflict, in trying to become your image which I have projected for myself. That energy is wasted when I am imitating the image which I have projected myself about you. So the dissipation of energy is this factor. And when I'm energetic, which can only take place when there is attention, I'm not hurt. I don't know whether you are following all this. No? Got it, sir? Let's go over it, let's understand it differently. I see, one observes - observation - one observes that one is hurt. One is hurt because basically one has an image about oneself. And that image has been built through the various forms of culture, education, civilization, tradition, nationality, economic condition, social injustice. That image is the past and therefore knowledge. Thought, whether it is my thought or the collective thought, has imprinted on this brain this sense of comparing image with another image. Obviously. The mother does it, the school teacher does it, the politician does it, Mao does it, the Red Book, the mythology of the Christians - you follow, this whole civilization is built on building this image. And there it is and that image is in the brain, which is thought. Now as long as one discovers, one understands, as long as one has an image, there must be hurt. Q: The image is the hurt, isn't it? K: Of course, the image is the hurt. All right. Now can the brain be free of all images and therefore never hurt? That means free of knowledge of the past as image. Knowledge of the past is essential to speak a language, but knowledge as the past, as an image put together by thought which is the 'me' which is the greatest image, and as long as I have the greatest image in me, you are perfectly right to put pins into it. And you do. So can the brain never be hurt. You know, sir, to find this out for yourself, not because I'm - to find it out for yourself and live a life in which the brain is never hurt. Then only can you have relationship. But if in that relationship you are hurting me, and I'm hurting you, it comes to an end. In that relationship between you and me there is hurt and that relationship comes to an end, then I go to find another relationship - divorce you and join somebody else. And that again is going to be hurt. You follow? We think by changing a relationship we're going to be completely invulnerable. But we are all the time being hurt. Right? Q: If the images are gone, then what is the relationship between two human beings? K: I understand. Why are you asking me? Q: Because you asked. K: Find out if your image has gone, not because you ask me a question and I answer it, find out if the images that you have, have gone, then you will find out what your relationship is with another. But if I say, look, "It is love", it's just a theory, throw it out, that has no meaning. But if you say, "Look, I know I'm hurt - all my life I've been hurt." A series of hurts - don't you know this? A series of inward tears, series of anxieties. And these images exist. Our question is, can the brain never be hurt at all? And that you have to apply, not just talk about it. Go after it, say, "Well have I got an image". Obviously you have, otherwise you and I wouldn't be sitting here. And if you have an image, examine it, go into it and see the futility of analysis. Because that prevents you from action. Whereas if you say now, "I move with the image". You follow, sir? That is, move with the image means the thought that is building this. And thought is knowledge. So can the brain be full of knowledge in one direction and have no knowledge in the other? Right? That means, silence in one direction, complete - not direction, you understand, sir, completely silent and out of that silence use knowledge. No? You won't see this. Q: What place is there for establishing relationship? K: Is there such a state - is there such a state as established relationship. Go to the Registrar and get married. That establishes legally a relationship. And what goes on, my god! And what goes on also, not legally. So it's your torture. So what, now, to come back, what is the relationship of thought to fear. Right, sir? We said, thought springs from knowledge of the past, knowledge is the past, knowledge is past, is the past. In that knowledge, thought has found security - I know my house, I know you, I am this, I am conditioned, not conditioned - you follow - I have asserted what I am in knowledge. Now tomorrow I don't know. I am afraid of tomorrow. And also I'm afraid of the knowledge which I have of the past, because in that knowledge I see there is tremendous insecurity also. Because if I live in the past as most of us do, I am already dead. And that feeling of living in the past is suffocating and I don't know how to get rid of it and I'm frightened of that, as I'm frightened of tomorrow. So I'm frightened of living and I'm frightened of dying. So what am I to do, what am I to do with the fears that I have, future, past - fears? Or is there only one fear, apart from the physical fear which does affect the brain, psychosomatic fears, all that - is there only one fear, taking different forms? Q: Is it the fear of nothingness? K: Is it the fear of not being. Is that right? Q: Yes. K: The fear of not having any image - the being is the image, isn't it? No? Come on. Q: Sir,... K: Wait, we haven't finished this question, it's half past eleven. Look, sir, we've got two more discussions or dialogues or conversations, tomorrow and Tuesday, Monday and Tuesday. Today's nearly over. And we're talking about fear. For the next quarter of an hour, let's apply our minds and see actually whether the mind can be free of fear. Right? Both physical fears, with all their neurotic business, and psychological fears which are much deeper, more neurotic. For a quarter of an hour let's apply, you know, get our teeth into it. Because one sees that when there is fear of any kind, it is the most appalling thing. Right? One lives in darkness, in a sense of void, disassociated, having no relationship, everything becomes ugly. No? Fear - fear not only of the past but also of the future, not only the fears of which one is conscious but deep down. Now when you look at this whole phenomena of fear, physical, psychological, with all their divisions, the various forms of fears, with all their varieties of fears - right, I hope you're following -when you see the whole structure of fear, with all their past, what is the root of it all? Unless I discover the root of it I'll go on manipulating the parts, modifying the parts. So I must find the root of it. What do you think is the root of it - root of all fear, not just one particular form of fear? Please don't answer me, be sure for yourself what is the root of it, discover it, unfold it, look at it. Q: (Inaudible) K: The gentleman says, this atmosphere is a bore, is politeness -I don't want to hurt you and you don't want to hurt me. Therefore its a form of politeness and it doesn't do anything. Right, sir, is that so? I don't mind you hurting me. Q: But relationship is not just sitting here and listening to you. When I hurt you there would be a relationship between us. K: What, sir. Q: When I hurt you there would be a relationship between you and me. K: Oh, when you hurt me there'll be a relationship between you and me. Q: Of course there will be, because I have destroyed part of... Q: That's nonsense, this is just reaction. Is it possible for you to continue on as we have such little time. K: You see, sir. No, it's not reaction, sir. He's telling you something - he says, look, we've been through this image business, we've examined the images, you having one, I having one, you hurting and I hurting, we've been through all that, it's not politeness. Q: (Inaudible) K: How do you know? You see, how do I know that you have not washed away your image, if my conceit says you have not. Who am I to tell you you have or have not - it's up to you. So let's go back. I want to find out, not the parts or the various parts or various fears, but I really want to find out the root of it. Is it not being, which is, the becoming, you follow, the becoming, that is, I am becoming something, I want to be something I've been hurt, I want to be free of hurts. All our life is this process of becoming - aggression is part of this becoming. And the not becoming is an immense fear, not being is a fear, isn't it - is that the root of it? Q: Sir, I try to find the root of fear, I see I can't think about it, fear, so the mind becomes silent so that I can just feel it as fear, and then all I feel is a deep, inner tension but I can't get beyond that point. K: The gentleman says he can't get beyond the point of tension, when he examines the root of fear. But why is one tense about it. Why should I - I just want to find out, why should I have any tension about it. Because I have a tension, if there is a tension I want to go beyond it, you know, I'm so eager, greedy. Sir, just look. You see we think, don't we, each one of us, in terms of becoming - becoming enlightened, breaking down the images, you don't listen to my image, I don't listen to your image - you follow? This whole business is a form of becoming or being. When the being is threatened, which is not becoming, there is fear. Right? Why should I, what is there to become? I can understand I can become more healthy, grow my hair longer, but psychologically what is there to become? What is becoming? Changing images? One image for another image? Obviously. But if I've no image at all and I see the reason of not having logically, and also I see the truth that image prevents relationship, whether it is the hurt image or a pleasant image - both, obviously. If I have a pleasant image about you, you are my friend. If I have an unpleasant image about you, you're my enemy. So not to have images at all. And work this out, apply it, not just accept it, but actually apply, enquire and apply and live it. Then one finds, if you do apply, do work at it, there is a mind, there is a brain that can never be hurt, because there is nothing to be hurt. SAANEN 7TH PUBLIC DISCUSSION 10TH AUGUST, 1971 K: I'd like to talk over the question of the observer and the observed and awareness. This is the last discussion or dialogue. What shall we talk about apart from what has been suggested. Q: Sir, could we discuss what yoga really means, and also what it means in the religious sense. K: No, no, yoga has quite a different meaning, I'll explain. Q: What is the difference between intelligence and meditation? K: Intelligence and meditation. And the other gentleman said, could we talk about the religious life - the meaning of that word 'religion' is to tie together and could we talk about it, like 'yoga' which is to tie together. Q: Could we talk about the purpose of being on this earth? K: The purpose of being on this earth - god only knows! Now could we discuss what is a religious life and perhaps in that, in talking it over, we'll come upon this question of observer and the observed, intelligence and meditation and all the rest of it. Shall we? Do you want to discuss that? Let us dispose of the word 'Yoga'. As it is generally understood, the word 'Yoga' is generally understood as bringing together, tying together. I have been told by scholars that the word 'Yoga' doesn't mean that at all; nor all the exercises and all the racket that goes with it. What it means is unitive perception, perceiving the whole thing totally, as a unit, the capacity, or the awareness, or the seeing the whole of existence as one - unitive perception, that's what it means, what the word 'Yoga' means. Right, sir? What is a religious life? I don't know if it interests you at all to find out what religion means, not the accepted meaning of that word, belief in some saviour, in some form of god, in some form of ritual and so on, which is all propaganda, and for me has no value whatsoever - that's not a religious life. Can we go on from there? Are you quite sure we all see that fact? A Catholic can be brought up believing in something, a saviour and so on - as most of the Christian mythology is based on that. That is, he's been conditioned from childhood, to believe, baptism, you know, the whole business of it. And in India and other parts of the world it is the same - from childhood you are conditioned to believe in something, in god, in Atman, in Brahman, in a way of life, a religious life, with all its sanctions and sacrifices, with their rituals, dogmas, priests, organizations and all that. Now can we honestly put aside all that - can we? Not become atheists, not say, well, that's all rubbish, nothing exists, but we are trying to examine the whole problem of what religion is, what a religious life is. Can we - if we are at all serious, can we push all that aside. Have you pushed all that aside? I don't know - it's up to you. You may not belong to any sect or any group or any community that believes in god, or doesn't believe in god - that belief in god or no god, is another form of fear. Right? My wanting some kind of security, certainty, because our life is so uncertain, so confused, so meaningless, we want something to believe in. So can we also put that aside? The hope that something outside, a superior agency exists - we are going to enquire, therefore all that must obviously be put aside. Can we proceed from there? Then what is a religious life, what do we mean by religion? And what relationship that word or that feeling, that man has sought or enquired into for millenia, millions of years he's been searching, searching, what relationship has that with meditation? Can we go on from there, that is, one's mind has completely understood the falseness of organized belief, organized religion, organized church, organized priests, with their saviours, with their gods, with their rituals, the mind must have understood completely and gone beyond that. Then also the mind must go beyond this desire to find something, this seeking. And that's much more difficult -intellectually one can see all the absurdities of religions. But the mind is seeking, not enquiring but seeking. I hope we see the difference between the seeking and the enquiring. Seeking implies going from one group to another, one guru to another, one sect to another, seeking if you can find happiness, contentment, satisfaction, in Buddhism, or in Zen, or in Hinduism, you follow -seeking. And there are all the people who purvey what you want, the people who talk a great deal about Buddhism, explain Buddhism, and you seeking, not knowing, being discontented, unhappy, miserable, confused, and caught in that trap. And you say, "At last I've found." Or you join some other sect or become a Communist and say, at last, there is the real stuff. So seeking also implies recognition, finding. And seeking implies recognition in that which you have found. Which means, when you seek, you've already known, obviously. And therefore it's not true. So the mind must be free of every form of organized belief, therefore it cannot possibly belong to any group, to any person - it is not a personal cult. And we are concerned with enquiry, therefore the whole question of seeking, finding, is nonexistent. So we ask, I hope you are, we are sharing together, are we? So we ask, what is this thing that man has already enquired into, all his past, you follow, the enquiry if there is or there is not a reality which is not the product of thought. Thought can invent anything. There was a man once, I used to know, he experimented with something which is quite amusing. He picked up a piece of stone which had a strange shape, and put it on the mantelpiece and every day he offered to that stone a flower. By the end of the year he was lost with that flower and that stone - that to him was reality. And he began just for fun, and then he was caught. So thought can invent, imagine anything - gods no gods, angels no angels, you follow, it can produce every form of neurotic perceptions, ideas, conclusions. So knowing that intelligently, man then says, how can that thought be quiet, so that the mind is free to enquire? Because if thought is capable - and it is - of projecting, inventing, imagining, every form of conclusion, an image in which the human mind finds security, that security, that image becomes an illusion, the Saviour, the Brahman, the Atman, the experiences you have through various forms of discipline and so on. So the problem then is, can thought be completely still? And they say you can make it still only through assistance. Please we are discussing, don't just accept anything the speaker is saying. Because they all see the necessity of having the mind completely quiet, because you see, when the mind is quiet it can see much more, hear much more, see things as they are, not invent, not imagine. So can the mind be completely, absolutely still? And it can only be stilled through, they say, discipline, control, through a particular form of a system which their teacher has invented. And can a system, a discipline, a conformity make the mind quiet, really quiet? Or following a system, practising day after day, day after day, doesn't it make the mind mechanical? And being mechanical then you can control it, like any other machine, you can control a machine. But the brain is not quiet, it has been shaped, conditioned, by the system which it has practised. Therefore such a brain, being mechanical, it can be controlled and think such control is quietness, stillness. Therefore obviously it is not. So can the mind become completely still without coercion, without compulsion, without discipline? Discipline being will, resistance, suppression, conformity, fitting into a pattern, pre-established. If you do that, you are forcing the mind, through conflict, to conform to the pattern established by the system. So discipline in the ordinary sense of the word is out. And the word discipline means to learn, not to conform, not to suppress, not to control, but to learn. So can the brain and the mind, the whole structure of the brain and the mind be completely quiet without any form of distortion by will, by desire, by thought? So that is the problem. And knowing it, people have said, "It's not possible", therefore they went in the other direction, control, discipline, do all kinds of tricks, in Zen, all that, they sit there, paying attention, to that, watching, watching, and if you go to sleep you are struck to keep awake. This kind of tremendous discipline, mechanical, and therefore controllable, and through it in the hope of achieving an experience which will be true. Are you taking part in all this or am I just going on by myself. Q: Why do you say the mind and the brain? K: Go with me, go along - we'll go into this. But see the problem first, not just the detail whether the mind is different from the brain, the brain is different from the mind - just see the whole problem. Man said, in the religion of history, not that I've read it, but friends have told me all about it, real scholars - man in his search for some super transcendental experience said, "Mind must be absolutely quiet to receive something which it has never experienced before, which it has never tasted, the smell, the quality of it". Therefore he said, "Mind must be still." And they've said there is only one way of making the mind still, force it. And when there is the operation of will in bringing about the mind to be quiet, there is distortion. Therefore a mind which is distorted cannot possibly see what there is. We are sharing together? You're doing this, you are not exercising will, you're not forcing the mind to be mechanical, through any form of discipline, system, in which is included Yoga, all the tricks of Yoga, which is totally wrong. Those people who teach physical exercise make it into a perfect racket. So seeing all this, can the mind become completely still, mind and brain, because it's very important that the brain be completely quiet. The brain which is the result of time with all the knowledge, experience and so on, which is always active to every stimuli, responding to every movement of influence, impression - can that brain also be quiet? Q: Why should it be quiet? K: Why should it be quiet - I've explained. It must be active within the field of knowledge, because that is its function. If I didn't know that a cobra is a most poisonous snake, I'll play with it and be killed. The knowledge that it is poisonous is self-protection, therefore knowledge must exist - technologically, in every way. And that knowledge has been acquired but we're not interfering with that knowledge, we don't say you mustn't have knowledge, on the contrary, you must have knowledge of the world, the facts. And that knowledge is to be used impersonally - I won't go into all that. So the brain has to be quiet because if it has any movement its movement will be in the direction of security, because it can only function in security, whether that security is neurotic or rational or irrational. So the brain has to have that quality of sensitivity so that it can function in knowledge, fully, completely, efficiently, sanely, healthily, and not for my country, for my people, for my family, for me. But also there must be that quality of sensitivity which makes the brain completely quiet - that is the problem. Now have I explained the problem - knowing the explanation is not the explained. I can give a description of the mountain, but the mountain is not the description, the picture is not the mountain, the mountain is there and the picture is something else. So I've only explained, described, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact. The fact is whether you, listening to this, have put aside every form of organized belief, every form of wanting more and more experience. Because if you are desirous of having, wanting more experience, then the desire is in operation, which is will. So the fact is this, and if you are interested in pursuing what is a religious life, you have to do this, which means, a really very, very serious life, no drugs, not all that silly nonsense - out. And also not seeking or demanding experience, because when you are seeking experience, transcendental or whatever you like to call it, you're seeking because you're bored with the daily experiences of life. And you want to have an experience which is beyond all this. And when you are experiencing what one calls a transcendental or a different level of experience, in that there is the experiencer and the experienced, there is the observer who is experiencing and the observed which is the experience. So there is division, then there is conflict. So you want more, more, more experience. So that also must be completely set aside, because when you are enquiring, experience has no place. So one sees clearly that it is absolutely necessary that the brain, the mind, the whole body, the whole system, the organism must be quiet, because as you can see if you want to listen to something, music, you listen, don't you, your body is still, your mind is still, you are listening. And if you are listening to somebody who is talking irrelevantly or relevantly, you listen, and your body becomes quiet. So the mind, the brain, the body, the whole organism becomes quiet naturally when you want to understand something. Look how you're all sitting quietly. You're not forcing yourself to sit quietly, because you are interested to find out. That very interest is the flame that makes the mind, the brain, the body quiet. So what is meditation in relation to a quiet mind? Can meditation bring about the quiet mind? Can breathing - you know Yoga in which also there is a whole system of respiration, breathing to bring about the quiet mind. Oh Lord! You know, a perfect idiot can breathe most beautifully, can practise breathing and do it ecstatically well. But his brain is still very small, he's still petty, he's still ambitious, greedy. So the whole question of breathing and sitting quietly is to bring blood to the brain, nothing else, because the more oxygen you have in your system the better the capacity to observe. You must have done all this, played tricks, played with all these things a little bit. So please don't be caught in the promise by the gurus, the teachers who teach you Yoga, that you will, through their particular system attain Nirvana or Heaven or Enlightenment. There are different systems of Yoga which I won't go into - it's all in India, you can read about it; but the main, the chief, the principle Yoga is Raja Yoga which is the king of all yogas, which is nothing to do with exercises, breathing, which is to see how the mind, the whole beauty of life is to be understood. So what relationship has meditation to a quiet mind? The word 'meditation' means measure, to measure, the root meaning of it. To measure. And thought alone can measure, thought is measurement. Please, this is important to understand. And the word 'meditation' -one shouldn't use that word at all. You see thought is based on measurement and the cultivation of thought is the action of measurement, technologically and in life. Without measurement there can be no modern civilization. Going to the moon, you must have the capacity to measure, infinitely. So the question is - if we could only find a different word - can this measurement which is so essential, which is so obviously necessary, how can that thought which is measurable, which is measure, not enter? Let's put it round the other way. When there is this absolute quietness of the mind and the whole organism, including the brain, in that measurement ceases, measurement as thought ceases. And then one can enquire if there is such a thing as the immeasurable, the measurable and the immeasurable. The measurable is thought and as long as thought is functioning the immeasurable is not, cannot be understood. Therefore they said, control, beat down thought. And the whole Asiatic world went into the immeasurable, neglecting the measurable. So what relationship has - we're still using the word 'meditation' which has a different meaning, as we explained - what relationship has that to the very still mind? Can thought be quiet? And if it can be quiet, really, not imaginatively, which means the body, the mind, the heart in complete harmony, and seeing the truth that thought is measurable and all the knowledge that thought has produced is essential, and seeing the truth that thought which is measurable can never understand the immeasurable. So if one has gone as far as that, then what relationship has this quality of the immeasurable in daily life? Are you all asleep? Are you all being mesmerized by the speaker? What, sir? What? Q: We can't hear you so well. K: Oh, you can't hear properly. Can you do something? I'm sorry you can't hear properly and I believe they can't do anything about it - it's too hot. I must speak a little nearer - is that better? Why didn't you tell me earlier? We're asking, knowing thought is measure, knowing all the mischief thought has done in human life - the misery, the confusion, the division between people, you believe and I don't believe, your god, my god, not my god - thought has brought about havoc in the world. And thought is also knowledge. So thought is necessary, and seeing the truth of that and seeing that thought can never investigate the immeasurable, therefore thought can never experience it as an experiencer and the experienced. So when thought is absolutely quiet, then there is a state or a dimension in which the immeasurable has its own movement. Now what relationship has that to daily life. Because if it has not any relationship, then I will live a life very carefully measuring my -you follow - my morality, my activity but very limited according to the measurement of thought. So what is the relationship of the unknown to the known? What is the relationship between the measurable and that which in not measurable? There must be a liaison, and that is intelligence. Intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with thought. You may be awfully clever, very good at argument, very learned, have experienced, lived a tremendous life, been all over the world, investigating, searching, looking, accumulated a great deal of knowledge, practised Zen, Hindu meditation; but all that has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence. Intelligence comes into being when the mind, the heart and the body are really harmonious. Therefore - follow this, sir - the body must be highly sensitive, not gross, not eating, drinking, all the rest, sex, all that makes the body coarse, dull, heavy. Therefore you have to understand all that. The very seeing the fact of that makes you eat less, gives the body its own intelligence. If there is an awareness of the body which is not being forced, all the rest of it, so the body becomes very, very, very sensitive, like a beautiful instrument. The same with the heart, which is, that it is never hurt and can never hurt another. That is innocency of the heart, not to hurt and not to be hurt. And the mind, having no fear, demanding no pleasure - not that you cannot enjoy the beauty of life, beauty of the tree, beauty of the beautiful face, looking at children, the flow of water, at the mountains, the green pastures - there is great delight in that. But that delight when pursued by thought becomes pleasure. So the mind has to be empty to see clearly. So the relationship between the immeasurable, the unknown and the known is this intelligence, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Buddhism, with Zen, with me or with you, absolutely nothing to do with authority, or tradition. Now have you got that intelligence? That is the only point that matters. Then that intelligence will operate in this world morally. Morality then is order, which is virtue, not the virtue or the morality of society, which is totally immoral. So that intelligence brings about order, which is virtue, and therefore a thing that is living, not mechanical. Therefore you can never practise being good, you can never practise trying to become humble. When there is that intelligence, that intelligence naturally brings about order, and the beauty of order. Now, so this is a religious life, not all the foolery around it. Now have you, listening to the speaker, have you understood this -understood not verbally or intellectually, but actually seen the truth of this? Therefore if you see the truth of it, it will act. If you see the truth that a snake is dangerous, the truth, you act. If you see the danger of a precipice, the fact, the truth of it, you act. If you see the truth of arsenic, the poison, you act. Wait! So do you see this, or do you still live in the world of ideas? If you live in the world of ideas, conclusions, then that's not truth, that's just a projection of thought. So that is the real question, whether listening to this, as you have listened for the last three weeks, in which all the varieties of human existence, suffering, pain and pleasure, sex and immorality and all the rest of it, social injustice, national divisions, wars, whether you see the truth of this and therefore there is that intelligence which operates, not me operating. When you say, "I must be myself", which is the slogan or the cliche of modern generation, which is, I must be myself, when you examine those words "I must be myself", myself, what is myself? A lot of words, a lot of conclusions, traditions, reactions, memories, a bundle of the past. And you say, "I want to be myself", which is too childish. So after having listened to all this, is there that awakening of that intelligence? And if there is that awakening of that intelligence then it'll operate, then you don't have to say, "What am I to do?" And as perhaps there's been a thousand people here during these three weeks that have listened - if they really lived that, do you know what's going to happen? We'd change the world. We'll be the salt of the earth. Q: Sir, do I understand correctly that what the mind has to see deeply is the truth of the poison of seeking security. Is that what you said? K: Part of that, sir. Q: And the difficulty seems to be that this part doesn't see, so the mind doesn't see it, and in order for the mind to see something, there has to be quiet - it seems like a vicious circle. K: No sir. First of all, why should a mind be quiet, why shouldn't it go on chattering? When the mind is chattering, you know, carrying on, you can't see anything very clearly, can you? You can't listen to anybody clearly. If you were looking at a mountain, seeing the beauty, seeing it, your mind has naturally to be quiet. Which means you have to give attention to that moment, to seeing. That's all. That is, if you see, if you listen to the fact that thought is measure, that thought has divided human beings, that thought has brought about wars - if you see the truth of it, not the explanation, the justification, all that - just see the fact, what thought has done - obviously to see that fact your mind must be quiet. No? So it is not a vicious circle at all, sir. Q: May I ask you a question: you were talking about beauty of the mountains and the beauty of that cloud. I wonder about looking at something horrible. K: Yes, you're always talking about the beauty of the mountains, hills and pastures, and also there is the ugly things of life, the refugee camps, in India, the Palestinian wars, the negro conflict, the ghettoes, the slums, poverty. Right? Can you also look at that with the same attention, with the same quality of mind that observes the dark and the light? Now just listen carefully, observe the dark and the light, the slum and the not slum. Can you watch that, can there be an awareness in which the division between that and that doesn't exist? Is there an awareness in which the division between poverty and riches doesn't exist - the division, not the fact that there is not the division, with all its injustice, immorality, all that - but the fact, an awareness, in which this division doesn't exist? That is, can the mind observe the beauty of the hill, and the squalor and not prefer or incline one opposed to the other, so that there is an awareness in which choice doesn't exist? You can do this. Not that poverty should go on - you would do something, politically, socially and so on. But the mind, freed from division, from this classical division between the rich and the poor, between beauty and ugliness, and all the rest of it, the opposite. Somebody has written me a question, that will we please stop at eleven fifty because many of us have to catch a train. Q: Sir, I'd like to ask you, is there a difference for you between thought and speculation, sometimes. K: Is there a difference between thought and speculation. Why should there be a difference between thought and speculation? Who is speculating - isn't thought speculating? Isn't thought theorizing that there is god, that there is no god, how many angels can sit on a pinhead and so on, it is the whole business of thought to speculate - there's no division, it's the same. Q: You can be aware objectively of a tree, of a mountain, of a person. Can thought observe its own movement? K: Yes, is there an awareness of thought watching itself. Q: I don't like the word 'watch'. K: All right, an awareness of itself. Now wait a minute, just look, have you understood the question? You can be aware of the tree, of the hill, of you sitting there - there is an awareness of that. Is there an awareness that you are aware? That you are aware that you are being aware. Please see the question. You can be aware of the tree, the cloud, the colour of your shirt or whatever women wear, and you can be aware objectively, and also aware of how your thought is operating. But is there an awareness of being aware? When you are aware of the tree as an observer, is that awareness - the tree is there and you are aware of that tree. You then become the observer and that becomes the observed, and he says, "That's not it". In that there is a division, as the observer and the observed. Wait a minute. Same with the cloud, same with you sitting there and the person speaking sitting on a platform and observing. In that too there is a division. In this too there is the observer, watching you, the observed - in that there is division. One can be aware of thought - I'm going on step by step, sir, thought, being aware of thought. In that also there is a division, the one who is aware separating himself from thought. Now you're asking a question, which is, does awareness know or is aware of itself, without an observer? Of course not, the moment there is no observer, there is no awareness of being aware. Obviously, sir, that is the whole point. The moment I am aware that I am aware, I'm not aware. Remain with it, sir, two minutes -remain with it. The moment I am aware that I am humble, humility is not. The moment I am aware that I am happy, happiness is not. So if I am aware that I am aware, then that is not aware, in that there is division between the observer and the observed. Now you're asking a question, which is, is there an awareness in which division as the observer and the observed comes to an end. Obviously awareness means that. Awareness means the observer is not. Q: I am aware of the tree... K: Wait, sir, look at it. When you look at a tree there is space between you and the tree - wait, sir, wait sir, not when you are, we're beginning step by step, go step by step. When you look at that tree there is a distance between you and the tree. There is the space, there is division. That division takes place when there is the observer, the observer which has an image of that tree as the oak, or the pine. So the knowledge, the image, separates the observer from the observed, as the tree. Now can you, please look at it, can you look at that tree without the image? Then if you look at that tree without the image, without saying that is an oak, that is beautiful, not beautiful, like or dislike. Then what takes place, what takes place when there is no observer but only the observed? Go on, sir, tell me what takes place - I'm not going to tell you. Q: Union. K: The gentleman says, there comes about union. Union between what? Q: I realize that union... K: No, union - union can only exist when there is the observer and the observed, when the two come together. Q: Oneness. K: Oneness means also the same thing. Q: Awareness. K: Let's invent, speculate. Q: When I am aware of the tree... K: I'm coming to that, sir - please. Q: As it comes together you have peace. K: No, Madam, it is not that. Look, I said to you, please listen to it step by step. I said to you, when you look ordinarily at a tree, there is the division between you and the tree. You're the observer and the tree is the observed. That's a fact. You with your image, with your prejudices, with your hopes and all the rest of it, that is the observer. Therefore as long as that exists as the observer, there must be division between you and the tree. When the observer is not but only the object, what takes place - what takes place - don't imagine it, do it. Q: There is a stillness, we get still. Thought doesn't work any more. We become the tree. K: You become the tree - my god, I hope not. (Laughter) I become the elephant. Q: There is neither the observer nor the observed. K: Do please listen. Do it. Look at a tree and see if you can look at it without any image. That's fairly easy. But to look at yourself without an image, to look at yourself without the observer, that's much more difficult, because what you see is unpleasant or pleasant, you want to change it, you want to control it, you want to shape it. So can you look at yourself without the observer, as you can do, if you look at the tree? Which means, look at yourself with complete attention. When there is complete attention there is no image. It's only when your mind is thinking, I wish I'd a better meal, or I'm going to so and so and you're looking at the tree, there is inattention. Q: Sir, am I wrong if I say that we are in a state of awareness all the time. K: Oh, no. Q: But we... K: No, sir, please sir. That is another speculation of thought, that we are aware all the time, we are in a state of awareness only at moments we go off to sleep. The moments we go off to sleep, the moments when we are inattentive, that is what is important, not when we are aware. I think I'd better stop, because it is nearly a quarter to twelve. Any more? What? Q: Are we aware of the infinite affection you express in translating intelligence as love? K: Are we aware of the infinite affection when you said, intelligence and its relationship to life. Are we aware of the infinite affection - it's up to you, sir. Q: Sir, when I am aware of my image and experience it, isn't that awareness in itself. K: When I'm aware of my image, does the image exist - it doesn't. Q: Then that is awareness in itself. K: That's right. Awareness in itself, without any choice, is that awareness. Sir, what is important in all this is, not what you have heard but what one is learning. Learning is not accumulation of knowledge. When you go away from here you'll have various ideas about awareness, love, truth, fear and all the rest of it - ideas. And those very ideas are going to prevent learning. But if you are aware a little bit, then you're learning. And then intelligence can operate through learning in daily life. BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST PUBLIC TALK 4TH SEPTEMBER 1971 K: What shall we talk about? Q: Children. K: Perhaps we can talk about that a little later. But what I think would be worthwhile, would be to talk over together this question of violence, which is spreading and getting worse and worse, right through the world, which is really a part of this whole human conditioning. And whether man can ever be free, not only of the superficial, environmental, economic, social conditioning of their particular culture, but also much deeper conditioning, which is the whole collective sorrow, violence and the destructive despairs and their activity of which most of us, I think, are unconscious. It's like a cloud which one has inherited, in which one lives, and apparently one finds it tremendously difficult to free oneself from it all. I think that would be worthwhile if we could talk over that together. Shall we? Would that interest you? Because as one observes, wherever you go, all over the world, the superficial cultures don't penetrate very deeply into human consciousness. But the deep roots of the great clouds of sorrow - I don't like to use the word 'evil', but that destructive violence - the great deal of antagonisms, mischief, misery, conflict - it seems to be so deeply rooted in all of us and whether one can be utterly free of them. And if that is essential, then how is one to set about it? Can we go into this? Because superficially we may be highly cultured, polite, slightly indifferent, callous, but deeply most of us, I think, are unaware that there is a great inheritance of this vast, complex, conflict, sorrow, misery, and fear. And if one is aware of it and one is conscious of it at all, is it possible to be entirely free of it, so that the mind is a totally different kind of instrument? I do not know if you have thought about it at all, or have thought that the superficial conditioning is so important that one is always struggling against it. And if one has been through it and put it away, then there are all these deep layers, unconscious for the most part, and how is one to become aware of those and whether it is at all possible to be completely rid of them? As this is such a small group comparatively, perhaps we could discuss how to be aware of these terrible things which man has inherited or cultivated - it is there. Whatever the explanations be, the fact is that we are deeply violent, but we are caught in sorrow. -We don't have this every day, thank god (referring to the roar of planes), this is for your welcome! - And there is this cloud of fear and obviously they bring about in action a great deal of mischief, confusion. I think that is fairly obvious, and how is one to be aware of all this, and is it possible to go beyond all that? And religions throughout the world, the organized religions, have forced man - not forced - but have implied that, have laid down certain sanctions, certain rules, certain disciplines, certain attitudes and beliefs, and those have not, obviously, resolved the human suffering, human fears, and deep-rooted anxieties, guilts, and all the rest of it. So we can brush all that aside, all the religious beliefs and hopes and fears, completely set aside all that - and one does, the more you think about it, the more one is aware of what is taking place in the world and the nature of the religious organizations with their heads and gurus and teachers and saviours and all their mythology. It becomes too childish and immature. Now if one has set aside all that because one has understood it and seen the futility of it, the falseness of it and are free of all that, then certain facts remain, like sorrow, violence, fear and a great anxiety, uncertainty - those remain. Now, how is one, if I am aware of all that, conscious of it, how am I to be free of all that, so that I have a different kind of brain, different kind of action, different kind of attitude towards life, different way of living? The more one is intelligent, enquiring and intellectually aware of all this, one not only becomes very, very serious, but also there is the demand that the mind must be totally free of all this mess and muck that human beings have created and carried about with them endlessly. So if that is the problem, and I think that is really the basic problem, not that there is not social injustice and reformation in all that, that there is not poverty, wars, violence, the division between nationalities - all that. All that can be solved, I feel, when human beings really understand this whole business of existence. And then they can tackle it, tackle all the confusion, the conflicts, the wars, the social injustice, the divisions of people and so on, from a different dimension. And the human mind wants to find that dimension. It has to find it to solve all this misery. So how am I, or you, to end all this, if you are serious, not playing with words, not speculating, not indulging in theoretical suppositions and ideas and hypothesis, but actually confronted with this, confronted with this human suffering, not only yours, but human suffering - the fears, the confusion, the uncertainties, the demand for constant security. The demand for psychological security is much deeper than physiological security, and because we want psychological securities, we give over all our thought and our hopes to some teacher, to some saviour, to some belief, to some outside agency. Now how shall I, knowing all this, understand and be free of this constant effort, struggle, misery? All right, shall we go into that. Shall we discuss it, talk it over together - that means share it together. How am I, or you, to be aware of that? What does this awareness or perception mean? How do I know that I am in sorrow, that human beings - not only me, but every human being in the world, of which I am part - how do I know or am aware that there is this sorrow? Is it a verbal recognition, or is it an acceptance of an idea that there is sorrow of which I am part? Or is there conscious awareness that sorrow is a fact. Are we going together? When I say to myself there is a tremendous sorrow in the world, of which I am part, because I am the world and the world is me -that's a fact. It's not an idea, it's not a sentiment, it's not an emotional assertion, it's an absolute fact, that I am the world and the world is me. Because I have made this world - you have made it, we are responsible for it. All my thoughts, my activities, my fears, my hopes are the hopes and fears of you, of the world. There is no division between the world and me. The community is me, the culture is me and I am that culture, so there is no division. I don't know if you see that and if you feel it. All that is going on in the world, in the Middle East and the Far East, between Pakistan and another nation - you know, all that - it's part of me, we are responsible for all that. And how am I, knowing I am the world and there must be a radical revolution in the world, not throwing bombs, that leads nowhere, but a revolution in the very psyche itself, in the mind itself, so that one lives differently, thinks differently, acts totally in a different manner altogether? How am I, knowing I am the world and the world is me, how am I to free the mind that is responsible for all this - the mind being thought? It is thought that has brought this about - the division between people, the wars, the structure of religious belief - thought has produced all this. And also thought has put together the technology that makes for the convenience of everyday existence - the bathroom, the electricity, the railway, the technological knowledge that makes one go to the moon - it is thought that has done all this - hasn't it? Obviously. Thought which has gathered so much information, so much knowledge, how is that thought to be free from the whole structure and nature of sorrow and fear, and yet function efficiently, with sanity in the field of knowledge, without bringing about division between man and man, thereby creating conflict, antagonism between man and man? You see the problem? At least, the problem which exists. Isn't thought responsible for all this? Isn't thought responsible for your saviours, for your beliefs, for saying you are an Englishman, or a Dutchman, or a German or a Russian? Isn't it thought that divides the Hindu from the Moslem and all that's going on in the world, in the East? And the war in Vietnam is the result of thought, carefully planned - thought is responsible for all this - isn't it? Do you say thought is not responsible? So thought is responsible, and yet we have to think very clearly. How then is thought to prevent this division? Because where there is division there is conflict, not only outwardly but inwardly. Am I making my problem clear? Not my problem, it's your problem, it's the problem of human beings because one sees what thought has done - cunning, extraordinarily capable, how it has gathered technological knowledge which cannot possibly be put aside - and yet thought has made the division between man and man: you are a Moslem, I am a Communist. You are a Buddhist, I am a Hindu. It is thought that has brought about violence, and thought is not love. So one has to have the clarity of thought in function and yet be aware that thought breeds all the divisions in the world and misery. So how am I and you in this enquiry to be aware of the whole implication of thought which is the measurable, and also a dimension in which thought as measure doesn't exist at all? Are we following each other? No? First, isn't it clear, what thought has done in the world? Right? Thought in science, the whole development of technology, and what it has done in the world, both beneficial and destructive? Thought has put together a series of religious structures and beliefs, as superstitions, mythology and saviours - no? How thought has divided people in religious beliefs. And how thought has invented means of destruction of human beings. So thought has done all that, hasn't it? And thought must be exercised to function at all. Now how is thought to function beautifully, efficiently, healthily and not create division between people? Q: When there is no fear. K: Just a minute - don't let's say when there is no fear, let's see the problem first. And thought is the collective memory of man, the collective memory from which there is the response as thought, which is the past. No? If you had no memory you couldn't think. And thought is the past. It may project in the future but it still has its root in the past and from there it functions. We see that in operation, and then I say to myself: that is necessary, but why does thought divide people as you as a Christian, Buddhist, violent, all the rest of it, and me something else? So can thought function happily, easily, effectively and yet not create division between man and man? You see my point? It's not my point, please. Why should I be conditioned as a Muslim which is the result of thought, and you conditioned as a Communist, which is the result of thought - you believe in a saviour, and I don't believe in a saviour, which is again the result of thought. The few who think, or the majority who think that violence can only produce a sociological change, and somebody else saying that is not the way. So thought is always creating divisions. Right? And where there is division there is conflict. So what is the function of thought? Right? Knowing that thought can only function in the field of knowledge, and can thought invent or come upon a different dimension, in which there is no division at all created by thought? Right? Are we getting somewhere together? Good. At least a few of us. We may be crazy, but let's get together. Because personally I am terribly interested in this, because I have seen in India, in America, all over Europe, in Australia and other parts of the world, thought has created such marvellous things and yet thought has brought about such misery, such confusion, enormous amount of sorrow. So seeing all that I ask myself: what is the function of thought? Can thought operate in one direction completely and be totally silent in another, so that there is no division, it doesn't create a division? So after having put that question to myself - and I hope you are putting it to yourselves - is it possible for thought to divide itself? You understand? For thought to say "I won't go beyond that," I will function, thought will function healthily, normally in all the technological world, in the knowledge, action and daily existence, and not enter into that dimension in which there is no division at all? Is that possible for thought to separate itself like that? Or we are putting the wrong question altogether. Can thought see its own limitations, and seeing its own limitations it brings about a different intelligence into being? If I see my own limitation, if thought sees its own limitation, has it not already discovered - not thought - , is there not a different kind of intelligence in operation? When thought sees its own limitation, then is there not an awakening of intelligence which is above and beyond thought? Please are we communicating with each other, or not at all? Q: Yes. K: You know communication means sharing, not accepting. Q: When thought is seeing itself that must not be thinking. K: I don't know sir. Q: Hasn't thought come up with systems to destroy itself? K: No, sir, first see our difficulty, this is an enormously difficult problem, don't let's find an easy answer. See the enormous implication of this. Man has lived by thought. We exercise thought every day, every minute, to go home, to catch a train, to catch the bus, to write, talk, to communicate, to function. We must have thought and if we have no thought there is no action, you can't live. You can't destroy thought. To destroy thought implies a thought which is superior and says "I must destroy my lower thought". It's all within the field of thought, thinking. Do you understand? This is what the Asiatics have done, the Indians; they have said: thought is very limited, there is a superior thought, the Atman, the Brahman, the thing above; keep thought silent and then the other will operate. And in the very assertion of that is thought - isn't it? Here you say the soul - it is still part of thought. So thought has produced this extraordinary world of technology, which thought uses for the destruction of human beings and for the convenience of human beings. It is thought that has invented the saviours, the myths, the gods, it is thought that has produced violence, it is thought that becomes jealous, anxious, fearful. So is there a field which is not measurable by thought and can that field operate in the field of thought, without thought breaking up into divisions, fragmentations? Sirs, you see, if thought is operating all the time, then the mind is functioning with the knowledge which is the past - knowledge is the past. I can't have knowledge of tomorrow. And knowledge is thought. If that is the only way to live, always within the field of thought, then the mind can never be free. Right? And so man must always live in sorrow, always have fear, always live in division, in fragmentation, therefore in conflict. And realizing that, man has said there must be an outside agency - as God, who will help me to overcome all this fragmentation of thought. But that God, that Brahman, that Atman, is still the invention of thought, or subtle forms of hope, which is again thought seeking security, not finding security in this world, invents or believes or projects an idea which it calls god, which is secure. Right? So I see this. So if thought is to be the only field in which human beings can live, then human beings are doomed. This is not my invention, this is what is actually going on. Then I ask myself, is it possible for thought to operate where it is absolutely necessary, healthily, normally, objectively, efficiently, sanely and be totally silent in every other direction? Do you understand? Now how is that possible? How is it possible for thought to function there, where it is absolutely necessary, in the most clear, objective, non-confused way, and at the same time live harmoniously in a dimension in which thought doesn't enter at all? You have got my problem? Have I made the problem clear? Because the human mind demands freedom - freedom from agonies, guilt, suffering, misery, confusion, these endless wars and violence. It demands it. And thought cannot produce freedom. It can invent the idea of freedom, but that's not freedom. So the human mind must find the answer. And it can only find out the answer when it has understood the nature of thinking and seen its capacity, how thought is measurable and find a freedom, a dimension, a state of the immeasurable in which thought doesn't function at all. You see, this is what's called meditation. People have done this, but again their meditation is part of the furthering of thought. They say, "I must sit quiet, there must be control, my thoughts must be controlled". Knowing the limitation of thought, they say, "I must control it, I must discipline it, I must hold it in check, don't let it wander". They discipline themselves tremendously, but they haven't got the other dimension, because thought cannot enter into that at all. So man has done everything! You follow? The really serious ones, the people who have really, deeply, enquired into this, not the casual people. And yet thought has been their major instrument and therefore they have never solved this problem. They have invented things. They have speculated. And poor fools like us accept these speculations, the philosophers, teachers - you follow? - the whole gamut of them. And I ask myself - and I hope you are asking it -how can this happen? Obviously there must be a different kind of meditation, a different kind of perception, that is seeing and not evaluating. To see the operations of thought, all its inward, outward movement, just to observe it, without giving any direction, forcing it in any way, just to observe it completely, without any choice. That is a different kind of perception. We see, but we always give it a direction. We say "This must not be", or "This should be", "I shall overcome it". All that is the old way of responding to any action, to any feeling, to any idea. But to observe without any direction, without any pressure, without any distortion, is that possible at all? To see myself as I am, without any condemnation, saying, "I'll keep this and I'll reject that" - can you do it? Then perception has a different quality. Right? Then it becomes a living thing, not the repetitive pattern of the past. So in the very act of listening, as we are doing now, in that very act of listening, you see the truth of it, that to perceive really there must be no directive or persuasion or compulsion: just to observe. In that observation you will see that thought doesn't enter at all. You are following? Which means in that perception, in that seeing, there is complete attention. Where there is no attention there is a distortion. Now when you are listening to this, if you see the truth of it, that acts. Are we meeting each other now? Q: Sir, in that state one sees oneself absolutely powerless and also there is a moral that thought always feels and knows its own power. K: So what? Q: Thought always enters where there is interest, fear and anxiety. K: Are you saying, sir, that thought - but isn't fear the result of thought, the result of anxiety - thought has produced fear - no? Q: Sometimes it comes unexpectedly. K: That may be, whether it is unexpected, but it's thought that has produced fear - no? Thought has produced this immense sorrow. Q: What about children's fears? K: Surely, isn't it based on their lack of security? Children need complete security, and the parents cannot give that complete security because they are interested in their own little selves. They are quarrelling, they are ambitious, they are this, they are that - do you follow? - so they cannot give completely the security that the child demands, which is love. And so we come back to the same question. Thought has produced fear, there is no question about it. Thought has produced the aching loneliness in oneself. Thought has said, I must fulfil, I must be, I am little - I must be big. Thought has brought about this jealousy, this anxiety, this guilt, thought is responsible for it. Thought is that, thought is guilt, not thought makes for guilt, thought is guilt. So how can I observe myself and the world, of which I am part, observe without any interference of thought in that observation, and therefore out of that observation a different action which doesn't produce fear, regrets and all the rest of it? Therefore I must learn to observe myself and the world and my action quite differently. There must be a learning of observation in which thought doesn't interfere at all. Because the moment thought interferes it gives it a distortion, it gives it a bias. Perception is in the present; you can't perceive tomorrow. You perceive now and in that perception, when thought interferes, thought is the response of the past and therefore it must distort the present. It's logically so. Q: Surely, to be aware we have to think. K: Wait, wait, look at it, what does awareness mean? I am aware that you are sitting there, and I am aware that I am sitting up here - unfortunately - and I am aware that I am sitting on a chair on a red cover, etc. I am aware. I perceive. I see. Then thought says, that is red, then thought says, I am a better person because I am talking, than somebody who is sitting below. Thought gives me prestige - you follow? Thought is doing all this - is that awareness, or is it merely the continuous movement of thought? Just go slowly, sir, can you see a tree without the operation of thought, isn't that it? Can you? Can't you? Can't you see a tree without the image of a tree? The image being the thought, thought that says: that is an oak. Q: It is not blind, if it can see. K: Ah, no - I'll go on - no, fortunately I am not blind. Sir, do look at it, do consider it. To look at a tree, to observe a tree, what takes place? There is the space between the observer and the tree. Right? There is distance, then there is the knowledge of that tree -the botanical knowledge, the knowledge of like and dislike of that tree. So I have the image of the tree. The image looks at that tree, and is there a perception without the image? The image is thought, thought is the knowledge of that tree. So when there is a perception with the image there is no direct perception of the tree. So is it possible to look at the tree without the image? There objectively it is fairly simple, but it becomes much more complex when I look at myself without any image about myself. Is that possible? Q: (Inaudible) K: First see sir, we will come to that, go slowly step by step. Please do it as we are talking, you will find out. That is, is there an observation of myself without any image about myself? Because I am full of my images - I am this, I am not that, I should be this, I should not be that, I must become, I must not become. They are all images. And I am looking at myself with one of the images, not with the whole group of images. So then, what is looking? You follow? What then is seeing if there is no image? Do you understand my question? If I have no images at all about myself - you know, which one has to go into very, very deeply if you want to - then what is there to see? There is absolutely nothing to see and one is frightened of that. Then one is absolutely nothing; but one can't face that, therefore one has those images about oneself. So, let's go back. The human mind demands freedom, absolutely. Even in Russia they are demanding freedom, and the powers that be are pushing them out. So freedom is essential, it is politically demanded. But you don't demand freedom from all images. So thought has created these images, for various sociological, economic, cultural reasons, and more. And these images are measurable: the greater, the lesser, the more, the less. And one asks can thought observe without distortion? Obviously it can't. When it observes there is a distorting factor in thought, because thought is the response of the past. So is there an observation without the interference of thought? That means without the interference of any image. You have to find this out, it is not a question of just accepting or believing, just find out if you can look at your wife or husband, the tree or the cloud, the person sitting next to you without any image. Q: Is there such a thing as an unconscious image one might not be aware of? K: Yes, there is. Of course. Now how can I be aware of the unconscious images that I have. Right? Please, listen to my question: how am I to be aware of the many, many unconscious images that I have stored up, man has stored up. Q: Krishnaji, as long as one is trying to be aware, one creates things to be aware of. K: That's what I am saying. You cannot try to be aware, you cannot determine to be aware, you cannot - it is not the result of exercising will to be aware. Either you see or you don't see. Either you listen to what we are talking about now, or you don't listen. But if you listen with your image then of course you don't listen at all. So the question really is very interesting - I can understand the images that I have consciously - conscious images, I can do this -some silly nonsense, all the superficial knowledge that I have, that is fairly simple and fairly clear. But the deep, hidden images that have such powerful influence on the whole way of life. How am I to be aware of these unconscious hidden images? How do you propose? Q: We find out by how we behave, by how these images come up. K: You find out how you behave, through your behaviour. Now wait, go slow. You'll find out your unconscious images through your behaviour. Q: Or sometimes in sleep. K: You will see it, sir, you will see it in a minute. Which means what? Through my behaviour I begin to discover my unconscious images that have been stored up. One image after another, you follow? I behave towards you differently and towards another differently, because you are bigger and more powerful, have greater prestige than the other man. Therefore my image of you is greater - and the other I despise, my image. So it means going through one image after another, you follow? Or is there a central fact that creates these images consciously as well as deeply? You are following? If I could find that out, then I don't have to go through image after image after image, or go through the discovery of the images through dreams. I don't know if you are following my question. You see if through my behaviour I discover my unconscious images, that's a form of analysis, isn't it? Of course, it's a form of analysis. Now will analysis resolve these images? These images are created by thought - analysis is thought. So through thought I hope to destroy the images that thought has created. So I am caught in a vicious circle. So how do I deal with this? You say through dreams. Are your images revealed through dreams? And what are dreams? Why should you dream at all? Isn't that another form of analysis? I don't know if you are following. I dream, and dreams are a continuation of my daily activity, aren't they? No? Do please investigate it together. I lead rather a messy life, uncertain, confused, miserable, unhappy, lonely, frightened, comparing myself with somebody else who is more beautiful, more intelligent, more this and more that, and that's my life during the waking hours and when I sleep that goes on. And I dream the things that I have been through, all the continuation that I have been living during the daytime, no? And if I examine myself, if there is a revelation of myself through dreams, that's a form of analysis. Therefore I say, look what I am doing. I am depending on dreams to reveal the images hidden deep down in the cave. And the dependence on dreams makes me less and less awake during the waking hours. No? Q: Thought and sub-thought create images and these are useful on a certain level. K: We've said that, that's why there are useful images which must function, which we must have, there are highly dangerous images which one must totally abolish, obviously. That's what the whole discussion is about this morning. Q: Is there not only one question, not whether thought can be silent when necessary, but can there be only silence? K: Ah, that means, sir - can there be silence from which thought can operate? Q: It's not a question of whether thought can operate or not, but can there be only silence? K: Can thought be completely quiet and function, awaken when it is necessary? Q: It's not the question whether thought can function where necessary, but can it be silent? K: Can thought be completely silent. Who is putting that question? Is thought putting that question? Q: Obviously. K: So thought is asking itself whether it can be quiet. No, don't laugh please, do look at it, do look at it. So thought is asking itself whether it can be quiet. How will you find out? Can it do anything to be silent, right sir - it can't can it? If it does, it is not silent. So can thought be quiet? Which means, can thought say to itself - I must be quiet? Then that's not quiet. Then what is quietness, which is not the product of thought. Right? Is there a silence which is not the result of thought? Which means, can thought come to an end by itself, without asking to come to an end? Isn't that implied when you listen to something, when you see clearly? When you are completely attentive, in that attention there is silence, isn't there? Completely attentive, which means your body, your nerves, everything is attentive. Then in that attention the observer as thought doesn't exist. Q: That only happens in moments of great danger? K: You mean to say when there is a crisis. Must one live in crises all the time? What an appalling idea, isn't it? In order to be quiet I must have a series of crises and thereby hope to be silent. That's too complicated! Q: May I say that silence happens from within. K: How does it happen? And can one function - please listen to this - can one function from silence - you follow? You put that question please. What is silence first of all, how does it come, and is there a functioning, that is living daily life out of silence? Q: (Inaudible) K: I can't assert anything, that there is an awareness all the time. I don't know. You don't know. Q: But it seems to be, it's just that it changes all the time. K: Now wait. I must find out sir. I only know, we only know one thing, that thought is perpetually in operation. And when thought is in operation there is no silence. There is no awareness as we discussed, as we pointed out. Awareness, or perception implies a state of seeing in which there is no image whatsoever. Until I find that out whether it is possible to see, observe, without any image, I can't state anything else. I can't state there is an awareness, there is a silence. Is it possible for me, in daily life, to observe my wife, my child, you know, everything, without a shadow of an image? Find out sir. Then out of that attention there is silence. That attention is silence. And it is not the result of practice - of course which is again thought. BROCKWOOD PARK 4TH PUBLIC TALK 12TH SEPTEMBER 1971 Shall we go on with what we said we were going to talk about this morning? I think it was that we should talk over together the question of meditation, various forms of yoga, and the appalling number of groups there are who are practising the most incredible things. You know, as one travels all over the world, there is not only the explosion of population, pollution and the heavy weight of bureaucracy, tyranny, not only of the politicians and dictators but also the tyranny of the priests, the gurus, those who say they have attained enlightenment and so on. Observing all this, and the appalling condition - conditions of poverty and the ugliness of man's relationship to man, it becomes obvious that there must be a total revolution. A different kind of culture must come into being. The old culture is almost dead and yet we are clinging to it, and those who are young, revolt against it, but unfortunately haven't found a way or a means of transforming the essential quality of the human being which is the mind. And unless there is a deep psychological revolution, mere reformation on the periphery will have little effect. And this revolution, this psychological revolution, which I think is the only revolution, is possible through meditation. Meditation is the total release of energy, and that is what we are going to talk over together this morning. Now, the word 'meditation', the root meaning of that word, is to measure. And the whole western world is based on that idea of measurement; and in the East they have said measurement is maya, illusion, and therefore one must find the immeasurable. The two went apart, culturally, socially, and intellectually and religiously. And as meditation is quite a complex problem, we have to go into it rather slowly and approach it from different angles, bearing in mind all the time that psychological revolution is absolutely necessary for a different kind of world, society, to come into being. I do not know how strongly you feel about it. Probably most of us, being bourgeois, comfortable on our little income, our little family, and so on and so on, would rather remain as we are and not be disturbed; but events, technology, and all those things that are happening in the world, are producing great changes outwardly; but inwardly most of us remain more or less as we have been for centuries upon centuries, and that revolution can only take place at the very centre of our being. And this revolution requires a great abundance of energy. And meditation is the release of that total energy. We are going to talk over that. You see, first of all, how is one to have this quality of energy which is without friction? We know mechanical energy which is friction, mechanically and the friction which produces in us energy, through conflict, through resistance, through control and all the rest of it. So there are two different kinds of energy, mechanical which is friction, and is there any other kind of energy, which has no friction whatsoever, and therefore completely free and immeasurable? I think meditation is the discovery of that, because unless one has great abundance of energy, not only physically but much more psychologically, intellectually, our action will never be complete. It will always produce friction, conflict, struggle. So observing the various forms of meditation throughout the world, including Zen, the various forms of yoga brought over from India, and the various contemplative groups as monks and so on, in all that, if one observes it very closely, there is the idea of control, acceptance of a system, and practising a repetition of words which is called mantra, and various forms of breathing, hatha yoga and so on. So first of all let us dispose of them altogether, by investigating not accepting what they say, investigating what they have said themselves, seeing the truth or the falseness of it. First of all there is this repetition of words: those words, sentences, mantras, a set of phrases given by a guru, a teacher, initiated, paying ten pounds, fifteen pounds or a hundred pounds so that you learn a peculiar phrase repeated by you secretly. Probably some of you have done that and you know a great deal about it. And that is called mantra yoga, brought over from India. I don't know why you pay a single penny to repeat certain words from somebody who says "If you do this you will achieve enlightenment - or you will have a certain quiet mind" and all the rest of it. You know when you repeat a series of words constantly, whether it is Ave Maria or various Sanskrit words or - what is the latest drink? - coca cola - and when you repeat that over and over and over again, obviously your mind becomes rather dull, and you have a peculiar sense of unity, quietness, and you think that will help to bring about clarity. You can see the absurdity of it altogether: because, first of all why should you accept what anybody says about anything, about these matters, including myself? Why should you accept any authority about inward movement of life. We reject authority outwardly - if you are at all intellectually aware, observe politically, other things, you reject it. But apparently we accept authority of somebody who says "I know; I have achieved; I have realized." The man who says he has, the man who says he knows, does not know. Right? The moment you say you know, you don't know. Because what is it you know? Some experience which you have had, some kind of vision, some kind of enlightenment - I dislike to use that word 'enlightenment'. And once you have experienced that, you think you have attained some extraordinary state, some extraordinary vision, and that is past, you can only know something which is over and therefore dead. So when all these people, this gang of people I like to call them, come over and say they have realized, do this or do that, for so much money, then it is obviously so absurd. So we can dispose of that. Then we can also dispose of this whole idea of practising a system, a method. When you practise a method in order to achieve enlightenment, or bliss, or have a quiet mind, or achieve a state of tranquility, when you practise a method, whatever it is, it obviously makes the mind mechanical. You repeat over and over again certain gestures, breathing, you know all that business, repeat, practising awareness, which is quite absurd. Then this practice not only implies suppression of your own movement, of your own understanding, conformity, and the endless conflict involved in practising a particular system - and the mind likes to conform to a system because then it gets crystallized and it is easy to live that way. Right? So can we dispose now of all systems of meditations? Then what is meditation? Is it control of thought? And if it is, who is the controller of thought? The controller of thought is thought itself, isn't it? Our whole culture both in the East and West is based on control - control of thought, and concentration in which only one thought can be pursued to the end. I hope we are meeting each other, are we? Shall I go on? Why should one control at all? Control implies imitation, conformity. Control implies the acceptance of a pattern as the authority, according to which you are trying to live - that pattern set by the society, the culture, by the priest, by somebody whom you think has knowledge, enlightenment and so on. And according to that pattern one tries to live, suppressing all one's own feelings and ideas and trying to conform. So in that there is conflict, and conflict is essentially wastage of energy. So concentration, which so many advocate in meditation, is totally wrong. You are accepting all this, or are you just listening out of boredom? Because we'll go into this question, whether thought without any form of control, control being suppression, conformity, conflict, whether thought can function when necessary, as in knowledge, in action, and be completely still at all other times? Do you follow my question? That is the real issue: whether the mind which is cluttered up with so many activities of thought and therefore uncertain, and trying to find clarity in that confusion, forces itself to control, conform to an idea, and therefore brings about more and more confusion within itself. I want to find out whether the mind can be quiet and only function when necessary, as in knowledge? Are you following my question? Am I making myself clear? And control obviously, because it implies conflict, is a great waste of energy. Please, that is important to understand because I feel meditation must be a releasing of energy in which there isn't the slightest friction. And how is a mind to do this? How is it to have such energy in which every form of friction comes to an end? And in enquiring into that, one must understand oneself completely. There must be self-knowing totally. I must know myself completely, and is that possible? Not according to any psychologist, philosopher, teacher, or the pattern set by a particular culture, but know myself right through, both at the conscious level as well as at the deeper levels, totally. So, when there is knowledge, understanding of oneself completely, then there is the ending of conflict, and this is meditation. Now how am I to know myself? I can only know myself in relationship. I can observe or the observation of myself takes place only when there is the response, reaction, in relationship; and there is no such thing as isolation, though the mind is all the time isolating itself in all its activities, building a wall round itself in order not to be hurt, in order not to have any discomfort, unhappiness, any trouble. It is isolating itself all the time in its activity, self-centred activity and I want to know myself as I want to know how to go from here to a particular town, clearly, watching everything that is involved in myself, my feelings, my thoughts, my motives, conscious or unconscious. How is this possible? You know, knowing oneself has been - the Greeks have said it, the Hindus have said it, the Buddhists have said it, 'know yourself', but apparently that is one of the most difficult things to know oneself. And we are going to find out this morning how to look at ourselves, because once you know yourself completely, that completeness prevents all friction, and therefore out of that comes this quality of energy which is totally different. So to find out how to observe oneself one must see what we mean by observing. When we observe objective things like trees, clouds, the things outside of us, there is not only the space between the observer and the observed, physical space, there is also space of time. Isn't there? When you look at a tree - please do listen to this - when you look at a tree there is not only physical distance but there is also psychological distance. There is the distance between you and the tree, the distance created by the image as knowledge -that's an oak tree, elm, the image, and that image between you and the tree separates you. You don't become the tree, you don't identify yourself with the tree, but when the quality of the mind of the observer becomes without imagination, without the image which is imagination, then there is quite a different relationship between the observer and the observed. Right? Have you ever done this, looked at a tree without a single word of like or dislike, without a single image and have you noticed then what takes place? Then for the first time you see the tree as it is, and you see the beauty of it, the colour, the depth, you know, the vitality of it. That's fairly easy to observe a tree, another person, but to observe oneself, that way, that is to observe without the observer - are you following all this? So one must find out who is the observer, what is the observer. I want to watch myself, I want to know myself as deeply as possible. And I watch myself. And what is the observer who is watching? What is the nature of that observer, the structure of that observer? That observer is the past, isn't it - the past knowledge, what he has remembered, collected, stored up, the past being the culture, the conditioning - that is the observer, who says, this is right, this is wrong, this must be, this must not be, this is good, I'll keep on, this is bad, I mustn't have. So the observer is the past, and with those eyes of the past we try to see what we are. Then we say, I don't like this, I am ugly, or, this I will keep - you follow? All those discriminations, condemnations take place. Now can I look at myself without the eyes of the past? Then is there an observer? Then there is only the observed, there is no observer. Please just see this. I am envious, or I over eat, I am greedy, and the normal reaction is, I must not over eat, I must not be greedy, I must suppress, you know all the rest of it that follows. So in that there is the observer trying to control his greed, his envy, and all the rest of it. Now when there is an awareness of greed, of your over eating, or whatever it is, without the observer, what takes place? Are we following each other, are we doing this thing? No? I over eat, my greed, I am very greedy. Can I observer that greed without giving it a name as greed, because the moment I name it I have already fixed it in my memory, as greed, which says, I must get over it, I must control. So is there an observation of greed without the word, without justifying it, without condemning it? Which means, can I observe this thing called greed without any reaction whatsoever? To so observe is a form of discipline isn't it, not imposed by any particular pattern and therefore conformity, suppression, and all the rest of it, but to observe anything, observe the movements that are in myself, greed, envy, over eating, anger, jealousy, anxiety, smoking, drinking, you follow, the whole series of actions, without condemning, justifying or naming, just to observe. Then you will see, if you so observe, the mind is no longer wasting energy. It is then aware, and therefore it has energy to deal with that which it is observing. All right? Are you all asleep? Q: (Inaudible) K: Quite right sir. That's it. But once you understand the whole mechanism of it, it doesn't become difficult. Once you see the truth of it, sir, that truth, that fact, acts. One can do that at the conscious level. There are a great many unconscious responses, motives, inclinations, tendencies, inhibitions, fears, how is one to deal with all that, the hidden accumulations? Must one go through analysing layer after layer, exposing all that through dreams? You follow? How is all that to be exposed totally so that knowing oneself becomes complete? You have understood my question? Now how is this possible? Apparently it cannot be done by the conscious mind. I can't investigate consciously the unconscious, the hidden - can you? Q: No. K: Don't say 'no' - see the difficulty of it, because I don't know what is hidden and the hidden may intimate through dreams but the dreams need to be interpreted and all the complications - and all that will take a lot of time, won't it? Q: I think it is possible under certain drugs to know myself with analysis - there is no conflict. K: If one takes LSD or various forms of drugs that helps a great deal, because in that there is no conflict at all. So you please take drugs. Does it really, does any drug, LSD, marijuana, any of them -does it really expose the totality of the content of consciousness, or does it bring about chemically a certain state of mind which is totally different from the understanding of oneself? These drugs - I have never taken them - they have taken them in India a great deal - I have watched many people there. I have also watched students in universities in America, and many, many other people who have been taking various forms of drugs, LSD, marijuana, you know I don't know what all the other names are - psychedelic drugs. If you have observed, these drugs do affect the mind, the brain cells themselves. They destroy the brain. If you have talked to one or many of those who have taken drugs, they can't reason, they can't pursue a logical sequence of thought - and the doctors and the scientists are beginning to say it does destroy the very structure of the brain cells. Not only LSD but marijuana, which is much more dangerous than LSD because that leaves a toxic condition in the brain cells and is much more difficult to get rid of. In India they have taken drugs for millions, for thousands of years and they are the most ignorant people who have taken drugs. And all the so-called intellectuals in India have denied it, said don't do it, touch it. I am not asking you not to take it, it's up to you, but when you see the effect of it, on people - they have no sense of responsibility, they think they can do anything they like, many, many hospitals are full of these people who mentally are unbalanced through drugs. We are talking of something which is non-chemical. If LSD or any drug can bring about a state of mind in which there is no conflict that would be a marvellous thing. And at the same time complete responsibility, sequence of thought, and action. Q: (inaudible) K: Beg your pardon, I cannot hear. Am I coming to a conclusion? Is that what you are saying sir? Q: I find your sequence of thought illogical. And also I cannot see how you can argue against drugs if you have not any experience of taking drugs. K: Ah wait. How can you argue against drugs if you have not taken drugs yourself? Must you go through various forms of experiences, must you get drunk in order to understand sobriety? Must you get angry in order to find out what it is not to be angry? Must you over eat in order - and so on and so on. Can't one observe without going through all the human mischief? So I am saying, we are asking, how is one to expose the whole content that lies hidden, at one glance - not through a series of dreams, not through analysis, all that implies time and wastage of energy? How is one to observe the whole content of consciousness, the obvious and the hidden, the superficial and the profound, at one look? You understand? Because this is an important question. I want to understand myself - myself being all the past, the incidents in my present life, the experiences, the hurts, the anxieties, the guilt, the various fears -how am I to understand all that without a single analysis, without going through all the dreams and intimations and so on, to comprehend all that immediately? To understand all that immediately gives immense energy. You follow? Am I making myself clear? Now how do you do that? Is that an impossibility? And we have to ask the impossible question to find a way out of it. Unless we ask the most impossible question we shall always be dealing with what is possible, and what is possible is very little. I don't know if you meet this. So I am asking the most impossible question, which is to have this whole content of consciousness exposed and understand it, see it totally without time, which means analysis, exploration, investigation and seeing layer after layer, layer after -that's all a waste of time. So how is the mind to observe this whole content with one look? Is that possible at all? If that question is put to you as it is being put now, what is your response? If you are honest, if you are really listening to that question, what is your response? You obviously say, I can't do it. Right? You obviously really don't know how to do it. Right? You really don't know, do you? Listen, please do listen. You don't know, do you? Or are you waiting for somebody to tell you? (Laughter) No, please, this is much too serious. Do listen to this. If I say to myself, I don't know, am I waiting for somebody to inform me? Am I expecting an answer? Then when I am expecting an answer, somebody to tell me, then I already know. Right? Are you following this? When I say, I don't know, I really don't know - I am not waiting for anybody to tell me, I am not expecting a thing because nobody can answer it. So I actually don't know. Right? Now, what is the state of the mind that says, I really don't know? I can't find it in any book, I can't ask anybody, I can't go to any teacher, priest, I really don't know. When the mind says, "I do not know" - what is the state of the mind? Please do listen, don't answer me yet. Do look at it because we always say, "We know". I know my wife, I know mathematics, I know this, I know that. We never say, "I really don't know." And I am asking, what is the state of the mind that actually, honestly says, "I don't know"? Q: Blank. K: Not blank - we'll take a little time, have a little patience with yourselves, don't verbalize immediately. When I say, I don't know and I really mean I don't know, what is the state of my mind? It has no answer. It is not expecting anything from anybody. Right? It is not waiting, it is not expecting. So what happens? What is the state of the mind that says, I don't know? Is it not completely alone? Right? It is not isolated. Isolation and aloneness are two different things. Aloneness, in that quality of aloneness there is no influence, there is no resistance, it has shed itself from all the past, it says, I really don't know. Therefore the mind when it says, I really deeply don't know, has emptied itself of all its content. Right? Have you understood this? Q: Yes. K: Have you? No, please, please. I do not know how to expose the whole content of my consciousness. I thought I could through analysis. I thought I could through drugs. I thought I could do it by following some teacher, philosopher, psychologist or analyst. I have tried all those ways and I see I am still caught in the net of all that, and I discard all that, because that doesn't help me to know myself totally, and I don't know what to do. Do you follow? I don't know what to do. I have asked the impossible question and the impossible question says, "I don't know". Therefore the mind empties itself of everything it has - every suggestion, every probability, every possibility. So the mind is completely active, empty of all the past, which is time, analysis, the authority of somebody. So it has exposed all the content of itself by denying the content. Do you understand now? No? Has somebody understood this or am I talking to myself? So, as we said, meditation can only begin with the understanding of myself totally, that is part of meditation, part of the beginning of meditation. Without understanding myself the mind can deceive itself, it can have illusions. That is, being conditioned by a particular culture in which one has been brought up, Hindu, Christian or Communist - if you are a Hindu you will see according to your conditioning, the god, the illusions, the myths, the falseness, the lies; if you are a Christian you are conditioned according to your particular culture, you will see Christ, you will see this and you will see that. If you are a Hibrew -you know all the rest of it, the same phenomenon goes through. And so when you know your conditioning and are free of it then there is no possibility of any kind of illusion. And that is absolutely essential because we can deceive ourselves so easily. So when I investigate into myself I see that the consciousness emptying itself of all its content through knowing itself, not by denying anything, but by understanding the whole content, that brings about a great energy which is necessary, because that energy transforms completely all my activity. It is no longer self-centred and therefore cause of friction. I don't know if you have followed this? So meditation is a way of putting aside altogether everything that man has conceived of himself and of the world. You understand? So he has a totally different kind of mind. Meditation also means awareness - awareness both of the world and of the whole movement of oneself, without any choice, to see exactly 'what is', without any distortion, to see. And distortion takes place the moment you bring in thought. Right? But thought has function, absolute function, but when there is an observation, when thought interferes with that observation as image, then there is distortion, then there is illusion. So to observe actually what is, in oneself and in the world, without any distortion, and to so observe, a quiet mind is necessary. You understand? A very still mind is necessary. And one knows that it is necessary to have a quiet mind, therefore they say, discipline. Do you understand? Control it, and there are various systems to help you to control. And all that is friction. So if you want to observe passionately, with intensity, the mind inevitably becomes quiet. You don't have to force it. I don't know if you follow it? The moment you force it, it is not quiet - it is dead. Whereas if you see the truth that to perceive anything you must look, and if you look with prejudice you cannot see. If you see that, your mind is quiet. So a quiet mind, a still mind, is necessary - not through any sense of conformity, discipline, enforcement. Right? Now what takes place in a quiet mind? Because we are enquiring not only into that quality of energy in which there is no friction, but also we are enquiring how to bring about a radical change within oneself, and oneself being the world and the world is oneself, the world is not different from me, I am the world. It's not just an idea, theory, but an actual fact that I am the world and the world is me. So if there is a radical revolution, a change in me, it will inevitably affect the world because I am part of the world. And in this enquiry into what is meditation I see that any wastage of energy is caused by friction in my relationship with another. And is it possible to have a relationship with another in which there is no friction whatsoever? And that is possible only when I understand what love is, and the understanding of what love is, is the denial of what love is not. Love is not - as we went into that the other day - jealousy, ambition, greed, self-centred activity, you know, obviously all that is not love. So, when in the understanding of myself there is the total setting aside of all that which is not love, then it is. So I have found in this examination, observing - the observation takes a second, the explanation takes a long time, the description takes pages but the act of observation is instantaneous. I have found in this observation no system, no authority, no self-centred activity, therefore no conformity, no comparison of myself with another. And to observe all this the mind must be extraordinarily quiet. If you want to listen to what is being said this morning, just now, you have to listen, haven't you? But you can't listen, if you are thinking about something else, if you are bored with this, I should get up and go. But to force yourself to listen is absurd, but if you are really interested in it, passionately, intensely, then you listen completely, and to listen completely the mind must be quiet. It is as simple as that. Now, all this is meditation; not just one act, sitting for five minutes by yourself, cross-legged, breathing properly - that's not meditation, that's self-hypnosis. I want to find out what is the quality of the mind that is completely still, and also what takes place when it is still. Do you understand my question? I've observed, I've recorded, I've understood, I've watched, I've finished with that, but there is another enquiry which is, what is the state of the mind, the brain cells themselves? The brain cells store for self-protection the memories that are useful, memories that are necessary, memories that might lead to danger. Haven't you noticed this? I suppose you read a lot of books, personally I don't, I only read detective stories, therefore I can look, I can look into myself and find out, watch myself, not according to somebody -just watch. I am asking myself what is the quality of such a mind, what has happened to the brain? The brain records, that is its function. It functions only through memory, so that it is protected, safe, secure, otherwise it can't function. The brain may find security in some neurosis. But it has found security there. It has found security in nationalism, in a belief, which are all various forms of neurosis, in the family, in having possessions. The brain must be secure to function, and it may choose that security in something that is false, unreal, illusory, neurotic. So, when I have examined myself thoroughly all this disappears. There is no neurosis, no belief, no nationality, no desire to hurt anybody, nor record all the hurts. So the brain then is a recording instrument without thought using it as the 'me' in operation. So meditation implies not only the body being still but also the brain being quiet. Have you ever watched your brain in operation -your own thinking, why you think certain things, why you react to others, how when you feel lonely, desperately lonely, unloved, nothing to rely on, no hope - you know, this tremendous sense of loneliness, though you may be married have children and live in a group but there is still this feeling of complete solitude - emptiness rather, not solitude. And seeing it one tries to escape from it, but if you remain with it, not escape from it, just look at it completely without condemning it, trying to overcome it, or escaping from it, just observe actually as it is then you will see that what you considered loneliness ceases to be. So the brain cells record, and thought as the 'me', my ambition, my greed, my purposes, my fulfilment - all that comes to an end. Therefore the brain and the mind become extraordinarily quiet. They only function when necessary. Therefore your brain, your mind enters into quite a different dimension, in which there is no description, because description is not the described. What we have done this morning is description, explanation, but the word is not the thing. When we realize the word is not the thing then one is free of the word. It is only the quiet mind can find out the immeasurable - not find out. The quiet mind then enters into the immeasurable, because all our life is based on thought which is measurable. It measures god, it measures its relationship with another through image, it tries to improve itself according to what it thinks it should be. So we live in a world of measurement, unnecessarily, and with that world we want to enter into a world in which there is no measurement at all. So meditation is the seeing 'what is' and going beyond it, seeing the measure and going beyond the measure. And what happens, what takes place when the brain, the mind and the body are really quiet, harmonious? Harmonious, which is the mind, the body and the heart are completely one. Then one lives a totally different kind of life. All right, sir. Any questions? Q: What is intuition? K: What is intuition? One has to be awfully careful of that word. Because I like something unconsciously and I say I have an intuition about it. Don't you know all the tricks one plays upon oneself through that word? Why do you want an intuition? When you see things as they are, why do you want an intuition? To observe things actually in yourself as they are without any distortion, why do you want any form of a hunch, intimation? We are talking of understanding oneself. Q: (Inaudible) K: Sir, self-knowledge is endless, you can't measure self-knowledge, can you? I have got so much, I have understood today so much, I'll understand so much tomorrow. Any other questions? Q: When one is aware of one's sexual appetites they seem to disappear and can that awareness, attention, be maintained all the time? K: Just watch the danger of this question. When I am aware of my sexual desires they seems to disappear. So awareness is a trick which will help me to make things which I don't like disappear. I don't like anger therefore I am going to be aware of it and perhaps it will disappear. But I do like my fulfilment, I want to become a great man, and I won't be aware of that. I believe in god but I won't be aware of all the dangers involved in that, because it separates people, destroys people, tortures people - not god only but worship of the state. So I am going to be aware of the things that are most unpleasant but I am going to be unaware of all those things which I am going to keep. Awareness is not a trick, it is not something that will help you to dissolve things that we don't want to keep -awareness means to observe the whole of the movement of like and dislike, of your suppressions. If you are a Victorian you don't talk about sex, you suppress it but you go on thinking about it. But if you are modern you are permissive - to be aware of all that. Q: Sir, can we by understanding our minds be aware when we are asleep? K: Can we be aware of what goes on when we are asleep? Oh Lord! Sir, this really is a complex question. How am I to be aware that I am asleep? Is there an awareness of what's going on during sleep? So to find that out, am I aware during the day of everything that's going on - aware not only outwardly of what's going on, the mischief of the politicians, the wars, the admiralty, the army, my relationship with my wife, husband, friend, girl, boy? Am I aware during the day of all the movements that are going on within me, the reactions? If I am not aware during the day how am I going to be aware at night when I sleep? And if I am aware during the day -do you understand what it means - watching, attentive, watching how much you eat, what you say, what you think, motives, aware of all that during the day, then during the night have you anything to be aware of? Do please find out. Then if you are not aware except that which is going on as a recording as the brain, what takes place? I have spent my day actively, being aware, watching what I eat, what I think, what I feel, how I talk to others, jealousy, envy, greed, violence - I have watched all that, been completely aware of all that. Which means I have brought order there - order, not according to any plan, but order, because I have lived a disordered life of not being aware. Now when I have become aware of all this, in that awareness there is order. Then when I go to sleep, when the body goes to sleep, what takes place? Generally the brain tries to bring about order while you are asleep because during the conscious waking hours you have lived a disordered life. Because the brain needs order - I don't know if you have not watched it - it can't function properly, healthily if there is no order. So if during the day there has been order, at night when you sleep the brain is not trying to bring order, trying through dreams, through intimations and so on, it becomes quiet. It may record but it is quiet, and so there is a possibility of renewal, possibility of a mind no longer fighting, struggling, and therefore the mind becomes extraordinarily young, fresh, innocent - innocent in the sense it won't hurt and will not be hurt. Isn't that enough for this morning? Yes? Q: When a man has a message, the relationship between a man and his message is usually a teacher and his teachings. The teacher often has followers, and his message is a system - why don't you consider yourself a teacher and your message a system? K: Generally a teacher has a message and followers - a teacher. Why don't you consider yourself as a teacher and have followers? I have made it fairly clear, haven't I? Don't follow anybody and don't accept anybody as a teacher except you yourself become the teacher and the disciple for yourself. BROCKWOOD PARK 7TH OCTOBER 1972 CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 'ON INTELLIGENCE' Bohm: About intelligence, I always like to look up the origin of a word as well as its meaning. It is very interesting; it comes from inter and legere which means 'To read between'. So it seems to me that you could say that thought is like the information in a book and that intelligence has to read it, the meaning of it. I think this gives a rather good notion of intelligence. Krishnamurti: To read between the lines. Bohm: Yes, to see what it means. There is also another meaning given in the dictionary which is: mental alertness. Krishnamurti: Yes, mental alertness. Bohm: Well, this is very different from what people have in mind when they measure intelligence. Now, considering many of the things you have said, you would say intelligence is not thought. You say thought takes place in the old brain, it is a physical process taking place, electrochemical; it has been amply proved by science that all thought is essentially a physical, chemical, electrical process. Then we could say perhaps that intelligence is not of the same order, it is not of the order of time at all. Krishnamurti: Intelligence. Bohm: Yes, intelligence reads this thought, sees the meaning of it. I thought we could start off with the question, there is one more point, you said that it is essential for the old brain to see its limits, so that it stays within its limits and doesn't make trouble. Of course thought tends to keep on worrying a question unless it is deeply seen that the question has no meaning, thought may keep on it at it. Now I think one of the questions which arises is this: if you say thought is physical, then the mind or intelligence or whatever you want to call it, seems different, it is of a different order. Would you say there is a real difference between the physical and intelligence? Krishnamurti: Yes. Are we saying that thought is matter? Let us put it differently. Bohm: Matter? I would rather call it a material process. Krishnamurti: All right; thought is a material process, and what is the relationship between that and intelligence? Is intelligence the product of thought? Bohm: And it raises many question which I think would be important for science. Krishnamurti: Is intelligence the product of thought? Bohm: Well I think we can take that for granted, it is not. Krishnamurti: It is not. Why do we take it for granted? Bohm: Simply because thought is mechanical. Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical, that is right. Bohm: Intelligence is not. Krishnamurti: So thought is measurable; intelligence is not. And how does it happen that this intelligence comes into existence? If thought has no relationship with intelligence, then is the cessation of thought the awakening of intelligence? Or is it that intelligence, being independent of thought, and therefore not of time, exists always? Bohm: That raises many difficult questions. Krishnamurti: I know. Bohm: I would like to put this in a framework of thinking that one could connect with any scientific views that may exist. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: Either to show that it fits or doesn't fit. So you say intelligence may be there always. Krishnamurti: I am asking - is it there always? Bohm: It may or may not be. Or it is possible that something interferes with intelligence? Krishnamurti: You see the Buddhists, and the Hindus have the theory, if I am right, the ancient Hindus, that intelligence, or Brahman, exists always and is covered over by illusion, by matter, by idiocy, by all kinds of mischievous things created by thought. I don't know if they would go as far as that. Bohm: Well, yes; we don't actually see the eternal existence of intelligence. Krishnamurti: They say peel all this off, that thing is there. So their assumption is that it existed always. Bohm: There is a difficulty in that, in the word 'always'. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: Because 'always' implies time. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: And that is just the trouble. Time is thought - I would like to put it that thought is of the order of time, or perhaps it is the other way round, that time is of the order of thought. In other words thought has invented time, and in fact thought is time. The way I see it is, that thought may sweep over the whole of time in one moment; but then thought is always changing without noticing that it is changing physically - for physical reasons, that is. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: Not rational reasons. Krishnamurti: No. Bohm: The reasons do not have to do with something total, but they have to do with some physical movement in the brain; therefore... Krishnamurti: ...they depend on environment and all kinds of things. Bohm: So as thought changes with time its meaning is no longer consistent, it becomes contradictory, it changes in an arbitrary way. Krishnamurti: Yes, I'll follow that. Bohm: Then you begin to think, everything is changing, I change, everything changes, and one begins to think "I am in time". When time is extended it becomes vast, the past before I was, further and further back and also forward in the future, so you begin to say time is the essence of all, time conquers everything. First the child may think, "I am eternal", then he begins to understand that he is in time. The general view that we get to is, that time is the essence of existence. This I think is not only the common sense view but also the scientific view. It is very hard to give up such a view because it is an intense conditioning. It is stronger even than the conditioning of the observer and the observed. Krishnamurti: Yes, quite. Are we saying that thought is time, thought is measurable, thought can change, modify, expand? And intelligence is of a different quality altogether? Bohm: Yes, different order, different quality. And I get an impression of this thought with regard to time. If we think of the past and the future, we think of the past as becoming the future; but you can see that that can't be, that it is just thought. Yet one gets the impression that past and future are present together and there is movement in another way; that the whole pattern is moving. Krishnamurti: The whole pattern is moving. Bohm: But I can't picture how it moves. In other words it is moving in a perpendicular direction to the direction between past and future. At first sight I begin to think that movement is in another time. Krishnamurti: Quite, quite. Bohm: But that gets you back into the paradox. Krishnamurti: Yes, that is it. Is intelligence out of time and therefore not related to thought, which is a movement of time? Bohm: But still thought must be related to it. Krishnamurti: Is it? I am asking. I think it is unrelated. Bohm: Unrelated? But at first sight it seems there is some relation in the sense that you distinguish between intelligent thought and unintelligent thought. Krishnamurti: Yes, but that requires intelligence to recognize unintelligent thought. Bohm: But when intelligence reads thought, what is the relationship? Krishnamurti: Let us go slowly... Bohm: And does thought respond to intelligence? Doesn't thought change? Krishnamurti: Let us be simple. Thought is time. Thought is movement in time. Thought is measurable and thought functions in the field of time, all moving, changing, transforming. Is intelligence within the field of time? Bohm: Well, we've seen that in one sense it can't be. But the thing is not clear. First of all, thought is mechanical. Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical, that is clear. Bohm: Secondly, in some sense there is a movement which is of a different time. Krishnamurti: Thought is mechanical; being mechanical it can move in different directions and all the rest of it. Is intelligence mechanical? Let's put it that way. Bohm: I would like to ask the question, what does mechanicalness mean? Krishnamurti: All right: repetitive, measurable, comparative. Bohm: I would say also dependent. Krishnamurti: Dependent, yes. Bohm: Intelligence - let us get it clear - intelligence cannot be dependent on any condition for its truth. But it seems that in some sense intelligence doesn't operate if the brain is not healthy. Krishnamurti: Obviously. Bohm: In that sense intelligence seems to depend on the brain. Krishnamurti: Or is it the quietness of the brain? Bohm: All right, it depends on the quietness of the brain. Krishnamurti: Not on the activity of the brain. Bohm: There is still some relation between intelligence and the brain. I understand this because we once discussed this question many years ago, when I raised the idea that in physics you could use a measuring instrument in two ways, the positive and the negative. Like an electric current, you can measure the electric current by the swing of the needle in the instrument, or you can use it in what is called the Wheatstone bridge, where the reading you look for is a null reading; a null reading indicates harmony, balance of the two sides of the whole system as it were. So if you are using the instrument negatively, then the non-function of the instrument is the sign that it is working right. Could we say the brain may have used thought positively to make an image of the world... Krishnamurti: ...which is the function of thought, one of the functions. Bohm: The other function of thought is negative, which is to indicate non-harmony. Krishnamurti: Yes, non-harmony. Let us proceed from there. Is intelligence dependent on the brain - we come to that point. Or when we use the word 'dependent' what do we mean by that? Bohm: It has several possible meanings. There may be simple mechanical dependence. But there is another kind: that one can't exist without the other. If I say, "I depend on food to exist", it doesn't mean that everything I think is determined by what I eat. Krishnamurti: Yes, quite. Bohm: So I propose that intelligence depends for its existence on this brain, which can indicate non-harmony, but the brain does not have anything to do with the content of intelligence. Krishnamurti: So if the brain is not harmonious, can intelligence function? Bohm: That is the question. Krishnamurti: That is what we are saying. It cannot function if the brain is hurt. Bohm: If the intelligence doesn't function, is there intelligence? Therefore it seems that intelligence requires the brain in order to exist. Krishnamurti: But the brain is only an instrument. Bohm: Which indicates this harmony or disharmony. Krishnamurti: But it is not the creator of the other. Bohm: No. Krishnamurti: Let us go into this slowly. Bohm: The brain doesn't create intelligence but it is an instrument which helps intelligence to function. That is it. Krishnamurti: That's it. Now if the brain is functioning within the field of time, up and down, negatively, positively, in any way, in that movement, or through that movement of time can intelligence operate? Or must that instrument be quiet for the intelligence to operate? Bohm: Yes. I would put it possibly slightly differently. The quietness of the instrument is the operation of intelligence. Krishnamurti: Yes, that is right. The two are not separate. Bohm: They are one and the same. The non-quietness of the instrument is the failure of the intelligence. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: But I think it would be useful to go back into questions which tend to be raised in the whole of scientific and philosophical thinking. We would ask the question: is there some sense in which intelligence exists independently of matter? You see that some people have thought that mind and matter have some separate kind of existence. This is one question that comes up. It may not be relevant, but I think the question should be considered in one way or another in order to help to make the mind quiet. The consideration of questions that cannot be clearly answered is one of the things that disturbs the mind. Krishnamurti: But you see, sir, when you say, will thought help the awakening of intelligence? When you put it that way it means that, doesn't it? Thought and matter and the exercise of thought and the movement of thought, or thought saying to itself, "I will be quiet in order for the awakening of intelligence". Any movement of thought is time, any movement, because it is measurable, it is functioning positively or negatively, harmoniously, or disharmoniously, in this field. And realizing that thought may say unconsciously, or unknowingly, that "I would be quiet in order to have this or that", then that is still within the field of time. Bohm: Yes. It is still projecting. Krishnamurti: It is projecting it to capture it. So from that, how does this intelligence take place - not how - when does it awaken? Bohm: Once again the question is in time. Krishnamurti: That is why I don't want to use the words 'when', 'how'. Bohm: You can't even ask, are there conditions for it to awaken, you can only say the condition for it to awaken is the non-operation of thought. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: But that is the same as the awakening, it is not merely its condition. You can't even ask if there are conditions for intelligence to awaken. Even to talk about a condition is a form of thought. Krishnamurti: Yes. Let us agree, any movement of thought in any direction, vertical, horizontal, in action or non-action, is still in time - any movement of thought. Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: Then what is the relationship of that movement to this intelligence which is not a movement, which is not of time, which is not the product of thought, and so on and so on? Where can the two meet? Bohm: They don't meet. But there is still some relation. Krishnamurti: That is what we are trying to find out. Is there any relationship at all, first? One thinks there is a relationship, one hopes there is a relationship, one projects a relationship. Is there a relationship at all? Bohm: That depends what you mean by relationship? Krishnamurti: Relationship: being in contact with, recognition, a feeling of being in touch with. Bohm: Well, the word relationship might mean something else. Krishnamurti: What other meaning has it? Bohm: For example there is a parallel, isn't there? The harmony of the two. That is, two things may be related without contact, but by simply being in harmony. Krishnamurti: Does harmony mean a movement of both in the same direction? Bohm: It might also mean in some way keeping in the same order. Krishnamurti: In the same order: same order, same direction, same depth, same intensity - all that is harmony. But can thought ever be harmonious - thought as movement, not static thought? Bohm: I understand. There is that thought which you abstract as static, in geometry let us say, that may have some harmony; but thought as it actually moves is always contradictory. Krishnamurti: Therefore it has no harmony in itself. But intelligence has harmony in itself. Bohm: I think I see the source of the confusion. We have the static products of thought that seem to have a certain relative harmony. But that harmony is really the result of intelligence, at least it seems so to me. In mathematics we may get a certain relative harmony of the product of thought, even though the actual movement of thought of a mathematician is not necessarily in harmony, generally won't be in harmony. Now that harmony which appears in mathematics is the result of intelligence, isn't it? Krishnamurti: Proceed, sir. Bohm: It is not perfect harmony because every form of mathematics has been proved to have some limit; that is why I call it only relative. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: But we want to go further and say that not so much thought but the action. There is another phase of the question of time which is the action which we generally do in general, in which we also seem to need time, chronological time. And that action at least should be in harmony it seems to me. Krishnamurti: As we said, sir, thought is movement, in that movement is there harmony? If there is, then it has relationship with the other. If there is no harmony and therefore it is contradiction, change, and all the rest of it, then it has no relationship with the other. Bohm: Then would you say that we could do entirely without thought? Krishnamurti: I would put it round the other way. Intelligence uses thought. Bohm: All right. But how can it use something which is disharmonious? Krishnamurti: In the sense, expression, communication, using thought which is contradictory, which is not harmonious, to create things in the world. Bohm: But still, there must be harmony in some other sense, in what is done with thought, in what we have just described. Krishnamurti: Let us go slowly in this. Can we first put into words, negatively or positively, what is intelligence, what is not intelligence? Or is that impossible because words are thought, time, measure and all the rest of it? Bohm: We can't put it in words. We are trying to point. Can we say that thought can function as the pointer to intelligence, and then its contradiction doesn't matter. Krishnamurti: That is right. That is right. Bohm: Because we are not using it for its content, or its meaning, but rather as a pointer which points beyond the domain of time. Krishnamurti: So thought is a pointer. The content is intelligence. Bohm: The content which it points to. Krishnamurti: Yes. Can we put this thing entirely differently? May we say, thought is barren? Bohm: Yes. When it moves by itself, yes. Krishnamurti: Which is mechanical and all the rest of it. Thought is a pointer, but without intelligence the pointer has no value. Bohm: Could we say that intelligence reads the pointer? If the pointer has nobody to see it then the pointer doesn't point. Krishnamurti: Quite. So intelligence is necessary. Without that this has no meaning at all. Bohm: But could we now say: that thought without intelligence points in a very confused way? Krishnamurti: Yes, confused, in irrelevant ways. Bohm: Irrelevant, meaningless and so on. Then with intelligence it begins to point in another way. But then somehow thought and intelligence seem to fuse in a common function. Krishnamurti: Yes. So we are asking: what is action in relationship to intelligence? Right? Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: What is action in relation to intelligence, and in the carrying out of that action thought is necessary. Bohm: Yes; well, thought is necessary and this thought points obviously towards matter. But it seems to point both ways, back towards intelligence as well. One of the questions which always comes up is: should we say that intelligence and matter are merely a distinction of the same thing, or are they different? Are they really separate? It seems that they ought to be a distinction in the same thing. Krishnamurti: I think they are separate, they are distinct. Bohm: They are distinct, but are they actually separate? Krishnamurti: What do you mean by that word 'separate'? Not related, not connected, with no common source? Bohm: Yes. Do they have a common source? Krishnamurti: That is just it. Thought, matter and intelligence, have they a common source? (Long pause.) I think they have, bound to have. Bohm: Otherwise there could be no harmony, of course. Krishnamurti: But you see thought has conquered the world. You understand, conquered? Bohm: Dominates the world. Krishnamurti: Thought, the intellect, dominates the world. And therefore intelligence has very little place here. When one thing dominates, the other must be subservient. Bohm: One asks, I don't know if it is relevant, how that came about. Krishnamurti: That is fairly simple. Bohm: What would you say? Krishnamurti: I would say thought must have security; it is seeking security in all its movement. Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: But intelligence is not seeking security. It has no security. The idea of security doesn't exist in intelligence. Intelligence itself is secure, not, "It seeks security." Bohm: Yes, but one could also consider this question, how did it come about that intelligence allowed itself to be dominated? Krishnamurti: Oh, that is fairly clear. Pleasure, comfort, physical security, first of all physical security: security in relationship, security in action, security... Bohm: But that is a kind of illusion of security. Krishnamurti: Illusion of security, of course. Bohm: You could say that thought got out of hand and ceased to allow itself to be orderly, ordered in general by intelligence, or at least it ceased to stay in harmony with intelligence, and began to move on its own accord. Krishnamurti: On its own accord. Bohm: Seeking security and pleasure and so on. Krishnamurti: As we were saying the other day when we were talking together, the whole Western world is based on measure; and the Eastern world tried to go beyond that. But they used thought to go beyond it. Bohm: Tried to anyway. Krishnamurti: Tried to go beyond the measure by exercising thought; therefore they were caught in thought. Now security, physical security, is necessary and therefore physical existence, physical pleasures, physical well-being became tremendously important. Bohm: Yes, I was thinking about that a little. If you go back to the animal, then there is instinctive response towards pleasure and security would be right. But now when thought comes in, it can dazzle the instinct and produce all sorts of glamour, more pleasure, more security. And the instincts are not intelligent enough to deal with the complexity of thought, therefore thought went wrong, because it excited the instincts and the instincts demanded more. Krishnamurti: Quite. So thought really created a world of illusion, miasma, confusion, and put away intelligence. Bohm: Well, as we said before, that has made the brain very chaotic and noisy and intelligence is the silence of the brain; therefore the noisy brain is not intelligent. Krishnamurti: The noisy brain is not intelligent, quite right! Bohm: Well that more or less explains the origin of the thing. Krishnamurti: We are trying to find out what is the relationship, in action, of thought and intelligence. Because everything is action or inaction. And what is the relationship of all that to intelligence? Thought does produce chaotic action, fragmentary action. Bohm: When it is not ordered by intelligence. Krishnamurti: Of course. And it is not ordered by intelligence in the way we all live. Bohm: That is because of what we have just said. Krishnamurti: It is fragmented activity, therefore it is not an activity of a wholeness. The activity of wholeness is intelligence. Bohm: Intelligence also has to understand the activity of thought. Krishnamurti: Yes, we said that. Bohm: Now would you say that when intelligence understands the activity of thought, then thought is different in its operation? Krishnamurti: Yes, obviously. That is, if thought has created nationalism as a means of security and when one sees the fallacy of it, the seeing of the fallacy of it is intelligence. Thought then creates a different kind of world in which nationalism doesn't exist. Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: And therefore division, conflict, war and all the rest. Bohm: That is very clear. Intelligence sees the falseness of what is going on. Now that falseness stops. When thought is free of this falseness it is different. Then it begins to be a parallel to intelligence. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: That is, it begins to carry out the implication of intelligence. Krishnamurti: Therefore thought has a place. Bohm: That is very interesting because you could say thought is never actually controlled or dominated by intelligence, thought always moves on its own. But in the light of intelligence, when the falseness is seen, then thought moves parallel or in harmony with intelligence. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: But thought never has anything that forces it to do anything. That would suggest that intelligence and thought have this common origin or substance, and that they are two ways of calling attention to a greater whole. Krishnamurti: Yes. Sir, one can see how politically, religiously, psychologically, thought has created a world of tremendous contradiction, fragmentation, and the intelligence that is the product of this confusion tries to bring order in this confusion, not the intelligence which sees the falseness of all this. I don't know if I am making myself clear. You see, I can be terribly intelligent although I am chaotic. Bohm: Well, in some ways. Krishnamurti: That is what is happening in the world. Bohm: But I suppose it is rather hard to understand that at this moment. You could say that in some limited sphere it seems that intelligence is able to operate, but outside it doesn't. Krishnamurti: We are, after all, concerned with living, not with theories, not theories of insight and so on. But one is concerned with a life in which intelligence operates. Intelligence which is not of time, which is not of measure, which is not the product or the movement of thought, or of the order of thought. Now a human being wants to live a different kind of life. He is dominated by thought, his thought is always functioning in measurement, in comparison, in conflict. He asks, "How am I to be free of all this in order to be intelligent?" "How can the 'me', how can 'I' be the instrument of this intelligence?" Bohm: Obviously it can't be. Krishnamurti: That is just it! Bohm: Because this thought in time is the essence of unintelligence. Krishnamurti: But one is thinking in terms of that all the time. Bohm: Yes. That is thought projecting some sort of phantasy of what intelligence is, and trying to achieve it. Krishnamurti: Therefore I would say that thought must be completely still for the awakening of that. There can't be a movement of thought and yet the awakening of that. Bohm: That is clear on one level. We consider thought to be actually mechanical and this may be seen on one level, but still the mechanism continues. Krishnamurti: Continues, yes... Bohm: ...through instincts and pleasure and fear and so on. The intelligence therefore has to come to grips with this question of the pleasures, the fears, the desires, which make thought continue. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: And you see there is always this trap, which is to form a concept or image of it, which is partial. Krishnamurti: Of course. So as a human being I would be concerned only with this. I know how confused, contradictory, disharmonious one's life is. Is it possible to change that so that intelligence can function in my life, so that I live without disharmony, so that the pointer, the direction is guided by intelligence? You see, sir, that is why the religious people, instead of using the word intelligence, have used the word god. Bohm: What is the advantage of that? Krishnamurti: I don't know what the advantage is. Bohm: But why use such a word? Krishnamurti: Because it came from primitive fear, fear of thunder, fear of nature, and gradually out of that grew the idea that there is a super-father. Bohm: But that is still the brain functioning. Krishnamurti: Of course. I am just saying that. They said trust god, have faith in god, then god will operate through you. Bohm: It is a sort of metaphor, if you said, god is intelligence. But most people didn't take it as a metaphor. Krishnamurti: Of course not, that's a terrific image. Bohm: Yes. You could say that if god means that which is immeasurable, beyond thought... Krishnamurti: ...it is unnameable, it is immeasurable, therefore don't have an image. Bohm: Then that will operate within the measurable. Krishnamurti: Yes. What I am trying to convey is, that the desire for this intelligence, through time, has created this image of god. And through the image of god, Jesus, Krishna, or whatever it is, by having faith in that - which is still the movement of thought -I hope that way there will be harmony in my life. Bohm: And this sort of image because it is so total produces an overriding desire, urge; that is, it overrides rationality. Krishnamurti: It overrides rationality, everything. Bohm: Everything. Krishnamurti: You heard the other day what the archbishops and bishops were saying - it sounded so ridiculous - that only Jesus matters, nothing else matters. Bohm: But it is the same movement whereby pleasure overrides rationality. Krishnamurti: Of course, of course. Fear and pleasure. Bohm: They override; no proportion can be established. Krishnamurti: Yes, what I am trying to say is: you see the whole world is conditioned this way. Bohm: Yes, but the question is what you have hinted at: what is this world which is conditioned this way? If we take this world as objectively existent, then we have fallen into the same trap. Krishnamurti: Of course, of course. Bohm: That is, the whole world is the result of this way of thinking, it is both the cause and the effect of this way of thinking. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: And this way of thinking is disharmony and chaos and unintelligence and so on. Krishnamurti: I was listening to the Labour Party Conference at Blackpool. It was very interesting, how clever, some of them very, very serious, double talk and all that, they are thinking in terms of Labour party and Conservative Party. They don't say, "Look, let all of us get together and see what is the best thing, the most marvellous thing for human beings." Bohm: They are not capable. Krishnamurti: That is just it, but they are exercising their intelligence! Bohm: Well, in that limited framework. That is what our trouble has always been; people have developed technology and weapons and other things in terms of some limited intelligence, which is serving highly unintelligent purposes. Krishnamurti: Yes, that is just it. Bohm: For thousands of years that has been going on. Then of course I think reaction tends to arise like this, that is all much too big. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: In other words it is a vast thing, over time and space. Krishnamurti: But it is really very simple, extraordinarily simple, this sense of harmony. Because it is so simple it can function in the most complex field. Let us go back. We said the source is common to both thought and intelligence. Bohm: Yes, we got that far. Krishnamurti: What is that source? Bohm: Well that would be beyond me. Krishnamurti: Wait a minute, sir. Let's see. What is that source? They generally attribute it to some philosophical concept, or they say that source is god - I am just using that word for the moment -or Jehovha or Brahman. That source is common, is the central movement which divides itself into matter and intelligence. But that is just a verbal statement, it is just an idea, which is still thought. Therefore you can't find it through thought. Bohm: That raises the question: if you find it then what are 'you'? Krishnamurti: 'You' don't exist. 'You' can't exist when you are asking what is the source. 'You' are time, movement, environmental conditioning - you are all that. Bohm: In that question the whole of this division is put aside. Krishnamurti: Absolutely. That is the point, isn't it? Bohm: There is no time. Krishnamurti: Yet we still say, "I am not going to exercise thought." When the 'me' enters there is division: so deliberately understanding the whole of this, what we have been talking about, I put away the 'me' altogether. Bohm: But that sounds like a contradiction. Krishnamurti: I know. I can't put it away. It takes place. Then what is the source? Can it ever be named? For instance the Jewish religious feeling is that it is not nameable: you don't name it, you can't talk about it, you can't touch it. You can only look. And the Hindus and others say the same thing in different words. The Christians have tripped themselves up over this word Jesus, this image, they have never gone to the source of it. Bohm: That is a complex question because it might be that they were trying to synthesize several philosophies. Krishnamurti: Yes, of course. Because after all Christianity came out of Judea. Bohm: And Greece and Asia. Krishnamurti: Of course. The other day a whole group of Arabs on television were marching, I forget where; another group, later on, from Israel was marching. I said, look, only the headdress - you follow, sir. Their Arabic, which is the outcome of Hebrew, and they have divided up. It is so appalling. Bohm: Yes, I mean if you watch the people on television in Lebanon, you could easily say they were just like Jews. Krishnamurti: After all they are all the semitic type, and all the rest of it. There it is. We see this. Now I want to get at this: what is the source? Can thought find it? And thought is born from that source; and intelligence is also born from that source. It is like two streams moving in different directions. Bohm: Would you say matter is also born from that source more generally? Krishnamurti: Of course. Bohm: I mean the whole universe. But then the source is beyond the universe. Krishnamurti: Of course. It must be, otherwise... Now what is that? Could we put it this way? Thought is energy, so is intelligence. Bohm: So is matter. Krishnamurti: Thought, matter, the mechanical, is energy. Intelligence is also energy. Thought is confused, polluted, dividing itself, fragmenting itself. Bohm: Yes, it is multiple. Krishnamurti: And this is not. This is not polluted. It cannot divide itself as 'my intelligence' and 'your intelligence'. It is intelligence, it is not divisible. Now it has sprung from a source of energy which has divided itself. Bohm: Why has it divided itself? Krishnamurti: Because for physical reasons, for comfort, for existence, you know all the rest of it. Bohm: To maintain physical existence. So a part of intelligence has been changed in such a way as to help to maintain physical existence. Krishnamurti: Yes. Bohm: It has developed in a certain way. Krishnamurti: And gone on in that way. Both are energy. So there is only one energy. Bohm: Yes, they are different forms of energy. There are many analogies to this, although it is on a much more limited scale. In physics you could say light is ordinarily a very complex wave motion, infinitely complex, but in the laser it can be made to move all together in a very simple and harmonious way. Krishnamurti: Yes. I was reading about the laser. What monstrous things they are going to produce with this. Bohm: Yes, using it destructively. Thought may get something good but then it always gets used in a broader way that is destructive. Krishnamurti: So there is only energy, which is the source. Bohm: Would you say energy is a kind of movement? Krishnamurti: No, it is energy. The moment it is a movement it goes off into this field of thought. Bohm: We have to clarify this notion of energy. I have also looked up this word. You see, it is based on the notion of work; energy means, "To work within." Krishnamurti: Work within, yes. Bohm: But now you say there is an energy which works, but no movement. Krishnamurti: Yes. I was thinking about this yesterday - not thinking - I realized the source is there, uncontaminated, non- movement, untouched by thought, it is there. From that these two are born. Why are they born at all? Bohm: One was necessary for survival. Krishnamurti: That is all. In survival this has been denied, or put aside in its totality, in its wholeness. What I am trying to get at is this, sir. I want to find out, as a human being living in this world with all the chaos and suffering, and all the rest of it, can the human mind touch that source in which the two divisions don't exist? And because it has touched this source, because it has no division, it can operate without the sense of division. I don't know if I am conveying this? Bohm: But how is it possible for the human mind not to touch the source? Why does it not touch the source? Krishnamurti: Because we are consumed by thought, by the cleverness of thought, by the movement of thought. All their gods, their meditations, everything is that. Bohm: Yes. I think this brings us to the question of life and death, because that is one of the things that gets in the way. This is also related to survival. Krishnamurti: Because of thought and its field of security, its desire for security, it has created death as something separate from itself. Bohm: Yes, that may be the key point. Krishnamurti: It is. That is what we were talking about yesterday morning to the students. Bohm: You can look at it this way. Thought has constructed itself as an instrument for survival, not to die. Now therefore... Krishnamurti: What it has done, it has created immortality in Jesus, or in this or that. Bohm: Thought cannot possibly contemplate its own death. So if it tries to do so, it always projects something else, some other broader point of view from which it seems to look at it. If anybody tries to imagine that he is dead, then he is still imagining that he is alive and looking at himself as dead. You can always complicate this in all sorts of theories and religion and so on; but it seems to be built into thought that it cannot possibly consider death properly. Krishnamurti: It cannot. It means ending itself. Bohm: That is very interesting. Suppose we take the death of the body, which we see outwardly; the organism dies, it loses its energy and therefore it falls apart. Krishnamurti: It is really that the body is the instrument of the energy. Bohm: So let us say the energy ceases to imbue the body and therefore the body no longer has any wholeness. You could say that with thought also; the energy in some ways goes to thought, as to the body. Would that make sense? Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: You and other people have often used the phrase: "The mind dies to the whole of thought." That way of putting it is puzzling at first, because you would think it was thought that should die. Krishnamurti: Quite, quite. Bohm: But now you are saying that it is the mind that dies, or the energy that dies to thought. The nearest I can see to what that means is, that when thought is working it is invested with a certain energy by the mind or the intelligence; and when thought is no longer relevant, then the energy goes and thought is like a dead organism. Krishnamurti: That is right. Bohm: Now it is very hard for the mind to accept this, because the comparison between thought and the organism seems so poor, because thought is insubstantial and the organism is substantial. So the death of the organism seems something far more than the death of thought. Now this is a point that is not clear. Would you say that in the death of thought we have the essence of the death of the organism as well? Krishnamurti: Obviously. Bohm: Although it is on a small scale, as it were, it is of the same nature? Krishnamurti: Yes. You see, sir, wait a minute. As we said, there is energy in both, and thought in its movement has created this energy, is this energy, and thought cannot see itself die. Bohm: It has no way of imagining, or projecting, or conceiving its own death. Krishnamurti: Therefore it escapes from death. Bohm: Well, it gives itself the illusion. Krishnamurti: Illusion of course. And it has created the illusion of immortality or a state beyond death, a projection of its own desire for its own continuity. Bohm: Well, that is one thing, that thought may have begun by desiring the continuity of the organism. Krishnamurti: Yes, that is right, and then gone on beyond it. Bohm: Gone beyond that, to desire its own continuity. That was the mistake, that was where it went wrong. Krishnamurti: Yes, went wrong. It saw the organism as itself. Bohm: It felt itself to be an extension, not merely an extension, but the essence of the organism. At first thought is functioning merely in the organism and then thought begins to present itself as the essence of the organism. Krishnamurti: That's right. Bohm: Then thought begins to desire its own immortality. Krishnamurti: And thought itself knows, is very well aware that it is not immortal. Bohm: It knows it only outwardly, though. I mean, it knows it as an outward fact. Krishnamurti: Therefore it creates immortality in pictures, images. I listen to all this as an outsider and I say to myself, "This is perfectly true, so clear, logical, sane; we see it very clearly, both psychologically and physically." Now my next question, observing all this, is: can the mind keep the purity of the original source? The original pristine clarity of that energy which is not touched by the corruption of thought, by thought at all? I don't know if I am conveying it? Bohm: The question is clear. Krishnamurti: Can the mind do it? Can the mind ever discover that? Bohm: What is the mind? Krishnamurti: The mind we now say is organism, thought, the brain with all its memories, experiences and all that, which is all of time. And the mind says, "Can I come to this?" It cannot. Then I say to myself, "As it cannot, I will be quiet." You see the tricks it has played. Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: I will learn how to be quiet; I will learn how to meditate in order to be quiet. I see the importance of having a mind that is free of time, free of the mechanism of thought, I will control it, subjugate it, put away thought. But it is still the operation of thought. That is very clear. Then what is it to do? Because a human being who just lives in this disharmony, he must enquire into this. And that is what we are doing. As we begin to enquire into it, or in enquiring, we come to this source. Is it a perception, an insight, and has that insight nothing whatsoever to do with thought? Is insight the result of thought? The conclusion of an insight is thought, but insight itself is not thought. So I have got a key to it. Then what is insight? Can I invite it, cultivate it? Bohm: You can't do any of that. But there is a kind of energy that is needed. Krishnamurti: That is just it. I can't do anything. When I cultivate it, it is desire. When I say I will do this or that, it is the same. So insight is not the product of thought. It is not in the order of thought. Now, how does one come upon this insight? (Pause) We have come upon it because we denied all that. Bohm: Yes, it is there. You can never answer that question, how you come upon anything. Krishnamurti: No. I think it is fairly clear, sir. You do come upon it when you see the whole thing. So insight is the perception of the whole. A fragment cannot see this, but the 'I' that sees the fragments and the 'I' seeing the fragments sees the whole, and the quality of a mind that sees the whole is not touched by thought; therefore there is perception, there is insight. Bohm: Perhaps we will go over that more slowly. We see all the fragments: could we say the actual energy, activity, which sees those fragments is whole? Krishnamurti: Yes, yes. Bohm: We don't manage ever to see the whole because... Krishnamurti: ...we are educated, and all the rest of it. Bohm: But I mean, we wouldn't anyway see the whole as something. But rather, the wholeness is the freedom in seeing all the fragments. Krishnamurti: That is right. Freedom to see. The freedom doesn't exist when there are fragments. Bohm: That makes a paradox. Krishnamurti: Of course. Bohm: But the whole does not start from the fragments. Once the whole operates then there are no fragments. So the paradox comes from supposing that the fragments are independently real, that they exist independently of thought. Then you would say, if I suppose that the fragments are there independently of me and my thought, and then I must somehow do something about them - that would be a paradox. The whole starts from the insight that these fragments are in a way nothing. That is the way it seems to me. They are not substantial realities. They are very insubstantial. Krishnamurti: Insubstantial, yes. Bohm: And therefore they don't prevent wholeness. Krishnamurti: Quite. Bohm: You see, one of the things that often causes confusion is that, when you put it in terms of thought, it seems that you are presented with the fragments that are real, substantial reality. Then you have to see them, and then you say, as long as the fragments are there, there is no wholeness so that you can't see them. But that all comes back to the one thing, the one source. Krishnamurti: I am sure, sir, really serious people have asked this question. They have asked it and tried to find an answer through thought. Bohm: Yes, well it seems natural. Krishnamurti: And they never saw that they were caught in thought. Bohm: That is always the trouble. Everybody gets into this trouble: that he seems to be looking at everything, at his problems, saying, "Those are my problems, I am looking." But that looking is only thinking, but it is confused with looking. One of the confusions that arises is that if you say, don't think but look, that person feels he is already looking. Krishnamurti: Quite. So you see, this question has arisen and they say, "All right, then I must control thought, I must subjugate thought and I must make my mind quiet so that it becomes whole, then I can see the parts, all the fragments, then I'll touch the source." But it is still the operation of thought all the time. Bohm: Yes, that means the operation of thought is unconscious for the most part and therefore one doesn't know it is going on. We may say consciously we have realized that all this has to be changed, it has to be different. Krishnamurti: But the unconscious is still going on. Can you talk to my unconscious, knowing my conscious brain is going to resist you? Because you are telling me something which is revolutionary, you are telling me something which shatters my whole house which I have built so carefully, and I won't listen to you. You follow? In my instinctive reactions I push you away. So you realize that and say, "Look, all right, old friend, just don't bother to listen to me that way. I am going to talk to your unconscious. I am going to talk to your unconscious and make that unconscious see that whatever movement it does is still within the field of time and so on." So your conscious mind is never in operation. When it operates it must inevitably either resist, or say, "I will accept", therefore it creates a conflict in itself, and all the rest of it. So can you talk to my unconscious? Bohm: You can always ask how. Krishnamurti: No, no. You tell me first, "Look, old boy, don't resist, think about, look at that tree, but I am going to talk to you." It sounds funny, but you know what I mean. I am going to talk to you. We two are communicating with each other without the conscious mind listening. Bohm: Yes. Krishnamurti: I think this is what really takes place. When you were talking to me - I was noticing it - I was not listening to your words so much. I was listening to you. I was open to you, not to your words, as you explained, I have looked in the dictionaries and all the rest of it. I said to myself, all right, leave all that, I am listening to you, not to the words which you use, but to the meaning, to the inward quality of your feeling which wants to tell me something. Bohm: I understand. Krishnamurti: That changes me, not all this verbalization. So can you talk to me about my idiocies, my illusions, my peculiar tendencies, without the conscious mind interfering and saying, 'Please don't touch all this, leave me alone!' They have tried subliminal propaganda in advertising, quickly, so that whilst you don't really pay attention, your unconscious does, so you buy that particular soap! We are not doing that, it would be deadly. You are telling me, look at the tree, and the cloud, or that picture on that wall, forget, don't listen to me with your conscious ears but listen to me with the ears that hear much deeper. That is how I listened to you this morning because I am terribly interested in the source, as you are. You follow, sir? And I say, by Jove, we will come to that, I caught on to it, we will come to that, and I am really interested in that one thing. All this is the explicable, easily understood - but to come to that thing together, feel it together! You follow? I think that is the way to break a conditioning, a habit, an image which I have cultivated. You talk to me about it at a level where the conscious mind is not totally interested. It sounds silly, but you understand what I am saying, sir? Say for instance I have a conditioning; you can point it out a dozen times, argue, see the fallacy of it, the stupidity. I still go on. I resist it, I say what it should be, what shall I do in this world otherwise, and all the rest of it. But you see the truth that as long as the mind is conditioned there must be conflict and all the rest of it. So you penetrate or push aside my resistance and get to that, get the unconscious to listen to you, because the unconscious is much more subtle, much quicker. It may be frightened, but it sees the danger of fear much quicker than the conscious mind does. As when I was walking in California high in the mountains: I was looking at birds and trees and watching, and I heard a rattler and I jumped. It was the unconscious that made the body jump; I saw the rattler when I jumped, it was two or three feet away, it could have struck me very easily. If the conscious brain had been operating it would have taken several seconds. Bohm: To reach the unconscious you have to have an action which doesn't directly appeal to the conscious. Krishnamurti: Yes. That is affection, that is love. When you talk to my waking consciousness, it is hard, clever, subtle, brittle. And you penetrate that, say, all right, keep your own beastly little stuff, and you penetrate it with your look, with your affection, with all the feeling you have. That operates, not anything else. A Dialogue with oneself, August 30 1977 Brockwood Park 1st public dialogue, August 30 1977 A DIALOGUE WITH ONESELF I realize that love cannot exist when there is jealousy; love cannot exist when there is attachment. Now, is it possible for me to be free of jealousy and attachment? I realize that I do not love. That is a fact. I am not going to deceive myself; I am not going to pretend to my wife that I love her. I do not know what love is. But I do know that I am jealous and I do know that I am terribly attached to her and that in attachment there is fear, there is jealousy, anxiety; there is a sense of dependence. I do not like to depend but I depend because I am lonely; I am shoved around in the office, in the factory and I come home and I want to feel comfort and companionship, to escape from myself. Now I ask myself: how am I to be free of this attachment? I am taking that just as an example. At first, I want to run away from the question. I do not know how it is going to end up with my wife. When I am really detached from her my relationship to her may change. She might be attached to me and I might not be attached to her or to any other woman. But I am going to investigate. So I will not run away from what I imagine might be the consequence of being totally free of all attachment. I do not know what love is, but I see very clearly, definitely, without any doubt, that attachment to my wife means jealousy, possession, fear, anxiety and I want freedom from all that. So I begin to enquire; I look for a method and I get caught in a system. Some guru says: "I will help you to be detached, do this and this; practise this and this." I accept what he says because I see the importance of being free and he promises me that if I do what he says I will have reward. But I see that way that I am looking for reward. I see how silly I am; wanting to be free and getting attached to a reward. I do not want to be attached and yet I find myself getting attached to the idea that somebody, or some book, or some method, will reward me with freedom from attachment. So, the reward becomes an attachment. So I say: "Look what I have done; be careful, do not get caught in that trap." Whether it is a woman, a method, or an idea, it is still attachment. I am very watchful now for I have learned something; that is, not to exchange attachment for something else that is still attachment. I ask myself: "What am I to do to be free of attachment?" What is my motive in wanting to be free of attachment? Is it not that I want to achieve a state where there is no attachment, no fear and so on? And I suddenly realize that motive gives direction and that direction will dictate my freedom. Why have a motive? What is motive? A motive is a hope, or a desire, to achieve something. I see that I am attached to a motive. Not only my wife, not only my idea, the method, but my motive has become my attachment! So I am all the time functioning within the field of attachment - the wife, the method and the motive to achieve something in the future. To all this I am attached. I see that it is a tremendously complex thing; I did not realize that to be free of attachment implied all this. Now, I see this as clearly as I see on a map the main roads, the side roads and the villages; I see it very clearly. Then I say to myself: "Now, is it possible for me to be free of the great attachment I have for my wife and also of the reward which I think I am going to get and of my motive?" To all this I am attached. Why? Is it that I am insufficient in myself? Is it that I am very very lonely and therefore seek to escape from that feeling of isolation by turning to a woman, an idea, a motive; as if I must hold onto something? I see that it is so, I am lonely and escaping through attachment to something from that feeling of extraordinary isolation. So I am interested in understanding why I am lonely, for I see it is that which makes me attached. That loneliness has forced me to escape through attachment to this or to that and I see that as long as I am lonely the sequence will always be this. What does it mean to be lonely? How does it come about? Is it instinctual, inherited, or is it brought about by my daily activity? If it is an instinct, if it is inherited, it is part of my lot; I am not to blame. But as I do not accept this, I question it and remain with the question. I am watching and I am not trying to find an intellectual answer. I am not trying to tell the loneliness what it should do, or what it is; I am watching for it to tell me. There is a watchfulness for the loneliness to reveal itself. It will not reveal itself if I run away; if I am frightened; if I resist it. So I watch it. I watch it so that no thought interferes. Watching is much more important than thought coming in. And because my whole energy is concerned with the observation of that loneliness thought does not come in at all. The mind is being challenged and it must answer. Being challenged it is in a crisis. In a crisis you have great energy and that energy remains without being interfered with by thought. This is a challenge which must be answered. I started out having a dialogue with myself. I asked myself what is this strange thing called love; everybody talks about it, writes about it - all the romantic poems, pictures, sex and all other areas of it? I ask: is there such a thing as love? I see it does not exist when there is jealousy, hatred, fear. So I am not concerned with love anymore; I am concerned with `what is', my fear, my attachment. Why am I attached? I see that one of the reasons - I do not say it is the whole reason - is that I am desperately lonely, isolated. The older I grow the more isolated I become. So I watch it. This is a challenge to find out, and because it is a challenge all energy is there to respond. That is simple. If there is some catastrophe, an accident or whatever it is, it is a challenge and I have the energy to meet it. I do not have to ask: "How do I get this energy?" When the house is on fire I have the energy to move; extraordinary energy. I do not sit back and say: "Well, I must get this energy" and then wait; the whole house will be burned by then. So there is this tremendous energy to answer the question: why is there this loneliness? I have rejected ideas, suppositions and theories that it is inherited, that it is instinctual. All that means nothing to me. Loneliness is `what is'. Why is there this loneliness which every human being, if he is at all aware, goes through, superficially or most profoundly? Why does it come into being? Is it that the mind is doing something which is bringing it about? I have rejected theories as to instinct and inheritance and I am asking: is the mind, the brain itself, bringing about this loneliness, this total isolation? Is the movement of thought doing this? Is the thought in my daily life creating this sense of isolation? In the office I am isolating myself because I want to become the top executive, therefore thought is working all the time isolating itself. I see that thought is aIl the time operating to make itself superior, the mind is working itself towards this isolation. So the problem then is: why does thought do this? Is it the nature of thought to work for itself? Is it the nature of thought to create this isolation? Education brings about this isolation; it gives me a certain career, a certain specialization and so, isolation. Thought, being fragmentary, being limited and time binding, is creating this isolation. In that limitation, it has found security saying: "I have a special career in my life; I am a professor; I am perfectly safe." So my concern is then: why does thought do it? Is it in its very nature to do this? Whatever thought does must be limited. Now the problem is: can thought realize that whatever it does is limited, fragmented and therefore isolating and that whatever it does will be thus? This is a very important point: can thought itself realize its own limitations? Or am I telling it that it is limited? This, I see, is very important to understand; this is the real essence of the matter. If thought realizes itself that it is limited then there is no resistance, no conflict; it says, "I am that". But if I am telling it that it is limited then I become separate from the limitation. Then I struggle to overcome the limitation, therefore there is conflict and violence, not love. So does thought realize of itself that it is limited? I have to find out. I am being challenged. Because I am challenged I have great energy. Put it differently: does consciousness realize its content is itself? Or is it that I have heard another say: "Consciousness is its content; its content makes up consciousness"? Therefore I say, "Yes, it is so". Do you see the difference between the two? The latter, created by thought, is imposed by the `me'. If I impose something on thought then there is conflict. It is like a tyrannical government imposing on someone, but here that government is what I have created. So I am asking myself: has thought realized its own limitations? Or is it pretending to be something extraordinary, noble, divine? -which is nonsense because thought is based on memory. I see that there must be clarity about this point: that there is no outside influence imposing on thought saying it is limited. Then, because there is no imposition there is no conflict; it simply realizes it is limited; it realizes that whatever it does - its worship of god and so on - is limited, shoddy, petty - even though it has created marvellous cathedrals throughout Europe in which to worship. So there has been in my conversation with myself the discovery that loneliness is created by thought. Thought has now realized of itself that it is limited and so cannot solve the problem of loneliness. As it cannot solve the problem of loneliness, does loneliness exist? Thought has created this sense of loneliness, this emptiness, because it is limited, fragmentary, divided and when it realizes this, loneliness is not, therefore there is freedom from attachment. I have done nothing; I have watched the attachment, what is implied in it, greed, fear, loneliness, all that and by tracing it, observing it, not analysing it, but just looking, looking and looking, there is the discovery that thought has done all this. Thought, because it is fragmentary, has created this attachment. When it realizes this, attachment ceases. There is no effort made at all. For the moment there is effort - conflict is back again. In love there is no attachment; if there is attachment there is no love. There has been the removal of the major factor through negation of what it is not, through the negation of attachment. I know what it means in my daily life: no remembrance of anything my wife, my girl friend, or my neighbour did to hurt me; no attachment to any image thought has created about her; how she has bullied me, how she has given me comfort, how I have had pleasure sexually, all the different things of which the movement of thought has created images; attachment to those images has gone. And there are other factors: must I go through all those step by step, one by one? Or is it all over? Must I go through, must I investigate - as I have investigated attachment - fear, pleasure and the desire for comfort? I see that I do not have to go through all the investigation of all these various factors; I see it at one glance, I have captured it. So, through negation of what is not love, love is. I do not have to ask what love is. I do not have to run after it. If I run after it, it is not love, it is a reward. So I have negated, I have ended, in that enquiry, slowly, carefully, without distortion, without illusion, everything that it is not - the other is. BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST PUBLIC DIALOGUE 30TH AUGUST 1977 I believe we are going to have a discussion but I am afraid that word implies that we are trying to find truth through argument, debate. And with so many people I am afraid discussion is not possible. Nor is dialogue - dialogue being a conversion between two people, people who are friendly. And that is also not possible with so many people. And also we thought of having about ten or twelve people in front here, have a dialogue with them and those who want to join in come in also. But that also is not possible. So what shall we do? Shall we have a question and answer meeting; or a dialogue with two or three people who are seriously enough concerned with their life, with their surroundings and their environment, with politics and so on to have a dialogue with those few people, and those who wish to join in can, so that they are not chosen specially or that anyone is excluded? So what shall we do? Q: The latter. K: Which is, question and answer? Q: No dialogue. Q: A few people talking. K: You want a few people talking? Now, who is going to choose the few people? If I choose, or if somebody else chooses, you will consider there are our favourites. Q: Let those who wish come forward and be part of the dialogue. Q: Questions and answers are the simplest. K: Question and answer: would you like that? So would you like a question and answer meeting? Or a dialogue between two or three people? And you choose those two or three people - not the speaker but somebody. Q: Play it by ear. K: How do you do that? Can we start off, if I may suggest, with a question and answer meeting, and then see how that works out. And then out of the questions and answers we will find who can really have a dialogue, who can exchange, who can say, look, I don't understand, what do you mean by that? Let us talk about it much more so that there is a conversation between the speaker and yourself. Can we try that? Question and answer first, then a dialogue - that is, a conversation between two or three people. We will see how this works out. Just a minute: before you put questions please, we are asking questions affecting our life, our daily life. How to bring about, or rather, is it possible to bring about a radical transformation in our daily existence, in our consciousness, a radical change in our whole way of thinking, looking, observing, acting? That is what we are concerned with. And if you ask questions, hypothetical questions, or theoretical questions I am afraid I won't answer. That is fairly simple and clear. Please ask questions directly concerning yourself because you are the rest of the humanity, and if you want to find out how to resolve your problems, how to look at life as a totally different thing, from that ask questions, then it is worthwhile. But if you discuss, ask questions which are not actual, factual but theoretical then I am afraid, at least I won't be able to answer them. Q: I see that there is a common thing amongst us all the time. And I can't see it, I can't hear it, but I think there is something. Can you tell us what it is about? K: What is the problem, sir? Q: That there is something common amongst all human beings, what is that? K: We have explained very carefully during these talks, and in the past, that wherever you go in the world human beings are caught in a trap of sorrow, misery, confusion, uncertainty, disorder and so on and so on. That is the common factor of all human beings living on this unfortunate earth. Q: Do you see that the psychological fear, greed and violence in each one of us is a direct transformation of the physical violence through the other senses for profit and food? Or in other words, killing animals is a prime cause of our misery? K: I haven't understood. Killing animals... Q: ...for the food and profit. K: What is the question sir. Q: Do you think that the psychological fear, greed and violence in each one of us is a direct transformation of physical violence over the centuries? K: Oh, I see. Biologists and others have said that in the process of evolution we are the result of the animal and so on. The animals are violent, therefore we have inherited that violence. Now what is the question? The question is, whether human beings can be free of that violence. Q: That's right. K: Are we really concerned about it? And that is a matter of daily occupation that you really deeply, profoundly seriously -there is an urge to be free of that? Just a minute sir. That is the question I am asking. If it is, then let's talk about it. Otherwise if you say, "Well theoretically I would like to be free but I am going to kill animals all the same", then it has no meaning. So what is violence? How does violence arise? And there is not only physical violence, hitting each other, throwing bombs at each other, killing each other, but also there are various forms of violence. It is violence when human beings are in conflict psychologically. That is a form of violence, surely? It is another form of violence when we imitate, when we conform, when we follow - all those are indications, like being angry and so on, are a form of violence. Right? So when we talk about violence we are not only talking about psychological factors of violence but also the physical actions of violence - hitting each other, throwing bombs at each other and so on and so on. The terrorists, the totalitarian states which suppress people - all that is a form of violence. Right? Now is it possible to be free of that violence, psychologically? Let's begin psychologically, not physically. We are saying is it possible? It is only possible, isn't it, when you can come face to face with it and deal with it - not have theories, ideals of nonviolence and all the rest of it. Right? That is an escape from the fact. I want to be free from violence, therefore there must be an awareness of all the factors of violence, and observe them, not run away from them, not say, "I must change them", "I must become non-violent". In becoming non-violent you are in conflict. Right? Because you are violent and you want to become non-violent and therefore you make an effort and that very effort is a form of violence. Can we go on from there? So is it possible to be free of violence and look at the whole issue, the complex problem of violence, psychologically? Which means, are we imitating, conforming, adjusting ourselves to a pattern which we or others have established for us? All those are symptoms of violence, like anger, hatred, jealousy. Now can we remain with that factor of violence and be aware choicelessly of the whole structure of violence? Will you do it? Are you doing it now? Are you doing it, sir, the questioner? Is the questioner, who put that question, is he doing it? Or is it just a theory about violence? Where there is division between man and man, woman and man, and so on there must be conflict, which is a form of violence. Nationalism and so on are a form of violence. Obviously. When there are two dogmatic beliefs, each trying to convert each other, oppose each other, it is a form of violence. So are we aware of this factor in our life? And when you become aware of it what are you going to do? Do you say, "Yes, I am aware of it" but carry on with violence? Therefore it becomes a very serious matter. If one is really to be free of violence, to look at it, to live with it, to understand it, to go into it and see all the multiple forms of violence, totally to be acquainted with it - and when you are acquainted with something it flowers and then it withers away, you don't have to fight it. Will you do it? Q: Are you saying that we become violent to understand it? K: We are not saying we become violent - we are violent! Q: What do you mean by flowering? K: Sir, look: I am violent. I observe it. Because I don't run away from it, I don't suppress it, I don't transform it into something else as non-violence, which is absurd - the transformation of violence in to non-violence is stupidity, it has no meaning. So as I am violent, I let it come out - not in action. Let it flower, let it grow, as you watch it, it grows and dies. Haven't you done all this? That is sir, when you are angry, at that moment of anger you are not aware, you are full out. Then a second later you say, "I have been angry". Right? So you have divided yourself as not being angry and that you have been angry. So there is a division between the observer who says, "I have been angry, and I must not be angry". Right? So the division brings about conflict, saying "I mustn't be angry, how am I to get rid of my anger" - and so on and so on. Whereas if you are aware of anger as it arises and let it come out non-verbally, non-actively, not say, "I am going to hit you" - let it flower, let it come out, and you will see it disappears very quickly and withers away. And if you do it properly you are never angry again, finished. Q: Can you do the same thing with fear? K: Same thing with fear. Q: Sir, when you say you should observe the totality of yourself, I find that very hard to do because I can only see what is coming up in the present moment. Now is that the totality of myself? Or is it the whole feelings, the whole of the mental consciousness? K: Sir, now let's go into that, shall we? Is it possible to be totally aware of the whole content of one's consciousness? That is the question, isn't it? Have I misunderstood the question? Q: In one moment. K: I am coming to that. First I am asking if I am telling you what the questioner is saying accurately? The questioner is asking whether it is possible to see the whole of the content of consciousness at one perception and to be totally aware of the whole thing? Is it possible when you have lived a partial life all the time? Right? You look at life partially, don't you? You are a business man, you are a doctor, you are a politician, you are a scientist, you are an artist, you are a writer, you are a labourer, a woman and so on. Those are all divided parts, aren't they? And our whole conditioning is to look at life in parts. Right? Are you following this? In parts. Therefore our conditioning is going to prevent seeing the totality, the whole of consciousness at one instant. So our concern then is not how to observe the totality of consciousness, but why does the mind, or the brain observe partially? Why is the brain not capable of observing the total affair? The brain has been conditioned through millenia to look at life partially. Right? That is clear, isn't it? You are all looking at life in fragments. Then my concern is - if I have a concern about it - our concern then is why does the mind or the brain observe in fragments? Right? Why? Q: What do you mean by observing in fragments? K: Don't we live that way? In the office I am brutal, ambitious, I want success, I am ruthless. At home - I come home and say, "Darling, how are you?" Q: Sir that seems almost optional. Whereas society seems to demand that we become more specialized. K: Yes. Society demands that we become more specialized, which is fragmentation. Society demands it because they need more engineers and so on and so on. But psychologically we are asking why does the brain function in fragments? As we were saying, it has been conditioned that way for millenia. Now is it possible to be free of that conditioning? Not how to look at the totality, but to be free of the conditioning as a nationalist, Arab, Jew, specialist, doctor and so on? To take life as a whole. Because there is security in fragments - in fragmentation both physiologically as well as psychologically, that is obvious, isn't it? No? I specialize in becoming a guru - and I find in that specialization a great deal of security - both physical as well as psychologically. I specialize as a doctor, as an engineer, as a businessman, as a priest, as a salesman, whatever you like, in that fragmentation of life, in the fragments there is a great deal of security. And the brain and all the structure of the brain demands security. So it has found security in a fragment. Now is there security in a fragment? Follow it up please. Is there security in division - as a Hindu, as a Muslim, as a Christian, as an Arab, as a Jew, or in a specialized career? Is there security? That is for you to answer. I can't answer. If there is no security, and to find out that there is no security is the beginning of intelligence, isn't it? To say there is security in being a Communist or a Catholic - I am taking those two as an example - if I am a Catholic, in a Catholic country I feel very safe. Psychologically I believe and all the rest of it. In that belief, in that conditioning there is security. And in the same way if I am a Communist, theoretically I believe in certain concepts of society, in the power of the State and so on and so on, control, and in believing that there is a great deal of security. So one has to find out if there is security in division. Right? However profitable, however pleasurable, however comforting, is there security in division, which is fragmentation? Obviously not. Now to find out that, to find out that there is no security in fragmentation is the beginning of intelligence. It is only the unintelligent who accept division and live in that division. Right? Q: Sir, if we are serious people, can the skill you spoke of... K: Ah, wait. We haven't finished this question? This is a very complex question, it is not just a couple of minutes. We live a fragmentary life. The essence of fragmentation is the 'me'. Right? The 'me' and the 'you', 'we' and 'they'. That is the essence of fragmentation. And we have lived that way, we are educated that way, we are conditioned to that, because in that there is tremendous idea or illusion that there is security. Now to be free of that requires a great deal of observation, living with the idea that I am really functioning in fragmentation and where there is fragmentation there must be conflict, and therefore the importance given to the 'me'. That is all. So can you, can one be free of the fragmentary way of living daily? Q: Sir, there seems to be no security in fragmentation, the fragmentation seems to continue as habit. K: But it is habit. Now, all right sir. It doesn't matter if it is habit. All right if it is habit can you be free of that habit - habit being conditioning? Otherwise we live in constant battle with each other, however intimate we are with each other, husband and wife and so on, there must be constant conflict and that is why so many families break up - you know all the rest of it. So we are asking: to observe the totality of consciousness is only possible when there is no fragmentary existence, then you see the whole thing at once. We are all so used to analysis, which is the continuation of fragmentation. Q: Sir, doesn't that mean the whole of the consciousness is nothing? K: The whole of consciousness first of all is its content, isn't it? Its content makes up consciousness - anger, jealousy, hatred, the innumerable hurts we have, nationalities, beliefs, conclusions, hopes, all that is our consciousness. Is it possible to be aware of all this, not bit by bit, but totally? And then to go beyond it, which means to be free of the content and see what happens. But nobody wants to try that! Q: It seems impossible. Q: Would you say to try that without compassion would have no real meaning in the transformation of mankind? K: I don't quite follow. Q: Well I will try and make it clearer if I can. You spoke on Saturday of three things: compassion, clarity and skill. You have shown us very clearly how skill comes into operation from clarity and compassion comes in from... K: Yes, yes sir. Q: Now how do we bring in compassion if we haven't got compassion? If compassion has not brought us to this tent today then what is the point of being here? My question to you was this: if we get this consciousness that you have talked about, if there is no compassion what is the point? K: If there is no compassion? Q: If man has no compassion. K: Quite right sir. There is no point. Q: It is fundamental that man hasn't got compassion. K: Quite right. Man has not got compassion. Why? Q: That is the question. K: No, go into it sir. Why as a human being, you or I or another, who is the essence of all humanity - right sir? - psychologically he is the essence of all humanity, therefore when you are aware of yourself you are representing the whole of mankind. And you or another has no compassion - why? Q: One of the problems is the feeling that our problems are our personal problems. K: Our problems are not personal, it is universal. Q: One of the factors that prevents compassion is this feeling that it is my problem. K: No, we are trying to find out sir why have human beings who are so evolved technologically to such enormous extent, why have they not got this simple factor which is so intelligent, why have they not got compassion - why? Q: Perhaps they are too busy. K: No, don't answer it. Find out why you as a human being, living on this earth, which is meant for all human beings to live happily, why haven't you compassion? You - not somebody else. Q: Sir I am too frightened. K: Madam, that is too quick an answer, you haven't gone into it. Q: Because I am greedy, because I want too much. Q: You will have compassion when you see yourself... K: You haven't even investigated, you haven't even looked for a couple of seconds at yourself and asked yourself why you haven't got compassion. You are already answering, throwing out words. That may be your defence. Why have you, with all your experiences, with all your knowledge, with all the civilization that you have behind you of which you are the result, why doesn't this thing exist in your daily life? Q: Because of self preservation? K: Is it a question of self preservation? To find out why you haven't got it, why it doesn't exist in the human heart and mind and outlook, don't you ask also the question: do you love anybody? Q: That is a mean question, I mean for me. I wonder sir what love is all about. K: I am asking you sir, please sir. I am asking you most respectfully, whether you love anybody at all? You may love your dog but the dog is your slave. Apart from animals and buildings and books and poetry and the love of the land, do you love anybody - which means not asking anything in return? Right? Q: (Inaudible) K: Just listen sir. Find out! Not asking anything from that person you love, not dependent on that person at all. Because if you are dependent then fear begins, jealousy, anxiety, hatred, anger. And if you are attached to somebody is that love? Find out! And if all that is not love - I am just asking, I don't say it is, or it is not - if all that is not love then how can you have compassion? We are asking for something much more than love. And even love we haven't got - just the ordinary love for another human being. So what shall we do? We can go on discussing, answering this question, umpteen times, but if you, the listener, don't listen, take it in, find out, then it becomes utterly meaningless to have a dialogue, or a discussion, or a question and answer meeting when you are not actively participating in the enquiry. Q: How do you find that love? K: I don't want to find that love. All that I want to do is to remove that which is not love, to be free of jealousy, attachment. Q: That means we should have no fragmentation. K: Sir that is just theory. You see you are going back again to theory. Find out if you love somebody. Q: (Inaudible) K: You haven't listened madam, you haven't listened to what the speaker has been saying. How can you love when you are concerned about yourself? Right? Your problems, your ambitions, your desire for success, your desire for all the rest of it. You first and the other second; or the other first and you second. It is the same thing. Q: I would like to know whether it is possible to look at a feeling without bringing in thought. K: We haven't finished this question madam. Now you see we have asked so many questions, now how can we have a dialogue about this, two people - you understand? Two or three people, sitting round here, all of you can sit on this platform with me, if you want to discuss, have a dialogue. Can we do that now? Two of you, or half a dozen of you sit here together and say, "Look, let's go into this. Why am I, I understand this verbally, that love cannot exist when there is jealousy, love cannot exist when there is attachment, now is it possible for me to be free of attachment?" That is a dialogue - then I will have a dialogue with myself, shall I, and you listen? Q: From the moment of conception up to the moment of being brought up, trained, people are selfish and they never learn to give. From the mother's womb up to being thrown into the world... K: We are saying that sir. I will have a conversation with myself, a dialogue with myself. I realize by listening to this that I don't love. That is a fact. I am not going to deceive myself. I am not going to pretend to my wife that I love her, or to the woman or the girl, or boy. Now first of all I don't know what love is. But I do know that I am jealous, I do know that I am terribly attached to her. And in that attachment there is fear, there is jealousy, there is anxiety, there is a sense of dependency, I don't like to depend but I depend because I am lonely and I'm shoved around by society, in the office, in the factory and I come home and I want to feel comfort, companionship, escape from myself. So I am dependent, attached to that person. Now how am I - I am asking myself - how am I to be free of this attachment, not knowing what love is, I won't pretend - love of god, love of Jesus, love of Krishna, all that nonsense, throw it all out - if I have thrown it all out. So I am saying: how am I to be free of this attachment? I am taking that just as an example. First of all I won't run away from it. Right? I don't know how it is going to end up with my wife. You understand? When I am really detached from her my relationship may change to her. She might be attached to me and I might not be attached to her or to any other woman. Please, you understand? It isn't that I want to be detached from her and join another woman. That is silly. I am having a dialogue with myself. So what shall I do? I won't run away from the consequence of being totally free of all attachment. I am going to investigate. I don't know what love is, but I see very clearly, definitely, without any doubt, that attachment to that person means fear, anxiety, jealousy, possession, all the rest of it. So I ask myself, how am I to be free of attachment? Not the method, I want the freedom from it. I don't know. I really don't know. So I begin to enquire. Then I get caught in a system. You understand? You are following this? I get caught in some guru who says, "I will help you to be detached, do this, this, this. Practise this, this". And I want to be free from it and I accept what the silly man says because I see the importance of being free, and he promises me that if I do this I will have a reward. So I want to be free in order to have a reward. You understand? I am looking for a reward. So I say, how silly I am. I want to be free and I get attached to the reward. You are following all this? Good! At last! I think I had better have a dialogue all the time with myself! So I represent the rest of humanity - and I really mean it -therefore if I am having a dialogue with myself I am in tears - you understand? Not like you, smiling. It is a passion for me. So I don't want to be attached and yet I find myself getting attached to an idea. You understand? That is, I must be free and somebody, or some book, or some idea, something says "Do this and you will have that." So the reward becomes my attachment -you follow? So I say, "Look what I have done. Be careful, don't get caught in that trap." Whether it is a woman or an idea it is still attachment. So I am very watchful now. I have learned something. That is, exchange for something else is still attachment - right? So I am very watchful. Then I say to myself, is there a way, or what am I to do to be free of attachment? What is my motive? Why do I want to be free from attachment? Because it is painful? Because I want to achieve a state where there is no attachment, no fear, no etc. etc? What is my motive? Please follow me because I am representing you. What is my motive in wanting to be free? And I suddenly realize a motive gives a direction. Right? And that direction will dictate my freedom. Are you following this? So why do I have a motive? What is motive? A motive is a movement, a hope, or to achieve something. So the motive is my attachment. I wonder if you are following all this. Do it sir as we are talking. The motive has become my attachment, not only the woman, the idea of a goal, but my motive; I must have that. So I am all the time functioning within the field of attachment. Right? The woman, the future and the motive - to all this I am attached. So I say "Oh, my god, it is a tremendously complex thing. I didn't realize that to be free of attachment implies all this." Right? Now, I see this as clearly as I see on a map the roads, the villages, the side roads, the main roads, very clearly. Then I say to myself: "Now, is it possible for me to be free of my motive, to which I am attached, to be free of the woman for whom I have great attachment, and also the reward which I am going to get when I am free?" To all this I am attached. Why? Is it that I am insufficient in myself? Is it that I am very, very lonely, therefore escape from that feeling of that extraordinary sense of isolation and therefore cling to something, man, woman, idea, motive? Hold on to something. Now is it I am lonely? I am taking that. Is it I am lonely? Therefore I am escaping from that feeling of extraordinary isolation, through attachment of another. Right? So I am not interested in attachment at all. I am interested in understanding why I am lonely, which makes me attached. You have understood? You are following me - my dialogue with myself? Which is: I am lonely, and that loneliness has forced me to escape through attachment to this or to that. Now I say as long as I am lonely, all the sequence is this. So I must investigate why I am lonely. What does it mean? Right? What does it mean to be lonely? How does it come about? Is it instinctual, inbred, heredity, or is it my daily activity that is bringing about this loneliness? You understand? I am going into it. I am having a dialogue with myself. If it is inherited, if it is an instinct, which I question because I accept nothing - you understand? - I accept nothing because I don't accept it is instinct and say "I can't help it". If it is heredity, I am not to blame. As I don't accept any of these things I say, "Why is there this loneliness?" Now I question it and remain with the question, not try to find an answer. I wonder if you understand this? Is somebody following all this? I have asked myself what is the root of this loneliness; and I am watching, I am not trying to find an intellectual answer; I am not trying to tell the loneliness what it should do, or what it is. I am watching it for it to tell me. I wonder if you understand this? Are we going along together somewhat? So there is a watchfulness for the loneliness to reveal itself. It won't reveal if I run away, if I am frightened, if I resist it. So I watch it. I watch it so that no thought interferes because this is much more important than thought coming in, because my whole energy is concerned with the observation of that loneliness therefore thought doesn't come in at all. Are you following this? Because the mind is being challenged and it must answer. And when you are challenged it is a crisis. And in a crisis you have got all the energy, and that energy remains without being interfered with. I wonder if you follow all this? Because this is a challenge which must be answered. Q: How can we hang on to that energy? How can we do something about this energy? K: It has come. You have lost the whole thing. Look: I have started out having a dialogue with myself. I said what is this strange thing called love. Everybody talks about it, writes about it: romantic poems, pictures and all the rest of it, sex and whole areas of it. And I say have I got this thing called love? Is there such a thing as love? I see love doesn't exist when there is jealousy, hatred, fear. So I am not concerned with love any more; I am concerned with 'what is', which is: my fear, attachment. And why am I attached? I say maybe one of the reasons is - one of the reason, I don't say that is the whole reason - one of the reasons is that I am lonely, desperately isolated. The older I grow the more isolation. So I watch it. This is a challenge to find out, because it is a challenge all energy is there to respond. That is simple, isn't it? When there is death in the family, it is a challenge. If there is some catastrophe, an accident or whatever it is, it is a challenge and you have the energy to meet it. You don't say, "Where do you get this energy?" When your house is on fire you have the energy to move. You have extraordinary energy. You don't sit back and say, "Well I must get this energy" and then wait. And the whole house will be burnt then. So there is this tremendous energy to answer this question: why is there this loneliness? Because I have rejected other ideas - you follow? - suppositions, theories, that I have inherited it, it is instinct. All that means nothing to me. It is 'what is'. So why am I lonely - not I - why is there this loneliness which every human being, if he is at all aware, goes through, superficially or most profoundly? And why? Why does this come into being? Is it the mind is doing something which is bringing it? You understand? If I have rejected theories, instinct, inheritance, I have rejected all that; therefore I am asking does the mind bring this about? You understand my question sir, or are you getting tired? Is the mind doing this? Loneliness means total isolation. Right? So I say, is the mind, the brain doing this? The mind which is partly the movement of thought, is thought doing this? You are following all this? Thought in daily life, is it creating, bringing about this sense of isolation? You understand? Which is, in the office I am isolating myself because I want to become bigger, become the executive, or the pope or the bishop - you know. Therefore it is working all the time isolating itself. Are you watching this? You understand sir? Q: I think it isolates itself in relation to how crowded it is. K: Yes. Q: As a reaction. K: Yes, that is right, sir, that is right. I want to go into this. So I see thought, the mind, is all the time operating to make itself superior, more, working itself to this isolation, towards this isolation. Right? Clear? So the problem then is: why does thought do this? Is it the nature of thought to work for itself? You understand what I mean? Is it the nature of thought to create this isolation? Does society create this isolation? Does education create this isolation? Right? Education does bring about this isolation - it gives me a certain career, a certain specialization, so it is isolation. You follow? So thought, being fragmentary, because I have found that - I have found that thought, which is the response of the past as knowledge, experience and memory, so thought is limited. Right? Thought is time-binding. So thought is doing this. So my concern then is why does thought do it? Is it in its very nature to do this? I came here for a discussion - wait sir - I came here for a discussion, dialogue. Now I am having a dialogue by myself. Too bad! I'll go on because look what it is leading me up to - leading. Q: This is the fourth time I have stood up to say something and you are saying that you are having a dialogue by yourself. This is silly! K: But sir are you telling me - please sir, are you having a dialogue with me? Q: Well I have something to say which I thought related to what you were saying. K: Are you having a dialogue with me? Q: I don't know. K: We said sir, please, we said that a dialogue implies conversation between two people. Are you and I conversing together about the same thing? Q: Well we can't be because every time I have something to say... K: I am asking you sir, not the others, I am asking you are we having a dialogue between you and me about this thing? Which is: why does thought create this isolation, if it does? Q: I want to do that. Because I thought that it came back to the beginning when you were talking about what is love. If there is a moral obligation to love a person at all costs, as there is in my family, it is an affectation. And affectation as love is nobody showing their true feelings, people are masking their violence by politeness which they call love. Therefore what is really inside is being hidden all the time and therefore thought must be deceptive, must lead to isolation because nobody knows what anybody else is feeling because of all the pretence. K: We have been through that sir. We are coming to the point when we are not pretending. I don't know what love is. We said in the dialogue that we don't know what love is. I know when we use that word 'love' there is a certain pretence, a certain hypocrisy, putting on a certain type of mask. We have been through all that. At the beginning of this dialogue we went into all that. So we come to the point now: why does thought, being a fragment, why does it bring about this isolation, if it does? I have found it does in my conversation with myself because thought is limited, thought is time-binding, therefore whatever it does must be limited. And in that limitation it has found security. It has found security in saying, "I have a special career in my life". It has found security in saying, "I am a professor. There I am perfectly safe. After seven years." -and there you are stuck for the rest of your life. And there is great security both psychologically as well as factual. So thought is doing this. Now the problem then is: can thought realize - please listen to this - can thought realize that it is limited and therefore the moment it understands that whatever it does is limited and therefore fragmentary and therefore isolating, whatever it does will be this. Therefore can thought - please I am having a dialogue, this is a very important point - can thought realize its own limitations? Or does thought say to itself, I am limited. You understand the difference? Are you all asleep? Thought being me -do I say, thought is limited and therefore it says, "I am limited". Or thought itself realizes I am limited. The two things are entirely different. One is an imposition, and therefore conflict, whereas when thought itself says "I am limited" it won't move away from that limitation. Please this is very important to understand because this is the real essence of this thing. We are imposing on thought what it should do. Thought has created the 'we', the 'me', and thought and the 'me' have separated itself from thought and says, I will dictate, tell what thought should do. But if thought realizes itself that it is limited then there is no resistance, no conflict, it says "I am that. I am blue". So does thought - in my dialogue with myself, I am asking -does thought realize this itself? Or am I telling it that it is limited? If I am telling it that it is limited then I become separate from the limitations. Then I struggle to overcome the limitation, therefore there is conflict, which is violence, which is not love. Are you following? So does thought realize itself that it is limited? I have to find out. I am being challenged. I have got energy now, because I am challenged I have got all energy. Does consciousness - put it differently - does consciousness realize its content? Does consciousness realize its content is itself? Or I have heard another say, "Consciousness is its content, its content makes up consciousness"? Therefore you say, "Yes it is so" - you follow? Or does consciousness, my consciousness, this consciousness realize its content and therefore its very content is the totality of my consciousness? Right? Do you see the difference in the two? The one imposed by me, the 'me' created by thought, then if I impose something on thought then there is conflict. Right? It is like a tyrannical government imposing on someone, but the government is what I have created. So we are asking: has thought realized its own littleness, its own pettiness, its own limitations; or is it pretending to be something extraordinary, noble? - you know, all the rest of it - divine? - which is nonsense because thought is memory, experience, remembrance. So I must, in my dialogue there must be clarity about this point: that there is no outside influence imposing on thought saying it is limited. So thought then because there is no imposition - you understand - there is no conflict, therefore it realizes it is limited. Therefore whatever it does - its worship of god, its worship of Jesus, its worship is limited, shoddy, petty, though it has created marvellous cathedrals throughout Europe. So there has been in my conversation with myself a discovery that loneliness is created by thought. And thought has now realized itself that it is limited, so it cannot solve the problem of loneliness. You understand? As it cannot solve the problem of loneliness does loneliness exist? You understand my question? Thought has made this sense of loneliness. Right? And thought realizes that it is limited and because it is limited, fragmentary, divided, it has created this, this emptiness, loneliness, therefore when it realizes this, loneliness is not. I wonder if you see this? Right? So therefore there is freedom from attachment. I have done nothing. You understand? I have watched it, the attachment, what is implied in attachment, greed, fear, loneliness, all that, and by tracing it, looking at it, observing it, not analysing it, examining, but just looking, looking, looking, and there is a discovery that thought has done all this. Right? Thought because it is fragmentary it has created this attachment. So when it realizes, attachment ceases. I wonder if you see this? There is no effort made at all, because the moment there is effort it is back again. You understand? So we have said if there is love there is no attachment; if there is attachment there is no love. So there has been the removal of the major factor through negation of what it is not, which is, love is not attachment. You know what it means in your daily life - no remembrance of anything, my wife, my girl-friend, or my neighbour told me, no remembrance of any hurt, no image about her because I am attached to the image, not to her. I am attached to the image thought has created about her. She has hurt me, she has bullied me, she has given me comfort - I have had a pleasant time sexually, ten different things which are all the movement of thought, which has created the image, and it is the image I am attached to. So attachment has gone. But there are other factors: fear, pleasure, comfort in that person, or in that idea. Now must I get through all these step by step, one by one, or all over? You understand my question? Must I go through, must I investigate as I have investigated attachment, fear? Must I investigate the desire for comfort? Must I observe why I seek comfort? Is it because I am insufficient, I want comfort, I want a comfortable chair therefore I want a comfortable woman -or a man, or whatever it is, a comfortable idea? I think most of us do. To have a comfortable, secure idea which can never be shaken, and to which I am deadly attached, and so anybody who says, nonsense to that I get angry, I get jealous, I get upset because he is shaking my house. So I say I don't have to go through all the investigation of all these various factors: I see it at one glance, I have captured it. You understand now? So through negation of what is not love the other thing is. I don't have to ask what is love. I don't have to run after it. If I run after it, it is not love, it is a reward. So I have ended in that enquiry, slowly, carefully, without distortion, without illusion, I have negated everything that it is not - the other is. Now, I have had a good dialogue with myself. Q: May I ask a question? Maybe I didn't get it. Would you say that loneliness is created by experiencing loneliness? K: I have explained all this Madam. Not that I have explained, I have had a dialogue with myself. If you have listened to it then you have got it. Foreword - Part 1 - Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Quotations from part 1 - Part 2 - Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Quotations from part 2 THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING FOREWORD At Brockwood Park in Hampshire, England there is an Educational Centre for boys and girls aged from thirteen to nineteen. Krishnamurti lives there when he is in England. The first part of this book gives some of the talks and discussions which take place twice a week in an informal way between Krishnamurti, students and staff. There are also schools in India founded by Krishnamurti and visited annually by him, particularly Rajghat at Benares, and Rishi Valley in the Chittoor District of Andhra Pradesh. Many of the conversations with parents and teachers in the second part of this book took place in India. Apart from Brockwood, others were in the United States where Krishnamurti has spoken in recent years at the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Cruz, and at Brandeis and Stanford Universities, as well as individually with educationalist and students. A school for young children is shortly to be opened in the Ojai Valley in California. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 1 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 22ND MAY 1973 Krishnamurti: Most people work either to avoid punishment or to gain something in the way of possessions, money, fame and so on. So most people work under great pressure. Here at Brockwood there is not that extreme pressure, or any kind of pressure put upon you. Therefore there is a tendency, if I may point out, to slacken, to let go, to become rather empty and lose that vitality that youth generally has - that feeling of urgency, the flame of doing something. All that gradually disappears and you are left here to be responsible to yourself, which is rather difficult. Most of us want somebody to lean on, somebody to encourage us, somebody to say, "You are doing very well, carry on!" And to push us a little when we are slack, drive us when we are indifferent, when we are sleepy, shake us to keep awake so that somebody gradually becomes the authority. Haven't you noticed this? There is no authority here, therefore you are left to yourself and it is very difficult to keep oneself at the highest point of energy, drive, intelligence and affection and not just go off into a kind of daydream, uselessly wasting time. Brockwood is supposed to give you - and I hope it does - the terrain, the environment, the atmosphere in which this self-generating energy can go on. How is all this to be created? Who is going to do it? Questioner: Everyone here. Krishnamurti: What does that mean? Questioner: Self-responsibility. Krishnamurti: When you use a word be very careful that you know what it means. Do you know what that word "responsibility" means? - not what you think it should mean, but what it means according to the dictionary. We must first understand the meaning of that word. Here is your English teacher, ask her. Questioner: Doesn't it mean the ability to respond? Krishnamurti: That's right, isn't it? - the capacity to respond. Questioner: We often use the word "answerable; we say,"I am answerable for such and such." Krishnamurti: If I am inefficient I can't answer, respond properly. So responsibility means to respond adequately to the job or to the environment or to the incidents around me. I must respond to my highest capacity: that is what the word "responsible" means. See what a lot is involved in that one word. So who is going to be responsible to bring about the right soil here, the right environment, the right atmosphere, so that you are totally awake, generating the energy for yourself? Questioner: Each one of us. Krishnamurti: Can you do this, Gregory? Is each one of us capable of this? Questioner: All of us together. Krishnamurti: No. Who is "All of us together"? Will you be responsible to bring about this soil where you will respond to an incident, to everything that is happening around you completely, adequately? If each one of us does that there is no problem, is there? Then the place will be marvellous and each one of us will have a thousand-watt candle inside him. Is each one of us capable of this? That is, when you say, "I'll go to bed at ten o'clock" - or whatever you agree on - you will do it and nobody need tell you. You follow what it implies? When you study you give your complete attention to it, that means an adequate response to the subject, to everything which is your responsibility. Can we all do this together? Questioner: We are capable of it, but we don't usually do it. Krishnamurti: Why not? Are you slack or indifferent to what you are doing because you want to be doing something else? Questioner: First, how can one be responsible if one doesn't know the field in which one is working well enough. I mean, before I can take responsibility for something, I have to know for certain that I can do it. Krishnamurti: Yes, that you are capable of doing it. Questioner: But mostly what happens is that people are saying, "You are responsible," and it's taken for granted that one knows what to do. Krishnamurti: No, look, Tungki, we have just now defined that word. I am asking you, are you capable, adequate, sufficiently intelligent to deal with something that has to take place here? If we are not, let's be humble about it, let's be sensible and say: we are not. Then how do we bring this about in us? Discuss it, I am not going to answer for you. Questioner: It has something to do with relationship. When you are responsible, you are responsible in relationship, aren't you? Krishnamurti: I don't know - find out. Questioner: I see so many misunderstandings in the school, very often among the students, among the staff. But I realize now that in order to be responsible we have to see first that we have misunderstandings which must be cleared up. Krishnamurti: Now how do you clear up a misunderstanding? What is the requisite quality necessary to help us to wipe away a misunderstanding? You say something and I misunderstand it and I get hurt. How do you and I wipe away that hurt, that sense of, "You've misunderstood me?" Or I have done something out of misunderstanding which you think I ought not to have done. How do you clear that up? Questioner: You go back to the beginning and see what went wrong. Krishnamurti: Is it necessary to do all that? Questioner: It needs time. Krishnamurti: No, it needs a little more than that - what else is necessary? Questioner: A regard, a proper relationship. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Go on, push. Questioner: (1) It needs patience and care, a feeling of eagerness. Questioner: (2) I would say affection. Krishnamurti: Peter says it needs affection - you understand? If I have affection I say, "Let's look at the misunderstanding and see if we can't get over it." But if I merely examine it intellectually and take time over it, then I'll be hurt by somebody else. So affection is the basis on which one can wipe away misunderstandings. Right? Questioner: I think if you didn't have an image about yourself you wouldn't be hurt. Krishnamurti: Yes, but I have an image and he has an image. I get hurt by what you have said; how do I wipe it away? Can I say, "Look, I have misunderstood, I am sorry, do let us talk about it again"? That requires a certain affection, doesn't it? Have you got that affection? Affection is different from sentiment - be very clear on that point. Questioner: What does sentiment mean? Krishnamurti: Feeling. Questioner: But it's not right feeling. Krishnamurti: Now find out the difference between affection, love and sentiment. We said sentiment is feeling, emotionalism. "I feel I should do this, I feel I am a great man, I feel anger" - that is a sentiment."I love children: In that there is a great deal of sentiment because I don't want to do things which may hurt them. Sentiment implies a feeling. Now what is affection and what is sentiment? Questioner: Somehow there is a self-deceptive element in sentiment. Krishnamurti: Yes, that's right. Sentiment can become hard: sentiment can become efficient but cruel. Questioner: You often find a sentimental person is capable of being brutal in another mood. Like the Nazis, who were sentimental about music and the arts, but very brutal. Krishnamurti: That's right. But we have all got that feeling in us also, so don't let us put it on certain types of people. That is, we can be sentimental, go into a kind of ecstatic nothingness over music, over painting, we can say, "I love Nature", and the next minute hit someone on the head because he thwarts us. So sentiment is one thing and affection is another. If I have affection for you I am going to talk things over with you. I say, "Don't be rough, be quiet, sit down, talk to me, I have misunderstood you. I want to talk it over with you because I have affection for you." I have no sentiment for you but I have affection for you. I don't know whether you see the difference - do you? Questioner: I think younger people often feel that sentiment is something sloppy. Krishnamurti: I agree. Questioner: Because if you have a sentiment it becomes mechanical, you automatically have a reaction. Krishnamurti: You see, idealism is sentimentality and therefore it breeds hypocrisy - I do not know whether you see that. Questioner: Because it has moods. Krishnamurti: That's right, all that is involved in sentiment. That being clear, have we this affection so that when there is a misunderstanding we can talk about it and get it over, not store it up? Questioner: Perhaps the word "sentimentality" needs a definition. I mean, it seems to go even further than sentiment. It's a secondhand emotion. Krishnamurti: It's an ugly thing. Questioner: It's mostly put on. Krishnamurti: Yes, that's right, like a mask you put on. Questioner: It seems that it is difficult to distinguish in daily life. Let's take an example: I see a beautiful tree. What is that feeling? Krishnamurti: Is that sentiment? I look at that tree and say, "What a marvellous tree that is, how beautiful," - is that sentiment? Questioner: Sir, are you talking to yourself when you say that? Krishnamurti: Yes. I say, "How beautiful that is" to myself. You may be there and then I would say, "Look, how lovely that tree is." Is that sentiment? Questioner: It's a fact. But when you see a tree and think you ought to feel it is beautiful that is a sentiment. Krishnamurti: Yes, that's it - you've understood? Have you absorbed it? Questioner: Yes. Which is, when you think you ought to... Krishnamurti: That's right. So when I feel sentimental about something I put on a false front: I "ought" to feel that is a beautiful tree. Questioner: It's an act of behaviour. Krishnamurti: Yes, an act of behaviour. I am glad we are getting into this. Questioner: Yes, but now, continuing your story, you take care of that tree and become attached. Then does sentimentality come in? Krishnamurti: Yes. When you become attached, sentimentality creeps in. So absorb it, it's a food you are chewing - you have to digest it. You ask: when there is affection, is there attachment? Questioner: No, but sometimes one jumps to the other without realizing it. Krishnamurti: Of course. Questioner: There seems to be no boundary. Krishnamurti: So you have to go very slowly. We are trying to differentiate between affection and sentimentality. We see what sentimentality is. Most of us don't feel sentimental when we are young but as we grow older we put on many unnecessary masks and say, "We must feel the beauty of that tree." Or, "I must love that poem because Keats or Shelley wrote it." Affection is something entirely different. Sentimentality is affectation, hypocrisy. Now, what is affection? Questioner: It literally means to move towards somebody. Krishnamurti: Yes, doesn't it? Questioner: To be affected by something. Krishnamurti: First listen to what Mr. Simmons said. We have to listen to each other. He said: "To move towards somebody." That means what? Questioner: You feel for them. Krishnamurti: Be careful - don't say "feel". I move towards you, you may be rigid but I move towards you, I make a gesture towards you. I stretch out my hand to you, you may not want it but I stretch it out. Affection means, "to move towards" - the tree, the bird, the lake, or a human being - to stretch out your arm, your hand, to make a gesture, smile; all that is affection, isn't it? If I stretch my hand out to you though I've misunderstood you, you immediately say, "Yes, I'll try and wipe it out." Unless there is a movement towards you the misunderstanding cannot be got rid of. Questioner: But some people might just stretch out their hand mechanically. Krishnamurti: That is sentimentality, that is hypocrisy. Questioner: And if you are affected by somebody, that can be a form of getting worked up in the same way. Krishnamurti: That's right. Questioner: We soon have to leave Brockwood, and then we meet people who are sentimental: our mother, or some person like that. You have to respond to her sentiments. Krishnamurti: I know. You see, then love is not sentiment or sentimentality. Love is something very hard, if I can use that word. You understand what it means? Not hard in the sense of brutal, it has no hypocrisy, no sentimentality, it has no clothing around it. Questioner: Down to earth, you mean? Krishnamurti: If you like to put it that way. We know now what we mean by affection, love and sentimentality. How do we create the environment here, the terrain, the soil in which there is that sense of freedom from pressure and hence non-dependence, so that you yourself generate this tremendous feeling of living, of vitality, of flame - whatever you like to call it. How do we set about it? It's your responsibility. Do you now understand the meaning of that word? What will you do to bring about this atmosphere? - because each one of us is responsible. It's not Mr. or Mrs. Simmons or X, Y, Z - you are responsible. Questioner: Surely affection cannot be cultivated? Krishnamurti: Then what will you do? We said affection is necessary, but we are asking how do you create this atmosphere in which affection can function? Questioner: If we can see it when we occasionally have this affection, then we can see the situation which encourages us to have it. Krishnamurti: You are not answering the question. Here at Brockwood we are responsible for creating this soil in which there is freedom, which is non-dependency. In that freedom, in this energy we can flower in goodness. How are we to create that? Questioner: Perhaps we could meet Tungki's point there, because I think some of us have felt the same thing. What he said was, we have felt moments of affection in the past and if we can analyse that, perhaps we can see what brought it about. If that's a false trail, Perhaps we can finish with it. We know we have felt affection, it has happened. Krishnamurti: Why does it disappear? Can it? Or was it sentimentality and therefore it has gone? You say, "I've felt sometimes, or often, this sense of great affection, but somehow it goes and comes back occasionally." Now, can affection go away or is it sentimentality that can wither? Questioner: We feel affection and in trying to hold on to it and perpetuate it we become sentimental, because we try to recognise its symptoms and what it does, and we act according to memory. Krishnamurti: Or it may be sentimentality, which we call affection. Questioner: Yes, if it's real affection I don't see how it can dissolve. Krishnamurti: That's right. Questioner: It gets buried maybe, but it doesn't dissolve. It can be buried by misunderstandings and it can re-emerge. Krishnamurti: Can it? If I have real affection can you bury it? No. Most of us haven't got this great sense of affection. Now how do we bring it about? Don't say "cultivate it", that takes time. Questioner: Isn't it part of seeing the necessity? During the first talks you had with us you tried to show us the necessity of this place. Krishnamurti: Look, affection can't be cultivated, can it? To say, "I love you" that feeling must come naturally, not be forced or stimulated. One can't say, "It is necessary therefore I must love you." How do you have this affection? Can you take time over it? Find out. It may be that you must come to it obliquely - you understand what I mean? Questioner: Perhaps you have to find out what stops you from having affection. Krishnamurti: But you must have it before you can find out what stops it. Anger, jealousy, misunderstanding - will all those things stop affection? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Will they? You say something brutal - will that destroy my affection? I am hurt, but the real thing, the beauty of affection, will that be destroyed? So it may be that we can come upon it from a different direction. Shall we investigate that possibility? I am full of sentimentality, emotionalism, idealism, of "This should be done," "That must be done," "I will try". Those are all sentimentalities. We said affection is a very hard reality, it's a fact, you can't distort it, you can't destroy it. If I haven't got it I want to find out how I am to come upon it. I can't cultivate it, I can't nourish it by good deeds, saying, "I must go and help you when you are sick; that is not affection. There must be a way of doing something that will bring it about. We'll find out. What do you think? Questioner: If I've never experienced it, how can I know that it is there? Krishnamurti: I am going to find out, I don't know, I haven't got any affection. I may have it occasionally when I am half asleep, but actually I haven't got it when I am living, struggling. Now how is that seed to flower in me? Questioner: You have to lose your images of people. Krishnamurti: That's one thing. I want to come much nearer. Questioner: Also, there are many things that are preventing it, maybe we can look at those things. Krishnamurti: Yes, go on. But will that do it? Questioner: I can't do it before I've looked at what is preventing me. Krishnamurti: Maybe I am angry, I get easily irritated and misunderstood. So I say: let me wipe it out. Will affection come? I know many people, so-called monks, good social workers and so on, who have trained themselves not to be angry. But the real flame has gone, they never had it, they are kind, generous people, they will help you, will give you their money, their coat, their shelter, but the real thing is nowhere there. I want to find out how to let this thing flower in us; once it flowers you can't destroy it. You have said: see the things that prevent it. That means you are deliberately cultivating affection. When you say, "I will see what the things are which are blocking me", that is a deliberate act in order to get it. I don't know whether you see this. Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Therefore you are trying to cultivate it, aren't you? - only in an obscure way. Questioner: (1) You said that we must try to find the soil for affection, for this sense of responsibility. Questioner: (2) If we try to create a certain relationship, an atmosphere, whatever you call it, in which this can flower, isn't that perhaps what she meant? Krishnamurti: I am trying to point out that you cannot cultivate it. Questioner: But can you not bring about the right "something"? Krishnamurti: That's what I'm trying to find out. So let's forget affection as you cannot cultivate it. I wonder if you understand this? You can cultivate chrysanthemums or other things, but you cannot cultivate affection - cunningly, unconsciously or deliberately, you can't produce this. So what are we to do? Questioner: It seems to me that there is something - not to do -but that you can recognise. When you are looking at somebody, or a situation, and you recognise there is no affection, that takes no time. Krishnamurti: That can be done. What takes place when you say, "Yes. I see when I look at you that I really have no affection for you." What has happened? Questioner: You have faced a fact. Something happens. Krishnamurti: Does it? Listen: unconsciously, deeply, this idea that there must be affection exists. I do various things in order to capture it. And it cannot be captured. You are all suggesting methods to capture it. Questioner: I was not suggesting a method, I was only saying: recognise that you haven't got it. Krishnamurti: Yes, I haven t got it, I know that very well. That flame isn't there. Questioner: It's quite hard to really see that it's not there, we go on pretending. Krishnamurti: I like to look at things as they are and face facts; personally I have no sentimentality of any kind in me, I strip away all that. Now I say, "I do not have this thing." And also I know it cannot be cultivated surreptitiously in a roundabout way. Yet I vaguely see the beauty of it. So what am I to do? May we move away from that and come back to it a little later? Krishnamurti: Just listen to what I have to say. Do you feel at home here? Do you know what a home is? Questioner: The place where you know you always get support and help. You feel comfortable, you don't feel self-conscious, you move more easily at home than where you are a stranger. Krishnamurti: At home you are not a stranger. Is that it? Questioner: (1) In that case you have many homes, because you may have many friends and brothers. I can feel comfortable in many places. Questioner: (2) You can have a house and live in it, but that doesn't mean it's a home. Krishnamurti: What makes it a home? Questioner: (1) To have affection and cooperation between the people who are living there. Questioner: (2) A home is a place where you have security. Krishnamurti: Is that what you call a home? - where you have security, where you feel comfortable, where you are not a stranger? Questioner: It's all these things. Krishnamurti: Tell me more. Questioner: (1) Where you have no fear. Questioner: (2) Actually I don't consider I have a `home; I have a house in California, I go to school here. Krishnamurti: He said something just then which was slurred over unfortunately. He said, "Friends and brothers", and also, "Wherever I am I'm at home." You said that - don't withdraw it! Now what is a home to you all? You said, wherever I am I feel at home. Where I am not a stranger, where I am comfortable, where I am not treated as an outsider, where I can do anything I want to without getting scolded - is that a home? They do scold you, they make you go to bed at a certain time. So what is a home? Questioner: A feeling in yourself about being at home? Krishnamurti: What is that feeling? Sentimentality? You must be careful here. Please pay attention, I am going to push you into this. I want to find out what is a home to you, actually, not theoretically. I go all over the world - except to Russia and China -I am put into different rooms, small rooms or big rooms. I have slept on the floor, I have slept on silver beds, I have slept in all kinds of places, and I have felt at home - you understand? To me, home means wherever I am. Sometimes there is a plain wall in front of my window, sometimes there is a beautiful garden, sometimes there is a slum next door - I am telling you accurate things, not just something imaginary. Sometimes there is a tremendous noise going on around me, the floor is dirty and so on -the mattresses I've slept on! I am at home as I am at home here. It means I bring my own home - you understand? Is Brockwood a home to you? In the sense of a place where you can talk to each other, feel happy, play, climb a tree when you want to, where there is no scolding, no punishment, no pressure, where you feel completely protected, feel that somebody is looking after you, taking trouble to see that you are clean, that your clothes are clean, that you comb your hair? Where you feel that you are completely secure and free? That's a home, isn't it? Questioner: What brings that about is self-responsibility, so that someone else doesn't have to push you into doing things. Krishnamurti: No, don't go on to something else. Is this a home to you in that sense? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Are you sure that you feel you are safe, protected, watched over, cared for, never blamed, being told affectionately not to do certain things? Questioner: Do we ever feel safe, wherever we are? Krishnamurti: Oh, don't theorize. I am asking you, Tungki, if you feel at home here, in the sense which we all agreed is more or less a home. Do you feel that? Questioner: Yes, more or less. Krishnamurti: When I said more or less, it was in the sense that I can add more to it - whether there are good books, good food, whether it is in good taste, where nobody scolds you. Do you understand what I mean? Questioner: I think it is such an "ideal" place that nobody dares say that we do scold. Krishnamurti: Ideals are sentimentality. Questioner: Yes, but we do scold. Krishnamurti: Scold affectionately, that's understood. Now is this a home to you? Don't be casual. Questioner: One does feel cared for here. Krishnamurti: So please tell me if you feel at home - I'm not saying you do or don't, it's up to you to tell me. If you don't want to tell me, that's all right too. If you feel at home here, are you also responsible? Questioner: If I'm not, I won't feel at home. Krishnamurti: That's why I am asking. I carry a piece of furniture from this room to the next and I bang it and I don't care. If it's my home I am going to take care - you follow? So that is what I mean by responsive, responsible. When you feel at home you look after things, you look after yourself, you don't want to hurt your mother, make too much work for her. It's a kind of mutual, affectionate, creative movement. Don't you know all these things? The moment you feel at home, what takes place? Questioner: Affection. Krishnamurti: Affection, isn't it? Then you can say to me: for goodness sake don't break up that furniture; and because I feel at home I won't get hurt. I wonder if you understand what I am talking about? So where you are at home the seed begins to germinate, you don't have to cultivate it, it begins to flower. Is that what is happening with all of you? If you don't feel at home here find out whose fault it is, whether it is yours or somebody else's; correct it, don't sit back and say, "Well, I don't feel at home" - do something about it. When you grow up you will leave this place and you will have to face the world. And if you haven't this seed in you here, the world is going to destroy you. They will trample on you, they are wolves, murderers - don't mistake it. This feeling that you are completely relaxed, completely at home - in the sense I am using that word - that brings about the responsibility which is affectionate. Do you understand this? Please do. And when you have that seed and it is flowering here, then you will keep it going all your life. But if it doesn't operate, then the world will destroy you; the world makes you what it wants you to be: a cunning animal. So let's find out if you are at home here and if you aren't, why not? Affection is non-dependency, I don't know if you realize this. Some of you are going to get married; you will say to your wife, "I love you, darling." Then you go off to the office or to some other kind of work, and there you are full of anxiety, wanting to further yourself, full of ambition, greedy. Back home you say, "Darling, I love you." You see the absurdity of it? That's what is going on in the world. In that there is attachment, jealousy, fear, anxiety: she mustn't look at anybody else except me. If parents really cared for their children there would be no wars. They would say, "Live, don't kill, live." There would be no army -see what would happen. So what is generally called home is not a home at all. Therefore this must be your home; you spend eight or nine months of the year here and it's your responsibility - we know what that means - to make it your home, to tell me, or Mrs. Simmons or whoever, "This is not my home because you're not doing certain things" - you follow? Then you share in this. Are you just listening, or are you taking part? Apply yourself, create, don't let everybody else do all the work and say, "Yes, I am very comfortable here, this is my home." Then it's not your home, because you haven't built it. You see, from an early age I have been living in other people's houses and I have never had a place of which I could say, "This is my home." But there is the feeling that you are at home wherever you are because you are responsible, you are affectionate. Home is not a creation of sentimentality, it is a creation of fact - the fact that I feel at home. That is, I am free I am responsible, I am affectionate. Total responsibility is the feeling of being at home. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 2 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 18TH SEPTEMBER 1970 Krishnamurti: Do you know what is happening in the world? - the hijacking, the deception, outright lying, revolt, and the chaos and the misery in India. When you read about it, what does it mean to you? Or don't you read about it - are you not aware of what is happening? Questioner: A lot of it is very sad. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by that word? Questioner: Some people are dominating others and hurting lots of people. Krishnamurti: But that has been going on for centuries, hasn't it? - all history is that. What do you think of it? Questioner: It doesn't really affect me. Krishnamurti: Why do you say it doesn't affect you? Questioner: I see people getting killed on television. I look at it and I don't realize that those are people getting killed. Krishnamurti: What part do you play in all that? Questioner: I'm not part of it. Krishnamurti: Then what is your relationship to it? Is it something that is happening "over there", in Jordan, in America? Questioner: Sometimes it hits home and I can feel what those people are feeling. Krishnamurti: Do you feel that one must change all this, or that you can't do anything about it? What is your relationship to the world? Is it an awareness of the extraordinary things that are going on technologically and the appalling inefficiency of man to meet that technological advance? What is your relationship to the confusion that man is producing all round the world? Questioner: As long as we are confused we are contributing to the confusion. Krishnamurti: I understand that, but what do you feel about it? What is your innermost response to all this? Questioner: I feel frustrated and angry that all this is happening. I have reactions to it; I see things which are wrong and I get hostile. Krishnamurti: And then what? You see, when you leave here, go on to university or through college, what part are you going to play in it all? Will you just fit into the machinery of it? What's going to become of you in relation to the world? Or are you not interested in that at present? You may say, "I'm too young to consider all this, I'll have a good time and enjoy life while I can; later on I will think about it." Or do you feel that this is a preparation, a commencement of what it is going to be when you grow older? One can revolt now and take drugs or not, this or that -but when you are twenty or twenty-five you will get married. Will you fit into all this? If you don't fit in, what are you going to do? If you are antagonistic to the system, to what is happening - not hypocritical but actually in revolt - can you pretend that you don't really feel the appallingness of all this? What is your response? Don't you consider what you are going to be at all? Get married and settle down? - if that is the end result, then what is education? Is it to help you to get settled down in life in this system? I have heard many students in India, when asked, "What are you going to do?" reply, "Oh, Sir, my father wants me to be an engineer, my father wishes me to be a doctor, we need doctors. I want to help India through becoming an efficient engineer." The majority of them think in terms of a professional career, they want to help the backward country, do social work. Is that what you are all going to do? Are you all asleep? I think that's where the sadness lies, not in what the world is. The world is that way, deceptive, the deceiving politicians, the money-minded - all that. If you are not properly educated you'll just slip into it. So what do you think is education? Is it to help you to fit into the mechanism of the present order, or disorder, of things or do you think it should be something else? If it is something else, what is it that you want? Questioner: It's just a learning process. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by learning? Questioner: Finding out about things around you and in you. Krishnamurti: Are you doing it? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Do you really want to learn? Questioner: Yes, I do. Krishnamurti: Be terribly serious - don't let's talk easily, glibly. Do you know what it means to learn? Questioner: To find out as much as one can about whatever it is - about everything. Krishnamurti: Is that what you mean by "learn"? - to find out? You can pick up an encyclopedia; you can find out everything there. Questioner: That only encompasses the theoretical side. Krishnamurti: Then what do you mean by learning? Questioner: Finding out something and being able to deal with it, cope with it, and possibly even use it. Krishnamurti: We were talking the other day about cooperation, intelligence and sex [See Chapter 5]. We discussed in principle what cooperation is, what it means to cooperate, to work together, to do things together. How are you going to learn about it - is it just a theory? A small community is living here at Brockwood. Any civilized man - civilised in the sense of cultured, thoughtful, intelligent - must cooperate, life demands cooperation - not with what you like, but the spirit of cooperation. You said,"I want to learn about cooperation." Now how do you learn about it? Because in any cultured society there must be cooperation; it can't exist otherwise. How are you going to learn about it? Questioner: In discussing it. There is some learning involved in that. Krishnamurti: I am asking what do you mean by learning about cooperation? We both agree, life cannot go on if there is no cooperation. Where do I begin? Questioner: By cooperating. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by that word cooperation, how do you cooperate, with whom, why? Where do I learn it? Questioner: By doing it. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by doing it - investigate, learn. Questioner: Find out why you want to cooperate. Krishnamurti: So are you going to learn? Is the process of learning asking this question? And also, do you have the spirit of cooperation, the feeling? Do you really, deeply want to cooperate? Don't you have to begin there? - to learn whether you really, deep down, want to cooperate. Because if you don't know what it means, you will never know what it means not to cooperate. If the State says, "Go and kill," unless you know what cooperation is, how do you know when not to cooperate? Now tell me, please, how are you going to find out for yourself whether you have the spirit of cooperation - not with me, or about something - but the feeling of it. Isn't that the beginning of learning about cooperation? Where do you begin to learn - from a book? If you say, "Learning begins with a book", then you have the encyclopedias, a vast knowledge accumulated in pages or in the brain of a teacher, but is that where you begin to learn? For instance, either I believe in an idea, and therefore I want you and others to cooperate with me in carrying out that idea, which is generally called cooperation; because we both believe in that idea, in a principle, in a system. Or, we have the feeling of cooperation -not about what and with whom, but the feeling. Do you deeply understand the meaning of that word? I mean not only working together but feeling together that certain things must be done - the feeling first, and the action. When you say you want to learn in a community, in a school like this, there is a problem. There are older people and the younger generation, the teacher and the students and others coming here; there must be a way to live happily, intelligently, actively, with a great deal of energy. One must have this feeling, otherwise we'll all pull in different directions. So I want to learn and my first enquiry in learning is to find out if I really want to cooperate, if I really have the feeling of it. Have you? If you don't have it find out why. This extraordinary quality, this feeling for cooperation, building together, doing things together, this is what has built this world. Questioner: What do you mean by, "It has built this world?" Krishnamurti: The world, in the sense of the railway, the post office, sending a rocket to the moon - three hundred thousand men were involved in that and had to cooperate; they cooperated for patriotic or financial reasons, reasons of vanity and so on. There, they cooperated round an idea in which was involved prestige, competition with Russia and so on. Now can there be real, deep, lasting cooperation when there is a motive? If I have any form of selfish regard, a self-interested motive, can there be cooperation in the sense we want to understand it? Questioner: You want to get something out of it, you don't have to do it. Krishnamurti: Therefore find out if you have got the feeling of getting something out of it. You are beginning to learn something which you can't learn from a book. Questioner: The idea of getting something out of it doesn't necessarily come in. If we want to build a house, I see that it will be easier for you and me to work along together. We organize it from the start and we cooperate with one another to build the house. Therefore I have the idea of building a house; we are going to get a house out of it, you and I. Krishnamurti: Quite - go further. You can go a little deeper. Questioner: So what happens when you want a white house and I don't. Krishnamurti: That's it. You want a square room and she wants a long room. You think you know much better than she does. Look what you are doing. Dominic said just now that we will cooperate if we want to build a house together, because he is going to get a house out of it. But if we begin to disagree on what kind of rooms it's going to have, we'll fall out. So what does that mean? Questioner: If you start with the spirit of cooperation and you both want to build something together, won't you still have a problem? Krishnamurti: You'll still have the problem - how will you tackle it? You and I want to cooperate, we want to build a house, you want a square room and I want a long one. And yet we both have the spirit of cooperation. What shall we do? Questioner: We try to find out why you want a long room and why I want a square one. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Questioner: We cooperate. Krishnamurti: Which means we are both willing to yield. You don't stick to your point, I don't stick to mine. Which means what? Questioner: You don't have a fixed idea, so you are learning. Krishnamurti: It means you have a pliable mind, you don't say, "I must have it", you are willing to change, which means you are not holding on to your particular desire, to your particular opinion. Questioner: Say you are willing to think about it and the other person isn't. Krishnamurti: What will you do? Questioner: I guess you would do what the other person wants -if you are willing to discuss and they are not. Krishnamurti: That's just it, what do you do if you want to cooperate and another doesn't? Questioner: See the point of that person. Krishnamurti: But in a community like this, what are you to do? Questioner: (1) You have to talk it over with them until they are back to cooperating. You see, I would be the one who would be yielding - I'm looking at it from my point of view - I'd be willing to talk about it. I don't know what I would do if the other person didn't want to. Questioner: (2) Perhaps instead of talking about the room you would start talking about cooperation itself, because this is the cause of the problem. Questioner: (3) And you have to have the spirit of cooperation to begin with. Krishnamurti: But I haven't got it. Take a wider issue. Generally we worship the intellect, the clever person who passes exams brilliantly is the most respected. Intellectually he is sharp, alive, good at his subject; playing games and doing anything in the garden is a bore to him. See how important it is that we should not only have a good brain, but also that we should be able to do things - to garden, cook, wash up - not just be one sided. Intelligence implies being able to do things, not to say, "I don't like gardening, it bores me, I only like to study." That is a lopsided way of living. Now I'm going to propose that here we should not only have really first class brains, that is to be able to think logically, sanely, dispassionately, not personally. But also one must have skill in action. You know Yoga? - that word also means "skill in action", not just doing a few exercises. How are you going to have that skill in action? Questioner: Through practice. Krishnamurti: Which means doing things. I would like to suggest - I have done a great deal of it in my life - that everyone should do some kind of work with the earth: gardening, planting, tending it - not just say, "I'll plant, you'll go and water." Looking after it, caring for it - that gives you an opportunity to care for something. Have you ever dug the soil? - you get in touch with the earth. I am going to propose that there should be not only an intellectual activity of the highest order here, but also a great deal of intense, active, clear thinking, working, studying at the highest level. And also to have skill in action, which is doing things. When you play the guitar, play it properly, not just strum. Do everything skilfully, and one of the ways to learn about it is to do things in the garden, play games and so on. Now I suggest this and you say, "I don't want to garden, it bores me." What are you going to do with such a person? Questioner: Find out why he or she won't do it. Krishnamurti: And then what? Questioner: There might be a reason why... Krishnamurti: Find out. He says to you, "I don't like it, I'm bored with it." Questioner: You have a right not to, if you don't want to. Krishnamurti: You are all too quick with answers. I don't want to garden and I don't want to work in the kitchen. You see what happens - gradually I withdraw. And round me I am going to collect people who don't want to do things. Questioner: That's just one thing you don't want to do. Krishnamurti: But why not? Intelligence says you must be good at these things and not say, "I don't want to play games." You are going to live here much more than you do at home this is your home, my home, other people's home; it is our home. Our home means also the garden, the lawn, the planting of the trees, the looking after the trees. As I am going to live here, I can't say, "I don't want to look after the garden." It is our home, I can't leave it to you. How will you show me or help me to learn that we must do things together, or learn about doing things together. It is as much your responsibility as Mrs. Simmons', or someone else's. How will you help me, who says, "I am bored with games - leave me alone with my pop music or with my book. As I feel at home, I am going to leave my pyjamas on the floor in my room." What will you do? "I'm going to leave my shoes in the corridor, or I'll leave my room untidy, I don't care. At home in California, in London, in Paris, I behave as I want to. Here, why are you telling me what I should do?" And then somebody comes along and tells you, "Please, don't do that." You reply, "You are authoritarian, this is our home I can do whatever I like." So how will you teach or help me to learn that to live intelligently implies playing games, looking after the garden, studying, doing things with one's hands, not just with one's brain. Personally, I like to do everything, gardening, milking cows, looking after chickens, looking after babies, changing diapers - I have done all kinds of things. I like it, nobody imposes it on me, and that's the way to live, that's the most intelligent way: having the capacity to do things. Now what will you do with a person in this school, who says, "I'm going to leave my room as I like - I sleep in it. I am orderly because I can find what I want among this disorder." Where do you start learning? We all want to live together, be happy together, do things together - life is doing things together. So please tell me how you propose to learn about all this. Questioner: You start in a spirit of cooperation. Krishnamurti: If you have got it, how are you going to help me to learn about it? Questioner: You have to make a rule. Krishnamurti: Then what happens? The moment you make a rule I'm going to break it, because I want to be free. People went to America because they did not like various impositions, they said they wanted to be free. They left the old country and went to a new country. They said, "We'll start anew, no bishops, no kings." Gradually the monster has grown there too. So do we see the importance of having a good brain that can think, that can study, that can observe and learn objectively, sanely? Questioner: Sir, what happens if we are born with an insufficient brain? Krishnamurti: If you are born with an insufficient brain, then I'm afraid there is nothing much you can do. Questioner: You talk about it as if there is something we can do. Krishnamurti: Obviously, because if we have got insufficient brains we are not necessarily moronic. Questioner: I mean feebleminded. Krishnamurti: If you are feebleminded, this can be corrected by recognising it. I'm going to do something about it, I don't just say, "I am feebleminded" and sit back. Questioner: Then what do you do? Krishnamurti: Learn that I am feebleminded. Questioner: Some people have a greater capacity to do things than others. Krishnamurti: So learn. If I have the capacity to do one thing better than another, it can lead to lopsided living. I am a human being, I've got extraordinary capacities. I must exercise all those capacities, otherwise I'm not a human being. I become merely a technician. If you say, "I'm not really interested in anything like music, or looking at the loveliness of the day - leave me with my mathematics," then I say, "You are feebleminded." Questioner: But isn't there something such as inherent capacity that we are born with. Krishnamurti: Anything can be changed. Questioner: Can we all be Beethovens? Krishnamurti: I want to learn: I don't want to be like anybody, I don't want to become like Christ or Buddha or Beethoven or Einstein! I want to see things differently, have a way of living entirely differently. As a group of people living together, who are encouraged to feel that here is their home, what will you do if somebody says, "Sorry, I don't feel like working in the garden, ever?" Questioner: (1) Maybe it's not their home. Questioner: (2) I suppose it's no good splitting up into groups? - those who like gardening and those who like doing something else. Questioner: (3) If someone doesn't like gardening, maybe he doesn't feel this is his home, maybe he doesn't belong here. Krishnamurti: Right, he doesn't belong here. How will you convey it to him? Will you say: "You come here to be educated in the real sense of that word and apparently you don't like to be educated; you want to remain a savage." Will you push him out? He came here too for education and he doesn't know what it means to be educated, he thought only in terms of revolt against the Establishment, against the professor, saying, "I know everything, who are you to tell me?" And he doesn't know what that word "cooperation" means. You may have to get rid of him. Will you do that? Questioner: Does that mean we have to get to like what learning is? Krishnamurti: That's what we are doing now. Questioner: That's what we're doing; so we don't have to worry about somebody else. Krishnamurti: But suppose at the end of four months I still keep my room like a pigsty, what are you going to do with me? Questioner: If I really agreed with you that having a clean room is necessary, it wouldn't ever be dirty again. Krishnamurti: But you don't. You are all children, with heavy bodies, with a lot of kick, but children. Questioner: Well then, what's the reason? Krishnamurti: Have patience to find out, tell me. Questioner: What would you do? Talk to them? Krishnamurti: First we come to a place like this to learn. Learning is not only from a book, but learning together what cooperation means. And learning together what it means to find out that man has always sought security: security in God, in marriage, socially - in everything man wants security. Security means passing an exam, getting a degree: that gives you the promise of security. Here is a place to find out if there is such a thing as security. Here is a place where we are going to educate ourselves, which means learning together what it means to cooperate, what it means to find out what love is. We are completely ignorant of so many things. Questioner: May I ask something? When someone is violent in his practice of yoga - in the way he does it - and you are constantly warning him, mostly this does not help the person to realize his own violence; he may at the time realize it, but he keeps on. In the same way, one could oneself have been doing certain things for a very long time until suddenly one realizes it. Krishnamurti: True. Questioner: Is it possible to educate someone who has not gone through a natural kind of maturation, like a plant? So what is the reaction of a person, who has grown a little more, to the person who has not grown? And if the person, for instance, has not grown to the awareness of the need for a still mind, the necessity of a still mind, how can you help another? - you cannot. So how can we act here? Krishnamurti: He's talking about Yoga. He asks, when you stand this way, take this posture, do you get the idea first, or do you do it as the yoga teacher is saying it? You see the difference? He says, "Sit this way," and he shows you. Do you have the image of how he sits and then carry it out, or in the very observing of how he is sitting, are you doing it? As he is showing it to you, do you have the idea of what he's doing and then carry out the idea? Or are you doing it as he is showing it to you? Which do you do? Questioner: We do it while he's showing it. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Go into it. Which means, doesn't it? that you are listening very carefully to what he's saying -the very listening is the doing. Not first listen, then have the idea, and then carry out the idea - which is entirely different. That needs education, that needs growth. Look, I have done yoga for many years. I've had several yoga teachers, and I did it as they told me; which means there was no contradiction between the doing and the listening. If you first create the idea, the image, then it will take an infinitely long time, then you need practice. But if the teacher says, "Do this" and you do it, you are doing it. You may do it badly, but you are doing it. See the importance of this. Most of us listen, then create an idea, and then carry out the idea. Here, if you listen and do, the idea is gone. The cultivation of the idea and carrying out the idea needs time - which is called maturity, growth. Questioner: Let us say someone is doing a yoga posture and I say, "Be violent, try to force it," that would be preventing them to see... Krishnamurti: I'll show you something - touch the floor with your hands. Say, you've never done it, you may not be able to do that. What do you do? You listen, you may not be able to touch the floor, but you are doing it. The actual doing of it may take a little time, but the "doing of it" is there already. Questioner: You haven't completed it, but you're on the way to doing it. Krishnamurti: That's it. Questioner: Because you're not resisting. Krishnamurti: The moment you have an idea you are already resisting. Questioner: It would be the same about cooperation. Krishnamurti: About everything. Questioner: (1) But in Yoga suppose he attempts to do something that's wrong... Questioner: (2) Maybe you have to do it anyway, because if you don't do what he does, you can't find out if it's wrong. Krishnamurti: Therefore you have to find out if he is the right teacher. I'm not a professional but I've done a great deal of yoga. There is a teacher who is supposed to be the teacher of other teachers. He says, "To do yoga properly, is to do it without any effort. If there is an effort it's not yoga." See the reason for it. Your body is not subtle, it's rigid, therefore it takes a week or more but don't force it. If you force, then you exert muscles in a wrong direction, which is bad for them; so do it very gently, take a week, a month, but do it slowly. If the teacher tells you, "Sit that way," you may do it wrongly, but begin, don't carry out the idea. In the same way, you listen to the feeling of cooperation, and you already have it if you're listening to it. Don't create an idea about cooperation and then carry that idea out. Questioner: Can we take orderliness, for instance? Krishnamurti: Yes. We need order; if you are untidy, if are unpunctual, we can't live together, it'll become impossible. We have to have a certain order. Don't create a picture of it: that I want order and you don't want order. We have to live together in a place like this. To live together implies order. So I have to have order. Do you listen to it without any resistance, or are you going to fight it? Please listen to what is being said without any resistance, knowing that living together needs order. If I don't bathe and I say, "What's wrong with it? I'm all right. I like my smell" - then we create disorder. Are you listening now to the word "cooperation", to the word "order", not creating a picture of it? - then you are immediately orderly. Questioner: Don't words like order and cooperation mean something to us, in so far as we've experienced them? Krishnamurti: Yes, of course they do. Which means what? You've already made a picture, had an experience of what order is, what cooperation is, and that becomes the resistance. Whereas if we say, "Look, let's find out, learn what it means to be orderly, what it means to cooperate," then we can't have a conclusion about it, because we're learning. If the yoga teacher says to you, "Sit this way," you may not be able to, it may take a week or a month, but the way you listen to it is far more important than sitting rightly. The sitting rightly will come, but the listening to what he says is instantaneous. Questioner: Usually for us to listen that way, we have to have a great deal of confidence. Krishnamurti: Why should you have confidence? I'm telling you and you listen. Why should you have confidence in me? Questioner: Because you might be telling me to kill. Krishnamurti: Why should you have confidence in me? First learn the art of listening, learn - not from me. Because I don't know, I may say things that are wrong; therefore listen to find out what is true and what is false, which is to become sensitive. You cannot become sensitive - which is intelligence - if you are obstinate, if you resist when someone says to you: "This is what I think." The important thing is the art of listening. Questioner: But if someone is telling you what they think, isn't that them telling you? Krishnamurti: Of course. I'm your yoga teacher, I'm supposed to know something about it, I may not know the whole of it, but I know a little bit of it and I teach you what I know. And in teaching you I'm also learning. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 3 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 9TH SEPTEMBER 1970 Krishnamurti: The other day we were discussing what Brockwood Park is trying to do. We were saying that it has come into being in order to bring about intelligence, if that is possible. The word "intelligence" means having the faculty of understanding - to understand not only each other, but also what cooperation means, what freedom, what discipline and order mean. We said intelligence implies freedom. That freedom is not yours or mine -but freedom. Let's be very clear on this point. Please stop me if you don't understand. Don't be silent and then say afterwards, "I disagree with you." We are trying to find out together. As we happen to be a small community, what does it mean to live together intelligently? Obviously the first thing is that there should be freedom between you and me and the others. Freedom doesn't mean doing what you want to do, because if each one of us did what he wanted there would be chaos here. Or a few of you would form a group thinking this is what we want to do in freedom, as opposed to another group. That is not freedom either. You may say, "I think it is freedom to do what I like, because at home I do what I like, there is nobody to say `don't do it', and if they did I would revolt, get angry, run away." To do what one likes is really quite impossible. Because what one likes may be temporary, a passing desire, and if we all did what we liked without considering the others, we couldn't live together. So intelligence implies freedom to find out how to live together. You don't impose on me and I don't impose on you. Do see the responsibilities. And freedom implies that together we understand what the implications of authority are. If I sit up late and you tell me it's time to go to bed, don't call that authoritarian: that would be unintelligent. Because both of us have gone into the question of going to bed at a fixed hour, we have agreed. Our relationship then is not authoritarian, not nagging, but through intelligence. We have discussed what time to go to bed and intelligence is telling us, not authority. If I react to your telling me in a friendly way or with annoyance - whether you tell me rudely or politely - it is my lack of intelligence. I don't know if you see that. Questioner: There is also a lack of intelligence in a person who tells me abruptly. Krishnamurti: Of course, none of us is completely intelligent. We are learning - learning the nature, the quality of intelligence. I get angry and say things, and I am aware that I am silly, which is part of intelligence. Next time I will be careful, I will be watchful. So you see, cooperation is an understanding of intelligence. Questioner: I wonder who is seeing, who is watching? Krishnamurti: Yourself. I am angry with you, I say, "Please go to bed at eleven, I have told you ten times." I get irritated and I say to myself, "How silly of me to get irritated with a person who hasn't got the intelligence to see and after discussing it is still late." I see I've got angry. What's the difficulty? Questioner: I am wondering if it's possible to look without the conditioning - the watcher is still in the conditioning. Krishnamurti: No, don't go into the complex problem of the observer. We'll come to that a little later, I'm not disregarding what you're saying, but we are talking now of the quality of intelligence that cooperates. Questioner: If someone says you are authoritarian, of course that's a reaction; but it is also a reaction to get angry. So why not say, "Don't be angry." Krishnamurti: Of course. We are living together, we are trying to see, to help each other, learn from each other. If you refuse to learn because you think you are better, what are we going to do? The younger people think they know everything; what are you going to do if they say, "I disagree with you" and stick to it. Questioner: We're going to go into it. Krishnamurti: But if they refuse to go into it. Questioner: That's what we are doing now, laying the foundations for that. Krishnamurti: That's just it, we are trying to lay the foundations so that we can live together intelligently. Not, you live intelligently and you tell me; or I tell you, but together. It's our responsibility together to be intelligent. Now what does that word mean? According to the dictionary it means to understand, to have the faculty of understanding. Questioner: To choose between different courses is what it literally means. Krishnamurti: Yes, you must have the faculty to choose and that faculty must be intelligent. If I choose out of prejudice it's not intelligence. So if we are laying the foundations of an environment in which our principal concern is to live together intelligently, this demands not only freedom, but self-critical awareness. I must be aware of what I am doing, why I'm doing it, of the consequence of that action; not be obstinate and say, "This is right! This is what I think! I'll stick to it." Then you stop learning, then we have no relationship. Do you see this? Don't agree with me unless you really see it. My problem is: we want to live here happily, freely and intelligently, which we can't do in the world, because the world is brutal, thoughtless. Here we want to create an atmosphere, an environment, build a foundation where we live together, happily, intelligently, in cooperation. I am explaining what intelligent living together means. Find out, don't be silent and then go your own way afterwards. Discuss with me, so that we both learn what it is to be intelligent and live together in cooperation. Intelligence implies the faculty of understanding freedom, and all of us want to be free. We don't want to be under the control of any tyranny, whether of the family or of someone else. And we are trying to find out how to live together freely. I can stay by myself in my loneliness, in my room, dissociated from everybody; that may be what I call my freedom, but I can't live that way. We are human beings in relationship with each other, therefore we must understand what it means to live together in freedom. And that demands intelligence. Now, how are we going to do this? You might have an idea of freedom and I have another idea of it. So I say to myself, "I don't know what it means, I'm going to find out." You see the difference? If you start by saying, "I know what freedom means", it is finished - I don't know if you see this? - then you are not intelligent enough to learn about it. Questioner: You are living in your own tyranny then. Krishnamurti: Of course, you are living in your own soup, which is not very interesting. So we must both understand what it means to be free. Do you want to learn about it? Or do you say, "Don't teach me, I know all about it." When you say that you are already unintelligent, because you are not learning, you are fixed in your idea of what you think is freedom. I want to learn what it means to live together in freedom; therefore the first thing is not to say to myself, "I know what it means." So do you want to learn what freedom means? Because that's what we want to do at Brockwood. I'll show you why. In freedom you can discover new things. In the world of science there must be freedom to discover new things. In human relationship, here, we are discovering, or learning, new things about ourselves. If I am fixed in my opinion, I can't learn. So I must be very careful, be aware of my fixed opinions or judgments; because this is what the world is doing and it's not learning. They have fixed ideas, opinions, conclusions from which they won't budge. And there are young people revolting against that; yet they have their own opinions, their prejudices, their fixed conclusions, so they are like the old. Questioner: What do you do then if people have their fixed opinions? Krishnamurti: People who have opinions, judgments, conclusions which they hold on to are incapable of living together freely, with intelligence. So have you opinions, judgments, conclusions, a tradition? All these things I have, but I am going to learn. You see the difference? After all, this is a place in which we are being educated, not only about geography and history, mathematics and so on, but we are educating ourselves with the help of each other to be highly intelligent when we leave. You may never leave, you may want to become a teacher here, that's up to you. This is an educational centre; an educational centre implies the cultivation of intelligence - which is the subtlety of understanding, the faculty to choose. To choose the right course the mind must be free from every form of prejudice, every form of conclusion. Do you want a place like this where you can be educated, freely, happily, in intelligence? Which means, really, cooperation, doesn't it? I cannot cooperate with you if I emphasize my peculiarities. You understand? If I give importance to length of hair and make that the symbol of revolt, follow the consequences of it. Long hair is now the fashion. Length of hair is a symbol of revolt, a symbol of doing what one likes, because the old generation are short haired: it is a symbol of self-assertive aggression, a symbol of beauty. All these are implied in it, aren't they? A symbol of revolt against war, of revolt against the established order. Do you wear your hair long because it's beautiful? Questioner: It's like a trap. There are two things: short hair is the Establishment, long hair is anti-Establishment. Krishnamurti: I don't say, "Long hair is right" or "Short hair is right". I am asking you: do you wear it because it looks beautiful? Questioner: Well, let's say it makes me feel more comfortable. Krishnamurti: Now go into it very carefully. It makes you feel comfortable. Suppose you sit next to me, unwashed, dirty, smelly and I say I don't want to sit next to you. If it is comfortable to you it must also be comfortable to me, who am sitting at the table next to you. Questioner: Right. Krishnamurti: Long hair does look very nice if it is kept properly - not hanging all over the face - do you do it for that reason? Questioner: I don't know if I do it specifically for that reason, to have nice shiny hair. Krishnamurti: Then why do you keep it long? Questioner: It feels good in the wind and it feels good in the water. Krishnamurti: All right, but you are not in the wind all the time. You have to sit next to me. You are not living alone in this world. We are learning to live together with intelligence, in freedom. Questioner: Yes, but I can see if bugs are crawling out of the hair, if the hair is just left to grow, I can see why you react on your part if you are sitting next to it. Krishnamurti: Wait, I've told you to watch it. As long as it is clean and really looks nice, doesn't smell, what's wrong with it? In Ceylon the men have long hair, they put circular combs in it to keep it tidy and it looks very nice. Are you going to go about like that, with a comb in it? (Laughter.) What's wrong? You see, you are prejudiced, that's what I am getting at. Questioner: It's not really prejudice. I don't have anything against you if you go around with a comb in your hair. Krishnamurti: As I have to live with you, if you are smelly, if you are untidy, I object to it. Questioner: Right. But there's a little confusion for me about the word "tidy". Krishnamurti: So if you feel long hair is right, then wear it. But it means that you have to be clean. Or, do you wear it as a symbol of your revolt against the Establishment? And because I have short hair, does it mean I am accepting the Establishment? See the danger, So why are you wearing long hair? You haven't answered me. Do you do it because everybody does it? - which is imitation, conformity, which is unintelligent. Know what you are doing. Is it part of intelligence? If you said, "Look, I'm growing my hair because I like it, it looks nice, it's clean", I'd accept it immediately. But if you're wearing it as a symbol, then I want to know what that symbol is, because I've got to live with you. Your symbol may mean death to me! I want to find out. Questioner: But isn't there also kinship with your generation? Krishnamurti: But know why you are doing it. Kinship with your generation - is that right? Questioner: Friendship, being related to... Krishnamurti: If you feel related to the long-haired ones and not to the short-haired ones, do you see what you are doing? It means you are creating division, which the older generation has created, and therefore you are following. So you are creating as much destruction as they did. Then to wear the symbol of peace on your shirt means nothing. So what I'm saying is, if we are going to live together in intelligence and freedom, we must both know what we are doing and why we are doing it. Not just cover it up with a lot of words, because that is not intelligence. Why do we have vegetarian food in this place? Do you ask that? You raised the word "tidy". Do you know what it means to be orderly? You don't, do you? Questioner: If I did I wouldn't be here. Krishnamurti: We are going to go into it. To think in an orderly way, to think clearly, to act clearly. Not: to think one thing and do something else; but to think very clearly, objectively, sanely, that is orderly, isn't it? I'm going to bring that word "tidy" into this. To dress neatly is orderly, isn't it? Questioner: I'm not sure. Krishnamurti: What is it you are not sure of? You come into the dining room with naked, dirty feet and I'm sitting next to you. I don't like it because it's not clean, I like to be clean. And you say, that's a prejudice. Is it? Every animal wants to be clean. Questioner: Every animal has naked feet too. Krishnamurti: But it is clean. It's always keeping clean, you've seen it licking itself. Come with clean feet! - which means keep the floor clean. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 4 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 8TH SEPTEMBER 1970 Krishnamurti: What kind of human being are you going to be when you go out into the world? You will have to face so many problems, won't you? Not only economic, social, environmental problems, but also problems of relationship, sex, of how to live intelligently, with great love and affection and not be smothered, corrupted by society. Here, in this school, we are more or less protected and among friends; there can be trust, we are familiar with each other's idiosyncrasies, prejudices, inclinations and tendencies, but when we go out into the world we do not know anybody and we are facing a monstrous world. We have to find out how we are going to meet all this, what kind of mind or intelligence is going to face this. So education becomes of the greatest importance. Education being not merely the acquisition of technical knowledge, but the understanding, with sensitivity and intelligence, of the whole problem of living - in which is included death, love, sex, meditation, relationship, and also conflict, anger, brutality and all the rest of it - that is the whole structure of human existence. If we could face just one issue completely, go into it very deeply, then perhaps we shall be able to relate it to all the others. No problem is something separate, all by itself. It is related to other issues, other problems, other affairs. So if we can take one human problem and enquire into it freely, then we shall be able to see the connection with all other problems. So what shall we talk about together? Questioner: What is the purpose of life? Krishnamurti: It was made very clear the other day that to have a purpose implies a direction: you fix a direction and avoid everything else. If I say, "I want to go to `The Grove' this morning because there are marvellous flowers there", then my whole attention is on getting there and therefore I resist everything else. Similarly, to ask what is the purpose of life is to invite more contradiction, more conflict. I don't know if you really see that? Questioner: Perhaps the real difficulty is communication? Krishnamurti: Is that our difficulty? When you want to say something, you say it, don't you? Questioner: Yes, but communication is to do something together. Krishnamurti: You say communication means doing something together - understanding together, creating together. Is that what you want to discuss? Questioner: (1) Perhaps we have a desire to do things together because we don't feel we can stand alone? Questioner: (2) So perhaps we can discuss right relationship? Questioner: (3) It seems that we are so scattered in our thinking. Krishnamurti: Surely your thoughts are not scattered when you are interested. Do tell me, what interests you? Questioner: Happiness. Krishnamurti: Is that what you are all interested in? - happiness, enjoyment, pleasure, having a good time? Is that what you are going to be interested in not only now when you are adolescent, but right through life? What are you all going to do? Just seek happiness, saying, "If I could have more jewels, more sex, more of this or that I would be happy" - is that what you all want? Questioner: I could be interested in certain other aspects of life, such as politics. Krishnamurti: All right, but if you are interested in politics are you only concerned with one segment of life? If you are really interested in politics you have to be interested in the whole movement of existence and not regard politics as something entirely separate, as most politicians do. Questioner: I could be interested in being an engineer, but also in living as a human being. Krishnamurti: So you are interested in engineering but also in understanding the whole of life. Now which do you consider the most important, the most vital - without putting them in opposition? Questioner: The whole, everything. Krishnamurti: Which includes religion - you follow? If you emphasize engineering and disregard all the rest, then you are a lopsided human being; in fact you are not a human being at all, just a technician. So knowing that, what shall we take to discuss, so that enquiring into it we shall understand that all other problems are included also? Which subject shall we take? Is sex a tremendous problem to you, an issue? Questioner: Well, it doesn't have to be an issue for me, but other people around me make it an issue. Krishnamurti: Do they? Can they? Questioner: Surely they can! Krishnamurti: All right. You are walking down the street and the girls are attracted to you and you say the blame lies with the girls and you are quite blameless! Questioner: No it's not quite that. But take sexual relationship. If I'm having a sexual relationship with someone and other people know about it, then somehow they can make it into a problem. Krishnamurti: Wait a minute. You are here in a school, a so-called Educational Centre; you are sent here by your parents and you have also said you want to come here. So you are not just a separate individual, doing what you like, you are responsible for this place. It is your home and you are responsible for it, for the house and the garden and for keeping it orderly. And you are responsible to your parents, to the people here, to the neighbours -the whole of it. And naturally people are watching what is going on here. They have given money, they have children here, there are the neighbours, the visitors, the people who work here who are interested, they are all watching. So if I want to have a sexual affair with someone here, I have to be fully awake to all the dangers of it and also to all the possible consequences of it. If I'm having an affair with someone here, then the staff who are responsible to your parents, to the neighbourhood and for the welfare of the school, are bound to be concerned, aren't they? They are bound to watch you very carefully; that's not being authoritarian, is it? Questioner: Does anyone else have to know about it? And is it necessarily harmful? Krishnamurti: Can you possibly keep it a secret in a place like this? We have not said it is harmful, or not. We are looking at it and someone says that the other person is to blame. The people who are in charge are keeping an eye on you and they say, "Now look, see what is happening, what you are doing." Is that being authoritarian? Who is making the problem? Are you making the problem, or the people who are concerned for the whole place? You have to be sensitive; you have to know you can't do certain things. If there's a baby, what will happen? Questioner: The one who has the baby is responsible. Krishnamurti: So the mother has the problem? Questioner: And the father too. Krishnamurti: And what happens about all the other people concerned, the parents, the school, the neighbourhood? Perhaps the parents are away in India, or America; did they send you here to produce children who have to be looked after? Questioner: But then, Sir, if boys and girls want to have sexual relationship, it creates a conflict if you can't do it. Krishnamurti: So, you do it. And then what? Questioner: Well, then it becomes a problem. Krishnamurti: What makes the problem? Questioner: It's a problem in that the students are saying contradictory things. On the one hand they don't want to conform, and on the other hand they say, "Why can't I do what I want to do?", which is conforming. Krishnamurti: Both sides are saying that. We have to go a little deeper. Please put yourself in the place of the parent who has sent a son or daughter here to be educated, or in the place of the person who is responsible for running this place, with the boys and girls together. What is your responsibility? (Pause.) You see how you become silent, how you smile differently? Questioner: Even if a mother and a father are very concerned about their child, it doesn't necessarily mean that they stop them having a sexual relationship. Krishnamurti: That is something different. The point is that we are here, in this school, boys and girls together. And perhaps all your glands are working at top speed because of biological urges, and there is all the excitement of showing off, showing one's body and all the rest of it. You know it all much better than I do. Now, what is going to happen, in a place like this? Here you are told to enquire into conformity, to understand it, to use your minds, your intelligence. Then this sexual problem arises, the sex instinct is aroused in a place where lots of boys and girls are together. What are you going to do? Pursue your biological urge secretly or openly? Come on, do discuss this. Questioner: Well, in America many of the students would say, "Yes." Krishnamurti: I know that many of the students in America, or France, or in the universities here say, "That's none of your business." Questioner: And if you put it the other way round, if you say, "I won't pursue my biological urge," what then? Krishnamurti: First let us see what is involved in the whole of it - not just my personal biological urge. Don't just say that the parents and the people who are concerned about this place are making me conform, that they are authoritarian. This place is in the public eye. The public eye may be corrupt, stupid, but if this centre gets a bad name then the whole future of the school is in jeopardy; then the place may have to shut down. You must take all this into consideration. So what will you do with your biological urge? Come on, let's discuss it. What will you do? You have investigated so far, you have thought about your parents, your responsibility here, the responsibilities to the parents of those who are in charge, of the neighbourhood, of the future of the school. Questioner: But aren't the students equally in charge here, not only the staff? Krishnamurti: I have said that. This is your home, the home of all of you, and therefore you are all responsible for what happens here. So, what is your action then? Knowing that biologically everything is supercharged, what will you do? After all, you read the magazines, the newspapers, the stories, you go to the cinema, you've seen the half-naked girls and you know about the whole thing. Now what is your responsibility? Please discuss with me. That is one of the problems of life and you don't want to face it. But you can't brush it under the carpet. How are you going to deal with a problem of that kind with a mind that is not completely mature? Because you are all very young, you understand? Your minds have not yet become tremendously active, sensitive and intelligent You are faced with this problem and naturally you want to avoid it. There is fear and apprehension. How is your mind going to be intelligent enough to deal with it? Because society all around you is pushing you in that one direction, through clothes, fashion - everything leads to wards sex. In India kissing on the screen is not allowed. When you go out into the world the problem is there and even if you are married it is there. So how will you have an intelligence that will deal with this problem without any kind of resistance, conflict or suppression? If you yield to it, it will become another form of neurosis; if you suppress it, it will also lead to neurosis; if you resist it, it will do terrible things to you. You know what happens to people who resist all these things? They become bottled up, they get angry about nothing, they become hysterical. So how can one bring about a mind that is capable of neither resisting, suppressing, nor yielding? This is a real problem. How do you have a mind that is sensitive, alert, sharp and also extraordinarily capable of responding to beauty - the beauty of a woman or of a child? How do you come by it? When you have examined a problem thoroughly and you come to this point, what do you do? You say, don't you: "I don't know what to do," and then you say, "Let's drop it." You follow? To live a life without effort, without conformity, without suppression, without resistance, without following the crowd - going to parties, the whole stupefying process of modern existence: that is real education. Now watch! - because this issue will exist right through life. As we have said, if you suppress it there is danger it will explode in other directions; and if you yield, or play tricks with it, it will destroy you, destroy the mind. So the mind has learnt not to suppress and not to yield, not to make an immense problem of it. Is this clear to you? Does it mean anything to you? Or do you say: "Let him talk, we'll have our pleasures, we'll get married, carry on, and then we'll face it"? Have you ever asked why human beings give such extraordinary importance to this one thing, to sex? Throughout the world it is much more important than money, much more important than religion. In the West it is talked about freely, exposed. In the East it is all kept behind locked doors, whether one is married or not. Why, do you think, has it become a thing of such colossal importance? Questioner: (1) Maybe it's because of the pleasure; it is something you can have without money. Questioner: (2) Could it be that people have a lot of energy in them which they haven't used on other things, and therefore they use it in this direction? Krishnamurti: Go on, push at it, create together, contribute! Don't just sit there and let me do all the work! Questioner: It may be an escape from a sorrow, or a problem. Krishnamurti: So look at it! We have been working together, understanding together, communicating. You have said sex has become so important because of the pleasure, the surplus energy, as an escape from the daily routine. Now is that what is happening to you? I don't say you are having sexual affairs, I'm just asking: is this what your mind is groping after? - seeking pleasure, escaping from the monotony of school, of learning this or that, and therefore your mind goes off, creating images? Questioner: Is it not also that we are looking for affection? This one thing is not found because people are always pointing out that it is not right. Krishnamurti: Is this what you are doing? Are you saying that you want affection, you want kindliness, tenderness, concern, something real, and because you don't get it you think you'll get it through pleasure, through sex? Of course you need affection as you need sunshine, rain and clouds. But why do you seek it? Why do you say so-and-so doesn't show me affection? Questioner: Because affection makes you feel better. Krishnamurti: Go deeper. Questioner: It feeds your ego. Krishnamurti: Go on, push at it! Questioner: You become closer to a person and you want to really get near to people and know them. Krishnamurti: That is, you say you want affection from others because it makes you feel comfortable and happy, you feel you can blossom. Questioner: And also there is something you want to give. Krishnamurti: Yes, you want to give and to share, all that. So go on, what does it all mean? I am seeking affection from others: what does that mean? Questioner: There is a lack of affection in myself. Krishnamurti: What does that mean, the lack of affection in yourself? Look, a spring of water is bubbling over all the time, isn't it? - giving, pouring out. And it is only when my own spring of affection is not functioning deeply that I want somebody else to give it to me. Right? Questioner: It's not always that way. Krishnamurti: Why do you say, "Not always"? please listen to this carefully. If you have deep affection in yourself for everything - not just for one, but for everything - love for the trees, the birds, the flowers, the fields and for human beings - if you really feel that way, will you even occasionally say, "I wish someone would show me affection"? Isn't it only when there is emptiness inside you that you want others to be with you? So you have learnt something, haven't you? Your mind now is actively observing, looking intelligently, and you see that where there is no affection in oneself, you want affection from others. That is translated as sex, relationship, and when that emptiness within seeks a relationship through sex and through a constant companionship, then you become jealous, fearful, angry. You follow? Please see all the consequences of it. So sex isn't the problem. The problem is to have an intelligent mind and in the very observing of all this it becomes highly intelligent and this intelligence will deal with sex. I don't know if you follow? Have you understood it? Questioner: It also means, in turn, that one can have a sexual relationship without having a problem. Krishnamurti: I don't say that. Questioner: I mean, there's a possibility. Krishnamurti: No, no. I wouldn't put it that way. First, be intelligent, then that intelligence will answer the problem rightly, whatever it is. Have an intelligent mind not a distorted mind. A distorted mind says, "That is what I want and I'm going after it." Which means that it has no concern for the whole, but only for its own little demands - it has not been watching the whole process. So here it is your responsibility to have this intelligence, and if you don't have it, then don't blame somebody else. You know, to live intelligently in this way becomes an extraordinary, a tremendous thing; there is real enjoyment in this. But along the other way you live with fear. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 5 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 31ST JANUARY 1970 Krishnamurti: In a school like this, what is order and what is discipline? The word "discipline" means "to learn". A "disciple" is one who learns, not who conforms, not who obeys; he is one who is constantly learning. And when learning ceases and becomes merely accumulation of knowledge then disorder begins. When we stop learning in our relationship, whether we are studying, playing, or whatever we are doing, and merely act from the knowledge that we have accumulated, then disorder comes. Discipline is learning. You say something, such as, "Don't give the dogs too much food" or, "Go to bed early" or, "Be punctual", "Keep the room tidy". You tell me that and I am learning. Life, living, is a movement in learning and if I resist your telling me what to do, the resistance is the assertion of my own particular accumulated knowledge; therefore I cease to learn and so create a conflict between you and me. Questioner: Does this apply to students only or to anybody? Krishnamurti: To life, not only to students, to human beings. Questioner: But everybody is not a disciple. Krishnamurti: Everybody is learning. "Disciple" means "one who learns". But the generally accepted meaning is that a disciple is one who follows someone, some guru, some silly person. But both the follower and the one who is followed are not learning. Questioner: But if we follow somebody who is not silly? Krishnamurti: You cannot follow anybody. The moment you follow somebody you are making yourself an idiot and the one whom you follow is also an idiot - because they have stopped learning. So, what do you do about discipline, about order? Are you learning about everything? - not only about geography, history and all the rest of it, but learning about relationship? We are living together in this house, each pulling in a different direction, each wanting something, each resisting somebody else saying, "Oh, he or she has become authoritarian." All such assertions, all such resistances, and doing what one thinks one wants to do - does not all that create disorder? If you say, "I'm doing what I want to do; I'm being natural; it's my nature and you are not going to tell me what to do" - if you say that, and I say the same, what then takes place? What is our relationship? Can we ever do anything "naturally"? This is a very serious question, if you follow what I mean. Are you natural, any of you? Of course you are not! You are influenced - by your father, by your mother, by society, by your culture, by the climate, the food, the clothes, the propaganda. You are completely influenced and then you say, "I must be natural!" It has no meaning. You say, "I want to do what I think is the right thing" or, "I am a free person". You are not! You are not free. Freedom is something tremendous and to start out saying, "I am free" has no meaning. You don't even know what it means. Questioner: Then how can you say, "It is tremendous"? Krishnamurti: It is tremendous when one is free, but one is not. Can one realize that one is not free? Freedom means freedom from fear. It means freedom from any form of resistance. Freedom means a movement without isolation. It means having no resistance at all. So are you free? We are frightened, we resist, we are isolated within our own little ideas, wants and desires, obviously. So when you say "freedom" and "natural", those two words have no meaning. You can only be free when you have understood how deeply you are conditioned and are free of that conditioning. Then one can be free, then one is natural. You know what order means? To have a lot of space, doesn't it? In a little room where there is no space it is more difficult to have order. You don't agree? You'll see it in a minute. Somebody told me about an experiment with rats: they put a lot of rats in a very small space and because they had no space they began to kill each other - the mother killed her babies. But we also need space inwardly. More and more cities are becoming overcrowded. You ought to go to India and see some of the big towns like Calcutta, Bombay or Delhi - you have no idea what it is like, the noise, the shouting, the people. They are like ants on the streets and, having no space, they are exploding in violence. Here we must have space; the house itself is limited in size, so what will you do? Outwardly there is limited space and also how are you going to have inward space? You understand what I mean by inward space? Our minds are so crowded with a thousand ideas there is no space at all, even between two thoughts, between two ideas; between two emotions there is no space, no interval. But unless you have space there is no order, Order means learning, doesn't it? Learning about everything, So, if somebody tells me I am a fool, I want to learn the truth of it; I want to find out. I don't merely resist it and say, "You're another." I want to see, I want to listen, to learn. Therefore, learning brings order and resistance brings disorder. So though outwardly I may not have space, because the world is getting more and more crowded, I want to see if I can have space inwardly. If I have no space inwardly, then I a bound to create disorder. What do you say to this? Here we are, a group of teenagers and they revolt against the established order, which is natural, inevitable. We have come here with those ideas, those feelings, and anybody who tells us anything we call "authoritarian". So what are we going to do? How do we live differently here, act differently, be happy differently? Otherwise, you know what is going to happen? You will be thrown into the jungle of the world, thrown to a lot of wolves and you will be destroyed. In India, about three to four thousand people apply for every job. You understand what that means? They advertised for a cook and do you know who applied? - B.A.s, M.A.s and Ph.Ds! And it is going to get worse, right throughout the world. So at a school of this kind we have to learn. I am using the word "learn" in the right sense: to find out, explore relationship, because after all that is how we live. Society is the relationship between man and man. And it is essential that we learn here how to live, what relationship is, what love is. We must learn, not just say, "This is love" or, "That's not love" or, "This is authority", "That's not authority" - all those absurd statements have no meaning. But if we can actually learn together, then I think that this school has some meaning. In India, at the school in the south, there are little boys from the ages of six up to eighteen, and we talk about everything. In India the word "meditation" is a tremendous word. There meditation has some meaning. And while I was talking about it, there they were, a whole group of boys, and yet they sat completely still. It was extraordinary how they did it! They shut their eyes, sat cross-legged and were absolutely quiet. It is part of the tradition there that you must meditate - whatever that may mean to them. You must sit quite still, and you must have a good feeling about life... So how are we, all of us, going to create this together? Not you alone, or Mrs. Simmons, or me - but all of us together. How can we do this? Questioner: (1) Is it only together that we can do this? Questioner: (2) Did you say, "Not individually, but together"? Krishnamurti: Together. You know what the word "individual" means? - indivisible. An individual means one who is not divisible in himself. But we are divisible, we are broken up, we are not individuals. We are little fragments, broken, divided. Look, where does one feel completely secure, safe, protected? And you must have complete security. Questioner: When you have trust in another? Krishnamurti: Yes, and also at home, don't you? Home is supposed to be that place where you are completely safe, which you can trust, where you are protected. This is your home, isn't it? -for eight months of the year this is your home. But you don't feel secure here, do you? Questioner: I do. Krishnamurti: Do you? That's good. But do you all? See what it means to be completely at home, where you are completely secure. The brain demands security; otherwise it can't function efficiently, clearly. It is only when the brain cells feel insecure that one becomes neurotic; one goes off balance. And this a place where you are at home, where you are completely safe. Questioner: What do you do if this isn't so? Krishnamurti: I'm coming to that. One needs safety, protection, trust, confidence and a feeling that you can do anything without destroying this. In a place like this you don't feel at home in that sense, do you? Who is going to make it for you? You understand what I'm talking about? Who is going to provide you with this environment of complete protection? I don't think you understand it. Do you know what it means, to be completely protected? You know how a baby needs complete protection, otherwise it cries? It must have its food regularly, it must be washed, taken care of, otherwise it is harmed. Now we are growing up and who is going to provide this home for us? Mrs. Simmons, or somebody like me? The day after tomorrow I'm gone. So who is going to provide it for us? Questioner: All of us. Krishnamurti: You are going to create it yourselves, you are going to build it. And if you don't build it, it is your fault. You can't say to Mrs. Simmons, "I want complete security and you are not providing it for me." This is your home and you are building it, you are creating it. If you don't feel at home here it is your fault. Find out about it, bring it about. Bring about this feeling that you are completely at home. Questioner: Could you go into this question of security because I think we don't understand it. Security for what? Not security for an idea. You see, we identify ourselves with an idea. Krishnamurti: No! Security, feeling completely safe, security not with ideas but with people. Don't you know what it means? Questioner: (1) I'm not sure. Questioner: (2) It's something we don't know. Some of us have come here because we have ideas about it. Krishnamurti: First of all look! I haven't studied neurology and the structure of the brain, but just watch yourself and you can easily find out. Where the brain feels completely at rest, safe, protected, it functions perfectly, beautifully. Have you ever tried it? It thinks very clearly, can learn very quickly, everything functions beautifully, without friction - that is safety. That is to be completely secure. The brain cells themselves feel there is no conflict. Why should you be in conflict with me or I with you? When you tell me: "Keep the room in order", why should I feel, "Oh, how terrible"? Why shouldn't I be told that? But it creates a conflict in me. Why? Because I have stopped learning. Are we meeting each other? It is your home and you have to build it, not somebody else. It is where you feel completely safe, otherwise you can't learn properly, otherwise you reduce this place to something just like the outside world, where each one is against the other. Safety means the brain cells themselves are in perfect harmony, in perfect equilibrium, in a sense of being healthy, quiet. That is home; and this place is your home. If you don't make it so, it is your fault. And if you see disorder in your own room, you have to make order there because it is your home. So you can never say, "I'm going to leave this place," because it's your home (though you may have to leave it one day). Do you know what that does when you feel completely at home, without fear, where you are open, where you are trusting? Not that you must have trust in somebody, but have the capacity of trusting, of generosity - it doesn't matter what the other does. I don't know if you are following all this? Questioner: When you say, "It does not matter what the other does", what do you mean? Krishnamurti: Look, you tell me something. Why do you tell me? Questioner: Because it's your idea of what is needed. Krishnamurti: No, no. Why do you or Mrs. Simmons tell me to keep my room in order? Before I say that I will or I won't, find out why you are telling me that. Questioner: (1) Because you're not doing it. Questioner: (2) Because they like order. Krishnamurti: No. You haven't understood my question. Do listen to it before you answer. I've told you ten times to keep your room in order and the eleventh time I get irritated. Then you say I'm bossy. Now, why have I told you this at all? Find out why. Is it because I want to express my egotism, my idea of what order is, my idea that you should behave in this way? Saying, "Go to bed", "Be punctual", imposing my idea on your idea. You answer, "Why should I keep my room in order? Who are you? It is my room." So what takes place then? Questioner: A struggle. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Questioner: Confusion... Krishnamurti: It means, really, that you don't feel at home. You are not learning. Right? Conflict exists only when you are not learning. You come and tell me : "Keep your room in order", and I listen to you, I learn. And you also find out why you are telling me. Do you follow what I mean? If you want to burn the place down... it's your home. If you want to keep the gardens, the house, the rooms untidy and have a messy way of eating, well, it's your home. But if somebody tells me: "Don't put your feet on the table when you're eating", I say "Quite right." I learn. Questioner: If somebody says to me: This is your country... Krishnamurti: Oh no. Please don't extend it. It is not "my country". I am talking about a home. If somebody tells me it is my country and for that country I must kill someone, that's sheer nonsense... Questioner: But can one be learning in that relationship too? Krishnamurti: Of course! Learning means learning. Questioner: Yes, but there is also resistance. Krishnamurti: No, no. You haven't understood the meaning. Questioner: I don't go and kill. Krishnamurti: We are discussing a school, living together here. If I know how to live here, learn here, then I will know what to do when the Government or the State says: "Go and kill somebody." If I don't know how to learn to live, I shan't be able to reply properly. Questioner: There's something I don't really have straight. If I walk around and I don't wear shoes and somebody says, "You should wear shoes..." Krishnamurti: What happens? You don't wear shoes and I come along and say, "Please put on your shoes." Questioner: I would probably say, "I don't want to put on my shoes!" Krishnamurti: Find out why I am asking you to. There are two people concerned, aren't there - you and I. I am asking you to put on your shoes. Why? Either I am conventional, or I want to boss you, or I see your feet are dirty, you'll dirty the carpet, or because it doesn't look nice to have dirty feet. I want to see that you understand what I am talking about. Questioner: Shouldn't you tell me, then? Krishnamurti: Yes, that's why I am telling you. I'm not telling you because I'm orthodox, you follow? I explain all this to you and you resist and say, "Why not? I did it at home, why not here?" Because here it's a different country, a different climate. And the crowd round about you, the neighbours, say: "What's the matter with all those people there, going about half naked?" You set up a bad reputation. You see all that is involved in it. So you have to learn about all this, which does not mean that you conform to the bourgeois. Questioner: I don't understand. If you're worried about what the others think, the others on the outside... Krishnamurti: I'm not worried. I'm living in the world. If the outside people give this place a bad reputation, what happens? Questioner: Trouble, probably. Krishnamurti: That's it. You will soon have to close the place. There are nasty people in the world. Questioner: And then there will not be the security which we need. Krishnamurti: That's just it. So learn about it! Don't say: "Why shouldn't I do what I like, to hell with the outside world, they're stupid." I have to learn, I have to live in the stupid world. To come back to the point. How are we, each one of us, going to make this our home? It's your job! Home means where you have energy, where you are creative, where you are happy, where you are active, where you are alive and not just learning from some book or other. I have been travelling, talking, for the last fifty years. I go from country to country, from a room to a different room, different food, different climate. Wherever I am that little room is my home. You understand? I'm at home, I feel completely safe because I have no resistance. So how are you going to make this place into your home from today? If you don't, will you allow someone to tell you that you don't? If I come along and say, "Look, you are not making this into your home", will you listen to me then? Or will you say: "What do you mean? It is my home, I interpret `home' in a different way from you." You interpret the idea of home in one way and I interpret it in another way and we quarrel. Then it's not a home! The interpretation of an idea of what you consider to be a home does not bring about a home, but to have the real feeling of it - and that implies a certain yielding. Which doesn't mean that you accept authority. If someone wants to come here who says, "These are all a lot of rather immature children" (Sorry, but you are), "What's going on here?" - and he is a disturbing factor - how will you deal with him? Will you all say: "Let's vote for him. We like his face, his appearance, or whatever it is, and therefore we alI agree that he should come"? Is that the reason you are going to accept him? He may be a drunkard; he may do all kinds of things. How will you act? These are the problems which you are going to have to face in life. Do you understand? How are you going to meet it all? Thank God I have no children - but I feel this very strongly here. You are going to leave this place and be thrown to the wolves and you are not capable of meeting all this. You think you are all very clever -but you're not. So, how can we live here wisely, with care and affection, so that when you go out into the world you are prepared for the monstrous things that are happening? How will you bring about order in this house? Do please consider this seriously. As you pass by a room, if you see everything lying on the floor - what will you do? Questioner: Pick it up. Krishnamurti: And do that every day? (Laughter.) Questioner: You ask him to put his things away. Krishnamurti: And he doesn't! Questioner: Tell him why he should. Remind him. Krishnamurti: All right. You remind me ten times! Questioner: You tell him why. Krishnamurti: Yes, you tell me all that but I'm sleepy. I don't care. I don't learn. I am dull-witted. What are you going to do? Beat me up? And I consider it's my home too, as well as yours. What are you going to do with me? You don't answer! It is your home, and if you have a room in disorder some part of the house is being destroyed. It's like setting fire to a house. What will you do? Questioner: Put it out! Krishnamurti: You put it out every day and he lights it every day? Find out. Don't give it up. It's your life! (Pause.) What do you say, what do you do? It's your home and I dirty the floor every day. How are you going to deal with me? Questioner: The problem is that somebody cares about it and somebody else doesn't care about it. Krishnamurti: What will you do? Questioner: Find out why. Krishnamurti: Yes. And I'll tell you all the reasons! You see, you're missing the point. I keep my room in disorder; there is dirt on the carpet, I dirty everything. What will you do with me? You have told me ten times and I go on doing it. Questioner: If there is no communication... Krishnamurti: What are you going to do? Don't say "no communication". You are all finding excuses. Let's put it another way. You are responsible, you are the Principal... what are you going to do? Questioner: It's as you say. If there is dirt and it's like a fire, there is no end to it. Either you say, "You are part of this home,you should take care of it" or, " You can't destroy the home". Krishnamurti: So what are you going to do with me? Questioner: Well, if you feel it's your home you'll do it, won't you? Krishnamurti: Then, why don't I? Questioner: (Many interjections.) Krishnamurti: Go into it. You will see. The moment I come here it's your responsibility to see that I understand what it means to feel at home. Not after making an awful mess of it. Perhaps you and I feel at home. But make the third person feel at home, then you will have order. But if you don't care and I don't care, then the other person says, "All right, I'll do as I like." So all of us are going to bring about this feeling that it is our home. Not Mrs. Simmons going round putting everything in order and telling us what to do and what not to do. We are all doing it together. Do you know what vitality it will give you? What energy you will have? Because now the energy is wasted in sentimental emotionalism and conflicts. When we feel that this is our home we will have tremendous vitality. Questioner: Well, everybody comes from different backgrounds, and therefore it is... Krishnamurti: Quite right. But they all want one thing: security. Questioner: Yes, but it's just their own form of security. Krishnamurti: Ah no - not your form of security and my form of security, but the feeling in which there is no fear. A feeling of being completely together. A sense of, "I can trust you", "I can tell you anything about myself." It's not my telling you in my own way or having particular idiosyncrasies, but I feel at home, I feel a sense of complete protection. Don't you know what it all means? Probably you don't feel this at home when you go back? Questioner: Well, when you go home you feel at home. I think I do. But I don't keep my room that neat. When I come here, I don't know why I should be so neat here. Krishnamurti: It s not a question of neatness. First, it's the feeling. As we have said, one functions better when one feels completely safe, and most of us don't feel safe anywhere because we build a wall of resistance round ourselves, we have isolated ourselves. In that isolation we may feel safe, but that isolation can be broken into at any time. Now, is there the feeling of having no resistance? I don't know if you understand this? When we are really friends, when I love you and you love me - not sex and all that - but really feeling together, then we are safe, aren't we? You will protect me and I will protect you in the sense of working together, but not in the sense of resisting others. Now, can't we live like this? Can't we create that feeling here? Otherwise, what's the point of all this? Can't we have a sense of well-being, a sense of caring, of affection, love? Surely, then we shall create something totally new! Look what happens. A mother brings up a baby. Think of the care - months and months of getting up at two o'clock at night; and then as the children grow up they are pushed out. Society swallows them up and sends them to Vietnam or somewhere else. And here there is this sense of being so safe. And you have to create it because it's your home, your furniture, your books, your food, your carpet. You understand? I know a man who said to his daughter: "You are going to get married and I know what that means. You will always be in trouble, you will be in strife with your husband and all the rest of it. But here you always have a room. It's your home." Do you know what happened? There was tremendous trouble between husband and wife. But she used to come to this room and become quiet, rest, and be happy in it, even if only for a little while. I used to know the family fairly well. Questioner: But in the story the girl is only being quiet, resting in the room. Krishnamurti: Yes, but you can see the implication for this place. Questioner: When one has accomplished this feeling of being at home, one is at home anywhere. Krishnamurti: Then begin here. Then you will be at home anywhere. Questioner: And you don't just "accomplish" it. You go on accomplishing it. Krishnamurti: But if you don't know what the feeling is now, when you are young, and don't create it, then later on it is too late. Do you know anything about meditation? You are interested in sex, aren't you? You are interested in being entertained; you are interested in learning geography, history - interested casually. You are interested in many things, aren't you? Meditation is part of life; don't say it's something outside for some silly people. It's part of existence, so you must know about it as you must know about mathematics, electronics or whatever it is. Do you know what it means to meditate? The dictionary meaning of the word is "to ponder", "to think over","to ruminate", "to enquire into". Shall we talk a little about it? When you sit very quietly, or lie down very quietly, the body is completely relaxed, isn't it? Have you ever tried to sit very, very quietly? Not to force it, because the moment you force it, it is finished. To sit very quietly, either with your eyes closed or open. If you have your eyes open there is a little more distraction, you begin to see things. So, after looking at things, the curve of the tree, the leaves, the bushes, after looking at it all with care, then close your eyes. Then you will not say to yourself, "What's happening, let me look." First look at everything - the furniture, the colour of the chair, the colour of the sweater, look at the shape of the tree. After having looked, the desire to look out is less. I've seen that blue sky and I've finished with it and I won't look again. But you must first look. Then you can sit quietly. When you sit quietly, or lie down very quietly, the blood flows easily into your head, doesn't it? There is no strain. That's why they say you must sit cross-legged with head very straight, because the blood flows easier that way. If you sit crouched it is more difficult for the blood to go into the head. So you sit or lie down very, very quietly. Don't force it, don't fidget. If you fidget, then watch it, don't say, "I must not." Then, when you sit very quietly, you watch your mind. First, you watch the mind. Don't correct it. Don't say, "This thought is good, that thought is not good" just watch it. Then you will see that there is a watcher and the watched. There is a division. The moment there is a division there is conflict. Now, can you watch without the watcher? Is there a watching without the watcher? It is the watcher that says, "This is good and that is bad", "This I like and that I don't like" or, "I wish she hadn't said this or that", "I wish I had more food". watch without the watcher - try it some time. That's part of meditation. Just begin with that. That's good enough. And you will see, if you have done it, what an extraordinary thing takes place... your body becomes very, very intelligent. Now the body is not intelligent because we have spoiled it. You understand what I mean? We have destroyed the natural intelligence of the body itself. Then you will find that the body says: "Go to bed at the right time." It wants it, it has its own intelligence and activity. And also if it wants to be lazy, let it be lazy. Oh, you don't know what all this means! You try it. When I come back in April we'll sit down together twice a week and go into all this, shall we? Good! I feel you ought to leave this place highly intelligent. Not just pass some exams, but be tremendously intelligent, aware, beautiful persons. At least that is how I feel for you. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 6 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 23RD MAY 1972 Krishnamurti: Has one got creative energy and how can one release it? You know what I mean by that? We've got plenty of energy when we want to do something. When we want to do it very badly, we've got enough energy to do it. When we want to play or go for a long walk we have energy. When we want to hurt people, we have energy. When we get angry, that's an indication of energy. When we talk endlessly, that's also an expression of energy. Now what is the difference between this and creative energy? Does this interest you? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: What is the difference - I'm just thinking aloud now - what is the difference between physical energy, and energy that is brought about through friction, such as anger, tension, dislike. There is purely physical energy, and there is the energy derived through tension, through conflict, through ambition. And is there any other kind of energy? We only know these two. The energy that a good, healthy body has - tremendous energy. And the energy that one gets through every kind of struggle, friction, conflict. Have you noticed this? The great writers who lead terrible lives, miserable lives of conflict in their relationship with others and with people generally: this tension gives them a tremendous energy. And because they've got a certain capacity, a gift to write, that energy expresses itself through writing. You see all this? Now what kind of energy have you? Physical energy - naturally, being young, you should have plenty of it, an abundance of it. And have you the other kind of energy which drives you, through hate, through anger, through ambition, through tension, through conflict, resistance? Because if I resist you I have tremendous energy. I dislike you, I fight you, because I want to have your - whatever it is - and that gives me energy. And behind that energy there is a motive. Now you see the two types: physical energy; and energy which comes through conflict and resistance, through fear, or the pursuit of pleasure. Is there any other kind of energy? Is there energy which is without motive? I want to get a job because I need it; and the drive for it, the necessity for a job, this gives enough energy to ask, demand, push, be aggressive. There is a motive behind it. And where there is motive, the energy is always restricted, limited. The moment there is a motive, it acts as a brake. You see the point? So have you that kind of energy that is always having a brake put on it because it has a motive? Discuss with me! I'm just thinking it out. Have you ever done anything without a motive? A motive such as fear, like and dislike, wanting something from someone, being as good as another: those are all motives which drive one forward. Now do you know any action without any motive? Is there such action at all? We're enquiring. What do you say? Questioner: The problem being... whether you're conscious or not of the motive - because you can have an action with a motive but if you're... Krishnamurti: Unconscious of it... Questioner: ...then you... Krishnamurti: Quite right. So you're saying, I may think I am acting without a motive and yet have a motive which is hidden. Questioner: Yes; or the contrary. Krishnamurti: Or the contrary. Now which is it in yourself, enquire, go into yourself, find out? Look at yourself. Do you know what it is to look at yourself? Don't you look at yourself in the mirror when you comb your hair - you do, don't you? Now what do you see? You see your reflection in the mirror, exactly what you look like is reflected there, unless the mirror is crooked or cracked. Can you look at yourself in the same way as see yourself in the mirror? Look at yourself without any distortion, without any twist, without any deviation, just to see exactly as you see yourself in a mirror. And only then you will find out whether you are acting with a motive or without a motive. Can you look at yourself very simply and very clearly, as though you were looking at yourself in a mirror? You know, it's very difficult, what we're talking about. I don't know whether you have ever done it; we're investigating into the question whether all our actions - going to meals punctually, getting up, whatever we do - have a motive behind them. Or is there a certain sense of freedom to move? Questioner: What do you mean by freedom to move? Krishnamurti: Freedom just to move, without fear, without resistance, without a motive - to live. And to find that out! We're saying, you have enough physical energy - if you want to build a model aeroplane you build it. It would take time, you investigate, you enquire, you read about it, you put your mind and heart into it and build it. That requires a great deal of energy. The motive there is the interest to build. In that, is there any friction, any struggle, any resistance? You want to build that aeroplane. I come along and prevent you and say, "Please, don't be silly, that's childish" - and you resist me, because your interest is to build. Now see what happens when you resist me, you're wasting your energy, aren't you? And therefore you have less energy to build the aeroplane. Go into it, take time, watch it. Now can your interest not be weakened, though I resist you, though I say you are silly? You see the point? I want to go out for a walk, for it's a lovely day. I want to see the trees, listen to the birds, see the new leaf, the marvellous spring day, I want to go out. And you come along and say, "Please help me in the kitchen." What takes place? I'm bored in the kitchen, I don't want to go because my interest is to go out for a walk. So there is a division in me, isn't there? The division is a waste of energy, isn't it? I want to go out for a walk so much and you come and ask me, "Please help me in the kitchen." Which shall I do? Come on, I'm doing all the investigation, you just listen! What shall I do? Knowing that it's a wastage of energy if I say, "Oh what a bore the kitchen is and I really want to go out for a walk." What shall I do, so that I shall not waste energy? Come on, discuss with me. What shall I do? Questioner: What do you mean by waste of energy? Krishnamurti: I'll show you. You ask me to come and help you in the kitchen. I really want to go out for a walk. If I am only doing what I want to do and go out for a walk, what happens to your question, "Come and help me?" I have a feeling of guilt, don't I. "All my walk is spoilt," I say. "Oh Lord, I ought to have gone," - I fight. That's a wastage of energy, isn't it? Questioner: You mean just the conflict. Krishnamurti: Conflict is a wastage of energy, isn't it? So what shall I do, knowing if I yield to you, if I come to the kitchen, I say, "My God, what a lovely day it is, why am I not out." And if I do go out for a walk I'll be saying, "My goodness, I should be in the kitchen." Questioner: See what's needed more. Krishnamurti: No, not what is more needed. How would you answer this, so that I do something without wastage of energy, which is conflict. You've understood my question, have you? Come on, Rachael, what shall I do? I don't want to have a struggle in myself. I shall have a struggle if I go out for a walk you've asked me to come and help you. If I go into the kitchen and I really want to go out for a walk, I'll also have a struggle in myself. I want to do something without a struggle. What shall I do in these circumstances? Questioner: Explain your feelings to the person who's asked you. Krishnamurti: Why should I explain? Questioner: So the person will understand. Krishnamurti: Yes, he asked me to come and help him, he wants my help - too few people want to peel potatoes, so he asked my help. Can I talk to him and say, "Look, I really want to go out for a walk, it's such a lovely day - do come with me." But the potatoes have to be peeled. So what shall I do? Questioner: Act responsibly, responsively. Krishnamurti: Act responsively, that is, act with responsibility, are you saying? Now what is my responsibility here - I'd love to go out for a walk, that's my responsibility too. So what shall I do? Questioner: How does one know that the walk gives more pleasure than the kitchen? Krishnamurti: It's a beautiful day, lovely clouds and to go and peel potatoes is terrible when the birds are calling! So what shall I do? Use your brain cells, come on! Questioner: (1) It doesn't matter what you do as long as, after you've said that you're really not going to help in the kitchen, you go out for the walk - as long as you just leave it there. Questioner: (2) You go to the kitchen and afterwards you go for the walk. (Laughter.) Krishnamurti: When I do go for a walk, I'll be tortured by my conscience or whatever it is. Questioner: But if you understand the whole situation, would there be this conflict? Krishnamurti: What is the whole situation? The kitchen, the lovely sunlight and shade, and my desire to go out for a walk. Questioner: This happened to me... Krishnamurti: This happens to all of us. Questioner: The point being, whatever you do, you're going to be in conflict. Krishnamurti: No, I'm not going to be in conflict. Questioner: If the kitchen really needs me, I'll go and help in the kitchen. Krishnamurti: He says he needs you, so you'll go there. But what happens to your walk? Questioner: You go afterwards. The walk's always there... Krishnamurti: Wait - there are huge clouds and darkness comes. And I say, "It's raining, why did you spoil my walk." Questioner: ...you'd probably have got wet anyway. (Laughter.) Krishnamurti: What do you do, go into the kitchen? Or say, "Go to hell, I'm going for a walk?" Questioner: You act. Krishnamurti: What is your action based on? Questioner: Just direct energy. Krishnamurti: You say you'll act - what is that action in which there is no conflict? Listen to it, what will you do in this situation when two things are contradictory - kitchen, walk? Have you got my question right? Questioner: What is the thing that creates the conflict? Krishnamurti: The conflict is: the contradictory demands, the demand to go out for a walk and your demand for my help. I'm pulled in two directions. Now what shall I do so that there is only one direction in which there is no conflict. You understand the beauty of this question? Questioner: When you see the urgency of helping in the kitchen... Krishnamurti: You see the urgency of the demand and you drop yours. Can you drop your desire, which is very strong, to go out for a walk, and comply to his demand, totally? Will you do that? Questioner: When I see the urgency of his demand... Krishnamurti: Can you drop your urgency to go for a walk and accept his demand with grace, with ease, without any conflict? Questioner: If you see the danger of the conflict. Krishnamurti: Do you see the danger of conflict, that it is poisonous, that it is a wastage of energy, that it doesn't lead anywhere? So can you drop your desire for a walk and just walk into the kitchen, equally happy, equally at ease, and forget your walk altogether? Because if you don't forget your walk, it's going to keep on nagging at you, isn't it? Questioner: Surely everything is making these demands on us all the time, silently, verbally and non-verbally. Krishnamurti: Everything is based on this. That's what I'm getting at. I want to stay in bed and I have to be punctual for breakfast. You go into the kitchen with a grudge, don't you? So I am asking, can you do something contrary to your desire and yet be in a state in which conflict doesn't exist. This is life, this is what happens all the time. Someone wants me to do something and I want to do something else. And then they begin to nag me and I resist. Questioner: On the other hand, if you always yield... Krishnamurti: If I'm always yielding I become a doormat. So can I find out how to act when there are contradictory demands -an action in which there is no friction, there is no grudge, there is no resistance, no antagonism. Can you do this? Questioner: It depends how strong the desire is. Krishnamurti: However strong, the mind is intense. Questioner: I compare the two demands. Krishnamurti: No, not comparison. Questioner: I mean, I want to do something, and somebody asks me to do something else - I have to compare those two. Krishnamurti: No, this is not comparison. You come and ask me to help you and I want to go out for a walk - I don't compare. There is no comparison between the two. Questioner: I see comparison because... Krishnamurti: No, that comes when I say, "Which is more important in this, my walk or going into the kitchen." I say, "The kitchen is more important." What has taken place? I am evaluating and basing my action on what is important. But I don't want to base my action on what is important. Questioner: But when the house catches fire... ? Krishnamurti: The house is on fire, the walk has gone finished. Questioner: Isn't this the same on a smaller scale, you evaluate what is at the moment necessary? Krishnamurti: No, I don't want to base my action on discrimination, on what is important. Questioner: Why? Krishnamurti: I'll show you why. Who is the judge who says, this is important and that's not important? Myself, isn't it? Questioner: It is the circumstances... Krishnamurti: You may consider that it's important and I might consider that it's not important, therefore there's friction between us. So I don't want to base my action on what is important. Questioner: Isn't there an objective, not subjective, factor? Krishnamurti: Factually, not based on importance but fact. The fact is, he asks me to come into the kitchen and the fact is I want to go out for a walk. Questioner: You still have to evaluate... Krishnamurti: Go into it slowly, carefully, it's quite interesting. Now, if I base my action on discrimination, what is important, what is not important, my discrimination may outcome of my prejudice, of my conditioning. So I say discrimination is very petty, because it's based on my conditioning, my prejudice, my opinion, my tendency. I won't base action on discrimination. I won't base my action on evaluation. Questioner: Evaluation of what I think. Isn't there still the evaluation that is not coloured by what I think? Krishnamurti: There is - I'm first clearing the ground. I will not discriminate, evaluate, because if I evaluate it might be based on my prejudice, my tendency, my wish, my imagination. So I won't base my action on my evaluation. Therefore I won't act on what is important and what is not important. I'm going to go into this - are you meeting me? This is a dangerous thing we are entering into -unless you understand very clearly you must stop me. Otherwise you'll pick up a few words and say, "This is not important", and throw it at Mrs. Simmons' head. So I've realized that if I evaluate it might be based on prejudice. But evaluation is necessary. When the teacher makes a report and says you are not good at French and very good at mathematics, that's evaluation, based on facts, not on your prejudice. Do you see the difference? You're a little bit suspicious? Questioner: It's very difficult because... Krishnamurti: Say I'm teaching you Italian. I know much more Italian than you do, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't be teaching. And I see that you're not very good at Italian, factually, it's not my prejudice - after six months you don't know how to put a sentence together. That's a fact. On that fact I evaluate not on my prejudice. Do you agree? That is entirely different from an evaluation about what is important. Questioner: Is it evaluation whether you want tea or coffee? Krishnamurti: Don't reduce it to tea or coffee just look at it first. So there are two factors in evaluation: prejudice and fact. When I evaluate what is important and what is not important it may be based on my prejudice and not on fact. And when he asks me to go into the kitchen, is it a fact or does he just want to annoy me? So I go in there and see what it is. If it's needed I do it and forget about it, because it's the fact that demands action. You see the difference? Questioner: I understand in this case... Krishnamurti: Understand this case and understand the general principle of it. If I evaluate what is important or not important, it is based perhaps on my prejudice, therefore I distrust my judgement in evaluation. But when facts demand evaluation, facts decide the value. The two are very clear, aren't they? Aren't they very clear? Questioner: It's very clear when on one side you have your desires and on the other side you're needed. If on both sides you are needed, you have to choose either one or the other. Krishnamurti: No, I won't choose. Questioner: You have to act - either one or the other. Krishnamurti: No, when you have to act, this or that, that means choice, and that means you don't know what to do and you choose which is more pleasurable. Questioner: It's extremely difficult for a conditioned person to see truth without bias. Krishnamurti: Look, begin again. I want to go out for a walk and you come and ask me to go into the kitchen. If I ask what is more important, the kitchen or my walk, I evaluate according to my pleasure, according to my wish, my prejudice. Therefore I say to myself, "I won't evaluate. The facts will produce the right action." So I go with him into the kitchen and see if the fact demands it. The fact says, "Yes," and I forget the rest. Questioner: Yes, but if you're needed in the kitchen at the same time as you're needed in the office? Krishnamurti: That's a different matter. The fact will tell me what to do. Then I realize, when the fact tells me what to do there is no friction. You see the beauty of it? Come on, you're not too young, are you? So the facts are the final factor of decision, of action, not my prejudice. Questioner: If both are of equal... Krishnamurti: My prejudice and the fact are two different things. My desire, my pleasure, my wish, my longing, my tendency are entirely different from the fact of the kitchen. That makes your mind so clear, then there is no choice between the kitchen and your walk. The fact has decided that you go to the kitchen and that is the end of it. You know, that demands a great deal of intelligence. A man who says, "I want to go for a walk and I'm going - who are you to call me into the kitchen, you're authoritarian, you're a bully" - to say that is a waste of time and energy. Much better to say, "Go away, please, I'm going for a walk, ask somebody else." That would be much simpler, wouldn't it? But we are frightened to say that. You know, I've described all this, but the words are not the fact. Questioner: I would like to examine it from a different point of view. Krishnamurti: Go ahead. Questioner: Take this case: I've been working on studies for six or seven hours. And then I feel the need to have a little break and have a walk. And some people say, "Come into the kitchen and help." Krishnamurti: What will you do? Questioner: It's a fact that I took the break to have a rest. Krishnamurti: So what will you do? Questioner: Even if I go into the kitchen, I won't pay full attention. Krishnamurti: So you ask, what is the fact - stick to facts. Questioner: The fact is I'm tired. Krishnamurti: You're tired, that's good enough. "Sorry, I'm tired, I can't come into the kitchen." That's all. But be honest - not pretending to be tired. So let's come back. There is physical energy and we have plenty of it, because we have good food, rest, and so on. Then there is psychological energy which is dissipated in conflict. And I say to myself, "That's a waste of energy." Though in psychological conflict tension is created and out of that tension grows a certain kind of energy. And if I have a capacity as a writer, as a speaker, or as a painter, I use that capacity, which is a wastage of psychological energy. So can I act psychologically, without wastage of energy, based on facts only and nothing else. You understand what I am saying? Only, facts and not psychological, emotional prejudice - "I must, I must not." Then you have harmony between the psyche and the physical. Then you have a harmonious way of living. From there you can find out if there is another kind of energy of a totally different kind. But without having the harmony between the psyche and the physical, psychosomatic harmony, then your enquiry into the other has no meaning. Now, you have listened to this. What are you going to do with your life, what are you going to do this morning, or this afternoon, when this problem arises? It is going to arise, every day of your life it's going to arise: come into the kitchen, go out for a walk, build an aeroplane, or come for a drive. School, class, stay in bed, "Oh, must I get up so early?" So what will you do? What you will do depends on how you have listened. If you have really listened you will from now on just act on facts only - that's a marvellous thing, you don't know the beauty of it - just on facts. Instead of bringing all your emotional circus into it. Did you find any difference after Sunday's talk about laziness? You remember we said, don't use the word "lazy", but find out why you want to stay in bed longer. Have you gone into it? Rose, have you gone into that other question, which was, we are hurt, from childhood we are hurt, by our mothers, by our fathers, by our neighbours, by our friends - people hurt us. Now can you not be hurt any more? - which doesn't mean resist, which doesn't mean build a wall round yourself, but which means not to have an image about yourself. Have you an image about yourself? Can you look at it all, not be so terribly attached to your long hair, or short hair? We're always talking about long hair, short hair here - what a waste of time! You know what it is to be pliable? Have you ever watched a river? You have? How it flows over a rock, how it moves, never caught in a corner, in a little pool - moving, moving, moving. And if you don't at this age keep on moving, you're going to be caught in a little pool of our own making and that is not the river, that's dirty water. An image isn't merely a picture about something: a conclusion is an image, a conclusion that I am something, that I must be something - that's an image. You know there is a school I go to in North India, just like this, but it's got three hundred acres and a marvellous river - the Ganges - it's on the banks of the Ganges, you see the river flowing by. It is really most extraordinary, that river. It comes down passing the big city called Benares, comes down. You see people washing their clothes, bodies being burnt and thrown into the river, people bathing, doing their laundry and another man drinking the water -all this is taking place within a few yards. And that river is always alive - because it's alive its water is not contaminated, is not polluted. Several doctors some years ago took that water to Switzerland to cure stomach troubles. I was rowing once on that river and as I put my hand down to see how cold the water was, an arm was floating by. Because the tradition there in India, specially round Benares, is that your body must be burnt on the river bank - in India they cremate their bodies, they don't bury them - it's much simpler and it occupies less space. So the poor people bring their dead relatives, come to the river bank, buy wood and with a little wood they burn the body. But they haven't the time to wait there till the body is consumed as they have to hurry back to their village. So the man who sells the wood puts the fire out, preserves the wood, throws the body into the river, and sells the wood to the next person who comes along. And you meet that body several miles below. Questioner: Sir, I believe the water's been analysed and they found some extraordinary things. Krishnamurti: I know. The sacred river, that's why it's called sacred. Questioner: We were discussing the morning meeting at our school meeting last night. There is some lack of clarity about it. Krishnamurti: With regard to what? Questioner: The meeting before breakfast. Krishnamurti: What about it? Why do you meet? Questioner: To be together. Krishnamurti: You're together all day. At the school I visit in Benares, they also meet every morning. At Rishi Valley they meet every morning and here you meet every morning - what for? You're against it, are you? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: Be simple. You're against it? No? Questioner: Not against it, I don't like pressure from other people... Krishnamurti: Wait, you don't like pressure being put on people - I'm putting pressure on you now by asking you what you think about it. You can tell me to go to hell, but people are putting pressure on you all the time, everybody is on somebody else - don't just say you don't like it. Your father is putting pressure on you, society is putting pressure on you, the books you read are putting pressure on you, the television, everything is putting pressure on you. You mean, "I like to choose my pressures, the ones that are pleasurable." That's all. So I'm asking you, do you like to meet in the morning? To come to a school is a pressure. So what do you say - you don't like it? Come on, be straight about these matters. Questioner: Sometimes I like it. Krishnamurti: Now why do you meet at all? - I'm asking you. Questioner: So that we hear different ideas and listen to everyone. Krishnamurti: That's right, that is, you want to listen to people, to the others. Is that the reason you meet? Questioner: The reason could be different for different people. Krishnamurti: Why do you all meet? Questioner: (1) To be quiet. Questioner: (2) To be together. Krishnamurti: To listen to what others are saying, to be quiet, to be together - you've said three things. Is that the reason you meet? Questioner: To make up an audience. (Laughter.) Krishnamurti: Why are you all sitting there? Questioner: You're the speaker so we're the audience, we construct an audience to listen. Krishnamurti: Is that the reason you meet, because you are the audience? I'm asking, why do you meet here? Questioner: (1) To discuss things together. Questioner: (2) It's because during the day we don't pay attention to all the voices around us. Krishnamurti: You re saying we want to be quiet in the morning, to gather ourselves, to pay attention, to listen to people -to be together, to find out, to feel a sense of communal action together - is that why you come? Questioner: (1) Because of habit. Krishnamurti: You go by habit? Questioner: (2) No, I don't come here by habit. Krishnamurti: What is the point of being together in the morning? Isn't it important in the morning to be together, to sit quietly, to listen to the birds, to listen to a person who is reading a poem - do you read a poem? Oh, by the way, do you write poetry? Yes? I'm so glad, good. Is it good poetry? (Laughter.) In the mornings, shouldn't you meet together in the mornings to be quiet, sit together, to listen to what is being read, so that you collect yourself? Questioner: So that everybody acts as one. Krishnamurti: No, not as one - I said gather yourself to be quiet. Questioner: Wouldn't that mean, if you did that, that you were ungathered before you gathered yourself. Krishnamurti: But you are ungathered before. Questioner: But why? Krishnamurti: Because you always happen to be that way. Are you gathered all the time? When you get up in the morning what takes place? You rush, you do your bathing, toilet and all the rest of it, "For God's sake, I've got ten minutes more left", and you rush through. Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: No? But you are different. (Laughter.) We are orientals, we get up early, we do it more lazily. But some of you get up and rush and you keep rushing all day, don't you? No? That's just it, you rush all day, from class to class, meals, play, keep moving. So that there is no time for self awareness, for being quiet, to look at yourself, to look at the trees, look at the birds, hear their song, never a moment to be quiet. Shouldn't you have quietness? To be quiet does not mean to pick up a paper and look at it - but to be absolutely quiet. Isn't it necessary? Then is that quietness habit? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: No, you're not aware of your constant agitation during the day; therefore when you are aware that you are constantly moving, agitated, talking, reading - in the morning be quiet together. You know what happens if you're quiet that way? Questioner: Why together? I mean you can be quiet on your own, too. Krishnamurti: Oh yes, I'm not saying you can't be quiet on your own, but when you're quiet together, it brings about a corporate action. Doesn't it? Haven't you noticed it? Then if somebody asked you to go into the kitchen, you'd go. Questioner: But outside Brockwood we can't come together every morning in a group, or set quietly. Krishnamurti: I said, to be together and to be quiet; then you read something and I listen, then you say something and I listen out of my quietness, not out of my agitation, you follow? I listen out of my quietness. Then I will really listen, then I will learn the art of listening, out of quietness. For that reason I would come to the meeting. I went once to a monastery and stayed there a week. The monastery was run by some friends of mine in California. The programme was: you got up at six and bathed and all that. From 6.30 to 7.30 you sat in a darkened room, really dark; a man was in charge who read a passage from Brother Lawrence, the Cloud of Unknowing, or some philosophical or devotional book - he read for two or three minutes. Then for that whole hour you sat. It was a small amphitheater - you know what an amphitheater is - steps going down, and each person sat on a step with his feet down on the next. So you sat in the complete darkness for an hour and meditated. That was demanded of you. Then from 7.30 to 8:00 you prepared the breakfast all together, and from 8.30 or a quarter to nine, you washed up all the dishes, and then went to your room to clean up and make the bed and so on. At 10:30 somebody gave a talk about whatever it was, science, philosophy, biology or anthropology. From 11.30 to 12:30 in that darkened room, meditation for an hour. Then lunch. After lunch you never said a word to anybody and then from 5.30 you went out for a walk or did something in the garden, or went to your room, but no talking. From 6:30 to 7:30 meditation in the dark room and dinner, washing dishes. From after lunch till the next morning after meditation you never talked. Now, if you followed that, it would be forming a habit, wouldn't it, because it was the custom, it was the thing to do? But unfortunately or fortunately that monastery broke up. As a student or teacher here, I would go to a morning meeting because I wanted to sit quietly for a few minutes, or half an hour, not only to look and listen to what other people were saying, or what was being read, but also to look at myself. I want to see what kind of animal I am, what kind of person I am, why I do this and why I do that, why I think this, why I want that - I want to know myself. Because when I know myself, then I have great clarity, then I can think very clearly, very simply, very directly. I would do that in the morning meetings - read, listen, and also sit quietly to see what I am - see the beauty of what I am, or see the ugliness of what I am, just to see, to observe. And when I come out of that there's a delight in my eyes, because I've understood something. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 7 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 5TH OCTOBER 1971 Questioner: Could we talk about sensitivity and consideration for others? Krishnamurti: Man has always wanted something holy, sacred. Just being kind to others, being sensitive, polite, considerate, thoughtful and affectionate: that hasn't got depth, it hasn't got vitality. Unless you find out in your life something really sacred which has depth, which has tremendous beauty, which is the source of everything, life becomes very superficial. You may be happily married, with children, a house and money, you may be clever and famous, but without that perfume everything becomes like a shadow that has no substance. Seeing what is happening around the world, will you, in your daily life, find out something that is really true, really beautiful, holy, sacred? If you have that, then politeness has meaning, then consideration has meaning, has depth. Then you can do anything you like, there will always be that perfume. How will you come to this? It is part of your education, not only to learn mathematics, but also to find this out. You know, to see something very clearly - even that tree - your mind must be quiet, mustn't it? To see that picture I must look at it, but if my mind is chattering, saying `I wish I were outside', or `I wish I had a better pair of trousers', if my mind is wandering, I will never be able to see that picture clearly. To see something very clearly I must have a very quiet mind. See the logic of it first. To watch the birds, to watch the clouds, to watch the trees, the mind must be extraordinarily still to follow. There are various systems in Japan and India to control the mind so that it becomes completely quiet. And being very quiet you then experience something immeasurable - that is the idea. So they say: first the mind has to be quiet, control it, don't let it wander, because when you have a quiet mind life is extraordinary. Now when you control or force the mind you are distorting it, aren't you? If I force myself to be kind, that is not kindness. If I force myself to be extremely polite to you that is not politeness. So if I force my mind to concentrate on this one picture then there is so much strain, effort, pain and suppression. Therefore such a mind is not a quiet mind - you see? So we have to ask: is there a way of bringing about a very quiet mind without any distortion, without any effort, without saying, "I must control it"? Of course there is. There is a quietness, a stillness without any effort. That requires understanding of what effort is. And when you understand what effort, control, suppression is understand it not just verbally but really see the truth of it - in that very perception the mind becomes quiet. You meet every morning at eight o'clock. What takes place what do you do when you meet? Questioner: We sit quietly in the room. Krishnamurti: Why? Go on, discuss it with me. Do you read anything? Questioner: Sometimes people read. Krishnamurti: What is the meaning of it? Why do you meet every morning? Questioner: I have been told that it is to find a feeling of togetherness. Krishnamurti: Do you, sitting quietly, get a feeling of togetherness? Do you actually feel it? Or is this just an idea? Questioner: Some do, some don't. Krishnamurti: Why do you meet at all? Come on, you don't discuss with me! You know, meeting in the morning, sitting together, if you do it rightly it is an extraordinary thing. I don't know if you have ever gone into it. When you sit down, do you sit really quietly? Is your body really very quiet? Questioner: No. It isn't quiet most of the time. Krishnamurti: Why isn't it quiet? Do you know what it means to sit quietly? Do you keep your eyes closed? Answer! I am doing all the talking. What do you do? Are you relaxed? Do you sit really quietly? Questioner: Sometimes you are very relaxed. Krishnamurti: Wait, don't say "sometimes". This is only an escape, stick to one question. Questioner: I am very quiet and very still. Krishnamurti: What do you mean by being quiet? Are you quiet physically? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Please listen to this. Are your nerves, your body movements and your eyes absolutely quiet? Is your body very quiet without twitching, without any movement and when you close your eyes are they still? To sit quietly means your whole body is relaxed, your nerves are not strained, not irritated, there is no movement in friction, you are physically absolutely quiet. You know, the eyes keep moving because you are always looking at things, therefore when you close your eyes keep them completely quiet. You go into this room at eight o'clock in the morning to sit quietly so as to have harmony between your mind, your body and your heart. That is the beginning of the day, so that this quietness goes on throughout the day, not just for ten minutes or half an hour. That quietness goes on though you play games, shout or chatter, but at the core there is always the sense of this quiet movement - you follow? Questioner: How? Krishnamurti: I am going to show you. Do you see the importance of it? Don't ask "How", first see the logic, the reason for it. When you meet in the morning for ten minutes you sit absolutely quietly, you may read something - it may be Shakespeare, or a poem - and you gather quietness. Look, sit absolutely quietly without a single movement so that your hands, your eyes, everything are completely quiet - what happens? Somebody has read a poem and you have listened to it; while you were going to the room you watched the trees, the flowers, you have seen the beauty of the earth, the sky, the birds, the squirrels, you have watched everything around you. And when you have watched everything around you, you come into the room; then you don't want to look out any more. I wonder if you follow? You have finished with looking out (because later you will go back to it), you have finished by looking very carefully at everything as you came in. Then you sit absolutely quietly without a single movement; then you are gathering quietness without any forcing. Be quiet. Then when you leave, when you are teaching or when yo learning this or that, there is this quietness going on all the time. Questioner: Isn't that a forced quietness? Krishnamurti: You didn't understand. You have had your bath, you come downstairs and you look, not just casually, but you look at the trees, you look at the bird going by, you look at the movement of the leaf in the wind. And when you do look, look. Don't just say "I've seen that", but give your attention to it. Do you see what I am saying? So before you come into the room look at everything clearly and with attention, with care. And when you come in and somebody reads something, you sit quietly. Do you see what happens? Because you have looked extensively at everything, then when you sit quietly, that quietness becomes natural and easy because you have given your attention to everything that you have looked at. You carry that attention over when you sit quietly, there is no wandering off, no wanting to look at something else. So with that attention you sit and that attention is quietness. You can't look if you are not attentive, which means being quiet. I don't know if you see the importance of this? That quietness is necessary because a mind that is really very quiet, not distorted, understands something which is not distorted, which is really beyond the measure of thought. And that is the origin of everything. You see, you can do this not only when you are sitting in the room but all the time, whilst you are eating, talking, playing games; there is always this sense of attention you have gathered at the beginning of the day. And as you do it, it penetrates more and more. Do it. Questioner: Sir, isn't the attention that one gives more important than sitting down and being quiet? Krishnamurti: I said, there is the attention that you have given to watching the birds, the trees, the clouds. And then when you go into the room you are gathering that attention, intensifying it - you follow? And that goes on during the day even though you don't pay attention to it. Try it tomorrow morning, I am going to question you about it. An examination! (Laughter.) Because when you leave this place you must have captured something - neither Hindu nor Christian - then your life will be sacred. (Pause.) What do you say, Sophia? I am going to make her talk! Questioner: At times we forget and in that time thought reforms us all again. Krishnamurti: What you are saying is: I watched the birds, the trees, the leaf, the movement of the branch in the wind, I watched the light on the grass, the dew - I paid attention. And when I come into this room I am still attentive. Not attentive to anything - you follow? There I have been attentive to the bird, to the leaf. Here, when I come in, I am not attentive to anything - I am just attentive. Then in that state of attention thought comes in - doesn't it? "I haven't done my bed", "I must clean my shoes" or whatever it is and you pursue that thought. Go to the very end of that thought, don't say, "I mustn't think that". Finish it. In the process of finishing that thought a new thought arises. So pursue every thought to the very end, therefore there is no control, no restraint. It doesn't matter if I have a hundred thoughts. I am going after one thought at a time so that the mind becomes very orderly. I don't know if you are following all this? Questioner: Where does silence come in then? Krishnamurti: You don't bother about silence because if thought is coming in you are not silent. Then don't force yourself to be quiet, pursue that thought. Questioner: Is there any end to that? Krishnamurti: Yes, if you finish it; but if you don't go to the very end of it, it will come back because you haven't finished one thing. You have understood? Look, I come out of the house, go round the lawn and watch, pay attention to the beauty, the tenderness, the move of the leaf. I watch everything and I come into the room and sit. You read something and I sit quietly. I am trying to sit quietly and my body jerks because I have a habit of twitching, so I have to watch that, I pay attention to it, I don't correct it. You can't correct the movement of the leaf can you? So in the same way I don't want to correct the movement of my hands, I watch it, I pay attention to it. When you pay attention to it, it becomes quiet - try it. I sit quietly, one second, two seconds, ten seconds, then suddenly up pops a thought: "I have to go to some place this afternoon. I didn't do my exercises, I didn't clean the bath." Or sometimes the thought is much more complicated: I am envious of that man. Now I feel that envy. So go to the very end of that and look at it. Envy implies comparison, competition, imitation. Do I want to imitate? - you follow? Go to the very end of that thought and finish it, don't carry it over. And when another thought pops up, you say, "Wait, I'll come back to that." If you want to play this game very carefully, you write every thought you have on a piece of paper and you will soon find out how thought can be orderly because you are finishing every thought, one after the other. And when you sit quietly the next day you are really quiet. No thought pops up because you have finished with it; which means you have polished your shoes, you have cleaned your bath tub, you have put the towel in its right place at the right moment. You don't say when you sit down, "I didn't put the towel back." So the thing that you are doing is finished each time, and when you sit quietly you are marvellously quiet, you bring an extraordinary sense of orderliness into your life. If you haven't that orderliness you cannot be silent, and when you have it, when the mind is really quiet, then there is real beauty and the mystery of things begins. That is real religion. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 8 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 7TH OCTOBER 1971 Questioner: There is something I'd like to discuss. I see that like and dislike are a matter of opinion - as what is ugly and what is beautiful - everyone has their own ideas. If I have no image about things, is there anything beautiful or ugly? Krishnamurti: To like: has that anything to do with affection, with love? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: Don't say, no or yes, go into it. And the feeling of beauty, does it come out of an image? Look at it - don't answer. I see a building created in space, and I say, `How beautiful that is.' Now that expression, "How beautiful", is it born of an image? Or is there no image, but the perception of something which has proportion, depth, quality, workmanship. Questioner: You have an image of what is beautiful or of what you like: you are comparing it with something else. Your conditioning comes in. Krishnamurti: That's right. Watch it, it is much more complex than that. You see that tree - do you say it is beautiful? Why do you say it is beautiful, who has told you? Or, apart from the images, do you feel from everything a sense of beauty? - not related to trees, buildings, people. You understand? - the sense of beauty - not looking at anything particular. Questioner: If you really look, it doesn't only happen with trees. Krishnamurti: You see a building and you say, "How beautiful that is." Is it because you have compared it with other buildings? -or because it is a famous building by Wren or the Ancient Greeks and so you say, "What a marvellous thing that is." Because you have been told about it and there is the image you have made about the man who built it; and so you comply because the popular thing to say is, "How beautiful!" Or do you have a sense of beauty irrespective of anything created or not created? Have you understood my question? Questioner: The sense of beauty has nothing to do with what you see. Krishnamurti: That's just it. The sense of beauty has nothing to do with what you see outside. Now what is that sense of beauty? Questioner: A state of harmony. Krishnamurti: You are too quick in answering, go into it. What is that sense of beauty? Questioner: It's vitality. Krishnamurti: It is a little more complex, go into it. As we said just now, if you have an image either about yourself, or an artist, or a great man, then that image is going to dictate what is beautiful, depending on the culture, on the popularity of the artist, or the statue, or the painting, this or that. So the image you have prevents the sense of beauty, in which there is no image. Questioner: It prevents the very seeing. Krishnamurti: Of course. So, not to have images at all! You follow? - the image is the `me'. When there is no `me', there is the sense of beauty. Have you the sense of the `me'? Then, when you say, "That is beautiful", you are just reacting to the image you have about what is beautiful, which is based on your literature, on your culture, the pictures, the museums to which you have been exposed. You can't ever say, "How ugly!" when looking at a painting by Leonardo da Vinci; or when you are listening to Mozart, "What a noise!" It is really quite extraordinary: to have no image about oneself is to have this sense of extraordinary beauty. Questioner: If you listen to some music for the first time and you don't like it, through repetition you suddenly, or gradually, come to like it. Krishnamurti: Yes, what happens? You don't like Indian music, and you listen to it three or four times; then you begin to see something in it - not because you have been told - you listen. That means you are paying attention. Questioner: You were paying attention the first time. Krishnamurti: The first time it was noise. Questioner: You already have a notion what Western music is. Krishnamurti: You are used to Western music and you are suddenly faced with Chinese music. The first time you couldn't listen to it very carefully, there was a reaction - you follow? That is why any image, outer or inner, is the emphasis of the `me', `the ego', the personality, all that; and that absolutely prevents the quality and the sense of beauty. Which means, passion is not dependent nor the cause of something. Questioner: If my sense of beauty makes me feel there is no difference between the beauty of the sun or the beauty of a tree..? Krishnamurti: Wait, I have no image, therefore I have the sense of beauty, the feeling of beauty. And I see squalor, dirt, filth. I see a piece of paper on the road. What happens? I pick it up. When I see filth on the road I do something; socially, I act. I don't say, "I have a sense of beauty, I don't see that." Questioner: I understand that. My sense of beauty is not destroyed by whatever goes on. Even if I close my eyes, it is not dependent on seeing. Krishnamurti: Absolutely right. But the sense of that beauty which is yours is mine also. It is not my sense of beauty or your sense of beauty, or the collective sense. It is beauty, the sense of beauty. To go into this is something passionate. It beats all books! But I mustn't say that, because you must pass exams! BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 9 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 27TH SEPTEMBER 1970 Questioner: Can we talk about reaction and how the moment we are reacting we don't see that we are reacting, only afterwards? Krishnamurti: Do you all want to discuss that? I think we can include that if we could discuss something with wider scope. We all want to fulfil, don't we? Questioner: What do you mean by fulfil? Krishnamurti: Don't you feel that you would like to express yourself in different ways? - either writing a poem, or wearing a certain type of dress, or you want to become something in life. Questioner: In fact, when you talk about it you see through it, but it's deeper than that. Krishnamurti: We're going to go into it more deeply. A woman feels that she is not fulfilled if she does not have a baby. A man feels frustrated if he does not work, if he does not do something in life. If you want to become something and are not able to, you feel frustrated, don't you? - you feel thwarted. What is it that wants to fulfil? What is behind that desire to fulfil? Who is it that is fulfilling? Questioner: It can be an idea, for instance. Krishnamurti: I don't know, let's find out. If you say, "This is my way of dressing, this is my way of acting, I want to express myself", what is this thing that wants to express itself? When I say `myself', what is that? Questioner: Isn't that an image of oneself? Krishnamurti: I don't know what you mean by that - find out. Don't you feel this? Or am I talking about something irrelevant? What do you say? Questioner: At the moment I don't have a particular way of saying, "This is my way of doing anything." Krishnamurti: What do you mean `my'? What do you mean by, "It is my personal expression"? What is the thing behind it, the `me' the `self' that says, "I must express myself, I must fulfil"? Questioner: (1) Your ego? Questioner: (2) It can be a reaction to feeling insecure. Krishnamurti: Yes. Questioner: (1) And that's why it comes about, the feeling, "That's my way." Questioner: (2) Isn't it a question not so much of `my' way or `your' way, but of finding out if there is a way which isn't influenced by `you' or by `me'? Krishnamurti: Which can only happen if I understand what is this `me' that is always projecting itself, thrusting itself forward. What is that? "My opinion, my judgement, my way of dressing, my way of keeping order" - what is that `me'? Are you learning about that `me'? Do you want to find out what that `me' is? There are two different things: to learn about the `me', and to find out if there is a `me' at all. Questioner: To learn about the `me' first you have to make the `me' exist. Krishnamurti: That's right, to learn about it. You see the Krishnamurti: When I said there is a `me', I've already stabilised it. Questioner: (1) The purpose is to learn about it. Questioner: (2) I know that it's there. Krishnamurti: Which means that I have a feeling it is there; all I have to do is to learn about it - its expressions, its way of acting, its resistances, its appetites and so on. Questioner: One feels that this is the situation one is in, that one feels the `me' does exist. Although I can say verbally that by saying this I am setting up the image of `me', deeply within the feeling seems to make this `me' there, so perhaps I can watch those feelings. Krishnamurti: We are trying to find out if there is a `me', a `self' which has to be studied. Or is there no `me' and therefore, when I say "I want to express myself," what does that mean? Don't you feel the `me' is important? What is that `me' which says, "I must fulfil, I must become, I must be this, that's my taste, I can go my way?" Questioner: Is it something I cling to? Krishnamurti: You understand, Sarah, that when you say `me' you have already established it, haven't you? And you resist anything that opposes that. Questioner: Why? Why should we resist? Krishnamurti: I have established `me' first. `I' am this, `I' am my prejudice, `I' want to dress in a particular way, `I' think this is the right way to have a tidy room. Questioner: It's been drummed into us in childhood. Krishnamurti: That is the `me' that must express itself, otherwise it feels thwarted. No? If I say, "Look, Sarah, I don't like the way you dress", you will tell me that is the way you want to express yourself, that is your order. Now before you state, "This is my order, my way of dressing," what is that `me'? Have you established the `me' that wants to express itself? Questioner. What is the `me' that says "You don't like the way I dress?" Krishnamurti: If I said to you I don't like the way you dress, what does that mean? Questioner: It means you are expressing an opinion. Krishnamurti: Am I prejudiced? What is it that says, "I don't like the way you dress?" And you reply, "That's my taste." There are two opposing statements. Who is it in you that says that's the way you want to dress? And who is the `me' that says, "That is not the way to dress"? Let's find out. Is it because I have a concept, an image, that miniskirts are much better? And you say, "I don't like them", you having your own idea of a long dress; and you say, "That's the way to dress." We have to live together in the same house, we come into contact. What do we do? Questioner: I cling to the ideas which I have... Krishnamurti: Don't theorize, then we are lost. See actually what the facts are, then we can deal with it. If you are speculating about it, then your speculation is as good as mine. What are these two: your `I' and my `I'? Questioner: We both have a bundle of memories and experiences, we have developed certain preferences. Krishnamurti: That `me' and that `you' who assert themselves, are they prejudiced? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Why do you say they are prejudiced? Questioner: Let's investigate it. Krishnamurti: Let's probe into it. Do I react to my conditioning and you to your conditioning? You like long dresses and I don't like them, or whatever it is. Questioner: The way you dress is an expression of your conditioning. Krishnamurti: Is it my prejudice or is it yours? Two prejudices coming into contact with each other explode - they have to do something. Why do I give such importance to the way you dress? And why do you resist what I say? Why don't you say, "What does it matter"? Why don't we do this? Why this resistance? Questioner: I think part of the resistance is to the way it is pointed out. Krishnamurti: I may point it out crudely, or I may point it out more gently, but why do you resist? Questioner: Because if somebody hits you in a forceful way, then you react automatically. But if they say, "Look, let's go into it, see why you dress the way you do," then you discuss it, as we are doing now. Krishnamurti: We are doing it - but at the end of it, let's wipe it out, not just theorize day after day and talk about clothes - who cares! Questioner: Didn't we make a distinction the other day between prejudice and preference? You said the other day... Krishnamurti: I don t care what I said the other day - you have to find out. It's not important what I said - what do you say? I'm asking you, Sarah, please tell me when I say this about your dress -is it a prejudice on my part? And when you say, "This is my way of dressing," is that your prejudice? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Now what do you mean by prejudice - don't repeat what I said. Questioner: When you have an idea about something and you're not willing to change it. Krishnamurti: Why aren't you willing to change it? Who is the person who asserts this? Questioner: It's my `me'. Krishnamurti: What is that `me'? Questioner: (1) It's part of myself, my conditioning, it's something I depend upon because without it, what am I? Questioner: (2) Are you something? Krishnamurti: Isn't it part of your education to understand yourself? Questioner: You asked if we care - but we do care, and I think it's very important... Krishnamurti: I am sorry. You all apparently do care tremendously about the way you dress. Questioner: But why shouldn't we? Krishnamurti: I'm not saying you shouldn't. You do care, you give it a certain importance, that's all. Now what is the problem? Questioner: The problem seems to me that we have to learn how not to react even if someone is prejudiced. We can't perhaps do very much about this prejudice, but supposing you say to me, "I don't like the way you dress",you may or you may not be prejudiced. But that is not what I have to go into, it's what I do about it. Krishnamurti: What will you do? We live in the same house. Questioner: If I don't understand deeply why I shouldn't dress that way, if I just change, then it's hypocritical. Krishnamurti: Yes. Questioner: And I don't want to be hypocritical. So it seems I am left with nothing to do. Krishnamurti: Why do we have such strong opinions about such trivial things? Questioner: (1) I don't think it's the dress that bothers us - it's being hypocritical and taking somebody else's ideas or opinions for our own. Questioner: (2) Why do you have an opinion anyway? It's me versus your opinion. Krishnamurti: Go on, Jimmy, help us out - don't just all sit quietly! She says, "I don't want to be hypocritical," that is, say one thing and do another. Questioner: (1) But why is there the need to be hypocritical? Questioner: (2) We have to be sensitive to the changing situation, but there is no set code, no set style of dress. Questioner: (3) But your sensitivity is not the same as somebody else's. Questioner: (4) It's not my sensitivity or your sensitivity, there is such a thing as sensitivity. Questioner: (5) That's what we're trying to find out, is there such a thing and how can you get to that thing? Krishnamurti: Is that your problem? Questioner: Yes, yes. Krishnamurti: How to be sensitive, not to any particular problem or to your own particular desires, but to be sensitive all around. What prevents you from being sensitive? - sensitive to my feelings, to somebody else's feelings, somebody's ideas, opinions, prejudices. Questioner: This is not an objective situation, we all have a different idea of what to wear, you couldn't be equally sensitive to all the ideas... Krishnamurti: So you have to be sensitive all round, objectively and inwardly. Why aren't you? Is it because you don't want to be hurt, therefore you'll resist, you'll build a wall round yourself and at the same time say, "I want to be sensitive." Is that it? Questioner: It's more a question of wanting to be able to function. Krishnamurti: You can function very well if you are extremely sensitive. That's the only way to function. You are very quick then, adjusting, not saying, "This is right, I'm going to stick to it." To every situation you are adjusting quickly - that's part of sensitivity, isn't it? Not your sensitivity, as she points out, or my sensitivity, which is absurd. Questioner: Also, isn't there a larger dimension to the sensitivity? In other words, I can be sensitive to what you say, but there's a larger thing. Krishnamurti: Of course, that's what I'm implying. Questioner: We live in a certain place and time and so forth, it wouldn't be appropriate to wear a suit of armour. There's a lot to be sensitive to. We tend to be sensitive about ourselves and to nothing else. Krishnamurti: Let's include all that. Why aren't we sensitive? What is preventing us from being sensitive all round? - to you, to me, objectively and subjectively. Questioner: It is preventing us getting to know each other. Krishnamurti: He said that the fear of being hurt makes us insensitive, so we withdraw. Is that one of the major reasons for insensitivity? You have established the image of yourself which says, "I must dress that way, it doesn't matter what the situation is, because I'm used to that way." Questioner: We're so concerned with our place in the whole that we don't look at the whole at all. Krishnamurti: That's it. Are you afraid of being hurt? Now what is the thing that is going to be hurt? Why don't you want to be hurt, what is it that fears being hurt? Questioner: The ego, the self. Krishnamurti: The ego? What is that ego? What is it that says -"I don't want to be hurt." Questioner: It's all your past. Krishnamurti: Go step by step, otherwise you'll miss it. When you say, "I don't want to be hurt," why are you saying that? Because you've already been hurt? Is that it? You've felt the pain of it and you say, "I don't want to be hurt again." You shrink back, you have been hurt in childhood and you say, "I don't want to be hurt." Now when you say that, it means doesn't it? - that you've already been hurt, and you remember the past hurt and you don't want that to be repeated. Watch it: "I don't want to be hurt." `I' being the memory of the past hurt, which says, "I must be careful". So what happens when you say, I don t want to be hurt"! What is the next step? Questioner: You've got a resistance. Krishnamurti: You resist, don't you? Then what happens? Watch it, don't speak, see what happens. You build a wall round yourself in order not to be hurt. Then what happens? Questioner: You get more hurt. Krishnamurti: I'm not going to help you with this. Go on, Jimmy. When I build a wall round myself in order not to be hurt, what takes place? You do the same and I do the same, each one is doing this. What happens? Questioner: There is no communication. Krishnamurti: No communication? And you're trying to do things together, trying to cooperate, each building a wall around himself or herself. That is the basis of hypocrisy. When you say, "I don't want to be a hypocrite", you are really saying, "Leave me alone, don't hurt me." You are sensitive in your way, I am sensitive in my way - which has no meaning. Questioner: I want to understand, I don't just want to accept something I'm told. Krishnamurti: I see that I don't want to be hurt and I build a wall around myself, and you do the same - and as long as this wall exists there is no cooperation. I talk about cooperation and when I say to you, "Please, this occasion doesn't demand that kind of dress," you say, "That's prejudice." Questioner: What is it in an occasion that dictates a specific dress? Krishnamurti: Leave the dress for the moment. You have a wall around yourself which is opinion, meaning,"I am this, don't come beyond" - you are resisting because you don't want to be hurt. So you build a wall of opinion, of assertion, of aggression. You are not pliable, there is not a free play in it. Questioner: (1) There are two things: the person who is expressing his own opinion, and there is an objective situation. Those two things get so mixed up. When you're saying the situation here is dictating something, it comes from what you're doing here, what you learn, how you behave. Questioner: (2) How can you separate what is our own conditioned valuation of the situation and the actual situation. We haven't understood what the situation is here at Brockwood. Krishnamurti: Actually it's very simple. The situation is, each of us is protecting himself against the other, that's all. Right? Questioner: I would say that's more important than all these other questions we've been raising. Krishnamurti: The other things are all so unimportant. When we understand this, everything else will fall into place. We have been raised in this modern world to do and think what we want. And we have developed this antagonism to anybody who says, "This is different." Questioner: I don't think we have been raised to do what we want. I think ever since we've been growing up, people have said, "Don't do this." Krishnamurti: And then you resist that. And you break away from that and then you develop your own resistances. Behind all this - I'm just suggesting, I'm not saying it is so - there is this act of resistance; you in your way, I in my way, each person has the feeling, "I must protect myself" - justly or unjustly. Then what shall we do? Living in a small community of this kind, if each one has a wall of resistance around him, how shall we work together? You know, this is an everlasting problem, not just here in Brockwood. Questioner: Everybody will have to drop their defences which means they will have to drop what they think about particular things in order to look at them. Krishnamurti: Then what? I turn up in some absurd Indian clothes and you come and tell me, "Don't dress that way, it's not suitable for this occasion!" And I resist you. Questioner: But this is where there is a lot of energy wasted. Krishnamurti: I agree with you, it's a waste of energy. Questioner: Sir, could we stay with the example you gave of absurd Indian dress. I can live with a person who wears Indian dress. Krishnamurti: Not that you can live with a person wearing absurd Indian dress, that's not the point. Am I incapable of being sensitive to the occasion which demands a different kind of dress? Questioner: Let's look at why an occasion demands a certain dress. Krishnamurti: I'll show you. Have you seen Indian ladies wearing saris? The other day in London I saw an Indian lady wearing a long sari, in India that's the fashion. She was sweeping the street with her sari, it was getting filthy, but she was totally unaware of it. What would you call that? Questioner: It's appropriate to her. Krishnamurti: No, you don't get the point. She was totally unaware of what she was doing - that the long Indian dress was sweeping the street. She was unaware of it. Questioner: But then, it's just as dirty in Bombay. Krishnamurti: (Laughter.) You are missing the point: She was totally unaware of it. Questioner: Well, that's her problem. Krishnamurti: Please... Questioner: Could I clarify whether the problem is that her dress was long and getting dirty, or whether it is the fact that she was wearing Indian dress in England? Krishnamurti: No, it's not that. I'm pointing out the insensitivity of a person who is unaware of what she is doing. That's all. Questioner: But if you are sensitive to the situation... Krishnamurti: That's all I'm saying. My point is, if that Indian woman in London was aware of what she was doing, she would obviously lift up her sari. Questioner: Because she wouldn't want to waste her energy washing it. Krishnamurti: Not only that, no, much more. The total unawareness of the occasion. Questioner: It's a question of being asleep or being awake. Krishnamurti: Yes. It s not, "Why do you care how she walks or what she does, it's her way of doing it," as you said. I am asking, are you aware of what you are doing - not of the occasion, not of what you wear. But are you aware why you dress the way you do? Why do you feel it's of tremendous importance that you do things the way you do? That's the problem, isn't it? Questioner: You seem to imply that once I'm aware of the way I'm dressing, I'll change. Krishnamurti: No, I did not say that. You may or may not change, it's up to you. But I am suggesting - are you aware of it? And being aware, see all the implications - not just being aware that you've got trousers on. Are you aware when I say to you, "Sit properly with a straight back?" I'll tell you something very interesting. Brahmin boys in India up to the age of seven can do what they like, play around. At the age of seven they go through a certain ceremony and during that ceremony they are taught to sit completely still, with closed eyes. After the ceremony you become a real Brahmin and all the rest of it. From that day on you must sit properly, meditate, you are drilled. I'm saying that to show you how habits are built in, conditioned, and most of us are that way. To break down that conditioning you have to be aware of what you're doing. That's all. Questioner: Breaking down good habits as well as bad? Krishnamurti: Everything. Habit means conditioning, a mechanical repetition, which is obviously not being sensitive. Now are you aware of what you're doing? When I say to you, "Please dress differently," are you taking my statement to help to be aware and therefore sensitive, or do you resist it? What do you do? To be sensitive implies learning. I say to you, "Jimmy, don't dress that way." Will you treat it as a help to be aware, or do you resist? Or do you feel you're being hurt, "I'm as good as you are, it's only your opinion," - all the battle of words and nonsense? Questioner: So where do we react wrongly? Krishnamurti: You have to take into consideration conformity, imitation, fear of being hurt, trying to find your own freedom apart from mine. Dominic said, "I don't want you to tread on my toes, I don't want to tread on yours." Are you aware of the implications of all that's going on? If you're not, you become a hypocrite. Do you know you're hurt and that you don't want to be hurt any more? Questioner: If you are giving your full attention to the moment, you haven't got time to remember that you've been hurt. Krishnamurti: No, but most of us don't know how to give complete attention to the moment. All that we remember is that we've been hurt and don't want to be hurt again. Have you got such hurts in you? What are you going to do about them. See what happens when you've got these hurts, they respond much more quickly than your reason does. Those hurts spring forward much quicker than, "Let's find out, let's learn." So you have to tackle that first. What will you do with those hurts? Questioner: But those hurts are past. Krishnamurti: Are they past and dead? Questioner: That's what is reacting. Krishnamurti: Yes. Questioner: It doesn't have to react. Krishnamurti: Of course it doesn't have to, but it does. If you understand the whole mechanism of hurt, you will never be hurt again. Do you know what the mechanism of being hurt means? Find out. We have all been hurt some way or another. First, why have we been hurt? Questioner: Sometimes it's because of our pride, our illusions. Krishnamurti: Why are you proud? What are you proud about? Did you write a book? Or can you play tennis better, run faster than somebody else? We make these statements and say, "Yes, I'm proud." What does it mean? Because you're so nice-looking, so bright? And somebody comes along who is still brighter than you and you're hurt - you're jealous, you're angry, you're bitter, which is part of being hurt. So what will you do with those hurts which you have accumulated, which say, "I must not be hurt any more?" What are you going to do, knowing that the hurts are going to respond so quickly? Questioner: I would say that hurts are really disillusionments and disillusionments are really learning, so they are not hurts. Krishnamurti: Yes, but that is just an explanation. The fact remains that you are hurt. I put my trust in you and suddenly I find my trust has been betrayed: I get hurt. What is behind this hurt? Questioner: I am sensitive. Krishnamurti: Is that it? Can sensitivity ever get hurt? Questioner: (1) Only the `I' in the middle of it. Questioner: (2) The difficulty is really openness. Krishnamurti: Exactly. And sensitivity is intelligence. So when you say, "I am hurt", who is the `I' that is asserting this all the time? Do you want to learn about that `I'? Or do you say, "What is there to learn about the `I'?" Do you see the difference? Questioner: Can you go into it a bit more? Krishnamurti: I am hurt by various people for various reasons. So I build a wall of resistance and you come along and say, "Learn about it", "Look at it". Am I looking at the `me' that is being hurt, the memories, which means another `I' that is looking at it, a superior `I' which says, "I must learn about the lower `I'." Do you see the falseness of this? You have established the `I' which has to be learnt about. But there is no such thing as `I' - it's just a series of memories. Actually, there is no `I' except your memories of being hurt. But you have said, "That is the `I' about which I'm going to learn." What is there to learn about the `I'? - it's just a bundle of memories, there's nothing to learn about it. Questioner: You mean there's no self-knowledge? Krishnamurti: There is plenty, that's what we're doing - look how far we have moved in self-knowledge. Questioner: If we are talking and I see something clearly, at that moment it's all right. Then afterwards the thing that I've seen becomes knowledge and I think I'm still seeing clearly. And somebody comes along and says to me, "You're not seeing clearly," and I say, "I am", because I remember having seen clearly. Perhaps the reason I want to see clearly in the first place is just to build up this pleasurable feeling. Krishnamurti: Obviously. You've been hurt and you don't want to be hurt any more, and so you resist. What will you do? -knowing that prevents affection, love, every form of cooperation, every form of communication, of relationship. What will you do with that thing? Questioner: You have to find a way of living where you are not building an image of yourself all the time. Krishnamurti: First of all, you have built an image; the next step is to prevent adding to it. There are two problems, aren't there? You have to prevent adding to it, as well as to cure and destroy the disease that you have. How will you set about this? I've explained it - you are not relating to it, that's all. Questioner: You have to be highly sensitive all the time. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Questioner: See exactly what the influences are... Krishnamurti: No. Questioner: Stop the hurt. Krishnamurti: No. Look, be aware of what you are doing, of what you are thinking, feeling. And if I tell you to dress differently, don't resist and fight me but use my words to help you to be aware. You have been hurt, you have built a wall of resistance and I say to you, "Sarah, don't do that because you'll prevent every form of relationship, you'll be miserable all your life." Do you receive what I say to you with understanding, because it will help you to break down the wall? Or do you say, "No, who are you to tell me, it's my way of living"? Which will you do, knowing that hurts and any wall of resistance prevents all relationships? Are you aware of this actually happening now? What's going to happen if I come along and say, "Sarah, you're not so nice-looking as I thought you were." Are you resisting? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: What is taking place then? Questioner: I am learning about it and not resisting. Krishnamurti: Then what will you do? Questioner: I'll see if what you say is right. Krishnamurti: So what does that mean? You have no conclusion about yourself. Is that what is actually taking place? Questioner: It is right now. Krishnamurti: Take your hurts and go into it. Do you know what it means not to have any image about yourself? Questioner: We can imagine about it. Krishnamurti: I can imagine good food, but I want to taste it in full! First, we said, "We are hurt; so we see actually, intelligently, sensitively, that we have built a wall round ourselves. Therefore we are hypocritical in saying, "We will cooperate, we will do this together." That's one point. The second point is: how am I, how is this mind to prevent image-making? Because if I have any image it is going to be hurt. Questioner: Don't we make images of others? Krishnamurti: Any image, whether you make it of yourself or another, is still an image. Do you see the two problems? I have memories of being hurt, which create a wall of resistance; and I see that prevents every form of relationship. The other is, can the mind not make any more images at all? What am I to do with the past hurts, with the past images? Come on, you're nearly asleep! How will you help me to get rid of my past hurts? I want your help, which means I want to establish a relationship in which this thing will be dissolved. Questioner: (1) You'll help me to learn that I am hurt and to see when my hurt is reacting. Therefore I can't just have a superficial relationship with you. Questioner: (2) Yes, but I want to show you that I'm hurt. Krishnamurti: I want to be free of the past hurts, because I see logically, with reason, with sanity, that if the mind keeps those hurts it has no contact with anything - I am afraid all the time. Now do I see that very clearly? Do you understand it, see it as clearly as you see this table or chair? - which means you are giving attention to what is being said and watching it in yourself. Are you doing it, or are you casually looking at it with your mind somewhere else? If you give your attention to the past hurts, they'll obviously fall away. The next thing is, how are you going to prevent further images being put together? Suppose I come along and say, "How very intelligent you are!" or "You are such an ass, you're half asleep." What will you do? How will you prevent immediately making an image when I say that? Questioner: You are creating an image of me by your saying that. Krishnamurti: Obviously I'm an ass myself when I tell you you're an ass! But I'm asking you how to prevent images being formed - whether they be pleasurable or painful. Questioner: You have to be awake to the image-making process. Krishnamurti: Help me to find out how to do it! Suppose I say to you, "What a nice person you are," that immediately brings a reaction and an image, doesn't it? Now, how will you prevent that taking place? Questioner: The image is there already, it's been made - can we not just see that we have made this image? Krishnamurti: No. There are two things involved. First the past and secondly the prevention of new images being made. Because otherwise I'm going to be hurt again and I don't want to be hurt because I want to live freely, I want to have no walls around me. So what am I to do? Questioner: I want to find out why I am flattered or hurt by what you say. Krishnamurti: One is pleasure, the other is fear. Questioner: But what is the basis of this? Krishnamurti: You depend on my statement, I don't know why, but you do. That's not the point. How do you prevent this image being formed? Do you want to know? What will you pay for it? Questioner: My life. Krishnamurti: What is the price of that life? - do you know what it means, Sir? It means you really are serious not to form any image about anybody, whatever they say. Are you willing to do that? How would you do it? I'll tell you. Each give me ten dollars. (Laughter.) Questioner: We haven't got it. Krishnamurti: Watch it carefully. I've said this is a very serious matter, far more important than taking a degree. You pay a great deal to get educated, but you neglect this. Without this, life has no meaning and you don't even pay a cent to find out. Which means, you don't even give that much energy to find out.Jimmy says, "I'll give my life to find out," which means he's willing to go to the very end of it to find out. I said, "Look, Jimmy, you've been hurt, and that hurt reacts in many ways. The root of that hurt is in an image you had of yourself, and that image doesn't want to get hurt." You saw the truth of that. You are willing to go into it and you saw the truth of that and you said, "I understood, I know how to deal with it. Any time it arises I'm going to be aware, pay complete attention to every moment when anybody says, `Do this, don't do that'! Now why don't you give the same attention when somebody says, "You're an ass?" Then you won't form an image. Only when you are inattentive, the old habit asserts itself. That means the mind says, "As long as there is any form of resistance, all relationship has no meaning." I see that very clearly. Not verbally, but I touch it, feel it. And I say, resistance exists because I don't want to be hurt. And why am I hurt? Because I have an image about myself, and I see there is not only the image about myself but there is another image in me which says, "I must get rid of this image." So there is a battle between the two images in me - the `higher' image and the `lower' image. Both images are created by thought. So I see all of that very clearly - clearly in the sense as I see anything dangerous. Therefore, the clarity of perception is its own action. Then I've finished with it, the past never comes again. Now with that same attention I'm going to see that when you flatter me, or insult me, there is no image, because I'm tremendously attentive. Will you do this? It doesn't matter what is said, I listen, I don't say, "You are prejudiced" or "You are not prejudiced." I listen because the mind wants to find out if it is creating an image out of every word, out of every contact. I'm tremendously awake, therefore I find in myself a person who is inattentive, asleep, dull, who makes images and gets hurt - not an intelligent man. Have you understood it at least verbally? Now apply it. Then you are sensitive to every occasion, it brings its own right action. And if anybody says some- thing to you, you are tremendously attentive, not to any prejudices, but you are attentive to your conditioning. Therefore you have established a relationship with him, which is entirely different from his relationship with you. Because if he is prejudiced, you are not; if he is unaware, you are aware. Therefore you will never create an image about him. You see the difference? Will you do this? You have no idea what vitality you'll have. Questioner: I think we have to help each other to do it. Krishnamurti: That's it, that is cooperation. You are helping me and I am helping you. You are learning from me and I am learning from you not to create images. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 10 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 19TH JUNE 1971 Krishnamurti: We are all terribly solemn this morning, aren't we? What do you think about all day long and why do you think about these things? Are you aware of what you are thinking or does one thought precede another endlessly and one is not aware of it? If you are aware of your thoughts from what source do they arise? Questioner: From past experiences. Krishnamurti: Are you quoting what I said? Be quite clear that you don't say anything that you don't know yourself, don't say it if you haven't thought it out and worked it out, otherwise you get verbal and theoretical, so be careful. First of all what do you think about all day long? Is it a secret to keep to yourself, or can you share it with another? Questioner: (1) I think about lots of different things. Questioner: (2) About people at Brockwood. Krishnamurti: What is the central core of your thinking? You know there is peripheral thinking which is not really important, but at the centre, what is the momentum, the movement of that thinking? What is that `me' that is so concerned with itself? I think about myself, that is the core, the heart of my thinking. And on the periphery I think about various things, the people here, the trees, the bird flying - these things don't really very much matter unless there is a crisis on the periphery and it affects the `me' and the `me' reacts. Now what is that centre from which you think - which is the `me'? And why is there this continual occupation about oneself? I am not saying it is right or wrong, or "How terrible", "How childish" or "How good" - but we see that we are occupied with ourselves. Why? Questioner: Because we think it is important. Krishnamurti: Why do you give it importance? Questioner: When you are a child you have to. Krishnamurti: Why do you think about yourself so much? See what is involved in this. Thinking about oneself isn't just a very small affair, you think about yourself in relation to another with like and dislike; and you think about yourself, identifying yourself with another - right? I think about the person I have just left, or the person I think I like, or the person with whom I have quarrelled, or the person whom I love. I have identified myself with all those people, haven't I? Questioner: What do you mean by `identify'? Krishnamurti: I love you, I have identified myself with you. Or, I have hurt her and you identify yourself with her and get angry with me. See what has happened: I have said something to her which is harmful and unpleasant; you are her friend, you identify yourself with her and get angry with me. So that is part of the self-centred activity, isn't it? Are you sure? Questioner: But isn't it the other person who is identifying with you? Krishnamurti: Is it or is it not? Let's enquire. I like you, I am very fond of you - what does that mean? I like your looks, you are a good companion and so on. It means what? Questioner: It means you are a better companion than other people and so I like being with you. Krishnamurti: Go a little deeper. What does it mean? Questioner: You keep that person to yourself and exclude others. Krishnamurti: That is part of it, but go on further. Questioner: It is pleasing to be with that person. Krishnamurti: It is pleasing to be with that person and it is not pleasing with another person. So my relationship with you is based on my pleasure. If I don't like you I say, "I'll be off!" My pleasure is my concern, as is my hurt, my anger. So self-concern isn't just thinking about myself and identifying with this or that possession, person, or book. Is that what you do all day? There is the peripheral occupation, and also I am comparing myself with you; that is going on all the time, but from a centre. Questioner: You read about the refugees in India and you haven't a personal relationship with them but you do identify with them. Krishnamurti: Why do I identify myself with those people who have been killed and chased out of East Pakistan? I watched them the other day on television; this is happening everywhere, not only in Pakistan, it is appalling. Now you say you identify yourself with all those refugees - what do you feel? Questioner; Sympathy. Krishnamurti: Go on, explore it, unravel it. Questioner: (1) Anger against the people who caused this. Questioner: (2) Frustration because you can't do anything about it. Krishnamurti: You get angry with the people who do these things, who kill the young men and chase out old women and children. Is that what you do? You identify with this and reject that. What is the structure, the analysis of this identification? Questioner: It is dualistic. Krishnamurti: Move on... Questioner: You don't feel secure. Krishnamurti: Through identification you feel that you could do something? Questioner: Even by taking one side you feel that you have a certain chance to do something. Krishnamurti: I am anti-Catholic, I identify myself with a group who are anti-clerical. Identifying myself with those, I feel I can do something. But go further, it is still me doing something about it, it is still the occupation with myself. I have identified myself with what I consider greater: India, Communism, Catholicism and so on. My family, my God, my belief, my house, you have hurt me - you follow? What is the reason for this identification? Questioner: I separate myself from the rest of the world and in identifying with something bigger, that something becomes my ally. Krishnamurti: Yes, but why do you do this? I identify myself with you because I like you. I don't identify myself with him because I don't like him. And I identify myself with my family, with my country, with my God, with my belief. Now why do I identify with anything at all - I don't say it is right or wrong - what is behind this identification? Questioner: Inward confusion. Krishnamurti: Is it? Questioner: You are afraid Krishnamurti: Push further. Questioner: The confusion is caused by the identification. Krishnamurti: Is it? I am questioning you and you must question me too. Don't accept what I am saying, enquire. This whole process of identification, why does it happen? And if I don't identify myself with you, or with something, I feel frustrated. Are you sure? Questioner: (1) I don't know. Questioner: (2) You feel unfulfilled empty. Krishnamurti: Go on. I feel sad, frustrated, not fulfilled, insufficient, empty. Now I want to know why I identify myself with a group, with a community, with feelings, ideas, ideals, heroes and all the rest of it - why? Questioner: I think it is in order to have security. Krishnamurti: Yes. But what do you mean by that word `security'? Questioner: Alone I am weak. Krishnamurti: Is it because you cannot stand alone? Questioner: It is because you are afraid to stand alone. Krishnamurti: You are frightened of being alone, so therefore you identify? Questioner: Not always. Krishnamurti: But it is the core, the root of it. Why do I want to identify myself? Because then I feel safe. I have pleasant memories of people and places so I identify myself with that. I see in identification I am much more secure right. Questioner: I don't know if you want to talk about this particular aspect, but if I see the killing in Vietnam is wrong, and there is a group of anti-war demonstrators in Washington, then I go and join them. Krishnamurti: Now wait a minute. There is an anti-war group and I join them. I identify myself with them because in identifying with a group of people who are doing something about it, I am also doing something about it; by myself I cannot do anything. But belonging to a group of people who demonstrate, who write articles and say, "It is terrible," I am actively taking part in stopping the war. That is the identification. We are not seeking the results of that identification - whether it is good or bad. But why does the human mind want to identify itself with something? Questioner: When is it action and when is it identification? Krishnamurti: I am coming to that. First, I want to be clear in myself and in talking it over find out why I should identify. And when necessary I will identify. That is, I must first understand what it means to cooperate. Then, when I am really deeply cooperating, then I will know when not to cooperate. Not the other way round. I don't know if you see this? If I know what is involved in cooperation, which is a tremendous thing - to work together, to live together, to do things together - when I understand that, then I will know when not to cooperate. Now I want to know why I identify myself with anything. Not that I shouldn't identify if there is a necessity of identification in action, but before I find out how to act, or with whom I can cooperate, I want to find out why there is this urge to identify. To have security? - is that the reason? Because you are far from your country, from your family, you identify with this house, with a group, to be safe, protected. The identification takes place because you feel, "Here I am secure." So is the reason you identify because you are insecure? Is that it? Insecurity means fear, uncertainty, not to know what to think, to be confused. So you need protection - it is good to have protection. Is that the reason why you identify? What is the next step? In myself I am uncertain, unclear, confused, frightened and insufficient, therefore I identify myself with a belief, Now what happens? Questioner: I find I am still insecure. Krishnamurti: No. I have identified myself with certain ideologies. What happens then? Questioner: You try to make that your security. Krishnamurti: I have given various reasons for this identification: because it is rational, it is workable, all the rest of it. Now what happens when I have identified myself with it? Questioner: You have a conflict. Krishnamurti: Look what happens. I have identified myself with an ideology, with a group of people, or a person, it is part of me. I must protect that mustn't I? Therefore if it is threatened I am lost, I am back again to my insecurity. So what takes place? I am angry with anybody who attacks or doubts it. Then what is the actual thing that takes place? Questioner: Conflict. Krishnamurti: Look: I have identified myself with an ideology. I must protect it because it is my security and I resist anybody who threatens that, in the sense of having a contradictory ideology. So where I have identified myself with an ideology there must be resistance, I build a wall round what I have identified myself with. Where there is a wall, it must create division. Then there is conflict. I don't know if you see all this? Now what is the next step? - go on. Questioner: (1) What is the difference between identification and cooperation? Questioner: (2) It seems there has to be more understanding of cooperation. Krishnamurti: You know what it means to cooperate, to work together? Can there be cooperation when there is identification? Do you know what we mean by identification? We have examined the anatomy of it. Cooperation means to work together. Can I work with you if I have identified myself with an ideology and you are identified with another ideology? Obviously not. Questioner: But people have to work together. Krishnamurti: Is that cooperation? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: See what is involved. Because of our identification with an ideology we work together, you protect it and I protect it. It is our security, in the name of God, in the name of beauty, in the name of anything. We think that is cooperation. Now what takes place? Can there be cooperation when there is identification with a group? Questioner: No, because there is division. I find myself in conflict with members of the group, because I keep identifying with them. Krishnamurti: Look what is happening. You and I have identified ourselves with that ideology. Our interpretation of that ideology may be... Questioner: ...different... Krishnamurti: Of course. If you vary in the interpretation of that ideology you are deviating, therefore we are in conflict. Therefore we must both of us agree about that ideology completely. Is that possible? Questioner: That is exactly what happens with a school. Instead of an ideology, you identify with a school and each person has his own concept. Krishnamurti: Yes, quite right - why? Questioner: I sense that sometimes there is conflict here for just the reason you were giving when talking about an ideology. If you and I identify with the school, we think we are cooperating, but there isn't that spirit. Krishnamurti: Therefore I am asking, can there be cooperation when there is identification. Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: Do you know what you are saying? (Laughter.) That is how everything in this world is working. Is that the truth? -that where there is identification there can be no cooperation? It is a marvellous thing to discover the truth of this. Not your opinion, or my opinion, but the truth, the validity of it. Therefore we have to find out what we mean by cooperation. You see there can be no cooperation when there is identification with an idea, with a leader, with a group and so on. Then, what is cooperation in which there is no identification? Questioner: Acting in response to the situation itself. Krishnamurti: I am not saying you are not right, but can we work together when you and I think differently? When you are concerned with yourself and I am concerned with myself? And one of the reasons is, that knowing we cannot cooperate when we are thinking of ourselves, we try to identify ourselves with an ideology, hoping thereby to bring about cooperation. But if you don't identify, what is cooperation? Here we are at Brockwood, in a school. We see there cannot be cooperation when there is identification with the school, with an idea, with a programme, with a particular policy of this and that. And also we see that identification is the cause of all division. Then, what is cooperation? To work together: not "about something". Do you see the difference? So before you do something together, what is the spirit of cooperation? The feeling, the inwardness of it, what is that feeling? Questioner: Understanding, being completely open to it. Krishnamurti: Go a little deeper. We said identification is not cooperation. Are you quite sure on that point? And are you quite clear that cooperation cannot exist when each of us is concerned with himself? But you are concerned with yourself, therefore you have no spirit of cooperation, you only cooperate when it pleases you. So what does it mean to cooperate? We are not playing parlour games. What does it mean to cooperate when there is no `me'? - otherwise you can't cooperate. I may try to cooperate round an idea, but there is always the `me' that is trying to identify itself with the thing that I am doing. So I must find out why it is that I am thinking about myself all day long: how I look, that somebody is better than me; why somebody has hurt me, or somebody has said, "What a nice person you are." Now why am I doing this all day long? And at night too, when I'm asleep this goes on. I am better than you, I know what I am talking about, it is my experience, you are stupid, I am clever. Why? Questioner: It seems a lot of it becomes a habit. Krishnamurti: What is habit? Questioner: Not being aware. Krishnamurti: No. What is habit? - not how is it formed. Questioner: Repetition of a movement. Krishnamurti: Right. Why is there a repetition of this movement? Why is habit formed? You will see something extraordinary if you go slowly. We have all got short hair or long hair - why? Because others do it. Questioner: Is that habit or imitation? Krishnamurti: See what takes place. First you imitate others, then you say short hair is square. Questioner: Is a custom a habit too? Krishnamurti: Yes. I don't want to go too quickly into this. Isn't all thinking habit? You agree? Questioner: Well, it is something you do over and over again. Krishnamurti: Go on, see what you can discover for yourself when we go into this whole question of habit. Questioner: It is really a situation with an old reaction, isn't it? Krishnamurti: A new situation we meet with old responses. Is not identification a habit? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Because you are insecure. So do you know the nature of this machinery that makes for habit? Are you aware that you are always operating by habit? To get up at six o'clock every day; to believe "all this; to smoke, not to smoke, to take drugs -you follow? Everything is reduced to habit - it may be of a week, ten days, or fifty years, but the habit is formed. Why does the mind fall into this groove? Haven't you asked yourself why you have a habit? - habit being merely tradition. Have you watched your mind working in habit? Questioner: (1) It is easier. Questioner: (2) It takes really a lot of energy to live without habit. Krishnamurti: I am coming to that. Don't jump, move from step to step. I am asking myself: why does the mind always live in habit? I thought that yesterday, I still think that today and I will think the same about it tomorrow - with slight modifications perhaps. Now why does the mind do this? Questioner. One is half asleep. Krishnamurti: We said laziness is part of it. What else? It feels easier with habits. Questioner: One is afraid of the unknown. Krishnamurti: I want to go a little deeper than that. Questioner: The mind is afraid that if it doesn't maintain thinking in the same way, it will itself be threatened. Krishnamurti: Which means what? Questioner: It sees a certain kind of order in habit. Krishnamurti: Is habit order? Questioner: You can form a certain structure with habit, but that is not necessarily order. Krishnamurti: Which means that the mind functions in habit for various reasons, like a machine. It is easier, it avoids loneliness, fear of the unknown, and it implies a certain order to say, "I will follow that and nothing else." Now why does the mind function in a groove, which is habit? Questioner: Its nature is that. Krishnamurti: But if you say that, then you stop enquiring. We know the reasons why the mind functions in habit. Are you actually aware of it? The highly psychopathic person has got a habit which is completely different from others. A neurotic person has got certain habits. We condemn that habit but accept others. So why does the mind do this? I want to go into it deeper, I want to see why it does it and whether the mind can live without habit. Questioner: Because it feels it is the personality. Krishnamurti: We said that: the personality, the ego, the `me' which says, "I am frightened, I want order", laziness, all that is `me' - different facets of the `me'. Can the mind live without habit? - except for the biological habits, the regular functioning of the body which has its own mechanism, its own intelligence, its own machinery. But why does the mind accept habit so quickly? The question, "Can it live without habit?" is a tremendous question. To say that there is God, there is a Saviour, is a habit. And to say there is no Saviour but only the State, that is another habit. So the mind lives in habit. Does it feel more secure in habit? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Go slowly, which means what? Functioning in the field of the known it feels safe. The known is habit - right? Questioner: Even then, we still say we don't feel safe. Krishnamurti: Because the known may change or may be taken away or get something added to it. But the mind is always functioning in the field of the known because there it feels secure. So the known is the habit, the known is knowledge - that is, knowledge of science, of technology, and the knowledge of my own experiences. And in that there is mechanical habit - of course. Now I am asking: can the mind move from the known - not into the unknown, I don't know what that means - but be free and move away from the borders of the known? Look. If I know everything about the internal combustion engine, I can continue experimenting in the same direction, but there is a limitation. I must find something new, there must be some other way to create energy. Questioner: Would the mind say that, if it wanted the security of the known? Krishnamurti: I am not talking about security at the moment. Questioner: Are you saying that there has to be a lack of continuity? In technology, in order for something new to happen, there has to be a break in continuity. Krishnamurti: That's right. That is what takes place. Otherwise man couldn't have invented the jet, he must have looked at the problem differently. Are you following all this? My mind always works in the field of the known, modified, which is habit. In relationship with human beings, in thought - which is the response of memory and always within the field of the known - I am identifying myself with the unknown through the known. So I am asking: the mind must function with the known, because otherwise one couldn't talk, but can it also function without any habit? Questioner: Does the mind ask that question because acting out of habit is unsuccessful? Krishnamurti: I am not thinking of success. Questioner: But what would make the mind ask this? Krishnamurti: My mind says, "This isn't good enough, I want more." It wants to find out more it can't find it within the field of the known, it can only expand that field. Questioner: But it has to realize the limitation. Krishnamurti: I realize it, and I say to myself: I can function within the field of the known, I can always expand it or contract it, horizontally, vertically, in any way, but it is always within the field of the known. My mind says: I understand that very well. And so, being curious, it says: can the mind live, can it function, without habit? Questioner: Is that a different question? Krishnamurti: Now I am talking psychologically, inwardly. Apparently all life, all the mental activity in the psyche, is a continuity of habit. Questioner: Is there really an impetus or something... Krishnamurti: I am creating an impetus. The mind is itself creating the impetus to find out - not because it wants to find something. Questioner: This is a very touchy point. This seems to be the key to some difficulty. Why - if I may just ask the question - does the mind say: I see the need for living without psychological habit? Krishnamurti: I don t see the need, I am not positing anything. I am only saying I have seen the mind in operation in the field of the known - contracting, expanding horizontally or vertically, or reducing it to nothing, but always within that area. And my mind asks, is there a way of living - I don't know it, I don't even posit it -in which there is no habit at all? So we come back: do you know what you are thinking about all day? You say, yes, I am thinking about myself, vaguely or concretely, or subtly, or in a most refined manner, but always round that. Can there be love when the mind is occupied with itself all the time? You say, "No". Why? Questioner: Because if you are thinking about your self all the time, you can't... Krishnamurti: Therefore you can never say, "I love you", until you stop thinking about yourself. When a man feels ambitious, competitive, imitative, which is part of thinking about oneself, can there be love? So we have to find a way of living in which habit is not. But habit can be used, the known can be used - I won't call it habit - in a different way, depending on the circumstances, the situation and so on. So is love habit? Pleasure is habit, isn't it? - is love pleasure? Questioner: What do you mean by love, Sir? Krishnamurti: I don't know. I will tell you what it is not, and when that is not in you, the other is. Listen to this: where the known is, love is not. Questioner: So one has to find out first what habit is, and then about non-habit. Krishnamurti: We have found it, we have said: habit is the continuation of action within the field of the known. The known is the tomorrow. Tomorrow is Sunday and I am going out for a drive - I know that, I have arranged it. Can I say, "Tomorrow I will love"? Questioner: (1) No. Questioner: (2) I do. Krishnamurti: What do you mean? "I will love you tomorrow?" Questioner: We promise that. Krishnamurti: In a church, you mean? That means love is within the field of the known and therefore within time. Questioner: But if you love once, can you suddenly stop loving? Krishnamurti: I loved you once, I am bored with you now! Questioner: If you love someone today you can love him tomorrow. Krishnamurti: How do you know? I love you today, but you want to be sure that I'll love you tomorrow, therefore I say, "I'll love you, darling, tomorrow." Questioner: That is something else. Krishnamurti: I am asking: has love a tomorrow? Habit has a tomorrow because it continues. Is love a continuity? Is love identification? - I love my wife, my son, my God? Therefore you have to really understand - not just verbally - the whole process, the structure and the nature of the known, the whole field of it inwardly, how you function always within that field, thinking from that field. The tomorrow you can grasp because it is projected from the known. To really understand this you have to understand all that we have said; you have to know what you think and why, and you have to observe it. Questioner: You can know what you think, but you don't always know why you think it. Krishnamurti: Oh yes, it is fairly simple. I want to know why I think, why thought comes in. Yesterday I went to the tailor and I forgot my watch there. Last night I looked for it and I thought about it and said, "How lazy of me, how inconsiderate on my part to leave it there, giving trouble" - all that went through the mind. Questioner: When you say it was inconsiderate of you, you were identifying yourself. Krishnamurti: No I forgot the watch. Which means they have to take the trouble to look after it, someone might take it, they will be responsible, all that. And I thought about it, and I know why this whole momentum of thinking arose from that I watched the whole flow of thought; you can know the beginning and the ending of thought - you look so mystified! - I have thought about it and I can end it. I left the watch there and I thought it might get lost; I have had it for a long time, I have cared for it. I would give it away, but not lose it. And it is lost! - finished. I didn't think any more about it. Now, to watch every thought, to be aware of it! Any thought is significant if you penetrate it; you can see the origin of it and the ending of it - not go on and on. Questioner: And you say, Sir, if you see why the thought originated you will be able to see the ending of it? Krishnamurti: No, look. Is there an individual thought separate from another thought? Are all thoughts separate or are they interrelated? What do you say? Questioner: They are interrelated. Krishnamurti: Are you sure? Questioner: Well, they all come from one another. Krishnamurti: If I understand their interrelationship, or if there is an understanding of the background from which all thought springs... Questioner: That is the difficult point. Krishnamurti: To watch without any question of wanting an answer means infinite watchfulness - not impatience - but watch carefully, then everything comes out. If you and I quarrel, I don't want to carry it in my mind, in thought, I want to finish it. I'll come to you and say, "I am sorry, I didn't mean it" - and it is finished. But do I do that? Have you learnt a lot this morning? Not "learnt" but "learning: what it means to learn. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 11 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 24TH JUNE 1971 Questioner: We were talking about why one can't say that one loves someone. Krishnamurti: Can we approach it in a different way? Do you know what aggressiveness is? It means opposition, to go against. From that arises the question: how are you going to meet life when you have passed through here and are so-called educated? Do you want to be swallowed up by the society, the culture in which you live, or are you going to oppose it, revolt against it, which will be a reaction and not a total action? Are you going to step into the easy way of life, conform, imitate, adjust to the pattern, whatever that pattern be, whether it be the establishment, or an establishment of a different kind, and so on? Or are you going to be a totally different human being, who is aware and knows he has to meet adversity and opposition, and that therefore there is no easy way of satisfaction? Because most of us want a life of ease, of comfort, without trouble, which is almost impossible; and if you do meet opposition will you run away from it? "I don't like this place, these people, this job", so I move away, run away from it to do something else which will be satisfactory. Do you use others for your own satisfaction? And is love the use of others, either sexually, or as companionship, or for one's own satisfaction, not superficially but much more deeply? How are you going to meet all this, which is what life is? The so-called educated people in the world, who have been to college, to university, have got a good job, fit into a place and stay there and advance there. They have their own troubles, their own adversities. One may pass some exam and get a job, or one may have been educated technologically. But psychologically one doesn't know anything about oneself. One is unhappy, miserable because one can't get this or that, one quarrels with one's husband or wife - you know all that goes on. And they are all very educated people who read books, disregarding the whole field of life. And the non-educated people do the same. You are going to be educated - I don't know why, but you are going to be - and then what? Lead a comfortable life? Not that one is against comfort, but if one is seeking comfort in life it becomes rather shoddy, rather shallow, and you have to conform to a tremendous extent to the structure of the culture in which you live. And if you revolt against the culture and join a group, which has its own pattern, you have to fit into that too. Seeing that most human beings throughout the world want to be safe, secure, comfortable, lead a life of indulgence, a life in which they do not have too much opposition - where they conform superficially, but revolt against conforming, become superficially respectable but are inwardly rebellious, have a job, get married, have children and responsibility - but the mind wanting something much more than that, they are discontented, running from one thing to another. Seeing all of it, not just one segment, one fraction of it, but the whole of the map - what are you all going to do? Or is it a question that you cannot possibly answer at your age? - you are too young perhaps, with your own occupations, the other can wait Questioner: One knows what one would like to do. Krishnamurti: Do you know what you want to do? Questioner: I know what I'd like to do. Krishnamurti: What would you like to do - like? I'd like to be the Queen of England! Or the greatest something or other and I can't. I haven't got the capacity. So when you say you'd like to do something that gives you pleasure, that gives you satisfaction, that is what everybody wants: comfort, pleasure, satisfaction. "This is what I want to do because I feel happy in doing it." And when you meet opposition along that path, you don't know how to meet it and then you try to escape from it. You know, this is really a very difficult question, it is not easy to say what one would like to do. This is a very complex question, that is why I said: is this asking too much? Or, at your age, are you already beginning to have the inkling of what you want to do, not only for the next year but for the rest of your life? Questioner: We are not too young. Krishnamurti: I don't know. I don't know whether you are too old or too young. It is for you to answer, not for me. I am putting this to you, for you to find out. Questioner: Some of us are already too old. We are already shaped. Already we have had experiences, etc., that makes us all very bored with life. Krishnamurti: You know, the other day we were talking about the fact that we are always thinking about ourselves. And when you are thinking about yourself, isn't it generally round what gives you the greatest pleasure? "I want to do that, because it is going to give me tremendous satisfaction." So how do you meet all these things? Shouldn't you be educated, not only in geography, history, mathematics and all the rest of it, but also in this field, where you have to discover for yourself how to live in this monstrous world -isn't that part of education? Now how could you set about educating yourself to meet this life? Do you expect somebody else to educate you, as they educate you in mathematics and other subjects? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: No? You are quite sure? If nobody is going to educate you in the psychological, inward way of living, how are you going to do it? How are you going to educate yourself? You know what is happening in the world? Apart from the monstrosities and wars and butcheries and all the terrible things that are going on, people who think they know are trying to educate you - not in the technological world: that is clear, simple and factual. The other day on television some bishop said: the knowledge of God is love and if you don't have knowledge of God you can't live, life becomes meaningless. You follow? Now there is that statement made most emphatically by a well-known bishop, or whatever he was, and I listened to it and I said: I am learning, I want to find out. I want to be educated. And he has reasonable explanations and you look at his collar, or his coat, or his beret, and you say, "Oh, he is a priest, he is an old man, he is repeating old stuff" - that is nothing, and you push him away. And then a man comes along and offers you a pattern of living (listen to all this, please) which seems reasonable, logical and because of his personality, the way he looks, dresses, walks - you know all the tricks - you say, "Yes, he has got something." And you listen to him. And through the very act of listening you are being conditioned by what he says, aren't you? Questioner: It depends how you listen. Krishnamurti: If you don't know how to listen to that bishop, you will say, "How reasonable, he says we have lived this way for two thousand years, this is the right way, with the knowledge of God." I listen to him and there is something that appeals to me and I accept it. I have been influenced by him. And I am also influenced by a man who says, "Do this and you will have enlightenment." So I am being influenced all round. What shall I do? I want to educate myself because I see very well nobody is going to educate me in that field. Because they have never educated themselves, they have never gone into themselves and examined, explored, searched out, looked and watched, but they have always conformed to a pattern. And they are trying to teach me how to live within that pattern, whether it is the Zen pattern, or the Christian, or the communist pattern; they have not educated themselves in the sense we are talking about, though they may be clever in argument and in dialectics. So as nobody is going to help me to educate myself inwardly, how shall I begin? And I see, if I don't do that I become a lopsided human being. I may be very good at writing an essay and getting a degree - then what? And the whole of the rest of my life is neglected. So how shall I educate myself, become mature in a field where very few people have taken the trouble to investigate, to enquire? Or they have done it and imposed their thinking on others, not helped them to find out for themselves. I don't know if you see that. Do you understand what I am talking about? Freud, Jung, Adler and other analysts, who have gone into this and stated some facts, traced all behaviour to childhood conditioning and so on - they have laid down a certain pattern and you can investigate in that direction and get more information, but it is not you learning about yourself. You are learning according to somebody else. So how will you set about it? - knowing what life is, what is happening in the world, wars, antagonism, politicians, priests, the hippies with their little bit of philosophy, the people who take drugs, the makers of communes and the hatred between various classes. Take all that outwardly; and inwardly people are ambitious, greedy, envious, brutal, violent, exploiting each other. These are facts, I am not exaggerating. Now seeing all this, what shall I do? Shall I conform to some pattern which is comforting, which is what I want to do, a fulfilment for myself? Because if you don't have a certain spark, a flame in you now at the age of fifteen, sixteen, twenty or twenty-five, it is going to be very difficult when you are fifty. Then it is much more difficult to change. So, what shall I do? How shall I face all this, look at it, listen to all the terrible noise in the world? -the priests, the technicians, the clever men, the workers, the strikes that are going on. Shall I choose a particular noise that appeals to me and follow that noise for the rest of my life? What shall I do? This is a tremendous problem, it is not a simple problem. Questioner: I want to experiment. Krishnamurti: Experiment? Questioner: Well let things come to me. Krishnamurti: Listen to what I am saying. "Seeing all this, I don't know what to do. Not knowing what to do, I am going to find an easy way out - I generally do." Don't fool yourself. This is a tremendously complex problem. Questioner: But to find the easy way out is still not real. Krishnamurti: Wait, I am not at all sure. I face it all this tremendous roar that is going on, the shouting, the pushing, and I find there is an easy way out, I become a monk. That is what is happening in certain parts of the world, because people don't trust politicians, scientists, technicians, preachers any more. They say, "I am going to withdraw from all this and become a solitary monk with a begging bowl" - they are doing it in India. Or not knowing what to do, you drift. Do you know what that word means? - to carry on from day to day, not to bother. Or if you must find a way out you force yourself, or you join a group that thinks it is tremendously advanced. Is that what you are all going to do? If I had a daughter or a son here, that would be my concern as a parent, I would feel tremendously concerned. And Brockwood is concerned - to me this is tremendously important. You can all go to colleges and universities and get a degree and a job. But that is too simple, it is a way out of it that doesn't solve anything either. So if I had a son or a daughter, I would ask, "How are they going to be educated in the field where they themselves don't take an interest?" And the others don't know how to help them to understand that enormous field that has been neglected. So I know what I would do in the sense that I would say to a daughter or son: Look, listen to all this, listen to all the noise that is going on in the world, don't take sides, don't jump to any conclusions but just listen. Don't say one noise is better than another noise; they are all noises, so just listen, first. And listen also to your own noise, your chattering, your wishes - "I want to be this and I don't want to be that" - find out what it means to listen. Find out, don't be told. Discuss it with me and find out what it means first. Find out what it means to think, why you think, what is the background of your thinking. Watch yourself, don't become self-centred in that watching. Be tremendously concerned in watching, which is further enlargement of oneself. Questioner: Did you say to be tremendously concerned with watching is further enlargement of the self? Krishnamurti: I said watch yourself. If I were a parent I would be tremendously concerned with the problem, the question how to educate people in this field where there is no real understanding or help. That is what I meant. But I said later on: if you watch yourself there is a danger of self-centredness - a tremendous danger. I must watch that too. I also said I would discuss with the group, find out how you think, why you think and what you think. Not in order to change it, not to suppress it, not to overcome it, but to find out why you think at all. Go on, question it! I don't know if you have noticed that most books, all the social, religious, moral, ethical structure, the relationship between man and man and all the rest of it, are based on thinking. Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: "This is right, this is wrong, this should be, this must not be" - it is based on the structure of thought. Are you quite sure? - don't agree with me. Now I want to find out if that is the way of living, to base everything on thought, on what I like and what I don't like, what I want to do, what I don't want to do. Probably you never think about it. Think about it now. Questioner: Because your thinking is either you want to, or you don't want to. It all comes from the `self'. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 12 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 10TH OCTOBER 1971 Questioner: Am I always self-centred, Sir? - it is a question that I find difficult to answer for myself. Krishnamurti: Here we are, in a beautiful countryside, living in a small community where relationship matters enormously. Can we live here with that quality of mind and feeling that is not wholly self-centred? Then, when we do leave this place - as we must -perhaps we shall be able to live in the world at a different level, with a different feeling and affection and with a different action. And to live like that, not just occasionally, but with a deeper sense of significance and worthwhileness and a feeling of sacredness, I think one has to be free of fear, or understand what fear is. Most of us are afraid of something, aren't we? Do you know what you are afraid of? Questioner: Not at the moment. Krishnamurti: Agreed, because you are sitting here safely. But what is it that one is generally afraid of? Do you know what you are afraid of? Questioner: The unknown. Krishnamurti: The unknown? What do you mean by the unknown? The tomorrow? What is going to happen to you, what the world will be like when you grow up and you have to face all the noise and the racket and absurdity of it? Is that what you are frightened of? Questioner: Well, that is what I mean by the unknown. Krishnamurti: And how will you be free of that fear so that you can face it without darkness, without withdrawal, without a neurotic reaction to what the world is? How will you meet that? If you are afraid of it you can't meet it, can you? Discuss it with me! If you have any kind of belief as to how you should behave in the world, which is so chaotic, of which one is afraid, if you have already set a pattern of your behaviour with regard to that, won't that idea, won't that conclusion make it much more difficult? Sophia, Laurence - do you know what you are afraid of? Are you afraid of your parents? Are you afraid of not being like the others? - having long hair, smoking, drinking, having a good time? Are you afraid of being rather odd, cranky, different? Are you afraid of being alone, standing alone? Are you afraid of what people might say? Of not making a good life in the sense of having money, property, house, husband or wife and all that - is that what you are afraid of? I feel if I don't smoke it is odd socially and I can't fit in; therefore I must force myself to smoke and do the things they do; I am a little frightened that I don't conform. Is that what you are afraid of: not conforming, not imitating, not fitting into the pattern, being square? So what are you afraid of? And throughout life are you going to carry any kind of fear with you? Do you know what fear does? It makes you aggressive, violent. Or, you withdraw and become slightly neurotic, odd, peculiar; you five in a darkness of your own, resisting any kind of relationship with anybody, building a wall around yourself, with this nagging fear always going on. So if you don't solve these fears now, when you are young, fresh, have plenty of vitality and energy, later on you won't be able to, it will become much more difficult. So shouldn't we consider what our fears are and see if we can't get rid of them now, while we are protected, while we are here, where we feel at home, meeting each other all the time? Shall we go into this? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: How do you go into this problem of fear? For instance, you are afraid of the unknown, the unknown being the tomorrow, having to face the world which is so chaotic, mad, vulgar and violent. Not being able to meet it you are frightened of the future. How do you know what the future will be? And why are you afraid of it? Questioner: Aren't we projecting an image of ourselves into the future? And then we are afraid of not being able to live up to that image. Krishnamurti: You have an image of yourself and if you don't live according to that image you are frightened. That is one of the fears, isn't it? He said just now he is afraid of the unknown - the unknown being the tomorrow, the world, his position in the world, of what is going to happen to him in the future, whether he will become a businessman or a gardener. How will you meet that? How will you understand the fear of the unknown? Because if you are going to be afraid now, as you grow older it will get worse and worse, won't it? Why do you think about the future? Why do you look at the future in terms of what you are now? You are young, fifteen, seventeen, whatever it is, and how do you know what you will be in twenty years' time? Is there a fear because you have an image of yourself or of the world in twenty years' time? Questioner: We have been conditioned to have such an image. Krishnamurti: Who conditions you? The society, the culture? Questioner: The whole environment. Krishnamurti: Now why do you submit to it? Questioner: It's fear again. Krishnamurti: That means what? Go into it. You feel you have to conform and you don't want to conform. You say, "I don't want to conform", and yet you are conforming. You have the image of yourself, which has been created by the culture in which you live, and you say, "That image must conform to the pattern." But it may not conform, and you are frightened. Is that it? Why do you have an image about yourself or the world? The world is cruel, brutal, harsh, violent, full of competition and hate; everybody is trying to get a job, struggle, struggle, struggle. That is a fact, isn't it? Why do you have an image about it? Why don't you say, "That is a fact"? The sun is shining: that is a fact. Or it is a cloudy day: that is a fact. You don't fight the fact. That is what it is. Do you want to fit into that? Do you want to accept the world as it is? Do you accept it and join it and become like that, do you want to be that? Questioner: Well, one doesn't. Krishnamurti: First see, just look. The world is like that, isn't it? The world has created the culture in which you were born. That culture has conditioned you and that conditioning says: you must conform, whether it is a Communist or Catholic or Hindu background. And now you are here being educated, not merely with books but also deeply to understand yourself. So you must ask yourself, do you want to fit into all that? Do you want to conform to the pattern to which culture has conditioned you, do you want to fit into that? Questioner: Obviously not. Krishnamurti: Don t say, "Obviously not." Questioner: I think most people do. Krishnamurti: You - leave the others out. Questioner: We don't. Krishnamurti: Don t say, "Most people do; they don't even think about it. They just run along with the rest. Here we are thinking about it, we are looking at it, we are questioning it. Do you know what it means not to conform to something? It means going against the whole structure of society. Morally, in business, in religion you are going against the whole culture; which means you have to stand alone. You may starve, you may have no money, you may have no job - you have to stand alone. Can you? Will you? You don't know, do you? - you may or may not. That is one of our fears, isn't it? One of the great fears in our life is about conforming. If you conform, then you become like the rest - and that is much easier. But if you don't conform then the whole world is against you. And this is very serious, unless you have the intelligence to withstand the world; otherwise you will be destroyed. If you have fear you cannot have that intelligence. Or you will probably get married and your wife will want to conform and you won't. Then you are stuck! You have children before you know where you are and it's much worse - because then you have to earn money to support the children. Questioner: Then you are back again. Krishnamurti: Then you are caught in a trap. So from now on you have to look at the whole problem, understand it, go into it. Don't just say, "I am frightened." You see the culture in which we are born makes us conform, doesn't it? It makes you conform and it makes you envious not to be like somebody else. So conformity and comparison make you afraid - do you follow? At home, in school, in college, and when you are out in the world, life is based on it. So if you are frightened, then you are caught for ever. But you can say, "I am not going to be frightened, let's examine it, let's find out how to live in the world which demands acceptance, conformity and comparison." How can you live in this world without being frightened, without conforming, without always comparing yourself with somebody? Then, if you know how to live that way, you will never be frightened. You understand? Begin here, don't look at the time when you will be fifty years old. Begin here, now, when you are very young, to find out how to live a really intelligent life in which there is no imitation, conformity and comparison, which is without fear. Your brain cells, while you are young are much more active, much more pliable, more inquisitive. Later on, when you are older, you will get conditioned, you will have a family, a house: "I can't think of anything except business, it is dangerous to think more." Now, how will you live a life in which you don't compare and conform, because you are not afraid. Which means what? Fear is engendered, is bred, when you have an image about yourself; and you have that image to conform. You, that image, wants conformity. Now we have to examine very carefully what conformity is. What do you mean by con forming? You have long hair; are you doing it because other boys and girls and older people have long hair? All the pop singers have long hair - have you seen their faces? Do you want to be like that? Having long and sloppy hair - which you have - do you consider that conforming? Are you doing it because others are doing it? Questioner: If you have short hair you are also conforming. Krishnamurti: Are you conforming? You have long hair; are you conforming, wearing sandals because others are doing it? -walking in Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue with naked feet. Do you also walk around with naked feet? Questioner: Usually I think it is the conditioning in which you are living. Krishnamurti: Which means: are you reacting against the short hair? I will tell you why I have short hair. I have had hair down to my waist, much longer than any of you here. And when I first came to England and went to school they used to say, "Get your hair cut!" Give your minds to find out why you wear long hair. Are you doing it because others are doing it, or do you like it? Questioner: I like it. Krishnamurti: What does that mean? You like to wear it because you are going to save money at the barber's? (Laughter.) You have to keep it clean, well brushed, otherwise it looks ugly. Do you do it because you like it? That is a good reason, isn't it? That means you are not conforming, because tomorrow the fashion will be short hair - will you all wear short hair then? So are you doing it because you want to do it, irrespective of what others do? Questioner: Isn't it the same with clothes? Krishnamurti: Do you put on these strange clothes because others do? Questioner: Every boy is concerned about his appearance to a greater or lesser extent. Krishnamurti: Right. You think this makes a good appearance, it's nice looking when you wear sloppy clothes? Questioner: You might feel that yourself. Krishnamurti: Do you do it because you like it, or because you want to conform? Questioner: Not necessarily because you want to conform. Krishnamurti: Find out! Don't say, "Not necessarily." Questioner: I think it is all a matter of like and dislike. Krishnamurti: I am asking. The pop singers wear purple trousers and yellow shirts - you have seen that. They say, "I like these clothes, they flatter me" - is that why you are doing it? So hair, clothes, the way you think, the way you feel - is it because the rest are feeling that way? The rest are Frenchmen, Germans, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Catholics - and you become one or the other because that is the easiest. Is that why you follow? Or do you say, "No, that is all wrong, I won't be like that." So first find out why you have long hair and clothes like this, whether you are American, French or German, so that you begin to exercise your own mind. You see, while you are young, if you are not revolutionary then - I don't mean throwing bombs, which is not revolution at all - if you are not enquiring, questioning, doubting, looking at yourself, finding out what you think, investigating the whole field of yourself, later on it will be much more difficult. Questioner: I think the main point in all this is fear. For example, say I have long hair; if I cut my hair it's because I know that everything will go smoothly and there will be no problems at all. I feel I do most things for security, for ease. Krishnamurti: I understand. So you are frightened - why? Questioner: Frightened that I don't fit in with the pattern that is going on. Krishnamurti: Then what will you do? Live with that fear? Why should you fit into the pattern? Questioner: If you want to stay here it is better to do so. Krishnamurti: You are saying, if you want to keep alive, you must fit into the pattern. And do you want to live that way -fighting, quarrelling, hating, envy, struggle, wars? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: As we said the other day, to be really educated means not to conform, not to imitate, not to do what millions and millions are doing. If you feel like doing that, do it. But be awake to what you are doing - quarrels, hatred, antagonism, division between people where there is really no relationship at all, wars - if you really like living that way. Then you will invite all the mess round you, you are part of that, then there is no problem. But if you say, "I don't want to live that way", then you have to find out how to live differently. And that demands intelligence. Conformity doesn't demand intelligence, it demands cunningness. The world is this and you are here to be educated in every department of life, both inwardly and outwardly. Which means: inwardly don't have fears. Not to have fears means you must find out how to live without fear, therefore you have to investigate what fear is. Enquiring into what fear is, your mind becomes intelligent; that intelligence will then show you how to live in this world sanely. Fear is one of the greatest problems in the world, probably the greatest problem. So you have to face this thing, you have to completely understand it and be out of it. You said, "I am afraid of the unknown, the tomorrow, the future". Why do you think of tomorrow at all? Is that a healthy sign? You are young, full of the strange beauty of this countryside, curious about birds, about living - why are you concerned about tomorrow? Because your mother, your father, the neighbours are already asking what will happen to you tomorrow? They are frightened people - why do you fall into their trap? The world is becoming more and more populated - do you know what that means? In India, I believe, twelve or thirteen million new babies are born every year. And in China many more. The world is getting fuller and fuller of people, and they all want jobs, they ali want homes, children, position, prestige, power, money. The more you look at it the more frightened you get and you say, "What is going to happen to me?" How do you know now what you will do or be like in twenty years' time? You see what you are doing? While you are young, live, enjoy, don't think about the future. If you live now without fear, then when you grow up you will be the same, you will live - it doesn't matter what you do, whether you're a gardener, a cook, whatever it is, it will be a happy thing for you. But if you say, "My God, how shall I fit into this world, how shall I manage when I am thirty", then you are destroying yourself. You see, each generation more or less conforms to the past generation, therefore no generation is ever a new generation. What we are trying to do here is to create a new generation. It may be forty people - that is good enough - who won't be afraid, who won't conform, who will have the intelligence to find out what to do when they grow up; this intelligence will tell you what to do. But if you are frightened, from now on you will be caught. Are you afraid of standing alone? Do you know what I mean by that? Are you, Rachael? Are you afraid of being alone? - not in the dark. Alone means not to have companions, not to be dependent on people, on their flattery, on their encouragement, on their saying, "You are marvellous." Are you dependent on anybody? Obviously we are dependent on the milkman, on food, on who cooks it - we are dependent in that way. But emotionally are we dependent on anybody? Find out! Look at it. Does love demand dependence? "I love you" - does it mean I depend upon you? Or do you depend upon me emotionally? I may earn the money, that is a different kind of dependence. But psychologically, inwardly, in our feelings, when we say "I love", does that mean I depend upon you, that without you I would be lost? Is love like and dislike? That is a form of dependency - do you understand that? Do you see the difference between like and love, between love and pleasure? To like is a form of pleasure, isn't it? Questioner: If I say, "I like you", it means I choose, but if I don't choose then it is all right. Krishnamurti: Look! I am saying: do you depend psychologically on anybody? If you do, in that there is fear, isn't there? Because if anything happens to you I am frightened. I become jealous if you look at somebody else. Which means I possess you - right? I depend on you, therefore I must be assured that I possess you in every way, otherwise I am lost. Therefore I am frightened, therefore I become more and more dependent and more and more jealous. So do you depend on anybody? And all this dependence is generally called love, isn't it? Questioner: Dependence is a fear of being without. Krishnamurti: Find out, don't agree, find out if you are dependent. And then find out why you depend and see what are the implications of that dependence - fear, loneliness, lack of comfort. If you don't depend on people then you are not frightened, are you? Then you don't mind standing alone. You are standing alone not out of fear; the moment you are alone you are much more honest, much more sure, nobody can corrupt you, there is no question of being hurt. So find out if you are dependent on people. And not only on people, on drink, tobacco, chatter, talking endlessly about nothing. Questioner: We do depend on our parents, don't we? Krishnamurti: We depend on our parents because they have brought us into the world, they feel responsible and we depend on them because they give us money to be educated. That is a different kind of dependence. Questioner: That is a necessary dependence. Krishnamurti: It is necessary. I depend on the postman. When I get into the train I depend on the engine driver. Questioner: Is one dependent if one thinks incessantly of one object or person? Krishnamurti: Yes, obviously. Questioner: It seems to me that one of the main things is that society is dependent on its art, which becomes part of any form of self-expression and art becomes incredibly important. Krishnamurti: "Self-expression" - what does that mean? "I must express myself", "I must be myself". Look at it carefully - "I" must express myself. "I" must be myself. "I" must find my identity -myself. You know all the phrases. Now what does that mean: "I must be myself"? Is the "I" the fear, the "I" that is envious, the "I" that says, "I am so frightened of the future, what is going to happen to me?" The "I" that says, "It is my house, my book, this is my husband, my boyfriend?" That is the "I", isn't it? And that "I" says, "I must express myself" - how silly it sounds! No? Questioner: Isn't expression creativity? Krishnamurti: Find out. Is expression creativity? Painting a picture, writing a poem, making a pot - is that creativity? I am not saying it is or it is not. Questioner: It does bring into being something that was not there before. Krishnamurti: To make something that was not there before is to be creative, is that it? Questioner: That is not what you mean. Krishnamurti: I don t know. People say expression is creativeness. Follow this step by step - self-expression is creative. The self: what is that self? Questioner: That kind of creativity is limited. Krishnamurti: Look at those words, "I express myself and therefore I am creative." What does it mean? Questioner: It may be a sort of therapy, to be able to do that. Krishnamurti: You are saying, by expressing yourself you will become healthy, you will become sane? Listen: "Self-expression is creative." Think of that. Questioner: I suppose it is just identifying oneself. Krishnamurti: Just look. What is the "I". Go into it, don't accept these terms: "I am expressing myself." What does it mean? Who is the "I"? My long hair, my short hair, my anger, my jealousy, my memories, my pleasures, my dislike, my sex, my little enjoyment -is that the "me"? It is the "me", isn't it?, that wants to express itself - which is my anger, my jealousy, my this and that, whatever it is. Is that creative? So what is creativeness? This is an immense question. Does the creative man, or the creative mind, ever think about expressing? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: Wait, This is a little difficult. Don't say yes or no. Whoever says, "I am expressing myself" ought to be kicked in the pants! Questioner: To express something does not mean to be creative... Krishnamurti: Therefore, what does creativeness mean? I exist and express myself - is that creativity? Or is creativity when the "I" is not? When the "I" says, "I must express myself by kicking somebody", the "I" expressing itself is violence. So is the state of creativity the absence of the "I"? When there is the absence of the "I", do you know that you are creative? That is all! Have you understood? When you are doing something with a motive behind it - of becoming popular, famous, having more money - that is not doing something which you really love to do. A musician who says, "I love music", but who is watching how many titled people there are in the audience, how much money he is going to make, he is not creative, he is not a musician; he is using music in order to become famous, to have money. So there can be no creativity if there is a motive behind it. See this for yourself. So when we use these words, "I must express myself", "I must be creative", "I must identify myself", it has no meaning. When you really see this, live that way, understand it, your mind is already free of the "me". Questioner: Is it valid to make things of beauty? Krishnamurti: Valid for whom? Questioner: For yourself. Krishnamurti: What do you mean, "yourself"? Do you remember, we talked about beauty the other day? Look at that tree and the shadow and the sunlight: that is beauty. How do you know what is beautiful? Because somebody told you? A famous artist has painted a picture, or a great poet has written about that light and the tree and the clouds and the shadows and the movement of the leaves. And you say, "He is a great man, I like that, it is beautiful." Is beauty something that comes to you through another? Is beauty something that you have been told about? What then is the sense of beauty? Not what is beautiful, but the sense of beauty? Does this beauty lie in the building, in the tree, in the face of a person, in music, in a poem, in things outside? Or do the things you see become much more intensified because you have this sense, this sense of beauty? You understand what I mean? - because you have the feeling of beauty. Therefore when you see something extraordinary like that, you delight in it because in yourself you have this sense. Now how do you arrive at this, or happen to have this sense? How do you come by it? Can you come by it by training, through an image, through any amount of reading, studying, collecting paintings and having a lovely house? How does this happen? Do you remember what we said the other day? It happens when you are physically very sensitive, watching - sensitive, not only about yourself but sensitive to others, to everything - sensitive to how much you eat, the way you sit, the way you talk, the way you walk. I am going to come down to something very practical. I have seen a lot of you eating: you touch something, lick your fingers thoroughly and go back and pick up something else - do you think that is to be sensitive? Questioner: It is then on your own plate. Krishnamurti: I didn't mean that. You can do whatever you like on your own plate. But you lick your finger and pick up a piece of bread. Questioner: It is unhygienic. Krishnamurti: I don't want to lick your spittle! I have seen everybody do it. First of all it is not hygienic. I touch my mouth and then pick up a piece of bread or something else - you follow? I have contaminated it. You are unaware of what you are doing, you do it automatically. Now to do something automatically is not to be sensitive - that is all. So when you become aware of it, of the implications, you won't do it. When you sit down to eat, some of you don't chew your food at all. You just swallow it, and food is meant to be chewed. When you become aware of everything, you become sensitive and to be sensitive is to have an awareness of beauty, to have the sense of beauty. And without the sense of inward beauty you may do the most marvellous things, but it won't contain the flame. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 13 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 17TH JUNE 1973 Krishnamurti: The other day we were talking about sanity and mediocrity, what those words mean. We were asking whether living in this place as a community we are mediocre. And we also asked whether we are sane totally, that is bodily, mentally, emotionally. Are we balanced and healthy? All that is implied in the words sane, whole. Are we educating each other to be mediocre, to be slightly insane, slightly off balance? The world is quite insane, unhealthy, corrupt. Are we bringing about that same imbalance, insanity and corruption in our education here? This is a very serious question. Can we find out the truth of it? - not what we think we should be in terms of sanity, but actually discover for ourselves if we are educating each other to be really sane and not mediocre. Questioner: Many of us will have a job to which we have to go every day, many people will get married and have children - those are things that are going to happen. Krishnamurti: What is your place in this world as a human being who is supposed to be educated, who has got to earn a livelihood, where you may, or may not marry, have the responsibility of children, a house and mortgage and may be trapped in that for the rest of your life? Questioner: Perhaps we are hoping somebody will look after us. Krishnamurti: That means you must be capable of doing something. You can't just say, "Please look after me" - nobody is going to do it. Don't be depressed by it. Just look at it, be familiar with it, know all the tricks people are playing on each other. The politicians will never bring the world together, on the contrary; there may be no actual war but there is an economic war going on. If you are a scientist you are a slave to the government. All governments are more or less corrupt, some more, some less, but all are corrupt. So look at all this without getting depressed and saying, "What am I going to do, how am I going to face this, I haven't the capacity?" You will have the capacity; when you know how to look you will have tremendous capacity. So what is your place in all this? If you see the whole, then you can ask that question, but if you merely say to yourself, "What am I going to do?", without seeing the whole, then you are caught, then there is no answer to it. Questioner: Surely the first thing is for us to discuss these things openly. But I think people are a little frightened to discuss freely. Perhaps the thing they really care about will be threatened. Krishnamurti: Are you frightened? Questioner: If I say what I want is a fast car, then perhaps somebody will question that. Krishnamurti: It must be questioned. I get letters questioning me all the time; I have been challenged since my childhood. Questioner: Sir, there is something which always bothers me when these things are discussed. It is said we live in a highly mechanised industrial society and if some of us can opt out of it, it is because there are other people who do go to the office and work and become mechanical. Krishnamurti: Of course. Questioner: We couldn't opt out of it without those people fulfilling their mechanised, miserable existence. Krishnamurti: No. How to live in this world without belonging to it, that is the question. How to live in this insanity and yet be sane? Questioner: Are you saying that the man who goes to the office and leads an apparently mechanical life could do all that and yet be a different sort of human being? In other words, it isn't necessarily the system... Krishnamurti: This system, whatever it is, is making the mind mechanical. Questioner: But does it have to make the mind mechanical? Krishnamurti: It is happening. Questioner: All young people are faced with growing up, they see they may have to take a job which entails that. Can there be another response to it? Krishnamurti: My question is: how to live in this insane world sanely. Though I may have to go to an office and earn a livelihood, there must be a different heart, a different mind. Is this different mind, this different heart happening here in this place? Or are we just treading the mill and getting thrown out into this monstrous world? Questioner: (1) There is no need any more to have a nine-to-five, six day a week job because of automation. What is happening is that this age is now giving us the extra time to attend to our other side. Questioner: (2) But we were saying we want leisure and we don't know how to use leisure. Questioner: (3) There is nothing wrong, surely, in earning a livelihood? Krishnamurti: I never said it's wrong to earn a livelihood; one has to earn a livelihood. I earn my livelihood by talking to people in many places. I have been doing it for fifty years and I am doing what I love to do. What I am doing is really what I think is right, is true; it is the way of living for me - not imposed on me by somebody - and that is my way of earning a livelihood. Questioner: I just want to say that you are able to do that because there are people who fly the aeroplanes. Krishnamurti: Of course, I know that: without them I couldn't travel. But if there were no aeroplanes I would remain in one place, in the village where I was born and I would still be doing the same thing there. Questioner: Yes, but in this highly mechanised society, where profit is the motive, this is the way things are organized. Krishnamurti: No, other people do the dirty work and I do the clean work. Questioner: So one tries to do the clean work? Krishnamurti: It comes to that. Questioner: But apart from earning a living, we have to begin to realize that to live sanely and yet earn a living in this world, there has to be an inner revolution. Krishnamurti: I am putting the same question differently. How am I to live sanely in this world which is insane? It doesn't mean I am not going to earn a livelihood, that I am not going to marry, that I am not going to take responsibilities. To live in this insane world sanely, I must reject that world and a revolution in me must come about so that I become sane and operate sanely. That's my whole point. Questioner: Because I've been brought up insanely I have to question everything. Krishnamurti: That's what education is. You have been sent here, or you came here, contaminated by an insane world. Don't fool yourself, you have been conditioned by that insane world, shaped by past generations - including your parents - and you come here and you have to uncondition yourself, you have to undergo a tremendous change. Does that change take place? Or are we just saying: "Well, we are doing a bit of good work here and there, day after day," and by the time you leave in two or four years' time, off you go with a little patchwork done? Questioner: There seems to be a conflict between what we want to do, what we desire to do, and what is necessary. Krishnamurti: What is it you desire to do? I want to be an engineer because I see it brings in a great deal of money, or this or that. Can I rely on that desire? Can I rely on my instincts which have been so twisted? Can I rely on my thoughts? What have I to rely on? So education is to create an intelligence which is not mere instinct or desire or some petty demand, but an intelligence that will function in this world. Is our education at Brockwood helping you to be intelligent? I mean by that word: to be very sensitive, not to your own desires, to your own demands, but to be sensitive to the world, to what is going on in the world. Surely education is not merely to give you knowledge, but also to give you the capacity to look at the world objectively, to see what is happening - the wars, the destruction, the violence, the brutality. The function of education is to find out how to live differently, not merely to pass exams, to get a degree, become qualified in certain ways. It is to help you to face the world in a totally different, intelligent way, knowing you have to earn a livelihood, knowing all the responsibilities, the miseries of it all. My question is: is this being done here? Is the educator getting educated as well as the student? Questioner: Your question is also my question, I ask whether this education is happening here. Krishnamurti: You are asking whether such education is taking place here at Brockwood to help you to become so intelligent, so aware that you can meet this insanity? If not, whose fault is it? Questioner: What is the basis which makes this education possible? Krishnamurti: Look, why are you being educated? Questioner: I really don't know. Krishnamurti: Therefore you have to find out what education means, mustn't you? What is education? Giving you information, knowledge about various subjects and so on, a good academic training? That has to be, hasn't it? Millions of people are being turned out by the universities and colleges. Questioner: They give you the tools to live with. Krishnamurti: But what are the hands that are going to use them? They are the same hands that have produced this world, the wars and all the rest of it. Questioner: Which means the tools are there but if there is no inner, psychological revolution you will use those tools in the same old way and keep the rottenness going. That's what my question is about. Krishnamurti: If this revolution does not take place here, then why doesn't it? And if it does, is it actually affecting the mind, or is it still an idea and not an actuality, like having to eat three meals a day. That is an actuality, somebody has to cook, that's not an idea. So I am asking you, is this kind of education we are talking about taking place here? And if it is, let us find out how to vitalise it, give life to it. If it is not, let's find out why. Questioner: It doesn't seem to be happening in the whole school. Krishnamurti: Why not? It may be happening with a few individuals here and there - why isn't it happening with all of us? Questioner: I feel it's like a seed which wants to germinate but the top soil is too heavy. Krishnamurti: Have you seen grass growing through cement? Questioner: (1) Well, this is a weak seed, you see. (Laughter.) Questioner: (2) But do we realize that we are mediocre and do we want to get out of it? - that's the point. Krishnamurti: I am asking you: Are you mediocre? I am not using that word in any derogatory sense - I am using the word "mediocre" as it is described in the dictionary. You are bound to be middle class if you merely pursue your own little activities instead of seeing the whole - the whole world and your particular little place in the whole, not the other way round. People don't see the whole, they are pursuing their little desires, their little pleasures, their little vanities and brutalities, but if they saw the whole and understood their place in it, their relationship to the whole would be totally different. You, living at Brockwood as a student in a small community, in relationship with your teachers and your fellow students, do you see the whole of what is going on in the world? That is the first thing. To see it objectively, not emotionally, not with prejudice, not with a bias, but just look at it. The various governments will not solve this problem, no politician is interested in this. They want more or less to maintain the status quo, with a little alteration here and there. They don't want the unity of man, they want the unity of England. But even there the different political parties don't say, "Let's all join together and find out what is best for man." Questioner: But you are not saying it's not possible? Krishnamurti: They are not doing it. Questioner: Are we? Krishnamurti: We are observing, we are first looking at the world. And when you see the whole thing, what is your desire in relation to the whole? If you don't see the whole and merely pursue your particular instinct or tendency or desire, that is the essence of mediocrity, that's what is happening in the world. You see, in the old days the really serious people said, "We will have nothing to do with the world, we will become monks, we will become preachers, we will live without property, with out marriage, without position in society. We are teachers, we will go round the villages and the country, people will feed us, we will teach them morality, we will teach them how to be good, not to hate each other." That used to happen but we can't do that any more. In India one still can. You can go from the north to the south and from east to west, begging. Put on a certain robe and they will feed you and clothe you because that is part of the tradition of India. But even that is beginning to fade, for there are so many charlatans. So we have to earn a livelihood, we have to live in this world a life that is intelligent, sane, not mechanical - that is the point. And education is to help us to be sane, non-mechanical and intelligent. I keep repeating this. Now how do we, you and I, discuss this thing and find out first what we actually are and see if that can be totally changed? So first look at yourself, don't avoid it, don't say, "How terrible, how ugly." Just observe whether you have got all the tendencies of the insanity which has produced this ugly world. And if you observe your own particular quirks, find out how to change. Let's talk about it, that is relationship, that is friendship, that is affection, that is love. Talk about it and say, "Look, I am greedy, I feel terribly silly". Can that be changed radically? That is part of our education. Questioner: It's when I feel insecure that I become silly. Krishnamurti: Of course. But are you sure? Don't theorize about it. Are you seeking security? - in somebody, in a profession, in some quality, or in an idea? Questioner: One needs security. Krishnamurti: You see how you defend it? First find out if you are seeking security; don't say one needs it. Then we will see whether it is needed or not, but first see if you are seeking security. Of course you are! Have you understood the meaning and the implications of that word `depending'? - depending on money, depending on people, on ideas, all coming from outside. To depend on some belief, or on the image you have about yourself, that you are a great man, that you have this or that, you know all this nonsense that goes on. So you have to understand what the implications of that word are and whether you are caught in those things. If you see you depend on somebody for your security than you begin to question, then you begin to learn. You begin to learn what is implied in dependency, in attachment, In security, fear and pleasure are involved. When there is no security you feel lost, you feel lonely; and when you feel lonely you escape, through drink, women or whatever you do. You act neurotically because you haven't really solved this problem. So find out, learn what the meaning, the significance and the implications of that word are in actuality, not in theory. Learn: that is part of our education. I depend on certain people. I depend on them for my security, for my safety, for my money, for my pleasure, etc. Therefore if they do something which upsets me I get frightened, irritated, angry, jealous, frustrated, and then I rush off and put my claws into somebody else. The same problem goes on all the time. So I say to myself, let me first understand what this means. I must have money, I must have food, clothes and shelter, those are normal things. But when money is involved the whole cycle begins. So I have to learn and know about the whole thing; not after I have committed myself, then it is too late. I commit myself by getting married to somebody and then I am caught, then I am dependent, then the battle begins, wanting to be free yet being caught by responsibility, by the mortgage. Here is a problem: Tungki says, "I must have security." I answered: before you say "I must", find out what it means, learn about it. Questioner: I must have food and clothes and a house. Krishnamurti: Yes, go on. Questioner: To have that I need to earn enough money. Krishnamurti: So you do whatever you can. Then what happens? Questioner: To earn this money I depend on someone... Krishnamurti: You depend on society, on your patron, on your employer. He chases you around, he is brutal, and you put up with it because you depend on him. That is what is happening right round the world. Please look at it first, as you look at a map. You say: I have to earn a livelihood. I know in earning a livelihood I am dependent on society as it exists. It demands so many hours a day for five or six days a week and if I don't earn a livelihood I have nothing. That's one thing. And I also depend inwardly on my wife or a priest or a counsellor - you understand? Questioner: So knowing all that I won't marry. I see the dependency, all the trouble that will come. Krishnamurti: You are not learning. Don't say you won't marry, see what the problem is first. I need food, clothes and shelter, those are primary needs and for those I depend on society as it is, whether it is communist or capitalist. I know that and I am going to look in other directions; I need security emotionally, that means dependence on somebody, on my wife, friends, neighbours, it doesn't matter who it is. And when I depend on somebody, fear always exists. I am learning, I am not saying what to do yet. I depend on you, you are my brother, my wife, my husband, and the moment you go away I am lost, I am frightened - I do neurotic things. I see dependence on people leads to that. Also I ask: do I depend on ideas? On a belief that there is a God - or not - that we must have universal brotherhood, whatever it is; that is another dependence. And you come along and say, "What rubbish this is, you are living in a world of illusion." So I get shaken and I say, "What am I to do?" Then instead of learning about it I join some other cult. Do you see all this? Do you discover that in yourself you are insufficient and therefore you are dependent? Then you seek sufficiency in yourself: "I am all right, I have found God, what I believe is true, my experience is the real thing." So you ask: what is there that is so completely secure that it is never disturbed? Questioner: I don't see the dependency on the two things you were talking about... Krishnamurti: We re asking what the implications of wanting security mean. We're looking at the map of security. It shows that I depend on food, clothes and shelter by working in a society that is corrupt - and I see what depending on people does. I am not saying this should be or that should not be. The map says: look, this road leads to fear, pleasure, anger, fulfilment, frustration and neurosis. And it also says: look at the world of ideas, depending on ideas is the most flimsy form of security, they are only words which have become a reality as an image; you live on an image. And that map says: be self-sufficient. So I depend on myself, I must have confidence in myself. What is yourself? You are the result of all this. So the map has shown you all these things and you ask now, "Where is there complete security - including a job and all the rest of it?" Where will you find it? Questioner: You find it when you have no fears. Krishnamurti: You haven't understood what I am saying. Put a map of this in front of you. Look at it all: physical security, emotional security, intellectual security, and security in your own thoughts, in your own feelings, in your self-confidence. You say, how flimsy all this is. Looking at it all and seeing the flimsiness, the invalidity, the lack of reality behind it, where is security then? It is learning about this which brings intelligence. So in intelligence there is security. Have you understood it? Questioner: Can one live without security? Krishnamurti: You haven't learned to look first. You have learned to look through your particular image; that image has given you the feeling of security. So first learn to look at the map, put aside the image of what you think is security - that you must have it - and just look. What are the implications of wanting security? When you find there is no security in anything that you have sought, that there is no security in death, no security in living, when you see all that, then the very seeing of the fact that there is no security in the things in which one had sought it, is intelligence. That intelligence gives you complete security. So learning is the beginning of security. The act of learning is intelligence, and in learning there is tremendous security. Are you learning here? Questioner: In the family they say one must manage to earn a living, have a certain amount of knowledge. There is this idea about security, this basic necessity. Krishnamurti: Yes, Tungki, that's quite right. Your family, the tradition says you must have physical security, you must have a job, you must have knowledge, a technique, you must specialise, you must be this, you must be that, in order to have that security. Questioner: It's an idea. Krishnamurti: I need money, that's not an idea - everything else is an idea. The physical continuity in security is the real thing; everything else has no reality. And to see that is intelligence. In that intelligence there is the most complete security; I can live anywhere, in the communist world or in a capitalist world. Do you remember we said the other day that meditation is to observe? That is the beginning of meditation. You cannot observe this map if you have the slightest distortion in your mind, if your mind is distorted by prejudice, by fear. To look at this map is to look without prejudice. So learn in meditation what it is to be free of prejudice; that is part of meditation, not just sitting cross-legged in some place. It makes you tremendously responsible, not only for yourself and your relationship but for everything else, the garden, the trees, the people around you - everything becomes tremendously important. To be serious is also to have fun. You can't be serious without having fun. We talked the other day about yoga, didn't we? I showed you some breathing exercises. You must do it all with fun, enjoy things - you follow? Questioner: There are certain things like learning. I don't think it's possible to discuss them with a sense of fun. Krishnamurti: Oh yes! It is. Look, Tungki, learning is fun. To see new things is great fun; it gives you tremendous energy if you make a great discovery for yourself - not if someone else discovers it and tells you about it, then it's secondhand. When you are learning it is fun to see something totally new, like discovering a new insect, a new species. To discover how my mind is working, to see all the nuances, the subtleties: to learn about it is fun. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 14 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 7TH FEBRUARY 1973 Krishnamurti: I have just come back from India. I have noticed that things are getting very bad, the world is in a very peculiar, destructive state, it is degenerating people don't want to work, there are strikes. Apparently the war is over in Vietnam, but there is really no peace there. The communist world is also very disturbed; there is corruption everywhere, corruption in the sense not only of passing money under the table, but also in the sense that everybody is thinking selfishly, fragmentarily and thinking in circles. Also our artists can't go any further, they have come to the end of things. They have tried every kind of expression and they too have come to a point when they can't go any further. And poverty, as in India, of which you know absolutely nothing, is spreading, especially where there are severe droughts. With poverty goes degradation, every kind of violence goes on. Terrible things are happening in South America, in Brazil, and so on. I do not know if you are aware of all this: probably you are studying current history, current events, and one wonders what is going to be the outcome of it all. You are going to face all this when you leave this place. So what is the relationship between the community here and the vast community of the world? What is going to happen to you all? This isn't a rhetorical, or merely an intellectually stimulating question. When you leave this place, what will be your fate - if I can use that word - what is going to happen? Do you know how to work, both intellectually and physically, and therefore are able to stand on your own against this current that is carrying people away? - the current of commercialism and vast selfishness. Either you are going to be drawn into it unknowingly, or knowingly, and if you know how to work, how to study, how to use your mind, then you may fit into it. Are you going to be sucked into the current, or stand alone? So when one comes to Brockwood and sees the beauty of the winter, the bare trees, the lovely lines of the branches, the peace and quiet, the beauty of the place, one is rather shocked by the contrast of it all. And one wonders whether Brockwood offers you the opportunity - or it may and you do not utilize it - to really use your brain, your highest capacities, intellectual, physical and psychological. One wants to cry about the things that are happening, and here is a group, a community of fairly serious, fairly thoughtful people, where ideas and freedom and so-called discipline go together. Or is freedom a word that is misused and means doing what one wants to do? What is it we are doing here together? Brockwood is a community, a so-called educational centre. I wonder if the word `education' is the right word at all. When one uses that word as it is generally understood, it means learning out of books, storing up information and using it either selfishly or for a particular cause or a particular sect, and making oneself important in that sect or organization. Generally that is what is happening. Are we using our minds to their highest capacity, or are we just slowing down? Come on, I want to find out what you say, what you think. I'm afraid one has to be terribly W serious, although you can laugh and play and have a good time; at the core one has to be terribly serious in this world - you are up against it. How will you respond later on? That depends on what you are doing now. Whether you have observed what is happening in the world, how it is fragmented, broken up, each one fighting the other commercially, intellectually and emotionally; the different types of war, economic, social, class warfare, and the ordinary war of butchery, and the worship of success. You must face this. Have you the capacity to see it and not enter into the game at all? I think Brockwood offers an opportunity for you to have this inward strength to stand against all this. Whether you use that opportunity is up to you, and of course up to the grown up people too. That is why I feel it is very important to know what it means to work; physically with your hands, psychologically with your mind - to work hard. Are you doing that here? Or is it all rather slack? Or do you say, "We are free to do what we want?" Questioner: What work is there to do besides just seeing all the problems? I mean that is the work, isn't it? Krishnamurti: But how do you see the problems? Everybody who is at all alive, a little watchful, sees these problems. Questioner: Well, you have to see how you react, or how you act. Krishnamurti: How do you react? Do you see all this as though it were `out there', or do you see it in relationship? Questioner: I see it as an expression. I see it like art. All the problems are expressions. Krishnamurti: Do you consider all that is part of you? Or don't you belong to it? Are you an outsider looking in? Or are you looking without being an outsider? You observe it all: the worship of success, the brutality, the intellectual worship of things, the storing of knowledge. Are you all that, or are you different from all that? Questioner: I don't feel either way. Krishnamurti: All that is the result of our greed, our ambition, competitiveness, worship of success, asserting oneself, thoughtlessness - are you free of all that? Questioner: Maybe we are not free of it, but we are not part of it right now. Krishnamurti: You may be free of it. But if you are not free of it, are you aware that you are part of it? Questioner: Every day you might say, "I am not a part of this smoking, this drinking" - but it can happen to you any day. Even when you are in your room and you are quiet inside, you still can be selfish.... Krishnamurti: What I mean is: do you look at all this as something different from you, or are you part of it? There may be moments when you are not - you may not be when you are thinking quietly - but as long as one is selfish, ambitious, greedy, possessive, one is that. Questioner: At Brockwood we may feel we are not part of it, or we somehow fool ourselves that we are not part of it. Krishnamurti: I don't know, I am asking you. You may be fooling yourself thinking, "We are different, we are young, therefore it is not yet our job to be concerned with it." If you don't lay the foundation now, when you are young, I don't see how you are going to lay it later. In about ten years' time you will all be married and have children. Questioner: There is some tendency to discriminate between what is nasty and what is necessary. To get down to practical things we have to associate ourselves, or be involved with everything that is here. A simple example is work in the garden - it is nice to work out there when it is sunny and warm... Krishnamurti: Yes, but it is awful on a day like this. Look, what are you all going to do? What is your future? What do you want to do? Or haven't you thought about it? If you haven't thought about it, just leave it alone, may be you are too young to think about it. But if you do think about it, what is going to happen to you? Questioner: I don't quite understand what you mean. Is it what you can do, or what you think you want to do? Krishnamurti: Both. Can you separate what you can do from what you want to do? What is it you want to do? Questioner: I could tell you what I don't want to do. I don't want to be part of what I see. Krishnamurti: I may not want to be part of all this mess, but I have to do something. I can't just say, "I don't want to be that" and stay in my room. I have to eat, I have to clothe myself, I have to have shelter. Questioner: You can work. You can leave here and just get a job. Krishnamurti: What is it the mind wants to do in this world? Questioner: You can get a job. Krishnamurti: A job isn't the point. You can get a job if you are lucky enough, or you can live on somebody else. I met a man who had hitch-hiked from New York and worked his way across the sea and hitch-hiked from Paris to Delhi. You understand what that means? He was a Brahmin and a strict vegetarian, therefore all through the voyage he lived on cucumbers, a few fruits, an occasional orange for the three weeks. He said, "I want to go to India, and when I get there I am going to spend my life as a really religious man" - whatever that may mean. Now what is going to happen to you? - I am really interested. Questioner: It seems as though the more I look at things the less I want to do. Krishnamurti: The less you want to do anything. Questioner: In a sense, yes. Not anything to do with business, most things are involved in this. Krishnamurti: I know, but nonetheless what will you do? You can't just sit back and say, "I won't do anything". You have got to eat, you have got to dress yourself and have got to pay to sleep somewhere. Questioner: There are so few things you can do. Krishnamurti: Are there so few things? Do you want to hitch- hike to India? No, don't do it! Are there so few things to do in life without getting involved in all this mess? Questioner: I would rather look at everything you can do, but everything seems to be contaminated by this mess. Krishnamurti: So that means that everything you do will be contaminated - is that it? Questioner: Well, you have to deal with it. Krishnamurti: So how will you deal with it? You have to pay taxes and so on. Will you join a monastery - many people are doing that - but will you like that kind of living? Or is that question rather irrelevant to people who are still very young? But you are old enough to know that unless you lay a foundation now, and see how you observe - not analytically - what your reactions are, and why those reactions exist, unless you do that, it will be very difficult to face this. Questioner: I wonder whether one can survive when one is put in a place where everybody is fighting with another. Krishnamurti: Yes, put yourself in that position. Have you thought about violence? What is involved in violence, how does it arise, what is the structure of violence? There is physical violence and there is the violence of obedience - are you obeying and therefore being violent? Do you understand what I mean? When I obey you and suppress what I think, that suppression will burst out one day. So there is physical violence and violence brought about through obedience, the violence of competitiveness, of conformity. When I conform to a pattern I am violent - you see the connection? When I live a life of fragmentation - that is, when I think one thing and say another, do another - that is fragmentation and that also breeds violence. I may be very quiet, gentle, do all the work I am asked to do, but I flare up: which indicates there has been suppression in me. So violence is not just physical violence, it is a very complex question. And if you haven't thought about it, when you are faced with violence you will react most unintelligently. Questioner: Can one live in this world without any violence at all? Krishnamurti: Find out, work. Find out how to live a life in which there is no violence. Questioner: A minute ago you spoke about suppression. Maybe here, if we discuss things, it can come out and not be suppressed. I don't know if that is a form of suppression. Krishnamurti: Let us take it one by one. You know what physical violence is, getting angry, hitting each other, or somebody is bullying you verbally. That is one kind of violence. Obedience is violence, isn't it? Or would you say that is not violence? I obey when I keep to the left side of the road - is that violence? Questioner: No. That is intelligence, if you didn't you would get run over. Krishnamurti: Yes, which means what? Questioner: It is a fact. Krishnamurti: So there are facts and what else? Go on. Questioner: And things that we produce in our head that don't really exist. Krishnamurti: I obey the law which says keep to the right in Europe and to the left in England. Is that violence? Obviously not. If you obey somebody who you think is superior in knowledge, is that violence? I teach you mathematics and you will discuss it with me, but in that there is some sort of imitation, conformity and obedience, isn't there? Is that violence? Society says you must go and kill the Muslims or the Communists - is that violence? Questioner: Yes. Krishnamurti: Why? There is not only physical violence involved in it, but also so-called love of country, nationalism, a division of yourself as an Englishman, a German, a Russian, or a Muslim - which is a form of violence. So how will you have the insight to see where obedience is not violence and where it is? Do you see the difference? I conform, I imitate when I drive on the left. I put on trousers in this country, but when I go to India I put on Indian dress - is that a kind of conformity? And inwardly I conform to being a Hindu, to my tradition, to my beliefs - isn't that violence? So where is the line between violence and seeing for oneself where freedom is order? All violence is disorder. Don't misunderstand what I am saying and afterwards say, "I won't conform" and go and do something silly. The whole world is involved in violence, in disorder of different categories. In the business world there is tremendous disorder, although there are marvellous companies run most efficiently; but they fight each other - there is disorder. So I see disorder, and that freedom from disorder is order -right? There has to be the intelligence or insight to see that any movement towards disorder is violence. If I put on trousers in this country, is that conformity? To me it is not. But it is conformity to say, "I am a Hindu, it is my tradition, my belief, my custom." So I won't conform, because conformity there leads to disorder. So I wipe out Hinduism from my blood. That is real freedom. What does it mean to obey? `'You should do this", "Keep to the left", "Go to church", or "You are an Englishman". When you are aware of the factors of disorder, then you are free because there is order in your life. This is real education: to live a life of tremendous order in which obedience is understood, in which it is seen where conformity is necessary and where it is totally unnecessary, and to see when you are imitating. Questioner: Would you say that when you are imitating inwardly then you have conflict? For instance, when you learn a language and you do it because you feel you have to do it. Krishnamurti: There is nothing you have to do. If you are forced by circumstances, that is violence. To belong to a sect, to a group, to a country, that is really violence because it separates people. I see this happening - am I doing this? To find out if I am doing it, that is real work, that is what I mean by work, not merely gardening, cooking and studying; that is part of it, but the real work is to see, to understand whether you live in disorder. You may have tremendous order outwardly, put on clean clothes, wash and be punctual at all meals, but the real order is inside. And because you are in order you will do things in an orderly way. If you say, "I will garden", you will garden whether it is foul or fair weather. Oh, you don't work - I have done all these things! Questioner: We learn it in doing it. We are not suggesting that we retire to our rooms and find out. Krishnamurti: Good God, no! You learn while you are doing. The doing is the learning. Questioner: To find out whether we are cooperating or conforming: if we are cooperating, then it really doesn't lead to contradictions. Krishnamurti: Either you have to cooperate because you are compelled, or violent circumstances compel you. Or you want to cooperate, you love to cooperate, you want to do things together. That is order; I can't live by myself in my room. Questioner: And there is no contradiction there at all? Krishnamurti: Obviously not. But if you compel me, or circumstances compel me, or I feel that if I don't I will be looked down upon, that is violence. But not if I see we must work together, that life is working together, that I can't live by myself. After all, I find out whether I am violent in doing things with you -how I play, how I talk, how I listen to you. In relationship I find out. Otherwise I can't find out, I can't sit in my room and try to find out whether I am violent. I can imagine I'm not violent, but the real test, the real action comes in relationship, to see if I am like that. That's real work. And if you do that you have tremendous energy because your life is in order. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART I CHAPTER 15 SCHOOL DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 25TH MAY 1973 Krishnamurti: I don't know if you were considering what we were talking about the other day: how knowledge conditions the mind and whether it is possible to teach facts, give information and so on - all of which is knowledge - without conditioning the mind. One has given such tremendous importance to knowledge. To some Indian minds knowledge is a way to God. In the East, I think, knowledge represents a way of life in which the very studying of the sacred books - the Talmud, the various Sutras and the Koran -memorising and repeating the texts, brings you nearer to what they call God, or Allah, or Jehovah. We are saying that conditioning takes place not only culturally, in the sense of religion, social morality and so on, but also through knowledge itself. Is it possible to teach students and ourselves to free the mind from knowledge and yet use knowledge without causing the mind to function mechanically? If I were a teacher here, I would be greatly concerned how to bring about this unconditioning in myself and in the student. We went into that: in the very act of teaching I learn about my own conditioning and see the conditioning of the child and learn how to uncondition the mind. Now, can we go into this question of whether knowledge conditions the mind, and if it does, how to prevent it; how not to shape the mind in the very act of teaching and giving information. Questioner: Knowledge itself doesn't condition your mind. It's your attitude to knowledge which conditions it; just having the facts in your head doesn't condition your mind. Krishnamurti: Why should I carry the facts in my mind? They are in the encyclopedia, in the books - why should I carry all this in my mind? Questioner: A great deal of the function of the mind is on a level where knowledge as a tool is necessary. Krishnamurti: If I want to build a bridge I must have a certain knowledge and experience, I need technical information. I use that knowledge to build a bridge. I see the necessity of a certain knowledge being held in the mind, but how am I to prevent that knowledge being misused by the engineer who says, "I am going to use this for self-advancement?" Is that the problem? Questioner: (1) Yes, it's the misuse. Questioner: (2) Isn't it also that the mind can't keep still? One goes for a walk and one is thinking about building the bridge, not looking at the trees. Krishnamurti: But if I have got to build a bridge I have to think a great deal about it. Questioner: It would seem that the more knowledge and information I can comfortably carry in the mind the better off I am, because I don't have to look it up in a book. I can refer to it very easily. Krishnamurti: So what is the function of knowledge? Here you are, teaching mathematics, geography, biology and so on; what is the function of it in life? Questioner: It is a tool which the individual may use in his action. Krishnamurti: Action in a particular direction. Questioner: It's the background you draw from in your action, whether it's knowledge from experience or from a book. Krishnamurti: I was talking yesterday to some parents in London. Their son is nineteen. When he was eighteen he was going to university and suddenly he dropped it all, took to drugs and gave whatever money he had to a particular guru, and he is meditating for an hour a day. The parents are concerned, they ask, "What is going to happen to him?" What is going to happen to these boys and girls we have here after you have taught them, given them all the information about art, music, geometry, history and English, whatever it is? They have acquired all that marvellous technical knowledge and then what happens to them? Will it make them glorified clerks in a rotten society? What for? If a boy does not go to university and get a degree, he finds it very difficult to get a job unless he has got some particular quality. So what is it we are trying to do? We give them all that knowledge and then leave a vast field, the other part of life, completely disregarded. Do you know what I mean? Questioner: (1) I don't know if it's disregarded completely. The students find out in the course of this what they enjoy doing, where they can put their energy. They are finding out gradually what they can spend their life doing. Questioner: (2) They are also coming into contact with other values because we listen to your talks together and as far as we can, we bring those to bear on our relationship with the student. Questioner: (3) But the student has to get a sense of purpose in life that goes beyond the intellectual accomplishments which will take care of his daily living. He has to see the whole picture of living: " What am I living for?" Questioner: (4) Can a young person answer that question? Questioner: (5) We can begin to enquire... Questioner: (6) There is a great deal of uncertainty in young people and in other people`s minds too, about the area where knowledge is good and useful and where it is irrelevant, where it goes wrong. I think the confusion between these two is constantly coming up among young people, among people who listen to you and have read your books. In a way it is clear and yet there is confusion about where the frontier lies between the two. Krishnamurti: Can I put the question differently? What is the function of a teacher? Questioner: To indicate a way of living. Krishnamurti: Apart from, "The teacher is the taught" - what is the function of a teacher? Questioner: Could it possibly be to inspire the student with the kind of energy which he can then continue on his own? Krishnamurti: Do you inspire your students? I dislike that word `inspire'. I don't want to inspire somebody - who am I? Questioner: You don't inspire them, you release them to their own energy. You remove the thing which is impeding them. Krishnamurti: Is that the function of a teacher? - to make them study, to inspire them, encourage them, or stimulate them to study when they are not interested? You say that we have to help them to find their purpose in life. Questioner: To find out what life is about in the sense of where I, as an individual, fit into the whole of life. Krishnamurti: Look at what is happening in the world. Thousands of boys are leaving university, taking to drugs, having individual sex or group sex, they run away, join appalling communities, sects, shave their heads, dance in the streets, give all their money to some guru. Questioner: It's happening because they haven't had the right education. Krishnamurti: Are we giving them the right education? Questioner: If we are, they won't do these things. Krishnamurti: No, not that they won't do it. What are we trying to do as teachers? We give them vegetarian food, ask them to get up in time, to be clean, keep their hair tidy, try to tell them to adjust themselves. What is it we are basically attempting to do here? Questioner: The primary thing is to be aware of our conditioning in our relationship with the child. Krishnamurti: No. Questioner: As it is, we have to spend so much time in relationship with the children, pointing out all these things which they do daily, like running along the corridors. In that way you are almost bound to spoil your relationship with the child. You see, a child here hasn't got one mother, he's got twenty, thirty mothers -all take it in turn to point out to him what he is doing wrong. What I want to know is, what kind of education, what approach do we have to the child that would make him not want to run down the corridor any longer. Krishnamurti: No. I would like to look at it this way - I may be wrong. You know what's happening in the world; politically all governments are corrupt, really corrupt, not superficially but deeply. And there are all these gurus going round the world, collecting money and followers, distorting the minds of young people; there are the drugs of various kinds, there is the army, there is business. Seeing what is going on, not abstractly but actually, what are we trying to do with these children? Make them fit into that? Questioner: Partly to make them see all that as well; it's partly reflected in our own environment. Krishnamurti: No. Do let's be a little more concrete, a little more direct about it. What are we trying to do? Questioner: (1) I want to encourage them to look at life with a greater seriousness. They seem very casual and relaxed, particularly the young ones. Questioner: (2) When education was most significant to me it was in moments when my mental horizon was suddenly expanded through the influence of a teacher or through some cultural impact. There was an expansion of a sense of values which put things into perspective. Questioner: (3) The keynote is the sense of values in a world where anything goes. Questioner: (4) Aren't we trying to find out how to live differently? Ways have started which are so ugly, the ways of doing whatever you want, which is so shallow and pointless. Maybe there is another way for the child in which there is infinite depth. Questioner: (5) The personality of the person who brings something to the child has to be acceptable to him. The child feels we are rather ordinary - I don`t see why he should listen to us. I feel we have to bring into being a new quality in ourselves, primarily. Questioner: (6) Do we, Doris? Primarily for ourselves? Questioner: (7) Yes. I think so. Krishnamurti: Surely not. Questioner: (1) Not in a self-centred sense, but primarily to find out, certainly for ourselves, a better way of actually living together. Questioner: (2) Well, if we find that out for ourselves, aren't we finding it out as a whole, not just for our own selves? Questioner: (3) Nothing is for our own, of course; we are not subtly trying to glorify our individual selves, on the contrary. But I feel that the quality of the being of each one here needs to be immensely more vital. Krishnamurti: `It should be' - now we are lost! Questioner: But what are we to do? Krishnamurti: I want to tackle it. Here I am, a teacher - what am I trying to do? Questioner: So many of the students are already aware of the happenings in the world outside, I think that's why some of the older ones are questioning the corruption of the government. Krishnamurti: Yes, then what? When they are faced with all this, when they go out into the world, will they be absorbed by it? Or just say, "Sorry, I won't have anything to do with that", and move away from it? Questioner: They have to find out for themselves. Krishnamurti: How will they find out, what will give them the light, the insight to say, "I won't"? Questioner: (1) That is what we are attempting to do here, and that is what they are also challenging. Questioner: (2) That is why some of them came here. Krishnamurti: Now let's be clear - is that what we are trying to do? Helping them to see `what is', the corruption and alI the rest of it, and not to enter into that trap at all? Questioner: That is only one part of it. Krishnamurti: What is the other part? Giving them knowledge? Helping them to have courage to battle? I asked the principal of one of the schools in India. I said, "You have been doing this for nearly forty years, you have spent your life in this, has it been worthwhile?" He answered, "Yes." So I asked, "In all those forty years has there been a boy or girl who was outstanding, who did not enter into this terrible morass of iniquity?" He answered, "I don't know, very few were." So I said, "You mean in all those forty years you spent here only one or two have kept out of it?" Questioner: Where does the trouble lie? - with the teacher or the taught? Krishnamurti: Both. You haven't got the material. If you want to make a good suit you must have good material. Questioner: (1) I'd say the material is pretty warped already. Questioner: (2) It's no good at all if you don't take any material you can find anywhere; the whole thing goes by the board if you are only having the best. But pick the first child you can from the slums of London. If it can be done at all, it can be done with that child. Questioner: (3) I wouldn't use that phrase - good material or bad material - I would just say they are all human beings. Questioner: (4) Then it has the implication that society is human beings all of whose intention is to do the right thing, to act intuitively, to be sensitive, aware, to be conscious of their actions. If that is so, then it seems to me that it defeats the purpose of having such a school, if we just take the mass of humanity and say everyone`s intention is to be awake and to be sensitive, that influence plays such a small part. I think there is certainly a difference. I think it is a question of who comes here, who is here -whether it be staff or student - and what is their intention in being here. Questioner: (5) There are some who have shown a predisposition to live in a different way, they have shown interest. There is an intelligence already. Krishnamurti: Now what part does knowledge play in that? Questioner: A flower, a dog, has no knowledge and therefore it lives the sort of life it does. You need knowledge; how you use that knowledge gives the measure of you. Krishnamurti: So you are saying, how a human being uses knowledge is the really important thing. Questioner: No, that can't be it. Krishnamurti: Why not? Questioner: (1) Knowledge doesn't play a part in actual being. Questioner: (2) Living properly does not depend at all on any sort of knowledge. Questioner: (3) But living itself depends on knowledge. Questioner: (4) What kind of knowledge are we talking about? Krishnamurti: Let's talk about what kind of knowledge we mean. Questioner: Knowledge which is academic knowledge, which is scientific knowledge; it is part of what we are. At this moment we are using it for insight, if you like. Krishnamurti: Let's call it academic knowledge; that's one thing. Knowledge of how to live using that knowledge is another thing. Or is knowledge the whole thing? And where does freedom, where does spontaneity come in this? There is academic knowledge; if I learn about myself and use that knowledge about myself there is no freedom in that. I don't know if I am conveying this? Questioner: Are you saying that one needs academic knowledge to learn about oneself? Krishnamurti: No. Must I go to a university to learn about myself? Questioner: But going to university doesn't prevent you knowing about yourself. Krishnamurti: So there is self-knowing and academic knowledge, which is always the past, adding to it, taking away from it, moulding it - all that. If I say "I know myself," it is the knowledge which I have acquired in observing myself. That doesn't give me freedom - I am still caught in knowledge of myself. Questioner: The idea I have about myself. Krishnamurti: Yes, Sir. Questioner: That is using the ways of scientific knowledge and applying it to self-knowledge; that is the problem. Krishnamurti: No. Suppose somebody has never been to university, he can learn about himself in his relationship to everybody. Questioner: But does he build on that, does he store that knowledge away? Krishnamurti: The moment he stores it, then that becomes an impediment, therefore he is never free. I wonder if I am making myself clear? Questioner: Are you saying that in learning about yourself there are two things. One is picking up little facts about yourself and storing them up and saying, "I do this and this." The other is a perception of that total process to a profound depth in which you suddenly see the whole thing and have then finished with it. Krishnamurti: Which has nothing to do with the accumulation of knowledge about yourself. Questioner: You mean you see to a degree that makes all the knowledge of the little pieces put together disappear, because you have seen them. Krishnamurti: You see the whole of yourself... Questioner:... and you therefore have freedom. Krishnamurti: That's right. That is freedom. If I learn about myself and say, "I mustn't do this, I must do that" - you know all the petty little things that go on - that knowledge is going to completely cripple me: I daren't do anything freely, spontaneously. Now I think we begin to see what the different kinds of knowledge are. So what is it we are trying to bring about in the student? We don't only teach book knowledge, that is understood. Then what is the other? Are you trying to help the student to know himself little by little? - collect knowledge about himself through little actions? Or are we trying to help him to have an insight into the whole of it? I think this is important. How is he to have a total insight into himself so that everything falls into place? - all the little things -how to behave, how to have good relationships, everything falls into place. Now, how am I to convey this and help him to it? Questioner: If one is indicating an action, a process in the present tense, it seems that one must be in that process oneself; one must be actively exploring it in oneself, otherwise it becomes just another fact that is added to all the others. Krishnamurti: Just another series of ideas; I understand that. Listen: I am trying to teach mathematics and also I am telling the student to get up early, to go to bed at the right time, eat properly, wash, etc. And yet I want to help him to have an insight which will enable him to get up at the proper time and do all the other things easily. Now there are three things I'm involved in: academic learning, telling him what to do, and at the same time I say to him, "Look, if you get the insight everything falls into place." I have all the three streams harmoniously running together. Now how am I to convey this? How am I to help him? Questioner: He has to see where they all fit. Krishnamurti: No, no. Again you are fitting him into this. Then he will say, "All right, I'll fit into this." Look at the problem first. Academic learning is one stream. The other is the details, such as, "Get up, don't do this, don't do that" -which you also have to do. And the third stream is to say, "Look, to be so supremely intelligent means you'll instinctively do the right thing in behaviour." Let all three streams run together harmoniously. Questioner: It's very difficult to... Krishnamurti: No, don t say it's difficult, don't say anything, but first see the thing. If you say it is very difficult, it is finished. Questioner: The third element is a concept. Krishnamurti: No, it is not a concept, it is not an idea - concept means an idea, a conclusion. I see the three things: the insight or the intelligence, the detailed behaviour, and academic learning; and I feel they are not moving together, they are not forming one harmonious river. So I say to myself: what am I to do, how am I to teach these three things so that they make a whole? When you listen to this you conclude, you say, "Yes, I accept that as an idea." I say it is not an idea. Then it becomes difficult, then you say, "I don't know what to do." But if it is a reality, how am I to convey the reality of it to the student - not the idea. Personally I have never had a problem or a conflict about all this. Now how am I as a teacher, living here in a rather intimate relationship with the students - intimate in the sense of daily contact - how am I to show this? I am asking you, how will you show this to the child? - but not as an idea. If it is an idea, then it means you must practise it, you must battle with it, all that nonsense begins. Questioner: Well, if it's meaningful to me, then it is meaningful. Krishnamurti: Is it meaningful to you? Questioner: It is very, very meaningful. Krishnamurti: In what way? When do you use the word `meaningful'? Questioner: I feel these three elements are extremely important. Krishnamurti: Sorry, I refuse to say it is important. Questioner: It is. Krishnamurti: Now how do you convey it to the child? Questioner: Surely the beauty of insight conveys itself - the sheer beauty of it. Krishnamurti: Sir, do you know what you are saying? I won't listen, I am looking at that bird and you say, "See the beauty of this." Let the seed be born in him. How are you going to plant that seed? You understand? Questioner: Yes, I understand. But I also see that if you can only plant the seed, and if relationship is not a meeting of one balanced mind with another balanced mind, then nothing comes of it. Krishnamurti: I agree. Now how do you propose this to happen? Take a boy, you help him, you give him everything he wants in the sense of good environment and good food, you tell him what to do, teach him academically and all the rest of it; then something happens and everything goes totally wrong for the rest of the boy's life. He takes to drink, women or drugs, cheats, does the most appalling things possible - he is finished. I have seen this happen. If you plant a seed in the ground it may die, but the seed itself is the truth of the tree, of the plant. Now, can this be done with us, with the children, with you and me? Questioner: (1) It is something that can be done; by definition it can't be measured. Questioner: (2) A child comes here perhaps from a very disturbed background for a very short time; we can only offer what we have. If we are fairly balanced, if we are very serious about it, if there is a right relationship, he takes that away when he goes out into the world. Krishnamurti: You are saying, "If we are serious, if we are balanced" - but are we? Questioner: I think that is one of the basic things we are questioning. Krishnamurti: Am I, are you, are we basically serious and balanced? - serious enough to say, "Look", and convey it verbally and non-verbally? Questioner: Sir, that is what I meant by beauty - the non-verbal conveying. Krishnamurti: To convey non-verbally one must be astonishingly clear oneself, limpid, and have that real seriousness, all that we said just now. Am I, are you? Questioner: Aren't we teaching and learning together? Aren't we giving attention to every detail that happens during the day? So all the time you take the instance that presents itself. Because you feel so strongly about this the force is there and so you are dealing with every moment of the day. And it`s not a correction, that is insight, if you like. And it's also linked with knowledge. Krishnamurti: I understand that. But I am trying to find out how I am to convey this thing? - the three streams moving together. Questioner: You deal with the fact. To take one example: someone asked, "Can I put the tent up?" And I said, "Don't put it near the road." She said, " Why not? I'm a free person" - in other words, "You needn't tell me." So I told the person why. You go into it so that she understands the situation, which is factual; it includes the academic side and the intonation of the voice comes in too. Krishnamurti: I know. Questioner: So it's not dealing with separate things all the time. Krishnamurti: Will this be conveyed to the student? Questioner: It does sometimes and it doesn't at other times. You have to work at it and go into it again. Krishnamurti: So you are saying, one has to be at it all the time. Questioner: All the time. Not in the sense of: " You haven't done that." That's pigeonholing and petty and gives a wrong feeling, not insight. It`s as though you came into a room and said, "You don't do it that way." Krishnamurti: I see that. I'm not questioning it, I think it's all right - I don't mean that in a patronizing way. Questioner: The other side of it is, that if we only stay at that level and that becomes the element in which we are working in relating to the other, if that is so, then again it comes back to ourselves and our relationship - a balanced relationship between balanced people, if it is possible. If not, it is always a corrective measure and never a penetrating gesture, a penetrating relationship. Krishnamurti: Yes, Sir. Questioner: (1) Isn't that very action on a penetrating, deep level? Questioner: (2) It depends whether it goes to that level and you can feel it. Perhaps I am talking too much about a specific example, because I know the situation and I know that child and I know my own relationship with that child on that level. Perhaps I am questioning whether or not it ever has penetrated the surface. I don't always feel that is true in relationship with a young child. Do we have the right to select and say: it seems that there is a possibility of insight in one child, or that in another child there isn't that possibility. Do we reject the child, or do we say: this is what this child needs and relate it to that? Krishnamurti: Take each child separately. Questioner: That's it. Krishnamurti: Sir, all you have said is right. Is there a different approach to this? What I mean is very difficult to put into words. Can this seed be born without your doing anything about it? We are doing something about it: my relationship with the child, how I behave, what I do, how I am - sentimental or balanced - learning about myself and then helping the child - all that. We know that as probably the only way. I am asking if there is another way at all, in which this thing takes place without us doing something about it -yet it takes place. Questioner: Surely it must, in any real relationship... Krishnamurti: You are bringing in relationship... Questioner: Is there a way for a person to have a deep understanding of the significance of his life? Is it possible to see... Krishnamurti:... the whole thing instantly. Questioner: Of course there must be. Krishnamurti: How? Questioner: Surely a relationship in any situation is only a secondary thing - the insight is by definition itself. So if we are talking about education being basically self-understanding and awareness, then a community, an environment, a relationship can indicate something; but the individual must see, that must be the spring, it comes from inside, not from outside. Krishnamurti: I understand all that. I am trying to find out something else. A student comes here, terribly conditioned, or the family is broken up - this and that. And as a teacher, I also come here conditioned. I am learning about myself, I am helping in our relationship, I am quiet and so on. I am unconditioning myself and him in our relationship. We know that, we have discussed it, we have seen it. Now I am asking myself: is there a way of doing something which will bring about the seed to be born naturally in the person? Questioner: What you are trying to say is: is there a way when a person can't say it for you? - yet you show me the way. Do you mean that? Krishnamurti: Not quite. Sir, can we produce a miracle? Questioner: That`s the question. Krishnamurti: Wait - you understand, Sir? Questioner: Do we want to produce a miracle? Or do we just... Krishnamurti: I think both are involved - a miracle is also necessary. Do you understand what I mean by miracle? I don't mean something like Lourdes. Questioner: Are you saying: if the seed is there, just like the seed in the ground, and the conditions are right, then it will flower? Krishnamurti: I don't mean it that way. We know the child as well as the teacher comes here conditioned and has to learn to uncondition himself. This unconditioning means: the academic side, behaviour in detail as well as seeing the totality, all of that running together. This is what I am trying to convey to the student and in that I am learning how to live that way. That takes too long. So I say to myself, "A miracle must happen to change it instantly." May be both together are necessary - the miracle as well as the other. Can we produce both? I think we can. And that's why, as you said just now, if we are balanced, serious - which means not sentimental, not verbal, not ideational but factual - if we are dealing with it in that way, the miracle comes. Questioner: That's half the miracle, isn't it? Krishnamurti: Yes, Sir. I think that is what is necessary here - a miracle in that sense. That can only happen if we are really tremendously serious and not anything but factual. Can we convey to the student the factual? - never the ideal, never the `what should be' - the sentiment involved in what `should' be. I think then the miracle comes about. If you tell me I am a fool and I see it as a fact - the miracle then takes place. We are all brought up on `what should be,' on ideation, a sentimental way of living, and these boys and girls are also used to that; they face facts only for a little while and turn it into sentiment. Can we convey to them never to enter into that field at all? Questioner: It means that as a community we must put all this aside altogether, because otherwise our relationship is one of constant interpretation of another's behaviour, rather than actual awareness and deep understanding. Krishnamurti: Yes, absolutely. BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING QUOTATIONS FROM PART I "The world is that way, deceptive, the deceiving politicians, the money-minded... If you are not properly educated you'll just slip into it. So what do you think is education? Is it to help you fit into the mechanism of the present order, or disorder, of things? Or do you think it should be something else?" "Is your education at Brockwood helping you to be intelligent? I mean by that word to be very sensitive, not to your own desires, to your own demands, but to be sensitive to the world, to what is going on in the world. Surely education is not merely to give you knowledge, but also to give you the capacity to look at the world objectively. The function of education is to help you to face the world in a totally different intelligent way." "When you have that seed, and it is flowering here, then you will keep it going all your life. But if this doesn't operate, then the world will destroy you. The world makes you what it wants you to be: a cunning animal." THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART II CHAPTER 1 CONVERSATION WITH PARENTS AND TEACHERS It is always exciting to go to a new country, especially when you are very young. One feels that very much in this country where there is great physical freedom, where everyone seems to have so much energy, where there is a restless, changing activity that seems to have no end. From coast to coast, except for one or two cities, the great towns are all alike. But the country is vast and extraordinarily beautiful with its great spaces, deserts and long, winding deep rivers. You can find all climates here from the tropics to high, snowy mountains. Over looking the blue Pacific, in a large room several of us were talking about education. A tall man in a tweed jacket said: "My sons and daughters are in revolt. They seem to regard their home as a passage to somewhere else. They have a feeling that they cannot be told anything, that they have all the answers. They dislike any form of authority or what they think is authority. They are naturally against war, not because they have thought a great deal about the causes of war, but because they are against killing other human beings; yet they would approve of war for certain causes. They are strangely violent, not only with us, but they are against the government, against this and that. They say they are against conformity but from what I have seen of them and the friends they bring home they are as conforming in their way as we ever were. Their form of conformity is long hair, dirty, bare feet, general slackness and promiscuity. They have their own language. My son has taken drugs. He could have done very well at the university but he has dropped out. Although he is sensitive, intelligent and what one would call thoughtful, he is caught up in this maelstrom of chaos. His whole generation is against the established order, whether it is that of the university, the government or the family. Some of them read books on mysticism or indulge in black magic and other strange occult subjects. Some of them are really very nice, gentle, quiet, but with a sense of agonizing despair." Another man spoke. "It is all very well while they are young but what will happen when they are older? In a country like this they can earn a few dollars easily and live on them for a while but as they grow older they will find it isn't as simple as they thought it would be. In revolt against our affluent society they turn to what they call a simple life; they want to go back to a primitive life and become like savages with many wives and children, digging a little in the garden and so on. They form communes. Some of them are serious but then others drift in and upset all their plans. And so it goes on." The third man said: "I don't know the cause of all this. As parents we are blamed for their upbringing, for their revolt, for their lack of respect. Of course we parents have our own difficulties. Our families are broken up, we quarrel, we are bored with what we are doing, we are deep down hypocrites. We keep our religion for the week ends and the rest of the week we are merely tamed savages. Our children see all this - at least mine do -and naturally they have scant respect for us. We voted for our leaders and they despise those leaders. We have been to colleges and universities, they see what we are like and naturally - I don't blame them - they don't want to be like us at all. My son called me a hypocrite to my face and as he was telling a fact, I couldn't do anything about it. This revolt is sweeping the world." And the fourth said: "If you ask them what they want to do, except for those who are committed to a particular political action -and fortunately there aren't too many of those - they will tell you, `We don't know and we don't want to know. We know what we don't want and as we go along we will find out.' Their argument is very simple: `You knew what you wanted to do - get more money and a better position and look where you have brought the world. We certainly don't want that.' Some of them want an easy, comfortable life, drifting, yielding to every form of pleasure. Sex is nothing to them. I wonder why all this has come about so suddenly in the last few years. You have often been to this country: what do you think is the cause of all this! Isn't there a deeper cause, a deeper movement of which perhaps the younger generation is not aware? In a society or culture that is so rich physically, with an astonishing technology, a people with so much energy may be living a very super- ficial life. Their religious beliefs and their struggles are not conducive to looking deeply within themselves. The outward thrust of material well-being with all its competitiveness, its wars, seems to satisfy them. They don't seem to want to investigate much wider or deeper, though they want to conquer space. They are concerned with the outer explosion - more of this and more of that - and are committed to the enjoyment of pleasure. Their God is dead, if they ever had a God. Volumes have been written about them, they have been analysed and put into categories. They even have classes where they learn to be sensitive. The feeling for vocation has come to an end. Life has become standardized and meaningless, with overcrowded cities, endless motorways and all the rest of it. What have you to offer to the young? What have you to give them - your worries, your problems, your absurd achievements? Naturally any intelligent person must revolt against all this. But that very revolt has in it the seed of conformity: conforming within one's own group and opposing another group. The young start out by revolting against conformity and end up conforming in a most absurd way just as thoroughly. You have lived for pleasure and they want to live for their own kind of pleasure. You have helped to bring about war and naturally they are against war. Everything that you have done, built and produced is for material well-being which has its place, but when that becomes an end in itself, then chaos begins. One wonders if you really love your children? Not that others do in other parts of the world; that is not the point. You may care for them when they are very young, give them what they want, give them the best food, spoil them, treat them like toys and use them for your own fulfilment and enjoyment. In this there is never any restraint, never a feeling for an austerity that is not at all the harshness of the monk. You have an idea that they must move freely, must not be repressed, that they must not be told what to do; you follow what the specialists recommend and the psychiatrists say. You produce a generation without restraint and when they revolt you are horrified, or pleased, according to your conditioning. So you are responsible for all this. Doesn't this indicate, if one may ask, that there is no real love? Love has become merely a form of pleasure, a spiritual or physical entertainment. In spite of all the care you gave them when they were small you allow them to be killed. In your heart you want them to conform, not to your pattern as parents, but to the structure of a social order that is in itself corrupt. You are horrified when they spit on all this but in a strange way you admire it. You think it shows great independence. After all, historically you left Europe to be independent and so the circle is everlastingly repeated. They were quiet. And then the tall man said, "What is the cause of all this? I understand very well what you say. It is clear and obvious when you look at it. But underneath what is the meaning of it?" You have tried to give significance to a life that has very little meaning, that is very shallow and petty, and failing in this you try to expand it on the same level. This expansion can go on endlessly but it has no depth, no profundity. The horizontal movement will lead to all kinds of places that are exciting and entertaining, but life remains very shallow. You may try to give depth to it intellectually but it is still trivial. To a mind that is really enquiring, not merely verbally examining or intellectually putting together hypotheses, to the enquiring mind the horizontal movement has very little significance. It can offer nothing except the very obvious, and so the revolt again becomes trivial because it is still moving in the same direction - outward, political, reformatory and so on. The only revolution is within oneself. It is not horizontal but vertical -down and up. The inward movement in oneself is never horizontal and because it is inward it has immeasurable depth. And when there is really this depth it is neither horizontal nor vertical. This you don't offer. Your Gods, your preachers, your leaders are concerned with the superficial, with better arrangements, better systems and organizations which are necessary for efficiency; but that is not the total answer. You may have a marvellous bureaucracy but it inevitably becomes tyrannical. Tyranny brings order to the superficial. Your religion which is supposed to offer depth is the gift of the intellect, carefully planned, recognized and believed in, a thing of propaganda. But this has no inward beauty. As long as education is concerned merely with the culture of the outer, specializing, enforcing conformity, the inner movement with its immense depth will inevitably be for the few, and in that also there lies great sorrow. Sorrow cannot be solved, cannot be understood when you are running with tremendous energy along the superficial. Unless you solve this through self-knowing you will have revolt after revolt, reforms which need further reformation, and the endless antagonism of man against man will go on. Self-knowing is the beginning of wisdom and it does not lie in books, in churches or in the piling up of words. THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART II CHAPTER 2 CONVERSATION WITH PARENTS AND TEACHERS You cannot get the whole feeling of a country unless you have lived in it for some time. Yet the people who live there, who spend their days and years and die there, seldom, it seems, have a feeling for the whole of their own country. People in this vast country with so many languages, generally are very secular and provincial. The different class divisions which at one time bound them together through religion, chants and stories, are rapidly going; this unity, this feeling of sacredness of life, of things that are beyond thought is disappearing. When you came year after year and spent several months here, you would notice the general decline; you would see in every big town the enormous increase in population; and walking down any street you would see people sleeping on the pavement, the terrible poverty, the dirt. Around a corner you would see a temple or a mosque full of people and beyond the town the factories, the fields and the hills. It is really a very beautiful country with its high snow covered mountains, its vast blue valleys, the rivers, the deserts, the rich red soil of the earth, palm trees, forests and the disappearing wild animals. The people are concerned with politics - one group against another group - the encroaching poverty, the squalor, the filth, but very few talk about the beauty of the land. And it is very beautiful in its variety, in the innumerable colours, in the vast expanse of the sky. You can get the whole feeling of the country with its ancient traditions, the mosques and the temples, the bright sunlight, the parrots and the monkeys, the thousands of villagers struggling with poverty and starvation, with lack of water until the rains come. When you go up into the hills the air is cool and fresh, there is green grass. You seem to be in a different world and can see many hundred miles of snowcovered mountains. It is startlingly magnificent and as you come down a narrow path poverty is there and misery; in a little shed there is a monk talking to his disciples. There is a feeling of great aloofness from all this. You meet people with brains that have been cultivated through many generations in religious thought and who have a peculiar capacity - at least verbally - to grasp the otherness of life. They will discuss sharply with you, quoting, comparing, remembering what has been said in their sacred books. It is all on the tip of their tongue, words piled upon words and the rich waters of the river pass by. You get the whole feeling of this extraordinary beauty, the vast mountains, hills, forests and rivers of the immense population, the varieties of conflict, the intense sorrow and the music. They all love music. They will sit listening by the hour in the villages, in the towns, absorbed in it, keeping time with their hands, with their heads, with their bodies. And the music is lovely. There is tremendous violence, increasing hate, and a crowd around the temple on the hill. Millions make a pilgrimage to the river, the most sacred of all rivers, and come away happy and weary. This is their form of enjoyment in the name of religion. There are sannyasis, monks, everywhere. Serious ones and those who have taken to the cloth as the easiest way of living. There is endless ugliness and there is the great beauty of a tree and of a face. A beggar is singing in the street, telling of ancient Gods, myths and the beauty of goodness. The workers on the buildings listen to it and give of their little to the man who sings. It is an incredible land with its incredible sorrow. You feel all this deep down in yourself with tears. The politician with his ambitions, everlastingly talking about the people and their welfare, the various petty leaders with their flocks, the division of language, the intense arrogance, the selfishness, the pride of race and ancient forebears, it is all there; and the strangest thing is children laughing. They seem to be so utterly ignorant of all this. They are poor and their laughter is greater than that of the rich and stuffy. Everything you can think of is in this land - deception, hypocrisy, cleverness, technology, erudition. A little boy in rags is learning to play the flute and a single palm tree grows in the field. In a valley that is far from towns and noise, where the hills are the oldest in the world, a parent had come to talk of his children. Probably he never looked at those hills; they seemed almost to be carefully carved by hand, huge boulders balancing on each other. The sky that morning was very blue and there were several monkeys running up and down in the tree outside the veranda. We were sitting on the floor on a red carpet and he said, "I have several children and my troubles have begun. I don't know what to do with them. I have to marry off the girls and it is going to be very difficult to educate the boys, and" - he added as an after-thought -"the girls. If I do not educate them they will live in poverty, without a future. My wife and I are very disturbed about all this. As you can see, Sir, I have been well educated; I have a university degree and a good job. Some of my children are very intelligent and bright. In a primitive society they would do very well, but today you need to be highly educated in some special field in order to live a fairly decent life. I think I love them and I want them to live a life that is happy and industrious. I don't know what that word love means but I have a feeling for them. I want them to be cared for, well educated, but I know that once they go to school the other children and the teachers will destroy them. The teacher is not interested in teaching them. He has his worries, his ambitions, his family quarrels and miseries. He will repeat something he has learned from a book and the children will become as dull as he is. There is this battle between the teacher and the student, resistance on the part of the children, punishment and reward and the fear of examinations. All this will inevitably cripple the minds of the children and yet they have to go through this mill to get a degree and a job. So what am I to do? I have often lain awake thinking of all this. I see year after year how children are destroyed. Haven't you noticed, Sir, that something happens to them after they reach the age of puberty? Their faces change; they seem to have lost something. I have often wondered why this coarseness, this narrowing of the mind should take place in the adolescent. Is it not part of education to keep alive this quality of gentleness? - I do not know how to put it. They all seem suddenly to become violent and aggressive, with a stupid feeling of independence. They are not really independent at all." "The teachers seem to disregard this totally. I see my eldest boy coming back from school, already changed, brutalized, the eye already hard. Again what am I to do? I think I love them, otherwise I wouldn't be talking this way about them. But I find I cannot do anything, the influence of the environment is too strong, the competition is growing, ruthlessness and efficiency have become the standards. So they will all become like the others; dull, the brightness gone from the eye and the happy smile never to appear again in the same way. So, as a parent among a million other parents, I have come to ask what I am to do. I see what effect society and culture have but I must send them to school. I can't educate them at home; I have not the time, nor has my wife and besides, they must have the companionship of other children. I talk to them at home but it is like a voice in the wilderness. You know, Sir, how terribly imitative we are and children are like that. They want to belong, they don't want to be left out and the political and religious leaders use this and exploit it. And in a month's time they are walking in parades, saluting the flag, demonstrating against this or that, throwing stones and shouting. They are gone, finished. When I see this in my children I am so depressed I often want to commit suicide. Can I do anything at all? They don't want my love. They want a circus, as I did when I was a boy, and the same pattern is repeated." We sat very silently. The mynah bird was singing and the ancient hills were full of the light of the sun. We cannot go back to the ancient system of a teacher with a few students living with him, being instructed by him and watching the way he lives. That is gone. Now we have this mechanical technology giving to the mind the sharpness of metal. The world is becoming industrialized and bringing with it its problems. Education neglects the rest of man's existence. It is like having a right arm highly developed, strong, vital, while the rest of the body withers, is weak and feeble. As a parent you may be an exception, but most parents want the industrial, mechanical process developed at the expense of the total human being. The majority seem to win. Could not the intelligent minority of parents get together and start a school in which the whole of man is considered and cared for, in which the educator is not merely the informant, a machine which imparts a particular knowledge, but is concerned with the well-being of the whole? This means that the educator needs education. It means creating a place where the educator is being educated, and the help of a few parents who are deeply interested. Or is yours only a temporary, despairing cry? We don't seem to be able to apply ourselves to seeing the truth of something and carrying it out. I think, Sir, that is where the trouble lies. You probably feel very strongly for your children and how they should be. But being aware of what is happening in the world doesn't seem radically to affect you; you drift with society. You merely indulge in complaint and that leads nowhere. You are responsible not only for your own children but for all children and you have to gather up your strength together with others to create the new schools. It is up to you and not up to society or governments, for you are part of this society. If you really loved your children you would actually and definitely apply yourself to bring about not only a different kind of education but also a totally different kind of society and culture. THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART II CHAPTER 3 CONVERSATION WITH PARENTS AND TEACHERS In the early morning before the sun was up there was a haze over the river. You could dimly see the other bank. It was still rather dark and the trees were shadows against the light sky. The fishing boats were still there: they had been there all night with their little lanterns. Dark and almost motionless, they had been fishing all night and there was not a sound from them. Occasionally of an evening you would hear the fishermen singing but now in the early dawn they were very quiet, tired out and sleepy. The current was carrying them gently along and they would presently return with their catch to their little village on this side of the river further down. As you watched, the rising sun would light up a few clouds in the sky. They were golden and full of that strange beauty of a morning. The light was spreading, making everything visible; the sun lately rising over the trees caught the few parrots screeching their way to the fields that lay beyond the river. They flew noisily, swiftly - green and red beaked - and they would return in an hour or more to their little holes in the tamarind tree across the garden. As you watched they blended into the green leaves so that you could scarcely see them except for their bright red beaks. The sun was making a golden path over the water and a train rattled by across the bridge with a hideous noise; but it was the water that held the beauty of the morning. There was a wide expanse between this and the other bank, probably over a mile. The other bank had been cultivated for the winter wheat and it was now fresh and green and shimmering in the light breeze of the morning. As you watched the golden path became silver, bright and clear, and you could watch this light on the river for a long time. It was this light that penetrated the trees, the fields and into the heart of any man who looked at it. Now the day had begun with all its accustomed noises but it was still the river that was so splendid, so full, so widely sweeping. It was the most sacred river in the world, sacred for many thousands of years. People came from all parts of that country to bathe in it, to wash away their sins, to meditate upon its banks still in their damp clothes, eyes shut and motionless. Now in the winter the river was low, but still very deep in the centre where the current was fairly strong. With the monsoon and the coming of the rains it would rise thirty, forty, sixty feet, sweeping everything before it, washing away the human filth, bringing down with it dead animals and trees until again it would be fresh, lovely and wide. That morning there was something about it that was new, and as you sat and looked at it, the newness was not in the trees or in the fields or in those still waters. It was somewhere else. You looked at it with a new mind, with a new heart, with eyes that had no memory of yesterday and the squalor of man's activities. It was a splendid morning, cool, fresh, and there was a song in the air. There were beggars passing by and women in their dirty, ragged clothes carrying fuel to the town a mile or two away. There was poverty everywhere and utter callousness. But the boys who were cycling, carrying milk, were singing, and the older men walked along quietly, relentlessly, broken, thin and hard of body. But still it was a beautiful, clear morning and the clarity was not disturbed by the train rattling over the bridge, by the sharp cry of the crows or by the call of a man on the other bank. The room with its veranda overlooked the river thirty or more feet below. There was a group of parents sitting on the floor on a fairly clean rug. They were all well fed, dark, cleanly and they had an air of smug respectability. They had come as parents to talk over their relationship to their children and their children's education. In that part of the world tradition is still very strong. They were all supposed to be well educated, or rather they had taken some degrees in universities and they had, in their opinions, fairly good jobs. Respect was ingrained in them, not only for their superiors in their professions, but also for religious people. That is part of this hideous respectability. Respect invariably shows disrespect, utter disregard for those who are below them. One of them said, "As a parent I would like to talk about my children, their education and what they are going to do. I feel responsible for my children. With my wife I have brought them up carefully, as carefully as we know how, telling them what to do and what not to do, guiding them, shaping them, helping them. I have sent them here to this school and I am concerned with what is going to happen to them. I have two daughters and two sons. As parents, my wife and I have done our very best and the best may not be sufficient. You know, Sir, there is an explosion of population, jobs are becoming more difficult, educational standards are lower and the students in the university are on strike because they don't want higher standards of examinations. They want easy marks; in fact they don't want to work or study. So I am disturbed and wonder how I, or the school or university, can prepare my children for the future." Another added. "That is exactly my problem too. I have three children; the two boys are in the school here. They will undoubtedly pass some kind of examination, enter the university, and the degrees they will get are in no way near the European or American standards. But they are bright children and I feel that the education they are going to get, not in this school but later on, is going to destroy their bright eyes and the quickness of heart. Yet they must have a degree to find some sort of livelihood. I am greatly perturbed, watching conditions in this country, the overpopulation, the crushing poverty, the utter incapacity of politicians and the weight of tradition. I have to marry off my daughter; she will leave it entirely in my hands, for how can she know whom she should marry? I must choose a suitable husband who, with God's blessing, will have a degree and find a safe job somewhere. It is not easy and I am greatly perturbed." The other three parents agreed; they nodded their heads solemnly. Their bellies were full; they were Hindus to the core, steeped in their petty traditions and superficially worried about their children. You have very carefully conditioned your children, though perhaps not deeply understanding the issue. Not only you but the society, the environment, the culture in which they have been brought up, both economic and social, have nurtured them, shaped them to a particular pattern. They are going to go through the mill of so-called education. If they are lucky they will get a job through your manipulations and settle down in their little homes with wives and husbands equally conditioned, to lead a monotonous, dull life. But after all that is what you want - a safe position, marriage so that they will not be promiscuous, with religion as an ornament. Most parents want this, don't they? - a safe place in society, a society they know in their hearts is corrupt. This is what you want and you have created schools and universities to bring this about. Give them a certain technological knowledge which will assure their livelihood and hope for the best, forgetting or purposely shutting your eyes to the rest of the human problem. You are concerned with one fragment and you will not consider the many fragments of human existence. You don't really want to be concerned, do you? "We are not capable of it. We are not philosophers, we are not psychologists, we are not experts to examine the complexities of life. We are trained to be engineers, doctors, professional people and it takes all our time and energy to be up to date because so many new things are being discovered. From what you say, you want us to be proficient in the study of ourselves. We haven't the time, the inclination or the interest. I spend most of my time, as we all do here, in an office or building a bridge or attending to patients. We can only specialize in one field and shut our eyes to the rest. We haven't even the time to go to the temple: we leave that to our womenfolk. You want to bring about a revolution not only in religion but in education. We can't join you in this. I might like to but I just haven't the time." One wonders whether you really have not the time. You have divided life into specialties. You have divided politics from religion, religion from business, the businessman from the artist, the professional from the layman and so on. It is this division that is creating havoc, not only in religion but in education. Your only concern is to see that your children have a degree. Competition is growing stiffer; in this country the standards of education are being lowered and yet you keep insisting that you have no time to consider the whole of human existence. That is what almost everybody says in different words. And therefore you sustain a culture in which there will be increasing competition, greater differences between the specialists and more human conflict and sorrow. It is your sorrow, not someone else's sorrow. Yet you protest that you have no time and your children will repeat the same thing. In the West there is revolt among the students and young people; revolt is always against something but those who revolt are as conformist as those against whom they have revolted. You want your children to conform: the whole religious and economic structure is based upon this conformity. Your education sees to it that they do conform. Because you hope through conformity to have no problems you think that problems arise only when there is disturbance, change. You don't see that it isn't change that produces problems but conformity itself. You are afraid that any alteration in the pattern will bring about chaos, confusion, and therefore you condition your children to accept the traditional attitudes; you condition them to conform. The problems that arise from this conformity are innumerable. Every physical revolution starts out to break the physical pattern of conformity but soon establishes its own pattern of conformity, as in Russia and China. Each one thinks that through his conformity there will be security. With this movement of conformity comes authority. Education as it is now, teaches the young to obey, accept and follow, and those who revolt against this have their own pattern of obedience, acceptance and subservience. With the increase of population and with the rapid growth of technology, you, the parents, are caught in a trap of mounting problems and the incapacity to solve them. This whole process you call education. "What you say is perfectly true. You are stating a fact, but what are we to do? Put yourself in our place. We beget children, our appetites are very strong. Our minds have been conditioned by the culture in which we have been brought up, as a Hindu, or Muslim, and confronted with this enormous problem of living - and it is enormous - to live as you suggest as whole, complete human beings is bewildering. We are committed, we have to earn a livelihood, we have responsibilities. We cannot go back and begin again. Here we are caught in a trap, as you say." But you can see to it that your children are not caught in a trap. That is your responsibility: not to push them through some stupid examinations, but as parents to see that from their childhood they are not in any way caught in the trap that you and the past generations have created. Give of your time to see that you change the environment, the culture; see that there are the right kinds of schools and universities. Don't leave it to the Government. The Government is as thoughtless as you are, as indifferent, as callous. Instead of perpetuating the pattern of the trap, your responsibility now lies in seeing to it that there is no trap. All this means that you have to be awake, not only in your particular profession or career but to the immense danger of perpetuating the trap. "We see the danger but we seem to be incapable of acting even when we see it." You see the danger verbally and intellectually, and that seeing you call danger, which actually it is not. When you really see danger you act, you don't theorize about it. You don't oppose dialectically one opinion with another: you actually see the truth of the danger as you would see the danger of a cobra and you act. But you refuse to see this danger because it would mean you would have to wake up. There are disturbances and you are frightened of them. This is what prompts you to say that you have no time, which obviously is not so. So as parents who are concerned, you must be committed utterly and completely to seeing that your children are not caught in the trap: therefore you will bring about different schools, different universities, different politics, different ways of living together, which means that you must care for your children. Caring for children implies the right kind of food, the right kind of clothing, the right kind of books, the right kind of amusement, the right kind of educatlon; and therefore you are concerned with the right kind of educator. To you the educator is the least respected. Your respect is for those who have a great deal of money, position and prestige, and the educator who has the responsibility for the coming generation you totally disregard. The educator needs education as you, the parents, need education. The sun was now beginning to get hot, there were deepening shadows and the morning was wearing itself out. The sky was less blue and the children were playing in the field, released from their classes, from the repetitive lessons and the drudgery of books. THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART II CHAPTER 4 CONVERSATION WITH PARENTS AND TEACHERS IT WAS AN old, vast Byzantine building which had become a mosque. It was immense. Inside they were chanting the Koran and one sat beside a beggar on a carpet under the huge dome. The chantlng was magnificent, echoing in the great space. There was no difference here between the beggar and that well-dressed man, apparently well-to-do. There were no women here. The men had their heads bowed, muttering to themselves silently. Light came through the coloured glass and made patterns on the carpet. Outside were many beggars, so many people wanting things; and down there was the blue sea, dividing the East and the West. It was a very ancient temple. They really couldn't tell how old it was but they loved to exaggerate the antiquity of their temples. One came to it through dusty, dirty roads with palm trees and open gutters. They walked seven times around the sanctuary and prostrated themselves as they passed the door through which one saw the image. They were devotees, completely absorbed in their prayers; and here only the Brahmins were allowed. There were bats and the smell of incense. The image was covered with jewels and bright silk. Women stood there with hands raised and children were playing in the courtyard, shouting, laughing, running round the pillars. All the pillars were carved; there was a great sense of space and heavy dignity, and because it was so bright outside in the dazzling sun, here it was cool. Some sannyasis sat meditating, undisturbed by the passers-by. There was that peculiar quality of atmosphere that exists when many thousands through the centuries come to pray, worship and give offerings to the Gods. There was a tank of water and they were bathing in it. It was a sacred tank because it was within the walls of the temple. It was very quiet in the sanctuary but the rest of the place was used not only for worship, for children to play in, but also by the older generation as a meeting place where they sat and talked and chattered about their life. Young students chanted in Sanskrit and later that evening about a hundred priests gathered outside the sanctuary to chant, praising the glory of the Lord. The chanting shook the walls and was a marvellous sound. Outside there was the hard blue sky of the south and in the evening light the palm trees were beautiful. There was the vast piazza with a curving colonnade of pillars and the huge basilica with its tremendous dome. People were pouring into it, tourists from all over the world, looking with great wonder at the mass being performed; but there was very little atmosphere here-- too many inquisitive people, hushed voices. It had become a show place. There was great beauty in the rituals, in the priests' robes but it was all man-made--the image, the Latin and the structure of the ceremony. It was made by the hand and by the mind, cunningly put together to convince one of the greatness and the power of God. We had been walking through the English countryside among the open fields: there were pheasants, a clear blue sky and the light of the early evening. The slow quiet autumn was coming in. Leaves were turning yellow and red and dropping from the huge trees. Everything was waiting for winter, silent, apprehensive, withdrawn. How very different nature was in the springtime. Then everything was bursting with life--every blade of grass and the new leaf. Then there was the song of birds and murmuring of many leaves. But now though there was not a breath of air, though everything was still, it felt the approach of winter, rainy stormy days, snow and violent gales. Walking along the fields and climbing over a stile you came to a grove of many trees and several redwoods. As you entered it you were suddenly aware of its absolute silence. There wasn't a leaf moving, it was as though a spell had been cast upon it. The grass was greener, brighter with the slanting sun upon it and you felt all of a sudden a great feeling of sacredness. You walked through it almost holding your breath, hesitating to step. There were great blooms of hydrangeas and rhododendrons which would flower in several months, but none of these things mattered, or rather they gave a benediction to this spot. You realized when you came out of the grove that your mind was completely empty without a single thought. There was only that and nothing else. When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques and churches become important. The teacher said, "How can one prevent, not only in the student but in ourselves, this competitive aggressive pursuit of one's own demand? I have taught now for many years in various schools and colleges, not only here but abroad, and I find throughout my teaching career this aggressive competitiveness. There is a reaction to this now. Young people want to live together in communes, feeling the warmth and comfort of companionship which they call love. They feel this way of living is much more real, full of meaning. But they also become exclusive. They gather together by the thousands for music festivals and in this living together they share not only the music but the enjoyment of it all. They seem so utterly promiscuous and to me it all seems childish and rather superficial. They may deny competitive aggression but it is still there in their blood. It shows itself in many ways of which they may not be aware. I have seen this same attitude among students. They are not learning for the sake of learning but for success, because of their desire to achieve. Some realize all this and reject it and drift. It is all right when they are young, under twenty, but soon they are caught and their drifting ways become the new routine. "All this seems superficial and passing, but deep down man is against man. It shows in this terrible competition both in the communist world and in the so-called democracies. It is there. I find it in myself like a flame burning, driving me. I want to be better than somebody, not only for prestige and comfort, but for the feeling of superiority, the feeling of being. This feeling exists in the students though they may have a mild gentle face. They all want to be somebody. It shows in the class and every teacher is comparing A with B and urging B to be like A. In the family and in the school this goes on." When you compare B with A, openly or secretly, you are destroying B. B is not important at all, for you have in your mind the image of A who is clever, bright, and you have given him a certain value. The essence of all this competitiveness is comparison: comparing one picture with another, one book with another, a person with another--the hero, the example, the principle, the ideal. This comparison is measurement between what is and what should be. You give marks to the student and so force him to compete with himself; and the final misery of all this comparison is the examinations. All your heroes, religious and worldly, exist because of this spirit of comparison. Every parent, the whole social structure in the worlds of religion, art, science and business is the same. This measurement between yourself and another, between those who know and the ignorant, has existed and continues in our daily life. Why do you compare? What is the need of measurement? Is it an escape from yourself, from your own shallowness, emptiness and insufficiency? This attachment to measurement of what you have been and what you will be divides life and thereby all conflict begins. "But surely, Sir, you must compare. You compare when you choose this or that house, this or that cloth. Choice is necessary." We are not talking about such superficial choice. That is inevitable. But we are concerned with the psychological, the inward comparative spirit which brings about competitiveness with its aggression and ruthlessness. You are asking why, as a teacher and human being, you have this spirit, why you compete, why you compare. If you do not understand this in yourself, you will be encouraging competition, consciously or unconsciously, in the student. You will set up the image of the hero--political, economic or moral. The saint wants to break records as much as the man who plays cricket. Really there is not much difference between them, for both have this comparative evaluation of life. If you seriously ask yourself why you compare and whether it is possible to live a life without comparison, if you seriously enquire into this, not merely intellectually but actually, and go into yourself deeply putting away this competitive aggression, would you not find that there is a deep fear of being nothing? By putting on different masks, according to the culture and society you live in, you cover the fear of not being and not becoming: the becoming as something better than what is-- something greater, nobler. When you observe what actually is, it is also the result of previous conditioning, of measurement. When you understand the real significance of measurement and comparison then there is freedom from what is. After a moment the teacher said, "If there is not the encouragement of comparison the student will not study. He needs to be encouraged, to be goaded, to be cajoled, and also he wants to know how he is doing. When he takes an examination he has the right to know how many of his answers were correct and how close his knowledge is to what was taught." If I may point out, Sirs, he is like you. He is conditioned by society and the culture in which he lives. One has to learn about this competitive aggression which comes through comparison and measurement. This may bring about an accumulation of great knowledge, you may achieve a great many things, but it denies love and it denies also the understanding of oneself. Understanding oneself is of far greater importance than becoming somebody. The very words we use are comparative--better, greater, nobler. "But, Sir, I must ask--how does either student or teacher evaluate his factual knowledge of a subject without some kind of examination?" Doesn't this imply that in everyday teaching and learning, through discussion, study, the teacher will become aware of how much factual knowledge the student has absorbed? This really means, doesn't it, that the teacher has to keep a close watch on the student, observe his capacity, what is going on in his head. That means you must care for the student. "There is so much to convey to the student." What is it you want to convey to him? To live a non-competitive life? To explain to him the machinery of comparison and what it does? Tell him in words and convince him intellectually? You yourselves may see this intellectually or verbally understand it, but is it not possible to find a way of living in which all comparison ceases? You as teachers and human beings have to live that way. Only then can you convey it to the student and it will have truth behind it. But if you don't live that way you are only playing with words and hypocrisy follows. To live without measurement and comparison inwardly is only possible when you yourself are learning the whole implication of it--the aggression, the brutality, the divi- sion and its envies. Freedom means a life without comparison. But inevitably you will ask what is the condition of a life without any high or low, without an example, without division. You want a description of it so that through description you may capture it. This is another form of comparison and competition. The description is never the described. You have to live it and then you will know what it means. THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART II CHAPTER 5 CONVERSATION WITH PARENTS AND TEACHERS MOST OF US do not seem to give sufficient importance to meditation. For most it is a passing thing in which some kind of experience is expected, some transcendental attainment, a fulfilment after all other attempts at fulfilment have failed. Meditation becomes a self-hypnotic movement in which appear various projections and symbols. But these are a continuity of what has been, perhaps modified or enlarged, but always within the area of some achievement. All this is rather immature and childish without great significance, and without breaking away from the established order - or disorder - of past events. These happenings become extraordinarily significant to a mind that is concerned with its own advancement, improvement and selfdetermined expectations. When the mind breaks through all this rubbish, which can only happen with self-knowing, then what happens can never be told to another. Even in the telling things have already changed. It is like describing a storm. It is already over the hills, the valleys, and gone beyond. And so the telling of it becomes something of the past and therefore no longer what is actually taking place. One can describe something accurately - an event - but the very accuracy of it becomes inaccurate when the thing has moved away. The accuracy of memory is a fact but memory is the result of something that has already happened. If the mind is following the flow of a river it has no time for description, nor for memory to gather itself. When this kind of meditation is going on a great many things take place which are not the projection of thought. Each event is totally new in the sense that memory cannot recognize it; and as it cannot recognize it, it cannot be gathered into words and memories. It is a thing that has never happened before. This is not an experience. Experience implies recognition, association and accumulation as knowledge. Obviously certain powers are released but these become a great danger as long as the self-centred activity goes on, whether these activities are identified with religious concepts or with personal tendencies. Freedom from the self is absolutely necessary for the real thing to be. But thought is very cunning, extraordinarily subtle in its activities and unless one is tremendously aware, without any choice, of all these subtleties and cunning pursuits, meditation becomes the gaining of powers beyond the mere physical ones. Any sense of importance of any action of the self must lead inevitably to confusion and sorrow. That is why, before you consider meditation, begin with the understanding of yourself, the structure and the nature of thought. Otherwise you will get lost and your energies will be wasted. So to go far you must begin very near: and the first step is the last step. The big room overlooked the blue Pacific. It was high on a cliff and from there you could see the waves breaking on the shore, white and spreading. It was very quiet though there were several young people there. We were all feeling rather shy. There were short-haired ones and long-haired, the bearded and the casual. "First of all, if I may start out," said a young man with clean long hair and beard, "why should I earn my livelihood? Why should I make a career, knowing where it leads - property, bank account, a wife and children, and the utter middle-classness of it all? I don't want to be caught in that trap. If others want to, it is for them, but not for me. I don't mind being a beggar or asking people for a handout. I sleep in somebody's house and I have enough clothes to get along with. I have been all over the State for the past few years living this way and I like it. Let them all work if they wish and if they feel like supporting me - let them. I don't want to belong to any commune, to any group. I am free and I want to remain free. And I'm not against anyone - black or white. But I'm told this is exploitation: that while I'm young it is all right but when I'm in my thirties I'll begin to see I can't go on like this. I don't know what the future holds but I'm living from day to day and that's good enough. I would like your opinion on this." Only fools offer opinions. You know the monks in Asia live this way: not in organized communities but as individuals going from village to village begging and being protected. In return they preach the good life: not the physical good life but a life of goodness. That is what they offer, unless they are criminals or exploiters. So what are you offering in return to those who feed you? "Why should I offer anything in return? I have nothing to give them. I don't want to tell them how to live. Any sensible man knows when the way he is living is bourgeois, square, and it is up to them to break away from it. I have tried talking to people but they don't care. I don't want to offer anything in return for their food and clothes. Basically I have nothing to offer. I don't paint, I don't play a guitar. I don't do any of the things they like. I am entirely outside their circle. If I had something basic I would offer it without caring whether they took it. But I've nothing. I am just as confused as the rest of the world and probably just as miserable. I'm not a drop-out. I've been through college and I'm disgusted with the whole thing; with their hypocrisies and with their pretensions. But what bothers me a little is, I want to find - not God, that is a bourgeois concept - but something that is real. I've read some Eastern books about this but they all take off on theories and ideas. I want to feel something real in my guts which they can't touch or take away. I want to get to the heart of it as quickly as possible. I see the absurdity of instant illumination but I haven't the patience to go through the rigmarole of discipline, fasting, following some system. I want to go straight to it on the shortest road possible." Surely this is possible: to see clearly `what is' without any distortion, without any motive, and go beyond it. If you see very clearly what is, you are already beyond it. And can you see very clearly what is? See not only the outward, the environment, the social morality, the bureaucratic sanctions, religious and worldly, but also inwardly? To see what is going on actually, without any choice, without any reservation. If you can, then the door is open. That is the shortest way and the most direct. Then you don't follow anybody. All systems are useless and the guru becomes a mischief maker. Can you do this? If you can, then the mind is free and the heart is full. Then you are a light to yourself. Another spoke. "I am a drop-out. I dropped out of college. I took economics as my major and just before graduation I left. I saw what the professors were like, intriguing among themselves, playing politics for better positions. I saw their utter indifference to anything as long as they were secure in their professors' world. I didn't want to become like them. A few of us here in this room want to form a community. Most of us don't belong to anything. We have no sympathy with the battle that goes on between black and white; we welcome black and white, as you can see. We want to get a piece of land to live on, and we will. We can do things with our hands, we will cultivate it and sell things. But our question is, is it possible to live together without any conflict amongst ourselves, without any authority, and in great affection?" A community is generally formed around an idea, a belief, or around someone who embodies that belief. The ideal or the Utopia becomes the authority and gradually some individual takes charge of it: guides, threatens and excommunicates. In this there is no cooperation at all; there is obedience which of course leads to disaster. Have you - if one may ask - considered this question of cooperation? If you have not, your community will inevitably fail. To live together and work together is one of the most difficult things. Each one wants to fulfil himself, become this or that, and therein lies the disruption of any co-operation. To work together implies the abnegation of the self without any motive. It is like learning together in which there is only function without any status. If you have this real understanding of the spirit of co-operation then it is bound to work. It isn't each one contributing something to the welfare of the community, but rather each one having this vital spark of understanding. Any personal motive or profit puts an end to the true quality of co-operation. Do you think that you and your friends have this? Or is it just that you want to start a community? That is like starting out on a boat, hoping to find an island, not knowing in what direction you are going, where you are going, but hoping to find somewhere somehow a happy land with a group of people who have no idea what to do with the land or themselves. A young man with a sensitive face and hands said, "I am one of those who take drugs. I've taken them regularly for four or five years; not too much; probably every month or so. I am well aware what it is doing to me. I am not quite as sharp as I was. When I'm high I think I can do anything. I seem to have tremendous energy and there is no confusion. I see things sharply. I feel like a god on earth, perfect, without any problems, without any regrets. But I can't maintain that state all the time and I'm back on this mad earth. Now I need a stronger dose and where it is leading me I really don't know. I'm uneasy about it now. I can see myself gradually ending up in a mental hospital, and yet the pull of the other state is so strong that I seem to have no resistance. I'm young. I'm not a dropout. I live with my parents. They know what I'm doing and want to help me stop it. I see a slow deterioration in myself. I experimented with it in the beginning because the others did. It was fun then, but now it has become a danger. You see how clearly I can explain all this? But yet there is part of me that has become slow, lethargic and ineffectual. It is these drug-gurus that have hooked me on it, promising an experience that is the real thing. I see now how easily we are deceived by these intellectuals. I don't want to end up in a mental hospital or prison, or lose my mind altogether." If you see this so clearly, how it is damaging your brain and sensibilities and the subtleties of your life, why don't you drop it? Not for a day or two, but drop it completely? If you really see the danger of it, not verbally or romantically, the very seeing is the action that will put an end to it. But you must see it, not theorize about seeing. You must completely negate it. In this you will have the strength to do it, the vitality and energy. Then you will stop it without any resistance. It is this resistance that is the core of the matter. Don't build a resistance against it. Then you will be in conflict with the drug on one side and you on the other, with a wall of decision which only separates and increases conflict. Whereas if you really see it, see the tremendous danger of it as you would see the tremendous danger of a shark, or a rattlesnake, then you would drop it completely, instantly. So, if we may suggest, don't decide not to take drugs, for decision is based on will, which is resistance with all its contradictions and conflicts. Being aware of this, you will then say it is impossible to give it up. Don't fight it but see actually the immense danger to the brain, to the whole nervous system, to the clarity of perception. That is all you have to do and nothing else: seeing is doing. "May we all come back another day, Sir?" Of course, as often as you like. THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART II CHAPTER 6 CONVERSATION WITH PARENTS AND TEACHERS THERE IS NO sequence in meditation. There is no continuity for this implies time and space and action within that. Our whole psychological activity is within the field of time and space and from this follows action which is always incomplete. Our mind is conditioned to the acceptance of time and space. From here to there, the chain of this and that, is time-sequence. In this movement action will bring about contradiction and therefore conflict. This is our life. Can action ever be free of time, so that there are neither regrets nor anticipation, the backward and forward looking of action? Seeing is acting. It is not first understanding and then acting, but rather seeing which in itself is action. In this there is no element of time, so the mind is always free. Time and space are the way of thought which builds and nourishes the self, the me and the not-me, with all its demands for fulfilment, its resistance and fear of being hurt. On this morning the quality of meditation was nothingness, the total emptiness of time and space. It is a fact and not an idea or the paradox of opposing speculations. One finds this strange emptiness when the root of all problems withers away. This root is thought, the thought that divides and holds. In meditation the mind actually becomes empty of the past, though it can use the past as thought. This goes on throughout the day and at night sleep is the emptiness of yesterday and therefore the mind touches that which is timeless. The young man with the beard and very long hair said, "I am an idealist who is a revolutionary. I don't want to wait for the slow progress of humanity. I want a radical change as quickly as possible. There are appalling social injustices among both blacks and whites, among all minorities, and of course the politicians as they now are, are corrupt, self-seeking in the name of democracy, and hypocritical. I am violent by nature and I cannot see anyway except through violence to bring about a radical change in the social structure. I am an idealist in the sense that we will tear down the mess and let something new grow. The new is our ideal. I don't know what it will be, but as we destroy the old, we will find out. I know what you think of violence but this is neither here nor there. Most people in the world are already violent, full of antagonisms and we will use that to pull down the Establishment and make a new society. We are for freedom. We want to be free to express ourselves; each one must fulfil himself, and the present society denies all this. We are, of course, against all religions." The idealist who is also a revolutionary, though he may talk convincingly about freedom, inevitably will bring about a dictatorship of the few or of the many. He will also create a personal cult and destroy totally every form of freedom. You may have observed this in the French and Russian revolutions. Your ideal which may come out of the ashes of the present structure will only be speculative and theoretical and on this speculative Utopia -call it what you like - you want to build a new society. This is what all the physical revolutionaries have done. They start off with equality, social justice, the withering of the state and so on, and end up with a tyrannical bureaucracy, insistence on conformity and the exercise of authority in the name of the state. Surely this is not what you want. You feel or think that through the destruction of the present social structure, you will find as you go along, without having a blueprint, a new structure which you think will have social justice, freedom for all, economic equality and so on. You hope to produce all this through violence. Violence can only breed more violence. You may be able through violence to destroy present systems but it will breed resistance and deep-rooted unwillingness to co-operate. It appears you all want quick changes only outwardly. You want to end wars immediately, with which most of us agree, but as long as there are divisions of nationalities, of religious beliefs with their dogmas, there must be conflict. Any form of division will breed antagonism and hatred. We want to change the surface of things without going to the very heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is education. It is the total understanding of man and not an emphasis on one fragment of his life - whether it be technology or earning a livelihood. We see that you are not listening to all this. If one may point it out, all the enthusiasts for outward change always brush aside the more fundamental issues. "What you say may be so, but all that will take time and we haven't time now to be properly educated. We must change the structure first in order to have proper education." The postponement of fundamental questions makes for a greater superficiality of life, of everyday existence, and leads to various forms of escape, including violence - escapes through so-called religions, through entertainment. We are not dividing the outer and the inner. We are concerned with the total movement of life and education is part of this. As it is now, in almost every country there is some sort of military service. Instead of that it should be part of education to work in the social field. But this too is not the fundamental issue. "You are not convincing me. You haven't shown me what to do and how to act in this murderous world." We are not trying to convince you of anything. We are pointing to certain facts, certain truths which are neither yours nor mine. We are saying that to bring about a radical change in the social structure, fundamental questions must be answered; and in the very asking is the answer. The answer is the action; not in some distant future, but now. That is the greatest revolution. The greatest and the only revolution. To that you reply: we haven't time, we want to change the social structure immediately. If we may point it out, this reply is utterly immature. Man is not merely a social machine. He is concerned with love, concerned with sex, with fears. Yet without taking all that into account, you hope by transforming the scaffolding of the social structure to bring about a radical change. The activist is the extrovert. But what we are concerned with is neither extrovert nor introvert - which again is a very superficial division. What really concerns us is the change of the human mind. If this is not deeply understood, your revolution will be a reform and like every reform will need further reform. "I'm bored with all this." A tall clean-shaven young man, in sloppy clothes spoke. "I'm not interested in this at all. But what does interest me - not as an escape - is really to find out what meditation is. Can we go into that?" Sirs, you see how divided we all are. One occupied with your physical revolution, another with sex, another with art or writing, and another with the understanding of truth. All these fragmentations make man self-centred, confused and miserable. And you with your revolution hope to solve all these problems by changing the superficial structure. To that you will probably reply: change the environment and man will be different. But again that is only a partial answer, or the statement of a partial fact. We are concerned with the total understanding of man. And this is meditation. Meditation is not an escape from `what is'. It is the understanding of it and going beyond it. Without understanding `what is', meditation becomes merely a form of self-hypnosis and escape into visions and imaginative flights of fancy. Meditation is the understanding of the whole activity of thought which brings into being the "me", the self, the ego, as a fact. Then thought tries to understand the image which it has created, as though that self were something permanent. This self again divides itself into the higher and the lower and this division in turn brings conflict, misery and confusion. The knowing of the self is one thing and the understanding of how the self comes into being, is another. One presupposes the existence of the self as a permanent entity. The other, through observation, learns how the self is put together by thought. So the understanding of thought, its ways and its subtleties, its activities and its divisions, is the beginning of meditation. But if you consider the self a permanent entity, you are studying a self which is non-existent, for it is merely a bundle of memories, words and experiences. So self-knowing is not the knowledge of the self but seeing how the self has been put together and how this makes for the fragmentation of life. One must see very clearly this misunderstanding. There is no permanent self about which to learn. But learning about the ways of thought and its activities is to dissipate self-centred activity. This is the foundation of meditation. Without understanding this deeply and radically, meditation becomes merely a game for the foolish, with their absurd little visions, fanciful experiences and the mischief of power. This foundation implies awareness, the observation of what is, without any choice, to see without any prejudice actually what is going on, both outwardly and inwardly, without any control or decision. This attention is action which is not something separate by itself; for life is action. You don't have to become an activist, which again is a fragmentation of life. If we are really concerned with total action, not a fragmentary one, then total action comes with total attention, which is to see actually `what is' both inwardly and outwardly. And that very seeing is the doing. "But don't you need training in this? Some method to practise so as to become attentive, so as to become sensitive?" That is what so-called schools of meditation offer, which is really quite absurd. Method implies a mechanical repetition of words, or of control, or of conformity. In this repetition the mind becomes mechanical. A mind that is mechanical is not sensitive. In seeing the truth of this mechanical process the mind is liberated and therefore is sensitive. The seeing is the attention. "But," said the young man, "I can't see clearly. How am I to do this?" To see clearly there must be no choice, no prejudice, no resistance or escape. Find out if you have escapes, if you are choosing, if you have prejudices. Understand this. Then the mind can observe very clearly not only the skies, the world, but what is going on within you - the self. "But doesn't meditation bring about extraordinary experiences?" Extraordinary experiences are totally irrelevant and dangerous. The mind being surfeited with experience wants wider, greater, more transcendent experience. The more is the enemy of the good. The good flowers only in the understanding of `what is', not in wanting more or greater experiences. In meditation there are certain things that do happen, for which there are no words; and if you talk about them, then they are not the real. THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART II CHAPTER 7 CONVERSATION WITH PARENTS AND TEACHERS YOU LEAVE THE sea behind and go inland. This sea always seemed to be rough with huge waves. It is not blue but rather dark brown with strong currents. It looked like a dangerous sea. A river flowed into it in the rainy season, but after the monsoon the sea washed up so much sand that the little river was closed in. You left it and went inland passing many villages, bullock carts and three of the most sacred temples, and after a long while, crossing many hills you entered the valley and felt again its peculiar fascination. The search for truth is such a false affair, as though by searching for it, asking others the way to it, reading about it in books, trying this or that system, you will be able to find it. To find it is if it were something there, fixed, motionless, and all you need do is recognise it, grasp it, and say you have found it. It isn't far away: there is no path to it. It is not something you can capture, hold, treasure and verbally convey to another. Search implies a seeker and in that there is division, the everlasting fragmentation that man has made within himself and in all his activities. It is not that there must be an end to seeking but rather the beginning of learning. Learning is far more important than finding. To find one must have lost. Losing and recognising is the pattern of search. One cannot experience truth. It does not give the satisfaction of achievement. It does not give one anything at all. It cannot be understood if the `you' is still active. No one can teach you about it so you need not follow anybody. All that one can do is to understand by careful observation the intricate movement of thought: how thought divides itself, how it creates its own opposites and thereby brings contradiction and conflict. Thought is so restless and in its restlessness it will attach itself to anything it thinks is essential, permanent, completely satisfying, and truth becomes its final attachment of satisfaction. You can never invite truth by any means. It is not an end; but it is there when the visual observation is very clear and when there is the perception of understanding. Understanding can take place only when there is complete freedom from all one's conditioning. It is this conditioning that is prejudice. So do not bother about truth but rather let the mind be aware of its own prison. Freedom is not in the prison. The beauty of emptiness is freedom. On the same verandah, with the scent of the jasmine and the red flower of the tall tree, there was a group of boys and girls. They had shining faces and seemed extraordinarily cheerful. One of them asked, "Sir, do you ever get hurt?" You mean physically? "Not quite, Sir. I don't know how to put it into words, but you feel inside that people can harm you, wound you, make you feel miserable. Someone says something and you shrink away. This is what I mean by hurt. We are all hurting each other in this way. Some do it deliberately, others without knowing it. Why do we get hurt? It is so unpleasant." Physical hurt is one thing and the other is much more complex. If you are physically hurt, you know what to do. You go to the doctor and he will do something about it. But if the memory of that hurt remains, then you are always nervous and apprehensive and this builds up a form of fear. There remains the memory of the past hurt which you don't want repeated. This is fairly understandable and can either become neurotic or be sanely dealt with without too much bother. But the other inward hurt needs very careful examination. One has to learn a great deal about it. First of all, why do we get hurt at all? From childhood this seems to be a major factor in our lives: not to be hurt, not to be wounded by another, by a word, by a gesture, by a look, by any experience. Why do we get hurt? Is it because we are sensitive, or is it because we have an image of ourselves which must be protected, which we feel is important for our very existence, an image without which we feel lost, confused? There are these two things: the image and sensitivity. Do you understand what we mean by being sensitive, both physically and inwardly? If you are sensitive and rather shy, you withdraw into yourself, build a wall around yourself in order not to be hurt. You do this, don't you? Once you have been hurt by a word or by a criticism, and that has wounded you, you pro- ceed to build a wall of resistance. You don't want to be hurt any more. You may have an image, an idea about yourself, that you are important, that you are clever, that your family is better than other families, that you play games better than somebody else. You have this image about yourself, don't you? And when the importance of that image is questioned or shaken or broken into fragments, you feel very hurt. There is self-pity, anxiety, fear. And the next time you build a stronger image, more affirmative, aggressive and so on. You see that nobody disturbs you, which again is building a wall against any encroachment. So the fact is that both the one who is sensitive and the image-maker bring about the walls of resistance. Do you know what happens when you build a wall around yourself? It is like building a very high wall around your house. You don't see your neighbours, you don't get enough sunlight, you live in a very small space with all the members of your family. And not having enough space, you begin to get on each other's nerves, you quarrel, become violent, wanting to get away and revolt. And if you have enough money and enough energy you build another house for yourself with another wall around it and so it goes on. Resistance implies lack of space and it is one of the factors of violence. "But," asked one of them, "mustn't one protect oneself?" Against what? Naturally you must protect yourself against disease, against the rains and the sun; but when you say mustn't one protect oneself, are you not asking to build a wall against being hurt? It may be your brother or your mother against whom you build the wall, thinking to protect yourself, but ultimately this leads to your own destruction and the destruction of light and space. "But," asked one of the girls with studious eyes and long plaited hair, "what am I to do when I am hurt? I know I'm hurt. I get hurt so often. What am I to do? You say I mustn't build a wall of resistance but I can't live with so many wounds." Do you understand, if one may ask, why you are hurt? And also when you get hurt? Do look at that leaf or that flower. It is very delicate and the beauty of it is in its very delicacy. It is terribly vulnerable and yet it lives. And you who so often are wounded, have you asked when and why you get hurt? Why do you get hurt -when somebody says something you don't like, when somebody is aggressive, violent towards you. Then why are you hurt? If you get hurt and build a wall around yourself, which is to withdraw, then you live in a very small space within yourself. In that small space there is no light or freedom and you will get more and more hurt. So the question is, can you live freely and happily without being hurt, without building walls of resistance. This is the important question, isn't it? Not how to strengthen the walls or what to do when you have a wall round your little space. So there are two things involved in this: the memory of the hurt and the prevention of future hurts. If that memory continues and you add to it fresh memories of hurts, then your wall becomes stronger and higher, the space and the light become smaller and duller, and there is great misery, mounting self-pity and bitterness. If you see very cleatly the danger of it, the uselessness, the pity of it, then the past memories will wither away. But you must see it as you would see the danger of a cobra. Then you know it is a deadly danger and you go nowhere near it. In the same way do you see the danger of past memories with their hurts, with their walls of self-defence? Do you actually see it as you see that flower? If you do then it inevitably disappears. So you know what to do with past hurts. Then how will you prevent future hurts? Not by building walls. That is clear, isn't it? If you do, you will get more and more hurt. Please listen to this question carefully. Knowing that you may be hurt, how will you prevent this hurt taking place? If somebody tells you that you are not clever or beautiful, you get hurt, or angry, which is another form of resistance. Now what can you do? You saw very clearly how the past hurts go away without any effort; you saw because you listened and gave your attention. Now when someone says something unpleasant to you, be attentive; listen very carefully. Attention will prevent the mark of hurt. Do you understand what we mean by attention? "You mean, Sir, concentration, don't you?" Not quite. Concentration is a form of resistance, is a form of exclusion, a shutting out, a retreat. But attention is something quite different. In concentration there is a centre from which the action of observation takes place. Where there is a centre, the radius of its observation is very limited. Where there is no centre, observation is vast, clear. This is attention. "I'm afraid we don't understand this at all, Sir." Look out at those hills, see the light on them, see those trees, hear the bullock cart going by; see the yellow leaves, the dried river bed, and that crow sitting on the branch. Look at all of this. If you look from a centre, with its prejudice, with its fear, with its like and dislike, then you don't see the vast expanse of this earth. Then your eyes are clouded, then you become myopic and your eyesight becomes twisted. Can you look at all this, the beauty of the valley, the sky, without a centre? Then that is attention. Then listen with attention and without the centre, to another's criticism, insult, anger, prejudice. Because there is no centre in that attention there is no possibility of being hurt. But where there is a centre there is inevitable hurt. Then life becomes one scream of fear. THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING PART II CHAPTER 8 CONVERSATION WITH PARENTS AND TEACHERS MEDITATION IS NEVER the control of the body. There is no actual division between the organism and the mind. The brain, the nervous system and the thing we call the mind are all one, indivisible. It is the natural act of meditation that brings about the harmonious movement of the whole. To divide the body from the mind and to control the body with intellectual decisions is to bring about contradiction, from which arise various forms of struggle, conflict and resistance. Every decision to control only breeds resistance, even the determination to be aware. Meditation is the understanding of the division brought about by decision. Freedom is not the act of decision but the act of perception. The seeing is the doing. It is not a determination to see and then to act. After all, will is desire with all its contradictions. When one desire assumes authority over another, that desire becomes will. In this there is inevitable division. And meditation is the understanding of desire, not the overcoming of one desire by another. Desire is the movement of sensation, which becomes pleasure and fear. This is sustained by the constant dwelling of thought upon one or the other. Meditation really is a complete emptying of the mind. Then there is only the functioning of the body; there is only the activity of the organism and nothing else; then thought functions without identification as the me and the not-me. Thought is mechanical, as is the organism. What creates conflict is thought identifying itself with one of its parts which becomes the me, the self and the various divisions in that self. There is no need for the self at any time. There is nothing but the body and freedom of the mind can happen only when thought is not breeding the me. There is no self to understand but only the thought that creates the self. When there is only the organism without the self, perception, both visual and non-visual, can never be distorted. There is only seeing `what is' and that very perception goes beyond what is. The emptying of the mind is not an activity of thought or an intellectual process. The continuous seeing of what is without any kind of distortion naturally empties the mind of all thought and yet that very mind can use thought when it is necessary. Thought is mechanical and meditation is not. It was very early and in the morning light two owls were sitting in the tamarind tree. They were small ones and always seemed to go in pairs. They had been crying all night, off and on, and one came to the window-sill and called to the other with a rattling note. The two on the branch had their hole in the tree. They were often there in the morning before they retired for the day, sitting there very grey and silent. Presently one would gently withdraw and disappear into the hole and the other would follow, but they made no noise. They only talked and rattled in the night. The tamarind tree not only sheltered the owls but also many parrots. It was a huge tree in the garden overlooking the river. There were vultures, crows and the green-golden flycatchers. The flycatchers would often come to the window-sill on the verandah, but you have to sit very still and not even move your eyes. They had a curious curving flight and they kept to themselves, unlike the crows that pestered the vultures. There were monkeys too that morning. They had been there in the distance but now they had all come closer to the house. They remained for a few days and after they left there was a lonely male who appeared every morning on the tallest of the tamarinds. He would climb to the highest branch and sit there looking at the river, at the villagers passing by and the cattle grazing. As the sun grew warmer, he would climb down slowly and disappear, and the next morning he would again be there as the sun came over the trees, making a golden path on the river. For two whole weeks he was there, lonely, aloof, watching. He had no companion and one morning he disappeared. The students had returned. One of the boys asked, "Mustn't one obey one's parents? After all, they brought me up, they are educating me. Without money I couldn't come to this school, so they are responsible for me and I am responsible to them. It is this feeling of responsibility that makes me feel I must obey them. After all, they may know much better than I do what is good for me. They want me to be an engineer." Do you want to be an engineer? Or are you merely studying engineering because your parents want it? "I don't know what I want to do. Most of us in this room don't know what we want to do. We have government scholarships. We can take any subject we like but our parents and society say that engineering is a good profession. They need engineers. But when you ask us what we want to do we become rather uncertain and this is confusing and disturbing." You said that your parents are responsible for you and that you must obey them. You know what is happening in the West where there is no parental authority any more. There the young people don't want any authority, though they have their own peculiar kind. Does responsibility demand authority, obedience, accepting the wishes of parents or the demands of society? Doesn't responsibility mean having the capacity for rational conduct? Your parents think that you are not capable of this and so they feel called upon to watch over your behaviour, what you do, what you study and what you might become. Their idea of moral conduct is based upon their conditioning, upon their education, upon their beliefs, fears and pleasures. The past generation has built a social structure and they want you to conform to that structure. They think it is moral and they feel they know much more than you do. And you in your turn, if you conform will see that your children also conform. So gradually the authority of conformity becomes moral excellence. Is that what you are asking when you wonder if you should obey your parents? You see what this obeying means? When you are very young you hear what your parents tell you. The constant repetition of your hearing what they say establishes the act of obedience. So obedience becomes mechanical. It is like a soldier who hears an order over and over again and complies, becomes subservient. And that is how most of us live. That is propaganda, both religious and worldly. So you see, a habit has been formed from childhood of hearing what your parents have told you, of what you have read. So hearing becomes the means of obedience. And now you are faced with the problem of whether you should obey or not obey: obey what others have said or obey your own urges. You want to hear what your desires say and that very hearing will make you obey your desires. Out of this arises opposition and resistance. So when you ask whether you should obey your parents there is a fear that if you didn't obey you might go wrong and that they might not give you money to be educated. In obedience there is always fear, and fear darkens the mind. So instead of asking that question, find out if you can talk to your parents rationally and also find out what it means to hear. Can you hear without any fear what they say? And can you also listen to your own urges and desires without fear of going wrong? If you can listen quietly without fear you will find out for yourself whether you should obey, not only your parents, but every form of authority. You see, we have been educated in a most absurd way. We have never been taught the act of learning. A lot of information is poured into our heads and we develop a very small part of the brain which will help us to earn a livelihood. The rest of the brain is neglected. It is like the cultivation of a corner in a vast field and the rest of the field stays overgrown with weeds, thistles and thorns. So now, how are you listening or hearing what we are saying? Will this hearing make you obey or will it make you intelligent, aware not only of the small corner but of the whole vast field? Neither your teachers nor your parents are concerned with the greatness of the field with all its content. But they are intensely, insanely concerned with the corner. The corner seems to give security and that is their concern. You may revolt against it - and people are doing this - but again those in revolt are concerned only with their piece of the corner. And so it goes on. So can you hear without obedience, without following? If you can, there will be sensitivity and concern for the whole field and this concern brings about intelligence. It is this intelligence which will act instead of the mechanical habit of obedience. "Oh," said a girl, "but our parents love us. They don't want any harm for us. It is out of love they want us to obey, tell us what studies we must take, how to shape our lives." Every parent says he loves his children. It is only the abnormal who hates his children or the abnormal child that really hates his parents. Every parent throughout the world says he loves his children, but does he? Love implies care, great concern not only when they are young, but to see that they have the right kind of education, that they are not killed in wars, and to see to a change in the social structure with its absurd morality. If the parents have love for their children they will see that they do not conform; they will see that they learn instead of imitate. If they really love them they will bring about vast changes so that you can live sanely, happily and securely. Not only you in this room but everyone all over the world. Love doesn't demand conformity. Love offers freedom. Not what you want to do, which is generally very shallow, petty and mean, but to understand, to listen freely, to listen without the poison of conformity. Do you think if parents really loved, that there would be war? From childhood you are taught to dislike your neighbour, told you are different from somebody else. You are brought up in prejudice so that when you grow up you become violent, aggressive, self-centred, and the whole cycle is repeated over again. So learn what it means to hear; learn to listen freely without accepting or denying, without conformity or resistance. Then you will know what to do. Then you will find out what goodness is and how it flowers. And it will never flower in any corner: it flowers only in the vast field of life, in the action of the whole field. THE BEGINNINGS OF LEARNING QUOTATIONS FROM PART II "It is not that there must be an end to seeking, but rather the beginning of learning. Learning is far more important than finding." "As long as education is concerned merely with the culture of the outer... the inner movement with its immense depth will inevitably be for the few and in that there lies great sorrow. Sorrow cannot be solved, cannot be understood when you are running with tremendous energy along the superficial. Unless you solve this with self-knowing you will have revolt after revolt, reforms which need further reformation, and the endless antagonism of man against man will go on." "The heart of the matter is education, it is the total understanding of man and not an emphasis on one fragment of his life... All the enthusiasts for outward change always brush aside the more fundamental issues." 1st Conversation - Knowledge And Transformation 2nd Conversation - Knowledge And Human Relationships 3rd Conversation - Responsibility 4th Conversation - Responsibility And Relationship 5th Conversation - Order 6th Conversation - Fear 7th Conversation - Desire 8th Conversation - Pleasure 9th Conversation - Inward Or True Beauty 10th Conversation - The Art Of Listening 11th Conversation - The Nature Of Hurt 12th Conversation - Love And Pleasure 13th Conversation - A Different Way Of Life 14th Conversation - Death 15th Conversation - Religion And Authority 1 16th Conversation - Religion And Authority 2 17th Conversation - Meditation 1 18th Conversation - Meditation 2 SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 18TH FEBRUARY 1974 1ST CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'KNOWLEDGE AND TRANSFORMATION' J Krishnamurti was born in South India and educated in England. For the past 40 years he has been speaking in the United States, Europe, India, Australia and other parts of the world. From the outset of his life's work he repudiated all connections with organized religions and ideologies and said that his only concern was to set man absolutely unconditionally free. He is the author of many books, among them THE AWAKENING Of INTELLIGENCE, THE URGENCY OF CHANGE, FREEDOM FROM THE KNOWN and THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE. This is one of a series of dialogues between Krishnamurti and Dr. Allan W. Anderson, who is professor of religious studies at San Diego State University where he teaches Indian and Chinese scriptures and the oracular tradition. Dr. Anderson, a published poet, received his degree from Columbia University and the Union Theological Seminary, he has been honoured with the distinguished teaching award from the California State University. A: Mr Krishnamurti I was very taken with a recent statement of yours in which you said that it's the responsibility of each human being to bring about his own transformation, which is not dependent on knowledge or time. And if it's agreeable with you I thought it would be a splendid thing if we explored together the general area of transformation itself and after we have done that perhaps the other related areas would begin to fall into place and we could bring about in conversation a relationship among them. K: Don't you think, sir, considering what's happening in the world, in India, in Europe and in America, the general degeneration in literature, in art, and specially in the deep cultural sense, in the sense religion... A: Yes K: ...there is a traditional approach, a mere acceptance of authority, belief which is not really the religious spirit. Seeing all this, the confusion the great misery, the sense of infinity sorrow, any observant and serious people would say that this society cannot possibly be changed except only when the individual, the human being, really transforms himself radically, that is regenerates himself fundamentally. And the responsibility of that depends on the human being not on the mass or on the priests or on a church or a temple or mosque or whatever, but on a human being who is aware of this enormous confusion, politically, religiously, economically, in every direction there is such misery, such unhappiness. And when you see that it is a very serious thing to ask oneself whether a human being like oneself or another whether he can really deeply undergo a radical transformation. And when that question is put to him, and when he sees his responsibility in relation to the whole then perhaps we can discuss what relationship has knowledge and time in the transformation of man. A: I quite follow. We need then to lay some groundwork in order to move into the question itself. K: Yes. Because most people are not concerned with the world at all. Most people are not concerned seriously with the events, with the chaos with the mess in the world at present. They are only concerned very superficially. The problem of energy, problem of pollution and so on - such superficial things. But they are really not deeply concerned with the human mind - the mind that is destroying the world. A: Yes - I quite follow. What you have said places in a very cardinal way the radical responsibility on the individual as such, if I've understood you correctly. K: Yes. A: There are no five years plans that we can expect to help us out. K: You see, the word individual is really not a correct word because individual, as you know sir, means undivided, indivisible, in himself. But human beings are totally fragmented, therefore they are not individuals. They may have a bank account, a name, a house, but they are not really individuals in the sense, a total complete harmonious whole, unfragmented. That is really what it means to be an individual. A: Well would you say then that to move or to make passage or perhaps a better word simply would be change, since we are not talking about time, from this fragmented state to one of wholeness which could be regarded as a change in the level of the being of the person. K: Yes A: Could we say that? K: Yes, but you see again the word whole implies not only sanity, health and also the word whole means holy, h-o-l-y. All that's implied in that one word whole. And human beings are never whole. They are fragmented, they are contradictory, they are torn apart by various desires. So, when we talk of an individual, the individual is really a human being who is totally completely whole, sane, healthy and therefore holy. And to bring about such a human being is our responsibility in education, politically, religiously, in every way. And therefore it is the responsibility of the educator, of everybody, not just myself, my responsibility, it is your responsibility as well as mine, as well as his. A: It's everybody's responsibility... K: Absolutely - because we have created this awful mess in the world. A: But the individual is the one who must make the start. K: A human being, each human being, it does not matter whether he is a politician or a businessman or just an ordinary person like me in the street, it's our business as a human being to realize the enormous suffering, misery, confusion there is in the world. And it's our responsibility to change all that, not the politicians, not the businessman, not the scientist. It's our responsibility. A: When we say our responsibility, and we have two uses of the word individual now. There is the general use of it meaning a quantitative measure... K: Yes - quantitative measure. A: ...and than this qualitative reference that we simply needed, it seems to me, to discern as a possibility. I am reminded again of the statement that you made that I quoted earlier, that it is the responsibility of each, each human person. K: Human being, yes. A: Right. K: Whether he is in India or in England or in America or wherever he is. A: So we can't slip out of this by saying, we have created this therefore we must change it. We get back to, well if the change is going to start at all, it's going to be with each. K: Yes, sir. A: With each. K: With each human being. Therefore the question arises from that, does a human being realize with all seriousness his responsibility not only to himself but to the whole of mankind? A: It wouldn't appear so from the way things go on. K: Obviously not, each one is concerned with his own petty little selfish desires. So responsibility implies tremendous attention, care, diligence - not negligence as now it is going on. A: Yes I do follow that. The word we that we used in relation to each brings about the suggestion of a relationship which perhaps we could pursue here a moment. There seems to be something indivisible apparently between what we refer to by each or the individual person as the usage is usually construed. It seems to be an indivisible relation between that and what we call the whole, which the individual doesn't sense. K: Sir, as you know, I have been all over the world, except behind the Iron Curtain and China - Bamboo Curtain. I have been all over and I have talked to and seen thousands and thousands of people. I have been doing this for 50 years and more. Human beings wherever they live are more or less the same. They have their problems of sorrow, problems of fear, problems of livelihood, problems of personal relationship, problems of survival, overpopulation and the enormous problem of death - it is a common problem to all of us. There is no eastern problem or western problem. The West has its particular civilization and the East has it's own. And human beings are caught in this trap. A: Yes I follow that. K: They don't seem to be able to get out of it. They are going on and on and on, for millennia. A: Therefore the question is how does he bring this about, as an each, as a one? The word individual as you have just described, seems to me to have a relationship to the word transform in itself, and I would like to ask you whether you would agree in this. It seems that many persons have the notion that to transform a thing means to change it utterly without any relationship whatsoever to what it is as such. That would seem to ignore that we are talking about form that undergoes a change, which form still abides. K: Yes sir, I understand. A: Otherwise the change would involve a loss, a total loss. K: So are we asking this question, sir? What place has knowledge in the regeneration of man, in the transformation of man, in the fundamental, radical movement in man? What place has knowledge and therefore time? Is it that what you are asking? A: Yes, yes, I am. Because either we accept that a change that is a genuine change means the annihilation of what preceded it, or we are talking about a total transformation of something that abides. K: Yes. So let us look at that word for a minute. Revolution in the ordinary sense of that word means, doesn't it, not an evolution, gradual evolution, it's a revolution. A: It doesn't mean that then - right. I agree. K: By revolution is generally meant, if you talk to a communist, he want to overthrow the government, if you talk to a bourgeois he is frightened, if you talk to an intellectual he has various criticisms about revolution. Now, revolution is either bloody, or... A: Yes. K: Or revolution in the psyche. A: Yes. K: Outward or inner. A: Outward, or inner. K: The outward is the inner. The inner is the outward. There is not the difference between the outward and the inner. They are totally related to each other, A: Then this goes back to what you mentioned earlier. There is no division even though intellectually you make a distinction, between the I and the we. K: That's right. A: Yes, of course. K: So, when we talk about change, we mean not the mere bloody revolution physical revolution, but rather the revolution in the makeup of the mind. A: Of each. K: Of human beings. A: Right. K: The way he thinks, the way he behaves, the way he conducts himself, the way he operates, he functions, the whole of that. Now, whether that psychological revolution - not evolution in the sense of gradualness... A: No. K: What place has knowledge in that? A: What place has knowledge in something? K: In the regeneration of man which is the inward revolution which will affect the outer. A: Yes, which is not a gradual progress. K: Gradual progress is endless. A: Exactly. So we are talking an instant qualitative change. K: Again when you use the word instant, it seems as though suddenly it is to happen. That's why I am rather hesitant in using the word instant. We will go into it in a minute. First of all, sir, let's be clear what you and I are talking about if we may. We see objectively the appalling mess the world is in. Right? A: Yes. K: The misery the confusion, the deep sorrow of man. A: Oh, yes. K: I can't tell you what I feel when I go round the world. The pettiness, the shallowness, the emptiness of all this, of the so-called western civilization, if I may use that word; into which the eastern civilization is being grabbed into. And we are just scratching on the surface. all the time. And we think the mere change on the surface - change in the structure is going to do something enormous to all human beings. On the contrary it has done nothing. It polishes a little bit here and there but deeply fundamentally it does not change man. So, when we are discussing change we must be, I think, fairly clear that we mean the change in the psyche, in the very being of human beings. That is, in the very structure and nature of his thought. A: The change at the root. K: At the root - yes. A: At the root itself. K: At the root. And therefore when there is that change he will naturally bring about a change in society. It isn't society first, or individual first, it is the human change which will transform the society. They are not two separate things. A: Now I must be very careful that I understand this precisely. I think I discern now why in the statement you said, which is not dependent on knowledge or time. Because when this person changes, this each human being changes, the change which begins in society is a change that is in a non-temporal relationship with the change in each human being. K: After all human beings have created this society. By their greed, by their anger, by their violence, by their brutality, by their pettiness, they have created this society. A: Precisely. K: And they think by changing the structure you are going to change the human being. This has been the communist problem, this has been the eternal problem: that if we change the environment then you change man. They have tried that in ten different ways and they haven't done it, succeeded in changing man. On the contrary man conquers the environment as such. So, if we are clear that the outer is the inner - the inner is the outer, that there is not the division, the society and the individual, the collective and the separate human being, but the human being is the whole, he is the society, he is the separate human individual, he is the factor which brings about this chaos. A: Yes, I am following this very closely. K: Therefore he is the world and the world is him. A: Yes. Therefore if he changes everything changes. If he doesn't change nothing changes. K: I think this is very important because we don't realize, I think, this basic factor that we are the world and the world is us, that the world is not something separate from me and me separate from the world. You are born in a culture, Christian or Hindu or whatever culture you are born in. You are the result of that culture. And that culture has produced this world. The materialistic world of the West, if one can call it, which is spreading all over the world, destroying their own culture, their own traditions -everything is being swept aside in the wake of the western culture, and this culture has produced this human being, and the human being has created this culture. A: Exactly. K: I mean he has created the paintings, the marvelous cathedrals, the marvelous technological things, going to the moon and so on and so on, the human beings have produced it. It is the human beings that have created the rotten society in which we live. It is the immoral society in which we live which human beings have created. A: Oh yes there is no doubt about that. K: And therefore the world is you, you are the world, there is no other. If we accept that, if we see that not intellectually, but feel it in your heart, in your mind, in your blood that you are that, then the question is, is it possible for a human being to transform himself inwardly and therefore outwardly? A: I am very concerned to see this as clearly as I can in terms of two texts that come to my mind, which we could say possess an inner meaning, and because of this inner outer thing that we have spoken about in the divided approach that is made to scripture -there is a tremendous irony here - I am thinking of that, to me, wonderful text in St Johns gospel, in the third chapter, which says -and I will try to translate this as the Greek has it - 'The one who is doing the truth is coming to the light'. It isn't that he does the truth and then later he comes to the light. And it isn't that we could say from the pulpit, I will tell you what the truth is, if you do it then you will see the light. Because we are back again to what you mentioned earlier, the non-temporal relationship between the action which itself is the transformation. K: Quite. A: And the marvelous vista of understanding, which is not an 'if' then thing, but is truly concurrent. And the other one that I thought of, I was hoping you might agree is saying the same thing, so that I understand it well in terms of what you have said, is, and again I will try to translate it as literally as I can: God is love and the one abiding in love is abiding in God and God is abiding in him. K: Quite, quite. A: I put the '-ing' on all those words because of the character of the language itself. One wouldn't want to translate that for pulpit reading perhaps - but that's the real sense of it. And this 'ing-ing' along gives the feeling that there is an activity here that is not bound temporally. K: It isn't a static state. It isn't something you intellectually accept, and leave it like that. Then it is death, there is nothing in it. A: Yes. K: That's why you see, sir, we have divided the physical world as the East and the West. We have divided religions, Christian religion and Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist. And we have divided the world into nationalities; the capitalist and the socialist, the communist and the other people and so on. We have divided the world, and we have divided ourselves as Christians, non-Christians, we have divided ourselves into fragments, opposing each other, so, where there is a division there is conflict. A: Precisely. K: I think that is a basic law. A: Where there is a division there is conflict. But in terms of that word knowledge it appears that people believe to start with that that division is there, and they operate on that radical belief. K: That's why I am saying it's so important to understand from the beginning of our talks, in our dialogue, that the world is not different from me and that I am the world. This may sound rather simplified, simplistic, but it has got very deep fundamental meaning if you realize what it means, not intellectually, but inwardly, the understanding of it, therefore there is no division. The moment I say to myself, I realize that I am the world and the world is me, I am not a Christian, nor a Hindu, or a Buddhist -nothing, I am a human being. A: I was just thinking when you were saying how certain kinds of philosophical analysis would approach that, and in terms of the spirit of what you have said, this really is almost a cosmic joke because on the one hand as you said, it might sound simplistic. Some would say it is, therefore we don't have to pay attention to it; others would say, well it's probably so much in want of clarity even though it's profound that it is some kind of mysticism. And we are back and forth, the division again, as soon as that. K: I know, I know. A: So I do follow you. K: So, if that is clear that human mind has divided the world in order to find it's own security, which brings about it's own insecurity, when one is aware of that then one must inwardly as well as outwardly deny this division, as we and they, I and you, the Indian and the European and the Communist. You cut at the very root of this division. Therefore from that arises the question, can the human mind which has been so conditioned for millennia, can that human mind which has acquired so much knowledge in so many directions, can that human mind change, bring about a regeneration in itself and be free to reincarnate now? A: Now? K: Now. A: Yes. K: That is the question. A: That is the question - exactly - reincarnate now. It would appear from what you have said that one could say that the vast amount of represented knowledge, an accretion of centuries, is a discussion we have been having with ourselves regardless of which culture we are speaking about as a commentary on this division. K: Absolutely. A: Without really grasping the division itself. And of course the division itself. And of course since division is infinitely divisible... K: Of course. A: Then we can have tome after tome, after tome, libraries after libraries, mausoleums of books without end because we are continually dividing the division. Yes I follow you. K: And you see that's why culture is different from civilization. Culture implies growth. A: Oh yes, oh yes. K: Now growth in the flowering of goodness. A: A lovely phrase, lovely phrase. K: That is culture - real culture - the flowering in goodness -you understand sir, and that doesn't exist. We have civilization, you can travel from India to America in a few hours - you have better bathrooms - better this and better that and so on with all the complications that involves. That has been the western culture which has been absorbed in the East. So goodness is the very essence of culture. Religion is the transformation of man. Not all the beliefs, churches and the idolatry of the Christians or the Hindus. That's not religion. So we come back to the point, if one sees all this in this world -observes it, not condemn it or justify it - just to observe it, then from that one asks: man has collected such enormous information, knowledge, and has that knowledge changed him into goodness? You follow sir - into a culture that will make him flower in this beauty of goodness. It has not. A: No it has not. K: Therefore it has no meaning. A: Excursions into defining goodness is not going to help us. K: You can give explanations, definitions, but definitions are not the reality. A: Of course not. K: The word isn't the thing. The description isn't the described. A: Precisely. K: So we come back again. A: Yes, let's do. K: Because personally I am tremendously concerned with this question: how to change man. Because I go to India every year for three months or five months and I see what is happening there, and I see what is happening in Europe, and I see what is happening in this country, in America, and I can't tell you what shock it gives me each time I come to these countries - the degeneration, the superficiality, the intellectual concepts galore without any substance, without any basis or ground in which the beauty of goodness, of reality can grow. So saying all that what place has knowledge in the regeneration of man? That is the basic question. A: That's our point of departure. K: Departure. A: Good. And the knowledge that we have pointed to so far that has emerged in our discussion is a knowledge which in itself has no power to effect this transformation. K: No sir, but knowledge has a place. A: Yes I didn't mean that. I mean what is expected of this knowledge that we pointed to, that is accumulated in libraries, is an expectation which in itself cannot fulfil. K: No, no. I must now go back to the word again - the word knowledge, what does it mean to know? A: Well I have understood the word in a strict sense this way: knowledge is the apprehension of 'what is', but what passes for knowledge might not be that. K: No. What is generally accepted as knowledge is experience. A: Yes, what is generally accepted. K: We will begin with that because it's generally accepted - the experience which yields, or leaves a mark which is knowledge. That accumulated knowledge whether in the scientific world or in the biological world or in the business world or in the world of the mind, the being, is the known. The known is the past, therefore knowledge is the past. Knowledge cannot be in the present. I can use knowledge in the present. A: But it's founded on the past. K: Yes. But it has its roots in the past. Which means - that's very interesting - whether this knowledge which we have acquired about everything - A: Yes. K: ...I personally don't read any of these books, neither the Gita, the Bhagvad-gita or the Upanishads, none of the psychological books, nothing. I am not a reader. I have observed tremendously all my life. Now, knowledge has it's place. A: Oh yes, yes. K: Let's be clear on this. In the practical, technological - I must know where I am going, physically, and so on. Now, what place has that, which is human experience as well as scientific knowledge, what place has that in changing the quality of a mind that has become brutal, violent, petty, selfish, greedy, ambitious and all the rest of that? What place has knowledge in that? A: We are going back to the statement we began with - namely that this transformation is not dependent on knowledge, then the answer would have to be, then it doesn't have a place. K: Therefore let's find out what are the limits of knowledge. A: Yes, yes, of course. K: Where is the demarcation, freedom from the known - where does that freedom begin? A: Good. Yes, now I know precisely the point at which we are going to move from. Where does that freedom begin, which is not dependent on this funded accretion from the past. K: That's right. So, the human mind is constructed on knowledge. It has evolved through millennia on this accretion, on tradition, on knowledge. A: Yes. K: It is there, and all our actions are based on that knowledge. A: Which by definition must be repetitious. K: Obviously and it is a repetition. So, what is the beginning of freedom in relation to knowledge? May I put it this way to make myself clear? A: Yes, yes. K: I have experienced something yesterday that has left a mark. That is knowledge and with that knowledge I meet the next experience. So the next experience is translated in terms of the old and therefore that experience is never new. A: So in a way if I understand you correctly, you are saying that the experience that I had yesterday, that I recall... K: The recollection. A: ...the recollection upon my meeting something new that appears to have some relationship to it, I approach on the basis of holding my previous knowledge up as a mirror in which to determine the nature of this new thing that I... K: Quite, quite. A: And this could be a rather crazy mirror. K: Generally it is. You see that's what I mean. Where is freedom in relation to knowledge? Or is freedom something other than the continuity of knowledge? A: Must be something other. K: Which means if one goes into it very, very deeply, it means the ending of knowledge. A: Yes. K: And what does that mean, what does it mean to end knowledge. Whereas I have lived entirely on knowledge. A: It means that immediately. K: Ah wait, wait. See what is involved in it, sir. I met you yesterday and there is the image of you in my mind and that image meets you next day. A: Yes. K: The image meets you. A: The image meets me. K: And there are a dozen images or hundred images. So the image is the knowledge. The image is the tradition. The image is the past. Now can there be freedom from that? A: If this transformation that you speak of is to happen, is to come to pass, there must be. K: Of course. Therefore we can state it, but how is the mind which strives, acts, functions on image, on knowledge, on the known - how is it to end that? Take this very simple fact, you are in sorrow, or you praise me, that remains a knowledge, with that with that image, with that knowledge I meet you. I never meet you. The image meets you. A: Exactly. K: Therefore there is no relationship between you and me. A: Yes, because between us this has been interposed. K: Of course, obviously. Therefore how is that image to end, never to register - you follow sir A: I can't depend on someone else to handle it for me. K: Therefore what am I to do? How is this mind which is registering, recording all the time - the function of the brain is to record, all the time - how is it to be free of knowledge? When you have done some harm to me personally, collectively or whatever, you have insulted me, flattered me, how is the brain not to register that? If it registers it is already an image, it's a memory - and the past then meets the present, And therefore there is no solution to it. A: Exactly. K: I was looking at that word the other day in a very good dictionary - tradition. It means and of course the ordinary word -tradere - to give, hand over, to give across. It also has another peculiar meaning - not peculiar - from the same word, betrayal. A: Oh yes traduce. K: Traduce. And in discussing in India this came out, betrayal of the present. If I live in tradition I betray the present. A: Yes I do see that. K: Which is knowledge betrays the present. I betray the present. A: Which is in fact a self betrayal. K: Yes, that's right. A: Yes I do see that. K: So how is the mind which functions on knowledge - how is the brain which is recording all the time... A: Yes. K: ...to end, to see the importance of recording and not let it move in any other direction? That is, sir, let me to put it this way, very simply: you insult me, you hurt me, by word, gesture, by an actual act, that leaves a mark on the brain which is memory. A: Yes. K: That memory is knowledge, that knowledge is going to interfere in my meeting you next time - obviously. Now how is the brain and also the mind, to record and not let it interfere with the present? A: The person must, it seems to me, take pains to negate. K: No, no. See what is implied, but how am I to negate it. How is the brain whose function is to record, like a computer it is recording... A: I didn't mean to suggest that it negates the recording. But it's the association, the translation of the recording into an emotional complex. K: How is it - that's just the point - how is it to end this emotional response when I meet you next time, you who have hurt me? That's a problem. A: That's the place from which we in a practical order in relation to ourselves must then begin. K: Yes. A: Exactly. There is an aspect of this that interests me very much in terms of the relation between the theoretical and the practical. K: Sir, to me theory has no reality. Theories have no importance to a man who is actually living. A: May I say what I mean by theory. I don't think I mean what you think I mean by it. I mean theory in the sense of the greek word theorea - spectacle, what is out there that I see. And the word is therefore very closely related to what you have been talking about in terms of knowledge. And yet it is the case that if we see something, that something is registered to us in the mind in terms of a likeness of it, otherwise we should have to become it in order to receive it, which in a material order would annihilate us, It seems to me, if I followed you correctly, that there is a profound confusion in ones relationship to that necessity for the finite being and what he makes of it. And in so far he is making the wrong thing of it he is in desperate trouble and can only go on repeating himself, and in such a repetition increasing despair. Have I distinguished this correctly? K: You see religion is based on tradition. Religion is vast propaganda, as it is now. In India, here, anywhere, propaganda of theories of beliefs, of idolatry, worship, essentially based on the acceptance of a theory. A: Yes. K: Essentially based on an idea. A: Statement, a postulate. K: Ideas, put out by thought. A: Right. K: And obviously that's not religion. So religion as it exists now is the very denial of truth. A: Yes. I am sure I understand you. K: And if a man like me or... wants to find out, discover what the truth is he must deny the whole structure of religion, as it is -which is idolatry propaganda, fear, division, you are a Christian I am a Hindu - all that nonsense, and be a light to oneself. Not in the vain sense of that word. Light because the world is in darkness and a human being has to transform himself, has to be a light to himself. And light is not lit by somebody else. A: So there is a point at which he must stop repeating himself. Is that correct? In a sense we could use the analogy perhaps from surgery: something that has been continuous is now cut. K: Yes. A: And cut radically - not just fooled around with. K: We haven't time to fool around any more - the house is on fire. At least I feel this enormously - things are coming to such a pass we must do something - each human being. Not in terms of better housing, better security, more this and that - but basically to regenerate himself. A: But if the person believes that in cutting himself from this accretion that he is killing himself, he is going to resist that idea. K: Of course. Therefore he has to understand what his mind has created, therefore he has to understand himself. A: So he starts observing himself. K: Himself - which is the world. A: Yes. Not learning five languages to be able to... K: Attending schools where you learn sensitivity and all that rubbish. A: The point that you are making, it seems it seems to me, is made also by the great Danish thinker, Kirkegaard, who lived a very trying life in his own community because he was asking them, it seems to me, to undertake what you are saying. He was saying: Look if I go to seminary and I try to understand what Christianity is by studying it myself then what I am doing is appropriating something here, but then when do I know I have appropriated it fully. I shall never know that point therefore I shall forever appropriate it and never do anything about it, as such, as a subject. The person who must risk the deed, not the utterance, in its essential form, or not simply thinking through what someone has thought but actually embodying the meaning through the observation of myself in relation to that. And that has always seemed to me a very profound insight. But one of the ironies of that is of course in the Academy we have an endless proliferation of studies in which scholars have learned Danish in order to understand Kirkegaard, and what they are doing is to a large extent - if I haven't misjudged the spirit of much that I have read - is simply perpetuate the very thing he said should be cut. I do have this very strong feeling that profound change would take place in the academy of which you know I am a member, if the teacher were not only to grasp this that you have said, but take the risk of acting on it. Since if it isn't acted on, if I understood you correctly, we are back again where we were. We have toyed with the idea of being valiant and courageous, but then we have to think about of what is involved before we do, and then we don't do. K: Quite. A: We think and don't do. K: Therefore sir, the word is not the thing. The description is not the described, and if you are not concerned with the description but only with the thing, 'what is', then we have to do something. When you are confronted with 'what is' you act, but when you are concerned with theories and speculations and beliefs you never act. A: So there isn't any hope for this transformation, if I understood you correctly, if I should think to myself that this just sounds marvelous. I am the world and the world is me, but while I go on thinking that the description is the described. There is no hope. So we are speaking about a disease over here, and we are speaking about something that has been stated as the case, and if I take what has been stated as the case, as 'the case', then I am thinking that the description is the described. K: Of course. A: And I never get out. K: Sir, it is like a man who is hungry, any amount of description of the right kind of food will never satisfy him. He is hungry he wants food. So, all this implies, doesn't it, sir, several things. First can there be freedom from knowledge - and knowledge has its place - can there be freedom from the tradition as knowledge... A: From the tradition as knowledge, yes. K: ...can there be freedom from this separative outlook - me and you? We and they, Christian, and all this divisive attitude or activity in life. Those are the problems we have to attend to. A: That's what we must attend to as we move through our dialogues. K: So first can the mind be free from the known, not verbally but actually? A: Actually. K: I can speculate about the body's freedom and all the rest of it, but see the necessity, the importance, that there must be freedom from the known, otherwise life becomes repetitive, a continuous superficial scratching. It has no meaning. A: Of course. In our next conversation together I hope we can begin where we have just left off. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 18TH FEBRUARY 1974 2ND CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS' A: Mr Krishnamurti, in our previous conversation I was extremely delighted, for myself at least, that we had made the distinction in terms of relation between knowledge and self transformation, between on the one hand, the relationship that I sustain with the world, as the world is me, and I am the world, and on the other hand this dysfunctional condition which indicates in your phrase, that a person is involved in thinking, that the description is the described. It would appear then that something must be done to bring about a change in the individual, and going back to our use of the word individual, we could say, and you used the word earlier, that we are dealing with an observer. So if the individual is not to make the mistake of taking the description for the described, then he must as an observer relate to the observed in a particular way that is totally different from the way he has been in his confusion. I thought that perhaps in this particular conversation, if we pursued that it would be a link directly with what we had said prior. K: What we previously, wasn't it, that there must be a quality of freedom from the known, otherwise the known is merely the repetition of the past, the tradition, the image, and so on. The past, sir, is the observer. The past is the accumulated knowledge as the me and the we, they and us. The observer is put together by thought as the past. Thought is the past. Thought is never free. Thought is never new, because thought is the response of the past, as knowledge, as experience, as memory. A: Yes I follow that. K: And the observer, when he observes, is observing with the memories, the experience, knowledge, hurts, despairs, hope - all that, with all that background he looks at the observed. So the observer then becomes separate from the observed. Is the observer different from the observed? Which we will go into presently later on. That leads to all kinds of other things. So when we are talking of freedom from the known we are talking about freedom from the observer. A: The observer, yes. K: And the observer is tradition, the past, the conditioned mind that looks at things, looks at itself, looks at the world, looks at me and so on. So the observer is always dividing. The observer is the past and therefore it cannot observe wholly. A: If the person uses the first person pronoun, I, while he is taking the description for the described, this is the observer he refers to when he says I. K: I is the past. A: I see K: I is the whole structure of what has been, the remembrances, the memories, the hurts, the various demands, all that is put together in the word, the I, who is the observer, and therefore division: the observer and the observed. The observer who thinks he is a Christian and observes a non-christian or a Communist, this division, this attitude of mind which observes with conditioned responses, with memories and so on. So that is the known. A: I see. K: I mean I think that is logically so. A: Oh, no, it follows precisely from what you have said. K: So, we are asking, can the mind or the whole structure, can the mind be free from the known? Otherwise the repetitious action, repetitious attitudes, repetitious ideologies, will go on, modified, changed, but it will be the same direction. A: Do go ahead, I was going to say something but I think I'll let it wait until you have finished what you have said. K: So, what is this freedom from the known. I think that is very important to understand because, any creative action - I am using the word creative in its original sense, not in the sense creative writing, creative... A: I know K: ...bakery, creative essay, creative pictures. I am not talking in that sense. In the deeper sense of that word, creation means something totally new being born. It is not creative, it is merely repetitive, modifying, changed, the past. So unless there is a freedom from the known there is no creative action at all. Which is freedom implies not the negation of the known but the understanding of the known and that understanding brings about an intelligence which is the very essence of freedom. A: I'd like to make sure that I've understood your use of this word creative. It seems to me very important. People who use the word creative in the sense that you described, creative this that or the other... K: That's a horror. That is a dreadful way of using that word. A: ...because what the issue is of their activity is something merely novel. K: Novel, novel, that's right. A: Not radically new, but novel. K: It's like creative writing, teaching creative writing. It's so absurd. A: Exactly. Yes, now I do, I think, grasp precisely the distinction you have made. And I must say I fully agree with that. K: Unless you feel new you cannot create anything new. A: That's right. And the person who imagines that he is creative in this other sense that we pointed to is a person whose reference for his activity is this observer that we mentioned that is tied to the past. K: Yes, that's right. A: So even if something does appear that is really extraordinarily novel, merely novel, but still extraordinarily novel, they are kidding themselves. K: The novel is not the creative. A: Exactly. K: The novel is just the... A: And today especially, it seems to me in our culture, we have become hysterical about this because in order to be creative one must simply wrack his brains in order to produce something, which in itself is bizarre enough to get attention. K: That's right. Attention, success. A: Yes. It has to be novel to the degree that I feel knocked on the head by it. K: Eccentric, and all the rest. A: Exactly. But if that tension is increased, then with each succeeding generation the person is put to tremendous stress not to repeat the past, which he can't help repeating. K: Repeating quite. That's why I say... A: Exactly. K: Freedom is one thing and knowledge is another. We must relate the two to see whether the mind can be free from knowledge. We won't go into it now. This is real meditation for me. You follow, sir? A: Yes I do. K: Because when we talk about meditation - we will go into it -but to see whether the brain can record and be free not to record, the brain to record and operate when necessary in the recording, in the memory, in knowledge, and be free to observe without the observer. A: Oh yes, yes. I see, that distinction seems to me to be absolutely necessary, otherwise it wouldn't be intelligible. K: So knowledge is necessary to act in the sense, my going home from here to the place I live; I must have knowledge. I must have knowledge to speak English. I must have knowledge to write a letter, and so on, everything. The knowledge as function, mechanical function, is necessary. Now if I use that knowledge in my relationship with you, another human being I am bringing about a barrier, a division between you and me, who is the observer. Am I making myself clear? A: I am the observed in that case. K: Yes. A: Right in that context. K: That is, knowledge in a relationship, in human relationship, is destructive, A: Yes. K: That is, knowledge which is the tradition, the memory, the image, which the mind has built about you when we are related together, that knowledge is separative and therefore creates conflict in that relationship. As we said earlier, where there is division there must be conflict. Division between India and Pakistan, India and America, Russia and all that, this divisive activity politically, religiously, economically, socially, in every way must inevitably bring conflict and therefore violence. That's obvious. A: Exactly. K: Now, when in a relationship, in human relationship, knowledge comes between then in that relationship there must be conflict - between husband and wife, boy and girl, wherever there is the operation as the observer who is the past, who is knowledge, in that activity there is division, and therefore conflict in relationship. A: So now the question that comes up next is the one of freedom from, being subject to this repetitive round. K: Yes, that's right, A: Good, good, K: Now is that possible? It is an immense question because human beings live in relationship. A: Yes. K: There is no life without relationship. Life means to be related. A: Exactly. K: People who retire into a monastery and all that, they are still related, however they might like to think they are alone, they are actually related, related to the past. A: Oh yes, very much so. K: To their saviour, to their Christ, to their Buddha, you follow, all that, they are related to the past. A: And their rules. K: And their rules, everything, A: Yes. K: They live in the past and therefore they are the most destructive people because they are not creative in the deeper sense of that word. A: No, and they also, in so far as they are involved in this confusion that you have been talking about, are not even producing anything novel. Not that that means anything, but perhaps that would rather radically... K: The novel would be for a man who is talkative to enter a monastery where they don't talk. A: Yes. K: That's a novel to him and he says that's a miracle! A: Right. K: So our problem then is, what place has knowledge in human relationship? A: Yes, that's the problem. K: That's one problem. A: Yes. K: Because relationship with the human being is the highest importance, obviously, because out of that relationship we create the society in which we live. Out of that relationship all our existence comes. A: This would take us back again to the earlier statement: I am the world and the world is me. That is a statement about relationship. It's a statement about many other things too, but that is a statement about relationship. The statement, the description is not the described, is the statement of the rupture of this relationship... K: That's right. A: ...in terms of everyday activity. K: Sir, everyday activity is my life, is our life. A: Is everything. Yes precisely. K: Whether I go to the office, the factory, or drive a bus or whatever it is, it is life, living. A: But it is interesting, isn't it, that even when that rupture is undergone, at a very destructive level, what we call thought in the context of our description of it and image becomes itself, even distorted, K: Of course, of course, A: So that the distortion that we've been calling knowledge in terms of its application - not as you described as, I need to know how to get from here to there, no of course - can itself suffer an even worse condition than we are presently related to; and we have tomes upon tomes about that pathology in itself don't we? Please, please do go on. K: So knowledge and freedom: they must both exist together, not freedom and knowledge. It's the harmony between the two. The two operating all the time in relationship. A: The knowledge and freedom in harmony. K: In harmony. It's like they can never be divorced. If I want to live with you in great harmony, which is love, which we will discuss that later on, there must be this absolute sense of freedom from you, not dependency, and so on, and so on, and so on, this absolute sense of freedom and operating at the same time in the field of knowledge. A: Exactly. So somehow this knowledge, if I may use a theological word here without prejudicing what we are talking about, if in correct relationship with this freedom it is somehow continuously redeemed, it is somehow operating no longer destructively but in coordination with the freedom in which I may live, because we haven't got to that freedom yet, we are just positing freedom. K: We have somewhat analyzed, or discussed, or opened the question of knowledge. A: Yes. K: And we haven't gone into the question of freedom, what it means. A: Yes, but we have established something, I think this conversation so far has revealed, which is terribly important, at least I'd say for my students in terms of helping them not to misunderstand what you are saying. K: Quite. A: I have the feeling that many persons because they are not sufficiently attentive to what you say simply dismiss many statements you say out of hand as... K: ...impossible. A: ...impossible, or if they like the aesthetics of it it still doesn't apply to them. It's a lovely thing out there, wouldn't it be great if somehow we could do this. But you see you haven't said that. You haven't said what they think you have said. You've said something about knowledge with respect to pathology and you've said something about knowledge in which knowledge itself is no longer destructive. K: No. A: So we're not saying that knowledge as such is the bad guy and something else is the good guy. K: No. A: No, I think it is terribly important that that's seen, and I wouldn't mind it being repeated over and over again, because I do heartily feel that it's easy to misunderstand. K: That's very important because religion, at least the meaning of word is to gather together to be attentive. That is the true meaning of that word, religion, I have looked it up in a dictionary. A: Oh yes, I agree. K: Gathering together all energy to be attentive; to be attentive, otherwise it's not religion. Religion is all the things - we'll discuss that when we come to it. So freedom means the sense of complete austerity and a sense of total negation of the observer. A: Exactly. K: Out of that comes austerity, everything else. We'll go into that later on. A: But austerity in itself doesn't produce it. K: No. Upside down. A: So we turn that upside down. K: Austere means really, the word itself means ash, dry, brittle. But the austerity that we are talking about means is something entirely different. A: Yes. K: It is the freedom that brings about this austerity inwardly. A: There is a beautiful Biblical phrase that points to this, just three words, 'beauty for ashes' when the transformation takes place. And in English we have the phrase ashes in the mouth when the whole thing has come to ashes. But there is a change from ashes to beauty. K: So freedom in action in the field of knowledge and in the field of human relationship, because that is the highest importance, human relationship. A: Oh yes, yes. Oh yes, particularly If I am the world and the world is me. K: Obviously. A: Yes. K: So what place has knowledge in human relationship? Knowledge in the sense of past experience, tradition, image. A: Yes. K: What has the observer, who is the observer, all that is the observer, what place has the observer in human relationship? A: What place has knowledge on the one hand, what place has the observer. K: Observer is the knowledge A: Is the knowledge. But there is the possibility of seeing knowledge, not simply negatively, but in coordination, in true creative relationship. K: I have said that. A: Right. Exactly. K: I am related to you let's say, to make it very simple. I'm related to you, You are my brother, husband or wife, what ever it is, and what place has knowledge as the observer, which is the past, and knowledge is the past, what place has that in our relationship? A: If our relationship is creative... K: It is not. Not if, we will state it actually as it is. I am related to you, I am married to you, I am your wife or husband whatever it is. Now what is the actuality in that relationship? The actuality, not theoretical actuality, but the actuality is that I am separate from you. A: The actuality must be that we are not divided. K: But we are. I may call you my husband, my wife, but I am concerned with my success, I am concerned with my money, I am concerned with my ambitions, my envy, I am full of me. A: Yes I see that, but I want to make sure now that we haven't reached a confusion here. K: Yes we have. A: When I say that the actuality is that we are not separate, I do not mean to say that at the phenomenal level that a dysfunction is not occurring. I am fully aware of that. But if we are going to say that the world is me and I am the world... K: We say it theoretically we don't feel it. A: Precisely. But if that is the case, that the world is me and I am the world and this is actual, this is actual... K: This is actual only when I have no division in myself. A: Exactly. Exactly. K: But I have a division. A: If I have a division then there is no relationship between one and the other. K: Therefore I accept, one accepts the idea that the world is me and me is the world. That is just an idea. Look sir. A: Yes, I understand. K: But if... A: But if and when it happens... K: Wait. Just see what takes place in my mind. I make a statement of that kind, the world is you and you are the world, The mind then translates it into an idea, into a concept and tries to live according to that concept. A: Exactly. K: It has abstracted from reality. A: This is knowledge in the destructive sense. K: I won't call it destructive or positive. This is what is going on. A: Well let's say the issue from it is hell. K: Yes. So in my relationship with you what place has knowledge, the past, the image which is the observer, all that is the observer, what place has the observer in our relationship? Actually the observer is the factor of division. A: Right. K: And therefore the conflict between you and me, this is what is going on in the world everyday. A: Then one would have to say, it seems to me, following the conversation point by point, that the place of this observer, understood as you have pointed out, is the point of dysrelationship. K: Is the point where there is really actually no relationship at all. I may sleep with my wife, and so on and so on but actually there is no relationship because I have my own pursuits, my own ambitions, all the idiosyncrasies, and so on and she has hers, so we are always separate and therefore always in battle with each other. Which means the observer as the past is the factor of division. A: Yes, I was just wanting to be sure that the phrase is the place, of what is the place of the observer was understood in the context of what we are saying. We have made the statement that there is such a thing. K: Yes. A: Well its place as such would seem to me not to be what we usually mean by its occupying a place. K: Yes. A: We are talking rather about an activity here that is profoundly disordered. K: Sir, as long as there is the observer, there must be conflict in relationship. A: Yes, I follow that. K: Wait, wait, see what happens. I make a statement of that kind, someone will translate that into an idea, into a concept and say, how am I to live that concept? The fact is he doesn't observe himself as the observer. A: That's right. That's right. He is the observer looking out there making a distinction between himself and the... K: ...and the statement. A: Right. Making a division. K: Has the observer any place at all in the relationship? I say, the moment he comes into existence in relationship there is no relationship. A: The relationship is not. K: Is not. A: It is not something that is in dysrelationship. K: Yes that's right. A: We are talking about something, in fact, that doesn't even exist. K: Exist. Therefore we have to go into the question why human beings in their relationship with other human beings are so violent, because that is spreading throughout the world. I was told the other day in India, a mother came to see me, very Brahmanical family, very cultured and all the rest of it, her son who is six, when she asked him to do something he took up a stick and began to hit her. A thing unknown. You follow, sir? A: Yes. K: The idea that you should hit your mother is traditionally something incredible. And this boy did it. And I said, see what is the fact, we went into it, she understood. So to understand violence one has to understand division. A: The division was already there. K: Yes. A: Otherwise he would not have picked up the stick. K: Division between nations, you follow sir? A: Yes. K: This race for armaments is one of the factors of violence. Which is, I am calling myself American and he is calling himself Russian or Hindu or whatever it is, this division is the factor of real violence and hatred. If a mind, not 'if', when mind sees that it cuts away all division in himself. He is no longer a Hindu, American, Russian. He is a human being with his problems which he is then trying to solve, not in terms of India, or America or Russia. So we come to the point, can the mind be free in relationship, which means orderly, not chaotic, orderly? A: It has to be otherwise you couldn't use the word relationship. K: No. No. So can the mind be free of that? Free of the observer? A: If not, there is no hope. K: That's the whole point. A: If not, we've had it. K: Yes. And all the escapes and going off into other religions, doing all kinds of tricks, has no meaning. Now, this demands a great deal of perception, insight into the fact of your life: how one lives one's life. After all philosophy means the love of truth, love of wisdom, not the love of some abstraction. A: Oh no, no, no. Wisdom is supremely practical. K: Practical. Therefore here it is. That is, can a human being live in relationship in freedom and yet operate in the field of knowledge? A: And yet operate in the field of knowledge, yes. K: And be absolutely orderly. Otherwise it is not freedom. Because order means virtue. A: Yes, yes. K: Which doesn't exist in the world at the present time. There is no sense of virtue in anything. Then we repeat. Virtue is a creative thing, is a living thing, is a moving thing. A: I am thinking as you are saying this about virtue, which is really power, which is really the ability to act; and if I am following you correctly what you are really saying, and please correct me if I am way off here, what you are really saying is that the ability to act in the strict sense, which must be creative, otherwise it's not an action but is simply a reaction. K: A repetition. A: A repetition. That the ability to act, or virtue, as you put it, bears with it necessarily the implication of order. it must. It seems to me no way out of that. K: Yes. A: I just wanted to recover that a step at a time. K: So can I come back. In human relationship as it exists now, we are looking at that, what actually is, in that human relationship there is conflict, sexual violence and so on and so on, every kind of violence. Now, can man live at total peace - otherwise he is not creative - in human relationship, because that is the basis of all life. A: I'm very taken with the way you have pursued this. I notice that when we asked this question, 'is it possible that', the reference for it is always a totality. K: Yes. A: And the reference over here is a fragment, or a fragmentation, or a division. Never once have you said that the passage from the one to the other is a movement that even exists. K: No. It can't exist. A: You see. K: Absolutely. A: I think Mr Krishnamurti, that nothing is so difficult to grasp as this statement that you have made. There is nothing that we are taught, from childhood up to render such a possibility, a matter for taking seriously, because when - well of course, one doesn't like to make sweeping statements about how everyone has been educated but I'm thinking of myself, from a child upward, all the way through graduate school, accumulating a lot of this knowledge that you have been talking about. I don't remember anybody saying to me, or even pointing me to a literature that so categorically makes this distinction between one and the other as in terms of each other, not accessible to each other through passage. K: No. No, no, quite, quite. A: Now, I'm correct in understanding you this way, aren't I? K: Quite right. A: Maybe I could just say this as an aside. K: The fragment can not become the whole. A: No. The fragment cannot become the whole, in and of itself. K: But the fragment is always trying to become the whole. A: Exactly. Exactly. Now of course, in the years of very serious and devoted contemplation and exploration of this which quite clearly you have undertaken with great passion, I suppose it must have occurred to you that the first sight of this, while one is in the condition of the observer, must be very frightening in the condition of the observer, the thought that there is no passage. K: No. But you see I never looked at it that way. A: Please tell me how you looked at it. K: From childhood I never thought I was a Hindu. A: I see. K: I never thought, when I was educated in England and all the rest of it, that I was European. I never was caught in that trap. I don't know how it happened, I was never caught in that trap. A: Well, when you were quite little then and your playmates said to you, well now look, you are a Hindu, what did you say? K: I probably put on Hinduism and all the trappings of Brahmin, tradition, but it never penetrated deeply. A: As we say in the vernacular, it never got to you. K: It never got to me, that's right. A: I see. That's very remarkable. That's extraordinary. The vast number of people in the world seem to have been got to in respect this. K: That's why I think, you see, propaganda has become the means of change. A: Yes. Yes. K: Propaganda is not truth. Repetition is not truth. A: It's a form of violence too. K: That's just it. So a mind that merely observes doesn't react to what it observes according to its conditioning. Which means there is no observer at anytime, therefore no division. It happened to me, I don't know how it happened, but it has happened. And in observing all this I've seen in every human relationship, every kind of human relationship, there is this kind of relationship there is this division and therefore violence. And to me the very essence of non-relationship is the factor of me and you. A: I was just trying to go back in my own personal history and think of when I was a child. I did, while accepting that I was different, I did believe that, I did come to accept that, there was something else however that always held me very, very hard to centre in terms of making an ultimate issue of that, and that was an experience I had when I was rowing a boat. I spent some time in Scandinavia as a child and I used to take a boat out on the fjord everyday, and when I would row I was profoundly moved by the action of the water when I moved the oar, because I lifted the oar out of the water, and there was a separation in substance between the water and the oar, but the water which was necessary for support and for purchase so that I could propel myself, never lost touch with itself, it always turned into itself without every having left itself in the beginning. And once in awhile I would laugh at myself and say, if anyone catches you looking at this water any longer than you are doing they will think that you are clear out of your mind. This is the observer talking to himself, of course. But that made such a profound impression on me that I think, it was what you might call a little salvation for me, and I never lost that. So maybe there is some relationship between that apprehension which I think changed my being, and what it is you are talking about as one who never ever suffered this sense of separation at all. Please go ahead. K: This brings us to the point sir, doesn't it, can the human mind which has evolved in separation, fragmentation... A: This is where evolution is. Yes. K: ...can such a mind transform, undergo a regeneration which is not produced by influence, by propaganda, by threat and punishment, because if it changes because it is going to get a reward then... A: It hasn't changed. K: ...it hasn't changed. A: No. K: So that is one of the fundamental things which one has to ask and answer it in action, not in words. A: In action. Oh yes, K: Which is, my mind, the human mind has evolved in contradiction, in duality. The 'me' and the 'not me' has evolved in this traditional cleavage, division, fragmentation. Now can that mind observe this fact, observe without the observer, and only then there is a regeneration. As long as there is an observer observing this then there is a conflict. I don't know if I make myself clear. A: Yes, you do. You make yourself very clear on two levels. On the level of discourse alone, which I know is not your major concern, on a level of discourse alone it necessarily follows that it must be the case that this possibility exists, otherwise we would be talking nonsense. But then the agony of the situation at large that we have been describing is simply that whether this can be done or not never occurs to a person and in the absence of it even occurring the repetition is going to continue indefinitely and things are going to get worse and worse. K: Sir, the difficulty is most people won't even listen. A: I know that. K: Won't listen. If they do listen they listen with their conclusions. If I am a Communist I will listen to you up to a point. After that I won't listen to you. And if I am slightly demented I will listen to you and translate what I hear according to my dementia. A: Exactly K: So one has to be extraordinarily serious to listen. Serious in the sense put aside my peculiar prejudices and idiosyncrasies and listen to what you are saying, because the listening is the miracle: not what shall I do with what you have said. A: Not what shall I listen to... K: But the act of listening. A: But the act of listening. K: Yes. A: We are back to 'ing', where there's listening itself. K: That requires that you are good enough to listen to me because you want to find out. But the vast majority say what are you talking about, I want to go on enjoying myself so go and talk to somebody else. So to create an atmosphere, to create an ambience, a feeling that life is dreadfully serious, my friend, do listen. It's your life, don't waste it, do listen. To bring about a human being that will listen is the greatest importance, because we don't want to listen. It's too disturbing. A: I understand. I have tried that sometimes in class to make this very point. And sometimes I suggest that we should watch the animal, especially the wild animal, because if it's not listening it's likely dead. K: Dead, yes sir, A: There is this extraordinary attention that it makes and every instant of its life is a crisis. K: Absolutely. A: And you know what happens, the eyes out there show in the main that they think I am talking about animal psychology. I'm not talking about psychology at all, I'm talking about what is the case which is either or, and there isn't any way to get from either to or. That's what I mean. So I think I understand you. K: In America what is happening how, as I observe it, I may be mistaken, they are not serious. They are playing with new things, something entertaining, go from one thing to the other. And they think this is searching. Searching! - searching, asking, but they get trapped in each one of them. A: Yes. K: And at the end of it they have nothing but ashes. So it is becoming more and more difficult for human beings to be serious, to listen, to see what they are, not what they should be. A: No. What is the case. K: What is. A: Exactly. K: That means you please do listen for 5 minutes. A: Yes. K: In this conversation you are listening because you are interested, you want to find out. But the vast majority of people say, for god's sake, leave me alone, I have my little house, my wife, my car, my yacht, or whatever it is, for god's sake don't change anything as long as I live. A: You know, going back to what I do know something about, namely the Academy, because I am situated there in terms of day to day activity. I've often remarked to myself in attending conferences where papers are read that nobody is listening. It's one long monologue. And after a while you get the feeling that it really is a shocking waste of time. And even to sit down and have coffee the discussion say between classes usually runs on the basis of babble, we are just talking about things in which we are not genuinely interested in, in order to fill up space. This, however, is far more serious a matter than simply a description of what's going on. K: It's a matter, I feel, of life and death. A: Exactly. K: If the house is burning I've got to do something. It isn't, I am going to discuss who burned the house. A: No. No. K: What colour his hair was, whether it was black or white or purple, I want to put that fire out. A: Or if such and such had not happened the house would not be burning. I know, I know. K: And I feel it is so urgent because I see it in India, I see in Europe and America, everywhere I go this sense of slackness, sense of, you know, sense of despair, sense of hopeless activity that is going on. So to come back to what we are saying, relationship is the highest importance. When in that relationship there is conflict, we produce a society which will further that conflict, through education, through national sovereignties, through all the rest of it that is going on in the world. So a serious man, serious in the sense who is really concerned, committed, must give his total attention to this question of relationship, freedom and knowledge. A: If I've heard you correctly, and I don't mean by that words that have passed between us, but if I have truly heard you, I've heard something very terrifying, that this disorder that we have in part described, has a built in necessity in it. As long as it persists it can never change. It can never change. K: Obviously. A: Any modification of it is... K: Further disorder. A: ...is more of the same. K: More of the same. A: More of the same. I have the feeling and I hope I have understood you correctly, that there is a relationship between the starkness of this necessity and the fact that there cannot be a gradual progress, or, as a philosopher would put it, something like essential progress, but nevertheless there is some demonic progress that takes place within this disorder that is not so much a progress as it is a proliferation of the same. Necessarily so. Is that what you have been saying? K: Yes, yes. A: Necessarily so. K: You know that word progress, I was told the other day meant, entering into enemies country fully armed. A: Really! Progress is entering into an enemy's country fully armed. Dear me. K: Sir. This is what is happening. A: I know. Next time we converse, next time, I would like very much if you would be good enough to pursue precisely what we have just come to: namely this necessity and the necessity that produced that statement. K: Yes, quite. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 19TH FEBRUARY 1974 3RD CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'RESPONSIBILITY' A: Mr Krishnamurti, in this series of conversations we have been exploring the general question of the transformation of man. A transformation, which as you say, is not dependent on knowledge or time. And, as I recall, we arrived at a point that was very crucial, namely the one concerned with relationship and communication. I remember one point in our conversation together that was extremely instructive for me, a point at which, when you asked me a question I began to answer it and you interrupted me and reminded the viewers and me, that the important thing here is, is not to finish out a theoretical construction but rather to attain to the right beginning point so that we do not go beyond where we haven't yet begun. This, as I repeat, was extremely instructive for me and I was thinking, if it is agreeable with you, it would be helpful today if we could begin at the point of concern for communication and relationship to go into that question and begin to unravel it. K: Unravel it, quite. I wonder sir, what that word communication means. To communicate implies not only verbally but also listening in which there is a sharing, a thinking together, not accepting something that you or I say, but sharing together, thinking together, creating together, all that is involved in that word 'communicate'. And in that word is implied also the art of listening. The art of listening demands a quality of attention in which there is real listening, real sense of having an insight as we go along, each second, not at the end, but at the beginning. A: So that we are... K: ...together... A: So that we are both - yes, yes! K: Walking together all the time. A: There is a concurrent activity. Not one making a statement, the other thinking about it and then saying, "Well, I agree, I don't agree, I accept, I don't accept. These are the reasons I don't accept. These are the reasons I do", but we are walking together. K: Journeying together, walking together on the same path. A: Side by side. Yes. K: On the same road, with the same attention, with the same intensity, at the same tongue, otherwise there is no communication. A: Exactly. Exactly. K: Communication implies there must be at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity, we are walking together, we are thinking together, we are observing together, sharing together. A: Would you say that this requires an activity that underlies the speaking together, or does one come to the activity after one has started to speak together ? K: No sir. We are not saying that. What is the art of listening, aren't we? The art of listening implies, doesn't it, that there is not only the verbal understanding between you and me, because we are both speaking English, and we know the meaning of each word, more or less, and at the same time we are sharing the problem together, sharing the issue together. A: Because, as you say, it's a matter of life and death. K: Also if you and I are both serious, we are sharing the thing. So, in communication there is not only a verbal communication, but there is a non-verbal communication, really which comes into being, or which happens when one has the art of really listening to somebody, in which there is no acceptance, no denial, or comparison, or judgement, just the act of listening. A: I wonder whether I am on the right track here, if I suggest that there is a relation that is very deep here between communication and what we call in English, 'communion'. K: Communion, yes. A: So that if we are in communion, our chance of communicating... K: ...becomes simpler. A: Right! K: Now, to be in communion with each other, we must be, both of us must be, serious about the same problem at the same time with the same passion. Otherwise there is no communication. A: Exactly! K: If you are not interested in what is being said, well, you will think of something else and communication stops. So there is a verbal communication and a non-verbal communication. They are both operating at the same time. A: One does not precede the other. Or follow upon the other. Yes, they move together. K: Which means that each of us, being serious, gives our attention completely to the issue. A: That act of seriousness that takes place then requires the utmost devoted attention. K: Sir, but a man who is really serious lives, not the man who is flippant, or merely wanting to be entertained. He does not live. A: The general notion of being serious about something generally suggests either undergoing some pain, or I'm serious about something in order to get something else. These two things, as a rule, are what persons imagine about seriousness. As a matter of fact, we often hear this expression, "Don't look so serious", don't we. K: Yes. A: It's as though we fear something about the serious. K: Sir, look! As we said yesterday, the world is in a mess and it's my responsibility living in this world as a human being who has created this mess, it's my responsibility to be serious in the resolution of this problem. I am serious. It doesn't mean I am long faced, I am miserable, unhappy, or I want something out of it. It has got to be solved. It's like if one has cancer, one is serious about it. You don't play around with it. A: Action in relation to this seriousness then is instantaneous. K: Obviously! A: This raises not an additional question, I don't mean to go beyond where we haven't begun in that sense, but time assumes for the serious person something very different for his undergoing than it would seem to be for the unserious person. One would not have then the feeling of something being dragged out. Or as may say in English, time that has to be put in. K: Put in, quite. A: As a matter of fact, in this concurrent communication in which communion is abidingly present time as such would not in any way oppress. K: No, sir, no, sir. A: Am I... K: Quite right. Like we see sir, I am trying to see what it means to be serious. The intent, the urge, the feeling of total responsibility, the feeling of action, the doing, not, I will do. All that is implied in that word seriousness. At least I'll put all those things into that word. A: Could we look for a moment at one of them that you put into them? Responsibility, able to be responsive. K: That's right. To respond adequately. A: Yes. To respond adequately. K: To any challenge. The challenge now is that the world is in mess, confusion, sorrow and everything, violence and all that. I must, as a human being who has created this thing, I must respond adequately. The adequacy depends on my seriousness, in that sense on my observation of the chaos and responding, not according to my prejudice, my inclination, or tendencies, or pleasures, or fears, but responding to the problem, not according to my translation of the problem. Right? A: Yes. I am just thinking as you are speaking about how difficult it is to communicate this to the person who is thinking that the way adequately to respond to this chaos is to have a plan for it which one superimposes on it. And that's exactly what we assume, and if the plan doesn't work out, we blame ourselves... K: Or change the plan. A: Or we change the plan, yes. K: But we don't respond to the challenge. A: No. K: We respond according to our conclusion about the problem. A: Exactly. K: Therefore, it means really sir, if we can explore it a little more, the observer is the observed. A: Therefore the change, if it comes, is total, not partial. One is no longer outside what he is operating upon. K: That's right. A: And what he is operating upon is not outside himself. K: Of course. As we said yesterday, it's very interesting if we go into it rather deeply, the world is me and I am the world. That is not intellectual or emotional, but a fact. Now, when I approach the problem, the chaos, the misery, the suffering, the violence, all that, I approach it with my conclusions, with my fears, with my despairs. I don't look at the problem. A: Would you think it possible to put it this way, that one doesn't make room for the problem. K: Yes. Yes, put it any way. A: Would that be alright? K: Yes. Sir, let's look at this. As a human being one has created this, this misery which is called the society in which we live, an immoral society. A: Oh yes! K: Completely immoral! As a human being one has created that. But that human being looking at it separates himself and says, "I must do something about it." The 'it' is me. A: Some people respond to that this way. They say, "Well look, if I, I am truly serious, I am truly responsible, I make this act and there comes between me and the world this confluent relationship, which is total, all the things that are going on out there that are atrocious, let's say, 2,500 miles away from where I am, don't stop. Therefore, how can I say that the whole world is me and I am the whole world?" This objection comes up again and again. I am interested to know what your reply to that would be. K: Sir, Look. We are human beings irrespective of our labels, English, French German, all the rest of it. A human being living in America or in India has the problems of relationship, of suffering, of jealousy, envy, greed, ambition, imitation, conformity. And all that are our problems, common to both of us. A: Yes. K: And when I say, the world is me and me is the world and the world I am, I see that as a reality, not as a concept. Now, my responsibility to the challenge to be adequate must not be in terms of what I think, but what the problem is. A: Yes. I follow you I'm sure here. I was thinking while you were saying that, that it might have been possible to answer the question that I posed, and I am posing the question simply because I know some persons who might very well view this, who would raise that and who would want to participate with us in this conversation. I wondered whether you might have said that as soon as one puts it that way, one has already divorced himself from the issue. K: That's right. A: That in the practical order that, that question is an interposition that simply does not have a place in the activity you are talking about. K: Yes, that's right. A: Now this is very interesting, because it means that the person must suspend his disbelief. K: Or his belief. A: Or his belief... K: ...and observe the thing. A: And observes the thing. K: Which is not possible if the observer is different from the observed. A: Now, would you explore the practical aspect of this with me for a moment? People will say, who up to this point are listening, it would seem people at this point will say, "Well, yes, but I can't stop it, I think I have an intuition of what you mean," they will say, "But the minute that I open myself, or begin to open myself, all these things seem to rush in on me. What I had hoped doesn't seem to take place." If I understand you correctly, they are really not doing what they claim that they are trying to do. K: That's right. Sir, can we put it, this question differently? What is a human being to do confronted with this problem of suffering, chaos, all that is going around us? What is he to do? He approaches it generally with a conclusion - what he should do about it. A: And this conclusion is interposed between him... K: Yes, the conclusion is the factor of separation. A: Right. K: Now, can he observe the fact of this confusion without any conclusions, without any planning, without any predetermined way of getting out of this chaos? Because his predetermined conclusions, ideas and so on are all derived from the past, and the past is trying to resolve the problem and therefore he is translating it and acting according to his previous conclusions, whereas the fact demands that you look at it; the fact demand that you observe it, you listen to it. The fact itself will have the answer, you don't have to bring the answer to it. I wonder if I am making myself clear? A: Yes, I'm listening very, very hard. I, really, am. I'm afraid if I am not going beyond where I shouldn't, having yet begun, the next question that would naturally arise here - well, perhaps you might feel when I raise the question that it is the wrong question - but can one communicate in the sense that we have been unravelling this? One says, I don't know. It doesn't seem to me that I have done this. I haven't done this yet. I can recognize all the things that have been described, that are terrible. I don't recognize all the things that appear to be promised without suggesting that I am imagining them or projecting them out there. Clearly, if there is to be a change, it has to be a change that is altogether radical. Now, I must start. What do I do? K: There are two things involved in that. First, I must learn from the problem, which means I must have a mind that has a quality of humility. He does not come to it, and say, "I know all about it." What he knows is merely explanations, rational or irrational. He comes to the problem with rational or irrational solutions. Therefore he is not learning from the problem. The problem will reveal an infinite lot of things, if I'm capable of looking at it and learning about it. And for that I must have a sense of humility, and say, "I don't know. There is tremendous problem. Let me look at it, let me learn about it." Not I come to it with my conclusions, therefore I have stopped learning about the problem. A: Are you suggesting that this act is a waiting on the problem to reveal itself? K: To reveal. That's right! Therefore, I must be capable of looking at it. I cannot look at it if I've come to it with ideas, with ideations, with mentations, or every kind of conclusion. I must come to it, say, "Look, what is it?" I must learn from it, not learn according to some professor or some psychologist, some philosopher. A: That one has the capacity for this, some persons would... K: I think everybody has. Sir, we are so vain. A: But this doesn't mean anything for the doing, of the what must be done, that there is a capacity. K: Look, the learning is the doing. A: Exactly. Yes, yes. I wanted to make that clear because we comfort ourselves with the curious notion if I have been following you, that we possess a possibility and because we possess the possibility we think that someday it will actualize itself perhaps. K: Quite right. A: But if I'm correct, both ways no possibility can actualize itself, and in the practical order that never occurs, but somehow it is believed, isn't it? K: I'm afraid it is. A: It is believed. K: Sir, it is really quite simple. There is this misery, confusion, immense sorrow in the world, violence, all that. Human beings have created it. Human beings have built a structure of society which sustains this chaos. That's a fact. Now, I come to it, a human being comes to it, trying to resolve it according to his plan, according to his prejudices, his idiosyncracies, or knowledge, which means he has already understood the problem, whereas the problem is always new. So I must come to it afresh. A: One of the things that has concerned me for many, many years as a reader, as a student, as one whose daily work involves the study of scriptures, is the recurrent statement that one comes upon, sometimes in a very dramatic form. For instance, take the prophetic ministry of Jesus where he speaks, and he says that they are hearing but they are not listening, they are observing but they are not seeing. K: And doing. A: But then it seems he does not say, "In order to attain to that, do this." No. The closest he comes to it is, through the analogy with the child, to have faith as a little child. I don't want to talk about words here because that would be disastrous, so what is meant by the word faith here is not something that would be proper to go into, but the analogy with the child suggests that the child is doing something that is lost somewhere along the way in some respect. I'm sure he didn't mean that there is a perfect continuity between the adult and the child. But why is it that over the centuries that men have said this over and over again, namely you are not listening, you are not seeing, and then they don't point to an operation, they point to an analogy. Some of them don't even point to an analogy. They just hold up a flower. K: Sir, look! We live on words. Most people live on words. They don't go beyond the word. And what we talking about is not only the word, the meaning of the word, the communication that exists in using words, but the non-verbal communication, which is having an insight. That is what we are talking about all the time so far. A: Yes. K: That is, I can, the mind can, only have an insight if it is capable of listening. And you do listen when the crisis is right at your doorstep. A: Now, I think I'm at a point here that is solid. Is it that we don't allow ourselves access to the crisis that is there continuously, it isn't a crisis that is episodic? K: No. The crisis is always there. A: It is always. Right. Well, we are doing something to shut ourselves of from it, aren't we? K: Or, we don't know how to meet it. Either we avoid it, or we don't know how to meet it, or we are indifferent. We have become so callous. All these things, all three are involved in not facing the crisis because I am frightened. One is frightened. One says, "My lord! I don't know how to deal with it." So one goes off to an analyst, or to a priest, or pick up a book to see how it can be translated. He becomes irresponsible. A: Sometimes people will register the disappointment that things haven't worked out. So why try something new? K: Yes. Of course. A: And this would be a buffer. K: Yes. That's what I mean. Avoidance. There are so many ways to avoid - clever, cunning, superficial and very subtle. All that is involved in avoiding an issue. So what we are trying to say, sir, isn't it, the observer is the past, as we said yesterday. The observer is trying to translate and act according to the past when the crisis arises. The crisis is always new. Otherwise it's not a crisis. A challenge must be new, is new, and always new. But he translates it according to the past. Now, can he look at that challenge, that crisis, without the response of the past? A: May I read a sentence out of your book? I think that may be this has a very direct relationship to what we are talking about. It's a sentence that arrested me when I read it. "Through negation that thing which alone is the positive comes into being." May I read it again? Through negation, something is done apparently. K: Absolutely. A: Right. So we are not leaving it at the point where we are saying, simply words are of no consequence. Therefore, I will do something non-verbal, or I will say something because I never communicate with the non-verbal. That has nothing to do with it. Something must be done. There is an act. K: Absolutely. Life is action. A: Exactly. K: It isn't just... A: Now here I suppose I should say for our listeners and viewers that this is from the "Awakening of Intelligence", the most recent publication of yours, and it's on page 196 in the chapter on Freedom. 'Through negation' - I take it that's a word for this act. K: Entirely. A: "That thing which alone is the positive" - the word alone came over to me with the force of something unique. K: Yes sir. A: Something that is not continuous with anything else. That thing which alone is the positive comes into being. There is no temporal hiatus here, so we are back to that thing we began with in our earlier conversations about not being dependent on knowledge and time. Could we look at this negation together for a moment? I have the feeling that, if I have understood this correctly, that unless whatever this is that's called negation is, is not an abiding activity, then communion and communication and the relationship that we are talking about just simply can never be reached. Is that correct? K: Quite. May I put it this way? I must negate, I mean negate not intellectually or verbally, actually negate the society in which I live. The implication of immorality which exists in society, on which society is built, I must negate totally that immorality. That means that I live morally. In negating that the positive is the moral. I don't know if I am.? A: Oh, yes. I am being quiet because I want to follow step by step. I don't want to go beyond where we have begun. K: I negate totally the idea of success. A: Yes, I negate totally. K: Totally. Not only in the mundane world, not only in the sense of achievement in a world of money, position, authority, I negate that completely, and I also negate success in the so-called spiritual world. A: Oh, yes. Quite, the temptation. K: Both are the same. Only I call that spiritual and I call that physical, moral, mundane. So in negating success, achievement, there comes an energy. Through negation there is a tremendous energy to act totally different which is not in the field of success, in the field of imitation, conformity and all that. So through negation, I mean actual negation, actual negation not just ideal negation, through actual negation of that which is immoral, morality comes into being. A: Which is altogether different from trying to be moral. K: Yes, yes. Of course, trying to be moral is immoral. A: Yes. May I try to go into this another step? At least it would be a step for me. There is something that I intuit here as a double aspect to this negation. I'd like very much to see whether this is concurrent with your own feeling about this. I was going to say a statement and I stopped myself. My desire for success in itself is a withholding myself from the problem that we talked about, and that itself is a form of negation. I have negated access to myself. I've negated, in other words, I have done violence to what it is that wishes to reveal itself. So I am going to negate then my negation as the observer. This I wanted to make sure. K: You are quite right. When we use the word negation, as it is generally understood, it is an act of violence. A: Yes. That's what I was hoping. K: It's an act of violence. I negate. A: That's what I thought. Yes. Yes. K: I brush it aside. And we are using the word negate not in the violence sense, but the understanding of what success implies. The understanding of what success implies. The 'me', who is separate from you, wanting or desiring success which will put me in a position of authority, power, prestige. So I am, in negating success, I am negating my desire to be powerful which I negate only when I have understood the whole process which is involved in achieving success. In achieving success is employed ruthlessness, lack of love, lack of immense consideration for others, lack of a sense of conformity, imitation, acceptance of the social structure, all that is involved and the understanding of all that when I negate success. It is not an act of violence. On the contrary, it is an act of tremendous attention. A: I've negated something in my person. K: I've negated myself. A: Right. I've negated myself. K: The 'me' which is separate from you. A: Exactly. K: And therefore I am negating violence which comes about when there is separation. A: Would you use the term self-denial here, not in the sense of how it has been received down the line, but that if there is anything to what has been stated in the past, could a person who saw that word self-denial read that word in this context that you are using? K: I'm afraid he wouldn't. Self-denial means sacrifice, pain, lack of understanding. A: But if he heard what you are saying. K: Ah, then why use another term when you have understood this thing? A: Well, may be he'd want to communicate with someone. K: But change the word so that we both understand the meaning of self-denial. I mean all religions have based their action on self-denial, sacrifice, deny your desire, desire your looking at a woman, or deny riches, take vow to poverty. You know all of them: vow of poverty, vow of celibacy and so on. All these are a kind of punishment, a distorting of a clear perception. If I see something clearly, the action is immediate. So, sir, to negate implies diligence. The word called diligence means giving complete attention to the fact of success - we are taking that word. Giving my whole attention to success, in that attention, the whole map of success is revealed. A: With all its horrors. K: With all the things involved in it and it is only then the seeing is the doing. Then it is finished. And the mind can never revert to success and therefore become bitter and all the things that follow. A: What you are saying, I take it, is that once this happens, there is no reversion. K: It is finished. Of course not. Say for instance sir... A: It's not something that one has to keep up. K: Of course not. A: Well, fine. I'm delighted we've established that. K: Now take for instance what happened. In 1928 I happened to be the head of a tremendous organization, a religious organization, and I saw around me various religious organizations, sects, Catholic, Protestant, and I saw all trying to find truth. So I said, "No organization can lead man to truth." So I dissolved it. Property, an enormous business. I can never go back to it. When you see something as poison you won't take it again. It isn't that you say, "By Jove, I've made a mistake. I should go back and..." It is sir, like seeing danger. When you see danger you never go near it again. A: I hope I won't annoy you by... K: No, no. A: ...by talking about words here again. But you know so many of the things that you say cast a light on common terms which for me at least illuminate them. They sound altogether different from the way they used to be heard. For instance, we say in English, don't we, practice makes perfect. Now obviously this can't be the case if we mean by practice we are repeating something. But if you mean by practice the Greek praxis, which is concerned directly with act, not repetition, with act, then to say, makes perfect, doesn't refer to time at all. It's that upon the instance the act is performed, perfection is. Now I'm sorry I used the word instant again and I understand why that's awkward, but I think in our communication the concern for the word here is one that surely is productive, because one can open himself to words and if one sees the word that way, then it appears there is a whole host of phenomena which suddenly acquire very magical significance. Not magical in the sense of enchantment, but they open a door, which, when walked into immediately situate him in the crisis in such a way that he attains to this that you call the one alone, the unique which comes into being. K: Yes. A: Which comes into being. K: Sir, can we now go back, or go forward to the question of freedom and responsibility in relationship? That's where we left off yesterday. A: Right. That was quoted from the chapter on freedom. Yes. K: First of all, can we go into this question of what it is to be responsible? A: I should like that. K: Because I think that is what we are missing in this world, in what is happening now. We don't feel responsible. We don't feel we are responsible because the people in position, in authority politically, religiously are responsible. We are not. That is the general feeling that is all over the world. A: Because those over there have been delegated to do a job by me. K: Yes. And scientists, politicians, the educational people, the religious people, they are responsible, but I know nothing about it, I just follow. That's the general attitude right through the world. A: Oh yes, oh yes. K: So, you follow the whole thing. A: One feels he gets off scot-free that way because its the other one's fault. K: Yes. So, I make myself irresponsible. By delegating a responsibility to you I become irresponsible. Whereas now we are saying, nobody is responsible except you, because you are the world and the world is you. You have created this mess. You alone can bring about clarity, and therefore you are totally, utterly, completely responsible. And nobody else. Now, that means you have to be a light to yourself, not the light of a professor, or a analyst, or a psychologist, or the light of Jesus, or the light of the Buddha. You have to be light to yourself in a world that is utterly becoming dark. That means you have to be responsible. Now, what does that word mean? It means really, to respond totally, adequately to every challenge. You cannot possibly respond adequately if you are rooted in the past, because the challenge is new, otherwise it is not a challenge. A crisis is new, otherwise it is not a crisis. If I respond to a crisis in terms of a preconceived plan, which the Communists are doing, or the Catholics, or the Protestants and so on and so on, then they are not responding totally and adequately to the challenge. A: This takes me back to something I think that is very germane in the dramatic situation of confrontation between the soldier and the Lord Krishna in the Gita. Arjuna, the general of the army says to Krishna, "Tell me definitely what to do and I will do it." Now Krishna does not turn around and say to him in the next verse, "I am not going to tell you what to do", But, of course, at that point he simply doesn't tell him what to do, and one of the great Sanskrit scholars has pointed out that that's an irresponsible action on the part of the teacher. But am I understanding you correctly, he couldn't have done otherwise? K: When that man put the question, he is putting the question out of irresponsibility. A: Of course, a refusal to be responsible. Exactly! A refusal to be responsible. K: That's why, that's why sir, responsibility means total commitment. A: Total commitment. K: Total commitment to the challenge. Responding adequately, completely to a crisis. That is, the word responsibility means that, to respond. I cannot respond completely if I am frightened. Or I cannot completely if I am seeking pleasure. I cannot respond totally if my action is routine, is repetitive, is traditional, is conditioned. So, to respond adequately to a challenge means that the 'me', which is the past, must end. A: And at this point Arjuna just wants it continued right down the line. K: That's what everybody wants, sir. Politically, look at what is happening in this country, and elsewhere. We don't feel responsible. We don't feel responsible to how we bring our children up. A: I understand. I really do, I think. In our next conversation I'd really like to continue this in terms of the phrase we sometimes use "being responsible for my action". But that does not seem to be saying exactly what you are saying at all. As a matter of fact, it seems to be quite wide of the mark. K: No. A: Good, let's do that. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 19TH FEBRUARY 1974 4TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'RESPONSIBILITY AND RELATIONSHIP' A: Mr Krishnamurti, just at the point where we left last time in our conversation we had raised the question of the distinction between the notion that I must be responsible for my action and just being responsible. I was sitting here thinking to myself, oh why can't we go on, so perhaps we could start at that point. Would that be agreeable? K: Sir, there is a very definite distinction between responsible for and being responsible. Being responsible for implies direction, a directed will. But the feeling of responsibility implies responsibility for everything, not in a direction, not in a direction, in any one particular direction. Responsible for education, responsible for politics, responsible the way I live, to be responsible for my behaviour. It's a total feeling of complete responsibility which is the ground in which action takes place. A: I think then this takes us back to this business of crisis we were talking about. If the crisis is continuous then it's misleading to say, I'm responsible for my action, because I've put the thing out there again and it becomes an occasion for my confusing what is at hand that requires to be done and the concept of this notion of this action because I am my action. K: Yes, that's just it. A: I am it. K: That means, the feeling of responsibility expresses itself politically, religiously, educationally in business, in the whole of life, responsible for the total behaviour. Not in a particular direction. I think there is great deal of difference when I say, when one says I am responsible for my action. That means you are responsible for your action according to the idea that you have preconceived about action. A: Exactly. Yes. People sometimes will say that the child is free because it's not responsible. K: Child is free, you can't take a child. A: No, of course not. But I think sometimes when we say this we have this nostalgia for the past as though our freedom would be freedom from constraint, whereas if one is his action genuinely absolutely... K: There isn't any restraint. A: ...there isn't any restraint at all. K: Not at all. A: Right. Right. K: Look. Take, if one has this total feeling of responsibility then what is your responsibility with regard to your children? It means education. Are you educating them to bring about a mind that conforms to the pattern which the society has established, which means you accept the immorality of the society that is. If you feel totally responsible you are responsible from the moment its born until the moment it dies. The right kind of education, not the education of making the child conform, the worship of success and the division of nationalities which brings about war. You follow, all that you are responsible for, not just in a particular direction. Even if you are in a particular direction, I'm responsible for my act, what is your action based on? How can you be responsible, when you, your action is the result of a formula that has been handed down to you? A: Yes I quite follow what you mean. K: Like communists, they say, the state is responsible. The state, worship the state, the state is the god and you are responsible to the state. Which means they have conceived what the state should be, formulated ideationally and according to that you act. That's not a responsible action. That's irresponsible action. Whereas action means the doing now. The active present of the verb to do, which is to do now. The acting now. The acting now must be free from the task. Otherwise you are just repeating, repetition, traditionally carrying on. That's all. A: I'm reminded of something in the I Ching that I think is a reflection of this principle that you pointed to. I don't mean principle in the abstract. If I am quoting it correctly from one of the standard translations, it goes like this, 'The superior man' by which it means the free man, not hierarchically structured 'does not let his thoughts go beyond his situation'. Which would mean that he simply would be present as he is, not being responsible to something out there that is going to tell him how to be responsible or what he should do, but upon the instant that he is, he is always... K: Responsible A: ...responsible. K: Always. A: He simply does not let his thoughts go beyond his situation. That goes back to that word negation. Because if he won't let his thoughts go beyond his situation he has negated the possibility for their doing so, hasn't he? K: Yes. Quite. A: Yes. Oh yes. Yes, I see that. The reason that I'm referring to these other quotations is because if what you are saying is true and if what they say is true, quite without respect to how they are understood or not understood, then there must be something in common here, and I realize that your emphasis is practical, imminently practical upon the act. But it does seem to me to be of great value if one could converse, commune with the great literatures which have so many statements and complain about the fact that they are not understood. I see that as a great gain. K: Sir, I have not read any books, any literature in the sense... A: Yes I understand. K: ...in that sense. Suppose there is no book in the world. A: The problem is the same. K: The problem is the same. A: Of course, of course. K: There is no leader, no teacher, nobody to tell you do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that. You are there. You feel totally, completely responsible. A: Right. Yes. K: Then you have to, you have to have an astonishingly, active, clear brain, not befuddled, not puzzled, not bewildered. You must have a mind that thinks clearly. And you cannot think clearly if you are rooted in the past. You are merely continuing, modified perhaps, through the present to the future. That's all. So from that arises the question, what is the responsibility in human relationship? A: Yes. Now we are back to relationships. K: Relationship, because that is the basic foundation of life: relationship. That is, to be related, to be in contact with. A: We are presently related. This is what is. K: What is human relationship? If I feel totally responsible, how does that responsibility express in relationship to my children, if I have children, to my family, to my neighbour, whether my neighbour is next door or ten thousand miles away; he is still my neighbour. So what is my responsibility. What is the responsibility of a man who feels totally completely involved in this feeling of being a light to himself and totally responsible? I think this is a question, sir, that has to be investigated. A: Yes, you know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking that only a person responsible, as you have said it, can make what we call, in our tongue, a clean decision. K: Of course. Of course. A: So many decisions are afraid. K: Sir, I would like to ask this. Is there decision at all? Decision implies choice. A: Yes K: Choice implies a mind that's confused between this and that. A: It means, I think radically to make a cut, to cut off. K: Yes, but a mind that sees clearly has no choice. It doesn't decide. It acts. A: Yes. Doesn't this take us back to this work negation again? K: Yes, of course. A: Might it not be that a clean decision could be interpreted in terms of what takes place at this point of negation from which flows a different action. K: I don't like to use that word decision because deciding between this and that. A: You don't want to use it because of the implications in it of conflict. K: Conflict, choice, we think we are free because we choose. We can choose, right? A: Yes. K: Is a mind free that is capable of choice? Or is a mind that is not free, that chooses? Because choice implies between this and that. Obviously. Now which means the mind doesn't see clearly and therefore there is choice. The choice exists when there is confusion. A mind that sees clearly, there is no choice. It is doing. I think this is where we have got into rather trouble when we say we are free to choose. Choice implies freedom. I say, on the contrary: choice implies a mind that is confused, and therefore not free. A: What occurs to me now is the difference between regarding freedom as a property or quality of action rather than a state. Yes. But we have the notion that freedom is a state, a condition which is, which is quite different from the emphasis you are leading me into. K: That's right. A: Yes. K: Let's come back to this, sir, which is what is responsibility of a human being who feels this sense of responsibility in relationship? Because relationship is life, relationship is the foundation of existence. Relationship is absolutely necessary, otherwise you can not exist. Relationship means co-operation. Everything is involved in that one word. Relation means love, generosity, all that's implied. Now what is a human responsibility in relationship? A: If we were genuinely and completely sharing then responsibility would be present fully. K: Yes, but how does it express itself in relationship? Not only between you and me now, but between man and woman, between my neighbour, relationships to everything, to nature. What's my relationship to nature? Would I go and kill the baby seals? A: No. No. K: Would I go and destroy human beings calling them enemies? Would I destroy nature, everything which man is doing now? He is destroying the earth, the air, the sea, everything. Because he feels totally irresponsible. A: He sees what is out there as something to operate on. K: Yes. Which is, he kills the baby seal, which I saw the other day on a film, it's an appalling thing. And a Christian, they call themselves Christian, going and killing a little thing for some lady to put on the fur. And, you follow, totally immoral, the whole thing is. So to come back: I say how does this responsibility show itself in my life? I am married, I am not, but suppose I am married, what is my responsibility? Am I related to my wife? A: The record doesn't seem very good. K: Not only record, actuality. Am I related to my wife? Or am I related to my wife according to the image I make about her? And I am responsible for that image. Do you follow, sir? A: Yes, because my input has been continuous with respect to that image. K: Yes. So I have no relationship with my wife if I have an image about her. Or if I have an image about myself when I want to be successful, and all the rest of that business. A: Since we were talking about now, being now, there ia a point of contact, I take it, between what you are saying and the phrase that you used in one of our earlier conversations, the betrayal of the present. K: Absolutely. You see that is the whole point, sir. If I am related to you, I have no image about you, or you have no image about me, then we have relationship. We have no relationship if I have an image about myself or about you. Our images have a relationship, when in actuality we have no relationship. I might sleep with my wife but it is not a relationship. It is a physical contact, sensory excitement, nothing else. My responsibility is not to have any an image. A: This brings to mind, I think one of the loveliest statements in the English language, which I should like to understand in terms of what we have been sharing. These lines from Keats' poem, Endymion, there is something miraculous, marvelous in this statement, it seems to me that is immediately related to what you have been saying: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." And then he says, as though that's not enough, "It's loveliness increases." And then as though that's not enough he says "It will never pass into nothingness." Now when the present is not betrayed, it's full with a fullness that keeps on abounding. K: Quite, I understand. A: Would I be correct in that? K: Yes, I think so. A: I think that's truly what he must be saying, and one of the things too that passed my mind was he calls it a thing of beauty. He doesn't call it a beautiful thing. It's a thing of beauty as though it's a child of beauty. A marvelous continuity between this. Not it's beautiful because I think it's beautiful and therefore it's outside. Yes, yes. K: I must stick to this because this is really quite important. Because go where you will there is no relationship between human beings, and that is the tragedy, and from that arises all our conflicts, violence, the whole business. So if, not if, when there is this responsibility, the feeling of this responsibility it translates itself in relationship. It doesn't matter with whom it is. A freedom from the known which is the image. And therefore in that freedom, goodness flowers. A: Goodness flowers. K: And that is the beauty. And that is beauty. Beauty is not an abstract thing, but it goes with goodness. Goodness in behaviour, goodness in conduct, goodness in action. A: Sometimes while we have been talking I have started a sentence with 'if', and I have looked into your eyes and immediately I got it out I knew I had said the wrong thing. It's just like a minute ago you said 'if', no 'when'. We are always 'ifing' it up. K: I know. 'Ifing' it up! A: It is awful. K: I know sir. We are always dealing with abstractions rather than with reality. A: Immediately we 'if', a construction is out there which we endlessly talk about. K: That's right. A: And we get cleverer and cleverer about it and it has nothing to do with anything. Yes, yes. K: So how does this responsibility translate itself in human behaviour? You follow, sir? A: Yes. There would be an end to violence. K: Absolutely. A: It wouldn't taper off. K: You see what we have done sir, we are violent, human beings, sexually, morally, in every way we are violent human beings, and not being able to resolve it we have created an ideal of not being violent, which is the fact, an abstraction of the fact, which is non fact and try to live the non fact. A: Yes. Immediately that produces conflict because it cannot be done. K: Conflict, misery, confusion all that. Why does the mind do it? The mind does it because it doesn't know what to do with this fact of violence. Therefore in abstracting the idea of not being violent, it postpones action. I am trying not to be violent and in the mean time I am jolly well violent. A: Yes. K: And it is an escape from the fact. All abstractions are escape from the fact. So the mind does it because it is incapable of dealing with the fact, or it doesn't want to deal with the fact, or it is lazy and says, I will try and do it another day. All this is involved when it withdraws from the fact. Now in the same way the fact is, our relationship is nonexistent. I may say to my wife, I love you, etc., etc., but it's nonexistent. Because I have an image about her and she has an image about me. So on abstractions we have lived. A: It just occurred to me that the word fact itself, which there have been no end of disquisitions about... K: Oh yes of course. The fact, 'what is'. Let's call it, 'what is'. A: But actually it means something done. K: Done, yes. A: Not the record of something. But actually something done, performed, act, act. And it's that sense of the word fact that with our use of the word fact. Give me facts and figures, we'd say in English, give me facts, we don't mean that when we say it. K: No, no. A: No. No. One probably wouldn't need facts and figures in that abstract sense. K: You see, sir, this reveals a tremendous lot. A: I follow K: When you feel responsible, feel responsible for education of your children, not only your's, children. Are you educating them to conform to a society, are you educating them to merely acquire a job? Are you educating them to the continuity of what has been? Are you educating them to live in abstractions, as we are doing now? So what is your responsibility as a father, mother, it doesn't matter who you are, responsible in education, for the education of a human being. That's one problem. What is your responsibility, if you feel responsible, for human growth, human culture, human goodness? What's your responsibility to the earth do you follow? It is a tremendous thing to feel responsible. A: This just came to mind which I must ask you about. The word negation in the book we looked at earlier which is continuous with what what we are saying, I think is itself rather endangered by the usual notion that we have of negation, which is simply a prohibition. Which is not meant. K: No. No. A: Which is not meant. K: Of course not. A: When we reviewed that incident in the Gita between the general and his charioteer, the lord, Krishna, the lord's response was a negation without it being a prohibition, wasn't it. K: Quite. I don't know. A: No, no. I mean in terms of what we just got through saying. K: Of course. A: There is a difference then between rearing a child in terms of relating to the child radically in the present, in which negation as is mentioned in the book here that we went through, is continuously and immediately and actively present. And simply walking around saying to oneself, "Now I am rearing a child therefore I mustn't do these things and I mustn't do those things, I must do that." Exactly. An entirely different thing. But, one has to break the habit of seeing negation as prohibition. K: And also, you see, with responsibility goes love, care, attention. A: Yes. Earlier I was going to ask you about care in relation to responsibility. Something that would flow immediately. K: Naturally. A: Naturally. Not something that I would have to project, that I needed to care for later and so I don't forget, but I would be with it. K: You see that involves a great deal too because the mother depends on the child, and the child depends on the mother, or the father, or whatever it is. So that dependence if cultivated: not only between the father and the mother but depend on a teacher, depend on somebody to tell you what to do. Depend on your guru. A: Yes, yes I follow. K: Gradually the child, the man is incapable of standing alone and therefore he says I must depend on my wife for my comfort, for my sex, for my this or that, and the other thing, I am lost without her. And I am lost without my guru, without my teacher. It becomes so ridiculous. When the feeling of responsibility exists all this disappears. You are responsible for your behaviour, for the way you bring up you children, for the way you treat a dog, a neighbour, nature, everything is in your hands. Therefore you have to become astonishingly careful what you do. Careful, not, "I must not do this, and I must do that". Care, that means affection, that means consideration, diligence. All that goes with responsibility, which present society totally denies. When we begin to discuss the various gurus that are imported into this country that's what they are doing, creating such mischief making those people unfortunate, thoughtless people who want excitement, join them, do all kinds of ridiculous nonsensical things. So, we come back: freedom implies responsibility. And therefore freedom, responsibility means care, diligence, not negligence. Not doing what you want to do, which is what is happening in America. Do what you want to do, this permissiveness is just doing what you want to do, which is not freedom, which breeds irresponsibility. I met the other day in Delhi, New Delhi, a girl and she'd become a Tibetan. You follow, sir. Born in America, being a Christian, brought up in all that. Throws all that aside and goes and becomes a Tibetan, which is the same thing in different words. A: Yes. As a Tibetan coming over here and doing it. K: It's so ridiculous. And I've known her some years, I said, where is your child? She said, "I've lift him with other liberated Tibetans". I said, "At six, you are the mother". She said, "Yes, he is in very good hands". I come back next year and I ask, "Where is your child?" "Oh he has become a Tibetan monk." He was seven. He was seven years old and had become a Tibetan monk. You understand sir? A: Oh yes, I do. K: The irresponsibility of it. The mother feels, "They know better than I do, I am Tibetan and the lamas will help me to become..." A: It puts a rather sinister cast on that Biblical statement: train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it. There is a sinister note in there isn't there. K: Absolutely. So this is going on in the world all the time. And a man who is really serious negates that because he understands the implications, the inwardness of all that. So he has to deny it. It isn't a question of will or choice, he says that's too silly, too absurd. So freedom means responsibility and infinite care. A: The phrase that you just spoke, 'infinite care'... K: Yes sir. A: ...would be totally impossible to what we mean by a finite being, unless the finite being did not betray the present. "With not betraying the present" is a negative again. It is a negation again. With not betraying the present. Which is not to say what would happen if it is not. K: Sir, the word 'present', the now, is rather difficult. A: Oh yes. Philosophers love to call it the specious present. K: I don't know what philosophers say. I don't want to enter into all that speculative things. But the fact, what is the 'now'? What is the act of now, the present? To understand the present I must understand the past - not history, I don't mean that. A: Oh no, no. K: Understand myself as the past. I am the past. A: In terms of what we said earlier about knowledge. K: Yes. I am that. Therefore I must understand the past, which is me, the 'me' is the known. The 'me' is not the unknown. I can imagine it is the unknown. But the fact is, the 'what is' is the known. That's me. I must understand myself. If I don't, the now is merely a continuation in modified form of the past. Therefore it is not the now, not the present. Therefore the 'me' is the tradition, the knowledge, in all the complicated manoevres, cunning, all that, the despairs, the anxieties, the desire for success, fear, pleasure, all that is me. A: Since we are still involved in a discussion about relationships here, might we return for a moment to where we were with respect to education and relationship. I want to be sure I have understood you here. Let us say that one were fortunate enough to have a school where what you are pointing to is going on. K: We are going to, we are doing it. We have got seven schools. A: Marvelous. Well we'll have a chance to talk about that, won't we? K: Yes. A: Good, good. If I'm current here, it would seem that if the teacher is totally present to the child the child will feel this. The child won't have to be instructed in what this means then. Is that right? K: Yes, but one has to find out what is the relationship of the teacher to the student. A: Yes, yes. I quite see that. K: What is the relationship? Is he merely an informer, giving information to the child? Any machine can do that. A: Oh yes, the library is filled with it. K: Any machine can do that. Or what is his relationship? Does he put himself on a pedestal, up there and his student down there. Or is the relationship between the teacher and the student, is it a relationship in which there is learning on the part of the teacher as well as the student. Learning. A: Yes. K: Not I have learned and I am going to teach you. Therefore in that there is a division between the teacher and the student. But when there is learning on the part of the teacher as well as on the part of the student there is no division. Both are learning. A: Yes. K: And therefore that relationship brings about a companionship. A: A sharing. K: A sharing. A: A sharing. Yes. K: Taking a journey together. And therefore an infinite care on both sides. So it means how is the teacher to teach mathematics, or whatever it is, to the student and yet teach it in such a way that you awaken the intelligence in the child, not simply about mathematics. A: No, no of course not. No. Yes. K: And how do you bring this act of teaching in which there is order, because mathematic means order, the highest form of order is mathematics - now how will you convey to the student in teaching mathematics that there should be order in his life? Not order according to a blueprint. That's not order. A: Yes, yes. K: It's a creative teaching, not creative. It's an act of learning all the time. It's a living thing. Not something I have learned and I am going to impart it to you. A: This reminds me of a little essay I read many years ago by Simone Weil which she called 'On Academic Studies' or some title like that and she said, that every one who teaches a subject is responsible for teaching the student the relation between what they are studying and the students making a pure act of attention. K: I know, of course, of course. A: And that if this doesn't take place the whole thing doesn't mean a thing. And when one stops to think what would a teacher say if a student walked up and looked at them and said, "Fine we're studying calculus right now. Now you tell me how I am to see this that I am pursuing in relation to my making a pure act of attention." It would be likely a little embarrassing, except for the most unusual person, who has a grasp of the present. K: So sir, that's just it. What is the relationship of the teacher to the student in education? Is he training him merely to conform, is he training him to cultivate mere memory, like a machine? Is he training, or is he helping him to learn about life - not just about sex, the life, the whole immensity of living, the complexity of it? Which we not are doing. A: No. No even in our language we refer students to subject matters. They take this, they take that, they take the other and in fact there are prerequisites for taking these other things. And this builds a notion of education which has absolutely no relationship to what... K: None at all. A: And yet, and yet amazingly in the catalogues of colleges and universities across the country there is in the first page or so a rather pious remark about the relation between their going to school and the values of civilization. And that turns out to be learning a series of ideas. I don't know if they do it any more but they used to put the word character in there. They probably decided that's unpopular, and might very well have dropped that out by now, I'm not sure. K: Yes, yes. A: Yes, I'm following what you are saying. K: So, sir, when you feel responsible there is a flowering of real affection, a flowering of care for a child, and you don't train him, or condition him to go and kill another for the sake of your country. You follow? All that is involved in it. So, we come to a point where a human being, as he is now so conditioned to be irresponsible, what are the serious people going to do with the irresponsible people? You understand? Education, politics, religion everything is making human beings irresponsible. I am not exaggerating. This is so. A: Oh no, you are not exaggerating. K: Now, I see this as a human being. I say what am I to do? You follow, sir? What is my responsibility in face of the irresponsible? A: Well if it's to start anywhere, as we say in English, it must start at home. It would have to start with me. K: So I say, that's the whole point. Start with me. A: Right. K: Then from that the question arises, then you can't do anything about the irresponsible. A: No. Exactly. K: No, sir. Something strange takes place. A: I misunderstood you. I'm sorry. What I meant by replying there is that I don't attack the irresponsible. K: No. No. A: No, no. Yes go ahead. K: Something strange takes place. Which is, consciousness, the irresponsible consciousness is one thing, and the consciousness of responsibility is another. Now when the human being is totally responsible that responsibility unconsciously enters into the irresponsible mind. I don't know if I'm making it clear A: Yes, yes. No, go ahead. K: I'm irresponsible. Suppose I'm irresponsible, you are responsible. You can't do anything consciously with me. The more you actively operate on me, I resist. A: That's right, that's right. That's what I meant by no attacking. K: No attacking. I react violently to you. I build a wall against you. I hurt you. I do all kinds of things. But you see you cannot do anything consciously, actively, let's put it that way. A: Designedly. K: Designedly, planned, which is what they are all trying to do. But if you can talk to me, to my unconscious, because the unconscious is much more active, much more alert, much more, sees the danger much quicker than the conscious. So it is much more sensitive. So if you can talk to me, to the unconscious that operates so you don't actively designedly attack the irresponsible. They have done it. And they have made a mess of it. A: Oh yes, it compounds, complicates the thing further. K: Whereas if you talk to me, I talk, you talk to me but your whole inward intention is to show how irresponsible I am, what responsibility means, you follow, you care. In other words you care for me A: Yes, yes. I was chuckling because the complete and total opposite crossed my mind and it just seemed so absolutely absurd. Yes. K: You care for me. A: I do. K: Because I am irresponsible. You follow? A: Exactly. K: Therefore you care for me. And therefore you are watching not to hurt me, not to, you follow? In that way you penetrate very, very deeply into my unconscious. And that operates unknowingly when suddenly I say, "By Jove, how irresponsible I am" - you follow. That operates. I have seen this, sir, in operation because I've talked for 50 years, unfortunately, or fortunately to large audiences, tremendous resistance to anything new. If I said, don't read sacred books, which I say all the time. Because you are just conforming, obeying. You are not living. You are living according to some book that you have read. Immediately there is resistance -'Who are you to tell us?' A: Not to do something. K: Not to do this or to do that. So I say, all right. I go on pointing out, pointing out. I'm not trying to change them. I'm not doing propaganda because I don't believe in propaganda. It's a lie. So I say, look, look what you do when you are irresponsible. You are destroying your children. You send them to war, to be killed, to kill and be maimed. Is that an act of love, is that affection, is that care? Why do you do it? And I go into it. They get bewildered. They don't know what to do. So it begins to slowly seep in. A: Well, at first it's such a shock. It sounds positively subversive to some of the people. K: Oh, absolutely, absolutely, sir. A: Of, course, of course. Yes. K: So we enter into something now, which is, my relationship to another, when there is total responsibility in which freedom and care go together, the mind has no image in relationship at all. Because the image is the division. Where there is care there is no image, imagination, no image. A: This would lead us into what perhaps later we could pursue, love. K: Ah, that's a tremendous thing. A: Yes. Could we lay a few words before that, I don't know necessarily that next time we would do that, but it would come naturally. I've been listening to what you have been saying and it's occurred to me that if one is responsible and care is continuous with that, one would not fear. One could not fear. Not, 'would not', 'could not', could not fear. K: You see that means really, one must understand fear. A: One must understand fear. K: And also the pursuit of pleasure. Those two go together. They are not two separate things. A: What I have learned here in our discussion is that what it is, if I have followed you correctly, that we should turn ourselves toward understanding, is not what are called values. K: Oh no. A: We don't understand love. We understand all those things which we catch ourselves into that militate against any possibility whatsoever. This is what's so hard to hear that, to be told that there just is no possibility. This produces immense terror. Do you think next time when we converse together we can begin at that point where we could discuss fear? K: Oh yes. A: Good, good. K: But sir, before we enter fear there is something we should discuss very carefully: what is order in freedom? A: Fine, fine, yes, yes. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 20TH FEBRUARY 1974 5TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'ORDER' A: Beginning from where we were: Mr Krishnamurti, when we were speaking last time it seemed to me that we had together reached the point where we were about to discuss order, converse about order and I thought perhaps we could begin with that today, if that's agreeable with you. K: I think we were talking about freedom, responsibility and relationship. And before we go any further we thought we'd talk over together this question of order. What is order in freedom? As one observes all over the world, there is such extraordinary disorder. A: Oh yes. K: Outwardly and inwardly. One wonders why there is such disorder. You go to India and you see the streets filled with people, bursting with population. And you see also so many sects, so many gurus, so many teachers, so many contradictory lies, such misery. And you come to Europe: there is a little more order but you see when you penetrate the superficial order there is equal disorder. And you come to this country and you know what it is like, better than I do, there is complete disorder. You may drive very carefully, but go behind the facade of so-called order and you see chaos, not only in personal relationship but sexually, morally, so much corruption. All governments are corrupt, some more, some less. But this whole phenomenon of disorder, how has it come about? Is it the fault of the religions that have said, do this and don't do that? And now they are revolting against all that? A: Yes. K: Is it governments are so corrupt that nobody has any trust in governments? Is it there is such corruption in business, nobody wants to look at it even, any intelligent man, any man who is really serious. And you look at family life, and there is such disorder. So taking the whole phenomenon of disorder, why is there such disorder? What has brought it about? A: Doesn't it appear that there is a sort of necessary, almost built in progression in terms of the way we have mentioned necessity earlier, once order so conceived is superimposed upon an existing situation, not only does it not effect what is hoped for but it creates a new situation which we think requires a new approach. And the new approach is still the super imposition. K: Like the communists are doing in Russia and China. They have imposed order, what they call order, on a disordered mind. And therefore there is revolt. So looking at all this, it's very interesting, looking at all this phenomenon of disorder, what is order then? Is order something imposed, order as in the military on the soldier, imposed order, a discipline which is a conformity, suppression, imitation? Is order conformity? A: Not in the sense that it's artificially imposed, yes, K: In any sense. If I conform to an order I am creating disorder. A: Yes, yes, I understand what you mean. In our use of the word conform we sometimes mean by it a natural relation between the nature of a thing, and the activities that are proper to it or belong to it. But then that use of the word conform is not the use that is usual and the one that we are concerned with here. K: So is order conformity? Is order imitation? Is order acceptance, obedience? Or because we have conformed, because we have obeyed, because we have accepted, we have created disorder. Because discipline, in the ordinary, accepted sense of that word, is to conform. A: Yes, we say in English, don't we, to someone who appears to be undisciplined, or who in fact is undisciplined, we say, straighten up. K: Straighten up, yes. A: The images that we use to refer to that correction are always rigid, aren't they. K: Yes. A: Yes. yes. K: So that authority, whether the communist authority of the few, or the authority of the priest, or the authority of someone who says, I know and you don't know, that is one of the factors that has produced disorder. And one of the factors of this disorder is our lack of real culture. We are very sophisticated, very sophisticated, very so-called civilized, in the sense we are clean, we have bathrooms, we have better food and all that, but inwardly we are not cultured. We are not healthy, whole human beings. A: The inner fragmentation spills out into our operations externally. K: So unless we understand disorder, the nature of disorder, the structure of disorder, we can never find out what is order. Out of the understanding of disorder comes order. Not first seek order, and then impose that order on disorder. I don't know if I make myself clear. A: Yes. I'm thinking as you are speaking of the phenomenon in the world of study and the world of teaching and learning as we understand them conventionally. I've noticed in our conversations that you always suggest that study some disfunction. We are never invited really to do that we, we are given the notion that the thing to study is the principle involved. The argument for that, of course, is that one refers to health in order to understand disease. K: Quite, quite. A: But then the reference to health, when that is said, is received purely conceptually. K: Quite right. A: So what we are studying now is a concept. K: Is a concept rather than the actuality, that the 'what is'. A: And we slip out of the true task. There is a difficulty in grasping the suggestion that we study the disorder simply because disorder by its own condition is without an ordering principle. Therefore it sounds when it comes out as though I am being asked to study something that is unstudyable. But to the contrary. K: On the contrary. A: Yes. Now I'll stop. You go ahead. On the contrary. You were about to say something. K: On the contrary. There must be an understanding of disorder, why it has come about. One of the factors, sir, I think, is basically that thought is matter, and thought by its very nature is fragmentary. Thought divides, the 'me' and the 'not me', we and they, my country and your country, my ideas and your ideas, my religion and your religion and so on. The very movement of thought is divisive, because thought is the response of memory, response of experience, which is the past. And unless we really go into this question very, very deeply the movement of thought and the movement of disorder... A: That seems to me to be a key word, from my understanding, in listening to you, movement. To study the movement of disorder would seem to me to take it a step deeper than the phrase, to study disorder. With the word movement we are dealing with act. K: Movement. A: Exactly. The career of disorder. K: The movement. A: Yes, If that is what we are directed upon then I think the objection that the study of disorder is to undertake an impossible pursuit is not made with any foundation. That objection loses its force precisely at the point, when one says, no, no it's not disorder as a concept we are dealing with here, it's the movement of it, it's its own career, it's its passage, it's the whole corruption of the act as such. Yes, yes, exactly. I keep on saying this business about act all the time, and perhaps it seems repetitious. K: Oh that's absolutely right. A: But you know hardly, hardly ever is that taken seriously... K: I know, sir. A: ...by our species. Of course the animals are on to that from the beginning, but we don't. K: No. You see we deal with concepts, not with 'what is', actually what is. Rather than discuss formulas, concepts and ideas, 'what is' is disorder. And that disorder is spreading all over the word, it's a movement, it's a living disorder. It isn't a disorder that is dead. It is a living thing, moving, corrupting, destroying. A: Yes. Exactly, exactly. K: So. A: But it takes, as you pointed out so often, it takes an extreme concentration of attention to follow movement and there is a rebellion in us against following movement which perhaps lies in our disaffection with the intuition that we have. The transition is unintelligible. K: Of course. Quite, quite. A: And we don't want that. We can't stand the thought that there is something that is unintelligible. And so we just will make that active attention. K: It's like sitting on the bank of a river and watching the waters go by. You can't alter the water, you can't change the substance or the movement of the water. In the same way this movement of disorder is part of us and is flowing outside of us. So, one has look at it. A: And there is no confusion in the act at all. K: Obviously not. First of all, sir, let's go into it very, very carefully. What is the factor of disorder? Disorder means contradiction, right. A: Yes. And conflict. Yes. K: Contradiction. This opposed to that. Or the duality, this opposed to that. A: The contention between two things to be mutually exclusive. K: Yes. And that brings about this dual, duality and the conflict. Is there a duality at all? A: Certainly not in act, there is not a duality. That simply couldn't be. There certainly could be said, not even with respect, don't you think, to thought itself and its operation that there is a dualism. But the duality, of course, is present in terms of distinction, but not in terms of division. K: Division, that's right. A: Not in terms of division. K: Not in terms. A: Yes, yes. I follow. K: After all there is man woman, black and white and so on, but is there an opposite to violence? You've understood? A: Yes, yes I'm listening very intently. K: Or only violence. But we have created the opposite. Thought has created the opposite as non-violence, and then the conflict between the two. The non-violence is an abstraction of the 'what is'. And thought has done that. A: Yesterday I had a difficult time in class over this. I made the remark that, vice is not the opposite of virtue. Virtue is not the opposite of vice, and somehow I just couldn't, it seems, communicate that because of the insistence on the part of the students to deal with the problem purely in terms of a conceptual structure. K: You see sir, I don't know if you want to go into it now, or if it is the right occasion: from ancient Greece, you must know, measurement was necessary to them. Measurement. And the whole of western civilization is based on measurement, which is thought. A: This is certainly true in continuous practice. It is certainly true. And the irony of it is that an historian looking at the works of the great Greek thinkers turn around and say at this point, well now just wait a minute. And we would say some things about Aristotle and Plato that would suggest that no, no, no, there's a much more organic grasp of things than simply approaching it in a slide rule way, but that doesn't come to terms with what you are saying. You see that's right. K: Sir, you can see what is happening in the world, in the western world: technology, commercialism, and consumerism is the highest activity that is going on now. A: Exactly. K: Which is based on measurement. A: Yes it is. Oh yes. K: Which is thought. Now look at it a minute, hold that a minute and you will see something rather odd taking place. The east, especially India, India exploded over the east in a different sense, they said measurement is illusion. To find the immeasurable, the measurement must come to an end. I'm putting it very crudely and quickly. A: No. But it seems to me that you are putting it precisely well with respect to this concern we have with act. K: Yes. A: It's not crude. K: It's very interesting because I've watched it. In the west, technology , commercialism and consumerism, god, saviour, church, all that's outside. It is a plaything. And you just play with it on Saturday and Sunday but the rest of the week... A: Yes. K: And you go to India and you see this. The word 'ma' is to measure, Sanskrit, and they said, reality is immeasurable. Go into it, see the beauty of it. A: Yes, oh yes, I follow. K: The measurement can never find - a mind that is measuring, or a mind that is caught in measurement can never find truth. I'm putting it that way. They don't put it that way, but I'm putting it. So they said, to find the real, the immense, measurement must end. But they use thought as a means to - thought must be controlled, they said. A: Yes, yes. K: You follow? A: Yes, I do. K: So, in order to find the immeasurable you must control thought. And to control, who is the controller of thought? Another fragment of thought. I don't know if you follow. A: Oh, I follow you perfectly, yes I do. K: So, they use measurement to go beyond measurement. And therefore they could never go beyond it. They were caught in an illusion of some other kind, but it is still the product of thought. I don't know if I'm conveying it? A: Yes, yes. What flashed over my mind as you were speaking, was the incredible irony of their having right in front of them, I'm thinking now of this profound statement: "That is full", meaning anything that I think is over there. "That's full, this that I've divided off from that, this is full. From fullness to fullness issues forth". And then the next line, "If fullness is taken away from the full, fullness indeed still remains." Now they are reading that, you see, but if they approach it in the manner in which you have so well described, they haven't read it in the sense of attended to what's being said, because it's the total rejection of that statement in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad that would be involved in thought control. K: Yes, of course, of course. You see that's what I've been trying to get at. You see, thought has divided the world physically: America, India, Russia, China, you follow, divided the world. Thought has fragmented the activities of man, the businessman, the artist, the politician, the beggar, you follow? A: Yes. K: Fragmented man. Thought has created a society based on this fragmentation. And thought has created the gods, the saviours, the Jesuses, the christs, the Krishnas, the Buddhas - and those are all measurable, in a sense. You must become like the christ, or you must be good. All sanctioned by a culture which is based on measurement. A: Once you start with forecasts, as we have classically, then we are going to necessarily move to five six, seven, 400, 4000 an indefinite division. And all in the interest, it is claimed, of clarity. All in the interest of clarity. K: So, unless, unless we understand the movement of thought, we cannot possibly understand disorder. It is thought that has produced disorder. It sounds contradictory, but it is so - thought is fragmentary, thought is time, and as long as we are functioning within that field there must be disorder. Which is, each fragment is working for itself, in opposition to other fragments. I, a Christian, am in opposition to the Hindu, though I talk about love and goodness and all the rest of it. A: I love him so much I want to see him saved so I will go out and bring him into the fold. K: Saved. Come over to my camp! A: Yes, yes. K: One of the, probably the basic cause of disorder is the fragmentation of thought. I was told the other day, that in a certain culture, thought means the outside. A: That's very interesting. K: When they use the word outside, they use the word thought. A: And we think it's inside. K: That's the whole... you follow. A: How marvelous. How marvelous. K: So thought is always outside. You can say, I am inwardly thinking. Thought has divided the outer and the inner. So to understand this whole contradiction, measurement, time, the division, the fragmentation, the chaos, and the disorder, one must really go into this question of what is thought, what is thinking. Can the mind, which has been so conditioned in fragments, in fragmentation, can that mind observe this whole movement of disorder, not fragmentarily? A: No, but the movement itself. K: Movement itself. A: Movement itself. Yes. But that's what's so terrifying - to look at that movement. It's interesting that you've asked this question in a way that keeps boring in because measure is, and I'm going to put something now in a very concise, elliptical way, is possibility, which is infinitely divisible. It only comes to an end with an act, with an act. And as long as I remain divided against act, I regard myself as a very deep thinker. I'm sitting back exploring alternatives which are completely imaginary, illusory. And in the business world men are paid extremely high salaries to come up with what is called a new concept. K: Yes, new concept. A: And it's called by its right name, of course, but it isn't regarded correctly as to its nature. It isn't understood as to what's being said when that happens. K: That brings up the point, which is, measurement means comparison. Our society and our civilizations are based on comparison. From childhood, to school to college and university, it is comparative. A: That's right. K: And comparison between intelligence and dullness, between the tall and the black, white and purple and all the rest of it -comparison in success. And look at also our religions. The priest, the bishop, you follow, the hierarchical outlook, ultimately Pope or the archbishop. The whole structure is based on that. Compare, comparison, which is measurement, which is essentially thought. A: Yes. The Protestants complain about the Catholic hierarchy, and yet their scripture, their Bible is what some Catholics call their paper pope. K: Of course. A: Yes, of course. With the very rejection of something, something takes its place which becomes even more divisive. K: So, is it possible to look without measurement, that is without comparison? Is it possible to live a life - life, living, acting, laughing, the whole life, living, crying, without a shadow of comparison coming into it? Sir, I'm not boasting, I'm just stating a fact. I have never compared myself with anybody. A: That's a most remarkable thing. Most remarkable thing. K: I never thought about it even - somebody much cleverer than me, somebody much more brilliant, so intelligent, somebody greater, spiritual - it didn't enter. Therefore, I say to myself, is measurement, comparison, imitation, are they not the major factors of disorder? A: I've had a very long thought about what you said a few conversations ago, about when you were a boy, and you never accepted the distinctions that were employed in a dividing way... K: Oh, of course, of course. A: ...and within the social order. And I had to think about my own growing up, and accept the fact that I did accept this distinction in terms of division, but I didn't do it with nature. But that set up conflict in me, because I couldn't understand how it could be the case that I'm natural as a being in the world but I'm not somehow related to things the way things are, in what we call nature. Then it suddenly occurred to me later that in thinking that way I was already dividing myself off from nature, and I'd never get out of that problem. K: No. A: And the thing came to me some years ago with a tremendous flash, when I was in Bangkok in a temple garden. And of an early morning I was taking a walk and my eye was drawn to a globule of dew resting on a lotus leaf and it was perfectly circle. And I said, where's the base. How can it be stable. Why doesn't it roll off. By the time I got to the end of my 'whys' I was worn out, so I took a deep breath and, I said, now shut up and just keep quiet and look. And I saw that each maintained its own nature in this marvelous harmony without any confusion at all. And I was just still. K: Good. A: Just still. I think that's something of what you mean about the fact. That was a fact. K: Just remain with the fact. Look at the fact. A: That marvelous globule on that leaf is the fact, is what is the act, is what is done. K: That is correct. A: Right. Yes. K: Sir, from this arises, can one educate a student to live a life of non comparison - bigger car, lesser car, you follow? A: Yes. K: Dull, you are clever, I am not clever. What happens if I don't compare at all? Will I become dull? A: On the contrary. K: I'm only dull, I know I'm dull only through comparison. If I don't compare, I don't know what I am. Then I begin from there. A: Yes, yes. The world becomes infinitely accessible. K: Oh, then the whole thing becomes extraordinarily different. There is no competition, there is no anxiety, there is no conflict with each other. A: This is why you use the word total often, isn't it. K: Yes. A: In order to express that there's nothing drawn out from one condition to the other. There is no link there, there is no bridge there. Totally disordered. Totally order. K: Absolutely. A: Yes, and you use the word 'absolute' often, which terrifies many people today. K: Sir, after all mathematics is order. The highest form of mathematical investigation, you must have a mind that is totally orderly. A: The marvelous thing about maths too, is that whereas it's the study of quantity, you don't make passage from one integer to another by two getting larger. Two stops at two. Two and a half is no more two. Somehow that's the case. K: Yes. A: But a child when he is taught mathematics is never introduced to that - that I've ever heard of. K: You see, sir, our teaching, our everything is so absurd. Is it possible, sir, to observe this movement of disorder, with a mind that is disorderly itself, and say, can this mind observe disorder, this mind which is already in a state of disorder. So disorder isn't out there but in here. Now can the mind observe that disorder without introducing a factor of an observer who is orderly? A: Who will superimpose. K: Yes. Therefore observe, perceive disorder without the perceiver. I don't know if I am making sense at all. A: Yes, yes you are, yes you are making sense. K: That is, sir, to understand disorder we think an orderly mind is necessary. A: As over against the disorderly mind. K: Disorderly mind. But the mind itself has created this disorder, which is thought and all the rest of it. So can the mind not look at disorder out there, but at the maker of disorder which is in here? A: Which is itself the very mind as disorder. K: Mind itself is disordered. A: Yes. But as soon as that is stated conceptually... K: No, no. Concepts are finished. A: Yes. But we are using words. K: We are using words to communicate. A: Exactly. What I'm concerned with, just for a second, is what are we going to say when we hear the statement that it is the disordered mind that keeps proliferating disorder, but it is that disordered mind that must see, it must see. K: I'm going to show you, you will see in a minute what takes place. Disorder is not outside of me, disorder is inside of me. That's a fact. Because the mind is disorderly all its activities must be disorderly. And the activities of disorder is proliferating or is moving in the world. Now can this mind observe itself without introducing the factor of an orderly mind, which is the opposite? A: Yes it is. Of course it is the opposite. K: So can it observe without the observer who is the opposite? A: That's the question. K: Now watch it, sir, if you are really interested in it. A: I am. I am deeply interested in it. K: If you will see. The observer is the observed. The observer who says, I am orderly, and I must put order in disorder. That is generally what takes place. But the observer is the factor of disorder. Because the observer is the past, is the factor of division. Where there is division there is not only conflict but disorder. You can see, sir, it is happening actually in the world. I mean all this problem of energy, all this problem of law, peace, and all the rest, can be solved absolutely when there are not separate governments, sovereign armies, and say, look let's solve this problem all together, for god's sake. We are human beings. This earth is meant for us to live on - not Arabs and Israelis, and America and Russia -it is our earth. A: And it's round. K: But we will never do this because our minds are so conditioned to live in disorder, to live in conflict. A: And vocation is given a religious description in terms of the task of cleaning up the disorder with my idea of order. K: Order. Your idea order is the fact that has produced disorder. A: Exactly. K: So, it brings up a question, sir, which is very interesting: can the mind observe itself without the observer? Because the observer is the observed. The observer who says, I will bring order in disorder, that observer itself is a fragment of disorder, therefore it can never bring about order. So can the mind be aware of itself as a movement of disorder, not trying to correct it, not trying to justify it, not trying to shape it, just to observe? I said previously to observe, sitting on the banks of a river and watch the waters go by. You see, then you see much more. But if you are in the middle of it swimming you will see nothing. A: I've never forgotten that it was when I stopped questioning, when I stood before that droplet of dew on the leaf, that everything changed totally, totally. And what you say is true. Once something like that happens there isn't a regression from it. K: Sir, it is not once, it is... A: ...forever. Yes. K: It's not an incident that took place. My life is not an incident, it is a movement. A: Exactly. K: And in that movement I observe this movement of disorder. And therefore the mind itself is disorderly and how can that disorderly, chaotic, contradictory, absurd little mind bring about order? It can't. Therefore a new factor is necessary. And the new factor is to observe, to perceive, to see without the perceiver. A: To perceive without the perceiver. To perceive without the perceiver. K: Because the perceiver is the perceived. A: Yes. K: If you once grasp that then you see everything without the perceiver. You don't bring in your personality, your ego, your selfishness. You say, disorder is the factor which is in me, not out there. The politicians are trying to bring about order when they are themselves so corrupt. You follow sir? How can they bring order? A: It's impossible. It's impossible. It's one long series of... K: That's what's happening in the world. The politicians are ruling the world - from Moscow, from New Delhi, from Washington, wherever it is, it's the same pattern being repeated. Living a chaotic, corrupt life, you try to bring order in the world. It's childish. So that's why transformation of the mind is not your mind or my mind, it's the mind, the human mind. A: Or the mind trying to order itself, even. Not even that. K: Now how can it, it is like a blind man trying to bring about colour. And he says, well that's grey. It has no meaning. So can the mind observe this disorder in itself without the observer who has created disorder? Sir, this brings up a very simple thing. To look at a tree, at a woman, at mountain, at a bird, or a sheet of water with the light on it, the beauty of it, to look without the see-er. The moment the see-er comes in, the observer comes in, he divides. And division is all right as long as it's descriptive. But when you are living, living, that division is destructive. A: Yes, what was running through my mind was this continuous propaganda that we hear about the techniques that are available to still the mind. K: Oh, sir A: But that requires a stiller to do the stilling. K: No, I wouldn't... A: And so that is absolutely, I'm using your words, absolutely and totally out, of any possibility of attaining. K: But yet you see that's what the gurus are doing. A: Yes, yes I do understand. K: The imported gurus and the native gurus are doing this. They are really destroying people. You follow, sir. We'll talk about it when the occasion arises. What we are now concerned is, measurement which is the whole movement of commercialism, consumerism, technology, is now the pattern of the world. Begun in the West, and made more and more perfect in the West and that is spreading all over the world. Go to the smallest little town in India or anywhere, the same pattern being repeated. And the village you go and they are so miserable, unhappy, one-meal-a-day stuff. But it is still within that pattern. And the governments are trying to solve these problems separately, you follow. France by itself, Russia by itself. It's a human problem, therefore it has to be approached not with, with a Washington mind, or a London, mind, or a Moscow mind, with a mind that is human that says, look this is our problem and for god's sake lets get together and solve it. Which means care, which means accepting responsibility for every human being. So we come back: as we said, order comes only with the understanding of disorder. In that there is no superimposition. In that there is no conflict. In that there is no suppression. When you suppress you react. You know all that business. So it is totally a different kind of movement, order. And that order is real virtue. Because without virtue there is no order. There's gangsterism. A: Oh yes. K: Politically or any other way, religiously. But without virtue, virtue being conduct, the flowering in goodness everyday. It is not a theory, sir, it actually takes place, when you live that way. A: The hexagram in the I Ching called conduct is also translated treading. K: Treading. A: Treading. Meaning a movement. K: Of course. A: A movement. And that's a vastly different understanding of the usual notion of conduct. But I understand from what you have said that your use of the word conduct as virtue, as order is precisely oriented to act, movement. K: Yes sir. You see, a man who acts out of disorder is creating more disorder. The politician, look at his life, sir, ambitious, greedy, seeking power, position. A: Running for election. K: Election, all the rest of it. And he is the man who is going to create order in the world. The tragedy of it and we accept it. You follow? A: Yes, we believe it's inevitable. We do. K: And therefore we are irresponsible. A: Because he did it and I didn't. Yes. Yes. K: Because we accept disorder in our life. I don't accept disorder in my life. I want to live an orderly life, which means I must understand disorder, and where there is order the brain functions much better. A: There is a miracle here, isn't there. K: Absolutely, that's the miracle. A: There is a miracle here. As soon as I grasp the movement of disorder... K: The mind grasps it. A: Yes, yes. Behold, there's order. That's truly miraculous. Perhaps it's the one and only miracle. K: There are other miracle but... A: I mean in the deepest sense of the word, all of them would have to be related to that or we wouldn't have any of them, is what I meant, the real heart, the real core. K: That's why, sir, relationship, communication, responsibility, freedom and this freedom from disorder, has a great sense of beauty in it. A life that is beautiful, a life that's really flowering in goodness. Unless we create, bring about such human beings the world will go to pot. A: Yes. K: This is what is happening. And I feel it's my responsibility. And to me I've a passion for it, it's my responsibility to see that when I talk to you, you understand it, you live it, you function, move in that way. A: I come back to this attention thing, The enormous emphasis that you've made on staying totally attentive to this. I think I begin to understand something of the phenomenon of what happens when a person begins to think that they are taking seriously what you are saying. I didn't say, begins to take it seriously, they think they are beginning to. As a matter of fact, they begin to watch themselves lean in to it. Of course nothing is started yet. But something very strange happens in the mind when this notion that I am leaning in. I start to get terribly afraid. I become terribly fearful of something. Next time could we discuss fear? SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 20TH FEBRUARY 1974 6TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'FEAR' A: Mr Krishnamurti, if I recall correctly I think, we had begun to talk together last time, just at the point where the question of fear arose, and I think we both, perhaps, could explore that together a little. K: Yes, I think so. I wonder how we can approach this problem, because it is a common problem in the world. Everyone, or I can say, almost everyone is frightened of something. It may be the fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of not being loved, fear of not becoming famous, successful and also fear of not having physical security, and fear of not having psychological security. There are so many multiple forms of fears. Now to go into this problem really very deeply, can the mind, which includes the brain, really fundamentally be free of fear? Because fear, as I have observed, is a dreadful thing. A: Oh yes. K: It darkens the world, it destroys everything. And I don't think we can discuss fear, which is one of the principles in life, without also discussing, or going into the pursuit of pleasure. The two sides of the same coin. A: Fear and pleasure, two sides of the same coin. K: So as we are first going to take fear there is conscious as well as unconscious fears. Fears that are observable, that can be remedied and fears that are deep rooted, deep in the recesses of one's mind. A: At the unconsious level. K: At the deeper levels. Now, we must be concerned with both, not only the obvious external fears, but also the deep seated undiscovered fears. The fears that have been handed down, traditional fears. A: Being told what to fear. K: And also fears that the mind itself has produced, has cultivated. A: In one's personal life. K: Personal. And also in relation to others; fears of physical insecurity, losing a job, losing a position, losing something, and all the positive, not having something, and so on and on. So, if we are going to talk about this question how should we, you and I, approach this? First take the outer, the obvious physical fears, and then from there move to the inner, and so cover the whole field, not just one little fear of an old lady, an old man, or a young man, take the whole problem of fear. A: Good. K: Not just take one leaf of fear, or one branch of it but the whole movement of fear. A: We are back to that word movement again. K: Movement. A: Good,good. The whole movement of fear. K: Now, outwardly, physically it is becoming obvious that we must have security, physical security. That is, food, clothes, and shelter are absolutely necessary. Not only for the Americans but for the whole humanity. A: Of course. K: It's no good saying, "We are secure and to hell with the rest of the world." The world is you. And you are the world. You can't isolate yourself and say, I am going to be secure and not bother about the others. A: Secure myself against them. K: It becomes a division, conflict, war, all that it produces. So that physical security is necessary for the brain. The brain can only function, as I have observed in myself, in others, not that I am an expert on brain, or neurology and all that but I have observed it. The brain can function only in complete security. Then it functions efficiently, healthily, not neurotically. And its actions won't be lopsided. The brain needs security, as a child needs security. That security is denied when we separate ourselves - the Americans, the Russians, the Indians, the Chinese. National division has destroyed that security, because wars. A: Because that is a physical barrier. K: Physical fact. And yet we don't see that. Sovereign governments, with their armies, their navies and all the rest of it, are destroying security. A: In the name of... K: So, you see what we are trying to get at is how stupid the mind is. It wants security. And it must have security, and yet it is doing everything to destroy security. A: Oh yes, yes. I see that. K: So that's one factor. And the factor of security is in jobs. Either in a factory, in a business, or as a priest in his job. So occupation becomes very important. A: Indeed it does, yes. K: So, see what is involved. If I lose my job I am frightened, and that job depends on the environment, on the production, business, factory, all that commercialism, consumerism, and therefore competition with other countries. France isolating itself because it wants to, which is happening. So we need physical security and we are doing everything to destroy it. If we all of us said, look let's all get together, not with plans, not with my plan, your plan, or the communist plan or Mao plan, let's as human beings sit together and solve this problem. They could do it. Science has the means of feeding people. But they won't because they are conditioned to function so as to destroy security which they are seeking. So that's one of the major factors in physical security. Then there is the fear of physical pain. Is physical pain in the sense, one has had pain, let's say last week. The mind is afraid that it should happen again. So there is that kind of fear. A: That's very interesting with respect to the phenomenon of physical pain, because what is remembered is not the neurological reaction but the emotion that attends what occurred. K: Yes, that's it. So there is that fear. A: Right, right. K: Then there is the fear of outward opinion, what people say, public opinion. A: Reputation. K: Reputation. You see, sir, all this is born out of disorder. I don't know if I'm? A: Oh yes, yes. K: Which we discussed. A: Which we looked into previously. K: So, can the mind bring about security, physical security, which means food, clothes and shelter for everybody. Not as a communist, as a capitalist, as a socialist, or as a Mao, but meet together as human beings to resolve this problem. It can be done. But nobody wants to do it, because they don't feel responsible for it. I don't know if you have been to India; if you have gone from town to town, village to village as I have done, you see the appalling poverty, the degradation of poverty, the sense of hopelessness. A: Yes, I have been to India and it was the first time in my life that I sensed poverty, not as a privation, but it seemed to have a positive character about it. It was so stark. K: I know sir. Personally we have been through all that. So, physical survival is only possible when human beings get together. Not as communists, socialists, all the rest, as human beings who say, look this is our problem, for god's sake let's solve it. But they won't because they are burdened with problem, with planning. How to solve that. I don't know if I am? A: Yes, yes, you are. K: You have your plan, I have my plan, he has his plan, so planning becomes most important, plans become most important rather than the starvation. And we fight each other. And common sense, affection, care, love can change all this. Sir, I won't go into that. Then the fear of public opinion. Do you understand it? What my neighbour will say. A: My image, the national image, yes. K: And I depend on my neighbour. A: Oh yes, necessarily. K: If I am a Catholic living in Italy, I have to depend on my neighbour because I would lose my job if I were a Protestant there. So I accept it. I will go and salute the pope or whatever, it has no meaning. So I am afraid of public opinion. See what a human mind has reduced itself to. I don't mind about public opinion, because that's stupid. They are conditioned, they are frightened as much as I am. So there is that fear. And there is the fear, physical fear of death, which is an immense fear. That fear one has to tackle differently when we come to it, when we talk about death and all that. A: Yes. K: So there is the outward form of fear; fear of darkness, fear of public opinion, fear of losing a job, fear of survival, not being able to survive. Sir, I have lived with people with one meal a day and that's not enough even. I have walked behind a woman with a girl, and the girl said, in India, "Mother, I'm hungry." And the mother says, "You have already eaten for the day." So there is all that, those physical fears, pain, and the fear of recurring pain, and that. And the other fears are much more complicated, fears of dependency, inwardly, I depend on my wife, I depend on my guru, I depend on the priest, I depend on the - so many dependents. And I am afraid to lose them, to be left alone. A: To be rejected. K: To be rejected. If that woman turns away from me I'm lost. I get angry, brutal, violent, jealous, because I have depended on her. So dependency is one of the factors of fear. And inwardly I am afraid. I am afraid of loneliness. The other day I saw on the television a woman saying, the only fear I have in life is my loneliness. And therefore being afraid of loneliness I do all kinds of neurotic activities. Being lonely I attach myself to you or to a belief, or to a saviour, or to a guru. And I protect the guru, the saviour, the belief and that soon becomes neurotic. A: Yes. I fill up the hole with this... K: With this rubbish. There is that fear. And then there is the fear of not being able to arrive, succeed, succeed in this world of disorder, and succeed in the so-called spiritual world. That's what they are all doing now. A: Spiritual achievement. K: Achievement, which they call enlightenment. A: Expanding consciousness. I know what you mean. It's very interesting that you just got through describing fear of being left behind. Now we are fearing that we'll never arrive. K: Arrive. A: Please go on. K: Same thing. Then there is the fear of not being, which translates itself in identification with. I must identify myself. A: In order to be. K: To be. Identify myself with my country, and I say to myself, that's too stupid. Then I say, I must identify myself with god, which I have invented. God has not made man in his image, man has made god in his image. You follow this? A: Oh, I follow you. K: So, not being, not achieving, not arriving, brings about tremendous sense of uncertainty, tremendous sense of not being able to fulfil, not being able to be with, and the cry, "I must be myself." A: Do my own thing. K: Your own thing. Which is rubbish. So there are all these fears, both logical fears, irrational fears, neurotic fears, and fears of survival, physical survival. So now how do you deal with all these fears and, many more fears which we can't go into, which we will presently - how do you deal with them all? One by one? A: Well you just be in the mournful round of fragmentation if you do that. K: And also there are the hidden fears, which are much more active. A: The continual bubbling from below. K: Bubbling up, when I'm not conscious they take over. A: That's right. K: So, how am I to deal first with the obvious fears which we have described? Shall I deal with it one by one, to secure myself? You follow? A: Yes. K: Or, take loneliness and tackle that, come to grips with it, go beyond it and so on. Or is there a way of dealing with fear, not with the branches of it but with the root of it? Because if I take each leaf, each branch it will take all my lifetime. And if I begin to analyze my fears, analyse, then that very analysis becomes a paralysis. A: Yes. And then I even fear that I might not have analyzed correctly. K: Correctly. And I am caught in it over and over again. So how shall I deal with this problem, as a whole, not just parts of it, fragments of it? A: Isn't there a hint about how it might be dealt with. Of course, when I say hint here, I mean terribly, terribly slight. I don't think I would call it a pointer, but fear, no matter how many varieties one imagines he knows, fear does have a common taste, you might say, there is something there K: Yes, sir, but what shall I do with it? A. Oh, yes, of course, I quite understand. But it interested me while you were speaking, to observe that already when we think of many fears we haven't even paid attention to how we feel when we fear. Yes, I was interested to have that flash because it seems to be altogether consonant with what you are talking about. And I said to myself, now in our conversations we've been pointing to movement. The movement of fear is one. K: Yes, a tremendous one. A: And it is a unified field of destruction. K: It is the common factor of everything. A: The whole field, yes, exactly. K: Whether I live, a man lives in Moscow or India, or in any place, it is the common thing of this fear, and how shall we deal with it? Because unless the mind is free of fear, really, not verbally or ideologically, absolutely be free of fear. And it is possible to be free, completely of fear, and I'm not saying this as a theory, but I know it, I've gone into it. A: Actual. K: Actual. Now how shall I deal with this? So I ask myself, what is fear? Not the objects of fear, or the expressions of fear. A: Nor the instant reaction to danger, no. K: What is fear? A: It's an idea in my mind in part. K: What is fear, sir? A: If we had said it's an abiding... K: No, no. Behind the words, behind the descriptions, the explanations, the way out and the way in, and all the rest of it, what is fear? How does it come? A: If I have followed you through our conversations up until now, I'd be inclined to say that it is another expression of the observer's disordered relation to the observed. K: What does that mean? What is what you say. Look, the problem is this - I am only making the problem clearer. We have, man has tried to lop off or prune one fear after the other, through analysis, through escape, through identifying himself with something which he calls courage. Or saying, well I don't care, I rationalize my fears and remain in a state of rationalizing, intellectual, verbal explanation. But the thing is boiling. So what shall I do? What is fear? Unless I find this out, not because you tell me, unless I find it out for myself as I find from myself that I am hungry, nobody has to tell me I am hungry, I have to find this out. A: Yes, now there is a difference here in terms of what you have just said. And in so saying pointing to something, and my earlier reply when you asked me what is fear, I did the usual academic thing - if I have followed you up until now then it seems clear that... Whereas let's forget about the following, let's zero in on it right now and then I must say, not I might say, but I must say that I can't tell anybody else what fear is with respect to what it is I am going to discover in me as such. And all my continual descriptions about it are simply a deflection from my immediate issue which is here. K: Yes. So, I'm not escaping. A: No. K: I'm not rationalizing. I am not analyzing, because analysis is real paralysis. A: Yes indeed. K: When you are confronted with a problem like this merely spinning or analysing, and the fear of not being able to analyze perfectly and therefore go to a professional, who needs also an analysis. So I'm caught. So I will not analyze because I see the absurdity of it. You follow sir. A: Yes I do. K: I won't run. A: No backing off. K: Backing off. A: Flight. K: No explanations, no rationalizations, no analysis. I am faced with this thing. And what is fear? Wait, wait. Leave that. Then there are the unconscious fears of which don't know. They express themselves occasionally when I am alert, when I see the thing coming out of me. A: When I am alert. K: Alert. When I am watching. Or when I'm looking at something this comes up, uninvited. Now, it is important for the mind to be completely free of fear. It's essential, as food is essential. It's essential for the mind to be free of fear. So I see outwardly what we have discussed. Now I say, what is this, what are the hidden fears, can I consciously invite them come to the surface? You follow? A: Yes I do. K: Or, the conscious cannot touch that. You follow? A: Yes, yes, yes I do. K: Conscious can only deal with the things it knows. But it cannot observe the things it doesn't know. A: Or have access to. K: So, what am I to do? Dreams? Dreams are merely continuation of what has happened during the day, they continue in a different form, and so on. We won't go into that for the moment. So how is all that to be awakened and exposed? The racial fears, the fears that society has taught me, the fears that the family has imposed, the neighbour, all those crawling, ugly, brutal things that are hidden, how shall they all come up naturally, and be exposed so that the mind sees them completely? You understand? A: Yes, I do. I was just thinking about what we are doing in relation to what you are saying. Here we are in a university situation where hardly any listening goes on at all, if any. Why? Well, if we were to relate to each other in terms of my sitting back here saying to myself, every time you make a statement, well what do I have to say back, even if my reaction were benign and I say to myself as a professor, I'd say, now that's an interesting concept. Perhaps we could clear that up a little bit, you know. That nonsense - nonsense in terms of what is immediate here. That's what I mean. K: I understand. A: I don't mean demonstrating something on the board. We should never have begun to be together, never started, and yet we might have given ourselves the idea that we were trying very hard to be sincere. Yes I understand. K: I know, I know. A: But fear is at the base of that too, because the professor is thinking to himself... K: ...his position, his... A: He's got his reputation at stake here. He better not keep quiet too long, because someone might get the idea that, either he doesn't understand a thing that is going on, or he doesn't have anything to contribute to what's going on. All of which has nothing to do with anything. K: Absolutely. Please sir, Look, sir, what I have found: the conscious mind, conscious thought cannot invite and expose the hidden fears. It cannot analyse it, because analysis, we said, is inaction, and if there is no escape, I shan't run off to a church, or Jesus, or Buddha, or somebody, or identify myself with some other thing. I have pushed all those aside because I've understood their use, their futility. So I am left with this. This is my baby. So, what shall I do? Some action has to take place. I can't just say, well I've pushed all that aside, I'll just sit. Now just see what happens sir, because I've pushed all this aside through observation, not through resistance, not through violence, because I have negated all those, escape, analysis, running off to something, and all the rest of all that, I have energy, haven't I. The mind has energy now. A: Now it has, yes. Yes it floods up. K: Because I have pushed away all the things that are dissipating energy. A: Energy leaks. K: Therefore I am now this thing. I am confronted with that, confronted with fear. Now, what can I do. Listen to this, sir, what can I do? I can't do anything, because it is I who have created the fear, public opinion, A: Yes, yes. K: Right, so I cannot do a thing about fear. A: Precisely. K: But there is the energy which has been gathered, which has come into being when all dissipation of energy has ended energy. There's energy. A: Yes. Exactly, virtue, right, right, manifested. K: Energy, energy. Now, what happens? This is not some hocus-pocus, some kind of mystical experience. There is actual fear and I have tremendous energy which has come because there is no dissipation of energy. So what takes place? So, wait, wait, A: Oh, I'm waiting, I'm waiting. There was something going through my mind. K: What takes place? So I say, so what has created fear? What has brought it about? Because if I have the energy, you follow, sir, to put that question and find the answer for that question. I've got energy now. I don't know if you are following? A: Yes. K: So, what has brought it about? You, my neighbour, my country, my culture? A: Myself. K: Hm? What has brought it about? A: I've done it. K: Who is I? A: I don't mean 'I' as the fragmented observer off from me. I am thinking what you said earlier about the mind as disordered, which requires to empty itself of the disorder, does it require another mind to do it, yes. K: I'm asking, what has brought this fear into me, into my consciousness? I won't use that word because we'll have to go into that in a different way. What has brought this fear? And I won't leave it till I find it. You understand, sir? Because I've got the energy to do it. I don't depend on anybody, on any book, on any philosopher, nobody. A: Would it be the case that once that energy begins to flood, that the question itself disappears. K: And I'll begin to find the answer. A: Yes. K: I don't put the question. A: No, no K: And I find the answer. A: Right, right. K: Now, what is the answer? A: The answer couldn't be academic, a description of something. K: No, no, no. A: A change has occurred in the being. K: What is the answer to this fact of fear which has been sustained, which has been nourished, which has carried on from generation to generation? So, can the mind observe this fear, the movement of it... A: The movement of it. K: ...not just a piece of fear. A: Or a succession of fears... K: But the movement of this. A: The movement of fear itself. K: Yes, observe it without the thought that has created the observer. I don't know if you follow? A: Oh yes, yes. K: So, can there be observation of this fact, which I've called fear because I have recognized it, the mind has recognized it, because it has had fear before. So through recognition and association it says, this is fear. A: Yes, that never stops. Yes. K: So, can the mind observe without the observer, who is the thinker, observe this fact only? Because the observer, which is thought, the observer as thought has produced this. I don't know - A: Yes, yes. K: So thought has produced this, right? A: Yes, yes. K: I am afraid of my neighbour, what he may say because I want to be respectable. That is part of the thought. Thought has divided the world into America, Russia, India, China and all the rest of it, and that destroys security. That is the result of thought. I am lonely and therefore I act neurotically, which is also the factor of thought. So I see very clearly that thought is responsible for that. Right, right, sir? A: Yes. K: So, what will happen with thought? Thought is responsible for this. It has nourished it, has sustained it, it has encouraged it, it has done everything to sustain it. I am afraid of the pain that I had yesterday happening again tomorrow. Which is the movement of thought. So can thought, which can only function within the field of knowledge, that's its ground, and fear is something new each time. Fear isn't old. A: No, no. K: It is made old when I recognize it. A: Yes, yes. K: But when the process of recognition, which is the association of words and so on, can the mind observe that without the interference of thought? If it does fear is not. A: Right. The thing that was hitting me while I was sitting here intently, the thing that was hitting me was that the moment that occurs, the thought and the fear immediately disappear. K: So, fear then can be put away completely. If I was living as a human being in Russia and they threaten me to be put into prison I would probably be afraid. It is natural self preservation. That's a natural fear like a bus coming rushing towards you, you step aside, you run away from a dangerous animal, that's a natural self protective reaction. But that's not fear. It's a response of intelligence operating saying, for god's sake move away from the rushing bus. But the other factors are factors of thought. A: Exactly. K: So, can thought understand itself and know its place and not project itself? Not control, which is an abomination. If you control thought, who is the controller? Another fragment of thought. A: Of thought. K: It is a circle, a vicious game you are playing with yourself. So can the mind observe without a movement of thought? It will only do that when you have understood the whole movement of fear. Understood that, not analysed, looking at it. It is a living thing, therefore you have to look at it. It is only a dead thing you can dissect and analyse, kick it around. But a living thing you have to watch. A: This is very shocking because in our last conversation, just towards the end we came to the place where we raised the question of someone saying to himself, I think I understand what I have heard, now I am going to try that. And then fear holds up a mirror to itself. K: Of course. A: And one is suddenly ringed about by a world of mirrors. K: You don't say, sir, when you see a dangerous animal, I will think about it. You move. You act. Because there is tremendous destruction waiting there. That is a self protective reaction which is intelligence says, get out. Here we are not using intelligence. And intelligence operates when we have looked at all these fears, the movements of it, the inwardness of it, the subtlety of it, the whole movement. Then out of that comes intelligence and says, I have understood it. A: It's marvelous. Yes, that's very beautiful, very beautiful. We were going to say something about pleasure. K: Ah, that must be dealt with. A: Right, exactly. K: So, sir, look, we said there is the physical fears, and psychological fears, both are interrelated, we can't say, that's one and this is the other. They are all interrelated. And the interrelationship and the understanding of that relationship brings this intelligence which will operate physically. It will say, let's then work together, co-operate together to feed man. You follow, sir? A: Yes. K: Let's not be national, religious, sectarian. What is important is to feed man, to clothe him, to make him live happily. But you see unfortunately we are so disorderly in our ways of life that we have no time for anything else. Our disorder is consuming us. A: It's interesting in relation to tradition, I don't mean to start an entirely new conversation now, but just to see what is immediately suggested, among many other things that would be, but just this one. What we could say about the misuses of tradition would be that we are actually taught what to fear. In our language we have an expression, don't we, that expresses part of this, old wives tales we say, an accumulation of warnings about things that, that are simply imaginary. Not in the creative sense of imagination, and I'm using the word creative there very loosely, very loosely, but fantasia, phantasmagoria, from the little ones' earliest years, gets this stuff with the bottle. And then when we get into adolescence we reflect on these things we have learned and if things go wrong we feel that perhaps it's because we haven't sufficiently grasped what we have been told. And then some young people will say at that point, I'm going to junk the whole thing. But then immediately the loneliness question arises. Yes, yes. K: They can't, sir, it is life, this is life, you can't reject one part and accept the other part. A: Exactly. K: Life means all this. Freedom, order, disorder, communication, relationship, it's the whole thing is living. If we don't understand, sir, I don't want to have anything to do with, then you are not living. You are dying. A: Yes, of course. I wonder how much, I wonder - I keep saying I wonder, and the reason I wonder is because what we have been saying about this movement, as a unified field, is when stated, taken by thought and, you might say put in the refrigerator, and, that's the reality to the person. K: Quite, sir. A: And when we want to look at it, it's one of the ice cubes we break out and have a look. K: That's right, sir. What place has knowledge in the regeneration of man? Look, our knowledge is: you must be separate. You are an American, I am an Hindu, that's our knowledge. Our knowledge is you must rely on your neighbour because he knows, he is respectable. Society is respectability, society is moral, so you accept that. So knowledge has brought about all these factors. And you are telling me suddenly, asking me, what place has that, what place has tradition, what place has the accumulated knowledge of millennia? The accumulated knowledge of science, mathematics, that is essential. But what place has knowledge which I have gathered through experience, through generation after generation of human endeavour, what place has it in the transformation of fear? None, whatsoever. A: None. Clear, clear. K: You see. A: Because of what we reached before that upon the instant that this is grasped, the thought that was operating as a fragment and the fear vanish; and it isn't that something takes its place in succession. K: No nothing takes its place. A: No, nothing takes its place. Nothing takes its place. K: It doesn't mean there is emptiness. A: Oh, no, no, no. But you see it's right there when you start thinking about that as a thought, you get scared. K: That's why it's very important to find out, or to understand the function of knowledge and where knowledge becomes ignorance. We mix the two together. Knowledge is essential, to speak English, driving, and a dozen things, knowledge is essential. But when that knowledge becomes ignorance, when we are trying to understand actually 'what is', the 'what is' is this fear, this disorder, this irresponsibility. To understand it you don't have to have knowledge. All you have to do, is to look. Look outside you, look inside you. And then you see clearly that knowledge is absolutely unnecessary, it has no value in the transformation or the regeneration of man. Because freedom is not born of knowledge; freedom is when all the burdens are not. You don't have to search for freedom. It comes when the other is not. A: It isn't something in place of the horror that was there before. K: Of course not. I think that is enough. A: Yes, yes, I quite follow you. Maybe next time we could carry on into this with pleasure as such, the opposite side of that coin. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 21ST FEBRUARY 1974 7TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'DESIRE' A: Mr Krishnamurti, last time we were speaking you made the remark that fear and pleasure are opposite sides of the same coin. And, as I remember, when we concluded our last conversation we were still talking about fear. And I was thinking perhaps we could move from fear into the discussion of pleasure. But perhaps there is something more about fear that we need still to look into, to explore. K: Sir, I think for most of us, fear has created such misery, so many activities are born of fear, ideologies and gods, that we never seem to be free completely from fear. That's what we were saying. A: That's what we were saying. K: And so freedom from. and freedom, are two different things. Aren't they. A: Yes. K: Freedom from fear, and the feeling of being completely free. A: Would you say that the notion even of freedom for is also a suggestion of conflict. K: Yes. A: Yes, yes, do go ahead. K: Yes. Freedom for, and freedom from, has this contradiction and therefore conflict and therefore battle, violence, struggle. When one understands that rather deeply then one can see the meaning of what it means to be free. Not from or for, but intrinsically, deeply, by itself. Probably it's a nonverbal, non ideational happening. A feeling that all the burden has fallen away from you. Not that you are struggling to throw them away. The burdens don't exist. Conflicts don't exist. As we were saying the other day, relationship then is in total freedom. A: Your word intrinsic interested me. Sometimes I think in our tongue we will use the adverbial preposition 'in'. Would it be possible to say freedom in, or would you not even want to have 'in'. K: Not 'in', no. A: You don't want 'in'. K: For, in, from. A: They are all out. I see, yes, yes, go on. K: So these two principles, pleasure and fear seem to be deeply rooted in us - these two principles of pleasure and fear. I don't think we can understand pleasure without understanding fear. A: I see. I see. K: You can't separate them, really. But for investigating one has to separate. A: Yes, were it not for fear do you think we should ever have thought of pleasure? K: We would never have thought of pleasure. A: We would never have got the notion. K: No. A: I understand. I understand. K: It's like punishment and reward. If there was no punishment at all nobody would talk about reward. A: Yes, yes I see. K: And when we are talking about pleasure I think we think we ought to be clear that we are not condemning pleasure. We are not trying to become puritanical or permissive. We are trying to investigate or examine, explore the whole structure and nature of pleasure, as we did fear. A: As we did fear. K: And to do that properly and deeply the attitude of condemnation or acceptance of pleasure must be set aside. You see, naturally. I mean if I want to investigate something I must be free from my inclinations, prejudices. A: The 'looking forward to' is, I see, beginning to emerge from what you are saying. K: Yes. A: We say we look forward to pleasure, we even ask a person, what is your pleasure. We get nervous in thinking perhaps we won't meet it, Now I take it that what your saying suggests the anticipation of gratification here. Would that be right? K: That's right. Gratification, satisfaction and sense of fulfillment. We will go into all that when we talk about pleasure. But we must be clear from the beginning, I think, that we are not condemning it. The priests throughout the world have condemned it. A: Yes, the notion of freedom is associated with many religious approaches to this. One is free from desire. K: Yes. Sir, one has to bear in mind that we are not justifying it, or sustaining it or condemning it but observing it. To really go into the question of pleasure I think one has to look into desire, first. The more commercial and the usage of things, the more desire grows. You can see it's commercialism, and consumerism. Through propaganda desire is, you know, sustained, is pushed forward, is - what is the word I am looking for - is nourished, expanded. A: Nurtured. K: Nurtured. Inflamed, that's the word, inflamed. A: Inflamed, yes. K: And you see this happening right through the world, now. In India, for example, not that I know India much better than I do America because I've not lived there very long, I go there every year, this desire and this instant fulfillment is beginning to take place. Before in the Brahmanical sense, there was a certain restraint, a certain traditional discipline which says, don't be concerned with the world and things. They are not important. What is important is the discovery of truth, of Brahman, of reality and so on. But now, all that's gone, now desire is being inflamed, buy more. Don't be satisfied with two trousers but have a dozen trousers. This feeling of excitement in possession is stimulated through commercialism, consumerism, and propaganda. A: There's a lot of terror, isn't there, associated with commercialism on the part of those who are purveyors in this, because the pleasure fades off and this requires a stronger stimulus next time. K: That's what the couturiers are doing, every year there is a new fashion, or every six months, or every month or whatever it is. Look, there is this stimulation of desire. It is really quite frightening in a sense, how people are using, are stimulating desire to acquire money, possession, the whole circle of a life that is utterly sophisticated, a life in which there is instant fulfillment of one's desire, and the feeling if you don't fulfil, if you don't act, there is frustration. So all that's involved. A: Would you say, then that the approach to this on the part of what you have described, is on the basis of frustration. Frustration itself is regarded as the proper incentive. K: Yes. A: Yes, I see. Yes. And since frustration itself is a nullity we are trying to suggest that nullity is in itself interested in being filled. Whereas it couldn't be by its nature. K: Like children - don't frustrate them. Let them do what they like. A: Yes. Yes, that reminds me of something years ago in graduate school. I was brought up as a child in England, and in a rather strict way compared with the permissiveness of today. And one of my graduate colleagues told me that he had been brought up by his parents in a totally permissive way. This was at Columbia University. And he looked at me, and he said, I think you were better off, because a least you had some intelligible reference against which to find out who you are, even if what you found out wasn't right, there was something to find out. Whereas I had to do it entirely on my own and I still haven't done it. And he talked about himself as being constantly in the world trying to hide the fact that he was a nervous wreck. We had a long conversation over dinner. K: Sir, I think that before we enter into the complicated field of pleasure, we ought to go into this question of desire. A: Yes, yes. I'd like to do that. K: Desire seems to be a very active and demanding instinct, demanding activity that is going on in us all the time. Sir, what is desire? A: I wonder if I could ask you to relate it to appetite as over against what one would call hunger that is natural. Sometimes I have found a confusion that seems to be a confusion to me, and that's why I am asking you. Someone will get the idea in class, talking about the question of appetite and desire, that if we look to nature, the lion desires to kill the antelope to satisfy his appetite. Whereas it has seemed to me the correct reply to that is, no that's not the case. The lion wants to incorporate the antelope into his own substance. He's not chasing his appetite. K: I think they are both related, appetite and desire. A: Yes. K: Appetite, physical appetite and there is psychological appetite. A: Yes, yes. K: Which is much more complex. Sexual appetite, and the intellectual appetite, a sense of curiosity. A: Even more furious. K: More furious, that's right. So I think both desire and appetite are stimulated by commercialism, by consumerism which is the present civilization actively operating in the world at the present time - both in Russia, everywhere, this consumerism has to be fulfilled. A: Right. We talk about planned obsolescence. K: Planned obsolescence. Quite. A: You have that in mind, yes I see. K: So, what is appetite and what is desire? I have an appetite because I am hungry. It's a natural appetite. I see a car and I have read a great deal about it and I would like to possess it, drive it feel the power of it, going fast, the excitement of all that. That is another form of appetite. A: Yes. K: Appetite, intellectual appetite of discussing with a clever intelligent, observing man or woman, to discuss, to stimulate each other in discussion. A: Yes. K: And comparing each other's knowledge, a kind of subtle fight. A: Making points. K: That's right. And that is very stimulating. A: Oh yes, oh yes it is. K: And there is the appetite, sexual appetite, the sexual appetite of constantly thinking about it, chewing the cud. All that, both psychological, and physical appetite, normal, abnormal. The feeling of fulfillment and frustration. All that's involved in appetite. And I'm not sure whether religions, organized religions and beliefs, whether they will not stimulate the peculiar appetite for rituals. A: I have the notion they do. It seems to me that despite pious protestations, there is a theatrical display that occurs in this. K: Go to a Roman Catholic Mass, and you see the beauty of it, the beauty of colour, the beauty of the setting, the whole structure is marvelously theatrical and beautiful. A: And for the moment it appears that we have heaven on earth. K: Tremendously stimulating. A: But then we have to go out again. K: Of course. And it's all stimulated through tradition, through usage of words, chants, certain association of words, symbols, images, flowers, incense, all that is very, very stimulating. A: Yes. K: And if one is used to that one misses it. A: Oh yes. I was thinking as you were saying about, at least to my ear how extraordinarily beautiful a language is Sanskrit, and the chanting of the Gita, and the swaying back and forth and then one sits down to study what the words say, and one says to himself, now look, what on earth is going on when we are doing this as over against what the word itself could disclose. But the seduction that is available, of course its self seduction, one can't blame the language for being beautiful, it's a self. And all this is encouraged. And the notion I take it that you are suggesting that we look at here, is that there's a tremendously invested interest in keeping this up. K: Of course. Commercially it is. And if it is not sustained by the priests then the whole thing will collapse. So is this a battle to hold the human being in his appetites - which is really very frightening when you look at it. Frightening in the sense, rather disgusting in one way, exploiting people and intrinsically destructive to the human mind. A: Yes. Yes. I've had this problem in teaching, in my classes, in terms of my own discussion in class. Sometimes, it has seemed that maybe the first stanza of a poem that I would have known by heart would be appropriate. And so I'll begin to recite it and when I get to the end of it the expectation has arisen, the ears are there, the bodies are leaning forward and I have to stop, you see, and I have to say, well you see we can't go on, because you are not listening to what I am saying, you are listening to how it is being said. And if I read it terribly you would no more listen to what it is. Your disgust would dominate just as the pleasure is dominating now. And the students have got after me for not reciting more poetry. You see that you would be upset with that is a perfect sign that you haven't started to do your work in class yet. And then we are up against the problem that they think I am being ascetical, and denying the goodies. That's part of what you mean. K: Yes, of course. A: Good, good. I'm glad you cleared that for me. K: And there is this desire, appetite, we have a little bit gone into it, what is desire? Because I see something and immediately I must have it, a gown, a coat, a tie, the feeling of possession, the urge to acquire, the urge to experience, the urge of an act that will give me tremendous satisfaction. The satisfaction might be the acquisition, acquiring a tie, or a coat, or sleeping with a woman, or acquiring. Now behind that, isn't there, sir, this desire. I might desire a house and another might desire a car, another might desire to have intellectual knowledge. Another might desire god, or enlightenment. They are all the same. The objects vary, but the desire is the same. One I call the noble; the other I call the ignoble, worldly, stupid. But the desire behind it. So what is desire? How does it come about that this very strong desire is born, is cultured? You follow? What is desire? How does it take place in each one of us? A: If I've understood you, you've made a distinction between on the one hand appetite associated with natural hunger, that sort of desire, and now we are talking about desire which sometimes gets the name artificial. I don't know whether you would want to call it that. K: Desire. I might desire, but the objects vary, sir, don't they. A: Yes, the objects vary. K: The objects of desire vary according to each individual, each tendency and idiosyncracy or conditioning and so on. Desire for that and that, and that. But I want to find out, what is desire? How does it come about? I think it's fairly clear, that. You see sir... A: You mean a sense of absence? K: No, no. I am asking what is desire? How does it come? A: One would have to ask himself. K: Yes, I'm asking, I'm asking you, how does it come about that there is this strong desire for, or against desire itself. I think it's clear: perception, visual perception, then there is sensation, then there is contact, and desire comes out of it. That's the process isn't it? A: Oh, yes, I'm quite clear now what you are saying. I've been listening very hard. K: Perception, contact, sensation, desire. A: And then if the desire is frustrated, anger. K: All the rest of it, violence. A: The whole thing goes down the line. K: All the rest of it follows. A: Follows, yes. K: So desire. So the religious people, monks, throughout the world said, be without desire. Control desire. ~Suppress desire. Or if you cannot, transfer it to something that's worthwhile - God, or enlightenment or truth or this or that. A: But then that's just another form of desire, not to desire. K: Of course. A: So we never get out of that. K: Yes, but you see they said, control. A: Power is brought into play. K: Control desire. Because you need energy to serve God and if you are caught in desire you are caught in a tribulation, in trouble, which will dissipate your energy. Therefore hold it, control it, suppress it. You have seen it sir, I have seen it so often in Rome, the priests are walking along with the Bible and they aren't look at anything else, they keep on reading it because they are attracted, it doesn't matter, to a woman, or a nice house or a nice cloak, so keep looking at it, never expose yourself to tribulation, to temptation. So hold it because you need your energy to serve God. So desire comes about through perceptions, visual perception, contact, sensation, desire. That's the process of it. A: Yes. And then there's the whole backlog of memory of that in the past to reinforce it. K: Of course, yes. A: Yes. I was taken with what you just said. Here's this book, that's already outside me, it's really no more than what they put on horses when they are in a race. K: Blinkers! A: Blinkers. K: The Bible becomes blinkers! A: Yes, the blinking Bible. Yes, I follow that. But the thing that caught me was, never, never quietly looking at it. K: That's it sir. A: The desire itself. K: I walked once behind a group of monks, in India. And they were very serious monks. The elderly monk, with his disciples around him, they were walking up a hill and I followed them. They never once looked at the beauty of the sky, the blue, the extraordinary blue of the sky and the mountains, and the blue light of the grass and the trees and the birds and the water - never once looked around. They were concerned and they had bent their head down and they were repeating something, which I happen to know in Sanskrit, and going along totally unaware of nature, totally unaware of the passers-by. Because their whole life has been spent in controlling desire and concentrating on what they thought is the way to reality. So desire there acted as a suppressive limiting process. A: Of course, of course. K: Because they are frightened. If I look there might be a woman, I might be tempted, and cut it. So we see what desire is and we see what appetite is; they are similar. A: Yes. Would you say appetite was a specific focus of desire? K: Yes, put it that way if you want. A: All right K: But we are both go together. A: Oh yes K: They are two different words for the same thing. Now the problem arises, need there be a control of desire at all? You follow, sir? A: Yes, I'm asking myself, because in our conversations I've learned that every time you ask a question, if I take that question and construe it in terms of a sylogistical relation to things that have been stated as premises before, I am certainly not going to come to the answer, that is not the right answer as over against the wrong answer, I'm not going to come to the one answer that is needful. So that every time you've asked me this morning, I have asked myself inside. Yes, please go ahead. K: Sir, you see, discipline is a form of suppression and control of desire - religious, sectarian, nonsectarian, it's all based on that, control. Control your appetite. Control your desires. Control your thought. And this control gradually squeezes out the flow of free energy. A: Oh, yes. And yet, amazingly he Upanishads in particular have been interpreted in terms of tapas, as encouraging this control. K: I know, I know. In India it is something fantastic, the monks who have come to see me, they are called sannyasis, they have come to see me. They are incredible. I mean, if I can tell you a monk who came to see me some years ago, quite a young man, he left his house and home at the age of 15 to find God. And he had renounced everything. Put on the robe. And as he began to grow older at 18, 19, 20 sexual appetite was something burning. He explained to me how it became intense. He had taken a vow of celibacy, as sannyasis do, monks do. And he said, day after day in my dreams, in my walk, in my going to a house and begging, this thing was becoming so like a fire. You know what he did to control it? A: No, no what did he do? K: He had it operated. A: Oh for heaven's sake. Is that a fact? K: Sir, his urge for God was so - you follow, sir? The idea, the idea, not the reality. A: Not the reality. K: So he came to see me, he had heard several talks which I had given in that place. He came to see me in tears. He said, what have I done? You follow, sir? A: Oh, I'm sure. Yes. K: What have I done to myself? I cannot repair it. I cannot grow a new organ. It is finished. That's the extreme. But all control is in that direction. I don't know if I am? A: Yes, his is terribly dramatic. The one who is sometimes called the first Christian theologian, Origen, castrated himself out of, as I understand it, misunderstanding the words of Jesus, "If your hand offends you cut it off". K: Sir, authority to me is criminal in this direction. It doesn't matter who says it. A: And like the monk that you just described, Origen came later to repent of this in terms of seeing that it had nothing to do anything. A terrible thing. Was this monk, if I may ask, also saying to you in his tears, that he was absolutely no better off in any way shape or form? K: No, on the contrary, sir, he said, I've committed a sin. I've committed an evil act. A: Yes, yes, of course. K: He realized what he had done. That through that way there is nothing. A: Nothing. K: I've met so many, not such extreme forms of control and denial, but others. They have tortured themselves for an idea. You follow, sir? For a symbol, for a concept. And we have sat with them and discussed with them, and they begin to see what they have to themselves. I met a man who is high up in bureaucracy and one morning he woke up and he said, I'm passing judgment in court over others, punishment, and I seem to say to them I know truth, you don't you are finished. So one morning he woke up and he said, this is all wrong. I must find out what truth is, so he resigned, left and went away for 25 years to find out what truth is. Sir, these people are dreadfully serious, you understand. A: Oh yes. K: They are not like cheap repeaters of some mantra, and such rubbish. So somebody brought him to the talks I was giving. He came to see me the next day. He said you are perfectly right. I have been meditating on truth for 25 years. And it has been self hypnosis, as you pointed out. I've been caught in my own verbal, intellectual formula, structure. And I haven't been able to get out of it. You understand, sir? A: 25 years. That's a very moving story. K: And to admit that he was wrong needs courage, needs perception. A: Exactly. K: Not courage, perception. So, now seeing all this, sir, the permissiveness on one side, the reaction to Victorian way of life, the reaction to the world with all its absurdities, trivialities and banality, all that absurdity and the reaction to that is to renounce it. To say, well I won't touch it. But desire is burning all the same, all the glands are working. You can't cut out your glands. So therefore they say, control, therefore they say, don't be attracted to a woman, don't look at the sky, because the sky is so marvelously beautiful and beauty then may become the beauty of a woman, the beauty of a house, the beauty of a chair in which you can sit comfortably. So don't look. Control it. You follow, sir? A: I do. K: The permissiveness, the reaction to restraint, control the pursuit of an idea as God, and for that control desire. And I met a man again he left his house at the age of 20. He was really quite an extraordinary chap. He was 75 when he came to see me. He had left home at the age of 20, renounced everything, all that, and went from teacher to teacher to teacher. He went to, I won't mention names because that wouldn't be right, and he came to me, talked to me. He said, I went to all these people asking if they could help me find God. I've spent from the age of 20 till I'm 75, wandering all over India. I'm a very serious man and not one of them has told me the truth. I've been to the most famous, to the most socially active, the people who talk endlessly about God. After all these years I returned to my house and found nothing. And you come along, he said, you come along you never talk about God. You never talk about the path to God. You talk about perception. The seeing 'what is' and going beyond it. The beyond is the real, not the 'what is'. You understand. He was 75. A: Yes, 55 years on the road. K: They don't do that in Europe, on the road. He was literally on the road. A: Yes. I'm sure he was. Because you said he was in India. K: Begging from village, to village to village. When he told me I was so moved, tears almost - to spend a whole lifetime, as they do in business world... A: Yes K: ...50 years to go day after day to the office and die at the end of it. It is the same thing. A: The same thing. K: Fulfilling of desire, money, money, money, more things, things, things; and the other, none of that but another substitute for that. A: Yes, just another form. K: So looking at all this sir, it is dreadful what human beings have done to themselves and to others, seeing all that one inevitably asks the question, how to live with desire? You can't help it, desire is there. The moment I see something, a beautiful flower, the admiration, the love of it, the smell of it, the beauty of the petal, the quality of the flower and so on, the enjoyment, one asks, is it possible to live without any control whatsoever? A: The very question is terrifying in the context of these disorders that you are speaking about. I am taking the part now of the perspective that one is in, when out of frustration he comes to you, let us say, like the man did after 55 years on the road, the minute he walks in the door, he has come to get something he doesn't already have. K: Obviously. A: And as soon as you make that statement, if the answer that is coming up he starts 'if-ing' right now, if the answer is going to be something that completely negates this whole investment of 55 years on the road, it seems that most persons are going to freeze right there. K: And it is a cruel thing too, sir. He has spent 55 years at it, and suddenly realizes what he has done. The cruelty of deception. You follow? A: Oh, yes. K: Self deception, deception of tradition, you follow, of all the teachers who have said, control, control, control. And he comes and you say to him, what place has control? A: I think I am beginning to get a very keen sense of why you say go into it. Because there is a place there like dropping a stitch we might say. He doesn't get past that initial shock, then he is not going to go into it. K: So we talked, I spent hours, we discussed, we went into it. Gradually he saw. He said, quite right. So, sir, unless we understand the nature and the structure of appetite and desire, which are more or less the same, we cannot understand very deeply pleasure. A: Yes, yes. I see why you have been good enough to lay this foundation before we get to the opposite side of the coin. K: Because pleasure and fear are the two principles that are active in most human beings, all human beings. And it is reward and punishment. Don't bring up a child through punishment but reward him. You know the psychologists are advocating some of this. A: Oh yes. They are encouraged by the experiments on Pavlov's dogs. K: Dogs, or peoples or ducks, geese. Do this and don't do that. So unless we understand fear, understand in the sense, investigate, see the truth of it and if the mind is capable of going beyond it, to be totally free of fear, as we discussed it the other day; and also to understand the nature of pleasure. Because pleasure is an extraordinary thing, and to see a beautiful thing to enjoy it - what is wrong with it? A: Nothing. K: Nothing. A: Nothing. K: See what is involved in it. A: Right. The mind plays a trick there. I say to myself, I can't find anything wrong with it, therefore nothing is wrong with it. I don't really believe that necessarily. And I was thinking a little while ago when you were speaking about the attempts through power to negate desire, through power. K: Because search for power, negating desire is search for power. A: Would you be saying that one searches for power in order to secure a pleasure that has not yet been realized? K: Yes, yes. A: I understood you well then? K: Yes. A: I see. It's a terrible thing. K: But is a reality. A: Oh, it's going on. K: It's going on. A: Oh, yes. But we are taught that from children. K: That's just it, sir. So, pick up any magazine, the advertisements, the half naked ladies, women and so on, and so on. So pleasure is a very active principle in man as fear. A: Oh yes. K: And again society, which is immoral, has said, control. One side, the religious side says, control and commercialism says, don't control, enjoy, buy, sell. You follow? And the human mind, says this is all right. My own instinct is to have pleasure I'll go after it. But Saturday, or Sunday or Monday or whatever the day it is I'll give it to God. You follow, sir? A: Yes. K: And this game goes on, forever it has been going on. So what is pleasure? You follow sir? Why should pleasure be controlled; why should, I'm not saying it's right or wrong, please let's be very clear from the beginning that we are not condemning pleasure. We are not saying you must give reign to it, let it run. Or that it must be suppressed, or justified. We are trying to understand why pleasure has become of such extraordinary importance in life. Pleasure of enlightenment. You follow, sir? Pleasure of sex. Pleasure of possession. Pleasure of knowledge. Pleasure of power. A: Heaven which is regarded as the ultimate pleasure... K: The ultimate, of course. A: ...is usually spoken of theologically as the future state. K: Yes. A: This is to me very interesting in terms of what you have been saying and even at the level of gospel songs we hear, "When the Roll is called up Yonder I'll be there". When it's called up yonder, which means at the end of the line. And then there's the terror that I won't be good enough when... K: When. A: Yes, so I'm tightening up my belt to pay my heavenly insurance policy on Saturday and Sunday, the two days of the weekend that you mentioned. What if you got caught from Monday through Friday. Yes. K: So pleasure, enjoyment and joy. Follow, sir? There are three things involved. A: Three things. K: Pleasure. A: Pleasure K: Enjoyment and joy. A: Joy. K: Happiness. You see joy is happiness, ecstasy, the delight, the sense of tremendous enjoyment. And what is the relationship of pleasure to enjoyment and to joy and happiness? A: Yes, we have been moving a long way from fear. K: Fear, that's right. A: Yes, but I don't mean moving away... K: No, no. A: ...by turning our back on it. K: No, we have gone into it, we see the movement from that to this, it's not away from it, pleasure. There is a delight in seeing something very beautiful. Delight. If you are at all sensitive, if you are at all observant, if there is a feeling of relationship to nature, which very few people unfortunately have, they stimulate it, but the actual relationship to nature, that is when you see something really marvelously beautiful, like a mountain with all its shadows valleys and the line and, you know it's something, a tremendous delight. Now see what happens: at that moment there is nothing but that. That is, beauty of the mountain, lake or the single tree on a hill, that beauty has knocked everything out of me. A: Oh yes. K: And at that moment there is no division between me and that. There is sense of great purity and enjoyment. A: Exactly. K: See what takes place. A: I see we've reached a point where we are going to take a new step, I feel it coming on. It's amazing how this thing has moved so inevitably but not unjoyfully. Not unjoyfully. In our next conversation I would just love to pursue this. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 21ST FEBRUARY 1974 8TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'PLEASURE' A: Mr Krishnamurti, I was wonderfully overjoyed in our last conversation, for myself, just as one who was trying and listening to you to learn something of this inwardness, to follow along the passage that we had made from fear through the points as we moved, until we came to pleasure. And as we left off we were still talking of pleasure and I hope we can begin now to move along. K: Yes, sir, we were saying, weren't we, pleasure, enjoyment, delight and joy and happiness, and what relationship has pleasure with enjoyment, and with joy and with happiness? Is pleasure joy. Is pleasure happiness? Is pleasure enjoyment. Or is pleasure something entirely different from those two? A: In English we think we make a distinction between pleasure, and joy without necessarily knowing what we mean. But in our use, in our employment of the words we will discriminate sometimes, we think it odd to use the word pleasure rather than joy when we think that joy is appropriate. The relation between the word please and pleasure interests me very much. We will say to a person, please sit down. And usually that will be thought of as... K: Have the pleasure to sit down. A: Yes. It's not a request. K: Please yourself to sit down. A: It's an invitation, not a request. K: Not a request. A: Be pleased to sit down. K: Be pleased to sit down. A: It's, be pleased to be seated. K: Yes. In Italian, French, so on. A: Right. So within pleasure itself, the word pleasure, there's the intimation of joy, intimation of it that is not strictly reduced to the word. K: I would like to question whether pleasure has any relationship with joy. A: Not in itself, I take it you mean. K: Or even beyond the word. Is there a line or continuity of pleasure to joy? Is there a connecting link? Because what is pleasure? I take pleasure in eating, I take pleasure in walking. I take pleasure in accumulating money. I take pleasure in - I don't know a dozen things, sex, hurting people, sadistic instincts, violence. They are all forms of pleasure. I enjoy - I won't use the word enjoy - I take pleasure in and pursue that pleasure. One wants to hurt people. And that gives great pleasure. One wants to have power. It whether doesn't matter over the cook or over the wife, or a thousand people, it is the same. The pleasure in something which is sustained, nourished, kept going. And this pleasure, when it is distorted becomes violence, anger, jealousy, fury, wanting to break, all kinds of neurotic activities and so on, so on, so on. So what is pleasure and what is it that keeps it going? What is the pursuit of it, the constant direction of it? A: I think something in our first or second conversation, I think it was the first, is intimated here when we talked about the built in necessity that one observes in a progress that is never consummated. It's just nothing but a termination and then a new start. But no consummation at all, no totality, no fulfillment -feeling full is what I mean by that. K: Yes, I understand, sir. But what is it that's called pleasure. I see something, something which I enjoy and I want it. Pleasure. Pleasure in possession. Take that simple thing which the child, the grown up man, and the priest, they all have this feeling of pleasure in possession. A toy or a house or possessing knowledge or possessing the idea of God, or the pleasure the dictators have, the totalitarian brutalities. The pleasure. What is that pleasure. To make it very, very simple: what is that pleasure? Look, sir what happens: there is a single tree on the hill, green meadow, deer and there is the single tree standing on the hill. You see that and you say, how marvellous. Not verbally, you merely say, how marvellous, to communicate to somebody. But when you are by yourself and see that it is really astonishingly beautiful. The whole movement of the earth, the flowers, the deer, the meadows and the water and the single tree, the shadow. You see that. And it's almost breathtaking. And you turn away and go away. Then thought says, how extraordinary it was. A: Compared with what now is. K: How extraordinary. A: Extraordinary. K: I must have it again. I must get that same feeling which I had then, for two seconds or five minutes. So thought - see what has taken place - there was immediate response to that beauty, nonverbal, non-emotional, non-sentimental, non-romantic, then thought comes along and says, how extraordinary, what a delight that was. And then the melody of it, the repetition, the demand, the desire for the repetition. A: When we go to performances this is what happens, we call it the encore, don't we. K: Of course. A: And with encores there's a creeping embarrassment. Because with the first reappearance this is a sign of adulation praise and everybody is happy. But then, of course, there's the problem of how many more encores can be made, maybe the last encore is a signal that we are fed up now. We don't need, we don't want any more. K: Quite, quite. A: Yes, yes, I understand. I think I am following you. K: So thought gives nourishment, sustains it and gives a direction to pleasure. There was no pleasure at the moment of perception, of that tree, the hill, the shadows, the deer, the water, the meadow. The whole thing was real non-verbal, non-romantic, and so on, perception. It has nothing to do with me or you, it was there. Then thought comes around and says memory of it, the continuing of that memory tomorrow and the demand for that, and the pursuit of that. And when I come back to it tomorrow it is not the same. I feel a little bit shocked. I say, I was inspired, I must find a means of getting again inspired therefore I take a drink, women, this or that. You follow? A: Yes, yes. Do you think, in the history of culture, the establishment of festivals would be related to what you say? K: Of course of course. It's the whole thing, sir. A: We live for, well in English we have this saying, to live it up. The rest of the time we are living it down. K: Down, yes, Mardi Gras, the whole business of it. So there it is. I see that. See what takes place, sir. Pleasure is sustained by thought - sexual pleasure, the image, the thinking of it, all that, and the repetition of it. And the pleasure of it and so on, keep on, keep on, routine. Now, in relationship, what is the place of pleasure, or relationship to the delight of the moment, not even the delight, it is something inexpressible. So is there any relationship between pleasure and enjoyment? Enjoyment becomes pleasure when thought says, I have enjoyed it, I must have more of it. A: It's actually a falling out of joy. K: Yes. That's it, you see, sir. So pleasure has no relationship to ecstasy, to delight, to enjoyment, or to joy and happiness. Because pleasure is the movement of thought in a direction. It doesn't matter what direction but in a direction. The others have no direction. Pleasure, enjoyment, you enjoy. Joy is something you cannot invite. Happiness you cannot invite. It happens and you do not know if you are happy at that moment. It is only the next moment you say, how happy, how marvellous that was. So see what takes place, can the mind, the brain register the beauty of that hill, the tree, the water the meadows and end it? Not say, I want it again. A: Yes. This would take us back to what you just said now, it would take us back to that word negation that we spoke of before, because there has to be a moment when we are about to fall out, we are about to fall out and what you are saying is the moment 'that about to fall out' appears something must be done. K: You will see it in a minute, sir, you will see what an extraordinary thing takes place. I see pleasure, enjoyment, joy and happiness, see pleasure as not related to any of that, the other two, joy and enjoyment. So thought gives direction and sustains pleasure. Right? Now I ask myself, the mind asks can there be non-interference of thought, non-interference of thought in pleasure? I enjoy. Why should thought come into it at all? A: There's no reason at all. K: But it does. A: It does, it does. K: Therefore the question arises how is the mind, the brain to stop thought entering into that enjoyment? You follow? A: Yes. K: Not to interfere. Therefore they said, the ancients, and the religious, control thought. You follow? Don't let it creep in. Therefore control it. A: The minute it raises its ugly head, whack it off. It's like a hydra. K: It keeps on growing. Now, is it possible to enjoy, to take a delight in that lovely scene, and not let thought creep in? Is this possible? I'll show you, it is possible, completely possible if you are attentive at that moment, completely attentive. You follow sir? A: Which has nothing to do with screwing oneself up with muscular effort to focus in there. K: Right. Just be wholly there. When you see the sunset see it completely. When you see a beautiful line of a car, see it. And don't let this thought begin. That means at that moment be supremely attentive, completely, with your mind, with your body, with your nerves, with your eyes, ears, everything attentive. Then thought doesn't come into it at all. So pleasure is related to thought and thought in itself brings about fragmentation, pleasure and not pleasure. Therefore I haven't pleasure, I must pursue pleasure. A: It makes a judgment. K: Judgment. A: A judgment. K: Judgment. And the feeling of frustration, anger, violence -you follow, all that come into it. There is the denial of pleasure, which is what the religious people have done. They are very violent people. They have said no pleasure. A: The irony of this is overwhelming. In classical thought you have that marvellous monument, the works of St. Thomas Aquinas who never tires of saying in his examination of thought, and the recognition of the judgment that one must distinguish in order to unite. His motive was very different from what seems to have been read. Because we have managed to distinguish, but we never see the thing whole and get to the uniting, so the uniting just vanishes. K: That's the whole point, sir. So unless I understand, unless the mind understands the nature of thinking, really very, very deeply, mere control means nothing. Personally I have never controlled a thing. This may sound rather absurd. But it is a fact. A: Marvellous. K: Never. But I've watched it. The watching is its own discipline and its own action. Discipline in the sense, not conformity, not suppression, not adjusting yourself to a pattern but the sense of correctness, the sense of excellence. When you see something why should you control? Why should you control when you see a poisonous bottle on the shelf? You don't control. You say, that's quite right, you don't drink. You don't touch it. It's only when I don't read the sign properly, when I see it and when I think it is a sweet then I take it. But if I read the label, if I know what it is I won't touch it. There's no control. A: Of course not. It's self evident. I'm thinking of that wonderful story in the Gospel about Peter who in the storm gets out to walk on the water because he sees his lord coming on the water and he's invited to walk on the water. And he actually makes it a few steps and then it says he loses faith. But it seems to me that one could see that in terms of what you are saying, at the point where thought took over he started going down. That was the time when he started going down. But he was actually walking. The reason that I am referring to that is because I sense in what you are saying that there is something that supports, there is a support that's not a support that's fragmented from something else but there is an abiding something which must be sustaining the person. K: I wouldn't put it that way, sir. That is, that leaves a door open, that opens a door to the idea in you there is God. A: Yes, yes I see the trap. K: In you there is the higher self, in you there is the Atman, the permanent. A: Maybe we shouldn't say anything about that. K: That's it. No, but we can say this though: to see - look what we have done this morning - to see appetite, desire, to see the implications, the structure of pleasure, and there is no relation to enjoyment, and to joy, to see all that, to see it, not verbally but actually, through observation, through attention, through care, through very careful seeing, that brings an extraordinary quality of intelligence. After all intelligence is sensitivity. To be utterly sensitive in seeing it - if you call that intelligence, the higher self, or whatever, it has no meaning. You follow? A: It's as though you are saying at that instant it's released. K: Yes. That intelligence comes in observation. A: Yes. K: And that intelligence is operating all the time if you allow it -not if you allow it. If you are seeing. And I see, I have seen all my life, people who have controlled, people who have denied, people who have negated, and who have sacrificed, who have controlled, suppressed, furiously, disciplined themselves, tortured themselves. And I say, for what? For God? For truth? A mind that has been tortured, crooked, brutalized, can such a mind see truth? Certainly not. You need a completely healthy mind, a mind that is whole, a mind that is holy in itself. Otherwise go and see something holy, unless the mind is sacred, you cannot see what is sacred. So, I say, sorry, I won't touch any of that. It has no meaning. So, I don't know how this happened that I never for a second control myself. I don't know what it means. A: And yet, amazingly you know what it is in others. K: Oh, obviously, you can see it. A: So this is something that you are able to see without having... K:...gone through it. A: Without having gone through it. Now this to me is profoundly mysterious. I don't mean in the sense of mystification. K: No, no. A: But I mean it's miraculous. K: No, not necessarily, sir. I'll show you something, sir. Must I get drunk in order to find out what it is to be sober? A: Oh no, no, no. K: Because I see a man who is drunk, I say, for god's sake, see the whole movement of drunkenness, what lies behind it, what he goes through, see it, finished. A: But it seems to me that in my listening to you that you are doing more than just observing that someone over there has fallen on his face therefore... K: No, no. A: Right, there's something that is very deep here. K: Of course. A: At least to me, that you've said. Control, in the very, very deep sense is an activity, not a product, and something that you haven't experienced that we would call normally intangible is nevertheless acutely present to you. K: Yes, yes. A: And I take it that what you've said that intelligence reveals that. Intelligence, if intelligence is allowed to reveal it. K: I think, sir, not allowed. That's a danger, to allow intelligence to operate. Which means you have intelligence then you allow it. A: Yes, I see the trap of that construction. Yes, yes, I see what you mean. Yes, because now we've got an observer who's got a new gimmick. Yes, I see what you mean. Please go on, please. K: So, you see that's why discipline has a different meaning. When you understand pleasure, when you understand its relationship to enjoyment and to the joy and happiness and the beauty of happiness, beauty of joy and so on, then you understand the utter necessity of a different kind of discipline that comes naturally. After all, sir, look at the word discipline in itself means to learn. To learn, not to conform, not to say, I must discipline myself to be like that, or not to be like that. The word discipline, as we both see, is to learn. To learn means I must be capable of hearing, of seeing, which means the capacity which is not cultivable. You can cultivate a capacity, but that is not the same as the act of listening. I don't know if I'm... A: Oh, you are. Yes I follow, very clearly. K: The capacity to learn demands a certain discipline. I must concentrate, I must give my time to it. I must set aside my efforts in a certain direction and all that. That is, developing a certain capacity needs time. A: Yes. K: But perception is nothing to do with time. You see it, and act, as you do when you see a danger. You act instantly. You act instantly because you are so conditioned to danger. A: Exactly. K: That conditioning is not intelligence. You are just conditioned. You see a snake and you recoil. You run away. You see a dangerous animal and you run. That's all self protective conditioned responses. That's very simple. But perception and action is not conditioned. A: You know, we have in the history of the English language turned that word fear upside down in terms of its derivation because, if I remember correctly, it, fear comes from the Anglosaxon word that means danger. That means danger. K: Danger, of course. A: And now we've psychologized that word and now a fear means rather my emotional response to that danger. K: Of course, of course. A: And not what I want to be doing. K: Yes, not aware of the danger of fear, you follow? A: Yes. K: That means sir look: ordinary human beings are conditioned now as they are to, by the culture, by the civilization they are living in. They accept nationalism, say for instance, I am taking that for example, they accept nationalism, the flag, and all the rest of it, nationalism is one of the causes of war. A: Oh yes, yes, indubitably. K: As patriotism and all the rest of it. Now we don't see the danger of nationalism because we are conditioned to nationalism as being secure, security. A: But we do see our fear of the enemy. K: Of course, A: Yes, right. And contemplating that fear of the enemy dulls our capacity to deal with the danger. K: Danger. So, fear, pleasure, and discipline, you follow sir. Discipline means to learn; I am learning about pleasure. The mind is learning about pleasure. Learning brings its own order. A: Its own. K: It's own order. A: Yes. That's what l've been calling miracle. It just asks you to jolly well leave it alone. K: It brings its own order, and that order says, don't be silly, control is out, finished. I talked to a monk once. He came to see me. He had a great many followers. And he was very well known. He is still very well known. And he said, I have taught my disciples, and he was very proud of having thousands of disciples, you follow? And it seemed rather absurd for a guru, to be proud. A: He was a success. K: Success. And success means Cadillacs or Rolls Royces, European, American followers, you follow, all that circus that goes on. A: His gimmick works. K: And he was saying, I have arrived because I have learned to control my senses, my body, my thoughts, my desires. I've held them as the Gita says: hold something, you are reigning, you are riding horse, you know, holding. He went on about it for some length, I said sir, what at the end of it? You have controlled. Where are you at the end of it: He said, what are you asking, I have arrived. Arrived at what? I have achieved enlightenment. Just listen to it. Follow, follow the sequence of a human being who has a direction, which he calls truth. And to achieve that there are the traditional steps, the traditional path, the traditional approach. And he has done it. And therefore he says, I have got it. I have got it in my hand. I know what it is. I said, all right sir. He began to be very excited about it because he wanted to convince me about being a big man and all that. So I suggested we sat, I sat very quietly and listened to him and he quietened down. And then I said to him, we were sitting by the sea, and I said to him, you see that sea, sir. He said, of course. Can you hold that water in your hand? When you hold that water in you hand it's no longer the sea. A: Right. K: He couldn't make out. I said, all right. And the wind was blowing from the north, slight breeze, cool. And he said, there is a breeze. Can you hold all that? No. Can you hold the earth? No. So what are you holding? Words? You know sir, he was so angry he said I won't listen to you any more. You are an evil man. And walked off. A: I was thinking of the absurd irony of that. All the time he thought he was holding on to himself and he just let go as he got up and walked away. K: So you sir, that's what I am saying. So learning about pleasure about fear, really frees you from the tortures of fear and the pursuit of pleasure. So there is a sense of real enjoyment in life. Everything then becomes a great joy, you follow, sir. It isn't just a monotonous routine, going to the office, sex and money. A: I've always thought it's a great misfortune that in that splendid rhetoric of our Declaration of Independence, we have that phrase, the pursuit of pleasure. K: Pursuit of pleasure. A: Because the child, the bright child is reared on that. K: Oh, rather, sir. A: And when you are very young you are not about to turn around and say, everybody's daft. K: I know, I know. So from this you see, discipline in the orthodox sense has no place in a mind that's really wanting to learn about truth - not philosophize about truth, not theorize about truth, as you say, tie ribbons round it, but learn about it. Learn about pleasure. It is really out of that learning comes the extraordinary sense of order which we were talking of the other day. The order which comes with the observation in oneself of pleasure. The order. And there is pleasure - there is enjoyment. A marvellous sense of ending each enjoyment as you live each moment. You don't carry over the past enjoyment. Then that becomes pleasure. Then it has no meaning. Repetition of pleasure is monotony, is boredom. And they are bored in this country, and other countries. They are fed up with pleasure. But they want other pleasures in other directions. And that is why there is the proliferation of gurus in this country. Because they all want, you know, the circus kept going. So discipline is order. And discipline means to learn about pleasure, enjoyment, joy and the beauty of joy. When you learn, it is always new. A: I've just thought - well thought is not the right word -something flashed in the communication of what you have been pointing to, if you don't mind I'd rather say that you've been pointing to than to use the phrase that, you've been saying, I hope I've understood you correctly here because in terms of the communication problem it seems that there's been a profound confusion between perception and practice. K: Yes. Oh yes. A: I have grasped that. It's as though we had the idea that perception is perfected at the end of practice. K: That is a routine, isn't it? A: We do have that idea. K: I know. A: Yes. K: You see, sir, they always say freedom is at the end. Not at the beginning. On the contrary, sir, the beginning is the first step that counts, not the last step. So if we understand this whole question of fear and pleasure, joy, the understanding can only come in freedom to observe. And in the observation learning and the acting. They all have the same meaning, at the same moment, not learn then act. It is the doing, the seeing all taking place at the same time. That is whole. A: All these marvellous participles that being in the infinite mood in themselves. In themselves. Yes, a little while back it occurred to me that if we paid attention to our language as well as to the flowers and the mountains and the clouds... K: Oh yes, A:...the language not only in terms of individual words, but words in context so that we would refer then to what we call usage, would through perception, intelligence disclose themselves completely. K: Quite. A: We say don't we, that one is pleased, one is joyed, but if we ask somebody, if we ask somebody: what have you been doing, and he said to us, I've been pleasing myself, we'd think that was a little odd. We wouldn't think it strange at all if he said, well, I have been enjoying myself. We don't mind that. K: That's right. A: But we don't pay attention to what we say. K: That's right, sir. I came back after lunch, and somebody said have you enjoyed your meal? And there was a man there who said, we are not pigs to enjoy. A: Oh good lord. K: Seriously. A: Yes. Exactly. I suppose he must feel very righteous. What he denied himself during the meal. K: It is a question of attention, isn't it, whether you are eating, whether you are observing pleasure. Attention, that's the thing we have to go into very, very deeply. I don't know if there is time now, what it means to attend. Whether we attend to anything at all, or is it only a superficial listening, hearing, seeing which we call attending; or the expression of knowledge in doing. Attention, I feel, has nothing to do with knowledge, or with action. In the very attending is action. And one has to go into this question again of what is action. Perhaps we can do it another day. A: Yes, I see a relation between what you've just said about action and what a few conversations ago we came to with the word movement. K: Yes. A: On-goingness. And when you were talking about standing and looking at the tree on the mountain, I remembered when I was staying at one of the ashramas, actually the Vedanta Forest Academy, and when I got to my quarters a monkey and sat on the window sill with her little baby, and she looked full into my face, and I looked full into her's, but I think she looked fuller into mine; I had that strange feeling that I was actually a human being being... K: Investigated. A:...investigated, or as the students say today, being psyched out by this monkey. And it was a profound shock to me. K: Talking of monkeys, sir, I was in Benares at the place I go to usually, I was doing yoga, exercises, half naked, and a big monkey, with black face and long tail, came and sat on the veranda. I closed my eyes. I looked and there was this big monkey. She looked at me and I looked at her. A big monkey, sir. They are powerful things. And it stretched out its hand, so I walked up and held her hand, like that, held it. A: Held it. K: And it was wrought but very, very supple, extraordinarily supple. But rough. And we looked at each other. And it said it wanted to come into the room. I said, look, I am doing exercises, I have little time, would you come another day. I kind of talked to it. Come another day. So it looked at me and I withdrew, went back. She stayed there for two or three minutes and gradually went away. A: Marvellous, just marvellous. Complete act of attention between you. K: There was no sense of fear. It wasn't afraid. I wasn't afraid. A sense of, you know... A: This reminds me of a story I read about Ramana Maharishi, how when he was a young man he went and lived in a tiger's cave. And it was occupied by the tiger. And the tiger would come back after the hunt in the early hours of the morning and sleep with him. To read that within the environs of our culture well it starts, well you feel undone when you read that if you think for a moment you could allow yourself to believe it. But in the context of what we have been saying about the monkeys, and this marvellous story you told me, I wish I could have shaken hands with that little mother with her baby. I wasn't ready to. K: No, it was really - I don't know, there must have been a communication, there must have been a sense of friendship, you know, without any antagonism, without any fear of it. It looked at me, you know. And I think attention is not something to be practised, not to be cultivated, go to a school to learn how to be attentive. That's what they do in, in this country and in other places, say, I don't know what attention is, I'm going to learn from somebody who will tell me how to get it. Then it's not attention. A: Speed reading, it's called. K: Speed reading, yes. A: A thousand words a minute. K: Sir, that's why I see there is a great sense of care and affection in being attentive, which means diligently watching. That word diligent comes from legere, you know, of course, to read. To read exactly what it is, what is there. Not interpret, not translate it, not contrive to do something with it, but to read what is there. There is an infinite lot to see. There is tremendous lot to see in pleasure, as we said. And to read it. And to read it, you must be watchful, attentive, diligent, careful. We are negligent. What's wrong with pleasure? A: There's a colloquial remark in our tongue when somebody wishes to secure attention, they will say, do you read me? That, of course, has been taken over in technology into a different aspect, but quite apart from what someone would be saying with ear phones on in a plane, just common ordinary practice, sometimes a person will say that. K: So that what we have done is really read this whole map. A: Yes. K: From the beginning of responsibility, relationship, fear, pleasure. All that. Just to observe the extraordinary map of our life. A: And the beauty of it is, we've been moving within the concern for the question of the transformation of man which is not dependent on knowledge or time without getting worried about whether we are getting off the track. It is happening naturally. That I take it is not a surprise to you, of course, but I'm sure it's shocking in terms... K: And that's why, also, sir, it is right to live with the company of the wise. Live with a man who is really wise. Not with people who are faking it, not in books, not attending classes where you are taught wisdom. Wisdom is something that comes with self knowing. A: It reminds me of a hymn in the Veda that talks about the goddess of speech who never appears except among friends. K: Yes. A: Marvellous. Actually that means that unless there is the care, the affection that you mentioned, that is continuous concurrent with attention, there can be nothing but babble. K: Of course. A: There can be, verbal babble. K: Which the modern world is encouraging, you see. A: Yes. K: Again which means the superficial pleasures, not enjoyment. You follow? Superficial pleasures become the curse. And to go behind that is one of the most difficult things for people to do. A: Because it goes faster and faster. K: That's just it. A: It goes faster and faster. K: That's what is destroying the earth, the air. Everything they are destroying. There is a place I go to every year in India, where there is a school: the hills the oldest hills in the world. A: What a beautiful thing. K: Nothing has been changed, no bulldozers, no houses, it's an old place, with the old hills and in amongst there is a school with which I am connected and so on. And you feel the enormity of time, the feeling of absolute non-movement. Which is, civilization, which is all this circus that is going on. And when you go there you feel this, utter quietness, in which time has not touched it. And when you leave it and come to civilization you feel rather lost, a sense of what is all this about? Why is there so much noise about nothing? That's why it is so odd, and rather inviting, a great delight to see everything as is, including myself. To see what I am, not through the eyes of a professor, a psychologist, a guru, a book, just to see what I am and to read what I am. Because all history is in me. You follow? A: Of course. There is something immensely beautiful about what you have said. Do you think in the next conversation we have we could talk about the relation of beauty to what you have said. Thank you so much. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 22ND FEBRUARY 1974 9TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'INWARD OR TRUE BEAUTY' A: Mr Krishnamurti, in our last conversation together we had moved from speaking together concerning fear and the relation between that and the transformation of the individual person which is not dependent on knowledge or time, and from that we went to pleasure and just as we reached the end of that conversation the question of beauty arose. And if it's agreeable with you I should like very much for us to explore that together. K: One often wonders why museums are so filled with pictures and statues. Is it because man has lost touch with nature and therefore has to go to museums to look at other people's paintings, famous paintings and some of them are really marvelously beautiful? Why do the museums exist at all? I'm just asking. I'm not saying they should or should not. And I've been to many museums all over the world, taken around by experts, and I've always felt as though I was being shown around and looking at things that were so, for me, artificial, other peoples' expression, what they considered beauty. And I wondered what is beauty. Because when you read a poem of Keats, or really a poem that a man writes with his heart and with very deep feeling, he wants to convey something to you of what he feels, what he considers to be the most exquisite essence of beauty. And I have looked at a great many cathedrals, as you must have, over Europe and again this expression of their feelings, their devotion, their reverence to, in masonry, in rocks, in buildings, in marvelous cathedrals. And looking at all this, I'm always surprised when people talk about beauty, or write about beauty, whether it is something created by man or something that you see in nature; or it has nothing to do with the stone or with the paint or with the word, but something deeply inward. And so often in discussing with so called professionals, having a dialogue with them, it appears to me that it is always somewhere out there, the modern painting, modern music, the pop and so on, so on, it's always somehow so dreadfully artificial. I may be wrong. But what is beauty? Must it be expressed? That's one question. Does it need the word, the stone, the colour, the paint? Or it is something that cannot possibly be expressed in words, in a building, in a statue? So if we could go into this question of what is beauty. I think to really go into it very deeply one must know what is suffering. Or understand what is suffering, because without passion you can't have beauty - passion in the sense, not lust, not the passion that comes when there is immense suffering. And the remaining with that suffering, not escaping from it, brings this passion. Passion means the abandonment, the complete abandonment of the 'me', of the self, the ego. And therefore a great austerity, not the austerity of - the word means ash, severe, dry which the religious people have made it into - but rather the austerity of great beauty. A: Yes, yes I'm following you, I really am. K: A great sense of dignity, beauty, that is, essentially, austere. And to be austere, not verbally or ideologically, but being austere means total abandonment, letting go of the 'me'. And one cannot let that thing take place if one hasn't deeply understood what suffering is. Because passion comes from the word, sorrow. I don't know if you have gone into it, looked into that word, the root meaning of that word passion is sorrow, from suffering. A: To feel. K: To feel. You see, sir, people have escaped from suffering. I think it is very deeply related to beauty, not that you must suffer. A: Not that you must suffer but - yes. K: That is, no we must go a little more slowly. I am jumping too quickly. First of all, we assume we know what beauty is. We see a Picasso or a Rembrandt or a Michelangelo and we think how marvelous. We think we know. We have read it in books, the experts have written about it and so on. One reads it and say, yes. We absorb it through others. But if one was really enquiring into what is beauty there must be a great sense of humility. Now, I don't know what beauty is actually. I can imagine what beauty is. I've learned what beauty is. I have been taught in schools, in colleges, in reading books and going on tours, guided tours and all the rest, visiting thousands of museums, but actually to find out the depth of beauty, the depth of colour the depth of feeling, the mind must start with a great sense of humility. I don't know. You see, as one really wonders what meditation is. One thinks one knows. We will discuss meditation when we come to it. So one must start as feeling if one is enquiring into beauty with a great sense of humility, not knowing. That very not knowing is beautiful. A: Yes, Yes, I've been listening and I've been trying to open myself to this relation that you are making between beauty and passion. K: You see, sir, let's start, right: man suffers, not only personally, but there is immense suffering of man. It is a thing that is pervading the universe. Man has suffered physically, psychologically, spiritually, in every way for centuries upon centuries. The mother cries because her son is killed, the mother cries because her husband is mutilated in a war, or accident - there is tremendous suffering in the world. And it is really a tremendous thing to be aware of this suffering. A: Yes. K: I don't think people are aware, or even feel this immense sorrow that is in the world. They are so concerned with their own personal sorrow, they overlook the sorrow that a poor man in a little village in India, or in China or in the Eastern world, where they never possibly have a full meal, clean clothes, comfortable bed. And there is this sorrow of thousands of people being killed in war. Or in the totalitarian world, millions being executed for ideologies, tyranny, the terror of all that. So there is all this sorrow in the world. And there is also the personal sorrow. And without really understanding it very, very deeply and resolving it, passion won't come out of sorrow. And without passion, how can you see beauty? You can intellectually appreciate a painting, or a poem, or a statue, but you need this great sense of inward bursting of passion, explosion of passion. You know, that creates in itself the sensitivity that can see beauty. So it is I think rather important to understand sorrow. I think it is related, beauty, passion, sorrow. A: I'm interested in the order of those words. Beauty, passion, sorrow. If one is in relation to the transformation we have been speaking about, to come to beauty I take it, it's a passage from sorrow to passion to beauty. K: That's right, sir. A: Yes. Please do go on. I understand. K: You see, in the Christian world, if I am not mistaken, sorrow is delegated to a person, and through that person we somehow escape from sorrow, that is, we hope we escape from sorrow. And in the Eastern world sorrow is rationalized through the statement of karma. You know the word karma means to do. And they believe in karma. That is, what you have done in the past life you pay for in the present or reward in the present, and so on, and so on. So that there are these two categories of escapes. And there are thousands of escapes - whiskey, drugs, sex, going off to attend a mass and so on, and so on. Man has never stayed with a thing. He has always either sought comfort in a belief, in an action, in identification with something greater than himself and so on, so on, but he has never said, look, I must see what this is, I must penetrate it and not delegate it to somebody else. I must go into it, I must face it. I must look at it. I must know what it is. So, when the mind doesn't escape from this sorrow, either personal or the sorrow of man, if you don't escape, if you don't rationalize, if you don't try to go beyond it, if you are not frightened of it, then you remain with it. Because any movement from 'what is', or any movement away from 'what is', is a dissipation of energy. It prevents you actually understanding 'what is'. The 'what is', is sorrow. And we have means and ways and cunning to escape. Now if there is no escape whatsoever then you remain with it. I do not know if you have ever done it. Because in everyone's life there is an incident that brings you tremendous sorrow, an happening. It might be an incident, a word, an accident, a shattering sense of absolute loneliness, and so on. These things happen and with that comes the sense of utter sorrow. Now when the mind can remain with that, not move away from it, out of that comes passion. Not the cultivated passion, not the artificial trying to be passionate, but the movement of passion is born out of this non-withdrawal from sorrow. It is the total completely remaining with that. A: I am thinking that we also say when we speak of someone in sorrow that they are disconsolate. K: Yes. Disconsolate. A: Disconsolate and immediately we think that the antidote to that is to get rid of the 'dis', not to stay with the 'dis'. And in an earlier conversation we spoke about two things related to each other in terms of opposite sides of the same coin, and while you have been speaking I've been seeing the interrelation in a pole sense between action and passion. Passion being able to undergo, able to be changed. Whereas action is doing to effect change. And this would be the movement from sorrow to passion at the precise point, if I have understood you correctly, where I become able to undergo what is there. K: So, if, when there is no escape, when there is no desire to seek comfort away from 'what is', then out of that absolute inescapable reality comes this flame of passion. And without that there is no beauty. You may write endless volumes about beauty, or be a marvelous painter, but without that inward quality of passion which is the outcome of great understanding of sorrow, I don't see how beauty can exist. Also one observes man has lost touch with nature. A: Oh yes. K: Completely, specially in big towns, and even in small villages, and hamlets man is always outwardly going, outward, pursued by his own thought, and so he has more or less lost touch with nature. Nature means nothing to him. It is very nice, very beautiful. Once I was standing with a few friends and my brother many years ago at the Grand Canyon, looking at the marvelous thing, incredible, the colours, the depth and the shadows; and a group of people came and one lady says, yes isn't it marvelous, and the next says, let's go and have tea. And off they trotted. You follow? That is what is happening in the world. We have lost touch completely with nature. We don't know what it means. And also we kill. You follow me. We kill for food, we kill for amusement, we kill for sport. I won't go into all that. So there is this lack of intimate relationship with nature. A: I remember a shock, a profound shock that I had in my college days, I was standing on the steps of the administration building and watching a very, very beautiful sunset and one of my college acquaintances asked me what I was doing, and I said, well, I am not doing anything, I'm looking at the sunset. And you know what he said to me? This so shocked me that it's one of those things that you never forget. He just said, well there's nothing to prevent it, is there. K: Nothing? A: Nothing to prevent it, is there? Yes, I know. I follow you. K: So, sir, you see we are becoming more and more artificial, more and more superficial, more and more verbal, a linear direction, not vertical at all, but linear. And so naturally artificial things become more important - theatres, cinemas, you know the whole business of modern world. And very few have the sense of beauty in themselves, beauty in conduct. You understand, sir? A: Oh yes. K: Beauty in behaviour. Beauty in their usage of their language, the voice, the manner of walking, the sense of humility. With that humility everything becomes so gentle, quiet, full of beauty. We have none of that. And yet we go to museums, we are educated with museums, with pictures, and we have lost the delicacy, the sensitivity, of the mind, the heart, the body, and so when we have lost this sensitivity how can we know what beauty is? And when we haven't got sensitivity we go off to some place to learn to be sensitive. You know this. A: Oh, I do. K: Go to a college or some ashrama or some rotten hole and there I am going to learn to be sensitive. Sensitive through touch, through you know. It becomes disgusting. So now how can we, as you are a professor and teacher, how can you, sir, educate, it becomes very, very important, the students to have this quality? Therefore one asks, what is it we are educating for? What are we being educated for. Everybody is being educated. Ninety per cent of the people probably in America, are being educated, know what to read and write and all the rest of it, what for? A: And yet, it's a fact, at least in my experience of teaching class after class, year after year, that with all this proliferation of publishing and so called educational techniques, students are without as much care to the written word and the spoken word as was the case that I can distinctly remember years ago. Now perhaps other teachers have had a different experience, but I have watched this in my classes, and the usual answer that I get when I speak to my colleagues about this is, well, the problem is in the high school. And then you talk to a poor high school teacher, he then puts it on the poor grade school. So we have poor grade school, poor high school, poor college, poor university because we are always picking up where we left off, which is a little lower next year that where it was before. K: Sir, that's why when I have talked at various universities and so on, I've always felt what are we being educated for? To just become glorified clerks? A: That's what it turns out to be. K: Of course it is. Glorified business men and god knows what else. What for? I mean if I had a son that would be a tremendous problem for me. Fortunately, I haven't got a son, but it would be a burning question to me: what am I to do with the children that I have? To send to all these schools, where they are taught nothing but just how to read, and write a book, and how to memorize, and forget the whole field of life? They are taught about sex and reproduction and all that kind of stuff. But what? So I feel, sir, I mean to me this is a tremendously important question because I am concerned with seven schools in India and in England there is one, and we are going to form one here in California. It is a burning question: what is it that we are doing with our children? Making them into robots or into other clever, cunning clerks, great scientists who invent this or that and then be ordinary, cheap, little human beings, with shoddy minds. You follow, sir? A: I am, I am. K: So, when you talk about beauty, can we, can a human being tell another, educate another to grow in beauty, grow in goodness, to flower in great affection and care? Because if we don't do that we are destroying the earth, as it is happening now, polluting the air. We human beings are destroying everything we touch. So this becomes a very, very serious thing when we talk about beauty, when we talk about pleasure, fear, relationship, order and so on, all that, none of these things are being taught in any school. A: No. I brought that up in my class yesterday and I asked them directly, that's very question. And they were very ready to agree that here we are, we are in an upper division course and we had never heard about this. K: Tragic, you follow, sir. A: And furthermore we don't know whether we are really hearing it for what it really is, because we haven't heard about it, we have got to go through that yet to find out whether we are really listening. K: And whether the teacher or the man, who is a professor, is honest enough to say, I don't know. I am going to learn about all these things. So sir, that is why western civilization, I am not condemning it, western civilization is mainly concerned with commercialism, consumerism, and a society that is immoral. And when we talk about the transformation of man, not in the field of knowledge or the field of time, but beyond that, who is interested in this? You follow, sir? Who really cares about it? Because the mother goes off to her job, earns a livelihood, the father goes off and the child is just an incident. A: Now, as a matter of fact I know this will probably appear like an astonishingly extravagant statement for me to make, but I think it's getting to the place now where if anyone raises this question at the level that you have been raising it, as a young person who is growing up in his adolescent years, let's say, and he won't let it go, he hangs in there with it, as we say, the question is seriously raised whether he is normal. K: Yes, quite, quite. A: And it makes one think of Socrates, who was very clear that he knew only one thing, that he didn't know, and he didn't have to say that very often, but he said it even the few times enough to get him killed, but at least they took him seriously enough to kill him. K: To kill him. A: Today I think he would be put in some institution for study. The whole thing would have to be checked out. K: That's what is happening in Russia. They send them off to an asylum... A: That's right, K: ...mental hospital and destroy him. Sir, here we neglect everything for some superficial gain, money. Money means power, position, authority, everything, money. A: It goes back to this success thing that you mentioned before. Always later, always later. On a horizontal axis. Yes. I want to share with you as you were speaking about nature, something that has a sort of wry humour about it in terms of the history of scholarship: I thought of those marvelous Vedic hymns to Dawn. K: Oh yes. A: The way Dawn comes, rosy fingered, and scholars have expressed surprise that the number of hymns to her are, by comparison, few compared with some other gods, but the attention is drawn in the study not to the quality of the hymn as revealing how it is that there is such consummately beautiful cadences associated with her, for which you would only need one, wouldn't you, you wouldn't need 25. The important thing is, isn't it remarkable that we have so few hymns and yet they are so wonderfully beautiful. What has the number to do with it at all, is the thing that I could never get answered for myself in terms of the environment in which I studied Sanskrit and the Veda. The important thing is to find out which god, in this case Indra, is in the Rig Veda, is mentioned most often. Now, of course, I'm not trying to suggest that quantity should be overlooked, by no means, but if the question had been approached the way you have been enquiring into it, deeper, deeper, deeper, then, I think, scholarship would have had a very, very different career. We should have been taught how to sit and let that hymn disclose itself, and stop measuring it. K: Yes sir. A: Yes, yes, please do go on. K: That's what I am going to say. You see when discussing beauty and passion and sorrow we ought to go into the question also of what is action? Because it is related to all that. A: Yes, of course. K: What is action? Because life is action. Living is action. Speaking is action. Everything is action, sitting here is an action. Talking, a dialogue, discussing, going into things, is a series of actions, a movement in action. So what is action? Action, obviously means, acting now. Not having acted or will act. It is the active present of the word act, to act, which is acting all the time. It is the movement in time and out of time. We will go into that a little bit later. Now what is action that does not bring sorrow? You follow? One has to put that question because every action, as we do now, is either regret, contradiction, a sense of meaningless movement, a repression, conformity and so on. So that is action for most people, the routine, the repetition, the remembrances of things past and act according to that remembrance. So unless one understands very deeply what is action, one will not be able to understand what is sorrow. So action, sorrow, passion and beauty. They are all together, not divorced, not something separate with beauty at the end, action at the beginning. It isn't fragmented at all, it is all one thing. But to look at it, what is action? As far as one knows now, action is according to a formula, according to a concept or according to an ideology. The communist ideology, the capitalist ideology, or the socialist ideology, or the ideology of a Christian, Jesus Christ, or the Hindu with his ideology. So action is the approximation of an idea. I act according to my concept. That concept is traditional, or put together by me, or put together by an expert. Lenin, Marx have formulated, and they conform according to what they think Lenin, Marx formulated. And action is according to a pattern. You follow? A: Yes I do. What's occurring to me is that under the tyranny of that, one is literally driven. K: Absolutely. Driven, conditioned, brutalized. You don't care for anything, except for ideas, and carry out ideas. See what is happening in China, you follow, in Russia. A: Oh yes, yes, I do. K: And here too, the same thing in a modified form. So action as we know it now is conformity to a pattern, either in the future or in the past, an idea which I carry out. A resolution, or a decision which I fulfil in acting. The past is acting, so, it is not action. I don't know if I am.? A: Yes, yes, I'm aware of the fact that we suffer a radical conviction that if we don't generate a pattern there will be no order. K: So you follow what is happening, sir? Order is in terms of a pattern. A: Yes, preconceived, yes. K: Therefore it is disorder, against which an intelligent man fights - fights in the sense revolts. So that's why it is very important if we are to understand what beauty is we must understand what action is. Can there be action without the idea? Idea means, you must know this from Greek, means to see. See what we have done, sir. The word is to see. That is seeing and the doing. Not the seeing, draw a conclusion from that and then act according to that conclusion. You see. A: Oh yes, oh yes. K: Perceiving, and from that perception draw a belief, an idea, a formula, and act according to that belief, idea, formula. So we are removed from perception. We are acting only according to a formula, therefore mechanical. You see, sir, how our minds have become mechanical. A: Necessarily so. K: Yes sir, obviously. A: I just thought about Greek sculpture, and its different character from Roman sculpture, the finest of ancient Greece. K: The Periclean age and so on. A: Sculpture is extremely contemplative. It has sometimes been remarked that the Romans have a genius for portraiture in stone and, of course... K: Law and order and all that. A: Yes, and of course one would see their remarkable attention to personality. But what occurred to me while listening to this, something that had never occurred to me before, that the Greek statue with which one sometimes asks oneself, well the face doesn't disclose a personality. Perhaps the quiet eye recognized that you don't put onto the stone something that must come out of the act itself. K: Quite, quite. A: Because you're doing something that you must wait to come to pass. The Greeks were correct. It's an expression of that relation to form which is an interior form. Marvelous grasp of that. It's a grasp that allows for splendour to break out rather than the notion we must represent it. Yes, I am following you, aren't I? K: You see sir, that's why one must ask this essential question: what is action? Is it a repetition? Is it imitation? Is it an adjustment between 'what is' and 'what should be' or 'what has been'? Or is it a conformity to a pattern? Or to a belief, or to a formula? If it is, then inevitably there must be conflict. Because idea, action, there is an interval, a lag of time between the two, and in that interval a great many things happen. A division in which other incidents take place and therefore there must be inevitably conflict. Therefore action is never complete, action is never total, it is never ending. Action means ending. You know, you used the word Vedanta the other day. It means the ending of knowledge, I was told. Not the continuation of knowledge, but the ending. So now, is there an action which is not tied to the past as time or to the future or to a formula, or to a belief or to an idea, but action? The seeing is the doing. A: Yes. K: Now, the seeing is the doing becomes an extraordinary movement in freedom. The other is not freedom. And therefore, sir the communists say there is no such thing as freedom. That's a bourgeois idea. Of course it is, a bourgeois idea, because they live in ideas, concepts, not in action. They live according to ideas and carry those ideas out in action, which is not action, the doing. I don't know if - A: Oh, yes, yes. I was just thinking. K: This is what we do in the western world, the eastern world, all over the world, acting according to a formula, idea, belief, a concept, a conclusion, a decision; and never the seeing and the doing. A: I was thinking about the cat, the marvelous animal the cat. K: Oh, yes, the cat. A: Its face is almost all eyes. K: Yes. A: I don't mean that by measure with calipers, of course not. And we don't train cats like we try to train dogs. I think we have corrupted dogs. Cats won't be corrupted. They simply won't be corrupted. And it seems to me great irony that in the middle ages we should have burned cats along with witches. K: The ancient Egyptians worshipped cats. A: Yes. The great eye of the cat, I read sometime ago that the cat's skeletal structure is among animals the most perfectly adapted to its function. K: Quite, quite. A: And I think one of the most profound occasions for gratitude in my life was the living with a cat, and she taught me how to make an end. But I went through a lot of interior agony before I came to understand what she was doing. It's as though one would say of her that she was performing a mission, you might say, without, of course, being a missionary in the ordinary sense of that word. K: Sir, you see one begins to see what freedom is in action. A: That's right. K: And it is the seeing in the doing is prevented by the observer who is the past, the formula, the concept, the belief. That observer comes in between perception and the doing. That observer is the factor of division. The idea and the conclusion in action. So can we act only when there is perception? We do this, Sir, when we are at the edge of a precipice; the seeing danger is instant action. A: If I remember correctly the word alert comes from the Italian which points to standing at the edge of a cliff. K: Cliff, that's right. A: That's pretty serious. K: You see, but it's very interesting, we are conditioned to the danger of a cliff, of a snake or a dangerous animal and so on, we are conditioned. But we are conditioned also to this idea you must act according to an idea, otherwise there is no action. A: Yes, we are conditioned to that. K: To that. A: Oh, yes, terribly so. K: Terribly. So we have this condition to danger. And conditioned to the fact that you cannot act without a formula, without a concept, belief and so on. So these two are the factors of our conditioning. And now, someone comes along and says, look, that's not action. That is merely a repetition of what has been. modified, but it is not action. Action is when you see and do. A: And the reaction to that is, oh, I see he has a new definition of action. K: I'm not defining. A: Yes, of course not. K: And I've done this all my life. I see something and I do it. A: Yes. K: Say, for instance, as you may know, I am not being personal or anything, there is a great big organization, spiritual organization, thousand of followers with a great deal of land, 5000 acres, castles and money and so on were formed around me as a boy. And in 1928 I said this is all wrong. I dissolved it, returned the property and so on. I saw how wrong it was. The seeing; not the conclusions, comparison, see how religions have done it. I saw and acted. And therefore there has never been a regret. A: Marvelous. K: Never say, oh, I have made a mistake because I shall have nobody to lean on. You follow? A: Yes, I do. Could we next time, in our next conversation relate beauty to seeing. K: I was going there. A: Oh, splendid. Yes that's wonderful. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 22ND FEBRUARY 1974 10TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'THE ART OF LISTENING' A: Mr Krishnamurti, last time we were speaking together, we were going into beauty, and just as we came to the end of our conversation the question of seeing and its relation to the transformation of man which is not dependent on knowledge or time, was something we promised ourselves we would take up next time we could come together. K: Sir, what is seeing, and what is listening, and what is learning? I think the three are related to each other: learning, hearing and seeing. What is seeing, perceiving? Do we actually see, or do we see through a screen darkly? A screen of prejudice, a screen of our idiosyncracies, experiences, our wishes, pleasures, fears, and obviously our images about that which we see and about ourselves? So we have this screen after screen between us and the object of perception. So do we ever see the thing at all? Or is it the seeing is coloured by our knowledge, mechanical, experience, and so on and so on, or our images which we have about that thing, or the beliefs in which the mind is conditioned, and therefore prevents the seeing, or the memories which the mind has cultivated prevents the seeing? So seeing may not take place at all. And is it possible for the mind not to have these images, conclusions, beliefs, memories, prejudices, fears, and without having those screens just to look? I think this becomes very important because when there is a seeing of the thing which I am talking about, when there is a seeing you can't help but acting. There is no question of postponement. A: Or succession. K: Succession. A: Or interval. K: Because when action is based on a belief, a conclusion, an idea, then that action is time-binding. And that action will inevitably bring conflict and so on, regrets and all the rest of it. So it becomes very important to find out what it is to see, to perceive. What it is to hear. Do I ever hear? When one is married, as a wife or a husband, or a girl or a boy, do I ever hear her or him? Or I hear her, him, through the image I have built about her or him? Through the screen of irritations, screen of annoyance, domination, you know all that, the dreadful things that come in relationship. So do I ever hear directly what you say, without translating, without transforming it, without twisting it? Do I ever hear a bird cry, or a child weep, or a man crying in pain? You follow, sir? Do I ever hear anything? A: In a conversation we had about a year ago, I was very struck by something you said which I regard, for myself, personally, immensely valuable. You said that hearing was doing nothing to stop, or interfere with seeing. Hearing is doing nothing to stop seeing. That is very remarkable because in conversation the notion of hearing is regarded an intimately associated with command. We will say, won't we, now hear me, hear me out. And the person thinks that they have to lean forward in the sense of do something voluntarily. K: Quite, quite. A: It's as though they have to screw themselves up into some sort of agonized twist here. Not only to please the one who is insisting that they are not hearing, but to get up some hearing on their own. K: Quite. So does a human being, Y or X, listen at all? And what takes place when I do listen? Listen in the sense without any interference, without any interpretation, conclusion, like and dislike, you know all that takes place, what happens when I actually listen? Sir, look, we said just now, we cannot possibly understand what beauty is if we don't understand suffering, passion. You hear that statement, what does the mind do? It draws a conclusion. It has formed an idea, verbal idea, hears the words, draws a conclusion, and an idea. A statement of that kind has become an idea. Then the may says, how am I to carry out that idea? And that becomes a problem. A: Yes, of course it does. Because the idea doesn't conform to nature and other people have other ideas and they want to get theirs embodied. Now we are up against a clash. K: Yes. So can I listen to that, can the mind listen to that statement without any forming an abstraction. Just listen. I neither agree nor disagree, just actually listen completely to that statement. A: If I am following you, what you are saying is that were I to listen adequately, or just let's say listen - because it's not a question of more or less - I am absolutely listening or I am absolutely not listening. K: That's right, sir. A: Yes. I would not have to contrive an answer. K: No. You are in it. A: Yes. So like the cat, the action and the seeing are one. K: Yes. A: They are one act. K: That's right. A: They are one act. K: That's right. So can I listen to a statement and see the truth of the statement or the falseness of the statement, not in comparison but in the very statement that you are making. I don't know if I am making myself clear. A: Yes, you are making yourself very clear. K: That is, I listen to the statement: beauty can never exist without passion, and passion comes from sorrow. I listen to that statement. I don't abstract an idea from it, or make an idea from it. I just listen. What takes place? You may be telling the truth, or you may be making a false statement. I don't know because I am not going to compare. A: No. You are going to see. K: I just listen. Which means I am giving my total attention -just listen to this, sir, you will see what is going to happen - I give my total attention to what you are saying. Then it doesn't matter what you say, or don't say. You see this thing? A: Of course, of course. K: What is important is my act of listening. And that act of listening has brought about a miracle of complete freedom from all your statements - whether true, false, real - my mind is completely attentive. Attention means no border. The moment I have a border I begin to fight you - agree, disagree. The moment attention has a frontier then concepts arise. But if I listen to you completely without a single interference of thought or ideation or mentation, just listen to that, the miracle has taken place. Which is my total attention absolves me, my mind, from all the statement. Therefore my mind is extraordinarily free to act. A: This has happened for me on this series of our conversations. With each one of these conversations, since this is being video-taped, one begins when one is given the sign and we're told when the time has elapsed; and one ordinarily, in terms of activity of this sort, is thinking about the production as such. K: Of course. A: But one of the things that I have learned is in our conversations, I've been listening very intensely, and yet I've not had to divide my mind. K: No, sir, that's the... A: And yet this is, if I'm responding correctly to what you have been teaching - well I know you don't like that word, but to what you have been saying, and I understand why teaching was the wrong word here - there is that very first encounter that the mind engages itself in. K: Yes. A: How can I afford not to make the distinction between paying attention to the aspects of the programme, on the production aspect of it, and still engage our discussion? K: Quite. A: But the more intensely the discussion is engaged... K: You can do it. A: ...the more efficiently all the mechanism is accomplished. K: Yes. A: We don't believe that, in the sense that not only to start with we will not believe but we won't even try it out. There is no guarantee from anybody in advance. What we are told rather is this, well you get used to it. And yet performers have stage fright all their lives, so clearly they don't get used to it. K: No, sir, it is because, sir, don't you think it is our minds are so commercial, unless I get a reward from it I won't do a thing. And my mind lives in the market place - one's mind: I give you this, you give me that. A: And there's an interval in between. K: You follow? A: Right. K: We are so used to commercialism, both spiritually and physically that we don't do anything without a reward, without gaining something, without a purpose. It all must be exchange, not a gift, but exchange: I give you this and you give me that; I torture myself religiously and God must come to me. It's all a matter of commerce. A: Fundamentalists have a phrase that comes to mind with respect to their devotional life. They say, I am claiming the promises of God. And this phrase in the context of what you are saying is, my goodness, what that couldn't lead to in the mind. K: Oh yes. So you see when one goes very deeply into this: when action is not based on an idea, formula, belief, then seeing is the doing. Then what is seeing and hearing, which we went into? Then the seeing is complete attention, and the doing is in that attention. And the difficulty is people will ask, how will you maintain that attention? A: Yes, and they haven't even started. K: No, how will you maintain it. Which means they are looking for a reward. A: Exactly. K: I practise it, I will do everything to maintain that attention in order to get something in return. Attention is not a result, attention has no cause. What has cause has an effect and the effect becomes the cause. It's a circle. But attention isn't that. Attention doesn't give you a reward. Attention, on the contrary, there is no reward or punishment because it has no frontier. A: Yes, this calls up an earlier conversation we had when you mentioned the word virtue, and we explored it in relation to power. K: Yes, exactly. A: And we are told what is difficult for a thinking child to believe, given the way a child is brought up, but he's required somehow to make his way through it, that virtue is its own reward. K: Oh, that. A: And, of course, it is impossible to see what is sound about that under... K: Yes, quite. A: ...under the conditioned situation in which he lives. K: That's just an idea, sir. A: So now we cut that back and then later when we need to remind somebody that they are asking too much of a reward for something good that they did, we tell them, have you forgotten that virtue is its own reward. Yes, yes. It becomes a form of punishment. K: Then, you see, seeing and hearing, then what is learning? Because they are all interrelated: learning seeing, hearing, and action, all that. It is all in one movement. They are not separate chapters, it's one chapter. A: Distinction is no division. K: No. So what is learning? Is learning a process of accumulation? And is learning non accumulative? We are putting both together. Let's look at it. A: Let's look at it, yes. K: I learn - one learns a language - Italian, French, whatever it is - and accumulate words and the irregular verbs and so on, and then one is able to speak. There is learning a language and being able to speak. Learning how to ride a bicycle, learning how to drive a car, learning how to put together a machine, electronics and so on. Those are all learning to acquire knowledge in action. And I am asking, is there any other form of learning? That we know, we are familiar with the acquisition of knowledge. Now is there any other kind of learning, learning which is not accumulated, and acting? A: Yes, and when we have accumulated it all we haven't understood anything on that account. K: Yes. And I learn in order to gain a reward, or in order to avoid punishment. I learn a particular job, or particular craft in order to earn a livelihood. That is absolutely necessary otherwise... Now I am asking, is there any other kind of learning? That's routine, that's the cultivation of memory and the memory, which is the result of experience and knowledge that is stored in the brain, and that operates, when asked to ride a bicycle, drive a car, and so on. Now is there any other kind of learning? Or only that? When one says, I have learned from my experience, it means I have learned, stored up from that experience certain memories, and those memories either prevent, reward, or punish. So all such forms of learning are mechanical. And education is to train the brain to function in routine, mechanically. Because in that there is great security. Then it is safe. And so our mind becomes mechanical. My father did this, I do it - you follow, the whole business is mechanical. Now, is there a non mechanical brain at all? A non-utilitarian, in that sense, learning which has neither future not past, therefore not time-binding. I don't know if I am making it clear. A: Don't we sometimes say, I have learned from experience, when we wish to convey something that isn't well conveyed by that expression. We wish to convey an insight that we don't feel can be, in a strict sense, dated. K: You see, sir, do we learn anything from experience? We have had, since history began, written history, five thousand wars. I read it somewhere. Five thousand wars. Killing, killing, killing, maiming. And have we learned anything? Have we learned anything from sorrow? Man has suffered, have we learned anything from the experience of the agony of uncertainty and all the rest of it? So when we say, we have learned, I question it. You follow? It seems such a terrible thing to say, I have learned from experience. You have learned nothing, except in the field of knowledge. A: Yes. May I say something here that just passed in recall. We were talking about sorrow before, and I was thinking of a statement of St Paul's in his letter to the Romans, where there is a very unusual sequence of words where he says, we rejoice in tribulations. Now some people have thought he must have been a masochist, or something, in making such a statement; but that certainly seems to me bizarre. We rejoice in tribulations. And then he says, because tribulation works - and in the Greek this means there is energy involved - works patience. Patience, experience. Now that's a very unusual order because we usually think that if we have enough experience we'll learn to be patient. And he completely stands that on its head. And in the context of what you are saying that order of his words makes eminent sense. Please go on. K: No, no. A: Yes, that's really very remarkable. K: You see, sir, that's why our education, our civilization, all the things about us, has made our mind so mechanical, repetitive reactions, repetitive demands, repetitive pursuits. The same thing being repeated year after year, for thousands of years: my country, your country, I kill you and you kill me. You follow, sir, the whole thing is mechanical. Now that means the mind can never be free. Thought is never free, thought is always old. There's no new thought. A: No. It is very curious in relation to a movement within the field of religion which called itself: 'New Thought'. Yes, I was laughing at the irony of it. Yes, goodness me. Some persons I imagine would object to the notion that we don't learn from experience in terms of the succession of wars, because wars tend to happen sequentially, generation to generation, and you have to grow up. But that is not true because more than one war will happen very often in the same generation and there hasn't been anything learned. K: That is what we have been talking about, two wars. A: There hasn't been anything learned at all. It's a terrifying thing to hear someone just come out and say, nobody learns anything from experience. K: No, the word experience also means to go through. A: Yes, yes. K: But you never go through. A: That's exactly right. K: You always stop in the middle. Or you never begin. A: Right. It means, if I'm remembering correctly, in terms of its radical root it means to test, to put to the test, to, well to put a thing to the test and behave correctly while that's going on, you certainly have to see, you just have to look, don't you. K: Of course. So as our civilization, our culture, our education has brought about a mind that is becoming more and more mechanical, and therefore time-binding, and therefore never a sense of freedom. Freedom then becomes an idea, you play around philosophically, but it has not meaning. But a man who says, now I want to find out, I want to really go into this and discover if there is freedom. Then he has to understand the limits of knowledge, where knowledge ends - or rather the ending of knowledge and the beginning of something totally new. I don't know if I am conveying anything? A: You are. Oh yes, yes. K: That is, sir, what is learning? If it is not mechanical then what is learning? Is there a learning at all, learning about what? I learn how to go to the moon, how to put up this, that and drive and so on. In that field there is only learning. Is there a learning in any other field, psychologically, spiritually? Can I learn - can the mind learn about what they call god? A: If in learning, in the sense that you have asked this question -no, I must rephrase that. Stop this 'ifing'. When one does what I am about to say; when one learns about god, or going to the moon, in terms of the question you have asked, he can't be doing what you are pointing to if this is something added on to the list. K: Sir, it is so clear. A: Yes, it is. K: I learn a language, ride a bicycle, drive a car, put a machine together. That's essential. Now I want to learn about god. Just listen to this. The god is my making. God hasn't made me in his image. I have made him in my image. Now I am going to learn about him. A: Yes, I am going to talk to myself. K: Learn about the image which I have built about Christ, Buddha, whatever it is. The image I have built. So I am learning what? A: To talk about talk. Yes. K: Learning about the image which I have built. A: That's right. K: Therefore is there any other kind of learning except mechanical learning? I don't know if you see? You understand my question? A: Yes, I do. Yes, I do, I certainly do. K: So there is only learning the mechanical process of life. There is no other learning. See what that means, sir. A: It means freedom. K: I can learn about myself. Myself is known. Known in the sense I may not know it, but I can know by looking at myself, I can know myself. So myself is the accumulated knowledge of the past. The 'me' who says I am greedy, I am envious, I am successful, I am frightened, I have betrayed, I have regret, all that is the 'me', including the soul which I have invented in the 'me' - or the Brahman, the Atman, it's all me still. The 'me' has created the image of god and I am going to learn about god. It has no meaning. So if there is - when there is - now I am going to use the word 'if', if there is no other learning what takes place? You understand? The mind is used in the acquisition of knowledge in matter. We'll put it differently. In mechanical things. And when the mind is employed there, are there any other processes of learning? Which means psychologically, inwardly - is there? The inward is the invention of thought as opposed to the outer. I don't know if you see. If I have understood the outer I have understood the inner. Because the inner has created the outer. The outer in the sense the structure of society, the religious sanctions, all that is invented or put together by thought - the Jesus's, the Christ, the Buddhas, all that. And what is there to learn? A: In listening to you... K: See the beauty of what is coming out. A: Oh yes, yes, it goes back to your remark about Vedanta as the end of knowledge. K: That's what I was told. A: Yes. The interesting thing to me about the Sanskrit construction is that unless I am mistaken, it doesn't mean the end of it as a terminus, as a term because that would simply start a new series. It is the consummation of it which is the total end in the sense that a totally new beginning is made. That very point. K: That means, sir, I know - the mind knows the activity of the known. A: That's right, yes. That's the consummation of knowledge. K: Of knowledge. Now what is the state of the mind that is free from that, and yet functions in knowledge? A: And yet functions in it. K: You follow? A: Yes, yes. It is seeing perfectly. K: Do go into it, you will see very strange things take place. Is this possible first? You understand? Because the brain functions mechanically, it wants security, otherwise it can't function. If we hadn't security we wouldn't be here sitting together. Because we have security we can have a dialogue. The brain can only function in complete security. Whether that security is found in a neurotic belief - all beliefs and all ideas are neurotic in that sense. So he finds it somewhere, in accepting nationality as the highest form of good, success is the highest virtue. He finds belief, security there. Now you are asking the mind, the brain, which has become mechanical, trained for centuries to see the other field which is not mechanical. Is there another field? A: No. K: You follow the question? A: Yes, I do. Yes, that's what so utterly devastating. K: Is there - wait, wait - is there another field? Now unless the brain and the mind understands the whole field - not field, understands the movement of knowledge, it is a movement. A: It is a movement, yes. K: It is not just static, you are adding, taking away, and so on. Unless it understands all that it cannot possibly ask that other question. A: Exactly. Exactly. K: And when it does ask that question, what takes place? Sir, this is real meditation, you know. A: This is, yes, yes. K: Which we will go into another time. So you see that's what it means. One is always listening with knowledge, seeing with knowledge. A: This is the seeing through a glass darkly. K: Darkly. Now is there a listening out of silence? And that is attention. And that is not time-binding, because in that silence I don't want anything. It isn't that I am going to learn about myself. It isn't that I am going to be punished, rewarded. In that absolute silence I listen. A: The wonder of the whole thing is that it isn't something which is done, this meditation, in succession. K: Sir, when we talk about meditation we will have to go very deeply into that because they have destroyed that word. These shoddy little men coming from India or anywhere, they have destroyed that thing. A: I heard the other day about someone who was learning transcendental meditation. K: Oh, learning. A: They had to do it at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. K: Pay 35 dollars or 100 dollars to learn that. It's so sacrilegious. A: That is, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon was judgement day. If you didn't do it according to your schedule then the world has obviously come to an end. But ostensibly you are doing it to get free of that. Do go ahead. K: So you see, sir, that's what takes place. We began this morning about beauty, then passion, then suffering, then action. Action based on idea is inaction. It sounds monstrous, but there it is. And from that we said what is seeing, and what is hearing. The seeing and the listening has become mechanical. We never see anything new. Even the flower is never new which has blossomed over night. We say, that's the rose, I have been expecting it, it has come out now, beautiful. It's always from the known to the known. A movement in time, and therefore time-binding, and therefore never free. And yet we are talking about freedom, you know philosophy, the lectures on freedom and so on and so on. And the communists call it a bourgeois thing, which it is, in the sense when you limit it to knowledge it is foolish to talk about freedom. But there is a freedom when you understand the whole movement of knowledge. So can you observe out of silence, and observe and act in the field of knowledge, so both together in harmony? A: Seeing then is not scheduled. Yes, of course, of course. I was just thinking about, I suppose you would say the classical definition of freedom in terms of the career of knowledge would be that it is a property of action, a property or quality of action. For general uses either word would do, property or quality. And it occurred to me in the context of what we have been saying, what a horror that one could read that statement and not let it disclose itself to you. K: Quite. A: If it disclosed itself to you, you would be up against it, you'd have to be serious. If you were a philosophy student and you read that and that thing began to operate in you, you'd say, I've got to get this settled before I go on. Maybe I'll never graduate, that's not important. K: That's not important, quite right. And I was thinking, in the West as well as in the East you have to go to the factory, or the office, every day of your life. Get up at 8 o'clock, 6 o'clock, drive, walk, work, work, work for fifty years, routine, and get kicked about, insulted, worship success. Again repetition. And occasionally talk about god if it is convenient, and so on and so on. That is a monstrous life. And that is what we are educating our children for. A: That's the real living death. K: And nobody says, for god's sake let's look at all this anew. Let's wipe our eyes clear of the past and look at what we are doing, give attention, care what we are doing. A: Now we have this question instead: what shall we do about it? Yes, that's the question. And then that becomes the next thing done that is added to the list. K: It is a continuity of the past, in a different form. A: And the chain is endlessly linked, linked, linked, linked. K: The cause becoming the effect and the effect becoming the cause. So it's a very serious thing when we talk about all this, because life becomes dreadfully serious. And it's only this serious person that lives. Not those people who seek entertainment, religious or otherwise. A: I had a very interesting occasion to understand what you are saying in class yesterday. I was trying to assist the students to see that the classical understanding of the four causes in operation is that they are non-temporarily related. And I said when the potter puts his hand to the clay, the hand touching the clay is not responded to by the clay after the hand has touched it. And one person who was visiting the class, this person was a well educated person and a professor, and this struck him as maybe not so, and I could tell by the expression on the face that there was a little anguish here, so I said, well, my radar says that there is some difficulty going on, what's the matter? Well, it seems like there is a time interval. So I asked him to pick something up that was on the desk. And I said, touch it with your finger and tell me at the moment of the touching with the finger whether the thing reacts to the finger after it is touched. Now do it. Well, even to ask somebody to apply a practical test like that with respect to a datum of knowledge like the four causes are... is to interrupt the process of education as we have known it. Because you teach a student about the four causes and he thinks about them, he never goes out and looks at things, or does anything about it. And so we were picking stuff up in class, and we were doing this until finally it seemed like a revelation that what has been said, in the classical teaching of it, which of course in modern society is rejected, happens to be the case. And I said, this has to be seen, watch. This is what you mean. K: Seeing, of course. A: Of course, of course. But we are back to that step there: why was that person and so many other students following suit, anguished at the point where the practical issue arose? There was a feeling, I suppose, that they were on the cliff. K: Quite, quite. A: That, and naturally alertness was required. But alertness registers that we are on a cliff, so therefore the best thing to do is to turn around and run back. Yes, yes. K: Sir, I think, you see, we are so caught up in words. To me the word is not the thing. The description is not the described. To us the description is all that matters because we are slave to words. A: And to ritual. K: Ritual and all the rest of it. So when you say, look, the thing matters more than the word, and then they say, how am I to get rid of the word, how am I to communicate if I have no word? You see how they have gone off? They are not concerned with the thing but with the word. A: Yes. K: And the door is not the word. So when we are caught up in words the word door becomes extraordinarily important, and not the door. A: And I don't really need to come to terms with the door, I say to myself, because I have the word. I have it all. K: So education has done this. A great part of this education is the acceptance of words as an abstraction from the fact, from the 'what is'. All philosophies are based on that: theorize, theorize, theorize, endlessly, how one should live. And the philosopher himself doesn't live. A: Yes, I know. K: You see this all over. A: Especially some philosophers that have seemed to me quite bizarre in this respect. I have asked my colleagues from time to time, if you believe that stuff why don't you do it? And they look at me as though I am out of my mind, as thought nobody would really seriously ask that question. K: Quite, quite. A: But if you can't ask that question, what question is worth asking? K: Quite right. A: I was thinking about that marvelous story you told in our previous conversation about the monkey, while you were speaking about this, when she shook hands with you, nobody had told her how to shake hands. K: No, it stretched out. A: Yes. K: And I took it. A: It wasn't something that she was taught how to do through a verbal communication, it was the appropriate thing at the time. K: At the time, yes. A: Without anyone measuring its appropriateness. K: Quite. A: Isn't that something. Yes, I can't tell you how grateful I am to have been able to share this with you. I have seen in respect to my own activity as a teacher where I must perform therapy even on my language. K: Quite, quite. A: So that I don't give the student an occasion for thinking that I am simply adding to this endless chain, link after link after link. There are two therapies here then: there's the therapy that relates to words and that flows our naturally. It is not a contrivance, it flows out naturally, if I've understood you correctly, from the therapy within. Now this relates directly, as you were saying earlier, to meditation. Are we ready, do you think to... K: I think that's too complicated. A: I don't mean right now. But maybe in one of our next conversations. K: Oh yes, we must discuss several things yet, sir. A: Yes. K: What is love, what is death, what is meditation, what is the whole movement of living. We've got a great deal to do. A: Oh, I do look forward to that very much. Splendid. Right. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 25TH FEBRUARY 1974 11TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'THE NATURE OF HURT' A: Mr Krishnamurti, during our conversations one thing has emerged for me with I'd say an arresting force. That is, on the one had we have been talking about thought and knowledge in terms of a dysfunctional relationship to it, but never once have you said that we should get rid of thought, and you have never said that knowledge, as such, in itself, has something profoundly the matter with it. Therefore the relationship between intelligence and thought arises, and the question of what seems to be that which maintains a creative relationship between intelligence and thought - perhaps some primordial activity which abides. And in thinking on this I wondered whether you would agree that perhaps in the history of human existence the concept of god has been generated out of a relationship to this abiding activity, which concept has been very badly abused. And it raises the whole question of the phenomenon of religion itself. I wondered if we might discuss that today? K: Yes. You know, a word like religion, love, or god, has almost lost all its meaning. They have abused these words so enormously, and religion has become a vast superstition, a great propaganda, incredible beliefs and superstitions, worship of images made by the hand or by the mind. So when we talk about religion I would like, if I may, to be quite clear that we are both of us using the word religion in the real sense of that word, not either in the Christian, or the Hindu, or the Muslim, or the Buddhist, or all the stupid things that are going on in this country in the name of religion. I think the word 'religion' means gathering together all energy, at all levels, physically, moral, spiritual, at all levels, gathering all this energy which will bring about a great attention. And in that attention there is no frontier, and then from there move. To me that is the meaning of that word: the gathering of total energy to understand what thought cannot possibly capture. Thought is never new, never free, and therefore it is always conditioned and fragmentary, and so on, which we discussed. So religion is not a thing put together by thought, or by fear, or by the pursuit of satisfaction and pleasure, but something totally beyond all this, which isn't romanticism, speculative belief, or sentimentality. And I think if we could keep to that, to the meaning of that word, putting aside all the superstitious nonsense that is going on in the world in the name of religion, which has become really quite a circus, however beautiful it is. Then I think we could from there start, if you will. If you agree to the meaning of that word. A: Yes. I have been thinking as you have been speaking that in the biblical tradition there are actual statements from the prophets which seem to point to what you are saying. Such things come to mind as Isaiah, taking the part of the divine, when he says, my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways, as high as the heavens are above the earth so are my thoughts and your thoughts, so stop thinking about me in that sense. And don't try to find a means to me that you have contrived since my ways are higher than your ways. And then I was thinking while you were speaking concerning this act of attention, this gathering together of all energies of the whole man; the very simple, be still and know that I am God. Be still. It's amazing when one thinks of the history of religion, how little attention has been paid to that as compared with ritual. K: But I think when we lost touch with nature, with the universe, with the clouds, lakes, birds, when we lost touch with all that, then the priests came in. Then all the superstition, fears, exploitation, all that began. The priests became the mediator between the human and the so-called divine. And I believe, if you have read the Rig Veda, I was told about it because I don't read all this, that there, in the first Veda there is no mention of God at all. There is only this worship of something immense, expressed in nature and in the earth, in the clouds, in the trees, in the beauty of vision. But that being, very, very simple, the priests said, that is too simple. A: Let's mix it up. K: Let's mix it up, let's confuse it a little bit. And that began. I believe this is traceable from the ancient Vedas to the present time, where the priests became the interpreter, the mediator, the explainer, the exploiter, the man who said, this is right, this is wrong, you must believe this or you will go to perdition, and so on and so on. He generated fear, not the adoration of beauty, not the adoration of life lived totally wholly without conflict, but something placed outside there beyond and above what he considered to be God and made propaganda for that. So I feel if we could from the beginning use the word religion in the simplest way. That is, the gathering of all energy so that there is total attention, and in that quality of attention the immeasurable comes into being. Because as we said the other day, the measurable is the mechanical. Which the west has cultivated, made marvelous, technologically, physically, medicine, science, biology and so on and so on, which has made the world so superficial, mechanical, worldly, materialistic. And that is spreading all over the world. And in reaction to that, this materialistic attitude, there are all these superstitious, nonsensical unreasoned religions that are going on. I don't know if you saw the other day the absurdity of these gurus coming from India and teaching the west how to meditate, how to hold breath, they say, "I am god, worship me" - it has become so absurd, and childish, so utterly immature. All that indicates the degradation of the word religion, and the human mind that can accept this kind of circus and idiocy. A: Yes. I was thinking of a remark of Sri Aurobindo's in a study that he made on the Veda, where he traced its decline in the sentence. He said it issues as language from sages, then it falls to the priests, then after the priests it falls to the scholars or the academicians. But in that study there was no statement that I found as to how it ever fell to the priests. K: I think it is fairly simple, sir. A: Yes, please. K: I think it is fairly simple, sir, how the priests got hold of the whole business. Because man is so concerned with his own petty little affairs, petty little desires, and ambitions, superficiality, he wants something a little more: he wants a little more romantic, a little more sentimental, something other than the daily beastly routine of living. So he looks somewhere and the priests say, come over here, I've got the goods. I think it is very simple how the priests have come in. You see it in India, you see it in the west. You see it everywhere where man begins to be concerned with daily living, the daily operation of bread and butter, house and all the rest of it, he demands something more than that. He says, after all I'll die but there must be something more. A: So fundamentally it's a matter of securing for himself some... K: ...heavenly grace. A: ...some heavenly grace that will preserve him against falling into this mournful round of coming to be and passing away. Thinking of the past, on the one had, anticipating the future on the other, you're saying he falls out of the present now. K: Yes, that's right. A: I understand. K: So, if we could keep to that meaning of that word religion then from there the question arises, can the mind be so attentive in the total sense that the unnameable comes into being? You see, personally I have never read any of these things, Veda, Gita, Upanishads, the Bible, all the rest of it, or any philosophy. But I questioned everything. A: Yes. K: Not question only, but observe. And I - one sees the absolute necessity of a mind that is completely quiet. Because it's only out of quietness you perceive what is happening. If I am chattering I won't listen to you. If my mind is constantly rattling away, to what you are saying I won't pay attention. To pay attention means to be quiet. A: There have been some priests, apparently, who usually ended up in a great deal of trouble for it, there have been some priests who had, it seems, a grasp of this. I was thinking of Meister Eckhardt's remark that whoever is able to read the book of nature doesn't need any scriptures at all. K: That's just it. A: Of course, he ended up in very great trouble. Yes, he had a bad time toward the ends of his life, and after he died the church denounced him. K: Of course, of course. Organized belief as church, and all the rest of it, is too obvious. It isn't subtle, it hasn't got the quality of real depth and real spirituality. You know what it is. A: Yes, I do. K: So I'm asking, what is the quality of a mind, and therefore heart and brain, what is the quality of a mind that can perceive something beyond the measurement of thought? What is the quality of a mind? Because that quality is the religious mind. That quality of a mind that is capable, that has this feeling of being sacred in itself, and therefore is capable of seeing something immeasurably sacred. A: The word devotion seems to imply this when it is grasped in its proper sense. To use your earlier phrase, gathering together toward a one pointed attentive... K: Would you say attention is one pointed? A: No, I didn't mean to imply focus when I said one pointed. K: Yes, that's what I wondered. A: I meant rather, integrated into itself as utterly quiet and unconcerned about taking thought for what is ahead, or what is behind. Simply being there. The word 'there' isn't good either because it suggests that there is a 'where' and all the rest of it. It is very difficult to find, it seems to me, language to do justice to what you are saying, precisely because when we speak utterance is in time and it is progressive, it has a quality, doesn't it, more like music than we see in graphic art. You can stand before a picture, whereas to hear music and grasp its theme you virtually have to wait until you get to the end and gather it all up. And with language you have the same difficulty. K: No, I think, sir don't you, when we are enquiring into this problem, what is the nature, the structure of a mind, and therefore the quality of a mind, that is not only sacred and holy in itself, but is capable of seeing something immense? As we were talking the other day about suffering, personal and the sorrow of the world, it isn't that we must suffer, suffering is there. Every human being has a dreadful time with it. And there is the suffering of the world. And it isn't that one must go through it, but as it is there one must understand it and go beyond it. And that's one of the qualities of a religious mind, in the sense we are using that word, that is incapable of suffering. It has gone beyond it. Which doesn't mean that it becomes callous. On the contrary it is a passionate mind. A: One of the things that I have thought much about during our conversations is language itself. On the one hand we say such a mind as you have been describing is one that is present to suffering. It does nothing to push it away, on the one hand; and yet it is somehow able to contain it, not put it in a vase, or barrel, contain it in that sense, and yet the very word itself, to suffer, means to under-carry. And it seems close to understand. Over and over again in our conversations I have been thinking about the customary way in which we use language as a use that deprives us of really seeing the glory of what the word points to itself, in itself. I was thinking about the word religion when we were speaking earlier. Scholars differ as to where that came from: on the one hand some say it means to bind, the church fathers spoke about that. And then others say, no, no, it means the numinous or the splendour that cannot be exhausted by thought. It seems to me that, wouldn't you say, that there is another sense to bind that is not a negative one, in the sense that if one is making this act of attention, one isn't bound as with cords of rope. But one is there, or here. K: Sir, now again let's be clear. When we use the word attention there is a difference between concentration and attention. Concentration is exclusion. I concentrate. That is, bring all my thinking to a certain point, and therefore it is excluding, building a barrier so that it can focus its whole concentration on that. Whereas attention is something entirely different from concentration. In that there is no exclusion. In that there is no resistance. In that there is no effort. And therefore no frontier, no limits. A: How would you feel about the word receptive, in this respect? K: Again, who is it who is to receive? A: Already we have made a division. K: A division. A: With that word. K: Yes. I think the word attention is really a very good word. Because it not only understands concentration, not only sees duality of reception, the receiver and the received, and also it sees the nature of duality and the conflict of the opposites; and attention means not only the brain giving its energy, but also the mind, the heart, the nerves, the total entity, the total human mind giving all its energy to perceive. I think that is the meaning of that word for me at least, to be attentive, attend. Not concentrate, attend. That means listen, see, give your heart to it, give your mind to it, give your whole being to attend, otherwise you can't attend. If I am thinking about something else I can't attend. If I am hearing my own voice, I can't attend. A: There is a metaphorical use of the word waiting in scripture. It's interesting that in English too we use the word attendant in terms of one who waits on. I'm trying to penetrate the notion of waiting, and patience in relation to this. K: I think, sir, waiting again means one who is waiting for something. Again there is a duality. And when you wait you are expecting. Again a duality. One who is waiting about to receive. So if we could for the moment hold ourselves to that word, attention, then we should enquire what is the quality of a mind that is so attentive that it has understood, lives, acts, in relationship and responsibility as behaviour, and has no fear psychologically in that, we talked about, and therefore understands the movement of pleasure. Then we come to the point, what is such a mind? I think it would be worthwhile if we could discuss the nature of hurt. A: Of hurt? Yes. K: Why human beings are hurt. All people are hurt. A: You mean both physically and psychologically? K: Psychologically especially. A: Especially the psychological one, yes. K: Physically we can tolerate it. We can bear up with a pain and say I won't let it interfere with my thinking. I won't let it corrode my psychological quality of mind. The mind can watch over that. But the psychological hurts are much more important and difficult to grapple with and understand. I think it is necessary because a mind that is hurt is not an innocent mind. The very word innocent comes from innocere, not to hurt. A mind that is incapable of being hurt. There is a great beauty in that. A: Yes, there is. It's a marvelous word. We have usually used it to indicate a lack of something. K: I know. A: Yes, and there it's turned upside down again. K: And the Christians have made such an absurd thing of it. A: Yes, I understand that. K: So I think we ought in discussing religion we ought to enquire very, very deeply into the nature of hurt, because a mind that is not hurt is an innocent mind. And you need this quality of innocency to be so totally attentive. A: If I have been following you correctly I think may be you would say, wouldn't you, that man becomes hurt when he starts thinking about thinking that he is hurt. K: Look sir, it's much deeper than that, isn't' it? From childhood the parents compare the child with another child. A: That's when that thought arises. K: There it is. When you compare you are hurting. A: Yes. K: No, but we do it. A: Oh yes, of course we do it. K: Therefore is it possible to educate a child without comparison, without imitation? And therefore never get hurt in that way. And one is hurt because one has built an image about oneself. The image which one has built about oneself is a form of resistance, a wall between you and me. And when you touch that wall at its tender point I get hurt. So not to compare in education, not to have an image about oneself. That's one of the most important things in life, not to have an image about oneself. If you have you are inevitably going to be hurt. Suppose one has an image that one is very good, or that one should be a great success, or that one has great capacities, gifts, you know the images that one builds, inevitably you are going to come and prick it. Inevitably accidents and incidents happen that's going to break that, and one gets hurt. A: Doesn't this raise the question of name. K: Oh yes. A: The use of name. K: Name, form. A: The child is given a name, the child identifies himself with the name. K: Yes, the child can identify itself but without the image, just a name: Brown, Mr Brown. There is nothing to it. But the moment he builds an image that Mr Brown is socially, morally different, superior, or inferior, ancient or comes from a very old family, belongs to a certain higher class, aristocracy. The moment that begins, and when that is encouraged and sustained by thought, snobbism, you know the whole lot of it, then you are inevitably going to be hurt. A: What you are saying, I take it, is that there is a radical confusion here involved in the imagining oneself to be his name. K: Yes. Identification with the name, with the body, with the idea that you are socially different, that your parents, your grandparents were lords, or this or that. You know the whole snobbism of England, and all that, and the different kind of snobbism in this country. A: We speak in language of preserving the name. K: Yes. And in India it is the Brahmin, the non Brahmin, the whole business of that. So through education, through tradition, through propaganda we have built an image about ourselves. A: Is there a relation here in terms of religion, would you say, for the refusal, for instance in the Hebraic tradition to pronounce the name of God. K: The word is not the thing anyhow. So you can pronounce it or not pronounce it. If you know the word is never the thing, the description is never the described, then it doesn't matter. A: No. One of the reasons I've always been over the years deeply drawn to the study of the roots of words is simply because for the most part they point to something very concrete. K: Very. A: It's either a thing or it's a gesture, more often than not it's some act. K: Quite, quite. A: Some act. When I use the phrase, thinking about thinking, before, I should have been more careful of my words and referred to mulling over the image, which would have been a much better way to put it, wouldn't it? K: Yes, yes. So can a child be educated never to get hurt? And I have heard professors, scholars, say, a child must be hurt in order to live in the world. And when I asked him, do you want your child to be hurt, he kept absolutely quiet. He was just talking theoretically. Now unfortunately through education, through social structure and the nature of our society in which we live, we have been hurt, we have images about ourselves which are going to be hurt, and is it possible not to create images at all? I don't know if I am making myself clear. A: You are. K: That is, suppose I have an image about myself - which I haven't fortunately - if I have an image, is it possible to wipe it away, to understand it and therefore dissolve it, and never to create a new image about myself? You understand? Living in a society, being educated, I have built an image inevitably. Now can that image be wiped away? A: Wouldn't it disappear with this complete act of attention? K: That's what I'm coming to gradually. It would totally disappear. But I must understand how this image is born. I can't just say, well, I'll wipe it out. A: Yes. K: Use attention as a meant of wiping it out - it doesn't work that way. In understanding the image, in understanding the hurts, in understanding the education in which one has been brought up in the family, the society, all that, in the understanding of all that, out of the understanding comes attention; not the attention first and then wipe it out. You can't attend if you're hurt. If I am hurt how can I attend? Because that hurt is going to keep me, consciously, or unconsciously, from this total attention. A: The amazing thing, if I'm understanding you correctly, is that even in the study of the dysfunctional history, provided I bring total attention to that, there's going to be a nontemporal relationship between the act of attention and the healing that takes place. K: That's right. A: While I am attending the thing is leaving. K: The thing is leaving, yes, that's it. A: We've got 'thinging' along here throughout. Yes, exactly. K: So, there are two questions involved: can the hurts be healed so that not a mark is left; and can future hurts be prevented completely, without any resistance. You follow? Those are two problems. And they can be understood only and resolved when I give attention to the understanding of my hurts. When I look at it, not translate it, not wish to wipe them away, just to look at it - as we went into that question of perception. Just to see my hurts. The hurts I have received, the insults, the negligence, the casual words, the gesture, all those hurts. And the language one uses, specially in this country. A: Oh yes, yes. There seems to be a relationship between what you are saying and one of the meanings of the word, salvation. K: Salvare, to save. A: To save. K: To save. A: To make whole. K: To make whole. How can you be whole, sir, if you are hurt? A: Impossible. K: Therefore it is tremendously important to understand this question. A: Yes, it is. But I am thinking of a child who comes to school who has already got a freight car filled with hurts. K: Hurts. A: We are not dealing with a little one in a crib now, we're already... K: We are already hurt. A: Already hurt. And hurt because it is hurt. It multiplies endlessly. K: Of course. From that hurt he's violent. From that hurt he is frightened and therefore withdrawing. From that hurt he will do neurotic things. From that hurt he will accept anything that gives him safety - god, his idea of god is a god who will never hurt. A: Sometimes a distinction is made between ourselves and animals with respect to this problem. An animal, for instance, that has been badly hurt will be disposed toward everyone in terms of emergency and attack. But over a period of time, it might take three or four years, if the animal is loved and... K: So, sir, you see, you said, loved. We haven't got that thing. A: No. K: And parents haven't got love for their children. They may talk about love. Because the moment they compare the younger to the older they have hurt the child. Your father was so clever, you are such a stupid boy. There you have begun. In school where they give you marks it is a hurt, not marks, it is a deliberate hurt. And that is stored, and from that there is violence, there is every kind of aggression, you know all that takes place. So a mind cannot be made whole, or is whole, unless this is understood very, very deeply. A: The question that I had in mind before regarding what we have been saying is that this animal, if loved, will, provided we are not dealing with brain damage or something, will in time love in return. But the thought is that with the human person love cannot be in that sense coerced. It isn't that one would coerce the animal to love, but that the animal, because innocent, does in time simply respond, accept. K: Accept, of course. A: But then a human person is doing something we don't think the animal is. K: No. The human being is being hurt and is hurting all the time. A: Exactly. Exactly. While he is mulling over his hurt then he is likely to misinterpret the very act of generosity of love that is made toward him. So we are involved in something very frightful here: by the time the child comes into school, seven years old... K: He is already gone, finished, tortured. There is the tragedy of it, sir, that is what I mean. A: Yes,I know. And when you ask the question, as you have, is there a way to educate the child so that the child... K: ...is never hurt. That is part of education, that is part of culture. Civilization is hurting. Sir, look, you see this everywhere all over the world, this constant comparison, constant imitation, constant saying, you are that, I must be like you. I must be like Krishna, like Buddha, like Jesus, you follow. That's a hurt. Religions have hurt people. A: A child is born to a hurt parent, sent to a school where it is taught by a hurt teacher. Now you are asking, is there a way to educate this child so the child recovers. K: I say it is possible, sir. A: Yes, please. K: That is, when the teacher realizes, when the educator realizes he is hurt and the child is hurt, he is aware of his hurt and he is aware also of the child's hurt then the relationship changes. Then he will in the very act of teaching, mathematics, whatever it is, he is not only freeing himself from his hurt but also helping the child to be free of his hurt. After all that is education: to see that I, who am the teacher, I am hurt, I have gone through agonies of hurt, and I want to help that child not to be hurt, and he has come to the school being hurt. So I say, all right, we both are hurt my friend, let us see, let's help each other to wipe it out. That is the act of love. A: Comparing the human organism with the animal, I return to the question whether it is the case that this relationship to another human being must bring about this healing. K: Obviously, sir, if relationship exists, we said relationship can only exist when there is no image between you and me. A: Let us say there is a teacher who has come to grips with this in himself, very, very deeply, has, as you put it, gone into the question deeper, deeper and deeper, has come to a place where he no longer is hurt-bound. The child that he meets or the young student that he meets, or even a student his own age, because we have adult education, is a person who is hurt-bound and will he not... K: Transmit that hurt to another? A: No, will he not, because he is hurt-bound, be prone to misinterpret the activity of the one who is not hurt-bound? K: But there is no person who is not hurt-bound, except very, very few. Look, sir, lots of things have happened to me personally, I have never been hurt. I say this in all humility, in the real sense, I don't know what it means to be hurt. Things have happened to me, people have done every kind of thing, praised me, flattered me, kicked me around, everything. It is possible. And as a teacher, as an educator, to see the child, and it is my responsibility as an educator to see he is never hurt, not just teach some beastly subject. This is far more important. A: I think I have some grasp of what you are talking about. I don't think I could ever in my wildest dreams say that I have never been hurt. Though I do have difficulty, and have since a child, I have even been taken to task for it, of dwelling on it. I remember a colleague of mine once saying to me with some testiness when we were discussing a situation in which there was conflict in the faculty: 'Well the trouble with you is you can't hate.' And it was looked upon as a disorder in terms of being unable to make a focus towards the enemy in such a way as to devote total attention to that. K: Sanity is taken for insanity. A: So my reply to him was simply, well that's right and we might as well face it and I don't intend to do anything about it. But it didn't help the situation in terms of the interrelationship. K: So the question is then: in education can a teacher, educator, observe his hurts, become aware of them, and in his relationship with the student resolve his hurt and the student's? That's one problem. It is possible if the teacher is really, in the deep sense of the word, educated, that is, cultivated. And the next question, sir, from that arises, is the mind capable of not being hurt, knowing it has been hurt? Not add more hurts. Right? A: Yes. K: I have these two problems: one, being hurt, that is the past; and never to be hurt again. Which doesn't mean I build a wall of resistance, that I withdraw, that I go off into a monastery, or become a drug addict, or some silly thing like that, but no hurt. Is that possible? You see the two questions? Now, what is hurt? What is the thing that is hurt? You follow? A: Yes. K: We said the physical hurt is not the same as the psychological. A: No. K: So we are dealing with psychological hurt. What is the thing that is hurt? The psyche? The image which I have about myself? A: It is an investment that I have in it. K: Yes, it's my investment in myself. A: Yes. I've divided myself off from myself. K: Yes, in myself. That means, why should I invest in myself. What is myself? You follow? A: Yes, I do. K: In which I have to invest something. What is myself? All the words, the names, the qualities, the education, the bank account, the furniture, the house, the hurts, all that is me. A: In an attempt to answer the question, what is myself, I immediately must resort to all this stuff. K: Obviously. A: There isn't any other way. And then I haven't got it. Then I praise myself because I must be so marvelous as somehow to slip out. K: Quite, quite. A: I see what you mean. I was thinking just a moment back when you were saying it is possible for the teacher to come into relationship with the student so that a work of healing, or an act of healing happens. K: See sir, this is what happens if I were in a class that's the first thing I would begin with, not some subject. I would say, look, you are hurt and I am hurt, we are both of us hurt. And point out what hurt does, how it kills people, how it destroys people; out of that there is violence, out of that there is brutality, out of that I want to hurt people. You follow? All that comes in. I would spend ten minutes talking about that, every day, in different ways, till both of us see it. Then as an educator I would use the right world and the student will use the right word, there will be no gesture, we are both involved in it. But we don't do that. The moment we come into class we pick up a book and there it goes off. If I was an educator, whether with the older people, or the younger people, I would establish this relationship. That's my duty, that's my job, that's my function, not just to transmit some information. A: Yes, that's really very profound. I think one of the reasons that what you have said is so difficult for an educator reared within the whole academic... K: Yes, because we are so vain. A: Exactly. We want not only to hear that it is possible for this transformation to take place, but we want it to be regarded as demonstrably proved and therefore not merely possible but predictably certain. K: Certain, yes. A: And then we are back into the whole thing. K: Of course we are back into the old rotten stuff. Quite right. A: Next time could we take up the relationship of love to this? K: Yes. A: I would very much enjoy that, and it would seem to me... K: ...it would all come together. A: Come together, in the gathering together. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 25TH FEBRUARY 1974 12TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'LOVE AND PLEASURE' A: Mr Krishnamurti, in our last conversation we were talking about religion as a phenomenon in relation to our concern for enquiring into the transformation of each individual human being, a transformation that is not dependent on knowledge or time, and during our discussion of religion you were speaking about what you regarded to be religion in the true sense, its relation to the act of attention and how when the whole personal history of hurt is a reference, this act of attention simply is vitiated, it cannot come to pass. And through the discussion of hurt that we had we touched. towards the end of the discussion, on love, and if it's agreeable with you perhaps we could explore this question of love now? K: Sir, when you use the word explore, are we using that word intellectually, exploring with the intellect, or exploring in relation to the word and seeing in that word the mirror which will reveal ourselves in that mirror? A: I hope the latter. K: That is, the word is the mirror in which I, as a human being, observe. So the word explored really means observing myself in the mirror of the word that you have used. SO the word then becomes the thing. Not just a word by itself. A: Right. K: And therefore it's not intellectual exploration, a theoretical exploration. A: It could be the beginning of a meditation. K: That's what I want to make quite clear. A: Yes. That is where I would want to be in relationship to the subject. K: And exploring also means the mind must also be very serious. Not caught up in the mere desire to achieve something - to know how to love. I mean, how to acquire the neighbour's love. You follow, sir? A: Yes. Become a successful lover. K: Successful lover, yes. So I think when we explore that word and meaning and the significance of it one has to very, very serious about this matter because they are using this word so loosely, it has become so corrupt - love of God, love of my wife, love of my property, love of my country, I love to read, I love to go to the cinema. And one of our difficulties is, modern education is not making us serious. We are becoming specialists. I mean first class doctor, first class surgeon, first class physician and so on, so on. But the specialist becomes a menace that way. A: A learned ignoramus. K: Education as we were saying previously is to encourage, to see that the human mind is serious. Serious to find out what it is to live, not just become a specialist. So if that is all understood, and much more, what is love? Is love pleasure? Is love the expression of desire? Is love sexual appetite fulfilled? Is love the pursuit of a desired end? The identification with a family, with a woman, with a man? Is love a thing that can be cultivated? That can be made to grow when I have no love, when I think about it, I do all kinds of things to it so that I will know how to love my neighbour? A: We sometimes hear the admonition that one has to work at it. Yes. In terms of our conversations up to now, that would be a denial of it. K: So, is love pleasure? And apparently it is, now. A: It seems to have been debased to that. K: Actually it is, that is what we call love. Love of God. I don't know what god is, and yet I am supposed to love him. And therefore I transfer my pleasures of the world, of things, of sex, to a higher level which I call God. It is still pleasure. So what is pleasure in relation to love? What is enjoyment in relation to love? What is joy, the unconscious feeing of joy? The moment I recognize joy it is gone. And what is the relationship of joy, enjoyment and pleasure to love, with love? Unless we understand that we shan't understand what love is. A: Yes, yes I have followed you. K: And take what is happening. Love has been identified with sex, love-making, love sexually, you follow, sir? A: The very construction love making, making love. K: It's a horrible thing. It gives me a shock, love-making as though that were love. You see, sir, I think it is very important, the western civilization has put this over the whole of the earth, through cinemas, through books, through pornography, through every kind of advertisements, stories, this sense of love is identification with sex, which is pleasure, basically. A: The whole glamour industry is based on that. K: On that. A: On that K: The whole thing. So can the mind, again we must come back to the point, can the mind understand the nature of pleasure and its relationship to love, can the mind that is pursuing pleasure, an ambitious mind, a competitive mind, a mind that says, I must get something out of life, I must reward myself and others, I must compete. Can such a mind love? It can love sexually. But is love of sex, is that the only thing? And why have we made sex such an enormous affair? Volumes are written on it. Unless really one goes into this very, very deeply, the other thing is not possible even to understand. We can talk endlessly about what love is, what love is not theoretically. But if we use the word love as a mirror to see what is happening inwardly, then I must inevitably ask the question whether it is pleasure in its multiple forms? Can a man who is top executive, got to that position through drive, through aggression, through deception through ruthlessness, can he know what love is? Can the priest who talks everlastingly of God, he is ambitious to become a bishop, archbishop or whatever his ambitions are - to sit next to Jesus. A: Who will sit on the right hand. K: Right hand. So can that priest who talks about it know what love means? A: No, he thinks he can in reference to something called a higher love which is based on a denial of a lower one. K: I mean that's just words. A: In that conflict there can be no love. K: So, then our whole social, moral structure is immoral. A: Oh, yes. K: I mean, sir, this is a thing that is appalling. And nobody wants to change that. On the contrary, they say, yes, let's carry on, put on a lot of coating on it, different colours, more pleasant and let's carry on. So, if a man is really concerned to come upon this thing called love he must negate this whole thing, which means he must understand the place of pleasure, whether intellectual pleasure, acquisition of knowledge as pleasure, acquisition of a position as power, you follow? The whole thing. And how is a mind that has been trained, conditioned, sustained in this rotten social conditioning, how can it free itself before it talks about love? It must first free itself of that. Otherwise your talk of love, it's just another word which has no meaning. A: We do seem, in western culture particularly, to be very sex-bound. On the one hand we are threatened with unhappiness if we don't succeed sexually. Yet on the other hand the whole history of clinical psychology focuses precisely on the pathology os sexuality. K: Of course. A: As somehow able in itself as a study to free us. The interrelationship between those two activities, the desire to succeed on the one hand and the necessity to study what's the matter with the drive on the other, brings about a paralysis. K: Yes, so you see this thing, sex, has become, I don't know, of such enormous importance right through the world now. In Asia they cover it up. They don't talk about it there. If you talk about sex it is something wrong. Here you talk endlessly about it. But there you don't, certain things you don't talk about. You can talk about it in the bedroom, or perhaps not even in the bedroom. It's not done. And when I talk in India, I bring it out. They are a little bit shocked because a religious man is not supposed to deal with all that kind of stuff. A: He is supposed to be beyond that. K: He is supposed to be, but he mustn't talk about it. That's one of the things, why has sex become so important? You see, love is, after all a sense of total absence of the 'me', total absence of the me - my ego, my ambitions, my greed, all that, which is me, total negation of all that. Negation, not brutal denial or surgical operation but the understanding of all that. When the 'me' is not, the other is. Obviously. It's so simple. You know, sir, the Christian sign, the cross, I was told is a very, very ancient symbol, previous to Christian acceptance of that symbol. It meant, wipe out the i. A: I had never heard of that. K: Wipe out the I. The I, wipe it out. You understand, sir? A: Yes, in a noncanonical statement of Jesus, it's written that he remarked that unless you make your up down, and your down up, your right left, your left right, the complete total turning of something upside down that one has been accustomed to do, a hundred and eighty degree turn, then one doesn't come to the kingdom of heaven which is of course in his language, not over here to be expected. He said precisely it doesn't come by observations, it's not here, it's not there, it's within one. Or in the Greek it doesn't mean in, as a locus but it's a presence. K: It's a presence, yes. So when we are enquiring into this question of love we must enquire into pleasure; pleasure in all its varieties, and its relationship to love, enjoyment to love, real joy, this thing which can never be invited, and its relation to love. So we had better begin with pleasure. That is, the world has made sex into an immense thing. And the priests right through the world, have denied it. They won't look at a woman, though they are burning inside, with lust and all kinds of things. They shut their eyes. And they say, only a man who is a celibate can go to God. Think of the absurdity of such a statement. So anybody who has sex is damned for ever. A: Then you have to invent some story as to how it was we so-called fell into it. K: Fell into it, or, the Virgin Mary, you follow, the whole idea. A: Yes, the whole thing. K: Which is a farce. So why have we made it such a fantastic, romantic, sentimental affair, sex? Is it because intellectually we are crippled? We are secondhand people. You follow, sir? I repeat what Plato, Aristotle, Buddha, somebody said, and therefore my mind intellectually is third rate. So it is never free. So intellectually I am a slave. Emotionally I become romantic. I become sentimental. And the only escape is sex, where I am free, if the woman or the man agrees, if they are compatible and all the rest of it then it is the only road, only door through which I say, for god's sake, at least I am free here. In the office I am bullied, you follow, sir. In the factory I just turn the wheels. So it is the only escape for me. The peasant in India, the poor villager in villages, look at them, that is the only thing they have. And religion is something else: I agree we should be celibate, we should be all the rest of it but for god's sake leave us alone with our pleasures, with our sex. So if that is so, and it looks like that, that we are intellectually, morally, spiritually crippled human beings, degenerate, and it is the only thing that gives us some release, some freedom. In other fields I have no freedom. I have to go to the office everyday. I have to go to the factory every day. I have to, you follow, cinema once, three times a week, or whatever it is you do, you've got, and here at last I am a man, woman. So I have made this thing into an enormous affair. And if I am not sexual I have to find out why I am not sexual. I spend years to find out. You follow, sir? Books are written. It has become a nauseating thing, a stupid thing. And we have to also in relation to that to find out what is celibacy. Because they have all talked about it. Every religion has talked about it: that you must be celibate. And they say, Christians say the Virgin, Jesus was born immaculate. You follow? And the Buddhists, I don't know if you ever heard of the story where the Buddha - the mother conceived because she - not out of human relationship, but out of - the same thing. They don't want sex to be associated with a religion. And yet every priest is burning with it. And they say you must be celibate. And they take a vow of celibacy. I told you the story of that monk. A: Oh, yes, yes. A deeply moving story. K: And what is celibacy? Is it in there, in your heart and your mind? Or just the act? A: If I have been following you correctly, it seems to me that you pointed to sex here as undergone in a utilitarian way. It's a means to and therefore, since... K: A routine, an insistence, encouragement, you follow? A: Yes. Always a goal that lies outside the activity. Therefore it can never be caught up to. K: Quite right. Therefore conflict. A: Therefore conflict and repetition. K: And therefore what is celibacy? Is it the act or the mind that is chaste? You follow, sir? A: It must be the mind. K: The chaste mind. Which means a tremendously austere mind. Not the austerity of severity and ruthless acceptance of a principle and all the rest of it. A: This goes back to the earlier conversation when we were talking about hurt. K: That's right. A: The chaste mind would never be hurt. K: Never. And therefore an innocent mind. Which has no picture of the woman or the man or the act. None of that imagination. A: This is very fundamental. I know in our conversations that I keep bringing up things that I've read and studied because that has largely been the occupation of my life. And the thing that moves me so deeply in listening to you is that so many of the things that have been said over the centuries, and written over the centuries, ought to have been understood in the way in which you've been presenting them. We even have a tradition in Christian theology that what is called the fall of man began at the point of imagination. And yet that hasn't been properly understood, it seems to me. Otherwise had it been properly understood we would not be in this immense conflict that we are in. K. Christians have first invented the sin and all the rest of it. A: It has been the cart before the horse. Yes, I do see what you are saying. K: So, can the mind be chaste? Not can the mind take a vow of celibacy and remain, and have burning desires, you follow? And we talked the other day, about desire. We are burning with desire. All our glands are full of it. So chastity means a mind that has no hurt, no image, no sense of pictures of itself, its appetites, all that. Can such a mind exist in this world? Otherwise love is not. I can talk endlessly about love of Jesus, love of this, love of that, but it becomes so shoddy. A: Because it's love of. K: Yes. A: Love as an activity is not the same as love undertaken as a means. K: Yes, sir. So is love pleasure? I can only answer it is not, when I have understood pleasure. And understand not verbally, but deeply, inwardly, see the nature of it, the brutality of it, the divisive process of it. Because pleasure is always divisive. Enjoyment is never divisive. Joy is never dividing. It is only pleasure that is dividing. When you listen to an Arab about the oil, the energy, it is his pride, his - you follow? You see it in him. And you see it in the ministers, in the politicians, this whole sense of arrogance, of power. And at the same time they talk about love. A: But it's always love of. K: Of course, love of, or love, I don t know what they mean anyhow. It has no meaning. They say love of my country, and my love is going to kill you. A: Yes, yes. K: So, you see sir, we have to understand this killing too. The western civilization has made killing a perfect art. The war, science of war. They have taught the whole world this. And probably the Christians are the greatest killers. After Muslims, and I believe the real religious, original Buddhists were really non-killers. A: Yes. K: They said don't kill. I must tell you this lovely story. I was several years ago in Ceylon and a Buddhist couple came to see me. They said we have got one major problem. We are Buddhist by practice. And they said, we don't kill, but we eat meat. I said what do you mean? He said we change our butchers. We change our butchers, therefore we are not responsible. And we like meat. I said, is that the problem? He said, no not at all. Our problem is, should we eat a fertilized egg because that contains life? A: Oh dear me. K: So, sir, when we talk about love, we must also talk about violence and killing. We kill, we have destroyed the earth, polluted the earth. We have wiped away species of animals and birds, we are killing baby seals, you've seen them on television? A: Oh, I have. K: How a human being can do such as thing... A: It's deeply shocking. K: ...for some woman to put on that fur. And he will go back and say, I love my wife. So. And we are trained to kill. All the Generals, they are preparing endlessly means of killing others. That's our civilization, you follow, sir? So, can a man who is ambitious, love? A: No. K: No. Therefore finish with ambition. They wont, they want both. That means, don't kill under any circumstances, don't kill an animal to eat. I have never eaten meat in my life, never. I don't know what it tastes like. Not that I am proud or anything, but I couldn't do it. And killing has become an industry, killing animals to feed human beings. You follow, sir? A: Yes. It has, right. I was thinking as you were speaking, about chastity and it came to me that the chaste mind would have to be an undivided mind. K: Yes sir. Killing and loving. A: And trying to get them together. And then taking all manner of means to palliate my obvious failure to get them together. K: Of course. A: The enormity of what you have brought out is truly staggering, and this I would like to stay with,if you don't mind. I've been listening very intently. It's that your radical counsel to make this stop in oneself is so radical that it requires a kind of seriousness that is not a quantitative relationship to seriousness in fact we don't really understand what it means. The relationship between seriousness and love has been coming into my awareness here. K: Yes, sir, if I am serious then I will never kill, and love then has become something, it is really compassion. Passion for all, compassion means, compassion for all. A: When you say one will never kill if he loves, you mean within the context of this image-making activity where one kills by design. K: Sir, suppose, sir, my sister - I have no sister - but my sister were attacked, a man comes to rape her. I will act at that moment. A: Precisely. K: My intelligence, because I love, have compassion, that compassion creates that intelligence, that intelligence will operate at that moment. If you tell me, what will you do if your sister is attacked, I will say, I don't know. I will know then. A: Yes, I quite follow that. But we have made an industry of designing. K: Designed killing. A: At all levels, not only ourselves. K: I don't know. I saw the other day on the television in the Red Square there was an enormous intercontinental missile, shot off to kill god knows, blind killing. And the Americans have it, the Indians have it, the French have it, you follow? A: Have to have it. K: Quite. Of course, one must exist. A: Yes. K: So can the mind be free of this urge to kill? Which means can the mind be free of being hurt? So, when there is hurt it does all kinds of neurotic things. Is pleasure love? Is desire love? But we have made pleasure, desire into love. I desire god. You follow, sir? I must learn about god. You know the whole thing. God is my invention, my image, out of my thought I have made that image, and so go around in circles. So I must know what enjoyment is. Is enjoyment pleasure? When I enjoy a good meal, or a good sunset, or see a beautiful tree or woman or whatever it is, at that moment if it doesn't end it becomes pleasure. If the mind, thought carries over that enjoyment and wants it to be repeated the next day it has become pleasure, it is no longer enjoyment. I enjoy and that's the end of it. A: William Blake has very, very beautifully, it seems to me, pointed to this. And, of course, he was regarded as a madman, as you know. I might not remember the words precisely but I think part of his little stanza goes: he who kisses a joy as it flies, lives to see eternity's sunrise. It's the joy that he kisses as it flies, not the pleasure. And it's, as it flies. And what you have said is, that if you won't let it fly, holds it, then we have fallen out of the act of joy into this... K: ...pursuit of pleasure. A: ...endless, repetitive in the end mournfully boring thing. K: And I think, sir, that is what is happening in this country, as well as in Europe and in India, primarily in this country, the desire to fulfil instantly - the pleasure seeking principle. Be entertained, football, be entertained. A: This goes back to what you were pointing out earlier in the last conversation we had, here somebody is, feels empty, needs to be filled. K: Yes. A: Lonely, filled, looking for what we call fulfillment, filling up full. K: Quite, filling up full. A: Filling up full. And yet if one undertakes to make this act of attention that you referred to in our discussion about religion, in order to fill up the whole, then we've had it. We're not going to do that. There has been an endless history of that attempt in the name of control of thought. K: Of course. A: It would seem that if one doesn't begin in love he will not make this act of attention in a non-utilitarian way. He simply will make it in a utilitarian way, if he doesn't begin in love. K: It is not in the market place, quite. A: And that's why in one of the very early conversations we had I take it, you said that the start is the end. K: Yes. The beginning is the end A: The beginning is the end. K: The first step is the last step. A: The first step is the last step. Quite. What I've been thinking about all through our conversations so far is, what is involved in -the word involved I don't like - what must one do - well that's no good either - There is something. We are speaking about an act that is a radical end to all this nonsense that's been going on which is terrifyingly destructive nonsense. K: I know, sir. A: There is the doing of something. K: That is the seeing of all this. A: And you have said, the seeing is the doing, is the act. K: As I see danger, I act. I see the danger of the continuity of thought in terms of pleasure, I see the danger of it, therefore end it instantly. If I don't see the danger I carry on. If I don't see the danger of nationality, I'm taking that as a very simple example, I carry on, murdering, dividing, seeking my own safety; but if I see the danger it is finished. A: May we relate here just for a moment, love to education? K: Yes. A: As a teacher I'm immensely concerned in this. K: Sir, what we have been discussing in our dialogue this last week and now is part of education. A: Of course it is. K: It isn't education is there, it is educating the mind to a different thing. A: I'm thinking of the student who sometimes comes to the teacher and says, I simply must change my way of life. That is, once in a while you will find the student who is up to here, he has really had it, as we say. The first question they will usually put to you is, what must I do. Now, of course, that's a trap. I've been following you, I've come to see that with much greater clarity than I observed it for myself before. Simply because they are looking for a means when they say that. K: What must I do? A: We are not talking about a means. K: Means is the end. Quite. A: I am thinking of the history of Christianity in this. You've got the question, what must I do to be saved. The answer is believe on. K: On, yes. A: And then the poor person is stuck with what this means and ends up in believing in belief. K: Yes, believing, quite. A: And that of course is abortive. The student comes and says, what must I do? Now in our earlier conversation together we reached the point where the teacher and the student were talking together. K: We are doing that now. A: We are doing this now. K: I am not your teacher, but we are doing that now. A: Well, no, I understand in our conversations that is not your role, but I must confess that it has been working out in this order because I have learned immensely. There are two things here that I want to get clear and I need your help. On the one hand to make this pure act of attention, I need only myself. Is that correct? K: No, not quite, sir. A: Not quite. K: Not quite. Sir, let's put the question first. The question is, what am I to do in this world? A: Yes. K: What is my place in this world? First of all, the world is me. I am the world. That is an absolute fact. And what am I to do? The world is this, corrupt, immoral, killing, no lack of it, there is no love. There is superstition, idol worship, of the mind and the hand. There is war. That is the world. What is my relationship to it? My relationship to it only is if I am that. If I am not that I have no relationship to it. A: I understand that in terms of act. K: That's it. A: In terms of act. Not a notion that I have. K: For me the world is corrupt, is geared to kill. And I won't kill. What is my relationship to the man who goes and kills a baby seal? I say, my god, how can you do such a thing. You follow, sir? I want to cry about it. I do. How can you educate that man, or a society which allows such a thing to happen? A: Then perhaps I should rephrase the question and say, well when I do whatever is done in making this pure act of attention, I am not separated from the world in which I am, and the world is not separate from me. K: I look at it from a different angle altogether. A: Exactly. K: I come to it, sir, because there is something different in me operating. Compassion, love, intelligence, all that is operating in me. A: But it seems that two possibilities are here. On the one hand, making this pure act of attention doesn't require that I be in the physical presence of another human being, but of course, I am always in relation whether I am there or not. K: Of course. A: Yes, I fully grasp that. But then the second possibility is that within conversation, as we are enjoying it together now, something occurs, something takes place. It's not that we must be together for it to take place. And it's not that we must be alone for it to take place. Therefore what we have established is that something occurs which is quite beyond all these distinctions of inner and outer, you over there, I'm over here. K: See what takes place, see what takes place. First of all we are serious, really serious. Second, the killing, the corruption we will cut it. We have finished with it. So we stand alone, alone, not isolated. Because when the mind is not that, it is alone. It hasn't withdrawn. It hasn't cut itself off, it hasn't built an ivory tower for itself, it isn't living in illusion. It says, that is false, that is corrupt, I won't touch it, psychologically. I may put on trousers, etc., etc., but I won't touch inwardly, psychologically, that. Therefore it is completely alone. A: And it is saying this amidst all this mournful round. K: Therefore, being alone it is pure. A: Chaste. K: Therefore purity can be cut into a million pieces and still remain pure. It is not my purity, or your purity, it is pure. Like pure water remains pure water. A: Entirely full, too. Wholly full. K: Wholly. A: That takes us back to that Sanskrit: this is full, that is full. Fullness is issued forth from fullness. It's a pity that the English doesn't carry this, the melody that the Sanskrit does. K: So you see sir, that's very interesting from this conversation what has come out. The thing is, we are frightened of being alone. Which is, we are frightened of being isolated. But every act a human being does is isolating himself. That is, his ambition is isolating himself. When he is nationalistic he is isolating himself. When he says, it is my family, he is isolating himself. I want to fulfil, isolating himself. When you negate all, that not violently, but see the stupidity of all that then you are alone. And that has tremendous beauty in it. And therefore that beauty, you can spread it everywhere, but it still remains alone. So the quality of compassion is that. But compassion isn't a word. It happens, it comes with intelligence. This intelligence will dictate if my sister is attacked, at that moment. But it is not intelligence if you say, what will you do if - such a question and an answer to that is unintelligent. I don't know if you see. A. Oh yes, I am following you precisely. K: But it is unintelligence, to say, I am going to prepare to kill all those people who are my enemies, which is the army, the navy, the whole sovereign governments. So love is something, sir, that is really chaste. Chastity is the quality of aloneness and therefore never hurt. A: It's interesting that in this one act one neither hurts himself, nor another. It's a total abstention from hurt. K: Sir, wait a minute. I have given you all my money because I trust you. And you won't give it to me; I say, please, give me a little of it. You won't. What shall I do? What is the act of intelligence? You follow, sir? Act of affection, act of compassion that says, what will I do? You follow my question? A friend of mine, during the second world war, he had found himself in Switzerland. He had quantities of money, plenty of money. And he had a great friend from childhood. And to that friend he said, he had to leave the next minute because the war took place and he had to leave the country and all the rest of it. So he took all the money and he said, here my friend keep it for me. I'll come back. I'll come back when the war is over. He comes back and says, please. He says, what money? A: Goodness me. K: You follow, sir? So, what should he do? Not theoretically. You are put in that position. You give me something. You entrust me with something. And I say, yes, quite right, you have given me, now whistle for it. What is your responsibility? Just walk away? A: No. If there were a means to recover it then that would be done upon the instant. K: Intelligence. A: Intelligence would take over. K: Therefore, that's what I am saying. Love is not forgiveness -you follow - I forgive and walk away. Love is intelligence. And intelligence means sensitivity, to be sensitive to the situation. And the situation, if you are sensitive will tell you what to do. But if you are insensitive, if you are already determined what to do, if you are hurt by what you have done, then insensitive action takes place. I don't know? A: Yes, yes, of course. yes of course. This raises very, very interesting questions about what we mean about conscience. K: Yes. A: And the word conscience, it seems to me has invited an astonishing amount of... K: ...rubbish. A: ...miscomprehension of what's going on. K: Therefore, sir, one has to investigate what is consciousness. A: Yes. K: I don't know if there is time now, but that requires - we'll do it tomorrow, another day: what is consciousness and what is conscience, and what is the thing that tells you to do or not to do? A: Consciousness in its relation to relationship is something that when we have a chance, I should like to explore with you. I remember years ago in graduate school being very arrested by coming across the statement that was made by an American thinker, I think Montague was his name, when he said, consciousness has been very badly understood because it has been thought that there has been something called 'ciousness'. But there is such thing as 'ciousness'. We've got to get the 'con' in there, the together, the relationship. And without that we have had it. I do hope that next time when we have the opportunity in our next conversation we could explore that. K: We have to discuss this question, living, love and this enormous thing called death. Are they interrelated or are they separate - living, existing, is it different from love? SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 26TH FEBRUARY 1974 13TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'A DIFFERENT WAY LIFE' A: Mr Krishnamurti, at the end of our last conversation, if I remember correctly, we were looking into the relationships among living, and love and death. That is we had just begun to when we had to bring our discussion to an end. I was hoping today that we might pursue this in terms of our continuing concern for the transformation of man. K: As usual, sir, this is such a complex question, this living, what it means and what it actually is; and love, which we talked about the other day fairly in detail and rather closely; and also this enormous problem of death. Every religion has offered a comforting belief, comforting ideas, hoping they would be a solution to the fear, sorrow and all the things that are involved in it. So we ought, I think perhaps we should begin with what is living and then go from there to love and death. A: Good. K: Shouldn't we actually look at what we call living now, what is taking place. A: Yes. K: What actually is going on which we call existence, living, those two words to cover this whole field of man's endeavour to better himself, not only in the technological world but also psychologically, he wants to be different, he wants to be more than what he is, and so on. So when we look at it in whatever country, whatever race, or whatever religion they belong to, it is a matter of constant struggle from the moment you are born to the moment you die, it is one battle. Not only in relationship with other human beings, however intimate or not intimate, but also economically, socially, morally, it is a vast battle. I think everyone agrees to that. It's obvious. The conflict, the struggle, the suffering, the pain, the frustrations, the agony, the despair, the violence, the brutality, killing, all that is what is actually going on. Spending 40, 50 years in an office, in a factory, occasional holidays for a month, and wild kind of holidays because the holidays are a reaction to their monotonous life. A: Time out. K: Time out or whatever it is called. You see them all over Europe, Americans, going from museum to museum, looking, at this, that, rushing about and that is an escape from the monotony of their daily routine. And they go off to India, and there are I believe about 15,000 so called hippies in various dresses and various monasteries, and various cities doing the most fantastic things -selling drugs, some of them, and putting on Indian clothes, dressing up as monks and all that. It is a kind of vast romantic sentimental escape from their daily monotonous routine life. That is what we call living: the battle in relationship, the battle in business, in an economic environment. It is a constant struggle. A: But what you've said seems to be ingrained into the grasp of this living itself. We have a saying, life is a battle, we interpret it in terms of what you have said. K: And nobody seems to say, why should it be that way? And we have all accepted it. We say, yes, it is part of our existence. If we don't struggle we are destroyed. It is a part of our natural inheritance. From the animal, we see how it struggles so we are part of the animal, part of the ape and so we must go on struggling, struggling, struggling. We have never said, is this right? Is this the way to live? Is this the way to behave, to appreciate the beauty of living? A: The usual question turns on how to engage the battle more effectively. K: Effectively, successfully, with least harm, with least strain, with least heart failure and so on, so on, so on. But the ground is prepared for struggle. The monks do it, you follow, sir, the religious people do it, the business, the artist, the painter, every human being, however compartmentalized he is, he is in battle. And that we call living. And the man who looks at it intelligently, might say, for god's sake, that's not the way to live. Let's find out if there is a different way of living. And nobody asks. I have talked with a great many politicians all over the world and to a great many gurus. We will come to that, it's very interesting, that word, what it means. We'll go into that. And I've talked to artists, to businessmen, to artisans, to labourers, very, very poor people, it is one constant battle. The rich, the poor, the middle class, the scientist, you follow, sir? A: Oh yes, I'm following you. K: And nobody says, this is wrong, this isn't living. It's bleeding. A: I was thinking about the literatures of the world of a visionary nature that tend to be divided into three basic statements in terms of their form and content. On the one hand we have epics that deal precisely with the representation of the battle of life. K: We have got the Odyssey, we have got the Mahabharata, we have got so many other books, all praising this. A: And then others deal with what we call the journey of life, the Odyssey would be specifically related to that, there are many battles concerned within it, in terms of confrontation between individuals. And then there's the notion of life as a fulfillment. But we hardly ever get to the question of the fulfillment. And when these are studied they are studied in terms of a literary form and the question that you've raised, which it seems to me would be a question that should be presented to the student in general. K: And it is an authentic question, it's a question that must be put. A: Exactly. I was reflecting as you were speaking that in the class room itself it's taken for granted that this battle is what it is. It is to be related to with fortitude, and so forth, but the question concerning it doesn't arise. K: No, to some young people it has arisen but they go off at a tangent. A: Exactly. K: Either a commune, or become a Hindu, you follow, go off to some ancient country and just disintegrate, do nothing, think nothing, just live. A: Which is just a lateral movement. K: Yes, lateral. A: Not a vertical one. K: That's right. A: Into the question. Yes. K: So it is a valid question and it must have a valid answer, not theoretical but say, well, I will live that way. I will live without conflict. See what it means. I may be smothered. I question whether you will be wiped out by society if you don't struggle. I never struggled personally. I have never thought of battling with myself or with somebody else. So I think a question of that kind must not only be put verbally, but in the expression of that word one must see if it is possible for each one of us to live that way, to live without a single conflict. That means without division. Conflict means division. Conflict means the battle of the opposites. Conflict means you and me, we and they, Americans, Russians, the division, division, division. Fragmentation not only inwardly but outwardly. Where there is fragmentation there must be battle. One fragment assuming the power and dominating the other fragments. So, an intelligent man, if there is such a person, has to find out a way of living which is not going to sleep, which is not just vegetating, which is not just escaping to some fanciful, mystical visions and all that stuff, but a way of living in daily life, in which conflict of any kind has come to an end. It is possible. I have watched it all around me for the last 50 years, the battle going on around me, spiritually, economically, socially, one class battling the other class, and the dictatorships the fascists, the communists, the nazis, you follow, sir? A: Yes I do. K: All of them have their roots in this: encouraging obedience, discouraging obedience, imitating, conforming, obeying, all battle. So life has become a battle. And to me personally, to live that way is the most destructive, uncreative way of living. I won't live that way. I would rather disappear. A: I think perhaps, and I wonder if you would agree, that some sort of confusion has arisen here in our minds when we identify ourselves with this battle in terms of your description of it. When we begin to think about the question, 'ought this to continue' and we have the image of battle before us, we tend to imagine to ourselves that what we are really talking about is the human equivalent of what is called, nature red in tooth and claw. But if I am following you correctly this is a cardinal mistake because in our previous conversations you have, at least for me, very, very clearly indicated that we must distinguish between fear and danger; and the animals, in their own environment, act with clean and immediate dispatch in the presence of danger whereas it seems we are making a mistake if we attempt to study what we call human conflict on the level of this analogy because analogy, if I have understood you correctly, simply doesn't apply. K: Doesn't, no. A: Don't you agree that this tends to be so. K: Oh rather, sir, rather. We study the animal or the birds in order to understand man. A: Right. K: Whereas you can study man, which is yourself. You don't have to go to the animal to know man. So that is, sir, really a very important question because I have, if I may talk a little about myself, watched it all. A: Please do. K: I've watched it in India. The sannyasis, the monks, the gurus, the disciples, the politicians all over the world. I happen somehow to have met them all. The writers, the famous people, the painters who are very well known, most of them have come to see me. And it is a sense of deep anxiety that if they don't struggle they will be nothing. They will be failures, that is, that way of living is the only and the righteous way of living. A: To drive oneself to be what is called productive. K: Productive, progressive. A: Progressive. K: And we are taught this from childhood. A: Yes. K: Our education is that. To battle, not only with yourself, but with your neighbour, and yet love the neighbour, you follow? It becomes too ridiculous. So, having stated that, is there a way of living without conflict? I say there is, obviously. Which is to understand the division, to understand the conflict, to see how fragmented we are, not try to integrate the fragments, which is impossible, but out of that perception the action is entirely different from integration. Seeing the fragmentations which bring about conflict, which bring about division, which bring about this constant battle, anxiety, strain, heart failure. You follow, sir? That is what is happening. To see it, to perceive it, and that very perception brings an action which is totally different from the action of conflict. Because the action of conflict has its own energy, brings its own energy, which is divisive, which is destructive, violent. But the energy of perception and acting is entirely different. And that energy is the energy of creation. Anything that is created cannot be in conflict. An artist who is in conflict with his colours, he is not a creative human being. He may have perfect craft, perfect technique, a gift for painting, but... A: It interests me very much that you used the word energy here in relation to both activities. K: Both, yes. A: And you haven't said that the energy at root is different. K: No, no. A: The phenomenon is different. K: Yes. A: It would appear that when one makes success, prosperity, victory, the object of his activity and engages this conflict, which he interprets as engaging him, he always tends to think that things are coming at me, when he undertakes this, if I have understood you correctly, energy is released, but it is released in fragmentary patterns. K: The other way, yes. A: Yes. Whereas the energy that's released with perception is the same energy is always whole. K: Is whole. Yes, sir, that's right. A: Isn't that what you are... K: Yes sir. Therefore same, therefore healthy, therefore holy. A: Yes. I have the feeling that this release of energy which shatters out into patterns of energy as fragmentation, is really what we mean by the word demonic. K: Demonic, that's right. A: That's giving it a hard name. K: A good name. A: But, you are really saying this, aren't you. K: It's an excellent name. A: I am saying this. K: But I am I totally see that with you. I see it is demonic. It is the very destructive thing. A: Exactly. K: And that's what our society is, our culture is. A: What we've done to that word, demonic! I was just thinking about Socrates, who refers to his demon, meaning the energy that operates in wholeness. K: That's right, sir. A: And we have taken that word from the Greek clear out of the context of the apology and turned it upside down and now it means... K: The devil. A: Right. And the same thing happened with the use of the word, the assurers. Originally in the Veda this was not a reference to the demonic, there was no radical polarization. And finally we end up with the gods and the demons. K: Quite. A: Which I take it you are suggesting is nothing other than the sheerest projection of our own demonic behaviour which we have generated ourselves. K: That's right. A: Sir, this makes tremendous sense to me. Yes, please go on. K: Now, so, the way we live is the most impractical, insane way of living. And we want the insane way of living made more practical. A: Yes and there isn't a prayer for it. K: But that is what we are demanding all the time. We never say, let's find a way of living which is whole, and therefore healthy, sane and holy. And through that, through perceiving, acting, is the release of total energy, which is nonfragmentary, which isn't the artist, the business man, the politician, the priest, the layman, all that doesn't exist at all. Now, to bring about such a mind, such a way of living, one has to observe what actually is taking place outside and inside, in us, inside and outside. And look at it, not try to transform it, not try to bring about different adjustments, see actually what it is. I look at a mountain, I can't change it. Even with a bulldozer I can't change it. But we want to change what we see. The observer is the observed, you understand, sir? Therefore, there is no change in that. Whereas in perception there is no observer. There is only seeing, and therefore acting. A: This holds a mirror up to an earlier conversation we had, when you referred to beauty, passion, suffering. K: Yes, certainly. A: And action. K: And action, yes. A: I remember asking you the question in order to recover the correct relationship among them we must begin with the suffering which, if perceived as it ought to be perceived, generates passion. K: That's right. A: One doesn't have to work it out. It happens. And behold, upon the same instant beauty breaks out, and love. So the passion in itself is compassion. The 'com' comes in exactly with the passion. K: With passion, that's right. A: Yes. K: Now, sir, if you could as a professor or as a teacher, or as a parent point this out, the impracticality of the way we are living, the destructiveness of it, the utter indifference to the earth. We are destroying everything we touch. And to point out a way of living in which there is no conflict. That seems to me is the function of the highest form of education. A: Yes, it has a requirement in it though that seems to me very clear, namely the teacher himself must be without conflict. This is a very different point of departure from what occurs in our general educational structure, particularly in professional educational activities where one gets a degree in professional education rather than in an academic subject as such. We are taught, for instance, and I am speaking about this somewhat as an outsider because I don't have a degree in education but in an academic subject as such, but I have observed in what goes on with my colleagues in education that tremendous emphasis is placed on techniques of education. K: Of course. A: And the question of the individual teacher as having undergone a transformation of the sort that you have been discussing is not a factor of radical concern. What is, of course, in an altruistic sense a matter of concern is that the teacher has the interests of the students at heart and that sort of thing, which, of course, is laudable in itself, but it's after the fact of this first transformation. K: Sir, you see first I must transform myself so I can teach. A: Precisely, precisely. K: You see, there is a little bit, something in it that is not quite accurate. That means I have to wait till I change. Why can't I change, if I am an educator, in the very act of teaching? The boys, the students live in conflict. The educator lives in conflict. Now if I was an educator with a lot of students, I would begin with that and say, I am in conflict, you are in conflict, let us see in discussing, in becoming aware of our relationship, in teaching, if it is not possible for me and for you to resolve this conflict. Then it has action. But if I have to wait till I'm free of all conflict I can wait until dooms day. A: I see now exactly what you are saying. What you are saying is literally this: the teacher, who is presently in conflict, simply acknowledges this. Walks into the classroom... K: That's right, sir, A:...not as somebody who is free from conflict. K: That's right. A: No. But he walks into the classroom and here it is, we are facing it. And he looks at his students and he lays it out. K: That's the first thing I would discuss, not the technical subjects. Because that's living. And also in the very teaching of a technical subject I would say, all right, let us see how we approach, you know, I can learn from that so that both the student and the educator know their conflicts and are interested in dissolving the conflict and therefore they are tremendously concerned. That produces an extraordinary relationship. Because I have watched it. I go to several schools in India and in England and it takes place. A: In this taking place love breaks out. K: Of course. That is the very essence of it. Because I care, I feel responsible. A: May I go into this just a little bit. One of the things that has concerned me in this series of dialogues is that someone should have perhaps not seen as clearly as I think as you have pointed out for me, that in our discussions of thought and of knowledge what we have been saying is that there is some disfunction in thought and in knowledge which relates to its own nature, the nature of thought and the nature of knowledge, which could very well give the impression that thought is a disease or that knowledge is a disease, rather than giving the impression, as I have understood from you that thought and knowledge have their proper uses. K: Of course. A: Their natures are not corrupt as such. K: Certainly not. It is the usage of it. Quite. A: Right. Therefore it becomes of utmost important, I think in understanding what you are saying, to be aware of the corrective that we bring to bear when together we examine the uses of thought and the uses of knowledge. While at the same time, not assuming that the principle of thought, the principle of knowledge is in its own nature corrupt. K: No. A: So that in a classroom we could study a text in which an assertion is made, a positive statement is made without thinking that name and form are in themselves... K: Corrupt. A:...corrupt. K: Obviously not. A microphone is a microphone. There is nothing corrupt about it. A: Exactly, but you know the thing comes home to me with tremendous force that one must begin in his relationship to his students with doing this. I must tell a little story on myself here. Years ago I went to hear a lecture of yours, and I listened, I thought, very, very carefully. And, of course, one lecture is not in itself perhaps, at least for someone like me, it was not enough. Or another way to put it more honestly, I was not enough at the time for the lecture because it seems as I recall it now, that the principles that we have been discussing you stated very, very clearly. I went away from that lecture with the impression that there was a very close relationship between what you are saying and Buddhism, and I was thinking about this whole label thing as scholars are wont to do, you know how we divide the world up into species. And in our series of conversations now I've come to see that I was profoundly mistaken. Profoundly mistaken. And I pinch myself to think, you know, I might have gone on thinking what I thought before, which had nothing to do with anything that you were concerned in. It is a revelation to face it that one doesn't have to have a credential to start with before he walks into the room. He just has to start looking at the very thing he believes is going to bring him into a hostile relationship with his class in order, because we believe that there are things that we must avoid talking about because they create dissension, disruption and put us off. And therefore let's not talk about conflict. Or if we are going to talk about it let's talk about it in terms of our being the ones who have the light over against these others who don't, and we have to take the good news to them. K: It's like a guru. A: Right, but simply to come into the room and say, let's have a look without any presuppositions that my thinking, that I have this in hand and you don't, or you have it and I don't. We're going to just hold it together. K: Right, sir. Share together. A: Share it together, and behold. Am I following you? K: Perfectly. A: Oh, that's wonderful. I'm going to do this, after our conversation comes to an end, I will walk into that room. Do go on. K: So, sir, the energy that is created through conflict is destructive. The energy that is created through conflict, struggle, battle, produces violence, hysteria, neurotic actions, and so on. Whereas the action of perception is total, non-fragmented, and therefore it is healthy, sane and brings about such intensive care and responsibility. Now that is the way to live: seeing, acting, seeing, acting, all of the time. I cannot see if there is an observer different from the observed. The observer is the observed. A: This does a very marvellous thing through what we call our confrontation with death. K: We'll come to that, yes. A: I see I have made a jump. K: No, no, sir, that's right. So you see, our whole content of consciousness is the battle, is the ground of battle, is the battleground, and this battle we call living. And, in that battle how can love exist? If I am hitting you, if I am competing with you, if I am trying to go beyond you, successful, ruthless, where does the flame of love or compassion, tenderness, gentleness, come into all that? It doesn't. And that's why our society as it is now has no sense of moral responsibility with regard to action or with regard to love. It doesn't exist. A: I'm going back into the context of my own experience in the classroom again. It has always seemed to me that the first stanza of the Gita, the first stanza, the first chapter of the Gita, which begins dharmaksettre Kuruksettre - in the field of Dharma, in the Kuru field, is a statement in apposition and that the field is one. I have walked into class when we have started to do the Gita and I've tried to show both linguistically, as it seemed to me was capable from the text, and in terms of the spirit of the whole that this was really what was being said, that it's one field, not two fields, though we have one army over here and the other over here but they don't occupy two fields. Somehow it is one field. K: It is our earth. A: Right. It's the whole. But you see I think I would have done better, now that I've listened to you, if I had gone into class and instead of making that statement and inviting them to look carefully at the text, and to bear that in mind as we proceed through the teaching and watch for any misinterpretations of that that would have occurred in commentary after commentary; it would have been better if I had started the other way. It would have been better if I had started by saying, let's have a look and see together whether it is one field or whether it's a field with conflict. We are not going to read the book at all at this point, we are just going to start here. This is the field. The classroom is the field. Now, let's take a look. That would have been the better way. K: If you have understood that, sir, the classroom is the field and if you have understood that, you have understood the whole thing. A: Exactly. But I went in with the notion, that, though I had grasped that, so I thought, it was enough, simply to show that verbally. But it's patently not. And this is terrifying. Because even though, if you say in the classroom what ostensibly passes for what we call the right thing, it still will not prevail in terms of this act... K: Act, yes. A:...that we've been talking about. K: Quite right. Can we go sir, from there. We've discussed life, living, in which love does not exist at all. Love can only exist when the perceiver is the perceived and acts, as we said. Then that flame, that compassion, that sense of holding the earth in your arms, as it were, if that is understood and from that behaviour, because that is the foundation, if there is no behaviour in the sense of conflicting behaviour, then after establishing that in ourselves, or in observing it we will proceed next to the question of death. Because the question of death is an immense thing. To me living, love and death are not separate. They are one movement. It isn't death over there which I am going to meet in twenty years or the next day. It is there. It is there with love and with living. It is a continuous movement, non-divisive. This is the way I live, think, feel. That's my life. I mean this. These are not just words to me. So, before we enter into the question of death we have to go into the question of what is consciousness? Because if one doesn't understand what is consciousness, not the explanation, not the description, not the word, but the reality of consciousness. Am I as a human ever conscious? And what is it to be conscious? What is it to be aware? Am I aware totally, or just occasionally I am aware when a crisis arises, otherwise I am dormant. So that's why it becomes very important to find out what is consciousness. Right sir? A: Yes, what you have just said seems to me to indicate that we are making a distinction between consciousness which is a continuing movement, utterly situated in act as over against these blips, these eruptions virtually, within the sleepy course of nature. K: That's right. A: Yes, I see that. Please go ahead. K: So what is consciousness? Consciousness is its content. I am putting it very simply. I prefer to talk about these things very simply, not elaborate, linguistic descriptions and theories and suppositions, and all the rest of it. That has no meaning to me personally. A: If it is true it will be simple. K: Simple. A: Yes, of course. K: Consciousness is its content. The content is consciousness. The two are not separate. That is the thoughts, the anxieties, the identifications, the conflicts, the anxiety, the attachments, the detachments, the fears, the pleasures, the agony, the suffering, the beliefs, the neurotic actions, all that is my consciousness. Because that is the content. A: This is an equivalent statement to, the world is me and I am the world. K: That's right. A: So there's a continuity there. K: Yes, so the content that says, that is my furniture, that's my god, that's my belief, with all its nuances and subtleties, and all that is part of my consciousness, is part of the consciousness that says, I am. I am that, I am the furniture. When I identify myself, saying, that's my furniture, then I am attached to it. I am that. I am that knowledge that says, I have acquired knowledge, I have grown with it, I have been successful with it, it has given me great comfort, it has given me a house, a position, power. That house is me. The battle which I have been through, suffering, agony, that's me, that's my consciousness. So the content of consciousness is its content, therefore there is no division as consciousness separate from its content. I can extend or widen the consciousness, laterally or horizontally, horizontally or vertically, but it is still within that field. I can extend it saying, God is immense. That's my belief. And I've extended my consciousness by imagining that it is extended. Whatever thought has created in the world, inside me is the content. The whole world, especially in the west, is based on thought. Its activities, its explorations, its achievements, its religions and so on is fundamentally the result of thought, with its images and so on, so on, so on. So that is the content of consciousness. Right? A: Right. K: Now from that rises, what is death? Is death the ending of consciousness, with its content? Or is death a continuity of that consciousness? Your consciousness is no different from mine. It may have little variations, little modifications, little more expansion, little contraction, and so on but essentially consciousness is yours as well as mine, because I am attached to my house. So are you. I am attached to my knowledge, I am attached to my family, I am in despair whether I live in India or in England or in America, wherever it is. So that consciousness is common. It is irrefutable. You follow? A: Oh yes it is. I do follow closely. K: So, see what happens. I never have examined this content. I have never looked at it closely and I am frightened, frightened of something which I call death, the unknown. Let us call it for the moment, the unknown. So, I'm frightened. There is no answer to it. Somebody comes along and says, yes my friend, there is life after death. I have proof for it. I know it exists because I have met my brother, my son - we will go into that presently. So I, frightened, anxious, fearful, diseased, you follow, I accept that tremendously, instantly say, yes there is reincarnation. I am going to be born next life. And that life is related to karma. The word karma means to act. Not all the rigmarole involved in it, just to act. See what is involved. That is, if I believe in reincarnation, that is this consciousness, with its content, which is the 'me', my ego, my self, my activities, my hopes, pleasures, all that is my consciousness, that consciousness is going to be born next life, which is the common consciousness of you and me, and him and her. That's going to be born next life. And they say if you behave properly now you'll be rewarded next life. That's part of the causation. A: That's part of the content of consciousness. K: Causation and the effect. A: Yes. K: So behave because you are going to be punished next life. You will be rewarded next life. That is, the whole of the Eastern world is based on and believes in reincarnation. So what happens? I have taken comfort in a belief but actually I don't carry it out: which says behave now, be good now, don't hurt another now. A: Actually the idea is that I should behave now - we've been through this 'ought' stuff. I should this, I should that, I should the other because of what will take place later. But then I take comfort in the thought that it's an endless process and it's somehow built into it that I'll get another chance. So I can sort of stall, I can stall. K: I can stall. I can postpone, I can misbehave. A: Yes. Because we are all destined to make it in the end. K: Eventually. Yes. A: Which shows that there's no grasp of what, throughout these conversations, you've been talking about, the immediacy and urgency of act. K: That's right. A: Yes. I follow. K: So you see the Hindus probably were the originators of this idea - cause, effect. The effect will be modified by next causation. So there is this endless chain. And if it's endless we'll break it sometime. Therefore it doesn't matter what you do now. Belief gives you great comfort in believing that you will continue, you will be with your brother, wife, husband, whatever it is. But in the meantime don't bother too seriously, don't take life too seriously. A: Exactly, yes. K: Have a good time in fact. Enjoy yourself. Or do whatever you want to do, pay a little next life, but carry on. A: I was speaking to a well known Hindu teacher about this and I made this very remark that you have just stated, and I thought it would have some force. And I said, you see there's no hope of stopping, repeating, if an act is not made immediately with respect to this, therefore in terms of the content of the consciousness of a whole people that bask in this notion, there can be nothing but an endless repetition and no true concern. K: What did he say? A: All he did was to laugh as though I had somehow perceived something which most people apparently are not really bothering their heads to look at. But the extraordinary thing to me was that he showed no concern for what he discerned intellectually. K. Sir, they are hypocrites, you follow, sir? They are hypocrites when they believe that and do something quite contrary. A: Precisely, I understand what you mean. What you are saying there is the usage of the Biblical notion of hypocrite in that strict sense. K: Sir, in the strict sense, of course. A: Yes, in the very strict sense. In our next conversation could we continue with this because it seems to me... K: Oh, there is a great deal involved in this. A: Splendid. I do so look forward to that. K: We'll go into it. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 26TH FEBRUARY 1974 14TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'DEATH' A: Mr Krishnamurti in our last conversation we were beginning to talk about consciousness and its relation to death in the context of living as a total movement. And we even touched on the word reincarnation toward the end when we had to draw our conversation to its conclusion. I do hope we can begin to continue there. K: You see one of the factors in death is the mind is so frightened. We are so frightened of that very word and nobody talks about it. It isn't a daily conversation. It is something to be avoided, something that is inevitable, for god's sake keep it as far away as possible. A: We even paint corpses to make them look as if they are not dead. K: That's the most absurd thing. Now what we are discussing, sir, is, isn't it, the understanding of death, its relation to living and this thing called love. One cannot possibly understand the immensity, and it is immense, this thing called death, unless there is a real freedom from fear. That's why we talked sometime ago about the problem of fear. Without really freeing the mind, unless the mind really frees itself from fear there is no possibility of understanding the extraordinary beauty, strength and the vitality of death. A: That's a very, very, remarkable way to put it - the vitality of death. And yet normally we regard it as the total negation of life. K: The negation of life. That's right. So if we are enquiring into the question of death fear must be completely non-existent in us. Then I can proceed. Then I can find out what death means. We have touched a little bit on reincarnation, the belief that is maintained from the East which has no reality in daily life. It is like going to church every Sunday and being mischievous for the rest of the six days. So, you follow, a person who is really serious, really attentive, goes into this question of death, he must understand what it means, the quality of it, not the ending of it. That's what we will go into a little this time. The ancient Egyptians, the pharaohs and all that and so on, they prepared for death. They said we will cross that river with all our goods, with all with all our chariots, with all our belongings, with all our property; and therefore their caves, their tombs are filled with all the things of their daily life, corn, you know all that. So living was only a means to an ending, dying. That's one way of looking at it. The other is reincarnation, which is the Indian, Asiatic outlook. And there is this whole idea of resurrection, of the Christians. Reborn, carried, the Gabriel Angel, and all that, to heaven and you will be rewarded. Now, what is the fact? These are all theories, suppositions, beliefs and non-facts. I mean, someone supposed to be born Jesus comes out of the grave, resurrected physically. That is just a belief. There were no cameras there, ten people say, yes I saw it. It is only somebody imagined. We will go into that a little bit later. So there is this living and preparing for death as the ancient Egyptians did. Then there is the reincarnation. Then there is resurrection. Now, if one isn't frightened - you follow, sir - deeply, then what is death? What is it that dies, apart from the organism? The organism may continue if you look after it very carefully for 80, 90, or 100 years. If you have no disease, if you have no accidents, if there is a way of living sanely, healthily, perhaps you will last 100 years or 110 years. And then what? You follow, sir? You live 100 years, for what? For this kind of life - fighting, quarrelling, bickering, bitterness, anger, jealousy, futility, a meaningless existence. It is a meaningless existence as we are living now. A: And in terms of our previous remarks, this is all the content of consciousness. K: That's right. So what is it that dies? And what is it I am frightened of, one is frightened of? You follow? What is it one is frightened of in death? Losing the known? Losing my wife? Losing my house? Losing all the things I have acquired? Losing this content of consciousness? You follow? So, can the content of consciousness be totally emptied? You follow, sir? A: Yes I do. K: Which is the living. The dying is the living, when the content is totally emptied. That means no attachment. It isn't a brutal cutting off, but the understanding of attachment, the understanding of dependency, the understanding of acquisition, power, position, anxiety, all that. The emptying of that is the real death. And therefore the emptying of consciousness means the consciousness which has created its own limitation, by its content, comes to an end. I wonder, have you got it? A: Yes, yes, yes. I was following you very carefully and it occurred to me that there is a radical relation between birth and death, that the two, when they are looked upon as moments in a total cycle are not grasped at the depth level that you are beginning to speak about. K: Yes sir. A: Am I correct? K: Correct. A: Good, please do go on. K: So, death becomes a living when the content of consciousness, which makes its own frontier, its own limitation, comes to an end. And this is not a theory, not a speculative, intellectual grasp, but the actual perception of attachment. I am taking that as an example, being attached to something - property, man, woman, the book I have written, or the knowledge I have acquired. The attachment. And the battle to be detached. Because attachment brings pain. Therefore I say to myself, I must be detached. And the battle begins. And the whole content of my consciousness is this, the battle which we described previously. Now can that content be emptied - empty itself? Not emptied by an act of perception, empty itself. Which means can this whole content be observed, with its unconscious content? You follow, sir? A: Yes, I do. I'm thinking. K: I can be consciously aware of the content of my consciousness - my house, my property, my wife, my children, my job, the things I have acquired, the things I have learned. I can be consciously aware of all that. But also there is a deeper content in the very recesses of my mind which is racial, collective, acquired, the things that unconsciously I have gathered, the influences, the pressures, the strains of living in a world that is corrupt. All that has seeped in, all that has gathered in there. A: Both personal and impersonal. K: Impersonal, yes. A: This includes then what the depth psychologists are calling collective unconscious. K: I don't what they are calling it. A: As well as the personal consciousness. K: Collective as well. So there is that. Now can all that be exposed. Because that is very important. Because if I really want to go, if the mind really wants to understand and grasp the full meaning of death, the vastness of it, the great quality of a mind that says, yes that's ended - you follow, it gives a tremendous vitality, energy. So, my question is: can the mind be aware totally of all the content, hidden as well as the open, the collective, the personal, the racial, the transitory? You follow? The whole of that. Now, we say it is possible through analysis. A: Yes we do. K: I said, analysis is paralysis. Because every analysis must be perfect, complete. And you are frightened that it might not be complete. And if you have not completed it you carry it over as a memory which will then analyse the next incident. So each analysis brings its own incompleteness. A: Oh, certainly, yes. K: Therefore it is a total paralysis. A: In following what you are saying, I'm very taken with what we usually regard as death which has a very clear relationship to what you've said about the endless series of analytical acts. K: Yes, sir. A: We regard death as terminus in terms of a line. K: Quite, because we think laterally. A: We think laterally, exactly. But what you're saying is, on the contrary, we must regard this vertically. K: Yes. A: And in the regarding of it vertically we no longer see, please check me if I am off here, we no longer see death as simply a moment of termination to certain trajectory repetition. But there is a total qualitative change here which is not the cessation of something that we have to regret as though we had lost something valuable. K: Yes, I am leaving my wife and children. A: Right. K: And my property, my blasted bank account. A: Yes, yes. K: You see, sir, if one can go very deeply into this: there is this content, which is my consciousness, acquired, inherited imposed, influenced, propaganda, attachment, detachment, anxiety, fear, pleasure, all that, and also the hidden things. I'm asking myself, since analysis is really paralysis, not an intellectual supposition, but actually it is not a complete act, analysis can never produce a complete act, the very word analysis means to break up, you know, the breaking up. A: Loosen up. K: Loosen up, break it up. Therefore I reject that totally. I won't analyse because I see the stupidity, the paralytic process of it. Then what am I to do? Are you following? Because that's the tradition, introspective, or analysis by myself or by a professional, which is now the fad and so on, so on, so on. So if the mind sees the truth of it, and therefore analysis falls away, then what is the mind to do with the content? A: Yes, I do see that. K: We know what the content is. We don't have thoroughly describe. Now, what is it to do? It has to be emptied. Otherwise it is merely continuity. A: No it is no use analyzing what is already there because that will not change what is there in anyway shape or form. That seems to be very, very plain. Perhaps you would for a moment explain why we simply refuse to see that. We do believe that an analytical enquiry is ordered to a revelation. We do believe that. K: No sir. You can see it in a minute. Analysis implies the analyzer and the analysed. A: Yes. K: The analsyer is the analysed. A: Yes, we are back to the observer and the observed. K: I am analyzing my anger. Who is the analyzer? Part of the fragment which is anger. So the analyzer pretends to be different from the analysed. But when I see the truth that the analyzer is the analysed then a totally different action takes place. Then there is no conflict between the analyzer and the analysed. There is instant action, a perception, which is the ending and going beyond the 'what is'. A: The reason I asked for the explanation was because of the concern raised earlier about knowledge. K: After all the observer is knowledge. A: Yes, I was concerned that study, in its proper form was not regarded in the context of our discussion as unprofitable as such. K: No. A: We don't mean that. K: We didn't even discuss it. That's so obvious. A: Yes, well it is obvious in terms of our discussion, but the thing that concerns me is that so ingrained is the notion that, for instance, in the story I told about when I came to hear you years ago, I began doing analysis while I was listening to your words and consequently I could hardly end up with anything qualitatively differently from what I came in with. But you see I didn't see that at the time and in video-taping our conversations here this will be listened to, and when we say, yes, about knowledge, this is obvious, in the context of our conversation it is. But then I'm thinking of... K: Not only in the context of our conversation, it is so. A: It is as such. K: It is. A: Exactly, I couldn't agree, but immediately I flashed back to my own behaviour, and I know that I was not alone in that because I listened to other conversations regarding it at the time. But, yes, I see what you mean now about analysis as such. It seems to me very clear. K: Analysis implies, sir, the analyzer and the analysed. A: Precisely. K: The analyzer is the analysed. And also analysis implies time, duration. I must take time to uncover, unearth, to uncover, and it will take me rest of my life. A: This is a confusion we have about death too with relation to time. K: That's right. I'm coming to that. A: Yes, of course, please do, yes. K: So, the mind perceiving discards analysis completely. Not because it's not profitable, not because it doesn't get me where I want, but I see the impossibility of emptying the consciousness of its content, if I approach - if the mind approaches through that channel: analyzer, time, and the utter futility at the end of 40 years I am still analyzing. A: And the content of my consciousness has not qualitatively changed at all. K: Changed at all. A: No, it's become intensified in its corruption. K: That's right. That's right. So. But the mind must see its content, must be totally aware of it, not fragments of it. How is that to be done? You follow, sir? A: Yes I do. K: Because that's very important in relation to death. Because the content of my consciousness is consciousness. That consciousness is me, my ego, my saying, I and you, we and they -whether they be the communists, they the catholic, they the protestant or they the Hindu. So it is very important to find out whether it is possible to empty consciousness of its content. Which means the dying to the me. You follow? A: Yes I do. K: Because that is the me. A: This is where the terror starts. K: That's where the terror starts. A: Precisely. There's the intuition that if I do to the content of this consciousness that I am wiped out. K: Yes, so I, who have worked, who have lived a righteous life or unrighteous life, who have done so much, mischief or good, I have struggled to better myself, I've been so kind, so gentle, so angry, so bitter, and when you say, empty your consciousness, it means you are asking me to die to all that. So, you are touching at the very root of fear. A: Yes exactly. K: At the root of terror of not being. Oh yes, that's it, sir. And I want to immortalize that me. I do it through books, writing a book and say, famous book. Or I paint. Or through paint, through works, through good acts, through building this or that, I immortalize myself. A: This has very pernicious effects within the family, because we must have a son in order to... K: ...carry on A: ...immortalize the name in time. K: Therefore the family becomes a danger. A: Exactly. K: So, look what we have done, sir: the ancient Egyptians immortalized themselves, made their life immortal by thinking of carrying on. A: Perpetuity. K: Perpetuating. And the robbers come and tear it all to pieces. Tutankhamen is merely a mask now, a golden mask with a mummy, and so on. So man has sought immortality through works, through every way to find that which is immortal, that is, beyond mortality. Right? A: It's a very remarkable thing that the very word immortal is a negative. K: Yes, not mortal. A. Yes, it's not saying what it is. K: We are going to find out what it is. A: Good. K: You follow, sir, this is a very, very serious thing. It isn't a plaything between two people who are enjoying a discussion. It is a tremendously important thing. A: I was laughing at the irony of it. That inherent in the structure of that word there is a warning, and we just go right through the red light. K: Right. A: Yes, please do go on. K: So, what is immortality? Not the book. A: Oh no. K: Not the painting which I have done, not going to the moon and putting some idiotic flag up there. Not living a righteous life, or not living a righteous life. So what is immortality? The cathedrals are beautiful, marvelous cathedrals, an earthquake comes, gone. You build, you carve out of marble a marvelous thing of Michelangelo, an earthquake, fire, destroyed. Some lunatic comes along with a hammer and breaks it up. So it is in none of those. Tight? A: Right. K: Because that is capable of being destroyed. Every statue becomes a dead thing,every poem, every painting. So then one asks, what is immortality? It's not in the building, just see it, sir. It's not in the cathedral. It's not in the Saviour which you have invented, which thought has invented. Not in the gods that man has created out of his own image. Then what is immortality? Because that is related to consciousness and to death. Unless I find that out, death is a terror. A: Of course, of course. K: I have tried to immortalize myself, become immortal by the thought that there is a Brahman, there is a god, there is eternality, there is a nameless one, and I will do everything to approach him. Therefore I'll lead a righteous life. Therefore I will pray, I will beg, I will obey, I will live a life of poverty, chastity, and so on, so on, so on, in order to have that immortal reality with me. But I know all that is born of thought. Right, sir? A: Yes, as soon as... K: Wait a minute, sir, see what happens. A: Yes. K: So I see thought and its products are the children of barren women. A: Precisely. K: See what takes place. Then what is immortality? The beauty in the church - not I built the church - the beauty in the cathedral, the beauty in the poem, the beauty in the sculpture, the beauty, not the object of beauty. A: The beauty itself. K: Itself. That is immortal. And I cannot grasp that, the mind cannot grasp it because beauty is not in the field of consciousness. A: Yes. You see what you have said again stands it all on its head. We think when something dies that we have cherished, that is beautiful, that beauty dies in some sense with that which has passed away. K: Passed away, yes. A: Actually it's the feeling of being bereft of that beauty that I regarded as my privilege to have personal access to. The belief that that has perished, not simply been lost because what is lost is by its nature predisposed to be found. But to perish is to be wiped out utterly, isn't it? And so the belief is deep. K: Oh, very, very. A: Extremely deep with respect to what we mean by perish. In fact the word isn't used very often, it's frightening, it's a very frightening word. We are always frightened about losing things, hardly ever do we say something perishes. Now back to what I mentioned about standing it on its head. The image came to my mind as a metaphor. I hope not one of those images we've been talking about. That beauty, rather than being imprisoned, and therefore taken down to the utter depths of nullity, when a thing perishes, has simply let it go. In some sense beauty has let this expression go. That is upside down from what is usually thought. K: I know, I know. A: And it has probably let it go precisely on time. K: That's right. A: That's what's so marvelous, yes, yes. K: So, immortality we have said is within the field of time. A: In the one field. K: Right. A: Yes. K: The field of time. A: Yes. K: And death is also then in the field of time. Because I have created, through thought, the things of time. And death is the ending or the beginning of a state that is timeless. Of that I am frightened. So I want everything preserved in the field of time. You follow, sir? A: Yes, yes we think it could... K: And that is what we call immortal - the statue, the poems, the church, the cathedral, and I see also all that is corruptible, destroyed by one accident, or by an earthquake, everything is gone. So immortality is not within the field of time. And time is thought. A: Of course, yes that follows. K: Of course. So anything that thought creates must be within the field of time. And yet thought is trying to seek immortality, which is immortality of itself, and the things it has created. A: Yes. K: So, then the problem is, can the mind see all this, see it? Not imagine that it is seeing it. A: No, actually see it. K: Actually see it. A: Yes, the remark I made before when you began saying the field of time, and I said, the one field, I didn't mean that the field of time, as you've described it, is the one field, but that we could be so appallingly... K: ...blind. A: ...mistaken and blind. K: Ignorant. A: The field of time is another fragment. K: That's right. A: It's the only field. And what really struck me was this misuse of thought generates the most appalling avarice. K: Yes, sir. A: I'm walling myself up in stone. Yes, please. K: So, the mind, perceiving all this, if it is alert, if it has been watchful all the time we have been discussing, must inevitably see the whole content exposed, without any effort. It's like reading a map. You spread it out and look. But if you want to go in a direction, then you don't look at the whole map. Then you say, I want to go from here to there, the direction is there, so many miles, and you do - you don't look at the rest. What we are asking is, no direction but just look. Look at the content of your consciousness without direction, without choice. Be aware of it without any exertion of discernment. Be choicelessly aware of this extraordinary map. Then that choiceless awareness gives you that tremendous energy to go beyond it. But you need energy to go beyond it. A: This leads me to the notion of reincarnation that we began to touch on a little earlier: that I see the demonic root in that. K: Yes, sir. You see, sir: reincarnate next life. Nobody says, incarnate now. A: Yes, exactly. K: You follow, sir? A: Yes, I do, I do. K: You can only incarnate now when you die to the content. A: And there is... K: You can be reborn, regenerated totally if you die to the content. A: Yes. Yes. Yes. And there is a terrible truth on the dark side, the demonic side, to this doctrine of reincarnation, because if that content of consciousness is not emptied out then it must prevail. K: So what happens? A: Then it really does, yes. K: It prevails. So what happens? I do not know, as a human being, how to empty this thing. I'm not even interested. I'm only frightened. A: Only scared to death. K: Scared to death. And I preserve something, and I die, am burned or buried under ground. The content goes on. As we said, the content of me is your content also, it's not so very different. A: No, no, no. K: Slightly modified, slightly exaggerated, given certain tendencies which depend on your conditioning of environments and so on, so on, but it is essentially the same consciousness. Unless a human being empties that consciousness, that consciousness goes on like a river - collecting, accumulating, all that's going on. And out of that river comes the expression, or the manifestation of the one that is lost. When the mediums, seances, all those say, your brother, your uncle, your wife is here. What has happened is they have manifested themselves out of that stream which is the continuous consciousness of struggle, pain, unhappiness, all that. And a man who has observed and has looked at the consciousness and empties it, he doesn't belong to that stream at all. Then he is living each moment anew because he is dying each moment. You understand, sir? A: Oh, yes I do, yes I do. K: There is no accumulation of the me which has to be expressed. He is dying every minute; living every minute, and dying every minute. Therefore in that there is - what shall I say -there is no content. You follow, sir? A: Yes. K: It is like a tremendous energy in action. A: This gives a totally different understanding of what we mean by the phrase, in the after life. On the one hand there is this continuity in disordered content of consciousness... K: It is totally disordered, that's right. A: ...which is not radically affected qualitatively with respect to its nature, simply because somebody has stopped breathing for good. No. It's on its way. K: On its way. A: And therefore the attempt that is often made on the part of persons to contact this stream of consciousness after the death of a person, when made within the same quality of consciousness, attains nothing but a reinforcement... K: Yes, that's right. A: ...within their own personal life. K: That's right. A: And it does a terrible thing to their content of consciousness, which has gone on, since it also feeds that some more. K: That's right. A: Yes, I do see that. K: A person came to see me and his wife was dead. And he really thought he loved her. So he said, I must see my wife again. Can you help me? I said, which wife do you want to see? The one that cooked? The one that bore the children? The one that gave you sex? The one that quarrelled with you? The one that dominated you, frightened you? He said, I don't want to meet any of those. I want to meet the good of her. You follow, sir? A: Yes, yes. K: The image of the good he has built out of her. None of the ugly things, or what he considered ugly things, but the idea of the good which he had culled out of her, and that is the image he wants to meet. I said, don't be infantile. You are so utterly immature when you have slept with her, and got angry with her, all that you don't want, you want just the image which you have about her goodness, I said. And you know, sir, he began to cry, really cry for the first time. He said, afterwards, I have cried when she died, but the tears were of self pity, my loneliness, my sense of, you follow, lack of things. Now I am crying, I cry because I see what I have done. You understand, sir? A: Yes, I do. K: So to understand death there must be no fear. The fear exists and the terror of it exists only when the content is not understood. And the content is the 'me'. And the 'me' is the chair, you follow, sir? A: Yes. K: The thing I am attached to. It is so stupid. And I am frightened of that, the bank account, the family, you follow? A: Ah, yes, yes I do. K: So unless one is really, deeply serious in this matter, you can't incarnate now, in the deep sense of that word; and therefore immortality is in the book, in the statue, in the cathedral, in the things I have put together, the things I have put together by thought. That's all the field of time. A: Right. It just occurred to me what a terrible thing we have been doing so often over and over again to Plato by this perennial attempt at academic analysis of the text, when he plainly said that the business of the philosopher, by which he didn't mean the analyzer in this mad way that we have been observing that goes on - the business of the philosopher, namely the one who is concerned with a radical change and rebirth, which he associated with wisdom; the business of the philosopher is to practice dying, to practice dying. I don't think he meant routine, repetition, die, die, die, die. I think he puts it with an 'ing', because he doesn't want to fall out of act. I know I use this phrase all the time but it came to me early in our in conversations and it seems to say, for me, what I want to say. I have to say I learned it from you, though I don't want to put the words in your mouth. But it's possible to fall out of act into the terror and the demonic stream of time, but when one is in act the whole thing is an ongoing move. K: So, sir, time has a stop. A: Precisely. K: See the beauty of it, sir. And it is that beauty which is immortal, not the things which thought has created. A: Right. K: So living is dying. A: Right. K: And love is essentially dying to the me. Not the things which thought has said this is love - love-sex, love-pleasure. You follow? All that. A: Yes. K: It is, dying to time is love. So living, love and death are one thing, not divisive, not separated, not divorced, not in the field of time but it is completely a living, moving thing, indivisible. And that is immortal. A: Yes. K: So. Now, most of us are educated wrongly. A: How true that is. K: From childhood we are never taught to be serious. From childhood we are taught the cultivation of thought, the cultivation of thought and the expression and the marvels of thought. All our philosophies, books, everything is based on that. And when you say, die to all that, you really awaken the terror of not knowing. This gives me security in knowing. A: Yes. K: Then knowledge becomes the field of my safety. And you ask me, give all that up, die to all that. And I say, you are insane. How can I die to that, that's part of me. A: There's a very, very beautiful, Zen saying that seems to relate to this when it's understood correctly. It speaks of jumping off the cliff with hands free. Jumping off a cliff with hands free. The hands... K: ...that hold. A: ...that hold, always grasping the past or reaching out towards the future, and we never get off that horizontal track. It's like a Lionel train, it forever goes on. K: So then comes the question, what is living in the present? Death is the future. And I've lived for 40 years, all the accumulation. What is the present? The present is the death of the content. You follow, sir? A: Yes. K: I don't know, it has immense beauty in that. Because that means no conflict, you follow sir, no tomorrow. But if you tell a man who loves, who is going to enjoy that man or woman tomorrow, when you say, there is no tomorrow, he says, what are you talking about? A: Yes, I know. Sometimes you will say when you have said something, it sounds absurd. K: Of course. A: And, of course, in relation to the way we have been taught to do analysis it does sound absurd. K: Therefore, sir, can we educate children, students, to live totally differently? Live and understand and act with this sense of understanding the content and the beauty of it all? A: If I've understood you correctly there's only one answer to that question: yes, yes. It sounds - I think the word here wouldn't be, absurd - it would be something like, wild. Yes, I see now what you mean about death and birth as non-temporally related in terms of the question that we raised about their relation earlier, because when you say there is this incarnation... K: ...now. A: ...now, upon the instant... K: Yes, sir. A: ...then... K: If you see the beauty of it, sir, the thing takes place. A: Then it's happened. K: It is not the result of mentation. A: No. K: It is not the result of man's thinking, thinking, thinking. This is actual perception of 'what is'. A: And the amazement that it is the same energy at root. K: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. A: It doesn't take something over here that's a different energy called god. K: No, that's an outside agency brought in here. A: No. K: It is the same wasted energy, dissipated energy which is no longer dissipated. A: Exactly. K: Therefore, it is... A: Exactly. This throws a totally - I'm beginning now to use the words, absolutely and totally, which in the Academy, you know, we're, advised to be very careful about. K: I know. A: But, I'm sorry about all that, the fact remains that it is total. It is total. K: Yes. A: There is a total change. And the transformation of each individual is a total one. K: It is not within the field of time and knowledge. A: Is not within the field of time and knowledge. K: You see how they are related. A: Yes, and then the profound seriousness of it that attends when one sees the rest of that sentence of yours. It is the responsibility of each. And if I may add just one other thing here because it seems to me that it is coming together. That it isn't the responsibility of one over against the other to do something. It is to come with and to, as the other is coming to and with, and we begin together... K: Yes, sir. Share together. A: ...to have a look. K: Learn together. A: Just quietly having a look. And in that activity, which is not planned - one of the amazing things about this conversation is that it, to use your beautiful word, flowers. K: It flowers, yes. A: It doesn't require an imposition without of a contrivance. K: No. A: Of a management. K: Or management, quite. A: Somehow it grows out of itself. It's this thing of growing out of itself that relates to this thing that you've been talking about in consciousness. By pointing to the head I don't mean consciousness is here, but it's the 'out of itself', it's like that water that turns in on itself. K: But it remains water. A: It remains water. Exactly. This has been a wonderful revelation, the whole thing about death, living and love. I do hope when we have our next conversation that we could begin to pursue this in relation to education even further. K: Further, yes, sir. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 27TH FEBRUARY 1974 15TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'RELIGION AND AUTHORITY -1' A: Mr Krishnamurti, we were talking last time together about death in the context of living, and love. And as I remember just as we came to the close of what we were discussing we thought it would be good to pursue this in terms of a further enquiry into education, what really goes on between teacher and student when they begin looking together. And what are the traps that immediately appear, and shock? You mentioned the terror of death, not simply externally, but internally in relation to thought. And it seemed to me perhaps it would be a splendid thing if we just continued that and went deeper into it. K: Sir, I would like to ask why we are educated at all? What is the meaning of this education that people receive? Apparently they don't understand a thing of life, they don't understand fear, pleasure, the whole thing that we have discussed, and the ultimate fear of death and the terror of not being. Is it that we have become so utterly materialistic that we are only concerned with good jobs, money, pleasure and superficial amusements, entertainments, whether they be religious or football. Is it that our whole nature and structure has become so utterly meaningless? And when we are educated for that, and to suddenly face something real is terrifying. And as we were saying yesterday, we are not educated to look at ourselves, we are not educated to understand the whole business of living, we are not educated to look and see what happens if we face death. So I was wondering as we came along this morning, religion, which we were going to discuss anyhow, has become merely not only a divisive process but also utterly meaningless. Maybe 2,000 years as Christianity, or 3,000, 5,000 as Hinduism, Buddhism and so on, it has lost its substance. And we never enquire into what is religion, what is education, what is living, what is dying, you know, the whole business of it. We never ask, what is it all about. And when we do ask we say, well, life has very little meaning. And it has very little meaning, and it has very little meaning as we live it, and so we escape into all kinds of fantastic, romantic nonsense, which has no reason, which we can't discuss, or logically enquire, but it is mere escape from this utter emptiness of the life that one leads. I don't know if you saw the other day, a group of people adoring a human being, and they were doing the most fantastic things, and that's what they call religion, that's what they call God. They seem to have lost all reason. Reason apparently has no meaning any more, either. A: I did see a documentary that was actually put on by this station, in which the whole meeting operation was being portrayed between the public and this individual in this young 15 year old guru, Maharaji. It was extraordinary. K: Disgusting. A: Amazing. It was in many respects revolting. K: And that's what they call religion. So shall we begin with the religion and go on? A: Yes, I think that would be a splendid thing to do. K: All right, sir. You know man has always wanted and tried to find out something beyond the everyday living, everyday routine, everyday pleasures, every activity of thought, he wanted something much more. I don't know whether you have been to India, I do not know if you have been to villages. They put a little stone under a tree, put some marking on it, the next day they have flowers, and of course to the people that are there it has become divinity, it has become something religious. That same principle is continued in the cathedrals. Exactly the same thing when you have mass and all the rituals in India, all that, it begins there: the desire for a human being to find something more than what thought has put together. Not being able to find it they romanticize it, they create symbols, or somebody who has got a little bit of this, they worship. And round that they do all kinds of rituals, Indian puja, you know all that business that goes on. And that is called religion. Which has absolutely nothing to do with behaviour, with our daily life. So seeing all this, both in the west and the east, in the world of Islam, in the world of Buddhism and all this, it is the same principle going on: worshipping an image which they have created, whether it is the Buddha, Jesus or Christ, it is the human mind that has created the image. A: Oh yes, certainly. K: And they worship the image which is their own. In other words they are worshipping themselves. A: And the division, the split, grows wider. K: Wider. So religion, when one asks what is religion, obviously one must negate in the sense not brutally cut off, understand all this. And so negate all religions: negate the religion of India and the multiple gods and goddesses; and here the religion of Christianity, which is an image which they have created, which is idolatry. They might not like to call it idolatry but it is. It is an idolatry of the mind. The mind has createds the ideal, and the mind through the hand created the statue, the cross and so on and so on. So if one really puts all that aside, the belief, the superstition, the worship of the person, the worship of an idea, and the rituals and the tradition, all that, if one can do it, and one must do it to find out. A: Exactly. There is a point of terror here that is many, many faceted it seems to me, it has so many different mirrors that it holds up to one's own dysfunction. To reach the place where one is willing to begin at the point where he makes this negation in order to find out, he thinks very often that he is being required to assume something in advance in order to make the negation. K: Of course. A: Therefore he balks at that, and he won't do it. K: No, because sir the brain needs security, otherwise it can't function. A: That's right. K: So it finds security in a belief, in an image, in rituals, in the propaganda of 2,000 or 5,000 years. And there, there is a sense of safety, comfort, security, well-being, somebody is looking after you, the image of somebody greater than me who is looking after me, inwardly he is responsible. All that. When you are asking a human being to negate all that, he is faced with an immense sense of danger, an immense sense - he becomes panicked. A: Exactly. K: So to see all that, to see the absurdity of all the present religions, the utter meaninglessness of it all, and to face being totally insecure, and not be frightened. A: I sense a trick that one can play on himself right here. Again I am very grateful to you that we are exploring together pathology in its various facets. One can begin with the notion that he is going to make this negation in order to attain to something better. K: Oh no, that's not negation. A: And that's not negation at all. K: No. Negation is to deny what is false not knowing what is truth. To see the false in the false and to see the truth in the false, and it is the truth that denies the false. You don't deny the false, but you see what is false, and the very seeing of what is false is the truth. I don't know? A: Yes, of course. K: And that denies, that sweeps away all this. I don't know if I am making myself clear. A: Well I had a very interesting experience in class yesterday. I had given the class an assignment. I think I mentioned this in a conversation we had yesterday, that I had given the class an assignment to go and look at the tree. So in fact I am making a report as to what happened after they came back. Well one young woman described what happened to her; and she described it in such a way that the class was convinced, and I was convinced that there was no blockage of her looking between herself and this tree. She was calmly ecstatic in her report. That sounds like a curious juxtaposition of words, but it seems to me to be correct. But then I asked her a question. And I said, now were you thinking of yourself as looking at this tree? And she hesitated - mind you she had already gone through this whole statement, which very beautifully undertaken - and I had come along playing the role of the serpent in the garden and I said, well now might it not have been the case that at any time during that you thought of yourself. And with this hesitation she began to fall more and more out of her own act. Well we had a look at that, she and I and the class, we all had a look at what she was doing. Finally she turned around and said, the reason that I stopped was not because of what went on between me and the tree - I am very clear about that - because I am in class now and I am thinking that I ought to say the right thing, and so I have gone and ruined the whole thing. It was a revelation not only to her but you could see with respect to the faces all around the room that we are all involved in this nonsense. K: Yes, sir. A: And her shock that she could so betray this relationship that she had had in doing her exercise in just a couple of words, was almost... K: Revealing. A: Yes, extremely revealing, but at the same time desperately hard to believe that anybody would do such a thing to himself. K: Quite. Negation can only take place when the mind sees the false, the very perception of the false is the negation of the false. And when you see the religions based on miracles, based on personal worship, based on fear that you, your own life is so shoddy, empty, meaningless, and that you are so transient, you will be gone in a few years, and then the mind creates the image which is eternal, which is marvelous, which is the beautiful, the heaven, and identifies with it and worships it. Because it needs a sense of security, deeply, and it has created all this superficial nonsense, a circus - it is a circus. A: Oh, yes. K: So can the mind observe this phenomenon, and see its own demand for security, comfort, safety, permanency, and deny all that? Deny in the sense see how the brain, thought, creates the sense of permanency, the eternality, or whatever you like to call it. And to see all that. Therefore one has to go much more deeply, I think, into the question of thought because both in the west and the east thought has become the most important movement in life. Right? A: Oh yes, oh yes. K: Thought, which has created this marvelous world of technology, marvelous world of science, and all that, and thought which has created the religions, all the marvelous chants, both the Gregorian and the Sanskrit chants, thought which has build beautiful cathedrals, thought which has made images of the saviours, the masters, the gurus, the father image. Unless one really understands thought, what is thinking, we will still play the same game in a different field. A: Exactly. K: Look what is happening in this country. These gurus come from India, they shave their head, put on the Indian dress, a little tuft of hair hanging down, and repeat endlessly what somebody has said. A new guru. They have had old gurus, the priests. A: Oh yes. K: The Catholic, the Protestant, and they have denied them but accept the others! You follow? A: Yes. K: The others are as dead as the old ones because they are just repeating tradition: traditionally repeating how to sit, how to shake, how to meditate, how to hold your head, breathe. Finally you obey what the old gurus says, or the young guru says. Which is exactly what took place in the Catholic world, in the Protestant world. You follow? They deny that and yet accept the other. Because they want security, they want somebody to tell them what to do, what to think, never how to think. A: No. This raises the question that I hope we can explore together, that concerns the word 'experience'. It's amazing how often in these times this word crops up to represent something that I desperately need, which somehow lies outside myself. I need the experience of an awakening. It isn't an awakening that I need, apparently, it's an experience of this awakening. The whole idea of religion as experience seems to me to need very, very careful thought, very, very careful penetration. K: Quite, quite. So, if I may ask, why do we demand experience? Why is there this craving for experience? We have sexual experience, experiences of every kind, don't we? A: Yes. K: As we live: insults, flattery, happenings, incidents, influences, what people say, don't say, we read a book, and so on and so on. We have experiences all the time. We are bored with that. And we say we will go to somebody who will give me the experience of god. A: Yes, that's precisely what is claimed. K: Now what is involved in that? What is involved in the demand of our experience, and the experiencing of that demand? I experience what that guru or master, or somebody tells me, how do I know it is real? And I say, I recognize it. Look, I experience something, and I can only know that I have experienced it only when I have recognized it. Right? A: Right. K: Recognition implies I have already known. A: Recognize. K: Recognize. A: Yes. K: So I am experiencing what I have already known, therefore it is nothing new. I don't know if I am making it clear. A: Yes, you are making yourself very, very clear. K: All they are doing is a self deception. A: It is actually lusted after. K: Oh, lord, yes. A: Yes, the drive for it is extraordinary. I have seen it in many, many students, who will go to extraordinary austerities. K: I know all this. A: We sometimes think that young people today are very loose in their behaviour, well some are, but what is so new about that, that has been going on since time out of mind. I think what is rarely seen is that many young persons today are extremely serious about acquiring something that someone possesses that they don't have, and if someone claims to have it, naively they are on their way. They go through any number of cart wheels, stand on their head indefinitely for that. K: Oh, yes, I have seen all that. A: Which is called an experience, as such. K: That's why one has to be very careful, as you pointed out, sir, to explore this word. And to see why the mind, why a human being demands more experience, when his whole life is a vast experience with which he is so bored. He thinks this is a new experience, but to experience the new how can the mind recognize it as the new, unless it has already known it? I don't know if I'm... A: Yes. And there is something very remarkable here in terms of what you said earlier in other previous conversations that we have had: in the recognition of what is called the new, the linkage with old thought, old image establishes the notion that there is something gradual in the transition. That there really is some kind of genuine link here with where I am now, and where I was before. Now I become the next guru who goes out and teaches the person how gradually to undertake this discipline. K: Yes, sir, yes, sir. A: And it never stops. No, no, I do see that. It's amazing, it's amazing. Driving down in the car this morning I was thinking about the whole business of chant, that you mentioned, the beauty of it all, and since this is related to experience as such, I thought maybe we could examine the aesthetics in terms of where this self trapping lies in it. And of course I thought of Sanskrit, that beautiful invocation that is chanted in the Isa Upanishad (chant in Sanskrit) and it goes on. And I said to myself, if one would attend to those words there is the echo of the abiding through the whole thing, through the whole glorious cadence, and within it there's the radical occasion to fall into a euphoria. K: Yes, sir. A: And somnolence takes over. But it is within the very same. And I said to myself, well maybe Mr Krishnamurti would say a word about the relation of beauty to this in terms of one's own relation to the beautiful, when that relation is not seen for what it is. Since there is a narcosis present that I can generate. It isn't in those words. And yet we think that the language must be at fault, there must be something demonically hypnotic about this that we do. And then religious groups will separate themselves totally from all this. We had a period in Europe when Protestants, Calvinists, wouldn't allow an organ, no music, because music is seductive. I am not the self seducer, it is the music's fault! K: That's just it, sir. A: Let's look at it. K: As we were saying the other day, sir, beauty can only be when there is the total abandonment of the self. Complete emptying the consciousness of its content, which is the 'me'. Then there is a beauty which is something entirely different from the pictures, chants, all that. And probably most of these young people, and also the older people, seek beauty in that sense through the trappings of the church, through chants, through reading the Old Testament with all its beautiful words and images, and all that, and that gives them a sense of deep satisfaction. In other words, sir, what they are seeking is really gratification through beauty - beauty of words, beauty of chant, beauty of all the robes and the incense, and the light coming through those marvelous pieces of colour. You have seen it all in cathedrals, Notre Dame and Chatres, marvelous. And it gives them a sense of sacredness, sense of feeling happy, relieved, at last here is a place where I can go and meditate, be quiet, get into contact with something. And then you come along and say, look, that's all rubbish, it has no meaning. What has meaning is how you live in your daily life. A: Yes. K: Then they throw a brick at you. A: It is like taking food away from a starving dog. K: Exactly. So this is the whole point, sir: experience is a trap, and all the people want this strange experience which the gurus think they have. A: Which is always called the knowledge. Interesting. K: Very. A: Isn't it? It is always called the knowledge. Yes. Of course I was thinking about previous conversations, about this self transformation that is not dependent on knowledge. K: Of course not. A: Not dependent on time. And eminently requires responsibility. K: And also, sir, we don't want to work. We work very strenuously in earning a livelihood. Look what we do, year after year, after year, day after day, the brutality, the ugliness of all that. But here, inwardly, psychologically, we don't want to work. We are too lazy. Let the other fellow work, perhaps he has worked, and perhaps he will give me something. But I don't say I am going to find out, deny the whole thing and find out. A: No, the assumption is that the priest's business is to have worked in order to know so that I am relieved of that task; or if I didn't come into the world with enough marbles then all I need do is simply follow his instructions and it's his fault if he gets it messed up. K: We never ask the man who says, "I know, I have experienced", what do you know? A: Exactly. K: What have you experienced? What do you know? When you say, I know, you only know something that is dead, which is gone, which is finished, which is the past. You can't know something that is living. You follow sir? A: Yes. K: A living thing you can never know, it's moving. It is never the same. And so I can never say, I know my wife, or my husband, children, because they are living human beings. But these fellows come along, from India specially, and they say, look, I know, I have experienced, I have knowledge, I will give it to you. And I say, what impudence. You follow sir? A: Yes. K: What callous indifference that you know and I don't know. And what do you know? A: It's amazing what has been going on in terms of the relation between men on the one hand, and women on the other, or man and woman in respect to this, because a whole mythology has grown up about this. For instance we say, our sex says, woman is mysterious, and never is this understood in terms of the freshness of life, which includes everything not just woman. Now we have an idea that woman is mysterious. So we are talking about something in terms of an essence, which has nothing to be with existence. Isn't that so? K: Exactly. A: Goodness me! And as you said earlier we are actually taught this, this is all in books, this is all in the conversations that go on in class rooms. K: So that why, sir, I feel education is destroying people - as it is now. It has become a tragedy. If I had a son - which I haven't got, thank god - I would say, where am I to educate him? What am I to do with him? Make him like the rest of the group? Like the rest of the community? Taught, memories, accept, obey. You follow, sir, all the things that are going on. And when you are faced with that, as many people are now, they are faced with this problem. A: Oh, they are, yes, yes. There's no question about that. K: So we say, look, let's start a school, which we have in India, which I am going to do in California, at Ojai. We are going to do that. Let's start a school where we think totally differently, where we are taught differently. Not just the routine, routine, routine, to accept, or to deny, react, you know, the whole thing. From that arises, sir, another question: why does the mind obey? I obey the laws of the country, I obey keeping to the left side of the road, or the right side of the road. I obey what the doctor tells me - I would be careful what he tells me, personally I don't go near doctors but I am very careful what they have to say, I am watchful. I don't accept immediately this or that. But politically in a so-called democratic world they won't accept a tyrant. A: No. K: They say no authority, freedom. But spiritually, inwardly, they accept every Tom, Dick and Harry - specially when they come from India. A: Oh yes. K: The other day I turned on the London BBC and there was a man interviewing a certain group of people. And the boy and the girl said, "We obey entirely what our guru says." And the interviewer said, "Will he tell you to marry?" "If he tells me I will marry. If he tells me I must starve, I will starve". Just a slave. You understand sir? And yet the very same person will object to political tyranny. A: Absurd. Yes. K: There he will accept the tyranny of a petty little guru, with his fanciful ideas, and he will reject politically a tyranny or a dictatorship. So why does the mind divide life into accepting authority in one way, in one direction, and deny it in another? And what is the importance of authority? That is, sir, the word authority, as you know, means the one who originates. A: The author. K: And these priests, gurus, leaders, spiritual preachers, what have they originated? They are repeating tradition, aren't they? A: Oh, yes, precisely. K: And tradition, whether it is from the Zen tradition, the Chinese tradition, or Hindu, is a dead thing. And these people are perpetuating the dead thing. The other day I saw a man, he was explaining how to meditate - put your hands here, close your eyes. A: Yes, that's the one I saw. K: And do this, that and the other. A: Appalling. K: And people accept it. A: And on the same thing there was this woman who had run out of money and every blessed thing, and she had nowhere to go to sleep and so forth, and hysterically she was saying, "I'm in line, I've got all these people ahead of me, but I'm must have this knowledge." The hysteria of it, the desperation of it. K: That's why, sir, what is behind this acceptance of authority? You understand? The authority of law, the authority of the policeman, the authority of the priests, the authority of these gurus, what is behind the acceptance of authority? Is it fear? Fear of going wrong spiritually, of not doing the right thing in order to gain enlightenment, knowledge, and the super consciousness, whatever it is, is it fear? Or is it a sense of despair? A sense of utter loneliness, utter ignorance? I am using the word ignorance in the deeper sense. A: Yes, yes, I follow. K: Which makes me say, well, there is a man who says he knows, I'll accept him. I don't reason. You follow, sir? I don't say, what do you know? What do you bring to one, give to me, your own tradition from India? Who cares? You are bringing something dead, nothing original, nothing real, but repeat, repeat, repeat what others have done - which in India they themselves are throwing out. A: Yes. I was just thinking of Tennyson's lines appropo of this, although in a different context when he wrote it: "There's not to reason why, but to do and die". K: That's what the gurus say. So what is behind this acceptance of authority? A: It is interesting that the word authority is radically related to the self - autos, the self. There is this sensed gaping void, through the division. K: Sir, that's just it. A: Through the division. And that immediately opens up a hunger, doesn't it? And my projection of my meal, I run madly to. K: When you see this, you want to cry. You follow sir? A: Yes. K: All these young people going to these gurus, shaving their head, dressing in Indian dress, dancing in the streets. Fantastic things they are doing. All on a tradition which is dead. All tradition is dead. You follow? And when you see that you say, my god, what has happened? So I go back and ask, why do we accept? Why are we influenced by these people? Why are we influenced when there is a constant repetition in a commercial, 'buy this, buy this'? It is the same as that. You follow sir? A: Yes. K: Why do we accept? The child accepts, I can understand that. Poor thing, he doesn't know anything, it needs security, it needs a mother, it needs care, it needs protection, it needs to sit on your lap and affection, kindness, gentle. It needs that. Is it they think the guru gives him all this? Through their words, through their rituals, through their repetition, through their absurd disciplines. You follow? A sense of acceptance as I accept my mother when a child, I accept that in order to be comfortable, in order to feel at last something, somebody is looking after me. A: This relates to what you said in a previous conversation, we looked into fear, the reaction of the infant is a reaction with no intermediary of any kind, of his own contrivance. He simply recognizes that he has a need, and this is not an imagined want, it is a radical need. He needs to feed, he needs to be affectionately held. K: Of course, sir. A: The transition from that to the point where as he gets older he begins to think about the source of the meeting of that need. He emerges as the image that is interposed as between the sense of danger and the immediate action. So if I am understanding you correctly, there is a deflection here from the radical purity of act. K: That's right. A: And I've done that myself. I have done that myself. It isn't because of anything I was told that actually coerced me to do it, even though what you say is true, we are continually invited, it's a kind of siren like call that comes to us throughout our entire culture, in all cultures to start that stuff. K: You see sir, that's what I want to get at. Why is it that we accept authority? In a democratic world, politically, we shun any dictator. But yet religiously they are all dictators. And why do we accept it? Why do I accept the priest as an intermediary to something which he says he knows? And so it shows, sir, we stop reasoning. Politically we reason, we see how important it is to be free, free speech, everything free, as much as possible. We never think freedom is necessary here. Spiritually we don't feel the necessity of freedom. And therefore we accept it - any Tom, Dick and Harry. It is horrifying. I've seen intellectuals, professors, scientists, falling for all this trash. Because they have reasoned in their scientific world, and they are weary of reasoning, and they say, at last I can sit back and not reason, be told, be comfortable, be happy, I'll do all the work for you, you don't have to do anything, I'll take you over the river. You follow? A: Oh, yes. K: And I'm delighted. So we accept where there is ignorance, where reason doesn't function, where intelligence is in abeyance, and you need all that: freedom, intelligence, reasoning, with regard to real spiritual matters. Otherwise what? Some guru comes along and tells you what to do, and you repeat what he does. You follow sir how destructive it is? A: Oh yes. K: How degenerate it is. That is what is happening. I don't think these gurus realize what they are doing. They are encouraging degeneracy. A: Well they represent a chain of the same. K: Exactly. So can we - sir, this brings up a very important question - can there be an education in which there is no authority whatsoever? A: I must say, yes, to that in terms of the experience that I had in class yesterday. It was a tremendous shock to the students when they suspended their disbelief for a moment, just to see whether I meant it when I said, now we must do this together, not your doing what I say to do. K: You have to walk together. A: We will do this together. K: Share it together. A: Right. You will question, and I will question, we will try to grasp as we go along - without trying. And I went into the business, about let's not have this shoddy little thing trying. That took a little while. That increased the shock because the students who have been to their own great satisfaction what you would call devoted, those who do their work, who make effort, are suddenly finding out that this man has come into the room and he is giving 'trying' a bad press. This does seem to turn the thing completely upside down. But they showed courage in the sense that they gave it a little attention before beginning the true act of attention. That's why I was using courage there because it is a preliminary to that. I've quite followed you when you have raised the question of the relation of courage to the pure act of attention. It seems to me that is not where it belongs. K: No. A: But they did get it up for this preliminary step. Then we ran into this what I think I called in an earlier conversation, dropping a stitch - where they really saw this abyss, they were alert enough to stand over the precipice. And that caused them to freeze. And it's that moment that seems to me absolutely decisive. It is almost like one sees in terms of events, objective events. I remember reading the Spanish philosopher, Ortega who spoke of events that trembled back and forth before the thing actually tumbles into itself. That was happening in the room. It was like water that moved up to the lip of the cup and couldn't quite spill over. I have spoken about this at some length because I wanted to describe to you a real situation, what was actually happening. K: I was going to say, sir, I have been connected with many school, for forty years, and more, and when one talks to the students about freedom and authority and acceptance, they are completely lost. A: Yes. K: They want to be slaves. My father says this, I must do this. Or, my father says, I won't do that. It is the same. A: Exactly. Do you think in our next conversation we could look at that moment of hesitation? K: Yes, sir. A: It seems to me so terribly critical for education itself. Wonderful. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 27TH FEBRUARY 1974 16TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'RELIGION AND AUTHORITY -2' A: Mr Krishnamurti in our series of conversations we have reached, it seems to me, an especially critical place. In our last discussion together we touched on the question of authority, not only in relation to what is out there, that we project, and what is out there that faces us, literally, but also the question at the deeper level of my relationship within that. And a point where in the enquiry, in going deeply into myself, in self examination, there is a point of boggling, when one boggles, one is hesitant, and trembles, there is a real fear and trembling that occurs at the birth of that enquiry. And I think you, at the conclusion of our former conversation, were moving toward a discussion of that in terms of its role in the religious life. K: That's right. A: Yes. K: Sir, why do we hesitate? That's what it comes to, what you are saying. Why do we not take the plunge? That's what you are asking? A: That's what I'm asking, yes. K: Why is it always coming to the brink and withdrawing, running away? Why don't we see the thing as is and act? Is it, sir, part of our education, that has cultivated function, enormous function, we give tremendous importance to function - as an engineer, as a professor as a doctor, and so on so on - functioning in a particular technique. And we have never cultivated, or encouraged or enquired into what is intelligence. Where there is intelligence there won't be this hesitation. There is action. When one is very sensitive, you act. That sensitivity is intelligence. Now, in education, as I have observed it both here and in India and other parts of the world, education is merely training the mind to function to the dictates of society. So many engineers are wanted, so many doctors are wanted. If you get into a profession where there are few you might make more money. A: You have to watch out for the glut. K: Glut, yes. Don't become a scientist, there are enough scientists, or whatever it is. A: Oh dear, dear, yes. K: So we are encouraged and trained to function in the field of activity as functions, careers. Now we hesitate to enter or plunge into something that demands all your attention, not fragmentary, all your attention because we don't know the measure. We know how to measure function. Here we have no measure. Therefore I depend. Therefore I won't reason here because I don't know how to reason. I don't say to a man who says 'I know,' what? I say, 'What do you know? You only know something that's gone, finished, dead. You can't say I know something that's living. And so gradually, as I see it, the mind becomes dull, restless. Its curiosity is only in the direction of functioning. And it has no capacity to enquire. To enquire you must have freedom first. I can't enquire otherwise. If I come to enquire to something which I have to enquire about, if I have prejudices I can't enquire. If I have conclusions about that I can't enquire. Therefore there must be freedom to enquire. And that is denied, because I've laid, society and culture laid tremendous importance on function. And function has its own status. A: Oh, yes, yes. It's exalted ultimately into process. K: Yes. Into a status. A: Right. K: So status matters much more than function. A: Yes. K: And so I live in that field, live in that structure and if I want to enquire into religion, what is religion, what is God, what is immortality, what is beauty - I can't do it. I depend on an authority. And I have no basis for reasoning - you follow, sir - in this vast field of religion. So it is partly the fault of our education, partly our incapacity to look at anything objectively. Our incapacity to look at a tree without all the rigmarole, knowledge, screen, blocks, that prevents me from looking at the tree. I never look at my wife, if I have a wife, or a girl, or whatever, I never look. I look at her or him through the image I have about her, or him. So the image is the dead, dead thing. So I never look at a living thing. I never look at nature, with all the marvel of it, the beauty of it, the shape, the loveliness of it. But I am always translating it, trying to paint it, write about it or enjoy it, or - you follow? A: Yes. K: So from that arises the question, why do I, why do human beings accept authority? Obey? Is it because they have been trained in the field of function where you must obey to learn, you follow, you can't do anything else. A: Oh yes. No, it has its own laws built in. K: Laws. It has its own disciplines. It has its own laws, its own ways. Because I have been trained that way I bring that over here into the field of religion, into the field of something that demands freedom. Freedom not at the end, right from the beginning. The mind must be free from authority, from the beginning. If I want to find out what is God, not I believe in God, that has no meaning, if there is God, if there is no God, I really want to find out. I am terribly serious. And if I am really serious, I am really concerned to the understanding, learning about God, if there is God, I must push aside completely all the beliefs, all the structure, all the churches, all the priests, all the books, all the things that thought has put together about religion. You follow? A: Yes, I do. I've been thinking very hard about your word 'intelligence' and the word 'truth' in relation to what you have been saying. And the passage from the gospel came to my mind which would end up, I think. with a very different exegesis in terms of what you've been saying, if one applied what you've been pointing to, to this text. "When he, the spirit of truth is come he will guide you into all truth and the truth shall make you free." The truth is called a spirit here. And in the very same St.John's gospel, God is also called spirit. a radical act, not this spirit over there, out there somewhere that I have projected. If one takes seriously, the terrible thing is that it hasn't been taken seriously. K: Because we are not allowed to be serious, sir. A: We can't even be serious about the thing that is claimed we must be the most serious about. K: Serious about. That's just it. A: Yes, I know. I know what you mean. K: And, look, we are not serious about our children. We don't feel responsible for them, right through life. Only till they are four, five, six, we are responsible, you know. After that they can do what they want. So freedom and authority cannot possibly exist. Freedom and intelligence go together. And intelligence has its own innate, natural, easy discipline, discipline in the sense of, not of suppression, control, imitation and all that, but discipline which is the act of learning all the time. A: In attention. K: Yes, in attention. A: In attention. This intelligence that you speak of is associated with splendour, isn't it? K: Yes. A: Its advent is immediate, not gradual. K: No, of course not. The perception is intelligence. A: The perception is intelligence. K: And therefore acting. A: And perception is the act. K: Of course. A: So the act, intelligence, beauty... K: All these. A: ...love, truth, freedom... K: Death, all those are one. A: ...order, they form a complete, total, integral movement in act. K: That's right. A: That in itself looked at positively is even, once it's translated into a concept... K: Oh, there is no longer that. A: ...becomes in itself an occasion for terror again. K: Of course, A: Because it seems that it runs away too fast from you. K: Yes. A: As soon as you say, yes I see. Isn't that marvelous. It's as though these that you've mentioned, beauty, intelligence, love, freedom... K: ...and death, A: ...have so to speak, secured themselves against all tom-foolery. K: Absolutely. Quite right. A: They are so radically pure, any foolery. K: So, sir, that means can the mind put aside totally all the structure of thought with regard to religion? It can't put away the function of thought in the field of knowledge. That we have understood. That's very clear. But here there is something, I don't know, we don't know - you follow, sir. We pretend we know. When a man says, Jesus is Saviour or whatever, it is a pretension. It is saying, "I know and you don't know." What do you know, in the name of heaven, you know nothing, you just repeat what you have learned from somebody else. So can the mind, in the field of religion, because religion is, as we said at the beginning, the gathering of all energy in that quality of attention. And it is that quality of attention that regenerates man, that brings about real transformation in man with regard to his conduct, his behaviour, his whole way of relationship, religion is that factor. Not all of this foolery that is going on. Now, to enquire, the mind must put aside all the structure of thought built around that word. You follow, sir? A: Yes I do. K: Can one do it? If not, we are pretending, talking about god, no god, yes a god. You follow? All that nonsense that is going on. So that is the first question. Can the mind be free of the authority of another, however great, however sublime, however divine or no divine, you follow? A: And because an act is required in order to answer this question... K: Absolutely. A: ...the individual must do this on his own. K: Otherwise he merely lives in a routine of function, which he has, which he is still doing and therefore he escapes into all these circuses which he calls religion. A: This came home to me with great dramatic force yesterday in class. On the one hand we have textbooks; textbooks which have survived the centuries because of their classical value in that sense. And the usual way in which this material is taught, is that one learns, let us say something about the Chinese vision of life. Then we have the Hindu vision of life and so we accumulate over a long period of time through school, clear through graduate school, if you hang in there long enough, if you can stand it, you come into possession of... K: ...what other people have said. A: ...what other people have said. K: But you know nothing about it. A: Exactly. You acquire certain skills in the order of function, as you have mentioned. Now the teacher has a problem. I am thinking of these schools that you have referred to in India and the one that will be in Ojai. There is a body of material here, clearly the teacher must be in possession of knowledge in the order of functional operation, procedural techniques and so forth. He simply has to know. The child is going to read books. K: Of course. A: In these schools that you mentioned he is going... K: Oh they do, they do. A: ...to read. They read books. Books. And all of them haven't been written necessarily by somebody who is undertaking to do the thing that goes on between the students and the teachers in these schools. Now the teacher must handle this written material in books in a way to indicate to the child, the younger student, the older student that it is possible to read this material without being self divided in doing it. K: And also what would you do if there was no book? A: You'd be in the same position. K: No, if there was no book, nobody saying tradition, you have to find out for yourself. A: But that's what we are asking him to do with his book, aren't we? K: Are we? A: No, no. Not in general. But in this new approach. K: Of course, of course. A: In this new approach we must somehow... K: ...bring the book and the other. A: ...bring the book and the other to freedom. K: ...and the freedom. Book and freedom. A: Yes. This is what hit me with such a shock yesterday in class. And I immediately felt radically responsible for doing this, n so far as I could. And I was surprised to see that though the students were extremely hesitant, there was a lot of anxiety there, real fear and trembling. What of health they possessed did assert itself and there was tremendous interest in the possibility. But then there was the hesitation that somehow wasn't passed. K: Passed, quite. A: The hesitation is there. I have this feeling that this has happened through the centuries with persons who have seriously studied scripture - since we were talking about religion. Sometimes you can detect it in their very commentaries, in their very writing. They come right up to it... K: And miss it. A: ...and then they can't... K: ...make it. A: ...push it over. They can't go... K: I understand. A: ...beyond the point. K: Yes, sir. It has been my fortune or misfortune to talk a great deal. And everybody comes to that point. They say, please what am I to, I've reached that point I can't go beyond it. Sir, look at it this way, if I may suggest. If I had a class, I wouldn't talk about the book first. I'd say freedom. You're secondhand people. Don't pretend you're not. You're secondhand, sloppy, shoddy people. And you are trying to find something that is original - god is, the reality is original. It's not coloured by all the priests in the world. It's original. Therefore you must have an original mind. Which means a free mind. Not original in painting a new picture, or a new this, that's all tommy rot. But a free mind. A free mind that can function in the field of knowledge, and a free mind that can look, observe, learn. Now, how do you help another, or is it not possible, to be free? You understand? Look, I never belonged to anything. I have no church, or no belief, all that. A man who really wants to find out if there is eternal, the nameless, something beyond all thought, he must naturally set aside everything based on thought: the saviour, the masters, the gurus, the knowledge, all that. Are there people to do that? You follow? Will anybody undertake that journey? Or will they say, you tell me all about it, old boy. I'll sit comfortably, and then you tell me. A: Yes, yes that's what goes on. K: I say, I won't describe that. I won't tell you a thing about it. That to put it into words is to destroy it. So, let us see if you cannot be free. What are you frightened about? Frightened of authority? Frightened of going wrong? But you are completely wrong the way you live, completely stupid the way you are carrying on, it has no meaning. You follow, sir? Deny the spiritual authority of every kind. What are you frightened of? Going wrong spiritually? They are wrong. Not you are wrong because you are just learning. They are the established in unrighteousness. A: That's beautiful. Yes. K: And so, why do you follow them? Why do you accept them? They are degenerate. And can you be free from all that, so that your mind through meditation, which we will discuss, perhaps another time, what it means to be free, what it means to wipe away all the things that people have put on you. You understand? So that you are innocent. Your mind is never hurt, is incapable of being hurt. That is what innocence means. And from that enquire, let's take a journey from there. You follow, sir? From this sense of negation, of everything that thought has put together. Because thought is time, thought is matter. And if you are living in the field of thought, there will be never freedom. You are living in the past. You may think you are living in the present, but actually you are living in the past when thought is in operation, because thought is memory, response of memory, knowledge, experience stored up in the brain. And that knowledge, experience is the expression of thought. Unless you understand that and know the limitation of thought you can't enter into the field of that which you call religion. You follow, sir? Unless this is told, repeated, shown to them, they can talk endlessly about books. This comes first. Then you can read the books. A: Yes. K: Sir, the Buddha never read a book. He listened, watched, looked, observed, fasted; said, all that's rubbish, and threw it out. A: I just thought of something you said, one must keep on repeating this again. K: In different ways. A: In different ways, and again. I'm speaking now about teaching. This point of hesitation is the point where something will or will not get born. K: That's right. A: That beautiful expression in earlier conversation about it that you used, incarnate now. K: Now, yes. A: So we're on the brink. We're, in the words of Ortega I mentioned earlier, rocking back and forth on the brink of a new event. And we're not over the line. There is nothing that any of us can do at that point with respect to the terror of the one who hears this, including my own, I'm not dividing myself from this doing together with the student, since I'm a student in this activity. So here we are, student among students. And there is this boggling, this fear and trembling, and nothing can be done other than simply encourage. K: And tell them, wait, stay there. A: Hold. K: Hold. It doesn't matter if you wobble, but keep on wobbling. A: Don't bolt. K: Don't run away. A: And so this is said in different ways over and over again. Now I understand what you meant by saying, now let's start the class ten minutes... K: ...with this. A: ...with this. We don't open the book. K: That's right, sir. A: We don't open the book, we start with this. And then when the book is opened perhaps the word, for a change, will disclose itself. K: That's right. A: Because intelligence has broken out. K: That's right. A: And behold it's all splendid. Yes, yes, yes I, please, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just wanted to make sure that I have - it's terribly important that I understand this. K: Because, you see, sir, students rush from one class to the other, because the period is short, run, from mathematics to geography, from geography to history, chemistry, biology, run, run. And if I was one of the professors, teachers I would say, "Look, sit down. Be quiet for five minutes. Be quiet. Look out of the window if you want to. See the beauty of light on water or the leaf and look at this and that, but be quiet." A: We teach in classes that don't have windows now. K: Of course, naturally. A: Yes, I was just being facetious. K: Of course, sir. A: But not only facetious. It's a horror. K: Horror. You are trained to be functional. You follow, sir? A: I know. K: Don't look at anything else but be monkeys. And my child is brought up that way. A: Yes. K: It is appalling. A: The classroom is a tomb. Yes. K: So, I say, 'sit quietly.' Then after sitting quietly I talk about this first. I have done this in schools. Talk about this, freedom, authority, beauty, love, you know, all that we have been discussing. Then pick up your book. But you have learned much more here than in the book. A: Oh, yes. Oh, sure. K: Therefore the book shows what you're - you follow? A: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. The book is seen... K: Book becomes a secondhand thing. A: Yes. It's seen with a clean eye. K: That's why, sir, I personally have never read a single book of all this, neither the Gita, the Upanishads, all that, what the Buddha has said. It somehow bored me. It meant nothing to me. What has meant anything was to observe: observe the very poor in India; observe the rich, the dictators, the Mussolinis, the Hitlers, the Krushchevs, Brezhnevs, all that. I have watched them, and the politician. And you learn an awful lot. Because the real book is you. Do you understand, sir? If you can read your book which is yourself you have learned everything, except the functional knowledge. So when there is self knowing, authority has no meaning. I won't accept. Why should I accept these people who bring truth from India? That's not truth they are bringing. They are bringing a tradition, what they believe. So, can the mind put away everything that man has taught or invented, imagined about religion, God, this and that? That means, can this mind, which is the mind of the world, which is the mind of common consciousness, can that consciousness empty itself of all the things that man has said about reality? Otherwise I can't - you follow, sir? A: Can't begin. K: Not only begin, what do I discover? What other people have said? What Buddha, Christ, why should I accept that? A: Well, the terrible thing is, I'm not in a position to grasp whatever they said that was worthwhile until this occurs. K: So freedom, sir, is an absolute necessity. A: Oh, yes. Absolutely. K: But none of them say this. On the contrary they say, freedom will come to you much later. Be in the prison for the rest of your life. When you die you'll have freedom. That's what they are preaching, essentially. So, can the mind, the heart, and all the storehouse in the brain be free of the things that man has said about reality? Sir, that's a marvellous question. You understand, sir? A: Oh I do, I do. One of the things that seems to me of remarkable cogency in our discussions, in our conversations, has been how continually you have returned to a question. K: Yes. A: Return to the question. And the notion of return in its depth, has it seems, if I've followed you correctly, been quite erroneously presented. The return has been presented as a movement to an answer. K: Quite, quite. A: But that is not a return. K: No, of course, not. A: No. Because the turn is toward that original that you mentioned. Therefore it is to the question, not to the answer at all. K: Quite, quite. Quite right, sir. You know I was staying once in Kashmir right among the hills, mountains. And a group of monks came to see me, freshly bathed and everything, done all the ceremony, and all that. They had come to see me. And they told me, they said they had just come from a group of unworldly people, super monks, who were very high up in the mountains. And they said they were totally unworldly. I said, "What do you mean by that word, sirs?" They said, "They had just left the world. They are no longer tempted by the world. They have this great knowledge of the world." And, I said, "When they have left the world, have they left the memory of the world?" The memory, the knowledge which the world has made. You follow? Which the gurus have put together to teach us. He said, "That's wisdom. How can you leave wisdom?" I said, "You mean wisdom is bought through a book, a teacher, from another, through sacrifice, torture, renunciation?" You follow, sir, their idea. That is, wisdom is something you can buy from somebody else. A: They went up the mountain with all this baggage. K: Baggage, that's right. That's exactly what I said. All the baggage which you have put away, the world, but they carry their baggage. You follow, sir? A: Oh goodness me. K: So that is really an important thing if a mind is really very serious to find out what religion means. Not all this rubbish. I keep on repeating because seems to be mounting, you know growing. But to free the mind from all the growth, accretions, and therefore which means see the accretions, see all the absurdities. A: This throws a very, very different cast on our word worldly. K: Yes, That's just it. A: They are going up the mountain in order to leave the world. But they are taking immense pains to take it with them. K: That's right, sir. That's what they are doing when they go into the monastery. A: Of course, of course, of course. Goodness. Accretions, incrustations. K: So now, come back: can the mind be completely alone? Not isolated, not withdrawn, not build a wall around itself, say, and then I'm alone. But alone in the sense, that aloneness that comes when you put away all this, all the things of thought. You understand, sir? Because thought is so clever, cunning. It can build a marvellous structure and call that reality. But thought is the response of the past, so it is of time. Thought being of time, it cannot create something which has no time. Thought can function in that field of knowledge. It is necessary, but not in the other. And this doesn't need bravery. It doesn't need sacrifice. It doesn't need torture. Just perception of the false. To see the false is to see the truth in the false. A: To see the false is to see the truth in the false. K: Of course. A: I must repeat that again. To see the false is to see the truth in the false. K: And see what is considered truth as the false. A: Yes, yes. K: So my eyes are stripped of all the false, so that there is no inward deception whatsoever, because there is no desire to see something, to achieve something. Because the moment there is a desire to experience, to achieve, to arrive at enlightenment all that, there is going to be illusion, something desire has created. Therefore the mind must be free of this pursuit of desire and its fulfillment, which we discussed previously. Understand what the structure of desire is. We talked a great deal about that. So it comes to this point, can the mind be free and free of all the things which are born of fear, and desire and pleasure? That means one has to understand oneself at great depth. A: The thing that keeps popping up is that one can repeat those questions... K: Yes, sir. A: ...and start to think that he has grasped them. K: You grasp the words. A: Exactly. There is something you have to come out the other side of. K: Quite right. A: But the repetition of the question does have a functional value. K: I know. A: It seems to me. K: Yes, sir, it does. That is if the person is willing to listen. A: If he is willing to listen, because thought is incredibly deceitful. K: Very. A: As you have pointed out. Goodness. I was just thinking of poor old Jeremiah's words: the heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things. Surely he must have... K: ...tasted something. A: Yes, and of course. But I was asking myself this question concerning why I went on to continue my formal education. And in following this deeply, it seems to me to go back to something that is going to sound very absurd, but it has something to do with everything you've said, you've been talking about. When I was very small, growing up in England, I was put to school rather earlier than many American children were put to school, and I always read a great deal of poetry. I don't know what has happened to us in this country, but poetry doesn't really exist for the populace at all. K: No, sir, I know. A: But, thank God, I was brought up on it daily. K: Yes, in England of course everybody reads poetry, Latin, you know. A: And I was always read poetry by the young woman employed by my parents to look after me and my little sister. I never went to sleep without hearing it. One day when I was very small, at school, the teacher read "The Owl and the Pussy Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat", that mad thing, marvelously mad thing, Edward Lear wrote. K: Edward Lear. A: Yes, and you know I was never the same again. And I know now why, it sounds absolutely absurd, I came to experience in language a splendour that I never lost touch with, despite all the struggles I had with my teachers, I had a bad time in school to get to the end of formal education, I have to say that, I had a pretty grim time. And one of the reasons for the grim time was my refusal to give this up, this... K: Quite, the Pussy Cat in the boat. A: The fact that there's a bird and a cat in the same boat. And the man is describing what you called act, movement in which truth and beauty and so on move along. Oh, goodness. K: Sir, I think we ought to, after coming to this point, we ought to go very deeply again into the question of meditation. A: Yes. K: Because religion, in the sense we are talking about, and meditation go together. That means religion isn't just an idea but is actual conduct in daily life. Your thoughts, your speech, your behaviour is the very essence of religion. You understand, sir? If that doesn't exist religion can't exist. A: Exactly. K: It's just words, you go around spinning a lot of words, go to various circus tents. But that's not religion. So after establishing that deeply in oneself, and the understanding of religion, inward, then the next thing is: what is meditation? That is of tremendous importance, because meditation is something, that is really, if it is understood properly, is the most extraordinary thing that man can have. Meditation is not divorced from daily life. A: What was running through my mind was, not mistaken, that the root relation to the word 'medeo'. K: 'Medeo' is to think, to ponder, to go into. A: In Homer, it actually carries the idea to provide for in the sense of to care for. It is very beautiful. It brings up the question that you raised earlier of true care. K: Yes, sir. A: That one is not meditating unless he is... K: ...careful. A: ...careful and caring. K: Caring rather than careful. A: Yes. It's all there in the word, but we don't look, won't have a look. Yes, yes please go on please. K: You see when we have divorced conduct from religion, which we have, divorced relationship from religion, which we have, divorced death from religion, which we have, divorced love from religion, when we have made love into something sensuous, something that is pleasurable, then religion, which is the factor of regeneration, disappears in man. And that's why we are so degenerate. And unless you have this quality of a mind that is really religious, degeneracy is inevitable. You follow, sir? Look at the politicians who are supposed to be the rulers, the guides, the helpers of the people: they are degenerate. You see what is happening in this country and everywhere. They are so corrupt. And they want to bring order. They are so irreligious. They may go to church, Baptists or whatever they are, and yet they are really irreligious, because they don't behave. And so man is becoming more and more degenerate. You can see it, sir. Because religion is the factor that brings a new quality of energy. It is the same old energy but it has become a new quality. So the brain doesn't regenerate. As we get older we tend to degenerate. But it doesn't because it is the freedom from every kind of security of the me has no place. A: I noticed this in class yesterday with this business about energy that you are just talking about. There was a quickening... K: Yes, sir. A: ...that took place. There was at the end of the class, and it was strenuous, because of this terrible hesitation. But even so there was a release of energy which has nothing to do with entertainment at all, people running to get their minds off themselves, as they say, which, of course, is nonsense. They are just grinding themselves into themselves some more with it. But in this particular case there was empirical demonstration of what you are saying. Something that is out there. It's to be seen. It's observable. K: That's right, sir. A: And behold it sprung up like a green bay tree. Yes, please, please go on. K: You see, sir, that's why the priests throughout the world have made religion into something profitable, both the worshipper and the intermediary. It has become a business affair, intellectually business, or it has become really commercial, not only physically but inwardly, deeply: do this and you will reach that. A: Utilitarian to the core. K: Which is commercial. A: Yes. K: And so, unless this is put an end to we are going to degenerate more and more and more. And that's why I feel so immensely responsible, personally. Tremendously responsible to the audience that I talk to, when I talk, when I go to the various schools in India, I feel I am responsible for those children. You follow, sir? A: Yes, of course. I do. I certainly do. K: I say, "For god's sake, be different. Don't grow up like that. Look." I go into it very, very, you know, talk a great deal. And they begin to see. But the world is too strong for them. They have to earn a livelihood. They have to resist their parents who want them to settle down and have a good job, and marry, a house. You know, all that business. A: Well, surely. K: And the public opinion, and overpopulation, is much too strong. A: The tremendous weight of that tradition of the four stages of life. K: Yes. A: Of course. K: So I say, let us find out if a few elite - quote the word elite, if I may use that word without any snobbery - let's create a few, who really are concerned, a few teachers, few students. Even that becomes very difficult because most teachers are not good at this or that and therefore become teachers. A: Yes. Oh dear, dear, dear, yes. K: So everything, sir, is against you. Everything. The gurus are against you. The priests are against you. Business people, the teachers, the politicians, everybody is against you. Take that for granted. They won't help you an inch. They want you to go their way. They've got their vested interest and all that. A: Yes, I do see that. I do see that with clarity. In our next conversation do you think we could explore the activity of meditation within the context of all this horror... K: Oh yes, sir, we will. A: ...that we have described. Oh that's wonderful, yes. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 28TH FEBRUARY 1974 17TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'MEDITATION - 1' A: Mr Krishnamurti, in our last conversation we came almost up to the point where we were about to begin another, on the subject of meditation. And I was hoping that today we could share that together. K: Right, sir. Sir, I don't know if you are aware of the many schools of meditation - in India, in Japan, in China, the Zen, and the various Christian contemplative orders, those who pray endlessly, keep going day after day; and those who wait to receive the grace of God - or whatever they call it. I think, if I may suggest, we should begin, not with what is the right kind of meditation, but what is meditation. A: Yes. Yes. K: Then we can proceed and investigate together, and therefore share together this question of what is meditation, the word means ponder, hold together, embrace, consider very, very deeply. The meaning of all that is involved in that one word meditation. If we could start with saying that we really do not know what meditation is. A: Very well. K: If we accept the orthodox, traditional Christian or Hindu or Buddhist meditation, and there is, of course, the meditation among the Muslims as the Sufis. If we accept that then it's all based on tradition. A: Yes. K: What some others have experienced. And they lay down the method or the system to practise what they have achieved. And so there are probably thousands of schools of meditation. And they are proliferating in this country: meditate three times a day; think on a word, a slogan, a mantra. And for that you pay $35 or $100 and then you get some Sanskrit word or some other Greek word and you repeat, repeat, repeat. Then there are all those people who practise various forms of breathing. And the practise of Zen. And all that is a form of establishing a routine and a practice that will essentially make the mind dull. Because if you practise, practise, practise, you will become a mechanical mind. So, I have never done any of those things because personally, if I may talk a little about myself... A: Please do. K: ...I have watched, attended, went into certain groups of various types, just to look. And I said, "This isn't it." I discarded it instantly. So if we could discard all that: discard the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian, and the various importations of meditation by the gurus from India, and the contemplative, all that as a continuance of a tradition, which is the carrying over of what others have said, and other's experiences, other's illuminations, other's enlightenment, and so on. If we could totally discard all of that, their methods, their systems, their practices, their disciplines. Because they are all saying, truth, or God, or whatever they like to call it, is something over there. You practise in order to get there. That is a fixed thing - according to them. Of course, it must be fixed. If I keep practising in order to get there, that must be static. A: Yes, of course. K: Therefore truth isn't static. It isn't a dead thing. A: No, no, I quite see that. K: So, if we could honestly put away all that and ask what is meditation. A: Good. K: Not how to meditate. In asking that question, what is meditation, we'll begin to find out, we'll begin to meditate ourselves. I don't know if I-? A: Yes, you do. You make yourself very clear. We're back again to, to the distinction between an activity, the goal of which lies outside the activity, in contrast to the activity... K: ...itself. A: ...the end of which is intrinsic to itself. K: Yes, sir. A: Yes. K: So, could we start with saying I do not know what meditation is? A: Yes, yes. I'm willing to start there. K: It's really marvelous if you start from there. A: It certainly is. K: It brings a great sense of humility. A: Also one intuits even from afar a freedom. K: Yes. Yes that's right. I don't know. That is a tremendous acknowledgment of a freedom from the established known, the established traditions, the established methods, the established schools and practices. A: Exactly. K: I start with something I don't know. That has, for me that has great beauty. Then I am free to move. A: Exactly. K: I'm free to flow, or swim with, in the enquiry. So, I don't know. Now then, from that we can start. First of all, is meditation divorced from daily living? The daily conduct, the daily desires of fulfillment, ambition, greed, envy, the daily competitive, imitative, conforming spirit, the daily appetites, sensual, sexual, other forms, intellectual and so on. Is meditation divorced from all that? Or does meditation flow through all that, covers all that, includes all that? Otherwise meditation has no meaning. You follow? A: Yes, I do. This raises an interesting question I'd like to ask you. Perhaps you'd be good enough to help me clarify this. Now, I've never personally undertaken meditation with respect to its ritual character in some traditions or its... K: ...monastic. A: ...its monastic and radically methodical approach. I've read rather deeply in the literatures that have emanated from those practices. And I'm thinking for instance of what I've understood from my study of, what is called the hesychast tradition, where, what is called the Jesus prayer is uttered by the monks, particularly on Mount Athos, "Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me a sinner." This is repeated over and over with, as I understand it, the hope that someday it will become so automatic that, perhaps as a modern day depth psychologist would put it, the unconscious comes into possession of it, so that what I am doing, whatever that may be, is itself focused entirely on that prayer. The claim being that when this is achieved, when I no longer have to utter the prayer, in that sense, the prayer is uttering itself in me. K: The same thing, sir, is expressed in India in a different way, which is mantra. You know that? A: Yes. K: Repetition of a sentence or a word. And the repeating loudly first, then silently. Then it has entered into your being and the very sound of it is going on. A: Yes. K: And from that sound you act, you live. But it's all self-imposed in order to arrive at a certain point. I, say for instance when you said the prayer which you just now repeated, sin - I don't accept sin. I don't know what sin is. A: I can just imagine the horror on the faces of those whose ears catch those words. K: That means they are conditioned accessing to a belief, that there is a Jesus, that there is a sin, that they must be forgiving - all that. It just carrying on a tradition. A: This speaks to me very personally. The basis for the decision that I made years ago not to do one of these things was embodied in your statement a little earlier, namely that it is expected that out of this word, or out of these words... K: ...out of breathing, all that. A: ...will come somehow this permeation of my total being. And the question that arose for me at the time was, and I'd like you to clarify whether you think this question was correct, what arose in my mind was, that statement itself whether the mantram or the Jesus prayer is itself a finite expression. K: Absolutely. A: Therefore, aren't I doing something strange here. K: Yes. A: And if I somehow attain to anything that's worth attaining to it would probably be in spite of that rather than because of it. That perhaps was thinking about thought. But I didn't feel it at the time. I thought that I was making an intuitive response to it. K: Quite. A: And therefore I simply wouldn't go ahead. K: You wouldn't go ahead. A: Yes. Please go on. K: Quite, quite right sir. So you see, all that implies that there is a path to truth - the Christian path, the Hindu path, the Zen, the various gurus and systems, there is a path to that enlightenment or to that truth or to that immeasurable something or other. And it is there, all you have to do is keep on keep on walking, walking, walking toward a saint. That means that thing is established, fixed, static, is not moving, is not living. A: It flashed into my mind the Biblical text in which God is described as the lamp unto my feet, and the light unto my path. It doesn't say he is the path. But rather he's the lamp... K: ...to the path, quite. A: Right. As a lamp to the feet, and a light to the path. But it doesn't say that God is the path. That's very interesting. K: Very. A: But maybe nobody really looks at those words closely enough. K: You see, sir, how you are looking at it already. You see the truth of that statement. The feeling of it. A: Yes, yes. K: So, that's one thing. Does meditation cover the whole field of existence? Or is it something totally apart from life? Like being in business, politics, sex, pleasure, ambition, greed, envy, the anxiety, death, fear, all that is my life, life, living. Is meditation apart from that or does it embrace all that? If it doesn't embrace all that meditation has no meaning. A: Something just came to me that I'm sure would be regarded as incredibly heretical. But you know that the words of Jesus himself, "I am the way, the truth, and the life", when understood in the context of what has been revealed through these discussions we've had, takes on, in relation to something else he said an incredibly different meaning from what we've been taught. For instance, when he asks Peter who he is, that is, "Who am I, Jesus?", and Peter says, "Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God", he immediately turns to him and says, "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you." Nothing to do with flesh and blood, "But my father which is in heaven", which he says elsewhere, is one with him. And he's one with the father. And then he prays in his prayer that the disciples be one with him as he and his father are one. That they all may be one. So if you look at that, I'm almost stuttering over myself because this, what I'm about to say, I'm aware of, theologically speaking would be, looked on as fantastical, when he says, "I am the way, the truth and the life", if it's seen in the context of that one as act, as act, then the whole business utterly is transformed. Isn't it? K: Quite, quite. A: I'm going to be swallowing hard about that for a long time. Please go on. K: So if it is divorced from life then meditation has no meaning. It's just an escape from life, escape from all our travails and miseries, sorrows, confusions. And therefore it's not worth even touching. A: Yes. Right. K: If it is not, and it is not for me, then what is meditation? You follow? Is it an achievement, an attainment of a goal? Or is it a perfume, a beauty that pervades all my activities, therefore it has tremendous significance? Meditation has tremendous significance. Then the next question is: is it the result of a search? Joining Zen group, then another group, one after the after, one after the other, practise this, practise that, don't practise, take a vow of celibacy, poverty, or don't speak at all, fast, in order to get there. For me all those are totally unnecessary. Because what is important is the seeing, as we said yesterday, the false, not I judge the false as true or false, but the very perception reveals the truth or the falseness of it. I must look at it. My eyes must look at it without any prejudices, without any reactions. Then I can say this is false, I won't touch it. That's what happens. I won't. People have come to me and said, "Oh, you have no idea of all the things", they have said "You must", I have said, "Nothing doing." To me this is false because it doesn't include your life. A: Yes. K: You haven't changed. You may say, "I'm full of love. I'm full of truth. I'm full of knowledge. I'm full of wisdom." I say, "That's all nonsense. Do you behave? Are you free of fear? Are you free of ambition, greed, envy and the desire to achieve success in every field? If not, you are just playing a game. You are not serious." So, from that we can proceed. A: Yes. K: That meditation includes the whole field of existence, whether in the artistic field, or the business field. Because, to me, the division as the artist, business, the politician, the priest, the scholar, and the scientist, you know, how we have fragmented all these as careers, to me, as human beings are fragmented, the expression of this fragmentation is this, business, scientist, the scholar, the artist. You follow? A: Yes, yes, yes. I'm thinking of what goes on in the academy with respect to this. We are always saying to each other as academicians, "For heaven's sake let's, let's find an ordering principle by which to bring all this into some kind of integration, so the student can really feel that he's doing something meaningful. And not just adding another freight car to the long train of what he hasn't even seen." K: Quite, quite. A: Yes. K: And meditation must be, or is, when you deny all this -systems, methods, gurus, authorities - a religious question. A: Yes, profoundly religious. K: Profoundly religious. A: Oh, yes. K: Now, what place has an artist in not only the social structure, in its expression of the religious? You understand? What is an artist, sir? Is he something apart from our daily living? The beauty of living. The quality of the mind that is really religious. You follow? Is he part of that? Or is he a freak, outside that? Because he has certain talents? And the expression of that talent becomes extraordinarily important to him and to the people. A: In our culture it often seems that the expression of that talent brings him into conflict with certain conventions. K: And also expressing that conflict in himself. A: Of course. Yes, we have a long tradition in western civilization of the artist as an outsider, don't we. K: Yes. Something outside. But he is much more sensitive, much more alert to beauty, to nature, but apart from that he is just an ordinary man. A: Yes, of course. Yes. K: To me, that is a contradiction. First be a total human being. And then whatever you create, whatever you do will be beautiful. A: Of course. K: Whether you paint, or whatever you do. Don't, let's divide the artist into something extraordinary. Or the business man into something ugly. Let's call it just living in the world of the intellect, or the scientist in the world of physics, and so on, so on. But first there must be human being. You follow, sir? Human being in the sense, the total understanding of life, death, love, beauty, relationship, responsibility, not to kill. All that's implied in living. Therefore it establishes a relationship with nature. And the expression of that relationship, if it is whole, healthy is creative. A: This is very, very different from what many artists conceive of as their task. Especially in modern times artists have this notion that they are in some sense reflectors of the fragmentation of their times. K: Absolutely. A: And so they make a statement which holds up the fragmentation as a mirror to us, and what has this got to do with anything else but reinforcing the fragmentation. K: Absolutely. A: Yes. Yes I quite understand what you are saying. K: You see that, sir. Meditation covers the whole field of existence. Meditation implies freedom from the method, the system, because I don't know what meditation is. I start from that. A: Yes. K: Therefore I start with freedom. Not with their burden. A: That's marvelous. Start with freedom and not with their burden. This business of holding up fragmentation to us from that perspective is really nothing more than a species of journalism. K: Journalism, absolutely. A: Isn't it. Yes, yes. K: Propaganda. A: Of course, yes. K: Therefore, lie. So I discard all that. So I have no burden. Therefore the mind is free to enquire what is meditation? A: Marvelous. K. I have done this. You follow, sir? It is not verbal expressions. I don't say anything which I haven't lived. A: Oh that's very, very obvious to me as one sitting here conversing with you. Yes. K: I won't. That is hypocrisy. I am not interested in all that. I'm really interested in seeing what is meditation. So I start - one starts with this freedom. And freedom means freeing the mind, emptying itself of the burdens of others, their methods, their systems, their acceptance of authority, their beliefs, their hope, because its part of me, all that. Therefore I discard all that. And, now I start by saying, I don't know what meditation is. I start. That means the mind is free, has this sense of great humility. Not knowing I'm not asking. Then somebody will fill it. A: Exactly. K: Some book, some scholar, some professor, some psychologist comes along and says, "You don't know. Here, I know. I'll give it to you." I say, "Please don't." I know nothing. You know nothing either. Because you are repeating what others have said. So I discard all that. Now I begin to enquire. I'm in a position to enquire. Not to achieve a result, not to arrive at what they call enlightenment. Nothing. I don't know if there is enlightenment or not. I start with this feeling of great humility, not knowing, therefore my mind, the mind is capable of real enquiry. So I enquire. First of all I look at my life, because I said in the beginning meditation implies covering the whole field of my life, of one's life. My life, our life, is first the daily conscious living. I've examined it. I have looked at it. There is contradiction and so on, as we've been taking about. And also there is the question of sleep. I go to sleep, eight, nine, ten hours. What is sleep? I start not knowing. Not what others have said. You follow, sir? A: Yes, I do. K: I'm enquiring in relation to meditation which is the real spirit of religion. That is, gathering all the energy to move from one dimension to a totally different dimension. Which doesn't mean divorce from this dimension. A: No, it's not like those monks going up the hill, no. K: I've been up those hills. A: Yes. K: So, what is sleep? And what is waking? Am I awake? Or, I am only awake when there is a crisis, when there is a shock, when there is a challenge, when there ia an incident, death, discard, failure. You follow? Or am I awake all the time, in waking during the daytime. So what is it to be awake? You follow, me sir? A: Yes, I am, I am. Since you are saying that meditation must permeate, obviously, to be awake cannot be episodic. K: That's it. Cannot be episodic. Cannot be something stimulating. A: Can't be described as peak experiences. K: No, no. Any form of stimulation, external or internal only implies that you are asleep and you need a stimulant, whether it is coffee, sex, or a tranquilizer. All keep you awake. A: Have a shot to go to sleep and have a shock to wake up. K: So, in my enquiry I am asking, am I awake? What does it mean to be awake? Not awake to what is happening politically, economically, socially, that is obvious. But awake. What does it mean? I am not awake if I have any burden. You follow, sir? There is no sense of being awake when there is any kind of fear. If I live with an illusion, if my actions are neurotic, there is no state of being awake. So I'm enquiring and I can only enquire by becoming very sensitive to what is happening in me, outside me. So is the mind aware during the day completely to what is happening inside, outside of me. A: Upon every instant. K: That's it. Otherwise I am not awake. A: I was just thinking about something that has always given me a great sense of wonder. At home we have some birds and, of all things, a cat too. K: Of course. A: But they love one another. That is to say, the birds don't run around in the room with the cat, but the cat supervises the birds. When the birds are put to bed in the evening the cat goes into that room and stays with them, maybe an hour or two, watches. Just seems to have the feeling that it must look after the birds. And in the day time, I've often watched the cat sit and look at the birds with an immense intensity, and the ordinary reaction is, "Well for heaven's sake, haven't you seen them before?" What is this everlasting intensity, but she's looking. K: That's right, sir. A: And her eyes are always with that jewel-like... K: ...clarity. A: ...intensity and clarity. Cleaner than flame. And it never stops. And when she sleeps, she really - yes. When you asked me what is sleep, there must be a relation between the wonder that we feel for the cat's ability completely to sleep. And when she awakes she's completely awake. K. That's right, sir. So in asking and enquiring what is sleep, I must also ask what is to be awake. A: Of course. K: Of course. Am I awake? Or is the past so alive that it is dictating my life in the present? Therefore I am asleep. A: Would you say that again? It's very important. K: I don't know how, I'll put it differently. Am I awake. Is my mind burdened with the past? And therefore bearing a burden I'm not awake to the present. A: Not awake in the present, exactly. K: Not awake as I am talking. A: That's right. K: Because I'm talking from the background of my past, of my experience, of my failures, my hurts, my depressions, therefore the past is dominating and putting me to sleep now. A: To sleep. It's a narcotic. K: Narcotic. Therefore what am I to do with the past? You follow, sir? A: Yes, I do. Yes, yes, yes. K: Past ia necessary. A: Of course, yes, the whole field of knowledge. K: Knowledge. Past is necessary. But when the past covers the present, then I am asleep. So is it possible to know what the past is and not let it overflow into the present? That question and the reality of it brings its own discipline. Therefore I say, yes, I know what it means. I can live, I can keep awake totally and widely and yet operate in the field of knowledge. So there is no contradiction. I don't know if I am conveying it ? A: Oh you are. You are, you are. K: So both are moving in harmony. One doesn't lag behind the other. One doesn't contradict the other. There's balance. A: Well, what I am seeing here, if I am following correctly is, on the one hand we have knowledge and the grasp of its necessity with respect to know how in practical affairs. K: Of course. A: On the other hand we have seeing, understanding. And the act of meditation is the nexus... K: That's right, sir. A: ...between them so that there is no interruption of flow in the activity... K: That's right. A: ...of understanding and knowing. K: That is part of meditation. A: Of course. K: You follow? A: Yes. K: See what is taking place. Then what is sleep? I have understood now what is means to be awake. That means I am watching. I am aware. I am aware without any choice, choiceless awareness, watching, looking, observing, hearing, what is going on and what is going outside, what people tell me, whether they flatter me, or they insult me. I am watching. So I am very aware. Now, what is sleep? I know what is sleep: resting, shutting your eyes, going to bed at 9 or 10 or later. What is sleep? And in sleep, dreams. What are dreams? I don't know what the others say. I am not interested in what the others say. You follow, sir? Because my enquiry is to find out whether meditation covers the whole field of life, not just one segment. A: My enquiry is from the point where I say, I don't know. K: I don't know. That is right. So I'll proceed. I dream. There are dreams. What are dreams? Why should I dream? So I have to find out why I dream. What are dreams? Dreams are the continuation of my daily sleep. Which is, I haven't understood - see what is taking place, sir - I have not understood my daily life. I watch my daily life. My daily life is in disorder; so I go to sleep and the disorder continues. And the brain says, I must have order otherwise I can't function. So if the mind doesn't put order during the day, the brain tries to bring order during the night. A: Through the dream. K: Through the dreams, through intimations. When I awake I say, yes I have a certain feeling this must be done. So, see what takes place. When the mind is awake during the day it has order, it establishes order, in the sense we have discussed previously. A: Yes. In that sense of order. K: Order which comes out of the understanding of disorder. The negation of disorder is order, not the following of a blueprint. A: No. K: Or a pattern, all that's disorder. So during the day, the mind, the brain has established order. So when I sleep the brain isn't working out how to establish order in itself in order to be secure. Therefore the brain becomes rested. A: I see. K: Therefore the brain becomes quiet, sleeps without dreams. It may have superficial dreams when you eat wrongly, you know, all that kind of thing. That I am not talking about. So, sleep means regeneration of the brain. I don't know if you follow? A: Yes, I do. I wonder if I could ask you a question about dreams here, that might introduce a distinction between dreams in terms of their nature. Sometimes we report that we've had a dream which points to future event. K: That's another thing. A: That's entirely different from what you are talking about. K: Yes, yes. A: So we could say that... K: Sir, that, I think we can understand that very simply. You know the other day we were walking high up in the hills in India and there was a river flowing down below. And two boats were coming in the opposite direction and you knew where they were going to meet. A: Of course. K: When you go high enough you see the boats coming together at a precise point. A: But that's very objective. That has nothing to do with my subjective unfinished business. K: No. A: Which is the other thing you were talking about. K: That's right. A: Yes, I quite see, I quite see. Right. What an amazing thing it would be to have all your business done and go to sleep. And if order should present you with... K: Yes, sir. A: ...an understanding. K: Of course. A: Then the understanding never stops from waking through sleeping. K: That's right. A: Yes. Of course. Of course. Marvelous. Marvelous K: So you see, that way the brain is regenerated, keeps young. No conflict. Conflict wears out the brain. A: Yes. K: So, sleep means not only order, rejuvenation, innocence, but also in sleep there are states in which there is absolutely freedom to enquire, to see into something which you have never seen with your eyes, physical eyes. A: Yes. K: Of course. A: Yes K: So we have described sufficiently into that. I see that. So do I - does the mind live that kind of life during the day? A: That would be rare. K: Otherwise it is not meditation. A: Otherwise it is not meditation, of course, of course, of course. K: And I don't want to play a game, a hypocritical game, because I am deceiving nobody. I am deceiving myself and I don't want to deceive myself. I don't see the point of deceiving myself because I don't want to be a great man, little man, big man, success. That's all too infantile. So I say, am I living that? If not, what is happening? And it gives me energy to live that way because I have no burden of the others. I don't know? A: This is very remarkable. It reminds me of a story that is told about a swordsman and his three sons. And he was an old, old swordsman in old Japan and he wanted to pass on the responsibility for his art to his sons. And he asked the sons each to come into his room and he would speak to them and he would decide. K: Quite, quite. A: He was a man of knowledge in terms of the sword, but he also was a man of understanding. And unbeknown to them he put a ball on top of the lintel and as they passed in, they, of course, were quite unaware of that. The youngest was called in first, and when the youngest walked in his father had arranged for this ball to drop, you see, and the ball dropped and the son, in a flash, cut it in two with his sword when it fell down. And his father said, "Please wait in the other room." The second son came in, ball fell on his head but precisely as it touched his head he reached up and he took it in his hands and the father said, "Please wait in the other room." Eldest son came in. He opened the door, and as he opened the door he reached up and he took the ball. And the father called them in and he read out the youngest son and he said, "Very brilliant. You've mastered the technique. You don't understand anything." He said to the second one, "Well, you're almost there. Just, just keep on, keep on." And he said to the eldest son, "Well, now you can begin." And it seemed to me that's just exactly - imagine! It's like the word 'prajna' which means 'pra' - ahead, 'jna' to, to know, to know beforehand, in the sense, not of some work of prediction that we do based on the study of rats in the lab or something but understanding is... K: Yes, sir, A: ...ahead and behind in the total movement of that one act. K: Yes, sir. A: Oh yes of course. K: So I see this, because I do not separate meditation from daily living. Otherwise it has no meaning. So I see the importance of order during the waking hours. And therefore freeing the mind - the brain from conflict, all that, during sleep, so there is total rest to the brain. That's one thing. Then, what is control? Why should I control? They have all said control. All religions have said control. Control. Be without desire. Don't think about yourself. You follow? All that. I say to myself - this is what they say - can I live without control? You follow, sir? A: Oh yes, yes. One has to start that question too at the very beginning. K: I am doing it. That's what we are doing. A: Yes. My statement is a reflection. Just a mirror to that, yes. K: Yes. A: Yes. K: Is it possible to live without control? Because what is the control? And who is controller? The controller is the controlled. When I say I must control my thought, the controller is the creation of thought. And thought controls thought. It has no meaning. One fragment controls another fragment, and yet therefore remain fragments. So I say, is there a way of living without control? Therefore no conflict. Therefore no opposites. Not one desire against another desire. One thought opposed to another thought. One achievement opposed to another achievement. So, no control. Is that possible? Because I must find out. You follow, sir? It's not just ask a question, just leaving it alone. I've got energy now because I am not carrying their burden anymore. Nor am I carrying my own burden. Because their burden is my burden. When I have discarded that I have discarded this. So I have got energy when I say is it possible to live without control. And so it is a tremendous thing. I must find out. Because the people who have control, they have said through control you arrive at Nirvana, heaven - to me that's wrong, totally absurd. So I say, can I live a life of meditation in which there is no control? A: When intelligence breaks out, as we looked at before, then with it comes order and that order... K: Intelligence is order. A: And intelligence is that order. The seeing is the doing. K: The doing, yes. A: Therefore there is no conflict at all. K: You see, therefore do I live a life, not only is it possible, do I live it? I've got desires: I see a car, a woman, a house, a lovely garden, beautiful clothes, or whatever it is, instantly all the desires arise. And not to have a conflict. And yet not yield. If I have money I go and buy it. Which is obvious. That's no answer. If I have no money I say, "Well, I'm so sorry. I have no money. And I will get sometime, someday. Then I'll come back and buy it." It's the same problem. But the desire is aroused. The seeing, contact, sensation and desire. Now that desire is there, and to cut it off is to suppress it. To control it is to suppress it. To yield to it is another form of fragmenting life into getting and losing. I don't know if I? A: Yes, yes, yes. K: So to allow for the flowering of desire without control. You understand, sir? A: Yes, I do. K: So the very flowering is the very ending of that desire. But if you chop it off it'll come back again. I don't know? A: Yes, yes. It's the difference between a terminus and a consummation. K: Quite, yes. So I let the desire come, flower, watch it. Watch it, not yield or resist. Just let it flower. And be fully aware of what is happening. Then there is no control. A: And no disorder. K: No, of course. The moment you control there is disorder. Because you are suppressing or accepting - you know, all the rest of it. So that is disorder. But when you allow the thing to flower and watch it, watch it in the sense be totally aware of it - the petals, the subtle forms of desire to possess, not to possess, to possess is a pleasure, not to possess is a pleasure, you follow? - the whole of that movement of desire. A: Exactly. K: And that you to be very sensitive, watchful, very sensitive, choiceless watching. A: This image that you have referred to metaphorically with the plant itself, could we pursue that in our next conversation through the continuation of concern to look further into meditation. K: We have not finished meditation. A: We haven't, no K: There's lots more involved. A: Good, good. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 28TH FEBRUARY 1974 18TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. ALLAN W. ANDERSON 'MEDITATION - 2' A: Mr Krishnamurti, we were discussing in our conversation last time meditation. And just as we concluded you brought up the very beautiful analogy from the flowering of a plant, and it struck me that the order that is intrinsic to the movement of the plant as it flowers is a revelatory image of order that you have been discussing. And we were talking also about the relation of meditation to understanding on the one hand and knowledge on the other, a distinction that's very, very rarely made. K: Yes. A: Though in ordinary language we make the distinction perhaps unwittingly. It's there. K: It's there. A: We have the two words. K: Quite. A: But then to go into what the distinction is was something you were beginning to do. And perhaps we could... K: We could on from there. A: Yes. K: Sir, we were talking, if I remember rightly about control. A: Yes. K: And we said the controller is the controlled. And we went into that sufficiently. And when there is control there is direction. Direction implies will. Control implies will. And in the desire to control there is established a goal and a direction. Which means to carry out the decision made by will, and the carrying out is the duration of time; and therefore direction means time, control, will, and an end. All that's implied in the word control. Isn't it? A: Yes. K: So what place has will in meditation and therefore in life? A: Yes, yes. K: Or it has no place at all. That means there is no place for decision at all. Only seeing, doing. And that doesn't demand will, nor direction. You follow? A: Yes, I do, yes I do. K: The beauty of this, sir, how it works out. When the mind sees the futility of control because it has understood the controller is the controlled, one fragment trying to dominate other fragments, and the dominant fragment is a part of other fragments, and therefore it is like going around in circles, vicious circle, never getting out of it. So can there be a living without control? Just listen to it sir. Without will, and without direction? There must be direction in the field of knowledge. Agreed? Otherwise I couldn't get home, to the place I live. I would lose the capacity to drive a car, ride a cycle, speak a language, all the technological things necessary in life. There, direction, calculation, decision in that field is necessary. Choice is necessary between this and that. Here where there is choice there is confusion, because there is no perception. Where there is perception there is no choice. Choice exists because the mind is confused between this and that. So, can a life be led without control, without will, without direction, that means time? And that is meditation. Not just a question, an interesting, perhaps, a stimulating question, but a question however stimulating has no meaning by itself. It has a meaning in living. A: I was thinking about ordinary language usage again, as you were speaking. It's interesting isn't it, that when we regard that somebody has performed an action, that we call wilful that this is an action that has been undertaken without understanding. K: Of course. A: So in the very distinction between will as a word and wilful as an adjective, we have a hint of this distinction. But I'd like to ask you, if I could, about the relationship of will, for the moment, even though we are talking about meditation, we did regard that knowledge, in its own right, does have a proper career. K: Of course. A: And we say that decision is referred to that. Choice is referred to that and therefore will is operative there. K: And a direction and everything. A: And a direction and so on. And so we are, we are making a distinction here between will and its role in relation to the whole field of what we call loosely know-how. K: Know-how, knowledge. A: Yes. And the confusion that occurs when that activity, so necessary in its own right is brought over into this. K: That's right. A: And then we can't do either of them, really. K: Then, that's just it. Therefore we become inefficient. A: Yes. K: Personal. A: But you see we don't think that. What we think is that we can be terribly efficient in knowledge and be what is called unspiritual. And be a success here and not be a success here. Whereas, if I understand you correctly, you don't fail in one or the other, you just fail period. It's a total failure if this confusion is made. You simply can't operate even well here no matter what it might look like in the short run. K: As long as you are not completely in order inside yourself. A: Right. Exactly. So the very division that we make between inner and outer is itself a symptom of this terrible... K: ...of thought which has divided the outer and the inner. A: Yes, yes. I hope you'll bear with me in going through that... K: Yes, actually you are quite right. A: ...because I know in religious thought, my academic discipline, in religious thought this confusion, well, the weight of it. K: I know. A: You feel... K: ...oppressed. A: And as soon as you begin to make a comment of any kind about it that is simply raising the question. The extreme rigidity and nervousness that occurs... K: Quite, quite. A: ...is dramatic. Yes. Yes. K: You see, sir. So I'm asking, meditation covers the whole field of living, not one segment of it. Therefore living a life without control, without the action of will, decision, direction, achievement. Is that possible? If it is not possible it is not meditation. Therefore life becomes superficial, meaningless. And to escape from that meaningless life we chase all the gurus, the religious entertainment, circuses, you follow? All the practices of meditation. It has no meaning. A: You know, well, of course you do, it's a rhetorical question: in the classical tradition we have a definition of will. We say that it's desire made reasonable. Desire made reasonable. K: Desire made reasonable. A: Desire made reasonable. Now, of course, we've long since lost the idea of what the ancients meant, against their contemplative background, by the word reason. We think it means calculation. But of course that's not what the classical tradition means when it says reasonable. It points rather to that order which isn't defined. And it occurs to me that if we understood that statement correctly we'd be saying, will is the focus of desire without my focusing self consciously. K: Yes, that's right. And watching desire to flower. A: Yes. K: And therefore watching the will in operation and let it flower and as it flowers as you are watching it dies, it withers away. After all it's like a flower you allow it to bloom and it withers. A: It comes to be and passes away in its own time. K: Therefore if you are choicelessly aware of this movement of desire, control, will, focusing that will in action, and so on, so on, so on, let it, watch it. And as you watch it you will see how it loses its vitality. So there is no control. So from that arises the next question which is, direction means space. A: Yes, of course. K: It's very interesting what comes. A: Yes it is, it is. K: What is space? Space which thought has created is one thing. Space that exists in heaven, in our, what is it, in the universe, space. There must be space for a mountain to exist. There must be space for a tree to grow. There must be space for a flower to bloom. So what is space? And have we space? Or are we all so limited physically to living in a little apartment, little houses, no space at all outwardly, and therefore having no space we become more and more violent. A: Yes. K: I don't know if you have watched of an evening when all the swallows are lined up on a wire. A: Oh, yes. K: And how exact spaces they have in between, you follow, sir? Have you? A: Yes I have. It's marvelous. K: It's marvelous to see this space. And space is necessary. And we have no space physically with more and more population and all the rest of it. And therefore more and more violence, more and more living together in a small flat, thousand people, you know, crowded. A: Oh yes. K: Breathing the same air, thinking the same thing, seeing the same television, seeing the same, reading the same book, going to the same church, believing the same thing. You follow? A: Yes. K: The same sorrow. The same anxiety. The same fears. My country - all that. So mind, and so the brain, has very little space. And space is necessary, otherwise I stifle. So can the mind have space? And there will be no space if there is a direction. A: Clearly, yes. K: You see, sir? A: Of course, of course. Yes I do. Yes. K: There is no space if direction means time. A: Yes... K: And so when mind is occupied with family, with business, with God, with drink, with sex, with experience, occupied, filled, there is no space. A: That's right. Exactly. K: So when knowledge occupies the whole field of the mind as thought there is no space. And thought creates a space around itself as the 'me' enclosed, and you enclosed, we and they. So the self, the 'me', which is the very essence of thought has its own little space. A; Yes. K: And to move out of that space is terror, is fear, is anxiety because I am only used to that little space. I don't know? A: Yes, exactly. That brings us back to an earlier conversation we had when we touched on the point of terror. K: Yes, that's right. A: Amazing. K: Not being and the being is in the little space which thought has created. So thought can never give space. A: Of course not. K: So, meditation is the freeing of the mind of its content as consciousness which creates its own little space. You follow, sir? A: Yes, I do. K: So from that says, is that possible. Because I'm occupied with my wife, my children, my responsibilities, I care for the tree, I care for the cat, I care for this and that and I'm occupied, occupied, occupied. A: This throws a marvelous light on that saying of Jesus which people have pondered and wondered about and thought it was very strange: foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests but the son of man hath not where to lay his head. He doesn't, man as such who grasps himself understands, is not inventing a space for himself. It fits perfectly. It fits perfectly. That's marvelous. K: I don't know. A: No, I understand. But I was thinking in the context of the whole discourse. It just flashed over me. And our conversations have been such a revelation to me with respect to the literatures that I've soaked myself in for so many years. And it's a demonstration to me of what you've said. For instance, in so far as I ask these questions of myself personally, precisely as they become answered... K: Quite, sir. A: ...so all these things out here become answered. And what could be more empirically demonstrable to an individual that I am the world and the world is me than that. K: That's right, sir. A: All I am doing is giving a report of the journey without direction. K: So, sir, look. The world is getting more and more overpopulated. Cities are growing more and more, spreading spreading, spreading, suburbs, and so on. Man is getting less and less space and therefore driving out animals, killing. You follow? A: Oh, yes, yes, yes. K: Killing the red Indians, the American Indians, killing the Indians in Brazil, and so on. They are doing this, actually it is going on. A: Oh yes. K: And, having no space out there, outwardly, except on occasions I go off into the country and say to myself, my god, I wish I could live here. But I can't because I've got... and so on. So, can there be space inwardly? When there is space inwardly there is space outwardly. A: Exactly. K: But the outward space is not going to give the inner space. The inner space of mind that is free from occupation, though it is occupied at the moment with what it has to do, it is occupied, but free, the moment it is finished it is over. I don't carry the office to my home. It is over. So space in the mind means the emptying of consciousness of all its content and therefore the consciousness which thought as the 'me' has created ends and therefore there is space. And that space isn't yours or mine. It is space. You follow? A: Yes, yes I was thinking of the creation story in Genesis. The appearance of space occurs when the waters are separated from the waters and we have vault now over which the birds fly and this space is called heaven. K: It is heaven. A: It is heaven. K: That's right. A: Yes, yes. Of course, of course. But then we read that you, see and we don't... K: Fortunately I don't read. A: Goodness. K: So space, direction, time, will, choice, control - you understand, sir. Now, all that has importance in my living, in the daily living of my life, of every human being. If he doesn't know what the meaning of meditation is, he merely lives in that field of knowledge and therefore that becomes a prison. And therefore being in prison he says, I must escape through entertainment, through Gods, through this and through that, through amusement. You know, that is what is actually taking place. A: The word vacation... K: Vacation that's right. A: ...says it all. K: Yes. A: Doesn't it. K: Absolutely. A: To vacate is to exit into space. K: Space. A: But then we go from one hole to another. K: To another hole. A: Yes. K: If that is clearly established, perceived in myself, I see the thing operating in my daily life, then what takes place? Space means silence. If there is no silence there is direction, it is the operation of will, I must do, I must not do, I must practise this, I must get this, you follow? The should be, should not be, what has been, what should not be, I regret. All that operates. Therefore space means silence inwardly. A: That's very deep. Very, very deep. Archetypally we associate manifestation as over against latency with sound. K: Yes, sound. A: And what you have said puts the whole thing into astonishing... K: Silence isn't the space between two noises. Silence isn't the cessation of noise. Silence isn't something that thought has created. It comes naturally, inevitably as you open, as you observe, as you examine, as you investigate. So then the question arises, silence, without a movement. Movement of direction. Movement of thought, Movement of time. All silence. Now, that silence, can that operate in my daily life? I live in the field of noise as knowledge. That I have to do. And is there a living with silence and at the same time the other? The two moving together, two rivers flowing in balance. No division. You follow? In harmony. There is no division. Is that possible? Because otherwise, if that's not possible to be deeply honest I can only live that in the field of knowledge. I don't know if you see? A: Oh yes, yes. K: So, for me it is possible, therefore, I am not saying that out of vanity, I say this in great humility. I think that is possible. It is so. Then what takes place? Then what is creation? Is creation something to be expressed - in paint, in poem, in statue, in writing, in bringing about a baby? Is that creation? Does creation need, or must it be expressed? To us it must be expressed - to most people. Otherwise one feels frustrated, anxious, I am not living. You follow? All that business. So what is creation? One can only answer that if one has really gone through all this. You understand, sir? Otherwise creation becomes a rather cheap thing. A: Yes, it becomes, in terms of the word expressed, simply something pressed out. K: Pressed out, of course. A: That's all. K: That's all. A: Yes. K: Like the life of literary people who - some of them - are everlastingly in battle in themselves, tension and all that, and out of that they write a book, become famous. A: Yes, the psychological theory that works of art are based on neurosis, which means I am driven. K: Yes, so what is creation? Is it something, a flowering in which the flower does not know that it is flowering. A: Exactly, exactly. K: Have I made it clear? A: Yes, you've made it very, very clear. All through our conversations the one word that has, for me, been like a clean blade of a two edged sword has been this word 'act'. K: Yes, sir. A: But not act over against inaction. K: No, no, no, no. A: No, not action as over against the philosophical term of it's opposite, passion, which is a different use from the one you were using in our conversations. But sheerly act. K: Act. A: Sheerly act. K: So, sir, see what takes place. Creation in my living. You follow, sir? Not expressing, creating a beautiful chair, this or that may come, that will come, but in living. And from that arises another question which is really much more important: thought is measure. And as long as we cultivate thought, and all our actions are based on thought as it is now, the search for the immeasurable has no meaning. I can give a meaning to it, say there is the immeasurable, there is the unnameable, there is the eternal. Don't let us talk about it. It is there. It has no meaning. That is just a supposition, a speculation, or the assertion of a few who think they know. One has discarded all that. Therefore one asks, when the mind is utterly silent what is the immeasurable? You follow, sir? What is the everlasting? What is the eternal? Not in terms of God, and you know all these things man has invented. Actually to be that. Now silence in that deep sense of that word opens the door. Because you've got there all your energy. Not a thing is wasted. There is no dissipation of energy at all. Therefore in that silence there is summation of energy. A: Precisely. K: Not stimulated energy, not self-projected energy, and so on, sir, that's all too childish. There is, because there is no conflict, no control, no reaching out or not reaching, searching, asking, questioning, demanding, waiting, praying, none of that. Therefore there is all that energy which has been wasted is now gathered in that silence. You follow? That silence has become sacred. Because obviously... A: Of course it has. K: It has, not the sacred thing which thought has invented. A: No, not the sacred over against the profane. K: No, no, no not all that. A: No, no, no. K: So it is only such a sacred mind can see this the most supreme sacred, the essence of all that is sacred, which is beauty. You follow, sir? A: I do. K: So there it is. God isn't something that man has invented, or created it out of his image and longing and failure. But when the mind itself becomes sacred then it opens the door to something that is immeasurably sacred. That is religion. And that affects the daily living, the way I talk, the way I treat people, the conduct, behaviour - all that. That is the religious life. If that doesn't exist then every other kind of mischief exists, however clever, however intelligent, however - all that. A: And meditation does not occur in the context of all this disorder. K: No. A: Absolutely not. But in its ongoingness, the way you have mentioned it, one is precisely in that, where your word religious is pointing to. K: That is the most profound religious way of living. You see sir what takes place, another thing. You see as this thing is happening, because your energy is being gathered - energy is being gathered, not your's - energy is being gathered, you have other kind of powers, extra sensory power, can do miracles, which has happened all this to me, exorcise, and all that kind of stuff, and healing. But they become totally irrelevant. Not that you don't love people. On the contrary religion is the essence of it. But they are all second issues. And people get caught in the second issues. I mean, look at what has happened, man who really can heal he becomes -people worship him, a little healing. A: It reminds me of a story you told me once. It was a year ago: it was about the old man sitting on the banks of a river and the young man came to him, after the older man had sent him away to undertake whatever he needed to learn and all this. And he came back with a marvelous announcement that he could now walk on water. And then you said that the older man looked at him and said, "What's all that about? So you can walk on water. And you have taken all these years to learn how to walk on water. Didn't you see the boat over there?" K: Oh yes, that's right, sir. That's right. A: Of course, of course. K: You see, sir, that's very important. Religion is as we said, is the gathering of all energy, which is attention. In that attention many things happen. Some of them have this gift of healing, miracles. I've had it and I know what I'm speaking about. And the religious man never touches it. You follow? He may say occasionally, "Do this or that" but it is a thing to be put away, like a gift, like a talent. It is to be put away, because it is a danger. A: Exactly. K: But the more you are talented, the more me, I am important, I have this talent, worship me. With that talent I'll get money, position, power. So this too is a most dangerous thing. So a mind that is religious is aware of all this and lives a life... A: ...in this space, in this marvelous space. Something occurred to me about our discussion earlier concerning energy and your remark that energy, when it patterns itself - I've forgotten what you used to designate what the pattern energy was, but I suspect it's what we often call matter. K: Matter, yes. A: Wouldn't that be correct? Right. In terms of this pointing to act that you have mentioned, it throws a very, very different light on the character of patterned energy and draws our gaze away from the pattern and reminds us... K: Quite. A: ...that the substance, or rather the substantive element - I don't want to use the word substance there for philosophical reasons - the substantive element that we point to is not the pattern but the energy. K: Energy, quite. You see sir, that is love, isn't it sir? A: Precisely. K: And when there is this sense of religious summation of energy that is love, that is compassion, and care. That operates in daily life. A: In love the pattern never resists change. K: So, you see, sir, that love you can do what you like, it will be still love. But there the love becomes sensation. You follow? A: Yes, the whole track of knowledge. K: And therefore there is no love there. A: Yes, that image of the Lionel train, the toy that goes round and round and round. Isn't that extraordinary? K: You see, sir, that means, can the mind, I'm using the word mind in the sense mind, the brain, the body, the whole thing, can the mind be really silent? Not induced silence, silence, not silence put together, not silence that thought imagines is silence. Not the silence of a church or the temple. They have their own silence when you enter a temple or a... A: Oh yes. K: ...old cathedrals. They have an extraordinary sense of silence. Thousands of people chanted or talked, prayed and all that. But it is above all that. It is not that either. So this silence isn't contrived and therefore it is real. It isn't, I have brought about through practice a silence. A: No, it's not what you mentioned earlier, that space between two noises... K: Oh, yes, that's right. A: ...because that would become an interval. K: That's right. A: And as an interval it simply becomes successive. K: Successive. That's right. A: This is extraordinary in terms of the continuing return to question. It seems to me that it's only in the attitude of the question that there's any possibility even intuiting from afar the possibility of the silence, since already the answer is a noise. K: Ah, yes. So, sir, just a minute, there is something very interesting. Does this come up through questioning? A: No. I didn't mean to suggest that questioning generates it. I meant that simply to take a step back from the enthrallment and enchantment with answers is in itself a necessary step. K: Of course. A: And that in itself has its own terror. K: Of course, of course. So I'm asking, is silence, is the sense of the immeasurable, does that come about by my questioning? A: No. K: No. A: No. K: No. Perception sees the false and discards the false... There is no question, it sees, and finished. But if I keep on questioning I keep on doubting. Doubt has its place but it must be kept on a leash. A: Now, let me ask you a question here, if I may. The act of perceiving is, as you have said, the doing. K: Doing, A: There's absolutely no interval between one. K: I see danger and I act. A: And I act. Exactly. Now, in this perceiving, the act is totally free... K: Yes, sir. A: ...and then every energy pattern is free to become changed. K: Yes, quite, sir. A. Yes, exactly. No more hoarding to itself... K: No regrets. A: ...all that its worked for all its life. And amazingly though, it seems to me, there's, if I have understood you correctly, there's a corollary to this. Not only is the pattern free to be changed, but the energy is free to pattern itself. K: Or not to pattern. A: Or not to pattern. Yes. K: There it is. The knowledge has to pattern. A: Of course. K: But here it can't pattern, pattern for what? If it patterns it has become thought again. And therefore thought, if it is divisive, thought is superficial. I don't know if I told you the other day, somebody was telling me, he was saying that in Eskimo language thought means the outside. Very interesting. The outside. When they say, go outside, the word is thought. So thought has created the outer and the inner. If thought is not then there is neither the outer nor the inner. That is space. It isn't, I've got inner space. A: No. We've been talking about meditation in relation to religion and I simply feel I must ask you to speak about the interrelationship of prayer to meditation, with meditation, because eventually we always refer to prayer and meditation. K: No. I don't, to repeat a prayer has no place in meditation. To whom am I praying? Whom am I supplicating? Begging? Asking? A: A prayer as petition has no place in it. K: Petition, right. A: Is there any use of the word prayer that would be consonant with what we we've been talking about? K: If there is no petition, you understand, deeply, inwardly, there is no petition... A: No grabbing, grasping. K: ...because the grabber is the grabbed. A: Exactly. K: If there is no petition what takes place? I petition only when I don't understand. When I'm in conflict, when I'm in sorrow, when I'm in - you follow? When I say, "Oh, God, I've lost everything. I'm finished. I can't arrive. I can't achieve." A: When there's no petition I can look. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. K: A woman came to me once, some time ago. She said, "I have prayed, enormously, for years. And I have prayed for my refrigerator. And I got it." Yes, sir! I pray for peace. And I live a life of violence all the time. I say, I pray for my country, and I have divided the country opposed to another country. And I pray for my country. It becomes so childish. A: In conventional prayers there is usually both petition and praise, both are there. K: Of course. Praising, and receiving A: Praise. K: You must know in Sanskrit it always begins, some parts of it, praising and then begging. There's a marvelous chant which is asking protection of the gods. Protection. And it says, "May you protect my steps." A: Yes, yes. K: Praising God, then saying, please protect my steps. So if there is no petition, because the petitioner is the petition, the beggar is the begged, is the receiver, then what takes place in the mind. No asking. A: An immense quietude. Immense quietude. The proper sense of whatever the word tranquillity points to. K: That's right, sir. That is real peace, not the phony peace they are all talking about - politicians and the religious people. There is no asking a thing. A: There is a very beautiful Biblical phrase, "The peace that passeth understanding." K: I've heard that phrase when I was small boy. A: I've always asked myself since a child, how it's the case that there is so much talk about such a thing and there's so little evidence of it. K: Sir, I think you know, books have become tremendously important. What they have written. What they have said. And so the human mind has become secondhand. Or the mind that has acquired so much knowledge about what other people have experienced about reality, how can such a mind experience or find, or come up on that thing which is original? A: Not that route. K: No. No, no. And can the mind empty itself of its content? If it cannot, it cannot acquire, then reject, then receive. You follow? A: Yes. K: Why should I go through all those things? But I'll look. There is no book in the world that is going to teach me. There is no teacher that is going to teach me. Because the teacher is the taught. The disciple is the teacher. I don't know? A: That is in itself, as a statement, if one will, as we said in an earlier conversation at the inception of looking, if one will hold that very statement, "I am the world and the world is me", is an occasion for healing. K: Yes, sir. A: But that very statement, "I am the world and the world is me" sounds, as you have said so often, so absurd that at that point one starts to bolt again. K: I know. A: Panic again. Meditation, when undertaken, as it must be, continuously, because we talked about that movement... K: That means one has to be very, very serious. It isn't a thing we play with. A: No. It's not what's called these days a fun thing. K: No sir! A: In no sense. No, no, no. The discussion that you have undertaken concerning it is so total. A meditation isn't a thing that you do among other things. K: Meditation means attention, care. That's part of it, care for my children, for my neighbour, for my country, for the earth, for the earth, for the trees, for the animals. Don't kill animals. You follow? Don't kill them to eat. It's so unnecessary. It's part of the tradition which says, you must eat meat. Therefore, sir, all this comes to a sense of deep, inward seriousness, and that seriousness itself brings about attention, caring and responsibility and all that we have discussed. It isn't that one has gone through all this. One sees it. And the very perception is action which is wisdom. Because wisdom is the ending of suffering. It isn't callous, callousness, the ending of it. And the ending of it means the observation, the seeing of suffering. Not to go beyond it, to refuse it, rationalize it or run away from it. Just to see it. Let it flower. And as you are choicelessly aware of this flowering, it comes naturally to wither away. I don't have to do something about it. A: Marvelous. Marvelous how energy can be free to pattern itself or not pattern itself. The pattern is free to be energized or the whole thing is simply all round. K: Yes, sir. It covers the whole of man's endeavour, his thoughts, his anxieties, everything it covers. A: So, in our conversations, all through, we have reached the point of consummation here where it is round. I wonder if Shakespeare had some intimation of this when he said, "Ripeness is all." He must have been thinking of that, not simply as setting a term to the career of fruit. K: No sir, time comes to an end, time stops. In silence, time stops. A: In silence time stops. Immensely beautiful. I must express to you my gratitude from the bottom of my heart. I hope you will let me. Because throughout the whole career of our discussions I have been undergoing a transformation. K: Quite. Because you are willing enough to listen, good enough to listen. Most people are not, they won't listen. They won't take the time, the trouble, the care to listen. A: I've already seen, in my relation to my classes, in the activity my students and I share, the beginning of a flowering. K: Flowering, quite. A: The beginning of a flowering. K: Quite. A: Thank you, so much again. - Part 1 - Chapter 1 - Existence Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Part 2 - Chapter 1 - Fear Chapter 2 - Violence Chapter 3 - Meditation Part 3 - Chapter 1 - Control And Order Chapter 2 - Truth Chapter 3 - The Religious Mind Part 4 - Chapter 1 - The Unconditioned Mind Chapter 2 - Fragmentation And Unity Part 5 - Chapter 1 - Psychological Revolution other - The Violence In Our Lives The Structure Of Fear BEYOND VIOLENCE PART I CHAPTER 1 SANTA MONICA 1ST PUBLIC TALK 1ST MARCH 1970 'EXISTENCE' I WOULD LIKE to talk about the whole problem of existence. Probably you know as well as the speaker what is actually taking place in the world - utter chaos, disorder, violence, extreme forms of brutality, riots ending up in war. Our lives are extraordinarily difficult, confused and contradictory, not only in ourselves - inside the skin as it were - but also outwardly. There is utter destruction. All the values are changing from day to day, there is no respect, no authority, and nobody has faith in anything whatsoever; neither in the Church, nor in the establishment, nor in any philosophy. So one is left absolutely to oneself to find out what one is to do in this chaotic world. What is the right action? - if there is such a thing as right action. I am sure each one of us asks what is the right conduct. This is a very serious question, and I hope those of you who are here are really serious, because this is not a gathering for philosophical or religious entertainment. We are not indulging in any theory, in any philosophy, or bringing from the East some exotic ideas. What we are going to do together, is to examine the facts as they are, very closely, objectively, non-sentimentally, unemotionally. And to explore in that way, there must be freedom from prejudice, freedom from any conditioning, from any philosophy, from any belief; we are going to explore together very slowly, patiently, hesitantly, to find out. It is like good scientists looking through a microscope and seeing exactly the same thing. Because if you are a scientist in the laboratory using a microscope, you must show what you see to another scientist, so that both of you see exactly what is. And that is what we are going to do. There is not your microscope, or the speaker's: there is only one precision-instrument through which we are going to observe and learn in the observation - not learn according to your temperament, your conditioning, or to your particular form of belief, but merely observe what actually is, and thereby learn. And in the learning is the doing - learning is not separate from action. So what we are going to do first, is to understand what it means to communicate. Inevitably we have to use words, but it is much more important to go beyond the words. Which means that you and the speaker are going to take a journey of investigation together, where each one of us is in constant communion with the other; that is sharing together, exploring together, observing together. For that word communication means partaking, sharing. Therefore there is no teacher or disciple, there is not the speaker to whom you listen, either agreeing or disagreeing - which would be absurd. If we are communicating, then there is no question of agreement or disagreement, because both of us are looking, both of us are examining, not from your point of view, or from the speaker's point of view. That is why it is very important to find out how to observe, how to look with clear eyes, how to listen so that there is no distortion. It is your responsibility as well as the speaker's to share together -we are going to work together. This must be very clearly understood from the beginning: we are not indulging in any form of sentimentality or emotionalism. If this is clear, that you and the speaker, being free from our prejudices, from our beliefs, from our particular conditioning and knowledge, are free to examine, then we can proceed; bearing in mind that we are using a precision instrument - the microscope -and that you and the speaker must see the same thing; otherwise it will not be possible to communicate. As this is a very serious matter, you must not only be free to examine it but free to apply it, free to test it out in daily life; not keep it merely as a theory or as a principle towards which you are working. Now let us look at what is actually going on in the world; there is violence of every kind, not only outwardly but also in our relationship with each other. There are infinite nationalistic and religious divisions between people, each against the other, both politically and individually. Seeing this vast confusion, this immense sorrow, what are you to do? Can you look to anybody to tell you what to do? - to the priest, to the specialist, to the analyst? They have not brought about peace or happiness, joy, freedom to live. So where are you to look? If you assume the responsibility of your own authority as an individual, because you no longer have any faith in outward authority - we are using the word `authority' advisedly in a particular sense of that word - then you as an individual, will you look for your own authority inwardly? The word `individuality' means `indivisible', not fragmented. Individuality means a totality, the whole, and the word `whole' means healthy, holy. But you are not an individual, you are not sane, because you are broken up, fragmented in yourself; you are in contradiction with yourself, separated, therefore you are not an individual at all. So out of this fragmentation how can you ask that one fragment assume authority over the other fragments? Please do see this very clearly, this is what we are examining; because we see that education, science, organized religion, propaganda, politics, have failed. They have not brought about peace, though technologically man has advanced incredibly. Yet man remains as he has been for thousands of years, fighting, greedy, envious, violent, and burdened with great sorrow. That is the fact; that is not an assumption. So to find out what to do in a world that is so confused, so brutal, so utterly unhappy, we have to examine not only what living is - actually as it is - but also we have to understand what love is; and what it means to die. Also we have to understand what man has been trying to find out for thousands of years: if there is a reality which transcends all thought. Until you understand the complexity of this whole picture, to say, `What am I to do with regard to a particular fragment?' has no meaning whatsoever. You have to understand the whole of existence, not just a part of it; however tiresome, however agonizing, however brutal that part is, you have to see the whole picture - the picture of what love is, what meditation is, if there is such a thing as God, what it means to live. We have to understand this phenomenon of existence as a whole. Only then can you ask the question, `What am I to do?' And if you see this whole picture, probably you will never ask that question - then you will be living and then the living is the right action. So first we are going to see what is living, and what is not living. We have to understand what that word `to observe' means. To see, to hear and to learn - what does it mean `to see' ? When we are together looking at something, it doesn't mean `togetherness'. It means that you and the speaker are going to look. What does that word `to look' mean? It is quite a difficult thing to look; one has to have the art. Probably you have never looked at a tree; because when you do look, all your botanical knowledge comes in and prevents you from observing it actually as it is. Probably you have never looked at your wife or your husband or your boyfriend or girlfriend, because you have an image about her or him. The image that you have built about her or him, or about yourself, is going to prevent you from looking. Therefore when you look there is distortion, there is contradiction. So when you look there must be a relationship between the observer and the thing observed. Please do listen to this because it needs great care. You know, when you care for something you do observe very closely; which means you have great affection; then you are capable of observing. So looking together means to observe with care, with affection, so that we see the same thing together. But first, there must be freedom from the image that you have about yourself. Please, do it as it is being said; the speaker is merely a mirror and therefore what you see is yourself in the mirror. So the speaker is in no way important; what is important is what you see in that mirror. And to see clearly, precisely, without any distortion, every form of image must go - the image that you are an American or a Catholic, that you are a rich man or a poor man, all your prejudices must go. And all that goes the moment you see clearly what is in front of you, because what you see is much more important than what you `should do' from what you see. The moment you see very clearly, there is action from that clarity. It is only the mind that is chaotic, confused, choosing, that says, `What am I to do?' There is the danger of nationalism, the division between peoples; that division is the greatest danger because in division there is insecurity, there is war, there is uncertainty. But when the mind sees the danger of division very clearly - not intellectually, not emotionally, but actually sees it - then there is a totally different kind of action. So it is very important to learn to see, to observe. And what is it we are observing? Not the outer phenomenon only, but the inward state of man. Because unless there is a fundamental, radical revolution in the psyche, in the very root of one's being, mere trimming, mere legislation on the periphery, has very little meaning. So what we are concerned with is whether man, as he is, can radically bring about a transformation in himself; not according to a particular theory, a particular philosophy, but by seeing actually what he is. That very perception of what he is, will bring about the radical change. And to see what he is, is of the highest importance - not what he thinks he is, not what he is told that he is. There is a difference between when you are told that you are hungry and actually being hungry. The two states are entirely different; in one you know actually through your own direct perception and feeling that you are hungry, then you act. But if you are told by somebody that you might be hungry, quite a different activity takes place. So similarly, one has to observe and see for oneself actually what one is. And that is what we are going to do: know oneself. It has been stated that to know oneself is the highest wisdom, but very few of us have done it. We have not the patience, the intensity or the passion, to find out what we are. We have the energy, but we have given that energy over to others; we have to be told what we are. We are going to find this out by observing ourselves, because the moment there is a radical change in what we are, we shall bring about peace in the world. We shall live freely - not do what we like, but live happily, joyously. A man who has great joy in his heart has no hatred, no violence, he will not bring about the destruction of another. Freedom means no condemnation whatsoever of what you see in yourself. Most of us condemn, or explain away or justify - we never look without justification or condemnation. Therefore the first thing to do - and probably it's the last thing to do - is to observe without any form of condemnation. This is going to be very difficult, because all our culture, our tradition, is to compare, justify or condemn what we are. We say `this is right', `this is wrong', 'this is true', `this is false', `this is beautiful', which prevents us from actually observing what we are. Please listen to this: what you are is a living thing, and when you condemn what you see in yourself, you are condemning it with a memory which is dead, which is the past. Therefore there is a contradiction between the living and the past. To understand the living, the past must go, so that you can look. You are doing this now, as we are talking; you are not going back home to think about it. Because the moment you think about it you are already finished. This is not group therapy, not a public confession - which is immature. What we are doing is to explore into ourselves like scientists, not depending on anybody. If you trust anybody you are lost, whether you trust your analyst, your priest, or your own memory, your own experience; because that is the past. And if you are looking with the eyes of the past at the present, then you will never understand what the living thing is. So we are examining together this living thing, which is you, life, whatever that is; that means we are looking at this phenomenon of violence, first at the violence in ourselves and then at the outward violence. When we have understood the violence in ourselves then it may not be necessary to look at the outward violence, because what we are inwardly, we project outwardly. By nature, through heredity, through so-called evolution, we have brought about this violence in ourselves. That is a fact: we are violent human beings. There are a thousand explanations why we are violent. We will not indulge in explanations, because we can get lost, with each specialist saying, `This is the cause of violence'. The more explanations we have, the more we think we understand, but the thing remains as it is. So please bear in mind all the time that the description is not the described; what is explained is not what is. There are many explanations which are fairly simple and obvious - overcrowded cities, overpopulation, heredity and all the rest of it; we can brush all that aside. The fact remains that we are violent people. From childhood we are brought up to be violent, competitive, beastly to one another. We have never faced the fact. What we have said is: `What shall we do about violence?' Please do listen to this with care, that is with affection, with attention. The moment you put that question: `What shall we do about it?' your answer will always be according to the past. Because that is the only thing you know: your whole existence is based on the past, your life is the past. If you have ever looked at yourself properly, you will see to what an extraordinary extent you are living in the past. All thinking - into which we shall go presently - is the response of the past, the response of memory, knowledge and experience. So thinking is never new, never free. With this process of thinking you look at life, and therefore when you ask, `What shall I do about violence?' you have already escaped from the fact. So can we learn, observe, what violence is? Now, how do you look at it? Do you condemn it? Do you justify it? If you do not, then how do you look at it? Please do this as we are talking about it - it is tremendously important. Do you look at this phenomenon, which is yourself as a violent human being, as an outsider looking within? Or do you look at it without the outsider, without the censor? When you look, do you look as an observer, different from the thing you look at - as one who says, `I am not violent, but I want to get rid of violence'? When you look that way you are assuming one fragment to be more important than the other fragments. When you look as one fragment looking at the other fragments, then that one fragment has assumed authority, and that fragment causes contradiction and therefore conflict. But if you can look without any fragment, then you look at the whole without the observer. Are you following all this? So sir, do it! Because then you will see an extraordinary thing taking place, then you will have no conflict whatsoever. Conflict is what we are, what we live with. At home, in the office, when you are asleep, all the time, we are in conflict, there is constant battle and contradiction. So until you understand the root of this contradiction yourself - not according to the speaker, not according to anybody - you can have no life of peace and happiness and joy. Therefore it is essential that you understand what causes conflict and therefore contradiction, what the root of it is. The root is this division between the observer and the thing observed. The observer says, `I must get rid of violence', or `I am living a life of non-violence' when he is violent - which is a pretence, hypocrisy. So to find out what causes this division is of the highest importance. You are listening to a speaker who has no authority, who is not your teacher, because there is no guru, there is no follower; there are only human beings, trying to discover a life without conflict, to live peacefully, to live with a great abundance of love. But if you follow anybody you are destroying yourself and the other. (Applause.) Please do not clap. I am not trying to entertain you, I am not looking for your applause. What is important is that you and I understand, and live a different kind of life - not this stupid life that one leads. And your applause, your agreement or disagreement does not change that fact. It is very important to understand for oneself, to see, through one's own observation, that conflict must exist everlastingly as long as there is a division between the observer and the observed. And in you there is this division, as the `I', as the `self', as the `me' that is trying to be different from somebody else. Is this clear? Clarity means that you see it for yourself. This is not just a verbal clarity, hearing a set of words or ideas; it means that you yourself see very clearly, and therefore without choice, how this division between the observer and the observed creates mischief, confusion and sorrow. So when you are violent, can you look at that violence in yourself without the memory, the justification, the assertion that you must not be violent - but merely look? Which means that you must be free of the past. To look means that you must have great energy, you must have intensity. You must have passion, otherwise you cannot look. Unless you have great passion and intensity you cannot look at the beauty of a cloud, or the marvellous hills that you have here. In the same way, to look at oneself without the observer needs tremendous energy and passion. And this passion, this intensity, is destroyed when you begin to condemn, to justify, when you say, `I must not', `I must', or when you say, `I am living a non-violent life', or pretend to live a non-violent life. That is why all ideologies are most destructive. In India they have talked about non-violence from time immemorial. They have said, `We are practising non-violence' and they are just as violent as anybody else. The ideal gives them a certain sense of hypocritical escape from the fact. If you can put aside all ideologies, all principles and just face the fact, then you are dealing with something actual, not mythical, not theoretical. So that is the first thing: to observe without the observer; to look at your wife, at your children, without the image. The image may be a superficial image or deeply hidden in the unconscious; one has not only to observe the image that one has put together outwardly, but also the images that one has deep down inwardly -the image of the race, of the culture, the historical perspective of the image that one has about oneself. So one must observe not only at the conscious level, but also at the hidden level, in the deep recesses of one's own mind. I do not know if you have ever observed the unconscious. Are you interested in all this? Do you know how difficult all this is? It is very easy to quote somebody, or to repeat what your analyst, or the professor has told you; that is child's play. But if you do not merely read books about these things, then it becomes extraordinarily arduous. It is part of your meditation to find out how to look at the unconscious; not through dreams, not through intuition, because your intuition may be your wish, your desire, your hidden hope. So you have to find out how to look at the image that you have created about yourself outwardly - the symbol - and also to look deeply within yourself. One must be aware not only of outward things, but also of the inward movement of life, the inward movement of desires, motives, anxieties, fears, sorrows. Now, to be aware without choice is to be aware of the colour that somebody is wearing, without saying, `I like it' or, `I don't like it', but just to observe; as you sit in a bus, to observe the movement of your own thought without condemning, without justifying, without choosing. When you so look you will see there is no `observer'. The observer is the `censor', the American, the Catholic, the Protestant; he is the result of propaganda; he is the past. And when the past looks, it must inevitably separate, condemn or justify. A man who is hungry, who is really in sorrow, does he say, `If I do this, will I get that?' He wants to be rid of sorrow or he wants to fill his stomach; he never talks about theories. So sir, first, if I may suggest, rid yourself of the idea of `if'. Do not live somewhere in the future; the future is what you project now. The now is the past; that is what you are when you say, `I am living now'. You are living in the past, because the past is directing and shaping you; memories of the past are making you act this way or that way. So `to live' is to be free of time; and when you say `if', you are introducing time. And time is the greatest sorrow. Questioner: How can we be ourselves to each other? Krishnamurti: Listen to that question: `to be ourselves'. What is `yourself' may I ask? When you say `ourselves to another', what is yourself? Your anger, your bitterness, your frustrations, your despairs, your violence, your hopes, your utter lack of love - is that what you are? No, sir, do not say, `How can I be myself with another?' - you don't know yourself. You are all this, and the other is also all that - his misery, his problems, his moods, his frustration, his ambitions; each lives in isolation, in exclusion. It is only when these barriers, these resistances, disappear that you can live with another happily. Questioner: Why do you separate the conscious from the unconscious when you do not believe in separation? Krishnamurti: That is what you do - I don't! (Laughter.) You have been taught, during the last few decades, that you have an unconscious, and volumes have been written about it; the analysts are making fortunes out of it. Water remains water: whether you put it in a golden jug or in a earthenware pot, it is water. In the same way, not to divide but to see the whole: that is our problem, to see the whole of consciousness, not a particular fragment as the conscious or the unconscious. To see the whole if it is one of the most difficult things to do, but to see a fragment is fairly easy. To see something whole, which means to see it sanely, healthily, wholly, you must have no centre from which to look - the centre as 'the me', as 'the you', as 'the they', as 'the we'. This is not a discourse, this is not a talk or a lecture to which you listen casually and go away. You are listening to yourself; if you have the ears to hear what is being said you cannot agree or disagree - it is there. Therefore we are sharing it together, we are communicating, we are working together. In that there is great freedom, great affection, compassion, and after all, out of that comes understanding. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART I CHAPTER 2 SANTA MONICA 2ND PUBLIC TALK 4TH MARCH 1970 WE WERE SAYING how important it is that there should be a fundamental change in the human psyche and that this change can only come about through complete freedom. That word 'freedom' is a most dangerous word unless we understand completely and absolutely what it means; we have to learn the full implications of that word, not just its meaning according to the dictionary. Most of us use it according to our particular tendency, or fancy, or politically. We are going to use that word neither politically not circumstantially, but rather go into the inward, psychological meaning of it. But before that, we have to understand the meaning of the word 'learn'. As we said the other day, we are going to communicate together - which means partake, share together - and learning is part of this. You are not going to learn from the speaker, but you learn by observing, by using the speaker as a mirror to observe your own movement of thought, of feeling, your own psyche, your own psychology. There is no authority involved in this at all; though the speaker has to sit on a platform, because it is convenient, that position does not give him any authority whatsoever. So we can brush that aside completely and consider the question of learning - not from another, but using the speaker to learn about oneself. You are learning from observing your own psyche, your own self - whatever it is. To learn, there must be freedom, there must be a great deal of curiosity and there must be intensity, passion, an immediacy. You cannot learn if there is no passion, no energy to find out. If there is any kind of prejudice, any bias, of like or dislike, of condemnation, then one cannot possibly learn, one only distorts what one observes. The word `discipline` means to learn from a man who knows; you are supposed not to know, so you learn from another. The word `discipline' implies that. But here we are using the word `discipline' not as learning from another, but as the observing of oneself, which demands a discipline which is not suppression, imitation or conformity, or even adjustment, but actually observing; that very observation is an act of discipline - which is learning through observation. That very act of learning is its own discipline, in the sense that you have to give a great deal of attention, you have to have great energy, intensity, and the immediacy of action. We are going to talk about fear, and in going into that we have to consider a great many things, because fear is a very complex problem. Unless the mind is absolutely free from fear, every form of action brings about more mischief, more misery, more confusion. So we are going to enquire together into the implication of fear and whether it is at all possible to be completely free of it -not tomorrow, not at some future date, but so that as you leave this hall, the burden, the darkness, the misery and the corruption of fear no longer exists. To understand this you have to examine also the idea that we have of gradualness - that is, the idea of gradually getting rid of fear. There is no such thing as gradually getting rid of fear. Either you are completely free of it, or not at all; there is no gradualness, which implies time - time not only in the chronological sense of that word, but also in the psychological sense. Time is of the very essence of fear, as we shall point out presently. So in understanding and being free of fear and the conditioning in which one is brought up, the idea of doing it slowly, eventually, must completely come to an end. That is going to be our first difficulty. If I may point out again, this is not a lecture; it is rather that two friendly, affectionate people, enquire together into a very difficult problem. Man has lived with fear, he has accepted it as part of his life and we are enquiring into the possibility, or rather the `impossibility', of ending fear. You know, what is possible is already done, is already finished - is it not? If it is possible you can do it. But what is impossible becomes possible only when you understand that there is no tomorrow at all - psychologically speaking. We are confronted with the extraordinary problem of fear, and man apparently has never been able to be rid of it completely. Not only physically, but inwardly, psychologically, he has never been rid of it; he has always escaped from it through various forms of entertainment, religious and otherwise. And the escapes have been an avoidance of `what is'. So we are concerned with the `impossibility' of being free from it completely - therefore what is `impossible' becomes possible. What actually is fear? The physical fears can be understood comparatively easily. But the psychological fears are much more complex, and to understand them there must be freedom to enquire - not to form an opinion, not a dialectical enquiry into the possibility of ending fear. But first let us go into the question of physical fears, which naturally affect the psyche. When you meet danger of any kind there is instant physical response. Is that fear? (You are not learning from me, we are learning together; therefore you have to pay a great deal of attention, because it is no good coming to a gathering of this kind and going away with a few sets of ideas, or formulas - that doesn't free the mind from fear. But what does free the mind from fear completely and absolutely, is to understand it totally now - not tomorrow. It is like seeing something wholly, completely; and what you see you understand. Then it is yours and nobody else's.) So there is physical fear, like seeing a precipice, meeting a wild animal. Is the response to meeting such a danger, physical fear, or is it intelligence? You meet a snake, and you respond immediately. That response is the past conditioning which says `be careful' and your whole psychosomatic response is immediate, though conditioned; it is the result of the past, for you were told that the animal is dangerous. In meeting any form of physical danger, is there fear? Or is it the response of intelligence to the necessity of self-preservation? Then there is the fear of having again a previous physical pain or illness. What takes place there? Is that intelligence? Or is it an action of thought, which is the response of memory, fearing that the pain which one had in the past might happen again? Is this clear, that thought produces fear? There are also the various forms of psychological fears - fear of death fear of society, fear of not being respectable, fear of what people might say, fear of darkness and so on. Before we go into this question of psychological fears, we have to understand something very clearly: we are not analysing. Analysis has nothing whatsoever to do with observation, with seeing. In analysis there is always the analyser and the thing analysed. The analyser is a fragment of the many other fragments of which we are compounded. One fragment assumes the authority of the analyser and begins to analyse. Now, what is involved in that? The analyser is the censor, the entity who assumes that he has knowledge and therefore he has the authority to analyse. Unless he analyses completely, truly, without any distortion, his analysis has no value at all. Please do understand this very clearly, because the speaker does not maintain the necessity of any analysis whatsoever, at any time. It is rather a bitter pill to swallow, because most of you either have been analysed, or are going to be analysed, or have studied what analysis is. Analysis implies not only an analyser separate from the analysed, but it also implies time. You have to analyse gradually, bit by bit, the whole series of fragments of which you are, and that takes years. And when you analyse, the mind must be absolutely clear and free. So several things are involved: the analyser, a fragment who separates himself from other fragments and says, `I am going to analyse', and also time, day after day, looking, criticizing, condemning, judging, evaluating, remembering. Also implied is the whole drama of dreams; one never asks if it is necessary to dream at all - though all the psychologists say you must, otherwise you will go mad. So who is the analyser? He is part of yourself, part of your mind, and he is going to examine the other parts; he is the result of past experiences, past knowledge, past evaluation; he is the centre from which he is going to examine. Has that centre any truth, any validity? All of us function from a centre and what is that centre? That centre is a centre of fear, anxiety, greed, pleasure, despair, hope, dependency, ambition, comparison - it is that from which we think and act. This is not a supposition, not a theory, but an absolute, observable, daily fact. In that centre there are many fragments and one of the fragments becomes the analyser - which is absurd, because the analyser is the analysed. You must understand this, otherwise you will not be able to follow when we go into the question of fear much more deeply. You have to understand it completely, because when you leave this hall you must be free of it so that you can live, enjoy and look at the world with different eyes; so that you can have your relationships no longer burdened with fear, with jealousy, with despair; so that you become a human being, not a violent, destructive animal. So the analyser is the analysed, and in the separation between the analyser and the analysed is the whole process of conflict. And analysis involves time: by the time you have analysed everything, you are ready for the grave and you have not lived at all. (Laughter.) No, do not laugh; this is not an entertainment, it is dreadfully serious. It is only the earnest, serious person who knows what life is, what living is - not the man who seeks amusement. Therefore this demands a great deal of earnest inquiry. The mind must be completely free of the idea of analysis, because it has no meaning. You must see this not because the speaker says so, but by seeing the truth of the whole process of analysis. And the truth will bring understanding; truth is understanding - of the falseness of analysis. Therefore when you see what is false, you can put it aside completely. It is only when we do not see, that we are confused. Now can we look into fear as a whole - not into the multitudinous psychological fears, but into fear? - there is only one fear. Though there may be different causes of fear, brought about through various reactions and influences, there is only fear. And fear does not exist by itself, it exists in relation to something, which is fairly simple and obvious. One is afraid of something - of the future, of the past, of not being able to fulfil, afraid of not being loved, of living a lonely, miserable life, of old age and death. So there is fear, both recognizable and hidden. What we are enquiring into is not any particular form of fear but the totality of it, the conscious as well as the hidden. How does it happen? In asking that question you also have to ask: what is pleasure? Because fear and pleasure go together. You cannot discard fear without understanding pleasure; they are the two sides of one coin. So in understanding the truth about fear, you also understand the truth about pleasure. To want only pleasure and have no fear, is an impossible demand. Whereas if you understood both, you would have quite a different appreciation, a different understanding of them. Which means that we have to learn about the structure and the nature of fear as well as of pleasure. You cannot be free of one and hold on to the other. So what is fear and what is pleasure? As you can observe in yourself, you want to get rid of fear. All life is an escape from fear. Your gods, your churches, your moralities are based on fear, and to understand that you have to understand how this fear comes about. You have done something in the past and you do not want another to find out; that is one form of fear. You are afraid of the future because you have no job, or you are frightened of something else. So you are afraid of the past, and you are afraid of the future. Fear comes when thought looks back to things that have happened in the past, or to events that may happen in the future. Thought is responsible for this. You have very carefully avoided - especially in America - thinking about death; but it is always there. You do not want to think about it, because the moment you do, you are afraid. And because you are afraid, you have theories about it; you believe in resurrection, in re-incarnation - you have dozens of beliefs - all because you are afraid and all of which arise from thought. Thought creates and sustains the fear of yesterday and of tomorrow, and thought also sustains pleasure. You have seen a beautiful sunset; at that moment there is great joy, the beauty of the light on the water and the movement of the trees; there is great delight. Then thought comes along and says, `How I wish I could have it again'. You begin to think about it and you go to that place again tomorrow and you do not see it. You have sexual pleasure and you think about it, you chew on it, you build images, pictures; and thought sustains that. There is thought sustaining pleasure and thought sustaining fear. So thought is responsible. This is not a formula for you to learn, but an actuality to understand together; therefore there is no agreement or disagreement. So, what is thought? Thought is obviously the response of memory. If you had no memory there would be no thought. If you had no memory of the road to your house, you would not get home. So thought not only breeds and sustains fear and pleasure, but thought is also necessary to function, to act, efficiently. See how difficult it becomes: thought must be employed completely, objectively, when you function technologically, when you do anything, and thought also breeds fear and pleasure and therefore pain. So one asks oneself the question: what place has thought? Where is the border-line between where thought must be employed completely and where it must not interfere - as when you see the most beautiful sunset and live it at the moment and forget it at that moment. The whole process of thinking is never free because it has its roots in the past; thought is never new. There is no question of freedom in choice because thought is in operation when you choose. So we have a very subtle problem, which is: one sees the danger of thought which brings about fear - fear destroys, perverts, makes the mind live in darkness, in misery - yet one sees that thought must be used efficiently, objectively, without emotion. What is the state of your mind - as you observe this fact? Look, sirs, it is most important to understand this very clearly, because it is no good your sitting there listening to a lot of words that have no meaning, when at the end of it, you are still afraid. When you leave there must be no fear, not because you hypnotize yourself that there is no fear, but because you have understood actually, psychologically, inwardly, the whole structure of fear. That is why it is very important to learn, to look. What we are doing is to observe very closely how fear comes into being. When you think about death, or about losing your job, when you think about a dozen things, either of the past or of the future, there is the inevitability of fear. When the mind sees the fact that thought must function and also sees the danger of thought, what is the quality of the mind that is seeing this. You have to find out, not wait for me to tell you. Please listen carefully; it is so simple, really. We said analysis is no good, and we explained why. If you saw the truth of it you have understood it. Before, you accepted analysis, as part of your conditioning. Now, when you see the futility, the falseness of analysis, it has dropped away. So what is the state of the mind that has put aside analysis? It is freer, is it not? Therefore it is more alive, more active and therefore much more intelligent, sharper, more sensitive. And when you have seen the fact, as to how fear comes into being, have learnt about it and watched also the process of pleasure, then watch your state of mind, which is becoming much more acute, much clearer, therefore tremendously intelligent. This intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with knowledge, with experience; you cannot arrive at this intelligence by going to college and learning how to be sensitive. This intelligence comes when you have observed very closely the whole structure of analysis and what is implied in it - the time involved and the stupidity of thinking that one fragment is going to clear up the whole process - and when you have seen the nature of fear and understood what pleasure is. So when fear - which has become a habit - comes upon you tomorrow, you will know how to meet it and not postpone it. And the very meeting of it is the ending of it at that moment, because intelligence is in operation. That means ending not only the known fears, but also the deep, hidden fears. You know, one of the most strange things is the ease with which we are influenced. From childhood we are brought up to be Catholic, Protestant, American, or whatever it is. We are the result of repeated propaganda and we keep on repeating it. We are secondhand human beings. Therefore be on your guard not to be influenced by the speaker, because you are dealing with your life, not his life. Going into the question of pleasure, one also has to understand what real enjoyment is, for it has nothing to do with pleasure. Has pleasure, desire, anything to do with love? To understand all this one has to observe oneself. One is the result of the world; one is a human being who is part of the other human beings, who all have the same problems, perhaps not economic or social, but human problems - all fighting, making tremendous efforts and saying to themselves that life has no meaning whatsoever as it is lived. So one invents formulas for living. All that becomes utterly unnecessary when you understand the structure of yourself, and of fear, pleasure, love, and the meaning of death. Then only can you live as a total human being and never do anything wrong. So, if you want to, ask questions, bearing in mind that the question and the answer is within yourself. Questioner: If fear is generated by an unknown and you say that using thought is a wrong way of going about understanding it..? Krishnamurti: You say you are frightened of the unknown, either of the unknown of tomorrow, or of the real unknown. Is it that you are frightened of something you do not know? Or are you frightened of something you do know, to which you are attached? Therefore are you frightened of leaving the known? Have you understood, sir? When you are frightened of death, are you frightened of the unknown? Or are you frightened of all the things you have known coming to an end, your pleasures, your family, your achievements, your success, your furniture? How can one be frightened of something one does not know? And if you are frightened of it, thought wants to take it into the field of the known, therefore it begins to imagine. Therefore your God is the product of your imagination or your fear. Sir, therefore do not speculate about the unknown. Understand the known and be free of the known. Questioner: I have read the expression `Father, I believe, help my disbelief'. How can we accomplish anything with this apparent conflict of belief and doubt? Krishnamurti: Why do you believe anything that you read? It does not matter whether it is in the Bible or in the Gita or in the sacred books of other religions. Do look at it - why do you believe? Do you believe in the sunrise tomorrow? You believe in a sense -you think it will arise. But you believe in heaven, you believe in a Father, you believe in something - why? Because you are afraid, you are unhappy, lonely, because of fear of death, you believe in something that you think is permanent. How can a mind that is burdened with beliefs see clearly? How can it be free to observe? How can such a mind love? You have your belief and another has his belief. In understanding the whole problem of fear, one has no belief whatsoever. The mind then functions happily, without distortion and therefore there is great joy, ecstasy. Questioner: I have read your books and I listen to you speak and I hear you say beautiful things. I hear you speak of fear and how we should eliminate it; but the nature of the mind is to be full of desire, to be full of thoughts. How are we to experience freedom of mind as long as the mind is constantly active? What is the system? Krishnamurti: Sir, what is desire? Why does the mind chatter so endlessly? Questioner: Dissatisfaction. Krishnamurti: Please do not answer, find out. Look: you want a system, a method, a discipline to quieten the mind, to understand this or that or to put aside desire. The practising of a system means a mechanical routine, doing the same thing over and over again; that is what a system implies. What takes place when the mind does that? It becomes a dull, stupid mind. One has to understand why the mind chatters, why the mind goes from one thing to another. I do not think I can go into it this evening - are you not tired? (Cries of`no'.) You have had a long day in the office; there it was routine. Here you say you are not tired, which means you have not been working. (Laughter.) You have not been sustaining a serious investigation. That means you are just being entertained and will go away with your fears. And for God's sake, sirs, what is the point of it? BEYOND VIOLENCE PART I CHAPTER 3 SANTA MONICA 3RD PUBLIC TALK 7TH MARCH 1970 WE WERE CONSIDERING the extraordinary complexity of everyday life, the strife, the conflict, the misery and the confusion one is in. Until one really understands the nature and the structure of this complexity, how one is caught in this trap, there is no freedom - neither the freedom to enquire nor the freedom that comes with great joy in which there is total self-abandonment. Such freedom is not possible if fear exists in any form, either superficially or in the deep recesses of one's mind. We pointed out the relationship between fear, pleasure and desire. To understand fear one must also understand the nature of pleasure. This morning we shall talk about the centre from which our life and our activities arise and whether it is at all possible to change that centre. Because change, a transformation, an inward revolution, is obviously necessary. To realize that transformation, one must examine very closely what our life is, not escape from it, not indulge in theoretical beliefs and assertions, but observe very closely what our life actually is, and see whether it is possible to transform it completely. In the transformation of it you may affect the nature and the culture of society. There must be change in society, because there are so many evils and social injustices, there is an appalling travesty of worship and so on. But the change in society is of secondary importance; that will come about naturally, inevitably, when you as a human being in relationship with another, bring about this change in yourself. This morning we are going to consider three essential things: what is living? - the life that we lead every day; what is compassion, love? and the third, what is death? They are closely related - in understanding the one, we will understand the other two. As we have seen, you cannot take fragments of life, choose a part of life you think worthwhile or which appeals to you, or that your tendency demands. Either you take the whole of life - in which is involved death, love and living - or you merely take a fragment of it which might seem satisfactory, but which will inevitably bring about greater confusion. So we must take the whole of it and in considering what living is we must bear in mind that we are discussing a whole, sane and holy affair. One observes in the daily life of relationships that there is conflict, pain and suffering; there is constant dependence on another, in which there is self-pity and comparison; this is what we call living. Please let me again repeat: we are not concerned with theories, we are not propagating any ideology - for ideologies obviously have no value whatsoever; on the contrary, they bring about greater confusion, greater conflict. We are not indulging in opinion, in evaluation, nor in condemnation. We are solely concerned with the observation of what actually takes place to see if that can be transformed. One can see very clearly in one's daily life how contradictory, how confused it is; one's life as it is lived now, is absolutely meaningless. One may invent a meaning; the intellectuals do invent a meaning and people follow that meaning - which may be a very clever philosophy, but is produced out of nothing. Whereas if one is only concerned with `what is', without inventing some significance, or escape, or indulging in theories or ideologies, if one is tremendously aware, then one's mind is capable of facing `what is'. Theories and beliefs do not change one's life - man has had them for thousands of years and he has not changed; they have, per- haps, given him a superficial polish; he is, perhaps, less savage, but he is still brutal, violent, capricious, incapable of sustaining seriousness. We live a life of great sorrow from the moment we are born till we die. That is a fact. No amount of speculative theories about that fact will affect it. What does affect `what is' is the capacity, the energy, the intensity, the passion with which one looks at that fact. And one cannot have passion and intensity, if one's mind is running after some delusion, some speculative ideology. We are going into something rather complex for which you need all your energy, all your attention - not only while you are here in this hall, but also throughout life, if you are at all serious. What we are concerned with is the changing of `what is', the sorrow, the conflict, the violence, the dependence on another - not the dependence on the grocer, the doctor, or the postman, but the dependence in our relationship with another, both psychologically and psychosomatically. This dependence on another invariably breeds fear: as long as I depend on you to sustain me, emotionally, psychologically or spirituality, I am your slave and therefore there is fear. This is a fact. Most human beings depend on another and in this dependence there is the self-pity which comes about through comparison. So, where there is psychological dependence on another - on your wife, or on your husband - there must not only be fear and pleasure, but also the pain of it. I hope you are observing this in yourself, and are not merely listening to the speaker. You know, there are two ways of listening: to listen casually, to hear a series of ideas, agreeing or disagreeing with them; or there is another way of listening, which is not only to listen to the words and the meaning of those words, but also to listen to what is actually taking place in yourself. If you listen in this way, then what the speaker says is related to what you are listening to in yourself; then you are not merely listening to the speaker - which is irrelevant - but to the whole content of your being. And if you are listening in that way with intensity, at the same time and at the same level, then we are both of us partaking, sharing together, in what is actually taking place. Then you have the passion which is going to transform that which is. But if you do not listen that way, with all your mind, with all your heart, then a meeting of this kind becomes utterly meaningless. In understanding`what is',the actual,terrible life one leads, one sees that one is leading an isolated life - though one may have a wife and children, yet in oneself there is a self-isolating process going on. The wife, the girlfriend or the boyfriend, each is actually living in isolation; though living together in the same house, each one is isolated, with his own ambitions, with his own fears, with his own sorrow. Living like this is called relationship. Again, this is a fact: you have your image about her and she has her image about you and you have your own image about yourself. The relationship is between these images and is not an actual relationship. So first one must find out how these images are constructed, how they come into being, why they should exist, and what it means to live without such images. I do not know if you have ever considered whether a life in which there is no image, no formula, is possible and what a life without images would mean. We are going to find out. We have many experiences all the time. We are either conscious or unaware of them. Each experience leaves a mark; these marks build up day after day and they become the image. Someone insults you and at that moment you have already formed the image about the other. Or someone flatters you and again an image is formed. So inevitably each reaction builds an image. And having created it, is it possible to end it? To end an image we must first find out how it comes into being; and we see that if we do not respond adequately to any challenge it must leave an image. If you call me a fool, immediately you become my enemy, or I do not like you. When you call me a fool I have to be intensely aware at that moment, without any choice, without any condemnation, just listening to what you are saying. If there is no emotional response to your statement, then you will see that no image is being formed. So one has to be aware of the reaction and not give it time to take root; because the moment that reaction takes root it has formed an image. Now, can you do it? To do it you need attention -not just dreamily wandering through life - attention at the moment of a challenge, with all your being, listening with your heart and with your mind, so that you see clearly what is being said - be it insult or flattery or an opinion about you. Then you will see there is no image at all. The image is always of what has happened in the past. If it is a pleasurable image, we hold on to it. If it is painful, we want to get rid of it. So desire comes into being; one thing we want to hold, the other we want to reject; and desire brings conflict. If you are aware of all this, giving attention to it without any choice, merely observing, then you can find out for yourself, then you are not living according to some psychologist or some priest or some doctor. To find out truth you have to be completely free of all that, to stand alone. And standing alone is to turn your back on society. If you have observed yourself carefully, you will see that a part of your brain, which has evolved for many thousands of years, is the past - the past being experience, the memory. In that past there is safety. I hope you are watching all this in yourself. The past always responds immediately; and to delay the response of the past when you meet a challenge, so that there is an interval between the challenge and the response, is to end the image. If this does not take place, we will always be living in the past. We are the past and there is no freedom in the past. So, that is our life, a constant battle, the past, modified by the present moving into the future - which is still the movement of the past, though modified. As long as this movement exists, man can never be free, he must always be in conflict, in sorrow, in confusion, in misery. Can the response of the past be delayed, so that there is not the immediate formation of an image? We have to look at life as it is, at the endless confusion and misery and the escape from that into some religious superstition or into the worship of the State, or into various forms of amusement. We have to look at how one escapes into neuroses - because a neurosis offers an extraordinary sense of security. The man who `believes' is neurotic; the man who worships an image is neurotic. These are neuroses in which there is great safety. And that does not bring about a radical revolution in oneself. To do that you have to observe choicelessly, without any distortion of desire or of pleasure or of fear - just observe actually what you are without escape. And do not name what you see, merely observe. Then you will have the passion, the energy, to observe, and in that observation there comes a tremendous change. What is love? We talk a great deal about it - love of God, love of humanity, love of country, love of the family - yet strangely, with that love goes hatred. You love your God and hate another's God, you love your nation, your family, but you are against another family, against another nation. And more and more, throughout the world, love is associated with sex. We are not condemning, we are not judging, we are not evaluating; we are merely observing what is actually taking place; and if you know how to observe that gives you tremendous energy. What is love and what is compassion? The word `compassion' means passion for everybody, care for everything - including the animals you kill to eat. First let us look at what actually is - not what should be - seeing what actually is, in daily life. Do we know what it means to love, or do we only know pleasure and desire, which we call love? - of course with the pleasure, with the desire, goes tenderness, care, affection and so on. So is love pleasure, desire? Apparently for most of us it is. One depends on one's wife, one loves one's wife, yet if she looks at somebody else, one is angry, frustrated, miserable - and ultimately there is the divorce court. That is what you call love! - and if your wife dies you take another, so great is dependency. One never asks why one depends on another (I am talking about psychological dependency). If you look into it, you will see how lonely you are, deep down, how frustrated and unhappy. You do not know what to do with this loneliness, this isolation, which is a form of suicide. And so, not knowing what to do, you depend. That dependence gives you great comfort and companionship but when that companionship is slightly altered you get jealous, furious. Would you send your children to war if you loved them? Would you give them the kind of education they have now, only educating them technologically, to help them to get a job, to pass some examinations, and neglect the rest of the whole of this marvellous life? You look after them till they are five so carefully and after that you throw them to the wolves. That is what you call love. Is there love, when there is violence, hatred, antagonism? So what will you do? Within this violence and hatred is your virtue and your morality; when you deny that, then you are virtuous. That means seeing all the implications of what love is; then you stand alone and you are capable of loving. You listen to this because it is the truth. If you do not live it, truth becomes a poison; if you hear something true and neglect it, that brings about another contradiction in life and therefore more misery. So either listen with your heart and with your complete mind or do not listen at all. But since you are here, you are listening, I hope! Love is not the opposite of anything. It is not the opposite of hate or of violence. Even if you do not depend on anybody and live a most virtuous life - do social work, demonstrate up and down the street - if you have no love it has no value at all. If you love, then you can do what you will. For the man who loves there is no error - or if there is an error, he corrects it immediately. A man who loves has no jealousy, no remorse; for him there is no forgiveness, because there is not a moment in which a thing that has to be forgiven arises. All this demands deep investigation, great care and attention. But you are caught in the trap of modern society; you have created that trap yourself and if anybody points it out to you, you disregard it. And so wars and hatred go on. I wonder how you consider death; not theoretically, but actually what it means to you - not as something that is going to come inevitably either through accident, from a disease or from old age. That happens to everybody: old age and the pretensions that go with old age, of trying to be young. All theories, all hope, mean you are in despair; being in despair you look to something to give you hope. Have you ever looked at your despair to see why it exists? It exists because you are comparing yourself with somebody, because you want to fulfil, become, be, achieve. One of the strange things in life is that we are conditioned by the verb `to be'. For in that there is the past, the present and the future. All religious conditioning is based on that verb `to be; on it are based all heaven and hell, all the beliefs, all the saviours, all the excesses. Can a human being live without that verb - which means to live and to have no past, no future? It does not mean `living in the present' - you do not know what it means to live in the present. To live completely in the present you must know what the nature and the structure of the past is - which is yourself. You must know yourself so completely, that there is no hidden corner; `yourself' is the past, and that self thrives on that verb `to be', to become, to achieve, to remember. Find out what it means to live without that verb psychologically, inwardly. What does death mean? Why are we all so dreadfully frightened of it? Throughout Asia people believe in reincarnation; in that there is great hope - I don't know why - and people go on talking and writing about it. When you look at the thing that is going to incarnate, what is it? - all the past, all your misery, all your confusion, all that you are now? And you think the `you' (here you use the word `soul') is something permanent. Is there anything in life that is permanent? You would like to have something permanent and so put death into the distance far away from you, never look at it, because you are scared. Then you have `time' -time between what is and what will inevitably take place. Either you project your life into tomorrow and continue as you are now, hoping that there will be some kind of resurrection, incarnation, or you die each day; die each day to yourself, to your misery, to your sorrow; you put aside that burden each day so that your mind is fresh, young and innocent. The word `innocence' means `incapable of being hurt'. To have a mind that is not capable of being hurt, does not mean that it has built up a lot of resistance -on the contrary, such a mind is dying to everything that it has known in which there has been conflict, pleasure and pain. Only then is the mind innocent; that means it can love. You cannot love with memory, love is not a matter of remembrance, of time. So love, death and living, are not separate but a total whole, and there is sanity. Sanity is not possible when there is hate, anger, jealousy, when there is dependency which breeds fear. Where there is sanity, life becomes holy; there is great joy and you can do what you will; what you do then is virtuous, is true. We do not know all this - we only know our misery - and not knowing, we try to escape. If only we did not escape, but could actually observe, never moving away even a fraction from `what is' by naming it, by condemning or judging it - but could just watch it. To watch something you need care - care means compassion. A life that is lived so splendidly and completely can then go into something we shall talk about tomorrow, which is meditation. Without laying such a foundation, meditation is self-hypnosis. Laying this foundation means that you have understood this extraordinary life, so you have a mind that is without conflict and you lead a life that has compassion, beauty and therefore order. Not the order of a blueprint, but the order which comes when you understand what disorder is - which is your life. Your life is in disorder. Disorder is contradiction, the conflict between opposites. When you understand that disorder which is in yourself, then out of that comes order - the order which is precise, mathematical, in which there is no distortion. All this demands a meditative mind, a mind that is capable of looking silently. Questioner: In one of your books you say that miracles are one of the easiest things to do. Will you please explain about the miracles you mentioned. Krishnamurti: I wish you would not quote from a book -including the speaker's. (Laughter.) I really mean it, seriously. Do not quote anybody. Living on other people's ideas is one of the most terrible things to do. And ideas are not truth. `In one of the books it is said that miracles are the easiest things in the world' -are they not? Is it not a miracle that you are sitting there and I here and we are talking to each other? Because if you listen without effort you will know what it means to live completely, wholly; if you live that way, there is a miracle, the greatest miracle of all. Questioner: I have been away for twenty-seven years and have come back about three months ago. I find tremendous fears developing here. From my own observation and from the observation of my friends I believe there is the take-over of the Mafia and the development of a complete police state. Can you help us as individuals, give us the key to fight against such conditions? I realize that to fight will be difficult, I also realize that if we fight we could go to jail. What can each individual do for himself to combat these awful forces? Krishnamurti: Sir, this is not an avoidance of the question, but: can you as an individual be peaceful? Are you an individual at all? You may have your bank account, you may have a separate house, a separate family and so on, but are you an individual? Individual means indivisible in himself, not fragmented. But we are fragmented, broken up, so we are not individuals. What society is, we are. We have made this society. So how can a broken up human being do anything but come to that state in which he is completely whole? Then a totally different kind of action will take place. But as long as we are acting in fragments, we are bound to create more chaos in the world. I am sure this answer satisfies nobody; you want the key and the key is in yourself. You have to forge that key. Questioner: But time is short and I do not seem to be able to find out how exactly to go about this. Krishnamurti: `Time is short' - can you change immediately? Not change gradually or tomorrow. Can you have this perception of a `whole' life in which there is love - all that we have talked about this morning - immediately? The speaker says that is the only thing to do - to change completely, radically, immediately. To do that, you have to observe with all your heart and mind; not escaping into anything, nationalism or your beliefs; put all these aside with one breath and become completely aware. Then there is a radical change, immediately, and from that immediate transformation you will act completely differently. Questioner: Does love have an object? Can one love only one person in one's life? Krishnamurti: Have you heard the question? Can you love one at the same time as the many? What a strange question to ask. If you love, you love the one and the many. But we do not love. Sir, many can smell a flower that has perfume - or only one can smell it - but the flower does not care, it is there. And that is the beauty of love: it can give to one or to many. That is only possible when there is compassion, when there is no jealousy, no ambition, no success; and that is the denial of all that man has built in himself or around himself. Through negation the positive comes into being. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART I CHAPTER 4 SANTA MONICA 4TH PUBLIC TALK 8TH MARCH 1970 WE SAID WE would talk about religion and meditation this evening. They form a really quite complex subject, needing a great deal of patience and hesitant enquiry, never assuming anything, never accepting or believing anything. Man has always sought something more than the daily living, with its pain, pleasure and sorrow; he has always wanted to find something more permanent. And in his search for this unnameable thing, he has built temples, churches, mosques. Extraordinary things have been done in the name of religion. There have been wars for which religions are responsible; people have been tortured, burned, destroyed; for belief was more important than truth, dogma more vital than the direct perception. When belief becomes all-important, then you are willing to sacrifice everything for that; whether that belief is real or has no validity does not matter as long as it gives comfort, security, a sense of permanency. It is very easy, if you seek something, to find it; but that means that before one begins to search one must have a basis, an idea of what is sought. In seeking, there are several processes involved; there is not only the desire and the hope that what you recognise will be the truth, but there is also the motive behind that search. If there is a motive of escape from fear, a longing for comfort and security, then you will inevitably find something that will gratify you; it may be the most absurd belief, but as long as it is satisfactory and completely comforting, however ridiculous the illusion be, you cling to it. So there is great danger for those who are seeking to find. If there is fear of any kind, hidden or open, searching becomes an evasion, a flight from the actual. And if in your search you discover something, that discovery is based on recognition - you must recognise it, otherwise it has no value. But recognition, if you observe, is of past memory, of something you have already known, otherwise you cannot possibly recognise it. All this is involved in this everlasting search for what one considers to be the truth; but something that is beyond the measure of the mind, is not based on recognition. Religion, in the accepted sense of that word, has now become a matter of propaganda, of vested interest, with much property, with a great hierarchical, bureaucratic system of `spirituality'. Religion has become a matter of dogma, belief and ritual - something which is totally divorced from daily living. You may, or you may not, believe in God, but that belief has very little meaning in daily life, where you cheat, where you destroy, are ambitious, greedy, jealous, violent. You believe in God or in a saviour, or in some guru, yet keep that far away so that it does not actually touch your daily life. Religion, as it is now, has become an extraordinary phenomenon which has no validity at all. The Christian, for the last two thousand years, has been conditioned to believe. Please observe in yourself, not criticizing, not condemning, just observing. One may not like it, but one must face the fact that one is, if one is a Christian, as conditioned as the Communist or the atheist. The believer and the non-believer are both conditioned by the culture of their time, by society, by the extraordinary process of propaganda. It has also been going on in Asia for thousands of years. All the physical structure, the psychological assertions, the strong beliefs, for which one is willing to destroy and be destroyed, are based on dialectical, assertive opinion, as to how to find out what is true; but `true opinion', however clever, however argumentative, has no reality whatsoever: it remains merely an opinion. Religions throughout the world now are utterly meaningless. We want to be entertained spiritually and so we go to the church or the temple or the mosque and that has nothing whatsoever to do with our daily sorrow, confusion and hatred. A man who is really serious, who really wants to find out if there is something more than this terrible thing called existence, must obviously be completely free from dogma, from belief, from propaganda, he must be free from the structure in which he has been brought up to be a `religious man'. Through the negation of `what is', in the so-called religions, you come to the positive. We are going to find out, if we can, what the thing is that man has sought - not through any belief, not through any saviour or through a guru, or through the speaker. We are going to find out for ourselves if there is, or if there is not, something that is not the projection of one's own hopes, of one's own fears, something that is not invented by a cunning mind or is bred from our intense loneliness. To find out, one must be free of belief; for belief is the quality of mind that invests in something that will give it some hope, comfort, security, a sense of permanency. To be free to enquire, one must be free from fear, from anxiety, from the desire to be psychologically secure. These are the obvious requirements for a very earnest and serious person who wants to find out. The instrument that is capable of enquiry is a mind that is clear, that has no distortions, or prejudice of conclusion, of formula, or belief. See how extraordinarily difficult it is to have a mind that is not in conflict; for it means a mind that has understood conflict and is free from it. The mind - which means not only the mind but also the heart, the whole psychosomatic nature of man - must be highly sensitive; for sensitivity implies intelligence. We are going to go into that a little, because all this is laying the foundation for meditation. If you do not lay the foundation of order, then meditation - which is one of the most extraordinary things in life - becomes merely an escape leading to self-delusion, self-hypnosis. A shoddy mind can learn the tricks, can practise so-called meditation, but it will still remain a shoddy, stupid mind. Most of us have very little energy; we spend it in conflict, in struggle, we waste it in various manners - not only sexually, but also a great deal of it is wasted in contradictions and in the fragmentation of ourselves which brings about conflict. Conflict is definitely a great waste of energy - the `voltage' decreases. Not only is physical energy necessary, but so also is psychological energy, with a mind that is immensely clear, logical, healthy, undistorted, and a heart that has no sentiment whatsoever, no emotion, but the quality of abundance of love, of compassion. All this gives a great intensity, passion. You need that, otherwise you cannot take a journey into this thing called meditation. You may sit cross-legged, breathe, do fantastic things, but you will never come to it. The body must be extraordinarily sensitive; that is one of the most difficult things, because we have spoiled the intelligence of the body through drink, through smoking, through indulgence, through pleasure; we have made the body coarse. Look at the body which should be extraordinarily alive and sensitive, and you will see what we have reduced it to! The body affects the mind and the mind affects the body, and for this reason, sensitivity of the body, the organism, is essential. This sensitivity is not brought about through fasting, through playing all kinds of tricks on it. The mind has to watch it dispassionately. (I hope you are doing it now, as the speaker is going into the problem - not tomorrow or the next day -because as we said, we are partaking together in the journey, in the exploration). Observation of `what is', is the understanding of that event. Understanding is derived from the observation of `what is; testing it out in everyday living leads to the understanding of experience. Most of us want great experiences because our own lives are so limited, so unspeakably dull. We want deep, lasting, beautiful experiences. But we have not even understood what that word `experience' means, and the mind that is seeking an experience is incapable of understanding what truth is. The life that we lead every day has to be transformed; there must be an end to this hatred, this violence in oneself, the anxiety, the guilt, the drive to succeed, to be somebody; and without changing all that radically, to try to seek some `experience' has no meaning whatsoever. A mind that hopes to see truth through drugs, to have extraordinary experiences, or to be entertained through drugs, becomes a slave to them and they ultimately make the mind dull and stupid. We are inquiring together into the question of the religious mind - not what religion is - but what a mind is that is religious, that is capable of finding out truth. The root meaning of the word `religion' is rather uncertain; we can give any meaning to it we like, and we generally do. But to have no opinion of what religion is, is to be free to enquire into it, into the quality of the mind that is religious. That quality of mind is not separated from the daily living of pain, pleasure, sorrow and confusion. To enquire into this, there must be freedom from all authority. You are alone to find out, there is no book, nobody to help you. Please see how important it is, because we have given our trust, our faith to others - to the priest, to the saviours, to the teachers and so on - and having given over our faith, we have looked to them to lead us and they have led us nowhere. In this enquiry there is no question of authority - you are enquiring, like a true scientist, without seeking a result. When there is no authority whatsoever, then there is no system, no practice. A system, a method, implies a routine, a forming of habit. If you practise a certain system daily, your mind invariably becomes dull. This is so simple and obvious. So systems, methods, practices, must completely disappear. See what is happening to a mind that is not afraid, that is not seeking pleasure or pursuing entertainment, a mind that has no dependence on authority, but is really enquiring; to a mind that does not depend on anything there is no fear and therefore it can enquire. Such a mind has already become extraordinarily sharp, alive, intense, earnest. (When we use the word 'mind', we mean the whole of it, including the organism, the heart.) That quality of mind has beauty; using no method, it is clear, enquiring, observing and learning as it is observing. Learning is not different from action. To learn is to act. If you learn about nationality, the danger of separation, of division of people, if you observe it and understand it, then the very understanding of it puts an end to this division in action. So observation is astonishingly important. You probably all know about yoga. There are so many books written about it, every Tom, Dick and Harry who has spent some months in India and taken a few lessons, becomes a `yogi'. That word `yoga' has many meanings; it implies a way of life, not just the practising of some exercises to keep young. It implies a way of life in which there is no division and therefore no conflict - which is the way the speaker looks at it. Of course regular exercise of the right kind is good, it keeps the body supple. The speaker has done a great deal of it for years, not to achieve some extraordinary state through breathing and all the rest of it, but to keep the body supple. You must have the right kind of exercise, the right food, not stuffing yourself with a lot of meat - with all the brutality and insensitivity that that inevitably brings about. Each one has to find out the right diet for himself, he has to experiment and test it out. Then there is this trick that has been foisted on you: Mantra Yoga. For five, or thirty dollars, you have been taught some mantra - a repetition of words, especially in Sanskrit. The Catholics have a rosary and repeat Ave Maria - or whatever they repeat. Do you know what happens when you constantly repeat a series of words? You mesmerize yourself into tranquillity. Or you ride on the tone of the word. When you keep on repeating a certain word it produces a sound, inwardly; and that inward sound keeps going - if you listen to it; it becomes extraordinarily alive and you think that is a most marvellous thing. It is nothing of the kind, it is a form of self-hypnosis. That too has to be rejected completely. Then we come to something quite different, which is: awareness and attention. I do not know if you have gone into this - not by reading books, not by being taught how to be aware in a school in Asia, in some monastery - but if you have, you will see for yourself what it means not to be taught by another. You have to learn for yourself what awareness means; to be aware of the hall in which you are sitting, to be aware of the proportion of the hall and the colours that it contains; not saying it is ugly or beautiful, just observing. As you walk down the street, be aware of the things that are happening around you, observing the clouds, the trees, the light on the water, the bird in flight. Be aware without any interference by thought which says: `this is right', `this is wrong', `this should be', or `should not be'. Be aware of the things that are happening outside, then also be aware inwardly - watch every movement of thought, watch every feeling, every reaction; that makes the mind extraordinarily alive. There is a difference between concentration and attention. Concentration is a process of exclusion, a process of resistance and therefore a conflict. Have you ever watched your mind when you are trying to concentrate on something? It wanders off and you try to pull it back and so a battle goes on; you want to focus your attention, to concentrate on something, and thought is interested in looking out of the window, or in thinking about something else. In this conflict there is such a waste of energy and time. One enquires why the mind chatters, talks endlessly to itself or to somebody else, or wants to be occupied everlastingly, in reading a book, turning on the radio, keeping active. Why? If you have observed, there is a habit of restlessness, your body can never sit still for any prolonged time, it is always doing something or fidgeting. The mind also chatters; otherwise what would happen to it? - it is frightened, so it must be occupied. It must be occupied with social reform, with this or that, with some belief, with some quarrel, with something that has happened in the past - it is thinking constantly. As we were saying: attention is entirely different from concentration. Awareness and attention go together - but not concentration. A mind that is intensely attentive can observe very clearly, without any distortion, without any resistance, and yet function efficiently, objectively. What is the quality of such a mind? (I hope you are interested in this, because it is part of life. If you reject all this, you reject the whole of life also. If you do not know the meaning and the beauty of meditation you do not know anything of life. You may have the latest car, you may be able to travel all over the world freely, but if you do not know what the real beauty, the freedom and the joy of meditation is, you are missing a great part of life. Which is not to make you say, 'I must learn to meditate'. It is a natural thing that comes about. A mind that is enquiring must inevitably come to this; a mind that is aware, that observes 'what is' in itself, is self-understanding, self-knowing.) We are asking: what is the quality of a mind that has come so far, naturally, without any effort? If you look at a tree or a cloud, the face of your wife or your husband or your neighbour, it is only out of silence that you can observe very clearly. You can only listen when there is no self-projected noise. When you are chattering to yourself, comparing what is being said with what you already know, then you are not listening. When you are observing with your eyes and all kinds of prejudices and knowledge are interfering, you are not really observing. So when you really observe and listen, you can only do so out of silence. I do not know if you have ever gone that far. It is not something you cultivate, take years to come upon, because it is not the product of time or of comparison; it is the product of observation in daily life, the observations of your thoughts and the understanding of thought. When the mind is completely aware it becomes extraordinarily silent, quiet; it is not asleep, but highly awake in that silence. Only such a mind can see what truth is, can see if there is something beyond or not. Only such a mind is a religious mind, because it has left the past completely - though it can use the memory of the past. Religion then is something that cannot possibly be put into words; it cannot be measured by thought - for thought is always measuring; it is, as we said, the response of the past. Thought is never free; it is always functioning within the field of the known. So a mind that is capable of understanding what truth is, what reality is - if there is such a thing as reality - must be completely free of all the human tricks, deceptions and illusions. And this takes a lot of work. It means an inward discipline; a discipline which is not imitation, conformity or adjustment. Discipline comes in the observation of 'what is' and learning about it; this learning about itself is its own discipline. Therefore there is order and with it the end of disorder in oneself. All this, from the beginning of these talks till now, is part of meditation. Only if you know how to look at a cloud or see the beauty of the light on the sea, how to look at your wife - or the boy, or the girl -with a fresh eye, with an innocent mind that has never been harmed, that has never shed a tear, can the mind see what truth is. Questioner: A while ago I had verified for myself what you say - that the key to inner freedom is to experience that the observer and observed are one. I had very laborious and tedious work to perform, for which I developed a great resistance. I realized that I was this resistance and that only resistance looked at resistance. Then suddenly that resistance was gone - it was like a miracle - and I had even physical strength to finish my work. Krishnamurti: Are you trying to confirm what I am saying, giving me or the audience encouragement? (Laughter.) Questioner: It needs enormous energy before one comes to the point of seeing that observer and observed are one. Krishnamurti: The gentleman says that the observer is the observed; that is: when there is fear, the observer is part of that fear. He is not identifying himself with fear; the observer is part of that very fear itself. To realize that is fairly simple. Either you realize it verbally, theoretically - understanding the meaning of the words - or you actually see that the observer and the observed are one. If you see that actually, it does make a drastic difference in your life; it ends conflict. When there is a division between the observer and the observed, a gap, there is a time interval and therefore there is conflict. When you actually see and test by observing that the observer and the observed are actually one, then you end all conflict in life, in all relationships. Questioner: When we realize that the past, as the memory, is interposed between something deeper and the outside, what can we do? We cannot stop it - it keeps going on. Krishnamurti: The memory interposes itself between the outer and the inner. There is the inner, and the outer, and the mind as memory as something separate, as the past. So there are three things now, the inner, the outer, and the mind as the past. Please, sir, do not laugh - this is our life, this is what we are doing; though you may put the question differently, this is actually what is going on in our daily li fe. You want to do something; the mind says, `Do not do it, or, do it some other way', so there is a battle going on. The mind is interfering; the mind as the thought, thought being the past. Thought comes in between the actual, the inner and the outer; so what is one to do? The function of thought is to divide; it has divided life as the past, the present, and the future. Thought has also divided the inner from the outer. Thought says: `How can I bridge the two and act as a whole'. Can thought do this? - being itself the factor of division? Questioner: Where there is a will there is a way. Krishnamurti: No, sir: you have your way in the world; you have your will to destroy people and you have succeeded, you have found the way. We are not concerned with will; will is the most destructive thing, for will is based on pleasure, on desire, and not on free joy. You are asking how thought can be kept quiet. How can thought be silent? Is that the right question? - because if you put the wrong question you invariably get the wrong answer. (Laughter.) No, sir, this is not a laughing matter. You must put the right question. Is it the right question to ask: `How can thought end'? Or must one find out what the function of thought is? If you put an end to thought -if that is at all possible - then how will you operate when you have to go to the office? Thought, apparently, is necessary. We are saying thought is dangerous in a certain direction, because it divides; and yet thought must function logically, sanely, objectively, healthily, in another direction. How is this possible? How can thought not interfere? You see the problem? It is not `how to end thought'. When you have put the question very clearly, you will see it for yourself. Thought, which is the response of the past, interferes, divides as the outer and the inner and destroys unity. So we say, `Let us destroy thought, let us kill the mind.' This is a totally wrong question. But if you enquired into the whole structure of thought, saw what its place is, where it is not necessary, then you would find out that mind will operate intelligently when thought does not function as also when thought must function. Questioner: Why is it that you have a greater awareness of `what is' than I have? What is your secret? Krishnamurti: I have really never thought about it. Just look: is humility something to be cultivated? If you cultivate humility, it is still vanity. If you cultivate awareness of 'what is', you are not being aware. But if you are aware when you sit in a bus, or drive a car, when you look, talk, or are enjoying yourself, then out of that, naturally, easily, comes the awareness of 'what is-'. But if you try to cultivate paying a great deal of attention to 'what is', thought is operating, not awareness. Questioner: Did you say: to be free we should have no teachers? Did I understand it rightly! Krishnamurti: What is the function of a teacher? If he knows a subject like medicine, science, how to run a computer and so on, his function is to instruct another about the knowledge and the information he has. That is fairly simple. But if we are talking about the teacher who says he knows, and wants to instruct the disciple, then be suspicious, for the man who says he knows, does not know. Because truth, the beauty of enlightenment, whatever you call it, cannot ever be described - it is. It is a living thing, a moving thing, it is active, it is weightless. Only about a dead thing can you say what it is; and the teacher who teaches you about dead things is not a teacher. Questioner: How can we put concentration, discipline and attention together? Krishnamurti: The word `discipline' means to learn from another. The disciple is one who learns from the teacher, Have you ever considered or gone into the question of what learning is? 'The active present of the verb `to learn' - what does it mean? Either you are learning in order to add to what you already know, which becomes knowledge - like science - or there is learning which is not an accumulation of knowledge but a movement. Do you see the difference between the two? I either learn in order to acquire knowledge, to be efficient, technologically and so on, or I am learning all the time something which is always new and therefore action is always new. Please listen to this: I want to know, I want to learn about myself. I am a very complex entity, there is both the hidden and the obvious. I want to know about the whole totality of myself. So I watch myself and I see I am afraid; I see the cause of that fear; in watching I have learnt and that has become my knowledge. But if the next time fear arises, I look at it with the previous knowledge, then I have stopped learning. I am only looking at it with the past and am not learning about what is actually going on. To learn about myself, there must be freedom, so that there is constant observation without the past interfering -without thought interfering. So `learning' has two meanings: learning to acquire knowledge with which I can operate most efficiently in certain fields, or learning about oneself, so that the past - which is thought - does not interfere all the time; in that way I can observe, and the mind is always sensitive. Questioner: I would like to ask you if you eat meat or fish? Krishnamurti: Does it really interest you? All my life I have never touched meat or fish - I have never tasted it, have never smoked or drunk; it does not appeal, there is no meaning to it. Will that make you also a vegetarian? (Laughter.) It won't! You know, heroes, examples, are the worst things you can have. Find out why you eat meat, why you indulge in smoking and drinking, why you cannot lead a simple life - which does not mean one suit of clothes, or one meal a day, but a quality of mind that is simple, without all the distortions of pleasures and desires, ambitions and motives - so that you can look directly and perceive the beauty of the world. Questioner: I just wanted to ask what humour is. Krishnamurti: I suppose it means really, to laugh at oneself. We have so many tears in our hearts, so much misery - just to look at ourselves with laughter, to observe with clarity, with seriousness and yet with laughter, if one can. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART II CHAPTER 1 SAN DIEGO STATE COLLEGE 2ND PUBLIC TALK 6TH APRIL 1970 'FEAR' ONE HAS TO be serious, for only those who are vitally serious can live a life that is complete and whole. And that seriousness does not exclude joy, enjoyment; yet as long as there is fear one cannot possibly know what it means to have great joy. Fear seems to be one of the most common things in life; strangely we have accepted it as a way of life - just as we have accepted violence in all its various forms as a way of life - and we have become used to being psychologically afraid. We should, I feel, go into the question of fear completely, understand it fully, so that when we leave this place we shall be rid of it. It can be done; it is not just a theory, or a hope. If one gives complete attention to this question of fear, to how one approaches it, looks at it, then one will find that the mind - the mind that has suffered so much, that has endured so much pain, that has lived with great sorrow and fear - will be completely free of it. To go into this it is absolutely essential that one has no prejudice which will prevent one from understanding the truth of `what is'. To take this journey together implies neither acceptance nor denial; neither saying to oneself that it is absolutely impossible to be rid of fear, nor that it is possible. One needs a free mind to enquire into this question; a mind that, having reached no conclusion, is free to observe, to enquire. There are so many forms of psychological and psychosomatic fear. To go into each one of these various forms of fear, into every aspect, would take an enormous amount of time. But one can observe the general quality of fear; one can observe the general nature and structure of fear without getting lost in the detail of a particular form of one's fears. When one understands the nature and structure of fear as such, then one can approach, with that understanding, the particular fear. One may be afraid of the dark; one may be afraid of one's wife or husband, or of what the public says or thinks or does; one may be afraid of the sense of loneliness, or of the emptiness of life, the boredom of the meaningless existence that one leads. One may be afraid of the future, of the uncertainty and insecurity of tomorrow -or of the bomb. One may be afraid of death, the ending of one's life. There are so many forms of fear, the neurotic as well as the sane rational fears - if fear can ever be rational or sane. Most of us are neurotically afraid of the past, of today and of tomorrow; so that time is involved in fear. There are not only the conscious fears of which one is aware, but also those that are deep down, undiscovered in the deep recesses of one's mind. How is one to deal with conscious fears as well as those that are hidden? Surely fear is in the movement away from `what is; it is the flight, the escape, the avoidance of actually `what is; it is this flight away that brings about fear. Also, when there is comparison, of any kind, there is the breeding of fear - the comparison of what you are with what you think you should be. So fear is in the movement away from what is actual, not in the object from which you move away. None of these problems of fear can be resolved through will -saying to oneself, `I will not be afraid.' Such acts of will have no meaning. We are considering a very serious problem to which one has to give one's complete attention. One cannot give atten- tion if one is interpreting or translating or comparing what is being said with what one already knows. One has to listen - an art one has to learn, for normally one is always comparing, evaluating, judging, agreeing, denying, and one does not listen at all; actually one prevents oneself from listening. To listen so completely implies that one gives one's whole attention - it does not mean one agrees or disagrees. There is no agreement or disagreement when we are exploring together; but the `microscope' through which one looks may not be clear. If one looks through a precision instrument then what one sees is what another will also see; therefore there is no question of agreement or disagreement. In trying to examine this whole question of fear one has to give one's whole attention; and yet, until fear is resolved it deadens the mind, makes it insensitive, dull. How does it happen that the hidden fears are exposed? One can know the conscious fears - how to deal with them will come presently - but there are hidden fears which are perhaps much more important. So how will one deal with them, how will one expose them? Can they be exposed through analysis, seeking their cause? Will analysis free the mind from fear, not a particular neurotic fear, but the whole structure of fear? In analysis is implied, not only time but the analyser - taking many, many days, years, even the whole of one's life, at the end of which perhaps you have understood a little, but you are ready for the grave. Who is the analyser? If he is the professional, the expert who has a degree, he will also take time; he also is the result of many forms of conditioning. If one analyses oneself there is implied the analyser, who is the censor, and he is going to analyse the fear which he himself has created. In any event analysis takes time; in the interval between that which you are analysing and its ending many other factors will arise which give it a different direction. You have to see the truth that analysis is not the way, because the analyser is a fragment among the many other fragments which go to make up the `me', the I, the ego - he is the result of time, he is conditioned. To see that analysis implies time and does not bring the ending of fear means that you have completely put aside the whole idea of progressive change; you have seen that the very factor of change is one of the major causes of fear. (To me, to the speaker, this is a very important thing, therefore he feels very strongly, he speaks intensely; but he is not doing propaganda - there is nothing for you to join, nothing for you to believe; but observe and learn and be free of this fear.) So analysis is not the way. When you see the truth of that, it means you are no longer thinking in terms of the analyser who is going to analyse, going to judge and evaluate, and your mind is free of that particular burden called analysis; therefore it is capable of looking directly. How are you to look at this fear; how are you to bring out all its structure, all its hidden parts? - through dreams? Dreams are the continuation of the activity of waking hours during sleep - are they not? You observe in dreams that there is always action, something or other is happening in dreams as in the waking hours, a continuation which is still part of one whole movement. So dreams have no value. You see what is happening: we are eliminating the things to which you are accustomed, analysis, dreams, will, time; when you eliminate all those, the mind becomes extraordinarily sensitive - not only sensitive but intelligent. Now with that sensitivity and intelligence we are going to look at fear. (If you really go in to this, you turn your back on the whole of the social structure in which time, analysis and will is in operation.) What is fear? - how does it come? Fear is always in relation to something; it does not exist by itself. There is fear of what happened yesterday in relation to the possibility of its repetition tomorrow; there is always a fixed point from which relationship takes place. How does fear come into this? I had pain yesterday; there is the memory of it and I do not want it again tomorrow. Thinking about the pain of yesterday, thinking which involves the memory of yesterday's pain, projects the fear of having pain again tomorrow. So it is thought that brings about fear. Thought breeds fear; thought also cultivates pleasure. To understand fear you must also understand pleasure - they are interrelated; without understanding one you cannot understand the other; this means that one cannot say `I must have only pleasure and no fear; fear is the other side of the coin which is called pleasure. Thinking with the images of yesterday's pleasure, thought imagines that you may not have that pleasure tomorrow - so thought engenders fear. Thought tries to sustain pleasure and thereby nourishes fear. Thought has separated itself as the analyser and the thing to be analysed - they are both parts of thought playing tricks upon itself. In doing all this it is refusing to examine the unconscious fears; it brings in time as a means of escaping fear and yet at the same time sustains fear. Thought nourishes pleasure - which has nothing whatever to do with joy; joy is not the product of thought, it is not pleasure. You can cultivate pleasure, you can think about it endlessly; you cannot do that with joy. The moment you think about joy it has gone, it has become something from which you derive pleasure and therefore something which you are afraid to lose. Thought engenders loneliness but condemns it and so invents ways of escaping from it, through various forms of religious or cultural entertainment, through the everlasting search for deeper and wider dependences. Thought is responsible for all these daily observable facts; they are not the speaker's invention, or his peculiar philosophy or theory. What is one to do? You cannot kill thought, you cannot destroy it, you cannot say, `I'll forget it', you cannot resist it; if you do, it is again the action of another form of thought. Thought is the response of memory: that memory is needed to function in daily life, to go to your office, your home, to be able to talk; memory is the storehouse of technological knowledge. So you need memory and yet you see how memory through thought sustains fear. Memory is needed in all purity and clarity of thought in one direction - technologically, to function daily, to earn a livelihood and so on - and yet you see the fact that it also breeds fear. So what is the mind to do? How will you answer this question, after having gone through the various facts of analysis, of time of escape, of dependency, having seen how the movement away from `what is' is fear; the movement itself is fear? After observing all that, seeing the truth of all that - not as opinion, not as your casual judgment - what is your answer to this question? How can thought function efficiently, sanely and yet that very thought not become a danger, because it breeds fear? What is that state of the mind that has gone through all this? What state of understanding has the mind, that has examined all these various factors which we have exposed, which have been explained or observed? - what is the quality of your mind now? -because on that quality depends your answer. If you have actually taken the journey, step by step, and gone into everything that we have discussed, then your mind, you will see, has become extraordinarily intelligent, live and sensitive, because it has thrown off all the burden that it had accumulated. How do you now observe the whole process of thinking? Is there a centre from which you think? - the centre being the censor, the one who judges, evaluates, condemns, justifies. Do you still think from that centre? - or is there no centre from which to think at all, yet there is thought? Do you see the difference? Thought has created a centre as the `me' - `me', my opinion, my country, my God, my experience, my house, my furniture, my wife, my children, you know, `me',`me',`me'. That is the centre from which you act. That centre divides. That centre and that division are the cause of conflict, obviously - when it is your opinion against somebody else's opinion, my country, your country, that is all division created by thought. You observe from that centre and you are still caught in fear, because that centre has separated itself from the thing it has called fear; it says, `I must get rid of it,' `I must analyse it', `I must overcome it', `resist it' and so on; thereby you are strengthening fear. Can the mind look at fear without the centre? - can you look at that fear without naming it? - the moment you name it `fear', it is already in the past. The moment you name something, you divide it off. So, can you observe without that centre, not naming the thing called fear, as it arises? It requires tremendous discipline. Then the mind is looking without the centre to which it has been accustomed and there is the ending of fear, both the hidden and the open. If you have not seen the truth of it this evening, do not take it home as a problem to think about. Truth is something which you must see immediately - and to see something clearly you must give your heart and your mind and your whole being to it immediately. Questioner: Are you saying that, rather than trying to escape from fear - what is in essence fearing fear - we should accept fear? Krishnamurti: No, sir. Do not accept anything. Do not accept fear but look at it. You have never looked at fear, have you? You have never said, `Well, I am afraid, let me look.' Rather you have said, `I am afraid, let me turn on the radio' - or go to Church or pick up a book, or resort to a belief - any movement away. Having never looked at fear you have never come directly into communication with it; you have never looked at fear without naming it, without running away, without trying to overcome it. just be with it, without any movement away from it and if you do this, you will see a very strange thing happen. Questioner: After you meet fear, can you become it? Krishnamurti: You are fear; how can you become it? You are fear, only thought has separated itself from fear, not knowing what to do with it, resisting it; dividing it from fear it becomes the 'observer' of that fear which resists or escapes from it. But the 'observer', that which resists, is also fear. Questioner: Sir , a great deal of frustration exists because people are not permitted to tape record lectures, privately. Could you tell us why, please? Krishnamurti: Sir: I will tell you - it is very simple. First of all: if you are taking a recording of this talk, it is very disturbing to your neighbour - you are fiddling with the instruments, all the rest of it. Secondly, what is more important: to listen, directly, now, to what is being said, or to take home a recording and listen to it at leisure? When the speaker is saying, 'Do not allow time to interfere', you say, on the contrary, 'Well, I'll record what you are saying and take it home.' Surely fear is now; you have it in your heart, in your mind now. Questioner: If that is true then why does the Foundation sell tapes? Krishnamurti: Is that not the most important thing: to listen directly to what is being said now, while you are here? You have taken all the trouble to come here and the speaker has taken all the trouble to come here also. We are trying to communicate together, trying to understand something now, not tomorrow. And the understanding 'now' is of the highest importance, therefore you must give all your attention to it. You cannot give all your attention if you are taking notes, if you are giving half your attention to a tape recorder. You may not understand all this immediately, so you may want to listen to it again. Then buy a tape, or do not buy a tape, a book or not a book - that is all. If you can take in all that has been said this evening during an hour and ten minutes, completely, so that you absorb it wholly, with your heart and mind, it is finished. You have not done it, unfortunately; you have not given your mind to all this before; you have accepted fear, you have lived with fear and your fear has become habit. What the speaker is saying is to shatter all that. And the speaker says, 'Do it now, not tomorrow'. Our minds are not used to seeing the total nature of fear and what is implied in it. But if you could see it immediately, you would leave this hall with ecstatic mind. But most of us are not capable of it, and therefore the tapes. Questioner: You observe fear and find yourself moving away from it. What are you to do? Krishnamurti: First of all, do not resist moving away. To observe fear you must give attention, and in attention you are not condemning, not judging, not evaluating, but just observing. When you move away, it is because your attention has wandered, you are not attending - there is inattention. Be inattentive, but be aware that you are inattentive - that very awareness of your inattention is attention. If you are aware of your inattention, be aware of it, do not do anything about it, except be aware that you are inattentive; then that very awareness is attention. It is so simple. Once you see this you will eliminate conflict altogether; you are aware without choice. When you say, 'I have been attentive, but now I am not attentive and I must become attentive', there is no choice. To be aware means to be aware without choice. Questioner: If, as you say, fear and pleasure are related, can one remove fear and so enjoy pleasure completely? Krishnamurti: Lovely, wouldn't it be? Take away all my fears so that I can enjoy myself in my pleasures. Everybody right through the world wants the same thing, some very crudely, some very subtly - to escape fear and hold on to pleasure. Pleasure - you smoke, it is a pleasure, yet there is pain within it because you may get a disease. You have had pleasure, whether as man or woman, sexually or otherwise, comfort and so on: when the other looks away you are jealous, angry, frustrated, mutilated. Pleasure inevitably brings pain (we are not saying we cannot have pleasure; but see the whole structure and you will know then that joy, real enjoyment, the beauty of enjoyment, the freedom of it, has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure or therefore with pain or fear. If you see that, the truth of it, then you will understand pleasure and give it its proper place. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART II CHAPTER 2 SAN DIEGO STATE COLLEGE 3RD PUBLIC TALK 7TH APRIL 1970 'VIOLENCE' WHAT SHALL WE discuss this morning? The word `discussion' is not right, it is more a dialogue. Opinions will lead us nowhere and indulging in mere intellectual cleverness will have very little meaning, because truth is not to be found through the exchange of opinions or of ideas. So if we are to talk over together any problem it must be on the level which is not intellectual, emotional or sentimental. Questioner: I think the war against Communism is in a certain sense justified. I would like to find out with you if I am right or wrong. You must understand, I lived ten years under communism, I was in a Russian concentration camp, I was also in a Communist prison. They understand only one language which is power. So my question is: is this war self-protection or not? Krishnamurti: I believe that every group that brings about war always says that it is a self-protective war. There have always been wars, offensive or defensive; but there are wars which have been a peculiar, monstrous game throughout the centuries. And we are, unfortunately, so-called educated and cultured, yet still we indulge in the most savage forms of butchery. So could we go into the question of what this deep violence, this aggression in man, is? -could we see whether it is at all possible to be free of it? There have been those who have said, `Under no circumstance express violence; that implies leading a peaceful life although surrounded by people who are very aggressive, violent; it implies a kind of nucleus in the midst of people who are savage, brutal, violent. But how does the mind free itself of its accumulated violence, cultured violence, self-protective violence, the violence of aggression, the violence of competition, the violence of trying to be somebody, the violence of trying to discipline oneself according to a pattern, trying to become somebody, trying to suppress and bully oneself, brutalise oneself, in order to be non-violent - how is the mind to be free of all such forms of violence? There are so many different kinds of violence. Shall we go into each kind of violence or shall we take the whole structure of violence? Can we look at the whole spectrum of violence, not just at one part of it? The source of violence is the `me', the ego, the self, which expresses itself in so many ways - in division, in trying to become or be somebody - which divides itself as the `me' and the `not me', as the unconscious and the conscious; the `me' that identifies with the family or not with the family, with the community or not with the community and so on. It is like a stone dropped in a lake: the waves spread and spread, at the centre is the `me'. As long as the `me' survives in any form, very subtly or grossly, there must be violence. But to ask the question, `What is the root cause of violence?', to try to find out what the cause is, is not necessarily to get rid of it. I think, if I were to know why I am brutal, that I would have finished with it. Then I spend weeks, months, years, searching for the cause, or reading the explanations given by experts, of the various causes of violence or aggression; but in the end I am still violent. So, do we enquire into this question of violence through the discovery of the cause and the effect? - or do we take the whole and look at it? We see that the cause becomes the effect and the effect becomes the cause - there is no cause and no effect so markedly different - it is a chain, a cause becoming the effect and the effect becoming the cause - and we go along this process indefinitely. But if we could look at this whole problem of violence, we will comprehend it so vitally that it will come to an end. We have built a society which is violent and we, as human beings, are violent; the environment, the culture in which we live, is the product of our endeavour, of our struggle, of our pain, of our appalling brutalities. So the most important question is: is it possible to end this tremendous violence in oneself? That is really the question. Questioner: Is it possible to transform violence? Krishnamurti: Violence is a form of energy; it is energy utilized in a certain way which becomes aggression. But we are not for the moment trying to transform or change violence but to understand it and comprehend it so fully that one is free of it; the mind has gone beyond it - whether it has transcended it or transformed it, is not so relevant. Is it possible? - is it not possible? - it is possible - these words! How does one think about violence? How does one look at violence? Please listen to the question: how does one know that one is violent? When one is violent, is one aware that one is violent? How does one know violence? This question of knowing is really complex. When I say, `I know you', what does `I know' mean? I know you as you were when I met you yesterday, or ten years ago. But between ten years ago and now you have changed and I have changed, therefore I do not know you. I know you only as of the past, therefore I can never say `I know you' - do please understand this simple thing first. Therefore I can only say, `I've been violent, but I do not know what violence is now.' You say something to me which irritates my nerves and I am angry. A second later, you say, `I've been angry.' At the moment of anger you do not recognise it, only later do you do that. You have to examine the structure of recognition; if you do not understand that you will not be able to meet anger afresh. I am angry, but I realize I am angry a moment later. The realization is the recognition that I have been angry; it is taking place after I have been angry -otherwise I do not know it as anger. See what has happened: the recognition interferes with the actuality. I am always translating the present actuality in terms of the past. So can one, without translating the present in terms of the past, look at the response anew, with a fresh mind? You call me a fool and my whole blood comes to the surface and says, `You're another.' And what has taken place, in me, emotionally, inwardly? I have an image about myself as something which I think is desirable, noble, worthwhile; and you are insulting that image. It is that image that responds, which is the old. So the next question is: can the response not be from the old? - can there be an interval between the `old' and the new actuality? - can the old be hesitant, so as to allow the new to take place? I think that is where the whole problem is. Questioner: Are you saying that all violence is just the division between what is not and what is? Krishnamurti: No, sir. Let us begin again. We are violent. Throughout existence, human beings have been violent and are violent. I want to find out, as a human being, how to transcend this violence, how to go beyond it. What am I to do? I see what violence has done in the world, how it has destroyed every form of relationship, how it has brought deep agony in oneself, misery - I see all that. And I say to myself, I want to live a really peaceful life in which there is deep abundance of love - all the violence must go. Now what have I to do? First I must not escape from it; let us be sure of that. I must not escape from the fact that I am violent - `escaping' being condemning it or justifying it, or the naming of it as violence - the naming is a form of condemnation, a form of justification. I have to realize that the mind must not be distracted from this fact of violence, neither in seeking the cause nor in the explanation of the cause, nor in naming the fact that I am violent, nor in justifying it, condemning it, trying to get rid of it. These are all forms of distraction from the fact of violence. The mind must be absolutely clear that there is no escape from it; nor must there be the exercise of will which says, `I will conquer it' - will is the very essence of violence. Questioner: Basically, are we trying to find what violence is by finding the order in it? Krishnamurti: No, sir. How can there be order in violence? -violence is disorder. There must be no escape from it of any kind, no intellectual or explanatory justification - see the difficulty of this, for the mind is so cunning, so sharp to escape, because it does not know what to do with its violence. It is not capable of dealing with it - or it thinks it is not capable - therefore it escapes. Every form of escape, distraction, of movement away, sustains violence. If one realizes this, then the mind is confronted with the fact of `what is' and nothing else. Questioner: How can you tell whether it is violence if you do not name it? Krishnamurti: When you name it you are relating it through the name to the past, therefore you are looking at it with the eyes that are touched by the past, therefore you are not looking at it afresh -that is all. Do you get the point? You look at violence, justifying it, saying that the violence is necessary in order to live in this monstrous society, saying that violence is part of nature - `look, nature kills' - you are conditioned to look with condemnation, justification or resistance. You can only look at it afresh, anew, when you become aware that you are identifying what you see with the images of what you already know and that therefore you are not looking at it afresh. So the question then arises: how are these images formed, what is the mechanism that forms images? My wife says to me, `You are a fool.' I do not like it and it leaves a mark on my mind. She says something else; that also leaves a mark on my mind. These marks are the images of memory. Now when she says to me, 'You are a fool', if at that very minute I am aware, giving attention, then there is no marking at all - she may be right. So inattention breeds images; attention frees the mind from the image. This is very simple. In the same way, if when I am angry I become completely attentive, then there is not that inattention which allows the past to come in and interfere with the actual perception of anger at the moment. Questioner: Is that not an act of will? Krishnamurti: We said: `Will is in essence violence.' Let us examine what will is: `I want to do that' - `I won't have that' - `I shall do that' - I resist, I demand, I desire, which are forms of resistance. When you say, `I will that', it is a form of resistance and resistance is violence. Questioner: I follow you when you say that we avoid the problem by seeking an answer; that gets away from 'what is'. Krishnamurti: So, I want to know how to look at `what is'. Now, we are trying to find out if it is possible to transcend violence. We were saying: `Do not escape from it; do not move away from that central fact of violence.' The question was asked: `How do you know it is violence?' Do you know it only because you are able to recognise it as having been violence? But when you look at it without naming, without justifying or condemning (which are all the conditioning of the past) then you are looking at it afresh - are you not? Then is it violence? This is one of the most difficult things to do, because all our living is conditioned by the past. Do you know what it is to live in the present? Questioner: You say,`Be free of violence' - that includes a lot more; how far does freedom go? Krishnamurti: Go into freedom; what does it mean? There are all the deep down angers, frustrations, resistances; the mind must also be free of those, must it not? I am asking: can the mind be free of active violence in the present, be free of all the unconscious accumulations of hate, anger, bitterness, which are there, deep down? How is this to be done? Questioner: If one is free of this violence in oneself, then when one sees violence outside of oneself, is one not depressed? What is one to do? Krishnamurti: What one is to do is to teach another. Teaching another is the highest profession in the world - not for money, not for your big bank account, but just to teach, to tell others. Questioner: What is the easiest way to... Krishnamurti: What is the easiest way?.... (Laughter.)... A circus! Sir, you teach another and by teaching you are learning yourself. It is not that first you have learnt, accumulated, then you inform. You yourself are violent; understanding yourself is to help another to understand himself, therefore the teaching is the learning. You do not see the beauty of all this. So, let us go on. Do you not want to know from your heart what love is? Has it not been the human cry, for millenia, to find out how to live peacefully, how to have real abundance of love, compassion. That can only come into being when there is the real sense of 'non-me', you understand. And we say: Look, to find that out - whether it is from loneliness, or anger, or bitterness - look, without any escape. The escape is the naming of it, so do not name it, look at it. And then see - not naming - if bitterness exists. Questioner: Do you advocate getting rid of all violence, or is some violence healthy in one's life? I do not mean physical violence, but getting rid of frustrations. Can this be helpful, trying to keep from being frustrated? Krishnamurti: No, Madame. The answer is in the question: Why be frustrated? Have you ever asked yourself why you are frustrated? And to answer that question have you ever asked: What is fulfilment? - why do you want to fulfil? Is there such a thing as fulfilment? What is it that is fulfilling? - is it the 'me', the 'me' that is violent, the 'me' that is separating, the 'me' that says, 'I am bigger than you', that pursues ambition, fame, notoriety? Because it wants to become bitter. Do you see that there is such a thing as the 'me' wanting to expand itself, which, when it cannot expand, feels frustrated and therefore bitter? - that bitterness, that desire to expand, is violence. Now when you see the truth of that, then there is no desire for fulfilment at all, therefore there is no frustration. Questioner: Plants and animals are both living things, they both try to survive. Do you draw a distinction between killing animals to eat and killing plants to eat? If so why? Krishnamurti: One has to survive, so one kills the least sensitive thing that is available, I have never eaten meat in all my life. And I believe some scientists are gradually coming to that point of view also: if they do, then you will accept it! Questioner: It seems to me, that everyone here is used to Aristotelian thinking, and you are using non-Aristotelian tactics; and the gap is so complete I am amazed. How can we commune very closely? Krishnamurti: That is the difficulty, sir. You are used to one particular formula or language, with a certain meaning, and the speaker has not that particular view. So there is a difficulty in communication. We went into that: we said, the word is not the thing, the description is not the described, the explanation is not the explained. You keep on sticking to the explanation, holding on to the word; that is why there is difficulty. So: we see what violence is in the world - part of fear, part of pleasure. There is a tremendous drive for excitement: we want that, and we encourage society to give it to us. And then we blame society; whereas it is we who are responsible. And we are asking ourselves whether the terrific energy of this violence can be used differently. To be violent needs energy: can that energy be transformed or moved in another direction? Now, in the very understanding and seeing the truth of that, that energy becomes entirely different. Questioner: Are you saying then that non-violence is absolute? -that violence is an aberration of what could be? Krishnamurti: Yes, if you want to put it that way. We are saying that violence is a form of energy and love is also a form of energy - love without jealousy, without anxiety, without fear, without bitterness, without all the agony that goes with so-called love. Now, violence is energy, and love hedged about, surrounded with jealousy, is also another form of energy. To transcend both, go beyond both, implies the same energy moved in a totally different direction or dimension. Questioner: Love with jealousy is actually violence? Krishnamurti: Of course it is. Questioner: So you have the two energies, you have the violence and the love. Krishnamurti: It is the same energy, sir. Questioner: When should we have psychic experiences? Krishnamurti: What has that to do with violence? When should you have psychic experiences? Never! Do you know what it means to have psychic experiences? To have the experience, extrasensory perceptive experience, you must be extraordinarily mature, extraordinarily sensitive, and therefore extraordinarily intelligent; and if you are extraordinarily intelligent, you do not want psychic experience. (Laughter.) Do give your heart to this, please: human beings are destroying each other through violence, the husband is destroying the wife and the wife is destroying the husband. Though they sleep together, walk together, each lives in isolation with his own problems, with his own anxieties; and this isolation is violence. Now when you see all this so clearly in front of you - see it, not just think about it -when you see the danger of it, you act, do you not? When you see a dangerous animal, you act; there is no hesitation, there is no argument between you and the animal - you just act, you run away or do something. Here we are arguing because you do not see the tremendous danger of violence. If you actually, with your heart, see the nature of violence, see the danger of it, you are finished with it. Now how can one point out the danger of it, if you do not want to see? - neither Aristotelian nor non-Aristotelian language will help you. Questioner: How do we meet violence in other people? Krishnamurti: That is really quite a different problem, is it not? My neighbour is violent: how shall I deal with it? Turn the other cheek? He is delighted. What shall I do? Would you ask that question if you were really non-violent, if there were no violence in you? Do listen to this question. If in your heart, in your mind, there is no violence at all, no hate, no bitterness, no sense of fulfilment, no wanting to be free, no violence at all, would you ask that question about how you meet the neighbour who is violent? Or would you know then what to do with your neighbour? Others may call what you do violent, but you may not be violent; at the moment your neighbour acts violently you will know how to deal with the situation. But a third person, watching, might say, `You are also violent'. But you know you are not violent. So what is important is to be for yourself completely without violence and it does not matter what another calls you. Questioner: Is not the belief in the unity of all things just as human as the belief in the division of all things? Krishnamurti: Why do you want to believe in anything? Why do you want to believe in the unity of all human beings? - we are not united, that is a fact; why do you want to believe in something which is non-factual. There is this whole question of belief; just think, you have your belief and another has his belief; and we fight and kill each other for a belief. Why do you have any belief at all? Do you have belief because you are afraid? No? Do you believe that the sun rises? - it is there to see, you do not have to believe in that. Belief is a form of division and therefore of violence. To be free of violence implies freedom from everything that man has put to another man, belief, dogma, rituals, my country, your country, your god and my god, my opinion, your opinion, my ideal. All those help to divide human beings and therefore breed violence. And though organized religions have preached the unity of mankind, each religion thinks it is far superior to the other. Questioner: I interpreted what you were saying about unity to mean that those who preach unity are actually aiding the division. Krishnamurti: Quite right, sir. Questioner: Is the purpose for living just to be able to cope with existence? Krishnamurti: You say, `Is this the purpose of living?' -but why do you want a purpose for living? - live. Living is its own purpose; why do you want a purpose? Look: each one has his own purpose, the religious man his purpose, the scientist his purpose, the family man his purpose and so on, all dividing. The life of a man who has a purpose is breeding violence. It is so clear and simple. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART II CHAPTER 3 SAN DIEGO STATE COLLEGE 4TH PUBLIC TALK 9TH APRIL 1970 'MEDITATION' WHAT IS MEDITATION? Before we go into that really quite complex and intricate problem we ought to be very clear as to what it is that we are after. We are always seeking something, especially those who are religiously minded; even for the scientist, seeking has become quite an issue - seeking. This factor, of seeking, must be very clearly and definitely understood before we go into what meditation is and why one should meditate at all, what is its use and where does it get you. The word `seek' - to run after, to search out - implies, does it not, that we already know, more or less, what we are after. When we say we are seeking truth, or we are seeking God - if we are religiously minded - or we are seeking a perfect life and so on, we must already have in our minds an image or an idea. To find something after seeking it, we must already have known what its contour is, its colour, its substance and so on. Is there not implied in that word, `seeking', that we have lost something and we are going to find it and that when we find it we shall be able to recognise it - which means that we have already known it, that all we have to do is to go after it and search it out? In meditation the first thing we realize is that it is no use to seek; for what is sought is predetermined by what you wish; if you are unhappy, lonely, in despair, you will search out hope, companionship, something to sustain you, and you will find it, inevitably. In meditation, one must lay the foundation, the foundation of order, which is righteousness - not respectability, the social morality which is no morality at all, but the order that comes of understanding disorder: quite a different thing. Disorder must exist as long as there is conflict, both outwardly and inwardly. Order, which comes of understanding disorder, is not according to a blueprint, according to some authority, or your own particular experience. Obviously this order must come about without effort, because effort distorts - it must come about without any form of control. We are talking about something very difficult in saying that we must bring about order without control. We must understand disorder, how it comes into being; it is the conflict which is in ourselves. In observing it, it is understood; it is not a matter of overcoming it, throttling it, suppressing it. To observe without any distortion, without any compulsive or directive impulse, is quite an arduous task. Control implies either suppression, rejection or exclusion; it implies a division between a controller and the thing controlled; it implies conflict. When one understands this, control and choice come totally to an end. All this may seem rather difficult and rather contradictory to everything you have thought about. You may say: how can there be order without control, without the action of will? But, as we have said, control implies division, between the one who controls and the thing that is to be controlled; in this division there is conflict, there is distortion - When you really understand this, then there is the ending of the division between the controller and the controlled and therefore comprehension, understanding. When there is understanding of what actually is, then there is no need for control. So there are these two essential things that must be completely understood if we are to go into the question of what meditation is: first, there is no use in seeking; second, there must be that order which comes from the understanding of disorder which comes from control, with all the implications of the duality and the contradiction which arises between the observer and the observed. Order comes when the one who is angry and tries to get rid of anger sees that he is anger itself. Without this understanding you really cannot possibly know what meditation is. Do not fool yourself with all the books written about meditation, or with all the people who tell you how to meditate, or the groups that are formed in order to meditate. For if there is no order, which is virtue, the mind must live in the effort of contradiction. How can such a mind be aware of the whole implication of meditation? With one's whole being one must come upon this strange thing called love - and therefore be without fear. We mean love that is not touched by pleasure, by desire, by jealousy love that knows no competition, that does not divide, as my love and your love. Then the mind - including the brain and the emotions - is in complete harmony; and this must be, otherwise meditation becomes self-hypnosis. You must work very hard, to find out the activities of your own mind, how it functions, with its self-centred activities, the `me' and the `not me; you must be quite familiar with yourself and all the tricks that the mind plays upon itself, the illusions and the delusions, the imagery and the imagining of all the romantic ideas that one has. A mind that is capable of sentimentality is incapable of love; sentiment breeds brutality, cruelty and violence, not love. To establish this deeply in yourself is quite arduous; it demands a tremendous discipline, to learn by observing what is going on in yourself. That observation is not possible if there is any form of prejudice, conclusion or formula, according to which you are observing. If you are observing according to what a psychologist has said to you, you really are not observing yourself, therefore there is no self-knowing. You need a mind that is able to stand completely alone - not burdened by the propaganda or the experiences of others. Enlightenment does not come through a leader or through a teacher; it comes through the understanding of what is in yourself -not going away from yourself. The mind has to understand actually what is going on in its own psychological field; it must be aware of what is going on without any distortion, without any choice, without any resentment, bitterness, explanation or justification - it must just be aware. This basis is laid happily, not compulsively, but with ease, with felicity, without any hope of reaching anything. If you have hope, you are moving away from despair; one has to understand despair, not search out hope. In the understanding of `what is' there is neither despair nor hope. Is all this asking too much of the human mind? Unless one asks what may appear to be impossible, one falls into the trap, the limitation, of what is thought to be possible. To fall into this trap is very easy. One has to ask the utmost of the mind and the heart, otherwise one will remain in the convenient and the comfortable possible. Now are we together still? Verbally, probably we are; but the word is not the thing; what we have done is to describe, and the description is not the described. If you are taking a journey with the speaker you are taking the journey actually, not theoretically, not as an idea but as something that you yourself are actually observing - not something you are experiencing; there is a difference between observation and experience. There is a vast difference between observation and experience. In observation there is no `observer' at all, there is only observing; there is not the one who observes and is divided off from the thing observed. Observation is entirely different from the exploration in which analysis is involved. In analysis there is always the `analyser' and the thing to be analysed. In exploring there is always an entity who explores. In observation there is a continuous learning, not a continuous accumulation. I hope you see the difference. Such learning is different from learning in order to accumulate so that from that accumulation one thinks and acts. An enquiry may be logical, sane and rational, but to observe without the `observer' is entirely different. Then there is the question of experience. Why do we want experience? Have you ever thought about it? We have experience all the time, of which we are either cognizant or ignorant. And we want deeper, wider, experiences - mystical, profound, transcendental, godly, spiritual - why? Is it not because one's life is so shoddy, so miserable, so small and petty? One wants to forget all that and move into another dimension altogether. How can a petty mind, worried, fearful, occupied with problem after problem, experience anything other than its own projection and activity? This demand for greater experience is the escaping from that which actually is; yet it is only through that actuality that the most mysterious thing in life is come upon. In experience is involved the process of recognition. When you recognise something, it means you have already known it. Experience, generally, is out of the past, there is nothing new in it. So there is a difference between observation and the craving for experience. If all this, that is so extraordinarily subtle, demanding great inward attention, is clear, then we can come to our original question: what is meditation? So much has been said about meditation; so many volumes have been written; there are great (I do not know if they are great) yogis who come and teach you how to meditate. The whole of Asia talks about meditation; it is one of their habits, as it is a habit to believe in God or something else. They sit for ten minutes a day in a quiet room and `meditate', concentrate, fix their mind on an image, an image created by themselves, or by somebody else who has offered that image through propaganda. During those ten minutes they try to control the mind; the mind wants to go back and forth and they battle with it - that game they play everlastingly; and that is what they call meditation. If one does not know anything about meditation, then one has to find out what it is, actually - not according to anybody - and that may lead one to nothing or it may lead one to everything. One must enquire, ask that question, without any expectation. To observe the mind - this mind that chatters, that projects ideas, that lives in contradiction, in constant conflict and comparison - I must obviously be very quiet. If I am to listen to what you are saying I must give attention, I cannot be chattering, I cannot be thinking about something else, I must not compare what you are saying with what I already know, I must listen to you completely; the mind must be attentive, must be silent, quiet. It is imperative to see clearly the whole structure of violence; looking at violence the mind becomes completely still - you do not have to `cultivate' a still mind. To cultivate a still mind implies the one who cultivates, in the field of time, that which he hopes to achieve. See the difficulty. Those who try to teach meditation, say, `Control your mind, make your mind absolutely quiet'. You try to control it and everlastingly battle with it; you spend forty years controlling it. The mind that observes does not control and everlastingly battle. The very act of seeing or listening is attention; this you do not have to practise at all; if you practise, you immediately become inattentive. You are attentive and your mind wanders off; let it wander off, but know that it is inattentive; that awareness of that inattention is attention. Do not battle with inattention; do not try, saying, `I must be attentive' - it is childish. Know that you are inattentive; be aware, choicelessly, that you are inattentive - what of it? - and at the moment, in that inattention, when there is action, be aware of that action. Do you understand this? It is so simple. If you do it, it becomes so clear, clear as the waters. The silence of the mind is beauty in itself. To listen to a bird, to the voice of a human being, to the politician, to the priest, to all the noise of propaganda that goes on, to listen completely silently, is to hear much more, to see much more. Such silence is not possible if your body is not also completely still. The organism, with all its nervous responses - the fidgeting, the ceaseless movement of fingers, the eyes - with all its general restlessness, must be completely still. Have you ever tried sitting completely still without a single movement of the body, including the eyes? Do it for two minutes. In those two minutes the whole thing is revealed - if you know how to look. The body being still, the flow of blood to the head becomes more. But if you sit crouched and sloppy, then it is more difficult for the blood to go to the head - you must know all this. But, on the other hand, you can do anything and meditate; when in the bus, or when you are driving - it is the most extraordinary thing, that you can meditate while you are driving - be careful, I mean this. The body has its own intelligence, which thought has destroyed. Thought seeks pleasure, and in this way thought leads to indulgence, overeating, indulging sexually, it compels the body to do certain things - if it is lazy, it forces it not to be lazy, or it suggests taking a pill to keep awake. That way the innate intelligence of the organism is destroyed and it becomes insensitive. One needs great sensitivity, therefore one has to watch what one eats - if one overeats, one know what happens. When there is great sensitivity, there is intelligence and therefore love; love then is joy and timeless. Most of us have physical pain, in some form or another. That pain generally disturbs the mind which spends days, even years, thinking about it - 'I wish I did not have it', 'Shall I ever be without it?' When the body has pain, watch it, observe it, do not let thought interfere with it. The mind, including the brain and the heart, must be in total harmony. Now, what is the point of all this, this kind of life, this kind of harmony, what good is it in the world, where is so much suffering? If one or two people have this ecstatic life, what is the point of it? What is the point of asking this question? - it has none whatsoever. If you do have this extraordinary thing going in your life, then it is everything; then you become the teacher, the disciple, the neighbour, the beauty of the cloud - you are all that, and that is love. Then comes another factor in meditation. The waking mind, the mind that is functioning during the day along the lines in which it has been trained, the conscious mind with all its daily activities, continues these activities during sleep in dreams. In dreams there is action going on, of some kind or other, some happening, so that your sleep is a continuation if the waking hours. And there is a lot of mysterious hocus-pocus about dreams - that they need to be interpreted, hence all the professionals interpreting dreams - which you can observe yourself very simply, if you watch your life during the daytime. Yet why should there be dreams at all? (Though the psychologists say that you must have dreams, otherwise you will go insane.) But when you have observed very closely your waking hours, all your self-centred activities, the fearful, the anxious, the guilty, when you are attentive to that all day then you will see when you sleep, you have no dreams. The mind has been watching every moment of thought, attentive to its every word, if you do it, you will see the beauty of it - not the tired boredom of watching, but the beauty of watching; you will see then that there is attention in sleep. And meditation, the thing that we have talked about during this hour, becomes extraordinarily important and worthwhile, full of dignity and grace and beauty. When you understand what attention is, not only during waking hours but also during sleep, then the whole of the mind is totally awake. Beyond that, every form of description is not the described; you do not talk about it. All that one can do is point to the door. And if you are willing to go, take a journey to that door, then it is for you to walk beyond; nobody can describe the thing that is not nameable, whether that nameable is nothing or everything - it does not matter. Anybody who describes it does not know. And one who says he knows, does not know. Questioner: What is quietness, what is silence? Is it the ending of noise? Krishnamurti: Sound is a strange thing. I do not know if you ever listen to sound - not to sounds which you like or do not like -but just to listen to a sound! Sound in space has an extraordinary effect. Have you ever listened to a jet plane that is passing overhead? - have you, to the deep sound of it, without any resistance? Have you listened and moved with that sound? It has a certain resonance. Now, what is silence? - is it the 'space' you produce, which you call silence, by control, by suppressing noise? The brain is all the time active, responding to stimuli with its own noise. So what is silence? You understand the question now? Is silence the cessation of that self-created noise? - is it the cessation of chattering, of verbalization, of every thought? Even when there is no more verbalization and thought seemingly comes to an end, the brain is still going on. Is not silence therefore not only the end of noise but the complete cessation of all movement? Observe it, go into it, see how your brain, which is the result of millions of years of conditioning, is responding to every stimulus instantly; see whether those brain cells, everlastingly active, chattering, responding, can be still. Can the mind, the brain, the whole organism, this total psychosomatic thing, be completely still? - not forced, not compelled, not driven, not out of greed saying `I must be still in order to have the most marvellous experience'? Go into it, find out and see whether your silence is a mere product, or whether it is perhaps because you have laid the foundation. If you have not laid the foundation, which is love, which is virtue, which is goodness, which is beauty, which is real compassion in the depth of your whole being, if you have not done that, your silence is only the ending of noise. Then there is the whole problem of drugs. In India, in ancient times, there used to be a substance called `soma'. It was a kind of mushroom of which they drank the juice which produced either tranquillity or all kinds of hallucinatory experiences; those experiences being the result of conditioning. (All experiences are the result of conditioning; if you believe in God, obviously you have the experience of God; but that belief is based on fear and all the agony of conflict; your god is the result of your own fear. And so the most marvellous experience of God is nothing but your own projection.) But they lost the secret of that mushroom, that particular thing called soma. Since then, in India, as here, there are various drugs, hashish, L.S.D., marihuana, you know the multiplicity of them all, tobacco, drink, heroin. Also there is fasting. If you fast, certain chemical actions take place producing a certain clarity and there is delight in that. If one can live a beautiful life without taking drugs, why take them? But those who have taken them tell us that certain changes take place; a certain vitality, an energy arises and the space between the observer and the observed disappears; things are seen much more clearly. One drug taker says he takes them when he goes to a museum, for then he sees colours more brilliantly then ever before. But you can see those colours in such brilliance without the drug when you pay complete attention, when you observe without the space between you the observer and the thing observed. When you take drugs you depend on them, and sooner or later they have all kinds of disastrous effects. So there it is - fasting, drugs, which it is hoped will satisfy the desire for great experience, which will produce everything that you want. And what is wanted is such a tawdry affair; some petty little experience, which is blown up into something extraordinary. So a wise man, a man who has observed all this, puts aside all the stimulants; he observes himself and knows himself. The knowing of himself is the beginning of wisdom and the ending of sorrow. Questioner: In right relationship, do we really help others? Is it sufficient to love them? Krishnamurti: What is relationship? What do we mean by relationship? Are we related to anybody? - except sanguinary relationship. What do we mean by that word `relationship'? Are we ever related to anything when each one of us lives a life of isolation - isolation in the sense of self-centred activity, each with his own problems, his own fears, his own despairs, his desire to fulfil - all enclosing properties. If he is, so-called, related to his wife, he has added images. It is these images that have relationship, and that relationship is called love! Relationship exists only when the image, the isolating process, comes to an end, when you have no ambition for her and she has no ambition for you, when she does not possess you or you possess her, or you depend on her or she on you. When there is love you will not ask whether it helps or not. A wayside flower, with its beauty, with its perfume, is not asking you who are passing by to come and smell it, to look at it, to enjoy it, to see the beauty, the delicacy, the perishable nature of it - it is there for you to look or not to look. But if you say `I want to help another', that is the beginning of fear, the beginning of mischief. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART III CHAPTER 1 LONDON 1ST PUBLIC TALK 16TH MAY 1970 'CONTROL AND ORDER' THERE ARE SO many frightening things happening in the world; there is so much confusion, violence and brutality. What can one do, as a human being, in a world that is torn apart, in a world where there is so much despair and sorrow? And in oneself there is so much confusion and conflict. What is the relationship of a human being with this corrupt society, where the individual himself is corrupt? What is the way of life in which one can find some kind of peace, some kind of order and yet live in this society which is corrupt, disintegrating? I am sure you must have asked these questions of yourself; and if one has found the right answer, which is extremely difficult, perhaps one can bring about some kind of order in one's life. What value has one individual who leads an orderly, sane, whole, balanced life in a world that is destroying itself, a world that is constantly threatened by war? What value has individual change? How will it affect this whole mass of human existence? I am sure you have asked these questions. But I think they are wrong questions, because one does not live and act rightly for the sake of somebody else, for the benefit of society. So one must find out, it seems to me, what order is, so as not to be dependent on circumstance, on a particular culture - economic, social or otherwise - because if one does not find out for oneself what order is and the way to live without conflict, one's life is wasted, it has no meaning, As we are living now in constant travail and conflict, life has very little meaning; it actually has no significance at all. Having a little money, going to the office, being conditioned, repeating what others say, having very strong, obstinate opinions and dogmatic beliefs - all such activity has very little meaning. And since it has no meaning, the intellectuals throughout the world try to give it a meaning. If they are religious they give it a particular slant; if they are materialistic they give it another, with a particular philosophy or theory. So it seems very important - not only now but at all times, if one is at all serious - to find a way of life for oneself, not as a theory, but actually in daily life, a way to live without conflict of any kind at every level of one's being. To find that out one must be serious. These meetings here are not a philosophical or religious entertainment. We are here - if we are serious, and I hope we are -to find out together a way of life not according to any particular formula or theory or principle or belief. Communication implies sharing together, creating together, working together, not merely listening to a lot of words and ideas; we are not dealing with ideas at all. So from the beginning it must be very clear that we are seriously giving our mind and heart to find out if man - if you - can live completely at peace, ending all conflict in all relationships. To find out, one must look at oneself not according to a particular philosophy or a particular system of thought, or from any particular religious point of view. I think one has to discard all that completely, so that one's mind is free to observe itself in relation to society, in relation to ourselves, to our families, to our neighbour; for only then, in the observation of what is actually going on, is there a possibility of going beyond it. And I hope that is what we are going to do during these talks. We are not professing a new theory, a new philosophy, nor bringing a religious revelation. There is no teacher, no saviour, no master, no authority - I really mean this - because if you are going to share in what is being said, you must also put aside totally every form of authoritarian, hierarchical outlook; the mind must be free to observe. And it cannot possibly observe if you are following some system, some guide, some principle, or are tethered to any form of belief. The mind must be capable of observing. That is going to be our difficulty, because for most of us knowledge has become a dead weight, a heavy stone round our necks; it has become our habit, our conditioning. The mind that is serious must be free to observe; it must be free of this dead weight which is knowledge, experience, tradition - which is accumulated memory, the past. So to observe actually `what is', to see the whole significance of `what is', the mind must be fresh, clear, undivided. And that is going to be another problem: how to look without this division -the `me' and the `not me', and `we' and `they'. As we said, you are observing yourself, watching yourself through the words of the speaker. So the question is: how are you to observe? I do not know if you have ever gone into that question at all. How do you look, hear, observe? - not only yourself, but the sky, the trees, the birds, your neighbour, the politician. How do you listen and observe another, how do you observe yourself? The key to this observation lies in seeing things without division. And can that ever happen? All our existence is fragmented. We are divided in ourselves, we are contradictory. We live in fragmentation - which is an actual fact. One fragment of these many fragments thinks it has the capacity to observe. Although through many associations it has assumed authority, it is still a fragment of the many fragments. And that one fragment looks and says, `I understand; I know what right action is.' So being fragmented, broken up, contradictory, there is conflict between the various fragments. You know this as a fact, if you have observed it. And we come to the conclusion that nothing can be done about it, that nothing can be changed. How can this fragmentation be made whole? We realize that to live a harmonious, orderly, sane, healthy life, this fragmentation, this division between the 'you' and the `me' must come to an end. But we have concluded that this is not possible - that is the dead weight of 'what is'. So we invent theories, we wait for `grace' from something divine - whatever you call it - to come and miraculously release us. Unfortunately that does not happen. Or you live in an illusion, invent some myth about the higher self, the Atman. This offers an escape. We are easily persuaded to escape because we do not know how this fragmentation can be made whole. We are not talking of integration, because that implies that somebody brings about integration - one fragment bringing the other fragments together. I hope you see the difficulty of this, how we are broken up into many fragments, conscious or unconscious. And we try many ways. One of the fashionable ways is to have an analyst to do this for you; or you analyse yourself. Please do follow this carefully: there is the analyser and the thing to be analysed. We have never questioned who the analyser is. He is obviously one of the many fragments and he proceeds to analyse the whole structure of oneself. But the analyser himself, being a fragment, is conditioned. When he analyses there are several things involved. First of all, every analysis must be complete or otherwise it becomes the stone round the neck of the analyser when he begins to analyse the next incident, the next reaction. So the memory of the previous analysis increases the burden. And analysis also implies time; there are so many reactions, associations and memories to be analysed that it will take all your life. By the time you have completely analysed yourself - if that is ever possible - you are ready for the grave. That is one of our conditionings, the idea that we must analyse ourselves, look at ourselves introspectively. In the analysis there is always the censor, the one who controls, guides, shapes; there is always the conflict between the analyser and the thing to be analysed. So one has to see this - not as a theory, not as something that you have accumulated as knowledge; knowledge is excellent in its own place but not when you are trying to understand the whole structure of your being. If you use knowledge through association and accumulation, through analysis, as a means of understanding yourself, then you have stopped learning about yourself. To learn there must be freedom to observe without the censor. We can see this going on in ourselves, actually, as `what is', night and day, endlessly. And seeing the truth of it - the truth, not as an opinion - the futility, the mischief, the wastage of energy and time, then the whole process of analysis comes to an end. I hope you are doing this as you are listening to what is being said. Because through analysis there is the continuation of the endless chain of association; therefore one says to oneself, `One can never change; this conflict, this misery, this confusion is inevitable, this is the way of life.' So one becomes mechanical, violent, brutal, and stupid. When one really observes this as a fact, one sees the truth of it; one can only see this truth when one actually sees what is going on - the `what is'. Do not condemn it, do not rationalize it -just observe it. And you can only observe when there is no association in your observation. As long as there is the analyser there must be the censor who brings about this whole problem of control. I do not know if you have ever realized that from the moment we are born till we die, we are always controlling ourselves. The `must' and the `must not', the `should be' and the `should not'. Control implies conformity, imitation, following a particular principle, an ideal, eventually leading to that appalling thing called respectability. Why should one control at all? - which does not mean you entirely lose all control. One has to understand what is implied in control. The very process of control breeds disorder; just as the opposite - lack of control - also breeds disorder. One has to explore, understand, look at what is implied in control and see the truth of it; then one lives a life of order in which there is no control whatsoever. Disorder is brought about by this contradiction caused by the censor, the analyser, the entity that has separated himself from the various other fragments, and who is trying to impose what he thinks is right. So one has to understand this particular form of conditioning, which is: that we are all bound and shaped by control. I do not know if you ever asked yourself why you control anything at all. You do control, don't you? Why? What makes you control? What is the root of this imitation, this conformity? Obviously one of the factors is our conditioning, our culture, our religious and social sanctions, as `you must do this' and `not do that'. In this control there is always the will, which is a form of urgent desire that controls, that shapes, that directs. Observe this, please, as you are listening; actually observe it and you will see that something quite different comes about. We control ourselves, our tempers, our desires, our appetites, because it is always safe. There is great security in control, with all its suppressions and contradictions, with all its struggles and conflicts; there is a certain sense of safety. And also it assures us that we shall never fail. Where there is division between the controller and the thing controlled, there is no goodness. Goodness does not lie in separation. Virtue is a state of mind in which there is no separation, therefore there is no control which involves division. Control implies suppression, contradiction, effort, the demand for security -all in the name of goodness, beauty, virtue; but it is the very denial of virtue, and is therefore disorder. So can one observe without division, without the observer opposed to the thing to be observed, without the knowledge which the observer has acquired, which separates him when he looks? For the observer is the enemy of the good - though he desires order, though he attempts to bring about righteous behaviour, to live peacefully. The observer who separates himself from the thing observed is the very source of all that is not good. Do you see all this? Or are you just being casually entertained on a Saturday afternoon? Do you know what all this means? - that the mind is no longer analysing but actually observing, seeing directly and therefore acting directly. It means a mind in which there is no division whatsoever; it is a total, whole mind - which means being sane. It is the neurotic who has to control; when he comes to the point of having controlled himself totally, he is completely neurotic so that he cannot move, is not free. See the truth of this! The truth is not `what is' - the `what is' is the division, the Black and White, the Arab and the Jew, all the mess that is going on in this frightful world. Because the mind has divided itself it is not a whole, sane, healthy, holy mind. And because of this division in the mind itself, there is so much corruption, so much disorder, so much violence and brutality. So the question then is: can the mind observe without division, where the observer is the observed? To look at a tree, at a cloud, at the beauty of the lovely spring, to look at yourself, without the burden of knowledge; to look at yourself and learn at the moment of observation, without the accumulation of learning, so that the mind is free all the time to observe. It is only the young mind that learns, not the mind that is burdened with knowledge. And to learn means to observe oneself without division, without analysis, without the censor dividing the good from the bad, the what `should be' from the `should not be'. This is one of the most important things, because if you so observe, the mind will discover that all conflict comes to an end. In that there is total goodness. It is only such a mind that can act righteously, and in that there is great joy - not the joy stimulated through pleasure. I wonder if you would care to ask any questions? You must question everything, including your pet beliefs, your ideals, your authorities, your scriptures, your politicians. Which means there must be a certain quality of scepticism. But scepticism must be kept on the leash; you must let it go when necessary, so that the mind can see freely, run rapidly. When you question, it must be your own particular problem, not a casual, superficial question that will entertain you; it must be something of your own. If this is so, then you will put the right question. And if it is the right question you will have the right answer, because the very act of putting that right question shows you the answer in itself. So one must - if I may point this out - put the right question. Then in putting the right question we can both of us share, partake together, in that problem. Your problem is not different from other people's problems. All problems are interrelated, and if you can understand one problem completely, wholly, you have understood all other problems. Therefore it is very important to put the right question. But even if it is the wrong question, you will find that in putting the wrong question you will also know when to ask the right question. You must do both: then we shall come to putting always the fundamental, real, true question. Questioner: What is the ultimate reason or purpose of human existence? Krishnamurti: Do you know any purposes? The way we live has no meaning and no purpose. We can invent a purpose, the purpose of perfection, enlightenment, reaching the highest form of sensitivity; we can invent endless theories. And we are caught in those theories, making them our problems. Our daily life has no meaning, no purpose, except to make a bit of money and lead an idiotic kind of life. One can observe all this, not in theory but actually in oneself; the endless battle in oneself, seeking a purpose, seeking enlightenment, going all over the world - specially to India or to japan - to learn a technique of meditation. You can invent a thousand purposes but you need not go anywhere, not to the Himalayas, to a monastery, or to any Ashram - which is another form of concentration camp - because everything is in you. The highest, the immeasurable, is in you, if you know how to look. Do not assume it is there - that is one of the stupid tricks we play upon ourselves, that we are God, that we are the `perfect' and all the rest of that childish stuff. Yet through the illusion, through `what is', through the measurable, you find something that is immeasurable; but you must begin with yourself, where you can discover for yourself how to look. That is: to look without the observer. Questioner: Would you please define, in the context of which you were speaking, control in relation to restraint. Krishnamurti: One has to understand the full meaning of that word control, not only according to the dictionary, but how the mind has been conditioned to control - control being suppression. In that there is the censor, the controller, the division, the conflict, the restraining, the holding, the inhibiting. When one is aware of all this, the mind then becomes very sensitive and therefore highly intelligent. We have destroyed that intelligence, which is also in the body, in the organism; we have perverted it through our pleasurable tastes and appetites. Also the mind has been shaped, controlled, conditioned through centuries by the culture, by fear, by belief. When one realizes this, not theoretically but actually, when one is aware of this, then one will find sensitivity responds intelligently without inhibition, control, suppression or restraint. But one has to understand the structure and the nature of control, which has bred so much disorder in ourselves - the will, which is the very centre of contradiction and therefore of control. Look at it, observe it in your life and you will discover all this and more. But when you make your discovery into knowledge, into some dead weight, then you are lost. Because knowledge is the accumulation of associations, an endless chain. And if the mind is caught in that, then change is impossible. Questioner: Can you explain to me how the mind overcomes the body so that it can levitate? Krishnamurti: Are you really interested in this? I do not know why you want to levitate. You know, sirs, the mind is always seeing something mysterious, something hidden, which nobody else will discover except yourself, and that gives you a tremendous sense of importance, vanity, prestige - you become the `Mystic'. But there is real mystery, something really sacred, when you understand the whole of this life, this whole existence. In that there is great beauty, great joy. There is a tremendous thing called the immeasurable. But you must understand the measurable. And the immeasurable is not the opposite of the measurable. There have been photographs of people who have levitated. The speaker has seen it and other forms of unimportant things. If you are really interested in levitation - I do not know why you should be, but if you are - you have to have a marvellous, highly sensitive body; you must not drink, nor smoke, nor take drugs, nor eat meat. You must have a body that is utterly pliable, healthy, that has its own intelligence, not the intelligence imposed by the mind on the body. And if you have gone through all that, then you may find that levitation has no worth in it! BEYOND VIOLENCE PART III CHAPTER 2 LONDON 3RD PUBLIC TALK 27TH MAY 1970 'TRUTH' THERE ARE SEVERAL things we should talk about, such as education, the significance of dreams, and whether it is at all possible, living in a world that has become so mechanical and imitative, for the mind ever to be free. We may approach the problem by going into the question of whether the mind can be free from all sense of conformity. We have to deal with the whole problem of existence, not one part of it, not only the technical side of life and the earning of a livelihood, but also we have to consider this whole question of how to transform society; whether this is possible through revolt, or if there is a different kind of inward revolution which will inevitably bring about a different kind of society. I think we should go into that and then come upon the question of meditation. Because - if you will forgive me for saying so - I do not think you know what is implied in meditation. Most of us have read about it or have been told what it is and we have tried to practise it. What the speaker has to say about meditation may be quite contrary to all that you know or practise or have experienced. One cannot search for truth; therefore one must understand the meaning of seeking. So it is a very complex question; meditation requires the highest form of sensitivity, a tremendous quality of silence, not induced, not disciplined, not cultivated. And that can only be, or come about, when we understand, psychologically, how to live, because our life as we live it daily, is in conflict; it is a series of conformities, controls, suppressions, and the revolt against all that. There is the whole question of how to live a life without violence of any kind; for without really understanding and being free from violence, meditation is not possible. You can play with it, go to the Himalayas to learn how to breathe and sit properly, do a little bit of yoga and think you have learnt meditation, but that is all rather childish. To come upon that extraordinary thing called meditation, the mind must be completely free of all sense of violence. Therefore it may be worthwhile to talk about violence and see if the mind can actually be free of that; not go off romantically into some kind of stupor called meditation. Volumes have been written as to why man is aggressive. Anthropologists give explanations and each expert puts it in his own way, contradicting or enlarging on what most of us know rationally: that human beings are violent. We think violence is merely a physical act, going to war and killing others. We have accepted war as the way of life. And accepting it, we do nothing about it. Casually or devotedly we may become pacifists in one part of our own life, but for the rest we are in conflict; we are ambitious, we are competitive, we make tremendous efforts; such effort implies conflict and therefore violence. Any form of conformity, any form of distortion - purposely or unconsciously -is violence. To discipline oneself according to a pattern, an ideal, a principle, is a form of violence. Any distortion, without understanding actually 'what is' and going beyond it, is a form of violence. And yet, is it at all possible to end violence in oneself without any conflict, any opposition? We are used to a society, a morality, that is based on violence. We all know this. From childhood we are brought up to be violent, to imitate, to conform - consciously or unconsciously. We do not know how to get out of it. We say to ourselves it is impossible, man must be violent, but violence can be done with gloves on, politely and so on. So we must go into this question of violence, because without understanding violence and fear, how can there be love? Can the mind which has accepted conformity to a society, to a principle, to a social morality which is not moral at all, a mind that has been conditioned by religions to believe - accepting the idea of God, or rejecting it - can it free itself without any form of struggle, without any resistance? Violence begets more violence; resistance only creates other forms of distortion. Without reading books or listening to professors or `saints', one can observe one's own mind. After all, that is the beginning of self-knowledge: to know oneself, not according to some psychologist or analyst, but by observing oneself. One can see how heavily the mind is conditioned - there is nationalism, racial and class differences, and all the rest of it. If one is aware of it one becomes conscious of this conditioning, this vast propaganda in the name of God, in the name of Communism or what you will, which has shaped us from childhood, during centuries upon centuries. Becoming aware of it, can the mind uncondition itself, free itself from all sense of conformity and therefore have freedom? How is this to be done? How can I, or you, become aware, knowing one's mind is solidly conditioned not only superficially but deep down? How is this conditioning to be broken down? If this is not possible we shall live everlastingly in conformity - even if there is a new pattern, a new structure of society or a new set of beliefs, new dogmas and new propagandas, it is still conformity. And if there is to be any kind of social change, there must be a different kind of education - so that children are not brought up to conform. So there is this question: how is the mind to free itself from conditioning? I do not know if you have ever tried it, gone into it very deeply, not only at the conscious level but at the deeper layers of consciousness. Actually, is there a division between the two? Or is it one movement, in which we are only conscious of the superficial movement which has been educated to conform to the demands of a particular society or culture? As we said the other day: we are not merely listening to a few sets of words, because that has no value at all. But by partaking in what is being said, sharing it, working together, you will find out for yourself how to observe this total movement, without separation, without division; because wherever there is any kind of division - racial, intellectual, emotional, or the division of the opposites, the `me' and the `not me', the higher self and the lower self and so on - it must inevitably bring about conflict. Conflict is a waste of energy and to understand all that we are discussing you need a great deal of energy. The mind being so conditioned, how can it observe itself, without division into the observer and the thing observed? The space between the observer and the observed, the distance, the time interval, is a contradiction and the very essence of division. Therefore when the observer separates himself from the thing observed, he not only acts as a censor but brings about this duality and hence conflict So can the mind observe itself without the division of the observer and the observed? Do you understand the problem? When you observe that you are jealous, envious - which is a very common factor - and are aware of it, there is always the observer who says `I must not be jealous.' Or the observer gives a reason for being jealous, justifying it - is that not so? There is the observer and the thing observed; the former observes jealousy as something separate from himself which he tries to control, which he tries to get rid of; hence there is a conflict between the observer and the thing observed. The observer is one of the many fragments which we are. Are we communicating with each other? Do you understand what we mean by communicating? It is sharing together, not just understanding verbally, intellectually seeing the point. There is no intellectual understanding of anything; especially when we are concerned with great fundamental human problems. So when you really understand the truth, that division of any kind must inevitably breed conflict, you will see that it is a waste of energy and therefore causes distortion and violence and everything else that follows from conflict. When you really understand this - not verbally but actually - then you will see how to observe without the time interval and the space between the observer and the thing observed; you will see how to observe the conditioning, the violence, the oppression, the brutality, the appalling things that are going on in the world and in oneself. Are you doing it as we are talking? Do not say `yes' because it is one of the most difficult things, to observe without the observer, without the verbaliser, without the entity that is full of knowledge which is the past, without that space between the observer and the thing observed. Do it - observe a tree, a cloud, the beauty of the spring, the new leaf - and you will see what an extraordinary thing it is. But then you will see that you have never seen the tree before, never! When you observe, you are always observing with an image or through an image. You have an image, as knowledge, when you look at the tree or when you look at your wife or husband; you have the image of what she is or what he is, which has been built up for twenty, thirty or forty years. So one image looks at another image and these images have their own relationships; therefore there is no actual relationship. Do recognise this very simple fact, that we look at almost everything in life with an image, with a prejudice, with a preconceived idea. We never look with fresh eyes; our mind is never young. So we must observe ourselves - who are part of violence - and the immense search for pleasure with its fears, with its frustrations, with the agony of loneliness, the lack of love, the despair. To observe this whole structure of oneself without the observer, to see it as it is without any distortion, without any judgment, condemnation or comparison - which are all the movement of the observer, of the `me' and the `not-me - demands the highest form of discipline. We are using the word `discipline' not in the sense of conformity or coercion - not as discipline brought about through reward and punishment. To observe anything - your wife, your neighbour or a cloud - one must have a mind that is very sensitive; this very observation brings about its own discipline, which is nonconformity. Therefore the highest form of discipline is no discipline. So to observe the thing called violence without division, without the observer, to see the conditioning, the structure of belief, the opinions, the prejudices, is to see what you are; that is `what is'. When you observe it and there is a division, then you say, `It is impossible to change.' Man has lived like this for millennia and you go on living in this way. Saying`It is not possible' deprives one of energy. Only when you see what is possible in the highest form, then you have plenty of energy. So one has to observe actually `what is', not the image you have about `what is', but what you actually are; never saying `it is ugly' or `beautiful'. You know what you are only through comparison. You say, `I am dull' compared to somebody who is very intelligent, very alive. Have you ever tried to live a life without comparing yourself with anybody or anything? What then are you? Then, what you are is `what is'. Then you can go beyond it, find out what truth is! So this whole question of freeing the mind from conditioning lies in how the mind observes. I do not know if you have ever gone into the question of what love is, or have thought about it or enquired into it. Is love pleasure? Is love desire? Is love something to be cultivated, a thing made respectable by society? If it is pleasure, as it apparently is, from everything that one has observed - not only sexual pleasure but the moral pleasure, the pleasure of achievement, of success, the pleasure of becoming, of being somebody, implying competitiveness and conformity - is that love? An ambitious man, even the man who says, `I must find truth', who pursues what he considers to be truth, can he know what love is? Should we not intelligently enquire into this? - that is, seeing what it is not; through negation come to the positive. Denying what love is not. Jealousy is not love; the memory of a pleasure, sexual or otherwise, is not love; the cultivation of virtue, the constant effort of trying to be noble, is not love. And when you say, `I love you', what does it mean? The image you have about him or her, the sexual pleasures and all the rest of it, the comfort, the companionship, never being alone and frightened to be alone, always wanting to be loved, to possess, to be possessed, to dominate, to assert, to be aggressive - is all that love? If you see the absurdity of it, not verbally but actually as it is, all the nonsense that one talks about love - love of one's country, love of God -when you see all the sensuality of it - we are not condemning sex, we are observing it - when you actually observe it as it is, you see that your love of God is love out of fear, your weekend religion is fear. And to observe it totally, implies no division. Where there is no division there is goodness; you do not have to cultivate goodness. So can the mind - the mind including the brain, the whole structure - totally observe the thing that it calls love with all its mischief, with all its pettiness and its bourgeois mediocrity? To observe that, there must be the denial of everything that love is not. You know, there is a great difference between joy and pleasure. You can cultivate pleasure, think about it a great deal and have more of it. You had pleasure yesterday and you can think about it, chew on it and you will want it repeated tomorrow. In pleasure there is a motive in which there is possessiveness, domination, conformity and all the rest of it. There is great pleasure in conformity - Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and so on, made people conform, because there is great security and safety in it. So when you see all that, when you are free of it - actually, not verbally, never to be jealous, never to dominate or be possessed - when the mind has swept away all that, then you know what love is - you do not have to seek it. When the mind has understood the meaning of the word love, then you are bound to ask: what is death? Because love and death go together. If the mind does not know how to die to the past, it does not know what love is. Love is not of time, it is not a thing to be remembered - you cannot remember joy and cultivate it; it comes uninvited. So what is death? I do not know if you have observed death, not someone dying, but yourself dying. It is one of the most difficult things, not to identify yourself with something. Most of us identify ourselves with our furniture, with our house, with our wife or husband, with our government with our country, with the image that we have about ourselves, identifying with something greater -the greater may be a greater tribalism, which is the nation; or you identify yourself with a particular quality or image. Not to identify with your furniture, with your knowledge, with your experiences, with your techniques and your technological knowledge as a scientist or engineer, to end all identification, is a form of death. Do it sometime and you will find out what it means: not bitterness, not hopelessness, not a sense of despair, but an extraordinary feeling - a mind that is completely free to observe and therefore live. Unfortunately we have divided life and death. What we are frightened of is `not to live' - this `living' which we call life. And when you actually examine what this living is, not theoretically, but observe it with your eyes and your ears, with everything you have, you see how shoddy it is, how small, petty, shallow; you may have a Rolls-Royce, a big house, a lovely garden, a title, a degree, but inwardly life is an everlasting battle, a constant struggle, with contradictions, opposing desires, multiple wants. That is what we call living and to that we cling. Anything that puts an end to that - unless you are tremendously identified with your body - we call death; though the physical organism ends too. And being afraid of ending, we have all kinds of beliefs. They are all escapes - including reincarnation. What matters is how you live now, not what you will be in the next life. Then the question is whether the mind can live entirely without time. One must really understand this question of the past - the past as yesterday, through today, shaping tomorrow from what has been yesterday. Can that mind - which is the result of time, of evolution - be free of the past? - which is to die. It is only a mind that knows this, that can come upon this thing called meditation. Without understanding all this, to try to meditate is just childish imagination. Truth is not `what is', but the understanding of `what is' opens the door to truth. If you do not actually understand `what is', what you are, with your heart, with your mind, with your brain, with your feelings, you cannot understand what truth is. Questioner: Whatever I hear you say in this Hall becomes so simple and easy to understand. But the moment I am outside I am at sea - and I do not know what to do when I am alone. Krishnamurti: Sir, look: what the speaker has said is very clear. He is pointing out to you 'what is' - it is yours, it is not in this Hall, it does not lie with the speaker; the speaker is not making any propaganda, he does not want a thing from you, neither your flattery, nor your insults nor your applause. It is yours, your life, your misery, your despair; that you have to understand, not just here, because here you are being pushed into a corner, you are facing yourself perhaps for a few minutes. But when you leave the Hall, that is where the fun begins! We are not trying to influence you to act, to think, to do this or that - that would be propaganda. But if you have listened with your heart and with a mind that is aware - not influenced - if you have observed, then when you go outside it will go with you wherever you are because it is yours, you have understood. Questioner: What is the role of the artist? Krishnamurti: Are artists so very different from other human beings? Why do we divide life into the scientist, the artist, the housewife, the doctor? The artist may be a little more sensitive, may observe more, he may be more alive. But he also has his problems as a human being. He may produce marvellous pictures, or write lovely poems, or make things with his hands, but he is still a human being, anxious, frightened, jealous and ambitious. How can an `artist' be ambitious? If he is, he is no longer an artist. The violinist or the pianist who uses his instrument to make money, to gain prestige - just think of it - is not a musician. Or the scientist who works for governments, for society, for war, is he a scientist? That man who is seeking knowledge and understanding has become corrupt like other human beings. He may be marvellous in his laboratory or he may express himself on a canvas most beautifully, but he is torn inside like the rest, he is petty, shoddy, anxious, frightened. Surely an artist, a human being, an individual, is a whole, indivisible, complete thing. Individual means undivided; but we are not, we are broken up, fragmented, human beings - the businessman, the artist, the doctor, the musician. And therefore we lead a life - Oh, I do not have to describe it, you know it. Questioner: Sir, what is the criterion in choosing between various possibilities. Krishnamurti: Why do you choose at all? When you see something very clearly, what is the need for choice? Do please listen to this. It is only a mind that is confused, uncertain, unclear, that chooses. I am not talking of choosing between red and black, but choosing psychologically. Unless you are confused, why should you choose? If you see something very clearly without any distortion, is there any need for choosing? There are no alternatives; alternatives exist when you have to choose between two physical roads - you may go one way or the other. But alternatives exist also in a mind that is divided in itself and is confused; therefore it is in conflict, therefore it is violent. It is the violent mind that says it will live peacefully and in its reaction it becomes violent. But when you see the whole nature of violence very clearly, from the most brutal to the most subtle form of violence, then you are free of it. Questioner: When can you ever see it all? Krishnamurti: Have you observed a tree totally? Questioner: I do not know. Krishnamurti: Sir, do it some time if you are interested in this kind of thing. Questioner: I always thought I had, until the next time. Krishnamurti; To go into it, let us being with the tree, which is the most objective thing. Observe it completely, which means without the observer, without the division - which does not mean you identify yourself with the tree, you do not become the tree, that would be too absurd. But to observe it implies to look at it without the division between you and the tree, without the space created by the observer with his knowledge, with his thoughts, with his prejudice about that tree; not when you are angry, jealous, or in despair, or full of a thing called hope - which is the opposite of despair, therefore it is not hope at all. When you observe it, see it without the division, without that space, then you can see the whole of it. When you observe your wife, your friend, your husband or whatever you will, when you look without the image, which is the accumulation of the past, you will see what an extraordinary thing takes place. You have never seen anything like that before in your life. But to observe totally implies no division. People take L.S.D. and other drugs in order to destroy the space between the observer and the observed. I have not taken it; and once you start that game you are lost, you are everlastingly dependent on it and it brings its own mischief. Questioner: What is the relationship between thought and reality? Krishnamurti: What is thought in relationship to time, thought in relationship to what is measurable and what is immeasurable? What is thought? Thought is the response of memory - obviously. If you had no memory you would not be able to think at all, you would be in a state of amnesia. Thought is always old, thought is never free, thought can never be new. When thought is silent there may be a new discovery; but thought cannot possibly discover anything new. Is this clear? Please do not agree with me. When you ask a question and you are familiar with that question, your response is immediate. `What is your name'? - you reply immediately. `Where do you live'? - you reply instantly. But a more complex question takes time. In that interval thought is looking, trying to remember. So thought in its desire to find what truth is, is always look- ing in terms of the past. That is the difficulty of search. When you seek, you must be able to recognise what you have found; and what you find in terms of your recognition is the past. So thought is time - obviously - this is so simple, is it not? You had an experience yesterday of great delight, you think about it and you want it repeated again tomorrow. Thought thinking about something that has brought pleasure, wants it tomorrow; therefore `tomorrow' and `yesterday' make the time interval in which you are going to get that pleasure, in which you are going to think about it. So thought is time. And thought can never be free because it is the response of the past. How can thought find out anything new? This is possible only when the mind is completely silent. Not because it wants to find something new, for then that silence is brought about by a motive and therefore it is not silence. If you understand this you have understood the whole thing and even answered your question. You see, we are always using thought as a means of finding, of asking, of enquiring, looking. Do you mean to say thought can know what love is? Thought can know the pleasure of what it has called love and demand that pleasure again in the name of love. But thought, being the product of time, the product of measure, cannot possibly understand or come upon that thing which is not measurable. So then the question arises: how can you make thought silent? You cannot. Perhaps we will go into that another time. Questioner: Do we need rules to live by? Krishnamurti: Madame, you have not heard all that I have been saying during this talk! Who is going to lay down the rules? The Churches have done it, tyrannical governments have done it, or you yourself have laid down the rules for your own conduct, for your own behaviour. And you know what that means - a battle between what you think you should be and what you are. Which is more important: to understand what you should be, or what you are? Questioner: What am I? Krishnamurti: Let us find out. I have told you what you are -your country, your furniture, your images, your ambitions, your respectability, your race, your idiosyncrasies and prejudices, your obsessions - you know what you are! Through all that you want to find truth, God, reality. And because the mind does not know how to be free of all this you invent something, an outside agency, or give significance to life. So when you understand the nature of thought - not verbally, but are actually aware of it - then when you have a prejudice, look at it and you will see that your religions are a prejudice, the identification with your country is a prejudice. We have so many opinions, so many prejudices; just observe one completely, with your heart, with your mind, with love - care for it, look at it. Do not say 'I must not' or `I must, - just look at it. And then you will see how to live without any prejudice. It is only a mind that is free from prejudice, from conflict, that can see what truth is. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART III CHAPTER 3 LONDON 4TH PUBLIC TALK 30TH MAY 1970 'THE RELIGIOUS MIND' SHALL WE TALK about meditation? Talking about something and doing it are quite different things. If we are going to go into this complex problem, we not only have to understand the meaning of words, but also, it seems to me, we must go beyond the words. There are several things involved in meditation. To really understand it, to actually do it, not merely intellectually or verbally or theoretically, requires a peculiar kind of seriousness in which there must be a great deal of intelligence and humour. First of all, one must enquire into what the religious mind is; not what religion is, but that quality of the mind and the heart that is religious. One can give a great many meanings to that word 'religion', depending on one's conditioning - either accepting it emotionally, sentimentally or devotionally, or totally denying the whole question of a religious attitude, a religious way of life, as a great many people do. One is rather ashamed even to talk about religious matters. But the religious mind has nothing whatsoever to do with belief in God - it has no theory, philosophy, or conclusion, because it has no fear and therefore no need for belief. A religious mind is difficult to describe - the description can never be the thing described. But if one is sensitive, aware and serious, one can feel one's way into it. First of all, one cannot belong to any organized religion. I think that is one of the most difficult things for most human beings; they want to cling to some kind of hope, belief, some kind of theory or conclusion, or an experience of their own, giving it a religious significance. Any kind of attachment and therefore dependence on one's particular, secret experience or the accumulated experience of the so-called saints, the mystics, or your own particular guru or teacher, all that must be completely and wholly set aside. I hope you are doing it, because a religious mind is not burdened with fear, or seeking out any form of security and pleasure. A mind that is not burdened with experience is absolutely necessary to find out what meditation is. In seeking experience lies the way to illusion. Not to seek any form of experience is very difficult; most of our lives are so mechanical, so shallow, that we want deeper experiences because we are bored with the superficiality of life. We want, or rather crave for, something that will have a meaning, a fullness, depth, beauty, loveliness, and so the mind is seeking. And what it seeks it will find; what it finds will not be the truth. Are you accepting all this, or rejecting it? Please do not accept or deny - this is not a matter of your pleasure or my pleasure, because in this there is no authority whatsoever, neither that of the speaker nor of anybody else. You see, most of us want someone to lead us, to guide us, to help us and we invest faith, trust, in that person or in that ideal or principle or image. Therefore we depend on another. A mind that is dependent on authority and therefore incapable of standing alone, incapable of understanding, incapable of looking directly, such a mind must inevitably have fear of going wrong, of not doing the right thing, of not reaching the ecstasy that is promised or that one hopes for. All such forms of authority must absolutely come to an end; which means to have no fear, no dependency on another (there is no guru) and a mind that is not seeking experience. Because when one wants an experience, it indicates that one wants - great pleasure, call it what you like -ecstasy, enjoyment, seeking truth, finding enlightenment. Also, how does the seeker know what he has found and if what he has found is the truth? Can the mind that is seeking, searching, find something that is alive, moving, that has no resting place? The religious mind does not belong to any group, any sect, any belief, any church, any organized circus; therefore it is capable of looking at things directly and understanding things immediately. Such is the religious mind, because it is a light to itself. Its light is not lit by another - the candle that is lit by another can be put out very quickly. And most of our beliefs, dogmas, rituals, are the result of propaganda which has nothing whatsoever to do with a religious life. A religious mind is a light to itself and therefore there is no punishment or reward. Meditation is the emptying of the mind, totally. The content of the mind is the result of time, of what is called evolution; it is the result of a thousand experiences, a vast accumulation of knowledge, of memories. The mind is so burdened with the past because all knowledge is the past, all experience is the past, and all memory is the accumulated result of a thousand experiences - that is the known. Can the mind, which is both the conscious as well as the unconscious, empty itself completely of the past? That is the whole movement of meditation. The mind being aware of itself without any choice, seeing all the movement of itself - can that awareness totally empty the mind of the known? Because if there is any remnant of the past the mind cannot be innocent. So meditation is the total emptying of the mind. So many things are said about meditation, especially in the East; there are so many schools, so many disciplines, so many books written on how to meditate, what to do. How do you know if what is being said is true or false? When the speaker says meditation is the complete emptying of the mind, how do you know it is true? What tells you? Your personal prejudice, your particular idiosyncrasy of liking the face of the man who speaks? - or his reputation, or because he has got some empathy, a certain friendliness? How do you know? Must you go through all the systems, all the schools, have teachers who teach you how to meditate, before you find out what meditation is? Or can you find that out if you have none of these people to tell you what to do? I am saying this most undogmatically: do not listen to anybody -including the speaker, especially the speaker - because you are very easily influenced, because you are all wanting something, craving for something, craving for enlightenment, for joy, for ecstasy, for heaven; you are caught very easily. So you have to find it out completely by yourself. Therefore there is no need to go to India, or to any Zen Buddhist monastery, to meditate, or to look to any teacher; because if you know how to look, everything is in you. Therefore you put aside completely all authority, all looking to anybody, because truth does not belong to anybody, it is not a personal matter. Meditation is not a private, personal pleasure or experience. One can see that one needs great harmony between the mind, the heart and the body, if you can so divide it - psychosomatically, if you prefer it. Obviously there must be complete harmony, because if there is any contradiction, any division, then there is conflict. Conflict is the very essence of waste of energy and you need tremendous energy to meditate. Therefore harmony is necessary so that the mind, the brain, the organism and the depth of the heart are whole, not broken up; you can see that for yourself, nobody need teach you that. How to bring about that harmony is quite a different matter. Complete harmony means that the mind as well as the organism must be extraordinarily sensitive; therefore one has to go into the whole question of diet, exercise, and living properly. Because we do not want to think about it or look into it, we turn to somebody else to tell us what to do. And if we look to somebody else we limit our energy, because then we ask whether it is possible or not possible. If we say it is impossible, our energy becomes very limited; if we say it is possible in terms of what we already know, it becomes very small and so on. So one realizes the necessity of this complete harmony, because if there is any kind of discord, there is distortion. And there must be discipline. Discipline means order - not suppression, not conformity to a principle or to an idea, to a conclusion, to a system or to a method. Order is not a design, a pattern according to which you are living. Order comes only when you understand the whole process of disorder - going through what is the negative to come to the positive. Our life is disorder, which means contradiction, saying one thing, doing another and thinking something entirely different. It is a fragmentary existence, and in this fragmentation we try to find some kind of order. We think this order comes about through discipline and control. A mind that is controlled, disciplined in the sense of conforming to a pattern, whether established by oneself, or by society, or by a particular culture, such a mind is not free, it is a distorted mind. Therefore one has to enquire into this question of disorder. And through the understanding of what disorder is, how it comes about, there comes order - a living thing. What is the very essence of disorder? Our lives are disorderly, divided; we live in different compartments; we are not a whole, unbroken entity. The essence of disorder is contradiction, and where there is contradiction in ourselves there must be effort and therefore disorder. (This is very simple. Probably you do not like simple things. One can make it very complex!) One sees how disorderly one's own life is, how the contradictions of various desires, purposes, conclusions, intentions, are tearing at each other; being violent, wanting to live peacefully; being ambitious, greedy, competitive and saying that one loves; being self-centred, egotistic, limited and talking about universal brotherhood. We pretend, and thus there is great hypocrisy. So order is necessary and the very understanding of disorder brings about its own discipline, which is order in which there is no suppression, no conformity. I hope the speaker is making it clear, at least verbally. Discipline means to learn, not to accumulate mechanical knowledge - to learn about the disorderly life one leads and therefore not to come to any conclusion at any moment. Most of our actions are based on conclusions or on ideals or approximation to an ideal. So our actions are always contradictory and therefore disorderly. This one can see very easily. If one is looking at this in oneself, there will naturally come about order, freedom from all authority and therefore freedom from fear. One can make a mistake but correct it immediately. How can the mind not be caught in illusion? - because you can `meditate' endlessly, creating your own illusions. We met a man the other day who had meditated for twenty-five years - not casually - he had given up everything, his good position, money, family, name, and for twenty-five years he practised meditation. Unfortunately somebody brought him to one of the Talks and the next day he came to see the speaker and said: `What you said about meditation is perfectly true: I have been hypnotizing myself, having my own visions, having my own personal delight in these visions according to my conditioning.' If one is a Christian, one has visions of Christ and so on; if one is a Hindu one has one's own particular God and is directly in communication with him, which means, according to one's conditioning. So the question is, how can the mind be totally free of illusion? One has to ask this question very seriously and deeply. A great many people listen to all kinds of yogis and teachers who tell them what to do, giving them some slogan, some mantra, some word that will give them extraordinary experiences - you know what the speaker is talking about. Have you ever listened so completely to a tone of music, that every other sound dies away except that one sound? If the mind pursues that sound, goes with it, you get extraordinary results. But that is not meditation, that is a kind of trick that one can play upon oneself and it is another form of illusion. Also taking drugs in order to have a `transcendental experience' can, through chemistry, bring about certain results; just as, if you fast a great deal, you have a certain sensitivity and your mind becomes much more alert, watchful, sharp and clear - or if you go in for breathing properly. These are various forms of tricks, bringing about their own illusion. And the mind clings to those illusions, because they are very satisfactory, they are your private, personal achievement. But when the world is suffering, going through agony, distortion, corruption, your particular little vision in a small corner of the field has no value. So, one can brush aside all that as being immature and childish. Besides, it leads to stupor, it makes the mind dull. Now, how is the mind to be free of all illusion? - bearing in mind that if there is any effort and any contradiction there must be illusion. How can that state of contradiction, that confusion, distortion, the various forms of corruption - social, religious and personal corruptions - how can all that which induces various forms of delusions and illusions be completely wiped away? This can only happen when the mind is completely still, because any movement of thought is a movement of the past. Thought is the reaction of memory, of accumulated experience, knowledge and so on - it is the past. And as long as that movement of the past exists in the whole structure of the mind - which includes the brain - there must be distortion. So the question is: how can thought be totally absent in meditation? Thought is necessary; the more it is logical, sane, healthy, objective, unemotional, impersonal, the more effective and efficient it is. You must use thought to function in life. And yet the mind must be capable, must be completely free of any sense of distortion to find out what is true, what is sacred. There must be harmony between the living functioning in thought and the freedom from thought. This is logical. this is not some cryptic, personal theory. To see anything that is true, that is new to be discovered, new to be perceived, something that has not been created or done before, the mind must be free from the known. And yet one has to live in the known. The man who came upon the jet engine, must have been free of the knowledge of the internal combustion engine. So in the same way, for the mind to come upon something that is totally new, there must be no illusion, there must be complete, total silence; not only in the movement of thought, but also in the very activity of the brain cells themselves with their memories. That is quite a problem, is it not? Do you understand the way we live in formulas, in conclusions, in prejudices? We live mechanically, in the routine of earning a livelihood, the routine of function from which we try to derive a position and prestige. Our life is a series of conformities; there is either the conformity of fear or the conformity of pleasure. Such a mind cannot possibly come upon anything new. Therefore any teacher, any method, any system that says, `Do this and you will find it', is telling you a lie. Because anyone who says he knows, he does not know. What he knows is the routine, the practice, the discipline, the conformity. So the mind and the brain and the body in complete harmony must be silent - a silence that is not induced by taking a tranquilliser or by repeating words, whether it be Ave Maria or some Sanskrit word. By repetition your mind can become dull, and a mind which is in a stupor cannot possibly find what is true. Truth is something that is new all the time - the word `new' is not right, it is really `timeless'. So there has to be silence. That silence is not the opposite of noise or the cessation of chattering; it is not the result of control, saying `I will be silent', which again is a contradiction. When you say `I will', there must be an entity who determines to be silent and therefore practices something which he calls silence; therefore there is a division, a contradiction, a distortion. All this requires great energy and therefore action. We waste a great deal of energy in accumulating knowledge. Knowledge has its own place - you must have knowledge, the more of it the better. But when it becomes mechanical, when knowledge makes the mind feel that no more is possible, when we come to the conclusion that it is not possible to change, then we have no energy. There is the idea of sexual control in order to have more energy to find God, and all the religious implications of it. Think of all those poor saints and monks, what tortures they go through to find God! And God - if there is such a thing - does not want a tortured mind, a mind that is torn apart, distorted or that has become dull and lives in stupefaction. Silence of the mind comes naturally - please do listen to this - it comes naturally, easily, without any effort if you know how to observe, how to look. When you observe a cloud, look at it without the word and therefore without thought, look at it without the division as the observer. Then there is an awareness and attention in the very act of looking; not the determination to be attentive, but looking with attention, even though that look may last only a second, a minute - that is enough. Do not be greedy, do not say, `I must have it for the whole day'. To look without the observer means looking without the space between the observer and the thing observed - which does not mean identifying oneself with the thing that is looked at. So when one can look at a tree, at a cloud, at the light on the water, without the observer, and also - which is much more difficult, which needs a greater attention - if you can look at yourself without the image, without any conclusion, because the image, the conclusion, the opinion, the judgment, the goodness and the badness, is centred round the observer, then you will find that the mind, the brain, becomes extraordinarily quiet. And this quietness is not a thing to be cultivated; it can happen, it does happen, if you are attentive, if you are capable of watching all the time, watching your gestures, your words, your feelings, the movements of your face and all the rest of it. To correct it brings contradiction, but if you watch it, this brings about alteration by itself. So silence comes about when there is profound attention, not only at the conscious level but also at the deeper levels of consciousness. Dreams and sleep are of great importance; it is part of meditation to be awake in sleep, to be aware, attentive while the mind and the body - the organism - is asleep. (Please, do not accept anything the speaker says - the speaker is not your guru, your teacher or your authority. If you make of him your authority, you are destroying yourself and the speaker.) We said: meditation is the emptying of the mind; not only the conscious mind but also all the hidden layers of the mind, which are called the unconscious. The unconscious is as trivial and absurd as the conscious. And during sleep there are various kinds of superficial dreams, not even worth thinking about - dreams that have no meaning at all. I am sure you know all about this, do you not? Then there is the dream which has meaning, and that meaning can be understood as it is being dreamt. This is only possible when during the day you are attentive, watching, listening to every movement of your thoughts, motives, feelings and ambitions. Watching does not tire you, does not exhaust you, if you do not correct what you watch. If you say, `This must not be' or, `It must be', then you get tired and bored. But if you watch choicelessly, are aware without like or dislike during the day, then when you dream and those dreams have some significance, at the very moment of dreaming - all dreams are active, there is always some action taking place - that very action is understood. So when you have done all this, the mind in sleep becomes extraordinarily awake and you do not have to go to an analyser of dreams. That wakefulness of the mind sees something which the conscious mind can never see. So silence is not a thing to be practised - it comes when you have understood the whole structure and the beginning and the living of life. We have to alter the structure of our society, its injustice, its appalling morality, the divisions it has created between man and man, the wars, the utter lack of affection and love that is destroying the world. If your meditation is only a personal matter, a thing which you personally enjoy, then it is not meditation. Meditation implies a complete radical change of the mind and the heart. This is only possible when there is this extraordinary sense of inward silence, and that alone brings about the religious mind. That mind knows what is sacred. Questioner: How can we make this complete change? Krishnamurti: Sir, can knowledge bring about a total revolution? - can the past, which is knowledge, bring about a complete change in the quality of the mind? Or must there be freedom from the past, so that the mind is in constant revolution, in constant movement of change? The centre of knowledge, of experience, of memory, is in the observer, is it not? Please do not accept this, just watch it for yourself. There is the censor, the ego in each one, who says, `This is right', `This is wrong', `This is good', `This is bad', `I must', `I should not'. That censor is observing. He is the observer and he divides himself from the thing he observes. The censor, the observer, is always the past and the `what is' is always changing, new. As long as there is this division between the observer and the observed, no radical revolution is possible: there will always be corruption. You can see what the French Revolution or what the Communist Revolution has done -corruption comes in all the time. As long as this condition exists, goodness is not possible. Then you will say, `How is this division to come to an end? ' How can the observer, who is the accumulated past as knowledge, come to an end? It cannot come to an end because you need the `observer' when you are functioning mechanically. You need knowledge when you go to the office or to the factory, or to the laboratory. But that knowledge, tied to the censor who is ambitious and greedy, becomes corrupt; he uses knowledge for corruption. This is so simple! When there is a realization of this, then the 'observer' comes to an end; it is not a matter of time, of the observer gradually coming to an end. We are conditioned to think, 'Gradually we will get rid of the observer, gradually we will become non-violent.' But in the meantime we sow the seeds of violence. So when we see very clearly how the 'observer' distorts everything - the observer being the ego, the 'me' - how it separates and distorts, in that flash of perception the observer is not. Questioner: Is it possible for continuous harmony to exist in this life? Krishnamurti: Continuous harmony in this life is a contradiction, is it not? The idea that it must be continuous prevents the discovery of anything new. Only in ending is there a new beginning. So the desire to have continuous harmony is a contradiction. You are harmonious - full stop. We are slaves to the word 'to be'. If anything which you call harmony has continuity, it is disharmony. Therefore, sir, do not wish for anything continuous. You want your relationship with your wife to be continuous, happy, lovely - all the romantic things. And it never happens. Love is not something that is of time. So do not let us be greedy. Harmony is not a thing that can continue. If it continues it becomes mechanical. But a mind that is harmonious is - not 'will be' or 'has been'. A mind that is harmonious - again, 'is' is the wrong word - a mind that is aware that it is harmonious does not ask the question, 'Will I have it tomorrow?' Questioner: Sir, how are things related to the verbal content of the mind? Krishnamurti: It is very simple, is it not? When we understand that the word is not the thing, that the description is not the described, the explanation is not the explained, then the mind is free of the word. If one has an image about oneself, the image is put together by words, by thought - thought is the word. One thinks oneself as big, or small, clever, or a genius or whatever you will -one has an image about oneself. That image can be described, it is the result of description. And that image is the creation of thought. but is the description, the image, part of the mind? What relationship has the content of the mind to the mind itself? Is the content the mind itself? - is that the question, sir? Of course it is. If the content of the mind is furniture, books, what people say, your prejudices, your conditioning, your fears, that is the mind. If the mind says there is a soul, there is God, there is hell, there is heaven, there is a devil, that is the content of the mind. The content of the mind is the mind. If the mind can empty itself of all that, it is something entirely different; then the mind is something new and therefore immortal. Questioner: What is the sign of a man who has begun to develop awareness? Krishnamurti: I'm sorry, I want to be funny about it - he doesn't carry a red flag! Look, sir, first of all, as we said, it is not a matter of development, it is not a matter of slow growth. Does it need time to understand something? What is the state of the mind that says, 'I've understood' - not verbally but totally? When does it say this? It says it when the mind is really completely attentive to the thing it is looking at. Being attentive at that moment it has understood completely, it is not a matter of time. Questioner: There is so much suffering; having compassion, how can one be at peace? Krishnamurti: Do you think you are different from the world? Are you not the world? - the world that you have made with your ambition, with your greed, with your economic securities, with your wars - you made it. The torture of animals for your food, the wastage of money on war, the lack of right education - you have built this world, it is part of you. So you are the world and the world is you; there is no division between you and the world. You ask, 'How can you have peace when the world suffers?' How can you have peace when you are suffering? This is the question, because you are the world. You can go all over the world, talk to human beings, whether they are clever, famous or illiterate, they are all going through a terrible time - like you. So the question is not, `How can you have peace when the world is suffering?' You are suffering and therefore the world suffers; therefore put an end to your suffering, if you know how to end it. Suffering with its self-pity comes to an end only when there is self-knowing. And you will say, `What can one human being do who has freed himself from his own sorrow, what value has that human being in the world?' Such a question has no value. If you have freed yourself from sorrow - do you know what that means? - and say, `What value has the individual in a suffering world?',that is a wrong question. Questioner: What is madness? Krishnamurti: Oh, that is very clear. Most of us are neurotic, are we not? Most of us are slightly off balance, most of us have peculiar ideas, peculiar beliefs. Once we were talking to a very devout Catholic and he said, `You Hindus are the most superstitious, bigoted and neurotic people; you believe in so many abnormal things.' He was totally unaware of his own abnormality, his own beliefs, his own stupidities. So who is balanced? Obviously, the man who has no fear, who is whole. Whole means sane, healthy and holy; but we are not, we are broken up human beings, therefore we are unbalanced. There is only balance when we are completely whole. That means healthy, with a mind that is clear, that has no prejudice and that has goodness. (Applause.) Please do not clap, your applause has no meaning to me - I mean it. If you have understood it, because you have seen it for yourself, then there is no need to applaud - it is yours. Enlightenment does not come through another, it comes through your own observation, your own understanding of yourself. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART IV CHAPTER 1 BROCKWOOD PARK 3RD PUBLIC TALK 12TH SEPTEMBER 1970 'THE UNCONDITIONED MIND' IF YOU ARE at all serious, the question whether it is possible to uncondition the mind, must be one of the most fundamental. One observes that man, in different parts of the world, with different cultures and social moralities, is very deeply conditioned; he thinks along certain lines, he acts and works according to pattern. He is related to the present through the background of the past. He has cultivated great knowledge; he has millions of years of experience. All this has conditioned him - education, culture, social morality, propaganda, religion - and to this he has his own particular reaction; the response of another form of conditioning. One has to be sufficiently attentive to see the whole significance of this conditioning, how it divides people, nationally, religiously, socially, linguistically. These divisions are a tremendous barrier, they breed conflict and violence. If one is to live completely at peace, creatively - we will go into the words `peace' and `creatively' presently - if one is to live that way, one must understand this conditioning which is not only peripheral or superficial; but also very deep, hidden. One has to discover whether the whole structure of this conditioning can be revealed. And when that is discovered, what is one to do, to go beyond it? If one observes that one is conditioned and says, `One can never possibly uncondition the mind', the problem ends. If you start out with a formula that one will never be unconditioned, all enquiry ceases, one has already resisted and answered the problem and there it ends; then one can only further decorate the conditioning. But if one goes into this fairly deeply and one becomes aware of the whole problem, then what is one to do? How does one respond if this is a very, very serious challenge and not something that one just brushes aside? If it is something vital and tremendously important in one's life, what is one's response? If you have discovered this conditioning then what is the manner of your observation? Have you observed it for yourself or has somebody told you about it? This is really quite an important question to answer. If you have been told about it and you say, `Yes, I am conditioned', then you are responding to a suggestion; it is not real, it is only a verbal concept which you have accepted, with which you agree; that is quite different from the discovery of it for yourself, for then it is tremendously vital and you have the passion to find the way out of it. Have you discovered that you are conditioned because you have enquired, searched and looked into it? If so: `who' has discovered it? - the observer, the examiner, the analyser? - `who' is observing, examining, analysing the whole mess and the madness that this conditioning is causing in the world? `Who' by observing has discovered the structure of this conditioning and its result? By observing what is happening, outwardly and inwardly - the conflicts, the wars, the misery, the confusion in oneself and outside oneself (the outside is part of what one is) - by observing this very closely (all over the world this thing is happening) I have discovered that I am conditioned and have found the consequence of this conditioning. So: there is the `observer' who has discovered that he is conditioned, and the question arises: is the `observer' different from that which he has observed and discovered, is that something separate from himself? If there is separation, then again there is division and therefore conflict as to how to overcome this conditioning, how to free oneself from this conditioning, what to do about it and so on. One has to discover whether there are two separate things, two separate movements, the `observer' and that which is observed. Are they separate? Or is the `observer' the observed? It is tremendously important to find this out for oneself; if one does, then the whole way one thinks undergoes a complete change. It is a most radical discovery as a result of which the structure of morality, the continuation of knowledge, has, for oneself, quite a different meaning. Find out if you have discovered this for yourself, or whether you have accepted what you have been told as fact, or whether you have discovered this for yourself without any outside agency telling you `It is so'. If it is your discovery, it releases tremendous energy, which before had been wasted in the division between the `observer' and the observed. The continuation of knowledge (psychological conditioning) in action is the wastage of energy. knowledge has been gathered by the `observer' and the `observer' uses that knowledge in action, but that knowledge is divided from action; hence here is conflict. And the entity that holds this knowledge - which is essentially his conditioning - is the `observer'. One must discover this basic principle for oneself; it is a principle, not something fixed; it is a reality which can never be questioned again. What happens to a mind that has discovered this truth, this simple fact, that the `observer' is the observed - psychologically speaking? If this is discovered, what takes place to the quality of the mind - which has for so long been conditioned by its concepts of the `Higher Self' or the `Soul' as something divided from the body? If this discovery does not open the door to freedom it has no meaning; it is still just another intellectual notion, leading nowhere. But if it is an actual discovery, an actual reality, then there must be freedom - which is not the freedom to do what you like or the freedom to fulfil, to become, to decide, or the freedom to think what you like and act as you wish. Does a free mind choose? Choice implies decision between this and that; but what is the need of any choice at all? (Please, sirs, these are not verbal statements; we have to go into it, we have to live it daily and then will be found the beauty of it, the vigour, the passion, intensity of it.) Choice implies decision; decision is the action of will; who is the entity that exercises will to do this or that? Please follow this carefully. If the `observer' is the observed, what need is there for decision at all? When there is any form of decision (psychologically), depending on choice, it indicates a mind that is confused. A mind that sees very clearly does not choose, there is only action - the lack of clarity comes into being when there is division between the `observer' and the observed. Questioner: Factually there has to be this choice, this division does there not? Krishnamurti: I choose between brown cloth and red cloth - of course. But I am talking psychologically. If one understands the effects of choice, the effects of division and decision, then the choosing becomes a very small affair. For example: I am confused; in this world I have been brought up as a Catholic, or as a Hindu; I am not satisfied and I jump into another religious organization that I have `chosen'. But if I examine the whole conditioning of a particular religious culture, I see that it is propaganda, a series of acceptances of beliefs, all arising through fear, through the demand for security, psychologically; because inwardly one is insufficient, miserable, unhappy, uncertain, one puts one's hope in something that can offer security, certainty. So when the particular religion to which I belong fails, I jump into another, hoping to find that security there; but it is the same thing under another name, whether called `X' or `Y'. When the mind is very clear about this, it understands the whole situation and it has no need of choice; then the whole response of action according to `will' comes completely to an end. `Will' implies resistance and is a form of isolation; a mind that is isolated is not a free mind. A mind that is caught up in the acquisition of knowledge as a means to freedom does not come to that freedom. Why has knowledge become such an extraordinarily important thing in life? - knowledge being the accumulated experience of that which other people have discovered - scientific, psychological and so on, together with the knowledge one has acquired for oneself through observation, through learning. What place has knowledge in freedom? Knowledge is always of the past; when you say `I know', it is implied that you have known. Knowledge of every kind, scientific, personal, communal, whatever it is, is always of the past; and as one's mind is the result of the past, can it be free at all? Questioner: What about self-knowledge? Krishnamurti: See, first, how the mind accumulates knowledge and why it does so; see where knowledge is necessary, and where it becomes an impediment to freedom. Obviously to do anything one must have knowledge - to drive a car, to speak a language, to do a technological job - you must have abundance of knowledge, the more efficient, the more objective, the more impersonal, the better - but we are speaking of that knowledge which conditions one, psychologically. The `observer' is the reservoir of knowledge. The `observer' therefore, is of the past, he is the censor, the entity that judges from accumulated knowledge. He does this with regard to himself. Having acquired knowledge about himself from the psychologists, he thinks he has learnt about himself and with that knowledge he looks at himself. He does not look at himself with fresh eyes. He says, `I know, I have seen myself, parts are extraordinarily nice, but the other parts are rather terrible.' He has already judged and he never discovers anything new about himself because he, the `observer', is separated from that which is observed, which he calls himself. That is what we are doing all the time, in all relationships. Relationships with another or relationships with the machine are all based on the desire to find a place where we can be completely secure, certain. And we seek security in knowledge; the keeper of the knowledge is the `observer', the thinker, the experiencer, the censor, always as being different from the thing observed. Intelligence is not in the accumulation of knowledge. The accumulation of knowledge is static - one may add to it but the core of it is static. From this static accumulation one lives, one functions, one paints, one writes, one does all the mischief in the world and one calls that freedom. So can the mind be free of knowledge, of the known? This is really quite an extraordinary question, if one asks it not merely intellectually, but really very, very deeply; can the mind ever be free of the known? Otherwise there is no creation; there is nothing new under the sun then; it is always reformation of the reformed. One has to find out why this division between the `observer' and the observed exists; and can the mind go beyond this division, so as to be freed from the known to function in a different dimension altogether? - which means that intelligence will use knowledge when necessary and yet be free of knowledge. Intelligence implies freedom; freedom implies the cessation of all conflict; intelligence comes into being and conflict comes to an end when the `observer' is the observed, for then there is no division. After all, when this exists there is love. That word, so terribly loaded, one hesitates to use; love is associated with pleasure, sex and fear, with jealousy, with dependency, with acquisitiveness. A mind that is not free does not know the meaning of love - it may know pleasure and hence know fear, which are certainly not love. Love can only come into being when there is real freedom from the past as knowledge. Is that ever possible? Man has sought this in different ways; to be free of the transiency of knowledge. He has always sought something beyond knowledge, beyond the response of thought; so he has created an image called God. All the absurdities that arise around that! But to find out if there is something that is beyond the imagery of thought there must be freedom from all fear. Questioner: Are you differentiating between the brain as intellect and the mind; the mind being something other, an awareness? Krishnamurti: No, we are using the word 'mind' as meaning the total process of thought, as memory, as knowledge, including the brain cells. Questioner: Including the brain cells? Krishnamurti: Obviously. One cannot separate the brain cells from the rest of the mind, can one? The brain - what is the function of the brain? A computer? Questioner: Yes, I think so. Krishnamurti: A most extraordinary computer, put together over thousands of years; it is the result of thousands of years of experience, to secure survival and safety. And one has so much knowledge of everything that is happening in the outer world, but very little knowledge about oneself. Questioner: Could not creation depend on memory and therefore depend on the past? You said earlier that there is in fact nothing new under the sun. Krishnamurti: `There is nothing new under the sun, - at least the Bible, Ecclesiastes, says so. Are we not confusing creation with expression - and whether a creative person needs expression? Do think it out: `I need to fulfil myself in something that must be expressed', `I have a feeling that I am an artist and I must paint, or write a poem.' Does creation need expression at all? And does the expression of an artist indicate a mind that is free in creation? You understand? One writes a poem or paints a picture - does that indicate a creative mind? What does creativeness mean? Not the mechanical repetition of the past! Questioner: I think creativeness does need expression or we would not have a world. Krishnamurti: Creativeness does need expression? What does creativeness mean? What is the feeling of the mind that is creative? Questioner: When the mind is inspired; when it can make something good and beautiful. Krishnamurti: Does a creative mind need inspiration? Must not the mind be free to be creative - free? Otherwise it is repetitive. In that repetitiveness there may be new expressions but it is still repetitive, mechanical; a mind that is mechanical, can it be creative? The mind of a human being in conflict, in tension, neurotic - though writing marvellous poems, marvellous plays -can it be creative? Questioner: It must be `in the now' and not... Krishnamurti: What does it mean, to be `in the now'? It cannot be mechanical. It cannot be burdened with all the weight of knowledge, of tradition. It means a mind that is really, profoundly free - free of fear. That is freedom, is it not? Questioner: But surely it must still seek safety; that is the function of the brain. Krishnamurti: Of course, it is the function of the brain to seek security. But is it secure when it conditions itself as to nationality and religious belief, in saying this is mine, that is yours and so on? Questioner: It seems to me that without opposition there is no growth. It is part of neurology. Krishnamurti: Is it? Questioner: Without high there is no low, or without wide there is no narrow. Krishnamurti: Let us find out. We have lived that way, between the good and the bad, between hate, jealousy and love, between tenderness and brutality, between violence and gentleness, for millions of years. And we say we have accepted that because it is something real; is it, to live like that? The quality of mind that wavers between hate and jealousy and pleasure and fear, can it know what love means? Can a mind that is always seeking expression, fulfilment, seeking to become famous, to be recognised - which we call becoming, being, which is part of the social structure, part of our conditioning - can such a mind be creative? When a mind is caught in always becoming something, in the verb 'to be', 'I will be', 'I have been', there is the fear of death, the fear of the unknown, so it clings to the known. Can such a mind ever be creative? Can creation result from stress, opposition, strain? Questioner: Creativeness is joy, imagination. Krishnamurti: Do you know what joy means? Is joy pleasure? Questioner: No. Krishnamurti: You say 'no; but that is what you are seeking, are you not? You may have a moment of great ecstasy, great joy, and you think about it. Thinking about it reduces it to pleasure. We all so easily come to conclusions, and a mind that has reached conclusions is not a free mind. Find out whether one can live without any conclusions; live daily a life without comparisons. You conclude because you compare. Live a life without comparison; do it and you will find our what an extraordinary thing takes place. Questioner: If there is just the experience and the experience is fear, or anger, what happens? Krishnamurti: If one lives only in an experience without that experience being recorded and recognised in the future as an experience, what happens? I think one has first to find out what we mean by that word 'experience'. Does it no mean 'to go through'? And does it not imply recognition, otherwise one would not know that one had had an experience? If I did not recognise the experience, would it be experienced? Questioner: Can there not just be the experience? Krishnamurti: Go a little further. Why do we need experience at all? We all want experience; we are bored with life, we have made life into a mechanical affair and we want wider, deeper experiences, transcendental experiences. So there is the escape from boredom, through meditation, into the so-called divine. Experience implies recognition of what has happened; you can only recognise if there is a memory of that thing which has already happened. so the question is: why do we seek experience at all? To wake us up, because we are asleep? Is it a challenge to which we respond according to our background, which is the known? So, is it possible to live a life in which the mind is so clear, awake, a light to itself, that it needs no experience? That means to live a life without conflict; that means a mind that is highly sensitive and intelligent, which does not need something to challenge it or to awaken it. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART IV CHAPTER 2 BROCKWOOD PARK 4TH PUBLIC TALK 13TH SEPTEMBER 1970 'FRAGMENTATION AND UNITY' ONE OF THE most important problems to solve is that of bringing about a complete unity, something beyond the fragmentary self-centred concern with the `me', at whatever level it be, social, economic or religious. The `me' and the `not me', the `we' and `they' are the factors of division. Is it ever possible to go beyond the activity of self-centred concern? If something is 'possible' then one has a great deal of energy; but what wastes energy is the feeling that it is not possible, so that one just drifts - as most of us do - from one trap to another. How is this possible? - recognising that in a human being there is a great deal of the animal aggression and violence, a great deal of the stupid mischievous activity; recognising how he is caught in various beliefs, dogmas and separatist theories and how he revolts against one particular system or establishment and falls into another. So, seeing the human situation as it is, what is one to do? This, I think, is the question that every human being who is sensitive, alive and aware of the things that are happening around him, must inevitably ask. It is not an intellectual or hypothetical question but something arising from the actuality of living. It is not something for the few rare moments but something that persists throughout the day and night, through the years and until one lives a life that is completely harmonious, without conflict in oneself and with the world. Conflict, as one observes, arises from self-centred concern, which gives such tremendous importance to the appetites. How does one go beyond this petty, shoddy, little self? (It is that, though one may call it the soul, the Atman - such pleasant sounding words that one invents to cover a corruption). How is one to go beyond? Not being capable of inward changes, psychologically, we turn to outside agency - change the environment, the social and economic structure, and man will inevitably also change! That has proved utterly false - though the communists insist on that theory. And religious authorities have said: believe, accept, put yourself in the hands of something outside and greater than yourself. That too has lost its vitality because it is not real, it is merely an intellectual invention, a verbal structure which has no depth whatsoever. The identification of oneself with the nation, that too has brought dreadful wars, misery and confusion - ever-increasing division. Seeing all this, what is one to do? - escape to some monastery, learn Zen meditation, accept some philosophical theory and commit oneself to that, meditate as a means of escape and self-hypnosis? One sees all this - actually, not verbally or intellectually - and sees that it leads nowhere; does one not inevitably throw it all aside, deny it all, completely, totally? One sees the absurdity of all forms of self-identification with something larger, of expecting the environment to shape man; one sees the falseness of it all; one sees the superficiality of beliefs, noble or ignoble; then does one not set all that aside, actually, not theoretically? If one does - and it is quite a task - it implies a mind that is capable of looking at things completely, as they are, without any distortion, without any interpretation according to one's like or dislike; then what takes place to the quality of the mind? Is there not immediate action? - action that is intelligence; the seeing of the danger and acting; intelligence in which there is no division between seeing and acting. In the very perception is action. When one does not act, insanity begins, imbalance takes place; then we say, `I cannot do that, it is too difficult, what shall I do?' When there is a concept according to which action is determined, psychologically, there is division and there must be conflict. This conflict between the idea and action is the most confusing factor in life. Is it not possible to act without the ideation taking place? - which is, seeing and the action taking place together; for when there is great physical danger, a crisis, that is what we do, act instantly. Is it possible to live like that? That is: is it possible to see clearly the danger, say, of nationalism, or of religious beliefs, which separate man against man, so that the very seeing of it is the understanding that it is false? - it is not a question of believing that it is false. Belief has nothing whatever to do with perception; on the contrary, belief prevents perception; if you have a formula, a tradition, or a prejudice, you are a Hindu, a Jew, an Arab or a Communist and so on, then that very division breeds antagonism, hate, violence, and you are incapable of seeing the actuality. In any division between the concept and action there must be conflict; this conflict is neurotic, insane. Can the mind see directly so that in the very seeing is the doing? That demands attention, that requires an alertness, a quickness of the mind, a sensitivity. One sees this - that one needs to have a clear, sharp, sensitive, intelligent awareness - and then one asks, 'How am I to get it, to capture it?' - in that question there is already division. Whereas, when you see the actual fact of what is going on, then the very seeing of it is the action - I hope this is clear. Every form of conflict, inwardly or outwardly - and there is really no division as the outer or the inner - is distortion. I do not think that one realizes this sufficiently clearly. One is so accustomed to conflict and struggle; one even feels that when there is no conflict one is not growing, not developing, not creating, that one is not functioning properly. One wants resistance, yet not seeing the implication of resistance, which is division. So, can the mind act without resistance, without conflict, seeing that any form of friction, any form of resistance, implies division bringing about a neurotic, conflicting state? When there is perception and action without concept, the activity of the centre, of the `self', the `me', the 'I', the `ego', the `libido' - whatever word one uses to describe that which is inside -the `observer', the censor, the controller, the thinker, the experiencer and so on, comes to an end. The centre of all psychological ideation is the `me' (not practical and scientific knowledge and so on). When there is any challenge, then the response from the centre as the `me' is the response of the past. Whereas, in the instant seeing and the instant acting the 'self' does not enter at all. The centre is the Hindu, the Arab, the Jew, the Christian, the Communist and so on; when that centre responds, it is the response of his past conditioning, is the result of thousands of years of propaganda, religious and social; and when it responds there must be conflict. When one sees something very clearly and acts there is no division. One does not learn this from books; it is something one can only learn through self-knowing, something learnt direct, not secondhand. Can man, realizing the transiency of all things, find something that is not of time? The brain is the result of time; it has been conditioned through thousands of years. Its thought is the response of memory, knowledge, experience; that thought can never discover anything new because it is from that conditioning; it is always the old; it is never free. Anything that thought projects is within the field of time; it may invent God, it may conceive a timeless state, it may invent a heaven, but all that is still its own product and therefore of time, of the past, and unreal. So man, as one observes, realizing the nature of time - the psychological time in which thought has become so extraordinarily important - has everlastingly sought something beyond. He sets out to find this; he becomes trapped in belief; through fear he invents a marvellous deity. He may set out to find it through a system of meditation, a repetitive affair, which may make the mind somewhat quiet and dull. He may repeat mantras endlessly. In such repetition the mind becomes mechanical, rather stupid; it may fly off into some mystical, supernatural, transcendental something or other that it projects for itself. That is not meditation at all. Meditation implies a mind that is so astonishingly clear that every form of self-deception comes to an end. One can deceive oneself infinitely; and generally meditation, so-called, is a form of self-hypnosis - the seeing of visions according to your conditioning. It is so simple: if you are a Christian you will see your Christ; if you are a Hindu you will see your Krishna, or whichever of the innumerable gods you have. But meditation is none of these things: it is the absolute stillness of the mind, the absolute quietness of the brain. The foundation for meditation has to be laid in daily life; in how one behaves, in what one thinks. One cannot be violent and meditate; that has no meaning. If there is, psychologically, any kind of fear, then obviously meditation is an escape. For the stillness of the mind, its complete quiet, an extraordinary discipline is required; not the discipline of suppression, conformity, or the following of some authority, but that discipline or learning which takes place throughout the day, about every movement of thought; the mind then has a religious quality of unity; from that there can be action which is not contradictory. And also, in all this: what part do dreams play? The mind is never still; the incessant activity that goes on during the day continues during sleep. The worries, the travails, the confusion, the anxiety, the fears and the pleasures go on when one sleeps; they become more acutely symbolized in dreams. Can the mind be completely still during sleep? This is possible, but only when the travail of the day is understood at each minute so that it is finished and not carried over. If one is insulted or praised, finish with it as it happens, so that the mind is constantly freed of problems. Then as you sleep, a different kind of quality comes into being, the mind is completely at rest, one is not carrying over the business of the day, one ends it with each day. If one has gone through all this one sees that meditation is that quality of mind that is completely free from all knowledge - but such a mind uses knowledge; because it is free from `the known' it can use `the known; when it uses `the known' it is sane, objective, impersonal, not dogmatic. And so it happens that in this silence of the mind there is a quality which is timeless. But, as we said, the explanation, the description, is not that which is explained or described. Most of us are satisfied with explanations or descriptions; one must be free of the word, for the word is not the thing. When one lives that way, life has quite a different beauty; there is great love which is neither pleasure nor desire; for pleasure and desire are related to thought, and love is not the product of thought. Questioner: When I observe myself, I see a very rapid movement of thought and feeling and I am unable to watch one thought to its conclusion. Krishnamurti: There is always a chain of events going on. What are you to do? When you watch and try to understand one thought, go to its very end, another arises; this goes on all the time. There is your problem: as you are watching you are the multiplication of thoughts, and you cannot finish one thought to its end. What are you to do? Put the question differently; why does the mind endlessly chatter - why does this soliloquy go on? What happens if it does not go on? Is the chattering the result of wanting to be occupied with something? If you are not occupied, what takes place? If you are a housewife you are occupied with housekeeping, or you are occupied as a businessman - occupation has become a mania. Why is the mind demanding this occupation, this chattering? What happens if it does not chatter, if it is not occupied? - is there fear behind it? Fear of what? Questioner: Of being nothing? Krishnamurti: Fear of being empty, being lonely, fear of becoming aware of all the turmoil in itself; therefore it must be occupied with something, as the monk is occupied with his saviour, his prayers; the moment he stops he is just like anybody else, there is fear. So you want to be occupied, and this implies a fear of finding out what you are. Until you solve that problem of fear you will chatter. Questioner: As I watch myself the fear increases. Krishnamurti: Naturally. So the question is: not so much how to stop the increase of fear, but rather, can fear end? What is fear? You may not feel fear as you are sitting here, so perhaps you may not be able to take that and examine it and learn from it now. But you can immediately perceive that you depend, can you not? You depend on your friend, on your book, on your ideas, on your husband; psychological dependency is there, constantly. Why do you depend? Is it because it gives you comfort, a sense of security and of well-being, companionship? When that dependency fails you become jealous, angry and all that follows. Or, you try to cultivate freedom from dependency, to become independent. Why does the mind do all this? Is it because in itself it is empty, dull, stupid, shallow? - through dependency it feels that it is something more. The mind chatters because it has to be occupied with something or other; this occupation varies from the highest occupation of the `religious' man to the lowest occupation of the soldier and so on. The mind is obviously occupied because otherwise it might discover something of which it is deeply afraid, something which it may not be able to solve. What is fear? does it not relate to something I have done in the past, or something that I imagine might happen in the future? - the past incident and the future accident; the past illness and the future recurrence of the pain of it. Now it is thought that creates this fear; thought breeds fear, just as thought sustains and nourishes pleasure. Then can thought end? - can it come to an end so that it no longer gives a continuity to fear or to pleasure? We want pleasure, we want it to continue; but fear, let us put it away. We never see that the two go together. It is the machinery of thinking that is responsible, that gives the continuity to pleasure and fear. Can this machinery stop? When you see the extraordinary beauty of a sunset, see it; but do not qualify it with thought, saying, `I must treasure it in the memory, or have it again'. To see it and so end it, is action. Most of us live in inaction, therefore there is endless chattering. Questioner: But when the chattering does go on, do you just observe it? Krishnamurti: That is, become aware of this chattering - without choice. Which means: do not try to suppress it, do not say `it is wrong, or right', or `I must get beyond'. As you watch chattering, you discover why it goes on. When you learn about chattering, it is finished, there is no resistance to chattering. Through negation you have the positive action. BEYOND VIOLENCE PART V CHAPTER 1 TALK AT ROME CINEMA PASQUINO 21ST OCTOBER 1970 'PSYCHOLOGICAL REVOLUTION' LIFE IS SERIOUS; one has to give one's mind and one's heart to it, completely; one cannot play with it. There are so many problems; there is so much confusion in the world; there is the corruption of society and the various religious and political divisions and contradictions. There is great injustice, sorrow and poverty - not only the poverty outside but the poverty inside. Any serious man - fairly intelligent and not just sentimentally emotional - seeing all this, sees the necessity of change. Change is either a complete psychological revolution in the nature of the whole human being, or it is a mere attempt at the reformation of the social structure. The real crisis in the life of man, you and I, is whether such a complete psychological revolution can be brought about - independent of nationality and of all religious division. We have built this society; our parents, and their parents before them, have produced this corrupt structure and we are the product of that. We are society, we are the world, and if we do not change ourselves radically, really very, very deeply, then there is no possibility of changing the social order. Most of us do not realize this. Everyone, especially the younger generation, says: 'We must society'. We talk a great deal but we do nothing about it. It is we ourselves that have to change, not society - do please realize this. We have to bring about in ourselves, at the highest and at the deepest levels, a change in our whole way of thinking, living, feeling; then only is the social change possible - mere social revolution, the change of the structure of society outwardly by physical revolution, inevitably brings about, as has been seen, dictatorship or the totalitarian state, which deny all freedom. To bring about such a change in ourselves is a lifetime's work -not just something for a few days then to be forgotten - it is a constant application, a constant awareness of what is going on, within and without. We have to live in relationship; without it we cannot possibly exist. To be related means to live totally, wholly; for this there must be in ourselves a radical transformation. How shall we radically transform ourselves? If this seriously interests you then we shall have communication with each other; we shall think together, feel and understand together. So: how can man, you and I, totally change? That is the question and nothing else is relevant -it is a question not only for the young but also for the old. In this world there is tremendous agony, immense sorrow, war, brutality and violence; there is starvation of which you know nothing. One realizes that there is so much that can be done but for the vast fragmentation that there is, in the political world with its many parties and in the many religions; they all talk about peace but deny it, for there can only be peace, reality and love, when there is no division. So again, seeing this vast fragmentation both inwardly and outwardly, the only issue is that a human being must radically, profoundly, bring about in himself a revolution. This is a very serious problem, it is an issue that affects one's whole life; in it is involved meditation, truth, beauty, love. These are not just words. One has to find a way of living where they come into reality. One of the most important things in life is love. But what is called love is associated with sex, which has become so tremendously important; everything seems to revolve around sex. Why do human beings right through the world, whatever their cultures be, whatever religious sanctions say - find sex so extraordinarily important? - and with it is associated the word `love' - why? When you look at your own life, you see how it has become mechanical; our education is mechanical; we acquire knowledge, information, which gradually becomes mechanical. We are machines, secondhand people. We repeat what others have said. We read enormously. We are the result of thousands of years of propaganda. We have become psychologically and intellectually mechanical. In a machine there is no freedom. Sex offers freedom; there for a few seconds is freedom, you have completely forgotten yourself and your mechanical life. So sex has become enormously significant; its pleasure you call love. But is love pleasure? Or is love something entirely different, something in which there is no jealousy, no dependency, no possessiveness? One has to give one's life to find out what love means, just as one has to give one's whole life to find out what meditation is and what truth is. Truth has nothing whatsoever to do with belief. Belief comes into being when there is fear. One believes in God because in oneself one is so completely uncertain. One sees the transient things of life - there is no certainty, there is no security, there is no comfort, but immense sorrow - so thought projects something with the attribute of permanency, called God, in which the human mind takes comfort. But that is not truth. Truth is something that is to be found when there is no fear. Again, one has to give a great deal of attention to understand what fear is - both physical and psychological fear. One has these problems in life which one has not understood, which one has not transcended; thereby one continues a corrupt society, whose morality is immoral and in which virtue, goodness, beauty, love, of which we talk so much, soon become corrupt. Will the understanding of these problems take time? Is change immediate? Or is it to be brought about through the evolution of time? If time is taken - that is to say, at the end of your life you have reached enlightenment - then in that time you continue to sow seeds of corruption, war, hatred. So can this radical inward revolution happen instantly? It can happen instantly when you see the danger of all this. It is like seeing the danger of a precipice, of a wild animal, of a snake; then there is instant action. But we do not see the danger of all this fragmentation which takes place when the `self', the `me', becomes important - and the fragmentation of the 'me' and the `not me'. The moment there is that fragmentation in yourself there must be conflict; and conflict is the very root of corruption. So, it behoves one to find out for oneself the beauty of meditation, for then the mind, being free and unconditioned, perceives what is true. To ask questions is important; it is not only that one exposes oneself, but in asking questions one will find for oneself the answer. If one puts the right question the right answer is in the question. One must question everything in life, one's short hair or long hair, one's dress, the way one walks, the way one eats, what one thinks, how one feels, everything must be questioned: then the mind becomes extraordinarily sensitive, alive and intelligent. Such a mind can love; such a mind alone knows what a religious mind is. Questioner: What is the meditation of which you speak? Krishnamurti: Do you know anything of what meditation means even? Questioner: I know there are various forms of meditation, but I do not know which one you speak of. Krishnamurti: A system of meditation is not meditation. A system implies a method, which you practise in order to achieve something at the end. Something practised over and over again becomes mechanical - does it not? How can a mechanical mind -which has been trained and twisted, tortured to comply to the pattern of what it calls meditation - hoping to achieve a reward at the end - be free to observe, to learn? There are various schools, in India and further East, where they teach methods of meditation - it is really most appalling. It means training the mind mechanically; it therefore ceases to be free and does not understand the problem. So when we use the word `meditation' we do not mean something that is practised. We have no method. Meditation means awareness; to be aware of what you are doing, what you are thinking, what you are feeling, aware without any choice, to observe, to learn. Meditation is to be aware of one's conditioning, how one is conditioned by the society in which one lives, in which one has been brought up, by the religious propaganda - aware without any choice, without distortion, without wishing it were different. Out of this awareness comes attention, the capacity to be completely attentive. Then there is freedom to see things as they actually are, without distortion. The mind becomes unconfused, clear, sensitive; such meditation brings about a quality of the mind that is completely silent - of which quality one can go on talking, but it will have no meaning unless it exists. Questioner: Will not this way lead to more isolation, more confusion? Krishnamurti: First of all: are not most human beings terribly confused? Are you not very confused? - see the fact, know whether you are confused or not. A mind that is confused, whatever it does, brings about confusion. A mind that is confused says `I will practise meditation,' or `I will find out what love is' - how can a confused mind find anything, except its own projection of confusion. If one has realized this fact, then what shall one do? One is confused and one tries to bring about a state of mind which is not confused. One tries this, that, ten different things -drugs, drink, sex, worship, escapes - you follow - throw bombs, anything. The first thing is to stop action, to stop doing something. Also, one must stop all movement away from confusion so that there is no action springing to, or away from, confusion. So all action then stops, there is only confusion. There is no escape from it, neither is there trying to find a way out of it, nor trying to replace that confusion by clarity; there is no movement of thought away from this, causing further confusion; thought is not concerned with action for the moment. Then the question arises: are you aware of this confusion as being something outside of you as the `observer', or are you part of this confusion? Is the `observer' different from the thing observed - the confusion? If the `observer' is differentiated from the thing observed then there is a contradiction - that very contradiction is the cause of confusion. So, how the mind looks at this confusion is important. Does it observe it as something apart, separated from itself, or is the `observer' the observed? Please do understand this most important thing. Once you have understood this you will see what a tremendous difference it makes in life; all conflict is removed. The `observer' no longer says: `I must change it', `I must bring about clarity', `I must overcome it', `I must try to understand it', `I must escape from it'. All such activity is that of the `observer' who has separated himself from the confusion and has generated conflict between himself and the confusion. Questioner: I admit my confusion. Krishnamurti: Ah! The moment you say `I admit my confusion', there is an entity who admits it. You do not see the importance of this. I observe; in observing do I find I am observing as an outsider, or as part of this confusion? If I am part of the confusion the mind becomes completely quiet, there is no movement, I am still, I do not move away from it. Therefore, when there is no division between the `observer' and the observed there is complete cessation of confusion. And the other question that was asked: `If I am to learn from myself, what happens when the world around me controls me, conscripts me, takes me to war, tells me what to do politically, economically, religiously? There are the psychologists and the gurus from the East - they all tell me what to do. If I obey - which is what they all want me to do, promising Utopia at the end of it, or Nirvana, Enlightenment or truth - then I become mechanical. The root meaning of the word `obey' is to hear. By hearing constantly what other people tell me, I gradually slip into obedience. If I learn from myself, I also learn about others. And if the government ask me to join the army, I will do what I think is right at the moment I am asked. A free mind does not obey. A free mind is free because in itself there is no confusion. Then you will say, `What is the good of having one individual, one human being, with such a mind when all about it there is corruption, confusion?' Do you think you would ask such a question if you had such a mind? What is the meaning of having a mind so completely clear and unconfused? Questioner: Surely there will be no words any more? Krishnamurti: Those are all your speculations, are they not? How do you know? Questioner: Words are the basis of ideas. There would be no ideas any more and the mind would be free; then we would not have relationships, we would not seek any more. We would have silence, complete silence and we would understand. Everybody can have a free mind. Krishnamurti: I understand what you are saying very clearly. But, first of all: are we concerned with the world as something separate from ourselves? Is the world `you' actually - not theoretically `you'? Do you feel the quality of a mind that says, `I am the world, the world is me, the me and the world are not two separate entities'? The `self' is divided from the community, the `self' is against the world, the `self' is against your friend, against your wife, your husband. The `self' is important, is it not. And that `self' is asking the question, `What will the world be if there is no self'? Find out if you can live without the `self' and then you will see the truth of it. Also there is the previous question: what is the good of one human being in the world having a clear, unspotted mind, free - what is the point of it? Now who is asking the question? He who is confused or he whose mind is clear, unconfused, free? `Who' is asking this question? Does the flower ask this question? Does love ask this question? Do you ask a question of this kind when you are confronted with a tremendous issue? Do you ask this question: what value is it if I know what it means to love when the others do not know what it means to love? You just love. You do not ask this question. When you have no fear, psychologically, and everyone around you has this fear, will you then ask: `What is the good of my having no fear when all the others have fear?' Then what do you do? You have no fear and others have fear - what do you do? - you try to help me to learn the whole structure of fear. Questioner: How do you prevent language creating division? Each language has its own peculiar structure, a certain pattern, and language becomes a barrier. Krishnamurti: So, how does one get over this barrier? Is it not fairly clear that the word is not the thing? Whether you use an Italian word or an English word or a Greek word, that word is not the thing. The word `door' is not the door. The word, the description, the explanation, is not the thing explained or described: if this is seen, then there is no longer a dependency on the mere word. Now thought is manufactured of words; thought is always responding, according to memory, in verbal structures. Thought is limited by words, is the slave of words. Can one listen without the word interfering? You say to me `I love you', but what happens there? The words do not mean anything at all; but there may be a feeling of relationship which has not been brought about by the response of thought to the words; there may be a direct communication. So the mind, being aware that the word is not the thing, that the word, which is thought, interferes, listens freely, without prejudice - as it does when you say `I love you'. Can you listen without interpreting, without your prejudices interfering, twisting - listen as you may listen to the song of a bird? (In Italy there are so few birds; they kill them. What monstrous people we are.) Can you listen to the song of the bird without verbal comment, without naming it, saying, `It is a blackbird', `I would like to go on listening to it; can you listen without any of that interference, just listen - eh? You can, can you not? Now: can you listen equally to what goes on in yourself? - without prejudice, without a formula, without distortion - just as you may listen to that bell (noise of bell without any association, just listening to the pure sound of it; then you are the sound, you are not listening to the sound as something separate. Questioner: To do this we need to practise. Krishnamurti: To so listen you need to practise! Somebody must teach you! The moment somebody teaches you, you have the guru and the disciple, the authority and the learner. Now when that bell rang, did you listen to it - without any interpretation, with complete attention? If you saw that you said to yourself, `It is mid-day', `What time is it?', `It is meal time', then you saw that you were not actually giving complete attention to that sound; so you learnt - you were not taught - that you were not listening. Questioner: There is a difference between a bell ringing or a bird singing, on the one hand, and a word in a sentence which is interlaced with other words. I can isolate the sound of a bird, but a word in a sentence I cannot isolate. Krishnamurti: Listening to a bird is objective, outside. But can I listen to myself using a word in the context of a sentence; can I listen to the word and be free of the word and its context? You may say: `That is a beautiful table.' You have given that table certain appreciation; you have called it beautiful. I may look at it and say: `What an ugly table.' So the word denotes your feeling; it is not the actual thing; it comes into being as an associated idea. Can you look at your friend without the image you have created about that friend - the image being the word, the symbol? We cannot, because we do not know how that image has been built. You tell me something, which is pleasurable, and I create an image out of that, that you are my friend; another tells me something which is unpleasant, similarly I build an image; when I meet you it is as a friend, when I meet another it is not as a friend. But can the mind not build an image at all, though you say pleasant or unpleasant things? It can stop building the image when I give attention; then there is no image-formation; I can listen - listen without any image. Questioner: Would it be possible to go back to what you were saying at the beginning, about changing ourselves in society? How is it possible to really change yourself when you are obliged to conserve your relationships. I am in the Capitalist world and all my relations have to be capitalistic otherwise I would starve. Krishnamurti: And if you lived in the Communist world, you would also adjust yourself there. Questioner: Exactly. Krishnamurti: So what will you do? Questioner: How can I change? Krishnamurti: You have put the question: if I live in a capitalist society I have to adjust myself to the Capitalist demands; yet if I lived in a Communist society, totalitarian, bureaucratic society, I would also have to do exactly the same things - so what will I do? Questioner: I do not think it would be the same thing. Krishnamurti: But it is the same pattern. There you might have short hair and you would have to go to work, do this or that. But it is within the same whirlpool. What will you do? A human being, realizing that change within himself is of primary importance -whether he lives here or there - where is his concern? He must change himself: what does this change imply? Freedom from psychological fear, freedom from greed, envy, jealousy, dependency; freedom from the fear of being lonely, from the fear of conformity - right? If you have all these things working inside you - realising no conformity - you live as well as you can, there or here. But, unfortunately for us, the important thing is not revolution inwardly but change this and that externally. Questioner: And then what happens if someone kills you? Krishnamurti: Ah! No one can kill a free man. They can put his eyes out; inwardly he is free, nothing can touch that freedom. Questioner: Would you give a definition of egoism? Krishnamurti: If you want a definition look it up in a dictionary. `Definition' - please, I have said very carefully that the description is not the described. What is this self that is isolating itself all the time? Even though you love somebody, whether you sleep with that somebody, etc., there is always this self which is separate -with its ambitions, its fears, its agonies, with its occupation with itself in self-pity. As long as that self exists there must be separation, as long as that exists there must be conflict - right? How is that self to disappear - without effort? The moment you make an effort, there is the `Higher Self', so-called, that is dominating the `lower self.' How can the mind dissipate this thing called `the self'? What is the self? - is it a bundle of memories? - or is it something permanent? If it is a bundle of memories, it is of the past; that is the only thing you have, it is nothing permanent. The self is the `me' that has accumulated knowledge and experience, as memory, as pain; and that becomes the centre from which all action takes place. See it actually as it is. Every religion, every society and culture, realizes that `the self' wants to express itself; in art, self-expression is tremendously important; it is also very important in its assertion to dominate. Every religion has tried to destroy the self - `Do not bother about the self,' `Put God in its place, or the State in its place'. And that has not succeeded. The self has identified itself with God -whatever that is - and so it remains. We are saying: observe that self in operation, learn about it, watch it, be aware of it, do not destroy it, do not say, `I must get rid of it' or `must change it', just watch it, without any choice, without any distortion; then out of that watching and learning, the self disappears. Rome. 21 October 1970. SAN DIEGO STATE COLLEGE, CALIFORNIA 3RD PUBLIC TALK 7TH APRIL, 1970 'THE VIOLENCE IN OUR LIVES' I would like, if I may, this evening, to talk about the implications of meditation and what is necessary for a mind that is capable of really true meditation - what is the first step, as it were. First of all, I think one has to understand the meaning of the word freedom. For most of us, freedom implies freedom to express ourselves, or freedom to do what we like in society; or freedom to think what we like; or freedom from a particular tiresome habit or a particular idiosyncrasy and so on. To understand what is freedom -because that seems to me absolutely necessary for a mind that is capable without any distortion to be able to meditate. For most of us we demand freedom politically or religiously or to think what we like, and there is the freedom of choice. Political freedom is all right and one must have it, but for most of us we never demand and find out whether it is at all possible to be free inwardly. Our mind is a slave to its own projections, to its own demands, to its own desires and fulfillments. The mind is a slave to its cravings, to its appetites. And apparently we never ask whether it is at all possible to be free inwardly. But we are always wanting freedom outwardly - to go against the society, against a particular structure of society. And this revolt against society, which is taking place all over the world, is a form of violence which indicates that one is concentrating on an outward change without the inward change. So, violence plays an extraordinary part in our life, we never ask whether the mind can be completely and utterly free from violence. We have accepted it as part of life, as we have accepted war as a way of life. And we have our favourite wars - you may not like this particular war, but you don't mind having other kinds of wars. And there will be always wars - and there have been for 5,000 years, wars, because man has accepted violence as a way of life. And we never question whether the mind can be really and truly, deeply free of violence. And the permissive society in which we live, the culture in which this is gradually coming out of this society, to do what one likes or choose what one likes, is still an indication of violence. Where there is choice there is no freedom. Choice implies confusion, not clarity. When you see something very clearly there is no choice, there is only action. It is only a confused mind that chooses. And choice is an indication of the lack of freedom and therefore in choice there is resistance, conflict. And so our life as it is now is based on violence. Our life is conditioned by the verb 'to be'. Please, this is important to understand, how our life is guided and conditioned by the verb 'to be: one has been, one is, and one will be. The idea in that verb is to arrive, to succeed, to achieve, to become, gradually attain peace, gradually get rid of the things that hinder us. So the verb 'to be' is the conditioning of the mind in time. Do please follow this. Because enlightenment is not of time at all. Understanding is not a matter of gradual sensitivity; either one understands it immediately or not at all. As long as the mind is conditioned by that verb, and as most minds are, all our modern structure is based on that. I will be good, I will gradually achieve a certain state of mind and so on. So one has to be aware of this dangerous word. And find out whether the mind can be free of the word, because the word is never the thing, the description is never the described. And we are satisfied with the description, with the explanations. So, as I said, we are going to go into this question of not only what is meditation - and I believe that is a new word that you have learned in this country, brought from the East, and one doesn't know the full meaning of that word. But before we go into that, which is a very complex and most important thing, meditation is the most beautiful thing in life, if you know what meditation is. But before one can meditate one must understand what is living, what is love and what is death. If you don't understand that your meditation is merely an escape, is a form of self-hypnosis. So you must lay the foundation, not gradually. There must be order before the mind can fully comprehend the significance of what meditation is, there must be complete order. Which means, the end of all conflict, all disturbance, all disorder within oneself, otherwise your sitting down in a corner by yourself for ten minutes a day and thinking you're going to meditate or achieve enlightenment, is nonsense, if you don't mind my saying so. So one has to understand what living is. And one can understand that only by observing what actually it is, not in opposition to a concept, to a formula, to an ideology, but actually what it is. So one must be free to observe actually what our life is, not what it should be. If you are thinking in terms of what it should be, then you are totally avoiding what your actual life is. So what is this life that we are living, this life, the actual daily life is disorder, isn't it? There is conflict, there is driving ambition, there is battle in ourselves, opposing contradictory desires and words, endless frustrations. And there is frustration because we have never understood what fulfillment is, and if there is such a thing as fulfillment. What is there to fulfil? One's own particular little ambition, one's own appetites, envies, ambitions to be somebody? And what is that centre that demands all this? Is not that very centre the cause of disorder? Please, as I said the other day, and I hope you won't mind the repetition of it, you are not merely listening to a few words or ideas of the speaker. That has no value whatsoever. What has significance and worthwhileness, is that through these words of the speaker you are observing yourself, you are observing your life, your daily life as it is lived. And without bringing about order in that life, complete mathematical order, life has very little meaning - going to the office every day for the next 60 years, 40 years, living in this constant battle between 'what is' and 'what should be', between the frustrated ambitions and the simple, clear, beautiful life; the images that one has built about oneself and about others, the self-centred activity that is going on all the time, which is isolating each one, and therefore dividing. And what is our life, a life of conflict, a life that has really no meaning as it is, a life that is a battlefield, not only in yourself but also in your relationship, a life of division, contradiction, routine, monotony. And a life that is, when you look at it very deeply, utterly lonely, a life that has no beauty. And that is our life and we are not exaggerating it, if you observe yourself very carefully, without any prejudice, bias, when you look at every human being, right through the world, the saint, the priest, the specialist, the careerist, the ordinary layman are all caught in this. And we want to escape from it. And so you escape through nationalism, through beliefs, through dogmas, through innumerable forms of entertainment, in which is included the religious entertainment. That is our life, comparing ourselves with something that should be, comparing ourselves with the greater, with the nobler, with the more intelligent, with the more spiritual and so on and on. Therefore conflict and fear. This is our life, a battle for security and in the very search for security, psychological as well as physical, we bring about destruction. These are obvious facts. And from this we want to escape, because man has lived like this for thousands and thousands of years, with sorrow, confusion and great misery and mischief. And without changing all that, completely, radically, mere outward revolution, changing a particular system for another system, does not solve this aching agony. There is only one revolution, the inward revolution. So, spitting on society, blaming society for your condition, is obviously blaming something which you have created - it is your society, you have built it, by your greed, envy, ambition, competitiveness, comparison, by one's own inward hatreds, violence. So that is our life, a really quite insane life. Now the question is, how can that life be changed, not gradually, but immediately, otherwise you're sowing the seed of violence, though you may want peace, you are actually sowing the seeds of enmity, misery. So seeing all this non-verbally, not as an explanation, not as an idea but seeing it actually as it is, feel it, as you feel hunger, therefore being intimately related to it. And you cannot be deeply, beautifully related to this living, which we call life, as long as you have any form of escape from it, any form of distortion. So, awareness without choice, to be aware of this whole phenomenon of existence, not someone else's existence, not being aware of this, of our life according to somebody, some philosopher, some guru, some psychologist, but being aware of it actually, because you yourself see it. If one is so completely aware of it, and one must be, because one cannot possibly live as we are living - we are talking inwardly, psychologically, a life that is so torn. And if we want order, and order is virtue, order demands discipline, that is to learn, not to conform, not to imitate, but to learn. And to learn about a disorder, which is our life, to observe it, to learn, and in that observation comes an extraordinary discipline, not imposed by anybody, because the very observation itself has its own discipline. In the very act of observing you are learning, and therefore the learning is the discipline. Please do see this because we have imposed on ourselves so many disciplines - the business discipline, the religious discipline, the family discipline - of course the military discipline is the most absurd kind of discipline. But we've got so many disciplines - the must and the must nots, all this conforming, imitating, suppressing, and being suppressed, wanting to fulfil - all that is disorder. So to understand order, to learn about order, not what order should be, but to learn about it, one must learn about disorder. Are we following each other or are you slowly being mesmerized by words, because if you are, tant pis, it's up to you. We said, one must learn about disorder, which is our life, which is our mind, our heart, our very core of our being, is disorder, because if you say, there is a soul, there is, according to the Hindus, the Atman and so on, they are just theories. Philosophy has nothing to do with living, and we are trying to understand what living is, and we are seeing that in living is disorder, utter disorder, the battle, the misery, the confusion, the agony, the guilt, the fear. So one has to observe without any choice, this disorder which is you, which is me - to observe it, not what you want it to be, then you create conflict between 'what is' and 'what should be'. And when there is conflict there is disorder. Please do understand this thing very simply - once you understand this you will find that by observing disorder in oneself, without any distortion, without wanting to bring about order out of this disorder, trying to impose what you think is order on disorder, but observe it without any choice, without any distortions. Then out of that observation comes supreme order, the highest good. And in that there is a total revolution. And from that inward radical change, then there comes outward order, not the other way round. We want outward order first and this has never been possible - every revolution including the Communist revolution, says forget about the inward order, let's have State order. And you know what is happening, every revolution has done this, try to bring about outward order without paying any attention whatsoever to this psychological, supreme order within oneself. And order means also not only virtue but love. And what is love? I wonder if you have ever asked that question, what love is -have you? What is love, how will you find out? You will find out what it is through what it is not, through negation the positive comes. But if you pursue the positive, then it is the pursuit of the projection of the mind. So when you deny all the projections of the mind, by denying in the sense, setting it aside, negating, then you will find out what it is. So that is what we are going to do, find out what it is not, to find out what it is. We said, what is love - you know, that is one of the most important things in life. If one has love you can do what you like, then there is no conflict, then there is no evil, there is great bliss, but to imagine what bliss is and pursue that, is not love. So we are going to see what it is not, and therefore come upon what it is. Therefore it is not a question of searching out love, nor cultivating love - how can you cultivate love, all cultivation is the product of the mind, product of thought; it is like a mind that pursues humility, it says, I know vanity and I must cultivate humility. And then the mind that is proud and vain cultivates humility it is still vain. It is like those saints that are pretending to be humble, because they have cultivated humility. So what we are going to do is to find out what it is not, not through me, not through the speaker at all, but by listening to yourself and finding out what it is not and if it is not that, wipe it away instantly. If you don't wipe it, if it doesn't disappear, then you are caught in time, you are a slave to the word and the verb 'to be'. And therefore there is no love. So first we are asking what it is not. Obviously it is not jealousy, it is not envy, and your love is hedged about, a prisoner to jealousy, envy. And when you see that, that what you call love is entangled with the ugly brutality of jealousy, see, actually observe it, and in that observation jealousy goes, and you will never be jealous again, never envious. Please do this as we are talking. Envy comes only when there is comparison. And is love comparison? So again, you put aside all comparison, which means all envy. Then, is love pleasure? This is going to be a little more difficult. For most of us, love is pleasure -there is love, sexual love, love of God or love of - God knows what else. It is based on pleasure. The love of respectability is the very essence of the bourgeois mind. So is love pleasure? Do observe it, please. We were saying yesterday evening what pleasure is - the product of thought, having had pleasure of different kinds yesterday, you think about it, you have image upon image built and that stimulates you and that gives you pleasure, sexual or otherwise, and that you call love. And is it love, because in pleasure there is frustration, there's pain, there's agony, there is dependency? Don't you depend psychologically on another? And when you do, when you depend on your wife or your husband, whatever it is, and you say, "I love you", is that love? And in that dependence is there not fear? You are the product of your conditioning, you're the product of your society, you're the product of propaganda, religious and otherwise - for two thousand years, as in India ten thousand or five thousand years they have been told what to believe, what to think. You repeat what others have said. All your education is that, the repetition of what you have learnt from a book. And you're that, you're conditioned, you are not free, happy, vital, passionate human beings. You are frightened human beings and therefore secondhand, you're full of authority of others; or your own particular little authority, of your own knowledge - you know something about something and you become an authority. So you're not free. And intellectually - look - are you free? Not repeat what others have said, not what you've been taught in the university or what you have learnt from a book. And what have you experienced? Go into it, you will see what you have experienced. You have experienced something that you will always recognize, otherwise it is not an experience. Therefore your experience is always old, like thought is always old - thought is never new, because it is the response of memory. So you - if you will forgive my repeating it - you are secondhand human beings, intellectually, emotionally. You go to places to learn how to be sensitive. Lovely, idea, isn't it, be taught by another how to think. So morally, intellectually, deeply, you are not free, and therefore you are only free in your sexual expression. And that is why it has become so extraordinarily important. There you are full, there you are free, though it has its own problems and its own neurotic attitudes and actions. So sex becomes important when everything else becomes unimportant, when life, the whole of it, not just sex, life includes living, life includes what love is, what death is, the whole movement of living, when that has no meaning, then one fragment which you call sex, becomes extraordinarily important and vital. When you are not passionate about freedom, inwardly, then you are lustfully passionate about sex, that's all. And with that you associate love, pleasure. And with that you associate tenderness, gentleness, you may be sexually very tender, very kind, considerate, but outwardly you destroy, you kill everything round you, animals to eat, to hunt. So your love is based on pleasure and therefore is it love? Love, surely, is something that is none of all this; compassion means passion for everybody, not to your particular little desire. So when you understand what disorder is by observing very closely, out of that comes order. And order has its own discipline which is its own virtue, therefore that order is the supreme good and therefore love, which has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure, because pleasure has pain. Love is enjoyment, love is joy, not the puny thing that man has made it. To find that out, what love is, you must also understand what death is. Do you really want to understand what death is? Yes? I doubt it, very much, because you are all so scared of death, aren't you? Or you have a belief in an after life, therefore you are not frightened. You have rationalized your life, knowing that it is going to come to an end, the puny, shoddy little life that one lives, and one is frightened of that, therefore you say, let's rationalize, it, think about it, clarify it - you know, all the rest of it. Or, you have a belief in an after life. The whole of Asia believes in an after life, millions believe in reincarnation. But they never question what it is that incarnates. They believe that there is a permanent entity that is going to incarnate and so on, I won't go into all that. If you believe in reincarnation, then what matters is how you live today, because you are going to pay for it next life. How you live, what you do, what you think, what your morality is. So, even though you may believe in reincarnation, what matters is how you live now. So you have to face death, not postpone it till old age, some accident, disease and so on - you have to meet it, you have to understand it, not be afraid of it. So we say, we must understand life and avoid death. But if you see life as a whole in which there is this living and this extraordinary thing called love, and death, as a total unit, not three separate things, then what is death? The organism, by usage, disease and all the rest of it, comes to an end - it comes to an end quicker when there is conflict. All your heart failures and all the business of it, is the result of this extraordinary emotional, contradictory way of living. The organism comes to an end. And either you can say, that is the end, finish; or, which we do say, the end of the whole structure and the nature of the 'me', the 'me' which has divided itself as us and they, we and them, we and you, that 'me' is the centre of conflict. Now can that 'me' die, not eventually but every day, then you will know what death is, so that the mind is always fresh tomorrow because you have death to the past. Do it, not follow it. Die to your pleasure, die to your furniture - that's what you are, your furniture: whether the chair or the furniture that you have accumulated in your mind, which you call knowledge. So that you die every day to everything that you have accumulated. And that's what is going to happen to you anyhow. That means, to empty the mind of everything known, which means the mind becomes utterly innocent. And it is only such a mind that has this extraordinary religious quality of purity that can come upon what is called enlightenment. SAN DIEGO STATE COLLEGE, CALIFORNIA 2ND PUBLIC TALK 6TH APRIL, 1970 'THE STRUCTURE OF FEAR' If we may, we will continue with what we were talking about the other day. I don't quite know where to begin, because what we are going to talk about is such a complex problem and needs considerable investigation. So I hope that we can go together easily with some hesitation into this question. One has to be serious. It is only those who are really, vitally serious, can live properly, can live a life that is complete and whole. And that seriousness doesn't exclude joy, enjoyment. But as long as there is fear, one cannot possibly be serious, or enjoy, or know what it means to have great joy. And fear seems to be one of the most common things in life, and strangely we have accepted it as a way of life, as we have accepted violence in all its various forms as a way of life, we have also accepted and got used to being psychologically as well as physically afraid. And this evening, if we can, we should go into this question. We should, I feel, go into it so completely that we understand it so fully that when we leave the hall, or this place, we shall be rid of this fear. I think it can be done, it isn't just a theory, or a hope, but if one gives, as we shall presently, complete attention to this question of fear, I'm quite sure that in exploring the causes of fear and also how to approach it, how to look at it, how to completely end it, so that our mind, the human mind that has suffered so much, that has endured so much pain, that has lived with great sorrow and fear, such a mind can completely be free of this thing called fear. And to understand it, we must communicate with each other quite easily. Communication implies, the very word means, creating together, understanding together, working together; not that you merely listen to the speaker, hear a few words or ideas, but with the speaker take a journey together, and understand this very complex problem of fear. And to communicate, to take this journey together implies neither acceptance nor denial, not saying to oneself, it's absolutely impossible to be rid of fear, or rationalize fear, or accept it - you need a free mind to enquire into this question, a mind that has no conclusion, that doesn't say, this is possible or it's not possible. Because we are enquiring, exploring together. So you must be free to observe, to enquire. And that's absolutely essential. So that one has no prejudice to find out, prejudice which will prevent the understanding of the truth of it, of 'what is'. You see, there are so many forms of fear, both physical as well as psychological, psychosomatic fears. And to go into each one of these various forms of fear requires enormous time, demands a great many days to go into every aspect of every fear. But I think one can observe the quality of fear, the general fear, not a particular fear, observe the nature of fear, the structure of fear, not get lost in a detail or in a particular form of one's own fear. Because when we understand the nature and the structure of fear, then we can apply that understanding, or come with that understanding, or approach with that understanding, our particular fear. One may be afraid of the dark, physically, or one may be afraid of one's wife or husband, or what the public says or thinks or does. Or one may be afraid of this sense of loneliness, or the emptiness of life, the boredom of a meaningless existence that one leads. Or one may be afraid of the future, the tomorrow, the uncertainty, the insecurity, the bomb. Or one may afraid of death, the ending of one's life. So there are various forms of fear, neurotic as well as sane, rational fears. If fear can ever be rational or sane. But most of us apparently are neurotically afraid of both the past, of today and of tomorrow; the things that one has done in the past or the ill health that one has had in the past with all its pain and agony and not wanting it repeated and is one afraid of that, tomorrow. One is afraid of time, growing old, getting senile, depending on another. So there is fear of time, fear of the past and of the future. And this fear of loneliness, of death, of public opinion, of not conforming, not being able to succeed, not being able to fulfil, not being somebody in this stupid world, and so on. And now one is afraid of the draft, the conscription. And there are so many fears, not only conscious fears, fears that one is aware of, but also there are fears deep down, undiscovered, unexplored, in the deep recesses of one's own mind. So the question is, not only how to deal with the conscious fears as well as those that are hidden, the fear of time, that is yesterday, of the things that one has done, the repetition of that misery, of tomorrow, the uncertainty, the insecurity, both psychological as well as physical. And there are the fears of great loneliness and the escape from that loneliness. Surely fear is a movement away from 'what is', the flight, the escape, the avoidance of actually 'what is', the movement, the flight away brings about fear. That is, when there is comparison of any kind, it breeds fear - comparing oneself with another whom you think is greater or wiser, nobler etc., etc. And the comparison of what you are with what you should be. So fear is a movement away from the actual, the 'what is', the movement, not the object from which you escape. And fear comes about through comparison. And there is the fear, deeply hidden in oneself, of which one is not aware. So that these problems are all very complex. And none of these problems of fear can be resolved through will, saying to oneself, I will not be afraid. An act of will has no meaning. I hope you are following all this - it isn't a game I am playing with you, nor you playing a game with me. We are considering very serious problems and therefore you have to give your attention to it. And you cannot give attention if you are interpreting or translating or comparing what is being said with what you already know - you have to listen. And the art of listening one has to learn, because one doesn't listen at all, one is always comparing, evaluating, judging, denying. Therefore you prevent yourself from actually listening. To listen so completely to another implies that you give your whole attention - it doesn't mean you agree or disagree, because there is no agreement or disagreement when we are exploring together. Only the microscope through which you look may be dull, may not be clear. So if you have a precision instrument then what you see, is what another will also see. Therefore there is no question of agreement or disagreement or denial. So we are trying to examine this whole question of fear, so you will have to give your attention, its your life, because fear deadens the mind, makes the mind insensitive, dull. How can a mind that is afraid love? A mind that depends, what can it know of joy, except fear? So there are conscious as well as hidden fears. How do you -first enquire - how do you expose those hidden fears? And when you do expose them, how will you be free of them, how can the mind be free of them? That is the first question. Please do follow this - you yourself are doing this, you yourself are observing it, the speaker is only pointing out. How does it happen that the hidden fears are open, exposed? One can know the conscious fears and how to deal with them will come presently. But there are the hidden fears, perhaps much more important. So how will you deal with them, how will you expose them? Would you permit me to take my coat off? You don't mind? It's so dreadfully hot, isn't it? I am working, you are not, and that's the pity of it. If you are working as hard as the speaker to go into this question, your whole attitude and attention would be entirely different, if you don't mind my saying so. So we are considering, how the deep layers of fear, hidden, can be exposed. Can they be exposed through analysis - analysing, seeing their causes? Will analysis free the mind from fear, not a particular neurotic fear but the whole of fear, the whole structure of fear - analysis? In analysis is implied, not only time, taking many, many days, years, the whole of one's life, at the end of it perhaps you may understand a little but you are ready for the grave. And also in analysis implies the analyser. Who is the analyser? Is he the professional, the expert, who has a degree, going to analyse your deep, hidden fears? And he will also take time, and therefore also your money. So analysis implies the analyser who is the censor, who is the result of many forms of conditioning. And he is going to analyse the fear which he himself has created. I hope you are following all this, because our intention is that when you do leave this rather warm hall, that you no longer have any form of fear. It can be done. And you will know quite a different kind of life, you'll know what tremendous joy is, a mind that is completely free of this terrible thing called fear. And to be free of that you have to walk together, you are going to work as hard as the speaker is working. So analysis implies time and an analyser. Please see the truth of this, not your opinion as opposed to the speaker's opinion or somebody else's opinion or knowledge - see the truth of it, that it takes time. And the interval between that which you are analysing and the ending of that will involve time and therefore many other factors which give it a different direction. [I hope this film, film-making is not disturbing you.] You have to see the truth that analysis is not the way, because the analyser is the result of time, the analyser is conditioned, the analyser is a fragment among many other fragments which go to make up the 'me', the 'I', the ego. So he becomes the analyser, assumes the authority of the analyser, and his analysis must be complete each time, otherwise what is the point of analysis at all. So analysis, which implies time is not the ending of fear. Is this somewhat clear? To see this means that you have completely put aside the whole idea of progressive change, because the very factor of change is one of the major causes of fear. Are you all being mesmerized? Because to me, to the speaker, this is a very important thing, therefore he feels very strongly, he speaks intensely, he is not doing propaganda - there is nothing for you to join, nothing for you to believe; but to observe and learn and be free of this fear. So analysis is not the way. Do you understand what that means, when you see the truth of that? It means that you are no longer thinking in terms of the analyser, who is going to examine, who is going to analyse, going to judge, evaluate, therefore your mind is free of a particular burden called analysis, therefore it is capable of looking directly. And if analysis is not the way and therefore false, how are you to look at this fear, how are you to bring out all the structure, all the hidden parts of fear? Through dreams? Dreams are the continuation of waking hours, through sleep - aren't they? I don't know if you have observed that in dreams there is always action, doing something or something is happening, which is the same in the waking hours, a continuation of the waking hours, when there is sleep, through dreams it is still part of the whole movement. So dreams have no value. Are you accepting all this? Great Scott, I hope not - I'm sure you don't - it doesn't matter. Because you see what is happening, we are eliminating the things to which you are accustomed: analysis, dreams, will, time, so that when you eliminate, the mind becomes extraordinarily sensitive. And through this elimination it has become not only sensitive but intelligent. Now with that sensitivity and intelligence we are going to look at fear. Are we going together? You know this is great fun, if you really go into this, because then you turn away, you turn your back on the whole of the social structure in which time, analysis, will is in operation. So what is fear? What is fear, how does it come? Fear is always in relation to something, it doesn't exist by itself: in relation to something that is permanent to another thing that is also permanent. There is fear of what happened yesterday, the repetition of that tomorrow, whether it is pain or some other form, there is always a fixed point from which relationship takes place. We'll go into that in a minute. So as we were saying, fear exists only in relationship with some other thing, otherwise there is no fear. Related to the past, in memory of the past pain and not wanting that, the repetition of that pain tomorrow or today. Relation to something that has happened. And what is fear - you have had pain yesterday, that is obvious, you have had it. Or there is some hope tomorrow which might not come about. So there is fear of yesterday, there is fear of tomorrow. How does that fear come about? You are asking the question, not I. So you are working hard. I've had pain yesterday, obviously, and there is the memory of it, and not wanting it again tomorrow. How does fear come into this? Thinking about the pain of yesterday, thinking, the memory of yesterday's pain projects the fear of tomorrow, of having pain again tomorrow. So thought brings about fear. Thought, thought brings about fear, breeds fear, and also thought cultivates pleasure. To understand fear you must also understand pleasure, because they are interrelated, without understanding one you can't understand the other, which is, you can't say I must have only pleasure and no fear, because fear is the other side of the coin which is called pleasure. So there was pleasure yesterday, sexual or different kinds of pleasures, you think about it, the image, chew the cud of pleasure, which is thinking about it. And you may not have it tomorrow. So thought engenders fear. I think that's fairly clear, isn't it? So thought not only sustains pleasure, it also nourishes fear, and thought has separated itself as the analyser, the thing to be analysed is also part of thought. So it is playing tricks upon itself. So then the question is: if thought is doing all this, thought that refuses to examine the hidden, unconscious fears, the thought that has set the analyser separate from the thing to be analysed, thought that has brought in time as a means of escaping fear, but sustaining fear, and thought also nourishing pleasure, which has nothing whatsoever to do with joy, because joy is not the product of thought, it is not pleasure. You can cultivate pleasure, you can think about it endlessly and derive great pleasure, but you can't do that with joy. The moment you do that it has gone, it has become something from which you derive pleasure and therefore which you are afraid to lose. So thought is responsible for pleasure, pain, fear. And also thought is afraid of being completely lonely. Thought has already condemned it, and so thought invents a way of escaping from that loneliness through various forms of religious entertainments or cultural something or other, the everlasting search for deeper and wider dependencies. So thought is responsible. Then what is one to do? What is one to do when one realizes that thought, which is the response of memory to any challenge, minor or major, which sustains both pleasure and fear, these are all facts, not the speaker's invention, or his peculiar philosophy or theory, these are absolute daily observable facts. Then the next question is, what is one to do? There is thought, you can't kill it, you can't destroy it, you can't say, well, I'll forget it, you can't resist it - if you do, that's another form of thought. Thought is the response of memory. And you need that memory to function daily, to go to your office, to go to your home, to be able to talk - memory is the storehouse of your technological knowledge. So you need memory, completely. And also you see how memory sustains fear through thought, having had pleasure yesterday, seeing the beauty of that lovely sunset, and you want that again repeated, that same experience, either through drug or through going to that particular spot to look at that exquisite light. And when it doesn't happen there is pain, there is disappointment, frustration. So thought. You need memory with all the purity and clarity of thought in one direction, technologically, to function daily, to earn a livelihood and so on. And also you see there is the fact that thought also breeds fear. So what is one to do, what is the mind to do? You've understood the question? Is it clear? You are putting the question to yourself, I'm not putting the question to you. If you are accepting my question, the speaker's question, then it's not your question. If it is your question, which it must be, after this examination, if it is not, you are asleep. If it is your own, then how will you answer it, how will you answer this question, after having gone through the various facts of analysis, of time, of escape, of dependency, seeing that a movement away from 'what is' is fear, the movement itself is fear. After observing all that, seeing the truth of all that, not opinion, not your casual judgement, what is your answer to this question that thought must function most efficiently, sanely, and yet that very thought becomes a danger because it breeds fear? Now before you answer that question, what is the state of the mind that has gone through all this? You understand what I mean? What is the state of the understanding of your mind, the mind that has examined all these various forms which we have being exposed, which have been explained or observed, what is the quality of your mind now, because on that quality you're going to answer? If you have not taken the journey you have no answer; but if you have actually taken the journey step by step and gone into everything that we have discussed, then your mind, you will see, has become extraordinarily intelligent, live, sensitive, because it has thrown off all the burden that it has accumulated. Then the question is, how do you observe this whole process of thinking? Is there a centre from which you think? Do follow all this, please. The centre being the censor, the one who judges, evaluates, condemns, justifies - do you still think from that censor? Or there is no centre from which to think at all, but you think? You see the difference? Is this getting all too much - do tell me, please. No? I'm surprised - you're merely listening, I'm afraid. Look sirs, thought has created a centre as the 'me' - me, my opinions, my country, my God, my experience, my house, my furniture, my wife, my children, you know, me, me, me. That is the centre from which you act, think. That centre divides. And because of that centre and that division, there must be conflict, obviously. When it is your opinion against somebody else's opinion, my country, your country and all that - division. Which means, the centre is always divided. And if you think from that centre and observe from that centre fear, you're still caught in fear, because that centre had separated itself from the thing it has called fear, and therefore it says, I must get rid of it, I must analyse it, I must overcome it, resist it and so on. So you are strengthening fear. So can you look, can the mind look at fear, which we will go into a little bit more, without the centre? Can you look at that fear without naming it, because the moment you say - fear - it is already in the past, because you have named it. You are following all this? The moment you name something, don't you divide it? The white and the black, and the brown and the Communist - don't you? And so that very division is a form of resistance, conflict and fear. So the question is, to observe without that centre, and not to name the thing called fear, as it arises. All this requires tremendous discipline. You know, the word discipline means to learn, to learn from somebody - you're not learning from the speaker, you're learning from yourself. And to observe all this very closely, with care, which means with affection and attention, then the mind is looking without the division as the centre, to which it has been accustomed. Therefore there is the ending of fear, both the hidden and the open. If you haven't done it this evening, don't take it home and think about it. Truth is something which you must see immediately. And to see something clearly and immediately you must give your heart and your mind and your whole being. Now perhaps you'd ask questions, if you'd care to. Q: Is what you are trying to say that, rather than trying to escape from fear, in essence, fearing fear, we should accept fear instead? K: No, sir. Don't accept anything. You see sir, I don't know how to make it simple. Not to accept, sir, but to look at fear. You have never looked at fear, have you? You've never said, well, I am afraid, let me look. Have you done that? Or you've said, I am afraid, let me turn on the radio, or go to Church or pick up a book, or resort to a belief - a movement away. So you have never looked at fear, you have never come directly into communication with it, you have never come directly in contact with it. The moment you say, my wife, see what you have done - the image that you have built about her or the husband, that image is in contact with the other image, therefore relationship is between image and image. In the same way, to look at fear without naming it, without running away, without trying to overcome it, just to be with it, without any movement away from it. You do it. And if you do it you will see very strange things happen. Q: After you meet fear do you become it? K: After you meet fear, can you become it? You are fear, how can you become it? Sir, I don't know how to explain this. You are fear, only the mind, thought, has separated itself from the fear, not knowing what to do with it, therefore it resists it; therefore having divided itself from fear, it becomes the observer of that fear and resists that fear or escapes from that fear. But the observer, the one who resists, is also fear. Q: Sir, a great deal of frustration exists because people are not permitted to tape-record lectures, privately. Could you tell us why, please? K: I'll tell you - very simple. Q: First of all, psychologically, why do they want to take notes; and secondly is the physical part of it, why are they not allowed to tape record? K: First of all, if you are taking a recording of this talk, it is very disturbing to your neighbour - you're fiddling with it, and all the rest of it. Second, what is important, to listen, directly, now, to what is being said, or take it home and later listen to it? Which is important, when the speaker is saying, time, don't allow time to interfere? And you say, well, I'll record what you're saying and take it home. Surely fear is now, you have it in your heart, in your mind, may be not actually at this moment - but it is there. Q: Sir, if that is true then why does the Foundation sell tapes? K: Wait sir, wait sir, look at it, sir - forget the Foundation, why they tape, and so on, kick it all overboard. Just listen, sir. Which is important: to listen directly to what is being said, while you are here? Is that the most important thing? Because you have taken all the trouble to come here and the speaker has also taken the trouble to come here. And we are trying to communicate together, now. Wait, sir - listen for two minutes. You are trying to understand it now, not tomorrow. And the understanding of that now is of the highest importance and therefore you must give all your attention to it. And you cannot give all your attention if you are taking notes. If you are paying half attention to your tape recorder, holding the beastly thing up and all the rest of it. Now you may not understand all this immediately. So you may want to listen to it again. Then buy a tape, or don't buy a tape, a book or not a book. That's all. If you take all this that has been said this evening, in an hour and ten minutes, completely, absorb it wholly with your heart and mind, it's finished. You haven't done it, unfortunately. Have you? Because you haven't given your mind to all this before, because you have accepted fear, you have lived with fear, your fear has become your habit. And what the speaker is saying is to shatter all that. And the speaker says, do it now, not tomorrow. Just a minute, sir. So that is clear, because our minds are not used to seeing the total nature of fear, what is implied. And if you could see it immediately, you'll be out of this hall with ecstatic mind. But most of us are not capable of doing that immediately, and therefore the tapes. Finished. Right, sir? Q: What about observing fear, and then you find yourself moving away, like you said. You said, observe it directly, but what if you observe it but then you find yourself moving away, what do you do? K: You observe fear and find yourself moving away from it. What are you to do? First of all, don't resist moving away. Move away, go with it, and come back to fear again. Look, to observe fear - please listen to this very simple fact - you must give attention, mustn't you? You must give attention, attention being, don't condemn, don't judge, don't evaluate, just observe. And when you move away, your attention has wandered. Right? Hasn't it? Which is, you're not attending, there is inattention. Be inattentive, but be aware that you are inattentive. Right? That very awareness of your inattention is attention. Have you got this? Please look what is implied - to observe fear you must give your whole attention, which means, to look without judgment but not to condemn it, not to resist it, to look at it with your heart, with your mind; as you are looking, you are wandering off, which is, you become inattentive. Now, don't resist inattention, don't try to become attentive, then you fight it, then there is conflict. But if you are attentive, if you are aware of your inattention, be aware of it, don't do anything about it, but be aware that you are inattentive, then that very awareness is attention. Got it? It's so simple. Once you get this, you will eliminate conflict altogether. You see, you are aware with choice. When you say, I have been attentive and now I am not attentive and I must become attentive - there is a choice. And to be aware means to be aware without choice. Therefore when you are inattentive, be inattentive, and know that you are inattentive - that very knowledge that you are inattentive is attention. Q: Sir, about fear and freedom from fear. Now somehow I can only be free from fear in itself. I am frightened of what fear actually is. For instance, some people may say they are so afraid of themselves, they try to escape from themselves. Up to about eight, eleven, I was afraid of thunder storms. And whenever there was one I would want to get in my parents' bed and I had fear. One day, it was a day I was up in the mountains and there was a thunder storm and there was fear, and I came to realize that a thunder storm couldn't possibly do any harm to me. K: What are you saying, madam? Q: Well, just that as I was afraid of a thunderstorm, as I was saying why I was afraid of that thunderstorm and why I was escaping. K: Madam, this is not... Q: It's a pretty common fear. Why is this fear so common? K: We've been through all that this morning. This is only a part of it. Q: I've got a problem that I've been in school for 23 years now, twenty four years, and I don't know anything else, it's my whole life. So the problem comes as to whether or not I'm dependent on the school, on its immediate affairs. And now I am free to leave school and to go out into the world - I'm afraid. And yet I also tell myself that well this is simply the situation, the situation I've always known, therefore I shouldn't leave it, it's my language. So the question is, am I in fear, or is it only my dependency here working, doing what my professors want me to do? K: Sir, I am not answering your question, but I am asking myself, why we depend on anything. I depend on the milkman, the postman, the policeman, and all the rest of it. But there are other forms of dependencies, depending on my job, psychologically, depending on my profession, depending on the audience sitting in front of me, because if I depend on the audience sitting in front of me, I realize certain pleasure from it, it sustains me, and therefore I depend. And then there is fear. So the question is, can the mind be free of dependency, psychologically? Not to depend means to have no fear. When you depend on another, is it love? And most people depend on another, on the wife, husband, whatever it is, and therefore love goes overboard, pleasure takes its place and fear comes in. And then one dominates the other and all the rest of the nasty business of a family. Whereas when there is no dependency at all, family has quite a different meaning. Q: Pleasure and fear are related: if we remove fear do you think we should enjoy pleasure? K: If as you say, fear and pleasure are related, can one remove fear and so enjoy completely pleasure. Lovely, wouldn't it be! Lovely question and a lovely idea. Take away all my fears so that I can enjoy myself in my pleasures. That's what everybody right throughout the world asks the same thing, some very crudely, some very subtly - can you escape, can you get rid of fear and hold on to pleasure? Pleasure - you smoke, it is a pleasure, there is pain within it, because you may get a disease. Pleasure, you've had pleasure, whether the man or the woman, sexually or otherwise, comfort and so on. And when that person looks away you are jealous, angry, frustrated, mutilated. So pleasure inevitably brings pain. And we are not saying we cannot have pleasure. See the whole structure and you will know then that joy is not pleasure, real enjoyment, the beauty of enjoyment, the freedom, has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure, and therefore with pain or fear. If you see that, the truth of it, then you will understand pleasure and give it its proper place. Q: I think that there are always times in life when we are confronted with a duty and sometimes this duty takes every ounce of energy that we have, both physical energy and spiritual energy. For example, a job or a family and so forth. My question is, how can one maintain the spirit of recollection beyond fragmentation that you were discussing yesterday, while being involved with these duties? K: I wonder why we use the word duty - it is such an ugly word. Isn't there a difference between duty and affection and love? Isn't there responsibility with love, not duty? Duty is an ugly word used by the politicians and the priests. And you use that word to condemn yourself, which means that you are no longer loving, being affectionate. So to find out, sir, what love is, is as important to find out what fear is. When there is the ending of fear, then there is the beginning of love. Then you can never use the word duty. Q: Just two questions. At the beginning of the talk you said one must be serious in order to realize properly. There are other men that would say, one must have a sense of humour concerning all aspects of life. Is your statement differing, entirely opposite to this one? K: To be serious means also to laugh. Q: So I'm not serious - O.K. The second question is, sir. you find a kind of fear but aren't there some fears that are useful at least for survival? For example, I'm very much afraid of jumping from the Empire State building. K: Surely. When physically you face a danger, the natural response is self-protection. Physical survival - is that fear or is it intelligence? Now we don't apply that same intelligence with regard to fear, the inward fears, the psychological fears. Look at this sir, very simply. The world has divided itself into nationalities and religious groups and political groups. This division is bringing about war, hatred. And that very war is destroying us, though we think through nationalism we shall have security. So when one realizes all this, intelligence becomes extraordinarily important. And you know when that intelligence is operating, and it can operate only when there is no fear. Enough, sirs. May I request you not to clap. Do what you like, but don't clap because you are not entertaining me, you're not applauding me. If you want to clap go outside or do it when I'm not here. Foreword The Central Root Of Fear Action In Attention The Chattering Mind The Centre And Duality Factors Of Deterioration Silence And Disorder How Deep Can One Travel Listening With The Heart Registration, The Movement Of Millennia The Nature Of Despair The Brain Cells And The Holistic State Self-Knowledge And The Teaching The Ending Of Recognition Energy And The Cultivation Of The Field EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT FOREWORD These dialogues extend over a wide range of subjects. For over 30 years, a group of people from various disciplines, backgrounds and pursuits, deeply concerned with the enormity of the challenge facing humanity and with one central interest, the unfoldment of the self through the perceptive field of self-knowledge, have gathered around J. Krishnamurti to undertake together, through dialogue, the investigation of the structure and nature of man's mind and consciousness and the energy resources that lie dormant within man's being. The concern in these dialogues is the freedom of the mind from the bondages of memory and time, a mutation in consciousness and the arising of insight that gives deep roots of steadiness to the mind. In the world today, scientific and technological revolution has unharnessed undreamt-of resources of power and knowledge. However, man has failed to discover in himself the sources of wisdom and compassion. What is needed is an inner revolution in the psyche of man. The insight that man lacks is the apprehension that he is the maker of his problems and that the root of this problem-making machinery is his mind. It is in this area of perception that the ultimate freedom of man lies. Starting tentatively, there is in these dialogues a relentless questioning, probing and inquiry, a `listening' and a `seeing' in which depths of the self with its vast subtleties and hidden escapes are exposed. This exploration to Krishnamurti is `a journey into time, into the past, into the limitless'. Man caught in the paradox of living, rarely questions. He escapes from his anguish, his loneliness, his sorrow. In a world sated with sensations, man turns to the guru, to the religious experience, or extrasensory powers that arise from various forms of concentration, as a further stimulus to his jaded appetites. Krishnamurti's teaching negates the guru and the psychic experience as a way to liberation. He demands a `life of correctness', a daily life free from all self-centred activity. All psychic experiences as they arise have to be put aside for they can become obstacles and traps to insight, which alone frees man from duality and the bondage of time as the past. Krishnamurti's role in these dialogues is of great interest. The dialogues are not questions and answers. Krishnamurti's mind is tentative, pliable, learning, seeking, probing; it is questioned, it pauses, observes, withdraws, to move forward again. There is no exchange of opinion, no spilling out of the verbal, no operation of memory as past experience, blocking the new. There is a listening with the total flowering of the senses'. In that intensity of enquiry, insight arises. Speaking of the nature of this state, Krishnamurti says `there is only perception and nothing else. Everything else is movement in time. Perception is without time. There is a momentum which is timeless.' The Krishnamurti Foundation India is offering these dialogues to those who seek fundamental answers to the problems of life. Pupul Jayakar Sunanda Patwardhan EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'THE CENTRAL ROOT OF FEAR' P: You have said, Krishnaji, that intelligence is the greatest security in the facing of fear. The problem is: In a crisis, when fear from the unconscious floods you, where is the place for intelligence? Intelligence demands negation of that which comes in the way. It demands listening, seeing and observation. But when the whole being is flooded by uncontrollable fear, fear which has a cause, but the cause of which is not immediately discernable, in that state where is the place for intelligence? How does one deal with the primeval, archetypal fears which lie at the very base of the human psyche? One of these fears is the destruction of the self, the fear of not being. K: What is it we are exploring together? P: How does one deal with fear? You have still not answered that. You have talked of intelligence being the greatest security. It is so; but when fear floods you, where is intelligence? K: You are saying that at the moment of a great wave of fear, intelligence is not. And how can one deal with that wave of fear at that moment? Is that the question? S: One sees fear like the branches of a tree. But we deal with these fears one by one and there is no freedom from fear. Is there a quality that sees fear without the branches? K: K said, `Do we see the leaves, the branches, or do we go to the very root of fear?' S: Can we go to the root of each single branch of fear? K: Let us find out. P: You may come to see the whole, through one fear. K: I understand. You are saying there are conscious and unconscious fears and the unconscious fears become extraordinarily strong at moments and at those moments intelligence is not in operation. How can one deal with those waves of uncontrollable fear. Is that it? P: These fears seem to take on a material form. It is a physical thing which overpowers you. K: It upsets you neurologically, biologically. Let us explore. Fear exists, consciously or at depths, when there is a sense of loneliness, when there is a feeling of complete abandonment by others, a sense of complete isolation, the sense of not being, a feeling of utter helplessness. And at those moments, when deep fear arises, obviously intelligence is not and there is ungovernable, uninvited fear. P: One may feel that one has faced the fears which are known but unconsciously one is swamped. K: That is what we are saying. Discuss it. One can deal with physical, conscious fears. The outskirts of intelligence can deal with them. P: You can even allow those fears to flower. K: And then in that very flowering there is intelligence. Now how do you deal with the other? Why does the unconscious - we will use that word `unconscious' for the time being - hold these fears? Or does the unconscious invite these fears? Does it hold them, do they exist in the traditional depths of the unconscious; or is it a thing that the unconscious gathers from the environment? Now, why does the unconscious hold fears at all? Are they all an inherent part of the unconscious, of the racial, traditional history of man? Are they in the inherited genes? How do you deal with the problem? P: Can we discuss the second one, which is the gathering of fear from the environment? K: First of all, let us deal with the first one. Why does the unconscious hold them at all? Why do we consider the deeper layers of consciousness as the storehouse, as the residue of fear? Are they imposed by the culture in which we live, by the conscious mind which, not being able to deal with fear, has pushed it down and therefore it remains at the level of the unconscious? Or is it that the mind with all its content has not resolved its problems and is frightened of not being able to resolve them? I want to find out what is the significance of the unconscious. When you said these waves of fear come, I say they are always there, but, in a crisis, you become aware of them. S: They exist in consciousness. Why do you say they are in the unconscious? K: First of all consciousness is made up of its content. Without its content there is no consciousness. One of its contents is this basic fear and the conscious mind never tackles it; it is there, but it never says, `I must deal with it'. In moments of crisis that part of consciousness is awakened and is frightened. But fear is always there. P: I don't think it is so simple. Is fear not a part of man's cultural inheritance? K: Fear is always there. Is it part of the cultural inheritance? Or is it possible that one is born in a country, in a culture that does not admit fear? P: There is no such culture. K: Of course there is no such culture. And so I am asking myself, is fear part of culture or is it inherent in man? Fear is a sense of not being, as it exists in the animal, as it exists in every living thing; the fear of being destroyed. P: The self-preservative instinct which takes the form of fear. K: Is it that the whole structure of the cells is frightened of not being? That exists in every living thing. Even the little ant is afraid of not being. We see fear is there, part of human existence, and one becomes tremendously aware of it in a crisis. How does one deal with it at that moment when the surge of fear comes about? Why do we wait for the crisis? I am just asking. P: You can't avoid it. K: Just a minute. We say it is always there, it is part of our human structure. The biological, psychological, the whole structure of the being is frightened. Fear is there, it is part of the tiniest living thing, the minutest cell. Why do we wait for a crisis to come and bring it out? That is a most irrational acceptance of it. I say, why should I have a crisis to deal with fear? P: Otherwise it is non-existent; I can face some fears intelligently. One faces fear of death. It is possible to face it with intelligence. Is it possible to face other fears intelligently? K: You say you can face these fears intelligently. I question whether you face them intelligently. I question whether you can have intelligence before you have resolved fear. Intelligence comes only when fear is not. Intelligence is light and you cannot deal with darkness when light is not. Light exists only when darkness is not. I am questioning whether you can deal with fear intelligently when fear exists. I say you cannot. You may rationalize it, you may see the nature of it, avoid it or go beyond it, but that is not intelligence. P: I would say intelligence lies in an awareness of fear arising, in leaving it alone, in not shaping it, in not turning away from it, and so to the dissolution of fear. But you say that where intelligence is, fear does not arise. N: Will fear not arise? K: But we don't allow fear to arise. N: I think fear arises. We don't allow it to flower. K: You see, I am questioning altogether the whole response to a crisis. Fear is there; why do you need a crisis to awaken it? You say a crisis takes place and you wake up. A word, a gesture, a look, a movement, a thought, those are challenges that you say bring it out. I am asking: Why do we wait for the crisis? We are investigating. Do you know what that word `investigate' means? - `to trace out'. Therefore, we are tracing out, we are not saying this, that or the other. We are following it, and I am asking: Why do I wait for a crisis? A gesture, a thought, a word, a look, a whisper; any of these are challenges. N: I don't look for the crisis. The only thing I am aware of is, it arises and I am paralysed. K: You get paralysed, why? Therefore for you, challenge is necessary. Why don't you contact fear before the challenge? You say crisis awakens fear. Crisis includes thought, gesture, word, whisper, a look, a letter. Is it a challenge which awakens fear? I say to myself, why should one not awaken to it without a challenge? If fear is there, it must be awake; or is it dormant? And if it is dormant, why is it dormant? Is the conscious mind frightened that fear may awaken? Has it put it to sleep and refused to look at it? Let us go slowly, we are tracing a rocket. Has the conscious mind been frightened of looking at fear and therefore it keeps fear quiet? Or fear is there, awake, and the conscious mind won't let it flower? Do you admit that fear is part of human life, of existence? P: Sir, fear has no independent existence apart from the outer experience, without the stimuli of outer experience. K: Wait, I question it, I don't accept it. You are saying without the outer stimuli, it is not. If it is true to you, it must be so for me, because I am a human being. P: I include in that both the outer and the inner stimuli. K: I don't divide the outer and the inner. It is all one movement. P: Fear has no existence apart from the stimuli. K: You are moving away, Pupul. P: You are asking: Why don't you look at it, why don't you face it? K: I say to myself: `Must I wait for a crisis for this fear to awaken?' That's all my question. If it is there, who has put it to sleep? Is it because the conscious mind cannot resolve it? The conscious mind is concerned with resolving it, and not being able to do so, it puts it to sleep, squashes it. And the conscious mind is shaken when a crisis takes place and fear arises. So I am saying to myself, why should the conscious mind suppress fear? S: Sir, the instrument of the conscious mind is analysis, the capacity of recognition. With these instruments it is inadequate to deal with fear. K: It can't deal with it. But what is required is real simplicity, not analysis. The conscious mind cannot deal with fear, therefore it says I want to avoid it, I can't look at it. Look what you are doing. You are waiting for a crisis to awaken it, and the conscious mind is all the time avoiding crisis. It is avoiding, reasoning, rationalizing. We are masters at this game. Therefore I say to myself, if fear is there, it is awake. You cannot put to sleep a thing that is part of our inheritance. The conscious mind only thinks that it has put fear to sleep. The conscious mind is shaken when a crisis takes place. Therefore deal with it differently. That's all my point. Is this true? The basic fear is of non-existence, a sense of complete fear of uncertainty, of not being, of dying. Why does the mind not bring that fear out and move with it? Why should it wait for a crisis? Are you lazy and therefore you haven't got the energy to go to the root of it? Is what I am saying irrational? P: It is not irrational. I am trying to see if it is valid. K: We say that every living thing is frightened of not being, not surviving. Fear is part of our blood cells. Our whole being is frightened of not being, frightened of dying, frightened of being killed. So fear of not being is part of our whole psychological, as well as biological structure, and I am asking myself why is a crisis necessary, why should challenge become important? I object to challenge. I want to be ahead of challenge, not behind challenge. P: One cannot participate in what you are saying. K: Why can't you? I am going to show it to you. I know I am going to die, but I have intellectualized, rationalized death. Therefore when I say my mind is far ahead of death, it is not. It is only far ahead of thought - which is not being far ahead. P: Let us take the actuality of it. One faces death and one feels one is a step ahead and one moves on and suddenly realizes that one is not ahead of it. K: I understand that. It is all the result of a challenge, whether it took place yesterday or a year ago. P: So the question is: With what instrument, with what energy, from what dimension does one see; and what does one see? K: I want to be clear. Fear is part of our structure, our inheritance. Biologically, psychologically, the brain cells are frightened of not being. And thought says I am not going to look at this thing. And so when the challenge takes place, thought cannot end it. P: What do you mean when you say, `Thought says I don't want to look at it'? N: It wants to look at it also. K: Thought cannot look at the ending of itself. It can only rationalize about it. I am asking you why does the mind wait for a challenge? Is it necessary? If you say it is necessary, then you are waiting for it. P: I say I don't know. I only know that challenge arises and fear arises. K: No, challenge awakens fear. Let us stick to that, and I say to you, why do you wait for a challenge for this to awaken? P: Your question is a paradox. Would you say that you don't wait for the challenge but evoke the challenge? K: No, I am opposed to challenge altogether. You are missing my point. My mind will not accept challenge at any time. Challenge is not necessary to awaken. To say I am asleep and that challenge is necessary to awaken me, is a wrong statement. P: No, sir, that's not what I am saying. K: So it is awake. Now what sleeps? Is it the conscious mind? Or is the unconscious mind asleep and are there some parts of the mind that are awake? P: When I am awake, I am awake. N: Do you invite fear? K: If you are awake, no challenge is necessary. So you reject challenge. If as we said it is part of our life that we should die, then one is awake all the time. P: Not all the time. You are not conscious of fear. But it is there all the time under the carpet. But you don't look at it. K: I say it is under the carpet, lift it and look. It is there. That's all my point. It is there and awake. So it does not need a challenge to make it awake. I am frightened all the time of not being, of dying, of not achieving. That is the basic fear of our life, of our blood and it is there, always watching, guarding, protecting itself. But it is very much awake. It is never a moment asleep. Therefore, challenge is not necessary. What you do about it and how you deal with it comes later. P: That is the fact. A: Seeing all this, don't you accept the factor of non-attention? K: I said it is awake, I am not talking of attention. A: Fear is active, operating. K: It is like a snake in the room, it is always there. I may look elsewhere, but it is there. The conscious mind is concerned how to deal with it, and as it can't deal with it, it moves away. The conscious mind then receives a challenge and tries to face it. Can you face a living thing? That does not need a challenge. But because the conscious mind has blinded itself against fear, the challenge is needed. Right, Pupul? N: When you think of it, it is just a thought; still that shadow is in the mind. K: Trace it, don't jump to conclusions. You have jumped to conclusions. My mind refuses challenge. The conscious mind will not allow challenge to awaken it. It is awake. But you admit challenge. I don't admit challenge. It is not within my experience. The next question is, when the conscious mind is awake to fear, it cannot invite something that is there. Go step by step. Don't conclude at any second. So, the conscious mind knows it is there, fully awake. Then what are we going to do next? P: There lies inadequacy. N: I am awake. K: You are missing the whole point. It is the conscious mind that is frightened of this. When it is awake, it is not frightened. In itself, it is not frightened. The ant is not frightened. If it is squashed, it is squashed. It is the conscious mind that says I am frightened of this, of not being. But when I meet with an accident, an aeroplane crashes, there is no fear. At the moment of death I say, `Yes, I know now what it means to die'. But the conscious mind with all its thoughts says, `My god, I am going to die, I will not die, I must not die, I will protect myself; that is the thing that is frightened. Have you never watched an ant? It is never frightened: if somebody kills it, it dies. Now you see something. N: Sir, have you ever seen an ant? If you put a piece of paper in front of the ant, it dodges it. K: It wants to survive, but it is not thinking about surviving. So we will come back to it. Thought creates fear: it is only thought that says, `I will die, I am lonely. I have not fulfilled.' See this: that is timeless eternity, that is real eternity. See how extraordinary it is. Why should I be frightened if fear is part of my being? It is only when thought says that life must be different, that there is fear. Can the mind be completely motionless? Can the mind be completely stable? Then that thing comes. When that thing is awake, what then is the central root of fear? P: Has it ever happened to you, sir? K: Several times, many times, when the mind is completely stable, without any recoil, neither accepting not denying, nor rationalizing nor escaping, there is no movement of any kind. We have got at the root of it, have we not? EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'ACTION IN ATTENTION' K: I wonder what we mean by action. M: Action invariably means change. K: I want to find out the meaning of the words `to act', `to do', not `having done' or `will do', either in the past or in the future. Acting is always in the active present, not as past action or future action, but action which is now. P: Can there be action now? K: I want to find out, Pupul, whether there is an action which is continuous and, therefore, always a movement without a causation. i am exploring, just move with me. P: What do you mean by action? K: Must action always have a cause, a motive, a direction? P: Is it not a problem of the mind? Action is `to do'. It is related to something. What is the movement of action? K: The past, the present and the future. We know that. What do we mean by action? To do, the physical doing, the going from here to there, intellectually or emotionally working out a problem? So, action to us means `operating on', `operating through', or `operating from'. I am just exploring. Is there an action without producing conflict - outside or inside? Is there an action which is whole, not fragmented? Is there an action which is a movement unrelated to environment, unrelated to me or to the community? Is there an action which is a movement out of time? All that to me is action. But to us action is in relationship to another. Action is related to the community we live in. Our action is dictated by the economic, climatic, personal, environmental condition. It is based on beliefs, ideals and so on. That is the action we know. Now, I want to find out if there is an action, which is not the result of environmental pressure. M: Action is not a separate movement. To be here or to be is to act. K: I want to see what is action. You are not helping me. What is action, moving from here to there, snatching a child from the road when a car is coming? Thinking about something and acting? M: It is the motivation that matters. K: Motivation is part of action. I want something and I get it. I don't like you and I act, or I like you and act. We know that. We are trying to find out what is action? P: If it is obvious, then, what is the fact which propels that movement? K: Pupulji, I think we have to eliminate causation in action. Is that possible? P: We have started something which is a movement in a direction. In attention there is also movement. It is not that one goes to sleep with it. I am speaking to you now or Maurice is speaking to you and we are listening to you and there is no other movement within us. The question is: In this state, which has nothing except seeing you, what is it that motivates, moves? K: I want to get at something much deeper. What is the action which is self-energizing? An action which is infinite movement with infinite energy? Am I making something clear? I think that is action. I am feeling my way into something. I feel all our actions are fragmented. All our actions are destructive: all our actions breed division and out of that division arises conflict. Our actions are always within the field of the known and, therefore, bound to time and therefore not free. That is so. Now I want to find out if there is any other action. We know action in the field of the known. We know technological action, the action of thought, the action of behaviour. Is there any other action? P: How is this stream, the `other action', contacted by or related to the brain cells? If it is not related to the brain cells and consciousness, then it would be synonymous with God. K: I am asking what is action? Within the field of consciousness, we know action very well. It is all within the field of the known. I feel that such action must lead to various forms of frustration, sorrow, disintegration. Now, let us go slowly. I ask myself: Is there any other action which does not belong to this consciousness with its frustration, failures, sorrows, misery, confusion? Is there any action which is not of time? Is that a legitimate question? One has acted always within the field of the known. I want to find out if there is an action which is without friction. That is all. I know every action breeds some kind of friction. I want to find out an action which is non-contradictory, which does not bring conflict. A: You would not be here if the motive was not there. K: This does not mean that action is consistent, follows a set pattern. Following a pattern leads to a complete destruction of the brain. Such action is a mere mechanical repetition. I want to find out an action which is not repetitive, which is not conflicting which is not imitative, conforming and therefore corrupt. M: To live means to act on environment. K: Therefore, I don't depend on environment. I want to live a life without conflict, which means life is action. And I see that life always has conflict in it. And I want to find a way of living which is action in which there is no conflict. Conflict means imitation, conformity and following a pattern in order not to have conflict, which is a mechanical way of living. Can we find a way of living in which there is not a breath of imitation, conformity, suppression? First of all, it is not a question of `finding', let us remove the word `finding'. It is a living now, today, in which there is no conflict. M: Such action may be disastrous? K: It won't be disastrous. My intelligence, looking at all the actions in the field of the known, observing them, paying attention to them, my intelligence asks this question. Intelligence is in operation now. A: My intelligence tells me that I cannot hurt another without hurting myself much more. In the world, there is no such thing as doing evil to another without doing a greater evil to yourself. K: The word `intelligence' means not only to have a very alert mind, but to read between the lines. I read between the lines of the known activity. Having read that, my intelligence says that in the field of the known, action will be contradictory. P: We appear to be totally blocked here. You say something and there is no way to find out, there is no way to talk about it. K: I said I am going to investigate. M: When intelligence searches for something, what happens? P: What is the difference between the words `investigate' and `search'? K: There is a great difference. Investigate means to `trace out'. Search means `seeking something to find'. P: How will you investigate this? M: In science, investigation means finding the unknown. K: I take the word `investigate', not what science means or what I mean. According to the dictionary, investigation means `to trace out'. I see that any action with a motive must inevitably bring about a diversion, contradiction. I see that, not as an idea, but as a fact. So, I say, is there in my mind any contradiction when I am investigating it. I want to see what happens. I see, in paying attention, that an action based on a belief is contradictory. So, I say to myself: Is there a belief which is living, acting and therefore contradictory? If there is, I go after that belief and wipe it out. P: Who is it who goes after that? K: In that attention there is no going after, there is no wiping away. From that attention, observation, belief ends in me, not in you. It ends. In that attention, I see that any form of conformity breeds fear, suppression, obedience. So, in that very attention, I wipe that away in me, and any action based on reward or punishment is out, finished. So, what has happened? I see that any action in relationship, based on an image, divides people. In paying attention to the known, all the factors of the known, their structure and their nature, end. And then attention becomes very important. Attention says: `Is there any action which has none of these things?' M: Would you say that attention it self has none of these things? A: Would you say that attention itself is action? K: That is it. Therefore, attention is perception in action and therefore in that there is no conflict. It is infinite. The action of a belief is wastage of energy. Action in attention is producing its own energy and it is endless. The brain has functioned always in the field of conflict, belief, imitation, conformity, obedience, suppression; it has always functioned that way and when the brain begins to know that, then attention begins to work. The brain cells themselves become attentive. M: From what I have now understood, you seem to say that attention calls for energy and then energy directs. K: Attention is action. We also said, consciousness is its content. P: In a state of attention, do the brain cells themselves undergo change? M: Biologically, every cell is individual, able to recharge energy and, therefore, to function. Every cell also functions because awareness is built into the cells. K: I think so. I would like to start from a different point. The brain cells have gone through wastage of energy which is conflict, imitation, all the rest of it.. They are accustomed to that. The brain cells now have stopped that. They are out of that field, and the brain is no longer the residue of all that. It may function technologically and so on, but the brain that sees life is action and is without conflict, is in a state of attention. When there is complete attention, right inside, not imposed, not directed, not willed, then the whole structure is alive; not in the usual sense, but in a different sense. I think there is a physical transformation. I think it is a direction of death and death is that. So, there is an action which is non-repetitive and therefore freedom from the known is attention in the unknown. P: Freedom from the known is also within the brain cells. The brain cells are the known but the freedom from the known is also within the brain cells. K: Therefore, there is a definite transformation coming into being. M: The brain is clear of engrams; that is a physical transformation. K: This logically is so in the sense that as long as the mind is functioning within the field of the known, it is functioning in a groove and the brain cells have been functioning in grooves. Now when those grooves are non-existent, the total brain acts, not in grooves, but in freedom, which is attention. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'THE CHATTERING MIND' M: I want to discuss the problem of the chattering mind. What makes our minds chatter? Where does the mind get the energy and what is the purpose of that chattering? It is a constant operation. Every moment it is murmuring. P: Isn't it the very nature of the mind? M: That does not explain it, does not offer any remedy. P: It must operate in order to exist. M: It is not a `must'. There is no `must'. The mind chatters all the time and the energy devoted to that purpose fills a major part of our life. K: Why does the mind chatter, what is its purpose? M: There is no purpose. As I watch the brain, I see that the chattering happens only in the brain, it is a brain activity; a current flows up and down, but it is chaotic, meaningless and purposeless. The brain wears itself out by its own activity. One can see that it is tiring to the brain, but it does not stop. K: Is this worth pursuing? P: If you take the process of thought continuous, without beginning and without end, then why should one differentiate between the chattering and the thought process itself? M: Our awareness or attention is absolutely wasted on it. We are aware of something that has absolutely no meaning. It is the neurotic function of the brain and our time, our awareness, attention, our best efforts are wasted. P: Would you say there is meaningful thought activity and chattering? K: Your mind chatters, why? M: Because I cannot stop it. K: Is it habit? Is it a fear of not being occupied with something? A: It is an extra-volitional act. M: It looks like a simple automatic activity. It just is there, there is no feeling, there is nothing. K: You have not understood what I mean. The mind apparently needs to be occupied with something. M: The mind is occupied all the time. K: The mind is occupied with something and if it is not occupied, it feels vacant, it feels empty and therefore it resorts to chattering. I am just asking, is it habit or is it the fear of not being occupied? M: It is a habit, an ingrained habit. K: I wonder if it is a habit? P: There is what we call meaningful thinking, directed thinking, thinking which is logical, which is analytical, which is concerned with the solution of problems. Chattering is not a conscious thing. In a non-aware state there is a continual movement of the mind throwing up reflexes, coming out with the accumulation of the rubbish the mind has acquired over the years and it keeps on throwing out and suddenly you awaken and say your mind is chattering. We give weight to what we call meaningful activity as against what we call chattering. Is this weight valid? K: Why is it chattering? P: It chatters; there is no `why' to it. K: He wants to find out why it chatters. Is it just like water flowing, like water running out of the tap? M: It is a mental leakage. P: It indicates to me, that my mind is not alive. K: Why do you object to a chattering mind? M: Loss of energy, loss of time; common sense says that what is going on is useless. P: We are back in the intermediate stage - we are neither here nor there. And it is not only the mind chattering, but also the awareness of the chattering, which is an indication of inadequacy. K: Drop attention, awareness, for the moment. I am just asking you why does the mind chatter? Is it a habit or does the mind need to be occupied with something? And when it is not occupied with what it thinks it should be occupied, we call it chattering. Why should not the occupation be chattering also? I am occupied with my house. You are occupied with your God, with your work, with your business, with your wife, with your sex, with your children, with your property. The mind needs to be occupied with something and therefore when it is not occupied, it may feel a sense of emptiness and therefore chatters. I don't see any problem in this. I don't see the great issue in this, unless you want to stop it chattering. M: If chattering were not oppressive, there would be no problem. K: You want to stop it, you want to put an end to it. So the question is not `why' but what for? M: Can a chattering mind be put an end to? K: Can a chattering mind come to an end? I don't know what you call chattering. I am questioning. When you are occupied with your business, that is also chattering. I want to find out what you call chattering. I say that any occupation, with myself, with my God, with my wife, with my husband, with my children, money, property or position, the whole of that is chattering. Why exclude all that and say the other is chattering? M: I am only talking about what I observe. P: Because the chattering we speak of has no rationality. K: It has no relationship to your daily activity. There is no rationality. It is not related to daily life. It has nothing to do with your everyday demands and so it chatters and that is what you call chattering. We all know that. P: Do you do that? K: That does not matter. Don't bother about me. A: Sir, our normal thinking has coherence to a context. Chattering is that activity of the mind which has no coherence to any context. Therefore we call it unmeaningful because we can break through the context, but when the activity of the mind is unconnected then it has no coherence. K: Is chattering a rest to the mind? A: No, sir. K: Wait, sir, not so quick. Listen Achyutji, I want to ask you; you are occupied with your daily work, conscious, rational, irrational, and chattering may be a release from all that. B: Would chattering bear the same relationship as the dream to the waking state? K: No. I wouldn't put it that way. My muscles have been exercised all day and I relax, and chattering may be a form of relaxation. A: It may be totally irrelevant. But it dissipates energy. K: Does it? A: Relaxation should not dissipate energy. Relaxation is an activity which comes into being after you have exhausted your energy and then are resting. K: Chattering, you say, is a wastage of energy and you want to stop it. A: It is not a question of wanting to stop it. The problem is that the mind that is wasting its energy in chattering should be put to something worthwhile. One can do some kind of japa, but that will again be a mechanical thing, it will solve no problem. We come back to understanding how this chattering process is going on. We don't understand it at all. It is extra-volitional. K: Would your mind stop chattering if it was fully occupied? Just listen, sir; if there is no empty space, if there is no space or if the whole mind is full of space, will it chatter? It is not a matter of what word you use, - space, full, totally empty, or completely without any occupation. Does the mind then chatter? Or does chattering take place only when there is some little space which is not covered? Do you know what I mean? When the room is completely full, would there be any movement at all? When the mind is completely full and there is no space, would there be any movement at all which you call chattering? I don't know if I am conveying something. M: It is hypothetical. K: In the sense that our minds are partly full, partly occupied and the unoccupied part is chattering. M: You are identifying with the unoccupied mind. K: I am not saying that. I am asking, I want to find out why the mind chatters. Is it a habit? M: It looks like habit. K: Why has the habit arisen? M: There is no reason as far as we know. K: I don't mind it chattering, but you object to its chattering. I am not sure it is a wastage of energy. Is it a habit? If it is a habit, then how does that habit come to an end? That is the only thing that you are concerned with. How does a habit come to an end -any habit, smoking, drinking, overeating? M: Unless you know something from your own experience, it is like talking to a child. It usually comes to an end by intensely looking at it. K: Will chattering stop when you intensely look at it? M: That is the wonder, it does not. K: I am not sure it does not. If I intensely observe smoking paying attention to all the movement of smoking, it withers away. So, why can't chattering wither away? M: Because it is automatic, smoking is not automatic. K: It is not automatic? It has become automatic. M: Let us not refer to the beginnings. There are no beginnings. I cannot trace any beginning to chattering. It is peculiarly automatic. It is an automatic shivering of the brain. I see only the brain shivering, murmuring and I cannot do anything. P: All other systems that deal with this peripheral movement of chattering say that it must end before one can get down to doing anything else. M: To end it, you repeat mantras, bring some uniformity, some monotony to the mind. But chattering is not monotonous, the content changes. K: That is interesting: the content changes. P: It is completely disjointed. The basic problem is that so long as the thinking process fills the major portion of consciousness, there will be both directed thinking and chattering. I don't think it is possible to get rid of one and keep the other. A: I would say that there is another approach to this, that our mind functions at different levels and chattering is that movement in which all these levels get jumbled. P: I don't think it is so, Achyutji. I don't think the levels get jumbled. The conscious movement of thinking is when the thinker draws on thought to build a premise and moves from there logically. In the field of the irrational, the chattering, many, many things take place which the rational mind does not understand. But I was wondering whether the two are not counterparts of each other and whether one can exist without the other. B: We object to chattering apparently, but we don't object to directed occupation. P: That is what I am saying. I say, as long as this is there, the other will also be. A: I question that. P: Let us discuss it. I wonder whether this is not a reflex of the other. B: The mind knows directed occupation, the mind also knows chattering, a non-directional chattering. Does the mind know space or emptiness? P: Where does space come in? B: Because Krishnaji brought in space. P: Don't put it that way. If one exists, the other will exist. That is what I would like to go into. A: No. It is possible for a person to be efficient in the doing of any single job to which he is directed. That is directed activity. You say that any person who is capable of directed activity must also have the lunatic fringe of chattering all the time. P: Directed activity does not mean a purely technological function; there is also the psychological activity which is directed. As long as the psychological, emotional activity is directed, the other remains. A: You see, sir, the directed activity can be understood as either a projection of the centre or that which strengthens the centre. So directed activity can be traced to a source, that source is a centre or it creates the source. K: How do you stop chattering? That is what he is interested in. P: If I may pursue it with Achyutji, he says that it is possible that there can be a state of directed thinking both at the functional level and at the psychological level within the mind; and there is also chattering. A: That is directed activity. I know its source, I know its intent. P: Directed activity - do I really know the source? A: That is how the centre sustains itself. This is the centre. P: When I want to explore and find the root of that, I find neither the root, nor do I find the source. A: I don't find it either. I say this is a self-sustaining activity out of which the centre gets strengthened, fed. Here is a channel of movement which seems to be even unrelated to that. M: So you divide the flow of the mind into chattering and nonchattering. P: How do you know that? K: He says chattering is a wastage of energy. D: Why do you say that? How does he know? K: Oh, yes. It is so irrational, so illogical, sloppy, it is all over the place. D: Don't we know that all rational effort ends in nothing? K: Wait, wait. M: Right or wrong, why choose? There are three movements of the mind - intended, non-intended and the mixed. I am not quarrelling with the intended. My quarrel is with the non-intended. Can I do away with the non-intended movement? K: That is all that we are concerned with. My mind chatters. I want to turn to any thing to stop it chattering, I want to stop it, because I see it is irrational, tawdry. How is it to come to an end? M: All I can do is to look at it. As long as I can look at it,it stops. K: But it will return later. I want to stop it for good. Now, how am I to do it? Instead of being occupied with a directed, intended movement, now I have occupied myself with stopping chattering. I want to get at this. B: I don't object to being occupied with money, with a hundred different kinds of things. I think that is all right. Why does the wretched mind chatter? I want to stop that. A: Looking at directed activity helps me to understand the ego process, the centre, how it all gets tied up. The exploration always leads to a little more clarity. K: Achyutji, I want to stop chattering and I see it is a wastage of energy. What am I to do? How am I to stop it for good? P: I feel that as long as you are looking at any process of the mind, whether it is directed action or non-directed action, you are trapped. K: Why do I object to chattering? You say you are wasting energy, but you are wasting energy in ten different directions. Sir, I don't object to my mind chattering. I don't mind wasting a little bit of energy because I am wasting energy in so many directions. Why do I object to chattering? M: Because I waste energy. K: So you are against wasting energy on a particular kind of work. I object to wasting energy on any account. M: It is a questionable point: what is waste of energy and what is not? A: I would also like to make sure that we are not shirking a very difficult problem. P: There are two ways of looking at this: the one way is of saying, how can I solve the problem? The other, why does one differentiate between the directed and non-directed? A: I don't object to that. K: Frydman objects to that. M: In any case, whenever my mind is in a state of chattering, there is anguish, there is despair. K: Sir, let us stick to one thing at a time. You say it is a wastage of energy. We waste energy in so many ways. M: It is a most unpleasant way. K: You don't want the unpleasant waste of energy, but you would rather have the pleasant. M: Of course. K: So, you are objecting to the waste of energy which is unpleasant. I will approach it differently. I am not concerned with whether my mind chatters or not. What is important is not whether there is movement, not-directed, directed, intended or not-intended, but that the mind is very steady, rock-steady and then the problem does not exist; the mind does not chatter. Let it chatter. P: I have to ask you a question. Are you first aware and then you speak? Are you aware of the word formations in the mind? K: What is this? Wait, wait, hold on to that. I would approach the question quite differently. If the mind is completely rock-steady, then a word passing over it, somebody spilling water on it or a bird making a mess on it, it brushes it off. That is the only way I would approach it. Find out if the mind is rock-steady and then a little wave, a little rain, a little movement does not matter. But you are approaching it from the point of trying to stop wastage of energy, irrational wastage, unintended wastage, and I say unintended or intended wastage is taking place all around you, all the time. Sir, to me the problem is very simple. Is the mind totally steady? I know the mind chatters, I know there is wastage of energy in so many directions, intended or unintended, conscious or unconscious. I say leave it alone, don't be so terribly concerned about it, look at it in a different way. P: Does your mind operate in thought at all, in thought and word formation moving across the mind? K: No. P: Do your brain cells ever spill out words which indicate a chattering mind? M: He does not know what he is going to say next but he says something and it makes sense. Here is a man who is completely empty. P: So your consciousness is really empty? K: This does not lead us very far. Let us drop that. B: Sir, you approach the issue from two different positions: one, you say look at fragmentation, look what happens; then you suddenly take a jump, and you say leave it and you ask is there a mind that is imperturbable? K: I don't think the problem of chattering will be stopped the other way. B: What is the relationship of the two approaches? K: I don't think there is any. Look, the mind is chattering and we have discussed it for half an hour, talked about it from different points of view. The mind still goes on fragmentarily, wanting to resolve the problem by looking at it and by various means. I listen to it all and I say this does not seem to be the answer. It does not seem to complete the picture and I see it is so because our minds are so unsteady. The mind has not got deep roots of in-depth steadiness and therefore it chatters. So that may be it. From the observation of `what is', I have not jumped away, I have watched it. B: You have not jumped away, we have dealt with the parts in ourselves, whereas you have collected the whole thing together. K: That is how I would operate, if my mind were chattering. I know it is wastage of energy. I look at it and some other factor comes into it - the fact that my mind is not steady at all. So I would pursue that rather than the chattering. P: When you say that if my mind chatters, I would pursue the fact that it is not stable, how would you tackle it? Pursue what? K: That would be my concern, not my chattering. I see as long as the mind is not steady, there must be chattering. So I am not concerned about chattering. So I am going to find out what is the feeling and the quality of a mind that is completely steady? That is all. I have moved away from chattering. M: You have moved away from `what is' to `what is not'. K: No. I have not moved away to `what is not'. I know my mind chatters. That's a fact. I know it is irrational, involuntary, unintended, a wastage of energy; I also know I am wasting energy in ten different ways. To gather all the wastage of energy is impossible. You spill mercury and there are hundreds of little droplets all over the place. To collect them is also wastage of energy. So I see, there must be a different way. The mind, not being steady, chatters. My enquiry now is: What is the nature and structure of steadiness? M: The steadiness is not there with me. K: I don't know it. I am going to enquire. I am going to come to it, I am going to find out. You say steadiness is the opposite of restlessness. I say steadiness is not the opposite of restlessness, because the opposite always contains the opposite of itself. Therefore it is not the opposite. I started with chattering and I see the wastage of energy and I also see the mind wastes energy in so many ways and I cannot collect all these wastages and make it whole. So I leave that problem. I understand it, it may be that the chattering will go on, all the wastage will go on in different directions as long as the mind is not rock-steady. That is not a verbal statement. It is an understanding of a state that has come into being by discarding the enquiry how to gather the wastage. I am not concerned about the wastage of energy. M: I understand that when there is the rock-steady state of mind, then there will be no wastage. K: No, no. B: There has always been this problem that with us, the negative is transformed into the positive by the mind. The negative does not naturally transform itself, you will say. But what would you do about it? K: I don't know. I am not bothered about it P: But you also say that it will be your concern. B: When he says that the negative is the positive, the negative observation is instantly the positive. The negative goes through this process. K: Attention is applied in a different direction. Instead of how to stop the wastage, it is now directed to the understanding of what it means to be steady. B: But it is not a mental direction. K: No, obviously not. It is not a verbal direction. I think that is really quite important. What is the nature of a steady mind? Can we discuss that, not the verbal description of a steady mind? P: What is the nature of a steady mind? M: Are you talking about being momentarily steady? P: I don't understand a state of mind which is momentarily steady. K: He said: `Is it temporary or permanent?' I don't like the word `permanent'. P: But what is the nature of a steady mind? K: Don't you know it? M: By your grace we all know it. P: I would say that, but that still would not stop either the chattering or the thinking process. K: He said the sea is very deep, it is very steady, a few waves come and go, and you don't care, but if you care then you remain there. P: When you find yourself remaining there, the only thing is to see that you are there. K: And you see that and discard it. Don't let us make a lot of fuss about it. As Balasundaram pointed out, the negative instantly becomes positive when I see. The false becomes the true instantly. The seeing is the rock; the hearing or listening is the rock. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'THE CENTRE AND DUALITY' K: What is duality? Does duality exist at all? A: Of course, it exists. K: I won't postulate. I know nothing of Vedanta, Advaita, scientific theories. We are starting anew, not knowing the assumption of others, which may be secondhand. Wipe them all out. Is there duality? Apart from the factual duality - woman-man, light-darkness, tall-short - is there any other duality? S: Duality of the `I' and `you' is structured within us. K: Is there duality apart from the man-woman, dark-light: the obvious? I want to be clear that we are all talking of the same thing. I am not assuming that I am superior, I want to find out if there is duality, psychological duality. There is obvious duality outwardly - tall trees, short trees, different colours, different materials and so on. But psychologically, there is only `what is' and because we are not able to solve `what is', we invent the `what should be'. So there is duality. From the fact, the `what is', there is an abstraction to `what should be', the ideal. But there is only `what is'. D: They say `what is' is dualistic. K: Wait, sir, I want to find out. I only know `what is' and not `what should be'. P: `What is' to me is duality. K: No. But you are conditioned to duality, you are educated to duality, you function psychologically in duality. S: The starting point is a dualistic position. It may be due to many factors. K: That is what I want to investigate - whether this dualistic attitude towards life has come into being because the mind has not been able to solve actually `what is'. A: As far as we can see, the newborn baby does not cry only for mother's milk, for nourishment. It cries whenever it is left alone. Duality is the expression of an inadequacy in oneself for what I am. This begins almost from the beginning of life. P: It is part of the racial heritage. S: What is the nature of`what is'? K: That's what I want to get at. If I can understand `what is', why should there be duality? S: What is the instrument with which I understand? B: Does the problem arise because there is no contact with `what is'? Duality is postulated because there is very little contact with `what is'. K: That is what I want to find out. What is duality? Is duality a measurement? B: Duality is a comparison. P: Duality is the sense of`I' as separate from the `not-I'. K: That is the basic cause of duality. Now, what is the `I' that says you are different? What is the `I'? A: The centre, the body. M: The brain. P: I ask that question and in observing the movement of the `I', I find that it is not something as factual as the chair or the table or the body. In itself it has no existence. K: May I say something? It may sound absurd. There is no duality for me. There is woman-man, dark-light. We are not talking of that kind of duality. Duality exists only as the `I' and the `not-I', the space between the `I' and the `you', the centre as the `I' and the centre as the `you'. The centre of the `I' looks at you and there is a distance between the `I' and the `you'. The distance can be expanded or narrowed down. This process is consciousness. Don't agree with me? I want to be clear, I want to start slowly. B: This distance enclosed is consciousness. M: Distance is in consciousness. K: No, no, sir, there is distance between you and me sitting here, the physical distance. Then, there is the distance the mind has created which is the `I' and the `you'. The `I' and the `not-I', the `you' and the distance is consciousness. D: You should distinguish between the physical and the psychological. S: Is the `I' a concrete entity? P: That's why I say this enquiry into who is the `I' is difficult. S: We started with what is duality - the `I' and the `not-I', the centre. K: The space between this centre and that centre, the movement between this centre and that centre, the vertical, horizontal movement, is consciousness. P: Is that all? K: I am just beginning. A: Sir, you have suggested two centres - this centre which comes across another centre. There is no other centre, sir. K: I am coming to that. Go slowly, step by step. The other centre is invented by this centre. A: I don't know. I say that even without the other centre, the distance comes. S: Achyutji, the `I' creates the `not-I'. It is implied in the `I' process. K: If I have no centre, there is no other centre. I want to question the whole structure of duality. I don't accept it. You have accepted it. Our philosophy, our judgement, everything is based on this acceptance. The `I' and the `not-I' and all the complications arising out of it, and I want to, if I may, question the whole structure of duality. So, the `I' is the only centre. From there, the `not-I' arises and the relationship between the `I' and the `not-I' inevitably brings about conflict. There is only the centre from which arises the other centre, the `you'. I think that is fairly clear; at least for me. Don't accept it. M: How does this centre arise? Because I have this centre, I create the other centre. K: I am coming to that. I don't want to answer that yet. In the waking state, the centre creates the other centre. In that, the whole problem of relationship arises, and therefore duality arises, the conflicts, the attempt to overcome duality. It is the centre that creates this division. I see that in the waking state because there is a centre, its relationship will always be divided. Division is space and time and where there is time and space as division, there must inevitably be conflict. That is simple, clear. So I see during the waking state, what is going on all the time is adjustment, comparison, violence, imitation. When the centre goes to sleep it maintains the division even when it sleeps. SWS: What do you mean by saying the centre goes to sleep? K: We don't know what that state is. We are going to investigate. S: In waking consciousness the experiencer is the centre. K: The experiencer is the centre, the centre is memory, the centre is knowledge, which is always in the past. The centre may project into the future but it still has its roots in the past. D: The centre is the present, I don't know the past or the future. K: You would never say that, if you have a centre. D: So far as my identity is concerned, the past and the future are only accretions, I have nothing to do with them. I am the present. A: You are the child of the past, you are the heir to everything of the past. D: Not at all. That is an hypothesis. How do I know the past? K: The language you are speaking in, English, is the result of the past. P: If one exists, the other exists. D: That is a theory. A: How can that be a theory? The very fact that you come into existence implies that you are the child of the past. D: I don't know the past, I don't know the future. P: If one is free of both the past and the future, then there is no problem. Let us talk about people who are concerned with the past. D: I am a very small nonentity with a feeling of `I'-ness. I know nothing about the past or the future. A: Is the `I' not created and produced by the totality of the past -my father, my grandfather? How can I deny that? My consciousness itself is made up of the past. P: There is the personal, racial, human past. Look, Deshpande, I remember the discussion of yesterday and the discussion comes in the way of my discussing today. D: My position is, I don't know about the past or the future. It is an accretion. A: Deshpandeji, when you say I am the present, please think. Do you mean to say that you are only this moment, with no past and no future? Is it a theory or a fact? Then you are in samadhi. K: just a minute, sir. Let us be quiet. You speak English. That is an accretion. What is the centre that accretes? D: That centre I call `I', but I don't know. K: So the centre which has accumulated is the `I'. D: The accumulator and the accumulated are not the same. K: Who is the centre that is accumulating? Is there a centre without accumulation? Is the centre different from the thing it has accumulated? D: I can't answer that. M: All that is the content of consciousness. K: We said the content of consciousness is consciousness. If there is no consciousness, there is no accumulation. M: I have not said that. K: I have said it, we started with it. M: The content of consciousness is consciousness. That means, when there is no content there is no consciousness. K: That is what it means. D: So it means that there is non-dual consciousness. K: No, no. That is a speculation. Stick to what we started out with. Consciousness is its content. The content is consciousness. This is an absolute fact. A: Sir, at any given time, this `I' is not able to command the whole field of consciousness as its purview of perception. In my perception, I don't see the whole field. K: Because there is a centre. Where there is a centre, there is fragmentation. P: The `I' is only operational through a process of thinking which is fragmentary. K: That is all. A: What I thought was that the content of consciousness has to be part of my field of perception. Is it not so? P: If it were part of my perception, then the whole content of consciousness is consciousness and there is nothing else. Then I would rest with consciousness. I would remain there. But I sit in front of you and say, `Show me the way,' and you keep on saying `The moment you ask the way, you will never know the way.' We still ask you to show the way. S: The first point is that we experience only fragmentarily and not total consciousness. K: That is what I am saying. As long as there is a centre, there must be fragmentation and the fragmentation is the `me' and the `you' and the conflict in that relationship. S: Are you equating this centre with consciousness or is it a fragment of total consciousness? K: The centre is the content of consciousness. S: So consciousness itself is fragmented? P: You say this centre is time-space, you also seem to postulate the possibility of going beyond the field of time-space. The centre is that which operates. It is not able to go beyond. If it could, time and space would cease to be the content of consciousness. K: Let us start again. The content of consciousness is consciousness. That is irrefutable. The centre is the maker of fragments. the centre becomes aware of the fragments when the fragments are agitated or in action; otherwise, the centre is not conscious of the other fragments. The centre is the observer of the fragments. The centre does not identify itself with the fragments. So there is always the observer and the observed, and the thinker and the experience. So, the centre is the maker of fragments and the centre tries to gather the fragments together and go beyond. One of the fragments says, `sleep' and one of the fragments says `keep awake'. In the state of keeping awake, there is disorder. The brain cells during sleep try to bring order because you cannot function effectively in disorder. S: The brain tries to bring order. Is that process dualistic or non-dualistic? K: I'll show it to you. The brain cells demand order. Otherwise, they cannot function. There is no duality in this. During the day, there is disorder because the centre is there, the centre is the cause of fragmentation; fragmentation it knows only through fragments; it is not conscious of the totality of fragments and, therefore, there is no order and therefore, it lives in disorder. It is disorder. though it says 'I must experience', it is living in disorder, living in confusion. It cannot do anything else but create disorder because it functions only in fragmentation. Right sir? A: Yes, sir. It is so. K: The brain cells need order; otherwise, they become neurotic, destructive. That is a fact. The brain cells are always demanding order and the centre is always creating fragmentation. The brain cells need order. This order is denied when there is a centre because the centre is always creating destruction, division, conflict and all the rest of it, which is a denial of security, which is denial of order. There is no duality. This process is going on. The brain saying `I must have order', is not duality. A: Are they two independent movements? P: I feel we are moving away from the thing which is tangible to us. K: This is very tangible. P: It is not tangible. The brain cells seeking order is not tangible. K: I will show it to you in a minute. S: Pupulji, the whole physical world, in spite of chaos, maintains an extraordinary order. It is the very nature of the universe to maintain order. P: The scientists' sense of time is not a real thing to us. The brain cells seeking order is not a real thing with us. I don't know but it may be. You are moving away from a fact to a fact which is beyond our comprehension. K: P, we both see the point. Where there is a centre, there must be conflict, there must be fragmentation, there must be every form of division between the `you' and the `me', but the centre is creating this division. How do you know? P: Because I have observed it in myself? K: Verbally or factually? P: Factually. K: The centre is the maker of fragments. The centre is the fragment. This whole field is disorder. How are you aware of this disorder? P: I have seen it. K: Wait, you are not answering my question. Forgive me. I am asking you. How are you aware of this disorder? If it is the centre that is aware that it is disorder, then it is still disorder. P: I see that. K: You see that when the centre is aware that this is disorder then it creates a duality as order and disorder. So, how do you observe disorder - without the centre or with the centre? If it is an observation with the centre, there is a division. If there is no observation of the centre, then there is only disorder. P: Or order. K: Wait. Please go slowly. When the centre is aware that there is disorder, there is division, and this division is the very essence of disorder. When the centre is not there and aware, what takes place? P: Then there is no centre; no disorder. K: Therefore, what has taken place? There is no disorder. That is a fact. That is what the brain cells demand. P: When you bring that in, you take this away. Let us now proceed. K: Stop there. So I have discovered something, that the centre creates space and time. Where there is space and time, there must be division in relationship and, therefore, disorder in relationship. Having disorder in relationship, it creates further disorder because that is the very nature of the centre. There is not only disorder in relationship, there is disorder in thought, action, idea. P: I want to ask you a question: Which is the fact - the perception of order or..? K: You are only aware of disorder. Just listen. I am also feeling my way, you understand. I see the centre is the source of disorder wherever it moves - in relationship, in thought, in action, in perception. There is the perceiver and the perceived. So, wherever the centre operates, moves, functions, has its momentum, there must be division, conflict and all the rest of it. Where there is the centre, there is disorder. Disorder is the centre. How are you aware? Is the centre aware of the disorder or is there only disorder? If there is no centre to be aware of disorder, there is complete order. Then the fragments come to an end, obviously, because there is no centre which is making the fragments. P: In that sense, the moment the fragments exist, the reality is the fragment. When the fragments end, the reality is non-fact. So, there is no division. You are back into the Vedantic position. K: I refuse to accept it. P: I am putting it to you. A: I would say that when you say that `I' is the source and the centre of disorder, or the centre is the source and it is disorder, that is a fact for me. When you say that if there is no centre observing that disorder - K: No. I asked: Who is observing the disorder? Achyutji, see this. There is no consciousness of order. And that is the beauty of order. P: What does the word `reality' mean to you? K: Nothing. P: What do you mean by that? I would like to explore that word `nothing'. K: When it is something, it is not aware. A: The field of cognition is the field of unreality. K: No, be careful, sir. Just a minute. Leave that now. Let us go into the question of the dream because that is apparently one of the fragments of our life. What are dreams? What is the matrix of the structure of dreams? How do they happen? Q: It happens when desires are not fulfilled during the day. K: So, you are saying during the day I desire something and it has not been fulfilled, carried out, it has not been worked out. So, the desire continues. P: Why do we go beyond? Thought is an endless process without a beginning, expelled from the brain cells. In the same way, there is a period when the mind is totally asleep; it is another form of the same propulsion. K: It is exactly the same thing. The movement of the day still goes on. So, the centre which is the factor of disorder, creating disorder during the day, still goes on, the movement which becomes dreams, symbolic or otherwise, is the same movement. M: You keep on saying that the centre is the source of disorder. K: The centre is disorder, not the source. M: The sense of `I' is a constant demand longing for order. There is nobody to create it, and I am in this world begging for order, searching for order, and all the duality is a given duality, not a created duality. K: No, sorry. M: I find it is so. I don't want duality. K: This search itself is duality. All our life is a search for non-duality. M: I know that whatever I do is for the sake of order. The order may be temporary, a petty little order, but still there is no gesture, there is no posture of mind which does not aim at order, whether one is eating, drinking or sleeping. It also makes life possible. So, chaos is something which is imposed on me, disorder is forced on me. That is my observation. If you say it is not, then my observation and your observation differ. P: In all observations, we have sat with Krishnaji and we have observed the self in operation and the nature of the self has been revealed. M: No, it is only an hypothesis. We are playing with words. The mind is incapable of co-ordinating the factors. There is no such thing as a revelation in this, sir. There is nobody to tell us. P: I agree. The very process of self-observation reveals it. It is not somebody telling you. K: This man says this centre is the source of disorder. The movement of daily life continues in sleep. It is the same movement and dreams are the expression of that `me'. When I wake up, I say `I have had dreams'. That is only a means of communication; dreams are `me', dreams are not separate from the centre which has created this movement, this disorder. The next factor is deep sleep. Are you aware when you are deeply asleep? S: Who is aware that there has been deep sleep? One is not conscious of deep sleep. You don't say: `I have had an extraordinary sleep.' You may say: `I have had no dreams, I had a peaceful sleep.' P: It is really saying that you have had a good sleep. M: When I am deeply asleep, I am fully aware that I have no thoughts, I have no consciousness. K: So, all that one can say is: `I have had a very good sleep without dreams.' How does one investigate that state which is without dreams, a state which you called just now deep sleep? Do you do it through the conscious mind or a theory, or by repeating what somebody has said about it? How do you go into it? S: The sleep has to reveal itself. Otherwise, you cannot go into the other state. K: Why do you want to go into it? S: Because I want to know whether it is the same state. P: There is a state of being `awake' and a state of `deep sleep'. SWS: My own experience is that when there is a sleep without dream, there is no centre. Then the centre comes again, it remembers that I have slept without dreams, again the centre starts its operation. S: Deep sleep is a sleep without a centre. K: Why don't we only talk about what is knowable? P: But you wanted to investigate deep sleep. Is it possible to investigate deep sleep? D: I see only one fact: in sleep there is no centre. K: That gentleman said deep sleep means no centre. M: Deep sleep means very low intensity of consciousness. P: I asked the question: Is it possible to investigate into deep sleep? K: What do you mean by `investigate'? Can I investigate, can the centre investigate? You watch the film at the cinema. You are not identifying with it; you are not part of it; you are merely observing. S: What is it that is observing without identifying? K: There is no one to observe. There is only observation. S: What Pupul is asking is: Can deep sleep be investigated? K: We understand that. Can it be revealed, can it be exposed, can it be observable? I say `yes'. Can I observe you, just observe without naming? Of course, it is possible. The observer is the centre, the observer is the past, the observer is the divider; the observer is the space between you and me. P: First of all, you should have the tools, the instruments with which this is possible. One has to have a state of awareness where this is possible. It is only when there is this state of awareness or jagriti, that it is possible. K: Is there an observation of this disorder without the centre becoming aware that there is disorder? If that can be solved, I have solved the whole momentum of it. What is order? We said the centre can never be aware of order. Then, what is that state? Then, what is virtue of which there is no consciousness of being virtuous? What man traditionally accepts as virtue is practice. Vanity practising humility is still vanity. Then, what is virtue? It is a state in which there is no consciousness of being virtuous. I am just exploring. If the centre is aware that it has humility, it is not humility. Virtue is a state of mind where it is not conscious that it is virtuous. Therefore, it topples all the practices, all the sadhanas. To see disorder not from a centre is order. That order you cannot be conscious of. If you are conscious of it, it is disorder. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'FACTORS OF DETERIORATION' P: Could we discuss the problems of deterioration and death? Why is it that the mechanism of the mind has an inbuilt tendency to deteriorate, an ebbing away of energy? K: Why does the body, the mind deteriorate? P: With age, with time, the body deteriorates; but why does the mind deteriorate? At the end of life, there is the death of the body and the death of the mind. But the death of the mind can take place even when the body is alive. If, as you say, the brain cells contain consciousness, then, with the deterioration of the cells of the human body, is it not inevitable that the cells of the human mind, the brain, will also deteriorate? K: Are we talking about the deterioration of the whole structure of the mind and the brain with age, with time? The biologists have given the answer. What do they say? M: The cells of the brain and the body deteriorate because there is no process of elimination. They are not made for perpetual functioning. They do not completely eliminate the products of their own metabolism. If they were given a chance to wash themselves out completely, they could live for ever. K: The question is: Why does the brain, which has been active during a certain period of time, deteriorate? And the biological answer to that is, given sufficient cleansing power, it can go on living for ever. What is the cleansing element? M: Adequate elimination. K: It is much deeper than that, surely. M: Adequate elimination is the outer expression of the cleansing process. P: That's not adequate. If that were so the human body if adequately cleansed, would not deteriorate. But death is inevitable. Is the mind different from the brain cells? K: Is it a deterioration of energy or a deterioration of the brain cells in their capacity to produce energy? Let us first put the question clearly. B: When we say that the brain deteriorates, the assumption is that the brain is very alive at some stage, but one of the problems of existence is the mediocrity of the mind. K: The question is: Why does the brain not keep its quality of sharpness, clarity, deep energy? As it gets older, it seems to deteriorate. This happens even at the age of twenty. It is already held in a groove and gradually peters out. I want to find out if it is a matter of age. You can see that certain minds, even though they are quite young, have already lost this quality of swiftness. They are already caught in a groove and the deteriorating factor has already begun. S: Is it that we are born with a certain conditioning? Is that the determining factor? K: Is it a matter of conditioning and the breaking through of that conditioning which frees energy and therefore enables the mind to go on indefinitely; or has the deterioration to do with a mind that functions in decisions? S: What do you mean by functioning in decisions? K: That which operates through choice and will. One decides the course of action one is going to take, and that decision is based not on clarity, not on the observation of the total field, but according to satisfaction and enjoyment, which are fragments of that field. And one continues to live in that fragmentation. That is one of the factors of deterioration. My choice to be a scientist may be based on environmental influence, family influence, or my own desire to achieve success in a certain direction. These many considerations being about the choice of a particular profession, and that decision, that choice and the action from that choice, is one of the factors of deterioration. I disregard the rest of the field and only follow a particular narrow corner of that field. The brain cells do not function totally but only in one direction. See, this is rather interesting. Don't accept this. We are examining it. P: Are you saying that the brain functions not fully, but only in one direction. K: The whole brain is not active, and I think that is the factor of deterioration. You asked what are the factors of deterioration, not whether the mind is capable of seeing the total or not. I have observed for these many years that a mind that has followed a certain course of action disregarding the totality of action, deteriorates. P: Let us explore that. The brain cells themselves have an inbuilt sense of time, sense of memory, instinct. They operate as reflexes. The very nature of operating in reflexes limits the brain from functioning totally. And we know no other way. K: We are trying to find out what are the factors of deterioration. When we see what the factors are, perhaps we may get to the other, see the total. P: One can think of twenty factors of conflict, for instance. K: Let us not take too many. A pursuit, based on choice, which has the motive of satisfaction of fulfilment or the desire to achieve, that action must create conflict. So, conflict is one of the factors of deterioration. Perhaps that is the major factor of deterioration. I decide to become a politician. I decide to become a religious man. I decide to become an artist, a sannyasi; that decision is made by a conditioning brought about by a culture which is in its very nature fragmentary. That is, I decide to be a bachelor because from what I have seen, from what I have heard, I think that to attain God, Truth, Enlightenment, I must remain celibate. I disregard the whole structure of human existence, the biological, the sociological, and all the rest of it. That decision obviously brings about a conflict in me, a sexual conflict, a conflict in keeping away from people, and so on. That is one of the factors of the deterioration of the brain. I am only using one part of it. The very factor of dividing one sector of my life from the rest is a factor of deterioration. So, choice and will are factors of deterioration. P: And yet they are the two instruments of action we have. K: That's right. Let us look at it. All our life is based on these two factors: discrimination or choice and the action of will in the pursuit of satisfaction. S: Why discrimination? K: Discrimination is choice. I discriminate between this and that. We are trying to see what is the factor of deterioration, the root factor of deterioration. We may come upon something different also. I see choice and will in action are the factors of deterioration, and if you see that, then the question is, Is there an action which does not have in it these two elements, these two principles? P: Let us take the other factors because there are many other factors; there is the inherited, there is also shock, for instance. K: If I have inherited a dull, stupid mind, I am finished. I can go to various temples and churches but my brain cells themselves have been affected. P: Then there is shock. K: Which is what? P: The action of life itself. K: Why should life itself produce a shock? P: It happens. K: Why? My son dies, my brother dies. It produced a shock because I never realized that my son would die. I suddenly realize he is dead, it is neurological shock. Are you using the word `shock' psychologically or physically? P: It is a physical shock, it is neurological shock, the coming into actual contact with the validity of something which ends. K: All right. Let us take shock - physical, psychological, emotional shock of suddenly losing something, losing somebody, the shock of being alone, the shock of something that has suddenly come to an end. The brain cells receive this shock. Now what will you do about it? Is that shock a factor of deterioration? S: No, the way we respond to the shock is the factor. P: Can one respond with a total quiet? The mind has registered something which it is unable to understand. There are depths beyond which it cannot respond. We are talking of shock and of new responses. To what depth has one penetrated? K: Wait Pupulji, just go slowly. My son is dead, my brother is dead. It is a tremendous shock because we have lived together, played together. That shock has paralysed the mind, and the shock does paralyse it for the time being. How the mind comes out of it is the important factor. Does it come out with a hurt, with all the implications of hurt or does it come out without a single hurt? S: I may not know. Consciously I may say I have worked it out. How do I know that there is not a trace of hurt? D: Sir, Could it be that in the case of shock, there is a death, there is an ending completely of the pattern of mind and the very seeing of that is the ending of it? K: That is all implied. When my brother dies or my son dies, my whole life changes. The change is the shock. I have to leave this house, I have to earn a different kind of livelihood, I have to do a dozen things. All that is implied in the word `shock'. Now, I am asking whether that shock has left a mark or hurt, or not. If it has not left a single mark, a single hurt, a single scratch or a shadow of sorrow, then the mind comes out of it totally refreshed, totally new. But if it has been hurt, brutalized, then that is a factor of deterioration. Now, how does the mind consciously know that it is not hurt deeply, profoundly? P: If it is hurt deeply, profoundly, does it mean that there is no hope and it is all over? Or is there a way of wiping away? K: We are going to go into that, Pupulji. The shock is natural because I have suddenly been thrown out on the street, metaphorically speaking. Neurologically, psychologically, inwardly, outwardly, the whole thing has changed. How does the mind come out of this? That is the question. Does it come out with hurt or does it come out totally purged of all hurt? Are the hurts superficial, or so profound that the conscious mind cannot possibly know them at a given moment and, therefore, they will keep on repeating, repeating? All that is wastage of energy. How does the mind find out whether it is deeply hurt? P: The superficial hurts one can dismiss, deal with, but the deep hurts... K: How will you deal with them? P: There is brutality, death, there is violence. K: Don't bring in violence. How does the mind come upon the deep hurts? What is a hurt? P: Deep pain. K: Is there a deep hurt? P: Yes. K: What do you mean by deep hurt? P: The really deep hurts are because of a crisis, the very nature of your being is on the edge of sorrow. K: My brother dies, my son dies; husband, wife, whatever. It is a shock. The shock is a kind of hurt. I am asking is the hurt very deep and what do I mean by 'very deep'? P: The depths of the unconscious are thrown up. K: What is being thrown up? P: Pain. K: Pain, of which you have not been aware and shock reveals the pain. Now, was the pain there or the cause of pain there? P: The cause of pain was there. The cause of pain was there of which I was not conscious. The shock comes and makes me aware of that pain. M: What do you mean by saying shock creates pain? K: Pain was there. It is one of the factors. My brother is dead, that is absolutely final. I cannot bring him back. The world faces this problem, not you and I alone, everybody faces this problem. There is a shock. That shock is a deep hurt. Was the cause of the hurt there before and the shock has only revealed it? Was the hurt there because I never faced it? I have never faced loneliness. I have never faced the sense of loneliness which is one of the factors of hurt. Now, can I, before the shock comes, look at loneliness? Can I, before the shock comes, know what it is to be alone? Before the shock comes, can I go into this question of reliance, dependency, which are all factors of hurt, the causes of hurt, so that when the shock comes, they are all brought out. Now, when the shock comes, what happens? I have no hurt. This is right. M: What makes you prepare yourself? K: I don't prepare. I watch life. I watch what are the implications of attachment or indifference or the cultivation of independence because I must not depend. Dependence causes pain, but to cultivate independence may also bring pain. So, I watch myself, I watch and see that dependence of any kind must inevitably bring about deep hurt. So, when the shock comes, the cause of hurt is not. A totally different thing takes place. S: It can happen that in order to prevent suffering, we do all that you have described. P: Sir, all these things one has done. One has observed, one has gone into the problems of attachment. K: Would you say shock is `suffering'? P: Shock seems to touch the depths of my being which I have never been able to touch before, to which I have had no access. K: What do you mean by that? If you have gone through loneliness, attachment, fear, not seeking independence or detachment as an opposite to attachment, then what takes place? When shock comes, the shock of death, what takes place? Are you hurt? P: That's a word I would like to enlarge upon. It seems to bring out all the pains I have had. K: Which means what? You have not resolved the pain - not resolved the pain of loneliness. I am taking that as an example. P: What I want to ask is: Is there a resolution of the pain of attachment or is it a complete comprehension of whatever is, an awakening to the total process of pain? K: No. Look, suffering is pain. We use that suffering to cover loneliness, attachment, dependence, conflict. We use the whole field of man's escape from suffering and the cause of suffering. We use the word `suffering' to include all that. Or, would you like to use the term `the totality of pain'? The hidden and the observable totality of suffering - the pain of a villager, the pain and sorrow of a woman who has lost her husband, the sorrow of a man, ignorant, unlettered, always in poverty; and the sorrow of man, the pain of man who is ambitious, frustrated - all that is suffering and the shock brings all that pain, not only yours, to the surface. Agreed? What takes place? I don't know how to deal with it. I cry, I pray and go to the temple. This is what takes place. I hope to meet my brother or son in the astral plane. I do everything, trying to get out of this torture of pain. Why should the shock reveal all this? P: The roots of pain have never been revealed. K: Seeing that beggar on the road, leprous, or the villager endlessly working in sorrow, why has that not touched the human mind? Why should shock touch it? P: Is there a why? K: Why does that beggar not shock me personally and the whole of society? Why does it not move me? D: The shock attacks the whole structure of pain and makes the structure of pain act. K: I am asking you a simple question. You see the beggar on the road. Why is that not a shock to you? Why do you not cry? Why do I cry only when my son dies? I saw a monk in Rome. I cried to see the pain of someone tied to a post called religion. We don't cry there but we cry here. Why? There is a `why', obviously. There is a `why' because we are insensitive. B: The mind is asleep. The shock wakes it up. K: That's it. The shock wakes it up and we are awakened to pain, which is our pain: we were not awakened to pain before. This is not a theory. P: No, sir, when you make a statement like that, I am awakened to pain and it is not a question of my pain... K: It is pain. Now, what do you do with pain? Pain is suffering. what takes place? P: It is like a storm. If one is in the middle of a storm, you don't ask `why'. In it is every pain. K: I said that it is not your pain; it is pain. I felt pain when I saw that beggar. When I saw that monk, I cried. When I saw that villager, I was tortured. When I saw the rich man, I said, `My God, look.' Society, culture, religion, the whole life of man is also the pain of my losing my brother. So it is pain. What do I do with pain? Is it deep or superficial? You say it is very deep. A: It is very deep. K: What do you mean by `deep'? P: What I mean by `deep' is that it goes through every part of my being. It is not sectional; it is not operating only in one part of my life. K: You say `It is very deep'. Don't call it deep. It has no measurement. It is not deep or shallow. Pain is pain. Then what? You remain in it, bear this hurt? B: We cannot escape from it or substitute it. K: So, what shall I do with the pain? Ignore it? We are going to find out. Do I go to the analyst to get rid of the pain, or do I read a book or go to Tirupati or to Mars to get rid of the pain? How shall I get rid of it? What shall I do with it? P: I am in the position of standing still. K: You are in pain. You are that pain. Hold it. You are there. You hold it. It is your baby, and then what? Let us find out. I am that pain - the pain of the villager, the pain of the beggar, the pain of that man who is rich who goes through agonies, the monk and all the rest of it. I am that pain. What shall I do? B: Is there not a transformation of this pain into wakefulness? K: That is what I want to find out. S: At the moment of death, everything is thwarted. K: At the moment of death, a few days after, my whole nervous, biological, psychological system is paralysed. I am not talking about that moment. Don't go back to it again. Now it has passed. It is a year old. I am left with this pain. What shall I do? B: When there is an unintelligent operation of this brain, suffering does wake it up. Apparently, it is a very unintelligent operation. K: A mother loses her son in Vietnam and yet mothers don't seem to learn that their sons might be killed through nationalism, through concepts and formulas. They don't realize it. That's pain. I realize that for them. I suffer. We suffer. There is suffering. What shall I do? Rad: I will see what it is. K: I see what it is. That beggar can never become a minister and that monk is tortured by his own vows, by his own ideas of God. I see all that. I see it so clearly. I don't have to examine it any more. What shall I do with it? M: The understanding by which the beggar's pain and another's pain becomes your own pain is unknown to us. Not everybody can see the beggar's pain as his own pain. K: I have that pain, what shall I do? I am not concerned whether everybody sees it or not. Many people do not see things. What shall I do? My son is dead. P: You are in the middle of it. I am talking of being held by it and of being in it. K: You heard that beggar singing last night. It was a terrible thing. The fact is there - the pain, the suffering. What will you do? M: You act, try to change the condition of the beggar. K: That is your fixed idea. You want to do it your way and somebody else wants to do it another way but I am talking about pain. We asked what are the factors of deterioration of the brain cells and the mind. We said one of the major factors is conflict. Another factor is hurt, pain. And what are the factors? - fear, conflict, suffering, and the pursuit of pleasure, call it God, social service, work for the country. So, these are the factors of deterioration. Who is to act? What am I to do? Unless the mind solves this, its action will produce more suffering, more pain. P: The deterioration will be accelerated. K: That's an obvious fact. We have come to the point of pain, hurt, suffering and the factor of fear, and the pursuit of pleasure, as a few factors that bring about deterioration. What shall I do? What shall the mind do? SWS: By asking this, the mind tries to become something other than what it is. K: If it is in pain, how can it act? S: How can it become something else? Becoming is another factor of deterioration. Becoming is a factor because in it, there is conflict. I want to be something; therefore, becoming is the avoidance of pain, therefore conflict. So, what shall I do? I have tried village work, I have tried social work, cinemas, sex, and yet pain remains. What shall I do? Q: There must be some way to let the pain go. K: Why should it go? All you are concerned with is to make it go. Why should it go? There is no way out, is that it? SWS: You have to live with it. K: How do you live with something which is pain, which is sorrow? How do you live with it? Rad: When I stop doing anything about it. K: Are you doing it or are you just saying it as a theory? What is the mind to do with this tremendous hurt which causes pain, suffering, this everlasting battle that brings about the deterioration of the brain cells? B: One should try to watch it. K: Watch what, sir? Is my suffering, is my pain different from the watcher? Is it? Is the pain different from the watcher? So, what takes place? The observer says, `I must get rid of pain'. But it is still there at the end of the journey. Now, what takes place when the observer is the observed? M: We started with what is the factor of deterioration. We have come to the conclusion that pain is the factor of deterioration. If we don't want deterioration, we must not suffer pain. Therefore, doing away with pain is important and we cannot say: `I am pain,' `I have to live with pain'. This is endless. We must cease to suffer. Now, what is the secret of it? You tell us. K: Secret of what? You introduce words which I never used. I am using words according to the dictionary. I don't want to be a blank wall which does not feel. M: Immunity does not mean insensitivity. K: We all want to get rid of pain. It would be idiotic to say: `I must endure pain`, and that is what most people do, and because they endure pain, they take neurotic action like going off to temples and so on. So, it is absurd to say that we must endure pain. On the contrary, knowing that pain is one of the major factors of deterioration, how does it come to an end? Sir, at the end of pain, the mind becomes extraordinarily passionate; it is not just a dull, painless mind. You want the secret of it? M: Do you know the secret? K: I will tell you. Do you want it? Let us approach it in a different way. Is it possible for a mind never to be hurt? Education hurts us, the family hurts us, society hurts us. I am asking: `Can the mind, living in a world in which there is hurt, never be hurt?' You call me a fool. You call me a great man. You call me enlightened or wise or a stupid old man. Call me anything; can I never be hurt? It is the same problem put differently. S: There is a slight difference. There the problem was one of being hurt and how to solve it. Here the question is: Is there a possibility of never being hurt? K: I am showing it to you. That is the secret. What will you do with all the hurts that human beings have accumulated? If you don't solve this problem, do what you will, it will lead to more sorrow. Let us proceed. We just now asked what takes place when the observer is the observed. SWS: There should be an observation without the centre. K: Observation without the centre means there is only that thing which you call pain. There is no entity that says I must go beyond the pain. When there is no observer, is there pain? It is the observer that gets hurt. It is the centre that gets flattered. It is the centre that says it is shocked. It is the centre that says `I know pain'. Now, can you observe this thing called pain without the centre, without the observer? It is not a vacuum. What takes place? M: The pain changes the feeling. K: What do you mean by saying that the pain changes the feeling? Sir, this is a difficult thing because we are always looking at pain from the centre as the observer who says: `I must do something.' So, action is based on the centre doing something about pain, but when the centre is pain, what do you do? What is there to be done? What is compassion? The word `compassion' means passion and how does that come? By chasing around activity? How does it come? When suffering is not, the `other' is. Does this mean anything to you? How can a mind that suffers know compassion? M: The knowledge that there is pain is compassion. K: Forgive me. I never said become compassionate. We are seeing the fact, the `what is', which is suffering. That is an absolute fact. I suffer and the mind is doing everything it can to run away from it. When it does not run away, then it observes. Then the observer, if it observes very very closely, is the observed, and that very pain is transformed into passion, which is compassion. The words are not the reality. So, don't escape from suffering, which does not mean you become morbid. Live with it. You live with pleasure, don't you? Why don't you live with suffering completely? Can you live with it in the sense of not escaping from it? What takes place? Watch. The mind is very clear, very sharp. It is faced with the fact. The very suffering transformed into passion is something enormous. From that arises a mind that can never be hurt. Full stop. That's the secret. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'SILENCE AND DISORDER' P: Can we discuss what is silence? Does silence have many facets or forms? How is it reached? Does it imply only the absence of thought? Or is the silence which arises through various experiences and situations, different in nature, dimension and direction? K: Where shall we start? Are you saying: Is there a right approach to silence and if there is, what is it? And are there different varieties of silence, which means different methods by which to arrive at silence? What is the nature of silence? Shall we go into it in that order? First, is there a right approach to silence and what do we mean by `right'? P: Is there only one approach? If all the silences are of the same nature, then there may be many approaches. K: I am just asking: What do we mean by the right approach? P: The only one as against the many. K: Therefore, what is the one? What is the approach which is true, natural, reasonable, logical and beyond logic? Is that the question? P: I would not put it that way. I would say that silence is when consciousness is not operating, when thought is not operating. Silence is generally defined as the absence of thought. K: I can go blank without any thought,just repeat something and go blank. Is that silence? S: How do you know what is true silence? K: Let us begin by asking: Is there a right approach to silence and what is that right approach? Are there many varieties of silences and is silence the absence of thought? In that a great many things are implied such as: I can go blank suddenly; I am thinking and I just stop and look at something and then go blank - daydreaming. I would like to approach this question by asking: Is there a true approach to silence? You started with that question. I think we ought to take that first and go into other things afterwards. S: You seem to be giving emphasis to the true approach rather than to the true nature of silence. K: I think so, because there are people who have practised silence by controlling thought, mesmerizing themselves into silence, controlling their chattering mind to such an extent that the mind becomes absolutely dull, stupid and silent. So I want to start with the enquiry from the point of right approach; otherwise we will wander off: Is there a natural, healthy, logical, objective, balanced approach to silence? Could we proceed from that? What is the necessity for silence? P: The need for silence is easy to understand. Even in ordinary living when a constantly chattering, constantly irritated mind comes to rest, there is a feeling of being refreshed. The mind is refreshed quite apart from anything else, so silence in itself is important. B: And also, even in the ordinary sense there is no seeing of colour, there is no seeing of things unless there is a certain quality of silence. S: Then there is the whole tradition that maintains that silence is important, is necessary and the various systems of pranayama, breath control, exist to ensure it. So there are many states of silence and you cannot distinguish between an unhealthy state and a healthy one. K: Supposing you don't know anything of what other people have said and why you should be silent, would you ask the question? P: Even at the level of the tranquillizer, we would ask the question. K: So you ask the question in order to tranquillize the mind. P: Yes. K: Because the mind is chattering and that is wearisome and exhausting. So do you ask whether there is a way of tranquillizing the mind without drugs? We know the way of tranquillizing the mind with drugs, but is there another way which will naturally, healthily, sanely, logically bring about tranquillity in the mind? How would you approach this? Being weary, exhausted by the chattering of the mind, I ask myself, `Can I, without the use of drugs, quieten the mind?' S: There are many ways of doing it. K: I don't know of any. You all say there are many ways. I say, how can the mind do this without effort? Because effort implies disturbance of the mind, it does not bring about tranquillity, it brings about exhaustion. And exhaustion is not tranquillity. Conflict will not bring about tranquillity, it will bring about exhaustion and that may be translated as silence by those who are completely tired out at the end of the day. I can go into my meditation room and be quiet. But is it possible to bring about tranquillity in the mind without conflict, without discipline, without distortion - all those are exhausting processes. S: When pranayama is done there is no conflict, it does not exhaust you but there is silence. What is its nature? K: There you are breathing, getting more oxygen into your system and the oxygen naturally helps you to be relaxed. S: That is also a state of silence. K: We will discuss the states of silence afterwards; I want to find out whether the mind can become tranquil without any kind of effort, breathing, enforcement, control, direction. Par: The mind only asks the question whether it is possible to have tranquillity without conflict because it is agitated, disturbed. K: I asked: Can there be silence without conflict, without direction, without enforcement of any kind? I can take a drug, a tranquillizer and make the mind very quiet. It is on the same level as pranayama; I control the mind and silence can be brought about. It is on the same level as breathing, or drugs. I want to start from a point where the mind is agitated, chattering, exhausting itself by incessant friction of thought, and ask whether it is possible to be really quiet without any artificial means? To me that is a central issue. I would approach it that way if I went into this. I would discard artificial controls - drugs, watching the breath, watching light, mantras, bhajans - all these are artificial means and induce a particular kind of silence. S: Are they external, motivated? K: It is all part of it. I would consider all these means as artificial enforcements in order to induce silence. What happens when you look at a mountain? The greatness, the beauty, the grandeur of the mountains absorb you. That makes you silent. But that is still artificial. I would consider any form of inducement to bring about silence artificial. S: Looking at a mountain is a non-dualistic experience. How can you then say that it is still not silence? K: I would not call it silence because the thing is so great that for the time being its greatness knocks you out. S: The absence of the `me' is not at the conscious level, but it is there. K: You see a marvellous picture, a marvellous sunset, an enormous chain of mountains and it is like a child being absorbed with a toy; that greatness knocks out the `me' for the moment and the mind becomes silent. You can experiment with it. S: But you say that is not silence. K: I would not call that silence because the mountain, the beauty of something, takes over for the moment. The `me' is pushed aside; and the moment that is gone, I am back to my chattering. At least I want to be clear that any artificial act with a motive, with a direction, seems to K a distortion which will not bring about the depth of silence. In this are included practices, discipline, control, identification with the greater and there by making oneself quiet, and so on. Then I ask myself: What is the necessity of silence? If there was no motive, would I ask that question? Par: Are you describing your mind? K: No, sir, I am not describing my mind. I said: Any inducement in any form, subtle or obvious, would not bring about the depth of great silence. I would consider it superficial; I may be wrong, we are enquiring. Par: The state of your mind is already a silent mind. K: May be, I don't know. So what is the natural, healthy approach to tranquillity? R: But an approach is a motivation. K: I would not use that word. What is the state of natural tranquillity? How does one come upon it naturally? If I want to listen to what you are saying, my mind must be quiet - that is a natural thing. If I want to see something clearly, the mind must not be chattering. P: In that state lies all poise, all harmony. K: I would say the basis for the depth of silence is poise, harmony between the mind, the body and the heart, great harmony, and the putting aside of any artificial methods, including control. I would say the real basis is harmony. P: You have used another word: `harmony'. How does this solve the problem? The only thing I know is conflict. I don't know silence. K: Therefore, don't talk about silence. Deal with conflict, not with silence. If there is disharmony between the mind, the body, the heart, etc. deal with that, not with silence. If you deal with silence, being disharmonious, then it is artificial. This is so. P: An agitated mind naturally seeks a state of non-agitation. Be concerned with the agitated mind, not with silence. Deal with `what is' and not with what might be. R: Are you asking whether the agitated mind can deal with its own agitation? K: That is a different question. B: She is saying that the agitated mind naturally asks the question. K: Yes, so be concerned, not with silence, but with why the mind is agitated. P: It seeks the opposite state. K: Then it is in conflict. The concept has its roots in its own opposite. R: The concept itself is part of agitation. K: I would say complete harmony is the foundation for the purity of silence. S: How does one know of this complete harmony? K: Let us go into that. We will later on come to the question of varieties of silences. So, what is harmony? P: Does harmony arise when conflict ends? K: I want to find out what is harmony between the mind, the body and the heart, a total sense of being whole without fragmentation, without the over development of the intellect, but with the intellect operating clearly, objectively, sanely; and the heart not operating with sentiment, emotionalism, outbreaks of hysteria, but with a quality of affection, care, love, compassion, vitality; and the body with its own intelligence, not interfered with by the intellect. The feeling that everything is operating, functioning beautifully like a marvellous machine is important. Is this possible? Q: In that harmony is there a centre? K: I don't know, we can find out. Can the mind, the brain function efficiently, without any friction, any distraction? Can the mind have the intelligence, the capacity to reason, to perceive, to be clear? When there is a centre it is obviously not possible, because the centre is translating everything according to its limitations. Am I reducing everybody to silence? R: Why does this division arise between the mind and the body? K: It arises through our education, where emphasis is laid on the cultivation of the intellect as memory and reason, as a function apart from living. R: That is the over-emphasis on the mind. Even without education, there can be an over-emphasis on emotions. K: Of course. Man worships the intellect much more than the emotions. Does he not? An emotion is translated into devotion, into sentimentality, into all kinds of extravagance. Par: How does one differentiate between the accumulation of memory for technical or day-to-day purposes, and the accumulation of emotional memory? K: That is very simple, sir. Why does the brain as the repository of memory, give such importance to knowledge - technological, psychological, and in relationship? Why have human beings given such extraordinary importance to knowledge? I have an office. I become an important bureaucrat, which means I have knowledge about performing certain functions and I become pompous, stupid, dull. Par: Is it an innate desire? K: It gives security - obviously. It gives you status. Human beings have worshipped knowledge - knowledge as identified with the intellect. The erudite person, the scholar, the philosopher, the inventor, the scientist, are all concerned with knowledge and they have created marvellous things in the world, like going to the moon, making new kinds of submarines and so on. They have invented the most extraordinary things and the admiration, the marvel at that knowledge is overwhelming and we accept it. So we have developed an inordinate admiration, almost verging on worship, of the intellect. This applies to all the sacred books and their interpretations. Correct me, if I am wrong. In contrast to that, there is a reaction to be emotional, to have feeling, to love, to have devotion, sentimentality, extravagance in expression, and the body gets neglected. You see this and therefore you practise yoga. This division between the body, the mind and the heart takes place unnaturally. Now we have to bring about a natural harmony where the intellect functions like a marvellous watch, where the emotions and affections, care, love and compassion are healthily functioning and the body, which has been so despoilt, which has been so misused, comes into its own. Now how do you do that? GM: I adore knowledge because I need it. K: Of course, I need it. It is very clear, sir, I need knowledge to talk to you in English. To ride a bicycle, to drive an engine, needs knowledge. Q: I have to solve the problem of disease. I need knowledge to deal with it. That is still within the field of knowledge. K: Knowledge is misused by the centre as the `me' which has got knowledge. Therefore I feel superior to the man who has less knowledge. I use knowledge to provide a status for myself, I am more important than the man who has no knowledge. S: If I may say so, we started the discussion with silence and the various ways in which we arrive at silence. You pointed out that unless there is harmony, we cannot have a basis for questioning or for asking what silence is. D: Do we not make a distinction between knowledge and the discovery of the new? K: Of course, sir. When knowledge interferes there is no discovery of the new. There must be an interval between knowledge and the new; otherwise you are just carrying on the new like the old. R asked: `Why is there division between the mind, the heart and the body.' We see that. How is this division to come to an end naturally? How do you do it - through enforcement, through the ideals we have of harmony? Sir, one is aware of this division -isn't one - between the intellect, the emotions and the body. There is this gap between all of them. How is the mind to remove this gap and be whole? What do the traditionalists say? M: Effort, clench your teeth. P: We are getting bogged down. We started with silence. We don't touch silence; then you used the word `harmony' and we can't touch harmony. K: Then what will you do? We will return to silence. P: We come back to only one thing, which is, we know only disharmony. K: Therefore let us deal with disharmony and not with silence and when there is the understanding of disharmony, from that may flow silence. S: Also there is the question: How does one know that one has ended disharmony totally? M: There is a Latin saying, `I know what is right, but I don't follow it.' K: Don't bring in anything from the Latin. Face the thing as it is. Pupul says we started out with silence and we said it is no good discussing silence until you find out if there is a natural way of coming to it. The artificial way is not the way. The natural way is to find out if there is harmony, but we don't know anything about harmony because we are in a state of disorder. So let us deal with disorder, not with harmony, not with silence. M: I observe my disorder and the disorder goes on looking at me. K: Therefore there is a duality, a division, a contradiction in your observation, as the observer and the observed. We can play with this endlessly. Please follow what we have so far discussed. We started out with asking: What is the nature of silence, are there different varieties of silence, are there different approaches to silence? Pupul also asked: `What is the right way to silence?, We said perhaps there may be a `right' way but that any artificial means to bring about silence is not silence; we made that very clear. Don't let us go back. If there is no artificial way, is it possible to come upon silence naturally without effort, without inducement, without direction, without artificial means? In examining this we came to harmony. To that Pupul says: `We don't know what harmony is, but what we do know is disorder.' So let us put aside everything else and consider disorder, not what silence is. A mind that is in disorder enquires after silence. Silence then becomes a means of bringing about order or escape from disorder. Silence then is imposed on disorder. So we stop all that and ask: Why is there disorder? Is it possible to end disorder? P: There is disorder when thought arises and I want silence. K: No, you are looking for a cause, you want to find out what is the cause of disorder. P: I don't. K: Then? P: I observe the nature of disorder. I don't look for the cause. I don't know. K: One observes disorder in oneself. P: I see that it is manifested as thought. K: I don't know. I would like to go into it very carefully because it is rather interesting. Why do I call what I observe disorder? S: Disturbance is disorder. K: I just want to find out. Why do I call it disorder? Which means I already have an inkling of what order is. So I am comparing what I have experienced or known as order and thereby ask what is disorder. I don't do that. I say, don't compare, just see what disorder is. Can the mind know disorder without comparing it with order? So, can my mind cease comparing? Comparison may be disorder. Comparison itself may be the cause of disorder. Measurement may be disorder, and as long as I am comparing, there must be disorder. I am comparing my disorder at present with a whiff of order which I have smelt and I call it disorder. So I see it is comparison which is really important, not disorder. As long as my mind is comparing, measuring, there must be disorder. R: Without comparing I look at myself and I see there is disorder because every part of me is pulling in a different direction. K: I have never felt that I am in disorder, except rarely, occasionally. I say to myself: Why are all these people talking about disorder? D: Do they really know disorder or do they only know it through comparison? P: You bring in words which I find very difficult to understand. There is no conscious comparison by the mind which says, `This is disorder and I want to end it.' I know disorder. A: A sense of uneasiness. P: I see a sense of confusion, one thought against another thought. You will say the word `confusion' is again comparison. I know confusion. K: You only know contradiction, which is confusion. Stick to that. You say your mind is in a state of confusion because it is contradicting itself all the time. Proceed from that. B: There is a real difficulty here. You talked about silence, then about harmony, then about disorder. Why do we speak of disorder? We function partly in order also. P: I am sorry, I don't know either harmony or silence. I say I observe my mind, I see disorder. K: Then what? From there move. P: Then I am bound to ask: Is it the nature of the mind? K: Ask. P: I ask, and there must be a way out of this. K: Then what? P: Then I observe myself asking that question. K: Yes. P: For the time being the activity of the mind comes to an end. M: What is the fallacy in this? K: There is no fallacy in this. I am coming to that. P: Look, sir, we need not have gone through this. But I thought it was better to go step by step. There is an ending here. May be to someone else there may not be an ending, but for me there is. What is the nature of this? I now come back to my first question: Is the undercurrent in that ending still operating? When we talk of different qualities and natures and dimensions of silence it means just this. The traditional outlook is that the gap between two thoughts is silence. K: That is not silence. Silence between two notes is not silence. Listen to that noise outside. Absence of noise is not silence. It is only an absence of noise. P: There is an ending of the perception of oneself in a state of disturbance. K: Pupul, you have not been clear. When you say `disorder' I am not at all sure that you know what disorder is. You call it disorder. I overeat, that is disorder. I overindulge in emotional nonsense, that is disorder. P: I catch myself talking very loudly and that is disorder. K: So what is disorder? How do you know it is disorder? Listen, I overeat; I have tummyache. I don't call it disorder. I say, `I over-ate, I must not eat so much.' P: We moved from silence to harmony and we found that it is impossible to go into the nature of harmony without going into disorder. K: That is all. Keep to those three points. P: Why do you call it disorder? R: It is not necessarily a recognition of disorder, because when there is a conflict between the body, the mind... K: You associate conflict with disorder. R: No, the conflict makes one weary, as you say, and one instinctively feels that there is something wrong with it. K: So what you are saying is, if I understand it rightly, conflict indicates disorder. R: Even when you don't name it. K: Conflict is disorder. You translate it as disorder. Don't move around in circles. P: I say you must be free of conflict. M: Of disorder. K: Which is the same thing. Silence, harmony, conflict. That is all - not disorder. P: Forgive me for saying it but you can take the word `conflict' and go through the same gymnastics with it as you did with the word `disorder'. But what do I do about conflict? K: That is all we are concerned with: silence, harmony, conflict. How am I to deal with conflict non-artificially? You know nothing. You are listening for the first time. You have to go into it with me. Don't say `How do I look at it for the first time?' Somebody comes and says: `Look at this marvellous machinery'. You look. S: This much I can see clearly. I cannot think of silence or harmony when I am in conflict. K: Is the mind capable of freeing itself from every kind of conflict? That is the only thing you can ask. What is wrong with that question? R: It is the mind again which is asking the question. S: It is a legitimate question. P: Can the mind be free of disharmony? I don't see the difference between the two. K: We have reduced it to conflict. Now stick to it and see if the mind can be free of it. How can the mind, knowing what conflict is and what it does, end conflict? That is surely a legitimate question. M: Because you assume that the mind can do it. K: I don't know. Q: If we look into this question of conflict, look into various aspects of it, we see there is no conflict without comparison. K: Conflict is contradiction, comparison, imitation, conformity, suppression. Put all that into one word and accept the meaning of the word as we defined it, and ask whether the mind can be free of conflict. S: Of course it can be free of conflict, but the question arises: What is the nature of that freedom from conflict? K: How do you know before you can be free? S: There is a knowing of the state of conflict for the time being. K: Is there a complete ending of conflict? That's why I asked the question: Is there a total ending of conflict? M: I say there is no ending of conflict in the universe as we live in it from day to day. K: Don't include the universe. In the universe everything is moving in order. Let us stick to our minds which seem to be endlessly in conflict. Now, how is the mind to end conflict naturally, because every other system is a compulsive, a directional method, a method of control and all that is out. How can the mind free itself from conflict? I ask: Where are you at the end of it? I say, the mind can be completely, utterly without conflict. S: For ever? K: Don't use the words `for ever' because you are then introducing a word of time and time is a matter of conflict. P: I want to ask you a question. Can the mind be totally in conflict? K: What are you trying to say? I don't quite understand. P: You see, I feel myself totally helpless in this situation. The fact is there is conflict and the operation of the self on it leads to further conflict. Seeing the nature of that, can the mind see that it is totally in conflict? K: Can the mind be aware of a state in which there is no conflict? Is that what you are trying to say? Or can the mind only know conflict? Right? Is your mind totally aware of conflict, or is it just a word? Or is there a part of the mind which says `I am aware that I am totally in conflict and there is a part of me watching conflict.' Or is there a part of the mind wishing to be free of conflict, which means, is there a fragment which says `I am not in conflict' and which separates itself from the totality of conflict? If there is a separate fragment, then that fragment says: `I must do, I must suppress, I must go beyond.' So this is a legitimate question. Is your mind totally aware that there is nothing but conflict or is there a fragment which skips away and says, `I am aware that I am in conflict but I am not in total conflict.' So, is conflict a fragment or is it total? I will keep to the same word, not to be substituted by a different word, for the time being. Is there total darkness or a slight light somewhere? R: If that light were not there, could there be awareness? K: I don't know anything about it. Don't ask me that question. When there is a fragmentation of the mind, that very fragmentation is conflict. Is the mind ever aware that it is in total conflict? Pupul says `yes'. P: You have moved away. K: I have not. P: I don't know anything about total conflict. K: Therefore you know only partial conflict. P: No, sir, whether partial or not, we know the fact that there is conflict and I ask: Can there be a refusal to move away? K: I have not moved away from silence, harmony or conflict. P: Where is totality in this? K: I think this is an important question. R: Sir, the very awareness of the mind indicates that there is a fragment. K: That is all. Therefore you say: Partially I am in conflict. Therefore you are never with conflict. P: No, sir. SWS: Total conflict cannot know itself unless there is something else. K: We are going to go into that. P: I am not making myself clear. The state of conflict does not have a wide, broad spectrum. When you say `total', it fills the mind. K: When the whole room is full of furniture - I am just taking that as an example - there is no space to move. I would consider that to be utter confusion. Is my mind so totally full of confusion that it has no movement away from this? Is it so completely full of confusion, of conflict, as full as this room is of furniture? Then what takes place? That is what I want to get at. We are not discussing the partial this and the partial that. When the steam is at full pressure it must explode, it must do something. I don't think we look at conflict totally. Could I use the word `sorrow'? There is no moving away from sorrow. When you move away from sorrow, then it is just an escape. Is there such a thing as being full of sorrow? Is there such a thing as being completely happy? When you are aware that you are completely happy, you are no longer happy. In the same way, when you are completely full of this thing called confusion, sorrow, conflict, it is no longer there. It is only there when there is division. That is all. R: No, sir, then it seems to be a hopeless problem. K: That is why one has to remain with the truth of the thing, not with the confusion of it. There is the truth of the thing when the mind is complete with something; then it cannot create conflict. If I love you and there is attachment in it, that is a contradiction, therefore there is no love. So I say, remain with the fact of that thing. Is the mind totally full of this sorrow, this confusion, this conflict? I won't move away till that is so. M: There is one peculiarity about your approach. When you draw a picture there is always a clear black outline. The colours don't merge. In reality there are no outlines, there are only colours merging with each other. K: This to me is very clear. If the heart is full of love and there is no part of envy in it, the problem is finished. It is only when there is a part that is jealous, then the whole problem arises. P: But when it is full of envy? K: Then remain with that envy fully - be envious, feel it! P: Then I know its total nature. K: It is a tremendous thing. But you say, `I am envious and I must not be envious.' Somewhere in a dark corner there lies the educational restraint; then something goes wrong. But can I be envious and not move from that? Moving away is rationalizing, suppressing, all that. Just remain with that feeling. When there is sorrow, be completely with it. This is merciless. All the rest is playing tricks. When you are with something, action has taken place. You don't have to do anything. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'HOW DEEP CAN ONE TRAVEL' P: Sir, how deep can one travel? K: Could we put the question this way? Most of our lives are very superficial and is it possible to live at great depth and also function superficially? Is it possible for the mind to dwell or live at great depth? I am not sure that we are all asking the same thing. We lead superficial lives and most of us are satisfied with that. P: We are not satisfied. But we don't know how to go deep. K: Most of us put up with it. Now, how is the mind to penetrate into great depth? Are we discussing depth in terms of measurement? Depth involves measurement. I want to be clear that we are not using the word in the sense of measurement or in the sense of time, but as something profound. These words have time significance, but we will wash away all the significance of time and measurement. We are asking whether the mind which generally lives superficially can penetrate to great depth? That is the question. I say it needs a build-up of energy, drive, and ask how is this energy to build up? P: I know no other dimension. It needs a build-up of energy which drives through. How is the energy to be built up, or is it a wrong question? K: Let us forget the word `energy' for the time being. I lead a very superficial life and I see the beauty, intellectually or verbally, of a life, of a mind that has gone into itself very very deeply. Now, I say to myself I see the beauty of it, I see the quality of it, how is this to be done? Let us stick to that, instead of bringing in energy and all that. How is this to be done? Can thought penetrate it? Can thought become profound? Please, sirs, do listen to this. I live a superficial life. I want to live a different kind of life, at great depth. I understand depth to mean not measurement or time to go down but depth as the bottomless; that which you cannot fathom, and I want to find it and live with it. Now, tell me what am I to do? I don't know. I am asking whether thought which is time, which is the past, whether thought can penetrate into this profundity? Just listen to what I am saying. I see very clearly any measurable depth is still within a small measurement. I see the going down as involved in time, it may take years, and so I see intellectually, reasoning it out, I see depth means a timeless, measureless quality, an infinite without ever reaching the bottom. It is not a concept. It is not verbal to me. I have only verbalized it to you. Therefore, it becomes a concept to you. M: Do you put the question to me or am I putting the question to myself? K: I am putting the question to myself and therefore asking you to put the question to yourself. I see my life is a superficial life. That's obvious. So, I say to myself: Can thought penetrate this depth as thought is the only instrument I have? Q: In that case, we cannot use the instrument. R: How does one come upon this depth without using the instrument? K: I live a very, very superficial life and I want to find out for myself if there is any depth which is not measurable and I see thought cannot reach it because thought is a measure, thought is time, thought is the response of the past; therefore thought cannot possibly touch it, Then, what will bring this about? If thought cannot touch it and that is the only instrument man has, then, what is he to do? Thought in its movement, in its function, has created this world which is superficial in which I live, of which I am. That is obvious. Now, is it possible for the mind, without the usage of thought, to touch something which is fathomless? Not just some moments in my sleep or when I am walking by myself, but to live there. My mind says the depth must be discovered, to let the mind be of the quality of that - I must be aware of that strange fathomless depth of something which is unnamed. P: Into what does one penetrate, delve? K: I won't use those words. P: No, sir. Thought is the instrument of measurement. There has to be freedom from the measurement-making machinery. K: No, no. Be simple about this. P: Can you delve into what is thought? K: We have been into that. Thought is time, thought is measure, thought is the response of memory, thought is knowledge, experience, past, therefore the past is time. That thought must function always superficially. That is simple. P: What you have said just now ends up in a big abstraction. K: No. P: It does, sir. K: It is not an abstraction. It is a reality. But what is thought? P: You said thought is time. You have abstracted that out of thought. K: Thought cannot penetrate it. That is all. Leave it like that. P: As it is the instrument that measures, can you penetrate this instrument? K: No, I am concerned with depth, not with the machinery of measurement. The machinery of measurement is fairly obvious, I don't have to delve into all that. P: If you say that, then I say into what dimension does one penetrate? If you won't have that and thought being the only instrument we know, into what dimension does one penetrate without thought? K: There is no question of penetration. P: Then what is it? Q: We are still bound by the available machinery of construction we have, which is not in a position to reveal that fathomless state which we want to live in, because language is delicate. That instrument is too frail. We must have the language to deal with that dimension. We must have the tool to communicate. P: What is the tool? Language is too frail. I cannot tell you about `how' when I am that state. K: Are we concerned with verbal communication or are we concerned with the touching of that depth? Q: I know that sometimes I do touch. How can I tell you about that state? P: You said that you don't use the existing instrument which you have, which is thought. R: But I think Krishnaji has pointed out the difference: that it is not a question of occasionally feeling that, but how to be in it, to live in it. K: As you eat, appetite comes. Leading a superficial life, as human beings do, I say to myself I would like to find that depth, where there is great width and beauty, something immense. Now, what am I to do? What is the other operation or the other movement that must take place when thought is not functioning? Can the mind remain without measure? P: The question then is: Can that state come into being where there is no measure? K: That is all. All your life you have known measure. Now, I am asking you: Can the mind be without measure? P: If I were to ask you `how', you would say `no'. The only thing left then is to observe your mind measuring because there is no other way. K: Have you done that? Have you observed, has the mind observed its movement and measurement? P: Yes. K: Comparing, measuring and ending. Then what? P: Then there is stillness. K: You say the movement of measurement has come to an end. Would that be right? Can you honestly, really say the movement with measurement has come to an end? P: Just now it has come to an end. K: That is not good enough. Good enough means that right through my life measurement has to come to an end. P: How can I know it? K: I am going to find out. I want to find out if my mind which has been conditioned in the movement of measurement -measurement equals comparison, imitation, conformity, an ideal, a resistance which safeguards it from non-measurement - can the mind say: `Now I have understood the whole movement of measurement and I see where its legitimate place is and where it has no place at all,? P: How is that understood by the mind in which there is no thought? K: It perceives. I will show it to you. Thought has investigated and analysed it for the moment, thought has enquired, pushed, investigated, and it says it has seen the whole movement of measurement and that very perception of that movement is the ending of that movement. The very perception of it, that is, the seeing is the acting and ending. Seeing that this movement is time, is measure, seeing the whole map of it, the nature of it, the structure of it, that very perception acts in ending it. So, the seeing is the ending. There is no effort involved in it all. You say, `I have seen this.' Have you? EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'LISTENING WITH THE HEART' P: I feel the central point missing in all of us is the factor of compassion. In Benaras, you once used a phrase, `Is it possible to listen with the heart?' What does it imply to listen with the heart? K: Shall we discuss that? FW: Could we enquire into the nature of matter? K: You see, sir, what I said was that thought is a material process and whatever thought has built - technological, psychological beliefs, the gods, the whole structure of religion based on thought, is a material process. Thought in that sense is matter. Thought is experience, knowledge stored up in the cells and functioning in a particular groove set by knowledge. All that to me is a material process. What matter is, I do not know. I won't even discuss that because I don't know. FW: I am not enquiring into it from the point of view of a scientist. Let me say matter is something unknown. So I feel when we explore into the unknown... K: You can't explore into the unknown. Be careful, you can explore into the known, go to the limit of it and when you come to the limit of it you have moved out of it. You can only enquire into the known. P: Which is, into thought? K: Of course. But when he says examine, explore, investigate into the unknown, we can't. So Pupul puts a question which is: What is it, what does it mean to listen with compassion? P: This is a crucial thing. If we have compassion, everything is. K: Agreed, but we have not got it, unfortunately. So how should we approach this matter? What does it mean to listen, and what is the nature and the structure of compassion? P: And what is this listening with the heart? It is a very important thing. Is there a listening which is much deeper than the ear listening? K: Can we take the two: listening and listening with the heart, with compassion. First, what does it mean to listen, what is the art of listening? FW: Perhaps we could approach the subject the other way round. What does it mean not to listen? K: What do you mean, sir? FW: When we ask what does it mean to listen, it seems very difficult and I think that perhaps if I am very clear about what it means not to listen... K: It is the same thing. That is, through negation come to the positive. If you could find out what is listening and in the investigation of what is listening you negate what is not listening, then you are listening. That is all. P: Can we go on? So there are two problems involved, which are, what is listening - in which is implied what is not listening -and what is compassion? What is the nature and the structure of the feeling and the depth of it, and the action that springs from it? K: Go on, discuss it. FW: I feel that in this question of compassion we have the same problem, because I feel that compassion has nothing to do with the field of the known. K: She meant something else, sir. What does it mean to listen with your heart? That was what she meant. I introduced the word `compassion'. Perhaps we can leave that out for the moment. P: Krishnaji spoke of a listening with the heart, and I am interested in going into that. K: So let us keep to those two: listening, and listening with one's heart, what does it mean? R: We have said that the response with thought is fragmentary. Whether we call that response observation or listening or whatever it is, it is the same thing. Isn't it? So is the heart the nonfragmentary? Is that what we mean? K: Now wait a minute. To listen with the total flowering of all senses is one thing; listening partially with a particular sense is fragmentary. R: Yes. K: That is, if I listen with all my senses, then there is no problem of negation of what is listening or not listening. But we do not listen. S: Sir, when you talk of listening with the heart, my response is I do not know it. But there is a movement, a feeling, a listening in which consciousness is not thought. I see that there is a movement of feeling when I listen to Radhaji or someone; there is a certain feeling with which one listens to another. There is a different kind of communication when that feeling is there. K: Is feeling different from thought? S: That is what I am coming to. P: It is different from thought. S: If feeling is not different from thought, we do not know any movement apart from that of thought. To accept that statement is very difficult because we have also experienced tenderness, affection. If everything is put in the category of thought, if it is the totality of consciousness then... K: We must be clear. Do not categorize it. Let us go slowly. Do I listen with thought or do I not listen with thought? That is the problem. S: Both are... K: Go slowly Sunanda. Do you listen with the movement of thought or do you listen without the movement of thought? I am asking you. P: Can we listen without thought? K: Yes. P: Sometimes, once in a lifetime may be, one gets the total feeling of the heart and the mind and consciousness being one. K: I understand that. P: When we ask if there is a listening without thought, we can say, `Yes, it is so; but if I may say so, there is something still lacking. K: We will come to that. Let us go slowly into this. A: At a lower voltage of sensitivity there may be no articulated thought, but there is listening. That listening is lacking in sensitivity. So it is not alive. K: I think we have to begin with what it means to communicate. I want to tell you something which I am deeply concerned with. You must be prepared to enter into the problem, or into the question, or into the statement which one is proposing; which means you must have the same interest as the speaker or the same intensity, and also meet him at the same level. All this is implied in communication. Otherwise there is no communication. S: Interest one can understand, but level is very difficult to know. P: May I say something? In introducing the word `communication', you are introducing the two. In listening from the heart there may not be the two. K: Yes. We will come to that. What is listening with one's heart? I want to tell you something which I feel profoundly. How do you listen to it? I want you to share it with me, I want you to feel it with me, I want you to be involved with me. Otherwise how can there be communication? S: How does one know the level? K: The moment it is not intellectual, verbal, but an intense problem, a burning problem, a deep, human problem that I want to convey to you, to share with you. Then we must be on the same level, otherwise you cannot listen. S: If there is deep seriousness, will the right level be there? K: You are not listening now. That is my problem. I want to tell you something which is profoundly important. I want you to listen to it because you are a human being and it is your problem. It may be you have not really delved into it. So, in sharing it with me you are exposing your own intensity to it. Therefore listening implies a sharing, a non-verbal communication. There must be a listening, there must be a sharing, which implies an absence of verbal distortion. P: Obviously you can only communicate if there is a certain level. K: That is what I am saying. Now Sunanda how will you listen to me? Will you listen like that? S: It seems that one does not listen like that to everyone. K: I am talking now, I am asking you, will you listen to me in that manner? P: To you we listen. K: Because you have built an image about me and that image you give importance to, and therefore you listen. S: Not to the image alone. K: You are missing my point. Can you not only listen to this man who is speaking at the moment, but also listen to Radha when she talks about it, or when Parchure or you or somebody says something? Can you listen? He may convey something to you which he may not be capable of putting into words? So will you, in the same manner, listen to all of us? S: We listen to some and we do not listen to all. K: Why? P: Because of prejudice. K: Of course. There, there is no communication. P: You mean to say, sir, listening to the voice which is established in truth and which speaks out of silence, the receiving of that, can it be the same as listening to the voice which speaks out of thought? Please answer that question. K: You are too definite. P: No, it is not too definite. When you speak, your voice is different. R: I think the point is whether there is a receiving at all, listening at all. If one is receiving, then the question of whether it is the voice of truth or something else does not arise. P: It does not happen with us. Raj: We listen with motive. The motive may be very subtle or very obvious. When we listen to another we think we will not get anything out of it. That is why, when we listen to K there is much more attention. K: So how do we alter all that and listen to each other? FW: Is it that we interpret? K: No, don't interpret what I am saying, for God's sake, listen. I go to Kata and tell him I know nothing about Karate. I watch it on the films but I don't know Karate. So I go to him now, not knowing. Therefore I am listening. But we know - and that is your difficulty. You say this should be this way, this should be that way - all conjectures, opinions. The moment I use a word, you are fully alive. But the first thing is the art of listening. Art means to put everything in its right place. You may have your prejudices, you may have your conclusions, but when you are listening put them away - the interpreting, comparing, judging, evaluating, put all that away. Then communication takes place. When somebody says `I love you,' you don't say, `Let me think about it' R: That is, putting away everything is the same as having the same intensity and being at the same level. K: Otherwise what is the point of it? R: I have seen this but I am not doing it. K: Do it now. S: It seems to me, you are saying the act of listening wipes away, swallows up the whole thing for the time being. K: When I say, `I love you,' what happens? S: But no one says that to us. K: But I am saying it to you. S: No, sir, in normal life it does not often happen like that. K: So what is the art of listening, what does it mean to listen with one's heart? If you do not listen with the heart, there is no meaning to it. If you listen with a sense of care, attention, affection, a deep sense of communion with each other, it means, you listen with all your senses, does it not? P: With fullness. K: Will you listen that way? Can we listen to somebody whom we don`t like, who we think is stupid? Can you listen with your heart to that man or to that woman? I don't think when you have that feeling, words don't matter any more. Let us proceed. Then what? Suppose I listen and I have done it often in my life. I listen very carefully, I have no prejudices, I have no pictures, I have no conclusions, I am not a politician, I am a human being listening to somebody. I just listen, because he wants to tell me something about himself. Because he has got an image, a picture of me, he generally comes to see me with a mask. If he wants to talk seriously with me, I say `Remove the mask, let us look at it together.' I don't want to look behind the mask unless he invites me. If he says `All right, sir, let us talk about it,' I listen; and in listening he tells me something which is so utterly, completely common to all human beings. He may put it wrongly, he may put it foolishly, but it is something which every man or woman suffers, and he is telling me about it and I listen. Therefore he is telling me the history of mankind. So I am listening not only to the words, the superficial feeling of his, but also to the profound depth of what he is saying. If it is superficial, then we discuss superficially and push it till he feels this thing profoundly. You follow? It may be that he is expressing a feeling which is very superficial and if it is superficial, I say let us go a little deeper. So in going deeper and deeper, he is expressing something which is totally common to all of us. He is expressing something which so completely belongs to all human beings. You understand? So there is no division between him and me. P: What is the source of that listening? K: Compassion. So, what is compassion? As Fritz says, it is unknown to us. So how am I to have that extraordinary intelligence which is compassion? I would like to have that flower in my heart. Now what is one to do? FW: Compassion is not in the field of thought. Therefore I can never have the feeling that I have it. K: No, you won't find it - it is like a drill, like a screwdriver, you have to push, push. P: There must be a perfume to it. K: Of course. You cannot talk about compassion without perfume, without honey. P: It is either there or not there. Why is it then, sir, that when we are in communication with you we have this feeling, why is it that you have this tremendous impact which knocks away all prejudices, all obstacles and this immediately makes the mind silent? K: It is like going to the well with a small bucket or with an enormous bucket which one can hardly carry. Most of us go with a small bucket and pull out of the well insufficient water. It is like having a fountain in your yard, flowing, flowing. I would like to watch it, see it out there and inside. So what am I to do? FW: I will find out what prevents me from having that. K: That is analysis. I won't analyse, because it is a waste of time. I have understood that, not because I have said it and you have accepted it, but I see the reason, the logic, the significance and therefore the truth of it. Therefore analysis is out. S: Not only that, sir, I also see that sitting in meditation regularly, being in silence, none of these things have any relationship to that. Duality and every kind of experience that one has gone through, has also nothing to do with it. K: Listen Sunanda, Radha and Pupul have got this thing in their backyard. They don't talk about it because it is there, flowering, flowing, murmuring, all kinds of things happen. And I say, Why is it not in my backyard? I want to find out. Not that I want to imitate. But it must happen. I won't analyse what prevents me, what blocks me, I won't ask, should I be silent, should I not be silent? That is the analytical process. I don't know if you understand this? S: That is clear, sir. K: Do you really understand what it means? S: What does it mean, `to really understand'? K: Look, they have got it, I haven't got it. I would like to have it. I would like to look at it like at a precious jewel. How is it to happen to me? That is my enquiry. He suggested that I look at what is blocking me. He said that is an analytical process and analysis is a waste of time. I don't know if you see that actually. Analysis and the analyser are both the same. Don't take time over it, don't meditate about it, sit cross-legged and all that. You have no time. Now, can you stop analysis? Totally? Can you do it? You do it when there is a tremendous crisis. You have no time then to analyse, you are in it. Are you in this? Do you understand my question? That is, she has got that extraordinary perfume which is so natural to her. She doesn't say, `How did I get it, what am I to do with it?' She has got it somehow, and I would like to have it. I am a human being and without it nothing matters. So it must be there. And I see the truth about analysis, therefore I will never analyse. Because I am in the middle of this question, I am soaked, burning with the question. The house is on fire and I am caught in that fire. R: Sir, the moment the beauty of the thing exists somewhere, the question does not arise, How am I to have it? K: I want it, how am I to have it? I do not care,I am hungry. You do not analyse hunger. R: I am not saying that. K: Sorry, what were you saying? R: I am saying that when at a certain moment one is filled with this, `I want it' does not arise. I do not know to what extent one is filled with the perfume, but this feeling, `I want it' does not exist there. K: You may be filled by my words, by my intensity, and then say you have got it. R: I do not say I have got it, but... K: Be simple, Radha. You have something in your backyard, a fountain which very few people have, very very few. They may talk about the water, they may talk about the beauty of the fountain, the song and the water, but that is not it. But you have got it. And as a human being, I see how marvellous that is and I go towards it, not that I want it; I go towards it, I don't have it. What am I do to? FW: Is there anything I can do? K: May be or may be not. May be the demand is so great I put everything aside. The demand itself puts everything aside. You understand? The house is burning. There is no argument, there is no weighing which bucket to use, which pump to use. P: Is it not very closely linked up with the volume of energy? K: All right. She says it is linked up with the flame of energy. No, Pupul, when you want something you burn like hell. Doesn't one? When you want that girl or that man, you are at it. FW: That makes the difference. K: I want to create a crisis. Then there is action. Do you understand what I am saying? Either you avoid the crisis or you act. Pupul, is the crisis taking place? Because it is a very important question. I come to you and talk about all this. You listen as far as you can listen, as far as you can go, but nothing happens. You hear it year after year, you take a little step each time,and by the end you are dead. What he wants to do is to bring about an action which is born out of tremendous crisis. He wants to break it up because then there is no argument, there is no analysis. He has created a crisis. Is that crisis the result of his influence, his words, his feeling, his urgency or is it a crisis which you have got to break through? That is his intention. He says that is the only thing that matters. A: The crisis is an external challenge to which I am unable to find an adequate internal response, and because I cannot find an adequate internal response, there is this crisis. The other crisis which I understood you to speak of is not at all triggered by any external fact but it is a projection from within. K: His intention is to create a crisis, not superficial, not external but inside. A: Are not these two channels distinct? When the mind is seeking an external crisis and seeking an adequate response from within, that is one type of crisis; and the other type of crisis is that within you there is the deep sense of inadequacy which says that this cannot be put away because it is a heavy responsibility. K: He has created that crisis in you, he is talking of truth. Is there a crisis when you talk to him? His demand is that there should be a crisis in you, not a superficial crisis. I think that is listening with the heart. He has turned you inwards so deeply, or he has taken away all anchorage. I think that is listening with the heart. The monsoon says to you: `Please collect all the water you can, next year there will be no monsoon.' You understand? That makes you build every kind of hold to collect water. So where are we at the end of it? P: In a strange way it also implies lifting your hands off everything. K: It may not. It may mean that an action which you have not premeditated may take place. If there is crisis, then it will happen. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'REGISTRATION, THE MOVEMENT OF MILLENNIA' P: Krishnaji, you have spoken about holding the quality of anger, fear or any strong emotion, without the word, in consciousness. Could we probe into that? The wiping away, whether it is a hurt, fear, anger or any one of the darknesses within one, is only possible if what you are talking about takes place. Can we come to that passion of feeling, which goes behind all these words of fear, anger, etc? Can that be held in consciousness? K: What does it mean to hold the feeling of anger, whatever `is', without the word? Is this possible? P: And is there anything without the word? K: Go on. FW: Is there fear when there is not the word `fear'? And what is the nature of the energy in the body or in the whole being if there is no naming? A: Clarity for us means naming. When we want to probe into a strong feeling, a disturbance, we want to know precisely what it is, we don't want any self-deception. Invariably, before we have been able to grasp it completely, we have named it. So, naming is both our instrument of clarity and the cause of confusion. K: Is the word different from the fact, from `what is'? Is the word `door' different from the door? The word `door' is not the actuality. So, the word is not the thing. S: The question arises, then, can one ever indicate the actuality? K: We are going to find out. We are going into it slowly. R: Is there a difference between the statements, `the word "door" is not the door' and ` "Fear" is not fear'? The two things seem to be different. K: The word `door' is not the actuality. The name `K' is not the actuality; the form is not the actuality. So, the word is not the thing. The `door', the word, is different from the actuality. We are trying to find out if the word `fear' is different from the actuality. Does the actuality represent the word and without the word is there the actuality? S: What is the feeling of fear without the word? K: Let us go very very slowly. I want to make this perfectly clear to myself. There is the word `fear', now is the word `fear' different from the actuality, the emotion, the feeling of fear and without the word is there that feeling? R: Word is thought. K: So, the word is the medium through which thought expresses itself. Without the word, can thought express itself? Of course it can; a gesture, a look, a nod of the head, and so on. Without the word, thought can express itself to a very very limited extent. When you want to express something very complicated in thought, the word is necessary. But the word is not the actual thought, the actual state. A: I raise one difficulty: we perceive with the senses. That process ends when there is naming. That starts the tertiary process. With the naming, a number of complicated things begin in my brain. Now, I see this and wipe out the word, the name. When I have wiped out the name, I have not wiped out the feeling. K: I am not quite sure, Achyutji. Pupulji is asking, what is the quality of the mind that without the word can hold that feeling without any movement, right? R: But we are questioning whether the feeling arises without the word? K: That is all. P: If I may say so, there are many things in consciousness which arise prior to the word. Rad: Primordial fear; but can it be sustained without the word? P: I am not talking about sustaining. But there are various things, tenderness, joy for instance. K: Can you observe something without the word? Can you observe me, the form, for the moment without the word? P: Yes. K: You can. Now, you are already observing the form, you have removed the word `K' and you are observing the form. P: We are observing. I don't say we are observing the form. K: Then, what are you observing? P: You see, sir, the moment you say 'I am observing the form', there has to be naming. K: There has to be a name. P: There has to be naming. K: No. P: Please listen, sir, when I say there is just observing, then the form is part of the whole observing field. I am observing, not only you, I am observing. K: I said, remove the word `K', and observe the form. That is all. Of course, you are observing. I am limiting it to just the form. Are you observing the form? P: Yes. I am observing the form. K: What are you trying to get at? P: I am trying to see whether the word is prior to that. K: Pupul, let us keep simple. There is fear. I want to find out whether the word has created that fear. The word is the recognition of that thing which I have called fear, because that fear has gone on for many years, and I have recognized it through the word. Ten years ago I was afraid, that fear is registered in my brain with the word. With the word is associated fear. It occurs again today and immediately the recognizing process sets in, which is the word, and so on. So, the word gives me a feeling that I have had before. The word encourages the feeling, has stabilized the feeling. R: Yes. Sustains it. K: It holds it. The word holds the thing by recognizing it, by remembering it and so on. Now, I am asking whether without the word there can be fear. The word is a process of recognition. Fritz, look at it. You are afraid. How do you know you are afraid? FW: By naming it. K: Now, how do you know it? FW: I have been afraid before, so I know that feeling. So, as it comes again, I recognize it. K: If you recognize it, it is a verbal process; if you don't recognize it, what is the state? FW: There is no fear. There is energy in the body. K: No, sir. Don't use the word `energy' because we will go into something else. There is fear. I have recognized it by naming it. In naming it, I have put it into a category and the brain remembers it, registers it, holds it. If there is no recognition, no verbal movement, would there be fear? P: There is disturbance. K: I am using the word `fear'. Stick to fear. P: If I may say so, fear is not such a simple thing that you can say, if there is no naming of it, fear is not... K: I don't say that, yet. Of course, there is a lot of complexity involved in it. P: It is a tremendous thing. S: Psychologically something happens even before naming takes place. P: There are profoundly deep fears. S: If we accept only this position that the word creates fear, that means there is no content to fear at all. K: I don't say that. There is a process of recognition. If that process of recognition didn't exist, if that is at all possible, then, what is fear? I am not saying it doesn't exist. I am asking a question. If there is no process of registration, recording, which is memory in operation, what is the thing called fear? P: Remove the word `fear', and see what remains. Any word I use is going to apply exactly as much as the word `fear'. K: I am attacking it quite differently. You insult me because I have an image. There is an immediate registration taking place. I am asking: Can that registration come to an end when you insult me and so there is no recording at all? S: I don't understand this. That is a totally different process. K: It is exactly the same thing. Fear arises because I am afraid of the past. The past is registered and that incident in the past awakens the sense of fear. That fear has been registered. Is it possible to observe the new feeling, whatever it is, without bringing the past into action? Have you got it? Rad: There is a feeling of recognition before you actually call it fear. K: No, look. Let us go calmly. You insult me. I insult you. What takes place? You register it, don't you? Rad: I register it when I recognize it initially. That itself creates a momentum. K: Therefore, stop that momentum. Can that momentum be stopped? Look Radhika, let us put it much more simply. You are hurt. Aren't you? You are hurt from childhood for various reasons and it has been deeply registered in the mind, in the brain. The instinctive reaction is not to be hurt any more. So, you build a wall, withdraw. Now, without building the wall, can you know that you are hurt, can you be aware of it and the next time a process of hurt begins, not register it? FW: What do you mean by registering? K: Our brain is a tape recorder. It is registering all the time, there is like and dislike, pleasure and pain. It is moving, moving. I say something ugly to you and the brain immediately takes charge, registers it. Now, I say: `Can you stop that registration, though it has registered? And next time if there is any insult, do not register it at all.' You understand what I am talking about? First, see the question. Is the question clear? FW: That means not to form any image of it right away. K: No, no. Just don't introduce the image for the moment. That becomes yet more complex. Can you recognize the word but not register it? I want to keep it very very simple. First, see this. The brain is registering all the time. You call me a fool, that is registered for various reasons. That is a fact. The next question is: Can that registration stop? Otherwise the mind, the brain, has no sense of freedom. P: The brain is a live thing. It has to register. Registration is one thing, but the cutting of the momentum is the movement away from registration. K: That is what I am talking about. S: Aren't you speaking of two things: one is the stopping of the momentum and the other stopping registration altogether. K: First, get what I am talking about. Then you can question. Then you can make it clear. P: When you say do not register, does that mean the brain cells come to a stop? K: Look, Pupulji, it is very important because if there is no possibility of stopping registration, then the brain becomes mechanical. A: I want to question this, because you are oversimplifying the matter. Actually, our state of receiving anything is without our knowing that there is either a preference or an aversion, and fear is in that cycle. It arises from the past, and is not directly related to what I perceive. But it is that which perceives. K: As long as the brain is registering all the time, it is moving from knowledge to knowledge. Now, I am challenging the word. I see knowledge is limited, fragmented and so on and I am asking myself whether registration can stop. GM: Can the brain answer that question? K: I think it can, in the sense the brain can become aware of its own registering process. P: There are certain fears which you can deal with in that way. But fear has been the cry of man for millennia. And you are that cry. K: I know. Stop. That cry of millennia is fear. The brain has been registering for millennia. Therefore, registering has become part of it. The brain has become mechanical. I say: Can that mechanical process stop? That is all. If it cannot be stopped it becomes merely a machine, which it is. This is all part of tradition, part of repetition, part of the constant registration through millennia. I am asking a simple question which has great depth to it, which is: Can it stop? If it cannot stop, man is never free. Par: May I ask you a question? Why do we register at all? K: For safety, security, protection, certainty. The registration is to give the brain a certain sense of security. P: Isn't the brain itself involved? It has evolved through registration. K: It has evolved through knowledge, which is registration. P: What is it from within itself which says `stop'? K: Somebody challenges me. P: What is the factor which makes you say `stop'? K: Someone comes along and says: Look, through millennia man has evolved through knowledge and at present you are certainly different from the great apes. And he says: Look, as long as you are registering, you are living a fragmentary life because knowledge is fragmentary and whatever you do from that fragmentary state of brain is incomplete. Therefore, there is pain, suffering. So, we are asking at the end of that explanation, can that registration, can that movement of the past, end? Listen. I am making it simple. Can this movement of millennia stop? P: I am asking you this question: Is there something in the very quality of listening? K: Yes, there is. That's it. P: And that listening ends, silences this registration. K: That is it. That is my point. You have come into my life by chance. You have come into my life and you have pointed out to me that my brain has evolved through knowledge, through registration, through experience; and that knowledge, that experience is fundamentally limited. And whatever action takes place from that limited state will be fragmentary and therefore there will be conflict, pain. Find out if that momentum which has tremendous volume, depth, can end. You know it is a tremendous flow of energy which is knowledge. Stop that knowledge. That is all. FW: May I ask you a question? Much reference has been made to the tape-recorder which just goes on registering, and it can't stop itself. It has to be stopped. But then, can the brain stop itself? K: We are going to find out. First, face the question, that is my point. First, listen to the question. S: Is the whole of my consciousness only registration? In the whole of my consciousness, is there only registration going on? K: Of course. S: Then, what is it that can observe that registering? K: What is it that can observe this registering or can prevent registering? I also know silence, - the silence that is between two noises... S: Is the silence which I experience also registered? K: Obviously. S: You can't use the word `registering' for silence. K: As long as there is this registration process going on, it is mechanical. Is there silence which is non-mechanistic? A silence which has not been thought about, induced, brought about or invented. Otherwise, the silence is merely mechanistic. S: But one knows the non-mechanistic silence sometimes. K: Not sometimes. Raj: Sir, is it possible for a non-mechanistic silence to come? K: No, no. I am not interested in that. I am asking something entirely different: this momentum, this conditioning, the whole o consciousness is the past. It is moving. There is no future consciousness. The whole consciousness is the past, registered, remembered, stored up as experience, knowledge, fear, pleasure. That is the whole momentum of the past. And somebody comes along and says: Listen to what I have to say, can you end that momentum? Otherwise this momentum, with its fragmentary activity, will go on endlessly. Raj: I think this movement can be stopped only if you don't hang on to it. K: No, the momentum is you. You are not different from the momentum. You don't recognize that you are this vast momentum, this river of tradition, of racial prejudices, the collective drive, the so-called individual assertions. If there is no stopping that, there is no future. So, there is no future if this current is going on You may call it a future, but it is only the same thing modified. There is no future. I wonder if you see this. P: An action takes place and darkness arises in me. The question arises: Can consciousness with its own content, which is darkness - K: End. Hold it. P: What do you mean exactly? K: Can you hold, can the brain hold this momentum, or is it an idea that it is momentum? You follow what I mean? Listen to it carefully. Is the momentum actual or is it an idea? If it is an idea, then you can hold the idea about the momentum. But, if it is not an idea, a conclusion, then the brain is directly in contact with the momentum. I wonder if you follow. And therefore, it can say: `All right, I will watch.' It is watching, it is not allowing it to move. Now, is it the word you are holding on to, or are you observing this vast movement? Look, you are the vast movement. When you say you are that vast movement, is it an idea? Raj: No. K: Therefore, you are that. Find out if that thing can end - the past coming, meeting the present, a challenge, a question and ending there. Otherwise, there is no end to suffering. Man has put up with suffering for thousands upon thousands of years. That momentum is going on and on. I can give ten explanations -reincarnation, karma - but I still suffer. This suffering is the vast momentum of man. Can that momentum come to an end without control? The controller is the controlled. Can that momentum stop? If it does not stop, then there is no freedom, then action will always be incomplete. Can you see the whole of that, see it actually? P: Can we ever see that? When we see feeling in the present, what is it we are seeing? K: I call you a fool. Must you register it? P: I can't just answer why should I register. K: Don't register. P: It is a question of whether these eyes and ears of mine are flowing out to the word; if they are still and listen, there is no registration. There is listening but no registration. K: So, what are you seeing? P: There is no seeing of this movement. I have been observing while this discussion has been going on and I say: What does it mean to register the fact? I am listening, you are listening. Obviously, if my listening is directed to the word, which is coming out of me, I register, and this very movement outward throws it back. But if the eyes and the ears are seeing and listening, but still, then they take in without any registration. K: So, you are saying that there is a quietness in listening. There is no registration, but most of us are not quiet. P: We can't answer that question of yours: Why should one register? K: No. I am asking quite a different question. Someone calls you a fool. Don't register it at all. P: It is not a process in which I can register or I can't register. The way you put it, you are suggesting two alternatives: it is either to register or not to register. K: No. You are registering all the time. P: There is a registration all the time. So long as my senses are moving outward, there is registration. K: No; when you say `as long as', that means you are not now. P: No. I am giving an explanation. K: I want to find out whether this vast stream of the past can come to an end. That is all my question. P: You won't accept anything. You won't accept any final statement on it. Therefore, there has to be a way to end. K: I am asking: How can it end? P: So, we have to move from that to the brain cells - to the actual registration. K: So, the brain cells are registering. Those brain cells which are so heavily conditioned, have realized that momentum is the only safety. So, in that momentum, the brain has found tremendous security. Right? P: Please listen to me. There is only one movement which is the movement of the past, touching the present and moving on. K: The past meeting the present, moving on, modifying - we have gone into that. The brain is conditioned to that. It sees as long as that stream exists, it is perfectly safe. Now, how are those cells to be shown that the momentum of the past in which the brain cells have found enormous security and well-being is the most dangerous movement? Now, to point out to that brain the danger of this momentum is all that matters. The moment it sees the actual danger, it will end it. Do you see the danger of this movement? Not the theoretical danger, but the actual physical danger? P: Are your brain cells saying that this movement is dangerous? K: My brain is using the words to inform you of the danger, but it has no danger in it. It has seen it and dropped it. Do you see the danger of a cobra? When you see the danger, you avoid it. You avoid it because you have been conditioned through millennia to the danger of a snake. So, your responses are according to the conditioning, which is instant action. The brain has been conditioned to carry on because in that there is complete safety, in meeting the present, learning from it, modifying it and moving on. To the brain, that is the only safe movement it knows, so it is going to remain there. But the moment the brain realizes that it is the most dangerous thing, it drops it because it wants security. Raj: I don't see the danger of the momentum as actually as you see it. K: Why, sir? Raj: Partly because I have never observed the vast momentum to see its danger. K: Are you living with the description of the momentum or living with the momentum itself which is you? You understand my question, sir? Is the momentum different from you? Raj: No, sir. K: So, you are the momentum? So, you are watching yourself? Raj: Yes. But this does not happen often. K: Often? The words `often' and `continuous' are awful words. Are you aware without any choice that you are the momentum, not sometimes? You can say: I only see the precipice occasionally. If the word is not the thing, then the word is not fear. Now, has the word created fear? R: No. K: Don't quickly answer it. Find out. Go slowly, Radhaji. The word is not the thing. That is very clear. Fear is not the word, but has the word created the fear? Without the word, would that thing called `fear' exist? The word is the registration process. Then, something totally new arises. That new, the brain refuses because it is a new thing; so, it immediately says it is fear. For the brain to hold the momentum of that, wait, watch. Give a gap between the movement of thought, without interfering with the actual movement of feeling. The gap can only happen when you go very deeply into the question that the word is not the thing, the word is not fear. Immediately, you have stopped the momentum. I wonder if you see this. P: I still want to get the thing clear. Is it possible to hold a quality of feeling without the word, whether it is hatred, anger or fear. K: Of course, you can hold the feeling of anger, fear, without the word; just remain with that feeling. Do it. P: But what do you do exactly? K: When fear arises from whatever cause, remain with it, without any momentum, without any movement of thought. P: What is it then? K: It is no longer the thing which I have associated with the past as fear. I would say it is energy held without any movement. When energy is held without any movement, there is an explosion. That then gets transformed. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'THE NATURE OF DESPAIR' P: Can we examine the roots of despair? It is a very real problem in our life. In a sense, the root of sorrow is the root of despair; it must be of the same nature. K: I wonder what is despair. I have never felt it. Therefore, please convey it to me. What do you mean by `despair'? P: A sense of utter futility. K: Is that it - a sense of utter futility? I doubt that. It is not quite that. Not knowing what to do, would you call that despair? R: The total absence of meaning and significance: is that what you mean? FW: I would like to suggest `a state of paralysed hope'. P: Despair, in a sense, has really nothing to do with hope. K: Is it related to sorrow? Is it self-pity? I am questioning, I am not suggesting. P: It is not self-pity. Self-pity is narrow in its dimension. K: We are investigating. Is it related to sorrow? Is sorrow related to despair and the sense of deep self-pity that can't find a way out? P: I feel all these descriptions are narrow. K: They are narrow, but we will make them wider. Would you say it is the end of the road, reaching the end of the tether? If there is no way around something, you look somewhere else, but that doesn't mean despair. FW: I could imagine that the mother whose child dies is desperate. K: Not quite. I won't call that desperate. I should think this is related to sorrow. P: Have we not all known despair? K: I don't know. I am asking; tell me. P: There is an utter and total sense of futility. K: No, Pupul. Instead of `futility' use a more significant word -futility is so futile - put it another way. R: I think it is the end of the tether. K: End of hope, end of search, end of relationship. Does somebody else know despair? FW: I think it is a blank wall. K: Blank wall is not despair. A: Something dies even before your body has died. K: Is that despair? Par: Utter helplessness. B: Is there any relationship to sorrow? I think it is the bottom of sorrow, the pit of sorrow. K: Balasundaram, you mean to say you have never known despair? Par: It is the opposite of hope. K: No, Doctor. Do you know what despair is? Could you tell me what it is? Par: A state resulting from failures. K: Failure? You are making it much too small. I think despair has rather a large canvas. I have talked to people who were in despair. Apparently, none of you know despair. Do you? R: I don't think I know despair. I know what suffering is. K: I want to question. When we talk about despair, is it something profound or is it merely the end of one's tether? P: You know despair. Now, tell us a little about it. Par: Is it darkness? K: No, sir. Do you know what despair is? A man who is suffering knows exactly what it means. He doesn't beat about the bush. He says I have suffered, I know my son is dead, and there is an appalling sense of isolation, loss, a sense of self-pity, a tremendous storm; it is a crisis. Would you say despair is a crisis? JC: Yes, sir. K: Don't please agree with me yet. Apparently, except for one or two, nobody seems to be in despair. R: Is it a form of escape from suffering? K: In despair, is jealousy involved, a sense of loss? I possess you and you suddenly drop me, build a wall against me, - is that part of despair? I am sorry this is something quite out of my depth. I am not saying it is valid or not valid; but I am just asking what is `despair'? What is the dictionary meaning? FW: The root of the word comes from hope. K: Have you been in despair, sir? Using the common word, which you and I use, do you know what it means - despair? Is it a deep sense of fear? P: When you get to the depths of yourself, to the very root of yourself, do you think it is possible to distinguish between fear and despair? K: No, then why do you use the word `despair'? A: Sir, I think the word despair is distinct from the sense of fear. P: When you hit the bottom, then it is very difficult to differentiate between fear, sorrow, despair. K: May I ask - not you personally - have you really reached the lowest depths of yourself? And when you do, is it despair? P: Sir, when you ask that question, there can be no possible answer. How does one know the depths? K: Is it a sense of helplessness or is it much more than that? P: It is much more than that. Because in helplessness you have hope. K: Therefore, it is something much more significant than hope. What is that feeling or what is that state where one feels completely, utterly in despair? Is it that no movement of any kind takes place, and since there is no movement, would you call that despair? P: How do you differentiate? K: Look, I love my son and he has gone to the dogs and I can't do anything. I can't even talk to him, I can't even approach him, I can't go near him, touch him. Would that state be despair? The word `desperate: desperate and despair. Would you consider to be desperate a state of despair? FW: We sometimes say: `I desperately want something.' There is a projection in it that I want something. P: There is an urgency towards a direction in that. There is no urgency towards anything in this. FW: Then despair is not the proper word. P: Despair is a very important word in living. B: It is also lack of energy. To be in despair is not to be desperate for something - but to touch the nadir of energy they are all one. P: When you plunge into depths, you cannot separate sorrow from despair. I do not think that the distinction is fundamentally valid. S: Pupulji, when you started, you wanted to make a distinction between despair and sorrow. P: I am finding that when you go down, delve, the distinction between despair and sorrow does not exist. K: Are you asking what is the root of sorrow? P: No, sir. I find that it is not possible for me to divide sorrow from despair. JC: Despair is a feeling of nothingness. FW: But the root of the word must have some significance. P: It may have no significance. A word may not cover its meaning. Sir, some people must have come to you in despair. There is the sorrow of nothingness, of despair. K: Pupulji, are we saying despair is related to sorrow, related to that sense of total abnegation of all relationship? P: Yes, a total anguish. K: A total anguish, the total feeling of complete isolation which means having no access or no relationship to anything. Is despair related to sorrow, related to isolation, withholding? JC: There is a finality to it, the end of all your hope or your expectation. K: Have you, or anyone reached that point? The darkness of the soul, the Christians call it, the dark night of the soul? Would you call it that? Is that despair? That is much more potent than despair. P: You can't tell me that I am at this level or that level. K: May we begin this way, Pupul? Let us use the word and the depth of that word, the meaning of that word `sorrow' first. Begin with that. P: In varying degrees, we all know sorrow. K: Grief, a sense of helplessness, a sense of no way out. Does that bring about despair? P: That is despair. Why do you object? K: I would not call it despair. Let us go slowly. Let us feel our way. My son is dead, and that is what I call sorrow. I have lost him. I will never see him again. I lived with him, we had played together, everything is gone and suddenly overnight I realize how utterly lonely I am. Would you call that feeling, that deep sense of loneliness, not having a companion, despair? Or, is it that sense of deep awareness, of a total lack of any kind of relationship with anybody, which is loneliness? Would you say that loneliness is despair? P: You use a word to describe a situation, to fit a situation. K: I will describe the situation. P: You can use the word `sorrow' or you can use `despair' but the situation remains the same. K: What is it, how to get out of it, what to do with it? P: No, you have said `remain totally with sorrow'. Is sorrow the summation of all energy? K: I don't follow. P: You have said that in the depth of sorrow is the summation of all energy. This must be of the same nature. K: I understand what you are saying. Last night K said sorrow is the essence of all energy, the quintessence of all energy. All energy is focused there; I think that's right. Now, is that a fact? Is that an actuality? P: This morning, I certainly had a feeling of the other which I call despair. I certainly had it, total, absolute. Whatever statement I make now, will move me away. K: Look, Pupul, I think I am getting it. My son is dead and I realize what is involved in that. That is a fact which can never be altered. Is the refusal to accept the actual fact despair? I totally, completely, accept that my son is dead. I can't do anything about it. He is gone. I remain with the fact. I don't call that despair, sorrow, I don't give it a name. I remain with the actual fact that he is finished. What do you say? Can you remain with that fact without any movement away from it? P: Is the sorrow or despair also not an unalterable fact? K: No... Let us look at it slowly, carefully. I loved my son and suddenly he is gone. The result of that is, there is a tremendous sense of energy which is translated as sorrow. Right? The word `sorrow' indicates this fact; only that fact remains. That is not despair. Let us move away from that. I want to see what actually takes place when there is this enormous crisis and the mind realizes that any form of escape is a projection into the future, and remains with that fact without any movement. The fact is immovable. Can I remain, can the mind remain with that immovable fact and not move away from it? Let us make it very very simple. I am angry, furious because I have given my life to something and I find somebody has betrayed that, and I feel furious. That fury is all energy. You follow? I haven't acted upon that energy. It is a gathering of all your energy which is expressed in a fury of anger. Can I remain with that fury of anger? Not translate, not hit out, not rationalize, just hold it. Is it possible? What happens? I won't even call it despair. A: Would you say it is a state of depression? K: No, no. That is reaction. This I remain with. It is going to tell me. I am not going to call it depression. That means I am acting upon it. A: I am saying that the patient is there, there is an infection and a fever. Now the fever is the symptom of that infection. In that way I have watched myself with anger without trying to do anything to it. K: No, Achyutji, I don't mean that you watch it. You are that anger, you are that total fury and that total energy of that fury. A: There is no energy. What goes with it is a feeling of total helplessness. K: No, sir. I think I understand what Pupulji is talking about, which is, I have come to realize that I am caught in a net of my own making, and I can't move, I am paralysed. Would that be despair? JC: If a woman who can't swim sees her son drowning in the sea, then I think there is absolute despair, because she knows that he could be saved, but she is unable to do it. You follow? K: Very well, sir. But I think we are getting away from something. We are now describing in different ways the meaning of despair, the meaning of sorrow, the meaning of all that. A: The condition that you have described just now and what Pupulji was describing is different from anger. Anger is the reaction to somebody's else's behaviour. This is a reaction to your own situation. K: It is not a reaction, but an awareness of one's own insufficiency and that insufficiency at its depth, not superficially, is despair, is that it? FW: Isn't there much more than this? I question this awareness of insufficiency, because there is already the element of not wanting to accept that insufficiency. P: How do you know? FW: I have tried to gather from what you said. K: Look, Fritz, either you feel it or it is not a fact. Would you say, if I may ask, have you ever felt totally insufficient? FW: I can't remember. I don't know. K: But I come to you and I say I have felt this total insufficiency and I want to understand it, it is boiling in me, I am in a desperate state about it. How would you tackle it? How would you help me go beyond it? FW: I know something quite similar to that, for example most of the things in life I am unable to understand and I also see that my brain is completely inadequate to understand. So, if you mean that insufficiency, I am aware of that insufficiency. K: Sir, I realize I am insufficient. I am aware of it. Then I try to fill it with various things. I know I am filling it and I see as I fill it, it is still empty, still insufficient. I have come to the point when I see that whatever I do, that insufficiency can never be wiped out; filled. That is real sorrow or despair. Is that it, Pupulji? Look, I want to get at something here. May I proceed? My son is dead. I am not only desperate, but I am in profound shock, profound sense of loss which I call sorrow. My instinctual response is to run away, is to explain, is to act upon it. Now, I realize the futility of that and I don't act. I won't call it sorrow, I won't call it despair, I won't call it anger, but I see the fact is the only thing; nothing else. Everything else is non-fact. Now, what takes place there? That's what I want to get at. If that is despair, if you remain with it without naming it, without recognizing it, if you remain with it totally without any movement of thought, what takes place? That's what we are going to discuss. R: It is very difficult because thought says remain with it, and that is still thought. K: No, that's an intellectual game. That is totally invalid. I meet an immovable fact and come to it with a desperate desire to move it, for whatever reason - love, affection, whatever motive, and so I battle against it, but the fact cannot be changed. Can I face the fact without any sense of hope, despair, all that verbal structure and just say, `Yes, I am what I am'? I think then some kind of explosive action takes place if I can remain there. A: Sir, there is some purgation called for, before this happens. Some purgation of the heart is called for, as I see it. K: I won`t call it purgation. See, Achyutji, you know what sorrow is, don't you? Can you remain with it without any movement? What takes place when there is no movement? I am getting it now - when my son is dead, that is an immovable irrevocable fact; and when I remain with it, which is also an immovable, irreconcilable fact, the two facts meet. P: In the profundity of sorrow without any known cause, there is nothing to react to, there is no incident to react to. K: No analytical process is possible, I understand. P: In a sense thought is paralysed there. K: Yes, that's it. There is the immovable fact that my son is dead and also that I have no escape is another fact. So, when these two facts meet, what takes place? P: As I said, the past is still there not because of any volition. K: I understand. P: Now, what is possible after that? JC: Our lack of awareness will not allow two facts. K: That's what I want to find out. Something must happen. I am questioning whether there are two facts or only one fact. The fact that my son is dead and the fact that I must not move away from it. The latter is not a fact. That is an idea, and therefore it is not a fact. There is only one fact. My son is dead. That is an absolute, immovable fact. It is an actuality. And I say to myself, I must not escape, I must meet it completely. And I say that is fact. I question if it is a fact. It is an idea. It is not a fact as is the fact that my son is dead. He is gone. There is only one fact. When you separate the fact from yourself and say, `I must meet it with all my attention,' that's non-fact. The fact is the other. S: But my movement is a fact. Isn't it? K: Is it a fact or is it an idea? S: Not wanting to stay there, but moving away from that energy of anger or moving away from the energy of hurt, isn't it a fact? K: Yes, of course. You remember, we discussed the other day -an abstraction can be a fact. I believe I am Jesus. That is a fact, as is the fact that I believe `I am a good man'. Both are facts; both are brought about by thought. That's all. Sorrow is not brought about by thought, but by an actuality which has been translated as sorrow. S: Sorrow is not brought about by thought? K: Wait, wait, go into it slowly. I am not sure. As I said, this is a dialogue, discussion. I say something. You must tear it up. S: There are different types of sorrow. K: No, no. My son is dead, that is a fact. R: And the question is of meeting the fact that he is not there. JC: Sorrow is not a fact? K: My son is dead. That is a fact. And that fact reveals the nature of my relationship to him, my commitment to him, my attachment to him, etc. which are all non-facts. P: Sir, that comes later. When my son dies, there is only one thing. K: That's all I am saying. P: Actually if your son is dead, in that moment can the mind move away? K: For the moment it is paralysed, totally paralysed. P: That is the moment. K: No, look, my son is dead, and I am paralysed by it; both psychologically and physiologically I am in a state of shock. That shock wears off: P: In a sense, the intensity of that state has already dissipated itself. K: No. Shock is not a realization of the fact. It is a physical shock. Somebody has hit me on the head. P: There is shock. K: That's all. Paralysis has taken place, for a few days, for a few hours, few minutes. When a shock takes place, my consciousness is not functioning. P: Something is functioning. K: No, just tears. It is paralysed. That is one state. But it is not a permanent state. It is a transient state out of which I am going to emerge. P: But the moment I start coming out... K: No, the shock I got, there I face reality. P: How do you face reality? K: Let us see. My brother or sister dies, and at the moment, that moment may last a few days or a few hours, it is a tremendous psychosomatic shock. There is no activity of the mind, no activity of consciousness. This is like being paralysed. That is not a state. P: It is sorrow, that is the energy of sorrow. 4 K: That energy has been much too strong. P: Any movement away dissipates that energy? K: No, but the body cannot remain psychosomatically in a state of shock. P: Then, how does it face sorrow? K: I am coming to that. It is like a man who is paralysed and wanting to speak. He can't. P: What takes place when shock goes? K: You are waking up to the fact, the fact that your son is dead. Thought then begins, the whole movement of thought begins. There are tears. I say, `I wish I had behaved properly, I wish I had not said those last cruel words at the last minute.' Then, you begin to escape from that - `I would like to meet my brother in my next life, in the astral place.' I escape. I am saying if you don't escape and don't observe the fact as though different from yourself, then the observer is the observed. P: The whole of that thing is that initial state of shock. K: I question that, Pupul. Go into it a bit more. It is a shock which the body and the psyche cannot tolerate, there is paralysis which has taken place. P: But if there is energy? K: It is too strong. It is much too strong. This is a fact. P: Let us go slowly, sir. K: Then, we are not talking about the same thing. P: It is at the instant of death that there is a total realization of this. It then gets dissipated. K: No, would you put it this way, Pupul? Leave aside death for the moment. P: But that is also a total thing. K: Wait, I am coming to that. When there is death, the tremendous shock has driven out everything. It is not the same as the mountain, that marvellous scenery. These two are entirely different. P: It depends, sir, on the state of the mind. K: It depends on the state of relationship. P: And the state of mind when death actually takes place. K: Yes. So what are we discussing? What are we having a dialogue about? P: We are trying to discover how in this maximum energy-quotient which arises out of despair, death, sorrow; what is the chemical alchemy which transforms the energy which is seemingly destructive and hurtful into what you call passion. If one allows sorrow or despair to corrode one, which is a natural process, then you have brought in another element. K: When energy is not dissipated through words, when the energy of the shock of some great event is not dissipated, that energy without a motive has quite a different significance. P: If I may ask, this holding it in consciousness... K: It is not in consciousness. P: Is it not in consciousness? K: It is not in consciousness. If you hold it in your consciousness, it is part of thought. Your consciousness is put together by thought. S: It has arisen in consciousness. K: No. S: Then, what is it? K: The holding of it, not running away from it, remaining with it. P: What is the entity that does not move? K: There is no entity. P: Then what is it? K: The entity is when there is movement away from the fact. P: How does the entity end itself? K: Look, Pupul, let us make it very simple, clear. P: It is very important. K: I agree, it is very interesting. There is a shock. The realization is gone out of the shock, there is sorrow. The very word `sorrow, is a distraction. The escape is a distraction away from the fact. To remain totally with that fact means no interference of the movement of thought; therefore, you are now not consciously holding it. I will repeat it. Consciousness is put together by thought. Content makes thought. The event of my son's death is not thought, but when I bring it into thought, it is within my consciousness. That is very important. I have discovered something. P: Is the very force of that energy that which totally silences thought? K: Put it that way if you like. Thought cannot touch it. But our conditioning, our tradition, our education is to touch it, change, modify, rationalize, run away from it, which is the activity of consciousness. R: The crux of it seems to be giving a name to the form that it takes and that is the seed from which the rest of the distraction grows. K: It is very interesting. I can't remember when my brother died. But from what Shiva Rao and others have told me, it seems that there was a shock period, and when K came out of it, he remained with that thing; he did not go to Dr. Besant and ask for help. So, now I can see how it happens. The shock; when the shock is over, you come to the fact that a tremendous event has taken place -death; not mine or yours, my brother's or your brother's, but death has taken place, which is an extraordinary event as is birth. Now, can one look at it, observe it without consciousness as thought entering into it? P: Let us go back to sorrow. You have said: 'Sorrow is not born of thought.' K: Yes. Sorrow is not born of thought. What do you say about it? P: When the death of sorrow is, thought is not. K: Wait, wait, Pupul. Sorrow is not the child of thought. That's what K said. Why? The word `sorrow' is thought. The word is not the thing, therefore that feeling of sorrow is not the word. When the word is used, it becomes thought. JC: We are talking about a situation where there has been a shock. The access of that energy, the return to consciousness is sorrow. K: I have named it as sorrow. JC: That is the return to the state of sorrow. K: No. There is shock. Then, there is the moving away from that shock. P: If sorrow is stripped of the word... K: Of course. That's why I want to be very clear. The word is not the thing, therefore that feeling of sorrow is not the word. If the word is not, thought is not. P: Sorrow is one thing; even if you remove the word, the content is. K: Of course. So, is it possible not to name it? The moment you name it, you bring it into consciousness. S: Prior to naming, is the existing condition not part of consciousness? The word is `sorrow: the moment you name it as `sorrow', that is a different thing. The `what is' which is not named, is it part of consciousness? K: We said consciousness is its content. Its content is put together by thought. An incident takes place where the energy shock drives out consciousness for a second or for days or months or whatever it is. Then, as the shock wears off, you begin to name the state. Then, you bring that into consciousness. But it is not in consciousness when it takes place. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'THE BRAIN CELLS AND THE HOLISTIC STATE' DS: I wonder if we could discuss the question of momentum -which is the creation of the thinker and which produces the identification with the thinker? The fact is that we are faced with this momentum, this movement. Could we examine that? P: Do you not think that in order to investigate that, one should go into the problem of dissipating energy? DS: I don't know what you mean by that. P: The momentum which pushes us, creates and disappears. Just as there is the engine which has energy, and which dissipates, there is the same kind of energy involved in the momentum which we are speaking about. Could we go into energy, the energy which dissipates and the energy which does not dissipate? DS: Maxwell says, for a scientist, the first principle of energy is one of defining relationship. When you say `energy', I am seriously asking what the problem is. I am wondering when we say `energy', do we mean a substance, a definable force? Or, does this `energy' imply a form of relationship? P: I don't quite comprehend what you say. DS: I question whether there is anyone who has actually thought about what energy is in the psychological sense. P: That is why if we discussed it, it might clarify matters. DS: Do we mean a substance or a force that exists within the person, or is `energy' something that is manifested in relationship, and if so, then it raises a whole category of questions. P: Doesn't physics (I have no knowledge of physics) accept that there is an energy which dissipates and an energy which in itself does not have the seed of dissipation? FW: Yes, but you see, no physicist can define what energy is. Energy is a basic assumption in physics - that it is there. We know that energy is necessary. Without energy, no force is possible. Without energy, no work is possible. So, energy and work are very much related. So, we can use force, we can see work being done, but we can never see energy. K: Is there an energy which is endless, without a beginning and without an end? And is there an energy which is mechanical which always has a motive? And is there an energy in relationship? I would like to find out. P: Dr Shainberg asked what is it that gives momentum. K: What is it? Let us keep to that. P: Is momentum the arising of the thinker, and then the thinker giving himself continuity? K: What is the drive, the force behind all our action? Is it mechanical? Or is there an energy, a force, a drive, a momentum which has no friction? Is that what we are discussing? DS: What is the momentum of this energy that becomes mechanical? Let us stay out of the fantasy realm for a while but keep to just this momentum of thought and desire and its mechanical nature. What is the momentum of this energy, of thought, desire and the creation of the thinker? K: Go on, sir, discuss it. DS: You see thought, sensation, then power, then desire, and fulfilment of desire; the whole drive with a little modification goes on, continues. So, that is the momentum. K: You are asking what is the momentum behind desire. I desire a car. What is behind that desire? We will keep it very simple. What is the urge, the drive, the force, the energy behind the desire that says, `I must have a car'? DS: Is it that you desire a car or does the car come up as a desire and then creates the `I'? Is the `I' created by desire? K: If I didn't actually see the car, didn't feel it, didn't touch it, I would have no desire for a car. Because I see people driving in a car, the pleasure of driving, the energy, the fun of driving, I desire it. P: Sir, is it only the object which creates desire? DS: That is the question. K: It may be a physical object, or a non-physical object, a belief, an idea, anything. FW: But in the first place, it probably has to be perceivable by the senses, because you perceive something by the senses, and you make an image of it, then you desire it. So, could one say that whatever can be desired has to be sensed? And so from your question I ask: Anything which can be desired, has it first to be perceivable through the senses? One could, of course, speak of `God'. I can desire God. P: It is desire that maintains and keeps the world going. Can you take desire back to its roots? DS: Would there be desire if there were no 'I'? K: What is the momentum behind any desire? Let us begin with that. What is the energy that makes me desire? What is behind my being here? I have come here to find out what you are talking about, what this discussion is about. The desire is to discover something other than my usual rush of thought. So, what is that? Is that desire? Now, what is behind the desire that made me come here? Is it my suffering? Is it my pleasure? Is it that I want to learn more? Put all these together, what is it that is behind all that? DS: To me it is relief from what I am. P: Which is identical with a sense of becoming. K: Becoming? What is behind becoming? DS: To get somewhere different from where I am, and there also there is desire. K: What is behind that energy that is making you do that? Is it punishment and reward? All our structure of movement is based on punishment and reward, to avoid one, to gain the other. Is that the basic drive or energy that is making us do so many things? So is the motive, the drive, the energy derived from these two: to avoid one and gain the other? DS: Yes. That is part of it. That is at the level of thought. K: No. Not at the level of thought only. I don't think so. I am hungry, my reward is food. If I do something wrong, my reward is punishment. M: Is that different from pleasure and pain? Is reward the same as pleasure, and punishment the same as pain? K: Reward - keep to that word. Don't enlarge that word. Reward and punishment. I think that is the basic, ordinary, common drive. P: Reward and punishment to whom? K: Not `to whom'. That which is satisfactory, and that which is not satisfactory. P: But for whom? You have to posit it. K: I have not yet come to that. The problem is, what is satisfying I call `reward', that which is not satisfying I call `punishment'. DS: Yes. K: So, is there not the `I' saying: `I must be satisfied', `I am hungry'? P: Hunger is a very physiological thing. K: I am keeping to that for the moment. Does the physiological spill over into the psychological field and does the whole cycle begin there? I need food; food is necessary. But that same urge goes into the field of psychology, and there begins a completely different cycle. But it is the same movement. Singh: Sir, where is all this process going on? If it goes on in me, what I experience, when I participate in this process of investigation, where is it taking place? Is it in the brain? Where do I find this pleasure - pain need? K: Both at the biological level and the psychological. Singh: If it is the brain, then there is definitely something, which one may say is twilight, between pleasure and pain. There are definitely some moments when there is no need to satisfy hunger and still the desire to be satisfied is there. I may be satisfied and may still feel hungry. K: I don't quite follow what you are saying. Singh: Sir, if there is reward and punishment, and if this process of reward and punishment is to be investigated in the brain, at the physiological level, then there are some responses in the brain which are in between reward and punishment. K: You mean there is a gap between reward and punishment? Q: Not a gap, but an interlink, a bridge. GM: You mean there is a state which is neither reward nor punishment? Singh: Yes. Where one merges into another. P: If I may ask, there may be another state, but I do not know what it is. How does this answer the question, how does this further the question of the nature of this force which brings it into being and then keeps it going? Basically, that is the question. DS: That is the question. Where is this momentum? Where is this momentum of reward and punishment? And even if there were space in between - K: Are you asking, what is it that is pushing one in the direction of reward and punishment? What is the energy, what is the momentum, what is the force, what is the volume of energy, that is making us do this or avoid that? Is that the question? Could it be satisfaction, gratification, which is pleasure? DS: But then, what is gratification? What is your state of being when you are aware that there is freedom from hunger? K: It is very simple, isn't it? There is hunger, food is given, and you are satisfied. But the same thing is carried on and it is never ending. I seek one satisfaction after another and it is endless. Is it that this energy, the drive to be satisfied, is both biological as well as psychological? I am hungry and psychologically I am lonely. There is the feeling of emptiness, there is the feeling of insufficiency. And so I turn to God, to the Church, to gurus. Physiologically, the insufficiency is satisfied very easily. Psychologically, it is never satisfied. Par: At what point does one go from the physiological fulfilment to the thought process? K: Sir, it may be that the physiological movement has entered into the psychological movement and carries on. Is this so? P: What I am trying to enquire into is this: It is not a question of whether it is possible or whether it is a matter of choice. It is so from the moment I am born. Both types of wants begin. Therefore, I am asking, what is the source of both beginnings, the physiological and psychological? Q: The one word `insufficiency' should be enough. P: It isn't. Both are structured in a force which then propels. That structure within one, the coming together of a number of things, is the centre, the `I'. K: Look. I don't think it is the `I'. P: What is it? Why do you say that? K: I don't think it is the `I'. I think it is the endless dissatisfaction, the endless insufficiency. DS: What is the source of that? P: Can there be insufficiency unless there is someone who is insufficient? DS: Who is insufficient? P: Can there be insufficiency without the one who feels it? K: I don't posit the `I'. There is continuous insufficiency. I go to Marxism. I find it insufficient, I go from one to the other. The more intelligent I am, the more awake I am, the more dissatisfaction there is. Then, what takes place? S: You are implying by that, that there is a matrix without the reality of the `I' which in its very momentum can act. K: I don't know the matrix. I don't know the `I'. All that I am pointing out is the one factor that there is physiological insufficiency which has entered into the field of psychological insufficiency and that goes on endlessly. DS: There is an endless sense of incompletion. K: Insufficiency. Keep to that word. A: I suggest at this point that we may cut out the physiological insufficiency. K: I am purposely insisting on that..It may be from the flowing out of that, that we create all this misery. Par: I question that. Is it a mixture of physiological and psychological spilling over? What do we exactly mean by `spilling over'? One is a fact, the other is not. K: No. Therefore, there is only physiological insufficiency. P: How can you say that? K: I don't say that. I am just investigating. P: There is both physiological as well as psychological insufficiency. K: Look, Pupulji, for the moment I will not use the word `I'. I am not investigating the `I'. I feel hungry. It has been satisfied. I feel sexual, that is being satisfied. And I say: `That is not good enough, I must have something more.' P: The `more'? K: The `more', what is that? P: It is the momentum, isn't it? K: No, the `more' is more satisfaction. P: What is the momentum then? K: Keep to that word. The brain is seeking satisfaction. P: Why should the brain seek satisfaction? K: Because it needs stability; it needs security. Therefore, it says: `I have discovered this: I thought I had found satisfaction in this but there isn't any. I shall find satisfaction and security in that, and again there isn't any'. And it keeps going on and on. That is so in daily life. I go to one guru after another, or one theory after another, one conclusion after another. Q: Sir, the very nature of this insufficiency at a physiological level leads to sufficiency at the metaphysiological level. It leads from some inadequacy in the physiological machine to the completion of it. And it is this cycle that is operative; that is how the brain works. If the physiological spill-over is ever to continue in the psychological field, then this cycle of insufficiency and sufficiency must continue. K: Must continue? Examine yourself. It is very simple. You are seeking satisfaction. Everybody is. If you are poor, you want to be rich. If you see somebody richer than you, you want that, somebody more beautiful, you want that and so on and on. We want continuous satisfaction. A: Sir, I want to draw your attention again to the central feature of physiological insufficiency, that every activity to fulfil that physiological insufficiency leads to satisfaction. That is to say, between the insufficiency and its recurrence, there is always a gap, as far as the physiological insufficiency is concerned; whereas where psychological insufficiency is concerned, we begin a cycle in which we do not know any gap. K: Forget the gap sir. That is not important. Watch yourself. Isn't the whole of the movement the energy a drive to find gratification reward? Shainberg what do you say to this? DS: I think what is coming out of this model of the physiological reward-punishment scheme is definitely so. I mean that is the whole way the `me' functions, whether it is logical or not. K: The whole momentum of seeking satisfaction is captured by the `I'. DS: Then it is there that the `I' becomes manifest. K: That's it. That is what I mean. I am seeking satisfaction. It never says, `satisfaction is being sought'. I am seeking satisfaction. Actually it should be the other way: satisfaction being sought. DS: Satisfaction sought creates the `I'. K: So momentum is the urge to be satisfied. P: I will ask you a question which may seem to be a movement away. Isn't the `I' sense inherent in the brain cells which have inherited knowledge? K: I question that. P: I am asking you, sir: listen to the question. The knowledge of man which is present in the brain cells, which is present in the depths of the subconsciousness, isn't that `I' part of the brain? S: Pupulji, are you then equating the whole of the past with the `I'? P: Of course, the whole of the past. I am asking whether the `I' comes into existence because of this manifestation of seeking satisfaction. Or, whether that very centre of memory, the matrix of memory, whether that is not the `I' sense. K: You are asking, is there the `I', the `me' the ego, identifying itself with the past, as knowledge. P: Not identifying itself. K: Wait. Let me get the question clear. P: Not identifying itself. But `I' as time, time as the past. And the 'I' sense is the whole of that. K: Wait. You said at the beginning, does the brain contain the `I'? I would say tentatively, investigating, there is no `I' at all but only the search for pure satisfaction. P: Is the whole racial memory of man fictitious? K: No. But the moment you say I am the past that `I' is fictitious. S: Is the past itself saying that I am the past, or a part of the past saying that it is the past? K: You see you are raising a question which is really very interesting: Do you observe the past as the `I'? There is the whole past, millennia of human endeavour, human suffering, human misery, confusion, millions of years. There is only that movement that current, there is only that vast river - not `I' and the vast river. P: I would like to put it this way: When this vast river comes to the surface, it brings to the surface the movement of the `I'. It gets identified with the `I'. Chorus: I don't think so. K: Pupulji, the `I' may merely be a means of communication. DS: Is it a way of talking, reporting? P: Is it as simple as that? K: No, I am just stating. It is not as simple as that. S: Sir, at one point you said the manifestation of the stream is the individual. When this vast stream of sorrow manifests itself as the individual, is the `I' present or not? K: Wait, wait. That is not the point. That vast stream manifests itself in this, in a human being; the father gives to me a form and then I say `I', which is the form, the name, the idiosyncratic environment, but that stream is `me'. There is this vast stream which is obvious. A: I am saying that we are looking with our existing knowledge at the stream and identifying ourselves with the stream. The identification is done post facto, whereas it really starts with the momentum. K: No, no. P: How can one see that? You see, the way Krishnaji puts it does not really lead to the depth of oneself. The depth of oneself says,'I want to, I will become, I will be'. That depth springs from the past, which is knowledge, which is the whole racial unconscious. K: Can I ask, why is the `I' there? Why do you say `I want'? There is only want. P: Still by saying that, you don't eliminate the `I'. K: No, you do eliminate that `I'. How do you observe? In what manner do you observe this stream? Do you observe it as the `I', observing? Or, is there observation of the stream only? P: What one does in observing is a different issue. We are talking of that nature of energy which brings about the momentum. Now I am saying the momentum is the very nature and structure of the `I' which is caught in becoming. K: I want to question whether the `I' exists at all. It may be totally verbal, non-factual. It is only a word that has become tremendously important, not the fact. FW: Isn`t there an imprint of the `I' in the brain matter? Isn't that an actuality? K: No, I question it. FW: But the imprint is there. The question is: If it isn't an actuality, then what is it? K: The whole momentum, this vast stream is in the brain. After all, that is the brain, and why should there be the `I' at all in that? P: When you are talking of the actual, it is there. K: It is there only verbally. DS: It is actually there. In the sense if you and I are together, there are two parts to it; my identification with myself is the `I', is the relationship with you. K: Sir, when are you conscious of the `I'? DS: Only in relationship. K: I want to understand when you are conscious of the `I'. DS: When I want something, when I identify myself with something, or when I look at myself in the mirror. K: When you experience, at the moment of experiencing something, there is no`I'. P: All right, there is no `I'. We agree with you. But then the `I' emerges a second later. K: How? Look, go into it slowly. FW: There is the question of momentum. K: You are missing my point. There is experience. At the moment of crisis there is no `I'. Then, later, comes the thought which says: `That was exciting, that was pleasurable,' and that thought creates the `I' which says: `I have enjoyed it.' Right? P: What has happened there? Is the `I' a concentration of energy? K: No. P: The energy that dissipates? K: It is the energy that dissipates, yes. P: But still it is the `I". K: No, it is not `I'. It is an energy that is being misused. It isn't the `I' that uses the energy wrongly. P: I am not saying I use the energy wrongly. The `I' itself is a concentration of energy that dissipates. As the body wears out, the 'I` in that sense has the same nature, it gets old, it gets stale. K: Pupul,just listen to me. At the moment of crisis, there is no 'I'. Follow it. Now can you live, is there a living at the height of that crisis, all the time? Crisis demands total energy. Crisis of any kind brings about the influx of all energy. Leave it for the moment. We will break it up afterwards. At that second, there is no `I'. It is so. DS: That is a movement. K: No. At that precise second, there is no `I'. Now, I am asking: `Is it possible to live at that height all the time?' DS: Why are you asking that? K: If you don't live that way, you have all kinds of other activities which will destroy that. DS: What is the question? K: The point is this: the moment thought comes in, it brings about a fragmentation of energy. Thought itself is fragmentary. So, when thought enters, then it is a dissipation of energy. DS: Not necessarily. Par: You said: `At the moment of experience, there is no 'I'. K: Not that `I said'. It is so. Par: Is that the momentum? P: No. The question really amounts to this; we say it is so. But still that does not answer the question as to why the `I' has become so powerful. You have still not answered the question even though at the moment of crisis, the `I' is not, the whole past is not. K: That is the point. At the moment of crisis, there is nothing. P: Why are you saying `no' to the `I' being the mirror of the whole racial past? K: I am saying `no' because it may be merely a way of communication. P: Is it as simple as that? Is the `I' structure as simple as that? K: I think it is extraordinarily simple. What is much more interesting, much more demanding, is that whenever thought comes into being, then dissipation of energy begins. So, I say to myself: `Is it possible to live at that height?' The moment the `I' comes into being, there is dissipation. If you left out the `I' and I left out the `I', then we would have right relationship. FW: You said the moment thought comes in, there is dissipation of energy. But the moment the `I' comes in, there is also dissipation of energy. What is the difference? K: Thought is memory, experience, all that. FW: You have to use it in your life. DS: Which is just what we are doing right now. I find when I say dissipation of energy, I immediately see myself take up the position of the observer and say `that is bad'. What I am suggesting is that you can be neutrally aware. There is a crisis and a dissipation, a crisis and a dissipation. That is the flow of existence. K: No. P: K's point is, there is that, but the transformation which we are talking about is to negate that. DS: I question whether there is any such thing as breaking out of this. I think we remember the intensity of the energy of the crisis, and then we say I would like to keep it all the time. Do you do that? K: No. DS: Then why ask the question? K: I am asking that question purposely because thought interferes. DS: Not all the time. K: No. All the time. Question it, sir. The moment you have a crisis, there is no past, nor present, only that moment. There is no time in that crisis. The moment time comes in, dissipation begins. Keep it for the minute like that. A: There is the crisis. Then, there is dissipation and then identification. P: At the moment of crisis, many things happen. You talk of a holistic position at the moment of crisis. Even to come to that, one has to investigate it very deeply, in oneself in order to know what this thing is. K: You see Pupul holistic implies a very sane mind and body, a clear capacity to think, and also it means holy, sacred; all that is implied in that word `holistic'. Now, I am asking: `Is there an energy which is never dissipated, which you want to draw from?' There is dissipation when it is not holistic. A holistic way of life is one in which there is no dissipation of energy. A non-holistic way of living in dissipation of energy. P: What is the relationship of the holistic and the non-holistic to the brain cells? K: There is no relationship to the brain cells. Let us look at it. I want to be quite clear that we understand the meaning of that word `holistic'. It means complete, whole, harmony, no disintegration, no fragmentation. That is the holistic life. That is endless energy. The non-holistic life, the fragmented life, is a wastage of energy. When there is a feeling of the whole, there is no `I'. The other is the movement of thought, of the past, of time; that is our life, our daily life, and that life is reward and punishment and the continuous search for satisfaction. P: Sir, the holistic is held in the brain cells. That is, it throws up responses, challenges. The non-holistic is held in the brain cells. It is the whole stream of the past meeting the challenge. Now, what relationship has the holistic to the brain cells and the senses? K: Have you understood the question, Doctor? DS: Her question is: What is the relationship of this holistic state in the brain to memory and the past and the senses? K: No, no. You haven't listened. P: I said there are two states, the holistic and the non-holistic. The non-holistic is definitely held in the brain cells because it is the stream of the past held in the brain cells, challenged and giving momentum. I am asking what is the relationship of the holistic to the brain cells and to the senses? DS: What do you mean by the senses? P: Listening, seeing, tasting... DS: Can I go into that? I think if there were something in what we were saying, there would be a different relationship of such part functions in the holistic state. They are not merely part functioning but functioning as part of the holistic state, whereas in the dissipation of energy and fragmentation, it begins to function as isolated centres. K: Sir, her question is very simple. Our brain cells now contain the past, memory, experience, knowledge of millennia, and those brain cells are not holistic. DS: Yes, they are separate cells. K: They are not holistic. Stick to that. She says the brain cells now are conditioned to a non-holistic way of living. What takes place in the brain cells when there is a holistic way? That is her question. DS: I would put it differently. I would say: `What takes place in the relationship to the brain cells in the holistic state of perception?' K: I am going to answer that question. Does the holistic brain contain the past and therefore can the past be used holistically? Because it is whole, it contains the part, but the part cannot contain the whole. Therefore, when there is the operation of the part, there is dissipation of energy. P: After going through all this, we have come to this point. K: Yes. A marvellous point. Stick to it. P: What is then its place in the brain which is the structure of the human mind? K: We know only the non-holistic way of living, keep to that. That is the fact, that we live non-holistically, fragmentarily. That is our actual life and that is a wastage of energy. We see also that there is contradiction, there is battle. All that is a wastage of energy. Now, we are asking: `Is there a way of living which is not a wastage of energy?' We live a non-holistic way of life, a fragmentary life, a broken life. You understand what I mean by broken, saying something, doing something else, a life that is contradictory, comparative, imitative, conforming, having moments of silence. It is a fragmentary way of living, a non-holistic way, that is all we know. And somebody says: Is there an energy which is not wasted? And with that question let us investigate it to see if it is possible to end this way of living. P: But I have asked another question, and you have still not answered that. K: I am coming to that. That is a very difficult question to answer which is: one lives a non-holistic life, which is a constant seepage of energy, a wastage of energy. The brain is conditioned to that. One sees that actually. Then one asks: Is it possible to live a life which is not that? Right? Q: Not always, sir, that is what we are investigating. Whether that breath of freedom could be a totality. K: No, it can never be totality, because it comes and goes. Anything that comes and goes involves time. Time involves a fragmentary way of living. Therefore, it is not whole. Look, we live a non-holistic life. The brain is conditioned to that. Occasionally, I may have a flair of freedom but that flair of freedom is still within the field of time. Therefore, that flair is still a fragment. Now, can the brain that is conditioned to that, a non-holistic way of living, can that brain so completely transform itself that it no longer lives the way of conditioning? That is the question. DS: My response to that is: Here you are in a state of fragmentation; here you are in a state of dissipation of energy. And there you are looking for satisfaction. K: No, I am not. I am saying this is a wastage of energy. DS: That is all we know and nothing else. K: Yes. Nothing else. So, the brain says: `All right, I see that.' Then it asks the question: `Is it possible to change all this?' DS: I wonder whether the brain can ask it. K: I am asking it. Therefore, if one brain asks it, the other brain must ask it too. This is not based on satisfaction. DS: Could you say anything about how you can ask the question about what you state without seeking satisfaction? K: It can be asked because the brain has realized for itself the game it has been playing. DS: So, how is the brain to raise the question? K: It is asking it, because it says, `I am seeing through that.' Now, it says: `Is there a way of living which is non-fragmentary, which is holistic?' S: And that question is as holistic as any. K; No, not yet. DS: That is what I am having trouble with - where that question comes from. You say it is not seeking satisfaction, it is not holistic. Then, what brain is producing this question? K: The brain which says: `I see very clearly the waste of energy'. P: The very fact of your saying that the brain is seeing through the whole problem of fragmentation... K: Is the ending of it. P: Is that holistic? K: The ending of it, that is holistic. P: The ending is the very seeing of fragmentation. DS: Is that holistic? K: That is holistic. But she asked a much more complex question in regard to the holistic brain which contains the past, the totality of the past, the essence of the past, the juice of it, sucking in everything of the past. What does that mean? The past is nothing, but such a brain can use the past. I wonder if you follow this. My concern is with one's life, actual, daily, fragmentary, stupid life. And I say, `Can that be transformed?' Not into greater satisfaction. Can that structure end itself? Not by an imposition of something higher which is just another trick. I say if you are capable of observing without the observer, the brain can transform itself. That is meditation. Sir, the essence is the whole. In fragmentation, there is no essence of anything. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT ' SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND THE TEACHING' P: What is the relationship between your teaching, as expressed in the words you use in your books and in your talks, and the actual process of self-knowing? In all other ways of arriving at truth, the words of the teacher are taken as an indication of a direction, something to move towards. Are your words of the same nature and, if so, what is their relationship to the perceptive process of self-knowing? K: I wonder whether I have understood the question. Am I right if I put it this way: What is the relationship between the word and the actuality that K is talking about? Is that it? P: When K talks about discipline, or talks about the holistic approach, that is the word. Then there is the actual process of self-knowing and what is revealed in self-knowing. What is the relationship of K's word to this revealed knowing? K: I don't quite catch this. P: You say `no authority', no psychological or spiritual authority. We have a tendency to take that expression `no authority' and apply it to our lives; which is, not be in that state, not discover freedom from authority in the process of self-knowing, but simply to try to see whether we can reach a state of non-authority. We take your word as the truth. K: I understand. `No authority,' is it an abstraction of words and therefore an idea and then one pursues that idea? When K says `no authority', is it self-revealing, or is it merely a conclusion, a slogan? A: There is also another side: when you say `no authority', does it become a commandment, a commandment to which one tries the nearest approximation? K: Yes, that's right. A: One is in the field of action, and the other is in the field of abstraction. P: There is self-knowing; that which is revealed in the process of self-knowing is not knowable through the word. One hears you speak, one takes in what you say, or one reads your books and applies it to one's daily life; therefore there is a gap between self-knowing and your word. Now, where does truth lie? K: Neither in the word nor in the self-revealing. It is completely apart. P: Can we discuss that? K: I listen to K and he talks about self-knowing and lays emphasis on self-knowing, how important it is, that without self-knowing there is no foundation. He says this. I listen to it. In what manner do I listen to that statement? Do I listen to it as an idea, a commandment, a conclusion? Or is it that in my self-knowing, I realize the implications of authority and therefore see that what he says tallies with what I discover for myself? If I listen to the word and draw a conclusion about that word as an idea and pursue the idea, then it is not self-revealing. It is merely a conclusion. But when I am studying myself, when I am pursuing my own thoughts, then in the words of K there is a self-discovery? P: Now, is the word of K necessary to self-discovery? K: No. I make a statement: without self-knowing whatever I think whatever I do or proceed with, has no basis. So I come to talk or read a book because I am interested in self-knowing and I pursue that. And when I hear K talking about `no authority', what is the state of my mind when I hear those words? Is it one of acceptance, is it a conclusion which I draw, or is it a fact? P: How does it become a fact? Does it become a fact through the discovery of that in the perceptive process of self-knowing? Or is it a fact because you have said so? K: The microphone is a fact. It is not because I say it is the microphone. P: But when you say `microphone', it is not a fact in the same sense as the microphone is a fact. K: So, the word is not the thing. The description is not that which is described. So, am I clear on that point, that the word is never the thing? The word `mountain' is not the mountain. Am I clear on that? Or is the description good enough for me and I get entangled in the description? Do I accept the description wanting that which is described and clinging to the idea? Don't reject the verbal structure altogether. I use language to communicate; I want to tell you something. I use words which we both know. But we both know that the words we use are not the actual feeling which I have. So the word is not the thing. D: One talks either through the mental process or one talks without the mental process. K: Sir, they are two different points. Either you communicate through the word or you communicate without the word. D: No, words are there; but when we listen to you, we know you are not talking the way we talk. K: Why do you say that? D: It is a difficult question, but it is a definite feeling as factual as seeing a microphone. K is not talking the way I talk, the source of his words lies much deeper than the words we use. K: I understand, sir. I can say superficially, `I love you', but I can also say `I really love you'. It is quite a different thing - the tone, the quality of the word, the depth of the feeling. The words convey the depth. D: I will go a little further. K: Go further. D: They really convey a deep feeling which is indefinable, which we call love - but I do not know the word for it. K: You may not know the word, yet I may hold your hand, I may make a gesture. D: That's true. But now between the gesture and the word, there is no linkage. K: Is that what you are trying to convey, Pupul? P: One of our difficulties, in understanding and going beyond, is that one takes your word, either the spoken word or the written word, and it becomes an abstraction to which one approximates. Then, on the other hand, there is the process of self-knowing in which the truth of your word can be revealed; but it does not normally happen that way. It always seems to me that listening to you without obstacle may bring about a change in the nature of my mind as such, but the discovery of the actuality of the words you use, can only be revealed in the process of self-knowing. K: What am I to say to that? P: Sir, I think first of all we should investigate self-knowing. We have not done it for a very long time. K: Let us do that. `Self-knowing' was being spoken about, thousands of years ago, by Socrates and by others before him. Now, what is self-knowing? How do you know yourself? What is it to know oneself? Do you know yourself from the observation of experience; from the observation of a thought and from that thought the observation of another thought springing up, and we are reluctant to let go the first thought, so that there is a conflict between the first thought and the second thought? Or is self-knowing to relinquish the first thought and pursue the second thought and then the third thought that arises dropping the second, following the third; dropping the third and following the fourth; so that there is a constant alertness and awareness of the movement of thought? Now, let's proceed. I observe myself being jealous. The instinctual response to jealousy is rationalization. In the process of rationalization I have forgotten, or put aside, jealousy. So I am caught in rationalization, in words, in the capacity to examine and then to suppress. I see the whole move- ment as one unit. Then arises the desire to run away from it. I examine that desire, that escape. It is an escape into what? P: Sometimes escape into meditation. K: Of course, that is the easier trick - into meditation. So, I say, what is meditation? Is it an escape from `what is'? Is that meditation? It is not meditation, if it is an escape. So, I go back and examine my jealousy: why am I jealous? because I am attached, because I think I am important and so on. This whole process is revelation. Then I come to the point: Is the examiner, the observer, different from the observed? Obviously he is not. So true observation is when there is no observer. P: You said, `Obviously he is not'. Let us go into that. K: The observer is the past; he is the past, the remembrance, the experience, the knowledge stored up in memory. The past is the observer and I observe the present which is my jealousy, my reaction. And I use the word 'jealousy' for that feeling because I recognize it as having happened in the past. It is a remembrance of jealousy through the word which is part of the past. So, can I observe without the word and without the observer which is the past? Does the word bring that feeling or is there feeling without the word? All this is part of self-knowledge. P: How does one observe without the word? K: Without the observer, without a remembrance. That is very important. P: How does one actually tackle the problem of the observer? A: May I say that in the watching of the observer, there is also the disapproval or the approval of the observer of himself. K: That is the past. That is his conditioning. That is the whole movement of the past, which is contained in the observer. A: That condemnation is the barrier. K: That is what Pupul is asking. She says: How do I observe the observer? What is the process of observing the observer? I hear K say that the observer is the past. Is that so? Par: In asking such a question, another observer is created. K: No, I do not create anything. I am merely observing. The question is, what is the observer? - who is the observer? How do I observe this microphone? I observe it through a word that we have used to indicate that it is a microphone; it is registered in the brain as a microphone, as remembrance; I use that word to convey the fact of the microphone. That's simple enough. P: Does one observe the observer? K: I am coming to that. How does one observe the observer? You don't. P: Is it the inability to observe the observer which gives one the understanding of the nature of the observer? K: No. You do not observe the observer. You only observe `what is' and the interference of the observer. You say you recognize the observer. You see the difference? Just go slowly. There is jealousy. The observer comes in and says: `I have been jealous in the past; I know what that feeling is.' So I recognize it and it is the observer. You cannot observe the observer by itself. There is the observation of the observer only in its relationship to the observed. When the observer arrests the observation, then there is awareness of the observer. You cannot observe the observer by itself. You can only observe the observer in relation to something. That is fairly clear. At the moment of feeling there is neither the observer nor the observed, there is only that state. Then the observer comes in and says, that is jealousy and he proceeds to interfere with that which is, he runs away from it, suppresses it, rationalizes it,justifies it, or escapes from it. Those movements indicate the observer in relation to that which is. FW: At the moment when the observer exists, is there a possibility of observation of the observer? K: That is what we are saying. I am angry or violent. At the moment of violence there is nothing. There is neither you the observer nor the observed. There is only that state of violence. Then the observer comes in which is the movement of thought. Thought is the past - there is no new thought - and that movement of thought interferes with the present. That interference is the observer and you study the observer only through that interference. It tries to escape from what is irrational in violence, to justify it and so on, which are all traditional approaches to the present. The traditional approach is the observer. P: In a sense, therefore, the observer manifests itself only in terms of escaping from the present. K: Escapes, or rationalizations. D: Or interference. K: Any form of interference with the present is the action of the observer. Don't accept this. Tear it to pieces, find out. Par: If there is no past, is there no interference? K: No, that is not the point. What is the past? Par: The accumulated, stored contents of my experience. K: Which is what? Your experiences, your inclinations and motives, all that is the movement of the past, which is knowledge. Movement of the past can only take place through knowledge, which is the past. So the past interferes with the present; the observer comes into operation. If there is no interference, there is no observer, there is only observation. In observation there is neither the observer nor the idea of observation. This is very important to understand. There is neither observer nor the idea of not having an observer; which means there is only pure observation without the word, without the recollection and association of the past. There is nothing, only observation. FW: In that way is the observation of the observer possible? K: No, I said: The observation of the observer comes only when the past interferes. The past is the observer. When that past interferes with the present, the observer is in action. It is only then that you become aware that there is an observer. Now, when you see that, when you have an insight into that, then there is no observer, there is only observation. So can I observe `no authority' per se, not because you have told me? P: No, I can only observe one thing: the movement of authority. I can never observe `no authority'. K: Of course not. But there is the observation of authority; the observation of authority which is in the demand from another for enlightenment; the leaning on, the attachment to another, all that is a form of authority. And is there `authority' in operation in my brain, in my mind, in my being? `Authority' may be experience, knowledge depending on the past - a vision and so on. Is there an observation of the movement of thought as `authority'? P: What is important? Is it the observation of every movement of my human mind, of my consciousness, or is it the attempt to discover in my consciousness the truth, the actuality of what you are saying? It is a very subtle thing. I do not know how to put it. S: Can I put it this way? For instance, I observe hurt. K: Do you observe hurt because K said it? S: I see that I am hurt. I see the emergence of hurt. The observation of the hurt is something which I can do as part of self-knowing. But where do I create authority? When Krishnaji says: `Once you see hurt it is over,' it is then that I create authority. Then I project a certain state, a movement towards that state, because I do not want to be caught in the trap of constant observation of hurt. But there are several other factors in consciousness. I see that instead of the observation of hurt, I hear from time to time a person saying that the observation of the hurt without the observer is the ending of hurt. That is where I create authority. K: I understand. I observe the hurt and all the consequences of the hurt, how that hurt has come into being and so on. I am aware of the whole process of that hurt and in my mind I hear K saying, once you see that in its entirety, holistically, then it is over, you will never be hurt. He has said that. S: It is there in my consciousness. K: What is in your consciousness? The word? S: Apart from the word, the state which he communicated when he uttered that, because when K is talking, he seems to indicate a `state' beyond the word. K: Sunanda, look: I am hurt. I know I am hurt. By listening to you I see the consequences of all that - the withdrawal, the isolation, the violence, all that I see. Do I see it because you have pointed it out to me? Or do I see it though you have pointed it out to me? S: Obviously the fact is there, you have come into my life and I have listened to you. K: Then the question arises; K says once you see it fully, holistically, then the whole hurt is over. Where is the authority there? S: Authority is there because it affirms a state which I would like to have. K: Then examine that state which is ambition, which is desire. P: I would like to examine your use of the word `holistic' and also enquire into something you have said, which is: Can you hold hurt and remain with it - that is, holistically? What is involved in holding? K: I am hurt. I know why I am hurt. I am aware of the image that is hurt and the consequences of that hurt - the escape, the violence, the narrowness, the fear, the isolation, the withdrawal, the anxiety, and all the rest of it. How am I aware of it? Is it because you have pointed it out to me? Or I am aware of it, I see it and I am moving with you? In that there is no authority. I am not separate from what you are saying. That's where the catch is. S: Up to a point there is movement with you. K: I am moving with you. D: So your word is like a pointer. K: No, no. S: So long as I am moving with you, there is a relationship. K: The moment I break that relationship, then begins my question: How am I to do it? If I am following exactly what you are saying - seeing that the image is hurt and then the escape, the violence - I am moving with you. It is like an orchestra, an orchestra of words, an orchestra of feeling, the whole thing is moving. As long as I am moving with you, there is no contradiction. Then you say `Once you see this as a whole, the thing is over - 'am I with you? S: It has not happened. K: I will tell you why. Because you have not listened. S: You mean to say that I have not listened for twenty years? K: It doesn't matter. One day is good enough. You have not listened. You are listening to the word, and you are carrying along the reaction. You are not moving with him. R: Is there a difference between that listening and the holistic view? K: No. Listen. Can you listen in the sense of no interpretation, no examination, no comparison? R: No expectation. K: Nothing, just listening. I am listening. It is like two rivers moving together there as one river. But I do not listen that way. I have heard you say `holistically' and I want to get that. Therefore I am no longer listening because I want that. R: Therefore, the question of how to remain with whatever is, is a wrong question, isn't it? K: I am remaining with it. R: Yes, but the question itself is a movement away from remaining with it. K: Of course. P: There is a feeling of intensity of sorrow and an observation to see that this sorrow is not dissipated by any movement away from it. In a moment of crisis there is an intensity of energy and to remain with it totally, the only action is the refusal to move away from it. Is that valid? R: Does it not mean that one can only watch every movement which is away from it and not to say how am I to remain with it? P: Sorrow arises and it fills you. That is the way it operates when it is something very deep. What is the action on that? What is the action that will enable it to flower without dissipation? K: If it fills you, actually, if your whole being is filled with that extraordinary energy called sorrow and there is no escape; but the moment you move away in any direction, it is a dissipation of that energy. Are you filled with that energy which is called sorrow completely, or is there a part of you, somewhere in you, where there is a loophole? R: I think there is always a loophole because there is a fear of anything filling one's whole being. I think that fear is there. K: So, sorrow has not filled your being. R: No, that is so. K: That is a fact. So you pursue not sorrow but fear. The fear what might happen, etc. So you go into that, you forget sorrow and go into that. D: The use of the word `holistic' implies actuality. Actuality itself is the whole. K: No, no. Sir, let us understand the meaning of the word `holistic'. Whole means healthy, physically healthy. Then it means sanity, mentally and physically and from that arises holy. All that is implied in the word `holistic' or `whole'. D: This is clear for the first time. K: When you have very good health and when the brain emotionally, intellectually, is sane without any quirk, without any neurotic movement, it is holy. That is the holistic approach. If there is a quirk, an idiosyncrasy, a belief, it is not whole, - so clean it up, do not talk about holistic. The holistic happens when there is sanity, health. S: This is where the dilemma comes. Pursue the fragment you say. But unless one sees the fragment holistically... K: Do not bother about holistically. S: Then, how does one observe the fragment? Then, what is the process involved? Which comes first? K: I am doing it. I do not know a thing about holistic. I do not know. I know the meaning of the word, the description of the word, what it conveys, but that is not the fact. The fact is that I am a fragment, I work, live, act in fragments, in myself. I know nothing about the other. FW: This brings us to the initial question: What is the meaning of your word apart from our communication now? In my daily life, to remember what you say that you should never be hurt, has it a meaning when I am hurt? K: No, I am hurt. That is all I know. That is a fact. I am hurt because I have an image about myself. Have I discovered that image for myself or has K told me that the image is hurt? That is very important to find out. Is it that the description has created the image or is it that I know the image exists? S: One knows that the image exists. K: All right. If the image exists, I am concerned with the image, not how to be rid of the image, not how to look at the image holistically. I know nothing about it. S: `Looking at the image,' it seems to imply the concept of `holistic'. K: No, I know nothing of such concept. I only know I have an image. I will not be with anything but the fragment, with `what is' - the holistic is non-fact. S: That is very clear. But how does one look at it, hold the hurt totally? That is where the question arises. P: That is his statement. K: What? S & P: `Totally.' That is your statement. K: Of course. But throw it out. S: Then there is no problem because one observes certain symptoms of hurt. There is an observation of it and it ends. This process goes on, I do not need K's telling me about it. This I know; to observe something at that level, everything that is arising in consciousness, the observing of it and the subsidence. A: The discussion started on the very crucial question of authority. The point of starting this discussion on authority lies in this, that we make an authority of what you have said, then that is a barrier. K: Obviously. D: Something is missing in this. K: Look, sir, there is something very interesting which comes out of this. Are you learning or are you having an insight into it? Learning implies authority. Are you learning and acting from learning? I learn about mathematics, technology and so on and from that knowledge I become an engineer and act. Or I go out into the field, act and learn. Both are the accumulation of knowledge and acting from knowledge - knowledge becomes the authority. Either you accumulate knowledge and act or you go out, act and learn. Both are an acting according to knowledge. So knowledge becomes the authority, whether it is the authority of the doctor, the scientist, the architect, or the guru who says `I know' - which is his authority. Now, somebody comes along and says:Look, acting according to knowledge is a prison; you will never be free; you can not ascend through knowledge.' And somebody like K says: `Look at it differently, look at action with insight - not accumulate knowledge and act but insight and action. In that there is no authority. P: You have used the word `insight'. What is the actual meaning of that word? K: To have insight into something; to grasp the thing instantly; to listen carefully. You see, you do not listen, that is my point. You act, after learning; that is, in learning there is an accumulation of information, knowledge and you act according to that knowledge, skilfully or non-skilfully. That is learning; accumulating knowledge and acting from it. Then there is learning from acting, which is the same as the other. Both are acting on the basis of knowledge. So knowledge becomes the authority and where there is authority, there must be suppression. You will never ascend anywhere through that process; it is mechanical. Do you see both as mechanical movement? If you see that, that is insight. Therefore, you are acting not from knowledge; but by seeing the implications of knowledge and authority. Your action is totally different. So where are we? Self-knowledge and the word of K. If there is a movement together, then it is over. It is very simple. You move. P: Is the word of K and the movement with that word essential? Can the revelation be without the word? K: All right. K says: `Be a light to yourself.' It does not mean you become the authority. K says: `Nobody can take you there; you can not invite that.' K says: `You can listen to K endlessly for the next million years and you will not get it.' But he says: `Be a light to yourself and you see holistically that thing. To know oneself is one of the most difficult things because in the observation of myself I come to a conclusion about what I am seeing; and the next observation is through that conclusion. Can one observe the actual anger without any conclusion, without saying right, wrong, good, bad? Can one observe holistically? Self-knowledge is not knowing oneself, but knowing every movement of thought. Because the self is the thought, the image, the image of K and the image of the `me.' So, watch every movement of thought, never letting one thought go without realizing what it is. Try it. Do it and you will see what takes place. This gives muscle to the brain. S: Would you say that in a single thought is the essence of the self? K: Yes. I will say `yes'. You see, thought is fear, thought is pleasure, thought is sorrow. And thought is not love. Thought is not compassion. The image that thought has created is `me'. The `me' is the image. There is no difference between `me' and the image. The image is me. Now, I am observing the image which is me, which is, say, `I want to attain nirvana,' which means I am greedy. That is all. Instead of wanting money, I want the other thing. It is greed. So I examine greed. What is greed? `The more'? That means I want to change what is into the more, the greater. Therefore that is greed. So I say: `Now why am I doing this?' `Why do I want more?' is it tradition, habit, is it the mechanical response of the brain? I want to find out. Either I can find out with one glance or step by step. I can observe it with one glance only when I have no motive, for motive is the distorting factor. It is most interesting to know yourself because yourself may be the universe, - not the theoretical universe but the global universe. I want to know myself because I see very clearly that if I do not know myself, whatever I say is meaningless, is corrupt - not just verbally, I see that it is corruption. My action is corrupt action and I do not want to live a corrupt life. I see I must know myself. To know myself I watch; I watch my relationship to you, to my wife, to my husband. In that watching I see myself reflected in that relationship. I want my wife because I want sex; I want her comfort; she looks after my children; she cooks; I depend on her. So, in my relationship to her, I discover the pleasure principle, the attachment principle and the comfort principle and so on. Am I observing it without the past, without any conclusion? Is my observation precise? The moment one says `Be a light to yourself, all authority is gone including the authority of the Gita, the gurus, the ashramas. The question would be really interesting on its own. If I am a light to myself, what is my relationship politically, economically, socially? But you do not ask these questions. I am a light to myself - go on, work it out - I am a light to myself. I see that very clearly. I have no authority, no guide. Then how do I act with regard to tyranny, the tyranny of the guru, of the ashramas? To be a light to oneself means being holistic. Anything that is not holistic is corruption. A holistic man will not deal with corruption. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'THE ENDING OF RECOGNITION' P: Shall we discuss the question of consciousness and the relationship of consciousness to the brain cells? Are they of the same nature or is there something which gives them separate identities? K: That's a good question. You begin. P: The traditional concept of the word `consciousness' would include that which lies beyond the horizon. A: Quite correct. The brain is only a conglomeration of cells, a forest of cells and yet each cell is dependent on the other although in fact every brain cell can act by itself. So we may ask: How does one know the sum total of all consciousness, of all the cells? Is there a co-ordinating factor? Is the brain merely a result? A further question is: What is primary and what secondary? Does consciousness come first and then the brain, or does the brain come first and then consciousness? K: If I may ask: What do you mean by the word `consciousness'? Let us start from the beginning: What is consciousness? What does it mean `to be conscious of? I want to be clear that we both have the same understanding of the meaning of that word. One is conscious, for instance, of the microphone. I am conscious of it and then I use the word `microphone'. So, when you are conscious of something naming begins; then like and dislike. So `consciousness, means to be aware of, to be conscious of, to be cognizant of sensation, cognition, contact. A: I feel that consciousness is prior to sensation. It is the field and at any one time I am aware of some part of it through sensation; I feel consciousness is much more vast. I see that I am aware of only a part of a very wide thing. That whole field is not in my awareness. So, I do not want to restrict consciousness to something that exists at any given moment. My awareness may not be extensive, but consciousness can be seen to be much more vast. K: What is the relationship between that consciousness and the brain cells? Pupul used the word `consciousness' and asked what is the relationship between the brain and consciousness. I am asking: What is that relationship? P: When K says the content of consciousness is consciousness, it would imply that the content of the brain cells is consciousness. If there is a field which is outside the brain cells and which is also consciousness, then you have to say all that is consciousness. But then you cannot say that the content of consciousness is consciousness. K: Is that clear? I have said the content of consciousness is consciousness. A: `The content of consciousness is consciousness' is a statement irrespective of, and unconnected with, the perceiver. It is a statement about consciousness, not your consciousness, or my consciousness. K: That is right. Therefore what is outside the field of consciousness is not its content. P: The moment you posit something outside of consciousness, you are positing a state which may or may not exist. A: Is the known a part of our consciousness, consciousness being the content? P: The major difference between K's position and the Vedantic position is that K uses the word `consciousness' in a very special sense. The Vedantic position is: consciousness is that which exists before anything exists. A: Basically, the source of existence is a vast incomprehensible energy which they call `Chaitanya'. `Chaitanya' is the energy, the source. They say that there is this source of energy, which they speak of as `Chit'. The Buddhist position does not say anything about this at all. It refuses to say a word about it. Therefore, the Buddhist position is one from which we cannot answer the enquiry. The Buddhist will say: `Don't talk about it; any talk about it will be speculative and speculative processes are not meant for actual practice.' K: `Ignorance has no beginning, but has an end. Don't enquire into the beginning of ignorance but find out how to end it'. A: We have immediately come upon something. K: Right, sir, that's a good point. A: Buddhists say: `There is no such thing as consciousness in general. Ignorance has no beginning. Ignorance can end. Don't let us investigate into the beginnings of ignorance because that would be speculative, would be a waste of time. But how is it possible to end ignorance? This ignorance is consciousness.' Consciousness as ignorance is a position into which we will have to investigate. The Vedantins will say to you that the source which you refer to as ignorance is of the nature of Sat, Chit and Anand. It is constantly renewing itself, it is constantly coming into being; and the entire process of birth, death, decay is a movement in it. I feel that a man who does not accept the Buddhist position, will not immediately accept what you say, that the beginning is ignorance and that it is a self-sustaining process. You cannot trace the beginning, but it can be brought to an end. I have stated the two positions and they are conflicting positions. K: We simply say that ignorance has no beginning; one can see it in oneself, see it within consciousness, within that field. P: If it is within this field, then has it existence apart from the brain cells which contain the memory about it? The scientific position is: whereas the brain cells and their operation are measurable, consciousness is not measurable and therefore the two are not synonymous. K: Wait a minute. What you are saying is that the brain cells and their movement are measurable, but consciousness is not measurable. A: May I suggest something? When we look through the biggest telescope, we see the expanse of the cosmos as far as that instrument will show it. If we get a bigger instrument, we get a bigger view. Though we measure it, that measurement is relevant only to the instrument which is a relative element. Consciousness is immeasurable in the sense that there is no instrument to which it can be related. Consciousness is something about which one cannot say that it is measurable or immeasurable. Therefore, consciousness is something about which one cannot make any statement. K: That is right. Consciousness is not measurable. What Pupul is asking is: Is there outside consciousness as we know it, a state which is not pertinent to this consciousness? P: Is there a state which is not divisible, not knowable, not available, within the brain cells? K: Have you got it Achyutji? Not knowable, in the sense, not recognizable; something totally new. A: I am coming to that. I say that consciousness as we know it is the source of all the recent memories and all the memories man has had. The brain cells will recognize everything that comes out of racial memories; everything that comes within the field of the past, out of that which has been known. P: The millions of years of the known. A: Even the earliest memories of man, the brain may be able to remember. K: Wait, keep it very simple. We said the known is consciousness - the content of consciousness is the known. Now, is there something outside this, something which is not known, totally new and which does not already exist in the brain cells? If it is outside the known, is it recognizable? - for if it is recognizable it is still in the field of the known. It is available only when the recognizing and experiencing process comes to an end. I want to stick to this. Pupul asked: Is it in the known or outside the known; and if it is outside the known, is it already in the brain cells? If it is in the brain cells, it is already the known because the brain cells cannot contain something new. The moment it is in the brain cells, it is tradition. I love to dig deep. Outside the brain, is there anything else? That is all. I say there is. But every process of recognition, experience, is always within the field of the known and any movement of the brain cells moving away from the known, trying to investigate into the other is still the known. M: How do you know that there is something? K: You cannot know it. There is a state where the mind does not recognize anything. There is a state in which recognition and experience, which are the movement of the known, totally come to an end. A: In what way is it differentiated from a state of the process of recognition, experiencing? P: Is it of a different nature? K: You see, the organism, the brain cells, come to an end. The whole thing collapses; there is a different state altogether. P: Let me put it to you in another way. When you say that all the processes of recognition come to an end, and yet it is a living state, is there a sense of existence, of being? K: The words, `existence' and `being' do not apply. A: How is it different from deep sleep? K: I don't know what you mean by deep sleep. A: In deep sleep the processes of recognition and recording are for the time being put in total abeyance. K: That is quite a different thing. P: What has happened to the senses in the state you mentioned earlier? K: The senses are in abeyance. P: Are they not operating? K: In that state, I might scratch myself - you follow - flies come and sit on me. That is the action of the senses, but it does not affect that. M: The knowledge that there is scratching going on is present. K: That is a natural thing. You must go very very slowly with it Any movement of the known, any movement, potential or nonpotential, is within the field of the known. I want to be quite clear that you and I are understanding the same thing. That is: when the content of consciousness with its experiences, demands, its craving for something new, including its craving for freedom from the known, has completely come to an end, then only does the other quality come into being. The former has a motive; the latter has no motive. The mind cannot come to that through motive. Motive is the known. So, can the mind come to an end which says: `It is no good investigating into it, I know how to make it come to an end, ignorance is part of the content, ignorance is part of this demand to experience more?' When that mind comes to an end - an end not brought about by conscious effort in which there is motive, with direction - then the other thing is there. M: The thing is there. In the situation in which we are now, do you know that? K: Of course, I see your shirt, I see the colour obviously. The senses are in operation. Recognition is in operation normally. The other is there. It is not a duality. M: Is knowledge a part of it? K: No. I must go very slowly. I know what you are getting at. I want to come to this very simply. I see the colour; the senses are in operation... A: Even trying to translate what you are saying is preventing one from getting at it because that would immediately be duality. When you say something, any movement in the mind is again preventing one from it. K: Achyutji, what are you trying to get at? A: I am pointing out the difficulty that arises in communication. I think communication about the other is not possible. I am trying to understand the conscious state of the mind of the man who talks to me. On what basis does he tell me that there is something? K: The basis for that is: when there is no movement of recognition, of experiencing, of motive, freedom from the known takes place. M: That is pure cognition without recognition. K: You are translating it differently. This movement has come to an end for the time being; that is all. M: The movement of recognition of that. Where does the time element come in? Is there another time? K: Let us begin again. The brain functions within the field of the known; in that function there is recognition. But when the brain, your mind, is completely still, you don't see your still mind. There is no knowing that your mind is still. If you know it, it is not still, for then there is an observer who says `I know'. The stillness which we are talking about is non-recognizable, non-experienceable. Then comes along the entity that wants to tell you this through verbal communication. The moment he, the entity, moves into communication, the still mind is not. Just look at it. Something comes out of it. It is there for man. I am not saying it is always there. It is there for the man who understands the known. It is there and it never leaves; and though he communicates it, he feels that it is never gone, it is there. M: Why do you use the word `communicate'? K: That is communication. M: Who communicates? You talked to me just now. K: Just now? The brain cells have acquired the knowledge of the language. It is the brain cells that are communicating. M: The brain contains its own observer. K: The brain itself is the observer and the operator. M. Now what is the relationship between that and this? K: Tentatively, I say there is no relationship. This is the fact: the brain cells hold the known and when the brain is completely stable, completely still, there is no verbal statement or communication -the brain is completely still. Then, what is the relationship between the brain and that? M: By what magic, by what means, does the state of a still mind make a bridge? How do you manage to make a permanent bridge between the brain and that, and maintain that bridge? K: If one says `I don't know', what will you answer? M: You have inherited it through some karma or somebody has given it to you. K: Let us begin again. Is it by chance that that event can happen to us, is it an exception? That is what we are discussing now. If it is a miracle, can it happen to you? It is not a miracle; it is not something given from above so that one can ask: How did this happen with this person and not with another - right? M: What can we do? K: I say you can do nothing - which does not mean doing nothing! M: What are these two meanings of nothing? K: I will tell you the two meanings of nothing: the one refers to desire to experience `That', to recognize `That' and yet to do nothing about `That'. The other is to do nothing, in the other sense, it is to see or to be aware, not theoretically but actually, of the known. M: You say, `Do nothing,just observe.' K: Put it that way if you want. M: It brings down the enlightenment to action. K: You must touch this thing, very very lightly. You must touch it very lightly -food, talk - and as the body and the senses become very light the days and nights move easily. You see there is a dying every minute. Have I answered, or very nearly answered, the question? P: You have not answered specifically. K: To put the whole thing differently: We will call `That', for the moment, infinite energy and the other, energy created by strife and conflict - it is entirely different from `That'. When there is no conflict at all the infinite energy is always renewing itself. The energy that peters out is what we know. What is the relationship of the energy that peters out to `that'? There is none. EXPLORATION INTO INSIGHT 'ENERGY AND THE CULTIVATION OF THE FIELD' P: Could we discuss one of the chief blockages to understanding, that is, the factor of self-centred activity? K: When you talk about self-centredness, a centre implies a periphery. Can we say, where there is a centre there is a boundary, a limitation and all action must be within the circle of centre and periphery? That is self-centred activity. P: What are the boundaries of the self? K: It can be limitless or within the limits, but there is always a boundary. D: Limitless? K: You can push it as far as you like. As long as there is a centre, there is a periphery, a boundary, but that boundary can be stretched. P: Does that mean, sir, there is no limit to this stretching? K: Let us go slowly. When we talk about self-centred activity, that is what is implied - a centre and a periphery, a limitation and within that circle all action takes place: to think about oneself, to progress towards something is still from the centre to a periphery. Where there is a centre, there is a boundary, and that centre may expand itself, but it is still within that boundary, and therefore within that circle all action takes place. From the centre you can stretch as far as you like, through social service, democratic or electorate dictatorship and tyranny, everything is within that area. A: The point is, sir, is action possible which does not nourish a centre? K: Or, can there be no centre? A: Sir, that cannot be said from our position because we start with a centre. We can honestly, factually say that we know there is a centre, and we know that every activity, including breathing, nourishes that centre. K: The point is this: the energy that is expanded within the circumference and the centre is a limited energy, a mechanical energy. Do you know, not verbally but actually inside you, that where there is a centre, there must be a circumference and that any action that takes place within that area is limited, fragmented and therefore a wastage of energy? VA: We have been discussing the circumference and the centre. To realize the self in ourselves would be the first problem. K: That is the problem, sir. We are selfish entities. We are self-centred human beings, we think about ourselves, our worries, our family - we are the centre. We can move the centre to social work, to political work, but it is still the centre operating. P: That is a little more subtle to see, because you can concern yourself with something in which you feel the centre is not involved. K: You may think so. It is `I' who work for the poor, but I am still working within this limitation. P: Sir, I want some clarification. It is not the work for the poor which you are questioning? K: No. It is the identification of myself with the poor, my identification of myself with the nation, identification of myself with God, identification of myself with some ideal and so on, that is the problem. Apa: I think the question that Pupulji asked was whether this movement of the mind with its habits can be stilled? Can this movement of the mind which is exhausted by identification, by a constant movement, from the centre to the periphery, from the periphery to the centre, can it be silenced? Is there an energy which can gush out, which will silence it or make it irrelevant, make it seem a shadow? K: I don't quite follow this. P: It is really like this: we have done everything to understand the nature of this self-centred activity. We have observed, we have meditated, but the centre does not cease, sir. K: No, because I think we are making a mistake. We don't actually see, perceive in our heart, in our mind, that any action within this periphery, from the centre to the periphery and the circumference, and then from the circumference to the centre, this movement back and forth is a wastage of energy and must be limited and must bring sorrow. Everything within that area is sorrow. We don't see that. P: Sir, if it is part of our brain cells and if it is the action of our brain cells to constantly throw out these ripples which get caught, which is in a sense self-centred existence, then... K: No, Pupul, the brain needs two things: security and a sense of permanency. P: Both are provided by the self. K: That is why it has become very important. Apa: Sir, the brain is a mechanical, a physical entity in its habit of seeking security or continuance. Now, how do you break out of its habits, its mechanical operations? That is what Pupulji has been hinting at. K: I don't want to go into that, sir. Any movement to break out, is still within the periphery. Is there an action, a move which is not self-centred? P: We know states, for instance, when it appears as if the self is not, but then if the seed of self-centred activity is held within the brain cells, it will repeat itself again. Then I say to myself there must be another energy, there must be another quality which will wipe it out. Apa: Our brains are computers and our behaviour patterns and actions are conditioned and programmed to that. The feed-backs are becoming more and more complicated. Now, sir, what is the energy; is it attention, is it silence, is it exterior, is it interior? K: Our brain is programmed to function from the centre to the periphery, from the circumference to the centre, this back-and-forth movement. It is programmed for that, it is trained for that, it is conditioned for that. Is it possible to break that momentum of the brain cells? P: Is there an energy which will, without my volition, wipe out that momentum? K: Can this momentum, can this programme of the brain, which has been conditioned for millennia, can that stop? Apa: And de-condition itself. K: The moment it stops, you have broken it. Now, is there an energy which is not self-centred movement, an energy without a motive, without a cause, an energy which without these would be endless? P: Yes. And is it possible, I am putting it very tentatively, is it possible to investigate that energy? K: We are going to. A: The only instrument we have is attention. So, any energy that you posit must manifest itself as attention. I say attention is the only instrument we have. P: If I may say so, I don't want to postulate anything. I am asking Krishnaji something which we have not asked before. How do I put it into words? K: You are asking, is there an energy which is not from the centre, an energy which is without a cause, an energy which is inexhaustible and therefore non-mechanical. We have discovered something. That is, the brain has been conditioned through millennia to move from the centre to the circumference and from the circumference to move to the centre, back and forth, extending it, limiting it and so on. And is there a way of ending that movement? We just now said it ends when there is a stopping, when the plug is pulled out. That is, the brain stops moving in that direction, but if there is any causation for the stopping, you are back again in the circle. Does that answer you? That is, can the brain which has been so conditioned for millennia to act from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery to the centre, can that movement stop? Now, the next question will be: Is it possible? You follow? I think that is a wrong question. When you see the necessity of stopping, when the brain itself sees the necessity of the movement ceasing, it stops. I wonder if I am making myself clear. Q: Yes. But it starts again. It stops the movement for a while, but then it starts. K: No, sir, the moment you say you want it again, you are back in the centre. Q: Probably I want to bring about a permanent stopping. K: That is greed. If I see the truth of the fact, the moment there is the cessation of this movement, the ending of that movement, the thing is over. It is not a continuous stoppage. When you want it to be continuous, it is a time movement. Apa: The seeing then is without movement. The seeing has come to an end. That seeing, is it a movement of the centre? K: Seeing, observing the whole movement of the centre to the circumference, from the circumference to the centre, that movement is `what is'. Apa: But that seeing is without any centre. K: Of course. Q: So, sir, that seeing is on a different plane, a different dimension altogether. K: I `see'. There is perception when you are aware without any choice. Just be aware of this movement. The programme stops. Let us leave that. We will come back to that. Pupul's question is: Is there an energy which is non-mechanical, which has no causation, and therefore an energy that is constantly renewing itself? VA: That is the energy of death. K: What do you mean, sir? Death in the sense of ending? VA: A total ending. K: You mean a total ending of the periphery. VA: What I know as myself. K: Just listen. You said something. The total ending of this movement from the centre to the circumference, that is death, in one sense. Then, is that the energy which is causeless? VA: It is causeless, sir. It comes, like the blood in the body. K: I understand. But, is that a supposition, a theory or an actuality? VA: An actuality. K: Which means what? That there is no centre from which you are acting? VA: During that period when that energy is there. K: No, no. Not periods. VA: There is a sense of timelessness at that time. K: Yes, sir. Then, what takes place? VA: Then again thought comes back. K: And so, you are back again from the centre to the periphery. VA: One is afraid of that particular thing happening, not only the wanting it again. One gets afraid of that particular thing happening again because it is like total death. K: It has happened without your invitation. VA: Yes. K: Now, you are inviting it. VA: I don't know whether I am inviting it or whether I am afraid of it. K: Afraid or inviting, whatever it is, it is still within the field of this. That is all. The other question is what Pupulji raised about an endless journey. You want to discuss kundalini? P: Yes, sir. K: Sir, first of all, if you really want to discuss, have a dialogue about kundalini, would you forget everything you have heard about it? Would you? We are entering into a subject which is very serious. Are you willing to forget everything you have heard about it, what your gurus have told you about it, or your attempts to awaken it? Can you start with a completely empty state? Then you have to enquire, really not knowing anything about kundalini. You know what is happening now in America, in Europe. Kundalini centres have been opened by people who say they have had the experience of the awakening of kundalini. Scientists are interested in it today. They feel that by doing certain forms of exercise, breathing, they will awaken the kundalini. It has all become a moneymaking concern, and it is being given to people who are terribly mischievous. Q: We just want to know whether there is an energy that can wipe out conditioning. K: So long as self-centred activity exists, you cannot touch it. That is why I object to any discussion on kundalini or whatever that energy is, because we have not done the spade work. We don't lead a life of correctness and we want to add something new to it and so carry on our mischief. VA: Even after awakening kundalini, self-centred activity continues. K: I question whether the kundalini is awakened. I don't know what you mean by it. VA: Sir, we really want to understand this, because it is an actuality sometimes. P: Do you know of an energy when self-centred activity ends? We assume that this is the source of this endless energy.It may not be. K: Are you saying the ending of this movement from the centre to the circumference and from the circumference to the centre, the end of that... P: Momentary ending of it... K: No, the ending of it, the complete ending of it - is the release of that energy which is limitless? P: I don't say that. K: I am saying that. P: Which is a very different thing to my saying it. K: Can we put kundalini energy in its right place? A number of people have the experience of what they call kundalini, which I question. I question whether it is an actual reality or some kind of physiological activity which is then attributed to kundalini. You live an immoral life in the sense of a life of vanity, sex, etc. and then you say that your kundalini is awakened. But your daily life, which is a self-centred life, continues. P: Sir, if we are going to examine it, let us see how it operates in one. The awakening of kundalini is linked to certain psychic centres located at certain physical parts of the body. That is what is said. The first question I would like to ask is whether that is so? Has the release of this energy, which has no end, anything to do with the psychic centres in the physical parts of the body? A: Before we go into that, sir, is it not essential to enquire whether the person who acquires that energy is incapable of doing harm. K: No, sir. Do be careful. How can we say somebody is incapable of doing harm? They say many Indian gurus have done tremendous harm misleading people. A: That is what I say, sir. I feel that unless the person's heart is cleansed of hate, and his thirst to do harm is completely transmuted, unless that has happened, then this energy can do nothing but more mischief. K: Achyutji, what Pupulji is asking about is the standard acceptance of the power of this energy going through various centres and the releasing of energy and so on. A: I say, sir, that before we ask that question, there is in the Indian tradition a word which I think is very valuable. That word is `adhikar'. Adhikar means that the person must cleanse himself sufficiently before he can pose this question to himself. It is a question of cleansing. K: Are you saying that unless there is a stoppage of this movement from the centre to the circumference and from the circumference to the centre, that Pupulji's question is not valid? A: I think so. I will use another word, the Buddhist word is `sheela'. It is really the same. The word `adhikar' used by the Hindus and the word `sheela' used by the Buddhist really mean the same thing. P: I take it that when one asks the question, there is a depth of self-knowing with which one asks. It is not possible to investigate the self which also releases energy, if one's life has not gone through a degree of inner balance, otherwise what K says has no meaning. When one listens to Krishnaji, one receives at the depth to which one has exposed oneself, and therefore I think it is right to ask the question. Why is this question more dangerous than any other question? Why is it more dangerous than inquiring into what is thought, what is meditation, what is this, what is that? To the mind which will comprehend, it will comprehend this and that. To the mind which will not comprehend, it will comprehend neither. To the mind which wants to misuse, it will misuse anything. K: Unless your life, your daily life is a completely nonself-centred way of living, the other cannot possibly come in. VA: There is arising of energy - there is delight at first, then fear. S: We would like to know why that energy creates fear. VA: Fear comes later. One experiences death and everything vanishes. You are alive again and you are surprised that you are alive again. You find the world again, and your thoughts, and your possessions and desires and the whole world slowly come back. K: Would you call that, sir, the awakening of kundalini? VA: I don't know, sir. K: But why do you label it as the awakening of kundalini? VA: For a few days after that, for a period of a month, the whole life changes. Sex vanishes, desires vanish. K: Yes, sir, I understand. But you do come back to it again. VA: One comes back to it because one doesn't understand. K: That is what I am saying, sir. When there is a coming back to something, I question whether you have had that energy. P: Why has this question awakened so many ripples? Most people go through a great deal of psychic experiences in the process of self-knowing. One also understands, at least one has understood because one has listened to Krishnaji, that all psychic experiences when they arise, have to be put aside. K: Is that understood? Psychic experience must be totally put aside. A: We put them aside, not only give no importance to them. VA: Some new passages do get opened in the body, and the energy keeps rising in those passages whenever it is required. K: Sir, why do you call it something extraordinary? Why do we attribute something extraordinary to this? I am just suggesting, it may be that you have become very sensitive. That is all. Very acutely sensitive. VA: I have more energy. K: Sensitivity has more energy. But why do you call it extraordinary, kundalini this, that or the other? P: The real problem is to what extent is your life totally changed. I mean the only meaning of awakening is if there is a totally new way of looking, a new way of living, a new way of relationship. Q: Sir, I want to ask a question. Taking for granted that one is leading a holistic life, is there something like kundalini? K: Sir, are you living a holistic life? Q: No. K: Therefore, don't that question. P: I am asking from a totally different point. As it is understood, kundalini is the wakening of certain psychic energies which exist at certain physical points in the human body, and that it is possible to awaken the psychic energies through various practices which then, as they go through these various psychophysical states and centres, transmute consciousness, and when they finally break through, they pierce through self-centred activity. This must be the basic meaning of the whole thing. Apa: Mescaline can do it; you can do it. P: I am just asking Krishnaji whether there is an energy which, on awakening, not being awakened, but on awakening completely wipes out the centre. K: I would put it the other way. Unless the self-centred movement stops, the other can't be. A: I say that the whole Hatha yoga tradition has engendered a belief that by manipulating these centres, you can do things to yourself. The whole idea is based on a wrong belief. P: Wipe out everything. A: We should wipe it out. P: As it does not seem possible to proceed with this discussion, may I put another question? What is the nature of the field which needs to be prepared, to be able to receive that which is limitless? K: Are you cultivating the soil of the brain, of the mind, in order to receive it? P: I understand your question. But I can neither say yes nor no to it. K: Then, why call it energy and bring the word `soil'? Prepare, work at it. We live a life of contradiction, conflict, misery. I want to find out if it can end sorrow, the whole of human sorrow and enquire into the nature of compassion. S: Is there any other way of living in which compassion is also part of cultivating the self? Why are you asking this question, why do you want to cultivate the soil? K: I say as long as you have motive to cultivate that soil in order to receive that energy, you will never receive it. S: What is the motive, sir? It is the whole prison. To see the whole prison and ask whether there is any other way out of this, is it a motive? Then, one gets caught in a circle, in a trap. K: No, you haven't listened. I live a life of torture, misery, confusion. That is my basic feeling and can that end? There is no motive. S: Here there is no motive. But you are also asking a further question. K: No. I don't have further questions, only that first question. Can that whole process end? Only then can I answer the other questions, which have tremendous significance. P: What is the nature of the soil of the human mind which has to be cultivated to receive the other? You tell me that is also a wrong question. You say I am in conflict, I am suffering and I see that a life of conflict and suffering has no end. K: That is all. If it cannot end, then the other enquiry and investigation, and the wanting to awaken the other in order to wipe this out is a wrong process. P: Obviously. K: It is asking an outside agency to come and clear up your house. I say in the process of clearing the house, this house, there are a great many things that are going to happen. You will have clairvoyance, the so-called `siddhis' and all the rest of it. They will all happen. But if you are caught in them, you cannot proceed further. If you are not caught in them, the heavens are open to you. You are asking, Pupul, is there a soil that has to be prepared, not in order to receive that, but the soil has to be prepared? Prepare, work at that, clean the house so completely that there isn't the shadow of escape. Then, we can ask, what is the state we are all talking about. If you are doing that, preparing, working at the ending of sorrow, not letting go, if you are working at that and you come along and say is there something known as kundalini power, then I am willing to listen. A: Sir, the reason why I objected is that in the Hatha yoga Pradipika text we make a statement that this investigation into kundalini is in order to strengthen you in your search. K: For God's sake, Achyutji, are you working at clearing up the house? A: Definitely. K: Now, what is the question? Is there an energy which is non-mechanistic, which is endless, renewing itself? I say there is. Most definitely. But it is not what you call kundalini. The body must be sensitive. If you are working, clearing up the house, the body becomes very sensitive. The body then has its own intelligence, not the intelligence which the mind dictates to the body. Therefore, the body becomes extraordinarily sensitive, not sensitive to its desires, or sensitive to wanting something, but it becomes sensitive per se. Right? Then, what happens? If you really want me to go into it, I'll do so. The people who speak of the awakening of kundalini, I question. They have not worked at the other, but say they have awakened kundalini. Therefore, I question their ability, their truth. I am not antagonistic, but I am questioning it. A man who eats meat, wants publicity, wants this and that and says his kundalini is awakened, I say it is nonsense. There must be a cleansing of this house all the time. Then Pupul says, `Can we talk about an energy which I feel must exist?', not theoretically but of which she has had a glimpse, the feeling of it, an energy that is endless; and K comes along and says `yes', there is such a thing. There is an energy which is renewing itself all the time, which is not mechanistic, which has no cause, which has no beginning and therefore no ending. It is an eternal movement. I say there is. What value has it to the listener? I say `yes' and you listen to me. I say to myself what value has that to you? Will you go off into that and not clear up the house? P: That means, sir, that to the person who enquires, it is the cultivation of the soil which is the ending of suffering, which is essential. K: The only job. Nothing else. It is the most sacred thing, therefore you can't invite it. And you are all inviting it. Clearing the house demands tremendous discipline, not the discipline of control, suppression and obedience, you follow? In itself it demands tremendous attention. When you give your complete attention, then you will see a totally different kind of thing taking place, an energy in which there is no repetition, and energy that isn't coming and going. It is not as though I have it one day and a month later I don't have it. It implies, keeping the mind completely empty. Can you do that? VA: For a while. K: No, no. I have asked: Can the mind keep itself empty? Then, there is that energy. You don't even have to ask for it. When there is space, it is empty and therefore full of energy. So, in cleansing, in ending the things of the house, of sorrow, can the mind be completely empty, without any motive, without any desire? When you are working at this, keeping the house clean, other things come naturally. It isn't you who are preparing the soil for that. That is meditation. P: And the nature of that is the transformation of the human mind. K: You see as Apa Saheb was saying, we are programmed to centuries of conditioning. When there is the stopping of it, there is an ending of it. If you pull the plug out of the computer, it can't function any more. Now, the question is: Can that centre, which is selfishness, end? And not keep on and on? Can that centre end? When that ends, there is no movement of time. That is all. When the movement of the mind from the centre to the periphery stops, time stops. When there is no movement of selfishness, there is a totally different kind of movement. 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk 5th Public Talk 6th Public Talk 7th Public Talk - Longer, Unedited Versions - 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk 5th Public Talk 6th Public Talk 7th Public Talk TALKS IN SAANEN 1974 1ST PUBLIC TALK 14TH JULY 1974 I think it is rather important to realize that we are going to talk about serious things and to understand them we ourselves must be quite serious. This is not an entertainment, something you attend to one day and then forget the rest of the time. I mean by serious, to be concerned and to be committed totally to the understanding of what is happening around us; to try to find - if we can, indeed we should as it is our responsibility - the answer to these many many challenges that are offered to us. It is in that sense that I mean we should be serious, we should be concerned and committed. And to be committed means action, not just the theoretical acceptance of any particular system, it means to be committed and totally concerned to find the solution and therefore the action in the problems that face us, politically, economically, socially, morally and religiously. As we observe the world we see that it is in a dreadful state. There is so much confusion politically; and in the field of education, they are educating people, but for what? Where is it all going, educationally? Also religiously, which should be the most important issue in life, there is the denial of creed, the denial of all the assumed authority of the priest, the doctrines and the beliefs. Everything is going to pieces around us - of which I am sure you must be aware. Go to India, an ancient country, with an ancient culture and tradition, there they are destroying themselves inwardly; and the ultimate destruction, there, inwardly is the nuclear bomb - I hope you realize all this. Turn to the West and it is the same problem, poverty - not so much as in the East - and the decline of social morality. It is now looking for the new political leaders. A leader is a dangerous person in whom, in that one person, the whole of society is involved. Society is so complex. When you follow a leader, either you know where he is leading to -which he generally does not - or you must give your mind to the investigation of his theories, of his propositions and so on. That is, you must be capable as citizens of following what he is saying. All that is involved in leadership, political or otherwise. Unfortunately the politicians, right throughout the world, are not concerned with human beings, with the unity of man and his total welfare, but are only concerned with their particular party, with their particular system. As all governments are more or less corrupt, the politicians cannot see very far, they can only operate within a very small field, segregated, not concerned with the total understanding of man. We accept slogans, cliches, worn out theories, or we invent new theories, new systems, but always within the field of consciousness which man has carried throughout the centuries. Consciousness is its content; without its content there is no consciousness, as we know it. Please, as we said, we are investigating together these problems. Therefore you must partake in the investigation, you must share in it, you must be involved in it. You must not merely listen to the speaker, accepting or rejecting what he says, but together in fellowship, in co-operation, try to find out what the world is like around us and what the world is inside of us; whether there is a relationship between the inner and the outer; or are they one indivisible? And that is our concern. We must be committed to the understanding of this. And that is why we must not be led, but investigate together; therefore there is no authority, there is no leader in investigating. To investigate you must be totally concerned, not one day be concerned and the rest of the time forget it. You must be concerned day after day, month after month, year after year, all your life - because this is your life. So, where do we find the answer, the logical, sane, healthy answer to all these problems; not only to the problems that lie outside of us, the wars, the violence, the cunning politicians, the preparation for war and talking about peace - you know what is happening around us, it is wicked, diabolical, appalling - but also the problem of our relationship to that? We have to find out what our place is in all this, our responsibility. To be responsible means to respond adequately or totally to what is happening; and to respond to it we must be deadly serious, right through our life. That is why, if you are going to be here for the next three or four weeks and you are going to share with what the speaker is saying, you have to listen, to find out. To find out, not merely what the speaker is saying, but to find out for yourself the right answer, you must put aside you prejudices, your nationalities, your beliefs, your experiences, your knowledge, your hopes, everything, to find out. And that demands tremendous seriousness. I do not think most of us realize what is actually going on in the world. We read newspapers, watch the television, go to lectures, political, religious and all the rest of it; but all they give are superficial explanations, superficial demonstrations. But if one can go beyond all that, put all that aside and observe rather closely, one can see how man is deteriorating, degenerating. This degeneration takes place when one depends totally on the outer, that is, when matter, material, has become all important. When you look at all this, the divergence of opinions, the ideologies, the political systems, right, left, or centre, when everybody is talking or arranging, or trying to reform the institutions, the governments, you see it is all still action in the field of time, of thought and matter, I use words which are very simple, not those of any particular jargon or words which have a subtle or hidden meaning, but words as they exist in the dictionary. To communicate we must use simple, clear words. And in communication, we must find out not only the meaning of the words but also the meaning that lies behind them. Only then is there communication between the speaker and you. But if you are merely caught in words and the explanation of words, the semantic meaning of words, then you will miss what lies behind. To communicate requires a great deal of concern on both sides, a great deal of serious attention. When one sees what is happening, when one observes the politicians, the religious people, the various sects and denominations and so on, one sees that they are merely concerned with the operation of thought. Thought has created this world, the world of politics, the world of economics, the world of business, of social morality and the whole of the religious structures - whether in India, or here or anywhere - and it is all based on thought, whether it is Jewish thought, Arabic thought, Christian thought or Hindu thought; it is all essentially the operation of thought as matter. When you meditate you are still caught within the pattern of that thought, still within that area of consciousness which is put together by thought. When you try to find political answers it is still within that area. All our problems, all our desires to find answers to those problems, are within that consciousness. If you have talked to any serious politicians, you will have seen, as the speaker has, in India, in America, here and elsewhere, that they are all trying to find an answer, a political philosophy, a reformation of institutions, within that field which thought has created. So thought is trying to find an answer to that which it has created, an answer to the mess it has made in our personal relationships, in our relationship with the community, in our relationship with the government and so on and so on, all within that field. Politics, unfortunately, play such an important part in our social, moral and environmental conditioning and the politicians - the so-called 'right on top of the ladder' - if they are at all serious are trying to find an answer to all these problems in the field, or in the function, of thought. That is so. It is not my invention, it is not what I think, it is a fact. Thought has divided the world into the Americans, the Communists, the Socialists, the Germans, the Swiss, the Hindus, the Buddhists and all the other religious divisions which it has created. So, is there an answer to all these problems through the operation of thought? Even your meditations, even your gods, your Christs and your Buddhas and all the rest, they are the creations of thought, thought which is matter, which can only operate within the field of time. If thought will give no answer to all these problems, then what will? That is what we are going to investigate, not only this morning, but right through all these discussions and talks. We think that through thought, through will, through ambition, through drive and aggression, we can solve all these problems, the problems of personal relationship between you and another by the substitution of new religions for the old traditions which, dead already in India, are brought over here or to America by gurus, who are soaked in tradition. What is consciousness? What is the operation of thought? Thought has created everything around us, the whole technological field with all its scientific knowledge and the culture in which we live - the Christian culture, the Western culture or the Eastern culture, they are all put together by thought. The gods, the saviours - our thought has created them. God has not created us in his image; we have created god in our image and we pursue that image which thought has created and we call that religious activity. When one says,'I am conscious' it implies that I am conscious of everything happening around me as much as possible and further, it means I am aware of what is happening within that consciousness. The investigation of the content of consciousness implies also what lies beyond - if there is something beyond the so-called consciousness. All your meditations are in that area; all your pursuits of pleasure, fear, greed, envy, brutality, violence, are within that field. And thought is always endeavouring to go beyond it, asserting the ineffable, the unnameable, unknowable and so on. The content of consciousness is consciousness. Your consciousness, or another's consciousness, is its content. If it is born in India, then all the traditions, superstitions, hopes, fears, sorrows, anxieties, violence, sexual demands, aggression, the beliefs, dogmas and creeds of that country are the content of its consciousness. Yet the content of consciousness is extraordinarily similar, whether of one born in the East or in the West. Consider, look at, your own consciousness, if you can. You are brought up in a religious culture as a Christian, believing in saviours, rituals, creeds and dogmas on one side and social immorality, accepting wars, accepting nationalities and their division and therefore restricting economic expansion and consideration for others, on the other side. Your personal unhappiness, your ambitions, your fears, your greeds, your aggressiveness, your demands, your loneliness, your sorrow, your lack of relationship with another, the isolation, frustration, confusion, misery, all that is consciousness, whether you are of the East or the West; with variations, with joys, with more knowledge or less knowledge, all that is the content of your consciousness. Without that content there is no consciousness as we know it. All education, in the schools, the colleges, the universities, is based on the acquiring of more knowledge, more information, but functioning always within this area. Any political reformation, based on a new political philosophy, instead of the Marxist philosophy or other established philosophy, is an invention still within that area. And so man goes on suffering, unhappy, lonely, fearful of death and of living, hoping for some great leader to come and take him out of his misery - a new saviour, a new politician. In this confusion we are so irresponsible, so that out of our own disorder we are going to create tyrants, hoping they will create order within this area. This is what is happening outside of us and inside. So what shall we do? It is not what the politicians will do, because they like us are confused, unhappy, ambitious, envious just as we are. Any leader we choose will be like us; we will not choose a leader who is totally different from us. So that is the actual picture of our life: conflict, inside and outside, struggle, one opposed to the other, appalling selfishness - you know the whole picture. The first thing that behoves one, if one is at all serious, and one must be serious when there is so much sorrow in the world, is to find out for oneself through careful investigation, slow, patient, hesitating investigation, if there is any other way of solving all these problems other than through the operation of thought. Is there an action which is not based on thought? Is there an intelligence which is not the function or the result of thought, which is not put together by thought, which does not come about through cunning, through friction and struggle, but something entirely different? That is what I want to communicate. Therefore one has to listen -not just to the speaker - but to the very action of listening. How does one listen? Does one ever really listen at all? Is one free to listen, or does one always listen with the cunning operations of thought, with interpretation, or prejudice? One has to listen, if one is free, to the content of one's consciousness; listen, not only to what is at the surface, which is fairly simple, but to the deeper layers of it, that means listen to the totality of consciousness, So from that arises the question: how does one listen to and look at one's consciousness? The speaker was born in a certain country where he absorbed all the prejudices, the irrationalities and the superstitions, the beliefs, the class differences, as a Brahmin; there the young mind absorbed all this, the tradition, the rituals, the extraordinary orthodoxy and the tremendous discipline imposed by that group upon itself. And then he moves to the West, again he absorbs from all that is there; the content of his consciousness is what has been put into it, what he has learnt, what his thoughts are and the thought which recognizes its own emotions and so on. That is the content and the consciousness of this person. Within that area he has all the problems, the political, religious, personal, communal, you follow? - all the problems are there. And not being able to solve them himself, he looks to books, to others, asking: ` Please tell me what to do, how to meditate, what shall I do about my personal relationship with my wife, or my girl-friend or whatever it is, between myself and my parents, should I believe in Jesus or in Buddha, or the new guru who comes along with a lot of nonsense?' - you follow? - searching for a new philosophy of life, a new philosophy of politics and so on, all within this area. And man has done this from time immemorial. There is no answer within that area. You may meditate for hours, sitting in a certain posture, breathing in a special way, but it is still within that area because you want something out of meditation. I do not know if you see all this? So there is this content of unconsciousness, thought, dull, stupid, traditional, recognising all its emotions - otherwise they are not emotions - always it is thought, which is the response of memory, knowledge and experience, operating. Now, can the mind look at it? Can you look at the operation of thought? Now, when you look, who is the observer who is looking at the content, is it different from the content? This is really a very important question to ask and to which to find an answer. Is the observer different from the content and therefore capable of changing, altering and going beyond the content? Or is it that the observer is the same as the content? first look: if the observer - the `I' that looks, the 'me' that looks - is different from the observed then there is a division between the observer and the observed, therefore conflict - I must not do this, I should do that - I must get rid of my particular prejudice and adopt a new prejudice - get rid of my old gods and take on new gods. So when there is a division between the observer and the observed there must be conflict. That is a principle, that is a law. So, do I observe the content of my consciousness as if I were an outsider looking in, altering the pieces and moving the pieces to different places? Or am I the observer, the thinker, the experiencer, the same as that thought which is observed, experienced, seen? If I look at the content of my consciousness as an outsider observing then there must be conflict between what is observed and the observer. So what happens when I hear this statement that when there is a division between the observer and the observed, there is conflict? There must be conflict; on that division and in that conflict we have lived, the 'me' and he `not me', `we' and 'they'. If 'I', the observer, am different from anger, I try to control it, suppress it, dominate it, overcome it and all the rest and here is conflict. But is the observer different at all; or is he essentially the same as the observed? If he is the same then there is no conflict is there? The understanding of that is intelligence; then intelligence operates and not conflict. It would be a thousand pities if you did not understand this simple thing. Man has lived 'in conflict' and he wants peace, through conflict and there can never be peace through conflict - however much armament you may have, against another armament equally strong, there will never be peace. Only when intelligence operates will there be peace -intelligence which comes when one understands that there is no division between the observer and the observed. That insight into that very fact, that very truth, bring this intelligence. Have you got it? This is a very serious thing, or then you will see you have no nationality - you may have a Passport but you have no nationality -you have no gods, there is no outside authority, nor inward authority. The only authority then is intelligence, not the cunning intelligence of thought, which is mere knowledge operating within a certain area - that is not intelligence. So this is the first thing to understand when you look at your consciousness: this division between the thinker and the thought, between the observer and the observed, between the experiencer and the experienced is false, for they are one. There is no thinker if you do not think. Thought has created the thinker. So that is the first thing to understand, to have an insight into the truth of it, the fact of it, as palpable as you are sitting here, so that there is no conflict between the observer and the observed. So: what is the content of you consciousness, the hidden as well as the open? Can you look at it? But do not make an effort. This you can find out, not just sitting here but in your relationships. That is the mirror in which you will see; not by closing your eyes, or by going off into the woods, and thinking up some dreams, but in the actual fact of relationship between man, woman, your neighbour, your politician, your gods, your gurus, you will observe your reactions, your attitudes, your prejudices, your images, your constant groping and all the rest - it is in that. What you are doing now is merely ploughing and we can go on ploughing ploughing and never sowing. You can only sow when you observe your relationships and see what actually is taking place. From listening you move to looking; and you can look as much as you like and begin to distinguish various qualities and tendencies and all the rest of it, but if you look as an observer different from the observed then you are bound to create conflict, therefore further suffering. When you have the insight, the truth of it, that the observer is the observed, then conflict ceases altogether. Then a totally different kind of energy comes into operation. There are different kinds of energy: physical energy, from good food; there may be energy created by emotionalism, sentimentality; there is energy created by thought through various conflicts and tensions; within that field of energy we have lived. I am only putting it differently. And we are still trying to find greater energy within that field, to solve our problems which need tremendous energy. Now there is a different kind of energy, or the continuation of this energy in a totally different form, when the mind is completely operating, not in the field of thought, but intelligently. Can the mind observe its content without any choice as to the content - not choosing any part of the content"any part of the piece, but observing totally? Now, how is it possible to observe totally? When I look at a map of France, as I come from England and cross the Channel, I see the road leading to Gstaad. I can tell the mileage, I can see the direction, and that is very simple because it is marked on the map and I follow it. In doing that I do not look at any other part of the map because I know the direction in which I want to go to, so that that direction excludes all others. In the same way, a mind that is seeking in a given direction does not see the whole. If I want to find something, something which I think is real, then the direction is set and I follow that direction and my mind is incapable of seeing the totality. Now, when I look at the content of my consciousness - which is the same as yours - I have set a direction to go beyond it. A movement in a particular direction, seeking a certain pleasure, not wanting to do this or that, makes one incapable of seeing the whole. If I am a scientist I only see in a certain direction. If I am an artist, there again, if I have a certain talent or gift, I see only a certain direction. So the mind is incapable of seeing the totality and the immensity of that totality if there is a movement in a particular direction. So, can the mind have no direction at all? This is a difficult question - please listen to it. Of course the mind has to have direction when I go from here to the house, or when I have to drive a car, when I have to do some technical function, those are all directions. But I am talking of a mind that understands the nature of direction and therefore is capable of seeing the whole. When it sees the whole it can then also operate in direction. I wonder if you get this? If I have the whole picture in mind then I can take in the detail; but if my mind only operates in a detail then I cannot take in the whole. If I am concerned with my opinions, with my anxieties, with what I want to do, with what I must do, I cannot see the whole - obviously. If I come from India with my prejudices, superstitions and traditions I cannot see the whole. So my question is: can the mind be free of direction? - which does not mean that it is without direction. When it operates from the whole the direction becomes clear, very strong and effective. But when the mind only operates in a direction according to the pattern it has set for itself then it cannot see the whole. There is the content of my consciousness - the content makes my consciousness. Now, can I look at it as a whole? - without any direction, without any judgement, without any choice, just look, which implies no observer at all, for that observer is the past - can it look with that intelligence which is not put together by thought, for thought is the past? Do it - it requires tremendous discipline; not the discipline of suppression, control, imitation or conformity, but a discipline that is an act in which the truth is seen. The operation of truth creates its own action which is discipline. Can your mind look at its content, when you talk to another, in your gestures, in the way you walk, in the way you sit and eat, in the way you behave? Behaviour indicates the content of your consciousness - whether you are behaving according to pleasure, reward or pain, which are part of your consciousness. The psychologists are saying that, so far, man has been educated on the principle of punishment and reward, hell and heaven. Now they say he must be educated on the principle of reward. Do not punish him but reward him - which is the same thing. They go from one thing to another, thinking they are solving everything. To see the absurdity of punishment and reward is to see the whole; when you see the whole there is the operation of intelligence which functions when you behave; you are not then behaving according to reward or punishment. Behaviour exposes the content of your consciousness. You may hide yourself behind a polished behaviour, a behaviour that is very carefully drilled, but such behaviour is merely mechanical. From that arises another question: is the mind entirely mechanical? - or is there any portion of the brain where it is not mechanical at all? I will go over what has been said this morning. Outside of us, in the political world with its new political philosophies, in the economic world, in the religious world, in the social world, and so on, man is searching, searching. There are gods, new gurus, new leaders. And when you observe all this very clearly you see that man is functioning within the field of thought. Thought essentially is never free, thought is always old, because thought is the response of memory as knowledge and experience; thought is matter, it is of the material world. And thought is trying to escape from that material world into a non-material world and trying to escape into the non-material world by thought is still material. We have all the moral, social and economic problems of the individual and the collective. The individual is essentially, intrinsically, part of the collective; the individual is different from the collective, he may have different tendencies, different occupations, different moods and so on, but he is intrinsically part of the culture, which is society. Now, those are facts as to what is going on about us; the facts as to what is going on inside us are very much the same. We are trying to find an answer to the major problems of our human life through the operation of thought - thought which the Greeks imposed upon the West, with their political philosophy, with their mathematics and so on. Thought has not found an answer, and it never will. So we must go then into the whole structure of thought and the content which it has created as consciousness. We must then observe the operation of thought in relationship, in our daily life. That observation implies having an insight as to whether it is a fact that the observer is different from the observed, for if there is a difference there must inevitably be conflict, just as there is between two ideologies - two ideologies which are the inventions of thought, conditioned by the culture in which they have developed. Now, can you, in your daily life, observe this? In such observation you will find out what your behaviour is, whether it is based on the principle of reward and punishment - as most of our behaviour is, however polished and refined. From that observation one begins to learn what real intelligence is - not the intelligence which is obtained from a book, or out of experience, that is not intelligence at all. Intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with thought. Intelligence operates when the mind sees the whole, the endless whole, not my country, my problems, my little gods, my meditations, whether this is right or this is wrong; it sees the whole implication of living. And this quality of intelligence has its own tremendous energy. 14th July 1974. TALKS IN SAANEN 1974 2ND PUBLIC TALK 16TH JULY 1974 We were saying that the world outside and in us is in such a chaotic condition and that the politicians, the leaders, the religious priests, are all trying to solve our problems in the field of thought. This has been so for centuries upon centuries; trying to solve all our human problems at the level of thought. One sees that suffering still goes on, there are endless wars, governments are more or less corrupt, politicians play a crooked game and ideologies and systems have taken the place of morality and intelligence. Seeing all this, objectively, without any prejudice, without being dedicated to any particular ideology or a system, one observes that thought is divisive and that excellence in thought is not necessarily excellence in conduct. As we said, these are serious talks, not mere entertainment, not something to amuse or to be cried over. We are concerned with something one has to go through, investigate deeply, as deeply as one can, verbally and non verbally. That demands a great deal of care, affection and consideration, a sense of intimate communication with each other. It demands that you and I share the thing together; that you share it, not by just listening to a series of words or ideas or concepts because they are not ideas or concepts with which to agree or disagree, but rather, by really taking part in it with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your energy; then such serious concern and commitment does reveal a great deal, does reveal, not only the source of our thought and its mischief, but also the source of action. We live by action, we cannot possibly avoid action; you may withdraw from the world into a monastery but that is still action; you may take a vow, that is action. You may specialize in a particular field which gives you an opportunity for your talent and a career, that is action. Action is also in relationship between you and another. The movement of life is action. And thought, in civilizations so far, has produced actions which are conflicting, contradictory, opposing, therefore breeding great mischief and misery. Is excellence in thought and therefore action, possible - or is there always conflict when thought produces action? You are following all this? This is your life and if you would understand your life, your behaviour, your conduct, your relationship, and in its confusion find out what to do so that action is excellent at all levels, then you must enquire if there is an action which is not fragmented by thought. Thought is fragmentary in its very nature and yet through thought you are trying to find at all levels an action which will not be contradictory, which will not be regretful, which will be whole, total, complete. We must examine very carefully whether such action can be the product of thought before we take the next step. Is there an action which is supremely excellent yet not based on the movement of thought? Why is thought, upon which we live, upon which our whole social morality is dependent, divisive? Thought is matter, it is the response of the past; it creates the movement of time, as yesterday, today and tomorrow. Thought has its source and root in the past; and having its root in the past it must create time as movement. One sees that by its very nature, by its very function and structure, that it has its being essentially in the past, it lives in tradition, in the accumulated knowledge that society has acquired and in the great accumulation of scientific knowledge, all of which is in the past. Thought is essentially a movement from the past, therefore it must be divisive; it can pretend, or stipulate, or conceive, that it is beyond time, it can imagine a timeless state, but it is still thought. It can pretend that it is going beyond its own limits, it is still thought. So thought creates a boundary of time around itself and that is the factor of division. We are all reared in the field of thought. Education is the movement in thought, the getting of more and more knowledge, the refinement of thought and so on and so on. Thought being divisive then whatever action it creates must be fragmented which therefore gives rise to conflict. This is the principle. Man has lived, historically as we know it, in a series of crises and responses which inevitably breed more conflict. One sees in the modern world what is going on. There is a crisis, thought tries to answer it and in the very answering it more problems are created. Arms are supplied to one country knowing well that that is going to create more trouble, and so on and so on. So, can thought ever bring about an action that is total, whole, sane not contradictory? Because our life is contradictory. We live at different levels, at the business level, the family level, the scientific level, the religious level, or at the artistic level; each opposing the other, each specializing in his own department. Specialization - which is the fashion now - becomes exclusive and therefore contradictory and therefore destructive. The man who specializes in religion, he is called a saint and is the most destructive man because he has specialized in one department - like the military man and so on and so on. So, thought trying to excellent in its action specializes and brings about more conflict, more division. Each specialization has its own ambitious end, each career has its own reward, contradictory, opposed to affection, care, consideration and love. Looking at it, one asks: is there an action which is whole, not fragmentary; an action in which there is no regret, no sense of fulfilment, no sense of frustration? Is there such an action? Because that is what we are asking all our life, for whatever we do brings a certain pain, a certain confusion or a certain reward in the pursuit of which we create more division. It is inevitable and natural and logical to ask if there is an action which is not born out of the movement of thought. May I go into something which may appear to be different, but which is not? We need energy; we have energy, physical energy, emotional energy, the energy of hate, the energy of lust, the energy of great passion and the energy of great tension which is brought about through the sense of frustration, division and lack of fulfilment. As one gets older the body becomes rather worn out, there comes disease and pain and energy wastes away. Most of our energy is the product of conflict - ` I am this, I should be that' - of fight and the aggressive desire to continue in a given direction. There is the energy that is brought about through an ideal, through commitment to that ideal; the whole Communist world is based on that, from the beginning of Lenin until now; destroy people by the million to get what you think is right. And that gives one tremendous energy. The saint, dedicated to an ideal, to a picture, to an imagination, to a formula, does have an extraordinary energy. The idealists have an extraordinary energy. In any form of specialization energy is required. The more you specialize the more energy you have, discarding all other forms of energy. This is what one sees, not only in oneself but also outside. Thought creates its own energy, as is happening in the Western world; to produce such a marvellous machine as a submarine one must have tremendous energy and co-operation, energy that is brought about through an idea, through organized thought. And this kind of energy is always, in the deep sense of that word, destructive, because it is divisive. Now, is there an energy which is not destructive, which is not divisive, which is not mechanical, which is not based on idea or a commitment to an ideology? Is there an energy which is not in any way involved in the field of time as thought, movement? Life is action, in the very living all relationship is action, movement in action. And that movement, that action, is based on thought. At present, all political, religious, social and economic life and moral relativism - which is rampant in the world now - are based on thought, which is divisive, contradictory and breeding misery. Is there an action totally unrelated to all that? To find out one must have energy, neither mere intellectual energy, with all its accumulated knowledge, nor emotional energy, which is recognizable by thought and therefore still part of thought, but an energy which can come so as to bring about a total transformation in the very process of the mind? To enquire very deeply if there is an action which is not based on the movement of thought, you need a great deal of energy, not the energy of trying to find an end, not the energy that you have when you are moving in a particular direction, but the energy that can change the content of consciousness. To put it differently: one knows what the content of one's consciousness is, if one is at all awake and aware, attending to one's behaviour, watching, listening. The desire to change that content is a movement in a particular direction; that does give energy but it is divisive. Yet one realizes that the content must be totally changed because we cannot go on as we are, unless we want to destroy the whole of humanity. The content makes consciousness, therefore when there is total transformation of the content there is a different kind of - I won't call it consciousness - a different level altogether. To bring about that change one needs tremendous energy. So there must be freedom from direction - please see the logic of it, the sanity of it - there must be freedom from a conclusion, though a conclusion may give one a great deal of energy, but a kind of energy that is wasteful. The mind must be freed of the response of thought, it must be free of ideals because they again have direction. The mind must be free of all the divisive movements of thought, as nationality, as race, as religious division. Now, can your mind be free of all that? If it cannot then it is not possible, do what you will - stand on your head for ten thousand years, or meditate sitting in a posture, breathing rightly, for another ten thousand years - you will never find the other. So, can the mind see how stupid, how unintelligent, ideals are; can it see the truth of it - not say that they are wrong and put them away - for when you see the truth of it you are free of it; not as when you logically or historically examine, but as when you see something poisonous you drop it; there is no conflict because intelligence sees it is too stupid to go that way. Can you free your mind from all this? Do you free it one thing at a time, or do you free it totally? If you free it one thing at a time, that takes energy, saying, ` Well, I'll look at my nationality, how stupid it is, I'll drop it: I'll look at my ideals saying they are too old fashioned, they do not lead anywhere, they breed conflict, I'll drop them.' Will you free the mind layer by layer, which will take time, which will take analysis - and analysis is paralysis? Will you go through that process taking long years?, Or is there a way of looking at all this totally? - and therefore being totally free of it. Traditionally it is said that you must go step by step; first you must get rid of this and then that, control your body, breathe rightly. Not only traditional but modern psychology says, go step by step, analyse, tear away layer by layer. You can spend years, until you die, doing that. Now, is that not a wastage of energy? If it is, then how shall the mind empty itself of its content so that it has a totally different kind of energy, a totally different existence? The content of my mind is the content of your mind. The content of your consciousness is the content of my consciousness, slightly modified, with a little more or a little less colour, a little more or a little less elaborate, more artistic and less and so on, but it is more or less the same as your consciousness. The mind becomes aware of this and it says, ` How can I be aware of the totality of it?' - not only of the conscious but the unconscious. I know I can strip layer after layer, both of the conscious as well as of the unconscious; I know I can go through that process, taking time, analysing, knowing the danger of analysis. I can do that. That is the traditional, accepted way to do this - if you are serious and so interested. And I see that that takes infinite time, because every step in analysis must be accurate, otherwise the next step will be corrupted by the previous analysis. So, each analysis must be complete, true and final, otherwise I am lost. And can such analysis take place? And who is the analyser? Is not the analyser the analysed? So I see that that is not going to do a thing. So what am I to do? You understand my question? What is my mind to do when it has seen the absurdity of this? Now, has it actually seen the absurdity of it, or does it imagine it has seen it because somebody has said that it is absurd - because we are secondhand people - so that I am accepting the authority of another when I say, `Yes, that is absurd'? That is a verbal assertion without any reality; that acceptance has no validity; it does not produce results. So the mind discards authority, whether traditional or the authority I have cultivated out of my own desires and selfishness; my authority which asserts that I know. The mind totally discards authority. Not the authority of law, I am obviously not talking about that, but the psychological authority of someone who tells you what to do because you are in confusion and look to somebody who will free you from this confusion - out of your disorder creating the authority. It is historically so: wherever there is disorder a man springs up and tyrannically brings about some kind of order -which is total disorder. So, can the mind put away authority because it sees the truth of it, the significance of it, the nature of it? - not as a reaction against authority, which is what is going on. When you react against authority you are creating another authority - that is obvious. So, can the mind, your mind, be free of this traditional approach. traditional analysis, introspectively trying to improve, because you see the truth of being free of it; therefore there is no guru, no saviour, there are no steps through meditation to come upon something extraordinary - there is something extraordinary, but not through this way. Can the mind put away all this, deny all this, without any resistance? To do that you must look. You must look outwardly and inwardly; hear the music of the world and the discord of the world and the music inwardly and the discord outwardly, because both are the same, we are an intrinsic part of the world. To do this we require energy and this energy is not brought about by concepts, by words. This energy comes when you have the insight into the disorder of a mind which functions mechanically in the movement of thought. So, no belief, no idea, no concept, no ideal, no commitment of any kind in that field. Then, through negation of what is false - not through resistance or reaction to the false - through choiceless rejection of what is false, you have a different kind of energy. It is simple enough. If you do climb a mountain you must discard all the things that you have been carrying on the plain, you must put them all aside. It is far more important to understand attachment and the corrupting factors of thought - which are attachment and power, domination in different forms, the corruption of property and possessions - than the search, or the taking of vows. Most of us are attached to possessions, whether the possession of an antique table which you look after and polish very carefully, or a house, or a person, or an idea, or attached to a particular form of experience, attached to a group and so on and so on. Why is the mind attached, to our looks, our hair, our worries? - there are so many things we are attached to. Why? And knowing that possessions in any form are one of the major corrupting factors in life we say `Do not possess, have a few clothes that are necessary but do not possess, take a vow of non-possession'. In that there is a lot of travail, 'I want that; I must give it up, I have taken a vow'. Possessions corrupt and we say we must be detached from possessions; so then there is all the conflict involved in that. Understanding attachment is much more important than detachment. Why is there attachment? Not, how to be detached, but, why the mind is attached - you see the difference? Why are you attached to your house, to your wife, to your girl, to your ideas, to your meditations, to your system - why? What would happen if you were not attached? Attachment gives a certain occupation to the mind; you constantly think about something. This constant occupation is one of the factors about which the brain and the mind says, `Yes, I must be occupied with something - with my god, with my sex, with my drink - I must be occupied' - with the kitchen or with some social order, or commune, or whatever it is. Out of this demand for occupation there is attachment, you hold on to something. Why must the mind be so occupied? What would happen if it was not so occupied? Would it go astray? Would it disintegrate? Would it feel utterly naked, empty and would the fear of that emptiness demand occupation? - therefore the importance of the furniture, the book, the idea and so on. Out of the empty feeling and loneliness from not being totally whole, the mind is attached. Can the mind live, be vital, energetic, full of depth, without attachment? Of course it can. One asks: is love attachment? - not that love is detachment. When love is attached or detached then it is painful - which we all know, we go through that ugly state. Power is another form of corruption, political power, religious power, power in the business world, power in the exercise of a certain talent that one has - the pleasure of power. When you dominate somebody, your cook or your servant, your wife or your husband, or somebody, there is tremendous pleasure. That is another factor of corruption. That energy, which is so necessary to bring about a transformation in the content of consciousness, is dissipated in all these ways. Can you see all this as fact, as a dangerous fact? - not a relative danger but a total danger for human beings. Now, if you see that as real danger, as you would see the danger of a falling rock, you move away from it instantly and you are free of it. To observe this you need a certain sensitivity, both physical as well as psychological and you cannot have this sensitivity if you are indulging in all kinds of things - drink, sex, overworking - you know the whole business. So, if you are at all serious, if you give your attention, your care, your affection to this, then you will see for yourself that out of this freedom from the division which thought has created, there is another kind of energy, which is intelligence. That intelligence is not put together by thought; it is not the cunning intelligence of a politician or a priest or a businessman. It comes out of the freedom which is perceiving the falseness, the unreality of all that. Can your mind see it totally? - it cannot see it totally if it has any direction at all. An intelligent mind acts in the field of thought intelligently, sanely, without resistance; it is free from the structure and implications of attachment, from the action of attachment, from the pursuit of power with all its complications, the ruthlessness of it. It sees the dividing process of thought, and seeing that clearly, totally, it has energy; that energy is intelligence. Having that energy, that intelligence, it can operate in the field of thought, not the other way round. One can see that there is no division between the outside and the inside, it is an interrelationship. One sees it; and one needs energy to transform the mind. So one discards everything that is wasteful, every thing that is psychological, everything that breeds division and conflict within the mind. It can be done only when there is an observation of it, not a resistance to it. There is such observation only when the observer is the observed. The observer is the past, put together by thought in terms of experience, knowledge, memory, tradition; they are the essence of the observer. What he observes, which is the result of thought, is still thought. The chaos in the world, the misery, the starvation, the poverty, the brutality, the violence, the mess that is going on, the madness that is going on, is created by thought. And it is the observer who says,'I must change all that' - if he is at all intelligent, if he is at all awake and not concerned with his own little pattern of life. But is the observer different from what he observes? He is put together by thought also, so he is the observed. Now when that takes place not as a verbal statement but as a reality, conflict ceases and the mind goes beyond the limitations which thought has imposed on action. Now can you do this? If you cannot, why not? Is it because you are indolent, lazy, indifferent, not only to your own sorrow, to your own suffering, to your own misery, but to the misery of millions of people, to what is going on in Russia, in India, everywhere? Are you totally indifferent to all that, because you want to find God, you want to meditate, you want to learn how to breathe properly, how to have the right kind of sexual relationship and this and that? If you are concerned with the whole - you understand? - with the whole of humanity, not just your neighbour or your wife, but with the whole of humanity, then when you see that whole you can put the detail in order. But without the perception of the whole you cannot put the detail in order. That is why the politicians are failing, they never answer this problem, neither do the analysts, nor the priests - nobody does. It is only you and I, if we are utterly responsible, concerned, serious, committed, who will be able to answer this question because we have seen the whole and therefore are extraordinarily alive and intelligent and yet able to function in detail. Questioner:Is the operation of intelligence insight? Krishnamurti: What is insight - to have an insight into something? To have insight into attachment: what does that mean? To see what the nature of attachment is, what it does, why it arises. What is the structure of attachment and what are the responses and actions of attachment? To have an insight into all that you must look at attachment, your attachment. Your attachment to your possessions: have you ever looked at it? Have you ever looked at your ideas, your opinions? - why you have a thousand opinions? That is another occupation of the mind, to have opinions; and you think it is extraordinarily important to have opinions. To have insight into attachment means that you go behind the word, you go behind your reactions of asserting and not asserting and you see how the mind has built up this whole process of attachment. It is to observe it; and you can only observe it when you are not against it, when you are not opposed to it, when you do not want to retain or to discard it. You can only observe when you see that the observer is that thing which he is observing; he has created the attachment and then tries to disassociate himself from it, tries to change it, control it, shape it, deny it, alter it, go beyond it and all the rest of it. Now, when you have an insight of that kind, then out of that insight comes intelligence. Simple, Sir, but you have to do it - not endlessly talk about it. Questioner: How can one live without foundations? Krishnamurti: What do you mean by foundation? This is the question for most of us; we need a basis, a foundation, a something from which to start, on which we can rely, something which says `that' is so. And then on that we build, we move; we say there is God, millions and millions have said there is God and on that they have built their life, that is their foundation. I may have a family, children, my responsibilities to them that is my foundation. Others may have the foundation of the ideology that the State as the only god - the Communists - and that is mine - you follow? Each one adopts a foundation according to his own temperament, according to his own conditioning in the culture in which he is born. So we say that a foundation, a basis, is necessary. Now, who has built that basis - Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, Stalin and so on, laid a foundation for you and me; if you accept that, on that you start? If I am a Catholic or a Hindu that is my basis. Now, how are these bases created? -obviously by thought - thought in different forms, in different manifestations. Now why does the mind need such foundations? Please ask that question of yourself. Why do you need a foundation? Is it because without it you would have no rudder, no direction, every whiff of wind would push you in every direction? Now, see what happens if I have a foundation; say for instance, if I have a foundation as a Hindu, what takes place? I live according to the Hindu tradition, according to the beliefs and dogmas handed down through the centuries. It is the past and that is my foundation. The result of that foundation is that I consider that I am not as you - you who are a Muslim, Buddhist; I am not as you; I am willing to tolerate you - toleration is the invention of the intellect - to live amicably, but that has nothing to do with reality because I am rooted in my foundation as a Hindu. So there is conflict between you and me, me a Hindu and you a Muslim, a Catholic, and so on, a believer in God and a non-believer in God, in Jesus, in Buddha. So I say to myself: "Why should I have a foundation at all?' If I had no foundation, would I go wrong? Does a foundation give me direction, or does it bring confusion? A foundation as a Hindu, or as a Catholic, Communist, Socialist, whatever it is, breeds more confusion, greater misery, greater division. You have your conclusions, your foundation, and I have mine. So I see that foundations have brought man to great sorrow and misery: he is willing to fight and kill, for what? - for ideas, which are part of reasoned thought. And if my foundation is based on thought then I live in conflict and misery for the rest of my life. That is obvious. So I say to myself: can I live without any foundation? I know the tree cannot live without foundations, it must have roots in the soil, water, sunshine, darkness. The foundation of food, clothes, shelter, I need, but is a foundation of ideas necessary? Now, can I live without any such foundation? I can only answer that when I see the nature and the structure of that foundation. The very negation of that foundation is intelligence. Then wherever the mind is, in a palace, in a hovel, when walking along by yourself in woods and looking at the beauty of light and darkness, at the shadows and the immeasureable sky, that intelligence is in operation, and it needs no foundation at all. That intelligence is not mine or yours, it is intelligence. Questioner: I see the implications of attachment but nevertheless I would like to ask you if there is not a certain biological attachment, as there are attachments in the animal kingdom. How can you possibly see the human race, composed of millions of people, with no possible attachments among themselves. Do you see, in all reality, the prospect of the human race with no attachment? Krishnamurti: Are we talking to the millions of people; in India, Mexico and America are millions and millions of people, are we talking to them about attachment? Or are we talking about attachment to you? Because the millions of people are not concerned with this. They say,'for god's sake give me food, clothing and shelter, I am starving, I am diseased' - they are not concerned with this. And you are asking: how do you answer those millions of people and ask them to be detached, or not be detached? You cannot, We are talking to you. If in your consciousness - which is the consciousness of millions of people -there is a transformation then that transformation affects the millions. Then you will have a different kind of education, a different kind of society - you follow - but not to ask: how can the millions and millions accept this idea of detachment? Of course you are attached to your mother when you are very young, you need a mother and a father to look after you; the child needs complete security, the more security of the right kind, then the happier it is. Millions of people want security, they think they will find it in attachment, in their country, in their little house, they are willing to fight the rest of the world for their country - that is their attachment. The Catholic is willing to fight the Protestant for his attachment. So for the moment we are concerned with the people who are in this tent. You are here. We are talking to you. Can you change the content of you consciousness so that in that transformation you affect the consciousness of man? This is a fact. The so-called Catholics have for two thousand years talked to individuals, they have conditioned them and their consciousness has accepted this conditioning and you have thereby been Catholics, Protestants or Communists, and you have functioned from there, if you have been at all serious in what you have accepted. In that way your consciousness has affected the world. Go to a village in India; you find a Christian cross there; the villagers do not know what it is all about, but there is a nice place to sit and chat, or sing or do something or other and they go there. But it has affected the consciousness of the world by conditioning it to a certain idea. Now what we are saying is quite to the contrary. In the transformation of your consciousness with all its content, you have freedom, and in that freedom you have a tremendous energy, an energy which is the essence of intelligence.That intelligence will operate in every field if you are so aware of the total human existence. Everybody needs clothes, food and shelter, that is prevented by division, the economic, racial and national divisions - America is more powerful than Russia and so on - you follow? - that is what is happening. Once we talked about this to a prominent politician and he said, `My dear man, that is impossible, that is so far away, a marvellous but distant life and ideal. I like what you are saying but it is impracticable. We have to deal with the immediate'. And the immediate is their power, their position, their ideology - the most impracticable and the most destructive thing. You know all this. Do you mean to say that if all the politicians in the world got together and said,' Look, forget your ideologies, forget your power, let us be concerned with human suffering, with human needs, food, clothing, shelter, then could we not solve this problem?' Of course they could. But nobody wants to. Everybody is concerned with their own immediate sickness, their ideologies. 16th July 1974 TALKS IN SAANEN 1974 3RD PUBLIC TALK 18TH JULY 1974 At the last two meetings we were concerned with the understanding of our actions, of our behaviour and the content of consciousness. Unless we understand the nature and the structure of this consciousness in which we act, through which all our behaviour and all our thinking takes place, until we understand that, it seems to me, we shall always be floundering, confused, always living in constant battle within ourselves and outside; we shall never be able to find peace, a sense of deep inward tranquillity. In a world that is getting madder and madder every day, where there is so much brutality, violence, deception and chicanery, it is so necessary that all of us should understand this immense problem of living. We are going to concern ourselves this morning, with what is called materialism. Materialism means the evaluating of life as matter, matter in its movement and modification; also matter as consciousness and will. That is what the materialists maintain. We have to go into it to find out if there is anything more than matter and if we can go beyond it. This is not merely an intellectual amusement and investigation but rather a deep enquiry as to whether our minds and our whole social, economic and religious life is entirely material, in the sense that materialism means having an opinion that all existence is matter, its movement, its modifications, including also its consciousness and will. We are ruled by our senses - taste, smell, touch and so on - and they play a great part in our life. And thought, the capacity to think, is also material. The brain - if you examine it, if you are rather aware of its activities - holds in its cells memory, memory as experience and know, ledge. What these cells hold is material; so thought is matter. And you can imagine, or construct through thought, as thought, `otherness', that is to say, other than matter; but it is still matter as imagination. We know that we live in a material world, based on our sensations, desires and emotions and we construct a consciousness which is essentially the product of thought with its content. We know that, if we do not just romanticize but go into it very deeply and seriously; yet knowing that, we say there must be 'otherness', something beyond that. So thought begins to investigate the ` other'. Yet when thought investigates the ` other' it is still material. It is important to understand this because we are all so romantically minded, all our religions are sentimental and romantic. Living in this very small field of materialism we want to have something much great beyond. That is a natural desire. So thought constructs a verbal or non-verbal structure of god, otherness, immensity, timelessness and so on and so on, but it is still the product of thought, so it is still material. So thought creates the form outside, thinking that that form, that image, that prototype is not material. But that form is the product of thought, the ideal is still the product of thought, so it is still material. If you go to India, or elsewhere in the East, they will tell you they accept that, but they say there is a higher self, there is a superconsciousness, which dominates the material, or encloses the material; as in the West you have the soul. They call it by a Sanskrit word, Atman and so on. But the Atman, the super consciousness, the soul, is still the product of thought. Thought is matter; whatever its movements, inside, outside, in trying to go beyond itself, it is still material. So the question arises: is the mind mechanical? That is, in your mind, are your thoughts, your feelings, your reactions, your responsibilities, your relationships, your ways, your opinions and so on and so on,merely mechanical? - that is, responding according to its conditioning, according to environmental influence and so on. If that is the totality of the mind then we live in a tremendous, inescapable prison. This has been the problem of man right through the ages. He knows he lives by the senses, by his desires, by touch, by appetites, sexual, intellectual, otherwise, and he questions - `is that all?' Then he begins to invent - the gods, the super gods, superconsciousness and so on and so on. Having invented and projected a form he pursues it thinking he is tremendously idealistic, or tremendously religious. But his pursuit of what he calls god or truth is still the pursuit of the product of thought, which is material. See what he has been doing. See what his churches, temples and the mosques have done to him, to each one of us, sense this great deception on which he has been fed, which he thinks is extraordinarily idealistic. When one realizes that, in seriousness, it is rather a shock, because one is stripped of all illusion. So one then begins to ask - if one has gone that far - is there a movement other than the movement of thought? How does one find out? If one is trying to find out if there is something beyond the material, then one must examine what is the cause of one's search. Is the cause of one's search an escape from this? You see, cause means motive. Is all one's enquiry motivated? Because if it is, the root of that is either the seeking of pleasure or the escape from fear; or if it is total dissatisfaction with what is, then it projects its own answer. Therefore to enquire into `the other' my mind must be without cause. As we said the other day and we are saying again today, there must be a transformation in the mind, not peripheral reformation, but a revolution deep in the mind, to solve our problems - the problems which thought has created, whether religious, economic, social or moral and so on. If one is really serious, not flippant, not merely amused by intellectual theories, or philosophies, that are invented by thought, then one must be concerned and totally committed to this question of transforming the content of consciousness; for it is in this content that makes up consciousness. We went into that, and asked: who is the entity that is to change it? We said that the observer is the observed and that when there is a division between the observer and the observed, the 'me' and the 'not me', then there is conflict. That conflict is essentially a waste of energy. And when you look into it and find that the observer is the observed, you remove conflict altogether and you have enormous energy because it is no longer wasted in conflict. Now this energy is either in the field of thought, or it is in energy totally different from thought. And we are asking now: if for a mind that is burdened, conditioned and shaped by materialistic thought, is there a movement other than that of thought? We said, to find that out we must look into the cause of this search. Where there is a cause there is time; the cause produces an effect and that effect again becomes a cause.Is this too difficult? It is not really difficult because this is our life. It becomes difficult when you treat it, or look at it, as something apart from our daily life. Put it differently. What is virtue, morality? Is morality transient? Is morality relative? Or is it absolute? For us, in the modern world, morality is relative, and that relativism is nearly destroying us. So one asks: what is virtue? Is there an absolute virtue; a sense of no hate under any circumstance? Is there a complete peace, an absolute peace, which can never be disturbed? Can one live without any sense of violence? Or is violence relative? - hate modified and so on. So what is virtue? If you hit me and I hit you back and apologize for it later, that becomes relative. If I have a cause for hating you, or disliking you, or being violent, that cause makes my action not complete, therefore relative. Is there a way of living which has no cause - because the moment you have a cause living becomes relative. If I have cause to love you because you give me comfort, psychologically, physically, sexually, morally, it is not love. So where there is a cause, action must be relative. But when there is no cause action will be absolute. See what takes place in your life, not in the explanation I am giving. If I depend on you, if I am attached to you, that dependence and attachment has a cause, it is because I am lonely, or I am unhappy, or I want companionship, I want your love, your affection, your care and so I am attached to you. From that attachment there is great sorrow, there is pain, because you do not love me, or you tolerate me, or give me a little of your affection and turn to somebody else, so there is jealousy, antagonism, hate and all the rest that follows. Where there is a cause, then action, morality, must be relative. Can the mind be free of form, free of the ideal, of that form as a cause, so that the mind is capable of going beyond itself. It is very simple really; words make it so difficult. Words are necessary in order to communicate, but if you merely live at the verbal level they are absolutely useless. It is like ploughing, ploughing, ploughing and you destroy the earth merely by ploughing. We have this problem, the problem which man right from the beginning has sought to solve, which is: is all life mechanical? Is all life material? - material in the sense of having an opinion, or evaluation, that all existence is matter, its movement, its modification - that mind and consciousness, with its will, is also matter; that your whole life is that. You may pretend it is not, but actually it is that. Being enclosed in that, thought creates a form, the ideal of the supreme, the highest form of excellence, great nobility, the gods, as well as all the other things that thought has put together in the world - the immense technological movement. It is all matter. And living on this shore - as we are, with our wars, our hatreds, our political appallingness - living on this side of the river, which is matter the mind says:I want to go across, there must be something there because this life is too stupid'. And it is stupid; just to go to the office, to earn money, to take responsibility, to struggle, compete, worry, to despair, to have anxieties, immense sorrows and then die. We say that is not good enough - we may put it more philosophically, in more extravagant or romantic language - and we want something more. Then we say: `How are we to cross this river to the other shore?' We ask `Who will take us across?' When we ask that question there is the priest, the guru, the man who knows and he says, `Follow me' and then we are done because he is exactly like us, because he still functions within the field of thought. He has created the gods, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, he has created the form and that form is as materialistic as your sensations, it is the product of thought. Now, if that is absolutely clear and there is no romantic escape, no ideological washing of the hands, no comfort and everything else that leads to such illusions, if it is absolutely clear that any movement and modification within the field of consciousness is merely moving from one object to another within the field of thought, then what is the mind to do? - or not to do? First, such a mind must be in total order - you understand? - material order. Because if it is in disorder it cannot go away from itself. Thought is matter and all its activity within consciousness has created extraordinary confusion and disorder - politically, religiously, socially, morally, in relationships, in every direction it has created disorder; and that is your life. Unless there is absolute order - and I am using the word ` absolute' not ` relative' - unless there is absolute order within that area, any cause to move away from that area is still the product of disorder. So there must be order. Now how does this order come about -politically, religiously, intellectually, morally, physically, in relationships - order, an absolute order, not a convenient order, not a relative order? How is the mind, which has been trained, educated, conditioned, to live in disorder and to accept disorder to bring order in itself? Bear in mind, that if you say there is an outside agency which will bring order then that outside agency is the product of thought and therefore it will create contradiction and therefore disorder. If you say the action of will will bring about order, then what is will? `I will do that' - look at it, find out. When you are aggressive, when you say, `I must do that', what is that will which is in action? It is - is it not? - desire; a projected end to be achieved; a projected end conceived by thought - the desire for success, the achieving of an end projected by thought as an ideal, as a form, as an original pattern. Can thought bring order? - which is the way the politicians and the so called priests and all the reformers are trying to achieve it. Can thought bring order? Thought has created disorder. So what is one to do? Now, can the mind, your mind observe, see, this disorder? One is in disorder, one sees that the exercise of will, the following of another, having desire to overcome it, is still within the field of disorder. So one says to oneself `What am I to do; what is the mind to do'? first of all, does one know disorder, does the mind see disorder - or does it know the description of disorder? You describe to me the mountain, its beauty, the snow, its lines against the blue sky, the depth of shadows in the forest, the running waters, the murmur of trees, the beauty of it all; you describe it to me and the description catches my mind and I live with that description But the description is not that which is described. So one asks oneself, am I caught in the description, or am I actually seeing disorder? One is intellectual, the other is factual. Now, is the mind observing its disorder which means no word, not caught in the description, but merely observing this enormous disorder? Can the mind so observe? And in observing its own disorder, is there an 'observer' looking at it, or is there no observer at all, but merely the observing? I observe you, I see you. I met you last year. You were pleasant or unpleasant to me, you flattered or insulted me, or neglected me. The memory of that remains - the memory. This year I meet you and the memory responds. That memory is the past and also that memory is the observer - of course. Can the mind observe all the disorder, social and moral and so on, which is created by thought - in which I am, which is part of me - can it observe this disorder without the observer? If the mind can do it then what takes place? If the observer is there looking at disorder then there is a division between the observer and the observed, in that division conflict takes place - I must control it, I must change it, I must suppress it, I must overcome it and so on; there is conflict. Now when the observer is not, and there is only observation, then there is no conflict, there is merely observing. Then there is energy to go beyond disorder. Where there is division there must be disorder. The observer rooted in the past is essentially the factor of division. Now can the mind see the truth of that and observe the disorder - the actual disorder of your life-, not the description? Can it observe your disorder, your confusion, your anxieties, your contradictions, your selfish demands, all that, observe? And if it observes without the observer there is then the going beyond it, which means total order, not relative order, mathematical order - that is essential before you can go any further. Without order in the material world, in the world of matter, in the world of thought, the mind has no basis, no foundation on which to move. Therefore there must be observation of behaviour, which is order. Do I behave according to a motive, according to circumstances? Is my behaviour pragmatic - you follow? - or is it under all circumstances the same? - not the same in the sense of copying a pattern. Is it a behaviour which is never relative, which is not based on reward and punishment? Enquire into it, observe it and you will find how terrible your behaviour is, how you look to a superior and inferior and all the rest of it. There is never a constant movement free of the motive of reward and punishment. Then also you have to enquire into relationship, for it is still the material world. Relationship is of the highest importance, because life is relationship. What is your relationship? Have you any relationship? Relationship means to respond adequately to any challenge in that relationship. Enquiring into relationship; is my relationship with you personal and intimate, or not so intimate; is it based on my opinions, my memories, my hurts, my demands, my sexual appetites? If it is, then my relationship with you is relative, it changes - I am moody one day, not moody the next day, the next day I am affectionate and the third day I hate you and the fourth day I love you and so on and so on. In that relationship, if it is not satisfactory, I will go to somebody else. This is the game that we have been playing for centuries, now it is more open, more extravagant, more vulgar - that is all. So my mind has to find out what its relationships actually are. Unless there is complete harmony in the world of material in which I live, which is part of me, in me, which is my consciousness, the mind cannot possibly go beyond itself. That is why your meditations, your postures, your breathing, your going to India and searching... well, never mind!... is so utterly meaningless. So, is my relationship relative? - is all relationship relative? Or is there no relationship at all except when the division as the me and the you does not exist? I am related to you because I love you, because you give me food, clothes, shelter, you give me sex, you give me companionship, I have built a marvellous image about you, we may get annoyed with each other, irritated, but that is trivial. And I hold on to you, I am attached to you, and in that attachment there is great pain, there is great sorrow, suffering, torture, jealousy, antagonism, and then I say to myself, `I must be free of that'. And in freeing myself from that I attach myself to somebody else. And the game begins again. So I say to myself, `What is this relationship? Is there a relationship, can there ever be a relationship?' There is the 'me' that,is pursuing my appetites, my ambitions, my greed, my fears, my wanting to have more prestige, greater position and so on and so on; and there is the other also pursuing his or her own demands. So is there any relationship possible at all between two human beings, each functioning on and each pursuing his own exclusive, selfish, demands? So there may be no relationship in that direction, but there may be relationship when there is no `me' at all. When the `me', as thought, is nonexistent, I am related - related to you, the trees, the mountains, to the rivers, to human beings. That means love - does it not? - which has no cause. Consciousness with its content is within the field of matter. The mind cannot possibly go beyond that under any circumstances, do what it will, unless it has complete order within itself and the conflict in relationship has come totally to an end; which means a relationship in which there is no `me'. This is not just a verbal explanation. The speaker is telling you what he lives, not what he talks about. If he does not live it, it is hypocrisy, a dirty thing to do. When the mind has order and the sense of total relationship, then what takes place? Then the mind is not seeking at all; it is not capable of any kind of illusion. That is absolutely necessary, because thought can invent anything, any experience, any kind of vision, any kind of superconsciousness and all the rest of it. There is no ideal, there is no form, there is only behaviour, which is order and the sense of relationship for the whole of man. There you have the foundation. Now another question arises from this: is the brain totally conditioned? This brain of man, having thousands and thousands of experiences, educated with a great deal of accumulated knowledge, whether its own or from books and so on, it is there in the brain. And thought operates only within that field of the known. It can invent a field that says, 'Apart from knowing, I am there' - but that is too silly. So my mind is asking: is the whole brain conditioned, conditioned by the culture it has lived in, economic, social, environmental, religious? Is the mind, in which included the brain, totally conditioned within the borders of time? Is he mind a complete slave? Do not say yes or no, for then you have settled; if you say `Yes' then there is nothing more into which to enquire; if you say `No' there is nothing more either. But a mind that is asking, groping, looking, without any motive, without any direction, says, `Is the mind totally conditioned, therefore mechanical?' And you see it is mechanical; when it is functioning in the field of knowledge it is mechanical, whether scientific, technological, or the priestly tradition, it is mechanical and there is repetition, repetition, repetition. That is what is going on; the repetition of a certain desire, sexual or otherwise, repeating, repeating, repeating. Therefore the mind asks itself, `Is the totality of this thing mechanical; or is there, in this field of the mind, an area which is not mechanical?' Can the mind be free of causation; for where there is causation it must be mechanical - all movement as thought must be mechanical. Therefore, the mind asks: is there a movement which is not of time? Questioner: Who is it then that observes when the observer and the observed are one? Krishnamurti: I observe the tree; there is the tree and there is the `me' that is observing it. The observer looks at the tree with the accumulation of knowledge about the tree - botanical and all the rest. Now when there is no knowledge as the observer looking at the tree, what takes place? Is there an observation as we know it now? What takes place when there is an observation of the tree, the mountain, or of a person - which is much more difficult, more involved rather - what takes place? First of all, the observer creates the distance - maybe a foot, or ten thousand miles - and distance means time. The observer is the creator of distance and time. When there is no distance and time what takes place? Is there an observer at all? Or only the thing that is? - only the tree and not the observer. Only that. Then what takes place when there is the observation of a human being? I observe you, the observer being the past, then there is a distance between me and the observed; in the past you have insulted me, the observer, flattered me, or whatever it is; that is the past and it creates the distance between me, the observer and you. But when the observer is not, the distance and time ceases, does it not? Do it and you will see this happen. Then there is no reaction, but only the observation -reaction is from the observer. So you exist, not the observer. But the observer says, `I have been cheated;you have taken my money'. I remember that. Should the observer forget that? So I look at you without the reaction of the past, but knowing that it has happened. There is no reaction to it, but the fact is that; my mind observes without the reaction but the fact is there. It is the reaction to the fact that creates distance, not the fact. So when the observer is not, which is when the 'me' is not, there is only the fact. And the operation of the fact matters, not my reaction. This requires great attention to one's observation, one's reactions. Questioner: Who sees the fact? Krishnamurti: There is this fact, the microphone, is there not? There is no question of who sees it. We both have agreed to call it the microphone - we won't call it the giraffe - in observing that there is no `me' or 'you', there is just that fact. But if you say that it is not a microphone, then begins all the reactions. Questioner: If I call what is going on disorder, does not that imply that I am imagining an order? Krishnamurti: The mind is only concerned with disorder, not with order; because it is disordered it does not know what order is. A neurotic, unbalanced mind, how can it know order? All it can know, all it can be aware of, is its own disorder. Any projection from that disorder is still disorder, that is simple. So can the mind be aware simply of its disorder - in the sense of contradiction, imitation, conformity, all that is implied in disorder? Disorder is the fact. The reaction to that disorder is the reaction of the observer. Now, can the mind observe that disorder? Questioner: Maybe I misunderstand you. The moment I use the word disorder, does that not... Krishnamurti: The word disorder - is that actually disorder? Is hunger a word or a reality? When you are hungry that is a reality. But the word hunger is different from the reality - although the word may awaken hunger. When we use the word disorder; is that a description which then tells you what disorder is? Or is it that within the description you see the actual disorder? So can the mind be free of the word disorder and look and discover its actual disorder? Can you disassociate the object and the name of the object? It is good to investigate this. The name and the object. I say it is my wife - or girl friend, my father, whatever it is. Wife is the name, the person is different from the word. Can I disassociate the word from the person? Does the word interfere with looking at the person? Do you follow? If it does, then the mind is a slave to the word and the person is then not important. So we are caught in words. We are slaves to words and the word is then the object, of course - for most of us. 18th July , 1974 TALKS IN SAANEN 1974 4TH PUBLIC TALK 21ST JULY 1974 We have been talking over together the whole materialistic attitude towards life. The word `materialism' means having values, opinions, judgements based on the principle that there is nothing else but matter, its movement, its modification which includes consciousness and will. That is generally accepted as the meaning of materialism. And philosophies - philosophy really means the love of life, or the love of truth - are ideals, suppositions, theories and systems which have been invented, or been conceived, or formulated by the mind of man. Most people in the world have been conditioned by these philosophies - religious, economic or social. And man has never tackled or enquired into, come to grips with, the whole structure of the mind - the mind that has built the egocentric activity. Egotism has been one of the major factors of our life, probably the only factor. Human beings have accepted it as inevitable, natural. We say, `-It exists in animals, so it exists in us; it is right we should be concerned with ourselves, with improvement, with our position in society', and so on and so on. I do not know if you have ever enquired whether it is not the human mind throughout the world, under different guises, in different forms, which has been the central factor of man's cruelty, man's barbarity and suffering. To understand the `me', the ego, we must first of all understand our consciousness at the very centre of which is the `me'. That consciousness may expand, include everything, but it still has a centre, and that centre, with its structure, its nature and activity is in essence the `me'. Consciousness, your consciousness is its content, the content being all the identifications with the race, the family, the community, with an ideology, a culture, a tradition, with the conflict, misery, confusion, with the struggle, the pain, the enormous amount of sorrow and the occasional joy and laughter -all that is its content. And that content is essentially the `me'. Remove your furniture, your name - what are you? Remove all the ideologies, experiences, knowledge, the fears, hopes, pleasures, pursuits and ambitions - there is nothing left. And we make such an enormous fuss, such a struggle, to maintain this structure. From this arises the question: is the mind mechanical? Because the 'me' is mechanical, the `I' which says, `I believe in, I have faith in, I am this, not that, or I must be this and not that' - this centre of great activity, is the product of a mind which is mechanical. I mean by mechanical the activity of a mind that always operates in the field of the known. If the whole of the mind is mechanical, then no matter what theory, what philosophy it may invent out of its own desperation, its gods, its rituals, its beliefs are no more than theories of the mechanical mind, responses which are the outcome of stored up knowledge. I am a Christian, my conditioning being Christian I respond to that; or according to my conditioning, I am a Communist, a Hindu, and so on. So reflex actions are mechanical. This brings one to question whether the brain, the mind, is wholly conditioned by the culture, the environmental influences, economic conditions, religious penetration of beliefs, ideals, gods, hopes, all that. Is the whole structure conditioned? When we use the word 'mind' we are including not only the nervous responses of the body, but also the emotions, the recognition of emotional states by thought - thought being the response of memory which is stored up as knowledge - and of course the intellect - the total mind, not just a part. We want to find out if there is any area in the mind which is not mechanical, if there is an energy which is non-mechanical, because we have lived on an energy which is mechanical: I respond to your insult or your flattery; I respond according to my conditioning. That is all within the field of the known, and as long as there is operation within the field of the known it must be mechanical. Man has recognised this, that to live in the field of the known is to live in a prison, and so he begins to speculate, invent, theorize, to say there must be an outside agency, a god, super-consciousness, Atman and so on. But it is still born out of the known. It is a concept formed by the past, therefore it is still within the field of time. So it is nothing new. And in that field we have lived, and in that field there is a certain energy created by thought and friction. That we know - friction as ambition, as envy, friction as competition, and so on. We have lived for centuries in that field, and in that field one has enormous energy, as seen in technology, science, political divisions, quarrels, antagonisms, wars, the extraordinary inventions of destruction - all that demands tremendous energy. Please watch your own mind, your own life, your own way of thinking, living, behaving and responding. And when you watch you will see it is always mechanical, it is always from the known. Now we are asking whether there is a field, an area of the mind or brain, which has not been touched by the known? Is there an area in the brain which is not contaminated (if I may use that word) by thought - thought being the response of memory? This is real meditation - to find out - and not all the nonsense that goes on in the world in the name of meditation. How is the mind to find out? -not invent, not hypnotize itself in the hope of something new because it is in despair, because it is bored with existence. To find that out every form of illusion must be totally put aside. Right? What brings about illusion? Why does the mind deceive itself, not face the fact as it is; why does it cover it up, escape from it - all of which are illusionary activities. The active present is the fact, whatever that fact is. Is it part of our education never to come directly in contact with `what is', to be other than we are, to be like someone else, to be somebody in this abominable world; is it because we are always educated to reform ourselves to improve ourselves? And is it because we have ideals which are always over there and never here, never actual, unreal? Is it because basically, fundamentally, we don't know what to do with `what is'? The incapacity to deal with `what is' makes us move away from ` what is'. This is dreadfully serious, because the world is in chaos; it is getting worse everyday, and a serious man has a tremendous responsibility to discover how to face this chaos. Religions haven't solved the problem, nor the politicians, the businessmen, the scientists; they are just drifting, and the more you drift the more the chaos grows. So the man who is really serious, who knows and feels his responsibility, has to consider the transformation of his consciousness, because it is only there that there is any hope of bringing about a different world, a different kind of education, a different human being. So we are asking:Is there any area of the mind which is really free from the known? Is there any part of the brain which is not cultivated by thought? This is really important, for if we do not find it then we will always live in the field of the known from which thought arises, which is matter. Thought is matter because it is the response of memory; memory is held in the brain cells and from there it responds, therefore it is still matter, and any activity is still within the known and therefore matter. So to find if there is any area of the brain, the mind, which thought cannot possibly enter, one must be free of the known, yet realize its value as function. You understand the problem? If we understand the problem then the problem will solve itself. It is this: man has cultivated the brain, the mind, giving extensive growth to knowledge - there must be knowledge, obviously, knowledge is essential to function, to go to the factory, to write a letter, to speak English and all the rest -but so long as the mind lives within that area it lives in a prison. So can the mind see the fact that knowledge is necessary, and yet realize, see the truth, that as long as it lives there it will everlastingly suffer, because it is based on thought? Then can the mind realize the value of knowledge and not be a slave to it? If the mind realizes something it is free of it. Recognising the value of knowledge, yet not dependent on it, not caught in it, not enslaved by knowledge, a new quality comes into being, a new kind of energy. So knowledge has its relative value, and being relative it is not all-important, which we are now making it. Can you see the reality of this: that you must operate in the field of knowledge and yet not be dependent on it? Therefore a certain quality of freedom from the known comes into being. Then you can begin to enquire by watching the movement of thought, the source of thought, by being aware, whether there is a demarcation, not drawn by thought, between the known and something else which is not at the behest of thought, which thought cannot capture at all. Let me put it differently. When we look at our life, our daily life, obviously we are very materialistic people; we depend on our senses, our senses dictate our action. We are really totally worldly people. And in materialism, which has been the conditioning of our life, there are two principal factors: pain and pleasure. As long as we live within that field of materialism pain and pleasure become extraordinarily important, and there is no escape as long as we live there. I don't know whether you understand this? We are materialistic, we depend on and react according to our senses we react according to our opinions, judgements, evaluations, which are all the product of thought, thought being matter. And as that has become as extraordinarily important in the world, pleasure and fear are the principal factors that direct behaviour. As long as we live in that area these two factors dominate, and there can be no escape from it, because to what do you escape? - more pleasure or more fear; more pleasure conceived by thought, or the avoidance of fear by seeking security in isolation: looking after myself, looking after my country with which I have identified myself, with my gods -gradual identification and isolation, and therefore more fear. Where there is isolation, division, there is inevitably wider and deeper fear, because the mind, being materialistic, pursues pleasure; for that is all it has, its gods, its moralities, its churches, its doctrines, everything based on the pursuit of pleasure and therefore more fear. Please do see this, because we are caught in this. You have your fears and the endless pursuit of pleasure, the dark fears explored and unexplored, all within this area of the known, which is matter. Only when the mind discovers an area where thought cannot possibly enter - not as an illusion, not as a hope, a belief, not as an idea - then only does fear disappear entirely. Do you understand? And there- fore, when there is no fear there is the understanding of pleasure, not the pursuit of pleasure, but the understanding of it. So can the mind be free from the known yet see how important the known is? If it sees this, then in the field of the known the activity of the `me' does not enter. Do you see the difference? If I see the importance of knowledge and its value, its significance, its necessity, then the `me' which has created such mischief in the world has no place in knowledge, it cannot identify itself with knowledge, because knowledge is pure function. But when function becomes status then it is the operation of the 'me'. I wonder if you have understood? Thus in the field of knowledge, objective efficiency, without the ruthlessness of the `me' entering into it, takes place, because it is pure function. There the `me' has no place at all. See the beauty of it! So the mind then begins to enquire if there is any area where it is totally free of the human endeavour, the human struggle, pain, sorrow. Unless the mind finds that, there is no way out. You can invent a way out, but it is still the known, materialistic. Now how does one discover this? Obviously not by a system - a system is still part of the known. Therefore what is the instrument of enquiry, of observation? Do you know? You have to find out, but not through somebody else, because if you find it through somebody else it is not truth; it is like living in the shadow of another. So when you are confronted with this problem, probably for the first time, you have no answer. Right? Really, you have no answer. That is a great thing! You understand? It is a marvellous thing to say, ` I have no answer. I don't know what to do', knowing that nobody is going to give you a helping hand, knowing that you can't possibly look to another. You really don't know. That is essential, and that is real innocence. Please listen to this carefully. That is deep, inexhaustible, innocence to say, `I really don't know.' Not that you are waiting for an answer, not that you are expecting something, because then we play that game again. To remain totally in that state of not knowing, for out of that not knowing you have a tremendous energy, haven't you? Then you are curious, you are not eager for satisfaction, you are not wanting to achieve something. That state of total not knowing is part of the brain which has not been contaminated. You understand? All the things which man has put together through centuries I know very well, but when I say, `I don't know', the mind has uncovered a field which has not been touched. Now can the mind remain there, yet function in knowledge? Look Sirs, man has searched for god, for happiness, for a better way of life, he has invented philosophies of various kinds, but he has not been able to solve his problem of sorrow, and unless he solves that he cannot possibly come upon that area of the mind which has not been touched by thought. Can the mind watch its activity - not try to change, reform or control it, because the observer is the observed - and see what it discovers in the field of the known and be totally responsible for that? That means not to let knowledge be used by thought as the 'me' - therefore there is only function, no status. Where there is status there is the `me' operating. Now can we do this, do this in daily life? You know that means great attention, not the attention of will, but simply to watch it as you watch a squirrel playing round the trees, or a child running about, just to watch it with care and affection. Then you will see that the `me' doesn't enter at all in the field of the known, in the operation, in the function. Then you have a whole area of the mind, the brain, which is totally unoccupied. You know when there is no occupation it is free, it is alive, it is moving. From this arises another problem: is it a matter of time to see this? The reality of knowledge and the non-reality of knowledge -to see this and to function in that - does that require time - time being a movement from here to there? I need time to learn a language, to learn a new technique; but is time necessary in seeing the operation of the known, the reality of it, the necessity of it, the inevitability of it, and the freedom from that which is an area totally innocent, innocent in the sense of an area which has not been hurt at all? You understand? We human beings are hurt, from our childhood we have been hurt, by parents, by fellow students, by everybody; the more sensitive we become the more we are hurt. And being hurt we resist, we withdraw and go through agonies of neurotic activity. An area of the brain which has never been hurt -does it take time to come upon that? It will take time if you make that into an ideal - which the mind will inevitably do - a thing to be gained, achieved, a thing with which I want to identify myself so that I will have more energy - to create more mischief. The desire to achieve is the factor of the 'me' which gives a direction. Is it a matter of time? Improvement is a matter of time, self-improvement, but the total emptying of the mind as the `me' is not of time, because you see reality. Do you see the whole of this, all that has been said this morning? - the materialistic attitude of our daily living in which there is great fear and great pleasure as the two operating principles within the field of the known. That is what we have lived on, and with that we are trying to get rid of fear to hold on to pleasure - all the battle that has been going on. Do you see also that as long as the mind lives there, there is no escape from fear, no solution to fear however deeply you analyse, there is no ending to fear or to sorrow? It is only when you come upon that other thing that there is an ending to all that. To see all that, the totality, doesn't require time at all. You either see it or don't see it. If you don't see it, it is either because you don't want to see it or you are so committed to your own belief, your own knowledge, to your own little self, or it is because you have not paid attention or you don't care how you live. But if you give your total attention you can't help seeing the totality - and then it is over, finished. Questioner: How can we put an end to violence between youngsters in our family? Krishnamurti: How can we put an end to violence between our children, the violence of the younger generation? Why has violence become so extraordinarily pervasive, why is it increasing so incredibly? Is it, first of all, because the parents have no time to give their children, because they are so occupied with their own problems, earning a livelihood and so on, and thus there is no relationship between the young and their elders? Is that one of the reasons? - not the only reason. The parents are away from home working to earn more money and the children are sent off to school. In the school there is competition, there is fighting - you know all that is going on in modern schools. There is no relationship, no real, deep human communication between the so-called teacher and the students. The teacher is occupied with his own problems, so he cannot find time before the lesson starts to talk to his pupils about living a life of goodness, quietness and gentleness; or to convey what he means because he is himself living it and not just talking about it. Is that one of the reasons? And yet another - pick up any newspaper any day and you read of some kind of violence: wars, somebody has been murdered, raped or kidnapped. It is pervasive, it is all around, this sense of violence. Why has this happened right throughout the world in recent years? Is it a reaction to Victorian ideals? Is it because some specialists have declared that children must just be allowed to grow up, never corrected, never told what to do, never punished? Is it because of recent wars? Or is it because everything around us has lost its meaning? The Communists, with their gods and their philosophy, have treated human beings like so many insects: millions and millions have been destroyed. There is so much violence everywhere, and is this why the younger generation, seeing how their elders have not brought peace to the world, feel they must be violent too? They see conflict in everything around them, in the struggle for security, success, position. This is the pattern of life, and we are educated to that from childhood. Do you not think it is inevitable then that violence comes into being. Also with religion - not this kind of crazy, circus religion, but the established religion which everyone quotes from - never do the churches say, `Don't kill!'. Rather they say ` Kill when necessary'. They have blessed the battleships, they have blessed the guns. They dare not say, `Don't kill another human being', because they are supported by governments, property and all the rest. So taking all this into account, what is a child to do? He is sensitive, inquisitive, tender, has no affection, no love in his home, or only occasionally, he sees his parents drinking, smoking, taking drugs, quarrelling, violent. There is the whole pattern set for him. Therefore what is he to do? What are you to do if you have children? And those who have no children in these days may well say, `Thank god!' But for those who have, this is a tremendous problem, a tremendous responsibility. It is not just a matter for half-an-hour's discussion and then return to your life of violence. So what are you to do when all the schools, the colleges, the universities are based on competition, with the struggle to have a place, the fear of not getting a place? What will you do with your child? Will you create a new school, undertake the responsibility with a few others for the money, the work, everything involved in a school? Have you the energy, the interest, the care, the affection to do that? If not, you will drift the way of the rest. If you cannot start a school and there are other kinds of schools, then help them. Do you follow? It is for you to create schools. We, the speaker and some others, are doing this; we want to do this, we are burning with it. It is our responsibility to carry this out and not just talk and talk endlessly and do nothing. 21st July 1974 TALKS IN SAANEN 1974 5TH PUBLIC TALK 23RD JULY 1974 We have been talking over together the nature and the structure of thought, its place and its limitations and all the processes and functions involved in the movement of thought. If I may, this morning - and it is rather lovely after all these days of rain and cloud to see the mountains, the shadows and the rivers, and to smell the pleasant air - I would like to talk about the question of responsibility and who is answerable to what. In observing, objectively, without any opinion or judgement, what is going on in the world, the recent wars, the appalling misery and confusion, one asks, who is responsible, or answerable, for all this? To really find the right response, the right answer, we must look at the whole phenomenon of existence; at the one end you have the extraordinary development of technology - which is almost destroying the earth - and at the other you have what may be called the hope, the demand, the entreatment of god, truth or what you will. There is this vast spectrum, this vast field of existence, which is our daily living and we seem to be incapable of responding to the whole of it, rather than just part of it. So we must find out for ourselves the right response, the right answer, to all this. If we merely answer to, or are responsible for, a very small part of it, which is ourselves and our little circle, our little desires, our petty little responsibilities, our selfish enclosed movement, if we only respond to that, neglecting the whole of it, then we are bound to create not only suffering for ourselves, but suffering for the whole of mankind. Because, as we said the other day, our consciousness is its content; when there is the transformation in that consciousness you affect the whole of the consciousness of human beings. This is a fact. It is not imagination, not a theory, not a speculative hope. If you change radically the content of your consciousness you are affecting the consciousness of your neighbour, of your children, of your society, of all the consciousness of human beings. This is so; Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, all of them, affected mankind, because they created in themselves a change - whether a good or bad change we are not discussing. So, is it possible to be responsible, to answer adequately, to the whole, the whole of mankind and therefore be responsible to nature, to your children, to your neighbour, to all the movement that man has created in his endeavour to live rightly? Is it possible to feel that immense responsibility, not only intellectually, verbally, but very deeply, so as to be able to answer to this whole of human struggle, pain, brutality, violence and despair? To respond totally one must know what it means to love. That word love has been misused, so spoilt, so trodden upon; but we will have to use it and give to it a totally different kind of meaning. To answer to the whole there must be love and to understand that quality, that compassion, to have that extraordinary sense of energy which is not created by thought, we must understand suffering. When we use the word love, understand that it is not a verbal or intellectual communication of the word, but the communication or communion that lies behind the word. Now first we must understand suffering and be able to go beyond it, otherwise we cannot possibly understand what responsibility to the whole is, which is real love. As we said the other day, we are sharing this thing together, we are partaking, not only verbally, intellectually, but going far beyond that. To share it is our responsibility. That means you must not only hear the word, listen to the meaning of the word semantically, but also share in the movement of self enquiry and go beyond it. You must take part in this whole movement, otherwise you will treat it merely verbally or intellectually or emotionally and then it is nothing. So as we said, to understand this responsibility to the whole and therefore that strange quality of love, one must go beyond suffering. What is suffering? Why do human beings suffer? This has been one of the great problems of life for millions of years. And apparently very very few have gone beyond suffering and they have become heroes or saviours, or some kind of neurotic religious leaders and there they remain. But as ordinary human beings we never seem to go beyond suffering. We seem to be caught in it; and we are asking now, this morning, is it possible to be really free of it? There are various kinds of suffering; the physical and the various psychological movements of suffering, the ordinary organic pains through disease, old age, ill health, bad diet and so on and the enormous field of psychological suffering. Can you be aware of that field? Can you know intimately the structure, nature and function of that suffering? Can you know how it operates, what are its results, crippling the mind, enclosing it in self-centred activity, more and more? Are you aware of it? You can have a great deal of pain through a disease and not allow it to interfere with the activity of the mind; you can dissociate from the physical pain so that that pain does not create neurotic activity; it requires considerable attention to the intelligence of the body. When the body is not dictated to by taste, by the tongue, by the various forms of artificial stimulation, then the organism has its own intelligence. Probably you will not pay the least attention to all this after you have left here, but at least during this hour do give a little attention and care. Because there is a lot to learn, a lot that you should know, though you may not act upon it, because most of us are rather lazy, indolent, easy going, accepting things as they are and carrying enormous burdens throughout our life. But at least you should know about these things, as you are good enough to be here. So, we now consider psychological suffering, which apparently man has not been able to resolve. He has been able to escape from it, through various channels, religious, economic, social, through political and business activities, through various drugs and every form of escape but never confronting the actual fact of suffering. What is suffering? Is it possible for the mind to be completely free of the psychological activity that brings about suffering? One of the major reasons for psychological suffering is the sense of isolation, the feeling of total loneliness, the feeling that you have nothing to depend upon, that you have no relationship with anyone, that you are totally isolated. You have had this feeling I am quite sure; you may be with your family, in a bus, or at a party or what you will and you have these moments of an extraordinary sense of isolation, an extraordinary sense of lack of total nothingness. Also, suffering, psychologically, comes through attachment. Attachment to ideas, or ideals, to opinions, to beliefs, to concepts. Please observe this in yourself. The word is the mirror in which you are looking in which to see the operations of your own mind - so look there. Another cause of suffering, is the great sense of loss - loss of prestige, loss of power, loss of so many things. The loss of somebody whom you think you love, in death, that is the ultimate suffering. Now can the mind be free of all this? Otherwise it cannot possibly know this sense of love for the whole. If there is no love for the whole of existence - which is not only your existence but that of total man - then there is no compassion and you will never understand, do what you will, what love is. In the love of the whole the particular comes in; but when there is the particular love of the one then there is the absence of the other. It is absolutely imperative that we understand and go beyond suffering. Is that possible? That is, is it possible for the mind to understand this sense of deep inward loneliness? When we feel lonely it is rather frightening, rather depressing and from that various kinds of moods arise; now without escaping, without rationalizing, can you observe it? - without any movement of escape? When you feel lonely, with all the implications involved in it, the escapes, the attachments, can you look at it without any movement of escape? Can you be aware of it without rationalizing, without trying to find the cause of it, just observing it. In that observation you discover that your escape is through attachment to an idea, to a concept, to a belief. Now can you be aware of that belief and how it is an escape? - when you observe it quietly, the escape and the belief disappear, without any effort. But the moment you introduce effort there is the observer and the observed and therefore the conflict. But when you are aware of all the implications of loneliness then there is no observer, there is only the fact of this feeling of being utterly isolated. This isolation takes place through your daily activity, your ambition, greed, envy, your concern with your own desire to fulfil, to become somebody, to improve yourself. You are so concerned with your little self and that is part of your loneliness. During the day, or during sleep, in all your activities you are so concerned about yourself - the' me' and 'you','we' and `they' - concerned and committed to yourself, wanting to do things for yourself in the name of your nation, in the name of your god, in the name of your family, in the name of your wife and all the nonsense that goes on. Loneliness comes into being through the daily activities of self concern. When you become aware of all the implications of loneliness you see this. You see it, you do not theorize about it. When you look at something closely the details come out, at a tree, at a river, or the mountain, or a person, in that observation you see everything, it tells you, you do not tell it. So when you observe, when you are so greatly without any choice, aware of this loneliness, then the thing disappears altogether. Then one of the causes of suffering is attachment. I am attached to a person, attached to an idea, attached to an opinion, attached to tradition and so on and so on. Why is the mind attached - attached to furniture, attached to a house, attached to your wife - why? It is one of the reasons for great suffering. Being attached and finding it is painful, we try to cultivate detachment, which is another horror. Attachment is a form of occupation for the mind. If I am attached to you then I am thinking about you, I am worrying about you, I am concerned about you, in my self-centred way, because I do not want to lose you; I do not want you to be free, I do not want you to do something which disturbs my attachment, for in that attachment I feel, somewhat at least, temporarily secure. In attachment there is fear, jealousy, anxiety, suffering. Now just look at it. Do not say,`What am I to do?' - you cannot do anything. If you try to do something about your attachment then you are trying to create another form of attachment. Do you follow this? So just observe it. When you are attached to a person you dominate that person, you want to control that person, you deny freedom to that person. When you are attached you are denying freedom altogether. If I am attached to communist ideals then I bring destruction to others - which is what is happening. So, seeing that attachment is one of the causes of sorrow, then is it possible for the mind to be free of attachments? - which does not mean that the mind becomes indifferent. If I am concerned with the whole of existence, I must respond, answer, to the whole and not just be concerned with my particular little desire to be attached to you and my wanting to get over that little anxiety or pain, my jealousy and all the rest of it. For the quality of love can only come into being when the mind is concerned with the whole and not with the particular. When it is concerned with the whole there is love and then from the whole the particular has a place. There is the suffering of loss, of losing somebody whom you love - `love', you understand, I am using that word in quotation marks. Why do you suffer? You lose your son, your mother, your wife - why do you suffer? Is it that you are suddenly left hurt, very deeply, through the death of another? You have identified yourself with that person, he is your son, you want him, for you are yourself projected in him, you have identified yourself with him, and when he is no longer there you feel a tremendous sense of hurt because you have none other in whom to continue the sense of `me'. So you are deeply hurt; from that hurt arises self-pity. You are not really so much concerned about the other but about yourself through the other. Therefore you are hurt when the other is not; and from that hurt and self-pity arises the desire to find somebody else through whom you can survive. There is not only your personal suffering, but the vast suffering of man; the suffering which wars have brought about to innocent people, to the killer and the killed, the mother, the husband, the children, whether in the far East, the Middle East or in the West; there is this vast human suffering, both physically and psychologically. Unless the mind understands this whole problem it will only play with the word love; you can do social work and talk about the love of god, the love of man, the love all this, but in your heart you will never know what it is - right? So is your mind, your consciousness, capable of looking at this fact, looking at it, seeing what extraordinary misery is caused, not only to another but to oneself? Seeing how you deprive the freedom of another when you are attached and in attachment depriving your own freedom; and so the battle goes on between you and me. So can the mind observe this? Because it is only with the ending of suffering that wisdom comes into being. Wisdom is not a thing that you learn from books or from another. Wisdom comes in the understanding of suffering and all its implications, not only the personal but also the vast human suffering which man has created. It is only when you go beyond it that wisdom comes into being. Then to understand, or come upon, this thing that we call love, we must also understand beauty - one of the most difficult things to put into words. Do you know what it means to be sensitive? - not sensitive to your desires and ambitions, to your hurts and failures or successes, most of us are sensitive to our own little demands, to our little pursuits of pleasure, fear, anxiety or delight. But we are talking of being sensitive, not to something, but being sensitive, both psychologically and physically. Physically, to be sensitive, is to have a very good supple body - healthy, not overeating and indulging - a sensitive body. To be sensitive psychologically - not that we are dividing the psyche from the body, they are interrelated - you cannot be sensitive in the psychological area if there is any kind of hurt. We human beings are hurt greatly, we have deep wounds, unconscious and conscious wounds, either self inflicted or caused by others, at school, at home, in the bus, in the office, in the factory, we are hurt. That deep hurt, conscious or unconscious, makes us psychologically insensitive, dull. Watch your own hurt if you can. A gesture, a word, a look, is enough to hurt. You are hurt when you are compared with somebody else, when you are trying to imitate somebody else, when you are conforming to a pattern you are hurt, whether that pattern is set by another or by yourself. We human beings are deeply wounded and those wounds bring about neurotic activity - neurotic beliefs and ideals. Again, is it possible to understand these hurts and to be free of them, never to be hurt again under any circumstances? We are hurt from childhood, as a result of various incidents or accidents; by a word, a gesture, a slighting look, gnawed; there are these wounds, can they be wiped away without leaving a mark? If there is a hurt, you are not sensitive and will never know what beauty is. You can go to all the museums in the world, comparing Michelangelo with Picasso, whatever you like, being experts in the study of artists and their paintings and all the rest of it, but as long as a human mind is hurt and therefore insensitive, it will never know beauty. Without knowing that quality of beauty - which is not merely in the thing, in the product which man has made, in the line which an architect has given to a building, or in the mountain, the beautiful tree and all the rest of it - there is no love. Can your mind know it has been hurt and not react to that hurt at the conscious or at the unconscious level? Can it know these hurts, be aware of them? It is fairly easy to be aware of conscious hurts but can you know those that are unconscious? Or must you go through all the process of analysis? Analysis implies the analyser and the analysed. And who is the analyser? Is he different from the analysed? If he is different why is he different? Who created the analyser to be different from the analysed? If he is different how can he know what the analysed is? The analyser is the analysed. That is obvious. At each stage of analysis there must be not the slightest misunderstanding for at the next analysis you cannot analyses completely because of that previous misunderstanding. And analysis implies time - you can go on, endlessly for the rest of your life and you will still be analysing as you are dying. So how is the mind to uncover the deep unconscious wounds? And there are the wounds which the race has collected. When the conqueror subjugates the victim he has hurt him; that is a racial hurt. The Imperialists, the makers of Empires, to them everybody is beneath them and they leave a deep unconscious hurt on those who have been conquered - it is there. How is the mind to uncover all these hidden hurts, deep in the recesses of its consciousness? I see the fallacy of analysis - right? Our tradition is to analyse and I have put aside the tradition of analysis. So what has happened to the mind when it has denied, put aside, or seen the falseness of something, the falseness of analysis? - it is free of that burden, therefore it has become sensitive. The mind is lighter, clearer, it can observe more sharply. By putting aside the tradition of analysis and introspection which man has accepted, the mind has become freed. By denying the tradition you have denied the content of the unconscious. The unconscious is the tradition; it is the tradition of religion, the tradition of marriage, of so many things. One of the traditions is to accept hurt and having accepted hurt then analyse to get rid of it. Now when you deny that, because it is false, you have denied the content of unconsciousness. Therefore you are free of the unconscious hurts. The mind by observing its hurt and not using the traditional instrument to wipe away that hurt - which is analysis, which is talking it over together, you know all that goes on, group therapy and individual therapy and collective therapy - wipes it away by being aware of the tradition and in denying that tradition you deny the hurt which accepts that tradition. The mind then becomes extraordinarily sensitive - the mind being the body, heart, brain, nerves, the total thing becomes sensitive. We said that beauty is not in the museum, it is not in the picture, it is not in the face, it is not in any response from the background of your tradition.The mind, having put all that aside, because it is sensitive and because suffering has been understood, there is passion. Passion is different from lust, obviously. Lust is the continuation of pleasure and the demand for pleasure in different forms, sexually or in the religious entertainment that goes on in churches and temples and all the rest of it. So when the mind is beyond suffering, then there is that quality of passion, a quality which is totally necessary to understand the extraordinary sense of beauty. That beauty cannot possibly exist when the 'me' is constantly asserting itself. You may be accepted by the world as the greatest painter, but if you are concerned with your little self you are no longer an artist. You are only furthering through art your own selfish continuation. Now we have a mind that is freed, that has gone beyond this sense of suffering, it is free from all hurt and therefore incapable of being hurt again under any circumstance, whether it is flattered or insulted, nothing can touch it - which does not mean it has built a resistance; on the contrary, it is excellently vulnerable. Then the mind will begin to find out what love is. Obviously love is not pleasure, because you have now been through all that and put it aside - not that you cannot enjoy the mountains, trees, and the rivers and the beauty of the land, but when that beauty becomes the pursuit of pleasure it ceases to be beauty. Love is not pleasure. Love is not the pursuit or the avoidance of fear. Love is not attachment. Love has no suffering. Love means the love of the whole, which is compassion. And that love has its own order, order both within and without, an order which cannot be brought about through legislation. Now when you understand this and live it, daily - otherwise all that we have spoken about has no value at all, it is just a lot of words without any meaning, just ashes - then life has quite a different significance. Questioner: If I am aware during the day of all my thoughts and actions, really aware, clearly, limpidly, with a quality of lightness, what takes place in sleep, what is the movement in sleep? Krishnamurti: What goes on during sleep? There are dreams, pleasant and unpleasant, dreams which indicate something that may happen in the future, dreams that warn me of certain actions and so on dreams. Now can the mind during so-called sleep renew itself totally? Is one really aware during the day? One says one is aware, or one thinks one is aware, which is worse. But actually is one aware of the fact, not the word but the fact? The word is never the thing, the description is never the described. So, I am aware not of the word, not of the description, but of the actual fact that I am angry, I am jealous, that I am conceited, vain, stupid, full of vanity, hurt, pride, anxiety; and I am aware of that, actually. Somebody can tell me I am hungry but that is not hunger. So in the same way am I aware actually? Or is it that I think I am aware? If I am so aware during the day, during the waking hours then the unconscious brings its intimations; it wants to tell you something, its prejudices, its fears, its anxieties, its hurts, its extraordinary hidden demands. Being consciously, totally aware one begins to discover what the unconscious is saying. Now if one does that during the day what takes place at night? Does the same process go on? If it does, then it is a continuation in dreams of what you have done during the day. I am aware - or rather, not fully aware but partially aware. I want to be aware because I think what you are talking about is fairly rational. I want to be aware and I try to be so; but it is a very difficult thing to be aware. So I play with it for a time, drop it, pick it up, drop it, pick it up and go on that way during the day. Then during the night the same game is going on in dreams. The mind is never at rest, it never has complete relaxation, complete quietness; it has been working, working, working during the day, it keeps on working, working at night. If during the day it does not find order, then at night it goes on trying to find it. You have watched all this I am sure. So what takes place when during the day you are really, nonverbally, completely, conscious, aware of everything happening inside you and as much as possible around you - what takes place? In that awareness during the day you have established order, have you not? See the importance of this. You have established order; order being no contradiction, no conflict, no sense of `me' dominating, which is disorder. So during the day by becoming totally aware - if that is possible and it is possible obviously - there is order; then the mind does not have to find order during sleep. Unless you have order during the day the mind tries to find it in sleep; the brain must have order, otherwise it cannot function happily, freely, effectively - obviously, for it is like a child, it must have security. When there is order the brain does not have to struggle to create order for itself; therefore there is no neurotic action during the day, nor does it invent neurotic actions which it thinks will give it security. When there is complete order during the day the brain does not have to struggle to create order neurotically or order according to circumstances and so on, it is orderly. In that order there is complete security for itself and dreams then become merely a physical reaction - you have eaten wrongly, or this or that - then dreams have very little meaning. So, can your mind be totally aware during the day and bring order out of disorder? Questioner: Why is it that sometimes one understands and at other times one does not? Why is it one thinks at times that one sees very clearly, without any conflict and yet at other times everything is dark? Krishnamurti: What is understanding ? When one says `I understand', `I understand the problem', `I understand my relationship with another', `I understand the meaning of love', what does one mean by that word understand? Does one mean a verbal understanding? - implying that the words are a means of communication and that by using certain words one says,'Yes, I have understood through the words what you mean' - therefore it is still verbal understanding. Or one understands the logic of certain things so that intellectually one understands. Now, one is asking something entirely different: is understanding something totally other? One has described what suffering is, and one says, `Yes, I have understood; has one understood the words, or seen the whole picture that the words convey and the implications of what they have conveyed and one says,'Yes, I see it, I understand the meaning, the verbal meaning, the content of what I have seen, and I have gone beyond it'. That is understanding: to grasp the whole thing instantly, which is non-verbal. When you grasp it totally you have understood completely, there is nothing more. Therefore you are outside that field. That is what I call understanding, then it has significance, it brings action. But when one merely understands intellectually, verbally or romantically or emotionally, it is just nothing at all. When you so understand something so completely you are beyond it, then the mind does not go back, there is nothing to go back to - you understand? It is not that at one moment there is all understanding and the next moment all dullness. When one understands suffering one is out of that and therefore the mind becomes extraordinarily clear. Questioner: You talk about the transcendence of all our problems, of going beyond them. What is to stop us becoming maniacs? Krishnamurti: When you have gone beyond suffering you will not ask that question. To go beyond suffering means intelligence. When there is that extraordinary quality of excellent intelligence -which is not personal or collective, it is just intelligence - then that intelligence operates in every field, there is no insanity; it is only when we have not that intelligence that we go insane. Questioner: Is there any direction for the evolution of man? Krishnamurti: So far, as one observes historically and from what one knows, the direction of man has been in the destruction of the earth, in the destruction of nature, in the destruction of all the living things around him. He is using up energy, exhausting the mineral oils and so on. There is the physical destruction first; then what is man doing psychologically? - is he progressing? psychologically is he creating order in the world? Questioner: Society is a living system. Krishnamurti: Society is a living system and that is such a lovely order, is it? Questioner: It is not lovely, but it is order that did not exist before man came. Krishnamurti: It is disorder this society we live in - injustice, violence, throwing bombs. Are we any different from previous generations? Have we progressed? Do you know what that word progress means? Originally I believe it meant to enter into the enemy's country fully armed! And we are doing that very beautifully. There is overpopulation, millions are starving, millions are being destroyed and also millions are being cured medically, there is division between races, classes, division between religions and millions of people being destroyed for ideologies; do you call all this progress? Is all this order? And seeing all this one is concerned, really concerned, about the transformation of the mind of man; that is what one is committed to and talking about - the transformation, the change, the revolution, of the mind of man; not in any particular direction for if you have a particular direction then that direction is set by thought, which is old and therefore it is part of the same machinery going on. One is concerned with human beings, human beings that have created this disorder, human beings that are populating the earth incredibly, human beings which have destroyed species of animals, human beings which breed wars, hatred, antagonism. And one is saying there can be no change out there unless there is a change in here. TALKS IN SAANEN 1974 6TH PUBLIC TALK 25TH JULY 1974 We have been going into the many problems and the many different forms of conflict in which we live - human problems which are common to the whole world. They are not only our personal problems for when you go to India, Asia, America you see the same issues, same miseries, confusions and sorrows. We have talked about love, the various forms of pursuit of pleasure and the great unsolved problem of fear and sorrow. This morning we ought to talk-about a rather different issue - it seems rather morbid but it is not - and that is: what is living and what it is to die. We ought to see whether we can really - not intellectually or romantically, or taking comfort in a belief, however rational, however logical and somewhat provable -consider the extraordinary problem of what the human mind has always avoided, this question of death, of why the human mind has never been able to solve it, of why the human mind has invented speculative, comforting theories, satisfying beliefs and so on. To go into that issue - that we all must face one day - to go into it very, very deeply, we must also understand what it is to live and if living is different from dying? We must look at what we call living, actual living, not the theoretical idea of how we should live, or the ideological concept of a good life, but the life that one leads every day. Unless we understand that, its whole significance, the whole area of existence in which is included death, then we shall not be able to penetrate into that thing that we don't know, called death. We have to look quite objectively, non-personally, non- ideationally, at what we are actually doing, which we call living and unless we understand the problem of security, in all its varieties, at various depths, we shall not be able to understand if there is a security when the whole organism comes to an end. As we have said several times before and it is worth repeating, we are serious people - at least the speaker is - and to go into this you must be very, very serious. It is not a thing for the immature mind. It is not something that you just look at then go away, pass it by; it is your life from the moment you are born till the moment you die. It is your life and we are examining that life, which we call living. As we also explained before: understanding is not merely an intellectual or verbal comprehension. One can say: I have understood verbally, intellectually what you have said. But that understanding is very superficial and therefore does not bring about an action. It remains at a certain level. Understanding implies understanding not only the word, intellectual understanding, but understanding as a whole which is therefore productive of action. If there is no action following understanding, there is no understanding, obviously. We must look first at our life, the daily, monotonous, boring life of every human being on this unfortunate earth. When you observe it in yourself, you see that the eternal pursuit is for security -security in pleasure, security in a relationship, security in an ideal, in a concept, in a formula. We seek security in possessions, property, money and we have built a society where that has become all important. We have created that society. All human beings, throughout the world, have put together a society that is based on security, not only personal but communal security, national security. And the structure of this necessity to be physically secure, predominates all our thinking. We need to have physical security - food, clothes and shelter - that is an absolute necessity. But that necessity is becoming more and more impossible of attainment because of ideologies, nationalities, class divisions, economic and national divisions, the concept of a superior and inferior. The mind can only survive physically when it is assured of food, clothes and shelter - that we see is an absolute necessity, not only for the Western world, but for the whole of mankind. And this physical security is denied because we have built a conceptual world, a world based on idea, on philosophies which are essentially material. Thought is essentially material because it is the response of memory: memory is experience and knowledge that is held in the brain cells, in the tissues of the brain, which are material. We have built a world on a concept, on the idea of self-importance, self-survival at any price, of identification with the nation, with a religious group. The world is becoming more and more overpopulated, security, physical security, is becoming more and more difficult of attainment. And a man who feels totally responsible for all human beings, is made by this flame of responsibility, non-ideological, non-national; he does not belong to any religion in the accepted form of that word; he is neither Christian, nor Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor Moslem; he sees that they are factors dividing people and therefore bringing about insecurity. The mind itself must have security, otherwise it cannot function. Which means that the brain, with which one thinks, must have security - just like a child it must have security. And when there is no security, in the real deep sense of that word, it creates a `security', in a formula, in a concept, in a belief which becomes a neurotic activity of the mind. If one has such concepts and is acting according to them one is acting neurotically, because in a concept there is no security. Yet the brain, the mind and the physical body need security. One wants security, not only for oneself but for the whole of humanity: that is love, that is compassion. But that compassion and love is totally denied when one seeks security in a neurotic concept, a thing formulated by thought, a thing formulated by a materialistic attitude. When an action is based on a concept, which is itself totally material, then division must inevitably take place - battles, quarrels, agony. That is one side of it; but one must ask: is there security at all? Mind has sought security in physical things - in name, in property and has sought it in concepts, ideals, formulas, systems, yet when one looks at all that very closely, objectively, non-sentimentally, non-personally and sees that this whole set-up brings insecurity for everybody, one asks: is there this thing called security at all? One sees the truth of the necessity of physical security and how that is totally denied by conceptual attitude, for the mind is always pursuing in different forms, security, something permanent -permanent relationship, a permanent house, a permanent idea. Now, is there such a thing as permanency? One may want it, because one sees everything around fading away, withering, in a flux, but the mind insists that there must be security, permanency. But there is no permanency in an idea, in a concept, there is no permanency in things; there is no permanency in one's relationships - in one's wife, in one's children and so on. When you want permanency in relationship the whole problem of attachment arises and from that fear of loss, suspicion, hate, jealousy, anxiety, fear - all that enters into the desire to have permanent relationship. One has found there is no permanency in a concept, though the Catholics, the Protestants and the Communists have all indoctrinated the mind, and the mind has accepted those beliefs, those philosophies as permanent. But as one can see they are disappearing, fading away, everything is being questioned. So one asks: is there anything permanent? It is a very serious question to ask and it is a very difficult thing to find out what happens to a mind that has found the truth that there is nothing permanent. Will it go off, become insane? Will it take drugs, commit suicide? Will it again fall into the trap of another ideology, another desire which projects a permanent thing? One has discovered by just observing one's everyday life, that mind seeks security in all these things. And thought says, `there is no security, there is nothing permanent' and it begins to seek something more permanent in another area, in another consciousness. But thought itself is impermanent; it has never questioned that it itself is impermanent. So, when the mind says there is nothing permanent it must include its own thought. Can the mind be sane, healthy, whole and therefore act totally, when it realizes there is nothing permanent? Or will it become insane? When one is confronted with this fact, that there is nothing permanent, including the structure of thought, can one stand it? Can one see the significance of saying there is nothing permanent? - including yourself! For it is thought which has built that structure which is `me'. That `me' is also impermanent. To understand the immense question of death we have to understand the question of time. Time means movement - from here to there, physically. To cover that distance from here to there you need time, time by the watch, time by the sun, time by day or time by year. And what is the relationship of time - which is distance, movement - to thought? The whole Western world is essentially based on measurement - physically, technologically -and spiritually there is the hierarchy, the bishop, the archbishop, the pope, all based on measurement. The saint is the supreme measure, accepted by the church or by the religion. So the whole moral and intellectual structure of our civilization is based on that -time, measurement, thought. Thought is measurement: thought is time - time being yesterday, what I did then modifies the present and this modification continues in a different form in the future. That is time, the movement from the past through the present to the future; that is time which is measurable. There must be time in which to go from here to there and time is needed to learn a language, or any technique. But does the mind need time to transform itself? The moment the mind admits time, in order to transform itself, it is still within the field of measurement, thought. That area has been created by thought in order to change itself, to bring about a different mind, but as it is functioning within that field, then there is no change at all. Put it this way: I am greedy and I know that greed is comparative. I have this feeling of greed, which arises when I see something more that I have, which is a measure. And I ask myself if, to transform that feeling, that measurement, time is necessary. If time is a necessity, then I remain within the field of measure; therefore I have not changed greed at all. So, is there a change which is not based on causality, on time, a change which is instantaneous? To change violence, to transform it, so that the mind is never violent, does it need time? If one admits that it needs time, then violence takes another form, but it is still within the same area. The desire for permanency is the cause that brings about the structure of time. We look at our daily life: we may have discarded the intellectual permanencies, the theories, state-worship, church and so on, we have discarded them; yet we say there must be permanent relation- ship, that is the only thing we have, but in that too we find there is no permanency. Can the mind, face this absolute truth, that there is no permanency? Having seen this truth, then the mind can look at this immense problem, which man has never been able to solve, this question of death - because it is related. When you go to India you see dead bodies being carried to the river side, to be burned: in the Western world you see the hearse, the black thing with flowers on it, and the long queue of mourners -and those who say, thank God he is dead! There are the people who cry, because they have lost, and the people who inherit the wealth, who are delighted. You see this physical phenomenon, what is your response? Do you see yourself in the hearse being... you follow the whole process? What is your relationship to death, which is there? This is not a morbid question, not something to make you sad or evoke any romantic nonsense; but actually, when you face this thing, when you see it all about you, in all its crudeness, in all its decorated corruption, what is your relationship to it? Is it an intellectual relationship? You say; `Yes we are all going to die one day, that is inevitable and I accept that inevitability, with a rational mind'. Or is it a romantic relationship? Or is it a total relationship? We are all going to die one day, that is inevitable - through diseases, because we have not taken care when we were young, or we have grown to maturity too quickly, you understand? Have you noticed how the young people in the modern world are astonishingly mature, physically, so quickly; they have sexual experience when they are twelve and thirteen, they smoke, drink and take drugs; at the age of twelve, thirteen, fifteen, they are already grown up - that is to say, they are already gone, you follow? Because of the pressure of society, all the industry of entertainment, the schools and colleges, everything making you mature, physically, at an astonishing speed, you are already old when you are thirty - gone! You follow? And as you grow older the body begins to decay more quickly - for which the doctors have their medicines, their pills. Do you not see the sadness of all this? If you have children it is a very sad thing to see them growing so quickly, never having a childhood, never a boyhood, always caught in the trap of civilization; it is a dreadful thing to see this happening to human minds, which should grow slowly, mature quietly, so that the mind at the end of its life is completely alive, whole, healthy. So we die, through disease, accident and old age, in misery, in conflict, in pain, in sorrow. Then there is the sorrow that comes through attachment to things that we are leaving behind - your friend, your wife, your book, your name, your experience, your fame, your notoriety, the character that you are supposed to have built up. All that you are leaving behind and you are frightened, enormously. Notice this now, when you are living before the organism fades, decays and dies. But thought says to itself: `All right, the body goes, but I go on, I go on in my books, I go on in my children, I go on in the work that I have done which I have left to somebody else'. That is called also, immortality - of a certain kind. But the book, the business, the name, the form, they also decay - somebody else takes it all over. And thought says: `All right, I know that too, but I will be born again next life' - the whole of the East believes that. So thought, not seeing its own impermanency, not seeing the structure which it has built around itself as the `me', and its impermanency, says: ` I am the cause and that cause must go on'. And that cause is time and it says: `I will go on; I will go on improving myself - 'God is there, I cannot reach him now, but I will go on, slowly, until I have ultimately perfected myself, reaching what it has projected as God. There is the thought of human beings as a great stream -everybody wants to go on - and in that stream the thought of you remains. And when the medium calls upon you, you manifest, out of that stream, because you are still there, still there in your daily life, because you are still pursuing the same thing that every human being is pursuing - security, permanency,`me' and `not me',`we' and `they', this constant concern with yourself in that stream in which all human beings are caught. When you die your thought of yourself goes on in that stream as it is going on now - as a Christian, Buddhist, whatever you please - greedy, envious, ambitious, frightened, pursuing pleasure - that is this human stream in which you are caught. Unless you step out of it now you will go on in that stream - obviously. Can the mind step out of that and face complete impermanency, now? If you have understood, that is death, is it not? The ancient Hindus, they thought that man cannot let go of everything instantly, it is impossible. Therefore the `me',as you hold to it, must go on, but must evolve, slowly; through various lives he must evolve till he reaches the highest excellence, which is Brahman, God, what you like to call it. They had that idea; the Christians have it in a different way, not so mathematically, so cleverly worked out and the implications are not so subtle. For the Hindus it is implied that the next life becomes very important -therefore how you behave now, in this life, is important; if you behaved rightly, you will be rewarded next life. They all believe in it, but nobody behaves now, so they carry on this game. So can the mind, seeing this phenomenon, this vast area in which the mind has sought security, in which mind has created time, as thought, as measurement, in which it has a movement trying to find permanency, as the me, an enormous area, very complex and extraordinarily subtle, can the mind see the truth that there is absolutely no permanence - which is really death? Can you see the truth of this - not accepting it from another, for then it is not truth, it is mere propaganda, a lie? Can you, for yourself, after all this explanation, see the truth of it - not as a verbal truth, not as an intellectual concept, saying:yes, I have understood it'. That is not truth. The truth acts, so you see that there is no permanency; then you are no longer attached, no longer attached to an idea, a religious belief, a dogma, a saviour. When you see the truth of that, there is freedom and freedom means total intelligence - not the intelligence of cunning thought, but that supreme intelligence which has seen the truth and is therefore free of the things that thought has created. That quality of intelligence -which is supreme and excellent in its essence - can operate and in that there is security - not in the things that thought has created. Then you can live in this world with possessions, or with nothing. That intelligence is immortal, it is neither yours, nor mine; it does not belong to any church, to any group, to anyone. That is the highest, in that there is a complete and total security. That intelligence takes place when you see the truth of the obvious; when you see the false as the false and mind is no longer caught in the network of thought. That intelligence can operate in our daily life; from there, there is permanency. Questioner: Have you achieved the state of freedom? If you are free, then I might have a chance. Krishnamurti: As I have said from the beginning, the speaker would not talk about this thing unless he has it, unless he is involved in it. But that is not important - whether he has it, or does not have it. But what is important is, have you? If you say:he has got it, therefore there is a chance for me', then you are depending on him. Then he becomes your little guru and you will become the follower: and followers always destroy truth. Invariably the follower corrupts truth and it does not exist any more. But if you -you as a human being - have understood this, understood it in the sense of act, then it is yours and nobody can take it away. Then you do not compare; for when you say, `I also have a chance', you are really comparing. When you compare you are competitive, you are measuring, your thought, not your intelligence, is operating. Do not look to another: be your own light. Questioner: You talk of deconditioning oneself immediately, with- out time. I do not have that experience,I have deconditioned myself but it takes time. Krishnamurti: I have explained what time is. One is conditioned; wherever one lives, in the Communist world, the Socialist world, Capitalist world, Catholic world, the Hindu world, one is conditioned, from childhood. By the culture in which one lives, by one's parents who themselves are conditioned, by the school, the college, the whole structure conditions one. And being conditioned, invariably, one lives in a very small field. Does it take time for the mind to free itself from its conditioning? Time is measurement. Time is movement, the movement from here to there including the movement from being conditioned to being non-conditioned. Time is thought, of course, because thought which has created this conditioning is also creating the idea of the unconditioned state, which it wants to achieve. So it is moving from the conditioned mind, to the non-conditioned mind. See what thought has done: created the conditioning and created the non-conditioned state which is another form of conditioning, because it is a product of thought; it is moving from the known to the known, a movement in time. Now, is it possible to look at that conditioning without this movement? I am conditioned, born in India, and so on and so on and I see that it will be good to have an unconditioned mind, because there, there is freedom, a sense of wholeness; no conflict. I see that; so I would like to get there; I would like to have a mind which is really unconditioned. So I need time for that; it is the tradition, is it not? Tradition also means betrayal; betraying the fact that your mind is conditioned. So can one look at the conditioning without the movement of time; without wanting to uncondition? The desire to uncondition is the movement in time to that state when the mind is unconditioned, knowing nothing about an unconditioned mind, it is something one has invented. Can one look at one's conditioning without the movement of its opposite? Can one look at one's greed, envy, lying, vanity, without its opposite? - if there is an opposite - obviously one cannot. When the mind moves towards an opposite, it is betraying the fact of what is and it is caught in the movement of time. Therefore there is no answer out of it. Therefore one has only one thing left. Can the mind observe the fact - the lie, the greed, the vanity, the neuroticism and so on and so on - can it just look? To look it must give its whole attention, for when there is no attention then there is the opposite. When it sees the falseness of the opposite, then it has this complete attention. Then you will see, attention burns away all conditioning. 25th July 1974 TALKS IN SAANEN 1974 7TH PUBLIC TALK 28TH JULY 1974 For the last two weeks we have met here talking about human problems; our chief concern and commitment - if we have been at all serious - has been the transformation, the radical change, of the human mind. The human mind includes the brain, the heart, the organism as a whole, the mind that has created this world around us, the world of corruption, violence, brutality, vanity and all the structure which brings about war. We have been concerned with the change of the content of consciousness because the content makes consciousness. Unless that radical revolution, that psychological change, comes about, there will be no end to conflict, no end to suffering and all the violence that is going on throughout the world. This change cannot possibly be brought about without knowing oneself, which is self knowledge; not knowledge of the higher self or the knowledge of some supreme consciousness, for they are still within the field of thought. Unless one understands oneself, the self of every day, what it thinks, what it does, its devotions, its deceptions, its ambitions, all its self-centred activities, its identification with something noble or ignoble, the state or some ideal, one is still within the field of the `me'. Unless one understands that narrowing field, of which one is so little aware, the field in which there is the unconscious as well as the conscious, which is concerned with the individual ego, its individual ambitions and reactions which are essentially a part of the whole, part of the community, part of the culture in which it lives, whether it is the Christian culture or the Hindu, the Moslem, the Buddhist, the Jewish, and so on, unless we understand that radically, the content of consciousness cannot possibly be transformed. 'Understanding' is not an intellectual, an emotional or a passing thing, it is something that comes with action; therefore it is a complete understanding and not a partial understanding. So in understanding oneself, one's consciousness and its content - for there is no consciousness without content - one sees there are two principle factors, pleasure and fear. They cannot be separated. Where there is the pursuit, the insistence and the demand for pleasure, there must be in its wake, fear. In understanding fear one must not disregard the fact of pleasure. Thought is the measure of fear. Thought is the response of memory, which is experience and knowledge stored up in the brain cells and tissues. Thought is matter. The whole world is constructed, is based, in its very nature and substance and activity, on thought. One has to find out whether it is thought that has bred fear; not how to be free of fear. freedom from fear will inevitably come about when one understands the structure, the nature, and the functioning of thought. When one observes the whole process of thought, which has created the world with all its religions, with all its gods, with its saviours, Christ, the Buddhas, Krishnas, which has created the materialistic world in which we live, one sees that as long as we function there and remain there, fear must continue. fear is the cause of loneliness, of deprivation, both physical and psychological, the cause of attachment to property, to people, ideas, concepts, nationalities, families. As long as there is this functioning of thought within the material world - and it has to function in that world - fear must remain. What else has one if one lives in that world, for there one must seek security, physical or psychological. As long as the mind seeks material security, as long as the mind asserts a permanency, there must be fear. Yet the brain can only function effectively, objectively, rationally, if it has complete security - that is obvious. When it has not security, it finds security in the belief in gods, in symbols, in ideologies, in nationalities, which leads to neurotic action. As long as I call myself a nationalist of a particular country, I am behaving neurotically, I bring about conflict and division between people -that is one of the causes of fear. When you realize that, when you are aware of its whole nature, are you still a nationalist? If you are, there must be the continuance of pleasure and of fear. If the mind lives totally in the material world, then nothing exists but matter, matter, which is manoeuvrable, which is thought, consciousness and will; if the mind lives there, fear will go on, because there, there is nothing else but the demand for material security and permanency. Where there is that demand, there must be fear. There are all the various fears concealed in the very recesses of one's consciousness, racial, collective - the fear of famine - and so on. There is the whole of tradition which is essentially based on thought which is not only handing over from the past to the present, but also betrayal. Traditionalists are the betrayers, are treacherous people, whether in the religious, the political or in the scientific field.(The speaker is not being dogmatic. The speaker feels the responsibility to answer to the whole of human beings, not to the particular little self. Your little self is the rest of the world, so you are the world and the speaker feels utterly, totally, responsible for that. Therefore he speaks rather passionately; which is not put on for your amusement, or for your emotional reactions; he is not interested in that, that is neither here nor there.) So there are these hidden fears and the extraordinarily subtle forms of pleasure. Can they all be exposed - without analysis? We explained the futility of analysis, how the analyser and the analysed are the same. The process of analysis must be total, complete; for if there is any disproportionate or inaccurate analysis, that inaccuracy is taken over to the next analysis. So altogether analysis is paralysis; it takes time, you can go on analysing for the rest of your life and die analysing yourself. So, what is a mind to do when it realizes the absurdity, the falseness, of analysis or introspective examination -what is it to do? There is fear, both conscious and unconscious; the fear of death, of loneliness, of losing a job, the fear of what people will say, the fear of your own attachments and of their loss, the fears of not succeeding, not becoming great, and all the rest; when you realize all this and there is no analysis, what is the mind to do? Is this question clear? To understand what the mind is to do, we must go into the question of meditation. When we use the word meditation, do not take up postures; do not sit suddenly straight - that is one of the things that has been brought over from India - hear it as though you have never heard the word before, or the meaning of that word, or anything about it. But unfortunately you cannot do that because you have a lot of gurus, sannyasis, swamis, and all the rest, that come to this country or to America, to teach you how to meditate, how to sit properly, how to breathe, how to concentrate and so on. So what is meditation? - not how to meditate; that is irrelevant, because the moment you understand what meditation is, it happens naturally, like breathing, you breathe naturally. To find out what meditation is, the real meaning, can you learn from another? Volumes have been written about it, people have meditated according to a particular system, Zen or the Hindu systems with their many, many varieties and methods; they all imply an end to be achieved, through control. Control implies a controller. And is the controller different from the controlled? They - the meditative groups with their systems and their philosophies, their breathing -they say control your thought; thought wanders about and that wandering about is a wastage of energy. Therefore they say thought must be absolutely held, disciplined, subjugated in the pursuit of that thing - enlightenment, God, truth, what you will, the nameless! That implies a controller, obviously. And who is the controller? Is he different in quality, in nature, from that which he says he is going to control? This is very important to understand. The speaker wants to point out that one can give completely, in daily life, without any control, against all the traditions, against all your education, your social and moral behaviour. To live a life absolutely without any controls, means you have to understand very, very deeply, who is the controller and what is the controlled, for this is part of meditation. Is the controller different from that which he is controlling, which is thought? Some say the controller is different: he is the higher self, he is part of the higher consciousness, he is the essence of understanding or the essence of the past which has accumulated so much knowledge. But the controller is still within the field of thought; and however much that thought may be elevated, it is still within the area of time and measure. Do see the truth of this, not the verbal acceptance of it, or the intellectual comprehension of it, but the truth of the matter, that all the gods, Christian or Hindu, all of them, are the invention of thought. Thought can project itself into all kinds of states, into all kinds of illusions and when thought says, there is the higher self, it is still within the field of thought, and therefore that higher self is still matter. When you see that the controller is the controlled, the whole aspect of meditation changes. Meditation means the emptying of consciousness of its content. Then only can the mind and the brain be absolutely quiet. That absolute - not relative - that absolute quietness is necessary to observe - not to experience. Experience we have had of every kind and thought desires more experience, the experience of another state, of another dimension. We are fed up with this world and its experiences - they are boring, they are limited, confined, narrow and we want an experience which is totally different. Now, to `experience' involves recognition. If I do not recognize, is there an experience? I have had the experience of looking at a mountain, the beauty of it, the shadow, the lovely deep blue of an early morning, the whole sense of something extraordinary and magnificent. That experience cannot exist if there is no relationship to the past. And so experience implies recognition from the past. And the mind wants to experience something supreme; to recognize it, it must have already had it. Therefore it is not the supreme; it is still the projection of thought. So meditation is that in which there is no experience. In that there is no element of time, which implies movement and direction - direction implies will. Can the mind empty itself of time, direction and movement, which implies the ending of thought? That is the whole problem. We need knowledge to function; to speak any language, we need knowledge; to drive a car we need knowledge; to do anything we need knowledge. What place has knowledge in meditation - or has it no place at all? It has no place because knowledge is merely a continuation of the past, it is still the movement of time, of the past. So, can the mind empty itself of the past and come upon that area of itself which is not touched by thought? You see, we have only operated, so far, within the area of thought, as knowledge. Right? Is there any other part, any other area of the mind, which includes the brain, which is not touched by human struggle, pain, anxiety, fear and all the violence, all the things that man has made through thought? The discovery of that area is meditation. That implies the discovery as to whether thought can come to an end, but yet for thought to operate when necessary, in the field of knowledge? We need knowledge, otherwise we cannot function, we would not be able to speak, nor be able to write, and so on. Knowledge is necessary to function and its functioning becomes neurotic when status becomes all important, which is the entering of thought as the `me', as status. So knowledge is necessary and yet meditation is to discover, or come upon, or to observe, an area in which there is no movement of thought. Can the two live together, harmoniously, daily? That is the problem, not breathing - you understand - not sitting straight, not repeating mantras, paying a hundred dollars, or whatever you pay, to learn some ugly little word, and repeating that until you think you are in heaven - which is transcendental nonsense! That is the whole problem of yoga; the practising of yoga, proficiency in yoga, standing on your head and all the rest of it. The word yoga, means `to join', to join the higher and the lower; that is what we now have. But it must have had quite a different meaning. Who is it that divided the two and who is it that joins them together? It is still thought. Yoga exercises are excellent; the speaker does them every day, for an hour or more; but that is merely physical exercise, to keep the body healthy, and so on. But through them you can never come upon the other - never! Because if you give them all importance, you are not giving importance to the understanding of yourself -which is to be watchful, to be aware, to give attention to what you are doing, every day of your life; which is to give attention to how you speak and what you say, to what you think, how you behave, whether you are attached, whether you are frightened, whether you are pursuing pleasure and so on. To be aware of the whole movement of thought; for if you are and you are really serious about it, then you will have established right relationship, obviously. Relationship becomes extraordinarily important when all things about are chaotic - when the world is going to pieces, as it is. But when there is this establishment of total relationship, whole relationship, not between you and me, but human relationship with the whole of the world, then you have the basis. From there you can go on to behaviour - how you behave. If your behaviour is based on pleasure or on reward, it is not behaviour. It is merely the pursuit of pleasure from which fear arises. Relationship, behaviour and order, these are absolutely essential if you want to go into the question of meditation. If you have not laid this foundation, then do what you like - stand on your head, breathe in for the next ten thousand years and repeat words, words - there will be no meditation. Even go to India if you have the money - I do not know why you go to India - you will find no enlightenment there. Enlightenment is where you are. And where you are, you have to understand yourself. Having established that, laid the foundation there, order - not mechanical order - order which is virtue, from moment to moment, which is not following a pattern, not the order of the establishment, the order or the virtue of society, which is immoral, then you can go into the question of finding out what meditation is. Meditation implies a quality of mind that is absolutely silent -not made silent, not a contrived act brought about through will, but a silence that comes naturally when you have established order, relationship and behaviour. Silence is necessary. If my mind is chattering - as most minds are - in that chatter there may be a period of silence - between two chatterings there may be a period of silence - but that is not silence. Silence is not the absence of noise; it is not the absence of conflict. Silence comes only when the content of consciousness has been completely understood and gone beyond; which means the observer and the observed are one and there is no controller. When there is no controller - which does not mean that you live a life of indiscipline - when there is no controller, no observer, then action is instantaneous and it brings a great deal of energy. Meditation means the emptying of consciousness of its content and that happens only when you observe your consciousness and its content without the observer. Can you look at your wife, your husband, your girl, your boy, or the mountain, without the observer? The observer is the past. As long as there is the observer, he will inevitably translate everything he observes in terms of the past; therefore he is the maker of time. He divides the observed and the observer; in that there is conflict. When there is observation without the observer, there is no conflict, no past, there is only the fact and you have the energy to go beyond it. Do it and you will find out. Meditation implies a gathering of all energy; you have established order, relationship, behaviour, therefore you are not dissipating energy in that field. That energy is necessary to look without the observer and you have the energy to go beyond. With that energy, which has not been dissipated, the mind sees that there is an area which is not touched by thought. But all this requires tremendous attention and discipline. It is not just a plaything for immature people. Meditation requires tremendous discipline. The word discipline in the dictionary means to learn; not that we must control, we must subjugate, imitate and conform. Discipline means, to learn. From the word discipline comes disciple; one who is willing to learn from the master - learn. But here there is neither a disciple nor a master but only the act of learning, all the time. And that requires a great deal of attention, a great deal of energy, so that you are watching and thus you create no illusions. It is so easy to create illusions; they come when you are pursuing, demanding, wanting, an experience. Desire creates illusions. All this implies a mind that is very, very serious and a heart that is of love, that has never been hurt. We human beings from childhood on are hurt; our parents hurt us, and in the business world we are hurt. We are hurt in every direction, and when we are hurt we cannot possibly love. So is it possible for a mind that has been hurt, to be free of all that hurt, which is part of consciousness? And you will find, when you look at it, that it is utterly and irrevocably possible to empty all hurts and therefore to love, to have compassion. To have compassion means to have passion for all things, not just between two people, but for all human beings, for all things of the earth, the animals, the trees -everything the earth contains. When we have such comparison we will not despoil the earth as we are doing now and we will have no wars. To a mind that is serious, totally dedicated, concerned, meditation means something extraordinary, something so immense. In meditation mind discovers space. This tent contains space. There is this tent; space is held within it and there is space outside it. Thought as the ` me' creates the narrow space in which it acts; it has created through hurt, through all kinds of reasons, a wall within which it lives. There is that narrow space and the space which thought has created outside of itself. Is there a space which has no frontiers, which has no boundaries and therefore, no centre? This is meditation, to find out. As long as there is a centre, the 'me' or the idea of the' me', with all its attachments, that very centre creates a space round itself. Where there is a centre there must be a border. The border may be extended, but it is still limited by the space which the centre has created. Meditation means to come upon that space in which there is no centre, therefore no direction, therefore no time. Without meditation and the coming upon that thing which is not experiencable, which is not to be put into words, which has no time, which has no continuity, life has very little meaning. You may have a lot of money, or no money; you may be attached to your property, to your wife, to your friend, or you may worship your particular little god which thought has invented; but as long as you live there, there will be suffering, pain, anxiety, and violence. And that has no meaning in itself - obviously. So unless you come upon this - not invent it, not project it, not bring it about through any system - then only does life have an extraordinary sense of beauty and meaning. Questioner: From what you have described about meditation, it appears to me you are entering a kind of vacuum. Is that so? Krishnamurti: It is not you entering, nor I entering, into a vacuum. Are we proceeding, or enquiring verbally, intellectually and theoretically, or are we living so as to bring order out of this chaos, order in our daily life~ We live in disorder and by observing that disorder without the observer, there is order. Order is not a vacuum. Order implies no conflict; no division, outwardly or inwardly. This division as the `me', and not the `me', is disorder. To have order does not mean I am living in a vacuum on the contrary. It is the most extraordinary and intelligent action to have relationship not based on image. That is not a vacuum. To behave without a motive is love; love is not a vacuum. So what we are talking about is not creating a vacuum. On the contrary, it is bringing about supreme, excellent intelligence. Intelligence is not a vacuum. 28th July, 1974 SAANEN 1ST PUBLIC TALK 14TH JULY 1974 I am so sorry it is raining. We have had beautiful weather before we began here and I hope we will have nice weather again. I think it is rather important to realize that we are talking about serious things and to understand them we must be quite serious. This is not an entertainment, something you attend one day and then forget the rest of the time. I mean by serious, to be concerned and to be committed totally to the understanding of what is happening around us, and to try to find, if we can, indeed we should as it is our responsibility, an answer to these many many challenges that are offered to us. I mean in that sense to be serious, to be concerned and committed. And committed means action, not just theoretical acceptance of any particular system but to be committed and totally concerned to the solution, and therefore the action, of the problems that face us - politically, economically, socially, morally and religiously. To be committed to these things. Because as we observe, the world is in a dreadful state: there is so much confusion - politically, in the field of education - they are educating people for what? Where is it all going educationally? And religiously, which should be the most important issue in life, there is also the denial of creed, the denial of all the assumed authority of the priest, the doctrines, the beliefs, everything is going to pieces around us. I am sure you must be aware of all this. You go to India, an ancient country, with ancient culture, tradition and there they are destroying themselves inwardly. And the ultimate destruction inwardly is the nuclear bomb there - I hope you realize all this. And you turn to the west and it is the same problem, poverty, not so much as in the east, decline of social morality and they are now looking for new leaders, politically they want leaders. A leader is a dangerous person in whom the whole society is involved in that one person. And society is so complex. And when we follow a leader, either you know where he is leading to, which he generally doesn't, or you must give your mind to the investigation of his theories, of his propositions and so on. That is you must also be capable as citizens to follow what he is saying. All that is involved in political leadership. And unfortunately the politicians right throughout the world are not concerned with human beings, with the unity of man, with their total welfare, but only are concerned with their particular party, with their particular system, and as all governments are more or less corrupt, some more, some less, the politicians cannot see very far, they can only operate within a very small field, segregated apart, not concerned with the total understanding of man. That was rather a mouthful, wasn't it! And so we are faced with this. We accept slogans, cliches, worn out theories, or invent new theories, new systems, but always it is within the field of consciousness which man has carried throughout the centuries. Consciousness is its content, without its content there is no consciousness as we know it. Please, as we said, we are investigating together these problems. Therefore you must partake in it, you must share in it, you must be involved in it, not merely listen to the speaker, accepting or rejecting what he says, but together in fellowship, in co-operation, together investigate, try to find out what the world is like around us, and what is the world inside of us: whether there is a relationship between the inner and the outer; or are they one, indivisible? And that is our concern. We must be committed to the understanding of this. And that is why you must share in it, we must journey together, not be lead, together and therefore there is no authority, there is no leader in investigating. And to investigate you must be totally concerned, not one day be concerned and the rest of the time forget it. You must be concerned day after day, month after month, year after year, all your life because this is your life. So where do we find the answer, a logical, sane, healthy answer to all these problems? Not only the problems that lie outside of us, the wars, the violence, the cunning politicians, the preparation for war and talking about peace - you know what is happening around us: it is wicked, diabolical, appalling - and also we have to find out our relationship to that, what is our place in all this. What is our responsibility - to be responsible means to respond adequately or totally to what is happening. And to respond to it one must be deadly serious, right through our life. That is why, if you are going to be here for the next three weeks or four weeks, you are going to share with what the speaker is saying. You have to listen to find out, and to find out, not what the speaker is saying only, but to find out for yourselves, the right answer, one must put aside your prejudices, your nationalities, your beliefs, your experiences, your knowledge, your hopes, everything to find out. And that demands tremendous seriousness. I don't think most of us realize what is actually going on in the world. We read newspapers - I personally don't read newspapers -but those of you who read them, those of you who watch the television, go to lectures, political, religious and all the rest of it, they are all the superficial explanations, superficial demonstrations, but if one can go beyond all that, putting all that aside, one can see, if one has observed rather closely, how man is deteriorating, degenerating, and this degeneration takes place when you depend totally on the outer. That is, when matter, material becomes all important. Are we going together? Please do listen to all this, give your heart and your ears to this. Not that the speaker wants to convince you, or do propaganda, that is terrible. When you look at all this, the divergence of opinions, ideologies, the political systems, right, left or centre, everybody is talking, or arranging, or trying to reform the institutions, the governments, they are still working in the field of time, thought and matter. Please, I may use words which are very simple, not any particular jargon, not any particular words that have a subtle or hidden meaning, but the words which exist in the dictionary. So to communicate we must use simple, clear words. And in communication, which is to think together, to understand the words together, to listen to find out not only the meaning of the words but also the meaning that lies behind the words. Only then there is communication between the speaker and you. But if you are merely caught in words and the explanation of words, the semantic meaning of words, then we shall miss what lies behind the word. So to communicate requires a great deal of concern on both sides, a great deal of serious attention. And when one sees what is happening, when one observes, all politicians, the religious people, the various sects and denominations and so on are merely concerned with the operation of thought, because thought has created this world - the world of politics, the world of economics, the world of business, social morality and the whole religious structure, whether it is in India, here or anywhere, is based on thought, whether it is the Jewish thought, or the Arabic thought, or the Christian thought, or the Hindu thought, it is essentially the operation of thought as matter -right? Are we meeting each other? And we are trying to solve all our problems within that field. When you meditate you are still caught in the pattern of that thought, still within that area of consciousness which is put together by thought. When you try to find political answers, it is still within that area - you understand? All our problems, all our desires to find answers to those problems, are within that consciousness - right? I do not know if you have talked to any serious politicians, perhaps? The speaker has in India, in America, here and elsewhere, they are all trying to find an answer, to find a political philosophy, a reformation of institutions within that field which thought has created. And so thought is trying to find an answer to that which it has created. The mess it has made in our personal relationships, in our relationship with the community, in our relationship with the government and so on and so on, it is all within that field. And as politics unfortunately play such an important part in our social, moral environmental conditioning, the politician, the so-called 'right on top of the ladder', they want to find an answer, if they are at all slightly serious, which I doubt, they are trying to find an answer to all the problems in the field, or in the function of thought - right? That is so. It is not my invention, it is not what I think, this is a fact. Thought, which has divided the world into the Americans, the Communists, the Socialists, the Germans, the Swiss, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the divisions, economic, national, religious divisions, which thought has created. So is there an answer to all these problems through the operation of thought? Even your meditations, even your gods, your Christs and your Buddhas and all the rest of it, they are the creation of thought and thought is matter. And thought can only operate within the field of time. I think this is very clear, if you have at all thought or given your heart to this. And is there an answer to all these problems through thought? Then if thought cannot answer it what will? You are following all this? So that is what we are going to investigate, not only this morning but right through all these seven or fourteen discussions and talks. Because we think through thought, through will, through ambition, through drive and aggression, we can solve all these problems - problems of personal relationship between you and another, the substitutions of new religions instead of the old, the traditions that are brought over, which are dead already anyhow in India, are brought over here or America or Europe by gurus, who are soaked in tradition. Do you understand all this? If you saw any of the television and all that you would have seen the absurdities that are going on. So first we must investigate what is consciousness. What is the operation of thought? Because thought has created everything around us, the whole technological field with all the scientific knowledge, the culture in which we live, the Christian culture, the western culture or the eastern culture is put together by thought. The gods, the saviours - we have created them. God has not created us in his image, we have created god in our image. And we pursue that image, which thought has created, and we call that religious activity. And to understand what is consciousness, because that is what we have, when we say, "I am conscious", it means I am conscious of everything happening around me as much as possible. To be aware of what is happening within that consciousness, to be attentive implies not only to the investigation of the content of consciousness but also what lies beyond, if there is something beyond the so-called consciousness. All that is involved. All right, we are understanding each other? Please at the end of this talk we will ask some questions but please this is the content, the essence of what we are talking about. And in that area all your meditations are, all your pursuits of pleasure, fear, greed, envy, brutality, violence are within that field. And thought is always endeavouring to go beyond it, asserting the ineffable, the unnameable, unknowable and so on - right? So the content of consciousness is consciousness - right? May we go on from there? Your consciousness, or another's consciousness if it is born in India, is its content. If it is born in that country with all the traditions, superstitions, hopes, fears, sorrows, anxieties, violence, sexual demands, aggression, his beliefs, his dogmas, his creeds, are the content of your consciousness. Right? Are you following this? When you examine the content of consciousness, the content is extraordinarily similar, whether in the east or in the west. Please consider your own consciousness, look at your consciousness, if you can. You are brought up in a culture, a religious culture as a Christian, believing in - and all the rest of it, you know what you believe - saviours, rituals, creeds, dogmas on one side, social immorality, accepting wars, accepting your nationalities and its divisions, and therefore restricting economic expansion, consideration of others and so on and so on. Your personal unhappiness, your ambitions, your fears, your greeds, your aggressiveness, your demands, your loneliness, your sorrow, your lack of relationship with another, isolation, frustration, confusion, misery, all that is your consciousness. No? With variations, with joys, with more knowledge or less knowledge, all that is the content of your consciousness. And without the content there is no consciousness as we know it. And all our education, the schools, the colleges, the universities are based on the acquiring of more knowledge, more information, but functioning always within that area. If you observe yourself and any reformation, politically, in a new political philosophy, instead of Communist philosophy, Marxian philosophy or other philosophy, to invent another philosophy is still within that area - right? Do please see this. And so man goes on suffering, unhappy, lonely, fearful of death and living, hoping for some great leader to come and take him out of his misery - a new saviour, a new politician, a new Hitler, a new Wilson and God knows what else. And because we are so irresponsible in this confusion we are, out of our own disorder, going to create tyrants, hoping they will create order within this area. Are you following all this? This is what is happening outside of us and inside. So what shall be done? What shall we do? Not what the politicians will do, because they are like us, confused, unhappy, ambitious, envious, you know, like us. And any leader we choose will be like us, we will not choose a leader who is totally different from us. So that is the actual picture of our life - conflict, inside and outside, struggle, fight, wrangle, one opposed to the other, appalling selfishness - you know the whole picture - right? Now our problem is, if you are at all serious and one must be serious when there is so much sorrow in the world, so much confusion, so much hate and antagonism, where there is not a spark of love - love is not pleasure, love is not desire. So the first thing that behoves us, if we are at all serious, is to find out for ourselves through careful investigation, slow, patient, hesitating investigation, to see if there is any other way of solving all these problems. Not through the operation of thought, but is there an action which is not based on thought? Is there an intelligence which is not cunning, which is not the function or the result of thought, which is not put together by thought, which doesn't come about through friction, struggle, but something entirely different? That is what I want to communicate. And therefore one has to listen: listen not to the speaker, but the action of listening. That is, how do you listen? Do you ever listen at all? Or do you always listen with interpretation, with prejudices, with cunning operations of thought? Or are you free to listen? So you have to listen, if you are free, to listen to the content of your consciousness, listen to, not only what is observable, which is fairly simple, but the layers of it. That means the conscious as well as the deeper, which is the totality of consciousness. Are we communicating with each other? So from that arises the question: how to look; how to listen and how to look? All right. This person, the speaker, was born in a certain country with all the prejudices, irrationalities, with the superstitions, with the beliefs, with the class differences, as a Brahmin and all the rest of it; there the mind, the young mind absorbed all this - the tradition, the rituals, the extraordinary orthodoxy of that particular group, the tremendous discipline imposed by that group upon itself. And he moves to the west, there again he absorbs all that. And the content of his consciousness is what he has learnt, what has been put into it, what are his thoughts and the thought which recognizes its own emotions and so on. That is the content of this person. And within that area he has got all the problems - political, religious, personal, communal, you follow? All the problems are there. And not being able to solve them he looks to others, to books, to various forms of asking "Please tell me what to do, how to meditate; what shall I do about my personal relationship with my wife, or my girl or whatever it is, between myself and my parents; should I believe in Jesus or in Buddha, or the new guru who comes along with a lot of nonsense?" You follow? Searching for a new philosophy of life, new philosophy of politics and so on and so on, all within that area. And man has done this from time immemorial. And there is no answer within that area. You may meditate for hours, sitting in a certain posture, breathing, but it is still within that area because you want something out of meditation. I don't know if you see all this? So there is this content - heavy, dull, stupid, traditional, thought recognizing all its emotions - otherwise they are not emotions - and always thought, which is the response of memory, knowledge and experience, operating. Now can the mind look at it? Can you look at it? You understand? We said to listen to it, to hear what it says. Now we are talking about looking. Now when you look, who is the looker, who is the observer? You understand? Come on sirs, you understand? Is the observer, who is looking at the content, different from the content? This is really a very important question to ask and find an answer. Is the observer different from the content and therefore he can then change, alter and go beyond the content? Or is the observer the same as the content? First look: if the observer, the 'I' that looks, the 'me' that looks, if the observer is different from the observed then there is a division between the observer and the observed and conflict. Right? "I must not do this, I should do that. I must get rid of my particular prejudice and adopt a new prejudice. Get rid of my old gods and take on new gods". So when there is a division between the observer and the observed there must be conflict. That is a principle, that is a law. When there is a German and a Russian and an Englishman, and a Frenchman there must be division and therefore there is everlasting conflict between them, economically and all the rest of it - right? This is a principle, this is a law, inevitable. So do I observe the content of my consciousness as an outsider looking in and therefore altering the pieces and moving the pieces to different places? Or is the observer, the thinker, the experiencer, the looker, is he different from that? Or both are the same? You understand? Don't be so puzzled please! It is very simple. Look sir: am I different from you? Physically, yes. But the content of my mind, if I have not gone beyond it, is like yours - the worries, the pain, the suffering, the anxieties, the brutalities, the sexual demands, you know human beings are the same right through the world - they may be brown, black, purple, yellow or pink and all the rest of it. Now how do I look at you? How do you look at me? Because the 'how you look' matters tremendously, whether it is a mountain, or a goat, or a politician, or your wife, or your girl or yourself, how you look matters tremendously. Because if you look at another man from India or Asia, look, not merely say, "Yes, he is like me", but actually look - if you look with eyes that are always divided then there is conflict between you and him - right? Naturally. And if I look at the content of my consciousness as an outsider observing, then there must be conflict between what is observed and the observer. That is so, isn't it? So what happens when I hear this statement - please listen to this - when I hear this statement that when there is a division between the observer and the observed, there is conflict? Like an Arab and the Jew there must be conflict. So in that division and conflict we have lived, 'me' and the 'not me', we and they. I observe the observer is different from anger, therefore he tries to control it, suppress it, dominate it, overcome it and all the rest of it - right? Are you following all this? So is the observer different at all? Or is he essentially the same as the observed? If it is the same there is no conflict, is there? You understand? The understanding of that is intelligence. Then intelligence operates and not conflict - you understand what I am talking about? Are you giving as much blood as the speaker is giving in understanding? Or are you just listening, you know, playing with words? And it would be a thousand pities if you don't understand this simple thing because man has lived in conflict, and he wants peace through conflict. And there can never be peace through conflict, however many armaments and all that you may have, against another armament equally strong, and then fight, there will never be peace. Only when intelligence operates will there be peace. Intelligence which comes when one understands that there is no division between the observer and the observed, and therefore that very insight, that very fact, that very truth brings this intelligence. Have you got it? Sirs this is a very serious thing. Then you will see that you have no nationality, you may have a passport but you have no nationality, you have no gods, there is no outside authority, nor inward authority. The only authority then is intelligence, not the cunning intelligence of thought, which is mere knowledge operating within a certain area - that is not intelligence. So this is the first thing to understand, that when you look at your consciousness - we will go into how to look - when you look into this consciousness this division between the thinker and the thought, between the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experienced, are one, there is no thinker if you don't think. Thought has put the thinker, thought has created the thinker. The thinker is the observer with his past knowledge, with his traditions, with his experiences, with his accumulated knowledge; and not being able to solve these problems we say, "Let's go back to the past, let's accept tradition". You know that word 'tradition' means not only to hand over, to give over, but also it has got another meaning, it has the meaning of 'betray'. You look in a good dictionary and you will find it is so. Tradition not only means what is generally accepted but also it means to betray. And that is what they are doing when they bring their old traditions from India to this country or to America, they are betraying; betraying the awakening of intelligence. So that is the first thing to understand, to have an insight, to have the truth of it, the fact of it as palpable as you are sitting there, so that there is no conflict between the observer and the observed. So: what is the content? Can you look at it? The content of your consciousness, the hidden as well as the open, can you look at it? Don't make an effort! For the love of god! This you can only find out not here, sitting, find out in your relationships. You understand? Because that is the mirror in which you will see, not by closing your eyes and going off into the woods and thinking up some dreams, but in actual fact of relationship, man, woman, your neighbour, your politician, your gods, your gurus, all the rest of the business. Because there you observe your reactions, your attitudes, your prejudices, your images, your constant groping and all the rest of it is in that. Right? Surely/ Are you following all this? Look: what we are doing now is merely ploughing, and we can go on ploughing, ploughing and never sowing. You can only sow when you observe your relationships and see what actually is taking place. So you see, from hearing you move to looking, from listening you are looking. And you can look as much as you like and begin to distinguish various qualities and tendencies and all the rest of it, but when you look as an observer different from the observed then you are bound to create conflict, and therefore it creates further suffering. But when you have the insight, the truth of it that the observer is the observed then conflict ceases altogether. Then a totally different kind of energy comes into operation. I wonder if you can go on with this? Do you understand all this? Sir, there are different kinds of energy - physical energy, good food and all the rest of it, there may be energy created by emotionalism, sentimentality, then there is energy created by thought through various conflicts and tensions, and within that area we have lived. I am only putting it differently. And we are still trying to find greater energy within that field, to solve our problems which need tremendous energy. Now there is a different kind of energy, or the continuation of this energy in a totally different form, when the mind is completely operating, not in the field of thought, but intelligently. We will go into that during all these talks. So can the mind observe its content without any choice of the content? Right? Not choosing any part of the content, any part of the piece but observe totally? Right? Now how is it possible to observe totally? You understand? When I look at a map of France, I come from England, cross the Channel and I look at the map, and I see the road leading to Gstaad. That is very simple. I know the mileage, I can see the direction and that is very simple because it is marked there and I follow it. And in doing that I don't look at any other part of the map because I know - please listen to this - I know the direction I want to go in, so the direction excludes all the other. Therefore a mind that is seeking a direction cannot see the whole. You understand this? If I want to find something, something which I think is real, then the direction is set, and I follow the direction and therefore my mind is incapable of seeing the totality. Now when I look at the content of my consciousness, which is yours, when I look at it I have a set direction to go beyond it. I have a set direction, a movement in a particular direction, pleasurable, not wanting to do this or that, it is always a movement in a certain direction, and therefore it is incapable of seeing the whole. If I am a scientist I only see in a certain direction. If I am an artist, there again, if I have a certain talent or gift, again the same direction. You are following all this? So the mind is incapable of seeing the totality and the immensity of that totality if there is a movement in a particular direction. Movement means time because times implies from here to there. So can the mind have no direction at all? Please this is a difficult question. Please listen to it. Of course it has direction when it goes from here to the house, when I have to operate in a certain direction, when I have to drive a car, when I have to do some technical function, those are all directions. But I am talking of a mind that understands the nature of direction and therefore capable of seeing the whole. When you see the whole it can then operate in direction. I wonder if you get this? If I have the whole picture in mind then I can take the details. But if my mind only operates in details I cannot take the whole. If I am concerned with my opinions, with my anxieties, with what I want to do, with what I must do, I cannot see the whole, obviously. If I come from India with my blasted prejudices and superstitions and traditions I cannot see the whole. So my question is: can the mind be free of direction? It doesn't mean it is without direction. When it operates from the whole the direction becomes very clear, very strong and effective. You understand? But when the mind only operates in direction according to the pattern it has set for itself then it cannot see the whole. Are we communicating with each other? We will go into it day after day in different ways. So there is the content of my consciousness. The content makes my consciousness. Now can I look at it as a whole - without any direction, without any judgement, without any choice, just to look? And as I said, as the speaker said, to look implies no observer at all, for the observer is the past. To observe with that intelligence which is not put together by thought, which is the past. Do do it. And this requires tremendous discipline, not the discipline of suppression, control, imitation, conformity and all that rubbish, but it is a discipline, it is an act in which the truth is seen. And the truth operates, and therefore the operation of truth creates its own action, which is discipline. So can your mind look at your content? And you can only look at it when you talk to another, in your gestures, in the way you walk, in the way you sit and eat, in the way you behave. Because behaviour indicates the content of your consciousness - right? Whether you are behaving according to pleasure, reward and pain, which is part of your consciousness. The psychologists are saying that so far man has been educated on the principle of punishment -heaven and hell, you know, all that business. Now he must be educated on reward - do you understand? On the principle of reward, don't punish him but reward him, which is the same thing, you understand? You go from one thing to another and you think you are solving everything. Now to see the absurdity of punishment and reward is to see the whole. And when you see the whole there is the operation of intelligence which functions when you behave. Right? You are getting it? You are not then behaving according to reward or punishment. I wonder if you are getting all this? Because behaviour exposes the content of your consciousness. You may hide yourself behind a polished behaviour, a mechanical behaviour, a behaviour that is very carefully drilled, but such behaviour is merely mechanical. And so from that arises another tremendously important problem: is the mind mechanical? Or is there any portion where the brain is not mechanical at all? We can't go into that now because it requires a great deal of investigation and enquiry. So we will stop this morning. That is I will go over it so that you will see what I mean. Outside of us, the political world, the economic world, the religious world, the social world, the new political philosophies, and so on, man is searching, searching, searching within that - new gods, new gurus, new leaders. And when you observe all this, you see very clearly that they are all functioning within the field of thought. Thought essentially is never free, thought is always old, because thought is the response of memory as knowledge and experience, which is matter. That is the material world. And thought is trying to escape from that material world into a non material world. And to escape into the non material world by thought is still material. And we have all these problems, personal, collective, moral, social, problems of the individuals and the collective - the individual is essentially, intrinsically part of the collective, you are no different from the collective, you may have a little different tendencies, different occupations, different moods and so on, but you are intrinsically part of your culture, which is society and so on. Now those are facts that are going on about us. The facts inside are also similar, very much alike. And we are trying to find an answer for the major problems of our human life through the operation of thought - thought which the Greeks have imposed upon the west, with their political philosophy, with their mathematics and you know all the rest of it, which is still thought. And thought has not found an answer, and it never will. So we must go then into the whole structure of thought and the content which thought has created as consciousness; and then observe it in relationship, in your daily life. And that observation implies looking, having an insight into the fact of whether the observer is different from the observed, if there is a division between the observer and the observed there must inevitably be conflict, as between two ideologies. Two ideologies are the inventions of thought, conditioned by the culture it has lived in and so on and so on. Now can you, in your daily life, observe this? And in the observation of this you will find out what your behaviour is, whether it is based on the principle of reward and punishment. And most of our behaviour is, however much polished, refined and all the rest. So from that observation one begins to learn what real intelligence is, not the intelligence which is bought out of a book, out of experience, that is not intelligence at all. Intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with thought. Intelligence operates when the mind sees the whole, the endless whole - not my country, my problems, my little gods, my meditations, is this right, is this wrong, but to see the whole implication of living. And when you observe, out of that comes this quality of intelligence which has got its own tremendous energy. Now perhaps some of you, if you care to, and if you are not too tired, might ask some questions - questions that are relevant to what we have been talking about. You know it is fairly easy to ask questions, very easy. And when you have asked questions who is going to answer your question? You understand? Who is going to answer it? The speaker? Q. I am. K. One moment sir. Let me finish. Who is going to answer the question? And then if you are going to answer it yourself then why ask the question? You ask the questions either to trip the speaker, to catch him out - and the speaker is quite willing to be caught out -or you are asking a question and in the very asking you are sharing that question with others, so the others have to listen to that question, not be caught in their own questions. You understand what I am saying? If I am asking a question I am asking it aloud so that you and I share that question, because my question is your question. So you must be willing to listen to that question and not just be involved in your own particular little question. So in the sharing of that question we are both together investigating the implications of that question, therefore it is my question as well as yours, and therefore we are sharing it, and therefore the answer is yours and mine - do you understand all this? That is involved in asking a question. Now, you wanted to ask a question sir? Q. (Inaudible) K. Sir, look sir. Thought has created these wars - right? Right? And the instruments of war. Thought has created the division between the countries, as German, Russian, American, Hindu and all the rest, the Jew and the Arab, it is the division by thought that has created wars, and we go on operating in that field, keeping the divisions and trying to talk about peace, meeting at different summit levels or whatever the beastly things are called, and is that intelligence? Or is intelligence seeing the inwardness of this, the truth of this and letting that intelligence operate, which means no division, which means all the politicians, get together - you follow? - and say, "Look, let's forget our systems, policies, what is the right thing to do for the world". Do you think any politician will ever do that? No. Therefore you have to change, not the politician. And the transformation lies not in the reformation of institutions, or new philosophies but the transformation in your consciousness. SAANEN 2ND PUBLIC TALK 16TH JULY 1974 Shall we go on talking about what we were saying on Sunday morning? Shall we go into all that again? We were saying, weren't we, that the world outside and in us is in such chaotic condition, and the politicians and the leaders and the religious priests are trying to solve these problems in the field of thought. This has been the game for centuries upon centuries, trying to solve all human problems at the level of thought. And apparently from what one sees, suffering still goes on, wars are endless, governments are more or less corrupt, politicians play a crooked game and ideologies, systems have taken the place of morality and intelligence. Seeing all this, objectively, without any prejudice or dedicated to a particular ideology or a system, one observes that thought is divisive, thought divides, and excellence in thought is not excellence in conduct. As we said the day before yesterday, please, these are serious talks, these are not mere entertainment, these are not something over which to be amused or cried over. It is something one has to go through, investigate deeply, as deeply as one can, verbally and non verbally. And that demands a great deal of care, affection, consideration, a sense of intimate communication with each other. And therefore that demands that you and I share the thing together, that you share it, not just listen to a series of words or ideas or concepts because they are not ideas or concepts, agreeing or disagreeing, but rather really taking part in it with your heart, with your mind, with all your energy. Then I think such a serious concern and commitment does reveal a great deal, does reveal not only the source of our thought and also our mischief, but also the source of action. Because we live by action, we cannot possibly avoid action. You may withdraw from the world into a monastery, that is action also. You may take a vow, that is action. Or you might specialize in a particular field which gives you an opportunity for your talent and a career, that is action. Action is also in relationship between you and another. So the movement of life is action. That is again fairly obvious. And we are enquiring: thought so far in civilizations has produced actions which are conflicting, contradictory, opposing and therefore breeding a great deal of mischief, misery, conflict. That is again obvious. And is there excellence in thought and therefore action? Or is there always conflict when thought with its ideas produces an action? You are following all this? Please this is your life, not my life. And if one would understand one's life, one's behaviour, one's conduct, one's relationship, and in this confusion find out what to do so that that action is excellent at all levels. Then we must enquire: is there an action which is not fragmented by thought, because thought is fragmentary in its very nature? And through thought we are trying to find an action at all levels of our life which will not be contradictory, which will not be regretful, which will be whole, total, complete. And can such action be the product of thought? That we must examine very carefully first before we take the next step. Which is: is there an action which is supremely excellent, which is not based on the movement of thought? That is the next question we will have to ask after we have enquired into this fragmentary action, which is the product of thought; and why is thought divisive? That is, why does thought divide? I do not know if you have noticed it, geographically, historically, economically, socially - god and man, the devil and - divisive - why? Why is thought, upon which we live, upon which our whole social morality is dependent, why is thought divisive? If thought is matter, which it is, and thought which is the response of the past, which it is, then thought creates the movement of time as yesterday, today and tomorrow. So thought has its source in the very root of the past. And having its root in the past it must create time as movement. I don't know if you are following all this. We will go into it. Just quietly listen to it first, don't agree or disagree and say, "Oh, Lord, what is it all about, I am unhappy, I want my problem solved immediately, I want to meditate, I want to do this, I am a vegetarian, should I be a vegetarian" - we will come to all that - "whether I should smoke, not smoke, whether I should wear leather or not" - you follow - all those problems we will come to a little later. But we cannot come to them without understanding this extraordinary movement of thought. We said, why is thought divisive, divided? One sees by its very nature, by its very function and structure, it has its being essentially in the past, it lives there - in tradition, in the accumulated knowledge that one has acquired or society has acquired, or the great accumulation of scientific knowledge which is in the past; so thought is essentially the movement from the past therefore it must be divisive. It can pretend, or stipulate, or conceive that it is beyond time, but it is still thought functioning. It can imagine a timeless state, but it is still thought. It can pretend that it is going beyond it own limits, it is still thought. So thought creates a boundary of time around itself, and that is the factor of division. Are we communicating with each other? Please this is really important if we are to go any further into this matter, as we are going to, day after day for the next three weeks. Because we are all reared in the field of thought. Our education is the movement in thought, getting more and more knowledge, refinement of thought and so on and so on and so on. And when thought is divisive, whatever action it creates must also be fragmented, and therefore conflict. This is the principle. Are we meeting each other? Come on sirs. You see man has lived, historically as we know it, lived in a series of crises and responses which breed inevitably more conflict. As you can see in the modern world what is going on. There is a crisis, the thought tries to answer it and in the very answering it you create more problems. You supply arms to one country knowing jolly well it is going to create more trouble, and so on and so on. So can thought ever bring about an action that is total, whole, sane, not contradictory? Because our life is contradictory. We live at different levels, at the business level, family level, or the scientific level or the religious level, or the artistic level, or each opposing the other, each specializing in its own department. And specialization, which is the fashion now, becomes exclusive and therefore contradictory, and therefore destructive. The man who specializes in religion, he is called a saint, and he is the most destructive man because he has specialized in one department, like the military, and so on and so on. So thought trying to be excellent in its action specializes and brings about more conflict, more division. I wonder if you are following all this? Sirs, don't follow it verbally, watch it in yourself, because we are talking about yourself. The words, the phrases that the speaker is using are a mirror in which you are looking at yourself, and you see this happening round you and in yourself. So each specialization has its own ambitious end, each career has its own reward, contradictory, opposing affection, care, consideration, love and all the rest of it -right? So looking at it, then one asks: is there an action which is whole, not fragmentary? In that action there is no regret, no sense of fulfilment, no sense of frustration - is there such an action? Because that is what we are asking all our life. Because whatever we do brings a certain pain, a certain confusion or a certain reward. And in the pursuit of that reward we create more division. So it is inevitable and natural and logical to ask if there is an action which is not born out of the movement of thought? May I go into something which may appear to be different, but it is not? We need energy, we have energy. A physical energy, emotional energy, the energy of hate, the energy of lust and the energy of great passion; and there is also the energy of great tension, which is brought about through a sense of frustration, division and lack of fulfilment. I do not know if you have noticed in yourself, as one gets older the body becomes rather worn out, diseased, old age, pain and all the rest of it begins, and the energy wastes away. And most of our energy is the product of conflict. I am, I should be - the fight, the aggressive desire to continue in that direction. You have noticed all this? And the energy that is brought about through an ideal, through commitment to that ideal - the whole Communist world is based on that, from the beginning of Lenin until now, destroy people by the million to get what you think is right. And that gives one tremendous energy. Like the saint dedicated to an ideal, to a picture, to an imagination, to a formula, it does breed extraordinary energy. The idealists have an extraordinary energy. In any form of specialization energy is required. The more you specialize the more energy you have, discarding all other forms of energy. This is what you see, not only in oneself but also outside. Thought creates its own energy, which is what is happening in the western world; to produce one of those marvellous machines as a submarine one must have tremendous co-operation, energy, and that energy is brought about through an idea. Idea is organized thought. I hope you are following all this. And this kind of energy is always in the deep sense of that word destructive, because it is divisive. Now is there an energy which is not destructive, which is not divisive, which is not mechanical? I will go into it. Give me a chance. You know I didn't prepare this talk. I never do and so I am also investigating as I am going along. Otherwise if I prepare a talk and come here it is a beastly bore. So I am asking myself and you: is there an energy which is not based on an idea, commitment to an ideology, an energy which is not dependent on attachment, whether it is to furniture, to an ideal or to a person? You are following all this? Is there an energy which is not in any way involved in the field of time as thought, movement? Right? What are we going to find out? You understand my enquiry? Life is action, the very living, all relationship is action, movement in action. Action is movement. And that movement is based on thought, at present - political, religious, social, economic and moral relativity, which is rampant in the world now - all that is based on thought, which is divisive and therefore contradictory and breeding more misery. And is there an action totally unrelated to all that? And to find out one must have energy, not mere intellectual energy, with all its accumulated, educated knowledge. It is not the intellectual energy, nor emotional energy, which is recognizable by thought and therefore it is still part of thought. So is there an energy which can come about so as to bring about a total transformation in the very process of the mind? You understand? Our minds are educated in so many ways, in excellent ways on the foundation of thought; and that thought has its own energy, and in action that energy does breed a great deal of mischief and confusion. That is clear. And in enquiring if there is an action which is not based on the movement of thought, to enquire into that very deeply you need a great deal of energy, not the energy of trying to find an end, not the energy that you have when you are moving in a particular direction, but the energy that can change the content of consciousness. You get what I am talking about? Look sirs: to put it differently. One knows what the content of one's consciousness is, if one is at all awake, aware, attending to one's behaviour, watching, looking, hearing. One knows what the content of one's consciousness is. And the desire to change that is a movement in a particular direction, and that does give you energy but it is divisive - right? And one realizes the content must be totally changed because we can't go on as we are, unless we want to destroy the whole of humanity. It requires a total transformation of the content of consciousness. The content makes consciousness, therefore when there is total transformation of the content there is a different kind of - I won't call it consciousness - a different level altogether. And to bring about that change you need tremendous energy - right? So there must freedom from direction - please see the logic of it, the sanity of it - there must be freedom from direction, from a conclusion, though conclusions give you a great deal of energy, but that kind of energy is a wasteful energy. So the mind must be freed of idea - you understand? Idea is the response of thought, the mind must be free of ideals because that is again direction, the mind must be free of all the divisive movements of thought as nationality, the race, freedom from the stupid religious divisions, all that. Now can your mind be free of that? If it cannot then it is not possible, do what you will, stand on your head for ten thousand years, or meditate sitting in a position, posture, breathing rightly, for another ten thousands years, you will never find the other. So can the mind, seeing how stupid, how unintelligent ideals are, see it not say that they are wrong and put it away, but see the truth of it, as when you see the truth of it you are free of it. Not when you logically, historically examine all this. When you see something as poisonous you drop it. There is no conflict because your intelligence says it is too stupid to go that way. Can you free your mind from all this? Please listen to this. Do you free it one by one? Or do you free it totally? If you free it one by one that takes energy doesn't it? Well I'll look at my nationality, how stupid it is, I'll drop it. I'll look at my ideals and say, good lord it is too old fashioned, it doesn't lead anywhere, it breeds conflict and I'll drop it - you follow? Will you free the mind layer by layer, which will take time, which will take analysis, and analysis is paralysis? And will you go through that period taking long years? Or is there a way of looking at all this totally, and therefore be totally free of it? You understand? Now traditionally it is said that you must go step by step. First you must get rid of, control your body, breathe rightly - you know all the beastly games they play. Tradition and modern psychology also says, to go step by step, analysis, tear away. And you can spend years, until you die doing that - right? Now is that not a wastage of energy? If it is, then how shall the mind - please go into this - how shall such a mind empty itself of its content so that it has a totally different existence, totally different kind of energy? Have I conveyed my question? Look sirs, the content of my mind is your content. Your content of your consciousness is the content of my consciousness, slightly modified, with a little more colour, with a little less colour, a little more elaborate, a little less elaborate, more artistic and less, and so on but it is more or less the same as your consciousness. The mind becomes aware of it, and it says, "How can I be aware of the totality of it?" - not only the unconscious but the conscious. I know I can strip layer after layer, both the conscious as well as the unconscious, go through that process taking time, analysing, knowing the danger of analysis. I can do that, that is the traditional, accepted way of the world to do this. If you are serious and if you are interested. And I see that it takes infinite time, because every analysis must be totally accurate, otherwise the next analysis will be corrupted by the past analysis. Right? So each analysis must be complete, true and final, otherwise I am lost. And can such analysis take place? And who is the analyser? The analyser is the analysed. Right? Am I going too fast? So I see that that is not going to do a thing. So what am I to do? You understand my question? What is my mind to do when it has seen the absurdity of this? Now has it seen the absurdity of it? Or does it imagine it has seen it because somebody has said that it is absurd, because we are secondhand people. You understand? So I accept the authority of another and say, "Yes, that is absurd". It is a verbal assertion without any reality. So I have accepted authority of another, and the acceptance has no validity because it does not produce results. Right? So the mind discards authority, traditional, recent, or the authority I have cultivated because out of my own desires, selfishness, demands, my authority, I know. So the mind totally discards authority, Can you do this? Not the authority of law and tax and all that, I am not talking about all that, but the psychological authority of someone to tell you what to do, because I am in confusion and I look to somebody who will free me from this confusion. Out of my disorder I create the authority - I wonder if you understand this? It is historically so: wherever there is disorder a man springs up tyrannically and brings about some kind of order, which is total disorder. So can the mind put away authority because it sees the truth of it, the significance of it, the nature of it, not a reaction to authority -which is what is going on? When you react against authority you are creating another authority. That is obvious. I do not know if you have ever seen that caricature which appeared in "The New Yorker" about when a little boy and a little girl were looking down from a window, and they see two hippies going along on the path. The boy says to the girl, "There goes the Establishment". That is reaction! So can the mind, your mind be free of this traditional approach, traditional analysis, introspective, trying to improve, all that, because you see the truth of it? Therefore there is no guru, no saviour, no steps through meditation to come upon something extraordinary. There is something extraordinary, but not through this way. So can the mind put away all this, deny all this without any resistance? And to do that you must look. You must look outwardly and inwardly; hear the music of the world and the discord of the world, the music of inside and the discord of inside, because both are the same. We are an intrinsic part of the world -right? And to do this I said we required energy. And this energy is not brought about by a concept, by words - right? This energy comes when you have the insight into the disorder of a mind which functions mechanically in the movement of thought - right? Have you got this? So no belief, no idea, no concepts, no ideals, no commitment of any kind in that field. I hope there aren't any gurus here! Or probably you are becoming one; don't become one! So through negation of what is false, not through resistance or reaction to the false, but through choiceless rejection of what is false, you have a different kind of energy, don't you? Look at it sirs. It is simple enough. It is like if you are climbing a mountain you must discard all the things that you have been carrying on the plain, you must put aside all that - the corrupting factors of thought, which is attachment and power, domination is different forms. It is far more important to understand attachment than the search, or taking vows, of seeing the corruption of property, possession and power. May I go on with that a little? We said the understanding of the nature and the structure, and the action that comes from that understanding of attachment. Most of us are attached to possessions, whether it is the possession of a table, antique table which you polish very carefully and look after it, or a house, or a person, or an idea, attached to a particular form of experience, attached to a group and so on and so on - why is the mind attached? Aren't you attached to lots of things? I am afraid we are: our looks, our hair, our worries, my god there are so many things we are attached to. Why? And knowing possessions in any form are one of the major corrupting factors in life - right? - and therefore we say, "Don't possess. Have a few clothes that are necessary but don't possess, take a vow on non-possession". And in that there is a lot of bother, travail, "I want that and I don't want it, I must give it up, I have taken a vow", you know. So possessions corrupt. And we say we must be detached from possessions. And all the conflict involved in that. For the speaker attachment is much more important than detachment. Because if one can find out why the mind is attached, it doesn't matter to what - my sitting here, I have done it for fifty years, on a platform, talking, and I am attached to that - if I am attached, I hope I am not - if I am attached. And why is it attached? You see the difference? Not how to be detached but why it is attached. Why are you attached to your house, to your wife, to your girl, to your ideas, to your meditations, to your system, why? What would happen if you were not attached? Attachment gives a certain occupation to the mind -right? You constantly think about it. And this constant occupation is one of the factors which the brain and the mind says, "Yes I must be occupied with something" - please follow all this. With my god, with my sex, with my drink, with my god knows what - I must be occupied - with the kitchen or with the king, or with some social order, or commune, or whatever it is. And out of this demand for occupation there is attachment, you hold on to something. Now why is the mind occupied? Why must it be occupied? And what would happen if it was not occupied? Would it go astray? Would it disintegrate? Would it feel utterly naked, empty and therefore the fear of that emptiness, therefore occupation? And therefore the importance of the furniture, the book, the idea, and all the rest of it. So out of the empty feeling and loneliness of not being totally whole, the mind is attached. You follow? And can the mind live, be vital, energetic, full of depth, without attachment? Of course it can. So one asks: is love attachment? Not, love is detachment. And when love is attached and detached, then love is painful - which we all know because we go through that ugly state, or whatever it is. And power is another form of corruption - political power, religious power, power in the business world, power in carrying out a certain talent that one has, the pleasure of power. Don't you all know it? When you dominate somebody, your cook or your servant, or your wife or your husband, or somebody, dominate, there is tremendous pleasure. That is another factor of corruption. Which means energy, which is so necessary to bring about a transformation in the content of consciousness, is dissipated in all these ways - right? Can you see all this as fact, as a dangerous fact? Not relative danger but total danger for human beings. Now if you see that as real danger as you would see the danger of a falling rock, you move away from it instantly and you are free of it. You understand? So to observe this you need a certain sensitivity, both physical as well as psychological. And you cannot have this sensitivity if you are indulging in all kinds of things -drink, sex, overworking, you know the whole business. So if you are at all serious, if you give your attention, your care, your affection to this, then you will see for yourself that out of this freedom of the division which thought has created, there is another kind of energy, which is intelligence. You understand how intelligence is not put together by thought, it is not the cunning intelligence of a politician or a priest or a businessman. It comes out of the freedom which is perceiving the falseness, the unreality of all this. Can the mind see it totally? And it cannot see it totally if you have any direction at all. Right, you are following all this? So an intelligent mind acts in the field of thought intelligently. You understand? One's mind has seen this and therefore sanely, without resistance, it is free from that - from all the implications of attachment, the structure of attachment, the action of attachment, the pursuit of power with all its complications, the ruthlessness of it, and also seeing the dividing process of thought. Seeing all that clearly, totally, out of that you have energy; and that energy is intelligence. Now having that energy, that intelligence, it can operate in the field of thought, not the other way round. I wonder if you see. Am I conveying this? Look sirs: one can see what the world actually is outside and inside, its interrelationship, there is no division between the outside and the inside, it is an interrelationship. And I see it. And I need energy to transform the mind. So I must discard everything that is wasteful, everything that is psychological, everything that breeds division and conflict within the mind - right? It can be done only when there is an observation of it, not a resistance to it. And there is an observation only when the observer is the observed, which we went into the other day a little more. The observer is the past -right? The observer is put together by thought in terms of experience, knowledge, memory, tradition; that is the essence of the observer. And what he observes, which is the result of thought, is still thought - right? I wonder if you see all this? Look sirs: the chaos in the world, the misery, the starvation, the poverty, the brutality, the violence, the mess that is going on, the madness that is going on, is created by thought. And the observer says, "I must change all that", if he is at all intelligent, if he is at all awake and not concerned with his own little pattern of life. And is the observer different from what he observes, because the observer is put together by thought also - right? So the observer is the observed. Now when that takes place not as a verbal statement but as a reality, conflict ceases, therefore you go beyond the limitations which thought has imposed on action. I wonder if you are getting all this? I hope you are all as hot as I am! Now can you do this? If you cannot, why not? Is it because you are indolent, lazy, indifferent, not only to your own sorrow, to your own suffering, to your own misery, to the misery of millions of people - what is going on in Russia, in India, everywhere, you are totally indifferent to all that because you want to find god, you want to meditate, you want to learn how to breathe properly, how to have the right kind of sexual relationship and this and that? If you are concerned with the whole - you understand? - with the whole of humanity, not just your neighbour or your wife, with the whole of humanity, then when you see the whole then you can put the detail in order. But without the perception of the whole you cannot put the detail in order. Right? That is why the politicians are failing, they never answer this problem, nor the analysts, nor the priests, nobody. It is only you and I, if we are utterly responsible, concerned, serious, committed, then we will be able to answer this question because we have seen the whole and therefore are extraordinarily alive and intelligent and function in detail. You have got it sirs? Have you understood? Now would you like to discuss anything? Would you like to discuss or answer questions about what we have been talking about? Q. Is the operation of intelligence insight? K. Is intelligence insight? What is insight? To have an insight into something: to have an insight into attachment - you understand? To have an insight into attachment, what does that mean? To see what attachment does. What is the nature of attachment. Why attachment arises. What is the structure of attachment. And the responses and actions of attachment. To have an insight into all that you must look at attachment - right? You must look at attachment, your attachment: your attachment to your possessions. Have you ever looked at it, to ideals, to your opinions - have you ever looked at opinions? Why you have a thousand opinions? That is another occupation of the mind, to have opinions; and to have opinions you think is extraordinarily important about -it doesn't matter who. So to have an insight implies that you have looked into the nature, structure and the response of attachment, into attachment. When you have an insight you go behind the word, you go behind your reactions of asserting and not asserting, you see how the mind has built up this whole process of attachment. To observe it. And you can only observe when you are not against it, when you are not opposed to it, when you don't want to discard it. You can only observe when you see that the observer is that thing which you are seeing. The observer has created the attachment and then disassociated himself from it and tries to change it, control it, shape it, deny it, alter it, go beyond it and all the rest of it. Now when you have an insight of that kind then out of that insight comes intelligence. Simple sir, but you have to do it, not endlessly talk about it. Q. How can one live without foundations? K. What do you mean by foundation? Please, this is the question of most of us, we need a basis, a foundation, a something from which to start - right? Something on which we can rely, something which says, that is so. And then on that we build, we move. We say there is god, millions and millions have said there is god, and on that they build their life, that is their foundation -right? I may have my foundation because I have a family, children, my responsibility to them, and that is my foundation. Maybe, I said, madame, don't deny it. Others may have the foundation of the ideology that the State is the only god, the Communists and that is mine - you follow? Each one invents a foundation according to his own temperament, according to his own conditioning or in the culture in which he is born. So we say a foundation, a basis is necessary - right? Now who has built that basis? Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, Stalin, and all the rest of that group, laid a foundation for you and me if you accept them as our gods - right? And on that I start. If I am a Catholic or a Hindu, that is my basis. Now who has created this basis? Obviously thought - thought in different forms, in different manifestations, those manifestations depending on one's peculiar reactions, and so on. Now why does the mind need foundations? Please answer that question yourself. Why do you need a foundation? Because then you would have no rudder, no direction, every wind, every whiff pushes you in every direction? Now see what happens if you have a foundation; say for instance if I had a foundation as a Hindu, which I haven't got, thank god, or a Christian, or this or that, if I had a foundation as a Hindu what takes place? I live according to the tradition, according to the beliefs, dogmas and all the rest of it, handed down through centuries, which is the past. That is my foundation. The result of that foundation is I am not you - you are a Muslim, a Hindu, Buddhist, god knows what else, I am not you, so I am willing to tolerate you - toleration is the invention of the intellect, to live amicably, but it has nothing to do with reality because I am rooted in my foundation as a Hindu - you are following all this? So there is conflict between you and me, me a Communist and you a Catholic, and so on, a believer in god and a non-believer in god, in Jesus, in Buddha, or god knows what else. So I say to myself; "Why should I have a foundation at all?" If I had no foundation, would I go wrong? Does a foundation give me direction? Or a foundation brings confusion? You are following all this? Don't go to sleep please, we will stop in a minute! Does a foundation as a Hindu, does it breed more confusion - as a Catholic, Communist, Socialist, whatever it is, does it involve greater confusion, greater misery, divided. You have your conclusions, I have my foundation. And I see foundations have brought man to a great deal of sorrow and misery, they are willing to fight and kill each other for what? For ideas, which are part of reasoned thought. And if my foundation is based on thought then I live a life of conflict and misery for the rest of my life. That is obvious. So I say to myself: can I live without any foundation? I know the tree cannot live without foundations, it must have the soil, water, sunshine, darkness, lightness. The foundation is food, clothes, shelter, I need that, but beyond that is foundation necessary? Knowing foundations have bred confusion, misery, conflict, wars - my foundation is me and your foundation is you, and we are fighting each other. Now can I live without any foundation? I can only answer that when I see the nature and the structure of foundations - you understand? The very negation of that is the foundation, which is intelligence - you understand? Come on sirs. Then wherever the mind is, in a palace, in a hovel, walking along by yourself in woods and looking at the beauty of light and darkness, and the shadows and the immeasurable sky, that intelligence is in operation, and therefore it needs no foundation at all. And that intelligence is not mine or yours, it is intelligence. Right sirs, have you understood? Q. I see the implications of attachment but nevertheless I would like to ask you if there isn't a certain biological attachment. There are attachments in the animal kingdom. How can you possibly see the human race, composed of millions of people, with no possible attachments among themselves? How can you see this human family who throughout the centuries has been attached? How can we possibly as human beings not feel any kind of attachment to one's own body? Do you see in all reality the prospect of the human race with no attachment whatsoever? K. Wait sir. Are we talking to the millions of people, in India, Mexico, America, millions and millions of people, telling them and talking to them about attachment? Or are we talking about attachment to you? Because - you understand my question sir? -are we talking to you, or to the millions of people? Because the millions of people are not concerned with this. They say, "For god's sake give me food, clothes and shelter - I am starving, I am diseased" - they are not concerned with this. And you are saying how do you answer those millions of people and ask them to be detached, or not be detached? You can't. But we are talking to you - right? If your consciousness, which is the consciousness of millions of people, if in that consciousness there is a transformation, then that transformation affects the millions. Then you will have a different kind of education, a different kind of society - you follow? But to say, how can the millions and millions accept this idea of detachment. You are attached to your mother, of course you are attached to your mother when you are five, four, three, two, you need a mother and a father to look after you; the child needs complete security, the more security of the right kind, then the happier it is. So millions of people want security, and they think they will find security in attachment to their country, to their little house, they are willing to fight the rest of the world for that country - that is their attachment. And the Catholic is willing to fight the Protestant for his attachment. So we are concerned with the people who are in this tent, for the moment. Because you are here. If I went and talked to labouring people they would say, "Please go away, we need beer". We are talking to you. And can you change the content of your consciousness so that in that transformation you affect the consciousness of man? Please sirs, this is a fact. Look: the so-called Catholics for two thousand years have talked to individuals, have conditioned you. And your consciousness has accepted this conditioning, and you have been Catholics, Protestants or Communists, and you function from there, if you are at all serious in what you are conditioned. And your consciousness has affected the world - you understand sirs? Go to a village in India, or elsewhere, you find a Christian cross there, and they don't know what it is all about but it is a nice place to sit and chat, or sing or do something or other and they go there. But it has affected the consciousness of the world by conditioning it to a certain idea. Now we are saying quite the contrary. In the transformation of your consciousness, with all its content, then in that freedom you have a tremendous energy, which is the essence of intelligence. And that intelligence will operate in every field if you are so aware of the total human existence. Right sirs? I need clothes, we need food and shelter, everybody needs it, that is prevented by the division, the economic division, racial division, national division, America is more powerful than Russia - you follow? That is what is happening. Once we were talking to a prominent politician, high up in the Cabinet and all the rest of that nonsense, and we talked about this, and he said, "My dear man, that is impossible, that is so far away, that is a marvellous distant life and ideal. I like what you are saying but it is impracticable. We have to deal with the immediate." You follow? And the immediate is their power, their position, their ideology, the most impracticable and the most destructive thing. You know all this. Do you mean to say if all the politicians in the world got together and said, 'Look, forget your system, forget your ideologies, forget your power, let us be concerned with human suffering, with human needs, food, clothing, shelter,' we can't solve this problem? Of course we could. But nobody wants to: everybody is concerned with their own immediate sickness, ideologies. Right? SAANEN 3RD PUBLIC TALK 18TH JULY 1974 May we go on with what we were talking about the last two meetings that we had here? We were concerned about the understanding of our action, of our behaviour and the content of consciousness. Unless we understand the nature and the structure of this consciousness in which we act, through which all our behaviour, our ways of thinking, are, until we understand that, it seems to me, we shall always be floundering, rather confused and always live in constant battle within ourselves, and outside. We shall never be able to find, it seems to me, peace, a sense of deep inward tranquillity; and in a world that is getting madder and madder every day, where there is so much brutality and violence and deception and chicanery, it is so necessary that all of us should understand this immense problem of living. And we can understand that field which we call the living only when we understand the content of that living. And that is what we have been talking about the last two times that we met here. And if one may point out, this is not an intellectual amusement, it is not a verbal entertainment, it is not a word investigation; but rather these talks should be taken as a serious thing because it affects our daily life, not merely the intellectual, emotional life but the whole of our life, which is all our consciousnesses. And we are going to, if we may, this morning concern ourselves with what is called materialism. Materialism means having an opinion, or evaluating life as matter. I am going to go slowly, please follow this: matter, its movement, its modification; also consciousness and will as matter. That is what the materialists maintain. Please you have to understand a little bit of this, because we have to find if there is anything more than matter and go beyond it, and therefore it is not merely an intellectual amusement and investigation but rather a deep enquiry whether our minds, our whole relationship, our social, economic and religious life, is entirely material - in the sense that materialism means having an opinion that all existence is matter, its movement, its modification and also its consciousness and will. Please you have to understand this a little bit. Because we are ruled by our senses, our taste, smell, touch and so on. Sensations play a great part in our life. And thought, the capacity to think, is also material. That is, the brain, if you examine it - I am not a specialist on the brain - if you examine or if you are rather aware of your activities you will see that the brain cells hold memory, memory as experience and knowledge. And when the cells hold that it is material, it is matter - so thought is matter. And one can imagine, or construct through thought, as thought, otherness, which is not matter - but it is still matter! That is, we know that we live in a material world, based on our sensations, desires, emotions, and we have constructed a consciousness which is essentially the product of thought with its content. We know that if we have gone into it very deeply and seriously, not just romanticized about it. Knowing that, we say there must be otherness, something beyond that. So thought begins to investigate the other. When thought investigates the other, it is still material. Please this is important to understand because we are all so romantically minded, all our religions are sentimental, romantic, and living in this very small field of materialism we want to have something much greater, beyond. That is a natural desire. So thought constructs a verbal and non-verbal structure of god, otherness, immensity, timelessness and so on and so on, but it is still the product of thought, so it is still material. Please don't agree or disagree. We are not doing propaganda, not trying to convince you of anything, and I really mean it. It is for you to examine, to listen, to find out. So thought creates the form outside, thinking that form, that image, that prototype, the original type, is not material. But the form is the product of thought, the ideal is still the product of thought, so it is still material. And if you go to India, or to the east, they will tell you that they accept that, but there is a higher self, there is a super consciousness, which dominates the material, or it is enclosing the material, as you have the soul. There they call it by a Sanskrit word, Atman and so on. But the Atman, the super consciousness, the soul is still the product of thought. Of course it is. Do you understand? So thought is matter. And whatever its movement, inside, outside, trying to go beyond itself, is still material. So the problem arises: is the mind mechanical? That is, your mind, your thoughts, your feelings, your reactions, your responsibilities, your relationships, your ways, your opinions and so on and so on, are they merely mechanical? That is, responding according to its conditioning, according to its environmental influences and so on. And if that is the totality of the mind then we live in a tremendous, inescapable prison - you are following all this? Do please give some of your attention to this. This has been the problem of man right through the ages. He knows he lives by the senses, by his desires, by his touch, by his appetites, sexual, intellectual, otherwise, and he questions, "Is that all?" Then he begins to invent - the gods, the super gods, super consciousness and so on and so on and so on. And having projected a form he then pursues it, and he thinks he is tremendously idealistic, or tremendously religious, but his pursuit of what he calls god or truth or whatever is still the product of thought, which is material. You have understood? See what we are doing. See what the churches, the temples, the mosques have done to us, to each one of us, this sense of great deception on which you have been fed, and we think we are extraordinarily idealistic. When one realizes that seriously, it is rather a shock, because you are stripped of all illusion. So you then begin to ask, if you have gone that far seriously, is there a movement other than the movement of thought? You are following? How does one find out? Now to find that out we must examine what is cause, causation? If I am trying to find out something beyond the material, what is the cause of my search? You are understanding? The cause of my search is either an escape from this, or a cause - no, you see I am thinking with you and I have to enquire, I am enquiring, I'll do it for you. You see cause means a motive. Is all my enquiry motivated? Because if I have a cause, the root of that is either pleasure or the escape from fear, or total dissatisfaction with 'what is' and therefore the cause projects its own answer. You are following this? Therefore to enquire into the other my mind must be without cause. You are following all this? As we said the other day, and we are saying it again today, there must be a transformation in the mind, not peripheral reformation, but a revolution deep in the mind to solve our problems. The problems which thought has created, whether religious problems, or economic, social, moral and so on. And if one is enormously serious, not flippant, not merely amused by intellectual theories, a philosophy that is invented by thought, then we must be concerned and totally committed to this question of transforming the content of consciousness. This content makes up consciousness. We went into that, I am not going to go over and over again the same thing. And who is the entity that is to change it? And we said the observer is the observed. When there is a division between the observer and observed, 'me' and the 'not me', there is conflict. And that is essentially a waste of energy. And when you look into it you will find that the observer is the observed, therefore you remove conflict altogether and you have enormous energy because it is no longer wasted in conflict. Now this energy is either in the field of thought, or it is an energy totally different from thought. Thought creates its own energy, that is obvious. So we are asking now whether a mind that is so burdened, so conditioned, so shaped by materialistic thought, for such a mind is there a movement other than that of thought? So we said to find that out we must look into the cause of this search. Where there is a cause there is time, because the cause produces an effect, and that effect becomes the cause later - right? Please, are you following all this? Or is it too difficult? It is not really difficult because this is your life. It becomes difficult when you treat it, or look at it as something apart from our daily life. I'll go into it. I'll put it differently. What is virtue? What is morality? Is morality transient? Is morality relative, or is it absolute? For us in the modern world reality is relative, and that relativity is nearly destroying us. So one asks: what is virtue? Is there an absolute virtue? Absolute non-killing? Do you understand? A sense of no hate under any circumstances. Is there a sense of complete peace, absolute peace which can never be disturbed? Can one live without any sense of violence? Or is violence relative? Killing is relative? Hate is modified and so on. You are following all this. So what is virtue? If you hit me and I hit you back and apologize for it later, that becomes relative. If I have a cause for hating you, or disliking you, or being violent, that cause makes my action not complete, therefore relative - you are following all this? Do please, it is your life. Is there a way of living which has no cause, because the moment you have a cause it becomes relative - right? You are following all this? Do please. If I have a cause to love you because you give me comfort, psychologically, physically, sexually, morally, comfort, it is not love. So where there is a cause the action must be relative. But when there is no cause the action will be absolute. You are following this? See what takes place in your life, not in what I am explaining. That is, if I depend on you, if I am attached to you, that attachment has a cause because I am lonely, or I am unhappy, or I want companionship, I want your love, your affection, your care, and so I am attached to you. And from that attachment there is great sorrow, there is pain because you don't love me, or you tolerate me, or give me a little of your affection and turn to somebody else, so there is jealousy, antagonism, hate and all the rest of it follows. So where there is a cause - please understand this, in your life - where there is a cause, action, morality must be relative. So can the mind be free of form, free of the ideal - the ideal that form has a cause. And therefore such a mind is incapable of going beyond itself. I wonder if you see this. It is very simple really. Words make it so very difficult. Words are necessary to communicate but if you don't apply, merely live at the verbal level it is absolutely useless. It is like ploughing, ploughing, ploughing, and you destroy the earth by merely ploughing. So we have this problem, the problem which man right from the beginning has sought to solve. Which is, is all life mechanical? Is all life material? - material in the sense which we have explained. Which is, the having an opinion, or evaluation that all existence is matter. Its movement, its modification - please listen to all this carefully - and also consciousness, with its will, is also matter. Your whole life is that. You may pretend it is not but actually it is that. Having that, being enclosed in that, thought creates a form, the ideal, the supreme, the highest form of excellence, great nobility, the gods and you know, all the things that thought has put together in the world - the immense technological movement, and the traditions and the gods. It is all matter. And living on this shore, as it were, which we are, our wars, our battles, our hatreds, our political appallingness, we are on this side of the river, which is matter. And mind says, "I want to go across, there must be something there because this life is too stupid" - and it is stupid, just to go to the office, earn money, responsibility, struggle, competition, worry, despair, anxieties,immense sorrows and then die. And we say that is not good enough, we put it more philosophically, in more extravagant, romantic languages if you wish, and we want something more. And then we say, "How am I to cross this river to go to the other shore?" - you follow all this? We want to cross the river to the other shore: then we ask, "Who will take us across?" And when you ask that question there is the priest, the guru, the man who knows, and he says, "Follow me", and then you are done because he is exactly like you, because he still functions within the field of thought. I don't know if you see this for yourself. Because he has created the form, your gods, your Jesus, your Buddha, Krishna, he has created the form and that form is as materialistic as your sensations, that form is the product of thought. Now if that is absolutely clear, no romantic escapes, no ideological washing of hands and comfort and all the rest of that tommy rot, which leads to such illusions, if that is absolutely clear that any movement and modification within the field of consciousness is merely moving from one object to another place. But it is still within the field of thought. Have you understood this? So what is the mind to do? Or not to do? I see first such a mind must be in total order - you understand? - material order. Because if it is in disorder it can't go away from itself. You have understood? I hope you are doing this with me. Please do it as I am talking. Thought is matter and all its activity within this consciousness has created an extraordinary sense of confusion and disorder, politically, religiously, socially, morally, in relationship, in every direction, it has created disorder. Your life. Unless there is absolute order, and I am using the word 'absolute' not relative, unless there is absolute order within that area, the cause to move away from that area is still the product of disorder - you understand? So there must be order. Now how does this order come about? You understand? Politically, religiously, intellectually, morally, physically, in relationship - order - an absolute order, not convenient order, not relative order. Now how is the mind, which has been trained, educated, conditioned to live in disorder and to accept disorder - you follow? - that is our life, how is such a mind to bring order in itself? Please bear in mind, if you say there is an outside agency that will bring order then that outside agency is the product of thought and therefore that outside agency will create a contradiction, and therefore that contradiction is a disorder. If you say the action of will will bring about order, then what is will? "I will do that" - please find out, look at it. When you are aggressive, when you say, "I must do that", what is that will in action? It is, isn't it, desire, a projected end to be achieved, that projected end conceived by thought. So it is desire, desire for success, achieving an end projected by thought as an ideal, as a form, as an original pattern, so it is still thought. Can thought bring order? Which is what the politicians are trying to do - you understand? Which is what the so-called priests are trying to do, and all the reformers. So can thought bring order? And thought has created disorder. So what is one to do? You are following all this? Now can the mind, your mind observe, see this disorder? You understand? I am in disorder - I am not but I am saying I am in disorder - I am in disorder and I see will, following another, having a desire to overcome it, is still within the field of disorder. So I say to myself "What am I to do, what is the mind to do"? First of all, do I know disorder - you understand? Does the mind see disorder? Or does it see the description of disorder? You are following this? Please do. Are you following this? You describe to me the mountain, the beauty of the mountain, the snow, the lines, the blue sky in the forest and the depth of shadows and the running waters and the murmur of trees and the beauty of it, you describe it to me, and the description catches my mind, and I live with that description. But the description is not the described. So I am asking myself, am I caught in the description? Or am I actually seeing disorder? You see the difference? One is intellectual, the other is factual - right? Now is the mind observing its disorder? Which means no word, not caught in the description, but merely observing this enormous disorder - disorder being contradiction, and so on and so on. Please follow this. Can the mind observe it? And to observe its own disorder, is there an observer looking at it? Or there is no observer at all, merely observing. This becomes rather difficult if you don't mind paying a little attention to it. I observe you, I see you. I met you last year. You were pleasant to me, or unpleasant to me, you flattered me, or insulted me, or neglected me. So the memories of that remain - right? The memory. And this year I meet you. The memory responds. So that memory is the past, that memory is the observer - of course. So can I observe this disorder - please listen - can the mind observe this disorder, social, moral and all that disorder, which is created by thought, in which I am, which is part of me, can I observe this disorder without the observer? If the mind can do it then what takes place? That is - I'll explain a little more - if the observer is there looking at disorder then there is a division between the observer and the observed, then in that division conflict takes place - I must control it, I must change it, I must alter it, I must suppress it, I must overcome it and so on, that is a conflict. Now when the observer is not, but only observation, then there is no conflict, you are merely observing. You follow? Then you have energy to go beyond disorder. So I see that where there is division there must be disorder. Right? And the observer essentially is the factor of division because he is rooted in the past. Now can the mind see the truth of that and observe the disorder? The disorder of your life, not my life, not the description. Can you observe your disorder, your confusion, your anxieties, your contradictions, your selfish demands, all that, observe. And if you observe without the observer there is then the going beyond it, which means total order, not relative order, mathematical order, and that is essential before you can go any further. Because without order in the material world, in the world of matter, in the world of thought, you have no basis to move, the mind has no foundation to move. I wonder if you see all this? Therefore there must be observation of behaviour, which is order. Do I behave according to a motive, according to circumstances, is my behaviour pragmatic, you follow?, or is my behaviour under all circumstances the same? - not the same in the sense of copying a pattern - a behaviour that is never relative, which is not based on reward and punishment. You are following all this? Enquire into it, observe it and you will find how terrible your behaviour is, how you look to a superior and inferior and all the rest of it. There is never a constant movement without a motive of reward and punishment. Then also you have to find out, which is still in the material world, your relationship, because relationship is of the highest importance, because life is relationship. What is your relationship? Have you any relationship? To be related. Relationship also means to respond rightly, adequately, to any challenge in that relationship. You understand? Come on sirs. We are enquiring into relationship: is my relationship with you, intimate or personal or not so intimate, based on my opinions, my memories, my hurts, my demands, my sexual appetites? If it is, then my relationship with you is relative, it changes - I am moody one day, not moody the next day, and the next day I am frightfully affectionate and the third day I hate you and the fourth day I love you and so on and so on. And in that relationship if it is not satisfactory I'll go to somebody else. This is the game we have been playing for centuries, now it is more open, more extravagant, more vulgar and all the rest of it - that's all. So my mind has to find out what actually its relationship is. Because unless there is complete harmony in the world of material in which I live, which is part of me, in me, which is my consciousness, the mind cannot possibly go beyond itself. You understand this? That is why your meditations, your postures, your breathing, your going to India and searching all those - well never mind! - it is so utterly meaningless. So is my relationship relative? And is all relationship relative? Please listen to this. Or there is no relationship at all but only when the division as the 'me' and the 'you' doesn't exist? You understand? Do please listen to this, I am finding something new for myself. You understand? I am related to you because I love you, because you give me food, clothes, shelter, you give me sex, you give me companionship, I have built a marvellous image about you, we may get annoyed with each other, irritated but that is trivial. And I hold on to you, I am attached to you, and in that attachment there is great pain, there is great sorrow, suffering, torture, jealousy, antagonism, and then I say to myself, "I must be free of that". And in freeing myself from that I am attaching myself to somebody else. And the game begins again. So I say to myself, "What is this relationship? Is there a relationship, can there ever be a relationship?" The 'me' that is pursuing my appetites, my ambitions, my greeds, my fears, my wanting to have more prestige, greater position and so on and so on, and the other also pursuing his own demands, so is there any relationship possible at all between two human beings, each functioning, each pursuing his own exclusive, selfish demands? So there may be no relationship in that direction at all. And there may be a relationship when there is no me at all - you are following this? When the 'me', as thought and all that, is non-existent I am related - you follow it? I wonder if you follow this? I am related to you, to the trees, to the mountains, to the rivers, to human beings. That means love, doesn't it, which has no cause. So consciousness with its content is within the field of materialism. And the mind cannot possibly go beyond it under any circumstances, do what you will, unless there is complete order within itself, and the conflict in relationship has totally come to an end, which means a relationship in which there is no me. You understand all this? Sirs, this isn't a verbal explanation; the speaker is telling you what he lives, not what he talks about. If he doesn't live it, it is hypocrisy, it is a dirty thing to do. So when the mind has order and the sense of total relationship, then what takes place? You understand? Then the mind is not seeking at all. Do you understand? Then the mind is not capable of any kind of illusion. That is absolutely necessary because a mind can invent, which is thought, can invent anything - any experience, any kind of vision, any kind of super consciousness, and all the rest of it. So there is no ideal, there is no form, there is only behaviour, which is order and the sense of relationship for the whole of man. There you have the foundation - you understand? Now another question from this arises from this. I have talked for an hour so we can't go into it, I'll just show you something. You see, is the brain totally conditioned? You have understood my question? I have got this brain, there is this brain of man, educated, having thousands and thousands of experiences, a great deal of accumulated knowledge whether it is his own or in the books and so on, it is there in the brain. And thought operates only within the field of the known - right? Of course. It can invent a field that says, "I don't know, I am there" - but that is too silly. So my mind is asking: is the whole brain conditioned - conditioned by the culture it has lived in, the economic, social, environmental, religious and all that? If it is, then it cannot go beyond - you follow? So the mind has to enquire, and this is real meditation, you understand sirs? Not all this silly stuff that goes on, this is real meditation, which we will go into presently, what is meditation, later. To find out whether the mind, in which is included the brain, is totally conditioned within the borders of time. Is the mind a complete slave? Don't say, yes or no. Then you have settled it, if you say, "Yes" then there is nothing more to enquire. If you say "No", there is nothing more to enquire either. But a mind that is asking, groping, looking, without any motive, without any direction, says, "Is the mind conditioned totally, therefore mechanical?" And you see it is mechanical. When it is functioning in the field of knowledge it is mechanical, whether scientific, or technological, or the priestly tradition, it is mechanical - repetition, repetition, repetition. And that is what we are doing. The repetition of a certain desire, sexual or otherwise, repeating, repeating. Therefore the mind asks itself, "Is the totality of this thing mechanical?" You are following all this? Or is there, in this field of the mind, an area which is not mechanical? You are following all this? We'll go into it but I have talked for an hour and a quarter, an hour and twenty minutes, that is enough, you can't take more. If you don't mind I'll stop there and we will continue on Sunday. This is really very important, which is: where there is a cause it must be mechanical. I hope you see this. Where there is a cause all movement as thought must be mechanical. So can the mind be free of causation? Therefore is there a movement which is not of time? We'll go into all that on Sunday. Yes sir? Q. Who is it then that observes when the observer and the observed are one? K. Who is it that observes when the observer and the observed are one? You have understood the question? I observe the tree -just listen to this - there is the tree and there is the 'me' that is observing it. The observer looks at it with the knowledge of the tree - right? - botanical and all the rest of it. Now when there is no knowledge as the observer looking at the tree what takes place? And is there an observation as we know it now? Are you following all this? What takes place when there is an observation of the tree, the mountain, or a person, which is much more difficult, more involved rather, not difficult, what takes place? First of all the observer creates the distance - you follow? - maybe a foot, or ten thousand miles, creates a distance. Distance means time. So the observer is the creator of distance and time. When there is no time as distance and space, what takes place? Is there an observer at all? Or only the thing that is? Only the tree and not the observer. You don't become the tree, which would be too silly. Only that. Therefore what takes place? When there is the observation of a human being - listen to this - I observe you, there is an observation of you. When the observer is there, the observer being the past, then there is a distance between you and the observer; the observer has been insulted, flattered or whatever it is, that is the past, he creates the distance between you and the observed. When the observer is not, the distance and time ceases, doesn't it? You do it and you will see this happen to you. Then there is no reaction, but only the observation. The reaction is the observer. So you exist, not the observer. But the observer says, "I have been cheated" - right? You have taken my money. I remember that. You have cheated me. Should the observer forget that? Please follow this. You have cheated me, taken money away from me, and left me naked, or whatever it is. So I look at you without the reaction of the past, but knowing that it has happened. You follow this sir? There is no reaction to it, but the fact is that. So my mind observes without the reaction but the fact is there. It is the reaction that creates the distance, not the fact, reaction to the fact. So when the observer is not, which is the 'me' is not, the observer is the 'me', when the 'me' is not there is only the fact. And the operation of the fact matters, not my reaction. I wonder if you see this? You know this requires great attention - you understand -to one's observation, to your reactions. Right sir, have I explained? Q. Who sees the fact? K. There is this fact, the microphone, isn't there? There is no question of who sees it. We both have agreed to call it the microphone, we might call it the giraffe - if we both agreed to give that name to that - in observing that there is no you or me, just there is that fact, isn't it? But if you say that is not a microphone, then begins all that. Q. If I call what is going on disorder, doesn't that imply that I am imagining an order? K. Oh, no, no, sir. I carefully explained. I am only - the mind is only concerned with disorder, not with order, because a disordered mind doesn't know what order is. A neurotic, unbalanced mind, how can it know order? All it can know is to be aware of its own disorder. Any projection from that disorder is still disorder, that is simple. So can the mind be aware of its disorder only? In the sense of disorder being contradiction and all that, imitation, conformity, all that is implied in disorder. Disorder is the fact. The reaction to that disorder is the observer that brings the reaction. Now can the mind observe that disorder? Q; Maybe I misunderstood you. The moment I use the word disorder, doesn't that... K. Yes, I have said that previously sir. The word disorder - is that disorder? You understand? Is hunger a word or a reality? When you are hungry that is a reality. But the word hunger is different from the reality. Or the word awakens the hunger. Do you follow? When we use the word 'disorder' - I explained that - is that a description which then tells you what disorder is? Or within the description you see the actual disorder? So can the mind be free of the word 'disorder' and look and discover its disorder? You understand? Am I explaining? No? Have I explained? Can you disassociate the object and the name of the object? Please investigate this, it is good to investigate this. The name and the object. I say it is my wife, or girl, my father, whatever it is, the wife is the name. And the person is different from the word - right? Can I disassociate the word from the person? And does the word interfere with looking at the person? Do you follow? If it does then the mind is a slave to the word, and not the person - not a slave to the person - the person is then not important. Am I explaining this sir? Or not? So we are caught in words. We are slaves to words and the word then is the thing. The word is the object, of course, for most of us. Q. (In Italian) K. The questioner says you are telling us that we don't see disorder. We actually don't see disorder. We see the description of disorder, the word being the description, but actually we are not in contact with disorder. That is right. Why? You mean to say you don't know your own disorder? Don't you know the room in which you live, with your shirts and everything thrown about, don't you know that is disorder? Don't you know psychologically, inwardly, that one lives in disorder? Obviously, sir. If you give a little attention, a little observation, an awareness, you know it. Don't say that you are not aware of your disorder. You don't want to be aware of your disorder. That is a different matter, because the moment you are aware you have to do something. You pick up the shirt and put it away, you don't let your wife or your friend do it, you look in the room, you are aware of that disorder in the room and being aware you put it in order. But if you say, "Well I don't care how I live," then that is another matter. But the moment you are aware you have to act. But most of us don't want to act because we are not serious, we are playing. SAANEN 4TH PUBLIC TALK 21ST JULY 1974 We have been talking over together this whole materialistic attitude towards life. The word 'materialism' means having values, opinions, judgements based on matter, that there is nothing else but matter, its movement, its modification; also consciousness and will. That is generally accepted as the meaning of materialism. And philosophies, which really means the love of life, or the love of truth are not ideals, suppositions, theories and systems which have been invented, or been conceived, or formulated by philosophers. And most people in the world have been conditioned, shaped by these philosophies - religious, economic or social. And they has never tackled or enquired, come to grips with the whole structure of the mind - the mind that has built the egocentric activity. Egotism has been one of the major factors in our life, probably the only factor. And human beings have never come into reality with it, we have accepted it as inevitable, as natural. We have been concerned, personally, whether that me, the ego, the whole subtle structure of it, can be utterly dissolved and yet live in this society, utterly understood, not theoretically, not in a romantic identification with something greater, but actually to be free of this egocentric action, its demands, its pursuits, its attachments. I do not know if you have gone into it. I do not know if you have enquired intelligently whether this human mind throughout the world, under different guises, in different forms, with different identifications, has not been the central factor of man's cruelty, man's barbarity and suffering. And I think it is important, at least this morning, and in life generally, if we could go into that, not as an idea but as an actuality, not the definition or the explanation of what the 'I' is, the 'me' the ego, the personality and all that structure, but consider as we are actually, and investigate whether the mind, which has become so mechanical, can ever be free to investigate. I hope I am making myself clear. You know, as we said repeatedly, this is a very serious subject, and it demands your attention, it demands your care, it demands your affection. When you care to investigate something you must also have affection, not the sense of brutal scientific analysis. And we must be serious, otherwise life is very shallow, life has very little meaning. Unless you are astonishingly, very deeply serious, it is like that water going by, just on the surface with all the reflections, with all the superficial beauty, with the noise, with the fuss the rivers make. But if you are really very serious, and I hope we are, we should really go into this question as to whether man can live intelligently, sanely and happily without the 'me', with all its complications, with all its travails, with its sorrows, with its fussy little demands. That is what we are going to do, if we may, this morning. First of all to enquire into it we must understand our consciousness, which is the very centre of the 'me'. That consciousness may expand, include everything but it still has a centre, and that centre essentially with its structure, with its nature and activity is in essence the 'me'. To understand that 'me', the I, the ego, we must look into our consciousness. Consciousness means to be aware, to know, to comprehend. These are ordinary words, not a special jargon. Consciousness, your consciousness is its content. Without its content there is no consciousness. That consciousness with its content may invent a super consciousness, but it is still within the field of thought which is aware of the past - right? I hope, please that we are communicating with each other. That means that we are sharing. You are not just listening to the speaker. You are really listening and observing your own consciousness through the words of the speaker. So the words of the speaker have little value except as an indication and a helpful hint to watch your own consciousness. Therefore it is a sharing, not a one sided affair, it is partaking together in this whole problem of human existence, which is your existence. As we said the other day, consciousness with its content - the content being all the identifications, with the race, with the family, with the community, with an ideology, with a culture, with a tradition, and the misery, the conflict, the confusion, the struggle, the pain, the enormous amount of sorrow, with occasional joy and laughter, all that is its content - and that content is essentially the 'me' - obviously. Remove your furniture - what are you? Remove your name and what are you? Remove all the ideologies, experiences, knowledge, the fears, the hopes, the pleasures, the pursuits, the ambitions - there is nothing left. And we make such an enormous fuss, such an enormous struggle to maintain this structure. And from that arises the question: is the mind mechanical? I mean by mechanical not merely the activity of a machine as a car, as an engine, but the activity of a mind that always operates in the field of the known - right? Please it is not difficult what we are talking about. We are using very simple words and it is very important, it seems to me, to understand this problem. Because if the whole of the mind is mechanical it may invent a theory which is not mechanical, and yet it will be still mechanical; it may out of its own desperation, misery, conceive or philosophize or invent a theory of desperation. That is still mechanical. And to find out if there is anywhere in the mind a field which is not mechanical - not invent it, because that has been done in India and here, thousands of years, that there is a greater, a superior consciousness. That is just a theory invented by a mechanical mind which always functions within the field of the known - right? Are we in communication with each other? At least some of us? I mean by mechanical responses which are the outcome of a stored up knowledge - right? I am a Christian, and my conditioning being Christian I respond to that, or as a Communist, a Hindu, Socialist and so on and so on. So reflexive actions are mechanical. Right? And from that one has to go into the question as to whether the brain - I hope you don't object to all this penetration and that we will be able to follow each other - whether the brain, the totality of the brain is wholly conditioned by the culture, by the environmental influences, by economic conditions, by religious penetration of beliefs, ideals, gods, the hopes - all that. Is the whole of the structure of the brain conditioned? And so is the mind totally conditioned? Right? When we use the word mind, we are including in that not only the nervous responses of the body, the recognition of emotional states by thought, thought being the response of memory which is stored up as knowledge - all that I include in the mind. In that is included of course the intellect, emotions and all that. So mind is the total, not just a part - right? And we want to find out if there is an energy which is non-mechanical. Right sirs? Because we have lived on an energy which is mechanical. I respond to your insult, or to your flattery. I respond according to my conditioning, my conditioning is always the result of the culture I have lived in - economic, social, religious, environmental and so on. That is all within the field of the known, and as long as there is an operation within the field of the known, it must be mechanical. Right? Man has recognized this and says, there must be an outside agency to change this. Because to live in the field of the known all the time is to live in a prison and so he says, there must be an outside agency, so he begins to speculate, invent, theorize and say there is god, super consciousness, Atman and so on and so on. But it is still born out of the known. It is the concept formed by the past therefore it is still within the field of time - right? So it is nothing new. And in that field we have lived, and in that field there is a certain energy created by thought and friction. That we know. Friction as ambition, friction as envy, friction as the competition and so on -all that - we have lived for centuries on that, in that field. Please you are watching your own mind, your own life, not my life. You are watching your own ways of thinking, living, behaving, and responding. And when you watch it you will see it is always mechanical, it is always from the known. The known can project itself as the future, but it is still the known. And in that field one has enormous energy - as seen in the field of technology, science, the political divisions, quarrels, antagonisms, wars, the extraordinary inventions of destruction and so on - all that demands tremendous energy. Now we are asking whether there is a field, an area of the mind or brain which has not been touched by the known? Is there a field, an area in the brain which is not contaminated, if I can use that word, by thought? - thought being the response of memory. You are following all this? This is real meditation to find out, not all the phoney stuff that goes on in the world in the name of meditation. How is the mind to find out? You understand? Not invent, not hypnotize itself in the hope of something new because it is in despair, because it is bored with existence, and wants something new. So to find that out every form of illusion must be totally put aside - right? You are understanding all this? To have no illusion -is that possible? What brings about illusion? Why does the mind deceive itself? And why does the mind not face the fact as it is? You are following? Why does the mind refuse to see what exactly is, and wants to cover it up, hide it, escape from it, and go beyond it? - which are all the activities of an illusory act - right? Why does the mind do this? Go on sirs. Why does the mind, your mind refuse to accept a fact? The fact being what is actually going on, not what should be, or what has been, but actually what is going on. The active present is the fact - whatever that fact is. And, if you observe, the mind refuses to face that fact. Is it part of our education to never come directly in contact with 'what is' because we have ideals, because we have a sense of denial of 'what is', the incapacity to deal with 'what is' - is that why the mind refuses to face 'what is', but always plays around it - right? Why? Is it our education? Which is, be like somebody else, you are not as clever as your brother, you must be somebody in this beastly world. So we are educated to be other than what we are. And what we are we never find out because we are always educated to reform ourselves, to improve ourselves. And is it because we have ideals, which are always over there and never here, never actual but unreal? Is it because basically, fundamentally we don't know what to do with 'what is'? The incapacity to deal with 'what is', makes us move away from 'what is' - right? You are following all this? Do please. This is dreadfully serious because the world is in chaos, it is getting worse and worse everyday, and a serious man has a responsibility, tremendous responsibility how to face this chaos. Religions haven't answered the problem, nor the politicians, nor the businessman, nor the scientist, they are just drifting, and the more you drift the more chaos grows. There is always the perpetual threat of war in one place or another - the Greeks and the Turks are going on at it now. So the man who is really very, very serious and knows his responsibility, feels the responsibility and therefore he has to consider the transformation of his consciousness, because it is only there that there is any hope of bringing about a different world, a different human being, a different kind of education. And that is what he is trying to do. So is it the lack of capacity that makes us run away from 'what is'? One suffers for various reasons - biological, physical, psychologically, intellectual and so on, one suffers, intensely, superficially or it passes away in a day. Man has never solved this problem of suffering. He has carried on for centuries upon centuries, and he has never faced it and gone beyond it totally. Is it because he has not the capacity to understand it, to look at it, to see what is totally involved within it, the nature, the structure and the activity of it? And to do that one must look at it, one must watch it with care, with attention, with that sense of great affection, because without affection and care you cannot possibly understand it. But we run away from it seeking comfort in another field, but the other field is still within the field of the known and so we go on from suffering to suffering. We will deal with suffering a little later as we go along. So we are asking: the mind has been trained, educated, religiously, in every way, to operate and function in the field of the known - right? I won't enlarge on that because we have gone into it sufficiently. And man has invented an outside agency which is equally absurd. So the question arises: is there any area - (I won't use the word 'part' as we will then ask "Which part, is it in the front or the back or the side" - you follow? And we get lost in that rigmarole) - is there any area of the mind which is really free from the known? Is there any part of the brain which is not cultivated by thought? This is really important, please give your attention to this. If we do not find it then we will always live in the field of the known, from which thought arises, which is matter. Thought is matter, we went into it sufficiently. Thought is matter because it is the response of memory, memory is held in the brain cells and from there it responds, therefore it is still matter; and any activity of thought is still within the known and therefore matter. And you may try to worship god, and become terribly religious and phoney but it is still within that field. So you have to find out if there is any area of the brain, the mind that thought cannot possibly enter -right? To find that out one must be free of the known, and realize its value as function. I'll explain it. Go slowly. You understand my problem? First understand the problem. And if we understand the problem then the problem will solve itself. The problem is this: man has cultivated the brain, the mind, giving a wide growth to knowledge. And there must be knowledge because otherwise I can't speak English, I can't drive a car, I wouldn't know where to go. So knowledge is essential to function, to go to a factory, to write a letter, anything, knowledge is necessary. And as long as the mind lives within that area it lives in a prison. It can decorate the prison, which we are doing, better bathrooms, better toilets, better cars, better this and better that, better, better, better. You know the better is the enemy of the good. Think about it. So can the mind see the fact that knowledge is necessary, and yet realize, or see the truth that as long as it lives there, it will everlastingly suffer because it is based on thought. See the truth of it. And then can the mind realize its value as knowledge and not be a slave to it? If the mind realizes something it is free of it, and yet it has its value, it is not dependent on it, it is not caught in it, it is not enslaved by knowledge. Therefore a new quality comes into being, a new kind of energy comes into being. Are we communicating with each other? Please give your attention. So knowledge has its relative value, and being relative it is not all important, which we are now making it. Now can you, sitting there, see the reality of this, that you must operate in the field of knowledge and yet not be dependent on it, therefore a certain quality of freedom from the known. Then you can begin to enquire by watching the movement of thought, and the source of thought, by watching it, by being aware, whether there is a demarcation, not drawn by thought, between the known and something else which is not at the behest of thought, which thought cannot capture at all? Look sirs, let me put this thing differently. When we look at our life, our daily life, we are very materialistic people, we depend on our senses, our senses dictate our action, we are really totally worldly people. And materialism which has been the conditioning of our life, in that there are two principal factors: pain and pleasure. As long as we live within that field of materialism, pain, and pleasure become extraordinarily important and there is no escape from that as long as we live there. I don't know if you understand this. We are materialistic, we depend and react according to our senses, opinions, judgements, evaluations, which are all the product of thought - right? And thought is matter. And as that has become so extraordinarily important in the world, pleasure and fear are the factors, are the principal factors that drive us to behave or not to behave. Right? And as long as we live in that area these two factors dominate, and there can be no escape from it. There is no escape from it because what do you escape to - more pleasure or more fear? More pleasure conceived by thought? Or the avoidance of fear by seeking security in isolation? Looking after myself, looking after my country with which I have identified myself, my gods - you follow? - gradual identification and isolation and therefore more fear. Where there is isolation, division, there is inevitably wider and deeper fear because the mind, being materialistic, pursues pleasure, that is all it has, its gods, its moralities, its churches, its doctrines, beliefs, everything is based on the pursuit of pleasure. Right? And therefore more fear. Please do see this. So unless the mind discovers, not as an illusion, not as a hope, not as a belief, not as an idea, discovers an area where thought cannot possibly enter then only fear disappears entirely. You understand? And therefore when there is no fear there is then the understanding of pleasure, not the pursuit of pleasure but the understanding of it. Right? Are we meeting each other somewhere? So can the mind be free from the known and yet see how important the known is. If it sees this then in the field of the known the activity of the 'me' does not enter. You see the difference? Have I conveyed it to you? If I see the importance of knowledge and its value, its significance, its necessity, then the 'me', which has created such great mischief in the world, that 'me' has no place in knowledge, it can't identify itself with knowledge, because knowledge is pure function. But when function becomes status then it is the operation of the 'me'. I wonder if you get it all? Have you got it? Good! So in the field of knowledge, objective efficiency without the ruthlessness of the 'me' entering into it, takes place, because it is pure function. Therefore the 'me' has no place at all. See the beauty of it sirs. Therefore the mind then begins to enquire, look, if there is any area where it is totally free of the human endeavour. You understand? - the human gathering, human struggle, human pain, sorrow. Unless the mind finds that there is no way out. You can invent a way out but it is still the known, the materialistic. Now how does one discover this? Obviously no system - system is still part of the known, please see all this. Therefore what is the instrument of enquiry? What is the instrument of observation? You are following? Do you know it? You probably have read a great deal, gone to many libraries, made research or looked into books and literature, religious literature, read intellectual literature and the existentialism, this and that, you know, you must have done all this, and have you found the answer? Or is this the first time that you are facing this problem? The first time in your life you are faced with this, and you have to find it out, not through somebody else, because if you find it through somebody else it is not truth, it is like living in a shadow of another. So when you are confronted with this problem for the first time, as you are, you have no answer - right? Really you have no answer. That is a great thing. You understand? It is a marvellous thing to say, "I have no answer". "I don't know what to do" - knowing that nobody is going to give you a hand to help you out, knowing that you can't possibly look to another. You understand? You really don't know - right? That is essential, that is real innocence - right? Please listen to this carefully. That is deep, inexhaustible innocence, to say, "I really don't know" - not that you are waiting for an answer, not that you are expecting something, because then we play that game again. To remain totally in that state of not knowing, then out of that not knowing you have got tremendous energy, haven't you? I don't know if you see? Then you are curious, you are not eager for satisfaction, you are not wanting to achieve something. Then in that state of not knowing totally, that not knowing is part of the brain which has not been contaminated - you understand? Are we meeting each other a little bit? Look sirs, I can say, "I don't know but I'll find out". I can find out by searching in my memory, or by looking to somebody, or reading in a book - right? When I say "I don't know" that is one of our tricks, I am expecting an answer from you, from myself, or from somebody else, in a book, or some other so-called idiotic wise man. We have done that. Or I can say "I don't know, but do tell me" - it is still the same thing. Or I can say "I really don't know at all". When the mind says that, realizes that, is it not that area which has not been touched? You understand? It is very simple if you look at it, if you go into it. It is the part of that brain that actually says, "You haven't touched me at all". All the things which man has put together through centuries I know very well, but when I say "I don't know", I have entered, the mind has uncovered a field which has not been touched - you understand? Now can the mind remain there and function in knowledge? You follow? I wonder if you get this? May I continue? We have searched for god, for happiness, for a better way of life. We have invented political philosophies, extreme Left, historical materialism, Capitalism, Socialism, we have invented various gods, saviours, Christ, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, dozens of them. And man has not been able to solve his problem of sorrow, because unless he solves that you cannot possibly come upon that area which has not been touched by thought. And can the mind see its activity because the observer is the observed, just to observe the activity, not try to change it, not to reform it, not to control it, just to observe it, and see what it discovers in the field of the known and be totally responsible for that. That means not to let the knowledge be used by thought as the 'me'. I wonder if you follow? Of course. Therefore I am only function, no status. Where there is status there is the 'me' operating - right? Now can we do this? Can you do it, not theory, but do it in daily life. You know that means great attention, not the attention of will, just watch it as you watch a squirrel playing round the trees, as a child running about, just watch it, with care and affection. Then you will see that the 'me' doesn't enter at all in the field of the known, in the operation, in the function. Then you have a whole area of the mind, the brain, which is totally unoccupied. You know when there is no occupation it is free, it is alive, it is moving. And from this arises another problem: is it a matter of time to see this? The reality of knowledge, and the non reality of knowledge, to see this, and to function in that, does that require time? I need time to learn a language, I need time to learn a function, drive a car, learn a new technique, time is necessary. But is time necessary in seeing the operation of the known, the reality of it, the necessity of it, the inevitability of it? And the freedom from that, an area which is totally innocent, innocent in the sense of an area which has not been hurt at all - you understand? We human beings are hurt, from our childhood we have been hurt, by the parents, by the fellow students, by everybody, the more sensitive we become the more hurt. And being hurt we resist, we withdraw and go through agonies of neurotic activity. And is there an area of the brain which has never been hurt - you understand? Now to come upon that, does it take time? It will take time if you make that into an ideal, which the mind will inevitably do - you understand? That it is a thing to be gained, that it is a thing to be achieved, that it is a thing which I want to identify myself with so that I will have more energy to create more mischief - you understand? Now the realization of all this, the totality of all this, does it take time? Or you see the whole thing instantly? You will see the whole thing, knowledge and the freedom from it, instantly when there is no direction, when you don't want to achieve this or that. Do you understand all this? The desire to achieve is the factor of the 'me', which gives a direction. So is it a matter of time? Improvement is a matter of time, self improvement, but the total emptying of the mind of the 'me' is not of time because you see the reality. When you see something dangerous there is instant action. So do you see the whole of this, all that has been said this morning, the totality of it - the materialistic attitude, which is our life, our daily living, in which there is great fear and great pleasure as the two principals operating always in the field of materialism, within the field of the known. That is what we have lived on, and with that we are trying to get rid of fear and to hold on to pleasure - all that battle that has been going on. And see also, as long as the mind lives there, there is no escape from fear at all, there is no solution to fear, however deeply, energetically you analyse, there is no ending to fear, nor to sorrow. It is only when you come upon that other thing, then there is an ending to all that. Now to see all that, the totality, the whole of it, doesn't require time at all. You either see it, or don't see it. You don't see it because either you don't want to see it, because you are so committed to your own belief, to your own knowledge, to your own little self, or you have not paid attention. Or you have not cared how you live, what you think, your behaviour, your attitude, everything, you don't care. Or you give your total attention, and when you do you can't help seeing the whole thing and then it is over, finished. Q: When one speaks about an untouched area, isn't that in some sort of way projecting, and therefore we are once more being caught in a circle? K: I have understood sir. Have I projected something for you to accept? The speaker has very carefully pointed out that as long as you live here, in this material world, and live with pleasure and pain and fear and pursuit of delight, then you are caught in that, there is no way out of it. And the human mind, if it is at all sane, rational, healthy, doesn't project an illusion. It says, "I know this, I have lived all this, I know all the implications of living in this area, nothing has escaped me, the deceptions, the delusions, the desire to achieve, the success, the pain and the delight, all that." So he says, "Is that my life, is that the whole of life, to live everlastingly in prison?" Now it enquires. It doesn't say, "There is", or it doesn't project, I have carefully explained. If it projects it is still within the same area. So it says, "I don't know". I explained very carefully, "I don't know", and that very acknowledgement, the truth of "I don't know" is that area, and honesty - you can never say "I don't know" if you are not free of the known. And this requires tremendous honesty, which means no deception at any level. And deception only comes when you desire, when you want, when you want to succeed, when you want to achieve something, to attain something, then the operation of will brings illusion. Q: My experience of life shows what you say is quite right but to me, in my life, the life of conflict, I think one needs more than what you say. There is behind what you say a good deal of love -this would send away all fear completely. I don't think there is any hope, I don't think there is any hope for me and the world in which I live. That is what I want to say. K: I understand sir. Are you saying this sir? Please correct me if I am mispresenting you, or misquoting you. Are you saying: without that quality of love everything has no meaning? I purposely, the speaker purposely avoided using that word 'love'. We will go into it on Tuesday. Q: I won't be here. K: You won't be here. (Laughter) It is a thing that we must go into very, very deeply. The word love is not love. The word is never the thing. And to really deeply go into this question of what is love, not verbally, intellectually or emotionally, because without that, as the questioner pointed out, without having love you can 'whistle in the dark', but when you have that you can do what you will. But we haven't got that! We know what pleasure is, we know what lust is, we know what the passion generated by lust, by thought is, but there is a totally different kind of passion, which is love. But one must go into it not ten minutes, five minutes, one must take a whole hour, in the sense go into oneself very, very deeply to find it out, and that requires a mind that is clear, that is not caught in words, that is not caught in sentiment, emotion, romantic nonsense, it requires a very clear, excellent instrument, so that all romanticism, emotionalism, sentimentality is stripped. Then perhaps you will come upon it. Q: The escape from the mechanical and the known, is that possible through the miracles of religion? K: I understand sir. To escape or understand, or go beyond the field of the known, will the miracles of religion help? Now first of all, what do you mean by a miracle, and what do you mean by religion? Just a minute sir. A miracle: the television set is a miracle, a motor car is a miracle, the aeroplane, if you watch it, it is extraordinarily beautiful, is a miracle. Miracle implies also an outside agency doing something to heal us of our wounds, so that we are clean. And you say, can religion do this. What do you mean by religion? Religion as we know it is the product of thought. Look at it carefully. I am not being dogmatic, don't accept what I say, or reject, just look at it. Religion as we know it is the invention of thought of the priests. The priest is not out there, but here. You understand? The priest who says, "I must find out" - or believes, or accepts, or follows authority, follows tradition. I am saying what is going on now in the world, which we call religion, organized belief. In India, in Europe, all over the world, it is organized belief - no? Conditioned through centuries of saying "You must believe in this, this is your god, this is your way of life", etc., etc., etc. Now I do not call that religion. Religion is something entirely different. Religion implies a way of living daily, living a life of truth daily, not truth according to a book, a priest, an analyst, or some tradition, living a life of truth which is real philosophy, love of life, love of truth, so that there is no deception, no hypocrisy, no conflict - conflict between 'what is' and 'what should be'. A way of life that has great care, attention, love, and that cannot possibly be when I am concerned about myself, my improvement, my gods, my beliefs, my opinions. The way of religion is the emptying of the mind of the 'me' so that it lives in that sense of great honesty, great inward simplicity and without any sense of achievement, a direction, therefore right behaviour, not imitation of the behaviour which society imposes on me. And it means great inward peace, quietness, to know something other than 'what is'. All that and much more is religion, not all this circus that is going on. Q: How can we put an end to the violence between youngsters in our family? K: How can we put an end to the violence between the younger generation, young children. Oh Lord! (Laughter) How can you put an end to violence in our children, in our younger generation, younger people? Why has, if I may ask, why has violence become so extraordinarily pervading, so incredibly increasing - why? Is it, first of all in our children, is it that the parents have no time to give to the children because they are to occupied with their own problems, earning their livelihood and so on and so on, that the children have no relationship between the older and the younger? Is that one of the reasons? I am not saying that is the only reason. The mother and the father go away to earn more money, and the children are sent off to schools. In the school there is competition, there is fighting, all that is going on in modern schools. There is no relationship between the teacher and the student. There is no real deep human communication with the so-called teacher and the pupil. He is occupied with his own problems. So he cannot talk to them before the class, the subject begins, about quietness, gentleness, living a life of goodness, talk to him, because he is himself doing it, not just talking about it. Is that one of the reasons? And is there another reason - pick up any newspaper and everyday there is some kind of violence - wars, somebody has been killed, raped, and kidnapped. It is pervasive, it is all around, this sense of violence. Why has this happened? You follow sir? Why has this happened right through the world, in these recent years? Is it a reaction to the Victorian ideals? Is it because some specialists have said that children must grow up and never be corrected? Let them grow up, don't tell them what to do, don't punish them. You follow? - that has been also. Is it because of the recent wars? There is so much violence all around us, in the air, is it because everything around us has lost its meaning? You understand? The Communists, with their gods and with their philosophy, say human beings are insects - you understand sir? - to be destroyed; millions and millions have been destroyed because they have been treated like so many insects. Is that one of the reasons? Is it because the younger generation see that the older generation has not given peace to the world and therefore they must be violent too? They see everything around them is a struggle, conflict, wanting security, success, position - you follow? - all around, this is the pattern. And we are educated to that, from childhood. And don't you think it is inevitable then that this violence comes into being? And also religion, the real kind of religion, not this kind of phoney circus religion, the ordinary religion which everybody trots out has never said and maintained "Don't kill". They say kill when necessary, they have blessed the battle-ships, they have blessed the cannons, they have blessed the heroes - you follow? - but never said, 'Don't kill another human being'. They daren't say it because they are supported by governments, property and all the rest of it. So taking all this into account, what is a child to do? He is sensitive, inquisitive, tender, has no affection or love at home except occasionally, he sees the parents, drinking, smoking, taking drugs, quarrelling, violent. There is the whole pattern set for him. Therefore what is one to do? What are you to do? If you have children what are you to do? Thank god for those who have no children at the present time. But for those who have, what are they going to do? Sir, this is a tremendous problem - you understand? -it is not just a morning's discussion for half an hour and talk over it and then go back to your life with violence. This requires tremendous responsibility. What are you to do? All the schools, the colleges, the universities are like this: passing exams, competition, struggle to have a place, the fear of not having a place. You know what is happening in the Communist world: if you cannot pass certain exams you become a worker for the rest of your life, therefore the competition is hectic, that means violence. So what will you do with your child? Will you form or help to create a new school? Will you undertake the responsibility with a few others, to create a new school - you understand? - responsible for money, for work, for everything involved in a school? Have you the energy, the interest, the care, the affection? And if you have not you will drift the way of the rest. If you have, and you cannot start a school, perhaps there are other kinds of schools, help them - do you follow? Create them. And we, the speaker and some others, we are doing this, we want to create schools, we are burning with it, it is our responsibility, not just to talk, talk, talk endlessly and do nothing. SAANEN 5TH PUBLIC TALK 23RD JULY 1974 We have been talking over together the nature and the structure of thought, its place and its limitations and all the processes and functions involved in the movement of thought. If I may this morning, and it is rather lovely after all these days of rain and cloud to see the mountains, the shadows and the rivers, and the pleasant smell of the air, I would like to talk this morning about what is responsibility, which is, to be answerable to what? In observing objectively, without any opinion or judgement, what is going on in the world - the recent war, the appalling misery and confusion - who is responsible, or answerable for all this? To really find the right response, which is the right answer, we must look at the whole phenomenon of existence. At the one end you have the extraordinary development of technology, which is almost destroying the earth; at the other end you have what may be called the hope, the demand, the entreatment of god, truth or what you will. There is this vast spectrum. And we seem to answer only to a very small part of it. There is this vast field of existence, of our daily living and we seem to be incapable of responding to the whole of it, not just to part of it. And so we must find out for ourselves what is the right response, what is the right answer to all this. If we merely answer, are responsible, to a very small part of it, which is ourselves and our little circle, and our little desires, our petty little responsibilities, our selfish enclosed movement, if we only respond to that, neglecting the whole of it, then we are bound to create not only suffering for ourselves, but suffering for the whole of mankind. Because, as we said the other day, our consciousness is its content. And when there is the transformation in that consciousness you affect the whole of the consciousness of human beings. This is a fact. It is not an imagination, this is not a theory, it is not a speculative hope. If you change radically the content of your consciousness you are affecting the consciousness of your neighbour, of your children, of your society, of all the consciousness of human beings. This is so. Like Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, our friend Mussolini, all of them, affected, because they in themselves created a change - whether it is good or bad we are not discussing that. So is it possible to be responsible to the whole, the whole of mankind? And therefore responsible to nature, responsible, that is to answer adequately, totally to your children, to your neighbour, to all the movement that man has created in his endeavour to live rightly. And to feel that immense responsibility, not only intellectually, verbally, but very deeply, to be able to answer to the whole of human struggle, pain, brutality, violence and despair, to respond totally to that, one must know what it means to love. And we are going to go into that - right? You know that word love has been so misused, so spoilt, so trodden upon, but we will have to use that word and give to it a totally different kind of meaning. To be able to answer to the whole there must be love. And to understand that quality, that compassion, that extraordinary sense of energy which is not created by thought, we must understand what is suffering. When we use the word understand, it is not a verbal or intellectual communication of words, but the communication or communion that lies behind the word. Now first we must understand, and be able to go beyond suffering, otherwise we cannot possibly understand the responsibility to the whole, which is real love. As we said the other day, and I will repeat it again if I may, if you are not bored by it, we are sharing this thing together, we are partaking, not only verbally, intellectually, but going far beyond that. And to share it is our responsibility. That means you must also hear the word, listen to the meaning of the word semantically, and also share in the movement of self enquiry, and go beyond it. This whole movement, one must take part in it. Otherwise you will treat it merely verbally or intellectually or emotionally and then it is nothing. So as we said, to understand this responsibility to the whole, and therefore that strange quality of love, one must go beyond suffering. What is suffering? Why do human beings suffer? And this has been one of the great problems of life for millions of years. And apparently very, very, very few have gone beyond suffering, and they either become heroes or saviours, or some kind of neurotic leaders, or religious leaders, and there they remain. But as ordinary human beings like you and me and others, we never seem to go beyond it. We seem to be caught in it. And we are asking now, this morning, whether it is possible for you to be really free of suffering? There are various kinds of suffering - the physical, and the various psychological movements of suffering, the ordinary organic pains through disease, old age, ill health, bad diet and so on, and also there is the enormous field of psychological suffering. Can you be aware of that field? Can you know intimately the structure and the nature, and the function of suffering? How it operates, what are its results, how it cripples the mind, how it encloses this self-centred activity more and more and more? Is one aware of all that? That is, are you aware of it? That is, one can deal fairly adequately, without that pain affecting the mind, fairly adequately with the pain of the physical organism - right? Are we communicating? Are we going along with each other? One can have really a great deal of pain through a disease and not allow it to interfere with the activity of the mind, to disassociate from the physical pain. I do not know if you have ever done it. It is quite possible, so that that pain does not create neurotic activity. And that requires a very considerable attention to the intelligence of the body. When the body is not dictated to by taste, by the tongue, by the various forms of artificial stimulations, then the organism has its own intelligence. Do listen to all this. Probably you won't pay the least attention to all this afterwards but at least during this hour do give a little attention and care, because there is a lot to learn, a lot that you should know, though you may not act upon it, because most of us are rather lazy, indolent, easy going, accepting things as they are and carrying enormous burdens throughout our life. But at least you should know about these things, what the speaker has to say, as you are good enough to be here. So we are now considering psychological suffering, which apparently man has not been able to resolve. He has been able to escape from it, through various channels - religious, economic, social activity, political activity, business, various forms of escapes, drugs - you know every form of escape but confronting the actual fact of suffering. What is suffering? And is it possible for the mind to be completely free of it, that is, completely free of the psychological activity that brings about suffering? You are following this? First of all one of the major reasons for this suffering is this sense of isolation, which is called the feeling of total loneliness -right? Which is to feel that you have nothing to depend upon; this sense of loneliness that you have no relationship with anyone, that you are totally isolated. You have had this feeling I am quite sure. You may be with your family, in a bus, or at a party, or what you will, you have moments of extraordinary sense of isolation, extraordinary sense of lack, of total nothingness. You must have had it, haven't you? That is one of the reasons. We will go into it step by step. And also suffering, psychologically, comes through attachment - attachment to an idea, or ideals, to opinions, to beliefs, to persons, to concepts - right? Please observe it in yourself. The word is the mirror in which you are looking, which shows your own operations of your own mind - right? So look there. And another reason is, a cause of this sense of suffering, a great sense of loss, loss of prestige, loss of power, loss of so many things, and the loss of somebody whom you think you love, which is death - that is the ultimate suffering. Now can the mind be free of all this? Otherwise it cannot possibly know, do what it will, this sense of love for the whole. If there is no love for the whole of existence, which is not only yours but of total man, then there is no compassion, then you will never understand, do what you will, what love is. In the love of the whole the particular comes in. But when there is the particular love of the one then there is the absence of the other. You are following all this? So it is absolutely imperative that we understand and go beyond suffering, and is that possible? That is, is it possible for the mind to understand this sense of deep inward loneliness, which is different from aloneness? Please don't let's mix the two - there is a difference between loneliness, and being deeply alone. We will understand what it means to be alone when we understand what is the significance of loneliness. You see when we feel lonely and it is rather frightening, and rather depressing, and you have various kinds of moods from that, without escaping, without rationalizing, can you observe it without any movement of escape? You understand? Suppose I feel lonely - I have never felt it but I am saying - if I now feel lonely, with all the implications involved in it, the escapes, the attachments, can I look at it without any movement of escape? Can I be aware of it without rationalizing, without trying to find the cause of it, just to observe? And in that observation I discover the escape for me is through the attachment to an idea - you are following? - to a concept, to a belief. Now can I be aware of that belief and how it is an escape? And when I observe it quietly the escape and the belief disappear without any effort. Are you following all this? Because the moment you introduce effort then there is the observer and the observed, and therefore the conflict. But when you are aware of all the implications of loneliness then there is no observer, there is only the fact of this feeling of being utterly isolated. This isolation takes place also through our daily activity - my ambition, my greed, my envy, concern with my own desire to fulfil, to become somebody, to improve myself, I am so concerned with my beastly little self, and that is part of my loneliness - you are following? During the day, during the sleep, in all the activities I do, I am so concerned about myself: me and you, we and they. You follow? I am concerned, I am committed to myself. I want to do things for myself in the name of my nation, in the name of my god, in the name of my family, in the name of my wife and all that nonsense that goes on. So this loneliness comes into being through daily activities of self-concern - right? And when I become aware of all the implications of loneliness I see all this - right? I see it, not theorize about it - you understand? When I look at something the details come out. When you look closely at a tree, at a river, or the mountain, or a person, then in that observation you see everything, it tells you, you don't tell it. So when you so observe, or when you are so greatly, without any choice, aware of this loneliness then the thing disappears altogether. Then one of the causes of suffering is attachment. I am attached to you. I am attached to you as an audience - you understand? Because you feed me psychologically, and I feel tremendously excited, elevated - you know - so I am attached. Or I am attached to a person, attached to an idea, attached to an opinion, attached to tradition and so on and so on. Why is the mind attached? Have you ever gone into this? Attached to furniture, attached to a house, attached to your wife, attached to god knows what - why? Come on sirs, it is your problem, not mine. And that is one of the reasons for great suffering. And being attached, and finding it is painful we try to cultivate detachment, which is another horror. So why is the mind attached? An attachment is a form of occupation for the mind. If I am attached to you I am thinking about you, I am worrying about you, I am concerned about you, in my self-centred way because I don't want to lose you, I don' want you to be free, I don't want you to do something which disturbs my attachment, in that attachment I feel somewhat at least temporarily secure. So in attachment there is fear, jealousy, anxiety, suffering. Now just look at it. Don't say, "What am I to do?" - you can't do anything. If you try to do something about your attachment then you are trying to create another form of attachment - right? Do you follow this? So just observe it. When you are attached to a person or an idea you dominate that person, you want to control that person, you deny freedom to that person. And when you are attached you are denying freedom altogether. If I am attached to a communist ideal then I bring destruction to others, which is what is happening. So seeing loneliness, attachment, is one of the causes - or let's say one of the causes of sorrow, is it possible for the mind to be free of attachment? - which doesn't mean that the mind becomes indifferent. Because we are concerned with the whole of existence, not just my existence - you follow? Therefore I must respond, answer to the whole, and not my particular little desire to be attached to you and I want to get over that little anxiety of pain, jealousy and all the rest of it. Because our concern is to find out this quality of love which can only cone into being when the mind is concerned with the whole and not with the particular. When it is concerned with the whole there is love, and then from the whole the particular has a place. Right? You are following this? And there is the suffering of loss, of losing somebody whom you love - 'love', you understand, I am using that word in quotation marks. Why do you suffer? I lose my son, my mother, my wife, or god knows whoever, I lose somebody. Why do I suffer? Go on sirs. Is it that I am suddenly left, hurt very deeply through the death of another? Because through the death of another, through that other, I have identified myself with that person - right, you are following all this? It is my son, I want him, I am myself projected in that son, identified myself with that person, and when that person is no longer there I feel a tremendous sense of hurt because I have nobody to continue me in another - right? So I am deeply hurt. From that hurt arises self-pity. Please do examine all this. I am not so much concerned about the other. I am really concerned about myself through the other. And therefore I am hurt when the other is not. And in that hurt, which is very deep, from that hurt arises self-pity and the desire to find somebody else through whom I can survive. You are following all this? So there is that suffering. And there is the suffering of not only the personal, but this vast suffering of man - you are following? The suffering which wars have brought about to innocent people, to people who have been killed, to the killer and the killed - you understand? - the mother, the wife, the children, whether they are in the Far East, the Middle East or in the West, this vast human suffering, both physically and psychologically. Unless this mind understands this whole problem, I can play with the word love, I can do social work and talk about the love of god, the love of man, the love of all this, but in my heart I will never know what it is - right? So is my mind, your mind, your consciousness capable of looking at this fact? Looking at it, seeing what extraordinary misery it causes, not only to another but to oneself. Seeing how you deprive another of his freedom when you are attached. And when you are attached you are depriving your own freedom. And so the battle begins between you and me. So can the mind observe this? Because it is only with the ending of suffering that wisdom comes into being - you understand? Wisdom is not a thing that you buy in books, or that you learn from another. Wisdom comes in the understanding of suffering and all the implications of suffering, not only the personal but also the human suffering, which man has created. It is only when you go beyond it that wisdom comes into being. Then to understand, or come upon this thing that we call love, we must understand I think also what is beauty. All right, may I go into it? Beauty. You know it is one of the most difficult things to put into words but we will try. You know what it means to be sensitive? Not sensitive to your desires, to your ambitions, to your hurts and to your failures, and to your successes, that is fairly easy, most of us are sensitive to our own little demands, to our own little pursuits of pleasure, fear and anxiety and delights. But we are talking of being sensitive, not to something but being sensitive, both psychologically and physically. Physically to be sensitive is to have a very good subtle body - you understand? - healthy, sane, not overeating, indulging, a sensitive body. That you can try, good diet and all the rest of it, if you are interested. And psychologically to be sensitive. We are not dividing the psyche from the body, it is all interrelated. You cannot be sensitive if in that area there is any kind of hurt - right? You are following all this? Do please. There is a lot to talk about in this. As we are saying, in that area psychologically we human beings are hurt greatly. We have deep wounds, unconscious and conscious wounds, either self inflicted or caused by others, at school, at home, in the bus, in the office, in the factory, we are hurt. And that deep hurt, conscious or unconscious, makes us psychologically insensitive, dull. Watch your own hurt, if you can. A gesture, a word, a look, is enough to hurt. And you are hurt when you are compared with somebody else, when you are trying to imitate somebody else, when you are conforming to the pattern you are hurt, whether that pattern is set by another or by yourself. So we human beings are deeply wounded. And those wounds bring about neurotic activity. All beliefs are neurotic anyhow, ideals are neurotic. And is it again possible to understand these hurts and to be free of them, and never to be hurt again under any circumstances? You understand my question? I am hurt from childhood, for various incidents or accidents, a word, a gesture, a look, a slighting, gnawed, there are these wounds - can these wounds be wiped away without leaving a mark? Watch it please. Don't look somewhere else, look at yourself. You have got these wounds, can they be wiped away not leaving a mark? That is one problem. And the other problem is: never to be hurt. If there is a hurt, you are not sensitive, you will never know what beauty is. You can go to all the museums in the world, compare Michelangelo, Picasso and whatever you like, be experts in the explanation, in the study of these people and their paintings, structure and all the rest of it, but as long as a human mind is hurt and therefore insensitive, it will never know what is beauty. Without knowing that quality of beauty, which is not in the thing, in the product which man has made, only, but in the line of an architect in a building, in the mountain, in the beautiful tree and all the rest of it, if there is any kind of inward hurt you will never know what beauty is, and therefore without beauty there is no love. So can your mind know it has been hurt and not react to those hurts at the conscious level, and also at the unconscious level, know these hurts, be aware of them? It is fairly easy to be aware of conscious hurts - right? Can you know your unconscious hurts? Or must you go through all the idiotic process of analysis? You are following all this? Because analysis - I'll go into it very quickly and get rid of analysis - analysis implies the analyser and the analysed. Who is the analyser? Is he different from the analysed? If he is different why is he different? Who created the analyser to be different from the analysed? If he is different how can he know what the thing is? You are following all this? So the analyser is the analysed. That is so obvious. And to analyse each analysis must be totally complete. That means if there is any slight misunderstanding, the next analysis you cannot analyse completely because of previous misunderstandings. You are following all this? Analysis implies time. You can go on endlessly for the rest of your life analysing and you will be still analysing as you are dying. Right? So how is the mind to uncover the unconscious deep wounds, the wounds which the race has collected - you understand? When the conqueror subjugates the victim he has hurt him. That is a racial hurt - you understand? When the Imperialists - I am using it in the ordinary sense, not the Communists' sense, they are the Imperialists anyhow! - when the Imperialist, the maker of Empires, to him everybody is beneath him, and he leaves a deep unconscious hurt on those whom he has conquered - you understand all this? It is there. How is the mind to uncover all these hidden hurts, deep in the recesses of one's consciousness? I see the fallacy of analysis -right? So there is no analysis. Please watch this carefully. There is no analysis and our tradition is to analyse - right? So I have put aside the tradition of analysis - right? Are you doing this? So what has happened to the mind when it has denied, or put aside, seen the falseness of something, the falseness of analysis, it is free of that burden - right? - therefore it has become sensitive, it is lighter, clearer, it can observe more sharply. So by putting aside a tradition which man has accepted - analysis, introspection and all the rest of it - the mind has become free - right? And by denying the tradition you have denied the content of the unconscious - you are following? Yes, you have got it? The unconscious is the tradition -tradition of religion, tradition of marriage, tradition of - oh, a dozen things. And one of the traditions is to accept hurt, and having accepted hurt analyse it to get rid of it. Now when you deny that, because I have been false - you are following this? - you have denied the content of the unconscious. Therefore you are free of hurt, of the unconscious hurts. You don't have to analyse or go through dreams and all the rest of it. (I haven't time to go into all this.) So the mind by observing the hurt and not using the traditional instrument to wipe away that hurt, which is analysis, which is talking it over together, you know all that business that goes on, group therapy and individual therapy and collective therapy and god knows, you wipe away by being aware - aware of the tradition. And therefore when you deny that tradition you deny the hurt which accepts that tradition. Got it? So the mind then becomes extraordinarily sensitive - the mind being the body, the heart, the brain, the nerves, the total thing becomes sensitive. Now we are asking what is beauty. We said it is not in the museum, it is not in the picture, it is not in the face, it is not a response to the background of your tradition - you are following? So when you put all that aside the mind, because it is sensitive, and because suffering has been understood, you have passion, there is passion. You understand? Passion is different from lust, obviously. Lust is the continuation of pleasure, and the demand for pleasure in different forms - sexually, religious entertainment that goes on in churches and temples and all the rest of it. So when there is no hurt, when there is the understanding and going beyond suffering, then there is that quality of passion which is totally necessary to understand the extraordinary sense of beauty. That beauty cannot possibly exist when the 'me' is constantly asserting - you understand? You may be a marvellous painter, accepted by the world as the greatest painter, but if you are concerned with your beastly little self you are no longer an artist - you understand what I am talking about? You are only furthering through art your own selfish continuation. So, now we have got this: a mind that is free, that has gone beyond this sense of suffering, a mind that is free from all hurt and therefore never capable of being hurt again under any circumstances, whether it is flattered or insulted, nothing can touch it - which doesn't mean it has built a resistance. On the contrary it is excellently vulnerable. Then you will begin to find out what love is. Obviously love is not pleasure - right? Now we can say that it is not pleasure, not before, because you have now been through all that and put aside all that - not that you cannot enjoy the mountains, the trees, and the rivers and the nice faces and the beauty of the land, but when that beauty of the land becomes the pursuit of pleasure it ceases to be beauty. So love is not pleasure. Love is not the pursuit or the avoidance of fear. Love in not attachment. Love has no suffering. Obviously. And that love means the love of the whole, which is compassion. And that love has its own order, order both within and without, and that order cannot be brought about through legislation - you understand all this? Now when you understand this and live it daily, otherwise it has no value at all, then they are just a lot of words without any meaning, they are just ashes. Then life has quite a different significance. We will talk about something else next time which is related to life, which is part of this whole field of existence which we call life, which is death. Life includes death, it is not outside, therefore it is necessary to understand that too, but we have no time this morning, we will go into it another day. Any questions sirs? Q: (In French) K: If I am aware - please correct me if I am wrong in my translation - if I am aware during the day of all my thoughts and activities, really aware clearly, limpidly, with a certain quality of lightness, what takes place during sleep, what is the movement in sleep? Is that your question? You understand the question? During the day I am aware, not condemning, not judging, but just aware, of the movement of my thoughts, of my emotions, the feelings that I have, the pleasures, the pains, the anxieties, just aware. Then what goes on during sleep? Dreams, pleasant and unpleasant, dreams which indicate something that may happen in the future, dreams that warn me of certain actions and so on and so on, dreams. Or can the mind during so-called sleep renew itself totally? You have understood my question? I think this is what the lady is asking, if I am correct. Q: (Inaudible) K: Sir, please I am answering that question. Please listen to the lady's question and not to your own question. I know your own question may be important to you, but also in listening to the other question perhaps your own question will be answered; but if you are occupied with your own question then you will not answer or find what the other person is saying. One is aware during the day. Is one aware during the day? One says one is aware, or one thinks one is aware, which is worse! But actually is one aware of the fact, not as the word and the fact - you understand? The word is never the thing, the description is never the described. So I am aware not of the word, not of the description, but of the actual fact that I am angry, I am jealous, that I am conceited, vain, stupid, full of vanity, hurt, pride, anxiety - am I aware of that actually, not through the word, which is entirely different? Somebody can tell me I am hungry but that is not hunger. So in the same way am I aware actually? Or I think I am aware? If I am so aware during the day, the unconscious brings its intimations - you understand? If I am aware during the conscious waking hours, the unconscious brings out its intimations, it wants to tell you something, its prejudices, its fears, its anxieties, its hurts, its extraordinary hidden demands - you follow? Being consciously aware implies also be aware totally, therefore one begins to discover what the unconscious is saying - right? Now if you do that during the day what takes place at night? Does the same process go on? You follow? If it does, then it is a continuation in dreams of what you have done during the day. I wonder if you understand all this? Look sirs: I am aware, or rather not fully aware, partially aware. I want to be aware because I think what you are talking about seems fairly rational, I want to be aware. So I try to be aware, but it is an awfully difficult thing to be aware. So I play with it for some time, drop it, pick it up, drop it, pick it up, and go on during the day that way. Then during the night the same game is going on as dreams. So the mind never has a rest - you follow? - never complete relaxation, complete quietness, but it has been working, working, working during the day, it keeps on working, working at night. If during the day it doesn't put order, then at night it tries to put order. You have watched all this I am sure. So what takes place when during the day you are really, nonverbally, completely conscious, aware of everything happening inside you as much as possible around you, what takes place? Then in that awareness during the day you have established order, haven't you? Right? Please see the importance of this. You have established order, haven't you? Order being no contradiction, no conflict, no sense of me dominating you, which is disorder - do you understand all this? So during the day by becoming totally aware, if that is possible, and it is possible obviously, then in that awareness there is order, there is no disorder. Disorder implies contradiction, conflict, 'me' and the not 'me', the observer and all that. Now when there is order during the day the mind then hasn't got to put order during the sleep. You follow all this? Because during sleep, unless you have order during the day, the mind tries to put order, because a brain must have order, otherwise it cannot function happily, freely, effectively. Obviously. It is like a child, it must have security. Security exists only when there is order - right? So the brain then hasn't got to struggle to create order for itself. Therefore - please see the sequence - therefore there is no neurotic action during the day, or it doesn't invent a neurotic action which will give it security - right? So when there is complete order during the day the brain hasn't got to struggle to create order neurotically or order according to circumstances and so on, it is orderly. Therefore in that order there is complete security for itself and dreams then become merely a physical reaction - you have eaten wrongly or this or that, then dreams have very little meaning. You understand all this? So can your mind be totally aware during the day and bring order out of disorder? Your question sir? Your question was: why is it that sometimes one understands and at other times one doesn't. Why is it one thinks one sees very clearly without any conflict and at other times everything is dark - right sir? Aren't you rather fed up with somebody else answering your questions? What is understanding? When you say, I understand, I understand the problem, I understand my relationship with another, I understand it, I understand the meaning of love, when you use that word what do you mean by that word? Is it an intellectual understanding, a verbal understanding, which is the words are a means of communication and by using certain words you say, "Yes, I have understood through the words what you mean" -therefore it is still verbal - right? Or you understand the logic of certain things, intellectually say that you accept that, and say you understand. Now we are asking something entirely different: is understanding verbal, intellectual, or something totally other? Now wait a minute. We have described what suffering is, and you say, "Yes, I have understood" - have you understood the words, or seen the whole picture the word conveys and the implications of what it has conveyed and you say, "Yes, I see it, I understand the meaning, the verbal meaning, the content of what I have seen, and I have gone beyond it" - that is understanding. To understand verbally, intellectually or to grasp the whole thing instantly, which is non-verbal. And when you grasp it totally you have understood completely and there is nothing more. Therefore you are outside that field. That is what I call understanding, then it has significance, it brings action. But when you merely understand intellectually, verbally or romantically or emotionally, that is just nothing at all. And when you so understand something so completely and are beyond it, the mind then doesn't go back, there is nothing to go back to - you understand? It isn't one moment all understanding, the next moment all dull. When you understand suffering you are out of that, and therefore the mind becomes extraordinarily clear. Yes sir? Q: You talk about transcendence of all our problems and so going beyond them. What is to stop us becoming maniacs? K: What stops one becoming a maniac when you have gone beyond all this? Sir, when you have gone beyond suffering you won't ask that question. To go beyond suffering means intelligence. And when there is that extraordinary quality of excellent intelligence, which is not personal or collective, it is just intelligence, then that intelligence operates in every field, there is no insanity; it is only when we have not that intelligence we go insane. Yes sir? Q: I would like to ask if there is any direction for the evolution of man? K: He would like to ask a question, which is: is there any direction for the evolution of man on this planet. So far, as one observes historically and from what one knows, the direction of man has been in the destruction of the earth, in the destruction of nature, in the destruction of all the living things around him - right? This is obvious sir. Oh, no come on! They are destroying whales, they are destroying animals, beavers, destruction is going on -right? You use up energy, petrol, they are exhausting it, the mineral oils. Wait sir, take all that. There is the physical destruction first, then what is man doing psychologically? Progressing? Q: Greater systems in the world. K: Psychologically he is creating order in the world? Q: Society is a living system. K: Society is a living system and that is such a lovely order, is it? Q: It is not lovely but it is order that did not exist before man came. K: It is disorder this society we live in. Sir, what are we talking about? Isn't it a disorder? Injustice, violence, throwing bombs. Are we any different from the previous generations? Have we progressed? Do you know what that word progress means? Originally I believe it meant to enter into the enemy's country fully armed! And we are doing that very beautifully. Are we psychologically progressing? Do look at it sir! Overpopulation, millions are starving, millions are being destroyed and also millions are being cured medically, there is division between races, classes, division between religions and millions of people being destroyed for ideologies. You understand sir? Do we call all this progress? Is all this order? Or one realizes this thing that man has created, man has brought about, apart from the technological world which is an extraordinary world by itself, and using that technological world to destroy each other, instruments of war, and one is concerned when seeing all this, really concerned, really committed in the transformation of the mind of man, that is what we are talking about. In the transformation, in the change, in the revolution of the mind of man, not in any particular direction - if you have a particular direction then that direction is set by thought which is old, and therefore it is part of the same machinery going on. We are concerned with human beings, human beings that have created this disorder, human beings that are populating the earth incredibly, human beings which have destroyed species of animals, human beings which breed wars, hatred, antagonism. And we are saying there can be no change out there unless there is a change in here. Right sirs. SAANEN 6TH PUBLIC TALK 25TH JULY 1974 We have been talking over together many problems, many issues and the different forms of conflict that we live. We have been going into all these problems, human problems which are common to the world. It is not only our personal problems but also when you go to India, Asia, America you see the same problems, the same issues, same miseries and confusions and sorrows, and we have gone into them not perhaps in great detail but somewhat deeply. And I think this morning we ought to talk over rather a difficult issue, a difficult problem. It seems rather a morbid subject but it is not. We have talked about love, pleasure and the various forms of pursuits of that pleasure and the great unsolved problem of fear and sorrow. And we ought to talk about what is living and what it is to die. And whether one can really, not intellectually or romantically, or converted to a certain form of belief and taking comfort in that belief, however rational, however logical and somewhat provable, consider this extraordinary problem of why the human mind has always avoided this question of death. Why the human mind has never been able to solve it. Why the human mind has invented speculative, comforting theories, satisfying beliefs and so on. To go into that problem, that issue, that we all must face one day or another - I hope not for a long time - to understand that, rather to go into it very, very deeply, one must also find out what it is to live. Is living different from dying? And to find out what living means, we must look at what we call living, actual living: not the theoretical living that we should live, or the ideological concept of a good life, but the life that one leads every day. And it seems to me unless we understand that, the whole significance, not just part of it, the whole area of existence in which is included death - we shall not be able to penetrate into that thing that we don't know, which is called death. So first we have to look quite objectively, non-personally, non-ideationally at what we are actually doing, which we call living. Because unless one understands this problem of security in all its varieties, at various depths, unless we understand that security, we shall not be able to understand if there is a security when this whole organism comes to an end. Please, as we said several times before, and it is worth repeating, we are serious people - at least the speaker is - and to go into this you must be very, very serious. It is not a thing for the immature mind. We will go into that presently, what we mean by maturity. It isn't something that you just look at and go away, pass it by; it is your life from the moment you are born till the moment you die. It is your life and we are examining that life, which we call living. And we also explained the day before yesterday, if I remember rightly, what it is to understand. Understanding is not merely an intellectual verbal comprehension. One can say, I have understood verbally, intellectually what you have said. But that understanding is very, very, superficial and therefore does not produce or bring about an action, it remains at a certain level. Understanding implies understanding not only the word, the understanding intellectually, but understanding as a whole, and therefore productive of action. If there is no action following understanding, there is no understanding, obviously. So when we use the word understanding in that word the implications are a total comprehension in which action takes place. It is not a verbal, emotional, intellectual amusing understanding. So we must look first at our life - the daily, monotonous, boring life of every human being on this unfortunate earth. Because when you observe it, which is in yourself, the eternal pursuit is for security. Security in pleasure, security in a relationship, security in an ideal, in a concept, in a formula. Please observe it, we are sharing this thing together, you are not just listening and passing it by; you are sharing totally, verbally, actually, in observing yourself. We are seeking security in things - property, money, possessions - and we have built a society where that becomes all important. We have created that society. All human beings right throughout the world have put together a society that is based on not only personal security but the communal security, national security, which is not only in the idea of a nation, but also in the possession of things. And we try to find this security in a concept, which you call the ideal. And all the structure of this desire, the demand, the necessity - and it is a necessity, to be physically secure predominates all our thinking. We need to have physical security - food, clothes and shelter: that is an absolute necessity. But that necessity is becoming more and more impossible because of ideological reasons - the ideological reasons being nationalities, class divisions, economic, national division and the concept of a superior and inferior -physical necessity. And the mind can only survive physically, when it is assured of food clothes and shelter - that we see is an absolute necessity, not only for the western world, but for the whole of mankind: the unity of mankind is the political responsibility but the politicians are not going to bring it about, because they survive on national divisions. And this physical security is denied not only for political reasons but a much deeper issue - which is, we have built a conceptual world, a world based on idea, a world based on a philosophy which is essentially material. We went into that the other day. We said thought - please listen to it although I have repeated it a hundred times - thought is essentially material because thought is the response of memory: memory is experience, knowledge that is held in the brain cells, in the tissues of the brain, which is matter. And we have built a world on a concept, on an idea of self-importance, self-survival at any price, identified with the nation, with a religious group. See it in yourself, please. So as the world is becoming more and more overpopulated, security, physical security is becoming more and more rare, more and more difficult. And a man who feels totally responsible -please listen - totally responsible for all human beings, not only for myself and for yourself - this flame of responsibility makes each one of us non-ideological, non-national and he does not belong to any religion in the accepted form of that word. He is neither a Christian, nor a Hindu, nor a Buddhist, nor a Moslem because they are the factors of dividing people, and therefore bringing about insecurity. I wonder if you follow all this? And yet the mind must have security, because otherwise it can't function. You follow? Are we communicating with each other? Do, please. This is really quite important if you will give your attention to it. The brain, as we said, with which I think the brain specialists and everybody agrees, must have security. Like a child it must have security. And when there is no security in the real deep sense of that word, it creates a security in a formula, in a concept, in a belief. Belief, a concept, a dogma, an ideal become the neurotic activity of a mind that is seeking security. Right? Watch yourselves. Are you doing this? - not that you agree or disagree with me but are you doing this? Are you seeking security in a concept - Communist, Socialist, Capitalist, all the religions, or a concept that you have yourself found out? And if you have a concept and are acting according to that concept you are acting neurotically, because in a concept there is no security. And yet the brain, the mind, the physical body need complete security. You understand the question? See what we are doing? Physically we want security, not only for ourselves but for the whole of humanity: that is love, that is compassion, but that compassion, that love is denied totally when you seek security in neurotic concepts, and all concepts are neurotic, obviously, because a concept is an idea - you follow? A thing formulated by thought. A thing formulated by a materialistic attitude, and when you have an action based on a concept which is totally material, then division must inevitably take place, and there are battles, quarrels, divisions, agony. So that is one side of it. Another is, is there security at all? Mind has sought security in things, physical things - property and so on, in name, in property, in a characteristic activity. It has sought security in concepts, ideals, formulas, systems - all that. And when one looks at all that very closely, objectively, non-sentimentally, non-personally, then you will see that whole set-up brings insecurity for everybody. And yet the mind, the brain must have security to function. So I am asking you and myself if there is this thing called security at all? Right? Now that is what we are going to investigate. That is what we are going to find out. But if I find out, and I tell you, then we shall not be sharing. But together we are going to find out. Right? That means you see the truth of the necessity of physical security which is totally denied by conceptual attitude, and yet the mind is always pursuing in different forms security - security being something permanent. Right? Permanent relationship, and a permanent house, a permanent idea. Now is there such a thing as permanency? I may want it because I see everything around me fading away, withering, in a flux, but the mind says, there must be security, permanency. But there is no permanency in an idea, in a concept, no permanency in things, because there is not or - I do not know - for various reasons. And then I seek permanency in my relationships - in my wife, in my children and so on. And is there a permanent security in relationship? You understand? You ask yourself. When you want permanency in relationship the whole problem of attachment arises. Please do - for your own sake, do watch it. And when you are attached, the whole problem of fear, loss, suspicion, hate, jealousy, anxiety, fear - all that enters into that problem, into that desire to have permanent relationship. You understand? One has found there is no permanency in a concept, though the Catholics, the Protestants, the Communists have indoctrinated the mind, and the mind has accepted that philosophy as permanent. But you can see it is disappearing, it is fading away, they are questioning everything. And also one sees there is no permanency in any physical thing. So the mind says, I must have personal relationship. Right? And then when we see the implications of that relationship, a relationship based on an image of you and of the other, each one having an image about the other, which is impermanent, and yet seeking permanency in that relationship. So one asks, is there anything permanent? It is a very difficult question to ask, if you are at all serious, and a very difficult thing to find out what happens to a mind - please listen - what happens to a mind that has found the truth that there is nothing permanent? Will it go off, become insane? Please listen to this. Will it take a drug, commit suicide? Will it again fall into the trap of another ideology, another desire which will project a permanent thing? You follow? So please listen to it. One has discovered by looking, not analysing, by just observing our daily, everyday life, that the mind has sought security in all these things. And thought says, there is no security, there is nothing permanent. And it begins to seek something more permanent. It has not found something permanent here - please listen - therefore it is seeking a permanency in another area, in another consciousness. But thought itself is impermanent. Right? But it has never questioned that itself is impermanent. You understand what I am saying? So, please this demands tremendous care, don't go off the deep end. So when the mind says, there is nothing permanent, it includes thought. Right? So look at it. Can the mind be sane, healthy, whole and therefore act totally when it realizes there is nothing permanent? Or will it become insane? You follow? When you are confronted with this problem that there is nothing permanent, including the structure of thought, can you stand it? You understand? Can you see the significance of saying there is nothing permanent - including yourself, including all the structure of thought which has built, and says, that structure is 'me'? That 'me' is also impermanent. I wonder if you see all this? Leave it there for the moment, we'll come to it in a different way. We have also to understand - we are coming to the immense question of death presently, all this is part of it - we have to understand this question of time. Time means movement - right? From here to there, physically; to cover that distance from here to there you need time - time by the watch, time by the sun, time by day or time by year. And what is the relationship of time, which is distance, movement, to thought? Please, this is not difficult, just listen to it and you will see it for yourself. The whole western world principally, essentially is based on measurement -technologically, spiritually, the hierarchy, the top-dog, the top bishop, the top archbishop, the pope, it is all based on measurement - socially, morally and obviously technologically. And the saint also is the supreme measure, accepted by the church or by the religion. So the whole moral, intellectual, structure of our civilization is based on that - time, measurement, thought. Right? Because thought is measurement: thought is time - time being yesterday, what I did yesterday; what I did, modifies the present and this modification continues in a different form in the future. That is time, the movement from the past through the present to the future, is time, which is measurable. Right? And there must be time to go from here to there. I need time to learn a language, or any technique, but does the mind need time to transform itself? You are following all this? The moment the mind admits time in order to transform itself, it is still within the field of measurement, time, thought. That area has been created by thought, and to change itself, to bring about a different mind, if it still functions within that same field, then there is no change at all. Right? May I go on? I hope you are following all this. Look, I'll put it this way. I am greedy and I know greed is comparative - right? I have this feeling of greed which arises when I see something more than I have: which is a measure - right? And I ask myself, to transform that feeling, that measurement, is time necessary? If time becomes a necessity, then I still remain within the field of measure: therefore I have not changed greed at all. You have seen this? So is there a change which is not based on cause, which is time, but change which is instantaneous? Please, you are asking all these questions, not I only. I am violent: human beings are unfortunately violent beings: violence, for various causes, we know all that. To change violence - to transform it so that the mind is never violent, does it need time? If you admit it needs time, then that violence takes another form because it is still within the same area - right? Some of you have got it? If you have got it, tell others. So I am asking, is the desire for permanency the cause, is that desire the cause - cause, desire and the action of permanency, that is still within the field of time: I am moving: the cause, the motive, makes me desire permanency, and so on. So cause brings about the structure of time. Now I ask is there any permanency at all? Now let's look at it: you follow, we have looked at time, permanency, time, and now we are going to look at our daily life which is based on that. Right? Desire for permanency in relationship, because that is becoming more and more real, because we have discarded all the others, the intellectual permanencies, of theories, state-worship, church - and so on: we have discarded it, and so we say there must be permanent relationship, that is the only thing we have, and in that too we find there is no permanent relationship. Can the mind, your mind, face this absolute truth that there is no permanency? To see this, not just theorize about it. Then let us look at the problem, at this immense problem which man has never been able to solve, this question of death. They are all related - please, you understand? When you go to India you see dead bodies being carried about to the river, to be burned: you see them in the western world, the hearse, the black thing with flowers on it, and the long queue of mourners, and those who say, thank God he is dead! You have all that. And the people who cry, because they have lost, and the people who inherit the wealth, who are delighted! And when we have seen this physical phenomenon, what is your response? Do you see yourself in the hearse - you follow, the whole process? What is your relationship to death which is there? This is not a morbid question, not something that will make you sad, and all the rest of the romantic nonsense, but actually when you face this thing, when you see it all about you, in all its crudeness, in all its decorated corruption, what is your relationship to it? Is it an intellectual relationship: you say, yes we are all going to die one day, that is inevitable, and logical, and I accept that logical inevitability with a rational mind? Is that what your relationship is? Or is it a romantic relationship? Or is it a total relationship? We are all going to die one day, that is inevitable: through disease, accident, old age, painful diseases because we have not taken care when we were young, or we have grown to maturity too quickly, you understand? Don't you understand what I am talking about? No. Have you noticed how all the young people in the modern world are astonishingly mature physically, so quickly: they have sexual experience when they are twelve and thirteen, they smoke, they drink, take drugs at the age of twelve, thirteen, fifteen: they are already grown up: they drink, they smoke, they do all these sexual things, and they are already gone - you follow? And because of the demands of society, all the industry of entertainment, the schools, the colleges, everything making them mature, physically at an astonishing speed. You are already old when you are thirty - gone! You follow? And as you grow older your body begins to date much quicker, and the doctors have their medicines, their pills - all the rest of it. And you do not see the sadness of all this. You understand? If you have children - and you see them growing so quickly, never having a childhood, never a boyhood, always caught in the trap of civilization, and it is a very sad thing to see this - not romantically but it is a dreadful thing to see this happening to human minds, where they should grow slowly, mature quietly, so that the mind at the end of its life is completely alive, whole, healthy But instead of that our bodies begin to have diseases, complaints, you know, all the rest of it. So we die, through disease, accident, old age, in misery, in conflict, in pain, in sorrow; then there is the sorrow that comes through attachments to things that we are leaving behind - right? Your friend, your wife, your book, your name, your experience, your fame, your notoriety - all that! The character that you are supposed to have built up. All that you are leaving behind, and you are frightened, enormously. Have you noticed all this? Notice it, not at the end of one's life, but now. You understand? You can notice this now, when you are living. And the organism fades, decays and dies. And also of course all this idea that you will be physically resurrected. You should have a camera at that moment. And they have their own physical resurrection of the saints in India, and all that. What a lot of rubbish we do indulge in! And the mind with its thoughts, all the things it has built, and thought says to itself, all right the body goes, but I go on. You follow? I go on in my books, I go on in my children, I go on in my work that I have done, and I have left it to somebody else - the work, the book, the name, the form, that goes on. And that is called also immortality, of a certain kind. But the book, the business, the name, the form also decay - somebody else takes it over - right? And thought says, all right, I know that too. So thought says, I'm alive, so I will be born again next life; the whole of the East believes that - the whole of the East. So thought, not seeing its own impermanency - please see this - thought not seeing the structure which it has built around itself as the 'me' as being permanent, and not seeing its impermanency, says I am the cause, and that cause must go on. And that cause is time. Please see the relationship - that cause is the time; and that says, I will go on, I will go on improving myself. You follow? Because God is there, and I cannot reach him now, but I will go on, slowly, till I am perfecting myself and ultimately I will reach what I have projected as God. You follow all this? So there is this thought of human beings as a great stream. Right? Everybody wants to go on. Right? And in that stream the thought of you remains. Please see this. And when the mediums, the physical research societies and all those people, when they call upon you, you manifest out of that stream, because you are still there, and you are still there in your daily life, because you are still pursuing this, the same thing every human being is pursuing -security, permanency, 'me' and not 'me', we and they, this constant concern with myself - in that stream all human beings are caught. Right? And when you die, the thought of you goes on in that stream. Right? As you are going now - you are a Christian, Buddhist, whatever it is. You are greedy, envious, ambitious, frightened, pursuing pleasure - that is this human stream in which you are caught. Unless you step out of this now you will go on in that stream, obviously. Can the mind step out and face complete impermanency, now? If you have understood the whole - that is death isn't it? You understand, sir? You see the ancient Hindus, they were very clever people; they thought this is impossible, man can't let go of everything instantly. Therefore the idea of 'me', as you hold to it, must go on: the 'me' which is the result of time, measurement, thought, of course. Right? You have got it? That 'me' must evolve, slowly through various lives must evolve till it reaches the highest excellence, which is Brahmin - God, what you like to call it. So they had that idea. The Christians have it in a different way, not so mathematically, so cleverly worked out, such subtle implications involved in it. I will not go into all that. In that is implied that the next life becomes very important, therefore this life is important. This life becomes tremendously important because how you behave now, if you behave rightly, you will be rewarded next life. You understand? That is the belief. They all believe in it, but nobody behaves now. (Laughter). So they carry on this game. You understand? So can the mind, seeing all this phenomena - you follow? -tremendous - I cannot go into all the details of it, it is such a vast area in which the mind has sought security: mind has created time, as thought, as measurement. And in that measurement, in that time, it has a movement in which it has tried to find permanency, as the 'me'. The 'me', and you, and so on. And we are asking, seeing all this enormous area, very complex and extraordinarily subtle, can the mind see the truth that there is absolutely no permanency -which is really death. You understand? Can you see the truth of this? Not accept the truth of another: then it is not truth, it is mere propaganda, which is a lie. Can you, for yourself, after all this explanation for an hour, see the truth of it? Not the verbal truth, not the intellectual concept, saying, yes, I have understood it. That is not truth. Truth means it acts. It acts, and so you see that there is no permanency: then you are no longer attached. You are no longer attached to an idea, a concept, a religious belief, a dogma, a saviour. So now what takes place. You follow? When you see the truth of that there is freedom, and freedom means total intelligence. I wonder if you see this. Not the intelligence of cunning thought but that supreme intelligence which has seen the truth and therefore is free of the things that thought has created. And that quality of intelligence, which is supreme and excellent in its essence, can operate, you follow? Therefore there is security in that - not in this. I wonder if you are getting all this? Then you can live in this world with things, or with nothing, you understand? So that is immortal, you understand? That intelligence which is neither yours, nor mine, which does not belong to any church, to any group, that is the highest form and therefore in that there is complete and total security. Mind cannot create that intelligence. It takes place when you see the truth of the obvious, when you see the false as the false. Then the mind is no longer caught in the network of thought, and that intelligence can operate in our daily life because there is permanency. Right - got it? Do you want to ask any questions? Q: Have you achieved the state of freedom? If you are free then I might have a chance. K: The gentleman asks, have you, the speaker, achieved or come upon that state. If you have, then I also have a chance. Sirs, as I have said from the beginning, the speaker would not talk about this thing unless he has it, he is involved in it. But that is not important, whether he has it, or does not have it. But what is important is, have you? You understand. If you say, you have got it, and therefore there is a chance for me, then you are depending on him. Right? Then he becomes your beastly little guru: then you will become the follower, and followers always destroy truth. You understand? Invariably he corrupts truth, and therefore truth does not exist any more. But if you - you as a human being - have understood this, understood in the sense, act, then it is yours, and nobody can take it away. Then you do not have to compare, and when you say, I have also a chance, then you are really comparing. When you compare you are competitive, you are measuring, thought is operating, not your intelligence operating. Therefore sirs, don't look to another: be your own light. Yes, sir? Q: You talk about unconditioning oneself immediately, without time. And I don't have that experience. I have unconditioned myself, but it takes time. K: You say, you must uncondition yourself, and you also say that it does not need time, but I find, the questioner says, that I can perhaps uncondition myself, but it takes time. Sir, I have explained what is time. Just listen to it. First of all, look, we are conditioned. Wherever you live, the Communist world, the Socialist world, Capitalist world, Catholic world, the Hindu world, you are conditioned, from childhood - by the culture in which you live, the parents themselves are conditioned, they condition you, the schools, the colleges, the whole structure conditions you. And being conditioned, invariably you live in a very small field, and that very conditioning divides and therefore there is conflict: wherever there is a division, there must be conflict, Jew, Arab, and so on and so on. Greek and the Turk, including the latest. So then you are conditioned. And does it take time for the mind to free itself from its conditioning? Right? That is the question. Right? Now we said, what is time? Time is measurement. Time is movement, the movement from being conditioned, to non-conditioning; the movement from there to there. Right? Time is thought, of course, because thought has created this conditioning and thought also is creating the unconditioned state, which it wants to achieve, of course. So it is moving, from conditioning, the conditioned mind, to a non-conditioned mind. That movement has a distance from there to there. And to cover that distance, you need time. Right? But see what thought has done: created the conditioning, and it has created the non-conditioned state, which is a form of another conditioning, because it is a product of thought: it is moving from the known to the known. Right? Therefore it is a movement in time. Now is it possible to look at that conditioning without this movement? You follow? Give it a little bit of your thought, your attention. I am conditioned, born in India, and so on and so on. And I see that it will be good to have an unconditioned mind, because there is freedom, there is a sense of wholeness, and in that there is no conflict - I see that. So I would like to get there: I would like to have that mind which is really unconditioned. And so I need time for that. This is the tradition, isn't it? This is the accepted tradition that you must have time. Right? Tradition also means, as I have pointed out, betrayal. Betrayal of the fact that you have done this: moved from wanting to uncondition - you follow? That is what you have done. And you are betraying the fact that your mind is conditioned. So can you look at that conditioning without the movement of time. You follow sir? Without wanting to uncondition that. The desire to uncondition is the movement of time to that state when the mind is not conditioned. You know nothing about an unconditioned mind - right? But you have invented an unconditioned mind. So can you look at your conditioning without the movement of its opposite? To look: can I look at my greed, envy, at my lying, my vanity, without its opposite? Is there an opposite? Obviously not. So when the mind moves towards the opposite, it is betraying the fact of 'what is', therefore it is caught in the movement of time, therefore there is no answer out of it. You follow? Therefore I have only one thing left. Can the mind observe the fact - the lie, the greed, the vanity, the neuroticism and so on and so on - just look? Now, to look you must give your whole attention - not casually play with it. Give your complete attention. There is no attention when there is the opposite. When you see the falseness of the opposite, then you have this complete attention with which to look. Then you will see, sir, attention burns away all conditioning. Q: I found that too with everything but fear. Some fear has gone away but others remain. K: Do you want to discuss fear now? Can we do it the day after tomorrow - on Sunday - part of it. I think we had better stop. We will go into this question of fear because that is really quite important, and perhaps in talking about it, or going into it, we will also go into the question of what is meditation. Meditation is something - I won't go into it now. You see what we did this morning is a form of meditation, you understand? SAANEN 7TH PUBLIC TALK 28TH JULY 1974 This is the last talk or whatever you call it, and we will have discussions on the 1st, which will be Wednesday. We have been, for the last two weeks that we have met here, talking about human problems. And our chief concern and commitment, if we have been at all serious here, has been the transformation, the radical change of the human mind - the mind which includes the brain, the heart, and the whole organism as a whole, that has created this world around us, the world of corruption, violence, brutality, vanity and all the structure which has, and does, bring about war. We have been concerned with the change of the content of consciousness, because the content makes consciousness. Unless that radical revolutionary, psychological change comes about, do what we will outwardly, certain parts of it are necessary, there will be no end to conflict, no end to suffering, and all the violence that is going on throughout the world. This is what we have been talking about for the last fortnight. And to go further into the matter. this change cannot possibly be brought about without knowing oneself, which is self-knowledge -not the higher self, not the knowledge of some supreme consciousness, which is still within the field of consciousness, which is still thought. Unless one understands oneself, the self of every day, what it thinks, what it does, its devotions, its deceptions, its ambitions, all its self centred activities, identified with something noble or ignoble, or the state or some ideal, it is still within the field of the self, the 'me'. And we have been considering whether that narrowing field of which one is so little aware, the field in which there is the unconscious as well as the conscious, which is all concerned with the individual ego, the individual ambitions and reactions, and mindlessness, which is essentially a part of the whole, part of the community, part of the culture in which it lives, part of that conditioning, whether it is the Christian conditioning or the Hindu, the Moslem, the Buddhist, the Jewish and so on, unless we understand that radically, that is the knowing of oneself, its reactions, how it behaves, its pursuits and so on, the content of consciousness cannot possibly be transformed. That is what we have stated, and I think that is fairly clear for those who are serious, who want to go into it very deeply. And when one goes into this problem, into this issue, there are two fundamental things, as we said the other day when we stopped when a gentleman asked could we go into the question of fear. Thought is the measure of fear. And when we are going to go into this question of fear, though it will be a verbal description, description through words of the fact of fear, the description, the word is not the thing, nor the described. I think that too is clear. Unless you share in it, unless you partake in the understanding of that fear, mere description will have no value whatsoever. And we are using the word 'understand' not intellectual, or emotional or a passing thing, but an understanding that comes with action, and therefore it is a complete understanding, and not a partial understanding. So in understanding oneself, one's consciousness and its content, which makes up consciousness, there is no consciousness without the content, in that content there are these two principle factors, pleasure and fear. They cannot be separated. Where there is the pursuit and the insistence and the demand for pleasure, there must be in its wake, fear. And in understanding, or going into, or investigating this question of fear one must also not disregard the fact of pleasure. We said just now that thought is the measure of fear. We went into the question of thought the other day, in fact many times. We said thought is the response of memory. Memory is experience, knowledge, stored up in the brain cells and tissues, therefore thought is matter. And when the whole world is constructed, its very nature and substance and activity is based on thought, one has to find out whether thought has bred fear? You follow the question? Not how to be free of fear, that will inevitably come about when we understand the structure and the nature, and the activity, the function of thought. I hope we are all sharing this together, that you are not merely listening to a description of fear, or to a verbal statement, but to the actual reality, which each one has, which is fear, and the insistent, continuous conscious or unconscious pursuit of pleasure. Right? If one observes in the structure of consciousness, one sees what an extraordinarily important part is played by thought. Fear is related to thought. Right? There are various forms of fear. I cannot go into all the details of it this morning because it would take too long, because I want also to talk over with you the whole question of meditation. So we must go through it fairly rapidly in not too many details, but grasp the whole significance of fear, conscious as well as unconscious. As we said, when one observes this whole process of thought, which has created the world with all its religions, with all its gods, with its saviours, Christ, the Buddhas, Krishnas and all of them, essentially based on thought. Therefore thought is material and a materialistic world in which we live, as long as we function there and remain there, fear must continue. Right? Because fear is the outcome or the cause of loneliness, of deprivation, both physical and psychological - attachment to property, to people, ideas, concepts, nationalities, families - as long as there is this manoeuvrability of thought, functioning within the material world, and it has to function in that world, fear must remain, because what else have I or you if we live in that world. You understand? There I must seek security, as you must seek security, physical or psychological. And we went into that question the other day again, which is, as long as the mind seeks material security, as long as the mind psychologically asserts a permanency, there must be fear. Right? Please this is simple enough. That is, sir, the brain can only function effectively, objectively, rationally, if it has got complete security. That is obvious. When it has no security it finds security in beliefs, in gods, in symbols, in ideologies, which become neurotic action; nationalities and their activity is essentially a neurotic action. As long as I call myself a nationalist of a particular country, it is a neurotic behaviour, because that brings about conflict, separation, division between people. And that is one of the causes of fear. Right? So that means, when you realize that, and are aware of its whole nature, are you still a nationalist? Do you still think in terms of a country, of a people or of an idea, of a particular race, or of an ideology, and so on? If you do, there must be continuance of fear. That is fairly clear. And the mind also, because it lives totally in the material world - we have described what is materialism: materialism is opinion, a concern, nothing matters but matter, nothing exists but matter, matter, which is manoeuvrable, movement, consciousness and will. All that is materialism. And thought is matter, and we live in that area. Please see that. See the reality of it, not my description of it. Unless you fundamentally grasp this, fear will go on, because there, there is nothing else but the demand for security, permanency. And where there is a demand for this, there must essentially be fear. Right? And there are the various forms of fear concealed, hidden, in the very recesses of one's own consciousness. Right? Hidden. These fears are racial, traditional, collective and the fears of the famine -and so on: you know, the whole tradition which is essentially based on thought. And tradition implies also as we said the other day, not only handing over from the past to the present, but also it means betrayal. So that traditionalists are the betrayers, are the treacherous people, whether in the religious field, or in the political field, or in a scientific field. The speaker is not being dogmatic. The speaker feels the responsibility, the responsibility to answer -responsibility means to answer - answer to the whole of human beings, not to your particular little self. Because your little self is the rest of the world, so you are the world, and the speaker feels utterly, totally responsible for the world, for that. And therefore he speaks rather passionately, which is not put on for your amusement, or for your emotional reactions: I am not interested in that, that is neither here nor there. So there are these hidden responses. Right? These hidden fears and the extraordinary subtle forms of pleasure. Now can all that be exposed, without analysis. We explained also the futility of analysis, because the analyser and the analysed are the same. And in the process of analysis, every analysis must be totally complete. And if there is any disproportionate, inaccurate analysis, that inaccuracy is taken over to the next analysis. So altogether analysis is paralysis, and it takes time, and you can go on analysing for the rest of your life, and die analysing yourself, if you are still conscious. So what is a mind to do when it realizes the absurdity, the falseness of analysis or introspective examination, what is it to do? You understand? There is fear, both conscious and unconscious - fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of losing a job, fear of what people will say, fear of your own attachments and the loss of attachments, fears of not succeeding, becoming great, and all the rest of it. When you realize all this, and there is no analysis, what is the mind to do? You understand? Is this question clear? If it is clear, we are asking then what is the mind, which has been conditioned by thought - all its culture is based on thought, whether religious, social, economic, environmental, family and all the rest of it, it is essentially the structure of thought - and when the mind realizes the futility of analysis, the futility of time as a means of understanding the content of fear and pleasure, what is it to do? You have understood the problem? Now, to understand what the mind is to do, we must go into the question of meditation. Please follow this. They are related, they are not something extraneous, about which the speaker is talking about. When we use the word meditation, don't take postures. Don't sit suddenly straight. That is one of the things that has been brought over from India. And when we go into this question of meditation, please look at it as though you have never heard the word, or the meaning of that word, or anything about it. But unfortunately you can't do that because you have a lot of gurus, sannyasis, swamis, and all the rest of that gang, that come to this country or to America, to teach you how to meditate, how to sit properly, how to breathe, how to concentrate and all the rest of it. So what is meditation? Not, how to meditate: that is irrelevant. The moment you understand what is meditation it naturally happens, like breathing. You breathe naturally. So you have to find out what is meditation. Right? Can you learn from another? Can you learn from another what is the real meaning of meditation? Volumes have been written about it, people have meditated according to a particular system - Zen, or the Hindu systems of many, many varieties and models and methods of system - the content of all those imply an end to be achieved through control. Right? Control implies a controller. Please follow this a little bit. And is the controller different from the controlled? You understand the question? They say, the whole meditative groups, and their systems and their philosophies, their breathing - they say, control your thought, because thought wanders about, and the wandering about is a wastage of energy. And therefore thought must be absolutely held, disciplined, subjugated in the pursuit of that thing - enlightenment, God, truth, what you will, Jehovah, the nameless - all that! That implies a controller, obviously. Right? And who is the controller? Is he different in quality, in nature from that which he says he is going to control? You are following all this? Please, this is very important to understand because the speaker wants to point out that one can live completely in daily life without any control, against all the traditions. You understand? Against all your education, your social, moral behaviour. So he says, live a life without absolutely any controls, but that means you have to understand very, very deeply who is the controller and the controlled, and this is part of meditation. Is the controller different from that which he is controlling, which is thought? Some say the controller is different: he is the higher self. Please listen to all this. He is the higher self, he is the part of higher consciousness, he is the essence of understanding, the essence of the past which has accumulated so much knowledge. So they - the whole traditional, and the gurus, and the swamis, the yogis, all of them say - control! Right? They have never asked, who is the controller. They may have asked it, but they have translated it, yes the controller is the supreme self -which is still within the field of thought. However much thought may be elevated, it is still within the area of time and measure, which is thought? Right? Do please see this. See the truth of this, not the verbal acceptance of it, or the intellectual comprehension of it, but the truth of the matter: that all the gods, Christian gods, and the Hindu - all of them are the invention of thought. And thought can project itself into all kinds of states, into all kinds of illusions, and when thought says, there is the higher self, it is still within the field of thought, and therefore the higher self is still matter. I wonder if you get this? So the controller is the controlled. Right? Do see this. Therefore the whole aspect of meditation changes. And what is the meaning of meditation? The meaning of meditation is - objectively, not my personal opinion, judgement, valuation, dogma, experience, none of that - meditation means the emptying of consciousness of its content. Then only can the mind and the brain be absolutely quiet. That absolute - not relative - absolute quietness is necessary to observe, not to experience. Right - please see all this. Most of us want experience - experience which we have had - sensory experiences, sexual, every kind of experience we have had - and thought desires more experiences, an experience of another state, of another dimension. Right? Because we are fed up with this world and its experiences - they are boring, they have a limitation, they are confined, narrow. And we want an experience which is totally different. Right? Now to experience involves recognition. Right? You are following? If I do not recognize, is there an experience? I have had the experience of looking at a mountain: the beauty of it, the shadows, the lovely deep blue of an early morning, the whole sense of something extraordinary, and magnificent. And that experience cannot exist if there is no relationship to the past. Right? So experience implies recognition from the past. Obviously - it is so simple. So the mind wants to experience something supreme; and to recognize it, you must have already had it, therefore it is not the supreme. You understand? It is still the projection of the mind, of thought. So meditation in which there is no experience. Swallow that! Because in that there is no element of time. Are we meeting each other? As we said, time implies movement and direction. Direction implies will. And can the mind empty itself of time and direction and movement, which is the ending of thought? That is the whole problem. You understand? Are we following each other - or is this still verbal description, and you are just enjoying the speaker's delight in talking about meditation? We are asking what is meditation? We said it is the emptying of the mind of the known. Emptying of the mind of its content as consciousness, with all its accumulation, and whether that is possible. Right? Because we need knowledge to function, to speak any language you need knowledge, to drive a car you need knowledge, to do anything you need knowledge. And what place has knowledge in meditation? Or, it has no place at all? It has no place because if it is merely a continuation of the past, it is still the movement of time, the movement of the past, and so on. Have you understood? So can the mind empty itself of the past, and come upon that area of the mind which is not touched by thought? You have understood the problem - my question? You see, we have only operated so far within the area of thought as knowledge. Right? Is there any other part, any other area of the mind, which includes the brain, which is not touched by human struggle, pain, anxiety, fear - all the violence, all the things that man has made through thought? Right? And the discovery of that area is meditation. That implies, can thought come to an end but yet for thought to operate when necessary, in the field of knowledge? You understand my question? Please understand this question - pay a little attention, you may be tired but you must give a little attention to it. We need knowledge, otherwise you cannot function, you can't go home, you wouldn't be able to speak, you wouldn't be able to write, and so on. Knowledge is necessary to function, and that functioning becomes neurotic, out of function status becomes all important, which is the entering of thought as the 'me', which is status. Right? So knowledge is necessary. And meditation is to discover, or come upon, or to observe an area in which there is no movement of thought, and can the two live together harmoniously, daily, in action? That is the problem, not breathing, you understand, not sitting straight, not repeating mantras, you know, slogans, paying a hundred dollars, or whatever you pay in order to learn some ugly little word, and repeat that, and you think you are in heaven, which is called transcendental nonsense! And that is the whole problem of yoga, practising yoga, standing on your head and proficiency in yoga, and all the rest of it. It must originally have had a totally different meaning. The word yoga means 'to join', to join the higher and the lower. You follow? That was what we have, but it must have quite a different meaning, because who is it that has divided the two, and who is it that joins them together? You follow? It is still thought. Right? So yoga exercises are excellent. One must do it. I do it - the speaker does it every day, for an hour or more, but that is merely physical exercise of a different kind, to keep the body healthy, breathing and so on. But through that, you can never come upon the other. Never! Because if you give to that all importance, then you are not giving importance to the understanding of yourself - which is to be watchful, to be aware, to give attention to what you are doing every day of your life: how you speak, what you say, what you think, how you behave, whether you are attached, whether you are frightened, whether you are pursuing pleasure, and so on. To be aware of this whole movement of thought. If you are, and if you are really serious about it, then you will have established right relationship, obviously. You understand? You know relationship becomes extraordinarily important when all things about you become chaotic. When the world is going to pieces as it is, relationship becomes extraordinarily important. There you seek security, you want to hold on to that one thing that can possibly give you a complete sense of unity, and all the rest of it. Right? So unless there is this establishment between you and another of total relationship, that means a whole relationship, not between you and me, but human relationship with the whole of the world, that is the basis: from there you can go on to behaviour -how you behave. If your behaviour has a motive, then it is not behaviour. If your behaviour is based on pleasure or on reward, it is not behaviour. It is merely the pursuit of pleasure or fear - not the pursuit of fear - fear arises. So relationship, behaviour, and order - these are absolutely essential if you want to go into the question of meditation. If you have not laid this foundation, then you can do what you like - stand on your head, breathe in for the next ten thousand years and repeat words, words - there will be no meditation. You can even go to India if you have the money. I do not know why you go to India -you will find no enlightenment there. Enlightenment is where you are. And where you are, you have to understand yourself. Having established that, laid the foundation there, order - not mechanical order, because order is virtue, from moment to moment, it is not following a pattern, it is not the order for the establishment, it is not the order or the virtue of society, which is immoral. So order, behaviour and relationship. Then you can go into the question of finding out what is meditation. Meditation implies a quality of mind that is absolutely silent, not made silent, not a contrived act, not brought about through will, but a silence that comes in naturally when you have established order, relationship and behaviour. And silence is necessary, because otherwise you can't see. Right? Please see this. If my mind is chattering, as most minds are, in that chatter there may be a period of silence - between two chatterings there might be a period of silence, but that is not silence: silence is not the absence of noise: silence is not the absence of conflict: silence comes only when the content of your consciousness has been completely understood and gone beyond; which means the observer and the observed are one. And when there is no controller - please listen to this. When there is no controller it doesn't mean that you live a life of undiscipline, but when there is no observer, no controller, action then is instantaneous, which brings a great deal of energy. Right? So meditation means not only the emptying of consciousness of its content, and that happens only when you observe your consciousness and its content without the observer - please see this. Right? Can you look at something, whatever it is, your wife, your husband, your girl, your boy, or the mountain, without the observer. The observer is the past. And as long as there is the observer, he will inevitably translate everything he observes in terms of the past, and therefore he is the maker of time. And he divides the observed, and the observer. And therefore in that there is conflict. When there is an observation without the observer, there is no conflict, there is no past, only the fact, and you have the energy to go beyond it. Do it and you will find out! So meditation implies a gathering of all energy, because you have established order, relationship, behaviour, therefore you are not dissipating energy in that field, and therefore you have energy. And that energy is necessary to look without the observer. Right? So that you have the energy to go beyond. And with that energy, which has not been dissipated, the mind sees there is an area which is not touched by thought. But all this requires tremendous attention and energy and discipline. You understand? It is not just a plaything for some immature, idiotic people. It requires tremendous discipline. Now discipline means - the word in the dictionary means to learn. Do you understand? Not the absurd thing that we have made of it - that we must control, we must subjugate, we must imitate, conform. Discipline means to learn. From the word discipline, comes disciple. Disciple who is one who is willing to learn from the master. Learn. Here there is neither a disciple nor a master, but only the act of learning, all the time. Right? And that requires a great deal of attention, a great deal of energy, so that you are watching, you create no illusions. You understand? Because it is easy to create illusions. Illusions exist only when you are pursuing, demanding, wanting an experience. Desire creates illusion: wish creates illusion. You know all this implies a mind that is very, very serious, a heart that is of love, that has never been hurt. You understand? We human beings from childhood are hurt; our parents hurt us, our friends hurt us, and in the business world we are hurt. We are hurt in every direction, and when we are hurt we cannot possibly love. Right? So is it possible for a mind that has been hurt, to be free of all those hurts, which is part of the consciousness? And you will find, when you look at it, that it is utterly and irrevocably possible to empty all hurts, and therefore to love, to have compassion. To have compassion means to have passion for all things, not just between two people, for all human beings, for all things of the earth, the animals, the trees, everything the earth contains. When you have such compassion you will not despoil the earth as we are doing now, and we will have no wars. You understand all this? It is up to you, gentlemen and ladies. So, a mind that is serious, totally dedicated, concerned, it is only to such a mind meditation means something extraordinary, something so immense, because in that meditation you discover -mind discovers space. You know what space is? This tent contains space. Right? There is this tent, and space in held within this tent. And there is space outside the tent. Right? And thought creates the space round itself. Have you noticed it? Thought as the 'me' creates the narrow space in which it acts. Which is, it has created through hurt, through all kinds of reasons, a wall within which it lives. Right? There is that narrow space, and the space which thought has created outside of itself, as the tent, and is there a space - not science fiction space - which has no frontiers, which has no boundaries, and therefore, no centre. You understand? I wonder if you understand. This is part of meditation, too. This is meditation, to find out. So to find out what it is, as long as there is a centre, the 'me' or the idea of the 'me', with all its attachments, all the rest of it, that very centre creates a space round itself, and where there is a centre there must be a border. The border may be extended, but it is still within the space which the centre has created. Meditation means to come upon that space in which there is no centre, and therefore no direction, and therefore no time. And all this is meditation. Right? Because without meditation and the coming upon that thing which cannot be experienced, which is not to be put into words, which has no time, which has no continuity, unless there is meditation, life has very little meaning. Do you understand? You may have a lot of money, or no money, you may be attached to your property, to your wife, to your friend and all the rest of it: or you may worship your particular little god which thought has invented - the Jesuses, the Christs, the Buddhas and all that, as long as you live there, there will be suffering, pain, anxiety and violence. And that has no meaning in itself - obviously. So unless you come upon this - not invented, not projected, not brought about through any system, then only, life has an extraordinary sense of beauty and meaning. Q: Sir, may I ask a question? K: Just a minute sir. Take a breather. That lady put up her hand. Yes? Q: In learning to look without an image, when you look outside the image sometimes goes. When you look in, it comes back. K: Can you look at the world outside you, and can you look at the world inside you without the image? Sometimes it happens. I can look at the world without the image - the image being my country, my people, my opinions, my judgements. I can look at the world objectively. Sometimes that happens. And occasionally, rarely I can look at myself without any image. Now can one look at oneself and the world without any image at all, all the time? Is that the question? And why does it come back? You have understood the question? That is, I look at myself and another, through the images I have built about myself and about the other. That is, I have built an image about my wife, and the wife has built one about me. The relationship is between these two images. Obviously. And I look at the world as a nationalist, as a Communist, as a Socialist, as a Catholic, as a Liberal, or a Conservative - those are all images, formulas. Now can I look at the world outside and look at myself, and my wife, children and all the rest of it, without a single image? Now how are these images formed? How do I form an image about my wife? (I'm not married) How do I form an image about my wife? How does that happen? I have lived with her - or she has lived with me - for ten years, or ten days, or one day. During that period of time, lots of things have happened - sexual, insults, nagging, dominating, demanding, hurt - all these are registered in the brain. The brain retains them, for its self protection. Follow this. And builds a wall against hurt. Because my wife or I nag and I instinctively withdraw. So the withdrawal is a form of resistance. That resistance is the image. Which is, I want to protect myself, the idea of myself as another image, the mind wants to protect the image it has created about itself against another image. So I have got two images, you understand? One, that I have created about myself, that I am noble, ignoble, that I am ugly, I am beautiful, I am precious, I am holy, I am not holy, I am so supremely intelligent, I am such an idiot, and so on and so on. And also the image I have created about another. So I have got two images: the one I have about myself, and the one about the other. And the wife has the two images, too. So look what we are doing: we have got dozens of images, not only two. And we have got images about the world - what America should do, America should not do, America is so rich, Russia is so corrupt. You follow? Images, images, formulas. Wait, I haven't finished yet. Would you mind listening to this question, and not be carried away by your own question. (Voice outside) The mother is calling the baby - it begins the image! So we have got these images. This is part of our conditioning. Right? Is the questioner listening? Then is it possible to be free of these images, not temporarily but completely, wholly? We see why the mind creates images. Right? For its protection and also it is part of our conditioning. Now can the mind be free of images - images which have been in the past and not create future images? Am I aware - are you aware of these images that you have? Actually aware - not because the speaker says, be aware of them and therefore you are aware. Are you aware of these images that you have? Or, have you never even thought about it. If you have gone into this question you will see that these images have been created by others, society, religion, and by your own desire to protect yourself, your own anxiety and so on and so on. We are asking, can the mind be free of all images? It can only be free when the mind gives attention at the moment of action. You understand? At the moment I am saying I am a Hindu - be aware of it. Then you will see there is no formation of image. Right? When I am aware that I am Christian - Christian being worshipper of Christ, the symbol, all the rituals, all the conditioning of two thousand years of propaganda - you know, all that goes on in the name of religion, to shape my mind, the mind of human beings; because that is very profitable for the priests, and so on and so on - now can the mind be aware of that when I look at the symbol? You understand? If at the moment of action I am completely aware, then there is no formation of image or the past image; there is an absolute cessation of images. You try it, you see it is so simple. But you don't do it. So the mind in attention, is a free mind. That freedom is not brought about by thought. Thought can invent freedom. Thought being in prison, says, there is freedom outside. But attention in action, whether in behaviour and so on, in that attention which is the summation of energy there in no formation of symbols or images. Got it? Right. You were going to ask something, sir. Q: It seems to me you are projecting. K: What you say, seems to me, the questioner says, you are projecting. You asked the same question the other day. You don't listen. The speaker has spent an hour talking about non projection, saying that any desire, any will, any sense of worship, to go beyond itself must create its own illusion. And you are asking after an hour, it seems to me that you are projecting. I am sorry, you have to listen all over again, so that is the end of that question. Q: (Inaudible) K: I am afraid it is not a paradox. It is not a contradiction. Sir I don't think you have listened. Forgive me for pointing out. I'm sorry I can't explain it any more. Anybody else? Yes, sir. Q: To enter into the meditative state which you have indicated to us could be to enter into a vacuum. K: The gentleman says, from what you have described about meditation, it appears to me you are entering into a kind of vacuum. You might be entering. Is that so? Q: If I enter into it... K: Sir, it is not you entering, nor I entering, into a vacuum. Sir, are we proceeding or enquiring verbally, intellectually, theoretically, or are we enquiring, living - which is, enquiring means living so as to bring out of this chaos, order in our daily life. Are we doing it? We live in disorder, and by observing that disorder without the observer, there is order. Order is not a vacuum. Order implies no conflict, no division, outwardly or inwardly. This division as the 'me', and not the 'me', is disorder. Now then, to have order, does not mean I am living in a vacuum. On the contrary. It is the most extraordinary, intelligent action to have relationship, not based on image but actual relationship, is not a vacuum. And to behave without a motive is love. And that love is not a vacuum. Right? Love becomes a vacuum as an idea, but if you are compassionate you draw the line where you will not kill beyond that. You understand? I have to draw the line - personally I have drawn the line. Let us say I am a vegetarian, I have never killed an animal, eaten meat and so on. I put on shoes, leather, say I have drawn the line. It means you are killing vegetables. Don't eat cabbage. Then you might just as well die. And that may be good also. So what we are talking about is not creating a vacuum. On the contrary, it is bringing about supreme, excellent intelligence. Intelligence is not a vacuum. Having established that, then meditation is not a vacuum. It is the furthering of that intelligence at its highest level. That's enough of that. Q: Thank you very much indeed, sir. K: Not at all sir. Q: (Long question - repeated several times) K: Yes. I understand. Are there schools for wisdom. There are schools for knowledge, of course. Can wisdom be learnt? Is that it sir? Q: No. K: Then what is the question? Q: Higher knowledge. K: Can one learn without sectarianism, without schools, higher knowledge? Is that it? Are there schools for higher knowledge without sectarianism? It is a lovely question! Are there schools for higher knowledge without sectarianism and authority? Right? You have answered the question, haven't you? Without sectarianism and authority can there be a school of your kind, which teaches higher knowledge? Who will teach you higher knowledge? Is the speaker teaching you higher knowledge? Go on sir. All the speaker is saying is, watch yourself. Be aware of all you are doing. Learn from yourself, because yourself is the world. Yourself is the highest goal. In that school there is no teacher nor disciple: there is only learning about yourself, and when, in the process of learning about yourself, you have established order and so on, then you can move to higher levels of intelligence. Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 - Alternative Versions - Chapter 4 IN INDIA 1974-75 CHAPTER 1 MADRAS 1ST PUBLIC TALK 7TH DECEMBER 1974 I wonder why you come to listen to me. Is it out of curiosity or do you want to find out what the speaker has to say? If you want to find out what he has to say, you have to listen. To listen is an art. The word `art' means to put everything in its right place. That is the real meaning of the word `art'. And if you are going to listen this evening to a discourse, you have to listen, not with your own opinions, your prejudices or your conclusions and ideas but rather listen, neither agreeing nor denying nor disagreeing. To listen requires a certain form of communication between the speaker and yourselves. Communication implies not only verbal exchange but also to think together, and share together the thing that lies behind the words, to read between the lines, to have an insight. So, listening is not only an art, but a responsibility. And if you are at all serious, faced with a declining, degenerating world, specially in this country, then a quality of mind that demands to investigate, to explore, to examine, is required. We have not only personal problems but also peripheral issues like inflation, overpopulation, economic chaos and so on. A serious mind demands and must find an answer to why there is this decline. There is a sense of total unrelatedness to world events; each one is concerned with his own problem, with his own survival, with his own security, with his own personal salvation. All this indicates a mind, a heart that is becoming more and more incapable of dealing with the problem as a whole. We have to find an answer because there is so much suffering, incalculable misery, a despair of which one may not be aware or conscious, but it is there. We are not exaggerating, not being pessimistic, but merely stating what is going on. Technologically there is extraordinary improvement but human beings are not keeping up with that rapid growth in technology. Seeing all this - wars, corruption, a social structure that is totally immoral, division, conflict, suffering and the brutal violence that is spreading throughout the world - if one is earnestly wanting to enquire into it, then that enquiry demands on your part an observation which is not judged, which is not prejudiced, which is not parochial, which is not Hindu or any other particular race or caste. To investigate, there must be freedom; otherwise you cannot investigate. That is obvious. If you want to find out something, your mind must be free to enquire, must not be caught in its own prejudices, in its own beliefs and conclusions. That is the first requirement of any enquiry, any examination, and I hope we can do this together. What is the reason of this decay? We are not seeking peripheral reasons, not reasons which are superficial, which any economist or socialist or philosopher invents or describes. What has happened to the mind? This is a question one asks after fifty years of coming to this country every winter and seeing the decline every year. Please, do not agree or disagree, but examine why this has happened. Do you enquire of some philosophical association or do you enquire through an idealistic formula or do you enquire what you are, what you have become? That is where the enquiry has to begin; otherwise it has no value; otherwise it becomes merely an amusing entertainment, an enquiry without any result. So, to enquire, you have to enquire within yourself why human beings, living in this country, have allowed themselves to be what they are, what they have become. You have become non-religious, though you may do puja three times a day, go to temples, follow innumerable gurus read the Gita, the Upanishads. These are extraneous events; what other people have said and by reading those books, you think you are religious, by going to some guru and worshipping him, by following his system of meditation, you think you are becoming extraordinarily religious; or by going to somebody who does some miracle, you think you have found religion. So, if you observe yourselves very seriously, you have to ask yourselves whether you are really religious. The word `Religion' means, according to the dictionary, gathering of your energy, intellectual, physical, psychological - all your energy so that it is totally aware of all its activities. It is a holistic activity concerned with the whole, not segmented. That is what religion means. Are you so religious? Thought plays an extraordinary part in our lives; it has done extraordinary things; it has created the whole scientific field of knowledge, the whole world of medicine and so on. Thought also has created wars, divided people. Thought has separated religions; thought has created the Gods which you worship, the saviours, the gurus, your Rama, Sita, the masters - that whole field is the projection of thought. So, you have created your Gods whom you worship. Are you observing all this? That thought, your daily thought, has accumulated tremendous knowledge in one field and that knowledge is operating in the technological world, and that thought as knowledge is destroying human beings. I will explain as we go along. Have you also observed yourselves that you are functioning, thinking, acting, according to knowledge? Knowledge means experience, accumulated memory, and you are acting, functioning according to that memory which has become mechanical. And as thought is fragmentary - thought is never whole - all action becomes fragmentary. So knowledge in one field, in one area, is absolutely necessary, but if the mind merely functions from knowledge as we all do, then it becomes mechanical and the decline begins. Knowledge to which you give such tremendous importance is always in the past and that past which is knowledge is tradition and when you are acting, living in that area, as you do, then the mind must become mechanical. That is, memory is experience and knowledge, stored up in the brain, and that knowledge is reacting all the time. You can observe it in yourself. We say that one of the basic reasons for the decline of the people in this country is that they are living in an area of mechanical knowledge and therefore the mind must decline. The mind must degenerate when you are living according to the knowledge of others. Discover it for yourself, the truth of it, the fact of it that you are living on knowledge, on tradition, which is a continuity of knowledge. A civilization, a culture, a people that live merely on knowledge must inevitably decline. And to find out a way of living which is non-mechanical, which is not based on knowledge, is regeneration. That is, in one area, knowledge is essential; otherwise you can't go home, you can't understand English, you can't recognise your wife, your husband. Knowledge in that area is necessary. But when the mind lives, merely nourished by memory, by knowledge of others, then the inevitable decline takes place. So, is it possible to live a life where the area of knowledge is sustained and to act in relationship without continuity of knowledge from day to day? You understand my question? You see I am using the word, `knowledge' in the sense of accumulated experience in human relationship which becomes memory stored up in the brain and according to that memory, I respond. This is absolutely necessary in the field of technology, but in the field of relationship between human beings, it becomes a des- tructive and a mechanical thing which prevents what one calls love. Have you ever gone into the question of what love is? Have you gone into it to find out that extraordinary thing which you call love, compassion? Is compassion knowledge? Is compassion the cultivation of thought? Is love a mere remembrance of certain incidents, knowledge? One asks is there love in this country -please I am not saying it does or doesn't exist in Europe, America or Russia - I am asking you non-comparatively. Have you reduced love to sex, pleasure or has it become duty, responsibility, a thing which is the outcome of a comfortable life or something which you call devotion? You understand all my questions? Because, it may be that this factor is responsible for the decline, for degeneration, for the fact that there is no love in your heart and that you are living entirely within the field of knowledge. Let us go into it a little more. You see when one observes what is going on in the world - the political divisions, the wars, the Arabs and the Jews and the Russians and the Chinese and the Americans, the constant strain, struggle and brutality, the threat of war, starvation, then you have to take the whole thing, not just one fragment. When you look at all this non-personally, objectively, the chaos, the immense suffering, not only the personal but the collective suffering of man, what is your answer to this? What do you say? Do you retreat into some philosophical jargon and slogan? If you are at all serious, you have to find this out: Whether human beings, as you and I, whether we can bring about a total revolution in ourselves psychologically because when you change fundamentally, you are affecting the consciousness of the world. Do you understand this? Lenin, whether you agree with him or not, has affected the consciousness of the world. Stalin has, Hitler has and the priests have affected the consciousness of the world by their belief, by their saviours and all the rest of it. Every human being, when there is a fundamental change in himself, affects the consciousness of the world - because you are the world and the world is you. You are India, geographically as well as psychologically, and when you change, not at the superficial level, but fundamentally, radically, because you are the world, because the world is you, you affect human consciousness. That is a fact, isn't it? Haven't the inventors of Rama and Krishna affected your consciousness? Of course all that has affected your consciousness, and if you as a human being transform yourself, you affect the consciousness of the rest of the world; it seems so obvious. And can knowledge transform man? You have knowledge about so many things, you have read so much; you have philosophies galore. Philosophy means the love of truth in daily life, not theories, not speculative concepts; it is the love of truth in daily life which means tremendous honesty and the love of being honest. Can the human mind, your mind, transform itself through knowledge or has knowledge no place in the regeneration of man? Knowledge is mechanical. You can add and take away from knowledge and if you live in that area - memory, experience, knowledge - the mind must inevitably become mechanical. In your relationship, in daily relationship between man and woman, don't you have an image of her and she an image of you? The image is knowledge and you live in that relationship based on knowledge and therefore there is no freedom. I am asking you: What place has knowledge in the transformation of man and society? We are saying knowledge has no place because knowledge is mechanical. Then what is the element, what is the core, the root which is not the product of thought and therefore a factor which is not knowledge? Look, Sir, I want to transform myself because I see what I am - miserable, confused, ugly, brutal, avaricious, hateful, jealous, ambitious, deceitful. I see all that. This contradiction, this conflict, this struggle from the moment I am born till I die I see; and I say to myself how can I change all this? That requires not sadness, not laziness, but I must find out what I am to do. Put yourself in that position and ask yourself seriously what you are to do. The knowledge that you have acquired either through self-knowing, or the knowledge that you have acquired from others, the knowledge that you have gained through experience, whether this knowledge is going to transform you or a different energy, a different factor is necessary to bring about a transformation? Can your knowledge that you have acquired, transform your envy? Take that one factor - can you totally be free of it? That is, can your knowledge of what it is to be envious and the results of envy and the cause of envy, transform your envy? If you are serious you want to find out how to end envy totally, so that it never comes back again. Can you end that envy through the information you have about it? You understand my question? What will end it? Determination? Now, when you determine to end envy, there is conflict, isn't there? You may suppress it, you may overcome it, you may escape from it, but it is still there. Knowledge will not open the door so that you are free of envy. Then the problem is what will. Please ask yourself because envy is jealousy, envy is hatred in a different form and a world that lives on hate, a human being who is nourished on hate, cannot bring about a different world, a different culture, a different existence. So it is absolutely necessary to end envy. Now, how is this done? How do you look at envy? Please watch yourself. You know you are envious, don't you, and how do you observe that envy? How do you see it, how do you know it ? When you say I am envious, is the you who says `I am envious' different from envy? Is the feeling of envy different from the observer of that feeling? If the observer of that feeling is different from the feeling, then there is a division, therefore there is a conflict. So wherever there is a division - the Arabs, the Jews, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Buddhist and the non-Buddhist, Christian - wherever there is a division, politically, inwardly, psychologically, there must be conflict. That is a law. That is a truth. So when you observe envy, is the observer different from the observed? Or are they both the same, the observer is observed? When the observer is the observed, conflict ceases. And what happens? When conflict ceases between the observer and the observed, because the observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought, the experiencer is the experienced, the observer is envy, there is no division and therefore there is no conflict. Therefore what has taken place? Do you understand my question? We live in conflict, we are nourished in conflict and the conflict comes about when there is division. We took the feeling of envy as an example, went into the effect and the cause of that envy, the effect in oneself, the bitterness, the anger, the jealousy, the venom of envy, and we see that we never resolve envy that way. Then we ask: is the observer different from the observed. If he is different, there must be conflict, suppression, rationalization, overcoming it and the battle begins; but the fact is the observer is the observed, the observer is envy itself. When we realize this, what has taken place? What happens to energy when you have not dissipated it in conflict, in suppression, in rationalization, in overcoming? You have all that energy collected, haven't you? And, when you have that energy, complete energy, which is not dissipated, then what takes place? Are you still awaiting the secondhand mind to answer? What actually takes place in you? You understand? Before, you said you are aware that you are envious and you said, "how terrible, I must control it, I must suppress it, one must have envy, otherwise one can't live in this world". You have done all that and now when you realize that the observer is not different from the observed, the observer is envy, then what has happened? Has it disappeared in you? No, you have not done it. That is what is happening in this country, you talk and invent ideas or repeat but you never enquire, find out. If you observe yourself, you find the answer. When you are not dissipating energy through suppression, overcoming and all the rest of it, you have that tremendous energy to deal with the fact. The fact is envy. You are that envy, envy is not separate from you. Your consciousness is its content. You are envy and you say `all right I am envy' and your whole mind is giving all its energy to this question of envy. So, what takes place? I will show it to you. When the observer is the observed, that is, the envy is the observer, the `me' who says I am envy, that me is envy. That is a fact. Not knowing what to do, we invent an outside agency, God, which will resolve this; we think an analyst will resolve this, some body else will do all the tricks for us and that means you are accepting authority. In spiritual matters, there is no authority including your gurus, your Bhagavat Gita, your Upanishads. That makes you second hand human beings, which you are. Now what takes place? I feel envious, that is a fact. How do I know that it is envy, because I have had previous memory of that feeling. So instinctively the previous experience recognises envy and that recognition strengthens envy. Do you understand what I am saying? That is, your previous knowledge, your knowledge of envy recognises the present envy; therefore you say to yourself I know all about it and then accept it. Do you see what the mind has done? When it recognises that envy, it is memory that is operating, which is knowledge and therefore, it cannot deal with the present feeling with the past memory. It only strengthens that feeling. So the problem then is, can the mind, can that feeling be observed without any recognition, which means not bringing your previous knowledge into it? Previous knowledge is the observer and so you create a division. Now when there is no division, when you see all this, you have abundance of energy; then that fact of envy can be dealt with instantly. It is gone. It is only the lazy, inattentive mind that knows the cause, the effect and goes on. But the attentive mind, the mind that sees the whole nature and the structure of envy and therefore has gathered that energy can deal with the fact; the fact being the observer is the observed, the observer is envy. Therefore there is no movement at all. And when you realize this, then the question arises: Is there a way of living in your daily life without a single conflict? Not as an idea, not as a slogan, not as something you repeat and so on, but find out for yourself a way of living in which there isn't a shadow of strife. In the realization that the observer is the observed - that is the `me' that says I am envy, that `me' is envy itself - there is no movement away from it because you can't move away from it; you are `it'. Therefore, that energy dissipates the fact of envy. Have an insight into this, do not accept my explanation of this. So, is conflict part of affection, part of love? We have to find an answer to this. You as a human being, individually and collectively, have to find an answer how to live a life without a single conflict. You will find it when you understand this whole problem of the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experienced because the experiencer is the experienced. So, the mind then finds that there is no question of experience. A mind that lives in the field of psychological knowledge, the know- ledge of experience, either your own or of another, the accumulated tradition or the tradition of a day, such a mind living in a field of its own particular knowledge, brings about its own decay. This is what is happening throughout the world and specially in this country because you have never gone into yourself and said "look, I have to find an answer to these problems not through books, not through teachers. "This requires energy. You have an abundance of energy when you want to do something; you have plenty of energy to earn money, to go to office day after day. Now, if you apply that same energy with the same intensity to go into yourself and find out how to live a life without a single shadow of conflict, then you will affect the whole consciousness of the world. IN INDIA 1974-75 CHAPTER 2 MADRAS 2ND PUBLIC TALK 8TH DECEMBER 1974 We were talking yesterday about the art of listening. The word `art' means to put everything in its right place. And to listen, there must be no comparison. You can't compare what is being said with what you already know or judge or evaluate; neither agreeing nor disagreeing, resisting or accepting, but actually listen to those crows, and to the wind among the leaves. There is also an art of seeing, seeing not only what is happening about one outwardly -the confusion, the misery, the starvation, the dirt and the beauty of a lovely tree in the sun set, the branch and the swaying leaves - the ways of the politicians, the affairs of businessmen, the crookedness of human thought but also to see inwardly, which is much more difficult. It needs a great awareness, attention to see exactly what is going on within oneself, within one's mind - the motives, the contradictions, the cunningness of thought, the movement of desire, the ambition, the greed, the envy, the corruption, the various activities of the mind - hidden and obvious. To observe all that becomes quite imperative in times like these when we are bombarded all around. We are bombarded by newspapers, politicians, priests, by philosophers; and to be aware and to observe our reactions - mechanical, innate, cultivated, educated reactions and so on - one must have no resistance, no shade of distraction but merely watch without any movement of thought, exactly `what is'. That is quite an art and if you can watch exactly, without any movement, what is taking place within one, then you will find the content of your consciousness. Consciousness is capacity - intellectual, emotional, physical - with all its sensory demands. One becomes aware of the content of one's whole being. I do not know if you have ever tried, not be pained by what one sees, discouraged or depressed, but to look at exactly what is going on, so that all peripheral movements come to an end and there is immobility of all movement, there is cessation of all movement, but only seeing actually what is. Please experiment with what we are saying as we are exploring. The content of our consciousness is consciousness; without the content there is no consciousness. I am going to go into it, because it is important to understand the nature of fear and pleasure and what love is. The content, if you have observed, if you are self-critically aware, is that which thought has put into consciousness. The Gods, the traditions, the cultural heritage, the immediate impressions, the attachments, the sense of great loneliness, the sense of frustration, the drive of ambition, the innumerable hurts, the wounds that one has received from childhood, the various compulsive desires, sexual lusts, the furniture that one clings to, the furniture which is knowledge, the beliefs, the dogmas, the rituals, all the things that man has sought and is seeking are the contents which make up our consciousness. That is simple, that is clear, that is obvious. Rama and Krishna, Jesus and various other religious propaganda have been thrown at us, century after century and through it all has run pleasure and fear, the two principal mainstreams - the pursuit of pleasure and in its wake the ebb and flow of fear. So, that is the content of our consciousness. Now is one aware of it? Is one so aware that there is a certain quality of sensitivity not only biologically, physically but a much deeper sensitivity of the psyche, the inward tenor that receives, that sees, that vibrates to something that is going on? Are you aware of this, of your content, not only at the conscious level, but also at the deeper levels, deeper layers? If one is conscious, aware of the movements of thought, of desire, of pleasure, of the inevitable movement of fear at one level, one knows that the superficial content of our consciousness is the education which one has received from childhood - the hurts, the agonies, the anxieties, the ache of loneliness and suffering. And is it possible to observe it at deeper level, at the very root? Is it possible for a conscious mind to observe the very deep hidden demands, motives, hopes, fears, causes of pain and so on? You may be conscious or aware of your desires at a superficial level as most people do, but to enquire into the deeper hidden consciousness, the hidden contents, to be aware of every intimation and hint that has projected into consciousness, requires a mind that is very sensitive, watchful. Then, there is the whole content of consciousness, the totality, not just the fragmentary - the incidents and accidents, fears and pleasures and hurts. One is totally the whole content and that very content limits consciousness. Do you see this? Look, if I am a Hindu the content of my consciousness, the religious content is what I believe, what I have been told to believe. And that propaganda has been going on for centuries and centuries and it has become tradition and I accept that tradition. That is one of the contents - and that very content, that very belief, that little tradition limits consciousness. The greater the limitation, the greater the prison in which that consciousness is held. In observing the content - the content is "what is" - every other movement ends. There must be a total attention. If I want to see you, to look at you, I must give all my attention to you, not bring in my prejudices, my likes and dislikes, but observe, see clearly. And, when you see this, not see it through description of words, but actually see it in yourself, you find these two dominant streams: of fear, of pleasure. You all have experienced pleasure - sexual, sensual, the pleasure of ambition, of possession, prestige, status, the pleasure of being appreciated, the pleasure of your own attachments, whether it is a house or a belief or a person. And with pleasure, there are the innumerable fears that one has - physical pain, fear of danger, of peril. These two are the principal streams in this consciousness. And without really deeply understanding, without having an insight into pleasure and fear, love becomes extraordinarily superficial, has very little meaning. So if one really wants to find out for oneself, not with conceit, not with a sense of discovery and the pride that comes with it, but to find out for oneself what it means, it is only possible if one understands the nature and structure of pleasure and fear. If one has not fully delved into these two, then love is another glorified form of pleasure or devotion to some ideas, some image created by the mind or by the hand; and that devotion to an external thing is really projected from an inward demand. That devotion then becomes a self-enjoyment, especially in this country where people are so devoted. Whereas life is a total unitary movement, it is not to be broken up. So your devotion is part of the pursuit of pleasure. And is one aware of the movement and the pursuit of pleasure, not resisting it, not denying it, not suppressing it, not rationalizing it, but just be aware of actually "what is", which is pleasure in all its subtle forms? Can you see it as it is in yourself, how your mind is pursuing pleasure endlessly? Then you will ask "what am I do to do with it, it is so instinctive, it is so natural, it is so easy? "And all religions, in the name of God, in the name of service to God ask you to suppress your desire, your hope, to control it. So, one is trained, conditioned, educated not to the understanding of pleasure but to give a greater strength to it by suppressing it or by enjoying it. And can you watch this? Can you observe the actual movement of pleasure - the pleasure of taste, the food that you eat to which you have become so accustomed? Have you noticed how difficult it is to change your particular habit of pleasure to a totally different kind of food? And you are caught, trapped in this and you accept it and carry on day after day. And occasionally you take a vow and do something - fast or shave your head or do something and carry on the next day with your pleasure. You satisfy your superstitions and carry on with the one thing that your mind wants, which is pleasure. We are not saying that it must be suppressed or given full freedom. We are saying: See what is implied in pleasure, see the nature of it, the content of pleasure, have an insight into it, understand it, go into it, be aware of its movement. Then you will find what is enjoyment and what is joy. You see a beautiful sunset and you have joy. At that moment, in seeing the sun set, in taking delight in it, what takes place? The delight of that moment is registered in the brain as memory and that incident of delight which has gone, is now stored up as memory and the pursuit of that delight as memory becomes pleasure. Right? You have followed this? It is the same with your sex, the same with every form of pursuit of this dominating, demanding urgency of pleasure. The other side of the coin is fear - both physical and psychological. Fear is danger, pain, hurt, disease and the fear of its recurring again - the whole biological, physiological responses. Watch your mind how it operates. That is, one has had physical pain, then that is recorded in the brain. Then that very recording stimulates thought and thought says, "I hope I will not have it next week, "and fear is set going. And there are both, as we said, physical fears and psychological fears. One has received hurts from childhood. Haven't you been hurt at school, the teacher compares you with another who is cleverer than you are, and that very comparison is a wound? And that wound is perpetuated through college, through university, through life. One builds a wall around oneself not to be hurt any more, one withdraws and any approach inwardly is the awakening of fear, of being further hurt. Do you know all these things? The speaker has never been hurt and therein lies innocence; that is a different matter. And there are the fears of death, of loneliness, of being loved or having loved, not receiving reciprocation and so on. We live in darkness of this fear, whether you are conscious of it or not. And we are saying, if you look, if you observe that you are the fear and you are the pleasure without the division as `me' as the observer and the observed, then you remain with that reality. Please do tell me if we are communicating with each other. Now, I am going to show you how to look. Please do give your heart and mind to this, not just casually sit down and listen, but give your attention to it. You are hurt, aren't you? Now, can you look at it, without any movement other than direct observation? I have been hurt,and I look at it without wanting to find out the cause of it. The wound is there and to go into the cause of that wound is a distraction to "what is". To rationalize it, to escape from it, to run away, is also a distraction to "what is". Can one then remain with that fact of the wound and look at it? And that is where the art comes in, the art of seeing, observing, to look without the observer. The observer is the past - the observer with all his resistance to that wound, the observer who has separated himself from that wound and is trying to do something about that wound. Can you look without the observer, the `me', which means without time ? Can you just see actually what is going on? Now, there are two factors in this: The wounds that you have received from childhood and the prevention of further hurts. And is it possible not to be wounded at all? You understand? The wounds that I have received, if I have received any, what am I to do with them, I can't forget them; there they are deeply embedded; I may forgive, I may do all kinds of things to cover the wounds, but they are there, what am I to do with them. Don't say "what am I do so that I am never hurt again". Have you put all these questions to yourself or am I putting these questions to you? How will you so completely feel the past wounds that no marks are left in your consciousness, you no longer will receive any hurts? Because the consciousness that is hurt will never know what love is. You may do social work, become a member of the communist, socialist party, go from one guru to another, but as long as you have not understood this deep hurt, love will never come to your heart. That is so obvious. It is absolutely essential to find out for yourself whether that wound can be healed so completely that it leaves no mark. First of all, is it possible? If you say it is possible or it is not possible, you are blocking yourself, What have you done with the hurts that you have received? If one is aware, then you see that you have built a wall around yourself. You know, you have built a wall around yourself, if you are hurt, but you do not build a wall around yourself when you are flattered - but both are wounds. Flattery is a form of wound as is insult. Neither flattery nor an insult should leave a mark. You understand what I am talking about? Can one live a life in which there is no hurt, a life in which every form of flattery leave no mark? Then only will you know what compassion is. Compassion is the regenerating factor in life. That factor brings a new life, however degenerate one is. Compassion means passion for all, for everything. Compassion also includes working together. Now, will you heal the wound which is part of the content of consciousness as attachment to your house, to your wife, to your children? Because you are attached, there is the fear of losing; therefore you cultivate detach- ment which is another form of conflict. All your books say "be detached" but you are really attached to your customs, to your temples, to your mosques, to your books, to your knowledge, to your experiences, to your beliefs, which are all part of your consciousness. And one of the contents of that consciousness is hurt. If you understand that one content completely, you will have understood the whole and you will know instantly how to deal with it. So, first, are you aware of the hurt and are you aware that you are resisting, that you are frightened that hurt might increase and invite more hurts? Are you aware that seeking the cause of that hurt is a waste of time? Isn't it ? So, what has happened? You are not spending your energy in enquiring into the cause of that hurt, you are not building a wall around that hurt in order not to be hurt more; you are no longer trying to cover it up. So you are merely watching, observing, seeing, which means you are giving complete attention to that hurt. When you give your complete attention, then you will see that the hurt is no longer there. Which means the mind that is not attentive gets hurt. It is only the mind that is inattentive that gets hurt. So give your whole attention and that whole attention is not possible when you are resisting, building a wall around that hurt, frightened about being further hurt. These are indications a inattention. And when you give your complete attention, then you will see that there is no hurt, then only you can proceed to find out what love is. Is love pleasure? You understand the meaning of my question? We have said, pleasure invites always fear, and is pleasure love, is pleasure desire, is desire love? Is the remembrance of something pleasurable that has happened yesterday, is that love? We are caught in that circle. Don't agree or disagree. Watch yourself and you will see that we are caught in that area. Every human being is caught in that. The ambitious man driven by his desire, by his pleasure to become something in the political field or in the business field, in whatever field he wants to succeed in, can such a man love? He may talk about it endlessly but he does not know love. You are also in that field, you may nod your head and say I agree with you as some of you are doing, but you haven't left that field, though you verbally agree. That is why you are living on words and therefore degeneracy is setting in your heart and mind because you have lived on words. Knowledge is words. Knowledge is not wisdom. You can't buy wisdom. You can attend any school where they teach you knowledge, but there is no book, there is no school where wisdom can be taught. If there is such a school, scrap it, don't go near it. Wisdom comes only when you understand what love is, the enormous compassion and that compassion can only come when you understand the depth of suffering and when you understand the content of your consciousness which is yourself. The content of that consciousness is yourself and in the understanding of yourself flowers wisdom. Do you want to ask any questions? Questioner: Sir, we live in a society that is particularly hurting human beings. The society that has created this education, created this hierarchical outlook on life, the society that tramples, that destroys, that brings about wars and destruction, a society that has no love, that is immoral, in such a society, we must inevitably get hurt. Krishnamurti: Now, who has created this society? Surely you and I collectively have created this society. Are you an individual or are you the collective? You are not individuals, you are the collective. That is so obvious, isn't it? You all think in one way as Hindus with your superstitions, with your Gitas; the Muslims, the Christians have their superstitions and beliefs. You are all the collective. Individual means an entity who is not fragmented in himself, who is not broken up, who is whole whereas we are the collective, the collective greed, the collective hate, the collective desire, the collective ambition and the collective has created this society and we are responsible for it. To change that society we must change, By your changing, you bring about a transformation in the collective consciousness. But you are not willing to change because it is too difficult and you say it is the fault of society. You find excuses. It is part of your laziness and so you are caught in this and you accept your hurts. I have shown you the way to end your hurts. The ending of your hurt which is the collective hurt affects the consciousness of the collective, which is you. IN INDIA 1974-75 CHAPTER 3 MADRAS 3RD PUBLIC TALK 14TH DECEMBER 1974 We have been talking about the art of listening and the art of seeing. We said the art of listening implies that you participate, share in what is being said. You cannot share in what is being said if your mind, if your thoughts are wandering all over the place or you are comparing what is being said to what you know or translate what is being said to see if it conforms to what is said. That is not the art of listening. And also we talked about the art of seeing, whether it be a tree, a mountain or the flutter of a leaf in the wind, one must observe; otherwise you do not see at all. And also there is another art which is the art of learning. So there is the art of listening, the art of seeing and the art of learning. For most of us, learning implies committing to memory a technology, a language, a method and so on; that is, acquiring knowledge and storing it up in the brain as memory and using that memory skillfully when the occasion demands. The cultivation of memory for most of us becomes tremendously important. Knowledge is always the past and you act according to the past whether it be tradition, a memory or an experience which you have stored up as information, as a linguistic acquisition. Learning has also another meaning. There is another kind of learning which has nothing whatsoever to do with storing of knowledge. The storing of knowledge in action is mechanical. But there is learning when there is a constant movement. That is the art of learning. I do not know if it is possible to convey this to you through a language. When we have learnt something it is stored up and according to that memory, we act - how to ride a bicycle, drive a car and so on and that is all a mechanical process. Then there is a learning which is the coming to a challenge with a mind that is curious, alert, aware and wanting to understand not only the challenge but the response. It is a mind which is in a state of enquiry, in a state of exploration, a mind that is never satisfied by mere knowledge. One of the factors of degeneracy in this country is the activity and the mechanical way of living in the field of knowledge. Always being told what to do, always referring to a past experience, always looking to somebody to guide, so that we are never in the act of learning; we are always storing up what other people have said and acting according to that. We want to talk this evening about several things - about death and the meaning of it, the immense sorrow - personal as well as collective and the essential freedom of passion. I hope that we are going together into these questions. Going together, taking a journey together, implies that we must walk at the same speed, with the same intention, with the same intensity, with the same energy; otherwise we can't keep up with each other. These talks, are not merely interpretations of an idea, but are rather the investigation, the enquiry together into this problem of suffering, passion and death. We are so accustomed to sorrow, to suffering, psychological inward suffering, which becomes distorted, if the physical suffering is not properly understood. So, we are talking over together as two people who are serious, who intend to understand this great problem of human suffering and why human beings have no passion; they have lust, which is entirely different from passion. Without passion you cannot create and creation is not merely a repetition or a conformity to a pattern. Creation implies an understanding not intellectually, but deeply having an insight, into this whole question of not only suffering, but the feeling of great intensity. If you are merely functioning mechanically as most people do from memory to action and skill, this quality of passion is never there. In the very enquiry into this question, we must go into the issue of suffering and passion. Both are related linguistically and actually. Together we are going to find out for ourselves what is the meaning of suffering, if there is an end to suffering, not theoretically, but actually, and what takes place when there is this freedom from suffering? Bear in mind all the time that description is not the described. I can describe a tree, a mountain, a river or the beauty of a blue sea, but the actual sea, the actual tree is not the word, is not the description. So, don't get caught up in words; though words are necessary to communicate, one must go beyond the words to grasp the significance or have an insight. When you have insight, learning becomes something entirely different. It is no longer the repetition of memory. I don't know if you have observed how human beings suffer right throughout the world. That is one of the common factors of our human existence. Young and old, with their anxieties and greeds, have acquaintance with sorrow. Man, which is you and I, has tried to rationalize it, has given so many reasons, explanations for this sorrow. Apparently, our minds are never free from it. If one is at all conscious of one's environment, of the society in which one lives, the culture in which one has been brought up, if one is aware of all that, not only as a community but as a nation, as a group of people, one must inevitably ask if there is an end to sorrow. Can man be ever free from sorrow? Is that possible? Because sorrow like fear is a tremendous burden. It distorts our thinking. It makes us bitter, anxious, frightened and if you observe yourselves, you will see how there is sorrow for various reasons, - whether it is the death of a friend or a son or a wife or a husband or somebody on whom you depended. There is always the sorrow of great loneliness, if one has observed it and had not accepted it as inevitable. One has to find out not merely verbally, intellectually but deeply, inwardly, profoundly, if there is an ending of sorrow and whether sorrow has any meaning at all. Most of us think it has a meaning, has a purpose and makes us more enlightened, that we must go through this area of sorrow. If one is aware, conscious, knows that one suffers, why has one, a human being, to put up with it? Why are we burdened everlastingly with it? No man seems to have resolved it. Not being able to resolve it, we translate it as a part of a period through which we must go through in order to be more wise, more capable, more enlightened. Or we worship a figure who represents suffering. I don't know if you haven't noticed all this in yourself and in others. What we are asking is not only the cause of it, but also the ending of it. One can find quite comparatively easily the cause of the wound, but sorrow goes on. I can tell you or another can tell you that the cause of sorrow is your loneliness, your attachment to somebody and when that something goes away or dies or turns away from you, there is anger, bitterness, anxiety, fear, sorrow. One knows the cause. It does not need great analysis and yet sorrow goes on. So is it worthwhile, is it necessary to spend time and energy in the analysis of finding out the cause? You suffer, don't you? Not from tooth ache, that you can deal with, but psychologically, inwardly, suffer for another, suffer for the stupidity of mankind, suffer in the cruelty of people, the degeneracy, the feeling of utter loneliness, of sorrow, the ignorance of human beings in the real sense of that word, to be ignorant of oneself. All that awakens in one a great sense of sorrow, sadness, if one is at all sensitive. And there is the sorrow of losing somebody, death, You shed tears and you feel great loss, emptiness, a sense of loneliness. These are the various causes of sorrow. So analysis into the cause is inaction, does not produce action. Are we clear about this? Analysis implies the analyser and the analysed, the division, the enormous amount of time spent in trying to find out the cause. Therefore being caught in time, cause becomes the very essence of time. If one sees the truth of all that, has an insight that the cause of suffering is not the ending of suffering, then we can proceed to find out whether it is possible to end sorrow. I suffer. I am taking this as an example: I suffer: I am not very interested in the cause of that suffering. The actual fact is that I am suffering; my son, my wife, my brother, everything is taken away from me and I am left lonely, isolated, having no relationship with another, bound to my own sorrow. Knowing the cause of it has no value. That is the one discovery I have made; it is firsthand, I have discovered for myself that the mere search for the cause of sorrow is not the ending of sorrow. On the contrary, it is time-binding, takes you away from the fact of sorrow. I see my mind wants to escape from it because I can't understand it. So what is involved, what is the significance, what is the meaning of sorrow? The mind wants to escape from it. Don't you want to escape from it all - your Gods, your entertainments, your rituals, reading the Gita, the Upanishads, whatever book you call sacred? You try to find comfort in something, comfort in an idea, in a picture, in a concept, in some hope. All escapes are a movement away from the fact of "what is", and the very moving away from "what is" is the beginning of sorrow. You understand this? So I see the fact that escape does not solve the problem of sorrow. So a mind having an insight into escape and the futility of escape, comes back to the fact of suffering. Therefore there is no escape. It is not that I have determined not to escape, but I see the futility of escape. Then I also see that any form of overcoming sorrow is still another waste of energy. So, my mind sees the waste of energy in the search for the cause of sorrow, in all the multiple escapes that thought has invented and there are a thousand escapes. Seeing that, seeing the futility of it, my mind says: "all right". Naturally there is no escape. So, there is no overcoming it, there is no rationalizing it, which are all forms of escape. Then what has any mind left? There is the fact of sorrow, not only the personal sorrow, but also this vast sorrow of human beings, the collective sorrow and the collective degeneracy. My mind has had a tremendous sorrow and it is trying to escape from it, run away from it, avoid it. And the escape, the avoidance, the flight away from it, is the wasting of energy. And the mind needs energy, vitality to understand this suffering. So, what takes place? There is no escape, there is no rationalization - I don't say "it is my karma". So there is no escape of any kind, verbally or theoretically or actually. Now what have I left? Is there an entity that is wanting to resolve that sorrow? Look, I am not escaping at all now, I have finished with all escapes. Is there a movement in me, a thought that says, "I must go beyond sorrow, I cannot tolerate this, I must end it"? That means the entity is different from sorrow. Is there an entity different from sorrow or the entity is sorrow? Therefore, when the entity is sorrow there is no conflict, therefore there is no escape. IT IS. Then what takes place? You have understood my question? It is tremendously important for you to understand this. I wish I could exchange it all with you, but unfortunately, I can't. What takes place when there is no escape? What takes place when all movement of thought which tries to escape from the fact of this ache, of this sense of anxiety, this great acquaintance with grief, ends? From that reality, what comes out? You know passion is different from lust. Lust is sensuous, having great desire - the compulsory eating, sexual pleasure or other forms of deep enjoyment through sensory perception. The word "passion" has its root in suffering. Passion comes out of this sorrow, and that passion has no cause. That is the beauty of it. It is not personal. It is not personal because sorrow is not limited to a person but there is this great sorrow of humanity. The great sorrow of humanity is totally impersonal. I can only understand the great sorrow of humanity if I have the passion that comes out of understanding or deeply going into this question of sorrow. Then passion is not personal and without that passion, there is no creation. You may paint pictures, you may write poems, you may do all kinds of skilful things with your hands, with your mind, but without that passion which comes out of suffering there is no creation. In the same way, we are going to investigate together this great problem of death because you will not understand death if there is no passion. If you are frightened, you won't understand it. Passion is free of fear and pleasure. Pleasure is sustained or nourished by desire which is the movement of thought as pleasure and fear. But passion has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure. and therefore with fear and it is only such a mind that says: "I want to find out; find out what it means to die, why humanity has never solved this problem. The ancient people, the ancient cultures considered death as a way of living for death; death was much more important than living and so on; there are various forms which we need not go into now. Man has tried to avoid in every way this immense mystery called death. You have in this country the comforting belief of reincarnation, you have been brought up in it. That is your tradition and the whole of Asia probably believes in that tradition because at one time India exploded over the whole of Asia, as Greece exploded over the whole of Europe. And the mind, knowing that there is death through accident, disease, old age, and so on, that death is inevitable and knowing that it can't avoid it, gets comfort in a belief. That belief is that you will be born next life under better conditions, if you do the right thing now. But your belief has no validity at all, it is just an idea, but the fact is, there is death. Now, how do you meet death? Have you ever given thought to this or is this the first time you are listening to all this? Or are you full of knowledge, of what other people have said about this? If you want to find out, you have to put aside all the things that people have said, from the Upanishads down to your guru. To find out what it is to die, you must have passion. Who is dying: the body, the organism which is the brain? That extraordinary brain is going to die, come to an end, stop breathing through pain, through a life that has been absurd, cruel, diseased. The organism, inevitably, by constant use with all the shocks, travail and conflicts, and despairs, that organism comes to an end. The family, the wife, the husband, the children, the jobs to which we are attached, all the knowledge that one has acquired, experiences, all that comes to an end. And is there something permanent in all this which will continue ? Is there in you something permanent, something that must perfect itself, through time, which is incarnate, which takes form in next life? The word "incarnate" comes from carnal, that is, taking flesh. Is there something in you that goes on till you reach Brahman, God or what you will? Is there such a thing? Is there anything permanent in you? Or is there nothing permanent - permanent being everlasting, enduring beyond death ? If there is nothing permanent, why is the mind then attached to everything, attached to the form, to the name, to the bank account, to your wife, to your children, to your furniture, to your books, to all your customs, traditions, to your petty little Gods? All that is your consciousness. Now, is there in that consciousness something real, permanent ? You have to find out, not agree or disagree. You have to give your life to find out as you give your life for money. Is there anything permanent or is everything in your consciousness put together by thought? Your Atman, your Superconsciousness, etc., all those are the movement of thought. You cannot possibly dispute that. Your attachment to your money, to your tradition, to your food, everything, is in the content of your consciousness. In that consciousness, is there anything permanent, or is every movement thought ? Thought is a material process because thought is the response of memory stored up in the brain. Therefore, can you die to your attachments? You can't take anything with you. Can you die to everything that you have collected, that thought has collected, die to your Gods, to your traditions, to your ways, everything? Have you ever said: "I meet death today? "You have pushed death far away because you are frightened of it and can you find out if you can bring it very close, be intimate with it? That means dying to all your attachments, dying to all the things that you think and have put together. Then what happens? Then what is immortality? If there is nothing permanent, then the `me' is not permanent; it is just a series of structural words, feelings put together, held together by thought and that has no reality except in words, in attachments. So, is there immortality? When I meet death, when I have abandoned all attachments, when the mind has completely let go everything, then you will find, if you have gone deeply so far, that there is...... No, I won't tell you, because you are copybook minded. Let us approach it differently. What happens if you invite death? You understand my question? There is a man who says "all right, I want to find out what it means to die. I know the physical organism, the form, the name dies. That is inevitable, and psychologically there is no tomorrow". There is tomorrow only when there is attachment and dependency. In being free, there is no tomorrow. When there is death, there is no tomorrow. Now, what happens to those who do not enter into that area where death has no meaning any more? What happens to the vast majority of people? What happens to you who are attached, frightened, who cling to your husbands because you are frightened of your loneliness, who think there is a permanent reality because traditionally it has been accepted? Have you ever thought about it? That is, there is a vast stream of humanity caught in this confusion of possession, recognition, attachment, pain, suffering, endless conflict, and that stream is the collective stream. The collective culture, the collective literature, the collective painting, all that is in that stream. What happens to you if you don't step out of that stream? Have you asked yourselves what happens to you if you have never faced the reality of death, not at the end when you are unconscious or gasping for breath but while living, fully alive? What will happen to you if you don't step out of that stream? You will go in that stream, caught in that stream. That is a reality, that is a fact. If you face the fact that you are caught in it, trapped in it, then you will do something, but if you say "all humanity is caught in it, let me also be in it, "then you never step out of that steam and the stream goes on and therein lies enormous sorrow. Where is passion, which is compassion? Sir, if you have a son whom you love - love means to care - to give your heart to your son, feel for him and when you understand the meaning of death and are stepping out of it, what do yon feel for your son? Passion comes with love. Now, when you come to this, what is eternity, what is immortality? That is a state of mind which has no death at all. That is what it means - immortality. Immortality has no death. What is that state of mind that has no death? When the mind knows the sense of complete death of the me, what then is there to find out? Tomorrow evening we will talk about meditation. You have twenty-four hours from now till that time to find out for yourself whether you are attached, whether you have motives, whether you can free yourselves from attachments. Out of that depth of insight, the truth of being free, out of that comes a flowering of goodness. Questioner: Is suffering necessary to be passionate? Krishnamurti: That is what I explained. The fact is, you suffer. That is the only fact and you know nothing about passion. Don't say will suffering help me to be passionate. It will help you to become lustful, not passionate. Sir, look, you want to get something, you want to be rewarded, you want to find a compensation for suffering. So you say "if I suffer or come through that, I hope to have passion". Questioner: Can't you have passion out of joy? Krishnamurti: Have you listened to that question? Do you know what joy is? Do you know when you are joyful? Do listen, Sir. Find out what I am asking. Can you be conscious of your joy? Is there a state of consciousness within you with which you can commune? If there is a consciousness which is joyous, blissful and you can commune with it, then it is separate from you. Questioner: No, I didn't say that. It is a part of myself. Krishnamurti: Therefore you cannot commune with something which is part of yourself. It is there. Sir, do you know when you are happy? You haven't even understood what I have said. I am asking when you know you are joyous, is it joy or is joy something that comes without your knowing? You can only know pleasure. Questioner: Pleasure is for the ordinary man; that is lust, which you spoke of. Pleasure is a kind of dignified love. Krishnamurti: You haven't answered my question Sir. Pleasure you can know and cultivate. You can spend endless days in the cultivation of pleasure. When you cultivate joy, it ceases to be joy, it becomes pleasure. Examine it. I am walking along in the wood or walking in the street looking at the sun set and suddenly there is a great sense of joy, uninvited. I don't know how it comes. It is there suddenly. Then that moment or that second is registered in the brain as memory. Doesn't it often happen to you, suddenly a delight and then every experience, every impact, every incident is registered in the brain? That is a fact. Then that incident and the pursuit of that incident by thought becomes pleasure. There was that joy uninvited, unexpected. It came because I was not thinking about myself, I was not worried, I was not bothered about my wife, husband, property. It was a moment of complete non-me. At that moment, there was that extraordinary flame, uncalled for ecstasy. It was then registered in the mind as memory and the pursuit of that incident through memory is pleasure. Now the relationship between joy and pleasure is that the one happens and the other you can cultivate. You cannot cultivate joy; you can cultivate pleasure. Questioner: Can you cultivate goodness ? Krishnamurti: What is goodness? What does it mean to be good? Cultivation implies time. I will cultivate what I consider goodness. That means time - like you cultivate a plant, water it, look after it so that it gradually grows to its excellence. But is goodness something of time, something dictated by the environment, by the society, by the culture in which you live? If I am vain, I can cultivate humility. But cultivation of humility is still part of vanity. So I can cultivate something which I think is profitable, which I think is worthwhile but goodness is not something that can be bought, sold, cultivated. It is not a matter of time. When I am good, there is no need to be good and therefore there is no need to cultivate the beauty and the flower of goodness. IN INDIA 1974-75 CHAPTER 4 MADRAS 4TH PUBLIC TALK 15TH DECEMBER 1974 We have been, during the last three talks, talking over together the question of listening, the art of seeing and the art of learning. Those who have paid a little attention to what was being said must have become aware of one's environment, the social condition, the poverty, the degradation, the degeneration of a whole group of people. One must have become aware, not only of the fact of degeneration which this country is going through, but also what it means to be reborn anew; what it means to have a mind that is not merely a plaything of thought; but a mind that can penetrate, investigate into itself and discover for itself all the movements of thought with all its calamities and destructive nature. And also to understand not only the meaning, but the depth and the beauty and the reality of such a mind, one must come to it through the enquiry of what is religion. Perhaps we could, with profit, see what it is not first. Obviously it is not the product of thought. All our religions, whether in the west or in the east, are based on thought. The religious structure with its saviours, with its gurus, with its systems, with its beliefs, dogmas and rituals is essentially the product of thought. And thought as we said the other day, is a material process. Thought is matter in the sense that it is the response of memory; memory stored up in the brain through experience and the accumulation of knowledge and so it is essentially a movement of matter, it is essentially material; thought which not only pursues pleasure, but also brings about fear because of its own fragmentary nature. All our religions are based on the movement of thought, fear and hope. All that, if one observes carefully and diligently, is the product of this movement of thought which is material. So there is absolutely nothing spiritual in them. I hope you are listening carefully. We are sharing, investigating into all this, not accepting or denying, but exploring together and therefore, being in communication with each other. We cannot be in communication or commune with each other if we have our own thoughts, opinions, judgments, our own particular form of belief to which we cling to, and that makes it impossible to investigate, to explore, to examine. When we are communicating together, it is necessary that we understand not only the words, the meaning of the words but also try to find out what lies between the words, to be able to read between the words and listen to the peculiar meaning that lies behind the words. So, observing what is going on in the world, not only the political, economic divisions, the world of division between Arabs and Jews, between Hindus and Muslims and so on, but also looking at the various religions, which have never brought peace to mankind, we ask what is religion, what we mean by that word. We know what it is not. All churches, temples and mosques, the structures that have been put together by thought, however beautiful have nothing whatsoever to do with reality. Can you really, not verbally, discard all that? Not discard because you feel someone knows better than you do; it is merely accepting authority and when you accept authority in spiritual matters, that is the very essence of decay, degeneracy. Then we can begin to find out, if you are serious, what religion means. Do you understand that the ceremonies, the rituals you perform, the temples you go to, and the vows you take are a compensation for your daily ugly life? You take vows, you go to temples as a compensation, and all that - the beliefs, the dogmas, the rituals, the private worship - have nothing to do with the reality of what religion is. If one is serious, one must find out what religion is. Because religion is the core of a new culture; without religion there is no culture; you may have beautiful paintings, you may write marvellous literature, compose lovely music, that is not culture; that does not bring about a new quality of mind, And we need a new quality of mind, when the whole world around us is collapsing, degenerating. To revive the old religions as some people are trying to do is meaningless. But a man who is deeply concerned with starvation, with wars, with corruption, with hypocrisy, with total dishonesty, must in seriousness find out, what is the true significance of a religious mind. It is only such a mind that can bring about a new culture. Not one religious mind alone, but the religious mind of man, which is you. Have you not observed religious leaders? A leader in the religious world is the denial of religion. Because when there is a religious movement, that very movement is the factor of degeneration, because then you are merely following; you are merely accepting the authority of another. When you understand the nature and structure of authority, have an insight into it, you see that there is no authority in spiritual matters including that of the speaker. Then we can proceed in our enquiry into what is religion. Religion,if you look into a good dictionary, means gathering together energy to be totally good, I am adding the extra words "to be totally good", good in action, good in thought, excellent in the way of life. And that implies diligence, care, attention. Care implies care in your work, in your thoughts, how you bring up your children, how you treat your wife, your husband, care which means affection, love. And most of us are negligent, we are careless, we are inconsiderate, we think goodness is something to be cultivated; goodness is some- thing that may come through time gradually. We never say "be good; there is no "I will be good". Religion also implies the understanding, the discovery in one's own mind, of what is sacred and also if there is such a thing as the eternal. Religion means beauty, goodness, which means also excellence and the finding or coming upon something sacred. It is also the enquiry into something that is not touched by thought because thought is time, thought is measure. It is also to find out if there is or if there is not something that is nameless, timeless, that has no beginning and no end. All that is religion. Without that quality of mind which is explosive, you cannot have a new culture which is absolutely necessary, a culture not brought about by these few, but by a religious mind, which means being a light to yourself. All that is implied in religion. So meditation is the enquiry into that which is sacred and also to find out if there is eternity, to feel that quality of mind that is really timeless. That is what we are going to do together. We are not going to meditate together; that is another imaginative, romantic nonsense, but we are going together to find out what it means to meditate and what it means to have the capacity of freedom that cares, that comes upon the thing that is sacred and from there move to something that may be timeless. This is a very complex question and what is complex can be understood only when the mind is really very simple, not childish, not immature, but simple. But most of you probably have read or gone to some guru or you have invented your own form of meditation and so you are already burdened with something which you call meditation. To find out what is meditation, you have to enquire, you have to put aside your particular form of meditation; otherwise you can't find out if what you are doing is true or false. To enquire into something that one may call sacred, you cannot possibly accept the authority of any book, any leader, any guru, any system, because your mind must be free to enquire, free to find out. Can you do this as you are sitting there, listening, which is the art of learning, the art of seeing? Can you put aside all that you know about meditation? That will be very difficult because your mind operates in routine, in habit, mechanically and to put away something that you are so accustomed to, becomes extraordinarily difficult because the mind has been conditioned to act mechanically. You have to see the danger of it; then when you see the danger of it, it has no power. When you see a dangerous animal, you have to leave it alone. It is only when you don't see that the danger exists. I want to find out what is meditation. I know nothing of what other people have said about it. I don't want to know what other people have said about it; not that I am vain, not that I am conceited, not that I want to have original experience, but I don't know if what people said has any validity. They may be as neurotic as myself, stupid, cunning, deceptive, caught in illusion. I am talking as a human being who is enquiring, who sees the reality that religions as they exist have no validity, no meaning or significance whatsoever, with all their rituals, dogmas, superstitions and authority. Such a mind says: "I want to find out; I want to find out what it means to meditate. "Perhaps that may be the environment, the atmosphere which will reveal that which is sacred. Unless you see for yourself the falseness of all the things that you have put together by thought, what you call religion has no meaning at all. If you see that, then you will discard all authority in these matters. So what is meditation and why should one meditate at all? These are the two questions into which we are going to enquire: What is meditation and why should we meditate? Now, the word meditation means to think over, to ponder over and also meditation means the capacity to measure and measure means movement between this and that. You are following all this? We are saying the word "meditation" means to think over, to ponder upon, to investigate, to have this mind that is measuring all the time, which means - progress, which means comparison, which means imitation; all that is implied in that word meditation. So I want to find out whether a mind can be without measure. Can a mind be without the movement of thought which is time? Time is measure, time is direction. I must go into the problem of time. There is time by the watch, there is time as movement from here to there. Time is necessary to cover from here to there. Time is movement. Is meditation a movement in time? Can time as a movement find out something that is sacred? We said thought is a material process; thought is matter which is a material process and to investigate what is meditation, what place has thought? Thought is time, thought is measure, thought is direction, which is from here to there. Has thought any place at all? If thought has no place at all, then what has the mind to do with thought? And if it has no place in meditation, then what do you do with this extraordinary movement of thought in which the mind is caught up, the mind that is everlastingly chattering, the mind that says: I will achieve, I will gain, I am comparing? You see movement all the time, incessantly. What will you do with that thought? You cannot deny it; it is there. So you begin to say I will control it; I will learn concentration on an object, on an image, on what I think to be sacred and dwell upon that and exclude every other thought. That is what you are doing and so the battle begins, the struggle to concentrate on something and the thought wandering off. This is what you do, don't you, when you meditate? This constant struggle is going on. Concentration implies centring your thought on something that thought has chosen to be noble, to be excellent, to be real. Thought has projected an idea, a picture, an image and thought says: "I am going to concentrate on that. "And in the process of concentration it must exclude everything else. Thought being fragmentary, its exclusion is the movement of fragmentation. So concentration on an idea, on a picture, on something that thought thinks is necessary is a movement in time, a movement of measurement, a movement in a particular direction; therefore it must be fragmentary. Seeing that, I say, I won't concentrate, it is finished. A mind that is enquiring into the meaning of meditation comes upon this fact that thought is measure, thought is the movement of time, thought sets a direction as will. Thought itself is a fragment, because thought is the response of memory, memory is the accumulation of knowledge as experience which is the past. In investigating what is meditation, one discovers this. The next point is what is one to do with this movement of thought? Should it be controlled and if you are controlling it, who is the controller? If the controller is the controlled then what is to be done with this movement of thought ? You have to find out, the mind has to find out the art of putting thought in its right place. Thought is necessary in the field or in the area of knowledge - to drive a car, to speak, to do your daily job and so on. There knowledge is necessary, and thought must function most efficiently, clearly, nonpersonally in that area. So in the understanding of what meditation is, mind has discovered that thought has its right place. When it discovers that it has a right place, then you will see that thought is no longer a matter of importance. Then the next question is do systems, the methods, the various practices that you do, have they any validity? Or are they all the cultivation of a mechanical habit which is part of thought ? After all, you have different systems of meditation, haven't you, from the Zen to the modern system? When you practice, what does that imply? It implies a direction. You have set a direction and you are practising daily in order to achieve that end which the guru, the book and other people have laid down as the end. You practice in order to achieve a definite end, a fixed end. If it is living thing, you cannot practice to arrive at it; it is moving all the time. So, when you are practising a method you have set a direction towards which you are moving, That direction and the end is put together by thought, You are not out of thought; you are still in the movement of thought. You will see, that when you have an insight into that end, then there is no direction, which means no will. Will is after all the accentuation, the exaggeration of desire. You desire to have enlightenment, you desire moksha, liberation or heaven or whatever you call it; you desire it and if you are serious, you then set a direction; you say: I will do these things regularly in order to achieve that Moksha, heaven, that liberation. Whatever the goal you have set for yourself is still within the area of thought, within the area of measure. You have not left thought at all, you are still caught in it and a mind that is enquiring into meditation is aware of this fact. Therefore there is no system, no method, no goal, no direction and therefore no will. The things that thought has put together as sacred are not sacred. They are just words to give a significance to life, because life as you live it is not sacred, it is not holy. The word "holy" comes from being whole, which means healthy, sane. A mind that is functioning through thought, however desirous it be to find that which is sacred, is still acting within the field of time, within the field of fragmentation. So, can the mind be whole, not fragmented? Can the mind which is the product of evolution, product of time, product of so much influence, so many hurts, so many travails, such great sorrow, great anxiety, can such a mind be free of the movement of thought? Can the mind be completely non-fragmented? Can you look at life as a whole? That is, can the mind be whole, which means without a single fragment? Therefore diligency comes into being. A mind is whole when it is diligent, attentive which means to have care, to have great affection, great love. The mind that is whole is attentive and therefore it is cared for and has this quality of deep abiding sense of love; such a mind is whole and that you come upon when you begin to enquire into what is meditation. Then we can proceed to find out what is sacred. Please listen, it is your life, give your heart and mind to find out a way of living differently which means can the mind abandon all control? It does not mean that you lead a life of doing what you like, yielding to every desire, every lustful glance or reaction, to every pleasure, to every demand of the pursuit of pleasure. To find out whether you can live a daily life without a single control, that is part of meditation. That means one has to have this quality of attention, attention which brings about insight into the right place of thought. Thought is fragmentary and where there is control, there is the controller and the controlled. So to find out a life, a way of living without a single control requires tremendous attention, great discipline, not the discipline that you are accustomed to, which is merely suppression, control, conformity, but we are talking of a discipline which means to learn. The word "discipline" comes from the word "disciple." The disciple is there to learn. Now, here there is no teacher, no disciple, you are the teacher and you are the disciple, and we are learning and that very act of learning brings about its own order. Now thought has found its place, its right place. So the mind is no longer burdened with the movement as a material process which is thought, which means the mind is absolutely quiet. It is naturally quiet, not made quiet. That which is made quiet is terrorized. That which happens to be quiet, in that quietness, in that emptiness a new thing can take place. So, can the mind, your mind, be absolutely quiet, without control, without the movement of thought? It will be quiet. (?) Do you understand what the words "silence" and "quiet" mean? You know you can make the mind quiet by taking a drug, by repeating a mantra or a word constantly; naturally your mind will become quiet and such a mind is dull, stupid and you call that transcendental meditation or whatever you call it. And there is a silence between two movements of thought; there is silence between two noises; there is silence between two notes; there is silence of an evening when the birds have made their noise, their chattering and have gone to bed, when there is no flutter among the leaves, there is no breeze near the trees or on the banks of a river. There silence descends on the earth and you are part of that silence. So there are different kinds of silence but the silence is not to be bought, it is not to be practised, it is not something you gain as a reward, compensation to an ugly life. It is only when the ugly life has been transformed into a good life - by good I mean not having plenty - but the life of goodness, the flowering of that goodness, in that beauty silence comes. Now we shall have to enquire into what is beauty. I am afraid, in this country, you have lost touch with nature. Though in your books nature is mentioned, you have lost touch with nature and therefore having lost touch with nature you have also lost touch with man, your neighbour. So you have to find out what beauty is. What is beauty? Did you look at the sunset behind the speaker this evening, as you where sitting there? Did you look at it? Did you feel the light and glory of that light on a leaf or do you think beauty is sensory, sensuous and a mind which is seeking sacred things cannot be attracted to beauty, cannot have anything with beauty because beauty implies woman in this country; therefore you suppress it and only concentrate on your little image which you have projected from your own thought as God. If you want to find out what meditation is, you have to find out what beauty is, beauty in the face, the beauty of action, the beauty of behaviour, conduct, the inward beauty, the beauty of the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you gesture, all that is beauty and without having that, meditation becomes merely an escape, a compensation, a meaningless action. In beauty there is great austerity, not the austerity of the sannyasi, not the austerity of a mind that has created a pattern of order, for that is not order. Order comes when you understand the whole disorder in which you live. In the understanding of that disorder comes naturally order, which is virtue. Therefore virtue, order is supreme austerity, not the denial of three meals a day or fasting or shaving your head and all the rest of that. So, there is order which is beauty, beauty of love, beauty of compassion. And also there is the beauty of a clean street, of a good architectural form of a building, there is beauty of a tree, a lovely leaf, the great big branches, to see all that is beauty, not merely to go to museums and talk everlastingly about beauty. So silence of a quiet mind is the essence of that beauty. And because it is silent, in that silence comes that which is indestructible, that which is sacred. In the coming of that which is sacred, then life becomes sacred, your life becomes sacred, our relationship becomes sacred, everything becomes sacred because you have touched that thing which is sacred. Then we shall also find out in meditation if there is something or if there is nothing which is eternal, timeless, which means can the mind which has been cultivated in the area of time, can that mind, come upon the everlasting? It means can the mind be without time, though time is necessary to go from here to there. Can that mind, that very same mind which operates in time, going from here to there, not psychologically, but physically, can that mind be without time which means can that mind be without the past, without the present, without the future? Can that mind be in absolute nothingness? Don't be frightened of that word. Have you ever looked at an empty cup? When you pour coffee into it, before you pour it, have you watched it, have you seen the emptiness of it? Because it is empty, it can receive and because it is empty, it has got vast space. Have you observed in your own mind if you have any space at all there? Is there a little space or is everything crowded, crowded by your worries, by your sex or no sex, by your achievements, by your knowledge, by your ambitions, fears, anxieties, pettiness? And how can such a mind understand or be in that state of enormous space? Space is always enormous. I don't know if you understand all this. A mind that has no space in daily life cannot possibly come upon that which is eternal, that which is timeless. That is why meditation becomes extraordinarily important; not the meditation that you all practice; that is not meditation at all, but the meditation which we are talking about transforms the mind and it is only such a mind that is a religious mind. It is only such a religious mind that can bring about a different culture, a different way of life, a different relationship, a sense of sacredness and therefore great beauty and honesty. All this comes naturally without effort, without battle, without sacrifice, without control, and this is the beginning and the ending of meditation. Questioner: What is love? Krishnamurti: The gentleman here wants to know what is love. If the speaker describes what love is, would you have love? If I describe food that you are going to eat when you are hungry, would you be satisfied by the description? Why do you ask what love is, which means you don't have love. Can you find out if you have no love, what love is? All that you can do is to find out what love is not. Right? Love is not jealousy. When you are seeking power, position, when you are pursuing your sexual pleasure, there is no love. When you put money first, as you do, there is no love. So will you, to find out what love is, will you drop your ambition? Will you drop your envies? Will you drop your competitive aggressiveness which does not mean you become docile? I am afraid you don't because to you those are far more important than love and I assure you if you have no love, you have no compassion; your society is doomed, your degeneration is guaranteed and you say: "yes, I don't mind, I will go on with my ambition, with my greed, with my money." All that you are concerned is with your own self. Questioner: To see, to look, the mind is the only instrument, but the mind is made up of the past. Krishnamurti: To look, to see, the mind is our only instrument and that instrument has been put together by the past. Therefore, how am I to look without the past? When you look at a tree, what takes place? Immediately you name the tree or you introduce your prejudices or your pleasures about that tree. So between you and that tree, there is the screen of words, the screen of prejudices, the screen of knowledge, the screen of your desires. So you will never, never look at that tree. Can you put aside your screens, can you put all that aside and just look? Can you look at your neighbour, at your politician, at your professor, at your guru, at your wife and your children and at yourself without all the images, the screens, the ideas, the prejudices, the fears? Can you just look, which means you must care to look, you must love to look. You can't look at the beauty of a woman or a man or a child, beauty of heavens, beauty of a bird, beauty of a tree, of a mountain if your mind is burdened with your own desires, burdened with your own sorrows. If you want to look, those burdens must be set aside to look and when you look, there is care, there is affection, there is love to look at the beauty of something. Questioner: How can a timeless mind operate in this world? Krishnamurti: How easily you accept such a state - a timeless mind - not knowing anything about it, not even having the breath and perfume of such a mind? You are asking how will such a mind operate here? I said to you Sirs, that we have to create a new world together. Therefore you have to have such a mind, not the speaker, the speaker is not important. What is important is for you to have such a mind. Then you will find out how to operate, how to live a different life, how to have a religious mind and live in this world, But without finding that out to say, "let me speculate about it", I am afraid, you will never find out for yourself. So bring order first in your life, be aware of the life of disorder that you live in every day - to say one thing, do another, think something and profess something else - the dishonesty, the unscrupulous way of living. To be aware of all that is to bring order in your life. Without that order in your daily life, meditation has no place, it is just an escape. And if you are concerned with the transformation of society you have to change. Society needs tremendous change because society is immoral, society is corrupt and collectively you have produced society and collectively you have to change because you are the collective, you are the world and the world is you. If you don't change as the collective, God help you. You are facing great dangers, great disaster, your house is burning and you can't shut your eyes, you may want to, but your children, your grandchildren are going to pay for what you are doing now. So Sirs, you cannot come upon that which is nameless, timeless which is the very essence of beauty and love, if you have no order, beauty and love in your daily life. IN INDIA 1974-75 CHAPTER 5 BOMBAY 1ST PUBLIC TALK 25TH JANUARY 1975 As there are only two talks - today and tomorrow - one has to be concise in what one has to say. I wonder if you are aware of what is happening to this country. This country is very beautiful; there are valleys, hills, snows, rivers, deserts and a great many varieties of trees and birds, and lovely earth, but you are not responsible for that. You are responsible for the deterioration that is going on in this country - morally, ethically, aesthetically. There is a great deal of corruption, degeneration, there is decay inwardly, spiritually. When one observes all this, as the speaker has done for the last fifty years, one wonders what is the reason for this moral decay, what is the fundamental cause of this degeneration. You might not like that word, you may think that India technologically is advancing and therefore you might consider that alone as progress, that the technological world is safe, is worthwhile, but when you consider religion, politics, economics and the human relationship between man and man, you are bound to find, observe, be aware that there is great decay and to find out the essence of this decay, one must consider what has happened today to the brain, to the whole structure of the human mind. We are not comparing India to Europe or America or Russia. We are taking the country as it is. Technologically, industrially, I suppose India is progressing, but mentally, intellectually, spiritually there is no flowering. You have many gurus, you have many temples, Gods, the vast superstitious structure called religion in India and that is not religion at all. Going to a temple or meditating according to a system which is no meditation at all; when one observes all this, one asks what is the cause, why is there this degeneration of the mind and heart. The word "degeneration" means inferior excellence. Because you give your concern, your heart to this matter to find out if this decay can be stemmed, then let us this evening share together this grave concern. As we said, the mind with its brain, with its feeling, with the whole structure of human endeavour is based on thought. Thought has built this society which is utterly immoral, this social order which is a series of inter-battle between human beings; the thought which has put together religion. Thought is responsible for technological growth and industrialization of society, but thought is also responsible for all the wars, for the divisions of man against man, for the racial, national divisions; thought is responsible for all the Gods that you have; thought has put them together. I don't think you can dispute that. Thought is responsible for the social disorder, for the social immorality, for the wars, for the Gods, for all the mischief that is going on in this country, the corruption, the thoughtless lack of concern. Thought is also responsible for the extraordinary things it has done, the electricity, the medical care and so on. And we have relied on thought to solve our problems. One of the fundamental reasons for this decay, degeneracy, in this country is the cultivation of memory through which we hope to have security. Without understanding the process of thought, there can be no regeneration of human beings in this country. That is the premise. And thought is not going to solve your problems. Thought will not bring about a transformation in your consciousness. Your consciousness is put together by thought. The content of your consciousness is the product, is the result of your thought. The content, the Upanishads, Gita, the daily quarrels, the sex, all the authoritarian acceptance of your particular religious beliefs, doctrines, superstitions, all that is the content of your consciousness and unless there is a transformation in that content, this country will go down, degenerate more and more. So the question is can the content of your consciousness be transformed because your consciousness is the collective consciousness. Please be aware of your own consciousness, of your own state, be aware of your conditioning, of the way you think, the way you look at life and so on. The content is put together by thought and the content makes up consciousness. The consciousness is its content. Have you understood this? Without the content of your consciousness, there is no consciousness; your attainments, your beliefs, your hopes, your fears, your racial and national pride and prejudice, all that is the content of your consciousness and the content makes up consciousness. Now, how is this content to be transformed? That is the central issue with which we are confronted. How is your mind, your consciousness with all its travail, with all its suffering, with all its anxieties, its pains, its fears, ambitions, etc., to be transformed? That is the problem. So first of all, memory is one of the factors of degeneration. Memory is mechanical. Memory is experience, knowledge as it is stored up in the brain and when you function within the area of knowledge which is the past, such a mind can never be free. And your concern is to bring about freedom; freedom from all your gurus, freedom from fear, freedom from anxiety, and so on. So knowledge as memory though very important, becomes a hindrance, a destructive factor which prevents further enquiry into human resources, the human mind. Thought is a material process because thought is response of memory; memory is experience; experience and knowledge are stored up in the brain cells and thought is the response which is borne out of knowledge and that knowledge becomes a hindrance to the discovery of something that is not the product of thought. So, if you observe the western world as well as the eastern world, all their culture is based on thought. Thought is measure and thought is time. Without measure, there is no technology. Sirs, you need measure to put anything together accurately. And measure is the basis of all technology. Thought is measure because without thought you cannot possibly create a technological world which is based on measurement. Where there is measurement, there must be time to achieve. If I want to learn a language, I need time, if I want to learn how to drive a car, I need time. I need time to acquire any technological skill. And that very thought based on memory as the cultivation of memory is what is destroying this country. To enquire into something that is not measurable which is religion, which is the immeasurable, and that is the very essence of religion, thought is not the instrument of investigation. We have exercised thought as a means of uncovering something which thought can never touch and religion is the only factor that can bring about regeneration of man. Religion is the only factor of a new culture. What do you mean by religion? Please listen to it: not all the superstitions, not all the beliefs, the dogmas, the churches, the mosques, the temples, none of them is religion; that is vast propaganda which has conditioned the human mind. Religion implies gathering together all your energy to understand something beyond the limitations of thought; gathering together all your energy to find out what is true; to find out for yourself, not according to somebody else, what it means to have enlightenment, what it means to have a quality of mind that is not caught in time. Your own consciousness must be transformed. So, from that arises then the question what place has thought in the transformation of man. That is, what place has knowledge in the transformation of man and society because society is the product of man's relationship with another, Without transforming, himself and society, merely talking about religion, worship and all that, are great verbal gestures which have no meaning. So we are concerned to find out the right place of thought and whether thought can hold itself without any form of control. Look Sirs, you know absolutely nothing beyond the operation of thought. You actually don't know if there is something unknown, if there is God. You believe in God, you are told that there is God, you are frightened and you are ready to worship out of your fear. but you actually don't know. And you have to find out, which means you have to find out where thought is necessary, important, vital and where thought is not. As we were saying, one of the factors of degeneration of this country is the cultivation of memory and relying on that memory to bring about salvation to man. Through education, through school, college, university you have cultivated memory to give you security. You have sought security and you must have security - physical security. And you hope to gain that security through the cultivation of knowledge and you have now come to a point when that very security is being denied. Aren't you aware of this factor? Now, there are certain things which we have to go into. First of all, human beings right throughout the world suffer not only physically, but psychologically, inwardly and haven't been able to solve that problem. Suffering may be accepted and a mind that suffers is a clouded mind, a mind that is incapable of looking at the world as a whole. So our concern is: Is it possible for the mind not to suffer at all? Would you say Yes or No? And there is the question of fear, suffering and love. When the mind is caught in fear there can be obviously no love. You may talk about love, you may go and worship the guru and be devoted to him and all that nonsense. but there is always fear. Can the mind be free of fear? If it cannot, that is one of the factors of degeneration. Now, what is the cause of fear, the root cause of fear? There are many fears, - fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of losing a job, fear of not being loved, dozens of fears, - but what is the root of fear? Have you ever gone into it? not escape from it, not go away or find excuses or rationalize fear, but find out the basic cause of fear, because unless your mind is free of fear, there is no love and there will always be suffering. So it is a very important question to find this out because this is part of the content of your consciousness. This deep fear, human beings seem to be incapable of putting away. We are asking what is the root cause of fear. Is it security, psychological desire to be secure in your relationship with another and is there permanent security in relationship? We have to find out the root of it. One can describe, but the description is not the described. I can describe the various forms of fear, but the description, the verbal statement does not show you the fear for yourself. Can you be aware, as you are sitting there, which is your fear and what is the cause of it, how does it happen that you are afraid? Is not thought the very essence of fear? One was happy yesterday and perhaps tomorrow one might not be happy. The tomorrow is the projection of thought, frightened that it might not have that happiness which it had yesterday. Thought is afraid of death. That is, when you say "I am afraid of death", you mean while you are living, that which you call death must be postponed, put away further. Thought is afraid of that death. Thought is afraid of losing your job. Thought awakens in you the fear that you might not achieve something, whatever you want. Thought is responsible basically and fundamentally for fear. Then the problem arises how can thought be controlled because thought is so active. It foresees what might happen. So thought is always much more active than the actual present. The question then is can thought be controlled? Then arises the question who is the controller. And not being able to answer that question who is the controller, you have introduced an outside agency as the Higher Self. Who is the controller? Is the controller different from the controlled? When you say if I could control my thought and therefore finish with fear, then who is it that is controlling thought? Is it not another fragment of thought? Thought is playing a trick upon itself and therefore there is no ending of fear. Therefore one has to observe that the controller is the controlled. You understand Sir? I see the necessity of thought being controlled. That is what you have all been educated upon, your whole meditation is based on that: Controlling your thought. Now when you go into it, you will see that thought is fragmentary and one fragment tries to control other fragments or tries to integrate other fragments but it is still the operation of thought. Do you see that? If you do, then you will see that the observer, the controller, the thinker is the thought, is the controlled, is the observed; there is no difference; there is no division. Where there is division, there must be conflict, like the Arabs and the Jews, the Muslims and the Hindus and all the rest of the division. When there is no division between the thinker and the thought, then there is no conflict and where there is no conflict, there is a transformation in consciousness. That is one point. Then what is love? Is love the movement of thought? Is love the movement of pleasure? Is love the movement of desire? Because in this country you have been conditioned by all your saints, by your scriptures, by your gurus that love is something that might lead to sexual appetite. Therefore, you are told "don't desire; control your desire". You have been conditioned and if you observe your life closely, have you love? Do you love anybody? Love implies care. Love implies attention, love implies compassion and if there is fear, there is no compassion. If you are ambitious, there is no compassion. If you are pursuing pleasure at any price, there is no compassion, no love. So, to awaken the flower of compassion, the beauty of it, can you live a life in which thought has not created the image in relationship? Sir, we have this problem in this country that love has gone from us. You have no love, you have devotion, devotion to your guru, to your God, to your scripture or to the image you have created which is the image of yourself really. You are devoted to all that, but that is not love because in the devotion there is fear. You are all seeking a reward. Don't you know all this? So, how do you come upon this flower of affection, care, love and compassion? How does it happen to you? How can you come upon it? Can you put aside your ambition, your tremendous self-concern, this desire to be successful? If you cannot, then this country of which you are, is going to degenerate more and more. So for this evening, there are certain factors that you have to see. That a new culture has to come about in this country and that culture cannot come without religion. Religion is not what is going on in this country. There is no religion in this country though there are all kinds of people who are doing miracles, grow long hair, you know all that childishness that is going on in this country, but that does not indicate a religious spirit at all. They are merely conforming to a religious pattern set by various people throughout the ages and this conformity to a pattern is not religion. Religion implies gathering all your energy so that you care, so that you have compassion, love. That is one factor and that is not possible if there is any kind of fear. Fear is the product of thought. Thought is fear, it is within the area of the known, within the area of knowledge and as long as you are operating with thought in that area, you are not only strengthening fear, but you are trying to escape from it and through escape your mind degenerates. It is only when you are capable of looking at fear, then, when you observe fear, is that fear different from the observer? Obviously not. Therefore when the observer is fear and therefore no conflict and when the observer is that fear, there is the gathering of all energy to go beyond it. Do it and you will find out. Then there is the problem of suffering. You know sirs, we have accepted suffering as we accept almost everything. What is sorrow? Is sorrow loneliness, is sorrow the failure and the vulgarity of attachment? Is sorrow something that thought can resolve? I am asking you all these questions for you to consider, find out, exercise your brain to find out. What is sorrow? You lose somebody whom you think you love and there is suffering. You lose your eye sight and there is suffering, you lose your job and there is suffering. You lose something of yourself, you feel lonely and in that loneliness there is suffering. So human beings know what is suffering. Only they have not been able to go beyond it. Why? You suffer, there is no question about it. And when you suffer, what do you do? I am not talking about physiological suffering. I am talking about psychological suffering, the inward suffering. What do you do? Don't you run away from it? Don't you try to find the cause of that suffering which is another form of escape? Or perhaps you say "it is my karma" which is another silly way of avoiding suffering. So, when you are confronted with this suffering, what do you do, actually do? escape from it, not run away from it, not rationalize it, not try to find a cause because that is a waste of time. You can very easily find out the cause of suffering. If you escape, if you rationalize, if you try to find the cause of it, those are all movements of thought. So, can the mind look at that suffering, not as though it was separate from it? The observer is the sorrow. To remain with that, not to move away from that reality that you are sorrow, to remain with that fact, then you will see that all the energy that you have dissipated in rationalization, in escape, in trying to find the cause and so on, all that energy now the mind has and therefore it goes beyond the factor of suffering. And another factor, another thing with sorrow, is that sorrow doesn't bring about the flower of goodness. Goodness is not the product of thought. You are good or you are not. And to cultivate goodness is like cultivating humility. So as long as we are operating in the field of knowledge and rely on knowledge to bring about the transformation of man, that is one of the factors of deterioration of man. IN INDIA 1974-75 CHAPTER 6 BOMBAY 2ND PUBLIC TALK 26TH JANUARY 1975 I would like, if I may, this evening to talk about a rather complex problem of our life. We are going to investigate together this problem. To investigate is to trace out, so that you can trace out for yourself the human problems that arise in your daily life. We are concerned with the problem of living, daily living in which is involved fear, pleasure, sorrow and the immense problem of compassion, love. If one can learn the art of investigation for oneself, then one is free from authority, from following another, from accepting the ethics or the suggestions of others. The capacity to investigate demands that you are free to observe yourself, to look at yourself with all your problems and not rely on any one, because freedom is essential to investigate. If you are not free to look, if you are not free to examine, to trace out, then freedom has very little meaning. To investigate, one has to have this quality of mind to penetrate, to have an insight, so that you yourself are a master of your own action, so that your own mind is capable of examining seriously the problems that arise in your daily life because it is daily life which brings about a culture, a society either of highest excellence or of corruption. As we were saying yesterday, religion is the gathering of all energy to live a life daily of excellent morality, excellent action, a way of living that is not contradictory. And we are going to investigate, examine, trace out, the immense question of death because death is part of life, like love, like suffering, like ambition, greed, envy, the many hurts that one has received from childhood. All that is part of our daily life and without understanding all that, merely to enquire into reality has very little meaning. We are concerned with our daily existence which is our relationship with another, which creates society. In going into this problem, there are three important things: the art of listening the art of seeing and the art of learning. The word "art" means to put things in their right place; to put every action, every thought, every feeling, all our miseries in their right place. So, there is the art of seeing, the art of listening and the art of learning. Now we are going together to learn or observe the art of listening. What does it mean to listen? I do not know if you have ever tried to listen to your wife, to your neighbour, to your politician, to your guru. Can you listen without prejudice? Can you listen without translating or interpreting what you hear with what you already know ? If you compare with what you already know, you are not listening. That is fairly clear. If you are listening with the desire to gain something, obviously you are not listening. So the art of listening means the capacity to listen and not interfere with, either agreeing or disagreeing with what is being said. And the art of seeing implies that you observe without the screen of your own images, without the screen of your own desires, just as you observe that tree or you observe the sunset just to see and not interpret what you see. Then there is the art of learning. The art of learning is to accumulate knowledge in one direction. That is what you do when you learn a language, when you acquire a technological information and gain knowledge about what you are learning and accumulating, which is learning to acquire knowledge, and using that knowledge skillfully in action. And there is another kind of learning, a learning in which there is no accumulation, a constant movement of learning which is non-mechanical. Having stated that, we are going to learn together, investigate together this immense question of what is death because that is part of our life. You may not like it, you may put it away from you, you may be frightened of it, but it is part of your life. Life is a total thing in which there is involved the technological knowledge, all the information that man has acquired through centuries upon centuries about mathematics, medicine and so on. And also life is this agony, the pain, the suffering, the loneliness, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the despair, all that is also part of our daily life; and also it is part of our daily life what it means to love, which is to care, to be attentive when you care for another, to have compassion and that compassion can only come when you understand the full significance of sorrow and that is also part of life. So, it is with this, the whole of life that we are concerned with, not one fragment of it, not one part or one fragment of it, but the whole of life in which is included this thing that man has never been able to solve, which man is frightened of, which is death. To investigate into this question, to examine it, to look closely into it, first there must be no fear. Obviously, if there is fear, you cannot examine the fear of death. Death is the end of the daily living, the ending of your attachment, the ending of your pleasure, the ending of your suffering, the ending of your position in the Government, central or local, and it puts an end either through old age, accident or disease. This is the common lot of every human being whether he is rich or poor, whether he thinks he has reached enlightenment or is the man of ignorance, it is the lot of every human being and we have never been able to find out psychologically what it means to die. We have avoided death as something to be not looked at, to be put far away. And we must find out, not accept what the speaker is saying, we are sharing together our investigation, so that it is yours, so that you understand it, so that your mind is capable of looking and not avoiding, your mind is capable of finding out what it means to die. There is the physical organism, the body, through usage, through time, through pressure, through all kinds of shocks and influences, it wears itself out. Here arises a rather interesting problem which is, the brain, our brain, is now being bombarded; bombarded by the politicians, the gurus, by all the traditions and it is put under great strains, both outwardly and inwardly. And that brain which is the most extraordinary instrument man has, is being gradually destroyed, by wrong kind of education, by the daily strain, by psychological fears, demands, urges, so that the brain which should operate freely, easily without any effort, is being compelled, destroyed, distorted. I do not know if you are aware of all this. You have your technological influence on the one side, tradition on the other, the authority of the Gita, the Upanishads and all the rest of it, you are being bombarded all the time and the brain which is very subtle, sensitive is becoming degenerate. That is one of the problems. So through old age, misuse, disease, the body, the organism, the biological instrument dies. That is inevitable. Then the question is why is man so frightened of dying? Why are you, if you face it, frightened of death and what is it that dies? You understand my question? The body, your organism will decay, and you are rational enough to accept, but you are frightened. Of what? Of your personality coming to an end, of all the things that you have accumulated, your knowledge, your attachments, your pains, your hurts, the very essence of the ego, the `me', is that what you are frightened about, the `me' coming to an end? Is that what you are frightened about? The `me' which has gathered a great deal of information, which has suffered, which has enjoyed, which has worked, all that `me' is that permanent? If that is permanent, then what is the end of this permanency? If I am permanent, what is the end of it? More trouble, more pain, more anxiety, or there is no permanent `me' at all? Is the you, the form, the name, the quality and all the rest of it, is that permanent? So, you have to find out for yourself by investigating carefully, seriously, whether that `me' is permanent, the self, the ego, the super-consciousness, the Atman is that permanent, or there is nothing permanent. Now you have to investigate, you have to go into this. Is your attachment to your husband, to your wife, to your possession, to your name, to your bank account and so on, is that attachment permanent or in all relationship there is nothing permanent? Are you investigating together with me this question? You are attached to your wife or to your son or whatever it is you are attached to. Now, why is the mind attached? You are attached to your wife or husband - let us take that for the moment. Why? What does that mean - to be attached? And this attachment you call love. This attachment you call responsibility; this attachment you call duty and so on. You are great in your verbal gesture when you say I am attached to my wife. When you are attached, there is pain involved in it, isn't there? There is fear involved in it and your attachment is part of your egotistic fear not to be alone. Your invention of the Atman, the superconsciousness, the Higher Self, all those are the products of thought; thought which is frightened of coming to an end. So death is the ending of the thing which thought has made into something permanent. That is, can one die each day? You understand my question? You have problems, don't you? Can that problem end each day, end it, not carry over the next day because the ending of a problem is part of death. That which continues has no creative energy, it is only that which ends that can begin anew. So is it possible for your attachment to end, not in some future time, but now; that means you are preparing for death each day, so that your mind is fresh, so that it is no longer carrying the burden of thousand yesterdays. And you especially in India believe in reincarnation, don't you? Audience: Yes. Krishnamurti: And you have never enquired what it is that reincarnates, what it is that will be reborn, take a new form, You believe in reincarnation. You who live a shoddy life, a mischievous life, a corrupt life, a life of fear, a life in which there is no love and you want that life to be born another time. Is that what you want? And you believe in that. Also if you really believe, then what you do now matters enormously. Because what you do now will either help or destroy you in the next life. So what is important is not next life, but this life, what you do now, how you live it. You know life is like a vast stream in which human consciousness is caught and it is only for him alone who steps out of that stream, there is no attachment, a life that is highly moral, not dependent on environmental influence. It is only such a man who steps out of that life, of this life of misery, sorrow, confusion, corruption; it is only such a man who can come upon life which is eternally true. Now let us investigate again what is meditation. Unfortunately most of you have practised some kind of meditation. Unfortunately for you, you have followed somebody who tells how you should meditate and they have told you that there are different stages in meditation and so on. They have bombarded your mind, your brain with their practices, with their systems, with their hope and so on. I wish you had never heard of that word because then only you can begin to find out the depth, the beauty, the necessity of what is meditation. It will be good if you could forget all that and start as though you knew nothing about it. Can you do it? Can you start as though you know nothing about meditation? Actually you don't. You do what other people have told you. But you have never started as though you never knew a thing about it. Then you can begin to investigate; then you are free to look into this question of what is meditation, but if you are already crowded, bombarded, filled with other people's ideas of what meditation is, as you are now, then you are incapable of finding out what is real meditation. So can you for this evening at least, forget, put aside your systems, your practices, the assertions of various gurus, the various stages of meditation with dances and all that rot that is going on in this country, can you put aside all that and together in freedom, not in belief, not with the acceptance of authority, but in freedom, investigate what it means to meditate. Can you do this or is it asking too much because your brain as we said is being bombarded by all the Gurus, by all the so called sacred literature, by the strain and stress of modern life; your brain is being slowly atrophied, is becoming slowly incapable of pliability, incapable of swiftness of perception. So one of the functions of meditation is for the brain to free itself from this external pressure, from all the shocks, strains and assertions of authority about spiritual matters, because your brain has its own rhythmic quiet movement. That brain can regenerate itself, renew itself, make itself young, fresh, untouched by all the pressures, by the various shocks of modern society and it is one of the major functions of meditation to keep that brain completely whole. Now we are going together to investigate into what is meditation. I am not telling you what to meditate about, how to meditate, that is too infantile, but if you are at all serious, together we are going to go into this question. As we said, the brain which now has been so badly educated, that brain which can only function in complete security like a child, that brain needs complete security. When it is completely secure, then it can function efficiently. And that security is denied when there is fear. So, the first thing in the enquiry into what is meditation is the ending of fear. As I pointed out yesterday, when you escape from fear, when you try to rationalize fear, when you try to suppress fear, then you are wasting your energy but when you do not escape, but look, observe, then you have that energy to go beyond it. Then the problem is that thought has made certain activities, certain beliefs, certain concepts as a means of being secure. You believe in God, don't you? Now the belief in God gives you security, doesn't it? Do listen to this, please. The belief in God gives you security, but you don't know anything about God, except what some idiotic man talks about God. So you know nothing about God and whet you believe it and you think you will find security in a belief which has become neurotic because it has no validity. Your belief in God gives you a false hope of security. Your action based on a false belief, on a belief which is radically false, must be neurotic. That belief is based on fear. The desire to be secure gives to the brain a false sense of safety. That is one of the causes of the deterioration of your brain. Then there is the question of thought. Thought is measure; thought is the movement of memory as knowledge; therefore thought is a material process. Thought is not something sacred. That thought is in constant movement, constantly thinking about the past, the present or the future, is constantly working, working. Haven't you noticed your own thoughts? It is ceaselessly operating and one of the factors of degeneration is this constant movement in the field of knowledge. You realize that thought must be controlled and this control is part of your so-called meditation. I am sure you have played that game for years, but you have never enquired who is the controller and if the controller is the controlled, then what is the necessity of control at all? You are conditioned, educated through tradition, through literature, through all the things that you call sacred that you must control thought. But you have never found out if you can live a life in which there is no control whatsoever. Because the controller is the essence of the past and the past with all its memories, fears and so on, controls another fragment of itself. Therefore, there is constant conflict. This constant inward battle between the controller and the controlled is another factor of the deterioration of your brain. Have you ever tried to find out a way of living in which there is not a single shadow of conflict? Or is that just an idyllic dream? So, meditation is the ending of conflict in oneself and in your relationship with another. Is not your relationship with another one constant battle except for the moments of forgetfulness, moments of great pleasure, sexual or otherwise? Don't you agree to that? Audience: Yes, Sir. Krishnamurti: So we accept this conflict, this struggle and we have never tried to find out, investigate whether it is possible to live a life in which there is no conflict. That demands great intelligence, not control, not suppression, which means the art of observing your relationship, the art of observing how you have an image about him and he has an image about you and therefore the conflict is between these two images, and whether you can live a life without a single image about yourself or another; that is part of meditation. Meditation is concerned with daily life, how you behave, how you talk, to watch your conduct. Meditation is freeing the mind from all conflict. Meditation is living a life, daily life, in which there is not a single conflict, a life in which belief has no place whatsoever, only facts. To discover a mind that is quiet, not compelled, not disciplined beyond measure, so that it is a mind that is alive, deeply quiet, a mind that is silent, that is part of meditation. All this is the totality of life - living in the technological world a life of excellence in manners, in behaviour, in conduct, and living a life in which death has been under- stood and therefore no fear of dying. And a mind that is completely quiet, not occasionally quiet. Then you will see if you have gone that far that thought which is measure, which is a material process, that thought functions in one area of knowledge only and does not move out of that field. Then only the mind will come upon that which is measureless, timeless and that which is eternally beautiful. All this is meditation and you must give your days and your thoughts and your heart to find out and for your mind to regenerate itself, to become fresh, young, alive, without fear, it is important to know the beauty and the reality of meditation. MADRAS 4TH PUBLIC TALK 15TH DECEMBER 1974 'MEDITATION WHICH TRANSFORMS THE MIND' All our religions whether in the West or in the East are based on thought. The whole religious structure with their saviours, with their gurus, with their systems, with their beliefs and dogma, rituals, and all the petty little ceremonies that one indulges in daily, is essentially the product of thought. All our religions are based on the movement of thought, fear, hope, and a sense of a belief into something that we hope exists. All that, if one observes very carefully and diligently, is the product of this movement of thought, which is material. So there is absolutely nothing spiritual in these religions. Right? We are sharing, investigating into all this. Not accepting or denying, but exploring together, and therefore being in communication with each other. We cannot be in communication or commune with each other if we have our own private thoughts, opinions, judgements. And that makes it impossible to investigate, to explore, to examine. And when we are communicating together, as we are, not only verbally but also beyond the word, it is necessary that we understand not only the words, the meaning of the word but also try to find out what lies between the words, to be able to read between the words, and listen to the peculiar deep meaning that lies behind the word. All that is implied in communication, which is thinking over together as two friends who are concerned, serious with the problems of life. So observing what is going on in the world, not only political, economic, in the world of division between the Arab and the Jew, between the Hindu and the Muslim and so on and so on and so on, but also looking at the various religions, which have never brought peace to mankind. On the contrary. And their divisions, and they must be divided because they are essentially based on thought. So what is religion? What do we mean by that word? We know what it is not - all the circus that goes on in the name of religion. Please don't be insulted, we are just stating facts. All the churches and temples and the mosques, all the structure that has been put together by thought, however beautiful - some cathedrals, some mosques, some temples are extraordinarily beautiful, but that is nothing whatsoever to do with reality. And when one really, not verbally, discards all that, not because someone says you must discard it, or someone you feel knows better than you do says, "This is not religion", then you do not discard, it is merely accepting authority. And when you accept authority in spiritual matters that is the very essence of decay, degeneracy. All right? You are still with me? Verbally, or in reality? When you discard all that nonsense, which means no sense, then we can begin to find out, if you are serious, what religion means. Do you understand? The ceremonies, the rituals, the temples and the vows you take as a compensation to your daily ugly life, you take vows to go to the temple and do all kinds of things as a compensation, and all that - the beliefs, the dogmas, the rituals, the private worship have nothing to do with the reality of what religion is. And if one is serious because religion is the core of a new culture, without religion there is no culture. And because there is no religion in the world there is no culture. You may have beautiful paintings, write marvellous literature, paint most extraordinarily, compose lovely music, but that is not culture. That doesn't bring about a new quality of mind. And we need a new quality of mind when the whole world around us in collapsing, degenerating. And merely to revive the old religions, as some are trying to do, is meaningless. But a man who is deeply concerned, as he must be, if you are concerned with the world, with the starvation, with the wars, with the corruption, with the hypocrisy, with the total dishonesty that is going on, one must in all seriousness find out what is the true significance of the religious mind because it is only such a mind that can bring about a new culture; not a religious mind, not one religious mind but the religious mind of man, which is you, that means together. In the old days, if you have observed in history, watched the things about you, there were religious leaders. That very word is the denial of religion - a leader in the religious world. You understand? Because when there is a movement in religious matters, that very movement is the factor of degeneration because then you are following, you are merely accepting authority of another. When you understand the nature and the structure of authority, have an insight into it, in spiritual matters there is no authority, including that of the speaker. Religion implies the understanding, the discovery for one's own mind, what is sacred. And also if there is such a thing as the eternal. Religion means the beauty, goodness, which means also excellence, and the finding, or coming upon something sacred; and the enquiry into something that is not touched by thought, because thought is time, thought is measure. And to find out if there is, or if there is not, something that is nameless, timeless, that has no beginning and no end, all that is religion. And as we said, without that quality of mind, which is explosive, not acquiescent, without that quality of mind you cannot have a culture which is absolutely necessary, a culture not brought about by a few but by a religious mind, which means a light to yourself, not the light of another but light which you have found for yourself. All that is implied in religion. So: meditation is the enquiry into that which is sacred. And also to find out - these are words, you can't find out if there is eternity -to feel that, to have that quality of a mind that is really timeless. So that is what we are going to do together. We are not going to meditate together, that is another phoney, imaginative, romantic nonsense, but we are going together to find out what it means to meditate, and what it means to have the capacity of freedom that can come upon that thing that is sacred, and from there move to something that may be timeless. This is a very complex question. And what is complex can be understood only when the mind is really very simple, not childish, not immature, but simple. But most of you have probably read, or gone to some guru, or you have invented your own form of meditation, and so you are already burdened with something which you call meditation. And to find out what is meditation you have to enquire, you have to put aside your particular form of meditation, otherwise you can't find out if what you are doing is true or false. Now to enquire into something that one may call sacred you cannot possibly accept the authority of any book, any leader, any guru, any system, because your mind must be free to enquire, free to find out. And can you do this? As you are sitting there listening, can you put aside all that you know about meditation? And that will be very difficult because your mind operates in routine, in habit, mechanically, and to put away something that you are so accustomed to becomes extraordinarily difficult, because the mind has been conditioned to act mechanically and to put away this mechanical habit is extremely ardous. You have to see the danger of it. Then when you see the danger of it then it has no power. When you see a dangerous animal you leave it alone, it has no power. It is only when you don't know then the danger exists. I want to find out what is meditation, because I know nothing about what other people have said about it. And I don't want to know what other people have said about it. Not that I am vain, not that I am conceited, not that I want to have original experience but I don't know if what those people say has any validity; they might be as neurotic as myself, as stupid, as cunning, as deceptive, as illusory, caught in an illusion. I am talking as a human being who is enquiring into it, I am not talking about myself personally. So I am a human being, an ordinary human being, who sees the reality that religions as they exist have no validity, no meaning, no significance whatsoever, with all their rituals, dogmas and superstitions, authority, and all that. Such a mind says, "I want to find out, I want to find out what it means to meditate", because perhaps that may be the ambience, the environment, the atmosphere which will reveal that which is sacred. So I must put all that aside; and I hope you are doing it, otherwise we cannot communicate with each other, unless you see for yourself the falseness of all the things that we have put together by thought, which you call religion, has no meaning at all. If you see that then you will discard all authority in these matters - not the authority of a doctor, not the authority of a policeman, which is obeying law, but you don't obey law anyhow, you are too clever, you make all kinds of devious ways to avoid law. That is your misery. So what is meditation? And why should one meditate at all? Now the word meditation means to think over, to ponder over; and also meditation means the capacity to measure, and measure means movement between this and that. Which means comparison, which means imitation, all that is implied in that word meditation. So I want to find out can a mind be without measure? You understand? Can a mind be without the movement of thought, which is time? Time is measure. Time is direction. Time, there is the time by the watch, there is the time as movement from here to there, time is necessary to cover from here to that - necessary time. Time is movement. And is meditation a movement in time? Can time, as a movement, find out something that is sacred? You understand my question? We said thought is a material process. And to investigate into what is meditation, what place has thought -thought being time, thought being measure, thought being direction, which is from here to there? What place has thought? Please. Has it any place at all? If it has no place at all, then what is the mind to do with thought? Has it any place at all? If it has no place at all, then what is the mind to do with thought. If it has no place in meditation, then what do you do with this extraordinary movement of thought in which the mind is caught up? The mind which is everlastingly chattering, the mind which says, "I will achieve, I will gain, I am comparing", it is moving all the time, incessantly. What will you do with that thought? You cannot deny it, it is there. And so you begin to say, 'I will control it. I will learn concentration on an object, on an image, on what I think to be sacred, and dwell upon that and exclude every other thought'. hat is what you are doing. And so the battle begins, the struggle to concentrate on something and the thought wandering off. This constant struggle going on. Concentration implies centring your thought on something that thought has chosen to be noble, to be excellent, to be real. Right? So thought has projected an idea, a picture, an image, and thought says, "I am going to concentrate on that". And in the process of concentration it must exclude everything else. And thought being fragmentary, its exclusion is the movement of fragmentation. So concentration on an idea, on a picture, on something that thought thinks is necessary, is a movement in time, a movement of measurement, a movement in a particular direction, therefore it must be fragmentary. So seeing that I say, "I won't concentrate" -out, it is finished. So a mind that is enquiring into the meaning of meditation comes upon this fact; that thought is measure, thought is the movement of time, thought sets a direction as will, and as thought in itself is a fragment, because thought is the response of memory, memory is the accumulation of knowledge as experience, which is the past and therefore it is a fragment, thought is a fragment. In investigating what is meditation, one discovers this. What is one to do with this movement of thought? Should it be controlled? And if you are controlling it, who is the controller? Is not the controller himself the thought? So the controller is the controlled. Then what to do with the thought, with this movement of thought? The mind has to find out the art of putting thought in its right place. Which is, knowledge is necessary, knowledge is the movement of thought as experience, so thought is necessary in the field, or in the area of knowledge. To drive a car, to speak, to do your daily job, technology, and so on, knowledge there is necessary and thought must function most efficiently, clearly, nonpersonally in that area. So in the understanding of what meditation is the mind has discovered thought has its right place. And when it discovers that it has a right place then you will see that thought is no longer a matter of importance. Then the next question is: the systems, the methods, the various practices that you do, has it any validity? Or is it the cultivation of a mechanical habit, which is part of thought? You understand? After all you have systems of meditation haven't you? Different kinds of systems of meditation from the Zen to the modern or the ancient methods or systems or practices of meditation. When you practise, what does that imply? It implies a direction. Right? You have set a direction and you are practising daily in order to achieve that end - the end, the guru, the book the other people have set, have laid down that is the end. So you practise in order to achieve a definite end, a fixed end. If it is a living thing you can't practise to arrive at it, it is moving all the time. So when you are practising a method, which means you have set a direction towards which you are moving, that direction and the end is put together by thought. So you are not out of thought. You are still in the movement of thought. Right? So you then see, have an insight into that, and so no direction, which means no will. Will is after all the accentuation, the exaggeration of desire. Right? You desire to have enlightenment. You desire moksha, liberation, or heaven or whatever you call it, you desire it, and you work for it, if you are serious and you are not playing with it, which you probably are. But if you are serious you then set a direction, and say, "I'll do these things regularly in order to achieve that moksha, that heaven, that liberation" - whatever the aim is, the goal you have set for yourself, is still within the area of thought, within the area of matter, within the area of time, within the area of measure. So you have not left thought at all, you are still caught in it. And a mind that is enquiring into meditation sees he is aware of this fact, therefore no system, no method, no goal, no direction, and therefore no guru. Then, as we said, the things that thought has put together as sacred are not sacred. They are just words to give a significance to life, because life as you live is not sacred, is not holy. And the word holy, H-O-L-Y comes from being whole, which means healthy, sane and therefore holy. All that is implied in that word. So a mind - please follow all this - a mind that is functioning through thought, however desirous it be to find that which is sacred is still acting within the field of time, within the field of fragmentation. So then can the mind be whole, not fragmented? This is all part of the understanding of what is meditation. Can the mind, which is the product of evolution, product of time, product of so much influence, so many hurts, so many travails, such great sorrow, great anxiety, it is caught in all that. And all that is the result of thought. And thought, as we said, is fragmentary by its very nature. And mind is the result of thought, as it is now. So can the mind be free of the movement of thought? Can the mind be completely non-fragmented? Can you look at life as a whole? Can the mind be whole, which means without a single fragment? Therefore diligence comes into this. A mind is whole when it is diligent, which means to have care means to have great affection, great love, which is totally different from the love of a man and a woman. So the mind that is whole is attentive and therefore cares, and has this quality of deep abiding sense of love. Such a mind is the whole. That you come upon when you begin to enquire what is meditation. Then we can proceed to find out what is sacred. Please listen, it is your life, give your heart and mind to find out a way of living differently. Which means when the mind has abandoned all control. It does not mean that you lead a life of doing what you like, yielding to every desire, to every lustful glance or reaction, to every pleasure, to every demand of the pursuit of pleasure, but to find out, to find out whether you can live a daily life without a single control. That is part of meditation. That means one has to have this quality of attention. That attention, which has brought about the insight into the right place of thought, and thought is fragmentary, and where there is control there is the controller and the controlled, which is fragmentary. So to find out a way of living without a single control, that requires tremendous attention, great discipline, not the discipline that you are accustomed to, which is merely suppression, control, conformity, but we are talking of a discipline which means to learn. The word discipline comes from the word disciple. The disciple is there to learn. Now here there is no teacher, no disciple: you are the teacher and you are the disciple if you are learning. And that very act of learning brings about its own order. Now: thought has found its own place, its right place. So the mind is no longer burdened with the movement as a material process, which is thought. Which means the mind is absolutely quiet. It is naturally quiet, not made quiet. That which is made quiet is sterile. That which happens to be quiet, in that quietness, in that emptiness a new thing can take place. So can the mind, your mind, be absolutely quiet, without control, without the movement of thought? It will be quiet naturally if you really have the insight - the insight which brings about the right place for thought. From there thought has its right place therefore the mind is quiet. You understand what the word silence and quiet means? You know you can make the mind quiet by taking a drug, by repeating a mantram or a word, constantly repeating, repeating, repeating, naturally your mind will become quiet. And then such a mind is a dull, stupid mind. And there is a silence between two noises. There is silence between two notes. There is silence between two movements of thought. There is silence of an evening when the birds have made their noise, chattering and have gone to bed and there isn't a flutter among the leaves, there is no breeze, there is absolute quietness, not in a city but when you are out with nature, when you are with the trees, or sitting on the banks of the river, there silence descends on the earth and you are part of that silence. So there are different kinds of silence. But the silence we are talking about, the quietness of a mind, that silence is not to be bought, is not to be practised, is not something you gain, a reward, a compensation to an ugly life. It is only when the ugly life has been transformed into the good life; by good I mean not having plenty, but the life of goodness, the flowering of that goodness, the beauty, then the silence comes. And also you have to enquire what is beauty? What is beauty? Have you ever gone into this question? Or will you find it in a book and tell me, or tell each other that book says what beauty is. What is beauty? Did you look at the sunset this evening as you are sitting there. The sunset was behind the speaker. Did you look at it? Did you feel the light and the glory of that light on a leaf? Or do you think beauty is sensory, sensuous, and a mind that is seeking sacred things cannot be attracted to beauty, cannot have anything with beauty, therefore only concentrate on your little image which you have projected from your own thought as the good. So you have to find out, if you want to find out what meditation is, you have to find out what beauty is. Beauty in the face, beauty in character - not character, character is a cheap thing, that depends on your environmental reaction, and the cultivation of that reaction is called character. The beauty of action, the beauty of behaviour, conduct, the inward beauty, the beauty of the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you gesture, all that is beauty. And without having that, meditation becomes merely an escape, a compensation, a meaningless action. And there is beauty in frugality, there is beauty in great austerity - not the austerity of sannaysi. The austerity of a mind that has order. Order comes when you understand the whole disorder in which you live, and out of that disorder comes naturally order, which is virtue. Therefore virtue, order is supreme austerity, not the denial of three meals a day or fasting, or shaving your head, and all the rest of that business. So there is order, which is beauty, there is beauty of love, beauty of compassion. And also there is the beauty of a clean street, of a good architectural form of a building, there is beauty of a tree, a lovely leaf, the great big branches, to see all that is beauty; not merely go to museums and talk everlastingly about beauty. So silence of a quiet mind is the essence of that beauty. And because it is silent and because it is not the plaything of thought, then in that silence there comes that which is indestructible, which is sacred. And in the coming of that which is sacred then life becomes sacred, your life becomes sacred, our relationship becomes sacred, everything becomes sacred because you have touched that thing which is sacred. And then we have also to find out in meditation if there is something, or if there is nothing, which is eternal, timeless; which means can the mind, which has been cultivated in the area of time, can that mind find out, come upon or see that thing that is from everlasting to everlasting? So it means can the mind be without time - though time is necessary to go from here to there and all the rest of it, can that mind, that very same mind which operates in time, going from here to there, not psychologically but physically, can that mind be without time? Which means can that mind be without the past, without the present, without the future? Can that mind be in absolute nothingness? Don't be frightened of that word. Because it is empty it has got vast space. Have you ever observed in your own mind if you have any space at all there? Just space, you know, a little space? Or is everything crowded? Crowded by your worries, by your sex, or no sex, by your achievements, by your knowledge, by your ambitions, fears, by your anxieties, your pettiness, crowded. And how can such a mind understand, or be in that state of being or having that enormous space? Space is always enormous. And a mind that has no space in daily life cannot possibly come upon that which is eternal, which is timeless. And that is why meditation becomes extraordinarily important. Not the meditation that you all practise, that is not meditation at all. But the meditation of which we are talking about transforms the mind. And it is only such a mind that is the religious mind. And it is only such a religious mind can bring about a different culture, a different way of life, different relationship, a sense of sacredness and therefore great beauty and honesty. All this comes naturally, without effort, without battle, INWARD FLOWERING DIALOGUE WITH STUDENTS AND STAFF BROCKWOOD PARK 1976 Krishnamurti: I think it would be good if we could talk over together this morning the question of whether here, in this community, each one of us is flowering, and growing inwardly. Or are we each following a certain narrow groove, so that at the end of our life we will realize that we have never taken the opportunity to flower completely, and regret it for the rest of our life? Could we go into that? We should ask, I think, not only now as students at Brockwood, but also as educators, whether we are inwardly and perhaps also outwardly - they are really related - whether we are growing, not physically taller or stronger, but inwardly, psychologically, flowering. I mean by that word flowering that nothing hinders us, nothing blocks or prevents us from actually growing deeply, inwardly. Most of us hardly ever flower, grow, bloom. Something happens in the course of our life which stultifies us, deadens us, so that there is no deep inward nourishment. Perhaps it is because the world around us demands that we become specialists - doctors, scientists, archeologists, philosophers and so on; perhaps that may be one of the reasons why, psychologically, we don't seem to grow... immensely. I think that is one of the questions that we should talk over together. As a small community of teachers and students living here together what is it that is preventing us from flowering? Is it that we are so deeply conditioned - by our society, by our parents, by our religion, and even by our knowledge? Are all these environmental influences really preventing, or blocking, or hindering this blossoming? Do you understand my question? You don't understand? Look! If I am a Catholic, my mind, my brain, my whole psychological structure, is already conditioned, isn't it? My parents tell me I am a Catholic, I go to church every Sunday; there is Mass, with all its beauty, the scent, the perfume, the people with new hats and dresses, watching each other, there is the intoning of the priest - all that conditions the mind, and there is never a flowering. You understand? I move along in a certain groove, a certain path, within a certain system, and that very path, that very system, that very activity is limiting - and therefore there is never a blossoming. Do you now understand my question? Is that what is happening here? Are we so heavily conditioned by the many accidents and incidents and pressures and assertions - of parents, society, and all the rest of it - that we are prevented from flowing easily, happily, from growing? If that is it, then does Brockwood, here, help us to break down our conditioning? You follow my question now? If it does not, then what's the point of it? What's the point of Brockwood if you're going to turn out like the many millions of people who have never felt, or enquired, or lived, in the sense of this vast deepening, flowing, flowering? You understand my question? Student: Outside, there is too much pressure, you know. Krishnamurti: You say there is too much pressure. Go into it slowly, enquire into it. If you had no pressure would you do anything? Would you pay attention, now? I am pressing you, you understand? I am not actually pushing you into a corner, but I am pointing something out to you - and that, to you, will also be a pressure because you do not want to look. You want to have fun in life, you think that you are a special person, that you want to do something special and therefore you neglect everything else. If you received no pressure at all of any kind would you be active? Or, would you become more and more lazy, indifferent and in the end, wither away? Though you may have a husband or a wife, children, a house, a job and all the rest of it - inwardly does the flowering ever take place? So, is one receiving here the right kind of pressure? You understand? The right kind. Not the compulsive pressure, not the pressure to imitate, not the pressure of success, climbing the ladder, becoming somebody, but the pressure that helps you to grow, inwardly. Are you following? Because if there is no flowering, then one lives an ordinary mundane life and dies at the end of sixty or eighty years. That is the usual life of the average person - have you noticed it? And when you observe all this, what is your reaction, what do you say about it? Student: One asks if it is meaningful to live like that. Krishnamurti: Look, my friend. You can see, as you grow older, that very few people are happy; there is too much pressure, competition, a thousand people after one job, there is overpopulation. Everything in the world is becoming more and more dangerous. You understand? And, when you observe all this, what is your response? Student: I can see my parents getting older, they are running around without any need to, because there is a fear of looking at all that. Krishnamurti: So you are saying that most people in the world are seeking physical security and perhaps, psychological security. Will security, biological or psychological, give you this sense of flowering? You understand? I use the word `flowering' in the sense of growing - like a flower growing in a field without any hindrance. Now, are you seeking security, both outwardly and inwardly? Are you psychologically depending on somebody, depending on a belief, on identification with a nation, with a group, or learning a specific technological subject and working at it, so that it will also give you inward security? Are you seeking psychological security in some kind of knowledge? You have to ask all these questions in order to find out, haven't you? You have to ask if there is such a thing as psychological security? Do you understand my question? Look - I depend on my husband, my wife, for many, many reasons - for comfort, sex, encouragement, when I feel lonely, depressed, to have somebody who says, "lt's all right. You're doing very well", who gives me a pat on the back and says how nice I am, so that gradually I feel more comfortable and so eventually become attached and increasingly depend on him or her. in that relationship there is a certain feeling of security, but actually, is there security in that relationship at all? Student: The relationship is very fragile. Krishnamurti: It is very fragile, but is there permanent security in any relationship at all? You will fall in love - whatever those words may mean - and for a few years you will be attached to each other, you will depend on each other in every way, both biologically and psychologically, and in that relationship you are seeking the continuity of that feeling all the time, aren't you? Aren't you? At least, you hope for it. But before you completely tie yourself in a knot, which you call `falling in love', mustn't you enquire whether there is any security in any relationship between human beings? - which doesn't mean a hopeless, depressing loneliness. You are lonely, uncomfortable by yourself, insufficient in yourself, afraid that you cannot live alone, and so gradually you begin to attach yourself to someone or something, because you are frightened. And so what happens? When you are attached you are equally frightened, because you may lose the object of your attachment. Right? That person may turn away from you, may fall in love with somebody else. So I think it is very important to be clear as to whether there is any security in relationship. What, in relationship,is love? You are following? Is love in relationship a sense of great satisfaction, of great security? If you find there is no security in relationship, then you will have to ask -is there security in love? You understand? No, you haven't understood? All right, let us look at it again. I am attached to you, I like you, I `fall in love' with you, I want to marry, have children. But is this attachment permanent? Is it lasting? Or is it very fragile, shaky, uncertain? I want to make it certain, yet in reality it is very uncertain. Right? So that is one point in relationship. And we say that in relationship there is love. Now is there security in love? And what do we mean by love? Are we going along together in this? So to go back to my first question: I want to find out whether it is possible to bloom, to grow and to live completely - you know: over the hills and dancing! That is what I want to find out in life. Or is life always to be depressing, lonely, miserable, violent, stupid? You follow? That is the first thing one wants to find out. And is Brockwood helping you to bloom? In Brockwood there is relationship with each other - as there is everywhere. You can't help it. You see each other every day. And, in this relationship you might fall in love with somebody. Yes? And you get attached to that person. When you are attached you want that attachment to continue, don't You? You want it to last endlessly - until both of you collapse at the end of it! And you have to find out whether in that relationship there is anything permanent. Is that relationship permanent? [A shaking of heads.] So, you say it is not permanent. How do you know it is not permanent? You may get married, in a Church or a Registry Office, but, in that relationship is there a continuity of real freedom, without any conflict, without any quarrels, isolation, dependence - all that? You say "No", but why do you say no? I want to find out why you say it. Will you say this when you are in love and married, in the first year? Will you say then that there is no security in this? Will you? Or after only a few years, five years or a dozen years, will you say, "Oh, my God! There's no security at all!"? And also you have to find out whether in this relationship of insecurity, of uncertainty, with always the fear, the boredom, the moments of happiness, the repetition - seeing the same face over and over again for ten, twenty, fifty years - whether in that relationship you will blossom. Will you grow? Will you be a most extraordinarily beautiful, total, entity? And also you have to find out, when you are so-called `in love' - which is a much used word, and spoilt, degraded - whether, in that feeling you will blossom. Student: it seems that when we have a relationship with someone we do not give sufficient time for an investigation - to know if there is security in it, or not; because perhaps the relationship will be much more between two `images.' Krishnamurti: Are you saying that we have images about each other - as a man and a woman - and that in those images there are conclusions? And we want those conclusions to continue permanently. Student: There is too much of the superficial thing in that relationship, and there is no time for investigation into what is the real, taking the image apart. Krishnamurti: What we are talking about is, first of all: does one see the importance that one must flower? The importance of it, the truth of it, the reality of it, the necessity of it, the beauty of it? -that one must flower. And does relationship, as it is now between two human beings, help you to flower? That is one point. And we also said that we love each other. Will that love nourish the flowering of the human mind, the human heart, the human qualities? You understand? We are also asking, does being here at Brockwood help you to grow, to flourish not technologically, not by just becoming a specialist in this or that, but inwardly, psychologically, under-the-skin, inside you? Do you see that there is nothing that blocks you, hinders you, that you are not neurotic, lopsided, but a whole complete human being growing, flowering? So, we have to ask now, what is love? Right? What do you think it is? There is a problem here. You love your parents, and your parents love you. At least, they say so and you say so. Are we on dangerous ground! Are we? My question is: Do they? If they love you they will see to it, from the moment you are born that you are unconditioned, that you flower, because you are a human being, because you are the world. Because, if you do not flower, you are caught in the world, you are destroying other human beings. If your parents loved you they would see that you are properly educated - not technologically, not merely to get a job - but inwardly so that you have no conflict. All this is implied when I say I love my daughter or my son. You understand all this? Or, I don't want him to become a first-class businessman, making a lot of money. What for? Or a marvellous specialist - even though he may help a little bit here and there outwardly - building better bridges, becoming a better doctor, and all the rest of it. So, what is love? Isn't it very important to find out? Please, don't you want to find out? Surely you have observed the people around you, parents, friends, grandmothers - the world around you. They all use the word `love'. And yet, they quarrel, there is competition, they are willing to destroy each other. You follow? Is that love? What is love to you, then? Student: It is difficult to talk about. Krishnamurti: What do you feel? What is love to you? I am sure you all use the word `love' don't you - a great deal! So what does it mean? You know the word `hate', the meaning of that word. And you know the feeling of it, don't you - antagonism, anger, jealousy - all that is part of hate isn't it? And competition is part of hate. Right? So you know the feeling of what it means to hate people. And you can put it down in words very well. Now, is love the opposite of hate? Student: The feelings are opposite. Krishnamurti: So can you have both in your mind, in your heart - hate and love? Stick to it! Do you have such feelings, hate and love, together? Or not together? One is kept in one corner and the other in another corner. I hate somebody, and I love somebody. Right? But, if you have love, can you hate anybody? Can you kill people, can you throw bombs, and all the other things that are happening in the world? So let us go back to the first question: do we feel, both the educator and the educated, do we all see the great importance, the necessity, that each human being, all of us, should grow, and flower - not merely mature physically, but mature deeply, inwardly? If you don't, then what is the point of it all? What is the point of your getting educated? Passing some exams and getting a degree, getting a job, if you're lucky, setting up house - will all that help you, help each human being, each one of you, to blossom? So, if you were my daughter or my son, that is the first thing I would talk to you about. I would say, look, look around you, at your friends in the school, at the neighbours - see what is happening around you - not according to what you like or don't like, but just look at the fact. See exactly what is happening, without distortion. People who are married are unhappy, have quarrels, endless strife, you know all that goes on. And the boy and the girl - they also have their problems. And see the division of people into races, groups - national groups, religious groups, scientific groups, business groups, artistic groups - you follow? Everything is broken up. Do you see that? Then the next question is, who has broken it up? Do you follow? Human beings have done this. Thought has done it. Thought that says, "I am a Catholic", "I am a Jew", "I am an Arab", "I am a Muslim", "I am a Christian". Thought has created this division. So, thought, in its very nature, in its very action, is seen to be divisive, bringing about fragmentation. Do you see that thought must bring about fragmentation, not only within yourself, but outwardly? Is this too difficult? I am asking, do you actually see the fact that thought, in its very nature and activity, must bring about fragmentation? And, if you say you see it, do you see it as a fact, or do you only see the idea? You follow? Which is it? Is it an idea or a fact? Student: It's an idea. Krishnamurti: So, why do you make of it into an idea? I say to you: Look around you, the wars, the terror, the bombs, the violence, and in every house the constant disturbance between relationships - the competitive society, the commercial society - do you see all this as real as this table is? Or is it an abstraction, which is called an idea? And, if it is an idea, why do you make it so when it is obviously a fact? Student: Perhaps thought is limited because of the structure within which it works. It takes things from the past and compares them with other things. Krishnamurti: Why is thought, in itself, fragmentary, broken up limited? In itself not merely its results. Isn't thought the result of time? Observe it, find out! Isn't thought the result of the movement of time? Thought is the result of memory, surely. You see that. It is the result of memory, experience, knowledge; and all that is the past, isn't it? It is modified in the present, and goes on. So, it is movement in time. So because thought is of the past and of time, it must be fragmentary. It is not, and never can be, the whole. Listen! from the age of nine I have learnt English - and other languages. That's memory, isn't it? It has taken me a few years to learn them, and they are stored up in the brain - the words, the syntax, how to put sentences together - all that took time, didn't it? And any thought springing from that period of time is limited. So thought is not the whole, not complete. Thought can never be complete because it is always limited. Please see this, not as an idea but as an actuality. We said thought is the response of memory. Memory is stored up in the brain; it is experience and the constant accumulation of knowledge. And when you are asked something - memory responds. So thought must be limited, because memory is limited, knowledge is limited, time is limited. It is thought that has created division in the world. You are Dutch and I am German, he is British and the other Chinese. Thought has created this division. Thought has created the religions - the thought that says "Jesus is the greatest Saviour; then go to India and they say, "Sorry, who is that gentleman? I don't know him at all. We have our own God who is best of all". Thought has created the wars and the instruments of war. Thought is responsible for all this. Right? Student: All these ideas, of which you have given examples.... Krishnamurti: They are not ideas these are facts Student: Yes, yes, but.... Krishnamurti: I want to stick to this. I'm asking you if you see this fact that you are from one country and I am from another. We have a different colour, different culture, and all the rest of it. Do you see the divisions in India - the Muslim, the Hindu? Who created them? Student: I see the divisions but I, personally, don't care because they're superficial. Krishnamurti: You may not care, but some people do care, and they hate each other. So what is behind this divisive thought? Conditioning, isn't it? My parents have said to me, "You are a Brahmin", "You are a Hindu", and your parents have said, "You are a Christian". Student: There is the instinct to belong to a group. Krishnamurti: Why is there the instinct to belong to a group - why? Because it is much safer. To belong to a community, to identify yourself with a small group gives you a sense of security. But why don't you identify yourself with all the human beings in the world, with a total human being? Why the small group? So I am pointing out that thought has created all these human, psychological and worldly problems. There is no denying it. Do you see this as a fact and not just as an idea? It is as much a fact as when you have toothache. You don't say, "It's an idea that I have toothache"! So let's put it this way. Is thought love? Can thinking bring about love? Student: If you love somebody, you have to think. Krishnamurti: What I am asking you is: Can love be cultivated by thought? We have said that thought is fragmentary - will always be fragmentary. And the next question. Thought, being fragmented, must in its activity and its action bring about fragmentation - then can thought cultivate and bring about love? Now when you say "No" - be careful, for I'm going to trip you on this! When you say, "No, thought is not love" - is it again an idea, or an actuality? If it is an actuality, something that is so... then, where love is concerned, there is no movement of thought. Is this a little too much? Do you understand this, not up here [touching head] but deeply, inwardly. Be very, very careful. If love is not thought, if it is not based on thought, then what is relationship? If thought is not love, then what do you do with the actual relationships that you have now? I say to myself that I see the fact, not the idea, that thought is not love. But I am married, I've got children, I've got my mother -we all have images about each other. That interacting relationship is the action of images - images which I have made about my mother, my wife, my children. And this I call `love'. I say - "I love my mother", "I love my wife, my children". Now I am saying that I see this relationship is based on thought, on the image. And also I see very clearly that love is not the product of thought, that love cannot be thought. Then what happens to my relationship with my mother, my wife, my children? Student: How do you see this? Krishnamurti: There is no `how' - it isn't a mechanical thing. Don't you see it, actually? - that love has nothing to do with thought - full stop. I see very clearly that thought is a movement in fragmentation. I see it very clearly. It is a fact, an actuality - not an idea. But I am married, I have children, I've got a mother, and when I see, realize, that my relationship has been based on my images, on thought, then what takes place? Student: That relationship between images used to be called `love', but you are saying love is something different from that. Krishnamurti: I have said: I fell in love, I have been married a number of years and I have children. I have an image about my wife. Right? I have created it. She nags me, she has bullied me, dominated me. And she has an image about me - that I have bullied and dominated her. There is this interaction going on, sexually and in every way. I have built a picture about her and she has built a picture about me. That's a fact. Please see this! See that this image-building is the movement of thought. Don't move from there unless you see it! Don't move from that fact. Now, you come along and tell me that thought is a movement of fragmentation. You explain to me very carefully why it is - because it is bound by time, bound by memory, bound by knowledge, so it is very limited. I see that. And the next step is - when I have seen that, in relationship with my mother, my wife, my children - what am I to do? So what happens? When I realize that my relationship with my wife, my husband, with a girl or a boy, whoever it is, is a movement of time and fragmentation - what happens? If you see it - then what is love? Is love the same as this? Is love fragmentation? Is love a picture, an image made by thought, a remembrance? Student: At first with the feeling of being in love you see something beautiful. Then you would like to crystalize that. Krishnamurti: Do you see something beautiful? Do you? Do you actually see something beautiful? When you look at that beautiful tree on the lawn, or a woman, or a cloud, or a sheet of water and see that it is extraordinarily beautiful - can you just remain with that? Or do you turn it into an idea - an idea that it is beautiful? What takes place at that moment of seeing? Student: There is no word. Krishnamurti: Which means what? No word, no thought. So beauty takes place when there is no movement of thought. You agree to this? [Heads nod.] You are all together in agreeing! How extraordinary! So, when you see something beautiful there is the absence of thought. Now, can you stay in that moment and not wander away from it? Watching that cloud the mind is not chattering because there is no thought in operation. Thought is totally absent when you see something extraordinarily beautiful Now watch it carefully, listen carefully, please listen carefully. The cloud, with its light, its splendour, its immensity, has taken you over. Do you see this? The cloud has absorbed you. Which means you, in that absorption, are absent. Next step. A child is absorbed by a toy. Remove the toy and he is back to his mischief. That is exactly what has happened. The cloud has absorbed you, and when the cloud goes away you are back to yourself. Can you, without being absorbed by the mountain, by the cloud, by the tree, by the sound of a bird, by the beauty of the land, be totally empty in yourself? Remove the toy, and the child is back to his naughtiness -yelling and shouting, but give him a toy and the toy takes him over. I'm asking you, without the toy, and therefore nothing to absorb you - can there be... an absence of yourself. Oh do see the beauty of this! You understand? So beauty is, when you are not. Beauty is, when thought is absent. Now - love is not thought, is it? Are you beginning to see the connection? I love you - you have absorbed me - I want you, you look nice, you smell nice, you have nice hair, my glands demand all kinds of things, sex, and so on. You have absorbed me. I have fallen in love with you. That is the absorption. And I cling to you. I Love you. But in time my old self asserts itself and says - yes, that was very nice two years ago, but now I dislike her. I fell in love with her -but now look what has happened! Please see the truth of this - that where there is beauty there is a total absence of thought. So, love is the total absence of... `me'. Got it? If you have got it you have drunk of the fountain of life. Student: Does the feeling include the being absorbed? Krishnamurti: What is feeling? If there is no thought would you have feelings? Look at it carefully. Look at it! Is beauty feeling? We said beauty is without thought. And is there a feeling when there is no thought? Get the kernel of it, the insight into it. Leave all the details, the details can come later. See the truth of this one thing, which is: where there is beauty there is no thought. Where there is love there is the absence of `me'... the `me' who is chattering, chattering, full of problems, anxiety, fear. When there is the absence of `me', there is love. Student: You look at a cloud, and it goes, and you fall back into yourself. Krishnamurti: Have you seen the little boy give the little girl a doll? She's perfectly happy, quiet, not restless, not crying. Give the boy a complicated toy and he'll spend an hour playing with it. He's forgotten to be naughty. The doll, the toy, have become all-important. And, when you see the cloud, the bird flying across the sky, when you see that, what takes place? Your chattering stops. And when you see a Western film, or any other film, you are looking at it. You are not thinking about all your problems, your worries, your fears. You are just absorbed by the film. Stop the film and you're back to yourself! So you see, if you push this much further, ideas are your toys, ideals are your toys, and they take over all of you. Religions are your toys. When these things are questioned you are back to yourself and you become disturbed, frightened. Student: Is there not one thing which is out of it, out of the world of toys? Krishnamurti: I've shown it to you. Please listen carefully. We have said that thought has created this world. The wars, the businessman, the politician, the artist, the crook - society has made all this. Society is our relationship with each other - which is based on thought. So thought is responsible for this awful mess. Is it so? Or is it an idea? If you say it is an idea, then you are not looking at the actual fact. So, move from that. Thought, we said, is broken up; whatever it does will break up. Do you see that as something as real as the fact that I am sitting here? Student: That is all mechanical thought, but is there something behind it which uses it? Krishnamurti: You have nothing else but mechanical thought. When that mechanical thought stops - then there is something else. But you can't say, "Yes, that is mechanical thought, so let us look at the other". Thought has to stop. And it stops, for instance, when you see beauty, when you see a vast range of mountains with snowcovered peaks; the majesty of it, the grandeur of it takes you over. And when that mountain is not there you are back with your quarrels, with your thoughts. Please find out for yourself. Sit down, meditate, go into it. Student: It's all very well, but.... Krishnamurti: It's all very well you say, but I've got to go back to my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my grandmother, and to earn money, and all the rest of it. And that's the problem with all of us. So what are you going to do? When you realize, when you see, actually, that, except technologically and in practical matters, thought is the most mischievous thing, that it is the most deadly thing in relationship, therefore destroying love... then what are you going to do? You have to earn money, get a livelihood, which demands thought. So there you exercise thought. When you have got to go to the dentist, you exercise thought. When you have to buy a suit, a dress, you compare - this is better material than that, and so on - that requires thought. But you realize that thought is deadly in relationship. That's all. Pax. Part 1, Conversation With David Shainberg And David Bohm - 1st Conversation - Transformation Of Man 2nd Conversation - Transformation Of Man 3rd Conversation - Transformation Of Man 4th Conversation - Transformation Of Man 5th Conversation - Transformation Of Man 6th Conversation - Transformation Of Man 7th Conversation - Transformation Of Man Public Talks And Dialogue - Chapter 1 Meditation Is The Emptying Of The Content Of Consciousness Chapter 2 The Ending Of Conflict Is The Gathering Of Supreme Energy Which Is A Form Of Intelligence Chapter 3 Out Of Negation Comes The Positive Called Love Chapter 4 Death; A Great Act Of Purgation Chapter 5 Action Which Is Skilful And Which Does Not Perpetuate The Self Chapter 6 Reason And Logic Alone Will Not Discover Truth Chapter 7 Intelligence, In Which There Is Complete Security Chapter 8 In Negation The Positive Is Born Chapter 9 Because There Is Space, There Is Emptiness And Total Silence Chapter 10 The State Of The Mind That Has Insight Is Completely Empty Chapter 11 Where There Is Suffering You Cannot Possibly Love Chapter 12 Sorrow Is The Outcome Of Time And Thought Chapter 13 What Is Death? Chapter 14 That Emptiness Is The Summation Of All Energy Chapter 15 When The Me Is Not, Then Compassion Comes Into Being Chapter 16 The Division Between The Observer And The Observed Is The Source Of Conflict Chapter 17 When There Is An Ending To Consciousness With Its Content There Is Something Entirely Different Chapter 18 Without Clarity, Skill Becomes A Most Dangerous Thing Chapter 19 How Is One To Know Oneself - Part 3, Ojai 1977- Chapter 1 - Small Group Dialogue Chapter 2 - Small Group Dialogue Longer, Unedited Versions - 1st Conversation With Shainberg And Bohm 2nd Conversation With Shainberg And Bohm 3rd Conversation With Shainberg And Bohm 4th Conversation With Shainberg And Bohm 5th Conversation With Shainberg And Bohm 6th Conversation With Shainberg And Bohm 7th Conversation With Shainberg And Bohm Part 2 - Chapter 2 Part 2 - Chapter 3 Part 2 - Chapter 5 Part 2 - Chapter 6 Part 2 - Chapter 8 Part 2 - Chapter 9 Part 2 - Chapter 10 & 11 Part 2 - Chapter 12 & 13 Part 2 - Chapter 14 Part 2 - Chapter 15 Part 2 - Chapter 17 Part 2 - Chapter 18 Part 2 - Chapter 19 THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART I DIALOGUE 1 1ST CONVERSATION WITH DR. DAVID SHAINBERG AND PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 17TH MAY, 1976 KRISHNAMURTI: Can we talk about the wholeness of life? Can one be aware of that wholeness if the mind is fragmented? You can't be aware of the whole if you are only looking through a small hole. Dr Shainberg: Right. But on the other hand in actuality you are the whole. K: Ah! That is theory. S: Is it? Dr Bohm: A supposition, of course it is. K: Of course, when you are fragmented how can you assume that you are the whole? S: How am I to know I am fragmented? K: When there is conflict. S: That's right. K: When opposing desires, opposing wishes, opposing thoughts bring conflict. Then you have pain, then you become conscious of your fragmentation. S: Right. But at those moments it often happens that you don't want to let go of the conflict. K: That is a different matter. What we are asking is: Can the fragment dissolve itself, for then only it is possible to see the whole. S: All you really know is your fragmentation. K: That is all we know. B: That is right. K: Therefore let's stick to that. B: The supposition that there is a whole may be reasonable but as long as you are fragmented you could never see it. It would be just an assumption. K: Of course, right. S: Right. B: You may think you have experienced it once, but that is also an assumption. K: Absolutely. Quite right. S: You know, I wonder if there is not a tremendous pain or something that goes on when I am aware of my fragmentation - a loneliness somehow. K: Look, sir: Can you be aware of your fragment? That you are an American, that I am a Hindu, Jew, Communist or whatever -you just live in that state. You don't say, "Well I know I am a Hindu" - it is only when you are challenged, it is only when it is said, "What are you?" that you say, "I am an Indian, or a Hindu, or an Arab". B: When the country is challenged then you have got to worry. K: Of course. S: So you are saying that I am living totally reactively? K: No, you are living totally in a kind of miasma, confusion. S: From one piece to the next, from one reaction to the next reaction. K: So can we be aware, actually, of the various fragments? That I am a Hindu, that I am a Jew, that I am an Arab, that I am a Communist, that I am a Catholic, that I am a businessman, that I am married, that I have responsibilities; I am an artist, I am a scientist - you follow? All this sociological fragmentation. S: Right. K: As well as psychological fragmentation. S. Right right. That is exactly what I started with. This feeling that I am a fragment. K: Which you call the individual. S: That I call important, not just the individual. K: You call that important. S: Right. That I have to work. K: Quite. S: It is significant. K: So can we now, in talking together, be aware that I am that? I am a fragment and therefore creating more fragments, more conflict, more misery, more confusion, more sorrow, because when there is conflict it affects everything. S: Right. K: Can you be aware of it as we are discussing? S: I can be aware a little as we are discussing. K: Not a little. S: That's the trouble. Why can't I be aware of it? K: Look, sir. You are only aware of it when there is conflict. It is not a conflict in you now. B: But is it possible to be aware of it without conflict? K: That is the next thing, yes. That requires quite a different approach. B: But I was thinking of looking at one point - that the importance of these fragments is that when I identify myself and say "I am this", "I am that", I mean the whole of me. The whole of me is rich or poor, or American, or whatever, and therefore it seems all-important. I think the trouble is that the fragment claims it is the whole, and makes itself very important. S: Takes up the whole life. B: Then comes a contradiction, and then comes another fragment saying it is the whole. K: You know this whole world is broken up that way, outside and inside. S: Me and you. K: Yes, me and you, we and they... B: But if we say "I am wholly this", then we also say "I am wholly that". S; This movement into fragmentation almost seems to be caused by something. It seems to be... K: Is this what you are asking? What is the cause of this fragmentation? S: Yes. What is the cause of the fragmentation? What breeds it? What sucks us into it? K: We are asking something very important, which is: What is the cause of this fragmentation? S: That is what I was getting into. There is some cause... I have got to hold on to something. K: No. Just look at it, sir. Why are you fragmented? S: Well, my immediate response is the need to hold on to something. K: No, much deeper than that. Much deeper. Look at it. Look at it. Let's go slowly into it. S: OK. K: Not immediate responses. What brings this conflict which indicates I am fragmented, and then I ask the question: What brings this fragmentation? What is the cause of it? B: Right. That is important. K: Yes. Why are you and I and the majority of the world fragmented? What is the cause of it? B: It seems we won't find the cause by going back in time to a certain... S: I am not looking for genetics, I am looking for right this second... K: Sir, just look at it. Put it on the table and look at it objectively. what brings about this fragmentation? S: Fear. K: No, no, much more. B: Maybe the fragmentation causes fear. K: Yes, that's it. Why am I a Hindu? - if I am, I am not a Hindu, I am not an Indian, I have no nationality. But suppose I call myself a Hindu. What makes me a Hindu? S: Well, conditioning makes you a Hindu. K: What is the background, what is it that makes me say "I am a Hindu"? Which is a fragmentation, obviously. S: Right, right. K: What makes it? My father, my grandfather - generations and generations before me, 10,000 or 5,000 years, they have been saying you are a Brahmin. S: You don't say or write I am a Brahmin, you are a Brahmin. Right? That is quite different. You say I am a Brahmin because... K: It is like you saying I am a Christian. Which is what? S: Tradition, conditioning, sociology, history, culture, family, everything. K: But behind that, what is behind that? S: Behind that is man's... K: No, no. Don't theorize. Look at it in yourself. S: Well, it gives me a place, an identity; I know who I am then, I have my little niche. K: Who made that niche? S: Well, I made it and they helped me make it. I am cooperating in this very... K: You are not co-operating. You are it. S: I am it. Right. That's right. The whole thing is moving towards... putting me in a hole. K: So what made you? The great-great-grandparent created this environment, this culture, this whole structure of human existence, with all its misery, all its conflict - which is the fragmentation. S: The same action that makes man right now. K: Exactly. The Babylonians, the Egyptians, we are exactly the same now. B: Yes. S: This is all giving me my secondhand existence. K: Yes. Proceed. Let's go into it. Let's find out why man has brought about this state. Which we accept - you follow? Gladly or unwillingly, we are of it. I am willing to kill somebody because he is a Communist or a Fascist, an Arab or a Jew, a Protestant or a Catholic or whatever it is. S: Well, everywhere, the doctors, lawyers... K: Of course, of course. The same problem. Is it the desire for security? Biological as well as psychological security? S: You could say yes. K: If I belong to something to some organization, to some group, to some sect to some ideological community I am safe there. B: That is not clear: you may feel safe. K: I feel safe then. But it may not be safety. B: Yes, But why don't I see that I am not really safe? K: Go into it. S: I don't see it. K: Just look. I join a community... S: Right. I am a doctor. K: Yes, you are a doctor. S: I get all these ideas.... K: Because you are a doctor you have a special position in society. S: Right. I have a lot of ideas of how things work. K: You are in a special position in society and therefore you are completely safe. S: Right. K: You can malpractice, but you are very protected by other doctors, other organizations - you follow? S: Right. K: You feel secure. B: it is essential that I shouldn't enquire too far to feel secure, isn't it? In other words I must stop my enquiry at a certain point. If I start to ask too many questions... K: ...then you are out! If I begin to ask questions about my community and my relation to that community, my relationship to the world, my relation to my neighbour, I am finished. I am out of the community. I am lost. S: That's right. K: So to feel safe, secure, protected, I belong. S: I depend. K: I depend. B: I depend wholly in one sense that if I don't have that, then I feel the whole thing is sunk. S: You see, not only do I depend but every problem I now have is with reference to this dependency. I don't know about the patient, I only know how the patient doesn't fit into my system. K: Quite, quite. S: Because that is my conflict. K: He is your victim. S: That's right, my victim. B: You see, as long as I don't ask questions I can feel comfortable. But I feel uncomfortable when I do ask questions, very deeply uncomfortable. Because the whole of my situation is challenged. But then if I look at it more broadly I see the whole thing has no foundation - it is all dangerous. This community itself is in a mess, it may collapse. Even if the whole of it doesn't collapse, you can't count on the academic profession any more, they may not give money for universities. Everything is changing so fast that you don't know where you are. So why should I go on with not asking questions? K: Why don't I ask questions? - Because of fear. B: Yes, but that fear is from fragmentations. K: Of course. So is that the beginning of this fragmentation? Does fragmentation take place when one is seeking security? S: But why..? K: Both biologically as well as psychologically. Primarily psychologically, then biologically. S: Right. K: Physically. B: But isn't the tendency to seek physical security built into the organism? K: Yes, that's right. It is. I must have food, clothes, shelter. It is absolutely necessary. S: Right. K: And when that is threatened - if I questioned the Communist system altogether, living in Russia, I am a non person. S: But let's go a little bit slower here. You are suggesting that in my need for security, biologically, I must have some fragmentation. K: No, sir. Biologically, fragmentation takes place, the insecurity takes place, when psychologically I want security. S: OK. K: I don't know if I am making myself clear. Wait a minute. That is: if I don't psychologically belong to a group, then I am out of that group. S: Then I am insecure. K: I am insecure, and because the group gives me security, physical security, I accept everything they give me. S: Right. K: But the moment I object psychologically to the structure of the society and the community I am lost. This is an obvious fact. S: Right. B: Yes. S: Were you suggesting then that the basic insecurity we live in is being conditioned, and the response to this - the answer to this -is a conditioned fragmentation? K: Partly. S: And that the movement of fragmentation is the conditioning? K: Sir, look: if there were no fragmentation, historically, geographically, nationally, we would live perfectly safely. We would all be protected, we would all have food, all have houses. There would be no wars, we'd be all one. He is my brother, I am him. He is me. But this fragmentation prevents that taking place. S: Right. So you are suggesting even more there - you are suggesting that we would help each other? K: I would help, obviously. B: We are going round in a circle because... K: Yes, sir, I want to get back to something, which is: if there were no nationalities, no ideological groups, and so on, we would have everything we want. That is prevented because I am a Hindu, you are an Arab, he is a Russian - you follow? We are asking : Why does this fragmentation take place? What is the source of it? Is it knowledge? S: It is knowledge, you say. K: Is it knowledge? I am sure it is but I am putting it as a question. S: It certainly seems to be. K: No, no. Look into it. Let's find out. S: What do you mean by knowledge, what are you talking about there? K: The word to know. Do I know you? Or have I known you? I can never say I know you, I mean actually; it would be an abomination to say "I know you". I have known you. But you in the meantime are changing - there is a great deal of movement going on in you. S: Right. K: To say I know you means I am acquainted or intimate with that movement which is going on in you. It would be impudence on my part to say I know you. S: That's right. K: So knowing - to know - is the past. Would you say that? B: Yes, I mean what we know is the past. K: Knowledge is the past. B: The danger is that we call it the present. The danger is that we call knowledge the present. K: That is just it. B: In other words, if we said the past is the past, then wouldn't you say it needn't fragment? K: What is that, sir? B: If we said - if we recognized, acknowledged, that the past is the past, that it is gone, and therefore what we know is the past, then it would not introduce fragmentation. K: No, it wouldn't, quite right. B: But if we say what we know is what is present now, then we are introducing fragmentation. K: Quite right. B: Because we are imposing this partial knowledge on the whole. K: Sir, would you say knowledge is one of the factors of fragmentation? It is a large pill to swallow! B: And also there are plenty of other factors. K: Yes. But that may be the only factor! B: I think we should look at it this way, that people hope through knowledge to overcome fragmentation. K: Of course. B: To produce a system of knowledge that will put it all together. K: Is that not one of the major factors, or perhaps the factor of fragmentation? My experience tells me I am a Hindu: my experience tells me that I know what god is. B: Wouldn't we better say that confusion about the whole of knowledge is because of fragmentation? K: That is what we were saying the other day - art is putting things in their right place. So I will put knowledge in its right place. B: Yes, so that we are not confused about it. K: Of course. S: You know I was just going to read you this rather interesting example of a patient of mine who was teaching me something the other day. She said, "I have the feeling that the way you doctors operate is that you have certain kinds of patients, and if you do `x' to them you will get a certain kind of effect. You are not talking to me, you are doing this to me hoping you will get this result." K: Quite. S: That is what you are saying. K: No, a little more, sir, than that. We are saying, both Dr Bohm and I, we are saying that knowledge has its place. S: Let's go into that. K: Like driving a car, learning a language and so on. B: If we drive a car using knowledge, that is not fragmentation. K: No, but when knowledge is used psychologically... B: One should see more clearly what the difference is. The car itself - as I see it - is a part, a limited part, that can be handled by knowledge. S: It is a limited part of life. B: Of life, yes. When we say, I am so and so, I mean the whole of me. And therefore I am applying the part to the whole. I am trying to take in the whole by the part. K: When knowledge assumes it understands the whole... B: But it is often very tricky because I am not explicitly spelling out that I understand the whole, but it is implicit by saying I, or everything, is this way. K: Quite, quite. B: It implies that the whole is this way, you see. The whole of me, the whole of life, the whole of the world. S: As Krishnaji was saying about never knowing a person - that is how we deal with ourselves. We say I know this and that about myself rather than being open to the new man. Or even being aware of the fragmentation. B: If I am talking about you then I shouldn't say I know all because you are not a limited part like a machine. You see, the machine is fairly limited and you can know all that is relevant about it, or most of it anyway, Sometimes it breaks down. K: Quite. Quite. B: But when it comes to another person, that is immensely beyond what you could really know. The past experience doesn't tell you the essence. K: Are you saying, Dr Bohm, that when knowledge spills over into the psychological field..? B: Well, also in another field which I call the whole in general. Sometimes it spills over into the philosophical field and then tries to make it metaphysical, the whole universe. K: That is purely theoretical and has no meaning for me personally. B: I mean that some people feel that when they are discussing metaphysics of the whole universe it is not psychological. It probably is, but some people may feel that they are making a theory of the universe, not discussing psychology. It is just a matter of language. K: Language, quite. S: Well you see what you are saying can be extended to what people are. They have a metaphysics about other people. I know all other people are not to be trusted. K: Of course. B: You have a metaphysics about yourself, saying I am such and such a person. S: Right. I have a metaphysics that life is hopeless and I must depend on these things. K: No, all that you can see is that we are fragmented. That is a fact. And I am aware of those fragmentations; there is an awareness of the fragmented mind because of conflict. S: That's right. B: You were saying before that we have got to have an approach where we are not aware of the fragmented mind just because of conflict. K: Yes. That's right. B: Are we coming to that? K: Coming, yes. I said: What is the source of this conflict? The source is fragmentation, obviously. What brings about fragmentation? What is the cause of it? What is behind it? We said perhaps knowledge. S: Knowledge. K: Knowledge. Psychologically I use knowledge; I think I know myself, when I really don't, because I am changing, moving. Or I use knowledge for my own satisfaction - for my position, for my success, for becoming a great man in the world. I am a great scholar, say. I have read a million books. This gives me position, prestige, a status. So is that it - that fragmentation takes place when there is a desire for security, psychological security, which prevents biological security? S: Right. K: You say right. Therefore security may be one of the factors. Security in knowledge, used wrongly. B: Or could you say that some sort of mistake has been made, that man feels insecure biologically, and he thinks, what shall I do, and he makes a mistake in the sense that he tries to obtain a psychological sense of security - by knowledge? K: By knowledge, yes. S: By knowing, yes. By repeating himself by depending on all these structures. K: One feels secure by having an ideal. S: Right. That is so true. B: But somewhere one asks why the person makes this mistake. In other words if thought - if the mind had been absolutely clear, it would never have done that. S: If the mind had been absolutely clear - but we have just said that there is biological insecurity. That is a fact. B: But that doesn't imply that you have to delude yourself. K: Quite right. Go on further. S: There's that biological fact of my constant uncertainty. The biological fact of constant change. K: That is created through psychological fragmentation. S: My biological uncertainty? K: Of course. I may lose my job, I may have no money tomorrow. B: Now let's look at that. I may have no money tomorrow. You see, that may be an actual fact, but now the question is: What would a man say if his mind were clear, what would be his response? K: He would never be put in that position. S: He wouldn't ask that question. B: But suppose he finds himself without money? K: He would do something. B: His mind won't just go to pieces. S: He won't have to have all the money he thinks he has to have. B: Besides that, he won't go into this well of confusion. K: No, absolutely. S: The problem 99 per cent of the time, I certainly agree, is that we all think we need more than this ideal of what we should have. K: No, sir. We are trying to stick to one point. What is the cause of this fragmentation? S: Right. K: We said knowledge spilling over into the field where it should not enter. B: But why does it do so? K: Why does it do so? That is fairly simple. S: My sense of it from what we have been saying is that it does so in the illusion of security. Thought creates the illusion that there is security. B: Yes, but why doesn't intelligence show that there is no security? S: Why doesn't intelligence show it? K: Can a fragmented mind be intelligent? S: No. B: Well, it resists intelligence. K: It can pretend to be intelligent. B: Yes. But are you saying that once the mind fragments then intelligence is gone? K: Yes. B: But now you are querying this problem. You are also saying that there can be an end to fragmentation. K: That's right. B: That would seem to be a contradiction. K: It looks like that but it is not. S: All I know is fragmentation. K: Therefore... S: That is what I have got. K: Let's stick to it and prove it can end. Go through it. B: But if you say intelligence cannot operate when the mind is fragmented... K: Is psychological security more important than biological security? S: That is an interesting question. K: Go on. S: One thing we have condensed... K: No, I am asking. Don't move away from the question. I am asking: Is psychological security more important than biological security, physical security? S: It isn't but it sounds like it is. K: No, don't move away from it. I am asking. Stick to it. Is it to you? S: I would say yes, psychological seems... B: What is actually true? S: Actually true, no. Biological security is more important. K: Biological? Are you sure? S: No. I think psychological security is what I actually worry about most. K: Psychological security. S: That is what I worry about most. K: Which prevents biological security. S: Right. I've figured that one out now. K: No, no. Because I am seeking psychological security in ideas, in knowledge, in images, in confusions, this prevents me from having biological, physical security - for myself, for my children, for my brothers. I can't have it. Because psychological security says I am a Hindu, a blasted somebody in a little corner. S: No question. I do feel that psychological... K: So can we be free of the desire to be psychologically secure? S: That's right. That is the question. K: Of course it is. S: That's the nub of it, right. K: Last night I was listening to some people arguing on television - the chairman of this, the something of that, talking about Ireland, and various other things. Each man was completely convinced of what he was saying. S: That's right. I am sitting on meetings every week. Each man thinks his category is the most important. K: So man has given more importance to psychological security than to biological, physical security. B: But it is not clear why he should delude himself in this way. K: He has deluded himself because - why, why? S: Images, power. K: No, sir, it is much deeper than that. Why has he given importance to psychological security? S: We seem to think that that is where security is. K: No. Look more into it. The me is the most important thing. S: Right. That is the same thing. K: No, me. My position, my happiness, my money, my house, my wife - me. B: Me. Yes. And isn't it that each person feels he is the essence of the whole? The me is the very essence of the whole. I would feel if the me were gone that the rest wouldn't mean anything. K: That is the whole point. The me gives me complete security, psychologically. B: It seems all-important. Of course. S: All-important. B: Yes, people say if I am sad then the whole world has no meaning - right? S: It is not only that; I am sad if the me is all-important. K: No. We are saying that in the me is the greatest security. S: Right. That is what we think. K: No. Not we think. It is so. B: What do you mean it is so? K: In the world that is what is happening. B: That is what is happening. But it is a delusion. K: We will come to that later. S: I think that is a good point. That it is so; that the me - I like that way of getting at it - the me is what is important. That is all it is. K: Psychologically. S: Psychologically. K. Me my country, my god, my house. S: We have got your point. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART I DIALOGUE 2 2ND CONVERSATION WITH DR. DAVID SHAINBERG AND PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 18TH MAY, 1976 KRISHNAMURTI: May we go on where we left off yesterday? Or would you like to start something new? Dr Bohm: I thought there was a point that wasn't entirely clear about what we were discussing yesterday. We rather accepted that security, psychological security, was wrong, was a delusion, but in general I don't think we made it very clear why we think it is a delusion. You see, most people feel that psychological security is a good thing and quite necessary, and that when it is disturbed, when a person is frightened, or sorrowful even - so disturbed that he might require treatment - he feels that psychological security is necessary before he can even begin to do anything. K: Yes, right. B: I don't think it's at all clear why one should say it is not really as important as physical security. K: I think we have made it fairly clear but let's go into it. Is there really psychological security at all? B: I don't think we discussed that fully yesterday. K: Of course. Nobody accepts that. But we are enquiring into it, going into the problem of it. B: I think that if you told somebody who was feeling very disturbed mentally that there is no psychological security he would just feel worse. K: Collapse. Of course. Dr Shainberg: Right. K: We are talking of fairly sane, rational people. S: OK. K: We are questioning whether there is any psychological security at aIl. Permanency, stability, a sense of well-founded, deep-rooted existence, psychologically... I believe in something... S: ...and that gives me... K: It may be the most foolish belief... S: Right. K: ...a neurotic belief. I believe in it. S: Right. K: And that gives me a tremendous sense of vitality and stability. B: I can think of two examples: one is that if I could really believe that after dying I would go to heaven, make quite sure of it, then I could be very secure anywhere, no matter what happens. S: That would make you feel good. B: Well, I wouldn't really have to worry; it would all be a temporary trouble; I would be pretty sure that in time it was all going to be very good. Do you see? K: Right. That is the whole Asiatic attitude, more or less. B: Or if I am a Communist, I think that in time Communism is going to solve everything; we are going through a lot of troubles now but it is all going to be worthwhile, and in the end everything will be all right. If I could be sure of that then I would feel very secure inside, even if conditions are hard now. S: OK. All right. K: So although one may have these strong beliefs which give one a sense of security, of permanency, we are questioning whether there is such a thing in reality, in actuality... S: Yes, yes. But I want to ask David something. Take a scientist, a guy who is going to his laboratory every day, or take a doctor - is he getting security from the very routinization of his life? K: His knowledge. S: Yes, from his knowledge. B: Well, he makes believe he is learning the permanent laws of nature, really getting something that means something. S: Yes. B: And also getting a position in society - being well known and respected and financially secure. S: He believes that these things will give him security. The mother believes that a child will give her security. K: Don't you have security psychologically? S: Yes. I get a security out of my knowledge, out of my routine, out of my patients, out of seeing my patients, out of my position... B: But there is conflict in that because if I think it over a little bit I doubt it, I question it. I say it doesn't look all that secure, anything may happen. There may be a war, there may be a depression, there may be a flood. S: Right. K: There may be sane people all of a sudden in the world! B: So I say there is conflict and confusion in my security because I am not sure about it. But if I had an absolute belief in god and heaven... K: This is so obvious! S: It is obvious. I agree with you it is obvious but I think it has to be really felt. K: But, sir, you, Dr Shainberg, you are the victim. S: I'll be the victim. K: For the moment. Don't you have strong belief S: Right. K: Don't you have a sense of permanency somewhere inside you? S: I think I do. K: Psychologically? S: Yes, I do. I mean I have a sense of permanency about my intention. K: Intention? S: I mean my work. K: Your knowledge? S: ...my knowledge, my... K: ...status... S: ...my status, the continuity of my interest. You know what I mean? K: Yes. S: There is a sense of security and the feeling that I can help someone. K: Yes. S: And that I can do my work. K: That gives you security, psychological security. S: There is something about it that is secure. What am I saying when I say "security"? I am saying that I won't be lonely. K: No, no. Feeling secure. That you have something that is imperishable. S: Which means - no I don't feel it that way. I feel it more in the sense of what is going to happen in time. What am I going to have to depend on? - what is my time going to be? - am I going to be lonely, is it going to be empty? K: No, sir. S: Isn't that security? K: As Dr Bohm pointed out, if one has a strong belief in reincarnation, as the whole Asiatic world has, then it doesn't matter what happens. You may be miserable this life but next life you will be happier. So that gives you a great sense of "this is unimportant, but that is important". S: Right, right. K: And that gives me a sense of great comfort, for this is a transient world anyhow and eventually I will get to something permanent. S: That is in the Asiatic world; but I think in the Western world you don't have that... K: Oh, yes, you have it. S: ...with a different focus. K: Of course. B: It is different but we have always had the search for security. S: Right, right. But what do you think security is? I mean, for instance, you became a scientist, you have your own laboratory, you pick up books all the time - right? What the hell do you call security? K: Having something... S: Knowledge? K: Something which you can cling to and which is not perishable. it may perish eventually but for the time being, it is there to hold on to. B: You feel that it is permanent. Like people in the past who used to accumulate gold because gold is the symbol of the imperishable. S: We still have people who accumulate gold... we have business men, they have got money. B: You feel it is really there. It will never corrode, it will never vanish and you can count on it. S: So it is something that I can count on. K: Count on, hold on to, cling to, be attached to. S: The me. K: Exactly. S: I know that I am a doctor. I can depend on that. K: Experience. And on the other hand, tradition. S: Tradition. I know that if I do this with a patient I will get a certain result - I may not get any good results but I'll get this result. K: So I think that is fairly clear. B: Yes, it is clear enough that this is part of our society. K: Part of our conditioning. B: Conditioning, that we want something secure and permanent. At least we think so. S: I think there is a feeling in the West of wanting immortality. K: That's the same thing. B: Wouldn't you say that in so far as thought can project time, that it wants to be able to project everything as far as possible into the future? In other words the anticipation of what is coming is already the present feeling. If you anticipate that something bad may come you already feel bad. K: That's right. B: Therefore you would want to get rid of that. S: So you anticipate that it won't happen. B: That it will all be good. S: Right. B: I would say that security would be the anticipation that everything will be good in the future... K: Good. S: It will continue. B: It will become better; if it is not so good now it will certainly become better. S: So then security is becoming? K: Yes, becoming, perfecting, becoming. S: I see patients all the time. Their projected belief is, I will become - I will find somebody to love me; I see patients who say, "I will become the chief of the department", "I will become the most famous doctor", "I will become the best tennis player". The best. K: Of course, of course. B: Well, it seems it is all focused on anticipating that life is going to be good, when you say that. K: Yes, life is going to be good. B: But it seems to me you wouldn't raise the question unless you had a lot of experience that life is not so good. In other words it is a reaction to having had so much experience of disappointment, of suffering... K: Would you say that we are not conscious of the whole movement of thought? B: It is only natural to feel I have had a lot of experience of suffering and disappointment and danger, and now I would like to be able to anticipate that everything is going to be good. At first sight it would seem that that is quite natural. But now you are saying it is not. K: We are saying there is no such thing as psychological security. We have defined what we mean by security. We don't have to beat it over and over. S: No, I think we have got that. B: Yes, but is it clear now that these hopes are really vain hopes. That should be obvious, should it? K: Sir, there is death at the end of everything. B: Yes. K: You want to be secure for the next ten years, that is all, or fifty years. Afterwards it doesn't matter. Or if it does matter you believe in something that there is god, that you will sit on his right hand or whatever it is you believe. So I am trying to find out, not only that there is no permanency psychologically, but that there is no tomorrow psychologically. B: That hasn't yet come out. K: Of course, of course. B: When we say empirically that we know these hopes for security are false because first of all you say there is death, secondly you can't count on anything; materially everything changes. K: Everything is in flux. B: Mentally everything in your head is changing all the time. You can't count on your own feelings, you can't count on enjoying a certain thing that you enjoy now, you can't count on being healthy, you can't count on money. K: You can't rely on your wife, you can't rely - on anything. S: Right. B: So that is a fact. But I am saying that you are suggesting something deeper. K: Yes, sir. B: But we don't base ourselves only on that observation. K: No, that is very superficial. S: Yes, I am with you there. K: So, if there is no real security, basic, deep, then is there a tomorrow, psychologically? Then you take away all hope. If there is no tomorrow you take away all hope. B: What you mean by tomorrow is the tomorrow in which things will get better? K: Better, more - greater success, greater understanding, greater... B:.... more love. K:.... more love, always that. S: I think that is a little quick. I think that there is a jump there because as I hear you, I hear you saying there is no security. K: But it is so. S: But for me to say - to really say, "I know there is no security"... K: Why don't you say that? S: That is what I am getting at. Why don't I say that? B: Well isn't it a fact - just an observed fact that there isn't anything you can count on psychologically? S: Right. But you see I think there is an action there. Krishnaji is asking, "Why don't you say there is no security?" Why don't I? K: Do you, when you hear there is no security, see it as an abstracted idea or as an actual fact? Like that table, like your hand here, or those flowers? S: I think it mostly becomes an idea. K: That is just it. B: Why should it become an idea? S: That, I think, is the question. Why does it become an idea? K: Is it part of your training? Part - yes. Part of my conditioning. S: Part of a real objection to seeing things as they are. S: That's right. B: If you try to see that there is no security, something seems to be there which is trying to protect itself - let us say that it seems to be a fact that the self is there. Do you see what I am driving at? K: Of course. B: And if the self is there it requires security, and this creates a resistance to accepting as a fact that there is no security, and puts it as an idea only. It seems that the factuality of the self being there has not been denied. The apparent factuality. K: Is it that you refuse to see things as they are? Is it that one refuses to see that one is stupid? - not you - I mean one is stupid. To acknowledge that one is stupid is already... S: Yes. You say to me, "You refuse to acknowledge that you are stupid" - let us say it is me - that means then that I have got to do something... K: No. Not yet. Action comes through perception, not through ideation. S: I am glad you are getting into this. B: Doesn't it seem that as long as there is the sense of self, the self must say that it is perfect? K: Of course, of course. S: Now what makes it so hard for me to destroy this need for security? Why can't I do it? K: No, no. It is not how you can do it. You see you are already entering into the realm of action. S: That I think is the crucial point. K: I say first see it. And from that perception action is inevitable. S: All right. Now to see insecurity. Do you see insecurity? Do you actually see it? K: No. No. No. Do you actually see that you are clinging to something, some belief which gives you security? S: OK. K: I cling to this house. I am safe. It gives me a sense of pride, a sense of possession; it gives me a sense of physical and therefore psychological security. S: Right, and a place to go. K: A place to go. But I may walk out and be killed and I have lost everything. There might be an earthquake and everything gone. Do you actually see it? The seeing, the perception, of that is total action with regard to security. S: I can see that that is the total action. K: No, that is an idea, still. S: Yes, you're right. I begin to see that this whole structure is the way I see everything in the world - right? I begin to see her, the wife, I begin to see these people - they fit into that structure. K: You see them, and your wife, through the image you have about them. S: Right. And through the function they are seeing. B: Their relation to you, yes. K: Yes. S: That is right. That's the function they serve. K: The picture, the image, the conclusion is the security. S: That's right. B: Yes, but why does it present itself as so real? I see that there is a thought, a process which is driving on, continually... K: Are you asking why has this image, this conclusion, become so fantastically real? B: Yes. It seems to be standing there real, and everything is referred to it. K: More real than the marbles, than the hills. B: Than anything, yes. S: More real than anything. K: Why? S: It is hard to say why. Because it would give me security. K: No. We are much further than that. B: Because, suppose abstractly and ideally you can see the whole thing as no security at all. I mean just looking at it professionally and abstractly. S: That is putting the cart before the horse. B: No, I am just saying that if it were some simple matter, with that much proof you would have already accepted it. S: Right. B: But when it comes to this, no proof seems to work. S: Right. Nothing seems to work. B: You say all that, but here I am presented with the solid reality of myself and my security and there is a sort of reaction which seems to say, well that may be possible but it is really only words. The real thing is me. S: But there is more than that. Why has it such potency? I mean, it seems to take on such importance. B: Well, maybe. But I am saying that the real thing is me, which is all important. S: There is no question about it. Me, me - me is important. K: Which is an idea. B: We can see abstractly that it is just an idea. The question is how do you break into this process? K: I think we can break into it, or break through it, or get beyond it only through perception. B: The trouble is that all that we have been talking about is in the form of ideas. They may be correct ideas but they won't break into this. S: Right. B: Because this dominates the whole of thought. S: That is right. I mean you could even ask why are we here. We are here because we want to... K: No, sir. Look: If I feel my security lies in some image I have, a picture, a symbol, a conclusion or an ideal, I would put it not as an abstraction but bring it down. You see it is so. I believe in something. Actually. Now I say, why do I believe? B: Well have you actually done that? K: No, I haven't because I have no beliefs. I have no picture, I don't go in for all those kinds of games. I said `if'. S: If, right. K: Then I would bring the abstracted thing into a perceptive reality. S: To see my belief, is that it? K: See it. S: To see my belief. Right. To see that `me' in operation. K: Yes, if you like to put it that way. Sir, wait a minute. Take a simple thing. Have you a conclusion about something? A concept? S: Yes. K: Now wait a bit. How is that brought about? Take a simple thing - a concept that I am an Englishman. B: The trouble is that we probably don't feel attached to such concepts. K: All right. S: Let's take one that is real for me. Take the one about me being a doctor. K: A concept. S: That is a concept. That is a conclusion based on training, based on experience, based on the enjoyment of the work. K: Which means what? A doctor means - the conclusion means he is capable of certain activities. S: Right, OK. Let's take it. Concretely. K: Work at it. S: So now I have got this concrete fact that I have had this training, that I get this pleasure from the work, I get a kind of feedback... K: Yes, sir. Move. S: All right. Now that is my belief. That belief that I am a doctor is based on all that, that concept. K: Yes. S: OK. Now I continually act to continue that. K: Yes, sir, that is understood. Therefore you have a conclusion. You have a concept that you are a doctor. S: Right. K: Based on knowledge, experience, everyday activity. S: Right. K: Pleasure and all the rest of it. S: Right. K: So what is real in that? What is true in that? Real, meaning actual. S: Well that is a good question. What is actual? K: Wait. What is actual in that? Your training. S: Right. K: Your knowledge. S: Right. K: Your daily operation. S: Right. K: That's all. The rest is a conclusion. B: But what is the rest? K: The rest: I am very much better than somebody else. B: Or else this thing is going to keep me occupied in a good way. K: In a good way. I will never be lonely. S: Right. B: But isn't there also a certain fear that if I don't have this then things will be pretty bad? K: Of course. S: Right, OK. B: And that fear seems to spur me on... K: Of course. And if the patients don't turn up... B: Then I have no money, fear. K: Fear. S: No activity. K: So loneliness. So be occupied. S: Be occupied doing this, completing this concept. OK. Do you realize how important that is to all people, to be occupied? K: Of course, sir. S: Do you get the meat of that? K: Of course. S: How important it is to people to be occupied. I can see them running around. K: Sir, a housewife is occupied. Remove that occupation and she says: Please... B: "What shall I do?" S: We know that as a fact. Since we put electrical equipment into the houses the women are going crazy, they have nothing to do with their time. K: The result of this is the effect on the children - don't talk to me about it. S: Right, OK. Let's go on. Now we have got this fact. K: Now is this occupation an abstraction? Or actuality? S: Now this is an actuality. I am actually occupied. K: No. B: What is it? K: You are actually occupied - eh? S: Yes. K: Daily. S: Daily. B: Well what do you really mean by occupied? S: What do you mean? B: Well, I can say I am actually engaged in all these occupations - that is clear. I mean I am seeing patients as the doctor. S: You are doing your thing. B: I am doing my thing, getting my reward and so on. Being occupied seems to me to have a psychological meaning. There was something I once saw on television about a woman who was highly disturbed; it showed on the electro-encephalograph, but when she was occupied doing arithmetical sums the electro-encephalograph went beautifully smooth. She stopped doing the sums and it went all over the place. Therefore she had to keep on doing something to keep the brain working right. K: Which means what? B: Well what does it mean? K: A mechanical process. S: That's right. B: It seems the brain starts jumping all over the place unless it has this thing. K: A constant... B: Content. K: So you have reduced yourself to a machine. S: Don't say it! No,it's not fair. But it is true. I have, I mean I feel there is a mechanical... K: ...response. S: Oh, yes - commitment. K: Of course. B: But why does the brain begin to go so wild when it is not occupied? That seems to be a common experience. K: Because in occupation there is security. B: There is order. K: Order. S: In occupation there is a kind of mechanical order. B: Right. So we feel our security really means we want order, is that right? K: That's it. B: We want order inside the brain. We want to be able to project order into the future, for ever. S: That's right. But would you say that you can get it by mechanical order? B: Then you get dissatisfied with it; you say, "I am getting sick of this mechanical life, I want something more interesting." K: That is where the gurus come in! B: Then the thing goes wild again. The mechanical order won't satisfy it. It works only for a little while. S: I don't like the way something is slipping in there. We are going right from one thing to another. I am working for satisfaction. B: I am looking for some regular order which is good, do you see? And I think that by my job as a doctor I am getting it. S: Yes. B: But after a while I begin to feel it is too repetitious. I am getting bored. S: OK. But suppose that doesn't happen? Suppose some people remain satisfied with their jobs? B: Well they don't really. I mean then they become dull. K: Quite. Mechanical. And you stop that mechanism and the brain goes wild. S: That's right. B: Right. So they may feel they are a bit dull and they would like some entertainment, or something more interesting and exciting. And therefore there is a contradiction, there is conflict and confusion. K: Sir, Dr Shainberg is asking what is disturbing him. He feels he hasn't got his teeth into it. S: You are right. K: What is disturbing you? S: Well, it is this feeling that people will say that... K: No, you say,you. S: Let's say I can get this order from occupying myself with something I like. K: Go on. Proceed. S: I do something I like and it gets boring, let's say, or it might get repetitious, but then I will find new parts of it. And then I'll do that some more because that gives me pleasure, you see. I mean I get a satisfaction out of it. B: Right. S: So I keep doing more of that. K: You move from one mechanical process, get bored with it, and move to another mechanical process. S: That's right. K: Get bored with it and keep going. S: That's right. That's it. K: And you call that living. S: That is what I call living. B: I see that the trouble is that I now try to be sure that I can keep on doing this, because I can always anticipate a future when I won't be able to do it. I will be a bit too old for it, or else I'll fail. I'll lose the job or something. So I still have insecurity in that order. K: Essentially it is mechanical disorder. S: Masking itself as order. K: Now, wait a minute. Do you see this? Or is it still an abstraction? Because you know, as Dr Bohm will tell you, idea means observation, the original meaning is observation. Do you observe this? S: I see that, yes. B: Then the point is, are you driven to this because you are frightened of the instability of the brain? If you are doing something because you are trying to run away from the instability of the brain, that is already disorder. S: Yes, yes. B: In other words that will be merely masking disorder. S: Yes. Well then you are suggesting that this is the natural disorder of the brain? B: No, I am saying that the brain without occupation tends to go into disorder. K: In a mechanical process the brain feels secure, and when that mechanical process is disturbed it becomes insecure and disordered. S: Then gets caught up again in the mechanical process. K: Again and again and again and again. S: It never stays with that insecurity. K: No. When it perceives this process it is still mechanical. And therefore there is disorder. B: The question is why does the brain get caught in mechanism? K: Because it is the safest, the most secure way of living. B: Well, it appears that way, but it is actually very... K: Not appears, it is so for the time being. B: For the time being, but in the long run it is not. S: Are you saying we are time-bound, conditioned to be time-bound? K: No. Conditioned by our tradition, by our education, by the culture we live in, to operate mechanically. S: We take the easy way. K: The easy way. B: At the beginning the brain makes a mistake, let's say, and says "This is safer" - but somehow it fails to be able to see that it has made a mistake; it holds to this mistake. In the beginning you might call it an innocent mistake; it says, "This looks safer and I will follow it" and it continues in this mechanical process rather than seeing that it is wrong. K: You are asking: Why doesn't it see that this mechanical process is essentially disorder? B: That it is essentially disorder and dangerous. K: Dangerous. B: It is totally delusory. S: Why isn't there some sort of feedback? In other words I do something and it comes out wrong. At some point I ought to realize that. Why haven't I seen that my life is mechanical? K: Now wait. You see it? S: But I don't. K: Wait. Why is it mechanical? S: Well, it is mechanical because it is all action and reaction. K: Why is it mechanical? S: It is repetitious. K: It is mechanical. S: It is mechanical. I want it to be easy. I feel that it gives me the most security to keep it mechanical. I get a boundary. It is mechanical because it is repetitious... K: You haven't answered my question. S: I know I haven't! I am not sure what your question is. K: Why has it become mechanical? S: Why? B: Why does it remain mechanical? K: Why does it become and remain mechanical? S: I think it remains mechanical... it is the thing we began with. K: No. Pursue it. Why does it remain mechanical? S: What has caused us to accept this mechanical way of living? I am not sure I can answer that. K: Look. Wouldn't you be frightened? S: I would see the uncertainty. K: No, no. If the mechanical life one lives suddenly stopped, wouldn't you be frightened? S: Yes. B: Wouldn't there be some danger? K: That, of course. There is a danger that things might... S: ...go to pieces. K: ...go to pieces. S: It is deeper than that. K: Wait. Find out. Come on. S: It is not just that there is a genuine danger, that I would be frightened. It feels like things take on a terribly, moment-by moment effect. K: No, sir. Total order would give complete security, wouldn't it? S: Yes. K: The brain wants total order. S: Right. K: Otherwise it can't function properly. Therefore it accepts the mechanical, hoping it won't lead to disaster. Hoping it will find order in that. B: Could you say that perhaps in the beginning the brain accepted this not knowing that this mechanicalism would bring disorder - that it just went into it in an innocent state? K: Yes. B: And now it is caught in a trap, and somehow it maintains this disorder, it doesn't want to get out of it. K: Because it is frightened of greater disorder. B: Yes. It says all that I've built up may go to pieces. In other words I am not in the same situation as when I first went into the trap because now I have built up a great structure. I'm afraid that structure will go to pieces. K: Yes, but what I am trying to get at is that the brain needs this order, otherwise it can't function. It finds order in the mechanical process because it is trained from childhood - do as you are told, etc. There is a conditioning going on right from the start to live a mechanical life. B: And at the same time the fear of giving up this mechanism. K: Of course, of course. B: In other words you are thinking all the time that without this mechanism everything will go to pieces, especially the brain. K: Which means the brain must have order. And finds order in a mechanical way. Now do you see that actually the mechanical way of living leads to disorder? Which is tradition. If I live entirely in the past, which I think is very orderly, what takes place? I am already dead and I can't meet anything. S: I am repeating myself always, right? K: So I say, "Please don't disturb my tradition!" Every human being says, "I have found something which gives me order, a belief, a hope, this, or that, so leave me alone." S: Right. K: And life isn't going to leave him alone. So then he gets frightened and establishes another mechanical habit. Now do you see this whole thing? And therefore an instant action clearing it all away, and therefore order. The brain says at last I have an order, which is absolutely indestructible. B: That doesn't follow logically. K: It would follow logically if you go into it. B: Go into it. Can we reach a point where it really follows necessarily? K: I think we can only go into it if you perceive the mechanical structure which the brain has developed, attached and cultivated. S: Can I share with you something I see as you are talking? I see it like this. Don't get impatient with me too quickly. I see it this way. Flashing through my mind are various kinds of interchange between people. The way they talk, the way I talk to them at a party. It is all about what happened before. You find them telling you who they are, in terms of their past. I can see what they will be. Like one guy who said, "I have just published my thirteenth book." It is very important to him that I get that information, see. And I see this. And I see this elaborate structure. This guy has got it into his head that I am going to think this about him, and then he is going to go to his university and they will think that about him. He is always living like that and the whole structure is elaborate -right? K: Are you doing that? S: When did you stop beating your wife! Of course I am doing it. I am doing it right now. And seeing the structure right now in all of us. K: But do you see that fragmentary action is mechanical action? S: That's right. It is there, Krishnaji. That is the way we are. K: And therefore political action can never solve any human problems. Nor can the scientist - he is another fragment. S: But do you realize what you are saying? Let us really look at what you are saying. This is the way it is. This is the way life is. K: That's right. S: Right? This is the way it is. Years and years and years... K: Therefore why don't you change it? S: But this is the way it is. We live in terms of our structures. We live in terms of history. We live in terms of our mechanics. We live in terms of our form. This is the way we live. K: It means that when the past meets the present and ends there, a totally different thing takes place. S: Yes. But the past doesn't meet the present so often. I mean... K: I mean it is taking place now. S: Now. Right now. Right. We are saying it now. K: Therefore can you stop there? S: We must see it totally. K: No. The fact. The simple fact. The past meets the present. That is a fact. B: Let us say how does the past meet the present? Let us go into that. S: How does the past meet the present? B: Well,just briefly, I think that when the past meets the present the past stops acting. What it means is that thought stops acting so that order comes about. S: Do you think the past meets the present, or the present meets the past? K: How do you meet me? S: I meet you in the present. K: No. How do you meet me? With all the memories, all the images, the reputation, the words, the pictures, the symbols - with all that, which is the past, you meet me now. S: That's right. That's right. I come to you with a... K: The past is meeting the present. S: And then? K: Ends there. Does not move forward. S: Can it stop? What is the past meeting present? What is that action? K: I will show it to you. I meet you with the past, my memories, but you might have changed in the meantime. So I never meet you. I meet you with the past. S: Right. That is a fact. K: That is a fact. Now if I don't have that movement going on... S: But I do. K: Of course you do. But I say that that is disorder. I can't meet you then. S: Right. How do you know that? K: I don't know it. I only know the fact that when the past meets the present and continues, it is one of the factors of time, movement, bondage, fear, and so on. If, when the past meets the present, one sees this, one is fully aware of this, completely aware of this movement, then it stops. Then I meet you as though for the first time, then there is something fresh. It is like a new flower coming out. S: Yes. K: I think we will go on this afternoon. We haven't really tackled the root of all this. The root, the cause, of all this disturbance, this turmoil, travail and anxiety. B: Why should the brain be in this wild disorder? K: I know, wild. You, Dr Shainberg, who are a doctor, an analyst, you have to ask that fundamental question - Why? Why do human beings live this way? THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART I DIALOGUE 3 3RD CONVERSATION WITH DR. DAVID SHAINBERG AND PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 18TH MAY, 1976 Krishnamurti: Shall we start where we left off? We were asking, weren't we, why do human beings live this way? Dr Shainberg: What is the root? K: The turmoil, the confusion, the sorrow behind it all, the conflict, the violence. And so many people offer different ways of solving the problems - the gurus, the priests all over the world, the thousands of books, everybody offering a new solution, a new method, a new way of solving the problems. And I am sure this has been going on for a million years. "Do this and you will be all right. Do that and you will be all right." But nothing seems to have succeeded in making man live in order, happily, intelligently, without this chaotic activity going on. Why do we human beings live this way - in this appalling misery? Why? S: Well, I have often said they do it because the very sorrow, the very turmoil, the very problems themselves, give them a sense of security. Dr Bohm: I don't really think so. I think people just get used to it, Whatever happens you get used to it and you come to miss it after a while just because you are used to it. But that doesn't explain why it is there. K: I was reading the other day that in 5,000 years there have been 5,000 wars - and we are still going on. S: That's right. A guy said to me once that he wanted to go to Vietnam to fight because otherwise his life was every night at the bar. K: I know, but that isn't the reason. Is it that we like it? S: It is not that we like it; it is almost that we like not liking it. K: Have we all become neurotic? S: Yes. The whole thing is neurotic. K: Are you saying that? S: Yes. The whole of society is neurotic. K: Which means that entire humanity is neurotic? S: I think so. This is the argument we have all the time: Is society sick? And then if you say society is sick, what is the value you are using for comparison? K: Yourself, who is neurotic. S: Right. K: So when you are faced with this, that human beings live this way and have accepted it for millennia, you say, "Well they are all half crazy - demented, corrupt from top to bottom", and then I come along and ask why? S: Why do we keep it up? Why are we crazy? I see it with my children. They spend 50 hours a week in front of the television box. That is their whole life. My children laugh at me, all their friends are doing it. K: No, moving beyond that - why? S: Why? Without it - what? K: No: not without it, what. S: That is what we run into. B: No that is very secondary. You see, as we were saying this morning, I think we get to depend on it to occupy us, and war would seem some release from the boredom of the pub, or whatever, but that is secondary. K: And also when I go to fight a war, all responsibility is taken away from me. Somebody else becomes responsible - the general.... S: Right. B: In the old days people used to think that war would be a glorious thing. When the first world war started in England everybody was in a state of high elation. K: So looking at this panorama of horror - I feel this very strongly because I travel all over the place and I see this extraordinary phenomenon going on everywhere - I say why do people live this way, accept these things? We have become cynical. B: Nobody believes anything can be done about it. S: That's it. K: Is it that we feel that we cannot do anything about it? S: That's for sure. B: That's been an old story. People say human nature... K: ...can never be altered. B: Yes. That is not new at all. K: Not new. S: But it's certainly true that people feel - let's not say people -we feel, like I said this morning, that this is the way it is, this is the way we live. K: I know, but why don't you change it? You see your son looking at the television for 50 hours; you see your son going off to war, killed, maimed, blinded - for what? B: Many people have said that they don't accept that human nature is this way, that they will try to change it, and it hasn't worked. The Communists tried it; others tried it. There has been so much bad experience, which all adds up to the idea that human nature doesn't change. S: You know when Freud came along, he made history: he never said psychoanalysis is to change people. He said we can only study people. K: I am not interested in that. I know that. I don't have to read Freud, or Jung, or you, or anybody, it is there in front of me. S: Right. So let's say we know this fact about people, they don't try to change. K: So what is preventing them? B: People have tried to change in many cases, but... S: OK. But now let's say that they don't try to change. K: They do. In a dozen ways they try to change. S: Right. K: But essentially they are the same. B: You see, I think people cannot find out how to change human nature. K: Is that it? B: Well, whatever methods have been tried are entirely... S: is that it? Or is it the fact that the very nature of the way they want to change is part of the process itself B: No. K: That's what he is saying. B: No, but I am saying both. I say the first part is that whatever people have tried has not been guided by a correct understanding of human nature. S: So it is guided by this very process itself. Right? By the incorrectness? B: Yes, let's take the Marxists who say that human nature can be improved, but only when the whole economical and political structure has been altered. K: They have tried to alter it but human nature... B: They can't alter it, you see, because human nature is such that they can't really alter it. S: They make a mechanical change. K: Look at it, sir: take yourself - sorry to be personal - but if you don't mind, you be the victim. S: Pig in the middle. K: Right. Why don't you change? S: Well, the immediate feel of it is that there is still... I guess I shall have to say there is some sort of false security - the fragmentation, the immediate pleasures that are got from the fragmentation. In other words there is still that movement of fragmentation. That's how come there is not the change. It is not seeing the whole thing. K: Are you saying that political action, religious action, social action, are all fighting each other? And we are that. S: Right. K: Is that what you are saying? S: Yes, I am saying that. My immediate response is: Why don't I change? What is it that keeps me from seeing the total? I don't know. I keep coming up with a kind of feeling that I am getting something from not changing. K: Is it the entity that wishes to change - which sets the pattern or change, and therefore the pattern is always the same under a different colour? I don't know if I am making myself clear? S: Could you say it another way? K: I want to change, and I plan what to change, how to bring about this change. S: Right. K: The planner is always the same. S: That's right. K: But the patterns change. S: That's right. Yes. I have an image of what I want. K: So the patterns change, but I, who want to change, create the patterns of change. S: That's right. K: So I am the old and the patterns are the new but the old is always conquering the new. S: Right. B: But when I do that I don't feel that I am the old... K: ...of course. B: I really don't feel I am involved in that old stuff I want to change. K: It has been said a hundred million times. Do this and you will be transformed. You try to do it but the centre is always the same. B: And each person who does it feels that it has never happened before. K: Never before. Yes. My experience through reading some book is entirely different, but the experiencer is the same... B: The same old thing, right. K: I think that is one of the root causes of it. S: Yes, yes. B: It is a kind of sleight-of-hand trick whereby the thing which is causing the trouble is put into the position of the thing that is tryng to make the change. It is a deception. K: I am deceiving myself all the time by saying I am going to change that, become that. You read some book and say, "Yes how true that is, I am going to live according to that." But the me who is going to live according to that is the same old me. S: Right, yes. That's right. We run into this with patients. For instance, the patient will say, the doctor is going to be the one who is going to help me. But when I see that that doctor is... K: ...is like me. S: ...is like me, he is not going to be able to help. Then the patient goes to someone else - most of them go to another therapy. K: Another guru. After all they are all men too. A new guru, or an old guru - it is all the same old stuff. S: You are really getting at the issue, that the root is this belief that something, someone, can help you. K: No, the root remains the same - and we trim the branches. B: I think the root is something we don't see because we put it in the position of the one who is supposed to be seeing. K: Yes. S: Say that another way. B: It is a sort of a conjuring trick. We don't see the root because the root is put into the position of somebody who is looking for the root. I don't know if you see it. K: Yes. The root says I am looking for the root. S: Right. B: It is like the man who says he is looking for his glasses, and he has got them on. S: Or like that Sufi story - you know the story? - a guy is looking for a key he has lost. The Sufi comes along and sees the guy crawling around under the lamppost, and he says, "What are you doing?" "I am looking for my key." "Did you lose it here?" "No, I lost it over there but there's more light over here." B: We throw the light on the other part. K: Yes, sir. So if I want to change I don't follow anybody because they are all like the rest of the gang. I don't accept any authority in all this. Authority arises only when I am confused. When I am in disorder. S: That's right. K: So I say, can I completely change at the very root? B: Let's look at that: there seems confusion in the language because you say "I". K: Confusion in the language, I know. B: You say I am going to change and it is not clear what you mean by I. K: The I is the root. B: The I is the root, so how can I change? K: That is the whole point. B: You see the language is confusing because you say I have got to change at the root, but I am the root. So what is going to happen? S: What is going to happen, yes? K: No, no. How am I not to be I? B: Well, what do you mean by that? S: How am I not to be I? Let's roll it back a second. You state you are not going to accept any authority. K: Who is my authority? Who? They have all told me, "Do this, do that, do the other. Read this book and you will change. Follow this system, you will change. Identify yourself with god, you will change." But I remain exactly as I was before - in sorrow, in misery, in confusion, looking for help, and I choose the help which suits me most. Umpteen different ways have been tried to change man. Rewarding him, punishing him, promising him. Nothing has brought about this miraculous change. And it is a miraculous change. S: It would be, yes, yes. K: It is so. So, seeing this, I reject all authority. It is a reasonable, sane rejection. Now how do I proceed? I have got 50 years to live. What is the correct action? S: What is the correct action to live properly? K: If everybody said, "I can't help you, you have to do it yourself, look at yourself", then the whole thing would begin to act. Here is a man who says, "I am neurotic and I won't go to any other kind of neurotic to make me sane". What does he do? He doesn't accept authority, because he has created the authority out of his disorder, B: Well, that is merely the hope that somebody knows what to do. K: Yes. B: Because I feel this chaos is too much for me and I just assume that somebody else can tell me what to do. But that comes out of this confusion. S: Yes the disorder creates the authority. K: In the school here I have been saying: If you behave properly there is no authority. The behaviour we have all agreed to -punctuality, cleanliness, this or that: if you really see it you have no authority. S: Yes, I see that. That I think is a key point. That the disorder itself creates the need for authority. B: It doesn't actually create a need for it. It creates among people the impression that they need authority to correct the disorder. That would be more exact. K: So let's start from there. In the rejection of authority I am beginning to become sane. I say that now I know I am neurotic what shall I do? What is correct action in my life? Can I ever find it - being neurotic? S: Right. K: I can't. So I won't ask what is the right action - I will now say: Can I free my mind from being neurotic? Is it possible? I won't go to jerusalem, I won't go to Rome, I won't go to any doctors. Because I am very serious now. I am deadly serious because this is my life. B: You have to be so serious because of the immense pressure to escape... K: I won't. B: ...you won't, but I am saying that one will feel at this juncture that there will probably be an intense pressure towards escape, saying this is too much. K: No. No, sir. You see what happens... S: What happens? K: ...when I reject authority I have much more energy. B: Yes, if you reject authority. K: Because I am now concentrated to find out for myself. I am not looking to anybody. S: That's right. In other words, I then have to be really open to "what is", that is all I have got. K: So what shall I do? S: When I am really open to "what is"? K: Not open. Here I am, here is a human being, caught in all this, what shall he do? - rejecting all authority, knowing that social discipline is immoral... S: Then there is intense alertness... K: No. Tell me. Tell me - you are a doctor, tell me what I am to do. I reject you. S: Right. K: Because you are not my doctor, you are not my authority. S: Right. K: You can't tell me what to do, because you are confused yourself S: Right. K: So you have no right to tell me what to do. So I come to you as a friend, and say let's find out. Because you are serious and I am serious. Let's see how... S: ...we can work together. K: No, no, be careful. I am not working together. S: You are not going to work together? K: No. We are investigating together. Working together means co-operation. S: Right. K: I am not co-operating. I say you are like me. What are we going to co-operate with? S: In order to co-operatively investigate. K: No. Because you are like me, confused, miserable, unhappy, neurotic. S: Right, right. K: So I say, how can we co-operate? We can only co-operate in neuroticism. S: That's right. So what are we going to do? K: So can we investigate together? S: How can we investigate together if we are both neurotic? K: I say look, I am going first to see in what ways I am neurotic. S: OK. Let's look at it. K: Yes, look at it. In what way am I neurotic - a human being, who comes from New York, or Tokyo, or Delhi, or Moscow, or wherever it is? He says, I know I am neurotic, the leaders of the world are neurotic and I am part of it - I am the world and the world is me - so I can't look to anybody. Do you see what that does? S: It puts you straight up there in front. K: It gives you a tremendous sense of integrity. S: Right. You have to fall on your hands and run with it. K: Now can I - I being a human being - can I look at my neuroticism? Is it possible to see my neuroticism? What is neuroticism? What makes me neurotic? All the things that have been put into me, which make the me. Can my consciousness empty all that? S: Your consciousness is that thought. K: Of course. B: Is it only that? K: For the moment I am limiting it to that. B: That is my consciousness. That proliferation of my fragmentation, my thought, is my neuroticism. Isn't that right? K: Of course. It is a tremendous question, you follow? Can I, can the consciousness of man, which began five, ten million years ago, with all the things that have been put into it, generation after generation, generation after generation, from the beginning until now - can you take the whole of it and look at it? S: Can you take the whole of it - that's not clear. How can you take the whole of it and look at it? B: It seems there's a language problem there: You say you are that, how can you look at it? K: I'll show you in a minute. We'll go into it. B: I mean there is a difficulty in stating it. K: I know, stating it. The words are wrong. B: Yes, the words are wrong. So we shouldn't take these words too literally. K: Not too literally, of course. B: Could we say that the words can be used flexibly? K: No, the word is not the thing. B: But we are using words and the question is how are we to understand them? You see they are in some way an... K: ...an impediment and... B: ...in some way a clue to what we are talking about. It seems to me that one trouble with words is the way we take them. We take them to mean something very fixed. K: Now, can you look at it without the word? Is that possible? The word is not the thing. The word is a thought. And as a human being I realize I am neurotic - neurotic in the sense that I believe, I live in conclusions, in memories, which are neurotic processes. S: In words. K: In words. Words, pictures and reality. I believe in something. My belief is very real; it may be illusory - all beliefs are illusory but because I believe so strongly they are real to me. B: Right. K: So can I look at the nature of the belief, how it arose - look at it? Can you look at that fact that you have a belief. Whatever it is, god, the State, or whatever. S: But I believe it is true. K: No, no. Can you look at that belief. S: There is a belief and not a fact. K: Ah, no. It is a reality to you when you believe in it. S: Right, but how am I going to look at it if I really believe it? I say there is a god. Now you are telling me to look at my belief in the god. K: Why do you believe? Who asked you to believe? What is the necessity of god? Not that I am an atheist, but I am asking you. S: God is there for me, if I believe. K: Then there is no investigation, it has stopped, you have blocked yourself; you have shut the door. S: That's right. But you see we have got such beliefs. How can we get at this? Because I think we have loads of these unconscious beliefs that we don't really shake. Like the belief in the me. B: I think a deeper question is how the mind sets up reality. I mean, if I look at things I may think they are real. That may be an illusion but when it comes it seems real. Even with objects, you can say a word and it becomes real when you describe it that way. And therefore in some way the word sets up in the brain a construction of reality. Then everything is referred to that construction of reality. S: How are we to investigate that? K: What created that reality? Would you say that everything thought has created is a reality - except nature? B: Thought didn't create nature. K: No, of course not. B: Can't we put it that thought can describe nature. K: Yes, thought can describe nature - in poetry... B: And also in imagination. K: Imagination. Can we say that whatever thought has put together is reality? The chair, the table, all these electric lights, nature - thought hasn't created nature but it can describe it. B: And also make theories about it. K: Make theories, yes. And also the illusion thought has created is the reality. S: Right. B: But doesn't this construction of reality have its place, because... K: Of course, of course. B: ...this table is real although the brain has constructed it. But at some stage we construct realities that are not there. We can see this sometimes in the shadows on a dark night constructing realities that are not there. K: That there is a man there. B: Yes. And also tricks and illusions are possible by conjurers. But then it goes further and we say that mentally we construct a logical reality, which seems intensely real, very strong. But it seems to me the question is: What is it that thought does to give that sense of reality, to construct reality? Can we watch that? K: What does thought do to bring about, to create, that reality? S: You mean like if you talk to someone who believes in God, he says to you that is real. And if you talk to somebody who really believes in the self. I talk to many people, to many psychotherapists - they say the self is real, that it exists, it is a thing. You heard a psychotherapist once say to Krishnaji, "We know the ego exists." B: Well, it is not only that. I think what happens is that the illusion builds up very fast once you construct the reality. It builds up a tremendous structure, a cloud of support around it. K: So let's come to it. What are we doing now? S: We are moving. K: We are trying to find out what is the correct action in life. I can only find that out if there is order in me - right? Me is the disorder. S: Right. That's right. K: However real that me is, that is the source of disorder. S: Right. K: Because that separates, that divides - me and you, we and they, my nation, my god - me. S: Right. K: Me with its consciousness. S: Right. K: Can that consciousness be aware of itself? Aware, like thought thinking. B: Thinking about itself? K: Put it very simply: can thought be aware of its own movement? B: Yes. S: That's the question. B: That's the question. It could be thought understanding its own structure. S: And its own movement. But is it thought that is aware of itself? Or is it something else? K: Try it. Try it. Do it now. S: Right. K: Do it now. Can your thought be aware of itself? Of its movement? B: It stops. K: What does that mean? S: It means what it says: it stops. The observation of thought, stops thought. K: No, don't put it that way. S: How would you put it? K: It is undergoing a radical change. B: So the word "thought" is not a fixed thing. K: No. B: The word "thought" does not mean a fixed thing. It can change - eh? K: That's right. B: In perception. K: You have told me, and other scientists have told me, that in the observation of an object through a microscope, the object undergoes a change. B: In the quantum theory the object cannot be fixed apart from the fact of observation. S: This is true with patients during psychoanalysis. They change automatically. K: Forget the patient, you are the patient! S: I am the patient, right. K: What takes place when thought is aware of itself? You know, sir, this is an extraordinarily important thing. B: Yes. K: That is, can the doer be aware of his doing? I can move this vase from here to there and be aware of that moving. That is very simple. I stretch out my arm... But can thought be aware of itself, its movement, its activity, its structure, its nature, what it has created, what it has done in the world? S: I want to save that question for tomorrow. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART I DIALOGUE 4 4TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. DAVID SHAINBERG AND PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 19TH MAY, 1976 KRISHNAMURTI: I don't think that yesterday we answered the question: Why do human beings live the way they are living? I don't think we went into it sufficiently deeply. Did we answer it? Dr Shainberg: We got the point - but we never answered that question. K: I was thinking about it this morning and it struck me that we hadn't answered it fully. We went into the question: Can thought observe itself? S: Right. Dr Bohm: Right. Yes. K: But I think we ought to answer that other question. B: But I think that what we said was on the way to answering it. I mean it was relevant to the answer. K: Yes, relevant. But it is not complete. S: No, it's not complete, it doesn't really get hold of that issue: Why do people live the way they do, and why don't they change? K: Yes. Could we go into that a little bit before we go on? S: Well, you know my immediate answer to that question was that they like it. We came up against that and then pulled away. K: I think it is much deeper than that, don`t you? Because if one actually transformed one's conditioning, the way one lives, one might find oneself economically in a very difficult position. S: Right. K: It would be going against the current, completely against the current. B: Are you saying that it might lead to a certain objective insecurity? K: Objective insecurity. B: It is not merely a matter of the imagination. K: No, no, actual insecurity. B: Yes, because a lot of the things we are discussing are to do with some illusion of security or insecurity. In addition there is some genuine... K: ...genuine insecurity. And also doesn't it imply that you have to stand alone? S: Definitely you would be in a totally different position. K: Because it is being completely out of the stream. And that means you have to be alone, psychologically alone. And we ask whether human beings can stand that. S: Well, certainly this other is to be completely together. K: It is the herd instinct. Be together, with people, don't be alone. S: Be like them, be with them - it is all based on competition in some way. I am better than you... K: Of course, of course. It is all that. B: Well, it is unclear because in some sense we should be together, but society, it seems to me, is giving us some false sense of togetherness which is really fragmentation. K: Quite right. So would you say that one of the main reasons why human beings don't want to transform themselves radically, is that they are frightened of not belonging to a group, to a herd, to something definite - of standing completely alone? I think you can only co-operate from that aloneness, not the other way round. S: People don't like to be different, that we know. K: I once talked to an FBI man - he came to see me and he said, "Why is it that you walk alone all the time? Why are you so much alone? I see you among the hills walking alone. Why?" He thought it was very disturbing. B: Well, I think anthropologists find that in primitive peoples the sense of belonging to the tribe is even stronger; their entire psychological structure depends on being in a tribe. K: You would rather cling to the misery you already know than come into another kind of misery you don't know. S: That's right. Being with others... K: ...you are safe. B: You will be taken care of, as your mother may have taken care of you; you are gently supported. You feel that fundamentally everything will he all right because the group is large, it is wise, it knows what to do. I think there is a feeling like that, rather deep. The Church may give that feeling. K: Yes. You have seen those animal pictures? They are always in herds. B: Aren't people seeking from the group a sense that they have some support from the whole? K: Of course. B: Now isn't it possible that you are discussing an aloneness in which you have a certain security? People are seeking in the group a kind of security; well, it seems to me, that that can arise actually in aloneness. K: Yes, that is right. In aloneness you can be completely secure. B: I wonder if we could discuss that because it seems there is an illusion there: people feel they should have a sense of security. K: Quite right. B: And they are looking for it in a group, the group being representative of something universal. K: The group is not the universal. B: It isn't, but it is the way we think of it. K: Of course. B: The little child thinks the tribe is the whole world. K: A human being, if he transforms himself, becomes alone, but that aloneness is not isolation - it is a form of supreme intelligence. B: Yes, but could you go into that a little further about it not being isolation, because at first when you say alone - the feeling that I am entirely apart... K: It is not apart. S: All people seem to gravitate together; they have to be like other people. What would change that? Why should anybody change from that? What would such people experience when they are alone? They experience isolation. K: I thought we had already dealt with that fairly thoroughly. When one realizes the appalling state of the world, and of oneself, the disorder, the confusion and the misery, and when one says there must be a total change, a total transformation, one has already begun to move away from all that. S: Right. But here one is, being together... K: Being together, what does it really mean? S: I mean being in this group... K: Yes, what does it really mean? Identifying oneself with the group, remaining with the group - what does it mean? What is involved in it? The group is me. I am the group. S: Right. K: Therefore it is like co-operating with myself. B: Perhaps you could say as Descartes said, "I think, therefore I I am" - meaning that I think implies that I am there. One says, "I am in the group, therefore I am". You see, if I am not in a group where am I? In other words I have no being at all. That is really the condition of the primitive tribe, for most of the members anyway. And there is something deep there because I feel that my very existence, my being, psychologically, is implied in being in the group. The group has made me, everything about me has come from the group. I am nothing without the group. K: Yes, quite right. I am the group in fact. B: And therefore if I am out of the group I feel everything is collapsing. I don't know where I am. I have no orientation, to life or to anything. S: Right. B: And therefore, you see, that might be the greatest punishment the group could inflict, to banish me. K: Yes, look what is happening in Russia: when there is a dissenter he is banished. B: Such banishment sort of robs him of his being. It is almost like killing him. K: Quite. I think that is what it is, the fear of being alone. Alone is translated as being isolated from all this. B: Could we say from the universal? K: Yes, from the universal. B: It seems to me you are implying that if you are really alone, genuinely alone, then you are not isolated from the universe. K: Absolutely. On the contrary. B: Therefore we first have to be free of this false universal. S: This false identification with the group. B: Identification with the group as the universal. Treating the group as if it were the universal support of my being. S: Right, right. Now there is something more to that. What is being said is that when that localized identification with the group, that false security, is dropped, one is opened up to the participation in... K: No, there is no question of participation - you are the universe. S: You are that. B: As a child I felt that the town I was in was the whole universe; then I found another town further away which felt almost beyond the universe, which must be the ultimate limits of all reality. So the idea of going beyond that would not have occurred to me. And I think that is how the group is treated. We know abstractly that it is not so, but the feeling you have is like that of a little child. K: Is it then that human beings love, or hold on to, their own misery and confusion because they don't know anything else? B: Yes. K: The known is so far, then the unknown. S: Right. Yes. K: Now to be alone implies, doesn't it, to step out of the stream? S: Of the known. K: Step out of the stream of this utter confusion, disorder, sorrow, despair, hope and travail - to step out of all that. S: Right. K: And if you want to go much deeper into this, to be alone implies, doesn't it, not to carry the burden of tradition with you at all? B: Tradition being the group, then. K: The group. Tradition also being knowledge. B: Knowledge, but it comes basically from the group. Knowledge is basically collective. It is collected by everybody. K: So to be alone implies total freedom. And when there is that great freedom it is the universe. B: Could we go into that further because to a person who hasn't seen this, it doesn't look obvious? S: I think David is right there. To a person, to most people, I think - and I have tested this out recently - the idea, or even the deep feeling, that you are the universe, seems to be so... K: Ah, sir, that is a most dangerous thing to say. How can you say you are the universe when you are in total confusion? When you are unhappy, miserable, anxious, jealous, envious how can you say you are the universe? Universe implies total order. B: Yes, the cosmos in Greek meant order. K: Order, of course. B: And chaos was the opposite. K: Yes. S: But I... K: No, listen. Universe, cosmos, means order. S: Right. K: And chaos is what we live with. S: That's right. K. How can I think I have universal order in me? That is the good old trick of the mind which says disorder is there, but inside you there is perfect order. That is an illusion. It is a concept which thought has put there and it gives me a certain hope, but it is an illusion, it has no reality. What has actual reality is the confusion. S: Right. K: My chaos. And I can imagine, I can project a cosmos but that. is equally illusory. So I must start with the fact of what I am, which is that I am in chaos. S: I belong to a group. K: Chaos, chaos is the group. So to move away from that into cosmos, which is total order, means that I am alone. There is a total order which is not associated with disorder, chaos. That is alone. B: Yes, can we go into that? Suppose several people are in that state, moving into cosmos, into order out of the chaos of society -are they all alone? K: No, they don't feel alone there. There is only order. B: Are they different people? K: Sir, would you say - suppose -no, I can't suppose - we three are in cosmos, there is only cosmos, not you, Dr Bohm, Dr Shainberg and me. B: Therefore we are still alone. K: That is, order is alone. B: I looked up the word "alone" in the dictionary; basically it is all one. K: All one. Yes. B: In other words there is no fragmentation. K: Therefore there is no three - we three. And that is marvellous, sir. S: But you jumped away there. We have got chaos and confusion. That is what we have got. K: So as we said, to move away from that, which is to have total order, most people are afraid. Alone, as he pointed out, is all one. Therefore there is no fragmentation, then there is cosmos. S: Right. But most people are in confusion and chaos. That is all they know. K: So how do you move away from that? That is the whole question. S: That is the question. Here we are in chaos and confusion, we are not over there. K: No, because you may be frightened of that. Frightened of an idea of being alone. S: How can you be frightened of an idea? B: That is easy. K: Aren't you frightened of tomorrow? Which is an idea. S: OK. That is an idea. K: So they are frightened of an idea which they have projected, which says, "My God, I am alone", which means I have nobody to rely on. S: Right, but that is an idea. B: Well, let's go slowly. We have said that to a certain extent it is genuinely so. You are not being supported by society. You do have a certain genuine danger because you have withdrawn from the hub of society. S: I think we are confused here. I really do because I think if we have got confusion, if we have got chaos... K: Not if - it is so. S: It is so, OK I go with you. We have got chaos and confusion, that is what we have got. Now if you have an idea about being alone while in chaos and confusion, that is just another idea, another thought, another part of the chaos. Is that right? K: That's right. S: OK. Now that is all we have got, chaos and confusion. K: And in moving away from that we have the feeling we will be alone. B: In the sense of isolated. K: Isolated. S: Right. That's what I am getting at. K: We will be lonely. S: That's right. K: Of that we are frightened. S: Not frightened, in terror. K: Yes. Therefore we say, "I would rather stay where I am in my little pond than face isolation." And that may be one of the reasons why human beings don't radically change. S: That's right. B: That's like this primitive tribe - the worst punishment is to be banished. S: You don't have to go to a primitive tribe. I see people and talk to people all the time; patients come to me and say, "Look, Saturday came, I couldn't stand being alone, I called up 50 people looking for somebody to be with." B: Yes, that is much the same. K: So that may be one of the reasons why human beings don't change. S: Right. K: The other is that we are so heavily conditioned to accept things as they are. We don't say to ourselves, "Why should I live this way?" S: That is certainly true. We don,t. B: We have to get away from this conviction, that the way things are is all that can be. K: Yes, that's right. You see, the religions have pointed this out by saying there is another world, aspire to that. This is a transient world, it doesn't matter, live as best as you can in your sorrow, and then you will be perfectly happy in the next world. S: Right. K: And the Communists say there is no next-world, so make the best of this world. B: I think they would say that there is happiness in the future in this world. K: Yes, yes. Sacrifice your children for the future, which is exactly the same thing. B: But it seems it is a sort of transformation of the same thing: we say we want to give up this society as it is, but we invent something similar. K: Yes, quite. S: It has to be similar if we are inventing it. B: Yes, but it seems it is an important point, that there is a subtle way of not being alone. K: Quite right. S: You mean we go ahead and make it out of the old ideas? B: Yes. To make heaven for the future. K: So what will make human beings change? Radically. S: I don't know. Even the idea you are suggesting here is that it can't be different, or that it is all the same: that is part of the system itself. K: Agreed. Now wait a minute. May I ask you a question? Why don't you change? What is preventing you? S: I would say that it is - oh, it's a tough question. I suppose the answer would be that - I don't have any answer. K: Because you have never asked yourself that question. Right? S: Not radically. K: We are asking basic questions. S: Right. I don't really know the answer to the question. K: Now, sir, move away from that, sir. Is it that our structure, our whole society, all religions, all culture is based on thought, and thought says, "I can't do this. Therefore an outside agency is necessary to change me." S: Right. K: Whether the outside agency is the environment, the leader, or God. God is your own projection of yourself, obviously. And you believe in God, you believe in some leader; you believe, but you are still the same. S: That's right. K: You may identify with the State and so on, but the good old me is still operating. So is it that thought doesn't see its own limit? Doesn't know, realize, that it cannot change itself? B: Well, I think thought loses track of something; it doesn't see that it itself is behind all this. K: Of course. We said that. Thought has produced all this chaos. B: But thought doesn't really see this exactly. S: What thought does in fact is to communicate through gradual change. K: That is all the invention of thought. S: Yes, but that is where I think the hook is. K: No, sir, please, sir, just listen. S: Sure. K: Thought has put this world together. Technologically as well as psychologically. The technological world is all right, leave it all alone, we won't even discuss that. It would be too absurd. But psychologically, thought has built all this world in me and outside me. And does thought realize that it has made this mess, this chaos? B: I would say that it doesn't. It tends to look on this chaos as independently existent. K: But it is its baby! B: It is, but it is very hard for thought to see that. That is really what we were discussing yesterday. K: Yes, we are coming back to that. B: To this question of how thought gives a sense of reality. We were saying that technology deals with something that thought made, but it is actually an independent reality once it is made. K: Like the table, like those cameras. B: But you could say that thought also creates a reality which it calls independent, but isn't. K: Yes, yes. So, does thought realize, is it aware, that it has created this chaos? S: No. K: Why not? But you, sir. Do you realize it? S: I realize that... K: Not you - does thought - you see! I have asked you a different question: Does thought, which is you, your thinking -does your thinking realize the chaos it has created? B: Thought tends to attribute that chaos to something else, either to something outside, or to me who is inside. K: Thought has created me. B: But also thought has said that me is not thought, although in reality it is. Thought is treating me as a different reality. K: Of course, of course. B: And thought is saying that it is coming from me and therefore it doesn't take credit for what it does. K: To me thought has created the me. S: That's right. K: And so "me" is not separate from thought. It is the structure of thought, the nature of thought that has made me. S; Right. K: Now: Does your thinking, or does your thought realize this? S: In flashes it does. K: No, not in flashes. You don't see that table in flashes; it is always there. We asked a question yesterday, and we stopped there: Does thought see itself in movement? S: Right. K: The movement has created the me, created the chaos, created the division, created the conflict, jealousy, anxiety, fear... S: Right. Now what I am asking is another question. Yesterday we came to a moment where we said thought stops. K: No. That is much later. Please just stick to one thing. S: OK. What I am trying to get at is what is the actuality of thought seeing itself? K: You want me to describe it? S: No, no, I don't want you to describe it - what I am trying to get at is what is the actuality that thought sees? We get into the problem of language here - but it seems that thought sees and forgets. K: No, no, please. I am asking a very simple question. Don't complicate it. Does thought see the chaos it has created? That's all. Which means: Is thought aware of itself as a movement? Not I am aware of thought as a movement - the I has been created by thought. S: Right. B: I think a question that is relevant is: Why does thought keep on going? How does it sustain itself? Because as long as it sustains itself it produces something like an independent reality, an illusion of reality. S: What is my relationship to thought? K: You are thought. There is no you related to thought. S: Right. But look, look. The question is: I say to you, "What is my relationship to thought" - and you say to me " You are thought". in some way what you say is clear, but that is still the way thought is moving for me, to say it is my relationship to thought. B: Well, that's the point. Can this very thought stop right now? K: Yes. B: What is sustaining this whole thing? - at this very moment? -was the question I was trying to get at. S: Yes, that's the question. B: In other words, say we have a certain insight but nevertheless something happens to sustain the old process right now. K: That's right. S: Right now thought keeps moving. K: No, Dr Bohm asked a very good question which we haven't answered. He said, Why does thought move? B: When it is irrelevant to move. K: Why is it always moving? What is movement? Movement is time - right? S: That's too quick. Movement is time. K: Obviously, of course. Physically, from here to London, from here to New York. And also psychologically from here to there. S: Right. K: I am this, I must be that. S: Right. But if a thought is not necessarily all that... K: Thought is the new movement. We are examining movement, which is thought. Look: if thought stopped there is no movement. S: Yes, I know. I am trying - this has to be made very clear. B: I think there is a step that might help: to ask myself what it is that makes me go on thinking or talking. I can often watch people and see they are in a hole just because they keep on talking. If they would stop talking the whole problem would vanish. I mean it is just this flow of words that comes out as if it were reality, and then they say that is my problem, it is real and I have got to think some more. There is a kind of a feedback saying, "I have got a problem, I am suffering." S: You have got an `I' thought. B: Yes, I think that; therefore I have a sense that I am real. I am thinking of my suffering, and in that it is implicit that it is I who am there, that the suffering is real because I am real. S: Right. B: And then comes the next thought, which is: Since that is real I must think some more. S: It feeds on itself. B: Yes. And one of the things I must think is that I am suffering. And I am compelled to keep on thinking that thought all the time. Maintaining myself in existence. Do you see what I am driving at? That there is a feedback. K: Which means that if thought is movement, which is time, and there is no movement I am dead! I am dead. B: Yes, if that movement stops, then the sense that I am there being real must go, because the sense that I am real is the result of thinking. K: Do you see this is extraordinary? S: Of course it is. K: No, no, actually. In actuality, not in theory. One realizes thought is movement - right? S: Right. B: And in this movement it creates an image of... K: ...of me... B: ...that is supposed to be moving. K: Yes, yes. Now, when that movement stops there is no me. The me is time, put together by time, which is thought. S: Right. K: So do you, listening to this, realize the truth of it? Not the verbal, logical statement, but the truth of such an amazing thing? Therefore there is an entirely different action. The action of thought as movement brings about a fragmentary action, a contradictory action. When the movement as thought comes to an end there is total action. B: Can you say then that whatever technical thought brings about has an order? K: Of course. B: In other words it doesn't mean that thought is permanently gone. K: No, no. S: It can still be a movement in its proper place, in its fitting order? K: Of course. So is a human being afraid of all this? Unconsciously, deeply, he must realize the ending of me. Do you understand? And that is really a most frightening thing. My knowledge, my books, my wife - the whole thing which thought has put together. And you are asking me to end all that. B: Can't you say it is the ending of everything? Because everything that I know is there. K: Absolutely. So you see, really I am frightened; a human being is frightened of death. Not the biological death... S: To die now. K: This coming to an end. And therefore he believes in God, reincarnation, and a dozen other comforting things, but in actuality, when thought realizes itself as movement and sees that movement has created the me, the divisions, the quarrels, the whole structure of this chaotic world - when thought realizes this, sees the truth of it, it ends. Then there is cosmos. You listen to this: how do you receive it? S: Do you want me to answer? K: I offer you something. How do you receive it? This is very important. S: Yes. Thought sees its movement... K: No, no. How do you receive it? How does the public, who listens to all this, receive it? They ask, "What is he trying to tell me?" S: What? K: He says I am not telling you anything. He says listen to what I am saying and find out for yourself whether thought as movement has created all this, both the technological world which is useful, which is necessary, and this chaotic world. S: Right. K: How do you receive t, listen to it? What takes place in you when you listen to it? S: Panic. K: No. Is it? S: Yes. There is a panic about the death. There is a sense of seeing, and then there is a fear of that death. K: Which means you have listened to the words; the words have awakened the fear. S: Right. K: But not the actuality of the fact. S: I wouldn't say that. I think that is a little unfair. They awaken the... K: I am asking you. S: ...they awaken the actuality of the fact and then there seems to be a silence, a moment of great clarity that gives way to a kind of feeling in the pit of the stomach where things are dropping out, and then there is a kind of... K: Withholding. S: ...withholding, right. I think there is a whole movement there. K: So you are describing humanity? S: No I am describing me. K: You are humanity. B: You are the same. S: Right. K: You are the viewer, the people who are listening. S: That's right. So there is a sense of what will happen tomorrow? K: No, no. That is not the point. No. When thought realizes itself as a movement, and realizes that that movement has created all this chaos, total chaos, complete disorder - when it realizes that, what takes place? Actually? You are not frightened, there is no fear. Listen to it carefully. There is no fear. Fear is the idea brought about by an abstraction. You understand? You have made a picture of ending and are frightened of that ending. S: You are right. You are right. K: There is no fear. S: No fear and then there is... K: There is no fear when the actuality takes place. S: That's right. When the actuality takes place there is silence. K: With the fact there is no fear. B: But as soon as thought comes in... K: That's right. S: That's right. Now wait a minute; no, don't go away. When thought comes in... K: Then it is no longer a fact. You haven't remained with the fact. B: Well, that is the same as saying you keep on thinking. K: Keep on moving. B: Yes. Well, as soon as you bring thought in, it is not a fact; it is an imagination or a fantasy which is thought to be real, but it is not so. Therefore you are not with the fact any longer. K: We have discovered something extraordinary, that with fact there is no fear. S: Right. B: So all fear is thought, is that it? K: That's right. S: We have got a big mouthful here. K: No. All thought is fear, all thought is sorrow. B: That goes both ways, that all fear is thought, and all thought is fear. K: Of course. B: Except the kind of thought that arises with the fact alone. S: I want to interject something right here: it seems to me we have discovered something quite important right here, which is that at the actual seeing, the instant of attention is at its peak. K: No. Something new takes place, sir. Something totally new that you have never looked at. It has never been understood or experienced, whatever it is. A totally different thing happens. B: But isn't it important that we acknowledge this in our thought, I mean in our language? K: Yes. B: As we are doing now. In other words, if it happened and we didn't acknowledge it, then we are liable to fall back. K: Of course, of course. S: I don't get you. B: Well, we have to see it not only when it happens but we have to say that it happens. S: Then are we creating a place to localize this, or not? K: No, no. What he is saying is very simple. He is saying, does this fact, this actuality take place? And can you remain with it, can thought not move but remain only with that fact? Sir, it is like saying: Remain totally with sorrow. Do not move away, do not say it should be or shouldn't be, or how am I to get over it - just totally remain with that thing. With the fact. Then you have an energy which is extraordinary. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART I DIALOGUE 5 5TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. DAVID SHAINBERG AND PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 19TH MAY, 1976 KRISHNAMURTI: We have talked about the necessity for human beings to change, and about why they don't change, why they accept this intolerable condition of the human psyche. I think we ought to approach the same thing from a different angle. Who has invented the unconscious? Dr Shainberg: Who has invented it? I think there is a difference between what we call the unconscious and what is the unconscious. The word is not the thing. K: Yes, the word is not the thing. Who has thought it up? S: Well, I think the history of thinking about the unconscious is a long and involved process. K: May we ask: Have you an unconscious? Are you aware of your unconscious? Do you know if you have an unconscious that is operating differently, trying to give you hints - are you aware of all that? S: Yes. I am aware of an aspect of myself that is incompletely aware. That is what I call the unconscious. It is aware of my experience, aware of events in an incomplete way. That's what I call the unconscious. It uses symbols and different modes of telling, of understanding a dream, say, in which I discover jealousy that I wasn't aware of. K: Do you also give importance, Dr Bohm, to a feeling that there is such a thing? Dr Bohm: Well, I don't know what you mean by that. I think there are some things we do that we are not aware of. We react, we use words in an habitual way... S: We have dreams. B: We have dreams, yes... K: I am going to question all that because I am not sure... S: You are not questioning that we have dreams? K: No. But I want to question, I want to ask the experts if there is such a thing as the unconscious, because I don't think it has played any important part in my life at all. S: Well, it depends on what you mean. K: I will tell you what I mean. Something hidden, something incomplete, something that I have to go after consciously or unconsciously - discover, unearth, explore and expose. See the motives, see the hidden intentions. B: Well, could we make it clear that there are some things people do which you can see they are not aware of doing? K: I don't quite follow. B: Well, for example, this Freudian slip of the tongue -somebody makes a slip of the tongue which expresses his will. K: Yes, yes, I didn't mean that quite. S: That is what most people think of as the unconscious. You see, I think there are two problems here, if I can just put in a technical statement. There has arisen in the history of thinking about the unconscious, a belief that there are things in it which must be lifted out. Then there are a large group of people now who think of the unconscious as areas of behaviour, areas of response, areas of experience that they are not fully aware of, so that in the daytime they might have, let's say, an experience of stress which they didn't finish with, and at night they go through re-working it in a new way. K: I understand all that. S: So that would be the unconscious in operation. You get it also from the past or from previous programmes of action. K: I mean - the collective unconscious, the racial unconscious. B: Let's say somebody has been deeply hurt in the past; you can see that his whole behaviour is governed by that. But he doesn't know it; he may not know it. K: Yes, that I understand. S: But his response is always from the past. K: Yes, quite. What I am trying to find out is why we have divided the conscious and the unconscious. Or is it one unitary total process - one movement? Not hidden, not concealed, but moving as a whole current. These clever brainy birds come along and split it up and say there is the conscious and the unconscious, the hidden, the incomplete, the storehouse of racial memories, family memories.... S: The reason that that has happened, I think, is partially explained by the fact that Freud and Jung and others were seeing patients who had fragmented off this movement which you are talking about. So much knowledge of the unconscious grew out of that. K: That's what I want to get at. S: There's the whole history of hysteria, where patients couldn't move their arms, you know? K: I know. S: Then you open up their memories and eventually they can move their arms. Or there were people who had dual personalities... K: Is it an insanity - not insanity - is it a state of mind that divides everything, that says there is the unconscious and the conscious? Is it also a process of fragmentation? B: Well, wouldn't you say, as Freud has said, that certain material is made unconscious by the brain because it is too disturbing? K: That is what I want to get at. B: It is fragmented. That is well known in all schools of psychology. S: That's right. That is what I am saying. It is fragmented off and is then called the unconscious. What is fragmented is the unconscious. K: I understand that. B: But would you say that the brain itself is in some sense holding it separate on purpose in order to avoid it? K: Yes, avoiding facing the fact. S; That's right. B: Yes. So that it is not really separate from consciousness. K: That is what I want to get at. S: It isn't separate from consciousness but the brain has organized it in a fragmented way. B: Yes, but then it is a wrong terminology to call it that. The word unconscious already implies a separation. K: That's right, separation. B: To say there are two layers, the unconscious and the surface consciousness, a structure is implied. But this other notion is to say that that structure is not implied, but that certain material wherever it may be is simply avoided. K: I don't want to think about somebody because he has hurt me. That is not the unconscious, it's just that I don't want to think about him. S: That's right. K: I am conscious he has hurt me and I don't want to think about it. B: But a kind of paradoxical situation arises there because eventually you would become so good at it that you wouldn't realize you were doing it. That seems to happen, you see. K: Yes, yes. B: People become so proficient at avoiding these things that they cease to realize they are doing it. K: Yes. B: It becomes habitual. S: That is right. I think this is what happens. These hurts.... K: The wound remains. S: The wound remains and we forget that we have forgotten-K: The wound remains. B: We remember to forget, you see! K: Yes. S: We remember to forget and then the process of therapy is to help the remembering and the recall - to remember you have forgotten, and then to understand the connections of why you forgot; then the thing can move in a more holistic way, rather than being fragmented. K: Do you consider, or feel that you have been hurt? S: Yes. K: And want to avoid it? Resist, withdraw, isolate - the whole picture being the image of yourself being hurt and withdrawing -do you feel that when you are hurt? S: Yes. I feel - how to put it? K: Let's go into this. S: Yes, I feel there is definitely a move not to be hurt, not to have that image, not to have that whole thing changed because if it is changed it seems to catapult into the same experience that was the hurt. This has a resonation with that unconscious which reminds me... you see I am reminded of being hurt deeply by this more superficial hurt. K: I understand that. S: So I avoid hurt - period. K: If the brain has a shock - a biological, physical shock - must the psychological brain, if we can call it that, be hurt also? Is that inevitable? S: No, I don't think so. It is only hurt with reference to something. K: No. I am asking you: Can such a psychological brain, if I can use those two words, never be hurt? - in any circumstances, given family life, husband, wife, bad friends, so-called enemies, all that is going on around you - never get hurt? Because apparently this is one of the major wounds of human existence. The more sensitive you are, the more aware, the more hurt you get, the more withdrawn. Is this inevitable? S: I don't think it is inevitable but I think it happens frequently, more often than not. And it seems to happen when an attachment is formed and then the loss of that attachment. You become important to me, I like you, or I am involved with you, then it becomes important to me that you don't do anything that disturbs that image. K: That is, the relationship between two people, the picture we have of each other, the image - that is the cause of hurt. B: Well, it also goes the other way: we hold those images because of hurt. K: Of course, of course. B: Where does it start? K: That is what I want to get at. S: That is what I want to get at too. K: He pointed out something. S: I know he did, yes. B: Because the past hurt gives tremendous strength to the image, the image which helps us to forget it. S: That's right. K: Now is this wound in the "unconscious" - we use the word unconscious in quotes for the time being - is it hidden? S: Well, I think you are being a little simplistic about that because what is hidden is the fact that I have had this happen many times - it happened with my mother, it happened with my friend, it happened in school, when I cared about somebody... You form the attachment and then comes the hurt. K: I am not at all sure that it comes through attachment. S: Maybe it is not attachment, that is the wrong word. What happens is that I form a relationship with you where an image becomes important - what you do to me becomes important. K: You have an image about yourself. S: That's right. And you are saying that I like you because you are conforming with the image. K: No, apart from like and dislike, you have an image about yourself. Then I come along and put a pin in that image. S: No, first you come along and confirm it. B: The hurt will be greater if you first come along and are very friendly to me and confirm the image, and then suddenly put a pin in me. K: Of course, of course. B: But even somebody who didn't confirm it can hurt if he puts a pin in properly. S: That's right. That's not unconscious. But why did I have the image to begin with? That is unconscious. K: Is it unconscious? That is what I want to get at. Or it is so obvious that we don't look. You follow what I am saying? S: I follow, yes. K: We put it away. We say it is hidden. I question whether it is hidden at all, it is so blatantly obvious. S: I don't feel all parts of it are obvious. B: I think we hide it in one sense. Shall we say that this hurt means that everything is wrong with the image, but we hide it by saying everything is all right? In other words the thing that is obvious may be hidden by saying it is unimportant, that we don't notice it. S: Yes we don't notice it but I ask myself what is it that generates this image, what is that hurt? K: Ah, we will come to that. We are enquiring, aren't we, into the whole structure of consciousness? S: Right. K: Into the nature of consciousness. We have broken it up into the hidden and the open. It may be the fragmented mind that is doing this. And therefore strengthening both. S: Right. The division grows greater and greater and greater... S: The fragmented mind is... K: ...doing this. Now most people have an image about themselves, practically everybody. It is that image that gets hurt. And that image is you, and you say, "I am hurt". B: It is the same as what we were discussing this morning. K: Yes. B: You see, if I have a pleasant self-image, I attribute the pleasure to me and say that it is real. When somebody hurts me then the pain is attributed to me and I say that's real too. It seems that if you have an image that can give you pleasure, then it must also be able to give you pain. There is no way out of that. K: Absolutely. S: Well, the image seems to be self-perpetuating, as you were saying. B: I think people hope that the image will give them pleasure. K: Pleasure only. B: Only pleasure, but the very mechanism that makes pleasure possible makes pain possible, because the pleasure comes if I say "I think I am good", and this is sensed to be real, which makes that goodness real, but if somebody comes along and says, " You are no good, you are stupid", that too is real and therefore very significant. K: The image brings both pleasure and pain. B: I think people would hope for an image that would bring only pleasure. S: People do hope that, there is no question. But people not only hope for the image, they invest all their interest in their image. B: The value of everything depends on this self-image being right. So if somebody shows it's wrong, everything is wrong. S: That's right. K: But we are always giving new shape to the image. B: But I think this image means everything, and that gives it tremendous power. S: The entire personality is directed to the achievement of this image. Everything else takes second place. K: Are you aware of this? S: Yes. I am aware of it. K: What is the beginning of this? S: Well... K: Please, just let me summarize first. Every human being practically has an image of himself, of which he is unconscious or not aware. S: That's right. Usually it's sort of idealized. K: Idealized, or not idealized, it is an image. S: That's right. They must have it. K: That have it. B: They have it. S: But they must direct all their actions towards getting it. B: I think one feels one's whole life depends on the image. K: Yes, that's right. S: Depression is when I don't have it. K: We will come to that. The next question is: How does it come into being? S: Well, I think it comes into being in the family in some way. You are my father and I understand through watching you that if I am smart you will like me, right? K: Quite. We agree. S: I learn that very quickly. So I am going to make sure I get that love... K: It is all very simple. But I am asking: What is the origin of making images about oneself? B: If I had no image at all I would never get into that, would I? S: If I never made images..? B: Yes. Never made any image at all no matter what my father did. K: I think this is very important. S: That is the question. B: Maybe the child can't do it, but suppose he can... K: I am not at all sure... B: Perhaps he can, but I am saying under ordinary conditions he doesn't manage to do it. S: You are suggesting that the child already has an image that he has been hurt. K: Ah, no, no. I don't know. We are asking. B: But suppose there was a child who made no image of himself. S: OK. Let's assume he has no image. B: Then he cannot get hurt. K: He can't be hurt. S: There I think you are in very hot water psychologically because a child... K: No, we said "suppose". B: Not the actual child - but suppose there was a child who didn't make an image of himself so he didn't depend on that image for everything. The child you talked about depended on the image that his father loved him. S: That's right. B: And therefore when his father doesn't love him, everything has gone, right? S: Right. B: Therefore he is hurt. But if he has no image that he must have his father love him, then he will just watch his father. S: But let's look at it a little more pragmatically. Here is the child and he is actually hurt. B: He can't be hurt without the image. Who is going to get hurt? K: It is like putting a pin into the air. S: Now wait a minute, I am not going to let you guys get away with this! Here you have got this child vulnerable in the sense that needs psychological support. He has enormous tensions. K: Sir, agreed to all that. Such a child has an image. S: No, no image. He is simply not being biologically supported. K: No. No. B: Well, he may make an image of the fact that he is not biologically supported. You have to get the difference between the actual fact of what happens biologically and what he thinks of it. Right? Now I have seen a child sometimes drop suddenly, he really goes to pieces, not because he was dropped very far but because that sense of... K: Loss, insecurity. B: ...insecurity, because his mother was gone. It seemed as if everything had gone, right? And he was totally disorganized and screaming, but he dropped only about this far, you see. But the point is he had an image of the kind of security he was going to get from his mother. Right? S: That is the way the nervous system works. B: Well, that is the question - Is it necessary to work that way? Or is this the result of conditioning? K: This is an important question. S: Oh, terribly important. K: Because whether in America or in this country, children are running away from their parents. The parents seem to have no control over them. They don't obey, they don't listen. They are wild. And the parents feel terribly hurt. I saw on TV what is happening in America. One woman was in tears. She said, "I am his mother he doesn't treat me as a mother, he just orders me about." He had run away half a dozen times. And this separation between parents and children is growing all over the world. They have no relationship between themselves, between each other. So what is the cause of all this, apart from sociological, economic pressures which made the mother go out to work and leave the child alone - we take that for granted - but much deeper than that? Is it that the parents have an image about themselves and insist on creating an image in the children? S: I see what you are saying. K: And the child refuses to have that image - he has his own image. So the battle is on. S: That is very much what I was saying when I said that initially the hurt of the child... K: We haven't come to the hurt yet. S: Well, what is in that initial relationship between child... K: I doubt if they have any relationship. That is what I am trying to get at. S: I agree with you. There is something wrong with the relationship. K: Have they a relationship at all? Look, young people get married, or they don't get married. They have a child by mistake, or intentionally, but young people are children themselves; they haven't understood the universe, cosmos or chaos - they just have this child. S: That's right. That is what happens. K: And they play with it for a year or two and then say, "For God's sake, I am fed up with this child", and look elsewhere. And the child feels left, lost. S: That's right. K: And he needs security, from the beginning he needs security. S: Right. K: Which the parents do not give, or are incapable of giving -psychological security, the sense of "You are my child, I love you, I'll look after you, I'll see that throughout life you will behave properly". They haven't got that feeling. They are bored with it after a couple of years. S: That's right. K: Is it that they have no relationship right from the beginning neither the husband, nor the wife, boy or girl? Is it only a sexual relationship, the pleasure relationship? Is it that they won't accept the pain principle involved with the pleasure principle? S: That's right. K: What I am trying to see is if there is actually any relationship at all, except a biological, sexual, sensual relationship. it. S: Well... K: I am questioning it, I am not saying it is so, I am questioning S: I don't think it is so. I think they have a relationship but it is a wrong relationship. K: There is no wrong relationship. It is a relationship or no relationship. S: Well, then we will have to say they have a relationship. I think most parents have a relationship with their children. B: Suppose the parent and child have images of each other, and the relationship is governed by those images - the question is whether that is actually a relationship or not, or whether it is some sort of fantasy of relationship. K: A fanciful relationship. Sir, you have children - forgive me if I come back to you - you have children. Have you any relationship with them? In the real sense of that word. S: Yes. In the real sense, yes. K: That means you have no image about yourself. S: Right. K: And you are not imposing an image on them? S: That's right. K: And the society is not imposing an image on them? S: There are moments like that... K: Ah, no. That is not good enough. It is like a rotten egg. S: This is an important point. B: If it is moments it is not so. It is like saying a person who is hurt has moments when he is not hurt, but he is sitting there waiting to explode when something happens. So he can't go very far. It is like somebody who is tied to a rope, and as soon as he reaches the limits of that rope he is stuck. S: That is right. B: So you could say I am related as long as certain things are all right, but beyond that point it just sort of blows up. You see what I am driving at? That mechanism is inside there, buried, so it dominates me potentially. It is like the man who is tied to a rope and says there are moments when I can move wherever I like, but I can't really because if I keep on moving I am bound to come to the end. S: That does seem to be what happens, in fact. There is a reverberation in which there is a yank-back. B: Either I come to the end of the cord, or else something yanks the cord. The person who is on the end of a cord is really not free ever. S: Well, that's true, I mean I think that is true. B: You see in the same sense the person who has the image is not really related ever. K: Yes, that is just the whole point. You can play with it verbally, but the actuality is that you have no relationship. S: You have no relationship as long as it is the image. K: As long as you have an image about yourself you have no relationship with another. This is a tremendous revelation - you follow? It is not just an intellectual statement. S: I have the memory of times when I do have what I think is a relationship, yet one must be honest with you, and say that after such relationship there inevitably seems to be this yank-back. B: The end of the cord. S: Yes, a yank-back. You have a relationship with somebody but you will go just so far. K: Of course. That is understood. B: But then really the image controls it all the time because the image is the dominant factor. If you once pass that point, no matter what happens, the image takes over. K: So the image gets hurt, and the child, because you impose the image on the child. You are bound to because you have an image. Because you have an image about yourself you are bound to create an image in the child. S: That is right. K: You follow, you have discovered? And society is doing this to all of us. B: So you say the child is picking up an image just naturally, as it were, quietly, and then suddenly it is hurt? K: Hurt. That's right. B: So the hurt has been prepared and preceded by this steady process of building an image? S: That's right. There is evidence, for instance, that we treat boys differently from girls... K: No. Look at it: don't verbalize it too quickly. B: You see, if the steady process of building an image didn't occur there would be no basis, no structure, to get hurt. In other words the pain is due entirely to some psychological fact. Whereas I was previously enjoying the pleasure of saying, "My father loves me, I am doing what he wants" - now comes the pain - "I am not doing what he wants, he doesn't love me". S: I don't think we touched on the biological situation of the child feeling neglected. B: Well, if the child is neglected, he must pick up an image in that very process. K: Of course. If you admit, see it as a reality, that as long as the parents have an image about themselves they are bound to give that image to the child... S: Right. There is no question, as long as the parent is the image-maker and has an image, he can't see the child. K: And therefore gives an image to the child. S: Right. He will condition the child to be something. K: You see, society is doing this to every human being. Religions, every culture around us is creating this image. And that image gets hurt. Now the next question is: Is one aware of all this? Which is part of our consciousness. S: Right, right. K: The content of consciousness makes up consciousness. That is clear. S: Right. K: So one of the contents is the image-making, or maybe the major machinery that is operating, the major dynamo, the major movement. Being hurt, which every human being is - can that hurt be healed and never be hurt again? That is, can a human mind which has created the image, which has accepted the image, can that mind put away the image completely and never be hurt? -which means that a great part of consciousness is empty - it has no content. I wonder. S: Can it? I really don't know the answer to that. K: Why? Who is the image-maker? What is the machinery or the process that is making images? I may get rid of one image and take on another. I am a Catholic, I am a Protestant, I am a Hindu, I am a Zen monk, I am this, I am that - you follow? - they are all images. S: Who is the image-maker? K: You see, after all, if there is an image of that kind how can you have love in all this? S: We don't have an abundance of it. K: We don't have it. S: That's right. We have got a lot of images. That is why I say I don't know. K: It is terrible, sir, to have these images - you follow? S: Right. I know about image-making, I see it. I see it even when you are talking about it. I can see that if I don't make one image I will make another. K: Of course, sir. We are saying, Is it possible to stop the machinery that is producing images? And what is the machinery? Is it wanting to be somebody? S: Yes. It is wanting to be somebody, it is wanting to know -wanting to have. Somehow or other it seems to be wanting to handle the feeling that if I don't have it I don't know where I am. K: Being at a loss? S: Yes. The feeling that you are at a loss. Not to be able to rely on anything, not to have any support, breeds more disorder - you follow? B: That is one of the images... K: The image is the product of thought - right? S: It is organized. K: Yes, a product of thought. It may go through various forms of pressure, a great deal of conveyor belt, and at the end it produces an image. S: Right. No question. I agree with you there, yes. K: Can the machinery stop? Can thought which produces these images, which destroys all relationship so that there is no love - not verbally but actually no love - can it stop? When a man who has got an image about himself says, "I love my wife, or my children", it is just sentiment, romantic, fanciful emotionalism. S: Right. K: As it is now, there is no love in the world. There is no sense of real caring for somebody. S: That is true. K: The more affluent the worse it becomes. Not that the poor have this. I don't mean that. Poor people haven't got this either - they are concerned with filling their stomachs, and work, work, work. B: But still they have got lots of images. K: Of course. All these are the people who are correcting the world - right? Who are ordering the universe. So I ask myself, can this image-making stop? Stop, not occasionally, but stop. Because unless it does I don't know what love means. I don't know how to care for somebody. And I think that is what is happening in the world because children are really lost souls, lost human beings. I have met so many, hundreds of them now, all over the world. They are really a lost generation. As the older people are a lost generation. So what is a human being to do? What is the right action in relationship? Can there be right action in relationship as long as you have an image? S: No. K: Ah! Sir, this is something tremendous. S: That is why I was wondering. It seemed to me you made a jump there. You said all we know is images, and image-making. That is aIl we know. K: But we never said can it stop? S: We have never said can it stop - that is right. K: We have never said, for God's sake if it doesn't stop we are going to destroy each other. B: You could say that the notion we might stop is something more we know that we didn't know before... K: It becomes another piece of knowledge. B: I was trying to say that when you say "all we know", a block comes in. S: Right. B: You see, it is not much use to say "all we know". If you say it is all we know then it can never stop. K: He is objecting to your use of "all". S: I am grateful to you. B: That is one of the factors blocking it. S: Well, if we come down to it, what do we do with that question: Can it stop? K: I put that question to you. Do you listen to it? S; I listen to it - right. K: Ah, do you? S: It stops. K: No, no. I am not interested in whether it stops. Do you listen to the question. Can it stop? We now examine, analyse, this whole process of image-making - the result of it, the misery, the confusion, the appalling things that are going on. The Arab has his image, the Jew, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian, the Communist. There is this tremendous division of images, of symbols. If that doesn't stop, you are going to have such a chaotic world - you follow? - I see this, not as an abstraction, but as an actuality, as I see that flower. S: Right. K: And as a human being, what am I to do? Because I personally have no image about this. I really mean I have no image about myself, no conclusion, no concept, no ideal - none of these images. I have none. And I say to myself what can I do? - when everybody around me is building images and so destroying this lovely earth where we are meant to live happily in human relationship and look at the heavens and be happy about it. So what is the right action for a man who has an image? Or is there no right action? S: Let me turn it back. What happens with you when I say to you Can it stop? K: I say, of course. It is very simple to me. Of course it can stop You don't ask me the next question: How do you do it? How does it come about? S: No, I just want to listen for a minute to when you say, "Yes, of course". OK. Now how do you think it can stop? Let me put it to you straight - I have absolutely no evidence that it can, no experience that it can. K: I don't want evidence. S: You don't want any evidence? K: I don't want somebody's explanation. S: Or experience? K: Because they are based on images. Future image, or past image or living image. So I say: Can it stop? I say it can. Definitely. It is not just a verbal statement to amuse you. To me this is tremendously important. S: Well, I think we agree that it is tremendously important, but how? K: Not how. Then you enter into the question of systems, mechanical processes, which are part of our image-making. If I tell you how, you will say tell me the system, the method and I'll do it every day and I'll get the new image. S: Yes. K: Now I see the fact of what is going on in the world. S: I am with you, yes. K: Fact. Not my reaction to it. Not romantic, fanciful theories of what it should not be. It is a fact that as long as there are images there is not going to be peace in the world, or love in the world -whether it be the Christ image, or the Buddha image or the Muslim image - you follow? There won't be peace in the world. Right. I see it as a fact. Right? I remain with that fact. Finished. This morning we said that if one remains with the fact there is a transformation. That is, not let thought interfere with the fact. B: For then more images come in. K: More images come in. So our consciousness is filled with these images. S: Yes, that is true. K: I am a Hindu, a Brahmin, I am by tradition better than anybody else, I am the chosen people, I am the Aryan - you follow? I am an Englishman - all that is crowding my consciousness. B: When you say remain with the fact, one of the images that may come in is that it is impossible, that it can never be done. K: Yes, that is another image. B In other words, if the mind could stay with that fact with no comment whatsoever... S: The thing that comes through to me when you say remain with the fact is that you are really calling for an action right there. K: Sir, it is up to you. You are involved in it. S: But that is different from remaining with it. K: Remain with that. S: To really see it. You know how that feels? It feels like we are always running away. K: So our consciousness, sir, is these images - conclusions, ideas... S: We are always running away. K: Filling, filling, and that is the essence of the image. If there is no image-making what is consciousness? That is quite a different thing. B: Do you think we could discuss that next time? K: Yes. Tomorrow. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART I DIALOGUE 6 6TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. DAVID SHAINBERG AND PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 20TH MAY, 1976 KRISHNAMURTI: Dr Bohm, as you are a well-known physicist, I would like to ask you, after these five dialogues we have had, what will change man? What will bring about a radical transformation in the total consciousness of human beings? Dr Bohm: Well, I don't know that the scientific background is very relevant to that question. K: No, probably not, but after having talked together at length, not only now but in previous years, what is the energy - I am using energy not in any scientific sense but in the just ordinary sense -the vitality, the energy, the drive - which seems to be lacking? If I were listening to the three of us, if I were a viewer, I would say, "Yes, it is all very well for these philosophers, these scientists, these experts, but it is outside my field. It is too far away. Bring it nearer. Bring it much closer so that I can deal with my life." B: Well, I think at the end of the last discussion we were touching on one point of that nature, because we were discussing images. K: Images, yes. B: And the self-image. And questioning whether we have to have images at all. K: Of course, we went into that. But, you see, as a viewer, totally outside, listening to you for the first time, the three of you, I would say, "How does it touch my life? It is all so vague and uncertain and it needs a great deal of thinking, which I am unwilling to do. So please tell me in a few words, or at length, what am I to do with my life. Where am I to touch it? Where am I to break it down? From where am I to look at it? I have hardly any time. I go to the office. I go to the factory. I have got so many things to do - children, a nagging wife, poverty - the whole structure of misery, and you sit there, you three, and talk about something which doesn't touch me in the least. So could we bring it down to brass tacks, as it were, where I can grapple with it as an ordinary being? B: Well, could we consider problems arising in daily relationship as the starting point? K: That is the essence, isn't it? I was going to begin with that. You see, my relationship with human beings is in the office, in the factory, on a golf-course. B: Or at home. K: Or at home. And at home there is routine, sex, children (if I have children, if I want children), and the constant battle, battle, battle all my life. Insulted, wounded, hurt - everything is going on in me and around me. B: Yes, there is continual disappointment. K: Continual disappointment, continual hope, desire to be more successful, to have more money - more, more, more of everything. Now how am I to change my relationship? What is the raison d'etre, the source of my relationship? If we could tackle that a little bit this morning, and then go on to what we were discussing, which was really much more - which is really very important - which is not to have an image at all. B: Yes. But it seems, as we were discussing yesterday, that we tend to be related almost always through the image. K: Through the image. That's right. B: You see I have an image of myself and of you as you should be in relation to me. K: Yes. B: And then that gets disappointed and hurt and so on. K: But how am I to change that image? How am I to break it down? I see very well that I have got an image and that it has been put together, constructed, through generations. I am fairly intelligent, I am fairly aware of myself, and I see I have got it. But how am I to break it down? B: Well, as I see it, I have got to be aware of that image, watch it as it moves. K: So I am to watch it? Am I to watch it in the office? B: Yes. K: In the factory, at home, on the golf-course? - because my relationships are in all these areas. B: Yes, I would say I have to watch it in all those places. K: I have to watch it all the time in fact. B: Yes. K: Now am I capable of it? Have I got the energy? I go through all kinds of miseries, and at the end of the day I crawl into bed. And you say I must have energy. So I must realize that relationship is of the greatest importance. B: Yes. K: Therefore I am willing to give up certain wastages of energy. B: What kind of wastage? K: Drinking, smoking, useless chatter. Endless crawling from pub to pub. B: That would be the beginning, anyway. K: That would be the beginning. But you see I want all those, plus more - you follow? B: But if I can see that everything depends on this... K: Of course. B: ...then I won't go to the pub, if I see it interferes. K: So I must, as an ordinary human being, realize that the greatest importance is to have right relationship. B: Yes. It would be good if we could say what happens when we don't have it. K: Oh, when I don't have it, of course... B: Everything goes to pieces. K: Not only everything goes to pieces but I create such havoc around me. So can I, by putting aside smoke, drink, and endless chatter about this or that - can I gather that energy? Will I gather that energy which will help me to face the picture which I have, the image which I have? B: That means going into ambition also and many other things. K: Of course. You see I begin by obvious things, like smoking, drinking, the pub... Dr Shainberg: Let me just stop you here. Suppose my real image is that you are going to do it for me, that I can't do it for myself. K: That is one of our favourite conditionings - that I can't do it myself, therefore I must go to somebody to help me. S: Or I go to the pub because I am in despair because I can't do it for myself and want to obliterate myself through drink, so that I no longer feel the pain of it. B: At least for the moment. S: That's right. And also I am proving to myself that my image that I can't do it for myself is right. By treating myself in such a way I am going to prove to you that I can't do it for myself, so maybe you will do it for me. K: No, no. I think we don't realize, any of us, the utter and absolute importance of right relationship. I don't think we realize it. S: I agree with you. We don't. K: With my wife, with my neighbour, with the office, wherever I am - and also with nature - I don't think we realize a relationship which is easy, quiet, full, rich, happy - the beauty of it, the harmony of it. Now can we tell the ordinary viewer, the listener, the great importance of that? S: Let's try. How can we communicate to somebody the value of a right relationship? You are my wife. You are whining, nagging me - right? You think I should be doing something for you when I am tired and don't feel like doing anything for you. K: I know. Go to a party. S: That's right. "Let's go to a party. You never take me out. You never take me anywhere." K: So how are you, who realize the importance of relationship, to deal with me? How? We have got this problem in life. B: I think it should be very clear that nobody can do it for me. Whatever somebody else does won't affect my relationship. S: How are you going to make that clear? B: But isn't it clear? S: It is not obvious. I, as the viewer, feel very strongly that you ought to be doing it for me. My mother never did it for me, somebody has got to do it for me. B: But isn't it obvious that it can't be done? It is just a delusion because whatever you do I will be in the same relationship as before. Suppose you live a perfect life. I can't imitate it, so I'll just go on as before, won't I? So I have to do something for myself. Isn't that clear? S: But I don't feel able to do anything for myself. B: But can't you see that if you don't do anything for yourself it is inevitable that it must go on? Any idea that it will ever get better is a delusion. S: Can we say then that right relationship begins with the realization that I have to do something for myself? K: And the utter importance of it. S: Right. The utter importance. The responsibility I have for myself. K: Because you are the world. And the world is you. You can't shirk that. B: Perhaps we could discuss that a bit because it may seem strange to the viewer to hear someone say "You are the world". K: After all, you are the result of the culture, the climate, the food, the environment, the economic conditions, your grandparents - you are the result of all that - all your thinking is the result of that. S: I think you can see that. B: That's right. That's what you mean by saying you are the world. K: Of course, of course. S: Well I think you can see that in what I have been saying about the person who feels he is entitled to be taken care of by the world - the world is in fact moving in that direction... K: No, sir. This is a fact. You go to India, you see the same suffering, the same anxiety - and you come to Europe, to America, and in essence it is the same. B: Each person has the same basic structure of suffering and confusion and deception. Therefore if I say I am the world, I mean that there is a universal structure and it is part of me and I am part of that. K: Part of that, quite. So now let's proceed from there. The first thing you have to tell me as an ordinary human being, living in this mad rat race, is, "Look, realize that the greatest, most important thing in life is relationship. You cannot have relationship if you have an image about yourself. Any form of image you have about another, or about yourself, prevents the beauty of relationship. S: Right. B: Yes. The image that I am secure in such and such a relation, for example, and not secure in a different situation, prevents relationship. K: That's right. B: Because I will demand of the other person that he put me in the situation that I think is secure, you see? S: Right. B: But he may not want to. S: Right. So that if I have the image of a pleasurable relationship, I have what I call claims on the other person; in other words I expect him to act in such a way that he acknowledges that image. B: Yes. Or I may say that I have the image of what is just and right. S: In order to complete my image? B: Yes. For example, the wife says, "Husbands should take their wives out to parties frequently" - that is part of the image. Husbands have corresponding images and then those images get hurt. S: I think we have to be very specific about this. Each little piece of this is with fury. B: With energy. S: Energy and fury and the necessity to complete this image in relationship; therefore relationship gets forced into a mould. K: Sir, I understand all that. But you see most of us are not serious. We want an easy life. You come along and tell me: relationship is the greatest thing. I say, of course, quite right. And I carry on in the old way. What I am trying to get at is this: What will make a human being listen to this seriously even for two minutes? He won't listen to it. If you went to one of the great experts on psychology, or whatever it is, he wouldn't take time to listen to it. The experts have all got their own plans, their pictures, their images - they are surrounded by all this. So to whom are we talking? B: To whoever can listen. S: We are talking to ourselves. K: No. Not only that. To whom are we talking? B: Well, whoever is able to listen. K: That means somebody who is somewhat serious. B: Yes. And I think we may even form an image of ourselves as not capable of being serious. K: That's right. B: In other words that it is too hard. K: Too hard, yes. B: There is an image to say I want it easy, which comes from the image that this is beyond my capacity. K: Quite. So let's move from there. We say that as long as you have an image, pleasant or unpleasant, created, put together by thought, there is no right relationship. That is an obvious fact. Right? S: Right. B: Yes, and life ceases to have any value without right relationship. K: Yes, life ceases to have any value without right relationship. Now my consciousness is filled with these images. Right? And the images make my consciousness. S: That is right. K: Now you are asking me to have no images at all. That means no consciousness, as I know it now. Right, sir? B: Yes, well could we say that the major part of consciousness is the self-image? There may be some other parts but... K: We will come to that. B: We come to that later. But for now, we are mostly occupied with the self-image. K: Yes. That is right. S: What about the self-image? And the whole way it generates itself? B: We discussed that before. It gets caught on thinking of the self as real. That is always implicit. Say, for example, the image may be that I am suffering in a certain way, and I must get rid of this suffering. There is always the implicit meaning in that, that I am real, and therefore I must keep on thinking about this reality. And it gets caught in that feedback we were talking about - the thought feeds back and builds up. S: Builds up more images. B: More images, yes. S: So that is the consciousness... K: Wait. The content of my consciousness is a vast series of images, inter-related - not separated, but interrelated. B: But they are all centred on the self. K: On the self, of course. The self is the centre. B: The self is regarded as all important. K: Yes. B: That gives it tremendous energy. K: Now what I am getting at is this: you are asking me, who am fairly serious, fairly intelligent, asking me as an ordinary human being to empty that consciousness. S: Right. I am asking you to stop this image-making. K: Not only the image-making. You are asking me to be free of the self, which is the maker of images. S: Right. K: And I say please tell me how to do it. And you tell me that the moment you ask me how to do it, you are already building an image, a system, a method. B: Yes, when you ask how am I to do it - you have already put `I' in the middle. The same image as before with a slightly different content. K: So you tell me, never to ask how to do it because the "how" involves the me doing it. Therefore I am creating another picture. B: That shows the way you slip into it. When you ask how to do it, the word "me" is not there but it is there implicitly. K: Implicitly, yes. B: And therefore you slip in. K: So now you stop me and say proceed from there. What is the action that will free consciousness, even a corner of it, a limited part of it? I want to discuss it with you. Don't tell me how to do it. I have understood that and I will never again ask how to do it. The how, as Dr Bohm explained, conveys implicitly the me wanting to do it, and the me is the factor of the image-maker. S: Right. K: I have understood that very clearly. So then I say to you, I realize this - what am I to do? S: Do you realize it? K: Yes, sir. I know it. I know I am making images all the time. I am very well aware of it. Because I have discussed with you. I have gone into it. I have realized right from the beginning during these talks that relationship is the most important thing in life. Without that life is chaos. S: Got it. K: That has been driven into me. I see that every flattery and every insult is registered in the brain, and that thought then takes it over as memory and creates an image, and the image gets hurt. B: So the image is the hurt... K: ...is the hurt. S: That's right. K: So, Dr Bohm, what is one to do? What am I to do? There are two things involved in it - one is to prevent further hurts and the other is to be free of all the hurts that I have had. B: But they are both the same principle. K: I think there are two principles involved. B: Are there? K: One to prevent it, the other to wipe away the hurts I have. S: It is not just that I want to prevent the further hurt. It seems to me that you must first say how I am to be aware of how in fact I take flattery. I want you to see that if I flatter you, you get a big inner gush; then you get a fantasy about yourself. So now you have 107 got an image of yourself as this wonderful person who fits the flattery. K: No, you have told me very clearly that it is two sides of the same coin. Pleasure and pain are the same. S: The same, exactly the same. K: You have told me that. S: That's right. I am telling you that. K: I have understood it. B: They are both images. K: Both images, right. So please - you are not answering my question. How am I, realizing all this, I am a fairly intelligent man, I have read a great deal, an ordinary man - I personally don't read so it is an ordinary man I am talking about - I have discussed this and I see how extraordinarily important all this is - and I ask, how am I to end it? Not the method. Don't tell me what to do. I won't accept it because it means nothing to me - right, sirs? B: Well, we were discussing whether there is a difference between the stored-up hurts and the ones which are to come. K: That's right. It is the first thing I have to understand. Tell me. B: Well, it seems to me that fundamentally they work on the same principle. K: How? B: Well, if you take the hurt that is to come my brain is already disposed to respond with an image. K: I don't understand it. Make it much simpler. B: Well, there is no distinction really between the past hurts and the present one because they all come from the past, I mean come from the reaction of the past. K: So you are telling me, don't divide the past hurt from the future hurt because the image is the same. B: Yes. The process is the same. I may just be reminded of the past hurt, and that is the same as somebody else insulting me. K: Yes, yes. So you are saying to me, don't divide the past from the future hurt. There is only hurt. Therefore look at the image, not in terms of past hurts or future hurts but just look at that image which is both the past and the future. B: Yes. K: Right? B: But we are saying look at the image, not at its particular content but its general structure. K: Yes, yes, that's right. Now then my next question is: How am I to look at it? Because I have already an image with which I am going to look. You promise me by your words, not promise exactly, but give me hope that if I have right relationship I will live a life that will be extraordinarily beautiful, I will know what love is - therefore I am already excited by this idea. B: Then I have to be aware of an image of that kind too. K: Yes, yes. Therefore, how am I - that is my point - how am I to look at this image? I know I have an image, not only one image but several images, but the centre of that image is me, the I - I know all that. Now how am I to look at it? May we proceed now? Right. Is the observer different from that which he is observing? That is the real question. B: That is the question, yes. You could say that that is the root of the power of the image. K: Yes, yes. You see, sir, what happens? If there is a difference between the observer and the observed there is that interval of time in which other activities go on. B: Well, yes, in which the brain eases itself into something more pleasant. K: Yes. And where there is a division there is conflict. So you are telling me to learn the art of observing, which is: that the observer is the observed. B: Yes, but I think we could look first at our whole conditioning, which tells us that the observer is different from the observed. K: Different. Of course. B: We should perhaps look at that, because that is what everybody feels. K: That the observer is different. B: Ordinarily, when I am thinking of myself, that self is a reality, which is independent of thought, do you see? K: Yes, we think that it is independent of thought. B: And that the self is the observer who is a reality. K: Quite right. B: Who is independent of thought and who is thinking, who is producing thought. K: But it is the product of thought. B: Yes. That is the confusion. K: Are you telling me, sir, that the observer is the result of the past? B: Yes. One can see that. K: My memories, my experiences - it is all the past. B: Yes, but I think the viewer may find it a little hard to follow that, if he hasn't gone into it. S: Very hard, I think. K: Be fairly simple. S: What do you mean? K: Don't you live in the past? Your life is the past. S: Right. K: You are living in the past. Right? S: That's right, yes. K: Past memories, past experiences. S: Yes, past memories, past becomings. K: And from the past you project the future. S: Right. K: You hope that you will be good, that you will be different in future. It's always from the past to the future. S: That's right. That's how it is lived. K: Now that past is the me, of course. B: But it does look as if it is something independent... K: Is it independent? B: It isn't, but... K: I know, that is what we are asking. Is the me independent of the past? B: It looks as if the me is here looking at the past. K: The me is the product of the past. S: Right. I can see that. K: How do you see it? B: Intellectually. S: I see it intellectually. K: Then you don't see it. S: Right. That is what I am coming to. K: You are playing tricks. S: I see it as an intellectual - that's right, that's right. I see it intellectually. K: Do you see this table intellectually? S: No. K: Why? S: There is an immediacy of perception there. K: Why isn't there an immediacy of perception of a truth, which is that you are the past? S: Because time comes in. I imagine that I have gone through time. K: What do you mean imagine? S: I have an image of myself at three, I have an image of myself at ten and I have an image of myself at seventeen, and I say that they followed in sequence in time. I see myself having developed over that time. I am different now from what I was five years ago. K: Are you? S: I am telling you that that is how I have got that image. That image of a developmental sequence. K: I understand all that, sir. S: And I exist as a storehouse of memories, of accumulated incidents. K: That is, time has produced that. S: Right. I see that, right. K: What is time? S: I have just described it to you. Time is a movement... I have moved from the time I was three. K: From the past, it is a movement. S: That's right. From three to ten, to seventeen. K: Yes, I understand. Now, is that movement an actuality? S: What do you mean by actuality? B: Or is it an image? Is it an image, or is it an actuality? I mean, if I have an image of myself as saying "I need this", it may not be an actual fact - right? It is just... K: An image is not a fact. S: Right. But I feel... K: No, what you feel is like saying "my experience'. S: No, I am describing an actual... B: But that is the whole point about the image, that it imitates an actual fact, you get the feeling that it is real. In other words I feel that I am really there - an actual fact looking at the past, at how I have developed. S: Right. B: But is it a fact that I am doing that? S: What do you mean? It is an actual fact that I get the feeling that I am looking. B: Yes, but is it an actual fact that that is the way it all is and was? S: No, it is not. I can see the incorrectness of my memory which constructs me in time. I mean, obviously I was much more at three than I can remember; I was more at ten than I can remember, and obviously there was much more going on at seventeen than I have in my memory. B: Yes, but the me who is here now is looking at all that. S: That's right. B: But is he really there and is he looking? That is the question. S: Is the me that is looking..? K: ...an actuality. As this table is. S: Well, let's... K: Stick to it, stick to it. S: That is what I am going to do. What is an actuality is this development, this image of a developmental sequence. B: And the me who is looking at it? S: And the me who is looking at it, that's right. B: But it may be, in fact it is, that the me who is looking at it is also an image as is the developmental sequence. S: You are saying then that this image of me is... K: ...is not reality. B: It is not a reality independent of thinking. K: So we must go back to find out what is reality. S: Right. K: Reality, we said, is everything that thought has put together. The table, the illusion, the churches, the nations - everything that thought has contrived is reality. But nature is not this sort of reality. It is not put together by thought, though it is nevertheless a reality. B: It is a reality independent of thought. But is the me who is looking, a reality independent of thought, like nature? K: That is the whole point. Have you understood? S: Yes. I am beginning to see. K: Sir, just let's be simple. We said we have images; I know I have images and you tell me to look at them, to be aware of them, to perceive the image. Is the perceiver different from the perceived? That is all my question is. S: I know. I know. K: Because if he is different then the whole process will go on indefinitely - right? But if there is no division, if the observer is the observed, then the whole problem changes. S: Right. K: Right? So is the observer different from the observed? Obviously not. So can I look at that image without the observer? And is there an image when there is no observer? Because the observer makes the image, the observer is the movement of thought. B: We shouldn't call it the observer then because it is not looking. I think the language is confusing. K: The language is, yes. B: Because if you say it is an observer that implies that something is looking. K: Yes, quite. B: What you really mean is that thought is moving and creating an image as if it were looking, but nothing is being seen. K: Yes. B: Therefore there is no observer. K: That is right. But put it round the other way: Is there a thinker without thought? B: No. K: Exactly. There you are. If there is no experiencer is there an experience? So you have asked me to look at my images, which is a very serious and very penetrating demand. You say look at them without the observer, because the observer is the image-maker, and if there is no observer, if there is no thinker, there is no thought -right? So there is no image. You have shown me something enormously significant. S: As you said the question changes completely. K: Completely. I have no image. S: It feels completely different. It's as if there is a silence. K: So I am saying, my consciousness is the consciousness of the world, because, in essence, it is filled with the things of thought -sorrow, fear, pleasure, despair, anxiety, attachment, hope;-it is a turmoil of confusion; a sense of deep agony is involved in it all. And in that state I cannot have any relationship with any human being. S: Right. K: So you say to me: To have the greatest and most responsible relationship is to have no image. You have pointed out to me that to be free of images, the maker of the image must be absent. The maker of the image is the past, is the observer who says "I like this", "I don't like this", who says "my wife, my husband, my house" - the me who is in essence the image. I have understood this. Now the next question is: Are the images hidden so that I can't grapple with them, can't get hold of them? All you experts have told me that there are dozens of underground images - and I say, "By Jove, they must know, they know much more than I do, so I must accept what they say." But how am I to unearth them, expose them? You see, you have put me, the ordinary man, into a terrible position. S: You don't have to unearth them once it is clear to you that the observer is the observed. K: Therefore you are saying there is no unconscious. S: Right. K: You, the expert! You, who talk endlessly about the unconscious with your patients. S: I don't. K: You say there is no unconscious. S: Right. K: I agree with you. I say it is so. The moment you see that the observer is the observed, that the observer is the maker of images, it is finished. S: Finished. Right. K: Right through. S: If you really see that. K: That's it. So the consciousness which I know, in which I have lived, has undergone a tremendous transformation. Has it? Has it for you? And if I may ask Dr Bohm also - both of you, all of us - realizing that the observer is the observed, and that therefore the image-maker is no longer in existence, and so the content of consciousness, which makes up consciousness, is not as we know it - what then? S: I don't know how you say it... K: I am asking this question because it involves meditation. I am asking this question because all religious people, the really serious ones who have gone into this question, see that as long as we live our daily lives within the area of this consciousness - with all its images, and the image-maker - whatever we do will still be in that area. Right? One year I may become a Zen-Buddhist, and another year I may follow some guru, and so on and so on, but it is always within that area. S: Right. K: So what happens when there is no movement of thought, which is the image-making - what then takes place? You understand my question? When time, which is the movement of thought, ends, what is there? Because you have led me up to this point. I understand it very well. I have tried Zen meditation, I have tried Hindu meditation, I have tried all the kinds of other miserable practices and then I hear you, and I say, "By Jove, this is something extraordinary these people are saying. They say that the moment there is no image-maker, the content of consciousness undergoes a radical transformation and thought comes to an end, except in its right place." Thought comes to an end, time has a stop. What then? Is that death? S: It is the death of the self. K: No, no. S: It is self-destruction. K: No, no, sir. It is much more than that. S: It is the end of something. K: No, no. Just listen to it. When thought stops, when there is no image-maker, there is a complete transformation in consciousness because there is no anxiety, there is no fear, there is no pursuit of pleasure, there are none of the things that create turmoil and division. Then what comes into being, what happens? Not as an experience because that is out. What takes place? I have to find out, for you may be leading me up the wrong path! THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART I DIALOGUE 7 7TH CONVERSATION WITH DR. DAVID SHAINBERG AND PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 20TH MAY, 1976 KRISHNAMURTI: After this morning, as an outsider, you have left me completely empty, without any future, without any past, without any image. Dr Shainberg: That's right. Somebody who was watching us this morning said, "How am I going to get out of bed in the morning?" K: I think that question of getting out of bed in the morning is fairly simple, because life demands that I act, not just stay in bed for the rest of my life. You see, I have been left, as an outsider who is viewing all this, who is listening to all this, with a sense of a blank wall. I understand what you have said very clearly. I have, at one glance, rejected all the systems, all the gurus, this meditation and that meditation. I have discarded all that because I have understood the meditator is the meditation. But have I solved my problem of sorrow, do I know what it means to love, do I understand what compassion is? - not just understand intellectually. At the end of these dialogues, after discussing with you all, listening to you all, have I this sense of astonishing energy which is compassion? Have I ended my sorrow? Do I know what it means to love somebody, to love human beings..? S: Actually. K: Actually. S: ...not just talk about it. K: No, no, I have gone beyond all that. And you haven't shown me what death is. Dr Bohm: No. K: I haven't understood a thing about death. You haven't talked to me about death. So we will cover these things before we finish this evening. B: Could we begin with the question of death? K: Yes. Let's begin with death. B: One point occurred to me about what we discussed this morning: We had come to the point of saying that when we see that the observer is the observed, that is death. Essentially that is what you said. Now this raises a question: If the self is nothing but an image what is it that dies? If the image dies that is nothing, it is not death - right? K: That's right. B: So is there something real that dies? K: There is biological death. B: We are not discussing that at the moment. You were discussing some other kind of death. K: We were saying this morning, that if there are no images at all in my consciousness, there is death. B: That is the point. It is not clear. What is it that has died? K: The images have died. `Me' is dead. B: But is that a genuine death? K: Ah, that is what I want to find out. Is it a verbal comprehension? B: Or, more deeply, is there something that has to die? Something real. In other words if an organism dies something real has died. But when the self dies... K: Ah, but I have accepted so far that the self has been an astonishingly real thing. B: Yes. K: Then you three come along and tell me that that image is fictitious. I understand that, and I am a little frightened that when that dies, when there is no image, there is an ending to something. B: Yes, well what is it that ends? K: Ah, quite. What is it that ends? B: Is it something real that ends? You could say that an ending of an image is no ending at all - right? K: At all... B: If it is only an image that ends it is only an image of ending. What I am trying to say is that nothing much ends if it is only an image. K: Yes. That is what I want to get at. B: Is it? You know what I mean? K: If it is merely an ending of an image... S: ...then that is nothing much. B: It is like turning off the television. Is that what death is? Or is there something deeper that dies? K: Oh, very much deeper. B: Something deeper dies? K: Yes. S: How about the image-making process? K: No, no. I would say it is not the end of the image which is death, but something much deeper. B: But it is still not the death of the organism. K: Still not the death of the organism, of course. The organism will more or less... B: ...go on, up to a point. K: Up to a point, yes. There is disease, accident, old age. But death. The ending of the image is fairly simple, and fairly acceptable. But that is a very shallow pool. B: Yes. K: You have taken away the little water there is in the pool and there is nothing but mud left behind. That is nothing. So is there something much more? S: That dies? K: No. Not that dies, but to the meaning of death. S: Is there something more than the image that dies, or does death have a meaning beyond the death of the image? K: That is what we are asking. S: Is there something about death that is bigger than the death of the image? K: Obviously, it must be. B: Will this include the death of the organism, this meaning? K: The organism might go on, but eventually it comes to an end. B: Yes, but if we were to see what death means as a whole, universally, then we would also see what the death of the organism means. But is there some meaning also in the death of the self-image? The same meaning? K: That is only, I should say, a very small part. B: That is very small. K: That is a very, very small part. B: But there might be a process or a structure beyond the self-image that might die, that creates the self-image. K: Yes, that is thought. B: That is thought. Now are you discussing the death of thought? K: That again is only superficial. B: That is very small. K: Very small. B: Is there something beyond thought in this that..? K: That is what I want to get at. S: We are trying to get at the meaning of death... B: We are not quite there. S: ...which is beyond the death of the self, thought or the image. K: No, just look: the image dies, that is fairly simple. S: Right. K: It is a very shallow affair. Then there is the ending of thought, which is dying to thought. B: You said thought is deeper than the image but still not very deep. K: Not very deep. Now is there something more? B: In what sense "more"? Something more that exists? Or something more that has to die? S: Is it something creative that happens? K: No, no. We are going to find out. B: But I mean your question is not clear when you say, "Is there something more?" K: Death must have something enormously significant. B: But are you saying that death has a meaning, a significance, for everything? For the whole of life? K: For the whole of life. B: It is not generally accepted, if we are thinking of the viewer, that death has that significance. As we live now death is... K: ...is at the end. B: ...is at the end and we try to forget about it. K: Yes. B: Try to make it unobtrusive. K: But as you three have pointed out, my life has been in a turmoil, my life has been a constant conflict... B: Right. K: That has been my life. I have clung to the known and therefore death is the unknown, so I am afraid of it. And you come along and say, "Look, death is partly the ending of the image and the maker of the image, but death has much greater significance than merely this empty saucer." B: Well, if you could make it more clear why it must have. S: Why must it? K: Is life just a shallow, empty pool? Empty mud at the end of it? S: Why would you assume it is anything else? K: I want to know. B: But even if it is something else we have to ask why is it that death is the key to understanding. K: Because it is the ending of everything. The end of reality and all my concepts, my images - the end of all the memories. B: But that is in the ending of thought, right? K: The ending of thought. It also means the ending of time. B: Ending of time. K: Time coming to a stop totally. There is no future in the sense of the past meeting the present and carrying on. B: Psychologically speaking. K: Yes, psychologically speaking, of course; we are speaking psychologically. Psychological ending to everything. S: Right. K: That's what death is. B: And when your organism dies then everything ends for that organism. K: Of course. When the organism dies it is finished. But wait a minute. If I don't end the image, the stream of image-making goes on. B: It is not too clear where it goes on. In other people? K: It manifests itself in other people. That is, I die; the organism dies and at the last minute I am still with the image that I have. B: Yes, well then what happens to that? K: That image has its continuity with the rest of the images, your image, my image. S: Right. K: Your image is not different from mine. S: Right. We share that. K: No, no. Not share it. It is not different. It may be a little more frail, or have a little more colour, but essentially my image is your image. S: Right. K: So there is this constant flow of image-making. B: Well, where does it take place? In people? K: It is there. It manifests itself in people. B: You feel it is in some ways more general, more universal? K: Yes, much more universal. B: That is rather strange. K: Eh? B: I say it is rather strange to think of that. K: Yes. S: It is there. Like a river, it is there. K: Yes, it is there. S: And it manifests itself in streams. B: In people. S: Which we call people. K: No, that stream is the maker of images and imagery. B: In other words you are saying that the image does not originate only in one brain, but is in some sense universal? K: Universal. Quite right. B: You are not only saying that it is just the sum of all the brains; you are implying something more? K: It is the effect of all the brains and it manifests itself in people as they are born. B: Yes. K: Now is that all? Let's say, yes. Does death bring about this sense of enormous, endless energy which has no beginning and no end? Life must have infinite depth. B: Yes, and it is death which opens that out. K: Death opens that up. B: But we say it is more than the death of the image-making. You see, this is not clear. Is it something real which is blocking that from realizing itself? K: Yes. It is blocking itself through images and the thoughtmaker. S: The image-making and thought-making are blocking this greater... K: Wait a minute. There are still other blocks, deeper blocks. B. That is what I was trying to get at. That there are deeper blocks that are real. K: That are real. B: And they really have to die. K: That is just it. S: Would that be like this stream that you were talking about.. ? K. There is a stream of sorrow, isn't there? B: Is sorrow deeper than the image? K: Yes. B: That is important. K: It is. S: You think so? K: Don't you? S: I do. K: Be careful, sir, this is very serious. S: That's right. B: Would you say sorrow and suffering are the same, just different words? K: Different words. S: Deeper than this image-making is sorrow. K: Isn't it? Man has lived with sorrow a million years. B: Well, could we say a little more about sorrow. It is more than pain. K: Much more than pain. Much more than loss. Much more than losing someone. S: It is deeper than that. K: Much deeper than that. B: It goes beyond the image, beyond thought. K: Of course. It goes beyond thought. B: Beyond thought, and what we ordinarily call feeling. K: Of course. Feeling, thought. Now can that end? S: Before you go on - are you saying that the stream of sorrow is a different stream from the stream of image-making? K: No, it is part of the stream. S: Part of the same stream? K: The same stream but much deeper. B: Then are you saying that there is a very deep stream, and that image-making is on the surface of this stream? K: That's all. B: Right. The waves on the surface, right? Could you say we have understood the waves on the surface of this stream, which we call image-making? K: Yes, that's right. Image-making. B: And the disturbances in sorrow come out on the surface as image-making. K: That's right. S: So now we have got to go deep-sea diving! K: You know, sir, there is universal sorrow. B: Yes, but let's try to make it clear. It is not merely that there is the sum of all the sorrow of different people... K: No, no. Could we put it this way? The waves on the river don't bring compassion or love - compassion, love, we have said, are synonymous, so we will keep to the word "compassion". The waves don't bring this. What will? Without compassion human beings are destroying themselves. So does compassion come with the ending of sorrow, which is not the sorrow created by thought? B: In thought you have sorrow for the self - right? K: Yes. Sorrow for the self. B: Which is self-pity. K: Self-pity. B: And now you say there is another sorrow, a deeper sorrow. K: There is a deeper sorrow. B: Which is not merely the total sum but something universal. K: That's right. S. Can we spell that out? Go into it? K: Don't you know it? I am just asking. Don't you know, aren't you aware of a much deeper sorrow than the sorrow of thought, of self-pity, the sorrow of the image? S: Yes. B: Is it sorrow for the fact that man is in this state which he can't get out of? K: That is partly it. That means partly the sorrow of ignorance. B: Yes. Man is ignorant and cannot get out of it. K: Cannot get out of it. And the perception of that sorrow is compassion. B: All right. Then the non-perception is sorrow? K: Yes, yes, yes. Are we seeing the same thing? S: No, I don't think so. K: Say, for instance, you see me in ignorance. B: Or I see the whole of mankind in ignorance. K: Mankind in ignorance. Ignorant in the sense we are talking about - that is, the maker of the image... B: Let's say that if my mind is really right, good, clear, that should have a deep effect on me. S: What would have a deep effect on me? B: To see this tremendous ignorance, this tremendous destruction. K: We are getting at it. We are getting at it. S: Right, right. K: We are getting at it. B: But then if I don't fully perceive, if I start to escape the perception of it, I am in it too. K: Yes, in it too. B: The feeling is that universal sorrow is still something I can feel, is that what you mean to say? K: Yes. B: Although I am not very perceptive as to what it means. K: No, no. You can feel the sorrow of thought. B: The sorrow of thought. But I can sense, or somehow be aware of the universal sorrow. K: Yes. B: Right. S: You say universal sorrow is there whether you feel it... K: You can feel it. B: Feel it or sense it. K: Sorrow of man living like this. B: Is that the essence of it? K: I am just moving into it. Let's go. B: Is there more to it than that? K: Much more to it. B: Then perhaps we should try to bring that out. K: I am trying to. You see me: I live the ordinary life, image, sorrow, fear, anxiety; I have the sorrow of self-pity. And you, who are "enlightened" (in quotes), look at me, and I say, "Aren't you full of sorrow for me?" - which is compassion. B: I would say that is a kind of energy which is tremendously aroused because of this situation. K: Yes. B: But would you call it sorrow? Or compassion? K: Compassion, which is the outcome of sorrow. B: But have you felt sorrow first? I mean, does the enlightened person feel sorrow and then compassion? K: No. S: The other way? K: No, no. Go very carefully. You see, sir, you are saying that one must have sorrow first to have compassion. B: I am not. I am just exploring. K: Yes, you are exploring. Through sorrow you come to compassion. B: That is what you seem to be saying. K: Which implies that I must go through all the horrors of mankind... S: Right. B: Well, let's say that the enlightened man sees this sorrow, sees this destruction, and he feels some tremendous energy - we will call it compassion. K: Yes. B: Now does he understand that the people are in sorrow..? K: Of course. B: ...but he himself is not in sorrow. K: That's right. That's right. B: But he feels a tremendous energy to do something. K: Yes. Tremendous energy of compassion. S: Would you say then that the enlightened man perceives, or is aware of the conflict, the awkwardness, the blundering, the loss of life, but that he is not aware of sorrow? K: No, sir. Dr Shainberg just listen. Suppose you have been through all this - image, thought, the sorrow of thought, fears, anxieties, and you say, "I have understood all that". But you have very little left. You have energy, but it is a very shallow business. And is life as shallow as all that? Or has it an immense depth? Depth is the wrong word. B: Well, yes, inwardness? K: Inwardness, yes. And to find that out don't you have to die to everything known? B: But how does this relate to sorrow at the same time? K: I am coming to that. You might feel that I am ignorant, that I have my anxieties and fears. You are beyond it, you are on the other side of the stream as it were. Don't you have compassion for me? S: Yes. B: Yes. K: Compassion. Is that the result of the ending of sorrow, universal sorrow? B: Universal sorrow? You say the ending of sorrow. Now you are talking about the person who is in sorrow to begin with. K: Yes. B: And in him this universal sorrow ends? Is that what you are saying? K: No. More than that. B: More than that? Well, we have to go slowly because if you say the ending of universal sorrow, the thing that is puzzling is to say that it still exists, do you see? K: Eh? B: You say if the universal sorrow ends then it has all gone. K: Ah, it is still there. B: Still there. There is a certain puzzle in language. K: Yes, yes. B: So in some sense the universal sorrow ends, but in another sense it persists. K: Yes, that is right. B: Could we say that if you have an insight into the essence of sorrow, universal sorrow, then sorrow ends in that insight? Is that what you mean? K: Yes, that's right. B: Although... K: Although it still goes on. S: I have got a deeper question. The question is... K: I don't think you have understood. S: Oh, I think I have understood that one, but my question comes before, which is that the image-making has died - right? That is, the waves. Now I come into the sorrow. K: You have lost the sorrow of thought. S: Right. The sorrow of thought has gone but there is a deeper sorrow. K: Is there? Or are you assuming there is a deeper sorrow? S: I am trying to see what you are saying. K: No, no. I am saying: Is there compassion which is not related to thought? Or is that compassion born of sorrow? S: Born of sorrow? K: Born in the sense that when the sorrow ends there is compassion. S: OK. That makes it a little clearer. When the sorrow of thought... K: Not personal sorrow. S: No. When the sorrow... K: Not the sorrow of thought. B: Not the sorrow of thought, something deeper. S: Something deeper. When that sorrow ends then there is a birth of compassion. B: Of compassion, of energy. K: Now is there not a deeper sorrow than the sorrow of thought? S: There is. As you were saying, there is sorrow for ignorance which is deeper than thought - the sorrow for the universal calamity of mankind trapped in this sorrow, the sorrow for a continual repetition of wars and poverty and people mistreating each other, that's a deeper sorrow. K: I understand all that. S: That is deeper than the sorrow of thought. K: Can we ask this question: What is compassion? Which is love. We are using that one word to cover a wide field. What is compassion? Can a man who is in sorrow, in thought, in the image - can he have that? He cannot. Actually he cannot - right? B: Yes. K: Now when does that compassion come into being? Without that life has no meaning. You have left me without that. All you have taken away from me is superficial sorrow, thought and image-making. And I feel there is something much more. B: Just doing that leaves something empty. K: Yes. B: Meaningless. K: There is something much greater than this shallow little business. B: When we have thought which produces sorrow, self-pity, and when we also have the realization of the sorrow of mankind, could you say that the energy which is deeper is in some ways being..? K: ...moved. B: ...moved. Well, first of all in this sorrow this energy is... K: ...caught. B: ...is caught up in whirlpools or something. It is deeper than thought but there is some sort of very deep disturbance of the energy. K: Quite right. B: Which we call deep sorrow. K: Deep sorrow. B: Ultimately its origin is the blockage in thought, isn't it? K: Yes, that is deep sorrow of mankind. For centuries upon centuries it has been like that - you know, like a vast reservoir of sorrow. B: It is sort of moving around in some way that is disorderly. K: Yes. B: And preventing clarity. I mean perpetuating ignorance. K: Yes, perpetuating ignorance, right. B: Because if it were not for that then man's natural capacity to learn would solve all these problems. K: That's right. S: Right, right. K: Unless you three give me, or help me, or show me, an insight into something much greater, I say, "Yes, this is very nice", and off I go - you follow? What we are trying to do, as far as I can see, is to penetrate into something beyond death. B: Beyond death? K: Death we say is not only the ending of the organism, but the ending of the content of the consciousness - consciousness as we know it now. B: Is it also the ending of sorrow? K: The ending of sorrow of the superficial kind. That is clear. B: Yes. K: And a man who has gone through all that says, "That isn't good enough. You haven't given me the flower, the perfume. You have just given me the ashes of it." And now we three are trying to find out that which is beyond the ashes. S: Right. B: There is that which is beyond death? K: Ah, absolutely. B: Would you say that is eternal, or... K: I don't want to use that word. B: I mean is it in some sense beyond time? K: Beyond time. B: Therefore eternal is not the best word. K: There is something beyond the superficial death, a movement that has no beginning and no ending. B: But it is a movement? K: It is a movement. Movement, not in time. S: What is the difference between a movement in time, and a movement out of time? K: Sir, that which is constantly renewing, constantly - new isn't the word - constantly fresh, endlessly flowering, that is timeless. But this word flowering implies time. B: I think we can see the point. S: I think we get that, the feel of renewal in creation, and coming and going without transition, without duration, without linearity. K: Let me come back to it in a different way. Being a fairly intelligent man, having read various books, tried various meditations, at one glance I have an insight into all that, at one glance - which is the end of image-making. It is finished. I won't touch it. Then a meditation must take place to delve, to have an insight, into something which the mind has never touched before. B: But even if you do touch, it doesn't mean that the next time it will be known. K: Ah, it can never be known in a sense. B: It can never be known. It's always new in some sense. K: Yes, it is always new. It is not a memory stored up, altered, changed, and called new. It has never been old. I don't know if I can put it that way. B: Yes. I think I understand that. But could you say it is like a mind that has never known sorrow? K: Yes. B: It might seem puzzling at first. You move out of this state which has known sorrow into a state which has not known sorrow. K: Quite right, sir. B: In other words there is no you. K: That's right, that's right. S: Can we say it in this way too - that it is an action which is moving where there is no you? K: You see when you use the word "action", it means not in the future, nor in the past; action is doing. S: Yes. K: And most of our actions are the result of the past, or according to a future ideal. That's not action, that is just conformity. S: Right. I am talking about a different kind of action. K: To penetrate into this, the mind must be completely silent. Otherwise you are projecting something into it. S: Right. It is not projecting into anything. K: Absolute silence. And that silence is not the product of control - wished for, premeditated, predetermined. S: Right. K: Therefore that silence is not brought about through will. S: Right. K: Now in that silence there is this sense of something beyond all time, all death, all thought - you follow? Nothing. Not a thing, you understand, nothing. And therefore empty and therefore tremendous energy. B: Is this also the source of compassion? K: That's it. S: What do you mean by source? B: Well, in this energy is compassion... K: Yes, that is right. S: In this energy is... K: This energy is. B: Compassion. S: That's different. K. Of course. S: This energy is compassion. You see that is different from saying the source. K: You see, beyond that there is something more. S: Beyond that? K: Of course. B: Why do you say of course? What could it be that is more? K: Sir, let us put it, approach it, differently. Everything thought has created is not sacred, is not holy. B: Because it is fragmented. K: It is fragmented. We know that putting up an image and worshipping it is a creation of thought. S: That's right. K: Made by the hand, or by the mind, it is still an image. So in that there is nothing sacred. Because, as Dr Bohm pointed out, thought is fragmented, limited, finite; it is the product of memory and so on. B: Is the sacred, therefore, that which is without limit? K: That's it. There is something beyond compassion. B: Beyond compassion. K: Which is sacred. B: Is it beyond movement? K: Sacred. You can't say movement, or non-movement. A living thing - you can only examine a dead thing. S: Right. K: A living thing you can't examine. What we are trying to do is to examine that living thing which we call sacred, which is beyond compassion. B: What is our relation to the sacred then? K: To the man who is ignorant there is no relationship - right? Which is true. To the man who is free of the image and the image- maker, it has no meaning yet - right? It has meaning only when he goes beyond everything, dies to everything. Dying means never for a single second accumulating anything psychologically. S: But he asked the question: What is the relationship to the sacred? Is there ever a relationship to the sacred? K: No, no. He is asking what is the relationship between that which is sacred, holy, and reality. B: Well, that is implicit anyway. I mean that is implied. K: Of course. We have talked about this question some time ago. Reality, which is the product of thought, has no relationship to that because thought is an empty little affair. S: Right. K: Relationship comes through insight, intelligence and compassion. S: What is intelligence, I suppose we are asking. I mean, how does intelligence act? K: Wait, wait. You have had an insight into the image. You have had an insight into the movement of thought - the movement of thought which is self-pity, which creates sorrow. You have had a real insight into that. Haven't you? It is not a verbal agreement or disagreement or a logical conclusion. You have had a real insight into that, into the waves of the river. S: Right. K: Now isn't that insight intelligence? S: Right. K: Which is not the intelligence of a clever man, we are not talking about that. Now work with that intelligence, which is not yours or mine, not Dr Shainberg's or Dr Bohm's, or somebody's. That insight is universal intelligence, global or cosmic intelligence. Now move further into it. Have an insight into sorrow, which is not the sorrow of thought. Then out of that insight compassion. Now have insight into compassion. Is compassion the end of all life? End of all death? It seems so because the mind throws out all the burdens which man has imposed upon himself - right? So you have that tremendous feeling, that tremendous thing inside. Now that compassion, delve into it. And there is something sacred, untouched by man - in the sense of being untouched by his mind, by his cravings, by his demands, by his prayers, by his everlasting chicanery. And that may be the origin of everything, which man has misused - you follow? B: If you say it is the origin of all matter, all nature... K: Everything, all matter, all nature. B: All of mankind. K: Yes. That's right, sir. So at the end of these dialogues, what have you, what has the viewer got, what has he captured? S: What would we hope he has got? Would you say what we hope he has captured, or what he has actually captured? K: What he has actually, not hope. What has he actually captured? Has his bowl filled? S: Filled with the sacred. K: Or does he say, "Well I have got a lot of ashes left, very kind of you, but I can get that anywhere". Any logical, rational, human being would say, "They are discussing my part in all this and I am left with nothing". S: What has he got? K: He has come to you - I have come to you three wanting to find out, wanting to transform my life, because I feel that is absolutely necessary, not just to get rid of my ambitions and all the silly stuff mankind has collected - I have emptied myself of all that - the I has died to all that. Now have I got anything out of all this? Have you given me the perfume of that thing? S: Can I give you the perfume? K: Or share it with me. S: Has the viewer shared with us the experience we have had being together? K: Have you two shared this thing with this man? S: Have we shared this with this man? K: If not, then what? A clever discussion - oh, we are fed up with that. You can only share when you are really hungry - burning with hunger. Otherwise you share words. So I have come to the point, we have come to the point, when we see that life has an extraordinary meaning. B: Yes, it has a meaning far beyond what we usually think. K: Yes, that is so shallow and empty. B: So would you say this sacred is also life? K: Yes, that's what I was getting at. Life is sacred. B: And the sacred is life. S: Have we shared that? K: Have you shared that? So we mustn't misuse life. We mustn't waste it because our life is so short. B: You feel that each of our lives has a part to play in this sacred which you talked about? It is a part of the whole, and to use it rightly has a tremendous significance? K: Yes, quite right. But to accept it as a theory is as good as any other theory. S: Right. But somehow I feel troubled. Have we shared it? That burns, that question burns. Have we shared the sacred? K: Which really means that all these discussions, dialogues, have been a process of meditation. Not a clever argument, but a real penetrating meditation which brings insight into everything that is being said. B: Well, I should say we have been doing that. K: I think we have been doing that. S: And have we shared that? B: With whom? S: With the viewer? K: Ah, are you considering the viewer? Or is there no viewer at all? Are you speaking to the viewer, or only to that thing in which the viewer, you and I, and everything is? You understand what I am saying? S: You said we have been in a meditation, and I say we have been in a meditation - but how far have we shared our meditation? K: No. I mean has it been a meditation? S: Yes. K: Meditation is not just argument. S: No, we have shared in that. K: Seeing the truth of every statement. S: Right. K: Or the falseness of every statement. Or seeing in the false the truth. S: Right. Then being aware of the false in each of us as it comes out and is clarified. K: Seeing it all, and therefore we are in a state of meditation. And whatever we say must then lead to that ultimate thing. Then you are not sharing. S: Where are you? K: There is no sharing. It is only that. S: The act of meditation is that. K: There is only that. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 1 6TH PUBLIC TALK OJAI CALIFORNIA 17TH APRIL 1977 'MEDITATION IS THE EMPTYING OF THE CONTENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS' Meditation is one of the most important things in life; not how to meditate; not meditation according to a system; not the practice of meditation; but rather that which meditation is. If one can find out, very deeply, the significance, the necessity and the importance of it for oneself, then one puts aside all systems, methods, gurus, together with all the peculiar things that are involved in the Eastern type of meditation. It is very important to uncover for oneself what one actually is; not according to the theories and the assertions and experiences of psychologists, philosophers and the gurus, but rather by investigating the whole nature and movement of oneself; by seeing what one actually is. One does not seem to be able to understand how extraordinarily important it is to see what one is, actually, as though one is looking at oneself in a mirror, psychologically; thereby bringing about a transformation in the very structure of oneself. When one fundamentally, deeply, brings about such a transformation, or mutation, then that mutation affects the whole consciousness of man. This is an absolute fact, a reality. To bring about a fundamental transformation becomes very important, if one is at all serious, if one is concerned with the world as it is, with all its appalling misery, confusion and uncertainty, with all the divisions of religions and nationalities, with their wars, with their accumulation of armaments, spending enormous sums to prepare for war, to kill people, in the name of nationality and so on and so on. To see what one actually is, it is vital that there be freedom, freedom from the whole content of one's consciousness; the content of consciousness being all the things put together by thought. Freedom from the content of one's consciousness, from one's angers and brutalities, from one's vanities and arrogance, from all the things that one is caught up in, is meditation. The very seeing of what one is, is the beginning of the transformation. Meditation implies the ending of all strife, of all conflict, inwardly and therefore outwardly. Actually, there is no inward or outward, it is like the sea, there is the ebb and flow. In uncovering what one actually is, one asks: Is the observer, oneself, different from that which one observes - psychologically that is. I am angry, I am greedy, I am violent; is that I different from the thing observed, which is anger, greed, violence? Is one different? Obviously not. When I am angry there is no I that is angry, there is only anger. So anger is me; the observer is the observed. The division is eliminated altogether. The observer is the observed and therefore conflict ends. Part of meditation is to eliminate totally all conflict, inwardly and therefore outwardly. To eliminate conflict one has to understand this basic principle; the observer is not different from the observed, psychologically. When there is anger, there is no I, but a second later thought creates the I and says: "I have been angry" and brings in the idea that I should not be angry. So there is anger and then the I who should not be angry; the division brings conflict. When there is no division between the observer and the observed, and therefore only the thing that is, which is anger, then what takes place? Does anger go on? Or is there a total ending of anger? When anger occurs and there is no observer, no division, it blossoms and then ends - like a flower, it blooms, withers and dies away. But as long as one is fighting it, as long as one is resisting it, or rationalizing it, one is giving life to it. When the observer is the observed, then anger blossoms, grows and naturally dies - therefore there is no psychological conflict in it. One lives by action; action according to a motive, according to an ideal, according to a pattern, or habitual and traditional action, all without any investigation. A mind that is in meditation must find out what action is. One of the major problems in one's life is conflict and from conflict all kinds of neurotic activities arise. To end conflict and therefore to end neurotic action, is very important, so that one has a sane mind, a mind that is healthy, a mind that is not neurotically caught in beliefs and fears and so on. How does one act, according to what principle, according to what quality or state of mind does one act? Generally one acts from memory, the memory which is set in a pattern, which has become habit, routine. One acts according to that which is remembered as pleasant; or one acts according to an ideal one has determined to carry out in daily life; or one has an ambition which one tries to fulfil. There are various types of action and each of them is incomplete, fragmented; none is holistic - "I'm a business man and I come home and I love my children, but when I'm at business, there, I do not love anybody, I want profit, etc. etc; I may be a scholar, a painter, but my life - though I am an excellent painter - is shoddy, I'm vicious, greedy, wanting money, position, recognition, fame." One's actions are divided, fragmentary and when there is fragmentary action it must inevitably bring conflict, psychologically. Is there an action which is without conflict in which there are no regrets, no failures, no sense of frustration; is there an action which is whole, harmonious, complete, an action not in a particular field contrary to another field? One has to see what one is actually doing, how one is actually living a contradictory life, acting contradictorily and therefore in conflict. One must become aware of it. And if one is completely aware, then what takes place? Suppose I live in contradictory actions and you tell me,"Be ware of it". What do you mean by being aware of it? - I ask. Awareness is not possible when you choose, when you say: "I like that particular action, I would like to keep that; please help me to avoid all other action." That is not awareness; that is choosing a particular action which appears most satisfactory, most comforting most gratifying, rewarding and so on. Where there is choice there is no complete awareness. If one is completely aware, there is no problem. There is then an action which is continuous, without any break and therefore holistic. It is to have a mind that is sane, which implies not being committed to any particular form of belief, dogma, or ideal, nothing. It is to have a mind able to think clearly, directly, objectively. In the process of meditation one comes to find that action. To find out what meditation is, all previous knowledge of what meditation is thought to be blocks the exploration. Freedom from psychological authority is absolutely necessary. What is necessary in the investigation? Is it concentration; is it attention or is it awareness? When one concentrates, one's whole energy is focused on something particular, one resists and puts aside all interfering thoughts. In concentration one is resisting. But to be aware of one's thought there is no concentration; one does not choose in awareness which thought one would like; one is just aware. From that awareness comes attention. In attention there is no centre from which one is attending. This is really important to understand, it is the essence of meditation. In concentration there is a centre from which one is concentrating, on a picture or on an idea or on some image, etc; one is exercising energy in concentration, in resisting building a wall, so that no other thought comes in and there must be conflict. To totally eliminate that conflict become choicelessly aware of thought; then there is no contradiction, no resistance about any thought. From that arises awareness; awareness of all the movement of one's thought. Out of that awareness comes attention. When one is attending to something, really deeply, there is no centre; there is no me. In attention - if one has gone that far - one is free from all the travails of thought, its fears, agonies and despairs; that is the foundation. The content of one's consciousness is being emptied; it is being freed. Meditation is the emptying of the content of consciousness. That is the meaning and the depth of meditation, the emptying of all the content - thought coming to an end. Meditation is the attention in which there is no registration. Normally the brain is registering almost everything, the noise, the words which are being used - it is registering like a tape. Now is it possible for the brain not to register except that which is absolutely necessary? Why should I register an insult? Why? Why should I register flattery? It is unnecessary. Why should I register any hurts? Unnecessary. Therefore, register only that which is necessary in order to operate in daily life - as a technician, a writer and so on - but psychologically, do not register anything. In meditation there is no registration psychologically, no registration except the practical facts of living, going to the office, working in a factory and so on - nothing else. Out of that comes complete silence, because thought has come to an end - except to function only where it is absolutely necessary. Time has come to an end and there is a totally different kind of movement, in silence. Religion then has a totally different meaning, whereas before it was a matter of thought. Thought made the various religions and therefore each religion is fragmented and in each fragment there are multiple subdivisions. All that is called religion, including the beliefs, the hopes, the fears and the desire to be secure in another world and so on, is the result of thought. It is not religion, it is merely the movement of thought, in fear, in hope, in trying to find security - a material process. Then what is religion? It is the investigation, with all one's attention, with the summation of all one's energy, to find that which is sacred, to come upon that which is holy. That can only take place when there is freedom from the noise of thought - the ending of thought and time, psychologically, inwardly - but not the ending of knowledge in the world where you have to function with knowledge. That which is holy, that which is sacred, which is truth, can only be when there is complete silence, when the brain itself has put thought in its right place. Out of that immense silence there is that which is sacred. Silence demands space, space in the whole structure of consciousness. There is no space in the structure of one's consciousness as it is, because it is crowded with fears - crowded, chattering, chattering. When there is silence, there is immense, timeless space; then only is there a possibility of coming upon that which is the eternal, sacred. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 12TH JULY 1977 'THE ENDING OF CONFLICT IS THE GATHERING OF SUPREME ENERGY WHICH IS A FORM OF INTELLIGENCE' There is the theory of old, that god, divinity, descends on man and helps him to grow, to evolve and to live nobly. That is the old tradition of the countries in the East and also in a different way, in the West. In belief in such theories there is great comfort; a feeling that one is at least secure in something; that there is somebody that is looking after you and the world. That is a very old theory and it has no meaning whatsoever. That theory and teaching gives some kind of hope in a Utopia in the future as made by the present; a hope arising from the limits of what one is now. Unless there is a radical transformation, such a future is the modified continuity of "what is". One realizes that there is no security whatsoever in the things that thought has put together if one has gone into it sufficiently intelligently, rationally and sanely to find out; one sees that there is really no structure, either in the future, or in the past, or in the present, philosophical, religious, or ideological, which can give any kind of security whatsoever. One accepts very easily the path that is the most satisfying, the most convenient, the most pleasurable. It is very easy to move into that groove. And authority dictates, lays down, in a religious or a psychological system, a method by which, or through which, you are told you will find security. But if one sees that there is no security in any such authority, then one can find out whether it is possible to live without any guidance, without any control, without any effort psychologically. So, one is going to investigate, to see, whether the mind can be free to find the truth of this matter, so that one will never, under any circumstance, conform to any pattern of authority, psychologically. When one is conforming to a pattern, religious, psychological, or the pattern which one has set for oneself, there is always a contradiction between what one actually is and the pattern. There is always a conflict and this conflict is endless. If one has finished with one pattern one goes to another. One is educated to live in this field of conflict because of these ideals, patterns, conclusions, beliefs and so on. Conforming to a pattern one is never free; one does not know what compassion is and one is always battling and therefore giving importance to oneself; the self becomes extraordinarily important with the idea of self-improvement. So, is it possible to live without a pattern? Now, how is one, as a human being, the total representative of all mankind, how is one going to find out the truth of this matter? Because if one's consciousness is changed radically, profoundly - no, revolutionized rather than changed - then one affects the consciousness of the whole of mankind. How is one going to go into this problem; with what capacity does one investigate? To investigate there must be freedom from motive. If one wants to investigate the question of authority, one's background says: I must obey, I must follow; and in the process one's background is always projecting, is always distorting one's investigation. Can one be free of one's background so that it does not interfere in any way with one's investigation? One's urgency to find the truth, one's immediacy, one's demand, puts the background in abeyance; one's intensity to find out is so strong that the background ceases to interfere. Although the background, one's education, one's conditioning, is so strong - it has accumulated for centuries; consciously one cannot fight it, one cannot push it aside; one cannot battle with it and one sees that to fight the background only intensifies the background - yet one's very intensity to find out the truth of authority puts that background much further away; it is no longer impinging on one's mind. One needs to have tremendous energy to find out the truth of this matter. Mostly, this energy is dissipated in the conflict between "what is" and "what should be". One sees that "what should be" is an escape from, or an avoidance of, the fact of "what is". Or thought, incapable of meeting "what is", projects "what should be" and uses that as a lever to try to remove "what is". So is it possible to look at, to observe, "what is", without any motive to change or to transform it, or to make it conform to a particular pattern that you or another has established - whatever may happen at the end of it? If one does, the background fades away. If one is very intense to understand, one forgets oneself, forgets one is a Hindu, a Christian, a Buddhist, one forgets all one's background; therefore the whole thing disappears, the background, the motive, everything, because there is the present necessity and the urgency to find out. The intensity that is necessary can only come into being when there is no cause and no effect and therefore no reaction. It implies that one must be completely alone in one's investigation. Aloneness does not mean isolation, it does not mean one is withdrawn and has built a wall around oneself. Alone means that one is all one. Then one is a total human being representing all humanity, one's consciousness has undergone a change through perception, which is the awakening of intelligence. That intelligence finishes forever with psychological authority; it profoundly affects one's consciousness. Is it possible to live a life without any pattern, without any goal, without any idea of the future, a life without conflict? It is only possible when one lives completely with "what is". With "what is" means with that which is actually taking place. Live with it; do not try to transform it, do not try to go beyond it, do not try to control it, do not try to escape from it,just look at it, live with it. If you are envious, or greedy, jealous, or you have problems, sex, fear, whatever they are, live with them without any movement of thought that wants to move away from them. Which means what? One is not wasting one's energy in control, in suppression, in conflict, in resistance, in escape. All that energy was being wasted; now one has gathered it up. Because one sees the absurdity of it, the falseness of it, the unreality of it, one has now the energy to live with "what is; one has that energy to observe without any movement of thought. It is the thought that has created jealousy and thought that says: "I must run away from it, I must escape from it, I must suppress it." If one sees that falseness of escape, resistance, suppression, then that energy which has gone into escape, resistance and suppression is gathered to observe. Then what takes place? One is not escaping, not resisting and then one is envious, the envy being the result of the movement of thought. The envy arises from comparison, measurement - I have not, you have. And thought, because it has been educated to run away, runs away from this thing. Now because one sees the falseness of it one stops and one has the energy to observe this envy. That very word "envy" is its own condemnation. When one says "I am envious", there is already a sense of pushing it away. So, one must be free of the influence of the word to observe. And this demands tremendous alertness, tremendous watchfulness, awareness, so as not to escape and so as to see that the word envy has created the feeling; for without the word, is there the feeling? If there is no word and therefore no movement of thought, then is there envy? The word has created the feeling because the word is associated with the feeling, it is dictating the feeling. Can one observe without the word? Now, words are the movement of thought used to communicate - communicate with oneself, or with another - when there are no words there is no communication between the fact and the observer. Therefore the movement of thought as envy has come to an end; come to an end completely, not temporarily - one can look at a beautiful car and observe the beauty of its lines and that is the end of it. To live with "what is" completely, implies no conflict whatsoever. Therefore there is no future as transforming it into something else. The very ending of it is the gathering of supreme energy which is a form of intelligence. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 3 5TH PUBLIC TALK OJAI CALIFORNIA 16TH APRIL 1977 'OUT OF NEGATION COMES THE POSITIVE CALLED LOVE' Throughout the world human beings are always seeking security, both physiological and psychological. Physical security is denied when psychological security - which does not really exist - is sought in various forms of illusion and in divisive beliefs, dogmas, religious sanctions and so on. Where there are these psychological divisions, there must inevitably be physiological division with all its conflicts, wars and the suffering and the tragedy and the inhumanity of man to man. Wherever one goes in the world, it does not matter whether it is in India, Europe, Russia, China or America, human beings, psychologically, are more or less the same; they suffer, they are anxious, uncertain, confused, often in great pain, ambitious, fighting each other everlastingly. Basically, psychologically, as all human beings are the same one can with reason say that the world is oneself and one is the world. That is an absolute fact, as one can see when one goes into it very deeply. And the content of human consciousness is the whole movement of thought and the desire for power, position, security and the pursuit of pleasure in which there is fear. Fear and pleasure are the two sides of the same coin. Without understanding the whole structure and nature of pleasure, based on desire, one will never understand and live a life in which there is love. Fear and the pursuit of pleasure are part of consciousness. But is love also a part of consciousness? When there is fear, is there love? When there is the mere pursuit of pleasure, is there love? Is love pleasure and desire, or has it nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure and desire? One's brain, through the constant habit of seeking security has become mechanical; mechanical in the sense of following certain definite patterns, repeating these patterns over and over again in the routine of daily life. There is the repetition of pleasure and the burden of fear and the inability to resolve it. So, gradually, the brain, or part of the brain, has become mechanical, repetitive, biologically as well as psychologically; one is caught in certain patterns of belief, dogma, ideology - the American ideology, the Russian ideology, the ideology of India and so on. There is the direction, the pursuit, and the mind and the brain deteriorate. However pleasant, the life one lives is a life that is repetitive; however desirable, however complex, it is a repetitive life - the same belief from childhood to death, the same rituals, whether it is church or temple, there is the tradition of it, over and over again. There is the repetition of pleasure, sexual pleasure or the pleasure of achievement, the pleasure of possession, the pleasure of attachment, all these cause the brain to deteriorate because they are repetitive. So long as there is the pursuit of pleasure as a repetitive process and the burden of fear which it brings and which man has not resolved - he has run away from it, escaped from it, rationalized it, but still it remains - the brain deteriorates. What is love? Is it pleasure - pleasure in the repetitive sexual act, which is generally called love? The love of one's neighbour, the love of one's wife, in which there is great pleasure, possession and comfort, based on desire - is that love? Where there is possessive attachment to another, there must be jealousy, there must be fear and antagonism. These are obvious facts - nothing extraordinary or ideological - they are facts, "what is". So is attachment love? And what is the basis of attachment? Why is one attached to something, to property, to an idea, to an ideology, to a person, to a symbol, to a concept which is called God? If one does not fully understand the significance of attachment, then one will never be able to find the truth of love. Is not the basis of attachment the fear of being alone, the fear of being isolated, the emptiness, the sense of insufficiency in oneself? We are attached to people, to ideas, to symbols, or to concepts, because in them we think there is security. Is there security in any relationship? Is there security - which is really the essence of attachment - in one's wife, or husband? And if one seeks security in the wife or the husband and so on, then what takes place? One possesses, legally or not legally. And where there is possession there must be fear of losing - therefore jealousy, hatred, divorce and aIl the rest of it. Is love attachment? Can there be love when there is attachment; with all the implications of that word which include fear,jealousy, guilt, irritation leading to hatred - all that is implied when one uses the word "attachment"? Where there is attachment can there be love? These are factual, not theoretical, questions. One is dealing with daily life, not with some extraordinary life. One can only go very deeply and very far if one begins very near, which is oneself. If one does not understand oneself one cannot move far. One is delving into problems which are tremendously important in one's daily life. Although one has to go into this question logically, rationally, sanely, one has to go beyond it; because logic is not love, reason is not love. The desire to be loved and to love is not love. Out of the negation of what is not love, every moment of one's life, out of the putting aside of what is not love, comes the positive thing called love. Thought is fragmentary, limited; thought cannot solve the problem of what love is and thought cannot cultivate love. When one makes an abstraction in thought, one moves away from "what is". That movement of abstraction becomes a condition according to which one lives, therefore one no longer lives according to facts. This is what one has done all one's life; but one will never know what love is through abstraction, will not know the enormous beauty, depth and significance of love. Why does man put up with this suffering? Why worship suffering, which the Christians do, apparently? What is the meaning of suffering? What is it that suffers? When one says "I suffer," who is it that suffers? What is the centre that says "I am in an agony of jealousy, of fear, of loss"? What is that centre, that "essence", of a human being who says "I suffer"? Is it the movement of thought, as time, which creates the centre? How does that I come into being, which, having come into being says, "I suffer, I am anxious, I am frightened, I am jealous, I am lonely". That I is never stationary,it is always moving: "I desire this, I desire that and then I desire something else", it is in constant movement. That movement is time, that movement is thought. There is a concept in the Asiatic world that the I is something which is beyond time; and further, the concept that there is a higher I still. In the Western world the I has never been thoroughly examined. Qualities have been attributed to it, Freud and Jung and other psychologists have given attributes to it but have never gone into this question of the nature and the structure of the I which says "I suffer". The I, as one observes, says "I must have that", a few days later it wants something else. There is the constant movement of desire; the constant movement of pleasure; the constant movement of what one wants to be and so on. This movement is thought as psychological time. The I who says "I suffer" is put together by thought. Thought says, "I am John, I am this, I am that". Thought identifies itself with the name and with the form and is the I in all the content of consciousness; it is the essence of fear, hurt, despair, anxiety, guilt, the pursuit of pleasure, the sense of loneliness, all the content of consciousness. When one says "I suffer", it is the image that thought has built about itself, the form, the name, that is in sorrow. The more intense the challenge is, the greater is the energy demanded to meet it. Sorrow is this challenge. To that challenge one has to respond. But if one responds to it by escaping from it, by seeking comfort from it, then one is dissipating the energy that one needs to meet this thing. There is no escape - there is no escape because if one tries to escape, sorrow is always there, like one's shadow, like one's face, it is always with one - so remain with it, without any movement of thought. If one runs away from it, one has not solved it; but if one remains with it, not identifying oneself with it - because one is that suffering - then all your energy is present to meet this extraordinary thing that happens. Out of that suffering comes passion. There is a solution, there is an ending to sorrow - as there is an ending to fear - completely. Then only is there a possibility to know what love is. One thinks that one will learn something from suffering, that there is a lesson to be learnt from suffering. But when one observes suffering in oneself, not escaping from it, but remaining with it totally, completely, without any movement of thought, without any alleviation, comfort, but just completely holding to it, then one will see a strange psychological transformation take place. Love is passion, which is compassion. Without that passion and compassion, with its intelligence, one acts in a very limited sense; all one's actions are limited. Where there is compassion that action is total, complete, irrevocable. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 4 5TH PUBLIC TALK OJAI CALIFORNIA 16TH APRIL 1977 'DEATH--A GREAT ACT OF PURGATION' Death is something not only mysterious but a great act of purgation. That which continues in a repetitive pattern is degeneration. The pattern may vary according to country, according to climate, according to circumstance, but it is a pattern. Moving in any pattern brings about a continuity and that continuity is part of the degenerating process of man. When there is an ending of continuity, something new can take place. One can understand it instantly if one has understood the whole movement of thought, of fear, hate, love - then one can grasp the significance, instantly, of what death is. What is death? When one asks that question, thought has many answers. Thought says: "I do not want to go into all the miserable explanations of death." Every human being has an answer to it, according to his conditioning, according to his desire, his hope. Thought always has an answer. The answer will invariably be intellectual, verbally put together by thought. But one is examining, without having an answer, something totally unknown, totally mysterious - death is a tremendous thing. One realizes that the organism, the body, dies and the brain -having in life been misused in various forms of self-indulgence, contradiction, effort, constant struggle, wearing itself out mechanically, for it is a mechanism - also dies. The brain is the repository of memory; memory as experience, as knowledge. From that experience and knowledge, stored up in the cells of the brain, as memory, thought arises. When the organism comes to an end, the brain also comes to an end, and so thought comes to an end. Thought is a material process - thought is nothing spiritual - it is a material process based on memory held in the cells of the brain; when the organism dies, thought dies. Thought creates the whole structure of the me - the me that wants this, the me that does not want that, the me that is fearful, anxious, despairing, longing, lonely - fearful of dying. And thought says: "What is the value, what is the significance of life for a human being who has struggled, experienced, acquired, lived in such an ugly, stupid, miserable way and then for it to end?" So, thought then says: "No, this is not the end, there is another world." But that other world is still merely the movement of thought. One asks what happens after death. Now ask quite a different question: What is before death? - not what is after death. What is before death, which is one's life. What is one's life? Go to school, to college, university, get a job, man and woman live together, he goes off to the office for 50 years, she goes off earning more money, they have children, pain, anxiety, each fighting. Living such a miserable life one wants to know what is after death - about which volumes have been written, all produced by thought, all saying, "Believe". So, if one puts all that aside, literally, actually, puts it all aside, then what is one faced with? - the actual fact that oneself who is put together by thought, comes to an end - all one's anxieties, all one's longings come to an end. When one is living, as one is living now, with vigour, with energy, with all the travail of life, can one live meeting death now? I am living in all vigour, energy and capacity, and death means an ending to that living. Now, can I live with death all the time? That is: I am attached to you; end that attachment, which is death - is it not? One is greedy and when one dies, one cannot carry greed with one; so end the greed, not in a week's time, or ten days' time - end it, now. So one is living a life full of vigour, energy, capacity, observation, seeing the beauty of the earth and also the ending of that instantly, which is death. So to live before death is to live with death; which means that one is living in a timeless world. One is living a life in which everything that one acquires is constantly ending, so that there is always a tremendous movement, one is not fixed in a certain place. This is not a concept. When one invites death, which means the ending of everything that one holds, dying to it, each day, each minute, then one will find - not "one" there is then no oneself finding it, because one has gone - then there is that state of a timeless dimension in which the movement we know as time, is not. It means the emptying of the content of one's consciousness so that there is no time; time comes to an end, which is death. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 5 1ST PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 27TH AUGUST 1977 'ACTION WHICH IS SKILFUL AND WHICH DOES NOT PERPETUATE THE SELF.' We have become very skilful in dealing with our daily life; skilful, in the sense of being clever in applying a great deal of knowledge which we have acquired through education and through experience. We act skilfully, either in a factory, or in a business and so. That skill becomes, through repetitive action, routine. Skill, when it is highly developed - as it should be - leads to self importance and self aggrandizement. Skill has brought us to our present state, not only technologically but in our relationships, in the way we deal with each other - not clearly, not with compassion, but with skill. Is there an action, in our daily life, which is skilful yet which does not perpetuate the self, the me, which does not give importance to oneself and to one's self-centred existence? Is it possible to act skilfully without strengthening the self? To answer that one has to enquire into what clarity is; when there is clarity there is action which is skilful and which does not perpetuate the self. Clarity exists only when there is freedom to observe. One is only capable of observing, looking, watching, when there is complete and total freedom; otherwise there is always distortion in the observation. Is it possible to be free of all the distorting factors in one's outlook? When one observes oneself, or another, or society, the environment, the whole cultural, political and religious movements that are going on in the world - the so-called religious movements - can one do so without any prejudice, without taking any side, without projecting one's own personal conclusions, one's beliefs and dogmas, one's experience and knowledge and be totally free to observe clearly? One may describe what compassion is in the most eloquent and poetic manner but in whatever words it is expressed, those words are not the thing. Without compassion there is no clarity; without clarity there is no selfless skill - they are interrelated. Can one have this extraordinary sense of compassion in one's daily life, not as a theory, not as an ideal, not something to be achieved, to be practised and so on, but to have it totally, completely, at the very root of one's being? Can there be clarity? One can be very clear in one's thinking, in its objectivity, rationality, sanity; but such thinking, however logical, however objective, is very limited. And one sees that such logical, objective thinking has not solved our problems; the philosophers, the scientists, the so-called religious people, have thought very clearly about certain things, but in daily life, clear thinking has not resolved our most important issues. One may think very clearly about one's envy or violence, but that does not bring about the ending of envy or violence. Clear thinking is limited because it is thought and thought itself is limited, conditioned. Thought itself has its own boundary; it may try to go beyond that boundary by inventing a logos, a deity or a Utopian State and so on, but these inventions are still limited because thought is the product of memory, experience and knowledge and it is always from the past and therefore time-bound. Is it possible to see the limitations of thought and give it its right place? Giving the right place to thought brings clarity. To understand the whole meaning and the depth of compassion one has to investigate the movement of one's consciousness. Wherever one goes in the world, east or west, north or south, human beings have great anxiety and live in uncertainty, always seeking security in some form or another - physiologically or psychologically. And they are full of violence, right through the world; this is an extraordinary phenomenon - violence, greed, envy, hatred. In consciousness there is the good and the bad; the bad is increasing; it is increasing because the good has become static, the good is not flowering. One has accepted certain patterns of what is thought to be good and one lives according to those patterns. So, the good, instead of flowering, is withering and thereby giving strength to the bad. There is more violence, more hatred, there are more national and religious divisions, there is every form of antagonism, right through the world. It is on the increase because the good is not flowering. Now, be aware of this fact without any effort; the moment one makes effort one gives importance to the self, which is the bad. Just observe the actual fact of the bad without any effort, observe it without any choice -because choice is a distorting factor. When one observes so openly, so freely, then the good begins to flower. It is not that one pursues the good and thereby gives it strength to flower but when the bad, the evil, the ugly, is understood, completely, the other naturally flowers. We have strengthened in our consciousness, through great development of skill, the structure and the nature of the self. The self is violence, the self is greed, envy and so on. They are of the very essence of the self. As long as there is the centre as the me, every action must be distorted. Acting from a centre you are giving a direction, and that direction is distortion. You may develop a great skill in this way but it is always unbalanced, inharmonious. Now, can consciousness with its movement undergo a radical transformation, a transformation not brought about by will? Will is desire, desire for something and when there is desire there is a motive, which is again a distorting factor in observation. In our consciousness there is this duality, the good and the bad. We are always looking with the eyes of the good and also with the eyes of the bad, so there is a conflict. Now to eliminate conflict altogether is only possible when you observe without any choice. Just observe yourself. In that way you eliminate the conflict between the good and the bad. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 6 1ST PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 10TH JULY 1977 'REASON AND LOGIC ALONE WILL NOT DISCOVER TRUTH.' Reason and logic have not solved our human problems, and we are going to find out if there is quite a different approach to all the problems and travails of life. We shall come upon something that is beyond reason; for reason has not solved any of our political, economic or social problems; nor has it solved the intimate human problems between two people. It becomes more and more obvious that we live in a world that is going to pieces, that has become quite insane, quite disorderly and a dangerous place to live in. Up to a point we must reason together, logically, sanely, holistically; then, perhaps, beyond that point, we shall be able to find a different state, a different quality of mind, not bound by any dogma, by any belief, by any experience and therefore a mind that is free to observe and through that observation see exactly "what is" and also find that there is energy to transform it. One must not start from any conclusion, from any belief, from any dogma which conditions the mind, but from a mind that is free to observe, to learn, to move and act. Such a mind is a compassionate mind for compassion has no cause; it is not a result. Compassion comes when the mind is free and it brings about a fundamental psychological revolution. That psychological revolution is what we are concerned with from the beginning to the end. So we will begin by asking ourselves: What is it that we are seeking? Physical comfort? Physical security? Deep down, is there the demand or desire to be totally secure in all our activities; in all our relationships to be stable, certain, permanent? We cling to experience that gives us a certain quality of stability, or to a certain identification which gives us a sense of permanency, well-being. In a belief there is security; in identification with a particular dogma, political or religious, there is security. If we are aged, we find security or happiness in the remembrance of things past, in the experiences that we have known, in the love that we have had, and we cling to the past. And if we are young and cheerful we are satisfied for the moment, not thinking about the future or the past. But gradually youth slips into old age with the desire to be secure, with the anxiety of uncertainty, of not being able to depend on anything or anybody, yet desiring deeply to have something secure to cling to. We have to examine closely whether there is psychological security at all. And if there is no psychological security will a human being go insane; will he become totally neurotic, because he has no security? Probably the majority of human beings are somewhat neurotic. A Communist, a Catholic, Protestant or Hindu, each is secure in his belief; he has no fear because he clings to it. And when you begin to investigate, or question, or reason with him he stops at a certain point and will not examine further, it is too dangerous, he feels his security is being threatened; then communication ceases. He may reason, think logically up to a certain point but is incapable of breaking through to a different dimension altogether; he is stuck in a groove and will not investigate anything else. Does that really give security? Does thought, which has created all these beliefs, dogmas, experiences, divisions, give security? We function with thought; all our activity is based on thought, horizontal or vertical; whether you are aspiring to great heights it is the movement of thought vertically; or whether you are merely satisfied to bring about a social revolution and so on it is the horizontal movement of thought. So does thought fundamentally, basically, give security, psychologically? Thought has its place; but when thought assumes that it can bring about psychological security then it is living in illusion. Thought wanting ultimate security has created a thing called god; and humanity clings to that idea. Thought can create every kind of romantic illusion. And when the mind, psychologically, seeks security in the dogma of the Church, or some other dogmatic assertion, or whatever it is, it is seeking security in the structure of thought. Thought is the response of experience and knowledge, stored up in the brain as memory; that response is therefore always moving from the past. Now, is there security in the past? Please use your reason, logic, all your energy to find out. Can any activity of thought, which is essentially of the past, give security? Follow the sequence of it; in that which it has created it seeks security and that security is of the past. Thought, though it may project the future, says: "I am going to attain godhood", yet that movement of thought is essentially from the past. Or, recognizing there is no security in the past, thought then projects an idea, an idealistic state of mind and finds security in the hope of that in the future. A human being, throughout life, depends on thought and the things that thought has put together as being most essential, holiness, unholiness, morality, immorality and so on. Someone comes along and says: "Now look, all that is the movement of the past." Having reasoned with him, logically, the other says: "Why not, what is wrong with holding on to thought even though it is of the past"? He acknowledges it, and says: "I'll hold to it, what is wrong?" Yet when the human mind lives in the past and when it holds to the past, then it is incapable of living, or perceiving truth. We come to a certain point and we say: "Yes, I see and I recognize logically, that in those things there is no security and when they are questioned there is fear." And when we say we see that, what do we mean by that word "see"? Is it merely a logical understanding, a verbal understanding, a linear understanding, or is it an understanding which is so profound that that very understanding breaks down, without any effort, the whole movement of thought? When you say: "I understand what you are saying", what do you mean by that word "understand"? Do you mean you understand the English words? Is it an understanding of the words, the meaning of the words, the explanation of the words and therefore an understanding only at a very superficial level? Or, is it that, when you say "I understand", you mean you actually "see", or observe the truth as to what thought is; you actually feel, taste, observe in your blood as it were, that thought, whatever it creates, has no security? You "see" the truth of it and therefore you are free of it. Seeing the truth of it is intelligence. Such intelligence is not reason, logic, or the very careful dialectical explanation; the latter is merely the exposition of thought in various forms; and thought is never intelligent. The perception of the truth is intelligence; and in that intelligence there is complete security. That intelligence is not yours or mine; that intelligence is not conditioned - we have finished with all that. We have seen that thought in its very movement creates conditioning and when you understand that movement, that very understanding is intelligence. In that intelligence there is security, from that there is action. We may talk about this question in different ways, in different fields, such as fear, pleasure, sorrow, death, meditation, but the essence of it is this: thought is the movement from the past, therefore of time and therefore measurable. That which is measurable can never find the immeasurable, which is truth. That can only take place when the mind actually sees the truth that whatever thought has created, in that there is no security; the very observation of that is intelligence. When there is that intelligence then it is all finished. Then you are out of this world, though you are living in it; though trying to do something in it, you are completely an outsider. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 7 1ST PUBLIC TALK OJAI CALIFORNIA 2ND APRIL 1977 'INTELLIGENCE, IN WHICH THERE IS COMPLETE SECURITY.' Wherever one goes in the world, India, Europe and America, one sees great sorrow, violence, wars, terrorism, killing, drugs - every kind of stupidity. One accepts these as though inevitable and easily puts up with them, or one revolts against them; but revolt is a reaction, as Communism is a reaction to Capitalism or Fascism. So, without revolting, without going against everything and forming one's own little group, or without following a guru from India or from elsewhere, without accepting any kind of authority -because in spiritual matters there is no authority - can we investigate these problems that human beings have had, centuries upon centuries, generation after generation, these conflicts, uncertainties, travails, all the things that human beings go through during life only to end in death, without understanding what it is all about? Psychologically, inwardly, every human being, whoever he is, is the world. The world is represented in oneself and oneself is the world. That is a psychological, absolute fact; though one may have a white skin and another a brown or black skin, be affluent or very poor, yet inwardly, deep down, we are all the same; we suffer loneliness, sorrow, conflict, misery, confusion; we depend on someone to tell us what to do, how to think, what to think; we are slaves to propaganda from the various political parties and religions, and so on. That is what is happening all over the world inwardly; deep down, we are slaves to the propaganda of the experts, of the governments and so on, we are conditioned human beings, whether we live in India, Europe or America. So, one is actually, psychologically, the world and the world is oneself. Once one realizes this fact, not verbally, not ideologically or as an escape from fact, but actually, deeply feel the fact, realize the fact, that one is not different from the other - however far away he is - inwardly he suffers greatly and is terribly frightened, uncertain, insecure, then one is not concerned with one's little self, one is concerned with the total human being. One is concerned with the total human being - not with Mr X or Y or somebody else - but with the total psychological entity as a human being, wherever he lives. He is conditioned in a particular way; he may be a Catholic, a Protestant, or he may be conditioned by thousands of years of certain kinds of beliefs, superstitions, ideas and gods, as in India, but below that conditioning, in the depth of his mind, when alone, he is facing the same life of sorrow, pain, grief and anxiety. When one sees this as an actual, irrevocable fact, then one begins to think entirely differently and one begins to observe, not as an individual person having troubles and anxieties, but whole, entire. It gives one an extraordinary strength and vitality; one is not alone, one is the entire history of mankind - if one knows how to read that history which is enshrined in one. This is not rhetoric but a serious factor one is deeply concerned with, a fact which one denies, because one thinks one is so individualistic. One is so concerned with oneself, with one's petty problems, with one's little guru, with one's little beliefs; but when one realizes this extraordinary fact, then it gives one tremendous strength and a great urgency to investigate and transform oneself, because one is mankind. When there is such transformation, one affects the whole consciousness of man because one is the entire humanity; when one changes fundamentally, deeply, when there is this psychological revolution in one, then naturally, as one is part of the total consciousness of the human being, which is the rest of humanity, its consciousness is affected. So, one is concerned to penetrate the layers of one's consciousness and to investigate whether it is possible to transform the content of that consciousness so that out of that transformation a different dimension of energy and clarity may come into being. A human being, who is representative of the world, who is the world, psychologically, what is his innermost demand? In one part of his consciousness it is to find both biological and psychological security; he must have food, clothes and shelter - that is an absolute necessity. But also he demands, craves, and searches for psychological security - to have psychological certainty about everything. The whole struggle in the world, both physiologically and psychologically, is to find security. Security means physical permanency, physically to be well, to continue, advance, grow, and also it means psychological permanency. Everything, psychologically, if one observes very carefully, is very impermanent; one's relationships, psychologically, are most uncertain. One may be temporarily secure in one's relationship with another, man or woman, but it is only temporary. That very temporary security is the ground of complete insecurity. So one asks: is there any security, psychologically, at all? One seeks psychological security in the family - the family being the wife, the children. There one tries to find a relationship that will be secure, lasting, permanent - all relative, because there is always death. And, not always finding it - there are divorces, quarrels and all the misery, jealousies, anger, hatred that goes on - one tries to find security in a community, with a group of people, large or small. One tries to find security in the nation - I'm an American, I'm a Hindu - that gives a tremendous sense of apparent security. But when one tries to find security, psychologically, in a nation, that nation is divided from another nation. Where there is division between nations - in one of which one has invested psychologically one's security - there are wars, there are economic pressures. That is what is actually going on in the world. If one seeks security in an ideology - the Communist ideology, the Capitalist ideology, the religious ideologies, with their dogmas, images - there is division; one believes in one set of ideals which one likes, which give one comfort, in which one seeks security with a group of people who believe the same thing, yet another group believes another thing and from them one is divided. Religions have divided people. The Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Muslims, divide; they are at each other, each believing something extraordinary, romantic, unrealistic, unreal, not factual. Seeing all this - not as something to be avoided or to become supercilious or intellectual about - seeing all this very clearly, one asks, is there psychological security at all? And, if there is no psychological security, then does it become chaos? One loses one's identity - one has been identified with a nation, America, or with Jesus, with Buddha and so on - when reason, logic, makes it clear how absurd all this is. Does one despair because one has observed the fallacy of these divisive processes, the unreality of these fictions, myths, fantasies which have no basis? The very perception of all this is intelligence - not the intelligence of a clever, cunning mind, not the intelligence of book knowledge, but the intelligence which comes out of clear observation. In that intelligence, brought about this clear observation, there is security; that very intelligence is secure. But one will not let go, one is too afraid to let go lest one does not find security. One can let go of being a Catholic, Protestant, Communist, and so on, fairly easily. But when one does let go, when one cleanses oneself of all this, either one does it as a reaction, or one does it because one has observed intelligently, holistically, with great clarity, the absurdity of the fantasies and the make-belief. Because one observes without any distortion, because one is not out to get something from it, because one is not thinking in terms of punishment and reward, because one observes very clearly, then that very clarity of perception is intelligence. In that there is extraordinary security - not that you become secure, but intelligence is secure. One has come to the absolute fact - not relative fact - the absolute fact that there is no psychological security in anything that man has invented; one sees that all our religions are inventions, put together by thought. When one sees that all our divisive endeavours, which come about when there are beliefs, dogmas, rituals, which are the whole substance of religion, when one sees all that very clearly, not as an idea, but as a fact, then that very fact reveals the extraordinary quality of intelligence in which there is complete, whole security. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 8 4TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 17TH JULY 1977 'IN NEGATION THE POSITIVE IS BORN.' We are dealing with the facts of daily life, our way of living. Most of us abstract from those facts ideas and conclusions which become our prisons. We may ventilate those prisons but still we live there and go on making further abstractions of facts there. We are not dealing with ideas, exotic philosophies, or with abstract conclusions. We are going into problems that require a great deal of care and about which we must be very serious - because the house is burning. The Communist world is pressing in all the time, constraining us to believe in certain ideologies and if we do not we can be sent either to a concentration camp or a mental hospital. That is gradually closing in. If you are aware of the world situation, of what is happening in the world economically, socially, politically, of the preparation for wars, you become extremely serious; it is not a thing to play around with, you have to act. Most of us are mediocre - we just go half way up the hill. Excellence means going to the very top of it and we are asking for excellence. Otherwise we shall be smothered, destroyed, as human beings, by the politicians, by the ideologists, whether they are Communists, Socialists and so on. We are demanding of ourselves the highest form of excellence. That excellence can only come into being when there is clarity and compassion without which the human mind will destroy human beings, destroy the world. We are exercising reason, clear objective thinking, and logic, but they themselves do not bring about compassion. We must exercise the qualities that we have, which are reason, careful observation and from those the excellency of clear sight to examine the various contents of consciousness, in which compassion does not exist; there may be pity in them, sympathy and tolerance, there may be the desire to help, there may be a form of love, but all these are not compassion. Is compassion or love, pleasure? What is the significance and the meaning of pleasure, which every human being is seeking and pursuing at any cost? What is pleasure? There is the pleasure derived from possessions; the pleasure derived from a capacity or talent; the pleasure when you dominate another; the pleasure of having tremendous power, politically, religiously or economically; the pleasure of sex; the pleasure of the great sense of freedom that money gives. There are multiple forms of pleasure. In pleasure there is enjoyment, and further on there is ecstasy, the taking delight in something and the sense of ecstasy. "Ecstasy" is to be beyond yourself. There is no self to enjoy. The self - that is the me, the ego, the personality - has all totally disappeared, there is only that sense of being outside. That is ecstasy. But that ecstasy has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure. You take a delight in something; the delight that comes naturally when you look at something very beautiful. At that moment, at that second, there is neither pleasure, nor joy, there is only that sense of observation. In that observation the self is not. When you look at a mountain with its snow cap, with its valleys, its grandeur and magnificence, all thought is driven away. There it is, that greatness in front of you and there is delight. Then thought comes along registering as memory what a marvellous and lovely experience it was. Then that registration, that memory, is cultivated and that cultivation becomes pleasure. Whenever thought interferes with the sense of beauty, the sense of the greatness of anything, a piece of poetry, a sheet of water, or a lonely tree in a field, it is registration. But, to see it and not register it - that is important. The moment you register it, the beauty of it, then that very registration sets thought into action; then the desire to pursue that beauty, which becomes the pursuit of pleasure. One sees a beautiful woman, or man; instantly it is registered in the brain; then that very registration sets thought into motion and you want to be in her or his company and all that follows. Pleasure is the continuation and the cultivation in thought of a perception. You have had sexual experience last night, or two weeks ago, you remember it and desire the repetition of it, which is the demand for pleasure. It is the function of the brain to register; in registration it is secure, it knows what to do and from that there is the development of skill. That skill in its turn becomes a great pleasure as a talent, a gift; it is the movement, the continuation of thought through desire and pleasure. Is it possible to register only that which is absolutely necessary and not register anything else? Take a very simple thing: most of us have had physical pain of some sort or another; that pain is registered and the brain says, tomorrow, or a week later, I must be very careful not to have that pain again. Physical pain is distorting; you cannot think clearly when there is great pain. It is the function of the brain to register that pain so as to safeguard itself from doing things that will bring about pain. It must register and then there is the fear of that pain happening again later - that registration has caused fear. Is it possible, having had that pain, to end it, not carry it on, not carry it over? If so, then the brain has the security of being free and intelligent; but the moment the pain is carried over it is never free. Is it possible to register only the things that are absolutely necessary? The necessary things are the knowledge of how to drive a car, how to speak a language, technological knowledge, the knowledge of reading, writing and so on. But in our human relationships, those between man and woman for example, every incident in that relationship is registered. What takes place? The woman is irritated, nags, or is friendly, kindly, or says something just before the man goes off to the office, which is ugly; so from this there is built up, through registration, an image about her and she builds an image about him - this is factual. In human relationships, between man and woman, or between neighbours and so on, there is registration and the process of image making. But when the husband says something ugly listen to it carefully, end it, do not carry it on; then you will find that there is no image-making at all. If there is no image-making between a man and a woman the relationship is entirely different; there is no longer the relationship of one thought opposed to another thought - which is called relationship, which actually it is not; it is just ideas. Pleasure follows registration of an incident in the continuation given by thought. Thought is the root of pleasure. If you had no thought and you saw a beautiful thing it would rest at that. But thought says: "No I must have that; from this flows the whole movement of thought. What is the relationship of pleasure to joy? Joy comes to you uninvited, it happens. You are walking along in a street, or sitting in a bus, or wandering in the woods, seeing the flowers, the hills, and the clouds and the blue sky and suddenly there is the extraordinary feeling of great joy; then comes the registration, thought says: "What a marvellous thing that was, I must have more of it." So, again,joy is made into pleasure by thought. This is seeing things as they are, not as you want them to be; it is seeing them exactly, without any distortion, seeing what is taking place. What is love? Is it pleasure; which is the continuation of an incident through the movement of thought? Is the movement of thought love? Is love remembrance? A thing has happened and living in its remembrance, feeling that remembrance of something which is over, resuscitating it and saying, "What a marvellous thing that was when we were together under that tree; that was love" - all that is the remembrance of a thing that is gone. Is that love? Is love the pleasure of sex? - in which there is tenderness, kindliness and so on - is that love? That is not to say that it is, or that it is not. We are questioning everything that man has put together of which he says: "This is love." If love is pleasure then it gives emphasis to the remembrance of past things and therefore brings about the importance of the me - my pleasure, my excitement, my remembrances. Is that love? And is love desire? What is desire? One desires a car; one desires a house; one desires prominence, power, position. There are infinite things one desires; to be as beautiful as you are; to be as intelligent, as clever, as smart as you are. Does desire bring clarity? The thing that is called love is based on desire - desire to sleep with a woman, or sleep with a man, desire to possess her, dominate her, control her, "she is mine, not yours." Is love in the pleasure derived in that possession, in that dominance? Man dominates the world and now there is woman fighting the domination. What is desire? Does desire bring about clarity? In its field does compassion flower? If it does not bring clarity and if desire is not the field in which the beauty and the greatness of compassion flower, then what place has desire? How does desire arise? One sees a beautiful woman, or a beautiful man - one sees. There is the perception, the seeing, then the contact, then the sensation, then that sensation is taken over by thought, which becomes the image with its desire. You see a beautiful vase, a beautiful sculpture -ancient Egyptian, or Greek - and you look at it and you touch it; you see the depth of sculpture of the figure sitting cross-legged. From that there is a sensation. What a marvellous thing and from that sensation desire; "I wish I had that in my room; to look at it every day, touch it every day" - the pride of possession, to have such a marvellous thing as that. That is desire: seeing, contact, sensation, then thought using that sensation to cultivate the desire to possess - or not to possess. Now comes the difficulty: realizing this the religious people have said: "Take vows of celibacy; do not look at a woman; if you do look treat her as your sister, mother, whatever you like; because you are in the service of God you need all your energy to serve Him; in the service of God you are going to have great tribulations, therefore be prepared, but do not waste your energy." But the thing is boiling and we are trying to understand that desire which is constantly boiling, wanting to fulfil, wanting to complete itself. Desire arises from the movement - seeing - contact - sensation -thought with its image - desire. Now we are saying: seeing - touching - sensation, that is normal, healthy - end it there, do not let thought take it over and make it into a desire. Understand this and then you will also understand that there will be no suppression of desire. You see a beautiful house, well proportioned with lovely windows, a roof that melts into the sky, walls that are thick and part of the earth, a beautiful garden, well kept. You look at it, there is sensation; you touch it - you may not actually touch it but you touch it with your eyes - you smell the air, the herbs, the newly-cut grass. Can you not end it there? End it there, say: "It is a beautiful house; but there is no registration and no thought which says: "I wish I had that house" - which is desire and the continuation of desire. You can do this so easily; and I mean easily, if you understand the nature of thought and desire. Is thought love? Does thought cultivate love? It is not pleasure, it is not desire, it is not remembrance, although they have their places. Then what is love? Is love jealousy? Is love a sense of possession, my wife, my husband, my girl - possession? Has love within it fear? It is none of these things, entirely wipe them all away, end them, putting them all in their right place - then love is. Through negation the positive is - through negation; that is: is pleasure love? - you examine pleasure and see it is not that -though pleasure has its place it is not that - so you negate that. You see it is not remembrance though remembrance is necessary; so put remembrance in its right place, therefore you have negated remembrance as not being love. You have negated desire, though desire has a certain place. Therefore through negation the positive is. But we, on the contrary, posit the positive and then get caught in the negative. One must begin with doubt - completely doubting - then you end up with certainty. But if you start with certainty, then you end up in uncertainty and chaos. So in negation the positive is born. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 9 7TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 24TH JULY 1977 'BECAUSE THERE IS SPACE, THERE IS EMPTINESS AND TOTAL SILENCE.' Time, for us, is very important, both chronologically and psychologically. We depend so much on psychological time. Time is related to movement - from here to there takes time. A distance to be covered, to arrive at a goal, to fulfil a purpose, requires time. To learn a language requires time. That has been carried over into the psychological field: "We need time to be perfect; we need time to get over something; we need time to be free of our anxieties; to be free of our sorrow; to be free of our fears and so on." Time is needed in practical matters, in the field of technology and so on and that need for time has been introduced into our psychological life and we have accepted it. To wipe away our nationalities, to become brotherly we think we need time. Psychological time implies hope; the world is mad, let us hope in the future there will be a sane world. We are questioning whether there is such a thing as psychological time at all. We ask: Is there an action in which time is not involved at all? Action arising from a cause, a motive, needs time. Action based on a pattern of memory needs time to put into action. If you have an ideal, however noble, however beautiful and romantic, however nonsensical even, you need time to arrive at that idealistic state. And to arrive at that you destroy the present. It does not matter what happens to you now; what is important is the future. For the sake of the future sacrifice yourself now - some marvellous future established by the ideologists, the religious teachers and so on throughout the world. We question that and ask whether there is any psychological time at all and therefore no hope. "What shall I do if I have no hope?" Hope is so important because it gives you satisfaction, energy, drive to achieve something. When one looks closely, non-sentimentally, logically, is there psychological time at all? There is psychological time only when one moves away from "what is". There is psychological time when one realizes that one is violent and then proceeds to enquire how to be free of it; that movement away from "what is" is time. But if one is totally and completely aware of "what is", then there is no such time. Most of us are violent. Violence is not only hitting somebody physically, but anger, jealousy, acceptance of authority, conformity, imitation, accepting the edicts of another. Human beings are violent; that is the fact - violence. The very word "violence" condemns it. By the very usage of the word "violence" you have already condemned violence. See the intricacies of this. Being violent and being negligent, or lazy, we move away from it and invent ideological non-violence. That is time - the movement from "what is" to "what should be". That time comes to an end, completely, when there is only "what is" - which is non-verbal identification with "what is". Anger is a form of violence, or hatred, jealousy. The words "anger", "hatred" or "jealousy" in themselves are condemnatory; they are verbalizations which strengthen by reaction. When I say "I am angry," I have recognized from past angers the present anger, so I am using the word "anger" which is of the past and identifying that word with the present. The word has become extraordinarily important; yet if there is no usage of the word so that there is only the fact, the reaction, then there is no strengthening of that feeling. Is it possible to live, psychologically, without tomorrow? To say: "I love you, I will meet you tomorrow", that affection is in memory projected towards tomorrow. Is there an activity without time at all? Love is not time; it is not a remembrance. If it is, it is not love, obviously. "I love you because you gave me sex; or you gave me food, or flattered me; or you said you needed a companion; I am lonely therefore I need you" - all that is not love, surely? When there is jealousy, when there is anxiety or hatred, that is not love. So then what is love? Love is obviously a state of mind in which there is no verbalization, no remembrance, but something immediate. There is a way of living, in daily life, where time as movement from this state to that, has gone. What happens when you do that? You have an extraordinary vitality, an extraordinary sense of clarity. You are then only dealing with facts, not with ideas. But as most of us are imprisoned in ideas and have accepted that way of life, it is very difficult to break away. But, have an insight into it, then it is finished. Our minds are so cluttered up, with knowledge, with worries, with problems, with money, with position and prestige; they are so burdened that there is no space at all; yet without space there is no order. When I look at this valley from a height and there is a direction because I want to see where I live, then I lose the vastness of space. Where there is direction space is limited. Where there is a purpose, a goal, something to be achieved, there is no space. If you have a purpose in life for which you are living, concentrating, where is there space? Whereas if there is no concentration there is vast space. When there is a centre from which we look, then space is very limited. When there is no centre, that is to say, no structure of the me which has been put together by thought, there is vast space. Without space there is no order, there is no clarity, there is no compassion. Living where there is no effort, where there is no action of will, where there is tremendous space, is part of meditation. So far we have only dealt with the waves on the surface of the ocean. You have only dealt with the superficiality of it. Now, if you have gone so far you can go into the depth of the ocean - of course you must understand how to dive deeply; not you dive, it comes about. There is concentration, choiceless awareness and attention. Concentration implies resistance. Concentration on a particular thing, on the page you are reading, or on the phrase you are trying to understand: to concentrate is to put all your energy in a particular direction. In concentration there is resistance and therefore effort and division. You want to concentrate, thought goes off on something else, you bring it back - the fight. If you are interested in something you concentrate very easily. Implied in the word concentrate is putting your mind on a particular object, a particular picture, a particular action. Choiceless awareness is to be aware both externally and inwardly, without any choice. Just to be aware of the trees, the mountains, nature, just to be aware. Not choose, saying, "I like this", "I don't like that", or "I want this", "I don't want that". It is to observe without the observer. The observer is the past, which is conditioned, always looking from that conditioned point of view, therefore there is like and dislike and so on. To be choicelessly aware implies observing the whole environment around you, the mountains, the trees, also the ugly world and the towns; just to be aware, observe and in that observation there is no decision, no will, no choice. In attention there is no centre, there is no me attending. When there is no me which limits attention then attention is limitless; attention has limitless space. After understanding all the waves on the surface - fear, authority, all the petty affairs compared to that which we are going into - the mind has then emptied consciousness of the whole of its content. It is empty; not through action of will, not through desire, not through choice. Consciousness, then, is totally different, is of a totally different dimension. Because there is space there is emptiness and total silence - not induced silence, not practised silence; which are all just the movement of thought and therefore absolutely worthless. When you have gone through all this - and there is great delight in going through all this, it is like playing a tremendous game - then in that total silence there is a movement which is timeless, which is not measured by thought - thought has no place in it whatsoever - then there is something totally sacred, timeless. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 10 5TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 19TH JULY 1977 'THE STATE OF THE MIND THAT HAS INSIGHT IS COMPLETELY EMPTY.' An awakened intelligence has a deep, true, insight into all our psychological problems, crises, blockages and so on; not intellectual comprehension, not the resolving of problems through conflict. Having an insight into a human issue is to awaken this intelligence; or, having this intelligence, there is the insight - both ways. In such insight there is no conflict; when you see something very clearly, when you see the truth of the matter, there is the end of it, you do not fight against it, you do not try to control, you do not make all manner of calculated, motivated, efforts. From that insight, which is intelligence, there is action - not postponed action but immediate action. We are educated from childhood to exercise, as deeply as possible, every form of effort. If you observe yourself you will see what tremendous efforts we make to control ourselves, to suppress, adjust and modify ourselves to certain patterns or objectives that you or another have established; so there is constant struggle. We live with it and we die with it. And we ask: Is it possible to live our daily life without a single conflict? Most of us are awakened to all the problems, political, religious, economic, social, ideological and so on, in which we live. Being somewhat aware of all that most of us are discontent. When you are young, this dissatisfaction becomes like a flame and you have a passion to do something. So you join some political party, the extreme Left, the extreme revolutionary, the extreme forms of "Jesus freaks" and so on and so on. By joining these things, by adopting certain attitudes, certain ideologies, that flame of discontent fades away and you then appear to be satisfied. You say: "This is what I want to do" and you pour your heart into it. But gradually you find, if you are at all awake to the problems involved, that you are not satisfied. It is too late; you have already given half your life to something which you thought would be completely worthwhile and you have found later on that it is not so; then your energy, capacity and drive has withered away. Gradually the real flame of discontent has withered away. You must have noticed the pattern that has been followed all the time, generation after generation, in yourself,in your children, in the young and the old. But if you are alive to all these things and are discontented and if you do not allow this discontent to be squashed by the desire to be satisfied, by the desire to adjust oneself to the environment, to the "establishment", or to an ideal, to a Utopia, if you allow this flame to keep on burning, not being satisfied with anything, then the superficial satisfactions have no place; then this very dissatisfaction is demanding something much greater and the ideals, the gurus, the religions, the "establishment", become totally superficial. This flame of discontent, because it has no outlet, because it has no object in which it can fulfil itself, that flame becomes a great passion. That passion is intelligence. If you are not caught in these superficial, essentially reactionary things, then that extraordinary flame is intensified. That intensity brings about a quality of mind having a deep insight instantly into things, and from that there is action. Such dissatisfaction does not make you neurotic or bring about imbalance. There is imbalance only when this dissatisfaction is translated, or caught in a trap of some kind or another; then there is distortion, then there are all kinds of fights, inwardly. If you have been caught in these various traps, can you put them aside, wipe them out, destroy them? - do what you like, but have this tremendous flame of discontent now. It does not mean that you throw bombs at people, destroy, indulge in physical revolution and riots. When you put aside all the traps that man has created around you and that you have created for yourself, then this flame becomes a supreme intelligence. And that intelligence gives you insight. And when you have insight, from that there is immediate action. Action is not tomorrow. There is an action without cause; it has been a problem for many great thinkers; action without cause, action without motive, action not dependent on some ideology. One of the demands of serious people is to find out if there is an action which is per se, for itself; which is without cause and motive. See what is implied in it: no regrets, no retention of those regrets and all the sequence that follows from those regrets, such action does not depend on some past or future ideology; it is an action which is always free. It is an action that is only possible when there is insight born of intelligence. Most people would say that there must be conflict otherwise there is no growth; that conflict is part of life. A tree in a forest struggles to reach the sun; that is a form of conflict. Every animal is in conflict. And we human beings, supposed to be intelligent, are yet constantly in conflict. Now discontent says: "Why should I be in conflict?" Conflict implies comparison, imitation, conformity, adjustment to a pattern, the modified continuity of what has been, through the present, to the future - all a process of conflict. The deeper the conflict the more neurotic you become. And so, in order to have respite from conflict you believe most deeply in God, saying: "His will be done" - and we create this monstrous world. Conflict implies comparison. Can one live without comparison? which means no ideal, no authority of a pattern, no conformity to a particular ideology. It implies freedom from the prison of ideas so that there is no comparison, no imitation, no conformity; therefore you are stuck with "what is" - actually what is. Comparison comes only when you compare "what is" with "what should be", or "what might be", or try to transform "what is" into something which it is not and all this implies conflict. To live without comparison is to remove a tremendous burden. If you remove the burden of comparison, imitation, conformity, adjustment, modification, then you are left with "what is". Conflict arises only when you try to do something with "what is", try to transform it, to modify it, to change it, or to suppress it, run away from it. But if you have an insight into "what is" then conflict ceases; you are left with "what is". And what happens to "what is"? What is the state of your mind when you are looking at "what is"? What is the state of your mind when you are not escaping, not trying to transform, or deform "what is"? What is the state of that mind that is looking and has insight? The state of the mind that has insight is completely empty. It is free from escapes, free from suppression, analysis and so on. When all these burdens are taken away - because you see the absurdity of them, it is like taking away a heavy burden - there is freedom. Freedom implies an emptiness to observe. That emptiness gives you insight into violence - not the various forms of violence, but the whole nature of violence and the structure of violence; therefore there is immediate action about violence, which is to be free, completely, from all violence. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 11 5TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 19TH JULY 1977 'WHERE THERE IS SUFFERING YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY LOVE' We say that love is part of suffering. When you love somebody it brings about suffering. We are going to question whether it is possible to be free of all suffering. When there is freedom from suffering in the consciousness of the human being then that freedom brings about a transformation in consciousness and that transformation affects the whole of mankind's suffering. That is part of compassion. Where there is suffering you cannot possibly love. That is a truth, a law. When you love somebody and he or she does something of which you totally disapprove and you suffer, it shows that you do not love. See the truth of it. How can you suffer when your wife throws you away and goes after somebody else? Yet we suffer from that. We get angry, jealous, envious, hateful; at the same time we say, "I love my wife"! Such love is not love. So, is it possible not to suffer and yet have the flowering of immense love? What is the nature and the essence of suffering - the essence of it, not the various forms of it? What is the essence of suffering? Is it not the total expression, at that moment, of complete self-centred existence? It is the essence of the me - the essence of the ego, the person, the limited, enclosed, resisting existence, which is called the "me". When there is an incident that demands understanding and insight, that is denied by the awakening of the me, the essence which is the cause of suffering. If there were no me, would there be suffering? One would help, one would do all kinds of things, but one would not suffer. Suffering is the expression of the me; it includes self-pity, loneliness, trying to escape, trying to be with the other who is gone - and all else that is implied. Suffering is the very me, which is the image, the knowledge, the remembrance of the past. So, what relationship has suffering, the essence of the me, to love? Is there any relationship between love and suffering? The me is put together by thought: but is love put together by thought? Is love put together by thought? - the memories of the pains, the delights, and the pursuit of pleasure, sexual or otherwise, of the pleasure of possessing somebody and somebody liking to be possessed; all that is the structure of thought. The me with its name, with its form, its memory, is put together by thought -obviously. But if love is not put together by thought, then suffering has no relationship to love. Therefore action from love is different from action from suffering. What place has thought in relation to love and in relation to suffering? To have an insight into it means you are neither escaping, wanting comfort, frightened to be lonely, isolated; it means therefore your mind is free and that which is free is empty. If you have that emptiness you have an insight into suffering. Then suffering as the me disappears. There is immediate action because that is so; action then is from love, not from suffering. One discovers that action from suffering is the action of the me and that therefore there is constant conflict. One can see the logic of it all, the reason for it. Only so is it possible to love without a shadow of suffering. Thought is not love; thought is not compassion. Compassion is intelligence - which is not the outcome of thought. What is the action of intelligence? If one has intelligence it is operating, it is functioning, it is acting. But if one asks: What is the action of intelligence? - one merely wants thought to be satisfied. When one asks: What is the action of compassion? - is it not thought that is asking? Is it not the me that is saying: If I could have this compassion I would act differently? Therefore when one puts such questions one is still caught in terms of thought, But with an insight into thought then thought has its right place and intelligence then acts. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 12 3RD PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 3RD SEPTEMBER 1977 'SORROW IS THE OUTCOME OF TIME AND THOUGHT' We are concerned with the whole existence of man and whether a human being can ever be free from his travail, his efforts, his anxieties, violence and brutality, and whether there is an end to sorrow. Why have human beings, throughout the ages, sustained and put up with suffering? Can there be an ending to it all? One must be free of all ideologies. Ideologies are dangerous illusions, whether they are political, social, religious, or personal. Every form of ideology either ends up in totalitarianism, or in religious conditioning - as the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hindu, the Buddhist and so on; and ideologies become such great burdens. So, to go into the enormous question of suffering, one must be free from all ideologies. One may have experienced a great deal of suffering which may have brought about certain definite conclusions. But to enquire into this question one must be utterly free of all conclusions. Obviously there is biological, physical, suffering, and that suffering may distort the mind if one is not very careful. But we are concerned with the psychological suffering of man. In investigating suffering we are investigating the suffering of all mankind, because each one of us is of the essence of all humanity; each one of us is, psychologically, inwardly, deeply, like the rest of mankind. They suffer, they go through great anxiety, uncertainty, confusion, violence, through great sense of grief, loss, loneliness, as each one of us does. There is no division, psychologically, between us all. We are the world, psychologically, and the world is us. That is not a conviction, that is not a conclusion, that is not an intellectual theory, but an actuality, to be felt, to be realized and to be lived. investigating this question of sorrow one is investigating not only one's own personal limited sorrow but also the sorrow of mankind. Do not reduce it to a personal thing, because when one sees the enormous suffering of mankind, in the understanding of the enormity of it, the wholeness of it, then one's own part has a role in it. It is not a selfish enquiry concerned with how I am to be free of sorrow. If one makes it personal, limited, then one will not understand the full significance of the enormity of sorrow. In opposition to sorrow there is happiness, as in one's consciousness there is the bad and the good. In one's consciousness there is sorrow and a sense of happiness. In enquiring one is not concerned with sorrow as an opposite to happiness, gladness, enjoyment but with sorrow itself. The opposites contain each other. If the good is the outcome of the bad, then the good contains the bad. And if sorrow is the opposite of happiness, then the enquiry into sorrow has its root in happiness. We are enquiring into sorrow per se, not as an opposite to something else. It is important to understand how one observes the nature and the movement of sorrow. How does one look at one's sorrow? If one looks at it as though it was different from oneself then there is a division between oneself and that which one calls sorrow. But is that sorrow different from oneself? Is the observer of sorrow different from sorrow itself? Or is it that the observer is sorrow? It is not that he is free from sorrow and then looks at sorrow, or identifies with sorrow. Sorrow is not just in the field of the observer; he is sorrow. The observer is the observed. The experiencer is the experienced; just as the thinker is the thought. There is no division as when the observer says "I am in sorrow", and who then divides himself off and tries to do something about sorrow - run away from it; seek comfort; suppress it; and all the various means of attempting to transcend sorrow. Whereas, if one sees that the observer is the observed, which is a fact, then one eliminates altogether the division that brings about conflict. One has been brought up, educated, to think that the observer is something totally different from the observed; as for example: one is the analyser therefore one can analyse - but the analyser is the analysed. So in this perception there is no division between the observer and the observed, between the thinker and the thought -there is no thought without the thinker - if there is no thinker there is no thought - they are one. So if one sees that the observer is the observed, then one is not dictating what sorrow is, one is not telling sorrow what it should be, or not be, one is just observing without any choice, without any movement of thought. There are various kinds of sorrow; the man who has no work; the man who will always remain poor, the man who will never enjoy clean clothes or a fresh bath - as happens among the poor. There is the sorrow of ignorance, the sorrow when children are maltreated, the sorrow when animals are killed - vivisection and so on. There is the sorrow of war, which affects the whole of mankind. There is the sorrow when someone whom you love, dies. There is the sorrow of the desire to fulfil and the ensuing failure and frustration. So, there are multiple kinds of sorrow. Does one deal with all the multiple expressions of sorrow piecemeal? Or does one deal with the root of sorrow as a whole? Does one take each expression of the hundreds of varieties of sorrow? Or go to the very root of sorrow? If one takes all the multiple expressions of sorrow there will be no end. One may trim them individually, diminish them, but more will always remain. Can one look at the multiple branches of sorrow and through that observation go into the very root of sorrow, from the outside go inside and examine what is at the root, the cause? If one does not end sorrow there is no love in one's heart - although one may pity others and be troubled by the slaughter that is going on. What is sorrow? Why does one suffer? Is it that one has lost something that one had? Or is there suffering because one has been promised a reward and that reward has not been given? - because we are educated through reward and punishment. Does one suffer because of self-pity? Because one has not the things that another has? Does one suffer through comparison, measurement? Does one suffer because, through limitation, one has not been able to achieve that which one is trying to imitate - trying to conform to a pattern and never reaching that pattern fully, completely? So one asks very deeply: What is suffering and why does one suffer? One must be very careful in examination to see whether the word "sorrow" itself weighs down on man. Sorrow has been praised, romanticized. It has been made into something that is essential in order to find reality - one must go through suffering to find love, pity, compassion. We seek through suffering a reward. Does not the word "sorrow" bring about the feeling of sorrow? Or, independent of that word and the stimulation of that word, the reaction of that word, is there sorrow by itself? If this examination is a matter of tremendous crisis in one's life, as it must be, then, when there is sorrow, it is a challenge and aIl one's energy is brought into being - otherwise one dissipates that energy by running away, seeking comfort, inventing explanations such as karma and so on. It is a challenge: What is sorrow? Is there an ending to sorrow? One can only respond completely to it when one has no fear, when one is not caught up in the machinery of pleasure, when one is not escaping from it, seeking comfort, but responding to it with all one's energy - a response that is the expression of the totality of one's energy. In the understanding of the cause of sorrow does sorrow disappear? I may say to myself: "I am full of self-pity, if I can end self-pity there will be no sorrow." So I work at getting rid of it because I see how silly it is; I try to suppress it; I worry about it like a dog with a bone. And I may, intellectually, think I am free from sorrow. But the uncovering of the cause of sorrow is not the ending of sorrow. The searching for the cause of sorrow is a wastage of energy; sorrow is there, demanding one's tremendous attention. It is a challenge asking one to act. But instead of that one says: "Let me look to the cause; let me find out; is it this, that, or the other? I may be mistaken; let me talk it over with others; or is there some book that will tell me what the real cause is?" But all this is moving away from the actual fact, the actual, response to that challenge. If one's mind, the movement of its thought, is looking through its memory and responding according to that memory, according to previous knowledge, then one is acting not directly to the challenge, but merely responding from memory, from the past. I am in sorrow, my son, my wife, or the social conditions - the poverty, the brutality of man - bring about a great sorrow in me. It wants a response, a complete response, from me as a human being who represents the totality of humanity. If thought responds to the challenge saying: "I must find out how to respond to it; I have had sorrow before and I know all the meaning of the suffering and the pain, the anxiety and the loneliness of sorrow," then it is responding according to remembrance, therefore it is not an actual response; it is not actually seeing the fact that any response to that challenge from memory is no response at all, it is mere reaction. It is not action, it is reaction. Once see that, then the question is: What is the root of it all - not the cause? When there is a cause there is an effect and the effect in turn becomes a cause and the action from that becomes the cause for the next action. There is a chain effect. When the mind is caught in this limited chain, and it is always limited, then any response to the challenge will be very limited and time bound. But can one act to that challenge without a time interval? One may not actually have had any immediate sorrow, but one sees the enormity of the sorrow of mankind - the global sorrow of mankind. If one responds to that according to one's conditioning, according to one's past memory, then one is caught in action that is always time binding. The challenge and its response demand no time interval. Therefore there is instant action. Fear is the movement of thought - thought as measure. Fear is time. Thought is the response of memory, knowledge, experience; it is limited; it is a movement in time. If there is no time there is no fear. I am living now but I am afraid I might die - I might in the future. There is a time interval produced by thought. But if there is no time interval at all, there is no fear. So, in the same way: is the root of sorrow time? - time being the movement of thought. And if there is no thought at all, when one responds to that challenge, is there suffering? Can one put away, for the time being, all one's habitual ideas about time, sorrow and fear? Put away all one's conclusions, all that one has read about sorrow and begin again as though one knew nothing about sorrow. Though one suffers one has no answer to it. But one has been so conditioned: put the burden of sorrow on to somebody else, as Christianity has done so beautifully; go to church and one sees all the suffering in that figure. The Christians have given all that suffering over to somebody and think by that they have understood the whole vast field of sorrow. In India, in the Asiatic countries, they have also another form of evasion -karma. But face the actual movement at the moment of sorrow and be completely choicelessly aware of that thing and one asks: Is time, which is thought, the fundamental issue that makes sorrow flower? Is thought responsible for suffering? - not only the suffering of others, the brutality of others, but for the total ignorance of this whole earth. There is no new thought; there is no free thought. There is only thought and that is the response of knowledge and experience, stored up in the brain as memory. Now if that is fact, if one sees that it is true that sorrow is the outcome of time and thought - if that is not a supposition - then one is responding to sorrow without the me for the me is put together by thought. My name, my form, how I look, my qualities, my reactions, all the things that are acquired, are all put together by thought. Thought is `me'. Time is `me', the self, the ego, the personality, all that is the movement of time as me. When there is no time, when one responds to this challenge of suffering and there is no me, then, is there suffering? Is not all sorrow based on me, the individual, the personality, the ego? It is the self that says, "I suffer", "I am lonely", "I am anxious", this whole movement, this whole structure, is me in thought. And thought posits not only me but also that I am a superior me - something far superior to thought; yet it is still the movement of thought. So, there is an ending to sorrow when there is no me. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 13 3RD PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 3RD SEPTEMBER 1977 'WHAT IS DEATH?' One has known of thousands of deaths - the death of someone very close or the death of masses through the atomic bomb - Hiroshima and all the horrors that man has perpetrated on other human beings in the name of peace and in the pursuit of ideologies. So, without any ideology, without any conclusion, one asks: What is death? What is the thing that dies - that terminates? One sees that if there is something that is continuous it becomes mechanical. If there is an ending to everything there is a new beginning. If one is afraid then one cannot possibly find out what this immense thing called death is. It must be the most extraordinary thing. To find out what death is one must also enquire into what life is before death. One never does that. One never enquires what living is. Death is inevitable; but what is living? Is this living, this enormous suffering, fear, anxiety, sorrow, and all the rest of it - is this living? Clinging to that one is afraid of death. If one does not know what living is one cannot know what death is - they go together. If one can find out what the full meaning of living is, the totality of living, the wholeness of living, then one is capable of understanding the wholeness of death. But one usually enquires into the meaning of death without enquiring into the meaning of life. When one asks: What is the meaning of life? - one immediately has conclusions. One says it is this; one gives it a significance according to one's conditioning. If one is an idealist, one gives life an ideological significance; again, according to one's conditioning, according to what one has read and so on. But if one is not giving a particular significance to life, if one is not saying life is this or something else, then one is free, free of ideologies, of systems, political, religious or social. So, before one enquires into the meaning of death one is asking what living is. Is the life one is living, living? The constant struggle with each other? Trying to under- stand each other? Is living according to a book, according to some psychologists, according to some orthodoxy living? If one banishes all that, totally, then one will begin with "what is". "What is" is that our living has become a tremendous torture, a tremendous battle between human beings, man, woman, neighbour - whether close or far. It is a conflict in which there is occasional freedom to look at the blue sky, to see something lovely and enjoy it and be happy for a while; but the cloud of struggle soon returns. All this we call living; going to church with all the traditional repetition, or the new English repetition, accepting certain ideologies. This is what one calls living and one is so committed to it one accepts it. But discontentment has its significance - real discontent. Discontent is a flame and one suppresses it by childish acts, by momentary satisfactions; but discontent when you let it flower, arise, it burns away everything that is not true. Can one live a life that is whole, not fragmented? - a life in which thought does not divide as the family, the office, the church, this and that and death so divided off that when it comes one is appalled by it, one is shocked by it so that one's mind is incapable of meeting it because one has not lived a total life. Death comes and with that one cannot argue; one cannot say: "Wait a few minutes more" - it is there. When it comes, can the mind meet the end of everything while one is living, while one has vitality and energy, while one is full of life? When one's life is not wasted in conflicts and worries one is full of energy, clarity. Death means the ending of all that one knows, of all one's attachments, of one's bank accounts, of all one's attainments - there is a complete ending. Can the mind, while living, meet such a state? Then one will understand the full meaning of what death is. If one clings to the idea of 'me', that me which one believes must continue, the me that is put together by thought, including the me in which one believes there is the higher consciousness, the supreme consciousness, then one will not understand what death is in life. Thought lives in the known; it is the outcome of the known; if there is not freedom from the known one cannot possibly find out what death is, which is the ending of everything, the physical organism with all its ingrained habits, the identification with the body, with the name, with all the memories it has acquired. One cannot carry it all over when one goes to death. One cannot carry there all one's money; so, in the same way one has to end in life everything that one knows. That means there is absolute aloneness; not loneliness but aloneness, in the sense there is nothing else but that state of mind that is completely whole. Aloneness means all one. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 14 4TH PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 4TH SEPTEMBER 1977 'THAT EMPTINESS IS THE SUMMATION OF ALL ENERGY' One's consciousness, which is oneself, is filled with one's own concepts and conclusions and with other people's ideas; it is filled with one's fears, anxieties and pleasures and with occasional flashes of joy and with one's sorrow. That is one's consciousness. That is the pattern of one's existence. Is it at all possible to bring about a radical change in one's consciousness? For if it is not possible then one is everlastingly living in a prison of one's own ideas, one's own concepts - living in a field where there is every kind of confusion, uncertainty, instability. And one seems to think that if one moves from one corner of that field to another one has greatly changed, but still one is in the same field. As long as one lives within the field that one calls one's consciousness, however little or however great it may change, yet in that field there is no fundamental human transformation. Ideologies, however clever, however carefully thought out, ultimately bring about dangerous illusions - whether they are the ideologies of the Right, Centre, or the extreme Left, they all end up either in great bureaucracies controlling man, or in concentration camps, or the destructive moulding of man according to a particular concept. This is what is happening throughout the world; the intellectuals have led us to this point. We have been prisoners of religious ideologies and dogmas - the Catholic, the Hindu, the Buddhist and so on, and the gurus, with their modern modifications of the ancient traditions and ideologies, are also the prisoners of those ideologies. If one observes all this, carefully, impersonally, objectively, one realizes that one must put away all ideologies and ask oneself whether consciousness with its content - which is what one is, with all one's conflicts, struggles, confusions, misery and occasional happiness - can become aware of itself and empty itself? That is one problem in meditation. Meditation is not seeking an end; it is not groping purposefully after a goal. Out of meditation comes immense silence; not cultivated silence, not the silence between two thoughts, between two noises, but a silence that is unimaginable. The brain becomes extraordinarily quiet when in this process of enquiry; when there is silence there is great perception. In this silence there is emptiness, an emptiness that is the summation of all energy. In examining the question of consciousness and its content it is very important to find out whether one, oneself, is observing it, or if in observing, consciousness becomes aware of itself. There is a difference. Either, one observes the movement of one's consciousness - one's desires, hurts, ambitions, greeds and all the rest of the content of our consciousness - as if from the outside; or consciousness becomes aware of itself. This is only possible when thought realizes that it is only observing what it has created, which is the content of its consciousness; then thought realizes that it is only observing itself, not `me' which thought has put together observing consciousness. There is only observation; then consciousness begins to reveal its content, not only the superficial consciousness but the deeper layers of consciousness, the whole content of consciousness. If one sees the importance of sheer absolute motionless observation, then the thing flowers; consciousness opens up its doors. One learns the art of observing without any distortion, without any motive, without any purpose just to observe. In that there is tremendous beauty because then there is no distortion. One sees things clearly as they are. But if one makes an abstraction of them into ideas and then through the ideas observes, then it is a distortion. One freely, without any distorting factor, enters into the observation of consciousness. There is nothing hidden and consciousness begins to reveal its own totality, its content, one's hurts, greed, envy, happiness, beliefs, ideologies, past traditions, the present scientific or factual traditions and so on and so on - all that is our consciousness. One observes it without any movement of thought; because it is thought that has put together all the content of our consciousness - thought has built it. When thought comes and says: "This is right, this is wrong, this shouldn't be, that should", one is still within the field of consciousness; one is not going beyond it. One has to understand very clearly the place of thought; it has its own place, in the field of knowledge, technology and so on. But thought has no place whatsoever in the psychological structure of man. So, can one observe one's consciousness and does it reveal its content? - not bit by bit, but the totality of its movement. Then only is it possible to go beyond it. In enquiring, can one observe without any movement of the eye? Because the eye has an effect on the brain. When one keeps the eyeballs completely still observation becomes very clear because the brain is quietened. So, can one observe without any movement of thought interfering with one's observation? It is only possible when the observer realizes that he and that which he is observing are one - the observer is the observed. Anger is not different from me - I am anger, I am jealousy. There is no division between the observer and the observed; that is the basic reality one must capture. Then the whole of consciousness begins to reveal itself without the making of any effort. In that total observation there is the emptying of, or the going beyond, all the things that thought has put together - which is one's consciousness. Then there is the problem of time - time psychologically, as a movement towards the fulfilment of an idea, an ideology. One is greedy, or violent: one says to oneself: "I will take time to get over it, or to modify it, or change it, or to get rid of it, or to go beyond it." That time is psychological time, not chronological time, by the watch or by the sun. There is this whole conditioning of one's mind which says: "I will take time to achieve that which I consider to be essential, to be beautiful, to be good." One questions that time, and asks: Is there psychological time at all? Is it not that thought has invented that time? This is a very important thing to understand because it shatters altogether the idea of tomorrow - psychologically. It is a tremendous fact. If one understands that, psychologically, there is no tomorrow, then what will one do with that "which is"? If there is no time, then how is violence to end? One is conditioned to use time as a means of getting rid, slowly or quickly, of - say -violence. But if there is no time at all then what takes place when there is violence? Will there be violence? If it is one's whole outlook that, psychologically, there is no time at all, then is there a me who is violent? The me is put together through time. The me as violence, is time. But if there is no time at all as me, then there is nothing, there is no violence. If there is no time at all, there is no past or future, but only something else, totally different. One is so conditioned to time and one says psychologically, that there must be time for me to evolve, for me to become something other than that which I am. When one sees the truth of the fact that thought itself is the cause of this time, then there is an ending of the past and the future; there is only the sense of timeless movement now. It is really extraordinary if one understands this. And, after all, love is that. Love is at the same level, at the same time, at the same intensity; at that moment that is love - not the remembrance of it, or the future hope for it. That state of mind, which is love, is really completely without time. Then see what happens in one's relationship with another. One perhaps has that extraordinary sense of love which is not of time, which is not of thought, which is not a remembrance of pleasure or pain; then what is the relationship between one who has that and another who has not? One has no image about another because the image is the movement of time, thought has built images step by step about another and that is no longer happening; but the other has made images about oneself step by step; for the other is in a movement of time and oneself has no time at all. One has this extraordinary sense of love which is not of time. What then is one's relationship with another? When one has that extraordinary quality of love then in that quality there is supreme intelligence. That intelligence is going to act in that relationship, it is not oneself who will act in that relationship. It is really a marvellous thing to go into because it totally alters all relationship; and if there is no such fundamental alteration in relationship there is no alteration in this monstrous society which we have built. What is space? Can there be space without order? Just take an outward physical example: is there space when there is disorder in a room? When one throws one's clothes all over the place and everything is in disorder, is there space? There is only space when everything is in its right place. So, outwardly. Now inwardly: our minds are so confused, our whole life is self-contradiction, disorder, caught in various habits, drugs, smoke, drink, sex and so on. Obviously habits are mechanical and where there are habits there is disorder. What is order inwardly? Is order something dictated by thought? Thought itself is a movement of disorder. One thinks one can bring about social order by very careful thought, by ideological thought. Society, whether in the West or the East, is in disorder, is confused, is contradictory and the world is so totally mad. Wherever there is the movement of thought, time-binding, fragmentary and limited in itself, there must be total disorder. Is there an action which is not the result of the movement of thought; an action not conditioned by ideologies which have been put together by thought? Is there an action totally free from thought? Such action, then, would be complete, whole, total - not fragmentary, not contradictory. Such action would be whole action in which there is no regret, no sense of "I wish I hadn't done that", or "I will try to do that". Disorder comes about when there is the movement of thought and thought itself is fragmentary and when it acts everything must be fragmentary. If one sees that very clearly, then one asks: "What is action without thought?" Action means the doing now, not doing tomorrow, or having done in the past. It is as love, it is not of time. Love and compassion are beyond intellect, beyond memory; they are a state of mind that acts because love and compassion are supremely intelligent - intelligence acts. Where there is space, there is order, which is the action of intelligence; it is neither yours nor mine, it is intelligence born out of love and compassion. Space implies a mind that is not occupied; yet our minds are occupied all day long about something or other and so there is no space, not even an interval between two thoughts, every thought is associated with another thought so that there is no gap -the whole mind is crowded, chattering, with opinions and judgements. True order brings enormous space; space means silence; out of silence comes this extraordinary sense of emptiness. Do not be frightened by that word "empty; when there is emptiness then things can happen. What is beauty? Does it lie in a picture, in a museum, in a poem? Does it lie in the line of the mountains against the sky; or in a sheet of water reflecting the beauty of the clouds, or in the line an architect gives a building; or in a home that has a certain beauty? What is beauty? - not the imagination that creates beauty; not the word that creates beauty; not a beautiful idea. When one sees something extraordinarily alive and beautiful, a mountain, a clear sky, a view, at that moment when seeing it totally one is absent, is one not? Because of the immensity of the mountain, its extraordinary stability, its sense of firmness and the line of it, its magnificence drives away the me - for the moment. The outer glory has driven away the petty little me - like a boy given a toy, he is absorbed by it, he will play with it for an hour and break it up and when you take the toy away he is back to himself, naughty, crying and mischievous. The same thing has happened; the great mountain has driven away the petty little me, and one sees it for the moment. When the me is absent, totally, there is beauty. Then one's relationship to nature changes completely; the earth becomes precious, every tree, every leaf, everything is part of that beauty -but man is destroying everything. Is there anything sacred, holy? Obviously the things that thought has put together in the religious sense - investing sacredness in images, in ideas - are not sacred at all. That which is sacred has no division, not one a Christian, another a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and all the rest of the divisions. That which thought has put together is of time, is fragmentary, is not whole, therefore it is not holy, though you worship the image on a cross that is not holy, that is invested with sacredness by thought; the same with the images that the Hindus have put together, or the Buddhists and so on. What then is sacred? One can only find out when thought has discovered itself, its right place, without effort, without will and there is this immense sense of silence; the silence of the mind without any movement of thought. It is only when the mind is absolutely free and silent that one discovers that which is beyond all words, which is timeless. Then out of that comes the vastness of true meditation. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 15 2ND PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 28TH AUGUST 1977 'WHEN THE ME IS NOT, THEN COMPASSION COMES INTO BEING' No guru and no system can help one to understand oneself. Without understanding oneself there is no raison d'etre to find out that which is right action, that which is truth. In investigating one's consciousness one is investigating the whole human consciousness - not only one's own - because one is the world and when one observes one's own consciousness one is observing the consciousness of mankind - it is not something personal and self-centred. One of the factors in consciousness is desire. From perception, contact and sensation, thought creates the image and the pursuit of that image is the desire to fulfil, with all the frustration and the bitterness following from that. Now, can there be an observation of sensation not ending in desire? Just to observe. Which means one has to understand the nature of thought, because it is thought that gives continuity to desire; it is thought that creates the image out of sensation followed by the pursuit of that image. Thought is the response of memory, experience and knowledge, stored up in the brain. Thought is never new, it is always from the past. Thought, therefore, is limited. Although it has created innumerable problems yet it has also created the extraordinary world of technology - marvellous things it has done. But thought is limited because it is the outcome of the past, therefore it is time-binding. Thought pretends to conceive the immeasurable, the timeless, something beyond itself; it projects all kinds of illusory images. Can one observe the whole movement of desire without images and the pursuit of those images; without thereby becoming involved in frustration, in the hope of fulfilment and so on? Just to observe the whole movement of desire; to become aware of it. Can one psychologically be free yet not be caught up in the illusion that one is free? That illusion comes about when one says to oneself. "I must be free from fear" - which is the movement of desire. Having understood the nature of desire and its movement, its images, its conflicts, then one can look at fear in oneself and not deceive oneself that one is psychologically free from fear. Then one can go into the whole question of fear; not a particular form of fear, but go to the very root of fear, which is much simpler and quicker than taking the various branches of fear and trimming them. By observing the totality of fear then come to the root of it. One can only go to the root of it when one observes the totality of the various forms of fears - observe, become aware of them, but not try to do something about them. By observing the whole tree of fear, with all the branches, with all its various qualities, all its divisions, go to the very root of it. What is the root of fear, psychologically? Is not the root of fear, time? - what might happen tomorrow, or in the future; what might happen if one does not do certain things. Time as the past, time as what might happen now or in the future; is not the root of fear and time the movement of thought? The root of fear is the movement of time; which is thought as measure. Can one observe, can one be aware of this movement, not controlling it, suppressing it, or escaping from it, but just observing aware of its total movement? One is aware of this total movement of thought as time and measure - I have been, I shall be, I hope to be - one is choicelessly aware of this fact and remaining with it, not moving away from what actually is. What actually is, is the movement of thought, which says: "I have been hurt in the past and I hope I shall not be hurt in the future." That very process of thinking is fear - taking that as an example. Where there is fear, obviously there is no affection, there is no love. A great part of consciousness is the enormous desire for and the pursuit of pleasure. All religions have said do not pursue pleasure, sexual or any kind of pleasure because you have given your life over to Jesus, or Krishna; they advocate suppressing desire, suppressing fear, suppressing any form of pleasure. Every religion has talked about it endlessly. We are saying: on the contrary do not suppress anything, do not avoid anything. Do not analyse one's fear - just observe. All human beings are caught in this pursuit of pleasure and when that pleasure is not given there is hatred, violence, anger and bitterness. So one must understand this pursuit, this enormous urge for pleasure which human beings have throughout the world. The function of the brain is to register, as a computer registers. It registers pleasure, and thought gives the energy and the drive to pursue pleasure. One has had pleasure of various kinds yesterday: they are registered. Then thought says there must be more and thought then pursues the more. The more then becomes pleasure; the desire for continuity of pleasure is given vitality and driven by thought - thinking about it, today or tomorrow, later on. That is the movement of pleasure. Now: is it possible to register only that which is absolutely necessary and nothing else? We are continually registering so many things unnecessarily and so building up the self, the me - "I am hurt; I am not what I should be; I must achieve what I think should be", and so on. The whole of this registration is an action of giving importance to the self. Now we are asking: Is it possible to register only that which is absolutely necessary? What is absolutely necessary? - not all the things the psyche builds up, which are memories. What is necessary to register and what is not necessary to register? The brain is occupied all the time with registering, therefore there is no tranquillity, no quietness, whereas if there is a clarity as to what is to be registered and what is not to be registered then the brain is quieter - and that is part of meditation. Are the things that one registers psychologically necessary at all? Anything that you hold psychologically is unnecessary. By holding those things, registering those things, by the brain holding on to them, it attains a certain security; but that security is merely the me that has gathered all the psychological hurts and imprints. So we are saying: to register anything psychologically and hold it is absolutely unnecessary - one's beliefs, one's dogmas, one's experiences, one's wishes and desires, they are all totally unnecessary. So, what is it that is necessary? Food, clothes and shelter - nothing else. This is a tremendous thing to understand in oneself; it means that the brain is no longer the accumulating factor of the me. The brain is rested, tranquil and it needs considerable tranquillity; but it has always sought that tranquillity, that security, in the me which is the accumulation of all the past registrations, which are just memories, therefore worthless - like collecting a lot of dead ash and giving tremendous importance to it. To register only that which is absolutely necessary; it is a marvellous thing if one can go into it and do it because then there is real freedom - freedom from all the accumulated knowledge, tradition, superstition and experience, which have all built up this enormous structure to which thought clings as the me. When the me is not, then compassion comes into being and that compassion brings clarity. With that clarity there is skill. Where there is unnecessary registration there is no love. If one wants to understand the nature of compassion one has to go into this question of what love is and whether there is such a thing as love without any form of attachment with all its complications, with all its pleasures and fears. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 16 2ND PUBLIC TALK OJAI CALIFORNIA 3RD APRIL 1977 'THE DIVISION BETWEEN THE OBSERVER AND THE OBSERVED IS THE SOURCE OF CONFLICT' There are two types of learning: one, memorizing what is being taught and then observing through memory - which is what most of us call learning - the other, learning through observation and not storing it as memory. Put another way: one is to learn something by heart, so that it is stored up in the brain as knowledge and subsequently acting according to that knowledge, skilfully or unskilfully; when one goes to school and university, one stores up a great deal of information as knowledge and according to that knowledge one acts, beneficially for oneself or for society; but incapable of acting simply, directly. The other kind of learning - to which one is not quite so accustomed because one is such a slave to habits, to tradition, to every form of conformity - is to observe without the accompaniment of previous knowledge, to look at something as though for the first time, afresh. If one observes things afresh, then there is not the cultivation of memory; it is not as when one observes and through that observation stores up memory so that the next time one observes it is through that pattern of memory, therefore not anymore observing afresh. It is important to have a mind that is not constantly occupied, constantly chattering. To an unoccupied mind a new seed of learning can germinate - something entirely different from the cultivation of knowledge and acting from that knowledge. Observe the skies, the beauty of the mountains, the trees, the light among the leaves. That observation, if stored up as memory, will prevent the next observation being fresh. When one observes one's wife or friend, can one observe without the interference of the recording of previous incidents in that particular relationship? If one can observe or watch the other without the interference of previous knowledge, one learns much more. The most important thing is to observe; to observe and not to have a division between the observer and the observed. Mostly there is a division as between the observer who is the total summation of past experience as memory and the observed, that which is - so the past observes. The division between the observer and the observed is the source of conflict. Is it possible for there to be no conflict at all, right through one's life? Traditionally, one accepts that there must be this conflict, this struggle, this everlasting fight, not only physiologically in order to survive, but psychologically in desire and fear, like and dislike, and so on. To live without conflict is to live a life without any effort, a life in which there is peace. Man has lived, centuries upon centuries, a life of battle, conflict, both outwardly and inwardly; a constant struggle to achieve and fear of losing, dropping back. One may talk endlessly about peace, but there will be no peace as long as one is conditioned to the acceptance of conflict. If one says it is possible to live in peace, then it is just an idea and therefore valueless. And if one says it is not possible, then one blocks any investigation. Go into it psychologically first; it is more important than physiologically. If one understands very deeply the nature and the structure of conflict psychologically and perhaps ends it there, then one may be able to deal with the physiological factor. But if one is only concerned with the physiological, biological factor, to survive, then one probably will not be able to do it at all. Why is there this conflict, psychologically? From ancient times, both socially and religiously, there has been a division between the good and the bad. Is there really this division at all - or is there only "what is", without its opposite? Suppose there is anger; that is the fact, that is "what is", but "I will not be angry" is an idea, not a fact. One never questions this division, one accepts it because one is traditional by habit, not wanting anything new. But there is a further factor; there is a division between the observer and the observed. When one looks at a mountain, one looks at it as an observer and one calls it a mountain. The word is not the thing. The word "mountain" is not the mountain, but to oneself the word is very important; when one looks, instantly there is the response, "that is a mountain". Now, can one look at the thing called "mountain", without the word, because the word is a factor of division? When one says "My wife," the word "my" creates division. The word, the name, is part of thought. When one looks at a man or a woman, a mountain or a tree, whatever it is, division takes place when thought, the name, the memory, comes into being. Can one observe without the observer, who is the essence of all the memories, experiences, reactions and so on, which are from the past? If one looks at something without the word and the past memories, then one looks without the observer. When one does that, there is only the observed and there is no division and no conflict, psychologically. Can one look at one's wife or one's nearest intimate friend without the name, the word and all the experiences that one has gathered in that relationship? When one so looks one is looking at her or him for the first time. Is it possible to live a life that is completely free from all psychological conflict? One has observed the fact, it will do everything if one lets the fact alone. As long as there is division between the image-making observer, and the fact - which is no image but only fact - there must be everlasting conflict. That is a law. That conflict can be ended. When there is an ending of psychological conflict - which is part of suffering - then how does that apply to one's livelihood, how does that apply in one's relationship with others? How does that ending of psychological struggle, with all its conflicts, pain, anxiety, fear, how does that apply to one's daily living - one's daily going to the office etc. etc? If it is a fact that one has ended psychological conflict, then how will one live a life without conflict outwardly? When there is no conflict inside, there is no conflict outside, because there is no division between the inner and the outer. It is like the ebb and flow of the sea. It is an absolute, irrevocable fact, which nobody can touch, it is inviolate. So, if that is so, then what shall one do to earn a livelihood? Because there is no conflict, therefore there is no ambition. Because there is no conflict, there is no desire to be something. Because inwardly there is something absolute which is inviolate, which cannot be touched, which cannot be damaged, then one does not depend psychologically on another; therefore there is no conformity, no imitation. So, not having all that, one is no longer heavily conditioned to success and failure in the world of money, position, prestige, which implies the denial of "what is" and the acceptance of "what should be". Because one denies "what is" and creates the ideal of "what should be" there is conflict. But to observe what actually is, means one has no opposite, only "what is". If you observe violence and use the word "violence" there is already conflict, the very word is already warped: there are people who approve of violence and people who do not. The whole philosophy of non-violence is warped, both politically and religiously. There is violence and its opposite, non-violence. The opposite exists because you know violence. The opposite has its root in violence. One thinks that by having an opposite, by some extraordinary method or means, one will get rid of "what is". Now, can one put away the opposite and just look at violence, the fact? The non-violence is not a fact. Non-violence is an idea, a concept, a conclusion. The fact is violence - that one is angry; that one hates somebody; that one wants to hurt people; that one is jealous; all that is the implication of violence, that is the fact. Now, can one observe that fact without introducing its opposite? For then one has the energy - which was being wasted in trying to achieve the opposite - to observe "what is". In that observation there is no conflict. So, what will a man do who has understood this extraordinary complex existence based on violence, conflict, struggle, a man who is actually free of it, not theoretically, but actually free? Which means, no conflict. What shall he do in the world? Will one ask this question if one is inwardly, psychologically, completely free from conflict? Obviously not. It is only the man in conflict who says: "If there is no conflict, I will be at an end, I will be destroyed by society because society is based on conflict." If one is aware of one's consciousness, what is one? If one is aware, one will see that one's consciousness is - in its absolute sense - in total disorder. It is contradictory, saying one thing, doing something else, always wanting something. The total movement is within an area which is confined and without space and in that little space there is disorder. Is one different from one's consciousness? Or is one that consciousness? One is that consciousness. Then is one aware that one is in total disorder? Ultimately that disorder leads to neurosis, obviously - and all the specialists in modern society such as psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and so on. But inwardly, is one in order? Or is there disorder? Can one observe this fact? And what takes place when one observes choicelessly - which means without any distortion? Where there is disorder, there must be conflict. Where there is absolute order there is no conflict. And there is an absolute order, not relative order. That can only come about naturally, easily, without any conflict, when one is aware of oneself as a consciousness, aware of the confusion, the turmoil, the contradiction, outwardly and inwardly observing without any distortion. Then out of that comes naturally, sweetly, easily, an order which is irrevocable. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 17 6TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 21ST JULY 1977 'WHEN THERE IS AN ENDING TO CONSCIOUSNESS WITH ITS CONTENT THERE IS SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT' To observe holistically is to observe - or to listen to - the whole content of something. Normally, we look at things partially, according to our pleasure, or according to our conditioning, or according to some idealistic point of view; we always look at things fragmentarily. The politician is mostly concerned with politics; the economist, the scientist, the business man, each has his own concern, generally throughout life. It seems that we never take, or observe the whole movement of life - like a full river with a great volume of water behind it; water right from beginning to end. It may become polluted but, given sufficient extent, it can cleanse itself. So,in the same way, we can treat life holistically moving totally from the beginning to the end without any fragmentation, without any deviation, without any illusion. It is important to understand how the mind creates illusions of self-importance and all the various types of illusions which are comforting and safe - at least for the time being. We look at something with a preconceived idea or belief, so that we never really actually see it. Illusions are created by seeking satisfaction in desire. Satisfaction is entirely different from ecstasy. Ecstasy is a state of being, or not being, which is outside of oneself. That is ecstasy in which there is no experiencing. The moment there is experiencing, then it is the self with its past memories, its recollections, which is translating, creating illusions. Ecstasy never creates illusions. You cannot hold on to ecstasy because it is outside of oneself; there is no question of remembering it; there is no question of wanting it; wanting it is the desire to satisfy and that creates illusion. Most of us are caught in some kind of illusion - the illusion of being, or not being, the illusion of power, position and so on: whole categories projected from the centre, which is the me. Illusion means to see sensuously through a definite conclusion, prejudice, or idea. A mind that is caught in illusions has no order. Order can only come about holistically. We need order; even in a very small room one puts things in their right place otherwise it becomes disorderly, ugly, and lacking repose. We think order, psychologically, is in the following of a certain pattern or a certain routine which we have already established in the past. Order is, psychologically, something entirely different; it can only come about when there is clarity. Clarity brings order, not the other way round; try to seek order then that becomes mechanistic, a conformity to a pattern in which there can be no clarity. Order implies harmony in daily life. Harmony is not an idea. We are caught in the prison of ideas and there is no harmony in that. Harmony and clarity imply seeing things holistically, observing life as a total unitary movement - not, I am a business man at the office and a different person at home; not, I am an artist and can do the most absurd and eccentric things; not this breaking up, or fragmenting, of life into various categories, the elite and the non-elite, the worker and the non-worker, the intellectual and the romantic, which is the way we normally live. See how important it is to treat life as a total movement in which everything is included, in which there is no breaking down, as the good and the bad and heaven and hell. See holistically so that when you observe your friend, or your wife or your husband, you see holistically in that relationship. We think of freedom as freedom from something - freedom from sorrow, from anxiety, from work - which is really reaction and therefore not freedom at all. When someone says "I am free from smoking", that is a response from what has been, a moving away from what has been. But we are talking of freedom which is not from something, which implies observing holistically. In observing holistically there is no fragmentation, or direction in that observation; for when there is direction there is distortion. Only when there is complete freedom can you observe holistically and in that observation there is no satisfaction and therefore there is no illusion. So, observe life as a total movement, non-fragmented, holistic, flowing continuously - "continuously" but not in the sense of time. Usually the word "continuous" implies time; but there is a continuity which is not of time. We think of the relationship between the past and the future as a continuity, without breaking up. That is what we generally understand by the word "continuity", which is of time. Time is movement, a time-span to be covered through days, months, or years, with an ideal to be achieved at the end of it. Time implies thought; thought is a movement of measure; the movement of time. But,is there a continuity - if we can use that word, which is not perhaps quite right - is there a continuity which is not a series of incidents related to the past as cause becoming effect now and the effect in turn becoming future cause? Is there a state of being in which there is an ending, a coming to an end, of everything? We think of life as a measured movement in time; a movement which ends in death. Up to that point that is what we call continuity. Yet one observes a movement which is not of time, which is not a remembrance of something of the past going through the present and modifying the future and so continuing. There is a state of mind which is dying to everything that is happening; all that happens is coming in and flowing out - there is no retaining but always a flowing out. That state of mind has its own sense of beauty and "continuity" which is not of time. Every religion, from ancient times, has tried to find out if there is something beyond death. The Ancient Egyptians thought that, in a way, living is part of death, so you carried over your slaves, your cattle, as you died. To go over to the other side was to live as you have lived this side, in the past. That was a continuity. The ancient people of India said life must have a continuity; for otherwise what is the point of achieving moral character, having so much experience in life, having suffered so much, if it merely ends in death - what is the point of it? Therefore, they said, there must be a future and in that future the content of consciousness is modified life after life; its content went on. The Christians have a different kind of fulfilment, such as the resurrection and so on. But, we want to find the truth of it; not what you think, not what the professionals, the priests and the psychologists think. There have appeared certain articles in the press in America and Europe affirming that people have "died" and come back to daily life remembering having experienced extraordinary "after death" states, light, beauty - whatever. One questions whether they really died, because if one is really dead it means that oxygen is not going to the brain and after several minutes the brain deteriorates; when there is real death there is no coming back and therefore no recollection of something after you die. Death may be a most extraordinary experience, much greater than so-called love, much greater than any desire, any idea, any conclusion; or it may be the end of everything, of every form of relationship, every form of recollection, remembrance, accumulation. It may be total annihilation; the complete ending of everything. One must find out what is the truth of the matter. To come upon the truth, every form of identification must end, every form of fear, every desire for comfort. One must not be caught in that illusion which says: "Yes, there is a marvellous state after death." The mind must have no identification with the name, with the form, or with any person, idea, conclusion. Is that possible? That does not deny love; on the contrary, when one is attached to a person there is no love; there is dependence; there is the fear of being left alone in a world where everything is so insecure, both psychologically and outwardly. To find out what is the truth of death, what is the meaning, the real depth, of that extraordinary thing that must happen, there must be freedom. And there is no freedom when there is attachment, when there is fear, when there is a desire for comfort. Can one put all that aside? To find the truth of this extraordinary thing called death one must also find the truth of what is before death; not the truth after death, but also the truth before death. What is the truth before death? If that is not clear the other cannot be clear. One must look very closely, carefully and freely, at what is before death, which we call living. What is the truth of one's living? - which means what is one, or who is one - which one calls living? A heavily conditioned mind brought about through education, environment, culture, through religious sanctions, beliefs and dogmas, rituals, "my country", "your country", the constant battle, wanting to be happy and being unhappy, depressed and elated, going through anxiety, uncertainty, hate, envy and the pursuit of pleasure; afraid to be alone, fear of loneliness, old age, disease - this is the truth of our life, our daily life. Can such a mind, which has not put order in this life - order in the sense of that which comes through clarity and compassion - can such a mind which is so utterly fragmented, disorderly, frightened, find out the truth about something outside of all that? So what is the truth of death - that is, complete ending? There may be annihilation, or there may be something; but that is a hope creating distortion and illusion; so one is cutting that out. One can only find out the truth of it when there is an ending - an ending to everything that you have; the ending to attachment, not giving it a day, ending it completely, now. That is what death means - ending, complete ending; and when there is complete ending something new is born. Fear is a burden, a terrible burden and when one removes that burden completely there is something new that takes place. But one is afraid of ending - either ending at the end of one's life, or ending now. End your vanity, because without ending there is no beginning. We are caught in this continuity of never ending. When there is total, complete, holistic, ending there is something totally new beginning, which you cannot possibly imagine; it is a totally different dimension. To find out the truth of death, there must be the ending of the content of one's consciousness. Then one will never ask "Who am I?' or `What am I?" One is one's consciousness with its content. When there is an ending to that consciousness with its content there is something entirely different, which is not imagined. Human beings have sought immortality in their actions; one writes a book and in that book there is one's immortality as a writer; a great painter makes a painting and that painting becomes the immortality of that human being. All that must end - which no artist is willing to do. Each human being is a representative of the whole of humanity and when there is that change in consciousness one brings about a change in the human consciousness. Death is the ending of this consciousness as one knows it. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 18 3RD PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 14TH JULY 1977 'WITHOUT CLARITY, SKILL BECOMES A MOST DANGEROUS THING' When one has developed a skill it gives a certain sense of wellbeing, security. And that skill, born of knowledge, must invariably, in its action, become mechanical. Skill in action is what one has sought because it gives a certain position in society, a certain prestige. Living in that field all the time, as one does in modern society, with all its economic demands, that knowledge and skill become, not only additive but also invariably a repetitive mechanical process that gradually gathers its own stimulation, its own arrogance, and power. In that power one has security. Society, at the present time, is demanding more and more skill -whether one is an engineer, a technological expert, a scientist, a psychotherapist, etc. etc - but there is great danger - is there not? -is seeking all this skill resulting from accumulated knowledge, for in this increase there is no clarity. When skill becomes all important in life, not only because it is the means of livelihood, but because one is totally educated for that purpose - all our schools, colleges and universities are directed for that purpose - then that skill invariably brings about a certain sense of power, of arrogance and self-importance. The art of learning is not only in the accumulation of the knowledge necessary for skilful action, but also in that learning which is without accumulation. There are two types of learning: acquiring and accumulating a great deal of knowledge through experience, through books, through education which may be used in skilful action; and another form in which one never accumulates and in which one never registers anything other than that which is absolutely necessary. In the first form, the brain is registering and accumulating knowledge, storing it up and acting from that store skilfully, or unskilfully. In the second form, one becomes so totally aware that one only registers that which is absolutely necessary and nothing else; then the mind is not cluttered and influenced with the movement of accumulated knowledge. In this art of learning, accumulating knowledge, by registering only the things that are necessary for skilful action, there is the non-registering of any psychological reactions; the brain is employing knowledge where function and skill are necessary and yet the brain is free not to register in the psychological area. It is very arduous this, to be so totally aware that one only registers that which is necessary and not, absolutely does not, register anything which is unnecessary. Someone insults you, someone flatters you, someone calls you this or that - no registration. This gives tremendous clarity. To register and yet not to register so that there is no psychological building up of the me, the structure of the self. The structure of the self arises only when there is the registration of everything that is not necessary; that is: giving importance to one's name, one's experience, one's opinions and conclusions, all that is the intensifying of the energy in the self - which is always distorting. The art of learning gives this extraordinary clarity and if there is great skill in action without that clarity then it breeds self-importance, whether the self-importance is identified with oneself or with a group, or with a nation. Self-importance denies clarity. There cannot be compassion without clarity and because there is no compassion skill has become so important. If there is no clarity there is no awakening of intelligence, that intelligence which is neither yours nor mine, it is intelligence. That intelligence has its own action, which is non-mechanistic and therefore without cause. As in the art of seeing and of listening, in the art of learning there is no movement of thought. Thought is necessary to accumulate knowledge to function skilfully, otherwise thought has no place whatsoever. This brings tremendous clarity. In such clarity there is no centre from which one is functioning; no centre which has been put together by thought, as the me, mine; for where there is that centre there must be a circumference, where there is a circumference there is resistance, there is the division which is one of the fundamental causes of fear. Without clarity skill becomes a most destructive thing in life - which is what is happening in the world; men can go to the moon and put the flag of their country there, but that is not from clarity; they can kill each other through wars as a result of the extraordinary development of technology, all from the movement of thought, which is not clarity. Thought can never understand that which is whole, that which is immeasurable, which is timeless. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART II CHAPTER 19 2ND PUBLIC DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST SEPTEMBER 1977 'HOW IS ONE TO KNOW ONESELF?' What is the nature of thought that it ceases when there is complete attention and when there is no attention it arises? One has to understand what it is to be aware otherwise one will not be able to understand completely the full significance of attention. Is there an idea of awareness or is one aware? There is a difference. The idea of being aware, or being aware. "Aware" means to be sensitive, to be alive, to the things about one, to nature, to people, to colour, to the trees, to the environment, to the social structure, the whole thing, to be aware outwardly of all that is happening and to be aware to what is happening inside. To be aware is to be sensitive, to know, to observe, what is happening inside psychologically and also what is happening outside, environmentally, economically, socially and so on. If one is not aware of what is happening outwardly and one begins to be aware inwardly then one becomes rather neurotic. But if one begins to be aware of what is exactly happening in the world, as much as possible, and then from there moves inwardly, then one has a balance. Then there is a possibility of not deceiving oneself. One begins by being aware of what is happening outwardly and then one moves inward - like the ebb and flow of the tide, there is constant movement - so that there is no deception. If one knows what is happening outside and from there moves inward one then has criteria. How is one to know oneself? Oneself is a very complex structure, a very complex movement; how is one to know oneself so that one does not deceive oneself? One can only know oneself in one's relationship to others. In one's relationship to others one may withdraw from them because one does not want to be hurt and in relationship one may discover that one is very jealous, dependent, attached and really quite callous. So relationship acts as a mirror in which one knows oneself. It is the same thing outwardly; the outer is a reflection of oneself, because society, governments, all these things, are created by human beings fundamentally the same as oneself. To find out what awareness is one must go into the question of order and disorder. One sees outwardly that there is a great deal of disorder, confusion and uncertainty. What has brought about this uncertainty, this disorder; who is responsible? Are we? Be quite clear as to whether we are responsible for the disorder outwardly; or is it some divine disorder out of which divine order will come? So, if one feels responsible for the outward disorder then is not that disorder an expression of one's own disorder? One observes that disorder outwardly is created by our disorder inwardly. As long as human beings have no order in themselves there will be disorder, always. Governments may try to control that disorder, outwardly; the extreme form is the totalitarianism of Marxism - saying it knows what order is, you do not, it is going to tell you what it is and suppress you, or confine you in concentration camps and psychiatric hospitals and all that follows. The world is in disorder because we are in disorder, each one of us. Is one aware of one's disorder or has one but a concept of disorder? Is one aware that one is in disorder or is it merely an idea which has been suggested that one accepts? The acceptance of an idea is an abstraction, an abstraction from "what is". The abstraction is to move away from "what is" - and one mostly lives in ideas and moves away from facts. Is one accepting a concept of disorder or is one aware that one is oneself in disorder? Does one understand the difference between the two? Does one become aware, per se, for itself? What does one mean by disorder? There is contradiction; one thinks one thing, and does another. There is the contradiction of opposing desires, opposing demands, opposing movements in oneself - duality. How does this duality arise? Is it not that one is incapable of looking at "what is"? One would rather run away from "what is" into "what should be", hoping somehow, by some miracle, by some effort of will, to change "what is" into "what should be". That is: one is angry and one "should not" be angry. If one knew what to do with anger, how to deal with anger and go beyond it, there would be no need for "what should be", which is "do not be angry". If one can understand what to do with "what is", then one will not escape to "what should be". Because one does not know what to do with "what is", one hopes that by inventing an ideal that one can somehow through the ideal change "what is". Or, because one is incapable and does not know what to do, one's brain becomes conditioned to living always in the future - the "what one hopes to be". One is essentially living in the past but one hopes by living for an ideal in the future to alter the present. If one were to see what to do with "what is" then the future does not matter. It is not a question of accepting "what is", but remaining with "what is". One can only understand something if one looks at "what is" and does not run away from it - not try to change it into something else. Can one remain with, observe, see, "what is" - nothing else? I want to look at "what is". I realize that I am greedy but it does not do anything. Greed is a feeling and I have looked at that feeling named greed. The word is not the thing; but I may be mistaking the word for the thing. I may be caught in words but not with the fact -the fact that I am greedy. It is very complex; the word may incite that feeling. Can the mind be free of the word and look? The word has become so important to me in my life. Am I a slave to words? -knowing that the word is not the thing. Has the word become so important that the fact is not real, actual, to me? I would rather look at a picture of a mountain than go and look at a mountain; to look at a mountain I have to go a great distance, climb, look, feel. Looking at a picture of a mountain is looking at a symbol, it is not reality. Am I caught in words, which are symbols, thereby moving away from reality? Does the word create the feeling of greed? - or is there greed without the word? This requires tremendous discipline, not suppression. The very pursuit of the enquiry has its own discipline. So I have to find out, very carefully, whether the word has created the feeling, or if the feeling exists without the word. The word is greed, I named it when I had that feeling before therefore I am registering the present feeling by a past incident of the same kind. So the present has been absorbed into the past. So I realize what I am doing. I am aware that the word has become extraordinarily important to me. So then, is there a freedom from the word greed, envy or nationality, Communist, Socialist and so on - is there a freedom from the word? The word is of the past. The feeling is the present recognized by the word from the past, so I am living all the time in the past. The past is me. The past is time; so time is me. The me says: "I must not be angry because my conditioning has said: do not be greedy, do not be angry." The past is telling the present what it should do. So there is a contradiction because fundamentally, very deeply, the past is dictating the present, what it should do. The me, which is the past with all its memories, experiences, knowledge, a thing put together by thought, the me, is dictating what should happen. Now, can I observe the fact of greed without the past? Can there be observation of greed without naming, without getting caught in the word, having understood that the word can create the feeling and that if the word creates the feeling then the word is `me', which is of the past, telling me "do not be greedy"? Is it possible to look at "what is" without the me - which is the observer? Can I observe greed, the feeling, its fulfilment and action, without the observer which is the past? The "what is" can only be observed when there is no me. Can one observe the colours and forms around one? How does one observe them? One observes through the eye. Observe without moving the eye; because if one moves the eye the whole operation of the thinking brain comes into being. The moment the brain is in operation there is distortion. Look at something without moving one's eyes; how still the brain becomes. Observe not only with one's eyes but with all one's care, with affection. There is then an observation of the fact, not the idea, but the fact, with care and with affection. One approaches "what is" with care, with affection; therefore there is no judgement, no condemnation; therefore one is free of the opposite. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART III CHAPTER 1 SMALL GROUP DIALOGUE OJAI CALIFORNIA 22ND MARCH 1977 Questioner(1): Can we discuss the relation between Krishnamurti's teaching and truth? Questioner (2): Is there such a thing as a teaching at all, or is there only truth? KRISHNAMURTI: Is it the expression of truth? There are two things involved. The speaker is either talking out of the silence of truth, or he is talking out of the noise of an illusion which he considers to be the truth. Q: That is what most people do. K: So which is it that he is doing? Q: There could be a confusion between the word and truth. K: No, the word is not the truth. That's why we said: either he is talking out of the silence of truth or out of the noise of illusion. Q: But because one feels that he is speaking out of the silence of truth there is a greater possibility for the word to be taken as truth. K: No, let's go slowly for this is interesting. Who is going to judge, who is going to see the truth of the matter? The listener, the reader? You who know Indian scriptures, Buddhism, The Upanishads, etc - you are familiar with them and know most of the contents of all that. Are you capable of judging? How shall we find out? You hear him talking about these things and you wonder if he is really speaking out of this extraordinary silence of truth, or as a reaction and from a conditioned childhood and so on. That is to say, either he is talking out of his conditioning or out of the other. How will you find out? How will you approach this problem? Q: Is it possible for me to find out if what is meeting that teaching is the noise within myself? K: That's why I am asking you. What is the criterion, the measure that you apply so you can say: "Yes, that is it." Or do you say: "I don't know"? I am asking what you do. Or don't you know but are examining, investigating; not whether he is speaking out of silence or conditioning, but you are watching the truth of what he is saying. I would want to know whether he was speaking out of this, or out of that. But as I don't know, I am going to listen to what he is saying and see if it is true. Q: But what sees it as true? K: Say one is fairly alive to things. One listens to this man and one wants to find out whether what he says is mere words or the truth. Q: When I have come to the conclusion that it is the truth, then I am already not listening. K: No, I don't know. My life is concerned with this problem -not just for a few years or a few days. I want to know the truth of this matter. Is he speaking out of experience or from knowledge, or not out of any of these things? Most people speak out of knowledge, so we are asking that question. I don't know how you would find out. I'll tell you what I would do. I would put his personality, his influence, all that, completely aside. Because I don't want to be influenced, I am sceptical, doubtful, so I am very careful. I listen to him and I don't say "I know" or "I don't know", but I am sceptical. I want to find out. Q: Sceptical means you are inclined to doubt it, which is already a bias... K: Oh, no! I am sceptical in the sense that I don't accept everything that is being said. P: But you lean towards doubting. It's negation. K: Oh, no. I would rather use the word doubt, in the sense of questioning. Let's put it that way. I say to myse1f. Am I questioning out of my prejudice? This question has never been put to me before, I am exploring it. I would put everything aside - all the personal reputation, charm, looks, this and that - I am not going to accept or reject, I am going to listen to find out. Am I prejudiced? Am I listening to him with all the knowledge I have gathered about religion, of what the books have said, what other people have said, or what my own experience tells me? Q: No. I may be listening to him precisely because I have rejected all that. K: Have I rejected it? Or am I listening to him with all that? If I have rejected that then I am listening. Then I am listening very carefully to what he has to say. Q: Or I am listening with everything that I already know of him? K: I have said: I have put away his reputation. Am I listening to him with the knowledge that I have acquired through books, through experience, and therefore I am comparing, judging evaluating? Then I can't find out whether what he is saying is the truth. But is it possible for me to put aside all that? I am passionately interested to find out. So for the time being - while I am listening at least - I will put aside everything I have known. Then I proceed. I want to know, but I am not going to be easily persuaded, pulled into something by argument, cleverness, logic. Now am I capable of listening to what he is saying with complete abandonment of the past? It comes to that. Are you? Then my relationship to him is entirely different. Then I am listening out of silence. This is really a very interesting question. I have answered for myself. There are a dozen of us here, how would you answer it? How do you know that what he is talking about is the truth? Q: I wouldn't be concerned with that word truth. When you use the word truth you indicate you have the ability to judge what is true, or you already have a definition of truth, or you know what truth is. Which means you will not be listening to what somebody is saying. K: Don't you want to know whether he is speaking falsehood, out of a conditioned mind, from a rejection and therefore out of a reaction? Q: (1): I realize that in order to listen to this man I can't listen with a conditioned mind - not to anybody. Q (1): Another question which arises is: I reject all this knowledge and listen in silence. Is truth in that silence? K: I don't know. That is one of the things I have got to find out. Q (1): If there is no rejection there is no silence. Q (2): As this well is an endless source, is the teaching the same as truth? K: How would you answer this question? Q: I think first of all you can be sensitive to what is false. In other words, to see if there is something false, something incoherent. K: Logic can be very false. Q(1): Yes, I don't mean just logic, but you can be sensitive to the whole communication to see if there is some deception. I think one of the questions implied here is: Are you deceiving yourself? Q(2): But doesn't that sensitivity imply the absence of one's own projections - the silence after having moved through all your own colouring of it. Only then can you be that sensitive. Q(3): You have to be free of deceiving yourself to see that. K: Again, forgive me for asking: How do you know he is speaking the truth? Or is he deceiving himself and is caught in an illusion which gives him a feeling that he is telling the truth? What do you answer? Q: One goes into it oneself. One cannot accept it without going deeply into it. K: But one can deceive oneself so appallingly. Q: You go through the layers of all those deceptions and beyond them. K: If I were a stranger I might say: You have listened to this man for a long time, how do you know he is telling the truth? How do you know anything about it? Q: I could say that I have looked at what you have said, and each time I was able to test it to see if it was right. I have not found anything which was contradictory. K: No. The question was: How do you find out the truth? - Not about contradiction, logic, all that. One's own sensitivity, one's own investigation, one's own delving - is that enough? Q(1): If one goes all the way, if one goes through all the possible self-deceptions. Q(1): And then goes so far as to say that in the moments when one is listening - I do not know how deeply, but listening at all - one feels there is a change in oneself. It may not be a total revolution, but there is a change. K: That can happen when you go for a walk and look at the mountains and are quiet, and when you come back to your home certain things have taken place. You follow what I am saying? Q(1): Yes. Q(2): We listen to people who speak from knowledge, and we listen to you, and there is something totally different. The nonverbal... K: Have you answered the question? Q(1): To myself I have. I have listened to scores of people and I listen to K. I don't know what it is, but it is totally different. Q(2): That means there is a ring of truth in it. Q(3): There are people who imply that in some way you are deceiving yourself. They do not see it that way. Q(4): There was a man who wrote to me and asked if I agreed with everything Krishnamurti said. "Didn't he tell you that you should doubt everything he said?" The only way I could answer was to say: "Look, to me it is self evident." K: It may be self evident to you and yet an illusion. It is such a dangerous, delicate thing. Q(1): It can be that there is a scale on which we weigh it. Q(2): I think that for thought it is not at all possible to be sure about this matter. It is typical of thought that it wants to be sure that it is not deceiving itself, that it is listening to truth. Thought will never give up that question, and it is right for thought never to give up questioning, but thought cannot touch it, cannot know about it. K: Dr Bohm and I had a discussion of this kind in a different way. If I remember rightly we said: Is there such a silence which is not the word, which is not imagined or induced? Is there such a silence, and is it possible to speak out of that silence? Q: The question was whether the words are coming from perception, from the silence, or from the memory. K: Yes. Q: The question is whether the words that are used are communicating directly and are coming out of the emptiness, out of the silence, or not. K: That is the real question. Q: As we used to say: like the drum which vibrates to the emptiness within. K: Yes. Are you satisfied by this answer? - by what the others have said? Q: No, Krishnaji. K: Then how do you find out? Q: The very words you are using deny the possibility of being satisfied and to work at it intellectually. It is something that has nothing to do with those things. K: Look, suppose I love you and trust you. Because I trust you and you trust me whatever you say won't be a lie and I know you won't deceive me under any circumstances, you won't tell me something which is not actual to you. Q: I might do something out of ignorance. K: But say you trust me and I trust you. There is a relationship of trust, confidence, affection, love; like a man and a woman when they are married, they trust each other. Now is that possible here? Because - as she points out - I can deceive myself with logic, with reason, with all these things: millions of people have done it. I can also see the danger of, "I love the priest; and he can play havoc with me. Q(1): If one has affection for someone, one projects all kinds of illusions on to him. Q(2): I think the trust, the investigation, logic and all that goes together with love. K: That is a very dangerous thing too. Q(1): Of course it is. Q(2): Isn't there any way to avoid danger? K: I don't want to be caught in an illusion. Q: So can we say that truth is in the silence out of which the teaching comes? K: But I want to know how the silence comes! I might invent it. I might have worked to have a silent mind for years, conditioned it, kept it in a cage, and then say, "Marvellous, I am silent". There is that danger. Logic is a danger. Thought is a danger. So I see all the dangers around me. I am caught in all these dangers and I want to find out if what that man is saying is the truth. Q(1): I think there is no way or procedure to find that out. There is no prescription. I cannot tell anybody how to find out. I can say that I feel it with all my being, that something is true and maybe I can convey it through my life, but I cannot convince anybody through words or reason or by any method. And in the same way I cannot convince myself. Q(2): Are we saying that perception has to be pure and in the realm of silence - the real realm of silence, not a fantasy - in order to be able to even come close to this question? K: Dr Bohm is a scientist, a physicist, he is clear-thinking, logical; suppose someone goes to him and asks, "Is what Krishnamurti says the truth?" How is he going to answer? Q: Doesn't Dr Bohm, or anybody, have to go beyond the limitations of logic? K: Somebody comes to him and asks: "Tell me, I really want to know from you, please tell me if that man is speaking the truth." Q: But you are then saying, use the instrument of logic to find out? K: No. I am very interested because I have heard so many people who are illogical and careless say he is speaking the truth. But I go to a serious thinker, careful with the use of words, and ask: "Please tell me if he is telling the truth, not some crooked thing covered up," How is he going to answer me? Q: The other day when that man said you may be caught in a groove,* and you looked at it first, what happened then? K: I looked at it in several different ways and I don't think I am caught in a groove, but yet I might be. So after examining it very carefully, I left it. Something takes place when you leave it alone after an examination, something new comes into it. Now I am asking you: Please tell me if that man is speaking the truth. Q: For me it is a reality. I can't communicate it to you. This is what I have found out and you have to find it out for yourself. You have to test it in your own mind. K: But you may be leading me up the garden path. Q: That is all I can say. I can't really communicate it. K: You may be up the garden path yourself. Q(1): But then why should I go to Dr Bohm, much as I respect him? *See Dialogue II, pages 234-5 and 236-7. Q(2): One thing I can say is that I have questioned it and I have said it may be so, it may not be so, and I have looked carefully into the question of self-deception. Q(3): It seems to me I would want to know what he is bringing to bear on the answer to this question. Is it science? Is it logic? Is it his own intelligence? I would want to know out of what he was going to answer me. K: How do you in your heart of hearts, as a human being, know that he is speaking the truth? I want to feel it. I object to logic and all that. I have been through that before. Therefore if all that is not the way, then what is? Q: There are people who are very clever, who speak of things which are very similar, who have grasped this intellectually very well and say they are speaking from truth. K: Yes, they are repeating in India now: "You are the world, That is the latest catch-word! Q: In order to communicate that, I have to speak out of the silence you were referring to. K: No, please be simple with me. I want to know if Krishnamurti is speaking the truth. Dr Bohm has known Krishnamurti for several years. He has a good, trained mind so I go to him and ask him. Q: All he can say is, "I know this man, this is how he affects me He has changed my life." And suddenly a note may be struck in the other one. K: No. I want it straight from the horse's mouth! Q(1): Dr Bohm is here. Let him tell us. Q(2): But you said you wanted proof. K: I don't. It is a very serious question, it isn't just a dramatic or intellectual question. This is a tremendous question. Q: Can one ever get an answer? Or is that person asking a false question to begin with? K: Is he? Q(2): Of course. How can a person know? Q(2): I think I could say to him that when we did discuss these things it was from the emptiness, and that I felt it was a direct perception K: Yes. Is direct perception unrelated to logic? Q: It doesn't come from logic. K: But you are logical all the same. Q: That may come later, not at that moment. K: So you are telling me: I have found out that man is telling the truth because I had a direct perception, an insight into what he is saying. Q: Yes. K: Now be careful, because I have heard a disciple of some guru saying exactly the same thing. Q: I have also heard a guru say this but a little later by looking at it logically I saw the thing was nonsense. When I was looking at the fact and the logic I saw that it did not fit. So I would say that in addition to direct perception I have constantly examined this logically. K: So you are saying that perception has not blinded you and with that perception goes logic also. Q: Yes, logic and fact. K: So perception first, then logic. Not first logic, then perception. Q: Yes. That is what it always has to be. K: So through perception and then with logic, you see that it is the truth. Hasn't this been done by the devout Christians? Q: Logic is not enough, because we have to see how people actually behave as well. I see that Christians say certain things, but when we look at the whole of what they do it doesn't fit. K: Isn't there a terrible danger in this? Q: I am sure there is a danger. K: So you are now saying that one has to walk in danger. Q: Yes. K: Now I begin to understand what you are saying. One has to move in a field which is full of danger, full of snakes and pitfalls. Q: Which means one has to be tremendously awake. K: So I have learned from talking to him that this is a very dangerous thing. He has said you can only understand whether Krishnamurti is speaking the truth if you are really prepared to walk in a field which is full of pitfalls. Is that right? Q: Yes. K: It is a field which is full of mines, the razor's edge path. Are you prepared to do that? One's whole being says "Be secure". Q: That is the only way to do anything. K: I have learnt to be aware of the dangers around me and also to face danger all the time and therefore to have no security. The enquirer might say, "This is too much" and go away! So this is what I want to get at. Can the mind - which has been conditioned for centuries to be secure - abandon that, and say, "I will walk into danger"? That is what we are saying. It is logical, but in a sense it is illogical. Q: In principle that is the way all science works. K: Yes, that is right. So it also means I don't trust anybody - any guru, any prophet. I trust my wife because she loves me and I love her, but that is irrelevant. Q: The word danger has to be explained too. From one point it is dangerous, and from another it isn't. I have to investigate. My conditioning is very dangerous. K: So we're saying: "I have walked in danger and I have found the logic of this danger. Through the perception of the danger I have found the truth of what Krishnamurti is saying. And there is no security, no safety in this. Whereas all the others give me safety." Q: Security becomes the ultimate danger. K: Of course. Q: What you have described is actually the scientific approach. They say every statement must be in danger of being false; it has been put that way. K: That is perfectly right. I have learnt a lot - have you? A man comes from Seattle or Sheffield or Birmingham and is told: "I have found that what he says is the truth because I have had a perception and that perception stands logically". It is not outside of reason. And in that perception I see that where I walk is full of pitfalls, of danger. Therefore I have to be tremendously aware. Danger exists when there is no security. And the gurus, the priests; all offer security. Seeing the illogic of it I accept this illogic too Q: I am not sure that you should call it illogical; it is not illogical but it is the way logic has to work. K: Of course. Are we saying that direct perception, insight and the working out of it demand great logic, a great capacity to think clearly? But the capacity to think clearly will not bring about insight. Q: But if the logic does not bring about perception, what does it do exactly? K: It trains, it sharpens the mind. But that certainly won't bring about an insight. Q: It is not through the mind that the perception comes. K: That all depends on what you mean by the mind. Logic makes the mind sharp, clear, objective and sane. But that won't give you the other. Your question is: How does the other come about? Q(1): No. That was not my question. Logic clears the mind, but is the mind the instrument of perception? Q(2): You see, you must have the perception. If you have a perception, for example, about the ending of sorrow, or fear, it may be that the whole thing is a deception. Logic is something which provides the clarity in what you are doing from there on. Q(3): Yes, that is what we said, that it clears the mind of confusion, of the debris. Q(4): The debris may come if you don't have logic. K: You might remain in the debris if you don't have logic. Q: If the perception is a real perception and so the truth, why does it then need the discipline of logic to examine it? K: We said perception works out logically. It does not need logic. Whatever it does is reasonable, logical, sane, objective. Q: It is logical without an intent to make it so. K: That's it. Q: It is like saying that if you see what is in this room correctly, you will not find anything illogical in what you see. K: All right. Will the perception keep the confusion, the debris away all the time so that the mind never accumulates it and doesn't have to keep clearing it away? That was your question, wasn't it? Q: I think perception can reach the stage at which it is continually keeping the field clear. I say that it can reach that stage for a certain moment. K: At a certain moment I have perception. But during the interval between the perceptions there is a lot of debris being gathered. Our question is: Is perception continuous so that there is no collection of the debris? Put it round the other way: Does one perception keep the field clear? Q: Can one make a difference between insight and perception? K: Don't break it up yet. Take those two words as synonymous We are asking: Is perception from time to time, with intervals. During those intervals a lot of debris collects and therefore the field has to be swept again. Or does perception in itself bring about tremendous clarity in which there is no debris? Q: Are you saying that once it happens it will be there for ever? K: That is what I am trying to get at. Don't use the words "continuous," "never again". Keep to the question; Once perception has taken place can the mind collect further debris, confusion? It is only when that perception becomes darkened by the debris, that the process of getting rid of it begins. But if there is perception why should there be a collecting, gathering? Q: There are a lot of difficult points in this. THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE PART III CHAPTER 2 SMALL GROUP DIALOGUE OJAI CALIFORNIA 24TH MARCH 1977 KRISHNAMURTI: We were discussing how one can know what Krishnamurti is saying is true. He might be caught in his own conditioning, illusions and knowing them, and not being able to free himself from them, have put together a series of observations, words, and call them truth. How do you know whether what he is saying is actual, truthful and lasting? Dr Bohm said that when one has an insight, a direct perception into what is being said, then there is no doubt that it is the truth. Having that insight you can work it out logically to show that the perception is true. But is that perception brief, only to be had at intervals and therefore gathering a lot of debris - those things that block perception - or is one perception enough? Does it open the door so that there is insight all the time? Q: Does that mean that you would never have any confusion? K: Yes, we came to that point. One has a perception, an insight, and that insight has its own capacity for reason, logic and action. That action is complete, because the perception is complete for the moment. Will further action confuse perception? Or, having perception is there no further confusion? Q: I think we were saying that there is danger in this. If you say: My action is always right... K: Oh, that is dangerous! Q: We also said that logic has its danger. One could think one has an insight when one has not. K: Suppose I have the capacity to reason it out and act and then say: That is a perfect, complete action. Some people who read the Gita act according to it and they call that insight. Their action is patterned after their reading. They say this action is complete. I have heard many of them say this; also Catholics and Protestants who are completely immersed in the Bible. So we are treading on very dangerous ground and therefore are greatly aware of it. Q: You also said that the mind tries to find security in all this. K: The mind has always been seeking security and when that security is threatened it tries to find security in insight, in direct perception. Q: In the illusion of insight. K: Yes, but it makes the insight into security. The next question is: Must there be a constant breaking of perception? That is, one day one sees very clearly, one has direct perception, then that fades away and there is confusion. Then again there is a perception and an action, followed by confusion and so on. Is that so? Or is there no further confusion after these deep insights? Q: Are we saying this perception is whole? K: Yes, if the perception is complete, whole, then there is no confusion at any time. Or, one may deceive oneself that it is whole and act upon it, which brings confusion. Q: There is also a possible danger that one has a genuine perception, an insight, and is not fooling oneself and that out of that comes a certain action. But then one could fall into making whatever that action was into a formula and stop having the insight. Let's say that out of an insight which was real a certain action came. One then thinks that is the way things should be. K: That is what generally happens. Q: But isn't that a corruption of the perception, just making a pattern out of the action instead of continuing to look? It is like being able to really look at something, for instance looking out of the window and something is seen. But then you don't look out again and think everything is the way it was. It may have totally changed. The perception starts out being genuine, but you don't continue to look, have insight. K: Yes. Scientists may have an insight in some specialized field and that insight is put into a category of science unrelated to their life. But we are talking of a perception that is not only in the field of action but also in daily life. Q: As a whole and so there is a continuity. K: Yes. Q: But I still don't think we have gone into the question of danger. You said that one day a man came to you and said maybe you were stuck in a groove. K: Yes, caught in a rut. Q: You didn't say immediately, "I know I am not because I have had a perfect insight." K: Ah, that would be deadly! Q: But rather, you said you looked at it for several days. K: Of course. Q: I am trying to find out what we are driving at. Perhaps we are saying that there may be an insight which never goes back into confusion. But we are not saying there is one. K: Yes, that's right. Now would you say, when there is complete perception - not an illusory perception - there is no further confusion? Q: It seems reasonable to say that. K: That means from day to day there is no confusion at all. Q: Then why did you feel it necessary to look into it? K: Because I may deceive myself. Therefore it is dangerous ground and I must be alert, I must watch it. Q: Are we seeing this as an insight now? - that when there is an insight of that kind there is no further confusion? But we may deceive ourselves nevertheless. K: Yes. Therefore we must be watchful. Q: Do you mean after the real insight you could then deceive yourself? K: No. You have a deep insight, complete, whole. Someone comes along and says: "Look, you are deceiving yourself". Do you instantly say, "No, I am not deceiving myself because my perception was complete"? Or do you listen and look at it all afresh? It doesn't mean that you are denying the complete perception, you are again watching if it is real or illusory. Q: That is not necessarily an intellectual process? K: No, no. I would say both. It is intellectual as well as nonverbal. Q: Is perception something that is always there and it is only that we... K: That leads to dangerous ground. The Hindus say that God is always there inside you - the abiding deep divinity, or soul, or Atman, and it is covered up. Remove the confusion, the debris and it is found inside. Most people believe that. I think that is a conclusion. You conclude that there is something divine inside, a soul, the Atman or whatever you like to call it. And from a conclusion you can never have a total, complete perception. Q: But this leads to another problem, because if you deny that, then what makes one step out of the stream? Does it mean that the stepping out is for certain individuals only? K: When you say "certain individuals" I think you are putting the wrong question, aren't you? Q: No. If the possibility exists for everyone... K: Yes, the possibility exists for human beings. Q: For the totality? K: For human beings. Q: Then there is some energy which... K: Which is outside of them or which is in them. Q: Yes. We don't know. K: Therefore don't come to any conclusion. If from a conclusion you think you perceive, then that perception is conditioned, therefore it is not whole. Q: Does that mean that there would not be the possibility of a deepening of perception? K: You can't deepen insight. You can't deepen perception. You perceive the whole - that's all. Q: What do you mean then by saying there was this mind into which you could continually go more deeply? K: That is something else. Q: Are you saying that perception, if it is partial, is not perception? K: Of course, obviously not. Q(1): So the deepening of perception would only be a partial step. That wouldn't be perception. Q(2): You mentioned watchfulness after perception. K: What happened was: A man came up to me and said, "You are getting old, you are stuck in a groove." And I listened to it. For a couple of days I thought about it. I looked at it and said to myself, "He may be right." Q: You are almost suggesting that it could be possible. K: No, I wanted to examine it. Don't say it could, or could not. Q: I was going to ask: to be caught in habit after a perception, could that not ever happen again, at certain levels? K: There is partial perception and total perception - let's divide it into those two. When there is total perception there is no further confusion. Q: You don`t get caught in habit? K: There is no further confusion. Because it is so. Q: What if something happens to the brain physically? K: Then of course it is gone. Q: So there seems to be a limitation to what you say, because one assumes that the brain remains healthy. K: Of course, assuming that the whole organism is healthy. If there is an accident, your brain suffers concussion and something is injured, then it is finished. Q(1): The major danger is that we would mistake a partial perception for the total. Q(2): But it still means that it is "here". You are not tapping it from "out there". That energy is within you, isn't it? K: One has to go into this question of what is perception. How do you come to it? That is very important, isn't it? You cannot have perception if your daily life is in disorder, confused, contradictory. That is obvious. Q: Doesn't this perception mean that there is constant renewal? K: No. is that energy outside, or inside? She is asking that question all the time. Q: Isn't that an artificial division: Outside and inside? Is that a real thing, or is it just an illusion? K: She said that this perception needs energy. That energy may be an external energy, a mechanical energy, or a non-mechanistic energy which may exist deeply inside you. Both are mental concepts. Would you agree to that? Both are conclusions which one has either accepted because tradition has said so, or one has come to that conclusion by oneself. Any form of conclusion is detrimental to perception. So what does perception mean? Can I have perception if I am attached to my position, to my wife, to my property? Q: It colours the act of perceiving. K: Yes, but take the scientists, they have their family, their attachments, they want a position, money and all the rest of it, but they have an insight. Q: It is not total. K: So we are saying that total perception can only take place when in your daily life there is no confusion. Q: May we look more closely into that, because couldn't it be that a total perception can take place in spite of that and wipe it away? K: I can see if the windows are not clean my view is confused. Q: Would that mean that there is a conditioned insight? K: If I am in fear my perception will be very partial. That is a fact. Q: But don't you need perception to end fear? K: Ah, but in investigating fear I have a total perception of fear. Q: Surely if there is fear, or attachment, even one's logic would be distorted. K: One is frightened - as we said, that distorts perception. But in investigating, observing, going into fear, understanding it profoundly, in delving into it I have perception. Q: Are you implying that there are certain things you can do which will make for perceptions? Which means although you have fear and it distorts, the distortion is not so total that you cannot investigate it. There is still that possibility, although you are distorting through fear? K: I realize I am distorting perception through fear. Q: That's right, then I begin to look at fear. K: Investigate it, look into it. Q: In the beginning I am also distorting it. K: Therefore I am watching every distortion. I am aware of every distortion that is going on. Q: But you see, I think the difficulty lies there. How can I investigate when I am distorting? K: Wait, just listen. I am afraid and I see fear has made me do something which is a distortion. Q: But before I can see that, the fear has to fade away. K: No, I am observing fear. Q(1): But I cannot observe fear if I am afraid. Q(2): How can you observe it if you are not afraid? Q(3): What is it that is observing? K: Take a fact: you are afraid. You are conscious of it. That means that you become aware of the fact that there is fear. And you observe also what that fear has done. Is that clear? Q: Yes. K: And you look more and more into it. In looking very deeply into it you have an insight. Q: I may have an insight. K: No, you will have insight, which is quite different. Q: What you are saying is that this confusion due to fear is not complete, that it is always open to mankind to have insight. K: To one who is investigating, who is observing. Q: If you try to investigate something else while you are afraid you get lost in fear. But it is still open to you to investigate fear. K: Yes, quite right. One suffers and you see what it does. In observing it, investigating it, opening it up, in the very unrolling of it you have a certain insight. That is all we are saying. That insight may be partial. Therefore one has to be aware that it is partial. Its action is partial and it may appear complete, so watch it. Q: Very often it looks as if it is totally impossible to have an insight, since you say: "If you are distorting how will you look?" But you are also saying, that as a matter of fact, when you have a distortion, the one thing you can look at is the distortion. K: That's right. Q: That factually you have that capacity. K: One has that capacity. Q(1): So when you are distorting something through fear or suffering, most things you look at will be distorted. But it is actually possible to look at that distortion itself. Q(2): You can look at that. The fear which creates the distortion can be looked at; so you can't say that no perception whatsoever is possible. K: That's just it. Then you have locked the door. Q: Could one say that the fear can look at itself? K: No, no. One is afraid: in looking at that fear - not having an insight, just watching it - you see what it does, what its action is. Q: You mean by looking, being aware of it. K: Without any choosing - being aware. And you see what fear does. In looking at it more extensively, deeply, widely, suddenly you have an insight into the whole structure of fear. Q: But there is still the question: in that moment of fear, I am fear. K: How you observe fear matters - whether you observe it as an observer, or the observer is that. You perceive the observer is the observed and in this action there is distortion, confusion. And you examine that confusion, which is born of fear and in the very process of examination you have an insight. Do it, you will see it -if you don't limit yourself. In saying, "I am too frightened, I can't look", you run away from it. Q: To simplify it perhaps too much: when we said one can't see through the window because it is dirty, it distorts, the action of examining the fear, the distorting factor, is the cleansing of the window. K: How you observe, how you investigate, that is the real thing. That is, perception can only take place when there is no division between the observer and the observed. Perception can only take place in the very act of exploring: to explore implies there is no division between the observer and the observed. Therefore you are watching the movement of fear and in the very watching of it there is an insight. I think that is clear. And yet you see, Krishnamurti says: "I have never done this." Q: Never gone through all this? Then how do you know somebody else can? K: That's just it. Let's discuss it. Suppose you have not gone through all this, but you see it instantly. Because you see it instantly your capacity to reason explains all this. Another listens and says, "I'd like to get that, I don't have to go through that whole process." Q: Are you saying that all we have been discussing just now is merely a pointer to something else? We don't have to go through all that. K: Yes. I want to get at that. Q: In other words, that helps to clear the ground in some way? K: Yes. Q: It is not really the main point. K: No. Q: Are you saying there is a short cut? K: No, no short cut. Must you go through fear,jealousy, anxiety, attachment? Or can you clear the whole thing instantly? Must one go through all this process? Q: You previously said that you have never done this. And by having that immediate total perception you are able to see what those with the dirty windows can do to clean them. But that isn't necessary, there is perhaps a direct, an immediate way for those who haven't... K: No. First put the question, see what comes out of it. Dr Bohm says to Krishnamurti: "You have probably not gone through all this. Because you have a direct, a total insight you can argue with reason, with logic; you can act. You are always talking from that total perception, therefore what you say can never be distorted." And another listens to all this and says: "I am frightened, I am jealous, I am this, I am that, and therefore I can't have total perception." So I observe attachment, or fear, or jealousy and I have an insight. Is it possible through investigating, through awareness and discovering that the observer is the observed and that there is no division, in the very process of investigation - in which we are observing without the observer and see the totality of it - to free all the rest? I think that is the only way. Q: Is it possible not to have certain fears, jealousy, attachment? Could that be part of one's conditioning if one were raised in a certain way, or went to a certain school? K: But there may be deeper layers. You may not be totally conscious of them, you may not be totally aware of the deeper fears, etc. You may say, superficially I am all right, I have none of these things. Q: But if one went to a certain school, the kind of learning and investigation that would take place in such a school, would that clear the way towards the possibility? K: Obviously. What we are talking about is: Must one go through all this process? Q: Couldn't we remove from the problem the personal aspect? We are discussing what is open to man rather than to any individual. K: Yes. Is it open to any human being without going through alI this process? Q: By "this process" do you mean involvement with the fear? K: With fear, sorrow, jealousy, attachment, you go through all that, step by step. Or can a human being see the whole thing at a glance? And that very glance is the investigation and the complete, total perception. Q: Which is what you mean when you say the first step is the last. K: Yes, total perception. Q: Then what would one's responsibility be towards someone who is in sorrow? K: The response to that human being is the response of compassion. That's all. Nothing else. Q: For instance, if you see an injured bird it is very easy to deal with that because it really doesn't require very much of you. But when you come in contact with a human being, he has a much more complex set of needs. K: What can you do actually? Somebody comes to you and says, "I am in deep sorrow". Do you talk to him out of compassion, or from a conclusion, or out of your own particular experience of sorrow which has conditioned you, and you answer him according to your conditioning? A Hindu, who is conditioned in a certain way says: "My dear friend, I am so sorry, but in the next life you will live better. You suffered because you did this and that" - and so on. Or a Christian would respond from some other conclusion. And he takes comfort in it. Because a man who is suffering wants some sort of solace, someone on whose lap he can put his head. So what he is seeking is comfort and avoidance of this terrible pain. Will you offer him any of those escapes? Whatever comes out of compassion will help him. Q: Are you saying that as far as sorrow is concerned you can't directly help anyone, but the energy of compassion itself may be of help? K: That's right; that's all. Q: But many such wounded spirits will come to the Centre here and I think it is going to be a problem to know how to deal with them. K: There is no problem if you are compassionate. Compassion doesn't create problems. It has no problems, therefore it is compassionate. Q: You are saying that total compassion is the highest intelligence? K: Of course. If there is compassion, that compassion has its own intelligence and that intelligence acts. But if you have no compassion and no intelligence, then your conditioning makes you reply whatever he wants. I think that is fairly simple. To go back to the other question: Must a human being go through the whole process? Has no human being said, "I won't go through all this. I absolutely refuse to go through all this"? Q: But on what basis does one refuse? It wouldn't make sense to refuse to do what is necessary. K: Of course. You see, we are such creatures of habit. Because my father is conditioned, generations after generations are conditioned and I am conditioned. And I accept it, I work in it and I operate with it. But if I say, I won't ever operate in my conditioned responses, something else may take place. Then, if I realize I am a bourgeois, I don't want to become an aristocrat or a militant, I refuse to be a bourgeois. Which doesn't mean I become a revolutionary, or join Lenin or Marx - those are all bourgeois to me. So something does take place. I reject the whole thing. You see, a human being never says, "I will reject the whole thing". I want to investigate that. Q: Do you mean that even to say: "I am going to get rid of the whole thing" is not necessary? K: Of course. I mean saying, "I won't be a bourgeois" is just words. Q: But isn't the key to this somewhere in desire? There is some sort of desire for continuity, for security. K: That's right. Bourgeois implies continuity, security, it implies belonging to something, a lack of taste, vulgarity - all that. Q: But Krishnaji, if you are saying that Krishnamurti never said this, never had the need to say it, we can only conclude that you are some kind of freak. K: No, no. You can say he is a freak but it doesn't answer the question. Krishnamurti says, "I have not touched all this". Somebody asks, "Why should I go through all this?" Don't say Krishnamurti is a freak, but ask: "How does it happen?" Q: In saying, "I won't be a bourgeois" you are discovering it in yourself. K: No, no. That is a different matter. If somebody says to you, "I have never been through all this", what do you do? Do you say he is a freak? Or would you say: "How extraordinary, is he telling the truth? Has he deceived himself"? You discuss with him. Then your question is: "How does it happen?" You are a human being, he is a human being: you want to find out. Q: You ask: "In what way are we different?" He is a human being that has never been through all that, and yet he points out. K: No, he has never been through it. Don't say he points out. Don't you ask that question: "How does it happen, must I go through all this?" Do you ask that? Q(1): I have assumed I must. Q(2): Krishnaji, you are taking two widely separate things. One is the uncontaminated person, who never had to go through the process because he was never in the soup. K: Leave out why he didn't go through it. Q: But most other people, apparently, are in some form of... K: ...conditioning... Q(1): ...in some form of contamination, it may be fear, or something else. Therefore the person who has already got this sickness - let's call it that - says "This man has never been sick for a day in his life." What good is it to examine that, because one is already sick in some form. Q(2): That is an assumption. I think we are saying that if any one human being never went through all this, that says something about the essence of mankind, which is a truth for everybody. Q(3): But one is already sick. Q(4): That may be a conclusion. Q(5): It is also an ascertainable fact. Q(6): I think one is assuming that whatever this sickness is, it is in the essence, it is essentially inevitable. Q(7): I didn't say that. But I am saying it is a fact - at least it is to me - that there is the sickness in some form or another. I don't think that is an assumption. I think that is a fact. Q(8): But the question is: What does the fact depend upon? You see, the fact may depend upon an assumption which people make about themselves that it will take time to overcome that sickness. Q(9): Is it part of the sickness to ask only about small things and not the greater things? Q(1O): Aside from all that the question is: How can a human being who is sick in some way, how can he get out of it directly without going through endless self-exploration? K: Can we put the whole thing differently? Do you seek excellence, not excellence for instance in a building, but the essence of excellence? Then everything falls away, doesn't it? Or do you seek excellence in a certain direction and never the essence of excellence? As an artist I seek excellence in my painting and get caught in that. A scientist gets caught in something else. But an ordinary human being, not a specialist, just an average intelligent human being who does not take drugs, does not smoke, is fairly intelligent and decent, if he sought the essence of excellence, would this happen? The essence would meet all this. I wonder if I am conveying something? Q: Does it exist apart from this manifestation? K: Listen carefully first. Don't object, or reject and say 'if' and "but". That very demand for excellence - how you demand it - brings the essence of it. You demand it passionately. You demand the highest intelligence, the highest excellence, the essence of it, and when fear arises, then you... Q: Where does the demand come from? K: Demand it! Don't say: "Where does it come from?" There may be a motive, but the very demand washes it all away. I wonder if I am conveying anything? Q: You are saying: Demand this excellence - which we don't know. K: I don't know what is beyond it, but I want to be morally excellent. Q: Does that mean goodness? K: I demand the excellence of goodness, I demand the excellent flower of goodness. In that very demand there is a demand for the essence. Q: Does perception come from this demand? K: Yes, that's right. Q: Could you go into what you call this demand? K: It is not a demand which means asking, a demand that means imploring, wanting - cut out all those. Q: It doesn't mean those? K: No, no. Q: But then you are back with prayer. K: Oh, no. Leave out all that. Q: You are really saying that the impossible is possible to the average intelligent human being? K: We are saying that, yes. Which is not a conclusion, which is not a hope. I say it is possible for the average human being, who is fairly clean, who is fairly decent, fairly kind, who is not a bourgeois. Q: Traditionally we are conditioned to believe that there are special people with no conscious content of consciousness, so it is very difficult for someone like me to feel that one could really be completely free of it. K: You see, you have not listened. K says to you: "Please listen first, don't bring in all these objections. Just listen to what he is saying. That is, what is important in life is the supreme excellence which has its own essence." That's all. And to demand does not mean begging or praying, getting something from somebody. Q: The point is, we find we confuse demand with desire. K: Of course. Q: There must be no beliefs. K: No beliefs, no desire. Q: You see, when people feel that they want to give up desire then there is a danger of giving up this demand as well. K: How can we put this? Let's find a good word for it. Would the word "passion" be suitable? There is passion for this, passion for excellence. Q: Does it imply that this passion has no object? K: You see how you immediately form a conclusion. Burning passion - not for something. The Communists are passionate about their ideas. That passion is very, very petty and limited. The Christians have passion for missionary work - that passion is born of the love of Jesus. That again is not passion, it is very narrow. putting all that aside, I say: "Passion". Q: As you were just saying, people have had some vision, or a dream of something and that has developed a great energy. But you are saying it is not a dream, it is not a vision; but it is nevertheless some perception of this excellence. K: All those passions feed the ego, feed the me, make me important, consciously or unconsciously. We are cutting out all that. There is a young boy who has a passion to grow up into an extraordinary human being, into something original. Q: He sees that it is possible. K: Yes. Q: And therefore he has the passion. K: Yes, that's right. It is possible. Is that what is missing in most human beings? Not passion, but the welling up of... I don't know how to put it. There is this passion in a human being who demands the supreme excellence, not in what he writes in his books, but the feeling of it. You know this, don't you? - that may shatter everything else. Again, that human being didn't demand it. He says: "I never even asked for it." Q: Perhaps that is due to conditioning. We are conditioned to mediocrity, not to make this demand. That is what you mean by mediocrity. K: Yes, of course. Mediocrity is lack of great passion - not for Jesus, or for Marx or whatever it is. Q: We are not only conditioned to mediocrity but to direction, so the demand is always to have some direction. K: The demand is a direction, quite right. Q: To have a demand without any direction... K: That's right. I like the word "demand", because it is a challenge. Q: Doesn't a demand without direction imply that it is not in time? K: Of course. It demands no direction, no time, no person. So does total insight bring this passion? Total insight is the passion. Q: They can't be separate. K: Total insight is the flame of passion which wipes away all confusion. It burns away everything else. Don't you then act as a magnet? The bees go towards the nectar. In the same way don't you act as a magnet when you are passionate to create? Is it that there is this lack of fire? That may be the thing that is missing. If there is something missing I would ask for it. Q(1): Could we talk about the relationship between the conditioned and the unconditioned mind, and whether it is only possible to ask for small things, or can we somehow leap beyond that into something bigger? Q(2): Whatever the me asks for, the asking in a direction is the small thing. K: Quite right. Q: We have to ask for the unlimited, for the unconditioned. K: She is really asking: What is the relationship between the conditioned and the unconditioned? Also, what is the relationship between two human beings, when one is unconditioned and the other is not? There is no relationship. Q: How can you say that there is no relationship between the unconditioned and the conditioned human being? K: There is no relationship from the conditioned to the unconditioned. But the unconditioned has a relationship to the other. Q: But logically one could ask: Is there an essential difference between the unconditioned and the conditioned? Because if you say there is, then there is duality. K: What do you mean by essential difference? Q: Let's say difference in kind. If there is an essential difference between the conditioned and the unconditioned there is duality. K: I see what you mean. X is conditioned, Y is not conditioned. X thinks in terms of duality, his very conditioning is duality. But duality has no relationship with Y, yet Y has a relationship to X. Q: Because there is no duality. K: Yes. Y has no duality therefore there is a relationship. You also asked some other question: Essentially, deeply, is there a difference? Are not both the same? Q: Could one ask the question in another way? Is the conditioning only superficial? K: No. Then we are lost. Q(1): Could we put it like this? When you say, "You are the world, the world is you" - does that statement include the conditioned as well as the unconditioned? Q(2): I am not sure about that. It seems that if the unconditioned mind can be related to the conditioned, can understand the conditioned, comprehend it, then there is not really a duality, that is fundamentally, in essence. The unconditioned mind comprehends the conditioned mind and goes beyond it. Q(3): The world couldn't be unconditioned, could it? K: The world is `me' and `me' is the world. Q: That is an absolute fact only to the unconditioned. K: Oh, not at all. Be careful, it is so. It is an obvious fact. Q: You mean that only the unconditioned can perceive that? K: That is what she says. I am refuting it. I say it isn't quite like that. Q: I mean it in the sense that I may say, "I am the world, the world is me", but I revert to an action which is a contradiction to that. Therefore it is not an absolute fact for me. There may be moments when the fact of it is seen by me. K: Yes. Do you mean: "I say to myself very clearly, `I am the world and the world is me'"? Q: I see it. K: I feel it. Q: I feel it, yes. K: And I act contrary to that. Which is, I act personally, selfishly - my, me. That is a contradiction to the fact that the world is me and I am the world. A person can say this merely as an intellectual conclusion, or a momentary feeling. Q: It is not an intellectual conclusion, because I am stating my position, but I accept that for you the position is totally different. K: No, you don't even have to accept that. See the fact, which is, when one says, "I am the world and the world is me" there is no me. But one's house has to be insured. I may have children, I have to earn a living - but there is no me. See the importance of it. There is no me all the time. I function, but there is no me which is seeking a higher position and all that. Though I am married I am not attached, I don't depend on a wife or husband. The appearances may give you the impression that the me is operating, but actually to a man who feels, "The world is me and I am the world", to him there is no me. To you, looking at him, there is. That human being lives in this world, he must have food, clothes and shelter, a job, transportation, all that, yet there is no me. So when the world is me and I am the world, there is no me. Can that state, that quality operate in all directions? It must operate in all directions. When you say, "I am the world and the world is me", and there is no me, there is no conditioning. I don't put the question: In that unconditioned state does the conditioned exist? When a human being says, "I am the world and the world is me", there is no I. Q: Therefore the other person also is not there. There is no you. K: There is no me, there is no you. When you ask if the conditioned exists in this state you are asking a wrong question. That is what I was getting at. Because when there is no I there is no you. Q: The question is: How does that person see the kind of confusion that arises around I and you. He sees what is going on in the world, that people are generally confused about this. K: I exist: there is you and me. And you also think the same thing. So we keep this division everlastingly. But when you and I really realize, have profound insight that, "The world is me and I am the world", there is no me. Q: There is no me and no you. "No" means "everything". K: The world of living - everything. Q: Then the question, "Is there an essential difference between this and that, the unconditioned and the conditioned", doesn't arise, because there is no "between". K: Yes, that's right. There is no you, there is no I in that state, which doesn't include the conditioned state. Is this too abstract? Q: Why do you have to say, "I am the world" first, and then deny this? K: Because it is an actuality. Q: But then you imply that the I is still there if I say, "I am the world". K: That is merely a statement. It is an actual fact that I am the world. Q: Whatever I mean by the word "I", I also mean by the word "world". K: Yes. Q: So we don't need those two words. K: Yes. You and I - remove that. Q: There is just everything. K: No, this is very dangerous. If you say I am everything... Q: I am trying to find out what you mean by "the world',. K: If you say, "I am everything", then the murderer, the assassin is part of me. Q: Suppose I say, "I am the world" instead, does that change it? K: (laughing) All right. I see the actual fact that I am the result of the world. The world means killing, wars, the whole of society -I am the result of that. Q: And I see everybody is the result of that. K: Yes. I am saying the result is I and you. Q: And that separation. K: When I say I am the world, I am saying all that. Q: You mean to say I am generated by the world, I am identified with everything. K: Yes. I am the product of the world Q: The world is the essence of what I am. K: Yes. I am the essence of the world. It is the same thing. When there is a deep perception of that, not verbal, not intellectual, not emotional, not romantic, but profound, there is no you or me. I think that holds logically. But there is a danger. If I say the world is me, I am everything, I'll accept everything. Q: You are really saying that one is the product of the whole of society. K: Yes. Q: But I am also of the essence of the whole of society. K: Yes. I am really the essential result of all this. Q: Does it help to use the word "ego"? K: It is the same thing, it doesn't matter. You see, when you say me, or ego, there is a possibility of deception that `I' is the very essence of God. You know about that superstition. Q: The Atman. K: Yes. Q: But there is still another question. Is the unconditioned mind also a product of all this? Then we come to a contradiction. K: No, there is no contradiction. Without using the word "I" it can be said: the result of the world is this. The result of the world is that also. We are two human beings, which means the result has created the I and the you. When there is an insight into the result there is no "result". Q: The result changes and vanishes when we see it. K: That means there is no result. Therefore 'you' and 'I' don't exist. That is an actual fact for a man who says, "I am not the result". You see what it means? There is no causation in the mind and therefore there is no effect. Therefore it is whole, and any action born of it is causeless and without effect. Q: You have to make that clear, in the sense that you still use cause and effect concerning ordinary, mechanical things. K: Quite. This human being, X, is a result. And Y is a result. X says I, and Y says I; therefore there is you and I. X says I see this and investigates, goes into it and he has an insight. In that insight the two results cease. Therefore in that state there is no cause. Q: There is no cause and no effect although it may leave a residue in the mind. K: Let's go into it. In that state there is no result, no cause, no effect. That mind acts out of compassion. Therefore there is no result. Q: But in some sense it would look as if there were a result. K: But compassion has no result. A is suffering, he says to X, "Please help me to get out of my suffering." If X really has compassion his words have no result. Q: Something happens, but there is no result. K: That's it. Q: But I think people generally are seeking a result. K: Yes. Let's put it another way. Does compassion have a result? When there is result there is cause. When compassion has a cause then you are no longer compassionate. Q(1): It is an extremely subtle thing, because something happens which seems final and yet is not. Q(2): But compassion also acts. K: Compassion is compassion, it doesn't act. If it acts because there is a cause and an effect, then it is not compassion: it wants a result. Q: It acts purely. K: It wants a result. Q: What makes it want a result is the idea of separation. Somebody says, " There is a person suffering, I would like to produce the result that he is not suffering. " But that is based on the idea that there is me and he. K: That's it. Q: There is no he and no I. There is no room, no place to have this result. K: It is a tremendous thing! One has to look at it very, very carefully. Look, "The world is me and I am the world". When I say me, you exist: both of us are there. The you and the I are the results of man's misery, of selfishness, and so on - it is a result. When one looks into the result, goes into it very, very deeply, the insight brings about a quality in which you and I - who are the result -don't exist. This is easy to agree to verbally, but when you see it deeply there is no you and no me. Therefore there is no result -which means compassion. The person upon whom that compassion acts wants a result. We say, "Sorry, there is no result." But the man who suffers says, "Help me to get out of this", or, "Help me to bring back my son, my wife", or whatever it is. He is demanding a result. This thing has no result. The result is the world. Q: Does compassion affect the consciousness of man? K: Yes. It affects the deep layers of consciousness. The I is the result of the world, the you is the result of the world. And to the man who sees this deeply with a profound insight, there is no you or I. Therefore that profound insight is compassion - which is intelligence. And the intelligence says: If you want a result I can't give it to you, I am not the product of a result. Compassion says: This state is not a result, therefore there is no cause. Q: Does that mean there is no time either? K: No cause, no result, no time. 1ST CONVERSATION WITH DR BOHM & DR SHAINBERG BROCKWOOD PARK 17TH MAY 1976 'TRANSFORMATION OF MAN' INTRODUCTION TO RECORDING SESSIONS: Questioner: Sir, we would like to know as much as we can about you before we start these dialogues. Would you please tell us where we are and who you are, and how you came to participate with Mr Krishnamurti in his teachings. Dr Bohm: We are here in Brockwood Park in Hampshire in England. And I am David Bohm, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of London. Now as to how I came here to participate: I think it best to begin by saying a little about my work, that in my studies in theoretical physics I have always been interested in what you'd call the deeper questions, the nature of time and space and matter, causality and what is behind it all, what is universal. And in general I found that very few physicists shared this interest, and I pursued it as best I could. But when we arrived in Bristol in 1957 there was a very good public library there, and my wife and I used to go there, and we became interested in books on philosophy and religion and we picked up a book by Mr Krishnamurti called FIRST AND LAST FREEDOM, and I read that and found it extremely interesting, especially because it discussed the observer and the observed. That is a question which is very significant in theoretical physics and the quantum theory: Heisenberg has brought it out with the effect of the observer on the particle which is observed. Also many other questions were raised there and I felt the whole thing very interesting. I read as many books as I could find by Mr Krishnamurti; then I wrote a letter to the publishers to ask where he was and finally I was put in contact with the Krishnamurti Foundation in England, and they said he was coming to talk. This was around 1960 or '61, I forget which. And so I arranged to come. Then while listening to the talks I sent another letter to the Foundation asking if I could talk personally with Mr Krishnamurti and they arranged a time. So we met and we talked. I think at that time I told him about my ideas in physics - he appreciated the spirit. And then every time after that, every year when Krishnamurti came to London we arranged to meet, once or twice, until later I began to go to Saanen in Switzerland and there we met more often. And finally, around '66 or '67, there was a plan to make a school in which Krishnamurti asked me to take part and gradually the school was organized here at Brockwood Park and I have been coming regularly. You know I am a member, a Trustee of the Foundation which is responsible for this school and also I come down to discuss with people and take part generally. And we have gone on discussing the questions which you will see arising. That essentially explains how I got here. Q: And you, Dr Shainberg? We would like to know about you. Dr Shainberg: Well, I am a practising psychiatrist in New York City. I first came to read and think about what Krishnamurti said as early as 1949, or '48, when I was about, let's see how old was I, I was about 18 or 19 then. And through the influence of several concatenations of events, I suppose the main one was my father, who was involved at that time with reading Krishnamurti. It seemed to me at that time even then that there was something there that was of interest in the question that the observer is the observed. How, and what the meaning, or the feeling of it was, I can say was only in a kind of intuitive awareness that this seemed to be the direction in which I wanted to move. Then I went to college, I went to medical school, I trained as a psychiatrist, I trained as a neurologist, I trained as a psychol-analyst. I had many different experiences. And all along I was reading Mr Krishnamurti, and still thinking about it, still trying to understand the difference between what he was saying and what western psychiatry, or western psychology was communicating. But it's only been in the last, I would say five to six years that I have really begun to feel that I have begun to understand how I can use it in my work. And most of that stimulus has come from meeting Dr Bohm, who has moved my thinking along and I have come to feel that specifically there is something about the way we think in psychiatry, which is, that all the theories deal with fragmentation and the relationships between fragmentation, and most of them do not have any understanding of the holistic action, the holism that gives birth to this fragmentation. So that very often it seemed to me, and it has seemed to me that most of the theories that we have analyse and break things down and break things into pieces which collaborate with the very problems that our patients present us with. And again I feel, very similar to what Dr Bohm said, that we have never really got in, in psychiatry, and Mr Krishnamurti's work has begun to help me to understand that the relationship between the observer and the observed in the very patient/doctor situation is very important, and that the very theories that we create are part of our very problem, that the fragmented people that we are, the fragmented theorists represent fragmentation and then call that the thing that we have to treat. There seems to be a basic problem here that I feel will come out in these dialogues, and I have talked with Mr Krishnamurti many times and they point the way as to how we can get through this problem of the fragmentation. Q: Mr Krishnamurti, how can the viewer best share in these dialogues? How can he gain the most from this experience? Krishnamurti: I think it all depends how serious you are. How serious in the sense of how deeply you want to go into these questions, which is after all your life. We are not discussing theoretically some abstract hypothesis, but we are dealing with actual daily life of every human being, whether he lives in India, or here, or in America, or anywhere else. We are dealing with the actual facts of fear, pleasure, sorrow, death and if there is anything sacred in life. Because if we don't find something real, something that is true life has very little meaning. So if you are really serious to go into this matter very carefully and with care, with attention, then you can share a great deal. But you have to be serious, really serious. And if you listen to it, listen with care, with attention, with a sense of affection, not agreeing or disagreeing, that anybody can do, but if you really care to find out how to live properly, what is right relationship between human beings, then you will share completely, I think, with all that we discuss or have a dialogue about during the next few days. DIALOGUE NO 1 Krishnamurti: What shall we talk about? What do you think is the most important thing that we three can talk about? Dr. Shainberg: Well, the one thing I had an idea lately, you know, there has been one thing on my mind, and I have been getting it from - when we had talked before, and that is the feeling you have been conveying that life comes first and not thought or work, something like that, in other words, I find in myself, and find I think most people are cought up in the fact that - it seems, I can't you know you said once we live second hand lives. If we could talk about that. I think then there is second handness of our lives. K: What do you say? Dr. Bohm: Well, in relation to that perhaps I would like to talk about the question of wholeness. K: Shall we talk about that first? B: Which first? K: And then include yours. S: Sure. I mean, I think this is part of that. I see that second handedness is not wholeness. K: Quite. I wonder how we can approach this question knowing that most people are fragmented broken up and not whole. How do we tackle or approach this question? S: Through direct awareness of the fragmentation. K: No. I would like to - I am just asking because - are we discussing it theoretically, verbally? S: No. K: Or taking ourselves - you, we three - taking ourselves as we are and examining what we mean by fragmented. And then work from there to what is the whole, not theoretically or verbally? Then I think that has vitality, that has some meaning. S: Right, right. Well, if we see the fragmentation, wholeness is there. K: I know. No, don't assume anything. Then we are after theory. B: That's too fast. S: Alright, right. K: You know, we have been talking to lots of students here -this question. Dr. Bohm was there too. And whether we can ever be aware of ourselves at all. Or we are only aware of patches, not the totality of fragmentations. I do not know if I am conveying this. S: Well you can. Go ahead. K: Can one be aware, conscious, know the various fragments, examining one by one by one by one? And who is the examiner? Is he not also a fragment who has assumed an authority? So when we talk about being aware of fragments, socially, morally, ethically, religiously - business, art, you know, the whole activity is fragmented. Can one, is one aware of the movement of these fragments or do you take one fragment and examine it or say yes, I am aware of that and not the many. Do you follow what I am saying? S: Yes, I am following. I think you are mostly aware - I think, when I think of what you are saying, I seem to be aware of that kind of many fragments. K: Are you? S: Well, not. One at a time, you know, like a machine-gun. K: So you are really aware one by one. S: Right. And cought up by the movement of the fragments. K: One by one. Is that so? Are you sure that it is so? S: Yes. I think, I mean it seems to be that - but then sometimes you can take a step back, or you seem to take a step back or I seem to take a step back when I am aware of these many. K: When Dr. Bohm asked, can't we talk over together, this question of wholeness which implies holiness, health, sanity and all that, I wonder from what source he is asking that question. S: Yes. You mean whether he is coming from a fragmented position or he is coming from a whole position? K: No. If he is asking from the whole position, there is no question. S: Right. K: Sir, I would like to, if one may ask, are we aware of the fragments as a whole, take a collection of fragments or are we aware of one fragment at each time? What do you say? B: Generally, thing presents itself first as primarily one fragment with a background of all the other fragments perhaps dimly present in it. I mean, in the beginning one fragment seems to take emphasis pre-eminence in awareness. S: Isn't that one fragment fragments out quickly into many little fragments. I have an idea and then that idea is in contrast to another idea and so I am immediately cought up into two fragments there. And then I have another idea which is the repeatition of that first idea. So I am cought up in a movement of fragments rather than - I mean, my identity is fragmented, my relationship is fragmented, my very substance of movement is a feeling of fragmentation. I don't have any centre when I am fragmented. I am not... K: I am not sure about that. S: That is the question, yes. B: No, no. K: I am not at all sure that there is no centre when you are fragmented. B: Right, then definitely there is a centre. K: There is. B: That is the major fragment that one is aware of. K: That's right. S: Let us go into that more. B: Well, I just think that there is a centre which you may sense anywhere, say here, and that seems to be the centre of everything, everything that is connected to everything. S: I see what you are saying, but I feel that when the fragmentation is going on it is like the centre is looking for itself, it feels like it has a centre. K: Are you aware of the fragmentation? Not, fragmentation is going on. S: No, you know, I am not. K: Then what are we aware of? S: I think - that is a terrific question - because when there is fragmentation what we are aware of is like being sucked into more fragments. In other words there is a kind of movement of more fragmentation, more fragmentation, which is what we are aware of. It is what you have talked about in terms of pleasure. It is like pleasure is pulling us forward into more fragments: this would give me pleasure, that would give me pleasure, that would give me pleasure. And it is that feeling of pieces. K: Before we go into the question of pleasure... S: Yes. K: ...are we aware actually, from a centre, which says, "I am fragmented"? That is the question, isn't it? B: Yes. S: Right. That is the question. B: We are both aware of a centre, and from a centre, you see. K: That's it. B: And this centre seems to be, as you say, the fragment that is dominating, or attempting to dominate. K: That centre is the dominating factor. B: Yes. In other words... K: Which is in itself a fragment. B: Yes, I mean, well it seems to be the centre of your being, or as it were the centre of the ego, or the self, which one might think is the whole. K: Quite, quite. B: Because it is in contact with everything, you see. K: Would you say having a centre is the very cause of fragmentation? B: Yes, I would say that although at first sight it seems different. S: At first sight - I think that is important. The difference between - at first sight it doesn't seem that way. B: At first sight it seems that the centre is what is organizing everything into a whole. S: Right. K: Yes. B: In other words one feels one wants a centre to bring everything to a whole, to stop the fragmentation. K: Yes, try to bring about integration, try to bring a wholeness, and all that. S: Right. If you see, if you feel the fragmentation, then you centre here and say, "I can see all the fragmentations" - but that is still centre. K: No, but I am asking whether when there is a centre doesn't it make for fragments? S: That I see. I see what you are saying. But I am trying to take it from what is the experience when there is fragmentation. There doesn't seem to be a centre. K: Contradiction. Contradiction. S: Right. But it doesn't feel like a centre. K: No. Contradiction. Sir, when there are fragments, I am aware of the fragments because of contradiction. S: Right. K: Because of opposing factors. S: Yes. B: You mean by contradiction also conflict. K: Conflict. Out of contradiction there is conflict. Then I am aware that there are fragments. I am working in an area of fragments. S: Right. But then - yes, I am not aware of the fact that I have in fact got a centre. That is the self deception, right there. K: No, sir - don't you think, if I may suggest, that where there is conflict then only you are aware of a conflict of contradiction. That is, one is aware only when there is conflict. Right? And then the next awareness, the next movement is conflict arises out of fragmentation; opposing elements, opposing desires, opposing wishes, opposing thoughts. B: But are you saying that these oppose first before one is aware; and then suddenly you are aware through the unpleasantness or the pain of the opposition that the conflict is unpleasant? K: Yes, conflict is unpleasant and therefore one is aware that... B: ...that something is wrong. K: Wrong. Yes. B: Yes, that something is wrong, not just simply wrong but wrong with the whole thing. K: The whole thing, of course. Sir, after all self consciousness, when you are aware of yourself only when there is pain, or intense pleasure. Otherwise you are not aware of yourself. So fragmentation with its conflict brings this sense of, I am aware I am in conflict - otherwise there is no awareness. I wonder if I am.? S: Yes. Go ahead. You are saying that the very fragmentation itself breeds the centre. K: Breeds the centre. S: And the centre has bred the fragmentation, so it is like a... K: Yes, back and forth. B: Then would you say that thought in itself before there is a centre breeds conflict? Or is there thought before a centre? K: Is there thought before the centre. B: I mean one view is to say that the centre and thought are always co-existent and that one breeds the other. K: One breeds the other, quite. B: And the other view is to say that there might be thought first and that produces conflict and then that produces a centre. K: Let's go into that a little bit. B: Yes. S: That's a good one. K: Does thought exist before conflict? B: Before a centre. K: Before the centre. One is aware of the centre only when there is conflict. B: Yes, because that comes in apparently to try to bring about wholeness again, to take charge of everything. K: The centre tries to take charge, or tries to create wholeness. B: Yes, to bring all the factors together. K: Yes, but the centre itself is a fragment. B: Yes, but it doesn't know that. K: Of course, it doesn't know but it thinks it can bring all the fragments together and make it a whole. So Dr Bohm is asking the question, which is: did thought exist before the centre, or the centre existed before the thought. B: Or are the two together? K: Or the two together. S: Right, right. Or he is also asking: does thought create the centre? K: Thought creates the centre. S: That would be the action, the very creation, a sort of after effect of the thought. In other words is the organism - is the production of thought the very cause of a centre? That I think carries... K: Yes, let's be clear on this. Are we asking: did thought create the centre? B: And yes, was there a kind of thought before a centre? K: Yes. Thought before the centre. That's it. B: Which came into contradiction. K: Yes, thought created the centre, or the centre existed before the thought. B: Or else the centre - I mean that is a view which is common. I mean people think the centre is me who was first. K: Me is the first. B: And then I began to think! Right. K: Yes. I think thought exists before the centre. S: Yes, then we have to ask the question - I don't know if we want to get into it at this minute - but we have to ask the question of why is there thought, what is thought? K: Oh, that is a different matter. We will go into that. B: That might be a long story. S: Yes. That's not for now. But we have to get at that. K: No. S: Let's stay with what we started with. K: We started out asking: can we talk about the wholeness of life. How can one be aware of that wholeness if one is fragmented? That is the next question. You can't be aware of the whole if I am only looking through a small hole. S: Right. But on the other hand in actuality you are the whole. K: Ah! That is a theory. S: Is it? B: A supposition, yes. K: Of course, when you are fragmented how can you assume that you are the whole? S: Well that is wonderful. I mean that is an issue because how am I to know I am fragmented? K: That is what we are asking. S: Yes. K: When are you aware that you are fragmented? Only when there is conflict. S: That's right. K: When the two opposing desires, opposing elements of movement, then there is conflict, then you have pain, or whatever it is, and then you become conscious. S: Right. But at those moments it often happens that you don't want to let go of the conflict. It is like you feel your fragmentation... K: No, that is a different matter. That is a different matter. S: Right. K: What we are asking is: can the fragment dissolve itself, and then only it is possible to see the whole. You cannot be fragmented and then wish for the whole. S: Right. K: Then it is merely... S: All you really know is your fragmentation. K: That is all we know. B: That is right. K: Therefore let's stick to that and not beat round the bush and say, let's talk about the whole and all the rest of it. S: Right. B: And the supposition that there is a whole may be reasonable but as long as you are fragmented you could never see it. It would be just an assumption. K: Of course, right. S: Right. B: You may think you have experienced it once, but that is also an assumption, that is gone. K: Absolutely. Quite right. S: You know, I wonder if there is not a tremendous pain or something that goes on when I am aware of my fragmentation. That is the loneliness somehow. K: Look sir: can you be aware of your fragments? That you are an American, that I am a Hindu, you are a Jew or whatever, Communist - you just live in that state. You don't say, "Well, I know I am a Hindu" - it is only when you are challenged, it is only when it is said, "What are you?", then you say, "I am an Indian", or a Hindu, or an Arab. B: When the country is challenged then you have got to worry. K: Of course. S: So you are saying that I am living totally reactively. K: No, you are totally living in a kind of, what? A miasma, confusion. S: From one piece to the next, from one reaction to the next reaction. K: Reward and punishment in that movement. So can we be aware, actually now, now, of the various fragments? That I am a Hindu, that I am a Jew, that I am an Arab, that I am a Communist, that I am a Catholic, that I am a businessman, I am married, I have responsibilities, I am an artist, I am a scientist. You follow? All this various sociological fragmentation. S: Right. K: As well as psychological fragmentation. S: Right, right. That is exactly what I started with. Right. This feeling that I am a fragment, this feeling that that is where I get absorbed, being a fragment. K: Which you call the individual. S: That I call important, not just the individual. K: You call that important. S: Right. That I have to work. K: Quite. S: It is significant. K: So can we now in talking over together, be aware that I am that? I am a fragment and therefore creating more fragments, more conflict, more misery, more confusion, more sorrow, because when there is conflict it affects everything. S: Right. K: Can you be aware of it as we are discussing? S: I can be aware as we are discussing it a little. K: Not a little. S: That's the trouble. Why can't I be aware of it? K: Look sir. You are only aware of it when there is conflict. It is not a conflict in you now. S: Yes. B: But is it possible to be aware of it without conflict? K: That is the next thing, yes. That requires quite a different approach. B: How will we consider this different approach? K: Quite a different approach. B: But I was thinking of looking at one point that the importance of these fragments is that when I identify myself and say, "I am this", "I am that", I mean the whole of me. In other words the whole of me is rich or poor, or American, or whatever, and therefore it is all important because it is the whole. I think it seems that the trouble is that the fragment claims that it is the whole, and makes itself very important. S: Takes up the whole life. This is life. B: Then comes a contradiction and then comes another fragment saying it is the whole. K: Look what is happening in Northern Ireland; in the Arab world, the Middle Eastern world, the Muslim and the Hindu; you know this whole world is broken up that way, outside and inside. S: Me and you. K: Yes, me and you, we and they, and all the rest of it. B: But I mean that is the difference between saying we have a lot of different objects in the room which are separate and so on, which we can handle. K: That is a different thing. B: There is no problem there. But if we say, "I am this, I am wholly this", then I also say, "I am wholly that". S: You are bringing in something different here. That is exactly how it is that we come to believe in these fragments. Because we look at objects and we say they are separate things, therefore I am a separate thing. K: I question that sir. Say for instance, the Arab and the Israeli -are they aware that I am an Arab, I want to fight that somebody else who is not? Or I have an idea - you follow - an idea. B: What do you mean? An idea that I am an Arab. K: Yes. B: But the idea is that that is very important, or rather I am totally in error. It is all important, that is one of the ideas. And now somebody else has the idea I am a Jew, that is all important and therefore they must destroy each other. K: Impossible. Quite. And I think the politicians, the religious people are encouraging all this. B: But they are also running by fragments. K: Because they are fragmented themselves. You see that is the whole point. People who are in power, being fragmented, sustain the fragmentation. S: Right. It is the only way to get into power, to be fragmented. K: Of course. B: Well he says, it is all important that I should be a politician, successful and so on. K: Of course. S: This movement into fragmentation, almost it seems to be caused by something. It seems to be... K: Is this what you are asking: what is the cause of this fragmentation? S: Yes. Right. What is the cause of the fragmentation? What breeds it? What sucks us into it? K: Look: what brings about fragmentation? S: Now, you know what brings it about. When the mother and child - when the child separates from the mother. Right? K: Biologically. S: No, psychologically. The child starts able to walk, and the child can walk away, then he runs back and then he runs back and he looks back, he says, is she still there. Gradually moves away. Now the mother that is not able to let go says, "Come back here". K: Quite. S: Then scares the child to death because the child thinks I can't do it, if she says I can't do it, I can't do it. K: Quite. We are asking something very important, which is: what is the cause of this fragmentation? S: That is what I was getting into. There is some cause there and it begins there, I have got to hold on to something. K: No. Just look at it sir. What has brought fragmentation in you? S: Well, my immediate response is the need to hold on to something. K: No, much deeper than that. Much more deep. Look at it. Look at it. Let's go slowly at it. S: OK. K: Not immediate responses. What brings this conflict which indicates I am fragmented, and then I ask the question: what brings this fragmentation. What is the cause of it? B: Are you saying there is a conflict and there something happens that causes fragmentation in the conflict? S: No, he is saying the fragmentation causes the conflict. B: Then what is the cause of the fragmentation? Right. That is important. K: That's right sir. Why are you and I and the majority of the world fragmented? What is the cause of it? B: It seems we won't find the cause by going back in time to a certain... S: I am not looking for genetics, I am looking for right this second to come upon a, to put it in these worlds, it seems to do that, there is a focussing or a holding on to something inside my movements. K: Sir, look at it as though not from Dr Shainberg's point of view, just look at it. Put it on the table and look at it objectively. What brings about this fragmentation? S: Fear. K: No, no, much more. B: Maybe the fragmentation causes fear. K: Yes, that's it. Why am I a Hindu? - if I am, I am not a Hindu, I am not an Indian, I have no nationality. But suppose I have, I call myself a Hindu. What makes me a Hindu? S: Well, conditioning makes you a Hindu. K: What is the background, what is the feeling or what is it that makes me say "I am a Hindu"? Which is a fragmentation, obviously. S: Right, right. K: What makes it? My father, my grandfather, generations and generations after ten thousand or five thousand years, they have said, you are a Brahmin. And I see all that. I am a Brahmin. S: You don't say or write, I am a Brahmin, you are a Brahmin. Right. That is quite different. You say, I am a Brahmin because... K: It is like you saying, I am a Christian. S: Right. K: Which is what? S: That is tradition, conditioning, sociology, history, culture, family, everything. K: But behind that, what is that? S: Behind that is man's... K: No, no. Don't theorize. Look at it in yourself. S: Well that gives me a place, an identity, I know who I am then, I am. I have my little niche. K: Who made that niche? S: Well I made it and they helped me make it. I am co-operating in this very... K: You are not co-operating. You are it. S: I am it. Right. That's right. The whole thing is moving towards putting me in a hole. K: So what made you? The great great grandparent made, created this environment, this culture, this whole structure of human existence, with all its misery and with all the mess it is in, what has brought it about? Which is the fragmentation, all the conflict. S: The same action then is there. K: That is all I am asking. S: The same action that makes man right now. K: Exactly. The Babylonians, the Egyptians, we are exactly the same now. S: Right. B: Yes. S: This is what I was getting at in the beginning. This is all giving me my secondhand existence. K: Yes. Proceed. Let's go into it. Let's find out why man has bred, or brought about this state, and which we accept. You follow? Gladly or unwillingly. We are of it. I am willing to kill somebody because he is a communist or a socialist or whatever it is. That is exactly what is going on in Northern Ireland, in the Middle East. S: Well, everywhere, the doctors, lawyers. K: Of course, of course. The same problem. S: My sense of it is that it stops me, it closes me off, it keeps the movement - it's like the tree doesn't get in. If I know who I am then I don't look at the tree. K: Yes, sir. You are not answering my question. Is it the desire for security, biological as well as psychological security? S: You could say yes. K: If I belong to something, to some organization, to some group, to some sect, to some ideological community, I am safe there. B: That is not clear: you may feel safe. K: I feel safe then. But it may not be safety. B: Yes, but why don't I see that I am not really safe? K: Because I am so - what? Go into it. S: I don't see it. K: Just look: I join a community. S: Right. I am a doctor. K: Yes, you are a doctor. S: I get all these ideas. K: You are a doctor, you have a special position in society. S: Right. I have a lot of ideas of how things work. K: You are in a special position in society and there you are completely safe. S: Right. K: You can malpractice and all the rest of it, but you are very protected by other doctors, the other organizations, a group of doctors. You follow? S: Right. K: You feel secure. B: It is essential that I shouldn't enquire too far to feel secure, isn't it? In other words, I must stop my enquiry at a certain point. K: I am a doctor - finished. B: I don't ask many questions but if I start to ask questions... K: ...Then you are out! B: If I say, don't ask questions, that's all right. K: If I begin to ask questions about my community and my relation to that community, my relationship to the world, my relation to my neighbour, I am finished. I am out of the community. I am lost. S: That's right. K: So to feel safe, secure, protected, I belong. S: I depend. K: Depend. B: I depend wholly in one sense that if I don't have that then I feel the whole thing is sunk. S: This is good. You see not only do I depend but every problem that I now have is with reference to this dependency. I don't know from nothing about the patient, I only know about how the patient doesn't fit into my system. K: Quite, quite. S: So that is my conflict. K: He is your victim. S: That's right, my victim. B: It is still not clear why I should go on with it. You see in other words as long as I don't ask questions I can feel comfortable. But I feel uncomfortable when I do ask questions, very deeply uncomfortable. Because the whole of my situation is challenged. But then if I look at it more broadly I see the whole thing has no foundation, it is all dangerous. In other words this community itself is in a mess, it may collapse. Even if the whole of it doesn't collapse, you can't count on the academic profession anymore, they may not give money for universities. Everything is changing so fast that you don't know where you are. So why should I go on with not asking questions? K: Why don't I ask questions? Because of fear. B: Yes, but that fear is from fragmentations. K: Of course. So is it the beginning of this fragmentation takes place when one is seeking security? S: But why? K: Both biologically and as well as psychologically. Primarily psychologically, then biologically. S: Right. K: Physically. B: But isn't the tendency to seek security physically built into the organism? K: Yes, that's right. It is. I must have food, clothes, shelter. It is absolutely necessary. S: Right. K: And when that is threatened - if I questioned the communist system altogether, living in Russia, I am a non-person. S: But let's go a little bit slower here. You are suggesting there that in my need for security biologically I must have some fragmentation. K: No, sir. Biologically fragmentation takes place, the insecurity takes place when psychologically I want security. S: OK. K: I don't know if I am making myself clear. Wait a minute. That is: if I don't psychologically belong to a group, then I am out of that group. S: Then I am insecure. K: I am insecure. S: Right. K: And because the group gives me security, physical security, I accept everything they give me, say to me. S: Right. K: But the moment I object psychologically to the structure of the society or the community I am lost. S: Right. K: This is an obvious fact. S: Right. B: Yes. S: Were you suggesting then that the basic insecurity that we live in is being conditioned, the response, the answer to this is a conditioned fragmentation? K: Partly. S: And that the movement of fragmentation is the conditioning. K: Sir, look, look: if there was no fragmentation, both historically, geographically, nationally, no nations, we would live perfectly safely. We would all be protected, you would all have food - you follow - all have houses. There would be no wars, you'd be all one. He is my brother; I am him, he is me. But this fragmentation prevents that taking place. S: Right. So you are even suggesting something more there -you are suggesting that we would help each other. K: I would help, obviously. B: We are going around in a circle still. K: Yes, sir. I want to get back to something, which is: if there were no nationalities, no ideological groups, and so on and so on, we would have everything we want, instead of depending on armaments and all the rest of it, all that. That is prevented because I am a Hindu, you are an Arab, he is a Russian. You follow? All that is prevented. We are asking: why does this fragmentation take place? What is the source of it? Is it knowledge? Yes, sir. S: It is knowledge, you say. K: Is it knowledge; I am sure it is, but I am putting it as a question. S: It certainly seems to be. K: No, no. Look into it. Let's find out. S: What do you mean by knowledge, what are you talking about there? K: The word to know: do I know you? Or I have known you? I can never say, I know you - actually. It would be an abomination to say, 'I know you'. I have known you. Because you in the meantime are changing, you have all your - you follow - there is a great deal of movement going on in you. S: Right. K: To say, I know you, means I am acquainted or intimate with that movement which is going on in you. It would be impudence on my part to say, I know you. S: That's right. Because not only that, it would be denying your effect on me which is causing a change from knowing you, and so being with you. K: So knowing, to know is the past. Would you say that? B: Yes, I mean what we know is the past. K: Knowledge is the past. B: I mean the danger is that we call it the present. The danger is that we call knowledge the present. K: That is just it. B: In other words if we said the past is the past, then wouldn't you say it needn't fragment? K: What is that sir? B: If we said, if we recognized, acknowledge that the past is the past, it is gone, therefore what we know is the past, then that would not introduce fragmentation. K: No, it wouldn't, quite right. B: But if we say what we know is what is present now, then we are introducing fragmentation. K: Quite right, quite. B: Because we are imposing this partial knowledge on the whole. K: Sir, would you say knowledge is one of the factors of fragmentation? Sir, that is saying an awful - you follow? It is a large pill to swallow! B: And also there are plenty of other factors. K: Yes. And that may be the only factor. B: But I think we should look at it this way: that people hope through knowledge to overcome fragmentation. K: Of course. B: To produce a system of knowledge that will put it all together. K: Like in Bronowsky's Ascent of Man through knowledge, emphasizing knowledge. Is that not one of the major factors, or perhaps the factor of fragmentation? My experience tells me, I am a Hindu: my experience tells me I know what god is. B: Wouldn't it be better to say that confusion about the whole of knowledge is because of fragmentation? In other words knowledge itself. You say, knowledge is always the cause. K: No, I said, we began by asking... B: That's my question. K: Of course, of course. Sir, that is what we said yesterday in our talk; art is putting things in its right place. So I will put knowledge in its right place. B: Yes, so we are not confused about it. K: Of course. S: You know I was just going to bring in this rather interesting example of a patient of mine who was teaching me something the other day. She said, I have the feeling that as a doctor the way you operate is, she said, there is a group of doctors who have seen certain kinds of patients, and if they do 'X' to them they will get a certain kind of effect. You are not talking to me, you are doing this to me hoping you will get this result. (Laughter) K: Quite. S: That is what you are saying. K: No, a little more, sir, than that. We are saying both Dr Bohm and I, we are saying, knowledge has its place. S: Let's go into that. K: Like driving a car, learning a language and so on. B: One could say: why is that not fragmentation? We have to make it clear. In other words if we drive a car using knowledge that is not fragmentation. K: No, but when knowledge is used psychologically... B: One should see more clearly what the difference is. The car itself, as I see it, is a part, a limited part and therefore it can be handled by knowledge. S: It is a limited part of life. B: Of life, yes. When we say I am so and so, I mean the whole of me. And therefore I am applying the part to the whole. I am trying to cover the whole by the part. K: When knowledge assumes it understands the whole... B: Yes. S: Yes. K: ...then begins the mischief. B: But it is often very tricky because I am not explicitly spelling out that I understand the whole, but it is implicit by saying I, or everything is this way, or I am this way. K: Quite, quite. B: It implies that the whole is this way, you see. The whole of me, the whole of life, the whole of the world. S: Krishnaji was saying, I mean like, "I know you", that is how we deal with ourselves. We say, I know this and that about me, rather than being open to the new. Or even being aware of the fragmentation. B: If I am saying about you then I shouldn't say I know all because you are not a limited part like a machine is. You see the machine is fairly limited and we can know all that is relevant about it, or most of it anyway. Sometimes it breaks down. K: Quite, quite. B: But when it comes to another person that is immensely beyond what you could really know. The past experience doesn't tell you the essence. K: Are you saying, Dr Bohm, that when knowledge spills over into the psychological field... B: Well, also in another field which I call the whole in general. You see sometimes it spills over into the philosophical field and man tries to make it metaphysical, the whole universe. K: That is of course. I mean that is purely theoretical and that has no meaning to me personally. B: But I mean that is one of the ways in which it does that, you see. It goes wrong. Some people feel that when they are discussing metaphysics of the whole universe that is not psychological, it probably is but the motives behind it are psychological but some people may feel that they are making a theory of the universe, not discussing psychology. I think it is a matter of getting the language. K: Language, quite. S: Well, you see this, what you are saying, can be extended to the way people are. They have a metaphysics about other people: I know all other people are not to be trusted. K: Of course. B: You have a metaphysics about yourself saying, I am such and such a person. S: Right. I have a metaphysics that life is hopeless and I must depend on these things. K: No, all that you can say is that we are fragmented. That is a fact. And I am aware of those fragmentations, fragmented mind, there is an awareness of the fragmented mind because of conflict. S: That's right. B: You were saying before that we have got to have an approach where we are not aware just because of that. K: Yes. That's right. B: Are we coming to that? K: Coming, yes. So from there conflict: I said, what is the source of this conflict. The source is fragmentation, obviously. What brings about fragmentation? What is the cause of it, behind it? We said, perhaps knowledge. S: Knowledge. K: Knowledge: psychologically I use knowledge, I know myself, when I really don't know, because I am changing, moving. Or I use knowledge for my own satisfaction. For my position, for my success, for becoming a great man in the world. I am a great scholar. I have read a million books and I can tell you all about it. It gives me the position, a prestige, a status. So is that it: that fragmentation takes place when there is a desire for security, psychological security, which prevents biological security? S: Right. K: You say, right. And therefore security may be one of the factors: security in knowledge used wrongly. B: Or could you say that some sort of mistake has been made, that man feels insecure biologically, and he thinks what shall I do, and he makes a mistake in the sense that he tries to obtain a psychological sense of security by knowledge? K: By knowledge, yes. S: By knowing, yes. By repeating himself, by depending on all of these structures. K: One feels secure in having an ideal. S: Right. That is so true. B: But somewhere one asks why a person makes this mistake. You see in other words if thought, if the mind had been absolutely clear, let's say, it would never have done that. S: If the mind had been absolutely clear but we have just said that there is biological insecurity. That is a fact. B: But that doesn't imply that you have to delude yourself. K: Quite right. S: But that implies that the organism - no, that's right. But it implies that that has to be met. B: Yes, but the delusion doesn't meet it. S: Right. That's the nub of the issue. K: Go on further. S: I mean there's that biological fact of my constant uncertainty. The biological fact of constant change. K: That is created through psychological fragmentation. S: My biological uncertainty? K: Of course. I may lose my job, I may have no money tomorrow. B: Now let's look at that. I may have no money tomorrow. You see that may be an actual fact, but now the question is, what happens. You see what would you say if the man were clear, what would be his response? K: You would never be put in that position. S: He wouldn't ask that question. B: But suppose he finds himself without money, you see. K: He would do something. B: His mind won't just go to pieces. S: He won't have to have all the money he thinks he has to have. B: Besides that he won't go into this well of confusion. K: No, absolutely. S: I mean the problem 99% of the time, I certainly agree, is that we all think we need more than this ideal of what we should have. K: No, sir. We are trying to stick to one point: what is the cause of this fragmentation? S: Right. K: We said knowledge spilling over into the field where it should not enter. B: But why does it do so, you see. K: Why does it do it? That is fairly simple. B: Why? K: It is fairly simple. S: My sense of it is from what we have been saying is, it does it in a delusion of security. It thinks, thought creates the illusion that there is security there. B: Yes, but why doesn't intelligence show that there is no security, you see? S: Why doesn't intelligence show it? B: Yes, in other words... K: Can a fragmented mind be intelligent? S: No. B: Well, it resists intelligence. K: It can pretend to be intelligent. B: Yes. But are you saying that once the mind fragments then intelligence is gone? K: Yes. B: But now that... S: Yes. B: But now you are creating a serious problem, because you are also saying that there can be an end to fragmentation. K: That's right. B: You see at first sight that would seem to be a contradiction. Is that clear? K: It looks like that, but it is not. S: All I know is fragmentation. K: Therefore? S: That is what I have got. K: Let's stick to it and see if it can end. Go through it. S: Yes. B: But if you say the fragmented mind cannot, intelligence cannot operate there. S: I feel like one answer to your question is that, you know we talked about it in terms of conditioning. I feel like I am a victim, or I am caught by this offering. You offer me, you tell me, look old boy, I think this can help you, here is a fragment, come along. And I feel like thought does that, you know, "Come" my mother or my father says, "Look, it is good to be a doctor", or it is good to do this. K: Is psychological security more important than biological security? S: That is an interesting question. K: Go on. We have got five minutes. S: One thing we have condensed... K: No, I am asking. Don't move away from the question. I am asking, is psychological security much more important than biological security, physical security, biological security? S: It isn't but it sounds like it is. K: No, don't move away from it. I am asking. Stick to it. To you? B: What is the fact? K: What is the fact. S: I would say yes, psychological security seems... K: Not seems. B: What is actually true. S: Actually true, no. Biological security is more important. K: Biological? Are you sure? S: No. I think psychological security is what I actually worry about most. K: Psychological security. S: That is what I worry about most. K: Which prevents biological security. S: Right. I forget about the other. K: No, no. Because I am seeking psychological security, in ideas, in knowledge, in pictures, in images, in conclusions, and all the rest of it, which prevents me from having biological, physical security for me, for my son, for my children, for my brothers. I can't have it. Because psychological security says I am a Hindu, a blasted little somebody in a little corner. S: No question. I do feel that psychological... K: So can we be free of the desire to be psychologically secure? S: That's right. That is the question. K: Of course it is. S: That's the nub of it, right. K: And last night I was listening to some people - the chairman, or whatever it was - and they were all talking about Ireland, and various things. Each man was completely convinced, you know. S: That's right. I sit in on meetings every week. Each man thinks his territory is the most important. K: So we have given - man has given - more importance to psychological security than to biological, physical security. B: But it is not clear why he should delude himself in this way. K: That is, he has deluded himself because - why, why? Look, there is the answer. Why? We have got two minutes more. We will have to stop. S: Images, power. K: No, sir, they are much deeper. Why has he given importance? S: He - we, not he, we seem to think that is where security is. K: No. Look more into it. The 'me' is the most important thing. S: Right. That is the same thing. K: No, me: my position, my happiness, my money, my house, my wife - me. B: Me. Yes. And isn't it that each person feels he is the essence of the whole. The 'me' is the very essence of the whole. I would feel that if the 'me' were gone the rest wouldn't mean anything. K: That is the whole point. The 'me' gives me complete security, psychologically. B: But it seems all important. K: Of course. S: All important. B: Yes, because people say, if I am sad then the whole world has no meaning. Right? S: It is not only that. I am sad if the 'me' is not important. K: No. We are saying the 'me' - in the 'me' is the greatest security. S: Right. That is what we think. K: No, not we think. It is so. B: What do you mean, it is so? K: In the world what is happening. B: That is what is happening. But it is a delusion. K: We will come to that later. S: I think that is a good point. That it is so that the 'me' - I like that way of getting at it - the 'me' is what is important. That is all it is. K: Psychologically. S: Psychologically. K: Me, my country, me, my god, my house, and so on. S: It is very important to let that in, you know. K: So it is twelve o'clock, we had better stop. S: We have got your point. 2ND CONVERSATION WITH DR BOHM & DR SHAINBERG BROCKWOOD PARK 18TH MAY 1976 'TRANSFORMATION OF MAN' Krishnamurti: Do we go on where we left off yesterday? Or would you like to start something new? Dr Bohm: I felt there was a point that wasn't entirely clear that we were discussing yesterday. Which is that we rather accepted that security, psychological security was wrong, was, you know, illusion; but in general I don't thank we made it very clear why we think it is a delusion. You see most people feel that psychological security is a real thing and quite necessary and when it is disturbed, or when a person is frightened, or sorrowful, or even so disturbed that he might be psychologically disturbed and require treatment, he feels that psychological security is necessary before he can even begin to do anything. K: Yes, right. B: And I think that it isn't at all clear why one should say that it is not really as important as physical security. K: Yes. No, I think we have made it fairly clear, but let's go into it. B: Yes. K: Is there really psychological security at all? B: I don't think we discussed that fully last time. K: Of course. Nobody accepts that. But we are enquiring into it, going into the problem of it. Dr Shainberg: But we said something even deeper I think yesterday. And that is that - at least as I was summarising for myself - and that is that we felt - correct me if you think I am wrong here - that conditioning sets the stage that is the importance of psychological security, and that in turn creates insecurity. And it is the conditioning that creates the psychological security as a focus? Would you agree that? K: I think that we two mean something different. S: What do you mean? K: First of all, sir, we take it for granted that there is psychological security. S: OK. Well, we think that we can get it. K: We feel that there is. S: Right. That's right. B: Yes, I think that if you told somebody who was feeling very disturbed mentally that there is no psychological security he would just feel worse. K: Collapse. Of course. S: Right. K: We are talking of fairly sane, rational people. S: OK. K: We are questioning whether there is any psychological security at all; permanency, stability, a sense of well-founded, deep-rooted existence psychologically. S: Maybe if we could say more then, what would be psychological security? K: After all I believe. I believe in something. S: And that gives me... K: It may be the most foolish belief... S: Right. K: ...a neurotic belief. I believe in it. S: Right. K: And then that gives you a tremendous sense of existence, living, vitality, and stability. B: I think you could think of two examples: one is that if I could really believe that after dying I would go to heaven, and be quite sure of it, then I could be very secure anywhere, not matter what happens. S: That would make you feel good. B: Well, I'd say, I don't really have to worry, because it is all a temporary trouble and then I am pretty sure that in time it is all going to be very good. Do you see? K: Right. That is the whole Asiatic attitude, more or less. S: Right. B: Or if I think I am a Communist, then I say, in time Communism is going to solve everything and we are going through a lot of troubles now but you know it is all going to be worthwhile and it will work out, and in the end it will be all right. S: Right. B: If I could be sure of that then I would say I feel very secure inside, even if conditions are hard. S: OK. All right. K: So we are questioning, though one has these strong beliefs which gives them a sense of security, permanency, whether there is such in reality, actuality... S: It is not possible. K: Wait! S: The question is: is it possible? K: Is it possible. S: Right. K: I may believe in god and that gives me a tremendous sense of... S: Right. K: ...impermanency of this world, but at least there is permanency somewhere else. S: Yes, yes. But I want to ask David something. Do you think that, for instance take a scientist, a guy who is going to his laboratory everyday, or take a doctor, he is getting security. He takes security from the very 'routinization' of his life. K: His knowledge. S: Yes, from his knowledge if he keeps doing this, In the scientist, where does he get security? B: Well, he makes belief he is learning the permanent laws of Nature, really getting something that means something. S: Yes. B: And also getting a position in society and being sure, being well known and respected and financially secure. S: He believes that these things will give him the thing. The mother believes that the child will give her security. K: Don't you psychologically have security? S: Yes, OK. Right. I get a security out of my knowledge, out of my routine, out of my patients, out of seeing my patients, out of my position. B: But there is conflict in that because if I think it over a little bit, I doubt it, I question it. I say, it doesn't look all that secure, anything may happen. I mean I say there may be a war, there may be a depression, there may be a flood. S: Right. K: There may be sane people all of a sudden in the world! (Laughter) S: Do you think there is a chance? B: So I say there is conflict and confusion in my security because I am not sure about it. S: You are not sure about it. B: But if I had an absolute belief in god and heaven. K: This is so obvious! S: It is obvious. I agree with you it is obvious, but I think it has to be - in other words, it has to be really felt through. K: But, sir, you, Dr Shainberg, you are the victim. S: I'll be the victim. K: For the moment. Don't you have strong belief? S: Right. Well, I wouldn't say strong. K: Don't you have a sense of permanency somewhere inside you? S: I think I do. K: Psychologically? S: Yes, I do. I mean I have a sense of permanency about my intention. K: Intention? S: I mean my work. K: Your knowledge. S: My knowledge, my... K: ...status. S: ...my status, the continuity of my interest. You know what I mean. K: Yes. S: There is a sense of security in the feeling that I can help someone. K: Yes. S: And I can do my work. OK. K: That gives you security, psychological security. S: There is something about it that is secure. What am I saying when I say 'security'? I am saying that I won't be lonely. K: No, no. Feeling secure that you have something that is impenetrable. S: Which means - no, I don't feel it that way. I feel it more in the sense of what is going to happen in time, am I going to have to depend, what is my time going to be, am I going to be lonely, is it going to be empty? K: No, sir. S: Isn't that security? K: As Dr Bohm pointed out, if one has a strong belief in reincarnation, as the whole Asiatic world has, then it doesn't matter what happens, then in the next life you have a better chance. You might be miserable this life but next life you will be happier. So that gives you a great sense of "this is unimportant, but that is important". S: Right, right. K: And that gives me a sense of great comfort, great - as though this is a transient world anyhow and eventually I will get there, to something permanent. This is human... S: This is in the Asiatic world; but I think in the western world you don't have that. K: Oh, yes you have it. S: With a different focus. K: Of course. B: It is different but we have always had the search for security. S: Right, right. But what do you think security is? I mean for instance if you became a scientist, you went to the laboratory, you picked up the books all the time. Right? You may not go to the laboratory, but you have had your own laboratory. What the hell do you call security? K: Security. S: Yes, but what does he call his security? K: Having something... S: Knowledge? K: ...to which you can cling to and which is not perishable. It may perish eventually but at the time, for the time being it is there to hold on to. B: You can feel that it is permanent. Like somebody in the past, people used to accumulate gold because gold is the symbol of the imperishable. S: We still have people who accumulate gold - we have business men, they have got money. B: You feel it is really there. K: There. B: It will never corrode, it will never vanish and you can count on it, you know. S: So it is something that I can count on. K: Count on, hold on to, cling to, be attached to. S: The 'me'. K: Exactly. S: I know that I am a doctor. I can depend on that. K: Knowledge, experience. S: Experience. K: On the other hand, tradition. S: Tradition. I know that if I do this with a patient that I will get this result. I might not get any good results but I'll get this result. K: So I think that is fairly clear. B: Yes it is clear enough that we have that, it is part of our society. K: Part of our conditioning. B: Conditioning, that we want something secure and permanent. At least we think we do. S: I think you see that Krishnaji's point about the Eastern world, there is I think a feeling in the West of wanting immortality. K: That's the same. S: Same thing. B: Wouldn't you say that in so far as thought can project time, that it wants to be able to project everything all right in the future as far as possible. S: That is what I meant when I said loneliness: if I don't have to have my loneliness... B: In other words the anticipation of what is coming is already the present feeling. You see if you can anticipate that something bad may come, you already feel bad. K: That's right. B: Therefore you would like to get rid of that. S: So you anticipate that it won't happen. B: That it will all be good. S: Right. B: I would say that security would be the anticipation that everything will be good in the future. K: Good. S: It will continue. B: It will become better, if it is not so good now it will become better with certainty. S: So then security is becoming. K: Yes, becoming, perfecting, becoming. S: I was thinking what you were saying the other day about the Brahmin. Anybody can become a Brahmin, then that gives him security. K: That is, a projected belief, a projected idea, a comforting satisfying concept. S: Right. You see I see patients all the time. Their projected belief is I will become - I will find somebody to love me. I see patients who say, "I will become the chief of the department", "I will become the most famous doctor", "I will become..." and his whole life goes like that. Because it is also focussed on being the best tennis player, the best. K: Of course, of course. B: Well it seems it is all focussed on anticipating that life is going to be good, when you say that. K: Yes, life is going to be good. B: But it seems to me you wouldn't raise the question unless you had a lot of experience that life is not so good, I mean. In other words, it is a reaction to having had to much experience of disappointment, of suffering. K: Would you say that we are not conscious of the whole movement of thought? B: No, but I mean think to most people they would say that is only very natural, I have had a lot of experience of suffering and disappointment and danger, and that is unpleasant and I would like to be able to anticipate that everything is going to be good. S: Yes. K: Yes. B: At first sight it would seem that that is really quite natural. But you are saying it is not now, there is something wrong with it. K: We are saying there is no such thing as psychological security. We have defined what we mean by security. S: Yes. K: We don't have to beat it over and over. S: No, I think we have got that. B: Yes, but is it clear now that these hopes are really vain hopes, that should be obvious, shouldn't it? S: That is a good question. You mean is it - you see, Krishnaji he is raising a good question, it is this whole business of you saying, is it meaningful to look for security. Is there such a thing? K: Sir, there is death at the end of everything. B: Yes. K: You want to be secure for the next ten years, that is all, or fifty years. Afterwards doesn't matter. Or it does matter then you believe in something. That there is god, you will sit next to god on his right hand, or whatever it is you believe. So I am trying to find out, not only that there is no permanency psychologically, which means no tomorrow psychologically. B: That hasn't yet come out. K: Of course, of course. B: We can say empirically that we know these hopes for security are false because first of all you say there is death, secondly you can't count on anything, no matter, materially everything changes. K: Everything is in flux. B: Mentally everything in your head is changing all the time. You can't count on your feelings, you can't count on enjoying a certain thing that you enjoy now, or you can't count on being healthy, you can't count on money. K: You can't rely on your wife, you can rely on nothing. S: Right. B: So that is a fact. But I am saying that you are suggesting something deeper. K: Yes, sir. B: But we don't base ourselves only on that observation. K: That is very superficial. S: Yes, I am with you there. K: So is there then, if there is no real security, basic deep, then is there a tomorrow, psychologically? And then you take away all hope. If there is no tomorrow you take away all hope. B: What you mean by tomorrow, is the tomorrow in which things will get better, I mean. K: Better, greater success, greater understanding, greater... B: More love. K: ...more love, you know the whole business. S: I think that is a little quick. I think that there is a jump there because as I hear you, I hear you saying there is no security. K: But it is so. S: It is so. But for me to say, to really say, "Look, I know there is no security". K: Why don't you say that? S: That is what I am getting at. Why don't I say that? B: Well, isn't it a fact, isn't it first of all a fact that, just an observed fact, that there isn't anything you can count on psychologically? S: Right. But you see I think there is an action there. Krishnaji is saying, why don't you. B: Why don't you what? S: Why don't you say there is no security? Why don't I? K: Can I? Do you rationalize what we are saying about security? As an idea? Or actually so? S: I actually say so, but I say, I'll keep doing it, I'll keep doing it. K: No. We are asking, do you when you hear there is no security, is it an abstracted idea? Or an actual fact, like that table, like your hand there, or those flowers? S: I think it mostly becomes an idea. K: That is just it. B: Why should it become an idea? K: That is it. S: That I think is the question. Why does it become an idea? K: Is it part of your training? S: Part, yes. Part of my conditioning. K: Part of a real objection to see things as they are. S: That's right. Because it moves. It feels like it moves there. Do you feel that? B: It seems that if you see that there is no security, then it seems first of all let us try to put it that there is something which seems to be there which is trying to protect itself, namely let us say that it seems to be a fact that the self is there. Do you see what I am driving at? K: Of course. B: And if the self is there it requires security and therefore this creates a resistance to accepting that as a fact and puts it as an idea only. If you see what I mean. It seems that the factuality of the self being there has not been denied. The apparent factuality. S: Right. But hasn't it? Why do you think it hasn't been? What happens? K: Is it that you refuse to see things as they are? Is it that one refuses to see that one is stupid? - Not you, I mean one is stupid. To acknowledge that one is stupid is already - you follow? S: Yes. It is like you say to me you refuse to acknowledge that you are stupid - let us say it is me - that means then I have got to do something, it feels like. K: No. S: Something happens to me. K: Not yet. Action comes through perception, not through ideation. S: I am glad you are getting into this. B: Doesn't it seem that as long as there is the sense of self, the self must say that it is perfect, and so on. Do you see? K: Of course, of course. S: What do you think it is? What makes it so hard to say? Is this what you mean when you talk about the destruction in creation? In other words, is there something here about the destruction that I am not. K: You must destroy that. S: I must destroy that. Now what makes it hard for me to destroy? I mean destroy this need for security, why can't I do it? K: No, no. It is not how you can do it. You see you are already entering into the realm of action. S: That I think is the crucial point. K; But I am not. I say first see it. And from that perception action is inevitable. S: Yes. All right. Now to see insecurity. Do you see insecurity? Do you actually see it? K: What? S: Insecurity. K: No, no, no. Do you actually see... S: ...there is no security. K: No. That you are clinging to something, belief and all the rest of it, which gives you security. S: OK. K: I cling to this house. I am safe. It gives me a sense of my house, my father, it gives me pride, it gives me a sense of possession, it gives me a sense of physical and therefore psychological security. S: Right, and a place to go. K: A place to go. But I may walk out and be killed and I have lost everything. There might be an earthquake and everything gone. Do you actually see it? S: I actually... K: Sir, go to a poor man. He says, of course I have no security, but he wants it. His security is, give me a good job, beer, and constant work and a house, and a good wife and children; that's my security. S: Right. K: When there is a strike, he feels lost. But he has got the Union behind him. S: Right. But he thinks he is secure. K: Secure. And that movement of security enters into the psychological field. My wife, I believe in god, I don't believe in god. If I am a good communist I will have a good paper. The whole thing. Do you see it? You see, the seeing, or the perception of that is total action with regard to security. S: I can see that that is the total action. K: No, that is an idea still. S: Yes, you're right. I begin to see that this belief, this whole structure begins to be the whole way that I see everything in the world. Right? I begin to see her, the wife, or I begin to see these people, they fit into that structure. K: You see them, your wife, through the image you have about them. S: Right. And to the function they are serving. B: Their relation to me, yes. K: Yes. S: That is right. That's the function they serve. K: The picture, the image, the conclusion is the security. S: That's right. B: Yes, but you see why does it present itself as so real? You see I see that there is a thought, a process which is driving on, continually. K: Are you asking why has this image, this conclusion, this all the rest of it, becomes so fantastically real? B: Yes. It seems to be standing there real, and everything is referred to it. K: More real than the marbles, than the hills. B: Than anything, yes. S: More real than anything. K: Why? S: I think it is hard to say why, except it would give me security. K: No. We are much further than that. B: Because, suppose abstractly and ideally you can see the whole thing as no security at all, I mean, just looking at it professionally and abstractly. S: That is putting the cart before the horse. B: No, I am just saying that if it were some simple matter, giving that much proof you would have already accepted it, you see. S: Right. B: But when it comes to this, no proof seems to work. S: Right. Nothing seems to work. B: You say all that but here I am presented with the solid reality of myself and my security, which seems to deny - there is a sort of reaction which seems to say, well, that may be possible but it really is only words. The real thing is me. Do you see? S: But there is more than that. Why it has such potency. I mean why it seems to take on such importance. B: Well may be. But I am saying it seems that the real thing is me, which is all important. S: There is no question about it. Me, me, me, is important. K: Which is an idea. B: But it doesn't... we can say abstractly it is just an idea. The question is, how do you break into this process? K: No. I think we can break into it, or break through it, or get beyond it, only through perception. B: Yes. S: Yes. B: Yes, because otherwise every thought is involved in that therefore... S: Because I am going to get through it because it will make me feel good, better. B: The trouble is that all that we have been talking about is in the form of ideas. They may be correct ideas but they won't break into this. S: Right. B: Because this dominates the whole of thought. S: That is right. I mean you could even ask why are we here. We are here because we want to... K: No, sir. Look: if I feel my security lies in some image I have, a picture, a symbol, a conclusion, an ideal and so on, I would put it not as an abstraction but bring it down. You see it is so. I believe in something. Actually. Now I say, why do I believe. B: Well, have you actually done that? K: No, I haven't because I have no beliefs. I have no picture, I don't go in for all those kind of games. I said, if. S: If, right. K: Then I would bring the abstracted thing into a perceptive reality. S: To see my belief, is that it? K: See it. S: To see my belief. Right. To see that me in operation. K: Yes, if you like to put it that way. Sir, wait a minute. Take a simple thing: have you a conclusion about something? Conclusion, a concept? S: Yes. K: Eh? S: Yes, I think I do. K: Now wait a bit. How is that brought about? S: Well, through... K: Take a simple thing, not complicated, take a simple thing. A concept that I am an Englishman. B: The trouble is that we probably don't feel attached to those concepts. K: All right. S: Let's take one that is real for me: take the one about me being a doctor. K: A concept. S: That is a concept. That is a conclusion based on training, based on experience, based on the enjoyment of the work. K: Which means what? A doctor means, the conclusion, means he is capable of certain activities. S: Right, OK. Let's take it, concretely. K: Work at it. S: So now I have got the fact that there is a concrete fact that I have had this training, that I get this pleasure from the work, I get a kind of feed back, I get a whole community of feed in. K: Yes, sir. S: Books I've written, papers, positions. K: Move. S: All right. All that. Now that is my belief. That belief that I am a doctor is based on all that, that concept. K: Yes. S: OK. Now I continually act to continue that. K: Yes, sir, that is understood. S: OK. K: Therefore you have a conclusion. S: A conclusion. K: You have a concept that you are a doctor. S: Right. K: Because it is based on knowledge, experience, everyday activity. S: Right. K: Pleasure and all the rest of it. S: Right. K: So what is real in that? What is true in that? Real meaning actual, actual. S: Well, that is a good question. What is actual? K: Wait! What is actual in that? Your training. S: Right. K: Your knowledge. S: Right. K: Your daily operation. S: Right. K: That's all. The rest is a conclusion. B: But what is the rest? K: The rest: I am very much better than somebody else. B: Or else this thing is going to keep me occupied in a good way. K: A good way. I will never be lonely. S: Right. I know what is going to facts because I have this knowledge. K: Yes. So? B: Well, that is part of it. K: Of course, much more. S: Yes, go ahead. I want to hear what you have to say. B: But isn't there also a certain fear that if I don't have this then things will be pretty bad? K: Of course. S: Right. OK. B: And that fear seems to spur on... K: Of course. And if the patients don't turn up? B: Then I have no money; fear. K: Fear. S: No activity. K: So loneliness. Back. S: Back again. Right. K: So be occupied. S: Be occupied doing this, completing this concept. OK. K: Be occupied. S: Right. K: Now: S: It is very important. Do you realize how important that is to all people, to be occupied? K: Of course, sir. S: Do you get the meat of that? K: Of course. S: How important it is to people to be occupied. I can see them running around. K: Sir, a housewife is occupied. Remove that occupation, she says, please... B: ...what shall I do? S: We know that as a fact. Since we put electrical equipment into the houses the women are going crazy, they have nothing to do with their time. K: But, no. The result of this, neglect of their children. Don't talk to me about it. S: Right. OK. Let's go on. Now we have got this fact, occupied. K: Occupied. Now is this occupation an abstraction, or actuality? S: Now this is an actuality. K: Which? S: Actuality. I am actually occupied. K: No. B: What is it? K: You are actually occupied? S: Yes. K: Daily. S: Daily. B: Well, what do you really mean by occupied? Do you see. S: What do you mean? B: Well, I can say I am actually doing all the operations. That is clear. I mean I am seeing patients as the doctor. S: You are going to do your thing. B: I am doing my thing, getting my reward and so on. And occupied it seems to me has a psychological meaning, further than that, that my mind is in that thing in a relatively harmonious way. There was something I saw on television once of a woman who was highly disturbed, it showed on the graph, but when you was occupied doing her mathematics, the graph went beautifully smooth. She stopped doing the sums and it went all over the place. Do you, therefore, she had to keep on doing something to keep the brain working right. K: Which means what? S: Go ahead. B: Well, what does it mean? K: A mechanical process. S: That's right. B: It seems the brain starts jumping all over the place unless it has this thing. K: A constant... B: ...content. K: So you have reduced yourself to a machine. S: Don't say it! (Laughter) No, it's not fair. But it is true. I have, I mean, I feel there is a mechanical... K: Responses. S: Oh yes, commitment. K: Of course. B: But why does the brain begin to go so wild when it is not occupied? S: That's right. B: The brain begins to jump around wildly when it is not occupied, you see. That seems to be a common experience. K: Because in occupation there is security. B: There is order. K: Order. S: In occupation there is a kind of mechanical order. K: Mechanical order. B: Right. So we feel our security really means we want order. Is that right? K: That's it. B: We want order inside the brain. S: That's right. B: We want to be able to project order into the future, for ever. S: That's right. But would you say that you can get it by mechanical order? B: Then we get dissatisfied with it, you see, you say, "I am getting sick, bored with it, I am sick of this mechanical life, I want something more interesting". K: That is where the gurus come in! (Laughter) B: Then the thing goes wild again. Do you see the mechanical order won't satisfy it because it works for a little while. S: I don't like the way something is slipping in there. You say that we are going like from one thing to another. I am looking for satisfaction and then I am not satisfied. B: I am looking for some regular order which is good, do you see. And I think that by my job as a doctor I am getting it. S: Yes. B: But after a while I begin to feel it is too repetitious, do you see. I am getting bored. S: OK. But suppose that doesn't happen. Suppose some people become satisfied with their job? B: Well, they don't really. I mean then they become dull, you see. K: Quite. Mechanical; so mechanical: and you stop that mechanism, the brain goes wild. S: That's right. B: Right. So they feel they are a bit dull and they would like some entertainment, or something more interesting and exciting. And therefore there is a contradiction, there is conflict and confusion in the whole thing. Well, take this woman who could always get everything right by doing arithmetical sums, but we can't keep on doing arithmetical sums! (Laughter) I mean somewhere she has got to stop doing these arithmetical sums. S: Right. B: Then her brain will go wild again. K: Sir, he is asking what is disturbing him. He feels he hasn't put his teeth into it. What is disturbing him? S: You are right. K: What is disturbing you? S: Well, it is this feeling that you see people will say that... K: No, you say, you. S: I will say, let's say I can get this order, I can get this mechanical order, and I can't. K: Yes, you can. S: From occupying myself in something I like. K: Go on. Proceed. S: I can do it. I mean I can do it, I can do something I like and it gets boring, let's say, or it might get repetitious, but then I will find new parts of it. And then I'll do that some more because that gives me a pleasure, you see. I mean I get a satisfaction out of it. B: Right. S: So I keep doing more of that. It is like an accumulative process. K: No, you move from one mechanical process... S: Right, right. K: ...get bored with it, and move to another mechanical process... S: That's right. K: ...get bored with it and keep going. S: That's right. That's it. K: And you call that living. S: That is what I call living. B: I see that the trouble in it, even if I accept all that, the trouble is that I now try to be sure that I can keep on doing this, because I can always anticipate a future when I won't be able to do it. You see? I will be a bit too old for the job, or else I'll fail. I'll lose the job, or something. In other words, I still have insecurity in that order. K: Essentially, essentially it is mechanical disorder. S: Masking itself as order. K: Order. Now, wait a minute. Do you see this? Or is it still an abstraction? Because you know as Dr Bohm will tell you, idea means observation, the original meaning, the root meaning, observation. Do you observe this? S: I see that, yes. I feel that, I think. I see what I see actually is I see this, a movement that goes on doing this, and then question, very much like Piaget's (?) theory. Right? In other words, there is assimilation, an accommodation and then there is seeing what doesn't fit and going on with it. And then there is more assimilation, and accommodation, and then going on with it. The psychologist, Piaget (?), the French psychologist, describes this as the enormity of human brains. K: Yes, yes. S: You know this. K: I don't have to read Piaget, I can observe it. B: Right. Then the point is, are you driven to this because you are frightened of the instability of the brain. Do you see? That would mean being occupied with this. And it seems then that is disorder. If you are doing something because you are trying to run away from instability of the brain, that is already disorder. S: Yes, yes. B: In other words, that will merely be masking disorder. S: Yes. Well, then you are suggesting that this is being the natural disorder of the brain. Are you suggesting a natural disorder? B: No, I am saying that the brain seems to be disordered. This seems to be a fact. Right? That the brain without occupation goes, tends to go, into disorder. S: Without the mechanics we get this. That is what we know, without the mechanics. K: So that is frightened of it. S: Frightened. B: Well, it is dangerous actually because one feels it is dangerous if it keeps doing this because of what is going to happen. K: Of course, it is dangerous. B: I mean it may do all sorts of crazy things. K: Yes. All the neurotics, you know all that business. B: In other words, I feel that the main danger comes from within, you see. K: Absolutely. Now, if, when you see it, observe it, there is action which is not fragmented. B: You see, I see one can feel that you do not know whether this disorder can stop. In other words if you were sure that it could stop, that religion, that god will take care of it, or something, then you will have security. K: Quite. B: That god will give you eternal bliss. S: Then you don't feel that you can depend on anything. B: Nothing can control that disorder. You see that this really seems to be the thing that there is nothing that can control that disorder. You may take pills, or do various things, but it is always there in the background. S: Right. K: Quite right. B: I don't know whether we should say, one question is, why do we have this disorder? Do you see. If it were built into the structure of the brain, seeing this is human nature, then there would be no way out. K: No, sir. I think the disorder arises, doesn't it, first when there are mechanical processes going on. And in that mechanical process the brain feels secure, and when the mechanical process is disturbed it becomes insecure. S: Then it does it again. K: Again, and again, and again, and again. S: It never stays with that insecurity. K: No, no. When it perceives this process it is still mechanical, and therefore disorder. B: The question is, why does the brain get caught in mechanism? Do you see. In other words, it seems in the situation the brain gets caught in mechanical process. K: Because it is the safest, the most secure way of living. B: Well, it appears that way. But it is actually very... K: Not, appears. It is so for the time being. B: For the time being, but in the long run it is not. S: Are you saying we are time bound, conditioned to be time bound? K: No. Conditioned to be time bound. Conditioned by our tradition, by our education, by the culture we live in and so on and so on, to operate mechanically. S: We take the easy way. K: The easy way. B: But it is also a kind of mistake to say in the beginning the mechanical way shows signs of being safer, and at the beginning the brain makes a mistake let's say, and says, "This is safer", but somehow it fails to be able to see that it has made a mistake, it holds to this mistake. Like in the beginning you might call it an innocent mistake to say, "This look safer and I will follow it". But then after a while you are getting evidence that it is not so safe, the brain begins to reject it, keep away from it. S: Well, I think you could raise the issue whether there are certain given facts in child rearing. I mean when the mother feels the baby is crying and jams a nipple in its mouth, that is teaching the baby that you shut up and take the easy way out. K: No, poor baby. B: Well there is a lot of conditioning. K: Well that is only the mothers who don't want babies when they jam in the nipples. Don't, no don't say that. B: Well I meant that is part of the conditioning that explains how it is propagated. But you see it still doesn't explain why the brain doesn't see at some stage that it is wrong. S: Why doesn't it see that at some stage it is wrong? B: In other words, it continues in this mechanical process rather than seeing that it is wrong. K: You are asking: why doesn't it see that this mechanical process is essentially disorder. B: It is essentially disorder and dangerous. K: Dangerous. B: It is totally delusory. S: Why isn't there some sort of feedback? In other words, I do something and it comes out wrong. At some point I ought to realize that. Why don't I? For instance, I have seen my life is mechanical. K: Now wait. You see it? S: But I don't. K: Wait. Why is it mechanical? S: Well, it is mechanical because it goes like this: it is all action and reaction. K: Why is it mechanical? S: It is repetitious. K: Which is mechanical. S: Which is mechanical. I want it to be easy. That is also mechanical. I want it to be easy. I feel that that gives me the most security, to keep it mechanical. I get a boundary. It is like you say I have the house, I have got my mechanical life, that gives me security, it is mechanical because it is repetitious. K: You haven't answered my question. S: I know I haven't! It is mechanical. I am not sure what your question is. Your question is why... K: ...has it become mechanical. S: Why. B: Why does it remain mechanical? K: Why does it become and remain mechanical? S: I think it remains mechanical, it is the thing we began with. K: No, pursue it. Why does it remain mechanical? S: I don't see it is mechanical. K: What has caused us to accept this mechanical process, way of living? S: I am not sure I can answer that. The feel of it is that I would see the insecurity, I would see. K: No, look: wouldn't you be frightened? S: I would see the uncertainty. K: No, no. If the mechanical process of life that one lives suddenly stopped, wouldn't you be frightened? S: Yes. B: Wouldn't there be some genuine danger? K: That, of course. There is a danger that things might... B: ...go to pieces. K: ...go to pieces. S: It is deeper than that. K: Wait! Find out, come on. S: It is not just that there is a genuine danger that I would be frightened. It feels like that things take on a terribly moment-by moment effect. K: No, sir. Look: would total order give it complete security? Wouldn't it? Total order. S: Yes. K: The brain wants total order. S: Right. K: Otherwise it can't function properly. Therefore it accepts the mechanical, and hoping it won't lead to disaster. S: Right. K: Hoping it will find order in that. B: Could you say that perhaps in the beginning that the brain accepted this just simply not knowing that this mechanism would bring disorder and it just went into it in an innocent state? K: Yes. B: Yes, but it is caught in a trap, you see. And somehow it maintains this disorder, it doesn't want to get out of it. K: Because it is frightened of greater disorder. B: Yes. It says, all that I've built up may go to pieces. In other words, I am not in the same situation as when I first went in the trap because now I have built up a great structure. I think that structure will go to pieces. S: That's right. I heard one man - I nearly jumped out of my seat - I heard one may say to another, to one of his colleagues, he says, "I have just published my thirteenth book". He said it just like that! (Laughter) The way he said it! K: Yes, but what I am trying to get it is, the brain needs this order, otherwise it can't function. It finds order in mechanical process because it is trained from childhood; do as you are told, etc., etc., etc. There is a conditioning going on right away: to live a mechanical life. S: Right. B: Also the fear induced of giving up this mechanism at the same time. K: Of course, of course. B: I mean that in other words you are thinking all the time that without this everything will go to pieces, including especially the brain. K: Yes, so they break from this mechanical business and join communities, you know, all the process, which is still mechanical. S: Right, right. K: Which means the brain must have order. And finds order in a mechanical way. Now, do I see, do you see actually mechanical ways. Now do I see, do you see actually the mechanical way of living leads to disorder? Which is, tradition. If I live entirely in the past, which is very orderly, I think it is very orderly, and what takes place? I am already dead and I can't meet anything. S: I am repeating myself always, right. K: So please don't disturb my tradition! The communists say that, the Catholics say that, you follow, the same thing. And every human being says, "Please, I have found something which gives me order; a belief, a hope, this, or that; and leave me alone." S: Right. K: And life isn't going to leave them alone. So he gets frightened and establishes another mechanical habit. Now do you see this whole thing? And therefore an instant action breaking it all away and therefore order. The brain says, at last I have an order which is absolutely indestructible. B: Well, I think you see it doesn't follow from what you said that this would happen. In other words, you are saying this. K: I am saying this. B: I mean but it doesn't follow logically. K: It would follow logically if you go into it. B: Go into it. You see can we reach a point where it really follows necessarily? K: I think we can only go into it if you perceive the mechanical structure which the brain has developed, attached and cultivated. S: Can I share with you something, that as you are talking I find myself, I see it in a certain way though, I see it like this - don't get impatient with me too quickly! But I see it this way: it is like I can see the mechanicalness. Right? And I see that I see, and I was flashing through my mind various kinds of interchanges between people. And the way they talk, they way I talk to them at a party, at a cocktail party, and it is all about what happened before, you can see them telling you who they are, in terms of their past. I can see what they will be. This guy who said, "I have published my thirteenth book", he said it like that. It is very important that I get that information, see. And I see this. And I see this elaborate structure. This guy has got in his head that I am going to think this about him, and then he is going to go to his university and he is going to be thought that. He is always living like that and the whole structure is elaborate. Right? K: Are you doing that? S: When did you stop beating your wife! Of course I am doing it. I am doing it right now, I am seeing the structure right now, all of us. K: But do you see that we were saying yesterday, fragmentary action is mechanical action. S: That;s right. It is there, Krishnaji. It is there, where we are. K: And therefore political action can never solve any problems, human problems; or the scientist, he is another fragment. S: But do you realize what you are saying? Let us really look at what you are saying. This is the way it is. This is the way life is. K: That's right. S: Right? This is the way it is. Years and years and years. K: Therefore, why don't you change it? S: Change it. That's right. But this is the way it is. We live in terms of our structures. We live in terms of history. We live in terms of our mechanics. We live in terms of our form. This is the way we live. K: Which means, as we were saying at Ojai, when the past meets the present and ends there, there is a totally different thing takes place. S: Yes. But the past doesn't meet the present so often. K: I mean it is taking place now. S: Right now. Right. We are seeing it now. K: Therefore can you stop there? S: We must see it totally. K: No. The fact, simple fact: the past meets the present. That is a fact. B: Let us see, how does the past meet the present? Let us go into that. K: We have got four minutes. S: How do you say the past meets the present? We have got two minutes now! B: Well, I think just briefly that the past meeting the present stops, that the past is generally active in the present towards the future. Now when the past meets the present then the past stops acting. And what it means is that thought stops acting so that order comes about. S: Do you think that the past meets the present, or the present meets the past? K: No. How do you meet me? S: I meet you in the present. K: No. How do you meet me? With all the memories, all the images, the reputation, the words, the pictures, the symbol, all that, with that, which is the past, you meet me now. S: That's right. That's right. I come to you with a... K: No, no. The past is meeting the present. B: Aren't you saying... S: That's right, go ahead. B: That the past should stop meeting the present? S: No. He is not saying that. You can't say that. K: I am saying something, which is... S: Let him say it. K: What I am trying to say is that the past meets the present. S: And then? K: End there. Not move forward. S: Can it? But is that a right question? Or is it, what is the past meeting the present? What is that action? K: I meet you with a picture. S: Why should I stop? K: I will show it to you. I meet you with the past, my memories, but you might have changed all that in the meantime. So I never meet you. I meet you with the past. S: Right. That is fact. K: That is a fact. Now if I don't have that movement going on... S: But I do. K: Of course you do. But I say that that is disorder. I can't meet you then. S: Right. How do you know that? K: I don't know it. I only know the fact that when the past meets the present and continues, it is one of the factors of time, movement, bondage, all the fear, and so on. If, when there is the past meeting the present, one see this, I am fully aware of this, completely aware of this movement, then it stops. Then I meet you as though for the first time, there is something fresh, it is like a new flower coming out. S: Yes, I understand. K: I think we will go on tomorrow. We haven't really tackled the root of all this, the root, the cause or the root of all this disturbance, this turmoil, travail, anxiety - you follow. B: Why should the brain be in this wild disorder? K: I know, wild. You, who are a doctor, an analyst and all the rest of it, you have to ask that fundamental question - why? Why do human beings live this way? S: Right. Why do they? I ask that all the time. Why are human beings sick? 3RD CONVERSATION WITH DR BOHM & DR SHAINBERG BROCKWOOD PARK 18TH MAY 1976 'TRANSFORMATION OF MAN' Krishnamurti: Shall we start where we left off? We were asking, weren't we, why do human beings live this way? Dr Shainberg: What is the root? K: The turmoil, the confusion, the sorrow behind it all, conflict, violence. And so many people offering different ways of solving the problems: the Asiatic gurus, and the priests all over the world, and the new books, you know, everybody offering a new solution, a new method, a new way of solving the problems. And I am sure this has been going on for a million years. "Do this and you will be all right. Do that you'll be all right". But nothing seems to have succeeded to make man live in order, happily, you know, intelligently, without any of this chaotic activity going on. Why? Why can't human beings, so-called educated, knowing all the scientific knowledge, biology, sociology, everything is now open to every human being; why do we human beings live this way, in this appalling misery? Some of them are conscious, some of them are unconscious, some of them say, "Well, this is all right, it is only for a few years and I will die. It is a jolly good business and it doesn't matter" - so why? What is it? Why? S: Well, I have often said they do it because the very sorrow, the very turmoil, the very problems themselves, is the security. Dr Bohm: I don't really think so. K: That doesn't... B: No. I think people just get used to it. I mean they miss anything they are used to. I mean people get used to scrap fighting and they miss it when they don't have it. But that isn't the primary reason in my view. S: What is the primary reason in your view? B: Whatever happens you get used to it, and you come to miss it after a while just because you are used to it. S: Yes. B: But that doesn't explain why it is there. K: I was reading the other day some writer saying, historically, five thousand years historically, there have been five thousand wars, thousands of people killed, millions killed, women crying -you follow - and still we are going on. S: That's right. I have the same experience. One time I was working, and a guy said to me that he wanted to go to Vietnam to fight because otherwise his life was every night at the bar. K: I know, but that isn't the reason. Why? S: That's not the reason but there is something they hope for. We hold on to the conflict and the sorrow. K: Is it that we like it? S: It is not that we like it; it is almost that we like not liking it. It is a kind of orientation, a kind of, I know my conflict, I know what I am at. K: Have we all become neurotic? S: Yes. The whole thing is neurotic. K: Are you saying that? S: Yes. The whole society is neurotic. K: Which means the entire humanity is neurotic? S: I think so. I mean this is the argument we have all the time: is the society sick? And then if you say the society is sick, what is your judgement, what is the value you are using for comparison? K: Which is yourself, who is neurotic. S: Right. K: So when you are faced with that, that human beings live this way and have accepted it for millennia; there have been saviours, there have been gurus, there have been teachers, there have been -you follow - and yet they go on this way. And you say, well, we are all half crazy, demented, from top to bottom, corrupt; and I come along and say, why? S: Why do we do it. K: Why? S: Why do we keep it up. Why are we crazy? I have it with my children. I say to my children, this is a sick society. Look, they spend fifty hours a week in front of the television box. That is their whole life. My children, they laugh at me, all their friends are doing it. K: No, moving beyond that, why? S: Why? Without it, what? K: No: not without it, what. S: That is what we run into. B: No, that is very secondary. You see I think we get to depend on it, as we were saying this morning, to occupy us and so on. And Vietnam would seem some release from the boredom of the pub, or whatever, but that is secondary. K: And also when I go to Vietnam, or fight the war, all responsibility is taken away from me. Somebody else is responsible - the general. S: Right. B: In the old days people used to think that war would be a glorious thing, you see. When the war started in England everybody was in a state of high elation. K: High, exactly. B: They didn't know what was in store, you see. K: And all united. Why? S: Why? K: Is it that we have started out on the wrong path? Is it the species don't kill themselves, you know the animal species, but we are the species that kill each other? S: Right. K: So looking at all this panorama of horror, the misery - I feel this very strongly because I travel all over the place and I see this extraordinary phenomena going on, in India, in America, here, everywhere, and I say why do people live this way, accept these things, read history and, you follow, it is no longer conceived. They have become cynical. It is all there. S: That's right. They have become cynical. B: Nobody believes anything can be done about it. K: That's it. S: That's it. K: Is it that we feel that we cannot do anything about it? S: That's for sure. B: That's been an old story. People say human nature... K: ...can never be altered. B: Yes. I mean that is not new at all. K: Not new. S: But that's certainly true that people feel, or we feel - let's not say people - we feel, like I said this morning, this is the way it is, this is the way we live. K: I know, but why don't you change it? S: Why don't we change it. K: You see your son looking at the television for fifty hours; you see your son going off to Vietnam, killed, maimed, blinded, for what? S: Right. K: Sorry! There have been pacifists, there have been war mongers. S: Many people have said that we don't accept that human nature is this way, we will try to change it, and it didn't work. You know, so many people did that right thing. The communists tried it, the socialists tried it, some others tried it. K: The utopians. B: The utopians, and there has been so much bad experience, it all adds up to the idea that human nature doesn't change. K: Doesn't change. S: You know when Freud came along, Freud made his studies: he never said psychoanalysis is to change people. He said we can only study about people. K: I am not interested in that. I know that. I don't have to read Freud, or Jung, or you, or anybody, it is there in front of me. S: Right. So let's say - that's good. We know this. We know this fact about people and we also know the fact of the matter is they don't try to change. K: So what is preventing them? S: That is the question. They don't. That is another fact. B: People have tried to change it in many cases, but... S: OK. But now let's say that they don't try to change it. K: They do. They go to Ashramas, a dozen ways they have tried to change. S: Right. K: But essentially they are the same. B: You see I think people cannot find out how to change human nature. You see. K: Is that it? B: Well, I mean what ever methods have been tried are entirely... S: Is that it? Or is it the fact that the very nature of the way they want to change it is part of the process itself? K: That's what he is saying. B: No, but I am saying both. I say the first point is that whatever people have tried has not been guided by an understanding, a correct understanding of human nature. S: So it is guided by this very process itself. Right? The incorrectness? B: Yes, let's take the Marxists who say that human nature can be improved, but only when the whole economic and politician structure has altered. K: Altered. S: Right. B: Then... K: They have tried to alter it but human nature stays the same. B: ...they can't alter it, you see, because human nature is such that they can't really alter it. K: Because class society, they started of no wars, you know... S: But they are using a mechanical way to make a mechanical change. K: Look at it, sir: you, take yourself - sorry to be personal, if you don't mind, you be the victim! S: Pig in the middle! K: Right. Why don't you change? S: Well, I... K: No, no. Don't give explanations. S: Well, the feel of it is, the immediate feel of it is that there is still, I guess I shall have to say there is some sort of false security, the fragmentation, the immediate pleasures that are gotten from the fragmentation; in other words there is still that movement of fragmentation. That's how come there is not the change. There is not seeing the whole thing. K: I mean, when you say that, are you saying: political action, religious action, social action, all separate, all fighting each other almost, and we are that. S: Right. K: Is that what you are saying? S: Yes, I am saying that. I mean we keep getting something back from it, we get these immediate pleasure and failures, frustrations from... K: There is a much deeper issue than that. S: Some more. My immediate response is: why don't I change? What is it that keeps me from seeing the total? I don't know. I keep coming up with a kind of feeling that I am getting something. I keep getting something from not changing. K: No. Is it the entity that wishes to change sets the pattern of change, and therefore the pattern is always the same under a different colour? I don't know if I am making myself clear? S: Can you say it another way? K: I want to change. And I plan out what to change, how to bring about this change. S: Right. K: The planner is always the same. S: That's right. K: But the patterns change. S: That's right. Yes. I have an image of what I want. K: No, the patterns change, but I, who want to change, create the patterns of change. S: That's right. K: Therefore I am the old and the patterns are new but the old is always conquering the new. S: Right. B: Now when I do that I don't feel that I am the old... K: Of course. B: ...but I am the new, I mean. K: Of course. S: Yes, I have got a new idea. B: But I really don't feel that I am involved in that old stuff that I want to change. K: Just now after lunch you were saying the Kabala, that thing, there is a new system. B: Yes. K: New, say if you study this you will be transformed. S: That's right. K: This has been said a hundred million times: do this and you will be transformed. They try to do it but the centre is always the same. B: And each person who does it feels that it has never happened before. K: Never before. Yes. My experience through that book is entirely different, but the experiencer is the same. S: The same old thing, right. K: I think that is one of the root causes of it. S: Yes, yes. B: It is a kind of sleight of hand trick whereby the thing which is causing the trouble is put into position as if it were the thing that is trying to make the change. You see it is a deception. K: I am deceiving myself all the time by saying, I am going to change that, become that; then if it doesn't, and so on and so on. Is that it? S: That begins to get at it. K: No, no. Look at yourself and say, "Is that it?" You read -wait a minute - Hindu, or some book. S: Right. K: And say, yes, how true that is, I am going to live according to that. But the 'me' that is going to live according to that is the same old me. S: Right, yes. That's right. We run into this, I think that all the systems, for instance, of therapy, with patients, for instance, the patient will say, the doctor is going to be the one who is going to help him. Right? And then when they see that their doctor is... K: ...is like you. S: ...is like you, or is not going to help you, they are supposed to get better, they are supposed to be well, but in fact they have never touched that central issue, which is that I thought that somebody could help me. So then they go to something else, and they go to something else - most of them go to another theory. K: Another guru. S: Another guru. K: After all, they are all men too. Talking about a new guru, or an old guru - you follow - it is all the same old stuff. S: You are really getting at the issue that the fact that the root is this belief that something can help you. K: No, the root remains the same. Right? And we trim the branches. B: I think the root is something we don't see because we put it in the position of the one who is supposed to be seeing. K: Yes. S: Say that another way. B: It is a sort of conjuring trick. You see we don't see the root because the root is put into the position of somebody who would be looking for the root. I don't know if you see it. K: Yes. The root says, I am looking for the root. S: Right. B: It is like the man who says, I am looking for my glasses, and he has got them on! S: Or like that Sufi story: I am looking for the key - you know the story? - I am looking for the key over here because it is locked. You understand? The Sufi, the guy comes along and the guy is crawling around under the lamppost, and a guy comes along and says, "What are you doing there?" "I am looking for my key". And he said, "Did you lose it here?" "No, I lost it over there but there is more light over here". B: We throw the light on the other part. K: Yes, sir. So if I want to change, because I don't want to live that way, I don't want to follow anybody because they are all like the rest of the gang. I don't accept any authority in all this. S: Yes. K: Authority arises only when I am confused. S: Right. K: When I am in disorder. S: That's right. K: So I say, can I completely change at the very root? B: Let's look at that because you are saying, well there seems confusion in the language because you say 'I'. K: Confusion in the language, I know. B: I mean it makes it hard because you say, "I am going to change", and it is not clear what I mean by 'I'. K: The 'I' is the root. B: The 'I' is the root, so how can I change? K: That is the whole point. B: You see, the language is confusing because you say, I have got to change at the root, you see, but I am the root. K: Yes. B: So what is going to happen? S: What is going to happen, yes. K: No, no. How am I not to be I? S: That's the question. B: Well, what do you mean by that? S: How am I not to be I. Let's role it back a second. You state you are not going to accept any authority. K: Who is my authority? Who? They have all told me, "Do this, do that, do the other. Read this book and you will change. Follow this system, you will change. Identify yourself with god, you will change". But I remain exactly as I was before: in sorrow, in misery, in confusion, looking for help, and I choose the help which suits me most. S: Can we stop here for a minute? What would you say - now I mentioned something about psychiatry here, and I'd like to get something straight if we can. There is this whole theory, and gurus have it, they don't talk about it, but they have it, and there is in all psychiatry and so forth, there is the theory that if I go along with the authority to where I see my addiction to authority then I free myself from the authority. You know that? K: Yes. All right. The communists say, "Freedom comes at the end of good discipline. And discipline is what I tell you". S: Right. B: Yes. S: Right. In other words by giving myself over I will discover my error. Now what do you want to say about that? B: Isn't that obvious. S: Right. It is obvious that I am doing the same thing, and then I see the failure of this authority, but you see there is a thesis there. That if I see the particular of my following authority, then I will see the universal in the root. B: Yes, but why do you have to follow the authority to see authority? You see this is one of the questions. You see, do you have to deceive yourself in order to understand self-deception? I mean, do you say first, I deceive myself and then I look through it and I see through self-deception and I am free of it? S: That is exactly it. B: But I mean that is absurd because when you are deceiving yourself you don't know what you are doing. It is too late. If you don't truly deceive yourself, what is the point? But if you truly deceive... K: Is it possible for a human being to change at the very root of his being? They have tried different ways, different, you know, Zen - you follow - ten, umpteen different ways they have tried to change man: rewarding him, punishing him, promising him. Nothing has changed, brought about this miraculous change. And it is a miraculous change. S: It would be, yes, yes. K: It is. Everyone promises: do this, do that, do the other. S: Right. K: And I, a man like we, comes along and says, look, I don't want to accept any authority. S: Right. K: Because you have misguided everybody - all the authorities. S: Authority... K: ...in itself is disorder. S: Right. K: Authority exists because human beings are in disorder. The disorder has created them, not clarity, not compassion, not something entirely different. It is the disorder that has created them. So why should I follow them? Though they promise, do this, discipline yourself according to this way and ultimately you will be free. I reject all that. Not intelligently but because I see it; it isn't a cantankerous rejection; it is a reasonable, sane rejection. So how do I proceed? I have got fifty years to live, I don't know what the future may be. I'll find out, but I have got fifty years to live probably. What is the correct action? S: What is the correct action to live properly? K: That's all. That's all. To be sane. S: To be sane. K: Not to be neurotic. Who is going to tell me? The communists? Marx? Lenin? Mao? The Pope? Or the local priest? Who is going to tell me? Because they don't act rightly either. S: We have a whole group of people who don't say that they will tell you, we have a whole group of people who say, see how you follow me and see, if you follow me, see your tendency to follow me. K: Yes, yes. B: I understand that. S: And then the same business of self-deception. B: To see through that. S: To see through your own self deception. B: That is really an impossible trick you see, because if you say, follow me and deceive yourself, then you must genuinely deceive yourself, and you can't, you see. S: That is right. The thesis is that if you deceive yourself you will see your own tendency to self-deception, which you don't see. B: But that must be authority because it doesn't make sense to say that if I deceive myself I am going to see through deceiving myself. I mean the whole point of self-deception is that if I am really doing it right I don't know what I am doing. S: Right. B: Therefore how do you guarantee to me that I can see through self-deception by deceiving myself? S: Because I am going to show you through - I am not going to participate. I am going to here, and you are going to deceive yourself and then you can see this authority in action, the way you need authority. K: You are talking of group therapy. S: I am talking about a kind of psychotherapy. K: Psychotherapy. B: You see, why do I need to go through all that to see self-deception? You see it is not clear. S: No, it is not clear. But that is the only way. You are so desperately in need. B: Yes. S: You need me desperately. K: I don't need you. S: No, but he does. K: That is fundamentally wrong. B: I am accepting authority. Right? S: Yes, but he is fundamentally wrong. Here he is, he is fundamentally wrong. K: Tell him that. Tell him that. S: You are fundamentally wrong, did you hear me? K: No. Don't allow him to appeal to you. S: Don't play along in this authority? K: I can't help you. S: I can't help you. K: Because I am like you. B: Then I'll take my trade elsewhere! S: You'll go somewhere else. K: So if everybody said, "I can't help you", you have to do it yourself, look at yourself, then the whole thing is beginning to act. S: Right. But the whole thing doesn't work like that. There are a lot of people who will be willing to deceive themselves for two dollars. K: So we know they are all neurotic people. S: Right. K: Here is a man who says, "I am neurotic. I won't go to any other of neurotic to become sane". I know. What does he do? He doesn't accept any authority, because I have created out of my disorder the authority. B: Yes, well that is merely the hope that somebody knows what to do, you see. K: Yes. B: Because I feel this chaos is too much for me and I just assume that somebody else can tell me what to do. But that comes out of this confusion. S: Yes, the disorder creates the authority. B: The authority, yes. K: In the school I have been saying: if you behave properly there is no authority. The behaviour we have all agreed to -punctuality, cleanliness, this or that. If you really see it, you have no authority. S: Yes, I see that. That I think is a key point: that the disorder itself creates the need for authority. K: Look what has happened in India. Mussolini is a perfect example. B: It doesn't actually create a need for authority. It creates among people the impression that they need authority to correct the disorder, you see. That would be more exact. K: Right. B: Because the authority they don't need at all because it is just destructive. S: Right, right. K: So let's start from there. I reject all this - being not insane. In the rejection of authority I have become very sane, I am beginning to become sane. S: Right. K: So I say, now I know I am neurotic, as a human being, I say I know, now what shall I do? What is the correct action in my life? Can I ever find it, being neurotic? S: Right. K: I can't. So I won't ask what is the right action. I will say, now can I free my mind, the mind, from being neurotic, is it possible? I won't go to Jerusalem, I won't to - you follow - to Rome, I won't go to any authority - Park Avenue, doctors, nobody. S: Right. K: Because I am very serious now. I am deadly serious because that is my life. B: But then you see you have to be so serious because then you say in spite of the immense pressure to escape... K: I won't. B: ...you won't. But I am saying that one will feel at this juncture that there will probably be an intense pressure towards escape, saying this is too much. K: No. No, sir. You see what happens? S: What happens? K: When I reject authority I have much more energy. S: Tremendous energy. B: Yes, if you reject authority. K: Because I am now concentrated to find out. S: That's right. That is what happens. K: I am not looking to anybody. S: That's right. In other words then I have to be really open to 'what is', that is all I have got. K: So what shall I do? S: When I am really open to 'what is'? K: Not open. Here I am, here is a human being, caught in all this, what shall he do? No authority, knowing social discipline is immoral. Right? S: Then there is intense alertness. K: No. Tell me. Tell me, you are a doctor, tell me what I am to do. I reject you. S: Right. K: Because you are not my doctor, you are not my authority. S: Right. K: You don't tell me what to do because you are confused. S: Right. K: So you have no right to tell me what to do. K: So I come to you as a friend... S: Right. K: ...and say, let's find out. Because you are serious and I am serious. S: That's right. K: Let's see how... S: ...we can work together. K: No, no, be careful. I am not working together. S: You are not going to work together? K: No. We are together investigating. S: OK we won't call it that. We are investigating together. K: No, no. Working together means co-operation. S: Right. K: I am not co-operating. I say, you are like me. What are we going to co-operate with? S: You don't want to co-operatively investigate? K: No, no. Because you are like me. S: That's right. K: Confused, miserable, unhappy, neurotic. S: Right, right. K: So I say, well why should we, how can we co-operate? We can only co-operate in neuroticism. S: That's right. You mean we will collude essentially to deceive ourselves. So what are we going to do? K: So can we investigate together? S: That is a very interesting question. Can we? How can we both investigate together if we are both neurotic? K: No. So I say, look, I am going to first see in what ways I an neurotic. S: OK. Let's look at it. K: Yes, look at it. In what way am I neurotic, a human being, who comes from New York, or Tokyo, or Delhi, or Moscow, or wherever it is. He says, I know I am neurotic, society is neurotic, the leaders are neurotic, and I am the world and the world is me. So I can't look to anybody. Do you see what it does? S: It puts you straight up there in front. K: It gives you a tremendous sense of integrity. S: Right. You have got the ball in your hands, now run with it. K: Now can I - I being a human being - can I look at my neuroticism? Is it possible to see my neuroticism? What is neuroticism? What makes me neurotic? All the things that are put into me - into me in the sense of the me that has collected all this, which makes the me. Can my consciousness empty all that? S: Your consciousness is that though. K: Of course. B: Is it only that? K: For the moment I am limiting it to that. S: That is my consciousness. The proliferation of my fragmentation, my thought is my neuroticism. What am I going to do with this, what am I going to do here, what am I going to get this, or do there, or how am I going to - I mean this me is made out of the proliferation of these fragments. Isn't that right? K: Of course. But also it means it is a tremendous question, you follow. Can I, can the consciousness of man, which began five, ten million years ago, with all the things that have been put into it, generation after generation, generation after generation, from the beginning until now; we are asking all that is neurotic, old boy, all that is a fragmented collection: can you take one at a time and look at it? Or can you take the whole of it and look at it? I don't know if I am? S: Yes. Can you take the whole of it and look - that's not clear. How can you take the whole of it and look at it? B: It seems a waste, a language problem there because you say you are that, how are you going to look at it? K: I'll show you in a minute. We'll go into it. B: I mean it is a difficulty stating it. K: I know, stating it. It is a verbal - you know, the words are wrong. B: Right, the words are wrong. S: The words are made by this very system. B: So we shouldn't take these words too literally. K: Too literally, of course. B: Could we say that the words can be used flexibly? S: Right. Now that's a good point. K: No, the word is not the thing. S: That's right. The word is not the thing but the word points at something much bigger than itself. K: No. The word is not the thing. It may be the big thing or the little thing but the word is not that. B: No, but we are using words and the question is how are we to understand them. You see they are in some way an... K: ...an impediment and... B: ...in some way a clue to what we are talking about. It seems to me, you see, that one trouble with the words is the way we take them. We take them to mean something very fixed, like say... K: ...this chair. B: ...this is exactly a chair. My consciousness is just so, you see. I am the neurosis, therefore we take it very fixed. K: It is moving. B: Yes, it is moving. It is changing, therefore you can't just exactly say I am the neurosis or I am not the neurosis. K: It is constantly in flux. B: Right. S: But he is saying something bigger which is the fact that the very thing that we are investigating is the way we use words as the thing is the very movement that we are investigating. That is the consciousness. K: That's it. Would you repeat that once more? S: Yes. That the very act of the word being seen as the thing by consciousness, that very movement is the thing we must investigate. B: Yes. S: That is... K: Now, can you look at it without the word? Is that possible? The word is not the thing. The word is a thought. And as a human being I realize I am neurotic - neurotic in the sense that I believe, I live in conclusions, in memories, which are all neurotic processes. S: In words. K: In words. Words, pictures and reality. I believe. S: That is how you live. K: My belief is very real, it may be illusory - all beliefs are illusory, but because I believe so strongly they are real to me. S: Right. B: Right. S: They are very real to you. K: Very. So can I look at the nature of the belief, how it arose, look at it? S: Look at how I am living in the world in which I am trapped by the belief that the word is the thing. Look at that movement. K: Don't expand that. I understand that. You have got a belief, haven't you? S: Oh,yes. K: Now look at it. Can you look at it? S: I saw, I mean this morning we were talking about the fact that the belief is doctor, word, thing. K: Don't expand it. Can you look at that fact that you have a belief? Whatever it is, god, the State is the most important, or whatever. S: Right. K: Marxist is nearest god, or Mao and so on and so on. S: But I believe it is true. K: No, no. Can you look at that belief? S: As a belief and not as a fact. K: Ah, no. It is a reality to you when you believe in it. Go to a Catholic or a Hindu, or a Marxist... S: Right. But how am I going to look at it if I really believe it? In other words, look: I say there is a god. K: Right. S: Right. Now you are telling me to look at my belief in the god. K: Why do you believe? Who asked you to believe? What is the necessity of god? Not that I am an atheist, but I am asking you. S: God is there for me, if I believe. K: Then there is no investigation, you have stopped. You have blocked yourself. You have shut the door. S: That's right. So how are we going to - well you see we have got such beliefs. K: Ask him. B: What? K: We have tried hundreds of times to show somebody who has a very strong belief, he says, what are you talking about? This is reality. B: That's right. That is the thing of how our word becomes reality. Can we investigate that? S: How can we get at this? Because I think we have loads of these unconscious beliefs that we don't really shake: like the belief in the me. K: He is asking some other question. B: How thought, the word, becomes the sense of reality, you see. K: Why words have become reality. B: You see I think a deeper question is, how the mind sets up the sense of reality, do you see. I mean if I look at things I may think they are real, sometimes mistakenly, you know, that's an illusion but you know, even with objects you can say a word and it seems real when you describe it that way. And therefore in some way the words sets up in the brain a construction of reality. Then everything is referred to that construction of reality. S: How are we to investigate that? K: What created that reality? Would you say everything that thought has created is a reality, except nature? B: Thought didn't create nature. K: No, of course not. B: Can't we put it that thought can describe nature. K: Yes, thought can describe nature, poetry and all the rest of it. B: And also imagination. K: Imagination and all the rest of it. Can we say thought, whatever it has put together is reality? The chair, the table, all these electric lights; nature it hasn't created but it can describe it. B: And also make theories about it. K: Make theories and all the rest of it. And also the illusion it has created is a reality. S: Right. B: But isn't it to a certain extent, this construction of reality has its place because you see if I feel that the table is real although the brain has constructed it, it is OK. But at some stage we construct realities that are not there, you see. We can see this sometimes in the shadows on a dark night, constructing realities that are not there. K: That there is a man there. B: Yes. You see and also tricks and illusions are possible by conjurors and so on. But then it goes further and we say that mentally we construct a psychological reality, which seems intensely real, very strong. But it seems to me the question is: what is it that thought does to give that sense of reality, to construct reality? Can we watch that? K: What does thought do to bring about, to create that reality? S: Yes. You mean like if you talk to someone who believes in god, they say to you that is real, that it is really there, it is not a construction. And if you talk to somebody who really believes in their self, I mean I have talked to many people and you have been talking to the psychotherapists, they say the self is real, that it exists, it is a thing. I mean you heard a man once say, a psychotherapist say to Krishnaji, "We know the ego exists. we have got a theory, it exists". B: Well, it is not only that you see, but I think people have felt its reality and what happens is that the illusion builds up very fast; once you construct the reality also its events are referred to it as if they were coming from that reality. You see, and it builds up a tremendous structure, a cloud around it of support. S: Right. So how am I to investigate my reality making a mechanism of it? K: We have got five minutes more. So let's come to it. What are we doing now? S: We are moving. It's moving. K: What are we doing? We have said no authority, nobody can say to another, "This is the right thing to do", because we are trying to find out what is the correct action in life. I can only find that out if there is no disorder in me. Right? Me is the disorder. S: Right. That's right. K: However real that me is, that is the source of disorder. S: Right. K: Because that separates, that divides - me and you, and we and they, and my nation, my god - me. S: Right. K: Now we are asking: with its consciousness, can that consciousness be aware of itself? - aware like thought thinking. B: Thinking about itself? K: Put it very simply: can thought be aware of its own movement? B: Yes. S: That's the question. B: That's the question. It could be say, self reference of thought, thought understanding its own structure. S: And its own movement. But is that thought that is aware of itself? Or is it something else? K: Try it! Try it! S: Try that. K: Do it now - four minutes you have! S: Right. K: Do it now. Whether you can be aware - not you - whether your thought can be aware of itself, of its movement. (Long pause) B: It stops. K: What does that mean? S: It means what it says: it stops, that it can't be. With the sense of the observation of thought, thought stops. K: No, don't put it that way. S: How would you put it? K: It is undergoing a radical change. B: So the word thought is not a fixed thing. K: No. B: The word thought does not mean a fixed thing. But it can change. K: That's right. B: In perception. K: You have told me, and other scientists have told me, in the very observation through a microscope of the object, the object undergoes a change. B: In the quantum theory the object cannot be fixed apart from the act of observation. S: This is true with patients in psychoanalysis. Being with the patient they change automatically. K: Forget the patient, you are the patient! S: I am the patient, right. It changes. K: What takes place when thought is aware of itself? You know, sir, this is an extraordinarily important thing. B: Yes. K: That is, can the doer be aware of his doing? Can I move this vase from here to there, can I be aware of that moving? S: Yes. K: I can physically. That is fairly simple. S: Right. K: I stretch out the arm and so on and so on. S: Yes. K: But is there an awareness of thought which says, "Yes, thought is aware of itself, its movement, its activity, its structure, its nature, what it has created, what it has done in the world, the misery, and all the rest of it"? S: Is there an awareness of the doing of the brain? Let me ask you something? Why do you think you can be aware of... K: It's time. S: I want to save that question for tomorrow. The question is: when you are aware of your movement of the vase, it doesn't stop. But when you are aware of the movement of the brain it does stop. Isn't that interesting? B: The irrelevant thoughts stop. 4TH CONVERSATION WITH DR BOHM & DR SHAINBERG BROCKWOOD PARK 19TH MAY 1976 'TRANSFORMATION OF MAN' Krishnamurti: You know I don't think we answered yesterday the question: why human beings live the way the are living. I don't think we went into it sufficiently deeply. Did we answer it? Dr Shainberg: We got to the point, we never answered that question. I left here feeling our discussion... K: I was thinking about it last night, I mean this morning rather, and it struck me that we hadn't answered it fully. We went into the question of can thought observe itself. S: Right. Dr Bohm: Right, yes. K: But I think we ought to answer that question. B: But I think that what we said was on the way to answering it. I mean it was relevant to the answer. K: Yes, relevant. But it is not complete. S: No, it's not complete, it doesn't really get hold of that issue: why do people live the way they do, and why don't they change? Why, knowing this, they don't change. K: Yes. Could we go into that a little bit before we go on? S: Well, you know my immediate answer to that question was that they like it; we came up against that and then pulled away. K: I think it is much deeper than that, don't you? Because what is involved, if one actually transformed one's conditioning, the way one lives, economically, you might find yourself in a very difficult position. S: Right. K: And also it is going against the current. S: That's right. K: Completely against the current. B: Are you saying that it might lead to a certain objective insecurity. K: Objective insecurity. B: It is not merely a matter of the imagination. K: No, no, actual insecurity. B: Yes, you see because a lot of things we are discussing yesterday, was some illusion of security or insecurity. In addition there is some genuine... K: ...genuine insecurity. B: ...insecurity. K: And also doesn't it imply you have to stand alone. S: Definitely, you would be in a new - I mean, you would be in a totally different position. K: No, because it is like completely - not isolated - away from the stream. And that means you have to be alone, psychologically alone; and whether human beings can stand that. S: Well certainly this other is completely to be together. K: That is herd instinct, which all these totalitarian people use, and also everything is together: be together, with people, don't be alone. S: Be like them, be with them - it is all based on competition in some way: I am better than you. K: Of course, of course. It is all that. B: Well, it is unclear because in some sense we should be together but... K: Of course. B: ...society, it seems to me, is giving us some false sense of togetherness which is really fragmentation. K: Quite right. B: But it is called being together. K: Right. B: It makes you feel that way. K: So would you say the reason, one of the main reasons, that human beings don't want to radically transform themselves is that they are really frightened not to belong to a group, to a herd, to something definite, which implies standing completely alone? And I think from that aloneness you can only co-operate; not the other way round. S: Certainly. I mean empirically people don't like to be different, and that we know. K: You must have seen on the television Chinese boys training, the Russians, all the eastern satellite people, all of them training, training, never alone. S: Right. B: Yes. K: I once talked to an FBI man. He came to see me and he said, "Why is it that you walk alone all the time? Why are you so much alone? I see you among the hills walking alone, and why?" You follow? He thought it was very disturbing. B: Well, I think that even anthropologists find that in the more primitive people, the sense of belonging to the tribe is even stronger, they feel completely lost, their entire psychological structure depends on being in the tribe. K: And I think that is one of the reasons why we don't want to -we are frightened. After all, cling to the misery that you already know, than come into another kind of misery that you don't know. S: That's right. But there is a whole action/reaction scheme. That is, by being with others... K: ...You are safe. S: ...you are safe. And I mean it even goes further: there is an action. It is almost as if you could say that being with others is the off-shoot of always living from, you're this, I compare myself with you and therefore, I am together with you, is the afterthought. In other words, that is part of the circle. B: Even if you leave off comparison, there is something deeper in the sense that people feel this togetherness, this sense of belonging to a group, you know even if they are not comparing, they just feel it is safe, they will be taken care of, like their mother may have taken care of them, and that you are sort of gently supported, and that fundamentally it will be all right because the group is large, it is wise, it knows what to do. I think there is a feeling like that, rather deep. The church may give that feeling. K: Yes. You have seen those animal pictures? They are always in herds. B: Yes. S: Except the mountain lion. Did you ever read about the lion? There have been some studies done by this fellow Shaller, in which he shows that always in lion groups there is always one who goes off alone. K: Yes, I have read about that. S: You have read about that? K: Yes, I have heard about it. B: Anyway the cats are not humans. K: The feeling of aloneness is much more, it has got a great deal in it. It isn't just isolation. S: Right, right. B: I was asking, now people are seeking that sense, that from the group you have some support from the whole. K: Of course. B: Now, isn't it possible that you are discussing an aloneness in which you have a certain security? You see, that people are seeking in the group a kind of security, it seems to me, that can arise actually in aloneness. K: Yes, that is right. In aloneness you can be completely secure. B: I wonder if we could discuss that because it seems there is an illusion there: people sense that you might feel that you should have a sense of security. K: Quite right. B: And they are looking for it in a group, the group being representative of something universal. K: The group is not the universal. B: It isn't, but it is the way we think of it. K: Of course. B: The little child thinks the tribe is the whole world, you know. K: I mean a human being as he lives this way, if he transforms himself he becomes alone, he is alone. That aloneness is not isolation and therefore it is a form of supreme intelligence. B: Yes, but could you go into that a little further about it not being isolation, because at first when you say alone, the feeling that I am here, entirely apart. Right? K: It is not apart, no. B: But that is... S: What do you think it is that a person experiences? I think there is one part of it that people, all people, seem to gravitate, like they have to be together, they have to be like other people. What would change that? That is one question. What would change anybody from that? And second of all: why should anybody change from that? And third: what would such a person experience when they are alone? They experience isolation. K: I thought we dealt with that fairly thoroughly the other day. That is, after all when one realizes the appalling state of the world, and oneself, the disorder, the confusion, the misery and all the rest of it, and when one says there must be a total change, a total transformation, he has already begun to move away from all that. S: Right. But here he is altogether, being together. K: No. Being together, what does it really mean? S: I mean being in this group. K: Yes, what does it really mean? S: Being together is different from this having to be... K: No. Identifying oneself with the group, and remain with the group, what does it mean? What is involved in it? S: That's right. What is involved in it? I think one of the things that is involved in it, is what I said before, it sets up this comparison. K: No, no, apart from all that superficiality, what is involved in it? The group is me. I am the group. S: Right, right. K: Therefore it is like co-operating with myself. B: Well, I think you could say like Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. Meaning that I think implies that I am there. You say I am in the group, therefore I am. You see if I am not in the group where am I? You see? K: Yes. B: In other words, I have no being at all. That is really the condition of the primitive tribe, for most of the members anyway. And there is something deep there because I feel that my very existence, my being psychologically, is implied in being first in the group. The group has made me, everything about me has come from the group. I say I am nothing without the group. K: Yes, quite right. I am the group, in fact. S: Right, right. B: And therefore if I am out of the group I feel everything is collapsing. That seems to me deeper than the question of competing: who is the chief, or who is the big shot. S: Right. B: That is a secondary affair. S: Well, except I wasn't really saying that that was important so much as I was saying that the very action - what I am trying to get at is some of the moment to moment experiences of being in the group, which is occupied. B: Could I say that the more striking thing is what happens when a person is taken out of the group and he feels lost, you see. In other words, all that stuff seems unimportant because he doesn't know where he is. S: Right, right. He doesn't know, he has no orientation or anything. B: To life, or to anything. S: Right. B: And therefore you see that might be the greatest punishment that the group could make, to banish him. K: Yes, they used to do that. S: Oh, yes. K: Look what is happening in Russia: when there is a dissenter he is banished. S: Right, right. K: Solzhenitsyn and all those people are against the group. S: Right. Right. B: Because such a banishment sort of robs them of his being, it is almost like killing him, you see. K: Of course. I think that is where it is, that the fear of being alone. Alone is translated as being isolated from all this. B: Right. Could we say from the universal? K: Yes, from the universal. B: It seems to me you are implying that if you are really alone, genuinely alone, then you are not isolated from the universe. K: Absolutely. On the contrary. B: That is what he is saying. And therefore we have to be free of this false universal first. S: This false identification with the group. B: Identification of the group as the universal, you see. Treating the group as if it were the universal support of my being, or something. S: Right, right. Now there is something more to that. What is being said is that by the localised identification that I am the group, that me, that false security is dropped, then one is opened up to the participation in... K: No, there is no question of participation; you are the universe. S: You are that. B: You see as a child I felt that, I was in a certain town, and I felt that was the whole universe, then I heard of another town beyond that which felt almost beyond the universe. That must be the ultimate limit of all reality, you see. So that the idea of going beyond that would not have occurred to me. (Laughter) And I think that is the way that the group is treated, you see. We know abstractly it is not so but the feeling you have, it is like the little child. K: Therefore is it that human beings love, or hold on to their own misery, confusion, and all the rest of it because they don't know anything else? B: Yes. K: The known is so far, then the unknown. S: Right. Right, yes, yes. K: Now to be alone implies, doesn't it, to step out of the stream. S: Of the known. K: Step out of the stream of this utter confusion, disorder, sorrow and despair, hope, travail, all that, to step out of all that. S: Right. K: And if you want to go much deeper into that: to be alone implies, doesn't it, not to carry the burden of tradition with you at all. B: Tradition being the group, then. K: Group; tradition also being knowledge. B: Knowledge, but it comes basically from the group. Knowledge is basically collective. K: Collective. B: It is collected by everybody. K: So to be alone implies total freedom. And when there is that great freedom it is the universe. B: Could we go into that further because you see to a person who hasn't see this, you know, it doesn't look obvious. S: Well, it doesn't look obvious. I think David is right there. To a person, to most people, I think, and I have tested this out recently, that the idea, or even the deep feeling, that you are the universe, that you don't have to do anything, that seems to be so... K: Ah, sir, that is a most dangerous thing. That is a most dangerous thing to say. How can you say you are the universe when you are in total confusion? When you are unhappy, miserable, anxious, you follow, jealous, envious, all that, how can you say you are the universe? Universe implies total order. B: Yes, the Cosmos in Greek meant order. K: Order, of course. B: And chaos was the opposite, you see. K: Yes. S: But I... K: No, listen: universe, Cosmos, means order. S: Right. B: And chaos is what we are. K: Chaos is what we live with. S: That's right. K: How can I think I have universal order in me? That is the good old trick of the mind which says, disorder is there, but inside you there is perfect order, old boy. That is an illusion. It is a concept which thought has put there and it gives me a certain hope, and therefore it is an illusion, it has no reality. What has actual reality is my confusion. S: Right. K: My chaos. And I can imagine, I can project a Cosmos. S: Right. K: But that is equally illusory. So I must start with the fact of what I am. S: Right. K: Which is I am in a chaos. S: I belong to a group. K: Chaos; chaos is the group. S: Right. K: They have political leaders, religious, you follow, the whole thing is a chaos. So to move away from that into Cosmos, which is total order means not that I am alone, there is a total order which is not associated with disorder, chaos. That is alone. B: Yes, well can we go into that. Suppose several people are doing that, in that state, moving into Cosmos, into order out of the chaos of society. K: That's right. B: Now then, are they all alone? K: No, of course. B: We want to get it clear. K: No, they don't feel alone there. There is only order. B: Are there different people? K: Sir, would you say, suppose - no, I can't suppose. We three are in Cosmos, there is only Cosmos, not you, Dr Bohm, Dr Shainberg and me. B: Therefore we are still alone. K: Which is, order is alone. B: Because I looked up the word 'alone' in the dictionary; basically it is all one. K: All one, yes, yes. B: In other words there is no fragmentation. K: Therefore there is no tree; and that is marvellous, sir. S: But you jumped away there. We got chaos and confusion. That is what we have got. K: So, as we said, to move away from that most people are afraid, which is to have total order. Alone, as he pointed out, is all one. Therefore there is no fragmentation, then there is Cosmos. S: Right. But most people are in confusion and chaos. That is all they know. K: So move. How do you move away from that? That is the whole question. S: That is the question. Here we are in chaos and confusion, we are not over there. K: No, because you may be frightened of that. S: May be frightened of that. K: Frightened of an idea of being alone. S: How can you be frightened of an idea? B: That is easy! K: Aren't you frightened of tomorrow? Which is an idea. S: OK. That is an idea. K: So they are frightened of an idea which they have projected, which says, my god, I am alone, which means I have nobody to rely on. S: Right, but that is an idea. B: Well, let's go slowly. S: Yes, this is very important. B: We have said to a certain extent it is genuinely so. You are not being supported by society and all that. You do have a certain genuine danger because you have withdrawn from the nub of society. K: Yes. If you are a Protestant in a Catholic country it becomes very difficult. S: I think we are confused here. I really do, because I think if we have got confusion, if we have got chaos... K: Not 'if', it is so. S: It is so, OK. I go with you. Now you have got chaos and confusion, that is what we have got. Now if you have an idea about being alone while in chaos and confusion that is just another idea, another thought, another part of the chaos. K: That is all. S: Is that right? K: That's right. S: OK. Now that is all we have got, chaos and confusion. B: We must watch the question of language because you see when you use the word 'all' it closes things. You see, in other words... S: All right. B: ...we were saying yesterday that language has to be more free in its usage, perhaps, and if you use this world 'all' you have to watch it. S: All right. But we have this. B: We have chaos. S: OK. Now that is what we have. Now I have an idea, let me say what my idea is: that most people are let's say unaware, unwilling, don't believe in, don't know anything about this 'all one'. K: I am not talking about that. We are not talking about that. S: That's right, we don't have that. K: No. S: All we have got right now is chaos. K: Sir. B: Leave out the word 'all'. S: OK. We have got chaos. (Laughter) Chaos. K: Chaos. Now wait a minute: being in chaotic conditions, to move away from that they have the feeling that they will be alone. S: Right. B: A sense of isolated. K: Isolated. S: Right. K: Isolated. S: That's what I am getting at. K: They will be lonely. S: That's right. K: Isolated. S: That's right. K: Of that they are frightened. S: Not frightened, in terror. K: Yes. Therefore they say, "I would rather stay where I am, in my little pond, rather than face isolation". S: That's right. K: And that may be one of the reason that human beings don't radically change. S: That's right. B: That's like this primitive tribe: the worst punishment is to be banished, you see, or isolated. S: You don't have to go to a primitive tribe: I see people and talk to people all the time; patients come to me and say, "Look, Saturday came, I couldn't stand to be alone, I called up fifty people looking for somebody to be with." B: Yes, that is much the same. S: "I had to join this group". B: It is much the same. I think it comes in a more simple and pure form there, when people just frankly admit it and they know that is the case, you see. S: Right. K: So that may be one of the reasons why human beings don't change. The other is we are so heavily conditioned to accept things as they are. We don't say to ourselves, "Why should I live this way?" S: That is certainly true. We don't. We definitely are conditioned to believe that is all. K: No. B: Well, that is important. That is an explanation, we are conditioned to believe that is all that is possible, you see. But this word 'all' is one of the traps. S: Maybe that is the very fact. Right. B: You see if you say "this is all that can be", then what can you do? K: Nothing, nothing. B: You see that is the use of language. You see this way of using language may be changed, you see. K: Quite right, sir. S: It is the condition. B: But the word 'all'... K: That is what he is pointing out. B: The word 'all', you see the word... K: When you say, "This is all I know", you have already stopped. S: Right, right. B: Because what does the word 'all' do, you see. It closes. K: It closes it. B: This thing is all reality, you see. It's got to be real. K: Yes, quite right. B: One thing it turns an idea into reality because apparently it gives that sense of reality to the idea, because if you say that is all there is, then that has to be real, do you see? You get me? S: Yes. I think that is a very good point. I mean that is very much like the points that we have been making where the very act of the thinking, that thought is complete, a thought becomes reality - that is also. So again the language itself is the condition. K: So shall we say human beings don't radically transform themselves, they are frightened of being isolated from the group, banished from the group. That is one reason. S: That's one reason. K: And also traditionally we are so conditioned that we would rather accept things as they are; our misery, our chaos, all the rest of it, and not say, "For god's sake, let me change this". S: Right. B: Well, we have to get out of this conviction that the way things are is all that can be, you see. K: Yes, that's right. You see the religions have pointed this out by saying there is another world: aspire to that. This is a transient world, it doesn't matter, live as best as you can in your sorrow, but hand over your sorrow to Jesus, or Christ, or somebody, and then you will be perfectly happy in the next world. S: Right. K: So the communists say there is no next world, but make the best of this world. B: Well I think they would say that there is happiness in the future in this world, you see. K: Yes, yes. Sacrifice your children for the future; which is exactly the same thing. B: But it seems that it is sort of a transformation of the same thing: if we say we have this society as it is and we want to give it up but we invent something similar... K: Yes, quite. B: ...to go to. S: We have to invent, it has to be similar if we are inventing it. B: Yes, but it seems it is an important point, that there is a subtle way of not being alone. K: Quite right. S: You mean to go ahead and make it out of the old ideas? B: Yes. To make heaven for the future. K: So what will make human beings change, radically? S: I don't know. I think that, well even the idea that you are suggesting here is that they say it can't be different, or it is all the same, that is part of the system itself. K: Agreed. S: All... K: Agreed. Now wait a minute. May I ask you a question? Why don't you change? What is preventing you? S: I would say that it is - oh, it's a tough question! I suppose the answer would be that - I don't have any answer! K: Because you have never asked yourself that question. Right? S: Not radically. K: We are asking basic questions. S: Right. I don't really know the answer to the question. K: Now sir, move away from that, sir. Is it as our structure, as our whole society, all religions, all culture, is based on thought, and thought says, "I can't do this, therefore an outside agency is necessary to change me"? S: Right. K: Whether the outside agency is the environment, the leader, Hitler, this, or Stalin, or Mao, or somebody outside, or god. God is your own projection of yourself, obviously. And you believe in god, you believe in Mao, you believe, but you are still the same. S: That's right. Right. K: You may identify with the State and so on and so on, but you are still - the good old me is operating. So is it thought doesn't see its own limit? And know, realize it cannot change itself? Realize it. it. B: Well, I think that something more subtle happens: thought loses track of something and it doesn't see that it, itself is behind all this. K: Of course. We said that. Thought has produced all this chaos. B: But thought doesn't really see, you know, abstractly. But I think you see it is in the bones. S: What about the whole business that thought, what thought does in fact is that it communicates through gradual change. K: That is all invention of thought. S: Yes, but that is where I think the hook is. K: No, sir, please sir, just listen. S: Sure. K: Thought has put this world together. S: Right. K: Technologically as well as psychologically. And the technological world is all right, leave it alone, we won't even discuss that. It would be too absurd. S: Right. K: So psychologically thought has built all this world in me and outside me - the churches, society and so on. And does thought realize it has made this mess, this chaos? B: I would say that it doesn't. It tends to look on this chaos as independently existent, do you see. K: But it is its bogey! B: It is, but it is very hard for it to see that. You see we were discussing that at the end of the hour yesterday really. K: Yes, really we are coming back to that. B: This question of how thought gives a sense of reality. You see we were saying that technology deals with something that thought made but it is actually an independent reality once it is made. K: Made; like the table, like those cameras. B: But you could say that thought also creates a reality which it calls independent but isn't, you see. I thought of a good example, that is: the Corporation, you see... K: Yes, yes. B: You see people are there working for the Corporation, it makes money, it loses money, they strike against the Corporation and so on. But actually you could say, where is the Corporation? It is not in the buildings because... K: They are part of it. B: ...well anyway if all the people were gone the buildings would be nothing. And if the buildings all burnt down the Corporation would still exist, as long as people think it exists. S: Right. And it pays taxes, the Corporation pays taxes, not the individuals. K: So, does thought realize, see, aware that it has created this chaos? S: No. K: Why not? But you, sir, do you realize it? S: I realize that... K: Not you - does thought? You see! I have asked you a different question: does thought, which is you, thinking, does your thinking realize that the chaos it has created? B: You see, thinking tends to attribute the chaos to something else; either to something outside, or to me who is inside. I mean at most I would say that I have done it, but then thinking is attributing, saying that I am doing the thinking. Do you see what I am driving at? K: Yes, yes. B: But there is something thinking. I was going to say it is like the Corporation, thinking has invented a sort of a Corporation who is supposed to be responsible for thinking. Do you understand? We could call it 'Thinking Incorporated'! K: 'Thinking Incorporated' - quite, quite. B: And you see the Corporation is supposed to be thinking. S: Yes, yes. B: So we attribute, we give credit for thought to this Corporation called me. S: Yes. K: Thought has created me. B: Me, because... S: Me is an Institution. B: But also thought has said that me is not thought, but in reality it is. K: Of course, of course. B: You see thought treats the Corporation as if it were there, just standing like the buildings. It says it is a reality, it is not a mere... I think it is in this question of reality, you see, if you say there are certain realities which are independent of thought, there are certain things that are appearances, like if you are standing on a cliff looking at the ocean, you see all the play of light which is not independent reality but it is due to the sky, the sea, and me, you see, all interrelated. K: Of course, of course. B: So it is important to keep clear whether it is a reality that is dependent on this whole movement, or whether it stands self-generated, you know - independent. Thought is treating me as an independent reality. K: Of course. B: And thought is saying it is coming from me and therefore it doesn't take credit for what it does. K: To me thought has created the me. S: That's right. K: And so the me is not separate from thought. It is the structure of thought. S: Right, right. K: The nature of thought that has made me. S: Right. K: Now: does thought, does your thinking, or does your thought realize this? S: I would say, yes and no. K: No, no. S: In flashes it does. K: No, not in flashes. You don't see that table in a flash, it is always there. S: I think what actually happens though is that you see the act. If one can be really honest about this, completely true about it, what happens, what is the actuality of thought seeing this creation? K: No. We asked a question yesterday, we stopped there: does thought see itself in movement? S: Right. K: The movement has created the me, created the chaos, created the division, created the conflict, jealousy, anxiety, fear and all that. S: Right. Now what I am asking is another question: that yesterday we came to a moment where we said thought stops. K: No, that is much later. Please just stick to one thing. S: OK. Thought - what I am trying to get at is what is the actuality of thought seeing itself. K: Tell me. You want me to describe it? S: No, no, I don't want you to describe it. What I am trying to get at is what is my actuality. I mean what is the actuality that thought sees. And as I observe this - we get into language here, the problem of language - but it seems that thought sees and forgets. K: No, no, please. I am asking a very simple question. Don't complicate it. S: Right. K: Does thought see the chaos it has created? That's all. Which means, is thought aware of itself as a movement? Not I am aware of thought. The I has been created by thought. B: I think the question that is relevant is: why does thought keep on going? You see how does it sustain itself? Because as long as it sustains itself it does produce something like an independent reality, an illusion of one. K: Why does thought... B: Why does thought keep on going? S: What is my relationship to thought? K: You are thought. There is not a you related to thought. B: That's the way when the language says there is, when it says, 'I am the entity who is doing, producing the thought'. K: Of course, of course. B: Which is to say, like General Motors says, "I am the Corporation which is producing automobiles". S: Right. But look, look: you are right. The question is: I say to you, "What is my relationship to thought?", you say to me, "You are thought". In some way what you say is clear, but that is still what's coming from me, do you see? That is still the way thought is moving, to say it is my relationship to thought. B: Well that's the point, you see. Can this very thought stop right now? Do you see. K: Yes. B: What is sustaining this whole thing, at this very moment, was the question I was trying to get at. S: Yes, that's the question. B: In other words, say we have a certain insight, but something happens to sustain the old process nevertheless right now. K: That's right. S: Right now thought keeps moving. K: No, he asked, Dr Bohm asked a very good question which we haven't answered. He said why does thought move? B: When it is irrelevant to moving. K: Why is it always moving? S; That's right. K: So what is movement? Movement is time. Right? S: That's too quick. Movement is time. K: Obviously, of course. B: But I think... S: Movement is movement. K: No, no. From here to there. S: Right, just like that. K: Yes, from here to there. S: Right. K: Physically, from here to London, from here to New York. And also psychologically from here to there. S: Right. K: I am this; I must be that. S: Right. But a thought is not necessarily all that. K: Thought is the movement. We are examining movement, which is thought. S: Thought... K: Look: if thought stopped there is no movement. S: Yes, I know. This has to be made very clear. B: I think there is a kind of step that might help, you see. To ask myself what is it that makes me go on thinking or talking. In other words, I often can watch people and see they are in a hole just because they keep on talking: if they would stop talking the whole problem would vanish. I mean it is just this flow of words, because what they say then comes out as if it were reality in them, and then they say, that is my problem, it is real, and I have got to think some more. I think there is a kind of a feedback. Suppose I say, 'Well, I have got a problem, I am suffering'. S: You have got an 'I' though. B: Yes. I mean I think that, you see, therefore I have a sense I am real. I am thinking of my suffering but in that it is implicit that it is I who is there, and that the suffering is real because I am real. S: Right. B: And then comes the next thought, which is: since that is real I must think some more. S: Right. B: Because if it were that would be the case. S: It feeds on itself. B: Yes. And then one of the things I must think, what is my problem, which is that I am suffering. And I am compelled to keep on thinking that thought all the time. Do you see? And maintaining myself in existence. Do you see what I am driving at? That there is a feedback. K: Which means that as thought is movement, which is time, as there is no movement I am dead! I am dead. B: Yes, if that movement stops, then the sense that I am there being real must go, because that sense that I am real is the result of thinking. K: Do you see this is extraordinary. S: Of course it is. K: No, no, actually. In actuality, not in theory. S: No, right. K: One realizes thought as movement. Right? S: Right. K: There is not, "I realize thought as a movement", thought itself realizes it is a movement. It is in movement. S: Right. B: And in this movement it creates an image of... K: Of me, or... B: ...that is supposed to be moving. K: Yes, yes. S: Right. K: Now when that movement stops there is no me. The me is the time, is time, put together by time, which is thought. S: Right. K: So do you, listening to this, realize the truth of it? Not the verbal logical truth, logical statement, but the truth of such an amazing thing? Therefore there is an action entirely different from that. The action of thought as movement brings about a fragmentary action, a contradictory action. When the movement as thought comes to an end there is total action. B: Can you say then that whatever technical thought comes about has an order? K: Of course. B: In other words it doesn't mean that thought is permanently gone. K: No, no. S: It can still be a movement in its proper place. In its fitting order. Right and proper. K: Of course. S: And it comes about. I mean the brain can still do that thing. B: Yes. K: So am I - not, am I - a human being, is he afraid of all this? Unconsciously, deeply, he must realize the ending of me. Do you understand? And that is really a most frightening thing: my knowledge, my books, my wife - you followthe whole thing which thought has put together. And you are asking me to end all that. B: I mean, can't you say it is the ending of everything? Because everything that I know is in there. K: Absolutely. So you see really I am frightened, a human being is frightened of death - not the biological death. S: To die now. K: Death of this coming to an end. And therefore he believes in god, reincarnation, a dozen other comforting things but in actuality when thought realizes itself as movement and sees that movement has created the me, the divisions, the quarrels, the political - the follow - the whole structure of the chaotic world, when thought realizes, it sees the truth of it and ends. Therefore it is in Cosmos. Then there is Cosmos. Now you listen to this: how do you receive it? S: Do you want me to answer? K: Receive it. S: Receive it. K: I offer you something. How do you receive it? This is very important. S: Yes. Thought sees its movement... K: No, no. How do you receive it? How does the public, who listens to all this, say how am I listening to this, what is he trying to tell me. S: How? K: He says I am not telling you anything. He says listen to what I am saying and find out for yourself whether thought as movement, in that movement it has created all this, both the technological world which is useful, which is necessary, and this chaotic world. S: Right. K: How do you receive, listen to it; or the public, another who is not here, listen to it? How do you listen to it? How do you? What takes place in you when you listen to it? S: Panic. K: No. Is it? S: Yes. K: Eh? S: There is a panic about the death, a sort of fear of the death. There is a seeing, there is a sense of seeing and then there is a fear of that death. K: Which means you have listened to the words, the words have awakened the fear. S: Right. K: But not the actuality of the fact. S: I wouldn't say that. I think that is a little unfair. They awaken the... K: I am asking you. S: ...they awaken the actuality of the fact, and then there seems to be a very quick process. There is an actuality of the fact and there seems to be a silence, a moment of great clarity that gives way to a kind of feeling in the pit of the stomach where things are dropping out and then there is a kind of... K: Withholding. S: ...withholding, right. I think there is a whole movement there. K: So you are describing humanity. S: Yes, I am trying. Yes; no, I am describing me. K: You are the humanity. B: You are the same. S: Right. K: You are the viewer, the people who are listening. S: Right. That's right. So there is a sense of what will happen tomorrow? K: No, no. That is not the point. What will happen... S: That is, I am telling you, that is the fear. K: No. When thought realizes as a movement, and that movement has created all this chaos, total chaos, not just patchy, but complete disorder, when it realizes that, what takes place, actually? You are not frightened, there is no fear. Listen to it carefully: there is no fear. Fear is the idea brought about by an abstraction. You understand? You have made a picture of ending, and frightened of that ending. S: You are right. You are right. There's stop... K: There is no fear. S: No fear, and then there is... K: There is no fear when the actuality takes place. S: That's right. When the actuality takes place there is silence. K: With the fact there is no fear. B: But as soon as the thought comes in... K: That's right. S: That's right. Now wait a minute, no don't go away. (Laughter) When thought comes in... K: We have got two minutes more. S: OK. Three minutes. K: Go on. S: The fact and the actuality, no fear. K: Ah, that's right. That's it. S: Right. But then thought comes in. K: No. Then it is no longer a fact. You can't remain with the fact. B: Well that is the same as to say that you keep on thinking. K: Keep on moving. B: Yes. Well I mean as soon as you bring thought in it is not a fact, that is an imagination or a fantasy which is felt to be real, but it is not so. S: Right, no. B: Therefore you are not with the fact any longer. K: We have discovered something extraordinary: when you are faced with fact there is no fear. S: Right. B: So all fear is thought, is that it? K: All. That's right. S: That's a big mouthful here. K: No. All thought is fear, all thought is sorrow. B: That goes both ways: that all fear is thought, and all thought is fear. K: Of course. B: Except the kind of thought that arises with the fact alone. S: I want to interject something right here, if we have got one second. And that is, it seems to me that we have discovered something quite important right here, and that is at the actual seeing, then the instant of attention is at its peak. K: No. Something new takes place, sir. S: Yes. K: Something totally that you have never looked at, it has never been understood or experienced, whatever it is. There is a totally different thing happens. B: But isn't it important that we acknowledge this in our thought, I mean in our language? K: Yes. B: As we are doing now. In other words, that if it happened and we didn't acknowledge it then we are liable to fall back. K: Of course, of course. S: I don't get you. B: Well, we have to see it not only when it happens, but we have to see it happens and we have to say that it happens. S: Well then are we creating a place to localise this, or not? K: No, no. What he is saying is very simple. He is saying, does this fact, actuality, take place. And can you remain with that, can thought not move in but remain only with that fact. Sir, it is like saying: remain totally with sorrow, not move away, not say it should be, shouldn't be, how am I to get over it, self pity and all the rest of it, just totally remain with that thing, with the fact. Then you have an energy which is extraordinary. S: Right. K: Can you? 5TH CONVERSATION WITH DR BOHM & DR SHAINBERG BROCKWOOD PARK 19TH MAY 1976 'TRANSFORMATION OF MAN' Krishnamurti: When we were talking about the necessity of human beings changing, and why they don't change, why they accept these intolerable conditions of the human psyche, I think we ought to go, or approach the same thing from a different angle: who has invented this unconscious? Shainberg: Who has invented it? I think there is a difference in what we call the unconscious and what is the unconscious. The word is not the thing. K: Yes, the word is not the thing. Who has thought it up? S: Well, I think the history of thinking about the unconscious is a long and involved process. I think it began... K: May we ask, have you an unconscious? S: Have I? Again, we are into a language problem here. K: No. S: Have I an unconscious. K: Are you aware of your unconscious? Do you know if you have an unconscious that is operating differently, or trying to give you hints, you know, all that, are you aware of all that? S: Yes. I am aware of an aspect of myself. I look at it a little differently: I look at it that there is an aspect of myself that is aware incompletely. That is what I call the unconscious. Is aware of my experience, aware of the events in an incomplete way. That's what I call the unconscious. Now it uses symbols and different modes of telling, of understanding, in other words a dream where I am discovering jealousy in the dream that I wasn't aware of. K: Do you also give importance, Dr Bohm, to a feeling that there is such a thing? Bohm: Well, I don't know what you mean by that. I think we can say that there are some things we do whose origin we are not aware of. You see, we react, we use words in an habitual way. S: We have dreams. B: We have dreams, I mean I suppose we... K: I am going to question all that because I am not sure... S: You are not questioning that we have dreams? K: No. But I want to question, or ask the experts, if there is such a thing as the unconscious. For me somehow I don't think it has played any important part in my life at all. S: Well, it depends on what you mean. K: I will tell you what I mean. Something hidden, something incomplete, something that I have to go after consciously or unconsciously, you know, go after and discover, unearth it, explore it and expose it. S: Right, right. K: See the motive, see the hidden intentions. S: Right, right. B: Well, could we make it clear? There are some things people do where you can see they are not aware of what they are doing, but some things of the nature of thought. K: I don't quite follow. B: Well, people, for example, this Freudian slip of the tongue, somebody makes a slip of the tongue which expresses his will. K: Yes, yes, I didn't mean that. Quite. S: That would be unconscious. That is what people would think of as the unconscious. You see I think there are two problems here, if I can just put in a technical statement here. There are those people, and there has arisen in the history of thinking about the unconscious, people who think that like the unconscious is a thing and that there are things in the unconscious which are there and must be lifted out. Then I think that there are a large group of people now who think of the unconscious as areas of behaviour, areas of response, areas of experience that we aren't aware of, totally aware of all that goes into what happens; so that in the daytime you might have, let's say, an experience of stress, or like you would say, disorder, you didn't finish with the experience and at night you go through reworking it in a new way. K: I understand all that. S: You know about that. So that would be the unconscious in operation. You get other things, let's say, from the past or from previous programmes of action. K: I mean, the collective unconscious, the racial unconscious. B: Let's say somebody has been deeply hurt in the past, and you can see his whole behaviour is governed by that. But he doesn't know, he may not know it. K: Yes, that I understand. S: But his response is always from the past. K: Yes, quite. What I am trying to find out is why we have divided it, the conscious and the unconscious. Or is it one unitary total process, moving? Not hidden, not concealed but moving as a whole current. And we come along, these clever brainy birds come along and split it up and say there is the unconscious and the conscious, the hidden, the incomplete, the storehouse of racial memories, family memories and all that. S: The reason that happened, I think, is that, well just partially explained, is the fact that Freud and Jung and these people that were seeing patients, out of which grew so much of the knowledge about the unconscious, would see patients, people who had separated it, had fragmented off this movement which you are talking about. K: That's what I want to get at. S: Right. In other words, a woman who says - the whole history of hysteria, you know, where patients couldn't move their arms, you know. K: I know. S: You know about that. And then if you open up the memories and then they eventually can move their arms. They put two and two together, they don't think it worked that way but that is the way they did it. Or there were people who had dual personalities. K: Is it an insanity - not insanity - is it a state of mind that divides everything, that says, there is the unconscious, conscious? It is a process of fragmentation also. S: Right. B: Well, wouldn't you say that certain material is made, even Freud has said, that certain material is made unconscious by the brain because it is too disturbing. K: That is what I want to get at. S: It is fragmented. B: I mean that is well known in all schools of psychology. S: That's right. That is what I am saying. That it is fragmented off and that then was called the unconscious. What is fragmented is the unconscious. K: I understand that. B: But would one say that the brain itself is on purpose in some sense holding it separate to avoid it? S: Right. K: Yes, avoid facing the fact. S: That's right. B: Yes. So that it is not really separate from consciousness. K: That is what I want to get at. You see? S: Right. It isn't separate from consciousness, but the brain has organized in a fragmented way. B: Yes, but then it is a wrong terminology to call it that. The word 'unconscious' already implies a separation. K: That's right, separation. B: To say there are two layers, for example, the deep unconscious and the surface consciousness, that structure is implied. But this other notion is to say that structure is not implied, but rather, certain material wherever it may be is simply avoided. S: That's right. That is the way I think about it. K: I don't want to think about somebody because he has hurt me. That is not the unconscious, it's I don't want to think about him. S: That's right. K: I am conscious he has hurt me and I don't want to think about it. B: But there is a kind of paradoxical situation arise, because eventually you would become so good at it that you don't realize you are doing it. I mean that seems to happen, you see. K: Yes, yes. B: People become so proficient at avoiding these things that they cease to realize they are doing it. K: Yes. B: It becomes habitual. S: That is right. I think this is what happens. That these kinds of things, the hurts... K: The wound remains. S: ...the wound remains and we forgets that we have forgotten. K: The wound remains. B: We remember to forget, you see! K: Yes. S: We remember to forget and then the process, actually the process of therapy is helping the remembering and the recall, to remember you have forgotten, and then to understand the connections of why you forgot, and then the thing can move in a more holistic way, rather than being fragmented. K: Do you consider, or feel that you have been hurt? S: Yes. K: And want to avoid it? Or, being hurt, resist, withdraw, isolate, the whole picture being the image of yourself being hurt and withdrawing, and all that - do you feel that when you are hurt? S: Yes, I feel - how shall I put it? I think, I think it is... K: Are you interested in this? Let's go into this. S: Yes, I feel there is definitely a move not to be hurt, not to have that image, not to have that whole thing changed because if it is changed it seems to catapult into that same experience that was the hurt. You see it may not. This is hurt but this has a resonation with that unconscious which reminds me. You see, I am reminded of being hurt deeply by this more superficial hurt. K: I understand that. S: So that I avoid hurt, period. K: Can the brain have a shock? Of course, the biological, physical shock, but the psychological brain, if we can call it that, must it be hurt? Is that inevitable? S: No, I don't think so. It is only hurt with reference to something. K: No. I am asking: can such a psychological brain, if I can use those two words, never be hurt under any circumstances? You know, family life, husband, wife, bad friends, so-called enemies, all that is going on around you and never get hurt? Because apparently this is one of the major wounds in human existence, to get hurt; the more sensitive you are, the more aware, you get more and more hurt, more and more withdrawn. Is this inevitable? S: I don't think it is inevitable, but I think it happens frequently, I mean more often than not. And it seems to happen when there is -how can I describe it? - an attachment is formed and then the loss of the attachment. You become important to me, what you think. You become important to me, I like you, or I am involved with you, then it becomes important to me that you don't do anything that disturbs that image. K: That is, in that relationship between two people the picture that we have of each other, the image, that is the cause of hurt. B: Well, it also goes the other way: that we hold those images because of hurt, I mean. K: Of course, of course. B: Where does it start? K: That is what I want to get at. S: That is what I want to get at too. K: No, he pointed out something. S: Right. I know he did, yes. B: Because the past hurt gives tremendous strength to the image, the image which helps us to forget it. S: That's right. K: Now is this wound in the unconscious - we use the word unconscious in quotes for the time being - is that hidden? S: Well, I think you are being a little simplistic about that, because what is hidden is the fact that I have had the event happen many times, it happened with my mother, it happened with my friends, it happened in school, where I cared about somebody and then the image - it's like you form the attachment and then the hurt. K: I am not at all sure through attachment it comes. S: I think it is something. May be it is not attachment, that is the wrong world, but there is something there that happens. What happens is that I form a relationship with you where an image becomes important? What you do to me becomes important. K: You have an image about yourself. S: That's right. And you are saying that I like you because you are confirming my image? K: No, apart from like and dislike, apart from like and dislike, you have an image about yourself. S: Right. K: I come along and put a pin in that image. S: No, first you come along and confirm it. K: No. B: The hurt will be greater if you first come along and be very friendly to me and confirm the image, and then suddenly you put a pin in me. K: Of course, of course. B: But even somebody who didn't confirm it, if he puts the pin in properly he can produce that hurt. S: That's right. That's not unconscious. But how come, like you said, why did I have the image to begin with? That is unconscious. K: Is it unconscious? That is what I want to get at. Or it is so obvious that we don't look? You follow what I am saying? S: I follow, yes. I am with you on this. K: We put it away. We say it is hidden. I question whether it is hidden at all; it is so blatantly obvious. S: I wonder if all the ingredients of it are. I tell you, I don't feel all parts of it are obvious. B: I think we hide it in one sense, you see, shall we say that this hurt means that everything is wrong with the image, but we hide it by saying everything is all right, you see, for example. In other words, the thing that is obvious may be hidden by saying it is unimportant, that we don't notice it. S: Yes, we don't notice it, but it like I get the feeling as we are talking personally, I get the feeling there is a kind of, well, I ask myself what is it that kind of generates this image, what is that hurt? K: Ah, we will come to that. We are enquiring, aren't we, into the whole structure of consciousness. S: Right, right. That is just what we are enquiring into. K: Into the nature of consciousness. We have broken it up into the hidden and the open. It may be the fragmented mind is doing that. S: That's right. K: And therefore strengthening both. S: Right. K: The division grows greater and greater and greater. S: The fragmented mind is... K: ...doing this. Now most people have an image about themselves, practically everybody. S: Right. Practically everybody. K: It is that image that gets hurt. And that image is you, and you say, "Well, I am hurt". B: It is the same as we were discussing this morning. K: Yes. B: You see, if I say I have a pleasant self image, then I attribute the pleasure to me and say, that's real. When somebody hurts me then the pain is attributed to me and I say, that's real too. It seems that if you have an image that can give you pleasure then it must be able to give you pain. K: Pain, yes. B: There is no way out of that. K: Absolutely. S: Well, the image seems to be self perpetuating, like you were saying. B: I think people hope that the image will give them pleasure. Right? K: Pleasure only. B: Only pleasure, but the very mechanism that makes pleasure possible makes pain possible because you see the pleasure comes if I say, "I think I am good", and that I is also sensed to be real, which makes that goodness real; but then if somebody comes along and says, "You are no good, you are stupid", and so on then that too is real, and therefore very significant. I mean it makes it hurt. Right? K: The image brings both pleasure and pain. B: Yes. S: Right. K: To put it very, very simply. B: I think people would hope for an image that would bring only pleasure. S: People do hope that, there is no question. But people not only hope for the image but they invest all their interest in their image, they say, "I should not be this way because I am in fact the image". So that they go both ways at the same time. That is the most curious thing about the mind. I am the image but when I discover that I am not the image then I should be that way because I really am that. So it works both ways. B: But the image, you see I think that if you make the self image and you get what is implied in that; that is to say everything depends on having the self image right, you see. In other words... S: That's right. B: ...the value of everything depends on this self image being right. So if somebody, you know, shows it's wrong, therefore everything, you know, is no good, everything is wrong. S: That's right. K: But we are always giving new shape to the image. S: That's right. B: I think that this image means everything, so it gives it tremendous power. S: The entire personality is directed to the achievement of this image. Everything else takes second place. K: Are you aware of this? S: Yes, I am aware of it. K: How? What is the beginning of this? S: Well... K: Please, just let me summarize first. Every human being practically has an image of themself, of which he is unconscious, or not aware. S: That's right. Usually it's some sort of idealized... K: Idealized, or not idealized, it is an image. S: That's right. It is an image, it's idealized and they must have it. K: They have it. B: They have it. S: They have money, they must get all their actions towards 'must have it'. In other words to accomplish it. B: I think one feels one's whole life depends on the image. K: Yes, that's right. S: Depression is when I don't have it. K: We will come to that. The next question is: how does it come into being? S: Well, I think it comes into being when as children there is this hurt and there is the feeling that there is no other way in which this hurt can be assuaged. Really it works in the family in some way. You are my father and I understand through my watching you that if I am smart you will like me. Right? K: Quite. We agree. S: I learn that very quickly. So I am going to make sure I get that love, so I am going to go from here to there. I am going to become that. K: It is all very simple. But I am asking: the beginning of it? The origin of making images about oneself. B: You see if I had no image at all then I would never get into that, would I? K: Yes, that is what I want to get at. B: You see why does... S: If I never made images. B: Yes. If I never made any image at all, no matter what my father did that would have no effect, would it? K: I think this is very important. S: That is the question. B: I am saying may be the child can't do it, but suppose so. K: I am not sure, I am not at all sure. B: Perhaps he can, but I am saying under ordinary conditions he doesn't manage to do it. S: You are suggesting that the child already has an image that he has been hurt. K: Ah, no, no. I don't know. We are asking. B: But suppose there were a child who made no image of himself. S: OK Let's assume he has no image. B: Then he cannot get hurt. K: He can't be hurt. S: Well, there you see I think you are in very hot water psychologically because a child... K: No, we said, 'suppose'. S: Suppose. B: Not the actual child, you know, but suppose there were a child who didn't make an image of himself so he didn't depend on that image for everything. You see the child you talk about depended on the image that his father loves him. S: That's right. B: And therefore everything goes when his father doesn't love him, everything has gone. Right? S: Right, right. B: Therefore he is hurt. S: That's right. B: But if he has no image that he must have his father love him, then he will just watch his father. S: The child who is watching his father... But let's look at it a little more pragmatically: here is the child and he is actually hurt. B: Well wait, he can't be hurt without the image. S: Well, that's... B: What is going to get hurt? K: It is like putting a pin into the air. S: Now wait a second, I am not going to let you guys get away with this! Here you have got this child, very vulnerable in the sense that he needs physiological support. He has enormous tensions. K: Sir, agreed to all that. Such a child has an image. S: No, no image. He is simply not being biologically supported. K: No. Eh? B: Well, he may make an image of the fact that he is not biologically supported. You see you have to get the difference between the actual fact that happens biologically and what he thinks of it. Right? Now you see I have seen a child sometimes drop suddenly, he really goes to pieces not because he was dropped very far but because that sense of... K: Loss, insecurity. B: ...insecurity from his mother was gone. It seemed as if everything had gone. Right? And he was totally disorganized and screaming, but he dropped only about this far, you see. But the point is he had an image of the kind of security he was going to get from his mother. Right? S: That is the way the nervous systems works. B: Well, that is the question, is it, everything we are discussing. Is it necessary to work that way? Or is this the result of conditioning? S: Yes, I would say yes. K: This is an important question. S: Oh, terribly important. K: Because whether in America or in this country, children are running away from their parents, thousands are running away. The parents seem to have no control over them. They don't obey, they don't listen, they don't - you follow? They are wild. S: Yes. K: And the parents feel terribly hurt. I saw on the TV what is happening in America. And the woman was in tears - you follow? She said, "I am his mother, he doesn't treat me as a mother, he just orders me, give me a bottle of milk", and all the rest of it. And he has run away half a dozen times. And this is growing, this separation between the parents and the children is growing all over the world. They have no relationship between themselves, between each other. So what is the cause of all this, apart from sociological, economic pressures and all that, which makes the mother go and work and leave the child alone, and he plays, you know, all that, we take that for granted, but much deeper than that? Is it the parents have an image about themselves and the parents insist in creating an image in the children? S: I see what you are saying. K: And the child refuses to have that image but he has his own image. So the battle is on. S: That is very much what I am saying when I say that initially the hurt of the child... K: We haven't come to the hurt yet. S: Well, that is where I am trying to get; what is in that initial relationship? What is the initial relationship between child... K: I doubt if they have any relations. That is what I am trying to get at. S: That's right. I agree with you. There is something wrong with the relationship. They have a relationship but it is a wrong relationship. K: Have they a relationship? S: They have a... K: Look: young people get married, or not. They have a child by mistake, or intentionally they have a child. The young people, they are children themselves, they haven't understood the universe, Cosmos or chaos, they just have this child. S: That's right. That is what happens. K: And they play with it for a year or two and then say, "For god's sake, I am fed up with this child", and look elsewhere. And the child feels left, lost. S: That's right. K: And he needs security, from the beginning he needs security. S: Right. K: Which the parents cannot give, or are incapable of giving, psychological security, the sense of "you are my child, I love you, I'll look after you, I'll see that throughout life you will behave properly, care". They haven't got that feeling. S: Right. K: They are bored with it after a couple of years. S: That's right. K: Right? S: Yes. K: Is it that they have no relationship right from the beginning, neither the husband, nor the wife, boy or girl? It is only a sexual relationship, the pleasure relationship; in accepting that, they won't accept the pain principle involved with the pleasure principle. S: That's right. They won't and not only that, they won't let the child go through that. K: The child is going through that. S: Yes, but they do things that don't let the child have the pleasure that goes all the way, nor do they let the child have the pain that goes all the way. K: What I am trying to see is that there is actually no relationship at all, except biological, sexual, sensual relationship. S: Yes, OK. K: I am questioning it, I am not saying it is so, I am questioning it. S: I don't think it is so. I think that they have a relationship, but it is a wrong relationship, there are all kinds of... K: There is no wrong relationship: it is a relationship, or no relationship. S: Well then we will have to say they have a relationship. Now we will have to understand the relationship. But I think that most parents have a relationship with their child. B: Wouldn't you say it is the image that is related? You see, suppose the parent and child have images of each other, and the relationship is governed by those images, the question is whether that is actually a relationship or not, or whether it is some sort of fantasy of relationship. K: A fanciful relationship. B: Yes. K: Sir, put it: you have children - forgive me if I come back to you - you have children. Have you any relationship with them? No, in the real sense of that word. S: Yes. K: Eh? S: In the real sense, yes. K: That means you have no image about yourself. S: Right. K: And you are not imposing an image on them. S: That's right. K: And the society is not imposing an image on them. S: There are moments like that. K: That is not good enough. It is like a rotten egg! S: This is an important point. B: If it is moments, it is not so. It is like saying a person who is hurt has moments when he is not hurt, but he is sitting there waiting to explode when something happens. K: Happens, yes. B: You see. So he can't go very far. It is like somebody who is tied to a rope, and as soon as he reaches the limits of that rope he is stuck. S: That is right. B: So you could say, I am related as long as certain things are all right, but then beyond that point it just sort of blows up. You see what I am driving at? That mechanism is inside there, buried, so it dominates it potentially. S: In fact what you just said is fact. B: Yes. S: I will verify that that is what happens. In other words, there seems that there are moments in which there are... B: Well, it is like the man who is tied to a rope and says there are moments when I can move wherever I like, but I can't really because if I keep on moving I am bound to come to the end. S: That does seem to be what happens, in fact, that there is a reverberation in which there is yank-back. B: Either I come to the end of the cord, or else something yanks the cord and then - but the person who is on the cord is really not free ever. S: Well, that's true, I mean, I think that is true. B: You see in the same sense the person who has the image is not really related ever, you see. K: Yes, that is just the whole point. You can play with it. S: Yes. K: You can play with it verbally, but the actual is you have no relationship. S: You have no relationship as long as it is the image. K: As long as you have an image about yourself you have no relationship with another. This is a tremendous revelation. You follow? It is not just an intellectual statement. S: Let me share with you something: I resent this. K: I see that. S: You see that. I mean I am rather angry with you. (Laughter) There is a real - we have seen this in other places. B: It always happens. S: It happens. But I was thinking we had psychotherapy, the meaning of the psychotherapists, this came up. There is a tremendous resentment to say that because I have the memory of times when I do have what I think is a relationship, yet I must be honest with you and say that after such relationship there inevitably seems to be this yank-back. B: The end of the cord. S: Yes. A yank-back. So that I must... (Laughter) There is that. There is no question that the image - there is a place where you say you have a relationship with somebody but you will go just so far. B: Yes. K: Of course. That is understood. B: But then really the image controls it all the time because you see the image is the dominant factor. If you once pass that point, no matter what happens, the image takes over. S: That's right. K: So, the image gets hurt. And the child, do you impose the image on the child? You are bound to because you have an image. S: You are trying to. K: No. S: Well no, you are working at it and the child picks it up, or he doesn't pick it up. K: No, no. Because you have an image about yourself you are bound to create an image in the child. S: That is right. K: That is it. You follow, you have discovered? And society is doing this to all of us. B: So you say the child is picking up an image just naturally, as it were, quietly and then suddenly it gets hurt. K: Hurt. That's right. B: So the hurt has been prepared and preceded by this steady process of building an image. S: That's right. Well you know, there is evidence, for instance, we treat boys differently from the way we treat girls. K: No. Look at it: don't verbalize it too quickly. B: You see if the steady process of building an image didn't occur then there would be no basis, no structure to get hurt. You see that it is. In other words, the pain is due entirely to some psychological factor, some thought which is attributed to me in saying, "I am suffering this pain". Whereas I was previously enjoying the pleasure of saying, "My father loves me, I am doing what he wants." Now comes the pain: "I am not doing what he wants, he doesn't love me". S: But what about the initial hurts? K: No, if you once... B: I think we have gone beyond that point. K: Beyond that point. S: I don't think we touched on the biological situation of the child feeling neglected. B: Well that is still, if the child is neglected, I mean, I think he must pick up an image in that very process. K: Of course. If you admit, once you admit, see the reality that as long as the parents have an image about themselves they are bound to give that image to the child, an image. B: It is the image that makes the parent neglect the child. S: Well you are right there. K: It is right. S: There is no question as long as the parent is an image-maker and has an image, then he can't see the child. K: And therefore gives an image to the child. S: Right. He will condition the child to be into something. K: Yes. B: Yes. And at first perhaps through pleasure he will get hurt. But if he begins by neglecting him, you see the process of neglect is also the result of an image and he must communicate an image to the child as he neglects the child. S: Which is neglect. B: Yes, neglect is the image. S: Right. K: That's right. And also the parents are bound to neglect if they have an image about themselves. B: That's right. S: That's right. They must. Right. K: It is inevitable. S: Because they are fragmenting rather than seeing the whole. B: Yes, the child will get the image that he doesn't matter to his parents. S: Except in that fragment. B: In the fragment, they like and so on. S: So if you are this way, I am with you, if you are not that way... K: But you see society is doing this to every human being. Right? Churches are doing it; churches, religions, every culture around us is creating this image. S: That is right. K: And that image gets hurt, and all the rest of it. Now, the next question is: is one aware of all this, which is part of our consciousness? S: Right, right. K: The content of consciousness makes us consciousness. Right? That is clear. S: Right. K: So one of the contents is the image making, or may be the major machinery that is operating, the major dynamo, the major movement. Being hurt, which every human being is, can that hurt be healed and never be hurt again? That is, can a human mind which has accepted the image which creates the image, put away the image completely and never be hurt. And therefore in consciousness a great part of it is empty, it has no content. I wonder. S: Can it? I really don't know the answer to that. K: Why? S: I know the answer only that I believe you could. K: Who is the image maker? What is the machinery or the process that is making images, making images? I may get rid of one image and take on another: I am a Catholic, I am a Protestant, I am a Hindu, I am a Zen monk, I am this, I am that. You follow? They are all images. S: Who is the image maker? K: You see after all if there is an image of that kind, how can you have love in all this? S: We don't have an abundance of it. K: We don't have it. S: That's right. We have got a lot of images. That is why I say I don't know. I know about image making. K: It is terrible, sir, to have these. You follow? S: Right. I know about image making and I see it. And I see it even when you are talking about it. I can see it there and the feeling is one of, it is like a map, you know, you know where you are at because if I don't make this image I will make another. K: Of course, sir. S: If you don't make this one you will make another. K: We are saying is it possible to stop the machinery that is producing images? And what is the machinery? Is it wanting to be somebody? S: Yes. It is wanting to be somebody, it is wanting to know where, wanting to have, to reduce, somehow or other it seems to be wanting to handle the feeling that if I don't have it I don't know where I am at. K: Being at a loss? S: Yes. K: You see how clever? You follow? The feeling that you are at a loss, not to rely on anything, not to have any support, breeds more disorder. You follow? B: Well, that is one of the images because communicated to it as a child to say that if you don't have an image of yourself you don't know what to do at all. K: That is... B: You don't know what your parents are going to do if you start acting without an image. I mean you may do something and they may just simply be horrified. S: That's right. K: The image is the product of thought. Right? S: It is organized. K: Yes, a product of thought. It may go through various forms of pressures and all the rest of it, a great deal of conveyor belt, and at the end produces an image. S: Right. No question. I agree with you there, yes. It is definitely the product of thought and that thought seems to be like, you know, the immediate action of knowing where you are at; or in trying to know where you are at. It is like there is a space. K: Can the machinery stop? Can thought which produces these images, which destroys all relationship, and therefore no love - not verbally, actually no love. Don't say, "I love my..." - when a man who has got an image about himself says, "I love my husband", or wife, or children, it is just sentiment, romantic, fanciful emotionalism. S: Right. K: So: as it is now there is no love in the world. There is no sense of real caring for somebody. S: That is true. People don't. K: The more affluent the worse it becomes. Not that the poor have this. I don't mean that. Poor people haven't got this either; they are after filling their stomachs, and clothes and work, work, work. B: But still they have got lots of images. K: Of course. I said both the rich and the poor have these images, whoever it is. S: Right. K: And these are the people who are correcting the world. Right? Who say, this must... you follow? They are the ordering of the universe. So I ask myself, can this image making stop: stop, not occasionally, stop it. Because I don't know what love means, I don't know how to care for somebody. And I think that is what is happening in the world because children are really lost souls, lost human beings, I have met so many, hundreds of them now, all over the world. They are really a lost generation. You understand? As the older people are a lost generation. So what is a human being to do? What is the right action in relationship? Can there be right action in relationship as long as you have an image? S: No. K: Ah! No, sir, this is tremendous, you follow. S: That is why I was wondering. You see it seemed to me you made a jump there. You said all we know somehow or other is images, and image making. That is all we know. K: But we have never said, can it stop. S: We have never said, can it stop. That is right. K: We have never said, for god's sake, if it doesn't stop we are going to destroy each other. B: You see, you could say that now the notion that we might stop is something more that we know, that we didn't know before. You see, in other words... K: ...it becomes another pieces of knowledge. B: But I was trying to say that when you say all we know, it is the same thing as before. I feel that a block comes in. S: Right. B: You see it is not much use to say, all we know. S: Because he said, can it stop - that is more. B: If you say, it is all we know, then it can never stop. K: He is objecting to your use of 'all'. S: I am grateful to you. B: That is one of the factors blocking it. S: Well, if we come down to it, I mean: what do we do with that question, can it stop? I mean there we are, we have got this question. K: I put that question to you. Do you listen to it? S: I listen to it. Right. K: Ah, do you? S: It stops. K: No, no. I am not interested in whether it stops. Do you listen to this statement, can it stop? We now examine, analyse, or examine this whole process of image making, the result of it, the misery, the confusion, the appalling things that are going on: the Arab has his image, the Jew, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian, the non - you follow - the communist. There is this tremendous division of images, symbols and all the rest of it. If that doesn't stop, you are going to have such a chaotic world - you follow? I see this, not as an abstraction, but as an actuality, as that flower. S: Right. K: And as a human being, what am I to do? Because I personally have no image about this. I really mean I have no image about myself: a conclusion, a concept, an ideal, all these are images. I have none. And I say to myself, what can I do when everybody around me is building images, and so destroying this lovely earth where we are meant to live happily, you know, in human relationship, and look at the heavens and be happy about it. So what is the right action for a man who has an image? Or, there is no right action? S: Let me turn it back. What happens with you when I say to you: can it stop? K: I say, of course. It is very simple to me. Of course it can stop. You don't ask me the next question: how do you do it? How does it come about? S: No, I just want to listen for a minute to when you say, "Yes, of course". OK, Now, how do you think it can? K: Five minutes, we have only five minutes. S: OK. Well, let's just touch on it. How can it stop? Let me put it to you straight. Let's see if I can get it straight. I have absolutely no evidence that it can, no experience that it can. K: I don't want evidence. S: You don't want any evidence. K: I don't want somebody's explanation. S: Or experience. K: Because they are based on images. S: Right. K: Future image, or past image, or living image. So I say: can it stop. I say it can: definitely. It is not just a verbal statement to amuse you. To me this is tremendously important. S: Well I think we agree that it is tremendously important, but how? K: Not 'how'. Then you enter into the question of systems, mechanical process, which is part of our image making. If I tell you how, then you say, tell me the system, the method, and I'll do it every day and I'll get the new image. S: Yes. K: Now I see the fact that is going on in the world. S: I have got it. I am with you, yes. K: Fact. Not my reactions to it, not romantic, fanciful theories, what it should not be. It is a fact that as long as there are images there is not going to be peace in the world, no love in the world -whether the Christ image, or the Buddha image or the Muslim, you follow. There won't be peace in the world. Right. I see it as a fact. Right? I remain with the fact. You follow? Finished. As this morning we said if one remains with the fact there is a transformation. Which is, not to let thought begin to interfere with the fact. B: The same as the morning, more images come in. K: More images come in. So our consciousness is filled with these images. S: Yes, that is true. K: I am a Hindu, Brahmin, I am my tradition I am better than anybody else, I am the chosen people, I am the Aryan, you follow. I am the only Englishman: all that is crowding my consciousness. B: When you say, remain with the fact, one of the images that may come in that it is impossible, it can never be done. K: Yes, that is another image. B: You see in other words if the mind could stay with that fact with no comment whatsoever. S: Well, the thing that comes through to me when you say that, is that when you say remain with the fact, you are really calling for an action right there. To really remain with it is that the action or perception is there. K: Sir, why do you make it so much? It is on you. You are involved in it. S: But that is different from remaining with it. K: Remain with that. S: To really see it. You know how that feels? It feels like something carries forward because we are always running away. K: So our consciousness, sir, is this image: conclusions, ideas, all that. S: We are always running away. K: Filling, filling and that is the essence of the image. If there is no image making then what is consciousness? That is quite a different thing. B: Do you think we could discuss that next time? K: Tomorrow. 6TH CONVERSATION WITH DR BOHM & DR SHAINBERG BROCKWOOD PARK 20TH MAY 1976 'TRANSFORMATION OF MAN' Krishnamurti: As you are such a well known physicist and scientist, practically every schoolboy knows about you throughout the world, I would like to ask after all these four, five dialogues that we have had, what will change man? Bohm: Well. (Laughter) K: What will bring about a radical transformation in the total consciousness of human beings? B: Well, I don't know that the scientific background is going to be very relevant to that question. K: No, probably not, but after we have talked considerably at length, not only now but in the previous years, what is the energy -I am using energy not in any scientific sense, just an ordinary sense, the vitality, the energy, the drive - which seems to be lacking? I mean after all if I listen to you as a viewer, to the three of us, I would say, "Yes, it is all very well for these philosophers, or these scientists, these experts, but it is outside my field. It is too far away. Bring it nearer. Bring it much closer so that I can deal with my life." B: Well, I think at the end of the last discussion we were touching on one point of that nature, because we were discussing images. K: Images, yes. B: And the self image. And questioning whether we have to have images at all. K: Of course, we went into that. But you see I want, as a viewer, totally outside, listening to you for the first time, the three of you, I would say, "Look how does it touch my life? It is all so vague and uncertain and it needs a great deal of thinking, which I am unwilling to do". You follow? "So please tell me in a few words, or at length, what am I to do with my life. Where am I to touch it? Where am I to break it down? From where am I to look at it? I have hardly any time: I go to the office; I go to the factory; I have got so many things to do - children, wife nagging, poverty". You follow? "The whole structure of misery and you sit there, you three, and talk about something which "c'est ne me touche pas" - it doesn't touch me in the least. So could we bring it down to brass tacks, as it were, where I can grapple with it as an ordinary human being?" B: Well, could we consider problems arising in daily relationship as the starting point? K: That is the essence, isn't it. I was going to begin with that. You see my relationship with human beings is in the office, in the factory, on a golf course. B: Or at home. K: Or at home. And at home it is pretty, you know, routine, sex, children, if I have children, if I want children, and the constant battle, battle, battle all my life. Insulted, wounded, hurt, everything is going on in me and around me. B: Yes, there is continual disappointment. K: Continual disappointment, continual hope, desire to be more successful, more money, more, more, more of everything. Now how am I to alter, change my relationship? What is the raison d'etre, the source of my relationship? If we could tackle that a little bit this morning, a little bit and go on to what we were discussing, which is really very important, which is not to have an image at all. B: Yes. But I mean it seems as we were discussing yesterday, we tend to be related almost always through the image. K: Through the image, that's right. B: You see I have an image of myself and of you as you should be in relation to me. K: Yes. B: And then that gets disappointed and hurt and so on. K: But how am I to change that image? How am I to break it down? I know after you have talked to me as an ordinary human being, I see very well I have got an image and it has been put together, constructed through generations. And I have got it. I am fairly intelligent, I am fairly aware of myself and I see I have got it. How am I to break it down? B: Well the point, as I see it, is that I have got to be aware of that image, to watch it as it moves, you see. K: So am I to watch it - I am taking the opposite - am I to watch it in the office? B: Yes. K: In the factory, at home, at the golf club, because in all these areas are my relationships. B: Yes. I would say I have to watch it on all those places, and also when I am not there. K: When I am not there. So I have to watch it all the time, in fact. B: Yes. K: Now am I capable of it? Have I got the energy because my wife wants sex, I don't want it, or I enjoy sex, I go through all kinds of miseries, and at the end of the day I crawl into bed. And you say I must have energy. So I must realize relationship is the greatest importance. B: Yes. K: Therefore I am willing to give up certain wastages of energy. B: What kind of wastage? K: Drink. B: Drink, yes. K: Smoke, useless chatter. B: Yes. K: Endless crawling from pub to pub. B: That would be the beginning, anyway. K: That would be the beginning. But you see I want all those plus more. You follow? B: But if I can see that everything depends on this... K: Of course. B: ...then I won't go to the pub, if I see that that interferes. K: So I must, as an ordinary human being, I must realize the greatest importance is to have right relationship. B: Yes. It would be good if we could say what happens when we don't have it. K: Oh, if I don't have it, of course. B: Everything goes to pieces. K: Everything goes to pieces; not only everything goes to pieces, I create such havoc around me. So can I by putting aside smoke, drink, pubs and you know the endless chatter about this or that, will I gather that energy? B: Well, that is the beginning. K: That I am asking: will I gather that energy which will help me to face the picture which I have, the image which I have? B: Yes. That means also must go ambition and many other things. K: Of course. You see I begin by obvious things, like smoke, drink, pubs and all the rest. Shainberg: Well, let me just stop you here. Suppose my image is that you are going to do it for me, and my real image is that I can't do it for myself. K: That is one of our favourite conditionings, that I can't do it myself therefore I must go to somebody to help me. S: Or I go to the pub because I see I can't do it for myself, so I create the condition, several things come from my going to the pub: one is I am in despair because I can't do it for myself, so I am going to obliterate myself through drink, so I no longer feel this pain. B: At least for the moment. S: That's right. And also too I am proving to myself that my image that I can't do it for myself is right. Look at me: I am on the ground, in the gutter. You going to deny that? Second of all, by treating myself in such a way I am going to prove to you I can't do it for myself. May be you can do it for me. K: No, no. I think we don't realize, any of us, the utter and absolute importance of right relationship. I don't think we realize it. S: I agree with you, we don't. K: With my wife, with my neighbour, with the office, wherever I am, I don't think we realize - with nature also - a relationship which is easy quiet, full, rich, happy, the beauty of it, the harmony of it. We don't realize that. Now can we tell the ordinary viewer, the listener, the great importance of that. S: Let's try. How can we communicate to somebody the value of a right relationship? You are my wife. You are whining, you are nagging me. Right? You think I should be doing something for you when I am tired and don't feel like doing anything for you. K: I know. Go to a party. S: That's right. Let's go to a party, you never take me out. K: Yes. S: Right. You never take me anywhere. K: So how are you, who realize the importance of relationship, to deal with me? How are you to deal with me? We have got this problem in life. B: I think it should be very clear that nobody can do it for me. You see whatever somebody else does it won't affect my relationship. S: How are you going to make that clear? B: But isn't it obvious? S: It is not obvious. I feel very strongly, I am the viewer, I feel very strongly that you ought to be doing it for me. My mother never did it for me, somebody has got to do it for me. B: But I mean, isn't it obvious that it can't be done? I mean, I am saying that that is just a delusion because whatever you do I will be in the same relationship as before. I mean suppose you live a perfect life. I mean I can't imitate it so I'll just go on as before, won't I? So I have to do something myself. Isn't that clear? S: But I don't feel able to do anything myself. B: But then can you see that if you don't do anything for yourself it is inevitable that it must go on. Any idea that it will ever get better is a delusion. S: Do you want to say that? Or can we say that right relationship begins with the realization that I have to do something for myself? K: And the utter importance of it. S: Right. The utter importance. The responsibility I have for myself. K: Because you are the world. S: Right. K: And the world is you. You can't shirk that. B: Perhaps we could discuss that a bit because it may seem strange to the viewer, to someone to say, "You are the world". K: After all, all that you are thinking, you are the result of the culture, the climate, the food, the environment, the economic conditions, your grandparents, you are the result of all that. S: Well, you can see that. I think you can see that. B: That's right. That's what you mean by saying you are the world. K: Of course, of course. S: Well, I think you can see that in just what I have been laying out here about the person who feels that he's entitled to be taken care of by the world: the world is in fact moving in that direction of all the pleasure and the technological... K: No, sir. This is a fact. You go to India, you see the same suffering, the same anxiety, and you come to Europe, to America, it, in essence, is the same. B: Each person has the same basic structure of suffering and confusion, and deception and so on. Therefore if I say, I am the world, I mean that there is a universal structure and it is part of me and I am part of that. K: Part of that, quite. So now let's proceed from that. The first thing you have to tell me as an ordinary human being, living in this mad rat race, you have to tell me, "Look, realize the utter, greatest important thing in life is relationship". You cannot have relationship if you have an image about yourself, or if you create a pleasurable image and stick to that. S: Or the image that you are entitled to, it comes before... K: Any form of image you have about another, or about yourself prevents the beauty of relationship. S: Right. B: Yes. You see the image that I am secure in such and such a situation, for example, and not secure in a different situation, that prevents relationship. K: That's right. B: Because I will say that I demand of the other person that he put me in the situation that I think is secure, you see. S: Right. B: And then he may not want it. S: Right. So that my relationship if I have the image of the pleasurable relationship, then all my actions are with reference to this other person, that I try to force him to move me into doing that, so that I have, a) I say to him, you should be this way because that would complete my image: b) I have what I call claims on the other person, in other words, I expect him to act in such a way that he acknowledges that image. B: Yes. Or I may say that I have the image of what is just and right. So in other words it is not that it is personally so but I would say that would be the right way for everybody to behave. S: Right. In order to complete my image. B: Yes. So for example the wife would say, "Husbands ought to take their wives out to parties frequently", that is part of the image. S: Right. B: Husbands have corresponding images and therefore that image gets hurt. Do you see? S: Right. Now: but I think we have to be very specific about this. Each little piece of this is with fury. B: With energy. S: Energy and fury and necessity to complete this image in relationship, therefore relationship gets forced into a mould. K: Sir, I understand all that. But you see most of us are not serious, we want an easy life. You come along and tell me: look, relationship is the greatest thing. I say, quite right. And I carry on the old way. What I am trying to get at is: what will make a human being listen to this, even seriously for two minutes? They won't listen to it. S: Right. K: If you went to one of the big experts on psychology, or whatever it is, they won't take time to listen to it. They have got their plans, their pictures, their images, you follow, they are surrounded by all this. So to whom are we talking to? B: Well to whoever can listen. S: We are talking to ourselves. K: No, not only that. Whom are we talking to? B: Well, whoever is able to listen. K: That means somebody who is somewhat serious. B: Yes. And I think you see that we may even form an image of ourselves of not being capable of being serious, and so on. K: That's right. B: In other words, that it is too hard. K: Too hard, yes. B: That is an image to say, I want it easy, which means it comes from the image that this is beyond my capacity. K: Quite. So let's move from there. We say as long as you have an image, pleasant or unpleasant, created, etc., etc., put together by thought and so on, there is no right relationship. That is an obvious fact. Right? S: Right. B: Yes, and life ceases to have any value without right relationship. K: Yes, life ceases to have any value without right relationship. Now my consciousness is filled with these images. S: Right. K: Right? And the images make my consciousness. S: That is right. K: Now you are asking me to have no images at all. That means no consciousness, as I know it now. Right sir? B: Yes, well could we say anyway that the major part of consciousness is the self image? Is that what you are saying? There may be some other parts, but... K: We will come to that. B: We come to that later. But most of it, for now - well, we are mostly occupied with the self image. K: Yes, that is right. S: What about the self image? And the whole way it generates itself, what do you think? B: Well, I think we discussed that before, that it gets caught on thinking of the self as real, and that is always implicit, you know, to say that for example the image may be that I am suffering in a certain way, and you see I must get rid of this suffering. You see there is always the implicit meaning in that that I am there, real, and therefore I must keep on thinking about this reality. And it gets caught in that feedback we were talking about. You see the thought feeds back and builds up. S: Builds up more images. B: More images, yes. S: So that is the consciousness. K: Wait. The content of my consciousness is... S: ...is all images. K: ...is a vast series of images, interrelated, not separated, interrelated. B: But they are all centred on the self. K: On the self, of course. The self is the centre. B: Yes, because they are all aimed at, or they are all for the self in order to make the self right, you know, correct. And the self is regarded as all important. K: Yes. B: That gives it tremendous energy. K: Now what I am getting at is: you are asking me, who am fairly serious, fairly intelligent, as an ordinary human being, you are asking me to empty that consciousness. S: Right. I am asking you to stop this image making. K: Not only the image making, the images that I have, and prevent further image making. S: Right, right. K: Both are involved. S: Yes, I am asking you to look at the machinery of consciousness. K: Yes. Wait a minute. I want to get at that. This is very important because... S: OK. Let's go! K: You are asking me, and I want to understand you because I really want to live a different way of living because I see it is necessary. I don't play with words. I don't want to be high faluting. I want to deal with this thing. You are asking me to be free of the self, which is the maker of images, and to prevent further image making. S: Right. K: And I say, please tell me what to do, how to do it. And you tell me, the moment when you ask me how to do it, you have already built an image, the system, the method. B: Yes, I mean one could say, you see when you say, how am I to do it, so you have already put 'I' in the middle. K: In the middle. B: The same image as before with a slightly different content. K: So you tell me, don't ever ask how to do it, because the 'how' involves the me doing it. S: Right, right. K: Therefore I am creating another picture. B: So that shows the way you slip into it, because you say how to do it, the word 'me' is not there but it is there implicitly. K: Implicitly, yes. B: And therefore you slip in. K: How am I to do it - of course. B: Yes. It usually slips in because it is there implicitly and not explicitly. That is the trick, I mean. K: Explicit, yes, yes. S: Right. K: So now you stop me and say, proceed from there. How am I to free this consciousness, even a corner of it, a limited part of it, what is the action that will do it? I want to discuss it with you. Don't tell me how to do it. I have understood. I have understood, I will never again ask, how to do it. The 'how', as he explained, implies implicitly the me wanting to do it, and therefore the me is the factor of the image maker. S: Right. K: I have understood that very clearly. Then I say to you, I realize this, what am I to do? S: Do you realize it? K: Yes. I know it. I know I am making images all the time. I am very well aware. S: Yes, but... K: Wait, wait. Let me finish. I am very well aware of it. My wife calls me an idiot; already registered in the brain, thought takes it over, it becomes the image which I have about myself and is hurt. S: Yes. K: Right? S: Yes. K: So this process I know, I am very well aware of this. S: Right. K: Because I have discussed with you. I have gone into it. I see because I have realized right from the beginning during these talks and dialogues that relationship is the greatest importance in life; without that life is chaos. S: Yes. K: That has been driven into me. And I see every flattery, and every insult is registered in the brain. And thought then takes it over as memory and creates an image, and the image gets hurt. S: That is right. B: So the image is the hurt because the image is the pleasure and with the new content, you know, of insult, when the content is flattery the image is pleasure, and when the content is insult the image is hurt. S: That's right. K: So Dr Bohm, what is one to do? What am I to do? There are two things involved in it: one to prevent further hurts and to be free of all the hurts that I have had. B: But they are both the same principle. K: I think - you explain to me - I think there are two principles involved. B: Are there? K: One to prevent it, the other to wipe away the hurts I have. B: Yes. S: I want to put it a little bit of another way. It is not just that you want to prevent the further hurt, but it seems to me that you must first say, how am I to be aware of the fact that I take flattery. How are you going to get aware? I want you to see that if I flatter you, you get a big inner gush, you start feeling big inside your belly, and then you get a fantasy about, well if you are so wonderful this way, then you will be twice as wonderful. So now you have got an image of yourself as this wonderful person who fits this flattery. Now I want you to see yourself eat my candy. K: No, you have told me very clearly it is two sides of the same coin. S: Right. K: Pleasure and pain are the same. S: The same, exactly the same. K: You have told me that. S: That's right. I am telling you that. K: I have understood it. B: They are both images, yes. K: Both images. So please, you are not answering my question. How am I, realizing all this, I am a fairly intelligent man, I have read a great deal, an ordinary man - I personally don't read, so an ordinary man I am talking about - I have read a great deal, I have discussed this and I see how extraordinarily important all this is. And I say, I realize that the two sides are the same coin. The brain registers and the whole thing begins. Now how am I to end that? Not the 'how', not the method, don't tell me what to do. I won't accept it because it means nothing to me. Right, sirs? B: Well, I mean we were discussing whether there is a difference between the stored up hurts and the ones which are to come. K: That's right. That's the first thing I have to understand. Tell me. B: Well, it seems to me that fundamentally they also work on the same principle. K: How? B: Well, if you take the hurt that is to come, my brain is already disposed to set up in order to respond with an image. K: I don't understand it. Make it much simpler. S: Well it seems to me... K: Ah, I am asking him. You are an expert at it. You have dozens of victims, he has only one victim here. B: Well, you see there is no distinction really between the past hurts and the present one because they all come from the past, I mean come from the reaction of the past. K: So, that is right. You are telling me, don't divide the past hurt or the future because the image is the same. B: Yes. The process is the same. K: The process, therefore the image is receiving. Right? B: Yes. It really doesn't matter because I may just be reminded of the past hurt, that is the same as somebody else insulting me. K: Yes, yes. So you are saying to me, don't divide the past or the future hurt; there is only hurt; there is only pleasure: so look at that. Look at the image, not in terms of the past hurts and the future hurts, but just look at that image which is both the past and the future. B: Yes. K: Right? B: But we are saying look at the image, not at its particular content but its general structure. K: Yes, yes, that's right. Now then my next question is: how am I to look at it? Because I have already an image, with which I am going to look. That I must suppress it, you promise to me by your words, not promise exactly, but give me hope that if I have right relationship I will live a life that will be extraordinarily beautiful, I will know what love is and all the rest of it, therefore I am already excited by this idea. B: But then I have to be aware of the image of that kind too. K: Yes, yes. Therefore, how am I - that is my point - how am I to look at this image? I know I have an image, not only one image but several images, but the centre of that image is me, the I; I know all that. Now how am I to look at it? May we proceed now? Right. Is the observer different from that which he is observing? B: Yes, well, that is... K: That is the real question. B: ...that is the question, yes. You could say that is the root of the power of the image. K: Yes, yes. You see, sir, what happens? If there is a difference between the observer and the observed there is that interval of time in which other activities go on. B: Well, yes, in which the brain sort of eases itself into something more pleasant. K: Yes, yes. B: Yes, that is all right. K: And where there is a division there is conflict. So you are telling me to observe in a different way, to learn the art of observing, which is, that the observer is the observed. B: Yes, but I think we could look first at our whole tradition, our whole conditioning, which is the observer is different from the observed. K: Different, of course. B: We should perhaps look at that for a while. K: Yes. B: Because that is what everybody feels. K: That the observer is different. B: Yes. And I think it ties up with what I was saying yesterday about reality, saying everything we think is reality of some kind, you see, because at least it is thought, real thought. But we make a distinction in reality between that reality which is self reference, self sustaining, it stands independent of thought and the reality which is sustained by thought. K: Yes, reality sustained by thought. B: The reality which may have been made by man but it stands by itself, like the table, or else like nature which... K: ...is different. B: ...is different. K: Yes, that we went through the other day. B: And now the observer, ordinarily we think that when I am thinking of myself, that self is a reality which is independent of thought. Do you see? K: Yes, we think that is independent of thought. B: And that that self is the observer who is a reality. K: Quite. B: Who is independent of thought and who is thinking, who is producing thought. K: But it is the product of thought. B: Yes, but that is the confusion. K: Yes, quite, quite, quite. Are you telling me, sir, as an outsider, that the observer is the result of the past? B: Yes, one can see that. K: My memories, my experiences, all the rest of it, the past. B: Yes, but I think if we think of the viewer, he might find it a little hard to follow that, if he hasn't gone into it. S: Very hard, I think, how to communicate it. K: It's fairly simple. S: What do you mean? K: Don't you live in the past? S: Right. K: Wait, no, no. Your life is the past. S: Right. K: You are living in the past. Right? S: That's right, yes. K: Past memories, past experiences. S: Yes, past memories, past becomings. K: And from the past you project the future. S: Right. K: Hope, hope it will be better, hope that I will be good, I will be different. It's always from the past to the future. S: That's right. That's how it is lived. K: Now I want to see, that past is the me, of course. B: But it does look as if it is something independent, just that you are looking at. K: Is it independent? B: It isn't but to see that may be... K: I know, that is all we are asking. Is it, is the me independent from the past? B: It looks as if the me is here looking at the past. K: Yes, of course, quite. The me is in a jar. B: Right. S: That's right. K: But the me is the product of the past. S: Right. You can see that but what is that jump that we go through where we say the me - I can say to you that I can see that I am the product of the past. I can see that. K: How do you see it? B: Intellectually. S: I see it intellectually. K: Then you don't see it. S: Right. That is what I am coming to. K: You are playing tricks. S: I see it as an intellectual - that's right, that's right, I see it intellectually. K: Do you see this intellectually? S: No. K: Why? S: There is an immediacy of perception there. K: In the same way, why isn't there an immediacy of perception of a truth which is, that you are the past? Not to make it an intellectual affair. S: Because time comes in. I imagine that I have gone through time. K: What do you mean imagine? S: I have an image of myself at three, I have an image of myself at ten and I have an image of myself at seventeen, and I say that they followed in sequence in time, and I see myself having developed over time. I am different now than I was five years ago. K: Are you? S: I am telling you that is how I have got that image. That image is of a developmental sequence. K: I understand all that, sir. S: In time. B: Yes. S: And I exist as a storehouse of memories of a bunch accumulated incidents. K: That is, time has produced that. S: Right. That is time, right. I see that. Right. K: What is time? S: I have just described it to you. Time is a movement in... K: It is a movement. S: Right. K: It is a movement. S: That's right. K: Right? The movement from the past. S: That's right. I have moved from the time I was three. K: From the past, it is a movement. S: That's right. From three to ten, seventeen. K: Yes, I understand. It is a movement. S: Right. K: Now, is that movement an actuality? S: What do you mean by actuality? B: Or is it an image? K: Eh? B: Is it an image or is it an actuality? K: Yes. B: I mean, you see if I have an image of myself as saying, "I need this", but that may not be an actual fact. Right. It is just... K: Image is not a fact. S: Right. But I feel... K: No. What you feel is like saying my experience. Your experience may be the most absurd experience. S: No, but that is casting me aside by saying, look, you have got this going on. I am describing an actual... B: But that is the whole point about the image, that it imitates an actual fact, do you see, you get the feeling that it is real. In other words, I feel that I am really there, an actual fact looking at the past, how I have developed. S: Right. B: But is that a fact that I am doing that? S: What do you mean? It is an actual fact that I get the feeling that I am looking at it. B: Yes, but I mean is it an actual fact that that is the way it all is, and was, and so on, you see, that all the implications of that are correct. S: No, it is not. I can see the incorrectness of my memory which constructs me in time. I mean obviously I was much more at three than I can remember, I was more at ten than I can remember, and there was much more going on obviously in actuality at seventeen than I have in my memory. B: Yes, but the me who is here now is looking at all that. S: That's right. B: But is he there and is he looking? That is the question. S: Is the me that is... K: An actuality. S: ...an actuality. K: As this is. S: Well, let's... K: Stick to it, stick to it. S: That is what I am going to do. What is an actuality is this development, this image of a developmental sequence. B: And the me who is looking at it? S: And the me who is looking at it, that's right. B: You see, I think that is one of the things we slip up on, because you see we say, there is the developmental sequence objectively so implying me is looking at it like I am looking at the plant. S: Right. B: But it may be, in fact it is, that the me who is looking at it is an image as is the developmental sequence. S: Right. You are saying then that this image of me is... K: ...is non-reality, is no reality. B: Well, the only reality is that it is thought. It is not a reality independent of thinking. K: So we must go back to find out what is reality. S: Right. K: Reality, we said, is everything that thought has put together: the table, wait a minute, the illusion, the churches, the nations, everything that thought has contrived, put together, is reality. But nature is not reality. S: Right. K: Is not put together by thought, but it is a reality. B: It is a reality independent of thought. But you see, is the me, who is looking, a reality that is independent of thought like nature? K: That is the whole point. Have you understood? S: Yes, I am beginning to see. Let me ask you a question: can you say anything about the difference for you between your - not, that's not fair. I was going to say, is there any difference for you between this perception, perception of this and your perception of the me? K: This is real: me is not real. S: Me is not real, but your perception of me? K: It doesn't exist. B: Suppose you perceive... S: What is your perception of the image? K: I have no image. I see if I have no image where is the me? S: But I have an image of me. B: Well, could I put it another way? S: What is my perception of me? B: Could I put it another way? Suppose you are watching a conjuring trick and you perceive a woman being sawn in half, you see. And then when you see the trick you say, what is your perception of this woman who is being sawn in half. You see, it isn't because she isn't being sawn in half. You see I am trying to say that as long as you don't see through the trick, what you see is apparently real is somebody being cut in half. But you have missed certain points but when you see the points that you have missed you don't see anybody being cut in half. S: Right. B: You just see a trick. S: Right. So I have missed the essence of it. K: Sir, just let's be simple. We said we have images; and I know I have images and you tell me to look at it, to be aware of it, to perceive the image. Is the perceiver different from the perceived? That is all my question is. S: I know. I know. K: Because if he is different then the whole process of conflict will go on endlessly. Right? But if there is no division the observer is the observed, then the whole problem changes. S: Right. K: Right? So is the observer different from the observed? Obviously not. So can I look at that image without the observer? And is there an image when there is no observer? Because the observer makes the image, because the observer is the movement of thought. B: Well, we shouldn't call it the observer then because it is not looking. I think the language is confusing. K: The language, yes. B: Because if you say it is an observer that implies that something is looking, do you see. K: Yes, quite. B: What you are really meaning is that thought is moving and creating an image as if it were looking but nothing is being seen. K: Yes. B: Therefore there is no observer. K: Quite right. But put it round the other way: is there a thinking without thought? B: What? K: Is there a thinker without thought? B: No. K: Exactly. There you are! If there is no experiencer is there an experience? So you have asked me to look at my images, and you said, look at it, which is a very serious and very penetrating demand. You say, look at it without the observer, because the observer is the image maker, and if there is no observer, if there is no thinker there is no thought. Right? So there is no image. You have shown me something enormously significant. S: As you said, the question changes completely. K: Completely. I have no image. S: It feels completely different. It's like then there is a silence. K: So I am saying, as my consciousness is the consciousness of the world, in essence, because it is filled with the things of thought, sorrow, fear, pleasure, despair, anxiety, attachment, detachment, hope, it is a turmoil of confusion, a sense of deep agony is involved in it all. And in that state you cannot have any relationship with any human being. S: Right. K: So you say to me: to have the greatest and the most responsible relationship is to have no image. S: That is to be responsive to 'what is'. K: Don't translate it. S: Well it is. I mean this means to be responsive. K: Yes. S: To open it up. K: So you have pointed out to me that to be free of images, the maker of the image must be absent; the maker of the image is the past, is the observer who says, "I like this", "I don't like this", 'my wife, my husband, my house' - you follow - the me who is in essence the image. So you see I have understood this. Now the next question is: is the image deep, hidden? Are the images hidden which I can't grapple, which I can't get hold of? You follow, sir? Are they in the cave, in the underground, somewhere hidden, which you have told me there are, all you experts have told me, yes, there are dozens of underground images. How am I, because I accept you, I say, "By Jove, they must know, they know much more than I do, therefore they say so, and so I accept it." So I say, "Yes, there are underground images. Now how am I to unearth them, expose them, out?" You see you have put me, the ordinary man, into a terrible position. S: You don't have to unearth them if this is clear to you there is no... K: But you have established already in me the poison. S: You don't exist anymore. Once it is clear to you that the observer is the observed... K: Therefore you are saying there is no unconscious. S: Right. K: Ah! You, the expert has said that! S: No, I said... K: You, who talk endlessly about unconscious with your patients. S: I don't. K: Therefore you say there is no unconscious? S: Right. K: I agree with you! I say it is so. S: Right. K: The moment when you see the observer is the observed, the observer is the maker of images, it is finished. S: Finished. Right. K: Right through. S: If you really see that. K: That's it. So the consciousness which I know, in which we have lived, has undergone a tremendous transformation: has it? Has it to you? S: Mm. K: No, sir, I mean has it to you? And if I may ask Dr Bohm, both of you, all of us, realizing that the observer is the observed, and therefore the image maker is no longer in existence, and so the content of consciousness, which makes up consciousness, is not as we know it. Right? What then? S: I don't know how you say it. K: You follow? I am asking this question because it involves meditation. I am asking this question because all religious people, the really serious ones, I am not talking of the gurus and all that, the real serious people who have gone into this question, as long as we live in daily life within the area of this consciousness - anxiety, fear and all the rest of it, with all its images, and the image maker -whatever we do will still be in that area. Right? I may join one year Zen, become a Zen monk, shave my head and do all kinds of stuff; then another year I will become some guru follower and so on and so on, but it is always within that area. S: Right. K: So what happens when there is no movement of thought, which is the image making, what then takes place? You understand my question? When time, which is the movement of thought, ends then what is there? Because you have led me up to this point. I understand it very well. I have tried Zen Buddhism, I have tried Zen meditation, I have tried Hindu meditation, I have tried all the kinds of miserable practices and all that, and I meet you, I hear you and I say, "By Jove, this is something extraordinary these people are saying. They say the moment when there is no image maker the content of consciousness undergoes a radical transformation and thought comes to an end, except when it absolutely has its place, knowledge and all the rest of it." So thought comes to an end, time has a stop. What then? Do you understand? Is that death? S: It is the death of the self. K: No, no. We have got three minutes more, one minute more. S: It is self destruction. K: No, no, sir. It is much more than that. S: It is the end of something. K: No, no. Just listen to it. When thought stops, when there is no image maker, there is a complete transformation in consciousness because there is no anxiety, there is no fear, there is no pursuit of pleasure, there is none of the things that create turmoil, division, and what comes into being, or what happens? Not as an experience because that is out. What takes place in that? Because, you follow, I have to find out. You may be leading me up the wrong path! 7TH CONVERSATION WITH DR BOHM & DR SHAINBERG BROCKWOOD PARK 20TH MAY 1976 'TRANSFORMATION OF MAN' K: After this morning, as an outsider, you have left me completely empty, completely without any future without any past, without any image. So where am I? S: But, sir, somebody said that was watching us this morning, or one of the people around here said, "How am I going to get out of bed in the morning?" B: Oh yes. K: No, I think that is fairly - that question of getting out of bed in the morning - is fairly simple. I have to get up and do things, because life demands that I act, not just stay in bed for the rest of my life. S: Mm-m K: You see, I have been left as an outsider who is viewing all this, who has listened to all this, with a sense of.. 'blank wall'. A sense of - I understand what you have said really, because it has been made very clear to me. I have, at one glance, I have rejected all the systems, all the gurus - the Zen Buddhism, this buddhism, this meditation that meditation and so on - I've discarded all that because I have understood the meditator in the meditation. But I am still feel, have I solved the problem of sorrow, do you know what it means to love? Do I understand what is compassion? Not understand intellectually, I can spin a lot of words, but at the end of all this, this dialogue, after discussing with you all, listening to you all, have I this sense of astonishing energy which is compassion, the end of my sorrow, do I know what it means to love somebody, love a human being? S: Actually love. K: Actually, actually. S: Not talk about it? K: No, no. I've gone beyond all that. And you haven't shown me what death is. B: Yes. K: I haven't understood a thing about death. You haven't talked to me about it. So there are these things we should cover before we have finished this evening - a lot of ground to cover. B: Could we begin on the question of death. K: Yes. Let's begin on death. B: One point that occurred to me, you know we discussed in the morning, saying that we had come to the point where we see the observer is the observed then that is death, essentially is what you said. Right? K: Yes. B: Now, this raises a question, you know, if the self is nothing but an image - right? - then what is it that dies? You see if the image dies that's nothing, that's not death - right? K: No B: So is there something real that dies? K: There is biological death. B: Well, we're not discussing that at the moment. K: No. B: I mean you were discussing some kind of death. K: I was discussing, when we were talking this morning, I was trying to point out that if there is no image at all... B: Yes K:... if there is no variety of images in my consciousness, there is death. B: Well that's the point exactly. What is it that has died? You see death implies something has died. K: Died? The images have died, me; me' is dead. B: But is that a genuine death in the sense that... K: That's what I want to know - is it a verbal comprehension? B: Yes. Or more deeply is there something that has to die? You see, I'm trying to say, something real. S: Some thing. B: In other words, if an organism dies, I say, I see that, up to a point. Something real has died, you see. K: Yes, something real has died. B: Ah, but when the self dies... ? K: Ah, but I have accepted so far the self has been an astonishingly real thing. B. Yes. K: You come along - you three come along - and tell me that that image is fictitious, and I understand it, and I'm a little frightened that when that dies, when there is no image - you follow - there is an ending to something. B. Yes, well what is it that ends? K: Ah, right. What's it that ends? B. Because is it something real that ends? You see, you could say an ending of an image is no ending at all, right? K: At all. B. If it's only an image that ends, that's an image that's ending. I mean, I'm trying to say that nothing much ends if it's only an image. K: Yes, that's what I want to get at. B. You know what I mean? K: If it is merely an ending of an image... S. Right, then there is nothing much. K: There is nothing. B. No, it's like turning off the television set. K: Yes, it leaves me nothing. S. Right. B: Is that what that is, or is there something deeper that dies? K: Oh, very much deeper. B. Something deeper dies. K: Yes. S. Well, how about the image-making process? K: No, no. I would say it is not the end of the image which is dead, but something much deeper than that. B But it's still not the death of the organism you see. K: Still not the death of organism, because the organism... B... will go on, up to a point. Right. K: Up to a point, yes. Till it's diseased, accident, old age, senility and so on. But death: is it the ending of the image, which is fairly simple and fairly, you know, acceptable and normal, but... B: Right. K:... but logically, or even actually. But it is like, you know, a very shallow pool. You have taken away a little water and there is nothing but mud left behind. There is nothing. So is there something much more? S: That dies? K: No. Not that dies, but the meaning of death. S: Well, is there something more than the image that dies, or does death have a meaning beyond the death of the image? K: Of course, that's what we are asking. S: That's the question. K: That's what we are asking. B Is there something about death that is bigger than the death of the image? K: Obviously. It must be. B: Will this include the death of the organism, this meaning? K: Yes. The organism might go on. I mean the organism might go on, but eventually come to an end. B: Yes. But if we were to see what death means as a whole, universally, then we would also see what the death of the organism means, right? But is there some meaning also to the death of the self image, the same meaning? K: That's only, I should say, that's only a very small part. B: That's very small. Right. K: That's a very, very small part. B: But then, is there, say, one could think there might be the death of the self-image, then there might be a process or a structure beyond the self-image that might die, that creates the self-image. K: Yes, that is thought. B: That's thought. Now are you discussing the death of thought? K: Yes, that's only also again superficial. B: It's very small. K: Very small. B: And is there something beyond thought itself that should... K: That's what I want to get at. S: We're trying to get a the meaning of death.. B: We're not quite clear. S:.. which is beyond the death of the self, thought or the image. K: No, just look. The image dies. Image, that's fairly simple. Is a very shallow affair. B: Right. K: Then there's the ending of thought, which is the ending, the dying to thought. B: Right. You would say thought is deeper than the image but still not very deep. K: Not very deep. So... B: All right. K: So, we have removed the maker of the image and the image itself. S: Right. Right. K: Now, is there something more? B: In what sense something more? Something more that exists or something more that has to die, or..? S: Is it something creative that happens? K: No. No, we are going to find out. B: But I mean your question is not clear when you say, "Is there something more?" K: Is there.? No. Is that all death? B: Oh, oh I see. Is that all that death is. K: Yes. S: This is death. K: No. No. I understand image, maker of image. S: Right. K: But that's a very shallow affair. S: Right. So then is something else..? K: And then I say, "Is that all, is that the meaning of death?" S: I think I'm getting with you - is that the meaning of death only in that little part. Is there a meaning that's bigger? K: Death must have something enormously significant. S: Right. B: Are you saying death has a meaning, a significance for everything? For the whole of life? K: Yes, whole of life. B: Yes, now first could you say why do you say it? Do you see, in other words, first it's not generally accepted if we're thinking of the viewer, that death is that sort of thing. In other words the way we live now, death... K: Is at the end. B:.. is at the end and you try to forget about it, you know, and try to make it unobtrusive, and so on. K: But if you, as you three have worked at it, pointed out, my life has been in a turmoil. And my life has been a constant conflict, anxiety, all the rest of it. B: Right. K: That's been my life. I have come to the known, and therefore death is the unknown. So I am afraid of that. And you come along, we come along and say, look death is partly the ending of the image, the maker of the image, and death must have much more, greater significance, than merely this empty saucer. B: Well, if you could make more clear why it must have, you see. K: "Why it must have". Because... S: Why must it. K: Is life just a shallow empty pool? With mud at the end of it? S: Well, why would you assume that it's anything else? K: I want to know B: But, I mean, even if it's something else, we have to ask why is it that death is the key to understanding that, do you see. K: Because it's the ending of everything. S: All right. Every thing K: Reality. B: Yes. K: And all my concepts, images - end of all the memories. B: But that's in the ending of thought, right? K: Ending of thought. And also it means, ending of time. B: Ending of time. K: Time coming to a stop totally. And there is no future in the sense of past meeting the present and carrying on. B: You mean psychologically speaking. K: Yes, psychologically speaking, of course. B: Where we still admit the future and the past. K: Of course. S: That's right, OK, yes. K: Ending - psychological ending of everything. S: Right K: That's what death is. B: Right. And when the organism dies then everything ends with that organism? K: Of course. When the organism - this organism dies, it's finished. S: Right K: But wait a minute. If I don't end the image, the stream of image-making goes on. B: Yes, well again it's not too clear where it goes on, you see; and other people are in... K: It manifests itself in other people. That is: I die. S: The organism. K: I die, the organism dies, and at the last moment I'm still with the image I have. B: Yes, what happens to that? K: That's what I'm saying. That image has its continuity with the rest of the images - your image, my image. S: Right. K: Your image is not different from mine. B: Right. S: We share that. K: Not share it. It's not different. S: Right K: It may have a little more frill, a little bit more colour, but essentially the image, my image is your image. S: Right. K: Now, so there is this constant flow of image-making. B: Well, where does it take place? In people? K: It is there, it manifests itself in people. B: Oh, you feel that in some ways its more general, more universal. K: Yes, much more universal. B: That's rather odd. K: Eh? B: I say, it's rather strange, I mean to think of that. K: Yes. S: It's there. K: It is. S: It's a river, yes, like a river, it's there. And it manifests itself in streams which we call people. K: Manifest, no. That stream is the maker of images and images. B: So, in other words, you're saying the image does not originate only in one brain, but in some sense it is universal. K: Universal. Quite right. B: Yes, well that's not clear. You're not only saying that it's just the sum of the effects of all the brains, but are you implying something more? K: Is the effect of all the brains, and it manifests itself in people, as they're born; genes and all the rest of it. B: Yes K: Now. Is that all? That's, yes. B: Yes. K: Does death leave me - me - does death bring about this sense of enormous, endless energy which has no beginning and no end? Or is it just, I have got rid of my images and the image-maker, I can stop it, it is very simple, it can be stopped, and yes. But I haven't touched the much deeper things, there must be, life must have infinite depth. B: That's death which opens that up. K: Death opens that up. B: Is the death, you see, we say, that it's more than the death of the image making, so this is what is not clear. Is there, for example... what I'm trying to say... something real which is blocking that from realizing itself? K: Yes, is blocking itself through image and thought maker, the maker of images. S: Yes, that's what's blocking it though, the image making and thought-making is blocking the greater. B: Yes. K: Wait, wait, blocking that. S: Blocking that, right. K: But there are still other blocks, deeper blocks. B: That's what I was trying to get at. That there are deeper blocks that are real. K: That are real. Now. B: And they really have to die? K: That's just it. S: So, would that be like this stream that you're talking about, that's there? K: No, no. There is a stream of sorrow, isn't there? B: Yes, now in what sense? Is sorrow deeper than the image? K: Yes. B: It is. Well, that's important then. K: It is. S: You think so? K: Don't you? S: I do. I think... K: No, no, be careful dir, it's very serious, this thing. S: That's right, that's right. B: I mean, would you say sorrow and suffering are the same or just different words? K: Oh, different words. B: All right, just to clear it up. S: Deeper than this image-making is sorrow. K: Isn't it? Man has lived with sorrow for a million years. B: Well could we say a little more about sorrow. You see, what is it. It's more than pain you see. K: Oh, much more than pain; much more than loss; much more than losing my son and my parent or this or that. S: It's deeper than that. K: It's much deeper than that. B: Right. Right. It goes beyond the image, beyond thought. K: Of course. Beyond thought. B: Oh. Beyond what we would ordinarily call feeling. K: Oh, of course. Feeling, thought. Now can that end? S: Well, before you go on, are you saying that the stream of sorrow, if I can be so naive, is a different stream from the stream of image-making? If you had to say it's there, is it two different streams, or..? K: No, it's part of the stream. S: Part of the same of the same stream. K: But much deeper. S: Much deeper. B: Are you saying, then, there's a very deep stream - image-making is on the surface of this stream. K: That's all. That's all. But we have been left with that you see, I want to penetrate. B: Well, could you say we've understood the waves on the surface of this stream which we call image making. K: Image making. That's right. B: Right. And whatever disturbances and sorrow comes out on the surface as image-making. K: That's right. S: So now we have got to go deep sea diving. B: River. K: River diving. B: But what is, you know, sorrow? K: You know, sir, there is universal sorrow. B: But let's try to make it clear. You see, it's not merely that the sum of all the sorrow of different people? K: No, no, it is this: could we put it this way - the waves on the river doesn't bring compassion - compassion and love are synonymous so we'll keep to the word compassion. The waves don't bring this. What will? Without compassion human beings - as they are doing - they are destroying themselves. So, does compassion come with the ending of sorrow which is not the sorrow created by thought. B: Yes, right. So, let's say in thought you have sorrow for the self - right? K: Yes, sorrow for the self. B: Which is self-pity, and now you say there's another side, I think we haven't right got hold of it. There's a deeper sorrow... K: There is a deeper sorrow. B:... which is universal, not merely the total sum but rather something universal. K: That's right. S: Can we spell that out, go into it? K: Don't you know it? S: Yes. K: Without my - I'm just asking - don't you know or are aware of a much deeper sorrow than the sorrow of thought, self pity, the sorrow of the image. B: Does this sorrow have any content? I mean to say it's sorrow for the fact that man is in this state of affairs which he can't get out of. K: That's partly it. That means partly the sorrow of ignorance. B: Yes. That man is ignorant and cannot get out of it. K: Cannot get out - you follow? B: Right. Yes. K: And that the perception of that sorrow is compassion. S: Right. B: Right, so the non perception is sorrow then. K: Yes, yes. Are we saying the same thing? S: No, I don't think so. K: Say for instance, you see me in ignorance. B: I see the whole of mankind. K: Mankind in ignorance. S: Yes. Right. K: And after living for millennia, they are still ignorant -ignorant in the sense we are talking that is, the maker of the image and all that. B: Now, let's say if my mind is really right, good, clear, that should have a deep effect on me? Right? K: Yes. B: Right? K: Yes. S: What would have a deep effect? B: To see this tremendous ignorance, you see, this tremendous destruction. K: We are getting at it. S: Right. K: We are getting it. B: Right. K: We are getting it. B: Right. But then if I don't fully perceive, if I start to escape the perception of it, then I'm in it too? K: Yes, you are in it too. B: But the feeling is still with me. That universal sorrow is still something that I can feel, I mean, is that what you mean to say? K: Yes. B: Although I am not very perceptive as to what it means. K: No, no, no. You can feel the sorrow of thought. B: The sorrow of thought. But I can sense, or somehow be aware, of the universal sorrow. K: Yes. You can S: Right. You say the universal sorrow is there whether you feel it or not. K: You can feel it. You can feel it. B: Feel it or sense it. S: Right. K: Sorrow of man living like this. B: Is that the essence of it? K: I'm just moving into it. Let's move in. B: Is there more to it? K: Oh, much more to it. B: Oh well, then perhaps we should try to bring that out. K: I am trying to, There is... S: Sorrow, yes. K: You see me. I live the ordinary life: image, sorrow, fear, anxiety, all that. I have the sorrow of self-pity, all that. And you who are enlightened in quotes, look at me and say, my god; aren't you full of sorrow for me? Which is compassion? B: I would say that is a kind of energy which is tremendously aroused because of this situation. K: Yes. B: Right? K: Yes B: But that, what do you call it, sorrow, or you'd call it compassion. K: Compassion, which is the outcome of sorrow. B: But have you felt sorrow first? Has the enlightened person felt sorrow and then compassion? K: No. S: Or the other way? K: No. No, no - be careful old man. Go very carefully. You see, sir, you are saying that one must have sorrow first to have compassion. B: I'm not saying, just exploring it. K: Yes, we are exploring. Through sorrow you come to compassion. B: That's what you seem to be saying. K: Yes, I seem to be saying, which implies, that I must go through all the horrors of mankind. S: Right. Experience. K: In order. S: Right. K: No. S: No? B: But let's say... K: That's the point. B: Well, let's say that the enlightened one, enlightened man, sees this sorrow, sees this destruction, you know - sees this - and he feels something, he senses something which is a tremendous energy... K: Yes. B:... we call it compassion. Now does he understand that the people are in sorrow... K: Of course. B:... but he is not himself in sorrow. K: That's right. B: Yes. K: That's right. B: But he feels a tremendous energy to do something. K: Yes. Tremendous energy of compassion. B: Compassion. Feeling for them. K: Compassion. S: Would you then say that the enlightened man perceives or is aware of the - I hate to use the word, inefficiency - but the conflict, he's not aware of sorrow, he's aware of the awkwardness, the blundering, the loss of life. K: No, sir. Doctor Shainberg just listen. You have been through all this, suppose you have been through all this. S: Sorrow K: Image, thought, the sorrow of thought, the fears, anxiety, and you say. I have understood that. It's over in me. But you have left very little: you have energy, but it is a very shallow business. S: Right. K: And is life so shallow as all that? Or has it an immense depth? Depth is wrong word, but... B: Has inwardness..? K: And great inwardness. And to find that out don't you have to die to everything known? B: Yes, but how does this relate to sorrow at the same time? K: I am coming to that. You might feel I am ignorant, my anxieties, all the rest of it. You are beyond it, you are in the other side of the stream as it were. Don't you have compassion? S: Yes, yes, I do. K: Not up here. S: No, I know. But I see it and I... K: Compassion. S: Yes. K: Is that the result of the ending of sorrow, universal sorrow. B: Why the universal sorrow? K: Universal sorrow. B: Wait - you say the ending of sorrow. You're talking about a person who was is in sorrow to begin with. K: Yes. B: And in him this universal sorrow ends. Is that what you're saying? K: No. No, it is more than that. B: More than that, then we have to go slowly, because if you say the ending of universal sorrow the thing that is puzzling is to say it still exists, you see. K: What? B: You see if the universal sorrow ends, then it's all gone. K: Ah! It's still there, no. B: It's still there. You see there is a certain puzzle in language. So in some sense the universal sorrow ends but in another sense it persists. K: Yes. Yes, that's right. B: But could we say that if you have an insight into the essence of sorrow - the universal sorrow - then in that sense sorrow ends in that insight. Is that what you mean? Although you know it still goes on. K: Yes, yes, although it still goes on. S: I've got a deeper question now. The question is... K: I don't think you have understood. S: I think I understood that one, but my question comes before: which is that here is me - the image-making has died. Right, that's the waves. Now, I come into the sorrow. K: You've lost the sorrow of thought. S: Right. The sorrow of thought has gone, but there's a deeper sorrow. K: Is there? Or are you assuming that there is a deeper sorrow? S: I'm trying to understand what you are saying. K: Ah! No no. I am saying, is there compassion which is not related to thought, or is that compassion born of sorrow? S: Born of sorrow? K: Born in the sense when the sorrow ends there is compassion. S: OK. That makes it a little clearer. When the sorrow of thought... K: Not personal sorrow! S: No. When the sorrow... K: Not the sorrow of thought. B: Not the sorrow of thought, but something deeper. S: Something deeper. When that sorrow ends then there is a birth of compassion, of energy. K: Now. Is there not a deeper sorrow than the sorrow of thought? S: There's the sorrow - David was saying there's the sorrow for ignorance is deeper than thought. The sorrow for the universal calamity of mankind trapped in this sorrow; the sorrow of a continual repetition of wars and history and poverty and people mistreating each other, that's a deeper sorrow. K: I understand all that. S: That's deeper than the sorrow of thought. K: Can we ask this question: what is compassion which is love -we're using that one word to cover a wide field. What is compassion? Can a man who is in sorrow, thought, image, can he have that? He can't. Absolutely he cannot. Right. Right? B: Yes. K: Now. When does that come into being? Without that life has no meaning. You have left me without that. So if all that you have taken away from me is superficial sorrow, thought and image, and I feel there's something much more. B: I mean just doing that leaves something emptier, you know? K: Yes. B: Meaningless. K: Something more. Much greater than this shallow little business. B: Is there, you see, when we have thought producing sorrow and self pity, but also the realization of the sorrow of mankind and could you say that the energy which is deeper is being in some way.. K: Moved. B: You see, well, first of all in this sorrow this energy is caught up in whirlpools. K: Yes, that's right, in small fields. B: It's deeper than thought but there is some sort of very deep disturbance of the energy... K: Yes. Quite right. B:... which we call deep sorrow. K: Deep sorrow. it? B: Ultimately it's origin is the blockage in thought, though, isn't K: Yes, yes. That is deep sorrow of mankind. B: Yea. The deep sorrow of mankind. K: For centuries upon centuries, it's like, you know, like a vast reservoir of sorrow. B: It's sort of moving around in, in some way that's disorderly and... K: Yes. B:... and preventing clarity and so on. I mean perpetuating ignorance. K: Ignorance. Perpetuating ignorance, right. B: That's it. Because, you see, if it were not for that then man's natural capacity to learn would solve all these problems. Is that possible? K: That's right. S: All right. K: Unless you three give me, or help me, or show me, or have an insight into something much greater, I say, "Yes that's very nice", and I go off - you follow? B: Yes. K: What we're trying to do, as far as I can see, is to penetrate into something beyond death. B: Beyond death. K: Death we say's not only the ending of the organism, but the ending of all the content of the consciousness and the consciousness which we know as it is now. B: Is it also the ending of sorrow? K: Ending of sorrow of that kind, of the... B: Superficial. K:... of the superficial kind. That's clear. B: Yes. K: And a man who's gone through all that says, that isn't good enough, you haven't given me the flower, the perfume. You've just given me the ashes of it. And, now, we three are trying to find out that which is beyond the ashes. B: Right. You say, there is that which is beyond death? K: Absolutely! B: I mean, would you say that is eternal or..? K: I don't want to use this word. B: No, not use the word, but I mean in some sense beyond time. K: Beyond time. B: Therefore 'eternal' is not the best word for it. K: Therefore, there is something beyond this superficial death, a movement that has no beginning and no ending. B: But it is a movement? K: It's a movement. Movement not in time. B: Not in time. S: What is the difference between a movement in time and a movement out of time? K: That which is constantly renewing, constantly - 'new' isn't the word - constantly fresh, flowering, endlessly flowering, that is timeless. This whole flowering implies time. B: Yea, well I think we can see the point. S: I think we get that. The feel of renewal in creation and in coming and going without transition, without duration, without linearity, that has... K: You see, let me come back to it in a different way. Being normally a fairly intelligent man, read various books, tried various meditations - Zen and this and that and the other thing - at one glance I have an insight into all that, at one glance it is finished, I won't touch it! And it may be the ending of this image-making and all that. There a meditation must take place to delve, to have an insight, into something which the mind has never touched before. B: Right. I mean even if you do touch it, then it doesn't mean the next time it will be known. K: Ah! It can never be known in the sense.. B" It can never be known, it's always new in some sense. K: Yes it's always new. It is not a memory stored up and altered, changed and call it 'new'. It has never been old. B: Yes. K: I don't know if I can put it that way. B: Yes, yes, I think I understand that, you see. Could you say like a mind that has never known sorrow. K: Yes. B: And to say that it might seem puzzling at first but it's a move out of this state which has known sorrow and... K: Quite right. B:...to a state which has not know sorrow. K: Not yet, that's quite right. B: In other words, there's no you. K: That's right. That's right. S: Can we say it this way too: could we say that it's an action which is moving where there is no 'you'? K: You see, when you use the word 'action', action means not in the future or in the past, action is the doing. And most of our actions are the result of the cause, or the past, or according to the future - ideals and so on. S: This is not that. K: That's not action. S: No, no. K: That's not action, that is just conformity. S: Right. No, I'm talking about a different kind of action. K: So. No, I wouldn't, action implies - see, there're several things involved. To penetrate into this, the mind must be completely silent. S: Right. K: Right? S: Right. K: Otherwise you are projecting something into it. B: Right. S: Right. It is not projecting into anything. K: Absolute silence. S: Right. K: And that silence is not the product of control: wished for, premeditated, pre-determined. Therefore that silence is not brought about through will. S: Right. K: Right? B: Right. K: Now, in that silence there is the sense of something beyond all time, all death, all thought. You follow? Something - nothing! Not a thing. Nothing! And therefore empty. And therefore tremendous energy. B: Is this..? S: Moving. K: Energy. Don't - leave it! Leave it! B: Is this also the source of compassion? K: That's it. S: What do you mean by 'source'? B: Well, that in this energy is compassion, is that right? K: Yes, that's right. S: In this energy... K: This energy is compassion B: Is compassion. S: That's different. K: Of course. S: This energy is compassion. You see, that's different from saying 'the source'. K: You see, and beyond that there is something more. B: Yes S: Beyond that? K: Of course. B: Beyond that. Well, why do you say 'of course'? What could it be that's more? K: Sir, let's put it, approach it differently. Everything thought has created is not sacred, is not holy. B: Yea, well, because it's fragmented. K: Is fragmented, we know, and putting up an image and worshipping it is a creation of thought; made by the hand or by the mind, is still an image. So, in that there is nothing sacred, because -as you pointed out - thought is fragment, limited, finite, it is the product of memory and so on. B: Is the sacred, therefore that which is without limit. K: That's it. There is something beyond compassion... B: Beyond compassion. K:... which is sacred. B: Yes. Is it beyond movement? K: Sacred. You can't say movement, or non movement. B: You can't say anything. K: A living thing; a living thing, you can only examine a dead thing. B: Right. K: A living thing, you can't examine. What we are trying to do, is to examine that living thing which we call sacred, which is beyond compassion. B: Well, what is our relation to the sacred then? K: To the man who is ignorant there is no relationship. Right? Which is true. B: Right. K: To the man who has removed the image, all that, who is free of the image and the image-maker, it has no meaning yet. Right? B: Yes. K: It has meaning only when he goes beyond everything, beyond - he dies to everything. Dying means, in the sense, never for a single second accumulating anything psychologically. S: Would you say that there is any - you asked the question, what is the relationship to the sacred - is there ever a relationship to the sacred or is the sacred..? K: No, no, no, he is asking something. S: Yes. K: He is asking, what is the relationship between that which is sacred, holy, and to reality. B: Yes, well, it's implicit anyway. K: Eh? B: I mean, that's implied. K: Of course. We talked about this question some time ago, which is: reality which is the product of thought has no relationship to that because thought is an empty... S: Right. Right. K:... little affair. That may have a relationship with this. B: In some way. S: Right. K: And the relationship comes through insight, intelligence and compassion. S: What is that relationship? I mean, what is intelligence I suppose we're asking. K: Intelligence? What is intelligence? S: I mean, how does intelligence act? K: Ah! Wait! Wait! You have had an insight into the image. You have had an insight into the movement of thought, moment of thought which is self-pity, creates sorrow, and all that. You have had a real insight into it. Haven't you? S: Right. K: It's not a verbal agreement or disagreement or logical conclusion, you have had a real insight into that business. Into the waves of the river. Now, isn't that insight intelligence? Which is not the intelligence of a clever man - we're not talking of that. So there is that intelligence - you've already got that intelligence. S: That's right. K: Now move with that intelligence, which is not yours or mine, intelligence - not Dr Shainberg's or K's, or somebody's: it is universal intelligence, global or cosmic intelligence - that insight. Now, move a step further into it. S: Move with, yes K: Have an insight into sorrow, which is not the sorrow of thought, and all that, the enormous sorrow of mankind, of ignorance, you follow, and out of that insight compassion. Now, insight into compassion: is compassion the end of all life, end of all death? It seems so because you have thrown away, mind has thrown away all the burden which man has imposed upon himself. Right? So we have that tremendous feeling, a tremendous thing inside you. Now, that compassion - delve into it. And there is something sacred, untouched by man - man in the sense, untouched by his mind, by his cravings, by his demands, by his prayers, by his everlasting chicanery, tricks. And that may be the origin of everything - which man has misused. You follow? Not that it exists in him because then we get lost. B: Would you say it's the origin of all matter, all nature. K: Of everything, of all matter, of all nature. B: Of all mankind. K: Yes. That's right. I'll stick by it! So, at the end of these dialogues, what have you, what has the viewer got? What has he captured? S: What would we hope he'ld capture? Would you say what'ld we hope that he would capture, or what has he actually captured? K: What he has actually, not hope. S: Right. K: What has he actually captured. Has his bowl filled. S: Filled with the sacred. K: Or will he say, "well, I've got a lot of ashes left, very kind of you, but I can get that anywhere". Any logical, rational human being say "Yes, by discussing you can wipe out all this and I am left nothing". S: Or has he got..? K: Yes, that's what... He has come to you - I have come to you three wanting to find out, transforming my life, because I feel it is absolutely necessary. Not to - you know - get rid of my ambition, all the silly stuff which mankind has collected. I empty myself of all that. I, please when I use the word 'I' it's not 'I' - I can't empty itself, I dies to all that. Have I got anything out of all this? Have you given me the perfume of that thing? S: Can I give you the perfume? K: Or, yes sir, share it with me. S: I can share it with you. Has the viewer shared with us... B: Yes S:...the experience we've had being together. K: Have you, have you two shared this thing with this man? B: Right. S: Have we shared this with this man? K: If not, then what, what? A clever discussion, dialogue, that we have fed up. You can only share when you are really hungry, burning with hunger. Otherwise you share words. So I have come to the point, we have come to the point when we see life has an extraordinary meaning. B: Well, let's say it has a meaning far beyond what we usually think of. K: Yes, this is, this is so shallow. B: Well, would you say the sacred is also life? K: Yes, that what I was getting at. B: Well. K: Life is sacred. B: And the sacred is life. K: Yes. S: And have we shared that? K: Have you shared that. So, we mustn't misuse life. B: Right. K: You understand? We mustn't waste it because our life is so short. You follow? B: You mean you feel that each of our lives has a part to play in this sacred that you talk about. K: What sir? B: Each of our lives has an important part in some sense to play. K: It's there B: It's part of the whole... K: Oh, yes. B:... and that misusing it is - well, to use it rightly has a tremendous significance. K: Yes. Quite right. But to accept it as a theory is as good as any other theory. B: Right. S: There's something though. I feel trouble. Have we shared it? That burns. that question burns. Have we shared the sacred? K: Which means, really, all these dialogues have been a process of meditation. Not a clever argument. A real penetrating meditation which brings insight into everything that's been said. B: Oh, I should say that we have been doing that. K: I think that we have been doing that. S: We've been doing that. B: Yes. S: And have we shared that? B: With whom? Among ourselves? S: With the viewer. B: Well, I should think... K: Ah! B:... that's the difficulty. K: Are you considering the viewer or there is no viewer at all? Are you speaking to the viewer or only that thing in which the viewer, you and I, everything is? You understand what I'm saying? You've got two minutes more. S: Well, how would you respond then to what David said, he said, "We have been in a meditation", you say "We have been" and I say "We've been in a meditation". How've we shared in our meditation? K: No. I mean, no. Has it been a meditation? S: Yes. K: This dialogue? S: Yes. K: You know meditation is not... S: Yes. K:... just an argument. B: Right. S: No, we've shared. I feel that. K: Shared the truth of every statement. S: Right. K: Or the falseness of every statement. S: Right. K: Or seen in the false the truth. B: Right. S: And aware in each of us and in all of us of the false as it comes out and is clarified. K: See it all, and therefore we are in a state of meditation. S: Right. K: And whatever we say must, must then lead to that ultimate thing. Then you are not sharing. S: When are you? K: There is no sharing. we have got one moment. There is no sharing. It is only that. S: That. The act of meditation is that. K: No. There is no - there is only that. Don't... S: Oh - OK SAANEN 2ND PUBLIC TALK 12TH JULY 1977. May we go on with what we were talking about the day before yesterday morning? I hope you aren't too hot. We were concerned at the last talk with the awakening of intelligence, that intelligence which is not yours or mine. We arrived at that point logically, sanely, and holistically. We said that all thought, however divine the thought may be, or it may think itself totally divine, it is still the movement of the past - the past being experience, knowledge, stored up in the brain as memory. And our lives are dictated by the past. And thought tries to find security in the things that it has created. We talked about that. That is, belief, in ideological philosophical projections, in conclusions which invariably are the result of an experience retained by memory and making them more and more definite. I hope we are communicating with each other all about these matters. We said also that thought can never solve our human problems, psychological problems, it may solve the problems of better food, shelter and so on, physical comforts for the whole of mankind. But that is not possible when there is nationalistic, ideological divisions - which we talked about too. So we are concerned with the desire to be secure, psychologically as well as physiologically, and in that desire to be secure we create all kinds of illusions, which we talked about. Illusions in the future, there is the old theory that god, divinity descends on earth and helps man to grow, to evolve, to live nobly. That is the old tradition of the countries in the east, and also in a different way in the west. In that there is a great deal of comfort, a great deal of feeling that you are at least secure in something, that there is somebody who is looking after you and the world. This is a very old theory and you know all about it. It has no meaning whatsoever, because the future, whether the teachings are for the future or some kind of Utopian outlook for the future is made by the present, obviously. What one is now, unless there is a radical transformation, the future is the modified continuity of 'what is'. We talked about that. May I go on? So to realize that the things that thought has put together, in those there is no security whatsoever. I wonder how many of us really understand this? How many of us have gone into it sufficiently, intelligently, rationally and sanely to find out for ourselves if there is really any structure, either in the future, or in the past, or in the present, if there is any structure whatsoever, philosophical, religious, or ideological, or economical and so on, whether there is any kind of security in that. And to find that out there must not only be the clear thinking, logically, sanely, rationally, objectively, but also that very thinking, that very reasoning, if it is pursued very deeply begins the awakening of that intelligence that we talked about the day before yesterday. All right? May we go on from there? And also thought seeks security in authority. There is the authority of the surgeon, and there is the authority of tradition, the guru, the bishop, the pope and so on. There are the two authorities well established in the world. The authority of the dictator, the totalitarian authority and all that. Now we must go into this very carefully because we are going to find out if there is any kind of security in authority - religious, economic, or psychological. We accept very easily the path that is the most satisfying, the most convenient, the most pleasurable. It is very easy to move into that groove. And authority dictates, lays down religiously and psychologically a system, a method by which, or through which you will find security. This is well known. And so we are going to go into this question as to whether there is any kind of authority, psychological, apart from technological, medicine and so on, if there is any kind of psychological authority whatsoever. Because if we see that there isn't anything, security in any authority, including the speaker's, then we are going to find out whether it is possible to live without any guidance, without any control, without any effort. This is asking a tremendous lot. Right? Because we are educated, conditioned to accept authority because that is the most convenient and the easiest way to live. Put all our faith and all our trust in somebody, or in some idea, or in some conclusion, or in some teaching, and give ourselves to that hoping that we shall find some deep satisfaction, deep security - the guru, those teachings have done all the work and you just have to follow! Now an intelligent person, a fairly aware, awakened in the normal sense, objects to that totally. Living in a free country like this where there is freedom of speech and so on, you would object tremendously to a totalitarian state; but you would accept the authority of psychologists, the guru, the teachings that would promise you something marvellous in the future, but not now, you'd accept all that because it is very satisfactory. So we are going to demolish all that - if you are willing - because otherwise you will not be able to awaken that intelligence of which we are talking. So where there is authority, psychologically, there is conformity. Right? To conform to the pattern set by another through various sanctions, or the authority of your own which you have experienced, which you have felt and from that conclude and have security in that conclusion. You are following all this? So is there any security in psychological authority, in any teachings? You are following all this? In any teachings - including the speaker's teachings, the so-called religious teachings and the top guru's - you know, all that stuff! So is there any security in all that? And yet if you observe, millions and millions are following that path, that way of thinking, hoping that eventually some day, in some future life, or somewhere there is going to be security. Now we are going to question and ask ourselves if in it there is any kind of truth. Right? Please, we are working together - right? We are exploring together. We are really thinking out this problem together, so that I am not thinking and you merely listening, but we are sharing the thing together to find out the truth of this enormous weight that man has carried hoping thereby to find somewhere some security and happiness. So please it is your responsibility as well as the speaker's to go into this question very, very carefully, to find out whether one can live a daily life, a nonconforming life, non-imitative life, not following any particular tradition, because if you have got a tradition, a sanction, a pattern, you will invariably conform to that, consciously, or unconsciously. So we are asking whether it is possible for a human being fairly awake, fairly intellectually alive, seeing the problems of the world, because the world is based on this, on authority, whether it is the authority of Lenin or Marx, or whatever they are, or the authority of some extraordinary self assuming guru... So we are going to investigate into this whether the mind can be free to find out the truth of this matter, so that you will never, under any circumstances, conform to any pattern, psychologically. When you are conforming to a pattern - religious, psychological, or the pattern which you have set out for yourself, there is always a contradiction: the pattern and what you are. I hope you are following all this. May I go on? The pattern and what you actually are and so there is always a conflict. Right? And this conflict is endless. If you haven't got one pattern you go to another pattern. We are educated in the field of conflict because we have got ideals, we have got patterns, we have got conclusions, beliefs and so on. So there is always conflict when there is any kind of pattern - the pattern which you have created for yourself, or the pattern given by some so-called illumined person. An illumined person, if he is at all illumined, will never have a pattern, because if you have a pattern you are never free, if you have a pattern you don't know what compassion is. If you have a pattern you are always battling and therefore giving importance to yourself, then the self becomes extraordinarily important - the idea of self-improvement. So, is it possible to live without a pattern - the pattern being tradition, a conclusion, an ideal, a future assumption that there is a divinity which will help you in the future to evolve and so on - you know, all that business. Now how are you going to find out the truth of this? You understand my question? Not accept what the speaker is saying but for yourself as a human being, who is the total representative of all mankind, how are you going to find out the truth of this matter? Because if your consciousness is changed radically, profoundly - no, revolutionized rather than changed - then you affect the consciousness of the whole of mankind. Please see this - right? If your consciousness, which is the consciousness of man - man, not the European man or the Chinese man, but a human being - when there is that radical transformation of that consciousness then you affect the whole consciousness of mankind, which is a fact. Stalin affected the whole of mankind -right? So has Hitler, so have the various preachers, or prophets, or priests affected the whole of the consciousness of mankind; the whole Christian world is affected by the dictums, beliefs, rituals of a Catholic structure - the whole of the European world is modified and continues in that structure. So please see the truth of this, then you become tremendously responsible, then you are not just worrying a little bit about your own particular little worry, whether you have a little sex, or no sex, or should smoke, or not smoke -you know all those kinds of petty little affairs. So we are going to see, investigate together, whether there is a life in which there is not a spark of authority. Now how are we going to investigate it? Because all our educated backgrounds, consciously, or unconsciously, is bound by this tradition of obedience - obey. They know better than you do, therefore the wise, the aristocracy of the wise is the salvation of the foolish. You know, you have heard about this. So how are we going to go into this problem, which is your problem, a human problem? With what capacity do you investigate? Investigation implies the mind must be free of cause and effect. Mustn't it? You understand? To investigate there must be freedom from motive. Right? I wonder if you see this? No? I want to investigate into the question of authority. My background says you must obey, you must follow. And in the process of investigation my background is always projecting, is always distorting my investigation. So can I be free of my background so that it doesn't interfere in any way with my investigation? My urgency to investigate, to find the truth, my urgency, my immediacy, my demand to find out the truth of it puts the background in abeyance, because my intensity is so strong to find out the background doesn't interfere. You see the point? I wonder if you do. The background is so strong, my education, my conditioning has accumulated for centuries, consciously I can't fight it, I can't push it aside. Right? I can't battle with it. I have no time to take it through analysis, step by step. Life is too short. So my very intensity to find out the truth of authority makes my background much further away. Do you follow what I mean? It is not impinging on my mind. Do you see that? It is reasonable, isn't it? It is logical, it is sane. To fight the background intensifies the background. Right? But the urgency to find out the truth of authority, the urgency, because it is tremendously important to discover the truth because then there is the freedom to look, to investigate, to find out. Right? I hope I am not pushing you through my interest. So are you prepared to investigate this whole question of psychological, external imposed authority of human beings by other human beings, to find the truth of it? Which means to find the truth there must be no motive, no cause for the investigation into the truth of authority. You understand this? I wonder if you do. This is asking a tremendous lot, isn't it? Are we prepared for this? Or are we all too old? It doesn't matter. If you are too old it is your affair, if you are not intense it is your affair. I want to find out the truth of it, as a human being - not me, I have gone through all this for the last fifty years so I am out. It doesn't mean a thing to me -any authority. But assuming I am a representative of the human beings, I say to myself I want to find the truth of this matter, which is: whether one can live a life without any conformity, without any conflict, without having a goal, a purpose, a projected ideal, which all creates, brings about conflict. You understand this? Right? The intensity of the investigation depends on the urgency to find the truth of it, to have tremendous energy to find out. Most of us dissipate this energy through conflict, Right? 'What is' and 'what must be'. If we see that 'what must be' is an escape or an avoidance of the fact of 'what is; or thought incapable of meeting 'what is' projects 'what should be' and uses that as a lever to remove 'what is.' Do you follow all this? Obviously. So is it possible to look, observe 'what is' without any motive? Not to change it, transform it, to make it conform to a particular pattern that you or another has established? You are following all this? Or is it getting too much? I wonder why you are all here? I would like to find out, if I may, why you are all here. You can't answer me, naturally, each one. But are you here out of curiosity, or to listen to some Asiatic person with some peculiar philosophy, or are you here because he has a reputation, or you have read some books and say, "Well, I wonder by reading the books I can't understand the man but I will go and listen to him and find out if I can understand". So you should ask yourself, if one may point out, why you are here. Because, as we said, this is a very, very serious matter. It is a matter of life and death. I mean it. In a world that is totally disintegrating, in a hypocritical, monstrous world, immoral world, where they are preparing for wars through all kinds of instruments. Right? You know all this. Is it that you want to escape from all that and listen to somebody who is talking about something which you hope to understand? Or seeing all that, seeing what the world is, there are divisions, the conflicts, the corruptions, the pollution, the horrors of killing each other - all that is going on in the world - seeing all that you say there must a way out of all this, an intelligent, rational, sane way out of all this mess? If that is your intention, then you are serious. But if you just come here casually and listen casually and agree or disagree - you know, that has no meaning whatsoever. So let's proceed. We are assuming - the speaker is assuming that you are really desperately serious, in a nice, humanistic way serious. And being serious together we are going to investigate into the question of authority and see the truth of it - not opinions, not judgements, not 'it is necessary', or 'it is not necessary', but see the truth of it and therefore be totally free of authority - authority of a book, authority of a priest, authority of psychologists with their latest desperate inventions and so on and so on and so on. I said to investigate there must be no motive, because the motive will dictate what you will discover. If there is a cause the effect is dependent on the cause. So the effect is not the truth, it is a reaction. So can your mind be free of every motive to investigate -whatever will happen at the end of it? Which means can you be free of this authoritarian education that one has received from childhood, and that freedom can only come into being when there is the present necessity and the urgency to find out the truth of the matter. Therefore the background fades away. You see? Because if I am very intent to understand what you are saying I forget myself. I forget I am a Hindu, a Christian, a Buddhist, all my background, I am only interested to understand fully what you mean. Therefore the whole thing disappears, the background, the motive is not because I am interested to find out. You get what I am talking about? Some of you? So the intensity is necessary to investigate. And that intensity can only come into being when there is no cause and no effect and therefore no reaction. Are we together? Are you doing this with me? Not you must, but together, we said, and that is why you are here, you have taken a journey, you have taken a lot of trouble, expense and all the rest of it, you are here to find out the truth of the matter. Not what you think, or what I think, which has relatively no value at all, but the truth of something so that you are free for ever from this beastly authority. Sorry to use such an adjective. You understand what it implies? It implies that you must be completely alone in your investigation. Right? Alone - the word alone means all one. Isn't that strange? Please I will repeat it so that you get it. Alone, the meaning of that word, the root meaning of that word means all one. Aloneness doesn't mean isolation, it doesn't mean you have withdrawn, that you have built a wall around yourself. Alone means you are all one. Oh, you don't see all this. Right? So: as humanity, general humanity, has a background, a motive, a purpose, a goal, a pattern to live by and therefore they never find out the truth of authority, here we are trying to find out the truth of authority. Here we are trying to find out the truth of it. So if you are at all serious to find the truth of it you must observe. Observe not outside as it were, but observe why you have authority, why you accept to obey somebody, with a beard, with garlands. Why you obey psychologically. I obey a surgeon, when he tells me I have got cancer and he says, "Look old boy you have got to go under the knife" and he takes X-rays and all the rest of it and shows me how dangerous it is, and I naturally obey him. That is a natural, self-preserving instinct. But the other is not a self-preserving instinct, it is a cultivated instinct, it is an educated instinct, it is a conditioned instinct. So why do we grown-up human beings, so-called civilized, obey? I am not talking about law, the policeman and all the rest of it. Psychologically, why is it that we obey? Is it because in that obedience to an authority there is deep rooted desire for security? Or we think there is security in that? Right? Otherwise you wouldn't be here, would you? Would you honestly? So in obedience to some person, idea, authority and so on psychologically, we hope to live a life without conflict, without any kind of uncertainty, which is very, very disturbing, leading to neuroticism. So being already psychologically neurotic one gives oneself over to somebody to be dictated what to do. Aren't you doing that? So in that obedience there is the root, the root of the desire for satisfaction and security. Please see this. And is there security in any teaching? Teaching, in any idea? Or in any person? You understand? You have to find out. A speaker like me comes along and says, "There is truth, there is an ecstasy" - the word 'ecstasy' means to be outside of oneself - not inside of yourself and then have a great feeling of happiness, but ecstasy implies - the root meaning - implies that you are completely outside of yourself. There is no self. So when a person like me comes along and says, "There is a state of mind which is beyond death and conflict and sorrow and therefore a mind that is full of compassion and intelligence" - he says that, the speaker says that. And you come along and say, "Yes, what a marvellous idea, I wonder how he has got it". And he says, if he is silly enough - I am not - he says, "Well, obey what I say, obey completely, the more totally you obey the greater your likelihood of having it". And in your eagerness to have this extraordinary state you obey. Right? The other day on the BBC I heard one of the disciples of one of these people, a European girl, saying to the interviewer that she has left her family, her friends, all the past and joined this particular group of ideas and she said, "My guru will tell me exactly what I should do, when to marry, when to have children, when to have sex, babies. I have given myself over to him." Right? This is what the Catholic church has done for centuries. Right? Only this new thing is rather attractive because it comes from the Orient, slightly romantic - you know, scented and chants and songs and all the rest of it, and you fall for it because there is the desire inside you to have this extraordinary sense of security so that you are never, never disturbed, never uncertain. Right? So in investigating rationally into the question of authority, if there is any form of obedience - because in obedience there is security - when you see that in that very obedience there is great illusion, then you drop obedience instantly. You understand what I am saying? Do you actually observe, are you aware, as you are aware of your heart beat, or your pulse, are you so deeply aware that in any form of obedience there is not only division, but there is conflict, there is imitation, conformity, and therefore endless trouble, which ultimately leads to various kinds of illusion. Right? Do you see this? If you see this, this morning, then it is over. Then you have dropped it. Then you will never, under any circumstances, obey anybody, including Jesus, or the Buddha, or Krishna or whoever it is, including the speaker. Then you are a total human being representing all humanity, your consciousness has undergone a change. Right? Which is, it has undergone through perception which is the awakening of intelligence. That intelligence says, finished forever with authority. Because you have finished with authority the awakening of intelligence comes. You understand? And therefore it affects your consciousness. And from that one asks: is it possible to live a life without any pattern, without any goal, without any idea of the future, to live without conflict? Is it possible? Because we are educated to conflict - right? If I am this, I must fight it, I must suppress it, I must control it. Now please listen. Is it possible to live without conflict? The speaker says yes. And you might say, "Oh, don't be silly, you are deceiving yourself. You like to think you are living without conflict but you actually aren't." And it is no good arguing with such a person because he has made up his mind. But when the speaker says it is possible to live without any conflict whatsoever, either he is speaking the truth, or he is indulging in some kind of hypocritical illusion. So we have to examine not only the illusion, the hypocrisy of oneself, and also find out if it is possible to live a life without conflict. Right? The speaker says, "I will tell you about it." Don't accept it, because if you accept it that becomes the authority and you are back in the old game. He says it is possible. It is only possible when you live completely with 'what is'. Right? With 'what is' means with what actually is taking place - live with it. That is, don't try to transform it, don't try to go beyond it, don't try to control it, don't try to escape from it, just look at it, live with it. You understand what I am saying? Will you do it now? Do it now for god's sake, not tomorrow. There is no tomorrow. To live with 'what is', that is, to live, if you are envious, or greedy, jealous, or you have problems, whatever it is, sex, fear, whatever it is, to live with that without any movement of thought that wants to move away from it. You understand? You understand what I am saying? Am I communicating with some of you? That is, I am envious of you because you are intelligent, you are bright, you look nice, you speak so intelligently, you know I am envious of you, you have a big car, a big house, I am envious of you, I want, I am envious. My education has been to deny it, which means I must control it, I must suppress it, I must try to go beyond it. That has been my background, my education. You come along and tell me: look, there is a different way of living, which is, don't condemn it, don't evaluate it, don't throttle it, don't run away from it, just look at it, like a newborn child, terribly ugly - the baby, the actual baby, you have seen them, terribly ugly, but the mother says "It is my baby, I am living with it, it is not ugly, it is the most beautiful child I have." So in the same way live with it - which means what? You are not wasting your energy in control, in suppression, in conflict, in resistance, in escape - all that energy has been wasted. Now you have gathered it - because you see the absurdity of it, the falseness of it, the unreality of it, you have now got the energy to live with 'what is'. You understand what I am saying? Am I making myself clear? Very clear? Good. Then do it! Then you have that energy to observe without any movement of thought. It is the thought that has created jealousy, and thought says, I must run away from it, I must escape it, I must suppress it, that is my education, my background, my conditioning, but somebody says to me, "Don't do all that, that is too childish, you can't solve this problem of envy that way. Live with it". That means don't move away from this thing which thought has created. You understand? Don't let another kind of thought say, 'Run away from it, resist it'. After all envy is created by thought - thought awakening a reaction which is emotional, sentimental, romantic and all the rest of it, that thought has created this reaction which is called envy. Thought has created it. And thought says now, also, I must run away from it, I don't know what to do with it. I must escape, resist, swallow. So we are saying if you see that the falseness of escape, resistance, suppression, then that energy which has gone into suppression, resistance, escape is gathered to observe. You understand? You see it? Then what takes place? You do it. Please do it with me as we go along together, otherwise there is no point in my talking. So now you are not escaping, not resisting, and you are envious, which is the result of the movement of thought. The envy is comparison, is measurement - I have, you have not, you have. So thought has brought about this feeling of envy. And thought itself says, I must run away from this enormous thing I don't know. I have been educated to run away. Now, because you see the falseness of it you stop, and you have this energy to observe this envy. The very word envy, the very word is its own condemnation - you understand what I am saying? Isn't it? When I say, I am envious there is already a sense of pushing it away. So the word -you follow, the word - one must be free of the word to observe. All this demands tremendous alertness, tremendous watchfulness, you know, awareness, so that not to escape and see the word envy - the word has created the feeling - or without the word is there a feeling? You follow all this? Now if there is no word and therefore no movement of thought - right, you understand what I am saying -then is there envy? You understand? I am envious - envy implies comparison, measurement, desire to be something other than 'what is' and so on, or to have something which I have not got. My education has been to run away from it, to suppress it and so on. Now by listening to what you are saying very, very carefully, I see the absurdity of it, the very perception of it puts it all away from me, therefore there is a gathering of energy. I am investigating envy - has the word created the feeling -because the word is associated with the feeling? Right? Communism is associated with a certain pattern of life and so on and so on. So the word is dictating my feeling. Can I observe without the word? You understand sirs? Do it! Do it! Can you observe your envy without the word? Which means, the word is the movement of thought used to communicate - communicate with itself, or with another. So when there is no word there is no communication between the fact and the observer. I wonder if you see all this? Therefore the movement of thought as envy has come to an end - come to an end completely, not temporarily. You can look at a beautiful car and observe the beauty, the lines, and that is the end of it. So to live with 'what is' completely implies no conflict whatsoever, therefore there is no future as transforming it into something else. The very ending of it is the gathering of supreme energy which is a form of intelligence. You understand? So at the end of this talk, communication with each other, are you really free from all authority, free from all conclusion, free from all sense of going towards something? Which doesn't mean you live in despair; on the contrary. There is only despair when there is a projection of hope, when you are living with 'what is' there is neither future, nor past - there it is. I wonder if you get all this? So can you, by having listened seriously, with care, I hope, have you discovered for yourself the truth that authority is the most destructive psychological factor? And therefore when there is no authority of any kind, which is pattern, idea and so on, you are living entirely in the world actually of timelessness, which is living with 'what is' in which there is no time. You understand? Therefore there is an awakening of intelligence with which we are concerned - at least with which the speaker is concerned. And that by talking, by discussing, going into it step by step with you, it is the intention of the speaker, it is the urgency of the speaker to awaken that intelligence in you. He is not awakening it in you but working together, listening over the thing together it is naturally awakened. Right? OJAI 5TH PUBLIC TALK 16TH APRIL 1977 So we're going to go together, if we may, into the question of what is love. You understand? Because part of our consciousness, one of the fragments of consciousness, is fear, and the pursuit of pleasure. So is love a fragment of our consciousness, in which there is fear and pleasure, the pursuit of pleasure? So we're asking, and I hope we are sharing in this, though the speaker is putting the question, when there is fear, is there love? And when there is the mere pursuit of pleasure, is there love? Is love pleasure, and desire, or has it nothing whatsoever to do with fear, pleasure and desire? We are going together to explore this very complex problem. Our minds, the brain, if you've observed it for yourself, brain in the sense, though the speaker is not an expert or a specialist in the brain structure and so on, but one can observe, read this whole history of mankind in oneself, if one has the capacity, the energy, the drive, the passion, to find out. Because you are the whole history, the story of mankind. And so you are the world and the world is you. Our brains through constant habit in which it has found security has become mechanical. I do not know if you have not observed it. Mechanical in the sense habitual, following certain definite patterns, repeating that pattern over and over again in a different field, but it's still a pattern. And the routine of daily life. The brain has become, if you observe, mechanical. The repetition of it, pleasure, the burden of fear, and not being able to resolve it. So gradually the brain, or part of the brain, has become mechanical, mechanical in the sense we are using the word, repetitive, both biologically as well as psychologically, repetitive, caught in certain patterns of belief, dogma, ideologies - the American ideology, the Russian ideology, the ideologies of India and so on. Where there is the pursuit and a direction, which becomes mechanical, the mind and the brain deteriorate. Please follow this, if you will, kindly. When we live a life that is repetitive, however pleasant, however desirable, however complex, a repetitive life, which is the same belief from childhood to death, the same rituals, whether it is church or the temple or wherever it is, the rituals, the tradition of it, over and over again. The repetition of pleasure, sexual, or the pleasure of achievement, the pleasure of possession, the pleasure of attachment, all these make the brain deteriorate, because they are repetitive. I hope we are meeting each other in this question. So long as there is the pursuit of pleasure as a repetitive process, and the burden of fear which man has not resolved but has run away from it, escaped from it, rationalized it, but it still remains. We are saying that the brain or part of the brain deteriorates. And this is very important, it seems to me, to understand. Because here is a country that's very young, historically speaking. And is it already deteriorating? Or is there a new life being born, regenerated, creative, not in the technological sense, not in the inventive sense, not in writing new books, and new ideas, but a mind, a brain that is incapable of a repetitive way of life. That repetitive pursuing pleasure everlastingly does bring about the deterioration of the brain. If you have observed that, and I hope in talking over together, you are observing your own mind. The words that the speaker is using and the speaker himself, please use the words and the speaker as a mirror, in which you see actually, factually, not theoretically, not as an idea, but actually use him as a mirror in which you see without distortion. And then when you see without distortion you can destroy the mirror. So the mirror doesn't become the authority. You're following all this? So we're not exercising any authority whatsoever, because in spiritual matters, in matters of that which we are going to go into, any kind of authority, any kind of following, any kind of acceptance, as a guide, does destroy the total perception, and therefore the perception of what is true. So if that is clearly understood, that the speaker is not your guru, under any circumstances. And gurus in this country are becoming a nuisance - to put it mildly. And there are gurus in India by the thousand, and so they are destroying that country, because they accept followers, they assume the authority, as though they knew everything, but they are traditional, following a certain pattern, rituals and all the rest of it. What we are saying, is something entirely different. So together we are going to question, explore, investigate and find out for yourself, not through the speaker, find out for yourself so that you are free human beings. So we're asking, what is love? Is it pleasure? Pleasure in the sense sexual, repetitive sexual act, which generally we call love. And the love of your neighbour, the love of your wife or boyfriend, in which there is a great deal of pleasure, possession, comfort, based on desire. Is that love? Where there is possessive attachment to another, there must be jealousy, there must be fear, and basic antagonism. Right? These are obvious facts, we're not saying anything extraordinary or ideological, but we are moving together from fact to fact, from the actual to the actual, from 'what is' to 'what is'. So we are asking, what is love? Do you love your wife or your girl friend or boy friend - when I use husband or wife, you know, it implies both so I won't repeat it over and over again - man and woman. Is that love, actually, not theoretically? In that love is there attachment? And is attachment love? And what is the basis of attachment? Why is one attached to something, to a property, to an idea, to an ideology, to a person, to a symbol, to a concept which you call God? Why is there attachment? Because if we do not fully understand the significance of attachment, then we will never be able to find out the truth of love. Is not the basis of attachment the fear of being alone, the fear of being isolated, the fear of loneliness, the emptiness, the sense of insufficiency in oneself? Please examine all that we are saying. Don't accept a thing that the speaker is saying, but look at it. But to look at it, to observe it, put away your personal prejudices, what you believe in, your experiences, what you think about it, because you're all here after all, taken the trouble to come, wherever you come from, to find out what the speaker has to say. But if you are full of ideas and conclusions about what you think love is, or don't think what love is, then there is no possibility of communicating with each other. So we are attached to people or ideas, to symbols, or to a concept, because in that we think there is security. Is there security in any relationship? You understand my question? Is there security, which is really the essence of attachment, in your wife or husband? And if you want security in the wife or the husband or the girl and so on, then what takes place? You must possess, legally or not legally. And where there is possession, there must be fear of losing, and therefore jealousy, hatred, divorce and all the rest of it. So we're asking, is love attachment? Can there be love when there is attachment, with all the implications of that word, in which there is fear, jealousy, guilt, irritation, leading to hatred - all that, when we use the word 'attachment' is implied. So where there is attachment can there be love? We're asking factual questions, not theoretical questions, we are dealing with daily life, not an extraordinary life, because we can only go very deeply and very far if you begin with very near, which is you. If you don't understand yourself, you can't move far. And we're going to delve into problems which are tremendously important in our daily life. So one has to go into this question logically, rationally, sanely, and then go beyond it, because logic is not love, reason isn't love, and the desire to be loved and to love is not love. So we're asking what is love? And we're saying that the negation of what is not love in daily life, every moment of your life, the negation, to put aside what is not love, then out of that negation comes the positive thing called love. You understand? We're understanding each other, not theory, not verbal understanding, but actually in our daily life, otherwise if you do not know how to love, if there is no love, then our society, the structure of our society becomes immoral, as it is, and if you love your children they'll be totally different. So one asks, if you are a parent, do you love your children, if you have children, or you are merely attached, attached to them while they are very young, and then push them away, let them lead their own life, and having no relationship with you as the parent. And so where there is no love, you'll have wars, your children will be killed and maimed, and the other people's children will be killed and maimed. This is what is actually happening in the world. So what is the relationship of love to suffering? You understand my question, because we are going into this question of suffering, which mankind throughout the ages has carried with him like a shadow. We are not philosophizing - philosophy means the love of truth, the love of wisdom; not as it's turned out now in the modern world, a lot of theories put together, clever philosophers use their brain and their thought, always thinking. So thought has become extraordinarily important. And as we discussed the other day, thought is a fragment, it's very limited, and thought cannot solve this problem of what love is, thought cannot make, cultivate love, because thought is a fragment, thought is the movement of time from here to there, both physiologically as well as psychologically. The man who says I am this and I must become that, psychologically, thought has brought about the space which is called time, and the measure. So we are not philosophizing in the modern sense. We are saying, we are dealing with daily actual everyday facts, and if we cannot understand them or run away from them, you lead the most extraordinary, miserable conflicting life. So we're asking, what is the relationship of love to suffering? What is suffering? Why has man throughout the ages suffered? There is the suffering when animals, the earth is destroyed, when the earth is misused, there is suffering. When you kill animals and watch them suffering, there is that kind of suffering. There is the suffering - if you have ever watched yourself -there is suffering when you see a man who is dishonest, who is crooked, who says one thing, does another - that's another kind of suffering. There is suffering when someone dies on whom you have relied, who you think you love. And so on. There is that kind of suffering. Then there is the suffering of physical pain. There is the suffering of not being able to achieve, to become something, which is not fulfilling, as you call it. And there is the suffering of a human being, when he says, "I must achieve the greatest worldly possessions, power, money." There is that kind of suffering. And also there is the suffering which is not self-pity, a suffering when there is the perception of what human beings can be and are not. You're following all this? So there is vast human suffering. Wars have brought enormous suffering to mankind. I do not know if you saw some time ago on the television the maimed soldiers returning home. Once I was taken to a hospital where there were the people who are wounded from the wars, in a state of appalling suffering. That is our inhumanity to man. So there is this vast human suffering. When you think you love your wife or your husband and he or she turns away from you, there is suffering. So you as the human being suffers, and humanity suffers. Everything man has done brings about suffering. The technological advancement has brought great benefits to humanity but also it has brought great suffering. You have watched all this? So what is suffering, why does man put up with it, why do you tolerate it? You understand my question? Why do you allow these things to happen? Which is, asking the question, why do you live this way? You understand, sirs? One mustn't become emotional, one must observe these things factually, not escape from them, and then only we'll be able to do something about it. When you make an abstraction, that is, move away from 'what is', which is an abstraction, you understand? Move away, run away, escape from 'what is', which is a movement of abstraction, then that abstraction becomes an idea, and you live according to that idea, but not according to facts. You see the difference? This is what we have done, all our life. And now we are saying, please listen without abstraction, which is, man suffers, man doesn't know the enormous beauty, the depth and the significance of love. And if you make an abstraction of it, that is, make an idea of it, make a conclusion about it, then you are not facing fact. So together we're examining without making a concept of it, which is so easy, because we think having a concept, a conclusion, makes us much more capable of dealing with 'what is'. But whereas if you look at 'what is' without the idea, then you can get your teeth into it. So why does man, woman, even the liberated woman, why do they put up with this suffering? Why worship suffering, which the Christians do, apparently? Why man, you, comprehend what is the meaning of suffering. You understand, sir? What is it that suffers? When you say, "I am suffering, I suffer because I see animals ill-treated, I suffer because my neighbour's son is killed." You follow? Who is it - please listen to this, give a little attention to what is being said, because nobody will tell you these things. - when you say, "I suffer," who is it that is suffering? What is the centre that says, "I am in agony of jealousy, of fear, of a loss." Now what is that centre, you follow, I'll use the word the 'essence' of man, you as a human being who says, "I suffer, I shed tears."? Please find out with me, though I have found out, but yet we are going together in it, is it the whole movement of time, time being the past, the present, and the future, both psychologically as well as chronologically, is it the movement of time, is it the movement of thought as time, which creates the centre? So when you say, "I suffer," what is that 'I', how has that 'I' come into being? Having come into being, then you say, "I suffer, I am anxious, I am frightened, I am jealous, I am lonely." "I must be this." Is that 'I' which is never stationary, which is always moving, 'I desire this and I desire that, and then I desire something else,' it's a constant movement. That movement is time, isn't it, that movement is thought, isn't it? So, sir, when you say, 'I', there is the whole philosophy or whole concept in the Asiatic world, the 'I' is something which is beyond time. Or the concept that there is a higher 'me' is still in the Asiatic world. In the Western world, the 'I' has never been thoroughly examined. You have attributed qualities to it, the Freuds and the Jungs and all the psychologists have given an attribute, given a description of it, given attributes. You follow? But never gone into this question of what is the nature and the structure of the 'I' which says, "I suffer." And we're saying, is there, that 'I' is as you observe one day I say, "I must have that." And a few days later you want something else. There is the constant movement of desire. Constant movement of pleasure, constant movement of what you must be, what you want to be and so on. We are saying, this movement is time. This movement is the structure and the nature of thought. [The poor child is crying.] So the 'I' who says, "I suffer", is put together by thought. Obviously. The thought says, "I am K., I am John, I am this, I am that," And thought identifies itself with the structure, with the name and with the form, which is the 'I', with all the content of consciousness, which is the 'I', fear, hurts, loneliness, despair, anxiety, guilt, the pursuit of pleasure, the sense of loneliness, all that, which is the content of your consciousness, which is the essence of your 'I'. So when you say, "I suffer", what is that? Is the image that thought has built about itself, which is the form, the name and all that, is it that that suffers? You're following this question? Because, please, if you don't, I will go into it in ten different ways. Because one can be free totally from sorrow. And when sorrow ends, there is not only wisdom but also there is tremendous passion, not lust, passion, which has nothing whatsoever to do with desire, with enthusiasm. So without escaping, when you say, "I suffer", when you shed tears, when there is somebody that you love is lost, is gone, without escaping, running away from this sense of anxiety, loneliness, despair, not to run away from it, but to remain with it totally. You understand? Because sorrow is the summation of energy. You know, any challenge, any challenge, the deeper the challenge, the wider the challenge, the more intense the challenge is, the greater energy is demanded to meet it. Sorrow is this challenge. And it is the essence of that challenge to which you have to respond. But if you respond to it by escaping from it, by seeking comfort from it, then you are dissipating the energy that you need to meet this thing. So when there is no escape, and there is no escape, because if you do escape, sorrow is always there, like your shadow, like your face, it's always with you, and without escaping, to remain with it without any movement of thought. You understand? Are you doing this? We are talking together, we are looking together into this. So are you doing it now, not tomorrow - do it now as we are talking. We are saying, don't escape from suffering, whatever that suffering is. Naturally physical suffering, you need to alleviate it, you need to quieten it. But we are talking about psychological suffering, the deep inward pain of man. If you run away from it, you have not solved it, but if you remain with it, not identify yourself with it, because you are that suffering. But if you say, "I must identify with it, I must accept it, I must rationalize it.' you're moving away from the actuality of suffering. So without escaping, remain with it. Which means, all energy, all your energy is present to meet this extraordinary thing that has happened. And out of that comes passion. The word 'suffering' has its root in passion, in the dictionary, if you go into it - I don't want go into all that. So there is a solution, there is an ending to sorrow, as there is an ending to fear, completely. Then only there is a possibility to love, because a man who suffers does not know what love is. But we think that we will learn something from suffering, that suffering is a lesson to be learnt. But when you observe suffering in yourself, not escape from it, remain with it totally, completely, without any movement of thought, of alleviation, comfort, just completely hold it, then you will see some strange, psychological transformation takes place. So love is passion, which is compassion. And compassion has its own intelligence. I wonder how much of this you understand, because without that passion and compassion, with its intelligence, we are acting in a very limited sense. All our action is limited. Where there is compassion that action is total, complete, irrevocable. I wanted to talk also in relation to this, the question of death. You know, death is something, not only mysterious, but also it is a great act of purgation. You understand? You understand the word, to cleanse. You know that which has continuity, is degenerating. I wonder if you understand this. That which continues, which is repetitive, which is in the same movement, in the same pattern, whether the pattern may vary according to countries, according to climate, according to circumstances, but it's the same pattern, moving in any pattern brings about a continuity. Right? Do you see that? And that continuity is part of the degenerating process of man. Whereas, when there is an ending to continuity, something new can take place. You understand - this is simple. You need a great deal of time to go into this question of what is death. Either you can understand it instantly, because you have understood, you have lived and understood the whole movement of thought, of fear, hate, love - you follow - all that, and you can then grasp the significance instantly, of what death is. But as most people don't do this kind of work, we'll have to work together to go into this, though I'm not your guru, so don't be a follower, of anybody. What is death? When you ask that question, thought has many answers. Right? Thought says - I don't want to go into all the miserable explanations of thought. Haven't you noticed, when you ask that question, every human being has an answer to it, according to his conditioning, according to his desire, according to his hope, according to the demands of his comfort. You follow? He always has an answer. So without having an answer, if you can, look at, let's find out, without answering it. You understand? The answer will invariably be intellectual, verbal, put together by thought. But we are examining something totally unknown, totally mysterious - death is a tremendous thing. I hope you can do this. We are asking, what is death. Obviously the organism dies, the organism, please listen to it a little bit carefully if you really want to go into this very deeply, please give your attention, though you may be a little tired after an hour, and five minutes or ten minutes. When we ask that question, what is death, one realizes the organism, the body, with its brain, having been misused, in various forms of self-indulgence, contradictions, effort, constant struggle, wears itself out mechanically, it's a mechanism. And with it dies the brain. The brain is the residue, the holder of memory. Right? Memory as experience, as knowledge, and from that knowledge, experience, stored up in the cells of the brain, as memory, from which thought arises, when the organism comes to an end, the brain also comes to an end. And so thought comes to an end, because we said, thought is a material process, thought has nothing etheric or spiritual, it is a material process based on memory. Memory is held in the cells of the brain. And its response is thought. And when the organism dies, thought dies. You understand? And thought has created the whole structure of the 'me'. No? I wonder if you understand all this. The 'me' that wants this, the 'me' that doesn't want that, the 'me' that is fearful, anxious, despairing, longing, lonely, fearful - you follow - the 'me'. That movement is brought about by thought which is also a movement, so that 'me' put together by thought, and when the organism dies, thought with its material process, also comes to an end. Wait, go into it very slowly. And, you say, is that all? You understand? You follow? One has lived, struggled, acquired knowledge, suffered and so on, and you say, "Well is that the end of it? What is the value of it?" What is the value of a human being who has lived, struggled, experienced, value in the sense, what is the significance of it? Just to acquire, live such an ugly, stupid, miserable wicked life, and then end? You follow? So thought says, "No, this is not the end." So thought says, "There is another world." That other world is still the movement of thought. You're following all this? So thought invents the other world. The world where you will be happy. (Laughter) The world where you will have all your desires fulfilled, where you will be most extraordinarily rewarded, sitting next to God. All that is the movement of thought also. You're following all this? See what thought does, see the danger of thought in the wrong place. Thought has a right place, which is to function where it is absolutely necessary, technology, language -you follow - all that. But when thought invents and says, "That is, it is there," it is still the movement of thought. So when one asks, when the brain comes to an end through disease, through old age, through an accident, through misuse, the misuse of living in an illusion, living in a belief - all beliefs are illusory, all ideals are not based on fact. There is only fact, no ideals. So the brain comes to an end with the organism, and so thought comes to an end. Thought realizes this very deeply, because thought is fairly cunning. So thought realizes this is not the end, I must continue. So it continues in an idea, in an illusion, in a heaven. Or in hell everlastingly suffering, because you didn't obey the laws of some priest. Please follow this. So we are saying, is that the whole meaning of living. You understand, sir? Do you understand my question? You bear children, you have pain, you struggle, you go through such misery, wars, hate each other, like each other. And suddenly end. So one says, then what is the meaning of living? You're following all this? One is always asking - again, please listen - one is always asking what happens after death. We are asking quite a different question - what is before death, not what is after death. You understand what I am saying? What is before death, which is your life. Right? What is your life? Go to school, to college, university, get a job, live, man and woman live together, sex, he goes off to the office, she goes off earning some more money, they have children, pain, anxiety, each man fighting. You're following it? Going to an office for the next fifty years, what a life you lead. This is your life, before death. And you want to know, living such a miserable life, you want to know what is after death. See what you are doing, sirs. I want to weep for you. But it's no good weeping for you. So is that all? That is an apparent fact, isn't it? Right? Are you following? Without inventing another world, without saying, "Yes, there is life after death, there is this," you follow? - the things thought has produced, and they have written volumes about it - all based on thinking. Right? All saying, "I believe." So if you put aside all that, literally, actually do it, put all that aside, then what are you faced with? The actual fact, the fact that you, who is put together by thought, comes to an end. Can you bear that? You follow what I'm saying? Can you see the fact of that? All your anxieties, all your longings - when you die the brain, which holds thought, comes to an end. Now, if that is so, as it so, then we can go into something which is entirely different. So we are asking, when all this ends, what is there? You understand? I wonder if you do. Look, sir, actually, when you're living, as you're living now, with vigour, with energy, with all the travail of life, as now, can you live meeting death now? Please, do you understand my question? Which is, I'm living with my vigour, energy, capacity, pain and all the rest of it - I'm living. And death means an ending to that living. Right? Now can I bring the ending into my living? That is, to live with death all the time. That is, I'm attached to you, end that attachment, which is death, isn't it? I wonder if you see this. I'm greedy, and when you die, you can't carry greed with you. So end the greed, not in a week's time, or ten days time - end it, now. So you're living a life full of vigour, energy, capacity, observation, see the beauty of the world, beauty of the earth, and also the ending of that instantly, which is death. So to live before is to live with death. Have you captured something? Which means that you are living in a timeless world. You understand? You're living a life of constant - everything that you acquire, you are ending, so that there is always a tremendous movement, not a certain place, you're fixed. I wonder if you see all this. Can you do all this? Will you do all this, or will you just listen and say, well, this is another idea, another concept. This is not a concept. When you invite death, which means the ending of everything that you hold, dying to it, each day, each minute, then you will find - not you, there is no 'you' finding it, because you have gone - then there is that state of a timeless dimension in which the movement as we know as time, is not. This is the depth of meditation. You understand? It means the emptying of the content of your consciousness, so that there is no time, time comes to an end, which is death. You understand? Not ten years later or fifty years later, but now. BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST PUBLIC TALK 27TH AUGUST 1977 I presume that most of you are here because you are serious people, that you are really concerned with the radical transformation of one's consciousness, its movement, which is the structure, and its nature. And if one is not serious I don't see the point of you coming here at all. It is a waste of your energy, it is a waste of your money, waste of all kinds of things that you might be doing otherwise. So please we are rather serious people - at least the speaker is, and we should consider the various issues that face us in our daily life - political, economical, social, personal and global. Perhaps some of you are already familiar with what we are talking about, but familiarity does not necessarily lead to contempt, or neglect, or saying it is all repetitive stuff. But rather together, and we mean together, actually together, you and I, go into these problems, sharing them together, investigating them together, exploring the whole content of our consciousness, and therefore our action in our daily life. That is what we are primarily concerned with. And if one is at all serious please give your attention to this for at least an hour this morning - at least for an hour. I don't know quite where to begin but we'll plunge into it, it's simpler. I think one should be aware of three fundamental issues in our daily life: which is compassion, clarity and skill. We are educated in the field of being very skilful in dealing with our life - skillful in the sense of being clever, applying a great deal of knowledge which we have acquired through education, through experience, and act skilfully, both in a factory, in a business, in our daily life. That skill becomes a routine, a repetitive action. And that skill when it is highly developed, as it should be, becomes the means of self perpetuation, self importance, self aggrandizement. So the skill has lead us to this present state, both technologically as well as in our relationships, how to deal with each other rather skilfully: not clearly, not with compassion, but skilfully. So is there an action which is skilful in our daily life and yet not perpetuating the self, the 'me', the importance given to oneself and to one's activities, one's self-centred existence - to act skilfully without strengthening the self. So is there an action in our daily life which is both skilful and yet not perpetuating the self? That is one problem. Because through our education we have developed, through experience, this enormous skill, and therefore it has given us a great deal of strength, vitality and comfort in the realm of skill and therefore perpetuating the self. Now is there an action that is free of that and yet skilful? And to go into that, one has to question what is clarity, because you cannot act skilfully without clarity. I hope we are travelling together - not my talking to myself, I can do that in my room, but if you will kindly join, take the responsibility to investigate what we are talking about together, then it will have some value. So what is clarity? Because we see if there is clarity then there is action which is skilful and not self perpetuating. We will go into that. Clarity can exist only when there is freedom to observe, when one is capable of looking, observing, watching. That is only possible when there is complete, total freedom, otherwise there is always distortion in our observation. I think that is fairly simple: simple in words but in action it becomes terribly difficult. So is it possible to be free of all the distorting factors in our outlook? When you observe yourself or another, society, the politicians, the environment, the whole cultural religious movement that is going on in the world - so-called religious movement - can you observe without any prejudice, without taking any sides, without projecting your own personal conclusions, your beliefs, your dogmas, your experience and knowledge, and therefore be totally free of all that to observe clearly? That is the second problem. The third problem is compassion. The word is not the thing. One may describe what is compassion in a most eloquent and poetic manner, but whatever is expressed in words is not the thing. So we are going to find out these three things: what is compassion, because without compassion there is no clarity, without clarity there is no skill - they are totally interrelated with each other. So we are going to investigate these three problems: whether human beings, as we are now, can have this extraordinary sense of compassion in our daily life, not a theory, not an ideal, not something to be achieved, to be practised and all the rest of it, to have it totally, completely, at the very root of our being. That is one question. Then from that arises: can there be clarity? Because one can be very clear in our thinking, objectively, rationally, sanely but reason, however logical, however objective is very limited -obviously. Right? I hope we are travelling together, moving together. And clear thinking has not solved our problems. The philosophers, the scientists, the so-called religious people have thought very clearly about certain things, but in our daily life clear thinking has not resolved our issues - right? One may think very clearly why one is envious or violent but the ending of violence cannot be brought about through clear thinking. Clear thinking implies a limitation because thought itself is limited, thought itself is conditioned, thought itself has its own boundaries. And thought may try to go beyond its boundaries and invent a logos, a deity, a Utopian State and so on but it is still limited because thought is the movement of memory, which is experience, knowledge and that is always from the past; therefore thought is time-bound. Can I go on with all this? You are following somewhat? Please I am not preaching. I am not doing any propaganda. We are not trying to convince of anything. And we really mean that - at least I mean it. Absolutely no sense of authority, no sense of trying to persuade you to think in a particular direction, do any kind of propaganda, trying to convince you of something, or trying to make you join something - nothing. So is it possible to see the limitations of thought and give it its right place, and therefore giving the right place to thought brings about clarity - right? We mean by right place - the art of that intelligence which comes through investigation, through exploration, that art - the very meaning of that word is to put everything where it belongs, put everything in our life where it belongs, and to find out where it belongs you need tremendous intelligence. And that intelligence can only come about when there is compassion, not directed by will, not following a certain pattern of thought, but in the process of investigating what is compassion, in that movement, or out of that movement comes an intelligence, which is not personal or individual, it is intelligence. That is what we are going to find out - right? Is it possible to awaken that intelligence which will bring about order in our daily life, and therefore socially, politically, in every direction? Because we are the centre of society - right? We make what society is, so we are essentially the product of the past, and whatever we do is limited by the past, by time and any revolution, whether physical or psychological, brought about by thought, is limited. So we are going to find out, examine together, what is compassion: what is clarity: and a skill that is born out of clarity and compassion - not skill by itself, because that has lead us to all kinds of misery, obviously. One can see it. So where shall we begin? With compassion? Or with clarity? Or with skill? Bearing in mind that clarity can only come out of compassion, and any skill born out of that clarity is not giving importance to the self. Right? I wonder? We are meeting somewhat with each other? Yes sir? So I would like to begin with compassion. To understand the whole meaning and the depth of that word one has to investigate the movement of our consciousness, of our consciousness, yours. Which means you are the world, and the world is you. That is an obvious fact, one must go into it a little bit, which is: wherever you go in the world, east or west, north or south, human beings psychologically have great anxiety, uncertainty, always seeking security in some form or another - physiologically or psychologically. They are full of violence, right through the world. This is an extraordinary phenomenon when you watch it - violence, greed, envy, hatred and in our consciousness there is the good and the bad. We will use those simple words to convey a great deal. So that is our consciousness, in which there is religious beliefs, political adherence to a particular party and so on and so on. All that is our consciousness, which is the consciousness of the whole of humanity - right? I do not know if you see this or if you want to discuss it. So in investigating one's consciousness, which is the global consciousness, not your consciousness, because you are the result of all the culture, the social structure, education, the religious assertions, two thousand or ten thousand years of propaganda, you are the result of all that. And in investigating the good and the bad we find the bad is increasing - right? You understand the word 'bad' - we are using it very simply. The bad is increasing because the good has become static, the good is not flowering. It is accepting the patterns and living according to that pattern, or ideals and so on, therefore instead of flowering it is withering, therefore giving strength to the bad. I don't know if you notice all this. There is more violence, more hatred, national divisions, religious divisions, every form of antagonism, right through the world, racial, communism, and so on and so on. That is on the increase because the good is not flowering. Right? Now to be aware of this fact without any effort - please the moment we make an effort we are giving importance to the self, which is the bad - right? So to observe the actual fact of the bad without any effort, just to observe it without any choice - because choice is a distorting factor. So to observe the world with all its violence, brutality, all that is going on, the political nastiness, all that without any choice, but to observe it freely. And when you observe it so openly, so freely, then the good begins to flower. Not that you pursue the good, and thereby give it strength to flower but when the bad, the evil, the ugly is understood completely the other naturally flowers. Are we making some sense out of this? So are we, each one of us who is at all serious, are we aware of this fact? That in us, in our consciousness, there is this duality. and therefore conflict between the two. And the outcome of conflict is, the bad grows more and more and more. But when you observe, without any choice, observe without any prejudice, without any conclusion - and therefore without any effort - that which is ugly, evil, the bad, declines and gives strength to the good. Is that clear? Are we doing it now, as we are talking? Or are we going to think over it tomorrow? Because if you think over it tomorrow you are not paying attention to it now. If you are not paying attention now you will not pay attention to it tomorrow. It is so obvious. That is, it is a tremendous thing, what we are talking about. You are in a crisis, the world is in a crisis, there must be different kinds of organizations, political and so on, but that can only come about rationally, sanely when this is understood by every person in the world: that where there is conflict between that which is bad, evil and ugly and when there is conflict that very conflict gives strength to the ugly, to the evil, to the bad. In us is that very clear because we are examining our consciousness, we are investigating the way you think, the way you act, the way you live, which is the very essence of our consciousness. And also in our consciousness we have given, through a great deal of skill, the structure and the nature of the self. The self is violence, the self is the greed, envy and all the rest of it - that is the very essence of the self. And as long as there is that centre as the 'me' every action must be distorted. Obviously. Because you are acting from a centre, and giving action a direction. And therefore when there is direction in action it is distortion. You may develop a great deal of skill in this way but it is always unbalanced - not balanced - not harmonious - whatever word you like to use. So we are trying to find out in our exploration whether consciousness, with its movement, can undergo a radical transformation, not brought about by will, because will is desire, desire for something, and therefore when there is desire, a motive, it is a distorting factor in observation? Is this somewhat clear between us? Or are we making confusion more confused? Look sirs, let us make it very simple. What is one to do in this world, surrounded by so much violence, where there are so many conclusions about everything, where there are so many gurus with their latest whatever it is, you are surrounded by all this -propaganda, influence, reward and punishment - facing all this what is one to do? Q: Run. K: Are you saying drown yourself? Q: Run. K: Run. When you run away from something it pursues you. What is one to do? What are you going to do? You understand my question? You may escape, go to all these camps, or entertainments that are going on right through England, where thousands and thousands of people are walking in mud and singing and all the rest of it. That is a marvellous escape. But that doesn't solve a thing. So one asks, very seriously, if you are all deeply concerned with the world, with what is happening with human beings, how they are destroying each other, what are you going to do? What is your action? Follow some guru? Accept a new sense of direction? New ideologies? All those are escapes from the fact - right? From the fact that we human beings are extraordinarily brutal, violent, ugly, occasional flashes of affection, consideration, compassion -occasionally! In asking that question, and if you want an answer which is truthful and therefore which is always true not just now truth and the next day it is false - one has to examine oneself very, very deeply - right? One has to go into oneself tremendously to find out. And to investigate into oneself you cannot follow anybody - right? Obviously. If you follow somebody who will tell you how to investigate yourself you are following what he is saying. You are not examining yourself. Therefore in examining yourself all authority of every kind must come to an end -psychologically. Are we capable of that? Are you really capable of putting aside all authority, psychologically - the authority of the priest, the authority of society, the authority of your own experience, the authority of your own knowledge or the knowledge of somebody else - can you put all that aside and begin to look at yourself? Will you? Which means you are brought to that position to look at yourself because it is a crisis. In a crisis all energy is centred, and that energy demands that you look at yourself. Nobody is forcing you; because you yourself see what is happening, you yourself are fully aware of the social, political, economic conditions of this world, the deteriorating factors and so on and so on. So that very crisis makes you observe. And it doesn't if you are serious - it doesn't make you run away from it. On the contrary you are totally committed. And in examining yourself, since there is no authority, you are looking at yourself as you are. But in our consciousness there is this duality - the good and the bad. So we are always looking with the eyes of the good and also with the eyes of the bad, so there is a conflict. I don't know if you follow? Now we are trying to eliminate all conflict altogether. That is only possible when you observe without any choice - just to observe yourself. Therefore in that way you eliminate the conflict between the good and the bad. You understand? Do it please as we are talking about it, if you are serious do it together. So we are observing ourselves without any sense of compulsion not according to any psychologist, Freud, Jung and all the old generation or the new generation, but looking at ourselves without any choice. Right? Are we doing it? Which means, are you looking at yourself, recognizing that there is violence in you, there is greed, envy, the desire for power, the desire for position, all these factors can you look at them all without the least effort and without any choice? To be choicelessly aware is the essence of observation. Right? Can we proceed from there? So: out of that choiceless observation comes clarity, obviously. Because there is no direction, there is no motive, nobody is forcing you to do this or that, nobody is offering a reward and if you don't do it nobody is going to punish you, you are free of all that nonsense. And in that observation comes clarity. And if that clarity is not related to compassion your action will be unskillful, because clarity comes with compassion. Clarity by itself has no meaning, any more than skill by itself has no meaning. So compassion, clarity, skill is related to the art of listening, the art of seeing, and the art of learning. There is the art of listening, there is the art of seeing, there is the art of learning. And if you have not got the art, which is to put everything in its right place, then you will not understand what is compassion - because we are going to learn about it. Learn that which is not compassionate - right? Because only through negation you come to the positive, not the other way round. We start with certainties - we all do. I believe, I know, I think. Those are all certainties. And when you begin with certainties you end up in uncertainties. You know man has given all his life, seventy years of his life with certainties, at the end he says, "I am utterly confused, I don't know where I am". Whereas if we start with uncertainties, not knowing, hesitant, then we end up with clarity, with certainty. So compassion is related naturally to love. That is, is there a love free of all the taint of civilization, taint of jealousy, possessiveness, remembrance, the pursuit of pleasure? So is there a love which is free from all this? Please sirs, this is a very, very serious question. It is your life, not my life, so you have to answer this question. Is there love in our heart, or wherever it is, in which there is not a shadow of corruption - not a remembrance which makes you think that you love? And is love the product of thought? And is there love which is whole, complete, not broken up - "I love" and "I hate", or I love but in me I am possessive of something or other. You understand? So if there is not that quality of love in us, compassion becomes impossible - because compassion is related to sorrow and that is quite an enormous problem. So we will go into it later on perhaps, as we have only four talks we must make it all concise. So we are concerned with the transformation of our consciousness, the movement of our consciousness. The movement is bound by thought, is propelled by thought, given energy to that movement by thought. But thought, as we said, is very limited because it is the response of the past which is memory, therefore it is of time. Is love of time? If I remember my sexual pleasure of yesterday, or of ten years ago, and I say to the person, "I love you" is that love? Go on sirs, you have to find this out. Unless you break through this circle there will be no compassion. And when there is no compassion you have no clarity. And you may develop skill, but the skill will always be self-centred, distorting, cruel. You understand? So we are investigating very seriously into the whole movement of consciousness. Do you want to discuss any of this now? Q: When we come to that point when we see that will is desire, we can observe that. But in a crisis, there seems to be a natural movement to wish to solve it and the very attempt to solve it is a distorting factor. So it seems. K: Sir, you see one of our problems in meditation - if you have gone into it, we can go into it again - is to be free of will, because will is based on desire - desire for enlightenment, desire for truth, desire for happiness. So where there is desire there must be will to fulfil that desire. And in the understanding of desire, is there freedom from choice? Because desire chooses - I like this, I don't like that, I want that, I don't want that. So we have to go into the question again of what is desire. Why do we have desires, so many desires? If we have a little we want more. If we have more we want something better. We think by putting the parts together we will understand the whole. That is one of the objects of desire. By putting the parts, gathering them together we think we will have comprehended the whole and can go beyond the parts, the more. So one has to go into this question of what is desire - not the object of desire, because that varies from time to time, from childhood till death the objects vary. When you are a child you want something, when you grow up and so on and so on. So one has to go to the very root of desire. Again to observe desire without any choice, say "I must not", "I must" - just to observe desire. What is desire? How does it come about? Go on sirs. Doesn't it come about, to put it very simply, through visual perception first? Seeing something, then contact - right? Touching it, smelling it, tasting it. And from that sensation. Then thought comes in and says 'more' or 'less'. So the desire is perception, seeing, sensation, contact, sensation, and desire with its images - right? I am not inventing this to make you accept this or reject it, just look at it for yourself and you will see how desire comes into being. You see something beautiful and the sensation and the desire to possess it. The desire, because the image that is brought about through desire to have it, possess it and the enjoyment and so on and so on. Or seeing something ugly and not wanting it, and resisting it, which is part of desire. Will to achieve, will to deny, which is born of desire. Now is there an action, in daily life, please listen to this, find out, is there an action in daily life in which desire doesn't operate? It is very exciting to find out for oneself if there is such an action at all, because we are accustomed, we are trained, it is our condition to act upon desire. The politicians, all the rest of it, the whole world is based on that. We are asking a question quite the contrary and therefore it is difficult to penetrate into that unless you are free of the other you cannot go into this question. That is, to find out an action which must be skilful and yoga - skill in action is yoga, not just doing exercises and so on, skill in action is part of yoga - and to find that out one has to see the whole movement of desire - how it arises, how it demands fulfilment, and then there is frustration, when there is not fulfilment, there is anger, bitterness, all the things that follow when there is frustration. And when there is fulfilment of that desire, the opposite to that. So is there an action without motive, which is desire, without a goal, without an end in view? Because if you have a goal, an end in view, you have already limited your action according to the motive and the end. Action is only the means, there is no other - right? I wonder if you understand? That is, there is a means of action, of right action, when there is no direction. Direction is from the 'me', my demands, my desires, my importance, my security, that gives a distorting factor in action. But when there is no centre as the 'me' then there is action without desire. You have to go into this very much otherwise it becomes merely verbal and meaningless. Q: Is there an experiencer sir, as such? K: Is there an experiencer as such. What is the experiencer? Who is the experiencer? Answer it sirs. Is there an experiencer without experience? Is there a collection of experiences which becomes knowledge, identified with the 'me'? You understand? The 'me' is the centre of experience. I have experienced happiness. I have experienced sex, I have experienced hurt, I have experienced a dozen things. All these accumulated experiences bring about the experiencer which is the 'me', separate from the experience. Right? The 'me' is going to experience something. So we are asking: is the experiencer different from the experience, or both are the same? That is, the experiencer, with all the memories of the accumulated past, and all its knowledge, is going to experience something different. Is that thing that is different really different? Or when I recognize it as an experience is it part of me already? I wonder if you see this? You understand sir? I experience something, in that is involved a remembrance of the past, recognition of that experience according to the past. Otherwise it is not experience. If I don't recognize it as an experience, it is not an experience - right? To recognize it, it must come out of the past, therefore what I am experiencing is already experienced, if I recognize it. Now it is only a mind that has no centre and therefore very clear, it is only such a mind that has no experience. Therefore the observer is the observed. Right? When a man says "I have had a new experience" - it is not new at all because he has recognized it and he has called it new, and given it a verbal significance. But it is born out of the past and therefore it is not new at all. So why should we have experiences at all? Is it that most of us are asleep, therefore somebody comes along and shakes you, and you call that experience? If you are totally awake, completely awake, there is no need for experience. I wonder if you get it. Q: How does one recognize a new kind of love which one is not used to? One is used to the love which is of jealousy. K: How do you recognize, the gentleman asks, the new kind of love. Q: I know the love which is with jealousy and possessiveness. K: I understand. We said, sir, you can't recognize it. Then if you recognize it, it is not new. We said very clearly that through negation of what it is not, it is - through negation of what it is not. Love is not remembrance - right? Love is not jealousy. Love is not violence. When you deny all that the other is, you don't even have to say "I have it" or "I have not it" - you don't experience it. You experience the negation but the positive you can never experience -it is. So sirs, we will go on with this tomorrow. But we have to be serious in our investigation about ourselves. It doesn't mean that you become selfish in investigating. On the contrary. In investigation you find you are like the world, like all the rest of humanity. And you are the essence of all that humanity, obviously. Because you suffer, you are in anxiety, a sense of loneliness, despair, unhappy, just like the man in India, just like the man in Russia, or China or America. So you are the essence of humanity psychologically. You may have fair skin, or dark skin, or black skin or whatever, that is all superficial. But when you penetrate into yourself you will find you are like the rest of the world. So you are the world. And that is a profound fact which affects all your thinking, all your observations, if you realize you are the essence of humanity. Then you are no longer concerned with yourself, with your petty little worries and idiosyncrasies, you are like everybody, it gives you an extraordinary strength. Q: One small question sir. Is there psychological time different from chronological time? K: Oh, that's fairly simple, isn't it? Q: Thank you very much sir. K: You don't have to thank me sir. It is fairly simple, isn't it? When I have hope, I am hoping I will be all right, both mentally, psychologically and in every way, that is psychological time. The other is chronological time. I must catch a bus at a certain time otherwise I will miss my rendezvous. That is all. SAANEN 1ST PUBLIC TALK 10TH JULY 1977. As there are going to be seven talks and discussions I think we must begin - if it is possible - by thinking over together - to think together. Which doesn't mean that you accept or reject, or be of a similar mind, but rather in talking over thoughtfully the various problems and questions and the travails of life, and reasoning together, and communicating that reasoning over together, then we will find as we go along that reason doesn't solve any problems - as has become so very obvious both politically, economically and socially. Reason has not solved our human problems, nor logic, but we are going to find out together in thinking over together, and so communicating with each other, that there is quite a different approach to all these problems of our life. And we are going to discover it together. Please let's be very clear about this from the beginning. I am not your guru. I hope that is clearly understood from the beginning. That you are not my followers, because those who follow somebody destroy truth. We are not proselytizing or convincing you of anything. We are going to reason together, talk over together, investigate together, explore together, and therefore there is no authority, there is no spiritual leader, but together through very careful thinking over together, exploring together, investigating together we shall come upon something that is beyond reason - because reason, as we said, has not solved any of our political, economic, social problems. Reason has also not solved our human problems between two people. It becomes more and more obvious in a world that is going to pieces, that has become quite insane, quite disorderly, and a dangerous place to live in. So all reason, though up to a point we must reason together, logically, sanely, holistically, then perhaps we shall be able to find out for ourselves a different state of mind, a different quality of a mind that is not bound by any dogma, by any belief, by any experience, and therefore a mind that is free to observe and through that observation and perception see what exactly is and therefore there is energy to transform 'what is'. So from the beginning please let us work together. You are not listening to me. You are listening to the speaker as though you are listening to yourself. And therefore to reason together one must not start from any conclusion, from any belief, from any dogma which conditions the mind so that we cannot reason together. Because I am not an Hindu, nor a Christian, nor a Buddhist, nor any of those things. The speaker is not starting from any conclusion, from any belief, from any experience, therefore from a mind that is free to observe, to learn, to move, to act. And I think such a mind is a compassionate mind, because compassion has no cause, it is not a result. Please understand this. It is very important because we are going to go into this very deeply: that compassion comes when the mind is free. And such compassion has no cause and therefore no effect. But when there is this compassion it brings about fundamental psychological revolution. That is what we are talking about from the beginning to the end. So we will begin by asking ourselves: what is it that we are seeking? What is it that we are wanting, each one of us? Please this is a serious question, don't brush it aside as though this is easily answered, it is not. What is it that we want? Physical comfort? Physical security? Or deep down there is the demand, or a desire to be totally secure in all our activities, in all our relationships, to be stable, certain, secure, permanent - is that what we are seeking? We cling to an experience and that gives us a certain quality of stability, a certain sense of identification which gives us a sense of permanency, well being. In that there is security. Right? In a belief there is security. Identification with a particular dogma, conclusion, nation, or an idea, gives a security. And that is why there are so many gurus springing up all over the world offering security. "Follow me and you will know how to act, how to be secure." Is that what you are seeking? Please go into it yourself, find out. If we are old, aged, we find security or happiness in remembrance of things past, in the experience that we have known, in the love that we have had, and we cling to that. The past becomes very important. And if we are young and alive and cheerful we are satisfied for the moment, not thinking about the future or the past. And gradually youth slips into old age and begins the trouble - the desire to be secure, the anxiety of uncertainty, not being able to depend on anything or anybody, and yet demanding, desiring deeply security, to have something to cling to. Don't you do that? If you are really deeply honest you are bound to come to that perception. Please may I again remind you all, if I may, this is not an entertainment: this is not something that you come to on a Sunday morning to listen to somebody oriental and say, "Good Lord, what is he talking about? Is he a mystic, is he this or that" - you know, all that nonsense. And also, if I may point out very carefully that this is a serious gathering. For me at least what we are talking about is very, very serious. One has spent over fifty years at this, and it would be a pity if you are not responsible for yourself and for the world, and are merely satisfied superficially and live for the day and are not concerned for tomorrow. So this is not an entertainment: this is not something ideological which you accept or deny; but together in the very process of thinking one becomes serious, in the very process of observation, reasoning, thinking logically, objectively you become inevitably very, very serious. And that is the purpose, if I may use the word, of these meetings: not exchanging one set of ideas for another, or rejecting one guru and accepting another, or trying to find a new experience, and if you are not able to find that experience be disappointed. We are together seriously going into the problems of our daily life with all its misery, confusion, uncertainty. So please be responsible, not casual. So we are asking: what is it that human beings seek - you as a human being, who is the total summation of all humanity - you understand? You are the summation of all humanity, whether they live in India, Russia, China or in America or here, you are the representative of every human being. And when you realize that you become tremendously important and responsible. But most of us don't want to recognize that because we don't want to be responsible. So if I may say again that we are together as human beings trying to find out deeply what it is that we are seeking, what is it that we want. You understand my question? The world about us is very uncertain, it is becoming more and more insane, dangerous, violent. You know what is happening? People are being killed casually for the fun of it. You have read all about it, you know all about it. Politics have not solved our problems, have not put an end to this human violence, nor any religion either. On the contrary religions have been tremendously responsible for killing millions of people. You know all this, I don't have to go into the history of mankind, you know it very well if you read at all. So, as one observes thought, reason, logic, though necessary, have not solved our human problems. And if they have not, then what is the solution for all this? So in asking that question: what is the solution for all this? - one inevitably comes to "What is it that I, as a human being, really recognizing that I am the world, what is it essentially I want?" - because I represent the world - you understand? Every human being is responsible, every human being is the whole of mankind, because if you go to India they think like you, they worry, they are miserable, unhappy, sorrowful, poverty, degradation, which exists all over the world, the same phenomena. So you are like every other human being, whether you like it or not. So in finding out what you want then we can proceed. Is it that you desire essentially, deeply, irrevocably, that you are concerned to find out if you want security, a sense of being identified with something, an idea, a person, a group, a conclusion that will give you tremendous satisfaction, and you say, "I have done, I have reached, I have gained, I know"? You understand my question? So we begin to find out slowly, carefully, if you desire satisfaction in security, whether that security be in a person, in an experience, in a conclusion, or in a romantic idealization, as god then we must examine logically, sanely if there is such a thing as security. You understand my question? Can I go on? We want security, every child, every boy demands security. And because parents, society don't give them security, nor education, they become violent. That is what is happening in the world, how the youth is going to destroy itself. You see all this. So they must have security, both physiological as well as psychological. You understand my question? Are you following all this, or am I talking to a wall? So are we seeking psychological security, which may destroy physiological security, and if you are seeking physiological security then the psychological security becomes unnecessary. So we must find out what it is we are seeking. I pause because I can go on talking, but there must be pauses so that you and I can communicate with each other both verbally and non verbally. Because if you are thinking along the same lines communication becomes extraordinarily easy, we understand each other instantly. But we may not want to examine closely our psychological structure because we are frightened, we don't know where it may lead to. It may destroy everything that we hold as the most essential necessity for a human being. So we rather examine superficially and agree and disagree and go away. And that is what the speaker is trying to prevent. You examine very closely, hesitantly, knowing that reason, logic, thought has not solved our problem, and yet thought must be used as we are presently going to go into all that business. So from the beginning we are asking: what is a human being seeking, you? Aren't you really seeking security, Both physical as well as psychological? You must have food, clothes and shelter otherwise you can't function. Whether you function in a community, or in a chaotic society, you must have a certain kind of security, which gives a sense of well being from which you can begin to think, observe and go into all that. And also one demands, probably much more deeply, psychological security. One may not have physical security but psychological security becomes extraordinarily important - doesn't it? Have you not noticed in yourself how deeply the craving for psychological security in our relationships, in our action, in our attitude towards life, in our experience, how we hold on to our experience, because that gives a tremendous sense of security? So we have to examine closely whether there is psychological security at all. Please, if there is no psychological security will a human being go insane? You understand? Will he become totally neurotic because he has no security psychologically? You understand? And therefore he becomes neurotic and probably the majority of human beings are fairly neurotic. So we have to go and find out for ourselves whether you want psychological security. And what do you mean by the word security? When we say, "I am secure with my wife" - or with my girl-friend, or with my ideas and conclusions, or as a Communist, as a Catholic, Protestant and the Hindus, they are secure in their belief. Right? They have no fear because they cling to this. And when you begin to investigate, or question them or reason with them they stop at a certain point, they won't examine further because it is too dangerous, because they feel they are being threatened - if you have talked to a Communist, Catholic, anybody, they go up to a certain point and refuse to go further. Probably you are doing the same and then communication ceases. You understand? And to that which your mind clings -whether it be a person, an object or an idea, or a conclusion, or something that you have deeply experienced - have they any significance, have they any deep significance at all? I will show you what I mean. If I cling to my particular form of experience, and that gives me an enormous satisfaction and I cling to that, what is then my relationship with another? You follow? He clings to his experience, or his belief, or his particular idea, so there is division, naturally. You understand this? Obviously. You follow this? So communication ceases completely. Right? So are you doing that -are you blocking yourself because you are afraid to examine that to which you are attached, to that which you are clinging? And therefore thought, logic, reason will not break through. You understand my point? You have got it? Right, may I go on? Look: if I am deeply convinced of my Buddhism, or Zen, or certain forms of meditation, convinced and hold on to them, and you think something entirely different, where is the communication between us two? You understand? That is what is taking place in the world: either you are a Communist, or a European Communist, or a Capitalist, or a Catholic - you follow? - division, division, division. Because each human being clings to his particular dogma, to his particular conditioning. Right? Are you doing that? Sorry to bring it home! Then if you are doing that, you may reason, think logically up to a certain point and therefore you are incapable of breaking through to a different dimension altogether. Do you follow? So we are asking, knowing that all human beings, practically the whole of humanity, clings, is attached to some form of an idea, to some form of thought which has created a belief, to some form of an experience which is a reaction to 'what is', and clings to that. So generally throughout the world this is the phenomena. Right? If you are deeply convinced of Communism - or rather Marxism and Leninism - then you are stuck in a groove. Right? You won't investigate anything else, and so on and on and on. So does that give security? Does thought - please follow this - does thought, which has created all these beliefs, dogmas, experiences, divisions, give security? You understand my question? Because you function with thought, all your activity is based on thought, horizontal or vertical - whether you are aspiring to great heights it is still the movement of thought vertically. Or if you are merely satisfied to bring about a social revolution and so on and so on, you are still the horizontal movement of thought. Right? So does thought fundamentally, basically, give security psychologically? You are getting my point? I can go to my guru - I haven't got any, thank god, but I may go to a guru: the action of going to a guru is based on thought, thought hoping that he will give me some kind of security in this uncertain world, he will lead me to some kind of happiness, to some kind of enlightenment. All that is the movement of thought. Right? And I am asking: does thought give security -psychologically? Right? And yet thought has its place, but when thought assumes that it can bring about a psychological security then it is living in illusion. You are getting it? Because look: if you believe in Jesus and all the rest of it, it is the movement of thought, isn't it? And thought can create every kind of romantic illusion. Right? And when the mind psychologically seeks in the dogma of the church, or the non-church, or whatever it is, it is the structure of thought. And thought is essentially - what - is the movement of the past, through the present - isn't it - modified. Please go into it, you will see it. Thought is the response of memory. Right? Memory is the result of experience, stored up as knowledge, which is all the past. Right? No? Somebody contradict me for god's sake! So thought, which is the response of memory, knowledge, experience, stored up in the brain as knowledge, memory, that response is always moving from the past. Now is there security in the past? You are following? Please use your reason, logic, all your energy to find out. Is there security in the past, which is tradition -tradition may be one day old, or ten thousand years old, it is still tradition, which is the past - and any activity of thought, which is the essence of the past, can that give security? You have got my point? Go into it sir, think it out. Our religions are based on the past, organized religions, their rituals, dogmas, and all the circus that goes on, meaningless, is essentially a tradition, which is the past. And the thought is seeking - see what is happening - is seeking security in the thing it has created itself. Right? I wonder if you see this? Mankind has created through thought the idea of god. I am not discussing whether there is god or not god, we will go into that much later. Thought wanting ultimate security has created a thing called god. And humanity clings to that idea. The other day the speaker tried to get a passport to a certain country and one of the questions asked was: "Do you believe in god?". That is respectable, safe, then you belong to the gang! So thought has created it and thought seeks in that which it has created security. Follow the sequence of it. That which it has created, in that it seeks security. And that security is in the past. Right? Because thought is the past, though it may project in the future and say there is the future of god, I am going to obtain godhood, but that movement of thought has created it. And thought is the essence of the past. I wonder if you see all this? You are seeking security in the past, in the things that you have created. So one asks: is there security in the past? You are following? Go into it step by step you will find out for yourself. Is there security in the past? Or recognizing there is no security in the past thought then projects an idea, an idealistic state or an idealistic mind and finds security in that, in the future. It is still the movement of the past. Right? So is there security in the movement of thought at all? Now I have explained it. Have you got it? So far we have reasoned together - right? And we are asking: is there security in the very things which we hold together as dear, holy, etc., which are all the movements of thought which is the essence of the past, is there in thought total security? Right? You understand? If there is not, then what? You understand my question? I have throughout my life -suppose - a human being, throughout his life has depended on thought and the things that thought has put together as being holy, unholy, moral, immoral and all the rest of it, and to that, a human being holds all that as most essential. You come along and say, now look, all that is the movement of the past - after having reasoned with him logically and so on. And he says why not, what is wrong with holding on to the past because thought is the past, he acknowledges it, and, I'll hold to it, what is wrong? Go on. That is, I have had an experience in my relationship with you as a human being, as another human being, I have had an experience with you, and to that experience I cling, which is memory, which is the past. So what happens to our relationship? I am living in the past. Right? And obviously a relationship is only in the present. Right? No? If I am living in the past, and you are living in the past, where is our relationship? So some thoughtful people realizing this have gone into it, then their problem is: if thought and all the things, however noble, ignoble, the churches, the temples, the mosques, all that, whatever it has created is the result of the past; and when the human mind lives in the past and holds to the past, then it is incapable of living, or perceiving what is truth. Right? Isn't it? You admit that? So if there is no security in thought - and there must be security, otherwise you are lost - if there is no security in thought then what? Do you face that problem as intensely, as vitally, as urgently now? Or you are just thinking about it? Are we meeting each other somewhere? Sorry, if I am sitting on a platform, it is only for convenience so that we can see each other. But sitting on the platform doesn't give one authority. Right? So don't look to me to answer it for you. I'll answer it much later, but we must go through the whole phenomena of thinking actively together. Why do you say in thought there is no security? - if you say it. Do you understand my question? We have come to a certain point in our dialogue - a dialogue being a conversation between two people. We have come to a certain point in our dialogue, which is: we recognize, we see or we think we understand that thought, with all the things it has created, the most extraordinary technological things - the missiles, have you heard of the missiles, and what the Russians have done, and so on and so on, the most technological, the most extraordinary things, and technologically human beings are destroying the earth, polluting the lakes, the rivers, all that is happening - and thought also has created the so-called religious structure, the popes, the anti-popes, you know, all what is going on. And we say, "Yes, I see that, and I recognize logically that in that there is no security because when that is questioned there is fear, therefore there is no security". Right? So when we say, do you see that, what do we mean by that word 'see'? Do you understand it? Is it a logical understanding, a verbal understanding, a linear understanding, or an understanding which is so profound that that very understanding breaks down without your effort, that very understanding breaks down the whole movement of thought? Do you understand what I am talking about? Am I explaining it? Or shall I go over it again? I listen to you very carefully, at what you are saying. So far logically, reasonably, without too many details, you have gone into this. I have listened to you, that thought is the past, thought is the essence of the past, and thought has created all this world, both the technological world and the so-called religious world, moral world and all that, and we try to find in that, psychological security. That security is the result of thinking. Right? And you ask; is there in that structure, or in the very process of thinking, in the movement of thought, is there security? Right? You may say, yes. Or you may say, there isn't. If you say there is, then it is obvious that you are not thinking logically to the very end because people are breaking away from one form of conditioning - Catholic, Protestant, Communist, Leninism, and going off to another conditioning -which is the same. It is like a Catholic becoming a Buddhist, or a Hindu, which they are trying to become, which is so absurd, and they remain in their isolated fields. Right? And therefore there is no communication between the two. And when there is no communication there is division. And when there is division there must be conflict. It is inevitable. Right? And if you say, "Well that is life, conflict is necessary, violence is necessary, brutality, wars, every ugliness, torture is necessary," then that is all right, for you. You understand? If you say yes, that is the end result. But if you say thought is not the answer, then what do you mean by saying "I understand thought does not solve this problem". You understand, thought is the essence of the past and therefore whatever it does is still in the past' - right? - whatever it does, and therefore in that there is no security. We have gone into it. And we are saying, when you say, "I understand what you are saying", what do you mean by that word 'understand'? That is what I am talking about. What do you mean by saying "I understand"? Do you mean you understand the English words? Right? Because you and I perhaps speak the same language. If I spoke in French and you say... you understand? Is it an understanding of the words, the meaning of the words, the explanation of the word and therefore you are understanding at a very superficial level? Right? Or when you say "I understand", you mean you actually see, observe the truth of what thought is. You understand? You actually feel, taste, observe in your blood as it were, that thought, whatever it creates, has no security, then you and the speaker can commune. But if you say, let's remain on the surface, we will remain on the surface but then there is no understanding. You get my point? Am I making myself clear? Look sir: when I say, "I love you", you understand very deeply if I really love you, don't you? There is instant emotional response. And with a very complex problem like thought, when you say you understand, is there an equal total response to it? When somebody says "I love you" - you follow - the heavens are open! And in the same way we are asking when you say "I understand what you are saying", is there an equal burst of energy, total energy? Or you are still saying "Explain to me some more, let me think about it much further, give me several days, let me listen to you for the next week, another year, then I will begin to understand" - is that your position? If it is, then you will never understand because you are postponing your direct challenge. It is like the house is on fire and you say, "Please I am going away" - you know how your house is burnt. I wonder if you see all this. So you cannot but respond instantly. When I say, "I love you", you respond instantly, don't you - that is, if you like my love? Then you respond instantly. In the same way when you see that thought does not give security at all, whatever its creation is, the object, the person, the idea, whatever it is, in that there is no security, when you see that wholly, then what takes place? You understand my question? If I see, observe, logically have thought out, and deeply comprehended in my blood, not just intellectually, wholly, that all nationalities are a danger, (which doesn't mean I accept Communism,) is a danger because it divides people, I see that completely with all my blood, with all my being, then there is no problem, I have dropped it. But if I see security in my nationality and cling to that, however logically you may point out the irrationality of it, I will still hold it. So are we dealing with irrational people? Right? Neurotic people? Or with reasonable somewhat sane people? You must be somewhat sane, somewhat, because you are here. I don't say you are totally sane, but you will be at the end of the talks! Q: One hopes! K: One hopes! Sorry! So when we say "I understand", either it is verbal, or real. You see the truth of it and therefore you are free of it. So the seeing the truth of it is the essence of intelligence. Right? I wonder if you see that. Intelligence is not reason, logic, the very careful dialectical explanation, that is not intelligence. That is merely the exposition of thought in various forms. And thought is never intelligent. If it was, our world would be different. So the perception of the truth is intelligence. And in that intelligence there is complete security, because that intelligence is not yours or mine, that intelligence is not conditioned because we have finished with all that, because we said thought in its very movement creates conditions. When you understand that movement that very understanding is intelligence. And in that intelligence there is security, from that there is action. Do get some of this? Are you like that? Have you got that intelligence? Not 'got' it - is there that intelligence taking birth in you, like a child? If not, what is the point of you're sitting there and listening to this poor chap? So we will talk about this question in different ways, in different fields, like fear, pleasure, sorrow, death, meditation, and all that, but the essence of this is this: that thought is the movement of the past, therefore of time, and therefore it is measurable. And that which is measurable can never find what is immeasurable, which is truth. And that can only take place when your mind sees actually the truth that whatever thought has created, in that there is no security and the very observation of that is intelligence. And when there is that intelligence then it is all finished. Then you are out of this world, though you are living in it, trying to do something, you are completely an outsider. And our question is during the next six talks and gatherings and so on; is it possible in this dialogue between you and the speaker to awaken this tremendous intelligence? That is the function of the speaker, to awaken this intelligence. And if you don't want it, don't sit there -want it in the sense that you want food, when you want sex, it is a tremendous thing. In the same way you have to find out with all your energies, with all your total being to see if there is this intelligence in each one of us. SAANEN 4TH PUBLIC TALK 17TH JULY 1977. If we may we will go on with what we were talking about the other day, when we met here. Some of you may not have been here and so I will go over it very briefly. First of all I would like to point out that we are a gathering of serious people - at least I hope so. Not a gathering for intellectuals, or romantics, or sentimentalists because we are dealing with facts - the facts of daily life, the way of living. And if one is not at all serious then one doesn't see the point of coming here, taking all the trouble and sitting down here for an hour. And I hope all of us who are here are really quite serious because we are concerned with our daily living, which are daily facts. And most of us make those facts into an abstraction - to abstract from the fact an idea, a conclusion, and we become prisoners to those ideas and conclusions. We may ventilate those prisons but still we live there because most of us make abstractions of facts in prison. Please, therefore, be good enough to understand that we are not dealing with ideas, some exotic philosophy, or dealing with abstractive conclusions. We are here - if I may again point out, as I have been doing for the last three or four gatherings here, that we are sharing this thing together. We are going into problems that require a great deal of care, a great deal of attention, one must be very, very serious because the house is burning. I do not know if you are aware of all this. There is the Communist world pressing all the time to make us believe in certain ideologies and if we don't we are either sent to a concentration camp or a mental hospital, and so on. That is gradually closing in. One may not be aware of it now, but if you are aware of the world situation, what is happening in the world economically, socially, politically, and in preparation for wars, one has to become terribly serious. It isn't a thing you play around with, one has to act. And, as we were saying, action based on skill, which we discussed the last time that we met here, last Thursday, action based on skill must inevitably lead to separative, fragmentary action. Please follow it. I will go into it again as we did last Thursday. Because our education, our environment, sociological demands, urge everyone to develop a particular skill. And that skill brings about not only a sense of power, position, but also such action born of that skill is very limiting, it emphasizes the importance of oneself. One builds the structure of oneself, the I, the ego. And without clarity skill becomes destructive. Clarity - we mean by that - the clarity that comes when there is the art of listening, the art of seeing, the art of learning. And we mean by that word 'art' to put everything in its right place, where it belongs. Then out of that action, which is to give everything its proper place, out of that comes clarity. Clarity is not born of logic, reason, or objective thinking, but clarity one must have to act clearly, wholly, completely. One must understand the meaning of listening, the meaning of seeing and the art of learning. We said the art of listening means that you listen not to your own prejudices, not to your own conclusions, to your own experiences, with which you are quite familiar. And if you with those prejudices, conditionings listen, then you don't listen at all. Then you are merely judging what is being said with what you already know, therefore there is no actual communication or clarity. And the art of seeing - to look without any direction, without any motive, to look at the world, to look at what is happening around you, politically, religiously, and all the things that the gurus are unfortunately bringing over to Europe - to see all that clearly without any personal demand, without any personal prejudice or want. That again needs a great deal of attention. And also to learn. I think this is very important to understand. To learn implies, as most of us know, to learn knowledge, facts, information, and that information, knowledge, experience is stored in the brain and according to that knowledge you act skilfully, or not skilfully. So when thought, which is the result of accumulated knowledge, experience, and memory, and therefore reaction to that memory, which is thought, when thought spills over, as it were, into psychological fields then it creates havoc - which we talked about sufficiently the other day. So if you don't mind we will not go into that again, because we have a lot of things to talk about still. So the art of listening, the art of seeing what is happening around you, what is happening inside you, what is taking place in your relationship with another, man, woman, to see it very clearly, then the art of learning brings about an extraordinary quality of clarity. If you have done it, as you are sitting there do it actually, not theoretically, follow it step by step and do it, then you will have an extraordinary clarity from which action takes place. And in that clarity there comes naturally the skill. But what we are doing now is to develop skill without clarity and therefore whatever we do in the world, in our daily life, leads to constant conflict, misery and confusion. That again is very obvious. And we are saying that without compassion clarity has in itself very little meaning. So we are going to go into this question this morning of what is the meaning and the significance of compassion. Before we go into that it becomes important to understand that we are dealing with daily life and nothing else, because that is the basis of all relationship and therefore of all life. Most of us are mediocre. The word 'mediocre' means - the root meaning of that word - to go half way up the hill. You understand? We just go half way up, and that is mediocrity. Excellence means going to the very top of it. So we are asking for excellence, not mediocrity - mediocre action. Right? Is that clear? To go all the way, not go half way, otherwise we are going to be smothered, destroyed as human beings by the politicians, by the ideologists, whether they are Communists, Socialists and so on. So we are demanding of ourselves the highest form of excellence. And that excellence can only come into being when there is compassion, clarity, and from this compassion and clarity comes skill - not the other way round. And that is what we are trying to do: to develop a skill and have clarity and then compassion. We are saying quite the contrary. So we are going into this question of what is compassion. What is the structure and the nature of this extraordinary quality, which if the human mind has not got, it will destroy the world, and therefore destroy human beings. We have also said in our talks that each human being - you as a human being - is the representative of the whole of humanity. Which isn't an idea or an abstraction, but an actual daily fact. That is, wherever you go - India, Asia, America or Europe, or even Russia or China - human beings are going through anxiety, fear, uncertainty, great sense of loneliness, insecurity, they are caught in the stream of sorrow. This is a fact right through the world. So every human being, that is you who are here in this gathering, and outside are actually the entire essence of all humanity. That is a fact: you must not only realize it intellectually but realize it with all your being, with your blood and your guts, which is an absolute fact. So it becomes very important for each human being, when he realizes this, to see that he is responsible. When you feel utterly responsible then you care; then you care what kind of education your children have, what kind of literature, everything you care about. So we are going to go into this question of compassion. As we said we are examining this thing together. We are reasoning over it together. We are exercising our highest excellent logic. But reason, clear objective thinking, and excellent logic does not bring about compassion. But we must exercise the qualities that we have, which is reason, careful observation, and from that excellence of clear sight. So we are taking the journey together and please see the importance of this. If you merely listen and accept or reject then we are not communicating with each other. The speaker wants to discuss it all with you, go into it because he feels tremendously urgent about this matter. And as we are sharing together this question: what is the implication of compassion? - then it becomes your responsibility to think clearly, not with your personal prejudices, not with your particular form of experience, or certain conclusions that you have derived through experience or by learning, reading and so on, as those conclusions, experiences will prevent you from sharing together with another. I think that is very clear. So we are going together to explore, to investigate, not intellectually but factually in our daily life, whatever that life be, ugly, sometimes happy, sometimes very depressing, and so on, whatever it is we are going to go together and examine all this. So please give your care, your attention, be serious for god's sake, for your own sake. The future is what you make of it today. If you are negligent, if you are merely superficially living, then you are creating a world for the future which will be most destructive. I do not know if you know what is happening in the world, how the technology is so far advanced, military and all the rest of the horror that is going on, and if you realize it you have got to do something. So let's proceed to find out, not from the speaker, because I am not your guru, we are not asking for anyone to follow because the follower destroys truth. There is no guru, there is no follower, there is no authority here of any kind. We are together as two human beings, deeply concerned, not only with our lives but the lives of humanity, to bring about a radical psychological transformation in our consciousness. The content makes consciousness - the content, what it is, what is inside that consciousness makes consciousness. Sorry if I am rather emphatic about all this. I am not being dogmatic. If you look at it, go into it, you will find it out for yourself. So we are concerned with the transformation of the content of our human consciousness. The human content is all the things that thought has put into it, like politics, the division in politics, my country and your country, the ideologies, the Communist ideologies according to Marx or Lenin, or EuroCommunism with their particular brand of Communism - the content is all the religious dogmas, rituals, beliefs, the demand that you obey because the priests, or the popes, or the representatives, they think they are the representative of god or Christ. And the content is fear, pleasure, pain, anxiety, loneliness, despair and the enormous sense of great sorrow, and the fear of death. All that is the content, of every human being in the world, whether they live in China, Asia, India, America or here. And when there is a transformation in consciousness it affects the whole of mankind. If you have gone through it you will find it. Do it and you will find out. So we are going to examine together the various contents of consciousness, in which compassion doesn't exist. There is pity in it, there is sympathy, there is tolerance, there is the desire to help, there is a peculiar form of love, but all that is not compassion. So we are going to examine this thing. Please understand that although the speaker is sitting on a platform it doesn't give him any authority whatsoever. He is sitting here for convenience so that you can see the man who is speaking. That's all. Because we have accepted for so long the feeling of obedience - 'Tell us what to do and we will do it' - that is not what we are saying. When there is understanding of what is compassion and so on, out of that comes your own clarity and action, then you are outside of all the misery and the confusion, and therefore you can bring about a different consciousness in the world. Now let's proceed. We are asking whether compassion or love is pleasure? So we are going to investigate together - please bear in mind, together - what is the significance and the meaning of pleasure, which every human being is seeking, which every human being is pursuing at any cost. What is pleasure - the pleasure derived from possessions, the pleasure derived from capacity, talent, the pleasure when you can dominate another, the pleasure of being, of having tremendous power, politically, religiously or economically? Then there is the pleasure of sex, the pleasure that money gives so that you have a great sense of freedom. And they are all multiple forms of pleasure. And if you observe very carefully, look at yourself as though you are looking at yourself in a mirror, you will see that you are pursuing the same - pleasure. It may not be money, it may not be many possessions, but it may be through sex, or clinging to a particular form of experience, which has given you great delight, holding on to that, or a particular conclusion, an ideological conclusion and that gives you a sense of great superiority, which is a form of pleasure. So, what actually is the meaning of pleasure? You understand? The word, not the pleasure derived from something, but the essence of pleasure. Because we discussed the other day when we met, the nature of fear, and whether human beings, you as a human being representative of all humanity, can be free completely, totally of fear. We went into that very carefully and I do not think we will go into it again today because we won't have time. So we are asking: what is the nature and the structure of pleasure, which every human being is seeking? In pleasure there are several things, which are: there is enjoyment, there is a sense of joy - pleasure, enjoyment, joy, and further on, ecstasy. In the field of pleasure these are involved - pleasure, joy, taking delight in something, and the sense of ecstasy. The meaning of the word 'ecstacy' - please understand what it means - the root meaning is to be beyond yourself. You understand? There is no self to enjoy. The self, that is, the 'me', the ego, the personality has all totally disappeared, there is only that sense of being outside. That is ecstasy. But that ecstasy has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure. So we are going to look carefully at pleasure, the meaning of it, in which is included joy, taking a delight in something and so on. I hope you want to go into this. You may not want to go into this because you may be frightened because you say, "For god's sake if you take away pleasure what have we in life?" We are not taking away pleasure. We are not saying it is ugly, wrong, anything of that. We are examining it. But if you say, "Don't examine it too closely because I am frightened", then please don't examine it. But if you want to understand it, see the significance of it, go into it very deeply, then there must be no blockage by your fear. We said: what is pleasure? You take a delight in something. The delight that comes naturally when you look at something very beautiful. At that moment, at that second, there is neither pleasure, nor joy, there is only that sense of great observation. And in that observation the self is not. Right? When you look at that mountain with its snow cap, with its valleys, the grandeur, the magnificence, the extraordinary line of it, that drives away all thought. There it is, that great thing in front of you. That is a delight. Then thought comes along and says, what a marvellous thing that was, what a lovely experience that was; then the memory of that perception is cultivated, then that cultivation becomes pleasure. So where thought interferes with the sense of beauty, the sense of greatness, grandeur, of anything, a piece of poetry, a sheet of water, or a marvellous tree in a lonely field - seeing it and not registering it. You follow? This is important. Please understand it. The moment you register it, the beauty of it, then that very registration sets thought into action. Then the seeing of that beauty and the desire to pursue that beauty becomes pleasure. Get it? Do you understand? Are we moving together somewhere? One sees a beautiful woman, or a man, and instantly it is registered in the brain. Right? It is a fact, isn't it? Then that very registration sets thought into motion and you want to be in her company and all the rest of it follows. So pleasure is the continuation and the cultivation of an incident by thought, which gives a continuity. You have had sexual experience last night or two weeks ago, you remember it and desire the repetition of it, which is the demand for pleasure. That is fairly obvious. So the point here is: is it possible not to register? You understand? The function of the brain is to register because in registration it is secure, it knows what to do. Right? And in registration, knowing what to do, in which there is security, there is the development of skill. Right? Then that skill becomes a great pleasure which is a talent, a gift, all that is the movement of the continuation of thought through desire and pleasure. You understand this? Good. Can we go on from there? Please. I can go on, the speaker can go on. But are you going on, along with the speaker, doing it actually, seeing for yourself what is going on and realize the whole explanation, the discovery, the exploration of it. Right? So is it possible to register only that which is absolutely necessary, and not register anything else? Look: take a very simple thing. Most of us have had pain, physical pain of some sort or another. And that pain is registered because my brain says I must be very careful not to have that pain again tomorrow, or a week later, because physical pain is distorting. Right? You can't think clearly when there is great pain. So the brain registers it. It is the function of the brain to register that pain so as to safeguard itself, so that it doesn't do things that will bring about pain. So it must register. Then what takes place? Look at it carefully for yourself. It has registered and then there is the fear of that pain happening again later. Right? So that registration has caused fear. Right? So we are asking: is it possible, having had that pain, to end it, not carry it on? Are you following this? Am I making it clear? We are talking from actual facts, not a theory, because we have all had pain of some kind or another, great pain or a little pain. And having that pain, end it, don't carry it over. Then the brain has the security of being free and intelligent. You see that? Because the moment you carry it over it is never free of fear, it is never free. But having had that pain, at the end of the day end it, don't think about it, don't let it worry you, "My god it is going to happen again tomorrow. I'll have to consult the doctor, take drugs" and all the rest of it, but end it. And then you will see for yourself. So we are saying, we are asking together - I am asking, you are also asking - whether it is possible not to register at all excepting the things that are absolutely necessary? The necessary things are knowledge - how to drive a car, how to speak a language, technological knowledge - please follow this carefully -technological knowledge, the knowledge of reading, writing, and all the things involved in that, but in our human relationship, man and woman, every incident in that relationship is registered. Right? Are you following this? It is registered and therefore what takes place? The woman gets irritated, nagging, or friendly, kindly, or says something just before you go off to the office, which is ugly -so you build up through registration the image about her, and she builds up an image about you. This is an actual fact - no? Oh for god's sake, am I talking, saying something extraordinary? So in human relationships, with man and woman, or between a neighbour and so on, the image making is the process of registration. Right? That is when a wife says something ugly, to listen to it and end it, not register it. You understand? Or when the husband says something ugly, listen to it carefully, end it, not carry it on. Then you will find that there is no image making at all, because if there is no image between the man and the woman, then relationship is quite different, entirely different. But when there is an image between the two the relationship is between one thought opposed to another thought. Right? And that we call relationship, which actually is not. It is just an idea that you are my wife or my girl friend, just an idea. Do you get all this? I hope you are equally active, as the speaker is. So we are enquiring into the question of what is the nature and the structure of pleasure? Pleasure is the continuation of an incident, given that continuation by thought. So thought is the root of pleasure. Right? If you had no thought and you saw a beautiful thing, there it would end. But thought says, no I must have that -you know the whole movement of thought. So what is the relationship of pleasure to joy? You understand this? Joy comes to you uninvited, it happens. You are walking along a street, or sitting in a bus, or wandering in the woods, seeing the flowers, the hills, and the clouds and the blue sky and suddenly there is the extraordinary feeling of great joy. Then registration, thought says what a marvellous thing that was, I must have more of it. So joy is made into pleasure by thought. You are following all this? This is not analysis; this is mere observation. That is, seeing things as they are, not as you want them to be. Seeing things exactly without any distortion, seeing what is taking place. Right? When you do that we are together, we are journeying together, we are exploring together. So from that: what is love? What is love? Please again we all have so many opinions about it. We have got such extraordinary ideas about it. Love is this, love is not that, you mustn't talk about love in front of a girl - you know - extraordinary things we have. Now we are going to examine the thing clearly - right? Examine it together. The speaker is not telling you what love is, or you telling the speaker what love is; but we are examining it. Right? So you must be free of your prejudice. You must be free of your opinions of what love should be. You are free to look. So what is love? Is it pleasure? Is love pleasure which is the movement of thought and the continuation of an incident through the movement of thought, which is pleasure? We have explained this very carefully: it is not my explanation, you can observe it for yourself. And we say is that pleasure? Is the movement of thought love? You understand? Is love a remembrance, a thing that has happened, a boy and a girl, a man and woman, that happened, and the remembrance of it, and living in that remembrance and feeling that remembrance which is over, resuscitating it and saying, "What a marvellous thing that was when we were together under that tree; that was love". That is the remembrance of a thing that has gone. Is that love? Is love the pleasure of sex, in which there is tenderness, kindliness, etc., etc., etc. - is that love? We are not saying it is, or that it is not. We are questioning, as you must question everything in life, doubt everything. But if you doubt everything you will have nothing left. But doubt must be kept on a leash; as you keep a dog on a rope or a leash, so doubt must be kept on a leash. And you must know when to let it go and when to hold it back. That is the art of doubting. So we are doubting, questioning everything that man has put together and then says, "This is love". So we said: is love pleasure? If it is, then pleasure gives emphasis to the remembrance, to past things, brings about the importance of the 'me' - my pleasure, my excitement, my remembrances. So is that love? And is love desire? Ask these questions, burn with these questions, because you have got to find out because we have reduced love into pleasure, which is a daily fact. Is love desire? So what is desire? I desire a car, I desire a house, one desires prominence, power, position. There are a dozen things one desires. To be as beautiful as you are, to be as intelligent, as clever, as smart as you are - desire. Then what is desire? Does desire bring clarity? Please question this with me. The thing that you call love, we are saying is that love based on desire - desire to possess a woman, to sleep with a woman, or sleep with a man, desire to hold her, possess her, dominate her, control her, she is mine, not yours. And the pleasure derived in that possession, in that dominance. Man dominates the world and so there is the woman fighting for domination. So what is the nature and the structure of desire? Desire, not for something - not for the house, or a good car, or position, power, be prominent in your little society, in your little pond. So we have to find out what is desire. We are not saying that we shouldn't have desire. That is what the churches throughout the world say, the organized religions have said suppress desire. If you want to serve god you must be without desire. And the priests have maintained that and although they talk about being without desire they are burning with desire, burning with it. They may not want worldly things but to become the bishop, the archbishop, the pope - you know climb the ladder of spiritual success. So what is desire? Does desire bring about clarity? And therefore that clarity is skill in action. In the field of desire does compassion flower? You have to ask these questions. So to find out the truth of the matter you must examine what is desire, not desire for the object, the objects are not important - you vary, from childhood you desire a toy and so on, as you grow older you desire something else. So we are not discussing, or talking over together the objects of desire, but actually what is desire? If it does not bring clarity, and if desire is not the field in which beauty and the greatness of compassion flower, then what place has desire? Right? So you must go into it and find out, not according to any psychologist, any preacher, including the speaker, but together to find out. We are insisting that we think together, reason together, find out together. Not I find and then you accept, or reject, but together find out. So what is desire? Desire for a better society, and the cultivation of that desire which becomes passion for an idea. Right? People are so committed to Communism, they are passionate about it - or to any other form of ideological projections. So it becomes very important to go into this question of what is desire - not how to suppress it, how to run away from it, how to make it more beautiful, but just what is desire? How does it come about that human beings are caught in this? One year you are a Christian, or for thirty years a Christian, then you throw that out and join some other label called Hindu, or Buddhist, or whatever it is, or Zen. So in enquiring we must deal with facts, not with opinions, not with judgements - then you have your opinions and the speaker may have his opinions and so there is a battle, therefore there is no communication. But we are going into facts - not your fact or my fact, but the fact that human beings have colossal desires, absurd desires, illusory desires. So what is desire? How does it come? Go into it. Look at it. You have your own desires, unfortunately, or fortunately. Desire to be good - you know. How does that desire arise in you? You see a beautiful woman or a beautiful man - see. Perception, the seeing, then the contact, then the sensation, then that sensation is taken over by thought, which becomes desire with its image. Right? Follow it yourself and you will see it. You see a beautiful vase, a beautiful sculpture - I don't mean the modern sculpture, sorry, somebody may like it, somebody may like that but personally I don't like it - you see a beautiful statue, the ancient Egyptian, or the Greek, and you look at it. As you look at it, if they allow you to touch it, you touch it. See the depth of that figure as he sits on a chair, or cross legged. And then from that there is a sensation, isn't there? What a marvellous thing. And from that sensation the desire says, I wish I had that in my room. Right? I wish I could look at it every day, touch it every day. And the pride of possession to have such a marvellous thing like that. You understand? That is desire, isn't it? Seeing, contact, sensation; then thought using that sensation to cultivate the desire to possess, or not to possess. Right? This is obvious. This is not my explanation. It is a factual explanation. Now comes the difficulty: realizing that the religious people throughout the world have said, "Don't look. When a woman comes near you look at something else. Think of her as your sister, mother, god," - or whatever it is! (Laughter) You laugh but you are born in this. You are conditioned to this. So all the religious people have said, "Take vows of celibacy. Don't look at a woman. If you do look, treat her as your sister, mother, whatever you like, because you are in the service of god and you need all your energy to serve him. In the service of god you are going to have great tribulations, therefore be prepared, but don't waste your energy." But the thing is boiling - right? So we are trying to understand that which is boiling. Not to look at a woman or a man, but that which is the desire which is constantly boiling, wants to fulfil, wants to complete itself. So we said desire is the movement of perception, seeing, contact, sensation, thought as desire with its image. Right? Now we are saying, see, touch - sensation, that is normal, healthy -end it there. Don't let thought come and say, yes, take it over and make it into a desire. Get it? No, do understand this and then you will see that there will be no suppression of desire. That is, you see a beautiful house, well proportioned, lovely windows, beautiful garden, well kept, with a roof that melts into the sky, walls that are thick and part of the earth. You look at it, there is sensation. You touch it, you may not actually touch it but you touch it with your eyes, you smell the air, the herbs, the newly cut grass. And can't you end it there? Why does sensation become desire? You follow? You are following this? Am I making it clear? When there is perception, contact, sensation, it is natural, it is beautiful to see the lovely things, or an ugly thing. Then to end it there, say it is a beautiful house. Right? Then there is no registration as thought which says, I wish I had that house - which is desire - you understand? - and the continuation of desire. You can do this so easily. And I mean easily, if you understand the nature of desire. So we are asking is pleasure love? Is remembrance love? Is desire love? So pleasure, remembrance, desire are the movements of thought. Right? Therefore one asks; does thought cultivate love? Is thought love? You understand? Am I making this clear? Please come on. So find out! If it is not pleasure, because pleasure has its place, it is not desire, it is not remembrance although they have there places, then what is love? Right? Is love jealousy? Is love a sense of possession - my wife, my husband, my girl, possession? Has love within it, fear? Ask these questions and find out. Therefore if it is none of these things, entirely wiping away all these things, to end them, putting all these things in the right place, then love is. You understand? Then love is. So we are saying that through the negation the positive is. You understand? Through negation. That is, is pleasure love? And we examine pleasure and we see it is not quite that, though pleasure has its place it is not that. Right? So you negate that. You say it is not remembrance though remembrance is necessary. Right? So we put remembrance in its right place, therefore you have negated remembrance as not being love. You have negated desire, though desire has a certain place. Therefore you say through negation the positive is - you understand? But we on the contrary posit the positive and then get caught in the negative. Right? That is, one must begin with doubt, completely doubting, then you end up with certainty. But if you start with certainty, as all of you do, then you end up in uncertainty and chaos. So in negation the positive is born. You understand? I have finished, sirs. I have finished for this morning. We will continue next Tuesday. SAANEN 7TH PUBLIC TALK 24TH JULY 1977. It is really a lovely morning - I don't know why you are sitting in this hot tent! There are several things that we ought to talk over together, though we have discussed many things, many human problems, and to go beyond all those problems, to be free. I would like this morning, if I may, to go into rather perhaps complex problems, complex issues, and I think they should be talked over together. Perhaps some of you are here for the first time, so if I may point out this is not a lecture where you listen, agreeing or disagreeing, or are put to sleep by the words, however eloquent they may be. But we are travelling together on a journey of a serious character, and unless one partakes in that journey, shares and walks in that journey seriously, what we are saying will have very little importance and very little effect - not that one wants to make an effect. We have talked about authority; we have talked about fear, pleasure, love, sorrow and the very deep issue of death. And also we said during these talks - and I believe this is the last talk - we said man has developed through centuries a great deal of skill, and that skill gives him certain importance, prestige and money. But without clarity, which comes through compassion, that skill becomes merely a destructive factor in life. We have talked a great deal about that too. Now if we may, let us talk over together the question of decision, whether it is necessary to decide at all, and the place of will; and also we are going to discuss or talk over together the question of time and space. And perhaps if we have time we can go into the question of meditation too. So we are going to talk over together the machinery that makes one decide, the action that is born of will, and what is the nature and the structure of time, and the importance of space. And from there move, if we can, into the question of what is meditation. Meditation is not something separate from all that we have talked about. It is not at the end of the parcel. When we talked about authority, that is part of meditation, the nature of fear and whether man can ever be free of fear both outwardly and inwardly, and the structure and the pursuit of pleasure. All that is part of meditation. And we also talked about the nature of love. And to investigate together you need a certain quality of mind that is meditative, that is not jumping to conclusions, that is not affirming or rejecting, but investigating - investigating without any prejudice, without any conclusion, without any end. After all that is a good scientist - not the scientist that is employed by governments, but the scientist who really wants to find truth, at whatever level. And also we talked about relationship, the importance of human relationship without conflict. That was also the deeper meaning of meditation. So we would like this morning, if we may, to talk over together - and we mean talk over together, though the speaker is sitting on a platform using words, we are taking the journey together, walking together, exploring together because we have created this monstrous world, the world that is becoming mad with violence, division, wars, sorrow and all the rest of it. So as we have created the society in which we live, we are responsible to bring about a transformation in that immoral society. So it is our responsibility as a human being. And each human being is the representative of total humanity - we talked about that. So we are taking a journey, exploration, an investigation together into why human beings decide - decide to do this and decide not to do that, to become this or not that, to follow somebody or not to follow somebody. All our life is a process of decision. And we are asking if you are aware that your life is based on various forms of deciding. We should also ask why we decide at all. Is it necessary - both physiologically in the world of technology, and also psychologically, inwardly, what is the necessity of any form of decision? This is very important because when we are going to go into the question of meditation one must know the nature of decision, because meditation is not something you decide, it is not something that is set down by some guru, or some neurotic person. So it is very important to understand why human beings throughout the world for millenia upon millenia have always exercised this faculty of decision. What is decision made of, what is the cause of decision? Would you decide if you are very clear? Is there any decision necessary when you see something very, very dangerous? Is there any necessity for decision? That is to act in a certain manner, or not to act in another way. Is the mind capable of observing the totality of the movement of thought, the totality, the wholeness of thought, the holistic - the meaning of the word 'holistic' is the same as the other - whole. Whole means, the root meaning of that word is health, sanity, and holy - H-O-L-Y. That means the whole totality of life, not just departmentalized life. Now we are asking: when there is decision there is always resistance. Right? One decides to do something and then there is always the uncertainty whether it is the right thing to do, there is always anxiety that your decision should be made upon something reasoned out, clarity, which has deep significance. So we are questioning that: whether there is a way of living in daily life, in which there is no decision at all? It is like a tremendous river with a volume of water with great depth, it moves, if there is any obstruction it goes round it, but it is always moving. It is only when there is no total movement of that nature, holistic movement, then there comes decision. Please see this for yourself. We are taking the journey together. I am not talking to myself and you agreeing or disagreeing, we are thinking this out together very deeply. So please be serious. We are going to find out in our examination whether it is possible to live a life where there is a holistic movement, a movement that is whole, non-fragmented. And when there is a movement of such nature there is no necessity for decision at all. And that implies an action of will. What is will? Why do we depend so much on will? I will do this, and I will not do that. This is good, that is bad, that I'll follow - the capacity to exercise will. And we think will is part of freedom - free will and all the rest of it. We are going to question all that together, because we have questioned everything here. Right? We have questioned all the religious attitudes. We have questioned authority. We have questioned whether human beings can be utterly, totally and completely free of fear. And also we are questioning what is love and so on because when one accepts, obeys and follows, you end up in uncertainty. But if you begin with uncertainty, that is, you are questioning, doubting, then you end up in certainty. But we unfortunately start the other way. And we are asking what is the nature of will and why is it that human beings depend on that capacity, and give such importance to the man who has strong will? So we are going to ask together what is the nature and the structure of will? Will is desire, heightened, strengthened by constant exercise of desire. It is the essence of desire - will. And where there is desire there must be illusion. We went into it the other day. And so we are asking whether will in action does not lead to not only illusion but to every form of resistance and therefore exclusion, therefore isolation? And is it possible to live a daily life without any kind of will? We are educated from childhood to the exercise of will. You must when you are children concentrate, you must obey, you must do this, you cannot do that. And our whole way of life is based on that. And will implies choice. Right? I hope we are carefully reasoning together, logically, sanely, going into this question. We are not asserting anything. We are reasonable people, I hope, serious people, therefore we are capable of examining without any prejudice, conclusion, belief. So we are saying where there is will there is choice. Right? And choice comes about when there is no clarity, both objectively and inwardly. When there is no clarity then the choice begins and I choose to do that, which is the exercise of will, which is the essence of desire. We went also into the question of what is desire? We said desire is the movement of seeing, perception, contact, sensation. And thought makes that sensation into desire, and the image that goes with the desire. I won't go into all that - there is no time for all that now. We have explained enough, about what is the nature and the structure of desire. So we are questioning what is the necessity of choice, and from choice the exercise of will, and will is the essence of desire. I hope you are following all this. When there is clarity, to see things exactly as they are, not romantically, emotionally, with prejudice, with what you would like it to be, but to see things absolutely as they are in daily life, brings about an extraordinary quality of clarity. Right? And when there is clarity there is no need for the exercise of will or choice. You see this? See the beauty of it. So one can live in daily life without any kind of will, choice or resistance. If there is something that is an impediment, you go round it, move like water. So there is - this is rather interesting, I am just discovering it - there is a movement which is likened to water. A river cleanses itself as it moves, but if there is too much pollution dropped in it, it can never clean itself. That is what is happening to us. Society, education, authority - except the authority of the surgeon, doctor, and so on, we have discussed that very clearly - so the stream is constantly being polluted, our human life, which is really a marvellous stream if there is no pollution. And one of the deep causes of this pollution is this lack of clarity. When there is lack of clarity there is choice, will and action, confined to a very narrow field. If you see that, not theoretically, intellectually or merely through words, but actually have an insight into the nature of this activity of will then that very insight clears away the pollution which is called the will. Right? We have also talked about when there is clarity, that clarity must go with compassion. You can be very clear intellectually -most thoughtful, intellectual people are very, very clear, but their clarity is limited because there is no compassion with it. We went into the nature of compassion. We said compassion comes through the understanding of pleasure - please follow this. Compassion is like a flower that is born, you cannot be compassionate, you cannot cultivate compassion, you cannot cultivate love, but when you understand the nature and the structure of pleasure, whether it is sexual, or the pleasure of a position, a status and so on - the pleasure, the pursuit of pleasure. That pursuit of pleasure is the movement of thought in time. And without understanding pleasure, love becomes a very shoddy little affair. And we went also into where there is suffering, various forms of suffering which we talked over together the other day, out of that suffering with the understanding of what love is, compassion is born. That compassion is not mine, nor yours. Out of that compassion comes intelligence. So intelligence cannot operate when there is the activity of will. I wonder if you see this? Will is desire. Desire is not compassion. We went through this very deeply the other day. So we are asking -taking the journey together, exploring together - whether it is possible to live a life in which the action of will doesn't exist at all, which means effort, the constant effort brought about through the action of will? To have an insight into this is to be free of it completely. And we said to have an insight the mind must be empty - empty of your conclusions, your prejudices, your experiences, your hopes - must be empty to have an insight from which arises intelligence. We talked about this the other day. Right? So to have an insight into the whole nature and the structure of will and decision, out of which comes this enormous trouble. So there is an ending to effort, struggle, and all the forms of resistance, and escapes and neuroticism, when you understand the nature and the structure of will, which is born of choice and effort. Right. From there we can move to the question of time. We are going into this because it is necessary to understand the whole movement of meditation. Because that word has been ruined, polluted by all the systems, the various forms of assertions, by the gurus - you know, they have recently invaded this country, Europe, with this word meditation. And one must understand together the nature of time because for us time is very important, both chronologically as well as psychologically. We are talking over together the psychological movement of time, not the time by the watch. The time by the watch is absolutely necessary otherwise you and I wouldn't be here at 10.30. Or if you want to catch a bus, and so on and so on, such time, chronological time is necessary. But we are going to investigate together - and we mean together - what is psychological time upon which we depend so enormously? Surely time is movement. That is very simple. From here to there, both chronologically as well as psychologically. A distance to be covered, a distance between 'what is' and 'what should be'. The distance to arrive at a goal, at a purpose requires time. If one wants to learn a language that requires time. So perhaps we have brought over from the learning of something which requires time, into the field of the psyche. Do you follow? You understand what I am saying? You need time to learn a new technique, to drive a car, to learn a language, to understand and work the electronics and so on, you need a great deal of time to fly an aeroplane. That same attitude has brought over into the psychological field: we need time to be perfect. We need time to get over something. We need time to be free of our anxieties, to be free of our sorrow, to be free of our fears and so on. See what we have done. Where time is necessary, which is in the field of technology, that need has been introduced into the psychological world and we have accepted it. For all nations to wipe away their nationalities needs time. To become brotherly we need time and so on and so on. Now we are questioning that together. We are questioning whether there is any psychological time at all. Because psychological time implies hope the world is mad, let's hope in the future there will be a sane world. So we are questioning together whether there is an action which is not involved in time at all. We are meeting together? Action brought about by a cause, by a motive needs time. Right? Action which has a pattern of memory, and to put that pattern into action needs time. If you have an ideal, however noble, however beautiful, romantic and all the rest of it, however nonsensical even, it needs time to arrive at that idealistic state. So to arrive at that, destroy the present. It doesn't matter what happens to you but what is important is the future. For the sake of the marvellous future sacrifice yourself! And that future is established by the ideologists Marx, Engles, you know, all the rest of it, all the religious teachers and so on, throughout the world. So we are questioning that: whether there is any psychological time at all, and therefore -please go into this very carefully - no hope? Dante in his Inferno, said, those who enter here have no hope. You know, all that. We are questioning this. This is a very serious thing. Please don't come to any conclusion yet - "What shall I do if I have no hope?" Hope is so important because it gives you satisfaction, energy, drive, to achieve something. Now when you look closely, non-sentimentally, logically, is there psychological time at all? There is psychological time only when you move away from 'what is'. Right? You are getting this? That is, there is psychological time when one realizes one is violent, and one proceeds to enquire how to be free of it, that movement away from 'what is' is time. But after investigation and so on, if one is totally completely aware of 'what is', then there is no time. I wonder if you see this. Do you? Look: most of us are violent. Violence is not only hitting somebody physically - anger, jealousy, acceptance of authority, conformity, imitation, accepting the edicts of another - all those are forms of violence. And human beings are violent. That is the fact, violence. The very word condemns it. I don't know if you see it. The very usage of the word 'violence', by that usage you have already condemned violence. Right? See the intricacies of this. So being violent and not being capable, or negligent, or lazy, we move away from it and invent ideological non-violence. That is time. The movement from 'what is' to 'what should be'. Right? Now that time comes to an end completely when there is only 'what is', which is non verbal identification with 'what is'. Get it sirs? I am just finding it out. Come on! There is anger, which is a form of violence, or hatred, jealousy. The word 'anger', the word 'jealousy', 'hate', in themselves are condemnatory. When one sees one is angry and says, "I have been angry", that verbalization of a reaction strengthens the reaction. I wonder if you see that? Do you? I am angry. When I say, "I am angry", it is I have recognized from the past angers the present anger, so I am using the word 'anger' which is the past, and identifying with that word the present. So the word becomes extraordinarily important. But if there is no usage of that word but only the fact, the reaction - are you following this? - then there is no strengthening of that feeling. So we are saying that it is possible to live psychologically without tomorrow. You understand? "I love you, I will meet you tomorrow." Which is the remembrance of that affection, or whatever it is, in memory and projected tomorrow. See the importance of all this sirs. So that there is an activity without time at all. Love is not time. Right? Love is not a remembrance. If it is, it is not love, obviously. "I love you because you gave me sex, or you gave me food, or flattered me, or you said you needed a companion, I am lonely therefore I need you" - all that is not love surely? When you are jealous, when there is anxiety, hatred, that is not love. So then what is love? Love is obviously a state of mind in which there is no verbalization, no remembrance, but an immediate fact. So it is possible through very careful examination, observing, which is totally different from analysis - we went into that, and there is no time now. My goodness there is so much to talk about! So there is a way of living in daily life where time as movement from this to that, has gone. Do you know what that means? What happens when you do that? You have an extraordinary vitality, an extraordinary sense of clarity. You are then only dealing with facts, not with ideas. But as most of us are imprisoned in ideas and we have accepted that as a way of life, it is very difficult to break away from that. But to have an insight into it, then it is finished. Right? Then there is the question of space. I think, if one may point out, it is very important to understand this. When we talk about space, we conceive space, or look at space from an object. Right? But to look, to observe space, or to be aware of space without the object, and therefore without the subject. You understand this? Please look at it, let's go slowly into this. Because our minds are so cluttered up - with knowledge, with worries, with problems, with money, with position, prestige, you know, so burdened, there is no space at all. Right? And without space there is no order. Right? And we are asking: what is space? Look, we are sitting here and we know the space from this tent. From a centre observe: or observe without a centre. Which means to observe without the centre implies non-verbalization. This becomes too difficult for you. May I go on? You are sure? Space implies no direction. Right? When I look at this valley from a height, if there is a direction because I want to see where I live, then I lose the vast space. Just see the sanity of it. So where there is direction there is no space. Where there is a purpose, a goal, something to be achieved, there is no space. Right? Look at it sirs, don't agree. Look at yourself. If I have a purpose in life and for which I am living, concentrating, where is the space? I have very little space. Whereas if there is no direction, there is vast space. Look at it. Go into it. You will see it for yourself. So where there is an object, a centre and from that centre we look, then space is very, very limited. When there is no centre, no object, no structure of the 'me' put together by thought, there is vast space. And without space there is no order, there is no clarity, there is no compassion. Because our lives are very limited, enclosed and to break that enclosure we do all kinds of things. So where there is resistance there is no space. Right? Where there is a centre from which you are acting, there is no space. Where there is direction, a motive, an end in view, there is no space. But space is necessary. Space is necessary because - the word 'because' implies cause, remove it! - it is necessary to have space. When there is space you can observe very clearly. From the top of a mountain on a clear day you see everything, the beauty of the whole valley, the mountains, the clarity. But our minds are so heavily conditioned, so heavily burdened, there is no space. Now to have an insight into it. Right? To see how important it is to have space. From there we can go into the question of meditation. But without understanding all that - that is, the freedom from all authority, from all psychological authority, to be completely free psychologically of any imposition by another. Right? There is no guru, no teacher and therefore you have to be completely and totally a light to yourself. And we said every human being is the representative of all humanity. Then when he is a light to himself -you understand? - he lights the world, lights the rest of humanity. You understand this? And we said there is no possibility of meditation, and the depth of it, and the beauty of it, the greatness of it, when there is any form of fear - obviously. Fear distorts, fear clouds the mind. And also we said if we do not understand the nature and the structure of pleasure then you turn meditation into an act of pleasure, and pursue that pleasure through various practices - the Zen, the various systems, methods, and all the rest of it. That is still the pursuit of pleasure, to be gained at the end. And we said the pursuit of pleasure is the movement of thought. Thought is memory, stored up in the brain as knowledge and experience. And the response of memory is thought. Thought is time, not the chronological time only but the whole nature of time psychologically. So there must be compassion, clarity, skill. After that we can examine, go into the question of meditation, knowing or living where there is no effort, where there is no action of will, where there is tremendous space. Then what is meditation? We said from the beginning of these talks until now, all that is part of meditation. If you have not taken the journey deeply together you cannot go into this very deeply, you may superficially talk about it, but you cannot really understand or live the greatness of meditation. Which is not that you must meditate. The idea to determine to meditate is the most absurd action. "I will meditate, spend twenty minutes in the morning, twenty minutes in the afternoon, twenty minutes in the evening" - that is a siesta! It is nothing else but absurd nonsense. But understanding the nature of all this, and in that understanding comes great beauty, not only the observation of the beauty of the mountains, of the hills, the rivers and nature, but also the beauty of a person, whether it be a man or a woman, the beauty. Beauty exists only when there is no me. Not the beauty of a picture painted by a well known artist, painter, or by Michelangelo etc., etc. You may look at it, go to a museum and observe it, see the lines, the colours, the shapes, how it is grouped together, all the rest of it, but when there is no me there is beauty and you need not go to any museum. And that is part of meditation, to see the enormous greatness of beauty. So what then is meditation? We have only dealt with the waves - authority, fear - the waves on the surface of an ocean. Now if you have gone so far we are going into the depth of the ocean. You understand? We have only dealt with the superficiality of it - of course you must understand it, be free of it, know how to dive deeply - not you dive - it comes about. First of all there is a difference between concentration, choiceless awareness and attention. (Please, are you all tired? I am afraid there is no other talk so please pay attention to this. There will be a discussion on Wednesday - five dialogues between us. But if you are tired it doesn't matter, don't listen. Don't make an effort to listen because that is a waste.) There are these three things which we must understand: concentration, choiceless awareness and attention. Concentration implies resistance - concentration on a particular thing, on the page you are reading, or on the phrase you are trying to understand: to concentrate, to put all your energy in a particular direction. That is one thing. I needn't enlarge on that, need I? In that concentration there is resistance and therefore there is effort and division. I want to concentrate, thought goes off on something else, I bring it back. The fight. And if you love something you concentrate very easily. All that is implied in the word to concentrate, to put your mind on a particular object, or a particular picture, a particular action. That is one thing. Choiceless awareness implies to be aware both objectively, outside, and inwardly, without any choice. Just to be aware of the colours, of the tent, of the trees, the mountains, nature - just to be aware. Not choose, say, "I like this", "I don't like that" or "I want this", "I don't want that". Right? To observe without the observer. The observer is the past, which is conditioned, therefore he is always looking from that conditioned point of view, therefore there is like and dislike, my race, your race, my god, your god, and all the rest of it. We are saying to be aware implies to observe the whole environment around you, the mountains, the trees, the ugly wars, the towns, aware, look at it. And in that observation there is no decision, no will, no choice. Get it? You understand it? And attention - concentration, choiceless awareness and attention. In attending there is no centre. Right? You are completely attentive. Are you now - if I may ask - attending to what is being said? If you are completely, totally attending there is no you who is attending - is there? You understand? If you are listening completely with your heart and with your blood, everything, there is no me attending. Right? There is no me that limits that attention. Then attention is limitless. Right? Therefore attention then has complete space. Attention then is not directed. Whereas concentration is, therefore it limits space. So we have to go into this very deeply and see if you have it. After understanding all the waves on the surface - fear, authority, all those petty little affairs compared to what we are going into. So the mind then - because insight implies emptiness - emptying the whole of the consciousness of its content. Empty it. Which is not through action of will, which is not through desire, which is not through choice, but seeing the nature of consciousness, your consciousness, not mine, your consciousness, with its content -fear, anxiety, my country, your country, I must be good - the content of it, sorrow, longing, loneliness, the ache of that loneliness, separation, conflict, all that is the content of your consciousness. Right? And the content makes consciousness. Without the content there is no consciousness. You understand? Now we are saying when you have an insight into all this naturally there comes about the emptying of the content. Therefore consciousness is totally different, is of a totally different dimension. And meditation then is: because there is space, because there is emptiness there is total silence - not induced silence, not practised silence, which are all just the movement of thought and therefore absolutely worthless - but when you have gone through all this -and there is great delight in going through all this, it is like playing a tremendous game - then in that total silence there is a movement which is timeless, which is not measured by thought because thought has no place in it whatsoever. And therefore there is something totally sacred, timeless. May I go? SAANEN 5TH PUBLIC TALK 19TH JULY 1977 We have been talking over together whether it is possible to awaken the intelligence. That is our chief concern. And for those who are serious and who have followed the past four talks - or rather talking over things together - this morning I would like to go into something that I think is equally important. This awakening of intelligence implies having an insight into all our problems - psychological problems, crisis, blockages and so on. The word 'intelligence', according to a good dictionary, means reading between the lines, partly. And also really, deeply, the significance of intelligence is to have deep true insight - not an intellectual comprehension, not resolving the problems through conflict, but having an insight into a human issue, that very insight awakens this intelligence. Or, having this intelligence there is the insight - both ways. And having insight involves no conflict, because when you see something very, very clearly, the truth of the matter, there is the end of it, you don't fight against it, you don't try to control, you don't make all these calculated, motivated efforts. From that insight, which is intelligence, there is action - not a postponed action but immediate action. That is what I would like to talk over together, if we may, this morning, a little bit, and then we will go on to some other problems if we have time. We are educated from childhood to exercise as deeply as possible every form of effort. If you observe yourself you will see what tremendous efforts we make to control ourselves, to suppress, to adjust, to modify ourselves to certain conclusions, pattern ourselves according to some patterns, or according to an objective that you or another has established, and so there is this constant struggle. You must have noticed it. One lives with it, and one dies with it. And we are asking if it is possible to live, the daily life, without a single conflict? And as most of us are somewhat awakened to all the problems, political, religious, economic, social, ideological and so on, when we are a little bit aware of all that there must be discontent, and most of us are dissatisfied. When you are young this dissatisfaction becomes like a flame, and you have passion to do something: so you join some political party, the extreme left, the extreme revolutionary, the extreme forms of Jesus freaks and so on and so on and so on. And by joining, adopting certain attitudes, certain ideologies, that flame of discontent fades away, because you are then satisfied. You say, "This is what I want to do" and then you pour your heart into it. And gradually you find, if you are at all awake to all the problems involved, that it doesn't satisfy. But it is too late: you have already given half your life to something which you thought would be completely worthwhile, but when you find a little bit later on that it is not, then I am afraid one's energy, capacity, drive has withered away. One must have noticed our discontent with regard to politics, why we are governed, by whom we are governed, for what purpose are we governed, the discontent that questions the religious attitudes, the religious dogmas, the orthodoxy of the priest, the guru - the discontent questions it, doubts it. And gradually you like somebody, or some idea, or your girl-friend says that this is the right thing to do old boy, go after it, and as you want to please her you adjust yourself to that pattern. So gradually this real flame of discontent withers away. You must have noticed it in yourself, in your children, in young people, and the old - you see the pattern that has followed on all the time, generation after generation. We are talking over together, I am not laying down the law, we are investigating, exploring into something that is really worthwhile if you go into it very, very deeply. Most of us fortunately, if you are at all alive to things, are discontented, and not to allow this discontent to be squashed, destroyed by the desire to be satisfied, by the desire to adjust oneself to the environment, to the establishment, or to a new ideal, to a Utopia. But to allow this flame to keep on burning, not be satisfied with anything, then the superficial satisfactions have no place. This very dissatisfaction is demanding something much greater than the ideals, the gurus, the religions, the establishment, all ecology that becomes totally superficial. And that very flame of discontent, because it has no outlet, because it has no object in which it can fulfil itself, that flame becomes a great passion. And that passion is this intelligence. You are following? Am I making this clear - not verbally? Is it clear to you, who must be dissatisfied - with your husband, with your wife, your girl-friend, or boy, with the society, with the environment, with all the ugly things that are going on in the name of politics, government. If you are not caught in some of these superficial things, reactionary, essentially reactionary, all of them, then that extraordinary flame is intensified. And that intensity brings about a quality of mind that has a deep insight instantly into things, and therefore from that there is action. So as most of us are here, and I hope it is a fact, that you who are here are dissatisfied. Right? Why are you governed? By whom are you governed, for what purpose are you governed? That is one question. Why do you accept religious patterns of any kind -whether it is the religious patterns of the ancient Hindus, their tradition, their superstition, their authority, their worship of tradition, or the Zen Buddhism, Zen meditation, or the transcendental meditation, everything - not to be satisfied? It doesn't make you nervous. It doesn't bring about imbalance. There is imbalance only when this dissatisfaction is translated, or caught in a trap of some kind or another, then there is distortion, then there are all kinds of fights, inwardly. So since you are here, and you must obviously, if I may point out, you must be dissatisfied, including with what we are saying -that's right. And to be aware of this flame and not allow superficial temptations and be caught by them. Right? Are we doing this now as we are talking it over together? Or having been caught in these various traps, can you put them aside, wipe them out, destroy them - do what you like but have this tremendous flame of discontent now? It doesn't mean that you go and throw bombs at people, destroy, physical revolution, violence, but when you put aside all the traps that man has created around you, and that you have created for yourself, then this flame becomes a supreme intelligence. And that intelligence gives you insight. And when you have insight, from that there is immediate action. Right? Are you following something. Right sirs? I am very keen on this because to me action is not tomorrow. An action - which has been a great problem with a great many people, with deep thinkers - an action without cause, action without motive, action not dependent on some ideology, which ideology is in the future and there is constant adjustment to that ideology, therefore there is conflict. So it has been one of the demands of serious people to find out if there is an action which is per se, for itself, which is without cause and motive. I don't know if you have ever asked this question of yourself - and I hope you are asking it now. Is there an action in life, in daily life, in which there is no motive, there is no cause, and therefore, see what is implied in it, no regrets, no retention of those regrets and all the sequence that follows from that regret, it doesn't depend on some past or future? So one is asking: is there an action, in daily life - the daily life which we know, what it means, what is involved in it, where action is always free? And this action is possible only when there is insight born of intelligence. Right? I wonder if you get it? Am I making it clear? Verbally perhaps, but dig deeply, have an insight in it, into what the speaker is saying? So our question then is: is it possible to live a daily life without any conflict whatsoever? Most people would say you must have conflict otherwise there is no growth. Part of life is conflict. A tree in a forest fights, struggles to reach the sun. That is a form of conflict. Every animal and so on makes conflict, but we are human beings, supposed to be intelligent, supposed to be educated, supposed to have sufficient knowledge, historical, and yet we are constantly in conflict. Now discontent says, "Why should I be in conflict?" You understand? Are you doing this now? We are educated to conflict - conflict implies comparison, imitation, conformity, adjustment to a pattern, modified continuity of what has been through the present to the future. Right? All this is a process of conflict. The deeper the conflict the more neurotic one becomes. And therefore not to have conflict at all. One believes in something most deeply, you believe in god most deeply and say "His will be done" - and we create a monstrous world. Right? - which is his will being done! And conflict implies, as I said, comparison. To live without comparison - you understand? Please do it now. Which means no ideal, no authority of a pattern, no conformity to a particular idea or ideology, and therefore freedom from the prison of ideas. Right? Are you doing it? So that there is no comparison, no imitation, no conformity, therefore you are stuck with 'what is' - right? Actually 'what is'. Because comparison comes only when you compare 'what is' with 'what should be', or 'what might be' or try to transform 'what is' into something which it is not. All this implies conflict. Right? Thousands go to India, from America and from Europe, to find enlightenment, to find the real guru, because they realize their religions, their outlook is very limited, materialistic, and India is supposed to be tremendously spiritual - which it is not - and there people go and try to find out. The guru, the patterns, the traditions say, "Do this, then that" - conformity. And they try every way -which is to bring about greater conflict in themselves. Right? This is what is happening right throughout the world. And so we are asking: is it possible to live without conflict? Now, it is possible when you have an insight into what is being said; to find out actually, in daily life, to live without comparison. Right? Therefore you remove a tremendous burden. Right? I wonder if you see that? And if you remove the burden of comparison, imitation, conformity, adjustment, modification, then you are left with 'what is'. Right? Conflict exists only when you try to do something with 'what is'. Right? May I go on? When you try to transform it, modify it, change it, or suppress it, run away from it, then conflict arises. But if you have an insight into 'what is' then conflict ceases. You understand? Are you doing it? When there is no comparison, and so on, then you are left with 'what is'. Conflict arises only when you are moving away from 'what is'. Right? And what happens with 'what is'? I'll show you. One is greedy, or envious, or violent. The fact is that you are violent, greedy, envious - that is a fact. The non-fact is nonviolence, you must not be greedy, you must be noble, etc., etc. So there is movement away from 'what is' and therefore that is conflict. Come on, sirs! So when you do not move away from 'what is', when thought does not move away then there is only 'what is'. Right? I am violent - one is violent. That is a fact. There is no escape from it whatsoever, suppressing all the violence, which is another form of violence. So you are left with violence, or with greed, or with envy. Can you have an insight into violence? Violence implies conflict, violence implies running away from 'what is', violence implies having an ideal of non-violence. So when you put away all that, you are left with 'what is', and to have an insight into that. That is, that can only happen - please follow this, give your heart to this - that can only happen when you are completely free from any form of having a desire to change 'what is'. Right? You understand this? Are we all together in this? Or am I just talking to myself? Please, life is very short. To find out a way of living which is righteous, and righteousness is only when there is no conflict; and how do you have an insight into 'what is'? You understand my question? We are governed - why are we governed? What is government? You follow? Everything. And that is 'what is'. And how do you have an insight into 'what is'? Which is - I am taking an example of violence - all forms of government are violent - the extreme right, and the extreme left or even the centre. There is violence. Human beings are violent. They say it is part of man's nature, and therefore you must accept it. Being aware one doesn't accept anything, we question. We said the day before yesterday that there is the art of doubt. The art of doubt is to let doubt express itself and also to learn when not to. So how does one have an insight into this, into violence? Without analysis - you understand, you see the problem? Because if you analyse, as we went into it, if you escape from it, and so on, they are all forms of the activity of thought which avoids the solution of 'what is'. Right? Are you understanding? For god's sake, come on! And how do I, or you, have an insight into this question of violence? What is the state of the mind - please listen - what is the state of your mind when you are looking at 'what is'? You understand what I am saying? I am asking you: what is the state of your mind when you are not escaping, not trying to transform, or deform 'what is'? What is the state of that mind that is looking? I may say something that may be shocking, but please go into it with me. The state of the mind that has an insight is completely empty. Right? Because it is free from escapes, free from suppression, analysis and so on. So when all these burdens are taken away -right - because you see the absurdity of them, it is like taking away a heavy burden, so there is freedom. Freedom implies an emptiness to observe. Right? And that emptiness gives you insight into violence - not the various forms of violence, but the whole nature of violence and the structure of violence, and therefore there is immediate action about violence, which means you are free completely from all violence. You get it? For god's sake get it. Is your mind, when you look at 'what is', greed, envy, jealousy, whatever it is, is it empty to observe so that there is instant insight and action, and therefore freedom from 'what is' - get it? We are not playing intellectual games, or analytical games. We are concerned with the awakening of intelligence. As I said, intelligence means, according to the dictionary, reading between the lines. See what is implied in reading between the lines. You must be so awakened so as not to be caught by words, but to see clearly, see the clarity in which there is no print. Do you get it? I wonder? Because in between the lines there is no printing, and there is only white space, which is clarity. And that clarity, if you have it, gives you insight into what is being said on the page. Insight implies observing 'what is' with a mind that is completely free and therefore empty to observe 'what is' - and therefore you have an insight. That is, when you are violent - please follow this -when you are violent and you do not escape from violence, avoid it, try to transform it into some nonsensical non-violence and so on and so on, then you are free of all that burden. Being free the mind is empty, that emptiness gives you insight. And when you have insight into violence you are no longer violent. You see without effort - that is what I want to get at. Are you all too old to follow this? So we are pointing out that it is possible to live, a daily life, in which there is not a shadow of conflict. You know what it means to live a life without conflict? Find out for yourself what it means. Because conflict is the strengthening of the self, the 'me', and therefore there is separation - the 'me' and the 'you', we and they. You understand? So it is possible to live a life without conflict -not because the speaker says so but because you, you have discovered it, the truth of it, not mine nor yours. So from discontent not to allow that flame to be smothered through any trap, and to understand the nature and the structure of insight. And that can only happen when you are not caught in any trap. Right? Now we can move to something else. Is this very clear? Can I go on to something else? Next week we are going to discuss, have a dialogue about all these questions - dialogue, a conversation between two friendly people. I hope you are friends. So we are going to have a dialogue. So if there is anything that is not clear let's discuss it, talk about it. The other thing that I would like to go into this morning is sorrow. We have talked about authority. We have talked over together about the desire for security, the nature and the structure of authority. We have talked about fear, pleasure, love. And if we may, we should also talk over together this enormous problem of suffering. I hope you are not tired - are you? We are going to have an insight into suffering. There is not only a particular human being with his suffering but there is the suffering of the world. Right? There is suffering through poverty, ignorance; there is suffering brought about through death; there is suffering out of great pity; there is suffering when you see animals tortured, killed, maimed; there is suffering when there is war, thousands of mothers and sisters and wives, girls crying their hearts out because we have accepted war - I don't know why we have accepted it, but we have. So wars have brought about immense suffering. The totalitarian, the authoritarian dictators have brought immense suffering - concentration camps, one may not have been in them but you see it, one knows it is happening and you suffer. So there are these various kinds of suffering, not only personal but the suffering of the whole of humanity. You are aware of it, aren't you? And we have accepted it. We say love is part of suffering. When you love somebody it brings about suffering. Right? So we are going to question together whether it is possible to be free of all suffering; and when there is this freedom from suffering in the consciousness of each human being who is listening here, then that freedom from suffering brings about a transformation in consciousness and therefore that consciousness, that radical change in consciousness, affects the whole of mankind's suffering. You understand? That is part of compassion -not saying, "I suffer, my god, my god, my god, why do I suffer? Why should I suffer"? - and from that suffering act neurotically and try to escape from that suffering through various forms of religious, intellectual, social work and so on - escape from it. So we are saying: is it possible for every human being here to be free of this enormous burden of suffering? Where there is suffering you cannot possibly love. That is a truth, a law. When you love somebody and he or she does something of which you totally disapprove, you suffer, and it shows that you don't love. Right? You understand? I am not laying down the law, but see the truth of it. How can I suffer when my wife - if I have a wife, or a girl - who throws me away and goes after somebody else? You understand? And we suffer from that. We get angry, jealous, envious, hateful; and at the same time we say, "I love my wife" - or my girl. I say such love is not love. Right? So is it possible not to suffer, and yet have immense love, the flowering of it? So we are going to find out what suffering is. There is physical suffering. Right? Headaches, operations, malformed bodies, accidents that bring about amputations, some form of ugly deformity. There is suffering from the various unfulfilled desires -I hope you are following all this. There is suffering from the loss of a person whom you think you love. After all what is the structure and the nature and the essence of suffering? You understand? The essence of it, not the various forms of it. What is the essence of suffering? I am asking myself for the first time. I am going to find out, together we are going to find out. Is it not the total expression at that moment of complete self-centred existence? What do you say? It is the essence of the 'me', the essence of the ego, the person, the limited, enclosed, resisting existence which you call the 'me' -the form, the name, all that. When there is an incident that demands investigation and understanding, an insight, that very incident brings about the awakening of the 'me', the essence, and that I call suffering. What do you say? If there was no me, would you suffer? You would help, you would do all kinds of things, but you wouldn't suffer. So suffering then is the expression of the 'me', which includes self-pity, loneliness, trying to escape, trying to be with the other who is gone - all that is implied which is the very me, which is the past. The image of the past which is me, the knowledge, the remembrance of the past, which is me. So what relationship has suffering, the essence of the 'me', to love? Please think it out, let's think it out together. We are asking: is there any relationship between love and suffering? Is love put together by thought, whereas the 'me' is put together by thought. Oh, come on! I see something. Are you following? Is love put together by thought - the experience, the memories, the remembrances, the pain, the delight, the pleasures, and the pursuit of pleasure, sexual or otherwise, the pleasures of possession, possessing somebody and the somebody liking being possessed - all that is the structure of thought, which we have gone into? And the 'me' with its name, with its form, the essence of me is the nature and structure put together by thought. Obviously. So what is the relationship between love and suffering? If love is not put together by thought - please go into this, put your heart into this - if love is not put together by thought then suffering has no relationship to it, therefore action from love is different from action from suffering - get it? Why am I so intense about all this? Why aren't you so intense? So to have an insight - please follow this - to have an insight into suffering, which means what place has thought in relationship to love, and in relationship to suffering? Right? To have an insight into it, which means you are neither escaping, wanting comfort, frightened to be lonely, isolated, therefore your mind is free; therefore that which is free is empty. And therefore if you have that emptiness, which means freedom, you have an insight into suffering. Therefore suffering as the 'me' disappears. There is immediate action because that is so. So your action then is from love, not from suffering. Do you get what I am talking about? Then one discovers that action from suffering is a continual action of the 'me' modified, and therefore constant conflict. Right? You can see the logic of it all, the reason for it. So it is possible to love without a shadow of suffering. And what is the action of compassion? You understand? If love is not the result of thought, thought which is the response of memory stored up in the brain as knowledge and experience, that thought is not love, and our action is based on thought. Now I must do this, this is my motive, I will -you follow - it is based on the movement and the modification of thought. When thought is not love, then what is the action of compassion, love? We can say then, from there, what is the action of an insight out of which there is intelligence? We are saying compassion is intelligence. What is the action of intelligence -which is not the outcome of thought? Right? What is the action of intelligence? Can one ask such a question? If you have intelligence it is operating, it is functioning, it is acting. But if you say, what is the action of intelligence, you want thought to be satisfied. Right? You see what I mean? When you say what is the action of compassion - who is asking it? Is it not thought? Is it not the 'me' that is saying, if I could have this compassion I would act differently? Therefore when you put that question you are still thinking in terms of thought. But with an insight into thought then thought has its right place and intelligence then acts. Have you got it? Is that enough for this morning? It is enough for me, for the speaker. So you see sirs what is implied in all this: how important it is that there should be a radical revolution, psychological revolution, because no politics, no government, no Lenin, Marx, nobody is going to solve any of our problems - the human problems from which every misery comes, from the human being who is functioning, living, operating, acting on thought. And when you have an insight into thought then you also have an insight into the nature and the beauty of love; and then action from that. There is a nice story of a preacher, a teacher - perhaps some of you have heard it from me, if you have please forgive me for repeating it - there was a teacher and his disciples. Every morning he used to talk to the disciples, give a sermon. And one morning he gets on the rostrum, on the pedestal, and was just about to begin when a bird comes in and sits on the window sill and begins to sing. And the preacher stops talking and listens to the bird, the beauty of the sound, the blue sky and the quietness of the song. And the bird flies away. So he turns to his disciples and says, "The morning sermon is over". BROCKWOOD PARK 3RD PUBLIC TALK 3RD SEPTEMBER 1977 May we go on with what we were talking about last Sunday? Please let me remind you, if I may once again, this is not an entertainment, or an intellectual affair, but we are concerned with the whole existence of man. Whether a human being can ever be free from his travail, with his efforts, with his anxieties, violence and the brutality, and if there is an end to sorrow. That is what we are going to talk over together this morning: whether there is an ending to sorrow and the whole complex problem of what is death. Because we have already dealt with, or gone into pretty thoroughly the question of fear, pleasure, and also to find out what love is. And before we go into this question of suffering I think we should be able to think together over this problem - think in the sense that both of us together should be free from our prejudices, from our convictions, from our beliefs, and investigate together, if that is possible, if you are willing, to go into this enormous problem of what is suffering. Why human beings throughout the ages have maintained and sustained, and put up with suffering. And whether there is an ending to all that. Because as we said, when there is suffering there is no love: and without love there is no compassion, no clarity. And out of that clarity and compassion comes the skill that is not cultivating the importance of the self. So if we may, we are going together, freely, to investigate this question of suffering. And one must also be free of all ideologies. Ideologies are dangerous illusions, whether they are political, social, or religious, or personal. Every form of ideology either ends up in totalitarianism, or a religious conditioning, like the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hindu, the Buddhist and so on, and therefore it becomes a much greater burden. So to really go into this enormous question of suffering, and love, and death, one must be free from all ideologies. I wonder if you will be free for this morning at least, to be free completely of your convictions, be free completely, wholly of any ideal, ideology - what should be, what must be - and your personal convictions. You may have experienced a great deal and perhaps those experiences have led you, or brought about certain definite conclusions, images. But to enquire into this question one must be utterly free of all this, otherwise it leads us to illusion. And I hope we see that clearly and we can proceed from there to enquire why human beings throughout the world suffer and have tolerated this suffering, and whether it is at all possible to end all suffering. Obviously there is biological, physiological suffering, but that suffering distorts the mind if one is not very, very careful. So we are talking about psychological suffering of mankind. In investigating suffering we are investigating into the suffering of man, because each one of us is the essence of all humanity. I hope that at least one is clear on that point, that you are psychologically, inwardly, deeply like the rest of mankind. They suffer, they go through a great deal of anxiety, uncertainty, confusion, violence, a great sense of grief, loss, loneliness, as all of us do. So there is no division psychologically between us all. We are the world, psychologically, and the world is us. That is not a conviction, that is not a conclusion, that is not an intellectual theory but an actuality, to be felt, to be realized and to live it. So in investigating this question of sorrow we are going to investigate not only your personal limited sorrow but also the sorrow of mankind. So please in investigating this don't let us reduce it to a personal thing, because when you see the enormous suffering of mankind, in the understanding of the enormity of it, the wholeness of it, then our own part has a role in it. So it is not a selfish enquiry: how am I, or you to be free of sorrow. If you make it personal, limited then we will not understand the full significance of the enormity of sorrow. In opposition to sorrow there is happiness, like in our consciousness there is the good and the bad. In our consciousness there is sorrow and a sense of happiness. Now we are enquiring not as an opposite to happiness, but sorrow itself. I hope we are somewhat clear on this point. Because the opposites contain each other: if the good is the outcome of the bad, then the good contains the bad. And if sorrow is the opposite of happiness, gladness, enjoyment and so on, all the rest of it, then the enquiry into sorrow has its root in happiness. So we are enquiring into sorrow per se, for itself, not as an opposite to something else. May we go on with this? Now if I may, we are thinking together. Not that you must accept or reject what the speaker is saying, but rather together being free of our particular idiosyncracies, tendencies, conclusions, together investigate. Then it is fun, then it is a movement together. But if you hold on to your particular belief, or prejudice or this or that then there is no movement of being together. Because the speaker, if he may point out a little bit, has no beliefs, no conclusions, no theories, no ideologies, so one is free to enquire, to look, to observe. In observing sorrow it is important to understand how one observes. I think this is very, very important. The nature and the movement of observation - how you look at your sorrow. If you are looking at it as though it were different from you then there is a division between you and that which you call sorrow. But is that sorrow different from you? Is the observer of sorrow different from sorrow itself, or the observer is sorrow? It is not he is free from sorrow and then looks at sorrow, or identifies with sorrow, but is not sorrow in the field of the observer, he is sorrow. So the observer becomes the observed. The experiencer is the experienced. The thinker is the thought. There is no division between the observer who says "I am sorrow" and divides himself and then tries to do something about sorrow - run away from it, seek comfort, suppress it and all the various means of transcending sorrow. Whereas if the observer is the observed, which is a fact, like when you are angry that anger is not different from you. You are that anger. So you eliminate altogether the division that brings about conflict. You understand? This is really very important to understand, if one may insist on this. Because we are traditionally brought up, educated, to think the observer is something totally different from the observed. He is the analyser therefore he can analyse. But the analyser is the analysed. So in this perception there is no division between the observer and the observed, between the thinker and the thought. There is no thought without the thinker. If there is no thinker there is no thought. They are one. So we are investigating together into this question, not something opposed to pleasure - pain, grief - pleasure opposed to sorrow, but we are investigating sorrow itself. That is, the observer is observed, so he is observing, he is not dictating what sorrow is, he is not telling what sorrow should be, or not be, he is just observing without any choice, without any movement of thought. So we are observing the nature and the movement of sorrow. There are various kinds of sorrow - the man that has no work, the man that will always remain poor, the man who will never enjoy clean clothes, fresh bath, as it happens among the poor. There are various kinds of sorrow such as ignorance, the sorrow you see when children are maltreated, the sorrow when animals are killed, the vivisection and all the rest of it. There is sorrow of war, which affects the whole of mankind. There is sorrow when someone whom you like or love dies. There is the sorrow of failure. There is the sorrow of the desire to fulfil and the failure and frustration of that. So there are multiple kinds of sorrow. Right? Do we deal with all the multiple expressions of sorrow, or deal with the root of sorrow? You understand my question? Do we take each expression of sorrow - and there are multiple varieties of sorrow, or go to the very root of sorrow? Because if we took the multiple expressions of sorrow there will be no end. But whereas you may trim them, diminish them but they will always remain outside. But if you could look at the multiple branches of sorrow and through that observation go into the very root of sorrow - from the outside go inside - then we can examine what is the root, the cause. And is there a cause for sorrow? And what is sorrow? You understand? May we go on? Please don't be mesmerized by my seriousness, or by my voice, or the way I look. Because to me, personally, it is a very, very serious matter because if I do not end sorrow there is no love in our hearts. You may pity others, you may be troubled by the slaughter that is going on, not only human beings but whales and baby seals and all the rest of the horrors that human beings perpetrate. So it is very important to find out for yourself through examination, through talking over together whether there can be an end to this enormous weight of mankind. So please we are journeying together into this question. As we said, it is very important to learn how to observe: to learn. That is, not to memorize, because that becomes mechanical, but to learn to observe, not to accumulate - the art of observation, which is to observe without any distortion. And there is distortion only when there is fear, when you say, I must get rid of sorrow. Or when you seek comfort because you are suffering and you hope there will be an end to suffering, and that hope gives you a certain sense of comfort. All these factors distort the enquiry into this great question. It requires a peculiar discipline of its own, so the mind is capable of looking at itself. As we talked, whether thought is aware of itself, your consciousness, aware of its own content. If it is aware of itself then it can move greatly, but if you impose on consciousness its content, saying these are its content and learn about the content then that becomes mechanical. That doesn't lead anywhere. So we are enquiring into this question of what is sorrow, and whether there is an end to sorrow. What is sorrow? Why does one suffer? Is it that one has lost something that one had? Or there is suffering because you have been promised a reward and that reward has not been given? Because we are traditionally educated through reward and punishment. And we are asking: is there sorrow because we have no rewards, heavenly or earthly rewards? Does one suffer because of self pity? Because you have not the things that somebody else has? You are not so bright, clever, intelligent, nice looking as the other, therefore through comparison is there suffering? Please follow all this. Do you suffer because through comparison, measurement, you suffer? Do you suffer because through limitation you have not been able to achieve that which you are trying to imitate? Is there suffering because you are trying to conform to a pattern and never reaching that pattern fully, completely? So one asks very deeply what is suffering, and why does one suffer? And also one must be very careful in examination whether the word sorrow itself weighs down on man? The word itself. We have praised sorrow. We have romanticized about sorrow. We have made sorrow into something that is essential in order to find reality. You must go through suffering to find something, to find love, pity, compassion. So we seek through suffering a reward. And does the word suffering, sorrow, does it bring about the feeling of sorrow? Please examine all this as we are going along. Or independent of the word and the stimulation of that word, the reaction of that word, is there sorrow by itself? This is not an intellectual exercise, but in examination you have to ask all these questions. If you are asking it intellectually then you won't go very far. But if it is a matter of tremendous crisis in one's life, as it is, when there is sorrow it is a challenge, and all your energy is brought into being. But we dissipate that energy by running away, comfort, explanations, karma, this that, ten different explanations. So as this is a challenge - which is, what is sorrow? Is there an ending to sorrow? It is a challenge. And either you respond completely to it - and you can only do that when you have no fear, when you are not caught up in the machinery of pleasure, when you are not escaping from it, seeking comfort, but responding to it with all your energy - then that response is the expression of your totality of your energy. Right? Because sorrow is a tremendous challenge. In the understanding of the cause of sorrow does sorrow disappear? I may say to myself, I am full of self-pity, and if I can end self-pity there will be no sorrow. So I work at getting rid of it because I see how silly it is, and I try to suppress it and I worry about it like a dog does with a bone. And thereby intellectually I think I am free from sorrow. But the uncovering, the cause of sorrow is not the ending of sorrow. The searching of the cause of sorrow is a wastage of energy; sorrow is there, demanding your tremendous attention. It is a challenge asking you to act. But instead of that we say, let me look at the cause, let me find out, is it this, that or the other? I may be mistaken, let me talk it over with others, or read some book which will tell me what the real cause is. But all this is moving away from the actual act, actual response to that challenge. You understand? So we are asking: what is the root of sorrow? If our mind, which is the movement of thought, is looking into its memory and responding according to that memory, which is according to that previous knowledge, then you are acting not to the challenge, but you are responding from the memory of the past. I wonder if you see this? Please stay with this for a few minutes and you will see the importance of this. I am in sorrow, my son, my wife or the social conditions, the poverty, the brutality of man, brings about a great sorrow in me. And it wants a response, a complete response from me as a human being who represents the totality of humanity - and I mean the totality of humanity. And thought responds to the challenge -thought - and says, I must find out how to respond to it. I have had sorrow before and I know all the meaning, the suffering and the pain, the anxiety, the loneliness of sorrow, and the remembrance of that, and according to that remembrance I respond. Therefore I am not responding, acting. I am responding from a memory. I wonder if you see that. Therefore it is not actual response. May we go on a little bit? Please, do this. I hope you are doing this, actually seeing the fact that any response to that challenge from memory is no response at all, it is a mere reaction. It is not action, it is a reaction. If you once see that then the question is: what is the root of it all, not the cause? There is a difference between causation, when there is a cause there is an effect - right? And the effect becomes the cause - right? There is the cause, from the cause there is an effect, which is the action, that effect becomes the cause for the next action. So it is a chain - cause, effect and that effect becomes the cause to the next effect, and so on. So when the mind is caught in this limited chain, and it is always limited, then your response to that challenge will be very limited. I wonder if you see all this? May I go on? Do you understand a little bit? I hope I am making this clear. If I am not making it clear I will go over it again ten times in different ways because it is very important, because to act to that challenge without a time interval - the time interval is the response of memory. Are you doing it? You know what sorrow is - all of us know it, every human being in the world knows what sorrow is. So you know it very well. You may not actually have had any sorrow, but you see others round you and the enormity of sorrow of mankind - the global sorrow of mankind. And if you respond to that according to your conditioning, according to your past memory, then you are then caught in an action that is always time-binding. The challenge and response demands no time interval. I wonder if you see this. Therefore there is instant action. So that is what we are enquiring into. That is, what is the root of sorrow? We are not trying to find out the cause but the very substance, the very nature, the very movement of sorrow. As we said, fear is time. Fear, we said, is the movement of thought, thought as measure. So thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge, and that thought is limited and so it is a movement in time. So if there is no time there is no fear. You understand this? I am afraid I might die; that is, I might in the future, I am living now but I might die. So that is a time interval. But if there was no time interval at all there is no fear. I wonder if you see this? So in the same way, is the root of sorrow time - time being the movement of thought, time is thought? And if there is no thought at all when you respond to that challenge, is there suffering? I wonder if you see? Please, again, let's forget science fiction, and also forget, put away for the time being, your ideas about time, sorrow, fear and all the rest of it, your conclusions, what you have read about sorrow, and reincarnation - everything, forget all that, and begin again as though you know nothing about sorrow, as though you really - though you suffer - have no answer to it. Then we can begin together. But you are so conditioned to put sorrow on somebody else. Christianity has done that beautifully. Go to church and you see all the suffering in that figure. The Christians have given all their suffering over to somebody. And they think by that they have understood the whole circus of sorrow. And in India and the Asiatic countries they have also another form of evasion - karma - I won't go into all that business. So here we are not doing that. Here we are trying to face the actual movement at the moment of sorrow, and to be completely choicelessly aware of that thing. We are asking: is time, which is thought, is that the fundamental issue that makes sorrow flower? So we are asking: is thought responsible for suffering? Not only the suffering of others, the brutality of others, the total ignorance of this whole movement of the self, is that the movement of thought - thought being the past? There is no new thought, there is no free thought, there is only thought, which is the response of knowledge as experience, stored up in the brain as memory, and that responds. Now if that is the fact, if that is true: that is, sorrow is the outcome of time and thought; if that is a fact, not a supposition then you are responding to sorrow without the 'me'. Aren't you? The 'me' is put together by thought - my name, my form, how I look, my qualities, my reactions, all the things that are required, it is all put together by thought surely? So that thought is me. Thought is me. So time is me, the self, the ego, the personality, all that is the movement of time as me. When there is no time - you understand - when you respond to this challenge of suffering and there is no me, is there suffering? I wonder if you see this? Isn't all sorrow based on me? The individual, the personality, the ego, the self says, "I suffer", "I am lonely", "I am anxious", "I have lost my son and I put all my energy, love into that one basket and now he is gone, and I am lonely" - you follow - this whole movement, this whole structure is me, is thought. And thought says, I am not only me but I am a superior me. There is something far superior than this thought which is still the movement of thought. So there is an ending to sorrow when there is no me. Right? Now we will come back to it a little later if time allows. Now we are going to talk over together the question of what is death. Again, please, if I may point out, one doesn't know what it means. Right? You can begin with that. You may have speculated about it, you may have read about it, you may have had your own conclusions about it but actually you have never realized what death is - obviously not. So when you are looking at this question of death don't bring in your secondhand knowledge - because all of us are secondhand human beings, or third-hand, or umpteenth-hand. So can we look at this problem as though we did not know a thing about it? Then you can find out. But if you come to it with a great deal of knowledge, then you are informing death what it is! Which is so absurd. But whereas if one comes to it totally not knowing then you begin to enquire quite differently. Right? You begin with uncertainty and therefore when there is uncertainty you end up with complete certainty. But we are certain first and end up in doubt. So we are starting not knowing whether it is a shoddy little affair called death - one has seen a thousand deaths. One has known the death of someone very close to you; or the death of millions through atomic bombs - Hiroshima and all the rest of this horror man has perpetuated on other human beings in the name of peace, in the name of ideologies - they are all ideologies. So doubt, put away every form of ideology because they are dangerous illusions, political, social and so on or the capitalist. So, without any ideology, without any conclusion, not knowing, we are going together to find out. Which is: what is death? What is the thing that dies? What is the thing that terminates? And also in enquiring one sees, if there is something that is continuous then it becomes mechanical. If there is an ending to everything there is a new beginning. I wonder if you see this. So we are enquiring without fear. And if you are afraid then you cannot possibly find out what this immense thing called death is. It must be the most extraordinary thing. To find out what is death we must also enquire into not what is after death, but what is before death. Surely that is much more important isn't it? We never do that. We never enquire what is living. You follow? Death is coming but what is living? Is this living, this enormous suffering, fear, anxiety, sorrow and all the rest of it, is that living? And because we cling to that we are afraid of the other. Right? So before we ask what is death, we must also ask what is living, because if you don't know what is living you won't know what is death. They must go together apparently. If one can find out what is living, what is the full meaning of living, the totality of living, the wholeness of living because then the brain is capable of understanding the wholeness of death. But we are enquiring into the meaning of death, without enquiring into the meaning of life. You understand? Now when one asks what is the meaning of life, you immediately have conclusions. You say, it is this, some ideology. Right? You give it a significance according to your conditioning. If you are an idealist - I hope you are not - if you are an idealist you give the ideological significance according to your conditioning, according to your conclusions, according to what you have read and so on. So is living a conclusion, an ideology? You follow? Come on sirs. I hope you are doing this actually, not theoretically because then you will see if you are not giving significance to life, if you are not saying life is this and this and this, or something else, an ideal, then you are free - you see what happens when you are free of ideologies, then you are free of systems - political, religious, social, the social ideology and so on. So before we enquire into the meaning of what is death, we are asking what is living. Is what we are living, living? Our constant struggle with each other? Trying to understand each other? Trying to understand the speaker? You understand? He has said this and what does he mean? Is that living? Is it living according to a book? According to some psychologist? So if you banish all that totally then we will begin with 'what is'. 'What is', is that our living has become a tremendous torture, a tremendous battle between human beings, man, woman, neighbour, whether he is close or very far. It is a conflict in which there is occasional freedom to look at the blue sky, to see something lovely and enjoy it and be happy for a while. But the cloud of struggle begins soon. And all this we call living - going to the church, doing mass, the mass there, and the traditional repetition, a meaningless repetition, accepting some ideologies - you follow? This is what we call living. And we are so committed to this. Right? We accept this. We are not discontented completely with all that. So discontentment has its significance. Real discontentment, not I want to play the guitar and I must play it until midnight, it doesn't matter whether you sleep or not - that is not discontent - all that childish stuff. Discontent is a flame and one suppresses it by childish acts, by momentary satisfactions, but discontent when you let it flow, arise, keep it, it burns away everything that is not true. So can one live a life that is whole, not fragmented, a life in which thought doesn't divide the living, the family, the office. You follow? The church, the god, this and that - it is all divided, broken up? The word whole means healthy, sane and holy, the meaning of that word itself. And we have lost all that. And when death comes we are appalled by it, we are shocked by it. And when it comes, it generally comes for others, not for oneself, when it comes your mind is incapable of meeting it because you have not lived a total life. You understand? I wonder if you understand all this? A life that is whole, complete, true. In this you also have to enquire: what is beauty? You are interested in all this? Aren't you tired? As I was saying yesterday, I dig the hole and you are all watching! I am digging into the whole structure of human consciousness and if you are not co-operating, enquiring, looking then you will say, "I am not tired" - at the end of an hour - it must be an hour isn't it - obviously you must be terribly worn out because you are not used to this kind of thinking, looking, observing. We lead such superficial lives. So the mind has looked into itself, into its consciousness and has found out, sees the way it lives daily. And if it has not understood very deeply the whole way of living, which is totally different, you understand, the ending of all tradition, of all habits, all memories, all that, how can you understand what death is? Death comes and with that you cannot argue, say, "Wait a few weeks more" - it is there. And can the mind meet it? That is, can the mind meet the end of everything while you are living, while you have vitality, the energy, full of life, because then you are not wasted in conflicts and worries and all the rest of that stuff, you are full of energy, clarity? And death means the ending of ending of all that you know, all your attachments, of all your bank accounts, of your this and that, completely end it. That is death. And can the mind, while living, meet such a state? You understand? Then you will understand the full meaning of what death is. If we cling to the idea of me, I must continue - the 'me' is put together by thought, so you are saying me and my consciousness in which there is the higher consciousness, the supreme consciousness - it is all put together by thought. And thought lives in the known. You understand? Thought is the outcome of the known so if there is not freedom from the known you cannot possibly find out what death is, which is the ending of everything. Both the physical organism with all its ingrained habits and so on, the identification with the body, with the name, with all the memories it has acquired - you cannot carry it over when you go to death. You must end it. As you cannot carry all your money, so in the same way you have to end everything you know. That means there is absolute aloneness - not loneliness but aloneness in the sense there is nothing else but that state of mind that is completely whole. Aloneness means all one. So if you go as far as that, not intellectually but actually, which means no ideologies, political, socialistic - apparently these political ideologies end up in some form of totalitarianism - and when there is no ideology, when there is nothing left to which you are attached, nothing, then that is death. But we are so frightened of this. We say, there must be some kind of continuity. I don't think there is time to go into this question of what there is, if there is a continuity or not. Human beings want that continuity. What is the point of my living this whole life, fifty years, sixty or whatever it is, in which I have accumulated a lot of knowledge, a lot of experience, I have changed myself - this thing which thought has created, is that all when it ends? Is that the end of everything? So then thought says there must be something more. You follow sirs? Thought says there is something much more. So it has all kinds of comforting ideas. But when thought recognizes its own limitation, not imposed limitation, when thought itself is aware of its own time-binding quality, then thought has its right place, where knowledge has its right place - technology and so on and so on. But it has no place at all in the psychological world. When the psyche is totally non-existent, empty, that is death. Then there is a totally different - I mustn't promise! You are all ready for a reward. I just stopped myself in time! No, you don't see the importance of this. You know our minds are overcrowded, full with all kinds of knowledge and information, both psychologically as well as physiologically. It is good to have physiological and biological knowledge, the outside, the world of technology and so on, but thought has no place in the psychological world. It has no place anywhere else. But thought is always seeking - because it functions in fragmentation - it is always seeking an end. I wonder if you see this? It is always seeking a fragmentary end, something to gain, by doing this I will get that. Therefore when you have the promise of a reward you forget the means. There is only the means, not the end. Right. That is enough. BROCKWOOD PARK 4TH PUBLIC TALK 4TH SEPTEMBER 1977 We have been talking over together last Saturday, Sunday, and yesterday, and during the discussions, questions and answers and so on, many of our human problems. Our consciousness, which is ourselves, is so filled with other people's ideas, with our own concepts and conclusions, with our fears, anxieties, pleasure, occasional flash of joy and sorrow, and a great many ideas. That is our consciousness, that is what we are. And if one may point out as we have been doing during the last fifty years and more, that ideas do not bring about a radical change in human consciousness. Idea -the root meaning of that word is to observe. What we do is to observe and make an abstraction of what we have seen into an idea, and live according to that idea. That has been the pattern of our existence. We have been talking about the radical change in human consciousness, whether it is at all possible, and if it is not possible we are everlastingly living in a prison of our own ideas, our own concepts within a field where there is every kind of confusion, uncertainty, instability. And we seem to think if we move from one corner of that field to another, we think that we have greatly changed, but it is still in the same field. I think very few of us realize that fact: that as long as we live within that area of what we call our consciousness, however little change, or however great change within that field, there is no fundamental human transformation. And meditation - that is what we are going to discuss this morning - we are going to talk over together this question of meditation. I think one should be very clear about certain things: ideations, or ideologies however clever, however thought out, ultimately bring about dangerous illusions, whether they are the ideologies of the right or centre or the extreme left, they all either end up in great bureaucracies controlling man, or concentration camps, or the destruction of moulding man according to a particular concept. This is what is happening throughout the world. And the intellectuals have led us up to this point, right throughout the world. They have accepted with a great delight and a great energy the whole ideological concept of Marxism, Maoism, and so on. And they have all led to a great deal of confusion, misery, concentration camps and all the rest of it - whether to the right or the left, or the centre. And we have also been prisoners of religious ideas, ideologies, the Catholic, the Hindu, the Buddhists and so on. Or the traditional acceptance of the gurus with their modern modifications of the ancient traditions, with their ideologies. And they are also becoming prisoners of those ideologies. So if one observes all this carefully, impersonally, objectively, one must put away all ideologies. And then if you have no ideologies how do we act? That is one of the problems which we more or less talked about some time ago. Actions based on ideologies are immoral because you are then conforming to a particular pattern. Is morality, ethics, the acceptance of authority and following certain laid down policies of ideologies and so on; or is morality something totally free from all ideologies? And we are going to talk over together this morning this question which unfortunately has been brought to this country and the various western countries by so-called gurus, with their ideas of meditation. So can we talk over together this morning this question? That is, we are both of us thinking together, investigating together. There is no authority here though the speaker sits on a platform, it doesn't give him any authority. Please let's be quite sure of that. Because if there is authority there is no freedom. And without freedom there is no compassion, there is no clarity, there is no skill in action -which we have talked about a great deal. So we are on the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity, investigating this. When we are at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity, that is love. And without love we cannot possibly understand this very complex problem of what is meditation - not how to meditate, that is too absurd, but what is the meaning and the significance of meditation? So we are both of us freely enquiring into this - not that you have learnt something from somebody - how to meditate, which may be like practising on a piano all the time. So in enquiring into this very complex problem one must ask for oneself whether the content of consciousness, which is what we are, with all our conflicts, struggles, confusions, misery and occasional happiness, whether that consciousness can become aware of itself and empty itself? That is one problem in meditation. The other is the question of time, which is: is there psychological progress? That is, is there psychological evolution? That's one point. And the other is space: whether there is space in which there is no direction, in which there is no centre. We are going to enquire into all this. And we are also going to enquire what is beauty? Because otherwise without beauty there is no love. And also we are going to enquire if there is anything sacred, holy. This is the whole movement of our investigation. Which is, whether consciousness with all its content, which makes up our consciousness, whether it can be totally, completely emptied? And the question of time: which is the psychological time which gives us the idea that we shall gradually progress, evolve, become better. The whole concept of that. And is the flowering of goodness, is it a matter of time? And is goodness the opposite of that which is not good? And we also have to enquire into the question of space. I am repeating the three things so that we know the whole thing that we are talking about. And whether there is beauty - beauty not of things, of ideas, of structure, but beauty in itself - fundamentally is there anything that is essentially beautiful and therefore good? And our enquiry also must come into: is there ultimately in our life, daily life, anything that is holy, sacred? This is the meaning of meditation. And any system, any method, which promises a reward is not meditation, obviously. If you do this, you will get that. That is, our centuries of conditioning: reward and punishment, hell and heaven. If you do the right thing, if you believe in what the church says, you will reach heaven; if you don't, down you go! And all the rest of that business right throughout the world. Our conditioning is based on this reward and punishment. And meditation is not seeking an end. It is not trying to grope after a purpose, a goal, an end. Because if you have a motive then the motive dictates what the end is. And enquiry, like all good scientists, first-class top scientists, they have no motive, they enquire. In the enquiry they find out. So one must understand this desire to reach a goal, a purpose, an end. And where there is desire, which we have gone into very carefully, the nature of desire which is perception, contact, sensation, then desire with all its images - then desire in meditation brings about illusion. Obviously. Now can we proceed really together? I mean together - not I talk and you listen but together freely, without any distortions, without any conclusions, begin, not knowing what meditation is. And in the process of this enquiry into the things that we are going to talk about, consciousness and so on, that very enquiry becomes meditation. You understand? Not that you must meditate, nor how to meditate and the problem of meditation, but in the process of enquiry that very movement is meditation. Is this clear? Can we proceed from there? I don't know if you are interested, or if you are at all serious about this question of meditation, because it is very important to find out because out of this comes immense silence. Not cultivated silence, not the silence between two thoughts, between two noises but a silence that is unimaginable. So the brain becomes extraordinarily quiet when in the process of enquiry, and that is why when there is silence there is great perception. And when in this silence there is emptiness, that emptiness is the summation of all energy. This is the problem of meditation. And if you are not interested in it I can't help it. If you are not interested in it then you will carry on your daily monotonous, bourgeois, intellectual, or amusing life. So let's begin by enquiring together. I am insisting - we are insisting on that word together, because we have made this monstrous, brutal world together, this immoral world together. And so in the enquiry of all this there may be, and there will be, total transformation of ourselves and therefore a different society, a different social order and so on, differing governments, everything will come out of this - if you know what it is to meditate. So we are going to examine together this question of consciousness and its content. In examination of this it is very important to find out whether you are examining it, or in observing consciousness becomes aware of itself. You see the difference? I hope this is clear. That is, you can observe the movement of your consciousness, which is your desires, your hurts, your ambitions, your greeds and all the rest of it, the content of our consciousness, you can observe it from the outside as it were; or consciousness becomes aware of itself. This is the problem. Whether you become aware of your consciousness; Or - please go into this with me a little bit - or consciousness is lighted up and you observe? Do you understand? This is only possible when thought realizes that what it has created, which is its consciousness, when thought realizes it is only observing itself, not you, which thought has put together, observing consciousness. I don't know how to put it - you understand this a little bit? Nobody has to tell you that you are hungry. There is hunger. In the same way is it possible for thought to become aware of itself; for consciousness to be aware itself, not that you are examining consciousness? Is this somewhat clear or not? Because this is very important at the beginning of our examination. I want to examine consciousness. So I begin to analyse the various aspects, the various contents of my consciousness. I am greedy, I am angry, there is hatred, there is jealousy, there is happiness, there is pleasure, there are a great many hurts from childhood, flowering or controlled. I can examine this. Or there is observation and therefore consciousness begins to reveal itself. Do you see the difference? I observe the tree, the tree tells me all its story if I know how to observe. So in the same way I must learn how to observe - observe only, not tell consciousness what it should do. Right? Am I making it somewhat clear? That is, if I want to examine consciousness I separate myself from consciousness and then examine it as an analyst. Whereas if there is only observation - only observation - then consciousness begins to reveal its content, its story. I don't have to tell the story about consciousness; consciousness tells its story. This is simple. I won't elaborate that. So that is what we are doing: we are observing only, and so consciousness begins to show itself, not only the superficial consciousness but the deeper layers of consciousness, the whole content of consciousness. This is an art to be learnt - not memorized, not to say, "Well, I have heard this I am going to store it up in my brain and I am going to learn about it." Then that is merely a mechanical process, which has no meaning whatsoever. Whereas if you see the importance of sheer, absolute motionless observation, then the thing flowers - consciousness opens up its doors, as it were. So observation implies seeing the totality of consciousness. I wonder if you see? Am I talking to myself? I hope not! One can have a dialogue with oneself. We did the other day. I can have a dialogue about the whole question of meditation with myself. But that is entirely different from having a dialogue with each other. That is what we are doing - although there are so many people here, we are actually a dialogue. There is only one person here and he or she and I are talking about this. I am telling him or her, to observe is the most important thing in life - not tell the observation how to observe, but to learn the art of observing without any distortion, without any motive, without any purpose, just to observe. In that there is tremendous beauty because then there is no distortion. You see things clearly as they are. But if make an abstraction of it into an idea, and then through that idea observe then it is a distortion. Right? So we are merely freely without any distorting factor entering into our observation, observing consciousness. So consciousness begins to reveal its own totality. There is nothing hidden. Which is, the content, which is our hurt, our greed, our envy, our happiness, our beliefs, our ideologies, all that makes up consciousness, the past traditions, the present, scientific or factual traditions and so on and so on and so on - all that is our consciousness. To observe it without any movement of thought, because thought has put all the content of our consciousness - thought has built it. When thought comes and says, "This is right, this is wrong, this shouldn't be that", you are still within the field of consciousness and you are not going beyond it. So one has to understand very clearly the place of thought. Thought has its own place in the field of knowledge, technology and all the rest of it. But thought has no place whatsoever in the psychological structure of man. When it does then confusion begins, then contradiction and all the struggles, the images about you and another - all the rest of it follows. So the art, as we said the meaning of 'art' means to put everything in its right place, not the painter, not the sculptor or the poet, but in our daily life to put everything in its right place, that is art. So can you observe your consciousness and does it reveal its content - not bit by bit, but the totality of its movement? Then only is it possible to go beyond it. Not through analysis which we talked about, because analysis implies the analyser and the analysed, the division, the problem of time and division, and when you analyse each analysis must be totally complete. If there is not complete analysis then the imperfection of that analysis is carried over to the next analysis, so imperfection grows more and more. You understand? You practise on the piano and you practise the wrong note all the time. Right? So that is our enquiry. And in enquiring can you observe without any movement of the eye? Because the eye has an effect on the brain. You can observe it for yourself. When you keep your eyeballs completely still observation becomes very clear because the brain is quietened. You can experiment with this. This is not a trick for something further. It is like going to a guru and learning a few tricks. There is a lovely story I must tell you about. A young man goes to a guru, a teacher, and says, "Please tell me what truth is. I have searched everywhere and nobody seems able to tell me, please tell me what truth is." And the guru says, "Stay with me. Be with me." And so the pupil, the disciple, stays with him for about fifteen years watching him - you know, all the rest of it. At the end of fifteen years he says, "Good Lord I have learnt nothing." And so goes to the guru and says, "I am so sorry you have taught me nothing. I haven't found truth. I am going to leave you and go to that guru, to the other one." And so after five years he comes back and says "At last I have learnt." And the guru says, "What have you learnt?" "You see that river, I can walk across it without a boat, without anything, I can walk on it, I can tread on the water." And the guru says, "You can do that for twopence if you take that little boat." I think you should bear that story in mind when you approach any guru. So can you observe without any movement of thought interfering with your observation? It is only possible when the observer realizes that which he is observing is one - the observer is the observed. Anger is not different from me, I am anger, I am jealousy. So there is no division between the observer and the observed. That is the basic reality one must capture. And to observe without the observer. Just to observe, then you will see the whole of consciousness, the whole of it begins to reveal itself without your making an effort. Which means in that total observation there is the emptying or going beyond all the things that thought has put together, which is our consciousness. The reality which thought has made is not truth - it is a reality of thought. We must go on. Then to enquire into this problem of time - not scientific fiction, but time as psychologically a movement towards an object, towards an idea, towards an ideology. That is, one is greedy - I am taking that - or violent. And one says to oneself, I will take time to get over it, or to modify it, or to change it, or to get rid of it, or to go beyond it. That will take time. We are talking about that time, not the chronological time by the watch or by the sun; but this whole conditioning of our mind which says, I will take time to achieve that which is essential, that which is beautiful, that which is good. We are questioning that time. Is there psychological time at all; or thought has invented that time? You are following? Please examine it. Look at it without any distortion, this question, this challenge. You know when you are challenged, unless you respond with all your energy it is not a challenge at all, you just pass it by. But if you respond to that challenge with all your energy, as we are doing now, whether there is a psychological time at all, all your energy is responding; all your energy is not responding if you are trying to withhold something, say, I must have a little time. "I was looking forward to meeting you the day after tomorrow. Oh my god, if there is no time I am lost. I love you, and all the rest of it, and if I don't meet you in a week's time, what is going to happen?" You follow? You are following all this? This is the psychological time, which is hope. Are you also please working together? We are working together. I am not working by myself. I can go and do this in my room - that is not important. But we are sharing this thing together, moving together. So we are asking: as there is chronological time, that is, it takes time to learn a language, it takes time to learn to drive a car, it takes time to learn mathematics, it takes time to learn certain specialities, to become a specialist. That same idea, that same thought says, it will take time for me to evolve, to be good, or to become chief executive of some blasted business. So is there such time? Please this is very important because you are going to shatter altogether the idea of tomorrow - psychologically. Then it is a tremendous shock. If you understand there is no psychological tomorrow then what will you do with that which is? You understand the problem. If there is no time, then how is violence to end? Our conditioning is, to use time as a means of getting rid slowly or quickly, or whatever it is of violence. But if there is no time at all then what takes place when there is violence? Will there be violence? You understand my question? If one's whole outlook is, psychologically that there is no time at all, then is there a me who is violent? You follow? The 'me' is put together through time. The 'me' is violence, is time. But if there is no time at all as 'me', which is the process of tomorrow, then there is nothing, there is no violence. I wonder if you see this? You see, is love a matter of time? Is love a thing to be remembered - or having remembrance, and the pleasure of that remembrance which you call love, which is time? Right? So is love a matter of time, remembrance? If it is a matter of time, which is thought, then it obviously is not love. "I will love you everlastingly" - which is of course nonsense. But we take vows in church, you know all that nonsense. So do we in our examination see very clearly that psychologically there is no time at all? If there is no time at all there is no past or future, but only something else totally different. I wonder if you see this? You see we are conditioned to time. We say, psychologically there must be evolution for me to become something other than what I am. And when you deny, when you see the truth of the fact that time is an invention of thought because thought itself has brought this time, then there is an ending of the past and the future. Do you understand what I am saying? There is only the sense of timeless movement now. I wonder if you see this. It is really extraordinary if you understand this. After all love is that, isn't it? Love is at the same level, at the same time, at the same intensity, at that moment that is love - not the remembrance, or the future - that state of mind that is really completely without time, which is love. Then see what happens in our relationship, see what happens in our relationship with another. You perhaps have that extraordinary sense of love which is not of time, which is not of thought, which is not a remembrance of pleasure or pain; and what is the relationship between you, who have that, and another who hasn't got that? You understand the problem? You have no image, because image is the movement of time, about another, because time has built that, thought has built this image step by step about another; and the other has made an image about you step by step, which is a movement of time. And you have no time at all, and therefore you have this extraordinary sense of love which is not of time, then what is your relationship with another? Do you understand? Work it out! Think it out, go into it and you will see. Then what is the relationship between human beings? When you have that extraordinary quality of love, then in that quality there is supreme intelligence. Right? I wonder if you see this. That intelligence is going to act in that relationship, not you will act in that relationship. I wonder if you see. I must get on. You can discover this. It is really a marvellous thing to go into a great deal because it totally alters all relationship. Because if there is no alteration fundamentally in our relationship there is no alteration in society because we have built this monstrous society. So that is the whole nature of time: the man that is hoping, that hope is born out of despair; that despair is the past and the hope is the future; and so he is caught in psychological time and there is no answer to that question at all. So then, the next thing is space - space. One wonders what is space. Do you ever wonder what is space? Not some science writer about space, or who has intellectually thought and laid down in words what space is, but what is space? Can there be space without order? Can there be space in disorder? All right, let's begin with that. We are enquiring together, please bear with me if I repeat it over and over again that we are examining moving, sharing this thing together. We are asking: is there space when there is disorder in a room? Just take the physical fact when you throw your clothes all over the place, and you know, messy, is there space? And that space can only come when you have put everything in its right place. Right? So outwardly. Now inwardly, our minds are so confused, our whole life is self-contradiction, disorder, caught in various habits, drugs, smoking, drink, sex, habits. Obviously where there is habit there is disorder, because habit is mechanical. So we are going to find out what is order. Is order something dictated by thought? Because thought itself is a movement of disorder because it is limited. Right? I wonder if you see this. We think we can bring about order socially by great careful thought, which is the ideological movement. Right? Our society whether in the west or the east is in disorder, is confused, is contradictory - you sell arms to some people and they hope to have peace. The world is all so totally mad - and we are also mad, somewhat. The world is mad because we have made it mad. So what is disorder, and what is order? We are saying, disorder comes outwardly when thought is a movement in action, thought which is limited, fragmentary and divides the whole of life into fragments. You have seen that. Thought does that. Are we aware of this? Please come on. That is, you are a business man, then if you are not a business man, you are an artist, if you are not an artist, you are a doctor, a professor, or merely a gardener - you follow, all our life is divided, divided, divided. That is disorder. Where there is division there is disorder, and thought has brought about this division - class, nationality, heaven and hell - you know all the rest of it. Thought has done this. So where there is movement of thought, which is time-binding, which is fragmentary in itself, therefore limited in itself, wherever it acts there must be total disorder. I wonder if you see this? No, don't agree with me please, it is not a question of agreeing with me. Do you see this in your life? So if that is true then what is order in relation to action? You understand? All our action now is based on thought, on conclusions, on memory. And we are saying, as long as thought, which is limited, which has created ideologies and acts according to that ideology, there must be total disorder. We are saying that, which is a fact, if you observe it in daily life. Then what is action in which there is no movement of thought - you understand? Is this all becoming too abstract? It is not. To me it is boiling. It is not an abstraction, not an intellectual amusement either. Is there an action which is not born out of the movement of thought, out of certain ideologies which have been put together by thought, or by memories, which again is the response of thought -is there an action totally free from thought? Such action then would be complete, whole, total. You understand? Not fragmentary, not contradictory, it will be the whole of action in which there is no regret, no sense of "I wish I hadn't done that", or "I will do that". Right? This is what we are enquiring into. Disorder comes about when there is the movement of thought, and thought itself is fragmentary and when it acts everything must be fragmentary. If one sees that very clearly then one asks, what is action without thought. Action means the doing now, not tomorrow, or having done, doesn't it? The meaning of that word is active, present acting, now. And, as we said, love is not of time. Right? Compassion is beyond intellect, beyond memory, it is a state of mind, and that love, that compassion acts because that compassion, love is supremely intelligent. So intelligence then acts. Are you getting some of this? Or is it just words? So we can go into this enormously. It is like digging into the bottomless pit and there is always water so we can go deeper and deeper and deeper. So then we are saying: order is space, this kind of order, which is action of intelligence, which is neither yours nor mine, it is intelligence born out of love and compassion. Now space implies a mind that is not occupied. But our minds are occupied all day long about something or other. So there is no space, or an interval between two thoughts, every thought is associated with another thought. Look at it, please look at it. So that there is no gap when your whole mind is crowded, chattering, opinions, judgements - I am right, I am left, I am this, that. So order of the kind we have talked about brings enormous space. Space means silence. Right? And out of silence comes this extraordinary sense of emptiness. Don't be frightened by that word empty because when there is emptiness then things can happen. You understand? Like a womb of a woman bears a child, it is empty. Do you understand all this? So then we go on to the next thing - beauty. What is beauty? Does it lie in a picture, in a museum, or in the poem of Keats? Does it lie in the line of the mountains against the sky, or in a sheet of water reflecting the heavens, the beauty of the clouds? Or the line of an architect, a building? We are asking what is beauty? You understand? Come on sirs, go into yourself, find out. The form, that has a certain beauty. We are enquiring into what is beauty, not the imagination that creates beauty, not the word that creates the beauty, not a beautiful idea, but what is beauty when you see something extraordinarily alive and beautiful like a mountain, a clear sky, a view, at that moment when you see it totally you are absent, aren't you. I wonder if you realize this. Because of its immensity, its extraordinary stability, its extraordinary sense of -you know - firmness and the line of it, that magnificence drives away the 'me' for the moment. And you say, "How extraordinary". Please listen carefully - which is the outer glory has driven away the petty little 'me'. Right? Like a boy, a child given a toy and he is absorbed by that toy. Right? And he will play with it for an hour and break it up, and when you take away the toy he is back to himself, naughty, crying, mischievous and all the rest of it. So the same thing has happened, the great mountains have driven away the petty little 'me', and you see it for the moment. That is, when the 'me' is absent totally there is beauty. Get it? Come on sirs. Not in the drum, not in the folk songs, not in the latest songs, on television they have it, I have forgotten - rock, that's it. You are carried away by all that but you never find out for yourself what is beauty because without beauty there is no love - not the beauty of a form, a face, curly hair, tall, short, black, but the beauty that comes when there is no 'me'. The 'me' that has been put together by thought, the 'me' that is the movement of time. And that is beauty. We can go into it much more deeply because then your relationship to nature changes completely; then earth becomes precious - you understand - every tree, every leaf, everything is part of that beauty. But man is destroying everything. So then we are asking: is there anything sacred, holy? Obviously the things that thought has put together in a church - in a church, not the building, which is also the result of thought -everything that thought has put together in the religious sense, or in the psychological sense, and investing sacredness in an image, in an idea, is that sacred at all? If it is sacred then it has no division -you are not a Christian then, nor a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and all the rest of the divisions. So that which thought has put together is of time, is fragmentary, is not whole, therefore it is not holy. Though you worship the image on a cross that is not holy, that is put together by thought - or the image that the Hindus have put together, or the Buddhists and so on. So what then is sacred? Because without finding that out, not being told, not wanting that sacredness because that gives an enormous vitality, enormous strength to life, without that, life becomes very shoddy, empty, meaningless. So one has to go into this question and find out. And you can only find out when thought has discovered - please listen -when thought has discovered for itself its right place, therefore without effort, without will, there is this immense sense of silence -silence of the mind without any movement of thought. It is only when the mind is absolutely free and silent then you discover that which is beyond all words, which is timeless. And all this is meditation. How can you meditate when you are angry, when your life is based on violence, when in yourself there is contradiction? So one has to put order there first. The very process of putting order is part of meditation - not to have conflict between two human beings, man, woman, never to have conflict, and to find out how to live without conflict, that is part of meditation. Then out of that comes the enormity of what is true meditation. Finito! BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND PUBLIC TALK 28TH AUGUST 1977 May we continue with what we were talking about yesterday? We were saying yesterday morning, if I remember correctly, that we have developed extraordinary skills, capacities, in almost every direction, in every field of our existence. And these skills, these extraordinary capacities have brought about a great deal of confusion, have exaggerated the importance of the self, the 'me', and perhaps divided people a great deal - those who know, and those who don't know. And without clarity, as we were saying, these skills will be disastrous because unless the mind is very clear, objective, and that clarity can only come about, as we were saying yesterday, through compassion. Compassion, clarity, and skill. Where there is compassion there is clarity and out of that clarity there is intelligence. And that intelligence is not personal - yours or mine. That intelligence will use the skill without giving importance to the self, the 'me'. That is what we were saying, more or less, yesterday. And also we were talking about desire. And I think it is very important to understand this factor of desire in our daily life, which is part of our consciousness. As we were saying yesterday - I hope you're not bored by the repetition of what we said yesterday - in our consciousness one of the major factors is this desire, amongst other factors equally important, such as fear, pleasure, so-called love and a great deal of sorrow. And we were talking yesterday about desire, because it is desire that creates illusion, it creates and holds on to various forms of images, conclusions, and concepts. And as most people have read a great deal about all these mysterious factors of occultism and mysterious miracles and so on, they have created a great many images to which the mind clings, and therefore it creates illusions. So it is very important, I think, to understand the movement of desire, which is the structure of desire. And most religions throughout the world have said, suppress desire, control it, transform it for other higher, nobler ends. And that brings about a great deal of conflict in oneself. That, again, is fairly obvious. Now, if I may point out, as we did yesterday, we are exploring the whole thing together, you and the speaker are investigating into this whole problem of consciousness and its content - its content makes up the consciousness - and whether it is possible to radically transform deeply, fundamentally, the whole content of our consciousness. That is what we are concerned with during all these talks and so on - discussions and dialogues. And, we were saying, one of the factors is desire of our consciousness. The desire may be for nobler ends, or for physical ends, or some projected ideological concepts. And these projections, these future states will inevitably bring about conflict, because then there is 'what is' and 'what should be' or 'what might be', or imitating or conforming to a certain pattern and therefore there is conflict between 'what is' and 'what should be'. And it is important, I think, to understand this conflict which is brought about by desire. We said that desire has its root, its beginning, in perception, seeing, contact, then sensation, desire and the desire which creates images. This is the whole process, movement of desire. It is fairly simple to understand this. I think most of us know this. But one of the factors of conflict is the achievement, or the fulfilment of desire, therefore there is constant struggle. The whole question of meditation is involved in this too: the desire to achieve some state through conformity, through pattern, through method - the whole structure is based on desire to be something, or to become something. Are we all together? I hope so. We are not talking to ourselves. We are together taking a journey into the whole field of consciousness, which is very complex, and needs very careful, hesitant, investigation. And if you are not serious, if you are not concerned with it, then I think you had better go and play golf. Q: (Inaudible) K: Just a minute sir, I haven't finished. Questions much later. We will have questions and dialogues on Tuesday. So if you can have patience until then, of if there is time at the end of the talk we can go into it. We are investigating into the movement of thought, of desire, of fear, anxiety, greed, violence and the pursuit of pleasure and to find out what love is, and whether there is a possibility of ending sorrow altogether, because this is the content of our consciousness. And, as we were saying, we human beings have created the society in which we live - immoral, divisions, racial, communal, national, religious, the various divisions which gurus have brought about throughout the world, native gurus and foreign gurus, the priests and so on. This is the whole content of our consciousness. To observe it without choice, to become aware of the whole nature of consciousness without any effort, persuasion, without seeking reward or avoiding punishment, just to observe it in our daily life. And that can only be observed very carefully in relationship between human beings because that is the mirror in which you can see yourself. Yourself being a human being which represents the world's humanity. That again is simple. That is you, as a human being, suffer, go through a great deal of trouble, anxiety, pain, uncertainty, insecurity, which is the nature of all human beings throughout the world. So you in essence are the world, and the world is you. This is not a theory, this is not an ideal, but an actual fact. So we are together exploring it. So it is your responsibility if you are serious to go into this. No guru, no system can help you to understand yourself. Without understanding yourself there is no raison d'etre to continue, to act, to find out what is right action, what is truth and so on. So in investigating our consciousness we are investigating the human consciousness, not only yours, because you are the world and therefore when you observe your own consciousness you are observing the consciousness of mankind. So it is not something personal, selfish and so on. One of the factors in that is desire. Desire is perception, contact, sensation and the thought which creates the image, and the pursuit of that image is the desire to fulfil, and the frustrations and the bitterness and all the rest of it following from that. Now can there be an observation, sensation and not ending in desire, just to observe? Which means one has to understand a great deal of the nature of thought, because it is thought that gives it a continuity, it is thought that creates the image out of that sensation and the pursuit of that image. That is fairly simple. May I go on? We are all together in this, I hope. So thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge stored up in the brain, so thought is never new, it is always old. That again is obvious. Thought therefore is limited. It has created innumerable problems and thought has also created the extraordinary technological world, marvellous things it has done. And as thought is limited because it is the outcome of the past, which is time, therefore thought is time-binding, therefore limited. Thought then tries to pretend it can perceive the immeasurable, the timeless, the something beyond itself, therefore it projects all kinds of images. This is obviously so. So can one observe this whole movement of desire without creating the image and pursuing that image and getting involved in frustration, in the hope of fulfilment and all that - just to observe the whole movement of desire, to become aware of it? I hope we are doing it as we are talking over together. Then also there is the question of fear. We are discussing, we are talking over together this question of compassion, clarity, and skill. To come upon this extraordinary quality of compassion which brings about clarity, from which comes skill, one has to understand the nature of the self, the 'me'. Right? It is the 'me' that is the distorting factor in life. It is the factor that divides me and you, we and they, and all the rest of it. In investigating our consciousness we are investigating also at the same time the nature and the structure of the 'me'. Right? I think that is clear. So to know oneself fundamentally, basically, not according to any philosopher, psychologist or the latest ones, or the ancient ones, we have to abandon all those authorities and observe actually what we are. Which means you have no authority to tell you what to do - right? If there is an authority to tell you what to do then there is all the conflicts, struggles to achieve what we have learnt from others. All right? So we wipe away every form of psychological authority so the mind is free to observe itself, to observe its own consciousness. The content makes up our consciousness. And one of the contents is desire and the other is fear - fear not only physiologically but psychologically. When we understand the psychological fears then we can deal intelligently with the physiological fears. Not the other way round. Though it is psychosomatic one has to understand the psychological fears. Now may we together go into it? That is, can you observe your fear - this is not group therapy, this is not confession, I am not your guru, thank god! But we can together examine this fear, which seems to be part of our daily life - and whether one can be psychologically free and not be caught up in the illusion that you are free. That illusion comes about when you say to yourself "I must be free from fear", which is the movement of desire. Therefore, having understood the nature of desire and its movement, its images, its conflicts, the whole business of desire, then we can look at fear in ourselves, and not deceive ourselves that we are psychologically free from fear. To go into the whole question of fear, not a particular form of fear - you may be afraid of your wife or your husband, or the girlfriend, or the boyfriend, or society, it doesn't matter, a dozen forms of fear - but to go to the very root of fear, which would be much simpler, quicker than taking the various branches of fear and trimming them. But we can go together into the very root of fear. To observe the various branches of fear which one has and not say, I must prune them one by one, but rather by observing the totality of fear then come to the root of it. I hope I am making myself clear, am I? That is, one may have the fear of attachment, fear that comes about through attachment - attachment to an idea, to an experience, to an image, or to a person, to something or other psychologically -and try to be free from that attachment, therefore from that particular form of fear. Or one may be afraid psychologically of not becoming something, not being something. The word - if I may here go off a little bit - the word 'mantra', you know the word mantra? - most of you know it. You are all familiar with transcendental rubbish. You are probably very familiar with it. And the word they use is mantra. The root meaning of that Sanskrit word means - I have talked to many scholars about that word and they have given me this meaning - which is: reflect on not being, meditate on not being or becoming, and wipe away all self-centred activity. That is the real meaning of that word mantra. You understand? Not for $150 or something or other, but to be free from self-centred action and reflect, think about, observe, meditate on not becoming, being. It is a tremendous thing this - not to be sold for $5 - right? So that is a deviation, sorry! So we are saying: is it possible, psychologically, to be free of fear, all fear? We took attachment - shall we examine one by one, each fear, or shall we go to the very root of it? You can only go to the root of it when you observe the totality, the various forms of fear - observe, become aware of them, not try to do something about them. Right? I wonder if I am conveying it. To observe the whole tree of fear, with all the branches, with all the various qualities, divisions of fear, by observing the whole of the tree go to the very root of it. You understand? That is what we are going to do, not take one fear after another, but go to the very centre of fear. Will you do it together? We are going to do it together. That is, can you observe not only your particular form of fear, but also various other forms with one glance, just to look - fear of darkness, fear of attachment, fear, being attached, the fear of losing, fear of darkness, fear of domination, the thousand fears one has? So by observing all that, you come to the root of it - right? What is the root of fear, psychologically? Is it not time? I am putting it, examining it, it may not be right, but we will go into it. Is it not, the root of fear, time - the tomorrow, what might happen tomorrow, or in the future? Or what might happen if one doesn't do certain things. So time as the past, time what might happen now, or time in the future. So is not the root of fear time? And time is movement of thought - right? That is, one has been hurt in the past psychologically, and one is afraid that one might be hurt again in the future; so there is resistance, building a wall around oneself not to be hurt, and fear of being hurt. That means it is the whole movement of time as thought, time as measure. Right? Is this fairly clear? I am sorry I must go on. If it is not clear, sorry. So we are saying: the root of fear is the movement of time, which is thought as measure. And can you observe, be aware of this movement, not control it, suppress fear, or escape from it, just to observe it? To be aware of this total movement. Right? Then when one is aware of this total movement of thought as time and measure - I have been, I shall be, I hope to be - to be choicelessly aware of this fact and remain with it, not move away from actually what is. Which is, what actually is, is the movement of thought, which says "I have been hurt in the past and I hope I shall not be hurt in the future". And that very process of thinking is fear. I am only taking that as an example. So where there is fear obviously there is no affection, there is no love. And we are concerned, as we said, with the understanding of compassion, clarity and skill. The skill that does not cultivate, exaggerate, give importance to the 'me' for status, position and all the rest of it, which is what is actually happening in the world when a man is highly skilled, he has a tremendous importance in society, therefore the importance of himself. And also part of this consciousness is the pursuit of this one enormous desire for pleasure. Again all religions have said, do not pursue pleasure, sexual or any other kind of pleasure because you have given your life over to Jesus, or Krishna, or to somebody or other, therefore suppress desire, suppress fear, suppress any form of pleasure. You know this. Every religion has talked about it endlessly. We are saying: on the contrary don't suppress anything, don't avoid anything, don't analyse your fear. Just to observe. Because analysis is a waste of time because in that is involved, who is the analyser and what is the analysed. Is the analyser different from the analysed? Obviously not. Right? I want to get on with it. So as most human beings, all of us are caught in this pursuit of pleasure, and when that pleasure is not given there is hatred, you know all the things that come from it - violence, hatred, anger, bitterness, you know. So one must understand this pursuit by human beings throughout the world and this enormous urge for pleasure. What is the function of the brain? The function is to register, like a computer, to register. And it has registered a pleasure, and thought gives it the energy, the drive to pursue that pleasure. You are following this? One has had pleasure of various kinds yesterday, suppose. And it is registered. Then thought comes and picks it up and says, there must be more. And thought then pursues the more. The more then becomes pleasure because the continuity of pleasure is given vitality, drive by thought, thinking about it, today or tomorrow, later on. So that is the movement of pleasure. Right? Having registered and thought pursuing that which has happened yesterday and gives to it continuity. Now the question is: is it possible to register only what is absolutely necessary and nothing else. You understand? Does it mean anything, this? One is hurt at school, college, university, later on in the family and so on, one is hurt. What is hurt is the image that one has about oneself. Right? And that image is hurt and thought then builds round that image not to be hurt further - which is simple. Now is it possible not to register the hurt at all? You understand my question? Am I talking to myself? This is very important, I think, to understand because we are registering so many things unnecessarily and so building up the self, the 'me'. I am hurt, I am not what I should be, I must achieve what I think should be and so on and so on and so on. This whole registration is a form of giving importance to the self. Right? Now we are asking: is it possible to register only what is absolutely necessary? What is absolutely necessary? Not all the things the psyche builds up, which are memories. Right? I wonder if you see it. We are all travelling together? Oh, good - some of us at least. So what is not necessary? And what is necessary? You understand my question? What is necessary to register and what is not necessary to register? Because the brain is occupied with this, all the time registering, therefore there is no tranquility, quietness to the brain, because whereas if there is a clarity of what is to be registered and what is not to be registered the brain is quieter, therefore that is part of meditation - not all the silly stuff that is talked about. Now what is necessary to register? Are the things that one registers psychologically necessary at all? You understand my question? Anything that you psychologically hold is unnecessary -by holding those things, registering those things, the brain holding on to them gives it a certain security, and that security is the 'me', because it has gathered all the psychological hurts, imprints, you know, all the rest of it - I don't have to repeat them over and over again. So we are saying: to register anything psychologically and hold them is absolutely unnecessary - your beliefs, your dogmas, your experiences, your wishes, your desires, all that is totally unnecessary. So when the brain is only registering what is necessary, then what is that that is necessary? Food, clothes, and shelter - nothing else! You understand? This is a tremendous investigation into oneself, therefore it means the brain is no longer the accumulating factor of the 'me'. Therefore the brain is quieter, rested, because it needs considerable tranquillity but it has sought that tranquillity, that security in the 'me' which is the accumulation of all the past registrations, which are just memories, therefore worthless - like collecting a lot of dead ash, and giving tremendous importance to it. Are we going together? So we are asking: to register what is absolutely. It is a marvellous thing if you can go into it and do it because then there is real freedom - freedom from all the accumulated knowledge, tradition, superstition, experience, which has all built up this enormous structure to which thought clings as the 'me'. When the 'me' is not then compassion comes into being, and that compassion brings clarity. With that clarity there is skill. When the 'me' is not the skill has tremendous importance. Then that skill will organize a totally different kind of political structure. Because we have tried Communism and that has failed; we have tried every form of government - when we say every form, the world has, not only England, but the world has, Communism, Socialism, various forms of sharing the earth and so on and so on. But they have not tackled it from this end, which is having compassion, clarity and skill, then organization has quite a different meaning and vitality. It is a living thing then, not patterns set by some politicians. I wonder if you are getting all this? So: that is what we are talking about. We are talking about the fact that our consciousness with all its content has to be observed, to be totally, choicelessly aware of it, which is ourselves. And you can become extraordinarily aware of it fully in relationship, between human beings, man, woman, boy and girl, husband and wife and all the rest of it. That is possible only when there is no creation of images about another. When the man doesn't create an image about his wife, the girl, or the girl doesn't create an image about the man. The image is the registering factor. I don't know if you see this? Do you see this? Between husband and wife, or a boy and a girl there is not only sexual registration and the pursuit of that pleasure, that experience, but also the registration of hurts, the registration of insults, the nagging, the pleasure, you know all that goes on in relationship. And this is the registration which is the image. Do you understand? Now when there is this image between the man and the woman there is no relationship at all; it is a relationship of registration, you register and I register and the registrations are the images. Now if we don't register at all anything psychological then relationship between man and woman is completely different - naturally. I wonder if you see this. Are you doing it as we are talking? Or is it just verbal acceptance because some of you may think it is very logical, reasonable, sane, or others might think it is much too difficult, sorry I can't pursue all this, I would rather go and sing in a camp, or whatever you do. But we are talking about this very seriously because it affects all human relationships. And where there is image as registration, and it is that registration of the image that brings about jealousy, anxiety, hatred, irritation and all that between human beings, and that denies love. Right? Now love, for most of us, is something - you know what it is, I don't have to explain it. It is biological and also it becomes psychological. I am attached to my wife, without a wife you feel lonely, you lose all comfort. So the more you register, the more attached you are and the more attached you are the greater the fear of losing. And facing that which is loneliness, the emptiness in that loneliness and trying to run away from the loneliness through various forms of entertainment, religious and otherwise. So we are saying where there is registration, unnecessary registration, there is no love. And if we want to understand the nature of compassion one has to go into this question of what is love and whether there is such a thing as love without any form of attachment, with all its complications, with all its pleasure and so on and so on, and fears. And next Saturday and Sunday we will talk about sorrow, death and meditation. Now you can bully me! Q: A man takes a wife out of loneliness. K: I did not say that. Just listen sir. I said that when one becomes aware of oneself there is this factor of loneliness, which is entirely different from being alone. Alone - the word alone means all one. Whereas loneliness is complete isolation from everything, don't you feel this? Q: Yes I do sir. K: Not only you sir, all human beings go through this sense of complete isolation in which there is no relationship with anything -you know. You are completely lost. And most of us never remain with it, understand it, go into it, but run away from it. That is, to look at loneliness and not move away from it. You know when you have great pleasure you don't want to move away from it, do you. You use everything to hold it. You live with it. In the same way live so completely with that loneliness without a movement away from it. Then out of that, living with something which you don't understand, which has got tremendous meaning in one's life, then that begins to flower, come out like a beautiful flower and wither away. But if you run away from it or try to force yourself to understand it, go into it, you are destroying the flower. Whereas if you remain with it completely it is like a thing that flowers and withers away. You understand this? Q: No I don't. All I can see is: why is my life a mess? It is a mess because I don't want to marry. K: I didn't say sir, marry, or not marry. Q: Well you say stay with your loneliness. It seems to me to stay in the rotten position I am in now. K: No,no. If one is neurotic and you know you are neurotic -most people don't know that they are neurotic - but if you are aware that you are neurotic and not act from neuroticism, you will end it. Surely this is simple enough. Q: How do I stop acting out of neuroticism when I am neurotic? I could put away myself and say I will not act any more. K: No sir, we are not saying that. We are saying - please listen sir - that as we said there is an art of listening, which is to listen not to the speaker only but to listen to yourself, to listen to the birds, to the movement of the wind amongst the leaves and so on. Just to listen. You know your own opinions, you know your own thoughts, but you have to put them aside to find out what the other fellow is saying. If you are not capable that is part of neuroticism. But I am sure, though most of us are perhaps neurotic, we can at moments, at least for this morning, put away our own thoughts, our own importance, our own opinions and just listen to find out what the other fellow is saying. That is all. The other fellow is saying simply, that to be aware of oneself, and if one is aware you discover that you are neurotic, that you have peculiarities, you have this and that - you know. You hold on to opinions and experiences, all the importance - just to be aware of it. And in that awareness the neuroticism comes out, flowers, withers away - if you give it an opportunity. But if you say, "No, I am neurotic, I must not act, I must lock myself up", then you are giving importance more and more to the neuroticism. Full stop. Isn't that enough for this morning? Q: No. K: Wait a minute sir. You say no - why? Look sir, we have this morning gone into something that demands your total attention, that you have to go into yourself very, very deeply, and if you have done it, you say at the end of an hour, "That is enough". SAANEN 6TH PUBLIC TALK 21ST JULY 1977. I would like to talk this morning about, if I may, observing holistically - to observe, to see or to listen to the whole total content of something. We look at things partially according to our pleasure, or according to our conditioning, or according to some idealistic point of view. So we are always looking at things fragmentarily. The politician is only concerned with politics, the economists and so on, the scientists, the businessman, all throughout life, it seems to one, that one never takes or observes the whole movement of life - not broken up - like a full river with a great volume of water behind it. It is water right from the beginning to the end. It may get polluted but given sufficient space between two pollutions it can clean itself. So in the same way can one treat one's live wholistically, move totally from the beginning to the end without any fragmentation, without any deviation, without any delusion? I would like to talk about that. First of all it is important to understand, I think, how the mind creates illusions of self-importance, of various types of comforting, safe, at least for the time being, illusions that give one security, and these bring about a great deal of illusions. That is, to look at something with a preconceived idea or belief, so we never really see it actually. And these illusions are created by desire, by satisfaction, by wanting comfort. And satisfaction is entirely different from ecstasy. Ecstasy, as we said the other day, is a state of being, or not being, which is outside of oneself. That is really ecstasy in which there is no experiencing. The moment there is an experiencing it is the self, it is the past memories that recollect, remember, that translate an experience according to the past demands, or past conditioning. So ecstasy never creates illusions. You cannot hold on to it because it is outside of oneself. There is no question of remembering it. There is no question of wanting it, because when one wants it there is the desire to satisfy and that creates illusion. Right? And most of us are caught in some kind of illusion - the illusion of being, or not being, the illusion of power, position and so on, the whole category from the projection of the centre, which is the 'me'. That invariably creates illusion. As we said, illusion means to observe, to see sensuously with a definite conclusion, prejudice, or idea. That invariably creates illusions. That is clear. And an illusory mind, or a mind that is caught in illusions, has no order. Right? Order can only come about holistically. Right? Please see the importance of this. We need order; even in a very small room you put things in their place otherwise it becomes terribly disorderly, ugly and rather dirty - as most rooms are - sorry! And we think order is following a certain pattern, following a certain conclusion, following a certain order which you have already established in the past and keep on in that routine. I think order is something entirely different. Order can only come about when there is clarity. Clarity brings order, not the other way round. If you put it the other way round, which is, try to seek order then that becomes mechanistic, naturally, repetition, a conformity to a pattern which you have established for yourself in the room or outside the room, or inside yourself. Order, as we said, can only come about through clarity - clarity to observe without any distortion. We went into it the other day very carefully, so we won't go into it again, if you don't mind. Order implies harmony in daily life. Harmony is not an idea because we are already prisoners of ideas. We are caught in the prison of ideas and therefore there is no harmony in that. Harmony implies clarity, which is to see things holistically, to see, to observe life as a total unitary movement. Right? Can we do this? You understand my question? Can one observe life, or observe one's living, which is life, as a total whole movement of life - not I am a businessman and I am different at home, or I am an artist and I can do the most absurd things, eccentricism, you know all that follows? This breaking or fragmenting life into various categories - the elite and the non-elite, the worker and the non worker, the intellectual and the romantic, the emotional, which is our whole way of living. Now can we see how important it is to see this life as a total movement in which everything is included, in which there is no breaking down, as the good and the bad, and heaven and hell? Right? It is only possible - no, I will put it this way: can one observe what it means to see holistically? Can one see holistically anything? Right? When you observe your friend, or your wife or your girl, or your boy, husband, can you observe, see holistically in that relationship? Right? Are you following all this? Right? Is that possible? It is possible only when there is no accumulated remembrances which become the image. Right? In any relationship there is accumulated remembrances, incidents, which definitely leave a mark on the brain, and therefore you always look at somebody, your wife and so on, fragmentarily. Now can we, being serious, wanting to find a different way of living in our daily life, to look at another in a relationship, intimate or not intimate, as a whole? Please do it now as we are talking. You are married, you have got girls and you have got boys, you have got a husband, wife and all the rest of it, uncle, aunt, whatever it is, can you look at another as a whole? Which means not having any remembrances or conclusions about another. Therefore to observe holistically implies freedom. Right? We are getting on. We think freedom is from something else. Right? To be free implies, generally as it is understood, I am free from my sorrow, from my anxiety, from my work - or whatever it is. Which is really a reaction, isn't it? Therefore it is not freedom at all. When a man says, "I am free from smoking" - I hope you don't smoke, any of you because it is very bad for one's health, that's up to you - when one says, "I am free from smoking", that is a response from what has been, moving away from what has been. But we are talking of freedom which is not from something, which means to observe holistically. Right? Get it? So we are going to talk about something which demands your careful attention. That is, to observe freely, holistically, means there is no fragmentation or direction in observation. Right? There is no freedom when there is direction; when there is direction there is distortion. It is only when there is complete freedom that you can observe holistically. And therefore in that observation there is no satisfaction, and therefore there is no illusion. Get it? Step by step we are going into it. So, can one observe life as a total movement, non-fragmented, but holistic, flowing continuously - 'continuously' not in the sense of time. Right? When one uses the word 'continuous' it implies time. Right? But there is a continuity which is not of time. I am going to go into that a little bit. Are you as excited about it as I am? I am getting into it. When one talks about continuity it is of time because a thing that has been and then will be. The relationship is between the past and the future as a continuity, without breaking up. Right? That is what we generally understand by the word 'continuity', which is of time. Right? Time is movement, from here to there; time implies distance, to be covered through days, or months, or years, or as an idea to be achieved. All that implies a movement. Right? Time implies thought, of course, so thought is movement in time, or, thought is the movement of time. Right? Therefore it is a movement of measure. Right? This is reasonable, sane. But is there a continuity, if we can use that word which isn't perhaps quite right, but we will use it for the moment - is there a continuity which is not a series of incidents related to the past and therefore the cause becomes the effect, and the effect becomes the cause, which is continuity. Right? Now we are asking is there a state of being in which there is a coming to an end of everything. I am discovering something, I want to talk about death, you will see in a minute. We think life is a movement in time and to be measured, and this movement ends with death. That is what we call continuity. There is, I think - not, I think - one observes a movement which is not of time, which is not a remembrance of something, going through the present, modified and continues. There is a state of mind which is dying to everything that is happening - coming in and flowing out. You understand? Not retaining, flowing out. There is never any retention but always flowing out. Right? That has its own sense of beauty, and, if I may use the word in quotes, 'continuity' - which is not of time. Now, are we working this out together? Otherwise it has no meaning, there is no fun in my talking about it. There is fun only when we can communicate with each other, and each of us are doing it together. It is like playing cricket, or football, or any game - together we have to do this. Not I do it and tell you, and then you copy it, or try to find out what it means. But if we do it together it is all the time active. Right? So, we are asking: is there a way of living which is only from moment to moment, without any retention, which is memory and so on? How shall I put this? I want to communicate therefore I must find the words - because communication - listen to this -communication implies compassion, clarity and the skill, which is verbal skill to communicate. If there is compassion and clarity, skill will inevitably come about - not the other way round. I want to tell you something very deep and I must have the skill to tell you, the words, the means of communication; but that communication remains only verbal when there is no compassion and clarity. Intellectually one can cleverly argue this out, logically, sanely, objectively, but it remains at a very, very superficial level; but when there is communication with compassion, clarity, skill is easy. I don't know if you follow all this? So I want to communicate - the speaker wants to communicate with you whether it is possible to live a life which is totally holistic. Right? Not fragmented - therefore no you and me. Right? No we and they, my country, your country, my god - all that is gone. Right? Are you doing it? As we are talking, are we together doing it? As I said, we are playing a tremendous game. If you don't take your part in it you are out of the game. If one of the football players doesn't play properly he goes out. So this is a game in which life is involved. Right? Our whole life, therefore you have to partake in this game. So we are asking together if it is possible to live a life that is holistic, without any fragmentation. And that fragmentation exists when there is a desire to satisfy, which creates illusion, therefore you are not playing the game. You are out of the game. If you say, "I have come here to understand you, the speaker", then you are out of the game. You are here not to understand me; you are understanding the whole of human existence, which is you. You are the representative of all humanity, therefore you have to take part holistically in the game. Right? Is that possible? I say it is possible only when you see exactly 'what is', without any distortion. If you are angry, see it as it is, not try to suppress and all the rest of it. When you are jealous, anxious, suffering, anything, to observe holistically. And that is possible only when you live with suffering completely - not to go beyond it, not to seek comfort, not to escape from it, when you completely, totally live with something then there is no distortion. Right? And out of that observation holistically comes clarity. Right? Do it. Please do it as we are talking. And for us life, as we said, is a movement in time. I was born so many years ago, I am going on until I die. There is this constant movement of remembrances, registration, retention, action, and, from that action learning, storing it up and so on. And we are saying that movement is of time; and that movement is brought about by thought which is time. And thought being limited, fragmented, thought can never see holistically, though we have cultivated it religiously through education and so on and so on. Thought becomes an extraordinary thing in our life. Therefore thought is always fragmentary. Why? Because it is born out of memory, out of knowledge, out of experience, stored up in the brain, so whatever is stored up in the brain is the past, therefore it is limited, therefore it is fragmentary, not holistic. That is clear -right? And also we said, order in life is essential, because the moment you have order you are clear. Right? When there is clarity there is order. So we are going to examine together this problem of death. Together. You know every religion, from the ancient of days, has tried to find out if there is something beyond death. The ancient Egyptians - if you have read something of it - thought, or lived in a way that living is part of death - so you carried on with your slaves, with your cattle as you die. To go over the other side is to live what you have lived in the past. You have read about it, you know the whole Egyptian attitude, the ancient Egyptians. And that was a continuity. Right? And the Hindus - the word 'Hindu' was invented by the British during their colonization - the word 'Hindu' never existed, Hinduism never existed. It was only invented by the British when they were big and in power. The ancient people of India - we will put it that way - geographically speaking, in those days there was no geography, they were human beings - they said life must have a continuity because what is the point of achieving a moral character, having so much experience in life, having suffered so much, if it merely ends is death, what is the point of it? Therefore, they said, there must be a future for this. And that future is the content of consciousness with its content. And that consciousness modified with its content went on, which is called... I won't name it even! Because it is much better not to name these things, you can observe them better. And also the Christians have different kinds of desires, fulfilments, as the resurrection and so on and so on. We want to find the truth of it - right? The truth of it, not what you think or I think, not what the professionals think, the priests and the psychologists and all the rest of it. And also there have appeared in a great many articles in America and Europe, that people who have died - 'died' in quotes - come back in daily life and remember that extraordinary state after death - light, beauty, whatever it is. One questions whether they are really dead, because if you are really dead, which means oxygen not going to the brain, and therefore the brain deteriorating after five minutes, or three minutes, I have forgotten exactly, therefore when there is real death there is no coming back. And therefore there is no recollection of something after you die. You know there have been articles about this. So I want to clear the field. I want to find out the truth of this extraordinary state, together. Please this is a very serious game that we are playing, it is beyond chess, beyond football, beyond everything. It is a game - we are playing a game with delight, enjoying the game, and therefore a mind that is eager to find out; not saying, "I must find out because I would like a next life, I am frightened of death, therefore please tell me if there is something more." That is not playing the game. So we are together trying to find out the truth of these things. Because death must be the most extraordinary experience, much greater than so-called love, much greater than any desire, any idea, any conclusion, because it may be the end of everything - the end of every form of relationship, every form of recollection, of remembrance, accumulation. It might be total annihilation. Right? Complete ending of everything. One must find out what is the truth of this matter. To find out the truth, to come upon it, every form of identification must end - right - every form of fear, and the desire for comfort. It is that desire for comfort that may create illusion, and therefore one is caught in that illusion and says, "Yes, there is a marvellous state after death." So we are learning how to observe the way of observation which is holistic - which means there is no fear, there is no desire for comfort, there is no illusion, and therefore the mind is completely free to look. Are you doing this? Which means you have no attachment - which is enormously difficult, because I am attached to my wife, house, ideas, conclusions, and therefore I am frightened to let go, I am frightened to be completely alone. We explained that word 'alone' means all one. So no attachment of any kind to anything, to ideas, to persons, to a future hope - please if you are playing the game this is very, very serious - to your son, to your daughter, to your wife, to your husband - no attachment, which doesn't mean that you become callous. When there is attachment there is illusion, and when there is illusion there is no clarity. And when there is no clarity there is no freedom and therefore no order. So the mind must have no identification with the name, with the form, or with any person, idea, conclusion - is that possible? And, as we said, that does not deny love: on the contrary, when you are attached to a person there is no love; there is dependence, there is the fear of loneliness, to be left alone in the world where everything is so terribly insecure, both psychologically as well as outwardly. Therefore there is a desire to be attached to something. As you are listening, if you want to find out what is the truth of death, what is the meaning, the real depth of that extraordinary thing that must happen in life, there must be freedom. And there is no freedom when there is attachment, when there is fear, when there is a desire for comfort. Can you put all that aside? Can you? Otherwise don't play the game. You can't play the game. I hope you have, because we are trying to find out together the truth of this extraordinary thing called death. And also the truth of what is before death. You understand? Not the truth after death, but also the truth before death. What is the truth before death? If that is not clear the other can't be clear. So we must look very closely, carefully and freely at what is before death, which we call living. Therefore, what is the truth of our living - which means what are you, or who are you? You understand? What are you, which you call living? We are trying to see the truth of that. I don't have to tell you, do I? You know it very well. A heavily conditioned mind through education, environment, through culture, through religious sanctions, beliefs and dogmas, rituals, my country, your country; the constant battle, wanting to be happy and being unhappy, depressed and elated, going through anxiety, uncertainty, hate, envy and the pursuit of pleasure, fear. Right? Afraid to be alone, fear of loneliness, old age, disease - this is the truth of our life, our daily life. Right? And can such a mind, which hasn't put order in this life, order in the sense of that which comes through clarity and compassion, can such a mind which is so utterly fragmented, disorderly, frightened, find out the truth about something else? You follow what I am getting at? So one must first put order in one's house. The house is burning and some of us are not aware of it at all. It is actually burning. If you read everyday a newspaper, what is happening in every country - so your house and the house of humanity is burning. And you aren't doing anything about it. Because we are all concerned with our own immediate security. Right? And when you seek security, for god's sake, you are bringing about total insecurity. So during the last six talks, or whatever we have been through, we have tried to bring about clarity. Out of that clarity and compassion comes intelligence. Intelligence is compassion, is clarity, the awakening of that. And that awakening in the midst of this misery can come about, when you live with it completely. Do you understand? When you live with your suffering, with your sorrow, with your agony, with your person, live it completely, not escape from it at all in any direction. Then out of that comes an extraordinary sense of clarity, which we have talked about considerably. So during these days have you, together, brought about this intelligence in life or death? If you have, and I hope for the sake of humanity and the world that you have - one wants to cry because human beings are so damn stupid - then you can find out the truth of death - not partially dying, partially awake, partially dead, as most human beings are, but the total ending, which is the brain not having enough oxygen can only last (I don't know exactly) three or five minutes, and after that it cannot function. That is death, through disease, accident, old age, or through senility. Now what is the truth of it all? Some of us may have seen what is before death, and in seeing it very, very clearly, and out of that clarity comes compassion and therefore the awakening of intelligence, and with that intelligence we are going to look. Do you understand? Otherwise you can't see the logic of it. If your house is not in complete order and therefore complete clarity and compassion, how can you find anything beyond it? So what is the truth of death? That is, complete ending. There may be something, or there may not be. Right? Because that is a hope and therefore hope creates distortion and therefore illusion. So we are cutting that out. Can you stand all this? So the ending: one can only find out the truth of it when there is an ending. Right? Right? Then there is an ending to everything that you have. Can you do it? Ending to your attachment, not giving it a day, but ending it completely now. That is what death means. Can you? So ending, complete ending - when there is complete ending something new is born. You understand? I wonder if you do? You know fear is a burden, a terrible burden, and when you remove that burden completely there is something new that takes place. Right? But we are afraid of ending, ending at the end of one's life. We are saying end it now. You have understood? End it; end your vanity, because without ending there is no beginning. Right? And we are caught in this continuity, never ending. So when there is total complete holistic ending there is something totally new beginning, of which you cannot possibly imagine. It is a totally different dimension - my saying it has no value. But as we are together playing the game of trying to find out what is the truth of this extraordinary thing called death, to end one's attachment - to one's fears, to one's vanities, conclusions, neuroticisms - to end it. Can you do it? Will you do it? Are you doing it? Not bit by bit -one day attachment, next day fear, third day vanity, fourth day anxiety and so on - to end the whole thing now. That is, to end the content of consciousness, which is our consciousness. The content makes consciousness. The content is fear, attachment, greed, envy, my country, your country, my god - content. To end all that, not through will - through will you can never do anything, in the psychological sense. Then if you do it by will there is conflict. Right? And through conflict there is no understanding of the depth and truth of anything. If you and your wife, or your husband are in conflict you don't understand the relationship. It is only when there is no conflict then you can look at each other, then you can feel each other, trust each other - you follow? Then a totally different state exists in relationship. So to find out the truth of what death is, there must be the ending of this content of one's consciousness. Therefore you will never ask: "Who am I?" Or "What am I?" You are your consciousness with its content. And when there is an ending to that consciousness with its content there is something entirely different, which is not imagined. You know, human beings have sought immortality in their action, one writes a book and in that book there is the immortality of the writer; a great painter does a sketch, a painting, and that painting becomes the immortality of that human being. All that must end, and which no artist is willing to do. So as human beings, and each human being is a representative of the whole of humanity - I wish you could feel that, understand the depth of such a statement - you are the world, and the world is you, and when there is change in that consciousness you bring about a change in the human consciousness. So death is the ending of this consciousness as we know it. Right sirs. See you on Sunday. SAANEN 3RD PUBLIC TALK 14TH JULY 1977. Shall we go on with what we were talking about the day before yesterday? We were talking about authority and the dangers of an authoritarian outlook on life, which not only perverts perception, clarity but also breeds fear. And we went into it comparatively deeply. And where there is psychological authority the awakening of intelligence is not possible. We went into that quite clearly. This morning, if one may, we will go into something that requires equal attention, that all of us think over together, the speaker is not only responsible for what he is saying but also those of you who are willing to listen seriously, it is your responsibility also, to share, to partake in thinking over together this thing that we are going to discuss this morning. We have been talking about security: security in the things of thought, the things thought has created, the security in authority; and also I would like to go into this question of finding safety, comfort, security in skill - skill in action. Please listen to it, because there is a great deal involved in this. When one has a skill in action it gives a certain sense of well being, security. And that skill born of knowledge must invariably in its action become mechanical. Right? I hope we are sharing this together. Skill in action is what man has sought because it gives him a certain position in society, certain prestige and power -power to go to the moon, live under the sea and so on - skill, skill, which is born of accumulated technological knowledge. And if one lives in that field all the time, as one does in modern society, with all its economic demands, that knowledge becomes not only additive - you add more to that knowledge - but also invariably it becomes a repetitive mechanical process that gradually gathers its own stimulation, its own activity, its own arrogance, and power. In that power one seeks a great deal of security - one has security. I do not know but this must be obvious to all of us. And the world at the present time is demanding more and more skill - whether you are an engineer, technological expert, a scientist, a psychotherapist, etc., etc., etc. But there is great danger, is there not, in seeking this absolute skill? That skill is born out of accumulated knowledge, but in that skill there is no clarity. Please listen: I am going to investigate something totally new this morning. And I hope you will have the kindness and the seriousness to listen, not agreeing or disagreeing but thinking over together - thinking together logically, sanely, rationally and with a certain sense of humility. When skill becomes all important in life, because that is the means of livelihood, and when one is totally educated for that purpose - all our universities, colleges, and schools are directed for that purpose - and that skill invariably breeds a certain sense of power, arrogance and self-importance. Right? What is the relationship of skill to clarity? And what is the relationship of clarity to compassion? These are the main things which we are going to discuss. We have talked very often about the art of listening, the art of seeing, the art of learning. The art of listening is to listen so that naturally everything is put in its right place. The meaning of that word 'art' means that: to put things where they belong. And the art of seeing is to observe without any distortion, obviously. If there is any distortion there is no observation. If we mistake a bird for a snake then you can't see clearly. In the same way to see clearly, to have great clarity in perception, there must be no distortion -distortion brought about by any form of motive, purpose, a direction. Right? May we go on? We are meeting each other, thinking together? And the art of learning is not only the acquisition of knowledge, which is necessary, necessary for skilful action, but also there is learning without accumulation. Right? This is a little more difficult. There are two types of learning: acquiring and gathering through experience, through books, through education a great deal of knowledge, and that knowledge is used skilfully - that is one form of learning; then there is the other form, which is never to accumulate, which means - please listen to this -which means never to register anything but that which is absolutely necessary. Right? Are we meeting each other? That is, when you learn any form of knowledge the brain is registering, accumulating knowledge, storing it up and acting from that storage of knowledge skilfully, or unskilfully. But there is another form of learning which is to become so totally aware that you only register what is absolutely necessary, and nothing else. You understand this? So then the mind is not cluttered up all the time with knowledge, movement. I wonder if you are following all this? We will go into this. There are these three essential things in the awakening of intelligence: which is, the art of listening, to communicate not only verbally but non-verbally exactly what you mean, and you listen without distortion: that is the art of listening. The art of seeing is to observe clearly without a direction, without motive, without any form of desire, but merely to observe. Right? And then there is the art of learning, accumulating knowledge which means registering all the things that are necessary for skilful action, and non-registering of any psychological responses, any psychological reactions so that the brain is employing itself where function, skill are necessary through knowledge and the brain is free not to register. Right? I wonder if you understand this? This is very arduous to be so totally aware so that you only register what is necessary and not, absolutely not register anything which is not necessary. Someone insults you, someone flatters you, someone calls you this or that, no registration. Right? This gives tremendous clarity - not only with regard to skill, which is the outcome of knowledge - why am I getting so... it is very exciting, you don't know what it means. I was thinking about this yesterday, I wanted to talk about it the day before yesterday but it slipped. To register and not to register so there is no psychological building up of the 'me', the structure of the self. The structure of the self arises only when there is registration of everything that is not necessary. That is, giving importance to one's name, form, one's experience, one's opinions, conclusions, all that is the gathering up of the energy of the self - which is always distorting. Right? Shall we go on? Please, I can go on but you must keep together with me. We are taking the journey together, I am not walking ahead of you, or walking behind you. We are all moving together. So where there is the art of learning, where there is putting everything in its right place and therefore to listen without any conclusion, without any opinion - which are all distorting factors. And in that listening one discovers the false and the true, without any effort because when there is actual attention given to listening that very attention excludes everything that is not absolutely factual. Right? And in the art of seeing, when one observes with one's conclusions, opinions, dogmas, beliefs you cannot possibly see very clearly - obviously. And the art of learning: learning to act in life skilfully, but any other form of registering distorts, gives importance to skill and therefore it becomes mechanical. I hope you understand this - right? You see this? So the art of listening, the art of seeing, the art of learning gives extraordinary clarity, and therefore that clarity can communicate verbally. Right? So there is the skill in action, and if there is no clarity it breeds self importance, whether that self importance is identified with a group or with oneself, or with a nation. And that self importance denies clarity, naturally. So skill, clarity and compassion. You cannot have clarity without compassion. And because we have no compassion skill has become more important. Right? It is very important to understand this because when you listen to all this seriously, with attention, and therefore sharing together in our thinking, logically and so on, when you have this compassion, clarity and skill, then you become the teacher, because then you have the teaching, not mine, the teaching. And so it becomes extraordinarily important for a person who listens. And this clarity is denied when there is any form of fear. Right? And most human beings have a great deal of fear which denies compassion. Right? Fear of various kinds, fear of growing old, fear of losing your husband, wife, losing your girl, boy and so on, fear of not being successful - you know, various forms of fear. I hope you are aware of your own fears. You may not be aware of them sitting here, at this present moment, but if you are serious you don't have to invite fear, it is there. So you can look at the fear now? Right? You don't have to say, "Well, I am not afraid at this moment and I can't recall my fears" - which is absurd because you are a living human being now and in that state your fears, though they may be dormant, they are still there - consciously or unconsciously. So fear in any form, both physiological as well as psychological, distorts clarity and therefore a person that is afraid in any form has no compassion. We will go into the whole question of compassion later, much later. But let's take all this together. So as I said, the art of seeing, the art of observing very clearly, and that is only possible when you don't want to get rid of fear because then that becomes a distorting factor; or you are unconscious of your fears, which is also a distorting factor. Right? So to be aware of the fear, the many fears which have a common root - right? Agreed to this? Oh, come on! It is like a tree: a tree has many, many branches and many leaves. And fear also has many branches, many leaves, many expressions of fear which breed their own flowering and their own fruit, which is action. Right? So one must go to the very root of fear, not take various forms of fears but the root of fear. Is that clear? Look: one may be afraid of darkness, one may be afraid of losing one's wife, or husband, one may be afraid of having no money, one may be afraid of some past pain and not wanting it again, one may be afraid of a dozen things. And analytically one can go through them one by one - right? And this is such a waste of time, isn't it? Whereas it would be much simpler and more direct if you go to the root of fear. Right? I don't think many of us realize, or are aware deeply of the nature of fear, what it does to human beings. Because when there is fear there are many kinds of neurotic actions. Fear of being lonely - you know most of you are lonely; and so you seek companionship escaping from loneliness. So companionship becomes very important, and if you have no companionship fear arises. Or out of that loneliness you build a wall around yourself, you resist, you escape and out of that escape, resistance, suppression, grows every form of neurotic action. So it is very important to understand the nature and the structure of fear, because it will not give clarity. And if there is no clarity there is no awakening of intelligence, which is the meaning that we have gathered together here, to see if we cannot awaken that intelligence which is neither yours nor mine, it is intelligence. And that intelligence has its own action, which is non mechanistic, and therefore without cause. Oh, I wonder if you understand all this? Right? Somebody, yes? So it is very important to understand, to be free totally, completely of fear. Right? Is that what we are prepared to do? Is that what we are thinking together? We see the importance and the urgency of being completely, consciously as well as unconsciously, to wipe fear away? One can deal with conscious fears comparatively easily. Right? But it is much more difficult to be free of fears of which you know naught of, fears that are hidden. Right? Do you understand this? Shall I go on? How are you going to examine the deep rooted fears? Is it possible to examine them? Psychologists say it is possible through analysis, through dreams, through careful psychoanalytical therapy. That is, one must go into this question of analysis altogether so that the mind is free from the analytical process, because analysis doesn't clear up the mind. Right? There is no clarity in analysis because the more you analyse the more there is. And it might take you the whole of your life - at the end of it you have nothing! Right? So we are going to think together and to find out the truth - the truth, not yours or mine, but the truth of analysis. Right? Can we go together? First of all in analysis there is the observer and the observed. Right? The analyser and the analysed. Which is, the analyser says, "I am going to analyse my reactions" - right? "My dreams, my desires, my fears". But is the analyser different from the fear? You understand? Different from the thing which he is going to analyse? You must be very clear on this. We are asking: is the analyser different from the analysed? If you say they are different, which most people do, then you are caught in everlasting conflict. Right? That is, the analyser, being different, he can examine his responses and jealousies, anger, violence, and in that examination, in that analysis, the examiner thinks he is separate. Right? And this separation will inevitably divide, and therefore there must be conflict. Right? Where there is division there must be conflict, whether the division is between two nations or division between man and woman - not that the woman is the same as the man, obviously biologically they are not - but the ideas, the accumulated responses of each, the images they have of each, they divide, and therefore there is conflict in all the relationships. Right? Can we go on? So: when there is analysis and the analyser is different there must be inevitably conflict. And most unfortunately, we are educated to have conflict, it is the way of our life. If we have no conflict we say, "What is wrong with me?" And to have conflict is the essence of neuroticism, as violence. And in analysis time is necessary. Right? It might take days, months, years, if you have the energy, the capacity, the money then you can go on analysing yourself endlessly - it becomes quite fun! Then you have somebody to go to, to tell them all about your troubles and pay fifty dollars, or whatever you pay. That is such a waste of time. So in analysis time is implied. That is, postponement of the immediate solution of the problem. Analysis implies conflict, analysis implies time, analysis implies no ending to any problem. That is a fact. So when you see the truth of this, or see the fact, you will never analyse. Right? Then what will you do? If you have been educated as most people are to analyse; it is necessary to analyse technologically - medicine and so on - but psychologically analysis, not only breeds time, division, but also each analysis must be complete, mustn't it? Otherwise the incompleteness of analysis is brought over from yesterday, and with the incomplete analysis you examine the new fact. Right? So there is always a colouring from the past of the present. Right? If you see this very, very clearly - and I hope you do, I am making it as clear as possible, one could talk about it endlessly but there is no time for that - then what will you do if you don't analyse? If you see analysis is a false process in spite of all the big names and all the rest of it, if you yourself see actually the truth that analysis doesn't lead anywhere, then what will you do? Now we are going to take fear. Most of us are accustomed to analyse fear, the cause and the effect. Right? What has made one afraid? One seeks the cause. Right? That is a process of analysis. It may be a hundred causes, or it may be a single cause. And the cause, with its effect, the effect becomes the cause for the next fear - right? So there is causation, effect, and the effect becomes the cause. So when you are seeking a cause you are caught up in this chain. Are you following all this? And therefore there is no release from this chain, which is part of analysis. Are we following this? Clear? So one asks: if there is no analysis then what will happen to my fear? What will happen to the fear that one has? The fears may be a dozen but the root of fear, we are concerned with the root, not with the branches - if you can pull out the root it is finished. The whole tree is dead. Right? So what is the root of fear? Can one find that out through analysis? Obviously not. Because as I have explained the reasons, the logic of not being able to see the root of fear if you are caught up with analysis. Right? So what is the root of fear? Is it time - time being chronological, there is the watch, time by the watch, twenty four hours, sunset to sunrise, that is one form of time? There is the other which is psychological time. Right? Are you following this? That is the tomorrow: psychologically I will solve my problems the day after tomorrow. Right? So is fear the result of time? I have had pain yesterday or last week, and that pain is registered in the brain, which is unnecessary, and that pain being registered then there is the fear of that pain happening again a week later. When there is no registration of that pain then there is no fear, which is time. You understand that? Oh, come on! Are we meeting each other somewhere? An I explaining clearly? There is fear when there is measurement. Right? When one measures oneself with somebody there is fear. I am not as intelligent as you are and I would like to be as intelligent as you are, and I am afraid I may not be. All that is a movement of time, isn't it? Which is measurement, which is comparison. So measurement, time, comparison, imitation breeds fear. Are you following? And all that, which is time, measurement, comparison, is the movement of thought. Right? So thought is the very root of fear. Please see the logic, the reasoning of this. It is not just a haphazard statement. We are thinking together, examining together, taking the journey together to find out. And we see analysis is not the solution; finding the cause is not the solution; and time is not the solution, time being measurement, comparison, and time is the movement of thought. So the problem then is not how to be free of fear, or how to suppress fear, but to understand the whole movement of thought. Right? See how far we have gone away from the demand to be free of fear? We are entering into something much greater, much more comprehensive. If there is understanding of the whole movement of thought it must be holistic, whole. And fear arises only when there is the 'me', which is the small, not the whole. I wonder if you understand all this? So the art of learning, the art of seeing, the art of listening - in that art there is no movement of thought. Right? I am just listening to you, why should I interfere with my thoughts. I am seeing, observing, in that observation there is no movement of thought. Right? I just observe. I observe the mountain, the tree, the river, the people, without any projection of my background and so on, which is the movement of thought. Right? And thought is necessary to accumulate knowledge to function skilfully, but otherwise thought has no place whatsoever. And this brings tremendous clarity, doesn't it? I hope you have clarity - have you? Clarity means there is no centre from which you are functioning. Right? A centre which is put together by thought as the 'me', mine, they and we -right? And where there is a centre there must be a circumference, and where there is a circumference there is resistance, there is division, and that is one of the causes, the fundamental causes of fear. Right? 'Causes' in quotes. So when we consider fear we are considering the whole movement of thought, which breeds fear. And clarity is only possible when thought is completely in abeyance. Right? That is, when thought has its right place, which is to act in the field of knowledge and not enter into any other field. You understand sirs? Therefore in that there is total elimination of all opinion, judgement, evaluation. There is only listening, seeing and learning. And without that clarity skill becomes the most destructive thing in life, which is what is happening in the world. You can go to the moon and put the flag of your country up there, which is not clarity. You can kill each other through wars, by the extraordinary development of technology, which is the movement of thought. You can divide yourselves into races, communes, and so on and so on, which are all divisions created by thought. So thought is fragmentary. Right? I wonder if you see all this. So whatever it does must be fragmented. Right? Do you see this? I wonder if you do? Thought is a fragment. Thought is limited. Thought is conditioned. Thought is narrow, because thought is based on experience, memory, knowledge, which is the past, which is time-binding. Right? So that which is time-binding is necessarily limited, therefore thought is fragmented. Right? Right sirs? So thought can never understand that which is whole. Thought can never understand that which is immeasurable, which is timeless. The timeless, the immeasurable one can imagine, thought can put up all kinds of imaginary future structures, but it is still limited. So god put together by thought is limited. Right? No, I am afraid those of you who believe in god won't see this, because your god is the result of your thought, of your fears, of your desire to be secure. And you may say, "Has not god created all nature?" - talk to the scientists and they will tell you about it, the biologists and the theoretical physicists and so on. So thought, whatever - please see the truth of this and clarity will come like sun out of the clouds -that thought is the word, and the word is never the thing, the word is the description of the thing but the thing is not the description. Right? So fear then becomes completely useless, it has no meaning. Then you have to find out whether thought can ever remain in its field? You understand? And not move out of that field. That is, to register, because that is the function of the brain, to register so that it can be secure, so that it can be safe. Right? It is safe, secure in the field of knowledge because that is the function of the brain accumulating knowledge so as to be secure in that field, because you can't live without security - food, clothes and shelter one must have, not for the few but for the whole. And that is only possible when thought only operates there; and when it does not register in any other direction there is then no nationality, there is no you and me. I don't know if you see this. There is no division because when there is no registration the mind is free to look. Right? The mind is free to observe. And when there is that clarity skill never becomes mechanical. You understand sirs? Because there is functioning always from that clarity. Whatever the skill be it is functioning, acting from that clarity which is born out of compassion. Right? So one has to enquire very deeply into what is compassion. Can we go into it now? You understand, we have talked very clearly about clarity and skill, and the dangers of skill without clarity -skill then becomes a means of self aggrandizement, the aggrandizement of a nation, of a group - you know, the whole process of it. So we are saying there are three things one must understand very, very carefully - understand in the sense of not intellectually, not verbally but actually see the quality of it. There are three things, which are compassion, clarity and skill. Right? And when there is compassion there is no division between clarity and skill. Right? It is one movement. I wonder if you see this? And because we are caught up in skill we don't see the total movement. So what is the nature and the structure of compassion? To understand it one must go into the whole question of pleasure, love, suffering, death. You can't just say, "I have compassion". The mind that says, "I am compassionate", is not compassionate. You understand? I wonder if you do. When the mind says, "I am intelligent", it is no longer intelligent because it is conscious of itself. Right? When it is conscious of itself there is no intelligence. So one must go into this question: what is the depth and the meaning and the significance and the beauty of compassion? And to do that we must enquire not only, as we did, into fear, but also into pleasure. Is love pleasure? Is love desire? Is love of another a remembrance? Is love of another an image? All these are involved when we think over together this question of compassion. And we can only go into it when we go together, not the speaker goes into it and you just listen, when we go together into it, because a human being is not alone, he is the essence of all human beings. And that is a fact, that is a reality. It is not my invention, my wanting to identify myself with the whole. The absolute fact is you, as a human being, living through millenia after millenia, you are the representative of the whole of mankind, mankind that has suffered, agonized, shed tears, killed, and been killed, jealous, angry, anxious, seeking pleasure, caught in fear - you are all that. Therefore you are the entire humanity. And when there is a total revolution in this consciousness, that revolution affects the consciousness of mankind. That is a fact. And that is why it is so urgently important that each one of us who listens, and you are good enough to listen, serious enough to take the journey together, when you fundamentally, deeply do that, when consciousness changes its content, you affect the whole of mankind. So when we meet next time, next Sunday, we will go into the question of what is compassion. Right sirs. BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND PUBLIC DIALOGUE 1ST SEPTEMBER 1977 What shall we do this morning? Discussions are not possible with a large crowd like this, nor dialogues, but perhaps we can start with questions and answers and see where it goes. May we do that? Right. No questions? Yes sir. Q: When one is totally attentive there is no thought, but when there is thought one is seeing inattentively. Could we discuss about how this inattention comes about? K: The gentleman would like to discuss, to talk over together, the question of when there is complete attention there is no movement of thought; but thought arises when there is inattention, when there is no attention. So could one go into this question? Are there any others? Q: Could we talk about education and responsibility? Q: Do you think sir that the unconditional freedom of the human mind is dependent upon the ending of suffering and slaughtering of animals? K: We have answered that question the other day sir. You are raising the same question again. Q: Forbearance and children. K: Education and responsibility - what shall we talk over together? When there is complete attention, a total, not commitment, not concentration, but complete attention there is no arising of thought. Is that so? Then also in that question was asked: when there is inattention, when there is no attention thought arises, how is one, or is it possible to maintain total attention all the time? Isn't that the question sir? And education and responsibility. So what shall we discuss? Q: The first question sir. K: The first question. Q: Could you include in that something to do with the flowering of good? K: Would you also discuss the nature of the flowering of goodness. Perhaps we can include all these three questions in talking over together what is attention and that which is not attention. Shall we begin with that? Am I going to have a dialogue with myself, or will you join in with me? You know having a dialogue with myself may be very amusing to you. I once saw a hole that had to be dug for an electric conduit and there were about eight people sitting all around and two men were working. The others were smoking, talking, drinking and having a good time watching the others dig! So it appears to me that it will be the same when I am having a dialogue with myself. So in answering this question: what is attention, what is the nature of thought that ceases when there is complete attention, and when there is no attention thought arises. That is what we are going to talk over together. First of all, if one may ask, has one gone into this question of what is awareness, what is it to be aware, otherwise we will not be able to understand, totally, completely the full significance of attention. So I think we ought to talk over together the question of what is awareness. Don't you think? I don't want to have a dialogue with myself, please. Q: How does the concept of awareness come about actually? K: What is the concept of awareness, how does it arise, what is the necessity of awareness? Right sir? Q: No sir, what I mean is that the concept of awareness is unawareness, and it seems that in trying to be aware there is a concept of awareness that gets in the way. K: That is what we are saying, the same. Q: You have to find out where the concept of awareness is, why should we make concepts of things? K: Wait a minute. I understand what you are saying. Which is: why do we make concepts? Why do we make out of a statement, which may be factual, a concept of it, an idea of it, a conclusion of it? Shall we deal with that first and go on into it? Someone makes a statement that politicians are generally crooked. And we make an image of politicians, or draw a conclusion from it, but you never take the word and its whole significance without making an abstraction of it. You understand? We make abstractions of truth, of a fact, but we never look at the fact but make an abstraction and then act according to that abstraction. That is fairly simple. So we will go into it. What is the concept of awareness - concept, that is, is there an idea of awareness, or are you aware? There is a difference. The idea of being aware: or be aware. Let's go into it a little more. The word 'aware' means to be sensitive, to be alive, to things about you - to nature, to people, to colour, to the trees, to the environment, to the social structure, the whole thing, to be aware outwardly of all that is happening outside and to be aware of what is happening inside - to be sensitive, to know, to observe what is happening inside, and also what is happening outside, environmentally, economically socially and so on and so on. Now if one is not aware what is happening outwardly and one begins to be aware inwardly then one becomes rather neurotic. But if one begins to be aware of what is exactly happening in the world, as much as possible, and then from there move inwardly, then you have a balance, then there is a possibility of not deceiving oneself. So we will begin by being aware of what is happening outwardly and then move, like an ebb on the tide that comes in and then goes out, comes in and goes out, there is constant movement, out, in, in and out, so that there is no deception. Why are we governed? Why is there a government? Why is there social difference - the poor and the rich, the various classes, racial differences, national differences, religious differences, all that is going on outwardly - wars, violence and every kind of brutal activity going on? And governments exist to rule, obviously. Without some kind of order there must be disorder - politically, religiously and all the rest of it. So let's find out what is order and what is disorder. Right? Can we begin with that? Because that is what is happening, outwardly there is tremendous disorder. Right? Q: Could you just clear up one point? You said that one must be aware outwardly first otherwise there may be deception within. Why is this so? K: The gentleman asks if one is not aware outwardly what is happening and begin to be aware inwardly - I said there might be a possibility of deception, of not being able to see clearly what is happening inside because what is happening outside you can observe, see, hear, know, and you can judge. And inwardly if you know what is happening outside and from there move inwardly you have then a criteria - I wonder if I am making it clear? This is fairly simple I think. Sir look: how am I to study myself? How am I to know myself? Which is: myself is a very complex structure, very complex movement, how am I to know myself so that I don't deceive myself? I can only know myself in my relationship to others. Right? In my relationship to others I may withdraw from others because I don't want to be hurt. Or in my relationship I may discover that I am very jealous, that I am dependent, that I am attached, that I am really quite callous. So relationship acts as a mirror in which one knows oneself. It is the same thing outwardly -the outer is a reflection of myself, because the society, the government, all the things we have created are created by humanity, by human beings. That is all fairly obvious. So in beginning to find out what is awareness we must go into the question of what is order and what is disorder. Right? We see outwardly there is a great deal of disorder, confusion and uncertainty. Right? Shall we go on? Now what has brought about this uncertainty, this order outwardly? I know there is this disorder outwardly, who is responsible for all this? Are we? Be quite clear please. Don't be hesitant. Be quite clear whether we are responsible for the disorder outwardly, or it is some divine disorder out of which divine order will come. So if we feel responsible for the outward disorder then is that disorder an expression of our own disorder? Q: We are generally confused therefore we throw out confusion. K: Quite. So as we are generally confused we throw out - the gentleman suggests - confusion. So I have learnt, observed this disorder outwardly is created by my disorder inwardly. So as long as human beings have no order in themselves there will be disorder always. And governments try to control that disorder outwardly. The extreme form is this totalitarianism where Marxism, Lenin, Maoism - you know - is to say we know what order is, you don't, we are going to tell you what it is. Right? And suppress you, or concentration camps, psychiatric hospitals and all the rest of it follow. So if the world is in disorder because we are in disorder, each one of us, then are we aware of our disorder? Or is it a concept of disorder? You understand? Are we aware that we are in disorder? Or there is an idea which has been suggested that we are in disorder therefore I accept that idea? The acceptance of an idea is an abstraction, an abstraction of 'what is'. The abstraction is to move away from 'what is' - and most of us live in ideas, move away from facts. So what is it we are doing now? Are we accepting a concept of disorder, or are we aware that we are ourselves in disorder? You understand the difference between the two? It is clear. Now which is it? Aware of disorder in ourselves because somebody else has suggested it? And without somebody suggesting it, or having a concept of order, do you become aware per se, for itself? I wonder? This is simple. Shall we go on from there? So am I aware of my disorder? Q: One is aware but one becomes very fearful, even suicide and all the rest of it. K: Yes sir, we are coming to that slowly. We will go slowly, if you don't mind, step by step - not jump to any conclusions. Are we aware, am I aware, I and you, aware that we are in ourselves in disorder? (Baby crying) That is disorder! Q: Sir I feel there would be order if that young lady could be very quiet with her mother. K: Yes sir. I am not responsible. So: are we in ourselves aware that we are in disorder? And what do we mean by disorder - not what is order, but what do we mean by disorder? Come on sirs. Q: May I come in on this point. It is very difficult, we can only be aware of our disorder at this particular moment but thought comes and goes. May I ask you: I have found how difficult it is to be actually aware of it. K: Yes sir. To be actually at every moment to be aware of this disorder. That is why - please if we are serious, talking seriously together - we are asking each other what does it mean to be in disorder? Q: To be in contradiction with oneself, within oneself. K: Yes, that means contradiction. Why are we in contradiction? Q: (Inaudible) K: Look into yourselves please, please look into yourself, watch it. Q: One half thinks one thing and another bit thinks another. K: So there is contradiction. You think one thing, do another. Say one thing and do something else and so on. There is contradiction, opposing desires, opposing demands, opposing movements in all of us, duality. Right? Are you clear on this? May we go on? Duality. How does this duality arise? I am having a conversation with myself. Q: My conditioning. K: Yes. Is it my conditioning? Is it our conditioning? Q: Dissatisfaction. K: Sir look. Q: The struggle between the inner self and what we have been conditioned to accept. K: So we have been conditioned to accept, and not to accept, to obey and not to obey, to follow and the urge to be independent. So that is there is constant dualistic action going on, whether it is conditioned, or not conditioned. So we are asking: how does this duality arise? Q: Because we compare 'what is' with 'what should be'. K: Are you doing that? Or is that an idea? Q: I am doing that. K: Good. I am not trying to be sarcastic sir. We are talking factually, not theoretically, not in abstractions, not in hypothetical anythings, but dealing with facts. Then we can go very far if we deal with facts. But if you go into abstractions you are lost. So we are asking: why does this contradiction arise, basically, -I know education, culture and all the rest of it, but go beyond that, much more fundamentally, deeply. Why does this contradiction arise, between heaven and hell, god and the devil - you follow? -the whole social, moral structure? Q: We are brought up to it, rewarded for being good, and punished for being bad. K: Yes sir, reward and punishment. Q: So therefore one is acting out of fear. K: I am asking sir - we know that - we are asking a much more fundamental thing: why does this contradiction, division, exist fundamentally? Go into it much deeper. Fear is involved in it but go much further than that. Q: Due to lack of awareness from without. Q: Sir, we call ourselves human beings but we have a lot of animal instincts. K: Yes. The animal instincts are based on reward and punishment - but it is only domesticated animals that have this reward and punishment conditioning. But generally, I believe, they have told me also, that wild animals don't have regard to reward and punishment, they kill to eat, that's all. That is not reward or punishment. Let's leave that for the moment. Shall I talk to myself? No? You are not following what I am asking you. Please just go into it. Fundamentally why does this contradiction exist? Q: Thought arises? K: Don't guess sir. Let's go into it. Q: I think it is trial and error. K: Trial and error - no, no. Q: Sir, can that question really be answered? K: I am going to answer it. I am not conceited. I have enquired into this - for fifty two years I have talked about this blasted thing. Q: Sir, is it not inherent in human consciousness? K: Is it inherent in human consciousness. If it is inherent, inborn, then you can't do anything about it. Q: An inherent conditioning. K: Inherent conditioning. It may be that. I want to go into it. Q: Is it because we want to be in harmony and we deceive ourselves. K: We deceive ourselves. Q: Mainly because I want two things. K: Man, woman, light and shadow, courage and cowardice -you know, you can multiply, but why does this dualistic activity go on in us? You can explain - conditioning, instinct, inherent, we have been taught and so on and so on, and so on and so on Q: We are operating all the time from self-centred activity. K: Yes sir, self-centred activity and therefore there is division. I am asking you, why does this division exist? I won't ask anymore. Q: There is a nerve and we don't listen to it, we try to be what we are not. K: Don't you want to find out? Q: I think there is a lot of influence from a lot of groups of people. Q: Is it that we are too ready with intellectual answers? K: That's right sir - just verbal answers, too quickly. If you don't mind go into it seriously and find out. Why is there this dualistic action, 'what is' and 'what should be ' - right? The ideal and the fact - that is good enough. 'What is' and 'what should be'. Look into that. Just take that. And why is there this division between 'what is' and 'what should be', the ideal? Q: Escaping from the fact. Q: Because we think we know what should be. K: I am asking, my lady, why is there this division? Q: Because we want to impress others. K: You see how you make me have a dialogue with myself -which I don't want. I am asking a very simple question. I am asking myself, and therefore I am asking you: why is there this division between 'what is' and 'what should be'? Q: We do not listen. Q: If I am living totally in the present, totally in the now, I don't have those thought, I don't have thoughts, I am totally aware. K: No, sir. Please you are not answering my question. Q: When I ask myself that question I don't like what I find. K: Let's begin with that, I don't like 'what is' and I would like 'what should be'. The pleasure of 'what should be' is greater then 'what is'. Right? Take a simple thing like that, begin with that. That is, sir, I have no hope in this life, but I have a hope later on, next life and so on. So what is the process of this division? Q: Surely the evolution of consciousness, imagination, always on the move, never ever satisfied. K: Is it sir that we are incapable of looking at 'what is'? We would rather run away from 'what is' into 'what should be', hoping somehow, by some miracle, by some effort of will to change 'what is' into 'what should be'. Take that simple fact and begin with that. That is, I am angry and I should not be angry. If I knew what to do with anger, how to deal with anger and go beyond it there is no need for 'what should be', which is 'don't be angry'. You understand my question? If you can tell me what to do with 'what is', then I won't escape to 'what should be' because I don't know what to do with 'what is', I hope by inventing an ideal I can somehow through the ideal change 'what is'. This is what is happening - no? Will you start from there? Q: If we remain with 'what is' is there anything to do at all? K: I am coming to that. Let's look into it first. Because I am incapable I don't know what to do, my brain has been so conditioned that I am always living in the future - 'what should be'. But I am essentially living in the past. But I hope by living in the future I can alter the present. Right? Now if you were to tell me what I am to do with 'what is' then the future doesn't matter to me. Right? I wonder if you understand this. It is not a question of accepting 'what is', but remaining with 'what is'. Right? Q: I see there is a lot more implied than you are actually bringing out in this. I am denied, the 'me' is denied when you say that. K: I don't want to go into the 'me' yet. It is very complex. Just begin with the simple. Which is: I am greedy, that is a fact. The abstraction of the fact is non-greedy. So it means I have moved away from 'what is'. And by moving away I hope to understand 'what is'. Now I can only understand something if I can look at 'what is' and not run away from it, not try to change into something else. So can I, with your help, can I remain, look, observe, see 'what is' - nothing else? You understand my question? You have understood my question? Please teach me. Q: The problem there is you see we don't want 'what is'. K: Then escape. Q: That is what we are all doing. K: Do it, but know that you are escaping. Q: That doesn't change it. K: Know that you are escaping. Therefore you haven't solved a thing. But be aware that you are escaping, that you are running away, avoiding. Q: The point is that it is worth seeing that as soon as one tries to see 'what is', one doesn't do that. I see that I am jealous - at least I do not see it yet but the feeling is there, that it is worth challenging perhaps. K: Sir, so please help me to understand how to deal with 'what is' - then my problem is solved, you understand? Then I won't fight duality, there won't be duality. So please teach me, help me to understand and go beyond it, not remain in it - go beyond 'what is'. Q: Sir we have the concept between 'what is' and 'what should be' and that is part of 'what is'. K: No, sir, please sir. Of course in a sense it is but please. Q: You want to learn about something, that is your greed, and to learn about anything you have to be attentive. K: That is what I am coming to sir. Slowly, sir, slowly, piano, piano. Please help me to understand 'what is'. How am I to look at 'what is'? Right? If I know how to look at it then I can begin to unravel it and then it is finished. Right? Now please help me to learn the art of observation of 'what is'. Q: Look at it without thought. K: Oh madam, how am I to look at it without thought? I don't know. Q: Be aware. K: You see you are not doing this. Do it, please, then you won't answer so quickly. Q: To look at 'what is' is very difficult. K: I said what is the art of looking? Please if you give five minutes, two minutes attention to this marvellous thing you'll learn something. What is the art of looking? Q: I said it is acceptance. K: No sir, it is not acceptance. Just to look. Q: Watch your thoughts. K: Oh no. I am asking you - I give up! I had better have a conversation with myself. I want to look at 'what is' - there must be a great deal involved in it because we have looked. I know I am greedy but it doesn't do anything. Greed is a feeling. I have looked at that feeling named greed. The word is not the thing. But we may be mistaking the word for the thing. This is not intellectual; it is very simple. I may be caught in words but not with facts. The fact is I am greedy. The word - it is very complex that is why you should go into this very deeply - the word may incite that feeling. Can the mind be free of the word and look? You follow what I am saying? So I must first learn whether the word has become important to me in my life. Am I a slave to words, knowing that the word is not the thing? So the word becomes important when the fact is not real, actual to us. I would rather look at a picture of a mountain than go and look at a mountain. Right? To look at a mountain I have to go a great distance, climb, look, observe, feel. But by looking at a picture of a mountain - it is a picture, it is a symbol, it is not reality. So are we caught in words? If you are caught in words then you are moving away from the fact. So does the word create the feeling of greed, or is there a greed without the word? Examination requires tremendous discipline, not suppression, the very enquiry and the pursuit in that enquiry has its own discipline. So I have to find out very carefully whether the word has created the feeling, or the feeling exists without the word. The word is greed, I have named it. I have named it because I have had that feeling before. So I am registering the present feeling by a past incident of the same kind. So the present has been absorbed into the past. Are you interested in all this? So I realize what I am doing. I am aware of what is happening. What is happening is that the word has become extraordinarily important to me. So then is there a freedom from the word -communist, socialist, etc.etc., greed, envy, nationality and so on -is there a freedom from the word? The word is the past. Right? The feeling is the present recognized by the word as the past, so I am living all the time in the past. So the past is me, the past is time, so time is me. Look what I am discovering - come on! Time is me. So the 'me' says, I must not be angry because my conditioning has said don't be angry, don't be greedy. So the past is telling the present what it should do. So there is a contradiction. So I am finding out why there is contradiction. There is contradiction because fundamentally, very deeply, the past is dictating the present, what it should do. Which is, the 'me', which is the past with all its memories, experiences, knowledge, and the thing that it has put together by thought, the 'me', which is the past, which is time, the past is dictating what should happen. Now can I observe the fact - please listen - the fact of greed without the past? Can there be observation of greed without naming it, without getting caught in the word and understand whether the word has created the feeling, and if the word has created the feeling then the word is me, which is the past, so the 'me' is telling me, "Don't be greedy". So I am asking myself whether it is possible to look at 'what is' without the 'me', which is the observer. Right? Can I observe greed, the feeling and its fulfilment and action without the observer, which is the past? Get it? Q: How? K: Don't say, how to do it. You will do it as we learn going along, it's like learning to drive a car. You learn day by day, looking, looking, looking. Or in one moment you can learn the whole thing, but that is much more difficult and I won't go into that. So are you doing now what is being said? That is, 'what is' can only be observed when there is no me. Right? Can you observe without the observer? Go on sirs. Q: Only if it is possible to look at it and not want an answer. K: I am going to show you in a minute. Wait a minute. I am asking then how you then observe? No, observe. Observe the tent, observe the colour round you, the shirts and the dresses - how do you observe it? What is observation? You observe through the eye, don't you? Now you can observe without moving the eye? Because if you move the eye the whole operation of the brain comes into being. I won't go into this because you will turn it into some kind of mystical, nonsensical thing, mysterious and you know, occult and all the rest of that. There is something mysterious in the world, hidden things which you cannot possibly find unless you have laid the foundation of righteousness - to live correctly, truthfully without conflict, then you have all kinds of powers. But if you start seeking powers of various kinds then you are lost, you become somewhat neurotic. So can you observe, as you do with your eyes, to look without any distortion? The moment there is distortion the brain is in operation. Golly, I have got it! You understand? Now look at something without moving your eyes. How still the brain becomes. Have you noticed it? The moment you look all around there is then taking all that in - I won't go into that. Anyhow, how do you observe all this? You observe it not only with your eyes but you observe with all your care, if you are interested you observe with care. Which means you observe with affection - care means affection - right? No? So is there an observation of the fact, not the idea, but the fact, with care, with affection? Is there an observation of violence with care and with affection? Therefore there is no -you follow? Oh, you don't see all this - it is so simple once you capture this. Awareness implies care, affection. So you approach 'what is' with care, with affection, therefore where there is affection there is no judgement. Right? There is no condemnation therefore you are free of the opposite. I wonder if you get this. Q: We have to love. K: Ah, not we have to love. That is not an action of will. If there is to be an understanding of 'what is', and 'what is ' may be violence, greed, brutality, cruelty or joy - awareness implies great care in looking. When you have a baby don't - the mother cares infinitely with affection, gets up at two, three or four o'clock in the morning, half a dozen times, watching, watching, watching. So in the same way where there is awareness there is care, there is affection. Can there be observation, awareness of violence with care, to look at it with a great deal of care? See all its operation, what is implied, how it affects humanity - you follow - the whole of it, what is happening in the world, what is happening inside, to look at it with infinite care and affection. Then there is no duality. The mother doesn't say my baby is not so beautiful as the other baby. It is her baby. Later on she might wish it. So awareness implies observing the fact, not the idea of the fact, but the fact of 'what is'. And in that awareness there is infinite care, watching, affection - you know. Then there is no duality. Duality exists because we don't know what to do with 'what is'. When I know what to do with it, duality is non-existent. When I know, for example, that I am greedy I go into it very, very carefully. Is it the word that has incited the feeling? Or does the feeling exist without the word? I must find out that first. That is, I see a shirt, material of a shirt and there is perception, contact, sensation, the desire to have it, cut properly - you follow - the image begins. So that is greed. Now is there greed without the object? Oh, you people don't know what all this is. Q: Maybe when you observe violence there is an immediate reaction to it and you become violent yourself. K: Yes. So when you observe violence there is an immediate reaction to it, and that reaction may be another form of violence. Now watch it! That is, you say something to me which I don't like and I become angry. It is a tremendous question sir, this, if you go into it. That is, not to register what you have said, either in the way of flattery or in the way of insult. If you don't register there is no reaction. This requires a discipline of a totally different kind, watching - watch yourself so completely that you only register, as we discussed the other day, what is absolutely essential, nothing psychologically. To understand that and to go into it, to watch it, is its own discipline - you understand? Not imposed. There is its own - it says, look, look carefully, don't move - you follow? - that itself is - right? So we said duality exists in all of us, which is self contradiction in various forms because we do not know what kind of action should take place with 'what is'. If I know it there is no duality. In India and all over the world, they have been preaching nonviolence, especially in India, it started from there, probably with Tolstoy and much earlier. And people who talk a great deal about non-violence are very violent people because that is a fact. They are suppressing it, they are holding it, they are controlling it but they talk about it. But if you really understand violence, the whole of it, the word and so on and so on then there is no opposite at all. So this is awareness. You understand? I have to watch the word violent and I see that violence, confusion exists because I have contributed to it, I am responsible for it. And to eliminate violence I must understand the whole nature of violence - anger, imitation, conformity, accepting authority and so on and so on. Right? Now when there is awareness you can move to something else, which is: what is the difference between awareness and concentration? We learn at school to concentrate. I want to look out of the window and the teacher says, "Look, look at your book", so there is immediately contradiction. I want to see out of the window, what is happening out there, and the teacher tells me, "Look at your book" - so there is conflict. If I have a good teacher he says, "First look at what is happening out there. Look at it with all your attention." You understand? "Look with great care at the tree, the bird sitting on it, the leaves moving in the wind." From that he learns attention - you follow - learns awareness and so on. So one has to find out for oneself what is awareness, what is concentration, and what is attention. We have talked about attention, whether it can be maintained, sustained all the time. Or if there is inattention, there is no attention? That is one problem. Then the other is: what is concentration? Why do we give such tremendous importance to concentration? Go on sirs, I don't want to have a dialogue with myself. Q: Concentration is to do with attention. K: No, no. You have to learn about it. What is concentration? Why do all of you who meditate under the tree or in your room, try to concentrate? Don't you? Q: You achieve something. K: Sir, are we talking about the same thing? Are you talking about concentration? Q: You achieve something. K: I am asking what is concentration, why do we give such importance to concentration? Q: It suppresses the chattering mind. K: To suppress the chattering mind. See what you are doing. That means conflict, doesn't it? Your mind is chattering and you suppress it, so there is duality, there is conflict, there is struggle. But you never ask why is your mind chattering. Not how to stop it. Why is your mind chattering? This is all so childish sirs. Why is one's mind chattering? Is it habit? Is it laziness? Is it comforting? Think it out sirs. Is it laziness that the mind has got into the habit and therefore it keeps on chattering, chattering, chattering? Is it your conditioning? Is it because it is afraid very profoundly that if it doesn't chatter what will happen? You understand? That is, most of our minds are occupied, whether in the kitchen, whether in the office, whether in the family, whether in bed or cooking, all the time occupied with something or other - why? Q: Does it really matter if the mind is chattering? K: Oh yes it does. Wait, wait, I'll show it to you why it matters if you don't mind listening for a minute. It matters really because it is a wastage of energy. It is like all the time working, working. Please answer this: why is the mind occupied with something? First watch yourself, don't immediately answer; that becomes verbal and meaningless, but if you say now why is my mind occupied? Why is the mind occupied? Q: Because the mind is not free. K: No, no. Is it afraid that if it is not occupied what would happen? Q: It would have no existence if it were not occupied. K: That is just it sir. Because it has no existence, so it says I exist because I am chattering. Oh you don't see all this. So I am asking you why is it that your mind is occupied? If it was not occupied it is empty isn't it? And you are frightened of that, aren't you? So fear is dictating that you should be occupied with something so as to escape from fear and chatter and chatter -is that it? Q: To avoid what can't be controlled. K: To avoid it. So your mind is occupied, and you know what it is when the mind is occupied it is useless - right? Isn't it? It may be thinking of god and saying god, god, or whatever it does, and read books about god, and never look at anything else - it is an utterly meaningless and useless mind. So a mind that is occupied is not only useless but it has no vitality. Right? And it has no - I won't go into all this, it is too difficult. We are so afraid of being empty. You understand? Of being nothing. So occupation implies a mind that is wasting its energy. And to avoid all that chattering you concentrate on something: you say, "I won't chatter and I'll look at this picture" - or this poem, at this face and look. But you are not looking because it is occupied. Right? Whereas to look there must be no occupation, which means you look without concentration. Concentration then becomes an occupation - I must concentrate. I must not allow any thought to come in etc.etc. So you are building a wall round yourself in order to concentrate, which becomes a conflict. Right? So awareness we have gone into. Concentration - we can go much more deeply into it but we haven't time, there is a great deal involved in it, because you know when you concentrate you are bringing about greater importance to the self, unconsciously. I may give my concentration in the office, or in the factory, or in the garden or whatever it is, that concentration becomes very important to me. Haven't you noticed it? Because through that concentration I am going to get something - a reward. So this is the question of concentration. Attention is something entirely different from awareness in which there is no choice, concentration which is focussing all your energy on a particular thing, thereby becoming a specialist -specialist as a gardener, professor, or whatever you like, which gives you tremendous importance to oneself. Now we said attention has nothing whatsoever to do with either, because in attention there is no centre from which you are observing. You are attending. Right? Now look: I am saying something; now give your whole attention, attention, your nerves, your body, everything, listen with such tremendous attention and you will see there is no centre as me who is listening. You are just listening. So where there is attention there is no me. Obviously. There is no centre and therefore there is no periphery, there is no distance from the centre to an end, there is only a space in which there is complete attention, without border. So what is then not attention? Because most of us attend very seriously for a couple of seconds and then seeing what it does we want to maintain it, practise attention, go to various schools where you learn to be attentive, or follow some guru who will tell you how to be attentive, practise and all the rest which is all nonsense. To attend: which means to give your whole attention, whole attention in observing, which means keeping your eyes absolutely still and looking. Will you all do some of all this? Or am I talking vainly, as usual? Look sirs: this is very important what we are talking about because responsibility becomes then extraordinarily important, relationship. That lady asks what is the relationship between education and responsibility. If I have a child and I am responsible for it unfortunately, and how am I to educate it? It becomes - you follow - a tremendous problem. Send it to an ordinary school where he is turned out to be like the rest of the world? You follow? And all the rest of it. What is your responsibility as a mother, a father, a parent? What is your responsibility? You are tremendously responsible when they are two or three years old, watching over them, careful. After five or six send them off to school and you have wiped your hands off them. This is not an educational meeting - we can go into that another time. So conflict ends with the understanding of 'what is'. Right? You understand now? If I have learnt a great deal about 'what is' there is no necessity for the opposite - right? Foreword - Talks to Students - Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 - Talks to Teachers - Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION FOREWORD This book is the outcome of talks and discussions held in India by J. Krishnamurti with the students and teachers of schools at Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh and Rajghat School at Varanasi. These centres are run by the Krishnamurti Foundation India, which was set up to create a milieu where the teachings of Krishnamurti could be communicated to the child. Krishnamurti regards education as of prime significance in the communication of that which is central to the transformation of the human mind and the creation of a new culture. Such a fundamental transformation takes place when the child, while being trained in various skills and disciplines, is also given the capacity to be awake to the processes of his own thinking, feeling and action. This alertness makes him self-critical and observant and thus establishes an integrity of perception, discrimination and action, crucial to the maturing within him of a right relationship to man, to nature and to the tools man creates. There is a questioning today of the basic postulates of the educational structure and its various systems in India and in the rest of the world. At all levels there is a growing realization that the existing models have failed and that there is a total lack of relevance between the human being and the complex, contemporary society. The ecological crisis and increasing poverty, hunger and violence, are forcing man inevitably to face the realities of the human situation. At a time like this, a completely new approach to the postulates of education is necessary. Krishnamurti questions the roots of our culture. His challenge is addressed not only to the structure of education but to the nature and quality of man's mind and life. Unlike all other attempts to salvage or suggest alternatives to the educational system, Krishnamurti's approach breaks through frontiers of particular cultures and establishes an entirely new set of values, which in turn can create a new civilization and a new society. To Krishnamurti a new mind is only possible when the religious spirit and the scientific attitude form part of the same movement of consciousness - a state where the scientific attitude and the religious spirit are not two parallel processes or capacities of the mind. They do not exist in watertight compartments as two separate movements that have to be fused but are a new movement inherent in intelligence and in the creative mind. Krishnamurti talks of two instruments available to the human being - the instrument of knowledge which enables him to gain mastery over technical skills, and intelligence which is born of observation and self-knowing. While Krishnamurti gives emphasis to the cultivation of the intellect, the necessity to have a sharp, clear, analytical and precise mind, he lays far greater stress on a heightened critical awareness of the inner and outer world, a refusal to accept authority at any level and a harmonious balance of intellect and sensitivity. To discover the areas where knowledge and technical skills are necessary and where they are irrelevant and even harmful, is to Krishnamurti one of the fundamental tasks of education, because it is only when the mind learns the significance of the existence of areas where knowledge is irrelevant that a totally new dimension is realized, new energies generated and the unused potentialities of the human mind activated. One of the unsolved problems and challenges to educationists all over the world is the problem of freedom and order. How is a child, a student, to grow in freedom and at the same time develop a deep sense of inner order. Order is the very root of freedom. Freedom, to Krishnamurti, has no terminal point but is renewed from moment to moment in the very act of living. In these pages, one can get a glimpse, a feel, of this quality of freedom of which order is an inherent part. The years which a student spends in a school must leave behind in him a fragrance and delight. This can only happen when there is no competition, no authority, when teaching and learning is a simultaneous process in the present, where the educator and the educated are both participating in the act of learning. Unlike the communication of the religious spirit by various sects and religious groups, Krishnamurti's approach is in a sense truly secular and yet has a deeply religious dimension. There is a departure in Krishnamurti's teachings from the traditional approach of the relationship between the teacher and the taught, the guru and the shishya. The traditional approach is basically hierarchical; there is the teacher who knows and the student who does not know and has to be taught. To Krishnamurti, the teacher and the student function at the same level - communicating through questioning and counter-questioning till the depths of the problem are exposed and understanding is revealed, illuminating the mind of both. The Krishnamurti Foundation India feels deeply privileged for being able to offer this book to the student and the educator. The Editors KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO STUDENTS CHAPTER 1 'ON EDUCATION' You know, you live in one of the most beautiful valleys I have seen. It has a special atmosphere. Have you noticed, especially in the evenings and early mornings, a quality of silence which permeates, which penetrates the valley? There are around here, I believe, the most ancient hills in the world and man has not spoilt them yet; and wherever you go, in cities or in other places, man is destroying nature, cutting down trees to build more houses, polluting the air with cars and industry. Man is destroying animals; there are vert few tigers left. Man is destroying everything because more and more people are born and they must have more space. Gradually, man is spreading destruction all over the world. And when one comes to a valley like this - where there are very few people, where nature is still not spoilt, where there is still silence, quietness, beauty - one is really astonished. Every time one comes here one feels the strangeness of this land, but probably you have become used to it. You do not look at the hills any more, you do not listen to the birds any more and to the wind among the leaves. So you have gradually become indifferent. Education is not only learning from books, memorizing some facts, but also learning how to look, how to listen to what the books are saying, whether they are saying something true or false. All that is part of education. Education is not just to pass examinations, take a degree and a job, get married and settle down, but also to be able to listen to the birds, to see the sky, to see the extraordinary beauty of a tree, and the shape of the hills, and to feel with them, to be really, directly in touch with them. As you grow older, that sense of listening, seeing, unfortunately disappears because you have worries, you want more money, a better car, more children or less children. You become jealous, ambitious, greedy, envious; so you lose the sense of the beauty of the earth. You know what is happening in the world. You must be studying current events. There are wars, revolts, nation divided against nation. In this country too there is division, separation, more and more people being born, poverty, squalor and complete callousness. Man does not care what happens to another so long as he is perfectly safe. And you are being educated to fit into all this. Do you know the world is mad, that all this is madness - this fighting, quarrelling, bullying, tearing at each other? And you will grow up to fit into this. Is this right, is this what education is meant for, that you should willingly or unwillingly fit into this mad structure called society? And do you know what is happening to religions throughout the world? Here also man is disintegrating, nobody believes in anything any more. Man has no faith and religions are merely the result of a vast propaganda. Since you are young, fresh, innocent, can you look at all the beauty of the earth, have the quality of affection? And can you retain that? For if you do not, as you grow up, you will conform, because that is the easiest way to live. As you grow up, a few of you will revolt, but that revolt too will not answer the problem. Some of you will try to run away from society, but that running away will have no meaning. You have to change society, but not by killing people. Society is you and I. You and I create the society in which we live. So you have to change. You cannot fit into this monstrous society. So what are you going to do? And you, living in this extraordinary valley, are you going to be thrown into this world of strife, confusion, war, hatred? Are you going to conform, fit in, accept all the old values? You know what these values are - money, position, prestige, power. That is all man wants and society wants you to fit into that pattern of values. But if you now begin to think, to observe, to learn, not from books, but learn for yourself by watching, listening to everything that is happening around you, you will grow up to be a different human being - one who cares, who has affection, who loves people. Perhaps if you live that way, you might find a truly religious life. So look at nature, at the tamarind tree, the mango trees in bloom, and listen to the birds early in the morning and late in the evening. See the clear sky, the stars, how marvellously the sun sets behind those hills. See all, the colours, the light on the leaves, the beauty of the land, the rich earth. Then having seen that and seen also what the world is, with all its brutality, violence, ugliness, what are you going to do? Do you know what it means to attend, to pay attention? When you pay attention, you see things much more clearly. You hear the bird singing much more distinctly. You differentiate between various sounds. When you look at a tree with a great deal of attention, you see the whole beauty of the tree. You see the leaves, the branch, you see the wind playing with it. When you pay attention, you see extraordinarily clearly. Have you ever done it? Attention is something different from concentration. When you concentrate, you don't see everything. But when you are paying attention, you see a great deal. Now, pay attention. Look at that tree and see the shadows, the slight breeze among the leaves. See the shape of the tree. See the proportion of the tree in relation to other trees. See the quality of light that penetrates through the leaves, the light on the branches and the trunk. See the totality of the tree. Look at it that way, because I am going to talk about something to which you have to pay attention. Attention is very important, in the class, as well as when you are outside, when you are eating, when you are walking. Attention is an extraordinary thing. I am going to ask you something. Why are you being educated? Do you understand my question? Your parents send you to school. You attend classes, you learn mathematics, you learn geography, you learn history. Why? Have you ever asked why you want to be educated, what is the point of being educated? What is the point of your passing examinations and getting degrees? Is it to get married, get a job and settle down in life as millions and millions of people do? Is that what you are going to do, is that the meaning of education? Do you understand what I am talking about? This is really a very serious question. The whole world is questioning the basis of education. We see what education has been used for. Human beings throughout the world - whether in Russia or in China or in America or in Europe or in this country - are being educated to conform, to fit into society and into their culture, to fit into the stream of social and economic activity, to be sucked into that vast stream that has been flowing for thousands of years. Is that education, or is education something entirely different? Can education see to it that the human mind is not drawn into that vast stream and so destroyed; see that the mind is never sucked into that stream; so that, with such a mind, you can be an entirely different human being with a different quality to life? Are you going to be educated that way? Or are you going to allow your parents, society, to dictate to you so that you become pad of the stream of society? Real education means that a human mind, your mind, not only is capable of being excellent in mathematics, geography and history, but also can never, under any circumstances, be drawn into the stream of society. Because that stream which we call living, is very corrupt, is immoral, is violent, is greedy. That stream is our culture. So, the question is how to bring about the right kind of education so that the mind can withstand all temptations, all influences, the bestiality of this civilization and this culture. We have come to a point in history where we have to create a new culture, a totally different kind of existence, not based on consumerism and industrialization, but a culture based upon a real quality of religion. Now how does one bring about, through education, a mind that is entirely different, a mind that is not greedy, not envious? How does one create a mind that is not ambitious, that is extraordinarily active, efficient; that has a real perception of what is true in daily life which is after all religion. Now, let us find out what is the real meaning and intention of education. Can your mind, which has been conditioned by society, the culture in which you have lived, be transformed through education so that you will never under any circumstances enter the stream of society? Is it possible to educate you differently? `Educate' in the real sense of that word; not to transmit from the teachers to the students some information about mathematics or history or geography, but in the very instruction of these subjects to bring about a change in your mind. Which means that you have to be extraordinarily critical. You have to learn never to accept anything which you yourself do not see clearly, never to repeat what another has said. I think you should put these questions to yourself, not occasionally, but every day. Find out. Listen to everything, to the birds, to that cow calling. Learn about everything in yourself, because if you learn from yourself about yourself, then you will not be a secondhand human being. So you should, if I may suggest, from now on, find out how to live entirely differently and that is going to be difficult, for I am afraid most of us like to find an easy way of living. We like to repeat and what other people say, what other people do, because it is the easiest way to live - to conform to the old pattern or to a new pattern. We have to find out what it means never to conform and what it means to live without fear. This is your life, and nobody is going to teach you, no book, no guru. You have to earn from yourself, not from books. There is a great deal to learn about yourself. It is an endless thing, it is a fascinating thing, and when you learn about yourself from ourself, out of that learning wisdom comes. Then you can live a most extraordinary, happy, beautiful life. Right? Now, will you ask me questions? Student: The world is full of callous people, indifferent people, cruel people, and how can you change those people? Krishnamurti: The world is full of callous people, indifferent people, cruel people, and how can you change those people? Is that it? Why do you bother about changing others? Change yourself. Otherwise as you grow up you will also become callous. You will also become indifferent. You will also become cruel. The past generation is vanishing, it is going, and you are coming, and if you also prove callous, indifferent, cruel, you will also build the same society. What matters is that you change, that you are not callous, that you are not indifferent. When you say all this is the business of the older generation, have you seen them, have you watched them, have you felt for them? If you have, you will do something. Change yourself and test it by action. Such action is one of the most extraordinary things. But we want to change everybody except ourselves, which means, really, we do not want to change, we want others to change, and so we remain callous, indiffer- ent, cruel, hoping the environment will change so that we can continue in our own way. You understand what I am talking about? Student: You ask us to change, what do we change into? Krishnamurti: You ask us to change, what is it we change into? You cannot change into a monkey, probably you would like to, but you cannot. Now when you say, "I want to change into something" - listen to this carefully - if you say to yourself, "I must change, I must change myself into something", the "into something" is a pattern which you have created, haven't you? Do you see that? Look, you are violent or greedy and you want to change yourself into a person who is not greedy. Not wanting to be greedy is another form of greed, isn't it? Do you see that? But if you say, "I am greedy, I will find out what it means, why I am greedy, what is involved in it", then, when you understand greed, you will be free of greed. Do you understand what I am talking about? Let me explain. I am greedy and I struggle, fight, make tremendous efforts not to be greedy. I have already an idea, a picture, an image of what it means not to be greedy. So I am conforming to an idea which I think is non-greed. You understand? Whereas if I look at my greed, if I understand why I am greedy, the nature of my greed, the structure of greed, then, when I begin to understand all that, I am free of greed. Therefore, freedom from greed is something entirely different from trying to become non-greedy. Do you see the difference? Freedom from greed is something which is entirely different from saying, "I must be a great man so I must be non-greedy?" Have you understood? I was thinking last night, that I have been to this valley, off and on, for about forty years. People have come and gone. Trees have died and new trees have grown. Different children have come, passed through his school, have become engineers, housewives and disappeared altogether into the masses. I meet them occasionally, at an airport or at a meeting, very ordinary people. And if you are not very careful, you are also going to end up that way. Student: What do you mean by ordinary? Krishnamurti: To be like the rest of men; with their worries, with their corruption, violence, brutality, indifference, callousness. To want a job, to want to hold on to a job, whether you are efficient or not, to die in the job. That is what is called ordinary - to have nothing new, nothing fresh, no joy in life, never to be curious, intense, passionate, never to find out, but merely to conform. That is what I mean by ordinary. It is called being bourgeois. It is a mechanical way of living, a routine, a boredom. Student: How can we get rid of being ordinary? Krishnamurti: How can you get rid of being ordinary? Do not be ordinary. You cannot get rid of it. Just do not be it. Student: How, Sir? Krishnamurti: There is no "how". You see that is one of the most destructive questions: "Tell me how"? Man has always been saying, throughout the world, "Tell me how". If you see a snake, a poisonous cobra, you do not say, "Please tell me how to run away from it". You run away from it. So in the same way, if you see that you are ordinary, run, leave it, not tomorrow, but instantly. Since you will not ask any more questions. I am going to propose something. You know people talk a great deal about meditation, don't they? Student: They do. Krishnamurti: You know nothing about it. I am glad. Because you know nothing about it, you can learn about it. It is like not knowing French or Latin or Italian. Because you do not know, you can learn, you can learn as though for the first time. Those people who already know what meditation is, they have to unlearn and then learn. You see the difference? Since you do not know what meditation is, let us learn about it. To learn about meditation, you have to see how your mind is working. You have to watch, as you watch a lizard going by, walking across the wall. You see all its four feet, how it sticks to the wall, and as you watch, you see all the movements. In the same way, watch your thinking. Do not correct it. Do not suppress it. Do not say, "All this is too difficult". Just watch; now, this morning. First of all sit absolutely still. Sit comfortably, cross your legs, sit absolutely still, close your eyes, and see if you can keep your eyes from moving. You understand? Your eye balls are apt to move, keep them completely quiet, for fun. Then, as you sit very quietly, find out what your thought is doing. Watch it as you watched the lizard. Watch thought, the way it runs, one thought after another. So you begin to learn, to observe. Are you watching your thoughts - how one thought pursues another thought, thought saying, "This is a good thought, this is a bad thought"? When you go to bed at night, and when you walk, watch your thought. Just watch thought, do not correct it, and then you will learn the beginning of meditation. Now sit very quietly. Shut your eyes and see that the eyeballs do not move at all. Then watch your thoughts so that you learn. Once you begin to learn there is no end to learning. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO STUDENTS CHAPTER 2 'ON THE RELIGIOUS MIND AND THE SCIENTIFIC MIND' Early this morning I saw a beautiful bird, a black bird with a red neck. I do not know what the bird is called. It was flying from tree to tree and there was a song in its heart, and it was a lovely thing to behold. I would like this morning to talk to you of a rather serious matter. You should listen carefully and if you want to, perhaps later on, you may be able to discuss it with your teachers. I want to talk about something which concerns the whole world, about which the whole world is disturbed. It is the question of the religious spirit and the scientific mind. There are these two attitudes in the world. These are the only two states of mind that are of value, the true religious spirit and the true scientific mind. Every other activity is destructive, leading to a great deal of misery, confusion and sorrow. The scientific mind is very factual. Discovery is its mission, its perception. It sees things through a microscope, through a telescope; everything is to be seen actually as it is; from that perception, science draws conclusions, builds up theories. Such a mind moves from fact to fact. The spirit of science has nothing to do with individual conditions, with nationalism, with race, with prejudice. Scientists are there to explore matter, to investigate the structure of the earth and of the stars and the planets, to find out how to cure man's diseases, how to prolong man's life, to explain time, both the past and the future. But the scientific mind and its discoveries are used and exploited by the nationalistic mind, by the mind that is India, by the mind that is Russia, by the mind that is America. Scientific discovery is utilized and exploited by sovereign states and continents. Then there is the religious mind, the true religious mind that does not belong to any cult, to any group, to any religion, to any organized church. The religious mind is not the Hindu mind, the Christian mind, the Buddhist mind, or the Muslim mind. The religious mind does not belong to any group which calls itself religious. The religious mind is not the mind that goes to churches, temples, mosques. Nor is it a religious mind that holds to certain forms of beliefs, dogmas. The religious mind is completely alone. It is a mind that has seen through the falsity of churches, dogmas, beliefs, traditions. Not being nationalistic, not being conditioned by its environment, such a mind has no horizons, no limits. It is explosive, new, young, fresh, innocent. The innocent mind, the young mind, the mind that is extraordinarily pliable, subtle, has no anchor. It is only such a mind that can experience that which you call God, that which is not measurable. A human being is a true human being when the scientific spirit and the true religious spirit go together. Then human beings will create a good world - not the world of the communist or the capitalist, of Brahmins, or of Roman Catholics. In fact the true Brahmin is the person who does not belong to any religious creed, has no class, no authority; no position in society. He is the true Brahmin, the new human being, who combines both the scientific and the religious mind, and therefore is harmonious without any contradiction within himself. And I think the purpose of education is to create this new mind, which is explosive, and does not conform to a pattern which society has set. A religious mind is a creative mind. It has not only to finish with the past but also to explode in the present. And this mind - not the interpreting mind of books, of the Gita, the Upanishads, the Bible - which is capable of investigating, is also capable of creating an explosive reality. There is no interpretation here nor dogma. It is extraordinarily difficult to be religious and to have a clear and precise, scientific mind, to have a mind that is not afraid, that is unconcerned with its own security, its own fears. You cannot have a religious mind without knowing yourself, without knowing all about yourself - your body, your mind, your emotions, how the mind works, how thought functions. And to go beyond all that, to uncover all that, you must approach it with a scientific mind which is precise, clear, un-prejudiced, which does not condemn, which observes, which sees. When you have such a mind you are really a cultured human being, a human being who knows compassion. Such a human being knows what it is to be alive. How does one bring this about? For it is imperative to help the student to be scientific, to think very clearly, precisely, to be sharp, as well as to help him uncover the depths of his mind, to go beyond words, his various labels as the Hindu, Muslim, Christian. Is it possible to educate the student to go beyond all labels and find out, experience that something which is not measured by the mind, which no books contain, to which no guru can lead you? If such an education is possible in a school like this, it will be remarkable. You must all see that it is worthwhile to create such a school. That is what the teachers and I have been discussing for some days. We have talked of a great many things - about authority, about discipline, how to teach, what to teach, what listening is, what education is, what culture is, how to sit still. Merely to pay attention to dance, to song, to arithmetic, to lessons, is not the whole of life. It is also part of life to sit still and look at yourself, to have insight, to see. It is also necessary to observe how to think, what to think and why you are thinking. It is also part of life to look at birds, to watch the village people, their squalor - which each one of us has brought about, which society maintains. All this is part of education. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO STUDENTS CHAPTER 3 'ON KNOWLEDGE AND INTELLIGENCE' You are here to gather knowledge - historical, biological, linguistic, mathematical, scientific, geographical, and so on. Apart from the knowledge that you acquire here, there is collective knowledge, the knowledge of the race, of your grandfathers, of your past generations. They all had a great many experiences, a great many things happened to them, and their collective experience has become knowledge. Then there is the knowledge of your own personal experiences, your own reactions, impressions, your own tendencies and inclinations, which have assumed their own peculiar forms. So there is scientific, biological, mathematical, physical, geographical, historical knowledge; there is also the collective knowledge of the past which is the tradition of the community, the race; then there is the personal knowledge which you yourself have experienced. There are these three kinds of knowledge - scientific, collective, personal. Do they collectively make for intelligence? Now what is knowledge? is knowledge related to intelligence? Intelligence uses knowledge, intelligence being the capacity to think clearly, objectively, sanely, healthily. Intelligence is a state in which there is no personal emotion involved, no personal opinion, prejudice or inclination. Intelligence is the capacity for direct understanding. I am afraid this is rather difficult, but it is important, it is good for you to exercise your brain. So there is knowledge, which is the past continually being added to, and there is intelligence. Intelligence is the quality of the mind that is very sensitive, very alert, very aware. Intelligence does not hold on to any particular judgement or evaluation, but is capable of thinking very clearly, objectively. Intelligence has no involvement. Are you following? Now, how is this intelligence to be cultivated? What is the capacity of this intelligence? You are living here, being educated in all the various disciplines, in various branches of knowledge. Are you also being educated so that intelligence comes into being at the same time? Do you see the point? You may have a very good knowledge of mathematics or engineering. You may take a degree, enter a college and be a first class engineer. But at the same time, are you becoming sensitive, alert? Are you thinking objectively, clearly, with intelligence, understanding? Is there a harmony between knowledge and intelligence, a balance between the two? You cannot think clearly if you are prejudiced, if you have opinions. You cannot think clearly if you are not sensitive; sensitive to nature, sensitive to all the things that are happening around you, sensitive not only to what is happening outside you but also inside you. If you are not sensitive, if you are not aware, you cannot think clearly. Intelligence implies that you see the beauty of the earth, the beauty of the trees, the beauty of the skies, the lovely sunset, the stars, the beauty of subtlety. Now, is this intelligence being gathered by you here in this school? Are you gathering it or only gathering knowledge through books? If you have no intelligence, no sensitivity, then knowledge can become very dangerous. It can be used for destructive purposes. This is what the whole world is doing. Have you the intelligence that questions, tries to find out? What are the teachers and you doing to bring about this quality of intelligence, which sees the beauty of the land, the dirt, the squalor, and is also aware of the inner happenings, how one thinks, how one observes the subtlety of thought? Are you doing all this? If not, what is the point of your being educated? Now what is the function of an educator? Is it merely to give you information, knowledge, or is it to bring about this intelligence in you? If I were a teacher here, do you know what I would do? First of all, I would want you to question me about everything - not about knowledge, that is very simple, but to question me about how to look, how to look at these hills, to look at that tamarind tree, how to listen to a bird, how to follow a stream. I would help you to look at the marvellous earth and nature, the beauty of the land, the redness of the soil. Then I would say, look at the peasants, the villagers. Look at them, do not criticize, just look at their squalor, their poverty, not the way you look at them at pre- sent, with utter indifference. There are those huts there, have you been there? Have the teachers been down there and looked at those huts, and if they all have, what have they done? So I will make you look, which is to make you sensitive, and you cannot be sensitive if you are careless, indifferent to everything that is happening around you. Then I would say, "To be intelligent, you must know what you are doing, the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you eat." You understand? I would talk to you about your food. I would say, "Look, discuss, do not be afraid to ask any questions, find out, learn", and in your classes I would discuss a subject with you, how to read, how to learn, what it means to pay attention. If you say you want to look out of the window, I would say look out of the window, see everything that you want to see out of the window, and after you have seen it, look at your book with equal interest and pleasure. Then I would say, "Through books, through discussions I have helped you to be intelligent; let me help you to find out how to live in this world sanely, healthily, not half asleep." That is the function of a teacher, of an educator, not just to give you a lot of data, knowledge, but to show you the whole expanse of life, the beauty of it, the ugliness of it, the delight, the joy, the fear, the agony. So that when you leave this place, you are a tremendous human being who can use your intelligence in life, not just a thoughtless, destructive, callous human being. Now you have listened, the teachers, the principal and students, you have all listened. What are you going to do about it? You know, it is as much your responsibility, as students, as it is the responsibility of the teachers. It is the respon- sibility of the students to demand, to ask, not just to say "I will sit down, teach me". It means that you must be tremendously intelligent, sensitive, alive, unprejudiced. It is also essential for the teacher to see that you are intelligent so that when you leave Rishi Valley you leave with a smile, with glory in your heart, so that you are sensitive, ready to cry, to laugh. Student: If you are very sensitive, do you not think you are apt to become emotional? Krishnamurti: What is wrong with being emotional? When I see those poor people living in poverty, I feel very strongly. Is that wrong? There is nothing wrong in feeling emotion when you see the squalor, the dirt, the poverty around you. But you also feel strongly if another says something ugly about you. When this happens what will you do? Because of your emotion will you hit back at him? Or because you are sensitive, emotional, will you be aware of what you are going to do? If there is an interval before your response and you observe, are sensitive to it, then in that interval intelligence comes in. Allow that interval; in it begin to watch. If you are tremendously aware of the problem there is instant action and that instant action is the right action of intelligence. Student: Why are we conditioned? Krishnamurti: Why do you think we are conditioned? It is very simple. You have asked the question. Now, exercise your brain. Find out why you are conditioned. You are born in this country, you live in an environment, in a culture, you grow into a young child, and then what takes place? Watch the babies around you. Watch the mothers, the fathers, if they are Hindus or Muslims or communists or capitalists; they say to the child, "Do this, do that". The child sees the grandmother going to a temple, preforming rituals, and the child gradually accepts all that. Or the parents may say "I don't believe in rituals" and the child also accepts that. The simple fact is that the mind, the brain of the child is like putty or clay and on that putty, impressions are made, like the grooves in a record. Everything is registered. So in a child everything is registered consciously or unconsciously, until gradually he becomes a Hindu, Muslim, Catholic or a non-believer. He then makes divisions - as my belief, your belief, my god, your god, my country, your country. You have been conditioned to make tremendous effort; you have to make an effort to study, to pass an examination, you have to make an effort to be good. So, the question is how is the mind, which is conditioned, to unravel itself, to get out of conditioning? How do you propose to get out of it? Now exercise your intelligence to find out. Do not follow somebody who says, "Do this and you will get unconditioned; find out how you will uncondition yourself. Come on, answer me, tell me, discuss with me. Student: Can you tell us how to uncondition ourselves? Krishnamurti: To fall into the trap of another conditioning, is that it? First of all, do you know that you are conditioned? How do you know? Is it only because somebody has told you that you are conditioned that you know? Do you see the difference? That is, somebody tells you that you are hungry, that is one thing, and to know for yourself that you are hungry is altogether different. These two statements are different, aren't they? In the same way, do you know for yourself without somebody telling you that you are conditioned, as a Hindu, a Muslim? Do you know it for yourself? Now I will ask you a question and see whether there is a gap before you answer it. Right? Now observe, think very clearly, unemotionally, without any prejudice. My question is, are you aware that you are conditioned without being told? Are you aware? It is not so very difficult. Do you know what it means to be aware? When there is a pain in the thumb, you are aware there is pain, nobody tells you there is pain. You know it. Now, in the same way do you know that you are conditioned, conditioned into thinking that you are a Hindu, that you believe in this, that you do not believe in that, that you must go to a temple, that you must not go to a temple? Are you aware of it? Student: Yes. Krishnamurti: You are? Now that you are aware that you are conditioned, what next? Student: I will then see whether I want to be unconditioned. Krishnamurti: You are conditioned and you become aware, then what takes place? Then I ask, what is wrong with being conditioned? Now I am conditioned as a Muslim and you are conditioned as a Hindu, right? What takes place? We may live in the same street, but because of my conditioning, my belief, my dogma, and you with your belief, with your dogma, though we may meet in the same street, we are separate, aren't we? So where there is separation there must be conflict. Where there are political, economic, social, nationalistic divisions, there must be conflict. So conditioning is the factor of division. Therefore, in order to live peacefully in this world, let us be free of conditioning, cease to be Muslim or Hindu. This is the factor of intelligence; becoming aware that one is conditioned, then seeing the effect of that conditioning in the world, the divisions, nationalistic, linguistic and so on, and seeing that where there is division there is conflict. When you see this, when you are aware that you are conditioned, that is the operation of intelligence. That is enough for the day. Do you want to ask more questions? Student: How can one be free from prejudice? Krishnamurti: When you say, "how", what do you mean by that word? How am I to get up from this place? All that I have to do is to get up. I never ask how I am to get up? Use your intelligence. Do not be prejudiced. First be aware that you are prejudiced. Do not be told by others that you are prejudiced. They are prejudiced, so do not bother what other people say about your prejudices. First be aware that you are prejudiced. You see what prejudice does - it divides people. Therefore you see that there must be intelligent action, which is that the mind must be capable of being free from prejudice, not ask "how" which means a system, a method. Find out whether your mind can be free from prejudice. See what is involved in it. Why are you prejudiced? Because part of your conditioning is to be prejudiced, and in prejudice there is a great deal of comfort, a great deal of pleasure. So first become aware, become aware of the beauty of the land, become aware of the trees, the colour, the shades, the depth of light, and the beauty of the moving trees, and watch the birds, be aware of all that is around you; then gradually move in, find out, be aware of yourself, be aware how you react in your relationships with your friends - all that brings intelligence. Is that enough for this morning? Then we will do something else. First of all sit completely quiet, comfortably, sit very quietly, relax, I will show you. Now, look at the trees, at the hills, the shape of the hills, look at them, look at the quality of their colour, watch them. Do not listen to me. Watch and see those trees, the yellowing trees, the tamarind, and then look at the bougainvillaea. Look not with your mind but with your eyes. After having looked at all the colours, the shape of the land, of the hills, the rocks, the shadow, then go from the outside to the inside and close your eyes, close your eyes completely. You have finished looking at the things outside, and now with your eyes closed you can look at what is happening inside. Watch what is happening inside you, do not think, but just watch, do not move your eyeballs, just keep them very, very quiet, because there is nothing to see now, you have seen all the things around you, now you are seeing what is happening inside your mind, and to see what is happening inside your mind, you have to be very quiet inside. And when you do this, do you know what happens to you? You become very sensitive, you become very alert to things outside and inside. Then you find out that the outside is the inside, then you find out that the observer is the observed. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO STUDENTS CHAPTER 4 'ON FREEDOM AND ORDER' It is a lovely morning, isn't it? Cool, fresh, and there is dew on the grass and the birds are singing. I hope you enjoyed this morning, as much as I did, looking out of the window, at the cloudless blue sky, the clear shadows, and the sparkling air and all the birds, the trees, and the earth shouting with joy. I hope you listened. I would like, this morning, to talk about something that we all must understand. To understand something, one has to listen, as you would listen to those birds. If you would hear that clear call, the song of the bird, you must listen very closely, very attentively, you must follow each note, follow each movement of the sound, see how deeply it goes and how far it reaches. And if you know how to listen, you learn a great deal; to listen is more important than anything else in life. To know how to listen, you have to be very attentive. If your mind, if your thoughts, if your heart is thinking about other things, feeling other things, you cannot listen to the birds. To listen, you have to give your whole attention. When you are watching a bird and are looking at the feathers, the colours, the beak, the size and the lovely shape of the bird, then you are giving your heart, your mind and body, everything that you have, to watch it. And then you are really part of that bird. You really enjoy it. So, in the same way, this morning, please listen, not that you must agree or disagree with what we are talking about, but just listen. Have you ever sat on the banks of a river and watched the water go by? You cannot do anything about the water. There is the clear water, the dead leaves, the branches. You see a dead animal go by, and you are watching all that. You see the movement of the water, the clarity of the water, the swift current of the water and the fullness of the water. But you cannot do anything. You watch and you let the water flow by. So in the same way listen to what I want to talk about this morning. Freedom does not exist without order. The two go together. If you cannot have order, you cannot have freedom. The two are inseparable. If you say: "I will do what I like. I will turn up for my meals when I like; I will come to the class when I like" - you create disorder. You have to take into consideration what other people want. To run things smoothly, you have to come on time. If I had come ten minutes late this morning I would have kept you waiting. So I have to have consideration. I have to think of others. I have to be polite, considerate, be concerned about other people. Out of that consideration, out of that thoughtfulness, out of that watchfulness, both outward and inward, comes order and with that order there comes freedom. You know, soldiers all over the world are drilled every day, they are told what to do, to walk in line. They obey orders implicitly without thinking. Do you know what that does to man? When you are told what to do, what to think, to obey, to follow, do you know what it does to you? Your mind becomes dull, it loses its initiative, its quickness. This external, outward imposition of discipline makes the mind stupid, it makes you conform, it makes you imitate. But if you discipline yourself by watching, listening, being considerate, being very thoughtful - out of that watchfulness, that listening, that consideration for others, comes order. Where there is order, there is always freedom. If you are shouting, talking, you cannot hear what others have to say. You can only hear clearly when you sit quietly, when you give your attention. Nor can you have order, if you are not free to watch, if you are not free to listen, if you are not free to be considerate. This problem of freedom and order is one of the most difficult and urgent problems in life. It is a very complex problem. It needs to be thought over much more than mathematics, geography or history. If you are not really free, you can never blossom, you can never be good, there can be no beauty. If the bird is not free, it cannot fly. If the seed is not free to blossom, to push out of the earth, it cannot live. Everything must have freedom, including man. Human beings are frightened of freedom. They do not want freedom. Birds, rivers, trees, all demand freedom and man must demand it too, not in half measures, but completely. Freedom liberty, the independence to express what one thinks, to do what one wants to do, is one of the most important things in life. To be really free from anger, jealousy, brutality, cruelty; to be really free within oneself, is one of the most difficult and dangerous things. You cannot have freedom merely for the asking. You cannot say, "I will be free to do what I like." Because there are other people also wanting to be free, also wanting to express what they feel, also wanting to do what they wish. Everybody wants to be free, and yet they want to express themselves - their anger, their brutality, their ambition their competitiveness and so on. So there is always conflict. I want to do something and you want to do something and so we fight. Freedom is not doing what one wants, because man cannot live by himself. Even the monk, even the sannyasi is not free to do what he wants, because he has to struggle for what he wants, to fight with himself, to argue within himself. And it requires enormous intelligence, sensitivity, understanding to be free. And yet it is absolutely necessary that every human being, whatever his culture, be free. So you see, freedom cannot exist without order. Student: Do you mean that to be free there should be no discipline? Krishnamurti: I carefully explained that you cannot have freedom without order and order is discipline. I do not like to use that word "discipline" because it is laden with all kinds of meaning. Discipline means conformity, imitation, obedience; it means to do what you are told; doesn't it? But, if you want to be free - and human beings must be completely free, otherwise they cannot flower, otherwise they cannot be real human beings - you have to find out for yourself what it is to be orderly, what it is to be punctual, kind, generous, unafraid. The discovery of all that is discipline. This brings about order. To find out you have to examine and to examine you must be free. If you are considerate, if you are watching, if you are listening, then, because you are free, you will be punctual, you will come to the class regularly, you will study, you will be so alive that you will want to do things rightly. Student: You say that freedom is very dangerous to man. Why is it so? Krishnamurti: Why is freedom dangerous? You know what society is? Student: It is a big group of people which tells you what to do and what not to do. Krishnamurti: It is a big group of people which tells you what to do and what not to do. It is also the culture, the customs, the habits of a certain community; the social, moral, ethical, religious structure in which man lives, that is generally called society. Now, if each individual in that society did what he liked, he would be a danger to that society. If you did what you liked here in the school, what would happen? You would be a danger to the rest of the school. Wouldn't you? So people do not genteelly want others to be free. A man who is really free, not in ideas, but inwardly free from greed, ambition, envy, cruelty, is considered a danger to people, because he is entirely different from the ordinary man. So, society either worships him or kills him or is indifferent to him. Student: You said that we must have freedom and order but how are we to get it? Krishnamurti: First of all, you cannot depend on others; you cannot expect somebody to give you freedom and order whether it is your father, your mother, your husband, your teacher. You have to bring it about in yourself. This is the first thing to realize, that you cannot ask anything from another, except food, clothes and shelter. You cannot possibly ask, or look to anyone, your gurus or your gods. Nobody can give you freedom and order. So, you have to find out how to bring about order in yourself. That is, you have to watch and find out for yourself what it means to bring about virtue in yourself. Do you know what virtue is - to be moral, to be good? Virtue is order. So, you have to find out in yourself how to be good, how to be kind, how to be considerate. And out of that consideration, out of that watching, you bring about order and therefore freedom. You depend on others to tell you what you should do, that you should not look out of the window, that you should be punctual, that you should be kind. But if you were to say: "I will look out of the window when I want to look but when I study I am going to look at the book," you bring order within yourself without being told by others. Student: What does one gain by being free? Krishnamurti: Nothing. When you talk about what one gains, you are really thinking in terms of merchandise. Are you not? I will do this and in return for it, please give me something. I am kind to you because it is profitable for me. But that is not kindliness. So as long as we are thinking in terms of gaining something, there is no freedom. If you say, "If I get freedom, I will be able to do this and that," then it is not freedom. So do not think in terms of utility. As long as we are thinking in terms of using, there is no question of freedom at all. Freedom can only exist when there is no motive. You do not love somebody because he gives you food, or clothes or shelter. Then it is not love. Do you ever walk by yourself Or do you always go with others? If you go out by yourself sometimes, not too far away because you are very young, then you will get to know yourself, what you think, what you feel, what is virtue, what you want to be. Find out. And you cannot find out about yourself if you are always talking, going about with your friends, with half a dozen people. Sit under a tree quietly by yourself, not with a book. Just look at the stars, the clear sky, the birds, the shape of the leaves. Watch the shadow. Watch the bird across the sky. By being with yourself, sitting quietly under a tree, you begin to understand the workings of your own mind and that is as important as going to class. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO STUDENTS CHAPTER 5 'ON SENSITIVITY' Some of the teachers of this school were discussing with me, the other day, how important it is to be sensitive, how necessary it is to have a sensitive body and a sensitive mind. A human being who is aware of his environment, as well as aware of every movement of thought and feeling, who is a harmonious whole, is sensitive. How does that sensitivity come about? How can there be a complete development of the body, of the emotions, of the capacity to think deeply and widely, so that the whole being becomes astonishingly alive to everything about it, to every challenge, to every influence? And is that possible, in a world like this, a world where technological knowledge is all important, where making money, being an engineer or an electronic expert is assuming such importance? Is it possible to be sensitive? The politician, the electronics expert become marvellous human machines, but lead very narrow lives. They are sorrowful people having no depth in them. All they know is their little world, the world determined by their own field. A life that is held in technological knowledge is a very narrow, limited life. It is bound to breed a great deal of sorrow and misery. But can one have technological knowledge, be able to do things, make a little money and still live in the world with intensity, with intensity, with clarity, with vision? That is the real question. Life is not merely going to the office day after day. Life is extraordinarily vital, important, and for that you must be sensitive, you must have the sensitivity that appreciates beauty. You know, there is something extraordinary about beauty. Beauty is never personal, though we make it personal. We put flowers in our hair, have nice saris, wear fine shirts and trousers, look very smart and try to be as beautiful as we can; that is a very limited beauty. I do not say that you should not wear nice clothes, but merely that - that is not appreciation of beauty. The appreciation of beauty is to see a tree, to see a painting, to see a statue, to see the clouds, the skies, the birds on the wing, to see the morning star, and the sunset behind these hills. To see such immense beauty we must cut through our little personal lives. You may have good taste. Do you know what good taste means? To know how to combine colours, how not to wear colours that jar, not to say something that is cruel about anybody, to feel kindly, to see the beauty of a house, to have good pictures in your room, to have a room with right proportions. All that is good taste, which can be cultivated. But good taste is not the appreciation of beauty. Beauty is never personal. When beauty is made personal it becomes self-centred. Self concern is the source of sorrow. You know, most people are not happy in the world. They have money, they have position and power. But remove the money, the position, the power and you see underneath an extreme shallowness of head. The source of their shallowness, misery, conflict and extreme anguish is a feeling of guilt and fear. To really appreciate beauty is to see a mountain, to see the lovely trees without the "you" being there; to enjoy them, to look at them although they may belong to another; to see the flow of a river and move with it from beginning to end; to be lost in the beauty, in the vitality, in the rapidity of the river. But you cannot do all that if you are merely concerned with power, with money, with a career. That is only a part of life and to be concerned only with a part of life is to be insensitive and, therefore, to lead a life of shallowness and misery. A petty life always produces misery and confusion not only for itself but for others. I am not moralizing, I am just stating the facts of existence. The function of your teachers is to educate not only the partial mind but the totality of the mind; to educate you so that you do not get caught in the little whirlpool of existence but live in the whole river of life. This is the whole function of education. The right kind of education cultivates your whole being, the totality of your mind. It gives your mind and heart a depth, an understanding of beauty. Probably, the girls among you will grow up and get married and the boys will have careers and that will be the end. You know, the moment you get married - I am not saying you should not get married - you have your husband, children, and responsibilities begin to crowd in like crows upon a tree. The husband, the house, your children, become a habit and you become caught in that habit. All through your life, till you die, you will be working, working in the house or going to the office, every day. I wondered - the other morning when I saw you all having a good time - what is going to happen to you all? Will you live a life with a fire burning in you or will you become for the rest of your life a businessman or a housewife? What are you going to do? Should you not be educated to cut through respectability, to burst through all conformity? Probably I am saying something dangerous, but it does not matter. Perhaps you will give an ear and perhaps this will sink somewhere into your consciousness and perhaps in a moment when you are about to make a decision, this may alter the course of your life. Student: How is one to be sensitive? Krishnamurti: I do not know if you noticed the other evening, it was drizzling. There was a sharp shower. There were dark, heavy, rain-laden clouds. There were also clouds that were full of light, white, with a rose-coloured light inside them. And there were clouds that were almost like feathers going by. It was a marvellous sight and there was great beauty. If you do not see and feel all these things when you are young, when you are still curious, when you are still indecisive, when you are still looking, searching, asking; if you do not feel now, then you never will. As you grow older life encloses you, life becomes hard. You hardly look at the hills, a beautiful face or a smile. Without feeling affection, kindness, tenderness, life becomes very dreary ugly, brutal. And as you grow older, you fill your lives with politics, with concern over your jobs, over your families. You become afraid and gradually lose that extraordinary quality of looking at the sunset, at clouds, at the stars of an evening. As you grow older, the intellect begins to create havoc with your lives. I do not mean that you must not have a clear, reasoning intellect, but the predominance of it makes you dull, makes you lose the finer things of life. You must feel very strongly about everything, not just one or two things, but about everything. If you feel very strongly, then little things will not fill your life. Politics, jobs, careers are all little things. If you feel strongly, if you feel vitally, vigorously, you will live in a state of deep silence. Your mind will be very clear, simple, strong. As men grow older they lose this quality of feeling, this sympathy, this tenderness for others. Having lost it they begin to invent religions. They go to temples, take drinks, drugs, to awaken this spontaneity. They become religious. But religion in the world is put together by man. All temples, churches, dogmas, beliefs are invented by man. Man is afraid because he is lost without a deep sense of beauty, a deep sense of affection. And, having lost this, superficial ceremonies, going to temples, repeating mantras, rituals become very important. In reality, they have no importance at all. Religion born of fear becomes ugly superstition. So, one has to understand fear. You know, one is afraid: afraid of one's parents, afraid of not passing examinations, afraid of one's teachers, afraid of the dog, afraid of the snake. You have to understand fear and be free of fear. When you are free of fear there is the strong feeling of being good, of thinking very clearly, of looking at stars, of looking at clouds, of looking at faces with a smile. And when there is no fear, you can go much further. Then you can find out for yourself that for which man has searched generation upon generation. In caves in the south of France and in northern Africa there are 25,000 year old paintings of animals fighting men, of deer, of cattle. They are extraordinary paintings. They show man's endless search, his battle with life and his search for the extraordinary thing called God. But he never finds that extraordinary thing. You can only come upon it darkly, unknowingly, when there is no fear of any kind. The moment there is no fear you have very strong feelings. The stronger you feel, the less you are concerned about small things. It is fear that drives away all feeling of beauty, of the quality of great silence. As you study mathematics, so you have to study fear. You must know fear and not escape from it so that you can look at fear. It is like going for a walk and suddenly coming upon a snake, jumping away and watching the snake. If you are very quiet, very still, unafraid, then you can look very closely, keeping a safe distance. You can look at the black tongue and the eyes that have no eyelids. You can look at the scales, the patterns of the skin. If you watch the snake very closely you see and appreciate it and perhaps have great affection for that snake. But you cannot look if you are afraid, if you run away. So, in the same way as you look at a snake, you have to look at this battle called life, with its sorrow, misery, confusion, conflict, war, hatred, greed, ambition, anxiety and guilt. You can only look at life and love if there is no fear. Student: Why do we all want to live? Krishnamurti: Don't laugh because a little boy asks, when life is so transient, why do we crave to live? Isn't it very sad for a little boy to ask that question? That means he has seen for himself that everything passes away. Birds die, leaves fall, people grow old, man has disease, pain, sorrow, suffering; a little joy, a little pleasure and unending work. And the boy asks why do we cling to all this? He sees how young people grow old before their age, before their time. He sees death. And man clings to life because there is nothing else to cling to. His gods, his temples, don't contain truth; his sacred books are just words. So he asks why people cling to life when there is so much misery. You understand? What do you answer? What do the older people answer? What do the teachers of this school answer? There is silence. The older people have lived on ideas, on words and the boy says, "l am hungry, feed me with food, not with words." He does not trust you and so he asks, "Why do we cling to all this?" Do you know why you cling? Because you know nothing else. You cling to your house, you cling to your books, you cling to your idols, gods, conclusions, your attachments, your sorrows, because you have nothing else and all that you do brings unhappiness. To find out if there is anything else, you must let go what you cling to. If you want to cross the river, you must move away from this bank. You cannot sit on one bank. You want to be free from misery and yet you will not cross the river. So, you cling to something that you know however miserable it is and you are afraid to let go because you don't know what is on the other side of the river. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO STUDENTS CHAPTER 6 'ON FEAR' I am sure you have often heard from politicians, from educators, from your parents and from the public that you are the coming generation. But when they talk about you as a new generation, they really do not mean it because they make sure that you conform to the older pattern of society. They really do not want you to be a new, different kind of human being. They want you to be mechanical, to fit in with tradition, to conform, to believe, to accept authority. In spite of this, if you can actually free yourself from fear, not theoretically, not ideally, not merely outwardly but actually, inwardly, deeply, then you can be a different human being. Then you can become the coming generation. The older people are ridden with fear - fear of death, fear of losing jobs, fear of public opinion. They are completely held in the grip of fear. So their gods, their scriptures, their puja, are all within the field of fear and therefore the mind is curiously warped, perverted. Such a mind cannot think straight, cannot reason logically, sanely, healthily, because it is rooted in fear. Watch the older generation and you will see how fearful it is of everything - of death, of disease, of going against the current of tradition, of being different, of being new. Fear is what prevents the flowering of the mind, the flowering of goodness. Most of us learn through fear. Fear is the essence of authority and obedience; parents and governments demand obedience. There is the authority of the book; the authority according to Sankara, Buddha; the authority according to Einstein. Most people are followers; they make the originator into an authority and through propaganda, through influence, through literature, they imprint on the delicate brain the necessity of obedience. What happens to you when you obey? You cease to think. Because you feel that the authorities know so much, are such powerful people, have so much money, can turn you out of the house, because they use the words "duty, love," you succumb, you yield, you begin obey, and become a slave to an idea, to an impression, to influence. When the brain is conforming to a pattern of obedience, it is no longer capable of freshness, no longer capable of thinking simply and directly. Now, is it possible to learn without authority? Do you know what learning is? Acquiring knowledge is one thing but learning is an altogether different thing. A machine can acquire information like a robot or like an electronic computer. A machine acquires knowledge because it is being fed certain information. it gathers more and more information which then becomes knowledge. It has the capacity to acquire information, store it and respond when it is asked a question. On the other hand when the human mind can learn, then it is capable of more than just acquiring and storing up. But there can be learning only when the mind is fresh, when it does not say "I know." So, one must differentiate, separate learning from acquiring knowledge. Acquiring knowledge makes you mechanical but learning makes the mind very fresh, young, subtle. And you cannot learn if you are merely following the authority of knowledge. Most educators, right through the world, are merely acquiring and imparting knowledge and so are making the mind mechanical and incapable of learning. You can only learn when you do not know. Learning only comes into being when there is no fear and when there is no authority. The question is, how do you teach mathematics, or any other subject without authority, and therefore, without fear? Fear is essentially involved in competition. Whether it is competition in a class or competition in life. To be afraid of being nobody, of not arriving, of not succeeding, is at the root of competition. But when there is fear, you cease to learn. And so it seems to me that it is the function of education to eliminate fear, to see that you do not become mechanical and at the same time to give you knowledge. To learn without becoming mechanical, which means to learn without fear, is a complex issue. It involves the elimination of all competition. In this process of competition, you conform, and gradually you destroy the subtlety, the freshness, the youth of the brain. But you cannot deny knowledge. So, is it possible to have know- ledge and yet learn to be free from fear? Do you see this? When do you learn most? Have you ever watched yourself learning? Try to watch yourself sometimes and observe yourself learning. You learn most when you have no fear, when you are not threatened by authority, when you are not competing with your neighbour. Then your mind becomes extraordinarily alive. So the issue for the teacher and the issue for you, as a student, is to learn without authority, to acquire knowledge without perverting or dulling the brain and to eliminate fear. Do you see the problem? To learn there must be no conformity, no authority and yet you must acquire knowledge. To combine all this without distorting the brain, is the problem. So that when you grow older, when you pass your examinations and marry, you meet life with a freshness, without fear. Then you are learning about life all the time; not merely interpreting life according to your pattern. Do you know what life is? You are too young to know. I will tell you. Have you seen those villagers in tattered clothes, dirty, perpetually starved, working every day of their lives? That is part of life. Then you see a man riding in a car, his wife covered with jewels, with perfume, having many servants. That is also part of life. Then there is the man who voluntarily gives up riches, lives a very simple life, who is anonymous, does not want to be known, does not proclaim that he is a saint. That is also part of life. Then there is the man who wants to become a hermit, sannyasi, and there is also the man who becomes a devotee, who does not want to think, who just blindly follows. That is also part of life. Then there is the man who carefully, logically, sanely thinks, and finding that such thoughts are limited goes beyond thought. That is also part of life. And death is also a part of life, the loss of everything. Belief in the gods and goddesses, in saviours, in paradise, in hell, is a part of life. It is a part of life to love, to hate, to feel jealous, to feel greedy, and it is also part of life to go beyond all these trivial things. it is no good growing up and accepting one part of life, the mechanical part concerned with acquiring knowledge, which is to accept the pattern of values created by the past generation. Your parents happen to have money, they send you to school and then to college, they see that you have a job. Then you get married and that is the end of it. All this is only a small segment of life. But there is this vast field of life, an incredibly vast field, to understand which there must be no fear, and that is very difficult. One of the more vital issues in life is the fact that one withers away, disintegrates. Fear and deterioration are related. As you grow older, unless you solve the problem of fear as it arises, immediately, without carrying it over to tomorrow, the deteriorating factor sets in. It is like a disease, like a wound which festers, destroys. Fear of not getting a better job, of not fulfilling yourself, eat into your capacity, your sensitivity, your intellectual, moral fibre. So the solving of the problem of fear and the factor of deterioration are related. Try and find out what you are afraid of and see if you cannot go beyond that fear, not verbally, not theoretically, but actually. Do not accept authority. Acceptance of authority is obedience which only breeds further fear. To understand this extraordinarily complex thing called life, which is both in time and beyond time, you must have a very young, fresh, innocent mind. A mind that carries fear within itself, day after day, month after month, is a mechanical mind. And you see machines cannot solve human problems. You cannot have an innocent fresh young mind if you are ridden with fear, if from childhood until you die, you are trained in fear. That is why a good education, a true education eliminates fear. Student: How can one be completely free from fear? Krishnamurti: First of all, you must know what fear is. If you know your wife, husband, parent, society, you are no longer afraid of them. To know about something completely makes the mind free from fear. How will you find out about fear? Are you afraid of public opinion, public opinion being what your friends think of you? Most of us, especially while we are young, want to look alike, dress alike, talk alike. We do not want to be even slightly different, because to be different implies not to conform, not to accept the pattern. When you begin to question the pattern there is fear. Now examine that fear, go into it. Do not say, "I am afraid", and run away from it. Look at it, face it, find out why you are afraid. Suppose I am afraid of my neighbour, my wife, my god, my country - now what is that fear? Is it actual or is it merely in thought, in time? I will take a simpler example. We are all going to die some time or other. Death is inevitable for all of us and thinking about death creates fear, thinking about something which I do not know creates fear. But if it were actual, if death were there immediately and I were going to die now, there is no fear. You understand? Thought in time creates fear. But if something has to be done immediately there is no fear, because thinking is not possible. If I am going to die the next instant, then I face it, but give me an hour, and I begin say, "My property, my children, my country, I have not finished my book." I get nervous, frightened. So fear is always in time, because time is thought. To eliminate fear you have to consider thought as time and then enquire into this whole process of thinking. It is a little bit difficult. I am afraid of my parents, my society, of what they will say tomorrow or ten days later. My thinking about what might happen projects fear. So can I say, "I am going to look at that fear now, not ten days later"? Can I invite what they are going to say in the present and look at it and if they happen to be right, can I accept it? Why should I be frightened? And if they are wrong, I also accept that. Why should they not be wrong? Why should I be frightened? And I will listen to the teacher to learn, but I am not going to be frightened. So, when I face fear it goes away. But to face fear, I have to enquire, which is quite a complex process because it involves the problem of time. You know, there are two kinds of time: time by the watch, the next minute, tonight, the day after tomorrow; and there is another kind of time which is created by the psyche inside one, by thought - "I shall be a great man", "I shall have a job", "I shall go to Europe" - that is the psychological future, in time and space. Now to understand chronological time by the watch and to understand time as thought and to go beyond both, is really to be free of fear. Student: You said if you know something, you stop feeling afraid of it. But how do you know what death is? Krishnamurti: That is a good question. You are asking, "How do you know what death is and how can you cease to be frightened of it?" I am going to show you. You know there are two kinds of death - bodily death and death of thought. The body is going to die inevitably - like a pencil writing, it eventually wears out. Doctors may invent new kinds of medicine; you may last one hundred and twenty years instead of eighty years. But still there will be death. The physical organism comes to an end. We are not afraid of that. What we are afraid of is the coming to an end of thought, of the "me" that has lived so many years, the "me" that has acquired so much money, that has a family, children, that wants to become important, that wants to have more property, money. That "me', dying is what I am afraid of. Do you see the difference between the two? The physical dying and the "me" dying? The "me" dying is psychologically much more important than the body's dying and that is what we are frightened of. Now take one pleasure, and die to it. I will explain this to you. You see I do not want to go into the whole problem; I am merely indicating something. You see the "me" is the collection of many pleasures and many pains. Can that "me", die to one thing? Then it will know what death means. That is, can I die to a wish? Can I say "I do not want that wish, I do not want that pleasure"? Can I end it, die to it? Do you know anything about meditation? Student: No, Sir. Krishnamurti: But the older people do not know either They sit in a corner, close their eyes and concentrate, like school boys trying to concentrate on a book. That is not meditation. Meditation is something extraordinary, if you know how to do it. I am going to talk a little about it. First of all, sit very quietly; do not force yourself to sit quietly, but sit or lie down quietly without force of any kind. Do you understand? Then watch your thinking. Watch what you are thinking about. You find you are thinking about your shoes, your saris, what you are going to say, the bird outside to which you listen; follow such thoughts and enquire why each thought arises. Do not try to change your thinking. See why certain thoughts arise in your mind so that you begin to understand the meaning of every thought and every feeling without any enforcement. And when a thought arises, do not condemn it, do not say it is right, it is wrong, it is good, it is bad. Just watch it, so that you begin to have a perception, a consciousness which is active in seeing every kind of thought, every kind of feeling. You will know every hidden secret thought, every hidden motive, every feeling, without distortion, without saying it is right, wrong, good or bad. When you look, when you go into thought very very deeply, your mind becomes extraordinarily subtle, alive. No part of the mind is asleep. The mind is completely awake. That is merely the foundation. Then your mind is very quiet. Your whole being becomes very still. Then go through that stillness, deeper, further - that whole process is meditation. Meditation is not to sit in a corner repeating a lot of words; or to think of a picture and go into some wild, ecstatic imaginings. To understand the whole process of your thinking and feeling is to be free from all thought, to be free from all feeling so that your mind, your whole being becomes very quiet. And that is also part of life and with that quietness, you can look at the tree, you can look at people, you can look at the sky and the stars. That is the beauty of life. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO STUDENTS CHAPTER 7 'ON VIOLENCE' There is a great deal of violence in the world. There is physical violence and also inward violence. Physical violence is to kill another, to hurt other people consciously, deliberately, or without thought, to say cruel things, full of antagonism and hate; and inwardly, inside the skin, to dislike people, to hate people, to criticize people. Inwardly, we are always quarrelling, battling, not only with others, but with ourselves. We want people to change, we want to force them to our way of thinking. In the world, as we grow up, we see a great deal of violence, at all levels of human existence. The ultimate violence is war - the killing for ideas, for so called religious principles, for nationalities, the killing to preserve a little piece of land. To do that, man will kill, destroy, maim and also be killed himself. There is enormous violence in the world; the rich wanting to keep people poor and the poor wanting to get rich and in the process hating the rich. And you, being caught in society, are also going to contribute to this. There is violence between husband, wife and children. There is violence, antagonism, hate, cruelty, ugly criticism, anger - all this is inherent in man, inherent in each human being. It is inherent in you. And education is supposed to help you to go beyond all that, not merely to pass an examination and get a job. You have to be educated so that you become a really beautiful, healthy, sane, rational human being, not a brutal man with a very clever brain who can argue and defend his brutality. You are going to face all this violence as you grow up. You will forget all that you have heard here, and will be caught in the stream of society. You will become like the rest of the cruel, hard, bitter, angry, violent world and you will not help to bring about a new society, a new world. But a new world is necessary. A new culture is necessary. The old culture is dead, buried, burnt, exploded, vapourized. You have to create a new culture. A new culture cannot be based on violence. The new culture depends on you because the older generation has built a society based on violence, based on aggressiveness and it is this that has caused all the confusion, all the misery. The older generations have produced this world and you have to change it. You cannot just sit back and say, "I will follow the rest of the people and seek success and position." If you do, your children are going to suffer. You may have a good time, but your children are going to pay for it. So, you have to take all that into account, the outward cruelty of man to man in the name of god, in the name of religion, in the name of self-importance, in the name of the security of the family. You will have to consider the outward cruelty and violence, and the inward violence which you do not yet know. You are still young but as you grow older you will realize how inwardly man goes through hell, goes through great misery, because he is in constant battle with himself, with his wife, with his children, with his neighbours, with his gods. He is in sorrow and confusion and there is no love, no kindliness, no generosity, no charity. And a person may have a Ph.D after his name or he may become a businessman with houses and cars but if he has no love, no affection, kindliness, no consideration, he is really worse than an animal because he contributes to a world that is destructive. So, while you are young, you have to know all these things. You have to be shown all these things. You have to be exposed to all these things so that your mind begins to think. Otherwise you will become like the rest of the world. And without love, without affection, without charity and generosity life becomes a terrible business. That is why one has to look into all these problems of violence. Not to understand violence is to be really ignorant, is to be without intelligence and without culture. Life is something enormous, and merely to carve out a little hole for oneself and remain in that little hole, fighting or everybody, is not to live. It is up to you. From now on you have to know about all these things. You have to choose deliberately to go the way of violence or to stand up against society. Be free, live happily, joyously, without any antagonism, without any hate. Then life becomes something quite differ- ent. Then life has a meaning, is full of joy and clarity. When you woke up this morning, did you look out of the window? If you did, you would have seen those hills become saffron as the sun rose against that lovely blue sky. And as the birds began to sing and the early morning cuckoo cooed, there was a deep silence all around, a sense of great beauty and loneliness, and if one is not aware of all that, one might just as well be dead. But only a very few people are aware. You can be aware of it only when your mind and heart are open, when you are not frightened, when you are no longer violent. Then there is joy, there is an extraordinary bliss of which very few people know, and it is part of education to bring about that state in the human mind. Student: Will complete destruction of society bring about a new culture, Sir? Krishnamurti: Will complete destruction bring about a new culture? You know there have been revolutions - the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution They destroyed everything to start anew. Have they produce anything new? Every society has three stages or hierarchies the high, the middle, the low; the high being the aristocracy the rich people, the clever people; then the middle class, who are always working, then the labourer. Now each is in battle with the other. The middle wants to get to the top and the bring about a revolution and then when they get to the top they hold on to their positions, their prestige, their welfare, their fortunes, and again the new middle class tries to come to the top. The low trying to reach the middle, and the middle trying to reach the top; this is the battle going on all the time, throughout society and in all cultures. And the middle says: "I am going to get to the top and revolutionize things", and when it gets to the top, you see what it does. It knows how to control people through thought, through torture, through killing, through destruction, through fear. So, through destruction you can never produce anything. But if you understand the whole process of disorder and destruction, if you study it, not only outwardly but in yourself, then out of that understanding, care, affection, love, out of that comes a totally different order. But if you do not understand, if you merely revolt, it is the same pattern repeated again and again, because we human beings are always the same. You know, it is not like a house that can be pulled down and a new house built. Human beings are not made that way, because human beings are outwardly educated, cultured, clever, but inwardly, they are violent. Unless that animal instinct is fundamentally changed, whatever the outward circumstances are, the inward always overcomes the outer. Education is the change of the inner man. Student: Sir, you said you must change the world. How can you change it, sir? Krishnamurti: What is the world? The world is where you live -your family, your friends, your neighbours. And your family, your friends, your neighbours can be extended and that is the world. Now, you are the centre of that world. That is the world you live in. Now how will you change the world? By changing yourself. Student: Sir, how can you change yourself. Krishnamurti: How can you do it? First see it. First see that you are the centre of this world. You with your family, are the centre. That is the world and you have to change and you ask, "How am I to change?" How do you change? That is one of the most difficult things - to change - because most of us do not want to change. When you are young, you want to change. You are full of vitality, full of energy, you want to climb trees, you want to look, you are full of curiosity and as you get a little older, go to college, you already begin to settle down. You do not want to change. You say, "For god's sake, leave me alone." Very few people want to change the world and still fewer want to change themselves, because they are the centre of the world in which they live. And to bring about a change requires tremendous understanding. One can change from this to that. But that is not change at all. When people say, "I am changing from this to that", they think they are moving They think they are changing. But in actual fact they have not moved at all. What they have done is projected an idea of what they should be. The idea of what they "should be" is different from "what is". And the change towards "what should be" is they think, a movement. But it is not a movement. They think it is change, but what is change is first to be aware of what actually "is" and to live with it, and then one observes that the "seeing" itself brings about change. Student: Is there any need for one to be serious? Krishnamurti: Is there any need for one to be serious? very good question, sir. First of all, what do you mean by serious? Have you ever thought what it means to be serious? Is it the stopping of laughter? To have a smile on your face, would that indicate that you are not serious? To want to look at a tree and see the beauty of a tree, would that be lack of seriousness? To want to know why people look that way, what they wear, why they talk that way, would that be, lack of seriousness? Or would seriousness be always having a long face, always saying: "Am I doing the right thing, am I conforming to a pattern?" I should say that would not be seriousness at all. Trying to meditate is not seriousness, trying to follow the pattern of society is not seriousness - whether it is the pattern of Buddha or Sankara. Merely to conform is never to be serious. That is mere imitation. So you can be serious with a smile on your face, you can be serious when you look at a tree, you can be serious when you paint a picture, when you are listening to music. The quality of seriousness is to pursue to the very end a thought, an idea, a feeling; to go to the very end of it, not to be dissuaded by any other factor; to enquire into every thought to the very end of it whatever may happen to you, even if you have to starve in that process, lose all your property, everything; to go to the very end of thought is to be serious. Have I answered your question, sir? Student: Yes sir. Krishnamurti: I am afraid I have not. You have agreed very easily because you have not really understood what I said. Why do you not stop me and say: "Look, I do not understand what you are talking about." That would be straight, that would be serious. If you do not understand something, it does not matter who says it, even god himself, say, "I do not understand what you are talking about, tell me more clearly; that would be serious. But to meekly agree because a man says so, that shows lack of seriousness. Seriousness consists in seeing things clearly, in finding out, in not accepting. But later on when you get married and have children and responsibilities there is a different kind of seriousness. Then you do not want to break the pattern, you want shelter, you want to live in safe enclosure, free of all revolutions. Student: Why is one seeking to have pleasure and discard pain? Krishnamurti: You are rather serious this morning, aren't you? Why? Because you think pleasure is more convenient, is it not? Sorrow is painful. The one you want to avoid, and the other you want to cling to. Why? It is a natural instinct to avoid pain, is it not? If I have a toothache, I want to avoid it. I want to go for a walk which is pleasurable. The problem is not pleasure and pain, but the avoidance of one or the other. Life is both pleasure and pain, is it not? Life is both darkness and light. On a day like this, there are clouds and there is the sun shining; then there is winter and spring; they are part of life, part of existence. But why should we avoid one and cling to the other? Why should we cling to pleasure and avoid pain? Why not merely live with both? The moment you want to avoid pain, sorrow, you are going to invent escapes, quote the Buddha, the Gita, go to the cinema or invent beliefs. The problem is not resolved by either sorrow or pleasure. So don't cling to pleasure or escape from pain. If you cling to pleasure what happens? You get attached, do you not? And if anything happens to the person to whom you are attached or to your property or to your opinion, you are lost. So you say there must be detachment. Do not be either attached or detached; just look at the facts, and when you understand the facts, then there is neither pleasure nor pain; there is merely the fact. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO STUDENTS CHAPTER 8 'ON IMAGE-MAKING' When we are very young it is a delight to be alive, to hear the birds of the morning, to see the hills after rain, to see those rocks shining in the sun, the leaves sparkling, to see the clouds go by and to rejoice on a clear morning with a full heart and a clear mind. We lose this feeling when we grow up, with worries, anxieties, quarrels, hatreds, fears and the everlasting struggle to earn a livelihood. We spend our days in battle with each other, disliking and liking, with a little pleasure now and then. We never hear the birds, see the trees as we once saw them, see the dew on the grass and the bird on the wing and the shiny rock on a mountainside glistening in the morning light. We never see all that when we are grown up. Why? I do not know if you have ever asked that question. I think it necessary to ask it. If you do not ask it now, you will soon be caught. You will go to college, get married, have children, husbands, wives, responsibilities, earn a livelihood, and then you will grow old and die. That is what happens to people. We have to ask now, why we have lost this extraordinary feeling for beauty, when we see flowers, when we hear birds? Why do we lose the sense of the beautiful? I think we lose it primarily because we are so concerned with ourselves. We have an image of ourselves. Do you know what an image is? It is something carved by the hand, out of stone, out of marble, and this stone carved by the hand is put in a temple and worshipped. But it is still handmade, an image made by man. You also have an image about yourself, not made by the hand but made by the mind, by thought, by experience, by knowledge, by your struggle, by all the conflicts and miseries of your life. As you grow older, that image becomes stronger, larger, all-demanding and insistent. The more you listen, act, have your existence in that image, the less you see beauty, feel joy at something beyond the little promptings of that image. The reason why you lose this quality of fullness is because you are so self-concerned. Do you know what that phrase "to be self-concerned" means? It is to be occupied with oneself, to be occupied with one's capacities whether they are good or bad, with what your neighbours think of you, whether you have a good job, whether you are going to become an important man, or be thrown aside by society. You are always struggling in the office, at home, in the fields; wherever you are, whatever you do, you are always in conflict, and you do not seem to be able to get out of conflict; not being able to get out of it, you create the image of a perfect state, of heaven, of God - again another image made by the mind. You have images not only inwardly but also deeper down, and they are always in conflict with each other. So the more you are in conflict -and conflict will always exist so long as you have images, opinions, concepts, ideas about yourself - the greater will be the struggle. So the question is: Is it possible to live in this world without an image about yourself? You function as a doctor, a scientist, a teacher, a physicist. You use that function to create the image about yourself, and so, using function, you create conflict in functioning, in doing. I wonder if you understand this? You know, if you dance well, if you play an instrument, a violin, a veena, you use the instrument or the dance to create the image about yourself to feel how marvellous you are, how wonderfully well you play or dance. You use the dancing, the playing of the instrument, in order to enrich your own image of yourself. And that is how you live, creating, strengthening that image of yourself. So there is more conflict; the mind gets dull and occupied with itself; and it loses the sense of beauty, of joy, of clear thinking. I think it is part of education to function without creating images. You then function without the battle, the inward struggle that goes on within yourself. There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born till the moment you die is a process of learning. Learning has no end and that is the timeless quality of learning. And you cannot learn if you are in battle, if you are in conflict with yourself, with your neighbour, with society. You are always in conflict with society, with your neighbour as long as there is an image. But if you are learning about the mechanics of putting together that image, then you will see that you can look at the sky, then you can look at the river and the raindrops on the leaf, feel the cool air of a morning and the fresh breeze among the leaves. Then life has an extraordinary meaning. Life in itself, not the significance given by the image to life - life itself has an extraordinary meaning. Student: When you are looking at a flower, what is your relationship with the flower? Krishnamurti: You look at a flower, and what is your relationship to the flower? Do you look at the flower or do you think you are looking at the flower? You see the difference? Are you actually looking at the flower or you think you ought to look at the flower or are you looking at the flower with an image you have about the flower - the image being that it is a rose? The word is the image, the word is knowledge and therefore you are looking at that flower with the word, the symbol, with knowledge and therefore you are not looking at the flower. Or, are you looking at it with a mind that is thinking about something else? When you look at a flower without the word, without the image, and with a mind that is completely attentive, then what is the relationship between you and the flower? Have you ever done it? Have you ever looked at a flower without saying that is a rose? Have you ever looked at a flower completely, with total attention in which there is no word, no symbol, no naming of the flower and, therefore, complete attention? Till you do that, you have no relationship with the flower. To have any relationship with another or with the rock or with the leaf, one has to watch and to observe with complete attention. Then your relationship to that which you see is entirely different. Then there is no observer at all. There is only that. If you so observe, then there is no opinion, no judgement. It is what it is. Have you understood? Will you do it? Look at a flower that way. Do it, Sir, don't talk about it, but do it. Student: If you have lots of time, how would you spend it, Sir? Krishnamurti: I would do what I am doing. You see, if you love what you are doing, then you have all the leisure that you need in your life. Do you understand what I have said? You asked me what I would do if I had leisure. I said, I would do what I am doing; which is to go around different parts of the world, to talk, to see people and so on. I do it because I love to do it; not because I talk to a great many people and feel that I am very important. When you feel very important, you do not love what you are doing; you love yourself and not what you are doing. So, your concern should be not with what I am doing, but with what you are going to do. Right? I have told you what I am doing. Now you tell me what you will do, when you have plenty of leisure. Student: I would get bored, sir. Krishnamurti: You would get bored. Quite right. That is what most people are. Student: How do I get rid of this boredom, sir? Krishnamurti: Wait, listen. Most people are bored. Why? You asked how to get rid of boredom. Now find out. When you are by yourself for half an hour, you are bored. So you pick up a book, chatter, look at a magazine, go to a cinema, talk, do something. You occupy your mind with something This is an escape from yourself. You have asked a question, Now, pay attention to what is being said. You get bored because you find yourself with yourself; and you have never found yourself with yourself. Therefore, you get bored. You say: Is that all I am? I am so small, I am so worried; I want to escape from all that. What you are is very boring, so you run away. But if you say, I am not going to be bored; I am going to find out why I am like this; I want to see what I am like actually then it is like looking at yourself in a mirror. There, you see very clearly what you are, what your face looks like. Then you say that you do not like your face; that you must be beautiful, you must look like a cinema actress. But if you were to look at yourself and say, "Yes, that is what I am; my nose is not very straight, my eyes are rather small, my hair is straight." You accept it. When you see what you are, there is no boredom. Boredom comes in only when you reject what you see and want to be something else. In the same way, when you can look at yourself inside and see exactly what you are, the seeing of it is not boring. it is extraordinarily interesting, because the more you see of it, the more there is to see. You can go deeper and deeper and wider and there is no end to it. In that, there is no boredom. If you can do that, then what you do is what you love to do, and when you love to do a thing, time does not exist. When you love to plant trees, you water them, look after them, protect them; when you know what you really love to do, you will see the days are too short So you have to find out for yourself from now on, what you love to do; what you really want to do, not just be concerned with a career. Student: How do you find out what you love to do, sir? Krishnamurti: How do you find out what you love to do? You have to understand that it may be different from what you want to do. You may want to become a lawyer, because your father is a lawyer or because you see that by becoming a lawyer you can earn more money. Then you do not love what you do because you have a motive for doing something which will give you profit, which will make you famous. But if you love something, there is no motive. You do not use what you are doing for your own self-importance. To find out what you love to do is one of the most difficult things. That is part of education. To find that out, you have to go into yourself very very deeply. It is not very easy. You may say: "I want to be a lawyer" and you struggle to be a lawyer, and then suddenly you find you do not want to be a lawyer. You would like to paint. But it is too late. You are already married. You already have a wife and children. You cannot give up your career, your responsibilities. So you feel frustrated, unhappy. Or you may say, "I really would like to paint, and you devote all your life to it, and suddenly find you are not a good painter and that what you really want to do is to be a pilot. Right education is not to help you to find careers; for god's sake, throw that out of the window. Education is not merely gathering information from a teacher or learning mathematics from a book or learning historical dates of kings and customs, but education is to help you to understand the problems as they arise, and that requires a good mind - a mind that reasons, a mind that is sharp, a mind that has no belief. For belief is not fact. A man who believes in god is as superstitious as a man who does not believe in God. To find out you have to reason and you cannot reason if you already have an opinion, if you are prejudiced, if your mind has already come to a conclusion. So you need a good mind, a sharp, clear, definite, precise, healthy mind - not a believing mind, not a mind that follows authority. Right education is to help you to find out for yourself what you really, with all your heart, love to do. It does not matter what it is, whether it is to cook or to be a gardener, but it is something in which you have put your mind, your heart. Then you are really efficient, without becoming brutal. And this school should be a place where you are helped to find out for yourself through discussion, through listening, through silence, to find out, right through your life, what you really love to do. Student: Sir, how can we know ourselves? Krishnamurti: That is a very good question. Listen to me carefully. How do you know what you are? You understand my question? You look into the mirror for the first time and after a few days or few weeks, you look again and say, "That is me again." Right? So, by looking at the mirror every day, you begin to know your own face, and you say: "That is me." Now can you in the same way know what you are by watching yourself Can you watch your gestures, the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you behave, whether you are hard, cruel, rough, patient? Then you begin to know yourself. You know yourself by watching yourself in the mirror of what you doing, what you are thinking, what you are feeling. That is the mirror - the feeling, the doing, the thinking. And in that mirror you begin to watch yourself. The mirror says, this is the fact; but you do not like the fact. So, you want to alter it. You start distorting it. You do not see it as it is. Now, as I said the other day, you learn when there is attention and silence. Learning is when you have silence and give complete attention. In that state, you begin to learn. Now, sit very quietly; not because I am asking you to sit quietly, but because that is the way to learn. Sit very quietly and be still not only physically, not only in your body, but also in your mind. Be very still and then in that stillness, attend. Attend to the sounds outside this building, the cock crowing, the birds, somebody coughing, somebody leaving; listen first to the things outside you, then listen to what is going on in your mind. And you will then see, if you listen very very attentively, in that silence, that the outside sound and the inside sound are the same. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO STUDENTS CHAPTER 9 'ON BEHAVIOUR' One of the most difficult things in life is to find a way of behaviour that is not dictated by circumstances. Circumstances and people dictate, or force you to behave in a certain way. The way you conduct yourself, the way you eat, the way you talk, your moral, your ethical behaviour depend on where you find yourself and so your behaviour is constantly varying, constantly changing. This is so when you speak to your father, your mother or to your servant -your voice, your words, are quite different. The ways of behaviour are controlled by environmental influences, and by analysing behaviour you can almost predict what people will do or will not do. Now can one ask oneself if one can behave the same inwardly, whatever the circumstances? Can one's behaviour spring from within and not depend on what people think of you or how they look at you? But that is difficult because one does not know what one is within. Within, a constant change is going on also. You are not what you were yesterday. Now can one find for oneself a way of behaviour which is not dictated by others or by society or by circumstances or by religious sanctions, a way of behaviour that does not depend on environment? I think one can find that out, if one knows what love is. Do you know what love is? Do you know what it is to love people? To look after a tree, to brush a dog, comb it, feed it, means that you care for the tree, you feel great affection for the dog. I do not know whether you have noticed a tree in a street for which nobody cares; occasionally people look at it and pass it by. That tree is entirely different from a tree that is cared for in a garden, a tree you sit under, look at, on which you see the leaves, climb the branches. Such a tree grows with strength. When you look after a tree, when you give it water, manure; when you trim it, prune it, care for it, it has a different feeling altogether from the tree that grows by the roadside. The feeling of care is the beginning of affection. You know, the more you look after things, the more sensitive you become. So there has to be affection, a sense of tenderness, kindliness, generosity. If there is such affection, then behaviour is dictated by that affection and is not dependent on environment, circumstance, or people. And to find that affection is one of the most difficult things - to be really affectionate whether people are kind to you or not kind to you, whether they talk to you roughly, or whether they are irritated with you. I think children have it. You all have it when you are young. You feel very friendly with one another, with people. You love to pat a dog. You look occasionally at things and you also smile easily. But as you grow older, all this disappears. And so to have affection right through life is one of the most difficult things and without it life becomes very empty. You may have children, you may have a nice house, a car and all the rest of it, but without affection life is like a flower that has no scent. And it is part of education, is it not, to come to this affection, from which there is great joy, from which alone love can come? With most of us love is possessiveness. Where there is jealousy, envy, it breeds cruelty, it breeds hatred, Love can only exist and flower when there is no hate, no envy, no ambition. Without love, life is like the barren earth, arid, hard, brutal. But the moment there is affection it is like the earth which blossoms with water, with rain, with beauty. One has to learn all this when one is very young, not when one is old for then it is too late. Then you become prisoners of society of environment, of husband, wife, office. Find out for yourself if you can behave with affection. Can you go to your class punctually because you feel you do not want to keep people waiting? Can you stop shouting while you are together because there are other people watching you, being with you? When behaviour, politeness, consideration are superficial and without affection they have no meaning. But if there is affection, kindliness, consideration, then, out of that, comes politeness, good manners, consideration for others, which means really that one is thinking less and less about oneself, and that is one of the most difficult things in life. When one is not concerned with oneself, then one is really a free human being. Then one can look at the skies, the mountains, the hills, the waters, the birds, the flowers, with a fresh mind, with a great sense of affection. Right? Now, ask questions. Student: If there is jealousy in love, is there not also sacrifice in love? Krishnamurti: Is there not also sacrifice in love? Love can never sacrifice. What do you mean by using that word "sacrifice?" Giving up? Doing things you do not want to do? Is that what you mean? I sacrifice myself for my country, because I love my country. I sacrifice myself because I love my parents. Is that what you mean? Now, is that love? Can love exist when you have to force yourself to do something for others? I wonder if you understand the word "sacrifice." Why do you use that word? You know, the words, "responsibility," "duty," "sacrifice," are dreadful words. When you love somebody there is no responsibility, there is no duty, there is no sacrifice. You do things because you love. And you cannot love if you are thinking about yourself. When you are thinking about yourself, then you come first and the other is second; then, to love him, you sacrifice yourself. Then it is not love. It is a bargain. Do you understand? Student: To learn and to love; are they separate or are they connected, sir? Krishnamurti: Do you know what it means to love and do you know what it means to learn? Student: I know what it is to learn. Krishnamurti: I wonder. I do not say you do not know. I am just asking you. Do you know what it means to learn? You know what it means to acquire knowledge. You hear the teacher tell you certain facts and you store what you hear in your mind, in your brain. This storing up process is what we call learning. Is that not so? Student: In a way. Krishnamurti: In a way. But what is the other way? You have an experience, you walk up the hills and slip and hurt yourself and you have learnt something from that. You meet a friend and he hurts you and you have learnt from that. You read a newspaper and you have learnt from that. So, your learning generally consists of adding more and more information. Now is that learning? There is another form of learning - that is, learning as you go along, never accumulating. And then from that to act, to think. Do you understand what it is to learn in doing? This does not mean having learnt and then doing. They are two different states, are they not? There is a state where I have learnt and from that knowledge I act, and there is learning as I am doing. The two are completely different. When I have learnt and then do, it is mechanical, whereas learning from doing is non-mechanical. It is always fresh. Therefore, learning as I am doing is never boring; it is never tiring, whereas to do, having learnt, becomes mechanical. That is why you all get bored with your learning. Do you understand? So now you know what learning means. Learning is doing, so that in the very act of doing you are learning. Now, what is love? Love is a feeling in which there is gentleness, quietness, tenderness, consideration, in which there is beauty. In love there is no ambition, there is no jealousy. Now you had asked whether learning and love are not similar. You had asked that question, had you not? Student: Are they connected? Krishnamurti: What do you say? You have understood what we mean by love, what we mean by learning. Are they connected? Student: In a way. Krishnamurti: Tell me in which way. May I help you? They are connected because both require an activity which is non-mechanical. Do you understand? Learning as I am doing is non-mechanical. But in love which becomes mechanical there is no learning. Love in which there is ambition, conflict, greed, envy, jealousy, anger, ambition, is not love. When there is no ambition, no jealousy, then there is a very active principle. It is renewing itself all the time, it is fresh. There is, in both learning and love, a movement of freshness, a movement which is spontaneous, which is not held by circumstances. it is a free movement. So there is a tenuous, delicate connection between the two. But to learn and to love there must be a great deal of affection. There is a great similarity in both when there is attention, which is not merely a conclusion. So if you are attending, attending to what you are thinking, out of that, there is affection, out of that there is learning. Student: How can we live our life, sir? Krishnamurti: First of all, do you know what your life is, to live it? I am not being funny. I am just asking. To live your life, you must know what your life is and to find out what your life is, you have to again examine. Your life is not what your father or mother, your society, your teacher, your neighbour, your religion, your politician tell you it is. Do not say: "No". It is so. Your life is made up of influences - political, religious, social, economic, climatic -all these influences converge in you and you say: "That is life. I must live it." You can only live your life when you understand all these influences, and I through understanding them begin to discover your own way of thinking and living. Then you do not have to ask: "How can I live my life?" Then you live it. But, first, you must understand all the influences. The influence of society, the political speeches, the politicians, the climate, the food, the books you read are influencing you all the time. You have to ask whether it is at all possible to be free of these influences. And that is one of the most demanding enquiries. And after enquiring, examining, you have to understand, to find a way of life that is neither yours nor anybody's. It is then life. Then you are living. Now, in all this, what is important? The first thing is not to lead a mechanical life. You understand what I mean by a mechanical life? It is doing something because somebody tells you to do it, or because you feel that it is the right thing to do, so you repeat, repeat, and gradually, your brain, your mind, your body becomes dull, heavy, stupid. So, do not lead a life of routine. You may have to go to the office. You may have to pass an examination, to study. But do it all with a freshness, with eagerness; and you can only do it with freshness and with vigour, when you are learning. And you cannot learn if you are not attentive. The second thing is, to be very gentle, to be very kind, not to hurt people. You have to look at people, help people, be generous, be considerate. There must be love, otherwise, your life is empty. You understand? You may have everything you want: husband, cars, children, wife; but life will be like an empty desert. You may be very clever, you might have a very good position, be a good lawyer, a good engineer, a marvellous administrator, but, without love, you are a dead human being. So do not do anything mechanical. Find out what it is to love people, to love dogs, the sky, the blue hills and the river. Love and feel. Then you must also know what meditation is, what it is to have a very still, a very quiet mind, not a chattering mind. And it is only such a mind that can know the real religious mind. And without the religious mind, without that feeling, life is like a flower that has no fragrance, a river bed that has never known the rippling waters over it, it is like the earth that has never grown a tree, a bush, a flower. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 1 'ON RIGHT EDUCATION' Krishnamurti: It is our intention in places like Rishi Valley in the South and Rajghat in the North to create an environment, a climate, where one can bring about, if it is at all possible, a new human being. Do you know the history of these two schools? They have been running for thirty years or more. The purpose, the aim and drive of these schools is to equip the child with the most excellent technological proficiency so that he may function with clarity and efficiency in the modern world, and far more important to create the right climate so that the child may develop fully as a complete human being. This means giving him the opportunity to flower in goodness so that he is rightly related to people, things and ideas, to the whole of life. To live is to be related. There is no right relationship to anything if there is not the right feeling for beauty, a response to nature, to music and art, a highly developed aesthetic sense. I think it is fairly clear that competitive education and the development of the student in that process is very destructive. I do not know how deeply one has grasped the significance of this. If one has, then what is right education? I think it is clear that the pattern which we now cultivate and call education, which is conformity to society, is very, very destructive. In its ambitious activities, it is frustrating in the extreme. And what we have so far considered, both in the West and East, as a development within this process, is culture. it is the inevitable invitation to sorrow. The perception of the truth of that is essential. If it is very clear, and if one has abandoned that voluntarily, not as a reaction, but just as a leaf falls away from the tree, a dropping away, then what is flowering, what is right education? Do you educate the student to conform, to adjust, to fit into the system or do you educate him to comprehend, to see very clearly the whole significance of all that and, at the same time, help him to read and write? If you teach him to read and write within the present system of frustration, then the flowering of the mind is impeded. The question then is, if one drops this competitive education, can the mind be educated at all in the ordinary accepted sense of the word? Or does education consist really in taking ourselves and the student away from the social structure of frustration and desire and, at the same time giving him information about mathematics, physics, and so on? After all, if the teacher and the student are stripped of all this monstrous confusion, what is there to be educated about? All that you can teach the student is how to read and write, how to calculate, design, remember and communicate facts and opinions about facts. So, what is the function of education and is there a particular method of education? Do you teach the student a technique so that he becomes proficient and in that very proficiency develops a sense of ambition? By teaching him a technique in order to find a job, you also burden him with its implications of success and frustration. He wants to be successful in life and he also wants to be a peaceful man. His whole life is a contradiction. The greater the contradiction, the greater the tension. This is a fact. When there is suppression in contradiction, there is greater outward activity. You give the student a technique and at the same time develop in him this extraordinary imbalance, this extreme contradiction which leads to frustration and despair. The more he develops his capacity in technique, the greater his ambition and the greater the frustration. You are educating him to have a technique which is going to lead to his despair. So the question is, can you help him not to drift into contradiction? He will drift into it if you do not help him to love the thing which he is doing. You see, if the student loves geometry, loves it as an end in itself, he is so completely absorbed in it that he has no ambition. He really loves geometry and that is an enormous delight. Therefore he flowers in it. How will you help the student to love, in this way, a thing which the student has not yet discovered for himself? If you are asked, as a teacher, what the intention of this school is would you be able to reply? I want to know what you are all trying to do, what you intend the student to be? Are you trying to shape him, condition him, force him in certain directions? Are you trying to teach the student mathematics, physics, giving him some information so that he is proficient technologically and can do well in a future career? Thousands of schools are doing this, all over the world - trying to make the student excellent technologically so that he becomes a good scientist, engineer, physicist and so on. Or are you trying to do something much more here? If it is much more, what is it? We must be very clear in ourselves what we want, clear what a human being must be - the total human being, not just the technological human being. If we concentrate very much on examinations, on technological information, on making the child clever, proficient in acquiring knowledge, while we neglect the other side, then the child will grow up into a one-sided human being. When we talk about a total human being, we mean not only a human being with inward understanding, with a capacity to explore, to examine his inward being, his inward state and the capacity of going beyond it, but also someone who is good in what he does outwardly. The two must go together. That is the real issue in education - to see that when the child leaves the school, he is well established in goodness, both outwardly and inwardly. There must be a starting point from which we function so that we will cultivate not only the technological side but also uncover the deeper layers, the deeper fields of the human mind. I will put it another way. If you concentrate on making the student excellent in technology and neglect the other side, as we generally do, what happens to such a human being? If you concentrate on making the student a perfect dancer or a perfect mathematician, what happens? He is not just that, he is something more. He is jealous, angry, frustrated, in despair, ambitious. So you will create a society in which there is always disorder, because you are emphasizing technology and proficiency in one field and neglecting the other field. However perfect a man may be technologically, he is always in contradiction in his social relationships. He is always in battle with his neighbour. So technology cannot produce a perfect or a good society. It may produce a great society, where there is no poverty, where there is material equality and so on. A great society is not necessarily a good society. A good society implies order. Order does not mean trains running on time, mail delivered regularly.It means something else. For a human being, order means order within himself. And such order will inevitably bring about a good society. Now from which centre are we to start? Do you understand my question? If I neglect the inner and accentuate technology, whatever I do will be one-sided. So I must find a way, I must bring about a movement which will cover both. So far, we have separated the two and having separated them, we have emphasized the one and neglected the other. What we are now trying to do is to join both of them together. If there is proper education, the student will not treat them as two separate fields. He will be able to move in both as one movement. Right? In making himself technologically perfect, he will also make himself a worthwhile human being. Does this convey something or not? A river is not always the same, the banks vary, and the water can be used industrially or for various other purposes, but it is still water. Why have we separated the technological world and the other world? We have said: "If we could make the technological world perfect, we would have food, clothes, shelter for everybody, so let us concern ourselves with the technological." And there are also those who are concerned only with the inner world. They emphasize the so-called inner world, and become more and more isolated, more and more self-centred, more and more vague, pursuing their own beliefs, dogmas and visions. There is this tremendous division and we say we must somehow bring these two together. So having divided life into the outer and inner, we now try to integrate them. I think that way also leads to more conflict. Whereas if we could find a centre, a movement, an approach which does not divide, we would function in both equally. What is the movement that is supremely intelligent? I am using the word "intelligent," not clever, not intuitive, not derived from knowledge, information, experience. What is the movement that understands all these divisions, all these conflicts; and that very understanding creates the movement of intelligence? We see in the world two movements going on, the deep religious movement which man has always sought and which has become Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, and this wordily movement of technology, a world of computers and automation that give man more leisure. The religious movement is very feeble and very few are pursuing it. The technological has become stronger and stronger and man is getting lost in it, becoming more mechanical and therefore man tries to escape from this mechanism, tries to discover something new - in painting, in music, in art, in the theatre. And the religious, if there are any, say "That is the wrong way" and move away to a world of their own. They do not see the insufficiency, the immaturity, the mechanical way of both. Now, can we see that both of these are insufficient? If we can see that, then we are beginning to perceive a non-mechanistic movement which will cover both. If I had a child to be educated I would help him to see the mechanical and the insufficient processes of both ways and in the very examination of the insufficiency of both as they operate in him, there would be born the intelligence which has come into being through examination. Sirs, look at those flowers, the brilliancy, the beauty of them. Now, how am I, as a teacher, to help the student to see the flowers and also be very good at mathematics? If I am only concerned with the flowers and I am not good at mathematics, something is wrong with me. If I am only concerned with mathematics, then also something is wrong with me. You cannot cultivate technological information, become perfect in it first and then say you must also study the other. By giving your heart to years of acquiring knowledge you have already destroyed something in you - the feeling and the capacity to look. By emphasizing one or the other you become insensitive and the essence of intelligence is sensitivity. So, the quality which we want the child to have is the highest form of sensitivity. Sensitivity is intelligence; it does not come from books. If you spend forty years in learning mathematics but cannot look at those flowers and also study mathematics. If there is a movement of that intelligence it will cover both fields. Now how are you and I, as a community of teachers, going to create that movement of sensitivity in the ` child? The student must be free. Otherwise he cannot be sensitive. If he is not free in the study of mathematics, enjoying mathematics, giving his heart to it, which is freedom, he cannot study it adequately. And to look at those flowers, to look at that beauty, he must also be free. So there must be freedom first. That means I must help that boy to be free. Freedom implies order, freedom does not mean allowing the boy to do what he likes, to come to lunch and to class when he likes. In examining, working, in learning, one understands that the highest form of sensitivity is intelligence. That sensitivity, that intelligence can come about only in freedom, but to convey that to a child requires a great deal of intelligence on our part. I would like to help him to be free and yet at the same time have order and discipline, without conformity. To examine anything one must have not only freedom but discipline. This discipline is not something from outside which has been imposed upon the child and according to which he tries to conform. In the very examination of these two processes - the technological and the religious, there is attention and therefore discipline. Therefore one asks, "How can we help that boy or girl to be free completely and yet highly disciplined, not through fear, not through conformity, not partially free but completely free and yet highly disciplined at the same time?" Not one first and then the other. They both go together. Now, how are we to do this? Do we clearly see that freedom is absolutely essential, and that freedom does not mean doing what one likes? You cannot do what you like, because you are always in relationship in life with others. See the necessity and importance of being completely free and yet highly disciplined without conformity. See that your beliefs, your ideas, your ideologies are secondhand. You have to see all that and see that you must be absolutely free. Otherwise you cannot function as a human being. Now I wonder if you see this as an idea or as a fact, as factual as this ink pot. How will you, as a community of teachers, when you see the importance of the child being completely free and also realize that there must be discipline and order - how will you help him so that he flowers in freedom and order? Your shouting at the child is not going to do it; your beating the child is not going to do it, your comparing him to another is not going to do it. Any form of compulsion, bullying, or system of giving him marks or no marks is not going to do it. If you see the importance of the boy being free and at the same time highly orderly, and if you see that punishment or cajoling him is not going to produce anything, will you completely drop all that in yourself. The old method has not produced freedom. It has made man comply and adjust, but if you see that freedom is absolutely necessary and therefore order is essential, these methods which we have used for centuries must drop away. The difficulty is that you are used to old methods and suddenly you are deprived of them. So you are confronted with a problem about which you have to think in a totally different way. It is your problem. It is your responsibility. You are confronted with this issue. You cannot possibly employ the old methods, because you have seen that the boy must be totally free and yet there must be order. So what has happened to you who have, so far, accepted and functioned with an old formula? You have thrown out the formula and are looking at the problem anew, are you not? You are looking at the problem with a fresh mind which is free. Teacher: To see, does one always have to be in that state? Krishnamurti: If you do not see it now but demand to see it always, that is nonsense. The seeing once is the seed put in the earth, that will flower. But if you say that you must see it always, then you are back to the old formula. Look what has happened: the old patterns of thinking with regard to teaching and freedom and order have been taken away from you. Therefore you are looking at problems differently. The difference is that your mind is now free to look, free to examine the issue of freedom and order. Now how will you convey to the child that you are not going to punish him, not going to reward him and yet he must be totally free and orderly? Teacher: I think the teacher has the same problem as the child. He needs to operate from a field where he feels freedom and discipline go together. In his present thinking, he separates order and freedom. He says freedom is against order and order is against freedom. Krishnamurti: I think we are missing something. When you see that the old methods of punishment and reward are dead, your mind becomes much more active. Because you have to solve this problem, your mind is alive. If it is alive, it will be in contact with the issue. Because you are free and understand freedom, you will be punctual in your class and from freedom you will talk to the student and not from an idea. To talk from an idea, a formula, a concept is one thing, but to talk from an actual fact which you have seen - that the student must be free and therefore orderly - is totally different. When you as a teacher are free and orderly you are already communicating it, not only verbally but non-verbally and the student knows it immediately. Once you see the fact that punishment and reward in any form are destructive, you never go back to them. By throwing them out, you yourself are disciplined and that discipline has come out of the freedom of examination. You communicate to the child the fact of that and not any idea. Then you have communicated to him not only verbally, but at a totally different level. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 2 'ON THE LONG VISION' I think most of us know what is happening in the world - the threat of war, the nuclear bomb, the many tensions and conflicts that have brought about new crises. It seems to me that a totally different kind of mind is necessary to meet these challenges. A mind that is not specialized, not trained only in technology, that is not merely seeking prosperity, but that can meet challenges adequately, completely. And it seems to me that that is the function of education, that is the function of a school. Everywhere - in Europe, Russia, America, Japan and here - they are turning out technicians, scientists, educators. These specialists are incapable of meeting the enormously complex challenge of life. They are utterly incapable and yet they are the people who rule the world as the politician, as the scientist. They are specialists in their fields and their guidance, their leadership has obviously failed and is failing. They are merely responding to the immediate. You see, we are thinking in terms of the immediate, the immediacy of events. We are concerned with the immediate responses of a country that is very poor, like India, or the immediate responses of the enormous prosperity of the West. Everyone is thinking in terms of doing something immediately. I think one has to take a long view of the whole problem and I do not think a specialist can do this because specialists always think in terms of action which is immediate. Though immediate action is necessary, I think the function of education is to bring about a mind that will not only act in the immediate but go beyond. Throughout the world the authoritarian governments, the priests, the professors, the analysts, the psychologists, everybody is concerned with controlling or shaping or directing the mind and, therefore, there is very little freedom. The real issue is to find out how to live in a world that is so compulsively authoritarian, so brutal and tyrannical, not only in the immediate relationships but in social relationships, how to live in such a world with the extraordinary capacity to meet its demands and also to be free. I feel education of the right kind should cultivate the mind not to fall into grooves of habit, however worthy or noble, however technologically necessary, but to have a mind that is extraordinarily alive, not with knowledge, not with experience, but alive. Because often the more knowledge one has, the less alert the brain is. I am not against knowledge. There is a difference between learning and acquiring knowledge. Learning ceases when there is only accumulation of knowledge. There is learning only when there is no acquisition at all. When knowledge becomes all important learning ceases. The more I add to knowledge the more secure, the more assured the mind becomes, and, therefore it ceases to learn. Learning is never an additive process. When one is learning, it is an active process. Whereas acquiring knowledge is merely gathering information and storing it up. So I think there is a difference between acquiring knowledge and learning. Education throughout the world is merely the acquisition of knowledge and therefore the mind becomes dull and ceases to learn. The mind is merely acquiring. The acquisition dictates the conduct I of life and, therefore, limits experience. Whereas learning is limitless. Can one, in a school, not only acquire knowledge, which is necessary for living in this world, but also have a mind that is constantly learning? The two are not in contradiction. In a school, when knowledge becomes all important, learning becomes a contradiction. Education should be concerned with the totality of life and not with the immediate responses to the immediate challenges. Let us see what is involved in the two. If one is living in terms of the immediate, responding to the immediate challenge, the immediate is constantly repeated in different ways. In one year it will be war, the next year it may be revolution, in the third year industrial unrest; if one is living in terms of the immediate, life becomes very superficial. But you may say that that is enough because that is all we need to care about. That is one way of taking life. If you live that way it is an empty life. You can fill it with cars, books, sex, drink, more clothes, but it is shallow and empty. A man living an empty life, a shallow life, is always trying to escape; and escape means delusion, more gods, more beliefs, more dogmas, more authoritarian attitudes, or more football, more sex, more television. The immediate responses of those who live in the immediate are extraordinarily empty, futile, miserable. This is not my feeling or prejudice; you can watch it. You may say that is enough, or you may say that that is not good enough. So there must be the long vision, though I must of course act in the immediate, do something about it when the house is burning, but that is not the end of action. There must be something else, and how can one pursue that something else without bringing in authority, books, priests? Can one wipe them all out and pursue the other? If one pursues the other, this immediacy will be answered in a greater and more vital way. So, what do you, as a human being and also as an educator, a teacher, what do you feel about it? I do not want you to agree with me. But if you have exercised your brain, if you have observed world events, if you have watched your own inclinations, your own demands, persuasions, if you have seen the whole state of man and his quivering despair, how do you respond? What is your action, your way of looking at it all? Forget that you are in a school. We talking as human beings. Teacher: In meeting an immediate challenge, especially as one grows older, one seems to bring in a sense of anxiety. Is there as one grows older, another approach? Krishnamurti: What do you mean by "getting older?" Older in terms of doing a job? Older in terms of routine, boredom? What do you mean by age? What makes you old? The organism wears out -why? Is it due to disease, or is it because there is repetition like a machine going on over and over again? The psyche is never alive; it is merely functioning in habit. So it reduces the body quickly to old age. Why does the psyche become old, or need it ever get old? I do not think it need ever get old. And is old age only a habit? Have you noticed old people, how they eat, how they talk? And is it possible to keep the psyche extraordinarily young, alive, innocent? Is it possible for the psyche to be alive and never for a second lose its vitality through habit, through security, through family, through responsibility? Of course it is possible, which means that you must destroy everything you build. That is what I mean by the long vision. You have an experience, pleasant or unpleasant, that leaves a mark, and the mind lives in that: "I have had such a marvellous experience" or "I have had such a sad life," and there is a decaying in itself. So, experience, and the living in experience, is decay. Let us come back to my question. As a human being, living in this society, in a world which is demanding immediate action, what is your response to the immediate challenge? The immediate challenge is always asking you to respond immediately, and you are caught in that. How do you, as a parent, as a teacher, as a citizen, respond to it? For, according to your response, you are caught in it. Whether you respond consciously or unconsciously, the effect of that will be on the psyche. Teacher: Is there a way by which this long vision becomes an actuality, as actual as the immediate? Krishnamurti: Of course. Because the immediate is the actual. There is the nuclear bomb -the Russian, the American, the French scientists are inventing ways of producing cheap atom bombs - they may blow themselves to bits. Why should you respond to it? The nuclear bomb is the result of a long series of events - nationalism, industrialism, class differences, greed, envy, hate, ambition - all these have produced the nuclear bomb. You reply without understanding it - that America or Russia should be stopped from producing nuclear bombs, and you call that an actual response. Without answering the total, what is the good of replying to the fragments of the problem? So, if this is the actual and you see that the actual produces such immature responses, then you must pursue the other. Knowing that you must respond to the immediate and also that you must have long vision, how do you bring this about as an educator? Nobody is concerned with the other; no educator is concerned with the long vision, the long view. Education today is concerned only with the immediate. But if you are dissatisfied with the immediate, then how would you pursue that and not neglect this? Do you see the urgency of it? Shall I put the problem differently? How can one keep the mind young, never let it grow old and never say, "I have had enough," and seek a corner to stay in and stagnate? That is the tendency and that is the actual fact. To get a position is difficult, but once you have got it, you stagnate. Everything about the world is destroying the long vision. Books, newspapers, politicians, priests, everything influences you, and how does one walk out of it all? You are being contaminated and yet you have to function and you cannot walk out of it. Life is destruction, life is love, life is creation. We know none of it. It is a tremendous thing. Now how would you translate all this into education? Teacher: Is it possible to pursue one vision at the cost of another? Is it possible to do away with the short vision? Krishnamurti: The problem is not to run away from all this misery or to see how to combine the two. You cannot combine the little with the big; the big has to take in the little. Teacher: But is it not better to follow the little in the beginning and come to the big later? Krishnamurti: Never. If you say the little is the first step, then you are lost, you are caught in the little. Think it out for yourself. If you accept the little, then where are you? You will be caught, won't you - little family, little house, little husband, little money, little clothes? You have made the little important, the little first and so you have little responsibility in society. You are all so terribly respectable. Why do you put the little first? Because that is the easiest way. Teacher: How does one grasp the little and understand it? Krishnamurti: You can only grasp the big, the little is not at all important, but you have made it important. it is a very delicate thing, a subtle thing, to have capacity and not to be a slave to it, to respond immediately to things you have to respond to, and to have this extraordinary depth and height and width. Deny the little. Do you know what it is to deny? Deny not because you have got the long vision but because what is denied is false. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 3 'ON ACTION' Krishnamurti: Shall we consider the question of immediacy of action? Action is pressing on each one of us, and there must be the long vision which includes the immediacy; but the immediacy does not include the larger, the wider, the deeper. Most people throughout the world who are intellectual and learned seem to be caught in the immediate responses to immediate challenges. More scientists, more engineers, more technicians are needed and education is geared to produce them. The immediate demand is accepted and answered and so one loses, I think, a larger perspective and therefore one's mind and body and emotions become very shallow and empty. If one actually realizes all this, not verbally, but with a direct perception, how is a teacher to educate a student to have not only technical knowledge, the know-how, but also a wider, deeper understanding of life? How will you translate this into action in education? Is that not what you have come here to do? How do you set about it, if you have not already done it? I believe, here in Rishi Valley, the origin of the school was to bring about a different kind of education. It was not only to provide the child with knowledge but to make him understand that knowledge is not the end of life; that it is necessary to be sensitive to trees, to beauty, to know what it is to love, to be kind, to be generous. Now how would you set about it? It seems at first absolutely necessary that there should be a few who have this feeling, and by their enthusiasm, understanding, capacity, not only to impart knowledge but also to see beyond the hills. If I were here and I felt this urgency that a student must academically be most proficient, and also that he must know how to dance, sing, look at the trees, see the mountains, know how to look at a woman without the usual sexual attitude and consider the extraordinary beauty of life, know sorrow and go beyond sorrow -if I were here, how would I set about it? If I were here and my sole job was that, I would not leave any one of you alone. I would discuss with you the way you talk, dress, look, behave, eat; I would be at it all the time - and probably you would call me a tyrant and talk of democracy and freedom. I do not think it is a question of democracy, tyranny and freedom. You see, this brings up the question of authority. We have talked about it a great deal in this place, on and off, whenever I have come; but let us discuss authority again. To me, authority is terrible, destructive. The quality of authority is tyrannical - the authority of the priest, the police - authority of law. Those are all outward authorities. There is also the inward authority of knowledge, of one's own dignity of one's own experience which dictates certain attitudes to life. All this breeds authority and without exercising this authority, you have to look after the child, to see that he has good taste, that he puts on the right clothes, eats properly, has a certain dignity in speech, in the way he walks; you have also to teach him to play games, not competitively and ruthlessly, but for the fun of it. To awaken in him all this without authority is extremely difficult and because of its difficulty, you resort to authority. One must have discipline in the school. Now, can you bring about discipline without exercising authority? Children must come to meals regularly, not talk incessantly at meal time, everything must be in proportion, in freedom and affection; and there must be a certain non-authoritarian awakening of self-respect. To give knowledge which does not become an end in itself and to educate the mind to have a long vision, a wide comprehension of life, is not possible if education is based on author. Teacher: It is extremely difficult to bring about an inner orderliness in the child without discipline, without restraint and authority. Adults are in a different position from children. Krishnamurti: I wonder if that is so. We are conditioned and children are being conditioned. Can education bring about a revolutionary mind? The difficulty is that this has to begin at a very tender age, not when children are fourteen or older. By then they are already formed and destroyed but if they came to you very young what would you do to encourage a feeling that there are other things than mere sex, money and position? Besides giving the child information as knowledge, how would you show him that the world is not only the immediate but that there are other things far greater? First, you and I must feel this, not merely because I talk about it or you talk about it. I must be burning with it, and if I am burning with it, how do I communicate it without influencing the child? Because when I influence, I destroy the child; I make him conform to the image I have. So I must realize, though I feel very strongly about all this, that in my relationship with the student, however young, I must not encourage an imitative attitude and action. This is all extremely difficult. If I love somebody, I want him to be different, to do things differently, to look at life, to feel the beauty of the earth. Can I show him all this without influence, without breeding the imitative instinct? Teacher: Before we come to help the child without influencing him, is there an approach which we can establish in ourselves, because in our lives there seem to be so many contradictions? Krishnamurti: In order to establish it - one must change, remove the contradictions, wipe out destructive feelings. That may take many days or perhaps no time at all. We say that can be done through analysis, through awareness, through questioning, enquiring, probing. All that involves time. But time is a danger. Because the moment we look to time to change, it is really a continuation of what has been. If I have to enquire into my mind and be aware of my activities and my conditioning and my demands and each day probe, all that entails time. Time as a means to mutation is illusion. And when I introduce time into the problem of mutation, then mutation is postponed, because then time is merely a further continuation of my desire to go on as I am. Time is necessary to learn French. The time taken to learn French is not an illusion, but to bring about a psychological mutation, a psychical change in myself through time is an illusion, because it encourages laziness, postponement, a sense of achievement, vanity. All that is implied in the employment of time when I use time as a means to mutation. So, if I do not look to time at all for mutation, then what happens? It is a marvellous thing. All religious people have seen time as a means of change and actually we find mutation can only be out of time, not through time. Teacher: Does that not apply to all creative action? Krishnamurti: Of course it does. So can my mind refuse to use time and deny time as a means to mutation? Do you see the beauty of it? Then what takes place? The thing which I want changed has been put together through time, it is the result of time, and I deny time. Therefore I deny the whole thing and therefore mutation has taken place. I do not know if you see this. It is not a verbal trick. Have you understood it? If I deny my conditioning as a Hindu, which is the result of time, and I deny time, I deny the whole thing. I am out of it. If I deny ritual - the Christian, Hindu or Buddhist -deny it because it is the product of time, I am out. I do not have to ask how to bring about mutation. The thing itself is the result of time and I deny time - it is finished. So the mind in which mutation has taken place, that mind can then instruct, can look, can bring about a definite series of environmental actions. One cannot deny the use of time for acquiring knowledge but does time exist anywhere else? Teacher: Even in activities we need time, we seem to do things in a sloppy way and therefore time hangs heavily. If the understanding of time in all these things is as simple as this, why are we not able to get out of it? Krishnamurti: But if you give your whole attention, not to mutation through time but to denying time, you would then be in a position to teach in a totally different way. The boys and girls are here to acquire knowledge and if you can impart this knowledge with attention which is not using time to convey information, then you are quickening their minds. That is what I am interested in, which is, to awaken the mind, to keep the mind tremendously alive. We say the mind can be kept alive through knowledge and therefore we pour in knowledge which only dulls the mind. A mind that functions in time is still a limited mind. But a mind which does not function in time is extraordinarily alert, is tremendously alive and can impart its aliveness to a mind which is still seeking, enquiring, innocent. So we have discovered something new. You and I have discovered something. I have imparted something to you. Together we have found that the mind functions in time and the mind is the result of time. In that state, the mind can only give information. Such a mind is limited. But a mind that is not functioning, thinking in terms of time, though it uses time, will quicken the mind of another and therefore knowledge will not destroy. You see, such a mind is in a state of learning, not acquiring. Therefore it is everlastingly alive; such a mind is young. Some of the boys in this school are already old, because they are merely concerned with acquiring knowledge, not with learning. And learning is out of time. Now, how will you set about quickening the mind, keeping it astonishingly alive all the time? You have to understand the quality of a mind in which mutation has taken place. It has taken place the moment you deny time. You have thrown the whole past out. You are no longer a Hindu, a Christian. Now how will such a mind in which mutation has taken place instruct, translate its action? How will it act in giving knowledge which involves time, and yet keep the mind of the child in a state of intense aliveness? Find out. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 4 'ON THE TRUE DENIAL' Teacher: In one of your talks to the children you said that when a problem arises one should solve it immediately. How is one to do this? Krishnamurti: To solve a problem immediately, you have to understand the problem. Is the understanding of a problem a matter of time or is it a matter of intensity of perception, an intensity of seeing? Let us say that I have a problem: I am vain. It is a problem with me in the sense that it creates a conflict, a contradiction within me. It is a fact that I am vain and there is also another fact that I do not want to be vain. Firstly, I have to understand the fact that I am vain. I have to live with that fact. I must not only be intensely aware of the fact but comprehend it fully. Now, is comprehension a matter of time? I can see the fact immediately, can't I? And the immediacy of perception, of seeing, dissolves the fact. When I see a cobra there is immediate action. But I do not see vanity in the same way - when I see vanity either I like it and therefore I continue with it, or I do not want it because it creates conflict. If it does not create conflict there is no problem. Perception and understanding are not of time. Perception is a matter of intensity of seeing, a seeing that is total. What is the nature of seeing something totally? What gives one the capacity, the energy, the vitality, the drive, to deal with something immediately, with all one's undivided energy? The moment you have divided energy you have conflict and therefore there is no seeing, there is no perception of something total. Now, what gives you the energy to make you jump when you see a cobra? What are the processes that make the organic as well as the psychological, the whole being, jump, so that there is no hesitation, so that the reaction is immediate? What has gone into that immediacy? Several things have gone into that action which is immediate: fear, natural protection, which must be there, the knowledge that the cobra is a deadly thing. Now, why have we not the same energetic action with regard to the dissolution of vanity? I am taking vanity as an example. There are several reasons that have gone into my lack of energy. I like vanity; the world is based on it; it is the basis of the social pattern; it gives me a certain sense of vitality, a certain quality of dignity and aloofness, a sense that I am a little better than another. All this prevents that energy which is necessary to dissolve vanity. Now, either I analyse all the reasons which have prevented my action, prevented my having energy to deal with vanity, or I see immediately. Analysis is a process of time and a process of postponement. While I am analysing, vanity continues and time is not going to end it. So I have to see vanity totally and I lack the energy to see. Now, to gather the dissipated energy requires a gathering not only when I am confronted with a problem such as vanity, but a gathering all the time, even when there is no problem. We do not have problems all the time. There are moments when we have no problems. If at those moments we are gathering energy, gathering in the sense of being aware, then, when the problem arises, we can meet it and not go through the process of analysis. Teacher: There is another difficulty: when there is no problem, and no gathering of this energy, some form of mentation is going on. Krishnamurti: There is a waste of energy in mere repetition, reaction to memory, reaction to experience. If you observe your own mind you will see that a pleasurable incident keeps on repeating itself. You want to go back to it, you want to think about it, so it gathers momentum. When the mind is aware there is no wastage, is it possible to let that momentum, to let that thought flower? Which means never to say, "This is right or wrong", but to live the thought over, to have a feeling in which the thought can flourish so that by itself it will come to an end. Should we approach the problem differently? We have been talking about creating a generation with a new quality of mind. How do we do this? If I were a teacher here, it would be my concern - and a good educator obviously has this concern at heart -to bring about a new mind, a new sensitivity, a new feeling for the trees, the skies, the heavens, the streams, to bring into being a new consciousness, not the old consciousness remolded into a new shape. I mean a totally new mind, uncontaminated by the past. If that is my concern, how do I set about it? First of all, is it possible to bring about such a new mind? Not a mind which is a continuity of the past in a new mould but a mind that is uncontaminated. Is it feasible, or must the past continue through the present to be modified and be put into a new mould? In which case there is no new generation, it is the older generation repeated in a new form. I think it is possible to create a new generation. And I ask: How am I, not only to experience this within myself, but to express it to the student? If I see something experimentally in myself I cannot miss expressing it to the student. Surely it is not a question of I and the other, but a mutual thing, isn't it? Now how do I bring about a mind that is uncontaminated? You and I are not newborn, we have been contaminated by society, by Hinduism, by education, by the family, by society, by newspapers. How do we break through the contamination? Do I say it is part of my existence and accept it? What do I do, sir? Here is a problem -that our minds are contaminated. For the older ones it is more difficult to break through. You are comparatively young and the problem is to uncontaminate the mind; how is it to be done? Either it is possible, or it is not possible. Now how is one to discover whether it is or not? I would like you to jump into it. Do you know what is meant by the word "denial"? What does it mean to deny the past, to deny being a Hindu? What do you mean by that word "deny"? Have you ever denied anything? There is a true denial and a false denial. The denial with a motive is a false denial. The denial with a purpose, the denial with an intention, with an eye on the future, is not a denial. If I deny something in order to get something more, it is not denial. But there is a denial which has no motive. When I deny and do not know what is in store for me in the future, that is true denial. I deny being a Hindu, I deny belonging to any organization, I deny any particular creed and in that very denial I make myself completely insecure. Do you know such a denial, and have you ever denied anything? Can you deny the past that way - deny, not knowing what is in the future? Can you deny the known? Teacher: When I deny something - say Hinduism, there is a simultaneous understanding of what Hinduism is. Krishnamurti: What we were discussing is the bringing about of a new mind and if it is possible. A mind that is contaminated cannot be a new mind. So we are talking of decontamination, and whether that is possible. And in relation to that I began by asking what you mean by denial, because I think denial has a great deal to do with it. Denial has to do with a new mind. If I deny cleanly, without roots, without motive, it is real denial. Now is that possible? You see, if I do not completely deny society in which is involved politics, economics, social relationships, ambition, greed -if I do not deny all that completely, it is impossible to find out what it is to have a new mind. Therefore, the first breaking of the foundation is the denial of the things I have known. Is that possible? Obviously, drugs will not bring about a new mind; nothing will bring it about except a total denial of the past. Is it possible? What do you say? And if I have felt the perfume, the sight, the taste of such denial, how do I help to convey it to a student? He must have in abundance the known - mathematics, geography, history - and yet be abundantly free of the known, remorselessly free of it. Teacher: Sir, all sensations leave a residue, a disturbance which lead to various kinds of conflict and other forms of mental activity. The traditional approach of all religions is to deny this sensation by discipline and denial. But in what you say there seems to be a heightened receptivity to these sensations so that you see the sensations without distortion or residue. Krishnamurti: That is the issue. Sensitivity and sensation are two different things. A mind that is a slave to thought, sensation, feeling, is a residual mind. It enjoys the residue, it enjoys thinking about the pleasurable world and each thought leaves a mark, which is the residue. Each thought of a certain pleasure you have had, leaves a mark which makes for insensitivity. It obviously dulls the mind and discipline, control and suppression further dull the mind. I am saying that sensitivity is not sensation, that sensitivity implies no mark, no residue. So what is the question? Teacher: Is the denial of which you are speaking different from a denial which is the restriction of sensation? Krishnamurti: How do you see those flowers, see the beauty of them, be completely sensitive to them so that there is no residue, no memory of them, so that when you see them again an hour later you see a new flower? That is not possible if you see as a sensation and that sensation is associated with flowers, with pleasure. The traditional way is to shut out what is pleasurable because such associations awaken other forms of pleasure and so you discipline yourself not to look. To cut association with a surgical knife is immature. So how is the mind, how are the eyes, to see the tremendous colour and yet have it leave no mark? I am not asking for a method. How does that state come into being? Otherwise we cannot be sensitive. It is like a photographic plate which receives impressions and is self-renewing. It is exposed, and yet becomes negative for the next impression. So all the time, it is self-cleansing of every pleasure. Is that possible or are we playing with words and not with facts? The fact which I see clearly is that any residual sensitivity, sensation, dulls the mind. I deny that fact, but I do not know what it is to be so extraordinarily sensitive that experience leaves no mark and yet to see the flower with fullness, with tremendous intensity. I see as an undeniable fact that every sensation, every feeling, every thought, leaves a mark, shapes the mind, and that such marks cannot possibly bring about a new mind. I see that to have a mind with marks is death, so I deny death. But I do not know the other. I also see that a good mind is sensitive without the residue of experience. It experiences, but the experience leaves no mark from which it draws further experiences, further conclusions, further death. The one I deny and the other I do not know. How is this transition from the denial of the known to the unknown to come into being? How does one deny? Does one deny the known, not in great dramatic incidents but in little incidents? Do I deny when I am shaving and I remember the lovely time I had in Switzerland? Does one deny the remembrance of a pleasant time? Does one grow aware of it, and deny it? That is not dramatic, it is not spectacular, nobody knows about it. Still this constant denial of little things, the little wiping's, the little rubbing's off, not just one great big wiping away, is essential. It is essential to deny thought as remembrance, pleasant or unpleasant, every minute of the day as it arises. One is doing it not for any motive, not in order to enter into the extraordinary state of the unknown. You live in Rishi Valley and think of Bombay or Rome. This creates a conflict, makes the mind dull, a divided thing. Can you see this and wipe it away? Can you keep on wiping away not because you want to enter into the unknown? You can never know what the unknown is because the moment you recognise it as the unknown you are back in the known. The process of recognition is a process of the continued known. As I do not know what the unknown is I can only do this one thing, keep on wiping thought away as it arises. You see that flower, feel it, see the beauty, the intensity, the extraordinary brilliance of it. Then you go to the room in which you live, which is not well proportioned, which is ugly. You live in the room but you have a certain sense of beauty and you begin to think of the flower and you pick up the thought as it arises and you wipe it away. Now from what depth do you wipe, from what depth do you deny the flower, your wife, your gods, your economic life? You have to live with your wife, your children, with this ugly monstrous society. You cannot withdraw from life. But when you deny totally thought, sorrow, pleasure, your relationship is different and so there must be a total denial, not a partial denial, not a keeping of the things which you like and a denying of the things which you do not like. Now, how do you translate what you have understood to the student? Teacher: You have said that in teaching and learning, the situation is one of intensity where you do not say "I am teaching you something". Now this constant wiping away of the marks of thought, has it something to do with the intensity of the teaching-learning situation? Krishnamurti: Obviously. You see, I feel that teaching and learning are both the same. What is taking place here? I am not teaching you - I am not your teacher or authority, I am merely exploring and conveying my exploration to you. You can take it or leave it. The position is the same with regard to students. Teacher: What is the teacher then to do? Krishnamurti: You can only find out when you are constantly denying. Have you ever tried it? It is as if you cannot sleep for a single minute during the day time. Teacher: It not only needs energy, sir, but also releases a lot of energy. Krishnamurti: But first you must have the energy to deny. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 5 'ON COMPETITION' We have been talking of establishing a right communication between ourselves and the student, and in the state of communion to bring about a different atmosphere or climate, in which the student begins to learn. I do not know if you have noticed that as frivolity is contagious so is seriousness. It is a seriousness that does not arise because of a heavy face or a heavy heart but a seriousness which comes into being when we are in a state of relationship, communion. I think learning can exist only in that state of communion between the teacher and the student, as between you and me - not that I am your teacher. You know what the word "communion" means: to communicate, to be in touch, to transmit a certain feeling, to share it, not only at the verbal level but also at an intellectual level and also to feel much more deeply, subtly. I think the word "communion" means all that, and in that state, at all levels, in that atmosphere, in that sense of togetherness, is it not possible for both the teacher and the student to learn? I think that is the only state in which to learn, not when you sit on a pedestal and pour information down the throat of the student. Could we establish that communion, not only with the speaker but with trees, with nature, with the world, with the early morning when we get up, a sense of communion in which we learn? This morning could we discuss something which I feel not only the professional teacher but the human being should consider, because what we are to discuss has a great deal of significance in life? The whole of civilization, not only in India but in the rest of the world, is geared to competition, to success, to achievement. The ambitious man seems to be the respected entity - the ambitious man, the aggressive man who wants to succeed, to intrigue, to pull strings and so get to the top of the heap. There is everlasting competition not only in the class room of a school but also in daily life, in the attitude of the clerk who feels he must become the manager and the manager the director and the director the board president and so on. This is the established pattern of existence in modern civilization. You see everywhere that man is after success and it is he who is respected, politically at least, and the same attitude exists in the school. You tell the student he is not as good, not as intelligent as another student. You coax the child, goad him, encourage him to compete, to succeed, to arrive at a certain intellectual level. You are worshippers of labels. So you have an inborn attitude, which is essentially competitive and aggressive. This is so not only in economic and social life but also in religious life. There is this everlasting struggle to climb, to compete, to compare at all the levels of our being. Do you question this background of the superior and the inferior or do you accept it as inevitable and carry on? And will this bring about real learning? Is this natural to life? Natural not in the primitive sense of that word but is this a cultured life? Would you bring up your child this way? Do you think it is the right way of existence? I know it is the accepted pattern, but is it the true way? First of all, what does this competition, this comparison, do to the mind? Do you think you learn through competition? Let us examine this. You know that it is the established pattern at all levels of our being, at all stages of our existence, to compare, to have goals, to achieve. This is the whole structure of human existence. When you see two pictures on the wall, your attitude is that if the name of the painter is well known, whatever he paints is excellent. But the man whose name is not known, his picture is inferior. This happens all the time. Is that right? Will that attitude bring comprehension, will that help us to learn? Not that I must not have the capacity to discriminate, but will comparison help the mind to understand, to learn? Is comparison a state of mind in which one learns? How will you proceed to help the student if both you and the student have this attitude of competition, of comparison? Let us make this very simple. What does this competition do to the mind? What happens to the mind that is always comparing, achieving success, worshipping success? Teacher: It is tiring itself. Krishnamurti: You are still watching the effects, the results, but you are not watching the mind itself. You are not watching the nature of the mind itself which is doing this, the mind which is in movement, which is in a state of competition. Please look at the mind itself which is doing these things. Teacher: If the mind is going to measure success by achievement, when it does not achieve, there is frustration. Krishnamurti: You are still dealing with results. I want to tackle the mind. Perhaps analogies are tiring. The seed of an oak can never become the pine tree. You say: "I do not know what seed I am but I want to become a pine, or an ash, or the oak". We do not know the seed or the state of the mind itself, but concern ourselves with what it should be. Let us experience the thing rather than verbalize it. We compete, worship success, because we feel that if we did not compete, we would stagnate. That is merely a speculative response, it is not an actual fact. You do not know what would happen. When you see what you are, whatever it is, then you begin to learn. Water is water in all circumstances whether it is in the river or in a single drink. At present we have no foundation from which to learn. What we are doing is merely adding. The additive process is what we call learning. It is no learning. It is only the mind that is in a state in which it is not comparing, when it has understood the absurdity of comparing, that it can establish a foundation from which it can start to learn in the true sense of the word. If there is such a foundation in which there is no wandering, no longing, it is a solid foundation and on that you can build. The building is the structure of learning and from that learning there is action and never conformity, and therefore never a sense of fear, never a sense of frustration. Can you help the student to learn in that manner? For the student to learn, you must differentiate totally between the process of addition and learning. Then, you are creating a real human being, not a machine. If you do not see that, how are you going to help the student? Can you wipe away all competition with one sweep, which means can you wipe away the so-called structure of a society? You are teachers; a new generation is coming into your hands. Do you want them to continue in the same way? If you feel that this society in which we have grown up is a rotten thing, how will you help the student to create a new quality of mind in which the monster of competition has no part? What are the steps you will take, day after day, to see that the child is not drowned, swallowed up by society? What will you do, step by step, to help him? Teacher: The child should not be brought up with luxuries. Krishnamurti: What is wrong with luxuries? He may wear clean clothes, he may sit in a chair, have good food. To me it is luxury, to you it is not. What has luxury to do with this? You are laying down the law, the ideal of "luxury". Talk to the child not once a week, talk to him about it all the time, because he is being conditioned to compete. How will you help him not to be caught in the vicious circle of competition? Teacher: By making him see that he should not be afraid and that as an individual he is unique and has a contribution to make. Krishnamurti: If an individual realizes he is unique, so unique that there is no other like him, is he unique factually? He comes with all the prejudices of his parents. Where is the uniqueness in that poor child? You have to strip him of all his conditioning and can you strip him of it? Is it not your function as a teacher to do that? It is your responsibility. You have to see it, to see that it is true; and you have to feel it so that you will transmit it. But the boy may not feel it is so urgent. How will you commune with the child so that he learns? How will you teach him or help him to learn without the spirit of competition? Teacher: I am not able to feel for the child unless the feeling is inside me, and when it is not there I feel I have already destroyed the child. Krishnamurti: I will tell you. Every case has its own lesson. You do not feel it because you yourself are competing. Are you not competing for money, position prestige? As long as you do not feel strongly about this, what will you do? You cannot wait till you completely understand. So what will you do? Do not give the student marks but keep a record for yourself to see how he is behaving, how he is learning and the stage of his knowledge and so on, but do not goad him and help him to compete. Let us go over what we have discussed. Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased. The competitive spirit is merely an additive process which is not learning at all. We want the child to learn and not merely add knowledge to himself like a machine. To help the child to learn basically and fundamentally he must cease to compete, with all its implications. Now, one of the ways to do this is to I see the truth of not comparing. Now, how will you help the child not to be competitive? Teacher: As I teach mathematics I think of the ways I can present the subject matter so that it will be interesting. So many things operate in relationship when a thing like this is presented, and how do we communicate them? It is a very vast thing, so we can only say it in parts. Krishnamurti: You are not meeting the point. When I say: "What will you do?" I mean not only in terms of action but also in terms of feeling. They are not two different things, the feeling and the action. I see very clearly that competitiveness is destructive not only in the classroom but right through life. Here is a young child; I want to help him to understand. How am I to proceed? I can talk to him and say, "Look at what is happening in life. There is misery, conflict". Talk to him so that you do not create condemnation, you do not create reaction. Look at the picture. See it very clearly as you would see London or Bombay on the map. Help the student to see very clearly, that is the first job. Convey to him the urgency of the feeling. Do not try to convince him, influence him, do not talk to him in terms of condemnation, in terms of agreement, persuasion. Show him the fact. Establish the fact. Then you are dealing with him entirely factually, scientifically, not romantically, sentimentally or emotionally. You have established between him and you right relationship. You are dealing with facts and you have established a relationship between you of mutual understanding of the fact, the corruptive fact of competition. Then he and you sit down and say "What are we going to do actually, in action?" Translation of the feeling of communion depends entirely on the intensity of this feeling. Now, you have established the feeling, the truth, the fact, that competition is deadly, but you have not communicated this fact to the child. That is the first thing to do. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 6 'ON FEAR' Krishnamurti: How would you, as an educator, tackle the problem of the eradication of fear in the student? Can you set about it as you would set about teaching mathematics? First, you must understand fear for yourself before you can help another. You have to understand the implication of fear, how fear comes about. Just as you know Hindi or some other subject, you have to know something of fear. Society is doing everything to inculcate fear by laying down standards, religious ideals, class distinctions, ideas of success, the sense of the inferior and the superior, the rich man and the poor man. Society is doing everything possible to breed distorted values. The question is not only for the teacher to go deeply into fear but also to see that fear is not transmitted and for the student to be able to recognize the causes that breed fear. As teachers, would this not be a problem to you? We have very little love in our lives, not only to receive but to give; love not in any mystical sense but the actual feeling of love, pity, compassion, generosity, an action which does not emanate from a centre. And as you have very little love, what would you do with the student, how would you help him to have this flame? Does religion mean anything to you? Not ceremonies, but the religious feeling, the religious benediction, the sacredness of something? Religion, fear, love - are they not very interrelated? You cannot understand the one without the other. There is fear, there is this appalling dearth of love - I mean the passion of it, the intensity of it - and then there is this feeling of benediction which is not mere recompense, which is not a reward for righteous action, which has nothing to do with religious organizations. Do you walk in the evening and have you noticed those villagers crossing the fields? How beautiful it all is? And the villager is totally unconscious of the beauty of the land, of the hills, of the water. For the villager returning to his unhealthy home there is nothing. There is fear, there is the immense problem of love and the feeling of sympathy when you see the poor villager go by. Don't you feel a tremendous surging in yourself, a despair at the colossal misery of it all? What can one do? There is the ability to receive and to give, to feel, and to have generosity, kindness, humility. What does it mean to you? How do you awaken this thing in yourself or awaken it in another? Can there be an approach that is not an isolated critical comprehension but an understanding that is total - of fear, love, the religious feeling? Now how am I to approach the problem? Am I to take each problem one by one, to take fear, look at it, and then study love? How am I to capture the whole thing? If you have the feeling of a sound, you have the feeling of a song and if you have a feeling for the silence between sounds you have the delight of the movement of a song. Song is not just the word, just the sound, it is the peculiar combination of the sound, the silence and the continuation of the sound. To understand music surely there must be comprehension of the whole thing. And in the same way, is fear an isolated problem which has to be comprehended by itself and love by itself and the religious feeling by itself, or is there an approach to the whole, a total thing? Have you ever watched a rain drop? The rain drop contains the whole of the rain, the whole of the river, the whole of the ocean. That drop makes the river, makes the ravines, excavates the Grand Canyon, becomes a vibrant thundering waterfall. In the same way can my mind look at fear, love, religion, god, as a movement, rather than as an isolated introspection, an analytical examination, a dissection? Teacher: What is the relationship between fear and love? Krishnamurti: If I am afraid, how can I have sympathy for anybody? An ambitious man does not know about the earth and the brotherhood of man. An ambitious man knows no love. Can a man who is afraid of death, of what his neighbours might say, of his wife, security, job, have sympathy? The one excludes the other. Teacher: We operate only in parts, we try through parts to apprehend the whole. Krishnamurti: What will transform fear? Teacher: Understanding. Krishnamurti: What brings the transformation and who is to transform? I have observed my mind which says, "I am afraid" and I want to get at what my mind is trying to do. What is effort and who is the maker of effort? Unless one goes into it very deeply, the mere saying "I must get rid of fear" has very little meaning. There is fear, there is love, and this feeling of immensity. I can analyse fear step by step. I can go into the causes of fear, the effects of fear, I can go into why I am afraid, and who is the maker of effort and whether the maker of effort is different from the thing which is making effort. And I can enquire into whether there is a mind which can observe effort, the maker of effort and the thing upon which he is making an effort, not only objectively but inwardly. At the end of it all, there is still lurking fear. I can go very analytically into this question of religion, dogma, belief, superstition but at the end of this analyzing still where I am. I have learned the techniques of analysis and at the end of it, my mind is so sharp that it can follow every movement of fear. But fear still lurks. Now what is the nature of the mind that takes in the whole, digests it at one sweep and throws out what is not worthwhile? There must be an approach which will give one a total comprehension, a total feeling with which one can approach each problem. Can I capture the whole meaning of something, of love, fear, religion, that extraordinary feeling of immensity, of beauty and then approach each problem individually? You have seen trees. Do you take in the whole tree or do you merely look at the branch ar,d the leaves and the flower? Do you see the whole tree inside you? After all, a tree is the root, the branch the flower, the fruit, the sap, the whole of the tree. Can you grasp the feeling, the significance, the beauty of the whole tree and then look at the branch? Such an observation will have tremendous significance. When you look at a tree next time, see the shape of it, the symmetry of it, the depth, the feeling, the beauty, the quality of the whole thing. I am talking of the feeling of the whole. In the same way you have a body: you have feelings, emotions; there is the mind, there are memories - the conscious and unconscious traditions, the centuries of accumulated impressions, the family name - can you feel the whole of that? If you do not feel the whole of that but merely dissect your emotions, it is immature. Can you feel within yourself this whole thing and with that feeling of the whole being, attack fear? Fear is an immense problem. Can you approach it with an immensity to meet an immensity? Teacher: It is not always possible, sir, we often get lost in our immediate problems. Krishnamurti: But once you have the feeling of this immensity, life has a different colouration, it has a different quality. Teacher: You are only conscious of this immensity at times. Krishnamurti: I do not think you have ever thought of it, have you? Teacher: Yes, I have, once in a way, by detaching myself from the immediate problem and looking at it. Krishnamurti: I do not mean that. I mean to have the feeling of all time, not today, tomorrow, the day after day, but the feeling of all time. To think in terms of man, the world, the universe is an extraordinary feeling. And with that feeling can one approach the particular problem? Otherwise we are going to land in an intellectual or emotional chaos. What is the difficulty in this? Is it the incapacity, the narrowness of the mind, the immediate occupation, the immediate concern for the child, the husband, the wife which so takes up your time that you have no time to think of it? Take the word, "immediate". There is no immediate, it is an endless thing. You make it into an immediate problem; that problem is the result of a thousand yesterdays and a thousand tomorrow's. There is no immediacy. There is fear, love and man's urge for the immense. Can you capture some of the quality of the feeling and say, "Let me look at fear"? What significance has fear, and how will you proceed to help the student? You should prepare the student for the whole of life, and life is an extraordinarily vast thing. And when you use the word "life" it is all the oceans and the mountains and the trees and all of human aspirations, human miseries, despairs, struggles, the immensity of it all. Can you help the student to apprehend that immensity of life? Must you not help the student to have this feeling? Do any of you meditate? Not only to sit still, not only to examine the ways of the mind but also to invite the conscious and the unconscious and to push further into silence and see what happens further and further. If you do not do this, are you not missing a lot in life? Meditation is a form of self-recollected awareness, a form of discovery, a form of cutting loose from tradition, from ideas, conclusions, a sense of being completely alone, which is death. With that sense of the total, can you meet the immediate? Let us become a little more practical. How do we set about to help the student actually to be free from fear? Teacher: I wouLd see that my relationship with the student is friendly. It would be stupid to discuss fear if I were not friendly with him. I would create situations, both practical and intellectual, where he would understand what fear actually means, intellectually explain the causes and effects of fear because the mind needs to be sharpened, and I would see if I could make him experience this wholeness of outlook and feeling. Krishnamurti: Be factual. In the class, how will you teach? How will you help the student to understand? There is a gap between the child and the total feeling, how would you lead up to that? Teacher: It should be possible to awaken in him a curiosity which is of a subtle type. The next thing I would like to do with him is to get him to appreciate quality in work, in playing a game, in mathematics or other subjects. I would find out what his interests were, how he reacted, and if I were able to progress further, I would see whether something more happened between me and the student. Krishnamurti: You have done the obvious things which are necessary. You would talk to him, you would show him how fear comes into being and all that. What next? Factually how will you help the student to be free from fear? I think that is the real issue. When there is an opportunity, would you be in a meditative, reflective self-recollected state which might help the student to see clearly what fear is? You see that is the necessary thing, but you leave that thing hanging. What would you actually do? What would you do factually? Teacher: Meditation would help the mind to deal with the situation. Krishnamurti: I may have a feeling for all this. Now how am I to translate it into action? What am I to do with those dozen children? Teacher: The feeling will translate itself. It is a link of love with the children which will help. Krishnamurti: First have affection, then use every occasion to help the student to be free from fear, explain to him the causes of fear and use every incident to show how he is afraid, In the class, in the very teaching of history, mathematics, talk to him about it. But what next? Proceed. Teacher: In doing all this I am also watchful to see that what I am doing to him is not also being undone. Krishnamurti: What is the total effect on the child of what you have said, the fact of your affection, your explanations? Is it not making him turn inward, and what does that do? Teacher: It helps him face some immediate problems. Krishnamurti: You have helped the student to look at himself, you have helped him to be aware of this fear and to turn inward in the sense that he feels more conscious of the fear. You have to balance it by something else. Teacher: Do you mean, sir, that this process of internal introspection is likely to lead to some complications in the child? Krishnamurti: It is bound to lead to a kind of self-conscious feeling. "Am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing?" There would be nervousness or self importance, or the showing off in "How fearless I am!" How will you balance that? Think it out, use your mind very carefully. At this stage I think the problem again requires a different kind of approach. Otherwise you will be helping the child by concentrated attention to become self-conscious, self-assertive, arrogant, and with an authoritarian outlook. Teacher: There should be an opportunity for the child to be sensitive to other things which are not within. Krishnamurti: It appears to me, you will unconsciously strengthen egotism, a sense of self-importance, a sense of being offensive, aggressive, rude. You have so far dealt with the movement of the mind. The tide is moving in, the tide also moves out. If it remains inward it is like the backwaters of a bay, but if the tide has a movement inward, then it has to have an outward movement. You have dealt so far only with an inward movement. How will you help the student to move out? Teacher: When you spoke of the outward movement, I felt I was not looking from the point of the whole but from the development of the partial movement. Krishnamurti: If I had not kept on pushing and therefore made you realize it was only a partial answer, you would not have moved. You only talk of the inner movement but it is a movement of the tide both inward and outward. It is a movement you have created in one direction and you do not know how to treat the inner and the outer as one movement. Teacher: Is it not possible right from the beginning to move both inward and outward? Krishnamurti: What is the outward movement that is going to give the balance? Teacher: Not only the balance, but a sense of humility that comes now and then. Krishnamurti: There are hills, trees, the river, the sands. That is the outward movement. The perception, the seeing, that is the outward movement. Nature has provided you with the beauty of all this, the rivers, trees, the arid land. So there has to be movement both outward and inward, the everlasting movement. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 7 'ON TEACHING AND LEARNING' Teacher: We realize that we cannot see a fact unless the mind is empty of thought. But even if it is empty for a while, thought seems to arise again. How do we end thought? Can we discuss this? Krishnamurti: I wonder if all of us understand the importance of the role of thinking? Is thought important, and at what level is it important? What is thinking? What makes us think? Where is thought important and where is it not important, and how do you answer that question? And what is the machinery that is set going when a question is asked? Is thinking merely the habitual response to a habitual pattern? You live here in this school in a certain groove, with certain patterns of thoughts, habits, feelings. You live, you function in those habits, patterns and systems, and the functioning of the brain, thought is very limited. And when you go out of the valley you live in a little wider field. You have certain grooves of action and you follow them. It is all a mechanical process really, but in that pattern of mechanical activity there are certain variations. You modify, change, but always in that pattern, wherever you are, whatever position you may have - minister, governor or doctor, or professor - it is always a groove with varying changes and modifications. You function in patterns. I am not saying it is right or wrong, I am just examining it. You have beliefs but they are in the background and you go on with your daily activities, with your envy, greed, jealousy. Whenever your beliefs are questioned you get irritated but you go on. Children are being educated to think, to form grooves of habits and to function in those habits for the rest of their lives. They are going to get jobs, they are going to be engineers, doctors, and for the rest of their lives, the pattern will be set. Any deviation from that is what is disturbing. That disturbance is lessened through marriage, responsibility, children; and so gradually the mould is set. And all thinking is between what is convenient, what is not convenient, what is beneficial, what is worthwhile - it is always within that field. Teacher: That is not thinking, sir, it is a repetition. Krishnamurti: But that is how we live, that is our life. That is all we want. Everything is repetition and the mind gets duller and more stupid. Is that not a fact, sir? We do not want to be disturbed, we do not want to shatter the pattern. What makes us shatter the pattern or break through the pattern? And is it possible not to fall into a groove? But why should I end the making of patterns? I begin to think about ending them when the pattern does not satisfy me, when the pattern is no longer useful to me or when there are in the pattern certain incidents like death, the husband leaving the wife, or losing a job. In the breaking of that particular pattern there is a disturbance called sorrow and I move away from that into another pattern. I move from pattern to pattern, from one framework into which circumstances, environment, family, education have put me, to another. The disturbance makes me question a little, but I immediately fall into another groove and there I settle. That is what most people want, what their parents want, what society wants. Where does this idea of ending thought come in? Teacher: Sir, there are times when one is discontented with the whole pattern and everything in it. Krishnamurti: What makes us see the futility of this pattern? When do I see it and what makes me see it? A pattern is set if there is a motive. If I break from this pattern with a motive, the motive will mould the new pattern. Now, what makes me change, what makes me do something without a motive? Teacher: It is very difficult to be free from motive. Krishnamurti: Who tells you to be free? If it is difficult, why bother about breaking the pattern? Be satisfied with a motive and continue with it, why bother if it is difficult? Teacher: It leads me nowhere, sir. Krishnamurti: But if it led anywhere, would you pursue it? Teacher: Which means there is a motive again. Krishnamurti: What makes you break through and give up the motive? What do you mean by motive? You teach here because you get some money, that is a motive. You like somebody because he can give you a position or you love god because you hate life. Your life is miserable, and love of god is the escape from that. These are all motives. Now, what makes a mind, a human being, live without a motive? If you can pursue that and go into it, I am sure you will find the answer to your question. Teacher: The question, "Do I know my motives?" seems to come before the question "Do I do something without a motive?" Krishnamurti: Do we know our motives? Why do I teach, why do I hold on to a husband, wife? Do I know my motives, and how do I find out? And if I do find out, what is wrong with having motives. I love somebody because I like to be with that somebody physically, sexually, as a companion, what is wrong with that? Teacher: When I teach because I must have money, motive is not a hindrance. I must have money, so I must take to some profession, and I take to teaching. Krishnamurti: First of all, do we know our motives, not only the conscious but the unconscious motives, the hidden motives? Do we do anything in our lives without a motive? To do something without a motive is love of what one is doing, and in that process thinking is not mechanical; then the brain is in a state of constant learning, not opinionated, not moving from knowledge to knowledge. It is a mind that moves from fact to fact. Therefore, such a mind is capable of ending and coming to something it does not know, which is freedom from the known. You asked at the beginning: "How do we end thought?" I said: "What for?" We do not even know what thinking is, we do not know how to think. We think in terms of patterns. So, unless we have investigated or understood all that, we cannot possibly ask that question: "How do we end thought?" Teacher: How can we enquire into thinking and how to think? Krishnamurti: Not only enquire into how to think but also into what is thinking. Can I, as a human being, as an individual, find out what is the way of my thinking? Is it mechanical, is it free? Do I know it as it is operating in me? To end thought I have first to go into the mechanism of thinking. I have to understand thought completely, deep down in me. I have to examine every thought, without letting one thought escape without being fully understood, so that the brain, the mind, the whole being becomes very attentive. The moment I pursue every thought to the root, to the end completely, I will see that thought ends by itself. I do not have to do anything about it because thought is memory. Memory is the mark of experience and as long as experience is not fully, completely, totally understood, it leaves a mark. The moment I have experienced completely, the experience leaves no mark. So, if we go into every thought and see where the mark is and remain with that mark, as a fact - then that fact will open and that fact will end that particular process of thinking, so that every thought, every feeling is understood. So the brain and the mind are being freed from a mass of memories. That requires tremendous attention, not attention only to the trees and birds but inward attention to see that every thought is understood. Teacher: That seems to be a vicious circle. The mind is involved in getting rid of a pattern of thinking and in order to understand the process of thinking it needs a certain sensitivity which the mind does not have. Krishnamurti: Take a thought, any kind of thought. Go into it. See why you have such a thought, what is involved in it, understand it, do not leave it till you have completely unearthed all the roots of it. Teacher: That can only be done if the instrument which is doing it, is sensitive. Krishnamurti: As you go into one particular thought you are beginning to understand the instrument which is examining that thought. Then what is important is not the thought but the observer who is examining the thought. And the observer is the thought which says: "I do not like that thought, I like this thought." So you attack the core of thought and not just the symptoms. And as you are a teacher, how will you create this or bring about this attentive observation, this examination without any judgement, in a student? If I may ask: How do you teach? What is the environment, the condition, the atmosphere, in which teaching and learning are possible? You teach, say, history, and the student learns. What is the atmosphere, the environment, the quality in the room in which teaching and learning are taking place? Teacher: There is a special atmosphere when the teacher and the student are both attending. Krishnamurti: I do not want to use the word "attention". If you learn anything from the teacher, what is the nature of that communication, of receiving and learning? For a flower to grow it must have rain, do you understand? Teacher: Could we approach it negatively. Krishnamurti: In any way you like. I am asking you to teach science. What is the atmosphere in the room where you teach science? Where the teacher and the student are learning, teaching? What is the quality necessary, what is the atmosphere, the smell, the perfume? Teacher: A quiet and calm environment. Krishnamurti: You are idealistic and I am not. I have not one ideal inside me, I just want to know the fact. You are moving away from the fact, that is what I object to. When you teach and they learn, in the class room, what is the atmosphere? The atmosphere is the fact. Teacher: Friendliness between the teacher and the student. Krishnamurti: You are not facing the fact. You teach and you also know and when the student is to learn, there must be a certain quality, and I am asking what is that quality? Have you actually experienced the quality where this communication is mutual, where the learning is the teaching? Teacher: In the beginning I thought that when I teach, I am handing over some facts to the students, but now I understand that when I am teaching there is also a learning. This happens at rare moments when there is exploration, when both the teacher and the student are exploring together. Krishnamurti: What is the state when that exploration together takes place? What is the atmosphere, the relationship? What is the word you would use to express that state in which communication is possible? Teacher: Curiosity. Krishnamurti: What do you teach? Teacher: Hindi. Krishnamurti: The children are anxious to know and you are anxious to teach. Now, what atmosphere does it create? What takes place? Teacher: The children listen to me. Krishnamurti: You say children listen to you. You want to tell them something. What has happened, I wish you would examine this. Teacher: There is a state of alertness. Krishnamurti: I want to go a little bit more into the matter. The moment you say it is alertness you have already put it in a framework. I am trying to prevent you and myself from defining it. Teacher: When the object is there, the object of learning and teaching, both operate; from this there is a fluidity, a movement; and temporarily, this state is slightly different from the other states I know. Krishnamurti: There is attention when the teacher and the taught, both have a drive to learn and to teach. You have to create a feeling, an atmosphere, in the room. Just now we have created an atmosphere - because I want to find out and you want to find out. Is it possible to maintain this atmosphere, in which alone teaching and learning are possible? We started by asking how to communicate this sense of enquiry into thinking, into motive, to the student. I asked you, how do you teach, that is, how do you convey anything? And I asked what takes place when you actually teach. What is the atmosphere when you are teaching? Is it a slack atmosphere or a tense atmosphere? Now, if you have not examined your thinking, the mechanism of thinking, to convey the sense of enquiry to the student is impossible. But if you have done it in yourself, you are bound to create the atmosphere. And I feel that atmosphere, that attention, is the essential quality of teaching and learning. Teacher: You have said that definition of a fact is something quite different from the experiencing of that fact. Now in all this there seems to be a gap between the definition and the actual doing of something. You also asked: Have you ever done something for its own sake because you love it? How does one, without examining one's motives, without all these ramifications, get to the heart of something? Krishnamurti: That is just what I was trying to get at. To see something totally is the ending of time or the comprehending of it. Can one see if there is a motive in teaching and learning at any level? Life is a constant process of teaching and learning: To teach and to learn is not possible if there is a motive, and when we have a motive the state of teaching and learning is not possible. Now, watch this carefully: In the very nature of teaching and learning there is humility. You are the teacher and you are the taught. So there is no pupil and no teacher, no guru and no sishya, there is only teaching and learning, which is going on in me. I am learning and I am also teaching myself; the whole process is one. That is important. That gives vitality, a sense of depth, and that is prevented if I have a motive. As teaching-learning is important, everything else becomes secondary and therefore, motive disappears. What is important drives away the unimportant. Therefore it is finished: I do not have to examine my motives day after day. Teacher: It is not very clear to me, sir. Krishnamurti: First of all, life is a process of learning. It is not saying "I have learned" and a settling back. Life is a process of learning and I cannot learn if there is a motive. If that is very clear, that life is a process of learning, then motive has no place. Motive has a place when you are using learning to get something. So the essential fact drives away all the unessential trivialities, in which motive is included. Teacher: Should there be a concern for the essential, as a fact? Krishnamurti: But the fact is the essential. Life is the essential. Life is "what is". Otherwise it is not life. If motive is not, "what is" is. If you understand the fact of sorrow, the "other" comes into being. You cannot come to the "other" without understanding motive, the unessential. Teacher: So there cannot be concern for the essential. Krishnamurti: Understand the fact, which is important, and go into it. If you are ambitious, be completely ambitious. Let there be no double thinking. Be either ambitious or see the fact of ambition. Both are facts, and when you examine one fact, go into it completely. If you go into the fact completely, the fact will begin to show what is involved in ambition. The fact of ambition will begin to unravel itself and then there is no ambition. Most religious people have invented theories about facts. But they do not understand "the fact". Having established a theory they hope it will ward off the actual fact; it cannot. So do not try to establish any essential fact. See how you slip into wrong action. There is no essential fact, there is only fact - you see the point? And one fact does not conform to another fact. The moment it is conforming, it is not a fact. If you look at the fact with a referent, with what you can get out of that fact, then you will never see the fact. To look at the fact is the only thing that matters. There is no fact that is superior or inferior, there is only fact. That is the ruthless thing. If I am a lawyer, I am a lawyer. I do not find excuses for it. Seeing that fact, going into it, seeing the motives, the fact and its complexities are revealed, and then you are out of it. But if you say, "I must always the truth", that is an ideal. That is a false assumption. So do not move from what you consider the unimportant fact to what you consider the more important fact. There is only fact, not the less or the more. It really does something to you to look at life that way. You banish all illusion, all dissipation of energy of the mind, the brain, at one stroke. The mind then operates in precision without any deception, without hatred, without hypocrisy. The mind then becomes very clear, sharp. That is the way to live. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 8 'ON THE GOOD MIND' Krishnamurti: I think that most of us have a fairly comprehensive view of what is happening in the world. Looking at the historical process, the appalling travesty of peace, one must have ask oneself what life is all about. There is the enslaving of whole masses of people; there is corruption and talk of democracy; religions have failed, only superstitions remain. There is the dead weight of tradition, the innumerable gurus, soothsayers, monks, astrologers. There is poverty, degradation, the squalor of existence. And there is also a sense of deep despair. So, seeing this immense suffering, what is our answer to it all? There are people who say that what is needed is not a new system or a new philosophy, but rather a new type of leadership, a new type of man who has immense authority not only in the state but in his own idealistic strength. But do we want new leaders? What we need is freedom from leaders. When we see this vast confusion, economic strangulation and imbalance, and come to Rishi Valley, what is it that a school of this kind can do, and should do? Can we discuss this? Not as an ideal, for ideals of any kind are very detrimental. Ideals prevent us from looking at facts, and it is only a concern with facts and the understanding of facts which releases an energy that is the movement in the right direction. Ideals merely engender various forms of escape. Let us consider all this and see what we can do here in this school. This is not going from the vast to the ridiculous, for this school is a miniature of what is taking place in the world and, seeing the destructive chaos, misery, suffering, I feel there is only one answer and that is the creation of a new mind. What is essential is a different mind that will look at all problems and find a solution and not create new problems. I think the right kind of education does bring about the good mind, the total development of man, and it seems to me that is the major issue not only in this valley but also in the rest of the world. How can one bring about a good mind, a mind that sees all these co-relations, not only at the superficial level but a mind that can penetrate inwardly? It seems to me that the problem of education is to see whether it is possible to cultivate an intelligence which is not the result of influence, an intelligence which is not the learning of certain techniques and the earning of a livelihood. They are part of education but surely they are not the only function of education? Now how do you educate a child so that he is able to face life and not merely conform to the established patterns of society, to certain modes of conduct? So that he can go much further, deeper into the whole problem of existence? I do not know if you have ever considered what a good mind is. Is it a good mind that has the capacity to retain what it reads, and functions from memory? The electronic brain is doing this marvellously. It calculates at astonishing speed some of the most complicated mathematical problems. It functions, I have been told, in the same way as the human brain, doing the desired calculations. Is a good mind one that repeats, like a gramophone, what it has been told? That is our education, isn't it? The learning of facts, dates, to repeat them once a year when a boy takes his examination. Can this be called cultivating a good mind? And yet is this not what most of us are doing when we are teaching? So the mere addition to knowledge, which is really the cultivation of memory, is just an additive process. it does not engender a clear, good mind, does it? Negatively, one can see that the mere cultivation of memory does not bring about a good mind although most of our existence is based on this. And yet, one must have memory, one must have a very good memory to remember certain things, to be a good technician. So, at what point does memory interfere with a good mind capable of explanation, investigation and discovery? At what point does memory interfere with real freedom? I do not know if you have ever considered the man who invented the jet aeroplane. He had first to understand the whole problem of the piston-propeller engine. He had to know it, but after knowing it, he had to put it away in order to discover something new. The specialists, until they really discover something new, merely continue a better and more complicated technique, but if a man is to invent something new he has to let go of the old. Teacher: Sir, you have said that perception of a fact leads to knowledge in the right direction, whereas ideals lead to escapes. Can you make the statement clearer? Krishnamurti: How do ideals come into being, and what is the need for ideals? The ideal of what should be, which is away from the fact, limits the mind and makes it static. If a child merely conforms to certain ideals, to the words of certain teachers, to the words of his father, grandfather, uncle and so on, that restrains energy and limits knowledge, does it not? All conformity limits knowledge. If I am an art teacher and I teach children to copy, which is imitation, it does not really help creative perception or expression, does it? Now let us see what happens when there is perception of the fact. I perceive that I am stupid. There is perception, realization, awareness of the fact that I am stupid. That is, I do not give explanations or offer an opinion about my stupidity and thereby escape through explanation. The observation of a fact without justification or condemnation releases tremendous energy. Now is there a release of energy through conformity, through motive, through mere acceptance? And can one function in the framework of that acceptance? Teacher: Physically, there is. Krishnamurti: Is physical energy released by conforming? What is the motive behind this extraordinary urge in most of us to conform to a pattern? What is the compulsive urge behind this? Obviously it is the desire to be secure, is it not? Security in your relationship with your wife, with your hus- band, in the good opinion of the public or a friend. All this indicates the desire not only for economic security but inward mental security or certainty, does it not? Teacher: The demand for security is the desire to have peace of mind. Krishnamurti: I need a certain amount of security. I must have a job. If I am uncertain of my next meal I would not be sitting here talking. Does the desire for peace mean that we should have a mind that will never be disturbed? And why should we not be disturbed? What is wrong if we are disturbed? Much of the world is disturbed. Why should we not be disturbed? And, is not the mind which says, "I must not be disturbed", really a dead mind? There can be no state of mind which says, "l am perfectly safe," there can be no mind which is so certain that it will never be disturbed. I think that is the kind of mind most of us want and that is why we conform endlessly. If you had a son, you would want him to conform to the pattern of society because you do not want him to be a revolutionary. So, I am asking what is behind this demand for security, certainty, this hope in which despair is included? We will come back to it in different way. I am just asking myself, why this urge? Is it fear? I am afraid of not being able to take care of my family and therefore I hold on to my job. I am afraid my wife may not care for me, or my husband may not care for me. I possess property. I am afraid that property may be taken away from me. Behind that threat there is a sense of fear, a desire to be secure. Teacher: We can only be secure when there is no fear. Krishnamurti: Wait a minute. Is that possible? You know what fear is. If most of us were free from all fear, you know what would happen? We would do exactly what we want to do. Fear restrains us, is that not so? But we are asking if a mind that is afraid, anxious, is it ever secure? I may have a good job, I may love my wife or husband, but am I secure when this fear is going on in me? To have no fear, which is an extraordinary state, is to be free of the problem of security. Is it possible for this mind to understand fear and be free from fear? Whatever such a mind does, being free, is right action. How will you educate a group of children to be fearless? Which does not mean that they can do what they like - but to be free from the sense of all apprehension, anxiety? Will this not release an enormous amount of energy? How do you set about educating the child? You are afraid and you see that fear is most disturbing. It is the worst form of destruction. How do I educate a boy to be without fear? What is it a teacher can do to translate this into action? Is it to allow the child to think freely? You see the importance of being without fear, because it is death to live in a state of fear. Whether it is conscious or unconscious fear, it troubles your mind. How will you help a child not to be afraid and yet to live with others? He cannot do whatever he likes, he cannot say, "I need not go to the class because I am fearless." Then what makes a child, a student, free? What gives him the deep impression that he is free, not to do what he likes, but free. If a child feels that you are really looking after him, that you care for him, that he is completely at home with you, completely secure with you, that he is not afraid of you, then he respects you and he listens to you because you are looking after him and he has complete confidence in you. He is then at peace with what you tell him. So open the door to him to be without fear. How else will you proceed? First of all you have to establish a relationship with the student, let him know that you really care for him, that he can really feel at home with you and therefore he can be completely at ease and feel secure. It is not a theory, it is not an idea. What will you do if your student fails in an examination? One boy may not be as quick as the other boy and yet he must learn. How will you encourage learning without fear? If you say one boy is better than another, it engenders fear. How will you avoid all this and yet help the child to learn? The child comes from a home where he has been brought up differently. His whole life is geared to achievement, success, and he comes here with all his background of fear and competition. How are you to help him? Teacher: You can help him learn according to his individual capacity. Krishnamurti: Let us go slowly. How is it to be done? This? school is in your hands. You have to create something out of it. Teaching is a creative thing, it is not merely something you can learn and repeat. How are you going to teach the children in your class for whom you have a feeling of love. Remember they are not interested in learning. They want to have a good time. They want to play cricket, watch birds, and occasionally look at a book. The fact is they want to do the easiest thing. If you leave it to them the more they are secure with you, the more they will exploit you. How will you help them to learn? You have to find ways to teach them and that is going to release your energy to devise mean of making subjects interesting for the child. Before you proceed with a child, what is the state of your mind which wants to help the child to learn subjects in which he is not interested? Teacher: It is the urge to share your learning with the child. Krishnamurti: I want these children to learn because learning is part of existence and the child can only learn if there is no fear. I must teach the child so that he learns without fear, which means I have to explode with this feeling of wanting to share with that boy. Do you know the state of mind that wants to share with another? That itself seems to be the right feeling. Do you know what that implies? The fact is I know more, the child knows less, and I have a feeling that he must learn, that he must be capable of sharing. We both are learning, which means we are going through an experience together. The child and I are then already in a state of communication. Once I have established the right relationship or communication between myself and the child, he is going to learn because he has confidence in me. Teacher: The teacher may be very fond of the child, but still the child is not willing to learn, the child is not interested. Krishnamurti: I question it. When the child has confidence in you, do you think he will not learn any subject you want him to? What we are trying to do is to establish relationship. If that is possible, then will I not convey to the child the importance of learning a subject? This morning when we began to talk there was no communication between the speaker and the audience. Now we have established some kind of communication and we are trying to work the thing out together. Can we not do the same thing with children? KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 9 'ON THE NEGATIVE APPROACH' Krishnamurti: What do you think is right education, not for any particular group of children, the children of the rich or the poor, the children of the village or of the town, but children? How would you bring up a child knowing that walls of destructive nationalism divide people? Machines are taking over man's labour and man is going to have more leisure. There will be electronic brains, machines which will run by themselves. Man is going to have a great deal of leisure, perhaps not immediately, but in fifty or a hundred years time. Taking into account the advance of technology, growing systematization, the acceptance of authority and tyranny in the world, what do you consider is the direction of education? What would you consider is the direction of the whole development of man? What is it you want the student to discover for himself? Are these vain questions? If you consider them seriously what would be your reaction? Machines are going to take over. The perfect teacher, who is really excellent in his subject, can teach a class and his instructions can be recorded through tapes and distributed throughout the world and the ordinary teacher can utilize them and instruct the student. So, the responsibility for good teaching may be taken out of individual hands, though you may need a teacher. You may say that what happens in fifty years is not your immediate problem. But a really good educator must be concerned not only with the immediate but be prepared for the future - future not in the sense of the day after, or a thousand days after tomorrow, but the tendency of this extraordinary development of the mind. I suppose you exist from day to day. The immediate is brutal, tiring and you say: "Why should I bother with what is going to happen?" But if you have a child if you are a teacher with students, unless you have a total comprehension of all this, you cannot see and understand the meaning of education. What will happen after you educate all these girls and boys? The girls are going to get married and disappear into the vast world. They will be sucked into society. What is the point of educating them? And the boys will get jobs. Why should you educate them to fit into this rotten society? To teach them how to behave, how to be gentle and kind, is that the end of education? Take the total picture of what is happening in the world, not only in India. Seeing this whole picture, comprehending it, what is it you are trying to do? Unless you have a total response to this whole issue the mere tinkering with it to improve teaching methods has very little meaning. The world is on fire, and being an educated man you must have the right answer to this; being a human being you must have an answer to this, and if you have an answer, a feeling of this totality of evil, then, when you teach mathematics, dancing, singing, it has a significance. Teacher: Sir, if I do not have this whole feeling towards something, do you think it is likely to come into being when I do something and do it well? Krishnamurti: I want you to be factual. Teacher: By being punctual, learning the technique, studying before I teach and doing the thing perfectly, would that help to bring about the quality of total feeling? Krishnamurti: Would it? It is essential that I be punctual, that I study my subject before I teach - that is understood. And you are asking if that will lead to the total feeling of all this? Teacher: I feel there is a likelihood - it is not a certainty - when I study something with attention. Krishnamurti: You have moved away from doing something, from being punctual and all the rest of it, to "attention". What do you mean by attention? I may give a certain meaning to attention and you may not. I will work on mathematics and I will be punctual. I will be very quiet and very tender and affectionate, encourage the student, discourage him from being competitive. Would you call that an attentive mind? Teacher: I think so, sir. By helping the student not to compete, there is a quality of attention. Krishnamurti: What does that mean? Not only are you attentive to your subject and to your relationship with the student but also attentive to nature, to world events and world tendencies, not only to the individual corruptions and individual aspirations but to the collective. But if you say you are attentive because you go to the class punctually, it has no meaning. Can you put the question differently? Is it possible to have this total comprehension without fear? In discussing the possibility of such a comprehension, and discovering it, can we then turn to the everyday activities and not the other way round? Now how would you discuss it? From what do we derive our energy? If we eat a certain amount of food we have a certain vitality but the vitality is not the thing that makes us live, function and be conscious. How do we derive energy, psychological energy, the driving energy? Most people get that energy by having an end in view, an ego, by maintaining a vision, an ideal, a thing that must be done, a result. That gives one an astonishing energy. Look at all the saints and politicians; the wish for success gives them enormous energy. The man who has an ideal in view and thinks that it must be established on earth, will walk the earth. He gets his psychological energy in spite of hi body because that is the thing he must do, because he thinks it is good for the people and from that he derives an abundant energy. And when he does not succeed he feels disappointed, depressed, unhappy, but he covers it up and goes on. Most people derive energy from wanting a result through the desire to achieve a position, to fulfil an ambition or an ideal. They get energy with its accompanying disappointments, frustrations, despair. In this is the destruction of energy. If you are interested in god, you want to create the most beautiful god in the world and you drive yourself, you exhaust yourself, and when the drive becomes a futility, a despair, you become depressed. So you meet a living energy with a negative energy which is depression, sorrow; so there is a contradiction going on. Teacher: Sir, is energy not destroyed when there is no interest in what one is doing? For example, when a gardener is interested in gardening, there is energy. Is this not real energy and the other one no energy at all? Krishnamurti: The poor gardener is also depressed if he cannot get what he wants. You are connecting interest with energy and the lack of interest with lack of energy. There are very few of us who are really interested in what we are doing. Most of us derive our energy from the desire for security, from ideals, from seeking a result, fulfilment of ambition and so on. For most of us that is energy. For the man who goes about doing good, his activity gives him enormous energy and when he does not succeed he is in despair, the two always go together. That energy always brings with it depression, frustration. In realizing that this form of energy is very destructive, would you not enquire to discover an energy which is not accompanied by depression, by despair, by frustration? Is there such energy? One knows the ordinary energy with its entanglements and one sees that energy which is brought about by seeking a result; and if, seeing it, one pushes it aside, then would that in itself not bring about an enquiry as to whether there is any other form of energy which is not accompanied by despair? That is the problem. Look at that for a little while, consider it, and let us go back to the first question. Seeing this world in flames, the world in utter confusion, an every politician trying to patch it up and every patch having a hole in it -seeing this total state, we must have a total answer. And how do you, as an educator, respond to this? Do you respond with the energy which is destructive or with the energy which is not destructive? Teacher: What is that energy which has no shadow of destruction in it? Krishnamurti: Do not ask that question. Never put a positive question. Always put a negative question in order to find a positive answer which is not the response of the opposite. Now, what is negative thinking? What is this energy which is not destructive? That is a positive question. What is this total energy? Would it be right for us to describe this total energy which is not destructive, and can I describe it? If I were to describe it, would it not be merely verbal, theoretical to others? Energy becomes a destructive thing the moment you want to achieve it. The desire to achieve it becomes the end for which you strive and if you do not achieve it, you are in despair. So your question was a wrong question and if one is not very careful, a wrong answer will ensue. So, what should the next question be: "How will you help me to experience this total energy?" If I were able to help you, you would be depending on the helper and the helper may be wrong. So how would you put the question? Teacher: Is it possible in communication to experience this total energy in the present? Krishnamurti: You can ask the same question in a different way. You are asking a positive question all the time about something you do not know. Your question is unrelated to the problem. Now how would you put the question? Teacher: Do you mean to say that the right question should be "When I see the destructive nature of this energy. " Krishnamurti: See the falseness of this energy which is destructive, that in itself is the answer. You cannot go beyond the destructive nature of this energy and say what the other is. Can you cease to revolve in creating destructive energy? You will not then ask what the other is. All you can ask is, "Is it possible to stop this self-created destructive energy?" You cannot enquire positively into energy, it must be a negative approach - the comprehending of the fact negatively, not positively, in order to get to the other - because you do not know the other. So your approach must be negative in the sense that you see the factual nature of this energy which is self-destructive. Can I comprehend negatively? Can I learn a technique, and can the mind liberate itself from the technique without recompense? Then the mind is open to a different pattern of i energy. The entire world is in a vast mess, in confusion. To have a total response to that, you must have energy of a different quality from the usual energy which you apply to a problem. The usual approach to a problem is in terms of hope, fear, success, fulfilment and so on, with its accompanying despair. This is obvious. These are all psychological facts. Here we have a world issue and you have to approach it not with the energy of despair but with an energy which is not contaminated by despair. To come upon that energy which is not destructive, the mind must be free from the energy of despair. This is a world problem, how do you answer it? Do you answer it idealistically with the intention, the desire and the feeling, "This is the right thing to do"? If you do, you answer it with the energy of despair. Or do you look at it with a different energy altogether? If you look at the total problem with that new kind of energy, you will have the right answer. Teacher: I would like to talk a little more about the communication of this feeling you are hinting at: that we are perpetuating through our education the energy of despair and hence the hopelessness of such education. Can we educate in I the accepted sense of the word, and yet have the other? Can a person who is engaged in teaching a certain subject teach that perfectly and yet get the whole, total feeling? Can he do it without a motive, with a total attention to the thing that he is doing and with a feeling of love? Will that help to keep the I mind open to the new source of energy? Krishnamurti: You are introducing suppositions, they are not facts. You see, you have no love. Occasionally there is an opening in the cloud and you see the bright light, but only occasionally. You are not dealing with facts, you are dealing with suppositions. If you were dealing with facts, then you could have answered. The main statement is not good enough, "I do pay attention sometimes, I do love without wanting something in return." You may do this occasionally, but you have to do it on all the three hundred and sixty five days, not just one day. Teacher: As I see it, whatever I do, I want to fit the "plus" into this. Krishnamurti: You cannot put the plus into the minus, you cannot put the creative thing into the destructive. The destructive energy has to cease for the creative thing to come in. You have time, you have leisure to meditate, and without becoming sentimental you have to discover the destructive energy in yourself. It is a continuous process of awareness, keeping the window open for the other. This is a total process all the time. There is a psychological climate that is necessary, which means relationship in teaching and that requires subtlety. You cannot have subtlety and pliability if you have an end in mind. If you are thinking from a conclusion, from an experience of knowing a great many techniques, you cannot have pliability, subtlety. Have you ever talked to anybody who is entrenched deep in some ideal, in some dogma? He has no pliability, no subtlety. To bring about subtlety, pliability, the mind must have no anchorage. Teacher: Is it possible to arrange circumstances so that this pliability and subtlety come into being? It is not always possible to create this within organizations. Krishnamurti: How can one create neither antagonism nor resistance in relationship? How is a sense of equality to be brought about? If you can establish that feeling then what is the next step? Is there a next step? First of all, is it possible to establish mutual confidence within an organization? To establish that requires a great deal of intelligence on my part and on the part of others. Teacher: As you said, the problem is how to establish relationship without the sense of high and low and with the awareness of this total feeling. Krishnamurti: We do not know anything about this total feeling. But we know the destructive nature of certain forms of energy and the mind tries to disentangle itself from that. We know there must be equality and that equality is denied when there are divisions, cliques, when we are functioning merely on an economic level and when there is no comprehension of the nature of destructive energy. It is not an economic equality that has to be established but an equality at every level. If we do not establish that right from the beginning and establish it also in ourselves, we have no contact. Can we spend time in considering how to establish an equality in that sense, not the equality of technique? Can we come together to establish between ourselves this feeling of equality in which all differences are gone? Then we are free. We must be quite sure that at least a few of us are walking along the road. Some of us then may walk slowly, some may walk fast but it is in the same direction and the direction is the quality. It is really a turning of one's back to the world. If you see the crippling effects of the energy of despair, you have to renounce it. If you are alive to this, it means that your relationship with the world is entirely different and that opens a great many doors. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 10 'ON FLOWERING' Teacher: I wonder whether we could go into the problem of how to ask the right question? We generally ask a question to find an answer, to arrive at a method, to discover the reason for things. We question to find out why one is jealous, why one is angry. Now, can the quality of questioning be engendered in oneself and in the child so that there is only enquiry without a method or without merely finding reasons? Is not the problem of right questioning of prime importance in our approach to the child? Krishnamurti: How do we question anything? When do we question ourselves or question authority or question the educational system? What does the word "question" mean? I wonder if a self-critical awareness is lacking in us. Are we aware of what we are doing, thinking, feeling? How do we awaken or question, so as to bring about this critical aware- ness? If we go into this it might help to arouse in the child a self-critical capacity, a critical awareness. How do we set about it? What makes me question? Do I ever question myself. Do I see how mediocre I am? Or do I question, find an explanation and move on? It is very depressing to discover one's mediocrity and therefore one does not question, and one never goes beyond. Let us put it differently. Very little of us is alive. A small part of us is throbbing, the rest is asleep. The little part that is throbbing, gradually grows dim, falls into a rut and is finished. Does one know what it means to be a full human being? The fact is, one is not alive. The question is to be totally alive, to be physically alive, to be in very good health, not to overeat, to be sensitive emotionally, to feel, to have a quality of sympathy, and to have a very good mind. Otherwise, one is dead. How would you awaken the mind as a whole? It is your problem. How would you see that you are completely alive inside, and outside; in your feelings, in your taste in everything? And how would you awaken in the student this feeling of non-fragmented living? There are only two ways of doing it: either there is something within you which is so urgent that it burns away all contradiction; or you have to find an approach which will watch all the time, which will deliberately set about investigating everything you are doing, an awareness which will ceaselessly ask the question to find out in yourself so that a new quality comes into being which keeps all the dirt out. Now, which is it that you are doing as a human being as well as a teacher? Teacher: Is one to question constantly, or is there a questioning which has its own momentum? Krishnamurti: If there is no momentum, then you have to start with little things, haven't you? Start with the little things, not the big things. Start observing how you dress, what you say, how you watch the road, without the operation of criticism. And, watching, listening, how are you going to get to the other, which will be the momentum, which carries all by itself? There is a momentum to which you do not have to pay attention, but you cannot come to it except by watching little things; and yet you have to see that you are not caught in this everlasting watching. To watch one's dress, the sky, and yet be out of it, so that your mind is not only watching little things but absorbing the wider issues, such as the good of the country, and the much wider issues also, such as authority, such as this perpetual desire to fulfil, this constant concern whether one is right or wrong, and fear. So, can the mind observe the little things and without being caught in the little things, can it move out so that it can record much greater issues? Teacher: What is the state of mind, the approach in which there is this everlasting watching, the understanding of little things, without being caught in the little things? Krishnamurti: Why are you caught in the little things? What is the thing that makes you a prisoner of the little? Teacher: My opinions. And yet I do not want to be caught in little things. Krishnamurti: But I have to pay attention to little things. Most people are caught in them the moment they pay attention. To pay attention and yet not to be prisoner to little things, is the issue. Now, what makes the mind or the brain a prisoner? Teacher: Concern with the immediate. Krishnamurti: What do you mean, sir? Do you mean not having a long vision? You are not looking at the problem. Teacher: My attachment to little things. Krishnamurti: Are you not a prisoner of little things? Teacher: I am. With me it is probably a deep unconscious sense, that I am preparing myself for something great, an illusion like that. Krishnamurti: Are you aware that you are a prisoner of little things? Examine why you are a prisoner. Take the fact that you are a prisoner of little things, and possibly of many little things, ask why, go into it, question it, find out. Do not give an explanation and run oR with the explanation which you did just now. You must actually take one thing and look at it. In tackling inwardly the frustration, the conflict, the resistance, you correct the outer. The psychological conflict within expresses itself outwardly in your becoming a prisoner of little things and then you try to correct them. Without understanding the inward conflict, the misery, life has no meaning. If you discover that you are frustrated, then go into it; and if you have gone deeply into it, it will correct the anger, the overeating, the over-dressing. The way you question frustration is important. How do you question? So that frustration unfolds, so that frustration flowers? It is only when thought flowers that it can naturally die. Like the flower in a garden, thought must blossom, it must come to fruition and then it dies. Thought must be given freedom to die. In the same way there must be freedom for frustration to flower and die. And the right question is whether can there be freedom for frustration to flower and to die? Teacher: What do you mean by flowering, sir? Krishnamurti: Look at the garden, the flowers in front over there! They come to bloom and after a few days they wither away because it is their nature. Now, frustration must be given freedom so that it blossoms. You have to understand the reason of frustration, but not in order to suppress it, not to say, "I must fulfil". Why should I fulfil? If I am a liar I can try to stop lying, which is what people generally do. But can I allow that lie to flower and die? Can I refuse to say it is right or wrong, good or bad? Can I see what is behind the lie? I can only find out spontaneously why I lie if there is freedom to find out. In the same way, in order not to be a prisoner of little things, can I find out why I am a prisoner? I want that fact to flower. I want it to grow and to expand, so that it withers and dies without my touching it. Then I am no longer a prisoner though I watch the little things. Your question was: "Is there a momentum which keeps moving, keeping itself clean, healthy?" That momentum, that flame which burns, can only be when there is freedom for everything to flower -the ugly, the beautiful, the evil, the good and the stupid - so that there is not a thing suppressed, so that there is not a thing which has not been brought up and examined and burnt out. And I cannot do that if through the little things I do not discover frustration, misery, sorrow, conflict, stupidity, dullness. If I only discover frustration through reasoning I do not know what frustration means. So, from little things I go to something, wider and in understanding the wider, the other things flower without intervention. Teacher: I seem to catch a glimpse of what you say, I am going to examine it. Krishnamurti: You are examining it while I am examining it. You are examining your own little things in which you are caught. Teacher: In the flowering of conflict, there should be freedom to flower and die. The little mind does not give itself that freedom. You are saying that the inward conflict should flower and die and again you said that this flowering and dying is happening as we are examining it now. There is one difficulty, which is, that I seem to project something into this floration and that itself is a hindrance. Krishnamurti: That is the real crux. You see, to you flowering is an idea. You do not see the fact, the symptom, the cause, and allow that cause to blossom right now. The little mind always deals with symptoms and never with the fact. It does not have the freedom to find out. It is doing the very thing which indicates the little mind, because it says, "It is a good idea, I will think about it," and so it is lost for it is then dealing with ideation, not with fact. It does not say, "Let it flower, and let us see what happens." Then it would discover. But, it says, "It is a good idea; I must investigate the idea". Now, we have discovered a great many things. First of all, we are unaware of the little things. Then, becoming aware of them, we are caught in them and we say, "I must do that, I must do this". Can I see the symptom, go into the cause, and let the cause flower? But I want it to flower in a certain direction, which I means I have an opinion on how it should flower. Now can I go after that? That becomes my major issue. And I see that I prevent the cause flowering because I am afraid I do not know what will happen if I allow frustration to flower. So I go after why I am afraid? What am I afraid of? I see, that so long as fear exists there can be no flowering. So I have to tackle fear, not through the idea, but tackle it, as a fact which means I will allow fear to blossom. I will let fear blossom, and see I what happens. All this requires a great deal of inward perception. Allow fear to blossom - do you know what that means? It may mean I may lose my job, be destroyed by my wife, my husband. Can I allow everything to blossom? It does not mean I am going to murder, rob somebody, but can I just allow "what is" to blossom. Teacher: Could we go into this, then allowing a thing to blossom? Krishnamurti: Do you really see the fact? What does it mean, to allow a thing to blossom, to allow jealousy to blossom? First of all, how unrespectable, how unspiritual. How do you allow jealousy to blossom, to achieve a full life? Can you do it so that you are not caught in it? Can you let that feeling have its full vitality, without obstruction? Which means you do not identify yourself with it, which means you do not say it is right or wrong, you do not have an opinion about it; these are all methods of destroying jealousy. But you do not want to destroy jealousy. You want it to blossom, to show all its colours, whatever they may be. Teacher: it is not very clear to me, sir. Krishnamurti: Have you grown a plant? How do you do it? Teacher: Prepare the ground, put in manure.... Krishnamurti: Put in the right manure, use the right seed, put it in at the right time, look after it, prevent things from happening to it. You give it freedom. Why do you not do the same with jealousy? Teacher: The flowering here is not expressed outside like the plant. Krishnamurti: It is much more real than the plant you are planting outside in the field. Do you not know what jealousy is? At the moment of jealousy, do you say it is imagination? You are burning with it, are you not? You are angry, furious. Why do you not pursue it, not as an idea but actually, take it out and see that it flowers, so that each flowering is a destruction of itself and therefore, there is no "you" at the end of it who is observing the destruction. In that is real creation. Teacher: When the flower blossoms, it reveals itself. What exactly do you mean, sir, when you say that when jealousy blossoms it will destroy itself? Krishnamurti: Take a bud, an actual bud from a bush. If you nip it, it will never flower, it will die quickly. If you let it blossom, then it shows you the colour, the delicacy, the pollen, everything. It shows what it actually is without your being told it is red, it is blue, it has pollen. It is there for you to look at. In the same way, if you allow jealousy to flower, then it shows you everything it actually is - which is envy, attachment. So in allowing jealousy to blossom, it has shown you all its colours and it has revealed to you what is behind jealousy, which you will never discover if you do not allow it to blossom. To say that jealousy is the cause of attachment is mere verbalization. But in actually allowing jealousy to flower, the fact that you are attached to something becomes a fact, an emotional fact, not an intellectual, verbal idea and so each flowering reveals that which you have not been able to discover; and as each fact unveils itself, it flowers and you deal with it. You let the fact flower and it opens other doors, till there is no flowering at all of any kind and, therefore, no cause or motive of any kind. Teacher: Psychological analysis will help me to find out the causes of jealousy. Between analysis and the flowering in which a flower reveals itself, is there a vital difference? Krishnamurti: One is an intellectual process, the observer operating on the thing observed, which is analysis, which is correction, the altering and the adding. The other is the fact without the observer, it is what the fact is itself. Teacher: What you say is totally non-verbal. There is no relationship between the observer and the observed. Krishnamurti: Once you get the feeling that everything in you must blossom, which is a very dangerous state, if you understand this thing, that everything must flower in you, which is a marvellous thing, in that there is real freedom. And, as each thing flowers, there is neither observer nor the observed; therefore there is no contradiction. So all the things blossom in you and die. Teacher: Why should I allow it to blossom if I can nip it in the bud? Krishnamurti: What is going to happen to the flower if you kill the bud? If you kill the bud, it will not flower any more. In the same way, you say, "I must kill jealousy or fear" but i it is not possible to kill jealousy and fear. You can suppress them, alter them, offer them to some god, but they will always be there. But if you really understand the central fact, to allow everything to flower without interference, it will be a revolution. Teacher: Jealousy is a complex thing. Krishnamurti: Let it flower. Jealousy, in flowering, reveals its complexity. And in understanding the complexity, in watching the complexity, it reveals some other factor, and let i that blossom, so that everything is blossoming in you, nothing is denied, nothing is suppressed, nothing is controlled. It is a tremendous education, is it not? Teacher: There is great significance in what you are saying. But is it possible? Krishnamurti: It is possible, otherwise there is no point in saying it. If you see that, how will you help the student to flower? How will you help him to understand? Teacher: I would start with myself. By a certain psychological approach I can see the cause. What you are saying is that in flowering, the problem unfolds itself. There is a great deal of difference between the two. But even if I have a glimpse of it, to convey it to the student is difficult. Krishnamurti: It is a non-verbal communication which I have communicated to you verbally. How have I come to a flowering of thought which takes place in communication? Teacher: Before one can investigate into this floration or even into the space in which floration can take place, there is a quality of equilibrium which has to be established to allow anything to flower in me. Krishnamurti: I do not accept it. I do not believe you can do it that way. Take the idea of jealousy. I say make it flower. But you will not let it flower. Teacher: When I am dealing with a child, is not the first factor this awakening of the quality of perception, which is equilibrium? Krishnamurti: I will tell you what it is. If you listened, really listened, the flowering would actually take place. If you listened, observed, understood, immediately after the listening, it has taken place if that has taken place, then the other things are very simple to the child. You will find different ways to watch the child, to help the child, to communicate with the child at the verbal level. The very act of listening is the following. Teacher: Is that listening a quality, sir? Krishnamurti: You are listening. Why do you call it a quality? You have listened to what I have to say this morning: "Let everything flower." If you listen, it will take place. It is not a quality. A quality is a thing already established. This is a living thing, a burning thing, a furious thing. You cannot make it a quality, a practice. Can you practice seeing colour? You cannot. You can see the beauty and the glory of the flower only when there is a flowering. KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION TALK TO TEACHERS CHAPTER 11 'ON MEDITATION AND EDUCATION' Are we human beings or professionals? Our professions take the whole of our lives and we give very little time to the cultivation or the understanding of the mind, which is living. The profession comes first, then living. We approach life from the point of view of the profession, the job, and spend our lives in it and at the end of our lives we turn to meditation, to a contemplative attitude of mind. Are we only educators or are we human beings who see education as a significant and true way of helping human beings to cultivate the total mind? Living comes before teaching. The man who is a specialist - a nose and throat specialist - spends all his days in the examination of noses and throats and obviously his mind is filled with throats and noses and only occasionally can he think about meditation or look at truth. Can we go into the question of meditation, as a compre- hensive total approach to life which implies the understanding of what meditation is? I do not know if any of you meditate and I do not know what meditation means to you. What part has meditation in education and what do we mean by meditation? We give so much importance to the getting of a degree, the getting of a job, to financial security; that is the entire I design of our thinking. And meditation, the real enquiry into whether there is god, the observing, experiencing of that immeasurable state, is not part of our education at all. We will have to find out what we mean by meditation, not how to meditate. That is an immature way of looking at meditation. If one can unravel what is meditation, then the very process of unravelling is meditation. What is meditation and what is thinking? If we enquire into what meditation is, we have to enquire into what thinking is. Otherwise, merely to meditate when I do not know the process of thinking is to create a fancy, a delusion, which has no reality whatsoever. So to really understand or to discover what meditation is, it is not enough to have mere explanations which are only verbal and therefore have little significance; one has to go into the whole process of thinking. Thinking is a response of memory. Thoughts become the slave of words, the slave of symbols, of ideas, and the mind is the word and the mind becomes slave to words like god, communist, the principal, the vice-principal, the prime minister, the police inspector, the villager, the cook. See the nuances of these words and the feelings that accompany these words. You say sannyasi and immediately there is a certain quality of respect. So the word for most of us has immense significance. For most of us the mind is the word. Within the conditioned, verbal, technical symbolic framework, we live and think; that framework is the past, which is time. If you observe this process taking place in yourself, then it has significance. Now is there thought without word? Is there thinking without word and therefore out of time? The word is time. And if the mind can separate the word, the symbol, from itself, then is there an enquiry which does not seek an end and is therefore timeless? First, let us look at the whole picture. A mind that has no space in which to observe has no quality of perception. From thinking, there is no observation. Most of us see through words, and is that seeing? When I see a flower and say it is a rose, do I see the rose or do I see the feeling, the idea that the word invokes? So, can the mind which is of time and space, explore into a non-spatial, timeless state because it is only in that state that there is creation? A technical mind which has acquired specialized knowledge can invent, add to, but it can never create. A mind that has no space, no emptiness from which to see, is obviously a mind that is incapable of living in a spaceless, timeless state. That is what is demanded. So a mind that is merely caught in time and space, in words, in itself, in conclusions, in techniques, in specialization, such a mind is a very distressed mind. When the world is confronted with something totally new, all our old answers, codes, traditions are inadequate. Now what is thinking? Most of our lives are spent in the effort to be something, to become something, to achieve something. Most of our lives are a series of connected and disconnected constant effort and in these efforts the whole problem of ambition and contradiction brings about a certain exclusive process which we call concentration. And why should we make an effort? What is the point of effort? Would we stagnate if we failed to make an effort and what does it matter if we stagnate? Are we not stagnating with our immense efforts - now? What significance has effort any more? If the mind understands effort will it not release a different kind of energy which does not think in terms of achievement, ambition, and so contradiction? Is not that very energy action , itself. In effort there is involved idea and action and the problem of how to bridge idea and action. All effort implies idea and action and the coming together of these two. And why should there be such division, and is not such a division destructive? All divisions are contradictory and in the self-contradictory state there is inattention. The greater the contradiction the greater the inattention and the greater the resultant action. So life is an endless battle from the moment we are born to the moment we die. Is it possible to educate both ourselves and students to live? I do not mean to live merely as an intellectual being but as a complete human being, having a good body and a good mind, enjoying nature, seeing the totality, the misery, the love, the sorrow, the beauty of the world. When we consider what meditation is, I think one of the first things is the quietness of the body. A quietness that is not enforced, sought after. I do not know if you have noticed a tree blowing in the wind and the same tree in the evening when the sun has set? It is quiet. In the same way, can the body be quiet, naturally, normally, healthily? All this implies an enquiring mind which is not seeking a conclusion or starting from a motive. How is a mind to enquire into the unknown, the immeasurable? How is one to enquire into god? That is also part of meditation. How do we help the student to probe into all this? Machines and the electronic brains are taking over, automation is going to come in about fifty years to this country and you will have leisure and you can turn to books for knowledge. Our intelligence, not merely the capacity to reason but rather the capacity to perceive, understand what is true and what is false, is being destroyed by the emphasis on authority, acceptance, imitation, in which is security. All this is going on but in all this what part has meditation? I feel the quality of meditation as I am talking to you. It is meditation. I am talking but the mind that is communing is in a state of meditation. All this implies an extraordinarily pliable mind, not a mind that accepts, rejects, acquiesces or conforms. So meditation is the unfolding of the mind and through it perception, the seeing without restraint, without a background and so an endless emptiness in which to see. The seeing without the limitation of thought which is time requires a mind that is astonishingly quiet, still. All this implies an intelligence which is not the result of education, book learning, acquisition of techniques. Obviously, to observe a bird you must be very quiet; otherwise at the least movement on your part the bird flies away; the whole of your body must be quiet, relaxed, sensitive to see. How you create that feeling? Take that one thing which is part of meditation. How will you bring this about in a school like this? First of all, is it necessary at all to observe, to think, to have a mind that is subtle, a mind that is still, a body that is responsive, sensitive, eager? We are only concerned with helping the student to get a degree and to get a job and then we allow him to sink into this monstrous society. To help him to be alive it is imperative for a student to have this extraordinary feeling for life, not his life or somebody's else's life, but for life, for the villager, for the tree. That is part of meditation - to be passionate about it, to love - which demands a great sense of humility. This humility is not to be cultivated. Now how will you create the climate for this, because children are not born perfect? You may say that all we have to do is to create the environment and they will grow into marvellous beings; they will not. They are what they are, the result of our past with all our anxieties and fears and we have created the society in which they live and children have to adjust themselves and are conditioned by us How will you create the climate in which they see all these influences, in which they look at the beauty of this earth, look at the beauty of this valley? Just as you devote time to mathematics, science, music, dance, why do you not give some time to all this? Teacher: I was thinking about practical difficulties and how it is not always possible. Krishnamurti: Why do you give time to dance, to music Why not give time to this as you give to mathematics? You are not interested in it. If you saw that it was also necessary you would devote time to it. If you saw that it was as essential as mathematics, you would do something. Meditation implies the whole of life, not just the technical, monastic, or scholastic life, but total life and to apprehend and communicate this totality, there must be a certain seeing of it without space and time. A mind must have in itself a sense of the spaceless and the timeless state. It must see the whole of this picture. How will you approach it and help the student to see the whole of life, not in little segments, but life in its totality? I want him to comprehend the enormity of this. Inscriptions - Part 1, Discussions With David Bohm - Chapter 1 Rality, Actuality, Truth Chapter 2 Insight And Truth. Gulf Between Reality And Truth Chapter 3 The Seed Of Truth - Part 2, Public Talks Brockwood Park 1975 - Chapter 4 Right Action Chapter 5 The Problem Of Fear Chapter 6 1st Public Dialogue Chapter 7 2nd Public Dialogue Chapter 8 3rd Public Dialogue - Suffering; The Meaning Of Death Chapter 9 4th Public Dialogue - The Sacred, Religion, Meditation - Part 3, Questions from Public Dialogues Saanen - Chapter 10 7th Public Dialogue 1976 - Right Livelihood Chapter 11 3rd Public Dialogue 1975 - Will Chapter 12 5th Public Dialogue 1975 - Emotions And Thought Chapter 13 5th Public Dialogue 1975 - Beauty Chapter 14 6th Public Dialogue 1975 - The Stream Of Selfishness Chapter 15 7th Public Dialogue 1975 - The Unifying Factor - Longer, Unedited Versions - Brockwood Park 1975 - 1st Public Talk Brockwood Park 1975 - 2nd Public Talk Brockwood Park 1975 - 1st Public Dialogue Brockwood Park 1975 - 2nd Public Dialogue Brockwood Park 1975 - 3rd Public Talk Brockwood Park 1975 - 4th Public Talk Saanen 1976 - 3rd Public Talk Saanen 1976 - 7th Public Talk - Related Texts - Saanen 1975 - 5th Public Talk Saanen 1975 - 6th Public Talk Saanen 1975 - 7th Public Talk TRUTH AND ACTUALITY INSCRIPTIONS "What is the relationship between truth and reality? Reality being, as we said, all the things that thought has put together. Reality means, the root meaning of that word is, things or thing. And living in the world of things, which is reality, we want to establish a relationship with a world which has no things - which is impossible." "Actuality means `What is'... Are you facing in yourself what actually is going on.. You don't take actuality and look at it." "Man has been concerned throughout the ages to discover or live in `Truth'." TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART I CHAPTER 1 1ST DISCUSSION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 18TH MAY 1975 'REALITY, ACTUALITY, TRUTH' Krishnamurti: I was thinking about the question of what is truth and what is reality and whether there is any relationship between the two, or whether they are separate. Are they eternally divorced, or are they just projections of thought? And if thought didn't operate, would there be reality? I thought that reality comes from "res", thing, and that anything that thought operates on, or fabricates, or reflects about, is reality. And thought, thinking in a distorted, conditioned manner is illusion, is self-deception, is distortion. I left it there, because I wanted to let it come rather than my pursuing it. Dr Bohm: The question of thought and reality and truth has occupied philosophers over the ages. It's a very difficult one. It seems to me that what you say is basically true, but there are a lot of points that need to be ironed out. One of the questions that arises is this: if reality is thought, what thought thinks about, what appears in consciousness, does it go beyond consciousness? K: Are the contents of consciousness reality ? Dr B.: That's the question; and can we use thought as equivalent to consciousness in its basic form ? K: Yes. Dr B: I wonder whether, just for the sake of completeness, we should include in thought also feeling, desire, will and reaction. I feel we should, if we are exploring the connection between consciousness, reality and truth. K: Yes. Dr B: One of the points I'd like to bring up is: there is thought, there is our consciousness, and there is the thing of which we are conscious. And as you have often said, the thought is not the thing. K: Yes. Dr B: We have to get it clear, because in some sense the thing may have some kind of reality independent of thought; we can't go so far as to deny all that. Or do we go as far as some philosophers, like Bishop Berkeley, who has said that all is thought? Now I would like to suggest a possibly useful distinction between that reality which is largely created by our own thought, or by the thought of mankind, and that realty which one can regard as existing independently of this thought. For example, would you say Nature is real? K: It is, yes. Dr B: And it is not just our own thoughts. K: No, obviously not. Dr B: The tree, the whole earth, the stars. K: Of course, the cosmos. Pain is real. Dr B: Yes. I was thinking the other day, illusion is real, in the sense that it is really something going on, to a person who is in a state of illusion. K: To him it is real. Dr B: But to us it is also real because his brain is in a certain state of electrical and chemical movement, and he acts from his illusion in a real way. K: In a real way, in a distorted way. Dr B: Distorted but real. Now it occurred to me that one could say that even the false is real but not true. This might be important. K: I understand. For instance: is Christ real? Dr B: He is certainly real in the minds of people who believe in Him, in the sense we have been discussing. K: We want to find out the distinction between truth and reality. We said anything that thought thinks about, whether unreasonably or reasonably, is a reality. It may be distorted or reasoned clearly, it is still a reality. That reality, I say, has nothing to do with truth. Dr B: Yes, but we have to say besides, that in some way reality involves more than mere thought. There is also the question of actuality. Is the thing actual? Is its existence an actual fact? According to the dictionary, the fact means what is actually done, what actually happens, what is actually perceived. K: Yes, we must understand what we mean by the fact. Dr B: The fact is the action that is actually taking place. Suppose, for example, that you are walking on a dark road and that you think you see something. It may be real, it may not be real. One moment you feel that it's real and the next moment that it's not real. But then you suddenly touch it and it resists your movement. From this action it's immediately clear that there is a real thing which you have contacted. But if there is no such contact you say that it's not real, that it was perhaps an illusion, or at least something mistakenly taken as real. K: But, of course, that thing is still a reality that thought thinks about. And reality has nothing to do with truth. Dr B: But now, let us go further with the discussion of "the thing". You see, the root of the English word "thing" is fundamentally the same as the German "bedingen", to condition, to set the conditions or determine. And indeed we must agree that a thing is necessarily conditioned. K: It is conditioned. Let's accept that. Dr B: This is a key point. Any form of reality is conditioned. Thus, an illusion is still a form of reality which is conditioned. For example, the man's blood may have a different constitution because he's not in a balanced state. He is distorting, he may be too excited, and that could be why he is caught in illusion. So every thing is determined by conditions and it also conditions every other thing. K: Yes, quite. Dr B: All things are interrelated in the way of mutual conditioning which we call influence. In physics that's very clear, the planets all influence each other, the atoms influence each other, and I wanted to suggest that maybe we could regard thought and consciousness as part of this whole chain of influence. K: Quite right. Dr B: So that every thing can influence consciousness and it in turn can work back and influence the shapes of things, as we make objects. And you could then say that this is all reality, that thought is therefore also real. K: Thought is real. Dr B: And there is one part of reality influencing another part of reality. K: Also, one part of illusion influences another part of illusion. Dr B: Yes, but now we have to be careful because we can say there is that reality which is not made by man, by mankind. But that's still limited. The cosmos, for example, as seen by us is influenced by our own experience and therefore limited. K: Quite. Dr B: Any thing that we see, we see through our own experience, our own background. So that reality cannot possibly be totally independent of man. K: No. Dr B: It may be relatively independent. The tree is a reality that is relatively independent but it's our consciousness that abstracts the tree. K: Are you saying that man's reality is the product of influence and conditioning? Dr B: Yes, mutual interaction and reaction. K: And all his illusions are also his product. Dr B: Yes, they are all mixed together. K: And what is the relationship of a sane, rational, healthy, whole man, to reality and to truth? Dr B: Yes, we must consider that, but first may we look at this question of truth. I think the derivation of words is often very useful. The word "true" in Latin, which is "verus", means "that which is". The same as the English "was" and "were", or German "wahr". Now in English the root meaning of the word "true" is honest and faithful; you see, we can often say that a line is true, or a machine is true. There was a story I once read about a thread that ran so true; it was using the image of a spinning-wheel with the thread running straight. K: Quite. Dr B: And now we can say that our thought, or our consciousness, is true to that which is, if it is running straight, if the man is sane and healthy. And otherwise it is not, it is false. So the falseness of consciousness is not just wrong information, but it is actually running crookedly as a reality. K: So you're saying, as long as man is sane, healthy, whole and rational, his thread is always straight. Dr B: Yes, his consciousness is on a straight thread. Therefore his reality - K: - is different from the reality of a man whose thread is crooked, who is irrational, who is neurotic. Dr B: Very different. Perhaps the latter is even insane. You can see with insane people how different it is - they sometimes cannot even see the same reality at all. K: And the sane, healthy, whole, holy man, what is his relationship to truth? Dr B: If you accept the meaning of the word, if you say truth is that which is, as well as being true to that which is, then you have to say that he is all this. K: So you would say the man who is sane, whole, is truth? Dr B: He is truth, yes. K: Such a man is truth. He may think certain things which would be reality, but he is truth. He can't think irrationally. Dr B: Well, I wouldn't say quite that, I'd say that he can make a mistake. K: Of course. Dr B: But he doesn't persist in it. In other words, there is the man who has made a mistake and acknowledges it, changes it. K: Yes, quite right. Dr B: And there is also the man who has made a mistake but his mind is not straight and therefore he goes on with it. But we have to come back to the question: does truth go beyond any particular man; does it include other men, and Nature as well? K: It includes all that is. Dr B: Yes, so the truth is one. But there are many different things in the field of reality. Each thing is conditioned, the whole field of reality is conditioned. But clearly, truth itself cannot be conditioned or dependent on things. K: What then is the relationship to reality of the man who is truth? Dr B: He sees all the things and, in doing this, he comprehends reality. What the word "comprehends" means is to hold it all together. K: He doesn't separate reality. He says, "I comprehend it, I hold it, I see it". Dr B: Yes, it's all one field of reality, himself and everything. But it has things in it which are conditioned and he comprehends the conditions. K: And because he comprehends conditioning, he is free of conditioning. Dr B: It seems clear then that all our knowledge, being based on thought, is actually a part of this one conditioned field of reality. K: Now another question. Suppose I am a scholar, I'm full of such conditioned and conditioning knowledge. How am I to comprehend truth in the sense of holding it all together? Dr B: I don't think you can comprehend truth. K: Say I have studied all my life, I've devoted all my life to knowledge, which is reality. Dr B: Yes, and it is also about a bigger reality. K: And suppose you come along and say, "Truth is somewhere else, it's not that". I accept you, because you show it to me, and so I say, "Please help me to move from here to that". Dr B: Yes. K: Because once I get that, I comprehend it. If I live here, then my comprehension is always fragmented. Dr B: Yes. K: Therefore my knowledge tells me, "This is reality but it is not truth". And suppose you come along and say, "No, it is not". And I ask: please tell me how to move from here to that. Dr B: Well, we've just said we can't move... K: I'm putting it briefly. What am I to do? Dr B: I think I have to see that this whole structure of knowledge is inevitably false, because my reality is twisted. K: Would you say the content of my consciousness is knowledge? Dr B: Yes. K: How am I to empty that consciousness and yet retain knowledge which is not twisted - otherwise I can't function - and reach a state, or whatever it is, which will comprehend reality. I don't know if I'm making myself clear. Dr B: Yes. K: What I'm asking is: my human consciousness is its content, which is knowledge; it's a messy conglomeration of irrational knowledge and some which is correct. Can that consciousness comprehend, or bring into itself, truth? Dr B: No, it can't. K: Therefore, can this consciousness go to that truth? It can't either. Then what? Dr B: There can be a perception of the falseness in this consciousness. This consciousness is false, in the sense that it does not run true. Because of the confused content it does not run true. K: It's contradictory. Dr B: It muddles things up. K: Not,"muddles things up; it is a muddle. Dr B: It is a muddle, yes, in the way it moves. Now then, one of the main points of the muddle is that when consciousness reflects on itself, the reflection has this character: it's as if there were a mirror and consciousness were looking at itself through a mirror and the mirror is reflecting consciousness as if it were not consciousness but an independent reality. K: Yes. Dr B: Now therefore, the action which consciousness takes is wrong, because it tries to improve the apparently independent reality, whereas in fact to do this is just a muddle. I would like to put it this way: the whole of consciousness is somehow an instrument which is connected up to a deeper energy. And as long as consciousness is connected in that way, it maintains its state of wrong action. K: Yes. Dr B: So on seeing that this consciousness is reflecting itself wrongly as independent of thought, what is needed is somehow to disconnect the energy of consciousness. The whole of consciousness has to be disconnected, so it would, as it were, lie there without energy. K: You're saying, don't feed it. My consciousness is a muddle, it is confused, contradictory, and all the rest of it. And its very contradiction, its very muddle, gives its own energy. Dr B: Well, I would say that the energy is not actually coming from consciousness, but that as long as the energy is coming, consciousness keeps the muddle going. K: From where does it come? Dr B: We'd have to say that perhaps it comes from something deeper. K: If it comes from something deeper, then we enter into the whole field of gods and outside agency and so on. Dr B: No, I wouldn't say the energy comes from an outside agency. I would prefer to say it comes from me, in some sense. K: Then the "me" is this consciousness? Dr B: Yes. K: So the content is creating its own energy. Would you say that? Dr B: In some sense it is, but the puzzle is that it seems impossible for this content to create its own energy. That would be saying that the content is able to create its own energy. K: Actually, the content is creating its own energy. Look, I'm in contradiction and that very contradiction gives me vitality. I have got opposing desires. When I have opposing desires I have energy, I fight. Therefore that desire is creating the energy - not God, or something profounder - it is still desire. This is the trick that so many played. They say there is an outside agency, a deeper energy - but then one's back in the old field. But I realize the energy of contradiction, the energy of desire, of will, of pursuit, of pleasure, all that which is the content of my consciousness - which is consciousness - is creating its own energy. Reality is this; reality is creating its own energy. I may say, "I derive my energy deep down", but it's still reality. Dr B: Yes, suppose we accept that, but the point is that seeing the truth of this... K: ...that's what I want to get at. Is this energy different from the energy of truth? Dr B: Yes. K: It is different. Dr B: But let's try to put it like this: reality may have many levels of energy. K: Yes. Dr B: But a certain part of the energy has gone off the straight line. Let's say the brain feeds energy to all the thought processes. Now, if somehow the brain didn't feed energy to the thought process that is confused, then the thing might straighten out. K: That's it. If this energy runs along the straight thread it is a reality without contradiction. It's an energy which is endless because it has no friction. Now is that energy different from the energy of truth? Dr B: Yes. They are different, and as we once discussed, there must be a deeper common source. K: I'm not sure. You are suggesting that they both spring out of the same root. Dr B: That's what I suggest. But for the moment there is the energy of truth which can comprehend the reality and - K: - the other way it cannot. Dr B: No, it cannot; but there appears to be some connection in the sense that when truth comprehends reality, reality goes straight. So there appears to be a connection at least one way. K: That's right, a one-way connection - truth loves this, this doesn't love truth. Dr B: But once the connection has been made, then reality runs true and does not waste energy or make confusion. K: You see, that's where meditation comes in. Generally, meditation is from here to there, with practice and all the rest of it. To move from this to that. Dr B: Move from one reality to another. K: That's right. Meditation is actually seeing what is. But generally meditation is taken as moving from one reality to another. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART I CHAPTER 2 3RD DISCUSSION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 31ST MAY 1975 'INSIGHT AND TRUTH. GULF BETWEEN REALITY AND TRUTH' Krishnamurti: I am concerned with trying to find out if there is an action which is not a process of thought, an action which is of truth - if I can put it that way - an insight which acts instantly. I want to inquire into that question. Dr Bohm: Perhaps one action that acts instantly is to see falseness. K: Yes. It's difficult to take examples. I have an insight into the fact that people believe in God - I'm taking that as an example. Dr B: What is the nature of your insight, then? K: The insight into the fact that God is their projection. Dr B: Yes, and therefore false. K: I have an insight. If I had a belief in God it would drop instantly. So it is not a process of thought, it is an insight into truth. Dr B: Or into falseness. K: Or into falseness, and that action is complete, it's over and done with. I don't know if I'm conveying it: that action is whole, there is no regret, there is no personal advantage, there is no emotion. It is an action which is complete. Whereas the action brought about by thought, the investigation of an analysis whether there is a God or no God, is always incomplete. Dr B: Yes, I understand that. Then there is another action in which you do use words, where you try to realize the insight Let's say, you talk to people. Is that action complete or incomplete? Say you have discovered about God. Other people are still calling this a fact, and therefore... K: But the man speaks from an insight. Dr B: He speaks from an insight, but at the same time he starts a process of time. K: Yes, to convey something. Dr B: To change things. Let's now consider that just to get it clear. It's starting from an insight but it's conveying truth. K: Yes, but it's always starting from an insight. Dr B: And in doing that you may have to organise... K: ...reasonable thinking and so on, of course. And the action of reasoned thought is different from the action of insight. Dr B: Now what is the difference when insight is conveyed through reasoned thought? To come back again to your insight about God: you have to convey it to other people, you must put it into a reasonable form. K: Yes. Dr B: And therefore isn't there still some of the quality of the insight, as you convey it? You must find a reasonable way to convey it. Therefore in doing that, some of the truth of the insight is still being communicated in this form. And in some sense that is thought. K: No, when conveying to another that insight verbally, one's action will be incomplete unless he has insight. Dr B: That's right. So you must convey what will give someone an insight. K: Can you give an insight? Dr B: Not really, but whatever you convey must somehow do something which perhaps cannot be further described. K: Yes. That can only happen when you yourself have dropped the belief in God. Dr B: But there is no guarantee that it will happen. K: No, of course not. Dr B: That depends on the other person, whether he is ready to listen. K: So we come to this point: is there a thinking which is nonverbal? Would this be what communicates insight? Dr B: I would say there is a kind of thinking that communicates insight. The insight is non-verbal, but the thinking itself is not nonverbal. There is the kind of thinking which is dominated by the word and there is another kind of thinking whose order is determined, not by the word, but by the insight. K: Is the insight the product of thought? Dr B: No, but insight works through thought. Insight is never the product of thought. K: Obviously not. Dr B: But it may work through thought. I wanted to say that the thought through which insight is working has a different order from the other kind of thought. I want to distinguish those two. You once gave an example of a drum vibrating from the emptiness within. I took it to mean that the action of the skin was like the action of thought. Is that right? K: Yes, that's right. Now, how does insight take place? Because if it is not the product of thought, not the process of organized thought and all the rest of it, then how does this insight come into being? Dr B: It's not clear what you mean by the question. K: How do I have an insight that God is a projection of our own desires, images and so on? I see the falseness of it or the truth of it; how does it take place? Dr B: I don't see how you could expect to describe it. K: I have a feeling inside that thought cannot possibly enter into an area where insight, where truth is, although it operates anywhere else. But truth, that area, can operate through thought. Dr B: Yes. K: But thought cannot enter into that area. Dr B: That seems clear. We say that thought is the response of memory. It seems clear that this cannot be unconditioned and free. K: I would like to go into this question, if I may: how does insight take place? If it is not the process of thought, then what is the quality of the mind, or the quality of observation, in which thought doesn't enter? And because it doesn't enter, you have an insight. We said, insight is complete. It is not fragmented as thought is. So thought cannot bring about an insight. Dr B: Thought may communicate the insight. Or it may communicate some of the data which lead you to an insight. For example, people told you about religion and so on, but eventually the insight depends on something which is not thought. K: Then how does that insight come? Is it a cessation of thought? Dr B: It could be considered as a cessation. K: Thought itself realizes that it cannot enter into a certain area. That is, the thinker is the thought, the observer, the experiencer, all the rest of it; and thought itself realizes, becomes aware, that,it can only function within a certain area. Dr B: Doesn't that itself require insight? Before thought realizes that, there must be an insight. K: That's just it. Does thought realize that there must be insight? Dr B: I don't know, but I'm saying there would have to be insight into the nature of thought before thought would realize anything. Because it seems to me that thought by itself cannot realize anything of this kind. K: Yes. Dr B.: But in some way, we said, truth can operate in thought, in reality. K: Truth can operate in the field of reality. Now how does one's mind see the truth? Is it a process? Dr B: You're asking whether there is a process of seeing. There is no process, that would be time. K: That's right. Dr B: Let's consider a certain point, that there is an insight about the nature of thought, that the observer is the observed and so on. K: That's clear. Dr B: Now in some sense thought must accept that insight, carry it, respond to it. K: Or the insight is so vital, so energetic, so full of vitality, that it forces thought to operate. Dr B: All right, then there is the necessity to operate. K: Yes, the necessity. Dr B: But you see, generally speaking it doesn't have that vitality. So in some indirect way thought has rejected the insight, at least it appears to be so. it. K: Most people have an insight, but habit is so strong they reject Dr B: I'm trying to get to the bottom of it, to see if we can break through that rejection. K: Break through the rejection, break through the habit, the conditioning, which prevents the insight. Though one may have an insight, the conditioning is so strong, you reject the insight. This is what happens. Dr B: I looked up the word "habit" and it says, "A settled disposition of the mind", which seems very good. The mind is disposed in a certain fixed way which resists change. Now we get caught in the same question: how are we going to break that "very settled disposition"? K: I don't think you can break it, I don't think thought can break it. Dr B: We are asking for that intense insight which necessarily dissolves it. K: So, to summarize: one has an insight into truth and reality. One's mind is disposed in a certain way, it has formed habits in the world of reality - it lives there. Dr B: It's very rigid. K: Now suppose you come along and point out the rigidity of it. I catch a glimpse of what you're saying - which is nonthinking -and I see it. Dr B: In a glimpse only. K: In a glimpse. But this conditioning is so strong I reject it. Dr B: I don't do it purposely; it just happens. K: It has happened because you helped to create that happening. Is that glimpse, first of all, strong enough to dissolve this? If it is not so strong, then it goes on. Can this conditioning dissolve? You see, I must have an insight into the conditioning, otherwise I can't dissolve it. Dr B: Maybe we could look at it like this: conditioning is a reality, a very solid reality, which is fundamentally what we think about. K: Yes. Dr B: As we said in the previous dialogue, it's actual. Ordinary reality is not only what I think about, but it fits actuality to some extent - the actual fact. That's the proof of its reality. Now, at first sight it seems that this conditioning is just as solid as any reality, if not more solid. K: Much more solid. Is that conditioning dissolved, does it come to an end through thing? Dr B: It won't because thinking is what it is. K: So thinking won't dissolve it. Then what will? Dr B: We're back again. We see that it's only truth, insight. K: I think something takes place. I see I'm conditioned and I separate myself from the conditioning, I am different from the conditioning. And you come along and say "No, it isn't like that, the observer is the observed". If I can see, or have an insight, that the observer is the observed, then the conditioning begins to dissolve. Dr B: Because it's not solid. K: The perception of that is the ending of the conditioning. The truth is, when there is the realization that the observer is the observed. Then in that realization, which is truth, the conditioning disappears. How does it disappear? What is necessary for the crumbling of that structure? Dr B: The insight into the falseness of it. K: But I can have an insight into something that is false and yet I go on that way, accept the false and live in the false. Dr B: Yes. K: Now I don't know if I can convey something. I want to bring this into action in my life. I have accepted reality as truth, I live in that - my gods, my habits, everything - I live in that. You come along and say "Look, truth is different from reality" and you explain it to me. How will I put away that tremendous weight, or break that tremendous conditioning? I need energy to break that conditioning. Does the energy come when I see, "the observer is the observed"? As we've said, I see the importance, rationally, that the conditioning must break down, I see the necessity of it: I see how it operates, the division, the conflict and all the rest of what is involved. Now when I realize that the observer is the observed, a totally different kind of energy comes into being. That's all I want to get at. Dr B: Yes, it's not the energy of reality then. I see it better when I say, "the thinker is the thought". It's actually the same thing. K: Yes, the thinker is the thought. Now, is that energy different from the energy of conditioning and the activity of the conditioning and reality? Is that energy the perception of truth? - and therefore it has quite a different quality of energy. Dr B: It seems to have the quality of being free of, not being bound by the conditioning. K: Yes. Now I want to make it practical to myself. I see this whole thing that you have described to me. I have got a fairly good mind, I can argue, explain it, all the rest of it, but this quality of energy doesn't come. And you want me to have this quality, out of your compassion, out of your understanding, out of your perception of truth. You say, "Please, see that". And I can't see it, because I'm always living in the realm of reality. You are living in the realm of truth and I can't. There is no relationship between you and me. I accept your word, I see the reason for it, I see the logic of it, I see the actuality of it, but I can't break it down. How will you help - I'm using that word hesitantly - how can you help me to break this down? It's your job, because you see the truth and I don't. You say, "For God's sake, see this". How will you help me? Through words? Then we enter into the realm with which I am quite familiar. This is actually going on, you understand? So what is one to do? What will you do with me, who refuses to see something which is just there? And you point out that as long as we live in this world of reality, there is going to be murder, death -everything that goes on there. There is no answer in that realm for any of our problems. How will you convey this to me? I want to find out, I'm very keen, I want to get out of this. Dr B: It's only possible to communicate the intensity. We already discussed all the other factors that are communicated. K: You see, what you say has no system, no method, because they are all part of the conditioning. You say something totally new, unexpected, to which I haven't even given a single moment of thought. You come along with a basketful and I do not know how to receive you. This has been really a problem; to the prophets, to every... Dr B: It seems nobody has really succeeded in it. K: Nobody has. It's part of education that keeps us constantly in the realm of reality. Dr B: Everyone is expecting a path marked out in the field of reality. K: You talk of a totally different kind of energy from the energy of reality. And you say that energy will wipe all this out, but it will use this reality. Dr B: Yes, it will work through it. K: It's all words to me, because society, education, economics, my parents, everything is here in reality. All the scientists are working here, all the professors, all the economists, everybody is here. And you say "Look", and I refuse to look. Dr B: It's not even that one refuses, it's something more unconscious perhaps. K: So in discussing this, is there a thinking which is not in the realm of reality? Dr B: One might ask whether there is such thought, in the sense of the response of the drum to the emptiness within. K: That's a good simile. Because it is empty, it is vibrating. Dr B: The material thing is vibrating to the emptiness. K: The material thing is vibrating. Wait - is truth nothingness? Dr B: Reality is some thing, perhaps every thing. Truth is no thing. That is what the word "nothing" deeply means. So truth is "nothingness". K: Yes, truth is nothing. Dr B.: Because if it's not reality it must be nothing - no thing. K: And therefore empty. Empty being - how did you once describe it? Dr B: Leisure is the word - leisure means basically "empty". The English root of "empty" means at leisure, unoccupied. K: So you are saying to me, "Your mind must be unoccupied". It mustn't be occupied by reality. Dr B: Yes, that's clear. K: So it must be empty, there mustn't be a thing in it which has been put together by reality, by thought - no thing. Nothing means that. Dr B: It's clear that things are what we think about, therefore we have to say the mind must not think about anything. K: That's right. That means thought cannot think about emptiness. Dr B: That would make it into a thing. K: That's just it. You see, Hindu tradition says you can come to it. Dr B: Yes, but anything you come to must be by a path which is marked out in the field of reality. K: Yes. Now, I have an insight into that, I see it. I see my mind must be unoccupied, must have no inhabitants, must be an empty house. What is the action of that emptiness in my life? - because I must live here; I don't know why, but I must on the other side you do have to take care of your real material needs. K: That's understood. Dr B: There arises a conflict because what you are proposing appears to be reasonable, but it doesn't seem to take care of your material needs. Without having taken care of these needs you're not secure. K: Therefore they call the world of reality "maya". Dr B: Why is that? How do you make the connection? K: Because they say, to live in emptiness is necessary and if you live there you consider the world as maya. Dr B: You could say all that stuff is illusion, but then you would find you were in real danger... K: Of course. Dr B: So you seem to be calling for a confidence that nothingness will take care of you, physically and in every way. In other words, from nothingness, you say, there is security. K: No, in nothingness there is security. Dr B: And this security must include physical security. K: No, I say, psychological security... Dr B: Yes, but the question almost immediately arises... K: How am I to be secure in the world of reality? Dr B: Yes, because one could say: I accept that it will remove my psychological problems, but I still have to be physically secure as well in the world of reality. K: There is no psychological security in reality, but only complete security in nothingness. Then if that is so, to me, my whole activity in the world of reality is entirely different. Dr B: I see that, but the question will always be raised: is it different enough to... K: Oh yes, it would be totally different, because I'm not nationalistic, I'm not "English", I am nothing. Therefore our whole world is different. I don't divide... Dr B: Let's bring back your example of one who understands and the one who wants to communicate to the other. Somehow what doesn't communicate is the assurance that it will take care of all that. K: It won't take care of all that. I have to work here. Dr B: Well, according to what you said, there is a certain implication that in nothingness we will be completely secure in every way. K: That is so, absolutely. Dr B: Yes, but we have to ask: what about the physical security? K: Physical security in reality? At present there is no security. I am fighting all my life, battling economically, socially, religiously. If I am inwardly, psychologically, completely secure, then my activity in the world of reality is born of complete intelligence. This doesn't exist now, because that intelligence is the perception of the whole and so on. As long as I'm "English" or "something", I cannot have security. I must work to get rid of that. Dr B: I can see you'd become more intelligent, you'd become more secure - of course. But when you say "complete security" there is always the question: is it complete? K: Oh, it is complete, psychologically. Dr B: But not necessarily physically. K: That feeling of complete security, inwardly, makes me... Dr B: It makes you do the right thing. K: The right thing in the world of reality. Dr B: Yes, I see that. You can be as secure as you can possibly be if you are completely intelligent, but you cannot guarantee that nothing is going to happen to you. K: No, of course not. My mind is rooted, or established, in nothingness, and it operates in the field of reality with intelligence. That intelligence says, "There you cannot have security unless you do these things". Dr B: I've got to do everything right. K: Everything right according to that intelligence, which is of truth, of nothingness. Dr B: And yet, if something does happen to you, nevertheless you still are secure. K: Of course - if my house burns down. But you see we are seeking security here, in the world of reality. Dr B: Yes, I understand that. K: Therefore there is no security. Dr B: As long as one feels that the world of reality is all there is, you have to seek it there. K: Yes. Dr B: One can see that in the world of reality there is in fact no security. Everything depends on other things which are unknown, and so on. That's why there is this intense fear. K: You mention fear. In nothingness there is complete security, therefore no fear. But that sense of no fear has a totally different kind of activity in the world of reality. I have no fear - I work. I won't be rich or poor - I work. I work, not as an Englishman, a German, an Arab - all the rest of that nonsense - I work there intelligently. Therefore I am creating security in the world of reality. You follow? Dr B: Yes, you're making it as secure as it can possibly be. The more clear and intelligent you are, the more secure it is. K: Because inwardly I'm secure, I create security outwardly. Dr B: On the other hand, if I feel that I depend inwardly on the world of reality, then I become disorganised inwardly. K: Of course. Dr B: Everybody does feel that he depends inwardly on the world of reality. K: So the next thing is: you tell me this and I don't see it. I don't see the extraordinary beauty, the feeling, the depth of what you are saying about complete inward security. Therefore I say, "Look, how are you going to give the beauty of that to me?" TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART I CHAPTER 3 6TH DISCUSSION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 28TH MAY 1975 'THE SEED OF TRUTH' Krishnamurti: If a seed of truth is planted it must operate, it must grow, it must function, it has a life of its own. Dr Bohm: Many millions of people may have read or heard what you say. It may seem that a large number of them haven't understood. Do you feel that they are all going eventually to see it? K: No, but it's going on, they are worried about it, they ask, "What does he mean by this?" The seed is functioning, it's growing, it isn't dead. You can say something false and that also operates. Dr B: Yes, but now we have a struggle between those two and we cannot foresee the outcome of this struggle; we can't be sure of the outcome. K: You plant in me the seed that, "Truth is a pathless land". Also a seed is planted in my consciousness that says, "There is a way to truth, follow me". One is false, one is true. They are both embedded in my consciousness. So there is a struggle going on. The true and the false, both are operating, which causes more confusion, more misery and a great deal of suffering, if I am sensitive enough. If I don't escape from that suffering what takes place? Dr B: If you don't escape, then it's clear what will take place. Then you will have the energy to see what is true. K: That's right. Dr B: But now let's take the people who do escape, who seem to be a large number. K: They are out, quite right, millions are out. But still, the struggle is going on. Dr B: Yes, but it is creating confusion. K: That is what they are all doing. Dr B: Yes, but we don't know the outcome of that. K: Oh yes, we do; dictatorship, deterioration. Dr B: I know, it gets worse. But now we want to get i; clear. In a few people who face the suffering, the energy comes to perceive the truth. And in a large number, who escape from suffering, things get worse. K: And they rule the world. Dr B: Now what is the way out of that? K: They say there is no answer to that, get away from it. Dr B: That also won't do. K: They say you can't solve this problem, go away into the mountains or join a monastery, become a monk - but that doesn't solve anything. All one can do is to go on shouting. Dr B: Yes, then we have to say we don't know the outcome of the shouting. K: If you shout in order to get an outcome, it is not the right kind of shouting. Dr B: Yes, that is the situation. K: You talk, you point out. If nobody wants to pay attention it's their business, you just go on. Now I want to go further. You see, there is a mystery; thought cannot touch it. What is the point of it? Dr B: Of the mystery? I think you could see it like this: that if you look into the field of thought and reason and so on, you finally see it has no clear foundation. Therefore you see that "what is" must be beyond that. "What is" is the mystery. K: Yes. Dr B: I mean, you cannot live in this field of reality and thought, because of all we said. K: No, of course not. But I don't mind, I have no fears. Dr B: You don't mind because you have psychological security. Even if something happens to you, it does not deeply affect you. K: I live in the field of reality, that is my life. There I am consciously aware, and I struggle and keep going in that field. And I can never touch the other. I cannot say, "I can touch it; there is no "I" to touch it when you really touch it. You say to me, "There is a mystery which passes all understanding". Because I am caught in this, I would like to get that. You say there is a mystery, because to you it is an actuality, not an invention, not a superstition, not self-deception. It is truth to you. And what you say makes a tremendous impression on me, because of your integrity. You point it out to me and I would like to get it. Somehow I must get it. What is your responsibility to me? You understand the position? You say words cannot touch it, thought cannot touch it, no action can touch it, only the action of truth; perhaps it will give you a feeling of that. And I, because I am a miserable human being, would like to get some of that. But you say, "Truth is a pathless land, don't follow anybody" - and I am left. I realize, I am consciously aware of the limitation of thought, of all the confusion, misery, and all the rest of it. Somehow I can't get out of it. Is your compassion going to help me? You are compassionate, because part of that extraordinary mystery is compassion. Will your compassion help me? - obviously not. So what am I to do? I have a consuming desire for that, and you say, "Don't have any desire, you can't have that, it isn't your personal property". All you say to me is: put order into the field of reality. Dr B: Yes, and do not escape suffering. K: If you actually put order into the field of reality then something will take place. And also you say to me, it must be done instantly. Is that mystery something everybody knows? - knows in the sense that there is something mysterious. Not the desire that creates mysteries, but that there is something mysterious in life apart from my suffering, apart from my death, from my jealousy, my anxiety. Apart from all that, there is a feeling that there is a great mystery in life. Is that it? - that there is a mystery which each one knows? Dr B: I should think that in some sense everybody knows it. Probably one is born with that sense and it gradually gets dimmed through the conditioning. K: And has he got the vitality, or the intensity, to put away all that? You see, that means "God is within you" - that is the danger of it. Dr B: Not exactly, but there is some sort of intimation of this. I think probably children have it more strongly when they are young. K: Do you think that modern children have that? Dr B: I don't know about them, probably less. You see, living in a modern city must have a bad effect. Dr B: There are many causes. One is lack of contact with nature; I think any contact with nature gives that sense of mystery. K: Yes. Dr B: If you look at the sky at night, for example. K: But you see the scientists are explaining the stars. Dr B: Yes, I understand that. K: Cousteau explains the ocean; everything is being explained. Dr B: Yes, the feeling has been created that in principle we could know everything. K: So knowledge is becoming the curse. You see, perception has nothing to do with knowledge. Truth and knowledge don't go together; knowledge cannot contain the immensity of mystery. Dr B: Yes, I think if we start with a little child, he may place the mystery in some part that he doesn't know. He could put it at the bottom of the ocean, or somewhere else outside, far away from where he is, and then he learns that people have been everywhere. Therefore the whole thing is made to appear non-existent. K: Yes. Everything becomes so superficial. Dr B: That's the danger of our modern age, that it gives the appearance that we know more or less everything. At least that we have a general idea of the scheme, if not of the details. K: The other night I was listening to Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man". He explains everything. Dr B: The original impulse was to penetrate into this mystery, that was the impulse of science. And somehow it has gone astray. It gives the appearance of explaining it. K: May I ask, do you as a trained scientist get the feeling of this mystery. Dr B: I think so, yes. But I've always had some of that, you see. K: But in talking now, do you get more of the intensity of it? Not because I feel intense, that's a totally different thing, that then becomes influence and all that. But in talking about something we open a door. Dr B: Yes. I think that my particular conditioning has a great deal in it to resist this notion of mystery, although I think that science is now going in a wrong direction. K: But even the scientists admit that there is a mystery. Dr B: Yes, to some extent. The general view is that it could be eventually cleared up. K: Cleared up in the sense of explained away. Dr B: My own feeling is that every particular scientific explanation will be a certain part of this field of reality, and therefore will not clear away the mystery. K: No, but it clears it away because I listen to you explaining everything, and then I say, "There is nothing". Dr B: That is the main point of distinguishing between truth and reality, because we could say, in the field of reality we may explain more and more broadly without limit. K: That is what the present day Communists are doing. Dr B: Not only the Communists. K: Of course not, I'm taking that as an example. Dr B: I think you could say, anything in the field of reality can be explained, we can penetrate more deeply and broadly, there is limitless progress possible. But the essence is not explained. K: No, I am asking a different question, I'm asking you, in talking like this, do you have an intimation of that mystery. Being a scientist, a serious person, perhaps you had an intimation long ago. In talking now, do you feel it's no longer an intimation but a truth? Dr B: Yes, it is a truth. K: So it's no longer an intimation? Dr B: I think it's been a truth for some time now. Because it's implied in what we have been doing here at Brockwood. K: Yes. You see there is something interesting: the truth of that mystery makes the mind completely empty, doesn't it ? it's completely silent. Or because it is silent, the truth of that mystery is. I don't know if I'm conveying anything. When the mind is completely silent, not in use, not meditated upon, and because it has put order in reality it is free from that confusion, there is a certain silence, the mind is just moving away from confusion. Realizing that is not silence, not moving away from that realization but staying with it, means negating that which order has produced. Dr B: You say, first you produce order. Why is it necessary to produce the order first and then negate it? K: To negate is silence. Dr B: This is why it has to take place in that sequence. K: Because when I remove disorder there is a certain mathematical order, and as a result of that order my mind is quiet. Dr B: You say that is not a true silence. K: No. Realizing that is not true silence I negate the false silence, for the moment. So in the negation of that silence I don't want any other silence. There is no movement towards greater silence. Then this total silence opens the door to that. That is, when the mind, with all the confusion, is nothing - not a thing - then perhaps there is the other. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART II CHAPTER 4 1ST PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 6TH SEPTEMBER 1975 'RIGHT ACTION' WE MUST ALL be very concerned with what is going on in the world. The disintegration, the violence, the brutality, the wars and the dishonesty in high political places. In the face of this disintegration what is correct action? What is one to do to survive in freedom and be totally religious? We are using the word "religious" not in the orthodox sense, which is not religious. The meaning of that word is: gathering together all energy to find out what is the place of thought and where are its limitations and to go beyond it. That is the true significance and the meaning of that world "religious". So what is one to do in this disintegrating, corrupt, immoral world, as a human being - not an individual, because there is no such thing as the individual - we are human beings, we are collective, not individual, we are the result of various collective influences, forces, conditioning and so on. As human beings, whether we live in this country, or in America or in Russia or in India, which is going through terrible times, what is one to do? What is the correct, right action? To find this out, if one is at all serious - and I hope we are serious here, otherwise you wouldn't have come - what is one to do? Is there an action that is total, whole, not fragmented, that is both correct and accurate, that is compassionate, religious in the sense we are using that word? This has nothing whatsoever to do with belief, dogma, ritual, or the conditioning of a certain type of religious enquiry. What is a human being confronted with this problem to do? To find an answer, not imaginary, fictitious or pretended, to find the true, the right answer one must enquire into the whole movement of thought. Because all our conditioning, all our activity, all our political, economic, social, moral and religious life is based on thought. Thought has been our chief instrument in all the fields of life, in all the areas, religious, moral, political, economic, social, and in personal relationships: I think that is fairly obvious. Please, if I may point out, we are talking this over together. We are enquiring into this together, sharing it, your responsibility is to share it, not just merely listen to a few ideas, agree or disagree, but to share it; which means you must give attention to it, you must care for it, this problem must be serious, this problem must be something that touches your mind, your heart, everything in life - otherwise there is no sharing, there is no communion, there is no communication except verbally or intellectually and that has very little value. So we are together enquiring into this question. What is the responsibility of thought? - knowing its limitation, knowing that whatever it does is within a limited area; and in that limited area is it possible to have correct, accurate response and action? At what level does one find for oneself, as a human being, the right action? If it is imaginary, personal, according to an idea, a concept, or an ideal, it ceases to be correct action. I hope we are understanding each other. The ideal, the conclusion is still the movement of thought as time, as measure. And thought has created all our problems; in our personal relationships, economically, socially, morally, religiously, thought has not found an answer. And we are trying to find out if we can, this morning - and in the next two or three talks - what is the action which is whole, non-traditional, non-mechanistic, which is not a conclusion, a prejudice, a belief. That is, I want to find out, if I am at all serious, how am I to act? An action in which there is no pretension, an action that has no regrets, an action that does not breed further problems, an action that will be whole, complete and answer every issue, whether at the personal level, or at the most complex social level. I hope this is your problem. Unless we solve this problem very deeply, talking about meditation, about what is God, what is truth and all the rest of it, has very little meaning. One must lay the foundation, otherwise one cannot go very far. One must begin as close as possible to go very far, and the nearness is you, as a human being living in this monstrous, corrupt society. And one must find for oneself an action that is whole, non-fragmented, because the world is becoming more and more dangerous to live in, it is becoming a desert and each one of us has to be an oasis. To bring about that -not an isolated existence - but a total human existence, our enquiry is into the problem of action. Can thought solve our problems, thought being the response of memory, experience and knowledge? Memory is a material process; thought is material and chemical - the scientists agree about this. And the things that thought has created in the world and in ourselves is the world of reality, the world of things. Reality means the thing that exists. And to find out what truth is one must be very clear where the limitations of reality are, and not let it flow into the world that is not real. One observes in the world and in oneself, thought has created an extraordinary complex problem of existence. Thought has created the centre as the "me" and the "you". And from that centre we act. Please look at it, observe it, you will see it for yourself; you are not accepting something the speaker is talking about, don't accept anything. You know, when one begins to doubt everything, then from that doubt, from that uncertainty grows certainty, clarity; but if you start with imagination, belief, and live within that area you will end up always doubting. Here we are trying to investigate, enquire, look into things that are very close to us: which is our daily life, with all its misery, conflict, pain, suffering, love and anxiety, greed, envy, all that. As we said, thought has created the "me", and so thought in itself being fragmentary makes the me into a fragment. When you say "I", "me", "I want, I don't want, I am this, I am not that", it is the result of thought. And thought itself being fragmentary, thought is never the whole, so what it has created becomes fragmentary. "My world", "my religion", "my belief", "my country", "my god" and yours, so it becomes fragmentary. Thought intrinsically is a process of time, measure, and therefore fragmentary. I wonder if you see this? If you see this once very clearly, then we will be able to find out what is action, a correct, accurate action in which there is no imagination, no pretension, nothing but the actual. We are trying to find out what is action that is whole, that is not fragmentary, that is not caught in the movement of time, not traditional and therefore mechanical. One wants to live a life without conflict and live in a society that doesn't destroy freedom, and yet survive. As the societies and governments throughout the world are becoming more and more centralised, more and more bureaucratic, our freedom is getting less and less. Freedom is not what one likes to do, what one wants to do, that is not freedom. Freedom means something entirely different. it means freedom from this constant battle, constant anxiety, uncertainty, suffering, pain, all the things that thought has created in us. Now is there an action which is not based on the mechanical process of memory, on a repetition of an experience and therefore a continuing in the movement of time as past, present and future? Is there an action that is not conditioned by environment? You know the Marxists say that if you control the environment then you will change man, and that has been tried and man has not changed. Man remains primitive, vulgar, cruel, brutal, violent and all the rest of it, though they are controlling the environment. And there are those who say don't bother about the environment, but believe in some divinity and that will guide you; and that divinity is the projection of thought. So we are back again in the same field. Realizing all this what is a human being to do? Can thought, which is a material, a chemical process, a thing, which has created all this structure, can that very thought solve our problems? One must very carefully, dill - gently, find out what are the limitations of thought. And can thought itself realize its limitation and therefore not spill over into the realm which thought can never touch? Thought has created the technological world, and thought has also created the division between "you" and "me". Thought has created the image of you and the "me" and these images separate each one of us. Thought can only function in duality, in opposites, and therefore all reaction is a divisive process, a separative process. And thought has created division between human beings, nationalities, religious beliefs, dogmas, political differences, opinions, conclusions, all that is the result of thought. Thought has also created the division between you and me as form and name; and thought has created the centre which is the "me" as opposed to you, therefore there is a division between you and me. Thought has created this whole structure of social behaviour, which is essentially based on tradition, which is mechanical. Thought has also created the religious world, the Christian, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Muslim, with all the divisions, all the practices, all the innumerable gurus that are springing up like mushrooms. And thought has created what it considers is love. Is compassion the result of "love", the result of thought? That is our problem, those are all our problems. Yet we are trying to solve all these problems through thought. Can thought see itself as the mischief maker, see itself as a necessary instrument in the creation of a society which is not immoral? Can thought be aware of itself? Please do follow this. Can your thought become conscious of itself? And if it does, is that consciousness part of thought? One can be aware of the activities of thought, and one can choose between those activities as good and bad, worthwhile and not worthwhile, but the choice is still the result of thought. And therefore it is perpetuating conflict and duality. Can thought be attentive to its own movements? Or is there an entity outside the field of thought which directs thought? I can say I am aware of my thoughts, I know what I am thinking, but that entity which says, "I know what I am thinking", that "I" is the product of thought. And that entity then begins to control, subjugate, or rationalize thinking. So there is an entity, we say, which is different from thought: but it is essentially thought. What we are trying to explain is: thought is tremendously limited, it plays all kinds of tricks, it imagines, it creates it. So our problem then is : can thought realize for itself where it is essential to operate, where it is accurate in its operation, and yet totally limited in every other direction? That means, one has to go into this question of human consciousness. This sounds very philosophical, very complicated, but it isn't. Philosophy means the love of truth, not love of words, not love of ideas, not love of speculations, but the love of truth. And that means you have to find out for yourself where reality is and that reality cannot become truth. You cannot go through reality to come to truth. You must understand the limitations of reality, which is the whole process of thought. You know, when you look into yourself, knowing your consciousness, why you think, what your motives are, what your purposes are, your beliefs, your intentions, your pretensions, what your imaginations are, all that is your consciousness; and that consciousness essentially is the consciousness of the world. Please do see this. Your consciousness is not radically different from the consciousness of a Muslim, a Hindu, or anybody else, because your consciousness is filled with anxiety, hope, fear, pleasure, suffering, greed, envy, competition; that is cons- ciousness. Your beliefs and your gods, everything is in that consciousness. The content of that makes up your consciousness, and the content of that is thought - thought that has filled consciousness with the things it has created. Look into yourself and you will see how extraordinary obvious it is. And from this content, which is conditioned, which is the tradition, which is the result of thought, we are trying to find a way to act within that area - within that area of consciousness which thought has filled with the things of thought. And one asks: if thought cannot solve all our human problems - other than technological or mathematical problems - then how can it limit itself and not enter into the field of the psyche, into the field of the spirit? - we can use that word for the moment. As long as we function within that area we must always suffer, there must always be disorder, there must always be fear and anxiety. So my question is: can I, can a human being bring about order in the world of reality? And when thought has established order in the world of reality, then it will realize its own tremendous limitations. I wonder if you see this? We live in a world of disorder, not only outwardly but inwardly. And we have not been able to solve this disorder. We try everything - meditation, drugs, accepting authority, denying authority, pursuing freedom and denying freedom - we have done everything possible to bring about order - through compulsion, through fear - but we still live in disorder. And a disordered mind is now trying to find out if there is a correct action - you follow? A disordered mind is trying to find out if there is a right, accurate, correct action. And it will find an action which is incorrect, disorderly, not whole. Therefore in the world of reality in which we live we must bring about order. I wonder if you see this? Order is not the acceptance of authority. Order is not what one wants to do. Order is not something according to a blueprint. Order must be something highly mathematical, the greatest mathematical order is the total denial of disorder, and so within oneself, within the human being. Can you look at your disorder, be aware of it, not choosing particular forms of disorder, accepting some and denying others, but see the whole disorder? Disorder implies conflict, self-centred activity, the acceptance of a conclusion and living according to that conclusion, the ideal and the pursuit of the ideal which denies the actual; can you totally deny all that? It is only when you deny totally all that, that there is order, the order that is not created by thought in the world of reality. You understand? We are separating reality and truth. We say reality is everything that thought has created; and in that area, in that field, there is total disorder, except in the world of technology. In that field human beings live in complete disorder and this disorder is brought about, as we have explained, by conflict, by the pursuit of pleasure, fear, suffering, all that. Can you become aware of all that and totally deny it - walk away from it? Out of that comes order in the world of reality. In that world of reality behaviour is something entirely different. When you have denied all that, denied the "me", which is the product of thought, which creates the division, the thought that has created the "me" and the super-conscious, all the imaginations, the pretensions, the anxieties, the acceptance and the denial. That is the content which is so traditional; to deny that tradition is to have order. Then we can go into the question of what truth is, not before; otherwise it becomes pretentious, hypocritical, nonsensical. In that one has to understand the whole question of fear, how human beings live in fear, and that fear is now becoming more and more acute, because the world is becoming so dangerous a place, where tyrannies are increasing, political tyrannies, bureaucratic tyrannies, denying freedom for the mind to understand, to enquire. So can we as human beings, living in this disorderly, disintegrating world, become actually, not in theory or imagination, an oasis in a world that is becoming a desert? This is really a very serious question. And can we human beings educate ourselves totally differently? We can do that only if we understand the nature and the movement of thought as time, which means really understanding oneself as a human being. To look at ourselves not according to some psychologist, but to look at ourselves actually as we are and discover how disorderly a life we lead - a life of uncertainty, a life of pain, living on conclusions, beliefs, memories. And becoming aware of it, that very awareness washes away aU this. For the rest of this morning can we talk over together, by question and enquiry, what we have talked about? Please, you are asking questions not of me, not of the speaker. We are asking questions of ourselves, saying it aloud so that we can all I share it because your problem is the problem of everybody share. Your problem is the problem of the world, you are the world. I don't think we realize that. You are actually in the world, in the very deepest essence - your manners, your dress, your name and your form may be different - but essentially, deep down, you are the world, you have created the world and the world is you. So if you ask a question you are asking it for the whole of mankind. I don't know if you see that? - which doesn't mean that you mustn't ask questions, on the contrary. Questioning then becomes a very serious matter, not a glib question and a glib answer, some momentary question and forget it till another day. If you ask, ask about a really human problem. Questioner: Did you say that by walking away from the disorder of traditions we create order? Is that what you meant ? Krishnamurti: Yes, that is what I meant. Now just a minute, that needs a great deal of explanation of what you mean by tradition, what you mean by walking away, what you mean by order. Q: In addition to that question, the seeing of this disorder already implies that the `see-er' has gone, that you have walked away. K: There are three things involved in this: order, walking away, and the observation of disorder. Walking away from disorder, the very act of moving away from it, is order. Now first, how do you observe disorder? How do you observe disorder in yourself? Are you looking at it as an outsider looking in, as something separate and there is therefore a division, you and the thing which you are observing? Or are you looking at it, if I may ask, not as an outsider, without the outsider, without the observer who says, "I am disorderly"? Let us put it round the other way. When you look at something, those trees and that house, there is a space between you and that tree and that house. The space is the distance and you must have a certain distance to look, to observe. If you are too close you don't see the whole thing. So if you are an observer looking at disorder, there is a space between you and that disorder. Then the problem arises, how to cover that space, how to control that disorder, how to rationalize the disorder, how to suppress it, or whatever you do. But if there is no space you are that disorder. I wonder if you see that? Q: How can I walk away from it? K: I am going to show it to you; I am going to go into that. You understand my question? When you observe your wife, your husband, a boy or a girl - nowadays they don't marry - or your friend, how do you observe him or her? Watch it please. Go into it, it is very simple. Do you observe directly, or do you observe that person through an image, through a screen, from a distance? Obviously, if you have lived with a person - it doesn't matter if it's for a day or ten years - there is an image, a distance. You are separate from her or him. And when you observe dis- order you have an image of what order is; or an image which says, "this disorder is ugly". So you are looking at that disorder from a distance, which is time, which is tradition, which is the past. And is that distance created by thought? Or does this distance actually exist? When you say, "I am angry", is anger different from you? No, so you are anger. You are disorderly: not you separate from disorder. I think that is clear. So you are that disorder. Any movement - please follow this -any movement of thought away from that disorder is still disorder. Because that disorder is created by thought. That disorder is the result of your self-centred activity, the centre that says, "I am different from somebody else" and so on. All that produces disorder. Now can you observe that disorder without the observer? Q: Then you will find in yourself what you are criticizing in the other? K: No, no. I am not talking about criticizing the others. That has very little meaning criticizing others. Q: No, what you found in the other, you will find it in yourself. K: No, madam. The other is me; essentially the other is me. He has his anxieties, his fears, his hopes, his despairs, his suffering, his pain, his loneliness, his misery, his lack of love and all the rest of it; that man or women is me. If that is clear, then I am not criticizing another, I am aware of myself in the other. Q: That is what I meant. K: Good. So is there an observation without the past, the past being the observer? Can you look at me, or look at another, without all the memories, all the chicanery, all the things that go on - just look? Can you look at your husband, wife and so on, without a single image? Can you look at another without the whole past springing up? You do, when there is an absolute crisis. When there is a tremendous challenge you do look that way. But we live such sloppy lives, we are not serious, we don't work. Q: How can you live permanently at crisis pitch? K: I'll answer that question, sir, after we have finished this. So the walking away from it is to be totally involved in that which you observe. And when I observe this disorder without all the reactions, the memories, the things that crop up in one's mind, then in that total observation, that very total observation is order. I wonder if you see this? Which raises the question, have you ever looked at anything totally? Have you looked at your political leaders, your religious beliefs, your conclusions, the whole thing on which we live, which is thought, have you looked at it completely? And to look at it completely means no division between you and that which looks. I can look at a mountain and the beauty of it, the line of it, the shadows, the depth, the dignity, the marvellous isolation and beauty of it, and it is not a process of identification. I cannot become the mountain, thank God! That is a trick of the imagination. But when I observe without the word "mountain", I see there is a perception of that beauty entirely. A passion comes out of that. And can I observe another, my wife, friend, child, whoever it is, can I observe totally? That means can I observe without the observer who is the past? Which means observation implies total perception. There is only perception, not the perceiver. Then there is order. Q: If there is only perception and no perceiver, what is it that looks? If I see that I am disorder, what is it that sees it? K: Now go into it, sir. Disorder is a large word, let us look at it. When you see that you are violent and that violence is not different from you, that you are that violence - what takes place? Let us look at it round the other way. What takes place when you are not the violence? You say violence is different from "me", what happens then? In that there is division, in that there is trying to control violence, in that there is a projection of a state of non-violence, the ideal, and conformity to that ideal; therefore further conflict, and so on. So when there is a division between the observer and the observed, the sequence is a continuous conflict in different varieties and shapes; but when the observer is the observed, that is when the observer says, "I am violent, the violence is not separate from `me"', then a totally different kind of activity takes place. There is no conflict, there is no rationalization, there is no suppression, control, there is no nonviolence as an ideal: you are that. Then what takes place? I don't know if you have ever gone into this question. Q: Then what is "you"? One cannot speak without "you". K: No, madam, that is a way of speaking. Look, please. You see the difference between the observer and the observed. When there is a difference between the observer and the observed there must be conflict in various forms because there is division. When there is a political division, when there is a national division there must be conflict; as is going on in the world. Where there is division there must be conflict; that is law. And when the observer is the observed, when violence is not separate from the observer, then a totally different action takes place. The word "violence" is already condemnatory; it is a word we use in order to strengthen violence, though we may not want to, we strengthen it by using that word, don't we? So the naming of that feeling is part of our tradition. If you don't name it then there is a totally different response. And because you don't name it, because there is no observer different from the observed, then the feeling that arises, which you call violence, is non-existent. You try it and you will see it. You can only act when you test it. But mere agreement is not testing it. You have to act and find out. The next question was about challenge. Must we always live with challenge? Q: I said crisis. K: Crisis, it is the same thing. Aren't you living in crisis? There is a political crisis in this country, an economic crisis, crisis with your wife or your husband; crisis means division, doesn't it? Which means crisis apparently becomes necessary for those people who live in darkness, who are asleep. If you had no crisis you would all go to sleep. And that is what we want - `For God's sake leave me alone!` - to wallow in my own little pond, or whatever it is. But crisis comes all the time. Now a much deeper question is: is it possible to live without a single crisis and keep totally awake? You understand? Crisis, challenge, shock, disturbance exist when the mind is sluggish, traditional, repetitive, unclear. Can the mind become completely clear, and therefore to such a mind there is no challenge? Is that possible? That means, we have to go deeper still. We live on experiences to change our minds, to further our minds, to enlarge our minds; experiences, we think will create, will open the door to clarity. And we think a man who has no experience is asleep, or dull or stupid. A man who has no experience, but is fully awake, has an innocent mind, therefore he sees clearly. Now is that possible? Don't say yes or no. Q: When you say he has no experience, do you mean in the sense that he is ignorant of basic life? K: No, no. Sir, look. We are conditioned by the society in which we live, by the food we eat, clothes, climate. We are conditioned by the culture, by the literature, by the newspapers, our mind is shaped by everything, consciously, or unconsciously. When you call yourself a Christian, a Buddhist, or whatever it is, that is your conditioning. And we move from one conditioning to another. I don't like Hinduism so I jump into Christianity, or into something else. If I don't like one guru I just follow another guru. So we are conditioned. Is it possible to uncondition the mind so that it is totally free? That means is it possible to be aware of your total conditioning - not choose which conditionings you like, but total conditioning, which is only possible when there is no choice and when there is no observer. To see the whole of that conditioning, which is at both the conscious level as well as at the unconscious level, the totality of it! And you can see the totality of something only when there is no distance between you and that - the distance created as movement of thought, time. Then you see the whole of it. And when there is a perception of the whole, then the unconditioning comes into being. But we don't want to work at that kind of thing. We want the easiest way with everything. That is why we like gurus. The priest, the politician, the authority, the specialist, they know, but we don't know; they will tell us what to do, which is our traditional acceptance of authority. Q: A question about true action. Actually, as we are, every action is a self-centred activity. So when you see that, you are afraid to act because everything has no significance. That is a reality, there is no choice or imagination. You are facing a terrible void and you... K: I understand the question... Q: Even material activity. K: When there is an observation and you see you can't do anything, then you say there is a void. just hold on to that sentence, to that phrase. There is an observation, you realize you can't do anything and therefore there is a void. Is that so? When I see that I have been able to do something before, there was no void. You understand? I could do something about it, join the Liberal Party, become a neurotic or whatever it is - sorry! (Laughter). Before I could do something and I thought by doing something there was no void. Because I had filled the void by doing something, which is running away from that void, that loneliness, that extraordinary sense of isolation. And now when I see the falseness of this doing, a doing about something - which doesn't give a significance or an answer - then I say to myself, "I observe that I am the observer, and I am left naked, stark naked, void. I can't do anything. There is no significance to existence." Before, you gave significance to existence, which is the significance created by thought, by aU kinds of imaginings, hope and all the rest of it, and suddenly you realize that thought doesn't solve the problems and you see no meaning in life, no significance. So you want to give significance to life - you understand? You want to give it. (Laughter). No, don't laugh, this is what we are doing. Living itself has no meaning for most of us now. When we are young we say, "Well at least I'll be happy" - sex and all the rest of it. As we grow older we say, "My God, it is such an empty life", and you fill that emptiness with literature, with knowledge, with beliefs, dogmas, ritual, opinions, judgements, and you think that has tremendous significance. You have filled it with words, nothing else but words. Now when you strip yourself of words you say, "I am empty, void". Q: These are still words. K: Still words, that is what I am saying. Still words. So when you see that thought has created what you considered to be significance, now when you see the limitation of thought, and that what it has created has no significance, you are left empty, void, naked. Why? Aren't you still seeking something? Isn't thought still in operation? When you say, I have no significance, there is no significance to life", it is thought that has made you say there is no significance, because you want significance. But when there is no movement of thought, life is full of significance. It has tremendous beauty. You don't know of this. Q: Thought is afraid not to think. K: So thought is afraid not to think. We will go into that tomorrow: the whole problem of thought creating fear and toying to give significance to life. If one actually examines one's life, there is very little meaning, is there? You have pleasant memories or unpleasant memories, which is in the past, dead, gone, but you hold on to them. There is all this fear of death. You have worked and worked and worked - God knows why - and there is that thing waiting for you. And you say, "Is that all?" So we have to go into this question of the movement of thought as time and measure. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART II CHAPTER 5 2ND PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 7TH SEPTEMBER 1975 'THE PROBLEM OF FEAR' WE MUST BE serious in facing what we have to do in life, with all the problems, miseries, confusion, violence and suffering. Only those live who are really ernest, but the others fritter their life away and waste their existence. We were going to consider this morning the whole complex problem of fear. The human mind has lived so long, so many centuries upon centuries, putting up with fear, escaping from it, trying to rationalize it, trying to forget it, or completely identifying with something that is not fear - we have tried all these methods. And one asks if it is at all possible to be free totally, completely of fear, psychologically and from that physiologically. We are going to discuss this, talk it over together, and find out for ourselves if it is at all possible. First, we must consider energy, the quality of energy, the types of energy, and the question of desire; and whether we have sufficient energy to delve deeply into this question. We know the energy and friction of thought; it has created most extraordinary things in the world technologically. But psychologically we don't seem to have that deep energy, drive, interest to penetrate profoundly into this question of fear. We have to understand this question of thought bringing about its own energy and therefore a fragmentary energy, an energy through friction, through conflict. That is all we know: the energy of thought, the energy that comes through contradiction, through opposition in duality, the energy of friction. All that is in the world of reality, reality being the things with which we live daily, both psychologically and intellectually and so on. I hope we can communicate with each other. Communication implies not only verbal understanding, but actually sharing what is being said, otherwise there is no communion. There is not only a verbal communication but a communion which is non-verbal. But to come to that non-verbal communion, one must understand very deeply whether it is possible to communicate with each other at a verbal level, which means that both of us share the meaning of the words, have the same interest, the same intensity, at the same level, so that we can proceed step by step. That requires energy. And that energy can come into being only when we understand the energy of thought and its friction, in which we are caught. If you investigate into yourself you will see that what we know, or experience, is the friction of thought in its achievement, in its desires, in its purposes - the striving, the struggle, the com. petition. All that is involved in the energy of thought. Now we are asking if there is any other kind of energy, which is not mechanistic, not traditional, non-contradictory, and therefore without the tension that creates energy. To find that out, whether there is another kind of energy, not imagined, not fantastic, not superstitious, we have to go into the question of desire. Desire is the want of something, isn't it? That is one fragment of desire. Then there is the longing for something, whether it be sexual longing or psychological longing, or so-called spiritual longing. And how does this desire arise? Desire is the want of something, the lack of something, missing something; then the longing for it, either imaginatively, or actual want, like hunger; and there is the problem of how desire arises in one. Because, in coming face to face with fear, we have to understand desire - not the denial of desire, but insight into desire. Desire may be the root of fear. The religious monks throughout the world have denied desire, they have resisted desire, they have identified that desire with their gods, with their saviours, with their jesus, and so on. But it is still desire. And without the full penetration into that desire, without having an insight into it, one's mind cannot possibly be free from fear. We need a different kind of energy, not the mechanistic energy of thought, because that has not solved any of our problems; on the contrary, it has made them much more complex, more vast, impossible to solve. So we must find a different kind of energy, whether that energy is related to thought or is independent of thought, and in enquiring into that one must go into the question of desire. You are following this? - not somebody else's desire, but your own desire. Now how does desire arise? One can see that this movement of desire takes place through perception, then sensation, contact and so desire. One sees something beautiful, the contact of it, visual and physical, sensory, then sensation, then from that the feeling of the lack of it. And from that desire. That is fairly clear. Why does the mind, the whole sensory organism, lack? Why is there this feeling of lacking something, of wanting something? I hope you are giving sufficient attention to what is being said, because it is your life. You are not merely listening to words, or ideas, or formulas, but actually sharing in the investigating process so that we are together walking in the same direction, at the same speed, with the same intensity, at the same level. Otherwise we shan't meet each other. That is part of love also. Love is that communication with each other, at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity. So why is there the sense of lacking or wanting in oneself? I do not know if you have ever gone into this question at all? Why the human mind, or human beings, are always after something - apart from technological knowledge, apart from learning languages and so on and so on, why is there this sense of wanting, lacking, pursuing something all the time? - which is the movement of desire, which is also the movement of thought in time, as time and measure. All that is involved. We are asking, why there is this sense of want. Why there is not a sense of complete self-sufficiency? Why is there this longing for something in order to fulfil or to cover up something? Is it because for most of us there is a sense of emptiness, loneliness, a sense of void? Physiologically we need food, clothes and shelter, that one must have. But that is denied when there is political, religious, economic division, nationalistic division, which is the curse of this world, which has been invented by the Western world, it did not exist in the Eastern world, this spirit of nationality; it has come recently into being there too, this poison. And when there is division between peoples, between nationalities and between beliefs, dogmas, security for everybody becomes almost impossible. The tyrannical world of dictatorship is trying to provide that, food for everybody, but it cannot achieve it. We know all that, we can move from that. So what is it that we lack? Knowledge? - knowledge being the accumulation of experience, psychological, scientific and in other directions, which is knowledge in the past. Knowledge is the past. Is this what we want? Is this what we miss? Is this what we are educated for, to gather all the knowledge we can possibly have, to act skilfully in the technological world? Or is there a sense of lack, want, psychologically, inwardly? Which means you will try to fill that inward emptiness, that lack, through or with experience, which is the accumulated knowledge. So you are trying to fill that emptiness, that void, that sense of immense loneliness, with something which thought has created. Therefore desire arises from this urge to fill that emptiness. After all, when you are seeking enlightenment, or self-realization as the Hindus call it, it is a form of desire. This sense of ignorance will be wiped away, or put aside, or dissipated by acquiring tremendous knowledge, enlightenment. It is never the process of investigating "what is", but rather of acquiring; not actually looking at "what is", but inviting something which might be, or hopeful of a greater experience, greater knowledge. So we are always avoiding "what is". And the "what is" is created by thought. My loneliness, emptiness, sorrow, pain, suffering, anxiety, fear, that is actually "what is". And thought is incapable of facing it and tries to move away from it. So in the understanding of desire - that is perception, seeing, contact, sensation, and the want of that which you have not, and so desire, the longing for it - that involves the whole process of time. I have not, but I will have. And when I do have it is measured by what you have. So desire is the movement of thought in time as measure. Please don't just agree with me. I am not interested in doing propaganda. I don't care if you are here or not here, if you listen or don't listen. But as it is your life, as it is so urgently important that we be deadly serious - the world is disintegrating -you have to understand this question of desire, energy, and the enquiry into a different kind of non-mechanical energy. And to come to that you must understand fear. That is, does desire create fear? We are going to enquire together into this question of fear, what is fear? You may say, "Well let's forget about energy and desire and please help me to get rid of my fear" - that is too silly, they are all related. You can't take one thing and approach it that way. You must take the whole packet. So what is fear, how does it arise? Is there a fear at one level and not at another level? Is there fear at the conscious level or at the unconscious level? Or is there a fear totally? Now how does fear arise? Why does it exist in human beings? And human beings have put up with it for generations upon generations, they live with it. Fear distorts action, distorts clear perceptive thinking, objective efficient thinking, which is necessary, logical sane healthy thinking. Fear darkens our lives. I do not know if you have noticed it? If there is the slightest fear there is a contraction of all our senses. And most of us live, in whatever relationship we have, in that peculiar form of fear. Our question is, whether the mind and our whole being can ever be free completely of fear. Education, society, governments, religions have encouraged this fear; religions are based on fear. And fear also is cultivated through the worship of authority - the authority of a book, the authority of the priest, the authority of those who know and so on. We are carefully nurtured in fear. And we are asking whether it is at all possible to be totally free of it. So we have to find out what is fear. Is it the want of something? -which is desire, longing. Is it the uncertainty of tomorrow? Or the pain and the suffering of yesterday? Is it this division between you and me, in which there is no relationship at all? Is it that centre which thought has created as the "me" - the me being the form, the name, the attributes - fear of loosing that "me"? Is that one of the causes of fear? Or is it the remembrance of something past, pleasant, happy, and the fear of losing it? Or the fear of suffering, physiologically and psychologically? Is there a centre from which all fear springs? - like a tree, though it has got a hundred branches it has a solid trunk and roots, and it is no good merely pruning the branches. So we have to go to the very root of fear. Because if you can be totally free of fear, then heaven is with you. What is the root of it? Is it time? Please we are investigating, questioning, we are not theorizing, we are not coming to any conclusion, because there is nothing to conclude. The moment you see the root of it, actually, with your eyes, with your feeling, with your heart, with your mind - actually see it - then you can deal with it; that is if you are serious. We are asking: is it time? - time being not only chronological time by the watch, as yesterday, today and tomorrow, but also psychological time, the remembrance of yesterday, the pleasures of yesterday, and the pains, the grief, the anxieties of yesterday. We are asking whether the root of fear is time. Time to fulfil, time to become, time to achieve, time to realize God, or whatever you like to call it. Psychologically, what is time? Is there such a thing - please listen - as psychological time at all? Or have we invented psychological time? Psychologically is there tomorrow? If one says there is no time psychologically as tomorrow, it will be a great shock to you, won't it? Because you say, "Tomorrow I shall be happy; tomorrow I will achieve something; tomorrow I will become the executive of some business; tomorrow I will become the enlightened one; tomorrow the guru promises something and I'll achieve it". To us tomorrow is tremendously important. And is there a tomorrow psychologically? We have accepted it: that is our whole traditional education, that there is a tomorrow. And when you look psychologically, investigate into yourself, is there a tomorrow? Or has thought, being fragmentary in itself, projected the tomorrow? Please, we will go into this, it is very important to understand. One suffers physically, there is a great deal of pain. And the remembrance of that pain is marked, is an experience which the brain contains and therefore there is the remembrance of that pain. And thought says, "I hope I never have that pain again: that is tomorrow. There has been great pleasure yesterday, sexual or whatever kind of pleasure one has, and thought says, "Tomorrow I must have that pleasure again". You have a great experience - at least you think it is a great experience - and it has become a memory; and you realize it is a memory yet you pursue it tomorrow. So thought is movement in time. Is the root of fear time? - time as comcomparison with you, "me" more important than you, "me" that is going to achieve something, become something, get rid of something. So thought as time, thought as becoming, is the root of fear. We have said that time is necessary to learn a language, time is necessary to learn any technique. And we think we can apply the same process to psychological existence. I need several weeks to learn a language, and I say in order to learn about myself, what I am, what I have to achieve, I need time. We are questioning the whole of that. Whether there is time at all psychologically, actually; or is it an invention of thought and therefore fear arises? That is our problem; and consciously we have divided consciousness into the conscious and the hidden. Again division by thought. And we say, "I may be able to get rid of conscious fears, but it is almost impossible to be free of the unconscious fears with their deep roots in the unconscious". We say that it is much more difficult to be free of unconscious fears, that is the racial fears, the family fears, the tribal fears, the fears that are deeply rooted, instinctive. We have divided consciousness into two levels and then we ask: how can a human being delve into the unconscious? Having divided it then we ask this question. It is said it can be done through careful analysis of the various hidden fears, through dreams. That is the fashion. We never look into the whole process of analysis, whether it be self-introspective, or professional. In analysis is implied the analyser and the analysed. Who is the analyser? Is he different from the analysed, or is the analyser the analysed? And therefore it is utterly futile to analyse. I wonder if you see that? If the analyser is the analysed, then there is only observation, not analysis. But the analyser as different from the analysed - that is what you all accept, all the professionals, all the people who are trying to improve themselves - God forbid! - they all accept that there is a division between the analysed and the analyser. But the analyser is a fragment of thought which has created that thing to be analysed. I wonder if you follow this? So in analysis is implied a division and that division implies time. And you have to keep on analysing until you die. So where analysis is totally false - I am using the word "false" in the sense of incorrect, having no value - then you are only concerned with observation. To observe! - we have to understand what is observation. You are following all this? We started out by enquiring if there is a different kind of energy. I am sorry we must go back so that it is in your mind - not in your memory, then you could read a book and repeat it to yourself, which is nothing. So we are concerned with, or enquiring into energy. We know the energy of thought which is mechanical, a process of friction, because thought in its very nature is fragmentary, thought is never the whole. And we have asked if there is a different kind of energy altogether and we-are investigating that. And in enquiring into that we see the whole movement of desire. Desire is the state of wanting something, longing for something. And that desire is a movement of thought as time and measure: "I have had this, and I must have more". And we said in the understanding of fear, the root of fear may be time as movement. If you go into it you will see that it is the root of it: that is the actual fact. Then, is it possible for the mind to be totally free of fear? For the brain, which has accumulated knowledge, can only function effectively when there is complete security - but that security may be in some neurotic activity, in some belief, in the belief that you are the great nation; and all belief is neurotic, obviously, because it is not actual. So the brain can only function effectively, sanely, rationally, when it feels completely secure, and fear does not give it security. To be free of that fear, we asked whether analysis is necessary. And we see that analysis does not solve fear. So when you have an insight into the process of analysis, you stop analysing. And then there is only the question of observation, seeing. If you don't analyse, what are you to do? You can only look. And it is very important to And out how to look. What does it mean to look? What does it mean to look at this question of desire as movement in time and measure? How do you see it? Do you see it as an idea, as a formula, because you have heard the speaker talking about it? Therefore you abstract what you hear into an idea and pursue that idea - which is still looking away from fear. So when you observe, it is very important to find out how you observe. Can you observe your fear without the movement of escaping, suppressing, rationalizing, or giving it a name? That is, can you look at fear, your fear or not having a job tomorrow, of not being loved, a dozen forms of fear, can you look at it without naming, without the observer? - because the observer is the observed. I don't know if you follow this? So the observer is fear, not "he" is observing "fear". Can you observe without the observer? - the observer being the past. Then is there fear? You follow? We have the energy to look at something as an observer. I look at you and say, "You are a Christian, a Hindu, Buddhist", whatever you are, or I look at you saying, "I don't like you", or "I like you". If you believe in the same thing as I believe in you are my friend; if I don't believe the same thing as you do, you are my enemy. So can you look at another without all those movements of thought, of remembrance, of hope, all that, just look? Look at that fear which is the root of time. Then is there fear at all? You understand? You will And this out only if you test it, if you work at it, not just play with it. Then there is the other form of desire, which not only creates fear but also pleasure. Desire is a form of pleasure. Pleasure is different from joy. Pleasure you can cultivate, which the modem world is doing, sexually and in every form of cultural encouragement - pleasure, tremendous pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure. And in the very pursuit of pleasure there must be fear also, because they are the two sides of the same coin. joy you cannot invite; if it happens then thought takes charge of it and remembers it and pursues that joy which you had a year ago, or yesterday, and which becomes pleasure. And when there is enjoyment - seeing a beautiful sunset, a lovely tree, or the deep shadow of a lake - then that enjoyment is registered in the brain as memory and the pursuit of that memory is pleasure. There is fear, pleasure, joy. Is it possible - this is a much more complex problem - is it possible to observe a sunset, the beauty of a person, the lovely shape of an ancient tree in a solitary field, the enjoyment of it, the beauty of it - observe it without registering it in the brain, which then becomes memory, and the pursuit of that tomorrow? That is, to see something beautiful and end it, not carry it on. There is another principle in man. Besides fear and pleasure, there is the principle of suffering. Is there an end to suffering? We want suffering to end physically, therefore we take drugs and do all kinds of yoga tricks and all that. But we have never been able to solve this question of suffering, human suffering, not only of a particular human being but the suffering of the whole of humanity. There is your suffering, and millions and millions of people in the world are suffering, through war, through starvation, through brutality, through violence, through bombs. And can that suffering in you as a human being end? Can it come to an end in you, because your consciousness is the consciousness of the world, is the consciousness of every other human being? You may have a different peripheral behaviour but basically, deeply, your consciousness is the consciousness of every other human being in the world. Suffering, pleasure, fear, ambition, all that is your consciousness. So you are the world. And if you are completely free of fear you affect the consciousness of the world. Do you understand how extraordinarily important it is that we human beings change, fundamentally, because that will affect the consciousness of every other human being? Hitler, Stalin affected all the consciousness of the world, what the priests have achieved in the name of somebody has affected the world. So if you as human beings radically transform, are free of fear, you will naturally affect the consciousness of the world. Similarly, when there is freedom from suffering there is compassion, not before. You can talk about it, write books about it, discuss what compassion is, but the ending of sorrow is the beginning of compassion. The human mind has put up with suffering, endless suffering, having your children killed in wars, and willingness to accept further suffering by future wars. Suffering through education-modern education to achieve a certain technological knowledge and nothing else - that brings great sorrow. So compassion, which is love, can only come when you understand fully the depth of suffering and the ending of suffering. Can that suffering end, not in somebody else, but in you? The Christians have made a parody of suffering - sorry to use that word but it is actually so. The Hindus have made it into an intellectual affair: what you have done in a past life you are paying for it the present life, and in the future there will be happiness if you behave properly now. But they never behave properly now; so they carry on with this belief which is utterly meaningless. But a man who is serious is concerned with compassion and with what it means to love; because without that you can do what you like, build all the skyscrapers in the world, have marvellous economic conditions and social behaviour, but without it life becomes a desert. So to understand what it means to live with compassion, you must understand what suffering is. There is suffering from physical pain, physical disease, physical accident, which generally affects the mind, distorts the mind - if you have had physical pain for some time it twists your mind; and to be so aware that the physical pain cannot touch the mind requires tremendous inward awareness. And apart from the physical, there is suffering of every kind, suffering in loneliness, suffering when you are not loved, the longing to be loved and never finding it satisfactory; because we make love into something to be satisfied, we want love to be gratified. There is suffering because of death; suffering because there is never a moment of complete wholeness, a complete sense of totality, but always living in fragmentation, which is contradiction, strife, confusion, misery. And to escape from that we go to temples, and to various forms of entertainment, religious and non-religious, take drugs, group therapy, and individual therapy. You know all those tricks we play upon ourselves and upon others if you are clever enough to play tricks upon others. So there is this immense suffering brought by man against man. We bring suffering to the animals, we kill them, we eat them, we have destroyed species after species because our love is fragmented. We love God and kill human beings. Can that end? Can suffering totally end so that there is complete and whole compassion? Because suffering means, the root meaning of that word is to have passion - not the Christian passion, not lust, that is too cheap, easy, but to have compassion, which means passion for all, for all things, and that can only come when there is total freedom from suffering. You know it is a very complex problem, like fear and pleasure, they are all interrelated. Can one go into it and see whether the mind and the brain can ever be free completely of all psychological suffering, inward suffering. If we don't understand that and are not free of it we will bring suffering to others, as we have done, though you believe in God, in Christ, in Buddha, in all kinds of beliefs -and you have killed men generation after generation. You understand what we do, what our politicians do in India and here. Why is it that human beings who think of themselves as extraordinarily alive and intelligent, why have they allowed themselves to suffer? There is suffering when there is jealousy; jealousy is a form of hate. And envy is part of our structure, part of our nature, which is to compare ourselves with somebody else; and can you live without comparison? We think that without comparison we shall not evolve, we shall not grow, we shall not be somebody. But have you ever tried - really, actually tried - to live without comparing yourself with anybody? You have read the lives of saints and if you are inclined that way, as you get older you want to become like that; not when you are young, you spit on all that. But as you are approaching the grave you wake up. There are different forms of suffering. Can you look at it, observe it without trying to escape from it? - just remain solidly with that thing. When my wife - I am not married - runs away from me, or looks at another man - by law she belongs to me and I hold her - and when she runs away from me I am jealous; because I possess, and in possession I feel satisfied, I feel safe; and also it is good to be possessed, that also gives satisfaction. And that jealousy, that envy, that hatred, can you look at it without any movement of thought and remain with it? You understand what I am saying? Jealousy is a reaction, a reaction which has been named through memory as jealousy, and I have been educated to run away from it, to rationalize it, or to indulge in it, and hate with anger and all the rest of it. But without doing any of that, can my mind solidly remain with it without any movement? You understand what I am saying? Do it and you will see what happens. In the same way when you suffer, psychologically, remain with it completely without a single movement of thought. Then you will see out of that suffering comes that strange thing called passion. And if you have no passion of that kind you cannot be creative. Out of that suffering comes compassion. And that energy differs totally from the mechanistic energy of thought. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART II CHAPTER 6 1ST PUBLIC DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 9TH SEPTEMBER 1975 Krishnamurti: This is in the nature of a dialogue between two friends, talking over their problems, who are concerned not only with their own personal affairs, but also with what is happening in the world. Being serious, these two friends have the urge to transform themselves and see what they can do about the world and all the misery and confusion that is going on. So could we this morning spend some time together having a friendly conversation, not trying to be clever, nor opposing one opinion against another opinion or belief, and together examine earnestly and deeply some of the problems that we have? In this, communication becomes rather important; and any one question is not only personal but universal. So if that is understood, then what shall we talk over together this morning? Questioner: The compilation of your biography has caused much confusion and quite a lot of questions. I have boiled them down to a few. May I at least hand them over to you. K: Do you want to discuss the biography written by Mary Lutyens? Do you want to go into that? Q: No. K: Thank God! (laughter). Q(1): Briefly and then finish with it. Q(2): I would propose that you go into the question of correct and incorrect thinking: that is a problem. Both kinds of thought, or thinking processes, are mechanical processes. K: I see. Can we discuss this? Do you want to talk over the biography - have many of you read it? Some of you. I was just looking at it this morning (laughter). Most of it I have forgotten and if you want to talk over some of the questions that have been given me, shall we do that briefly? Basically the question is: what is the relationship between the present K and the former K? (laughter). I should think very little. The basic question is, how was it that the boy who was found there, "discovered" as it was called, how was it that he was not conditioned at all from the beginning, though he was brought up in a very orthodox, traditional Brahmin family with its superstitions, arrogance and extraordinary religious sense of morality and so on? Why wasn't he conditioned then? And also later during those periods of the Masters, Initiations and so on - if you have read about it - why wasn't he conditioned? And what is the relationship between that person and the present person? Are you really interested in all this? Audience: Yes. K: I am not. The past is dead, buried and gone. I don't know how to tackle this. One of the questions is about the Masters, as they are explained not only in Theosophy but in the Hindu tradition and in the Tibetan tradition, which maintain that there is a Bodhisattva; and that he manifests himself and that is called in Sanskrit Avatar, which means manifestation. This boy was discovered and prepared for that manifestation. And he went through all kinds of things. And one question that may be asked is, must others go through the same process. Christopher Columbus discovered America with sailing boats in dangerous seas and so on, and must we go through all that to go to America? You understand my question? It is much simpler to go by air! That is one question. How that boy was brought up is totally irrelevant; what is relevant is the present teaching and nothing else. There is a very ancient tradition about the Bodhisattva that there is a state of consciousness, let me put it that way, which is the essence of compassion. And when the world is in chaos that essence of compassion manifests itself. That is the whole idea behind the Avatar and the Bodhisattva. And there are various gradations, initiations, various Masters and so on, and also there is the idea that when he manifests all the others keep quiet. You understand? And that essence of compassion has manifested at other times. What is important in all this, if one may talk about it briefly, is: can the mind passing through all kinds of experiences, either imagined or real - because truth has nothing to do with experience, one cannot possibly experience truth, it is there, you can't experience it - but going through all those various imagined, illusory, or real states, can the mind be left unconditioned? The question is, can the mind be unconditioned always, not only in childhood. I wonder if you understand this question? That is the underlying problem or issue in this. So as we say, all that is irrelevant. I do not know if you know anything about the ancient tradition of India and Tibet and of China and Japan, about the awakening of certain energy, called Kundalini. There are now all over America, and in Europe, various groups trying to awaken their little energy called Kundalini. You have heard about all this, haven't you? And there are groups practising it. I saw one group on television where a man was teaching them how to awaken Kundalini, that energy, doing all kinds of tricks with all kinds of words and gestures - which all becomes so utterly meaningless and absurd. And there is apparently such an awakening, which I won't go into, because it is much too complex and probably it is not necessary or relevant. So I think I have answered this question, haven't I? The other question asked was: Is there a non-mechanistic activity? is there a movement - movement means time - is there a state of mind, which is not only mechanical but not in the field of time? That is what the question raised involves. Do you want to discuss that, or something else? Somebody also sent a written question, "What does it mean to be aware? Is awareness different from attention? Is awareness to be practised systematically or does it come about naturally?" That is the question. Are there any other questions? Q(1): Would you go into the question of what it means, finding one's true will? Q(2): What is the difference between denial and suppression? Q(3): When being together with another person I lose all my awareness; not when I am alone. K: Can we discuss awareness, begin with that and explore the whole thing, including the will of one's own destiny? Q: What about earnestness and effort? K: Earnestness and effort, yes. We are now discussing awareness. Does choice indicate freedom? I choose to belong to this society or to that society, to that cult, to a particular religion or not, I choose a particular job - choice. Does choice indicate freedom? Or does freedom deny choice? Please let us talk this over together. Q: Freedom means that no choice is needed. K: But we choose, and we think because we have the capacity to choose that we have freedom. I choose between the Liberal Party and the Communist party. And in choosing I feel I am free. Or I choose one particular guru or another, and that gives me a feeling that I am free. So does choice lead to awareness? Q: No. K: Go slowly. Q: Choice is the expression of conditioning, is it not? K: That is what I want to find out. Q: It seems to me that one either reacts out of habit, or one responds without thinking. K: We will come to that. We will go into what it means to respond without choice. We are used to choosing; that is our conditioning. Q: Like and dislike. K: All that is implied in choice. I chose you as my friend, I deny my friendship to another. One wants to find out if awareness includes choice. Or is awareness a state of mind, a state of observation in which there is no choice whatsoever? Is that possible? One is educated from childhood to choose and that is our tradition, that is our habit, that is our mechanical, instinctive reaction. And we think, because we choose there is freedom. What does awareness mean: to be aware? It implies, doesn't it, not only physical sensitivity, but also sensitivity to the environment, to nature, sensitivity to other people's reactions and to my own reactions. Not, I am sensitive, but to other people I am not sensitive: that is not sensitivity. So awareness implies, doesn't it, a total sensitivity: to colour, to nature, to all my reactions, how I respond to others, all that is implied in awareness, isn't it? I am aware of this tent, the shape of it and so on. One is aware of nature, the world of nature, the beauty of trees, the silence of the trees, the shape and beauty and the depth and the solitude of trees. And one is aware also of one's relationship to others, intimate and not intimate. In that awareness is there any kind of choice? - in a total awareness, neurologically, physically, psychologically, to everything around one, the influences, to all the noises and so on. Is one aware? - not only of one's own beliefs but those of others, the opinions, judgements, evaluations, the conclusions, all that is implied - otherwise one is not aware. And can you practise awareness by going to a school or college, or going to a guru who will teach you how to be aware? Is that awareness? Which means, is sensitivity to be cultivated through practice? Q: That becomes selfishness, concentration on oneself. K: Yes, that is, unless there is total sensitivity, awareness merely becomes concentration on oneself. Q: Which excludes awareness. K: Yes, that is right. But there are so many schools, so many gurus, so many ashramas, retreats, where this thing is practised. Q: When it is practised it is just the old trick again. K: This is so obvious. One goes to India or japan to learn what it means to be aware - Zen practice, all that. Or is awareness a movement of constant observation? Not only what I feel, what I think, but what other people say about me - to listen, if they say it in front of me - and to be aware of nature, of what is going on in the world. That is total awareness. Obviously it can't be practised. Q: It is a non-movement, isn't it? K: No, it is movement in the sense of, "alive". Q: It is a participation. K: Participation implies action. If there is action through choice, that is one kind of action; if there is an action of total awareness, that is a totally different kind of action, "being aware"? You understand? To be aware of the people around one, the colour, their attitudes, their walk, the way they eat, the way they think -without indulging in judgement. Q: Is it something to do with motive? If you have a motive... K: Of course. Motive comes into being when there is choice; that is implied. When I have a motive then choice takes place. I chose you because I like you, or you flatter me, or you give me something or other; another doesn't, therefore there is choice and so on. So is this possible? - this sense of total awareness. Q: Is there a degree of awareness? K: That is, is awareness a process of time? Q: Can one man be more aware than another? K: Why should I enquire if you are more aware than I am? just a minute, let us go into it. Why this comparision? Is this not also part of our education, our social conditioning, which says we must compare to progress? - compare one musician with another, one painter with another and so on. And we think by comparing we begin to understand. Comparing means measurement, which implies time, thought, and is it possible to live without comparing at all? You understand? One is brought up, educated in schools, colleges and universities to compare oneself with "A", who is much cleverer than myself, and to try to reach his level - this constant measurement, this constant comparison, and therefore constant imitation, which is mechanical! So can we find out for ourselves whether it is possible to be totally sensitive and therefore aware? Q: Can you know if you are totally aware or not? Can we be aware of our awareness? K: No (laughter). Q: You can be aware when you are not aware. K: Watch it in yourself; verbally it becomes speculative. When you are aware do you know you are aware? Q: No. K: Find out. Test it, madam, test it. Do you know when you are happy? The moment you are aware that you are happy it is no longer happiness. Q: You know when you have got a pain. K: That is a different matter. When I have pain I am aware of it and I act, do something about it. That is one part of being aware, unless I am paralysed - most people are, in other directions! So we are asking ourselves, not asking somebody else to tell us, but one is asking oneself if there is that quality of awareness? Does one watch the sky, the evening stars, the moon, the birds, people's reactions, the whole of it? And what is the difference between that awareness and attention? In awareness is there a centre from which you are aware? When I say, "I am aware", then I move from a centre, I respond to nature from a centre, I respond to my friends, to my wife, husband or whatever it is - that centre being my conditioning, my prejudices, my desires, my fears and all the rest of it. In that awareness there is a centre. In attention there is no centre at all. Now please listen to this for two minutes. You are now listening to what is being said and you are giving total attention. That means you are not comparing, you do not say, "I already know what you are going to say", or, "I have read what you have said etc. etc". All that has gone, you are completely attentive and therefore there is no centre and that attention has no border. I don't know if you have noticed? So, by being aware one discovers that one responds from a centre, from a prejudice, from a conclusion, from a belief, from a conditioning, which is the centre. And from that centre you react, you respond. And when there is an awareness of that centre, that centre yields and in that there is a total attention. I wonder if you understand this? And this you cannot practise; it would be too childish, mechanical. So we go to the next question, which is: "Is there an activity which is not mechanistic?" That means, is there a part of the brain which is non-mechanical. Do you want to go into this? No, no, please, this isn't a game. First of all one has to go into the question of what is a mechanical mind. Is the brain, which has evolved through millennia, is that totally mechanical? Or is there a part of the brain which is not mechanical, which has never been touched by the machine of evolution? I wonder if you see. Q: What do you mean by mechanical? K: We are going to discuss that, sir. Part of this mechanical process is functioning within the field of conditioning. That is, when I act according to a pattern - Catholic, Protestant, Communist, Hindu, whatever it is, a pattern set by society, by my reading, or other influences, and accept that pattern or belief - then that is part of the mechanical process. The other part of the mechanical process is, having had experiences of innumerable kinds which have left memories, to act according to those memories: that is mechanical. Like a computer, which is purely mechanical. Now they are trying to prove it is not so mechanical, but let's leave that alone for the moment. Mechanical action is accepting tradition and following tradition. One of the aspects of that tradition is acceptance and obedience to a government, to priests. And the mechanical part of the brain is following consciously or unconsciously a line set by thought as the goal and purpose. All that and more is mechanical; and we live that way. Q: Is thought of itself mechanical? K: Of course, that is the whole point. One has to discover this for oneself, not be told by others, then it becomes mechanical. If we discover for ourselves how mechanical our thinking, our feeling, our attitudes, our opinions are, if one is aware of that, it means thought is invariably mechanistic - thought being the response of memory, experience, knowledge, which is the past. And responding according to the pattern of the past is mechanical, which is thought. Q: All thought? K: All thought, of course. Whether noble, ignoble, sexual, or technological thought, it is all thought. Q: Thought of the great genius also? K: Absolutely. Wait, we must go into the question of what is a genius. No, we won't go into that yet. If all thought is mechanical, the expression which you often use, "clear thinking", seems to be a contradiction. K: No, no. Clear thinking is to see clearly, clear thinking is to think clearly, objectively, sanely, rationally, wholly. Q: It is still thought. K: It is still thought, of course it is. Q: So what is the use of it? (laughter). K: If there was clear thought I wouldn't belong to any political party! I might create a global party - that is another matter. Q: Can we get back to your question as to whether there is a part of the brain which is untouched by conditioning? K: That's right, sir; this requires very careful, hesitant, enquiry. Not saying, "Yes, there is", or, "No, there isn't". "I have experienced a state where there is no mechanicalness" - that is too silly. But to really enquire and find out, you need a great deal of subtlety, great attentive quality to go step by step into it, not jump. So we say most of our lives are mechanical. The pursuit of pleasure is mechanical - but we are pursuing pleasure. Now, how shall we find out if there is a part of the brain that is not conditioned? This a very serious question, it is not for sentimentalists, romantic people, or emotional people; this requires very clear thinking. When you think very clearly you see the limitation of thinking. Q: Are we going to look very clearly at the barriers which interfere with an unconditioned mind? K: No, we are trying to understand, or explore together, the mechanical mind first. Without understanding the totality of that you can't find out the other. We have asked the question: "Is there a part of the brain, part of our total mind - in which is included the brain, emotions, neurological responses - which is not completely mechanical?" When I put that question to myself I might imagine that it is not all mechanical because I want the other; therefore I deceive myself. I pretend that I have got the other. So I must completely understand the movement of desire. You follow this? Not suppress it, but under. stand it, have an insight into it - which me;ms fear, time, and all that we talked about the day before yesterday. So we are now enquiring whether our total activity is mechanistic? That means am I, are you, clinging to memories? The Hitlerian memories and all that, the memories of various pleasurable and painful experiences, the memories of sexual fulfilment and the pleasures and so on. That is: is one living in the past? Q: Always, I am. K: Of course! So all that you are is the past, which is mechanical. So knowledge is mechanical. I wonder if you see this? Q: Why is it so difficult to see this? K: Because we are not aware of our inward responses, of what actually is going on within ourselves - not to imagine what is going on, or speculate about it, or repeat what we have been told by somebody else, but actually to be aware of what is going on. Q: Aren't we guided to awareness by experience? K: No. Now wait a minute. What do you mean by experience? The word itself means, "to go through" - to go through, finish, not retain. You have said something that hurts me, that has left a mark on the brain, and when I meet you that memory responds. Obviously. And is it possible when you hurt me, say something cruel, or justified, or violent, to observe it and not register it? Try it, sir; you try it, test it out. Q: It is very difficult because the memory has already been hurt; we never forget it. K: Do go into this. From childhood we are hurt, it happens to everybody, in school, at home, at college, in universities, the whole of society is a process of hurting others. One has been hurt and one lives in that consciously or unconsciously. So there are two problems involved: the past hurt retained in the brain, and not to be hurt; the memory of hurts, and never to be hurt; Now is that possible? Q: If "you" are not there. K: Go into it. You will discover it for yourself and find out. That is, you have been hurt. Q: The image of myself... K: Go into it slowly. What is hurt? The image that you have built about yourself, that has been hurt. Why do you have an image about yourself? Because that is the tradition, part of our education, part of our social reactions. There is an image about myself, and there is an image about you in relation to my image. So I have got half a dozen images and more. And that image about myself has been hurt. You call me a fool and I shrink: it has been hurt. Now, how am I to dissolve that hurt and not be hurt in the future, tomorrow, or the next moment? You follow the question? There are two problems involved in this. One, I have been hurt and that creates a great deal of neurotic activity, resistance, self protection, fear; all that is involved in the past hurt. Second, how not to be hurt any more. Q: One has to be totally involved. K: Look at it and you will see. You have been hurt, haven't you - I am not talking to you personally - and you resist, you are afraid of being hurt more. So you build a wall round yourself, isolate yourself, and the extreme form of that isolation is total withdrawal from all relationship. And you remain in that but you have to live, you have to act. So you are always acting from a centre that is hurt and therefore acting neurotically. You can see this happening in the world, in oneself. And how are those hurts to be totally dissolved and not leave a mark? Also in the future how not to be hurt at all? The question is clear, isn't it. Now how do you approach this question? How to dissolve the hurts, or how not to be hurt at all? Which is the question you put to yourself, which do you want answered? Dissolve all the hurts, or no more hurts? Which is it that comes to you naturally? Q: No more hurts. K: So the question is: "Is it possible not to be hurt?" Which means is it possible not to have an image about yourself? Q: If we see that image is false... K: Not false or true. Don't you see, you are already operating in the field of thought? Is it possible not to have an image at all about yourself, or about another, naturally? And if there is no image, isn't that true freedom? Ah, you don't see it. Q: Sir, if what happens to you is of no importance to you, then it doesn't matter and it won't hurt you. If you have managed to get rid of your self-importance... K: The gentleman says if you can get rid of your self-importance, your arrogance, your vanity, then you won't be hurt. But how am I to get rid of all that garbage which I have collected? (laughter). Q: I think you can get rid of it by being entirely aware of the relationship between yourself and your physical body and your thinking. How you control your physical body and... K: I don't want to control anything, my body, my mind, my emotions. That is the traditional, mechanistic response. Sorry! (laughter). Please go into this a little bit and you will see. First of all, the idea of getting rid of an image implies that there is an entity who is different from the image. Therefore he can kick the image. But is the image different from the entity who says, "I must get rid of it"? They are both the same, therefore there is no control. I wonder if you see that. When you see that you are no longer functioning mechanically. Q: Surely by destroying one image we are immediately building another one? K: We are going to find out if it is possible to be free of all images, not only the present ones but the future ones. Now why does the mind create an image about itself? I say I am a Christian, that is an image. I believe in the saviour, in Christ, in all the ritual, why? Because that is my conditioning. Go to India and they say, "What are you talking about, Christ? I have got my own gods, as good as yours, if not better" (laughter). So that is their conditioning. If I am born in Russia and educated there I say, "I believe in neither. The State is my god and Marx is the first prophet and so on and so on. So the image formation is brought about through propaganda, conditioning, tradition. Q: Is that related to the fact that out of fear one behaves in a certain way which is not natural for one to behave; and therefore one is not being oneself? And that is making the image you are talking about. K: The image is what we call ourself: "I must express myself", "I must fulfil myself". "Myself" is the image according to the environment and culture in which one has been born. I believe there was a tribe in America, among the Red Indians, where anybody who had an image about himself was killed (laughter), was liquidated, because it led to ambition and all the rest of it. I wonder what would happen if they did it to all of us. It would be a lovely world, wouldn't it? (laughter). So is it possible not to create images at all? That is, I am aware that I have an image, brought about through culture, through propaganda, tradition, the family, the whole pressure. Q: We cling to the known. K: That is the known, tradition is the known. And my mind is afraid to let that known go, to let the image go, because the moment it lets it go it might lose a profitable position in society, might lose status, might lose a certain relationship; so it is frightened and holds on to that image. The image is merely words, it has no reality. It is a series of words, a sense of responses to those words, a series of beliefs which are words. I believe in Marx, in Christ, or in Krishna or whatever they believe in India. They are just words ideologically clothed. And if I am not a slave to words, then I begin to lose the image. I wonder if you see how significant deeply rooted words have become. Q: If one is listening to what you say and realizes that one has an image about oneself, and that there is a large discrepancy between the image one has of oneself and the ideal of freedom... K: It is not an ideal... Q:.. freedom itself... then knowing that there is a discrepancy, can one think of freedom, knowing that it is just an idea? K: Is freedom an abstraction, a word, or a reality? Q: It is being free of relationship, is it not? K: No please, we are jumping from one thing to another. Let us go step by step. We began by asking whether there is any part of the brain, any part of the total entity, that is not conditioned? We said conditioning means image-forming. The image that gets hurt and the image that protects itself from being hurt. And we said there is only freedom - the actuality of that state, not the word, not the abstraction - when there is no image, which is freedom. When I am not a Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Communist, Socialist, I have no label and therefore no label inside. Now is it possible not to have an image at all? And how does that come about? Q: Isn't it all to do with the activity... K: Look, we come to a point and go off after something else. One wants to find out whether it is possible to live in this world without a single image. Q: When there is no observer there is nothing observed, and yet one comes across something in this silence... K: Madam, is this an actual fact that there is no observer in your life - not only occasionally. Is it possible to be free of the image that society, the environment, culture, education has built in one? Because one is afl that; you are the result of your environment, of your culture, of your knowledge, of your education, of your job, of your pleasure, you are all that. Q: What happens to one's sense of orientation without a centre. K: All that comes a little later, please. Q: If you are aware of your conditioning does that free you? K: Now, are you actually aware - not theoretically or in the abstract - actually aware that you are conditioned this way, and therefore you have got an image? Q: If you don't have the image then you don't know what your place is. K: "If you have no image then you do not know what your place is." Listen to that carefully. If you have no image, you have no place in the world. Which means if you have no image you are insecure. Go step by step. Now are you, having a place in the world, secure? Q: No. K: Be actual. Q: When you see that the image that you have built, which you are attached to, when you see that it is just a load of words... K: You are finding security in a word: and it is not security at all. We have lived in words and made those words something fantastically real. So if you are seeking security, it is not in an image; it is not in your environment, in your culture. One must have security, that is essential, food, clothes, and shelter; one must have it otherwise one can't function. Now that is denied totally when I belong to a small group. When I say I am a German, or a Russian, or an Englishman, I deny complete security. I deny security because the words, the labels have become important, not security. This is what is actually happening, the Arabs and the Israelis both want security, and both are accepting words and all the rest of it. Now we come to the point. Is it possible to live in this world, not to go off into some fantastic realm of illusion, or to some monastery, and to live in this world without a single image and be totally secure. Q: How can we be secure in a sick society? K: I am going to go into this, madam, I'll show it to you. Q: It is competitive, it is vicious. K: Please go with me. I'll show you that there is complete security, absolute security, not in images. Q: To be totally aware every moment, then your conditioning does not exist. K: Not if you are aware. Are you aware that you have an image and that image has been formed by the culture, the society? Are you aware of that image? You discover that image in relationship, don't you? Now we are asking ourselves whether it is possible to be free of images. That means, when you say something to me that is vulgar, hurting, at the moment to be totally aware of what you are saying and how I am responding. Totally aware, not partially, but to be totally aware of both the pleasurable image and the displeasurable image. To be aware totally at the moment of the reaction to your insult or praise. Then at that moment you don't form an image. There is no recording in the brain of the hurt, the insult or the flattery, therefore there is no image. That requires * See Discussion about security, pages 39-43. tremendous attention at the moment, which demands a great inward perception, which is only possible when you have looked at it, watched it, when you have worked. Don't just say, "Well, tell me all about it; I want to be comfortable". Q: Who watches all this? K: Now, who watches all this? If there is a watcher, then the image is continuous. If there is no watcher there is no image. In that state of attention the hurt and the flattery are both observed, not reacted to. You can only observe when there is no observer, who is the past. It is the past observer that gets hurt. Where there is only observation when there is flattery or insult, then it is finished. And that is real freedom. Now follow it. In this world, if I have no image, you say I shall not be secure. One has found security in things, in a house, in property, in a bank account, that is what we call security. And one has also found security in belief. If I am a Catholic living in Italy, I believe that; it is much safer to believe what ten thousand people believe. There I have a place. And when my belief is questioned I resist. Now can there be a total awareness of all this? The mind becomes tremendously active, you understand? Not just saying, "I must be aware", "I must learn how to be attentive". You are tremendously active, the brain is alive. Then we can move from that to find out if there is in the brain a part that has not been conditioned at all, a part of the brain which is non-mechanistic. I am putting a false question, I don't know if you see that. Do see it quickly, do see it. Please just listen for two minutes, I am on fire! If there is no image, which is mechanical, and there is freedom from the image, then there is no part of the brain that has been conditioned. Full stop! Then my whole brain is unconditioned. Q: It is on fire! K: Yes, therefore it is non-mechanistic and that has a totally different kind of energy; not the mechanistic energy. I wonder if you see this. Please don't make an abstraction of it because then it becomes words. But to see this, that your brain has been conditioned through centuries, saying survival is only possible if you have an image, which is created by the circle in which you live and that circle gives you complete security. We have accepted that as tradition and we live in that way. I am an Englishman, I am better than anybody else, or a Frenchman, or whatever it is. Now my brain is conditioned, I don't know whether it is the whole or part, I only know that it is conditioned. There can be no enquiry into the unconditioned state until the conditioning is non-existent. So my whole enquiry is to find out whether the mind can be unconditioned, not to jump into the other, because that is too silly. So I am conditioned by belief, by education, by the culture in which I have lived, by everything, and to be totally aware of that, not discard it, not suppress it, not control it, but to be totally aware of it. Then you will find if you have gone that far there is security only in being nothing. Q: What about images in racial prejudices? Do you belong to a community? I quite agree with you. You don't want any psychological image but you must have a physical image for your physical survival... even if you want to drop it everyone forces it on you. K: Sir, if one wants to survive physically, what is preventing it? All the psychological barriers which man has created. So remove all those psychological barriers and you have complete security. Q: No, because the other one involves you in it, not yourself. K: Nobody can put you into prison. Q: They kill you. K: Then they kill you, all right (laughter). Then you will find out how to meet death (laughter). Not imagine what you are going to feel when you die - which is another image. Oh, I don't know if you see all this. So nobody can put you psychologically into prison. You are already there (laughter). We are pointing out that it is possible a to be totally free of images, which is the result of our conditioning. And one of the questions about the biography is about that very point. How was that young boy, whatever he was, how was he not conditioned right through? I won't go into that because it is a very complex problem. If one is aware of one's own conditioning then the whole thing becomes very simple. Then genius is something entirely different. And that leaves the question: What is creation? TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART II CHAPTER 7 2ND PUBLIC DIALOGUE BROCKWOOD PARK 11TH SEPTEMBER 1975 Questioner (1): You were going to speak on what is creation; could you say something about creative intelligence 1. Q(2): Is there any reality in the belief in reincarnation? And what is the nature and quality of the meditative mind? Q(3): What is the difference between denial and suppression of habits? Q(4): You were saying that for the mind to function sanely one must have great security, food and shelter. This seems logical. But it seems that in order to try and find a way to having this security one encounters the horrors and the difficulties which make things so hard and impossible sometimes. What is the right action in this connection? Krishnamurti: I don't quite follow this. Q: How are we to live to have this basic security without taking part in all the horrors that are involved in it. K: You are asking, what is correct action in a world that is chaotic, where there is no security and yet one must have security. What is one to do? Is that the question? Q(5): I have a question which, when I ask it of myself, I always come up against a wall. I say, "I am the observer, and I would like to see the whole of the observer. I cannot see the whole of the observer because I can only see in fragments. So how is the observer to see the whole of the observer unless there is no observer? How can the observer see the observer with no observer? K: How can one see the whole of the observer and can the observer watch himself as the observer. Is that the question? Q(6) This is about the state of mind in observation. Now when a situation occurs, what holds one to the observation that the observer is not different from what is observed? There seems a lack of attention at the moment, at that point; but that attention requires a tremendous vitality that we don't have. K: Have I understood the question rightly? We do not have enough energy to observe wholly. Is that it? Q: Yes. K: Now which of these questions shall we talk over together? Q(7): May I ask a question? Can an act of willpower - I think you call it an act of friction - can this generate the vitality or the passion? K: Can will generate sufficient energy to see clearly? Would that be right? Q: Yes. Q(8): What happens to the brain and the process of thought during hypnosis? For medical reasons we use hypnosis. What is the process of thought in that particular case? K: We have got so many questions. What shall we begin with? The observer? Q: Yes. K: To see the whole of the observer one needs energy and how is that energy to be derived? How is that energy to be acquired? And will that energy reveal the totality of the nature and structure of the observer? Should we discuss that? And what is the quality of the mind that has this meditative process? How is one to observe the whole of something, psychologically? How is one to be aware of oneself totally? Can we begin with that? Q: Surely one can only be aware of the totality if one loses oneself. K: Yes, sir. Is it possible to see the totality of one's reactions, the motives, the fears, the anxieties, the sorrows, the pain, the totality of all that? Or must one see it in fragments, in layers? Shall we discuss that? How is one to be aware of the content of one's consciousness? What is consciousness? What do you think is consciousness -under hypnosis, as well as when one is not hypnotized? Most of us are hypnotised - by words, by propaganda, by tradition, by all the things that we believe in. We are hypnotized not only by external influence, but also we have our own peculiar process of hypnotizing ourselves into believing something, or not believing and so on. Can one see the totality of one's consciousness? Let us enquire into this. Q: The observer cannot see it. K: Don't let us say one can, one cannot, it is so, it is not so. Let's enquire. Q: One has the feeling one has got to begin! K: We are going to begin, sir (laughter). How shall I begin, from where shall I begin? To be aware of myself, myself being all the beliefs, the dogmas, conclusions, the fears, the anxieties, the pain, the sorrow, the fear of death, the whole of that - where shall we begin to find out the content of this? Q: You just asked what consciousness was. K: We are going into that. Q: If one is going to observe, is it true that one has to stand outside the things that one is observing? K: Madam, I am asking, if I may, how shall I begin to enquire into the whole structure of myself. If I am interested, if I am serious, where shall I begin? Q: Is the question, "Who am I?" K: That becomes intellectual, verbal. I begin to know myself in my relationship to others - do let's face that fact. I cannot know myself in abstraction. Whereas if I could observe what my reactions are in relationship to another, then I begin to enquire. That is much closer, more accurate and revealing. Can we do that? That is, in my relationship to nature, to the neighbour and so on, I discover the nature of myself. So how do I observe my reactions in my relationship with another? Q: Each time I see something about myself in a reaction it becomes knowledge, it becomes something retainable. K: I wonder if we are aware what takes place in our relationship with another. You all seem to be so vague about this matter. Q: When I am very interested in some relationship I notice that I can't really observe. When I am angry in my relationship I see immediately that I really can't observe what is going on. K: What do we mean by relationship? Q: When we seem to want something... K: Look at the word first, the meaning of the word. Q: I like to compare myself with the other person. K: We are asking the meaning of the word itself, relationship. Q(1): Communication. Q(2): It means you are relating to that person. K: When I say I am related to my wife, or to my husband, father, son, neighbour, what does that mean? Q(1): I care for the person. Q(2): The whole human race is one's brother. Q(3): I'd rather you told us. K: Ah! (laughter). Relationship means - I am enquiring please, I am not stating it - doesn't relationship mean to respond accurately. To be related, the meaning in the dictionary is, to respond -relationship comes from that word. Now how do I respond in my relationship to you, or to my wife, husband and all the rest of it? Am I responding according to the image I have about you? Or are we both free of the images and therefore responding accurately? Q: Isn't it largely subconscious? K: First let us see what the word in itself means. Q: What do you mean by accurate? K: Accurate means care - the word accurate means to have great care. If you care for something you act accurately. If you care for your motor you must be very well acquainted with it, you must know all the mechanical processes of it. Accurate means infinite care; we are using that word in that sense. When there is a relationship with another, either intimate, or distant, the response depends on the image you have about the other, or the image the other has about you. And when we act or respond according to that image, it is inaccurate, it is not with complete care. Q: What is a love and hate relationship? K: We will come to that. I have an image about you and you have an image about me. That image has been put together through pleasure, fear, nagging, domination, possession, various hurts, impatience and so on. Now when we act or respond according to that image, then that action, being incomplete, 1-s inaccurate, or without care, which we generally call love. Are you aware that you have an image about another? And having that image you respond according to the past, because the image has been put together and has become the past. Q: And also it is according to one's selfish desires. K: I said that, fear, desire, selfishness. Q: You can't think of another person without an image; how can you write a letter without an image? K: How quickly you want to resolve everything, don't you? First of all, can we be aware that we have an image, not only about ourselves but about another? Q: The two images are in relation, images of the other are in relation with the image of yourself. K: You see what you are saying - there is a thing different from the image. Q: The image of the other is made from the image of yourself. K: That is what we said. Q: Would anything practical help? K: This is the most practical thing if you listen to this. The practical thing is to observe clearly what we are and act from there. Is one aware that one has an image about another? And is one aware that one has an image about oneself? Are you aware of that? This is a simple thing. I injure you, I hurt you, and you naturally have an image about me. I give you pleasure and you have an image about me. And according to that hurt or pleasure you react, and that reaction, being fragmentary, must be inaccurate, not whole. This is simple. Can we go on from there. Now what do you do with the image you have built about another? I am aware that I have an image about myself and I have an image about you, so I have got two images. Am I conscious of this? Now if I have an image, why has this image been put together? And who is it that has put the image together? You understand the question? Q(1): Is it fear that creates the image? Q(2): Is experience a necessary imaginative process? Q(3): Previous images. Q(4): Lack of attention. K: How does it come? Not through lack of something, but how does it come? You say through experience, through various incidents, through words... Q: Retaining it all as memory. K: Which is all the movement of thought, isn't it? So thought as movement, which is time, put this image together, created this image. It does it because it wants to protect itself. Am I inventing, or fabricating this, or is this actual? Q: Actual. K: That means "what is". Actuality means "what is". (Sorry, I am not teaching you English!) Q: It means that it then can see itself. K: No, no. You have an image about me, haven't you? Q: Well, it is changing. K: Wait, go slow (laughter). You have an image about me, haven't you, if you are honest, look into yourself, you see you have an image. How has that image been brought about? You have read something, you have listened to something, there is a reputation, a lot of talk about it, some articles in the papers and so on. So all this has influenced thought and out of that you have created an image. And you have an image, not only about yourself but about the other. So when you respond according to an image about the speaker you are responding inaccurately; in that there is no care. We said care implies attention, affection, accuracy. That means to act according to "what is". Now let's move from there. Q: Is not an image a thought form? K: We said that, a thought. Q: Thought has created images and it seems to imply that thought has created thought so... K: Wait, we will get very far if we go slowly. So thought has built this image through time. It may be one day or fifty years. And I see in my relationship to another this image plays a tremendous part. If I become conscious, if I don't act mechanically, I become aware and see how extraordinarily vital this image is. Then my next question is: is it possible to be free of the image? I have an image as a Communist, believing in all kinds of ideas, or as a Catholic - you follow. This whole cultural economic, social background has built this image also. And I react according to that, there is a reaction according to that image. I think this is clear. Now is one aware of it? Then one asks: is it necessary? If it is necessary one should keep it, one should have the image. If it is not necessary how is one to be free of it? Now, is it necessary? Q: Images form the whole chaos in the world where we live, so it is not necessary. K: He says this whole image-making is bringing about chaos in the world. Q: Aren't we making a lot of judgements? K: Are we making a lot of judgements? Q: In making an image there is a lot of judgement. K: Yes, but we are asking a little more. We are asking whether it is necessary to have these images? Q: No, we can be free of it. K: Is it necessary? First let us see that. Q: No. K: Then if it is not necessary why do we keep it? (laughter). Q: I have a feeling, being what we are, we can hardly help it. K: We are going to find out whether it is possible to be free of this image, and whether it is worth while to be free of this image, and what does it mean to be free of the image. Q: What is the relation with the chaos? Is it judging that is wrong? K: No, no, sir. Look, I have an image about myself as a Communist and I believe in Marx, his economic principles, I am strongly committed to that. And I reject everything else. But you think differently and you are committed to that. So there is a division between you and me, and that division invariably brings conflict I believe that I am Indian and I am committed to Indian nationalism, and you are a committed Muslim and there is division and conflict. So thought has created this division, thought has created these images, these labels, these beliefs and so there is contradiction and division, which brings conflict and therefore chaos. That is a fact. So you think life is a process of infinite conflicts, neverending conflicts, then you must keep these images. I don't say it is, we are asking. I believe there have been more than five thousand wars within the last two thousand years and we have accepted that. To have our sons killed because we have these images. And if we see that is not necessary, that it is really a tremendous danger to survival, then I must find out how to be free of the images. Q: I think something else is involved in this, because you say we always react from the past, but what difference does it make -the past is a cyclic phenomenon that repeats so you can't prevent yourself, you know it is a fact that you will repeat it in the same way all the time. K: We are talking about the necessity... Q: (interrupting) You are pitting yourself against necessity... K:.. of having an image, or not having an image. If we are clear that these images are a real danger, really a destructive process, then we want to get rid of them. But if you say: I keep my little image and you keep your little image, then we are at each other's throat. So if we can see very clearly that these images, labels, words, are destroying human beings... Q: Krishnamurti, doesn't spiritual commitment give us the penetration or energy? I mean if I am a committed Buddhist and I channel my energy in that direction, it doesn't necessarily mean that I am in conflict with those who aren't Buddhists. K: Just examine that please. If I am a committed human being, committed to Buddhism, and another is committed to the Christian dogma, and another to Communism... Q: That is not my concern. K: Isn't this what is happening in life? Don't say it is not my business if you are a Communist. It is my business to see if we can live in security, in peace in the world, we are human beings, supposed to be intelligent. Why should I be committed to anything? Q: Because it gives energy, the power of penetration. K: No, no. Q: The danger is that we are moving away from the central fact. K: Yes, we are always moving away from the central fact. Q: We are doing that right now: the image is not necessary. K: People think it is necessary to be an Englishman, a German, a Hindu, a Catholic, they think it is important. They don't see the danger of it. Q:1: Some people think it is not necessary. Q:2: Why don't we see the danger? K: Because we are so heavily conditioned, it is so profitable. My job depends on it. I might not be able to marry my son to somebody who is a Catholic. All that stuff. So the point is: if one sees the danger of these images, how can the mind free itself from them? Q: Can "I" be there when no image is formed? K: Images, whether they are old or new, are the same images. Q: Yes, but when an image is formed can I be aware? K: We are first of all going to go into that. How is an image formed? Is it formed through inattention? You get angry with me and if at that moment I am totally attentive to what you say there is no anger. I wonder if you realize this? Q: So the image and the image-former must be the same in that case. K: Keep it very simple. I say something that doesn't give you pleasure. You have an image instantly, haven't you? Now at that moment, if you are completely aware, is there an image? Q: If you don't have that new image, all the other images are gone. K: Yes, that is the whole point. Can one be attentive at the moment of listening? You are listening now, can you be totally attentive? And when someone called you by an unpleasant name, or gives you pleasure, at that moment, at that precise moment, can you be totally aware? Have you ever tried this? You can test it out, because that is the only way to find out, not accept the speaker's words. You can test it out. Then if there is no image-forming, and therefore no image, then what is the relationship between the two. You have no image about me, but I have an image about you; then what is your relationship to me? You have no image because you see the danger of it, but I don't see the danger of it, I have my images and you are related to me, as wife, husband, father, whatever it is. I have the image and you have not. Then what is your relationship to me? And what is my relationship to you? Q: There is a barrier somewhere. K: Of course there is a barrier, but we are asking what is that relationship. You are my wife; and I am very ambitious, greedy, envious, I want to succeed in this world, make a lot of money, position, prestige, and you say, "How absurd all that is, don't be like that, don't be silly, don't be traditional, don't be mechanical, that is just the old pattern being repeated". What happens between you and me? Q: Division. K: And we talk together about love. I go off to the office here I am brutal, ambitious, ruthless, and I come home and am very pleasant to you - because I want to sleep with you. What is the relationship? Q(1): No good. Q(2): No relationship. K: No relationship at all. At last ! And yet this is what we call love. So what is the relationship between you and me when I have an image and you have no image? Either you leave me, or we live in conflict. You don't create conflict but I create conflict because I have an image. So is it possible in our relationship with each other to help each other to be free of images? You understand my question? I am related to you by some misfortune, sexual demands and so on and so on. I am related to you and you are free of the images and I am not, and therefore you care infinitely. I wonder if you see that? To you it is tremendously important to be free of images - and I am your father, wife, husband or whatever it is. Then will you abandon me? Q: No. K: Don't say "no" so easily. You care, you have affection, you feel totally differently. So what will you do with me? Q: There is nothing you can do. K: Why can't you do something with me? Do go into it, don't theorize about it. You are all in that position. Life is this. Q(1): It depends if this person has the capacity to see what the truth of the matter is. Q(2): See through it all and don't take any notice of it (laughter). K: When I am nagging you all the time? You people just play with words. You don't take actuality and look at it. Q: Surely if you have no image in yourself and you look at another person, you won't see their image either. K: If I have no image I see very clearly that you have an image. This is happening in the world, this is happening in every family, in every situation in relationship - you have something free and I have not and the battle is between us. Q: I think that situation is in everything. K: That is what I am saying. What do you do? just drop it and disappear and become a monk? Form a community? Go off in meditation and all the rest of it? Here is a tremendous problem. Q(1): I tell you how I feel, first of all. Q(2): But surely this is fictitious, because we are trying to imagine. K: I have said that if you have an image and I have an image, then we live very peacefully because we are both blind and we don't care. Q: That situation you have created for us because you want us to be free of images! K: Of course, of course, I want you to be free of images because otherwise we are going to destroy the world. Q: I see that. K: The situation is not being created for you: it is there. Look at it. Q: I have an image about you, and I have had it for a long time. And there are different kinds of images. I have been trying to get rid of those images because I have read that they have created problems for me. Now every time I try to work it out with you; and yet it hasn't helped. K: I'll show you how to get rid of it, how to be free of images. Q: I don't believe you, sir. K: Then don't believe me (laughter). Q: All the time you are just sitting there talking. Abstractions and abstractions. Me having an image about you means you are sitting up on the platform being an enlightened person I am here as a listener, let's say a disciple or a pupil. Now I feel very strongly that is not actuality or reality because we are two human beings. But still you are the king of gurus, you are the one who knows and... (laughter). K: Please don't laugh, sirs, be quiet, he is telling you some thing, please listen. May I show you something? If that image of the guru has not created a problem you would live with that guru happily, wouldn't you? But it has created a problem, whether it is the guru, the wife, or the husband - it is the same thing. You have got the image about the speaker as the supreme guru (Krishnamurti and others laugh) - the word means, one who dispels ignorance, one who dispels the ignorance of another. But generally the gurus impose their ignorance on you. You have an image about me as the guru, or you have an image about another as a Christian and so on. If that pleases you, if that gives you satisfactIon you will hold on to it - won't you? That is simple enough. If it causes trouble then you say, "It is terrible to have this" and you move away, form another relationship which is pleasant; but it is the same image-making. So one asks: is it possible to be free of images. The speaker sits on the platform because it is convenient, so you can all see; I can equally sit on the ground but you will have the same image. So the height doesn't make any difference. The question is, whether the mind - the mind being part of thought, and thought has created these images - can thought dispel these images? Thought has created it and thought can dispel it because it is unsatisfactory and create another image which will be satisfactory. This is what we do. I don't like that guru for various reasons and I go to another because he praises me, gives me garlands and says, "My dear chap, you are the best disciple I have". So thought has created this image. Can thought undo the image? Q: Not if you are looking at it intellectually. But looking at it intellectually, you are not using your senses. K: I am asking that first. Look at it. Can the intellect, reasoning, dispel the image? Q: No. K: Then what will? Q: The thing that stands in the way is merely self, the "I". If you overcome this... K: I know; but I don't want to go into the much more complex problem of the "I". Q: You say the image is what he means by the "I", but what do you mean by the "I"? K: Of course, of course. How does thought get rid of the image without creating another image? Q: If the guru causes trouble and it feels uncomfortable with the image, if one can see the trouble then perhaps that guru can help? K: You are not going into it at all, you are just scratching on the surface. Q: Thought cannot get rid of the image. K: If that is so, then what will? Q: Understanding. K: Don't use words like understanding. What do you mean by understanding? Q: Getting rid of the thoughts. K: Now who is going to get rid of thought? Q: Is it a question of time? Could it be that our energies are all in the past, and we need to think now? K: All the images are in the past. Why can't I drop all that and live in the now? Q: That is what I meant. K: Yes. How can I? With the burden of the past, how to get rid of the past burden? It comes to the same thing. Q: if one lives in the present, do the past images still come through? K: Can you live in the present? Do you know what it means to live in the present? That means not a single memory, except technological memories, not a single breath of the past. Therefore you have to understand the totality of the past, which is all this memory, experience, knowledge, imagination, images. You go from one thing to another, you don't pursue one thing steadily. Q(1): Please keep going with one having no image and the other having an image. Q(2): Yes, but we don't answer it. K: I'll answer it, all right. You have no image and I have an image. What happens? Aren't we eternally at war with each other? Q: What am I going to do with you? K: We are living on the same earth, in the same house, meeting often, living in the same community, what will you do with me? Q: I would try to explain to him what I've learned. K: Yes, you have explained it to me, but I like my image (laughter). Q: Sir, we cannot know because we have these images of urselves. K: That is all I am saying! You are living in images and you don't know how to be free of them. These are all speculative questions. So let's begin again. Are you aware that you have images? If you have images that are pleasant and you cling to them, and discard those which are unpleasant, you still have images. The question really is, can you be free of them? Q: Go and listen to some music. K: The moment that music stops you are back to those images. This is all so childish. Take drugs, that also creates various images. Q: Isn't there division between wanting to hold on to the images and wanting to let them go. K: What is the line, the division? The division is desire, isn't it? Listen, sir. I don't like that image, I am going to let it go. But I like this image, I am going to hold on to it. So it is desire, isn't it? Q: I feel there is a pleasure-motive even in... K: Of course. You don't stick to one thing, sir. Q: If I have no image, then the other has no image at all. K: How inaccurate that is. Because I am blind therefore you are also blind! This is so illogical; do think clearly. What should I do so that there is no image-forming at all? Let us think together. Q: I think most people - I am sorry - I think most people here are looking for consolation in your words, rather than anything else... K: I am aware that I have images, I know. There is no question of it, I know I have images. I have an image about myself and I have an image about you - that is very clear. If I am satisfied with you and we have the same images, then we are both satisfied. That is, if you think as I think - you like to be ambitious, I like to be ambitious - then we are both in the same boat, we don't quarrel, we accept it, and we live together, work together, are both ruthlessly ambitious. But if you are free of the image of ambition and I am not, the trouble begins. What then will you do, who are free of that image, with me? You can't just say, "Well it is not my business" -because we are living together, we are in the same world, in the same community, in the same group and so on. What will you do with me? Please just listen to this. Will you discard me, will you turn your back on me, will you run away from me, will you join a monastery, learn how to meditate? Do afl kinds of things in order to avoid me? Or will you say, "Yes, he is here in my house". What will you do with regard to me, who has an image? Q: First I would ask you politely to listen. K: But I won't listen. Haven't you lived with people who are adamant in their beliefs. You are like that. Q: It is best not to waste one's time. K: We are going to find out, sir. You see this is really a hypothetical question because you have got images and you live in those images, and the other person lives in images. That is our difficulty. Suppose I have no images, and I haven't, I have worked at this for fifty years, so I have no image about myself, or about you. What is our relationship? I say please listen to me, but you won't. I say please pay attention, which means care, to attend means infinite care. Will you listen to me that way? That means you really want to learn - not from me, but learn about yourself. That means you must infinitely care and watch yourself, not selfishly, but care to learn about yourself - not according to me, or to Freud, or Jung, or to the latest psychologist, but learn about yourself. That means, watch yourself; and you can only do that in your relationship with each other. You say, "You are sitting on that platform and you have gradually assumed, at least in my eyes, a position of authority, you have become my guru". And I say to you, "My friend just listen. I am not your guru. I won't be a guru to anybody." It is monstrous to be a guru. Are you listening when I say this? Or do you say, "I can't listen to you because my mind is wandering'. So when you listen, listen with care, with affection, with attention, then you begin to learn about yourself, actually as you are. Then, from there we can move, we can go forward; but if you don't do that, but keep on repeating, "Oh I have got my image, I don't know how to get rid of it" and so on, then we don't move any further. Now you have an image with regard to sex, that you must have a girl or a boy. We are so conditioned in this. I say to you please listen, are you aware that you are conditioned - don't choose parts of the conditioning: be totally aware of your whole conditioning. We are conditioned much more at the deeper levels than at the superficial levels - is that clear? One is conditioned very deeply, and superficially less so. listening with your heart, not with your little mind, with your heart, with the whole of your being, is it possible to be totally aware of all this, the whole of consciousness? To be totally aware implies no observer. The observer is the past and therefore when he observes he brings about fragmentation. When I observe from the past, what I observe brings about a fragmentary outlook. I only see parts, I don't see the whole. This is simple. So I have an insight that says, "Don't look from the past". That means, don't have an observer who is all the time judging, evaluating, saying, "This right, this is wrong", "I am a Christian, I am a Communist" - all that is the past, Now can you listen to that, which is a fact, which is actual, which is not theoretical? You are facing actually what is. Are you facing in yourself what actually is going on? And can you observe another without the past - without all the accumulated memories, insults, hurts - so that you can look at another with clear eyes? If you say, "I don't know how to do it", then we can go into that. As we said, any form of authority in this matter is the reaction of submission to somebody who says he knows. That is your image. The professor, the teacher knows mathematics, geography, I don't, so I learn from him, and gradually he becomes my authority. He knows, I don't know. But here, psychologically, I think I don't know how to approach myself, how to learn about it, therefore I look to another - the same process. But the other is equally ignorant as me, because he doesn't know himself. He is tradition-bound, he accepts obedience, he becomes the authority, he says he knows and you don't know: "You become my disciple and I will tell you". The same process. But it is not the same process psychologically. Psychologically the guru is "me". I wonder if you see that? He is as ignorant as myself. He has got a lot of Sanskrit words, a lot of ideas, a lot of superstitions; and I am so gullible I accept him. Here we say there is no authority, no guru, you have to learn about yourself. And to learn about yourself, watch yourself, how you behave with another, how you walk. Then you find that you have an image about yourself, a tremendous image. And you see these images create great harm, they break up the world - the Krishna-conscious group, the Transcendental group, or some other group. And your own group; you have your own ideas, you must have sex, you must have a girl, you must have a boy, and all the rest of it, change the girl, change the boy, every week. You live like that and you don't see the tremendous danger and wastage of life. Now we come to the point: how am I to be free of all image-making? That is the real question. Is it possible? I will not say it is, or it is not, I am going to find out. I am going to find out by carefully watching why images are made. I realize images are made when the mind is not giving its attention at the moment. At the moment something is said that gives pleasure, or something that brings about displeasure, to be aware at that moment, not afterwards. But we become aware afterwards and say, "My god, I must pay attention, terrible, I see it is important to be attentive and I don't know how to be attentive; I lose it and when the thing takes place it is so quick; and I say to myself I must be attentive". So I beat myself into being attentive - I wonder if you see this - and therefore I am never attentive. So I say to myself, "I am not attentive at the moment something is said which gives pleasure or pain", I see that I am inattentive. I have found that my whole mind, make-up, is inattentive, to the birds, to nature, to everything, I am inattentive - when I walk, when I eat, when I speak, I am inattentive. So I say to myself, I am not going to be concerned with attention, but inattention". Do you get this? Q: Yes. K: I am not going to be concerned with being attentive, but I am going to see what is inattention. I am watching inattention, and I see I am inattentive most of the time. So I am going to pay attention to one thing at a time, that is, when I walk, when I eat, I am going to walk, eat, with attention. I am not going to think about something else, but I am going to pay attention to every little thing. So what has been inattention becomes attention. I wonder if you see that? So I am now watching inattention. That is, I am watching that I am not attentive. I look at a bird and never look at it, my thoughts are all over the place - I am now going to look at that bird; it may take me a second but I am going to look at it. When I walk I am going to watch it. So that out of inattention, without any effort, there is total attention. When there is total attention, then when you say something pleasant or unpleasant there is no image-forming because I am totally there. My whole mind, heart, brain, all the responses are completely awake and attentive. Aren't you very attentive when you are pursuing pleasure? You don't have to talk about attention, you want that pleasure. Sexually, when you want it, you are tremendously attentive, aren't you? Attention implies a mind that is completely awake, which means it doesn't demand challenge. It is only when we have images that challenges come. I wonder if you see this. Because of those images challenges come and you respond to the challenge inadequately. Therefore there is a constant battle between challenge and response, which means the increase of images; and the more it increases the more challenges come, and so there is always the strengthening of images. I wonder if you see this? Haven't you noticed people when they are challenged about their Catholicism or whatever it is, how they become more strong in their opinions? So by being completely attentive there is no image formation, which means conditioning disappears. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART II CHAPTER 8 3RD PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 13TH SEPTEMBER 1975 'SUFFERING; THE MEANING OF DEATH' May we go on with what we were discussing the other day? We were saying that the crisis in the world is not outward but the crisis is in consciousness. And that consciousness is its content: all the things that man has accumulated through centuries, his fears, his dogmas, his superstitions, his beliefs, his conclusions, and all the suffering, pain and anxiety. We said unless there is a radical mutation in that consciousness, outward activities will bring about more mischief, more sorrow, more confusion. And to bring about that mutation in consciousness a totally different kind of energy is required; not the mechanical energy of thought, of time and measure. When we were investigating into that we said there are three active principles in human beings: fear, pleasure and suffering. We talked about fear at some length. And we also went into the question of pleasure, which is entirely different from joy, enjoyment, and the delight of seeing something beautiful and so on. And we also touched upon suffering. I think we ought this morning to go into that question of suffering. It is a nice morning and I am sorry to go into such a dark subject. As we said, when there is suffering there can bc no compassion and we asked whether it is at all possible for human minds, for human beings right throughout the world, to put an end to suffering. For without that ending to suffering we live in darkness, we accept all kinds of beliefs, dogmas, escapes, which bring about much more confusion, more violence and so on. So we are going this morning to investigate together into this question of suffering, whether the human mind can ever be free from it totally; and also we are going to talk about the whole question of death. Why do we accept suffering, why do we put up with it psychologically? Physical suffering can be controlled or put up with; and it is important that such physical suffering does not distort clarity of thought. We went into that. Because for most of us, when there is physical pain, a continued suffering, it distorts our thinking, it prevents objective thinking, which becomes personal, broken up, distorted. If one is not actively aware of this whole process of physical suffering, whether remembered in the past, or the fear of having it again in the future, then neurotic habits, neurotic activities take place. We spoke of that briefly the other day. We are asking if it is at all possible for human beings to end suffering at all levels of their existence, psychological suffering. And when we go into it in ourselves deeply, we see one of the major factors of this suffering is attachment - attachment to ideas, to conclusions, to ideologies, which act as security; and when that security is threatened there is a certain kind of suffering. Please, as we said the other day, we are sharing this together, we are looking into this question of suffering together. You are not merely listening to a talk, if I may point out, and gathering a few ideas and agreeing or disagreeing, but rather we are in communication, sharing the problem, examining the question, the issue, actively; and so it becomes our responsibility, yours as well as the speaker's, to go into this question. There is also attachment to persons; in our relationships there is a great deal of suffering. That is, the one may be free from this conditioning of fear and so on, and the other may not be and hence there is a tension. The word attachment means "holding on", not only physically but psychologically, depending on something. In a relationship, one may be free and the other may not be free and hence the conflict; one may be a Catholic and the other may not be a Catholic, or a Communist and so on. Hence the conflict that breeds continuous strain and suffering. Then there is the suffering of the unknown, of death; the suffering of losing something that you were attached to in the past, as memory. I do not know if you have not noticed all these things in yourself? And is it possible to live in complete relationship with another without this tension, which is brought about through self-interest, through self-centred activity, desire pulling in different directions, and live in a relationship in which there may be contradictions, for one may be free, the other may not be? To live in that situation demands not only what is called tolerance - that absurd intellectual thing that man has created - but it demands a much greater thing, which is affection, love, and therefore compassion. We are going to go into that. We are asking whether man can end suffering. There are various explanations: how to go beyond it, how to rationalize it, how to suppress it, how to escape from it. Now we are asking something entirely different: not to suppress it, not to evade it, nor rationalize it, but when there is that suffering to remain totally with it, without any movement of thought, which is the movement of time and measure. One suffers: one loses one's son, or wife, or she runs away with somebody else; and the things that you are attached to, the house, the name, the form, all the accumulated conclusions, they seem to fade away, and you suffer. Can one look at that suffering without the observer? We went into that question of what the observer is. We said the observer is the past, the accumulated memory, experience and knowledge. And with that knowledge, experience, memory, one observes the suffering, so one dissociates oneself from suffering: one is different from suffering and therefore one can do something about it. Whereas the observer is the observed. This requires a little care and attention, the statement that, "the observer is the observed". We don't accept it. We say the observer is entirely different; and the observed is something out there separate from the observer. Now if one looks very closely at that question, at that statement that the observer is the observed, it seems so obvious. When you say you are angry, you are not different from anger, you are that thing which you call anger. When you are jealous, you are that jealousy. The word separates; that is, through the word we recognise the feeling and the recognition is in the past; so we look at that feeling through the word, through the screen of the past, and so separate it. Therefore there is a division between the observer and the observed. So we are saying that when there is this suffering, either momentary, or a continuous endless series of causes that bring about suffering, to look at it without the observer. You are that suffering; not, you are separate from suffering. Totally remain with that suffering. Then you will notice, if you go that far, if you are willing to observe so closely, that something totally different takes place: a mutation. That is, out of that suffering comes great passion. If you have done it, tested it out, you will find it. It is not the passion of a belief, passion for some cause, passion for some idiotic conclusion. It is totally different from the passion of desire. It is something which is of a totally different kind of energy; not the movement of thought, which is mechanical. We have a great deal of suffering in what is called love. Love, as we know it now, is pleasure, sexual, the love of a country, the love of an idea, and so on - all derived from pleasure. And when that pleasure is denied there is either hatred, antagonism, or violence. Can there be love, not just something personal between you and me or somebody else, but the enormous feeling of compassion - passion for everything, for everybody. Passion for nature, compassion for the earth on which we live, so that we don`t destroy the earth, the animals, the whole thing... Without love, which is compassion, suffering must continue. And we human beings have put up with it, we accept it as normal. Every religion has tried to find a way out of this, but organized religions have brought tremendous suffering. Religious oganizations throughout the world have done a great deal of harm, there have been religious wars endless persecution, tortures, burning people, especially in the West - it wasn't the fashion in those days in the East. And we are speaking of - not the acceptance of suffering, or the putting up with suffering - but remaining motionless with that suffering; then there comes out of it great compassion. And from that compassion arises the whole question of creation. What is creation, what is the creative mind? Is it a mind that suffers and through that suffering has learnt a certain technique and expresses that technique on paper, in marble, with paint - that is, is creativeness the outcome of tension? Is it the outcome of a disordered life? Does creativeness come through the fragmentary activity of daily life? I don't know if you are following all this? Or must we give a totally different kind of meaning to creativeness, which may not need expression at all? So one has to go into this question within oneself very deeply, because one's consciousness is the consciousness of the world. I do not know if you realize that? Fundamentally your consciousness is the consciousness of the speaker, of the rest of the world, basically. Because in that consciousness there is suffering, there is pain, there is anxiety, there is fear of tomorrow, fear of insecurity, which every man goes through wherever he lives. So your consciousness is the consciousness of the world, and if there is a mutation in that consciousness it affects the total consciousness of human beings. It is a fact. So it becomes tremendously important that human beings bring about a radical transformation, or mutation in themselves, in their consciousness. Now we can go into this thing called death, which is one of the major factors of suffering. As with everything else in life we want a quick, definite answer, an answer which will be comforting, which will be totally satisfactory, intellectually, emotionally, physically, in every way. We want immortality, whatever that may mean, and we want to survive, both physically and psychologically. We avoid death at any price, put it as far away as possible. So we have never been able to examine it closely. We have never been able to face it, understand it, not only verbally, intellectually, but completely. We wait until the last moment, which may be an accident, disease, old age, when you can't think, when you can't look, you are just "gaga". Then you become a Catholic, a Protestant, believe in this or that. So we are trying this morning to understand, not verbally, but actually what it means to die - which doesn't mean we are asking that we should commit suicide. But we are asking, what is the total significance of this thing called death, which is the ending of what we know as life. In enquiring into this we must find out whether time has a stop. The stopping of time may be death. It may be the ending and therefore that which ends has a new beginning, not that which has a continuity. So first can there be an ending to time, can time stop? not chronological time by the watch, as yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the twenty-four hours, but the whole movement of time as thought and measure. That movement, not chronological time, but that movement as thought, which is the whole process of comparing, of measurement, can all that process stop? Can thought, which is the response of memory, and can experience as knowledge - knowledge is always in the past, knowledge is the past can that whole momentum come to an end? Not in the technological field, we don't even have to discuss that, that is obvious. Can this movement come to an end? Time as hope, time as something that has happened to which the mind clings, attachment to the past, or a projection from the past to the future as a conclusion, and time as a movement of achievement from alpha to omega - this whole movement in which we are caught. If one said there is no tomorrow, psychologically, you would be shocked, because tomorrow is tremendously important: tomorrow you are going to be happy, tomorrow you will achieve something, tomorrow will be the fulfilment of yesterday`s hopes, or today's hopes, and so on. Tomorrow becomes extraordinarily significant -the tomorrow which is projected from the past as thought. So we are asking, can all that momentum come to an end? Time has created, through centuries, the centre which is the "me". Time is not only the past as attachment, hope, fulfilment, the evolving process of thought until it becomes more and more refined. But also that centre around which all our activities take place, the "me", the mine, we and they, both politically, religiously, economically and so on. So the "me" is the conclusion of time, adding to itself and taking away from itself, but there is always this centre which is the very essence of time. We are asking, can that movement come to an end. This is the whole problem of meditation, not sitting down and repeating some mantra, some words, and doing some tricks - that is all silly nonsense. I am not being intolerant but it is just absurd. And it becomes extraordinarily interesting to find this out, enquire into this. Then what is death? Can that be answered in terms of words, or must one look at it not only verbally but non-verbally? There is death, the organism dies, by misuse, by abuse, by overindulgence, drink, drugs, accident, all the things that the flesh is heir to - it dies, comes to an end, the heart stops, the brain with all its marvellous machinery comes to an end. We accept it - we are not afraid of the physical organism coming to an end but we are afraid of something totally different. And being afraid of that basically, we want to resolve that fear through various beliefs, conclusions, hopes. The whole of the Asiatic world believes in reincarnation, they have proof for it - they say so at least. That is - watch this, it is extraordinary - the thing that has been put together by time as the "me", the ego, that incarnates till that entity becomes perfect and is absorbed into the highest principle, which is Brahman, or whatever you like to call it. Time has created the centre, the "me", the ego, the personality, the character, the tendencies, and so on, and through time you are going to dissolve that very entity, through reincarnation. You see the absurdity? Thought has created something as the "me", the centre, and through the evolutionary process, which is time, you will ultimately dissolve that and be absorbed into the highest principle. And yet they believe in this tremendously. The other day I was talking to somebody who is a great believer in this. He said, "If you don't believe it you are not a religious man", and he walked out. And Christianity has its own form of continuity of the "me", the resurrection - Gabriel blowing the trumpet and so on (laughter). When you believe in reincarnation, what is important is that you are going to live another life and you suffer in this life because of your past actions. So what is important is, if one is actually basically committed wholly to that belief, it means that you must behave rightly, accurately, with tremendous care now. And we don't do that. That demands superhuman energy. There are several problems involved in this. What is immortality and what is eternity - which is a timeless state - and what happens to human beings who are still caught in this movement of time? We human beings live extraordinarily complex, irresponsible, ugly, stupid lives, we are at each other's throats, we are battling about beliefs, about authority, politically and religiously, and our daily lives are a series of endless conflicts. And we want that to continue. And because our lives are so empty, so full of meaningless words, we say there is a state where there is no death, immortality - which is a state where there is no movement of time. That is, time through centuries has created the idea of the self, of the "me" evolving. It has been put together through time, which is a part of evolution. And inevitably there is death and with the ending of the brain cells thought comes to an end. Therefore one hopes that there is something beyond the "me", the super-consciousness, a spark of God, a spark of truth, that can never be destroyed and that continues. And that continuity is what we call immortality. That is what most of us want. If you don't get it through some kind of fame, you want to have it sitting near God, who is timeless. The whole thing is so absurd. Is there something which is not of time, which has no beginning and no end, and is therefore timeless, eternal? Our life being what it is, we have this problem of death; and if I, a human being, have not totally understood the whole quality of myself, what happens to me when I die? You understand the question? Is that the end of me? I have not understood, if I have understood myself totally, then that is a different problem, which we will come to. If I have not understood myself totally - I am not using the word "understand" intellectually - but actually to be aware of myself without any choice, all the content of my consciousness - if I have not deeply delved into my own structure and the nature of consciousness and I die, what happens? Now who is going to answer this question? (laughter). No, I am putting it purposefully. Who is going to answer this question? Because we think we cannot answer it we look to someone else to tell us, the priest, the books, the people who have said, "I know", the endless mushrooming gurus. If one rejects all authority - and one must, totally, all authority - then what have you left? Then you have the energy to find out - because you have rejected that which dissipates energy, gurus, hopes and fears, somebody to tell you what happens - if you reject all that, which means all authority, then you have tremendous energy. With that energy you can begin to enquire what actually takes place when you have not totally resolved the structure and the nature of the self, the self being time, and therefore movement, and therefore division: the "me" and the "not me" and hence conflict. Now what happens to me when I have not ended that conflict? You and I and the rest of the world, if the speaker has not ended it, what happens to us? We are all going to die - I hope not soon but sometime or other. What is going to happen? When we live, as we are living, are we so fundamentally different from somebody else? You may be cleverer, have greater knowledge or technique, you may be more learned, have certain gifts, talents, inventiveness; but you and another are exactly alike basically. Your colour may be different, you may be taller, shorter, but in essence you are the same. So while you are living you are like the rest of the world, in the same stream, in the same movement. And when you die you go on in the same movement. I wonder if you understand what I am saying? It is only the man who is totally aware of his conditioning, his consciousness, the content of it, and who moves and dissipates it, who is not in that stream. Am I making this clear? That is, I am greedy, envious, ambitious, ruthless, violent - so are you. And that is our daily life, petty, accepting authority, quarrelling, bitter, not loved and aching to be loved, the agonies of loneliness, irresponsible relationship - that is our daily life. And we are like the rest of the world, it is a vast endless river. And when we die we'll be like the rest, moving in the same stream as before when we were living. But the man who understands himself radically, has resolved all the problems in himself psychologically, he is not of that stream. He has stepped out of it. The man who moves away from the stream, his consciousness is entirely different. He is not thinking in terms of time, continuity, or immortality. But the other man or woman is still in that. So the problem arises: what is the relationship of the man who is out to the man who is in? What is the relationship between truth and reality? Reality being, as we said, all the things that thought has put together. The root meaning of that word reality is, things or thing. And living in the world of things, which is reality, we want to establish a relationship with a world which has no thing - which is impossible. What we are saying is that consciousness, with all its content, is the movement of time. In that movement all human beings are caught. And even when they die that movement goes on. It is so; this is a fact. And the human being who sees the totality of this -that is the fear, the pleasure and the enormous suffering which man has brought upon himself and created for others, the whole of that, and the nature and the structure of the self, the "me", the total comprehension of that, actually - then he is out of that stream. And that is the crisis in consciousness. We are trying to solve all our human problems, economic, social, political, within the area of that consciousness in time. I wonder if you see this? And therefore we can never solve it. We seem to accept the politician as though he was going to save the world, or the priest, or the analyst, or somebody else. And, as we said, the mutation in consciousness is the ending of time, which is the ending of the "me" which has been produced through time. Can this take place? Or is it just a theory like any other? Can a human being, can you actually do it? When you do it, it affects the totality of consciousness. Which means in the understanding of oneself, which is the understanding of the world -because I am the world - there comes not only compassion but a totally different kind of energy. This energy, with its compassion, has a totally different kind of action. That action is whole, not fragmentary. We began by talking about suffering, that the ending of suffering is the beginning of compassion; and this question of love, which man has reduced to mere pleasure; and this great complex problem of death. They are all interrelated, they are not separate. It isn't that I am going to solve the problem of death, forgetting the rest. The whole thing is interrelated, inter-communicated. It is all one. And to see the totality of all that, wholly, is only possible when there is no observer and therefore freedom from all that. Questioner: I'd like to ask a question. You said towards the beginning that it is important for each individual to transform his consciousness. Isn't the fact that you say that it is important an ideal, which is the very thing to be avoided ? Krishnamurti: When you see a house on fire, isn't it important that you put it out? In that there is no ideal. The house is burning, you are there, and you have to do something about it. But if you are asleep and discussing the colour of the hair of the man who has set the house on fire... Q: The house on fire is in the world of reality, isn't it? It is a fact. We are talking about the psychological world. K: Isn't that also a factual world? Isn't it a fact that you suffer? Isn't it a fact that one is ambitious, greedy, violent - you may not be, but the rest - that is a fact. We say the house is a fact, but my anger, my violence, my stupid activities are something different; they are as real as the house. And if I don't understand myself, dissolve all the misery in myself, the house is going to become the destructive element. Q: Sir, as I understand it, your message and the message of Jesus Christ seem to reach towards the same thing, although stated differently. I had always understood your message and Jesus Christ's message to be quite different in content. About two years ago I was a Christian, so it is very difficult to get rid of statements that Jesus made, such as, "No man cometh to the Father but by me". Although I find more sense in your message at the moment, how do you equate this? K: It is very simple. I have no message. I am just pointing out. That is not a message. Q: But why are you doing it? K: Why am I doing it? Why do we want a message? Why do we want somebody to give us something? When everything is in you. Q: It is wonderful. K: No, it is not wonderful (laughter). Please do look at it. You are the result of all the influences, of the culture, the many words, propaganda, you are that. And if you know how to look, how to read, how to listen, how to see, the art of seeing, everything is there, right in front of you. But we don't have the energy, the inclination, or the interest. We want somebody to tell us what there is on the page. And we make that person who tells us into an extraordinary human being. We worship him, or destroy him, which is the same thing. So it is there. You don't need a message. Do look at it please. Is the book important, or what you find in the book? What you find in the book, and after you have read it you throw it away. Now in these talks, you listen, find out, go into it, and throw away the speaker. The speaker is not at all important. It is like a telephone. The other question is, "Why do you speak?" Does that need answering? Would you say to the flower on the wayside, "Why do you flower?" It is there for you to look, to listen, to see the beauty of it and come back again to look at the beauty of it. That is all. Q: (partly inaudible) We have the same message, the same words, we have it in ourselves, the guru. Q: (repeating) We have a guru in ourselves. K: Have you? Guru means in Sanskrit, the root meaning of that word means "heavy". Q: He said heaven. K: Heaven, it is the same thing, sir. Have you a heaven in yourself? My lord, I wish you had! (laughter). In yourself you are so confused, so miserable, so anxious - what a set of words to use -heaven! You can substitute God into heaven, heaven as God and you think you are quite different. People have believed that you had God inside you, light inside you, or something else inside you. But when you see actually that you have nothing, just words, then if there is absolutely nothing there is complete security. And out of that, everything happens, flowers. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART II CHAPTER 9 4TH PUBLIC TALK BROCKWOOD PARK 14TH SEPTEMBER 1975 'THE SACRED, RELIGION, MEDITATION' I would like this morning to talk about the question of what is sacred, what is the meaning of religion and of meditation. First we must examine what is reality and what is truth. Man has been concerned throughout the ages to discover, or live in truth; And he has projected various symbols, conclusions, images made by the mind or by the hand and imagined what is truth. Or he has tried to find out through the activity and the movement of thought. And I think we should be wise if we would differentiate between reality and truth and when we are clear what reality is then perhaps we shall be able to have an insight into what is truth. The many religions throughout the world have said that there is an enduring, everlasting truth, but the mere assertion of truth has very little significance. One has to discover it for oneself, not theoretically, intellectually, or sentimentally, but actually find out if one can live in a world that is completely truthful. We mean by religion the gathering together of all energy to investigate into something: to investigate if there is anything sacred. That is the meaning we are giving it, not the religion of belief, dogma, tradition or ritual with their hierarchical outlook. But we are using the word "religion" in the sense: to gather together all energy, which will then be capable of investigating if there is a truth which is not controlled, shaped, or polluted by thought. The root meaning of the word reality is thing or things. And to go into the question of what is reality, one must understand what thought is. Because our society, our religions, our so-called revelations are essentially the product of thought. It is not my opinion or my judgement, but it is a fact. All religions when you look at them, observe without any prejudice, are the product of thought. That is, you may perceive something, have an insight into truth, and you communicate it verbally to me and I draw from your statement an abstraction and make that into an idea; then I live according to that idea. That is what we have been doing for generations: drawing an abstraction from a statement and living according to that abstraction as a conclusion. And that is generally called religion. So we must find out how limited thought is and what are its capacities, how far it can go, and be totally aware that thought doesn't spill over into a realm in which thought has no place. I don't know if you can see this? Please, we are not only verbally communicating, which means thinking together, not agreeing or disagreeing, but thinking together, and therefore sharing together; not the speaker gives and you take, but tðer we are sharing, therefore there is no authority. And also there is a nonverbal communication, which is much more difficult, because unless we see very clearly the full meaning of words, how the mind is caught in words, how words shape our thinking, and can go beyond that, then there is no non-verbal communication, which becomes much more significant. We are trying to do both: to communicate verbally and non-verbally. That means we must both be interested at the same time, at the same level, with the same intensity, otherwise we shan't communicate. It is like love; love is that intense feeling at the same time, at the same level. Otherwise you and I don't love each other. So we are going to observe together what is reality, what are the limitations of thought, and whether thought can ever perceive truth. Or is it beyond the realm of thought? I think we all agree, at least most of us do, even the scientists, that thought is a material process, is a chemical process. Thought is the response of accumulated knowledge as experience and memory. So thought is essentially a thing. There is no sacred thought, no noble thought, it is a thing. And its function is in the world of things, which is technology, learning, learning the art of learning, the art of seeing and listening. And reality is in that area. Unless we understand this rather complex problem we shall not be able to go beyond it. We may pretend, or imagine, but imagination and pretension have no place in a human being who is really serious and is desirous to find out what is truth. As long as there is the movement of thought, which is time and measure, in that area truth has no place. Reality is that which we think and the action of thought as an idea, as a principle, as an ideal, projected from the previous knowledge into the future modified and so on. All that is in the world of reality. We live in that world of reality - if you have observed yourself you will see how memory plays an immense part. Memory is mechanical, thought is mechanical, it is a form of computer, a machine, as the brain is. And thought has its place. I cannot speak if I have no language; if I spoke I-n Greek you wouldn't understand. And learning a language, learning to drive a car, to work in a factory and so on, there thought is necessary. psychologically, thought has created the reality of the "me". "Me", "my", my house, my property, my wife, my husband, my children, my country, my God - all that is the product of thought. And in that field we have established a relationship with each other which is constantly in conflict. That is the limitation of thought. Unless we put order into that world of reality we cannot go further. We live a disorderly life in our daily activities; that is a fact. And is it possible to bring about order in the world of reality, in the world of thought, socially, morally, ethically and so on? And who is to bring about order in the world of reality? I live a disorderly life - if I do - and being disorderly, can I bring about order in all the activities of daily life? Our daily life is based on thought, our relationship is based on thought, because I have an image of you and you have an image of me, and the relationship is between those two images. The images are the product of thought, which is the response of memory, experience and so on. Now can there be order in the world of reality? This is really a very important question. Unless order is established in the world of reality there is no foundation for further enquiry. In the world of reality, is it possible to behave orderly, not according to a pattern set by thought, which is still disorder? Is it possible to bring about order in the world of reality? That is, no wars, no conflict, no division. Order implies great virtue, virtue is the essence of order -not following a blueprint, which becomes mechanical. So who is to bring order in this world of reality? Man has said, "God will bring it. Believe in God and you will have order. Love God and you will have order." But this order becomes mechanical because our desire is to be secure, to survive, to find the easiest way of living - let us put it that way. So we are asking, who is to bring order in this world of reality, where there is such confusion, misery, pain, violence and so on. Can thought bring about order in that reality - a world of reality which thought has created? Do you follow my question? The Communists say control the environment, then there will be order in man. According to Marx the State will wither away - you know all that. They have tried to bring order but man is in disorder, even in Russia! So one has to find out, if thought is not to bring about order, then what will? I don`t know if this is a problem to you, if it really interests you? So one has to ask, if thought, which has made such a mess of life, cannot bring clarity into this world of reality, then is there an observation in the field of reality, or of the field of reality, without the movement of thought. Are we meeting each other about this? A human being has exercised thought, he says there is disorder, I will control it, I will shape it, I will make order according to certain ideas - it is all the product of thought. And thought has created disorder. So thought has no place in order, and how is this order to come about? Now we will go into it a little bit. Can one observe this disorder in which one lives, which is conflict, contradiction, opposing desires, pain, suffering, fear, pleasure and all that, this whole structure of disorder, without thought? You understand my question? Can you observe this enormous disorder in which we live, externally as well as inwardly, without any movement of thought? Because if there is any movement of thought, then it is going to create further disorder, isn't it? So can you observe this disorder in yourself without any move, ment of thought as time and measure - that is, without any movement of memory? We are going to see whether thought as time can come to an end. Whether thought as measure, which is comparison, as time, from here to there - all that is involved in the movement of time -whether that time can have a stop? This is the very essence of meditation. You understand? So we are going to enquire together if time has a stop, that is, if thought as movement can come to an end. Then only is there order and therefore virtue. Not cultivated virtue, which requires time and is therefore not virtue, but the very stopping, the very ending of thought is virtue. This means we have to enquire into the whole question of what is freedom. Can man live in freedom? Because that is what it comes to. If time comes to an end it means that man is deeply free. So one has to go into this question of what is freedom. Is freedom relative, or absolute? If freedom is the outcome of thought then it is relative. When freedom is not bound by thought then it is absolute. We are going to go into that. Outwardly, politically, there is less and less freedom. We think politicians can solve all our problems and the politicians, especially the tyrannical politicians, assume the authority of God, they know and you don't know. That is what is going on in India, freedom of speech, civil rights, have been denied, like in all tyrannies. Democratically we have freedom of choice, we choose between the Liberal, Conservatives, Labour or something else. And we think that having the capacity to choose gives us freedom. Choice is the very denial of freedom. You choose when you are not clear, when there is no direct perception, and so you choose out of confusion, and so there is no freedom in choice - psychologically, that is. I can choose between this cloth and that cloth, and so on; but psychologically we think we are free when we have the capacity to choose. And we are saying that choice is born out of confusion, out of the structure of thought, and therefore it is not free. We accept the authority of the gurus, the priests, because we think they know and we don't know. Now if you examine the whole idea of the guru, which is becoming rather a nuisance in this country and in America, the world over - I am sorry I am rather allergic to gurus (laughter), I know many of them, they come to see me (laughter). They say, "What you are saying is the highest truth" - they know how to flatter! But we are dealing, they say, with people who are ignorant and we are the intermediaries: we want to help them. So they assume the authority and therefore deny freedom. I do not know if you have noticed that not one single guru has raised his voice against tyranny. A man who would understand what freedom is must totally deny authority, which is extraordinarily difficult, it demands great attention. We may reject the authority of a guru, of a priest, of an idea, but we establish an authority in ourselves - that is "I think it is right, I know what I am saying, it is my experience. All that gives one the authority to assert, which is the same thing as the guru and the priest. Can the mind be free of authority, of tradition, which means accepting another as your guide, as somebody to tell you what to do, except in the technological field? And man must be free if he is not to become a serf, a slave, and deny the beauty and depth of the human spirit. Now can the mind put aside all authority in the psychological sense? - if you put aside the authority of the policeman you will be in trouble. That requires a great deal of inward awareness. One obeys and accepts authority because in oneself there is uncertainty, confusion, loneliness, and the desire to find something permanent, something lasting. And is there anything lasting, anything that is permanent, created by thought? Or does thought give to itself permanency? The mind desires to have something it can cling to, some certainty, some psychological security. This is what happens in all our relationships with each other. I depend on you psychologically - because in myself I am uncertain, confused, lonely - and I am attached to you, I possess you, I dominate you. So living in this world is freedom possible, without authority, without the image, without the sense of dependency? And is it freedom from something or freedom per se? Now can we have freedom in the world of reality? You understand my question? - can there be freedom in my relationship with you? Can there be freedom in relationship between man and woman, or is that impossible? - which doesn't mean freedom to do what one likes, or permissiveness, or promiscuity. But can there be a relationship between human beings of complete freedom? I do not know if you have ever asked this question of yourself? You might say it is possible or not possible. The possibility or the impossibility of it is not an answer, but to find out whether freedom can exist, absolute freedom in our relationships. That freedom can only exist in relationship when there is order: order not according to you, or another, but order in the sense of the observation of disorder. And that observation is not the movement of thought, because the observer is the observed; only then there is freedom in our relationship. Then we can go to something else. Having observed the whole nature of disorder, order comes into being in our life. That is a fact, if you have gone into it. From there we can move and find out whether thought can end, can realize its own movement, see its own limitation and therefore stop. We are asking, what place has time in freedom. Is freedom a state of mind in which there is no time? - time being movement of thought as time and measure. Thought is movement, movement in time. That is, can the brain, which is part of the mind - which has evolved through centuries with all the accumulated memories, knowledge, experience - is there a part of the brain which is not touched by time? Do you understand my question? Our brain is conditioned by various influences, by the pursuit of desires; and is there a part of the brain that is not conditioned at all? Or is the whole brain conditioned and can human beings therefore never escape from conditioning? They can modify the conditioning, polish, refine it, but there will always be conditioning if the totality of the brain is limited, and therefore no freedom. So we are going to find out if there is any part of the brain that is not conditioned. All this is meditation, to find out. Can one be aware of the conditioning in which one lives? Can you be aware of your conditioning as a Christian, a Capitalist, a Socialist, a Liberal, that you believe in this and you don't believe in that? - all that is part of the conditioning. Can a human being be aware of that conditioning? Can you be aware of your consciousness? - not as an observer, but that you are that consciousness. And if you are aware, who is it that is aware? Is it thought that is aware that it is conditioned? Then it is still in the field of reality, which is conditioned. Or is there an observation, an awareness in which there is pure observation? Is there an act, or an art of pure listening? Do listen to this a little bit. The word "art" means to put everything in its right place, where it belongs. Now can you observe without any interpretation, without any judgement, without any prejudice - just observe, see purely? And can you listen, as you are doing now, without any movement of thought. It is only possible if you put thought in the right place. And the art of learning means not accumulating - then it becomes knowledge and thought - but the movement of learning, without the accumulation. So there is the art of seeing, the art of listening, the art of learning -which means to put everything where it belongs. And in that there is great order. Now we are going to find out if time has a stop. This is meditation. As we said at the beginning, it is all in the field of meditation. Meditation isn't something separate from life, from daily life. Meditation is not the repetition of words, the repetition of a mantra, which is now the fashion and called transcendental meditation, or the meditation which can be practised. Meditation must be something totally unconscious. I wonder if you see this? If you practise meditation, that is follow a system, a method, then it is the movement of thought, put together in order to achieve a result, and that result is projected as a reaction from the past and therefore still within the area of thought. So can there be a mutation in the brain? It comes to that. We say it is possible. That is, a mutation is only passible when there is a great shock of attention. Attention implies no control. Have you ever asked whether you can live in this world without a single control? - of your desires, of your appetites, of the fulfilment of your desires and so on, without a single breath of control? Control implies a controller: and the controller thinks he is different from that which he controls. But when you observe closely the controller is the controlled. So what place has control? In the sense of restraint, suppression, to control in order to achieve, to control to change yourself to become something else - all that is the demand of thought. Thought by its very nature being fragmentary, divides the controller and the controlled. And we are educated from childhood to control, to suppress, to inhibit - which does not mean to do what you like; that is impossible, that is too absurd, too immature. But to understand this whole question of control demands that you examine the desire which brings about this fragmentation; the desire to be and not to be. To find out whether you can live without comparison, therefore without an ideal, without a future - all that is implied in comparison. And where there is comparison there must be control. Can you live without comparison and therefore without control - do you understand? Have you ever tried to live without control, without comparison? Because comparison and control are highly respectable. The word "respect" means to look about. And when we look about we see that all human beings, wherever they live, have this extraordinary desire to compare themselves with somebody, or with an idea, or with some human being who is supposed to be noble, and in that process they control, suppress. Now if you see this whole movement, then one will live without a single breath of control. That requires tremendous inward discipline. Discipline means actually to learn, not to be disciplined to a pattern like a soldier. The word "discipline" means to learn. Learn whether it is possible to live without a single choice, comparison, or control. To learn about it; not to accept it, not to deny it, but to find out how to live. Then out of that comes a brain which is not conditioned. Meditation then is freedom from authority, putting everything in its right place in the field of reality, and consciousness realizing its own limitation and therefore bringing about order in that limitation. When there is order there is virtue, virtue in behaviour. From there we can go into the question, whether time has a stop. Which means, can the mind, the brain itself, be absolutely still? - not controlled. If you control thought in order to be still, then it is still the movement of thought. Can the brain and the mind be absolutely still, which is the ending of time? Man has always desired throughout the ages to bring silence to the mind, which he called meditation, contemplation and so on. Can the mind be still? - not chattering, not imagining, not conscious if that stillness, because if you are conscious of that stillness there is a centre which is conscious, and that centre is part of time, put together by thought; therefore you are still within the area of reality and there is no ending in the world of reality of time. Man has made, whether by the hand or by the mind, what he thinks is sacred, all the images in churches, in temples. All those images are still the product of thought. And in that there is nothing sacred. But out of this complete silence is there anything sacred? We began by saying that religion is not belief, rituals, authority, but religion is the gathering of all energy to investigate if there is something sacred which is not the product of thought. We have that energy when there is complete order in the world of reality in which we live - order in relationship, freedom from authority, freedom from comparison, control, measurement. Then the mind and the brain become completely still naturally, not through compulsion. If one sees that anything which thought has created is not sacred, nothing - all the churches, all the temples, all the mosques in the world have no truth - then is there anything sacred? In India, when only Brahmins could enter Temples and Ghandi was saying that all people can enter temples - I followed him around one year - and I was asked, "What do you say to that"? I replied, God is not in temples, it doesn't matter who enters. That was of course not acceptable. So in the same way we are saying that anything created by thought is not sacred, and is there anything sacred? Unless human beings find that sacredness, their life really has no meaning, it is an empty shell. They may be very orderly, they may be relatively free, but unless there is this thing that is totally sacred, untouched by thought, life has no deep meaning. Is there something sacred, or is everything matter, everything thought, everything transient, everything impermanent? Is there something that thought can never touch and therefore is incorruptible, timeless, eternal and sacred? To come upon this the mind must be completely, totally still, which means time comes to an end; and in that there must be complete freedom from all prejudice, opinion, judgement - you follow? Then only one comes upon this extraordinary thing that is timeless and the very essence of compassion. So meditation has significance. One must have this meditative quality of the mind, not occasionally, but all day long. And this something that is sacred affects our lives not only during the waking hours but during sleep. And in this process of meditation there are all kinds of powers that come into being: one becomes clairvoyant, the body becomes extraordinarily sensitive. Now clairvoyance, healing, thought transference and so on, become totally unimportant; all the occult powers become so utterly irrelevant, and when you pursue those you are pursuing something that will ultimately lead to illusion. That is one factor. Then there is the factor of sleep. What is the importance of sleep? Is it to spend the sleeping hours dreaming? Or is it possible not to dream at all? What are dreams, why do we dream, and is it possible for a mind not to dream, so that during sleep, the mind being utterly restful, a totally different kind of energy is built in? If during waking hours we are completely attentive to our thoughts, to our actions, to our behaviour, totally aware, then are dreams necessary? Or are dreams a continuation of our daily life, in the form of pictures, images, incidents - a continuity of our daily conscious or unconscious movements? So when the mind becomes totally aware during the day, then you will see that dreams become unimportant, and being unimportant they have no significance and therefore there is no dreaming. There is only complete sleep; that means the mind has complete rest: it can renew itself. Test it out. If you accept what the speaker is saying, then it is futile; but not if you enquire and find out if during the day you are very very awake, watchful, aware without choice - we went into what it is to be aware - then out of that awareness when you do sleep, the mind becomes extraordinarily fresh and young. Youth is the essence of decision, action. And if that action is merely centred round itself, round the centre of myself, then that action breeds mischief, confusion and so on. But when you realize the whole movement of life as one, undivided, and are aware of that, then the mind rejuvenates itself and has immense energy. All that is part of meditation. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART III CHAPTER 10 QUESTION FROM THE 7TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 25TH JULY, 1976 'RIGHT LIVELIHOOD' Questioner: Is a motive necessary in business? What is the right motive in earning a livelihood? Krishnamurti: What do you think is the right livelihood? - not what is the most convenient, not what is the most profitable, enjoyable, or gainful; but what is the right livelihood? Now, how will you find out what is right? The word "right" means correct, accurate. It cannot be accurate if you do something for profit or pleasure. This is a complex thing. Everything that thought has put together is reality. This tent has been put together by thought, it is a reality. The tree has not been put together by thought, but it is a reality. Illusions are reality - the illusions that one has, imagination, all that is reality. And the action from those illusions is neurotic, which is also reality. So when you ask this question, "What is the right livelihood", you must understand what reality is. Reality is not truth. Now what is correct action in this reality? And how will you discover what is right in this reality? - discover for yourself, not be told. So we have to find out what is the accurate, correct, right action, or right livelihood in the world of reality, and reality includes illusion. Don't escape, don't move away, belief is an illusion, and the activities of belief are neurotic, nationalism and all the rest of it is another form of reality, but an illusion. So taking all that as reality, what is the right action there? Who is going to tell you? Nobody, obviously. But when you see reality without illusion, the very perception of that reality is your intelligence, isn't it? in which there is no mixture of reality and illusion. So when there is observation of reality, the reality of the tree, the reality of the tent, reality which thought has put together, including visions, illusions, when you see all that reality, the very perception of that is your intelligence - isn't it? So your intelligence says what you are going to do. I wonder if you understand this? Intelligence is to perceive what is and what is not - to perceive "what is" and see the reality of "what is", which means you don't have any psychological involvement, any psychological demands, which are all forms of illusion. To see all that is intelligence; and that intelligence will operate wherever you are. Therefore that will tell you what to do. Then what is truth? What is the link between reality and truth? The link is this intelligence. Intelligence that sees the totality of reality and therefore doesn't carry it over to truth. And the truth then operates on reality through intelligence. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART III CHAPTER 11 QUESTION FROM THE 3RD PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 15TH JULY, 1975 'WILL' Questioner: I wish to know if effort of will has a place in life. Krishnamurti: Has the will a place in life? What do we mean by life? - going to the office every day, having a profession, a career, the everlasting climbing the ladder, both religiously and mundanely, the fears, the agonies, the things that we have treasured, remembered, all that is life, isn't it? All that is life, both the conscious as well as the hidden. The conscious of which we know, more or less; and all the deep down hidden things in the cave of one's mind, in the deepest recesses of one's mind. All that is life: the illusion and the reality, the highest principle and the "what is", the fear of death, fear of living, fear of relationship - all that. What place has will in that? That is the question. I say it has no place. Don't accept what I am saying; I am not your authority, I am not your guru. All the content of one's consciousness, which is consciousness, is created by thought which is desire and image. And that is what has brought about such havoc in the world. Is there a way of living in this world without the action of will? That is the present question. I know this, as a human being I am fully aware of what is going on within my consciousness, the confusion, the disorder, the chaos, the battle, the seeking for power, position, safety, security, prominence, all that; and I see thought has created all that. Thought plus desire and the multiplication of images. And I say, "What place has will in this?" It is will that has created this. Now can I live in this without will? Biologically, physiologically, I have to exercise a certain form of energy to lean a language, to do this and that. There must be a certain drive. I see all this. And I realise - not as a verbal realization, as a description, but the, actual fact of it, as one realizes pain in the body - I realize that this is the product of thought as desire and will. Can I, as a human being, look at aU this, and transform this without will? Now what becomes important is what kind of observation is necessary. Observation to see actually what is. Is the mind capable of seeing actually "what is"? Or does it always translate into "what should be", "what should not be", "I must suppress", "I must not suppress", and all the rest of it? There must be freedom to observe, otherwise I can't see. If I am prejudiced against you, or like you, I can't see you. So freedom is absolutely necessary to observe -freedom from prejudice, from information, from what has been learned, to be able to look without the idea. You understand: to look without the idea. As we said the other day, the word "idea" comes from Greek; the root meaning of that word is to observe, to see. When we refuse to see, we make an abstraction and make it into an idea. There must be freedom to observe, and in that freedom will is not necessary; there is just freedom to look. Which means, to put it differently, if one makes a statement, can you listen to it without making it into an abstraction? Do you understand my question? The speaker makes a statement such as, "The ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom". Can you listen to that statement without making an abstraction of it? - the abstraction being: "Is that possible?", "What do we get from it?,', "How do we do it?". Those are all abstractions - and not actually listening. So can you listen to that statement with all your senses, which means with all your attention? Then you see the truth of it. And the perception of that truth is action in this chaos. SAANEN 22ND JULY, 1975 'EMOTIONS AND THOUGHT' Questioner: Are emotions rooted in thought? Krishnamurti: What are emotions? Emotions are sensations, aren't they? You see a lovely car, or a beautiful house, a beautiful woman or man, and the sensory perception awakens the senses. Then what takes place? Contact, then desire, Now thought comes in. Can you end there and not let thought come in and take over? I see a beautiful house, the right proportions, with a lovely lawn, a nice garden: all the senses are responding because there is great beauty - it is well kept, orderly, tidy. Why can't you stop there and not let thought come in and say, "I must have" and all the rest of it? Then you will see emotions, or sensations, are natural, healthy, normal. But when thought takes over, then all the mischief begins. So to find out for oneself whether it is possible to look at something with all the senses and end there and not proceed further - do it! That requires an extraordinary sense of awareness in which there is no control; no control, therefore no conflict. Just to observe totally that which is, and all the senses respond and end there. There is great beauty in that. For after all what is beauty? SAANEN 22ND JULY, 1975 'BEAUTY' Is beauty in the world of reality? Or is it not within the movement of thought as time? Please follow this carefully because we are investigating together. I am not laying down the law. I am just asking myself: does beauty lie within the movement of thought as time? That is, within the field of reality. There are beautiful paintings, statues, sculpture, marvellous cathedrals, wonderful temples. If you have been to India, some of those ancient temples are really quite extraordinary: they have no time, there has been no entity as a human being who put them together. And those marvellous old sculptures from the Egyptians, from the Greeks, down to the Moderns. That is, is it expression and creation? Does creation need expression? I am not saying it does, or does not, I am asking, enquiring. Is beauty, which is both expression outwardly and the sense of inward feeling of extraordinary elation, that which comes when there is complete cessation of the "me", with all its movements? To enquire what is beauty, we have to go into the question of what is creation. What is the mind that is creative? Can the mind that is fragmented, however capable, whatever its gifts, talent, is such a mind creative? If I live a fragmented life, pursuing my cravings, my selfishness, my self-centred ambitions, pursuits, my pain, my struggle - is such a mind (I am asking) creative? - though it has produced marvellous music, marvellous literature, architecture and poetry - English and other literature is filled with it. A mind that is not whole, can that be creative? Or is creation only possible when there is total wholeness and therefore no fragmentation? A mind that is fragmented is not a beautiful mind, and therefore it is not creative. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART III CHAPTER 14 QUESTION FROM THE 6TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 24TH JULY, 1975 'THE STREAM OF"SELFISHNESS"' One can see that thought has built the "me", the "me" that has become independent, the "me" that has acquired knowledge, the "me" that is the observer, the "me" that is the past and which passes through the present and modifies itself as the future. It is still the "me" put together by thought, and that "me" has become independent of thought. That "me" has a name, a form. It has a label called X or Y or John. It identifies with the body, with the face; there is the identification of the "me" with the name and with the form, which is the structure, and with the ideal which it wants to pursue. Also with the desire to change the "me" into another form of "me", with another name. This "me" is the product of time and of thought. The "me" is the word: remove the word and what is the "me"? And that "me" suffers: the "me", as you, suffers. The "me" in suffering is you. The "me" in its great anxiety is the great anxiety of you. Therefore you and I are common; that is the basic essence. Though you may be taller, shorter, have a different temperament, different character, be cleverer, all that is the peripheral field of culture; but deep down, basically we are the same. So that "me" is moving in the stream of greed, in the stream of selfishness, in the stream of fear, anxiety and so on, which is the same as you in the stream. Please don't accept what I am saying - see the truth of it. That is, you are selfish and another is selfish; you are frightened, another is frightened; you are aching, suffering, with tears, greed, envy, that is the common lot of all human beings. That is the stream in which we are living, the stream in which we are caught, all of us. We are caught in that stream while we are living; please see that we are caught in this stream as an act of life. This stream is "selfishness" - let us put it that way - and in this stream we are living - the stream of "selfishness" - that expression includes all the descriptions of the "me" which I have just now given. And when we die the organism dies, but the selfish stream goes on. Just look at it, consider it. Suppose I have lived a very selfish life, in self-centred activity, with my desires, the importance of my desires, ambitions, greed, envy, the accumulation of property, the accumulation of knowledge, the accumulation of all kinds of things which I have gathered - all of which I have termed as "selfishness". And that is the thing I live in, that is the "me", and that is you also. In our relationships it is the same. So while living we are together flowing in the stream of selfishness. This is a fact, not my opinion, not my conclusion; if you observe you will see it, whether you go to America, to India, or all over Europe, modified by the environmental pressures and so on, but basically that is the movement. And when the body dies that movement goes on... That stream is time. That is the movement of thought, which has created suffering, which has created the "me" from which the "me" has now asserted itself as being independent, dividing itself from you; but the "me" is the same as you when it suffers. The "me" is the imagined structure of thought. In itself it has no reality. It is what thought has made it because thought needs security, certainty, so it has invested in the "me" all its certainty. And in that there is suffering. In that movement of selfishness, while we are living we are being carried in that stream and when we die that stream exists. Is it possible for that stream to end? Can selfishness, with all its decorations, with all its subtleties, come totally to an end? And the ending is the ending of time. Therefore there is a totally different manifestation after the ending, which is: no selfishness at all. When there is suffering, is there a "you" and "me"? Or is there only suffering? I identify myself as the "me" in that suffering, which is the process of thought. But the actual fact is you suffer and I suffer, not "I" suffer something independent of you, who are suffering. So there is only suffering... there is only the factor of suffering. Do you know what it does when you realize that? Out of that non-personalised suffering, not identified as the "me" separate from you, when there is that suffering, out of that comes a tremendous sense of compassion. The very word "suffering" comes from the word "passion". So I have got this problem. As a human being, living, knowing that I exist in the stream as selfishness, can that stream, can that movement of time, come totally to an end? Both at the conscious as well as at the deep level? Do you understand my question, after describing all this? Now, how will you find out whether you, who are caught in that stream of selfishness, can completely step out of it? - which is the ending of time. Death is the ending of time as the movement of thought if there is the stepping out of that. Can you, living in this world, with all the beastliness of it, the world that man has made, that thought has made, the dictatorships, the totalitarian authority, the destruction of human minds, destruction of the earth, the animals, everything man touches he destroys, including his wife or husband. Now can you live in this world completely without time? - that means no longer caught in that stream of selfishness. You see there are many more things involved in this; because there is such a thing as great mystery. Not the thing invented by thought, that is not mysterious. The occult is not mysterious, which everybody is chasing now, that is the fashion. The experiences which drugs give are not mysterious. There is this thing called death, and the mystery that lies where there is a possibility of stepping out of it. That is, as long as one lives in the world of reality, which we do, can there be the ending of suffering in that world of reality? Think about it. Look at it. Don't say yes, or no. If there is no ending of suffering in the world of reality - which brings order - if there is no ending of selfishness in the world of reality - it is selfishness that creates disorder in the world of reality - if there is no ending to that then you haven't understood, or grasped, the full significance of ending time. Therefore you have to bring about order in the world of reality, in the world of relationships, of action, of rational and irrational thinking, of fear and pleasure. So can one, living in the world of reality as we are, end selfishness? You know it is a very complex thing to end selfishness, it isn't just, "I won't think about myself".... This selfishness in the field of reality is creating chaos. And you are the world and the world is you. If you change deeply you affect the whole consciousness of man. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY PART III CHAPTER 15 QUESTION FROM THE 7TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 27TH JULY, 1975 'THE UNIFYING FACTOR' What is the unifying factor in meditation? Because that is one of the most necessary and urgent things. Politicians are not going to bring this unity however much they may talk about it. It has taken them thousands of years just to meet each other. What is that factor? We are talking about a totally different kind of energy, which is not the movement of thought with its own energy; and will that energy, which is not the energy of thought, bring about this unity? For God's sake, this is your problem, isn't it? Unity between you and your wife or husband, unity between you and another. You see, we have tried to bring about this unity; thought sees the necessity of unity and therefore has created a centre. As the sun is the centre of this world, holding all things in that light, so this centre created by thought hopes to bring mankind together. Great conquerors, great warriors, have tried to do this through bloodshed. Religions have tried to do it, and have brought about more division with their cruelty, with their wars, with their torture. Science has enquired into this. And because science is the accumulation of knowledge, and the movement of knowledge is thought, being fragmentary it cannot unify. Is there an energy which will bring about this unity, this unification of mankind? We are saying, in meditation this energy comes about, because in meditation there is no centre. The centre is created by thought, but something else, totally different, takes place, which is compassion. That is the unifying factor of mankind. To be - not to become compassionate, that is again another deception - but to be compassionate. That can only take place when there is no centre, the centre being that which has been created by thought - thought which hopes that by creating a centre it can bring about unity, like a fragmentary government, like a dictatorship, like autocracy, afl those are centres hoping to create unity. All those have failed, and they will inevitably fail. There is only one factor, and that is this sense of great compassion. And that compassion is when we understand the full width and depth of suffering. That is why we talked a great deal about suffering, the suffering not only of a human being, but the collective suffering of mankind. Don't understand it verbally or intellectually but somewhere else, in your heart, feel the thing. And as you are the world and the world is you, if there is this birth of compassion you will inevitably bring about unity, you can't help it. BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST PUBLIC TALK 6TH SEPTEMBER 1975 As we are going to have only four talks and two discussions we ought to make it as brief and to the point as possible. We must all be very concerned with what is going on in the world: the fact of disintegration, the violence, the brutality, the wars and dishonesty in high political fields. So in the face of all this disintegration, what is correct action? What is one to do to survive in freedom and be totally religious? We are using the word 'religion' not in the orthodox sense at all, which is no religion, but the meaning of that word being, "gathering together all energy to find out what is the place of thought and where its limitations are, and to go beyond it". That is the true significance and the meaning of that word religion. If you look into a good dictionary you will find that. And so what is one to do in this disintegrating, corrupt, immoral world, what is a human being - not the individual because there is no such thing as the individual - we are human beings, we are collective, not individual, we are the result of various influences, collective influences, forces, conditioning and so on. So as human beings, whether we live in this country, or in America or in Russia or in India, which is going through terrible times, what is one to do? What is the correct, right action? To find this out, if one is at all serious and I hope we are serious here, otherwise you wouldn't have come, what is one to do? Is there an action that is total, whole, not fragmented, that is both correct, accurate, that is compassionate, religious in the sense we are using that word, which has nothing whatsoever to do with belief, dogma, rituals, conditioning of a certain type of religious enquiry, what is a human being confronted with this problem to do? To find an answer, not imaginary, fictitious or pretended, to find the true, the right answer one must enquire into the question of what is the whole movement of thought. Because all our conditioning, all our activity, all our religions, all our political, economic, social, moral life is based on thought. I hope we are meeting each other in this problem. Thought has been our chief instrument in all the fields of life, in all the areas, religious, non-religious, political, economic, social, moral and personal relationships. I think that is fairly obvious. Please, if I may point out, we are talking this thing over together. We are enquiring into this together, you are sharing it, your responsibility is to share it, not just merely listen to a few ideas, agree or disagree, but to share it, which means you must give attention, you must care for it, this problem must be serious, this problem must be something that touches your mind, your heart, everything in life - otherwise there is no sharing, there is no communion, there is no communication except verbally or intellectually and that has very little value. So we are together enquiring into this question. And what is the responsibility of thought, knowing its limitations, knowing that whatever it does is within the limited area, and in that limited area is it possible to have correct, accurate response and action? At what level does one find for oneself, as a human being, the right action? If it is imaginary, personal, according to an idea or a concept, or an ideal, it ceases to be correct action. I hope we are understanding each other. The ideal, the conclusion is still the movement of thought as time, as measure. And thought has created all our problems - in our personal relationship, economically, socially, morally, religiously, thought has not found an answer. And we are trying to find out, if we can this morning, and the next two or three talks, what is a human being concerned seriously in the face of this enormous problem, which is very complex, and being committed, responsible, what is the action that is whole, non-traditional, non-mechanistic, which is not a conclusion, a prejudice, a belief? That is, I want to find out, if I am at all serious, how am I to act - in which action there is no pretension, an action that has no regrets, an action that does not breed further problems, an action that will be whole, complete and answer to every issue, whether at the personal level or in the most complex social level? This is your problem. Unless we solve this problem very deeply, talking about meditation, what is god, what is truth and all the rest of it has very little meaning; one must lay the foundation, otherwise you cannot go very far. One must begin as close as possible to go very far, and the nearness is you, as a human being living in this monstrous society, corrupt and all the rest of it. And one must find for oneself an action that is whole, non-fragmented, because the world is becoming more and more dangerous to live in, it is becoming a desert and each one of us has to be an oasis. And to bring about that, not isolated existence, but a total human existence, our enquiry is into the problem of action. Can thought solve our problems - thought being the response of memory, experience and knowledge? The response of memory. Memory is a material process. Thought is material and chemical, and all the scientists agree about this. And the things that thought has created, if you observe in the world and in ourselves, is the world of reality, the world of things. Reality means - I won't go into the root meaning of all that - the word means 'the thing that exists' - not imagined, not fictitious, something that is actual, real. Reality means this thing. And to find out what truth is one must be very clear where the limitations of reality are, and not let it flow into the world that is not real. I don't know if you are following all this? May we go on? We are all together in this? So when one observes in the world and in oneself, thought has created an extraordinarily complex problem of existence. Thought has created the centre as the 'me' and the 'you'. And from that centre we act. Please look at it yourself, observe it, you will see it for yourself, you are not accepting something the speaker is talking about, don't accept anything. You know when one begins to doubt everything, then from that doubt, from that uncertainty grows certainty, clarity; but if you start with imagination, belief, conclusions and live within that area you will end up always doubting. So here we are trying to investigate, enquire, look into things that are very close to us, which is our daily life, with all its misery, conflict, pain, suffering, love and anxiety, greed, envy, all that. And as we said, thought has created the 'me', and so thought in itself being fragmentary makes the 'me' into a fragment - right? When you say I, the 'me', I want, I don't want, I am this, I am not that, it is the result of thought. And thought itself being fragmentary - thought is never the whole, so what it has created becomes fragmentary. My world, my religion, my belief, my country, my god and yours, so it becomes fragmentary. So thought intrinsically is a process of time, measure and therefore fragmentary. I wonder if you see this. If you see this once very clearly, then we will be able to find out what is action, a correct, accurate action in which there is no imagination, no pretension, nothing but the actual. Right. So we are trying to find out what is action that is whole, that is not fragmentary, that is not caught in the movement of time, which is not traditional and therefore mechanical. One wants to live a life without conflict and yet live in a society that doesn't destroy freedom and yet survives. As the societies and governments throughout the world are becoming more and more centralized, more and more bureaucratic, our freedom is getting less and less. Freedom is not what one likes to do, what one wants to do, that is not freedom. Freedom means something entirely different: freedom from this constant battle, constant anxiety, uncertainty, suffering, pain, all the things that thought has created in us. So is there an action which is not based on the mechanical process of memory, on a repetition of an experience and therefore a continuing in the movement of time as past, present and future, is there an action that is not conditioned by environment? You know the Marxists say that control the environment then you will change man, and that has been tried, and man has not changed. Man is as primitive, vulgar, cruel, brutal, violent and all the rest of it, though they are controlling the environment. And there are those who say, don't bother about the environment but have a belief in some divinity and that will guide you. You must know all this. And that divinity is the projection of thought. So we are back again in the same field. So realizing all this what is a human being to do? And can thought, which is material process, which is a chemical process, therefore a thing, a thing which is real, which has created all this structure, can that very thought solve our problems? You understand my question? So one must very carefully, diligently, find out what are the limitations of thought, and can thought realize itself its limitation and therefore not spill over into the realm which thought can never touch? I wonder if you see - right? You understand my question? Thought has created the technological world, the house, the bicycle, the aeroplane, and thought has also created the division between you and me. Thought has also created the image of you and the 'me', and these images separate each one of us. Thought can only function in duality, in opposites, and therefore all reaction is a divisive process, separating process. And thought has created time, not only division between human beings, nationalities, religious beliefs, rituals, dogmas, political differences, opinions, conclusions, all that is the result of thought. Thought has also created the division between you and me, as form and name. And thought has also created the centre which is the 'me' as opposed to you, and therefore there is a division between you and me. Thought has also created this whole structure of social behaviour, which is essentially based on tradition, which is mechanical. Thought has also created the religious world - the Christian, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Muslim, with all the divisions, all the practices, all the innumerable gurus that are springing up like mushrooms. It is awfully serious all this, you don't know how deadly serious all this is. How they are all destroying all this. And thought has created what it considers is love. And is compassion the result of love, the result of thought? That is our problem - those are all our problems - the technological world, the world of relationship between man and woman and so on, in which the image is the most formidable barrier, and the social behaviour which has become totally immoral, each one seeking his own pleasure, his own security, his own existence and denying everything else. And in the world of religion it has projected the saviours, the gurus, the gods, all kinds of fantastic imaginary things, fictitious, unreal. And yet we are trying to solve all these problems through thought. I wonder if you get it - right? And can thought see itself as the mischief maker, see itself as a necessary instrument in the creation of a society which is not immoral? Can thought be aware of itself? You understand my question? Please do follow this. Can your thought become conscious of itself? And if it does, is that consciousness part of thought? One can be aware of the activities of thought, and one can choose those activities as good and bad, and worthwhile and not worthwhile, but the choice is still the result of thought. And therefore it is perpetuating conflict and duality - right? Can thought be attentive to its own movements? Or is there an entity outside the field of thought who directs thought? You are following all this? You understand? I can say, "I am aware of my thoughts, I know what I am thinking". But that entity that says, I know what I am thinking, that 'I' is the product of thought. And that entity then begins to control, subjugate, or rationalize thinking. So there is an entity, we say, that is different from thought - but it is essentially thought. So what we are trying to explain is: thought is tremendously limited, it plays all kinds of tricks, it imagines, it creates a super-consciousness - but it is still thought. So our problem then is: can thought realize for itself where it is essential to operate, where it is accurate in its operation and totally limited in every other direction? That means, one has to go into this question of human consciousness. You know this sounds very philosophical, very complicated, but it isn't. Philosophy means the love of truth - not love of words, not love of ideas, not love of speculations, but the love of truth. And that means you have to find out for yourself where reality is, and that reality cannot become truth. You cannot go through reality to come to truth. You must understand the limitations of reality, which is the whole process of thought - right? You know when you look into yourself, which is knowing yourself, knowing your consciousness - why you think, what your motives are, what your purposes are, what your beliefs are, what your intentions are, what your pretensions, what your imaginations are - all that is your consciousness. That consciousness essentially is the consciousness of the world. Please do see this. Your consciousness is not radically different from the consciousness of a Muslim, Hindu, anybody else, because your consciousness is filled with anxiety, hope, fear, pleasure, suffering, greed, envy, competition, that is your consciousness. And the beliefs and your gods, everything is in that consciousness. The content of that makes consciousness. The content of that is thought - right? The thought that has filled the consciousness with the things it has created. Look into yourself and you will see how extraordinary obvious it is. And from this content, which is tradition, which is conditioned, which is the result of thought, we are trying to find a way to act within that area. Right? Within that area of consciousness which thought has filled with the things of thought. And one asks: if thought cannot solve all our problems, human problems, not technological problems, not mathematical problems, them how can it go, or how can it limit itself and not enter into the field of the psyche, into the field of the spirit - we can use that word for the moment. You see as long as we function within that area we must always suffer, there must always be disorder, there must always be fear and anxiety. So my question is: can I, can a human being bring about order in the world of reality, and when you have established order, when thought has established order in the world of reality, then it will realize its own tremendous limitations. I wonder if you see - right? We live in a world of disorder, not only outwardly but inwardly. And we have not been able to solve this disorder. We try everything - meditation, drugs, accepting authority, denying authority, pursuing freedom and denying freedom - we have done everything possible to bring about order - through compulsion, through fear, through various forms of motivations - but still we live in disorder. And a disordered mind is now trying to find out if there is a correct action - you follow? A disordered mind is trying to find out if there is a right, accurate, correct action. And it will find an action which is incorrect, disorderly, not whole, therefore in the world of reality in which we live we must bring order. I wonder if you see this? Order is not the acceptance of authority. Order is not what one wants to do. Order is not something according to a blue print -right? So order must be something highly mathematical, because the greatest mathematical order is the total denial of disorder, within oneself and within every human being. Can you look at your disorder, be aware of it, not choosing particular forms of disorder and accepting others and denying others, but see the whole disorder? Disorder implies conflict, self-centred activity, the acceptance of a conclusion and living according to that conclusion, the ideal and the pursuit of the ideal which denies the actual, can you totally deny all that? It is only when you deny totally all that, that there is order - the order that is not created by thought in the world of reality. You understand? We are separating the words, reality and truth. We say reality is everything that thought has created: and in that area, in that field, there is total disorder, except in the world of technology. In that field human beings live in complete disorder, and this disorder is brought about by the things which we have explained - conflict, the pursuit of pleasure, fear, suffering, death, all that. Can you become aware of all that and totally deny it, walk away from it? And out of that comes order in the world of reality. So in that world of reality behaviour is something entirely different. When you have denied all that - you understand what I am talking about? - when you have denied the 'me', which is the product of thought, which creates the division, the thought that has created the 'me' and the super consciousness, all the rest of it - all the imaginations, the pretensions, the anxieties, the acceptance and the denial. That is, the content which is so traditional, to deny that tradition is to have order. Then we can go into the question of what truth is, not before because then it becomes pretentious, hypocritical, nonsensical. In that one has to understand the whole question of fear, how human beings live in fear, and that fear is now becoming more and more acute, because the world is becoming so dangerous a place, where tyrannies are increasing, political tyrannies, bureaucratical tyrannies and therefore denying freedom for the mind to understand, to enquire. So can we as human beings, living in this disorderly world and disintegrating world, become, not in theory or in imagination, but actually an oasis in a world that is becoming a desert? This is really a very serious question. And can we human beings educate ourselves totally differently? And we can do that only if we understand the nature and the movement of thought as time, which means really understanding oneself as a human being - to look at oneself not according to some psychologists, Freudians and Jungians and all the rest of it, but to look at ourselves actually as we are, and discover for ourselves how disorderly a life we lead - a life of uncertainty, a life of pain, living on conclusions, beliefs, memories - and becoming aware of it and that very awareness washes away all this. So perhaps there is no time this morning to go into - perhaps we will tomorrow morning - into this question of fear which seems to dominate all our minds, consciously or unconsciously. And that fear guides our life, not gods, not divinities, not destiny, not something imagined, but actually this fear of not only physical survival but also fear of not knowing, fear of not understanding the whole significance of life, fear in a very, very limited small area of our self-induced activity. So we can perhaps go into that tomorrow because that is a very complex problem. So for this morning can we talk over together by questioning and enquiring what we have talked about? You understand? Please, you are asking questions not of me, not of the speaker; we are asking questions of ourselves, saying it aloud so that we can all share it because your problem is the problem of everybody else. Your problem is the problem of the world, you are the world. I don't think we realize that. You are actually the world, in the very deepest essence, your manners, your dress, your name and your form may be different but essentially, deep down you are the world, you have created the world and the world is you. So if you ask a question you are asking it for the whole of mankind. I don't know if you see that. Which doesn't mean that you mustn't ask questions: on the contrary. Questioning then becomes a very serious matter, not a glib question and a glib answer, some momentary question and forget it and pick it up another day. If you ask, ask something of a really human problem. Q: Did you say that by walking away from the disorder of tradition, we create order? K: Yes, that is what I meant. Now just a minute. That needs a great deal of explanation. What you mean by tradition; what you mean by walking away; what you mean by order. Q: In addition to that question the seeing of this disorder already implies that the see-er has gone, that you have walked away. K: That is what I was going to go into. There are three things involved in this: order, walking away, and the observation of disorder. Walking away from disorder and the very act of moving away from it is order. Now first how do you observe disorder? How do you observe disorder in yourself? Are you looking at it as an outsider looking in, as something separate from you and therefore there is a division, you and the thing which you are observing? Or are you looking at it, if I may ask, not as an outsider, looking at it without the outsider, without the observer who says, "I am disorderly"? Look, let us put it round the other way. When you look at something, say those trees and the house, there is a space between you and that tree and that house. The space is the distance and you must have a certain distance to look, to observe. If you are too close you don't see the whole thing. So if you are an observer looking at disorder there is a space between you and that disorder. Then the problem arises: how to cover that space, how to control that disorder, how to rationalize this disorder, how to suppress it, or whatever you do. But if there is no space, you are that disorder. I wonder if you see that? Q: How can I walk away from it? K: One moment, I understand and I am going to show it to you. I am going to go into that. You understand my question? One looks at one's wife - if you have a wife or a husband, or a boy or a girl, nowadays they don't marry. So when you observe your wife, or your husband, your boy or girl, or your friend, how do you observe him or her? Watch it please. Go into it, it is so simple. Do it! How do you observe? Do you observe directly? Or do you observe that person through an image, through a screen, through a distance? Obviously, if you have lived with a person, it doesn't matter if it's for a day or ten years, there is an image, a distance. You are separate from that, from her or him. And when you observe disorder you have an image of what order is. Or an image which says, this disorder is ugly. So you are looking at that disorder from a distance, which is time, which is traditional, which is the past. So you are looking at disorder from a distance. Put it this way: is that distance created by thought, or does this distance exist actually? When you say, "I am angry" - is anger different from you? No, so you are anger. So you are disorderly, not you separate from disorder - right? I think that is clear. Right. So you are that disorder. Any movement - please follow this -any movement of thought away from that disorder is still disorder. No? Because that disorder is created by thought. That disorder is the result of your self-centred activity, the centre that says, "I am different from somebody else" and so on and so on and so on. That is, all that produces disorder. Now can you observe that disorder without the observer? Q: Then you will find it in yourself. Then you criticize the others. K: No, no. I am not talking about criticizing the others. That has very little meaning criticizing others Q: No, what you found in the other. K: No, madame. The other is me. He may have a red shirt, or a woman, or a man, or dark coloured or whatever it is, essentially the other is me - he has his anxieties, his fears, his hopes, his despairs, his suffering, his pain, his loneliness, his misery, his lack of love and all the rest of it - that man is me. If that is clear then I am not criticizing another, I am aware of myself in the other. Q: That is what I meant. K: Good. So can I observe, is there an observation without the past, the past being the observer? Can you look at me, or look at another without all the memories, all the chicanery, all the things that go on, just look? Can you look at your husband, wife and so on, without a single image? Can you look at another without the whole past springing up? You do it when it is absolutely a crisis. When there is a tremendous challenge you do look that way. But we live such sloppy lives, we are not serious, we don't work. Q: How can you live permanently at crisis pitch? K: I'll answer that question sir, after we have finished this. So the walking away from it, is to be totally involved in that which you observe. I cannot walk away from my disorder if I know I am that disorder. But I can walk away from it if I say, that is different from me. I am already miles away from it. And when I observe this disorder without all the reactions, the memories, the things that crop up in one's mind, then in that total observation, that very total observation is order. I wonder if you see this? Which means sirs and ladies, whether you have ever looked at anything totally - whether you have looked at your political leaders, your religious beliefs, your conclusions, the whole thing upon which we live, which is thought, whether you have looked at it completely. And to look at it completely means no division between you and that at which you look. I can look at the mountain and the beauty of it, the line of it, the shadows, the depth, and the dignity, and the marvellous isolation and beauty of it, and it is not a process of identification. I cannot become the mountain, thank god! Or the tree. That is a trick of the imagination. But when I observe without the word, the mountain, there is a perception of that beauty entirely, and there comes a passion out of that. And can I observe another, my wife, friend, child, whatever it is, can I observe totally? That means can I observe without the observer who is the past? That means observation implies total perception. There is only perception, not the perceiver. Then there is order. Right. Q: If there is only perception and no perceiver, what is it that looks? If I see that I am disorder, what is it that sees it? K: Now go into it sir. Disorder is a large word, let us look at it. When you see that you are violent, and that violence is not different from you, you are that violence, what takes place? Let us look at it round the other way. What takes place when you are not the violence? You say violence is different from me, what happens then? In that there is division, in that there is trying to control violence, in that there is a projection of a state of non-violence, the ideal, and conformity to that ideal, therefore further conflict, and so on. So when there is a division between the observer and the observed, the sequence of that is a continuous conflict in different forms and varieties, and shapes; but when the observer is the observed, that is when the observer says, "I am violent, the violence is not separate from me", then there is a totally different kind of activity that goes on: there is no conflict, there is no rationalization, there is no suppression, control, there is no non-violence as an ideal: your are that. Then what takes place? I don't know if you have ever gone into this question. Q: Then what is you? K: There is no you madame. Q: But you said 'you'. K: No, madame, that is a way of speaking. Wait a minute. I understand. Look, please. You see the difference between the observer and the observed. When there is a difference between the observer and the observed there must be conflict in various forms because there is division. When there is a political division, when there is a national division, there must be conflict, as is going on in the world. We are all human beings, we call each other Arabs, Jews or whatever it is, and we are butchering each other. Where there is division there must be conflict: that is law. And when the observer is the observed, when violence is not separate from the observer, then a totally different action takes place. Which is, if you have gone into it, the word 'violence' is already condemnatory - right? It is a word we use in order to strengthen violence, though we may not want it, we strengthen it by using that word. Don't we? So the naming of that feeling is part of our tradition. If you don't name it then there is a totally different response. And because you don't name it, because there is no observer different from the observed, then that feeling which arises which you call violence, is non existent. You try it and you will see it. You can only act when you test it. But mere agreement is not testing it. You have to act and find out. Right. The next question was about challenge. Must we always live with challenge? Q: I said crisis. K: Crisis, it is the same thing. Aren't you living in crisis? There is a political crisis in this country, economic crisis, crisis with your wife or your husband, crisis means division, doesn't it? Which means crisis apparently becomes necessary for those people who live in darkness, who are asleep - no? If you had no crisis you would all go to sleep. And that is what we want - for god's sake leave me alone, to wallow in my own pond, or whatever it is. So crisis comes all the time. Now a much deeper question to all that is: is it possible to live without a single crisis and keep totally awake? You understand? Crisis, challenge, shocks, disturbance exist when the mind gets sluggish, traditional, repetitive, unclear. Can the mind become completely clear, and therefore to such a mind there is no challenge? Is that possible? That means - we have to go much deeper still - which means we live on experiences, to change our minds, to further our minds, to enlarge our minds, experiences we think will open the door to clarity. And a man that has no experience, we think he is asleep or dull or stupid. A man that has no experience but is fully awake is an innocent mind, therefore he sees clearly. Now is that possible? Don't say yes or no. Q: When you say he has no experience, do you mean in the sense that he is ignorant of basic life? K: Sir, look: we are conditioned by the society in which we live, by the food we eat, clothes, climate. We are conditioned by the culture in which we live, by the literature, by the newspapers, by everything our minds are shaped, consciously, or unconsciously. When you call yourself a Christian, or a Buddhist, or whatever it is, that is your conditioning. And we move from one conditioning to another conditioning. I don't like Hinduism, I jump into Christianity, or into something else. If I don't like one guru, I just follow another guru. So we are conditioned. Is it possible to uncondition the mind so that it is totally free? That means is it possible to be aware of your total conditioning - not choose which conditionings you like, but total conditioning, which is only possible when there is no choice and when there is no observer. To see the whole of that conditioning, which is at both the conscious level as well as at the unconscious level, the totality of it. And you can see the totality of something only when there is no distance between you and that - the distance created as movement of thought, time. Then you see the whole of it. And when there is a perception of the whole then the unconditioning comes into being. But we don't want to work at that kind of thing. We want the easiest way of everything. That is why we like gurus. The priests, the politicians, the authority, the specialist, they know, I don't know, they will tell me what to do, which is our traditional acceptance of authority. Q: A question about true action. Actually as we are, every action is a self-centred activity. So when you see that, you are afraid to act because everything has no significance. That is a reality, not a choice or an imagination. You are facing a terrible void and you... K: No, wait. I understand the question sir. Q: Even material activity. K: When there is an observation and you see you can't do anything, then you say there is a void. Just hold on to that sentence, to that phrase. When there is an observation, you realize you can't do anything and therefore there is a void. Is that so? When I see that I have been able to do something before there was no void. You understand? I could do something about this, join the Liberal Party, or whatever it is, or become a neurotic whatever it is. Sorry! Before I could do something, and I thought by doing something there was no void, because that void I had filled by doing something, which is running away from that void, that loneliness, that extraordinary sense of isolation. And now when I see the falseness of that, this doing, doing about something which doesn't give a significance or answer, then I say to myself, "I observe and I am the observer and I am left naked, stark naked, void. I can't do anything. There is no significance to existence." Yes sir. Before you gave significance to existence, which is the significance created by thought, by all kinds of imaginations, hopes and all the rest of it, and suddenly you realize that thought doesn't solve the problems and you see no meaning in life, no significance. So you want to give significance to life - you understand? You want to give it. Life itself has no significance but you follow? Living itself has no meaning for most of us now. When we are young we say "Well at least I'll be happy" sex and you know, all the rest of it. As we grow older we say, "My god, it is such an empty life", and you fill that emptiness with literature, with knowledge, with beliefs, dogmas, rituals, opinions, judgements and you think that has tremendous significance. And you have filled it with words, nothing else but words. Now when you strip yourself of words you say, "My god, I am empty, void". Q: It is words. K: Still words, that is what I am saying. Still words. So when you see that thought has created what you considered significant, now when you see the limitations of thought, and what it has created has no significance, you are left empty, void, naked - why? Aren't you still seeking something? Isn't thought still in operation? When you say, "I have no significance, there is no significance to life", it is thought that has made you say there is no significance because you want significance. But when there is no movement of thought life if full of significance. There is tremendous beauty. You don't know anything of this. Q: Thought is afraid not to think. K: So thought is afraid not to think. So we will go into that tomorrow. The whole problem of thought creating fear and trying to give significance to life. If one actually examined one's life, there is very little meaning, isn't there? You have pleasant memories, or unpleasant memories, which is in the past, dead, gone, but you hold on to them. There is all this fear of death. You have worked and worked and worked - god knows why - and there is that thing waiting for you. And you say, "Is that all?" So we have to go into this question of the movement of thought as time and measure. Right sirs. BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND PUBLIC TALK 7TH SEPTEMBER 1975 It is a lovely morning, but this gathering isn't an entertainment. We are rather serious and we must be serious in facing what we have to do in life, with all the problems, miseries, confusion, violence and suffering. It is only those who are really earnest live, but the others fritter their life away and waste their existence. And if we may we will continue with what we were talking about yesterday. We were going to consider this morning, the whole complex problem of fear. Whether the human mind, which has lived so long, so many centuries upon centuries, putting up with fear, escaping from it, trying to rationalize it, trying to forget it, or completely identifying with something that is not fear. We have tried all these methods, conscious as well as unconscious fear. And when one asks if it is at all possible psychologically and from that physiologically, whether it is at all possible to be free totally, completely of fear. And we are going to discuss this, talk it over together, and find out for ourselves if it is at all possible. Before we go into that we must consider energy, the quality of energy, the types of energy, and the question of desire. So in order to understand completely, and if it is possible to be totally free of fear, we must go into, and consider energy - whether we have sufficient energy to delve deeply into this question. We know the energy and friction of thought. It has created most extraordinary things in the world technologically, and also psychologically we don't seem to have that deep energy, drive, interest to penetrate profoundly into this question of fear. So we have to first of all understand and go into this question of thought bringing about its own energy, and therefore fragmentary energy; and the energy through friction, which is through conflict. That is all we know: the energy of thought, the energy that comes in contradiction, in opposing, in duality, the opposites, and the energy of friction - all that is in the world of reality, reality being the things with which we live daily, both psychologically as well as intellectually and so on - right? I hope we are communicating with each other. Communication implies not only verbal understanding, but sharing, actually sharing what is being said. Otherwise there is no communion, communication. There is not only a verbal communication but a communion which is non verbal. But to come to that non verbal communion one must understand very deeply the question, whether it is possible to communicate with each other at a verbal level, which means that we both of us share the meaning of the words, have the same interest, the same intensity, at the same level, so that we can proceed step by step. That requires energy. And that energy can come into being only when we understand the energy of thought and its friction, in which we are caught. That is all we know actually. If you investigate into yourself you will see that what we know, or experience, or are aware of, is the friction of thought in its achievement, in its desires, in its purposes - the striving, the struggle, the competition. All that is involved in the energy of thought. Now we are asking if there is any other kind of energy, which is non mechanistic, non traditional, non contradictory, and therefore tension and that tension creates energy. I hope you are meeting all this. To find that out, if there is another kind of energy, not imagined, not fantastic, not superstitious, traditional, but to find out, we have to go into the question of desire. May we go along? We are communicating with each other, a little bit at least? Desire, as most of us have, is the want of something - right? That is one fragment of desire. Then the longing for something, whether it is sexual longing or psychological longing, or the so-called spiritual longing. And the third part of that desire, the other fragment, is how does this desire arise? Do you follow? There is desire - desire is the want of something, the lack of something, missing something. Then the longing for it, either imaginatively, or actually wanting, like hunger. And there is this whole problem of how desire arises in one. Because in comprehending, in coming face to face with fear, we have to understand desire. Desire may be the root of fear, not the denial of fear, but the insight into desire. The religious monks throughout the world have denied desire, they have resisted desire, they have identified that desire with their gods, with their saviours, with their Jesus and so on and so on and so on. But it is still desire. And without the full penetration into that desire, having an insight, fear cannot possible be free from one's mind. So first, how does desire arise? Please you are following all this? That is, we need a different kind of energy, not the mechanistic energy of thought, because that has not solved any of our problems. On the contrary it has made it much more complex, more vast, impossible to solve them. So we must find a different kind of energy, whether that energy is related to thought, or independent of thought, and in enquiring into that one must go into the question of desire. You are following this? Not somebody else's desires, but your own desire. Now how does desire arise? If you have observed yourself, how does this whole feeling of desire, which is the lack or the want of something? One can see that this movement of desire takes place through perception, seeing, visual, then sensation, contact and desire - you follow? One sees something beautiful, the contact of it, visual, and physical, sensory, then sensation, then from that the feeling of the lack of that, and from that desire. That is fairly clear. Why does the mind, the whole sensory organism, lack - you follow? Why is there this feeling of lacking something, of wanting something? I hope you are giving sufficient attention to what is being said because it is your life. You are not merely listening to words, or ideas, or formulas, but actually sharing in the investigating, in the investigating process so that we are together walking in the same direction, at the same speed, with the same intensity, at the same level. Otherwise we shan't meet each other. That is part of love also. Love is that communication with each other, at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity. So why is there the sense of lacking or wanting in oneself? I do not know if you have ever gone into this question at all: why the human mind, human beings, are always after something apart from technological knowledge. Apart from learning languages and so on and so on, why is there this sense of wanting, lacking, pursuing something all the time - which is the movement of desire, which is also the movement of thought as time and measure? All that is involved in that. I hope you are following. Shall we go on? We are asking: why there is this sense of want. Why there is not this sense of complete self sufficiency. Why is there this sense of longing for something in order to fulfil, or cover up something? Is it because for most of us there is this sense of emptiness, loneliness, sense of void? Physiologically we need food, clothes and shelter, that one must have. But that is denied when there is political, religious, economic division, nationalistic division, which is the curse of this world, which has been invented by the western world, it did not exist in the eastern world, this spirit of nationality. It has come recently into being there too, this poison. So when there is division between people, between nationalities and therefore between beliefs, dogmas, and from that arises economic division, security for everybody becomes almost impossible. And the tyrannical world, the dictatorship is trying to provide that, food for everybody, but it cannot achieve it for everybody. We know all that. We can move from that. Then there is this question why psychologically there is this sense of want, this sense of lacking. And what is it that we lack? Knowledge? Knowledge being the accumulation of experience, both scientific, psychological and in other directions, which is, knowledge is the past. Knowledge is the past. Is this what we want? Is this what we miss? Is this what we are educated for - to gather all the knowledge you can possibly have, to act skilfully in the technological world? Or, is there a sense of lack, want, psychologically, inwardly? Which means you will try to fill that inward emptiness, which is the lack, through or with experience, which is the accumulated knowledge. So you are trying to fill that emptiness, that void, that sense of immense loneliness, with something which thought has created. Therefore desire arises from this urge to fill that emptiness. After all when you are seeking enlightenment, as you call it, or self-realization as the Hindus call it, it is a form of desire. This sense of ignorance which will be wiped away, or put aside, or dissipated by acquiring tremendous knowledge, enlightenment. It is never the process of investigating 'what is', but rather by acquiring. I wonder if you follow all this? Not actually looking at 'what is', but inviting something which 'might be', or hoping for a greater experience, greater knowledge. So we are always avoiding 'what is'. And the 'what is' is created by thought - my loneliness, emptiness, sorrow, pain, suffering, anxiety, fear - that is actually 'what is'. And thought is incapable of facing it and tries to move away from that. In the understanding of desire, which is perception, seeing, visual perception, contact, sensation, and the want of that which you have not, which there is not, and the desire, the longing for it. That involves the whole process of time. I have not, but I will have. When I do have, it is measured by what you have. So desire is the movement of thought in time as measure. Right? Please, you are not agreeing with me. I am not interested in doing propaganda. I don't care if you are here or not here, if you listen or don't listen. But as it is your life, as it is so urgently important that we be deadly serious, the world is disintegrating. You have to understand this question of desire, energy and the enquiry into a different kind of non-mechanistic energy. And to come to that you must understand fear. You get it now? That is, does desire create fear, the want of something? So what is fear? We are going to enquire together into this question of fear, all related to each other, they are not something separate. You say, "Well let's forget about energy and desire and please help me to get rid of my fear" - that is too silly. They are all related. You can't take one thing and approach it that way. You must take the whole packet. So what is fear, how does it arise? Is there a fear at one level, and not at another level? Is there fear at the conscious level, or at the unconscious level? Or is there a fear totally? Now how does fear arise? Why does it exist in human beings? And human beings have put up with it for generations upon generations, they live with it. And fear distorts action, distorts clear perceptive thinking, objective efficient thinking, which is necessary, logical, sane healthy thinking. Fear darkens our lives. I do not know if you have not noticed it. If there is the slightest fear there is a contraction of all your senses. And most of us live in whatever relationship we have, in that peculiar form of fear. Our question is: whether our mind, our whole being can ever be free completely of fear? You see, the education, society, governments, religions have encouraged this fear. All religions are based on this fear. And fear also is cultivated through the worship of authority - right? The authority of the book, the authority of the priest, the authority of those who know, the authority of the politician and so on and so on. We are carefully nurtured in fear -right? And we are asking whether it is at all possible to be totally free. So we have to find out what is fear. Is it the want of something, which is desire, longing? Is it the uncertainty of tomorrow? Or the pain and the suffering of yesterday? Is it this division between you and me, in which there is no relationship at all? Is it that centre which thought has created as the 'me' - the 'me' being the form, the name, the attributes, and loosing that 'me'? Is that one of the causes of fear? Or is it the remembrance of something past, pleasant, happy, and the fear of losing it? Or the fear of suffering, both physiologically, neurologically and psychologically? You are following all this? So is there a centre from which all fear springs? Like a tree, though it has got a hundred branches it is a solid trunk, its roots, and it is no good merely pruning the branches. So we have to go to the very root of fear. Are we walking together? What is that root of fear? Because if one can be totally free of fear, then heaven is with you. So what is the root of it? Is it time? Please, we are investigating, questioning, we are not theorizing, we are not coming to any conclusion, because there is nothing to conclude. The moment you see the root of it, actually, with your eyes, with your feeling, with your heart, with your mind, actually see it then you can deal with it. That is if you are serious. So what is the root of it? We are asking: is it time? - time being not only chronological time by the watch as yesterday, today and tomorrow, but also psychologically - yesterday, the remembrance of yesterday, the pleasures of yesterday, and the pains, the grief, the anxieties of yesterday, which is time. We are asking whether the root of fear is time - time to fulfil, time to become, time to achieve, time to realize god, or whatever you like to call it. And what is time - not by the watch, that is fairly simple, but psychologically what is time? Is there such a thing - please listen - as psychological time at all? Or we have invented psychological time? Is there psychologically tomorrow? And if you say there is no time psychologically as tomorrow, it will be a great shock to you. Won't it? Because you say, "Tomorrow I will be happy. Tomorrow I will achieve something. Tomorrow I will become the executive of some business. Tomorrow I will become the enlightened one. Tomorrow the guru promises something and I'll achieve it." To us tomorrow is tremendously important. And is there a tomorrow psychologically? We have accepted it: that is our whole traditional education that there is a tomorrow. And when you look psychologically, investigate into yourself, is there a tomorrow? Or has thought, being fragmentary in itself, projected the tomorrow? Please we will go into this, it is very important to understand. One suffers physically, there is a great deal of pain. And the remembrance of that pain is marked, is an experience which the brain contains, and therefore there is the remembrance of that pain - right? And thought says, "I hope I never have that pain again" -that is, tomorrow. There has been great pleasure yesterday, sexual, whatever kind of pleasure that one has, and thought says, "Tomorrow I must have that pleasure again." You have had great experience - at least you think it is great experience - and it has become a memory, and you realize it is a memory but yet you pursue it tomorrow - right? So thought is movement in time. So is the root of fear time? Time as 'me' compared to you, 'me' more important than you, 'me' that is going to achieve something, become something, get rid of something. So thought as time, which is to become, is the root of fear. We have said time is necessary to learn a language. Time is necessary to learn any technique. And we think we apply the same process to the psychological existence. You are following? I need several weeks to learn a language and I say in order to learn about myself, what I am, what I have to achieve, I need time. And we are questioning the whole of that - whether there is time at all psychologically, actually, or is it an invention of thought, and therefore fear? You get it? That is one problem. And consciously we have divided consciousness into the conscious and the hidden. Again division by thought. And we say, "I may be able to get rid of conscious fears, but it is almost impossible to be free of the unconscious fears having their deep roots in the unconscious." You follow? We say that it is much more difficult to be free of unconscious fears - which is the racial fears, the family fears, the tribal fears, the fears that are deeply instinctively rooted. We have divided consciousness into two levels. And then we ask: how can I, how can a human being delve deeply into the unconscious? - having divided it then we ask this question, as the Christians who first invented sin, and then the Saviour who will save you from the sin! This is the same old problem. Now: we say it can be done through careful analysis, introspection. Careful analysis of the various hidden fears, through dreams - I haven't time to go into all that, I must be quick because there is a great deal to cover in one hour. To uncover the unconscious with all the inherited fears, the racial, the family, the name, all that is hidden there, and we say we must analyse it -right? That is the fashion. We never look into the whole process of analysis, whether it is self-introspective, or professional. In analysis is implied the analyser and the analysed. Who is the analyser? Is he different from the analysed? Or the analyser is the analysed, and therefore it is utterly futile to analyse? I wonder if you see that? Right? If the analyser is the analysed, then there is only observation, not analysis - right? But if the analyser is different from the analysed, which is what you all accept, all the professionals, all the introspective, all the people who are trying to improve themselves - god forbid! - they are all concerned with this thing, that there is a division between the analysed and the analyser. But the analyser is a fragment of thought which has created that thing to be analysed. I wonder if you follow all this? So in analysis is implied a division, and that division implies time -because you have to keep on analysing until you die! So when analysis is totally false - I am using the word 'false' in the sense of incorrect, it has no value - then you are only concerned with observation, that is, to observe. So we have to understand the whole question of what is observation. You are following all this? We started out by enquiring if there is a different kind of energy. I am sorry we must go back to it so that it is in your mind -not memory - then you can read a book and repeat to yourself, that is nothing. So we are concerned, or enquiring into energy. We know the energy of thought is mechanistic, a process of friction, because thought in its very nature is fragmentary, thought is never the whole, therefore it is a fragment. And we have said, is there a different kind of energy altogether? And we are investigating that. And enquiring into that you see the whole movement of desire. Desire is the state of wanting something, longing for something. And that desire is a movement of thought as time and measure. "I had this, I must have more". And we said, in the understanding of fear, the root of fear may be time as movement. That may be the root of it. And if you go into it you will see that it is the root of it, not may be. That is the actual fact. Then is it possible for the mind to be totally free of fear? That is, the brain which has accumulated knowledge and can only function effectively when there is complete security - right? And that security may be in some neurotic activity, in some belief, in the belief that you are the great nation, in the belief of dozens and dozens of things - all belief is neurotic, obviously, because it is not actual. So the brain can only function effectively, sanely, rationally, when it feels completely secure, and fear does not give it security. And to be free of that fear we say, analysis is necessary. And we see that analysis does not solve fear. So when you have an insight into the process of analysis, you stop analysing - right? And then there is only the question of observation, seeing. If you don't analyse, what are you to do? You can only look. And it is very important to find out how to look. What does it mean to look? What does it mean to look at this question of desire as movement in time and measure? How do you see it? You are following this? Do you see it as an idea? As a formula because you have heard the speaker talking about it, therefore abstract what you hear into an idea and pursue the idea, which is still away from fear. I don't know if you see this. So when you observe it is very important to find out how you observe. Can you observe your fear without the movement of escaping, suppressing, rationalizing, or giving it a name, which is quite complex? That is, can you look at fear, your fear of not having a job tomorrow, of not being loved, a dozen forms of fear, can you look at it without naming, without the observer who is different from that which is observed, because the observer is the observed? I don't know if you follow all this? So the observer is fear, not, he is observing fear. Is this getting all too much? So can you observe without the observer - the observer being the past? Then is there fear? You follow? We have the energy to look at something as an observer. I look at you and say you are a Christian, a Hindu, Buddhist, whatever you are, I look at you saying, "I don't like you", or "I like you". If you believe in the same thing as I believe you are my friend. If I don't believe the same thing as you do you are my enemy. So I am always looking at you or another - not I, I don't, thank god - can you look at another without all these movements of thought, of remembrances, of hope, all that, just look at yourself, look at that fear which is the root of time? Then is there fear at all? You understand? You will find this out only if you test it, if you work at it, not just play with it. Then there is the other form of desire, which not only creates fear but also pleasure. Desire is a form of pleasure. Pleasure is different from joy, from enjoyment. Pleasure you can cultivate, which the modern world is doing, both sexually, in every form of cultural encouragement, pleasure, tremendous pleasure and the pursuit of pleasure. And therefore in the very pursuit of pleasure there must be fear also, because they are the two sides of the same coin. And joy you cannot invite. If it happens then thought takes charge of it and remembers it and pursues that joy which you have had a year ago, or yesterday, which becomes pleasure. And when there is enjoyment - seeing a beautiful sunset, a lovely tree or a deep shadow of a lake - then that enjoyment is registered in the brain as memory and the pursuit of that memory as pleasure. Do you follow? There is fear, pleasure, joy and enjoyment. And is it possible - this is a much more complex problem - is it possible to observe the sunset, the beauty of a person, the lovely shape of an old ancient tree in a solitary field, the enjoyment of it, the beauty of it, and observe it without registering it in the brain, which then becomes memory, and the pursuit of that tomorrow? Do you follow? That is, to see something beautiful and end it, not carry it. So there is this problem of fear, pleasure, and also there is another principle in man: that is the principle of fear, the principle of pleasure, and suffering. Is there an end to suffering? We want suffering to end physically, so we take drugs, and do all kinds of yoga tricks and all that. But we have never been able to solve this question of suffering, human suffering, not only of a particular human being but the whole of humanity suffering. There is your suffering and millions and millions of people in the world suffer, through war, through starvation, through brutality, through violence, through bombs, and can that suffering in you as a human being end? Because if it comes to an end in you, as your consciousness is the consciousness of the world, because your consciousness is the consciousness of every other human being -you may have different peripheral behaviour but basically, deeply, your consciousness is the consciousness of every other human being in the world, they suffer, they have pleasure, they have fear, they are ambitious - you follow - all that is your consciousness. So you are the world. And if you are completely free of fear you affect the consciousness of the world. You understand how extraordinarily important it is that we human beings change, fundamentally, because that will affect the consciousness of every human being. That Hitler has done, Stalin affected all the consciousness of the world, what the priests have achieved in the name of somebody, it has affected the world. So if you, as a human being, radically transform yourself, be free of fear you will naturally affect the consciousness of the world. Similarly if there is a freedom from suffering, because when there is freedom from suffering there is compassion, not before. You can talk about it, write books about it, discuss what compassion is, but the ending of sorrow is the beginning of compassion. And can your human mind, which has put up with suffering, endless suffering, having their children killed in wars, suffering, and willing to accept further suffering by future wars. Suffering through education - modern education is to achieve a certain technological state and nothing else and that brings great sorrow. So compassion, which is love, can only come when you understand fully the depth of suffering and the ending of suffering. And can that suffering end - not in somebody else, in you? The Christians have made a parody of suffering - sorry to use that word - but it is actually so. The Hindus have made it into an intellectual affair, that what you have done in a past life, you are paying for in the present life, and for the future there will be happiness for you if you behave properly now. But they never behave properly now. So they carry on with this belief which is utterly meaningless. But if a man who is serious, who is concerned with compassion, what it means to love, because without that you can do what you like, build all the skyscrapers, have a marvellous economic world and social behaviour and all that, but without that life becomes a desert. So to understand what it means, or to live with compassion, you must understand what suffering is. Is suffering apart from the physical pain, physical disease, physical accident, which generally affects the mind, distorts the mind? If you have had physical pain for some time it twists your mind, and to be aware that the physical pain cannot touch the mind requires tremendous inward awareness. And then there is the suffering apart from the physical, there is suffering of every kind, suffering in loneliness, suffering when there is no love and you are not loved, the longing for you to be loved and never finding it satisfactory, because we make love into something to be satisfied, we want love to be gratified; and suffering because there is death, suffering because there is never a moment of complete wholeness, a complete sense of totality, but always living in fragmentation, which is contradiction, strife, confusion, misery. And to escape from that we go to temples, drugs and various forms of entertainment, religious and non-religious, group therapy, and individual therapy. You know all those tricks we play upon ourselves and upon others, if you are clever enough to play tricks upon others. So there is this immense suffering brought by man against man. We bring suffering to all the animals, we kill them, we eat them, we have destroyed species after species because our love is fragmented: we love god and kill human beings. So there is this problem: can that end? Can suffering totally end so that there is complete and whole compassion? Because suffering means, the root meaning of that is to have passion, not the Christian passion, passion, not lust, that is too cheap, that is very easy, but to have compassion, which means passion for all, for all things, and that can only come when there is total freedom from suffering. You know it is a very complex problem, like everything, like fear, pleasure and suffering, they are all interrelated, and to go into it and see whether the mind, which includes the brain can ever be free completely of all psychological suffering, inward suffering. If we don't understand that and are not free we will bring suffering to others, as we have done - though you believe in god, in Christ, in Buddha, in all kinds of beliefs, you have killed men generation after generation. You understand what we do, what our politicians do in India, and here. So what is suffering? And why is it that human beings who think themselves extraordinarily alive and intelligent, why have they allowed themselves to suffer? Do you understand? There is the suffering when there is jealousy - jealousy is a form of suffering, a form of hate, not only jealousy of those who have achieved something in this world, or supposedly achieved in another world, envy is part of our structure, part of our nature, which is to compare ourselves with somebody else, and can you live without comparison? We think without comparison we shall not evolve, we shall not grow, we shall not be somebody. But have you ever tried to live really, actually without comparing yourself with anybody? You have read the lives of saints, etc., etc., and if you are inclined that way, as you get older, you want to become like that, not when you are young, you spit on all that; but as you are approaching the grave you wake up. So there are different forms of suffering and can you look at it, observe it, without trying to escape from it, just remain solidly with that thing? When my wife - I am not married - when my wife runs away from me, or looks at another man because the wedding has by law said she belongs to me and I hold her - stupid stuff all this -and when she moves away from me I am jealous because I possess. In possession I feel satisfied, I feel safe. And also it is good to be possessed, that also gives satisfaction. And that jealousy, that envy, that hatred, can you look at it without any movement of thought and remain with it? You understand what I am saying? Jealousy is a reaction, a reaction which has been named through memory as jealousy, and I have been educated to run away from it, to rationalize it, or to indulge in it, and hate, anger and all the rest of it. But without doing any of that can my mind solidly remain with it without any movement? You understand what I am saying? Do it and you will see what happens In the same way when you suffer, psychologically, to remain with it completely without a single movement of thought. Then you will see out of that suffering comes that strange thing called passion. And if you have no passion of that kind you cannot be creative. So out of that suffering comes compassion. And that energy is totally different from the mechanistic energy of thought -right? BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST PUBLIC DIALOGUE 9TH SEPTEMBER 1975 This is a dialogue between two friends, talking over their problems, who are concerned with not only their own personal affairs, but also with what is happening in the world. Being serious these two friends have the urge to transform themselves and see what they can do about the world and all the misery and confusion that is going on. So if we could this morning spend some time together having a friendly conversation, not trying to be clever or trying to oppose one opinion against another opinion or belief or conclusion, but together examine earnestly and deeply some of the problems that one has. And so communication becomes rather important. And any one question is not only personal but universal. So if that is understood then what shall we talk over together this morning? Q: The compilation of your biography has caused much confusion and quite a lot of questions. I have boiled them down to a few. May I at least hand them over to you? K: Do you want to discuss the Biography, written by Mary Lutyens - do you want to go into that? Q: No. K: Thank god! Q: Briefly and then finish with it. Q: I would propose that you go into the question of correct and incorrect thinking as that is a problem. Both kinds of thought, or thinking processes are mechanical processes. K: I see. Now wait a minute. Have many of you read the Biography? Some of you. I was just looking at it this morning. Most of it I have forgotten, and if you want to talk over the questions that Anneka Korndoffer has put, shall we do that briefly? Basically the question is: what is the relationship between the present K and the former K? I should think very little. The whole question is - if you want to go into it very deeply - how was it that boy who was found there, discovered as it was called, how was it that he was not conditioned at all from the beginning, though he was brought up among a very orthodox traditional Brahmin family with their superstitions, arrogance and extraordinary religious sense of morality and so on? Why wasn't he conditioned then? And also during all those periods of the Masters, Initiations and so on and so on and so on - if you have read any of them - why wasn't he conditioned and what is the relationship between that person and the present person? Right? Are you really interested in all this? Audience: Yes. K: I am not. The past is dead buried and gone. I don't know how to tackle this. One of the questions is: do the Masters as they are explained, not only in the Theosophical world, but in the Hindu tradition and the Tibetan tradition maintains that there is a Bodhisattva - do you understand all this? And that he manifests himself rarely and that is called in Sanskrit, Avatar, which means manifestation. And this boy was discovered and prepared for that manifestation. And he went through all kinds of things. And one question that may be asked: must others go through the same process? Christopher Columbus discovered America with sailing boats, dangerous seas and so on. And must we go through all that to go to America? You understand my question? It is much simpler to go by air. That is one question. What is relevant and irrelevant in all this is the whole structure in which he was brought up is totally irrelevant, and what is relevant is the present teachings, and nothing else. So if you are interested in wanting to find out the reality of the whole past - and I don't know why you should be interested in it - if you are and if the idea that the Bodhisattva - you know this is a very ancient tradition that there is a state of consciousness, let us put it that way, which is the essence of compassion. And when the world is in chaos that essence of compassion manifests itself. That is the whole idea behind the Avatar and behind the Bodhisattva. And there are various gradations in all that - Initiations, various Masters and so on. And also the idea when he manifests all the others keep quiet. You understand? And he, that essence of compassion, has manifested at other times. So what is important in all this is, if one may talk about it briefly: can the mind passing through all kinds of experiences, either imagined or real - because truth has nothing to do with experience, one cannot possibly experience truth, it is there, you can't experience it - but going through all those various imagined or illusory or real states has not left the mind conditioned. The question is: can the mind be unconditioned always - not only in childhood and therefore gradually get rid of conditioning, but start unconditioned? I wonder if you understand this question. That is the underlying problem or issue in these questions. So as we said, all that is irrelevant. I do not know if you know anything about the ancient tradition of India and Tibet and therefore China and Japan at one time, that the awakening of certain energy, called Kundalini, if you are interested in all this. And there are now all over America, and in Europe, various groups trying to awaken their little energy called Kundalini. You have heard about all this, haven't you? And there are all kinds of groups practising it. I saw one group on a television where a man is teaching them how to awaken Kundalini, that energy, and making all kinds of tricks and all kinds of words and gestures, which all become so utterly meaningless and absurd. And there is apparently such an awakening, which I won't go into because it is much too complex and probably is not necessary or relevant. So I think I have answered this question, haven't I? The other question which was put: is there a non-mechanistic activity? Is there a movement - movement means time - is there a state of mind, active which is not only not mechanical but not in the field of time? That is what the question raised involves. Do you want to discuss that, or something else? Somebody also put a question on a paper which was sent: what does it mean to be aware? Is awareness different from attention? Is awareness to be practised systematically, or does it come about naturally? That is the question. Are there any other questions? Q: Would you go into the question of what it is to find one's true will? K: Finding out one's true will. What is one's true will. Q: What is the difference between denial and suppression? Q: I lose all my awareness when I am alone. K: Can we talk over together awareness, begin with that and explore the whole thing, including the will of one's own destiny, the destiny, the will in a certain direction? (Is that what you mean sir?) Q: Well I am not sure. Q: What about earnestness and effort? K: We are now discussing awareness. Does choice indicate freedom? Please this a discussion. I chose to belong to this society, or that society, to that cult, or another, to a particular religion or not, I chose a particular job - choice. Does choice indicate freedom? Or freedom denies choice? Please let is talk over together this. Q: Freedom means no choice is needed. K: But we chose and we think because we have the capacity to choose that we have freedom. I chose between the Liberal Party and the Communist Party, or the Conservative Party. And in choosing I feel I am free. Or I chose one particular form of guru or another, and that gives me a feeling that I am free. So does choice lead to awareness? Q: No. K: Go slowly. Q: Choice is the expression of conditioning, is it not? K: That is what I want to find out. Q: It seems to me that one either reacts out of habit, or one responds without thinking. K: We will come to that. We will go into what does it mean to respond without choice. We are used to choosing. That is our conditioning. Q: Like and dislike. K: All that is implied in choice. I chose you as my friend, I deny my friendship to another and so on and so on and so on. I want to find out, one wants to find out if awareness includes choice. Or is awareness a state of mind, a state of observation in which there is no choice whatsoever? Is that possible? One is educated from childhood to choose, and that is our tradition, that is our habit, that is our mechanical, instinctive reaction. And we think because I chose there is freedom. And what does awareness mean? To be aware? It implies, doesn't it, not only physiological sensitivity, physical sensory sensitivity, but also a sensitivity to my environment, to nature, sensitivity to other people's reactions, and sensitivity to my own reactions - not I am sensitive and to every other person I am not sensitive. That is not sensitivity. So awareness implies, doesn't it, a total sensitivity - to colour, to nature, to all my reactions, how I respond to others - all that implies awareness, doesn't? I am aware of this tent, the shape of it and so on and so on and so on. One is aware of nature, the world of nature, the trees, the beauty of trees, the silence of the trees, you know the shape and the beauty and the depth, and the solitude of trees. And one is aware also of one's relationship to others, intimate and not intimate. Whether in that awareness there is any kind of choice. That is a total awareness, not only neurologically, physiologically but psychologically, to everything around me, to the influences, to all the noise and so on and so on. Is one so aware - not only to the beliefs of one's own but of others, the opinions, judgements, evaluations, the conclusions? All that is implied -otherwise one is not aware. And can you practise awareness? By going to a school, college, or going to a place where there is a guru who will teach me to be aware, is that awareness? Which is, is sensitivity to be cultivated through practise? Come on sirs. Q: That becomes selfishness. K: Yes, that is unless there is total sensitivity, awareness merely then becomes concentration on oneself. Q: Which excludes awareness. K: Yes, that is right. So there are so many schools, so many gurus, so many ashramas, retreats, where this thing is practised. Q: When it is practised it is just the old trick again. K: This is so obvious. One goes to India, or to Japan to learn what it means to be aware. The Zen practice, you know all that. Or is awareness a movement of constant observation - not only what I feel, what I think, but also what other people are saying about me, if they say it in front of me, to listen, and to be aware of nature, of what is going on in the world? That is the total awareness. Obviously it can't be practised. Q: It is a non-movement. K: No, it is movement in the sense alive. Q: It is a participation. K: Participation implies action. If there is action through choice, that is one kind of action. If there is an action of total awareness, that is a totally different kind of action, obviously. So is one so aware? Or we indulge in words of being aware? You understand? To be aware of the people around one, the colour, their attitudes, their walk, the way they eat, the way they think - you know aware -without indulging in judgement. Q: Is it something to do with motive? If you have a motive... K: Of course. Motive comes into being when there is choice. That is implied. When I have a motive then the choice takes place. I chose you because I like you, or you flatter me, or you give me something or other. And the other doesn't, therefore there is choice and so on. So is this possible, this sense of total awareness? Q: Is there a degree of awareness? K: Is there a degree of awareness. That is, is awareness a process of time? Q: Can one man be more aware then another? K: Why should I enquire if you are more aware than I am? Just a minute, let us go into it. Why this comparison? Is it not also part of our education, our social conditioning which says we must compare to progress? - compare one musician against another, one painter and so on and so on. And we think by comparing we begin to understand. Comparing means measurement, which means time, thought, and is it possible to live without comparing at all? You understand? One is brought up, educated, in schools, colleges, and universities to compare oneself with A who is much cleverer than myself and try to reach his level. This constant measurement, this constant comparison, and therefore constant imitation, which is mechanical. So can we find out for ourselves whether it is possible to be totally sensitive and therefore aware? Q: Can you know if you are totally aware or not? K: Can you know if you are aware or not. Q: Totally aware. K: Totally. Q: Can we think our thoughts? Can we be aware of our awareness? K: No. Can we be aware of our awareness? Q: You can be aware when you are not aware. K: Watch it in yourself. It becomes speculative, verbal, but when you are aware, do you know you are aware? Q: No. K: Find out, Test it madame, test it. Do you know when you are happy? The moment you are aware that you are happy it is no longer happiness. Q: You know when you have got a pain. K: Wait. That is a different matter. When I have got pain I am aware that I have got pain and I act, do something about it. That is one part of being aware, unless I am paralysed totally, then I am not aware that I have pain. Most people are in other directions. So we are asking ourselves, not asking somebody else to tell me I am aware, I am asking, one is asking oneself if there is that quality of awareness? Does one watch the sky - you follow? - the evening stars, the moon, , the birds, and people's reactions, you know, the whole of it? And what is the difference between that awareness and attention? In awareness is there a centre from which you are aware? You understand? When I say, I am aware, then from a centre I move, I respond to nature, from a centre I respond to my friends, to my wife, husband or whatever it is - right? If there is a centre from which I respond - that centre being my prejudices, my conditioning, my desires, my fears and all the rest of it - then in that awareness is there a centre? You follow? So in attention there is no centre at all, obviously. Now please listen to this for two minutes. You are now listening to what is being said, and to what is being said you are giving total attention. That means you are not comparing, you do not say, I already know what you are going to say, or I have read what you have said, etc., etc. All that is gone, you are completely attentive and therefore there is no centre and that attention has no border. I don't know if you haven't noticed. So by being aware one discovers one responds from a centre, from a prejudice, from a conclusion, from a belief, from a conditioning, which is the centre. And from that centre you react, you respond. And when there is an awareness of that centre, that centre yields and in that there is a total attention. I wonder if you understand this? And this you cannot practise. It would be too childish, that becomes mechanical. So we go to the next question, which is: is there an activity which is non-mechanistic? That means, is there a part of the brain which is non-mechanical. Do you want to go into this. No, no, please, this isn't a game. First of all one has to go into the question of what is a mechanical mind - right? Is the brain, which has evolved through millenia, is that totally mechanical? Or is there a part of the brain which is not mechanical, which has never been touched by the machine of evolution? I wonder if you see. Q: What do you mean by mechanical? K: We are going to discuss that sir. Part of this mechanical process is functioning within the field of conditioning. That is, when I act according to a pattern - Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, whatever it is - according to a pattern set by society, by influence, by my reading, and accept that pattern or a belief and so on, then that is part of the mechanical process. The other part of the mechanical process is, having had experiences of innumerable kinds which have left memories, and act according to those memories, that is mechanical - like a computer, which is purely mechanical. Now they are trying to prove it is not so mechanical, but let's leave that alone for the moment. Then mechanical action is, accepting tradition and following tradition. One of the aspects of that tradition is acceptance and obedience to a government, to priests, you know, obedience. And the mechanical part of the brain is following consciously or unconsciously a line set by thought as the goal and purpose. All that and more is mechanical. And we live that way. Q: Is thought of itself mechanical? K: Of course. That is the whole point. So one has discovered for oneself, not told by others as then that becomes mechanical. If one discovers for oneself how mechanically our thinking, our feeling, our attitudes, our opinions are, all that, if one is aware of that, which means thought is invariably mechanistic - thought being the response of memory, experience, knowledge, which is the past. And responding according to that pattern of the past is mechanistic, which is thought. Right? Q: All thought? K: All thought, of course. Whether noble thought, ignoble thought, sexual thought or technological thought, it is all thought. Q: Part of the great genius also? K: Absolutely, Wait, wait we must go into the question of what is a genius. No, we won't go into that yet. Q: So if all thought is mechanical, the expression which you often use 'clear thinking' seems to be a contradiction. K: No, no. Clear thinking is to see clearly, obviously, clear thinking is to think clearly, objectively sanely, rationally, wholly. Q: It is still thought. K: It is still thought. Wait, of course it is. Q: So what is the use of it? K: What is the use of clear thought. If there was clear thought I wouldn't belong to any political party. I might create a global party, because obviously - that is another matter. Q: Can we get back to your question as to whether there is a part of the brain which is untouched by conditioning? K: That's right sir. To go into this requires one to be very careful and hesitant - you know, one has to enquire into this - not say "Yes, there is", or not. "I have experienced a state where there is no mechanism" - that is all too silly. But to really enquire and find out you need a great deal of subtlety, great attentive quality to go step by step into it, not jump. So we say most of our lives are mechanistic. The pursuit of pleasure is mechanistic - right? But we are pursuing pleasure. Now how will we find out if there is a part of the brain that is not conditioned? How will you find out? This is a very, very serious question, it is not for sentimentalists, or romantic people, or emotional people, this requires very clear thinking. And when you think very clearly you see the limitation of thinking. Q: Are we going to look very clearly at the barriers which interfere with an unconditioned mind? K: No. We are trying to understand, or explore together the mechanistic mind first. Without understanding the totality of that, you can't find out the other. We have asked the question: is there a part of the brain, part of our total mind in which is included the brain, emotions, neurological responses, the total brain, is that completely mechanistic? And when I put that question to myself I might imagine that it is not, because I want the other, therefore I deceive myself. I pretend that I have got the other. So I must completely understand the movement of desire. You follow all this? Not suppress it, but understand it, have an insight in this -which means fear, time and all that we talked about the day before yesterday. So we are now enquiring: is our total activity mechanistic? That means am I, or you, are we, or is one clinging to memories? - the Hitlarian memories and all that, the memories of various pleasurable and painful experiences, the memories of sexual fulfilment and the pleasures and so on. That is, is one living in the past? Q: Always I am. K: Of course! So all that you are is the past, which is mechanistic. So knowledge is mechanistic. I wonder if you see this? Q: Why is it so difficult to see this? K: Because we are not aware of our inward responses, or aware of what actually is going on within oneself - not imagine what is going on, or speculate about what is going on, or repeat what is going on because we have been told by somebody else, but actually being aware. Q: Aren't we guided to awareness by experience? K: No. Now wait a minute. What do you mean by experience? The word itself means to go through - to go through, finish, not retain. You have said something that hurts me. That has left a mark on the brain and when I meet you that memory responds. Obviously. And is it possible when you hurt me, say something cruel, violent, or justified, to observe it and not register it. You understand? Try it sir. You try it, test it out. Q: It is very difficult because the memory has already been hurt sir, we never forget it. K: Don't forget. Do go into this. From childhood we are hurt, which is happening to everybody, in school, at home, at college, in universities, the whole society is a process of hurting others. One has been hurt and one lives in that, consciously, or unconsciously. So there are two problems involved: the past hurt retained in the brain, and not to be hurt. That which has given you and the memory of hurts, and never to be hurt. Now is that possible? Q: If you are not there. K: Go into it sir, go into it. You will discover it for yourself and find out. That is, you have been hurt. Q: The image of myself... K: Go into it slowly. What is hurt? The image that you have built about yourself, that has been hurt. Why do you have an image about yourself? Because that is the tradition, part of our education, part of our social reactions. There is an image about myself and there is an image about you in relation to my image. So I have got half a dozen images and more. And that image about myself has been hurt. You call me a fool and I shrink, and it has been hurt. Now how am I to dissolve that hurt and not be hurt in the future, tomorrow, or the next moment? You follow the question? There are two problems involved in this. One, I have been hurt and that creates a great deal of neurotic activity, resistance, self protection, fear, all that is involved in the past hurt; and also how not to be hurt any more - right? Q: One has to be totally involved. K: Go into it sir. Look at it and you will find out. You have been hurt haven't you - I am not talking to you sir. You have been hurt haven't you, and you resist, you are afraid of being hurt more. So you build a wall round yourself, isolate yourself, and the extreme form of that isolation is total withdrawal from all relationship. And you build a wall and you remain in that but you have to live, you have to act. So you are always acting from a centre that is hurt and therefore neurotically acting - right? You can see this happening in the world, in oneself. And how are those hurts to be totally dissolved and not leave a mark, and also in the future not to be hurt at all? Right, the question is clear, is it? Now how do you approach this question: how to dissolve the hurts and be concerned with that, or how not to be hurt at all? Which is the question you put to yourself? Put to yourself. Now which do you want answered? To dissolve all the hurts, or no more hurts. You understand? Which is it that comes to you naturally? Q: No more hurts. K: Don't guess. If you say "I will find out if it is possible not to be hurt at all" - then you will have to solve the problem of past hurts, won't you? I don't know if you see that. But if you say, "I will try to dissolve my past hurts", you are still living with hurts. I wonder if you see - right? So if you see that: if it is possible to have no hurt, then you have solved the past hurts. Shall we go on? So the question is: is it possible not be hurt? Which means is it possible not to have an image about yourself? Q: If we see that image is false... K: No false or truth. Don't - you see you are already operating in the field of thought. So is it possible not to have an image at all about yourself, or about another, naturally? And if there is no image, isn't that true freedom? You see it? We are doing it slowly. Q: Sir, if what happens to you is of no importance to you, then it doesn't matter, and it won't affect you and it won't hurt you. If you have managed to get rid of your self importance... K: Yes, sir. The gentleman says if you can get rid of your self importance, your arrogance, your vanity, your etc., etc. then you won't be hurt. But how am I to get rid of all that garbage which I have collected? Q: I think you can get rid of it by being entirely aware of the relationship between yourself and your physical body and your thinking. How you control your physical body and... K: I don't want to control anything, my body, my mind, my emotions. That is the traditional, mechanistic response. Sorry! Please go into this a little bit and you will see. First of all the idea of getting rid of an image implies there is an entity who is different from the image, and therefore he can then kick the image. But is the image different from the entity who says, I must get rid of it? Therefore there is no control. Therefore when you see that you are no longer functioning mechanistically. Q: Surely by destroying one image we are immediately building another one? K: We are going to find out if it is possible to be free of all images, not only the present one but the future ones. Now why does the mind create an image about itself? Come on sirs. Why do I create an image about myself? I say I am a Christian, that is an image. I belief in the Saviour, in Christ, in all the rituals, you know, all that, why? Because that is my conditioning. Go to India and they say "What are you talking about, Christ? I have got my own gods, as good as yours, if not better." So that is his conditioning. If I am born in Russia and educated there I say "I believe in neither. The State is my god and Marx is the first prophet" and so on and so on and so on. So the image formation is brought about through propaganda, conditioning, tradition - right? Q: Sir, is that related to the fact that out of fear one behaves in a certain way which is not natural for one to behave, and therefore one is not being oneself? And that is making the image that you are talking about. K: The image is what we call oneself. I must express myself. I must fulfil myself - myself is the image according to the environment and culture in which I have been born. I believe there was a tribe in America, among the Red Indians where anybody who had an image about himself was killed, was liquidated. That lead to ambition and all the rest of it. I wonder what would happen if they did it to all of us. It would be a lovely world, wouldn't it? So: is it possible not to create images at all? That is, I know, I am aware that I have an image, brought about through culture, through propaganda, tradition, family, you follow, the whole pressure. Q: We cling to the known. K: That is the known, tradition is the known. And my mind is afraid to let that known go, the image go, because the moment it lets it go it might lose a profitable position in society, might lose status, might lose a certain relationship and so on and so on, so it is frightened, and yet holds to that image. The image is merely words, it has no reality. It is a series of words, a series of responses to those words, a series of beliefs which are words - I believe in Christ. Or in Krishna, or whatever they believe in in India, or Marx. They are just words ideologically clothed. And if I am not a slave to words then I begin to lose the image. I wonder if you see how deeply rooted words have become significant. Q: If one is listening to what you say and realize that one has an image about oneself, and that there is a large discrepancy between the image one has of oneself and the ideal of freedom... K: It is not an ideal. Q: Freedom itself. Then knowing that there is a discrepancy can one think of freedom knowing that it is just an idea? K: That is why sir - is freedom an abstraction, a word in abstraction? Or a reality? Q: It is free of relationship, is it not? K: No sir, please we are jumping from one thing to another. Let us go step by step. We began by asking whether there is any part of the brain, which means any part of the total entity, that is not conditioned? We said conditioning means the image forming - the image that gets hurt and the image that protects itself from being hurt. And we said there is only freedom, the actuality of that state, not the word, not the abstraction, but the actuality of that word when there is no image which is freedom. When I am not a Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Communist, Socialist - you follow? - I have no label, and therefore no label inside. I am a global politician -sorry! Now is it possible not to have an image at all? And how does that come about? Q: Isn't it all to do with the activity... K: No sir. Look. Please we come to a point and go off after something else. I want to find out, one wants to find out whether it is possible to live in this world without a single image. Q: When there is no observer there is nothing observed and yet one comes across something in this silence. K: Madame, is this an actual fact that there is no observer in your life, not occasionally? Please, please - we go off into something. Is it possible to be free of the image that society, environment, culture, education has built in one? Because one is all that - right? You are the result of your environment, of your culture, of your knowledge, of your education, of your technological job, of your pleasure, you are all that. Q: What happens to one's sense of orientation without a centre? K: All that comes a little later, please. Q: If you are aware of your conditioning does that free you? K: Now are you actually, not theoretically or in abstraction, actually aware that you are conditioned this way, therefore you have got an image? Q: If you don't have the image then you don't know what your place is. K: Wait, listen to that carefully. If you have no image, you have no place in the world. Which means if you have no image you are insecure. Go step by step. Now are you, having a place in the world, secure? Q: No. K: Be actual. Q: Sir when you see that the image that you have built, you think you are attached to, when you see that it is just a load of words... K: So you are finding security in a word, and therefore it is not a security at all. You understand sir? We have lived in words and made those words something fantastically real. So if you are seeking security, it is not in an image, it is not in your environment, in your culture. I want security, I must have security, that is essential, food, clothes, and shelter. I must have it otherwise I can't function. Now that is denied totally when I belong to small groups - right? When I say I am a German, or a Russian, or an Englishman, I deny complete security. That is, I deny security because the words, the labels have become important, not security. I wonder if you see? Right, we meet this? This is what is actually happening, the Arab and Israel, both want security - right? And both are accepting words and all the rest of it. Now we come to the point: is it possible to live in this world, not go off into some fantastic realm or illusion, or monasteries and all the rest of it, live in this world without a single image and be totally secure? Q: How can we be secure in a sick society? K: I am going to go into this madame, I'll show it to you. Q: All right. I am going to hold on to it. K: All right you have got your security, then hold on to your security. Please go with me. I'll show you that there is complete security, absolute security, not in images. Q: To be totally aware every moment, then your conditioning does not exist. K: Not, if you are aware. Are you aware that you have an image and that image has been formed by the culture, society and all the rest of it? Are you aware of that image? And you discover that image in relationship, don't you? How you react in relationship with each other. When you tell me something ugly and I get hurt, that is, the image is hurt, the image is me, carefully put together by words. I am a Christian. I believe in this. I do not believe in that. This is my opinion - you follow? Now we are asking ourselves whether it is possible to be free of images? That means sir - listen to it carefully - that means when you say something to me that is vulgar, hurting, at that moment to be totally aware of what you are saying and how I am responding. Totally aware, not partially - I like what you said about me, it is pleasant and I hold on to that, and what somebody else says is unpleasant and I get hurt. But to be totally aware of both, the pleasurable image which I have and the unpleasurable image which has been put together. To be aware totally at the moment of the reaction to your insult or praise. At that moment you don't then form an image. There is no recording in the brain of the hurt, of the insult or the flattery, therefore there is no image. That requires tremendous attention at the moment. Which demands a great inward perception, you understand sir -which is only possible when you have looked at it, watched it, you have worked. You don't just say, "Well tell me all about it. I want to be comfortable." Q: Who watches all this? K: Now who watches all this. If there is a watcher then the image is continuous. If there is no watcher there is no image. Obviously. So: in that state of attention both the hurt and the flattery, or the pleasant things, are both observed, not reacted to. Both observed and you can only observe when there is no observer, who is the past. It is the past observer that gets hurt. There is only observation when there is flattery and insult, then it is finished. And that is real freedom. Now follow it. In this world, if I have no image, as you say, I shall not be secure. One has found security in things, in a house, in a property, in a bank account, that is what we call security. And you have also found security in belief. I believe - if I am a Catholic living in Italy - I believe in that it is much safer to believe what ten thousand people believe. There I have a place. And when that belief is questioned I resist. And Protestantism grew out of that and so on and so on. Now can there be a total awareness of all this? So my mind is tremendously active you understand? Not say, "I must be aware", "I must learn how to be" - play games. It requires that you are tremendously active, the brain is alive. Then we can move from that to find out if there is in the brain a part that has not been conditioned at all, which is part of the brain which is non-mechanistic. I am putting a false question, I don't know if you see that. Do see it quick; do see it. Please just listen for two minutes, I am on fire, sorry, excuse me. If there is no image which is mechanistic, and there is freedom from that image, then there is no part of the brain that has been conditioned. Full stop. You understand? Then my whole brain is unconditioned. Q: It is on fire! K: Yes, therefore it is non-mechanistic and that has got a totally different kind of energy. Not the mechanistic energy - right? I wonder if you see this. Please don't make an abstraction of it because then it becomes words. But if you see this, that your brain has been conditioned through centuries, saying survival is only possible if you have an image which is created by the circle in which you live, and that circle gives you complete security. We have accepted that as tradition, and we live in that way. I am an Englishman - you follow - I am better than anybody else, or a Frenchman or whatever it is. Now my brain is conditioned, I don't know whether it is whole or part, I only know that it is conditioned. There is no enquiry into the unconditioned state until the conditioning is non-existent. So my whole enquiry is to find out whether the mind can be unconditioned, not jump into the other because that is too silly. So I am conditioned by belief, by education, by the culture in which I have lived, by everything, and to be totally aware of that, not discard it, not suppress it, not control it, but to be aware of it. Then you will find if you have gone that far there is security only in being nothing. Q: What about images in relationship? Don't belong to a community. I quite agree with you. You don't want any psychological image but you must have a physical image for your physical survival. And even if you want to drop it you can't because the other one puts it on you. K: Sir, if I want to survive physically, what is preventing it? All the psychological barriers which man has created - right? So remove all those psychological barriers, you have complete security. Q: No, because the other one puts it on you, not yourself. K: Nobody can put you into prison. Q: They kill you. K: Then they kill you, all right. Then you will find out how to meet death - not imagine what you are going to feel when you die, which is another image. Oh, I don't know if you see all this. So nobody can put you psychologically into prison. You are already there. We are pointing out that it is only possible to be totally free of images, which is the result of our conditioning. And one of the questions about the biography is that whole point: how was one, that young boy, or whatever he was, how was he not conditioned right through? I won't go into that because it is a very complex problem, I will not go into that. If one is aware of one's own conditioning then the whole thing becomes very simple. Then genius is something entirely different. That leaves the question of what is creation - right sir? BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND PUBLIC DIALOGUE 11TH SEPTEMBER 1975 K: What shall we talk over this morning together? Q: Continue with the question about security and being nothing. Q: You were going to speak on what is creation and to say something about creative intelligence. Q: Is there any reality in the belief of reincarnation, and what is the nature and quality of the meditative mind? Q: The difference between denial and suppression of habit. Q: You were saying that for the mind to function sanely one must have great security, food and shelter. This seems logical. But it seems that in order to try and find a way of having this security one encounters the horrors and the difficulties which makes things so hard and impossible sometimes. What is the right action? K: I don't quite follow this. Q: How are we to live and have this basic security without taking part in all the horrors that are involved in this? K: Do we understand rightly that you are asking: what is the correct action in a world that is chaotic, insecure, where there is no security, one must have security and what is one to do? Is that the question? Are you quite sure? Q: I have a question that when I ask myself I always come up to a wall. I say, "I am the observer" and I would like to see the whole of the observer. I cannot see the whole of the observer because I can only see in fragments: so how is the observer to see the whole of the observer unless there is no observer? So how can the observer see the observer with no observer? K: How can one see the whole of the observer and can the observer watch himself as the observer? Is that the question? Q: When a situation occurs, what keeps one into the observingness that the observer is different from what is observed? It seems a lack of attention to the moment, at that point, but that attention to the point requires a tremendous vitality that we don't have. K: Have I understood the question rightly sir? We do not have enough energy to observe wholly. Is that it? Q: Yes. K: Now which of these questions shall we talk over together? Q: May I just ask a question? Can an act of will-power - I think you call it an act of friction - can this generate the vitality or the passion? K: Can will generate sufficient energy to see clearly. Would that be right? Q: Yes. Q: What happens to the brain and the process of thought during hypnosis? Is hypnosis a way of looking at one's thought process? K: Have you heard that question? Q: For medical reasons, we use hypnosis in medicine. What is the process of thought in that particular case? K: What is the process of thought when there is hypnosis. Is that it? Now wait a minute sirs: we have got so many questions. What shall we begin with? The observer? Q: Yes. K: The observer, and to see the whole of that of that observer one needs energy, and how is that energy to be derived, to be got. How is that energy to be acquired? And will that energy reveal the totality of the whole nature and structure of the observer? Should we discuss that? And what is the quality of the mind that has this meditative process and so on. Now wait a minute. How is one to observe the whole of something, psychologically? How is one to be aware of oneself totally? Can we begin with that? How am I, or we, or one to be wholly aware of oneself? Q: Surely one can only be aware. K: Yes sir. How is one, you or I, to be aware of the totality of our consciousness, with all its content - right? Would you like to discuss this? That is what was proposed. Is it possible to see the totality of one's own reactions, the motives, the fears, the anxieties, the sorrows, the pain, the totality of all that? Or must one see it in fragments, in layers? Shall we discuss that? How is one to be aware of the content of one's consciousness? Right, can we begin with that? What is consciousness? What do you think is consciousness? Under hypnosis as well as when one is not hypnotized. Most of us are hypnotised - by words, by propaganda, by tradition, by all the things that we believe in, and so on. We are hypnotized not only externally, by external influence, but also we have our own peculiar process of hypnotizing ourselves into believing something, or not believing, and so on and so on. All that - can one see the totality of one's consciousness? Come on sirs, let us enquire into this? Q: The observer cannot see. K: Don't let us say one can, one cannot, it is so, it is not so. Let's enquire. Q: One has the feeling one has to begin. K: We are going to begin sir. How shall I begin, from where shall I begin? To be aware of myself - myself being all the beliefs, the dogmas, the conclusions, the fears, the anxieties, the pain, the sorrow, the fear and the fear of death, and so on, the whole of that, where shall we begin to find out the content of this? You understand? Q: You just asked what consciousness was. K: We are going into that. Q: If one is going to observe, is it true that one has to stand outside the things that one is observing? K: Madame I am asking, if I may, how shall I begin to enquire into the whole structure of myself? If I am interested, if I am serious, where shall I begin? Q: Is the question "Who I am?" K: Enquire who I am, that becomes intellectual, verbal. Would you please follow this. I can only know myself, begin to know myself in my relationship to others - right? Do let's face that fact. I cannot know myself in abstraction. It would be rather a vain process to say to myself, "I am going to learn about myself". And then I can imagine all kinds of fantasies, illusions and so on. But whereas if I could observe what my reactions are in my relationship to another, then I begin to enquire. That is much closer, more accurate and revealing. Can we do that? That is, in my relationship with my wife, husband, friend, or boy, girl and so on, with my relationship to nature, with my relationship to the neighbour and so on, I discover the nature of myself. Right? Please, this is a dialogue, not a talk by me. So how do I observe my reactions in my relationship with another? Q: Each time I see something in a reaction about myself it becomes knowledge. K: I wonder if we are aware what takes place in our relationship with another. You all seem to be so vague about this matter. Q: When I am very interested in some relationship I notice that I can really observe. When I am angry in my relationship I see immediately that I really can't observe what is going on. K: Sir, you and I are related. You and I are related as friends, or husband, wife or this or that: what is our relationship? What do we mean by relationship? Q: When we seem to want something... K: Look at the word first, the meaning of the word. Q: I like to compare myself with the other. K: Sir we are asking, if I may, the meaning of the word itself, relationship. Q: Communication. Q: It means you are relating to that person. K: I am lost! When I say I am related to my wife, or to my husband, father, son, neighbour, what does that mean? Q: Care for the person, I care for the person. Q: The whole human race is one's brother. Q: I'd rather you told us. K: Ah! (Laughter). I am related to you, either in blood, same father and mother, or I am related to you economically, I am related to you sexually, socially, or I am related to you because we have both the same belief, the same ideal, the same purpose. Relationship means, does it not, I am enquiring please, I am not stating it, doesn't relationship mean to respond accurately. To be related, the meaning in the dictionary, says to respond -relationship comes from that word. Now how do I respond in my relationship to you, if you are my wife, husband and all the rest of it? Am I responding according to the image I have about you? And you are responding according to the image you have about me? Or are we both free of the images and therefore responding accurately? I don't know if you see. Q: Isn't it largely subconsciousness? K: We will go into that. First let us see what the word means in itself. Q: What do you mean by accurate? K: Accurate means care - the word accurate means to have great care. Therefore accurate, if you care for something you act accurately. If you care for your motor you must be very well acquainted with it, you must know all the mechanical processes of it. So accurate means infinite care. We are using that word in that sense: that when there is a relationship with another, either intimate, or distant, the response depends on the image you have about the other, or the image the other has about you; and when we act according to that image, that is we respond according to that image, it is inaccurate, it is not with complete care. Is that clear? Q: What is a love hate relationship? K: Love and hate relationship. Sir we are just beginning to enquire. We will come to that. Now I have an image about you and you have an image about me. That image has been put together through, it may be one day or it may be ten years, through pleasure, fear, nagging, domination, possession, various hurts, impatience and so on and so on. Now when we act or respond according to that image then that action, being incomplete, it is inaccurate, and therefore without care, which we generally call love. May we go on from there? Please, not verbally. Are you aware, is one aware that you have an image about yourself, about another? And having that image you respond according to the past, because the image has been put together but has become the past. Q: And also it is according to one's selfish desires. K: I said that, fear, desire, selfishness. Q: You can't think of another person without an image, so how can you write a letter? K: How quickly you want to resolve everything, don't you. First of all can we be aware that we have an image, not only about ourselves but about another? Q: The two images are in relation, images of the other are in relation with the image of yourself. K: So there is - you see what you are saying - there is a thing different from the image. Q: The image of the other is made from the image you have of yourself. K: That is what we said sir. Q: Sir would anything practical help? K: Sir this is the most practical thing if you listen to this. You want something practical, and the practical is to observe clearly what we are and act from there. Is one aware that one has an image about another? And is one aware that one has an image about oneself? Are you aware of that? This is a simple thing. I injure you, I hurt you, and you naturally have an image about me. I give you pleasure, and you have an image about me. And according to that hurt and pleasure you react; and that reaction, being fragmentary, must be inaccurate, not whole. This is simple. Can we go on from there? Now what do you do with the image you have built about another? I am conscious, I am aware that I have an image about myself, and I have an image about you, so I have got two images, the one that I have about myself and the other is about you. Am I conscious of this? Q: From moment to moment. K: Just look now, sir, not moment to moment. Now if I have an image why has this image been put together? And who is it that has put the image together? You understand the question? Why is it that there is an image and who is it that has put it there? Who is the creator of these images? Let us begin there. I have an image about you. How has that image been born? How has it come into being? Q: Is it a necessary imaginative process? - experience, imagination and previous images. Q: Lack of attention. K: How does it come? Not through lack of something, but how does come? You say through experience, through various incidents, through words. Q: Retaining it all as memory. K: Which is all the movement of thought, isn't it? No? So thought as movement, which is time, put this image, created this image. It does it because it wants to protect itself - right? Am I inventing or fabricating this, or is this actual? Q: Actual. K: Actual. That means 'what is'. Actually means 'what is'. Sorry I am not teaching you English! Q: It means that it then can see itself. K: No, no sir. You have an image about me, haven't you? Q: Well it is changing. K: Wait, wait, go slow. You have an image about me, haven't you, if you are honest, look into yourself, you see you have an image. How has that image been brought about? You have read something, you have listened to something, there is a reputation, a lot of talk about it, some articles in the papers and so on and so on. So all this has influenced the thought and out of that you have created an image. And you have an image, not only about yourself but about the other. So when you respond according to an image about the speaker you are responding inaccurately, in that there is no care. We said care implies attention, affection, accuracy; that means to act according to 'what is'. Now let's move from there. Q: Is not an image a thought? K: We said that sir, a thought. Q: Thought has created images and it seems to imply that thought has created thought so... K: Wait sir, we will get very far if we go slowly. So thought has built this image through time. It may be one day or fifty years. And I see in my relationship to another this image plays a tremendous part, if I become conscious, if I don't act mechanically, I become aware and see how extraordinarily vital this image is. Then my next question is: is it possible to be free of the image? I have the image as a Communist, believing in all kinds of ideas, or a Catholic - you follow? It is not just an image but this whole cultural, economic, social thing has built this image also. And I act according to that, there is a reaction according to that image. I think this is clear. May we go on from there? Now is one aware of it? Then one asks: is it necessary? If it is necessary one should keep it, one should have the image. If it is not necessary how is one to be free of it? Right? Now is it necessary? Q: Images form the whole chaos in the world where we live, so it is not necessary. K: He says this whole image making is bringing about chaos in the world - the image as a Hindu, as a Buddhist, as a Communist, as a Mao, as a Trotsky-ite, as a Catholic, as a Protestant, good god, you understand? Q: Aren't we making a lot of judgement? K: Are we making a lot of judgement? Q: In making an image there is a lot of judgement. K: But we are asking a little more. We are asking whether it is necessary to have these images? Q: No, we can be free of it. K: Wait. Is it necessary? First let us see. Q: No. K: Then if it is not necessary why do we keep it? Q: I have a feeling being what we are we can hardly help it. K: We are going to find out whether it is possible to be free of this image, and whether it is worthwhile to be free of this image, and what does it mean to be free of the image. Q: What is the relation with the chaos? Judging that chaos is wrong. K: No, no sir. Look: I have an image about myself as a Communist, and I believe in Marx, his economic principles, I am strongly committed to that. And I reject everything else. But you think differently and you are committed to that. So there is a division between you and me, and that division invariably brings conflict. Wait, go slowly. I believe that I am Indian and I am committed to Indian nationalism, and you are committed to a Muslim and there is a division and there is conflict. So - wait, slowly. So thought has created this division, thought has created these images, these labels, these beliefs and so there is contradiction, division, which brings conflict and therefore chaos. That is a fact. Now wait a minute. That is a fact. So if you think life is a process of infinite conflicts, never ending conflicts, then you must keep these images. Wait. I don't say it, we are asking it sir. All our wars - I believe there have been five thousand wars within the last two thousand years, more, five thousand years - and we have accepted that: to have our sons killed, you know, the whole business, because we have these images. And if we say that is not necessary, it is really a tremendous danger to survival, to physical survival, then I must find out how to be free of the images - right? Q: I think something else is involved in that because you say we always react from the past but what difference does it make - the past is a cyclic phenomenon that repeats so you can't prevent yourself, you know it is a fact that you will repeat it in the same way all the time. K: Sir, we are talking about the necessity of having an image, or not having an image. If we are clear that these images are a real danger, real destructive processes then we want to get rid of them. But if you say, I keep my little image and you keep your little image, then we are at each other's throats. So if we see very clearly that these images, labels, words are destroying human beings... Q: Krishnamurti, doesn't spiritual commitment give us the penetration of energy. I mean if I am a committed Buddhist and I channel my energy into that direction, it doesn't necessarily mean that I am in conflict with those that aren't Buddhist. K: If I am a committed Buddhist, it does not necessarily mean I am in conflict with another - right? Just examine that please. If I am a committed human being to Buddhism and another is committed equally to the Christian dogma, and another equally committed to Communism... Q: That is not my concern. K: Isn't this what is happening in life? Don't say, it is not my business if you are a Communist. It is my business to see if we can live in security, in peace in the world, we are human beings, supposed to be intelligent. Why should I be committed to anything? Q: Because it gives energy, the power of penetration. K: No, no. Sirs, let's go on. Q: The danger is that we are moving away from the central fact. K: Yes, we are always moving away from the central fact. Q: We are doing that right now, it is not necessary. K: You may think it is necessary, people think it is necessary to be an Englishman, to be a German, to be a Hindu - you follow - or a Catholic, they think it is important. They don't see the danger of it. Q: Some people think it is not. Q: Why don't you see the danger? K: Why don't I see the danger. Because I am so heavily conditioned, it is so profitable, my job depends on it. I might not be able to marry my son to somebody else, who is a Catholic. All that stuff. So the point is: if one sees the danger of these images, then how can the mind free itself from these images? That is the next question. Can we go on from there? Q: Can I be there when no image is formed? K: Images, whether they are old or new are the same images. Q: Yes but when an image is formed can I be aware. K: We are first of all going to go into that. How is an image formed? Is it formed through inattention, when I am not paying attention the image is formed. You get angry with me and if I am at that moment totally attentive to what you say there is no anger. I wonder if you realize this. Q: So the image and the image former must be the same in that case. K: Sir, look. Keep it very simple. I say something that doesn't give you pleasure. You have an image instantly, haven't you? Now at that moment if you are completely aware, is there an image? Q: If you are not trying to utilize what has been said to you. K: That's right, call it any word you like. Utilize, or liquidate, any word. Q: If you don't have that image, all the other images are gone. K: Yes, that is the whole point sir. Can one be attentive at the moment of listening? You understand? You are listening now, can you be totally attentive, so that when you call me a name, not a pleasant name, or give me pleasure, at that moment, at that precise moment to be totally aware? Have you ever tried this? You can test it out, because that is the only way to find out, not accept the speaker's words. You can test it out. Then if there is no image forming, and therefore no image, then what is the relationship between the two? You understand? I wonder if you follow all this? You have no image about me, but I have an image about you, then what is your relationship to me? You are following this question? You have no image because you see the danger of it, but I don't see the danger of it, I have my image and you are related to me, I am your wife, husband, father, whatever it is, girl, boy and all the rest of it. I have the image and you have not. Then what is your relationship to me? And what is my relationship to you? Q: There is a barrier somewhere. K: Of course there is a barrier. But we are saying what is that relationship. You are my wife - my god! - and I am very ambitious, greedy, envious, I want to succeed in this world, make a lot of money, position, prestige, and you say, "How absurd all that is, don't be like that, don't be silly, don't be traditional, don't be mechanical, that is just the old pattern being repeated." What happens between you and me? Q: Division. K: And we talk together about love. I go off to the office where I am brutal, ambitious, ruthless, and I come home and be very pleasant to you, because I want to sleep with you. What is the relationship? Q: No good. K: No, is there any relationship at all? At last. For god's sake. And yet this is what we call love. So what is the relationship between you and me, I have an image and you have no image? Either you leave me, or we live in conflict. You don't create conflict but I create conflict, because I have an image. So is it possible in our relationship with each other to help each other to be free of images? You understand my question? I am related to you by some misfortune - sexual demands, glands frightfully active and so on and so on, I am related to you and you are free and I am not, of the images, and therefore you care infinitely - you follow? I wonder if you see that? To you this is tremendously important to be free of images, and I am your father, wife, husband or whatever it is, Then will you abandon me? Q: No. K: Don't say, no, so easily. Because you care, you have affection, you feel totally differently. So what will you do with me? Drown me? Hold hands? Q: There is nothing you can do. K: Why can't you do something with me? Do go into it, don't theorize about it. You are all in that position. Life is this. Q: It depends if this person has the capacity to see what the truth of the matter is. K: This is the truth - you have none and I have. Q: See through it all and don't take any notice of it. K: When I am nagging you all the time? You people just play with words. You don't take actuality and look at it. Q: Surely if you have no image in yourself and you look at another person you won't see their image either. K: Oh goodness! If I have no image I see very clearly that you have an image. Sir, look this is happening in the world, this is happening in every family, in every situation in relationship: you have something free and I am not and the battle is between us. Q: I think that situation is in everything. K: That is what I am saying. What do you do? Just drop it and disappear and become a monk? Form a community? Go off to meditation and all the rest of it? Here is a tremendous problem. Q: I tell you how I feel first of all. Q: But surely this is fictitious because we are trying to imagine. K: I have said that madame; if you have an image and I have an image, then we live very peacefully because we are both blind and we don't care. Q: That situation you have created for us because you want us to be free of images. K: Of course, of course I want you to be free of images because otherwise we are going to destroy the world. Q: Of course, I see that. But you say to us that situation. K: We are not creating the situation for you: it is there. Look at it. Q: I have an image about you, and I have had it for a long time. And there are different kinds of images. I have been trying to get rid of those images because I have read that they have created problems for me. Now every time I try to work it out with you and it hasn't helped. K: I'll show you sir how to get rid of it, how to be free of images. Q: I don't believe you sir. K: Don't believe me. Q: You are all the time just sitting there talking. K: I am not asking you... Q: Abstractions and abstractions. Me having an image about you means you are sitting up on the platform being an enlightened person. I am here as a listener, a disciple or a pupil. Now I feel very strongly that is really not actuality or reality because we are two human beings. But still you are the guru, you are the one who knows and... K: Please sirs be quiet, he is telling you something please listen. I'll show you something. Please do sit down. I'll show you something. If that image of the guru had not created a problem you would live with that guru happily - right? But it has created a problem, whether it is the guru, the wife, husband, it is the same thing. Now how am I, how is one, or you who have got the image about the speaker as the supreme guru - talking about gurus, the word means one who dispels ignorance, one who dispels the ignorance of another. That is one of the meanings. But generally the gurus impose their ignorance on you. This is a fact. Now we won't go into the whole business of the gurus. You have an image about me as the guru, or you have an image about another as a Christian and so on and so on and so on. First of all, if that pleases you, if that gives you satisfaction, you will hold it - right? That is simple enough. If it causes trouble then you say, "My god, it is terrible to have this" and you move away and form another guru, another relationship which is pleasant, but it is the same image making. Right? So one asks: is it possible to be free of images? The speaker sits on the platform because it is convenient, because you can all see, I can equally sit on the ground but you will have the same image - right? So the height doesn't make any different. So the question is, please: whether the mind, the mind being part of thought, and thought has created these images, can thought dispel these images? Do you understand? That is the first question. Thought has created it, and thought can dispel it because it is unsatisfactory, and create another image which will be satisfactory. This is what we do - I don't like that guru for various reasons, because he stinks, or I don't like that guru and I go to another because he praises me, gives me garlands and says, "My dear chap you are the best disciple I have". And so on and so on and so on. So thought has created this image. Can thought undo the image? Q: Not if you are looking at it intellectually. Looking at it intellectually you are not using your senses. K: I am asking that first. Look at it. Can the intellect, intellection, dispel the image? Q: No. K: Then what will? Q: The thing that stands in the way is merely self, the I. You overcome this. K: No sir. I know but I don't want to go into the much more complex problem of the I. Q: You say the image but what do you mean by the I? K: How does thought get rid of the image without creating another image? Q: It feels uncomfortable perhaps with the image if the guru causes trouble, so if one can see the trouble then perhaps that guru can help? K: You are not going into it at all sir, you are just scratching on the surface. Q: Thought cannot get rid of the image. K: If that is so, if thought cannot get rid of the image then what will? Q: Understanding. K: Don't use words like understanding. What do you mean by understanding? Q: Getting rid of the thoughts. K: Getting rid of thought. Now who is going to get rid of thought? Q: Is it a question of time? Would it be that our energies are all in the past, and we need to think now. K: All the images are in the past, why can't I drop all that and live in now? Q: That is what I meant. K: Right. Yes. How can I, with a burden of the past? How do I get rid of the burden? It comes to the same thing. Q: Sir if one lives in the present, do the past images still come through? K: If I live in the present will the past images come? Can you live in the present? Do you know what it means to live in the present? That means not a single memory except technological memory, not a single breathe of the past. And therefore you have to understand the totality of the past, which is all this memory, experience, knowledge, imagination, images, which is the past. I am asking. You go off from one thing to another, you don't pursue steadily one thing. Q: Please keep going with one having no image and the other having an image. K: We have been through that sir. I'll answer it, all right, if you want it. You have no image and I have an image. I want you to be the richest man, etc., etc. I have got an image, and you haven't. And I live with you, what happens? Aren't we eternally at war with each other? No? Q: I can't drown him. K: No you can't drown me. Q: What am I going to do with you? K: I am going to go into it. I have an image and you haven't. We are living on the same earth, in the same house, meeting often, living in the same community, what will you do with me? Q: I would try to explain to him. K: Yes, you have explained it to me, but I like my image. Q: Sir we cannot know because we have this image ourselves. K: That is all I am saying. You are living in images and you don't know how to be free of it. And these are all speculative questions. So let's begin again. Are you aware that you have images? If you have those images that are pleasant and you cling to them, and discard those which are unpleasant, you have still images. Right? Then the question is really: can you be free of them? Q: Go and listen to some music. K: Go and listen to music. The moment that music stops you are back to those images. This is all so childish. Take drugs, that also creates various images. Q: Isn't the division between wanting to hold on to the images and wanting to let them go. K: Wanting to hold on to images and to let them go. What is the line, the division? The division is desire, isn't it? Listen sir. Listen. Desire isn't it? I don't like that image, I am going to let it go. But I like this image, I am going to hold on to it. So it is desire, isn't it? Q: I feel that there is a pleasure motive even in... K: Of course sir. You don't stick to one thing sir. Q: If I have no image then the other person has no image at all. K: If I have no image, the other person has no images at all. How inaccurate that is. Because I am blind therefore you are also blind. Don't please. This is so illogical. Do think clearly. Let's go into this. What are the activities, what should I do so that there is no image forming at all? May I talk a few minutes? Will you listen to it? Let us think together. Q: I think most people - I am sorry - I think most people in this place are, in your words, here for consolation, rather then any other; I mean it all gets such a bore really because the same words get used over and over again, and everybody is looking like a load of zombies. K: I am aware that I have images - aware being I am conscious, I know - there is no question of it, I know I have images - right? I am an Englishman, Dutchman, or a Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic, Communist and all the rest of it, I have an image about myself and I have an image about you. That is very clear. If I am satisfied -both you and I have the same image, then we are satisfied. That is, if you think as I think, you like to be ambitious, I like to be ambitious, then we are both in the same boat, we won't quarrel, we accept it, and we live together, work together, be ruthlessly ambitious. But if you are free of the image of ambition and all the rest of it, and I am not, the trouble begins. What then will you do, who are free of that image, with me? You can't just say, "Well it is not my business" - because we are living together, we are in the same world, in the same community, in the same group and so on. What will you do with me? Please just listen to this. Will you discard me, will you turn your back on me, will you run away from me, will you join a monastery, learn how to meditate? Do all kinds of things in order to avoid me? Or, you say, "Yes, he is here" -right? He is in my house. What shall I do? What will he do with regard to me, who has an image? Q: First I would ask you politely to listen. K: But I won't listen. You people! Haven't you lived with people who are adamant in their beliefs? You are like that. You are so... Q: It is best not to waste one's time. K: We are going to find out sir. You see this is really a hypothetical question because you have got images and you live in those images, and the other person lives in those images. That is our difficulty. Suppose I have no images, and I haven't, I have worked at this for fifty years, so I have no image about myself, or about you. What is our relationship? I say please listen to me, but you won't. I say please pay attention, which means care, to attend means infinite care. Will you listen to me that way? That means you really want to learn - right? Learn, not from me, but learn about yourself. That means that you must infinitely care about yourself, not selfishly, care to learn about yourself - right? Not according to me, or to Freud, or to Jung, or to some latest psychologist, learn about yourself. That means, watch yourself and you can only do that in your relationship with each other. When you say, "You sitting on that platform, you have gradually assumed, at least in my eyes, a position of authority, you have become my guru". And I say to you, "My friend, just listen, I'm not your guru. I won't be a guru to anybody. It is monstrous to be a guru". Therefore it means, please are you listening when I say this. Or you say, "I can't listen to you because my mind is wandering." Do you follow all this? So when you listen, you listen with care, with affection, with attention, then you begin to learn about yourself, actually as you are. Then from there we can move, we can go forward, but if you don't do that, keep on repeating, "Oh I have got my image, I don't know how to get rid of it" and so on and so on, then we don't move any further. Right? Now you have an image with regard to sex, that you must have a girl, or a boy, you must be a Christian - you follow? We are so conditioned. Now I say to you please listen, are you aware that you are conditioned? Aware. Don't choose parts of the conditioning. Right? Totally aware of your whole conditioning. One will explain what it means to be totally aware of one's conditioning, not only at the conscious level but the deeper levels - right? We are conditioned much more at the deeper levels than at the superficial levels - right? Is that clear? One is conditioned very deeply, and superficially less. Now can the mind - are you listening? - listening with your heart, not with your little mind, with your mind, with your heart, with your whole being - then is it possible to be totally aware of all this, the whole of consciousness? Do you follow? To be totally aware implies no observer: the observer is the past and therefore when he observes he brings about fragmentation. This is clear, isn't it? When I observe anything, trees, mountains, you, my wife, my husband, my children, my neighbour, and the politicians, when I observe from the past, what I observe brings about a fragmentary outlook - right? I only see parts, I don't see the whole. So I realize that, I see when I observe from the past there must be a fragmented outlook - right? This is simple. So I have an insight that says, don't look from the past. That means, don't have an observer who is all the time judging, evaluating, saying this is right, this is wrong, I am a Christian, I am a Communist - you follow? - all that is the past. Now can you listen to that, which is a fact, which is actual, which is not theoretical. So you are facing actually 'what is'. Are you? Facing in yourself what actually is going on? And can you observe another without the past - without all the accumulated memory, insults, hurts, so that you can look at another with clear eyes? If you say, "I don't know how to do it", then we can go into that. As we said, any form of authority in this matter is the reaction of submission to somebody who says he knows. That is your image. The professor, the teacher knows mathematics, I don't, so I learn from him, so gradually he becomes my authority. He knows, I don't know - mathematics, geography and all the rest of it. But here, psychologically I think I don't know how to approach myself, how to learn about it, therefore I look to another, the same process. But the other is equally ignorant as me, because he doesn't know himself. He is traditional bound, he accepts obedience, he becomes the authority, he says he knows and my dear chap you don't know, you become my disciple and I will tell you. The same process. But it is not the same process psychologically. Psychologically the guru is me. I wonder if you see that? He is as ignorant as myself. He has a lot of Sanskrit words, a lot of ideas, a lot of superstitions, and I am so gullible I accept him. Here we say there is no authority, no guru, you have to learn about yourself. And to learn about yourself, watch yourself, how you behave with another, how you walk - you follow? Then you find that you have an image about yourself, a tremendous image. And you see these images create great harm, they break up the world - right? The Krishna conscious group, the Transcendental group, and some other group, you follow? And your own group; you have your own ideas, you must have sex, you must have a girl, you must have a boy, and all the rest of it, change the girl, change the boy, every week. And you live like that. And you don't see the tremendous danger and wastage of life - right? Can we move from there? Now we come to the point: how am I to be free of all image making? That is the real question. Is it possible? So I will not say it is, or it is not, I am going to find out. I am going to find out by carefully watching why images are made. I realize images are made when the mind is not giving its attention at the moment something is said. Right? At the moment of something that is said that gives pleasure, something that is said that brings about displeasure, to be aware at that moment, not afterwards. But we become aware afterwards and say "My god, I must pay attention, terrible, I see it is important to be attentive but I don't know how to be attentive, I lose it and when the thing takes place it is so quick and I say to myself I must be attentive." So I beat myself into being attentive - right? I wonder if you see this. And therefore I am never attentive. So I say to myself, "I am not attentive at the moment something is said which gives pleasure or pain." And I see that I am inattentive. You understand? I wonder if you see this? I have found that my whole mind, make-up is inattentive, to the birds, to nature, to everything, I am inattentive, when I walk, when I eat, when I speak, I am inattentive. So I say to myself, "I am not going to be concerned with attention, but pay attention to inattention" -you understand? Do you get this? Q: Yes. K: I am not going to be concerned with being attentive, but I am going to see what is inattention. And I am watching inattention - do you understand? And I see I am inattentive most of the time. So I am going to pay attention to one thing at a time, that is, when I walk, when I eat, I am going to eat with attention. I am not going to think about something else - you understand? I am going to pay attention to every little thing. So what has been inattention becomes attention. I wonder if you see that? Q: By fragmentation you mean choice? K: No. Fragment means broken up. Q: I mean by fragmentation you mean choice? K: No sir. Fragmented. Sir is not thought a fragment? Or is thought the whole? There is a fragmentation taking place when I have an image and you have an image. In that relationship, that relationship is broken up, fragmented, it is not whole. So I am now paying, watching inattention. That is, I am watching I am not attentive. I look at a bird and never look at it, my thoughts are all... I am now going to look at that bird, it may take me a second but I am going to look at it. When I walk I am going to watch it. So that out of inattention without any effort there is total attention. You understand? So when there is total attention, when you say something pleasant there is no image forming, or unpleasant there is no image forming because I am totally there. My whole mind, heart, brain, all the responses are completely awake and attentive. So aren't you very attentive when you are pursuing pleasure? You don't have to talk about attention, you want that pleasure. Sexually, when you want it, you are tremendously attentive, aren't you? And attention implies a mind that is completely awake, which means it doesn't demand challenge. It is only when we have images that challenges come. I wonder if you see this? And because of those images, challenge comes and you respond to the challenge inadequately. Therefore there is constant battle between challenge and response, which means the increase of images and the more it increases the more challenges come, and so there is always the strengthening of images. I wonder if you see this? Haven't you noticed people when they are challenged about their Catholicism, or whatever it is, they become more strong? So by being completely attentive there is no image formation, which means conditioning disappears. Right. BROCKWOOD PARK 3RD PUBLIC TALK 13TH SEPTEMBER 1975 May we go on talking about what we were saying the other day? We were saying, I think, that the crisis in the world is not outward but the crisis in consciousness. And that consciousness, as we said, is its content - all the things that man has accumulated through centuries, his fears, his dogma, his superstitions, his beliefs, his conclusions, and all the suffering, pain and anxiety. We said unless there is a radical mutation in that consciousness, outward activities will bring about more mischief, more sorrow, more confusion. And to bring about that mutation in consciousness, we said a totally different kind of energy is required - not the mechanical energy of thought, of time and measure. And when we were investigating into that we said, there are three principles: fear, pleasure and suffering. We talked about fear at some length. And also we went into the question of pleasure, which is entirely different from enjoyment and the delight of seeing something beautiful and so on. And we also touched upon suffering. The three active principles in human beings: fear, pleasure and suffering. I think we ought to go this morning into that question of suffering. It is a nice morning and I am sorry to go into such a dark subject. As we said, when there is suffering there can be no compassion, and whether it is at all possible for human minds, for human beings right throughout the world to put an end to suffering. For without that ending to suffering we live in darkness, we accept all kinds of beliefs, dogmas, escapes, which bring about much more confusion, more violence and so on. So we are going together this morning to investigate into this question of suffering, whether the human mind can ever be free from it totally, and also we are going to talk about affection, love and if there is time, this whole question of death. Why do we accept suffering, why do we put up with it -psychologically we are talking about, not physiological suffering. Physiological suffering can be controlled, put up with, and it becomes much more important that such physical suffering does not distort clarity of thought. We went into that too. Because for most of us, when there is a physical pain, a continued suffering, it distorts our thinking, it prevents objective thinking, it becomes personal, broken up, distorted. And physical suffering, whether in the past, or the fear of having it again in the future, if one is not actively aware of this whole process of suffering then neurotic habits, neurotic activities take place. We went into that briefly the other day. So we are asking if it is at all possible for human beings to end suffering, deeply at all the levels of our existence, psychologically? And when we go into it in ourselves deeply, one sees one of the major factors of this suffering is attachment - attachment to ideas, to conclusions, to various forms of ideologies which act as security, and when that security is threatened there is a certain kind of suffering. Please as we said the other day, we are sharing this thing together, we are looking into this question of suffering together. You are not merely, if I may point out, listening to a talk and gathering a few ideas and agreeing or disagreeing, but rather in communication sharing the problem, examining the question, the issue, actively; and so it becomes our responsibility, yours as well as the speaker's, to go into this question. Then there is also the attachment to persons. That is, in our relationship there is a great deal of suffering. That is, one may be free from this conditioning of fear and so on, and the other may not be, and hence there is a tension, and that tension arises not only out of attachment - the word attachment means holding on, not only physically but psychologically, depending on something - and this attachment in relationship, in which there is no freedom. One may be free and the other may not be free, and hence the conflict. One may be a Catholic and the other may not be a Catholic, a Communist and so on and so on, and hence the conflict that breeds continuous strain and suffering. Then there is also the suffering of the unknown, of death. The suffering of losing something that you were attached to in the past, as memory. I do not know if you have not noticed all these things in yourself, and whether it is possible to live in complete relationship with another, without this tension, which is brought about through self-interest, through self-centred activity, desire pulling in different directions, and living in a relationship in which there may be contradictions, one may be free, the other may not be, and to live in that situation demands not only what is called that absurd intellectual thing that man has created which is tolerance, but it demands a much greater thing which is affection, love and therefore compassion. We are going to go into that. We are asking whether man can end suffering. Christianity has not solved it; it has made a parody of suffering - forgive that word. The ancient Hindus, being very clever, invented the whole idea of karma, which is, if you do something now you will pay for it next life - so behave. And as most human beings don't behave they maintain suffering. So there are various varieties of explanations for suffering, and how to go beyond it, how to rationalize it, how to suppress it, how to escape from it. Now we are asking something entirely different: that is, not to suppress it, not to evade it, or rationalize it, but when there is that suffering to remain totally with it, without any movement of thought, which is the movement of time and measure. Are we all following each other somewhat? One suffers, one loses one's son, the wife runs away with somebody else, and the things that you are attached to - the house, the name, the form, all the accumulated conclusions - they seem to fade away, and you suffer. And can one look at that suffering without the observer? We went into that question of what the observer is. We said the observer is the past, the accumulated memory, experience and knowledge. And with that knowledge, experience, memory he observes the suffering, so he disassociates himself from suffering. He is different from suffering and therefore he can do something about it. Whereas the observer is the observed. It requires a little care and attention in looking at this question, that the statement, that the observer is the observed. We don't accept it. We say the observer is entirely different, and the observed is something out there separate from the observer. Now if one looks very closely at that question, at that statement, that the observer is the observed, it seems so obvious. When you say you are angry, you are not different from anger, you are that thing which you call anger. When you are jealous, you are that jealousy. The word separates. That is, through the word we recognize the feeling, and the recognition is in the past, so we look at that feeling through the word, through the screen of the past and so separate it, and therefore there is a division between the observer and the observed. So we are saying that when there is this suffering, either momentary or a continuous endless series of causes that bring about suffering, to look at it without the observer. That is, you are that suffering, not that you are separate from suffering. To totally remain with that suffering. Then you will notice, if you go that far, if you are willing to observe so closely, then a totally different mutation takes place. That is, out of that suffering comes great passion. If you have done it, tested it out, you will find it. It is not the passion of a belief, passion for working for some cause, passion for some idiotic conclusion: it is totally different from the passion of desire. It is something that is of a totally different kind of energy that is not the movement of thought, which is mechanical. And we have a great deal of suffering in what is called love. Love, as we know it now, is pleasure, sexual or the love of a country, or the love of an idea, and so on and so on - all derived from pleasure. And when that pleasure is denied there is either hatred, antagonism or violence. And can there be love, not just something personal between you and me and somebody else, but the enormous feeling of compassion? Which means passion for everything, for everybody - passion for nature, passion for the earth, compassion for the earth in which we live so that we don't destroy the earth, the animals, you know, the whole thing. And without love, which is compassion, suffering must continue. And we human beings have put up with it, we accept it as normal. Every religion has tried to find a way out of it. But very organized religions have brought tremendous suffering. We used to say: there were two friends one day walking down the street, and one of them picks up something off the pavement, looks at it and is radiantly happy and puts it into his pocket. And the other says, "What have you picked up?" He says, "I have picked up part of truth and would you like to look at it?" He says, "I would". And the other fellow recognizes it as truth, so he says, "My friend, what are you going to do with it?" And the friend says, "I am going to keep it." "Don't keep it but let us organize it." So in religious organizations throughout the world they have brought a great deal of harm, there have been religious wars, endless persecution, tortures, burning people, especially in the west - it wasn't the fashion in those days in the east. And we are saying: when there is not the acceptance of suffering, or putting up with suffering, but to remain motionless with that suffering, then there comes out of it a great compassion. And from that compassion arises the whole question of creation. Which is, what is creation? What is the creative mind? Is it a mind that suffers and through that suffering has learnt a certain technique, and expresses the technique on paper, marble, paint? Is creativeness the outcome of tension, the outcome of a disorderly life? Does creativeness come through fragmentary activity of daily life? I don't know if you are following all this? Or we must give a totally different kind of meaning to creativeness, which may not need expression at all. So one has to go into this question within oneself very deeply because one's consciousness is the consciousness of the world. I do not know if one realizes that. Fundamentally your consciousness is the consciousness of the speaker, of the rest of the world, basically, because in that consciousness there is suffering, there is pain, there is anxiety, there is fear of tomorrow, fear of insecurity, which every man wherever he lives goes through. So your consciousness is the consciousness of the world and if there is a mutation in that consciousness it affects the total consciousness of human beings. It is a fact. So it becomes tremendously important that human beings bring about a radical transformation or mutation in themselves, in their consciousness. So now we can go into the question of this thing called death, which is one of the major factors of suffering. May we go into it? It is a very complex question, like everything else in life we want a quick answer, we want a definite answer, an answer that will be comforting, an answer which will be totally satisfactory, intellectually, emotionally, physically, in every way, complete satisfaction. We want immortality, whatever that may mean, and we want to survive, both physiologically and psychologically. And we avoid death at any price, put it as far away as possible. So we have never been able to examine it closely. We have never been able to face it, go into it, understand it, not only verbally, intellectually but completely what it means. We wait until the last moment, either that last moment an accident, a disease, old age and when you can't think, when you can't look, you are just gaga, then you become a Catholic, Protestant, you believe in this - you follow? So what we are trying this morning is to understand, not verbally, but actually what it means to die, which doesn't mean we are asking that we should commit suicide. But we are asking what is the total significance of this thing called death, which is the ending of what we know as life? Right? We are moving together? In enquiring into this question we must also find out whether time has a stop. The stopping of time may be death. You understand? It may be the ending and therefore that which ends has a new beginning, not that which has a continuity - right? So first can there be an ending to time? Can time stop? What is time - time not chronological by the watch, as yesterday, today, and tomorrow the 24 hours, but the whole movement of time as thought and measure? That movement, not the chronological time but the movement of thought, which is time, which is the whole process of comparing, which is measurement, can all that process stop? You understand? Which means can thought, which is the response of memory, experience as knowledge, and knowledge is always in the past, knowledge is the past, can that whole momentum come to an end - not in the technological field, that is so obvious we don't even have to discuss that - can this movement come to an end? So one has to find out what is time as we know it? Not the watch, let's forget that. The time as hope, time as something that has happened to which the mind clings, the attachment to the past, or a projection from the past to the future, as a conclusion, and time as a movement of achievement, from alpha to omega. This whole movement in which we are caught. If you say that there is no tomorrow psychologically you would be terribly shocked, because tomorrow is tremendously important, because tomorrow you are going to be happy, tomorrow you will achieve what you want, and tomorrow will be the fulfilment of yesterday's hopes or today's hopes. Tomorrow becomes extraordinarily significant - the tomorrow which is projected from the past as thought - right? So we are asking: can all that momentum come to an end? Time has created through centuries the centre which is the 'me'. Time is not only the past as attachment, the hope, the fulfilment, the evolving process of thought until it becomes more and more refined and so on and so on, but also that centre around which all our activities take place, the 'me', the mine, 'we' and 'they', both politically, religiously, economically and so on and so on. So the 'me' is the conclusion of time adding to itself and taking away from itself, but there is always this centre which is the very essence of time. We are asking: can that movement come to an end? This is the whole problem which perhaps we will go into tomorrow if we have time and the occasion arises, this is the whole problem of meditation, not sitting down and doing some mantra and repeating some words and doing some tricks, that is all silly nonsense. I am not being intolerant but it is just absurd. And it becomes extraordinarily interesting to find this out. And in enquiring into this, then what is death? Can that be answered in terms of words, or must one look at it not only verbally but nonverbally? There is death - the organism by misuse, by abuse, by over indulgence, drink, drugs, accident, all the things that the flesh is heir to dies, comes to an end, the heart stops, the brain with all its marvellous machinery comes to an end. We accept it. We are not afraid of the physical organism coming to an end but we are afraid of something totally different. And being afraid of that basically we want to resolve that fear through various forms of beliefs, conclusions, hopes. The whole of the Asiatic world believes in reincarnation. They have proof for it - they say so, at least. That is - watch this thing, it is extraordinary - that is the thing that has been put together by time as the 'me', the ego, that incarnates till that entity becomes perfect and is absorbed into the highest principle, which is Brahman, or whatever you like to call it. You are following all this? Does this interest you? I don't know, it doesn't matter. And time has created the centre, the 'me', the ego, the personality, the character and so on, the tendencies, and through time you are going to dissolve that very entity, through reincarnation - you understand? You see the absurdity! Thought has created something as the 'me', the centre, and through evolutionary process, which is time, you will ultimately dissolve that and be absorbed into the highest principle. And yet they believe in this tremendously. The other day I was talking to somebody, who was a great believer in this: he said if you don't believe it you are not a religious man, and he walked out. And Christianity has it own forms of continuity of the 'me', resurrection - you know - Gabriel blowing the whistle and so on. So we have all these principles. And when you believe in reincarnation what is important is that as you are going to live next life, and you suffer this life because of your past actions, therefore if you do not behave in this life righteously, according to the highest principles, next life you are going to pay for it. This is a tremendous belief and naturally they don't behave, they just carry on like everybody else -cruel, bitter, angry, jealous, vain, arrogant, full of antagonism, bitterness - just like everybody else. So what is important is, if one actually, really basically is committed wholly to that belief, it means that you must behave rightly, accurately, with tremendous care now. And we don't do that. That demands super human energy. So there are several problems involved in this: what is immortality, and what is eternity, which is a timeless state, and what happens to human beings who are still caught in this movement of time? That is, we human beings live an extraordinarily complex, irresponsible, ugly stupid life, we are at each other's throats, we are battling about beliefs, we have authority, politically, religiously, which has suppressed all freedom, and our daily life is a series of endless conflicts. And we want that to continue! And because our life is so empty, full of meaningless words, we say, is there a state where there is no death, immortal, immortality - which is a state where there is no movement of time? I wonder if you see? That is, time through centuries has created the idea of the self - the self, the 'me' evolving. It has been put together through time, which is a part of evolution. And there is inevitably death, and with the ending of the brain cells thought comes to an end. Therefore one hopes there is something beyond the 'me' - the super consciousness, the super ego, a spark of god, spark of truth, that can never be destroyed, and therefore that continues. And that continuity is what we call immortality. That is what most of us want. If you don't get it through some kind of fame, you want to have immortality sitting next to god who is timeless. The whole thing is so absurd. So is there a continuity - sorry - is there something which is not of time, which has no beginning and no end, and therefore timeless, eternal? And our life being what it is, we have this problem of death, and if I, a human being, have not totally understood the whole quality of myself, what happens to me when I do die? You understand the question? That is, a man, a human being, who has totally resolved the centre, the 'me', through understanding himself, through studying himself, enquiring into himself, not according to any philosopher, any psychologist, analyst those are all too childish, understood himself and therefore understood the world, because he is the world, and is that the end of me? I have not understood. If I have understood myself totally then that is a different problem, which we will come to. If I have not understood myself totally, not intellectually, I am not using the word 'understand' intellectually but actually aware of myself without any choice, all the content of my consciousness, if I have not deeply delved into my own structure and nature of consciousness, I die - what happens? Now who is going to answer this question? I am putting it purposely. Who is going to answer this question? Because we think we cannot answer it, we look for someone else to tell us - the priest, the books, the people who have said, "I know", the endless mushrooming gurus. If one rejects all authority, and one must, totally all authority, then what have you left? Then you have the energy, because you have rejected that which dissipates energy -gurus and hopes, fears, and somebody to tell you what happens, if you reject all that, which means all authority, then you have tremendous energy. With that energy you can begin to enquire what actually takes place when you have not totally resolved the structure and the nature of the self - the self being time and therefore movement and therefore division, the 'me' and the not 'me', and hence conflict. Now what happens to me when I have not ended that conflict? You and I and the rest of the world, if the speaker has not ended it, the rest of us, what happens to us? We are all going to die - I hope not soon but sometime or other. What is going to happen? When we are living as we are living, are we so fundamentally different from somebody else? You may be more clever, have greater technique, have greater knowledge of technique, you may be more learned, you might have certain gifts, talents, inventiveness, not creativeness - the difference between inventiveness and creativeness are two different things. You and another are exactly alike basically, your colour may be different, taller, shorter, but in essence you are the same. So while you are living you are like the rest of the world, in the same stream, in the same movement - right? And when you die, what happens? You go on, in the same movement. I wonder if you understand what I am saying? It is only the man who is totally aware of his conditioning, his consciousness, the content of it, and moves and dissipates it, he is not in that stream. Am I making this clear? That is, I am greedy, envious, ambitious, ruthless, violent - so are you. And that is our daily life - petty, accepting authority, quarrelling, bitter, not loved and aching to be loved, the agonies of loneliness, irresponsible relationship - that is our daily life. And we are like the rest of the world. It is a vast endless river. And when we die, when I die I'll be like the rest, moving in the same stream as before, when I was living. But the man who understands himself radically, has resolved all the problems in himself psychologically, he is not of that stream. He has totally stepped out of it. So there are two things involved. The man who moves away from the stream, his consciousness is entirely different, therefore he is not thinking in terms of time, continuity, or immortality. But the other man, or the woman, are still that. So the problem arises: what is the relationship between the man who is out and the man who is in? What is the relationship between truth and reality? Reality being, as we said, all the things that thought has put together. Reality means in essence, the root meaning of that word, is things. And living in the world of things, which is reality, we want to establish a relationship with a world which has no thing, which is impossible. So what we are saying is: consciousness, with all its content, is the movement of time. In that movement all human beings are caught. And even when they die that movement goes on. It is so. This is a fact. And the man or woman, the human being (not man and woman, cut that out) - the human being who sees the totality of this, that is, fear, pleasure and the enormous suffering which man has brought upon himself, and created that suffering for others, the whole of that. And the nature and the structure of the self, the 'me', the total comprehension of that, actually, then he is out of that stream. And that is the crisis in consciousness. We are trying to solve all our human problems - economic, social, political - within the area of that consciousness of time. I wonder if you see this? And therefore we can never solve it. We seem to accept the politician as though he was going to save the world - or the priest, or the analyst, or somebody else. And, as we said, the mutation in consciousness is the ending of time, which is the ending of the 'me' which has been produced through time. Can this take place? Or is it just a theory like any other? Can a human being, you, actually do it? And therefore when you do it, it affects the totality of consciousness. Which means in the understanding of oneself, which is the understanding of the world, because I am the world, there comes not only compassion but a totally different kind of energy. And this energy, with its compassion, has a totally different kind of action. That action is whole, not fragmentary. So we began by talking about suffering, the ending of suffering is the beginning of compassion, and this question of love, which man has reduced to mere pleasure, and this great complex problem of death. They are all interrelated, they are not separate. It isn't that I am going to solve the problem of death, forgetting the rest. The whole thing is interrelated, inter-communicated. It is all one. And to see the totality of all that, wholly, is only possible when there is no observer, and therefore freedom from all that. Right? Do you want any questions? Or do we stop? Q: I'd like to ask a question. You said towards the beginning that it is important for each individual to transform his consciousness. Isn't the fact that you say that it is important for that to be done itself an ideal, which is the very thing to be avoided? K: Sir, when you see a house on fire, isn't it important that you put it out? In that there is no ideal. The house is burning and you are there and you have to do something about it. But if you are asleep and you are discussing what the colour of the hair of the man who set the house on fire, then... Q: Sir with respect... K: Please, no respect is necessary. (Laughter) Q: The house on fire is in the world of reality, isn't it? It is a fact. We are talking about now the psychological world. K: Isn't that also a factual world? Isn't it a fact that you suffer? Isn't it a fact that one is ambitious, greedy, violent - you may not be, but the rest - that is a fact. So you see, we say the house is a fact, but my anger, my violence, my stupid activities are something different. It is as real as the house. Because the house, if I don't understand myself, dissolve all the misery in myself, the house is going to become the destructive element. Q: Sir, your message and the message of Jesus Christ seem to reach toward the same thing, although stated differently. I had always understood your message and Jesus Christ's message to be quite different in content. K: My message and whose, sir? Q: Jesus Christ. About two years ago I was a Christian so it is very difficult to get rid of statements that Jesus made that no man cometh to the Father but by me. Although I find more sense in your message at the moment, how do you equate this? K: All right sir, it is very simple. I have no message. Right? I am just pointing out. That is not a message. Q: But why are you doing it? K: Why am I doing it. Wait a minute, I'll answer it. First of all let us answer the first question. There is a great doubt amongst those who have gone into this question whether Jesus lived at all. There may have been a Jesus but we won't go into all that. Why do we want a message? You understand? Why do we want somebody to give us something when everything is in you? You understand? Q: It is wonderful. K: No, it is not wonderful. Please. It is not wonderful. Please do look at it. You are the result of all the influences, of the many cultures, many words, propaganda, influences, you are that. And if you know how to look, how to read, how to listen, how to see - the art of seeing, the art of learning, the art of listening - everything is there, right in front of you. But we don't have the energy, the inclination, or the interest. We want somebody to tell us what there is on the page. And we make that person who tells you what is on the page into an extraordinary human being. We worship him, or destroy him, which is the same thing. So it is there. You don't want a message. For god's sake. Do look at it, please. Is the book important? Or what you find in the book? What you find in the book after you have read it you throw it away. Now what you find in these talks, you listen, find out, go into it and throw away the speaker. The speaker is not at all important. He is like a telephone. Right? The other question is: why do you speak. Does that need answering? Would you say to the flower on the wayside, "Why do you flower?" It is there for you to look, to listen, to see the beauty of it and come back again to look at the beauty of. That is all. Q: We have the message in ourselves, we are the guru. K: We have a guru in ourselves. Have you? Please listen. Guru means in Sanskrit, the root meaning of that word means, heaven. Have you a heaven in yourself? My lord, I wish you had! Have you a heaven in yourself? Or yourself is so confused, so miserable, so anxious, how can you use such words - heaven. You substitute god into heaven, heaven as god and you think you are quite different. Before people believed that you had god inside you - right? - light inside you, or something else inside you. But when you see actually that you have nothing, just words, then if there is absolutely nothing, then there is complete security. And from that everything happens, flowering. BROCKWOOD PARK 4TH PUBLIC TALK 14TH SEPTEMBER 1975 This is the last talk. And this afternoon you will have Mr. Ravi Shankar playing the sitar at 3 o'clock. We have been talking about various human problems during the three talks and discussions, not merely accepting or denying certain ideas or conclusions, but rather examining closely, and committed to that examination, of our various problems, political, religious, social, and the problem of fear, pleasure and suffering. We also talked about yesterday morning, compassion, love and death. And I do not know if you have taken all those things seriously, or merely verbally, intellectually. And if one has then unfortunately it will remain at the verbal level without any deep action or commitment. I would like this morning, if I may, to talk about the whole question of what is sacred, what is the meaning of religion and meditation. When we enter into this very complex question we must examine, I think, what is reality and what is truth. Because man has been concerned throughout the ages to discover, or live in truth. And he has projected various forms of images, symbols, conclusions, images made by the mind or by the hand, and imagined what is truth; or tried to find out through the activity and the movement of thought, what is truth. And I think we would be wise, if I can use that word without bringing a lot of emotionalism into it, if we could differentiate between, what is reality, and when we are clear what is reality, then perhaps we shall be able to have an insight into what is truth. And to have this insight into what is truth, religion and the many religions throughout the world have said that there is an enduring truth, everlasting truth. And mere assertion of what truth is has very little significance. One has to discover it for oneself, not theoretically, not intellectually, or sentimentally, but actually find out if one can live in a world that is completely truthful. And we mean by religion, not the organized religions which are really sectarian, however many they may have, we mean by religion, gathering together all energy to investigate if there is anything sacred. That is the meaning we are giving - not the propagandists' religion, not the religion of belief, dogma, tradition, or rituals with their hierarchical outlook. But we are using the word religion in that sense, to gather all together, all energy, which then will be capable of investigating the possibility, or if there is a truth which is not controlled or shaped or polluted by thought. And to do that one must go into the question of what is reality. The word reality means, the root meaning is thing, a thing. And so to go into that question of what is reality, one must understand what is thought. Because all the things that thought has created -our society, our religions, our so-called revelations - all that is essentially the product of thought. It is not my opinion or my judgement, but it is a fact. All religions when you look at them, investigate, observe without any prejudice, are the product of thought. That is, you may perceive something, or have an insight into truth, you communicate it verbally to me, and I make statement into an abstraction and make that into an idea, and live according to that idea. I don't know if you see? And that is what we have been doing for generations: drawing an abstraction from a statement, and living according to that abstraction as a conclusion. And that is generally called religion. So we must find out how limited thought is, and what are its capacities, how far can it go, and be totally aware that thought doesn't spill over into a realm in which thought has no place. Are we meeting each other? Please we are not only verbally communicating with each other, which means thinking together, not agreeing or disagreeing, thinking together and therefore sharing together, not the speaker gives and you take, but together we are sharing: therefore there is no authority. And also there is a non-verbal communication. And that is much more difficult because unless we verbally see very clearly the full meaning of words, how the mind is caught in words, how words shape our thinking, and can go beyond that, there is no non-verbal communication, which becomes much more significant. We are trying to do both. Both communicate verbally and non-verbally. That means that we must both be interested at the same time, at the same level, with the same intensity, otherwise we shan't communicate. It is like love. Love is that intense feeling at the same time, at the same level. Otherwise you and I don't love each other. So we are going to observe together what is reality, what are the limitations of thought, and whether thought can ever perceive truth, or it is beyond the realm of thought. Right? May we go on? I think we all agree, at least most do, even the scientists, that thought is a material process, is a chemical process. Thought is the response of accumulated knowledge as experience and memory. So thought is essentially a thing. There is no sacred thought, no noble thought. It is a thing. And its function is in the world of things, which is technology, learning, learning the art of learning, the art of seeing and listening. It is in that area is truth, is reality - right? Are we meeting each other? Unless we understand this rather complex problem, we shall not be able to go beyond it. We may pretend, or imagine, but imagination and pretension have no place in a man, in a human being who is really serious and is desirous to find out what is truth. As long as there is the movement of thought, which is time and measure, in that area truth has no place. And reality is that which we think and the action of thought as an idea, as a principle, as an ideal, projected from the previous knowledge into the future, modified and so on. All that is in the world of reality. And we live in that world of reality - if you have observed yourself you will see how memory plays an immense part. Memory which is mechanical, so thought is mechanical, it is a form of computer, a machine, as the brain is. And thought has its place. I cannot speak if I have no language, if I spoke in Greek you wouldn't understand. And learning a language, learning to drive a car, to labour in a factory and so on and so on, there thought is necessary. Psychologically thought has created the reality of the 'me'. Me, my, my house, my property, my wife, my husband, my children, my country, my god - all that is the product of thought. And in that field we have established a relationship with each other which is constantly in conflict. So that is the limitation of thought. And unless we put order in that world of reality we cannot go further - right? I hope we are following each other, at least a little bit. We live a disorderly life in our daily activity. That is a fact. And is it possible socially, morally, ethically and so on to bring order in the world of reality, in the world of thought - right? And who is to bring the order in the world of reality? I live a disorderly life - if I do - and being disorderly can I bring order in all my activity of daily life? The daily life is based on thought, our relationship is based on thought, because I have an image of you and you have an image of me, and the relationship is between those two images. The images are the product of thought, which is the response of memory, and experience and so on. Now can there be order in the world of reality? This is really a very important question. Unless there is order established in the world of reality there is no foundation for further enquiry. In the world of reality is it possible to behave orderly, not according to a pattern set by thought, which is still disorder? So is it possible to bring order in the world of reality? That is, no wars, no conflict, no division, order implies great virtue, virtue is the essence of order, not following a blue print, then that becomes mechanical. So who is to bring order in this world of reality? Right? So man has said, "God will bring it. Believe in God and you will have order. Love God and you will have order". But this order becomes mechanical because our desire is to be secure, to survive, to find a way of living, the easiest way of living - let us put it that way. So we are asking: who is to bring order in this world of reality where there is such confusion, misery, pain and violence and so on, a world of reality which thought has created, can thought bring order in that reality? So who is to bring order in the world of reality? The communists say, according to Marx, that control the environment, then there will be order in man. According to Marx, the State will wither away - you know all that stuff. And now they have tried to bring order but man is in disorder, even in Russia! So one has to find out, if thought is not to bring about order, then what will? I don't know if this is a problem to you, if it really interests you. So one has to say can thought, which has made such a mess of life, and thought cannot bring clarity into this world of reality, then is there an observation in the field of reality, or of the field of reality, without the movement of thought? Are we meeting each other about this? A human being has exercised thought, he says, there is disorder, I will control it, I will shape it, I will make order according to certain ideas - all the product of thought. And thought has created disorder. So thought has no place in order. So how has this order to come about? Now we will go into it a little bit. Can one observe this disorder in which one lives, which is conflict, contradiction, opposing desires, pain, suffering, fear, pleasure and all that, can one observe that, this whole structure of disorder without thought? You understand my question? Can you observe this enormous disorder in which we live externally as well as inwardly, without any movement of thought? Because if there is any movement of thought then it is going to create further disorder - right? So can one observe this disorder in oneself without any movement of thought as time and measure, that is, without any movement of memory? Right? Now we are going to see whether thought, as time, can come to an end. Whether thought as measure, which is comparison, from here to there, all that is involved in the movement of time, can that time have a stop? This is the very essence of meditation. You understand? So we are going to enquire together if time has a stop. That is, if thought as movement can come to an end. Then only there is order and therefore virtue - not cultivated virtue which requires time and therefore not virtue, but the very ending of thought is virtue. Now this means we have to enquire into the whole question of what is freedom. Can man live in freedom -because that is what it comes to? If time comes to an end it means that man is deeply free. So one has to go into this question of what is freedom. Is freedom relative? Or absolute? If freedom is the outcome of thought then it is relative. When freedom is not bound by thought then it is absolute. We are going to go into that. Outwardly, politically, there is less and less freedom. We think politicians can solve all our problems, and the politicians, especially the tyrannical politicians, they assume the authority of god - they know and you don't know. That is what is going on in India, the freedom of speech, Civil Rights, have been denied, like all tyrannies. And democratically we have freedom of choice, we choose between the Liberal, Conservative, Labour or something else. And we think that having the capacity to choose gives us freedom. Choice is the very denial of freedom. You choose when you are not clear, then there is no direct perception, and so you choose out of confusion, and so there is no freedom in choice - psychologically we are talking about. I can choose between this cloth and that cloth and so on and so on; but psychologically we think we are free when we have the capacity to choose. And we are saying that choice is born out of confusion, out of the structure of thought and therefore it is not free. And we accept the authority of the gurus, the priests, because we think they know, and we don't know. Now if you examine the whole idea of the guru, which is becoming rather a nuisance in this country, and in America, and the world over - I am sorry I am rather allergic to gurus! I know several of them, many of them, they come to see me. They say, what you are saying is the highest truth - they know how to flatter! But they say, we are dealing with people who are ignorant, and we are the intermediaries and we want to help them. So they assume the authority, and therefore deny freedom. I do not know if you have not noticed that not one single guru has raised his voice against tyranny. So a man who would understand what freedom is must totally deny authority, which is extraordinarily difficult, which demands great attention. We may reject the authority of a guru, of a priest, of an idea but we establish an authority in ourselves - that is, I think it is right, I know what I am saying, it is my experience. All that gives one the authority to assert, which is the same thing as the guru and the priest. So can the mind be free of authority, which means tradition, which means the accepting another as your guide - except in the technological field it is natural there - as your guide, as somebody to tell you what to do. If you reject that authority, as one must if there is to be freedom, and man must be free, if he is not he is becoming a serf, a slave and denying the beauty and the depth of human spirit. Now can the mind put aside all authority - in the psychological sense? If you put aside the authority of the policeman you will be in trouble! That requires a great deal of inward awareness. One obeys and accepts authority because in oneself there is uncertainty, confusion, loneliness and the desire to find something permanent, something lasting. Right? And is there anything lasting? Anything that is permanent, created by thought? Or thought gives to itself permanency? And in investigating that, mind desires to have something it can cling to, some certainty, some psychological security. This is what happens in all our relationships with each other. I depend on you psychologically because in myself I am uncertain, confused, lonely and I am attached to you, I possess you, I dominate you. So is freedom possible, living in this world, without authority, without the image, without the sense of dependency and therefore independency? So is freedom from something? Or is freedom per se? Now can we have freedom in the world of reality? You understand my question? Can there be freedom in my relationship with you? Can there be freedom in relationship between man and woman? Or is that impossible? Which doesn't mean freedom to do what one likes, or permissiveness, or promiscuousness, but can there be a relationship between human beings of complete freedom? I do not know if you have ever asked this question of yourself? You might say it is not possible, or it is possible. The possibility or the impossibility of it is not an answer. But to find out whether freedom can exist, absolute freedom in our relationships. And that freedom can only exist when in our relationship there is order - right? Order not according to you, or to the man or the woman, but order in the sense of the observation of disorder, and that observation is not the movement of thought, therefore the observer is the observed, only then there is freedom in our relationship. So then we can go to something else: having observed the whole nature of disorder, order comes into being in our life. That is a fact, if you have gone into this that is a fact. From there we can move and find out whether thought can realize its own movement, see its own limitations and therefore stop? We are asking: what place has time in freedom? Is freedom a state of mind in which there is no time - time being movement of thought as time and measure? Thought is movement, and thought is movement in time, from here to there and so on and so on. That is, can the mind and the brain, which is part of the mind, can the brain which has evolved through centuries, with all the accumulated memory, knowledge, experience, is there a part of the brain which is not touched by time? Do you understand my question? Our brain is conditioned by various influences, by the pursuit of desires, and is there a part of the brain that is not conditioned at all? Or is the whole brain conditioned - and therefore human beings can never escape from conditioning? They can modify the conditioning, polish the conditioning, refine the conditioning, but there will always be conditioning if the totality of the brain is limited, conditioned, and therefore no freedom - right? So we are going to find out if there is any part of the brain that is not conditioned. All this is meditation - we will go into that presently. As we said this is meditation, to find out. Can one be aware of the conditioning in which one lives? Can you be aware of it? Conditioning that you are a Christian, that you are a Capitalist, that you are a Socialist, that you are a Liberal, that you believe in this and you don't believe in that, that you are ten different things, that you are god, no god, there is no god, that there is only knowledge and so on and so on and so on - all that is part of the conditioning. Can a human being be aware of that conditioning? That is, can you be aware of your consciousness, not as an observer but you are that consciousness - can you be aware of that? And if you are aware, who is it that is aware? Is it thought that is aware that it is conditioned - therefore it is still in the field of reality, which is conditioned? Or is there an observation, an awareness in which there is pure observation? Is there an act, or the art of pure listening? Do you understand? I am asking, do listen to this a little bit. The word 'art' means to put everything in its right place, where it belongs, the meaning of that word 'art' means that. Now can you observe, see purely, without any interpretation, without any judgement, without any prejudice, just to observe? And also can you listen, as you are doing now, can you listen without any movement of thought? Which is only possible if you put thought in the right place. And the art of learning, which means not accumulating, then it becomes knowledge, and thought, but the movement of learning without the accumulation. So there is the art of listening, the art of seeing, the art of learning, which means put everything where it belongs. And in that there is great order. Now we are going to find out if time has a stop. Now this is meditation. As we said from the beginning of this talk, and the previous talks and discussions, it is all in the field of meditation. Meditation isn't something separate from life, from daily life. Meditation is not the repetition of words, a repetition of a mantra, which is now the fashion and called transcendental meditation, or the meditation which can be practised. Meditation must be something totally unconscious. I wonder if you see this. If you practise meditation, that is, follow a system, a method, then it is the movement of thought, put together in order to achieve a result, and that result is projected as a reaction from the past and therefore still within the area of thought. Is this all becoming too much? So can there be in the brain a mutation? It comes to that. We say it is possible. That is, it is only possible, a complete psychological revolution, a mutation is only possible when there is a great shock of attention. You understand? Attention implies no control. That means have you ever asked whether you can live in this modern world, or in the ancient world, in the modern world because you are not living in the ancient world, can you live in this world without a single control - of your desires, of your appetites, of your fulfillments of desires and so on, without a single breath of control? Control implies a controller - right? And the controller thinks he is different from that which he controls. But when you observe closely the controller is the controlled - right? So what place has control - in the sense of restraint, suppression, controlling in order to achieve, controlling to change yourself to become something else? All that is the demand of thought. And so thought by its very nature being fragmentary divides the controller and the controlled. And we are educated from childhood to control, to suppress, to inhibit, which does not mean to do what you like. That is impossible, you may do what you like. That is too absurd, too immature. But to understand this whole question of control demands that you examine this desire which brings about this fragment, the desire to be and not to be. So find out whether you can live without comparison - you understand? Therefore without an ideal, without a future - all that is implied in comparison. And where there is comparison there must be control. And can you live without comparison and therefore without control - do you understand? Have you ever tried to live without control, without comparison? Because comparison and control are highly respectable. The word 'respect' means to look about. And when we look about we see that all human beings, wherever they live, have this extraordinary desire to compare themselves with somebody, or with an idea, or with some human being who is supposed to be noble, and in that process control, suppress. Now if you see this whole movement, then you will live without a single breath of control, that requires tremendous inward discipline. Now discipline means actually to learn, not be disciplined to a pattern like a soldier. The word 'discipline' means to learn. Learn whether it is possible to live without a single choice, comparison, control. To learn about it, not to accept it, not to deny it, but to find out how to live. Then out of that comes a brain which is not conditioned. And therefore there is a brain which is totally unconditioned. We won't go into all that. So meditation then is freedom from authority, putting everything in its right place in the field of reality, and consciousness realizing its own limitation and therefore bringing order in that limitation. So when there is order there is virtue, virtue in behaviour. From there we can go now into the question whether time has a stop. Which means can the mind, the brain itself and the mind be absolutely still? Not controlled - please, if you control thought in order to be still then it is still the movement of thought. So can the brain and the mind be absolutely still - which is the ending of time? Now man has always desired, throughout the ages, to control and bring silence to the mind, which he calls meditation, which is contemplation and so on and so on. Can the mind be still? Not chattering, not imagining, not be conscious of that stillness, because if you are conscious of that stillness there is a centre which is conscious of that stillness, and therefore that centre is part of time, put together by thought, therefore you are still within the area of reality and therefore it has no ending in the world of reality, of time. I wonder if you get all this? I must go on. Because man has made what he thinks is sacred - all the images, whether made by the hand or by the mind, all the images, in churches, in temples, in the Muslim mind, all those images are still the product of thought. And therefore in that there is nothing sacred. So to find out - not to find out - out of this complete silence is there anything sacred? I began by saying - we began by saying that religion is not a belief, is not propaganda, is not rituals, authority and all the rest of it, but religion is the gathering of all energy to investigate if there is something sacred which is not the product of thought. We have that energy when there is order, when there is complete order in the world of reality, in which we live - that is relationship, freedom from authority, freedom from comparison, control, measurement, which is all order - then the mind and the brain becomes completely still naturally, not through compulsion. And is there anything sacred? If one sees that anything that thought has created is not sacred, nothing - all the churches, all the temples, all the mosques in the world have no truth. I was once asked in India when Ghandiji was going around, I followed him one year, and he was saying all people can enter temples - because there was division in India and only the Brahmins could enter. And they asked me "What do you say to that"? I said god is not in temples, it doesn't matter who enters. And that was of course non-acceptable. So in the same way we are saying that anything created by thought is not sacred. And is there anything sacred? Unless human beings find that sacredness their life has really no meaning, it is an empty shell. They may be very orderly, they may be relatively free, but unless there is this thing, something that is totally sacred, untouched by thought, life has no deep meaning. And is there something sacred? Or everything is matter, everything is thought, everything transient, everything impermanent? Or is there something that thought can never touch, and therefore incorruptible, and therefore timeless and eternal and therefore sacred? You understand? And to come upon this the mind must be completely, totally still, which means thought, time comes to an end. And therefore in that there must be complete freedom from all prejudice, opinions, judgements, you follow - completely. Then only one comes upon this extraordinary thing that is timeless, and therefore the very essence of compassion. So meditation has a significance. One must have this meditative quality of the mind, not occasionally but all day long. And that implies another thing, which is: this something that is sacred, not imagined, not fantastic, affects our lives not only during the waking hours but during sleep. And in this process of meditation there are all kinds of powers that come into being. One becomes clairvoyant, the body then becomes extraordinarily sensitive. Now clairvoyance, healing, thought transference and so on, becomes totally unimportant. All the occult powers become so utterly irrelevant and when you pursue those you are pursuing something that will ultimately lead to illusion. That is one factor. Then there is the factor of sleep. What is the importance of sleep? Is it to spend the sleeping hours dreaming? You understand my question? And what are dreams? And is it possible not to dream at all? What are dreams, why do we dream, and is it possible for a mind not to dream, and therefore during sleep the mind being utterly restful a totally different kind of energy is built in. You understand? I don't mind if you do not understand. During waking hours, if one is completely attentive to our thoughts, to our actions, our behaviour, totally aware, then are dreams necessary? Or are dreams a continuation of our daily life in forms of pictures, images, incidents, and therefore continuity of our daily conscious or unconscious movements? So when the mind becomes totally aware during the day then you will see that dreams become unimportant, and being unimportant they have no significance and therefore there is no dreaming, there is only complete sleep. That means the mind has complete rest, and therefore it can renew itself. I wonder if you are following this. Test it out. If you accept what the speaker is saying then it is futile, but if you say,' I am going to find out if during the day I am very, very awake, watchful, aware' - aware without choice, we went into all that, what is it to be aware - then out of that awareness when you do sleep, the mind becomes extraordinarily fresh and young. Youth is the essence of decision - right? Action. And if that action is merely centred round itself, round the centre of myself then that action breeds mischief, confusion and so on. But when you realize the whole movement of life as one, undivided, and are aware of all that, then the mind rejuvenates itself, and has immense energy. All that is part of meditation. Do you want to ask any questions? Q: Last night I couldn't sleep because I was thinking of people who were camping. I was worried for the campers. K: Is that the question, after all that one has said this morning? Probably next year we will arrange different things for the campers. You see sirs, look at what you are saying. We are talking of the highest things and you talk about not sleeping well. SAANEN 3RD PUBLIC TALK 15TH JULY 1976 Questioner: Excuse me. Before you begin can we meditate together? Krishnamurti: The lady asks before we begin to talk, would it be possible to meditate together. I am afraid that word meditation has been so misused, there are so many systems of meditation, the Tibetan, the Chinese, the Hindu, the Buddhist, I don't know what you mean by meditation. To me personally meditation is something that cannot be cultivated, practised, follow a system. It must come naturally, like a flower that blooms, you can't force it. So I don't know what you mean by meditation together. Q: Talk together. K: Talk together? We have been doing that for the last two times that we met here. Would you please sit down and we can go on. We were talking the last time that we met here, the day before yesterday, about whether there is any possibility in the whole structure and the nature of the mind, in which is included all the feelings, sensations, matter and so on, is there a field where thought, which is of time, has never touched. And it is very important, it seems to me, to find that out, not from what the speaker has told you but for yourself. To find out, or to discover naturally and easily without effort, through deep investigation and objective, non-neurotic observation, whether there is that area where all the conditioning doesn't exist at all. Because as we said the other day, when we live as we do in the area of knowledge, which is our conditioning, then all action, whatever it be, however noble, however idealistic, must invariably be mechanical. For centuries upon centuries our brains have been cultivated to comply, to accept, or go to the opposite, not to comply not to accept, which is the same pattern, both the negative and positive. And therefore living in that area naturally all our actions must be mechanical, because our actions are based on either reward or on punishment. The reward which thought has projected, or the punishment which thought has projected, and thought is the response of knowledge and therefore mechanical. I hope we are meeting this. This is very important to understand because is there an area where there is non-mechanistic action, non-computerised action - not an idea? So it is very important to find out because our lives, as one observes, most unfortunately, are repetitive, both sexually, and in every direction, they are repetitive and conformative, or suppressing, or yielding to various demands, both psychological and physiological. And so when you observe your actions it is essentially based on the past as memory, which is mechanical; and to discover for oneself, not repeat what others have said, but for oneself - that is, oneself being the total essence of humanity. That one must have absolutely clear, that you are not a separate individual; you are the result of centuries of conditioning, like everyone else in the world. Conditioned in sorrow, to accept sorrow, to live with fear, to live with great anxiety, guilt and all the rest of it. So you are, in essence, humanity. And when you observe your own activity, both physiological and psychological, then one observes it is mechanical, always operating from the background of knowledge. Knowledge has its place, driving a car, doing certain skills, and so on and so on, which we don't have to go into. So there knowledge is essential. But knowledge in action, psychological action, becomes mechanical. Are we understanding each other? Please this is very important because we are going to go into something that you have to carefully examine, logically, sanely. Because one finds, as you observe throughout the world, very few human beings change radically. They change from one pattern to another pattern, from one religious sanction to another religious sanction, they become Tibetan monks, or Hindu monks, which is the same old pattern repeated over and over and over again. And as one observes one asks: why doesn't a human being, living as he does in confusion, disorder, always in conflict, always struggling, why doesn't he change basically? I don't know if you have asked that question of yourself. Which is: why don't you, as a human being, change most profoundly? Because one sees that one must change, to change not only the society, the corruption, the misery, the confusion, all that is going on outwardly, which is contributed by our inner state, which is our confusion, our disorder, and constant effort, effort, effort. Why do we live in this state? Do you understand my question? Why? We have infinite knowledge about ourselves, from philosophers, psychologists and others. There are many facts and analysis of human beings. And we read them, we listen to them, but we go on in our own way, in the same old pattern. Why? Why don't you, as a human being, radically dispel all this? When you ask that question of yourself, you will say probably, "I haven't got enough energy to battle with all this". Is that so, that you have not enough energy? One has plenty of energy if one wants anything - if you want to climb those mountains, you climb; if you want plenty of money, you work; if you want your sexual appetites satisfied, you will drive; if you want to fulfil your ambitions, you are at it day and night; if you want to find some comfort in some religious teacher - and those are not religious teachers at all, there is no teacher and the taught in religious matters, please understand this basically. They travel miles, go through great discomfort, live in utter poverty, they have got plenty of energy; but somehow that energy is dissipated in doing all this, in doing something that is not at all worthwhile. The doing of something which is repetitious, of a pattern which is not their own, it is a new pattern but it is still a pattern. So it is not a question of lack of energy. Right? Would you agree to that? Would you see that? And is it a direction? You understand? To have a direction in life. Like you have a direction if you want to become an executive, a foreman, an expert, you have an end in view, a directive. And is there a directive in the psychological field at all? Please this is very important for us to understand. We are used to directives, purposiveness, an end. And we are asking: is there in the psychological field a purpose at all, an end in view, to be satisfied, to be conquered, to be achieved? So one must go into that question very deeply. That is: biologically there is an end - to keep the body healthy, eat the right food, not to destroy its native intelligence, to have food, clothes and shelter, and biologically to be secure, otherwise the brain can't function actively. So there is that biological necessity, which becomes a purpose, an end. Now we are asking: is it the biological instinct, moving towards the psychological state which says, "I must have a purpose, what is the meaning of life, what is the end, what is it all about?" So biologically it has made the movement in the psychological area. And in the psychological area there may be no end at all. Do you understand? It may be our illusion, moving from one biological instinctive movement to a psychological field in which all movement is meaningless. So we are going to examine that. We said human beings as they are conditioned now, demand, seek, pursue an end, apart from the biological one. And we are asking if there is a psychological end at all, which may be enlightenment, god, noble life, you know all the rest of it. We are questioning all that. What is the psychological field? You understand? Inwardly, what is that? Is that filled by the movements of thought, the things of thought? Is that psychological field, which is our consciousness, human consciousness, with its content, is that the result of human struggle, pain, suffering, anxiety, which are all the movement of thought? So is that psychological field filled with the things of thought? And thought being matter. Please you may not have gone into this deeply, or you may have heard some scientists talking about it, but when one observes one can see very well that thought is a material process because knowledge is stored up in the brain, which is matter. So thought is a movement in time, a process of matter - right? Sensation, which is the response, and all the rest of it. So there is in the brain a movement of thought all the time operating mechanistically, endlessly going on and on and on, while you are awake and also while you are asleep, dreams, all that is going on all the time. And that is our psyche. You understand? Realizing the confusion within that area, thought says, "Is there a purpose? Is there an end? Is there a goal? Is there a freedom?" Do you understand all this? I hope we are meeting all this, are we? Please for this morning, or a few mornings, put away all your prejudices, all your anxieties, and demands, sexual, this, that, and just listen. I am telling you something lovely, something which is effortless, something very beautiful. Just listen to it. Don't fight it, nor accept it, just, as you listen to the river, just listen and then you will find if this is serious, true, it will take place, then it will blossom. And our action is from this area of knowledge and therefore action is never complete, it is always regretting, always foreseeing, and not being able to fulfil, so there is always frustration - right? So we are asking: why do human beings, living in this chaos, misery, why is it they don't change? Some of you have listened to the speaker, unfortunately, for fifty years - why in the name of heaven haven't you changed - radically, not superficially, just dropping one church, or this or that, is all trivial stuff? So one demands why. We said it is not the lack of energy, you have got plenty of energy to come here, sit in this hot tent, travel all round and come and listen, you have got plenty of energy. Is it the lack of will? Will implies - no, let's begin slowly. What is will? I will do this. I won't do that. I must and must not. What is this will, which plays such a tremendous part in our life? Please go into it with me, not accepting what the speaker is saying, find our for yourself in heaven's name what will is, because that plays such an extraordinary part in our life. I must give up smoking. I must not do this, and so on. What is that will? It is a movement, isn't it? Obviously. A movement in a direction, in a particular direction, either the negative direction, or the positive direction, but it is a direction. Please listen carefully. When there is a direction there is time involved. I am here and I must be there. I am angry, I must get rid of anger. So will is a movement in time -right? Please. And what is the essence of that will? What brings about, or what generates that will? You understand my question? As long as you have a directive, an end, you must have a will. So what is the nature and the structure of will? When you say, "I will do that" - what is that? And when you say, "I will not do that", or mustn't do that, the movement, what is it that takes place? Is it opposing desires, the desire that says, "I will", and the desire that says, "I will not"? So desire, desire strengthened, concentrated, is will. Right? Opposing, or completely unified. So what is desire? Please listen. You understand? We are used to being conditioned to exercise will. You smoke, begin to smoke gradually, it comes into a habit and you find it is necessary to give up that habit and you say, "I must fight it. I must get rid of it" - for various biological, emotional, or psychological reasons. So will is the essence of desire. And what is desire? We are examining this because we are trying to find out why human beings don't change after millenia. You understand? Why live in this miserable way? We said we have got plenty of energy. Now we are asking: is it the lack of will? And we are examining the nature of will, the structure of it, how it is formed, how it comes into being. So we said desire is the essence of will. So what is desire? Please examine through my words, the speaker's words, the issue in yourself. Desire is sensation, plus thought, plus the image which thought creates. You understand? Sensation, seeing something, then the thought taking over the observation, then thought creating the image. Sensation, plus thought, plus the image - right? That is desire. From that all our activity of will takes place. So the question is: as long as there is a will there is a directive and therefore movement towards that direction, positive or negative. And that is the pattern which you are used to. Having sensations, thought, and thought plus sensation creating the image, the image that I must be that, the image that I must not be that -you follow? All that is will. And we have exercised that will endlessly. The Socialists, the Communists, the religious people, the non-religious people, this movement is all the time going on. That is our conditioning. Which is: in the psychological field this movement of desire plus thought and image is constant. And as long as that mechanistic process goes on there cannot be change, there cannot be psychological, deep revolution. So how can this movement come to an end? You understand my question? I wonder if you understand all this? Is this becoming a bit difficult? You understand? I am a human being, I have lived in the pattern of agony, suppression, quarrels, violence, bitterness, and an occasional feeling of tenderness, an occasional sense of something which I dreamt of, or I feel immense, all that, I have lived like that, as a human being. And I say to myself, "Why am I living this way? I know I will die. There is always death, but I live during that fifty, twenty, thirty, eighty years in a squalid pigsty way - why?" Is it a lack of - I won't come to that yet. Is it lack of energy? I see I have got plenty of energy when I want to do something. Is it lack of will? And I begin to examine the will, the whole nature of will. And that is my habit, conditioning. Now I am questioning if I can break that habit, if that habit can be broken? That is, not to operate on will at all. You understand? Will only comes into being - please listen - comes into being when sensation, which is natural, which is acceptable, which is normal, sane, when that sensation is taken over by thought and that thought creates the image. So is it possible to be completely, wholly with sensation and no interference of thought? You understand what I am saying? You see a beautiful house, a beautiful woman, a nice man, see the hills and the glory of the earth, when you observe there is tremendous sensation if you are at all watching. And then thought comes along and says, "Yes, how marvellous", from that begins the image-making, the picture-making, the imagination. Now is it possible to have this complete sensation, which is normal, healthy, sane, and not let thought seep in? You understand? When thought seeps in you have the projection of tomorrow. I don't know if you see that? You see something extraordinarily beautiful, and all your senses are awake, then thought comes along and says, "I must have it tomorrow", which is the image-making, the pleasure - you follow? - the delight of something beautiful, thought has taken over, created an image and therefore there is tomorrow - you understand? So the tomorrow is the process of time, which is thought. So in the psyche there is only sensation, no tomorrow. I wonder if you see this? This is a little bit complex, is it? I see some people are not - let me explain it more. We live in the hope of tomorrow - right? Tomorrow to us is tremendously important, as yesterday, the images of yesterday, all that is as important, the past, as tomorrow. So we live in the past and tomorrow becomes tremendously significant. So psychologically we are saying: what is tomorrow? There is tomorrow which is Friday, we have to do certain things, but psychologically we are asking what is tomorrow? Tomorrow is a directive. Please do see the beauty of this. Tomorrow is a directive, the end, the goal; and so tomorrow psychologically assumes a great significance. And psychologically, inwardly, the tomorrow is the movement of thought in time, the movement of thought as a material process in time. Tomorrow is a measurement - right? Where there is a measurement there must be illusion. Oh, come on! I am afraid you don't see all this. Look: measurement means comparing, doesn't it? I am not so beautiful as you are. I am not so intelligent as you are. Right? I want to be as intelligent as you are, which is measurement, comparison is measurement. So thought is a process of comparison, so thought is measurement. Which is: the directive from 'what is' to 'what should be' - right? Now is there such a thing as tomorrow in the psychological world? If I live with tomorrow then it is a mechanistic process - right? Because thought has created tomorrow psychologically. That may be an illusion altogether. So I must, as a human being I must find out, because that is the pattern, that is conditioning, that is the accepted norm of existence, which may be totally absurd. Because I am concerned as a human being with the radical transformation, and we are examining the will, the will in action. And will in action means tomorrow, the directive. And is there such a thing as tomorrow, psychologically, apart from biologically, physically? I need time, tomorrow, if I need to learn a language, if I have to learn to drive a car and so on and so on. So is there a tomorrow? There is no tomorrow when there is only sensation, and no image and no thought. I wonder if you capture it? Do you get it? You see people, specially so-called religious people, the monks throughout the world, have said, "Sensation is totally wrong, control it, because sensation leads to desire, and desire means the woman or the man. God cannot accept a man who has desire" - you know, you have heard all this stuff put in different words. "Therefore suppress desire, therefore control all your sensations, because if you don't you are in the devil's hands." So we are saying something quite opposite. Which is: sensation is natural, sensation must exist, does exist, it is a fact, If you don't have your sensations fully alert you are paralysed. You may be paralysed because we have learned the art of suppression. So there are all your sensations. When the sensations meet the movement of thought then there is tomorrow, because thought is a fragment. Thought is a fragment because it is based on yesterday's memory. Thought is never whole. So sensation totally is whole, therefore there is no tomorrow. Do you understand all this? No, don't agree with me. Please do it. See what happens when you do look at those hills, at anything. Look at it with all your senses fully awakened. Senses, not only your brain, your mind, because mind is part of the sensations, with all your sensations. Then you will see thought comes along and the image making begins, and tomorrow will happen. But when there is only complete sensation, without the movement of thought, there is only now, no tomorrow. Oh, I wonder if you see this? So is it because we have no energy that we don't change? And we see that we have got energy, whenever we want to do something we break everything to do it. And is it the lack of will? We see the mischief of will. So there is an action which is born, not out of will, but out of the perception of this movement of will. You understand? So there is an action which is not born from an image, which is fragmentary, but an action born out of total awareness, which is total sense of sensation. Please, this is very important all this. Don't misunderstand - if you misunderstand it is not my fault. Then if it is not the lack of energy, then will has no place, then why is it that human beings haven't changed? Is it that they are always thinking of reward and punishment, which is the motive for our operation? We are brought up from childhood on that basis, reward if you are good, punished if you are not. Reward if you struggle, climb the ladder you are rewarded, you become the President, or god knows what else, or the Bishop. So our conditioning is based on reward and punishment, which is the motive. A motive based on reward and punishment. Motive means a movement. The word itself means a movement. You see what is implied? The moment you have a motive the movement is time. So you say, "I will take time to change." If it is not reward or punishment, then it is "I am going to heaven" or whatever, reward. So where there is a motive there is a direction, and that direction is set by thought, and so tomorrow. So as long as there is a motive all action is incomplete, isn't it? If I love you because you give me food, this, that, and the comfort and all the rest of it, it is my motive, it isn't love. So is there an action without motive? You understand my question? The moment I have a motive as a human being, whatever I do is partial, fragmentary, which will bring about regret, pain, suffering and all the rest of it. So I am asking as a human being: is there an action without a motive? Don't translate it into saying love, because that word is so abused, so heavily laden, don't bring in that word, we will discuss it another time. So is there an action in which there is no tomorrow, no will, only total energy? When you have total energy you have total action. You understand? I wonder if you get this? Look: we are fragmented human beings. We go to the office, or the factory, or garden and that is a field by itself. And our family is a field by itself. My ambitions, my desires is another fragmentation. So we live in fragments - right? That is a fact. And so any action born of that fragmentation must be inevitably incomplete, and therefore always destructive, frightening, regretting, in sorrow and all the rest of it. So I say as a human being: is there an action in which all this doesn't exist? You understand? You must ask that question. You are not asking it. I am asking it. If you ask it, not superficially because this is a tremendous thing this, to discover, you will find as a human being, a human being who represents the whole world of humanity, you will find there is an action which is not of tomorrow, the ideal, the directive, but an action that springs from that total energy which is total sensation. So then for what reason further is it that human beings have not changed? You understand? We said it is lack of energy - is it lack of energy? Is it will? Is it incomplete action, with which you are familiar? And is there another thing that is impeding why human beings don't fundamentally change? Is there another? Of course there are many others. We will take the fundamental things, not superficial fragmentary things; energy, will, complete action and is it that in all of us there is a longing for something other than 'what is'? You understand my question? A longing of something beyond all this mess, a happiness, a deliverance, something that thought has never touched - you understand? Something eternal, nameless -it doesn't matter what name you give it. Is that one of the reasons that we don't change? You understand my question? I live a miserable, sordid life. And I see it round me, everybody more or less the same pattern, and my parents, grandparents, past, past, past parents, have lived the same way. And I feel I cannot escape from this. I feel that I am chained, bound. And I want something beyond all this. And that may be one of the reasons I don't change. It is very important. Questioner: (In Italian.) K: One moment. You understand? The priests throughout the world, the Christian, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Tibetan priests, always said there is a promise of something greater. Do this and you will go to heaven, and if you don't you will go to hell. Which is interpreted in the Hindu in a different way, and so on and so on, which is irrelevant. So our minds are conditioned heavily by something other than 'what is'. The other is the promised land, the never-never land, the heaven, the enlightenment, the nirvana, the moksha of the Hindus. Because I don't know what to do with this, the 'what is', and my whole longing is that. Put it in different ways: it may be the Communists may want perfect a State, perfect environment, it is the same problem - you understand? It is the same issue only put in different words - the tomorrow. So that may be - I am asking - one of the fundamental reasons why human beings don't change, because they have this -the perfect highest principle, called in India Brahman, Nirvana by the Buddhists, heaven by the Christians and so on and so on. That may be one of the fundamental reasons why human beings don't change. The perfect ideal, the perfect man or woman. Which means the 'what is' is not important but that is important. The perfect ideal is important, the perfect state is important, the nameless is important. So don't bother with 'what is', don't look at 'what is', but translate 'what is' in terms of 'what should be'. You understand all this? I hope I am getting at you. So we have created a duality: the 'what should be' and 'what is'. And we are saying that may be one of the greatest reasons why human beings don't change. When there is this division between 'what is' and 'what should be', the highest, then there is conflict - right? The Arab and the Jew, division. Wherever there is a division there must be conflict, that is a law. So we have been conditioned in this division, to accept this division, to live in this division, the 'what is' and 'what should be'. The 'what should be' has been brought about because I don't know how to deal with 'what is'. Or the 'what should be' is a lever - you understand? - to get rid of 'what is'. So it is a conflict. So why has the mind created the 'what should be'? You understand my question and not be concerned totally with 'what is'? Why has the mind done this? Why has thought done this? Thought, if it is at all aware, knows it has created 'what is', and thought says, "This is a fragment, this is transitory. That is permanent" - you understand? This 'what is' is transitory and thought has created the highest principle which it thinks is permanent - thought thinks that. This is impermanent, that is permanent. Both the creation of thought. Right? God, saviour - all created by thought, the 'what should be'. So thought has created this division, and then thought says, "I cannot solve this, but I am going to approach that" - when you see the truth of this, that doesn't exist. Only this remains. I wonder if you see this? Right? Do you see this? Thought has created the perfect ideal, the perfect State, the perfect Nirvana, the perfect Moksha, the perfect Heaven, thought has created it, because it does not know what to do with this, with 'what is', with my sorrow, with my agony, with my impenetrable ignorance. So thought has created this division. Do you see the truth of it? - not the verbal agreement, not the acceptance, the logical acceptance of this, but the truth of it? Then if you see the truth of it that doesn't exist, the ideal, the perfect, that doesn't exist. Because you know nothing about it, it is merely a projection of thought. So you have the energy then to deal with 'what is', instead of losing that energy in there, you have the energy to deal with what is happening. You see the difference? Oh, for god's sake! Do you see it? So you have this energy to deal with 'what is'. Then you have to learn how to look at 'what is' - you understand? To observe 'what is'. Therefore you have no longer the duality of 'what should not be', only 'what is'. You are beginning to see the implications of it? When there is no 'what should be', the highest principle, you have only this. This is a fact. That is not fact. So we can deal with facts. When there is no duality there is only one thing, say for instance, violence. There is only violence, not nonviolence. Right? The non-violence is 'what should be'. So when you see the truth of it there is only violence - right? Now you have the energy to deal with that violence. What is violence? Go into it with me for a moment. Violence: anger, competition, comparison, imitation - imitation being I am this, I must be that. So violence psychologically is comparison, imitation, various forms of conformity, essentially comparison - I am this, I must be that - that is violence. Not just throwing bombs, physical violence, that is something quite different. That is brought about by our rotten society, immoral society, we won't go into that. So there is only violence, this thing. What is important there? What is the nature of it - you understand? We have described, more or less, what is violence. You may not agree with the description, but you know what we mean by violence; jealousy, anger, hatred, annoyance, arrogance, vanity, all part of that structure of violence. That violence comes with the picture, with the image I have, that is part of my image. Now can the mind be free of the image? You understand? As long as there is an image, a picture, I must be violent. The picture is formed through sensation, plus thought and the image - you are following this? So a human being realizes that as long as there is this image created through sensation plus thought, as long as that image, which is me, exists I must be violent. Violence means me and you, we and they. You know. So violence is there as long as this image exists. And that image is sensation plus thought. So there is no image if there is only complete sensation. So we can deal then with 'what is' - you understand? I wonder if you understand this? Look: I am angry, or I hate somebody - I don't but we will take that as an example. I hate somebody because he has done something ugly, hurt me and all the rest of it. My instinctual response, being a fairly intelligent, fairly normal human being, is to say, "I mustn't hate him, it is bad." I now have two images: I hate, and I mustn't hate. Two images. So there is a battle between these two images. One says, control, suppress, change, don't yield, yield - you follow? - that goes on all the time as long as two images exist. And I know the images are formed through - I have realized this very deeply - through sensation plus thought. That is a fact. I have realized that. So I put away non-hate - you understand? I have only this feeling of annoyance, anger, hatred. What is that feeling, created through the image, by some action of another - right? You have done something to the image, which is me. And that image is hurt, and from reaction of that hurt is anger. And if I have no image, thought, sensation, if I have no image you don't touch me -you understand? There is no wounding, there is no hate, which is 'what is'. Now I know, I am aware of what to do with the 'what is'. You understand? Have you got something of this? So I have found human beings don't change because they are wasting their energy; don't change because they are exercising their right of will, which they think is extraordinarily noble, which is called freedom of choice; and also they don't know what to do with 'what is' and therefore project 'what should be', and also maybe because that, the nirvana, the moksha, the heaven, is far more important than the 'what is' - you follow? These are the blocks that human beings don't change, why they don't radically transform themselves. If you have understood this deeply, you understand, with your blood, with your heart, with all your senses, then you will see that there is an extraordinary transformation without the least effort. Q: There is also a lack of will - pathological. I wish to know if effort of will has a place in life. K: Has will a place in life. Would you give me two minutes rest? Has will a place in life. What do you mean by life? What do we mean by life? Going to the office everyday, having a profession, a career, the everlasting climbing the ladder, both religiously and mundanely, the fears, the agonies, the things that we have treasured, remembered, all that is life, isn't it? Right? All that is life, both the conscious as well as the hidden. The conscious which we know, more or less. And then all the deep down hidden things in the cave of one's mind, in the deepest recesses of one's mind. All that is life. The illusion and the reality. The highest principle and the avoidance of 'what is'. The fear of death, fear of living, fear of relationship, all that. What place has will in all that? That is the question. I say it has no place. Don't accept what I am saying please. I am not your authority, I am not your guru. All the content of one's consciousness, which is consciousness, is created by thought, which is desire and the image. And that is what has brought about such havoc in the world. Is there a way of living in this without the action of will? That is the gentleman's question. I know this, as a human being I am fully aware of what is exactly going on within my consciousness' the confusion, the disorder, the chaos, the battle, the seeking for power, position, safety, security, prominence, all that business; and I see thought has created all that - thought plus desire and the multiplication of images. And I say, "What place has will in this"? It is will that has created this. Now can I live - please listen carefully - can I live in this without will? Biologically, physiologically I have to exercise a certain form of energy to learn a language, to do this and that. There must be a certain drive here. I see all this. And I realize, not as a verbal realization, as a description, but the actual fact of it, as factual as a pain in the leg. I realize it and I say this is the product of thought as desire and will. Can I, as a human being, look at all this, transform this without will? So what becomes important is what kind of observation is necessary. You understand? Observation, to see actually 'what is'. Is the mind capable of seeing actually 'what is'? Or does it always translate the 'what should be', the 'what should not be', I must suppress, I must not suppress, and all the rest of it? Right? So there must be freedom to observe otherwise I can't see. If I am prejudiced against you, or like you, I can't see you. So freedom is absolutely necessary to observe. Freedom from my prejudice, from my information, from what I have learned, to look without the idea - you understand? Just a minute I haven't finished. To look without the idea. As we said the other day, the word 'idea' comes from Greek, which means to observe - not the meaning we have made of it. The root meaning of that word is to observe, to see. When we refuse to see we make an abstraction and make it into an idea. So there must be freedom to observe, and in that freedom will is not necessary, there is just freedom to look. Which is - may I put it differently - if one makes a statement can you listen to it without making it into an abstraction? Do you understand my question? I make a statement, the speaker makes a statement as, the ending of sorrow is the beginning of wisdom. The speaker says that. Can you listen to that statement without making an abstraction of it? The abstraction being, is that possible? What do we get from it? How to do it? Those are all abstractions and not actually listening. So can you listen to that statement with all your senses? Which means with all your attention. Then you see the truth of it. And the perception of that truth is action in that chaos. Got it? SAANEN 7TH PUBLIC TALK 25TH JULY 1976. This is the last talk: there will be dialogues starting on Wednesday for five days. We have been talking over together for the past six gatherings, so many human psychological problems, and I would like this morning, if I may, to talk about something that I think is quite important. The word meditation has been so misunderstood, at least I think so, both in the east and in the west. The word itself means to think over, to ponder over, to enquire into, and not all the things that we have made of it. It is a very complex problem, as all human problems are, and meditation has very little meaning if you have not laid the right foundation for meditation. The very laying of the foundation, which is righteous behaviour, to be free from fear and so on, in the very laying of that foundation is meditation. Meditation isn't something away, isolated from daily activity, it is all-inclusive. I think this must be understood right from the beginning. It is not something that you do for 20 minutes in a morning or afternoon and at night and then forget all about it and then carry on your daily mischievous life. When meditation takes place it is something extraordinary and we must investigate it together, we are going into it together, sharing it together. I am not telling you how to meditate - that is too silly, that is too infantile. Because one of the first things is that one must be free, to be completely a light to oneself - you understand? A light to oneself. And this light cannot be given by another, nor can you light it at the candle of another. If you light it at the candle of another it is just a candle, it can be blown out. But whereas if we could find out what it means to be a light to oneself then that very investigation of it is part of meditation. So we are going together to investigate first what it means to be a light to oneself, and see how extraordinarily important it is to have this light. We are so accustomed, and our conditioning is, to accept authority. The authority of the priest, the authority of a book, the authority of a guru, the authority of someone who says he knows, and so on. In all spiritual matters, if one may use that word 'spiritual', in all those matters there must be and there should be no authority whatsoever, because otherwise you can't be free, you can't be free to investigate, to find out for yourself what meditation means. So if you are really deeply interested in this question, because this question of meditation, not how to meditate, that is again too childish, but the movement of meditation, the act of meditation, the flow of meditation, to discover what it means, authority, that is to find out from another, what and how to meditate, is one of the questions of authority. Where there is authority there can be no freedom, either in the tyrannical world of dictatorship, the totalitarian state - there is no freedom; in the same way if there is no freedom from authority, that is, the word 'authority' means one who originates something, the author, the word comes from the word author, the one who begins something, originates something, and the rest of the people follow it, make it into an authority and then it is dead. So one must be very careful if you really want to go into this question of meditation, to be completely, wholly, inwardly free from all authority, from all comparison. I don't know if you can do it. Including that of the speaker - especially that of the speaker, that is me, because if you follow what he says it is finished. Therefore one must be extremely aware of the importance of authority in one direction, that is the doctor, the scientist, the man who - and all the rest of it; and understand the total unimportance of authority inwardly. Whether it is the authority of another, which is fairly easy to throw off, or whether it is the authority of your own experience, knowledge, conclusion, which becomes your authority, which then becomes your prejudice. So one must be equally free from the authority of another and also one must be free from conclusions, which become one's own authority, from one's own experience. We shall go into that word 'experience' presently. From one's own understanding, "I understand therefore I am right". All those are forms of authority. You understand how difficult this is going to be if you really want to go into this extraordinary complex question; otherwise you can never be a light to yourself. When you are a light to yourself you are a light to the world, because the world is you, and you are the world. I wonder if you see that? So that is the first thing to understand: that there is no one to guide you, no one to tell you that you are progressing, no one to tell you that or to encourage you. You have to stand completely alone in meditation. You understand what it means? And this light to yourself can only come when you understand, or investigate into yourself what you are. That is self-awareness, to know what you are - not according to psychologists, not according to some philosophers, not according to the speaker, but to know, to be aware of your own nature, of your own structure, of your own thinking, feeling, find out the whole structure of it. Therefore self-knowing becomes extraordinarily important. Not the description given by another, but actually 'what is', what you are, not what you think you are, or what you think you should be, but what actually is going on. Do you know how difficult that is? Have you ever tried it? To be aware actually of what is taking place, inside, inside the skin as it were, because we observe through the knowledge of the past - right? So what you have acquired as an experience, or what you have gathered from another, with that knowledge you examine, therefore you are examining yourself from the background of the past, therefore you are not actually observing 'what is'. So there must be freedom to observe. And then in that observation the whole structure and the nature of oneself begins to unroll. You are following all this? Please give for this morning at least an hour's attention. Because very few people will tell you all this because they have self-interest, they want to form organizations, groups - you follow, the whole structure of that business. So please, if you don't mind, give your complete attention to what is being said. So to understand oneself there must be observation, and that observation can only take place now. And the now is not the movement of the past which observes the now. You see the difference? I can observe the now from the past, from my past conclusions, prejudices, hopes, fears and all the rest of it. Which is an observation from the past of the present, and I think I am observing the now. But the observation of the now can only take place when there is no observer who is the past. You understand this? So observation of the now becomes extraordinarily important. Which, as we said the other day, the movement of the past, meeting the present must end there, that is the now, But if you allow it to go on then the now becomes the future, or the past, but never the actual now. I hope you understand all this. So observation can only take place in the now; in the very doing of it when you are angry, when you are greedy, to observe it as it is. Which means not to condemn it, not to judge it, but to watch it and let it flower and disappear. You understand the beauty of it? Oh, come on! Traditionally we are educated to suppress, or to move within a certain direction. What we are saying is: to observe your anger, your greed, your sexual demands, whatever it is, and to observe without the past so that the anger flowers and disappears, withers away. And when you do that you will never be angry again. I don't know if you have ever done these things: do it some time and you will discover it for yourself. To allow, through observation, in which there is no choice, just to observe your greed, your envy, your jealousy, whatever it be, and in the very observation of it, it is flowering and undergoing a radical change. The scientists are saying too that when you examine through a microscope, the very act of the observation of the cell, or whatever it is, undergoes a change. You understand this? The very observation without the background brings about a change. You understand? So to be aware of oneself without any choice, and to see what is actually happening in the now, is to allow the whole movement of the self, the 'me', to flower, and as you observe it undergoes a radical transformation, if there is no background, if there is no observer who is the background. You have got this somewhat? Have you understood it sirs? Go at it! So in doing that, obviously authority has no place. The man who says, "I know, I will do this or do that" - that is out, completely, for ever. So there is no intermediary between your observation and truth. We are going to find out presently, what truth is, if it can at all be described. So in doing that one becomes a light to oneself, so then you don't ask anybody at any time how to do something. In the very doing, which is the observing, there is the act, there is the change. So that is the first thing to learn - because we are learning - the first thing to learn is, that one has to be a light to oneself. And it is extraordinarily difficult to resist the tradition that you must be guided. You understand? That is why gurus from India are multiplying like ugly mushrooms, all over the world. Sorry but they are really bringing old tradition and putting it in different words and offering it. It is the old. In India this has been going on for thousands of years. I have seen many of the so-called pop gurus, they have come to see me, and they leave with great respect but they go on their own way. So freedom to observe, and therefore no authority of any kind, is essential. Then the search for experience, which we all want, must come to an end. I will show you why. We have every day various kinds of experiences. We have had sexual experience, experiences of various kinds through books, through - you know the whole demand for experience. The word 'experience' means to go through, to go through and finish, not to record it. The recording of it becomes a memory, and that memory distorts observation. Say, for instance, if one is a Christian, you have been conditioned for two thousand years, in all your ideologies, beliefs, dogmas, rituals, saviours, and you want to experience that which you call whatever it is. So you will experience it because that is your conditioning. As in India they have various gods, hundreds of them, and they are conditioned to that and they have visions of them, because according to their conditioning they see. So the demand for experience, when you are bored with all the physical experiences, we want some other kind of experience, the spiritual experience, the greatest demand to find out if there is god, to have visions and all the rest of it. You will have visions, experiences, according to your background, obviously, because your mind is conditioned that way. And to be aware of that, and to see what is implied in experiences. What is implied in experiences? There must be an experiencer to experience. Right? The experiencer is all that he craves for, all that he has been told, his conditioning. And he wants to experience something which he calls god, or Nirvana, or whatever it is. So he will experience it. But the word 'experience' means recognition, recognition implies that you already know, therefore it is not something new. So a mind that demands experience is really living in the past, and therefore can never possibly understand something totally new, original. So there must be freedom from that urge for experience. Do you understand? You know this is going to be tremendously arduous, to go into this kind of meditation, because we all want rather easy, comfortable, happy, you know, an easy going life. And so when something difficult, which demands your attention, your energy, you say, "Well that is not for me, I'll go another way." So no authority; no demand for any kind of experience. That means there is no experiencer - you understand? Are we sharing this together somewhat? Then to observe your fears, your pleasures, the sorrows and all the complexities of daily living in relationship, to observe all that. To observe very carefully. And we said to observe implies that there is no observer, therefore there is no question of suppressing, denying, accepting, but merely observing your fear, because when there is a fear it always distorts perception. When you are merely pursuing pleasure - again that is a distorting factor. Or when there is sorrow - again that is a burden. So the mind which is learning what is meditation must be free of this, and understand the daily, everyday relationship, which is much more arduous. Because, as we said, our relationship with each other is based on our own image of the other and so on. So as long as there is an image-maker, that image-maker prevents actual relationship with each other - right? So this is essential before we can go very deeply into the question of meditation. And that is why very few people meditate properly, rightly. They just play as an amusement, something that you add to that which you already have. Now when that is carefully well established deeply - which is part of meditation - then we can proceed to find out whether thought can be controlled. You understand? Wherever you go either in India, or in a Zen monastery, or various forms of meditation, Tibetan, you know they are bringing all the stuff over from Asia because we are all so gullible, so ready to accept something you think is new, it is just as old as the hills. You give up Christianity and take on that burden - you follow? It is the same old game. So the question is: whether thought can be controlled. All systems of meditation, systems being practice, method, day after day, day after day, they all assert that thought must be controlled, because thought is the disturbing factor for a still mind. You understand all this? Are we meeting each other somewhere? Is there a common ground between us? So thought, they say, must be absolutely held so that it cannot possibly chatter, go off. Therefore, they say, in order to control it various systems are necessary: the Zen system, the Tibetan system, the Buddhist system, and the various forms of Hindu meditation, which is in essence: control your thought. Right? I do not know if you have gone into this question at all. If you have, and if you have read something about it, or listened to gurus - if you have any gurus and I hope none of you have gurus, at least you won't at the end of the talk - they all insist, because I have listened to all of them, they have come and told me a great deal about it, they asked the speaker to join them -oh, I won't go into all that rubbish. They all insist that thought must be controlled and therefore thought must be held. One of the systems is Mantra yoga - you have heard of that. You know, Transcendental Meditation. Give it a good name like transcendental and then you change that into something marvellous. The word 'mantra', the root meaning of it is a sentence, a formula, a word that will bring about concentration - you understand? It can be Coca-cola (Laughter) - don't laugh please, don't laugh, you are caught in it, that is what I am objecting to, you are caught in it. It can be that drink, it can be another word, or a Sanskrit sentence, given to you by your guru for a hundred and fifty dollars and so on and so on and so on. The idea being to help to bring about concentration so that your thought is completely held - you understand? Now when you look into it, who is the controller? You understand? You want to control your thought, you see the importance of controlling your thought, and you say "I will try to control it", and all the time it slips away. You spend forty years in controlling - you understand? Every moment it is slipping away. So you have to enquire: who is the controller? And why is it so important to make such tremendous efforts to control? Effort - you follow? Which means conflict between the thought that moves away and another thought which says, "I must control it", which is a battle all the time, struggle, conflict. All that goes on. So we must enquire into who is the controller? You understand? Is not the controller another thought? Right? So one thought, which assumes the dominance, says, "I must control the other thought". One fragment trying to control another fragment. Please see this very carefully, because if you don't see it what we are going into you will miss. That is, thought has divided itself as movement, chattering, thinking about various things. When you want to look at something, concentrate, it goes off thinking about your shoes or something or other. And another thought which says, "I mustn't do that, I must control it." So both are thought. One assumes the dominance and tries to suppress the other. See this. See the validity of what is being said, not because I say it, it is so. That is, thought says, 'It would be marvellous if I could control the thought which is wandering, so that I can experience Nirvana.' - or whatever it wants to experience. So there is a division - please observe it - between the controller and that which needs to be controlled, and so there is a conflict between the controller and the controlled. And there are various systems that will help you to control. One of the systems is: become very slowly aware of everything you are doing, your breathing, your posture - oh, it's all too... I can't bear with that kind of stuff. So what is important is to find out whether there is only thinking, not the thinker and the thought, and so the thinker controlling thought. So there is only thinking - you understand? Whether you think about boot laces or about god, or about your wife, or about some future happiness, or whatever it is, it is still thinking. So we are concerned not with how to control thought, but with what is the whole process of thinking? Now if one is aware of all that, then there is only thinking. You understand? Not the thought which is wandering, and the controller which says, "I must control it". So there is only thinking. Why should it stop? You understand? If there is only thinking, why should it stop? So thinking is a movement, isn't it? Thinking is a movement, a movement in time, from here to there and so on. Thinking is a movement as time. Now, can that time come to an end? That is the question; not how to stop thinking. Have you understood my question first? We have laid emphasis in meditation, people have, the gurus and all the rest of that group have laid emphasis on control. Where there is control there must be effort, there must be conflict, there must be suppression. And where there is suppression there are all kinds of neurotic behaviour and so on and so on. So is it possible - please listen - is it possible to live without any control? You understand? Which doesn't mean to do what you like, be completely permissive - you understand? We are asking a much more serious question, which is: in your daily life, psychologically can you live without any control whatsoever? You can. We have done it. Please this is a very, very serious thing because we don't know a life, in which there is no shadow of control. We all know only control. So to understand a life without control, one must go into it very, very deeply. That is, control exists where there is comparison. I compare myself with you and I want to be like you, because you are more intelligent, more bright, more spiritual, god knows what else. So I want to be like you, so I make an effort to be like you. If there is no comparison whatsoever psychologically, what takes place? I am what I am. I don't know what I am but I am that. There is no movement towards something which I think is more. So what takes place? When there is no comparison what has taken place? Am I dull because I have compared myself with you, who are clever, bright, and therefore I have become dull? Or the very word 'dull' makes me dull? You understand? I wonder if you understand all this? You know when you go to a museum you look at various pictures, and you compare them, Michelangelo - you know various artists and say "This is better than that" - we are traditionally trained that way. In the school we say we must be better than 'A', and you struggle, struggle to be 'A'. And college examinations and the whole movement of that is comparison, make effort. Now we are saying that when you understand the movement of measurement, and when you see the unreality of it, psychologically, then you have 'what is'. You understand? You have exactly 'what is'. You can only meet 'what is' when you have energy. That energy has been dissipated in comparison - right? So now you have that energy to observe 'what is'. To observe the now with that energy. Therefore 'what is' now undergoes a radical transformation. So thought has divided itself as the controller and the controlled. But there is only thinking. There is no controller, or the controlled, but only the act of thinking. Thinking is a movement in time as measure. And can that naturally, easily, without any control, come to an end? You understand my question? When I make an effort to bring it to an end, thinking is still in operation. I am deceiving myself by saying that the thinker is different from the thought. So my question is entirely different. Which is: there is only thinking. The thinker is the thought. There is no thinker if there is no thought. And therefore can this thinking, which is a movement in time, come to an end? Which is, can time have a stop? Now I'll show it to you if you'll go into it. We said time - please pay attention, if you are tired take a rest and I will stop too, if you are not tired we will go on - time is the past. Right? There is no future time. There is future time only when the past meets the present, modifies it and moves on. So time is a movement from the past, modified but still moving on. We are saying that movement must stop. You understand? Which is the whole movement of knowledge - right? Which is the whole movement of that which has been known. Unless you are free from that movement there is no freedom to observe the new - you understand? So we are saying that movement must stop. Now you can't stop it by will, which is to control. You can't stop it by desire, which is part of your sensation, thought, image. And so how is this movement to come to an end, naturally, easily, happily, so that it comes to an end, without your knowing? Have you ever given up something that gives you great pleasure at the moment, dropped it instantly? Have you ever done it? You can do it with pain and sorrow, I am not talking of that, because you want to forget it, put it away. But something that gives you immense pleasure. Have you ever done it? To drop it instantly without any effort. Have you? I'll show you. The past is always our background. We live in the past. He has hurt me, he has told me, I want this - you follow? - our whole life is spent in the past. The incident of now is transformed into memory, and memory becomes the past. So we live in the past. The movement of the past - can that stop? That is what we are asking. You understand? Now it can stop only - this is not a trick, this isn't something you repeat and say, "Yes, I have stopped it", that is too damn silly - it means that the past, which is a movement, and the now which is non-movement - you understand? You have understood this? I have just discovered something. The past is the movement, modified through the present, to the future. That is the movement of time. The past is a movement, always moving, moving, moving, moving, going forward, meeting the present and moving. The now is non-movement, because you don't know what the now is; you only know movement. Right? When that movement meets the now there is no movement at all -you understand? Please this is not a verbal communication, it has to be felt, known deeply, understood. You see the immovable is the now. The now is the past meeting the present, we said that, do you remember? - the past meeting the present and ending there. That is the now. So the movement of the past meets the now, which is immovable, and stops. You understand? So thought, which is a movement of the past, meets the present completely, and ends there. This has to be meditated over, thought over, you go into it. So the next thing is: the mind, which is not only matter, which is the brain, which is also sensation, which is also all the things that thought has put into that mind, which is consciousness, in that consciousness there are all the various unconscious demands. And we are asking: can that totality of consciousness be observed as a whole, not fragment by fragment? Do you understand my question? Because if we examine fragment by fragment it will be endless. It is only when there is an observation of the totality there is an ending to it, or leading to something else. You understand? So can this totality of consciousness be observed, totally? It can if you will do it. Which is, when you look at a map, you are looking at it with the desire to go to a certain place. So there is a direction. So when you are seeking a direction it is very simple - right? You are in this town, you want to go to Bern, or Zurich, or Geneva, whatever it is, and the direction is there. So to observe the whole map is to have no direction. That is simple. See how simple it is, for god's sake don't make it complex. So in the same way, to look at this whole consciousness is to have no direction. Which means to have no motive, because the moment, when you look into a map and want to go from here to there you have a motive for going there, your pleasure, this or that. So your motive gives the direction. But when you can observe totally anything, yourself or your consciousness, it is to have no motive and therefore no direction, then you see the whole, as you see when you look at a map wholly. Right? Then you don't misplace Germany with Italy, or Italy where England is. So you look at the whole map when there is no direction, which means no motive. So to observe your consciousness wholly there must be no motive, no direction. And is that possible when you have been trained to do everything to act with a motive? There is no action without a motive - that is what we are trained to do, educated for, all our religions, everything says you must have a motive. But the moment you have a motive, which is either pleasure or pain, reward or punishment, that gives you a direction and therefore you can never see the whole. If you understand that, see that actually then you have no motive. Not, "How am I to get rid of my motive?" You understand? You can only see something totally when there is no direction. All this is part of meditation, so that there is no centre from which a direction can take place - you understand? The centre is the motive. If there is no motive there is no centre, and therefore no direction. Therefore what then? Then there are all the systems of yoga - you know what yoga means? Yoga means to join. I think and I have been told too, it is quite a wrong meaning. It had originally, as I suspected, something totally different. Which is: total harmony. Not by doing exercises, breathing, you will get harmony, but the way of living itself is harmony - you understand? And you can only do that when you have understood relationship -you follow? Are you following all this? So the mind - I must go into something else here too. In doing all this, in living that way daily, you have certain powers - you understand? In Sanskrit they are called siddhis, which is, you become clairvoyant, because your body becomes astonishingly sensitive, your mind becomes very clear, you can read other people's thoughts, you have certain capacities which you have never had before, telepathy, and you know, all the rest of it. Now we have been through all that. But to be caught in any of that means you can't go further - you understand? If you are caught in all that rather childish stuff - and it is quite childish - if you have a very sensitive body, you understand, you can almost hear what people are thinking, all that, and it gives you certain power, certain capacities, but if those become important then you have lost the whole thing. And also they are now talking about, unfortunately, these people who know nothing, they are talking about Kundalini - I won't go into all that. So now the mind is prepared. You understand? It is prepared to observe without any movement. You have got it? Because you have understood authority, you have understood all the rest of it - I won't go into all that. It stands completely alone, to be a light to yourself, therefore no impingement. Therefore the mind is not registering, the brain, which we went into the other day. So the mind now is without a single movement - right? Therefore it is silent; not imposed silence, not cultivated silence, which has no meaning, but a silence that is not the result of stopping something, stopping noise. You understand? It is a natural outcome of the daily living. And the daily living has its beauty. And this beauty is part of this non-movement. I must talk about beauty. What is beauty? Is it the description, is it the thing that you see, the proportions, the heights, the depths, the shadows, a picture by Michelangelo, or a statue of his? What is beauty? Is it in your eye? Or it is out there? Or it is not in your eye, or out there? You understand what I am talking about? We say that is a beautiful thing, beautiful architecture, marvellous cathedral, and a lovely painting - it is out there. Or is it in the eye? Because it has been trained, it has been observing, it is seeing that which is ugly, that is not proportionate, not having any depth, no style? Is it out there? Or is it in the eye? Or it has nothing to do with the eye, or with that outside? I am asking. Beauty is when you are not - right? You understand? When you look, it is you are looking, you are judging, you are saying "That is a marvellous proportion", "That is so still, it has got depth, it has got such grandeur", but it is all you looking, giving it importance. But when you are not there, that is beauty. You understand? Oh, you don't. And when that beauty is there, that expression of it may never take place. You understand? But we want to express it because that is self-fulfilment. I am an artist, I am a great - you follow? Therefore beauty may be when you as a human being with all your travail, your anxieties, pain, sorrow, are not there, then there is beauty. So the mind now is still, without a movement. Then you ask -we are investigating, not investigating because all investigating, all movement has stopped - then what is there when movement stops? You understand? Is compassion a movement? One is compassionate, one goes and does something for another, goes to some Indian village and helps the people because you are compassionate - so all that is various forms of sentimentality, affection and so on, but we are asking something much more important, which is: when there is no movement then what takes place, what is there? We are asking is it compassion? Or is it beyond all that? Which is, is there something that is totally original and therefore sacred - you understand? Because we don't know what is sacred. Our images are sacred, whether you go to a church, a temple or a mosque, our images are sacred, but the images are put together by thought. So thought is a material process, movement; so when there is no movement is there something totally original, totally untouched by humanity, untouched by all the movement of thought? Therefore that may be that which is original and therefore most holy. You understand? This is real meditation. To start from the very beginning not knowing - please if you start with knowing you end up in doubt. You understand? If you start with not knowing you end up with absolute truth, which is certainty. I wonder if you capture this. Because we began by saying we must investigate into ourselves, and ourselves is the known, therefore empty the known. So from that emptiness all the rest of it flows naturally. So where there is something most holy, which is the whole movement of meditation, then life has a totally different meaning. It is never superficial, never. You may have ten suits or a house, but if you have this nothing matters. Well sirs, that is it. Questioner: May I ask a question? K: Yes sir. Q: Is a motive necessary in business, and if so how does one choose the right motive? K: What is the right motive in earning a livelihood. That's right, sir? Q: Yes. Is it necessary to have a motive? K: I'll show you. What is the right motive in earning a livelihood. Which means: what is the right livelihood, that's right sir? What do you think is the right motive in earning a livelihood? Not what is the most convenient, not what is the most profitable, or enjoyable, or gainful, but what is the right livelihood? Now how will you find out - please just listen - what is right? Because you asked what is the right livelihood. What is right? The word 'right' means correct, accurate - you understand sir? Accurate. It cannot be accurate if you do something for profit or pleasure - right? Accurate, therefore correct, therefore right. Now what is right? Now just a minute. This is again a very complex thing. Everything thought has put together is reality - right? The tent has been put together by thought, it is a reality. The tree has not been put together by thought, it is a reality. The illusions are reality. The illusions that one has, the imagination, all that is a reality. And the action from that illusion is neurotic, which is the reality. So we must see first, when you ask this question what is the right livelihood, you must understand what is reality - right? Reality is not truth - we will go into that a little later, if we have time. So there is reality. Now what is correct action in this reality? Now how will you discover what is right in this reality? Discover for yourself, not to be told, if I tell you go and do this, then you might regret it and then curse me at the end of it. So we have to find out what is the accurate, correct, right action, or right livelihood in the world of reality. Reality includes illusion, don't escape, don't move away, illusion and the activities of illusion, like belief is an illusion, and the activities of belief are neurotic, believing in nations and all the rest of it is another form of reality but an illusion. So taking all that as reality, what is the right action there? You understand? Who is going to tell you? Nobody, obviously. So when you see - please listen sir - when you see reality without illusion, which is also reality, the very perception of that reality is your intelligence - right? - in which there is no mixture of reality and illusion and all the rest of it. So when there is observation of reality, which is reality of the tree, reality of the tent, reality which thought has put together, including visions, illusions, when you see all that reality, the very perception of that is your intelligence - isn't it? Right? So your intelligence says what you are going to do. I wonder if you get this? Do you understand this? Intelligence is to perceive what is, and what is not. To perceive 'what is' and see the reality of 'what is', which means you don't have any psychological involvement, psychological demands, which are all forms of illusion. To see all that is intelligence; and that intelligence will operate wherever you are. Therefore that will tell you what to do. Now: then what is truth? Reality we said - right? Then what is truth? Certainly not reality. So there is truth. One has to go into it, I haven't time now. There is truth. Then what is the link between reality and truth? You understand? The link is this intelligence. That intelligence that sees the totality of reality and therefore doesn't carry it over to truth. And the truth then operates on reality through intelligence. Got it? SAANEN 5TH PUBLIC TALK 22ND JULY 1975. We talked over together the last time, which was on Sunday, the whole question of fear. I think we ought to go into the problem of pleasure, enjoyment and that which is not pleasure, which is joy. It's really quite a complex problem because it involves a great deal and to understand this problem, this question, which man has been pursuing centuries upon centuries - the pursuit of pleasure - we ought to consider what is freedom with regard to pleasure, what part does intelligence play with regard to pleasure, and beauty which incites pleasure. What is freedom? Many books and theoreticians and so-called philosophers - the word philosophy means the love of truth, not the love of words and theories - many philosophers and others have written a great deal, I believe, about pleasure, and about freedom. The Communist world denies freedom, all dictatorship, totalitarianism denies the necessity and the demand of freedom, they call it a bourgeois idiosyncrasy without any reality. I am using the word reality in the sense which we have been talking about. And religious people have said, there is no freedom in this world, you have to find it in heaven, or withdraw from this world into some kind of monastic world and seek freedom inwardly - freedom from everything that one has observed in oneself and in the world about one. If there is no freedom of expression, of thought, of speech, then one lives a life of slavery. But that freedom of expression has led to a great deal of danger, damage, a freedom to express oneself without investigating totally, completely what is expression and what is it being expressed, and who is it that is expressing it - without considering that, merely to demand freedom of expression does lead to a great deal of mischief and confusion. And in enquiring into this question of freedom, is that freedom total, whole or is freedom partial, that is, freedom from something which is invariably partial? That is: if I want to be free from something, it is only a reaction which cultivates the opposite. And the opposite invariably contains its own opposite - so in that there is no freedom. Are we moving together in this? In the opposite - whether it is the Communist opposite as an antithesis - the opposite can never give freedom, because the opposite has its root in that which has been considered its own opposite. So in that there is no freedom. So is freedom away from reality, reality being that which thought has brought about, which thought has put together, which thought reflects upon, which thought has created the idea of freedom and then seeks it as something separate from itself - or is freedom not from something but from reality? That is to give reality its right place. As we said the other day, the word 'art' means, to put everything in its right place, where it belongs. So in enquiring into freedom, is that freedom totally away from reality, though in reality there must be a certain order of freedom? If in the world of reality there is no freedom at all, then we are complete slaves. But when there is order, that is to put everything where it belongs in the world of reality, then there is a certain quality of freedom there. But that freedom is not the total freedom. Right? This is not a theory, this is not a speculative conclusion, but when one observes the whole demand of man for freedom, he has always sought freedom in the world of reality. Please, see that. He has always sought out this sense of self-expression, choice, identification - always in the world of reality and there he says: I must have freedom. And that freedom has created a great deal of confusion, chaos, individual pursuits and so that freedom, without order in the world of reality, becomes meaningless. But freedom, that is, total complete psychological freedom, is not within the field of reality. And in enquiring into this question of freedom one asks, what is intelligence? The word 'intelligence' in the dictionary says: to read between the lines in the printed page and to keep the mind very alert, but also read between linear expressions. I wonder if you understand - between two thoughts - and thoughts are always linear, linear, vertical or horizontal. And intelligence, also the dictionary says, is to keep a very alert mind. Is that intelligence? We are asking: what is intelligence? Because in understanding what is intelligence, we should be able to put pleasure where it belongs, otherwise the pursuit of pleasure becomes dominant in life. I wonder if you are meeting this? Is intelligence merely to keep a mind extraordinarily awake, which is necessary, and is it merely to read between two thoughts, between two lines, between two words, between two symbolic conclusions? Or does intelligence come about through the orderly action in the field of reality and that orderly action in the field of reality gives intelligence to perceive? Am I conveying something at all or is it altogether Greek or Chinese? There must be freedom for perception. To see clearly, you must be free. You cannot see clearly, if you are not able to read between the lines, to have a clear undistorted mind and therefore there is the act, the total act of perception and that act of perception is intelligence. I am investigating as we are going along. Because I see very clearly that in the world of reality in which we live, we live a very disorderly life, and to escape from that disorderly life, we resort to all kinds of absurdities. But if we do not bring about order in the field of reality, the field of reality being the activity of thought, seeing its limitation, seeing it cannot possibly go beyond its limitation however much it may expand, it is still limited and that thought, which has created a disorder in this world of reality, that thought itself cannot possibly bring order in that reality. To see all that is intelligence. The word 'intelligence' is not merely just a word, it doesn't come by merely offering opinions or definitions about intelligence. You can play that game endlessly - but without that quality of intelligence, which is the act of perception, and the act of perception is to do what it sees immediately - that is intelligence. That is: a man who has ideals is unintelligent - forgive me -because his action is fragmented by what he calls a future achievement, according to the goal, the ideal and therefore he is not acting. If a man has a belief and acts according to that belief, it is not action. But a man who perceives acts instantly, such a man is an intelligent human being, because he sees the danger and acts. He sees the falseness and acts. Not: tell me how to act, or, I'll take time to act. When you see a dangerous animal, you act instantly. So the action of perception is the movement of intelligence. Have you got this? Please, don't accept my word or my argument, or my logic - just see it for yourself. Like a man who has been brought up in a culture which says: you must be nationalistic or a patriot, fight and kill etc, etc. If you see that, what it has done in the world, all the calamities, the misery, the suffering, the brutality of division -if you see this clearly, you act. Therefore you are no longer held within the boundaries of a particular country. I wonder if you see this. So such an action is supreme intelligent action - right? Then also we must consider what is beauty in relation to pleasure. We asked what is freedom with regard to pleasure, because we all say: I must be free to pursue my pleasure. If I am thwarted, I'll become violent and all the rest of it. And in the understanding of pleasure, what is the relationship of intelligence to the pursuit of pleasure? The pursuit is one thing and pleasure is another. The pursuit of pleasure is the movement of thought in time. All right? May I go on? So there must be an understanding, there must be the ordering of beauty in relation to pleasure. So what is beauty? You know again this is a very, very subtle question, because we all have opinions, unfortunately. We say beauty is this, beauty is that or this is not beautiful, and that is beautiful - and so on - this is ugly, that is beautiful. We are so entrenched in our own conclusions, in our own experience, in our own accumulated prejudice which we call knowledge - and if you could put aside all that, what you think is beauty, what other people have said about beauty, what you have experienced and hold that memory and say: as long as beauty conforms to that experience which I have had as beautiful, that is not beautiful. So if you could put aside all that, which is quite arduous - because that is freedom. If I cling to my experience of beauty and somebody comes along and says: look, that is not beautiful, I won't give up my beauty, because I have experienced it. I know, what it means. So if we could liberate ourselves from those various forms of conclusions, then what is beauty? Is beauty in the world of reality or is it not within the movement of thought as time? Please follow this carefully, we are investigating together, I am not laying down the law. I am not as stupid as that, I have no opinions about it, I have no conclusions about it, I am just asking myself: does beauty lie within the movement of thought as time? That is, within the field of reality. There are beautiful paintings, statues, sculptures, marvellous cathedrals, wonderful temples - if you have been to India, some of those ancient temples are really quite extraordinary, they have no time, there has been no entity as a human being who put it. Those marvellous old sculptures from the Egyptians, the Greeks and to the modern. That is, is the expression the creative feeling? Does creation need expression? Please, I am not saying it does or does not, I am asking, enquiring. Is beauty both the expression outwardly and the sense of inward feeling of extraordinary relation which comes when there is complete cessation of the 'me' with all the movements? I wonder if you follow this? So before we begin to enquire what is beauty, we have to go into this question of what is creation? What is the mind that is creative? Can the mind that is fragmented - however capable, whatever its gifts, talents - is such a mind creative? If I live a fragmented life, pursuing my cravings, my selfishness, my division as the artist and everything is non-art world, my life, my activity, my thoughts, my self-centred ambitions, pursuits, my pain, my struggle - is such a mind - I am asking, please - is such a mind creative, though it has produced marvellous music, marvellous literature, built cathedrals and temples and mosques - and poems - English literature is filled with it, as other kinds of literature. Is a mind that is not whole, can that be creative? Or creation is only possible when there is total wholeness and therefore no fragmentation? A mind that is fragmented is not a beautiful mind and therefore not creative. I wonder if you get this? No please, this is not my conclusion. I am not the Delphic Oracle, I am enquiring with you, we are enquiring together, taking the journey together into this enormous problem of what is called beauty. And does such a mind that is whole, whole in the sense -not fragmented, not contradictory in its action, not contradictory in its activity, not self-centred, caught in the movement of thought in time - all that - is such a mind, which always demands expression: my painting, my work, my picture, my poem, my everything else -which is identifying the expression with himself as the entity who expresses - is such a mind creative? Or a mind that has never known or lives in fragmentation? Fragmentation implies contradiction and therefore conflict, struggle. And you will say: that may be marvellous, but we have to live in this fragmented world, we haven't got that extraordinary feeling of totality - and so on. There is division then between the artist, the businessman, the scientist, the writer and you are just as destructive in this division as anybody else. I wonder if you see this thing, not accept my feeling about it. So is beauty the expression of a marvellous building, the outline of an extraordinary structure? Is beauty the poem - however romantic, however usual, whatever its content, written by a poet who himself is ambitious, greedy, wants to have success, sensitive in one direction and totally insensitive in other directions, is such a man really creative and can such a man, though he may express the feeling of what he thinks is beauty in words and which we accept as beauty, is that really beauty? So to find out what beauty is - the inward sense of it, not the expression of it: when you see the mountain which is beautiful, we don't have to be told that it is beautiful - and when you paint that mountain and exhibit it, the thing that is painted is not the mountain. So we have to go very deeply into the question of what is beauty, because apparently all religions have denied beauty. Have you ever watched monks in Europe in a monastery - they may have a lovely old, ancient monastery - but have you watched them? They are immersed with their own prayers, they are everlastingly looking at the book, they are caught in a routine and so on. Once in the mountains in the north of India I was following a group of monks, Hindu monks - they didn't know I was behind them but if they knew, they would have walked and turned round and done all kinds of silly superstitious respect. I was walking behind them: not one of them looked at the sky nor the beauty of a tree, nor the sound of the water, because they were chanting and never dared to look at anything that might incite a desire - a desire for a woman, a desire for great pleasure - nothing. Only I have been told, in recent years the landscape was painted in Italy with the saints. So religions, because they said: beauty is associated with pleasure, therefore if you are pursuing god you cannot pursue pleasure, therefore don't be caught in beauty. You understand? This is happening. Beauty and love and pleasure. We said a human being who is selfish - selfish being ambitious, greedy, worldly, worldly in the sense wanting a name, position, recognition, popularity, money, a status - all that is included in that word selfishness for the moment. A mind that is selfish, is it creative or is it only a mind that is totally unselfish that knows this feeling of total creation - not as an artist as nothing, total? That is: there is beauty only when there is total abandonment of the ego, the 'me', because the 'me' is the product of thought. Having created the 'me', the 'me' thinks it is different from thought. Haven't you? And that 'me' may have certain capacity, talents, gifts and that expresses itself and which we greatly admire, buy pictures, worth millions, because it has financial value later on. But we consider all that creative. It is like a person who is teaching or concerned with creative writing. Creativeness comes only when there is no me. Then there is beauty. That requires great sensitivity of the body, the mind, the whole entity. So pleasure has been identified with beauty: the beautiful woman - the beautiful, which is lovely. So love and beauty and pleasure apparently have gone together. And one questions that whole concept, because it is a concept: that love is beauty and the pursuit of beauty is pleasure. So one has to go into this question of what is pleasure. You understand? Freedom which is an enormous thing, enormous issue; then there is intelligence. We said, intelligence is an act of total perception - not a cunning mind that reads between the lines or having a very alert mind. You can have a very alert mind by taking drugs, by various forms of stimulation -but that's not an alert mind, that is gradually becoming a dull mind. And also this freedom, intelligence and this quality of beauty with which is identified love and pleasure. So is love pleasure? You understand? We have associated love with pleasure, with the desire - and what is pleasure and why does man everlastingly pursue that pleasure? If you have watched yourself, if you have gone into, looked at yourself even for ten minutes, ten seconds - this is one of the great principles, like suffering, pleasure, fear. And why does man pursue to the very end of his life or beyond it as coming nearer to God - the ultimate pleasure. Why? And what is pleasure? Is there such a thing as pleasure? Please go into it. There are three things concerned with pleasure: joy, enjoyment and pleasure. This is so, look at it. You are going to find out what is the relationship between the three of them. Joy - real enjoyment of a lovely day, the enjoyment of seeing the mountains, hearing the great thunder rolling among the hills - and the mind that is pursuing the pleasure as that which has happened yesterday, with that lightning. So what is pleasure? Is there a movement of pleasure when you can say: this is pleasure; or you only know it after? You recognize it as pleasure when it is over, which is the movement of thought as time. I wonder if you see this thing! So is there a moment, when you say: "My god, this is great pleasure!" But only when thought, when that incident which has been called pleasure in quotes has been registered in the brain and then the awakening of thought and recognizing that as the like, pleasure and pursuing it - sexually - in so many ways. So what is the relationship of thought to pleasure? - pleasure being emotions, great feeling, sentimentality, feeling tremendously sentimental, gooey, romantic, ideological. What relationship has pleasure to thought, or is pleasure the movement of thought only? There has been a pleasure - what we call pleasure - a flattering, someone flatters you: "Marvellous, how beautiful, what a lovely writing that is, what a marvellous speech you have made!" That is pleasure. And you listen to that and you like the flattery of another, which means you are not really concerned with the truth of perception but the flattery of someone who says: what a marvellous fellow you are. Then thought picks that up, pursues it and you who have flattered are my everlasting friend and I seek more and more flattery. That is the pursuit of pleasure which also acts in the other opposite way, which is - you hurt me and I pursue that hurt, thought pursues that hurt, and you are my enemy or I don't like you, avoid you. It's the same principle. So is thought the pursuer, not pleasure? I wonder if you have seen that? We are not pursuing pleasure but thought is pursuing pleasure. And when you, when thought pursues something, it must be in the field of time: therefore, yesterday the sexual pleasure, the remembrance of it and the pursuit of it. Seeing the pleasure, all pleasure, in quotes, the mountains, the sunset and the thunder rolling among the hills and thought pursuing that sound, pursuing that marvellous light of an evening on the snow. So it is the movement of thought as a remembrance in time that is the pursuit of pleasure. I wonder if you get all this? I pursue a Guru - not I, I have an abomination of Gurus, because they are the new priests; before you accepted the Catholic domination - you were told exactly what to do and you did that -now you are bored with that and you take on new Gurus and you will get bored with that and then you will go on to the Gurus of China or Japan, or Russia - it is the same pattern. So: can thought not pursue? You understand? You flatter me - and I listen to it - and that's the end of it. Thought then doesn't carry it over. You have said something which may be right or wrong, I listen to it - there is a reaction and that is the ending of it. The light on those mountains yesterday evening, with all that great sense of space, stillness and great strength, see it and end it, so that thought doesn't come and say, what a lovely thing that was, I am going to pursue it. I wonder if you understand? That means to be totally awake to the whole problem of pleasure. And what is the relationship between pleasure and enjoyment? You enjoy a good meal - if you do - and you want the repetition of that enjoyment tomorrow. Right? So there is the enjoyment of the moment, and thought pursuing that enjoyment of the moment as a movement in time. I wonder if you see that. What is the relation of pleasure to joy? Is there any relationship at all? Or the joy comes unexpectedly, not invited. That which is invited is pleasure as thought in time. I wonder if we are getting this? So, is love pleasure? Tell me, sirs? That is, we said: the pursuit, the hunter, is the thought. So is love to be hunted by thought? And which it does, as we live now - and is that love? Has love any relationship to thought? Please, sirs, go into it. And if it has no relationship to love, then what is my relationship to another whom I so-called love? To find out all this, not from another, because each one is concerned with his own life. His own life is the life of the world and the life of the world is you - because you suffer, you are anxious, you pursue pleasure, there is suffering, you have fear, so has another. So you are the world and the world is you - and this is your life. Don't waste it, for god's sake, don't waste it. And to find out what it is to be totally free. So freedom, intelligence, beauty and love and the pursuit of pleasure are all interrelated, they are not separate things which we have made it: "I must be beautiful - not only physically attractive, sexually appealing". This is our education, our conditioning, and to see all this as a whole not as fragments, not as broken up - as freedom something separate, intelligence something separate and so on - to see the whole of it as a whole - that is the act of intelligence, that is beauty, that is love, that is freedom. Here all this is important to understand and live - not merely intellectually, understand verbally, because we are going to deal with something which is the total truth and total creation, which is death. And to understand this problem which has torn man, which man has pursued, tried to understand the problem, overcome it -unless we lay the foundation, which we have been doing, because in comprehending what death is, we shall see what the meaning of life is. At present our life has no meaning - actually as we live it. Has it? If you are honest to yourselves, deeply, has it any meaning? Meaning in the sense: total significance. It might have a meaning in order to earn money and livelihood and all that - but that must be related to the whole of life. If you are merely concerned with the earning of a livelihood, unrelated to the rest of our existence, then that earning a livelihood does cause great mischief, then we become totally competitive - all that is happening in the world. So we have this problem of death, and later on perhaps we will talk about meditation and all that. We have got two more talks, haven't we? Two more. We'll have to cover those two things in next two days that we meet here. But you know, if you have no sense of beauty - not painting and all the rest of it, paint your face and long hair and short nose and the latest fashion, you know - but the feeling of beauty which can only come about when there is total abandonment of selfishness, the total abandonment of the 'me' which thought has created. That means: there is only beauty, when thought is silent. You understand this? I've got it! Not when thought is chattering about the thing that is painted, only when thought is completely silent, then there is beauty. But when you say: how is thought to be silent, which is what you will ask - then you have lost beauty. And the gurus and all the professionals are supplying 'how to make thought silent'. Therefore they never had beauty. And when you pursue them, you are denying beauty. For god's sake see this. So the whole meaning, the whole substance of life is this, if you can capture it and live with it; and if you do live with it then you will affect the consciousness of every human being. You can't help it. SAANEN 6TH PUBLIC TALK 24TH JULY 1975. We said we would talk about the very complex problem of what is death. I think we should look at this question not as something separate from other factors of life, like suffering, love, fear, pleasure and the chaotic world we live in and the confusion for most people. We should not separate this factor of death from the rest. We should take it, I think, as a whole process from being born to dying, a total, a whole movement of life. And before we go into that we should also understand, I think, not verbally, the question of authority also. As the world is becoming more and more confused, more and more disturbed, authoritarian governments are gradually creeping in, in the East and so on. And when a political life is dominated by terrorism, by imprisonment, by all the totalitarian methods of propaganda which breeds fear, one has to be, I think, very much aware of this question, that it does breed great fear and so for those who live in those countries fear becomes part of their lives. And those who are seriously concerned with the whole of life should go into this question of authority. We are so eager to accept authority, the say-so of somebody, intellectual, so-called religious or psychological; so we submit ourselves to their concepts, to their description, to their way of thinking. And specially when we are considering this question of death, we should bear this in mind, that there is no authority whatsoever, including and specially of the speaker. And we also should apprehend, that is hold, participate in the question of what is creation, which we went into the other day when we last met here. That which has continuity, which is thought, as movement in time - as long as time has no stop, there cannot possibly be creation. Time must have a stop to bring about that creative feeling, that creative action. And it is always very difficult to understand what it means for time to have a stop because we are going into the question of death, which is the ending of time in a totally different way. So we should understand, not intellectually, but feel our way, investigate, whether there is a possibility of time coming to an end. I do not know if you have ever thought about it. Poets have written about it, talked about it. Novelists have said there is an ending to time. But one does not accept all these romantic theoretical suppositions, one wants to find out for oneself what it means for time to end. We said, thought is movement in time. That time is a bondage in the world of reality. We went into that. And whether time as measure, as movement of thought, can ever possibly end - either consciously or deep down. One may theoretically accept the possibility of time coming to an end, consciously one can work at it, one can imagine, one can almost feel the ending, but the movement in the semi-conscious state, in that dim consciousness, time is part of the structure. Because after all, all our conditioning is a result of time - it may be one day or ten thousand years. We are conditioned in so many ways, influenced through propaganda, influenced by books, by talks, by radio; everything around us is trying to penetrate deeper and deeper and deeper. And the more authoritarian the world becomes, with more penetration, the technological penetration of propaganda is becoming more. So we are the result of all that which is fairly obvious, which we do not have to go into in great detail. You can believe in god, because that is your conditioning. But a Communist says: "That's all nonsense" - because that is conditioning. So, we are all conditioned. One can consciously eliminate, if one is at all serious and aware and alert, one can consciously put away all that. That is fairly simple, and not fall into another trap of conditioning. But the unconscious movement - that is, in the deep layers of one's consciousness, deep recesses of one's mind, there is the movement of time, the hope, the events of the past are deeply embedded. And whether that time as a whole, both as the conscious and at the deeper level, can totally come to an end? One can ask this question verbally but to penetrate into that, not intellectually, you can't do this intellectually which is the structure of words, the comprehension of words, the realization intellectually that words have no significance, but yet be caught in words. And to go into that question of time coming to an end - because if it does not come to an end there is only variety in continuation, a modified change in continuity which is time. Thought can adjust itself to any environment and shape itself according to various influences and demands. One must have noticed all this around you, and to find out whether time has a stop, which is a tremendously important question, because that stops one's evolution, as we know it, which is a process of time: gradual growing, gradual becoming, gradual fulfilment, gradual activity of desire - all that is part of the continuity of time. So we are going to go into this question of authority, which we have done a little bit, of the mind, thought, the brain adjusting itself to all environment whatever it is, because the brain needs security and therefore thought will adjust itself to Communism, to Catholicism, to whatever it is. And as long as there is a continuity, which is a movement of time as thought, unless that movement, however expressive, however capable, technologically perfect, unless that movement comes to an end there is no creativeness, because if we continue the same pattern - not only the same pattern but in a different mode - there is a constant continuity. So that is the question. And is it possible, not consciously, because if you do something consciously, then it is part of the process of thought, to find out whether time has an end, not cultivated, not through the action of will to stop thought? Will is part of thought, will is part of desire, and when there is an action of will, then there is no ending of thought. So we are going then to find out, what does it mean to die? Because that may be the absolute truth, that may be the ending of all time. Please, we are sharing this together, I am not taking a journey by myself. Is death something separate from living? Is death something totally opposite from existence? Is death the ending of all that one has built in oneself, that one has experienced, that one has observed, gone into? Does it all end? You understand my question? Or is death not something separate, but part of living though we have separated it, put it far away from us because we are frightened of it, we never even talk about it? Or is it part of the whole movement of life? Is it part of love? We are going to find all these things out. First of all one has to consider what various religions and so-called people of ancient times have said about death. Because the modern generation does not talk about death. No books are written about it. Nobody says: "Live properly in order to die properly". Death is something to be avoided, something which you do not want even to look at. You may pass a cemetery or a crematorium and then shut your eyes and say: "How ugly it all is" - and move on. So if we are serious we are going to look at it, we are going to face it, not avoid it, not speculate about it, not demand comfort and no tears. The Asiatic world, specially in India which at one time exploded over the whole of Asia, as Greece exploded over the western world, said there is an entity, called the 'self', the ego, the 'me', that gathers experiences through life after life, which is called reincarnation, goes through life after life, perfecting itself and ultimately arrives at the highest principle which is Brahman. They all call it different names. That is their whole concept. And people, specially in the Asiatic world, believe that most intensely. They said that they have proof that you exist, that what you are now, is the result of your past and that your future as an entity depends on how you behave now, what your actions are now. That will determine what you will be. Though the believers say this, they do not act, they just believe which is a very comforting, nonsensical, meaningless thing. And you have in the western world also a concept of that kind. The Christian believes that you must be buried and ultimately Gabriel blows a trumpet and you go to heaven. You know all that business. And the ancient Egyptians - from what one has been told and one has been told accurately by professionals - that they believed in this reincarnation. It is a very old concept, it is a very old belief which gave man a great comfort, because they have said: "After all I live only eighty, forty, fifty years and accumulate so much - and what is the point of it all, if I don't continue?" We want to find out what is the truth of this. Not a speculative, imaginative acceptance of tradition - tradition being that which is handed over from generation to generation, and also that word means; betrayal, betraying the present by the past. So we are going to find out. Please don't accept at all what the speaker is saying under any circumstances, because you are very easily influenced -because it is your life. Before we go into that, you must also understand very deeply, not verbally, that you are the world and the world is you. Not an idea, but a deep understanding of it, the truth of it. What you are in essence, deeply, the world is. You are like the rest of the world, you have your problems, your suffering, your tears, your pleasures, your fears, your anxieties - all that is like anybody else, whether he lives in China, Japan, in Russia or America. Basically you are that, you are the world. And at the peripheral existence you are conditioned. And according to that conditioning your temperament is, your idiosyncrasies are, the way you behave - all conditioned by the culture in which you live on the outside, at the peripheral level - but basically you are like the rest of the world. Right? Please that is something you have got to understand. Therefore you are not different from somebody who is greedy, envious, accepting authority, afraid, competitive, violent. That is the world and you are part of that. So what is death? There is old age, disease, accident, poisoning, various forms of physical destruction of the organism. That is a fact. I don't think one is afraid of that. One accepts it, doesn't one? As you grow older, as you may have an accident, you walk across a road and a bus strikes you or a car and that is the end. One accepts, if one is at all rational, sane, that the organism comes to an end naturally or unnaturally. That does not cause so much fear. What causes fear, it seems, is that the ego, the 'me', that has acquired so much, that has lived such a strenuous life, that has accumulated knowledge, that has accumulated all kinds of movement, it has accumulated and there is the ending of all that. It is that, that one is afraid of if one observes that. So what is the 'me' that clings to what is the known? You understand? The unknown is the death and I cling to the known. The 'me' says: "I know, I have lived, I have acquired, I have experienced, I have suffered enormously, I have been through all kinds of delights". And that 'me' is resisting, frightened, avoiding this thing called death. Right? This is so. Please, we are going together, I am not dragging you like a train! So one has to enquire, investigate, what is the 'me'? Is it the result of thought? Is it put together by the movement of time? Does it exist by itself, apart from thought? First of all, does it have a life of its own, independent of thought, or has thought put it together and that self thinks it is independent of thought? You understand the question? Do you understand the question? Thought we said is the movement of time. Thought in the world of reality separates itself from that which it has put together. Thought has built this, but that has become independent of thought. The mountain or the tree is not put together by thought, but it is independent of thought. And thought has built the 'me', obviously. And the 'me' has separated itself from the thought which has built me. Now what is the reason for building the structure, called the 'me'? Why has thought done this? You are following all this? Please, move with me, don't go to sleep because this is really an extraordinarily important question, all this, because it is our life. We have to take this desperately seriously. Why has thought created the 'me'? If you see the fact that thought has built the 'me', if you say, the 'me' is something divine, something that existed before all time - which many do - we have to investigate this too. So first we are asking, why has thought created the 'me' - why? I don't know, I am going to find out. Why do you think thought has created the 'me'? There are two things, aren't they? One is, thought demands stability, because it is only where there is security there can be a satisfying answer to the brain. That is, where there is security the brain operates marvellously either neurotically or reasonably. So one of the reasons is that thought, being insecure in itself, fragmented in itself, broken up in itself, has created the 'me' as something permanent; the 'me' which has become separate from thought and therefore thought recognizes it as something permanent. And this permanency is identified through attachment: my house, my character, my wish, my desire, all that gives a complete sense of security and continuity to the 'me'. Isn't that so? We are investigating. You are not silent, just listening to me, you are going into it with the speaker. And the idea that the 'me' is something before thought - is that so? And who can ever say that it existed before thought? You understand my question? If you say it existed before thought - as many do - then on what reason, on what basis do you assert that? Is it an assertion of tradition, of belief, of not wanting to recognize that the 'me' is a product of thought, but something marvellously divine - which again is a projection of thought that the 'me' is permanent? So one observes, putting away the idea that the 'me' is everlastingly divine, or everlastingly timeless or whatever it is, that is too absurd, but one can see very clearly that thought has built the 'me' - the 'me' that has become independent, the 'me' that has acquired knowledge, the 'me' that is the observer, the 'me' which is the past. The 'me' which is the past, passes through the present and modifies itself as the future, it is still the 'me', put together by thought and that 'me' has become independent of thought. Right? Shall we go on from there? Please, don't accept the description, not the words, but see the truth of this thing. As you see the fact of the microphone, see that thing. That 'me' has a name, a form. The 'me' has a label, called K or John and it has its form, it identifies with the body, with the face, with the whole business. So there is the identification of the 'me' with the name and with the form, that is the structure and with the ideal which it wants to pursue, or the desire to change the 'me' into another form of 'me', with another name. So this is the 'me'. That 'me' is the product of time and therefore thought. That 'me' is the word. Remove the word, what is the 'me'? So that 'me' suffers. The 'me', as the you, suffers. So the 'me' in suffering is you. The 'me' in its great anxiety is the great anxiety of the you - therefore you and I are common. That is the basic essence. Though you are taller, shorter, more clever, have a different temperament, different character - all that is the peripheral movement of culture, but deep down, basically, we are the same. So that 'me' is moving in the stream of greed, in the stream of selfishness, in the stream of fear, anxiety and so on, which is the same as you in the stream. I wonder if you get this? Please, do not accept what I am saying, see the truth of it. That is: you are selfish and another is selfish, you are frightened and another is frightened - basically - you are aching, suffering, tears, greed, envy - that is the common lot of all human beings. That is the stream in which we are living in the present. Right? That is the stream in which we are caught - all of us. We are caught in the stream while we are living. Please see that, that we are caught in that stream as an act of life. That is, the stream is selfishness. Let's put it this way - in that stream we are living, the stream of selfishness. That word includes all the descriptions which are just now given. And when we die, the organism dies but the selfish stream goes on. You understand? Just look at it, take time, consider it. Suppose I have lived a very selfish life: that is, self-centred activity: my desires, the importance of my desires, the ambitions, the greed, the envy, the accumulation of property, the accumulation of knowledge, the accumulation of all kinds of things that we have gathered - which I have termed as selfishness. And that is the thing I live in. That is the 'me'. And that is you also. In our relationship it is the same. So while living, we are together flowing in the stream of selfishness. Got it? This is a fact, not my opinion, not my conclusion. If you observe it, you see it. Then you go to America, you see the same phenomena, in India, all over Europe, modified by the environmental pressures and so on - but basically that is the movement. And when the body dies, the movement goes on. So there is this vast stream of selfishness, if I may use that word to include all the things implied in that word, is the movement of time and when the body dies that goes on. Go slowly in this. I am going to go into this a little more. And I die, my wife tearful, upset, lonely, missing the companionship, having no money - you follow - still like the rest of the world. And she goes to a medium, seance, because she wants to get in touch with me, because she is lonely, unhappy, suffering, no money - all that. And the medium there gets into contact with what it calls the 'me', the husband and says: "Your husband is here, he has a message for you. He says, he is perfectly happy. Look under the drawer and you will find the testament". This phenomena is repeated differently in a different way all over the world. Either it is the medium picking up the intimations, unconscious intimations of the wife and repeating it. One can do that very simply if you have observed there is such a thing as transmission of thought. You must have played with it, you must know it, it has its own reality. Or out of that stream of selfishness the thought of K still exists and the thought manifests. So there it is. We live in that stream in our daily life till we die, and when we die that stream continues. That stream is time. That is, the movement of thought which has created suffering, which has created the 'me', which the 'me' has now asserted itself, being independent and divides itself from you, but the 'me' is the same as you when it suffers. So the 'me' is the word. The 'me' is the imagined structure of thought. In itself it has no reality. It is what thought has made it, because thought needs security, certainty. So it has invested in the 'me' all its certainty. And in that there is suffering and all the rest of it. In that movement of selfishness, while we are living we are being carried in that stream. When I die, that stream exists. Is it possible for that stream to end? You understand? I die physically, that is obvious. My wife may cry about it, but the fact is I die, the body dies. And this movement of time is going on, of which we are all part. That is why the world is me and me is the world. And will there be an end to this stream and is the manifestation of the ending of the stream, is it the manifestation of something totally different from the stream? I wonder if you follow all this? Are you interested in all this? Which is: can selfishness with all its decoration, with all its subtleties, come totally to an end? And the ending is the ending of time, and therefore there is a totally different manifestation of that ending - which is no selfishness at all. I wonder if you have understood this a little bit. You see there are several things involved in this: in that stream, is there a 'you' and a 'me'? You understand? When there is suffering, is there a 'you' and 'me' - or is there only suffering? I identify myself as the 'me' in that suffering which is the process of thought. But the actual fact is, you suffer and I suffer, not me suffer something independent of you who are suffering. I wonder if you see that. So there is only suffering: not I suffer and you suffer. You suffer because my son, my wife, my husband, my neighbour, my relative is dead. I suffer because my wife has turned away from me. I suffer because there is loneliness. I suffer because I can't fulfil, because I can't get everything I want. I want position, power, money, sex - in that order - and I suffer. Don't you also suffer in the same way? So the suffering is the same as 'me'. It is not, "I suffer something separate from you". You understand? That is a tremendous thing to find out. So there is no individual suffering. There is individual blindness but that is a physical phenomena. But the suffering is the same as you and me. Therefore there is only the factor of suffering. Do you know what it does when you realize that? Out of that non-personalized suffering, non-identified as the 'me' who is suffering, separate from you - when there is that suffering - out of that comes a tremendous sense of compassion. I wonder if you see that. The very word suffering comes from the word 'passion'. So I have got this problem now: living, there is selfishness, dying, there is selfishness. And that is the stream of time as a movement of thought. And that stream of selfishness can manifest itself, which is happening all the time. That manifestation of that selfishness may have a name - as John Smith, K and somebody else. But if there is no name, if there is no naming of that suffering as belonging to me what is then the individual at all? You follow? I wonder if you see this? There is suffering and that suffering has been given a name, a form as K , K is me - and that name and form becomes the individual, separate from the stream of suffering. And that individual says: "I am different from you. I am cleverer, I am duller or you are more clever or this and that". If there is no naming the form, then is there an individual at all? The word individual means 'indivisible' - a human being who is not fragmented, indivisible in himself. That he is the whole - whole being healthy, sane, rational, holy. And when that takes place, when there is living is there an ending of time as movement of thought and suffering now? You follow the question? Can I as a human being, living, knowing in that stream I exist as selfishness, can that stream, can that movement of time come totally to an end? Both at the conscious as well as the deep level? You understand my question after describing it? Now how will you find out? How will you find out whether you who are caught in the stream of selfishness, can completely step out of it, which is the ending of time? And therefore death is the ending of time as a movement of thought, if there is this stepping out of that. Can you, living in this world with all the beastliness of it, the world that man has made, which thought has made - the dictatorship, the totalitarian authority, the destruction of human minds, the destruction of the earth, the animals - everything he touches he destroys, including his wife and husband - now can you live in this world completely without time? That means no longer caught in that stream of selfishness? Can you? Now who is going to tell you whether you can or cannot? You understand? Or will you take time? You understand? If you take time, you are still in there, still in the stream. So the whole idea of gradual change, gradual evolution, gradual process, is still the continuity of suffering, continuity of selfishness. So do you actually see that? See in the sense clearly as you see the speaker sitting on the platform. You see there are many more things involved in this which we have not time to go into. But there is such a thing as great mystery not the things invented by thought - that is not mysterious. The occult is not mysterious, which everybody is chasing now, that is the fashion. The experience which drugs give is not mysterious. This thing called death and seeing all this, the description and much more involved in it and the mystery that lies when there is a possibility of stepping out of it. Which is: as long as one lives in the world of reality - which we do - can there be the ending of suffering in that world of reality? Wait, wait, wait. Think about it. Look at it, look at it! Don't say: "Yes" - or "No". If there is no ending of suffering in the world of reality, which is order, if there is no ending of suffering, which is selfishness in the world of reality, it is selfishness that creates disorder in the world of reality, if there is no ending to that, then you have not understood or grasped the full significance of ending time. Therefore you have to bring order in the world of reality. That is, in the world of relationship, in the world of action, in the world of rational and irrational thinking - the fear, the pleasure - all that is in the world of reality. So can one living in the world of reality as we are, end selfishness? You know it is a very complex thing ending selfishness, it is not just: "I won't think about myself". It is a very complex thing and very subtle. One may think one is not selfish, but deeply there is this root of it which shows itself in its peculiar ways. So to be enormously aware about all this, that means, being sensitive. You cannot be sensitive if you drink, if you take drugs, smoke, obviously. Or you cannot learn by going to college how to be sensitive. You cannot learn how to be sensitive from another. One has to be aware of one's insensitivity. One is sensitive to one's desires, to one's hurts, to one's demands, but we are talking of being totally sensitive - both physiologically as well as psychologically. That means one has to have an excellent body, not a drugged body by alcohol or overeating or all the rest of it. So one has to be aware of this selfishness in the field of reality, because this selfishness in the field of reality is creating chaos. And you are the world and the world is you. If you change deeply you affect the whole consciousness of man. SAANEN 7TH PUBLIC TALK 27TH JULY 1975. We have been talking over together the many issues of our daily life. We have talked about education - perhaps not completely - we have talked about the world as it is with all the misery, confusion, suffering, dictatorship and a lack of freedom, and we also talked about fear - whether it is at all possible to eradicate it totally, not only the conscious but the deeper recesses of one's own mind, and we talked about thought, pursuing pleasure, and the things that thought has created, both outwardly and inwardly. Both the outward and the inward structure of thought is the world of reality in which we live. And we also talked about, considerably at length, I think, about death and the meaning of love - apart from the thing we call love which is the pursuit of pleasure and the fulfilment of desire. We talked about this whole process as a unitary movement, not to be fragmented - and thought invariably fragments all our existence. We talked about all this. We also asked, why thought is fragmentary, why all its structure in the technological world as well as in the psychological area, why thought must be fragmented, inevitably. And we said it comes about when thought has created a centre and that centre separates itself from thought and therefore thought becomes fragmentary. We have talked about all this and we would like, if we may, this morning to talk about the quality of energy which comes about through meditation, and the quality of energy which is totally different from the energy of meditation and the energy which thought has created. This is what we are going to talk about this morning, as this is the last talk and we are going to have discussions or dialogues on Wednesday morning for the next four or five days. There are two kinds of energies. I think they are separate. One is the energy of conflict, of division, of all the movement of thought. Thought has built outwardly a tremendous structure, technologically, socially, morally. That thought in its movement, which is time, has gathered together momentum, a tremendous vitality of force. And that energy is totally different from the energy which comes about through the understanding of the right area of thought and moving away from that area, which is the movement of meditation. We know very well and fairly clearly after these days of talking over together and also by observing what is going on in the world: the division, the wars, the utter lack of consideration, callousness, brutality, violence and immense suffering brought about by this division, ideologically as well as psychologically. That energy has built the world of reality. I think this is fairly clear when one observes it, not only outwardly but also when one is aware of what is going on inwardly. Now we are asking: as that energy has not solved any of our problems psychologically, and unless one solves this psychological problem of correct living - correct living implies accurate living, not a living according to a pattern or according to an ideal or to some gathered experience as knowledge, but that energy which thought has brought about has not solved human relationship. Now is there another kind of energy. We are inquiring together. We are not laying down, we are not the authority, we are just together, you and the speaker are investigating into a question which is: is there another kind of energy which is not the energy of thought in its movement as time, is there another kind of energy which will solve the problem of relationship, the problem of death, the whole human existence with all its complex problems? Because our existence is not very simple, it is getting more and more complicated, more and more complex. And we want a single answer to all this complexity: 'Tell us what to do and we will do it'. Or is there a way of living which is not the mere movement of thought with all its conflict? Is there a way of living in which there is no conflict, in which there is a unitary movement of mankind? And is there an energy which is not time-binding and which may uncover something that is really sacred? This is what we are going to enquire into together. The speaker is not talking to himself. We are sharing together this problem, knowing that thought, because it is fragmentary, is not the factor of the unification of mankind. Politically that is essential and no dictatorship, no Socialist or Communist government is ever going to produce this unity. Otherwise we will be destroying each other, which is what is going on. So we are going to enquire into the origin of an energy which is not the movement of time. I do not know if we can do this together with such a large audience, because this requires a great deal of attention, a great deal of care, and no possibility of illusion, no possibility of deluding oneself that one has this peculiar energy. So one has to understand first that there must be no kind of self-hypnosis, no illusion, no deception, no hysteria. So we have to find out what is the cause of illusion. Right? If we are to enquire into this question, whether there is an energy which is not that of thought, one must be absolutely clear that one does not create illusion. The word illusion means sensuous perception of objective things, involving belief. So a mind that is caught in belief must inevitably bring to itself illusion. And there must be illusion as long as there is a desire - desire being something to which we cling to, which we long for, which we subjectively run after. All these factors produce illusion. So if we are to enquire together into the question one must be free of having no end, no goal, no belief and therefore no illusion. Can you do this? Because we are going to go into something very, very complex and unless one's mind is very clear on this point that illusion, deception, imagination, a desire for some kind of energy, if there is any of that wave, or movement in one's enquiry, then you are going to end up in an asylum - which most people are doing already. This is very, very serious, it is not a thing that you play with. So we are going to enquire with a mind that is not going to be caught in any form of deception. Deception arises only when there is a desire to achieve something, or to realize something, or to come upon something. Is this clear? So is there a different kind of energy? And to find that out accurately we must have naturally put order in our daily life. Because if there is no order in our daily life, enquiry into that is merely an escape, like taking a drug, drink, anything, it is just an escape and that escape becomes actual and illusory. Right? We mean by order in the world of reality, which is order in the world of relationship between you and another, between man and woman and so on - that relationship is society. Please, listen to all this. It is your life. And if there is no order in that life, in the field of reality in which we live, you cannot possibly - do what you will - come upon that energy which is not the product of thought. We mean by order, a movement of total comprehension of the activity of thought which we have discussed perhaps ad nauseam for the last seven talks. To perceive totally as a whole movement of thought which has brought about in reality utter confusion. Perhaps this is the first time some of you are hearing all this, so I am afraid we can't go over all the things that we have already talked over together. But what we are saying then is that thought has brought about confusion. Thought has brought about division between human beings. And yet thought wants unity. Please follow this. And so it has created a centre, a centre that will hold things together, not only a centre in oneself but a centre in governments. You follow? After all dictatorship is a form of centre, trying to hold a group of people. Religions have made that centre, hoping to hold man together - Catholicism, Hinduism and so on, and so on, and so on. Thought has created a centre and that centre has become independent of thought and that centre exists hoping to create, bring about a complete unity of mankind. You are following this? You watch this in your own relationship. In the family there is a centre, the centre is the family and trying to hold that family together. And thought in the field of reality, wanting unity, security, stability has brought about instability, insecurity. There is no cohesive movement, no co-operation. And when we are talking about order, we mean unity in the field of reality. Is this clear? So unless that sense of harmonious existence happens in the world of reality, you cannot possibly enquire into the other. Then your enquiry will be distorted because it is an escape, your enquiry then will pursue illusory imitations which then you will accept as reality. Right? So we are going to see whether one's mind, whether one's life, daily life is accurate, which means care, which means attention, which means diligent application not negligence. There is a difference between diligence and negligence. Diligence means care, accuracy, mean what you say and live a life that is completely correct, orderly, with care. Contrary to that is negligence. So having laid the foundation of order in reality, then we can proceed to enquire into the question whether there is or there is not an energy which is not the movement of reality, which does not mean illusory. Right? That means there must be freedom to enquire, no attachment to a belief, to a person, to an idea, to a country, to a leader, because if you are attached, held to your opinion, to your judgement, to your conclusion, to your leader, to your guru, to your priest - all that - that very attachment denies freedom of enquiry. These are obvious facts. As a scientist: if he is to enquire very deeply, he cannot be bothered with the country, with the nation, with the border - he is completely absorbed in what he is doing. So then the mind now is capable of enquiring. I hope your mind is capable. Capable means, having an instrument that can be actively, swiftly able to perceive, to see without distortion. And that distortion will take place as long as there is the observer. The observer is the past, the conclusions, his memories, his desires, his will. As long as there is that observer, whatever he perceives must be distorted. If I am a Hindu or a Catholic, or a Communist or whatever it is, or addicted to beliefs then perception, that is, seeing, becomes, clouded, distorted, not accurate. What we have been talking about for the last six gatherings here is part of meditation. Meditation is not something separate from the understanding and the action in the world of reality. That is part of meditation. The meaning of that word meditation means to ponder over, to think about, to go into. That is what we have done, which is - we are saying - part of meditation. But unfortunately for most people meditation is something apart from life, apart from daily existence. We think by meditating we will achieve an experience which will alter our structure of thought and from there act in the world of reality. You understand? That is, I hope by meditating I hope to have a certain experience or understanding or realization which will then function in the world of reality and therefore bring order there. This is what most people are doing right through the world, unfortunately introduced by the gurus from India. See the fallacy of this. "First seek god, or whatever it is and then everything will be all right". But you have never enquired who is the seeker. The seeker is the observer, is the thing put together by thought. So meditation is the understanding of order and accuracy in the world of reality. That's part of meditation. Meditation also means much more; not just bringing order in reality. Anybody can do that, any sane, rational, healthy human being can do that without meditating. But through meditation it gives beauty to the order in daily life. Are you following all this? Are you following somewhat? So what is meditation? A mind that is free from all illusion, that is not attached to belief, to persons, to ideas, to conclusions. Complete freedom is absolutely necessary to proceed further. What place has will in meditation? You understand my question? What place has will in trying to meditate - or in meditation. What is will? It is the action of desire for something. I desire to be rich - god forbid! - and I work for it. I exercise my will, my desire to achieve all the things that money will give. I work for it. That is, will is a movement of desire as thought. Will is thought. Will is desire. Desire is thought. They are not separate. Desire, the action of will, the movement of thought are one. And in meditation if there is the action of will that will is a form of resistance, and therefore that will is still the movement of thought as time and division. I wonder if you get this. Don't be bored. Do not yawn yet, give me another ten minutes or half an hour, before you yawn. You understand my statement? We are asking, what place has will in meditation? We say: there is no place for will, for will is desire. Desire means to achieve something or to cling to something, or demand enlightenment, beauty, love, all the rest of it. And in that movement of meditation there are a whole complexity of activities. First of all let us look into the word 'Yoga'. Right? You know something about it, don't you? Yoga in Sanskrit means 'join', the root meaning of it. And there are different kinds of Yoga - the highest Yoga being Raja Yoga - 'King of Yogas' in which there is only the activity of the mind, the activity of living a right kind of life, accurate life. It has nothing whatever to do with exercises, postures, breathing and all that business. There are different kinds of Yogas and they have also said: "What the speaker is saying is another form of Yoga". You can wipe out all that rubbish and start again. Then through meditation - because all this implies a highly sensitive mind, a highly sensitive body, therefore no drugs, no drinks, no tobacco - you follow - anything that makes the mind dull, which is repetition. Any practice will inevitably make the mind dull. Right? That is why when the gurus come to this country and bring their superstitious, traditional, conventional, conditioned practices of various kinds, they are destroying your brain, they are making your mind dull. And you need a very clear, active, subtle, sensitive mind and you cannot have that if you keep on repeating, repeating, repeating. You understand this, naturally. Then your mind becomes mechanical, which it is already, and you are making it more mechanical. So, put away, if I may suggest altogether this whole idea of following somebody and accepting their systems. Many gurus have come to see the speaker and they have brought out all their arguments. They say: "What you are saying is the highest truth, but we translate this truth to others, because they can't understand you". You understand the game they play? So therefore first: no acceptance of authority. Please, do see this. When you don't accept authority there is the activity of freedom, which is intelligence. Then that intelligence will bring about right political activity which is not dependent on party politics, on their leaders, dictatorship and all that business. So then in meditation because the mind has become astonishingly sensitive, there is all this field of clairvoyance, right? Field of healing, field of investigating into occult things, hidden things. Right? Unfortunately it is becoming the fashion now to talk about the occult, the hidden, the mysterious, all that. When the body is sensitive, the mind is active, accurate, therefore all these things come about. But they are totally irrelevant. They are playthings. Please, the speaker knows something of all this and there is great danger in all that, unless you really want to pursue that like a child with a toy. It has no value. Now we can proceed to enquire, after clearing the ground accurately, with the question: is there an energy, a something, which is totally different - not the opposite, because the opposite of the energy of thought is still its own opposite, is still the movement of thought. Therefore we are using purposely a word that is totally different. Now we can proceed. And also there is the whole question, brought over from India, of the energy which they think will come about through awakening the various centres in the body which is called 'Kundalini'. Have you heard all about this rubbish? It isn't rubbish if you know what it is, but as you don't know, you are playing with rubbish. Please forgive me if I talk frankly about all these nonsensical, unreal things, unless you have gone into it. You cannot go into it unless you have brought order in your life. They have brought this word called 'Kundalini' from India. It is now a fashionable thing to pursue. When it becomes common it has lost its reality, its worthwhileness. You understand? When everybody is trying to awaken their beastly little what they call 'Kundalini' it becomes too silly. A truth, when made common, becomes vulgar and therefore no longer truth. Now we can proceed. No action of will, therefore no action of deception, illusion, no attachment to belief, to dogmas, to rituals, to all the myths that man has put together through thought. Then what takes place to a mind that has done this - not imagined it has done, actually has done? To such a mind there is that quality of silence, a silence that is not between two noises, the silence that is not between two thoughts. Please, watch it in yourself, you will see this. A silence that has not been put together by thought because it desires to be silent. Because there has been order in our daily life, because there has been no conflict as will, there is no division politically, religiously, no practice. Out of all that comes a natural intelligence, natural sensitivity and therefore a mind that is astonishingly quiet. That is, a mind that has put a stop to time -mind has not put it - but it has inevitably come about. You understand what I am saying? Time is movement of thought as measure. Time is thought. And thought as measure is from here to there, psychologically as well as physically. And when there is this movement of time as achievement, as experience, as gaining something, it is still the activity of thought, and therefore it is fragmentary, not whole. From that, when the mind has perceived the totality of thought - that is the totality of the movement of thought, all its varieties, all its movements, all its subtleties hidden and open - when the mind is totally aware of all that, then time, to such a mind, comes to an end, therefore there is complete quietness. Right? Perception can only take place in silence. You follow this? Please. Are we sharing this together? Or am I pursuing my own investigation? You understand? If you want to hear what the speaker is saying, you have to listen, you have to pay attention. If you want to listen, if you don't want to, that is quite a different matter. But if you want to listen you have to pay attention. That means care. That means you have to listen, listen without any prejudice, without conclusion, comparing what you hear with what you already know. All those inhibit, prevent listening. So, when you want to listen, you must be completely silent, naturally. When you want to see the mountains, the flowing of the water in the river, there must be total observation, not the observer observing. Right? So there is this silence. And what is the unifying character, what is the unifying movement, so that it brings about no division between man and man? Because that is a tremendously important question. You understand? When the world is divided - nation against nation, people against people, ideas against ideas - democracy - so-called democracy against autocracy and so on. When there is this tremendous division taking place in mankind, in human beings outwardly as well as inwardly, what is the unifying factor? Is there is no unifying factor we are going to destroy ourselves - unifying factor being co-operation. You understand all this? So what is that unifying factor in meditation? Because that is one of the most urgent absolute necessities. Politics and politicians are not going to bring this unity, however much they may talk about it. It has taken them thousands of years just to meet each other at Bonn or Moscow or in Washington or some other hideous place - thousands of years. Think of such a mentality that is going to bring unity to mankind. What is that factor? You understand? We are talking about a totally different kind of energy which is not the movement of thought with its own energy. And will that energy which is not the energy of thought bring about this unity? You understand? Are you interested in this? It is your problem, isn't it? Unity between you and your wife, unity between you and another. You see we have to bring about this unity, thought sees the necessity of this unity and therefore has created a centre. Like the sun is the centre of this universe, holding all things in that light, so this centre created by thought hopes to bring mankind together. Great warriors try to do this, great conquerors. They did it through bloodshed. Religions have tried to do it, and those religions who have tried to do it brought about more division with their cruelty, with their wars, with their torture. Science has enquired into this, and because science is knowledge, the accumulation of knowledge, and the movement of knowledge, which is thought being fragmentary cannot unify. You understand all this? So is there any energy which will bring about this unity? This unification of mankind? And we were saying: in meditation this energy comes about, because in that meditation there is no centre. The centre is created by thought. But something else totally different takes place - which is compassion. That is the unifying factor of mankind: to be, not that you will become compassionate which is again another deception, but be compassionate. That can only take place when there is no centre, the centre being that which has been created by thought, thought which hoped by creating a centre it could bring about unity - like a federal government, like a dictatorship, like autocracy. All those are centres hoping to create unity. All those have failed and they will inevitably fail. And there is only one factor and that is the sense of great compassion. And that compassion comes, when we understand the full width and depth of suffering. That is why we talked a great deal about suffering - suffering not only of a human being, the collective suffering of mankind. You understand, sirs? Don't understand it verbally or intellectually, but somewhere else, in your heart feel the thing. And as you are the world and the world is you, if there is this birth of compassion then you will inevitably bring about unity, you can't help it. Let us move further. That is: does this energy reveal that which is sacred? Mankind has always sought something sacred, knowing that nothing in this world is sacred - this world in which there is all the movement of agony, suffering, lack of love, despair, anxiety, competition, ambition, ruthlessness - anything, we are saying now, anything that thought has created is not sacred, obviously. The things that have been put in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques is not sacred, but yet we worship it. We worship the word, the symbol, created by thought and we pray to that. So we project that which is sacred according to our conditioning. If I was born in India - tradition and all the rest of it - I project that sacredness in a statue or something, a symbol, in the temple. And the Communist deny all that, but they have their own sacredness which is the State. For that they are willing to sacrifice, kill and all the rest of it. So anything that thought has put together is not sacred - your Christ, your Jesus, your saviours, the Hindu Gods - nothing! So in meditation, because the mind is absolutely quiet and therefore compassionate, is there something sacred? If you do not find it, life has no meaning. You understand? Has your life any meaning? Except pleasure, money and power? That has very little meaning. Your daily existence has very little meaning. Right? And you try to find a meaning by joining communes, this or that, doing something - which is still the movement of thought. So when you see totally, when you perceive totally all the movement of thought, and whatever thought creates is nothing sacred. So we are going to find out when the mind is completely quiet and therefore has that quality of great compassion, then is there anything that is sacred? That is, not supernatural? When the mind does not project anything, then the mind is still. You understand? If it does not project according to his conditioning, that which is called sacred, then the mind is still. Now in this stillness is there anything sacred? Or is there anything sacred, holy out of this silence? You know there is mystery. All religions have said: there is a mystery, you cannot go beyond a certain point - logically, sanely. That is why they have created temples that are very, very dark. The Cathedrals have coloured windows and all the rest of it, but it is very dark, quiet, hoping thereby to create through thought a sense of great mystery or great myth. When you understand this movement of thought as a whole, you have no myth, you have no mystery, no enquiry through reality a mystery. So when you have put away all that, then is there a mystery which thought cannot touch? You understand? That which is mysterious, not in the sense of the mystery that thought has created, that great sense of mystery which scientists are also enquiring into that mystery, that mysterious thing is sacred. It has no symbol, no word. You cannot experience it, because if you experience there is still the experiencer who is the centre, who is the 'me' who will experience, therefore still division. That division is still the movement of thought. So the experience of 'it' is not possible, but it is there when the mind has gone through this whole business of existence with clarity, in which there is no fear and the understanding of that enormous thing called death and suffering. And out of that comes great compassion. And then when the mind is totally still in this compassion - your mind cannot be still without compassion, do understand this - then out of that comes something mysterious which is the most sacred. Foreword - Brockwood 1973 - September 14th September 15th September 16th September 17th September 18th September 19th September 20th September 21st September 22nd September 23rd September 24th September 25th September 27th September 28th September 29th September 30th October 2nd October 3rd October 4th October 6th October 7th October 8th October 9th October 10th October 12th October 13th - Rome 1973 - October 17th October 18th October 19th October 20th October 21st October 22nd October 24th October 25th October 29th - Malibu 1975 - April 1st April 2nd April 3rd April 4th April 6th - Ojai 1975 - April 8th April 10th April 14th April 17th - Malibu 1975 - April 23rd April 24th KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL FOREWORD IN SEPTEMBER 1973 Krishnamurti suddenly started keeping a journal. For nearly six weeks he made daily entries in a notebook. For the first month of that period he was staying at Brockwood Park, Hampshire, and for the rest of the time in Rome. He resumed the journal eighteen months later while in California. Nearly every entry starts with a description of some natural scene which he knows intimately, yet in only three instances do these descriptions refer to the place in which he was actually staying. Thus, the first page of the first entry describes the grove in the park at Brockwood, but by the second page he is evidently in Switzerland in imagination. It is not until he is staying in California in 1975 that he again gives a description of his actual surroundings. For the rest, he is recalling places he has lived in, with a clarity that shows how vivid is his memory for natural scenery, arising from the acuteness of his observation. This journal also reveals to what an extent his teaching is inspired by his closeness to nature. Throughout, Krishnamurti refers to himself in the third person as "he", and incidentally he tells us something about himself which he has not done before. M. L. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST ENTRY 14TH SEPTEMBER 1973 The other day, coming back from a good walk among the fields and trees, we passed through the grove [Many rare trees, including redwoods, grow in the grove at Brockwood.] near the big white house. Coming over the stile into the grove one felt immediately a great sense of peace and stillness. Not a thing was moving. It seemed sacrilegious to walk through it, to tread the ground; it was profane to talk, even to breathe. The great redwood trees were absolutely still; the American Indians call them the silent ones and now they were really silent. Even the dog didn't chase the rabbits. You stood still hardly daring to breathe; you felt you were an intruder, for you had been chatting and laughing, and to enter this grove not knowing what lay there was a surprise and a shock, the shock of an unexpected benediction. The heart was beating less fast, speechless with the wonder of it. It was the centre of this whole place. Every time you enter it now, there's that beauty, that stillness, that strange stillness. Come when you will and it will be there, full, rich and unnameable. Any form of conscious meditation is not the real thing; it can never be. Deliberate attempt to meditate is not meditation. It must happen; it cannot be invited. Meditation is not the play of the mind nor of desire and pleasure. All attempt to meditate is the very denial of it. Only be aware of what you are thinking and doing and nothing else. The seeing, the hearing, is the doing, without reward and punishment. The skill in doing lies in the skill of seeing, hearing. Every form of meditation leads inevitably to deception, to illusion, for desire blinds. It was a lovely evening and the soft light of spring covered the earth. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND ENTRY 15TH SEPTEMBER 1973 It is good to be alone. To be far away from the world and yet walk its streets is to be alone. To be alone walking up the path beside the rushing, noisy mountain stream full of spring water and melting snows is to be aware of that solitary tree, alone in its beauty. The loneliness of a man in the street is the pain of life; he's never alone, far away, untouched and vulnerable. To be full of knowledge breeds endless misery. The demand for expression, with its frustrations and pains, is that man who walks the streets; he is never alone. Sorrow is the movement of that loneliness. That mountain stream was full and high with the melting snows and the rains of early spring. You could hear big boulders being pushed around by the force of on-rushing waters. A tall pine of fifty years or more crashed into the water; the road was being washed away. The stream was muddy, slate coloured. The fields above it were full of wild flowers. The air was pure and there was enchantment. On the high hills there was still snow, and the glaciers and the great peaks still held the recent snows; they will still be white all the summer long. It was a marvellous morning and you could have walked on endlessly, never feeling the steep hills. There was a perfume in the air, clear and strong. There was no one on that path, coming down or going up. You were alone with those dark pines and the rushing waters. The sky was that astonishing blue that only the mountains have. You looked at it through leaves and the straight pines. There was no one to talk to and there was no chattering of the mind. A magpie, white and black, flew by, disappearing into the woods. The path led away from the noisy stream and the silence was absolute. It wasn't the silence after the noise; it wasn't the silence that comes with the setting of the sun, nor that silence when the mind dies down. It wasn't the silence of museums and churches but something totally unrelated to time -- Page 1O -- and space. It wasn't the silence that mind makes for itself. The sun was hot and the shadows were pleasant. He only discovered recently that there was not a single thought during these long walks, in the crowded streets or on the solitary paths. Ever since he was a boy it had been like that, no thought entered his mind. He was watching and listening and nothing else. Thought with its associations never arose. There was no image-making. One day he was suddenly aware how extraordinary it was; he attempted often to think but no thought would come. On these walks, with people or without them, any movement of thought was absent. This is to be alone. Over the snow peaks clouds were forming, heavy and dark; probably it would rain later on but now the shadows were very sharp with the sun bright and clear. There was still that pleasant smell in the air and the rains would bring a different smell. It was a long way down to the chalet. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 3RD ENTRY 16TH SEPTEMBER 1973 At that time of the morning the streets of the small village were empty but beyond them the country was full with trees, meadows and whispering breezes. The one main street was lighted and everything else was in darkness. The sun would come up in about three hours. It was a clear starlit morning. The snow peaks and the glaciers were still in darkness and almost everyone was sleeping. The narrow mountain roads had so many curves that one couldn't go very fast; the car was new and being run in. It was a beautiful car, powerful with good lines. In that morning air the motor ran most efficiently. On the auto-route it was a thing of beauty and as it climbed it took every corner, steady as a rock. The dawn was there, the shape of the trees and the long line of hills and the vineyards; it was going to be a lovely morning; it was cool and pleasant among the hills. The sun was up and there was dew on the leaves and meadows. He always liked machinery; he dismantled the motor of a car and when it ran it was as good as new. When you are driving, meditation seems to come so naturally. You are aware of the countryside, the houses, the farmers in the field, the make of the passing car and the blue sky through the leaves. You are not even aware that meditation is going on, this meditation that began ages ago and would go on endlessly. Time isn't a factor in meditation, nor the word which is the meditator. There's no meditator in meditation. If there is, it is not meditation. The meditator is the word, thought and time, and so subject to change, to the coming and going. It's not a flower that blooms and dies. Time is movement. You are sitting on the bank of a river, watching the waters, the current and the things floating by. When you are in the water, there's no watcher. Beauty is not in the mere expression, it's in the abandonment of the word and expression, the canvas and the book. How peaceful the hills, the meadows and these trees are: the whole country is bathed in the light of a passing morning. Two men were arguing loudly with many gestures, red in the face. The road runs through a long avenue of trees and the tenderness of the morning is fading. The sea stretched before you and the smell of eucalyptus was in the air. He was a short man, lean and hard of muscle: he had come from a far away country, darkened by the sun. After a few words of greeting, he launched into criticism. How easy it is to criticize without knowing what actually are the facts. He said: "You may be free and live really all that you are talking about, but physically you are in a prison, padded by your friends. You don't know what is happening around you. People have assumed authority, though you yourself are not authoritarian." I am not sure you are right in this matter. To run a school or any other thing there must be a certain responsibility and it can and does exist without the authoritarian implication. Authority is wholly detrimental to co-operation, to talking things over together. This is what is being done in all the work that we are engaged in. This is an actual fact. If one may point out, no one comes between me and another. "What you are saying is of the utmost importance. All that you write and say should be printed and circulated by a small group of people who are serious and dedicated. The world is exploding and it is passing you by." I am afraid again you are not fully aware of what is happening. At one time a small group took the responsibility of circulating what has been said. Now, too, a small group has undertaken the same responsibility. Again, if one may point out, you are not aware of what is going on. He made various criticisms but they were based on assumptions and passing opinions. Without defending, one pointed out what was actually taking place. But - How strange human beings are. The hills were receding and the noise of daily life was around one, the coming and the going, sorrow and pleasure. A single tree on a hillock was the beauty of the land. And deep down in the valley was a stream and beside it ran a railroad. You must leave the world to see the beauty of that stream. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 4TH ENTRY 17TH SEPTEMBER 1973 That evening, walking through the wood there was a feeling of menace. The sun was just setting and the palm trees were solitary against the golden western sky. The monkeys were in the banyan tree, getting ready for the night. Hardly anyone used that path and rarely you met another human being. There were many deer, shy and disappearing into the thick growth. Yet the menace was there, heavy and pervading: it was all around you, you looked over your shoulder. There were no dangerous animals; they had moved away from there; it was too close to the spreading town. One was glad to leave and walk back through the lighted streets. But the next evening the monkeys were still there and so were the deer and the sun was just behind the tallest trees; the menace was gone. On the contrary, the trees, the bushes and the small plants welcomed you. You were among your friends, you felt completely safe and most welcome. The woods accepted you and every evening it was a pleasure to walk there. Forests are different. There's physical danger there, not only from snakes but from tigers that were known to be there. As one walked there one afternoon there was suddenly an abnormal silence; the birds stopped chattering, the monkeys were absolutely still and everything seemed to be holding its breath. One stood still. And as suddenly, everything came to life; the monkeys were playing and teasing each other, birds began their evening chatter and one was aware the danger had passed. In the woods and groves where man kills rabbits, pheasants, squirrels, there's quite a different atmosphere. You are entering into a world where man has been, with his gun and peculiar violence. Then the woods lose their tenderness, their welcome, and here some beauty has been lost and that happy whisper has gone. You have only one head and look after it for it's a marvellous thing. No machinery, no electronic computers can compare with it. It's so vast, so complex, so utterly capable, subtle and productive. It's the storehouse of experience, knowledge, memory. All thought springs from it. What it has put together is quite incredible: the mischief, the confusion, the sorrows, the wars, the corruptions, the illusions, the ideals, the pain and misery, the great cathedrals, the lovely mosques and the sacred temples. It is fantastic what it has done and what it can do. But one thing it apparently cannot do: change completely its behaviour in its relationship to another head, to another man. Neither punishment nor reward seem to change its behaviour; knowledge doesn't seem to transform its conduct. The me and the you remain. It never realizes that the me is the you, that the observer is the observed. Its love is its degeneration; its pleasure is its agony; the gods of its ideals are its destroyers. Its freedom is its own prison; it is educated to live in this prison, only making it more comfortable, more pleasurable. You have only one head, care for it, don't destroy it. It's so easy to poison it. He always had this strange lack of distance between himself and the trees, rivers and mountains. It wasn't cultivated: you can't cultivate a thing like that. There was never a wall between him and another. What they did to him, what they said to him never seemed to wound him, nor flattery to touch him. Somehow he was altogether untouched. He was not withdrawn, aloof, but like the waters of a river. He had so few thoughts; no thoughts at all when he was alone. His brain was active when talking or writing but otherwise it was quiet and active without movement. Movement is time and activity is not. This strange activity, without direction, seems to go on, sleeping or waking. He wakes up often with that activity of meditation; something of this nature is going on most of the time. He never rejected it or invited it. The other night he woke up, wide awake. He was aware that something like a ball of fire, light, was being put into his head, into the very centre of it. He watched it objectively for a considerable time, as though it were happening to someone else. It was not an illusion, something conjured up by the mind. Dawn was coming and through the opening of the curtains he could see the trees. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 5TH ENTRY 18TH SEPTEMBER 1973 It is still one of the most beautiful valleys. It is entirely surrounded by hills, filled with orange groves. Many years ago there were very few houses among the trees and orchards but now there are many more; the roads are wider, more traffic, more noise, especially at the west end of the valley. But the hills and high peaks remain the same, untouched by man. There are many trails leading to the high mountains and one walked endlessly along them. One met bears, rattle snakes, deer and once a bob cat (a lynx). The bob cat was there ahead, down the narrow trail, purring and rubbing himself against rocks and the short trunks of trees. The breeze was coming up the canyon and so one could get quite close to him. He was really enjoying himself, delighted with his world. His short tail was up, his pointed ears straight forward, his russet hair bright and clean, totally unaware that someone was just behind him about twenty feet away. We went down the trail for about a mile, neither of us making the least sound. It was really a beautiful animal, spritely and graceful. There was a narrow stream ahead of us and wishing not to frighten him when we came to it, one whispered a gentle greeting. He never looked round, that would have been a waste of time, but streaked off, completely disappearing in a few seconds. We had been friends, though, for a considerable time. The valley is filled with the smell of orange blossom, almost overpowering, especially in the early mornings and evening. It was in the room, in the valley and in every corner of the earth and the god of flowers blessed the valley. It would be really hot in the summer and that had its own peculiarity. Many years ago, when one went there, there was a marvellous atmosphere; it is still there to a lesser degree. Human beings are spoiling it as they seem to spoil most things. It will be as before. A flower may wither and die but it will come back with its loveliness. Have you ever wondered why human beings go wrong, become corrupt, indecent in their behaviour aggressive, violent and cunning? It's no good blaming the environment, the culture or the parents. We want to put the responsibility for this degeneration on others or on some happening. Explanations and causes are an easy way out. The ancient Hindus called it Karma, what you sowed you reaped. The psychologists put the problem in the lap of the parents. What the so-called religious people say is based on their dogma and belief. But the question is still there. Then there are others, born generous, kind, responsible. They are not changed by the environment or any pressure. They remain the same in spite of all the clamour. Why? Any explanation is of little significance. All explanations are escapes, avoiding the reality of what is. This is the only thing that matters. The what is can be totally transformed with the energy that is wasted in explanations and in searching out the causes. Love is not in time nor in analysis, in regrets and recriminations. It is there when desire for money, position and the cunning deceit of the self are not. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 6TH ENTRY 19TH SEPTEMBER 1973 The monsoon had set in. The sea was almost black under the dark heavy clouds and the wind was tearing at the trees. It would rain for a few days, torrential rains, and it would stop for a day or so, to begin again. Frogs were croaking in every pond and the pleasant smell the rains brought filled the air. The earth was clean again and in a few days it became astonishingly green. Things grew almost under your eyes; the sun would come and all the things of the earth would be sparkling. Early in the morning there would be chanting and the small squirrels were all over the place. There were flowers everywhere, the wild ones and the cultivated, the jasmine, the rose and the marigold. One day on the road that leads to the sea, walking under the palms and the heavy rain trees, looking at a thousand things, a group of children were singing. They seemed so happy, innocent and utterly unaware of the world. One of them recognised us, came smiling and we walked hand in hand for some time. Neither of us said a word and as we came near her house she saluted and disappeared inside. The world and the family are going to destroy her and she will have children too, cry over them and in the cunning ways of the world they will be destroyed. But that evening she was happy and eager to share it by holding a hand. When the rains had gone, returning on the same road one evening when the western sky was golden, one passed a young man carrying a fire in an earthenware pot. He was bare except for his clean loin cloth and behind him two men were carrying a dead body. All were Brahmins, freshly washed, clean, holding themselves upright. The young man carrying the fire must have been the son of the dead man: they were all walking quite fast. The body was going to be cremated on some secluded sands. It was all so simple, unlike the elaborate hearse, loaded with flowers, followed by a long line of polished cars or mourners walking behind the coffin: the dark blackness of it all. Or you saw a dead body, decently covered, being carried at the back of a bicycle to the sacred river to be burnt. Death is everywhere and we never seem to live with it. It is a dark, frightening thing to be avoided, never to be talked of. Keep it away from the closed door. But it is always there. The beauty of love is death and one knows neither. Death is pain and love is pleasure and the two can never meet; they must be kept apart and the division is the pain and agony. This has been from the beginning of time, the division and the endless conflict. There will always be death for those who do not see that the observer is the observed, the experiencer is the experienced. It is like a vast river in which man is caught, with all his worldly goods, his vanities, pains and knowledge. Unless he leaves all the things he has accumulated in the river and swims ashore, death will be always at his door, waiting and watching. When he leaves the river there is no shore, the bank is the word, the observer. He has left everything, the river and the bank. For the river is time and the banks are the thoughts of time: the river is the movement of time and thought is of it. When the observer leaves everything which he is, then the observer is not. This is not death. It is the timeless. You cannot know it, for what is known is of time; you cannot experience it: recognition is made up of time. Freedom from the known is freedom from time. Immortality is not the word, the book, the image, you have put together. The soul, the "me", the atman is the child of thought which is time. When time is not then death is not. Love is. The western sky had lost its colour and just over the horizon was the new moon, young, shy and tender. On the road everything seemed to be passing, marriage, death, the laughter of children and someone sobbing. Near the moon was a single star. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 7TH ENTRY 20TH SEPTEMBER 1973 The river was particularly beautiful this morning; the sun was just coming over the trees and the village hidden among them. The air was very still and there was not a ripple on the water. It would get quite warm during the day but now it was rather cool and a solitary monkey was sitting in the sun. It was always there by itself, big and heavy. During the day it disappeared and turned up early in the morning on the top of the tamarind tree: when it got warm the tree seemed to swallow it. The golden green flycatchers were sitting on the parapet with the doves, and the vultures were still on the top branches of another tamarind. There was immense quietness and one sat on a bench, lost to the world. Coming back from the airport on a shaded road with the parrots, green and red, screeching around the trees, one saw across the road what appeared to be a large bundle. As the car came near, the bundle turned out to be a man lying across the road, almost naked. The car stopped and we got out. His body was large and his head very small; he was staring through the leaves at the astonishingly blue sky. We looked up too to see what he was staring at and the sky from the road was really blue and the leaves were really green. He was malformed and they said he was one of the village idiots. He never moved and the car had to be driven round him very carefully. The camels with their load and the shouting children passed him without paying the least attention. A dog passed, making a wide circle. The parrots were busy with their noise. The dry fields, the villagers, the trees, the yellow flowers were occupied with their own existence. That part of the world was underdeveloped and there was no one or organization to look after such people. There were open gutters, filth and crowding humanity and the sacred river went on its way. The sadness of life was everywhere and in the blue sky, high in the air, were the heavy-winged vultures, circling without moving their wings, circling by the hour, waiting and watching. What is sanity and insanity? Who is sane and who is insane? Are the politicians sane? The priests, are they insane? Those who are committed to ideologies, are they sane? We are controlled, shaped, pushed around by them, and are we sane? What is sanity? To be whole, non-fragmented in action, in life, in every kind of relationship that is the very essence of sanity. Sanity means to be whole, healthy and holy. To be insane, neurotic, psychotic, unbalanced, schizophrenic, whatever name you might give to it, is to be fragmented, broken up in action and in the movement of relationship which is existence. To breed antagonism and division, which is the trade of the politicians who represent you, is to cultivate and sustain insanity, whether they are dictators or those in power in the name of peace or some form of ideology. And the priest: look at the world of priesthood. He stands between you and what he and you consider truth, saviour, god, heaven, hell. He is the interpreter, the representative; he holds the keys to heaven; he has conditioned man through belief, dogma and ritual; he is the real propagandist. He has conditioned you because you want comfort, security, and you dread tomorrow. The artists, the intellectuals, the scientists, admired and flattered so much are they sane? Or do they live in two different worlds - the world of ideas and imagination with its compulsive expression, wholly separate from their daily life of sorrow and pleasure? The world about you is fragmented and so are you and its expression is conflict, confusion and misery: you are the world and the world is you. Sanity is to live a life of action without conflict. Action and idea are contradictory. Seeing is the doing and not ideation first and action according to the conclusion. This breeds conflict. The analyser himself is the analysed. When the analyser separates himself as something different from the analysed, he begets conflict, and conflict is the area of the unbalanced. The observer is the observed and therein lies sanity, the whole, and with the holy is love. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 8TH ENTRY 21ST SEPTEMBER 1973 It is good to wake up without a single thought, with its problems. Then the mind is rested; it has brought about order within itself and that is why sleep is so important. Either it brings about order in its relationship and action during the waking hours, which gives to the mind complete rest during sleep, or during sleep it will attempt to arrange its affairs to its own satisfaction. During the day there will again be disorder caused by so many factors, and during the hours of sleep the mind will try to extricate itself from this confusion. Mind, brain, can only function efficiently, objectively, where there is order. Conflict in any form is disorder. Consider what the mind goes through every day of its life: the attempt at order in sleep and disorder during waking hours. This is the conflict of life, day in, day out. The brain can only function in security, not in contradiction and confusion. So it tries to find it in some neurotic formula but the conflict becomes worse. Order is the transformation of all this mess. When the observer is the observed there is complete order. In the little lane that goes by the house, shaded and quiet, a little girl was sobbing her heart out, as only children can do. She must have been five or six, small for her age. She was sitting on the ground, tears pouring down her cheeks. He sat down with her and asked what had happened but she couldn't talk, sobbing took all her breath. She must have been struck or her favourite toy broken or something which she wanted denied by a harsh word. The mother came out, shook the child and carried her in. She barely looked at him for they were strangers. A few days later, walking along the same lane, the child came out of her house, full of smiles, and walked with him a little way. The mother must have given her permission to go with a stranger. He walked often in that shaded lane and the girl with her brother and sister would come out and greet him. Will they ever forget their hurts and their sorrows or will they gradually build for themselves escapes and resistances? To keep these hurts seems to be the nature of human beings and from this their actions become twisted. Can the human mind never be hurt or wounded? Not to be hurt is to be innocent. If you are not hurt you will naturally not hurt another. Is this possible? The culture in which we live does deeply wound the mind and heart. The noise and the pollution, the aggression and competition, the violence and the education all these and more contribute to the agony. Yet we have to live in this world of brutality and resistance: we are the world and the world is us. What is the thing that is hurt? The image that each one has built about himself, that is what is hurt. Strangely these images, all over the world are the same, with some modifications. The essence of the image you have is the same as of the man a thousand miles away. So you are that man or woman. Your hurts are the hurts of thousands: you are the other. Is it possible never to be hurt? Where there is wound there is no love. Where there is hurt, then love is mere pleasure. When you discover for yourself the beauty of never being hurt, then only do all the past hurts disappear. In the full present the past has lost its burden. He has never been hurt though many things happened to him, flattery and insult, threat and security. It is not that he was insensitive, unaware: he had no image of himself, no conclusion, no ideology. Image is resistance and when that is not, there is vulnerability but no hurt. You may not seek to be vulnerable, highly sensitive, for that which is sought and found is another form of the same image. Understand this whole movement, not merely verbally, but have an insight into it. Be aware of the whole structure of it without any reservation. Seeing the truth of it is the ending of the image builder. The pond was overflowing and there were a thousand reflections on it. It became dark and the heavens were open. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 9TH ENTRY 22ND SEPTEMBER 1973 A woman was singing next door: she had a marvellous voice and the few who were listening to her were entranced. The sun was setting among the mango trees and palms, rich golden and green. She was singing some devotional songs and the voice was getting richer and mellower. Listening is an art. When you listen to classical western music or to this woman, sitting on the floor, you are either being romantic or there are remembrances of things past or thought with its associations swiftly changing your moods, or there are intimations of the future. Or you listen without any movement of thought. You listen out of complete quietness, out of total silence. Listening to one's thought or to the blackbird on a branch or to what is being said, without the response of thought, brings about a wholly different significance from that which the movement of thought brings. This is the art of listening, listening with total attention: there is no centre which listens. The silence of the mountains has a depth which the valleys have not. Each has its own silence; the silence among clouds and among trees is vastly different; the silence between two thoughts is timeless; the silence of pleasure and of fear are tangible. The artificial silence which thought can manufacture is death; the silence between noises is the absence of noise but it is not silence, as the absence of war is not peace. The dark silence of a cathedral, of the temple, is of age and beauty, especially constructed by man; there is the silence of the past and of the future, the silence of the museum and the cemetery. But all this is not silence. The man had been sitting there on the bank of the beautiful river, motionless; he was there for over an hour. He would come there every morning, freshly bathed, he would chant in Sanskrit for some time and presently he would be lost in his thoughts; he didn't seem to mind the sun, at least the morning sun. One day he came and began to talk about meditation. He did not belong to any school of meditation, he considered them useless, without any real significance. He was alone, unmarried and had put away the ways of the world long ago. He had controlled his desires, shaped his thoughts and lived a solitary life. He was not bitter, vain or indifferent; he had forgotten all these some years ago. Meditation and reality were his life. As he talked and groped for the right word, the sun was setting and deep silence descended upon us. He stopped talking. After a while, when the stars were very close to the earth, he said: "That is the silence I have been looking for everywhere, in the books, among the teachers and in myself. I have found many things but not this. It came unsought, uninvited. Have I wasted my life in things that did not matter? You have no idea what I have been through, the fastings, the self-denials and the practices. I saw their futility long ago but never came upon this silence. What shall I do to remain in it, to maintain it, to hold it in my heart? I suppose you would say do nothing, as one cannot invite it. But shall I go on wandering over this country, with this repetition, this control? Sitting here I am conscious of this sacred silence; through it I look at the stars, those trees, the river. Though I see and feel all this, I am not really there. As you said the other day, the observer is the observed. I see what it means now. The benediction I sought is not to be found in the seeking. It is time for me to go." The river became dark and the stars were reflected on its waters near the banks. Gradually the noises of the day were coming to an end and the soft noises of the night began. You watched the stars and the dark earth and the world was far away. Beauty, which is love, seemed to descend on the earth and the things of it. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 10TH ENTRY 23RD SEPTEMBER 1973 He was standing by himself on the low bank of the river; it was not very wide and he could see some people on the other bank. If the talk was loud he could almost hear them. In the rainy season the river met the open waters of the sea. It had been raining for days and the river had broken through the sands to the waiting sea. With the heavy rains it was clean again and one could swim in it safely. The river was wide enough to hold a long narrow island green with bushes, a few short trees and a small palm. When the water was not too deep cattle would wade across to graze on it. It was a pleasant and friendly river and it was particularly so on that morning. He was standing there with no one around, alone, unattached and far away. He was about fourteen or less. They had found his brother and himself quite recently and all the fuss and sudden importance given to him was around him. [Krishnamurti is writing here about his own boyhood at Adyar, near Madras.] He was the centre of respect and devotion and in the years to come he would be the head of organizations and great properties. All that and the dissolution of them still lay ahead. Standing there alone, lost and strangely aloof, was his first and lasting remembrance of those days and events. He doesn't remember his childhood, the schools and the caning. He was told years later by the very teacher who hurt him that he used to cane him practically every day; he would cry and be put out on the verandah until the school closed and the teacher would come out and ask him to go home, otherwise he would still be on the verandah, lost. He was caned, this man said because he couldn't study or remember anything he had read or been told. Later the teacher couldn't believe that boy was the man who had given the talk he had heard. He was greatly surprised and unnecessarily respectful. All those years passed without leaving scars, memories, on his mind; his friendships, his affections, even those years with those who had ill-treated him somehow none of these events, friendly or brutal, have left marks on him. In recent years a writer asked if he could recall all those rather strange events, how he and his brother were discovered and the other happenings, and when he replied that he could not remember them and could only repeat what others had told him, the man openly, with a sneer, stated that he was putting it on and pretending. He never consciously blocked any happening, pleasant or unpleasant, entering into his mind. They came, leaving no mark and passed away. Consciousness is its content: the content makes up consciousness. The two are indivisible. There is no you and another, only the content which makes up consciousness as the "me" and the not "me". The contents vary according to the culture, the racial accumulations, the techniques and capacities acquired. These are broken up as the artist, the scientist and so on. Idiosyncrasies are the response of the conditioning and the conditioning is the common factor of man. This conditioning is the content, consciousness. This again is broken up as the conscious and the hidden. The hidden becomes important because we have never looked at it as a whole. This fragmentation takes place when the observer is not the observed, when the experiencer is seen as different from the experience. The hidden is as the open; the observation the hearing of the open is the seeing of the hidden. Seeing is not analysing. In analysing there is the analyser and the analysed, a fragmentation which leads to inaction, a paralysis. In seeing, the observer is not, and so action is immediate; there is no interval between the idea and action. The idea, the conclusion, is the observer the seer separate from the thing seen. Identification is an act of thought and thought is fragmentation. The island, the river and the sea are still there, the palms and the buildings. The sun was coming out of masses of clouds, serried and soaring to the heavens. In only a loin cloth the fishermen were throwing their nets to catch some measly little fishes. Unwilling poverty is a degradation. Late in the evening it was pleasant among the mangoes and scented flowers. How beautiful is the earth. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 11TH ENTRY 24TH SEPTEMBER 1973 A new consciousness and a totally new morality are necessary to bring about a radical change in the present culture and social structure. This is obvious, yet the left and the right and the revolutionary seem to disregard it. Any dogma, any formula, any ideology, is part of the old consciousness; they are the fabrications of thought whose activity is fragmentation the left, the right, the centre. This activity will inevitably lead to bloodshed of the right or of the left or to totalitarianism. This is what is going on around us. One sees the necessity of social, economic and moral change but the response is from the old consciousness thought being the principle actor. The mess, the confusion and the misery that human beings have got into within the area of the old consciousness, and without changing that profoundly, every human activity, political, economic and religious, will only bring us to the destruction of each other and the earth. This is so obvious to the sane. One has to be a light to oneself; this light is the law. There is no other law. All the other laws are made by thought and so fragmentary and contradictory. To be a light to oneself is not to follow the light of another, however reasonable, logic, historical, and however convincing. You cannot be a light to yourself if you are in the dark shadows of authority, of dogma, of conclusion. Morality is not put together by thought; it is not the outcome of environmental pressure, it is not of yesterday, of tradition. Morality is the child of love and love is not desire and pleasure. Sexual or sensory enjoyment is not love. High in the mountains there were hardly any birds, there were some crows, there were deer and an occasional bear. The huge redwoods, the silent ones, were everywhere, dwarfing all the other trees. It was a magnificent country and utterly peaceful, for no hunting was allowed. Every animal,every tree and flower was protected. Sitting under one of those massive redwoods, one was aware of the history of man and the beauty of earth. A fat red squirrel passed by most elegantly, stopping a few feet away, watching and wondering what you were doing there. The earth was dry, though there was a stream nearby. Not a leaf stirred and the beauty of silence was among the trees. Going slowly along the narrow path, round the bend was a bear with four cubs as large as big cats. They rushed off to climb up trees and the mother faced one without a movement, without a sound. About fifty feet separated us; she was enormous, brown, and prepared. One immediately turned one's back on her and left. Each understood that there was no fear and no intention to hurt, but all the same one was glad to be among the protecting trees, squirrels and the scolding jays. Freedom is to be a light to oneself; then it is not an abstraction, a thing conjured by thought. Actual freedom is freedom from dependency, attachment, from the craving for experience. Freedom from the very structure of thought is to be a light to oneself. In this light all action takes place and thus it is never contradictory. Contradiction exists only when that law, light, is separate from action, when the actor is separate from action. The ideal, the principle, is the barren movement of thought and cannot co-exist with this light; one denies the other. This light, this law, is separate from you; where the observer is, this light, this love, is not. The structure of the observer is put together by thought, which is never new, never free. There is no "how", no system, no practice. There is only the seeing which is the doing. You have to see, not through the eyes of another. This light, this law, is neither yours nor that of another. There is only light. This is love. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 12TH ENTRY 25TH SEPTEMBER 1973 He was looking out of the window on to the green rolling hills and dark woods with the morning sun on them. It was a pleasant and lovely morning, there were magnificent clouds beyond the woods, white with billowing shapes. No wonder the ancients said the gods had their abode among them and the mountains. All around there were these enormous clouds against a blue and dazzling sky. He had not a single thought and was only looking at the beauty of the world. He must have been at that window for some time and something took place, unexpected, uninvited. You cannot invite or desire such things, unknowingly or consciously. Everything seemed to withdraw and be giving space only to that, the unnameable. You won't find it in any temple, mosque or church or on any printed page. You will find it nowhere and whatever you find, it is not that. With so many others in that vast structure near the Golden Horn (Istanbul) he was sitting next to a beggar with torn rags, head lowered, uttering some prayer. A man began to sing in Arabic. He had a marvellous voice, the entire dome and great edifice was filled with it, it seemed to shake the building. It had a strange effect on all those who were there; they listened to the words and to the voice with great respect and were at the same time enchanted. He was a stranger amongst them; they looked at him and then forgot him. The vast hall was filled and presently there was a silence; they went through their ritual and one by one and then they left. Only the beggar and he remained; then the beggar too left. The great dome was silent and the edifice became empty, the noise of life was far away. If you ever walk by yourself high in the mountains among the pines and rocks, leaving everything in the valley far below you, when there is not a whisper among the trees and every thought has withered away, then it may come to you, the otherness. If you hold it, it will never come again; what you hold is the memory of it dead and gone. What you hold is not the real; your heart and mind are too small, they can hold only the things of thought and that is barren. Go further away from the valley, far away, leaving everything down there. You can come back and pick them up if you want to but they will have lost their weight. You will never be the same again. After a long climb of several hours, beyond the tree line, he was there among rocks and the silence mountains have; there were a few misshaped pines. There was no wind and everything was utterly still. Walking back, moving from rock to rock, he suddenly heard a rattler and jumped. A few feet away was the snake, fat and almost black. With the rattle in the middle of the coils, it was ready to strike. The triangled head with its forked tongue flickering in and out, its dark sharp eyes watching, it was ready to strike if he moved nearer. During all that half hour or more it never blinked, it stared at you, it had no eyelids. Uncoiling slowly, keeping its head and tail towards him, it began to move away in a U-shape and when he made a move to get nearer it coiled up instantly ready to strike. We played this game for a little while; it was getting tired and he left it to go its own way. It was a really frightening thing, fat and deadly. You must be alone with the trees, meadows and streams. You are never alone if you carry the things of thought, its images and problems. The mind must not be filled with the rocks and clouds of the earth. It must be empty as the newly-made vessel. Then you would see something totally, something that has never been. You can't see this if you are there; you must die to see it.You may think you are the important thing in the world but you are not.You may have everything that thought has put together but they are all old, used and begin to crumble. In the valley it was surprisingly cool and near the huts the squirrels were waiting for their nuts. They had been fed every day in the cabin on the table. They were very friendly and if you weren't there on time they began their scolding and the bluejays waited noisily outside. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 13TH ENTRY 27TH SEPTEMBER 1973 It was a temple in ruins, with its roofless long corridors, gates headless statues and deserted courtyards. It had become a sanctuary for birds and monkeys, parrots and doves. Some of the headless statues were still massive in their beauty; they had a still dignity. The whole place was surprisingly clean and one could sit on the ground to watch the monkeys and chattering birds. Once very long ago, the temple must have been a flourishing place with thousands of worshippers, with garlands, incense and prayer. Their atmosphere was still there, their hopes, fears and their reverence. The holy sanctuary was gone long ago. Now the monkeys disappeared as it was growing hot but the parrots and doves had their nests in the holes and crevices of the high walls. This old ruined temple was too far away for the villagers to further destroy it. Had they come they would have desecrated the emptiness. Religion has become superstition and image-worship, belief and ritual. It has lost the beauty of truth; incense has taken the place of reality. Instead of direct perception there is in its place the image carved by the hand or the mind. The only concern of religion is the total transformation of man. And all the circus that goes on around it is nonsense. That's why the truth is not to be found in any temple, church or mosque, however beautiful they are. Beauty of truth and the beauty of stone are two different I things. One opens the door to the immeasurable and the other to, the imprisonment of man; the one to freedom and the other to the bondage of thought. Romanticism and sentimentality deny the very nature of religion, nor is it a plaything of the intellect. Knowledge in the area of action is necessary to function efficiently and objectively, but knowledge is not the means of the transformation of man; knowledge is the structure of thought and thought is the dull repetition of the known, however modified and enlarged. There is no freedom through the ways of thought, the known. The long snake lay very still along the dry ridge of the rice fields, lusciously green and bright in the morning sun. Probably it was resting or waiting for some careless frog. Frogs were being shipped then to Europe to be eaten as a delicacy. The snake was long and yellowish; and very still; it was almost the colour of the dry earth, hard to see but the light of day was in its dark eyes. The only thing that was moving, in and out, was its black tongue. It could not have been aware of the watcher who was somewhat behind its head. Death was everywhere that morning. You could you could hear it in the village; the great sobs as the body, wrapped in a cloth was being carried out; a kite was streaking down on a bird; some animal was being killed; you heard its agonizing cries. So it went on day after day: death is always everywhere, as sorrow is. The beauty of truth and its subtleties are not in belief and dogma, they never are where man can find them for there is no path to its beauty; it is not a fixed point, a haven of shelter. It has its own tenderness whose love is not to be measured nor can you hold it, experience it. It has no market value to be used and put aside.It is there when the mind and heart are empty of the things of thought. The monk or the poor man are not near it, nor the rich; neither the intellectual nor the gifted can touch it. The one who says he knows has never come near it. Be far away from the world and yet live it. The parrots were screeching and fluttering around the Tamarind tree that morning; they begin early their restless activity, with their coming and going. They were bright streaks of green with strong, red, curved beaks. They never seemed to fly straight but always zigzagging, shrieking as they flew. occasionally they would come to sit on the parapet of the verandah; then you could watch them, but not for long; they would be off again with their crazy and noisy flight. Their only enemy seemed to be man. He puts them in a cage. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 14TH ENTRY 28TH SEPTEMBER 1973 The big black dog had just killed a goat; it had been punished severely and tied up and it was now whining and barking. The house had a high wall around it but somehow the goat had wandered in and the dog had chased and killed it. The owner of the house made amends with words and silver. It was a large house with trees around it and the lawn was never completely green however much it was watered. The sun was cruelly strong and all the flowers and bushes had to be watered twice a day; the soil was poor and the heat of the day almost withered the greenery. But the trees had grown large and gave comforting shadows and you could sit there in the early morning when the sun was well behind the trees. It was a good place if you wanted to sit quietly and lose yourself in meditation, but not if you wanted to daydream or lose yourself in some satisfying illusion. It was too severe there in those shadows, too demanding, for the whole place was given over to that kind of quiet contemplation. You could indulge in your friendly fantasies but you would soon find out that the place did not invite the images of thought. He was sitting with a cloth over his head, weeping; his wife had just died. He did not want to show his tears to his children; they too were crying, not quite understanding what had happened. The mother of many children had been unwell and lately very sick; the father sat at her bedside. He never seemed to go out, and one day, after some ceremonies, the mother was carried out. The house had strangely become empty, without the perfume that the mother had given to it, and it was never the same again for there was sorrow in the house now. The father knew it; the children had lost someone forever but as yet they did not know the meaning of sorrow. It is always there, you cannot just forget it, you cannot cover it up through some form of entertainment, religious or otherwise. You may run away from it but it will be there to meet you again. You may lose yourself in some worship, prayer or in some comforting belief but it will appear again, unbidden. The flowering of sorrow is bitterness, cynicism or some neurotic behaviour. You may be aggressive, violent and nasty in your conduct but sorrow is where you are. You may have power, position and the pleasures of money but it will be there in your heart, waiting and preparing. Do what you will you cannot escape from it. The love that you have ends in sorrow; sorrow is time, sorrow is thought. The tree is cut down and you shed a tear; an animal is killed for your taste; the earth is being destroyed for your pleasure; you are being educated to kill, to destroy, man against man. The new technology and machines are taking over the toil of man but you may not end sorrow through the things that thought has put together. Love is not pleasure. She came desperate in her sorrow; she talked, pouring out all the things she had been through, death, the inanities of her children, their politics, their divorces, their frustrations, bitterness and the utter futility of all life that had no meaning. She was not young any more; in her youth she had just enjoyed herself, had a passing interest in politics, a degree in economics and more or less the kind of life that almost everyone leads. Her husband had died recently and all sorrow seemed to descend upon her. She became quiet as we talked. Any movement of thought is the deepening of sorrow. Thought with its memories, with its images of pleasure and pain, with its loneliness and tears, with its self-pity and remorse, is the ground of sorrow. Listen to what is being said. Just listen not to the echoes of the past, to the overcoming of sorrow or how to escape from its torture but listen with your heart, with your whole being to what is now being said. Your dependence and attachment have prepared the soil for your sorrow. Your neglect of the study of yourself and the beauty it brings, have given nourishment to your sorrow; all your self-centred activities have led you to this sorrow. lust listen to what is being said: stay with it, don't wander off. Any movement of thought is the strengthening of sorrow. Thought is not love. Love has no sorrow. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 15TH ENTRY 29TH SEPTEMBER 1973 The rains were nearly over and the horizon was flowing with billowing white and golden clouds; they were soaring up to the blue and green heavens. All the leaves of every bush were washed clean and they were sparkling in the early morning sun. It was a morning of delight, the earth was rejoicing and there seemed to be benediction in the air. High up in that room you saw the blue sea, the river running into it, the palms and the mangoes. You held your breath at the wonder of the earth and the immense shape of the clouds. It was early, quiet and the noise of the day had not yet begun; across the bridge there was hardly any traffic, only a long line of bullock carts, laden with hay. Years later buses would come with their pollution and bustle. It was a lovely morning, full of song and bliss. The two brothers were driven in a car to a village nearby to see their father whom they had not seen for nearly fifteen years or more. They had to walk a little distance on an ill-kept road. They came to a tank, a storage of water; all its sides had stone steps leading down to the clear water. At one end of it there was a small temple with a small square tower, quite narrow at the top; there were many images of stone all round it. On the verandah of the temple, overlooking the big pond, were some people, absolutely still, like those images on the tower, lost in meditation. Beyond the water, just behind some other houses, was the house where the father lived. He came out as the two brothers approached and they greeted him by prostrating fully, touching his feet. They were shy and waited for him to speak, as was the custom. Before he said anything he went inside to wash his feet, as the boys had touched them. He was a very orthodox Brahmanah, no one could touch him except another Brahmanah, and his two sons had been polluted by mixing with others who were not of his class and had eaten food cooked by non-Brahmanahs. So he washed his feet and sat down on the ground, not too close to his polluted sons. They talked for some time and the hour when food is eaten approached. He sent them away for he could not eat with them; they were no longer Brahmanahs. He must have had affection for them, for after all they were his sons whom he had not seen for so many years. If their mother were alive she might have given them food but she would certainly not have eaten with her sons. They must have had a deep affection for their children but orthodoxy and tradition forbade any physical contact with them. Tradition is very strong, stronger than love. The tradition of war is stronger than love; the tradition of killing for food and killing the so-called enemy denies human tenderness and affection; the tradition of long hours of labour breeds efficient cruelty; the tradition of marriage soon becomes a bondage; the traditions of the rich and the poor keep them apart; each profession has its own tradition, its own elite which breeds envy and enmity. The traditional ceremonies and rituals in the places of worship, the world over, have separated man from man and the words and gestures have no meaning at all. A thousand yesterdays, however rich and beautiful, deny love. You cross over a rickety bridge to the other side of a narrow, muddy stream which joins the big wide river; you come to a small village of mud and sun-dried bricks. There are quantities of children, screaming and playing; the older people are in the fields or fishing, or working in the nearby town. In a small dark room an opening in the wall is the window; no flies would come into this darkness. It was cool in there. In that small space was a weaver with a large loom; he could not read but was educated in his own way, polite and wholly absorbed in his labours. He turned out exquisite cloth of gold and silver with beautiful patterns. In whatever colour of cloth or silk he could weave into traditional patterns, the finest and the best. He was born to that tradition; he was small, gentle and eager to show his marvellous talent. You watched him, as he produced from silken threads the finest of cloths, with wonder and love in your heart. There was the woven piece of great beauty, born of tradition. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 16TH ENTRY 30TH SEPTEMBER 1973 It was a long yellowish snake crossing the road under a banyan tree. He had been for a long walk and was coming back when he saw the snake. He followed it, quite closely, up a mound; it peered into every hole; it was totally unaware of him, though he was almost on top of it. It was quite fat; there was a large bulge in the middle of its length. The villagers on their way home had stopped talking and watched; one of them told him that it was a cobra and that he had better be careful. The cobra disappeared into a hole and he resumed his walk. Intent on seeing the cobra again at the same spot, he returned the next day. There was no snake there but the villagers had put a shallow pot of milk, some marigolds and a large stone with some ashes on it and some other flowers. That place had become sacred and every day there would be fresh flowers; the villagers all around knew that that place had become sacred. He returned several months later to that place; there was fresh milk, fresh flowers and the stone was newly decorated. And the banyan was a little older. The temple overlooked the blue Mediterranean; it was in ruins and only the marble columns remained. In a war it was destroyed but it was still a sacred sanctuary. One evening, with the golden sun on the marble, you felt the holy atmosphere; you were alone, with no visitors about and their endless chatter. The columns were becoming pure gold and the sea far below was intensely blue. A statue of the goddess was there, preserved and locked up; you could only see her at certain hours and she was losing the beauty of sacredness. The blue sea remained. It was a nice cottage in the country with a lawn that had been rolled, mown and weeded for many a year. The whole place was well looked after, prosperous and joyful; behind the house was a small vegetable garden; it was a lovely place with a gentle stream running beside, making hardly a sound. The door opened and it was held back by a statue of the Buddha, kicked into place. The owner was totally unaware of what he was doing; to him it was a door-stop. You wondered if he would do the same with a statue he revered, for he was a Christian. You deny the sacred things of another but you keep your own; the beliefs of another are superstitions but your own are reasonable and real. What is sacred? He had picked it up, he said, on a beach; it was a piece of sea-washed wood in the shape of a human head. It was made of hard wood, shaped by the waters of the sea, cleansed by many seasons. He had brought it home and put it on the mantelpiece; he looked at it from time to time and admired what he had done. One day, he put some flowers round it and then it happened every day; he felt uncomfortable if there were not fresh flowers every day and gradually that piece of shaped wood became very important in his life. He would allow no one to touch it except himself; they might desecrate it; he washed his hands before he touched it. It had become holy, sacred, and he alone was the high priest of it; he represented it; it told him of things he could never know by himself. His life was filled with it and he was, he said, unspeakably happy. What is sacred? Not the things made by the mind or hand or by the sea. The symbol is never the real; the word grass is not the grass of the field; the word god is not god. The word never contains the whole, however cunning the description. The word sacred has no meaning by itself; it becomes sacred only in its relationship to something, illusory or real. What is real is not the words of the mind; reality, truth, cannot be touched by thought. Where the perceiver is, truth is not. The thinker and his thought must come to an end for truth to be. Then that which is, is sacred that ancient marble with the golden sun on it, that snake and the villager. Where there's no love there is nothing sacred. Love is whole and in it there's no fragmentation. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 17TH ENTRY 2ND OCTOBER 1973 Consciousness is its content; the content is consciousness. All action is fragmentary when the content of consciousness is broken up. This activity breeds conflict, misery and confusion; then sorrow is inevitable. From the air at that height you could see the green fields, each separate from the other in shape, size and colour. A stream came down to meet the sea; far beyond it were the mountains, heavy with snow. All over the earth there were large, spreading towns, villages; on the hills there were castles, churches and houses, and beyond them were the vast deserts, brown, golden and white. Then there was the blue sea again and more land with thick forests. The whole earth was rich and beautiful. He walked there, hoping to meet a tiger, and he did. The villagers had come to tell his host that a tiger had killed a young cow the previous night and would come back that night to the kill. Would they like to see it? A platform on a tree would be built and from there one could see the big killer and also they would tie a goat to the tree to make sure that the tiger would come. He said he wouldn't like to see a goat killed for his pleasure. So the matter was dropped. But late that afternoon, as the sun was behind a rolling hill, his host wished to go for a drive, hoping that they might by chance see the tiger that had killed the cow. They drove for some miles into the forest; it became quite dark and with the headlights on they turned back. They had given up every hope of seeing the tiger as they drove back. But just as they turned a corner, there it was, sitting on its haunches in the middle of the road, huge, striped, its eyes bright in the headlamps. The car stopped and it came towards them growling and the growls shook the car; it was surprisingly large and its long tail with its black tip was moving slowly from side to side. It was annoyed. The window was open and as it passed growling, he put out his hand to stroke this great energy of the forest, but his host hurriedly snatched his arm back, explaining later that it would have torn his arm away. It was a magnificent animal, full of majesty and power. Down there on that earth, there were tyrants denying freedom to man, ideologists shaping the mind of man, priests with their centuries of tradition and belief enslaving man; the politicians with their endless promises were bringing corruption and division. Down there man is caught in endless conflict and sorrow and in the bright lights of pleasure. It is all so utterly meaningless the pain, the labour and the words of philosophers. Death and unhappiness and toil, man against man. This complex variety, modified changes in the pattern of pleasure and pain, are the content of man's consciousness, shaped and conditioned by the culture in which it has been nurtured, with its religious and economic pressures. Freedom is not within the boundaries of such a consciousness; what is accepted as freedom is in reality a prison made somewhat livable in through the growth of technology. In this prison there are wars, made more destructive by science and profit. Freedom doesn't lie in the change of prisons, nor in any change of gurus, with their absurd authority. Authority does not bring the sanity of order. On the contrary it breeds disorder and out of this soil grows authority. Freedom is not in fragments. A non-fragmented mind, a mind that is whole is in freedom. It does not know it is free; what is known is within the area of time, the past through the present to the future. All movement is time and time is not a factor of freedom. Freedom of choice denies freedom; choice exists only where there is confusion. Clarity of perception, insight, is the freedom from the pain of choice. Total order is the light of freedom. This order is not the child of thought for all activity of thought is to cultivate fragmentation. Love is not a fragment of thought, of pleasure. The perception of this is intelligence. Love and intelligence are inseparable and from this flows action which does not breed pain. Order is its ground. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 18TH ENTRY 3RD OCTOBER 1973 It was quite cold at the airport so early in the morning; the sun was just coming up. Everyone was wrapped up and the poor porters were shivering; there was the usual noise of an airport, the roars of the jets, the loud chatter, the farewells and the take-off. The plane was crowded with tourists, business men and others going to the holy city, with its filth and teeming people. Presently the vast range of the Himalayas became pink in the morning sun; we were flying south-east and for hundreds of miles these immense peaks seemed to be hanging in the air with beauty and majesty. The passenger in the next seat was immersed in a newspaper; there was a woman across the aisle who was concentrating on her rosary; the tourists were talking loudly and taking photographs of each other and of the distant mountains; everyone was busy with their things and had no time to observe the marvel of the earth and its meandering sacred river nor the subtle beauty of those great peaks which were becoming rose-coloured. There was a man further down the aisle to whom considerable respect was being paid; he was not young, seemed to have the face of a scholar, was quick in movement and cleanly dressed. One wondered if he ever saw the actual glory of those mountains. Presently he got up and came towards the passenger in the next seat; he asked if he might change places with him. He sat down, introducing himself, and asked if he might have a talk with us. He spoke English rather hesitantly, choosing his words carefully for he was not too familiar with this language; he had a clear, soft voice and was pleasant in his manners. He began by saying he was most fortunate to be travelling on the same plane and to have this conversation. "Of course I have heard of you from my youth and only the other day I heard your last talk, meditation and the observer. I am a scholar, a pundit, practising my own kind of meditation and discipline." The mountains were receding further east and below us the river was making wide and friendly patterns. "You said the observer is the observed, the meditator is the meditation and there's meditation only when the observer is not. I would like to be informed about this. For me meditation has been the control of thought, fixing the mind on the absolute." The controller is the controlled, is it not? The thinker is his thoughts; without words, images, thoughts, is there a thinker? The experiencer is the experience; without experience there's no experiencer. The controller of thought is made up of thought; he's one of the fragments of thought, call it what you will; the outside agency however sublime is still a product of thought; the activity of thought is always outward and brings about fragmentation. "Can life ever be lived without control? It's the essence of discipline." When the controller is the controlled, seen as an absolute fact as truth, then there comes about a totally different kind of energy which transforms what is. The controller can never change what is; he can control it, suppress it, modify it or run away from it but can never go beyond and above it. Life can and must be lived without control. A controlled life is never sane; it breeds endless conflict, misery and confusion. "This is a totally new concept." If it may be pointed out, it is not an abstraction, a formula. There's only what is. Sorrow is not an abstraction; one can draw a conclusion from it, a concept, a verbal structure but it is not what is, sorrow. Ideologies have no reality; there is only what is. This can never be transformed when the observer separates himself from the observed. "Is this your direct experience?" It would be utterly vain and stupid if it were merely verbal structures of thought; to talk of such things would be hypocrisy. "I would have liked to find out from you what is meditation but now there's no time as we are about to land." There were garlands on arrival and the winter sky was intensely blue. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 19TH ENTRY 4TH OCTOBER 1973 As a young boy, he used to sit by himself under a large tree near a pond in which lotuses grew; they were pink and had a strong smell. From the shade of that spacious tree, he would watch the thin green snakes and the chameleons, the frogs and the watersnakes. His brother, with others, would come to take him home. [Krishnamurti is describing his own childhood.] It was a pleasant place under the tree, with the river and the pond. There seemed to be so much space, and in this the tree made its own space. Everything needs space. All those birds on telegraph wires, sitting so equally spaced on a quiet evening, make the space for the heavens. The two brothers would sit with many others in the room with pictures; there would be a chant in Sanskrit and then complete silence; it was the evening meditation. The younger brother would go to sleep and roll over and wake up only when the others got up to leave. The room was not too large and within its walls were the pictures, the images of the sacred. Within the narrow confines of a temple or church, man gives form to the vast movement of space. It is like this everywhere; in the mosque it is held in the graceful lines of words. Love needs great space. To that pond would come snakes and occasionally people; it had stone steps leading down to the water where grew the lotus. The space that thought creates is measurable and so is limited; cultures and religions are its product. But the mind is filled with thought and is made up of thought; its consciousness is the structure of thought, having little space within it. But this space is the movement of time, from here to there, from its centre towards its outer lines of consciousness, narrow or expanding. The space which the centre makes for itself is its own prison. Its relationships are from this narrow space but there must be space to live; that of the mind denies living. Living within the narrow confines of the centre is strife, pain and sorrow and that is not living. The space, the distance between you and the tree, is the word, knowledge which is time. Time is the observer who makes the distance between himself and the trees, between himself and what is. Without the observer, distance ceases. Identification with the trees, with another or with a formula, is the action of thought in its desire for protection, security. Distance is from one point to another and to reach that point time is necessary; distance only exists where there is direction, inward or outward. The observer makes a separation, a distance between himself and what is; from this grows conflict and sorrow. The transformation of what is takes place only when there is no separation, no time, between the seer and the seen. Love has no distance. The brother died and there was no movement in any direction away from sorrow. This non-movement is the ending of time. It was among the hills and green shadows that the river began and with a roar it entered the sea and the endless horizons. Man lives in boxes with drawers, acres of them and they have no space; they are violent, brutal, aggressive and mischievous; they separate and destroy each other. The river is the earth and the earth is the river; each cannot exist without the other. There are no ends to words but communication is verbal and non-verbal. The hearing of the word is one thing and the hearing of no word is another; the one is irrelevant, superficial,leading to inaction; the other is non-fragmentary action, the flowering of goodness. Words have given beautiful walls but no space. Remembrance, imagination, are the pain of pleasure, and love is not pleasure. The long, thin, green snake was there that morning; it was delicate and almost among the green leaves; it would be there, motionless, waiting and watching. The large head of the chameleon was showing; it lay along a branch; it changed its colours quite often. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 20TH ENTRY 6TH OCTOBER 1973 There is a single tree in a green field that occupies a whole acre; it is old and highly respected by all the other trees on the hill. In its solitude it dominates the noisy stream, the hills and the cottage across the wooden bridge. You admire it as you pass it by but on your return you look at it in a more leisurely way; its trunk is very large, deeply embedded in the earth, solid and indestructible; Its branches are long, dark and curving; it has rich shadows. In the evening it is withdrawn into itself, unapproachable, but during the daylight hours it is open and welcoming. It is whole, untouched by an axe or saw. On a sunny day you sat under it, you felt its venerable age, and because you were alone-with it you were aware of the depth and the beauty of life. The old villager wearily passed you by, as you were sitting on a bridge looking at the sunset; he was almost blind, limping, carrying a bundle in one hand and in the other a stick. It was one of those evenings when the colours of the sunset were on every rock, tree and bush; the grass and the fields seemed to have their own inner light. The sun had set behind a rounded hill and amidst these extravagant colours there was the birth of the evening star The villager stopped in front of you, looked at those startling colours and at you. You looked at each other and without a word he trudged on. In that communication there was affection, tenderness and respect, not the silly respect but that of religious men. At that moment all time and thought had come to an end. You and he were utterly religious, uncorrupted by belief, image, by word or poverty. You often passed each other on that road among the stony hills and each time, as you looked at one another, there was the joy of total insight. He was coming, with his wife, from the temple across the way. They were both silent, deeply stirred by the chants and the worship. You happened to be walking behind them and you caught the feeling of their reverence, the strength of their determination to lead a religious life. But it would soon pass away as they were drawn into their responsibility to their children, who came rushing towards them. He had some kind of profession, was probably capable, for he had a large house. The weight of existence would drown him and although he would go to the temple often, the battle would go on. The word is not the thing; the image, the symbol is not the real Reality, truth, is not a word. To put it into words wipes it away and illusion takes its place. The intellect may reject the whole structure of ideology, belief and all the trappings and power that go with them, but reason can justify any belief, any ideation. Reason is the order of thought and thought is the response of the outer. Because it is the outer, thought puts together the inner. No man can ever live only with the outer, and the inner becomes a necessity. This division is the ground on which the battle of "me" and "not me" takes place. The outer is the god of religions and ideologies; the inner tries to conform to those images and conflict ensues. There is neither the outer nor the inner but only the whole. The experiencer is the experienced. Fragmentation is insanity. This wholeness is not merely a word; it is when the division as the outer and inner utterly ceases. The thinker is the thought. Suddenly, as you were walking along, without a single thought but only observing without the observer, you became aware of a sacredness that thought has never been able to conceive. You stop, you observe the trees, the birds and the passer-by; it is not an illusion or something with which the mind deludes itself. It is there in your eyes, in your whole being. The colour of the butterfly is the butterfly. The colours which the sun had left were fading, and before dark the shy new moon showed itself before it disappeared behind the hill. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 21ST ENTRY 7TH OCTOBER 1973 It was one of those mountain rains that lasts three or four days, bringing with it cooler weather. The earth was sodden and heavy and all the mountain paths were slippery; small streams were running down the steep slopes and labour in the terraced fields had stopped. The trees and the tea plantations were weary of the dampness; there had been no sun for over a week and it was getting quite chilly. The mountains lay to the north, with their snow and gigantic peaks. The flags around the temples were heavy with rain; they had lost their delight, their gay colours fluttering in the breeze. There was thunder and lightning and the sound was carried from valley to valley; a thick fog hid the sharp flashes of light. The next morning there was the clear blue, tender sky, and the great peaks, still and timeless, were alight with the early morning sun. A deep valley ran down between the village and the high mountains; it was filled with dark blue fog. Straight ahead, towering in the clear sky was the second highest peak of the Himalayas. You could almost touch it but it was many miles away; you forgot the distance for it was there, in all its majesty so utterly pure and measureless. By late morning it was gone, hidden in the darkening clouds from the valley. Only in the early morning it showed itself and disappeared a few hours later. No wonder the ancients looked to their gods in these mountains, in thunder and in the clouds. The divinity of their life was in the benediction that lay hidden in these unapproachable snows. His disciples came to invite you to visit their guru; you politely refused but they came often, hoping that you would change your mind or accept their invitation, becoming weary of their insistence. So it was decided that their guru would come with a few of his chosen disciples. It was a noisy little street; the children played cricket there; they had a bat and the stumps were a few odd bricks. With shouts and laughter they played cheerfully as long as they could, only stopping for a passing car as the driver respected their play. They would play day after day and that morning they were particularly noisy when the guru came, carrying a small, polished stick. Several of us were sitting on a thin mattress on the floor when he entered the room and we got up and offered him the mattress. He sat cross-legged, putting his cane in front of him; that thin mattress seemed to give him a position of authority. He had found truth, experienced it and so he, who knew, was opening the door for us. What he said was law to him and to others; you were merely a seeker, whereas he had found. You might be lost in your search and he would help you along the way, but you must obey. Quietly you replied that all the seeking and the finding had no meaning unless the mind was free from its conditioning; that freedom is the first and last step, and obedience to any authority in matters of the mind is to be caught in illusion and action that breeds sorrow. He looked at you with pity, concern, and with a flair of annoyance, as though you were slightly demented. Then said, "The greatest and final experience has been given to me and no seeker can refuse that." If reality or truth is to be experienced, then it is only a projection of your own mind. What is experienced is not truth but a creation of your own mind. His disciples were getting fidgety. Followers destroy their teachers and themselves. He got up and left, followed by his disciples. The children were still playing in the street, somebody was bowled out, followed by wild clapping and cheers. There is no path to truth, historically or religiously. It is not to be experienced or found through dialectics; it is not to be seen in shifting opinions and beliefs. You will come upon it when the mind is free of all the things it has put together. That majestic peak is also the miracle of life. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 22ND ENTRY 8TH OCTOBER 1973 The monkeys were all over the place that quiet morning; on the verandah, on the roof and in the mango tree - a whole troop of them; they were the brownish red-faced variety. The little ones were chasing each other among the trees, not too far from their mothers, and the big male was sitting by himself, keeping an eye over the whole troop; there must have been about twenty of them. They were rather destructive, and as the sun rose higher they slowly disappeared into the deeper wood, away from human habitation; the male was the first to leave and the others followed quietly. Then the parrots and crows came back with their usual clatter announcing their presence. There was a crow that would call or whatever it does, in a raucous voice, usually about the same time, and keep it up endlessly till it was chased away. Day after day it would repeat this performance; its caw penetrated deeply into the room and somehow all other noises seemed to have come to an end. These crows prevent violent quarrels amongst themselves, are quick, very watchful and efficient in their survival. The monkeys don't seem to like them. It was going to be a nice day. He was a thin, wiry man, with a well-shaped head and eyes that had known laughter. We were sitting on a bench overlooking the river in the shade of a tamarind tree, the home of many parrots and a pair of small screech-owls which were sunning themselves in the early morning sun. He said: "I have spent many years in meditation, controlling my thoughts, fasting and having one meal a day. I used to be a social worker but I gave it up long ago as I found that such work did not solve the deep human problem. There are many others who are carrying on with such work but it is no longer for me. It has become important for me to understand the full meaning and depth of meditation. Every school of meditation advocates some form of control; I have practised different systems but somehow there seems to be no end to it." Control implies division, the controller and the thing to be controlled; this division, as all division, brings about conflict and distortion in action and behaviour. This fragmentation is the work of thought, one fragment trying to control the other parts, call this one fragment the controller or whatever name you will. This division is artificial and mischievous. Actually, the controller is the controlled. Thought in its very nature is fragmentary and this causes confusion and sorrow. Thought has divided the world into nationalities, ideologies and into religious sects, the big ones and the little ones. Thought is the response of memories experience and knowledge, stored up in the brain; it can only function efficiently, sanely, when it has security, order. To survive physically it must protect itself from all dangers; the necessity of outward survival is easy to understand but the psychological survival is quite another matter, the survival of the image that thought has put together. Thought has divided existence as the outer and the inner and from this separation conflict and control arise. For the survival of the inner, belief ideology, gods, nationalities, conclusions become essential and this also brings about untold wars, violence and sorrow. The desire for the survival of the inner, with its many images, is a disease, is disharmony. Thought is disharmony. All its images, ideologies, its truths are self-contradictory and destructive. Thought has brought about, apart from its technological achievements, both outwardly and inwardly, chaos and pleasures that soon become agonies. To read all this in your daily life, to hear and see the movement of thought is the transformation that meditation brings about. This transformation is not the "me" becoming the greater "me" but the transformation of the content of consciousness; consciousness is its content. The consciousness of the world is your consciousness; you are the world and the world is you. Meditation is the complete transformation of thought and its activities. Harmony is not the fruit of thought; it comes with the perception of the whole. The morning breeze had gone and not a leaf was stirring; the river had become utterly still and the noises on the other bank came across the wide waters. Even the parrots were quiet. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 23RD ENTRY 9TH OCTOBER 1973 You went by a narrow-gauge train that stopped at almost every station where vendors of hot coffee and tea, blankets and fruit, sweets and toys, were shouting their wares. Sleep was almost impossible and in the morning all the passengers got into a boat that crossed the shallow waters of the sea to the island. There a train was waiting to take you to the capital, through green country of jungles and palms, tea plantations and villages. It was a pleasant and happy land. By the sea it was hot and humid but in the hills where the tea plantations were it was cool and in the air there was the smell of ancient days, uncrowded and simple. But in the city, as in all cities, there was noise, dirt, the squalor of poverty and the vulgarity of money; in the harbour there were ships from all over the world. The house was in a secluded part and there was a constant flow of people who came to greet him with garlands and fruit. One day, a man asked if he would like to see a baby elephant and naturally we went to see it. It was about two weeks old and the big mother was nervous and very protective, we were told. The car took us out of town, past the squalor and dirt to a river with brown water, with a village on its bank; tall and heavy trees surrounded it. The big dark mother and the baby were there. He stayed there for several hours till the mother got used to him; he had to be introduced, was allowed to touch her long trunk and to feed her some fruit and sugar cane. The sensitive end of the trunk was asking for more, and apples and bananas went into her wide mouth. The newly-born baby was standing, waving her tiny trunk, between her mother's legs. She was a small replica of her big mother. At last the mother allowed him to touch her baby; its skin was not too rough and its trunk was constantly on the move, much more alive than the rest of it. The mother was watching all the time and her keeper had to reassure her from time to time. It was a playful baby. The woman came into the small room deeply distressed. Her son was killed in the war: "I loved him very much and he was my only child; he was well-educated and had the promise of great goodness and talent. He was killed and why should it happen to him and to me? There was real affection, love between us. It was such a cruel thing to happen." She was sobbing and there seemed to be no end to her tears. She took his hand and presently she became quiet enough to listen. We spend so much money on educating our children; we give them so much care; we become deeply attached to them; they fill our lonely lives; in them we find our fulfilment, our sense of continuity. Why are we educated? To become technological machines? To spend our days in labour and die in some accident or with some painful disease? This is the life our culture, our religion, has brought us. Every wife or mother is crying all over the world; war or disease has claimed the son or the husband. Is love attachment? Is it tears and the agony of loss? Is it loneliness and sorrow? Is it self-pity and the pain of separation? If you loved your son, you would see to it that no son was ever killed in a war. There have been thousands of wars, and mothers and wives have never totally denied the ways that lead to war. You will cry in agony and support, unwillingly, the systems that breed war. Love knows no violence. The man explained why he was separating from his wife. "We married quite young and after a few years things began to go wrong in every way, sexually, mentally, and we seemed so utterly unsuited to each other. We loved each other, though, at the beginning and gradually it is turning into hate; separation has become necessary and the lawyers are seeing to it." Is love pleasure and the insistence of desire? Is love physical sensation? Is attraction and its fulfilment love? Is it a commodity of thought? A thing put together by an accident of circumstances? Is it of companionship, kindliness and friendship? If any of these take precedence then it is not love. Love is as final as death. There is a path that goes into the high mountains through woods, meadows and open spaces. And there is a bench before the climb begins and on it an old couple sit, looking down on the sunlit valley; they come there very often. They sit without a word, silently watching the beauty of the earth. They are waiting for death to come. And the path goes on into the snows. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 24TH ENTRY 10TH OCTOBER 1973 The rains had come and gone and the huge boulders were glistening in the morning sun. There was water in the dry riverbeds and the land was rejoicing once again; the earth was redder and every bush and blade of grass was greener and the deep-rooted trees were putting out new leaves. The cattle were getting fatter and the villagers less thin. These hills are as old as the earth and the huge boulders appear to have been carefully balanced there. There is a hill towards the east that has the shape of a great platform on which a square temple has been constructed. The village children walked several miles to learn to read and write; here was one small child, all by herself, with shining face, going to a school in the next village, a book in one hand and some food in the other. She stopped as we went by, shy and inquisitive; if she stayed longer she would be late for her school. The rice fields were startlingly green. It was a long, peaceful morning. Two crows were squabbling in the air, cawing and tearing at each other; there was not enough foothold in the air, so they came down to the earth, struggling with each other. On the ground feathers began to fly and the fight began to be serious. Suddenly about a dozen other crows descended upon them and put an end to their fight. After a lot of cawing and scolding they all disappeared into the trees. Violence is everywhere, among the highly educated and the most primitive, among the intellectuals and the sentimentalists. Neither education nor organized religions have been able to tame man; on the contrary, they have been responsible for wars, tortures, concentration camps and for the slaughter of animals on land and sea. The more he progresses the more cruel man seems to become. Politics have become gangsterism, one group against another; nationalism has led to war; there are economic wars; there are personal hatreds and violence. Man doesn't seem to learn from experience and knowledge, and violence in every form goes on. What place has knowledge in the transformation of man and his society? The energy that has gone into the accumulation of knowledge has not changed man; it has not put an end to violence. The energy that has gone into a thousand explanations of why he's so aggressive, brutal, insensitive, has not put an end to his cruelty The energy which has been spent in analysis of the causes of his insane destruction, his pleasure in violence, sadism, the bullying activity, has in no way made man considerate and gentle. In spite of all the words and books, threats and punishments, man continues his violence. Violence is not only in the killing, in the bomb, in revolutionary change through bloodshed; it is deeper and more subtle. Conformity and imitation are the indications of violence; imposition and the accepting of authority are an indication of violence; ambition and competition are an expression of this aggression and cruelty, and comparison breeds envy with its animosity and hatred. Where there's conflict, inner or outer, there is the ground for violence. Division in all its forms brings about conflict and pain. You know all this; you have read about the actions of violence, you have seen it in yourself and around you and you have heard it, and yet violence has not come to an end. Why? The explanations and the causes of such behaviour have no real significance. If you are indulging in them, you are wasting your energy which you need to transcend violence. You need all your energy to meet and go beyond the energy that is being wasted in violence. Controlling violence is another form of violence, for the controller is the controlled. In total attention, the summation of all energy, violence in all its forms comes to an end. Attention is not a word, an abstract formula of thought, but an act in daily life. Action is not an ideology, but if action is the outcome of it then it leads to violence. After the rains, the river goes around every boulder, every town and village and however much it is polluted, it cleanses itself and runs through valleys, gorges and meadows. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 25TH ENTRY 12TH OCTOBER 1973 Again a well-known guru came to see him. We were sitting in a lovely walled garden; the lawn was green and well kept, there were roses, sweet peas, bright yellow marigolds and other flowers of the oriental north. The wall and the trees kept out the noise of the few cars that went by; the air carried the perfume of many flowers. In the evening, a family of jackals would come out from their hiding place under a tree; they had scratched out a large hole where the mother had her three cubs. They were a healthy looking lot and soon after sunset the mother would come out with them, keeping close to the trees. Garbage was behind the house and they would look for it later. There was also a family of mongooses; every evening the mother with her pink nose and her long fat tail would come out from her hiding place followed by her two kits, one behind the other, keeping close to the wall. They too came to the back of the kitchen where sometimes things were left for them. They kept the garden free of snakes. They and the jackals seemed never to have crossed each other, but if they did they left each other alone. The guru had announced a few days before that he wished to pay a call. He arrived and his disciples came streaming in afterwards, one by one. They would touch his feet as a mark of great respect. They wanted to touch the other man's feet too but he would not have it; he told them that it was degrading but tradition and hope of heaven were too strong in them. The guru would not enter the house as he had taken a vow never to enter a house of married people. The sky was intensely blue that morning and the shadows were long. "You deny being a guru but you are a guru of gurus. I have observed you from your youth and what you say is the truth which few will understand. For the many we are necessary, otherwise they would be lost; our authority saves the foolish. We are the interpreters. We have had our experiences; we know. Tradition is a rampart and only the very few can stand alone and see the naked reality. You are among the blessed but we must walk with the crowd, sing their songs, respect the holy names and sprinkle holy water, which does not mean that we are entirely hypocrites. They need help and we are there to give it. What, if one may be allowed to ask, is the experience of that absolute reality?" The disciples were still coming and going, uninterested in the conversation and indifferent to their surroundings, to the beauty of the flower and the tree. A few of them were sitting on the grass listening, hoping not to be too disturbed. A cultured man is discontented with his culture. Reality is not to be experienced. There's no path to it and no word can indicate it; it is not to be sought after and to be found The finding, after seeking, is the corruption of the mind. The very word truth is not truth; the description is not the described. "The ancients have told of their experiences, their bliss in meditation, their super consciousness, their holy reality. If one may be allowed to ask, must one set aside all this and their exalted example?" Any authority on meditation is the very denial of it. All the knowledge, the concepts, the examples have no place in meditation. The complete elimination of the meditator, the experiencer, the thinker, is the very essence of meditation. This freedom is the daily act of meditation. The observer is the past, his ground is time, his thoughts, images, shadows, are time-binding. Knowledge is time, and freedom from the known is the flowering of meditation. There is no system and so there is no direction to truth. or to the beauty of meditation. To follow another, his example, his word, is to banish truth. Only in the mirror of relationship do you see the face of what is. The seer is the seen. Without the order which virtue brings, meditation and the endless assertions of others have no meaning whatsoever; they are totally irrelevant. Truth has no tradition, it cannot be handed down. In the sun the smell of sweet peas was very strong. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL BROCKWOOD PARK 26TH ENTRY 13TH OCTOBER 1973 We were flying at thirty-seven thousand feet smoothly and the plane was full. We had passed the sea and were approaching land; far below us was the sea and the land; the passengers never seemed to stop talking or drinking or flipping over the pages of a magazine; then there was a film. They were a noisy group to be entertained and fed; they slept, snored and held hands. The land was soon covered over by masses of clouds from horizon to horizon, space and depth and the noise of chatter. Between the earth and the plane were endless white clouds and above was the blue gentle sky. In the corner seat by a window you were widely awake watching the changing shape of the clouds and the white light upon them. Has consciousness any depth or only a surface fluttering? Thought can imagine its depth, can assert that it has depth or only consider the surface ripples. Has thought itself any depth at all. Consciousness is made up of its content; its content is its entire frontier. Thought is the activity of the outer and in certain languages thought means the outside. The importance that is given to the hidden layers of consciousness is still on the surface, without any depths. Thought can give to itself a centre, as the ego, the "me", and that centre has no depth at all; words, however cunningly and subtly put together, are not profound. The "me" is a fabrication of thought in word and in identification; the "me", seeking depth in action, in existence, has no meaning at all; all its attempts to establish depth in relationship end in the multiplications of its own images whose shadows it considers are deep. The activities of thought have no depth; its pleasures, its fears, its sorrow are on the surface. The very word surface indicates that there is something below, a great volume of water or very shallow. A shallow or a deep mind are the words of thought and thought in itself is superficial. The volume behind thought is experience, knowledge, memory, things that are gone, only to be recalled, to be or not to be acted upon. Far below us, down on the earth, a wide river was rolling along, with wide curves amid scattered farms, and on the winding roads were crawling ants. The mountains were covered with snow and the valleys were green with deep shadows. The sun was directly ahead and went down into the sea as the plane landed in the fumes and noise of an expanding city. Is there depth to life, to existence at all? Is all relationship shallow? Can thought ever discover it? Thought is the only instrument that man has cultivated and sharpened, and when that's denied as a means to the understanding of depth in life, then the mind seeks other means. To lead a shallow life soon becomes wearying, boring, meaningless and from this arises the constant pursuit of pleasure, fears, conflict and violence. To see the fragments that thought has brought about and their activity, as a whole, is the ending of thought. Perception of the whole is only possible when the observer, who is one of the fragments of thought, is not active. Then action is relationship and never leads to conflict and sorrow. Only silence has depth, as love. Silence is not the movement of thought nor is love. Then only the words, deep and shallow, lose their meaning. There is no measurement to love nor to silence. What's measurable is thought and time; thought is time. Measure is necessary but when thought carries it into action and relationship, then mischief and disorder begin. Order is not measurable, only disorder is. The sea and the house were quiet, and the hills behind them, with the wild flowers of Spring, were silent. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL ROME 27TH ENTRY 17TH OCTOBER 1973 It had been a hot, dry summer with occasional showers; the lawns were turning brown but the tall trees, with their heavy foliage, were happy and the flowers were blooming. The land had not seen such a summer for years and the farmers were pleased. In the cities it was dreadful, the polluted air, the heat and the crowded street; the chestnuts were already turning slightly brown and the parks were full of people with children shouting and running all over the place. In the country it was very beautiful; there is always peace in the land and the small narrow river with swans and ducks brought enchantment. Romanticism and sentimentality were safely locked up in cities, and here deep in the country, with trees, meadows and streams, there was beauty and delight. There's a road that goes through the woods, and dappled shadows and every leaf holds that beauty, every dying leaf and blade of grass. Beauty is not a word, an emotional response; it is not soft, to be twisted and moulded by thought. When beauty is there, every movement and action in every form of relationship is whole, sane and holy. When that beauty, love, doesn't exist, the world goes mad. On the small screen the preacher, with carefully cultivated gesture and word, was saying that he knew his saviour, the only saviour, was living; if he was not living, there would be no hope for the world. The aggressive thrust of his arm drove away any doubt, any enquiry, for he knew and you must stand up for what he knew, for his knowledge is your knowledge, your conviction. The calculated movement of his arms and the driven word were substance and encouragement to his audience, which was there with its mouth open, both young and old, spellbound and worshipping the image of their mind. A war had just begun and *Krishnamurti was now in Rome until October 29. neither the preacher nor his large audience cared, for wars must go on and besides it is part of their culture. On that screen, a little later, there was shown what the scientists were doing, their marvellous inventions, their extraordinary space control, the world of tomorrow, the new complex machines; the explanations of how cells are formed, the experiments that are being made on animals, on worms and flies. The study of the behaviour of animals was carefully and amusingly explained. With this study the professors could better understand human behaviour. The remains of an ancient culture were explained; the excavations, the vases, the carefully preserved mosaics and the crumbling walls; the wonderful world of the past, its temples, its glories. Many, many volumes have been written about the riches, the paintings, the cruelties and the greatness of the past, their kings and their slaves. A little later there was shown the actual war that was raging in the desert and among the green hills, the enormous tanks and the low-flying jets, the noise and the calculated slaughter; and the politicians talking about peace but encouraging war in every land. The crying women were shown and the desperately wounded, the children waving flags and the priests intoning blessings. The tears of mankind have not washed away man's desire to kill. No religion has stopped war; all of them, on the contrary, have encouraged it, blessed the weapons of war; they have divided the people. Governments are isolated and cherish their insularity. The scientists are supported by governments. The preacher is lost in his words and images. You will cry, but educate your children to kill and be killed. You accept it as the way of life; your commitment is to your own security; it is your god and your sorrow. You care for your children so carefully, so generously, but then you are so enthusiastically willing for them to be killed. They showed on the screen baby seals, with enormous eyes, being killed. The function of culture is to transform man totally. Across the river mandarin ducks were splashing and chasing each other and the shadows of the trees were on the water. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL ROME 28TH ENTRY 18TH OCTOBER 1973 There is in Sanskrit a long prayer to peace. It was written many, many centuries ago by someone to whom peace was an absolute necessity, and perhaps his daily life had its roots in that. It was written before the creeping poison of nationalism, the immorality of the power of money and the insistence on worldliness that industrialism has brought about. The prayer is to enduring peace: May there be peace among the gods, in heaven and among the stars; may there be peace on earth, among men and four-footed animals; may we not hurt each other; may we be generous to each other; may we have that intelligence which will guide our life and action; may there be peace in our prayer, on our lips and in our hearts. There is no mention of individuality in this peace; that came much later. There is only ourselves our peace, our intelligence our knowledge, our enlightenment. The sound of Sanskrit chants seems to have a strange effect. In a temple, about fifty priests were chanting in Sanskrit and the very walls seemed to be vibrating. There is a path that goes through the green, shining field, through a sunlit wood and beyond. Hardly anyone comes to these woods, full of light and shadows. It is very peaceful there, quiet and isolated. There are squirrels and an occasional deer, shyly watchful and dashing away; the squirrels watch you from a branch and sometimes scold you. These woods have the perfume of summer and the smell of damp earth. There are enormous trees, old and moss-laden; they welcome you and you feel the warmth of their welcome. Each time you sit there and look up through the branches and leaves at the wonderful blue sky, that peace and welcome are waiting for you. You went with others through the woods but there was aloofness and silence; the people were chattering, indifferent and unaware of the dignity and grandeur of the trees; they had no relationship with them and so in all probability, no relationship with each other. The relationship between the trees and you was complete and immediate; they and you were friends and thus you were the friend of every tree, bush and flower on earth. You were not there to destroy and there was peace between them and you. Peace is not an interval between the ending and beginning of conflict, of pain and of sorrow. No government can bring peace; its peace is of corruption and decay; the orderly rule of a people breeds degeneration for it is not concerned with all the people of the earth. Tyrannies can never hold peace for they destroy freedom: peace and freedom go together. To kill another for peace is the idiocy of ideologies. You cannot buy peace; it is not the invention of an intellect; it is not to be purchased through prayer, through bargaining. It is not in any holy building, in any book, in any person. No one can lead you to it, no guru, no priest, no symbol. In meditation it is. Meditation itself is the movement of peace. It is not an end to be found; it is not put together by thought or word. The action of meditation is intelligence. Meditation is none of those things you have been taught or experienced. The putting away of what you have learnt or experienced is meditation. The freedom from the experiencer is meditation. When there is no peace in relationship, there is no peace in meditation; it is an escape into illusion and fanciful dreams. It cannot be demonstrated or described. You are no judge of peace. You will be aware of it, if it is there, through the activities of your daily life, the order, the virtue of your life. Heavy clouds and mists were there that morning; it was going to rain. It would take several days to see the blue sky again. But as you came into the wood, there was no diminishing of that peace and welcome. There was utter stillness and incomprehensible peace. The squirrels were hiding and the grasshoppers in the meadows were silent and beyond the hills and valleys was the restless sea. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL ROME 29TH ENTRY 19TH OCTOBER 1973 The wood was asleep; the path through it was dark and winding. There was not a thing stirring; the long twilight was just disappearing and the silence of the night was covering the earth. the small gurgling stream, so insistent during the day, was conceding to the quietness of the coming night. Through the small opening among the leaves were the stars, brilliant and very close. Darkness of the night is as necessary as the light of day. The welcoming trees were withdrawn into themselves and distant; they were all around but they were aloof and unapproachable; they were asleep, not to be disturbed. In this quiet darkness, there was growth and flowering, gathering strength to meet the vibrant day; night and day were essential; both gave life, energy, to all living things. Only man dissipates it. Sleep is very important, a sleep without too many dreams, without tossing about too much. In sleep many things happen both in the physical organism and in the brain (the mind is the brain; they are one, a unitary movement. To this whole structure sleep is absolutely essential. In sleep order, adjustment and deeper perceptions take place; the quieter the brain the deeper the insight. The brain needs security and order to function harmoniously, without any friction. Night provides it and during quiet sleep there are movements, states, which thought can never reach. Dreams are disturbance; they distort total perception. In sleep the mind rejuvenates itself. But you might say dreams are necessary; if one doesn't dream one might go mad; they are helpful, revealing. There are superficial dreams, without much meaning; there are dreams that are significant and there is also a dreamless state. Dreams are the expression in different forms and symbols of our daily life. If there is no harmony, no order in our daily life of relationship, then dreams are a continuance of that disorder. The brain during sleep tries to bring about order out of this confusing contradiction. In this constant struggle between order and disorder the brain is worn out. But it must have security and order to function at all, and so beliefs, ideologies and other neurotic concepts become necessary. Turning night into day is one of those neurotic habits; the inanities that go on in the modern world after nightfall are an escape from the daytime of routine and boredom. The total awareness of disorder in relationship both private and public, personal and distant, an awareness of what is without any choice during conscious hours during the day, brings order out of disorder. Then the brain has no need to seek order during sleep. Then dreams are only superficial, without meaning. Order in the whole of consciousness, not merely at the conscious level, takes place when division between the observer and the observed ceases completely. What is, is transcended when the observer who is the past, who is time, comes to an end. The active present the what is, is not in the bondage of time as the observer is. Only when the mind the brain and the organism during sleep has this total order, is there an awareness of that wordless state, that timeless movement. This is not some fanciful dream, an abstraction of escape. It is the very summation of meditation. That is, the brain is active, waking or sleeping, but the constant conflict between order and disorder wears down the brain. Order is the highest form of virtue, sensitivity, intelligence. When there is this great beauty of order, harmony, the brain is not endlessly active; certain parts of it have to carry the burden of memory but that is a very small part; the rest of the brain is free from the noise of experience. That freedom is the order, the harmony, of silence. This freedom and the noise of memory move together, intelligence is the action of this movement. Meditation is freedom from the known and yet operating in the field of the known. There is no "me'` as the operator. In sleep or awake this meditation goes on. The path came slowly out of the woods and from horizon to horizon the sky was filled with stars. In the fields not a thing moved. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL ROME 30TH ENTRY 20TH OCTOBER 1973 It is the oldest living thing on the earth. It is gigantic in proportion, in its height and vast trunk. Among other redwood trees, which were also very old, this one was towering over them all; other trees had been touched by fire but this one had no marks on it. It had lived through all the ugly things of history, through all the wars of the world, through all the mischief and sorrow of man, through fire and lightning, through all the storms of time, untouched, majestic and utterly alone, with immense dignity. There had been fires but the bark of these redwood trees were able to resist them and survive. The noisy tourists had not come yet and you could be alone with this great silent one; it soared up to the heavens as you sat under it, vast and timeless. Its very years gave it the dignity of silence and the aloofness of great age. It was as silent as your mind was, as still as your heart, and living without the burden of time. You were aware of compassion that time had never touched and of innocency that had never known hurt and sorrow. You sat there and time passed you by and it would never come back. There was immortality, for death had never been. Nothing existed except that immense tree, the clouds and the earth. You went to that tree and sat down with it and every day for many days it was a benediction of which you were only aware when you wandered away. You could never come back to it asking for more; there was never the more, the more was in the valley far below. Because it was not a man-made shrine, there was unfathomable sacredness which would never again leave you, for it was not yours. In the early morning when the sun had not yet touched the tops of the trees, the deer and the bear were there; we watched each other, wide-eyed and wondering; the earth was common to us and fear was absent. The blue jays and the red squirrels would come soon; the squirrel was tame and friendly. You had nuts in your pocket and it took them out of your hand; when the squirrel had had enough the two jays would hop down from the branches and the scolding would stop. And the day began. Sensuality in the world of pleasure has become very important. Taste dictates and soon the habit of pleasure takes hold; though it may harm the whole organism, pleasure dominates. Pleasure of the senses, of cunning and subtle thought, of words and of the images of mind and hand is the culture of education, the pleasure of violence and the pleasure of sex. Man is moulded to the shape of pleasure, and all existence, religious or otherwise, is the pursuit of it. The wild exaggerations of pleasure are the outcome of moral and intellectual conformity. When the mind is not free and aware, then sensuality becomes a factor of corruption which is what is going on in the modern world. Pleasure of money and sex dominate. When man has become a secondhand human being, the expression of sensuality is his freedom. Then love is pleasure and desire. Organized entertainment, religious or commercial, makes for social and personal immorality; you cease to be responsible. Responding wholly to any challenge is to be responsible, totally committed. This cannot be when the very essence of thought is fragmentary and the pursuit of pleasure, in all its obvious and subtle forms, is the principal movement of existence. Pleasure is not joy; joy and pleasure are entirely different things; the one is uninvited and the other cultivated, nurtured; the one comes when the "me" is not and the other is time-binding; where the one is the other is not. Pleasure, fear and violence run together; they are inseparable companions. Learning from observation is action, the doing is the seeing. In the evening when the darkness was approaching, the jays and the squirrels had gone to bed. The evening star was just visible and the noises of the day and memory had come to an end. These giant sequoias were motionless. They will go on beyond time. Only man dies and the sorrow of it. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL ROME 31ST ENTRY 21ST OCTOBER 1973 It was a moonless night and the Southern Cross was clear over the palm trees. The sun wouldn't be up for many hours yet; in that quiet darkness all the stars were very close to the earth and they were sparklingly bright; they were a penetrating blue and the river was giving birth to them. The Southern Cross was by itself without any other stars around it. There was no breeze and the earth seemed to stand still, weary of man's activity. It was going to be a lovely morning after the heavy rains and there wasn't a cloud on the horizon. Orion had already set and the morning star was on the far horizon. In the grove, frogs were croaking in the nearby pond; they would become silent for a while and wake up and begin again. The smell of jasmine was strong in the air and in the distance there was chanting. But at that hour there was a breathless silence and its tender beauty was on the land. Meditation is the movement of that silence. In the walled garden the noise of the day began. The young baby was being washed; it was oiled with great care, every part of it; special oil for the head and another for the body; each had its own fragrance and both were slightly heated. The small child loved it; it was softly cooing to itself and its fat little body was bright with oil. Then it was cleaned with a special scented powder. The child never cried, there seemed to be so much love and care. It was dried and tenderly wrapped in a clean white cloth, fed and put to bed to fall asleep immediately. It would grow up to be educated, trained to work, accepting the traditions, the new or old beliefs, to have children, to bear sorrow and the laughter of pain. The mother came one day and asked, "What is love? Is it care, is it trust, is it responsibility, is it pleasure between man and woman? Is it the pain of attachment and loneliness?" You are bringing up your child with such care, with tireless energy, giving your life and time. You feel, perhaps unknowingly, responsible. You love it. But the narrowing effect of education will begin, will make it conform with punishment and reward to fit into the social structure. Education is the accepted means for the conditioning of the mind. What are we educated for - for endless work and to die? You have given tender care, affection, and does your responsibility cease when education begins? Is it love that will send him to war, to be killed after all that care and generosity? Your responsibility never ceases, which doesn't mean interference. Freedom is total responsibility, not only for your children but for all children on the earth Is love attachment and its pain? Attachment breeds pain, jealousy, hatred. Attachment grows out of one's own shallowness, insufficiency, loneliness. Attachment gives a sense of belonging, identification with something, gives a sense of reality, of being. When that is threatened there is fear, anger, envy. Is all this love? Is pain and sorrow love? Is sensory pleasure love? Most fairly intelligent human beings know verbally all this and it is not too complicated. But they do not let all this go; they turn these facts into ideas and then struggle with the abstract concepts. They prefer to live with abstractions rather than with reality, with what is. In the denial of what love is not, love is. Don't be afraid of the word negation. Negate all that is not love, then what is, is compassion. What you are matters enormously for you are the world and the world is you. This is compassion. Slowly the dawn was coming; in the eastern horizon there was a faint light, it was spreading and the Southern Cross began to fade. The trees took on their shape, the frogs became silent, the morning star was lost in the greater light and a new day began. The flight of crows and the voices of man had begun but the blessings of that early morning were still there. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL ROME 32ND ENTRY 22ND OCTOBER 1973 In a small boat on the quiet slow current of the river all the horizon from north to south, east to west was visible; there wasn't a tree or house that broke the horizon; there was not a cloud floating by. The banks were flat, stretching on both sides far into the land and they held the wide river. There were other small fishing boats, the fishermen huddled at one end with their nets out; these men were immensely patient. The sky and the earth met and there was vast space. In this measureless space the earth and all things had their existence, even this small boat carried along by the strong current. Around the bend of the river the horizons extended as far as the eye could see, measureless and infinite. Space became inexhaustible. There must be this space for beauty and compassion. Everything must have space, the living and the dead, the rock on the hill and the bird on the wing. When there is no space there is death. The fishermen were singing and the sound of their song came down the river. Sound needs space. The sound of a word needs space; the word makes its own space, rightly pronounced. The river and the faraway tree can only survive when they have space; without space all things wither. The river disappeared into the horizon and the fishermen were going ashore. The deep darkness of the night was coming, the earth was resting from a weary day and the stars were on the waters. The vast space was narrowed down into a small house of many walls. Even the large, palatial houses have walls shutting out that immense space, making it their own. A painting must have space within it even though it's put in a frame; a statue can only exist in space; music creates the space it needs; the sound of a word not only makes space: it needs it to be heard. Thought can imagine the extension between two points, the distance and the measure; the interval between two thoughts is the space that thought makes. The continuous extension of time, movement and the interval between two movements of thought need space. Consciousness is within the movement of time and thought. Thought and time are measurable between two points, between the centre and the periphery. Consciousness, wide or narrow, exists where there is a centre, the "me" and the "not me". All things need space. If rats are enclosed in a restricted space, they destroy each other; the small birds sitting on a telegraph wire, of an evening, have the needed space between each other. Human beings living in crowded cities are becoming violent. Where there is no space, outwardly and inwardly, every form of mischief and degeneration is inevitable. The conditioning of the mind through so-called education, religion, tradition, culture, gives little space to the flowering of the mind and heart The belief, the experience according to that belief, the opinion, the concepts, the word is the "me", the ego, the centre which creates the limited space within whose border is consciousness. The "me" has its being and its activity within the small space it has created for itself. All its problems and sorrows, its hopes and despairs are within its own frontiers, and there is no space The known occupies all its consciousness. Consciousness is the known. Within this frontier there is no solution to all the problems human beings have put together. And yet they won't let go; they cling to the known or invent the unknown, hoping it will solve their problems. The space which the "me" has built for itself is its sorrow and the pain of pleasure. The gods don't give you space, for theirs is yours. This vast, measureless space lies outside the measure of thought, and thought is the known. Meditation is the emptying of consciousness of its content, the known, the "me". Slowly the oars took the boat up the sleeping river and the light of a house gave it the direction. It had been a long evening and the sunset was gold, green and orange and it made a golden path on the water. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL ROME 33RD ENTRY 24TH OCTOBER 1973 Way down in the valley were the dull lights of a small village; it was dark and the path was stony and rough. The waving lines of the hills against the starlit sky were deeply embedded in darkness and a coyote was howling somewhere nearby. The path had lost its familiarity and a small scented breeze was coming up the valley. To be alone in that solitude was to hear the voice of intense silence and its great beauty. Some animal was making a noise among the bushes, frightened or attracting attention. It was quite dark by now and the world of that valley became deep in its silence. The night air had special smells, a blend of all the bushes that grow on the dry hills, that strong smell of bushes that know the hot sun. The rains had stopped many months ago; it wouldn't rain again for a very long time and the path was dry, dusty and rough. The great silence with its vast space held the night and every movement of thought became still. The mind itself was the immeasurable space and in that deep quietness there was not a thing that thought had built. To be absolutely nothing is to be beyond measure. The path went down a steep incline and a small stream was saying many things, delighted with its own voice. It crossed the path several times and the two were playing a game together. The stars were very close and some were looking down from the hill tops. Still the lights of the village were a long way off and the stars were disappearing over the high hills. Be alone, without word and thought, but only watching and listening. The great silence showed that without it, existence loses its profound meaning and beauty. To be a light to oneself denies all experience. The one who is experiencing as the experiencer needs experience to exist and, however deep or superficial, the need for it becomes greater. Experience is knowledge, tradition; the experiencer divides himself to discern between the enjoyable and the painful, the comforting and the disturbing. The believer experiences according to his belief, according to his conditioning. These experiences are from the known, for recognition is essential, without it there's no experience. Every experience leaves a mark unless there's an ending to it as it arises. Every response to a challenge is an experience but when the response is from the known, challenge loses its newness and vitality; then there's conflict, disturbance and neurotic activity. The very nature of challenge is to question, to disturb, to awaken, to understand. But when that challenge is translated into the past, then the present is avoided The conviction of experience is the negation of enquiry. Intelligence is the freedom to enquire, to investigate the "me" and the "not me", the outer and the inner. Belief, ideologies and authority prevent insight which comes only with freedom. The desire for experience of any kind must be superficial or sensory, comforting or pleasurable, for desire, however intense, is the forerunner of thought and thought is the outer. Thought may put together the inner but it is still the outer. Thought will never find the new for it is old, it is never free. Freedom lies beyond thought. All the activity of thought is not love. To be a light to oneself is the light of all others. To be a light to oneself is for the mind to be free from challenge and response, for the mind then is totally awake, wholly attentive. This attention has no centre, the one who is attentive, and so no border. As long as there's a centre, the "me", there must be challenge and response, adequate or inadequate, pleasurable or sorrowful. The centre can never be a light to itself; its light is the artificial light of thought and it has many shadows. Compassion is not the shadow of thought but it is light, neither yours nor another's. The path gradually entered the valley and the stream went by the village to join the sea. But the hills remained changeless and the hoot of an owl was the reply to another. And there was space for silence. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL ROME 34TH ENTRY 25TH OCTOBER 1973 Sitting on a rock in an orange orchard the valley spread out and disappeared into the fold of mountains. It was early in the morning and the shadows were long, soft and open. The quails were calling with their sharp demand and the mourning dove was cooing, with soft, gentle lilt, a sad song so early in the morning. The mocking-bird was making swooping curves in the air, turning somersaults, delighted with the world. A big tarantula, hairy and dark, slowly came out from under the rock, stopped, felt the morning air and unhurriedly went its way. The orange trees were in long straight lines, acre upon acre, with their bright fruit and fresh blossom flower and fruit on the same tree at the same time. The smell of these blossoms was quietly pervasive and with the heat of the sun the smell would get deeper, more insistent. The sky was very blue and soft and all the hills and mountains were still dreaming. It was a lovely morning, cool and fresh, with that strange beauty which man had not yet destroyed. The lizards came out and sought a warm spot in the sun; they stretched out to get their bellies warm and their long tails turned sideways. It was a happy morning and the soft light covered the land and the endless beauty of life. Meditation is the essence of this beauty, expressed or silent. Expressed, it takes form, substance; silent it's not to be put into word, form or colour. From silence, expression or action have beauty, are whole, and all struggle, conflict cease. The lizards were moving into the shade and the humming-birds and the bees were among the blossoms. Without passion there's no creation. Total abandonment brings this unending passion. Abandonment with a motive is one thing, and without a purpose, without calculation, it is another. What which has an end, a direction, is short lived, becomes mischievous and commercial, vulgar. The other, not driven by any cause, intention or gain, has no beginning and no ending. This abandonment is the emptying of the mind of the "me", the self. This "me" can lose itself in some activity, in some comforting belief or fanciful dream but such loss is the continuing of the self in another form, identifying with another ideology and action. The abandonment of the self is not an act of will, for the will is the self. Any movement of the self, horizontally or vertically, in any direction, is still within the field of time and sorrow. Thought may give itself over to something, sane or insane, reasonable or idiotic, but being in its very structure and nature fragmentary, its very enthusiasm, excitement, soon turn into pleasure and fear. In this area the abandonment of the self is illusory, with little meaning. The awareness of all this is the awakening to the activities of the self; in this attention there is no centre, the self. The urge to express oneself for identification is the outcome of confusion and the meaninglessness of existence. To seek a meaning is the beginning of fragmentation; thought can and does give a thousand meanings to life, each one inventing its own meanings which are merely opinions and convictions and there's no end to them. The very living is the whole meaning but when life is a conflict, a struggle, a battlefield of ambition, competition and the worship of success, the search for power and position, then life has no meaning. What is the need of expression? Does creation lie in the thing produced? The thing produced by hand or by the mind, however beautiful or utilitarian is that what one is after? Does this self-abandoned passion need expression? When there is a need, a compulsion, is it the passion of creation? As long as there is division between creator and the created, beauty, love, come to an end. You may produce a most excellent thing in colour or in stone, but if your daily life contradicts that supreme excellence the total abandonment of the self that which you have produced is for admiration and vulgarity. The very living is the colour, the beauty and its expression. One needs no other. The shadows were losing their distance and the quails were quiet. There was only the rock, the trees with their blossom and fruit, the lovely hills and the abundant earth. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL ROME 35TH ENTRY 29TH OCTOBER 1973 In the valley of orange orchards, this one was very well looked after row upon row of young trees, strong and sparkling in the sun. The soil was good, well-watered, manured and cared for. It was a beautiful morning with a clear blue sky, warm and the air was softly pleasant. The quails in the bushes were fussing about, with their sharp calls; a sparrow-hawk was hovering in the air, motionless, and soon it came down to sit on a branch in the next orange tree and went to sleep. It was so close that the sharp claws, the marvellous speckled feathers and the sharp beak were clearly visible; it was within the reach of an arm. It had been earlier in the morning along the avenue of mimosa and the small birds were crying out their alarm. Under the bushes two King snakes, with their dark brown rings along the length of their bodies, were curling around each other, and as they passed close by they were utterly unaware of a human presence. They had been on a shelf in the shed, stretched out, their dark, bright eyes watching and waiting for the mice. They stared without blinking for they had no eyelids. They must have been there during the night and now they were among the bushes. It was their ground and they were seen often, and on picking up one of them, it coiled around the arm and felt cold to the touch. All those living things seemed to have their own order, their own discipline and their own play and gaiety. Materialism, that nothing exists but matter, is the prevailing and the persistent activity of human beings who are affluent and those who are not. There's a whole block of the world which is dedicated to materialism; the structure of its society is based upon this formula, with all its consequences. The other blocks are also materialistic but some kind of idealistic principles are accepted when it's convenient and discarded under the name of rationality and necessity. In changing the environment, violently or slowly, revolution or evolution, the behaviour of man is changed according to the culture in which he lives. It is an age-old conflict between those who believe man is matter and those who pursue the spirit. This division has brought such misery, confusion, illusion to man. Thought is material and its activity, outer or inner, is materialistic. Thought is measurable and so it is time. Within this area, consciousness is matter. Consciousness is its content; the content is consciousness; they are inseparable. The content is the many things which thought has put together: the past modifying the present which is the future which is time. Time is movement within the area which is consciousness, expanded or contracted. Thought is memory, experience and knowledge, and this memory, with its images and its shadows, is the self, the'`me" and the "not me", the "we" and "they". The essence of division is the self with all its attributes and qualities. Materialism only gives strength and growth to the self. The self may and does identify itself with the State, with an ideology, with activities of the "non-me", religious or secular, but it is still the self. Its beliefs are self-created, as are its pleasures and fears. Thought by its very nature and structure is fragmentary, and conflict and war are between the various fragments, the nationalities, the races and ideologies. A materialistic humanity will destroy itself unless the self is wholly abandoned. The abandonment of the self is always of primary importance. And only from this revolution a new society can be put together. The abandonment of the self is love, compassion: passion for all things the starving, the suffering, the homeless and for the materialist and the believer. Love is not sentimentality, romanticism; it is as strong and final as death. Slowly the fog from the sea came over the western hills like huge waves; it folded itself over the hills and down into the valley and it would presently reach up here; it would become cooler with the coming darkness of the night. There would be no stars and there would be complete silence. It is a factual silence and not the silence which thought has cultivated, in which there is no space. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL MALIBU 36TH ENTRY 1ST APRIL 1975 Even so early in the morning the sun was hot and burning. There wasn't a breeze and not a leaf was stirring. In the ancient temple it was cool and pleasant; the bare feet were aware of the solid slabs of rocks, their shapes and their unevenness. Many thousands of people must have walked on them for a thousand years. It was dark there after the glare of the morning sun and in the corridors there seemed to be few people that morning and in the narrow passage it was still darker. This passage led to a wide corridor which led to the inner shrine. There was a strong smell of flowers and the incense of many centuries. And a hundred Brahmanas, freshly bathed, in newly washed white loin cloths, were chanting. Sanskrit is a powerful language, resonant with depth. The ancient walls were vibrating, almost shaking to the sound of a hundred voices. The dignity of the sound was incredible and the sacredness of the moment was beyond the words. It was not the words that awakened this immensity but the depth of the sound of many thousand years held within these walls and in the immeasurable space beyond them. It was not the meaning of those words, nor the clarity of their pronunciation, nor the dark beauty of the temple but the quality of sound that broke walls and the limitations of the human mind. The song of a bird, the distant flute, the breeze among the leaves, all these break down the walls that human beings have created for themselves. In the great cathedrals and lovely mosques, the chants and the intoning of their sacred books it is the sound that opens the heart, to tears and beauty. Without space there's no beauty; without space you have only walls and measurements; without space there's no depth; without space there's only poverty, inner and outer. You have so little space in your mind; it's so crammed full of words, remembrances, knowledge, experiences and problems. There's hardly any space left, only the everlasting chatter of thought. And so your museums are filled and every shelf with books. Then you fill the places of entertainment, religious or otherwise. Or you build a wall around yourself, a narrow space of mischief and pain. Without space, inner or outer, you become violent and ugly. Everything needs space to live, to play and to chant. That which is sacred cannot love without space. You have no space when you hold, when there is sorrow, when you become the centre of the universe. The space that you occupy is the space that thought has built around you and that is misery and confusion. The space that thought measures is the division between you and me, we and they. This division is endless pain. There's that solitary tree in a wide, green, open field. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL MALIBU 37TH ENTRY 2ND APRIL 1975 It was not a land of trees, meadows, streams and flowers and mirth. It was a sunburnt land of sand and barren hills, without a single tree or bush; a land of desolation, an endless scorched earth mile upon mile; there wasn't even a bird and not even oil with its derricks and flames of burning oil. Consciousness could not hold the desolation and every hill was a barren shadow. For many hours we flew over this vast emptiness and at last there were snow peaks, forest and streams, villages and spreading towns. You may have a great deal of knowledge and be vastly poor. The poorer you are the greater the demand for knowledge. You expand your consciousness with great varieties of knowledge, accumulating experiences and remembrances and yet may be vastly poor. The skilful use of knowledge may bring you wealth and give you eminence and power but there may still be poverty. This poverty breeds callousness; you play while the house is burning. This poverty merely strengthens the intellect or gives to the emotions the weakness of sentiment. It's this poverty that brings about imbalance, the outer and inner. There's no knowledge of the inner, only of the outer. The knowledge of the outer informs us erroneously that there must be knowledge of the inner. Self-knowing is brief and shallow; the mind is soon beyond it, like crossing a river. You make a lot of noise in going across the river and to mistake the noise as knowledge of the self is to expand poverty. This expansion of consciousness is the activity of poverty. Religions, culture, knowledge, can in no way enrich this poverty. The skill of intelligence is to put knowledge in its right place. Without knowledge it's not possible to live in this technological and almost mechanical civilization but it will not transform the human being and his society. Knowledge is not the excellence of intelligence; intelligence can and does use knowledge and thus transforms man and his society. Intelligence is not the mere cultivation of the intellect and its integrity. It comes out of the understanding of the whole consciousness of man, yourself and not a part, a separate segment, of yourself. The study and the understanding of the movement of your own mind and heart give birth to this intelligence. You are the content of your consciousness; in knowing yourself you will know the universe. This knowing is beyond the word for the word is not the thing. The freedom from the known, every minute, is the essence of intelligence. It's this intelligence that is in operation in the universe if you leave it alone. You are destroying this sacredness of order through the ignorance of yourself. This ignorance is not banished by the studies others have made about you or themselves. You yourself have to study the content of your own consciousness. The studies the others have made of themselves, and so of you, are the descriptions but not the described. The word is not the thing. Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. Even in a monastery you are related to the society which has made the monastery as an escape, or closed the doors to freedom. The movement of behaviour is the sure guide to yourself; it's the mirror of your consciousness; this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and the sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations. or in its identities. Negating without resistance this content of consciousness is the beauty and compassion of intelligence. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL MALIBU 38TH ENTRY 3RD APRIL 1975 How extraordinarily beautiful is the great curve of a wide river. You must see it from a certain height, not too far up or too close as it meanders lazily through the green fields. The river was wide, full of water, blue and clear. We were not flying at a great altitude and we could just see the strong current in the middle of the river with its tiny waves; we followed it, past towns and villages to the sea. Each curve had its own beauty, its own strength, its own movement. And far away were the great snowcovered peaks, pink in the early morning light; they covered the eastern horizon. The wide river and those great mountains seemed to hold, for that hour, eternity - this overwhelming sense of timeless space. Though the plane was rushing south-east, in that space there was no direction, no movement, only that which is. For a whole hour there was nothing else, not even the noise of the jets. Only when the Captain announced that we would soon be landing did that full hour come to an end. There was no memory of that hour, no record of the content of that hour and so thought had no hold on it. When it came to an end there were no remains, the slate was clean again. So thought had no means to cultivate that hour and so it got ready to leave the plane. What thought thinks about is made into a reality but it's not the truth. Beauty can never be the expression of thought. A bird is not made by thought and so it's beautiful. Love is not shaped by thought and when it is it becomes something quite different. The worship of the intellect and its integrity is a reality made by thought. But it is not compassion. Thought cannot manufacture compassion; it can make it into a reality, a necessity, but it will not be compassion. Thought by its very nature is fragmentary and so it lives in a fragmented world of division and conflict. So knowledge is fragmentary and however much it is piled up, layer after layer, it will still remain fragmented, broken up. Thought can put together a thing called integration and that too will be a fragment. The very word science means knowledge, and man hopes through science he will be transformed into a sane and happy human being. And so man is pursuing eagerly knowledge of all the things of the earth and of himself. Knowledge is not compassion and without compassion knowledge breeds mischief and untold misery and chaos. Knowledge cannot make man love; it can create war and the instruments of destruction but cannot bring love to the heart or peace to the mind. To perceive all this is to act, not an action based on memory or patterns. Love is not memory, a remembrance of pleasures. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL MALIBU 39TH ENTRY 4TH APRIL 1975 By chance it happened that one lived for some months in a small dilapidated house, high in the mountains, far from other houses. There were lots of trees and as it was spring there was perfume in the air. The solitude was of the mountains and the beauty of the red earth. The towering peaks were covered with snow and some of the trees were in bloom. One lived alone amidst this splendour. The forest was nearby, with deer, an occasional bear and those big monkeys with black faces and long tails, and of course there were serpents too. In deep solitude in strange ways one was related to them all. One could not hurt a thing, even that white daisy on the path. In that relationship the space between you and them didn't exist; it was not contrived; it was not an intellectual or an emotional conviction that brought this about but simply it was so. A group of those large monkeys would come around, especially in the evening; a few were on the ground but most of them would be sitting in the trees quietly watching. Surprisingly they were still; occasionally there would be a scratch or two and we would watch each other. They would come every evening now, neither too close nor too high among the trees, and we would be silently aware of each other. We had become quite good friends but they didn't want to encroach upon one's solitude. Walking one afternoon in the forest one came suddenly upon them in an open space. There must have been well over thirty of them, young and old, sitting among the trees round the open space, absolutely silent and still. One could have touched them; there was no fear in them and sitting on the ground we watched each other till the sun went behind the peaks. If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity. If there's no relationship with nature then you become a killer; then you kill baby seals, whales, dolphins and man either for gain, for `sport', for food or for knowledge. Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty. You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places but you are a killer and so lose their friendship. You probably are not related to anything, to your wife or your husband; you are much too busy, gaining and losing, with your own private thoughts, pleasures and pains. You live in your own dark isolation and the escape from it is further darkness. Your interest is in a short survival, mindless, easygoing or violent. And thousands die of hunger or are butchered because of your irresponsibility. You leave the ordering of the world to the lying corrupt politician, to the intellectuals, to the experts. Because you have no integrity, you build a society that's immoral, dishonest, a society based on utter selfishness. And then you escape from all this for which you alone are responsible, to the beaches, to the woods or carry a gun for `sport'. You may know all this but knowledge does not bring about transformation in you. When you have this sense of the whole, you will be related to the universe. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL MALIBU 40TH ENTRY 6TH APRIL 1975 It is not that extraordinary blue of the Mediterranean; the Pacific has an ethereal blue, especially when there is a gentle breeze from the west as you drive north along the coast road. It is so tender, dazzling, clear and full of mirth. Occasionally you would see whales blowing on their way north and rarely their enormous head as they threw themselves out of the water. There was a whole pod of them, blowing; they must be very powerful animals. That day the sea was a lake, still and utterly quiet, without a single wave; there was not that clear dancing blue. The sea was asleep and you watched it with wonder. The house overlooked the sea. [This is the house where he was staying at Malibu.] It is a beautiful house, with a quiet garden, a green lawn and flowers. It's a spacious house with the light of the Californian sun. And rabbits loved it too; they would come early in the morning and late in the evening; they would eat up flowers and the newly planted pansies, marigolds and the small flowering plants. You couldn't keep them out though there was a wire netting alI around, and to kill them would be a crime. But a cat and a barn owl brought order to the garden; the black cat wandered about the garden; the owl perched itself during the day among the thick eucalyptus; you could see it, motionless, eyes closed, round and big. The rabbits disappeared and the garden flourished and the blue Pacific flowed effortlessly. It is only man that brings disorder to the universe. He's ruthless and extremely violent. Wherever he is he brings misery and confusion in himself and in the world about him. He lays waste and destroys and he has no compassion. In himself there is no order and so what he touches becomes soiled and chaotic. His politics have become a refined gangsterism of power, deceit, personal or national, group against group. His economy is restricted and so not universal. His society is immoral, in freedom and under tyranny. He is not religious though he believes, worships and goes through endless, meaningless rituals. Why has he become like this cruel, irresponsible and so utterly self-centred? Why? There are a hundred explanations and those who explain, subtly with words that are born out of knowledge of many books and experiments on animals, are caught in the net of human sorrow, ambition, pride and agony. The description is not the described, the word is not the thing. Is it because he is looking for outward causes, the environment conditioning man, hoping the outer change transforms the inner man? Is it because he's so attached to his senses, dominated by their immediate demands? Is it because he lives so entirely in the movement of thought and knowledge? Or is it because he's so romantic, sentimental, that he becomes ruthless with his ideals, make-beliefs and pretensions? Is it because he is always led, a follower, or becomes a leader, a guru? This division as the outer and inner is the beginning of his conflict and misery; he is caught in this contradiction, in this ageless tradition. Caught in this meaningless division, he is lost and becomes a slave to others. The outer and the inner are imagination and the invention of thought; as thought is fragmentary, it makes for disorder and conflict which is division. Thought cannot bring about order, an effortless flow of virtue. Virtue is not the continuous repetition of memory, practice. Thought-knowledge is time-binding. Thought by its very nature and structure cannot grasp the whole flow of life, as a total movement. Thought-knowledge cannot have an insight into this wholeness; it cannot be aware of this choicelessly as long as it remains as the perceiver, the outsider looking in. Thought-knowledge has no place in perception. The thinker is the thought; the perceiver is the perceived. Only then is there an effortless movement in our daily life. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL OJAI 41ST ENTRY 8TH APRIL 1975 In this part of the world it doesn't rain much, about fifteen to twenty inches a year, and these rains are most welcome for it doesn't rain for the rest of the year. There is snow then on the mountains and during summer and autumn they are bare, sunburnt, rocky and forbidding; only in the spring are they mellow and welcoming. There used to be bear, deer, bob cat, quail and any number of rattlers. But now they are disappearing; the dreaded man is encroaching. It had rained for some time now and the valley was green, the orange trees bore fruit and flower. It is a beautiful valley, quiet away from the village, and you heard the mourning dove. The air was slowly being filled with the scent of orange blossoms and in a few days it would be overpowering, with the warm sun and windless days. It was a valley wholly surrounded by hills and mountains; beyond the hills was the sea and beyond the mountains desert. In the summer it would be unbearably hot but there was always beauty here, far from the maddening crowd and their cities. And at night there would be extraordinary silence, rich and penetrating. The cultivated meditation is a sacrilege to beauty, and every leaf and branch spoke of the joy of beauty and the tall dark cypress was silent with it; the gnarled old pepper tree flowed with it. You cannot, may not, invite joy; if you do it becomes pleasure. Pleasure is the movement of thought and thought may not, can in no way, cultivate joy, and if it pursues that which has been joyous, then it's only a remembrance, a dead thing. Beauty is never time- binding; it is wholly free of time and so of culture. It is there when the self is not. The self is put together by time, by the movement of thought, by the known, by the word. In the abandonment of the self, in that total attention, that essence of beauty is there. The letting go of the self is not the calculated action of desire-will. Will is directive and so resistant, divisive, and so breeds conflict. The dissolution of the self is not the evolution of the knowledge of the self; time as a factor does not enter into it at all. There is no way or means to end it. The total inward non-action is the positive attention of beauty. You have cultivated a vast network of interrelated activities in which you are caught, and your mind, being conditioned by it, operates inwardly in the same manner. Achievement then becomes the most important thing and the fury of that drive is still the skeleton of the self. That is why you follow your guru, your saviour, your beliefs and ideals; faith takes the place of insight, of awareness. There's no need for prayer, for rituals, when the self is not. You fill the empty spaces of the skeleton with knowledge, with images, with meaningless activities and so keep it seemingly alive. In the quiet stillness of the mind that which is everlasting beauty comes, uninvited, unsought, without the noise of recognition. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL OJAI 42ND ENTRY 10TH APRIL 1975 In the silence of deep might and in the quiet still morning when the sun is touching the hills, there is a great mystery. It is there in all living things. If you sit quietly under a tree, you would feel the ancient earth with its incomprehensible mystery. On a still night when the stars are clear and close, you would be aware of expanding space and the mysterious order of all things, of the immeasurable and of nothing, of the movement of the dark hills and the hoot of an owl. In that utter silence of the mind this mystery expands without time and space. There's mystery in those ancient temples built with infinite care, with attention which is love. The slender mosques and the great cathedrals lose this shadowy mystery for there is bigotry, dogma and military pomp. The myth that is concealed in the deep layers of the mind is not mysterious, it is romantic, traditional and conditioned. In the secret recesses of the mind, truth has been pushed aside by symbols, words, images; in them there is no mystery, they are the churnings of thought. In knowledge and its action there is wonder, appreciation and delight. But mystery is quite another thing. It is not an experience, to be recognised, stored up and remembered. Experience is the death of that incommunicable mystery; to communicate you need a word, a gesture, a look, but to be in communion with that, the mind, the whole of you, must be at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity as that which is called mysterious. This is love. With this the whole mystery of the universe is open. This morning there wasn't a cloud in the sky, the sun was in the valley and all things were rejoicing, except man. He looked at this wondrous earth and went on with his labour, his sorrow and passing pleasures. He had no time to see; he was too occupied with his problems, with his agonies, with his violence. He doesn't see the tree and so he cannot see his own travail. When he's forced to look, he tears to pieces what he sees, which he calls analysis, runs away from it or doesn't want to see. In the art of seeing lies the miracle of transformation, the transformation of what is". The "what should be" never is. There's vast mystery in the act of seeing. This needs care, attention, which is love. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL OJAI 43RD ENTRY 14TH APRIL 1975 A very large serpent was crossing a wide cart road just ahead of you, fat, heavy, moving lazily; it was coming from a largish pond a little way off. It was almost black and the light of the evening seen falling on it gave to its skin a high polish. It moved in a leisurely way with lordly dignity of power. It was unaware of you as you stood quietly watching; you were quite close to it; it must have measured well over five feet and it was bulging with what it had eaten. It went over a mound and you walked towards it, looking down upon it a few inches away, its forked black tongue darting in and out; it was moving towards a large hole. You could have touched it for it had a strange attractive beauty. A villager was passing by and called out to leave it alone because it was a cobra. The next day the villagers had put there on the mound a saucer of milk and some hibiscus flowers. On that same road further along there was a bush, high and almost leafless, that had thorns almost two inches long, sharp, greyish, and no animal would dare to touch its succulent leaves. It was protecting itself and woe to anyone that touched it. There were deer there in those woods, shy but very curious; they would allow themselves to be approached but not too close and if you did they would dart away and disappear among the undergrowth. There was one that would let you come quite close, if you were alone, bright-eyed with its large ears forward. They all had white spots on a russet-brown skin; they were shy, gentle and ever-watchful and it was pleasant to be among them. There was a completely white one, which must have been a freak. The good is not the opposite of the evil. It has never been touched by that which is evil, though it is surrounded by it. Evil cannot hurt the good but the good may appear to do harm and so evil gets more cunning, more mischievous. It can be cultivated, sharpened, expansively violent; it is born within the movement of time, nurtured and skilfully used. But goodness is not of time; it can in no way be cultivated or nurtured by thought; its action is not visible; it has no cause and so no effect. Evil cannot become good for that which is good is not the product of thought; it lies beyond thought, like beauty. The thing that thought produces, thought can undo but it is not the good; as it is not of time, the good has no abiding place. Where the good is, there is order, not the order of authority, punishment and reward; this order is essential, for otherwise society destroys itself and man becomes evil, murderous, corrupt and degenerate. For man is society; they are inseparable. The law of the good is everlasting, unchanging and timeless. Stability is its nature and so it is utterly secure. There is no other security. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL OJAI 44TH ENTRY 17TH APRIL 1975 Space is order. Space is time, length, width and volume. This morning the sea and the heavens are immense; the horizon where those yellow flowered hills meet the distant sea is the order of earth and heaven; it is cosmic. That cypress, tall, dark, alone, has the order of beauty and the distant house on that wooded hill follows the movement of the mountains that tower over the low-lying hills; the green field with a single cow is beyond time. And the man coming up the hill is held within the narrow space of his problems. There is a space of nothingness whose volume is not bound by time, the measure of thought. This space the mind cannot enter; it can only observe. In this observation there is no experiencer. This observer has no history, no association, no myth, and so the observer is that which is. Knowledge is extensive but it has no space, for by its very weight and volume it perverts and smothers that space. There is no knowledge of the self, higher or lower; there's only a verbal structure of the self, a skeleton, covered over by thought. Thought cannot penetrate its own structure; what it has put together thought cannot deny and when it does deny, it is the refusal of further gain. When the time of the self is not, the space that has no measure is. This measure is the movement of reward and punishment, gain or loss, the activity of comparison and conformity, of respectability and the denial of it. This movement is time, the future with its hope and the attachment which is the past. This complete network is the very structure of the self and its union with the supreme being or the ultimate principle is still within its own field. All this is the activity of thought. Thought can in no way penetrate that space of no time, do what it will. The very method, the curriculum, the practice that thought has invented are not the keys that will open the door, for there is no door, no key. Thought can only be aware of its own endless activity, its own capacity to corrupt, its own deceits and illusions. It is the observer and the observed. Its gods are its own projections and the worship of them is the worship of yourself. What lies beyond thought, beyond the known, may not be imagined or made a myth of or made a secret for the few. It is there for you to see. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL MALIBU 45TH ENTRY 23RD APRIL 1975 The wide river was still as a millpond. There wasn't a ripple and the morning breeze hadn't awakened yet for it was early. The stars were in the water, clear and sparkling and the morning star was the brightest. The trees across the river were dark and the village amongst them still slept. There was not a leaf stirring and those small screech owls were rattling away on the old tamarind tree; it was their home and when the sun was on those branches they would be warming themselves. The noisy green parrots were quiet too. All things, even the insects and the cicadas, were waiting, breathless for the sun, in adoration. The river was motionless and the usual small boats with their dark lamps were absent. Gradually over the dark mysterious trees there began the early light of dawn. Every living thing was still in the mystery of that moment of meditation. Your own mind was timeless, without measure; there was no yardstick to measure how long that moment lasted. Only there was a stirring and an awakening, the parrots and the owls, the crows and the mynah, the dogs and a voice across the river. And suddenly the sun was just over the trees, golden and hidden by the leaves. Now the great river was awake, moving; time, length, width and volume were flowing and all life began which never ended. How lovely it was that morning, the purity of light and the golden path the sun made on those living waters. You were the world, the cosmos, the deathless beauty and the joy of compassion. Only you weren't there; if you were all this would not be. You bring in the beginning and the ending, to begin again in an endless chain. In becoming there is uncertainty and instability. In nothingness there is absolute stability and so clarity. That which is wholly stable never dies; corruption is in becoming. The world is bent on becoming, achieving, gaining and so there is fear of losing and dying. The mind must go through that small hole which it has put together, the self, to come upon this vast nothingness whose stability thought cannot measure. Thought desires to capture it, use it, cultivate it and put it on the market. It must be made acceptable and so respectable, to be worshipped. Thought cannot put it into any category and so it must be a delusion and a snare; or it must be for the few, for the select. And so thought goes about its own mischievous ways, frightened, cruel, vain and never stable, though its conceit asserts there is stability in its actions, in its exploration, in knowledge it has accumulated. The dream becomes a reality which it has nurtured. What thought has made real is not truth. Nothingness is not a reality but it is the truth. The small hole, the self, is the reality of thought, that skeleton on which it has built all its existence the reality of its fragmentation, the pain, the sorrow and its love. The reality of its gods or its one god is the careful structure of thought, its prayer, its rituals, its romantic worship. In reality there is no stability or pure clarity. The knowledge of the self is time, length, width and volume; it can be accumulated, used as a ladder to become, to improve, to achieve. This knowledge will in no way free the mind of the burden of its own reality. You are the burden; the truth of it lies in the seeing of it and that freedom is not the reality of thought. The seeing is the doing. The doing comes from the stability, the clarity, of nothingness. KRISHNAMURTI'S JOURNAL MALIBU 46TH ENTRY 24TH APRIL 1975 Every living thing has its own sensitivity, its own way of life, its own consciousness, but man assumes that his own is far superior and thereby he loses his love, his dignity and becomes insensitive, callous and destructive. In the valley of orange trees, with their fruit and spring blossom, it was a lovely clear morning. The mountains to the north had a sprinkling of snow on them; they were bare, hard and aloof, but against the tender blue sky of early morning they were very close, you could almost touch them. They had that immense sense of age and indestructible majesty and that beauty that comes with timeless grandeur. It was a very still morning and the smell of orange blossom filled the air, the wonder and the beauty of light. The light of this part of the world has a special quality, penetrating, alive and filling the eyes; it seemed to enter into your whole consciousness, sweeping away any dark corners. There was great joy in that and every leaf and blade of grass was rejoicing in it. And the blue jay was hopping from branch to branch and not screeching its head off for a change. It was a lovely morning of light and great depth. Time has bred consciousness with its content. It is the culture of time. Its content makes up consciousness; without it, consciousness, as we know it, is not. Then there is nothing. We move the little pieces in this consciousness from one area to another according to the pressure of reason and circumstance but in the same field of pain, sorrow and knowledge. This movement is time, the thought and the measure. It is a senseless game of hide and seek with yourself, the shadow and substance of thought, the past and the future of thought. Thought cannot hold this moment, for this moment is not of time. This moment is the ending of time; time has stopped at that moment, there is no movement at that moment and so it is not related to another moment. It has no cause and so no beginning and no end. Consciousness cannot contain it. In that moment of nothingness everything is. Meditation is the emptying of consciousness of its content. Foreword Part 1 - Ojai Part 2 - London Part 3 - Gstaad Part 4 - Paris Part 5 - Rome and Florence Part 6 - Bombay and Rishi Valley Part 7 - Madras Part 8 - Rajghat Part 9 - Delhi Part 10 - Bombay KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK FOREWORD BY MARY LUTYENS In June 1961 Krishnamurti began to keep a daily record of his perceptions and states of consciousness. Apart from about fourteen days he kept up this record for seven months. He wrote clearly, in pencil, and with virtually no erasures. The first seventy-seven pages of the manuscript are written in a small notebook; from then until the end (p. 323 of the manuscript) a larger, loose-leaf book was used. The record starts abruptly and ends abruptly. Krishnamurti himself cannot say what prompted him to begin it. He had never kept such a record before, nor has he kept one since. The manuscript has received the minimum amount of editing. Krishnamurti's spelling has been corrected; a few punctuation marks have been put in for the sake of clarity; some abbreviations, such as the ampersand he invariably used, have been spelt out in full; some footnotes and a few interpolations in square brackets have been added. In all other respects the manuscript is presented here as it was written. A word is needed to explain one of the terms used in it - "the process". In 1922, at the age of twenty-eight, Krishnamurti underwent a spiritual experience that changed his life and which was followed by years of acute and almost continuous pain in his head and spine. The manuscript shows that "the process", as he called this mysterious pain, was still going on nearly forty years later, though in a much milder form. "The process" was a physical phenomenon, not to be confused with the state of consciousness that Krishnamurti variously refers to in the notebooks as the "benediction", the "otherness", "immensity". At no time did he take any- pain-killing drugs for "the process". He has never taken alcohol or any kind of drug. He has never smoked, and for the last thirty years or so he has not so much as drunk tea or coffee. Although a lifelong vegetarian, he has always been at great pains to ensure a plentiful and well-balanced diet. Asceticism is, to his way of thinking, as destructive of a religious life as overindulgence. Indeed he looks after "the body" (he has always differentiated between the body and the ego) as a cavalry officer would have looked after his horse. He has never suffered from epilepsy or any of the other physical conditions that are said to give rise to visions and other spiritual phenomena; nor does he practise any "system" of meditation. All this is stated so that no reader should imagine that Krishnamurti's states of consciousness are, or ever have been, induced by drugs or fasting. In this unique daily record we have what may be called the wellspring of Krishnamurti's teaching. The whole essence of his teaching is here, arising from its natural source. Just as he himself writes in these pages that "every time there is something `new' in this benediction, a 'new' quality, a `new' perfume, but yet it is changeless", so the teaching that springs from it is never quite the same although often repeated. In the same way, the trees, mountains, rivers, clouds, sunlight, birds and flowers that he describes over and over again are forever "new" because they are seen each time with eyes that have never become accustomed to them; each day they are a totally fresh perception for him, and so they become for us. On June 18th, 1961, the day Krishnamurti started writing this record, he was in New York staying with friends in West 87th Street. He had flown to New York on June 14th from London where he had spent some six weeks and given twelve talks. Before going to London he had been in Rome and Florence, and, before that, for the first three months of the year, in India, speaking in New Delhi and Bombay. M.L. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 1 OJAI, CALIFORNIA 20TH JUNE TO 8TH JULY 1961 In the evening it was there: suddenly it was there, filling the room, a great sense of beauty, power and gentleness. Others noticed it. 19th All night it was there whenever I woke up. The head was bad going to the plane [to fly to Los Angeles] - The purification of the brain is necessary. The brain is the centre of all the senses; the more the senses are alert and sensitive the sharper the brain is; it's the centre of remembrance, the past; it's the storehouse of experience and knowledge, tradition. So it's limited, conditioned. Its activities are planned, thought out, reasoned, but it functions in limitation, in space-time. So it cannot formulate or understand that which is the total, the whole, the complete. The complete, the whole is the mind; it is empty, totally empty and because of this emptiness, the brain exists in space-time. Only when the brain has cleansed itself of its conditioning, greed, envy, ambition, then only it can comprehend that which is complete. Love is this completeness. 20th In the car on the way to Ojai,* again it began, the pressure and the feeling of immense vastness. One was not experiencing this vastness; it was simply there; there was no centre from which or in which the experience was taking place. Everything, the cars, the people, the bill-boards, were startlingly clear and colour was painfully intense. For over an hour it went on and the head was very bad, the pain right through the head. The brain can and must develop; its development will always be from a cause, from a reaction, from violence to non-violence and so on. The brain has developed from the primitive state and however refined, intelligent, technical, it will be within the confines of space-time. Anonymity is humility; it does not lie in the change of name, cloth or with the identification with that which may be anonymous, an ideal, a heroic act, country and so on. Anonymity is an act of the brain, the conscious anonymity; there's an anonymity which comes with the awareness of the complete. The complete is never within the field of the brain or idea. 21st Woke up about two and there was a peculiar pressure and the pain was more acute, more in the centre of the head. It lasted over an hour and one woke up several times with the intensity of the pressure. Each time there was great expanding ecstasy; this joy continued - Again, sitting in the dentist's chair, waiting, suddenly the pressure began. The brain became very quiet; quivering, fully alive; every sense was alert; the eyes were seeing the bee on the window, the spider, the birds and the violet mountains in the distance. They were seeing but the brain was not recording them. One could feel the quivering brain, something tremendously alive, vibrant and so not merely recording. The pressure and the pain was great and the body must have gone off into a doze. Self-critical awareness is essential. Imagination and illusion distort clear observation. Illusion will always exist, so long as the urge for the continuation of pleasure and the avoidance of pain exist; the demand for those experiences which are pleasurable to continue or be remembered; the avoidance of pain, suffering. Both these breed illusion. To wipe away illusion altogether, pleasure and sorrow must be understood, not by control or sublimation, identification or denial. Only when the brain is quiet can there be right observation. Can the brain ever be quiet? It can when the brain, being highly sensitive, without the power of distortion, is negatively aware. All the afternoon the pressure has been on. 22nd Woke up in the middle of the night and there was the experiencing of an incalculable expanding state of mind; the mind itself was that state. The "feeling" of this state was stripped of all sentiment, of all emotion, but was very factual, very real. This state continued for some considerable time - All this morning, the pressure and the pain has been acute. Destruction is essential. Not of buildings and things but of all the psychological devices and defences, gods, beliefs, dependence on priests, experiences, knowledge and so on. Without destroying all these there cannot be creation. It's only in freedom that creation comes into being. Another cannot destroy these defences for you; you have to negate through your own self-knowing awareness. Revolution, social, economic, can only change outer states and things, in increasing or narrowing circles, but it will always be within the limited field of thought. For total revolution the brain must forsake all its inward, secret mechanism of authority, envy, fear and so on. The strength and the beauty of a tender leaf is its vulnerability to destruction. Like a blade of grass that comes up through the pavement, it has the power that can withstand casual death. 23rd Creation is never in the hands of the individual. It ceases entirely when individuality, with its capacities, gifts, techniques and so on, becomes dominant. Creation is the movement of the unknowable essence of the whole; it is never the expression of the part. Just as one was getting to bed, there was that fullness of ill.** It was not only in the room but it seemed to cover the earth from horizon to horizon. It was a benediction. The pressure, with its peculiar pain, was there all the morning. And it continues in the afternoon. Sitting in the dentist's chair, one was looking out of the window, looking past the hedge, the TV antenna, the telegraph pole, at the purple mountains. One was looking not with eyes only but with one's whole head, as though from the back of the head, with one's entire being. It was an odd experience. There was no centre from which observation was taking place. The colours and the beauty and lines of the mountains were intense. Every twist of thought must be understood; for all thought is reaction and any action from this can only increase confusion and conflict. 24th The pressure and the pain was there all day yesterday; it is all becoming rather difficult. The moment one's by oneself, it begins. And desire for its continuance, any disappointment if it does not continue does not exist. It is simply there whether one wants it or not. It's beyond all reason and thought. To do something for its own sake seems quite difficult and almost undesirable. Social values are based on doing something for the sake of something else. This makes for barren existence, a life which is never complete, full. This is one of the reasons of disintegrating discontent. To be satisfied is ugly but to be discontented breeds hatred. To be virtuous in order to gain heaven or the approval of the respectable, of society, makes of life a barren field which has been ploughed over and over again but has never been sown. This activity of doing something for the sake of something else is in essence an intricate series of escapes, escapes from oneself, from what is. Without experiencing the essence there is no beauty. Beauty is not merely in the outward things or in inward thoughts, feelings and ideas; there is beauty beyond this thought and feeling. It's this essence that is beauty. But this beauty has no opposite. The pressure continues and the strain is at the base of the head and it's painful. 25th Woke up in the middle of the night and found the body perfectly still, stretched out on its back, motionless; this position must have been maintained for some time. The pressure and the pain were there. The brain and the mind were intensely still. There was no division between them. There was a strange quiet intensity, like two great dynamos working at great speed; there was a peculiar tension in which there was no strain. There was a sense of vastness about the whole thing and a power without direction and cause and so no brutality and ruthlessness. And it continued during the morning. During the past year or so, one would wake up, to experience, in wakened state, what had been going on while asleep, certain states of being. It is as though one woke up merely for the brain to register what was going on. But curiously, the particular experience would fade away quite soon. The brain was not putting it away in its scrolls of memory. There is only destruction and no change. For all change is a modified continuity of what has been. All social, economic revolutions are reactions, a modified continuation of that which has been. This change does not in any way destroy the roots of egocentric activities. Destruction, in the sense we are using the word, has no motive; it has no purpose which implies action for the sake of result. Destruction of envy is total and complete; it implies the freedom from suppression, control, and without any motive whatsoever. This total destruction is possible; it lies in seeing the total structure of envy. This seeing is not in space-time but immediate. 26th The pressure and the strain of it was there, very strongly, yesterday afternoon and this morning. Only there was a certain change; the pressure and the strain were from the back of the head, through the palate to the top of the head. A strange intensity continues. One has to be quiet only for it to begin. Control in any form is harmful to total understanding. A disciplined existence is a life of conformity; in conformity there is no freedom from fear. Habit destroys freedom; habit of thought, habit of drinking and so on makes for a superficial and dull life. Organized religion with its beliefs, dogmas and rituals denies the open entry into the vastness of mind. It is this entry that cleanses the brain of space-time. Being cleansed, the brain can then deal with time-space. 27th That presence which was at il I. was there, waiting patiently, benignly, with great tenderness. It was like the lightning on a dark night but it was there, penetrating, blissful. Something strange is happening to the physical organism. One can't exactly put one's finger on it but there's an "odd: insistency, drive; it's in no way self-created, bred out of imagination. It is palpable when one's quiet, alone, under a tree or in a room; it is there most urgently as one's about to go off to sleep. It's there as this is being written, the pressure and the strain, with its familiar ache. Formulation and words about all this seem so futile; words however accurate, however clear the description, do not convey the real thing. There's a great and unutterable beauty in all this. There is only one movement in life, the outer and the inner; this movement is indivisible, though it is divided. Being divided, most follow the outer movement of knowledge, ideas, beliefs, authority, security, prosperity and so on. In reaction to this, one follows the so-called inner life, with its visions, hopes, aspirations, secrecies, conflicts, despairs. As this movement is a reaction, it is in conflict with the outer. So there is contradiction, with its aches, anxieties and escapes. There is only one movement, which is the outer and the inner. With the understanding of the outer, then the inner movement begins, not in opposition or in contradiction. As conflict is eliminated, the brain, though highly sensitive and alert, becomes quiet. Then only the inner movement has validity and significance. Out of this movement there is a generosity and compassion which is not the outcome of reason and purposeful self-denial. The flower is strong in its beauty as it can be forgotten, set aside or destroyed. The ambitious do not know beauty. The feeling of essence is beauty. 28th Woke up in the middle of the night shouting and groaning; the pressure and the strain, with its peculiar pain, was intense. It must have been going on for some time and it went on for some time after waking up. The shouting and groaning take place quite often. These do not take place from indigestion. Sitting in the dentist's chair, while waiting, the whole thing began again and is going on, in the afternoon, as this is being written. It is more noticeable when one is alone or in some beautiful place or even in a dirty, noisy street. That which is sacred has no attributes. A stone in a temple, an image in a church, a symbol is not sacred. Man calls them sacred, something holy to be worshipped out of complicated urges, fears and longings. This "sacredness" is still within the field of thought; it is built up by thought and in thought there's nothing new or holy. Thought can put together the intricacies of systems, dogmas, beliefs, and the images, symbols, its projects are no more holy than the blueprints of a house or the design of a new aeroplane. All this is within the frontiers of thought and there is nothing sacred or mystical about all this. Thought is matter and it can be made into anything, ugly - beautiful. But there's a sacredness which is not of thought, nor of a feeling resuscitated by thought. It is not recognizable by thought nor can it be utilized by thought. Thought cannot formulate it. But there's a sacredness, untouched by any symbol or word. It is not communicable. It is a fact. A fact is to be seen and the seeing is not through the word. When a fact is interpreted, it ceases to be a fact; it becomes something entirely different. The seeing is of the highest importance. This seeing is out of time-space; it's immediate, instantaneous. And what's seen is never the same again. There's no again or in the meantime. This sacredness has no worshipper, the observer who meditates upon it. It's not in the market to be bought or sold. Like beauty, it cannot be seen through its opposite for it has no opposite. That presence is here, filling the room, spilling over the hills, beyond the waters, covering the earth. Last night, as it has happened once or twice before, the body was just the organism and nothing else, functioning, empty and still. 29th The pressure and the strain of deep ache is there; it`s as though, deep within, an operation was going on. It's not brought on through one's own volition, however subtle it might be. One has deliberately and for some time gone into it, deeply. One has tried to induce it; tried to bring about various outward conditions, being alone and so on. Then nothing happens. All this isn't something recent. Love's not attachment. Love does not yield sorrow. Love has no despair or hope. Love cannot be made respectable, part of the social scheme. When it is not there, every form of travail begins. To possess and to be possessed is considered a form of love. This urge to possess, a person or a piece of property, is not merely the demands of society and circumstances but springs from a far deeper source. It comes from the depths of loneliness. Each one tries to fill this loneliness in different ways, drink, organized religion, belief, some form of activity and so on. All these are escapes but it's still there. To commit oneself to some organization, to some belief or action is to be possessed by them, negatively; and positively is to possess. The negative and positive possessiveness is doing good, changing the world and the so-called love. To control another, to shape another in the name of love is the urge to possess; the urge to find security, safety in another and the comfort. Self-forgetfulness through another, through some activity makes for attachment. From this attachment, there's sorrow and despair and from this there is the reaction, to be detached. And from this contradiction of attachment and detachment arises conflict and frustration. There's no escape from loneliness: it is a fact and escape from facts breeds confusion and sorrow. But not to possess anything is an extraordinary state, not even to possess an idea, let alone a person or a thing. When idea, thought, takes root, it has already become a possession and then the war to be free begins. And this freedom is not freedom at all; it's only a reaction. Reactions take root and our life is the ground in which roots have grown. To cut all the roots, one by one, is a psychological absurdity. It cannot be done. Only the fact, loneliness, must be seen and then all other things fade away. 30th Yesterday afternoon it was pretty bad, almost unbearable; it went on for several hours. Walking, surrounded by these violet, bare, rocky mountains, suddenly there was solitude. Complete solitude. Everywhere, there was solitude; it had great, unfathomable richness; it had that beauty which is beyond thought and feeling. It was not still; it was living, moving, filling every nook and corner. The high rocky mountain top was aglow with the setting sun and that very light and colour filled the heavens with solitude. It was uniquely alone, not isolated but alone, like a drop of rain which holds all the waters of the earth. It was neither joyous nor sad but alone. It had no quality, shape or colour; these would make it something recognizable, measurable. It came like a flash and took seed. It did not germinate but it was there in its entirety. There was no time to mature; time has roots in the past. This was a rootless, causeless state. So it is totally "new", a state that has not been and never will be, for it is living. Isolation is known and so is loneliness; they are recognizable for they have often been experienced, actually or in imagination. The very familiarity of these breeds certain self-righteous contempt and fear from which arises cynicism and gods. But self-isolation and loneliness do not lead to aloneness; they must be finished with, not in order to gain something, but they must die as naturally as the withering away of a gentle flower. Resistance breeds fear but also acceptance. The brain must wash itself clean of all these cunning devices. Unrelated to all these twists and turns of self-contaminated consciousness, wholly different is this immense solitude. In it all creation takes place. Creation destroys and so it is ever the unknown. All the evening of yesterday, this solitude was and is there, and on waking in the middle of the night it sustained itself. The pressure and the strain continue, increasing and decreasing in continuous waves. It's pretty bad today, during the afternoon. July 1st It's as though everything stood still. There's no movement, no stirring, complete emptiness of all thought, of all seeing. There's no interpreter to translate, to observe, to censor. An immeasurable vastness that is utterly still and silent. There is no space, nor time to cover that space. The beginning and the ending are here, of all things. There is really nothing that can be said about it. The pressure and the strain have been going on quietly all day; only now they have increased. 2nd The thing which happened yesterday, that immeasurable still vastness, went on all the evening, even though there were people and general talk. It went on all night; it was there in the morning. Though there was rather exaggerated, emotionally agitated talk, suddenly in the middle of it, it was there. And it's here, there's a beauty and a glory and there's a sense of wordless ecstasy. The pressure and the strain began rather early. 3rd Been out all day. All the same, in a crowded town in the afternoon, for two or three hours the pressure and the strain of it was on. 4th Been busy, but in spite of it, the pressure and the strain of it was there in the afternoon. Whatever actions one has to do in daily life, the shocks and the various incidents should not leave their scars. These scars become the ego, the self, and as one lives, it becomes strong and its walls almost become impenetrable. 5th Been too busy but whenever there's some quiet, the pressure and the strain was on. 6th Last night woke up with that sense of complete stillness and silence; the brain was fully alert and intensely alive; the body was very quiet. This state lasted for about half an hour. This in spite of an exhausting day. The height of intensity and sensitivity is the experiencing of essence. It's this that is beauty beyond word and feeling. Proportion and depth, light and shade are limited to time-space, caught in beauty-ugliness. But that which is beyond line and shape, beyond learning and knowledge, is the beauty of essence. 7th Woke up several times shouting. Again there was that intense stillness of the brain and a feeling of vastness. There has been pressure and strain. Success is brutality. Success in every form, political and religious, art and business. To be successful implies ruthlessness. 8th Before going to sleep or just going off to sleep, several times there were groans and shouts. The body is too disturbed on account of travelling, as one leaves tonight for London [via Los Angeles]. There is a certain amount of pressure and strain. 9th As one sat in the aeroplane amidst all the noise, smoking and loud talking, most unexpectedly, the sense of immensity and that extraordinary benediction which was felt at il L., that imminent feeling of sacredness, began to take place. The body was nervously tense because of the crowd, noise, etc. but in spite of all this, it was there. The pressure and the strain were intense and there was acute pain at the back of the head. There was only this state and there was no observer. The whole body was wholly in it and the feeling of sacredness was so intense that a groan escaped from the body and passengers were sitting in the next seats. It went on for several hours, late into the night. It was as though one was looking, not with eyes only but with a thousand centuries; it was altogether a strange occurrence. The brain was completely empty, all reaction had stopped; during all those hours, one was not aware of this emptiness but only in writing it is the thing known, but this knowledge is only descriptive and not real. That the brain could empty itself is an odd phenomenon. As the eyes were closed, the body, the brain seemed to plunge into unfathomable depths, into states of incredible sensitivity and beauty. The passenger in the next seat began to ask something and having replied, this intensity was there; there was no continuity but only being. And dawn was coming leisurely and the clear sky was filling with light - As this is being written late in the day, with sleepless fatigue, that sacredness is there. The pressure and the strain too. * The Ojai Valley, some eighty miles north of Los Angeles. ** A house above Florence where he had stayed in April. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 2 LONDON 10TH JULY TO 12TH JULY 1961 Little sleep but wake up to be aware that there is a great sense of driving energy which is focused in the head. The body was groaning and yet it was very still, stretched out flat and very peaceful. The room seemed to be full and it was very late and the front door of the next house was shut with a bang - There was not an idea, not a feeling and yet the brain was alert and sensitive. The pressure and the stra1n were there causing pain. An odd thing about this pain is that it does not in any way exhaust the body. There seems to be so much happening within the brain but yet it is impossible to put into words what exactly is taking place. There was a sense of measureless expansion. 11th The pressure and strain have been rather heavy and there is pain. The odd part of all this is that the body in no way protests or puts up resistance in any way. There is an unknown energy involved in all this. Too busy to write much. 12th It was bad last night, shouting and groaning. The head was painful. Though little sleep, woke up twice and each time there was a sense of expanding intensity and intense inward attention and the brain had emptied itself of all feeling and thought. Destruction, the complete emptying of the brain, the reaction and memory must without any effort wither away; withering away implies time but it is time that ceases and not the ending of memory. This timeless expanding that was taking place and the quality and degree of intensity are wholly different from passion and feeling. It was this intensity totally unrelated to any desire, wish or experience, as remembrance, that was rushing through the brain. The brain was only an instrument and it's the mind that is this timeless expanding, exploding intensity of creation. And creation is destruction. In the aeroplane it's going on.* * Flying to Geneva from where he drove to a friend's chalet at Gstaad. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 3 GSTAAD, SWITZERLAND 13TH JULY TO 3RD SEPTEMBER 1961 I think it's the quietness of the place, of the green slopes of the mountains, the beauty of the trees and the cleanliness, that and other things, has made the pressure and the strain far greater; the head has been bad all day; it becomes worse when one is by oneself. All last night it seems to have been going on and woke up several times shouting and groaning; even during rest, in the afternoon, it was bad, accompanied by shouting. The body is completely relaxed and at rest here. Last night, after the long and lovely drive through mountainous country, on entering the room, that strange sacred blessing was there. The other also felt it.* The other also felt the quiet, that penetrating atmosphere. There is a feeling of great beauty and love and of mature fullness. Power is derived from asceticism, from action, from position, from virtue, from domination and so on. All such forms of power are evil. It corrupts and perverts. The use of money, talent, cleverness to gain power or deriving power from any use of these is evil. But there is a power which is in no way related to that power which is evil. This power is not to be bought through sacrifice, virtue, good works and beliefs, nor is it to be bought through worship, prayers and self-denying or self-destructive meditations. All effort to become or to be must wholly, naturally, cease. Only then that power which is not evil, can be. 14th The whole process has been going on all day - the pressure, the strain and the pain at the back of the head; woke up shouting several times, and even during the day there was involuntary groaning and shouting. Last night that sacred feeling filled the room and the other felt it also. How easy it is to deceive oneself about almost everything, especially about deeper and more subtle demands and wishes. To be utterly free of all such urges and demands is arduous. But yet it is essential to be free from them or else the brain breeds every form of illusion. The urge for the repetition of an experience however pleasant, beautiful, fruitful, is the soil in which sorrow grows. The passion of sorrow is as limiting as the passion of power. The brain must cease to make its own ways and be utterly passive. 15th The whole process was bad last night; it has left one rather tired and sleepless. Woke up in the middle of the night, with a sense of immense and measureless strength. It was not the strength that will or desire has put together but the strength that is there in a river, in a mountain, in a tree. It is in man when every form of desire and will have completely ceased. It has no value, has no profit to a human being, but without it the human being is not, nor the tree. The action of man is choice and will and in such action there is contradiction and conflict and so sorrow. All such action has a cause, a motive and hence it is reaction. Action of this strength has no cause, no motive and therefore is immeasurable and the essence. 16th The whole process went on most of the night; it was rather intense. How much can the body stand! The whole body was quivering and, this morning, woke up with the head shaking. There was, this morning that peculiar sacredness, filling the room. It had great penetrating power, entering into every corner of one's being, filling, cleansing, making everything of itself. The other felt it too. It's the thing that every human being craves for and because they crave for it, it eludes them. The monk, the priest, the sannyasi torture their bodies and their character in their longing for this but it evades them. For it cannot be bought; neither sacrifice, virtue nor prayer can bring this love. This life, this love cannot be if death is the means. All seeking, all asking must wholly cease. Truth cannot be exact. What can be measured is not truth. That which is not living can be measured and its height be found. 17th We were going up the path of a steep wooded side of a mountain and presently sat on a bench. Suddenly, most unexpectedly that sacred benediction came upon us, the other felt it too, without our saying anything. As it several times filled a room, this time it seemed to cover the mountainside across the wide, extending valley and beyond the mountains. It was everywhere. All space seemed to disappear; what was far, the wide gap, the distant snowcovered peaks and the person sitting on the bench faded away. There was not one or two or many but only this immensity. The brain had lost all its responses; it was only an instrument of observation, it was seeing, not as the brain belonging to a particular person, but as a brain which is not conditioned by time-space, as the essence of all brains. It was a quiet night and the whole process was not so intense. On waking this morning, there was an experiencing whose duration was perhaps a minute, an hour or timeless. An experiencing that is informed with time ceases to be experiencing; what has continuity ceases to be the experiencing. On waking there was in the very depths, in the measureless depth of the total mind, an intense flame alive and burning furiously, of attention, of awareness, of creation. The word G not the thing; the symbol G not the real. The fires that burn on the surface of life pass, die away, leaving sorrow and ashes and remembrance. These fires are called life but it's not life. It's decay. The fire of creation that is destruction is life. In it there is no beginning, no ending, neither tomorrow or yesterday. It's there and no surface activity will ever uncover it. The brain must die for this life to be. 18th The process has been very acute, preventing sleep; even in the morning and in the afternoon shouting and groaning. The pain has been rather bad. Woke up this morning with a great deal of pain but at the same time there was a flash of a seeing that was revealing. Our eyes and brain register the outward things, trees, mountains, swift running streams; accumulate knowledge, technique and so on. With that same eyes and brain, trained to observe, to choose, to condemn and justify, we turn inward, look inward, recognize objects, build up ideas, which are organized into reason. This inward look does not go very far, for it's still within the limitation of its own observation and reason. This inward gaze is still the outward look and so there's not much difference between the two. What may appear to be different may be similar. But there's an inward observation which is not the outward observation turned inward. The brain and the eye which observe only partially do not comprehend the total seeing. They must be alive completely but still; they must cease to choose and judge but be passively aware. Then the inward seeing is without the border of time-space. In this flash a new perception is born. 19th It had been rather bad all the afternoon of yesterday and it seems more painful. Towards the evening that sacredness came and filled the room and the other felt it too. All night it was fairly quiet, though the pressure and strain were there, like the sun behind the clouds; early this morning the process began again. It appears one's awakened merely to register a certain experience; this has happened quite often, for the past year. One was awakened this morning with a living feeling of joy; it was taking place as one woke up; it wasn't a thing in the past. It was actually taking place. It was coming, this ecstasy, from "outside", not self-induced; it was being pushed through the system, flowing through the organism, with great energy and volume. The brain was not taking part in it but only registering it, not as a remembrance but as an actual fact which was taking place. There was, it seemed, immense strength and vitality behind this ecstasy; it wasn't sentimental nor a feeling, an emotion but as solid and real as that stream crashing down the mountain-side or that solitary pine on the green mountain slope. All feeling and emotion are related to the brain and as love is not, so was this ecstasy. It is with the greatest difficulty, the brain can recall it. Early this morning there was a benediction that seemed to cover the earth and fill the room. With it comes an all consuming quietness, a stillness that seems to have within it all movement. 20th The process was particularly intense yesterday afternoon. In the car, waiting, one was almost oblivious of what was going on around one. The intensity increased and it was almost unbearable so that one was forced to lie down. Fortunately there was someone in the room. The room became full with that benediction. Now what followed is almost impossible to put down in words; words are such dead things, with definite set meaning and what took place was beyond all words and description. It was the centre of all creation; it was a purifying seriousness that cleansed the brain of every thought and feeling; its seriousness was as lightning which destroys and burns up; the profundity of it was not measurable, it was there immovable, impenetrable, a solidity that was as light as the heavens. It was in the eyes, in the breath. It was in the eyes and the eyes could see. The eyes that saw, that looked were wholly different from the eyes of the organ and yet they were the same eyes. There was only seeing, the eyes that saw beyond time-space. There was impenetrable dignity and a peace that was the essence of all movement, action. No virtue touched it for it was beyond all virtue and sanctions of man. There was love that was utterly perishable and so it had the delicacy of all new things, vulnerable, destructible and yet it was beyond all this. It was there imperishable, unnameable, the unknowing. No thought could ever penetrate it; no action could ever touch it. It was "pure", untouched and so ever dyingly beautiful. All this seemed to affect the brain; it was not as it was before. (Thought is such a trivial thing, necessary but trivial.) Because of it, relationship seems to have changed. As a terrific storm, a destructive earthquake gives a new course to the rivers, changes the landscape, digs deep into the earth, so it has levelled the contours of thought, changed the shape of the heart. 21st The whole process is going on as usual, in spite of cold and feverish state. It has become more acute and more insistent. One wonders how long the body can carry on. Yesterday, as we were walking up a beautiful narrow valley, its steep sides dark with pines and green fields full of wild flowers, suddenly, most unexpectedly, for we were talking of other things, a benediction descended upon us, like gentle rain. We became the centre of it. It was gentle, pressing, infinitely tender and peaceful, enfolding us in a power that was beyond all fault and reason. Early this morning, on waking, changing, changeless purifying seriousness and an ecstasy that had no cause. It simply was there. And during the day, whatever one did it was there in the background and it came directly and immediately to the fore when one was quiet. There is an urgency and beauty in it. No imagination or desire could ever formulate such profound seriousness. 22nd Waiting in the doctor's dark, airless office, that benediction, which no desire can construct, came and filled the small room. It was there till we left. If it was felt by the doctor it's impossible to say. Why is it that there is deterioration? Inwardly as well as outwardly. Why? Time brings destruction to all mechanical organizations; it wears out by use and disease every form of organism. Why should there be deterioration inwardly, psychologically? Beyond all explanations which a good brain can give, why do we choose the worse and not the better, why hate rather than love, why greed and not generosity, why self-centred activity and not open total action? Why be mean when there are soaring mountains and flashing streams? Why jealousy and not love? Why? Seeing the fact leads to one thing, and opinions, explanations, to another. Seeing the fact that we decline, deteriorate is all important and not the why and wherefore of it. Explanation has very little significance in face of a fact, but to be satisfied with explanations, with words is one of the major factors of deterioration. Why war and not peace? The fact is we are violent; conflict, inside and outside the skin, is part of our daily life - ambition and success. Seeing this fact and not the cunning explanation and the subtle word, puts an end to deterioration. Choice, one of the major causes of decline, must wholly cease if it's to come to an end. The desire to fulfil and the satisfaction and sorrow that exist in its shadow, is also one of the factors of deterioration. Woke up early this morning, to experience that benediction. One was "forced" to sit up to be in that clarity and beauty. Later in the morning sitting on a roadside bench under a tree one felt the immensity of it. It gave shelter, protection like the tree overhead whose leaves gave shelter against the strong mountain sun and yet allowed light to come through. All relationship is such protection in which there's freedom, and because there's freedom, there is shelter. 23rd Woke up early this morning with an enormous sense of power, beauty and incorruptibility. It was not something that had happened, an experience that was past and one woke up to remember it as in a dream, but something that was actually taking place. One was aware of something utterly incorruptible, in which nothing could possibly exist that could become corrupt, deteriorate. It was too immense for the brain to grasp, to remember; it could only register, mechanically, that there is such a "state" of incorruption. Experiencing such a state is vastly important; it was there, limitless, untouchable, impenetrable. Because of its incorruptibility, there was in it beauty. Not the beauty that fades nor something put together by the hand of man, nor the evil with its beauty. One felt that in its presence all essence exists and so it was sacred. It was a life in which nothing could perish. Death is incorruptible but man makes of it a corruption as, for him, life is. With it all, there was that sense of power, strength as solid as that mountain which nothing could shatter, which no sacrifice, prayer, virtue could ever touch. It was there, immense, which no wave of thought could corrupt, a thing remembered. It was there and the eyes, the breath were of it. Time, laziness, corrupts. It must have gone on for a certain period. Dawn was just coming and there was dew on the car outside and on the grass. The sun wasn't up yet but the sharp snow peak was clear in the grey-blue sky; it was an enchanting morning, with not a cloud. But it wouldn't last, it was too lovely. Why should all this happen to us? No explanation is good enough, though one can invent a dozen. But certain things are fairly clear. 1. One must be wholly "indifferent" to it coming and going. 2. There must be no desire to continue the experience or to store it away in memory. 3. There must be a certain physical sensitivity, a certain indifference to comfort. 4. There must be self-critical humourous approach. But even if one had all these, by chance, not through deliberate cultivation and humility, even then, they are not enough. Something totally different is necessary or nothing is necessary. It must come and you can never go after it, do what you will. You can also add love to the list but it is beyond love. One thing is certain, the brain can never comprehend it nor can it contain it. Blessed is he to whom it is given. And you can add also a still, quiet brain. 24th The process has not been so intense, as the body for some days has not been well, but though it is weak, now and then one can feel the intensity of it. It's strange how this process adjusts itself to circumstance. Yesterday, driving through the narrow valley, a mountain stream noisily making its way beside the wet road, there was this benediction. It was very strong and everything was bathed in it. The noise of the stream was part of it and the high waterfall which became the stream were in it. It was like the gentle rain that was coming down and one became utterly vulnerable; the body seemed to have become light as a leaf, exposed and trembling. This went on through the long, cool drive; talk became monosyllabic; the beauty of it seemed incredible. All the evening it remained and though there was laughter, the solid, the impenetrable seriousness remained. On waking this morning, early when the sun was still below the horizon, there was the ecstasy of this seriousness. It filled the heart and the brain and there was a sense of immovability. To look is important. We look to immediate things and out of immediate necessities to the future, coloured by the past. Our seeing is very limited and our eyes are accustomed to near things. Our look is as bound by time-space as our brain. We never look, we never see beyond this limitation; we do not know how to look through and beyond these fragmentary frontiers. But the eyes have to see beyond them, penetrating deeply and widely, without choosing, without shelter; they have to wander beyond man-made frontiers of ideas and values and to feel beyond love. Then there is a benediction which no god can give. 25th In spite of a meeting,** the process is going on, rather gently but going on. Woke up this morning, rather early, with a sense of a mind that had penetrated into unknown depths. It was as though the mind itself was going into itself, deeply and widely and the journey seemed to have been without movement. And there was this experience of immensity in abundance and a richness that was incorruptible. It's strange that though every experience, state, is utterly different, it is still the same movement; though it seems to change, it is still the changeless. 26th All yesterday afternoon the process was on and it was pretty bad. Walking in the deep shadow of a mountain, Beside a chattering stream, in the intensity of the process, one felt utterly vulnerable, naked and very open; one hardly seemed to exist. And the beauty of the snowcovered mountain, held in the cup of two dark pine slopes of curving hills, was greatly moving. Early in the morning when the sun was not yet up and the dew on the grass, still in bed, lying quietly, without any thought or movement, there was a seeing, not the superficial seeing with the eyes but seeing through the eyes from behind the head. The eyes and from behind the head were only the instrument through which the immeasurable past was seeing into the immeasurable space that had no time. And later, still in bed, there was a seeing in which all life seemed to be contained. How easy it is to deceive oneself, to project desirable states which are actually experienced, especially when they are pleasure. There's no illusion, no deception, when there's no desire, conscious or unconscious, for any experience of any kind, when one's wholly indifferent to the coming and going of all experience, when one's not asking for anything. 27th It was a beautiful drive through two different valleys, up to a pass; the sweeping mountainous rocks, fantastic shapes and curves, their solitude and grandeur, and far away the green, sloping mountain, made an impression on the brain that was still. As we were driving, the strange intensity and the beauty of these many days came more and more pressing upon one. And the other felt it too. Woke up very early in the morning; that which is a benediction and that which is strength were there and the brain was aware of them as it is aware of a perfume but it was not a sensation, an emotion; they were simply there. Do what one will, they will always be there; there was nothing one could do about it. There was a talk this morning and during the talk, the brain which reacts, thinks, constructs was absent. The brain was not working, except, probably, for the memory of words. 28th Yesterday we were walking along the favourite road beside the noisy stream, in the narrow valley of dark pine trees, fields with flowers and in the distance the massive snowcovered mountain and a waterfall. It was enchanting, peaceful and cool. There, walking, that sacred blessing came, a thing that one could almost touch, and deep within one there were movements of change. It was an evening of enchantment and of beauty that was not of this world. The immeasurable was there and then there was stillness. This morning woke up early to register that the process was intense, and through the back of the head, rushing forward as an arrow with that peculiar sound as it flies through the air, was a force, a movement that came from nowhere and was going nowhere. And there was a sense of vast stability and a "dignity" that could not be approached. And an austerity that no thought could formulate but with it a purity of infinite gentleness. All these are merely words and so they can never represent the real; the symbol is never the real and the symbol is without value. All the morning the process was on and a cup that had no height and no depth seemed to be full to the overflowing. 29th Had been seeing people and after they left, one felt as though one was suspended between two worlds. And presently the world of the process and that unquenchable intensity came back. Why this separation? The people one saw were not serious, at least they thought they were serious but they were serious only in a superficial way. One could not give oneself completely and hence this feeling of not being at home again, but all the same, it was an odd experience. We were talking and a little bit of the stream between the trees was pointed out. It was an ordinary sight, an everyday incident, but as one looked, several things took place, not any outward incidents but clear perception. It's absolutely necessary for maturity that there should be - 1. Complete simplicity which goes with humility, not in things or possessions but in the quality of being. 2. Passion with that intensity which is not merely physical. 3. Beauty; not only the sensitivity to outward reality but being sensitive to that beauty which is beyond and above thought and feeling. 4. Love; the totality of it, not the thing that knows jealousy, attachment, dependence; not that as divided into carnal and divine. The whole immensity of it. 5. And the mind that can pursue, that can penetrate without motive, without purpose, into its own immeasurable depths; that has no barrier, that is free to wander without time-space. Suddenly one was aware of all this and all the implications involved in it; just the mere sight of a stream between decaying branches and leaves on a rainy, dismal day. As we were talking, for no reason, for what we were talking about was not too serious, out of some unapproachable depths suddenly one felt this immense flame of power, destructive in its creation. It was the power that existed before all things came into being; it was unapproachable and by its very strength one could not come near it. Nothing exists but that one thing. Immensity and awe. Part of this experience must have "continued" while asleep for on waking early this morning it was there and the intensity of the process had awakened one. It is beyond all thought and words to describe what's going on, the strangeness of it and the love, the beauty of it. No imagination could ever build all this up nor is it an illusion; the strength and the purity of it is not for a make-believe mind-brain. It's beyond and above all faculties of man. 30th It was a cloudy day, heavy with dark clouds; it had rained in the morning and it had turned cold. After a walk we were talking but more looking at the beauty of the earth, the houses and the dark trees. Unexpectedly, there was a flash of that unapproachable power and strength that was physically shattering. The body became frozen into immobility and one had to shut one's eyes not to go off into a faint. It was completely shattering and everything that was didn't seem to exist. And the immobility of that strength and the destructive energy that came with it, burned out the limitations of sight and sound. It was something indescribably great whose height and depth are unknowable. Early this morning, just as dawn was breaking, with not a cloud in the sky and the snowcovered mountains just visible, woke up with that feeling of impenetrable strength in one's eyes and throat; it seemed to be a palpable state, something that could never not be there. For nearly an hour it was there and the brain remained empty. It was not a thing to be caught by thought and stored up in memory to be recalled. It was there and all thought was dead. Thought is functional, is only useful in that realm; thought could not think about it for thought is time and it was beyond all time and measure. Thought, desire could not seek for its continuation or for its repetition, for thought, desire, was totally absent. Then what is it that remembers to write this down? Merely a mechanical record but the record, the word is not the thing. The process goes on, more gently, probably because of the talks and there is also a limit beyond which the body will crack. But it's there, persistent and insistent. 31st Walking along the path that followed the fast-running stream, cool and pleasant, with many people about, there was that benediction, as gentle as the leaves and there was in it a dancing joy. But there was beyond and through it that immense, solid strength and power that was unapproachable. One felt that there was immeasurable depth behind it, unfathomable. It was there, with every step, with an urgency and yet with infinite "indifference". As a big, high dam holds back the river, forming a vast lake of many miles, so was this immensity. But every moment there was destruction; not the destruction to bring about a new change - change is never new - but total destruction of what has been so that it can never be. There was no violence in this destruction; there is violence in change, in revolution, in submission, in discipline, in control and domination but here all violence, in any form with a different name, has totally ceased. It is this destruction that is creation. But creation is not peace. Peace and conflict belong to the world of change and time, to the outward and inward movement of existence, but this was not of time or of any movement in space. It is pure and absolute destruction and only then can the "new" be. This morning on awaking this essence was there; it must have been there all night, and on waking it seemed to fill the whole head and body. And the process is going on gently. One has to he alone and quiet, then it is there. As one writes that benediction is there, as the soft breeze along the leaves. August 1st It was a beautiful day and driving in the beautiful valley there was that which was not to be denied; it was there as the air, the sky and those mountains. Woke up early, shouting, for the process was intense but during the day, in spite of the talk,*** it has been going on with mildness. 2nd Woke up early this morning; unwashed one was forced to sit up and one has generally sat up in bed for some time before getting out of bed, But this morning it was beyond the usual procedure, it was an urgent and imperative necessity. As one sat up, in a little while there came that immense benediction and presently one felt that this whole power, this whole impenetrable, stern strength was in one, about one and in the head, and in the very middle of all this immensity, there was complete stillness. It was a stillness which no mind can imagine, formulate; no violence can produce this stillness; it had no cause; it was not a result; it was the stillness in the very centre of a tremendous hurricane. It was the stillness of all motion, the essence of all action; it was the explosion of creation and it's only in such stillness that creation can take place. Again the brain could not capture it; it could not record it in its memories, in the past, for this thing is out of time; it had no future, it had no past or present. If it was of time, the brain could capture it and shape it according to its conditioning. As this stillness is the totality of all motion, the essence of all action, a living that was without shadow, the thing of shadow could not, by any means, measure it. It is too immense for time to hold it and no space could contain it. All this may have lasted a minute or an hour. Before sleeping the process was acute and it has continued in a mild way all day long. 3rd woke up early with that strong feeling of otherness, of another world that is beyond all thought; it was very intense and as clear and pure as the early morning, cloudless sky. Imagination and illusion are purged from the mind for there is no continuance. Everything is and it has never been before. Where there is a possibility of continuance, there is delusion. It was a clear morning though soon clouds would be gathering. As one looked out of the window, the trees, the fields were very clear. A curious thing is happening; there is a heightening of sensitivity. Sensitivity, not only to beauty but also to all other things. The blade of grass was astonishingly green; that one blade of grass contained the whole spectrum of colour; it was intense, dazzling and such a small thing, so easy to destroy. Those trees were all of life, their height and their depth; the lines of those sweeping hills and the solitary trees were the expression of all time and space; and the mountains against the pale sky were beyond all the gods of man. It was incredible to see, feel, all this by just looking out of the window. One's eyes were cleansed. It is strange how during one or two interviews that strength, that power filled the room. It seemed to be in one's eyes and breath. It comes into being, suddenly and most unexpectedly, with a force and intensity that is quite overpowering and at other times it's there, quietly and serenely. But it's there, whether one wants it or not. There is no possibility of getting used to it for it has never been nor will it ever be. But it's there. The process has been mild, these talks and seeing people probably make it so. 4th Woke up very early in the morning; it was still dark but dawn would soon come; towards the east there was in the distance a pale light. The sky was very clear and the shape of the mountains and the hills were just visible. It was very quiet. Out of this vast silence suddenly, as one sat up in bed, when thought was quiet and far away, when there wasn't even a whisper of a feeling, there came that which was now the solid, inexhaustible being. It was solid, without weight, without measure; it was there and besides it, there existed nothing. It was there without another. The words solid, immovable, imperishable do not in any way convey that quality of timeless stability. None of these or any other word could communicate that which was there. It was totally itself and nothing else; it was the totality of all things, the essence. The purity of it remained, leaving one without thought, without action. It's not possible to be one with it; it is not possible to be one with a swiftly flowing river. You can never be one with that which has no form, no measure, no quality. It is; that is all. How deeply mature and tender everything has become and strangely all life is in it; like a new leaf, utterly defenceless. 5th There was, as one woke up this morning early, a flash of "seeing", "looking", that seems to be going on and on for ever. It started nowhere and went nowhere but in that seeing all sight was included and all things. It was a sight that went beyond the streams, the hills, the mountains, past the earth and the horizon and the people. In this seeing, there was penetrating light and incredible swiftness. The brain could not follow it nor could the mind contain it. It was pure light and a swiftness that knew no resistance. On the walk yesterday, the beauty of light among the trees and on the grass was so intense, that it left one actually breathless and the body frail. Later this morning, as one was just going to have breakfast, like a knife thrust into a soft earth, there was that benediction, with its power and strength. It came as does lightning and was gone as quickly. The process was rather intense yesterday afternoon and somewhat less this morning. There's a frailty about the body. 6th Though one had slept, not too well, on waking one was aware that all night the process was going but, much more, that there was a blossoming of that benediction. One felt as though it was operating upon one. On waking, there was an outgoing, outpouring of this power and strength. It was as a stream rushing out of the rocks, out of the earth. There was a strange and unimaginable bliss in this, an ecstasy that had nothing to do with thought and feeling. There is an aspen tree and its leaves are trembling in the breeze and without that dance life is not. 7th One was done up after the talk**** and seeing people and towards the evening we went for a short walk. After a brilliant day, clouds were gathering and it would rain during the night. Clouds were closing in on the mountains and the stream was making a great deal of noise. The road was dusty with cars and across the stream was a narrow, wooden bridge. We crossed it and went up a grassy path and the green slope was full of flowers of so many colours. The path went up gently past a cow shed but it was empty; the cattle had been taken to pastures much higher up. It was quiet up there, without people but with the noise of the rushing stream. Quietly, it came, so gently that one was not aware of it, so close to the earth, among the flowers. It was spreading, covering the earth and one was in it, not as an observer but of it. There was no thought or feeling, the brain utterly quiet. Suddenly, there was innocence so simple, so clear and delicate. It was a meadow of innocence past all pleasure and ache, beyond all torture of hope and despair. It was there and it made the mind, one's whole being innocent; one was of it, past measure, past word, the mind transparent and the brain young without time. It went on for some time and it was late and we had to return. This morning, on waking it took a little time for that immensity to come but it was there and thought and feeling were made still. As one was cleaning one's teeth, the intensity of it was sharp and clear. It comes as suddenly as it goes, nothing can restrain it and nothing can call it. The process has been rather acute and the pain has been sharp. 8th On waking, everything was quiet as the previous day had been tiring. It was surprisingly quiet and one sat up to carry on with the usual meditation. Unexpectedly, as one hears a distant sound, it began, quietly, gently, and all of a sudden, it was there in full force. It must have lasted for some minutes. It was gone but it left its perfume deep in one's consciousness and the seeing of it in one's eyes. During the talk this morning that immensity with its benediction was there.***** Each one must have interpreted it in his way and thereby destroying its indescribable nature. All interpretation distorts. The process has been acute and the body has become rather frail. But beyond all this, there is the purity of incredible beauty, the beauty not of things, which thought or feeling has put together, or the gift of some craftsman, but as a river that wanders, nourishing and indifferent, polluted and made use of; it's there, complete and rich in itself. And a strength that has no value in man's social structure and behaviour. But it is there, unconcerned, immense, untouchable. Because of this, all things are. 9th Again this morning, on waking one felt it was an empty night; it had been too much, for the body, with the talk [the day before] and seeing people, was tired. Sitting up in bed as usual, it was quiet; the country was asleep, there was no sound and the morning was heavy with clouds. Wherever it has its being, it came suddenly and fully, this benediction with its strength and power. It remained filling the room and beyond, and presently it went, leaving behind a feeling of vastness, whose height was beyond the word. Yesterday, walking amidst hills, meadows and streams, among pleasant quietness and beauty one was again aware of that strange and deeply moving innocence. It was quietly, without any resistance, penetrating, entering into every corner and twist of one's mind, cleansing it of all thought and feeling. It left one empty and complete. Suddenly all time had stopped. Each one was aware of its passage.****** The process is going on but more gently and deeply. 10th It had rained sharply and very heavily, washing off the white dust on the big round leaves by the unpaved road that went deep into the mountains. The air was soft and gentle and at that altitude not heavy; the air was clean and pleasant and there was the smell of rain-washed earth. Walking up the road, one was aware of the beauty of the earth and the delicate line of the steep hills against the evening sky; of the massive, rocky mountain with its glacier and wide field of snow; of the many flowers in the meadows. It was an evening of great beauty and quietness. The stream so boisterous, was made muddy by the recent, heavy rain; it had lost that peculiar bright clarity of mountain water but in a few hours it would again become clear. As one looked at the massive rocks, with their curves and shapes and the sparkling snow, half-dreamily with no thought in mind, suddenly there was an immense, massive dignity of strength and benediction. It filled the valley on the instant and the mind had no measurement; it was deep beyond the word. Again there was innocence. On waking early this morning, it was there and meditation was a little thing and all thought died and all feeling had ceased; the brain was utterly quiet. Its record is not the real. It was there, untouchable and unknowable. It would never be what has been: it is of never ending beauty. It was an extraordinary morning. This has been going on for four solid months, whatever the environment, whatever the condition of the body. It's never the same and yet the same; it is destruction and never ending creation. Its power and strength are beyond all comparison and word. And it's never continuous; it is death and life. The process has been rather acute and it all seems rather unimportant. August 11th, 1961******* Sitting in the car, beside a boisterous mountain stream and in the middle of green, rich meadows and a darkening sky, that incorruptible innocence was there, whose austerity was beauty. The brain was utterly quiet and it was touched by it. The brain is nourished by reaction and experience; it lives on experience. But experience is always limiting and conditioning; memory is the machinery of action. Without experience, knowledge and memory, action is not possible but such action is fragmentary, limited. Reason, organized thought, is always incomplete; idea, response of thought, is barren and belief is the refuge of thought. All experience only strengthens thought negatively or positively. Experiencing is conditioned by experience, the past. Freedom is the emptying of the mind of experience. When the brain ceases to nourish itself through experience, memory and thought, when it dies to experiencing, then its activity is not self-centred. It then has its nourishment from elsewhere. It is this nourishment that makes the mind religious. On waking this morning, beyond all meditation and thought and the delusions that feelings create, there was an intense bright light at the very centre of the brain and beyond the brain at the very centre of consciousness, of one's being. It was a light that had no shadow nor was it set in any dimension. It was there without movement. With that light there was present that incalculable strength and beauty beyond thought and feeling. The process was rather acute in the afternoon. 12th Yesterday, walking up the valley, the mountains covered with clouds and the stream seemingly more noisy than ever, there was a sense of astonishing beauty, not that the meadows and hills and the dark pines had changed. Only the light was different, more soft, with a clarity that seemed to penetrate everything, leaving no shadow. As the road climbed, we were able to look down on a farm, with green pasture land around it. It was a green meadow, a rich green that is seen nowhere, but that little farmhouse and that green pasture contained all the earth and all mankind. There was an absolute finality about it; it was the finality of beauty that is not tortured by thought and feeling. The beauty of a picture, a song, a building is put together by man, to be compared, to be criticized, to be added up but this beauty was not the handwork of man. All the handwork of man must be denied with a finality before this beauty can be. For it needs total innocence, total austerity; not the innocence that thought had contrived nor the austerity of sacrifice. Only when the brain is free of time, and its responses; utterly still, is there that austere innocency. Woke up long before dawn when the air is very still and the earth waiting for the sun. Woke up with a clarity that was peculiar and an urgency that demanded full attention. The body was completely motionless, an immobility that was without strain, without tension. And inside the head a peculiar phenomenon was going on. A great wide river was flowing with the pressure of immense weight of water, flowing between high, polished granite rock. On each side of this great wide river was polished, sparkling granite, on which nothing grew, not even a blade of grass; there was nothing but sheer polished rock, soaring up beyond measurable eyesight. The river was making its way, silently, without a whisper, indifferent, majestic. It was actually taking place, it wasn't a dream, a vision nor a symbol to be interpreted. It was there taking place, beyond any doubt; it was not a thing of imagination. No thought could possibly invent it; it was too immense and real for thought to formulate it. The immobility of the body and this great flowing river between the polished granite walls of the brain, went on for an hour and a half by the watch. Through the open window the eyes could see the coming dawn. There was no mistaking the reality of what was taking place. For an hour and a half the whole being was attentive, without effort, without wandering off. And all of a sudden it stopped and the day began. This morning, that benediction filled the room. It was raining hard but there would be blue sky later. The process, with its pressure and ache, continues gently. 13th As the path that goes up the mountain can never contain all of the mountain, so this immensity is not the word. And yet walking up the side of the mountain, with the small stream running at the foot of the slope, this incredible, unnameable immensity was there; the mind and heart was filled with it and every drop of water on the leaf and on the grass was sparkling with it. It had been raining all night and all the morning and it had been heavy with clouds, and now the sun was coming out over the high hills and there were shadows on the green, spotless meadows that were rich with flowers. The grass was very wet and the sun was on the mountains. Up that path there was enchantment and talking now and then seemed in no way to [word left out] the beauty of that light nor the simple peace that lay in the field. The benediction of that immensity was there and there was joy. On waking this morning, there was again that impenetrable strength whose power is the benediction. One was awakened to it and the brain was aware of it without any of its responses. It made the clear sky and the Pleiades incredibly beautiful. And the early sun on the mountain, with its snow, was the light of the world. During the talk******** it was there, untouchable and pure, and in the afternoon in the room it came with a speed of lightning and was gone. But it's always here in some measure, with its strange innocency whose eyes have never been touched. The process was rather acute last night and as this is being written. 14th Though the body was done up this morning after the talk [of yesterday] and seeing people, sitting in the car under a spreading tree there was a deep strange activity going on. It was not an activity which the brain, with its customary responses, could comprehend and formulate; it was beyond its scope. But there was an activity, deep within, which was wearing out all obstruction. But the nature of that activity is impossible to tell. Like deep subterranean waters making their way to the surface, so there was an activity far deeper than beyond all consciousness. One is aware of the increase of sensitivity of the brain; colour, shape, line, the total form of things have become more intense and extraordinarily alive. Shadows seem to have a life of their own, of greater depth and purity. It was a beautiful, quiet evening; there was a breeze among the leaves and the aspen leaves were trembling and dancing. A tall straight stem of a plant, with a crown of white flowers, touched by faint pink, stood as a watcher by the mountain stream. The stream was golden in the setting sun and the woods were deep in silence; even the passing cars didn't seem to disturb them. The snowcovered mountains were deep in dark, heavy clouds and the meadows knew innocence. The whole mind was far beyond all experience. And the meditator was silent. 15th Walking beside the stream and with the mountains in clouds, there were moments of intense silence, like the brilliant patches of blue sky among the parting clouds. It was a cold, sharp evening, with a breeze that was coming from the north. Creation is not for the talented, for the gifted; they only know creativeness but never creation. Creation is beyond thought and image, beyond the word and expression. It is not to be communicated for it cannot be formulated, it cannot be wrapped up in words. It can be felt in complete awareness. It cannot be used and put on the market, to be haggled and sold. It cannot be understood by the brain, with its complicated varieties of responses. The brain has no means to get into touch with it; it's utterly incapable. Knowledge is an impediment and without self-knowing, creation cannot be. Intellect, the sharp instrument of the brain, can in no way approach it. The total brain, with its hidden secret demands and pursuits and the many varieties of cunning virtues, must be utterly quiet, speechless but yet alert and still. Creation is not baking bread or writing a poem. All activity of the brain must cease, voluntarily and easily, without conflict and pain. There must be no shadow of conflict and imitation. Then there is the astonishing movement called creation. It can only be in total negation; it cannot be in the passage of time, nor can space cover it. There must be complete death, total destruction, for it to be. On waking this morning, there was complete silence outwardly and inwardly. The body and the measuring and weighing brain were still, in a state of immobility, though both were alive and highly sensitive. And quietly, as the dawn comes, it came from somewhere deep within, that strength with its energy and purity. It seemed to have no roots, no cause but yet it was there, intense and solid, with a depth and a height that are not measurable. It remained for some time by the watch and went away, as the cloud goes behind a mountain. Every time there is something "new" in this benediction, a "new" quality, a "new" perfume but yet it is changeless. It is utterly unknowable. The process was acute for a while but it's there in a gentle manner. It is all very strange and unpredictable. 16th There was a patch of blue sky between two vast, endless clouds; it was a clear, startling blue, so soft and penetrating. It would be swallowed up in a few minutes and it would disappear for ever. No sky of that blue would ever be seen again. It had been raining most of the night and the morning and there was fresh snow on the mountains and on the higher hills. And the meadows were greener and richer than ever but that little patch of limpid blue sky would never be seen again. In that little patch was the light of all heaven and the blue of all the skies. As one watched it, its form began to change and the clouds were rushing to cover it lest too much of it be seen. It was gone never to appear again. But it had been seen and the wonder of it remains. At that moment, resting on the sofa, as the clouds were conquering the blue, there came, quite unexpectedly, that benediction, with its purity and innocence. It came in abundance and filled the room till the room and the heart could hold no more; its intensity was peculiarly overpowering and penetrating and its beauty was on the land. The sun was shining on a patch of brilliant green and the dark pines were quiet and indifferent. This morning, it was very early, the dawn wouldn't come for a couple of hours, on waking, with eyes that have lost their sleep, one was aware of an unfathomable cheerfulness; there was no cause to it, no sentimentality or that emotional extravagance, enthusiasm, behind it; it was clear, simple cheer, uncontaminated and rich, untouched and pure. There was no thought or reason behind it and neither could one ever understand it for there was no cause to it. This cheerfulness was pouring out of one's whole being and the being was utterly empty. As a stream of water gushes out from the side of a mountain, naturally and under pressure, this cheer was pouring out in great abundance, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, but the heart and mind would never be the same again. One was not aware of the quality of this cheer as it was bursting forth; it was taking place and its nature would show itself, probably, to time and time would have no measure for it. Time is petty and it cannot weigh abundance. The body has been rather frail and empty but last night and this morning the process has been acute, not lasting for long. 17th It had been a cloudy, rainy day with north-west wind, hard and cold. Up the road that led to the waterfall which became the noisy stream, we were walking; there were few on the roads and few cars went by and the stream rushed on, faster than ever. We walked up the road with the wind behind us and the narrow valley widened and there were patches of sun on the sparkling, green pasture. They were widening the road and as we passed they greeted us, with friendly smiles and a few words in Italian. They had been labouring all day digging and carrying rocks so that it seemed incredible that they should smile at all. But they did and up further on under a large shed, modern machinery was cutting wood, drilling holes and cutting patterns on heavy lumber. And the valley opened more and more and there was a village further on and still further on was the waterfall from the glacier high up in the rocky mountain. One felt more than one saw the beauty of the land and the weary people, the fast running stream and the quiet meadows. On the way back, near the chalet, all the sky was covered with heavy clouds and suddenly the setting sun was on some rocks, high up in the mountain. That patch of sunlight on the face of those rocks revealed a depth of beauty and feeling that no graven image can hold. It was as though they were alight from within, a light of their own, serene and never fading. It was the end of the day. Only on waking early next morning, one was aware of the previous evening's splendour and the love that went by. Consciousness cannot contain the immensity of innocence; it can receive it, it cannot pursue it nor cultivate it. The entire consciousness must be still, not wanting, not seeking and never pursuing. The totality of consciousness must be still and only then, that which has no beginning and no end can come into being. Meditation is the emptying of consciousness, not to receive, but to be empty of all endeavour. There must be space for stillness, not the space created by thought and its activities but that space that comes through denial and destruction, when there is nothing left of thought and its projection. In emptiness alone can there be creation. On waking early this morning the beauty of that strength, with its innocency, was there, deep within and coming to the surface of the mind. It had the quality of infinite flexibility but nothing could shape it; it could not be made to adjust, to conform to the mould of man. It could not be caught in symbols or words. But it was there, immense and untouchable. All meditation seemed trivial and foolish. It only stayed and the mind was still. Several times during the day, at odd moments, that benediction would come and pass away. Desiring and asking have no significance whatsoever. The process goes on mildly. 18th It had been raining most of the night and it had turned quite cold; there was quite a lot of fresh snow on the higher hills and mountains. And there was a sharp wind too. The green meadows were extraordinarily bright and the green was startling. And it had been raining most of the day too and only towards the late afternoon it began to clear up and sun was among the mountains. We were walking along a path that went from one village to another, a path that wound around farmhouses, among rich green meadows. The pylons that carried heavy electric cables, stood startlingly against the evening skies; looking up at these towering steel structures against scudding clouds, there was beauty and power. Crossing over a wooden bridge, the stream was full, swollen by all this rain; it was running fast, with an energy and force that only mountain streams have. Looking up and down the stream, held in by tightly packed banks of rocks and trees, one was aware of the movement of time, the past, the present and future; the bridge was the present and all life moved and lived through the present. But beyond all this, there was along that rain-washed and slushy lane, an otherness, a world which could never be touched by human thought, its activities and its unending sorrows. This world was not the product of hope nor of belief. One was not fully aware of it at that moment, there were too many things to observe, feel and smell; the clouds, the ale blue sky beyond the mountains and the sun among them and the evening light on the sparkling meadows; the smell of cow-sheds and red flowers around the farmhouses. This otherness was there covering all this, never a little thing being missed, and as one lay awake in bed, it came pouring in, filling the mind and the heart. Then one was aware of its subtle beauty, its passion and love. It's not the love that is enshrined in images, evoked by symbols, pictures and words, nor that which is cloaked in envy and jealousy, but that which is there freed from thought and feeling, a curving movement, everlasting. Its beauty is there with the self-abandonment of passion. There's no passion of that beauty if there is no austerity. Austerity is not a thing of the mind, carefully gathered through sacrifice, suppression and discipline. All these must cease, naturally, for they have no meaning for that otherness. It came pouring in with its measureless abundance. This love had no centre nor peri- phery and it was so complete, so invulnerable that there was no shadow in it and so ever destructible. We always look from outside within; from knowledge we proceed to further knowledge, always adding and the very taking away is another addition. And our consciousness is made up of a thousand remembrances and recognitions, conscious of the trembling leaf, of the flower, of that man passing by, that child running across the field; conscious of the rock, the stream, the bright red flower and the bad smell of a pig-sty. From this remembering and recognizing, from the outward responses, we try to become conscious of the inner recesses, of the deeper motives and urges; we probe deeper and deeper into the vast depths of the mind. This whole process of challenges and responses, of the movement of experiencing and recognizing the hidden and the open activities, this whole is consciousness bound to time. The cup is not only the shape, the colour, the design but also that emptiness inside the cup. The cup is the emptiness held within a form; without that emptiness there would be no cup nor form. We know consciousness by outer signs, by its limitations of height and depth, of thought and feeling. But all this is the outer form of consciousness; from the outer we try to find the inner. Is this possible? Theories and speculations are not significant; they actually prevent all discovery. From the outer we try to find the inner, from the known we probe hoping to find the unknown. Is it possible to probe from the inner to the outer? The instrument that probes from the outer, we know but is there such an instrument that probes from the unknown to the known? Is there? And how can there be? There cannot be. If there is one, it's recognizable and if it's recognizable, it's within the area of the known. That strange benediction comes when it will, but with each visitation, deep within, there is a transformation; it is never the same. The process goes on, sometimes mild and sometimes acute. 19th It was a beautiful day, a cloudless day, a day of shadows and light; after the heavy rains the sun shone in a clear, limpid blue sky. The mountains, with their snow, were very close, one could almost touch them; they stood out sharply against the sky. The bright brilliant meadows were sparkling in the sun, every blade of grass did a dance of its own and the leaves were heavier in their movement. The valley was radiant and there was laughter; it was a magnificent day and there were a thousand shadows. Shadows are more alive than the reality; shadows are longer, deeper, richer; they seem to have a life of their own, independent and protecting; there is a peculiar satisfaction in their invitation. The symbol becomes more important than reality.The symbol gives a shelter; it is easy to take comfort in its shelter. You can do what you will with it, it will never contradict, it will never change; it can be covered with garlands or ashes. There's an extraordinary satisfaction in a dead thing, in a picture, in a conclusion, in a word. They are dead, past all recalling and there is pleasure in the many smells of yesterday. The brain is always the yesterday, and today is the shadow of yesterday, and tomorrow is the continuation of that shadow, somewhat changed but it still smells of yesterday. So the brain lives and has its being in shadows; it is safer, more comforting. Consciousness is always receiving, accumulating, and from what it has gathered, interpreting; receiving through all its pores; storing up, experiencing from what it has gathered, judging, compiling, modifying. It looks, not only through the eyes, through the brain but through this background. Consciousness goes out to receive and in receiving, it exists. In its hidden depths, it has stored what it has received through centuries, the instincts, the memories, the safeguard, adding, adding, only to take away to add further. When this consciousness looks out, it is to weigh, to balance and to receive. And when it looks within, its look is still the outer look, to weigh, to balance and to receive; the inward stripping is another form of adding. This time-binding process goes on and on with an ache, with fleeting joy and sorrow. But to look, to see, to listen, without this consciousness - an outgoing in which there is no receiving, is the total movement of freedom. This outgoing has no centre, a point, small or extensive, from which it moves; thus it moves in all directions, without the barrier of time-space. Its listening is total, its look is total. This outgoing is the essence of attention. In attention, all distractions are, for there are no distractions. Only concentration knows the conflict of distraction. All consciousness is thought, expressed or unexpressed, verbal or seeking the word; thought as feeling, feeling as thought. Thought is never still; reaction expressing itself is thought and thought further increases responses. Beauty is the feeling which thought expresses. Love is still within the field of thought. Is there love and beauty within the enclosure of thought? Is there beauty when thought is? The beauty, the love that thought knows is the opposite of ugliness and hate. Beauty has no opposite nor has love. Seeing without thought, without the word, without the response of memory is wholly different from seeing with thought and feeling. What you see with thought is superficial; then seeing is only partial; this is not seeing at all. Seeing without thought is total seeing. Seeing a cloud over a mountain, without thought and its responses, is the miracle of the new; it's not "beautiful", it's explosive in its immensity; it is something that has never been and never will be. To see, to listen, consciousness in its entirety must be still for the destructive creation to be. It is the totality of life and not the fragment of all thought. There is no beauty but only a cloud over the mountain; it is creation. The setting sun touched the mountain tops, brilliant and breathtaking and the land was still. There was only colour and not different colours; there was only listening and not the many sounds. This morning, waking late, when the sun was pressing the hills, like a brilliant light that Benediction was there; it seems to have a strength and power of its own. Like a distant murmur of waters, there is an activity going on, not of the brain with its volitions and deceptions, but an activity of intensity. The process goes on with varying intensity; sometimes it is fairly acute. 20th It was a perfect day; the sky was intensely blue and everything was sparkling in the morning sun. There were a few clouds floating about, leisurely, with nowhere to go. The sun on the fluttering leaves of aspen were brilliant jewels against the green sloping hills. The meadows overnight had changed, more intense, more soft, a green that is utterly unimaginable. There were three cows far up the hill, lazily grazing and their bells could be heard in the clear early morning air; they moved in a line steadily chewing their way from one side of the meadow to the other. And the ski-lift passed over them and they never even bothered to look up or be disturbed. It was a beautiful morning and the snow mountains were sharp against the sky, so clear that one could see the many small waterfalls. It was a morning of long shadows and infinite beauty. Strange, how love has its being in this beauty, there was such gentleness that all things seemed to stand still, lest any movement should awaken a hidden shadow. And there were a few more clouds. It was a beautiful drive, in a car that seemed to enjoy what it was built for; it took every curve, however sharp, easily and willingly and up the long incline it went never grumbling and there was plenty of power to go up wherever the road went. It was like an animal that knew its own strength. The road curved in and out, through a dark sunlit wood, and every patch of light was alive, dancing with the leaves; every curve of the road showed more light, more dances, more delight. Every tree, every leaf stood alone, intense and silent. You saw, through a small opening of the trees, a patch of startling green of a meadow that was open to the sun. It was so startling that one forgot that one was on a dangerous mountain road. But the road became gentle and lazily wound around to a different valley. The clouds were gathering in now and it was pleasant not to have a strong sun. The road became almost flat, if a mountain road can be flat; it went on past a dark pine-covered hill and there in front were the enormous, overpowering mountains, rocks and snow, green fields and waterfalls, small wooden huts and the sweeping, curving lines of the mountain. One could hardly believe what the eyes saw, the overpowering dignity of those shaped rocks, the treeless mountain covered with snow, and crag after crag of endless rock, and right up to them were the green meadows, all held together in a vast embrace of a mountain. It was really quite incredible; there was beauty, love, destruction and the immensity of creation, not those rocks, not those fields, not those tiny huts; it wasn't in them or part of them. It was far beyond and above them. It was there with the majesty, with a roar that no eyes or ears could see or hear; it was there with such totality and stillness that the brain with its thoughts became as nothing as those dead leaves in the woods. It was there with such abundance, such strength that the world, the trees and the earth came to an end. It was love, creation and destruction. And there was nothing else. There was the essence of depth. The essence of thought is that state when thought is not. However deeply and widely thought is pursued, thought will always remain shallow, superficial. The ending of thought is the beginning of that essence. The ending of thought is negation and what is negative has no positive way; there is no method, no system to end thought. The method, the system is a positive approach to negation and thus thought can never find the essence of itself. It must cease for the essence to be. The essence of being is non-being, and to "see" the depth of non-being, there must be freedom from becoming. There is no freedom if there is continuity and that which has continuity is time-bound. Every experience is binding thought to time and a mind that's in a state of non-experiencing is aware of all essence. This state in which all experiencing has come to an end is not the paralysis of the mind; on the contrary, it's the additive mind, the mind that's accumulating, that is withering away. For accumulation is mechanical, a repetition; the denial to acquire and mere acquisition are both repetitive and imitative. The mind that destroys totally this accumulative and defensive mechanism is free and so experiencing has lost its significance. Then there's only the fact and not the experiencing of the fact; the opinion of the fact, the evaluation of it, the beauty and non-beauty of it is the experiencing of the fact. The experiencing of the fact is to deny it, to escape from it. The experiencing of a fact without thought or feeling is a profound event. On waking this morning, there was that strange immobility of the body and of the brain; with it came a movement of entering into unfathomable depths of intensity and of great bliss and there was that otherness. The process goes on mildly. 21st Again, it has been a clear, sunny day, with long shadows and sparkling leaves; the mountains were serene, solid and close; the sky was of an extraordinary blue, spotless and gentle. Shadows filled the earth; it was a morning for shadows, the little ones and the big ones, the long, lean ones and the fat satisfied ones, the squat homely one and the joyful, spritely ones. The roof-tops of the farms and the chalets shone like polished marble, the new and the old. There seemed to be a great rejoicing and shouting among the trees and meadows; they existed for each other and above them was heaven, not the man-made, with its tortures and hopes. And there was life, vast, splendid, throbbing and stretching in all directions. It was life, always young and always dangerous; life that never stayed, that wandered through the earth, indifferent, never leaving a mark, never asking or calling for anything. It was there in abundance, shadowless and deathless; it didn't care from where it came or where it was going. Wherever it was there was life, beyond time and thought. It was a marvellous thing, free, light and unfathomable. It was not to be closed in; where they closed it, in the places of worship, in the market place, in the home, there was decay and corruption and their perpetual reform. It was there simple, majestic and shattering and the beauty of it is beyond thought and feeling. It is so vast and incomparable that it fills the earth and heavens and the blade of grass that's destroyed so soon. It is there with love and death. It was cool in the wood, with a shouting stream a few feet below; the pines shot up to the skies, without ever bending to look at the earth. It was splendid there with black squirrels eating tree mushrooms and chasing each other up and down the trees in narrow spirals; there was a robin that bobbed up and down, or what looked like a robin. It was cool and quiet there, except for the stream with its cold mountain waters. And there it was, love, creation and destruction, not as a symbol, not in thought and feeling but an actual reality. You couldn't see it, feel it, but it was there, shatteringly immense, strong as ten thousand and with the power of the most vulnerable. It was there and all things became still, the brain and the body; it was a benediction and the mind was of it. There is no end to depth; the essence of it is without time and space. It's not to be experienced; experience is such a tawdry thing, so easily got and so easily gone; thought cannot put it together nor can feeling make its way to it. These are silly and immature things. Maturity is not of time, a matter of age, nor does it come through influence and environment. It's not to be bought, neither the books nor the teachers and saviours, the one or the many, can ever create the right climate for this maturity. Maturity is not an end in Itself; it comes into being without thought cultivating it, darkly, without meditation, unknowingly. There must be maturity, that ripening in life; not the ripeness that is bred out of disease and turmoil, sorrow and hope. Despair and labour cannot bring this total maturity but it must be there, unsought. For in this total maturity there is austerity. Not the austerity of ashes and sackcloth but that casual and unpremeditated indifference to the things of the world, its virtues, its gods, its respectability, its hopes and values. These must be totally denied for that austerity which comes with aloneness. No influence of society or of culture can ever touch this aloneness. But it must be there, not conjured up by the brain, which is the child of time and influence. It must come thunderingly out of nowhere. And without it, there's no total maturity. Loneliness - the essence of self-pity and self-defence and life in isolation, in myth, in knowledge and idea - is far away from aloneness; in them there is everlasting attempt to integrate and ever breaking apart. Aloneness is a life in which all influence has come to an end. It's this aloneness that is the essence of austerity. But this austerity comes when the brain remains clear, undamaged by any psychological wounds that are caused through fear; conflict in any form destroys the sensitivity of the brain; ambition with its ruthlessness, with its ceaseless effort to become, wears down the subtle capacities of the brain; greed and envy make the brain heavy with content and weary with discontent. There must be alertness, without choice, an awareness in which all receiving and adjustment have ceased. Overeating and indulgence in any form makes the body dull and stupefies the brain. There is a flower by the wayside, a clear, bright thing open to the skies; the sun, the rains, the darkness of the night, the winds and thunder and the soil have gone into make that flower. But the flower is none of these things. It is the essence of all flowers. The freedom from authority, from envy, fear, from loneliness will not bring about that aloneness, with its extraordinary austerity. It comes when the brain is not looking for it; it comes when your back is turned upon it. Then nothing can be added to it or taken away from it. Then it has a life of its own, a movement which is the essence of all life, without time and space. That benediction was there with great peace. The process goes on mildly. 22nd The moon was in the clouds but the mountains and the dark hills were clear and there was a great stillness about them. There was a large star just hanging over a wooded hill and the only noise that came out of the valley was the mounta1n stream as it rushed over rocks. Everything was asleep save the distant village but its sound didn't come as high up as this. The noise of the stream soon faded; it was there but it didn't fill the valley. There was no breeze and the trees were motionless; there was the light of the pale moon on the scattered roofs and everything was still, even the pale shadows. In the air there was that feeling of unbearable immensity, intense and insistent. It was not a fanciful imagination; imagination ceases when there's reality; imagination is dangerous; it has no validity, only fact has. Fancy and imagination are pleasurable and deceptive and they must be wholly banished. Every form of myth, fancy and imagination must be understood and this very understanding deprives them of their significance. It was there, and what was started as meditation, ended. Of what significance is meditation when reality is there! It was not meditation that brought reality into being, nothing can bring it into being; it was there in spite of meditation but what was necessary was a very sensitive, alert brain which had stopped entirely, willingly and easily, its chatter of reason and non-reason. It had become very quiet, seeing and listening without interpreting, without classifying; it was quiet and there was no entity or necessity to make it quiet. The brain was very still and very alive. That immensity filled the night and there was bliss. It had no relationship with anything; it was not trying to shape, to change, to assert; it had no influence and therefore was implacable. It was not doing good, not reforming; it was not becoming respectable and so highly destructive. But it was love, not the love which society cultivates, a tortured thing. It was the essence of the movement of life. It was there, implacable, destructive, with a tenderness that the new alone knows, as the new leaf of spring, and it will tell you. And there was strength beyond measure and there was power that only creation has. And all things were quiet. That one star that was going over the hill was now high up and it was bright in its solitude. In the morning, walking in the woods above the stream, with the sun on every tree, again it was there, that immensity so unexpected, so still that one walked through it, marvelling. A single leaf was dancing rhythmically and the rest of the abundant leaves were still. It was there, that love that's not within the scope of man's longing and measure. It was there and thought could blow it away and a feeling could push it away. It was there, never to be conquered, never to be caught. The word to feel is misleading; it's more than emotion, than a sentiment, than an experience, than touch or smel1. Though that word is apt to be misleading, it must be used to communicate and especially so when we are talking of essence. The feel of essence is not through the brain nor through some fancy; it's not experienceable as a shock; above all it's not the word. You cannot experience it; to experience there must be an experiencer, the observer. Experiencing, without the experiencer, is quite another matter. It is in this `'state", in which there is no experiencer, no observer, that there is that "feeling". It is not intuition, which the observer interprets or follows, blindly or with reason; it is not the desire, longing, transformed into intuition or the "voice of God" evoked by politicians and religio-social reformers. It's necessary to get away from all this, far away to understand this feeling, this seeing, this listening. To "feel" demands the austerity of clarity, in which there is no confusion and conflict. The "feeling" of essence comes when there is simplicity to pursue to the very end, without any deviation, sorrow, envy, fear, ambition and so on. This simplicity is beyond the capacity of the intellect; intellect is fragmentary. This pursuit is the highest form of simplicity, not the mendicant's robe or one meal a day. The "feeling" of essence is the negation of thought and its mechanical capacities, knowledge and reason. Reason and knowledge are necessary in the operation of mechanical problems, and all the problems of thought and feeling are mechanical. It's this negation of the machinery of memory, whose reaction is thought, that must be denied in the pursuit of the essence. Destroy [in order to] to go to the very end; destruction is not of the outer things but of the psychological refuges and resistances, the gods and their secret shelters. Without this, there's no journey into that depth whose essence is love, creation and death. On waking early this morning, the body and the brain lay motionless for there was that power and strength which is a benediction. The process is gentle. 23rd There were a few wandering clouds in the early morning sky which was so pale, quiet and without time. The sun was waiting for the excellency of the morning to finish. The dew was on the meadows and there were no shadows and the trees were alone, waiting for them. It was very early and even the stream was hesitant to make its boisterous run. It was quiet and the breeze hadn't yet awakened and the leaves were still. There was no smoke yet from any of the farmhouses but the roofs began to glow with the coming light. The stars were yielding reluctantly to dawn and there was that peculiar silent expectation when the sun is about to come; the hills were waiting and so were the trees and meadows open in their joy. Then the sun touched the mountain tops, a gentle soothing touch and the snow became bright with the early morning light; the leaves began to stir from the long night and smoke was going straight up from one of the cottages and the stream was chattering away, without any restraint. And slowly, hesitantly and with delicate shyness the long shadows spread across the land; the mountains cast their shadows on the hills and the hills on the meadows and the trees were waiting for their shadows but soon they were there, the light ones and the deep ones, the feathery and the heavy. And the aspens were dancing, the day had begun. Meditation is this attention in which there is an awareness, without choice, of the movement of all things, the cawing of the crows, the electric saw ripping through the wood, the trembling of leaves, the noisy stream, a boy calling, the feelings, the motives, the thoughts chasing each other and going deeper, the awareness of total consciousness. And in this attention, time as yesterday pursuing into the space of tomorrow and the twisting and turning of consciousness has become quiet and still. In this stillness there is an immeasurable, not comparable movement; a movement that has no being, that's the essence of bliss and death and life. A movement that cannot be followed for it leaves no path and because it is still, motionless; it is the essence of all motion. The road went west, curling through rain-soaked meadows, past small villages on the slope of hills, crossing the mountain streams of clear snow waters, past churches with copper steeples; it went on and on into dark, cavernous clouds and rain, with mountains closing in. It began to drizzle, and looking back casually through the back window of the slow-moving car, from where we had come, there were the sunlit clouds, blue sky and the bright, clear mountains. Without saying a word, instinctively, the car stopped, backed and turned and we went on towards light and mountains. It was impossibly beautiful and as the road turned into an open valley, the heart stood still; it was still and as open as the expanding valley, it was completely shattering. We had been through that valley several times; the shape of the hills were fairly familiar; the meadows and the cottages were recognizable and the familiar noise of the stream was there. Everything was there except the brain, though it was driving the car. Everything had become so intense, there was death. Not because the brain was quiet, not because of the beauty of the land, or of the light on the clouds or the immovable dignity of the mountains; it was none of these things, though all these things may have added something towards it. It was literally death; everything suddenly coming to an end; there was no continuity, the brain was directing the body in driving the car and that was all. Literally that was all. The car went on for some time and stopped. There was life and death, so closely, intimately, inseparably together and neither was important. Something shattering had taken place. There was no deception or imagination; it was much too serious for that kind of silly aberration; it was not something to play about. Death is not a casual affair and it would not go; there's no argument with it. You can have a lifelong discussion with life but it is not possible with death. It's so final and absolute. It wasn't the death of the body; that would be a fairly simple and decisive event. Living with death was quite another matter. There was life and there was death; they were there inexorably united. It wasn't a psychological death; it wasn't a shock that drove out all thought, all feeling; it wasn't a sudden aberration of the brain nor a mental illness. It was none of these things nor a curious decision of a brain that was tired or in despair. It wasn't an unconscious wish for death. It was none of these things; these would be immature and so easily connived at. It was something in a different dimension; it was something that defied time-space description. It was there, the very essence of death. The essence of self is death but this death was the very essence of life as well. In fact they were not separate, life and death. This was not something conjured up by the brain for its comfort and ideational security. The very living was the dying and dying was living. In that car, with all that beauty and colour, with that "feeling" of ecstasy, death was part of love, part of everything. Death wasn't a symbol, an idea, a thing that one knew. It was there, in reality, in fact, as intense and demanding as the honk of a car that wanted to pass. As life would never leave nor can be set aside, so death now would never leave or be put aside. It was there with an extraordinary intensity and with a finality. All night one lived with it; it seemed to have taken possession of the brain and the usual activities; not too many of the brain's movements went on but there was a casual indifference about them. There was indifference previously but now it was past and beyond all formulation. Everything had become much more intense, both life and death. Death was there on waking, without sorrow, but with life. It was a marvellous morning. There was that benediction which was the delight of the mountains and of the trees. 24th It was a warm day and there were plenty of shadows; the rocks shone with a solid brilliance. The dark pines never seemed to move, unlike those aspens which were ready to tremble at the slightest whisper. There was a strong breeze from the west, sweeping through the valley. The rocks were so alive that they seemed to run after the clouds and the clouds clung to them, taking the shape and the curve of the rocks; they flowed around them and it was difficult to separate the rocks from the clouds. And the trees were walking with the clouds. The whole valley seemed to be moving and the small, narrow paths that went up to the woods and beyond, seemed to yield and come alive. And the sparkling meadows were the haunt of shy flowers. But this morning rocks ruled the valley; they were of so many colours that there was only colour; these rocks were gentle this morning and they were of so many shapes and sizes. And they were so indifferent to everything, to the wind, rains and to the explosions for the needs of man. They had been there and they were going to be past all time. It was a splendid morning and the sun was everywhere and every leaf was stirring; it was a good morning for the drive, not long but enough to see the beauty of the land. It was a morning that was made new by death, not the death of decay, disease or accident but the death that destroys for creation to be. There is no creation if death does not sweep away all the things that the brain has put together to safeguard the self-centred existence. Death, previously, was a new form of continuity; death was associated with continuity. With death came a new existence, a new experience, a new breath and a new life. The old ceased and the new was born and the new then gave place to yet another new. Death was the means to the new state, new invention, to a new way of life, to a new thought. It was a frightening change but that very change brought a fresh hope. But now death did not bring anything new, a new horizon, a new breath. It is death, absolute and final. And then there's nothing, neither past nor future. Nothing. There's no giving birth to anything. But there's no despair, no seeking; complete death without time; looking out of great depths which are not there. Death is there without the old or the new. It is death without smile and tear. It is not a mask covering up, hiding some reality. The reality is death and there's no need for cover. Death has wiped away everything and left nothing. This nothing is the dance of the leaf, it is the call of that child. It is nothing and there must be nothing. What continues is decay, the machine, the habit, the ambition. There is corruption but not in death. Death is total nothingness. It must be there for out of that, life is, love is. For in this nothingness creation is. Without absolute death, there's no creation. We were reading something, casually and remarking about the state of the world when suddenly and unexpectedly the room became full with that benediction, which has come so often now. The door was open in the little room and we were just going to eat when through the open door it came. One could literally, physically feel it, like a wave flowing into the room. It became "more" and "more" intense, the more is not comparatively used; it was something that was incredibly strong and immovable, with shattering power. Words are not the thing and the actual thing can never be put into words; it must be seen, heard and lived; then it has quite a different significance. The process has been acute the last few days; and one need not write about it every day.********* 25th It was very early in the morning; there wouldn't be dawn for another couple of hours or more. Orion was just coming up over the top of that peak that is beyond the curving and wooded hills. There was not a cloud in the sky but from the feel of the air, there would probably be fog. It was an hour of quietness and even the stream was sleeping; there was a fading moonlight and the hills were dark, clear in their shape, against the pale sky. There was no breeze and the trees were still and the stars were bright. Meditation is not a search; it's not a seeking, a probing, an exploration. It is an explosion and discovery. It's not the taming of the brain to conform nor is it a self-introspective analysis; it is certainly not the training in concentration which includes, chooses and denies. It's something that comes naturally, when all positive and negative assertions and accomplishments have been understood and drop away easily. It is the total emptiness of the brain. It's the emptiness that is essential not what's in the emptiness; there is seeing only from emptiness; all virtue, not social morality and respectability, springs from it. It's out of this emptiness love comes, otherwise it's not love. Foundation of righteousness is in this emptiness. It's the end and beginning of all things. Looking out of the window, as Orion was climbing higher and higher, the brain was intensely alive and sensitive and meditation became something entirely different, something which the brain could not cope with and so fell back upon itself and became silent. The hours till dawn and after seemed to have had no beginning and as the sun came up the mountains and the clouds caught its first rays and there was astonishment in splendour. And day began. Strangely meditation went on. 26th It had been a beautiful morning, full of sunshine and shadows; the garden in the nearby hotel was full of colours, all colours and they were so bright and the grass so green that they hurt the eye and the heart. And the mountains beyond were glistening with a freshness and a sharpness, washed by the morning dew. It was an enchanting morning and there was beauty everywhere; over the narrow bridge, across the stream, up a path into the wood, where the sunshine was playing with the leaves; they were trembling and their shadows moved; they were common plants but they outdid in their greenness and freshness all the trees that soared up to the blue skies. You could only wonder at all this delight, at the extravagance, at the trembling; you could not but be amazed at the quiet dignity of every tree and plant and at the endless joy of those black squirrels, with long, bushy tails. The waters of the stream were clear and sparkling in the sun that came through the leaves. It was damp in the wood and pleasant. Standing there watching the leaves dancing away suddenly there was the otherness, a timeless occurrence and there was stillness. It was a stillness in which everything moved, danced and shouted; it wasn't a stillness which comes when a machine stops working; mechanical stillness is one thing and the stillness in emptiness is another. The one is repetitive, habitual, corrupting which the conflicting and weary brain seeks as a refuge; the other is exploding, never the same, it cannot be searched out, is never repetitive, and so it does not offer any shelter. Such a stillness came and stayed as we wandered along, and the beauty of the wood intensified and the colours exploded to be caught on the leaves and flowers. It was not a very old church, about the beginning of the seventeenth century, at least it said so over the arch; it had been renovated and the wood was light-coloured pine and the steel nails looked bright and polished, which was impossible, of course; one was almost sure that those who had gathered there to listen to some music never looked at those nails all over the ceiling. It was not an orthodox church, there was no smell of incense, candles or images. It was there and the sun came in through the windows. There were many children, told not to talk or play which didn't prevent them from being restless, looking terribly solemn and their eyes ready to laugh. One wanted to play, came close but was too shy to come any nearer. They were rehearsing for the concert that evening and everyone was dutifully solemn and there was interest. Outside the grass was bright, the sky clear blue and shadows were numberless. Why this everlasting struggle to be perfect, to achieve perfection, as the machines are? The idea, the example, the symbol of perfection is something marvellous, ennobling, but is it? Of course there's the attempt to imitate the perfect, the perfect example. Is imitation perfection? Is there perfection or is it merely an idea, given to man by the preacher to keep him respectable? In the idea of perfection there's a great deal of comfort and security and always it is profitable both to the priest and to the one who's trying to become perfect. A mechanical habit, repeated over and over again can eventually be perfected; only habit can be perfected. Thinking, believing the same thing over and over again, without deviation, becomes a mechanical habit and perhaps this is the kind of perfection everyone wants. This cultivates a perfect wall of resistance, which will prevent any disturbance, any discomfort. Besides, perfection is a glorified form of success, and ambition is blessed by respectability and the representatives and heroes of success. There's no perfection, it's an ugly thing, except in a machine. The attempt to be perfect is, really, to break the record, as in golf; competition is saintly. To compete with your neighbour and with God for perfection is called brotherhood and love. But each attempt at perfection leads only to greater confusion and sorrow which only gives greater impetus to be more perfect. It's curious, we always want to be perfect in or with something; this gives the means for achievement, and the pleasure of achievement, of course, is vanity. Pride in any form is brutal and leads to disaster. The desire for perfection outwardly or inwardly denies love and without love, do what you will, there's always frustration and sorrow. Love is neither perfect nor imperfect; it's only when there's no love that perfection and imperfection arise. Love never strives after something; it does not make itself perfect. It's the flame without the smoke; in striving to be perfect, there's only greater volume of smoke; perfection, then, lies only in striving, which is mechanical, more and more perfect in habit, in imitation, in engendering more fear. Each one is educated to compete, to become successful; then the end becomes all important. Love for the thing itself disappears. Then the instrument is used not for the love of the sound but for what the instrument will bring, fame, money, prestige and so on. Being is infinitely more significant than becoming. Being is not the opposite of becoming; if it's the opposite or in opposition, then there is no being. When becoming dies completely, then there's being. But this being is not static; it's not acceptance nor is it mere denial; becoming involves time and space. All striving must cease; then only there is being. Being is not within the field of social virtue and morality. It shatters the social formula of life. This being is life, not the pattern of life. Where life is there's no perfection; perfection is an idea, a word; life, the being, is beyond any formula of thought. It is there when the word, the example, and the pattern are destroyed. It has been there, this benediction, for hours and in flashes. On waking this morning, many hours before sunrise, when there was the eclipse of the moon, it was there with such strength and power, that sleep for a couple of hours was not possible. There is a strange purity and innocency in it. 27th The stream, joined by other little streams, meandered through the valley, noisily and the chatter was never the same. It had its own moods but never unpleasant, never a dark mood, The little ones had a sharper note, there were more boulders and rocks; they had quiet pools in the shade, shallow with dancing shadows and at night they had quite a different tone, soft, gentle and hesitant. They came down through different valleys from different sources, one much further away than the other; one from a glacier and from a winding waterfall and the other must come from a source too far away to walk to. They both joined the bigger stream which had a deep quiet tone, more dignified, wider and swifter. All the three of them were tree-lined and the long curving line of trees showed where these streams came from and where they went, they were the occupants of the valleys and everyone else was a stranger, including the trees. One could watch them by the hour and listen to their endless chatter; they were very gay and full of fun, even the bigger one, though it had to maintain certain dignity. They were of the mountains, from dizzy heights nearer the heavens and so purer and nobler; they were not snobs but they maintained their way and they were rather distant and chilly. In the dark of the night they had a song of their own, when few were listening. It was a song of many songs. Crossing the bridge, up in the sun-speckled wood, meditation was quite a different thing. Without any wish and search, without any complaint of the brain, there was unenforced silence; the little birds were chirping away, the squirrels were chasing up the trees, the breeze was playing with the leaves and there was silence. The little stream, the one coming from a long distance, was more cheerful than ever and yet there was silence, not outside but deep, far within. It was total stillness within the totality of the mind, which had no frontiers. It was not the silence within an enclosure, within an area, within the limits of thought and so recognized as stillness. There were no frontiers, no measurements and so the silence was not held within experience, to be recognized and stored away. It may never occur again and if it did, it would be entirely different. Silence cannot repeat itself; only the brain through memory and recollection can repeat what had been, but what had been is not the actual. Meditation was this total absence of consciousness put together through time and space. Thought, the essence of consciousness, cannot, do what it will, bring about this stillness; the brain with all its subtle and complicated activities must quiet down of its own accord, without the promise of any reward or of security. Only then it can be sensitive, alive and quiet. The brain understanding its own activities, hidden and open, is part of meditation; it's the foundation in meditation, without it meditation is only self-deception, self-hypnosis, which has no significance whatsoever. There must be silence for the explosion of creation. Maturity is not of time and age. There is no interval between now and maturity; there is never "in the meantime". Maturity is that state when all choice has ceased; it's only the immature that choose and know the conflict of choice. In maturity there's no direction but there's a direction which is not a direction of choice. Conflict at any level, at any depth, indicates immaturity. There's no such thing as becoming mature, except organically, the mechanical inevitability of certain things to ripen. The understanding, which is the transcending of conflict, in all its complex varieties, is maturity. However complex it is and however subtle, the depth of conflict, within and without, can be understood. Conflict, frustration, fulfilment is one single movement, within and without. The tide that goes out must come in and for that movement itself, called the tide, there's no out and in. Conflict in all its forms must be understood, not intellectually, but actually, actually coming emotionally into contact with conflict. The emotional contact, the shock, is not possible if it is intellectually, verbally, accepted as necessary or denied sentimentally. Acceptance or denial does not alter a fact nor will reason bring about a necessary impact. What does is "seeing" the fact. There's no "seeing" if there is condemnation or justification or identification with the fact. "Seeing" is only possible when the brain is not actively participating, but observing, abstaining from classification, judgment and evaluation. There must be conflict when there is the urge to fulfil, with its inevitable frustrations; there is conflict when there is ambition, with its subtle and ruthless competition; envy is part of this ceaseless conflict, to become, to achieve, to succeed. There's no understanding in time. Understanding does not come tomorrow; it will never come tomorrow; it is now or never; there's only now and there's no never. The "seeing" is immediate; when from the brain the significance of "seeing", understanding, eventually is wiped away, then seeing is immediate."Seeing" is explosive, not reasoned, calculated. It is fear that often prevents "seeing", understanding. Fear, with its defences and its courage, is the origin of conflict. The seeing is not only with the brain but also beyond it. Seeing the fact brings its own action, entirely different from the action of idea, thought; action from idea, thought, breeds conflict; action then is an approximation, comparison with the formula, with the idea, and this brings conflict. There's no end to conflict, small or great, in the field of thought; the essence of conflict is non-conflict which is maturity. On waking very early in the morning, that strange benediction was meditation and meditation was that benediction. It was there with great intensity, walking in a peaceful wood. 28th It had been rather a hot sunny day, hot even at this altitude; the snow on the mountains was white and glistening. It had been sunny and hot for several days and the streams were clear and the sky pale blue but there was still that mountain intensity about the blue. The flowers across the way were extraordinarily bright and gay and the meadows were cool; the shadows were dark and there were so many. There's a little path through the meadows going up across the rolling hills, wandering past farm-houses; there was no one on the path except for an old lady carrying a milk can and a small basket of vegetables; she must have been going up and down that path all her life, racing up the hills when she was young and now, all bent and crippled, she was coming up, slowly, painfully, hardly looking up from the ground. She will die and the mountains will go on. There were two goats higher up, white, with those peculiar eyes; they came up to be petted, keeping a safe distance from the electric fence which kept them from wandering off. There was a white and black kitten belonging to the same farm as the goats; it wanted to play; there was another cat higher up still, in a meadow, perfectly still waiting to catch a field rat. Up there in the shade, it was cool and fresh and beautiful, the mountains and the hills, the valleys and the shadows. The land was boggy in places and there grew reeds, short and golden coloured, and among the gold were white flowers. But this was not all. Going up and coming down, there was during that whole hour and a half that strength which is a benediction. It has the quality of enormous and impenetrable solidity; no matter could have, possibly, that solidity. Matter is penetrable, can be broken down, dissolved, vaporized; thought and feeling have certain weight; they can be measured and they too can be changed, destroyed and nothing left of them. But this strength, which nothing could penetrate, nor dissolve, was not the projection of thought and certainly not matter. This strength was not an illusion, a creation of a brain that was secretly seeking power or that strength that power gives. No brain could formulate such strength, with its strange intensity and solidity. It was there and no thought could invent it or dispel it. There comes an intensity when there is no need for anything. Food, clothes and shelter are necessities and they are not needs. The need is the hidden craving, which makes for attachment. The need for sex, for drinking, for fame, for worship, with their complex causes; the need for self-fulfilment with its ambitions and frustrations; the need for God, for immortality. All these forms of need inevitably breed that attachment which causes sorrow, fear and the ache of loneliness. The need to express oneself through music, through writing or through painting and through some other means, makes for desperate attachment to the means. A musician who uses his instrument to achieve fame, to become the best, ceases to be a musician; he does not love music but the profits of music. We use each other in our needs and call it by sweet-sounding names; out of this grows despair and unending sorrow. We use God as a refuge, as a protection, like some medicine and so the church, the temple, with its priests become very significant, when they have none. We use everything, machines, techniques for our psychological needs and there is no love for the thing itself. There is love only when there is no need. The essence of the self is this need and the constant change of needs and the everlasting search, from one attachment to another, from one temple to another, from one commitment to another. To commit oneself to an idea, to a formula, to belong to something, to some sect, to some dogma, is the drive of need, the essence of the self, which takes the form of most altruistic activities. It's a cloak, a mask: The freedom from need is maturity. With this freedom comes intensity, which has no cause and no profit. 29th There is a path beyond the few scattered chalets and farmhouses that goes through the meadows and barbed wire fences; before it goes down, there is a magnificent view of the mountains with their snows and glacier, of the valley and the little town, with so many shops. From there one can see the source of one stream and the dark, pine-covered hills; the lines of these hills against the evening sky were magnificent and they seemed to tell of so many things. It was a lovely evening; there hadn't been a cloud in the sky all day long and now the purity of the sky and of the shadows was startling and the evening light was a delight. The sun was going down behind the hills and they were casting their great shadows across other hills and meadows. Crossing another grassy field, the path went down rather steeply and joined a bigger and wider path, which went through the woods. There was no one on that path, it was deserted, and it was very quiet in the woods except for the stream which seemed to be noisier before it quieted down for the night. There were tall pines there and a perfume in the air. Suddenly as the path turned, through a long tunnel of trees, was a patch of green and a newly cut piece of pine wood with the evening sun on it. It was startling in its intensity and joy. One saw it, and all space and time disappeared; there was only that patch of light and nothing else. It was not that one became that light or one identified oneself with that light; the sharp activities of the brain had stopped and one's whole being was there with that light. The trees, the path, the noise of the stream had completely disappeared and so had the five hundred yards and more between the light and the observer. The observer had ceased and the intensity of that patch of evening sun was the light of all the worlds. That light was all heaven and that light was the mind. Most deny certain superficial and easy things; there are others who go far in their denial and there are those who deny totally. To deny certain things is comparatively easy, church and its gods, authority and the power of those who have it, the politician and his ways and so on. One can go pretty far in the denial of things that apparently do matter, relationships, the absurdities of society, the conception of beauty as established by the critics and of those who say they know. One can put aside all these and remain alone, alone not in the sense of isolation and frustration but alone because one has seen the significance of all this and has walked away from them casually and without any sense of superiority. They are finished, dead and there's no going back to them. But to go to the very end of denial is quite another matter; the essence of denial is the freedom in aloneness. But few go that far, shattering through every refuge, every formula, every idea, every symbol and be naked, unburnt and clear. But how necessary it is to deny; deny without reaching out, deny without the bitterness of experience and the hope of knowledge. To deny and stand alone, without tomorrow, without a future. The storm of denial is nakedness. To stand alone, without being committed to any course of action, to any conduct, to any experience, is essential, for this alone frees consciousness from the bondage of time. Every form of influence is understood and denied, giving thought no passage in time. Denying time is the essence of timelessness. To deny knowledge, experience, the known is to invite the unknown. Denial is explosive; it is not an intellectual ideational affair, something with which the brain can play. In the very act of denial there is energy, the energy of understanding and this energy is not docile, to be tamed by fear and convenience. Denial is destructive; it is unaware of con- sequences; it is not a reaction and so not the opposite of assertion. To assert that there is or that there is not, is to continue in reaction, and reaction is not denial. Denial has no choice and so is not the outcome of conflict. Choice is conflict and conflict is immaturity. Seeing the truth as truth, the false as false and the truth in the false is the act of denial. It's an act and not an idea. The total denial of thought, the idea and the word brings freedom from the known; with the total denial of feeling, emotion and sentiment there's love. Love is beyond and above thought and feeling. The total denial of the known is the essence of freedom. Waking early this morning, the sunrise many hours away, meditation was beyond the responses of thought; it was an arrow into the unknowable and thought could not follow it. And dawn came to brighten the sky and as soon as the sun was touching the highest peaks, there was that immensity whose purity is beyond the sun and the mountains. 30th It had been a cloudless day, hot, and the earth and the trees were gathering strength for the coming winter; autumn was already turning the few leaves yellow; they were bright yellow against the dark green. They were cutting the meadows and the fields of their rich grass for the cows during the long winter; everyone was working, grown-ups and children. It was serious work and there wasn't much talk or laughter. Machines were taking the place of scythes and here and there scythes were cutting the pasture. And along the stream there's a path, through the fields; it was cool there for the hot sun was already behind the hills. The path went past farmhouses and a sawmill; in the newly cut fields, there were thousands of crocuses, so delicate, with that peculiar perfume of their own. It was a quiet, clear evening and the mountains were closer than ever. The stream was quiet, there were not too many rocks and the water ran fast. You would have to run to keep with it. There was, in the air, the smell of freshly cut grass, in a land that was prosperous and contented. Every farm had electricity and there seemed to be peace and plenty. How few see the mountains or a cloud. They look, make some remarks and pass on. Words, gestures, emotions prevent seeing. A tree, a flower is given a name, put into a category and that's that. You see a landscape through an archway or from a window, and if you happen to be an artist or are familiar with art, you say almost immediately, it is like those medieval paintings or mention some name of some recent painter. Or if you are a writer, you look in order to describe; if you are a musician, probably you have never seen the curve of a hill or the flowers at your feet; you are caught up in your daily practice, or ambition has you by the throat. If you are a professional of some kind, probably you never see. But to see there must be humility whose essence is innocence. There's that mountain with the evening sun on it; to see it for the first time, to see it, as though it had never been seen before, to see it with innocence, to see it with eyes that have been bathed in emptiness, that have not been hurt with knowledge - to see then is an extraordinary experience. The word experience is ugly, with it goes emotion, knowledge, recognition and a continuity; it is none of these things. It is something totally new. To see this newness there must be humility, that humility which has never been contaminated by pride, by vanity. With this certain happening, that morning, there was this seeing, as with the mountain top, with the evening sun. The totality of one's whole being was there, which was not in a state of need, conflict and choice; the total being was passive, whose passivity was active. There are two kinds of attention, one is active and the other is without movement. What was happening was actually new, a thing that had never happened before. To "see" it happening was the wonder of humility; the brain was completely still, without any response though it was fully awake. To "see" that mountain peak, so splendid with the evening sun, though one had seen it a thousand times, with eyes that had no knowledge, was to see the birth of the new. This is not silly romanticism or sentimentality with its cruelties and moods, or emotion with its waves of enthusiasm and depression. It is something so utterly new, that in this total attention is silence. Out of this emptiness the new is. Humility is not a virtue; it is not to be cultivated; it's not within the morality of the respectable. The saints do not know it, for they are recognized for their saintliness; the worshipper does not know it for he is asking, seeking; nor the devotee and the follower for he is following. Accumulation denies humility, whether it be property, experience or capacity. Learning is not an additive process; knowledge is. Knowledge is mechanical; learning never is. There can be more and more knowledge but there is never more in learning. Where there is comparison learning ceases. Learning is the immediate seeing which is not in time. All accumulation and knowledge are measurable. Humility is not comparable; there's no more or less of humility; so it cannot be cultivated. Morality and technique can be cultivated, there can be more or less of them. Humility is not within the capacity of the brain, nor is love. Humility is ever the act of death. Very early this morning, many hours before dawn, on waking there was that piercing intensity of strength with its sternness. There was in this sternness, bliss. By the watch it "lasted" for forty-five minutes with increasing intensity. The stream and the quiet night, with their brilliant stars, were within it. 31st Meditation without a set formula, without a cause and reason, without end and purpose is an incredible phenomenon. It is not only a great explosion which purifies but also it is death, that has no tomorrow. Its purity devastates, leaving no hidden corner where thought can lurk in its own dark shadows. Its purity is vulnerable; it is not a virtue brought into being through resistance. It is pure because it has no resistance, like love. There is no tomorrow in meditation, no argument with death. The death of yesterday and of tomorrow does not leave the petty present of time, and time is always petty, but a destruction that is the new. Meditation is this, not the silly calculations of the brain in search of security. Meditation is destruction to security and there is great beauty in meditation, not the beauty of the things that have been put together by man or by nature but of silence. This silence is emptiness in which and from which all things flow and have their being. It is unknowable, neither intellect nor feeling can make their way to it; there is no way to it and a method to it is the invention of a greedy brain. All the ways and means of the calculating self must be destroyed wholly; all going forward or backward, the way of time, must come to an end, without tomorrow. Meditation is destruction; it's a danger to those who wish to lead a superficial life and a life of fancy and myth. The stars were very bright, brilliant so early in the morning. Dawn was far away; it was surprisingly quiet, even the boisterous stream was quiet and the hills were silent. A whole hour passed in that state when the brain was not asleep but awake, sensitive and only watching; during that state the totality of the mind can go beyond itself, without directions for there is no director. Meditation is a storm, destroying and cleansing. Then, far away, came dawn. In the east there was spreading light, so young and pale, so quiet and timid; it came past those distant hills and it touched the towering mountains and the peaks. In groups and singly, the trees stood still, the aspen began to wake up and the stream shouted with joy. That white wall of a farm-house, facing west, became very white. Slowly, peacefully, almost begging it came and filled the land. Then the snow peaks began to glow, bright rose and the noises of the early morning began. Three crows flew across the sky, silently, all in the same direction; from far came the sound of a bell on a cow and still there was quiet. Then a car was coming up the hill and day began. On that path in the wood, a yellow leaf fell; for some of the trees autumn was here. It was a single leaf, with not a blemish on it, unspotted, clean. It was the yellow of autumn, it was still lovely in its death, no disease had touched it. It was still the fullness of spring and summer and still all the leaves of that tree were green. It was death in glory. Death was there, not in the yellow leaf, but actually there, not an inevitable traditionalized death but that death which is always there. It was not a fancy but a reality that could not be covered up. It is always there round every bend of a road, in every house, with every god. It was there with all its strength and beauty. You can't avoid death; you may forget it, you may rationalize it or believe that you will be reborn or resurrected. Do what you will, go to any temple or book it is always there, in festival and in health. You must live with it to know it; you can't know it if you are frightened of it; fear only darkens it. To know it you must love it. To live with it you must love it, The knowledge of it isn't the ending of it. It's the end of knowledge but not of death. To love it is not to be familiar with it; you can't be familiar with destruction. You can't love something you don't know but you don't know anything, not even your wife or your boss, let alone a total stranger. But yet you must love it, the stranger, the unknown. You only love that of which you are certain, that which gives comfort, security. You do not love the uncertain, the unknown; you may love danger, give your life for another or kill another for your country, but this is not love; these have their own reward and profit; gain and success you love though there's pain in them. There's no profit in knowing death but strangely death and love always go together; they never separate. You can't love without death; you can't embrace without death being there. Where love is there is also death, they are inseparable. But do we know what love is? You know sensation, emotion, desire, feeling and the mechanism of thought but none of these is love. You love your husband, your children; you hate war but you practice war. Your love knows hate, envy, ambition, fear; the smoke of these is not love. Power and prestige you love but power and prestige are evil, corrupting. Do we know what love is? Never knowing it is the wonder of it, the beauty of it. Never knowing, which does not mean remaining in doubt nor does it mean despair; it's the death of yesterday and so the complete uncertainty of tomorrow. Love has no continuity, nor has death. Only memory and the picture in the frame have continuity but these are mechanical and even machines wear out, yielding place to new pictures, new memories. What has continuity is ever decaying and what decays isn't death. Love and death are inseparable and where they are there's always destruction. September 1st The snow was melting fast in the mountains for there have been many unclouded days and hot sun; the stream had become muddy and there was more water and it had become more noisy and impetuous. Crossing the little wooden bridge and looking up the stream, there was the mountain, surprisingly delicate, aloof, with inviting strength; its snow was glistening in the evening sun. It was beautiful, caught between the trees on either side of the stream and the fast-running waters. It was startlingly immense, soaring into the sky, suspended in the air. It wasn't only the mountain that was beautiful but the evening light, the hills, the meadows, the trees and the stream. Suddenly the whole land with its shadows and peace became intense, so alive and absorbing. It pushed its way through the brain as a flame burning away the insensitivity of thought. The sky, the land and the watcher, all were caught up in this intensity and there was only the flame and nothing else. Meditation during that walk, beside the stream on a path which meandered gently through many green fields, was not there because of silence or because the beauty of the evening absorbed all thought; it went on in spite of some talk. Nothing could interfere with it; meditation went on, not unconsciously somewhere in the recesses of the brain and memory, but it was there, taking place, like the evening light among the trees. Meditation is not a purposeful pursuit which breeds distraction and conflict; it's not the discovery of a toy that will absorb all thought, as a child is absorbed by a toy; it's not the repetition of a word to still the mind. It begins with self-knowing and goes beyond knowing. On the walk, it was going on, stirring deeply and moving in no direction. Meditation was going on beyond thought, conscious or hidden, and a seeing beyond the capacity of thought. Look beyond the mountain; in that look are the nearby houses, the meadows, the shapely hills and the mountains themselves; when you drive a car, you look well ahead, three hundred yards or more; that look takes in the side roads, that car that is parked, the boy that is crossing and the lorry that's coming towards you, but if you merely watched the car ahead of you, you would have an accident. The distant look includes the near but looking at what is near does not include the distant. Our life is spent in the immediate, in the superficial. Life in totality gives attention to the fragment but the fragment can never understand the totality. Yet this is what we are always attempting to do; hold on to the little and yet try to grasp the whole. The known is always the little, the fragment, and with the small we seek the unknown. We never let the little go; of the little we are certain, in it we are secure, at least we think we are. But actually we can never be certain about anything, except probably, about superficial and mechanical things and even they fail. More or less, we can rely on outward things, like trains, to operate and be certain of them. Psychologically, inwardly, however much we may crave it, there's no certainty, no permanency; neither in our relationships, in our beliefs, in the gods of our brain. The intense longing for certainty, for some kind of permanency and the fact that there is no permanency whatsoever is the essence of conflict, illusion and reality. The power to create illusion is vastly more significant to understand than to understand reality. The power to breed illusion must cease completely, not to gain reality; there's no bargaining with fact. Reality is not a reward; the false must go, not to gain what's true but because it's false. Nor is there renunciation. 2nd It was a beautiful evening in the valley, along the stream, the green meadows, so rich in pasturage, the clean farm-houses and the rapturous clouds, so full of colour and clarity. There was one that hung over the mountain with such vivid brilliancy that it seemed to be the favourite of the sun. The valley was cool, pleasant and so intensely alive. There was a quietness about it and a peace. Modern farm machinery was there but they still used the scythe and the pressure and the brutality of civilization hadn't touched it. The heavy electric cables on pylons ran through the valley and they too seemed a part of that unsophisticated world. As we walked along the narrow grassy path through fields, the mountains, with their snow and colour, seemed so close and delicate, so utterly unreal. The goats were bleating to be milked. Quite unexpectedly, all this extravagant beauty, colour, the hills, this rich earth, this intense valley, all this was within one. It wasn't within one, one's own heart and brain were so completely open, without the barrier of time and space, so empty of thought and feeling, that there was only this beauty, without sound or form. It was there and everything else ceased to be. The immensity of this love, with beauty and death, was there filling the valley and one's whole being which was that valley. It was an extraordinary evening. There's no renunciation. What is given up is ever there and renunciation, giving up, sacrifice do not exist when there is understanding. Understanding is the very essence of non-conflict; renunciation is conflict. To give up is the action of will, which is born of choice and conflict. To give up is to exchange and in exchange there is no freedom but only more confusion and misery. * The friend he was staying with at Gstaad. ** The first of nine talks given at Saanen, the village next to Gstaad. *** The fourth talk at Saanen. **** The talk had been the day before. ***** This was the seventh talk. It was principally about meditation. ****** Presumably he had been walking with several friends. ******* The larger notebook begins here, giving the year for the first time. ******** This was the last talk. It was chiefly concerned with the religious mind. ********* The process is not mentioned again, though presumably it continued. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 4 PARIS 4TH SEPTEMBER TO 25TH SEPTEMBER 1961 Coming down from the valleys and high mountains into a big, noisy, dirty town affects the body.* It was a lovely day when we left, through deep valleys, waterfalls and deep woods to a blue lake and wide roads. It was a violent change from the peaceful, isolated place to a town that's noisy night and day, to a hot clammy air. Sitting quietly in the afternoon, looking over the roof-tops, watching the shape of roofs and their chimneys, most unexpectedly, that benediction, that strength, that otherness came with gentle clarity; it filled the room and remained. It is here as this is being written. 5th From the top of an eighth-floor window, the trees along the avenue were becoming yellow, russet and red in the midst of a long line of rich green. From this height the tops of the trees were brilliant in their colour and the roar of the traffic came up through them, somewhat softening the noise. There's only colour, not different colours; there's only love and not different expressions of it; the different categories of love are not love. When love is broken up into fragmentation, as divine and carnal, it ceases to be love. Jealousy is the smoke that smothers the fire, and passion becomes stupid without austerity, but there is no austerity if there is no self-abandonment, which is humility in utter simplicity. Looking down on that mass of colour, with different colours, there's only purity, however much it may be broken up; but impurity however much it may be changed, covered over, resisted, will always remain impure, like violence. Purity is not in conflict with impurity. Impurity can never become pure, any more than violence can become non-violence. Violence simply has to cease. There are two pigeons who have made their home under the slate roof across the courtyard. The female goes in first and then slowly, with great dignity, the male follows and then for the night they remain there; early this morning they came out, the male first and then the other. They stretched their wings, preened and lay down flat on the cold roof. Soon from nowhere other pigeons came, a dozen of them; they settled around these two, preening, cooing, pushing each other in a friendly way. Then, all of a sudden, they all flew away, except the first two. The sky was overcast, there were heavy clouds, full of light on the horizon and a long streak of blue sky. Meditation has no beginning and no end; in it there's no achievement and no failure, no gathering and no renunciation; it is a movement without finality and so beyond and above time and space. The experiencing of it is the denying of it, for the experiencer is bound to time and space, memory and recognition. The foundation for true meditation is that passive awareness which is the total freedom from authority and ambition, envy and fear. Meditation has no meaning, no significance whatsoever without this freedom, without self-knowing; as long as there's choice there's no self-knowing. Choice implies conflict which prevents the understanding of what is. Wandering off into some fancy, into some romantic beliefs, is not meditation; the brain must strip itself of every myth, illusion and security and face the reality of their falseness. There's no distraction, everything is in the movement of meditation. The flower is the form, the scent, the colour and the beauty that is the whole of it. Tear it to pieces actually or verbally, then there is no flower, only a remem- brance of what was, which is never the flower. Meditation is the whole flower in its beauty, withering and living. 6th The sun was just beginning to show through the clouds, early in the morning and the daily roar of traffic had not yet begun; it was raining and the sky was dull grey. On the little terrace the rain was beating down and the breeze was fresh. Standing in the shelter, watching a stretch of the river and the autumnal leaves, there came that otherness, like a flash and it remained for a while to be gone again. It's strange how very intense and actual it has become. It was as real as these roof-tops with hundreds of chimneys. In it there is a strange driving strength; because of its purity, it is strong, the strength of innocency which nothing can corrupt. And it was a benediction. Knowledge is destructive to discovery. Knowledge is always in time, in the past; it can never bring freedom. But knowledge is necessary, to act, to think, and without action existence is not possible. But action however wise, righteous and noble will not open the door to truth. There's no path to truth; it cannot be bought through any action nor through any refinement of thought. Virtue is only order in a disordered world and there must be virtue, which is a movement of non-conflict. But none of these will open the door to that immensity. The totality of consciousness must empty itself of all its knowledge, action and virtue; not empty itself for a purpose, to gain, to realize, to become. It must remain empty though functioning in the everyday world of thought and action. Out of this emptiness, thought and action must come. But this emptiness will not open the door. There must be no door nor any attempt to reach. There must be no centre in this emptiness, for this emptiness has no measurement; it's the centre that measures, weighs, calculates. This emptiness is beyond time and space; it's beyond thought and feeling. It comes as quietly, unobtrusively, as love; it has no beginning and end. It's there unalterable and immeasurable. 7th How important it is for the body to be in one place for a length of time; this constant travelling, change of climate, change of houses does affect the body; it has to adjust itself and during the period of adjustment nothing very "serious" can take place. And then one has to leave again. All this is a trial on the body. But this morning, on waking, early before the sun was up, when dawn had already come, in spite of the body, there was that strength with its intensity. It's curious how the body reacts to it; it has never been lazy, though often tired, but this morning, though the air was cold, it became or rather wanted to be active. Only when the brain is quiet, not asleep or sluggish but sensitive and alert, can the "otherness" come into being. It was altogether unexpected this morning for the body is still adjusting itself to new environment. The sun came up in a clear sky; you couldn't see it for there were many chimneys in the way but its radiance filled the sky; and the flowers on the little terrace seemed to come to life and their colour became more brilliant and intense. It was a beautiful morning full of light and the sky became a marvellous blue. Meditation included that blue and those flowers; they were part of it; they wound their way through it; they were not a distraction. There's no distraction really, for meditation is not concentration, which is exclusion, a cutting off, a resistance and so a conflict. A meditative mind can concentrate which then is not an exclusion, a resistance, but a concentrated mind cannot meditate. It's curious how all-important meditation becomes; there's no end to it nor is there a beginning to it. It's like a raindrop; in that drop are all the streams, the great rivers, the seas and the waterfalls; that drop nourishes the earth and man; without it, the earth would be a desert. Without meditation the heart becomes a desert, a wasteland. Meditation has its own movement; you can't direct it, shape it or force it, if you do, it ceases to be meditation. This movement ceases if you are merely an observer, if you are the experiencer. Meditation is the movement that destroys the observer, the experiencer; it's a movement that is beyond all symbol, thought and feeling. Its rapidity is not measurable. But the clouds were covering the sky and there was a battle going on between them and the wind, and the wind was conquering. There was a wide expanse of blue, so blue and the clouds were extravagant, full of light and darkness and those to the north seemed to have forgotten time, but space was theirs. In the park [the Champ de Mars] the ground was covered with autumn leaves and the pavement was full of them. It was a bright, fresh morning and the flowers were splendid in their summer colours. Beyond the huge, tall open tower [the Eiffel Tower], the main attraction, passed a funeral procession, the coffin and the hearse covered with flowers, followed by many cars. Even in death, we want to be important, to our vanity and pretence there is no end. Everyone wants to be somebody or be associated with someone who is somebody. Power and success, little or great, and recognized. Without recognition they have no meaning, recognized by the many or by the one who is dominated. Power is always respected and so is made respectable. Power is always evil, wielded by the politician or by the saint or by the wife over the husband. However evil it is, everyone craves for it, and those who have it want more of it. And that hearse with those gay flowers in the sun seems so far away and even death does not end power, for it continues in another. It's the torch of evil that continues from generation to generation. Few can put it aside, widely and freely, without looking back; they have no reward. Reward is success, the halo of recognition. Not to be recognized, failure long forgotten, being nobody when all striving and conflict has ceased, there comes a blessing which is not of the church nor of the gods of man. Children were calling and playing as the hearse passed by, never even looking at it, absorbed in their game and laughter. 8th Even the stars can be seen in this well-lighted town and there are other sounds than the roar of traffic - the cooing of pigeons and the chirping of sparrows; there are other smells than the monoxide gases - the smell of autumn leaves and the scent of flowers. There were a few stars in the sky and fleecy clouds early this morning and with them came that intense penetration into the depth of the unknown. The brain was still, so still it could hear the faintest noise and being still and so incapable of interfering, there was a movement which began from nowhere and went on, through the brain, into unknown depth where the word lost its meaning. It swept through the brain and went on beyond time and space. One is not describing a fantasy, a dream, an illusion but an actual fact which took place, but what took place is not the word or the description. There was a burning energy, a bursting immediate vitality and with it came this penetrating movement. It was like a tremendous wind, gathering strength and fury as it rushed along, destroying, purifying, leaving a vast emptiness. There was a complete awareness of the whole thing and there was great strength and beauty; not the strength and beauty that are put together but of something that was completely pure and incorruptible. It lasted by the watch ten minutes but it was something incalculable. The sun arose amidst a glory of clouds, fantastically alive and deep in colour. The roar of the town had not begun yet and the pigeons and sparrows were out. How curiously shallow the brain is; however subtle and deep thought is, it's nevertheless born of shallowness. Thought is bound by time and time is petty; it's this pettiness that perverts "seeing". Seeing is always instantaneous, as understanding, and the brain which is put together by time, prevents and also perverts seeing. Time and thought are inseparable; put an end to one, you put an end to the other. Thought cannot be destroyed by will for will is thought in action. Thought is one thing and the centre from which thought arises is another. Thought is the word and the word is the accumulation of memory, of experience. Without the word is there thought? There's a movement which is not word and it is not of thought. This movement can be described by thought but it is not of thought. This movement comes into being when the brain is still but active, and thought can never search out this movement. Thought is memory and memory is accumulated responses and so thought is always conditioned however much it may imagine it is free. Thought is mechanical, tied to the centre of its own knowledge. The distance thought covers depends on knowledge and knowledge is always the remains of yesterday, of the movement that's gone. Thought can project itself into the future but it is tied to yesterday. Thought builds its own prison and lives in it, whether it's in the future or in the past, gilded or plain. Thought can never be still, by its very nature it is restless, ever pushing and withdrawing. The machinery of thought is ever in motion, noisily or quietly, on the surface or hidden. It cannot wear itself out. Thought can refine itself, control its wanderings; can choose its own direction and conform to environment. Thought can not go beyond itself; it may function in narrow or wide fields but it will always be within the limitations of memory and memory is always limited. Memory must die psychologically, inwardly, but function only outwardly. Inwardly, there must be death and outwardly sensitivity to every challenge and response. The inward concern of thought prevents action. 9th To have such a beautiful day in town seems such a waste; there isn't a cloud in the sky, the sun is warm and the pigeons are warming themselves on the roof but the roar of the town goes on without pity. The trees feel the autumnal air and their leaves are turning, slowly and languidly, without care. The streets are crowded with people, always looking at shops, very few at the sky; they see each other as they pass by but they are concerned with themselves, how they look, what impression they give; envy and fear is always there in spite of their make-up, in spite of their polished appearance. The labourers are too tired, heavy and grumbling. And the massed trees against the wall of a museum seem so utterly sufficient to themselves; the river held in by cement and stone seems so utterly indifferent. The pigeons are plentiful, with a strutting dignity of their own. And so a day passed by on the street, in the office. It's a world of monotony and despair, with laughter that soon passes away. In the evening the monuments, the streets, are lit up but there's a vast emptiness and unbearable pain. There's a yellow leaf on the pavement, just fallen; it's still full of summer and though in death it's still very beautiful; not a part of it is withered, it has still the shape and grace of spring but it's yellow and will wither away by the evening. Early in the morning, when the sun was just showing itself in a clear sky, there was a flash of otherness, with its benediction and the beauty of it remains. It's not that thought has captured it and holds it but it has left its imprint on consciousness. Thought is always fragmentary and what it holds is always partial, as memory. It cannot observe the whole; the part cannot see the whole and the imprint of benediction is non-verbal and non-communicable through words, through any symbol. Thought will always fail in its attempt to discover, to experience that which is beyond time and space. The brain, the machinery of thought can be quiet; the very active brain can be quiet; its machinery can run very slowly. The quietness of the brain, though intensely sensitive, is essential; then only can thought disentangle itself and come to an end, The ending of thought is not death; then only can there be innocency, freshness; a new quality to thought. It's this quality that puts an end to sorrow and despair. 10th It's a morning without a cloud; the sun seems to have banished every cloud from sight. It is peaceful except for the roar of traffic, even though it is Sunday. The pigeons are warming themselves on the zinc roofs and are almost the same colour as the roof. There's not a breath of air, though it's cool and fresh. There's peace beyond thought and feeling. It's not the peace of the politician nor the priest nor of the one who seeks it. It is not to be sought. What is sought must already be known and what's known is never the real. Peace is not to the believer, to the philosopher who specializes in theory. It is not a reaction, a contrary response to violence. It has no opposite; all opposites must cease, the conflict of duality. There's duality, light and darkness, man and woman and so on but the conflict between the opposites is in no way necessary. Conflict between the opposites arises only when there's need, the compulsion to fulfil, the need for sex, the psychological demand for security. Then only is there conflict between the opposites; the escape from the opposites, attachment and detachment, is the search for peace through church and law. Law can and does give superficial order; the peace that church and temple offer is fancy, a myth to which a confused mind can escape. But this is not peace. The symbol, the word must be destroyed, not destroyed in order to have peace but they must be shattered for they are an impediment to understanding. Peace is not for sale, a commodity of exchange. Conflict, in every form, must cease and then perhaps it is there. There must be total negation, the cessation of demand and need; then only does conflict come to an end. In emptiness there is birth. All the inward structure of resistance and security must die away; then only is there emptiness. Only in this emptiness is there peace whose virtue has no value nor profit. It was there early in the morning, it came with the sun in a clear, opaque sky; it was a marvellous thing full of beauty, a benediction that asked nothing, no sacrifice, no disciple, no virtue, no midnight hour. It was there in abundance and only an abundant mind and heart could receive it. It was beyond all measure. 11th In the park it was crowded; everywhere there were people, children, nurses, different races, they were talking, shouting, playing and the fountains were going. The head gardener must have very good taste; there were so many flowers and so many colours all mixed together. It was quite spectacular and they had an air of gay festivity. It was a pleasant afternoon and everyone seemed to be out, in their best clothes. Going through the park, crossing a main thoroughfare, there was a quiet street with trees and old houses, well kept; the sun was just going down, setting fire to the clouds and to the river. It promised to be a nice day again tomorrow, and this morning, the early sun caught a few clouds, turning them bright pink and rose. It was a good hour to be quiet, to be meditative. Lethargy and quietness don't go together; to be quiet, there must be intensity and meditation, then it is not a meandering but very active and forceful. Meditation is not a pursuit of thought or idea; it is the essence of all thought, which is to be beyond all thought and feeling. Then it is a movement into the unknown. Intelligence is not the mere capacity of design, remembrance and communication; it is more than that. One can be very informed and clever at one level of existence and quite dull at other levels. There knowledge, however deep and wide, does not necessarily indicate intelligence. Capacity is not intelligence. Intelligence is sensitive awareness of the totality of life; life with its problems, contradictions, miseries, joys. To be aware of all this, without choice and without being caught by any one of its issues and to flow with the whole of life is intelligence. This intelligence is not the result of influence and environment; it is not the prisoner of either of them and so can understand them and thus be free of them. Consciousness is limited, open or hidden, and its activity, however alert, is confined within the borders of time; intellgence is not. Sensitive awareness, without choice, of the totality of life is intelligence. This intelligence cannot be used for gain and profit, personal or collective. This intelligence is destruction and so the form has no significance and reform then becomes a retrogression. Without destruction all change is modified continuity. Psychological destruction of all that has been, not mere outward change, that is the essence of intelligence. Without this intelligence every action leads to misery and confusion. Sorrow is the denial of this intelligence. Ignorance is not the lack of knowledge but of self-knowing; without self-knowing there is no intelligence. Self-knowing is not accumulative as knowledge; learning is from moment to moment. It is not an additive process; in the process of gathering, adding, a centre is formed, a centre of knowledge, of experience. In this process, positive or negative, there is no understanding, for as long as there is an intention of gathering or resisting, the movement of thought and feeling are not understood, there is no self-knowing. Without self-knowing there's no intelligence. Self-knowing is active present, not a judgment; all self-judgment implies an accumulation, evaluation from a centre of experience and knowledge. It is this past that prevents the understanding of the active present. In the pursuit of self-knowing there is intelligence. 12th A town is not a pleasant place, however beautiful the town is and this is. The clean river, the open spaces, the flowers, the noise, the dirt and the striking tower, the pigeons and the people, all this and the sky make for a pleasant town but it is not the country, the fields, the woods and the clear air; the country is always beautiful, so far away from all the smoke and the roar of traffic, so far away and there is the earth, so plentiful, so rich. Walking along the river, with the ceaseless roar of traffic, the river seemed to contain all the earth; though it was held by rock and cement, it was vast, it was the waters of every river from the mountains to the plains. It became the colour of the sunset, every colour that the eye had ever seen, so splendid and fleeting. The evening breeze was playing with everything and autumn was touching every leaf. The sky was so close, embracing the earth and there was peace past belief. And night came slowly. On waking this morning early, when the sun was below the horizon and dawn had begun, meditation yielded to that otherness whose benediction is clarity and strength. It was there last night as one was getting into bed, so unexpectedly, so clearly. One had not been with it for some days, the body was adjusting itself to the ways of the town, and so when it came, there was great intensity and beauty and everything became still; it was filling the room and far beyond the room. There was a certain rigidity, no, a certain immobility of the body, though relaxed. All during the night it must have gone on, for on waking it was there actively present, filling the room and beyond. All description of it is of no significance for the word can never cover the immensity nor the beauty of it. Everything ceases when that is, and strangely the brain with all its responses and activities, finds itself suddenly and voluntarily quiet, without a single response, without a single memory nor is there any recording of what is going on. It is very much alive but utterly quiet. It is too immense for any imagination, which is rather immature and silly anyway. What is actually, is so vital and significant that all imagination and illusion have lost their meaning. The understanding of need is of great significance. There is the outward need, necessary and essential, food, clothes and shelter; but beyond that is there any other need? Though each one is caught up in the turmoil of inward needs, are they essential? The need for sex, the need to fulfil, the compulsive urge of ambition, envy, greed, are they the way of life? Each one has made them the way of life for thousands of years; society and church respects and honours them greatly. Each one has accepted that way of life or, being so conditioned to that life, goes along with it, struggling feebly against the current, discouraged, seeking escapes. And escapes become more significant than the reality. The psychological needs are a defensive mechanism against something much more significant and real. The need to fulfil, to be important springs from the fear of something which is there but not experienced, known. Fulfilment and self importance, in the name of one's country or party or because of some gratifying belief, are escapes from the fact of one's own nothingness, emptiness, loneliness, of one's own self-isolating activities. The inward needs which seem to have no end multiply, change and continue. This is the source of contradictory and burning desire. Desire is always there; the objects of desire change, diminish or multiply but it is always there. Controlled, tortured, denied, accepted, suppressed, allowed to run freely or cut off, it is always there, feeble or strong. What is wrong with desire? Why this incessant war against it? It is disturbing, painful, leading to confusion and sorrow but yet it is there, always there, weak or rich. To understand it completely, not to suppress it, not to discipline it out of all recognition is to understand need. Need and desire go together, like fulfilment and frustration. There's no noble or ignoble desire but only desire, ever in conflict within itself. The hermit and the party boss are burning with it, call it by different names but it is there, eating away the heart of things. When there is total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has quite a different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame life itself is lost. It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will - love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end. 13th It was a strange day yesterday. That otherness was there all day yesterday, on the short walk, while resting and very intensely during the talk.** It was persistently there most of the night, and this morning, waking early, after little sleep, it continued. The body is too tired and needs rest. Strangely, the body becomes very quiet, very still, motionless but every inch of it very alive and sensitive. As far as the eye can see, there are short small chimneys, all without smoke for the weather is very warm; the horizon is far away, uneven, cluttered up; the town seems to stretch far out endlessly. Along the avenue there are trees, waiting for winter, for autumn is slowly beginning already. The sky was silver, polished and bright and the breeze made patterns on the river. Pigeons stirred early in the morning and as the sun made the zinc roofs warm they were there warming themselves. Mind, in which are the brain, thought, feeling and every subtle emotion, fancy and imagination, is an extraordinary thing. All its contents do not make up the mind and yet without them, it is not; it is more than what it contains. Without the mind the contents would not be; they exist because of it. In the total emptiness of the mind, intellect, thought, feeling, all consciousness have their existence. A tree is not the word, nor the leaf, the branch or the roots; the whole of it is the tree and yet it is none of these things. Mind is that emptiness in which the things of the mind can exist but the things are not the mind. Because of this emptiness time and space come into being. But the brain and the things of the brain cover a whole field of existence; it is occupied with its multiple problems. It cannot capture the nature of the mind, as it functions only in fragmentation and the many fragments do not make the whole. And yet it is occupied with putting together the contradictory fragments to make the whole. The whole can never be gathered and put together. The activity of memory, knowledge in action, the conflict of opposing desire, the search for freedom are still within the confines of the brain; the brain can refine, enlarge, accumulate its desires but sorrow will go on. There's no ending of sorrow as long as thought is merely a response of memory, of experience. There's a "thinking" born out of the total emptiness of the mind; that emptiness has no centre and so is capable of infinite movement. Creation is born out of this emptiness but it is not the creation of man putting things together. That creation of emptiness is love and death. Again, it has been a strange day. That otherness has been present wherever one has been, whatever the daily activity. It is as though one's brain was living in it; the brain has been very quiet without going to sleep, sensitive and alert. There's a sense of watching from infinite depth. Though the body is tired, there's a peculiar alertness. A flame that is always burning. 14th It has been raining all night and it is pleasant after many weeks of sun and dust. The earth has been dry, parched and there were cracks; heavy dust covered the leaves and lawns were being watered. In a crowded and dirty city, so many days of sun was unpleasant; the air was heavy and now it has been raining for many hours. Only the pigeons don't like it; they take shelter where they can, depressed and have stopped cooing. The sparrows used to take their bath wherever there was water with the pigeons and now they are hidden away somewhere; they used to come on the terrace, shy and eager but the driving rain has taken over and the earth is wet. Again, most of the night, that blessing, that otherness was there; though there was sleep, it was there; one felt it on waking, strong, persistent, urgent; it was here, as though it had continued throughout the night. With it, there is always great beauty, not of images, feeling or thought. Beauty is neither thought nor feeling; it has nothing whatsoever to do with emotion or sentiment. There is fear. Fear is never an actuality; it is either before or after the active present. When there is fear in the active present, is it fear? It is there and there is no escape from it, no evasion possible. There, at that actual moment, there is total attention at the moment of danger, physical or psychological. When there is complete attention there is no fear. But the actual fact of inattention breeds fear; fear arises when there is an avoidance of the fact, a flight; then the very escape itself is fear. Fear and its many forms, guilt, anxiety, hope, despair, is there in every movement of relationship; it is there in every search for security; it is there in so-called love and worship; it is there in ambition and success; it is there in life and in death; it is there in physical things and in psychological factors. There is fear in so many forms and at all the levels of our consciousness. Defence, resistance and denial spring from fear. Fear of the dark and fear of light; fear of going and fear of coming. Fear begins and ends with the desire to be secure; inward and outward security, with the desire to be certain, to have permanency. The continuity of permanence is sought in every direction, in virtue, in relationship, in action, in experience, in knowledge, in outward and inward things. To find and be secure is the everlasting cry. It is this insistent demand that breeds fear. But is there permanency, outwardly or inwardly? Perhaps in a measure, outwardly there might be, and even that is precarious; wars, revolutions, progress, accident and earthquakes. There must be food, clothes and shelter; that is essential and necessary for all. Though it is sought after, blindly and with reason, is there ever inward certainty, inward continuity, permanency? There is not. The flight from this reality is fear. The incapacity to face this reality breeds every form of hope and despair. Thought itself is the source of fear. Thought is time; thought of tomorrow is pleasure or pain; if it's pleasurable, thought will pursue it, fearing its end; if it's painful, the very avoidance of it is fear. Both pleasure and pain cause fear. Time as thought and time as feeling bring fear. It is the understanding of thought, the mechanism of memory and experience, that is the ending of fear. Thought is the whole process of consciousness, the open and the hidden; thought is not merely the thing thought upon but the origin of itself. Thought is not merely belief, dogma, idea and reason but the centre from which these arise. This centre is the origin of all fear. But is there the experiencing of fear or is there the awareness of the cause of fear from which thought is taking flight? Physical self-protection is sane, normal and healthy but every other form of self-protection, inwardly, is resistance and it always gathers, builds up strength which is fear. But this inward fear makes outward security a problem of class, prestige, power, and so there is competitive ruthlessness. When this whole process of thought, time and fear is seen, not as an idea, an intellectual formula, then there is total ending of fear, conscious or hidden. Self-understanding is the awakening and ending of fear. And when fear ceases, then the power to breed illusion, myth, visions, with their hope and despair also ceases, and then only begins a movement of going beyond consciousness, which is thought and feeling. It is the emptying of the innermost recesses and deep hidden wants and desires. Then when there is this total emptiness, when there is absolutely and literally nothing, no influence, no value, no frontier, no word, then in that complete stillness of time-space, there is that which is unnameable. 15th It was a lovely evening, the sky was clear and in spite of city light, the stars were brilliant; though the tower was flooded with light from all sides, one could see the distant horizon and down below patches of light were on the river; though there was the everlasting roar of traffic, it was a peaceful evening. Meditation crept on one like a wave covering the sands. It was not a meditation which the brain could capture in its net of memory; it was something to which the total brain yielded without any resistance. It was a meditation that went far beyond any formula, method; method and formula and repetition destroy meditation. In its movement it took everything in, the stars, the noise, the quiet and the stretch of water. But there was no meditator; the meditator, the observer must cease for meditation to be. The breaking up of the meditator is also meditation; but when the meditator ceases then there's an altogether different meditation. It was very early in the morning; Orion was coming up over the horizon and the Pleiades were nearly overhead. The roar of the city had quietened and at that hour there were no lights in any of the windows and there was a pleasant, cool breeze. In complete attention there is no experiencing. In inattention there is; it is this inattention that gathers experience, multiplying memory, building walls of resistance; it is this inattention that builds up the self-centred activities. Inattention is concentration, which is exclusion, a cutting off; concentration knows distraction and the endless conflict of control and discipline. In the state of inattention, every response to any challenge is inadequate; this inadequacy is experience. Experience makes for insensitivity; dulls the mechanism of thought; thickens the walls of memory, and habit, routine, become the norm. Experience, inattention, is not liberating. Inattention is slow decay. In complete attention there is no experiencing; there's no centre which experiences, nor a periphery within which experience can take place. Attention is not concentration which is narrowing, limiting. Total attention includes, never excludes. Superficiality of attention is inattention; total attention includes the superficial and the hidden, the past and its influence on the present, moving into the future. All consciousness is partial, confined, and total attention includes consciousness, with its limitations and so is able to break down the borders, the limitations. All thought is conditioned and thought cannot uncondition itself. Thought is time and experience; it is essentially the result of non-attention. What brings about total attention? Not any method nor any system; they bring about a result, promised by them. But total attention is not a result, any more than love is; it cannot be induced, it cannot be brought about by any action. Total attention is the negation of the results of inattention but this negation is not the act of knowing attention. What is false must be denied not because you already know what is true; if you knew what is true the false would not exist. The true is not the opposite of the false; love is not the opposite of hate. Because you know hate, you do not know love. Denial of the false, denial of the things of non-attention is not the outcome of the desire to achieve total attention. Seeing the false as the false and the true as the true and the true in the false is not the result of comparison. To see the false as the false is attention. The false as the false cannot be seen when there is opinion, judgment, evaluation, attachment and so on, which are the result of non-attention. Seeing the whole fabric of non-attention is total attention. An attentive mind is an empty mind. The purity of the otherness is its immense and impenetrable strength. And it was there with extraordinary stillness this morning. 16th It was a clear bright evening; there wasn't a cloud. It was so lovely that it was surprising that such an evening should happen in a town. The moon was between the arches of the tower and the whole setting seemed so artificial and unreal. The air was so soft and pleasant that it might have been a summer's evening. On the balcony it was very quiet and every thought had subsided and meditation seemed a casual movement, without any direction. But there was, though. It began nowhere and went on into vast, unfathomable emptiness where the essence of everything is. In this emptiness there is an expanding, exploding movement whose very explosion is creation and destruction. Love is the essence of this destruction. Either we seek through fear or being free from it, we seek without any motive. This search does not spring from discontent; not being satisfied with every form of thought and feeling, seeing their significance, is not discontent. Discontent is so easily satisfied when thought and feeling have found some form of shelter, success, a gratifying position, a belief and so on, only to be roused again when that shelter is attacked, shaken or broken down. With this cycle most of us are familiar, hope and despair. Search, whose motive is discontent, can only lead to some form of illusion, a collective or a private illusion, a prison of many attractions. But there is a seeking without any motive whatsoever; then is it a seeking? Seeking implies, does it not, an objective, an end already known or felt or formulated. If it's formulated it's the calculation of thought, putting together all the things it has known or experienced; to find what is sought after methods and systems are devised. This is not seeking at all; it is merely a desire to gain a gratifying end or merely to escape into some fancy or promise of a theory or belief. This is not seeking. When fear, satisfaction, escape have lost their significance, then is there seeking at all? If the motive of all search has withered away, discontent and the urge to succeed are dead; is there seeking? If there is no seeking, will consciousness decay, become stagnant? On the contrary, it is this seeking, going from one commitment to another, from one church to another, that weakens that essential energy to understand what is. The "what is" is ever new; it has never been and it will never be. The release of this energy is only possible when every form of search ceases. It was a cloudless morning, so early and time seemed to have stopped. It was four-thirty but time seemed to have lost its entire meaning. It was as though there was no yesterday or tomorrow or the next moment. Time stood still and life without a shadow went on; life without thought and feeling went on. The body was there on the terrace, the high tower with its flashing warning light was there and the countless chimneys; the brain saw all these but it went no further. Time as measure, and time as thought and feeling had stopped. There was no time; every movement had stopped but there was nothing static. On the contrary there was an extraordinary intensity and sensitivity, a fire that was burning, without heat and colour. Overhead were the Pleiades and lower down towards the east was Orion and the morning star was over the top of the roofs. And with this fire there was joy, bliss. It wasn't that one was joyous but there was ecstasy. There was no identification with it, there couldn't be for time had ceased. That fire could not identify itself with anything nor be in relationship with anything. It was there for time had stopped. And dawn was coming and Orion and the Pleiades faded away and presently the morning star too went its way. 17th It had been a hot, smothering day and even the pigeons were hiding and the air was hot and in a city it was not at all pleasant. It was a cool night and the few stars that were visible were bright, even the city lights couldn't dim them. They were there with amazing intensity. It was a day of the otherness; it went on quietly all day and at moments it flared up, became very intense and became quiet again, to go on quietly.*** It was there with such intensity that all movement became impossible; one was forced to sit down. On waking in the middle of the night it was there with great force and energy. On the terrace, with the roar of the city not so insistent, every form of meditation became inadequate and unnecessary for it was there in full measure. It's a benediction and everything seems rather silly and infantile. On these occasions, the brain is always very quiet but in no way asleep and the whole of the body becomes motionless. It is a strange affair. How little one changes. Through some form of compulsion, pressure, outward and inner, one changes, which is really an adjustment. Some influence, a word, a gesture, makes one change the pattern of habit but not very much. Propaganda, a newspaper, an incident does alter, to some extent, the course of life. Fear and reward break down the habit of thought only to reform into another pattern. A new invention, a new ambition, a new belief does bring about certain changes. But all these changes are on the surface, like strong wind on water; they are not fundamental, deep, devastating. All change that comes through motive, is no change at all. Economic, social revolution is a reaction and any change brought about through reaction is not a radical change; it is only a change in pattern. Such change is merely adjustment, a mechanical affair of desire for comfort, security, mere physical survival. Then what brings about fundamental mutation? Consciousness, the open and the hidden, the whole machinery of thought, feeling, experience, is within the borders of time and space. It is an indivisible whole; the division, conscious and hidden, is there only for the convenience of communication but the division is not factual. The upper level of consciousness can and does modify itself, adjust itself, change itself, reform itself, acquire new knowledge, technique; it can change itself to conform to a new social, economic pattern but such changes are superficial and brittle. The unconscious, the hidden, can and does intimate and hint through dreams its compulsions, its demands, its stored-up desires. Dreams need interpretations but the interpreter is always conditioned. There is no need for dreams if during the waking hours there is a choiceless awareness in which every fleeting thought and feeling is understood; then sleep has altogether a different meaning. Analysis of the hidden implies the observer and the observed, the censor and the thing that is judged. In this there is not only conflict but the observer himself is conditioned and his evaluation, interpretation, can never be true; it will be crooked, perverted. So self-analysis or an analysis by another, however professional, may bring about some superficial changes, an adjustment in relationship and so on but analysis will not bring about a radical transformation of consciousness. Analysis does not transform consciousness. 18th The late afternoon sun was on the river and among the russet leaves of autumnal trees along the long avenue; the colours were burning intensely and of such variety; the narrow water was aflame. A whole long queue was waiting along the wharf to take the pleasure boat and the cars were making an awful noise. On a hot day the big town was almost unbearable; the sky was clear and the sun was without mercy. But very early this morning when Orion was overhead and only one or two cars passed along the river, there was on the terrace quietness and meditation with a complete openness of mind and heart, verging on death. To be completely open, to be utterly vulnerable is death. Death then has no corner to take shelter; only in the shade, in the secret recesses of thought and desire there is death. But death is always there to a heart that has withered in fear and hope; is always there where thought is waiting and watching. In the park an owl was hooting and it was a pleasant sound, clear and so early; it came and went with varied intervals and it seemed to like its own voice for not another replied. Meditation breaks down the frontiers of consciousness; it breaks down the mechanism of thought and the feeling which thought arouses. Meditation caught in a method, in a system of rewards and promises, cripples and tames energy. Meditation is the freeing of energy in abundance, and control, discipline and suppression spoil the purity of that energy. Meditation is the flame burning intensely without leaving any ashes. Words, feeling, thought, always leave ashes and to live on ashes is the way of the world. Meditation is danger for it destroys everything, nothing whatsoever is left, not even a whisper of desire, and in this vast, unfathomable emptiness there is creation and love. To continue - analysis, personal or professional, does not bring about mutation of consciousness. No effort can transform it; effort is conflict and conflict only strengthens the walls of consciousness. No reason, however logical and sane, can liberate consciousness, for reason is idea wrought by influence, experience and knowledge and all these are the children of consciousness, When all this is seen as false, a false approach to mutation, the denial of the false is the emptying of consciousness. Truth has no opposite nor has love; the pursuit of the opposite does not lead to truth, only the denial of the opposite. There is no denial if it is the outcome of hope or of attaining. There is denial only when there is no reward or exchange. There is renunciation only when there is no gain in the act of renouncing. Denial of the false is the freedom from the positive; the positive with its opposite. The positive is authority with its acceptance, conformity, imitation, and experience with its knowledge. To deny is to be alone; alone from all influence, tradition and from need, with its dependence and attachment. To be alone is to deny the conditioning, the background. The frame in which consciousness exists and has its being is its conditioning; to be choicelessly aware of this conditioning and the total denial of it is to be alone. This aloneness is not isolation, loneliness, self-enclosing occupation. Aloneness is not withdrawal from life; on the contrary it is the total freedom from conflict and sorrow, from fear and death. This aloneness is the mutation of consciousness; complete transformation of what has been. This aloneness is emptiness, it is not the positive state of being, nor the not being. It is emptiness; in this fire of emptiness the mind is made young, fresh and innocent. It is innocency alone that can receive the timeless, the new which is ever destroying itself. Destruction is creation. Without love, there is no destruction. Beyond the enormous sprawling town were the fields, woods and hills. 19th Is there a future? There is a tomorrow, already planned; certain things that have to be done; there is also the day after tomorrow, with all the things that are to be done; next week and next year. These cannot be altered, perhaps modified or changed altogether but the many tomorrows are there; they cannot be denied. And there is space, from here to there, near and far; the distance in kilometres; space between entities; the distance which thought covers in a flash; the other side of the river and the distant moon. Time to cover space, distance, and time to cross over the river; from here to there, time is necessary to cover that space, it may take a minute, a day or a year. This time is by the sun and by the watch, time is a means to arrive. This is fairly simple and clear. Is there a future apart from this mechanical, chronological time? Is there an arriving, is there an end for which time is necessary? The pigeons were on the roof, so early in the morning; they were cooing, preening and pursuing each other. The sun wasn't up yet and there were a few vapourous clouds, scattered all over the sky; they had no colour yet and the roar of traffic had not yet begun. There was plenty of time yet for the usual noises to begin and beyond all these walls were the gardens. In the evening yesterday, the grass where no one is allowed to walk except of course the pigeons and a few sparrows, was very green, startlingly green and the flowers were very bright. Everywhere else was man with his activities and interminable work. There was the tower, so strongly and delicately put together, and presently it would be flooded with brilliant light. The grass seemed so perishable and the flowers would fade, for autumn was everywhere. But long before the pigeons were on the roof, on the terrace meditation was gladness. There was no reason for this ecstasy - to have a cause for joy is no longer joy; it was simply there and thought could not capture it and make it into a remembrance. It was too strong and active for thought to play with it and thought and feeling became very quiet and still. It came wave upon wave, a living thing which nothing could contain and with this joy there was benediction. It was all so utterly beyond all thought and demand. Is there an arriving? To arrive is to be in sorrow and within the shadow of fear. Is there an arriving inwardly, a goal to be reached, an end to be gained? Thought has fixed an end, God, bliss, success, virtue and so on. But thought is only a reaction, a response of memory and thought breeds time to cover the space between what is and what should be. The what should be, the ideal, is verbal, theoretical; it has no reality. The actual has no time; it has no end to achieve, no distance to travel. The fact is and everything else is not. There is no fact if there's not death to ideal, to achievement, to an end; the ideal, the goal are an escape from the fact. The fact has no time and no space. And then is there death? There is a withering away; the machinery of the physical organism deteriorates, gets worn out which is death. But that is inevitable, as the lead of this pencil will wear out. Is that what causes fear? Or the death of the world of becoming, gaining, achieving? That world has no validity; it's the world of make-believe, of escape. The fact, the what is, and the what should be are two entirely different things. The what should be involves time and distance, sorrow and fear. Death of these leaves only the fact, the what is. There is no future to what is; thought, which breeds time, cannot operate on the fact; thought cannot change the fact, it can only escape from it and when all the urge to escape is dead, then the fact undergoes a tremendous mutation. But there must be death to thought which is time. When time as thought is not, then is there the fact, the what is? When there is destruction of time, as thought, there's no movement in any direction, no space to cover, there's only the stillness of emptiness. This is total destruction of time as yesterday, today and tomorrow, as the memory of continuity, of becoming. Then being is timeless, only the active present but that present is not of time. It is attention without the frontiers of thought and the borders of feeling. Words are used to communicate and words, symbols, have no significance in themselves whatsoever. Life is always the active present; time always belongs to the past and so to the future. And death to time is life in the present. It is this life that is immortal, not the life in consciousness. Time is thought in consciousness and consciousness is held within its frame. There is always fear and sorrow within the network of thought and feeling. The ending of sorrow is the ending of time. 20th It had been a very hot day and in that hot hall with a large crowd, it was suffocating. **** But in spite of all this and tiredness, woke up in the middle of the night, with the otherness in the room. It was there with great intensity, not only filling the room and beyond but it was there deep down within the brain, so profoundly that it seemed to go through and beyond all thought, space and time. It was incredibly strong, with such energy that it was impossible to be in bed, and on the terrace, with fresh, cool wind blowing, the intensity of it continued. It went on for nearly an hour, with great force and drive; all the morning it had been there. It is not a make-believe, it's not desire taking this form of sensation, excitement; thought has not built it up from past incidents; no imagination could formulate such otherness. Strangely every time this takes place, it's something totally new, unexpected and sudden. Thought, having tried, realizes that it cannot recall what had taken place at other times nor can it awaken the memory of what had taken place this morning. It is beyond all thought, desire and imagination. It is too vast for thought or desire to conjure it up; it is too immense for the brain to bring it about. It's not an illusion. The strange part of all this is that one's not even concerned about all this; if it comes, it is there, without invitation, and if it doesn't, there is an indifference. The beauty and the strength of it is not to be played with; there's no invitation or denial of it. It comes and goes, as it will. Early this morning, somewhat before sunrise, meditation, in which every kind of effort has long ago ceased, became a silence, a silence in which there was no centre and so no periphery. It was just silence. It had no quality, no movement, neither depth nor height. It was completely still. It is this stillness that had movement expanding endlessly and the measurement of it was not in time and space. This stillness was exploding, ever moving away. But it had no centre; if there was a centre, it would not be stillness, it would be stagnant decay; it had nothing whatsoever to do with the intricacies of the brain. The quality of the stillness which the brain can bring about, is entirely different, in every way, from the stillness that was there this morning. It was a stillness that nothing could disturb, for it had no resistance; everything was in it and it was beyond everything. The early morning traffic of lorries bringing foodstuff and other things to the town, in no way disturbed that stillness nor the revolving beams of light from the high tower. It was there, without time. As the sun rose, a magnificent cloud caught it, sending streaks of blue light across the sky. It was light playing with darkness and the play went on till the fantastic cloud went down behind the thousand chimneys. How curiously petty the brain is, however intelligently educated and learned. It will always remain petty, do what it will; it can go to the moon and beyond or go down into the deepest parts of the earth; it can invent, put together the most complicated machines, computers that will invent computers; it can destroy itself and recreate itself but do what it will, it will ever remain petty. For it can only function in time and space; its philosophies are bound by its own conditioning; its theories, its speculations, are spun out of its own cunningness. It cannot escape from itself, do what it will. Its gods and its saviours, its masters and leaders are as small and petty as itself. If it's stupid, it tries to become clever and its cleverness is measured in terms of success. It is always pursuing or being chased. Its shadow is its own sorrow. Do what it will, it will ever remain petty. Its action is the inaction of pursuing itself; its reform is action that ever needs further reform. It is held by its own action and inaction. It never sleeps and its dreams are the awakening of thought. However active, however noble or ignoble, it is petty. There is no end to its pettiness. It cannot run away from itself; its virtue is mean and its morality mean. There is only one thing it can do - be utterly and completely quiet. This quietness is not sleep or laziness. The brain is sensitive and to remain sensitive, with its familiar self-protective responses, without its customary judgments, condemnation and approval, the only thing it can do is to be utterly quiet, which is to remain in a state of negation, complete denial of itself and its activities. In this state of negation, it's no longer petty; then it is no longer gathering to achieve, to fulfil, to become. It is then what it is, mechanical, inventive, self-protective, calculating. A perfect machine is never petty and when it functions at that level it is a wonderful thing. Like all machines, it wears out and dies. It becomes petty when it proceeds to investigate the unknown, that which is not measurable. Its function is in the known and it cannot function in the unknown. Its creations are in the field of the known but the creation of the unknowable it can never capture, neither in paint nor in word; its beauty it can never know. Only when it is utterly quiet, silent without a word and still without a gesture, without movement, there is that immensity. 21st The evening light was on the river and the traffic across the bridge was furious and fast. The pavement was crowded with people returning home after a day's work in offices. The river was sparkling; there were ripples, small ones pursuing each other, with such delight. You could almost hear them but the fury of the traffic was too much. Further down the river the light on the water was changing, becoming more deep and it would soon be dark. The moon was on the other side of the huge tower, looking so out of place, so artificial; it had no reality but the high steel tower had; there were people on it; the restaurant up there was lit up and you could see crowds of people going into it. And as the night was hazy, the beams of the revolving lights were far stronger than the moon. Everything seemed so far away except the tower. How little we know about ourselves. We seem to know so much about other things, the distance to the moon, the atmosphere of Venus, how to put together the most extraordinary and complicated electronic brains, to break up the atoms and the minutest particle of matter. But we know so little about ourselves. To go to the moon is far more exciting than to go into ourselves; perhaps one's lazy or frightened, or it's not profitable, in the sense of money and success, to go into ourselves. It's a much longer journey than to go to the moon; no machines are available to take this journey and no one can help, no book, no theories, no guide. You have to do it yourself. You have to have much more energy than in inventing and putting together parts of a vast machine. You cannot get this energy through any drug, through any interaction of relationship nor through control, denial. No gods, rituals, beliefs, prayers can give it to you. On the contrary, in the very act of putting these aside, in being aware of their significance, that energy comes to penetrate into consciousness and beyond. You can't buy that energy through accumulating knowledge about yourself. Every form of accumulation and the attachment to it, diminishes and perverts that energy. Knowledge about yourself binds, weighs, ties you down; there's no freedom to move, and you act and move within the limits of that knowledge. Learning about yourself is never the same as accumulating knowledge about yourself. Learning is active present and knowledge is the past; if you are learning in order to accumulate, it ceases to be learning; knowledge is static, more can be added to it or taken away from it, but learning is active, nothing can be added or taken away from it for there is no accumulation at any time. Knowing, learning about yourself has no beginning and no end, whereas knowledge has. Knowledge is finite, and learning, knowing, is infinite. You are the accumulated result of the many thousand centuries of man, his hopes and desires, his guilts and anxieties, his beliefs and gods, his fulfilments and frustrations; you are all that and more additions made to it in recent times. Learning about all this, deep down and on the surface, is not mere verbal or intellectual statements of the obvious, the conclusions. Learning is the experiencing of these facts, emotionally and directly; to come into contact with them not theoretically, verbally, but actually, like a hungry man. Learning is not possible if there's a learner; the learner is the accumulated, the past, the knowledge. There is a division between the learner and the thing he is learning about and so there is conflict between them. This conflict destroys, diminishes energy to learn, to pursue to the very end the total make-up of consciousness. Choice is conflict and choice prevents seeing; condemnation, judgment also prevent seeing. When this fact is seen, understood, not verbally, theoretically, but actually seen as fact, then learning is a moment to moment affair. And there is no end to learning; learning is all important, not the failures, successes and mistakes. There is only seeing and not the seer and the thing seen. Consciousness is limited; its very nature is restriction; it functions within the frame of its own existence, which is experience, knowledge, memory. Learning about this conditioning breaks down the frame; then thought and feeling have their limited function; they then cannot interfere with the wider and deeper issues of life. Where the self ends, with all its secret and open intrigues, its compulsive urges and demands, its joys and sorrows, there begins a movement of life that is beyond time and its bondage. 22nd There is a little bridge across the river only meant for people; it is fairly quiet there. The river was full of light and a big barge was going up, full of sand brought from the beaches; it was fine, clean sand. There was a heap of it in the park, purposely put there for children to play with. There were several and they were making deep tunnels, a big castle with a moat around it; they were having great fun. It was a pleasant day, fairly cool, the sun not too strong and there was dampness in the air; more trees were turning brown and yellow and there was the smell of autumn. The trees were getting ready for the winter; many branches were already naked, black against the pale sky; every tree had its own pattern of colour, in varying strength, from the russet brown to pale yellow. Even in dying they were beautiful. It was a pleasant evening full of light and peace, in spite of the roar of the traffic. There are a few flowers on the terrace, and this morning, the yellow ones were more bright and eager than ever; in the early morning light they seemed more awake and had more colour, much more so than their neighbours. The east was beginning to get brighter and there was that otherness in the room; it had been there for some hours. On waking in the middle of the night, it was there, something wholly objective which no thought or imagination could possibly bring about. Again, on waking the body was perfectly still, without any movement as was also the brain. The brain was not dormant but very much awake, watching without any interpretation. It was the strength of unapproachable purity, with an energy that was startling. It was there, ever new, ever penetrating. It wasn't just outside there in the room or on the terrace, it was inside and outside but there was no division. It was something in which the whole mind and heart were caught up and the mind and heart ceased to be. There is no virtue, only humility; where it is, there is all virtue. Social morality is not virtue; it is merely an adjustment to a pattern and that pattern varies and changes according to time and climate. It is made respectable by society and organized religion, but it is not virtue. Morality, as recognized by church, society, is not virtue; morality is put together, it conforms; it can be taught and practised; It can be brought about through reward and punishment, through compulsion. Influence shapes morality as does propaganda. In the structure of society there are varying degrees of morality, of different shades. But it is not virtue. Virtue is not of time and influence; it cannot be cultivated; it is not the result of control and discipline; it is no a result at all as it has no cause. It cannot be made respectable. Virtue is not divisible as goodness, charity, brotherly love and so on. It is not the product of an environment, of social affluence or poverty nor of the monastery nor of any dogma. It is not born out of a cunning brain; it is not the outcome of thought and emotion; nor is it a revolt against social morality, with its respectability; a revolt is a reaction and a reaction is a modified continuity of what has been. Humility cannot be cultivated; when it is, it is pride taking on the cloak of humility which has become respectable. Vanity can never become humility, any more than love can become hate. Violence cannot become non-violence; violence has to cease. Humility is not an ideal to be pursued; ideals have no reality; only what is has reality. Humility is not the opposite of pride; it has no opposite. All opposites are interrelated and humility has no relationship with pride. Pride has to end, not by any decision or discipline or for some profit; it ceases only in the flame of attention, not in the contradiction and confusion of concentration. To see pride, outwardly and inwardly, in its many forms, is the ending of it. To see it is to be attentive to every movement of pride; in attention there is no choice. There is attention only in the active present; it cannot be trained; if it is, then it becomes another cunning faculty of the brain and humility is not its product. There is attention when the brain is utterly still, alive and sensitive, but still. There is no centre from which to attend whereas concentration has a centre, with its exclusions. Attention, the complete and instant seeing of the whole significance of pride, ends pride. This awakened "state" is humility. Attention is virtue, for in it flowers goodness and charity. Without humility there is no virtue. 23rd It was hot and rather oppressive, even in the gardens; it had been so hot for so long which was unusual. A good rain and cool weather will be pleasant. In the gardens they were watering the grass and in spite of the heat and lack of rain the grass was bright and sparkling and the flowers were splendid; there were some trees in flower, out of season, for winter will be here soon. Pigeons were all over the place, shyly avoiding the children and some of the children were chasing them for fun and the pigeons knew it. The sun was red in a dull, heavy sky; there was no colour except in the flowers and in the grass. The river was opaque and indolent. Meditation at that hour was freedom and it was like entering into an unknown world of beauty and quietness; it is a world without image, symbol or word, without waves of memory. Love was the death of every minute and each death was the renewing of love. It was not attachment, it had no roots; it flowered without cause and it was a flame that burned away the borders, the carefully built fences of consciousness. It was beauty beyond thought and feeling; it was not put together on canvas, in words or in marble. Meditation was joy and with it came a benediction. It's very odd how each one craves power, the power of money, position, capacity, knowledge. In gaining power, there's conflict, confusion and sorrow. The hermit and the politician, the housewife and the scientist are seeking it. They will kill and destroy each other to get it. The ascetics through self-denial, control, suppression gain that power; the politician by his word, capacity, cleverness derives that power; the domination of the wife over the husband and he over her feel this power; the priest who has assumed, who has taken upon himself the responsibility of his god, knows this power. Everyone seeks this power or wants to be associated with divine or worldly power. Power breeds authority and with it comes conflict, confusion and sorrow. Authority corrupts him that has it and those that are near it or seeking it. The power of the priest and the housewife, of the leader and the efficient organizer, of the saint and the local politician is evil; the more power the greater the evil. It is a disease that every man catches and cherishes and worships. But with it comes always endless conflict, confusion and sorrow. But no one will deny it, put it aside. With it goes ambition and success and a ruthlessness that has been made respectable and so acceptable. Every society, temple and church gives it its blessing and so love is perverted and destroyed. And envy is worshipped and competition is moral. But with it all comes fear, war and sorrow, but yet no man will put these aside. To deny power, in every form, is the beginning of virtue; virtue is clarity; it wipes away conflict and sorrow. This corrupting energy, with its endless cunning activities, always brings its inevitable mischief and misery; there is no end to it; however much it is reformed and fenced in, by law or by moral convention, it will find its way out, darkly and unbidden. For it is there, hidden in the secret corners of one's thoughts and desires. It is these that must be examined and understood if there is to be no conflict, confusion and sorrow. Each one has to do this, not through another, not through any system of reward or punishment. Each one has to be aware of the fabric of his own make-up. To see what is, is the ending of that which is. With the complete ending of this power, with its confusion, conflict and sorrow, each one faces what he is, a bundle of memories and deepening loneliness. The desire for power and success are an escape from this loneliness and the ashes which are memories. To go beyond, one has to see them, face them, not avoid them in any way, by condemning or through fear of what is. Fear arises only in the very act of running away from the fact, the what is. One must completely and utterly, voluntarily and easily put aside power and success and then in facing, seeing, being passively aware, without choice, the ashes and loneliness have a wholly different significance. To live with something is to love it, not to be attached. To live with the ashes of loneliness there must be great energy and this energy comes when there is no longer fear. When you have gone through this loneliness, as you would go through a physical door, then you will realize that you and the loneliness are one, you are not the observer watching that feeling which is beyond the word. You are that. And you cannot get away from it as you did before in many subtle ways. You are that loneliness; there is no way to avoid it and nothing can cover it or fill it. Then only are you living with it; it is part of you, it is the whole of you. Neither despair nor hope can banish it nor any cynicism nor any intellectual cunning. You are that loneliness, the ashes that had once been fire. This is complete loneliness, irremediable, beyond all action. The brain can no longer devise ways and means of escape; it is the creator of this loneliness, through its incessant activities of self-isolation, of defence and aggression. When it is aware of this, negatively, without any choice, then it is willing to die, to be utterly still. Out of this loneliness, out of these ashes, a new movement is born. It is the movement of the alone. It is that state when all influences, all compulsion, every form of search and achievement have naturally and completely stopped. It is death of the known. Then only is there the neverending journey of the unknowable. Then is there power whose purity is creation. 24th***** There was a beautifully kept lawn, not too large and it was incredibly green; it was behind an iron grill, well watered, carefully looked after, rolled and splendidly alive, sparkling in its beauty. It must have been many hundred years old; not even a chair was on it, isolated and guarded by a high and narrow railing. At the end of the lawn, was a single rose bush, with a single red rose in full bloom. It was a miracle, the soft lawn and the single rose; they were there apart from the whole world of noise, chaos and misery; though man had put them there, they were the most beautiful things, far beyond the museums, towers and the graceful line of bridges. They were splendid in their splendid aloofness. They were what they were, grass and flower and nothing else. There was great beauty and quietness about them and the dignity of purity. It was a hot afternoon, with no breeze and the smell of exhaust of so many cars was in the air but there the grass had a smell of its own and one could almost smell the perfume of the solitary rose. On waking so early, with the full moon coming into the room, the quality of the brain was different. It wasn't asleep nor heavy with sleep; it was fully awake, watching; it wasn't watching itself but something beyond itself. It was aware, aware of itself as a part of a whole movement of the mind. The brain functions in fragmentation; it functions in part, in division. It specializes. It's never the whole; it tries to capture the whole, to understand it but it cannot. By its very nature, thought is always incomplete, as is feeling; thought, the response of memory, can function only in the known things or interpret from what it has known, knowledge. The brain is the product of specialization; it cannot go beyond itself. It divides and specializes - the scientist, the artist, the priest, the lawyer, the technician, the farmer. In functioning, it projects its own status, the privileges, the power, the prestige. Function and status go together for the brain is a self-protective organism. From the demand for status begins the opposing and contradictory elements in society. The specialist cannot see the whole. 25th Meditation is the flowering of understanding. Understanding is not within the borders of time, time never brings understanding. Understanding is not a gradual process to be gathered little by little, with care and patience. Understanding is now or never; it is a destructive flash, not a tame affair; it is this shattering that one is afraid of and so one avoids it, knowingly or unknowingly. Understanding may alter the course of one's life, the way of thought and action; it may be pleasant or not but understanding is a danger to all relationship. But without understanding, sorrow will continue. Sorrow ends only through self-knowing, the awareness of every thought and feeling, every movement of the conscious and that which is hidden. Meditation is the understanding of consciousness, the hidden and the open, and of the movement that lies beyond all thought and feeling. The specialist cannot perceive the whole; his heaven is what he specializes in but his heaven is a petty affair of the brain, the heaven of religion or of the technician. Capacity, gift, is obviously detrimental, for it strengthens self-centredness; it is fragmentary and so breeds conflict. Capacity has significance only in the total perception of life which is in the field of the mind and not of the brain. Capacity and its function is within the limits of the brain and so becomes ruthless, indifferent to the total process of life. Capacity breeds pride, envy, and its fulfilment becomes all important and so it brings about confusion, enmity and sorrow; it has its meaning only in the total awareness of life. Life is not merely at one fragmentary level, bread, sex, prosperity, ambition; life is not fragmentary; when it's made to be, it becomes utterly a matter of despair and endless misery. Brain functions in specialization of the fragment, in self-isolating activities and within the limited field of time. It is incapable of seeing the whole of life; the brain is a part, however educated it be; it is not the whole. Mind alone sees the whole and within the field of the mind is the brain; the brain cannot contain the mind, do what it will. To see wholly, the brain has to be in a state of negation. Negation is not the opposite of the positive; all opposites are related within the fold of each other. Negation has no opposite. The brain has to be in a state of negation for total seeing; it must not interfere, with its evaluations and justifications, with its condemnations and defences. It has to be still, not made still by compulsion of any kind, for then it is a dead brain, merely imitating and conforming. When it is in a state of negation, it is choicelessly still. Only then is there total seeing. In this total seeing which is the quality of the mind, there is no seer, no observer, no experiencer; there's only seeing. The mind then is completely awake. In this fully wakened state, there is no observer and the observed; there is only light, clarity. The contradiction and conflict between the thinker and thought ceases. * He had flown to Paris where he stayed with friends in an eighth-floor apartment in the Avenue de la Bourdonnais. He gave the first of nine talks in Paris on this day. They lasted until September 24th. ** This was the third talk, chiefly about conflict and consciousness. *** He gave the fifth talk that morning. **** At his talk the day before. It was the seventh talk and had been concerned mostly with death. At the beginning he politely suggested to his audience that they should refrain from taking notes. ***** He gave his last talk in Paris on this day. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 5 ROME AND FLORENCE 27TH SEPTEMBER TO 18TH OCTOBER 1961 Walking* along the pavement overlooking the biggest basilica and down the famous steps to a fountain and many picked flowers of so many colours, crossing the crowded square, we went along a narrow one-way street [via Margutta], quiet, with not too many cars; there in that dimly lit street, with few unfashionable shops, suddenly and most unexpectedly, that otherness came with such intense tenderness and beauty that one's body and brain became motionless. For some days now, it had not made its immense presence felt; it was there vaguely, in the distance, a whisper but there the immense was manifesting itself, sharply and with waiting patience. Thought and speech were gone and there was peculiar joy and clarity. It followed down the long, narrow street till the roar of traffic and the overcrowded pavement swallowed us all. It was a benediction that was beyond all image and thoughts. 28th At odd and unexpected moments, the otherness has come, suddenly and unexpectedly and went its way, without invitation and without need. All need and demand must wholly cease for it to be. Meditation, in the still hours of early morning, with no car rattling by, was the unfolding of beauty. It was not thought exploring with its limited capacity nor the sensitivity of feeling; it was not any outward or inward substance which was expressing itself; it was not the movement of time, for the brain was still. It was total negation of everything known, not a reaction but a denial that had no cause; it was a movement in complete freedom, a movement that had no direction and dimension; in that movement there was boundless energy whose very essence was stillness. Its action was total inaction and the essence of that inaction is freedom. There was great bliss, a great ecstasy that perished at the touch of thought. 30th The sun was setting in great clouds of colour behind the Roman hills; they were brilliant, splashed across the sky and the whole earth was made splendid, even the telegraph poles and the endless rows of building. It was soon becoming dark and the car was going fast.** The hills faded and the country became flat. To look with thought and to look without thought are two different things. To look at those trees by the roadside and the buildings across the dry fields with thought, keeps the brain tied to its own moorings of time, experience, memory; the machinery of thought is working endlessly, without rest, without freshness; the brain is made dull, insensitive, without the power of recuperation. It is everlastingly responding to challenge and its response is inadequate and not fresh. To look with thought keeps the brain in the groove of habit and recognition; it becomes tired and sluggish; it lives within the narrow limitations of its own making. It is never free. This freedom takes place when thought is not looking; to look without thought does not mean a blank observation, absence in distraction. When thought does not look, then there is only observation, without the mechanical process of recognition and comparison, justification and condemnation; this seeing does not fatigue the brain for all mechanical processes of time have stopped. Through complete rest the brain is made fresh, to respond without reaction, to live without deterioration, to die without the torture of problems. To look without thought is to see without the interference of time, knowledge and conflict. This freedom to see is not a reaction; all reactions have causes; to look without reaction is not indifference, aloofness, a cold-blooded withdrawal. To see without the mechanism of thought is total seeing, without particularization and division, which does not mean that there is not separation and dissimilarity. The tree does not become a house or the house a tree. Seeing without thought does not put the brain to sleep; on the contrary, it is fully awake, attentive, without friction and pain. Attention without the borders of time is the flowering of meditation. October 3rd The clouds were magnificent; the horizon was filled with them, except in the west where the sky was clear. Some were black, heavy with thunder and rain; others were pure white, full of light and splendour. They were of every shape and size, delicate, threatening, billowy; they were piled up one against the other, with immense power and beauty. They seemed motionless but there was violent movement within them and nothing could stop their shattering immensity. A gentle wind was blowing from the west, driving these vast, mountainous clouds against the hills; the hills were giving shape to the clouds and they were moving with these clouds of darkness and light. The hills with their scattered villages, were waiting for the rains that were so long in coming; they would soon be green again and the trees would soon lose their leaves with the coming winter. The road was straight with shapely trees on either side and the car was holding the road at great speed, even at the curves; the car was made to go fast and to hold the road and it was performing very well that morning.*** It was shaped for speed, low, hugging the road. We were too soon leaving the country and entering into the town [Rome] but those clouds were there, immense, furious and waiting. In the middle of the night (at Circeo], when it was utterly quiet, save for an occasional hoot of an owl which was calling without a reply, in a little house in the woods,+ meditation was pure delight, without a flutter of thought, with its endless subtleties; it was a movement that had no end and every movement of the brain was still, watching from emptiness. It was an emptiness that had known no knowing; it was emptiness that had known no space; it was empty of time. It was empty, past all seeing, knowing and being. In this emptiness there was fury; the fury of a storm, the fury of exploding universe, the fury of creation which could never have any expression. It was the fury of all life, death and love. But yet it was empty, a vast, boundless emptiness which nothing could ever fill, transform or cover up. Meditation was the ecstasy of this emptiness. The subtle interrelationship of the mind, the brain and the body is the complicated play of life. There is misery when one predominates over the other and the mind cannot dominate the brain or the physical organism; when there is harmony between the two, then the mind can consent to abide with them; it is not a plaything of either. The whole can contain the particular but the little, the part, can never formulate the whole. It is incredibly subtle for the two to live together in complete harmony, without one or the other forcing, choosing, dominating. The intellect can and does destroy the body and the body with its dullness, insensitivity can pervert, bring about the deterioration of the intellect. The neglect of the body with its indulgent and demanding tastes, with its appetites can make the body heavy and insensitive and so make dull thought. And thought becoming more refined, more cunning can and does neglect the demands of the body which then sets about to pervert thought. A fat, gross body does interfere with the subtleties of thought, and thought, escaping from the conflicts and problems it has bred, does make the body a perverse thing. The body and the brain have to be sensitive and in harmony to be with the incredible subtleness of the mind which is ever explosive and destructive. The mind is not a plaything of the brain, whose function is mechanical. When the absolute necessity of complete harmony of the brain and body is seen, then the brain will watch over the body, not dominating it and this very watching sharpens the brain and makes the body sensitive. The seeing is the fact and with the fact there is no bargaining; it can be put aside, denied, avoided but it still remains a fact. The understanding of the fact is essential and not the evaluation of the fact. When the fact is seen, then the brain is watchful of the habits, the degenerating factors of the body. Then thought does not impose a discipline on the body nor control it; for discipline, control makes for insensitivity and any form of insensitivity is deterioration, a withering away. Again on waking, when there were no cars roaring up the hill and the smell of a small wood near by was in the air**** and rain was tapping on the window, there was that otherness again filling the room; it was intense and there was a sense of fury; it was the fury of a storm, of a full, roaring river, the fury of innocency. It was there in the room with such abundance that every form of meditation came to an end and the brain was looking, feeling out of its own emptiness. It lasted for considerable time and in spite of the fury of its intensity or because of it. The brain remained empty, full of that otherness. It shattered everything that one thought of, that one felt or saw; it was an emptiness in which nothing existed. It was complete destruction. 4th The train [to Florence] was going very fast, over ninety miles an hour; the towns on the hills were familiar and the lake [Trasimenus] seemed a friend. It was a familiar country, the olive and the cypress and the road that followed the railway. It was raining and the earth was glad of it, for months had passed without rain and now there were new shoots of green and the rivers were running brown, fast and full. The train was following the valleys, shouting at the crossroads, and the workmen labouring along the metalled way stopped and waved as the train slowed down. It was a pleasant cool morning and autumn was turning many leaves brown and yellow; they were ploughing deep for the winter sowing and the hills seemed so friendly, never too high, gentle and old. The train was again running very fast and the drivers of this electric train welcomed us and asked us to come into their cab for we had met several times in several years; before the train started they said we must come and see them; they were as friendly as the rivers and the hills. From their window the country was open and the hills with their towns and the river that we were following seemed to be waiting for the familiar roar of their train. The sun was touching a few of the hills and there was a smile upon the face of the land. As we raced north, the sky was becoming clear and the cypress and the olive against the blue sky were delicate in their splendour. The earth, as ever, was beautiful. It was deep in the night when meditation was filling the spaces of the brain and beyond. Meditation is not a conflict, a war between what is and what should be; there was no control and so no distraction. There was no contradiction between the thinker and the thought for neither existed. There was only seeing without the observer; this seeing came out of emptiness and that emptiness had no cause. All causation breeds inaction, which is called action. How strange love is and how respectable it has become, the love of God, the love of the neighbour, the love of the family. How neatly it has been divided, the profane and the sacred; duty and responsibility; obedience and the willingness to die and to deal out death. The priests talk of it and so do the generals, planning wars; the politicians and the housewife everlastingly complain about it. Jealousy and envy nourish love, and relationship is held in its prison. They have it on the screen and in the magazine and every radio and television blares it out. When death takes away love there is the photo in the frame or the image which memory keeps on revising or it is tightly held in belief. Generation after generation is bred upon this and sorrow goes on without an end. Continuity of love is pleasure and with it comes always pain but we try to avoid the one and cling to the other. This continuity is the stability and security in relationship, and in relationship there must be no change for relationship is habit and in habit there is security and sorrow. To this unending machinery of pleasure and pain we cling and this thing is called love. To escape from its weariness, there is religion and romanticism. The word changes and becomes modified with each one but romanticism offers a marvellous escape from the fact of pleasure and sorrow. And, of course, the ultimate refuge and hope is God who has become so very respectable and profitable. But all this isn't love. Love has no continuity; it cannot be carried over to tomorrow; it has no future. What has is memory, and memories are ashes of everything dead and buried. Love has no tomorrow; it cannot be caught in time and made respectable. It is there when time is not. It has no promise, no hope; hope breeds despair. It belongs to no god and so to no thought and feeling. It is not conjured up by the brain. It lives and dies each minute. Is a terrible thing, for love is destruction. It is destruction without tomorrow. Love is destruction. 5th There is a huge, tall tree in the garden,***** it has an enormous trunk and during the night its dry leaves were noisy in the autumnal wind; every tree in the garden was alive, rustling, and winter was still far away; they were all whispering, shouting and the wind was restless. But the tree dominated the garden; it towered over the four-storey house and the river [the Mugnone] fed it. It was not one of those large rivers, sweeping and dangerous; its life had been made famous and it curves in and out of the valleys and enters the sea, some distance away. There is always water in it and there are fishermen hanging over the bridges and along its banks. In the night the small waterfall complains a great deal and its noise fills the air; the rustle of leaves, the waterfall and the restless wind seem to be talking to each other a great deal. It was a lovely morning with a blue sky and a few clouds scattered about; there are two cypresses beyond all others that stand clear against the sky. Again, well after midnight, when the wind was noisy among the trees, meditation became a fierce explosion, destroying all the things of the brain; every thought shapes every response and limits action. Action born of idea is non-action; such non-action breeds conflict and sorrow. It was in the still moment of meditation that there was strength. Strength is not the many threads of will; will is resistance and the action of will breeds confusion and sorrow within and without. Strength is not the opposite of weakness; all opposites contain their own contradiction. 7th It had begun to rain and the sky was heavy with clouds; before the sky was covered over entirely, immense clouds filled the horizon and it was a marvellous thing to see them. They were so immense and peaceful; it was the peace of enormous power and strength. And the Tuscan hills were so close to them, waiting for their fury. It came during the night, shattering thunder and lightning that showed every leaf aquiver with wind and life. It was a splendid night full of storm, life and immensity. All the afternoon the otherness had been coming, in the car and in the street. It was there most of the night and early this morning, long before dawn, when meditation was making its way into the unknown depths and heights; it was there with insistent fury. Meditation yielded to the otherness. It was there in the room, with the branches of that huge tree in the garden; it was there with such incredible power and life that the very bones felt it; it seemed to press right through one and made the body and brain completely motionless. It had been there all night in a mild and gentle way and sleep became a very light affair, but as dawn was coming near, it became a crushing, penetrating power. The body and the brain were very alert, listening to the rustle of leaves and seeing the dawn coming through the dark branches of a tall, straight pine. It had great tenderness and beauty that was past and beyond all thought and emotion. It was there and with it was benediction. Strength is not the opposite of weakness; all opposites breed further opposites. Strength is not an event of will and will is action in contradiction. There is a strength that has no cause, that is not put together through multiple decisions. It is that strength that exists in negation and denial; it is that strength that comes into being out of total aloneness. It is that strength which comes when all conflict and effort have completely ceased. It is there when all thought and feeling have come to an end and there is only seeing. It is there when ambition, greed, envy have come to an end without any compulsion; they wither away with understanding. There is that strength when love is death and death life. The essence of strength is humility. How strong is the newborn leaf in spring, so vulnerable, so easily destroyed. Vulnerability is the essence of virtue. Virtue is never strong; it cannot stand the glare of respectability and the vanity of the intellect. Virtue is not a mechanical continuity of an idea, of thought in habit. The strength of virtue is that it is easily destroyed to be reborn again anew. Strength and virtue go together for neither can exist without the other. They can only survive in emptiness. 8th It had been raining all day; the roads were slushy and there was more brown water in the river and the slight fall of the river was making more noise. It was a still night, an invitation to the rains which never stopped till early this morning. And the sun suddenly came out and towards the west the sky was blue, rain washed and clean, with those enormous clouds full of light and splendour. It was a beautiful morning and looking to the west, with the sky so intensely blue, all thought and emotion disappeared and the seeing was from emptiness. Before dawn, meditation was the immense opening into the unknown. Nothing can open the door save the complete destruction of the known. Meditation is explosion in understanding. There is no understanding without self-knowing; learning about the self is not accumulating knowledge about it; gathering of knowledge prevents learning; learning is not an additive process; learning is from moment to moment, as is understanding. This total process of learning is explosion in meditation. 9th Early this morning, the sky was without a cloud; the sun was coming up behind the Tuscan hills, grey with olive, with dark cypress. There were no shadows on the river and the aspen leaves were still. A few birds that had not yet migrated were chattering and the river seemed motionless; as the sun came up behind the river it cast long shadows on the quiet water.****** But a gentle breeze was coming over the hills and through the valleys; it was among the leaves, setting them trembling and dancing with the morning sun on them. There were long and short shadows, fat ones and little ones on the brown sparkling waters; a solitary chimney began to smoke, grey fumes carrying across the trees. It was a lovely morning, full of enchantment and beauty, there were so many shadows and so many leaves trembling. There was perfume in the air and though it was an autumnal sun there was the breath of spring. A small car was going up the hill, making an awful noise but a thousand shadows remained motionless. It was a lovely morning. In the afternoon yesterday, it began suddenly, in a room overlooking a noisy street; the strength and the beauty of the otherness was spreading from the room outward over the traffic, past the gardens and beyond the hills. It was there immense and impenetrable; it was there in the afternoon, and just as one was getting into bed it was there with furious intensity, a benediction of great holiness. There is no getting used to it for it is always different, there's something always new, a new quality, a subtle significance, a new light, something that had not been seen before. It was not a thing to be stored up, remembered and examined, at leisure; it was there and no thought could approach for the brain was still and there was no time, to experience, to store up. It was there and all thought became still. The intense energy of life is always there, night and day. It is without friction, without direction, without choice and effort. It is there with such intensity that thought and feeing cannot capture it to mould it according to their fancies, beliefs, experiences and demands. It is there with such abundance that nothing can diminish it. But we try to use it, to give it direction, to capture it within the mould of our existence and thereby twist it to conform to our pattern, experience and knowledge. It is ambition, envy, greed that narrow down its energy and so there is conflict and sorrow; the cruelty of ambition, personal or collective, distorts its intensity, causing hatred, antagonism, conflict. Every action of envy perverts this energy, causing discontent, misery, fear; with fear there is guilt and anxiety and the never ending misery of comparison and irritation. It is this perverted energy that makes the priest and the general, the politician and the thief. This boundless energy made incomplete by our desire for permanency and security is the soil in which grow barren ideas, competition, cruelty and war; it is the cause of everlasting conflict between man and man. When all this is put aside, with ease and without effort, then only is there that intense energy which can only exist and flower in freedom. In freedom alone, it causes no conflict and sorrow; then alone it increases and has no end. It is life that has no beginning and no end; it is creation which is love, destruction. Energy used in one direction leads to one thing, conflict and sorrow; energy that is the expression of total life is bliss beyond measure. 12th The sky was yellow in the setting sun and the dark cypress and the grey olive were startlingly beautiful, and down below the winding river was golden. It was a splendid evening, full of light and silence. From that height******* you could see the city in the valley, the dome and the beautiful campanile and the river curving through the town. Going down the incline and down the steps, one felt the great beauty of the evening; there were few people and the odd, restless tourists had passed by there earlier, always chattering, taking photos and hardly ever seeing. There was perfume in the air and as the sun went down, the silence became intense, rich and unfathomable. Out of this silence only, there is seeing, listening really, and out of this came meditation, though the little car went down the curving road noisily, with a great many bumps. There were two Roman pines against the yellowing sky and though one had seen them often before it was as if they were never seen; the gentle sloping hill was silver-grey with the olive and the darkly solitary cypress was everywhere. Meditation was explosion, not carefully planned, contrived and joined together with determined pursuit. It was an explosion without leaving any remnant of the past. It exploded time, and time never need again stop. In this explosion everything was without shadow and to see without shadow is to see beyond time. It was a marvellous evening so full of humour and space. The noisy town with its lights and the smooth running train were in this vast silence and its beauty was everywhere. The train, going south [back to Rome] was crowded with many tourists and businessmen; they were endlessly smoking eating heavily when the meal was served. The country was beautiful, rain washed, fresh and there was not a cloud in the sky. There were old walled towns on the hills and the lake of many memories was blue, without a ripple; the rich land yielded to poor and arid soil and the farms seemed less prosperous, the chickens were thinner, there were no cattle about and there were few sheep. The train was going fast trying to make up the time that it had lost. It was a marvellous day and there in that smoky compartment, with passengers that hardly looked out of the window, there was that otherness. All that night, it was there with such intensity that the brain felt its pressure. It was as though at the very centre of all existence, it was operating in its purity and immensity. The brain watched, as it was watching the scene racing by, and in this very act, it went beyond its own limitations. And during the night at odd moments, meditation was a fire of explosion. 13th The skies are clear, the small wood across the way is full of light and shadows. Early in the morning before the sun showed over the hill, when dawn was still on the land and there were no cars going up the hill, meditation was inexhaustible. Thought is always limited, it cannot go very far, for it is rooted in memory, and when it does go far, it becomes merely speculative, imaginative, without validity. Thought cannot find what is and what is not beyond its own borders of time; thought is time-binding. Thought unravelling itself, untangling itself from the net of its own making is not the total movement of meditation. Thought in conflict with itself is not meditation; the ending of thought and the beginning of the new is meditation. The sun was making patterns on the wall, cars were coming up the hill and presently the workmen were whistling and singing on the new building across the way. The brain is restless, an astonishingly sensitive instrument. It's always receiving impressions, interpreting them, storing them away; it is never still, waking or sleeping. Its concern is survival and security, the inherited animal responses; on the basis of these, its cunning devices are built, within and without; its gods, its virtues, its moralities are its defences; its ambitions, desires, compulsions and conformities are the urges of survival and security. Being highly sensitive, the brain with its machinery of thought, begins the cultivation of time, the yesterdays, the today and the many tomorrows; this gives it an opportunity of postponement and fulfilment; the postponement, the ideal and the fulfilment are the continuity of itself. But in this there is always sorrow; from this there is the flight into belief, dogma, action and into multiple forms of entertainment, including the religious rituals. But there is always death and its fear; thought then seeks comfort and escape in rational and irrational beliefs, hopes, conclusions. Words and theories become amazingly important, living on these and building its whole structure of existence on these feelings which words and conclusions arouse. The brain and its thought function at a very superficial level, however deeply thought may have hoped it has journeyed. For thought, however experienced, however clever and erudite, is superficial. The brain and its activities are a fragment of the whole totality of life; the fragment has become completely important to itself and its relationship to other fragments. This fragmentation and the contradiction it breeds is its very existence; it cannot understand the whole and when it attempts to formulate the totality of life, it can only think in terms of opposites and reactions which only breed conflict, confusion and misery. Thought can never understand or formulate the whole of life. Only when the brain and its thought are completely still, not asleep or drugged by discipline, compulsion, or hypnotized, then only is there the awareness of the whole. The brain which is so astonishingly sensitive can be still, still in its sensitivity, widely and deeply attentive but entirely quiet. When time and its measure cease then only is there the whole, the unknowable. 4th In the gardens [of the Vila Borghese], right in the middle of the noisy and smelly town, with its flat pines and many trees, turning yellow and brown and the smell of damp ground, there, walking with certain seriousness, was the awareness of the otherness. It was there with great beauty and tenderness; it was not that one was thinking about it - it avoids all thought - but it was there so abundantly that it caused surprise and great delight. Seriousness of thought is so frag- mentary and immature but there must be seriousness which is not the product of desire. There is a seriousness that has the quality of light whose very nature is to penetrate, a light that has no shadow; this seriousness is infinitely pliable and therefore joyous. It was there and every tree and leaf, every blade of grass and flower became intensely alive and splendid; colour intense and the sky immeasurable. The earth, moist and leaf-strewn, was life. 15th The morning sun is on the little wood on the other side of the road; it is a quiet, peaceful morning, soft, the sun not too hot and the air is fresh and cool. Every tree is so fascinatingly alive, with so many colours and there are so many shadows; they are all calling and waiting. Long before the sun was up, when it was quiet with no car going up the hill, meditation was a movement in benediction. This movement flowed into the otherness, for it was there in the room, filling it and overflowing it, outward and beyond, without end. There was in it a depth that was unfathomable, of such immensity and there was peace. This peace never knew contact, was uncontaminated by thought and time. It was not the peace of ultimate finality; it was something that was tremendously and dangerously alive. And it was without defence. Every form of resistance is violence, so also is concession. It was not the peace that conflict engenders; it was beyond all conflict and its opposites. It was not the fruit of satisfaction and discontent, in which are the seeds of deterioration. 16th It was before dawn, when there was no noise and the city was still asleep, that the waking brain became quiet for the otherness was there. It came in so quietly and with hesitant care for there was sleep still in the eyes but there was great delight, the delight of great simplicity and purity. 18th On the plane.******** There was thunder and a great downpour of rain; it woke one up in the middle of the night [in Rome] and the rain was beating on the window and among the trees across the road. The day had been hot and the air was now pleasantly cool; the town was asleep and the storm had taken over. The roads were wet and there was hardly any traffic so early in the morning; the sky was still heavy with clouds and dawn was over the land. The church [S. Giovanni in Laterano] with its golden mosaic was bright with artificial light. + The airport was far away and the powerful car was running beautifully; it was trying to race the clouds. It passed the few cars that were on the road and hugged the road round every corner at high speed. It had been held too long in the city and now it was on the open road. And there was the airport too soon. The smell of the sea and the damp earth was in the air; the freshly ploughed fields were dark and the green of the trees so bright, though autumn had touched a few leaves; the wind was blowing from the west and there would be no sun during all that day on the land. Every leaf was washed clean and there was beauty and peace on the land. In the middle of the night, when it was quiet after thunder and lightning, the brain was utterly still and meditation was an opening into immeasurable emptiness. The very sensitivity of the brain made it still; it was still for no cause; the action of stillness with cause is disintegration. It was so still that the limited space of a room had disappeared and time had stopped. There was only an awakened attention, with a centre which was attentive; it was the attention in which the origin of thought had ceased, without any violence, naturally, easily. It could hear the rain and movement in the next room; it was listening without any interpretation and watching without There is no entry for the 19th. Ciampino. The airport at Fiuminei had not yet been built. knowledge. The body was also motionless. Meditation yielded to the otherness; it was of shattering purity. Its purity left no residue; it was there, that is all and nothing existed. As there was nothing, it was. It was the purity of all essence. This peace is a vast, boundless space, of immeasurable emptiness. * He was now in Rome. He had flown there on the 25th. ** On the way to Circeo, near the sea, between Rome and Naples. *** On the way back to Rome from Circeo where he had spent three nights in the hotel la Baya d'argento. One of the little cottages belonging to the hotel at Circeo, situated in a wood-garden. It was very quiet there. Each cottage contained two bedrooms, a bathroom and sitting-room. **** He was staying in Rome in the via dei colli della Farnesina, a new road with very little traffic on it; the small wood was across the way. ***** An ilex. He was staying in a villa, Il Leccio, north of Florence, above Fiesole. ****** A little pond formed by the stream in a wood. An apartment in Florence where he was paying a visit. ******* From S. Miniato al Monte on the south side of the Arno. ******** Flying to Bombay where he arrived on the 20th. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 6 BOMBAY AND RISHI VALLEY 20TH OCTOBER TO 20TH NOVEMBER 1961 The sea, far below, nearly forty thousand feet below, seemed to be without a wave, so calm, so vast, so empty of any movement; the desert, the burning red hills, treeless, beautiful and pitiless; more sea and the distant lights of the town where all the passengers were getting down; the clamour, the mountain of bags, inspection and the long drive through ill-lit streets and the pavement crowded with ever increasing population; the many penetrating odours, the shrill voices, the decorated temples, cars festooned with flowers, for it was a day of festival, the rich houses, the dark slums and down a steep incline, the car stopped and the door was opened. There is a tree full of green bright leaves, very quiet in its purity and dignity, surrounded by houses that are ill proportioned with people that have never looked at it or one single leaf of it. But they make money, go to offices, drink, beget children and eat enormously. There was a moon over it last night and all the splendid darkness was alive. And waking towards dawn, meditation was the splendour of light for the otherness was there, in an unfamiliar room. Again it was an imminent and urgent peace, not the peace of politicians or of the priests nor of the contented; it was too vast to be contained in space and time, to be formulated by thought or feeling. It was the weight of the earth and the things upon it; it was the heavens and beyond it. Man has to cease for it to be. Time is always repeating its challenge and its problems; the responses and answers are concerned with the immediate. We are taken up with the immediate challenge and with the immediate reply to it. This immediate answer to the immediate call is worldliness, with all its indissoluble problems and agonies; the intellectual answers with action born of ideas which have their roots in time, in the immediate, and the thoughtless, amazed, follow him; the priest of the well-organized religion of propaganda and belief responds to the challenge according to what he has been taught; the rest follow the pattern of like and dislike, of prejudice and malice. And every argument and gesture is the continuity of despair, sorrow and confusion. There is no end to it. To turn your back on it all, calling this activity by different names, is not to end it. It is there whether you deny it or not; whether you have critically analysed it or whether you say the whole thing is an illusion, maya. It is there and you are always measuring it. It is these immediate answers to a series of immediate calls that has to come to an end. Then you will answer from the emptiness of no time to the immediate demand of time or you may not answer at all which may be the true response. All reply of thought and emotion will only prolong the despair and the agony of problems that have no answers; the final answer is beyond the immediate. In the immediate is all your hope, vanity and ambition, whether that immediacy is projected into the future of many tomorrows or in the now. This is the way of sorrow. The ending of sorrow is never in the immediate response to the many challenges. The ending lies in seeing this fact. 21st The palms were swaying with great dignity, bending with pleasure in the westerly breeze from the sea; they seemed so far away from the noisy crowded street. Against the evening sky, they were dark, their tall trunks were shapely, made slender with many years of patient work; they dominated the evening of stars and the warm sea. They almost stretched their palms to receive you, to snatch you away from the sordid street but the evening breeze took them away to fill the sky with their movement. The street was crowded; it would never be clean, too many people had spat on it; its walls were made filthy with the announcements of latest films; they were plastered with names to whom you must give your vote, the party symbols; it was a sordid street though it was one of the main thoroughfares; unwashed buses roared by; taxis honked at you and many dogs seemed to have passed by. A little further on was the sea and the setting sun. It was a round red ball of fire, it had been a scorching day; it made the sea and the few clouds red. The sea was without a ripple but it was restless and dreamy. It was too hot to be a pleasant evening and the breeze seemed to have forgotten its delight. Along that sordid street, with people pushing into you, meditation was the very essence of life. The brain so delicate and observant was completely still, watching the stars, aware of the people, the smells, the barking of the dogs. A single yellow leaf was falling on the dirty road and the passing car destroyed it; it was so full of colour and beauty and destroyed so easily. As one walked along the street of few palms, the otherness came like a wave that purified and strengthened; it was there like a perfume, a breath of immensity. There was no sentiment, the romance of illusion or the brittleness of thought; it was there, sharp and clear, without any vague possibility, unhesitating, definite. It was there, a holy thing and nothing could touch it, nothing could break its finality. The brain was aware of the closeness of the passing buses, the wet street and the squealing brakes; it was aware of all these things and, beyond, the sea, but the brain had no relation to any of these things; it was completely empty, without any roots, watching, observing out of this emptiness. The otherness was pressing in with sharp urgency. It was not a feeling, a sensation but as factual as the man who was calling. It was not an emotion that changes, varies and continues, and thought could not touch it. It was there with the finality of death which no reason could dissuade. As it had no roots and relation, nothing could contaminate it; it was indestructible. 23rd The complete stillness of the brain is an extraordinary thing; it is highly sensitive, vigorous, fully alive, aware of every outward movement but utterly still. It is still as it is completely open, without any hindrance, without any secret wants and pursuits; it is still as there is no conflict which is essentially a state of contradiction. It is utterly still in emptiness; this emptiness is not a state of vacuum, a blankness; it is energy without a centre, without a border. Walking down the crowded street, smelly and sordid, with the buses roaring by, the brain was aware of the things about it and the body was walking along, sensitive, alive to the smells, to the dirt, to the sweating labourers but there was no centre from which watching, directing, censoring took place. During the whole of that mile and back the brain was without a movement, as thought and feeling; the body was getting tired, unaccustomed to the frightful heat and humidity though the sun had set some time ago. It was a strange phenomenon though it had happened several times before. One can never get used to any of these things for it is not a thing of habit and desire. It is always surprising, after it is over. The crowded plane [to Madras] was hot and even at that height, about eight thousand feet up, it never seemed to get cool. In that morning plane, suddenly and most unexpectedly the otherness came. It is never the same, always new, always unexpected; the odd thing about it is that thought cannot go back over it, reconsider it, examine it leisurely. Memory has no part in it, for every time it happens it is so totally new and unexpected that it does not leave any memory behind it. For it is a total and complete happening, an event that leaves no record, as memory. So it is always new, young, unexpected. It came with extraordinary beauty, not because of the fantastic shape of clouds and the light in them nor of the blue sky, so infinitely blue and tender; there was no reason, no cause for its incredible beauty and that is why it was beautiful. It was the essence not of all the things put together and boiled down to be felt and seen but of all life that has been and that is and that will be, life without time. It was there and it was the fury of beauty. The little car was going home to its valley,* far from cities and civilizations; it was going over bumpy roads, over potholes, round sharp corners, groaning, creaking but it went; it was not old but it had been assembled carelessly; it smelled of petrol and oil but it was racing home as fast as it could over the paved and unpaved roads. The country was beautiful; it had rained recently, the night before. The trees were alive with bright, green leaves - the tamarind and the banyan and other innumerable trees; they were so vital, fresh and young though some of them must have been quite old. There were hills and the red earth; they were not thundering hills but gentle and old, some of the oldest on earth, and in the evening light they were serene, with that ancient blue which only certain hills have. Some were rocky and barren, others had scrubby bushes and a few had some trees but they were friendly as though they had seen all sorrow. And the earth at their feet was red; the rains had made it more red; it was not the red of blood or of the sun or of any man-made dye; it was the red, the colour of all reds; there was a clarity and purity about it and the green was the more startling against it. It was a lovely evening and it was getting cooler for the valley was at some height. In the midst of the evening light and the hills becoming more blue and the red earth richer, the otherness came silently with benediction. It is marvellously new each time but yet it is the same. It was immense with strength, the strength of destruction and vulnerability. It came with such fullness and was gone in a flash; the moment was beyond all time. It was a tiring day but the brain was strangely alert, seeing without the watcher; seeing not with experience but out of emptiness. 24th The moon was just coming over the hills, caught in a long serpentine cloud, giving her a fantastic shape. She was huge, dwarfing the hills, the earth and the green pastures; where she was coming up was more clear, fewer clouds, but she soon disappeared in dark rain-bearing clouds. It began to drizzle and the earth was glad; it doesn't rain much here and every drop counts; the big banyan and the tamarind and the mango would struggle through but the little plants and the rice crop were rejoicing at even a little rain. Unfortunately even the few drops stopped and presently the moon shone in a clear sky. It was raining furiously on the coast but here where the rain was needed, the rain-bearing clouds passed away. It was a beautiful evening, and there were deep dark shadows of many patterns. The moon was very bright and the shadows were very still and the leaves, washed clean, were sparkling. Walking and talking, meditation was going on below the words and the beauty of the night. It was going on at a great depth, flowing outwardly and inwardly; it was exploding and expanding. One was aware of it; it was happening; one wasn't experiencing it, experiencing is limiting; it was taking place. There was no participation in it; thought could not share it for thought is such a futile and mechanical thing anyhow, nor could emotion get entangled with it; it was too disturbingly active for either. It was happening at such an unknown depth for which there was no measurement. But there was great stillness. It was quite surprising and not at all ordinary. The dark leaves were shining and the moon had climbed quite high; she was on the westerly course and flooding the room. Dawn was many hours away and there was not a sound; even the village dogs, with their shrill yapping, were quiet. Waking, it was there, with clarity and precision; the otherness was there and waking up was necessary, not sleep; it was deliberate, to be aware of what was happening, to be aware with full consciousness of what was taking place. Asleep, it might have been a dream, a hint of the unconscious, a trick of the brain, but fully awake, this strange and unknowable otherness was a palpable reality, a fact and not an illusion, a dream. It had a quality, if such a word can be applied to it, of weightlessness and impenetrable strength. Again these words have certain significance, definite and communicable, but these words lose all their meaning when the otherness has to be conveyed in words; words are symbols but no symbol can ever convey the reality. It was there with such incorruptible strength that nothing could destroy it for it was unapproachable. You can approach something with which you are familiar, you must have the same language to commune, some kind of thought process, verbal or non-verbal; above all there must be mutual recognition. There was none. On your side you may say it is this or that, this or that quality, but at the moment of the happening there was no verbalization for the brain was utterly still, without any movement of thought. But the otherness is without relationship to anything and all thought and being is a cause-effect process and so there was no understanding of it or relationship with it. It was an unapproachable flame and you could only look at it and keep your distance. And on waking suddenly, it was there. And with it came unexpected ecstasy, an unreasonable joy; there was no cause for it for it has never been sought or pursued. There was this ecstasy on waking again at the usual hour; it was there and continued for a lengthy period of time. 25th There is a long-stemmed weed, grass of some kind, which grows wildly in the garden and it has a feathery flowering, burnt gold, flashing in the breeze, swaying till it almost breaks but never breaking, except in a strong wind. There is a clump of these weeds of golden beige and when the breeze blows it sets them dancing; each stem has its own rhythm, its own splendour and they are like a wave when they all move together; the colour then, with the evening light, is indescribable; it is the colour of the sunset, of the earth and of the golden hills and clouds. The flowers beside them were too definite, too crude, demanding that you look at them. These weeds had a strange delicacy; they had a faint smell of wheat and of ancient times; they were sturdy and pure, full of abundant life. An evening cloud was passing by, full of light as the sun went down behind the dark hill. The rain had given to the earth a goodly smell and the air was pleasantly cool. The rains were coming and there was hope in the land. Of a sudden it happened, coming back to the room; it was there with an embracing welcome, so unexpected. One had come in only to go out again; we had been talking about several things, nothing too serious. It was a shock and a surprise to find this welcoming otherness in the room; it was waiting there with such open invitation that an apology seemed futile. Several times, on the Common,** far away from here under some trees, along a path that was used by so many, it would be waiting just as the path turned; with astonishment one stood there, near those trees, completely open, vulnerable, speechless, without a movement. It was not a fancy, a self-projected delusion; the other, who happened to be there, felt it too; on several occasions it was there, with an all-embracing welcome of love and it was quite incredible; every time, it had a new quality, a new beauty, a new austerity. And it was like that in this room, something totally new and wholly unexpected. It was beauty that made the entire mind still and the body without a movement; it made the mind, the brain and the body intensely alert and sensitive; it made the body tremble and in a few minutes that welcoming otherness was gone, as swiftly as it must have come. No thought or fanciful emotion could ever conjure up such a happening; thought is petty, do what it will, and feeling is so fragile and deceitful; neither of them, in their wildest endeavour could build up these happenings. They are too immeasurably great, too immense in their strength and purity for thought or feeling; these have roots and they have none. They are not to be invited or held; thought-feeling can play every kind of clever and fanciful trick but they cannot invent or contain the otherness. It is by itself and nothing can touch it. Sensitivity is wholly different from refinement; sensitivity is an integral state, refinement is always partial. There is no partial sensitivity, either it is the state of one's whole being, total consciousness or it is not there at all. It is not to be gathered bit by bit; it cannot be cultivated; it is not the result of experience and thought, it is not a state of emotionalism. It has the quality of precision, no overtones of romanticism and fancy. Only the sensitive can face the actual, without escaping into all kinds of conclusions, opinions and evaluations. Only the sensitive can be alone and this aloneness is destructive. This sensitivity is stripped of all pleasure and so it has the austerity, not of desire and will but of seeing and understanding. There is pleasure in refinement; it has to do with education, culture, environment. The way of refinement is endless; it is the outcome of choice, conflict and pain and there is always the chooser, the one who refines, the censor. And so there is always conflict and contradiction and pain. Refinement leads to isolation, self-enclosing aloofness, the separation which intellect and knowledge breed. Refinement is self-centred activity, however enlightened aesthetically and morally. There is great satisfaction in the refining process but no joy of depth; it is superficial and petty, without great significance. Sensitivity and refinement are two different things; one leads to isolating death and the other to life that has no end. 26th There is a tree, just across the verandah with large leaves and with many large red flowers; they are spectacular and the green, after the recent rains, is vivid and strong. The flowers are orange-red and against the green and the rocky hill, they seem to have taken the earth to themselves and they cover the whole space of the early morning. It was a beautiful morning, cloudy and there was that light which made every colour clear and strong. Not a leaf was stirring and they were all waiting, hoping for more rain; the sun would be hot and the earth needed far more rain. The river beds had been silent for many years; bushes were growing in them and water was needed everywhere; the wells were very low and the villagers would suffer if there was not more water. The clouds were black over the hills, heavy with the promise of rain. There was thunder and distant lightning and presently there was a downpour. It didn't last long but enough for the time being and there was a promise of more. Where the road goes down and over the bridge of a dry river bed of red sand, the westerly hills were dark, heavy with brooding; and in the evening light, the luscious green fields of rice were incredibly beautiful. Across them were dark green trees and the hills to the north were violet; the valley lay open to the heavens. There was every colour, seen or unseen, in that valley that evening; every colour had its overtones, hidden and open, and every leaf and every blade of rice was exploding in the delight of colour. Colour was good, not mild and gentle. The clouds were gathering black and heavy, especially over the hills and there were flashes of lightning, far away over the hills and silent. There were already a few drops; it was raining among the hills and it would soon be here. A blessing to a starving land. We were all talking after a light dinner about things pertaining to the school, how this and that was necessary, how difficult it was to find good teachers, how the rains were needed and so on. They went on talking and there, sudden and unexpectedly, the otherness appeared; it was there with such immensity and with such sweeping force that one be- came utterly quiet; the eyes saw it, the body felt it and the brain was alert without thought. The conversation was not too serious and in the midst of this casual atmosphere, something tremendous was taking place. One went to bed with it and it went on as a whisper during the night. There is no experiencing of it; it is simply there with a fury and benediction. To experience there must be an experiencer but when there is neither, it is an altogether different phenomenon. There is neither accepting it or denying it; it is simply there, as a fact. This fact had no relation to anything, neither in the past nor in the future and thought could not establish any communication with it. It had no value in terms of utility and profit, nothing could be got out of it. But it was there and by its very existence there was love, beauty, immensity. Without it, there is nothing. Without rain the earth would perish. Time is illusion. There is tomorrow and there have been many yesterdays; this time is not an illusion. Thought which uses time as a means to bring about an inward change, a psychological change is pursuing a non-change, for such a change is only a modified continuity of what has been; such thought is sluggish, postpones, takes shelter in the illusion of gradualness, in ideals, in time. Through time mutation is not possible. The very denial of time is mutation; mutation takes place where the things which time has brought into being, habit, tradition, reform, the ideals, are denied. Deny time and mutation has taken place, a total mutation, not the alteration in patterns nor the substitution of one pattern by another. But acquiring knowledge, learning a technique, require time which cannot and must not be denied; they are essential for existence. Time to go from here to there is not an illusion but every other form of time is illusion. In this mutation, there is attention and from this attention there is a totally different kind of action. Such action does not become a habit, a repetition of a sensation, of an experience, of knowledge which dulls the brain, insensitive to a mutation. Virtue then is not the better habit, the better conduct; it has no pattern, no limitation; it has not the stamp of respectability; it is not then an ideal to be pursued, put together by time. Virtue then is a danger not a tame thing of society. To love then is destruction; a revolution, not economic and social but of total consciousness. 27th Several of us were chanting and singing; learning new chants and songs; the room overlooked the garden that was with great difficulty maintained as there was little water; the flowers and the bushes were watered by small buckets, really kerosene tins. It was quite a nice garden with many flowers but the trees dominated the garden; they were shapely, wide-spreading and at certain seasons, full of flowers; now only one tree was flowering, orange-red flowers with large petals, a profusion of them. There were several trees with fine, small delicate leaves, mimosa-like trees but with greater abundance of foliage. So many birds came and now after two long heavy showers they looked bedraggled, soaked to the skin, their feathers drenched. There was a yellow bird with black wings, larger than a starling, nearly as big as a blackbird; the yellow was so bright against the dark-green foliage and its bright elongated eyes were watching everything, the slightest movement among the leaves and the coming and going of other birds. There were two black birds, smaller than crows, their feathers soaked, sitting close to the yellow one on the same tree; they had spread out their tail feathers and were fluttering their wings to get them dry; several other birds of different sizes came to that tree, all at peace with each other, all alertly watching. The valley needed the rain very badly and every drop was welcome; the wells were very low and the big urban tanks were empty and these rains would help to fill them. They had been empty for many years and there was hope now. The valley had become very beautiful, rain-washed, fresh, filled with varying rich green. The rocks had been washed clean and had lost their heat and the stunted bushes that grew among the rocks in the hills looked pleased and the dry river beds were singing again. The land was smiling again. The chant and the song went on in that rather bare room, without furniture, and to sit on the floor seemed normal and comfortable. In the midst of a song quite suddenly and unexpected the other appeared; others went on with the song but they too became silent, not being aware of their silence. It was there with a benediction and it filled the space between the earth and the heavens. About ordinary things, up to a certain point, communication is possible through words; words have significance but words lose altogether their limited significance when we are trying to commune about events that cannot be verbalized. Love is not the word and it is something entirely different when all verbalization and the silly division of what is and what is not ceases. This event is not an experience, not a thing of thought, the recognition of a happening of yesterday, not the product of consciousness at whatever depth. It is not contaminated by time. It is something beyond and above all this; it was there and that is enough for heaven and earth. Every prayer is a supplication and there is no asking when there is clarity and the heart unburdened. Instinctively, in time of trouble, a supplication of some kind comes to the lips, to avert the trouble, the ache or to gain some advantage. There is hope that some earthly god or the gods of the mind will answer satisfactorily, and sometimes by chance or through some strange coincidence of events, a prayer is answered. Then god has answered and faith has been justified. The gods of men, the only true gods, are there to comfort, to shelter, to answer all the petty and noble demands of man. Such gods are plentiful, every church, every temple and mosque has them. The earthly gods are even more powerful and more immediate; every state has them. But man goes on suffering in spite of every form of prayer and supplication. With the fury of understanding only can sorrow end but the other is easier, respectable and less demanding. And sorrow wears away the brain and the body, makes it dull, insensitive and weary. Understanding demands self-knowing, which is not an affair of the moment; learning about oneself is endless and the beauty and the greatness of it is that it is endless. But self-knowing is from moment to moment; this self-knowing is only in the active present; it has no continuity as knowledge. But what has continuity habit, the mechanical process of thought. Understanding has no continuity. 28th There is a red flower among the dark green leaves and from the verandah you only see that. There are the hills, the red sand of the riverbeds, the big high banyan tree and the many tamarinds, but you only see that flower, it is so gay, so full of colour; there is no other colour; the patches of blue sky, the burning clouds of light, the violet hills, the rich green of the rice field, all these fade away and only this wondrous colour of that flower remains. It fills the whole sky and the valley; it will fade and fall away; it will cease and the hills will endure. But this morning it was eternity, beyond all time and thought; it held all love and joy; there was no sentiment and romantic absurdities in it; nor was it a symbol of something else. It was itself, to die in the evening but it contained all life. It was not something you reasoned out nor was it a thing of unreason, some romantic fancy; it was as actual as those hills and those voices calling to each other. It was the complete meditation of life, and illusion exists only when the impact of fact ceases. That cloud so full of light is a reality whose beauty has no furious impact on a mind that is made dull and insensitive by influence, habit and the everlasting search for security. Security in fame, in relationship, in knowledge destroys sensitivity and deterioration sets in. That flower, those hills and the blue restless sea are the challenge, as nuclear bombs, of life, and only the sensitive mind can respond to them totally; only a total response leaves no marks of conflict, and conflict indicates partial response. The so-called saints and sannyasis have contributed to the dullness of mind and to the destruction of sensitivity. Every habit, repetition, rituals strengthened by belief and dogma, sensory responses, can be and are refined, but the alert awareness, sensitivity, is quite another matter. Sensitivity is absolutely essential to look deeply within; this movement of going within is not a reaction to the outer; the outer and the inner are the same movement, they are not separate. The division of this movement as the outer and as the inner breeds insensitivity. Going within is the natural flow of the outer; the movement of the inner has its own action, expressed outwardly but it is not a reaction of the outer. Awareness of this whole movement is sensitivity. 29th It was really quite an extraordinarily beautiful evening. It had been drizzling off and on all day; one had been cooped up indoors all day; there was a talk-discussion, seeing people and so on. It had stopped raining for some hours and it was good to get out. To the west the clouds were dark, almost black, heavy with rain and thunder; they were hanging over the hills making them dark purple and unusually heavy and threatening. The sun was setting in a tumultuous fury of clouds. To the east, clouds shot up full of evening light; each one was a different shape with a light of its own, towering over the hills, immense, shatteringly alive, soaring up into high heavens. There were patches of blue sky, so intensely blue, green of such a delicacy that it faded into the white light of bursting clouds. The hills were sculptured with the dignity of endless time; there was one that was alight from within, transparent and strangely delicate, so utterly artificial; another one was chiselled out of granite, darkly alone, with a shape of all the temples of the world. Every hill was alive, full of movement and aloof with the depth of time. It was a marvellous evening, full of beauty, silence and light. We had started all of us walking together but now we had fallen silent, separate, a little distance from each other. The road was rough crossing the valley, over the dry, red sandy riverbeds which had thin trickles of rain water. The road turned and went east. Down the valley there is a white farmhouse surrounded by trees and one huge tree covering them all. It was a peaceful sight and the land seemed enchanted. The house was a mile or so away among the green, luscious rice fields and silent. One had often seen it, as the road went on to the mouth of the valley and beyond it; it was the only road in and out of the valley by car and foot. The white house among few trees had been there for some years and it had always been a pleasant sight, but seeing it, that evening, as the road turned, there was an altogether different beauty and feeling about it. For the otherness was there, and coming up the valley; it was like a curtain of rain but only there was no rain; it was coming as a breeze comes, soft and gently and it was there inside and outside. It was not thought, it was not feeling nor was it a fancy, a thing of the brain. Each time it is so new and amazing, the pure strength and vastness of it that there is astonishment and joy. It is something totally unknown and the known has no contact with it. The known must wholly die for it to be. Experience is still within the field of the known, and so it was not an experience. All experience is a state of immaturity. You can only experience and recognize as experience something which you have already known. But this was not experienceable, knowable; every form of thought must cease and every feeling; for they are all known and knowable; the brain and the totality of consciousness must be free of the known and be empty without any form of effort. It was there, inside and outside; one was walking in it and with it. The hills, the land, the earth were with it. It was quite early in the morning and it was still dark. The night was thunderous and rainy; windows banged and rain was pouring into the room. Not a star was visible, the sky and the hills were covered with clouds and it was raining with fury and noise. On waking, the rain had stopped and it was still dark. Meditation is not a practice, following a system, a method; these only lead to the darkening of the mind and it is ever a movement within the boundaries of the known; there is despair and illusion within their activity. It was very quiet so early in the morning and not a bird or leaf was stirring. Meditation which began at unknown depths and went on with increasing intensity and sweep, carved the brain into total silence, scooping out the depths of thought, uprooting feeling, emptying the brain of the known and its shadow. It was an operation and there was no operator, no surgeon; it was going on, as a surgeon operates for cancer, cutting out every tissue which has been contaminated, lest the contamination should again spread. It was going on, this meditation for an hour by the watch. And it was meditation without the meditator. The meditator interferes with his stupidities and vanities, ambitions and greed. The meditator is thought, nurtured in these conflicts and injuries, and thought in meditation must totally cease. This is the foundation for meditation. 30th Everywhere there was silence; the hills were motionless, the trees were still and the riverbeds empty; the birds had found shelter for the night and everything was still, even the village dogs. It had rained and the clouds were motionless. Silence grew and became intense, wider and deeper. What was outside was now inside; the brain which had listened to the silence of the hills, fields and groves was itself now silent; it no longer listened to itself; it had gone through that and had become quiet, naturally, without any enforcement. It was still ready to stir itself on the instant. It was still, deep within itself; like a bird that folds its wings, it had folded upon itself; it was not asleep nor lazy, but in folding upon itself, it had entered into depths which were beyond itself. The brain is essentially superficial; its activities are superficial, almost mechanical; its activities and responses are immediate, though this immediacy is translated in terms of the future. Its thoughts and feelings are on the surface, though it may think and feel far into the future and way back into the past. All experience and memory are deep only to the extent of their own limited capacity but the brain being still and turning upon itself, it was no longer experiencing outwardly or inwardly. Consciousness, the fragments of many experiences, compulsions, fears, hopes and despairs of the past and the future, the contradictions of the race and its own self-centred activities, was absent; it was not there. The entire being was utterly still and as it became intense, it was not more or less; it was intense, there was an entering into a depth or a depth which came into being which thought, feeling, consciousness could not enter into. It was a dimension which the brain could not capture or understand. And there was no observer, witnessing this depth. Every part of one`s whole being was alert, sensitive but intensely still. This new, this depth was expanding, exploding, going away, developing in its own explosions but out of time and beyond time and space. 31st It was a beautiful evening; the air was clean, the hills were blue, violet and dark purple; the rice fields had plenty of water and were a varying rich green from light to metallic to dark flashing green; some trees had already withdrawn for the night, dark and silent and others were still open and held the light of day. The clouds were black over the western hills, and to the north and east the clouds were full of the [reflection of the] evening sun which had set behind the heavy purple hills. There was no one on the road, the few that passed were silent and there wasn't a patch of blue sky, clouds were gathering in for the night. Yet everything seemed to be awake, the rocks, the dry riverbed, the bushes in the fading light. Meditation, along that quiet and deserted road came like a soft rain over the hills; it came as easily and naturally as the coming night. There was no effort of any kind and no control with its concentrations and distractions; there was no order and pursuit; no denial or acceptance nor any continuity of memory in meditation. The brain was aware of its environment but quiet without response, uninfluenced but recognizing without responding. It was very quiet and words had faded with thought. There was that strange energy, call it by any other name, it has no importance whatsoever, deeply active, without object and purpose; it was creation, without the canvas and the marble, and destructive; it was not the thing of human brain, of expression and decay. It was not approachable, to be classified and analysed, and thought and feeling are not the instruments of its comprehension. It was completely unrelated to everything and totally alone in its vastness and immensity. And walking along that darkening road, there was the ecstasy of the impossible, not of achievement, arriving, success and all those immature demands and responses, but the aloneness of the impossible. The possible is mechanical and the impossible can be envisaged, tried and perhaps achieved which in turn becomes mechanical. But the ecstasy had no cause, no reason. It was simply there, not as an experience but as a fact, not to be accepted or denied, to be argued over and dissected. It was not a thing to be sought after for there is no path to it. Everything has to die for it to be, death, destruction which is love. A poor, worn-out labourer, in torn dirty clothes, was returning home with his bone-thin cow. November 1st The sky was burning with fantastic colour, great splashes of incredible fire; the southern sky was aflame with clouds of exploding colour and each cloud was more intensely furious than the other. The sun had set behind the sphinx-shaped hill but there was no colour there, it was dull, without the serenity of a beautiful evening. But the east and the south held all the grandeur of a fading day. To the east it was blue, the blue of a morning-glory, a flower so delicate that to touch it is to break the delicate, transparent petals; it was the intense blue with incredible light of pale green, violet and the sharpness of white; it was sending out, from east to west, rays of this fantastic blue right across the sky. And the south was now the home of vast fires that could never be put out. Across the rich green of rice fields was a stretch of sugar cane in flower; it was feathery, pale violet, the tender light beige of a mourning dove; it stretched over and across the luscious green rice fields with the evening light through it to the hills, which were almost the same colour as the sugar-cane flower. The hills were in league with the flower, the red earth and the darkening sky, and that evening the hills were shouting with joy for it was an evening of their delight. The stars were coming out and presently there was not a cloud and every star shone with astonishing brilliance in a rain-washed sky. And early this morning, with dawn far away, Orion held the sky and the hills were silent. Only across the valley, the hoot of a deep-throated owl was answered by a light-throated one, at a higher pitch; in the clear still air their voices carried far and they were coming nearer until they seemed quiet among a clump of trees; then they rhythmically kept calling to each other, one at a lower note than the other till a man called and a dog barked. It was meditation in emptiness, a void that had no border. Thought could not follow; it had been left where time begins, nor was there feeling to distort love. This was emptiness without space. The brain was in no way participating in this meditation; it was completely still and in that stillness going within itself and out of itself but in no way sharing with this vast emptiness. The totality of the mind was receiving or perceiving or being aware of what was taking place and yet it was not outside of itself, something extraneous, something foreign. Thought is an impediment to meditation but only through meditation can this impediment be dissolved. For thought dissipates energy and the essence of energy is freedom from thought and feeling. 2nd It had become very cloudy, all the hills were heavy with them and clouds were piling up in every direction. It was spitting with rain and there wasn't a blue patch anywhere; the sun had set in darkness and the trees were aloof and distant. There is an old palm tree that stood out against the darkening sky and whatever light there was held by it; the riverbeds were silent, their red sand moist but there was no song; the birds had become silent taking shelter among the thick leaves. A breeze was blowing from north-east and with it came more dark clouds and a spattering of rain but it hadn't begun in earnest; that would come later in gathering fury. And the road in front was empty; it was red, rough, and sandy and the dark hills looked down on it; it was a pleasant road with hardly any cars and the villagers with their oxdrawn carts going from one village to another; they were dirty, skeleton-thin, in rags, and their stomachs drawn in but they were wiry and enduring; they had lived like that for centuries and no government is going to change all this overnight. But these people had a smile, though their eyes were weary. They could dance after a heavy day's labour and they had fire in them, they were not hopelessly beaten down. The land had not had good rains for many years and this may be one of those fortunate years which may bring more food for them and fodder for their thin cattle. And the road went on and joined at the mouth of the valley the big road with few buses and cars. And on this road, far away were the cities with their filth, industries, rich houses, temples and dull minds. But here on this open road, there was solitude and the many hills, full of age and indifference. Meditation is the emptying the mind of all thought, for thought and feeling dissipate energy; they are repetitive, producing mechanical activities which are a necessary part of existence. But they are only part, and thought and feeling cannot possibly enter into the immensity of life. Quite a different approach is necessary, not the path of habit, association and the known; there must be freedom from these. Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known. It cannot be done by thought or by the hidden prompting of thought, nor by desire in the form of prayer, nor through the self-effacing hypnotism of words, images, hopes and vanities. All these have to come to an end, easily, without effort and choice, in the flame of awareness. And there walking on that road, there was complete emptiness of the brain, and the mind was free of all experience, the knowing of yesterday, though a thousand yesterdays have been. Time, the thing of thought, had stopped; literally there was no movement before and after; there was no going or arriving or standing still. Space as distance was not; there were the hills and bushes but not as high and low. There was no relationship with anything but there was an awareness of the bridge and the passer-by. The totality of the mind, in which is the brain with its thoughts and feelings, was empty; and because it was empty, there was energy, a deepening and widening energy without measure. All comparison, measurement belong to thought and so to time. The otherness was the mind without time; it was the breath of innocence and immensity. Words are not reality; they are only means of communication but they are not the innocence and the immeasurable. The emptiness was alone. 3rd It had been a dull, heavy day; the clouds were pressing in and it had rained violently. The red riverbeds had some water in them but the land needed lots more rain for the big catchments, tanks, and the wells to get filled up; there would be no rains for several months and the hot sun would burn the land. Water was needed urgently for this part of the country and every drop was welcome. One had been indoors all day and it was good to get out. The roads were running with water, there was a heavy shower and under every tree there was a puddle and the trees were dripping with water. It was getting dark; the hills were visible, they were just dark against the sky, the colour of the clouds; the trees were silent and motionless, lost in their brooding; they had withdrawn and refused to communicate. One was aware, suddenly, of that strange otherness; it was there and it had been there, only there had been talks, seeing people and so on and the body had not had enough rest to be aware of the strangeness but on going out it was there and only then was there a realization that it had been there. Still it was unexpected and sudden, with that intensity which is the essence of beauty. One went with it down the road not as something separate, not as an experience, something to be observed and examined, to be remembered. These were the ways of thought but thought had ceased and so there was no experiencing of it. All experiencing is separative and deteriorating, it is part of the machinery of thought and all mechanical processes deteriorate. It was something, each time, totally new and that which is new has no relation whatsoever with the known, with the past. And there was beauty, beyond all thought and feeling. There was no call of the owl across the silent valley; it was very early; the sun would not be over the hill for several hours yet. It was cloudy and no stars were visible; if the sky were clear, Orion would be this side of the house, facing west, but everywhere there was darkness and silence. Habit and meditation can never abide together; meditation can never become a habit; meditation can never follow the pattern laid down by thought which forms habit. Meditation is the destruction of thought and not thought caught in its own intricacies, visions and its own vain pursuits. Thought shattering itself against its own nothingness is the explosion of meditation. This meditation has its own movement, directionless and so is causeless. And in that room, in that peculiar silence when the clouds are low, almost touching the treetops, meditation was a movement in which the brain emptied itself and remained still. It was a movement of the totality of the mind in emptiness and there was timelessness. Thought is matter held within the bonds of time; thought is never free, never new; every experience only strengthens the bondage and so there is sorrow. Experience can never free thought; it makes it more cunning, and refinement is not the ending of sorrow. Thought, however astute, however experienced, can never end sorrow; it can escape from it but it can never end it. The ending of sorrow is the ending of thought. There is no one who can put an end to it [to thought], not its own gods, its own ideals, beliefs, dogmas. Every thought, however wise or petty, shapes the response to the challenge of limitless life and this response of time breeds sorrow. Thought is mechanical and so it can never be free; only in freedom there is no sorrow. The ending of thought is the ending of sorrow. 4th It had been threatening to rain but it never rained; the blue hills were heavy with clouds; they were always changing, moving from one hill to another but there was a long white-grey cloud, stretching west over many hills to the horizon, which had its birth in one of the eastern hills; it seemed to begin from there, from the side of the hill, and went on to the western horizon in a rolling movement, alive with the light of the setting sun; it was white and grey but deep within it was violet, a fading purple; it seemed to be carrying on its way the hills it covered. In the western gap the sun was setting in a fury of clouds and the hills were getting darker and more grey and the trees were heavy with silence. There is a huge, unmolested banyan tree, many years old, by the side of the road; it is really magnificent, huge, vital, unconcerned and that evening it was the lord of the hills, the earth and the streams; it had majesty and the stars seemed very small. Along that road, a villager and his wife were walking, one behind the other, the husband led and the wife followed; they seemed a little more prosperous than the others that one met on the road. They passed us, she never looking at us and he looked at the far village. We caught up with her; she was a small woman, never taking her eyes off the ground; she wasn't too clean; she had a green soiled sari and her blouse was salmon coloured and sweat-stained. She had a flower in her oily hair and was walking bare-footed. Her face was dark and there was about her a great sadness. There was a certain firmness and gaiety in her walk which in no way touched her sadness; each was leading its own life, independent, vital and unrelated. But there was great sadness and you felt it immediately; it was an irremediable sadness; there was no way out, no way to soften it, no way to bring about a change. It was there and it would be there. She was across the road, a few feet away and nothing could touch her. We walked side by side for a while and presently she turned off and crossed the red riverbed of sand and went on to her village, the husband leading, never looking back and she following. Before she turned off, a curious thing was taking place. The few feet of road between us disappeared and with it also disappeared the two entities; there was only that woman walking in her impenetrable sadness. It was not an identification with her, nor overwhelming sympathy and affection; these were there but they were not because of the phenomenon. Identification with another, however deep, still maintains separation and division; there are still two entities, one identifying with the other, a conscious or an unconscious process, through affection or through hate; in it there is an endeavour of some kind, subtle or open. But here there was none at all. She was the only human being that existed on that road. She was and the other was not. It was not a fancy or an illusion; it was a simple fact and no amount of clever reasoning and subtle explanation could alter that fact. Even when she turned off the road and was going away, the other was not on that straight road that went on. It was some time before the other found himself walking beside a long heap of broken stones, ready for renewing the road. Along that road, over the gap in the southern hills, came that otherness with such intensity and power that it was with the greatest difficulty that one could stand up and continue the walk. It was like a furious storm but without the wind and the noise and its intensity was overwhelming. Strangely every time it comes, there is always something new; it is never the same and always unexpected. This otherness is not something extraordinary, some mysterious energy, but is mysterious in the sense that it is something beyond time and thought. A mind that is caught in time and thought can never comprehend it. It is not a thing to be understood, any more than love can be analysed and understood, but without this immensity, strength and energy, life, and all existence, at any level, becomes trivial and sorrowful. There is an absoluteness about it, not a finality; it is absolute energy; it is self-existent without cause; it is not the ultimate, final energy for it is all energy. Every form of energy and action must cease for it to be. But in it all action is. Love and do what you will. There must be death and total destruction for it to be; not the revolution of outward things but the total destruction of the known in which all shelter and existence is cultivated. There must be total emptiness and only then that otherness, the timeless, comes. But this emptiness is not to be cultivated, it is not the result whose cause can be bought and sold; nor is it the outcome of time and evolutionary process; time can only give birth to more time. Destruction of time is not a process; all methods and processes prolong time. Ending of time is the ending of total thought and feel1ng. 5th Beauty is never personal. The hills were dark blue and carried the light of the evening. It had been raining and now great spaces of blue appeared; the blue was ablaze with white clouds surrounding it; it was the blue that made the eyes sparkle with forgotten tears; it was the blue of infancy and innocence. And that blue became a pale nile-green of early leaves of spring and beyond it was the fire-red of a cloud that was gathering speed to cross the hills. And over the hills were the rain clouds, dark, heavy and immovable; these clouds were piling up against the hills in the west and the sun was caught between the hills and the clouds. The ground was soaked, red and clear, and every tree and bush had deep moisture; there were already new leaves; the mango had long russet tender leaves, the tamarind had bright yellow small leaves, the rain-tree had a few shoots of fresh light green; after a long wait of many months of baking sun, the rains brought comfort to the earth; the valley was smiling. The poverty-ridden village was filthy, smelly and so many children were playing, shouting and laughing; they didn't seem to care for anything except the games they were playing. Their parents seemed so weary, haggard and forgotten; they would never know one day of rest, cleanliness and comfort; hunger, labour and more hunger; they were sad, though they smiled readily enough, their eyes forlorn, beyond recalling. Everywhere there was beauty, the grass, the hills and the crowded sky; the birds were calling and high in the air an eagle was circling. There were lean goats on the hills, devouring everything that grew; they were insatiably hungry and their little ones pranced from rock to rock. They were so soft to touch, their skin sparkling, clean and healthy. The boy who was looking after them was singing away, sitting on a rock and occasionally calling to them. The personal cultivation of the pleasure of beauty is self-centred activity; it leads to insensitivity. 6th It was a lovely morning, clear, every star was ablaze and the valley was full of silence. The hills were dark, darker than the sky and cool air had a smell of rain, the scent of leaves and some strong-scented flowering jasmine. Everything was asleep and every leaf was still and the beauty of the morning was magic; it was the beauty of the earth, heavens and of man, of the sleeping birds and the fresh stream in a dry riverbed; it was incredible that it was not personal. There as a certain austerity about it, not the cultivated which is merely the activities of fear and denial but the austerity of completeness, so utterly complete that it knew no corruption. There on the verandah, with Orion in the western sky, the fury of beauty wiped away the defences of time. Meditating there, beyond the limits of time, seeing the sky ablaze with stars and the earth silent, beauty is not the personal pursuit of pleasure, of things put together, of things known, or unknown images and visions of the brain with its thoughts and feelings. Beauty has nothing whatsoever to do with thought or sentiment or with the pleasurable feeling aroused by a concert or a picture or seeing a game of football; the pleasures of concert, poems, are perhaps more refined than football but they are all in the same field as the Mass or some puja in a temple. It is the beauty beyond time and beyond the aches and pleasures of thought. Thought and feeling dissipate energy and so beauty is never seen. Energy, with its intensity, is needed to see beauty - beauty that is beyond the eye of the beholder. When there is a seer, an observer, then there is no beauty. There on the perfumed verandah, when dawn was still far away and the trees were still silent, what is essence is beauty. But this essence is not experienceable; experiencing must cease, for experience only strengthens the known. The known is never the essence. Meditation is never the further experiencing; it is not only the ending of experience, which is the response to challenge, great or small, but it is the opening of the door to essence, opening the door of a furnace whose fire utterly destroys, without leaving any ashes; there are no remains. We are the remains, the yes-sayers of many thousand yesterdays, a continuous series of endless memories. of choice and despair. The Big Self and the little self are the pattern of existence and existence is thought and thought is existence, with never ending sorrow. In the flame of meditation thought ends and with it feeling, for neither is love. Without love, there is no essence; without it there are only ashes on which is based our existence. Out of the emptiness love is. 7th The owls started, very early this morning, calling to each other. At first they were in different parts of the valley; one was in the west and the other north; their hoots were very clear in the still air and carried very far. At first they were quite a distance from each other and gradually they came nearer and as they came, their hoots became hoarse, very deep, not so long drawn out, shorter and more insistent. As they came nearer they kept calling to each other more frequently; they must have been large birds, one couldn't see them, it was too dark even when they were in the same tree quite close and the tone and quality of their hoots changed, They were talking to each other at so profound a depth that they could hardly be heard. They were there for considerable time, until dawn came. Then slowly a series of noises began, a dog barked, somebody called, a firecracker went off - for the last two days there was some kind of festival - a door opened and as it became lighter all the noises of the day began. To deny is essential. To deny today without knowing what tomorrow will bring is to keep awake. To deny the social, economic and religious pattern is to be alone, which is to be sensitive. Not to be able to deny totally is to be mediocre. Not to be able to deny ambition and all its ways is to accept the norm of existence which breeds conflict, confusion and sorrow. To deny the politician and so the politician in us, the response to the immediate, to live with short vision, is to be free from fear. Total denial is the negation of the positive, the imitative urge, conformity. But this denial itself is positive, for it is not a reaction. To deny the accepted standard of beauty, past or present, is to discover beauty which is beyond thought and feeling; but, to discover it, energy is necessary. This energy comes when there is no conflict, contradiction, and action is no longer partial. 8th Humility is the essence of all virtue. Humility is not to be cultivated, nor is virtue. The respectable morality of any society is mere adjustment to the pattern set by social, economic, religious environment, but such morality of changing adjustment is not virtue. Conformity and the imitative self-concern of security, called morality, is the denial of virtue. Order is never permanent; it has to be maintained every day, as a room has to be cleaned every day. Order has to be maintained from moment to moment, every day. This order is not personal, individual adjustment to the pattern of conditioned responses of like and dislike, pleasure and pain,. This order is not a means of escape from sorrow; the understanding of sorrow and the ending of sorrow is virtue, which brings about order. Order is not an end in itself; order, as an end in itself leads to the dead end of respectability, which is deterioration and decay. Learning is the very essence of humility, learning from everything and from everybody. There is no hierarchy in learning. Authority denies learning and a follower will never learn. There was a single cloud, aflame with the light of the setting sun, behind the eastern hills; no fantasy could build such a cloud. It was the form of all forms; no architect could have designed such structure. It was the result of many winds, of many suns and nights, of pressure and strains. Other clouds were dark without light; they had no depth or height but this one shattered space. The hill, beyond which the cloud was, appeared emptied of life and strength; it had lost its usual dignity and its purity of line. The cloud had absorbed all the quality of hills, their might and silence. Below the towering cloud lay the valley, green and rain-washed; there is something very beautiful in this ancient valley when it has rained; it becomes spectacularly bright and green, green of every shade and the earth becomes more red. The air is clear and the big rocks on the hills are polished red, blue, grey and pale violet. There were several people in the room, some sitting on the floor and some on chairs; there was the quietness of appreciation and enjoyment. A man was playing on an eight-stringed instrument. He was playing with his eyes closed, delighted as the little audience. It was pure sound and on that sound one rode, far and very deep; each sound carried one deeper. The quality of sound that instrument produced made the journey infinite; from the moment he touched it till the moment he stopped, it was the sound that mattered not the instrument, not the man, not the audience. It had the effect of shutting out all other sound, even the fireworks that the boys were setting off; you heard them crash and crack but it was part of the sound and the sound was everything - the cicadas that were singing, the boys laughing, the call of a small girl and the sound of silence. He must have played for over half an hour and during that entire period the journey, far and deep, continued; it was not a journey that is taken in imagination, on the wings of thought or in the frenzy of emotion. Such journeys are short, with some meaning or pleasure; this had no meaning and no pleasure. There was only sound and nothing else, no thought, no feeling. That sound carried one through and beyond the confines of time, and quietly it went on into great immense emptiness from which there was no return. What is returning always is memory, a thing that has been, but here there was no memory, no experience. Fact has no shadow, memory. 9th There wasn't a cloud in the sky as the sun went down behind the hills; the air was still and not a leaf moved. Everything seemed held tight, in the light of a cloudless sky. The reflection of the evening light on a little stretch of water by the roadside was full of ecstatic energy and a little wildflower, by the wayside, was all life. There is a hill that looks like one of those ancient and ageless temples; it was purple, darker than violet, intense and vastly unconcerned; it was alive with an inward light, without shadow, and every rock and bush was shouting with joy. A bullock cart with two oxen came along the road, carrying some hay; a boy was sitting on the hay and a man was driving the cart which made a lot of noise. They stood out clearly against the sky, especially the outlines of the boy's face; his nose and forehead were clean cut, gentle; it was the face that had no education and probably would never have; it was an unspoiled face, not yet used to hard work nor to any responsibility; it was a smiling face. The clear sky was reflected on it. Walking along that road, meditation seemed a most natural thing; there was a fervour and a clarity and the occasion suited the state. Thought is a waste of energy as also is feeling. Thought and feeling invite distraction and concentration becomes defensive self-absorption, like a child absorbed in his toy. The toy is fascinating and he is lost in it; remove it and he becomes restless. The same with the grown-ups; their toys are the many escapes. There on the road, thought, with its feeling had no power of absorption; it had no self-generating energy and so it came to an end. The brain became quiet, as the waters become quiet when there is no breeze. It was the stillness before creation takes place. And there on that hill, just close by, an owl started gently hooting but suddenly stopped and high up in the sky one of those brown eagles was crossing the valley. It is the quality of stillness that has significance; an induced stillness is stagnation; a stillness that is bought is a merchandise which has hardly any value; a stillness that is the outcome of control, discipline, suppression is clamorous with despair. There was not a sound in the valley nor in the mind, but the mind went beyond the valley and time. And there was no returning for it had not gone. Silence is the depth of emptiness. At the bend of the road, the road gently goes down across a couple of bridges over dry red riverbeds, to the other side of the valley. The bullock cart had gone down that road; some villagers were coming up it, shy and noiseless; there were children playing in the riverbed and a bird kept on calling. Just as the road turned east, that otherness came. It came pouring down in great waves of benediction, splendid and immense. It seemed as though the heavens opened and out of this immensity came the unnameable; it had been there all day, one realized suddenly and only now, walking alone, with the others a little way off, did one realize the fact, and what made it extraordinary was this thing that was happening; it was the culmination of what had been going on and not an isolated incident. There was light, not of the setting sun nor powerful artificial light; this makes shadows but there was light without shadow and it was light. 10th A deep-throated owl was hooting in the hills; its deep voice penetrated the room and quickened hearing. Except for these hoots everything was still; there was not even the croak of a frog or the rustle of some passing animal. The silence intensified between the hoots which came from the southern hills; they filled the valley and the hills and the air throbbed with the call. It wasn't answered for a very long time and when it came, it was way down the valley to the west; between them, they held the silence and the beauty of the night. Dawn would come presently but now it was dark; you could see the outlines of the hill and that huge banyan tree. The Pleiades and Orion were setting in a clear, cloudless sky; the air was fresh by a short shower of rain; it had a perfume that comes of old trees, rain, flowers and very ancient hills. It was really a marvellous morning. What was outside was taking place inside and meditation is really a movement of both, undivided. The many systems of meditation merely trap the mind in a pattern offering marvellous escapes and sensations; it is only the immature that play with them, getting a great deal of satisfaction from them. Without self-knowing all meditation leads to delusion and to varying forms of self-deception, factual and fancied. It was a movement of intense energy, that energy which conflict will never know. Conflict perverts and dissipates energy, as ideals and conformity do. Thought was gone and with it feeling but the brain was alive and fully sensitive. Every movement, action with a motive is inaction; it is this inaction that corrupts energy. Love with motive ceases to be love; there is love without motive. The body was completely motionless and the brain utterly still and both were actually aware of everything but there was neither thought nor motion. It was not a form of hypnosis, an induced state because there was nothing to be gained by it, no visions, sensations, all that silly business. It was a fact and a fact has no pleasure or pain. And the movement was lost to all recognition, to the known. Dawn was coming and with it came the otherness which is essentially part of meditation. A dog barked and the day had begun. 11th There are only facts, not greater or lesser facts. The fact, the what is, cannot be understood when approached with opinions or judgments; opinions, judgments, then become the fact and not the fact that you wish to understand. In pursuing the fact, in watching the fact, the what is, the fact teaches and its teaching is never mechanical, and to follow its teachings, the listening, the observation must be acute; this attention is denied if there is motive for listening. Motive dissipates energy, distorts it; action with a motive is inaction, leading to confusion and sorrow. Sorrow has been put together by thought and thought feeding upon itself forms the I and the me. As a machine has life, so does the I and the me, a life which is fed by thought and feeling. Fact destroys this machinery. Belief is so unnecessary, as are ideals. Both dissipate energy which is needed to follow the unfolding of the fact, the what is. Beliefs like ideals are escapes from the fact and in escape there is no end to sorrow. The ending of sorrow is the understanding of the fact from moment to moment. There is no system or method which will give understanding but only a choiceless awareness of a fact. Meditation according to a system is the avoidance of the fact of what you are; it is far more important to understand yourself, the constant changing of the facts about yourself, than to meditate in order to find god, have visions, sensations and other forms of entertainment. A crow was cawing its head off; it was sitting on the branch with thick foliage. It wasn't visible; other crows came and went but it went on hardly stopping its sharp, penetrating croak; it was angry with something or complaining about something. The leaves shook around it and even the few drops of rain didn't stop it. It was so completely absorbed in whatever it was that was disturbing it. It came out, shook itself and flew away, only to resume its biting complaint; presently, it got tired and rested. And from the same crow, in the same place came a different caw, subdued, somewhat friendly and inviting. There were other birds on the tree, the Indian cuckoo, a bright yellow bird with black wings, a silvery grey fat bird, one of many who was scratching at the foot of the tree. One of those small striped squirrels came along and went up the tree. They were all there in that tree but the crow's call was the loudest and most persistent. The sun came out of the clouds and the tree cast a heavy shadow and across the small, narrow dip in the land came the sounds of a flute, strangely moving. 12th It had been cloudy all day, heavy dark clouds but they brought no rain and if it didn't rain heavily and for many hours, the people would suffer, the land would be empty and there would be no voices in the riverbed; the sun would bake the land, the green of these few weeks would disappear, the earth would be bare. It would be a disaster and all the villages around here would suffer; they were used to suffering, to deprivation, to go with little food. Rain was a blessing and if it didn't rain now there would be no rain for the next six months and the soil was poor, sandy, rocky. The rice fields would be watered from the wells and there would be the danger that they too might go dry. Existence was hard, brutal, with little pleasure. The hills were indifferent; they had seen sorrow from generation to generation; they had seen all the varieties of misery, the coming and the going for they were some of the most ancient hills in the world, and they knew and they couldn't do much. People cut down their forests, their trees for firewood and the goats destroyed their bushes and the people had to live. And they were indifferent; sorrow would never touch them; they were aloof, and though they were so close, they were far away. They were blue that morning and some were violet and grey in their greenness. They could offer no help though they were strong and beautiful with the sense of peace that comes, so naturally and easily, without deep inward intensity, complete and without roots, But there would be neither peace nor plenty if the rains didn't come. It is a terrible thing to depend for one's happiness on rain, and the rivers and irrigation canals were far away and government was busy with its politics and schemes. Water that is so alive with light and that dances tirelessly was needed, not words and hope. It was drizzling and low on the hill was a rainbow, so delicate and fanciful; it circled just over the trees and across the northern hills. It didn't stay long for the drizzle was a passing thing but it had left so many drops on the mimosa-like leaves of the spreading tree close by. On these leaves, three crows were taking a bath, fluttering their black-grey wings to get the drops on the underpart of their wings and their bodies; they called to each other and there was pleasure in their caw; when there were no more drops, they moved to another part of the tree. Their bright eyes looked at you and their really black beaks were sharp; there is a little water running in one of the river beds close by and there is a leaky tap which forms a decent pool for birds; they were there often but these three crows must have taken a fancy to having their morning bath among the cool, refreshing leaves. It is a wide-spreading tree, beautiful in shape and many birds come to take shelter at noonday. There is always some bird in it, calling or chattering away or scolding. The trees are beautiful in life and in death; they live and have never thought of death; they are always renewing themselves. How easy it is to degenerate, in every way, to let the body waste, become sluggish, fat; to allow feelings to wither away; the mind allowing itself to become shallow, petty and dull. A clever mind is a shallow mind and it cannot renew itself and so withers away in its own bitterness; it decays by the exercise of its own brittle sharpness, by its own thought. Every thought shapes the mind in the mould of the known; every feeling, every emotion, however refined becomes wasteful and empty and the body fed on thought and feeling loses its sensibility. It is not physical energy, though it is necessary, that breaks through the wearying dullness; it is not enthusiasm or sentiment which bring about sensitivity of one's whole being; enthusiasm and sentiment corrupt. It is thought which is the disintegrating factor; for thought has its roots in the known. A life based on thought and its activities, becomes mechanical; however smoothly it may run, it is still mechanical action. Action with motive dissipates energy and so disintegration sets in. All motives, conscious or unconscious, generate from the known, life of the known, though projected into the future as the known, is decay; in that life there is no renewal. Thought can never bring about innocency and humility and yet it is innocency and humility that keep the mind young, sensitive, incorruptible. Freedom from the known is the ending of thought; to die to thought, from moment to moment, is to be free from the known. it is this death that puts an end to decay. 13th There is a huge boulder which projects itself from the southern hills; it changes its colour from hour to hour, it is red, highly polished marble of deep rose, a dull brick red, a rain-washed, sunburnt terra cotta, a grey of mossy green, a flower of many hues and sometimes it seems just a block of rock without any life. It is all these things, and this morning, just as dawn was making the clouds grey, this rock was a fire, a flame among the green bushes; it is moody as a spoiled person but its moods are never dark, threatening; it has always colour, flamboyant or quiet, shouting or smiling, welcoming or withdrawn. It might be one of the gods that is worshipped but it is still a rock of colour and dignity. All these hills seem to have something special to each one of them, none of them is too high, they are hard in a hard climate, they seem to be sculptured and exploding. They seem to go with the valley, not too large, far away from towns and traffic, green when it rains and arid; the beauty of the valley is the trees in the green rice fields. Some of the trees are massive, big of trunk and branch and they are splendid in their shape; others are waiting, expectantly, for the rain, stunted but slowly growing; others are full of leaves and shade. There are not too many of them but these that survive are really quite beautiful. The earth is red and the trees are green and the bushes very close to the red earth. They all survive in the rainless, harsh sunny days of many months and when it does rain, their rejoicings shatter the quietness of the valley; every tree and every bush is shouting with life and the green leaf is quite incredible; the hills too join and the whole earth becomes the glory that is. There was not a sound in the valley; it was dark and there wasn't a leaf moving; dawn would come in an hour or so. meditation is not self-hypnosis, by words or thought, by repetition or image; all imagination of every kind must be put aside for they lead to delusion. The understanding of facts and not theories, not the pursuits of conclusions and adjustments to them and the ambitions of visions. All these must be set aside and meditation is the understanding of these facts and so going beyond them. Self-knowing is the beginning of meditation; otherwise so-called meditation leads to every form of immaturity and silliness. It was early and the valley was asleep. On waking, meditation was the continuation of what had been going on; the body was without a movement; it was not made to be quiet but it was quiet; there was no thought but the brain was watchful, without any sensation; neither feeling nor thought existed. And a timeless movement began. Word is time, indicating space; word is of the past or the future but the active present has no word. The dead can be put into words but the living cannot. Every word used to communicate about the living is the denial of the living. It was a movement that passed through and between the walls of the brain but the brain had no contact with it; it was incapable of pursuit or of recognition. This movement was something that was not born out of the known; the brain could follow the known as it could recognize it but here no recognition, of any kind, was possible. A movement has direction but this had no direction; it was not static. Because it was without direction, it was the essence of action. All direction is of influence or of reaction. But action which is not the outcome of reaction, push, or pull, is total energy. This energy, love, has its own movement. But the word love, the known, is not love. There is only the fact, the freedom from the known. Meditation was the explosion of the fact. Our problems multiply and continue; the continuation of a problem perverts and corrupts the mind. A problem is a conflict, an issue which has not been understood; such problems become scars and innocency is destroyed. Every conflict has to be understood and so ended. One of the factors of deterioration is the continued life of a problem; every problem breeds another problem, and a mind burnt with problems, personal or collective, social or economic, is in a state of deterioration. 14th Sensitivity and sensation are two different things. Sensations, emotions, feelings always leave a residue, whose accumulation dulls and distorts. Sensations are always contradictory and so conflicting; conflict always dulls the mind, perverts perception. The appreciation of beauty in terms of sensation, of like and dislike, is not to perceive beauty; sensation can only divide as beauty and ugliness but division is not beauty. Because sensations, feeings, breed conflict, to avoid conflict, discipline, control, suppression, have been advocated but this only builds resistance and so increases conflict and brings about greater dullness and insensitivity. The saintly control and suppression is the saintly insensitivity and brutal dullness which is so highly regarded. To make the mind more stupid and dull, ideals and conclusions are invented and spread around. All forms of sensations, however refined or gross, cultivate resistance and a withering away. Sensitivity is the dying to every residue of sensation; to be sensitive, utterly and intensely, to a flower, to a person, to a smile, is to have no scar of memory, for every scar destroys sensitivity. To be aware of every sensation, feeling, thought as it arises, from moment to moment, choicelessly, is to be free from scars, never allowing a scar to be formed. Sensations, feelings, thoughts are always partial, fragmentary and destructive. Sensitivity is a total of body, mind and heart. Knowledge is mechanical and functional; knowledge, capacity, used to acquire status, breeds conflict, antagonism, envy. The cook and the ruler are functions and when status is stolen by either, then begin the quarrels, snobbery and the worship of position, function and power. Power is always evil and it is this evil that corrupts society. The psychological importance of function breeds the hierarchy of status. To deny hierarchy is to deny status; there is hierarchy of function but not of status. Words are of little importance but fact is of immense significance. Fact never brings sorrow but words covering the fact and escapes from it, do breed untold conflict and misery. A whole group of cattle were feeding on the green land; they were all brown of different shades and when they moved together it was as though the earth moved. They are quite big, indolent and pestered by flies; these are specially cared for, well fed, unlike the village cattle; those are bone-thin small, yielding very little, rather smelly and seem to be everlastingly hungry. There is always some boy or a little girl with them, shouting at them, talking to them, calling them. Everywhere life is hard, there is disease and death. There is an old woman who goes by every day, carrying a little pot of milk or food of some kind; she seems to be shy, without teeth; her clothes are dirty and there is misery on her face; occasionally she smiles but it is rather forced. She is from the village nearby and always barefooted; they are surprisingly small feet and hard but there is fire in her; she is a wiry old lady. Her gentle walk is not at all gentle. Everywhere there is misery and a forced smile. The gods have gone except in the temples and the powerful of the land never have eyes for that woman. But it rained, a long and heavy shower and the clouds hold the hills. The trees follow the clouds and the hills were pursuing them and man is left behind. 15th It was dawn; the hills were in clouds and every bird was singing, calling, screeching, a cow was bellowing and a dog howled. It was a pleasant morning, the light was soft and the sun was behind the hills and clouds. And a flute was being played under the old, big banyan tree; it was accompanied by a small drum. The flute dominated the drum and filled the air; by its very soft, gentle notes, it seemed to penetrate into your very being; you listened to it though other sounds were coming to you; the varying throbs of the little drum came to you on the waves of the flute and the harsh call of the crow came with the drum. Every sound penetrates, some you resist and others you welcome, the unpleasant and the pleasant and so you lose. The voice of the crow came with the drum and the drum rode on the delicate note of the flute and so the whole sound was able to go deeply beyond all resistance and pleasure. And in that there was great beauty, not the beauty which thought and feeling know. And on that sound rode the exploding meditation; and in that meditation, the flute, the throbbing drum, the harsh caw of the crow and all the things of the earth joined in and thereby gave depth and vastness to the explosion. Explosion is destructive and destruction is the earth and life, as love is. That note of the flute is explosive, if you let it be, but you won't for you want a safe, secure life and so life becomes a dull affair; having made it dull, then you try to give significance, purpose to the ugliness, with its trivial beauty. And so music is something to be enjoyed, arousing a lot of feeling, as football or some religious ritual does. Feeling, emotion, is wasteful and so easily turned to hate. But love is not sensation, a thing captured by feeling. Listening completely, without resistance, without any barrier is the miracle of explosion, shattering the known, and to listen to that explosion, with- out motive, without direction is to enter where thought, time, cannot pursue. The valley is probably about a mile wide at its narrowest point, where the hills come together and they run east and west, though one or two hills prevent the others from running freely; they are to the west; where the sun comes from is open, hill after hill. These hills fade into the horizon with precision and height; they seem to have that strange quality of blue-violet that comes with vast age and hot sun. In the evening these hills catch the light of the setting sun and then they become utterly unreal, marvellous in their colour; then the eastern sky has all the colour of the setting sun, you might think that the sun went down there. It was an evening of light pink and dark clouds. The moment one stepped out of the house, talking with another of quite different things, that otherness, that unknowable, was there. It was so unexpected, for one was in the midst of a serious conversation and it was there with such urgency. All talk came to an end, very easily and naturally. The other did not notice the change in the quality of the atmosphere and went on saying something which needed no reply. We walked that whole mile almost without a word and we walked with it, under it, in it. It is wholly the unknown, though it comes and goes; all recognition has stopped for recognition is still the way of the known. Each time there is "greater" beauty and intensity and impenetrable strength. This is the nature of love too. 16th It was a very quiet evening, the clouds had gone and were gathering around the setting sun. The trees made restless by the breeze were settling down for the night; they too had become quiet; the birds were coming in, taking shelter for the night among the trees that had thick foliage. There were two small owls, sitting high up on the wires, with their unblinking eyes, staring. And as usual, the hills stood alone and aloof far away from every kind of disturbance; during the day they had to put up with the noises of the valley but now they withdrew from all communication, and darkness was closing in upon them, though there was the feeble light of the moon. The moon had a halo of vaporous clouds round it; everything was preparing to go to sleep save the hills. They never slept; they were always watching, waiting, looking and communing amongst themselves, endlessly. Those two little owls on the wire made rattling noises, stones in a metal box; their rattling was far louder than their little bodies, like large fists; you would hear them in the night, going from tree to tree, their flight as silent as the big ones. They flew off the wire flying low, just above the bushes, rising again to the lower branches of the tree, and from a safe distance they would watch and soon lose interest. On the crooked pole further down was a large owl; it was brown with enormous eyes and with a sharp beak that seemed to come out between those staring eyes. It flew off with a few beats of its wings, with such a quietness and deliberation that it made you wonder at the structure and the strength of those graceful wings; it flew off into the hills and lost itself in darkness. This must be the owl, with its mate that has the deep hoot, calling to the other in the night; last night they must have gone into the other valleys beyond the hills; they would come back, for their home was in one of those northern hills where you could hear their early evening calls if you happened to pass by quietly. Beyond these hills were more fertile lands, with green, luscious rice fields. Questioning has become merely a revolt, a reaction to what is and all reactions have little meaning. The communists revolt against the capitalists, the son against the father; the refusal to accept the social norm, to break through the economic and class bondage. Perhaps, these revolts are necessary but yet they are not very deep; instead of the old, a new pattern is repeated and in the very breaking of the old a new one is, closing in the mind and so destroying it, The endless revolt within the prison is the questioning reaction of the immediate, and remodelling and redecorating the prison walls seems to give us such intense satisfaction that we never break through the walls. The questioning discontent is within the walls, which doesn't get us very far; it would take you to the moon and to the neutron bombs but all this is still within the call of sorrow. But the questioning of the structure of sorrow and going beyond it is not the escape of reaction. This questioning is far more urgent than going to the moon or to the temple; it is this questioning that tears down the structure and not the building of a new and more expensive prison, with its gods and saviours, with its economists and leaders. This questioning destroys the machinery of thought and not the substitution of one by another thought, conclusion, theory. This questioning shatters authority, the authority of experience, word and the most respected evil power. This questioning, which is not born of reaction, of choice and motive, explodes the moral, respectable self-centred activity; it is this activity that is always being reformed and never smashed. This endless reformation is the endless sorrow. What has cause and motive inevitably breeds agony and despair. We are afraid of this total destruction of the known, the ground of the self, the me and the mine; the known is better than the unknown, the known with its confusion, conflict and misery; freedom from this known may destroy what we call love, relationship, joy and so on. Freedom from the known, the explosive questioning, not of reaction, ends sorrow, and so love then is something that thought and feeling cannot measure. Our life is so shallow and empty, petty thoughts and petty activities, woven in conflict and misery and always journeying from the known to the known, psychologically demanding security. There is no security in the known however much one may want it. Security is time and there is no psychological time; it is a myth and an illusion, breeding fear. There is nothing permanent now or in the hereafter, in the future. By right questioning and listening, the pattern moulded by thought and feeling, the pattern of the known, is shattered. Self-knowing, knowing the ways of thought and feeling, listening to every movement of thought and feeling, ends the known. The known breeds sorrow, and love is the freedom from the known. 17th The earth was the colour of the sky; the hills, the green, ripening rice fields, the trees and the dry, sandy riverbed were the colour of the sky; every rock on the hills, the big boulders, were the clouds and they were the rocks. Heaven was the earth and the earth heaven; the setting sun had transformed everything. The sky was blazing fire, bursting in every streak of cloud, in every stone, in every blade of grass, in every grain of sand. The sky was ablaze with green, purple, violet, indigo, with the fury of flame. Over that hill it was a vast sweep of purple and gold; over the southern hills a burning delicate green and fading blues; to the east there was a counter sunset as splendid in cardinal red and burnt ochre, magenta and fading violet. The counter sunset was exploding in splendour as in the west; a few clouds had gathered themselves around the setting sun and they were pure, smokeless fire which would never die. The vastness of this fire and its intensity penetrated everything and entered the earth. The earth was the heavens and the heavens the earth. And everything was alive and bursting with colour and colour was god, not the god of man. The hills became transparent, every rock and boulder was without weight, floating in colour and the distant hills were blue, the blue of all the seas and the sky of every clime. The ripening rice fields were intense pink and green, a stretch of immediate attention. And the road that crossed the valley was purple and white, so alive that it was one of the rays that raced across the sky. You were of that light, burning, furious, exploding, without shadow, without root and word. And as the sun went further down, every colour became more violent, more intense and you were completely lost, past all recalling. It was an evening that had no memory. Every thought and feeling must flower for them to live and die; flowering of everything in you, the ambition, the greed, the hate, the joy, the passion; in the flowering there is their death and freedom. It is only in freedom that anything can flourish, not in suppression, in control and discipline; these only pervert, corrupt. Flowering and freedom is goodness and all virtue. To allow envy to flower is not easy; it is condemned or cherished but never given freedom. It is only in freedom the fact of envy reveals its colour, its shape, its depth, its peculiarities; if suppressed it will not reveal itself fully and freely. When it has shown itself completely, there is an ending of it only to reveal another fact, emptiness, loneliness, fear, and as each fact is allowed to flower, in freedom, in its entirety, the conflict between the observer and the observed ceases; there is no longer the censor but only observation, only seeing. Freedom can only be in completion not in repetition, suppression, obedience to a pattern of thought. There is completion only in flowering and dying; there is no flowering if there is no ending. What has continuity is thought in time. The flowering of thought is the ending of thought; for only in death is there the new. The new cannot be if there is no freedom from the known. Thought, the old, cannot bring into being the new; it must die for the new to be. What flowers must come to an end. 20th It was very dark; the stars were brilliant in a cloudless sky and the mountain air was cool and fresh. The headlights caught the tall cacti and they were polished silver; the morning dew was upon them and they shone; the little plants were bright with the dew and the headlights made the green sparkle and flash with a green that was not of the day. Every tree was silent, mysterious and dreaming and unapproachable. Orion and the Pleiades were setting among the dark hills; even the owls were far away and silent; except for the noise of the car, the country was asleep; only the nightjars, with red sparkling eyes, caught by the headlights, sitting on the road, stared at us and flutteringly flew away. So early in the morning, the villages were asleep and the few people on the road had wrapped themselves up just showing their face; and were walking wearily from one village to another; they looked as though they had been walking all night; a few were huddled around a blaze, throwing long shadows across the road. A dog was scratching itself in the middle of the road; it wouldn't move and the car had to go around it. Then suddenly, the morning star showed itself; it was easily as large as a saucer, astonishingly bright and seemed to hold the east in sway. As it climbed, Mercury appeared, just below her, pale and overpowering. There was a slight glow and far away was the beginning of dawn. The road curved in and out, hardly ever straight and trees on either side of the road held it from wandering off into the fields. There were large stretches of water, to be used for irrigation purposes in the summer when water would be scarce. The birds were still asleep, except for one or two and as dawn came closer, they began to wake up, crows, vultures, pigeons and the innumerable small birds. We were climbing and went over a long wooded range; no wild animals crossed the road. And there were monkeys on the road now, a huge fellow, sitting under the large trunk of the tamarind; it never moved as we passed by though the others scampered off in every direction. There was a little one, it must have been a few days old, clinging to the belly of her mother who looked rather displeased with things. Dawn was yielding to day and the lorries that crashed by had turned off their lights. And now the villages were awake, people sweeping their front steps and throwing dirt in the middle of the road; many dogs still fast asleep right in the middle of the road; they seemed to prefer the very centre of the road; lorries went around them, cars and people. Women were carrying water from the well, with little children following them. The sun was getting hot and glary and the hills were harsh and there were fewer trees and we were leaving the mountains and going towards the sea in a flat, open country; the air was moist and hot and we were coming nearer the big, crowded, dirty city*** and the hills were far behind. The car was going fairly fast and it was a good place to meditate. To be free of the word and not to give too much importance to it; to see that the word is not the thing and the thing is never the word; not to get caught in the overtones of the word and yet use words with care and understanding; to be sensitive to words and not to be weighed down by them; to break through the verbal barrier and to consider the fact; to avoid the poison of words and feel the beauty of them; to put away all identification with words and to examine them, for words are a trap and a snare. They are the symbols and not the real. The screen of words acts as a shelter for the lazy, the thoughtless and the deceiving mind. Slavery to words is the beginning of inaction which may appear to be action and a mind caught in symbols cannot go far. Every word, thought, shapes the mind and without understanding every thought, mind becomes a slave to words and sorrow begins. Conclusions and explanations do not end sorrow. Meditation is not a means to an end; there is no end, no arrival; it is a movement in time and out of time. Every system, method, binds thought to time but choiceless awareness of every thought and feeling, understanding their motives, their mechanism, allowing them to blossom is the beginning of meditation. When thought and feeling flourish and die, meditation is the movement beyond time. In this movement there is ecstasy; in complete emptiness there is love, and with love there is destruction and creation. * Rishi Valley, some 170 miles north of Madras and 2,500 feet above sea level. There is a Krishnamurti school there where he stayed. ** Wimbledon Common. He was remembering London where he had stayed in May in a house at Wimbledon. *** Madras. He went to stay in a house in seven acres of ground on the north bank of the Adyar River. This river flows into the Bay of Bengal, south of Madras. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 7 MADRAS 20TH NOVEMBER TO 17TH DECEMBER 1961 All existence is choice; only in aloneness there is no choice. Choice, in every form, is conflict. Contradiction is inevitable in choice; this contradiction, inner and outer breeds confusion and misery. To escape from this misery, gods, beliefs, nationalism, commitment to various patterns of activities become compulsive necessities. Having escaped, they become all important and escape is the way of illusion; then fear and anxiety set in. Despair and sorrow is the way of choice and there is no end to pain. Choice, selection, must always exist as long as there is the chooser, the accumulated memory of pain and pleasure, and every experience of choice only strengthens memory whose response becomes thought and feeling. Memory has only a partial significance, to respond mechanically; this response is choice. There is no freedom in choice. You choose according to the background you have been brought up in, according to your social, economic, religious conditioning. Choice invariably strengthens this conditioning; there is no escape from this conditioning, it only breeds more suffering. There were a few clouds gathering around the sun; they were far down on the horizon and were afire. The palm trees were dark against the flaming sky; they stood in golden-green rice fields stretching far into the horizon. There was one all by itself, in a yellowing green of rice; it was not alone, though it looked rather forlorn and far away. A gentle breeze from the sea was blowing and a few clouds were chasing each other, faster than the breeze. The flames were dying and the moon strengthened the shadows. Everywhere there were shadows, quietly whispering to each other. The moon was just overhead and across the road the shadows deep and deceptive. A water snake might be crossing the road; quietly slithering across, pursuing a frog; there was water in the rice fields and frogs were croaking, almost rhythmically; in the long stretch of water beside the road, with their heads up, out of the water, they were chasing each other; they would go under and come up to disappear again. The water was bright silver, sparkling and warm to the touch and full of mysterious noises. Bullock carts went by, carrying firewood to the town; a cycle bell rang, a lorry with bright glaring lights screeched for room and the shadows remained motionless. It was a beautiful evening and there on that road so close to town, there was deep silence and not a sound disturbed it, not even the moon and the lorry. It was a silence that no thought, no word could touch, a silence that went with the frogs and the cycles, a silence that followed you; you walked in it, you breathed it, you saw it. It was not shy, it was there insisting and welcoming. It went beyond you into vast immensities and you could follow it if your thought and feeling were utterly quiet, forgetting themselves and losing themselves with the frogs in the water; they had no importance and could so easily lose themselves, to be picked up when they were wanted. It was an enchanting evening, full of clarity and fast-fading smile. Choice is always breeding misery. Watch it and you will see it, lurking, demanding, insisting and begging, and before you know where you are you are caught in its net of inescapable duties, responsibilities and despairs. Watch it and you will be aware of the fact. Be aware of the fact; you cannot change the fact; you may cover it up, run away from it, but you cannot change it. It is there. If you will let it alone, not interfering with it with your opinions and hopes, fears and despairs, with your calculated and cunning judgements, it will flower and show all its intricacies, its subtle ways and there are many, its seeming importance and ethics, its hidden motives and fancies. If you will leave the fact alone, it will show you all these and more. But you must be choicelessly aware of it, walking softly. Then you will see that choice, having flowered, dies and there is freedom, not that you are free but there is freedom. You are the maker of choice; you have ceased to make choice. There is nothing to choose. Out of this choiceless state there flowers aloneness. Its death is never ending. It is always flowering and it is always new. Dying to the known is to be alone. All choice is in the field of the known; action in this field always breeds sorrow. There is the ending of sorrow in aloneness. 22nd* In the opening of masses of leaves was a pink flower of three petals; it was embedded in green and it too must have been surprised by its own beauty. It grew on a tall bush, struggling to survive among all that greenery; there was a huge tree towering over it and there were several other bushes, all fighting for life. There were many other flowers on this bush but this one among the leaves had no companion, it was all by itself and so more startling. There was a slight breeze among the leaves but it never got to this flower; it was motionless and alone and because it was alone, it had a strange beauty, like a single star when the sky is bare. And beyond the green leaves was a black trunk of the palm; it wasn't really black but it looked like the trunk of an elephant. And as you watched it, the black turned to a flowering pink; the evening sun was upon it and all the treetops were afire, motionless. The breeze had died down and patches of the setting sun were upon the leaves. A small bird was sitting on a branch, preening itself. It stopped to look around and presently flew off into the sun. We were sitting facing the musicians who were facing the setting sun; there were very few of us and the little drum was being played with remarkable skill and pleasure; it was really quite extraordinary what those fingers did. The player never looked at his hands; they seemed to have a life of their own, moving with great rapidity and firmness, striking the taut skin with precision; there was never hesitation. What the right hand did the left hand never knew for it was beating out a different rhythm but always in harmony. The player was quite young, grave with sparkling eyes; he had talent and was delighted to be playing to that small, appreciative audience. Then a stringed instrument joined in and the small drum followed. It was no longer alone. The sun had set and the few wandering clouds were turning pale rose; at this latitude there is no twilight and the moon, nearly full, was clear in a cloudless sky. Walking on that road, with the moonlight on the water and the croaking of many frogs, became a blessing. It is strange how far away the world is and into what great depth one has travelled. The telegraph poles, the buses, the bullock carts and the worn-out villagers were there beside you but you were far away, so deep that no thought could follow; every feeling stayed far away. You were walking, aware of everything that was happening around you, the darkening of the moon by masses of clouds, the warning of the cycle bell, but you were far away, not you but great, vast depth. This depth went on more profoundly within itself, past time and the limits of space. Memory couldn't follow it; memory is tethered, but this wasn't. It was total complete freedom, without root and direction. And deep, far from thought there was bursting energy which was ecstasy, a word that has pleasurable gratifying significance to thought but thought could never capture it or travel the spaceless distance to pursue it. Thought is a barren thing and could never follow or communicate with that which is timeless. The thundering bus, with its blinding lights, nearly pushed one off the road, into the dancing waters. The essence of control is suppression. The pure seeing puts an end to every form of suppression; seeing is infinitely more subtle than mere control. Control is comparatively easy, it doesn't need much understanding; conformity to a pattern, obedience to established authority, fear of not doing the right thing, of tradition, the drive for success, these are the very things that bring about suppression of what is or the sublimation of what is. The pure act of seeing the fact, whatever the fact be, brings its own understanding and from this, mutation takes place. 25th The sun was behind the clouds and the flat lands stretched far into the horizon which was turning golden brown and red; there was a little canal over which the road went among the rice fields. They were golden yellow and green, spreading on both sides of the road, east and west to the sea and to the setting sun. There is something extraordinarily touching and beautiful to see palm trees, black against the burning sky, among the rice fields; it was not that the scene was romantic or sentimental or picture post-cardish; probably it was all this but there was an intensity and a sweeping dignity and delight in the earth itself and in the common things that one passed by every day. The canal, a long, narrow strip of water of melting fire, went north and south among the rice fields. silent and lonely; there was not much traffic on it; there were barges, crudely made, with square or triangular sails carrying firewood or sand and men sitting huddled together, looking very grave. The palm trees dominated the wide green earth; they were of every shape and size, independent and carefree, swept by the winds and burnt by the sun. The rice fields were ripening golden yellow and there were largish white birds among them; they were flying now into the sunset, their long legs stretched out behind, their wings lazily beating the air. Bullock carts, carrying casuarina firewood to the town, went by, a long line of them, creaking and the men walking and the load was heavy. It was none of these common sights that made the evening enchanting; they were all part of the fading evening, the noisy buses, the silent bicycles, the croaks of the frogs, the smell of the evening. There was a deep widening intensity, an imminent clarity of that otherness, with its impenetrable strength and purity. What was beautiful was now glorified in splendour; everything was clothed in it; there was ecstasy and laughter not only deeply within but among the palms and the rice fields. Love is not a common thing but it was there in the hut with an oil lamp; it was with that old woman, carrying something heavy on her head; with that naked boy, swinging on a piece of string a piece of wood which gave out many sparks for it was his fireworks. It was everywhere, so common that you could pick it up under a dead leaf or in that jasmine by the old crumbling house. But everyone was occupied; busy and lost. It was there filling your heart, your mind and the sky; it remained and would never leave you. Only you would have to die to everything, without roots, without a tear. Then it would come to you, if you were lucky and you forever ceased to run after it, begging, hoping, crying. Indifferent to it, but without sorrow, and thought left far behind. And it would be there, on that dusty, dark road. The flowering of meditation is goodness. It is not a virtue to be gathered bit by bit, slowly in the space of time; it is not morality made respectable by society nor is it the sanction of authority. It is the beauty of meditation that gives perfume to its flowering. How can there be joy in meditation if it is the coaxing of desire and pain; how can it flower if you are seeking it through control, suppression and sacrifice; how can it blossom in the darkness of fear or in corrupting ambition and in the smell of success; how can it bloom in the shadow of hope and despair? You will have to leave all these far behind, without regret, easily, naturally. You see, meditation has not the strain of building defences, to resist and to wither; it is not fashioned out of a sustained practice of any system. All systems will inevitably shape thought to a pattern and conformity destroys the flowering of meditation. It blossoms only in freedom and the withering of that which is. Without freedom there is no self-knowing and without self-knowing there is no meditation. Thought is always petty and shallow however far it may wander in search of knowledge; acquiring expanding knowledge is not meditation. It flowers only in the freedom from the known and withers away in the known. 26th There is a palm tree, all by itself, in the middle of a rice field; it is no longer young, there are only a few palms. It is very tall and very straight; it has the quality of righteousness with the fuss and noise of respectability. It is there and it is alone. It has never known anything else and it would continue to be that way until it died or is destroyed. You suddenly came upon it at the turn of the road and you are startled to see it among the rich rice fields and flowing water; the water and the green fields were murmuring to each other which they always have been doing from ancient days and these gentle mutterings never reached the palm; it was alone with the high heaven and flashing clouds. It was by itself, complete and aloof and it would be nothing else. The water was sparkling in the evening light and away from the road towards the west was the palm tree and beyond it were more rice fields; before coming upon it you had to go through some noisy, dirty, dusty streets, full of children, goats and cattle; the buses raised clouds of dust which nobody seemed to mind and the mangy dogs crowded the road. The car turned off the main thoroughfare which went on, past many small houses and gardens, past rice fields. The car turned left, went through some pompous gates, and a little further on, there in the open, were deer, grazing. There must have been two or three dozen; some had tall heavy antlers and some of the young ones were already showing, sharply, what they would be; many of them were spotted white; they were nervous, flicking their large ears but they went on grazing. Many crossed the red road into the open and there were several more waiting among the bushes to see what was going to happen; the little car had stopped and presently all of them crossed over and joined the others. The evening was clear and the stars were coming out, bright and clear; the trees were withdrawing for the night and the impatient chattering of the birds had come to an end. The evening light was on the water. In that evening light, along that narrow road, the intensity of delight increased and there was no cause for it. It had begun while watching a small jumping spider which jumped with astonishing rapidity on flies and held them fiercely; it had begun while watching a single leaf fluttering while the other leaves were still; it had begun while watching the small striped squirrel, scolding something or other, its long tail bobbing up and down. The delight had no cause, and joy that is a result is so trivial anyway and changes with the change. This strange, unexpected delight increased in its intensity and what is intense is never brutal; it has the quality of yielding but still it remains intense. It is not the intensity of all energy, concentrated; it is not brought about by thought pursuing an idea or occupied with itself; it is not a heightened feeling, for all these have motives and purposes. This intensity had no cause, no end, nor was it brought into being through concentration which really bars the awakening of the total energy. It increased without something being done about it; it was, as something outside of you, over which you had no control; you had no say in the matter. In the very increasing of intensity, there was gentleness. This word is spoilt; it indicates weakness, sloppiness, irresolution, uncertainty, a shy withdrawal, a certain fear and so on. But it was none of these things; it was vital and strong, without defences and so, intense. You couldn't cultivate it, if you wished; it didn't belong to the category of the strong and the weak. It was vulnerable as love is. The delight with its gentleness increased in intensity. There was nothing else but that. The coming and the going of people, the drive in the car and the talk, the deer and the palm tree, the stars and the rice fields were there, in their beauty and freshness, but they were all inside and outside this intensity. A flame has a form, a line, but inside the flame there is only intense heat without form and line. 27th The clouds were piling up to the south-west driven by a strong wind; they were magnificent, great billowing clouds, full of fury and space; they were white and dark grey, rain-bearing filling the sky. The old trees were angry with them and the wind. They wanted to be left alone, though they wanted rain; it would wash them again clean, wash away all the dust and their leaves would sparkle again but they didn't like being disturbed, like old people. The garden had so many flowers, so many colours and each flower was doing a dance, a skip and a jump and every leaf was astir; even the little blades of grass on the little lawn were being shaken. And two old, thin women were weeding it; two old women, old before their age, thin and worn out; they were squatting upon the lawn, chatting and weeding, leisurely; they weren't all there, they were somewhere else, carried away by their thoughts, though they were weeding and talking. They looked intelligent, their eyes sparkling, but perhaps too many children and lack of good food had made them old and weary. You became them, they were you and the grass and the clouds; it wasn't a verbal bridge over which you crossed out of pity or out of some vague, unfamiliar sentiment; you were not thinking at all, nor were your emotions stirred. They were you and you were they; distance and time had ceased. A car came with a chauffeur and he entered into that world. His shy smile and salute were those of yours and you were wondering at whom he was smiling and whom he was saluting; he was feeling a little awkward, not quite used to that feeling of being together. The women and the chauffeur were you and you were they; the barrier which they had built was gone and as the clouds overhead went by, it all seemed a part of a widening circle, including so many things, the filthy road and the splendid sky and the passer-by. It had nothing to do with thought, thought is such a sordid thing anyway and feeling was involved in no way. It was like a flame that burned its way through everything leaving no mark, no ashes; it wasn't an experience, with its memories, to be repeated. They were you and you were they and it died with the mind. It is strange, the desire to show off or to be somebody. Envy is hate and vanity corrupts. It seems so impossibly difficult to be simple, to be what you are and not pretend. To be what you are is in itself very arduous without trying to become something, which is not too difficult. You can always pretend, put on a mask but to be what you are is an extremely complex affair; because you are always changing; you are never the same and each moment reveals a new facet, a new depth, a new surface. You can't be all this at one moment for each moment brings its own change. So if you are at all intelligent, you give up being anything. You think you are very sensitive and an incident, a fleeting thought, shows that you are not; you think you are clever, well-read, artistic, moral but turn round the corner, you find you are none of these things but that you are deeply ambitious, envious, insufficient, brutal and anxious. You are all these things turn by turn and you want something to be continuous, permanent, of course only that which is profitable, pleasurable. So you run after that and all the many other you's are clamouring to have their way, to have their fulfilment. So you became the battlefield and generally ambition, with all its pleasures and pain, gaining, with envy and fear. The word love is thrown in for respectability's sake and to hold the family together but you are caught in your own commitments and activities, isolated, clamouring for recognition and fame, you and your country, you and your party, you and your comforting god. So to be what you are is an extremely arduous affair; if you are at all awake, you know all these things and the sorrow of it all. So you drown yourself in your work, in your belief, in your fantastic ideals and meditations. By then you have become old and ready for the grave, if you are not already dead inwardly. To put away all these things, with their contradictions and increasing sorrow, and be nothing is the most natural and intelligent thing to do. But before you can be nothing, you must have unearthed all these hidden things, exposing them and so understanding them. To understand these hidden urges and compulsions, you will have to be aware of them, without choice, as with death; then in the pure act of seeing, they will wither away and you will be without sorrow and so be as nothing. To be as nothing is not a negative state; the very denial of everything you have been is the most positive action, not the positive of reaction, which is inaction; it is this inaction which causes sorrow. This denial is freedom. This positive action gives energy, and mere ideas dissipate energy. Idea is time and living in time is disintegration, sorrow. 28th There was a large opening in the thick closely-planted casuarina grove beside a quiet road; towards the evening it was dark, deserted and the opening invited the heavens. Further down the road there was a thin-walled hut with palm leaves, woven together, for its roof; in the hut was a dim light, a wick burning in a saucer of oil, and two people, a man and a woman, were sitting on the floor, eating their evening meal, chatting loudly, with occasional laughter. Two men were coming through the rice fields on a narrow path dividing the fields and to hold water. They were talking volubly, carrying something on their heads. There was a group of villagers, laughing shrilly and explaining something to each other, with a great many gestures. A few days' old calf was being led by a woman, followed by the mother softly assuring the baby. A flock of white birds with long legs were flying north, their wings beating the air slowly and rhythmically. The sun had set in a clear sky and a rose-coloured ray shot across the sky, almost from horizon to horizon. It was a very quiet evening and the lights of the city were far away. It was that little opening in the casuarina grove that held the evening, and as one walked past it, one was aware of its extraordinary stillness; all the lights and glare of the day had been forgotten and the bustle of men coming and going. Now it was quiet, enclosed by dark trees and fast-fading light. It was not only quiet but there was joy in it, the joy of immense solitude and as one went by it, that ever-strange otherness came, like a wave, covering the heart and the mind in its beauty and its clarity. All time ceased, the next moment had no beginning. Out of emptiness only is there love. Meditation is not a play of imagination. Every form of image, word, symbol must come to an end for the flowering of meditation. The mind must lose its slavery to words and their reaction. Thought is time, and symbol, however ancient and significant, must lose its grip on thought. Thought then has no continuity; it is then only from moment to moment and so loses its mechanical insistency; thought then does not shape the mind and enclose it within the frame of ideas and condition it to culture, to the society, in which it lives. Freedom is not from society but from idea; then relationship, society, does not condition the mind. The whole of consciousness is residual, changing, modifying, conforming, and mutation is only possible when time and idea have come to an end. The ending is not a conclusion, a word to be destroyed, an idea to be denied or accepted. It is to be understood through self-knowing; knowing is not learning; knowing is recognition and accumulation which prevents learning. Learning is from moment to moment, for the self, the me, is everchanging, never constant. Accumulation, knowledge, distorts and puts an end to learning. Gathering knowledge, however expanding its frontier, becomes mechanical and a mechanical mind is not a free mind. Self-knowing liberates the mind from the known; to live the entire life in the activity of the known breeds endless conflict and misery. Meditation is not personal achievement, a personal quest for reality; it becomes one when it is restricted by methods and systems and thereby deceptions and illusions are bred. Meditation frees the mind from the narrow, limited existence to the everexpanding, timeless life. 29th Without sensitivity there can be no affection; personal reaction does not indicate sensitivity; you may be sensitive about your family, about your achievement, about your status and capacity. This kind of sensitivity is a reaction, limited, narrow, and is deteriorating. Sensitivity is not good taste for good taste is personal and the freedom from personal reaction is the awareness of beauty. Without the appreciation of beauty and without the sensitive awareness of it, there is no love. This sensitive awareness of nature, of the river, of the sky, of the people, of the filthy road, is affection. The essence of affection is sensitivity. But most people are afraid of being sensitive; to them to be sensitive is to get hurt and so they harden themselves and so preserve their sorrow. Or they escape into every form of entertainment, the church, the temple, gossip and cinema and social reform. But being sensitive is not personal and when it is, it leads to misery. To break through this personal reaction is to love, and love is for the one and the many; it is not restricted to the one or to the many. To be sensitive, all the senses must be fully alive, active, and fear of being a slave to the senses is merely the avoidance of a natural fact. The awareness of the fact does not lead to slavery; it is the fear of the fact that leads to bondage. Thought is of the senses and thought makes for limitation but yet you are not afraid of thought. On the contrary, it is ennobled with respectability and enshrined with conceit. To be sensitively aware of thought, of feeling, of the world about you, of your office and of nature, is to explode from moment to moment in affection. Without affection, every action becomes burdensome and mechanical and leads to decay. It was a rainy morning and the sky was heavy with clouds, dark and tumultuous; it began raining very early and you could hear it among the leaves. And there were so many birds on the little lawn, big and little ones, light grey, brown with yellow eyes, large black crows and little ones, smaller than sparrows; they were scratching, pulling, chattering, restless, complaining and pleased. It was drizzling and they didn't seem to mind but when it began to rain harder, they all flew off, complaining loudly. But the bushes and the large, old trees were rejoicing; their leaves were washed clean of the dust of many days. Drops of water were clinging to the ends of leaves; one drop would fall to the ground and another would form to fall; each drop was the rain, the river and the sea. And every drop was bright, sparkling; it was richer than all the diamonds and more lovely; it gathered to a drop, remained in its beauty and disappeared into the ground, leaving no mark. It was an endless procession and disappeared into the ground. It was an endless procession beyond time. It was raining now and the earth was filling itself for the hot days of many months. The sun was behind many clouds and the earth was taking rest from the heat. The road was very bad, full of deep potholes, filled with brown water; sometimes the little car went through them, sometimes dodged them but went on. There were pink flowers which crept up trees, along the barbed wire fences, growing wildly over bushes and the rain was among them, making their colours softer and more gentle; they were everywhere and would not be denied. The road went past a filthy village, with filthy shops and filthy restaurants and as it turned, there was a rice field, enclosed among the palm trees. They surrounded it, almost holding it to themselves, lest men should spoil it. The rice field followed the curving lines of the palms and beyond it were banana groves whose large, shining leaves were visible through the palms. That rice field was enchanted; it was so amazingly green, so rich and wondrous; it was incredible, it took your mind and heart away. You looked and you disappeared, never to be again the same. That colour was god, was music, was the love of the earth; the heavens came to the palms and covered the earth. But that rice field was the bliss of eternity. And the road went on to the sea; that sea was pale green, with enormous rolling waves crashing on a sandy beach; they were murderous waves and angry with the pent-up fury of many storms; the sea looked furiously calm and the waves showed its danger. There were no boats on the sea, those flimsy catamarans, so crudely put together by a piece of rope; all the fishermen were in those dark, palm-thatched huts on the sands, so close to the water. And the clouds came rolling along carried by winds that you couldn't feel. And it would rain again, with the pleasant laughter. To the so-called religious to be sensitive is to sin, an evil reserved for the worldly; to the religious the beautiful is temptation, to be resisted; it's an evil distraction to be denied. Good works are not a substitute for love, and without love all activity leads to sorrow, noble or ignoble. The essence of affection is sensitivity and without it all worship is an escape from reality. To the monk, to the sannyasi, the senses are the way of pain, save thought which must be dedicated to the god of their conditioning. But thought is of the senses. It is thought that puts together time and it is thought that makes sensitivity sinful. To go beyond thought is virtue and that virtue is heightened sensitivity which is love. Love and there is no sin; love and do what you will and then there is no sorrow. 30th A country without a river is desolate. It is a small river, if it can be called a river, but it has a fairly large bridge of stone and brick; it is not too wide and the buses and cars have to go slowly and there are always people on foot and the inevitable bicycle. It pretends to be a river and during the rains it looks like a deep, full river but now when the rains are nearly over, it looks like a large sheet of water with a large island, with many bushes in the middle of it. It goes to the sea, due east, with a great deal of animation and joy. But now there is a wide sand-bar and so it waits for the next rainy reason. Cattle were fording on to the island and a few fishermen were trying to catch some fish; the fish were always small, about the size of a large finger and they smelt dreadful as they were being sold under the trees. And that evening, in the quiet waters, was a large heron, utterly frozen and still. It was the only bird on the river; in the evening crows and other birds would be flying across the river but there were none that evening, except for this single heron. You couldn't help seeing it; it was so white, motionless, with a sunlit sky. The yellow sun and the pale green sea were some distance and as the land went towards them, three large palm trees faced the river and the sea. The evening sun was upon them and the sea beyond, restless, dangerous and pleasantly blue. From the bridge, the sky seemed so vast, so close and unspoiled; it was far from the airport. But that evening, that single heron and the three palm trees were the whole earth, time past and present and life that had no past. Meditation became a flowering without roots and so a dying. Negation is a marvellous movement of life and the positive is only a reaction to life, a resistance. With resistance there is no death but only fear; fear breeds further fear and degeneration. Death is the flowering of the new; meditation is the dying of the known. It is strange that one can never say, "I don't know". To really say it and feel it, there must be humility. But one never admits to the fact of never knowing; it is vanity that feeds the mind with knowledge. Vanity is a strange disease, ever hopeful and ever dejected. But to admit to not knowing is to stop the mechanical process of knowing. There are several ways of saying, "I don't know" - pretence and all its subtle and underhand methods, to impress, to gain importance and so on; the "I don't know" which is really marking time to find out and the "I don't know" which is not searching out to know; the former state never learns, it only gathers and so never learns, and the latter is always in a state of learning, without ever accumulating. There must be freedom to learn and so the mind can remain young and innocent; accumulating makes the mind decay, grow old and wither. Innocency is not the lack of experience but to be free of experience; this freedom is to die to every experience and not let it take root in the soil of the enriching brain. Life is not without experience but life is not when the soil is full of roots. But humility is not conscious clearing of the known; that is the vanity of achievement, but humility is that complete not knowing which is dying. Fear of death is only in knowing, not in not knowing. There is no fear of the unknown, only in the changing of the known, in the ending of the known. But the habit of the word, the emotional content of the word, the hidden implications of the word, prevent the freedom from the word. Without this freedom you are a slave to words, to conclusions, to ideas. If you live on words, as so many do, the inward hunger is insatiable; it is forever ploughing and never sowing. Then you live in the world of unreality, of make-believe, of sorrow that has no meaning. A belief is a word, a conclusion of thought, made up of words and it is this that corrupts, spoiling the beauty of the mind. To destroy the word is to demolish the inward structure of security, which has no reality in any way. To be insecure, which is not the violent wrenching from security, leading to various forms of illness, but that insecurity which comes from the flowering of security, is humility and innocency whose strength the arrogant can never know. December 1st, 1961 The road was muddy, deep rutted, full of people; it was outside the town and slowly a suburb was being built, but now it was incredibly dirty, full of holes, dogs, goats, wandering cattle, buses, cycles, cars and more people; shops were selling coloured drinks in bottles, shops that had cloth to sell, food, wood for fire, a bank, a cycle-repair shop, more food, goats and more people. There was still country on either side of the road, palm trees, rice fields, and great puddles of water. The sun was among the clouds behind the palm trees bursting with colour and vast shadows; the pools were ablaze and every bush and tree was amazed by the vastness of the sky. The goats were nibbling at their roots, women were washing their clothes at a tap, children went on playing; everywhere there was activity and nobody bothered to look at the sky or at those clouds, bearing colour; it was an evening that would soon disappear never to appear again and nobody seemed to care. The immediate was all important, the immediate that may extend into the future beyond sight. The long vision is the immediate vision. The bus came hurtling along, never giving an inch, sure of itself, everyone giving way, but the heavy buffalo stopped it; it was right in the middle, moving at its own heavy gait, never paying attention to the horn and the horn stopped in exasperation. At heart everyone is a politician, concerned with the immediate and trying to force all life into the immediate. And later on there would be sorrow, round the corner, but it could be avoided; there was the pill, the drink, the temple and the family of immediacies. You could end it all if you believed in something ardently or drowned yourself in work or committed yourself to some pattern of thought. But you have tried them all and your mind was as barren as your heart and you crossed to the other side of the road and got lost in the immediate. The clouds were now heavy in the sky and there was only a patch of colour where the sun had been. The road went on, past the palm trees, the casuarinas, rice fields, huts and on and on and suddenly as ever unexpectedly, that otherness came with that purity and strength which no thought or madness could possibly ever formulate and it was there and your heart seemed to explode into the empty heavens, with ecstasy. The brain was utterly still, motionless, but sensitive, watching. It could not follow into emptiness; it was of time but time had stopped and it could not experience; experience is recognition and what it recognized would be time. So it was motionless, merely quiescent, without asking, seeking. And this totality of love or what you will, word is not the thing, entered into everything and was lost. Everything had its space, its place, but this had none and so it cannot be found; do what you will you will not find it. It is not on the market nor in any temple; everything has to be destroyed, not a stone left unturned, no foundation to stand on, but even then this emptiness must be without a tear, then perhaps the unknowable might pass by. It was there and beauty. All deliberate pattern of change is non-change; change has motive, purpose, direction and so it is merely a continuity, modified, of what has been. Such change is futile; it is like changing clothes on a doll but it remains, mechanical, lifeless, brittle, to be broken and thrown away. Death is the inevitable end of change; economic, social revolution is death in the pattern of change. It is not a revolution at all, it is a continuity, modified, of what has been. Mutation, total revolution, takes place only when change, the pattern of time, is seen as false and in its total abandonment mutation takes place. 2nd The sea was rough, with thunderous waves that came in from afar; nearby was a village built round a large, deep pond, a tank it is called, and a broken-down temple. The water of the tank was pale green and steps lead down to it, from all sides. The village was neglected, dirty and there were hardly any roads, and round about this tank were houses and on one side was the old temple in ruins and a comparatively new one, with red striped walls; the houses were dilapidated but that village had a familiar, friendly feeling about it. Beside the way that led to the sea a whole group of women were haggling over some fish at the top of their voices; everyone seemed so excited about everything; it was their evening entertainment for they were laughing too. And there were the sweepings of the road in a heap in the corner and the mangy village dogs were poking their noses into it and a shop close to it was selling drinks, things to eat, and a poor woman with a baby and torn rags was begging at the door of the shop. The cruel sea was close by, thundering away and the luscious green rice fields were beyond the village, peaceful, full of promise in the evening light. Clouds were coming across the sea, unhurriedly, with the sun upon them and everywhere there was activity and no one looked up at the sky. The dead fish, the noisy group, the green waters in that deep pond, the striped walls of the temple seemed to hold back the setting sun. If you walk on that road across the canal, beside the rice field and casuarina groves, every passer-by you know, they are friendly, they stop and talk to you, that you should come to live among them, that they would look after you, and the sky is darkening and the green of the rice fields is gone and the stars are very bright. Walking on that road in the dark with the light of the city in the-clouds, that inviolable strength comes with such abundance and with such clarity that it took literally your breath away. All life was that strength. It wasn't the strength of carefully built-up will, nor the strength of many defences and resistances; it was not the strength of courage nor the strength of jealousy and death. It had no quality, no description could contain it and yet it was there as those dark distant hills and those trees beside the road. It was too immense for thought to bring it about or speculate upon. It was a strength that had no cause and so nothing could be added to or taken away from it. It cannot be known; it has no shape, form, and cannot be approached. Knowing is recognition but it is always new, something that cannot be measured in time. It had been there all day, uncertainly, without insistence like a whisper but now it was there with an urgency and with such abundance that there was nothing but that. Words have been spoilt and made common; the word love is on the market but that word had a totally different meaning, walking on that empty road. It came with that impenetrable strength; the two were inseparable, like the colour of a petal. The brain, the heart and the mind were totally consumed by it and there was nothing left but that. But yet the buses rattled by, the villagers were talking loudly and the Pleiades were just over the horizon. It continued, walking alone or walking with others, and it went on during the night until the morning came among the palm trees. But it is there like a whisper among the leaves. What an extraordinary thing meditation is. If there is any kind of compulsion, effort to make thought conform, imitate, then it becomes a wearisome burden. The silence which is desired ceases to be illuminating; if it is the pursuit of visions and experiences, then it leads to illusions and self-hypnosis. Only in the flowering of thought and so ending thought does meditation have significance; thought can only flower in freedom not in everwidening patterns of knowledge. Knowledge may give newer experiences of greater sensation but a mind that is seeking experiences of any kind is immature. Maturity is the freedom from all experience; it is no longer under any influence to be and not to be. Maturity in meditation is the freeing of the mind from knowledge for it shapes and controls all experience. A mind which is a light to itself needs no experience. Immaturity is the craving for greater and wider experience. Meditation is the wandering through the world of knowledge and being free of it to enter into the unknown. 3rd They are quarrelling in that little hut, with an oil lamp, on that pleasant road; in a high-pitched, screechy voice she was screaming something about money, there wasn't enough left over with which to buy rice; he in a low, cowed tone was mumbling something. You could hear her voice quite far away and only the crowded bus drowned it. The palm trees were silent and even the feathery tops of the casuarinas had stopped their gentle movement. There was no moon and it was dark, the sun having set among the gathering clouds, some time ago. Buses and cars passed, so many of them, for they all had been to see an ancient temple by the sea and again the road became quiet, isolated and far away. The few villagers that passed talked quietly, worn out after a day's labour. That strange immensity was coming and it was there with incredible gentleness and affection; as a tender, new leaf in spring, so easily destroyed, it was there utterly vulnerable and so everlastingly indestructible. Every thought and feeling disappeared and recognition ceased. It is strange how important money has become, both to the giver and to the receiver, to the man in power and to the poor. They talk everlastingly of money or avoid talking of money, as it is bad form but are conscious of money. Money to do good work, money for the party, money for the temple, and money to buy rice. If you have money you are miserable and if you haven't you are in misery too. They tell you what he is worth as they tell you his position and the degrees he has taken, his cleverness, his capacity and how much he is making. The envy of the rich and the envy of the poor, the competition to show off, knowledge, clothes and the brilliancy of conversation. Everyone wants to impress somebody, the larger the crowd the better. But money is more important than anything else except power. These two things are a marvellous combination; the saint has power, though he has no money; he is influencing the rich and poor. The politician will use the country, the saint, the gods that be, to come to the top and tell you the absurdity of ambition and the ruthlessness of power. There is no end to money and power; the more you have, the more you want and there is no end to it. But behind all money and power, there is sorrow which cannot be denied; you may put it aside, try to forget it but it is always there; you can't argue it away and it is always there, a deep wound that nothing seems to heal. Nobody wants to be free of it, it is too complex to understand sorrow; it is all explained in the books, and the books, words, conclusions, become all important but sorrow is there still covered over with ideas. And escape becomes significant; escape is the essence of superficiality, though it may have varying depth. But sorrow is not easily cheated. You have to go into the very heart of it to end it; you have to dig very deep into yourself, never leaving a corner uncovered. You have to see every twist and turn of cunning thought, every feeling about everything, every move of every reaction, without restraint, without choice. It is like following a river to its source; the river will take you to it. You have to follow every threat, every clue to the heart of sorrow. You have only to watch, see, listen; it is all there open and clear. You have to take the journey, not to the moon, not to the gods but into yourself. You can take a swift step into yourself and so swiftly end sorrow or prolong the journey, idling, lazy and dispassionate. You need to have passion to end sorrow, and passion is not bought through escape. It is there when you stop escaping. 4th Under the trees it was very quiet; there were so many birds calling, singing, chattering, endlessly restless. The branches were huge, beautifully shaped, polished, smooth and it was quite startling to see them and they had a sweep and a grace that brought tears to the eyes and made you wonder at the things of the earth. The earth had nothing more beautiful than the tree and when it died it would still be beautiful; every branch naked, open to the sky, bleached by the sun and there would be birds resting upon its nakedness. There would be shelter for owls, there in that deep hollow, and the bright, screeching parrots would nest high up in the hole of that branch; woodpeckers would come, with their red-crested feathers sticking straight out of their heads, to drive in a few holes; of course there would be those striped squirrels, racing about the branches, ever complaining about something and always curious; right on the top-most branch, there would be a white and red eagle surveying the land with dignity and alone. There would be many ants, red and black, scurrying up the tree and others racing down and their bite would be quite painful. But now the tree was alive, marvellous, and there was plenty of shade and the blazing sun never touched you; you could sit there by the hour and see and listen to everything that was alive and dead, outside and inside. You cannot see and listen to the outside without wandering on to the inside. Really the outside is the inside and the inside is the outside and it is difficult, almost impossible to separate them. You look at this magnificent tree and you wonder who is watching whom and presently there is no watcher at all. Everything is so intensely alive and there is only life and the watcher is as dead as that leaf. There is no dividing line between the tree, the birds and that man sitting in the shade and the earth that is so abundant. Virtue is there without thought and so there is order; order is not permanent; it is there only from moment to moment and that immensity comes with the setting sun so casually, so freely welcoming. The birds have become silent for it is getting dark and everything is slowly becoming quiet ready for the night. The brain, that marvellous, sensitive, alive thing, is utterly still, only watching, listening without a moment of reaction, without recording, without experiencing, only seeing and listening. With that immensity, there is love and destruction and that destruction is unapproachable strength. These are all words, like that dead tree, a symbol of that which was and it never is. It has gone, moved away from the word; the word is dead which would never capture that sweeping nothingness. Only out of that immense emptiness is there love, with its innocency. How can the brain be aware of that love, the brain that is so active, crowded, burdened with knowledge, with experience? Everything must be denied for that to be. Habit, however convenient, is destructive of sensitivity, habit gives the feeling of security and how can there be alertness, sensitivity, when habit is cultivated; not that insecurity brings alert awareness. How quickly everything becomes habit, sorrow as well as pleasure and then boredom sets in and that peculiar thing called leisure. After habit which has been working for forty years, then you have leisure or leisure at the end of the day. Habit had its turn and now it's the turn of leisure which again turns into habit. Without sensitivity there is no affection and that integrity which is not the driven reaction of contradictory existence. The machinery of habit is thought which is always seeking security, some comforting state from which it will never be disturbed. It is this search for the permanent that denies sensitivity. Being sensitive never hurts, only those things in which you have taken shelter cause pain. To be totally sensitive is to be wholly alive and that is love. But thought is very cunning; it will evade the pursuer, which is another thought; thought cannot pursue another thought. Only the flowering of thought can be seen, listened to, and what flowers in freedom comes to an end, dies without leaving a mark. 5th This cuckoo which had been calling from dawn was smaller than a crow, greyer, with long tail and brilliant red eyes; it was sitting on a small palm tree half hidden, calling in clear soft tones; its tail and head were showing and there on a small tree was its mate. It was smaller, more shy, more hidden; then the male flew to the female who came out onto an open branch; they stayed there, the male calling and presently they flew away. There were clouds in the sky and a soft breeze was playing among the leaves; the heavy palms were still, their time would come, later in the day, towards the evening to do their heavy dancing but now they were still, lethargic and indifferent. It must have rained during the night and the ground was wet and the sand was brittle; the garden was peaceful for the day had not yet begun; the heavy trees were somnolent and the little ones were all awake, and two squirrels were chasing each other playfully in and out of the branches. The clouds of early dawn were giving way to the clouds of day and the casuarinas were swaying. Every act of meditation is never the same, there is a new breath, a new shattering; there is no pattern to be torn down for there is no building of another, a new habit covering the old. All habits, however recently acquired, are old; they are formed out of the old but meditation is not shattering the old for a new pattern. It was new and shattering; it was new, not in the field of the old; it had never entered into that ground; it was new as it had never known the old; it was shattering in itself; it was not breaking down something but it itself was destruction. It destroyed and so it was new and there was creation. There is no toy in meditation which absorbs you or you absorb it. It is the destruction of all toys, visions, ideas, experience that goes to the making of meditation. You must lay the foundation for true meditation otherwise you will be caught in various forms of illusion. Meditation is purest negation, negation which is not the outcome of reaction. To deny and to remain with the denial in negation is action without motive, which is love. 6th There was a grey speckled bird, nearly as large as a crow; it wasn't a bit shy and it could be watched as long as one liked; it was eating berries, choosing very carefully, which were hanging down in heavy bunches, green and silver. Presently two other birds, nearly as large as the speckled one, came to hang on to other branches; they were the cuckoos of yesterday; there were no soft-throated calls this time, they were all eating busily. They generally are shy birds, these cuckoos, but they didn't seem to mind someone standing so close watching them, only a few feet away. Then the striped squirrel came to join them but all the three flew off and the squirrel set to and was eating away ravenously when a crow came cawing and this was too much for it and it raced away. The crow didn't eat any of the berries but probably didn't like others enjoying themselves. It was a cool morning and the sun was coming up slowly behind the thick trees; there were long shadows and the soft dew was still on the grass, and in the little pond there were two blue lilies with heart of gold; it was light golden in colour and the blue was the blue of spring skies and the pads were round, very green and a small frog was sitting on one of them, motionless, eyes staring. The two lilies were the delight of the whole garden, even the large trees looked down upon them without shadow; they were delicate, soft and quiet in their pond. When you looked at them, all reaction ceased, your thoughts and feelings faded away and only they remained, in their beauty and their quietness; they were intense, like every living thing is, except man who is so everlastingly occupied with himself. As you watched these two, the world was changed, not into some better social order, with less tyranny and more freedom or poverty eliminated, but there was no pain, no sorrow, the coming and going of anxiety and there was no toil of boredom; it was changed because those two were there, blue with golden hearts. It was the miracle of beauty. That road was familiar with us all now, the villager, the long line of bullock carts with a man walking beside each one of them, fifteen or twenty of them in a long line, with the dogs, goats and the ripening rice fields, and that evening it was smilingly open and the skies were very close. It was dark and the road shone with the light of the sky and night was closing in. Meditation is not the way of effort; every effort contradicts, resists; effort and choice always breed conflict and meditation then only becomes an escape from fact, the what is. But on that road, meditation yielded to that otherness, utterly silencing the already quiet brain; the brain was merely a passage for that immeasurable; as a deep wide river between two steep banks, this strange otherness moved, without direction, without time. 7th Out of the window you could see a young palm tree and a tree full of large, pink-petalled flowers among the green leaves. The palm leaves were waving in every direction, heavily and clumsily and the flowers were motionless. Far away was the sea and you heard it all night, deep and penetrating; it never varied its heavy sound which kept rolling in; in it there was threat, restlessness and brutal force. With the dawn the roar of the sea faded and other noises took over, the birds, cars and the drum. Meditation was the fire that burned away all time and distance, achievement and experience. There was only vast, boundless emptiness but in it there was movement, creation. Thought cannot be creative; it can put things together, on a canvas, in words, in stone or in a marvellous rocket; thought, however polished, however subtle is within the boundaries of time; it can only cover space; it cannot go beyond itself. It cannot purify itself; it cannot pursue itself; it can only flower, if it does not block itself, and die. All feeling is sensation and experience is of it, and feeling with thought builds the boundaries of time. 9th From a long way you could hear the sea, thundering away, wave after wave, endlessly; these were not harmless waves; they were dangerous, furious, ruthless. The sea looked as though it was calm, dreaming, patient but the waves were huge, high and frightening. People were carried away, drowned and there was a strong current. The waves were never gentle, their high curves were magnificent, splendid to watch from a distance but there was brute force and cruelty. The catamarans, so flimsy, dark thin men on them, go through those waves, indifferent, careless, with never a thought of fear; they would go far out to the horizon and probably would come back late in the day, with their heavy catch. The waves that evening were particularly furious, high in their impatience and their crash on the shore was deafening; the shore stretched north and south, clean washed sand, yellowish, burnt by the sun. And the sun was not gentle either; it was always hot, burning and only in the early morning, just as it was coming up out of the sea or setting among the gathering clouds, was it mild, pleasant. The furious sea and the burning sun were torturing the land and the people were poor, thin, ever hungry; misery, was there, ever present and death was so easy, easier than birth, breeding indifference and decay. The well-to-do were indifferent too, dull, except in making money or seeking power or in building a bridge; they were very clever at this kind of thing, getting more and more - more knowledge, more capacity - but always losing and there is always death. It is so final, it cannot be deceived, no argument, however subtle and cunning, can ward it off; it is always there. You cannot build walls against it but you can against life; you can deceive it, run away from it, go to the temple, believe in saviours, go to the moon; you can do anything with life and sorrow is there and death. You can hide from sorrow but not from death. Even at that distance you could hear the waves thundering away and the palm trees were against the red evening sky. The pools and the canal were flashing with the setting sun. Every kind of motive drives us, every action has a motive and so we have no love. Nor do we love what we are doing. We think we cannot act, be, live without a motive and so make our existence a dull trivial thing. We use function to acquire status; function is only a means to something else. Love for the thing itself doesn't exist and so everything becomes shoddy and relationship a dreaded affair. Attachment is only a means to cover up our own shallowness, loneliness, insufficiency; envy only breeds hate. Love has no motive and because there is no love, every kind of motive creeps in. To live without is not difficult; it requires integrity not conformity to ideas, beliefs. To have integrity is to be self-critically aware, aware of what one is from moment to moment. 10th It was a very young moon that seemed to be hanging between the palm trees; it wasn't there yesterday; it might have been hiding behind the clouds, shyly avoiding, for it was just a slip like a delicate golden curving line, and between the palm trees, dark and solemn, it was a miracle of delight. Clouds were gathering to hide her but she was there open, tender and so close. The palm trees were silent, austere, harsh and the rice fields were turning yellow with age. The evening was full of talk among the leaves and the sea was thundering some miles away. The villagers were unaware of the beauty of the evening; they were used to it; they accepted everything, their poverty, their hunger, the dust, the squalor and the gathering clouds. One gets used to anything, to sorrow and to happiness; if you didn't get used to things you would be more miserable, more disturbed. It is better to be insensitive, dull than to invite more trouble; die slowly, easier that way. You can find economic and psychological reasons for all this but the fact remains, with the well-to-do and with the poor, that it is simpler to get used to things, going to the office, factory, for the next thirty years, the boredom and the futility of it all; but one has to live, one has responsibility and so it is safer to get used to everything. We get used to love, to fear and to death. Habit becomes goodness and virtue and even escapes and gods. A habit-ridden mind is a shallow, dull-witted mind. 11th Dawn was slow in coming; the stars were still brilliant and the trees were still withdrawn; no bird was calling, not even the small owls that rattled through the night from tree to tree. It was strangely quiet except for the roar of the sea. There was that smell of many flowers, rotting leaves and damp ground; the air was very very still and the smell was everywhere. The earth was waiting for the dawn and the coming day; there was expectation, patience and a strange stillness. Meditation went on with that stillness and that stillness was love; it was not the love of something or of someone, the image and the symbol, the word and the pictures. It was simply love, without sentiment, without feeling. It was something complete in itself, naked, intense, without root and direction. The sound of that faraway bird was that love; it was the direction and distance, it was there without time and word. It wasn't an emotion, that fades and is cruel; the symbol, the word can be substituted but not the thing. Being naked, it was utterly vulnerable and so indestructible. It had that unapproachable strength of that otherness, the unknowable, which was coming through the trees and beyond the sea. Meditation was the sound of that bird calling out of that emptiness and the roar of the sea, thundering against the beach. Love can only be in utter emptiness. The greying dawn was there far away on the horizon and the dark trees were more dark and intense. In meditation there is no repetition, a continuity of habit; there is death of everything known and the flowering of the unknown. The stars had faded and the clouds were awake with the coming sun. Experience destroys clarity and understanding. Experience is sensation, response to various kinds of stimuli, and every experience thickens the walls that enclose, however expanding and wide the experience. Accumulating knowledge is mechanical, all additive processes are, and are necessary for mechanical existence, but knowledge is time-binding. The craving for experience is endless as all sensation is. The cruelty of ambition is the furthering of experience, in sensation of power and the hardening in capacity. Experience cannot bring about humility which is the essence of virtue. In humility alone there is learning and learning is not the acquisition of knowledge. A crow began the morning and every bird in the garden joined in and suddenly everything was awake and the breeze was among the leaves and there was splendour. 13th There was a long stretch of black clouds heavy with rain, from horizon to horizon, north, south, and white were the breakers; it was pouring in the north and slowly coming south, and from the bridge over the river there was a long white line of waves against the black horizon. Buses, cars, bicycles and naked feet were making their way across the bridge and rain was coming in a fury. The river was empty, as it generally is at that time and the water was as dark as the sky; there wasn't even that lovely heron and it was deserted. Across the bridge was part of the big town, crowded, noisy, dirty, pretentious, prosperous, and a little way further to the left were the mud huts, dilapidated buildings, small, unclean shops, a small factory and a crowded road, a cow lying right in the middle of it, the buses and cars going around it. There were streaks of bright red towards the west but they too were being covered up by the coming rain. Past beyond the police station, over a narrow bridge, is the road among the rice fields, going south, away from the noisy filthy town. Then it began to rain, heavy sharp downpour that made puddles in a second in the road and there was running water where there was dry land; it was a furious rain, an exploding rain that washed, cleansed, purified the earth. The villagers were soaked to the skin but they didn't seem to mind; they went on with their laughter and chatter, their naked feet in the puddles. The little hut with the oil lamp was leaking, the buses roared by, splattering everybody, and the cycles, with their feeble lamps, passed with a tinkle, into the heavy rain. Everything was being washed clean, the past and the present, there was no time, no future. Every step was timeless, and thought, a thing of time, stopped; it could not go further or go back, it had no existence. And every drop of that furious rain was the river, the sea and the unmelting snow. There was total, complete emptiness and in it were creation, love and death, not separate. You had to watch your step, the buses passed almost touching you. 15th It was a beautiful evening; a few clouds had gathered around the setting sun; there were a few wandering clouds, heavy with burning colour and the young moon was caught among them. The roar of the sea came through the casuanina and the palm, softening the fury. The tall, straight palms were black against the bright, burning rose of the sky and a whole group of white water-birds were going north, group after group, their thin legs stretched out behind them, their wings moving slowly. And a long line of creaking bullock carts were making their way to the town, laden with the firewood, the felled casuarinas. The road was crowded for a while and became almost deserted as you went further on and as it got darker. Just as the sun sets, quietly there comes over the land a strange sense of peace, a gentleness, a cleansing. It is not a reaction; it is there in the town with all its noises, squalor, bustle and milling people; it is there in that little patch of neglected earth; it is there where that tree is with a coloured kite caught in it; it is there in that empty street, across the temple; it is everywhere, only one has to be empty of the day. And that evening, along that road, it was there, softly wooing you away from everything and everybody, and as it got darker, it became more intense and beautiful. The stars were among the palms and Orion was between them, coming out of the sea, and Pleiades was beyond their reach, already three-quarters of the journey done. The villagers were getting to know us, wanted to talk to us, sell us some land, so that we would be among them. And as the evening advanced that otherness descended with exploding bliss and the brain was as motionless as those trees, without a single leaf stirring. Everything became more intense, every colour, every shape and in that pale moonlight all the wayside puddles were the waters of life. Everything must go, be wiped away, not to receive it but the brain must be utterly still, sensitive, to watch, to see. Like a flood that covers the dry parched land it came full of delight and clarity and it stayed. 17th** It was long before dawn when the sharp cry of a bird woke up the night for an instant and the light of that cry faded away. And the trees remained dark, motionless, melting into the air; it was a soft quiet night, endlessly alive; it was awake, there was movement; there was a deep stirring with utter silence. Even the village next door, with its many dogs, always barking, was quiet. It was a strange stillness, terribly potent, destructively alive. It was so alive and still that you were afraid to move; so your body froze into immobility and the brain, which had awakened with that sharp cry of the bird, had become still, with heightened sensitivity. It was a brilliant night with the stars in a cloudless sky; they seemed so close and the Southern Cross was just over the trees, sparkling in the warm air. Everything was very quiet. Meditation is never in time; time cannot bring about mutation; it can bring about change which needs to be changed again, like all reforms; meditation that springs out of time is always binding, there is no freedom in it and without freedom there is always choice and conflict. * That morning he gave the first of eight talks in Madras, continuing until December 17th. ** The day of his last talk. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 8 RAJGHAT, BENARES 18TH DECEMBER 1961 TO 20TH JANUARY 1962 High up in the mountains, among the barren rocks with not a tree or bush, was a little stream, coming out of massive, unapproachable rock; it was hardly a stream, it was a trickle. As it came down it made a waterfall, just a murmur, and it came down, down to the valley, and it was already shouting of its strength, the long way it would go, through towns, valleys, woods and open spaces. It was going to be an irresistible river, sweeping over its banks, purifying itself as it went along, crashing over rocks, flowing into far places, endlessly flowing to the sea.* It wasn't getting to the sea that mattered, but being a river, so wide, so deep, rich and splendid; it would enter the sea and disappear into the vast, bottomless waters but the sea was far away, many a thousand miles, but from now until then it was life, beauty and ceaseless merriment; none could stop that, not even the factories and dams. It was really a marvellous river, wide, deep, with so many cities on its banks, so carelessly free and never abandoning itself. All life was there upon its banks, green fields, forests, solitary houses, death, love and destruction; there were long, wide bridges over it, graceful and well-used. Other streams and rivers joined it but she was the mother of all rivers, the little ones and the big ones. She was always full, ever purifying herself, and of an evening it was a blessing to watch her, with deepening colour in the clouds and her waters golden. But the little trickle so far away, amongst those gigantic rocks which seemed so concentrated in producing it, was the beginning of life and its ending was beyond its banks and the seas. Meditation was like that river, only it had no beginning and no ending; it began and its ending was its beginning. There was no cause and its movement was its renewal. It was always new, it never gathered to become old; it never got sullied for it had no roots in time. It is good to meditate, not forcing it, not making any effort, beginning with a trickle and going beyond time and space, where thought and feeling cannot enter, where experience is not. 19th It was a beautiful morning, fairly cool and dawn was far away still; the few trees and the bushes around the house seemed to have become a forest during the night and were hiding many serpents and wild animals and the moonlight with a thousand shadows deepened the impression; they were large trees, far above the house and they were all silent and waiting for dawn. And suddenly, through the trees and from beyond came a song, a religious song of devotion; the voice was rich and the singer was putting his heart into it and the song rode far into the moonlit night. As you listened to it, you rode on the wave of the sound and you were of it and beyond it, beyond thought and feeling. Then there was another sound of an instrument, very faint but clear. 26th The river is wide and splendid here; it is deep and as smooth as a lake, without a ripple. There are a few boats, mostly fishermen's and a large boat, with a torn sail, carrying sand to the town, beyond the bridge. What is really beautiful is the stretch of the water towards the east and the bank on the other side; the river looks like an enormous lake, full of untold beauty and space to match the sky; it is a flat country and the sky fills the earth and the horizon is beyond the trees, far far away. The trees are on the other bank, beyond the recently sown wheat; there are the green spreading fields and beyond them are the trees, with villages among them. The river rises very high during the rains and brings with it rich silt and the winter wheat is sown as the river goes down; it is a marvellous green, so rich and plentiful, and the long, wide bank is a carpet of enchanting green. From this side of the river the trees look like an impenetrable forest but there are villages tucked among them. But there is one tree, huge, its roots exposed, that is the glory of the bank; there is a little white temple under it but its gods are as the water that goes by and the tree remains; it has thick foliage with long-tailed leaves and birds come across the river for the night; it towers over the trees and you can see it as far as you care to walk on this side down the river. It has the presence of beauty, the dignity of that which is alone. But those villages are crowded small, filthy, and human beings foul the earth around them. From this side, the white walls of the villages among the trees look fresh, gentle and of great beauty. Beauty is not man-made; the things of man arouse feelings, sentiment, but these have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty can never be put together, neither the thing built, nor in the museum. One must go beyond all this, all personal taste and choice, be cleansed of all emotion for love is beauty. The river curves majestically as it flows east,** past villages, towns, and deep woods but here, just below the town and the bridge, the river and its opposite bank is the essence of all rivers and banks; every river has its own song, its own delight and mischief but here out of its very silence, it contains the earth and the heavens. It is a sacred river, as all rivers are, but again here, a part of the long, winding river, there is a gentleness of immense depth and destruction. Looking at it now, you would be enchanted by its mellow age and tranquillity. And you would lose all earth and heaven. In that quiet silence that strange otherness came and meditation lost its meaning. It was like a wave, coming from afar, gathering momentum as it came, crashing on the shore, sweeping everything before it. Only there was no time and distance; it was there with impenetrable strength, with destructive vitality and so the essence of beauty which is love. No imagination could possibly conjure up all this, no deep hidden impulse can ever project this immensity. Every thought and every feeling, every desire and compulsion was totally absent. It was not an experience; experience implies recognition, an accumulating centre, memory and a continuity. It was not an experience; only the immature crave for experience and thereby are caught in illusion; it was simply an event, a happening, a fact, like a sunset, like death and the curving river. Memory could not catch it in its net and keep it and thereby destroy it. Time and memory could not hold it nor thought pursue it. It was a flash in which all time and eternity were consumed, without leaving any ashes, memory. Meditation is the complete and total emptying of the mind, not in order to receive, to gain, to arrive, but a denudation without motive; it is really emptying the mind of the known, conscious and unconscious, of every experience, thought and feeling. Negation is the very essence of freedom; assertion and positive pursuit is bondage. 30th Two crows were fighting, they were viciously angry with each other; there was fury in their voices, both were on the ground but one had the advantage driving its hard, black beak into the other. Shouting at them from the window did no good and one was going to be killed. A passing crow dived in suddenly breaking its flight, calling, cawing more loudly than the two on the ground; it landed beside them, beating its black, shiny wings against them. In a second, half a dozen more crows came, all cawing away furiously and several of them with their wings and beaks separated the two who were intent on killing each other. They might kill other birds, other things, but there was going to be no murder amongst their own kind and that would be the end of them all. The two still wanted to fight it out but the others were telling them off and presently they all flew away and there was quietness in the little open space among the trees by the river. It was late in the afternoon, the sun was behind the trees and the really bitter cold was gone and all the birds, all day were singing, calling and making all those pleasant sounds they do. Parrots were flying in crazily for the night; it was a bit early but they were coming in; the large tamarind tree could hold quite a lot of them; their colour was almost the colour of the leaves but their green was more intense, more alive; if you watched carefully you would see the difference and also you would see their brilliant curving be which they used to bite and to climb; they were rather clumsy among the branches, going from one to the other but they were the light of heavens in movement; their voices were harsh and sharp, and their flight never straight, but their colour was the spring of the earth. Earlier, in the morning, on a branch of that tree, two small owls were sunning themselves, facing the rising sun; they were so still you would not have noticed them, they were the colour of the branch, mottled grey, unless by chance, you saw them coming out of their hole in the tamarind tree. It had been bitterly cold, most unusual, and two golden green flycatchers dropped dead that morning from the cold; one was the male and the other female, they must have been mates; they died on the game instant and they were still soft to the touch. They were really golden green, with long, curving bills; they were so delicate, so extraordinarily alive still. Colour is very strange; colour is god and those two were the glory of light; the colour would remain, though the machinery of life had come to an end. Colour was more enduring than the heart; it was beyond time and sorrow. But thought can never solve the ache of sorrow. You can reason in and out but it would be there still after the long, complicated journey of thought. Thought can never resolve human problems; thought is mechanical and sorrow is not, Sorrow is as strange as love, but sorrow keeps away love. You can resolve sorrow completely but you cannot invite love. Sorrow is self-pity with all its anxieties, fears, guilt but all this cannot be washed away by thought. Thought breeds the thinker and between them sorrow is begotten. The ending of sorrow is the freedom from the known. 31st There were many fishing boats as the sun was deep in the west and the river suddenly was awake with laughter and loud talk; there were twenty-three of them and each boat held two or three men. The river is wide here and these few boats seemed to have taken charge of the waters; they were racing, shouting, calling to each other in excited voices, like children at play; they were very poor people, in dirty rags but just now they had no cares and loud talk and laughter filled the air. The river was sparkling and the slight breeze made patterns on the water. The crows were beginning now to fly back from across the river to their accustomed trees; the swallows were flying low, almost touching the water. January 1st, 1962*** A winding stream makes its way to the wide river; it comes through a dirty part of the town made filthy by everything imaginable and comes to the river almost exhausted; near where it meets the big one, there is a rickety bridge over it made up of bamboos, pieces of rope, and straw; when it is almost collapsing, they put a pole in the soft bed of the stream and more straw and mud and tie it up with not too thick a rope and the rope has many knots. The whole thing is a ramshackle affair; it must have been fairly straight once but now it dips almost touching the lazy stream and as you walk across it, you hear the mud and the straw dropping into the water. But somehow it must be fairly strong; it is a narrow bridge; it is rather difficult to avoid touching another coming the other way. Bicycles loaded with milk cans, happily go across it, without the least concern for themselves or for others; it is always busy with villagers going to town with their produce and coming back in the evening to their villages, worn out, carrying something or other, tongs, kites, oil, a piece of wood, a slab of rock, and things they can't pick up in their own village. They are dressed in rags, dirty, ill and endlessly patient, walking, in naked feet, endless miles; they have not the energy to revolt, to chase all the politicians out of the country but then they themselves would soon become politicians, exploiting, cunning, inventing ways and means to hold on to power, the evil that destroys the people. We were crossing that bridge with a huge buffalo, several cycles and the crossing villagers; it was ready to collapse but somehow we all got across it and the cumbersome animal didn't seem to mind at all. Going up the bank following the well-worn sandy path, past a village with an ancient well, you came into the open, flat country. There are mangoes and tamarinds and fields of winter wheat; it is a flat country stretching away mile upon mile till it meets far away, the foothills and the eternal mountains. The path is ancient, many thousand years and countless pilgrims have walked upon it, with ruined temples.**** As the path turns, you catch the sight of the river, between trees in the distance. It was a lovely evening, cool, silent and the sky was immense, no tree, no land could contain it; somehow, there was no horizon, the trees and the endless flat earth melted into the expanding sky. It was pale, delicate blue and the sunset had left a golden haze where the horizon should have been. Birds were calling from their sheltering trees, a goat was bleating and far away a train was whistling; some village folk, all women, were huddled around a fire and strangely they too had fallen silent. The mustard was in flower, a spreading yellow and from a village across the fields a column of smoke went straight up into the air. The silence was trangely penetrating; it went through you and beyond you; it was without a movement, without a wave; you walked in it, you felt it, you breathed it, you were of it. It was not that you brought this silence into being, by the usual tricks of the brain. It was there and you were of it; you were not experiencing it; there was no thought that could experience, that could recollect, gather. You were not separate from it, to observe, to analyse. Only that was there and nothing else. Time, by the watch, was getting late and, by the watch, this miracle of silence lasted nearly half an hour but there was no duration, no time. You were walking back in it, past the ancient well, the village, across the narrow bridge, into the room that was dark. It was there and with it was the otherness, overwhelming and welcoming. Love is not a word nor a feeling; it was there with its impenetrable strength and the tenderness of a new leaf, so easily destroyed. Pleiades was just overhead and Orion was over the treetops and the brightest star was in the waters. 2nd The village***** boys were flying kites on the bank along the river; they were yelling at the top of their voices, laughing, chasing each other and wading into the river to get the fallen kites; their excitement was contagious, for the old people, higher up the bank, were watching them, shouting to them, encouraging them. It seemed to be the evening entertainment of the whole village; even the starved, mangy dogs were barking; everyone was taking part in the excitement. They were all half-starved, there wasn't a fat one among them, even among the old; the older they were the thinner they were; even the children were all so thin but they seemed to have plenty of energy. All of them had torn, dirty rags on, patched with different cloths of many colours. And they were all cheerful, even the old and ailing ones; they seemed to be unaware of their own misery, of their physical weakness, for many of them carried heavy bundles; they had amazing patience and they had to have it for death was there, very close and so also the agony of life; everything was there at the same time, death, birth, sex, poverty, starvation, excitement, tears. They had a place, under some trees higher up the bank, not far from a ruined old temple to bury their dead; there were plenty of little babies who would know hunger, the smell of unwashed bodies and the smell of death. But the river was there all the time, sometimes threatening the village but now quiet, placid with swallows flying so low, almost touching the water, which was the colour of gentle fire. The river was everything, they occasionally bathed in it, they washed their clothes in it and their thin bodies, and they worshipped it and put flowers, when they could get them, in it to show their respect; they fished in it and died beside it. The river was so indifferent to their joy and sorrow; it was so deep, there was such weight and power behind it; it was terribly alive and so dangerous. But now it was quiet, not a ripple on it and every swallow had a shadow on it; they didn't fly very far, they would fly low for about a hundred feet, go up a little, turn and come down again and fly for another hundred feet or so, until darkness came. There were small water birds, their tails bobbing up and down, swift in their flight; there were larger ones, almost the colour of the damp earth, greyish-brown, wading up and down the water's edge. But the marvel of it all was the sky, so vast, boundless, without horizon. The late afternoon light was soft, clear and very gentle; it left no shadow and every bush tree and bird was alone. The flashing river by day was now the light of the sky, enchanted, dreaming and lost in its beauty and love. In this light, all things cease to exist, the heart that was crying and the brain that was cunning; pleasure and pain went away leaving only light, transparent, gentle and caressing, It was light; thought and feeling had no part in it, they could never give light; they were not there, only this light when the sun is well behind the walls of the city and not a cloud in the sky. You cannot see this light unless you know the timeless movement of meditation; the ending of thought is this movement. But love is not the way of thought or feeling. It was very quiet, not a leaf was stirring and it was dark; all the stars that could fill the river were there and they spilled over into the sky. The brain was completely still but very alive and watching, watching without a watcher, without a centre from which it was watching; nor was there any sensation. The otherness was there, deep within at a depth that was lost; it was action, wiping away everything without leaving a mark of what has been or what is. There was no space in which to have a border nor time in which thought could shape itself. 3rd There is something curiously pleasant to walk, alone, along a path, deep in the country, which has been used for several thousand years by pilgrims; there are very old trees along it, tamarind and mango, and it passes through several villages. It passes between green fields of wheat; it is soft underfoot, fine, dry powder, and it must become heavy clay in the wet season; the soft, fine earth gets into your feet, into your nose and eyes, not too much. There are ancient wells and temples and withering gods. The land is flat, flat as the palm of the hand, stretching to the horizon, if there is a horizon. The path has so many turns, in a few minutes it faces in all the directions of a compass. The sky seems to follow that path which is open and friendly. There are few paths like that in the world though each has its own charm and beauty. There is one [at Gstaad] that goes through the valley, gently climbing, between rich pasturage, to be gathered for the winter to be given to the cows; that valley is white with snow but then [when he was there] it was the end of summer, full of flowers, with snow mountains all around and there was a noisy stream going through the valley; there was hardly anyone on that path and you walked on it in silence. Then there is another path [at Ojai], climbing steeply by the side of a dry, dusty, crumbling mountain; it was rocky, rough and slippery; there wasn't a tree anywhere near, not even a bush; a quail with her small new brood, over a dozen of them, was there and further up you came upon a deadly rattler, all curled up, ready to strike but giving you a fair warning. But now, this path was not like any other; it was dusty, made foul by human beings here and there, and there were ruined old temples with their images; a large bull was having its fill among the growing grain, unmolested; there were monkeys too and parrots, the light of the skies. It was the path of a thousand humans for many thousand years. As you walked on it, you were lost; you walked without a single thought and there was the incredible sky and the trees with heavy foliage and birds. There is a mango on that path that is superb; it has so many leaves that the branches cannot be seen and it is so old. As you walk on, there is no feeling at all; thought too has gone but there is beauty. It fills the earth and the sky, every leaf and blade of withering grass. It is there covering everything and you are of it. You are not made to feel all this but it is there and because you are not, it is there, without a word, without a movement. You walk back in silence and fading light. Every experience leaves a mark and every mark distorts experience; so there is no experience which has not been. Everything is old and nothing new. But this is not so. All the marks of all experiences are wiped away; the brain, the storehouse of the past, becomes completely quiet and motionless, without reaction, but alive, sensitive; then it loses the past and is made new again. It was there, that immensity, having no past, no future; it was there, without ever knowing the present. It filled the room, expanding beyond all measure. 5th The sun comes out of the trees and sets over the town and between the trees and the town is all life, is all time. The river passes between them, deep, alive and tranquil; many small boats go up and down it; some with large, square sails, which carry wood, sand, cut stone and sometimes men and women going back to their villages but mostly there are small fishing boats, with lean dark men. They appear to be very happy, voluble people, calling and shouting to each other though they are all clad in rags, with not much to eat, inevitably with many children. They cannot read and write; they have no outside entertainment, no cinemas etc., but they amuse themselves singing, in chorus, devotional songs or telling religious stories. They are all very poor and life is very hard, disease and death are always there, like the earth and the river. And that evening there were more swallows than ever, flying low, almost touching the water and the water was the colour of dying fire. Everything was so alive, so intense; four or five fat puppies were playing around their thin hungry mother; crows, many groups of them, were flying back to the other bank; parrots were flying back to their trees, in their flashing, screeching manner; a train was crossing the bridge and the noise of it came far down the river and a woman was washing herself in the cold river. Everything was struggling to live, a battle for its very life and there is always death, to struggle every moment of life and then to die. But between the rising of the sun and its setting behind the walls of the city, time consumed all life, time past and present ate man's heart away; he existed in time and so knew sorrow. But the village men walking behind along the narrow path beside the river, strung out one by one, somehow were part of the man walking in front; there were eight of them and the old man directly behind was coughing and spitting all the time and the others were more or less walking silently. The man that was in front was aware of them, their silence, their coughs, their weariness after a long day; they were not agitated but quiet and if anything cheerful. He was aware of them as he was aware of the glowing river, of the gentle fire of the sky and the birds coming back to their home; there was no centre from which he was seeing, feeling, observing; all these imply the word, thought. There was no thought but only these things. They were all walking fast and time had ceased to be; those villagers were going back home to their hovels and the man was going with them; they were part of him, not that he was aware of them as being a part. They were flowing with the river, flying with the birds and were as open and wide as the sky. It was a fact and not imagination; imagination is a shoddy thing and fact is a burning reality. All those nine were walking endlessly, going nowhere and coming from nowhere; it was an endless procession of life. Time and all identity had ceased, strangely. When the man in front turned to walk back, all the villagers, especially the old man who was so close, just behind him, saluted as though they were age long friends. It was getting dark, the swallows had gone; there were lights on the long bridge and the trees were withdrawing into themselves. Far away a temple bell was ringing. 7th There is a little canal, about a foot wide, that goes between the green fields of wheat. There is a path along it and you can walk along it for quite a while, without meeting a soul. That evening it was particularly quiet; there was a fat jay with startlingly bright blue wings that was having a drink in that canal; it was fawn coloured, with those sparkling blue wings; it wasn't one of those scolding jays; you could approach it fairly close without being called names. It looked at you in wonderment and you looked at it with exploding affection; it was fat and comfortable and very beautiful. It waited to see what you would do and when you did nothing, it grew calmer and presently flew away without a cry. You had met in that bird all the birds ever brought into being; it was that explosion that did it. It was not a well planned, thought-out explosion; it just happened with an intensity and fury whose very shock stopped all time. But you went along that narrow path, past a tree which had become the symbol of a temple, for there were flowers and a crudely painted image and the temple was a symbol of something else and that something else was also a vast symbol. Words, symbols, have become, like the flag, so frighteningly important. Symbols were ashes which fed the mind and the mind was barren and thought was born out of this waste. It was clever, inventive, as all things are which come out of arid nothingness. But the tree was splendid, full of leaves, sheltering many birds; the earth around was swept and kept clean; they had built a mud platform around the tree and on it was the image, leaning against the thick trunk. The leaf was perishable and the stone image was not; it would endure, destroying minds. 8th The early morning sun was on the water, shimmering, almost blinding the eyes; a fisherman's boat was crossing that brilliant path and there was a slight fog among the trees, on the opposite bank. The river is never still, there is always a movement, a dance of countless steps and this morning it was very alive, making the trees, the bushes heavy and dull, except the birds which were calling, singing, and the parrots as they screeched by. These parrots lived in the tamarind tree beside the house and they would be coming and going all day, restless in their flight. Their light green bodies shone in the sun and their red curving beaks were brighter as they flashed by. Their flight was fast and sharp and you could see them among the green leaves if you looked carefully, and once there they became clumsy and not so noisy as on their flight. It was early but all the birds had been out long before the sun was on the water. Even at that hour the river was awake with the light of the heavens and meditation was a sharpening of the immensity of the mind; the mind is never asleep, never completely unaware; patches of it were, here and there sharpened by conflict and pain, made dull by habit and passing satisfaction, and every pleasure left a mark of longing. But all these darkened passages left no space for the totality of the mind. These became enormously important and always breeding more immediate significance and the immensity is put aside for the little, the immediate. The immediate is the time of thought and thought can never resolve any issue except the mechanical. But meditation is not the way of the machine; it can never be put together to get somewhere; it is not the boat to cross to the other side. There is no shore, no arriving and, like love, it has no motive. It is endless movement whose action is in time but not of time. All action of the immediate, of time, is the ground of sorrow; nothing can grow on it except conflict and pain. But meditation is the awareness of this ground and choicelessly never letting a seed take root, however pleasant and however painful. Meditation is the passing away of experience. And then only is there clarity whose freedom is in seeing. Meditation is a strange delight not to be bought on the market; no guru or disciple can ever be of it; all following and leading have to cease as easily and naturally as a leaf drops to the ground. The immeasurable was there, filling the little space and all space; it came as gently as the breeze comes over the water but thought could not hold it and the past, time, was not capable of measuring it. 9th Across the river, smoke was going up in a straight column; it was a simple movement bursting into the sky. There wasn't a breath of air; there wasn't a ripple on the river and every leaf was still; the parrots were the only noisy movement as they flashed by. Even the little fisherman's boat did not disturb the water; everything seemed to have frozen in stillness, except the smoke. Even though it was going so straight up in the sky there was a certain gaiety in it and freedom of total action. And beyond the village and the smoke was the glowing sky of the evening. It had been a cool day and the sky had been open and there was the light of a thousand winters; it was short, penetrating and expansive; it went with you everywhere, it wouldn't leave you. Like perfume, it was in the most unexpected places; it seemed to have entered into the most secret corners of one's being. It was a light that left no shadow and every shadow lost its depth; because of it, all substance lost its density; it was as though you looked through everything, through the trees on the other side of the wall, through your own self. Your self was as opaque as the sky and as open. It was intense and to be with it was to be passionate, not the passion of feeling or desire, but a passion that would never wither or die. It was a strange light, it exposed everything and made vulnerable, and what had no protection was love. You couldn't be what you were, you were burnt out, without leaving any ashes and unexpectedly there was not a thing but that light. 12th There was a little girl of ten or twelve leaning against a post in the garden; she was dirty, her hair had not been washed for many weeks, it was dusty and uncombed; her clothes were torn and unwashed too, like herself. She had a long rag around her neck and she was looking at some people who were having tea on the verandah; she looked with complete indifference, without any feeling, without any thought of what was going on; her eyes were on the group downstairs and every parrot that screeched by made no impression on her nor those soft earth-coloured doves that were so close to her. She was not hungry, she was probably a daughter of one of the servants for she seemed familiar with the place and fairly well-fed. She held herself as though she was a grown-up young lady, full of assurance and there was about her a strange aloofness. As you watched her against the river and the trees, you suddenly felt you were watching the tea party, without any emotion, without any thought, totally indifferent to everything and to whatever might happen. And when she walked away to that tree overlooking the river, it was you that was walking away, it was you that sat on the ground, dusty and rough; it was you who picked up the piece of stick and threw it over the bank, alone, unsmiling and never cared for. Presently you got up and wandered off around the house. And strangely, you were the doves, the squirrel that raced up the tree and that unwashed, dirty chauffeur and the river that went by, so quietly. Love is not sorrow nor is it made up of jealousy but it is dangerous for it destroys. It destroys everything that man has built around himself except bricks. It cannot build temples nor reform the rotting society; it can do nothing, but without it nothing can be done, do what you will. Every computer and automation can alter the shape of things and give man leisure which will become another problem when there are already so many problems. Love has no problem and that is why it is so destructive and dangerous. Man lives by problems, those unresolved and continuous things; without them, he wouldn't know what to do; he would be lost and in the losing gain nothing. So problems multiply endlessly; in the resolving of the one there is another, but death, of course, is destruction; it is not love. Death is old age, disease and the problems which no computer can solve. It is not the destruction that love brings; it is not the death that love brings. It is the ashes of a fire that has been carefully built up and it is the noise of automatic machines that go on working without interruption. Love, death, creation are inseparable; you cannot have one and deny the others; you cannot buy it on the market or in any church; these are the last places where you would find it. But if you don't look and if you have no problems, not one, then perhaps it might come when you are looking the other way. It is the unknown, and everything you know must burn itself away, without leaving ashes; the past, rich or sordid, must be left as casually, without any motive as that girl throwing a stick over the bank. The burning of the known is the action of the unknown. Far away a flute is playing not too well and the sun is setting, a great big red ball behind the walls of the town, and the river is the colour of gentle fire and every bird is coming in for the night. 13th Dawn was just coming and already, every bird seemed to be awake, calling, singing, endlessly repeating one or two notes; the crows were the loudest. There were so many of them, cawing to each other and you had to listen with care to catch the notes of other birds. The parrots were already screeching in their flight, flashing by and in that pale light their lovely green was already splendid. Not a leaf was stirring and the river was running silver, wide, expansive, deep with the night; the night had done something to it; it had become richer, deep with the earth and inseparable; it was alive with an intensity that was destructive in its purity. The other bank was still asleep, the trees and the wide green stretches of wheat were still mysterious and quiet and far away a temple bell was ringing, without music. Everything was beginning to wake up now, shouting with the coming sun. Every caw was more loud and every screech and the colour of every leaf and flower, and strong was the smell of the earth. The sun came over the leaves of trees and made a golden path across the river. It was a beautiful morning and its beauty would remain, not in memory; memory is shoddy; it is a dead thing and memory can never hold beauty or love. It destroys them. It is mechanical, having its use, but beauty is not of memory. Beauty is always new but the new has no relationship with the old, which is of time. 14th****** The moon was quite young yet it gave enough light for shadows; there were plenty of shadows and they were very still. Along that narrow path, every shadow seemed to be alive, whispering amongst themselves, every shadowy leaf chattering to its neighbour. The shape of the leaf and the heavy trunk were clear on the ground and the river down below was of silver; it was wide, silent and there was a deep current which left no mark on the surface. Even the afternoon breeze had died and there were no clouds to gather around the setting sun; higher up in the sky, there was a solitary rose-coloured whisper of a cloud that remained motionless till it disappeared into the night. Every tamarind and mango was withdrawing for the night and all the birds were silent, taking shelter, deep among the leaves. A little owl was sitting on the telegraph wire and just when you were below it, it flew off on those extraordinary silent wings. After delivering milk, the cycles were coming back, the empty tins rattling; there were so many of them, single or in groups, but for all their chatter and noise that peculiar silence of the open country and immense sky remained. That evening nothing could disturb it, not even a goods train crossing the steel bridge. There is a little path to the right wandering among the green fields and as you walk on it, far away from everything, from faces, tears, suddenly, you are aware that something is taking place. You know it is not imagination, desire, taking to some fancy or to some forgotten experience or the revival of some pleasure and hope; you know well it is none of these things; you have been through this examination before and you brush all these aside, swiftly with a gesture and you are aware something is taking place. It is as unexpected as that big bull that comes through the darkening evening; it is there with insistency and immensity, that otherness, which no word or symbol can catch; it is there filling the sky and the earth and every little thing in it. You and that little villager who without a word,passes you by, are of it. At that timeless time, only there is that immensity, neither thought nor feeling and the brain utterly quiet. All meditative sensitivity is over, only that incredible purity is there. It is the purity of strength, impenetrable and unapproachable but it was there. Everything stood still, there was no movement, no stir and even the sound of the whistle of the train was in the stillness. It accompanied you as you walked back to your room and it was there, too, for it had never left you. 16th With the heavily-laden camel, we all crossed the new bridge across the little stream, the cyclists, the village women returning from town, a mangy dog and an old man with a long, white beard and haughty. The old, rickety bridge was taken away and there was this new bridge, made of heavy poles, bamboos, straw and mud; it was strongly built and the camel didn't hesitate to cross it; it was haughtier than the old man, its head right up in the air, disdainful and rather smelly. We all went over the bridge and most of the villagers went down along the river and the camel went the other way. It was a dusty path, fine dry clay and the camel left a big wide imprint and couldn't be coaxed to walk along any faster than it wanted to; it was carrying sacks of grain and it seemed so utterly indifferent to everything; it went past the ancient well and ruined temples and its driver his best to make it walk faster, slapping it with his bare hands. There is another path that turns off to the right, past the flowering yellow mustard, flowering peas and rich green wheat fields; this path is not used much and it is pleasant to walk along there. The mustard had a slight smell but the pea was a little stronger, and the wheat, which was beginning to form its ear, had its own smell too and the combination of the three filled the evening air with a fragrance that was not too strong, pleasant but unobtrusive. It was a beautiful evening, with the setting sun behind the trees; on that path you were far away from anywhere, though there were scattered villages all around but you were far away and nothing could come near you. It was not in space, time or distance; you were far away and there was no measure. The depth was not in fathoms; there was a depth that had no height, no circumference. An occasional village passed you by, carrying the few meagre things that he had bought in town and as he went by, almost touching you, had not come near you. You were far away, in some unknown world that had no dimension; even if you wanted to know, you couldn't know it. It was too far away from the known; it had no relationship with the known. It wasn't a thing you experience; there was nothing to be experienced, and besides all experiencing is always in the field of the known, recognized by that which has been. You were far away, immeasurably far, but the trees, the yellow flowers and the ear of the wheat were astonishingly close, closer than your thought and marvellously alive, with intensity and beauty that could never wither. Death, creation and love were there and you didn't know which was which and you were part of it; they were not separate, something to be divided and argued over. They were inseparable, closely interrelated, not the relationship of word and action, expression. Thought could not shape it, nor feeling cover it, these are too mechanical, too slow, having their roots in the known. Imagination is within their ground and could never come near. Love, death, creation was a fact, an actual reality, as the body they were burning on the river-bank under the tree. The tree, the fire and the tears were real, were undeniable facts but they were the actualities of the known and the freedom of the known, and in that freedom those three are - inseparable. But you have to go very far and yet be very near. The man on the bicycle was singing in a rather hoarse and tired voice, coming back with the rattling empty milk- cans from the city; he was eager to talk to someone and as he passed by he said something, hesitated, recovered and went on. The moon was casting shadows now, dark and almost transparent ones and the smell of the night was deepening. And around the bend of the path was the river; it seemed to be lighted from within, with a thousand candles; the light was soft with silver and pale gold and utterly still, bewitched by the moon. Pleiades was overhead and Orion was well up in the sky and a train was puffing up the grade to cross the bridge. Time had stopped and beauty was there with love and death. And on the new bamboo bridge there was no one, not even a dog. The little stream was full of stars. 20th It was long before dawn, a clear starlit sky; there was a slight mist over the river and the bank on the other side was just visible; the train was chugging up the grade to cross the bridge; it was a goods train and these trains always puff up the incline in a special way, long, slow strokes of heavy puffs, unlike the passengers [trains], who have quick short bursts and are on the bridge almost immediately. This goods train, in that vast silence, made a rattling roar, more noisy than ever before but nothing seemed to disturb that silence in which all movements were lost. It was an impenetrable silence, clear, strong, penetrating; there was an urgency which no time could gather. The pale star was clear and the trees were dark in their sleep. Meditation was the awareness of all these things and the going beyond all these and time. The movement in time is thought and thought cannot go beyond its own bondage to time and is never free. Dawn was coming over the trees and the river, a pale sign as yet but the stars were losing their brilliancy and already there was a call of the morning, a bird in a tree quite close by. But that immense silence still persisted and it would always be there, though the birds and the noise of man would continue. * He was now in Benares and was recalling the source of the Ganges which he had once visited. He stayed at Rajghat, just north of Benares, on the banks of the Ganges, where there is a Krishnamurti School. The Indians call Benares: Benaras or Varanasi. ** Although Rajghat is north of Benares it is downstream, for the river curves north-east at this point before flowing south again. *** On this day he gave the first of seven talks at Rajghat. **** The pilgrims' path runs-through the Rajghat estate, linking Kashi with Sarnath where the Buddha preached his first sermon after Enlightenment. ***** These villagers were Moslems. ****** He gave the last of his seven talks that morning. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 9 DELHI 20TH JANUARY TO 23RD JANUARY 1962 The cold* had been too severe, it had been below freezing; the hedge had been burned brown, the brown leaves had fallen off; the lawn was grey-brown, the colour of the earth; except for a few yellow pansies and roses, the garden was bare. It had been too cold and the poor, as usual, were suffering and dying; population was exploding and people were dying. You saw them shivering, with hardly a thing on, in dirty rags; an old woman was shaking from head to foot, hugging herself, the few teeth chattering; a young woman was washing herself and a torn cloth by the cold river [the Jumna] and an old man was coughing deeply and heavily and children were playing, laughing and shouting. It was an exceptionally cold winter they said and many were dying. The red rose and the yellow pansy were intensely alive, burning with colour; you couldn't take your eyes off them and those two colours seemed to expand and fill the empty garden; even though the children were shouting, that shivering old woman was everywhere; the incredible yellow and red and the inevitable death. Colour was god and death was beyond the gods. It was everywhere and so was colour. You could not separate the two and if you did then there was no living. Neither could you separate love from death and if you did it was no longer beauty. Every colour is separated, made much of but there is only colour and when you see every different colour as only colour, then only is there splendour in colour. The red rose and the yellow pansy were not different colours but colour that filled the bare garden with glory. The sky was pale blue, blue of a cold, rainless winter but it was the blue of all colour. You saw it and you were of it; the noises of the city faded but colour, imperishable, endured. Sorrow has been made respectable; a thousand explanations have been given to it; it has been made a way to virtue, to enlightenment, it has been enshrined in churches and in every house it is made much of and given sanctity. Everywhere there is sympathy for it, with tears and blessing so sorrow continues; every heart knows it, abiding with it or escaping from it, which only gives to it greater strength, to flourish and darken the heart. But sorrow is the way of self-pity, with its immeasurable memories. Sorrow has its root in memory, in the dead things of yesterday. But yesterday is always very important; it is the machinery that gives significance to life; it is the richness of the known, the things possessed. The source of thought is in the yesterday, the yesterdays that give meaning to a life of sorrow. It is yesterday that is sorrow and without cleansing the mind of yesterday there will always be sorrow. You cannot clean it by thought for thought is the continuation of yesterday and so also are the many ideas and ideals. The loss of yesterday is the beginning of self-pity and the dullness of sorrow. Sorrow sharpens thought but thought breeds sorrow. Thought is memory. The self-critical awareness of this whole process, choicelessly frees the mind from sorrow. Seeing this complex fact, without opinion, without judgment, is the ending of sorrow. The known must come to an end, without effort, for the unknown to be. 22nd The surface was highly polished; every line, every curl of the hair was studied and had its place, every gesture and smile was contained and all movement was examined before the glass. She had several children and the hair was turning grey; she must have money and there was a certain elegance and aloofness. The car was highly polished too; the chromium was bright and sparkling in the morning sun; the white-walled tyres were clean, without any mark and the seats spotless. It was a good car and could go fast, taking the corners very well. This intense and expanding progress was bringing security and superficiality, and sorrow and love could so easily be explained and contained and there are always different tranquillizers and different gods and new myths replacing the old. It was a bright, cold morning; the slight fog was gone with the rising sun and the air was still. The fat birds, with yellowish legs and beak, were out on the little lawn, very pleased, inclined to be talkative; they had black and white wings with dark fawn-coloured bodies. They were extraordinarily cheerful, hopping about chasing each other. Then the grey-throated crows came and the fat ones flew off scolding noisily. Their long, heavy beaks shone and their black bodies sparkled; they were watching every movement you were making and nothing was going to escape them and they knew that big dog was coming through the hedge before he was aware of them but they were off cawing and the little lawn was empty. The mind is always occupied with something or other, however silly or supposedly important. It is like that monkey always restless, always chattering, moving from one thing to another and desperately trying to be quiet. To be empty, completely empty, is not a fearsome thing; it is absolutely essential for the mind to be unoccupied, to be empty, unenforced, for then only it can move into unknown depths. Every occupation is really quite superficial, with that lady or with the so-called saint. An occupied mind can never penetrate into its own depth, into its own untrodden spaces. It is this emptiness that gives space to the mind and into this space time cannot enter. Out of this emptiness there is creation whose love is death. 23rd The trees were bare, every leaf had fallen off, even the thin, delicate stems were breaking off; the cold had been too much for them; there were other trees which kept their leaves but they were not too green, some of them were turning brown. It was an exceptionally cold winter; there was heavy snow all along the lower ranges of the Himalayas, several feet thick and in the plains a few hundred miles away it was quite cold; there was heavy frost on the ground and flowers were not blooming; the lawns were burnt. There were a few roses whose colour filled the little garden and the yellow pansies. But on the roads and public places you saw the poor, wrapped up in torn, filthy rags, bare-legged, their heads covered up, their dark faces hardly showing; the women had every kind of coloured cloth on them, dirty, with silver bangles or some ornament around their ankles and around their wrists; they walked freely, easily and with a certain grace; they held themselves very well. Most of them were labourers but in the evening as they went back to their homes, huts really, they would be laughing, teasing each other and the young would be shouting and laughing, far ahead of the older people. It was the end of the day and they had been labouring heavily all day; they would wear themselves out very quickly and they had built houses and offices where they would never live or ever work. All the important people went by there in their cars and these poor people never even bothered to look who went by. The sun was setting behind some ornate building, in a mist that had been hanging about all day; it had no colour, no warmth and there wasn't a flutter among the flags of different countries; these flags too were weary; they were just coloured rags but what importance they had assumed. A few crows were drinking out of a puddle and other crows were coming in to have their share. The sky was pale and ready for the night. Every thought, every feeling was gone and the brain was utterly still; it was past midnight and there was no noise; it was cold and the moonlight was coming in through one of the windows; it made a pattern on the wall. The brain was very awake, watching, without reacting, without experiencing; there was not a movement within itself but it was not insensitive or drugged by memory. And of a sudden that unknowable immensity was there, not only in the room and beyond but also deep, in the innermost recesses, which was once the mind. Thought has a border, produced by every kind of reaction, and every motive shapes it as with every feeling; every experiencing is from the past and every recognition is from the known. But that immensity left no mark, it was there, clear, strong, impenetrable and unapproachable whose intensity was fire that left no ash. With it was bliss and that too left no memory for there was no experiencing it. It simply was there, to come and go, without pursuit and recall. The past and the unknown do not meet at any point; they cannot be brought together by any act whatsoever; there is no bridge to cross over nor a path that leads to it. The two have never met and will never meet. The past has to cease for the unknowable, for that immensity to be. 24th [January 1962]** The sky was intensely blue, the blue that gives colour to all things; that morning, there was colour everywhere. The birds, the neighbours’ children with their brilliant red trousers, the saris and the few flowers in the garden and the yellow pansies. These were extraordinary; one had seen them every day and marvelled at their delicacy and openness but this morning, they seemed to have covered the garden with their colour; they were really yellow not brown yellow or red-green yellow, their purity was the delight of the blue sky and the eyes were filled with the colour. Beauty is beyond personal taste; it is not a reaction which is taste; taste is within the field of things that have been gathered, it can be cultivated, as knowledge can be; it can be sharpened, refined but beauty is not the plaything of thought nor is it the fancy of any sentiment. Beauty as love cannot be put together by the vagaries of the mind. But that brief moment, when the sky and the flowers met was the everlasting. Time totally ceased and there was no space; there was only that and nothing else but that brief moment was the unknowable. No mind could measure it, formulate it or imagine it and there was no word. The crested bird with its black head chattered on the gate and the big brown eagles were circling in the sky, their sharp cry reaching the ground. It was a beautiful morning and at the horizon, over the trees, a few clouds were gathering. To be beyond sorrow is to love. Sorrow is the loneliness of the empty mind that has built a wall around itself, the wall of resistance and anxiety. It’s this loneliness that breeds sorrow; the sympathy, the consideration which this loneliness offers is the action of escape. In itself it is poor and out of poverty there is not a new thing. And love is a new thing and sorrow cannot meet it. Sorrow seeks refuge, an escape, the comfort of words and ashes are not love. Love is dangerous, destructive and words are comforting. And sorrow continues, like the weed in the garden; it flourishes and builds temples, churches and tyrannies. To face every fact, not with words and conclusions, to see without thought and so without feeling, to see it without distortion brings about that energy which is essential to meet every movement of life. It was a still night and that strange otherness was there with its immensity; it was a flame that left no ash. 25th You could hear the lions roaring in the zoo and the roar of the traffic on the main road and the quiet noises of the night. There was a slight breeze which had died with the setting sun; every tree and bush was still, withdrawing for the night, except the flowers which seemed to be awake all day and all night; darkness was as necessary as light and the birds had settled for the night. The traffic grew less and the night was deepening; it was a clear cold night and an aeroplane was coming in to land; it must have been a big plane and it made the windows rattle. And again there was quiet. There’s a quietness which is not the opposite of disturbance; in this quietness the mind can travel very far, beyond the measure of time. It’s free to travel, there are no hindrances, no barriers, no self-imposed restrictions. All resistance prevents this journeying but resistance and commitments do not bring about this quietness for this is born out of freedom, the freedom that is at the beginning. Every talent, every specialization, every ambition prevents this freedom and when there is no freedom, there is death and decline. To be free from the beginning and not that supposed freedom that is said to come after resistances and commitments are over; then there’s no freedom at all; a withered disciplined mind can never be free. It has lost its youth, its innocence. Freedom is at the beginning and not at the end. To wander through life, without ever being shaped to some pattern, by some frustration and guilt is then as the deep wide river which purifies itself; its very movement is the purification. You cannot work for freedom, then it becomes political, a thing to be bargained for, to be cultivated, to be put together, and what is put together or conquered can always be destroyed. You have to see it and not act about it; if you see it then it is there, indestructible, never ending; if you don’t, then no effort, no conniving will ever bring it. It’s there, only see it. A dog began to bark far in the night; it was a peculiar bark, several short ones and a long drawn out moan ending with two or three short barks; other dogs joined in but the deepthroated barks continued, never changing its rhythm for nearly half an hour. By its voice, it was not a street, stray dog; there was power and strength behind it, like the roar of the lion which came through the barks. It was a deep roar repeated several times but the dog kept up its barks. On that sound, you journeyed again very far, far beyond the measure of time. Again, the brain was utterly still, every thought and feeling wholly absent for that otherness, that incredible immensity filled the room and the space beyond the walls. There was bliss. 26th The clouds began to gather in the morning, light, fleecy ones; they were gathering from different directions, mostly from south-west; the sun raced between them and shadows covered the land. Towards the evening, the sky was dark and rain was in the air. The road by the house is not an important thoroughfare, it connects two main streets; there were a great many children on it that evening, all dirty, all in rags, all in torn shoes or barefoot. One or two smiled, the rest were solemn, sad and cold; a small boy was playing with a small piece of iron table; he had it on a string with several knots on it; he would run, holding on to the string and the small cylinder would chase after him; he would look back to see if it was following and each time he looked back, he was delighted to see it was still there; he would smile and talk to it and race off again. He was thin, dark with lack of nourishment, his head covered in a filthy rag. His eyes were far away and would never come back. They would always be poor, always labouring, always hungry; they would never take the salute in the big military and nationalistic parade; they would die without much resistance and live amid squalor, uneducated and lost. The big people, who were always in the papers who ruled and thought they were shaping the world would never know them; there was no affection and no tear and tears only when you died; they seldom laughed and their eyes never smiled. It was a sad world and it began to drizzle; it laid the all-pervading dust, washed the leaves clean and it brought that fragrance of rain on dry earth. It was a pleasant smell and the birds had taken shelter for the night. The buffaloes were getting wet and that was not a nice smell. Suddenly two forks of lightning tore through darkness and for a second in great clarity [were] the naked branches of the trees and the straight electric poles and a man crouching under a tree. And now it had settled down to rain for the night. The little boy with the string was no longer on the road. Attention is seeing. Seeing is an art as listening. But one hardly ever listens or sees; everyone is so occupied, so busy with the things that have to be done, with one’s joys, problems and tears. One has no time to see. But time does not give you sight; time hinders seeing, listening. Time is the space for experiencing and experience only dulls the mind and heart. The mind is filled and the heart has turned away and so there is no seeing. To see knowledge must be kept in the books and not in the mind; knowledge interprets, chooses, giving colour, opinion, weighing, criticising, choosing and then there is no seeing. When the mind is so crowded and the heart dull with sorrow, how can there be seeing? What you see is your own projections, your own desires, your own fears but you don’t see what is. It goes by and you are lost with your own toys. But when you do see, do listen, then that act is the miracle that transforms, that has emptied the mind and the heart of the past. You don’t have to do anything, thought is incapable of this miracle; then that seeing is love, as listening is. You cannot come by these through exertion, through the dullness of discipline, through any bargaining nor through the shock of unanswerable questions. There must be emptiness to see, to listen there must be a quietness. It was rather late in the night; lightning and rain were making great noise. Again, the brain was aware of the lightning, and the rain on the window, but it was motionless, astonishingly still, for that immensity was there with clarity and unapproachable strength. 27th It was a still morning, cloudy and there was not a sound; it was too early for birds and man; everything was asleep and it would be some hours before day began. It had been cloudy all day and there was an endless procession of clouds, heavy, dark and full of rain. They were rather magnificent, strange shapes, moving across the sky with determined purpose; they were all going north-west; for a moment you had the impression that the earth was moving for the clouds were the mountains, streams and rivers and the cities that man had built; they looked like towers, peaks and the blue waters. The sun came out through a mile-long blue patch and there was glory. Every leaf was washed clean, every leaf shone, with drops of sparkling water, every bird was out, chattering, singing, flying, a whole group of crows were settling down on the wires, thirty-seven of them, and parrots were screeching across the sky. It was a marvellous moment of light, clear and incredibly rich. Far away there was the sound of a bugle and a motor-bicycle roared, but the blue sky remained and there were a thousand shadows. There is no space in light, no journey to be taken, nothing to be fulfilled and the pain of frustration; there was no death in that clear light nor time to gain; it was a marvellous moment and it is always there, not a thing to be remembered, to be pursued. It is there but you have to turn the corner, just beyond your property, your family, your work and responsibility. You have to be alone without loneliness. Meditation is not a means to an end; there is no end to be gained; meditation is a constant flowering, not away from life but in life and that morning, in that deep silence, when not a thing was stirring there was a movement which the meditative mind alone could understand. It was not a movement in time and thought could not follow it; thought can only trace its own patterns moulded in the past. To dissolve the past is the far away beginning of meditation. If you begin to dissolve the past there is no ending to the past. The fire that burns away the past, the structure of time, is the act of seeing. Seeing is complete attention. 28th A lovely morning it was after the rain, clear, crisp and there was heavy dew; in the air there was slight fragrance of woodsmoke, of grass and of that peculiar odour that freshly washed leaves have. There were sharp shadows of depth and lightness and the sky, so early in the morning was already intensely blue. There was peace in the air in spite of poverty, squalor and the cunning hand of the politician. It was a morning that enticed you away, that took you into the heart of things where beauty was untouched, where affection was always young. It was a morning in which meditation expanded beyond the borders of time, in which goodness flowered and thought was silent. Every little thing was so intensely alive with that strange beauty the common things have. Your eyes were sharpened and you saw the skinny dark leaf of the rose and it was the leaf of every tree and bush; you listened to the birds and it was the voice of the earth and meditation was not some fanciful flight into some illusory vision but the seeing of the fact and going beyond it into regions of death and love; for these two are inseparable. Death is destruction, final and absolute and so is love. Love isn’t the tame domesticated thing of man, made respectable by thought, seasoned in tradition. It is new, dangerous and not the thing of thought. It is a flame that leaves no ashes, of memory, of self-pity. As you cannot argue with death, you cannot entice it into the dark corners of the mind. They are always together, waiting, watching, welcoming. You will know them when meditation opens the door of time; with the burden of time you cannot come to it; you must destroy it, the past must be wiped away. It is wiped away when you see, see without the screen of tradition, without knowledge. The eyes must be young, and far away to see and then the inseparable are there. And then there is something beyond and above them that includes them both. But on a morning like this, the yellow bamboo leaves and the dark leaves of a tall tree intimate the beauty that is besides them. The parrots were screeching across the sky, they never flew straight, but from side to side and they were flying fast, streaks of green light; then a group of crows came to settle on the little lawn, still heavy with dew; they seemed to be cleaning their claws and beaks in it and their black bodies were spilling light. There is a little pool of rain-water on the path beside the lawn; it was full of light and mischief and as you saw it, it was the sky and the earth, the measurable and the immeasurable and the two never come together. The brain is sharpened and made highly sensitive when it is utterly still. You cannot make it still, if you do you will make it dull and shape it to the pattern of knowledge. It is only in freedom that it can be still to flower. But resistance and desire can only breed conflict which wears it away, giving it age and weight. When the brain is utterly still, then attention, in which alone goodness can flower, is that explosive energy that carries the mind to that which is beyond all measure. 29th A little boy in red trousers and in a red coat was playing by himself under a large, spreading tree; there was no one near him, he was by himself, lost in his own world; he must have been five or six, with a happy round face; his eyes were almost closed and he was going round and round the tree in a widening circle, talking to himself, with an occasional gesture. He stopped all of a sudden, looked up the tree, came back to the large, rough trunk and touched it softly, almost caressing it and started running back to his house; he stopped, looked back at the tree, waved his hand and disappeared behind a gate. The tree and the little boy must have been great friends; he was completely at home with it, completely happy. The tree heavy with dark, bright leaves and the red suit were beautiful in the morning light. It was an enchanting morning and they were both part of the morning, like that flower and the sky; the sky was very blue, rain-washed, clear, without a cloud. A military jet came out screaming and disappeared. Once again that tree, that boy and the flower remained, past time and thought, and every blade of grass and leaf were of that timeless space. Only the mind that is completely empty in that freedom from the known could contain not the word but the fact and beyond the fact; the fact then is of no significance. Meditation is the emptying the mind of the known, of knowledge and the fact. It is the fact, the what is, that frees thought; thought cannot free itself; thought is the word of the known. Thought cannot cover the fact but the fact does put an end to thought. Knowledge is the experiencing of the fact, but the fact is not knowledge nor is it the word. Thought is of knowledge and knowledge cannot free the mind of the fact. Meditation is the choiceless awareness of this complex, which empties the mind of the known. The thought that is disciplined with resistance, fear and with the cunning ways of ambition is always a slave to the known. Discipline is conformity, a substitution which prevents the understanding of fear; it is suppression and so sustains conflict which makes the brain dull; a disciplined thought is subservient and ready to obey. Where there is understanding, the destructive discipline ceases. 30th The morning was heavy with fog; you couldn’t see across the road; you couldn’t see the tall, naked tree nor its delicate branches. The leaves were dripping with dew and the few yellow pansies were weighed down with it, and the usual roar of the aeroplane engines was quiet; they couldn’t take off in this thick fog. The birds were silent, only the crows were out, flying low, searching for food. But the sun would come out presently and shadows would begin, the lean ones and the fat ones. How important shadows, symbols have become, a word, an image, a picture. The real is far away, it is too dangerous but the symbol is very close, comforting. You could always worship it, get terribly enthusiastic about it, get violent enough to kill and be killed and also in the name of the symbol talk about peace and exploit. But with the fact, with the real, there is no possibility to deceive and to be deceived; it is too direct, too dangerous. So the word, the book, the image become all important. But the fog that morning hid everything, the squalor, the beauty, the blue sky and the fading rose. The people across the road in their filthy rags were shivering, hugging themselves waiting for the sun; a baby was crying and the buffaloes, with gunnysacks on their backs, had a strong unpleasant smell. And slowly, hesitantly the sun came out and a bank of fog would hide it again and soon all the fog was gone and the blue sky of the morning was there; it was that blue of flowers and their purity. And all the birds were out and high up the vultures were circling again, effortlessly, with hardly a beat of the wing. Meditation is freeing the mind from knowledge for knowledge breeds problems and there is no end to them; one begets another. Freedom from the known is the ending of problems. But you cannot free the mind from the known by thought for thought is the reaction of the known; so it becomes a vicious circle to be broken only when you realize that all search is from the known to the known, and so completely stop all seeking, all finding. Then there is the mind that has no problems but can meet problems without their taking root in the mind. 31st It was a clear cloudless evening, the smoke was going up straight into the sky and no air was stirring and the people were out on the road; the office workers were going back on their bicycles by the thousands; they were crowding the roads four or five abreast and the cars were trying to avoid them; it was an open war between the cyclists and the cars and the pedestrians kept out of their way. It was quite cool and some of the cyclists had on woollen gloves, their faces tired and they eager to get back home. You turned left, past the big hotel and went on past the embassies and then climbed; gears had to be changed; there were bullock carts, several of them, taking rest before going on; an empty bus with a puncture, an army lorry, full of soldiers, thundering up and a man all wrapped up, just showing his face, walking down, wearily. On both sides the road was wild and undeveloped, thorny bushes, rocks and cattle paths; as the road climbed, you saw the town, sprawling miles of it, with its ancient and modern domes, turrets, minarets and far away on the horizon the ancient column. It was a lovely evening and where the earth meets the sky was clear, cloudless and there was great beauty. In this wilderness, overlooking the domes, they are creating a new park, a rock garden with flowers, cactus, open green lawns, with canals of water running among them; it is going to be rather a nice park, full of flowers, trees and rocks. Crowds of school girls were sighing, shouting, stepping out like soldiers; they were not happy groups but boisterous. And the sun was going down, a great big orange balloon, in great splendour and alone. It is strange to be alone, not cut off, withdrawn, isolated, lonely, but to be completely alone; alone without thought, without association, without the relationship of memory. Every influence, known and hidden, understood and so put aside and thus be alone. This is really love. The hermit and the monk are never alone in their cell, in their retreat; they have still the burden of the past, their traditions, their gods, their experiences and knowledge; they are never alone, they are full of thought, determinations and creating visions, disciplines. They have changed their names and their clothes but aloneness is not near them. But yet you must be alone, not to be influenced, not seeking, not resisting. You can build a wall around yourself, of belief, of knowledge, of incessant action but that wall makes of you a prisoner, everlastingly enlarging and decorating the prison. You can’t invite the immeasurable into the prison; what you invite will be your own ideas, projections, images; you can battle with them or embrace them but you are still within the walls. This fact alone brings that energy which will break down the walls. There is bliss in this aloneness; it is not a void, a dry aridness of no thought; thought is arid, dry and to be without thought, alone, is not a desert of nothingness. It is there and you will come upon it when thought comes to an end and with it feeling. You cannot buy it at any chemist nor at any altar and without it there is no love. February 1st The trees were bare, open to the sky, with not a leaf, and a cold wind was blowing from the north; there was fresh snow in the mountains; it had been snowing there for a couple of months and there were several feet of snow. It could be felt here and the leaves were falling; even the evergreen trees were feeling it; they said it was a most unusually severe winter, lasting for so long. The grass was burnt by the cold and so were the hedges and bushes; the birds were going further south, to sunny places. And as usual the poor were suffering. Sorrow is always there and only death could wipe it away. But death also was a greater sorrow, living and dying. The rich in their big houses and the powerful had their share of it, death and life. The few years of power and money were all that mattered and the struggle to live from day to day with little. Death was always there waiting, watching; you couldn’t escape it, even though it was worshipped. There were so many beliefs, so many hopes and so many doctors but it was always there, in every house, in every hut; wherever you lived it was there, with disease or with health. You were burnt on the banks of a river or buried in marble halls; to death it was all the same, young, old or newly born. Tears, the latest drugs and flowers cannot dissuade death; it is so final and absolute. But who thinks of it, till it comes; you avoid it, turn your face away from it. Others will [die] but you may by chance, by luck continue. You are never face to face with it every day; you see it in the street, amidst mountains of flowers, elegant cars and black veil or on a flimsy bamboo stretcher being taken to the river but you never meet it; others meet it. To others in the coffin or on the bank, it is dreadfully real but to you it is still an idea, not a fact. It never is a fact till the last moment but then it’s too late; then you cannot do anything about it; others will cry, sob their hearts out but you are deaf and gone. But life is death; they are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other, however much you may love the one. You cannot separate the one from the other and spend all the days of your life cheating the other. It is there as your shadow, night and day, sleeping or waking. Your house is more or less permanent, the government or someone in the family will get it; your family will inherit your name but they too will pass away, with all your beliefs, fears and guilt. There is nothing permanent, not even your bank account, though you may like to have it till the last moment. Nothing is permanent and so your heart says, ‘Let’s live for the day’, but the day is full of sorrow and shadows. The more superficial you are, the more dead you are but even for you, it is waiting there, even for the quick-witted, none can avoid it, do what you will. But it is with life and so live with it, die every day, as you live every day, die to all the miseries, to all the pleasures. Don’t keep one, locked away deep in your heart, die to every thing; to your memories, to your youth, to your gods, to your saviours and also to your family. Be an outsider to everything. Don’t die tomorrow but today, to everything that you have known. Then there is no fear which is the shadow of death. Then you will see that life is not one thing and death another; the ending is the beginning. Then the mind is beyond time; fear is time, thought breeds it. With the death of the past, the experiences, memories, the new and the old traditions, mind is made new and there is the unknown, the not measurable. The wind was still blowing from the north; clouds were darkening the sky and it would rain. It would turn cold and as usual the poor would suffer. There would be disease and death and fears. An aeroplane, one of those new jets, was crossing the sky, ready to land; the screech and the roar were far behind. It was a beautiful thing to see. 2nd It had been a splendid day, full of light and deep shadows; it was a light that entered into deep corners, into concealed places; even in the open, it had that penetrating quality that revealed the other side of the leaf and almost the dark side of the trunk. It exposed your heart and mind, if you allowed it; even if you were indifferent, careless, it lighted the fringes of thought and gave a passing delight. If you were willing, it entered into the unexplored regions of your mind where you had never been but had hovered round the edges of it and now you saw the whole of it, without a shadow, where something could hide. There was no secret corner. You were surprised, open, vulnerable. And there was innocency. And every leaf was bright with light and all the birds were in the little garden, the little and the big, the many coloured and the plain ones, chattering away, unafraid and unwilling to leave. And towards the evening there were huge clouds on the horizon; there was one of fantastic shape, without colour, white, and against it four vultures were circling, without a flutter of the wing. There was one that refused to leave the centre of the vast cloud; it circled endlessly but wouldn’t leave its chosen boundaries; it was there for over twenty minutes. Those four must have been at well over a thousand feet and during all that time there was not a beat of the wing; the others wandered off but the central one remained; there was such ease, effortless movement and freedom. You watched it as long as it was there, the dark bird against a white, enormous cloud; there were many in the sky that sunlit afternoon but this one captured your attention. You were there in that garden but you were that thing flying effortless against that massive cloud; it was [not] in thought you were up there; nor in empty fancy and imagination; you were actually up there, not identifying yourself with it but you were that bird; watching the earth and flying on the wind. If it was fancy or imagination, a thing of thought, when that bird left the cloud, you were everything, that man in rags on the road, that black and white bird with its bobbing tail and the man who was talking to you about his difficulties. You were everything and yet nothing; because you were nothing, you were everything. But this nothingness is not a thing of the mind; thought can only beget thought; expand itself through knowledge or belittle itself in self-pity. But thought cannot make itself into nothing; it can only form itself with ideas, with words but it can never be the fact, the nothing. Later that evening that immense cloud was the colour of the rose, delicate, with a purity that eyes could not see. It was now taking the colour of the setting sun but not all of it, there were still the white curves, there were shades of black and russet brown. And there was beauty. On the road there was bustle and movement, smoke and noise; they were selling white cloth and fruit and the cloud was there covering the city with silence and immensity. The brain, the product of time and experience, experience is time, was utterly still, not experiencing, sensitive, for that which is beyond time was there filling the room and beyond without measure. 3rd She was a woman on the road, poor, dirty, unwashed for days, dark burnt by the sun and ill-nourished, with bangles around her ankles and completely oblivious of what was going on around her. She had on a bright dress torn and patched up; she was like so many others on that road, worn out with labour and with bearing children; she was a cut above the others and walked by herself. She held herself very straight and there was an odd dignity about her with that peculiar indifference which misery or joy brings. She looked straight ahead, her eyes far away; she must have lost everything, not recently but ages ago and now she was lost in it; nothing would ever bring her out of it, employment or another man. She held something on her head, wrapped in a rag not too clean, with one hand, and the other moved with ease and grace; now both hands were free and the thing on her head remained in place; she walked along that path, unconscious that there were others. She was not thinking, she was simply lost; when there is some thought, there is some kind of animation in the face, she had none. She had on layers of skirts, a filthy blouse and a coloured cloth on the top of it; she had on many colours; they were bright but dirty, unwashed, with sweat and dust. She had good, regular features, but all life had gone out of them. The colours, the walk and the face and the dignity were all of one piece; they were not put together at different times, one after another and nothing could ever break it up, except death. And she had no fear of that either; living and dying were the same, both had lost their meaning and nothing could ever give meaning to them again. She didn’t want pity, comfort nor a word; she was by herself and would remain so. There was a flower, hanging over the wall, along that path, full of colour and beauty. The wall was white, recently whitewashed and the flower, in the evening light, was the reality of life, perishable, vulnerable and fragrant. The woman never noticed it, went by, without a glance but the flower remained, alone and destructible. The sky had cleared and the sun was setting in a cloudless sky, brick-red, big and unnoticed. The trees were bare and hundreds of birds were there taking rest before going to their shelter for the night; they were noisy but not as noisy as they would be among the leaves, settled down before darkness came. Love is not pity nor is it the acceptance of relationship, with its jealousies, anxieties and guilt; it is not the nurturing kindliness of rich experience nor is it the help that you give to another. It is none of these things. If you knew it; it would not be love. All the cars were going to the big hotel, there was some kind of function there, all the important and rich were going there but not that flower nor that woman. Experience only strengthens the past, conditioning the experiences that come. Experience with its knowledge is never the way of wisdom. That immensity came without any yesterday, pure, impenetrable, alone. 4th It was an old tomb in the middle of a wide enclosure with thick brick walls, well proportioned, high and there were towers at the four corners; there were green lawns, trees, flowers and in the old days, fountains and water channels. It is rather beautiful and it must have been much more when the tomb was respected. There must be many acres within those walls and there were people everywhere, picnic parties, students and young girls and boys playing. It was a pleasant afternoon, with sun on the trees. The dome was of marble, onion shaped and though there were people, there was the quiet solitude of a garden that was not used much. If you went there on weekdays there was hardly anyone, except a few tourists with their cameras but you would be surprised by the solitude that was there. The late afternoon made long shadows and the sky was blue, the blue of northern skies. There were parrots about, green with sharp red curving beaks; they had nests in the walls around the marble tomb; they were coming in from the surrounding country, screeching, zigzagging in their flight. Perched on the walls, they were motionless light; their long tails were the green of early spring and their wings were late spring and their red beaks shone, made more red by the evening sun; high up there, they were startlingly beautiful and frail. Clouds were gathering around the sun and there was solitude. It was not a thing that you ran after but it was there, in splendour; it surrounded you, it held you. It maintained its purity even though you were in it; nothing could soil it, the noises, the laughing children and the passing tourists. You stayed in it, separate; you had come upon it, unexpectedly, just as, turning round a corner, you met an old friend. You were still separate from it, isolated in your own world; but soon you were of it, without a barrier, without thought. The whole of your consciousness, every little movement of feeling was taken over by it. It didn’t absorb you, like a toy does a child; it would never leave you again. You couldn’t lose it; it was not yours to keep to lose. All the yesterdays were gone and it was not an experience. There is experience only when the dead revives only to die again. Experience is changing recognition and recognition is part of the known. Continuity of the known brings sorrow and the ache of time. But here there was no experience, something to be gained, added on to the past. It was there and every leaf, every bird and the blade of grass were not something different from it. Love is that solitude; it is always alone. The sun was setting in fire; every cloud was aflame and all the clouds had gathered [with “come” written above] around the sun; there was not one left, all were there burning. All light was there and the birds were silent for the night. Again that incredible immensity was there filling the heavens and the earth. 5th It was a cloudy morning, cold, without a leaf stirring; there was a mist among the trees and the lawn was heavy with dew and every petal was covered with it. So early in the morning, there was no noise, not even a dog barked. It was a silence that was strangely alive, full of movement and you were part of it. It was a movement that had no origin, it was there without an end. There was not a bird awake and in that stillness, even the slightest sound was an explosion and your body lay still, without thought and feeling. Thought is never free, no reaction can ever be, and every action of that reaction is inaction, though it appear to be very active. Out of this inaction, which is called action, confusion and misery grows; it is the ground in which mischief and mediocrity are bred. Far away, suddenly, the note of a flute exploded, it was a beginner who was playing it. A single note; it was not romantic, it was not in the hands of an expert; it was not played to entertain; in that silence, it had depth, it was pure, it had the quality of unheard melody. That note was being played over and over again, till dawn came and birds began to sing. But that silence persisted, widening with greater depth. It was not more, there was no comparison, the active present had no borders of time. And an aeroplane was coming in to land. And the day had begun. 7th There were four parrots on that old tree; they had their nests in the dying trunk; they flew in screeching and became quiet as they settled on the branches; they were endlessly fidgeting, hanging on by their red beaks, to go to a higher branch or to lower themselves. They were lighter green than the leaves, their long tails almost the colour of new leaves; once they got among the leaves it was difficult to spot them; light was colour and colour was light. There were others on other trees but those four on the dying tree seemed to have captured the whole light of heaven. They were intense, ready to fly on the instant, gravely playful; from this distance their eyes couldn’t be seen but their curving red beaks shone in the morning sun. From that window, with traffic roaring by, they seemed so utterly indifferent to the human world but in flocks they came in from the outlying fields and groves to settle for the night among the ruins of old tombs or among the trees that man had planted. You couldn’t take your eyes off them and there was joy in their very existence. A motive to joy is the death of joy. They were the flowers of the sky and looking at them from that room where there was pain, it seemed so incredible that these green birds could exist. Everywhere there was sorrow and pain, decay and corruption and that light among the leaves, moving, restless beauty that knew no pain; they would die, killed or put in a cage but they had tomorrow, there was no time for them; they neither lived for today or for tomorrow; they just lived, the green delight of heaven. Death is time; every thought intensifies time and the many yesterdays had shaped thought, moulded it to fashion tomorrow. But love had no tomorrow nor had it a yesterday. It was the only thing that had no time and it was there, green among the wintry leaves. Sorrow and love cannot live together. Sorrow has a motive, self-pity and memory; every tear is of time, a remembrance and sorrow grows in the soil of time. You cannot be free of sorrow if you are not free of time; they are inseparable as the shadow of that electric pole. Sorrow is in the shadow not in the fact, in the what is. Fact has no time but thought about the fact has. As you were aware of those parrots, the traffic, the pain, in that expanding attention, only fact remained and time was not and even the fact was gone, ceased to have meaning, and [there was] only this attention in which everything was, for it was beyond time and measure. But you could not get to it through that window or through any door; there is no way to it. Neither tears nor time will open the door to the eternal. You must die without effort, without a cry and then perhaps as you turn along the road it will be there. But it is not. 9th It is a lovely morning, clear and full of perfume; the sky has been very blue and this morning, it is bluer still and it is so close to the earth, so close to the little garden with its few flowers and the dew soaked lawn. Every flower was open to the sky, to the sun that was just coming over the trees. There were hardly any shadows and the flowers were waiting for the sun to touch them. A jet was streaking across the sky with a roar and the blue sky contained all the beauty and the mischief of man; the earth was swallowed up in that blue, in that immensity. A stray dog walked in; it was brushed, clean, fur shining, tail wagging. It was very friendly and it looked straight at you and you were the dog, the flowers and the heavens. Two mynahs were strutting on the lawn and a vendor passed calling out his goods. It was part of the morning so utterly far away and everything was aware of this fragrance; nothing could be hurt, there would be no sorrow, no guilt or the fear of tomorrow for that delicate perfume was everywhere. It wasn’t some fanciful mysticism, some mischief of the mind but a very real thing, as real as those two birds and that friendly dog. You would be aware of it had you been there and it wasn’t an experience, leaving a mark on thought, adding more to the already known. Every experience is a reaction of the known, recognizable by the known, by the uncounted days of the past; every experience darkens the immediacy of life and floods the memory. It was not between yesterday and tomorrow and all experience is caught in time. It wasn’t an experience to be repeated; repetition is the projection of the past, the known, but it wasn’t the known for there was no centre, the known which is always gathering, experiencing, asking, seeking. But that perfume was there, not the word, not the thing you buy in a shop nor the incense, awakening sensation, of the church and the temple; you couldn’t capture it and keep it in the decaying corners of memory. It was there and your heart and mind were of it; it wouldn’t leave you for you were not there. The immense was there, the unknowable and the unexperiencable, and time had come to an end. All this is not imagination, to pick and choose; the brain, the thing of time, was utterly quiet, without its familiar movement and the whole of the mind was completely still. It was there unapproachable in its strength and beauty. The dog had gone and the noise of the day had begun and the postman came with letters. 11th A group of about a dozen parrots were flying low, screeching at the setting sun; their flight was noisy always, singly or in groups and that evening they seem to be more loud than ever. They were returning from their day in the country, for the night, to the shelter of the trees in town, and seemed to be very excited to get back. It had been a lovely day, there was the touch of the spring and there were a few clouds making the sky more blue. The ancient and modern domes faded into the sky and the trees were still bare, open to the sky; that evening every thing was open to it and the mind had no secrets. Every corner of it was exposed and in its exposure lost its shape; every region of the mind was the beginning of the new. Thirty or forty crows were sitting on a bare tree of many branches, their black bills caught in the evening sun; others were taking their bath in a puddle, cawing, calling, complaining and shouting their delight. There were mynahs fluttering around the puddle, trying to have their bath if the crows allowed them. There was a great delight among the trees and among the birds and the few men that passed by were not too wrapped up in their own affairs. There was the slip of the new, young moon, just a line, just a suggestion and there was the beauty of a day that was over. A woman in a green sari was carrying a big bundle on her head, her arms swinging freely by her side. You have to die to all things to be aware of this beauty that had no resting place; you couldn’t find it if you sought it; it was not in the museums, in books nor in faces; the smile fades and there are tears. You would never find it if you set out to capture it. You have to die to all things that you have pursued. You have to die not knowing; you have to die without a purpose, without a motive, maturing in a day and dying in a day, without a past. An aeroplane droned overhead, somebody was taking flying lessons and above the plane were the vultures, endlessly circling, without a beat of the wings; there was delight in their movement but soon they would be coming down to be lost in the darkness of the night. You lived for something, you worked for something and your life was intended for something. You had to be useful to society; everything had its use and you of course were of the highest use—for the church, for the government, for the revolutionary. What was the use of that leaf, that flower and those birds taking their evening bath? But that beauty cannot be used; it had no value, there was no market for it and all life is travail and sorrow. Without that beauty there is no love. The clouds were gathering around the sun leaving the sky empty. Every bird was now silent and the trees were withdrawing for the night. The moon was too young to cast any shadow but that would come later as she grew older. Innocency and youth were always with death, with the ending of thought. And with death comes that immensity, unapproachable, measureless. And it was there. * He was now in New Delhi where he gave eight talks, from January 21st to February 14th. He must have flown from Benares to Delhi on January 20th. ** Here begin the pages that were missing from the first publication of Krishnamurti’s Notebook. KRISHNAMURTI'S NOTEBOOK PART 10 BOMBAY 17TH FEBRUARY TO 19TH MARCH 1962 17th* They were small clouds, mere brush strokes with wings, hundreds of them, filling the western sky; the sea was covered with small, dancing ripples and the sun was setting, a gigantic red globe, splendid. But it was those little clouds, with wings, that gave enchantment to the evening; they were just a whisper of clouds, breathlessly flying north, all going north; each was enclosed in its own space, in its own beauty and they conquered space in their flight. And yet they were motionless; there was not a breath of air except just over the sea and over the land close to it. The curving bay, with its many houses, held the breeze but those enchanted clouds never moved but yet they were flying and there was no space. As the sun went down into the sea, they took on its colour; some deep rose, some light pink and others white. And they were flying; they had the beauty of all the earth and heavens; they were delicate, newly born but with that energy that destroys space. And as you watched them and the rippling waters, you were lost; you did not see them; they were there, only you were not there; they existed and nothing else; not even space and time. There was no thought, no feeling and so no experiencing. The essence of immaturity is experiencing. Every form of experience is in the net of the past and in the bondage of time. They were flying in the light of colour and there was emptiness. Seeing is a marvellous thing; you see only when there is emptiness; from emptiness, seeing dissolves space and time is consumed. The horizon, the dancing waters, the ever flying clouds and the abiding earth were in timeless movement and the glory of heaven was in that rock, on which a sea gull was sitting. The man in the car shouted some abusive or warning word; the traffic was heavy and a little girl laughed. Now the flying clouds were fading and the moon was casting transparent shadows. There were lights in the windows and shops and a powerful car dashed by, only to put on its screeching brakes as another car turned, blocking its way. It was a dusty, crowded road, people everywhere; only the poor, it seemed, walked or waited in a long queue for the buses. You walked seeing, observing, listening without a thought and feeling and so you saw everything, leaving no mark, no scratch. 20th The moon was full and from the long, enclosed balcony, she was just over the large tree, serene, clear and very close. There were a thousand shadows, soft and breathless; the city was silent so early in the morning. A large rat was quietly crossing the window-sill, pretending that it wasn’t seen. Not a bird was stirring and the dusty leaves were motionless but the shadows were whispering and a baby began to cry. Meditation is a delight and there was no distraction for there was no concentration; it is a movement in which everything is for it is nothing; it has no centre and so no beginning but then no ending. You cannot enter into that movement; the you must be left in your office, in your church and temple. You may not enter into that movement with experience and knowledge. There must be no you. The moon was now behind a house across the way and the shadows were thickening to disappear with the coming dawn. Then the birds began, a chorus of all the birds, shouting, singing, chattering. You listened but you were not there; you saw the palm tree awakening but you were not there and with the setting moon the light from the east began to cover the earth. Strangely you were aware of everything but you were nowhere, neither in the books nor in the street; you were not lost, you had ceased to be, not only during that silent and awakening morning but it was going to be extremely difficult to find yourself again; you wouldn’t seek to find it because it wasn’t worth it. You lived but it wasn’t you who lived. Living is entirely a different thing, a movement without measure, an ecstasy that no thought or feeling could ever capture. A mother came out, carrying a freshly bathed, combed little girl in her arms and by her side walked an older girl. This little girl was talking to the braided girl, carried around the hips of the mother; she talked in a soft voice, with such pleasure and boundless affection; you felt it, moving you to tears for it was an affection that had in it the earth, the heavens and tears. Those three were all life, neither east nor west, and the immensity of it. They just went by, in the dirty alley and time ceased. And then began the day, with its noises; people love noise. The children going to school were laughing, shouting and a boy was beating a tin can, just for the noise of it and a car going up the hills crashed its gears. The sun was touching the tree tops, so faintly, so delicately that the leaves were trembling. The scent of flowers in the next garden became stronger and the colours vivid, brilliant but you could never come back. 21st A little boy was throwing a stone tied to a long red string; he threw it high up in the mango tree and by chance, the string caught around a branch on which there were some mangoes the size of large pebbles; he pulled the string; it broke; he went up the wall, like a monkey, tied the two ends, came down the wall and this time, pulled the string more gently. Three or four raw, small mangoes fell which he pocketed, gave the string a jerk and was gone in a flash. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was still hot and glary. Two sparrows, male and female, came into the room and began to chatter; they came in whenever they could, full of chatter and curious; they would talk to you if you talked to them and they had become quite friendly. There’s a long mirror on the wall and the male would do a battle with itself in the mirror; it was an endless and futile battle; the female would sit on the little table and encourage him on with little chirps. They had to be pushed out, literally but they would come back; the female would be at the mirror first and then the male and the battle was on. The sun was now behind the trees and on the road it was dusty, dirty and crowded; there were people everywhere, endlessly talking, poor, ill-clothed, hungry looking and worn out. And there was the sea, restless and the water would be alight with the setting sun. Everywhere there was movement, every colour was alive and the black rocks were intense. Action is not something separate from living; the idea of action and action are two different things; idea is not action; life based on idea is inaction which breeds endless conflict and misery. Idea is the invention of thought in conflict and action based on ideation can only lead to contradiction, and the tension born of this is inaction, though it may produce books and pictures, gods and visions. Living is action; living is not memory; the ashes of memory is not the fire of life. Ideation is of these ashes. Living and dying, every moment without time is action. Continuity, permanency is mechanical inaction which needs conflict to keep it going. Conflict and sorrow, self-pity and memory are the fuel of inaction. Complete living is total action. The sun was now a fading line in the water and there was beauty, which no thought or feeling could ever capture. It cannot be put in a museum or hung up on a wall; it is not those two couples nor that family with so many children. Love, beauty and death are inseparable for life is ever dancing on the water. 22nd He was a poor boy, in a dirty, torn shirt, too long for him; he was running across the road, with an eye on the traffic; he was very thin, very dark with regular, clear features. He stopped on the other side of the road for a while and then went on aimlessly in front of us; he was about seven or eight, his eyes sparkling, ready to smile, barefooted, large of head and infinitely sad. He wouldn’t know what sadness was; he wanted a good meal, a long undisturbed sleep and clean clothes. There was no one to talk to him, other boys along the street must have quarrelled with him or left him alone. He was lonely but he wouldn’t know what that meant either; his father and mother must be labouring somewhere, probably helping to build those endless flats, in which they will never live. He turned sharply and ran into us; there was a moment of hesitation, apprehension and pain for he must have been beaten often. He stood there, so surprised and smiling; he was rooted in that filthy road, eager and tearful. His hands were rough, small, dirty, eager to hold. We walked together, not talking for he didn’t understand English but there was no need for words. Everything was forgotten except those two, walking hand in hand; there was no traffic, no people, no dirt and the sea was there, quiet to the horizon. He wanted to say something and words came pouring out, though he knew they were not understood; he stopped, freeing his hands, we looked at the sea, the palm trees, the little dog on a leash and the bus thundering by. It was a cloudless evening, clear, warm and those brown eagles were circling in the empty sky. Meditation is the emptying of the mind of time and thought; feeling distorts and every experience shapes thought; making it dull, insensitive. When time is not there is no experiencing and experiencing is the essence of immaturity. Total negation is emptiness and in it alone there is creation—not the picture and the book but complete nothingness. It is love. The brain was without a movement, sensitive, seeing not recording, listening without gathering. In those flats lights came on and a man with a long pole was turning the gaslights on. Night was coming in and the dust-covered trees were silent for the night. A car passed by with a lot of children laughing and shouting; a woman with a garland of jasmine in her hair went by and that scent was the earth, the people and that little boy. Mind was without space and time. The immensity was there. 24th Two parrots were streaking across the sky, screeching as usual in their flight; they were green light full of that strange beauty and grace that only birds seem to have; they seemed to be without weight, a flash in the evening sky; they had tireless energy; they were going home to roost for the night, hidden among the dark leaves. They liked the town with all the noise, the glare of lights and probably it was safer here than the country; these two disappeared behind a house into a mango tree but they had left a light in the sky. Just around the bend of the road, there’s a gate and behind it, there are four cages, with green parrots in them. They were calling and a man with a fat rolling belly, half naked, was sitting on a cot, with nothing on but a scrap of cloth round his loins; he was chatting to a woman standing beside him. They were small cages, too small for these birds and their tail feathers were out of the cage; they were dirty and the glory was going out of them, but they were very beautiful still, they were sleek and fat and their beaks were bright red. The fat man must have liked them for that was the only beauty he had in his life; they were his companions and not that woman who was standing beside him; she only bore him children. But those four birds were his joy, his care, you felt that; he never would understand the immensity of the crime he was committing, the darkness he had brought about, a bird in a cage, but they were the visible sign of his possessions; his children would leave, die but they would remain. He was scratching himself and looking at them. And the evening sun touching the sparkling water made a path of burnt gold, and a sail was against the sun. It was an evening when meditation was the complete stillness of the brain; it was empty and wholly aware of the activities around itself but sensitive in its stillness. There was no thought, no reaction for there was a movement which was without a cause, without a motive; there was no end, no beginning. There was no observer to experience. It was movement that had no continuity; it is the only active present. The sun was below the water now and the circling birds were over the town, endlessly wheeling till the stars came out. They were chanting, four voices, deep throated but light and filling the air; they might have been in an ancient cathedral and temple but the voices came from a room. And suddenly everything became quiet, not oppressively and the voices went on; there was an eagerness and depth and a heightened penetration into nothingness. You were riding on it, it was carrying you; actually, you were not there, only that nothingness. It was not nothingness of being or not being. It was empty without the borders of time; there was no measure for space. It was immeasurably empty as the mind was. There was not mind separate from that nothingness; there was only that. It was there beyond all asking and seeking and recalling. It was incorruptible for thought cannot touch it. 25th The road goes past flats, houses, empty lots, rich houses with gatekeepers and well kept gardens, with green fresh lawns; the houses and flats may be clean inside but the road is filthy, only the centre of the road is comparatively clean, so many cars and buses pass by. Where one walks, there’s no pavement, it’s really dirty; banana and orange peel, bits of paper, spit, the dropping of dogs and everything imaginable. People walk there every day, unmindful; they are mostly poor people; the rich go by in cars; they have their golf-courses or take a car and walk along the beach; here it’s noise and dirt; everyone has got used to it as they get used to sorrow, privation, insults and death. Here they sell coffee with all the dust of the road in it, the little shops sell bananas and grain and there are plenty of flies. There are a few old mango trees and they are in bloom. There’s a faint fragrance, mixed with monoxide gas but you can smell it; nobody looks at these flowers but the fruit they will eat. They are rather nice pinkish flowers; they are high up and open to the hot sun and this evening the setting sun was upon them, gently afire and the sea breeze was stirring them. A man went by selling small garlands of jasmine which the ladies wore round their knotted hair. On that dirty road the smell of jasmine, so unexpected, opened the door to an enchanted garden to a fleeting immensity, to a paradise of emptiness. A poor old man, almost blind, pushed his way and nobody seemed to notice him. Everyone was busy talking, waiting for the bus or rushing home. Meditation is the destruction of habit; habit is a continuity, a mechanical momentum that prevents the flash of an eternal moment. It will ever be a flash, a spark of no time and thought cannot make of it a continuity, a series of related thought, habit. Thought builds relationship, the getting used to things, to people, to ideas. This relationship is time and through time, do what you will, that flash can be never seen. Meditation is the ending of thought and the beginning of emptiness. There is no resting place in that emptiness, no thought as experience can take root which is the beginning of time. From this emptiness there is love whose death is creation. A little girl, freshly washed, with long, plaited hair, with a clean blouse and frock and a flower in her hair, passed by, following her fat mother, so occupied with her own thought. A juggler with three little brown monkeys, went by beating a tiny little drum and the sun was setting in a clear horizon; it was close and it seemed to have no end. A big man in a big car got out and walked as though he owned the little earth he was walking on; he was an important man, at least he thought he was and that little stretch of earth along the sea was meant to be used for his daily walk. The evening light was gone and swiftly came darkness. Thought was still and the night was that emptiness. 26th A little girl, about four or five, was sitting by the side of the dirty road and she had beside her another little girl, two or less; probably her sister; both were small, in dirty clothes, uncombed hair but full of smiles and tenderness. The older girl was forcing the little one to sit in her lap, but the little one preferred to sit, cross-legged on the hard, dirty road, with cars, buses, lorries rushing by; to the people, it was a common sight and an everyday event. They were very nice looking children; as yet the sun had not burnt their skin too much. They weren’t too thin, their hair wasn’t combed but they were happy and smiling, especially the older one. They had clear eyes and there was beauty in them, unspoiled and new. The older girl was holding the other’s hand and telling her something; they were utterly oblivious of the traffic, the people and the agony of life. The older girl was stroking the little girl’s hair to make it look neat; she was mothering the little one and there was no sorrow. And a policeman came along with a gesture and a word to get closer to the wall; they did as they were told and now the baby was in the lap of the other and there was peace with the abundance of love. Over the wall was a mango tree full of bloom and fragrance and there were also small, pebble-sized mangoes. It was an evening full of charm and space, everything seemed so close, so near; you could almost touch the horizon and there was that light that showed the beauty of everything. It was a light that revealed and in its revelation, there was neither beauty nor ugliness. Thought has continuity, not ugliness or beauty, thought has relationship and not love; love is not in time. Time and thought are interrelated; one does not exist without the other. These two destroy love. For love is not a feeling nor can it be shaped by thought; the love that thought breeds is sorrow. Love has no sorrow and love is not the response of memory which has continuity. The flash of beauty and ugliness is not of two different things; that light reveals without relationship but thought joins them together. It was clarity and not the beautiful and the ugly. It was the light as of the quivering sea in which everything seemed to live; the big was not the small. Meditation is the emptying of the mind of time which is thought and feeling and that emptiness is light. The two little girls had gone for it was dark now, the street lamps were lit and there weren’t so many cars; but where they had been there was perfume of the mango blossom. 28th The sea was empty, there was not a sail on it; it was restless, agitated, wide and open; it was so alive, every ripple was whispering; the tide was coming in, gently with an insistence that the black rocks knew. In that little bay, with palm trees at one end of the curve and the dust and noise of a new building going up at the other end, there were black rocks on which were spread newly washed saris of many colours, bright and luminous; they caught the light of the setting sun and you forgot the world. There was only colour and light was upon them. It was not the light of fancy or of the fast fading evening; it was the light which only the god of colour can give and the black rocks were heavy with age and countless storms. On this ancient blackness was colour, every colour that eyes could see; and the traffic ceased and the man standing next to you, smoking a cheap cigarette, disappeared. You were alone with colour; you were colour, not the many saris that were spread out but just colour; nothing existed and the dark sea was of it. Colour was god and that god was everywhere. And as you watched meditation came upon you, not forced, without thought. It was the meditation of expanding, open emptiness which had no horizon, no time; it was that immeasurable space of the mind meeting the vast space of time and distance and in the meeting there was emptiness. It was the death of everything known, every movement of pleasure, joy and sorrow; thought could not travel in that emptiness of timeless space and it became silent; it could not experience and so all recognition ceased. Experience is the recognition, the continuity of the known. Meditation is the uprooting of the known. Words, recognition, the known had come to an end and the immeasurable space of the mind moved with its own swiftness that left no mark. It was energy without frontiers. The road was crowded with cars; there was hardly any space to walk; they pushed you into the gutter; the chauffeur looked and was indifferent and a child was playing on the verandah. It would cross and uncross its legs, tuck them in more and more and sit upon them, to see how little space she could cover. She was dirty, with a skirt that wasn’t washed for days but she had a sweet face, mischievous and enjoying. The whole street was filled with cars and they were all going to a wedding party and every car was full with well dressed people, jewels, bright saris and the sober dress of men. The little girl never even looked at them for there was nothing much to see; they were the respectable, dead people. Now, the evening light was gone and Orion was overhead, filling the little space between the trees and the house. March 1st It’s strange how little humility there is. A car went by, with a very smart, bejewelled woman inside; she was so terribly conscious of herself, of her hair, dress and of her body. She was patting her hair, adjusting her dress and in a little mirror looking at herself; probably she was going to some party or other. The man beside her seemed so insignificant, so bored, so sloppy. She was everything and he was nothing; she ruled and he followed but probably in the office, he was the tyrant. Both of them had that peculiar atmosphere of the rich, of the arrogant; probably they could buy anything they wanted, including the men in position. They had a large expensive car, with a chauffeur, smartly turned out; he was conscious too of driving an expensive car and rich people. There was money and more of it but not too ostentatious. She had stopped looking at herself and was looking out of the window and nobody existed, not even the setting sun and the light on the water. It was a look of infinite boredom, waiting to be [“entertained” with “amused” written above]. But the sea wouldn’t wait nor that mass of people on the beach. It was a mass of people that was alive because it was together. At the end of the day, it was cool near the water and the sun was setting behind the wooded hill. The streets were crowded; and the beauty of the evening was there everywhere, but not in the cars, in the people. You can’t find beauty, nor the tree nor the bird will give it to you, but you will find it everywhere if you look. Beauty as love, is not an act of experience; experience is the interaction of the thinker and thought and so of conflict. Beauty, as love, is there where the thinker is not and thought with its feeling has come to an end. All knowledge must come to an end for beauty, as love, to be. But you know about everything; you have argued and counter argued and come to many conclusions; you have become so clever for you have known dullness. You know everything and if you don’t you can always find it in books. You can go to the moon but you have no space in the mind; you have little open spots, but not space where the infinite past and the infinite future have met and lost their meaning completely. It is only in that space that there is beauty as love. There is no space for thought, there is, to go to the moon but beauty, as love, is not there. It’s there, in that unspotted space of the mind and it’s difficult to find the mind for there is only exploding space. For creation is beauty, as love and death. But the expensive car slipped through and a taxi, yellow and black, took its place. 4th It was a magnolia flower, not the large variety, about the size of a small rose; it was still attached to its leaf, long, sparklingly green and beautifully shaped. The flower was pale yellow, with a delicate smell; the whole flower was the size of a large marble, with darker yellowish green petals outside. Somebody had picked it off the tree, carelessly, leaving it short of stem. As it lay on the leaf, it was designed to contain the structure and colour of the earth and heavens and there was space within it, not the space that’s measured but it was endless. You saw it in a flash, a swiftness that the eye and the heart could not follow. It left you as empty as that space around that flower; it was an explosion without the time fuse and you were left marvelling that such a thing should be. All this in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye. And therein lay the beauty of the everlasting. Beauty is the seeing the immediacy of the whole. You can see the immensity only in a flash, the whole of life in a fleeting second. It is not thought that sees; thought is put together through time; when thought sees, it is within the field of time and so there is continuity and decay follows; age and sorrow set in. But it was there on the table, the flower and the leaf, waiting to be put in water, if somebody cared. People didn’t care; it would be put in a vase and a few gurgling words said about it; people were too occupied, too committed to everything but to the flower and to see there must be space in the mind, vast, limitless space in the mind and only in that emptiness can there be the flash which wipes away all time. It would wither away in a few hours and if you cared, you would have no memory of it, the dead ashes of the past second. But then your mind would be full and there would be no space. The beauty of that space is silence; not the silence that time has bred. It is only in that immeasurable silence that there is the flash of the immense. You looked at that sculptured flower, with its sparkling leaf and wondered that such a thing could happen. In that wondering was humility which the earth cannot yield and beyond that flower was the noisy dirty lane, with children shouting, crying and laughing; it came out of the road more noisy, more dirty. There was always somebody on it, coming and going and only in the depth of night was there quiet. The whole city slept and forgot; you would hear, if the tide was high, the far away roar of the sea and the mechanical hum of the air-conditioners. The streetlight made shadows and there is a shadow on the frosted window pane that comes every evening; it’s always dancing, always whispering and you are among those delicate leaves, lost and forgotten and you can never come back to the chaos and misery of the lane. Everywhere there were ashes and that immensity of the fleeting second was gone. You could not recall it, and there was the road which had awakened to the coming day. 7th You should never be here too much; be so far away that they can’t find you, they can’t get at you to shape, to mould. Be so far away, like the mountains, like the unpolluted air; be so far away that you have no parents, no relations, no family, no country; be so far away that you don’t know even where you are. Don’t let them find you; don’t come into contact with them too closely. Keep far away where even you can’t find yourself; keep a distance which can never be crossed over; keep a passage open always through which no one can come. Don’t shut the door for there is no door, only an open, endless passage; if you shut any door, they will be very close to you, then you are lost. Keep far away where their breath can’t reach you and their breath travels very far and very deeply; don’t get contaminated by them, by their word, by their gesture, by their great knowledge; they have great knowledge but be far away from them where even you cannot find yourself. For they are waiting for you, at every corner, in every house to shape you, to mould you, to tear you to pieces and then put you together in their own image. Their gods, the little ones and the big ones, are the images of themselves, carved by their own mind or by their own hands. They are waiting for you, the churchman and the Communist, the believer and the non-believer, for they are both the same; they think they are different but they are not for they both brainwash you, till you are of them, till you repeat their words, till you worship their saints, the ancient and the recent; they have armies for their gods and for their countries and they are experts in killing. Keep far away but they are waiting for you, the educator and the businessman; one trains you for the others to conform to the demands of their society, which is a deadly thing;** they will make you into a scientist, into an engineer, into an expert of almost anything from cooking to architecture to philosophy. Keep far, far away; they are waiting for you, the politician and the reformer; the one drags you down into the gutter and then the other reforms you; they juggle with words and you will be lost in their wilderness. Keep far away; they are waiting for you, the experts in god and the bomb throwers: the one will convince you and the other [show you] how to kill; there are so many ways to find god and so many, many ways to kill. But besides all these, there are hoards of others to tell you what to do and what not to do; keep away from all of them, so far away that you cannot find yourself or any other. You too would like to play with all of them who are waiting for you but then the play becomes so complicated and entertaining that you will be lost. You should never be here too much, be so far away that even you cannot find yourself. They were all sitting in a row in the fairly well kept garden; they had on the light and they were eating and the big house was behind them. There was the scent of many flowers in the air and the breeze was coming from the restless sea. On that road there was hardly any car and your brain was utterly still and the movement of a flash was taking place. The meditation was the flash and that flash can only be in emptiness; the flash that opens the door into the unknown. That flash has no time but it’s only a fleeting second. You can never keep that flash any more than you can hold the winds in your fists. 11th She had a yellow flower in her hair and she was sweeping the front steps of the big flats; her green sari was not clean, she was lean and had many, many children. The husband was supposed to be a gardener; he took care of the few dilapidated bushes and flowers around the place; he too was lean, haggard and he just managed to carry the heavy bucket of water to water the plants, and they weren’t watered every day either; his shirt was torn, unmended, dirty and as dirty as the entrance, and dogs used the place. And nobody seemed to care. The family lived in the alley, under a thatched roof of palm leaves; their house was built around a few loose bricks, a couple of posts and a filthy gunny-sack. It was their house where they could breed and if allowed died there. He was getting as a gardener a mere pittance, a generous tip you would give to the waiter in a good restaurant and they had to live on that, his whole family of five or six or eight children who were always playing, shouting, crying in the alley, just below the windows. Of course they would never get any education and they would always remain poor, lean, dirty and lost. There’s a little girl of about two, who used the alley as her toilet and all children of the neighbourhood used to race up and down that alley, screaming, calling and laughing. The rich people had a temple higher up on the crowded hill with roaring traffic at its doorstep. But everywhere there were the desperately poor, lean, hungry; and the polished cars went by and the people in there were sad too. Their day was over, never to return; they had money and nothing else. You never saw anything so utterly innocent; she was lying on her back; you could just see the whole delicate line of her and she was almost touching the water; it was a stroke of light of the very young, new moon, appearing for the first time in a cloudless sky. You never saw her before, though you had seen her a thousand times; it was so innocent that you in that crowded noisy street were made innocent. You were innocent, without striving, without thought; everything about you was new, you had never seen them before. Your eyes were washed clean and you had not a spot in your heart; you were so far away that nothing could touch you. You could never be polluted again for there was no again; there was no in the meantime; there was no past or future; there was only that vast empty space of now, of innocency whose immensity was blessedness. It was a benediction and you couldn’t carry another to it, even though you loved. There was no saviour, no teacher could bring you to it; you have to abandon them and get lost where your thought couldn’t find you. It was the innocency of complete aloneness, not a thing that you had carefully carved out of life, a corner of self-immolated isolation. You were not alone, for you were where experience could not reach you. You did not know it was aloneness; you were not aware of anything but there was that immense innocency in that nothingness. It was the innocence of all energy and life and if you ever came there casually, and it must always be casual never determined, then you would be in an ecstasy that had no reason and no death. The long line of cars honked behind you, and in front of you a political meeting was going on, on the beach, and the bellowing voice of the politician, through the loudspeaker, came to you. The new moon was below the sea. 13th The dirty street was terribly crowded; it was more dirty than ever; they spat all over the place; the narrow pavement was incredibly filthy, never swept and it would be many months before the torrential rains would come and wash away the brutal ugliness of an overcrowded and callous city. The sea was just on the other side of the road. The purifying tide was coming in, covering the black rocks and the sands made dirty by man. Wherever he went there was dirt, brutality and a terrifying indifference to everything, and those who cared a little soon became social workers or those undying politicians. The hideous posters on the walls were telling the world what marvellous things they would do if you only elected them and nobody else. Every dog left a mark on that road where you walked; no incoming tide would wash the street clean; the mind was tired and the heart had withered and a small girl was using the street as her toilet. You wept and out of the car a man threw the butt of a cigarette and before a man could pick it up, the tyres of a car went over it; it was a half-smoked cigarette too. And going through the crowded street, you came to a bit of road that went round the curve of the sea and on the black rocks were the many coloured saris, stretched out to dry; they were collecting them now and carefully folding them up. And the red sun was touching the water and the horizon was clear, without a sail, without a cloud. You went with the sun, far away; you didn’t withdraw you just went away, not knowing where; if you withdrew, you would come back, now or later, and then you would repeat the whole weary cycle again, endlessly. Your withdrawal bred callousness and the agony of despair. Don’t ever withdraw or isolate yourself; don’t retreat into corrupting family or into the dead ashes of ideas, beliefs and the cheap gods of your mind. There is no love there. But if you just went away, not knowing where, not planned, not cunningly plotted out, then you can walk in that filthy street, with dead men and you would know love. As you walked, pushed around by cars and people, you would meditate, with delight; then meditation became an ecstasy, a movement of infinite tenderness and you held the hand of a passing child. Then you would give the garland of fragrant jasmine that had just been given to you to that passing beggar and you would see his immense surprise and delight. Then you would know that the everlasting was always there, round every corner, under that dead leaf and the fallen flower. The man ahead of you was smoking a strong cigarette and the brown eagles had stopped circling in the sky. l9th*** We were flying at 32,000 feet; the endless clouds were far below us and the clear, spotless blue sky above; the sun was coming out of the clouds, dazzlingly white. There wasn’t a break in them and they stretched from continent to continent; they were over the desert, sea and islands and at that height the sky was of intense blue; from the earth, from the mountains, you never saw such blue; it was so solid that you could cut it and keep it in your pocket and the horizon was white where the blue met. From a deep valley or from a high mountain sometimes you saw the blue of the sky, but it was never like this. It filled your eyes and carried you very far, beyond the measure of time. The plane wasn’t crowded yet, probably, it would fill up at the next landing, so you had the next two seats to yourself. There was the roar of those jets and it wasn’t too noisy, you could hear the conversation of those ladies, seated across the aisle. But there was silence. Amidst all that chatter and roar, it was there as clear and spotless as the blue sky. You were aware of it not as an observer [of] something to be experienced and put away into endless memory; you could not think about it, there was no time; it was there with such intensity that there was no experiencing of it. Out of this silence, suddenly and unexpectedly, there was that immensity. Your whole being became utterly still, without a thought, without a feeling; there was that unapproachable strength that was not put together by man. It was the strength that nothing could penetrate and so utterly vulnerable. And there was that strange intensity which no will or passion could conjure up. They were not separate things, the immense, that impenetrable strength and intensity; they were inseparable, never to be broken up, like death and love and creation. Your brain could not grasp the vastness, the majesty of it; it had become still, many centuries ago, before you came aboard the plane when they were playing some light music; out of the humid heat of the night, you came in and instantly were lost, many, many centuries ago, only an hour ago or perhaps a little more. You sat there motionless and totally lost and you would never be back completely. Three hours passed and you thought you had just got in and they were telling you to fasten your belt. And the two seats next to you were taken by a man and woman. And again we were in the blue sky, innocent and spotless, and that immensity was there. No man or god could disturb it and your mind and heart were of it, past belief and past beyond all time. Such a thing should happen in such a place! The man was smoking and it was in your face; the baby across the aisle was crying in breathless sobs, there was no milk and the mother couldn’t quieten it; the strain of it all was beginning to tell on the mother. The hostesses came and took the baby away, to clean it up, to quieten it and now the mother began to cry. The roar of the jets changed and we were coming down to land again. There was a river and green fields; the river was like a snake winding in and out through the fields and the fields were like men’s mind, all broken up, divided; the property of each owner. And beyond was the sea, blue, rough and incredibly alive. And there were the hills and the islands. * He is now in Bombay where he will give talks until March 13th. ** They have a thing called society and family: these two are their real gods, the net in which you will be entangled. [Krishnamurti’s insertion.] *** He flew today from Bombay to Rome. Chapter 1, Discussion With Buddhists - Illusion And Intelligence Chapter 2, Seminars Madras 1981 - Part 1 - In Listening Is Transformation Part 2 - In Listening Is Transformation Part 3 - In Listening Is Transformation Chapter 3, Seminars New Delhi 1981 - Part 1 - The Future Of Man Part 2 - The Future Of Man Part 3 - The Future Of Man Chapter 4, Seminars Madras 1979 - Part 1 - The Nature Of A Religious Life Part 2 - The Nature Of A Religious Life Part 3 - The Nature Of A Religious Life Chapter 5, Seminars Madras 1978 - Part 1 - Insights Into Regeneration Part 2 - Insights Into Regeneration Part 3 - Insights Into Regeneration Chapter 6, Seminars Rishi Valley 1980 - Part 1 Intelligence, Computers And The Mechanical Mind Part 2 Intelligence, Computers And The Mechanical Mind Part 3 Intelligence, Computers And The Mechanical Mind Part 4 Intelligence, Computers And The Mechanical Mind THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 1 DISCUSSION WITH BUDDHISTS VARANASI 13TH NOVEMBER 1978 'ILLUSION AND INTELLIGENCE' Rimpoche: Sir, when the observer observes, he is the matrix of thought, of memories. So long as the observer is observing from this matrix, it is not possible for him to see without naming, because that naming arises out of that matrix. How then can the observer free himself from this matrix? Krishnamurti: I would like to know whether we are discussing this as a theoretical problem, an abstraction, or as something that has to be faced directly without theories? Jagannath Upadhyaya: This question is directly connected with one's daily life. K: Sir, who is the observer? We take it for granted that the observer is born of the matrix, or that he is the matrix. Or, is the observer the whole movement of the past? Is this a fact to us or an idea? Does the observer himself realize that he is the whole movement of the past? And that as long as he is observing, that which is being observed can never be accurate? I think this is an important question. Can the observer, who is the whole movement of the past, with all his conditioning, ancient and modern, be aware of himself as being conditioned? Achyut Patwardhan: The observer when he looks at a fact, looks with his old conditioning, samskar. And so he cannot see the fact as it is. J.U.: Can we accept this? K: Are we all on the same level as Rimpocheji, who has asked this question: The observer is made up of the past and as long as he is rooted in the past, is he able to see the truth of a fact? If he is not aware of himself as the observer who is conditioned, there will be a contradiction between himself and the thing which is being observed, contradiction being a division. A.P.: As long as he does not see this clearly, there will be conflict in the act of seeing. K: Sir, the question arises then: Is it possible for the observer to understand himself and discover his limitations, his conditioning, and so not interfere with the observation? RMP: That is the basic problem. Whenever we try to observe, the observer is always interfering in the observation. I would like to know whether there is a method to cut off the `me' which is interfering. K: The observer is the practice, the system, the method. Because he is the result of all past practices, methods, experiences, knowledge, the routine, the mechanical process of repetition, he is the past. Therefore, if you introduce another system, method, practice, it is still within the same field. RMP.: Then how can it be done? K: We are coming to that. Let us first see what we are doing. If we accept a method, a system, the practising of it will make the observer more mechanical. Any system will only strengthen the observer. J.U.: Then this leads to a deadlock. K: No. On the contrary. That is why I said, does the observer realize he is the result of all experience, of the past and the present. In that experience is included methods, systems, practices, the various forms of sadhana. And you now ask, is there a further series of practices, methods, systems, which means that you are continuing in the same direction. J.U.: I feel that it is not only possible to reject the past totally but the present as well. The past can be negated by observation, but the power of the present will not go unless the past is negated. One is concerned with the present moment. A.P.: The present and the past are actually one. They are not separate. J.U.: Therefore, we should negate the present. The roots of the past will be negated when the present is broken. A.P.: You mean by the present, this moment, this present moment of observation? K: This present moment in observation is the observation of the whole movement of the past. What is the action necessary to put an end to that movement? Is that the question? J.U.: What I am saying is, it is on this moment of time that the past rests and on this moment that we build the edifice of the future. So, to be completely free of either the past or the future, it is necessary to break the moment in the present, so that the past has no place in which to rest and no point from which the future could be projected. Is this possible? K: How is this movement of the past which is creating the present, modifying itself as it moves, and which becomes the future, to end? J.U.: By the process of observation we negate the past. By negating the past we also negate the present. And we cease to build the future based on the desires created by the past. Only observation remains. But even this moment of observation is a moment. Unless we break that, we are not free from the possibility of the rising of the past and the creation of the future. Therefore, the present moment, the moment of observation, has to be broken. K: Are you saying, sir, that in the state of attention now, in the now, the past ends; but that the very observation which ends the past has its roots in the past? J.U.: This is not what I am saying. I do not accept the position that the past creates the present or the present the future. In the process of observation, past and future history are both dissolved. But the question is that again the histories of the past and the future touch on this moment, this existent moment. Unless this moment itself is negated, the past and the future are again restored to activity. To make it clear, I would like to call it `existence', the moment of `is'-ness. One has to break this moment of `is' ness, and then all these tendencies, whether they reflect the past or project the future, are broken. Is this possible? K: This question has special relevance for you. I want to understand the question before I answer. I am just asking, not answering: The past is a movement. It has stopped with attention. And with the ending of the past, can that second, that moment, that event, itself disappear? J.U.: I would like to make it more clear: This moment is an `existent' moment. K: The moment you use the word `existence', it has a connotation. We must look at it very carefully. Pupul Jayakar: It is not stable. J.U.: I would like to call this moment kshana bindu, the moment of time. The `suchness' of the moment, the `is' ness of the moment, has to be broken. Is this possible? In the movement of observation there is neither the past nor the possibility of the future. I do not even call it the moment of observation because it does not have any power of existence. Where there is no past or future, there cannot also be any present. K: May I put this question differently? I am the result of the past. The `me' is the accumulation of memories, experience, knowledge - which is the past. The `me' is always active, always in momentum. And the momentum is time. So, that momentum as the `me' faces the present, modifies itself as the `me' but is still the `me', and that `me' continues into the future. This is the whole movement of our daily existence. You are asking, can that movement as the `me', the centre, cease and have no future? Is that right, sir? J.U.: Yes. K: My question is, does the `me', which is consciousness, recognise itself as the movement of the past, or is thought imposing it as an idea - that it is the past? J.U.: Could you repeat the question? K: I, my ego, the centre from which I operate, this self-centredness is centuries old, millions of years old. It is the constant pressure of the past, the accumulated result of the past. The greed, the envy, the sorrow, the pain, the anxiety, the fears, the agony, all that is the `me'. Is this `me' a verbal state, a conclusion of words, or is it a fact as this microphone is a fact? J.U.: Yes, it is so; yet it is not absolutely so. It is not self-evident. A.P.: Why? On what is it dependent? J.U.: When I say it is so, it is only in terms of the past or future. It is neither in the past nor in the future. I do not accept it as transcendental truth. I may accept it at the level of a day-to-day order of reality. A.P.: But you are saying it is the creator of the context. J.U.: `This' is a creation of the past. What is the meaning of `this'? The `me' is the history of the past. K: Which is the story of man who has been in travail, who has struggled, who has suffered, who is frightened, who is in sorrow and so on. P.Y. Deshpande: It is the story of the universe, not of `me'. K: It is `me'. Don't let us pretend it is of the universe. J.U.: The `me' is history, which can be broken by observation. A.P.: He is saying that these facts are unrelated to the centre as the observer. K: Existence has no self-existence. It is a descriptive statement in observing; it is not a fact. J.U.: It is history. It has nothing to do with observation. P.J.: He says, I am this, I am that, I am history. This is a descriptive statement. In observing, it has no existence. K: Let us go into it quietly. The `me' is the movement of the past, the story of humanity, the history of man. And that story is `me'. It expresses itself all the time in my relationship with another. So, that past in my relationship with my wife, husband, child or friend, is the operation of the past with its images, with its pictures, and it divides my relationship with another. J.U.: This exists prior to awareness. With awareness the moment will be broken and with it all relationships. P.Y.D.: At the point of attention everything dissolves. K: You are saying that at the point of attention everything disappears. But does it disappear in my relationship with my wife? J.U.: No. This is not my experience. I have no history; I have not made any history. History is independent of the `me' or the `I'. A.P.: He says he is the product of history, and he has accepted this identity. K: But if you are the product of history, you are the result of the past. That past interferes with your relationship with another. And my relationship with another brings about conflict. My question is, can that conflict end now? J.U.: Yes. It will end because the moment is broken. P.J.: It will end in the instant of attention, and with it the totality of the past. Radha Burnier: This is absolutely theoretical. J.U.: I am speaking from experience. Attention is an experience, a special experience - and it denies the past. A.P.: Attention cannot be an experience because it would then be imaginary. It is a part of the past because there is an observer separate from the observed and so there is no attention. K: That is why, sir, I began by asking in the beginning, are we discussing theories or facts of daily life? Rimpocheji, I think your first question was, can this past history, this past movement, which is always exerting its pressure on our minds, our brains, our relations, on all our existence, end, so that it does not prevent pure observation? Can the sorrow, the fear, the pleasure, the pain, the anxiety, which is the story of man, end now, so that the past does not interfere or prevent pure observation? RMP.: Yes. That was the original question. K: You asked, if I understood rightly, is there a practice, a method, a system, a form of meditation, which will end the past? RMP.: Whenever we try to observe the past, the past intervenes. At that moment, observation becomes useless. That is so according to my own experience. K: Of course, obviously. RMP.: Now, how to observe without the interference of the observer? K: What is the quality or nature of the observer? When you say the observer is all the past, is he aware of himself as the past? RMP.: I don't think so. K: No, he is not aware. R.B.: Or is he partially aware that he is the past? RMP.: No. At the moment of observation he is not aware of the past. K: For the moment we are not observing; we are examining the observer. We are asking if the observer can be aware of himself. RMP.: You mean at the moment of observation? K: No. Not at the moment of observation; forget the observation. I am asking whether the observer can know himself. RMP.: Yes. He can understand the past, he can understand his conditioning. K: Can he understand his conditioning as an outsider observing it, or is he aware of himself as being conditioned? You see the difference, sir? RMP.: Observation by the mind of the real man, whether it is dual or it is itself - that is not clear. The awareness of self - is it a duality? K: I don't know about duality. I don't want to use words which we don't understand. To make it much simpler: Can thought be aware of itself? RMP.: No. R.B.: Is it the same as saying, is one aware of envy, anger, etc., as other than oneself? K: Am I aware that I am angry? Is there awareness of anger as it arises? Of course, there is, I can see the awakening of envy. I see a beautiful carpet, and there is envy, there is the greed for it. Now, in that knowing, is thought aware that it is envy or is envy itself aware? I am envious, I know what the meaning of the word `envy' is. I know the reaction, I know the feeling. Is that feeling the word? Does the word create that feeling? If the word `envy' did not exist, then is it envy? So, is there an observation of envy, the feeling without the word? We don't know it exactly, but is there something to which we later give a name? P.J.: Naming which creates the feeling? K: That is what I am saying. The word has become more important. Can you free the word from the feeling? Or does the word make the feeling? I see that carpet. There is perception, sensation, contact and thought, as the image of owning that carpet, and so desire arises. And the image which thought has created is the word. So, is there an observation of that carpet without the word, which means there is no interference of thought? RMP.: Observation of a carpet, an outside object... It can be seen without interference. K: Now, is it possible to observe without the word, without the past, without remembrance of previous envies? RMP.: It is difficult. K: If I may point out, sir, it does not become difficult. First, let us be clear: The word is not the thing; the description is not the described. But for most of us the word has become tremendously important. To us the word is thought. Without the word, is there `thinking', in the usual usage of that word? The word influences our thinking, language moulds our thinking, and our thinking is with the word, with the symbol, with the picture, and so on. Now, we are asking, can you observe that feeling that we have verbalized as envy, without the word, which means without the remembrance of past envies? RMP.: That is the point we do not see. As soon as observation starts, the past as thought always interferes. Can we make any observation without the interference of thought? K: I say `yes', absolutely. J.U.: The clue to all these lies in seeing that the walker is not different from walking. Walking itself is the walker. K: Is that a theory? J.U.: This is not a theory. Otherwise it is not possible to have a dialogue. K: Is this so in daily life? J.U.: Yes. When we sit here, it is only on that level of relationship. We are here to see the fact of `what is', we are separating the actor from action. It becomes history. When we understand that the actor and acting are one, through observation, then we break history as the past. A.P.: Are we definitely clear that there is no distinction between relationship and the fact of relationship? J.U.: I must make myself clear. There is a bullock cart and it is loaded. All that is loaded on the cart, where does it rest, what does it stand on? It is resting on that point of the earth, the point of the wheel which is in contact with the point of the earth. It is on that point that the whole load rests. Life is a point on which history as the past rests - past and future. That present existent moment, when I hold it in the field of observation, is broken. Therefore, the load and the bullock cart are broken. A.P.: When you say it is broken, is that attention your experience? If what you say is a fact, then Rimpoche's question should have been answered. If his question has not been answered, then what has been said is theoretical. RMP.: This does not answer my question. K: Sir, your question in the beginning was, can the past end? It is a very simple question because all our life is the past. It is the story of all humanity, the enormous length, depth, volume, of the past. And we are asking a very simple but very complex question: Can that vast story with all its tremendous volume, like a tremendous river with a great deal of water flowing, come to an end? First of all, do we recognise the immense volume of it - not the words, but the actual volume of it? Or is it just a theory that it is the past? Do you understand my question, sir? Does one recognise the great weight of the past? Then the question arises, what is the value of this past? Which is, what is the value of knowledge? RMP.: It is the point of realization. A.P.: The factual realization is impossible because at this point thought comes in. K: There is no realization because thought interferes. Why? Why should thought interfere when you are asking me the question: What place has knowledge in my life? RMP.: It may have its own utility. K: Yes, knowledge has its limited place. Psychologically, it has no place. Why has knowledge, the past, taken over the other field? P.J.: Sir, what is it that you seek by this question? I am asking this because the receiving of this question is also in the field of knowledge. K: No. That is why I am asking you a very simple question: Why should knowledge take a place in my relationship with another? Is relationship with another a remembrance? Remembrance means knowledge. My relationship with her, or with you, becomes a remembrance - as, for instance, `You have hurt me; `She has praised me; then `She is my friend', `You are not my friend'. When relationship is based on memory, remembrance, there is division and conflict. Therefore, there is no love. How is this memory, remembrance, which prevents love, to come to an end in relationship? A.P.: The original question that we started with has ended in a new question. K: I am doing it now: What is the function of the brain? RMP.: To store memory. K: Which means what? To register, like a tape-recorder. Why should it register anything except what is absolutely necessary? I must register where I live, how to drive a car. There must be registration of the things that have utility. Why should it register when she insults me, or you praise me? It is that registration that is the story of the past - the flattery, the insult. I am asking, can't that be stopped? RMP.: When I am thinking, it is very difficult... K: I am going to show you it is not difficult. RMP.: Sir, you say why not register only what is necessary, but the brain does not know what is necessary. That is why it goes on registering. K: No, no. RMP.: The registering is involuntary. K: Of course. RMP.: Then how can we register only that which is necessary? K: Why has it become involuntary? What is the nature of the brain? It needs security - physical security - because otherwise it cannot function. It must have food, clothes and shelter. Is there any other form of security? Thought has invented other forms of security: I am a Hindu, with my gods. Thought has created the illusion and in that illusion the brain seeks shelter, security. Now, does thought realize that the creation of the gods, etc. is an illusion, and, therefore, put it away, so that I don't go to a church, perform religious rituals, because they are all the products of thought in which the brain has found some kind of illusory security? J.U.: The moment of self-protection is also the past. To break that habit of self-protection is also a point. It is that point on which the whole of existence rests. This atma which is samskriti must also be negated. This is the only way out. K: For survival, physical survival, not only of you and me but of humanity, why do we divide ourselves as Hindu, Muslim, communist, socialist, Catholic? RMP.: This is the creation of thought, which is illusory. K: Yet we hold on to it. You call yourself a Hindu. Why? RMP.: It is for survival, a survival reflex. K: Is it survival? A.P.: It is not, because it is the enemy of survival. P.J.: At one level we can understand each other. But it does not end that process. K: Because we don't use our brains to find out, to say this is so: I must survive. P.J.: You say the brain is like a tape-recorder recording. Is there another function of the brain, another quality? K: Yes, it is intelligence. P.J.: How is it awakened? K: Look, I see there is no security in nationalism, and, therefore, I am out: I am no longer an Indian. And I see there is no security in belonging to any religion; therefore, I don't belong to any religion. Now what does that mean? I have observed how nations fight each other, how communities fight each other, how religions fight each other, the stupidity of it, and the very observation awakens intelligence. Seeing that which is false is the awakening of intelligence. P.J.: What is this seeing? K: Observing outwardly England, France, Germany, Russia, America, are at each other's throats, I see how stupid it is. Seeing the stupidity is intelligence. R.B.: Are you saying that as one sees this, the unnecessary recording comes to an end? K: Yes. I am no longer a nationalist. That is a tremendous thing. Sunanda Patwardhan: You mean if we cease to be nationalists, all unnecessary recording stops? K: Yes, with regard to nationalism. R.B.: Do you mean to say that when one sees that security or survival is an absolute minimum and eliminates everything else, then the recording stops? K: Of course, naturally. J.U.: One song has ended and another has started; a new song has been recorded on the old. It will go on. The old destructive music will keep on breaking and the new music which is good, which is right, will take over. Is this the future of humanity? K: No, you see, this is theory. Have you stopped being a Buddhist? J.U.: I don't know. The past as history has shaped the image in my brain. My being a Buddhist is the past - a historical past. K: Then drop it - which means you see the illusion of being a Buddhist. J.U.: That is correct. K: Seeing the illusion is the beginning of intelligence. J.U.: But we would like to see that when one thing breaks another does not form. K: Could we tackle this differently? We are surrounded by false illusory things. Must we go step by step, one after another? Or is there a way of looking at this whole illusion and ending it? To see the whole movement of illusion, the movement of thought which creates illusions and, seeing it, to end it - is that possible? J.U.: This is possible. K: Is it a theory? The moment we enter into theory, then it is meaningless. J.U.: If we can break the self-protective process, then this is possible. The form of this process will then undergo a change; but the self-protective process itself will not end. When we think that something has existence, even that is an illusion. Thousands of such illusions break and thousands of new ones come into being. That is not sadhana; this happens all the time. So far we have been talking only of the gross illusions; these certainly break. But a new image is continually shaping itself. It is making its own thought structures. A.P.: What he is saying is that this process of negating gives place to the arising of new, subtler illusions. K: No. Thought being limited, whatever it creates is limited -whatever: gods, knowledge, experience, everything is limited. Do you see that thought is limited and its activity is limited? If you see that, it is finished; there is no illusion, no further illusion. RMP.: This point, this thought, again arises. K: That is why I said, sir, thought must find its own proper place, which is utility, and it has no other place. If it has any other place, it is illusion. Thought is not love. Does love exist? You agree thought is limited, but do you love people? I don't want theories. What is the point of all this? What is the point of all your knowledge, Gita, Upanishads, and all the rest of it? Have we made ourselves clear, or are we still at the verbal level? RMP.: No, not at the verbal level. K: When we have really discovered the limitations of thought, there is a flowering of something else. Is it really happening? Does that take place? RMP.: I can now recognise the limitations of thought more poignantly. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 2 PART 1 1ST SEMINAR MADRAS 14TH JANUARY 1981 'IN LISTENING IS TRANSFORMATION' Achyut Patwardhan: Reflective minds have come to realize that there is a certain degeneration at the very source of the human brain. Would it be possible for us to explore this source of degeneration? Is it possible for us to start our exploration with a mind which says, `I see the fact of degeneration, I don't know its causes, I am willing to explore'? Brij Khare: I am wondering whether we can discover the tools we are going to use in order to explore; what really are the tools we need to enter into such an enquiry? P.J.: Is the brain the tool of enquiry and are we enquiring into the movement of the brain? Does the tool then enquire into itself? B.K.: Is it characteristic of the human brain or mind to be an observer of itself? A.P.: Is it possible to cleanse the brain of the source of pollution? P.J.: Can we take these two questions together? Are the tools which are available to us adequate to explore the nature of this movement? If they are of the essence of pollution, can they investigate pollution? Therefore, should we not investigate the tools? B.K.: I was also wondering, is it really a question of tools or can we directly see disorder? We can then ask what evolves from that. Degeneration somehow seems to imply a time scale. Clearly there is disorder. Q: Will the examination of the tools by itself take us anywhere? P.J.: I do not think the two questions are independent of each other. A.P.: I discover that the tools are inadequate, and I put them aside, I say I can only see that there is this very rapid process of degeneration which threatens human survival. Now, how do we understand this? P.J.: We said there is a state of degeneration, both outside and within, that this is part of the very condition of man, the degenerative process having accelerated and, therefore, degeneration being at our doorstep and within one. We start with the query, with what instruments do we enquire. Unless one asks this question we will keep on going round the circle of degeneration. K.: I think all of us agree that there is degeneration, that there is corruption - moral, intellectual and also physical. There is chaos, confusion, misery, despair. To think is to be full of sorrow. Now, how do we approach this present condition? Do we approach it as a Christian, as a Buddhist, or a Hindu or Muslim, or as a communist? Or do we approach the problem without taking a stand, a position? The communist agrees that sorrow is the burden of mankind, but if one is to change that sorrow one must recondition society. If we could put aside all our stands, positions, then perhaps we can really look at the problem of degeneration. The problem is very serious. Knowledge either of the technological world or of the psychological world, or knowledge handed down through tradition, books and so on, appears to be at the root of all degeneration. Let us discuss this. I see this chaos throughout the world, there is uncertainty, utter confusion and despair. How do we approach it? It is quite clear that I have no answer to this problem of degeneration within me. I imagine I have read Vedanta and the answer is in that; I imagine I am a Marxist and that there is an answer in that, and that only some modifications in the system are necessary. These positions would vitiate enquiry. Therefore, I don't want to say anything beyond what is based on observable fact. P.J.: Krishnaji has brought an element into this enquiry which demands a great deal of examination, which is that knowledge per se - technological knowledge, skill, all that the human brain has acquired through millennia - is itself the source of degeneration. First, I must see that challenge. And how do I see the challenge, how do I respond to it? Q: The challenge may be utterly false. P.J.: I must discover the truth or untruth of it. B.K.: I still say that perhaps we are anatomically, biologically, physiologically, inadequate to deal with the situation and we do not have appropriate tools. What I am enquiring is, is there a root cause for all this? K: What is the root cause? Can we find out what is? We are not examining the symptoms; we all know the symptoms. Can we find out through sceptical investigation what is the effect of knowledge on our minds, on our brains? This has to be examined, and then the root cause will be uncovered. Can we find a different approach? J.U.: There are two points from which we look at this problem: one is that of the individual and the other is that of society. Problems arise because the individual feels he is intrinsically free, but at the same time there is a dimension of him which is in interaction with society. The individual himself is, partly, an entity but, largely, he is the product of society. In order to examine the question, we have to draw attention to the problems of the individual and society separately. The individual in relation to himself on the one hand, and the individual in relation to society on the other, are really processes within society. I would not like to go back to the ancient past - I am confining myself to the last three to four hundred years of civilization. I want to stress that the problem lies in the nature of the relationship between the individual and society. There are moments when the individual acquires a greater importance, and moments when society acquires greater importance. What is the nature of the relationship of one to the other, and how are the balances disturbed? Is it in the transmission of knowledge or experience that one has to see the relationship between them? K: I question whether there is an individual, whether society is not an abstraction. What is actual is human relationship. You may call that relationship society, but the fact is, it is relationship between you and another, intimate or otherwise. Let us find out whether we are individuals or we are programmed to think we are individuals. I am questioning very deeply whether the concept of the individual is actual. You think you are an individual and you act as one and from this arise problems and then you pose the question of relationship between society and the individual. But society is a total abstraction. What is real, actual, is the relationship between two human beings - which is society. J.U.: Do you say that the individual is not? There are two levels of delusion at which one is working. P.J.: Upadhyayaji says that the individual is not, but he deludes himself that he is. Society is not, but there is a delusion that society is. While the two delusions - of individual's existence and society's existence - `exist', ,there is conflict between the two which must also be resolved. G. Narayan: Though the individual is an illusion and society is an illusion, we have made a reality out of them and all the effects are there. K: Are you saying that the brain has been programmed as the individual, with its expressions, freedom, fulfilment, with society opposed to the individual? Are you admitting that the brain has been programmed? Don't call it a relationship; it is programmed to think in that way. Therefore, it is not illusion. Programming is an illusion, not what is programmed. A.P.: To say that the individual is an illusion or society is an illusion is to say that we have created an imaginary problem which we are discussing speculatively. Actually, we are discussing the condition of man. The condition of man is a fact; he is degenerating, he is selfish, unhappy, in conflict, and is on the point of destroying himself. This cannot be denied. Krishnaji says to the traditionalists and to the Marxists that they are programmed. P.J.: Achyutji, you are missing the point. Krishnaji says, don't call it illusion, it is not an illusion in that sense. The brain has not created it. The brain itself is that, because it has been programmed to be that. K: If you call it illusion, then the programmed is the illusion. So if you stop programming the brain, which is illusion, you wipe out the whole thing. The computer is programmed and we are programmed. J.U.: If I wipe that out, then what is relationship? K: Not ifs and buts. Do we actually see the fact, not the theory of the fact, that we are not individuals? RMP.: Whenever we speak of relationship, we are taking for granted that there are two points, between which we speak of relationship. My assumption is that before we examine relationship, we must examine the two points. To speak about relationship without the two points becomes merely academic. B.K.: Does it include the animal, animalistic mind? If yes, then we cannot talk about the last three or four hundred years only - we must go back to the time when we were living in trees. K: What is the point, sir? P.J.: The whole point is in your saying that the brain is programmed. Where do we go from there? You have been saying that self-centred activity, the individual as he is, elaborated a little more, has to be negated at every point. But when we observe, whether it is the outer or the inner - sometimes the outer predominates, sometimes the inner - the interaction between the two is always evident. You can call it individual and society, or anything else, but there are always the two; I create it. This is the point. Therefore, as Rimpocheji says, we cannot wipe out the individual and just talk of relationship, we cannot because we have to examine the two points. K: I question that. I am saying there is only relationship. P.J.: Are you taking relationship out of the context of the two? K: Yes. That is, the brain relating itself to the past. The brain is the past. P.J.: Then, who is relating to whom? K: It is not relating to anybody. It is functioning within its own circle, within its own area. This is obvious. S.P.: But, sir, this brain is relating to other brains with which it has certain similarities. P.J.: Sunanda, did you hear what he said - that you are never relating to another, that the brain itself creates the `other' and then relates to that? K: Can you repeat what I said? G.N.: You are saying that there is no relationship because the brain creates the `other' and then relates to it. In fact, there is only the human brain. K: The brain is only concerned with itself, its own security, its own problems, its own sorrow, and the `other' is also this. The brain is never related to anything. There is no `other'. The `other' is the image created by thought which is the brain. R.B.: Are you saying that relationship itself is part of the programming? K: No. Let us move from that word `programme'. R.B.: There is no `other' and no relationship. K: No. Relationship is always between two. S: Do you mean to say there is no `other'? K: You exist, but my relationship with you is based on the image I have created of you. Therefore, my relationship is with the image which I have. B.K.: But part of the brain is also questioning it. K: Let us get this clear. My relation to you is based on the thought which I have about you, the image that I have created about you. The relationship is not with you, but with the image that I have. Therefore, there is no relationship. B.K.: What I do not understand is, how does the programming come in? K: Sir, the computer is programmed. It will believe in god, it will believe in the Vedas, believe in anything it has been told. My brain has also been programmed that I am a Hindu, I am Christian, I believe in god, I don't believe in god. Leave it for the moment. We are saying there is no `other'. Therefore, there is no relationship with `other'. A.P.: I question this. K: I am examining this. My brain is the common brain of humanity; it is not my brain. The common brain, which has existed for five to ten million years, has through experience, knowledge, etc., established for itself an image of the world - and also of my wife. My wife is only there for my pleasure, my loneliness; she exists as an image in me which thought has created. Therefore, there is no relationship. But if I actually see that and change the whole movement, then perhaps we may know what love is. Then relationship is totally different. A.P.: You have stated something. Is this a description or a fact? K: It is a description to communicate a fact. Question the fact, not the description. A.P.: I am questioning the fact. I say the fact is that the world is full of people. They are divided into nationalities, etc. I cannot permit an oversimplification of a situation in which the problem itself is reduced to what is happening in the brain - because I say something is happening outside, something is happening within me and there is an interaction, and that, that is the problem. K: You are saying that there is an interaction between my psychological world and the world. I am saying there is only one world - my psychological world. It is not an oversimplification; on the contrary. Q: You said that my relationship with my wife is my ideal or image, but how does that image come about? For the coming into being of the image, you as an individual are necessary. I have created the image of her but for that she has to be out there as an object. Something has to trigger it off. Q: You have taken away the object. K: I have not. P.J.: We are talking of degeneration. Anyone who has observed the mind in operation sees the validity of what Krishnaji says, that you may be physically a human being but you exist in terms of an image in my mind and my relation is to that image in my mind. K: Therefore, there is no interaction. Therefore, there is no `you' for the `I' to interact with. A.P.: I have a difficulty. Unless you accept the existence of the other individual, you are by implication devaluing or negating what arises as a challenge from the `other', which is as great a reality as my urges or responses. My urges and responses are no more valid than those of the other person. Q: You are taking away the object which sets something in motion, which is a reality. G.N.: The brain creates its own image which prevents real relationship. In fact, when the brain is relating to its own image, all the problems arise. A.P.: Is the movement arising from the image sui generis, or is the brain a response to a challenge from outside? I say it is a response to a challenge from outside. P.J.: The response is in the brain. K: The brain is the centre of all the sensory reactions. I see a woman and all the sensory responses awaken. Then the brain creates the image - the woman and the man sleeping, sex, all that business. The sensory response is stored in the brain. The brain then reacts as thought, through the senses, memory and all the rest of it. Then this sensation meets a woman and all the responses, the biological responses, take place. Then the image is created. The image then becomes all-important, not the woman. The woman may be necessary for my pleasure, etc., but there is no relationship with her except the physical. This is simple enough. A.P.: There is a certain fear lurking in my mind: Is this a process of refined self-centredness? K: It is. I am saying that. B.K.: Can we take one more step? Can there be a mental relationship? Images can be refined, modified, manipulated. So, can there be mental relationship? K: Of course, the brain is doing that all the time. P.J.: The real question then arises, what is the action or challenge or that which triggers the ending of this image-making machinery so that direct contact is possible? The trap we are caught in is, we see it is so but we continue in the same pattern. K: This is so. Why is the brain functioning so mechanically? P.J.: What is the challenge, what is the action which will break this mechanical functioning so that there is direct contact? R.B.: Contact with what? P.J.: Direct contact with `what is'. K: Let us get this clear. The brain has been accustomed to this sensory, imaginary, movement. What will break this chain? That is the basic question. J.U.: The implication is that everything that arises, arises out of the senses. Nothing arises out of outer challenges. K: I said there is no outer, there is only the brain responding to certain reactions, which is knowledge. S.: Are you saying that there is no outer and inner, but only the brain? K: Yes. J.U.: You have made a statement. I have listened to what you said. It is not part of my brain - that there is no outer challenge, that the image is born out of the image-making machinery of the brain itself, that the self projects the images of the other. All that you have said is not part of my brain. K: Why? J.U.: It is something new to me. B.K.: It is programmed differently. P.J.: The question is, what is your relationship to me or to Upadhyayaji or to Y? Are you not a challenge to me? K: What do you mean by `you'? P.J.: Krishnaji's statement or the way he has asked, or what he has been saying, to which I am listening, is it not a challenge to this very brain? K: It is. P.J.: If it is so, then there is a movement which is other than the movement of the brain. K: K makes a statement. It is a challenge to you only when you can respond to it. Otherwise it is not a challenge. P.J.: I don't understand that. A.P.: You see, someone walking on the road makes no impression on me; there is no record and, therefore, there is no response. There is a possibility of something happening and of my not responding in any way; and there is another, that he says something and immediately it evokes a reaction. K: Now, this is a challenge. How do you respond to challenge? As a Buddhist, as a Christian, as a Hindu, Muslim, or as a politician, etc? Either you respond at the same intensity as the challenge or you don't respond at all. To meet a challenge you and I must face each other, not bodily, but face each other. J.U.: If you are a challenge, then why are you denying there can be a challenge from the outer? K: That is entirely different. The outside challenge is a challenge which thought has created. The communist challenges the believer. The communist is a believer therefore, he is challenging another belief; so, it becomes a protection, a reaction against belief. That is not a challenge. The speaker has no belief. From that point he challenges, which is different from the challenge from the outside. P.J.: What is the challenge of the no-centre? K: If you challenge my reputation or question my belief, then I react to it because I am protecting myself and you are challenging from your image. It is a challenge between two images which thought has created. But if you challenge K, which is the challenge of absoluteness, that is entirely different. P.J.: We need to go back to where we started... S: My brain which is the image-making machinery responds to the other in the same way as the challenge created by a person like you. Does it not respond in the same way? P.J.: It is so. But the question is, how is this movement to end? K: How is this cycle of experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action - action again going back to knowledge, the circle in which you are caught - to end? P.J.: It is really asking, how is the stream of causation to end? This process you have shown - challenge, sensation, action - does the learning of that action return and get stored? K: Of course. Obviously. This is what we are doing. J.U.: Does that which goes out return, or does something new return? P.J.: It acts, and in between many causes have flowed into it. The whole thing comes back and is stored again. G.N.: We have been saying the programme works this way -experience, knowledge, memory, action. Action further strengthens experience and this is repeated. J.U.: In that process, what goes does not come back as it was, but something special is added to it. What is the special quality of what is added? RMP.: In the whole thinking process, according to Upadhyayaji, there is this fixed point, which is the inner and outer. If we can discuss this, then perhaps it will be easier to understand. G.N.: We are not denying the reality of the outer world, but there is nature, there are other human beings, there are things. Everything is real; war is real, nationality is real, the other person is real. But what we imply is: There is really no contact; only contact with our own image and this makes for no contact. P.J.: It implies that at no point is there real freedom because, caught in this, there can be no freedom. G.N.: This does not deny the existence of the outer world. Otherwise we go back to the me and society. A.P.: You are not denying the outer world as things, you are denying the reality of the outer world as persons. P.J.: No, you are denying the reality of the images that your mind has made of the outer world. J.U.: I have accepted this, that he who makes the images is responsible for this process. He has gone that far only through a process of causation. When he returns, he returns with new experience, desires and urges. What is this new factor; from where does it come? P.J.: How has this accumulation of knowledge taken place? That which was green has turned yellow as in a leaf, as in a fruit. K: Sir, all that I am saying is, knowledge as it exists now, psychological knowledge, is the corruption of the brain. We understand this process very well. You ask, how is that chain to be broken? I think the central issue is psychological knowledge which is corrupting the brain and, therefore, corrupting the world, corrupting the rivers, the skies, relationships, everything. How is this chain to be broken? Now, why do you ask that question? Why do you want to break this chain? This is a logical question. Has the breaking of the chain a cause, a motive? If it has, then you are back in the same chain. If it is causing me pain and, therefore, I want to be out of it, then I am back in the chain. If it is causing me pleasure, I will say, please leave me alone. So I must be very clear in myself. I cannot persuade you to be clear, but in myself I must have no direction or motive. Satyendra: It is a central question and people keep on asking, `How do I break the chain?' But the question I ask is, given the brain that I have, is it possible to end the chain? I am conscious of myself. Can I ask the question in this way - is it basically a way of looking at things? Is it a matter of reason, logic? K: No, it is not a matter of analysis, but of plain observation of what is going on. Sat: Without the mind forming an image? K: The brain is the centre of all sensory responses. The sensory response has created experience, thought and action, and the brain being caught in that which is partial, is never complete. Therefore, it is polluting everything it does. If you admit that once, not as theory but as a fact, then that circle is broken. P.J.: Practically every teaching which is concerned with the meditative processes has regarded the senses as an obstruction to the ending of this process. What role do you give to the senses in freeing the mind? R.B.: I think what you are saying is not correct. All of them have never regarded the senses as obstruction because when they said `senses' they included the mind. They never separated the mind from the senses. P.J.: After all, all austerities, all tapas, all yogic practices, were meant, as I have understood them, to see that the movement of the senses towards the object was destroyed. K: I don't know what the ancients have said. Kapila Vatsyayan: I think, at least in what is broadly called Hindu or ancient Indian thought, the senses are not to be denied. That is very crucial to the whole culture, and where it all began was with the Katha Upanishad, with sensory perception. The image they have is the chariot and horses. Yes, horses are primary; senses are primary and they are not to be destroyed. They are to be understood, controlled. They are the factors of the outer reality. They do not deny the outer. P.J.: I am asking, what is the role of the senses, K: The senses, as thought, create desire. Without the interference of thought they have very little importance. P.J.: Senses have no importance? K: Senses have their place. If I see a beautiful tree, it is beauty; the beauty of a tree is astonishing. Where does desire interfere with the senses? That is the whole point;not whether the senses are important or unimportant, but where desire begins. If one understands that, then why give such colossal importance to it? R.B.: It sounds as if you are contradicting yourself. K: No. R.B.: Sir, you have said, not just now but earlier, `if you can observe with all your senses'... Therefore, you cannot deny the importance of the senses. K: I did not deny the senses. I said if you respond to that tree, look at that tree with the sunlight on it after the rain, it is full of beauty, there is a total response, there is no `me', there is no thought, there is no centre which is responding. That is beauty, not the painting, not the poem, but the total response of all your senses to that. We don't so respond because thought creates an image from which a desire arises. There is no contradiction in what I have said. P.J.: If I may ask Upadhyayaji, how would the Vedantin regard the senses? J.U.: According to Vedanta, without the observer there can be no observation. P.J.: What about the Buddhist? S: There is seeing only when the seer is not. There is no difference between the seer and the seeing. K: The observer is the observed. Just look what is happening here. We stick to the Vedantist attitude, the Buddhist attitude; we do not move out of the field. I am not criticizing. Let us come back. This is the whole point: The brain is caught in this movement. And you are asking, how is the chain which is built by thought - thought being limited because it is born of knowledge, which is incomplete - to be broken? Knowledge has created this chain. Then you ask the question, how is the chain to break? Who is asking this question? S: The prisoner is asking. K: You are that. Who is asking the question? S: That which is itself incomplete is asking itself. K: Just look at it. The brain is caught in this. Is the brain asking the question, or is desire asking, `How am I to get out of it?' I don't ask that question. Do you see the difference? A.P.: That I understand. When you say, is the brain asking that question, or is desire asking it, I am bogged. P.J.: Don't we ask the question? K: There is only this chain. That is all. Don't ask the question. The moment you ask the question, you are trying to find an answer, you are not looking at the chain. You are that; you can't ask any question. I am coming to the next point which is, what happens when you do that? When you do that, there is no movement. The movement has created this, and when there is no movement, that ends. There is totally different dimension. So, I have to begin by not asking questions. But is the chain a fact to me? This chain is desire - desire in the sense of sensory responses. If all the senses respond, there is no desire. But only when the sensory responses are partial, then thought comes in and creates the image. From that image arises desire. Is this a fact, that this is the chain the brain works in? Whatever it does must operate in this? B.K.: How can one be more in touch with that observation? K: Look, I have physical pain; I immediately take a pill, go to a doctor and so on. That same movement is taken over by the psyche; the psyche says: `What am I do? Give me a pill, a way out.' The moment you want to get out, there is the problem. Physical pain I can deal with, but with psychological pain, can the brain say that it is so, I won't move from that? it is so. Then see what happens. Sceptical research, sceptical investigation is the true spiritual process. This is true religion. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 2 PART 2 2ND SEMINAR MADRAS 15TH JANUARY 1981 'IN LISTENING IS TRANSFORMATION' J.U.: In Varanasi, you have been speaking over the years. Two types of people have been listening to you. One group is committed to total revolution at all levels and the other to the status quo, that is to the whole stream of tradition as it flows. Both go away, after listening to you, satisfied. Both feel that they have received an answer to their queries. You say that when all thought, all self-centred activity, the movement of the mind as the `me' has ended totally, there is a state of benediction, endless joy, bliss, which is beauty, love, a state which has no frontiers. Now the man listening to you with the mind rooted in the status quo, takes a stand on what you have said regarding the eternal, goes back to the tradition of the great teachers who have also posited a state of eternal bliss, joy, beauty, love. He then posits that that alone is important. For him a transformation of society today is unnecessary. You can make a slight change here and there, but these changes are transient and of no importance. Neither a transformation in man nor in society is important. But you go on to say that when all thought, all self-centred activity, has ended, then there is a direct contact with the great river of sorrow, which is not the sorrow of individual man. From this will arise a karuna, compassion, beauty and love, which will demand transformation here and now. Only this will end the emphasis on eternal bliss which ultimately is an illusion. I do not feel that there is a place for the concept of eternal bliss, benediction, in your teaching. K: Just what is the question? P.J.: Today more and more people are hearing you and they see a contradiction - that the man who stands for the status quo and the one who stands for revolution, takes your teachings and amalgamates it into his. That contradiction needs clarification. What does your teaching stand for? K: Let us take it one by one. J.U.: I am a student. I am learning, and in this process of learning I see a contradiction when you posit a state which is beyond. K: Cut that out.. J.U.: I can't cut that out; it figures very much every time you speak. When you posit a state beyond, which is bliss, etc., that is the contradiction. Therefore, I say that the stream of sorrow and the compassion which arises upon direct contact with that stream is the only reality. K: I don't quite see the contradiction. I would like that contradiction explained to me. A.P.: What I feel is that Upadhyayaji goes with you up to the point that there is no such thing as personal sorrow because personal sorrow posits the personal sufferer. So, there is the substance of human existence as sorrow. Out of this perception, arises compassion which becomes love. He is bogged down when you say that the perception of sorrow is the birth of compassion. P.J.: No, no. He is seeing the contradiction in Krishnaji making any statement about the `otherness', because the mind picks on that. K: First of all, I don't quite see the contradiction, personally. I may be wrong, subject to correction. One thing is very clear, that there is this enormous river of sorrow. That is so. Can that sorrow be ended and, if it ends, what is the result on society? That is the real issue. Is that right? J.U.: There is this vast stream of sorrow. No one can posit when this sorrow will totally end. K: I am positing it. J.U.: There can be a movement for the ending of sorrow but no one can posit when that sorrow of mankind can end. A.P.: We know life as irreparably built on the fabric of sorrow. Sorrow is the very fabric of our existence, but you have said that the ending of sorrow can be attained. K: Yes, there is an ending to sorrow. A.P.: This is not a statement about the sorrow of man ending at a certain time and date; it has no future or past. It is a statement that this state can end this instant. K: I don't understand all this. P.J.: Sir, Upadhyayaji says there is a contradiction in your positing the `other', and he is asking why is there this contradiction? K: I don't think it is a contradiction. I think we all agree that humanity is in the stream of sorrow and that humanity is each one of us. Humanity is not separate from me; I am humanity, not representative of humanity. My brain, my psychological structure, is humanity. Therefore, there is no `me' - and a stream of sorrow. Let us be very clear on that point. P.J.: Are you saying that there is no stream of sorrow independent of the human? Upadhyayaji suggests that there is a stream of sorrow which is independent of sorrow as it operates in individual consciousness. K: No, no. The brain is born through time. That brain is not my brain. It is the brain of humanity in which the hereditary principle is involved, which is time. My consciousness is the consciousness of man; it is the consciousness of humanity because man suffers, he is proud, cruel, anxious, unkind, this is the common ground of man. There is no individual at all for me. The stream of sorrow is humanity; it is not something out there. G.N.: I see a child being beaten. That perception is the moment of pity. How do you say that when I see a person beating a child I am also that sorrow? K: Before we move to the specific, let us get the ground clear. The ground is, there is no individual suffering. Pleasure, fear, anxiety, vanity, cruelty, etc., all that is common to humanity. That is the psychological structure of man. Where does individuality come into this? G.N.: I am different from that suffering of the child. K: What are you trying to say? G.N.: I am saying that there is a stream of sorrow; there is violence. I see something out there. K: Outside yourself? Let us stick to that. It is outside me. Which is what? What are you? You are part of that stream. P.J.: The fact is that I see myself separate from that child, that man. The state of consciousness within me which leads to that perception is also the state of consciousness which in another situation acts in a violent way. G.N.: I see a certain action going on in front of me. The perception of the fact that a child is being beaten gives rise to another action. Therefore, there are two actions. K: We are not talking about actions. P.J.: The problem arises because we see ourselves as a fact, we see ourselves seeing the child being beaten, but we don't see the same consciousness in being rude to someone else. K: But humanity is part of that child, part of the act of beating that child. We are part of all this. J.U.: Krishnaji has said something which is of utmost importance. That is, there is no such thing as individual sorrow, that individual sorrow is the sorrow of mankind. Now, that should be investigated, understood, not as a theory but as an actuality. One sees the stream of sorrow, the stream of mankind, one sees that it has a direction, it has movement. K: That which is moving has no direction. The moment it has a direction, that direction creates time. J.U: A stream which is flowing may appear as a stream, but it is made up of individual drops, and when the energy of the sun falls on that stream, it draws up individual drops, not the whole stream. P.J.: You see what is implied in it? It is a very interesting question. Does it mean that when there is the ending of sorrow, does it arise in the individual drop or in the whole stream? Upadhyayaji says that when the light of the sun falls on the stream of water which is flowing, which is composed of individual drops, it draws up drop by drop. K: Take a river; it has a source. The Rhine, the Volga, the Ganga, all the rivers of the world have a source. The source is sorrow, not the drops of water. Has our sorrow a source, not the source of individual drops that make up the stream but is the very stream the source of our sorrow? To me, individuality does not exist. My body may be tall, dark, light, pink, whatever colour; it may have certain inherited genetic trappings. Basically, there is no such thing as an individual. If you accept that as a fact, you cannot then say that the source is made up of individual drops. B.K.: You said the source is sorrow. If we translate this into human terms, that really means human beings are born of sorrow, and are condemned also. K: No. I am not condemning. I am saying what is a fact. You cannot condemn a fact. P.J.: You say there is the stream of sorrow. I am questioning it. K: I want to start with a clean slate. I am not a Vedantist, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim. And I watch, I observe what is happening around me. I observe what is happening inside me. I observe that the `me' is that. P.J: I observe what? K: I observe what is going on. I observe how war is being fought, why it is being fought, I read about it, investigate it, think about it. Am I a Hindu against the Muslim? If I am, I produce war. I am going step by step. So I am the result of thought. P.J.: You have leaped. K: No. I am the result of experience, knowledge stored up in memory, that is, I am the result of thousands of generations. That is a fact. I have discovered that as a fact, not as a theory. Sat: When I say I know, that I have gone through the whole of mankind, who is saying it? K: Am I saying that as an idea or as a fact which is happening in me, in my brain cells? I am only concerned with I what is happening around me and in me. In me is what is happening out there. I am that. The worries, the anxieties, the misery, the confusion, the uncertainty, the desire for security, the psychological world which thought has built, is mankind. P.J.: Sir, if it were so simple; we would be floating in the air. How is sorrow important? The importance is in the movement of sorrow, the movement of violence, as it arises in me. How is it important whether that movement is part of mankind or part of my brain cells? K: I quite agree. You are concerned with sorrow; I am concerned. My brother dies and I shed tears. I watch my neighbour whose husband has gone; there are tears, loneliness, despair, misery, which I am also going through. So I recognise a common thread between that and my woe. P.J.: How is it important? K. It is important because when I see there is a common factor, there is immense strength. Have you understood that? I say that if you are only concerned with your individual sorrow, you are weak. You lose the tremendous energy that comes from the perception of the whole of sorrow. This sorrow of the individual is a fragmentary sorrow and, therefore that which is fragmentary has not the tremendous energy of the whole. A fragment is a fragment and whatever it does, it is still within a small radius and, therefore, trivial. If I suffer because my brother is dead and I grow more and more involved, shed more and more tears, I get more and more depleted, I lose contact with the fact that I am part of this enormous stream. P.J.: When my brother is dead and I observe my mind, I see the movement of sorrow; but of that stream of human sorrow, I know nothing. K: Then stop there. We are not talking of the stream of sorrow. My brother dies and I am in sorrow, I see this happening to my neighbour on the left and on the right. I see this happening right through the world. They are going through the same agony, though not at the moment I go through it. So, I discover something, that it is not only me that suffers but mankind. What is the difficulty? P.J.: I don't weep at the world's sorrow. K: Because I am so concerned with myself, my life; my relationship with another is myself. So I have reduced all this life to a little corner, which I call myself. And my neighbour does the same; everybody is doing the same. That is a fact. Then I discover that this sorrow is a stream. It is a stream that has been going on for generations. J.U.: The particular and the stream, are they one? K: There is no particular. J.U.: The particular is experienceable, is manifest, but even when we say we see the stream, we see it as particulars put together. As long as the self is, the particular will have to be. K: I understand that. I keep to this fact: My brother dies; I shed tears; I am desperate. It is a fact. It is not a theory, and I see my neighbour going through the same thing as I am. So, what happens? Either I remain caught in my little sorrow or I perceive this enormous sorrow of man. J.U.: Even when I see this in a man who is a thousand miles away, I see it as separate. P.J.: What is the factor, the instrument, which enables one to see directly? K: See what has happened to my mind, my brain. My brain has been concerned with the loss of the brother. The visual eye sees this enormous suffering in my neighbour here or a thousand miles away. How does it see it? How does it see the fact that my neighbour is me, who is going through hell? The neighbour all over the world is my neighbour. This is not a theory; I recognise it, see it. I walk down the streets; there is a man crying because he has lost his son. I see it as a fact, not a theory. J.U.: When Krishnaji talks of a thousand miles away, seeing people dying and the sense of sorrow which he sees as sorrow, it is not individual. He can do it because he has negated the self totally; K has negated time totally. There is no movement which is fragmentary in him. When my brother dies, I can't see with the same eyes. K is standing on the bank of the river and watching and I am floating in the river. K: What has happened? Go through the actuality of it. My brother dies and I am shocked. It takes a week or two to get over it. When that shock is over, I am observing. I see this thing going on around me. It is a fact. P.J.: You still have to tell me with what eyes I must see. Mary Zimbalist: The stream of sorrow is so intense that in it there is not the fact of being particular. There is pain and sorrow; it is so strong, and one is part of the universality, not the individual or whatever it is that is causing sorrow. One can perceive in some extraordinary way, transforming it. One can at that moment see the enormity of it because it is enormous, and not enclose ourselves. K: Am I so enclosed that I don't see anything except me and something outside of me? That is the first thing to be established. I want to go back to this point - sorrow of my brother dying - there is only sorrow. I don't see it as a stream of sorrow; there is this thing burning in me, I see this happening right and left and it is happening to all human beings. I see that too, theoretically. Why can't I see it as a fact, as me suffering and, therefore, the world suffering? Why don't we see it? That is the point we have come to. P.J.: I don't see it, the sorrow of another. That passion, that intensity which is born in me when there is sorrow arising in me, does not arise when I see the sorrow of another. K: All right. When you suffer, you close your ears and eyes to everything else. Actually, when my brother dies, everything is shut out and that is the whole point. If the brain says, `Yes, I won't move from that, I won't seek comfort,' there is no movement. Can I hold it, perceive it? What happens to the mind? That is my point. If you remain with sorrow, you have denied everything. J.U.: That is so only for Krishnaji. K: Panditji, throw K away. This is a fact. We never remain with anything completely. If the brain remains completely with fear, everything is gone. But we don't, we are always searching, moving, asking, questioning. Sir, my brother dies, I shed tears, do all kinds of things, and suddenly realize that there is no answer in reincarnation, going to the gods, doing this, doing that, nothing remains except the one thing. What happens then to the brain that has been chattering, making noises about sorrow, chasing its own tail? B.K.: There is always some other interference. K: There is no interference when you observe something totally; to observe totally is not to allow thought to interfere with what is being perceived totally. J.U.: Sorry for going back to my original question. You have said when all duality has ended, when sorrow has ended, happiness will be there. K: When sorrow has completely ended, then there is compassion. J.U.: The perception that human existence is sorrow gives rise to compassion. K: No. J.U.: The perception of the fact that human existence is sorrow is the ending of sorrow, and without the ending of sorrow, there is no compassion. That is your position. K: I will make my position very clear. There is only the stream of mankind. A.P.: The perception of the stream is not compassion; the ending of sorrow is that perception. J.U.: Is there bliss after ending sorrow? Will everyone be happy? K: No. I never said that. I said the ending of sorrow is the beginning of compassion, not bliss. S.P.: He is objecting to your talking about the `other'. K: All right. I won't talk about the `other'. It is irrelevant, I agree. P.J.: You must take the question as Upadhyayaji stated it in the beginning. He said people come to hear your talks, and at the end of the talk you say, `Then there is benediction, then there is a state of timelessness.' He says that makes them go away thinking that that is the final state. K: To them `that' is a theory which they have accepted. A.P.: Sir, I will go a step further. I can say that Upadhyayaji has listened to the fact that the substance of human existence is sorrow and the perception of this is compassion. This is also a theory and he seeks corroboration of this when you say this, and that also gives him satisfaction. I say this satisfaction and that satisfaction are on the same level. K: I quite agree. I would like to ask something: Are we discussing this as a theory, as something to be learnt, studied, informed about, or is it a fact in our lives? At what level are we discussing all this? If we are not clear on this, we will mess it up. The speaker says sorrow is an endless thing that man has lived with, whether it is his neighbour or a child being beaten and so on. And can it end? You come along and tell me it can end. I either treat it as a theory or I say, `Show me the way, show me how to end it, the manner in which it can end.' That's all I am interested in. We never come to that point. He says to me I will show it to you. Am I willing to listen to him completely? I am willing to listen to him because I want to end this thing. So he says to me, `Sorrow is the stream, remain with the stream. Don't be in it, don't be of it, under it or over it, but remain with it without any movement because any movement is the cause of sorrow.' I don't know if you see that. So he says, `Remain with it. Don't intellectualize, don't get emotional, don't get theoretical, don't seek comfort, just remain with the thing.' That is very difficult and, therefore, we play around with it. And he also tells us that if you go beyond this, there is some beauty that is out of this world. I listen to the `out of this world' and create a contradiction. Do you follow? Sir, I still insist it exists; it is not a contradiction. I don't know why you say it is a contradiction. If you found something astonishingly original which is not in books, not in the Vedas, if you discovered something of an enormous nature, would you not talk about that, knowing that man will do exactly what he has done before - catch on to that and neglect this? He would do it, sir, because it is a part of the whole thing; it is not there and here. It is part of the tree. The tree is the hidden roots, and if you look at the beauty of the roots, you talk about them. It is not that you are escaping, not that you are contradicting, but you say the tree is the root, the trunk, the leaf, the flower, the beauty of the whole thing. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 2 PART 3 3RD SEMINAR MADRAS 16TH JANUARY 1981 'IN LISTENING IS TRANSFORMATION' P.J.: Rimpocheji has asked a question: In listening to you over the years, one feels that the door is about to open but it does not. Is there something inhibiting us? A.P.: We live in time. Do we find that the door to perception is closed because perception is not? P.J.: Many of us have had this feeling that we are at the threshold. B.K.: It is true for all of us, but part of the problem also - and perhaps it is implied in the question - is that we are afraid to open the door because of what we might find behind it. P,J.: I did not say that. A.P.: What you say would imply that there is somebody who opens the door. It is not like that. K: What is it that prevents one, after exercising a great deal of intelligence, reason, rational thinking and watching one's daily life; what is it that blocks us all? That is the question, isn't it? P.J.: I would go beyond that. I would say there has been diligence, seriousness, and we have discussed this over the years. K: But yet something does not click. It is the same thing. I am an average man, fairly well educated, with the capacity to express myself, to think intellectually, rationally and so on; there is something totally missing in all this and I can't go any further - is that the question? Further, do I perceive that my whole life is so terribly limited? P.J.: I say we have done what has to be done. We have taken the decisions. K: All right. What is it that a man or a woman can do who has studied K, talked all these years but finds himself up against a wall? P.J.: I am neither here nor there; I am in-between. I am in the middle of the stream. You can't say you are there nor can you say that you have not started. You must take this into account, sir, even though you say there is no gradual approach. K: Then what is the question? P.J.: It is as if something is at the point of opening, but it does not open. K: Are you like the bud which has moved through the earth; the sun has shone on it but the bud never opens to become a flower? Let us talk about it. G.N.: Biological time propels action because of the innate energy in it. You say, in the same way psychological time also propels a certain kind of action. Is psychological time a deposit like biological time? K: You are mixing up the two questions. Pupulji says this: I have done most things, I have read. I have listened to K, I have come to a certain point where I am not entirely with the world nor with the other. I am caught in between. I am half way and I don't seem to be able to move any further. B.K.: I think the answer has been suggested by you for several years and that is the intellectual answer we give. P.J.: I am not prepared to accept that. When I put K this question, all this I have seen and gone through. B.K.: The rational part of the mind is repressed. P.J.: No, it is not so. I have observed time. I have gone into the process of time - psychological time. I have seen its movement. Some of the things K says seem so to me. I can't say that they are totally unknown to me. But there seems to be a point at which some leap is necessary. K: In Christian terminology, you are waiting for grace to descend on you. P.J.: Perhaps. K: Or are you looking for some outside agency to break this? Do you ever come to the point where your brain is no longer saying, `I am seeking, searching, asking,' but is absolutely in a state of not-knowing? Do you understand what I am saying? When the brain realizes, `I don't know a thing' except the technological - do you ever come to that point? P.J.: I do not say that, but I do know a state in which the brain ceases to function. It is not that it says, `I don't know,' but all movement ends. K: You are missing my point. P.J.: I am not. K: I am afraid I am not making myself clear. A state of not-knowing - I think that is one of the first things that is demanded. We are always arguing, searching; we never come to the point of utter emptiness, of not-knowing. Do we ever come to that, so that the brain is really at a standstill? The brain is always active, searching, asking, arguing, occupied. I am asking, is there a state of the brain when it is not occupied with itself? Is that the blockage? M.Z.: in emptiness, there is a tremendous openness where nothing is being stored, where there isn't any movement, where the state of openness of the brain is at its greatest. K: I would not introduce all these words for the moment. I am just asking, is there a moment when the brain is totally unoccupied? S.P.: What do you mean by `totally unoccupied'? B.K.: It does not think at that moment. It is blank. K.: See the danger, because you are all translating what I have said. J.U.: All action is bound within a time-space framework. Are you trying to bring us to the point where we see that all action as we know it is bound by time and space, is illusion, and so has to be negated? K: Yes. It is negated. Is that a theory or an actuality? J.U.: Are you speaking of that state which lies between two actions? K: Shall we begin by enquiring into action? What is action? J.U.: In reality, there is no action. K: You are all theorizing. I want to know what action is, not according to some theory but the action itself, the doing. J.U.: Action is the movement of thought from one point in space to another or one moment of time to another... K: I am not talking about thought moving from one point to another point, but of action, of the doing. P.J.: What is the fundamental question? K: I am trying to ask the fundamental question which you raised at the beginning: What is keeping us not flowering? I am using the word, however, with its beauty, its perfume, delight. Is it basically thought? I am enquiring. Is it time, or is it action, or have I not really, deeply, read the book which is myself? I have read certain pages of the chapter but I have not totally finished with the book. P.J.: At this point, I say I have read the book. There is no saying I have read the book completely because every day, every minute, a chapter is being added. K: No, no. Here we are - at last. I am asking a question: Have you ever read the book, not according to Vedanta or Buddhism or Islam, or according to modern psychologists, but read the book? P.J.: Can one ever ask: Has one read the whole book of life? K: You will find, if you have read the book at all, that there is nothing to read. J.U.: You have been saying that if there is perception of the instant in its totality, then the whole instant is. K: But that is just a theory. I am not criticizing, sir. Pupulji said I have listened to K. I have also met various gurus, I have meditated. At the end of it, there is just ashes in my hand, in my mouth. P.J.: I won't say there are ashes in my hand. K: Why? P.J.: Because I don't see them as ashes. M.L.: We have come to a certain point. We have explored. K: Yes, I admit it. You have come to a certain point and you are stuck there. Is that it? P.J.: I have come to a certain point and I do not know what to do, where to go, how to turn. R.B.: You mean that the breakthrough does not come? K: Why don't you be simple? I have reached a point and that point is all that we have said, and from there I will start. P.J.: You must understand one thing. There is a difference, Krishnaji - to take a journey and then say we are in despair. I do not say that. K: You are not in despair? P.J.: No. I am also awake enough to see that having travelled, the flower has not blossomed. K: So you are asking, why does the flower not blossom, the bud open up - put it any way. A.P.: Just to take it out of the personal context - when you speak to us there is something within us which responds and says this is the true, right note, but we are not able to catch it. P.J.: I have wept in my time. I have had despair in my time. I have seen darkness in my time. But I have also had the resources to move out and, having moved out of this, I have come to a point when I say, `Tell me, I have done all this. What next?' K: I come to you and ask you this question, `With all that you have said just now, what would be your answer? Instead of asking me, what would you tell me? How would you answer?, P.J.: The answer is tapas. A.P.: Tapas means that you have to keep on, which involves time. P.J.: It means, burn the impurities which are clouding your sight. K: You understand the question? `Thought is impure' - can we go into this? R.B.: This is very interesting: Thought is impure - but there is no impurity. K: When you admit thought is impure, impure in the sense that it is not whole... R.B.: Yes, that is what corrupts. K: No. Thought is not whole. It is fragmented, therefore, it is corrupt, therefore it is impure or whatever word you would like to use. That which is whole is beyond the impure and pure, shame and fear. When Pupulji says, burn impurity, do please listen that way. Why is the brain incapable of perception of the whole and from that wholeness, of acting? Is the root of it - the block, the inhibition, the not flowering - the thought that is incapable of perceiving the whole? Thought is going round and round in circles. And I am asking myself, suppose I am in that position, I recognise, I see, I observe that my actions are incomplete and, therefore, thought can never be complete. And, therefore, whatever thought does is impure, corrupt, not beautiful. So, why is the brain incapable of perceiving the whole? If you can answer that question, perhaps you will be able to answer the other question. RMP.: You have correctly interpreted our question. K: So, could we move from there, or is it not possible to move from there? That is, we have exercised thought all our life. Thought has become the most important thing in our life, and I feel that is the very reason there is corruption. Is that the block, the factor, that prevents this marvellous flowering of the human being? If that is the factor, then is there the possibility of a perception which has nothing to do with time, with thought? Have you understood what I am saying? I realize, not only intellectually but actually, that thought is the source of all ugliness, immorality, a sense of degeneration. Do I actually see that, feel it in my blood? If I do, my next question is: Since thought is fragmented, broken up, limited, is there a perception which is whole? Is that the block? J.U.: My mind has been trained in the discipline of sequence. So, there is no possibility of saying, can this be? Either it is so or it is not. K: I have been trained in the sequence of thought - thought which is logic. And my brain is conditioned to cause-effect. J.U.: I agree that thought is not complete. K: The moment you agree that thought is incomplete, whatever thought does is incomplete. Whatever thought does must create sorrow, mischief, agony, conflict. A.P.: Thought will only take you up to a point. It will only move to a degree. J.U.: We have certain other instruments, certain processes, but you seem to dispense with them. You dissolve whatever we have acquired. Supposing we have a disease, you cannot heal it, no outside agency can do that. We ourselves have to be free of the disease. So, we have to discover an instrument which can open the door from disease to good health. That door is only thought which, in one instant, breaks the grip of the false, and in the very breaking, another illusion or the unreal comes into being. Thought again breaks that, and in this fashion, is negating the false again and again. There is a process of the dissolution of thought and thought itself accepts this and goes on negating. Thus the nature of thought itself is to perceive that it can dissolve itself. The whole process of thought is discrimination. It leaves a thing the moment it discovers that it is the false. But that which perceived it as false is also thought. K: Of course. J.U.: Therefore, the process of perception is still riding the instrumentality of thought. K: You are saying perception is still thought. We are saying something different - that there is a perception which is not of time, not of thought. RMP.: We want to know your position more clearly. Please elaborate. K: First of all, we know the ordinary perception of thought: discriminating, balancing, constructing and destroying, moving in all the human activities of choice, freedom, obedience, authority, and all that. That is the movement of thought which perceives. We are asking - not stating - is there a perception which is not thought? P.J.: I often wonder what is the value of a question like that. You see, you pose a question; you say no answer is possible. K: No. P.J.: Is an answer possible? K: Yes. We know the nature of thought. Thought discerns, distinguishes, chooses; thought creates the structure. There is a movement of thought in perception to distinguish between the right and the wrong, the false and the true, hate and good. We know that and, as we said, that is time-binding. Now, do we remain there, which means, do we remain in perpetual conflict? So, you ask, is there an enquiry which will lead us to a state of non-conflict? Which is what? Is there a perceiving which is not born of knowledge, knowledge being experience, memory, thought, action? I am asking, is there an action which is not based on remembrance, remembrance being the past? Is there a perception which is totally denuded of the past? Would you enquire with me that way? I know this, and I realize that this implies everlasting conflict. A.P.: This process of thinking in the field of cause and effect has no way of escaping out of the chain reaction. It is only a bondage. Therefore, observing this, we let go of it here and now. Next we ask the question, is there a perception which does not touch the past, does not get involved in the past, the past being all that we have done and been concerned with? K: It is a rational question to ask whether this can end; not an illogical question. A.P.: Because we have learnt by experience that thinking through the medium of cause and effect cannot free us from the wheel of sorrow. J.U.: Whatever instrument we had, you have broken that. Before an ailment afflicts us, you have removed it, which means, before a disease grips you, it is removed. The sick man will continue to live. Therefore, when he wants to be free from disease, it is necessary to point out to him some process by which he achieves this. Even after renouncing the chain of cause-effect, he needs to be shown its futility. I accept it is difficult to do this. A.P.: No. What you are saying amounts to an assertion that we cannot let go the wheel of time. J.U.: No, this is not what I am saying. Cause and effect is a movement in time, and if you say that at the end of this a `process' still remains, it must be a form of mental activity. Whatever that be, the question is: Can the patient be allowed to die before the ailment is cured? I accept the fact that the cause and effect chain is incomplete. I also understand that till we can break that, this dilemma cannot be broken; but the question is very simple, that the patient has to be restored to health and not be allowed to die. The disease will have to be cured without killing the patient. K: If you say life is conflict, then you remain where you are. P.J.: The metaphor Upadhyayaji uses is, he understands the whole movement of conflict in time and sees the inadequacy of it. But the ill man, the suffering man who wants to be cured, cannot kill himself before he is cured. What you are asking is for him to kill himself. K: You are making a case which is untenable. P.J.: He may put it in a different way. Don't also forget that conflict is the `I'. Ultimately society and all can go down the drain. Ultimately it is `I'. All experience, all search, centres round that which is thought, caught in time as conflict. K: So `I' is conflict. P.J.: I see it is so in an abstract way. K: No, not in an abstract way. It is so. P.J.: Maybe this is the ultimate thing which is stopping us... K: Let us be very simple. I recognise conflict is my life. Conflict is `me'. A.P.: After accepting the futility of cause and effect, What remains is an identification with a certain habit reflex. Does that identification break or not? If it does not break, then our dialogue is only at the theoretical level. K: Don't introduce more words. When you say conflict ends, the `me' ends, there is the block. P.J.: I know conflict. K: You don't know it. You can't know it. P.J.: How can you say that? K: That is just a theory. Do you actually realize that you are conflict? Do I realize in my blood, in my heart, in the depth of `me', `I am conflict', or is it just an idea which I am trying to fit into? J.U.: If you accept that the chain of causality includes the impact of time, space and circumstance, we must recognise that this is a major problem. This is like a wheel, and any movement of this wheel is not going to dissolve the problem. We accept this by logic and experience. What I was seeking to explain by the simile is that a process must remain which is within the wheel of sorrow. If the disease is not, and the wheel of sorrow is not, still some life principle must be left. A.P.: Process is continuity. J.U.: Then, what is it? Is it immutable? A.P.: When perception and action are not related to the past, then there is a cessation of continuity. K: I only know my life is a series of conflicts till I die. Can man admit this? This is our life, and you come along and say to me, must you go on doing this? Find out if there is a different way of looking, acting, which does not contain this. That is the continuity, that is all I am saying. Next, I am a reasonable man, thinking man, and I say, must I go on this way. You come along and tell me that there is a different way which is not this and he says I will show it to you. J.U.: I accept that this circle of continuity in which I am moving is not taking us anywhere. I come with you up to there. Where it is a matter of experience, I clear my position with the help of an example. But you cut the ground under that example by saying that I must discard the continuity. If continuity is cut, the question itself disappears. So how can I accept the proposition that I renounce continuity altogether? A.P.: Therefore you must let go of examples or similes. Let go of all anchorages of the past. J.U.: If I give up the simile, it does not bring a termination; unless there is an ending, how can there be a new beginning? K: Who is saying that? A.P.: You have said that this is time; you say negate time. R.B.: What Upadhyayaji is saying is this: Life is conflict, time, thought. He accepts they have to go. K: I am not asking anything to go. J.U.: If that goes, then what is the connection between that and what is to be? K: I am not talking about any connection. I am a man who is suffering, in conflict, in despair, and I say I have been with this for sixty years. Please show me a different way of living. Would you accept that very simple fact? If you accept it, then the next question is, is there a way of looking or observing life without bringing in all the past, acting without the operation of thought which is remembrance? I am going to find out. What is perception? I have perceived life as conflict; that is all I know. He comes along and tells me, let us find out what is true perception. I don't know it, but I am listening to what he says. This is important. I have not brought into listening my logical mind; I am listening to him. Is that happening now? The speaker is saying that there is a perception without remembrance. Are you listening to it or are you saying there is a contradiction, which is, you are not listening at all. I hope you have got it. I say, Achyutji, there is a way of living without conflict. Will he listen to me? Listen, and not translate it immediately into a reaction - are you doing that? A.P.: When a question is asked, when you are faced with a challenge, there must be listening without any reaction. Only in such a state can there be no relationship whatsoever with that which is the past. K: Therefore there is no reaction, which means what? You are already seeing. You get it? J.U.: I have not understood the state. For instance, at the same moment if one observes with attention all illusions, then in the light of that attention the whole process of illusion is dispelled. And that same moment of attention is the moment of true observation. Is that so? That means one observes `what is' as is. P.J.: Krishnaji is asking us whether you can listen without the past, without bringing in the projections of the past. Only then, in such listening, is there perception. J.U.: That is why I was saying that if the moment which is loaded with illusion can be seen with full attention, then it becomes the true moment of perception because the illusion is seen for what it is. To give an example: I see a coin on which there is the seal of the Ashoka chakra. The other side of the coin is different, but they are two sides of the same coin. Is the seeing, the perception which was caught in the past, the same seeing? K: No. Now sir, you are a great Buddhist scholar. You what the Buddha has said, all the intricacies of Buddhist analysis, exploration, the extraordinary structures. Now, if the Buddha came to you and said, `Listen,' would you listen to him? Please don't laugh; this is much too serious. Sir, answer my question: If the Buddha comes to you today, now, sitting there in front of you, and says, `Please sir, listen,' would you listen? And he says to you, `If you listen to me, that is your transformation.' Just listen. That listening is the listening to the truth. You can't argue with the Buddha. J.U.: This pure attention is the Buddha and this attention is action, which itself is the Buddha. That is why I gave you the instance of the coin, which has one seal on one side whereas the other side has another seal. K: Would you listen? If the Buddha talked to me, I would say, `Sir, I listen to you because I love you. I don't want to get anywhere because I see what you say is true, and I love you.' That is all. That has transformed everything. A.P.: When I am aware that this is the word of the Buddha, it is the truth. This truth wipes out every other impression. K: Nobody listened to him; that is why there is Buddhism. J.U.: There is no Buddha; there is no speaking of the Buddha. There is only listening and in the right listening the quintessence of that wisdom which transforms is there. The word Buddha or the word of the Buddha is not the truth. Buddha is not the truth. This attention itself is the Buddha. The Buddha is not a person; he is not an avatara and there is no such thing as the word of Buddha. Attention is the only reality. In this attention, there is pure perception. This is prajna, intelligence; this is knowledge. That moment which was surrounded by the past, that moment itself, under the beam of attention, becomes the moment of perception. K: Now, just listen to me. There is conflict. A man like me comes along. He says, there is a way of living without knowledge. Don't argue. Just listen - listen without knowledge, which means without the operation of thought. A.P.: That moment of attention is totally unrelated to the thought process, from causality. K: I know my life is conflict. And I am saying, is there a way of looking, listening, seeing, which has no relationship to knowledge. I say there is. And the next question is, as the brain is full of knowledge, how can such a brain understand this statement? I say that the brain cannot answer this question. The brain is used to conflict, habituated to it, and you are putting a new question to it. So the brain is in revolt; it cannot answer it. J.U.: I want to know this. The question that you have put is my question. You have posed it with clarity. K: The speaker says, don't be in revolt,. listen. Try to listen without the movement of thought, which means, can you see something without naming. The naming is the movement of thought. Then find out what is the state of the brain when it has not used the word in seeing, the word which is the movement of thought. Do it. R.M.P.: That is very important. A.P.: Your perception is that. J.U.: This is right. P.J.: The truth is to see the brain's incapacity. K: My whole life has changed. Therefore there is a totally different learning process going on, which is creation. P.J.: If this is itself the learning process, this is creativity. K.: I realize my life is wrong. Nobody has to point that out; it is so. That is a fact and you come along and tell me that you can do something instantly. I don't believe you. I feel it can never happen. You come and tell me this whole struggle, this monstrous way of living, can be ended immediately. My brain says, sorry, you are cuckoo, I don't believe you. But K says, look, I will show it to you step by step. You may be god, you may be the Buddha, but I don't believe you. And K tells you, listen, take time, in the sense, have patience. Patience is not time. Impatience is time. Patience has no time. S.P.: What is patience which is not time? K: I said life is conflict. I come along and tell you there is an ending to conflict and the brain resists. I say let it resist, but keep on listening to me, don't bring in more and more resistance. Just listen, move. Don't remain with resistance. To watch your resistance and keep moving - that is patience. To know the resistance and to move along, that is patience. So he says, don't react but listen to the fact that your brain is a network of words and you cannot see anything new if you are all the time using words, words, words. So, can you look at something, your wife, the tree, the sky, the cloud, without a single word? Don't say it is a cloud. Just look. When you so look, what has happened to the brain? A.P.: Our understanding, our total comprehension, is verbal. When I see this, then I put aside the word. That which I see now is non-verbal. What then happens to the accumulated knowledge? K: What actually happens, not theoretically, when you are looking without the word? The word is the symbol, the memory, the knowledge and all that. A.P.: This is only a perception. When I am observing something, keeping aside verbal knowledge and watching that which is non-verbal, what reaction does the mind have? It feels its whole existence is threatened. K: Watch it in yourself. What happens? It is in a state of shock, it is staggering. So have patience. Watch it staggering, that is patience. See the brain in a staggering state and be with it. As you are watching it, the brain quietens down. Then look with that quiet brain at things, observe. That is learning. A.P.: Upadhyayaji, K is saying that when you observe the instability of the mind, when you see that is its nature, then that state disappears. K: Has it happened? The bond is broken. The chain is broken. That is the test. So, sir, let us proceed. There is a listening, there is a seeing and there is learning, without knowledge. Then what happens? What is learning? Is there anything to learn at all? Which means you have wiped away the whole self. I wonder if you see this. Because the self is knowledge. The self is made up of experience, knowledge, thought, memory; memory, thought, action - that is the cycle. Now has this happened? If it has not happened, let us begin again. That is patience. That patience has no time. Impatience has time. J.U.: What will come out of this observing, listening? Does this state go on, or will something come out of it which will transform the world? K: The world is me, the world is the self, the world is different selves. That self is me. Now what happens when this takes place, actually, not theoretically? First of all, there is tremendous energy, boundless energy, not energy created by thought, the energy that is born out of this knowledge; there is a totally different kind of energy, which then acts. That energy is compassion, love. Then that love and compassion are intelligence and that intelligence acts. A.P.: That action has no root in the `I'. K: No, no. His question is, if this really takes place, what is the next step? What happens? What actually happens is, he has got this energy which is compassion and love and intelligence. That intelligence acts in life. When the self is not, the `other' is. The `other' is compassion, love and this enormous, boundless energy. That intelligence acts. And that intelligence is naturally not yours or mine. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 3 PART 1 SEMINAR NEW DELHI 4TH NOVEMBER 1981 'THE FUTURE OF MAN' Achyut Patwardhan: Sir, there is a general feeling of a deepening crisis. This feeling is due to various factors in the environment -the arms race, pollution, economic problems, underlying all this is a deep feeling of moral decline; in a country like India, this feeling is quite overpowering. It would be valuable to understand the relationship between this inner moral crisis and its outer manifestations which threaten the survival of man. The problem is: Can we discover for ourselves the relationship of the crisis within man and the crisis outside? Romesh Thapar: Sir, I would just like to add a word to what Achyutji has said. I, as a person who has been analysing problems, presenting a perspective within a time-span of about twenty-five to thirty years, look at the world and see it shrinking. When I look at the problem in my country, I see that I have to texture by the year 2000 A.D. a society for a thousand million people. I know that the texturing of that society cannot be done in the way in which other societies have been textured. If I want to be honest to my people, the texturing has got to be a special kind; the civilizational underpinning has to be of a special kind. But with the world shrinking and with communications playing the role that they do, value systems towards which I grope are constantly under attack and may even be destroying those modernizing elements that exist within society. Now I ask myself; Is it possible to work out some system of thought which will protect me from this horrendous scenario? For, if I am unable to retexture my society on just principles, and in isolation from what corruption is taking place elsewhere, I will establish a society which is very brutal and unjust. T.N. Madan: I would like to seek a clarification regarding the first question which was raised. I do not know of any age, time, culture or country when people have not felt there was a moral crisis. The question, therefore, seems to be that one should first define what is the nature of our moral crisis; otherwise, we come much too close to our immediate problems and immediate surroundings and think that ours is the worst of times, that the best of times were in the past; or we think in terms of utopias. So, in the first place, could we define the nature of the moral crisis? And a clue to that might lie in what Mr. Thapar was saying. We adhere to the values we think were good, but perhaps those values no longer exist because the world has shrunk. The values of the village community will not serve the world community. We seem to be caught in a split - a split represented by changes which are being forced upon us, and value systems which we have inherited and which we naturally think are precious. How do we resolve this dilemma between a shrinking world which we have to accept and the world of values which we do not want to leave, do not want to get away from? Rajni Kothari: Sir I would say that a feeling of moral crisis has from time to time arisen essentially when institutions are breaking down. There are many views about the present crisis. One is that we are going through a period of such rapid transformation that this crisis is bound to occur; we will have, as a result, to restructure all this at some point. I don't clearly see the outlines of an alternative system, a new way of restructuring human activity or the human intellect, and as there is nothing taking the place of what is crumbling, this sense of a moral crisis has come in. Ashish Nandy: Frankly, I do not see any real moral crisis. But there is a moral crisis in people like us, and this has been manifest for many years. I am a great votary of the common man, and I don't think he suffers from a moral crisis; he suffers from a crisis of survival. Q: One of the most significant facts is that today we have some technological tools which will make a big impact on the future of man. I happen to be a computer scientist and I am aware of some of the very important things that are taking place in the computer business. And what I would very much like to learn from this seminar is how to quantify and think about these value systems so that machines that are going to come about in the future, electronic computers which will have the ability to think and learn, will be able to make the right kind of choices. Sudhir Kakkar: I question the feeling of moral crisis, also the pessimism expressed by previous speakers. P.J.: I wonder why we are using the word `moral'. Is the crisis facing the human being of the same nature as the crises in the past? Or, because of a special set of circumstances, due to the pressures generated by the action of human beings - genetic engineering, computer engineering and the limitless possibilities of the computer taking over the functions of the human mind - is the crisis of a totally different order? It is not only a moral crisis; we have had moral crises in the past, but the crisis which strikes at the roots of the human mind is of a very different order. I think it is time we brought into this aspect, that the crisis that man faces today is the crisis of survival. With the growth of modern genetics and computer technology, methods will be forthcoming which will take over the functions of the human mind; the distinct possibility of the human mind itself atrophying is something which we can no longer disregard. If this is so, then shouldn't we start thinking of the crisis we face today? A few years later it may be beyond consideration. If there is a threat to the very root of the human mind, to the survival of what is called human, then what is the action of man? Is there such a threat? Is it possible to meet it? If it is possible to meet it, with what tools, what instruments of our own being, do we meet it? A.P.: May I explain the point I raised? Consider Sakharov, the scientist, who, under pressure of circumstances, was responsible for inventing the hydrogen bomb but, later, finding that he was responsible for a colossal threat to human survival, sought ways to meet the crisis. This may be dramatic in the case of scientists. But the crisis exists as much for the farmer in the village as for the ordinary citizen in the town. There is a challenge to his integrity, created by the pressure of the environment. J.U.: There is a political, scientific, social and also a moral crisis. What is the resolution of this crisis? Is it faith? Jai Shankar: We have all talked about a moral crisis. The question is: Does it exist for all people? I don't think a moral crisis exists, for instance, for makers of computers, or for the makers of armaments and those who buy them, or for the people who wield political power at all cost. And at the other end of the spectrum, as Dr. Nandy said, the poor don't face any moral crisis; they face a crisis of survival. So what is the crisis we are talking about? The crisis is really not a moral crisis per se, but the result of dissociating morality from knowledge. K.V.: Apropos of all that has been said, does fear play a part in this amoral knowledge ? P.J.: I don't think anyone will question the premise that a tool is neither moral or immoral. It is only the application of the tool which is moral or immoral. Nobody can stop tools being made; but their application, the way they are used, can be controlled. R.K.: I think Mr. Jai Shankar was referring to an integral part of the nature of modern science, whose motive, dynamic force, is manipulation, conquest of nature, the re-ordering of society; and it is not that there is no moral perspective behind modern science. There is a moral perspective which has led today to our becoming aware of the manipulative kind of knowledge which turns out to be amoral. I think Achyutji has already pointed this out in the case of Sakharov: it is also true of Einstein. After what they invented, they felt sorry for what had happened as a consequence. I think Jai Shankar is talking of something inherent in the nature of modern knowledge, which tends to make science and technology amoral. J.S.: When does the tool cease to be a tool and become the master? That is the question. You presume that at all times tools can be controlled. I think that there could be tools that could overtake you; in fact, tools have already overtaken you; they control you, and there is very little freedom that is left to you. O. V. Vijayan: I was wondering whether this crisis is modern at all, whether it is not the repetition of a perennial crisis with a contemporary, modern reference. What causes the collapse of morality? J.U.: It is true that scientific and political developments have affected human consciousness. However, I feel that if human consciousness or that which is at the centre of human consciousness is strengthened, then it would always be possible for human consciousness to be the master of all the tools that it creates. The problem is awakening human consciousness so that it can master the tool it creates. K. V.: At what point do tools become masters? R.K.: There is a fantastic stirring of consciousness at the level of the ordinary person. In fact, the shrinkage that Romesh spoke of is not only the shrinkage that telecommunication and technology have brought about; it is also a shrinkage between the bottom and top layers of society. And that shrinkage gives rise to forms and issues that the mind has discovered. I have no answers to these two issues; it is an extremely complicated process. A process of the transformation of consciousness is on in such a radical manner that it makes me pretty nervous. K: If I may point out, I don't think the crisis is in morality or values at all. I think the crisis is in consciousness and knowledge. Unless human beings radically transform this consciousness, we are going to end up in bloody wars. Has knowledge transformed man at all, at any time? This is the real crisis. Man has lived for twenty-five thousand years, from what modern discovery has shown. During these two hundred and fifty centuries, he has not radically changed. Man is anxious, frightened, depressed, unhappy, aggressive, lonely, all that. The crisis is there, and the crisis is in modern knowledge. What havoc has knowledge played? Has it any place at all in the transformation of man? That is the real question. We have to understand, not intellectually, not verbally, but deep down in our being the nature of our consciousness and this tremendous accumulation of knowledge in the last hundred and fifty years, whether that has brought about the destruction of man, or the ascent of man, or if it has any place at all in the transformation of man. P.J.: What kind of knowledge are you talking about? When you ask, `What place has knowledge in the transformation of man?' should we not clarify your conception of knowledge? T.N.M.: We surely have a problem here of communicating with each other and understanding each other, I was trying to explain to myself what Krishnaji meant by his observation about knowledge, and suggesting that perhaps what he meant was the will to be human through experience, to convert knowledge into experience. Now, this could be knowledge at any level. This could be the knowledge of the scientists. Let me, for a moment, be the devil's advocate and say that the rubric of the scientist is bad enough but his moral righteousness can be worse. And one must remember that the scientist who produces the computer does not do it in the name of bringing about human freedom. I think we should try to find out whether the problem is one of moral crisis or in the nature of knowledge or in the acquisition of knowledge. P.J.: We seem to be going round and round this factor of knowledge. You spoke of consciousness, which contains not only knowledge about machines, computers, etc., but of more potent things, fear, greed, sorrow, envy, loneliness. This is not knowledge in the ordinarily recognised sense of the word, though you may consider all this part of the process of knowledge because it arises out of experience. K: I would like to discuss what consciousness is, and what is the nature of knowledge. These two factors apparently are dominating the world. Thought is knowledge. Knowledge is experience. Knowledge, memory, thought, action - this is the cycle man has been caught in for twenty-five thousand years. I think there is no dispute about that. This cycle has been a process of accumulating knowledge and functioning from that knowledge, either skilfully or unskilfully. The process is stored in the brain as memory, and the memory responds in action. This is the cycle in which man is caught; always within the field of the known. Now what will change man? That is one problem. The other is consciousness. Consciousness is its content; its content makes up consciousness. All the superstitions, beliefs, the class divisions, the brahmanic impressions, all that falls within consciousness. The idol, the belief, the idea of god, suffering, pain, anxiety, loneliness, despair, depression, uncertainty, insecurity, all that is within human consciousness. It is not my consciousness; it is human consciousness, because wherever you go, America or Russia, you meet the same problem. Human beings carry this complex burden of consciousness which contains all the things that thought has put together. R.K.: I would like a definition of the content of consciousness. Is it all that thought has put together? Do you say both are co-terminous? K: We will come to that presently. When you examine your own consciousness, whether you are a doctor, a scientist, a philosopher, a guru, you find your own anxieties, your uncertainties - all that is your consciousness. And that consciousness is the ground on which all humanity stands. J.S.: Is that all? Is all this added up the sum of consciousness; or is consciousness more than this sum? G.N.: If you say that the content of consciousness is the sum of man's past thoughts, of the things that man has known, then there is nothing that is added through aggregation. The question is: Is consciousness the sum of its past thoughts, knowledge, all that is put together, or, is there something more to it? K: Is that the question? R.K.: Is there something in consciousness which is not just an aggregation of anxiety and fear? J.S.: There has been talk in our tradition about pure consciousness as well, a consciousness which is not an aggregate of anxiety, pain, despair. That one is more than the sum of these parts is a possibility that must be considered. K: Even positing something as pure consciousness is part of our consciousness. Would you agree so far: whatever thought has put together, whether it is super-consciousness, ultimate consciousness, pure consciousness, is still part of our consciousness, is still part of thought, and thought is born of knowledge, and, therefore, completely limited? All knowledge is limited. There is no complete knowledge of the computer or of the atom bomb or of anything. P.J.: Is consciousness a putting together of many fragments of different types, or has it a holistic quality in it? T.N.M.: Consciousness must be integrated. K: If it is limited, it is not holistic. T.N.M.: If consciousness is not holistic, what about knowledge? K: Consciousness is knowledge. Would you not say that our whole existence is experience? From experience - whether it is scientific, emotional or sexual - we acquire knowledge. And that knowledge is stored in the brain as memory. The response of memory is thought. Put in any way, the process is that. S.K.: Thought is born of fear. K: Fear is the product of thought, not the other way round. Would you admit that thought arises from knowledge, that knowledge can never be complete about anything? Therefore, thought is always limited, and all our actions - scientific, spiritual, religious - are limited. So the crisis is in knowledge, which is consciousness. P.J.: The question which has been raised is: Is fear independent of thought? Does thought arise as a reaction to fear? How does fear arise? J.S.: You had said that thought arises out of knowledge. K: It is a fact. S.K.: Well, I was suggesting that there is an intermediate step, that out of knowledge first comes fear; fear is the father of thought rather than the other way round. J.U.: Knowledge constructs itself through a process: previous knowledge is replaced by new knowledge, there is conquest of knowledge by knowledge; knowledge rides on its own shoulders. K.V.: Does that then constitute consciousness or does it not? Upadhyayaji said `yes', some of us certainly say `no'. K: I don't quite follow the argument. P.J.: We are not communicating; perhaps if you open up the whole problem of knowledge, thought, consciousness, it may be simpler to come to a meeting point. K: Sir, what is reality? I would like to explore that question. What is nature, the tree, the tiger, the deer? Nature is not created by thought; what is not created by thought is reality. Thought has created everything that I know - all the temples, the churches, the mosques. There is nothing sacred about thought; the rituals, the mass, the namaz, the prayers, all that is the invention of thought. Then I ask myself: What is thinking? If you ask my name, I respond immediately because I am familiar with it. But if you ask me something which is more complex, it takes time to investigate, to answer. That is, I look to my memory and try to find the answer or I consult books or talk to somebody to find the answer. So there are: an immediate response, a response of time, and the response which says, `I really do not know.' We never say, `I do not know.' We are always responding from memory. That memory is in the cells of my brain, derived through tradition, education, experience, perception, hearing and so on. I am all that. Born in India, educated abroad, the content of my consciousness is the result of Indian culture, European culture, Italian culture, so on and so forth; the content of my consciousness is the result of innumerable talks, discussions with scientists, religious people. My consciousness is me; I am not different from my consciousness. So the observer is the observed. That is a fact. My consciousness is the consciousness of humanity; it is not separate. And this consciousness has known conflicts, pain. It has invented god. Human beings have lived for twenty-five thousand years in this misery, inventing technology, using that technology to destroy each other. Seeing all that, what am I to do? What I am is the rest of the world; I am the world. This is no intellectual idea, but fact. I am an ordinary man, not a highly intellectual type. I have looked to the gurus; they have not helped me; the politicians have not helped me; the scientists have not helped me; on the contrary they have destroyed me, apart from technological convenience, communication and all that. Their atom bombs, their military technology, are perpetually creating wars. For the last five thousand years we have had wars every year. This is a historical fact. However, will all this accumulation of tremendous knowledge help me to change all that? That is the real crisis. I have relied on everyone to help me. I have to discard all that help totally. I feel the crisis is there, and not in the world of technology or in the intellectual world or in the totalitarian world. R.K.: Are you not ascribing a certain homogeneity to everything? You are giving the same character to different civilizations, different religious systems, systems of modern science and systems of thought that create wars all over the world. K. Of course, I don't see any difference. R.K.: I have no difficulty in seeing that a human being is a result of all those factors. But to give the same kind of character to all that without differentiation, that I don't see. K: Physically you are taller, I am shorter; and psychologically there are certain characteristic tendencies depending on different cultures, following certain values. T.N.M.: At a certain level we are different. But at the level of what we are, I think he has a point. Whether you are living in the Amazonian jungle or in a modern town, here is a basic universality to the human predicament. But surely in terms of what we have, whether we have the computer or the sewing machine, there is a difference. R.K.: The question is not of differentiation but about the stream of consciousness that have gone on in the past. You talk in terms of twenty-five thousand years. Can the modern, scientific, homocentric view of knowledge and its impact on consciousness be put on a par with some of the ancient streams of consciousness? In other words, do experience and the accumulation of experience offer no choices to us at this moment of history, or are we doomed? P.J.: As long as we continue within our known consciousness, its concern with the little better, the little worse, we are still caught in the grip of something from which we do not seem to be able to get out. Krishnaji is hinting at a quantum leap, and we are still within the structure of time. Perhaps tomorrow we may see clearly, but can we do so with the instruments with which we see the world, which are the instruments we have? Can we somehow come to this point from which we see? Otherwise, we will go round and round; we can be better, more moral, less moral, less destructive or more destructive, but we will still be caught within this framework. I think that is the problem. J.S.: Sir, I understand your anguish. But I do not understand the problem. If this is the way we have been for the last twenty-five thousand years without any change, then we cannot go back to a period or a state where things would be more desirable than they are. If that is what we are, I don't see how we can make the quantum leap. R.K.: That was exactly my point. K: My question is: At the end of twenty-five thousand years I am what I am. We all see that. Hitler has left his imprint on us; the Buddha also has; if Jesus ever lived, he also has. The result of all that is my conditioning. Is it possible to be totally unconditioned? I say `yes', it is possible to be completely unconditioned. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 3 PART 2 SEMINAR NEW DELHI 5TH NOVEMBER 1981 MORNING SESSION 'THE FUTURE OF MAN' P.J.: Can we start laying the landscape of the future of man, the problems which he faces and what lies in the matrix of the human mind which makes it impossible for him to break free? K: What is the future of man? The computer can out-think man, learn faster than man, record much more extensively than man. It can learn, unlearn, correct itself, according to what has been programmed. Computers exist that can programme other computers and so keep going, learning more. So, what is the future of man when everything that he has done or will do, the computer can outdo? Of course, it cannot compose like Beethoven, it cannot see the beauty of Orion on an evening in the sky. But it can create a new Vedanta, a new philosophy, new gods and so on. What then is man to do? Either he seeks entertainment, enters more and more into the world of sports, or seeks religious entertainment. Or he goes inward. The human mind is infinite. It has got an immense capacity; not the capacity of specialization, not the capacity of knowledge. It is infinite. This is perhaps the future of mankind: Scientists have started asking what is going to happen to man when the computer takes charge of the whole of man. The brain is occupied now; it is active. When that brain is not active, it is going to wither and the machine is going to operate. We may all become zombies, lose our extraordinary inward capacity or become superficially intellectual, seeking the world of entertainment. I do not know if you have noticed that more and more time is given on the T.V. to sport, especially in Europe. So, is that the future of man? The future of man may depend on the atom bomb, the neutron bomb. In the East, in India, war may seem very far away. But if you live in Europe, there is tremendous concern about the bomb; war is very close there. So there are these two threats: war and the computer. So what is the future of man? Either he goes very deeply inward, not through delving into the depth of his mind, into the depth of his heart. Or he will be entertained. Freedom of choice, freedom from dictatorship, freedom from chaos, are problems that man has to face. In the world, there is great disturbance, corruption; people are very very disturbed. It is dangerous to walk on the streets. When we are talking about freedom from fear, we want outward freedom, freedom from chaos, anarchy, or dictatorship. But we never demand or enquire if there is an inner freedom at all: freedom of the mind. Is that freedom actual or theoretical? We regard the State as an impediment to freedom. Communists and other totalitarian people say there is no such thing as freedom; the State, the government, is the only authority. And they are suppressing every form of freedom. So what kind of freedom do we want? Out there? Outside of us? Or inward freedom? When we talk about freedom, is it the freedom of choice between this government and that, here and there, between outer and inward freedom? The inner psyche always conquers the outer. The psyche, that is, the inward structure of man - his thoughts, emotions, his ambitions, his actions, his greed - always conquers the outer. So, where do we seek freedom? Could we discuss that? Can there be freedom from nationality which gives us a sense of security? Can there be freedom from all the superstitions, dogmas and religions? A new civilization can only come about through real religion, not through superstition, dogma or traditional religions. P.J.: You have asked a question: What is the choice that man has in the world of the outer when the world of the inner is not participating in the movement of freedom? That is, without knowing whether the mind is free or in bondage, is there a choice possible in the outer? Is it possible for a mind which is unexplored, to make a choice in the outer? S.K.: Sir, you talked about the computer and the possibility of the human brain withering away from lack of activity. Do you then foresee the possibility of man becoming extinct and being replaced by a non-biological entity? K: Perhaps, but my point is, we must take things as they are and see if we can't bring about a mutation in our brain itself. S.K.: I would like to ask you a little more about freedom of the mind when it is in bondage. We only know relative freedom. There is a complete distinction between inner and outer freedom and bondage; they somehow confuse me. For example, we are talking about greed and the aggression of the mind. To me it makes man human. This is what makes a distinction between a computer and man. I would like you to throw a little more light on this freedom. Is it relative freedom? Does it include all the emotions we are talking about? How can one be with them, live with them? It seems that somewhere there are some boundaries set by those customs and to try to transcend them is to try to transcend humanity itself. K: The human mind has lived in fear for so many millions of centuries. Can that fear possibly come to an end? Or, are we going to continue with it for the rest of our lives? P.J.: What Dr. Kakkar said was that it is these very elements of fear, envy, anger, aggression, which make up humanness. What is your response to that? K: Are they? We accept them as human nature. We are used to that. Our ancestors and the present generation have accepted that as the condition of man. I question that. Humanity, a human being, may be entirely different. P.J.: If you question it, then you must be able to show what it is that makes it possible to quench these elements so that the humanness which you speak about can flower totally. How is it possible? R.T.: It also means that there can be no such thing as freedom unless you have quenched these elements. K: Yes sir, as long as I am attached to some conclusion, to some concept, some ideal, there is no freedom. Should we discuss this? P.J.: This is after all the core of the whole problem of mankind. J.S.: May I stretch the question further by suggesting that in the statement or the question which Dr. Kakkar asked, there is implied another concept of freedom, where you obtain freedom not by getting rid of fear, anxiety, greed, so on and so forth, but by integrating them, incorporating them within a larger whole. K: Integrating in a larger awareness of consciousness. Swami Chidanand:. Learning successfully to cope with them. S.K.: May I elaborate? There are two things; fear is a part of humanness; the elimination is also part of humanness. If you talk only of elimination of desire or of quenching it, reaching another state is, to me, leaving out the other part. And this is very important to me for a strategy. My strategy is that I believe that envy, greed, etc., are part of humanness because that is what makes man. Man has to live with them, but he has to make friends with them and use them. Then he will see that fears are not as great as we think; that greed is not really that frightening. To have fear reduced, lessened, used - that is my strategy. P.J.: Dr. Kakkar is right; you cannot take only the dark elements in man. It is the same centre which talks of transformation of the good, which talks of all the elements which are today considered the opposites. The total thing makes up man - the dark and the light. Is it possible to integrate the dark and the light? And who integrates them? So the problem is really a central one. That is, is there an entity who can choose, integrate? K: Why is there this division; dark, light; beauty, ugly? Why is there in human beings this contradiction? Shanta Gandhi: Without contradiction one can hardly live. Life is full of contradictions. An outcome of life is contradiction. K: Oh! You consider life a contradiction. Contradiction implies conflict. So to you life is an endless conflict. You reduce life to a perpetual conflict. S.G.: Life, as we know it, certainly is. K: We have accepted life to be a conflict. That may be our habit, our tradition, our education, our condition. S.G.: My difficulty is that my tool for attaining this awareness is also my own mind. It is the sum total of that which is conditioned by what has gone by. And I can only start from that point. K: So we start with the human condition. Some say it is impossible to change that condition; you can only modify it. The existentialists say that you cannot possibly uncondition that. Therefore, you must live perpetually in conflict. We are contradicting ourselves, that is all. S.K.: What I feel is, there are two conditions; this is part of human growth and development. There are two conflicts which are inescapable. One is separation, the awareness of `I am' as different from my parents. This is part of human evolution. And the second is differentiation, when one learns sex differentiation - I am male and the other one is female; these are part of human evolution, faces of contradiction, of differences, and they are the basic anxieties which are inescapable in the human mind. K: So what is integration? S.K.: Trying to get them together. K: Can you bring the opposites together? Or is there no opposite at all? May I go into that? I am violent; human beings are violent. That is a fact. Non-violence is not a fact. Violence is `what is; the other is not. But all your leaders, philosophers, have tried to cultivate non-violence. Which means what? Through the cultivation of non-violence I am being violent. So non-violence can never be. There is only violence. Why do I, the mind, create the opposite? As a lever to escape from violence? Why cannot I deal only with violence and not be concerned with non-fact? There is only violence; the other is merely an escape from this fact. So there is only `what is; not `what should be; ideals, concepts, all that goes. A.P.: When you say that non-violence is only an idea and violence is the fact, then the enquiry must logically proceed a step further and ask: Can violence end? K: Surely. First we should understand what violence is. What is violence? Conformity is violence. Limitation is violence. S.K.: I would like to understand this a little more. K: What do I call violence? Anger, hatred, hitting another, killing another for an ideal, for a concept, for the word `peace'. And is violence an idea or a fact? When I get angry, it is a fact. Why do I call it violence? Why do I give it a name? I give a name to a reaction which is called violence. Why do I do that? Look, there is a squirrel on the roof. Do I have to name it? Do you follow my question? Do I do it for purposes of recognition, thereby strengthening the present reaction? Of course. So the present reaction is caught up in the past remembrance and I name the past remembrance as violence. S.K.: Yes, sir, I also discover that violence is violating. I was saying `yes' to you without understanding what violence is. S.C.: When you speak of violence, we of course know of violence; one refers to anger; there is also subjective violence. K: I was coming to that. What is violence? Doing harm to others, hurting another psychologically by persuasion and through reward and punishment; by making him conform to a pattern by persuading him logically, affectionately, to accept a certain framework - all that is violence. Apparently that is inherent in man. Why do we call that violence? That is happening all the time. Tradition does it; the whole religious world does it; the political world does it; the business world does it; the intellectual world does it, enforcing their ideas, their concepts, their theories. S.G.: Is all education violence? K: No. I won't use that word `education' for the moment. Is there a mind which cannot be persuaded, a mind that sees very clearly? That is the point. S.K.: No. K: Why do you say `no'? S.K.: Because the question you asked is whether there is a mind that cannot be persuaded. My point is there is no such mind. K: We are the result of persuasion; all propaganda, religious or political, is persuading, pressurizing, dragging us in a certain direction. S.K.: So deep is that persuasion that it cannot be reached by us. It wears so many masks that those masks cannot be seen by us any more. K: Can we be free from that violence? Can we be free from hatred? Obviously we can. P.J.: You cannot leave it there and say, `Obviously you can be free.' K: Have we agreed up to that point? S.K.: That we hate, yes. But can we be free from that hate? No. K: We will go into that. What is the cause of hate? Why do you hate me when I say something which you don't like? Why do you push me aside, you being stronger, intellectually more powerful, etc? Why do I get hurt? Psychologically, what is the process of being hurt? What is hurt? Who is hurt? The image I have of myself is hurt. You come and tread on it and put a pin into it; I get hurt. So the image I have about myself is the cause of hurt. You say something to me, call me an idiot, and I think I am not an idiot; you hurt me because I have an image of myself as not being an idiot. S.K.: With one proviso - when you say that the image is hurt when it is called an idiot, it means it is not you who is hurt but something which you have invented. K: We are the result of every hurt. S.K.: It is not you who is hurt. K: No. Suppose I think I am a great man. You come along and say, don't be silly, there are many greater men than you. I get hurt. Why? Obviously, I have an image of myself as a great man. You come and say something contrary to that. I get hurt. You are not hurting me; you are hurting my image of myself. The image which I have built about myself gets hurt. So the next question is: Can I live without an image of myself? S.K.: No. P.J.: Where, in what dimension, do I discover that I am making an image of myself? K: I don't discover; I perceive. P.J.: Where? K: What do you mean by where? You pointed out to me just now that I have an image about myself. I have not thought about it, I have never seen my image. You point it out; you make a statement that I have an image. I am listening to you very carefully, very attentively, and in that very listening I discover the fact that I have an image of myself. Or, do I see an image of myself? P.J.: I don't think I am making myself clear. If I don't see it as an abstraction, then that image-making machinery is the ground on which this is seen. Let me go into it a little further. There is a ground from which the image-making machinery rises. K: Why do you use the word `ground'? P.J.: Because, in talking and responding, there is a tendency to become conceptual. If one comes out of the con- ceptual to the actual, then the actual is the process of perceiving. K: That is all. Stop there. P.J.: I cannot stop there. I ask you further: I don't perceive it in your statement; then where do I perceive it? K: You perceive it as it is taking place. P.J.: When you say `as it is taking place', where do I perceive it? Do I perceive it outside or in my imagination? K:. I saw that squirrel walking about. I perceive it, I perceive the fact, I watch the fact that I have an image. P.J.: This is not very clear. K: It is very very clear. You tell me that I am a liar. I have told a lie. I realize that I am a liar. P.J.: Is there a difference between realizing that I am a liar and perceiving that I am a liar? K: I have perceived that I am a liar. I am aware - let us use the word `aware' - that I am a liar. That is all. P.J.: Can you open up this seeing of the movement within the mind? I think this is the core of the whole thing. K: We were talking about freedom from fear. We want to discuss the whole movement of fear. It begins with desire, with time, with memory; it begins with the fact of the present movement of fear. All this is involved in the whole river of fear. Either the fear is very, very shallow or it is a deep river with a great volume of water. We are not discussing the various objects of fear, but fear itself. Now is it an abstraction of fear that we are discussing, or actual fear in my heart, in my mind? Is it that I am facing the fear? I want to be clear on this point. If we are discussing abstract fear, it has no meaning to me. I am concerned only with the actual happening of fear. I say in that fear all this is involved, the desire and the very complexity of desire, time, the past impinging on the present, and the sense of wanting to go beyond fear. All this must be perceived. I don't know if you follow. We have to take a thing like the drop of rain which contains all the rivers in the world, see the beauty of that one drop of rain. One drop of desire contains the whole movement of fear. So what is desire? Why do we suppress it? Why do you say it has a tremendous importance? I want to be a minister; my desire is for that, or my desire is for god. My desire for god and my desire to be a minister are one and the same thing - it is desire. So I have to understand the depth of what desire is, why it drives man, why it has been suppressed by all religions. One asks what is the place of desire and why the brain is consumed with desire. I have to understand it not only at the verbal level through explanation, through communication, but to understand it at its deepest level, in my guts. What is the place of thought in desire? Is desire different from thought? Does thought play an important part in desire? Or is thought the movement of desire? Is thought part of desire or does thought dominate desire, control and shape desire? So I am asking: Are thought and desire not like two horses? I must understand not only thought, but the whole movement of thinking, the origin of thought; not the end, but the beginning of thought. Can the mind be aware of the beginning of thought and also of the beginning of desire? I have to go into that question: What is desire and what is thought? First, there is perception, contact, sensation. That is, I see a blue shirt in the window. I go inside and touch the texture, then out of that touching, there is sensation. Then thought says, how nice it would be if I put on that blue shirt. The creation by thought of the image of that shirt on me is the beginning of desire. S.K.: You said, you feel in the guts. I think that is where desire resides. K: We understand desire, how it arises, where thought creates the image and desire begins. Then what is time? Is time a movement of thought? There is time, the sun rises, the sun sets at a certain time; time as the past, present and the future; time as the past modifying itself, becoming the future physically; time as covering a distance; time as learning a language. Then there is the whole area of psychological time. I have been, I am, I will be. That is a movement of the past through the present modifying into the future. Time as acquiring knowledge through experience, memory, thought, action - that is also time. So there is psychological time and physical time. Now, is there psychological time at all? Or, has thought as hope created time? That is, I am violent, I will be non-violent, and I realize that that process can never end violence. What will end violence is confronting the fact and remaining with it, not trying to dodge it or escape from it. There is no opposite; only `what is'. And what is thinking? Why has man given a tremendous importance to the intellect, to words, theories, ideas? Unless I discover the origin of thinking, how it begins, can there be awareness of thought arising? Or, does awareness come after it has arisen? Is there awareness of the movement of the whole river of thought? Thought has become extraordinarily important. Thought exists because there is knowledge, experience, stored up in the brain as memory; from that memory there is thought and action. In this process we live, always within the field of the known. So desire, time, thought, is essentially fear. Without this there is no fear. I am afraid inwardly, and I want order out there - in society, in politics, economics. How can there be order out there if I am in disorder here? P.J.: Can I bring order within, me if there is disorder outside? I am deliberately posing this problem which lay in your early dichotomy between the outward and the inward. The outward is compared to the computer on the one hand and the atom bomb, which I think is taking over. J.U.: We cannot realize that freedom without relating ourselves to the outside where there is dukh (sorrow), where there is so much turmoil. We cannot understand the process of freedom without relating the inward and the outward. K: Have I understood the question rightly? You are saying that the division between the outer and the inner is false. I agree with you. It is a movement like a tide, going out and coming in. So what is outside is me; me is the outside. The outer is a movement of the inner; the inner is the movement of the outer. There is no dichotomy at all. But by understanding the outer, that criterion will guide me to the inner, so that there is no deception; because I do not want to be deceived at the end of it. So the outer is the indicator of the inner and the inner is the indicator of the outer. There is no difference. My part is not to put away the outer; I say I am responsible for that. I am responsible for everything that is happening in the world. My brain is not my brain: it is the brain of humanity, which has grown through evolution and all the rest of it. So there is responsibility, political, religious, all along the line. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 3 PART 3 SEMINAR NEW DELHI 5TH NOVEMBER 1981 'THE FUTURE OF MAN' P.J.: Most people see that in the human mind there is a shrinkage of space available to us to explore because of the various pressures which operate on it, an incapacity to face complex situations, the violence and terror. I would suggest that we do not go into specific problems of fear or the future of man, but lay bare the structure of the human mind, bringing us face to face with the structure of thought. It is only then that it is possible for each one of us to investigate into these complexities which occupy our consciousness. K: We have talked over the movement of fear together. How do you listen to those statements? How do you read those statements? What is the impact of those statements on you? We said desire, time, thought, the hurts, the whole of that is fear, and you tell me that very clearly in words which are common. You have communicated to me the truth of it, not the verbal description of it. How do I listen to that statement? I am not opposing it or comparing what you say with something I already know, but I am actually listening to what you say. It has entered into my consciousness, that part of consciousness which is willing to comprehend entirely what you are saying. What is the impact? Is it a verbal impact or a logical one, or have you talked to me at a level where I see the truth of what you have said? What does it do to my consciousness? P.J.: We are speaking of the future of man, the danger of technology taking over man's functions. Man seems paralysed. You have said there are only two ways open to him: either the way of pleasure or the way of an inner movement. I am asking you the `how' of the inner movement. K: When you ask `how', you are asking for a system, a method, a practice. That is obvious. Nobody asks `how' otherwise. How am I to play the piano? It is all implied - practice, a method, a mode of acting. Now when you ask `how', you are back again to the same old pattern of experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action. Now, can we move away from the `how' for the moment and observe the mind, or the brain? Can there be a pure observation of it, which is not analysis? Observation is totally different from analysis. In analysis there is always the search for a cause; there is the analyser and the analysed. That means the analyser is separate from the analysed. That separation is fallacious; it is not actual, the actual being that which is happening now. Observation is totally free of analysis. Is it possible just to observe without any conclusion, any direction, any motive - just pure, clear looking? Obviously, it is possible when you look at these lovely trees; it is very simple. But to look at the operation of the whole movement of existence, to observe it without any distortion, is entirely different from analysis. In that observation the whole process of analysis has no place. You go beyond it. That is, I can look at that tree without any distortion because I am looking optically. Now, can I look at, is there any observation of the whole activity of fear without trying to find the cause, or asking how to end it, or trying to suppress it, or running away from it? Is it possible just to look and stay with it, stay with the whole movement of fear? I mean by staying with it, to observe without any movement of thought entering into my observation. Then I say, with that observation comes attention. That observation is total attention. It is not concentration; it is attention. It is like focusing a bright light on an object, and in the focusing of that energy which is light on that movement, fear ends. Analysis will never end fear; you can test it out. That is, is my mind capable of such attention, which is to bring all the energy of my intellect, emotion, nerves, to look at this movement of fear without any opposition or support, or denial? P.J.: Thought arises in observation, and does not stay with observation of fear. Then what happens to thought? Does one push it aside? What does one do? Thought does arise, which is also a fact. K: Just listen. The speaker explained not only the personal fears but the fears of mankind in which is this stream, in which is included thought, desire, time and the desire to end it, to go beyond it, all that is the movement of fear. Can you look at it, observe it without any movement? Any movement is thought. P.J.: You may say movement is fear, but in that observing, thought arises, which is also a fact. K: Please listen. I said, desire, time, thought; thought is time, and desire is part of thought. You have shown the whole map of fear, in which thought is included. There is no question of suppressing thought; that is impossible. I said, first look at it. We don't give attention to anything. You have just said something about thought. I listened to it very, very carefully; I was attending to what you were saying. Can you so attend? P.J.: For an instant of attention thought is not; then thought arises. This is the state of mind. There is no doer because that is pretty obvious. It is neither possible to remain immovable nor to say that thought will not arise. If it is a stream, it is a stream which flows. K: Are we discussing what is observation? P.J.: Yes, we are discussing observation. In that observation I have raised this problem because that is the problem of attention, of self-knowledge, the problem of our minds, that in observing, thought arises. So, then what? What does one do with thought? K: When in your attention thought arises, you put aside fear totally, but you pursue thought. I do not know if I am making myself clear. I observe the movement of fear. In that observation, thought arises. The movement of fear is not important, but the arising of thought and total attention on that thought. There is this stream of fear. Tell me what to do: How am I, caught in fear, to end it? - not the method, not the system, not the practice, but the ending of it. You say analysis will not end it; that is obvious. So, what will end it - a perception of the whole movement of fear, a perception without direction? J.U.: You made a statement about observing the movement of fear. I do not accept the distinction you have made between analysis and observation. I do not agree with your rejection of analysis. It is only through analysis that the entire structure of tradition and the weight of memory can be broken. It is only when that is broken that an observation is possible. Otherwise, it would only be a conditioned mind which would be observing. By your insistence on observation as distinct from analysis, perhaps there is the possibility or probability of the type of accidents or sudden happenings occurring, of which other people have spoken. Therefore, there can be the opportunity in which the shaktipata, the transmission of power takes place. P.J.: Is that the nature of looking at fear? I am answering part of this question. Is the nature of observing or looking at fear or listening to fear of the same nature as looking at a tree, or listening to a bird? Or are you talking of a listening and a seeing which is optical observing plus? And if it is plus, what is the plus? A.P.: I see a great danger in what Upadhyayaji has said. He says there cannot be observation unless it is accompanied by analysis, and if there is observation without analysis then that observation may have to depend upon an accidental awakening of an insight. He speaks of that as a possibility. My submission to him is that unless observation is cleansed of analysis, it is incapable of freeing itself from the fetters of conceptualism, the processes in which we have been reared, the process where observation and conceptual understanding go together. It is difficult to bring simultaneously into operation, unconsciously and consciously, a process of conceptual comprehension. Now, observation that is not cleansed of wordy comprehension distinguishes itself from pure observation. Therefore, in my opinion, it is very necessary to establish that analysis is an obstacle to observation. We must see this as a fact that analysis prevents us from observing. K: Sir, do we clearly understand that the observer is the observed? I observe that tree, but I am not that tree. I observe various reactions as greed, envy and so on. Is the observer separate from greed? The observer himself is the observed, which is greed. Is it clear, not intellectually, but actually, that you can see the truth of it as a profound reality, a truth which is absolute? When there is such observation, the observer is the past. And when I observe that tree, all that past association with that tree comes into being. I name it as oak, or whatever it is; there is like or dislike. Now, when I observe fear, that fear is me. I am not separate from that fear. So the observer is the observed. In that observation there is no observer to observe because there is only the fact: the fear is me, I am not separate from fear. Then, what is the need for analysis? In that observation, if it is pure observation, the whole thing is revealed, and I can logically explain everything from that observation without analysis. We are not clear on this particular point that the thinker is the thought, the experiencer is the experience. The experiencer, when he experiences something new, recognizes it. I experience something. To give to it a meaning, I must bring in all the previous records of my experiences; I must remember the nature of that experience. Therefore I am putting it outside me. But when I realize that the experiencer, the thinker, the analyser, is the analysed, is the thought, is the experience, in that perception, in that observation, there is no division, no conflict. Therefore, when you realize the truth of that, you can logically explain the whole sequence of it. K: Let us go slowly. I am angry. At the moment of anger, there is no `me' at all; there is only that reaction called anger. A second later, I say, I have been angry. I have already separated anger from me. P.J.: Yes. K: So, I have separated it a moment later; there is me and anger. Then I suppress it, rationalize it. I have already divided a reaction which is me, into `me' and `not-me', and then the whole conflict begins. Whereas anger is me, I am made up of reactions. Right? Obviously. I am anger. What happens then? Earlier, I wasted energy in analysing, in suppressing, in being in conflict with anger. That energy is now concentrated; there is no waste of energy. With that energy which is attention, I hold this reaction called fear. I do not move away from it because I am that. Then, because I have brought all my energy to it, that fact which is called fear disappears. You wanted to find out in what manner fear can end. I have shown it. As long as there is a division between you and fear, fear will continue. Like the Arab and the Jew, the Hindu and the Muslim, as long as this division exists there must be conflict. P.J.: But, sir, who observes? K: There is no `who observes'. There is only the state of observation. P.J.: Does it come about spontaneously? K: Now, you have told me it is not analysis, it is not this, it is not that, and I discard it. I don't say I'll discuss it. I discard it. My mind is free from all the conceptual, analytical process of thought. My mind is listening to the fact that the observer is the observed. P.J.: You see, sir, there are two things in this. One is that when one observes, when there is the observing of the mind, one sees the extraordinary movement in it. It is beyond anyone's control or capacity to even give direction to it. It is there. In that state, you say, bring attention on to fear. K: Which is all your energy... P.J.: Which actually means, bring all attention on to that which is moving. When we question in our minds, the response immediately arises. In your mind responses do not arise; you hold it. Now, what is it that given you the capacity to hold fear in consciousness? I don't think we have that capacity. K: I don't think it is a question of capacity. I don't know. What is capacity? P.J.: I will cut out the word `capacity'. There is a holding of fear. K: That is all. P.J.: That is, this movement which is fluid becomes immovable. K: That is it. P.J.: Fear ends. With us that does not happen. K: Can we discuss a fact? Can we hold anything in our minds for a few seconds, or a minute? Anything? I love; can I remain with that feeling, that beauty, that clarity which love brings? Can I hold it; not say what is love, what is not love, but just hold it, which is like a vessel holding water? You are all sceptical. You see, sir, when you have an insight into fear, fear ends. The insight is not analysis, time, remembrance, all that. It is immediate perception of something. We do have it. Often we have this sense of clarity about something. Is this all theoretical? J.U.: Sir, I find that when you speak of clarity, there is that moment of clarity. I accept that. But it must come as a result of something that happens. It must move from period to period, from level to level. My clarity cannot be the same as your clarity. K: Sir, clarity is clarity, it is not yours or mine. Intelligence is not yours or mine. P.J.: Sir, I would like to go into something different. I will start with one statement: In observing the movement of the mind there is no point at which you say I have observed totally and it is over. K: You can never say that. P.J.: So, you are talking of an observation which is a state of being; that is, you move in observation, your life is a life of observing... K: Yes, that is right. P.J.: Out of that observing, action rises; analysis arises; wisdom comes. Is that observing? Unfortunately, we observe and then enter into the other sphere of non-observing and therefore have always this dual process going on. None of us knows what this observing is. None of us can say we know what a life of observing is. K: No. I think it is very simple: Can't you observe a person without any prejudice? P.J.: Yes. K: Without any concept? What is implied in that observation? You observe me, or I observe you. How do you observe? How do you look at me? What is your reaction to that observation? P.J.: With all the energy I have, I observe you. No, sir, it becomes very personal. Therefore, I won't pursue this. K: So I move away from it. P.J.: I can't say that I do not know what it is to be in a state of observing without the observer. K: Could we take this example? Say I am married. I have lived with my wife for a number of years. I have all the memories of those twenty years or five years. In what manner do I look at her? Tell me. I am married to her; I have lived with her, sexually and all the rest of it. When I see her in the morning, how do I look at her? What is my reaction? Do I see her afresh, as though for the first time, or do I look at her with all the memories flooded into my mind? Q: Either is possible. K: Anything is possible, but what happens actually? Do I observe anything for the first time? When I look at the moon, the new moon coming up with the evening star, do I look at it as though I have never seen it before? The wonder, the beauty, the light, do I look at anything as though for the first time? Q: Can we die to our yesterdays and our past? K: Yes, sir. We are always looking with the burden of the past. So, there is no actual looking. This is very important. When I look at my wife, I do not see her as though I have seen her for the first time. My brain is caught in memories about her or about this or that. So I am always looking from the past. Is it possible to look at that moon, at the evening star, as though for the first time without all the associations connected with them? Can I see the sunset which I have seen in America, in England, in Italy and so on, as though I am seeing it for the first time? Don't say `yes'. That means my brain is not recording the previous sunsets I know of. Q: Very rare. How does one know that it is so? You are asking, can you see the moon and the evening star? Maybe it is the memory of the first time which makes you look. K: I know what you are asking; that leads you to another question. I am asking, is it possible not to record, except what is absolutely necessary? Why should I record the insult I may have received this morning, or the flattery? Both are the same. You flatter me saying it is a good talk, or she comes and says you are an idiot. Why should I record either? P.J.: You ask a question as if to say we have the choice of whether to record or not to record. K: There is no choice. I am asking a question to investigate. Because the brain was registering the squirrel on the parapet this morning, the kites flying, all that you said in our discussion at lunch, so it is like a gramophone record playing over and over again. The mind is constantly occupied, isn't it? Now, in that occupation you cannot listen; you cannot see clearly. So one has to enquire why the brain is occupied. I am occupied with god, he is occupied with sex, she is occupied about her husband, somebody is occupied with power, position, politics, cleverness, etc. Why? Is it that when the brain is not occupied there is the fear of being nothing? Because occupation gives me a sense of living? But if I am not occupied, I say I am lost. Is that why we are occupied from morning till night? Or is it a habit, sharpening itself? This occupation is destroying the brain and making it mechanical. Now, does one see that one is occupied actually? And seeing that, remain with it, not saying, I don't want to be occupied, it is not good for the brain? Can you just see you are occupied? See what happens then. When there is occupation there is no space in the mind. I am the collection of all the experiences of mankind. The story of all mankind is me if I know how to read the book of me. You see, we are so conditioned to this idea that we are all separate individuals, that we all have separate brains, and the separate brains with their self-centred activity are going to be reborn over and over again. I question this whole concept that I am an individual; not that I am the collective. I am humanity, not the collective. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 4 PART 1 1ST SEMINAR MADRAS 2ND JANUARY 1979 'THE NATURE OF A RELIGIOUS LIFE' Achyut Patwardhan: What is the nature of a religious life? A paradoxical situation has developed during the last fifty years or more; there has been an explosion of knowledge that has led to specialization, with the result that the wholeness of life is lost in the multiplicity of information. The problem has become more acute because development of knowledge leads us further away from the religious life. Can we explore this problem? P.J.: Is the problem one of perception which is total? When there was not this plethora of knowledge, was man's capacity to see the whole greater than it is today? Is it the extension of the frontiers of knowledge which has made the problem more difficult, or is it that knowledge which has made the problem more difficult, or is it that the basic problem of man is his incapacity to see in a total sense? Is it that the very nature of seeing is fragmentary, whether there is vast knowledge or limited knowledge? G.N.: There is also the modern view that with knowledge we are ascending in terms of living conditions, comfort, equality, which some people feel has made for a greater sense of well-being and awareness. This is the ascent of man through knowledge, through specialization. P.J.: But Achyutji's statement suggests that when knowledge was not so intricate, so complex, then man's capacity to see wholly was to that extent greater. A.P.: What I felt was that there is an assumption that if we could know more, we would come nearer to the heart of wholeness. The assumption itself is totally illusory because the greater the knowledge, the further away we move from the centre. P.J.: But when you say illusory, is it actually illusory or conceptually illusory? David Shainberg: I think that is a completely erroneous assumption. I don't think anyone ever thought that technology or knowledge would bring greater happiness. It is all within the operation of knowledge - more knowledge, more technology, leading to an instant response, a greed, a curiosity. Curiosity is a form of greed. Knowledge operates from one greed to the next: You want to know more and more. It is the same with technology. This I think is complete illusion. We don't think technology will ever provide happiness. An engineer is infatuated with creating more and more. With the facility of aeroplane designing, we can get from Delhi to London in a few hours. Nobody thinks that this is going to make you happier. P.J.: Today, in a developing country like India, in making technology available to a vaster number of people, there is an inbuilt assumption that you are going to bring happiness. D.S.: I think you will have to evaluate what you mean by happiness. P.J.: Happiness is not the same thing as seeing this wholeness. These two are totally different. D.S.: That's it. Technology may not be looking for a deeper form of happiness, but looking for more comfortable living. P.J.: What is the basic question here? S.P.: Are we saying that in the pursuit of a so-called religious life, we are using the intellect, and the intellect itself is fragmentary and, therefore, it cannot comprehend the holistic? A.P.: I don't want to start with the assumption that the intellect is an inadequate tool. I say it is the only tool I have. Whatever powers of understanding I have, have been secured largely by the development of my intellect, and I say that whatever I have gained through the intellect seems to lead me away from my religious base, from that centre. K: What do you mean by a religious life, and why do we deny the influence of knowledge on a religious life? Bronowski maintains that only through knowledge is there the ascent of man. He traced the development from the stone age to the modern age and pointed out that man has evolved from savagery. That is, the ascent of man is only possible through knowledge, and you are saying knowledge is detrimental, or prevents or distorts a religious life. A.P.: A religious life is absolutely essential to restore sanity to human existence. When we approach the question of a religious life in the context of contemporary society, we are not seeking a religious life in terms of what the church did or the people who went in search of Brahman did. K: Sir, would you define what you mean by a religious life, the nature of a mind that is religious? A.P.: A religious life is that perception which gives us a view of human well-being undistorted by contradictory, self-destructive tendencies. We are not seeking some kind of a theoretical moksha, or a metaphysical moksha. What we want is a capacity to see human well-being as an indivisible fact, and ourselves as agents of that human well-being. K: You are saying that a religious life is concerned with human dignity, human well-being, human happiness. Right? A.P.: Yes, sir. Development of the human potential. K: When you use the word `religious', I wonder what the depth of that word is, the significance of that word, the quality of the mind which says that it is enquiring into a religious life. Sir, you said that knowledge is the major factor which prevents a religious life. Let us hold on to that for a few minutes. Does knowledge interfere with a religious life? Does a religious life have no knowledge, or, having knowledge, does not allow that knowledge to interfere with a holistic life? A.P.: Without a religious life, knowledge seems to lose its direction. K: Yes sir, you have more or less defined what you mean by knowledge. But I have not quite understood what you mean by a religious life. A.P.: A religious life is a life in which one feels that no harm would come to another through one's knowledge, one's capacity. It really means that you are part of humanity, that through you humanity is fulfilling itself. P.J.: I find this very difficult to understand. K: We are discussing not what a religious life should be, we are investigating, exploring into the nature of a religious life. Therefore, you cannot presuppose that you must not hurt another. A.P.: Sir, it is out of deep anguish - when you see that man's knowledge is becoming an instrument of his own destruction - that you come to a religious life. P.J.: I cannot say that. I would say that what has led me to even enquire has been sorrow, loneliness, inadequacy. These are the three things which have led me to enquire. I don't even know the nature of a religious life. K: I think we are not enquiring. We are making statements. What do you mean when you say that we must not hurt another human being? A.P.: Is it possible for knowledge not to be a source of destruction? P.J: Achutji, before you can come to this question, what do you do with the nature of the self which is so inadequate that it cannot even pose this question? It cannot pose the question about humanity. A.P.: I feel that for a man like me who is witness to appalling cruelty, appalling threats to human well-being arising out of human knowledge, there is no self here at all. I am not bothered about the self. I am bothered about a situation of which I am an integral part. I cannot separate myself. I am part of that. Ravi Ravindra: I find all this a little too abstract. I say I wish to be religious, and also I wish to be in contact with some knowledge or at least not be destroyed by it. So, this is a problem of knowledge. This is one way in which I would like to raise it, because the question of general human knowledge is too abstract. Now, how can I be religious and still be a physicist? As a physicist, there are certain sets of laws, certain operations that I teach and I see that some of these relationships in terms of energy or time do not necessarily relate to my sense of time or energy or momentum, as I experience it inwardly. And one way of understanding a religious life is by a balancing of what I see as external time or energy, and what I see as the flow inwardly; time and energy moving. In the rare moments I can see them related to each other. At the moment, I am in touch with the religious life. Now, the question that arises from this is, how does one continue with activities like physics and lead a religious life? K: I would like first of all to find out what you mean by a religious life. Achyutji has pointed out, that it is not to hurt a human being and also that it has to be holistic, if you can use that word; that is, a life that is complete, whole and not fragmented. And he also said that knowledge misused, as it is now, is destroying humanity, and knowledge also prevents or becomes a distraction to a religious life. But we have not yet gone into the question of what you mean by a religious life. D.S.: Krishnaji, is there not something wrong with even the whole of religious life? If I take the proper drug, I am going to be religious; the religious life is traditional nonsense. K: I would like to go into it a little more. Achyutji has pointed out that man wants happiness. Happiness at what level? Physical level? At the psychological level so that he has no problems, no conflicts and so on? And at a still higher level, if you can so call it, a sense of absolute relaxed peace? Would you call that a religious life? Is that what we want? That is what every human being craves for because he knows what knowledge has done in the world. Then the question is, what place has knowledge in our human existence, in our human daily life? Let us for the moment forget the religious life; let us find out if it is possible to live a daily life here on this earth, which is ours, with an extraordinary sense of freedom from all problems. Can you start from that? P.J.: My only query would be, is it valid that there should be a movement `towards', once you posit this movement? K: I am not positing anything; I am enquiring. P.J.: I was saying, is it valid for any movement `towards'? To meet the movement `towards' is a denial of the religious life. S.P.. I would put it this way: That I who am in contradiction, moving from this to that, want to end the conflict. So, it is a very valid thing which I am seeking, and when you say a movement from here to there is an invalid movement, I ask the question: How do I end this whole turmoil? P.J.: But there is a movement. K: I am not moving from here to there. P.J.: There is no movement `towards'? D.S.: Krishnaji, you are moving in the sense that you are saying: Can we live in peace? K: No. All that I am saying is, this is my life. S.P.: It is not finished. I will say a person who says this is my life, this is not how I want to live, naturally asks the question: Is there something different? That movement is valid. K: I do not even ask if there is something different. I live in conflict, misery, confusion. This constant battle is going on inside and outside. It is terrible to live that way, and I say, please help me to live differently. S.P.: Seeing that, most people ask the question: Is there anything different? K: The validity lies in their escape from it. S.P.: Before they escape, the movement is there. K: The movement away from the fact is an escape. S.P.: So, that is the insight which man has to have. But before he has that insight, both are facts. K: I am facing facts. The facts are, my life is in a dreadful mess. That is all. R.R.: Sir, the fact also is that I wish to change it. K: First, I must acknowledge the fact. To change it may be an escape from the fact. D.S.:Is not your statement, `My life is a dreadful mess,' a kind of value judgment that you make? K: I am not making a value judgment. It is a fact. I get up at six o'clock, go to office for the rest of my life, ten hours a day. There is insecurity, the terrible mess of living. That is not a value judgment; it is a fact. D.S.: I think there is a kind of judgment in it the way you say, `It is a terrible mess.' K: It is not a value judgment. It is a fact which I observe in my life. There is a constant struggle, there is fear. That is a fact which I call a mess. P.J.: I say that is a fact. Now what relationship has the query about the religious life to this? S.P.: There have been people who have talked about the religious life, and I see a person who I think leads a religious life, and when I see, I cannot remove that impression from my consciousness. K: That may be your tradition, your wish, an illusion you are living in because it is tradition. Rajesh Dalal: Sir, there is an actual position of a man who is in contradiction. Recognising the contradiction as a fact, he says I want to change it, but does not know what to change into. K: The changing into is a movement away from the fact. I find I am in conflict with my wife or husband or whatever it is, and I want to understand the nature of the conflict, not change it into something else. Now, how do I change this fact that I cannot get on with my wife? To me a religious life is a life in which all these problems have completely ceased. D.S.: That is an assumption. K: No. It is not a fact to you; it is a fact to me. So I say, don't let us jump into what a religious life is. Here I am, a human being, caught up in this rat race, and I say to myself: How am I to change this? Not into something else, because I am intelligent enough to know that changing into something else is an avoidance of `what is'. D.S.: That is where the subtle leap takes place. Is the mind or the brain changing into something better? K: I am not changing into something better. Better is the enemy of the good. D.S.: You are dodging this subtle point that right here it happens. K: Sir, I see very clearly, logically, rationally, that the movement away from the fact does not bring about the understanding of the fact. That is all my point. R.R.: But sir, I see my conflict, I have also heard J. Krishnamurti say, there is a state of non-conflict. Perhaps that is my trouble - I have heard that. K: He has always said, `Face the fact, don't move away from the fact.' There is another way of living. This man says very clearly the other way cannot be found or come upon or reached or moved into unless you have faced the fact and resolved the fact. S.P.: But the true state is that this statement has been conceived by the mind as an idea. K: Therefore, it is valueless. As long as it is an idea, it is valueless. Let us be clear. The fact is I am afraid: I don't face the fact that there is this feeling arising, but I create an idea about the fact and act according to that idea. I say don't do that, look at the fact without making it into an abstraction. Stay with fact, don't move away under any circumstances. S.P.: I don't act from that idea, but the idea is there. It is in my consciousness. K.: Our conditioning is, hearing a statement and making that statement into an idea. Now, you make a statement to me; I hear it and from that form a conclusion or an idea. I say don't do that, but just listen to what is being said. M.Z.: Suffering as such is not an idea; suffering is real. K: No. I want to go into it more clearly and not say real or not real. When there is suffering, is that suffering a concept, an idea, a remembrance, or is it an actual moment of suffering? Please find out. At the moment of sorrow, there is nothing else. It is possible to remain with that movement without making an abstraction of it and say, `I am suffering.' M.Z.: Sir, would you say that it is a continuation of suffering the moment it moves into an abstraction? K: It is not suffering; it is just an idea of suffering. I am very clear. A.P.: If we may compare this suffering with pain, there is an impulse of pain followed by another impulse of pain, followed by a third impulse of pain, etc. Therefore, that pain may be intermittent but it is repetitive and, therefore, it can never become an idea. It is a physical pain. K: Physical suffering is of a different nature. Repetition of psychological pain is the memory of that which has happened. Go into it slowly. You have physical pain; you have a toothache and you do something to stop it, but it recurs. Now, the continuation of pain is the registration of a first pain in the mind, in the brain. It is simple enough, isn't it? P.J.: It can become psychological. A.P.: The moment you register, it becomes psychological. P.J.: But the physical pain as such is of a different nature from psychological pain. The psychological pain seems to be the shadow of physical pain. It does not arise for any one particular reason. It shows itself with many faces: One day I am depressed, one day I am alone, one day I feel inadequate. These are all manifestations of that deep, inner inadequacy, pain, which is psychological. The point is, Krishnaji posits that at the very instant when pain arises, there is action which comes through the cord of continuity, that which connects this pain or suffering to the next pain. And he implies that there can be a cutting of it the instant it arises. Now, I would like to go into the nature of this cutting. M.Z.: Can you say that the cutting is between the actual pain and the leap of abstraction? K: Is that what you are saying, Pupul? P.J.: I say, sir, that you seem to imply that at the instant of the arising of psychological suffering, there is a cutting so that continuity ends. K: No, there is no cutting. P.J.: Is there no action at all? K: I think it is fairly simple. Are we discussing physical pain or psychological pain? I sat in a dentist's chair for four hours -drilling, all the rest of it. When I got out of that chair, there was no registration of that drill. D.S.: But you remember it now. K: Suffering is an actual fact. It takes place at the moment of arising. Apparently we don't seem to be able to see anything else but that suffering. When you are not moving away from it at all, there is no registration of it. Have you listened to the statement? That is, when there is no movement away from that moment, that thing called suffering, there is no registration of that, no remembrance. Can the mind, the brain, remain absolutely with that feeling of suffering and nothing else? S.P.: At this moment, I have no quality of suffering in my mind. When you ask this question, there is no reality to it. The mind is operating, but it does not catch the quality of it. You are asking, can the brain remain with the moment of suffering? It is not an idea, it is an actual fact that all human beings are suffering. It is not I alone who am suffering. R.R.: Sir, are you suggesting that this fact does not register for you because you are not running away from it? K: In the second of suffering there is no registration. It is only when thought takes it up and moves away from the second that registration takes place. At this movement you are not suffering but there is suffering around you, there is immense suffering. Are you in contact with that? Or is it an idea that human beings are all suffering? S.P.: There is no contact. Krishnan Kutty: It is only an idea that humanity suffers. K: Explore that. What does it mean? An idea is not factual. Then why do you have it? S.P.: What is the nature of this contact? D.S.: How are we in contact with that? K: We are not in contact with that. It is there. Let us put it differently: Do you feel that you are the rest of mankind, that you are the whole of mankind? R.R.: Sometimes. K: I am not talking about sometimes, sir. P.J.: I would like to go back. There is something else at the moment of suffering. Can there be no movement away from it? That is what K said. The movement away from there is the movement of registration. K: The movement is the registration. D.S.: I want to raise another question: To what degree is the very act of being in the condition of suffering, or conflict, some implication of movement? Someone suffers because someone who was important to him dies. He is already caught in a movement. You suggest to Dr. Ravindra to look at it as a fact, a condition in which there is no conflict. K: No. I am saying, sir, all human beings suffer. That is a fact, and in investigating the whole thing - or rather, not investigating, but having an insight into it, which is not an investigation - you see that suffering continues. When it is registered, then the whole problem arises: How am I to escape from suffering, and all the rest of it? I am asking, investigating: Is it possible for a non-registration to take place? D.S.: I am not arguing with you. The fact of suffering, to me, seems to be already the act of registration. K: Of course, that is our conditioning. If I am aware of this conditioning, aware of what is actually taking place, then the very perception of that ends it. D.S.: That is the paradox. K: Not paradox; that is a fact. P.J.: You have asked whether there can be an insight into the movement of suffering. Then the question arises, can there be a total non-movement away from it? What is the nature of this insight? Let us negate what it is not. It is obvious that it is not in the nature of thought. K: Go on step by step. It is not a movement of thought. It is not a movement of memory. It is not a movement of remembrance. Which means what? A complete freedom from the known. P.J.: How does this freedom from the known arise which is insight? How does insight take birth? K: Freedom from the known can only take place when one has observed the whole phenomenon of working in the field of the known. Then, in the very investigation of the known, from that comes freedom from the known. It is not the other way round. P.J.: What is the nature of this insight? K: I say, the nature of this insight is freedom from the known first, which implies no remembrances of the past. It is not a state of amnesia; it is complete, total attention in which there is no memory operating, no experience operating. D.S.: Sir, the movement that I come upon is the tangle of a movement of registration; it is the movement of memory. You will register it if you are attached. K: I have an image about myself and you come along and insult me, and that is immediately registered. If I have no image, you can call me anything you like. M.Z.: But sir, we were talking about the pain of sorrow. K: Shock, a psychological shock. M.Z.: Am I correct in understanding that in the registration of pain there is the impact, the shock, and we experience it as pain ? K: It is the continuation of remembrance of that shock. M.Z.: There is the fact of registration. So, what you suggested was that the blow as pain remained, without the vibration entering into it as registration. Then something else happens. Would you call this the action of insight? You also talked about remaining with the pain, with the blow, not moving into registration. K: Consider a millpond which is absolutely quiet, and you drop a stone into it. There are the waves, but when the waves are over, it is completely quiet again; the normality is the non-registration, because there is no stimulus at that point. M.Z.: Normality is not quiet. Why don't you call the waves normality? K: I purposely used the word `mill-pond'. That is its natural state - quietness. You drop something into it and there are waves. It is an outside action. M.Z.: Take the fact, you have a shock for various reasons. Can the mind remain with that shock, not let waves arise - which is the registration - but remain with the shock? S.P.: Normally what happens is that there is a shock and the observation of that shock is in the nature of duality, the observer feeling the shock. K: I have a shock. For the moment I am paralysed; I can't move. My son is dead. That's tremendous shock and a day or so later begins the whole movement of saying, `I have suffered, I have lost, I am lonely.; that movement takes days. I am suggesting, can one remain entirely with that pain? Then the waves won't come in. S.P.: Do you mean to say, if it is understood there would not be loneliness, pain? K: No. I am only saying, do you look at suffering holistically, which includes everything, or do you break it up as suffering, pain, pleasure, fear, anxiety. That's why I am suggesting that a religious life is a life which is holistic, in which there is total insight into the whole structure and nature of consciousness and the very ending of that. Have we answered this question or not at all? P.J.: We have started probing into the question. K: Where are we now after probing? After probing I must come to something. P.J.: I can remain with the nature of probing. K: Which means I probe into the whole nature of knowledge and place it, put it in its right place, and, therefore, it is no longer interfering with my perception. Knowledge is creating havoc in the world, destroying humanity, and without living a religious life, knowledge inevitably destroys humanity. We are saying that the very ascent through knowledge is the destruction of man, and to prevent that destruction, knowledge must be put in its right place, and in the very placing of it, is the beginning of the religious life. That is what our investigation so far has come to. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 4 PART 2 2ND SEMINAR MADRAS 3RD JANUARY 1979 'THE NATURE OF A RELIGIOUS LIFE' K: We said that according to scientists like Bronowski and others there is the ascent of man only through knowledge. Achyutji pointed out that knowledge is destroying the world. We were enquiring into this question of what is a religious mind and what you would consider a religious life. A.P.: Sir, the trouble is that with the advancement of technology, knowledge has become diversified, specialized; the mind tends to lose the sense of wholeness with the result that the fragmented mind of man is the source of mischief. Knowledge is preventing us from seeing the whole. Is it possible for us to understand the process by which we can glimpse the religious mind? K: Sir, you said just now that knowledge is preventing a holistic outlook, holistic in the sense of an outlook that is whole. I wonder if that is so. Or is it that the intellect has become so supremely important that it has brought about a deep fragmentation? Is it that the worship of the intellect with all its activities has brought about a sense of the breaking up of the whole nature of man? I am just putting that forward to be discussed, not as a theory. Would you accept that? Because, the intellect implies the whole movement of thought, the cognition through, the understanding through, thought. When you use that word, the implication is, thought has understood what is being said. Thought which is the instrument of the intellect, being essentially limited, has brought about this cleavage, this fragmentation of man. Thought is not the movement of a religious mind. D.S.: You said thought is not the movement of a religious mind. Certainly the religious mind thinks. K: Let me explain that. Thought, I said, cannot contain the religious mind. Thought in itself being a fragment, whatever it does will bring about fragmentation, and a religious mind is not fragmentary. P.K. Sundaram: Knowledge, in so far as it is mediated by the mind, must be considered essentially as transitive - it always wants an object. It is intentional, it must go forth from itself to find an object for itself. When it does so, naturally it dissects. Thought always dwells on dualities without which it cannot even live. So, the religious mind must transcend duality, the duality between thought and object. K: I am questioning whether there is duality at all. P.J.: Sir, what do you mean when you question the fact of duality? K: I question whether duality exists. S.P.: But we are living in duality. K: The opposite may be an illusion. S.P.: The thinking process itself functions in duality. K: Let me expand it a little more. Has the fact an opposite? S.P.: Will you say thought is a fact? K: Thought is a fact. What it has invented, apart from technology, is an illusion - the gods, the rituals. What is considered a religious mind - is an illusion, illusion being a perception with a certain direction, a prejudice, a fixation. We are saying that a fact, that is, anger or envy, has no opposite. P.J.: I question this whole business of duality and fact. We use the word `illusion' because you have introduced the word. K: I use the word `illusion' in the sense - sensory perception of external objects which is coloured, which is destroyed by belief, by prejudice, by opinion, by a conclusion. I would call that an illusion. P.J.: I will use a phrase which you used in another context. My face is observable in the mirror; Achyutji's face is also observable. I divide my face from that of Achyutji's face; there are two. That too is a part of consciousness within me. How can you say that the two which are within me are an illusion? It is this separation which divides us, which brings into being the problem of becoming which moves away from being. It is in this movement to become that all the other processes of comparison, opposites, want, not want, the more, the less, exist. K: How do you perceive Achyutji, how do you observe him? How do you look at him? P.J.: When you ask that question, the response comes from the thirty years I have been hearing you. K: Put away all the thirty years. How will you now observe Achyutji? What is the process of observation? If that observation is pure - in the sense, without any kind of motive, distortion, prejudice, so that there is nothing between your perception and the object which you perceive - then that very perception denies duality. R.R.: I don't have that pure perception. K: That's the problem. The whole question to me is: there is only the fact. A fact has no opposite. But we accept duality: I am angry; I must not be angry. R.R.: But in my perception I see Achyutji separate. K: Which means what? Your perception is conditioned. Can you observe putting aside that conditioning? S.P.: Would you say that so long as there is conditioning, there is duality? K: I would. S.P.: Then is not duality a fact? K: No. It is the conditioning that decides duality. P.J.: It decides? K: It says there is duality. P.J.: You used a phrase: put aside. What is implied in it? K: Putting aside implies there is no `you' to put aside. R.D.: Is putting aside an illusion? K: No. Let me explain. The perception of sorrow and the moving away from that perception is the continuation of sorrow. That continuation which is memory, which is remembrance of an incident which was sorrow, creates duality. And can the observation be so complete that there is no observer and the thing observed, only observation? `Putting away' means to be aware of this whole movement away from the fact, which creates duality. Then there is pure observation in which there is no duality. D.S.: Krishnaji, are you saying that in the act of seeing Achyutji, there is an awareness of the very act of making the separateness? K: Yes, that means your awareness is conditioned by the past and tradition and all that, therefore there is duality. D.S.: But is there an awareness of this whole movement? K: Yes. R.R.: What you have just said is a theoretical idea to me. K: Why is it a theoretical idea? D.S.: Because that is not my perception. K: How would you get that perception - not my perception, but perception? If you would examine that, then perhaps we could go into the question of non-movement in which there is non-movement of perception. R.R.: Non-movement of perception? You mean a perception that does not move? Please explain that. K. We are saying that when there is perception without the observer, then there is no duality. Duality occurs when there is the observer and the observed. The observer is the past. So, through the eyes of the past the observation takes place and that creates a duality. P.J.: The only point in question then is, when you said `When there is perception without the observer,' you used the word `when'. K: Yes, because he says to me that it is a theory to him. P.J.: That's why I ask: How is a person to come to a state in which the `when' has ceased? Uma: I am observing, I find my observation is interrupted and I also know that it is interrupted because I don't have the energy to be in that state of observation. K: Why don't you have that energy? Perception does not need energy. You just perceive. D.S.: There is validity when she says you lose energy. But is it a question of losing energy or is there a subtle kind of commitment when I look at Achyutji, much as I am attached in some way to creating duality? In other words, I want him to be there so that somehow or the other I can go on relating to him as a separate entity? That's where I think the energy is dissipated, because I am attached to creating him as an object. It is something I need; the mere presence of him is a duality, is a drug which satisfies me. That is where my energy gets dissipated. It is because in most cases it is a commitment to duality. K: Not commitment. It is your tradition or conditioning. Your whole outlook is that. D.S.: It is much easier for me in some sense to create the duality because then I know. P.J.: Still we have not come to the core of the problem. G.N.: There is a core of memory functioning. We are trained in memory functioning and it is always in some way associated with knowledge, and when you have memory functioning and knowledge, duality occurs. K.K.: Why is it that all these are becoming problems? We are all the time converting facts into problems. We are all the time in the world of duality because we are all the time ordered by ideas. For me it is quite simple; I see that we can't remain with the fact because we are haunted by ideas. G.N.: The difficulty is, we are acquiring knowledge all the time and knowledge is being converted into memory, and in this process there is duality creeping in. It may be a problem, it may not be. There is something more than that. A.P.: I see that man can survive only as an indivisible whole, but the weight of my knowledge and the requirements of my daily living are stressing separateness, and separateness is so overpowering that it seems to eclipse the perception that man's well-being is indivisible. Do you think I am creating a problem because I am stating it? The problem is implicit in the human situation. K: What is a problem? What is the meaning of the word? A.P.: A contradiction. K: No. A problem is something not resolved, something that you have not worked out, something which is bothering you, worrying you, that goes on day after day, for many years. He is asking: Why don't we resolve something that arises as a problem immediately and not carry on and on? P.J.: Sir, what he has said is unacceptable. There are many other issues involved here. The issues are that it does not need Krishnaji to tell me that there is a source of energy, perception, which I have not touched. Without touching that, this partial solution of the problem keeps on existing, keeps me within the framework of time, for eternity. I know that the very imperatives of the human situation demand that there must be a source of energy which, once touched, will physically transform our ways of thinking. K.K.: Will that become an ideal, an idea? K: What do you call an idea? D.S.: An idea is a thought that displays or presents a constructive perception. It presents or shows the way of ordering of a perception. It has to do with display, with show. K: The root meaning is `to observe'. Look up a dictionary; you will see it means `to perceive', which means, to perceive that flower and not make an idea of that. R.R.: It is not the sense in which it is generally used. P.J.: Even if you take its present usage, idea is something which I move towards. K. I hear a statement from you or from Dr. Shainberg. Why should I make an idea of it? Why can't I see a flower, that thing that is there and only observe it? Why should there be an idea? P.K.S.: Without seeing it as a fly, I don't see the fly at all. K: That thing that is moving there, sir, I may not call it a fly; I may call it something else but it is that thing. D.S.: The whole act of perception in the nervous system is by an organization of that form. K: Organization, yes. Not of that form. But I name it a fly. S.P.: Are you saying you can see the form without naming? K: Why can't you? P.K.S.: Sir, is not the perception of the form on the same level as the perception of the fly? K: Can I observe you or you observe me without forming a conclusion, without forming an idea of me? P.K.S.: That is possible. K: We started out discussing the place of knowledge in religious life. Let us start from here again and move around. We said knowledge is destroying the world without this religious mind. Then we started asking what is a religious mind. Now, what is a religious mind? P.J.: The first question that arises out of that is, what is the instrument I have? K: First of all, I use intellect, reason, logic. I do not accept any authority. P.J.: And the senses? K: Of course, that's implied. Logic, reason, all that is implied, sanity without any illusion, without a belief dictating my enquiry. That means a mind that is free to look. P.J.: The difficulty is in your very statement of what you have said; you have annihilated the whole premise. K: Which is what? P.J.: Which is the structure of human consciousness. K: So, what is human consciousness? P.J.: The structure of human consciousness is thought, belief, movement, becoming, identity. K: And dogma. So, consciousness is the whole movement of thought with its content. I am a Hindu, I believe in puja, I worship, I pray, I am anxious, I am afraid - all that is this whole spectrum of movement. P.J.: What place has the word `sanity' which you use in this totality? K: One's consciousness is an insane consciousness. G.N.: Do you imply that sanity is not caught in make-believe? K: Sanity means sane, healthy, no make-believe. I don't pretend I am healthy, I don't pretend that I do puja and that it will lead me to some heaven. I say that is nonsense. So, sanity means a healthy mind, a healthy body, a healthy inwardness. G.N.: If one is not sane, can one enquire? K: How can I be sane when I am a businessman and go off to do puja? It is insanity. P.J.: Are you saying that this consciousness which has all these elements can never enquire? K: That is what I am saying. So, my consciousness is a bundle of contradictions, a bundle of hopes, illusions, fears, pleasures, anxiety, sorrow and all that. Can that consciousness find a religious way of life? Obviously it cannot. S.P.: You say sanity is necessary for the mind to start enquiry, but this consciousness which is enquiring is full of contradictions. K: Such a mind cannot even understand or even be capable of enquiry. So, I'll drop the enquiry into a religious life, and enquire into consciousness. Then my enquiry is sane, logical. P.J.: In all the traditional ways of approaching this whole content of consciousness, it is symbolized by one word `I', and the enquiry is into the nature and the dissolution of the `I'. K: All right. Let us work at it. We say in religious life there is a total absence of the self. Then my enquiry is whether the self can be dissolved. So I say: What is my consciousness? I begin from there and see if it is possible to empty totally that consciousness. P.J.: What is the nature of that emptying? K: I am doing it now. Can I be free from my attachment? Can I be free from my absurd daily puja ? Can I be free from my nationalism? Can I be free from following some authority? I go on, and my consciousness is totally stripped of its contradictions. I hope that silences you. Let us start enquiring whether it is possible to be aware totally, holistically, of our consciousness. If it is not possible, let us take fragment by fragment - but will that bring about comprehension of the total perception of consciousness? P.K.S.: Will you not be open to the charge of being intellectual in your enquiry? K: No. I put my heart into it. With my whole being I am enquiring. My heart, my affection, my nerves, my senses, my intellect, my thought, everything is involved in this enquiry. R.R.: Sir, will you state the conditions of this enquiry? K: You are a scientist. You observe and that very observation changes that which is being observed. Why can't you do that with yourself? R.R.: Because my attention wanders. K: Which means what? When you are looking, in spite of your acquiring knowledge, you put that aside when you are watching. The very watching is the transformation of that which is being observed. R.R.: Sir, maybe I am not expressing it rightly. If I observe myself, I think it is a fact for me that my attention wanders. K: Let us begin step by step. I am watching myself. I can only watch myself; `myself is a bundle of reactions. I begin with things which are very near to me, such as puja. I see it, I look at it, I watch it, and I don't say, `Well, it pleases me because I am used to it.' I see it is absurd and put it away for ever. R.R.: It does not seem to work like that. K: Is it because of your habit? R.R.: Yes, that is right. K: So go into habit. Why do you have habit? Why do you have a mind functioning in habit which means a mechanical mind? Why is it mechanical? Is it because it is very safe to be mechanical, secure? And has this repetition of puja which gives you security, any real security in it or have you invested security in it? R.R.: I give it security. K: Therefore, wipe it away. R.R.: This is where the difficulty is. I can see my mind is mechanical or caught in habit, but that does not seem to lead to what you seem to suggest, of cutting away. K: Because your mind is still functioning in habit. Do you have a habit? Are there good habits or bad habits, or are there only habits? And why are you caught in them? So let us come back. We are saying, consciousness that is in turmoil, in contradiction, wanders from one thing to another. There is a battle that is going on. So long as that consciousness is there, you can never pure perceiving. Is it possible to bring about in consciousness a total absence of this movement of contradiction? S.P.: I can see the truth of repetitiveness, the mechanical action of puja, and it is out of my system. Speaking of other things, many fragments, the truth of them can be seen and negated. Even then the problem remains, which is the ending of the content of consciousness. There can be an ending of a fragment but the problem is that of ending the totality of consciousness. K: Are you saying that sequentially you see fragment by fragment? Then you can never come to the end of the fragmentation. S.P.: That is what we see after ten, fifteen years of observing. K.: You can't. Therefore, you must say, is there an observation which is total? I hear the statement that through fragmentation, through examining the fragmentation in my consciousness which is endless, it cannot be resolved that way. Have I listened to it? Have I understood it deeply in my heart, in my blood, in my whole being, that examining fragmentation will never solve it? I have understood that; therefore, I won't touch it. I won't go near a guru. All that is out because they all deal with fragments - the communists, the socialists, the gurus, the religious people, everything is fragmented, including human beings. S.P.: Have I to see all the implications at this point or have I to work it out? K: No, no. Working out is a fragmentation. I can't see the whole because my whole being, thinking, living, is fragmented. What is the root of this fragmentation? Why has one divided the world into nations, religions? Why? S.P.: The mind says it is the `I-ness' which acts. K: No, that is intellectual. I said to you, listen. How do you listen to that statement? Listening with the intellect is fragmentation. Hearing with the ear is fragmentation. Do you listen with your whole, entire being, or do you just say `Yes, it is a good idea'? George Sudarshan: I feel very stagnant, checkered by this attack on knowledge. It is not knowledge which is causing fragmentation but its function. So, let me go back to the question: What is a religious life? It is cessation of the contradiction between causality and spontaneity. Most of the world around is causal: That is, this being so this happens, if this has happened, it must have been because of such and so. All this is comparison, copying. If you can't copy a system, then you cannot talk about a law or the system, and, therefore, there is much of the world which is of our experience, which we talk about in terms of causality. On the other hand, fortunately, we are also subject to the experience of spontaneity, experiences of movement with no cause, without time, in which there is only functioning. Much of the problem of life is, in fact, reconciling these two things because, somehow or the other, one feels these two are both real experiences and one would like to resolve the contradiction. As far as I have observed, it appears to me that when you are in the spontaneous mode of functioning, there is in fact no possibility of it being broken down. When you are happy, you are happy; then there is no question of anxiety about it. If at any time you feel that you would like to continue this mode, then, of course, the mode has already ceased. When you want to maintain an experience which you already have in time, corruption has set in, and it is only a matter of time before it will come to an end. Therefore, the whole question of how to end fragmentation is wrong. We cannot logically conceive it, we cannot dictate the rules, we cannot legislate it, we cannot write a manual about it. Therefore, in a certain sense, when it comes, it comes by itself. That is, in fact, the only true mode of existence. K: So, what do we do? Say I am fragmented and carry on? G.S.: It is not a question of `I am fragmented and let us carry on'. In the fragmented mode you try to perceive. K: Being fragmented, I live a fragmented life and recognise it, and so leave it? G.S.: Would you tell me how to end fragmentation, the process? K: I will tell you, sir. G.N.: No, not ending fragmentation by process, because once you say process, it can become mechanical. K: Quite right. S.P.: What Krishnaji is talking about is the ending of time as a factor to end fragmentation. D.S.: One of the things that is emerging clearly for me is that something about the very framework of thought conditions and limits and fragments it. K: Right sir, thought is fragmentary. D.S.: And that framework? K: Thought is not in that framework. Thought is always fragmentary. So, what is the root of fragmentation? Can thought stop? G.S.: Just stop? K: Not periodically, occasionally, spontaneously. To me all that implies a movement in time. G.S.: As long as you are thinking, that is movement. K: I said so. Thought is the root of fragmentation. Thought is a movement and so time is a movement. So, can time stop? G.S.: May I make a slight distinction? You say thought is the cause of fragmentation. I ask, where did that thought arise - in the unfragmented state or the fragmented? K: In the fragmented state. We answer always from a fragmented mind. G.S.: No. K: I said, generally. And is there a speaking which comes of a non-fragmented mind? G.S.: I am not sure I am following your terminology. K: We said thought is fragmented, that it is the cause of fragmentation. G.S.: What I am saying is that we see fragmentation and thought together. To say that one is the cause of the other is not true. K: Cause and effect are the same. G.S.: So, they are aspects of the same entity? K: Thought and fragment are the same movement, which is part of time. It is the same thing, whether it is one or the other. So, I can ask, can time stop? Can psychological time, inward time, stop? Can the whole movement stop completely? There is a cessation of time. Time is not. I don't become time or my being is not in time. There is nothing, which means, love is not of time. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 4 PART 3 3RD SEMINAR MADRAS 4TH JANUARY 1979 'THE NATURE OF A RELIGIOUS LIFE' N. Vasudevan Nair: What is the choice before mankind, sir? In the enormity of his grief, man faces the world, which is a very devastating experience. He crawls on all fours to catch a blade of grass, he suffers, he is lost. Can there be a complete rebirth or has he to undergo the pain of one birth after another? K: Are you asking, sir, what is the challenge before mankind? N. V.N.: What is his choice? To be born or not to be born? To be or not to be? K: Would you say that is a real question: What is the challenge for mankind in the present crisis? N. V.N: No. That is not the real question. The real question is, to be or not to be. K: I don't quite understand the question, sir. Please explain. What is the real question which we have been discussing for the last two days? We all see, quite obviously, the deterioration of mankind not only in this country but in every country, and we have not only to stop it but also to bring about a re-birth - not the old pattern but a totally different way of life. Is that the question we are asking? We also see that science, Karl Marx, Gita, the Upanishads, Mao and all the organizational propaganda and institutions have completely failed. And we are asking: Is there a way of living which is totally religious in the sense that we are using the word? And we are trying to investigate what is that religious life. Because historically, as one observes, a new culture, a new way of painting, music, living, comes out of a deep, profound religious life. What is that religious life which is not sentimental, romantic, devotional, because all that is utterly meaningless? What is a truly religious mind? That is what we are trying to investigate in this group. As Achyutji pointed out, knowledge, whether it is Marxian or scientific or the accumulated knowledge of mankind in any field, is destroying man, and to end that destruction, a new way, a religious way, has to be found. Is it possible to find a religious way in the modern world with all the technological advancement, with all the crumbling relationships? P.K.S.: Earlier we came to the conclusion that a religious life is the very antithesis of fragmentation. We spoke of two things which are mutually incompatible as far as I can see: One, complete emptying of the mind, and the other, the removal of fragmentation. But fragmentation is the opposite of totality. Totality is richness, not emptiness. You spoke of emptying the mind. Are we going to fill the mind or empty the mind? This incompatibility I am not able to follow. Prof. Sanjivi: Now, that is the pertinent question which I also wanted to pose before you. Is emptying the mind practicable? Is it possible, relevant, in day-to-day life? K: We are trying to examine a way of life which is nonfragmentary, which is holistic, whole, and perhaps that would lead us to a truly religious life. We said that because thought in itself is limited, all its movements are fragmentary. Thought itself is fragmented. Would you accept that? San: Sir, there is one difficulty in accepting this. Even this thought is the result of a fragmentary thought. Is it not? K: No. This is not a thought; it is a statement. A.P.: It is an insight. San: Even if you call it an insight, is it not the result of a fragmentary personality? K: No, sir. G.N.: We have a lot of knowledge, and from that knowledge there is a way of functioning. What is the difference between knowledge and insight? What is the nature of insight? A religious life, you say, is a sane life. There is some connection between that and insight which is not just knowledge, which is not a memory function. Is it possible to communicate this distinction? A.P.: I would like to add that insight is different from conclusion. When there is knowledge, there is conclusion. When there is insight, it opens a door. So, we must also understand the difference between a conclusion which comes from knowledge and an insight, which is qualitatively different. K: Are we trying now to explore what is insight? D.S.: We should also discuss the question of how a fragmented mind can investigate. K: First, let us see that the movement of thought must inevitably be a broken up process. You are asking whether this statement is not also a fragmentary statement. It is. Uma: I see the movement of thought; I am observing it, I am perceiving it. Even as I observe, I become very silent. But at the same time, I see the need for change, the urgency of change, and the very content of observation prevents that. There is conflict because I want to change and I see it is all in the movement of thought. K: All that is the movement of thought, and that very movement is a fragmentary movement. The point and the question is, can that fragmentary movement end? What do you say, sir? D.S.: Krishnaji, I am rattled. Even the question `Can this end?' comes out of another fragment. K: She used the word `perception'. She watches, she perceives her own life, and in that perception she discovers that there is conflict, that there is fragmentation, and the need for change in herself. So, the essential point here is perception, the seeing of this whole movement of thought. Is that what you are trying to say? Could we then discuss what perception is, not theoretically but actually? Could we go into that and move from there? San: I think the relevant and useful thing for us to discuss today will be what the technique behind it is and how it is possible as a practicable solution in day-to-day life. P.J.: Sir, could we start the investigation into the religious mind with the query, how can thought end? San: I, for the time being, accept you suggestion that the solution to all the problems would be the cessation of thought, the stopping of the thought process. How does one achieve that? K: Would you say a religious life is the ending of all movement of thought, the ending of all problems? San: That's how I have understood you. K: Sir, it is much more complex. Shall we discuss that? R.D.: One difficulty arises in almost all of us - that is, the `I' and thought. When we use the word `thought', we seem to externalize it as if it is there as a kind of object we don't perceive. Insight is to see from within. Is it possible for one to see from within? K: You have put so many questions. Where shall we start? Do we all see or understand, either verbally or intellectually or deeply, that thought, in itself being limited whatever its activity, is broken up? Do we see it, or intellectually agree with it? The next question that arises would be, is it possible to stop thought, and if it is stopped, then what is my activity in my daily life? Can thought be stopped, and who is it that stops it? If there is an entity which can stop it, that entity is either outside the field of thought or created by thought itself. I am an outside agency and I am going to stop it. If that agency is outside - heaven or god or whatever - then that very outside agency is created by thought. So, our problem then is: Can thought realize itself as limited, and, therefore, being limited, limit itself to a certain activity in daily life? Now, the next question is: Can thought become aware of itself, and in that very awareness put itself in a particular corner, as it were, and from that corner act? But it can't. D.S.: Let us look at it from another angle then. If I want to put a nail in the wall, I take a hammer and hit the nail. If I want to go rowing in a boat I use an oar and row. What happens to thought? Thought does not see itself in such a fashion. In other words, thought has a function like a nail to a hammer or an oar to a boat. What happens if thought arrogates or takes on more than it is supposed to take on? You were saying thought has a limited function. K: No sir. This is the question: Can thought become aware of itself as being limited? R.D.: Can thought intellectually think that it is limited? K: It is still another thought that says I am limited. So, let us move out of that for a while. Can your consciousness become aware of itself? P.J.: What is the difference between thought becoming aware of itself and consciousness becoming aware of itself? Does consciousness itself have a capacity to reflect itself? K: Has consciousness the capacity to observe itself, not reflect itself? Is there in consciousness a seeing or an element that observes itself as is? It is very important to find out if there is observation. Is there an observer observing, or there is only pure observation? P.K.S.: If consciousness can observe itself, then I think we are introducing a duality within consciousness itself. K: Sir, consciousness is full of duality. I do, I don't, I must not, fear, courage - the whole of that is consciousness. That's why it is so difficult. I say one thing, you say another. We never meet. M.Z.: Are we admitting that thought is capable of recognising a fact? K: No. S.P.: Is awareness of consciousness part of consciousness? K: I would like to discuss it. Is there an observation without the observer? Because if there is, then that observation operates on the whole of consciousness. It is important to discuss this question of observation. We are missing a very important thing, which is, there is only observation, not the observer. D.S.: If I know that there is observation without the observer, I have already introduced an observer. K: Why is there not pure observation? It is because you are introducing an observer into observation. So, who is the observer? Am I introducing the observer into observation? I am saying: As long as there is an observer different from his observation and what is observed, there must be duality. As most of us observe with the observer, we, therefore, have to examine what the observer is. I want to come to a point where I can carry this out in my daily life. How can I observe without the observer? Can I observe my actions, my wife, my husband, my children, the whole cultural tradition, without the observer? Who is the observer to whom you give so much importance? P.K.S.: Sir, you seem to be dogmatically accepting the distinction between the observer and observation as though there is an observer apart from observation. K: No. I said we have established this in our life - the observer, `I am observing', `I am looking', `My opinion is that', and so on. That is the whole build-up through generations, the idea that the observer is different from that which he is observing. I observe this house. Obviously the home is different from me, from the observer. P.K.S.: The object is different from the observer but observation is not. K: I am coming to that. There is an observation of that thing called a tree. There is an observation, and I say it is a tree, and so on. Now, we are talking about psychological observation. In that observation, there is a duality - I and the thing I am observing. It is the observer who brings about this distinction. Now, what is the observer? S.P.: The whole collection of experience and identification is the observer. The observer has many depths. K: That is, knowledge, the past; the past being accumulation of knowledge, experience of mankind - racial, non-racial. The observer is the past. A.P.: With one addition - the observer is the past plus the sense of continuity. K: The continuity is the observer who is the past meeting the present, modifying itself and continuing the present. San: The observer has depths which are very difficult to fathom. K: I don't think so. I know the observer has depth, the depth being knowledge of centuries. P.J.: The nature of the observer is the field of consciousness. What is the totality of the observer, the totality of consciousness? K: You talked about totality of consciousness and whether there can be an observation without the observer. Now, when you say there are depths to the observer, I say the observer himself is the field of consciousness. The totality of the observer is itself the field of observation. You can keep on expanding the observer endlessly. Look, Pupulji. Make it very simple: Can I observe my wife or my husband without all the accumulation that I have had during my twenty years of life with her or him? P.J.: I may say `yes'. K: That would just be agreeing. We are not meeting the point. Can I observe my wife or husband with whom I have lived, and about whom, during the course of those twenty years, I have accumulated knowledge, as she has about me? Can I observe her without the accumulated knowledge? San: As it is, it is not possible. K: The observer is the past, whether it is the totality of consciousness, infinite depth and so on. Can you observe your wife, husband, as though you are seeing a human for the first time? Then your whole relationship changes. S.P.: There is one difficulty. There have been occasions when one can see a husband or a friend without any move- ment of the past. So, one sees it is possible to see that way. When you say the entire relationship is changed for ever, then the difficulty arises. K: All right. Have we communicated to each other that the observer who is the past and, therefore, time-bound creates the distinction between himself and his wife - dominating her, pushing her? So, the past is always operating. And, therefore, his relationship with her is based not on affection, not on love, but on the past. S.P.: We have affection. K: I question it. Can we have affection if there is the operation of the past? San: There is only one way out. K: I am not seeking a way out. I want to understand the problem in which I live. There is no way out. All I am concerned with is how I approach a problem, because the approach is going to dictate the understanding of the problem. P.K.S.: Then the question arises: Is the observer able to observe the past? K: That constitutes the ego, the `I', the self, the `me'. P.J.: You say: Can the observer observe the past? That is the essential nature of the enquiry. Is it possible for an observation to be there without the observer? San: Is that the question or something different: (a) Can you make an observation without the burden of the past; or (b) Can there be an observation without the observer? I find a world of difference between the two. K: Sir, this is the problem with all of us. Can I observe a thing without all the burden of the past? Because, if it is possible to observe totally, then that observation is not time-bound, it is not a continuity. The moment you do it, don't you fall into a new mode of existence; something totally irrevocable? P.J.: How is it possible? S.P.: At this point, what does the mind do? What can it do? There is no movement of thought. K: That's why I am enquiring into the process of observing the observer. The observer is the past. Can the observer see the movement of the past as it operates? Is there an observation of the past - the hurt, for example? Is there an observation of the movement of hurt, the whole cycle of hurt, psychologically, biologically, physically and so on, the hurt which involves resistance, agony, pain, all that? Can there be an observation of that hurt, that observation telling the story of the hurt, revealing itself? Is it impractical? S.P.: Again, we are taking a fragmentary view of the whole thing. D.S.: Everything you see in some way is the action of the observer. So, every question arises in the condition of the observer. K: If I tell you a simple fact, that love is not of time, then duality, the observer, everything ends. Now, what is a religious life? Obviously, all things that go on in the name of religion are not religion - all the rituals, the puja, the gods, all that is out. Then what will it be? All that is thrown out, which means you are throwing out yourself, the `me'. So, the essence of religion is the total absence of the `me', of the `self. San: What is it you mean by self? Is it ego? K: Ego, which means my characteristics, my desires, my fears. San: But is it not the mechanism of observation - an instrument to observe? A.P.: Would you accept it if I say that the self is only an adhesive, it has the quality of making things stick to it. K: The description is not the self. I want to see what the self is. Can that self be washed off? Can I get rid of my jealousy, anger? As long as that is there - fear of this or that - I have no religious mind. I can pretend to be religious by going to a temple. You have to see that you are selfish. The self is jealousy, envy, greed, authority, power, position, domination, attachment. End it. And can you be selfless, can you live without the self and live in this world? Is that what you asked? San: Not exactly that. We left at the point that the solution of all problems is to stop thinking, stop the whole process of thinking. It will be more fruitful if we find a technique for this. K: Sir, the word `technique' signifies practice, a continuous repetition and that makes the mind mechanical. A mechanical mind can never have love. Please see that any system will make the mind mechanical. If you see it intellectually, probe it further. We have had systems galore and nobody has come to anything with these systems. D.S.: The fact is that we have talked about it many times. Inevitably the question is: Is there a system? In the very nature of the observer arise the questions: How can I be religious, how can I be unselfish, how can I be this, how can I be that? Everybody wants to get another drug; everybody is trying to get there. K: Yes sir, every body wants to be something else. Everybody is doing something. So, all I say is: Start where you are. D.S.: You stick to that? K: I do. D.S.: But you talk of being unselfish. M.Z.: Envy, jealousy and all this is where you are. D.S.: In all that he has said, there is a subtle suggestion that you can get rid of jealousy, envy. K: No sir. That is your comprehension, rather misinterpretation. I am saying: Start near. Because, if you know this whole history of man which is you, it is finished. D.S.: You just don't change that. K: It is a book, a vast book, and I read it. I am not trying to change it. I want to read the whole history instantly. S.P.: Without movement in time, how can you read? K: I just want to know the whole content of myself. My whole consciousness is its content. And I am investigating. You can investigate something when you are free, when there is no prejudice, belief, conclusion. R.D.: Then there is no investigation at all of the history. The history is the prejudice, and you are saying, `Read it.' K: Then it is finished. I have come to the end of the chapter. S.P.: Then you are not really interested in investigating the content but in stopping? R.D.: There are people who are seeking systems. I see intellectually that a system will not end the problem at all. So, I don't seek. Now the question is, what do I do? I am learning and observing, but my tool of observation is still the intellect. And I am sitting and observing with you. The tool is inadequate -investigation through knowledge. I see this now; I see something very practical. I have denied systems, denied practice. Where am I? K: If you have put away systems, practice, what is the quality of your mind? R.D.: It is enquiring, investigating. K: You are not answering my question. What is the state of your mind when you have put away systems? Look, sirs, you have seen something false, and you have dropped it. You have put away systems. Why have you put them away? Because you see they are silly, you logically see it. Which means what? Your mind has become sharper, more intelligent. That intelligence is going to observe, put away everything that is false. That intelligence sees fragmentarily or sees the wholeness of it. When you put away something false, your mind is lighter. It is like climbing a mountain and throwing away that which you don't need. Your mind becomes very, very clear. So your mind has the capacity of perceiving that which is true and that which is false. Discard everything that is false, which is, everything that thought has put together. Then the mind has no illusion. Sir, that is the whole book, I am not reading anything but the book. I began with the first chapter which says: Be aware of your senses. And the next chapter says: Human beings have their partial senses, exaggerating one sense and denying the others. The third chapter says: See that all the senses can operate; that means there is no centre of a particular sensory operation. And the fourth chapter and so on. I am not going to read the book for you. Read it and explore the nature of the religious life. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 5 PART 1 1ST SEMINAR MADRAS 13TH JANUARY 1978 'INSIGHTS INTO REGENERATION' Sunanda Patwardhan: The present century is witness to tremendous advances in technology and the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge, and yet this does not seem to have brought about a better society or happiness to man. Serious people all over the world are increasingly questioning the role of technology and knowledge in society. It is in this context of the values in culture and in human consciousness that we have to search for the roots of regeneration and of human progress. Mankind can no longer be looked upon as an entity in mass. Though we are meeting in Madras which is just a part, a corner, of this great ancient earth, I feel that our perspective and approach to the problems should have a global dimension. A.P.: Modern society developed during the last two hundred years. It has certain clear postulates - that the problems that affect human society arise from a lack of material resources, from poverty, disease, squalor; and that these can be remedied by control over the material environment. This view persists in men's minds, particularly in countries like India where there is so much poverty. Similarly, the institutional patterns of ownership of property and social resources have been treated as one of the principal factors of social disorder. It is becoming increasingly obvious that these postulates are a facile oversimplification. Misuse of resources are a peril to human survival. The criminal misdirection of scientific and technological skill for the production of lethal weapons, atomic and others, and pollution are grave risks to human survival. Science and technology by themselves have no defence against their own misuse. Similarly, the developments in the communist world clearly expose the naive optimism that changes in the ownership pattern will automatically lead to the creation of a society of free and equal men. Marxism and science were the gods of my generation but they have failed to avert the crisis in which human society is caught. Today we question the validity of unrestricted growth of the gross national product as the index of economic wellbeing. The oil crisis and the energy crisis have lent great weight to this scrutiny. A wider question arises about whether the growth of knowledge itself is not equally irrelevant to the central predicament of modern man. Man is tethered to a fragmented view of human development which aggravates the crisis. We are, therefore, once again moving away from the periphery to explore whether human consciousness is capable of a radical regeneration which makes possible a new perspective and a sane and humane relationship. We need to go beyond our present resources of knowledge to come upon that wisdom which is also compassion. So long as we treat the ego as a semi-permanent entity, it appears that love is locked out and we live in a field of approximations. Regeneration of man in society is tied up with the problem of self-knowing. We now find that no solution can arise out of a social perspective. P.J.: Can we indicate the pressures, the challenges, which man faces today within and without? There is no answer to the problem of self-regeneration unless man comprehends the sense of humanness. Does this understanding come through knowledge, through technological processes? In what direction does man search? I would suggest, therefore, that it is only through discussion, dialogue, that the nature of our thinking can be laid bare. This would bring to light not only the predicament but also the solution. Ivan Illich: One of our concerns in the last ten years has been that a challenge which previously was regional has become worldwide. For instance, the need to seek joy, peace, enlightenment, satisfaction through the acceptance of limits; and an austerity, a renunciation which previously might have been considered merely a personal task for individuals in certain kinds of cultures, based on their personal convictions, is becoming the absolutely necessary condition for survival. The need for this can be operationally verified, demonstrated scientifically. We are gathered here from very different cultures and traditions. During the last generation, we have come - one nation after another, one representative group after another, parties, professions like medicine or teaching - to accept as the purpose of public obligation certain concepts which were not really around when I was born only fifty years ago. Progress, development, in the sense in which we use these terms today is a post-World War II concept. Economic growth, GNP are words which some of the older amongst us still have some difficulty in grasping. Progress, growth, development, have come to be understood essentially as the substitution of things which people previously did on their own. Its use-value is being substituted by the commodity. In this process, politics has become mainly a concern of providing for everybody equal outputs of commodities. The equal protection of people's power and ability to make, to do things on their own, to be autonomous, the struggle for productive freedoms as opposed to productive rights, has been almost forgotten, submerged, rendered impossible by the various systems within which we live. If, as you say, Pupulji, there is one canvas, one analytical tool, one way of looking at the peculiar mutation in front of which we stand, this is what I propose: For a hundred years - and in a very intensive way for thirty years - progress had been conceived of as enrichment, which inevitably destroyed those conditions in the environment which make autonomy possible. This is the real environmental destruction, in my opinion, deeper even than the destruction of the physical environment through poisons, through the aggressive overuse of the earth's resources. It is the destruction in the environment of those conditions - social, physical, mental -which make autonomy possible. When you live in a large city almost anywhere in the world, such simple things as giving birth or dying autonomously become impossible. The apartment, the rhythm of life, is not arranged for it. People have lost even the basic skills which any midwife would have or any human being had who stood next to another when he died. Most of us - unless we are lucky to live perhaps in the suburbs of Benares or in the countryside of India - are not allowed to die. I am using the transitive term `to die'. We will cease to exist under an action, which I shall call `Medicare'. It is not murder, but man is made into a vegetable for the benefit of a hospital. The rhythm of this development is of a grasping, accumulative society, a society in which men are being led to believe that modern techniques require such a society, where technical progress means the incorporation of new inventions into the commodity production processes. Printed books are tools for teachers; ball bearings are means to accelerate motorized vehicles even to a point where the car pushes the bicycle off the road. Now, it is an illusion that technical progress could be used in order to render a modern society use-value intensive. In a commodity-intensive society, goods which can be produced in a machine are at the centre of the economy. And what people can do on their own is permitted marginally, is tolerated as long as it does not interfere with the process of enrichment; in a society in which we inverse this use-value intensive and get modern, we welcome technical devices only when we increase the ability of people to generate use-values which are not destined for the markets and we consider commodities very valuable only when we increase people's ability to do or make things on their own. In the kind of society in which we live, legitimate production is overwhelmingly the result of employment. I buy part of your time and energy, paying for it, and make you work under my administration. Now in a use-value oriented society,just the opposite would be true. Besides the work there would be equal access to tools, opportunities for making or doing things without being employed. Any employment would be considered a condition which is necessary. Now, how do we experience what it means to be human? In summarizing a similar revolution in the darkest of the middle ages in Europe, my teacher, Lerner, points out three concepts of revolution, of turning around: One, which goes back to the Golden Age and then starts again; the second, the turning of this world into a golden age; and the third, the organistic view. Lerner carefully worked out these three ideas and said that in the sixth or seventh century, a fourth view came about through a marriage between the Christian message and the monastic tradition which came from the East into Europe - that each man is responsible for his own revolution. And that the only way for the world to be transformed is by the transformation of each man, principally guided by the idea of basic virtue. The first virtue to cultivate in the process of true revolution is austerity or poverty of spirit. And austerity was defined by a 13th century philosopher as that particular part of the virtue of balance or prudence, which is the basis of friendship, because it does not eliminate all pleasures, but only those pleasures or things which would enter between me and you or that which distracts me or you from each other. Therefore, austerity is the basic condition of virtue for him who wants to balance gracefully and joyfully. K: May I add something to what Dr. Illich has said? I am only adding, not contradicting. I think most people, thoughtful people, have rejected every form of system, institution; no longer are they trustful of communism, socialism, liberalism, the left, right, politically or religiously. I think man has come to a point where he feels - and I am sure Dr. Illich feels the same - that one must have a new mind, a new quality of mind. I mean by mind the activities of the brain consciousness, sensory perception and intelligence. Is it possible before man destroys himself completely, to bring about a new mind? That is the major question that is confronting most serious and thoughtful people. One has rejected completely the notion that any system, institution, dogma or religious belief is going to save man; and one demands or requires a revolution not only sociologically, but inwardly, with clarity and compassion. Is it possible for human beings to bring about a totally different category or dimension of the mind? P.K.S.: The crisis in consciousness, so far as I can see, is an ever-recurring phenomenon in history. I think, therefore, that it must be genetically viewed. It is possible to find a general pattern in this crisis. One form is man against nature, man finding himself a stranger in a world which he perhaps considers inimical to him. Therefore, man has to fight against the forces of nature, and this brings about a crisis in his heart. Another form is much deeper and perhaps more significant for human history - man versus man. This arises because man considers another man as an objective phenomenon and, therefore, alien. That is, an individual poses a danger, a threat, a challenge to his own security, completeness. The third aspect of this crisis is man against himself. He does not know what is the inspiration of his own life, mind, thought. Very frequently, he carries on a battle in his own heart; there is a dialogue between the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral, the progressive and the regressive, the civilized and the uncivilized, the mechanical and the inspired. In my view the solution lies in the heart of man, which brings us back to consciousness. The examination now becomes rather internal: From the Indian point of view, certainly, there has been time when inwardness - aavritta chakshu - has been a progressive attitude against outwardness, where objectification yielded place to examination. Nandishwara Thero: Is it possible to find the solution from theories of knowledge or should knowledge come from within? K: Are we having a dialogue theoretically or in abstraction? I.I.: I think what has been said is the kernel of the matter. We have industrialized gurus and, as a consequence, the minds of a very large percentage of people have been industrialized. Knowledge is considered competence, awareness, valuable. In the West, the largest professional body are the self-appointed bureaucrats with the guru function, called pedagogues, and people who are afraid to trust their latent powers. I don't think there has been such a time when people all over the world with the desire to trust their latent powers have been so totally repressed. K: Yes, sir, I know. But I keep on asking, are we having a dialogue on theories or on actualities, the actual being what is taking place now, not only outwardly but inside ourselves. At what level are we having a dialogue - theoretical, philosophical or concerned with our daily existence, our relationship to each other and to our daily activity? Talking about consciousness, are we individuals? Human beings are fragmented. Do we have consciousness which is common, every man going through suffering, agonies of loneliness, the whole business of existence? Is that not universal consciousness? It seems to me that our consciousness is the consciousness of all man because every human being goes through fear, anxiety and so on. So our consciousness is the consciousness of the world. Therefore, I am the world and the world is me; I am not an individual. We are not individual in the real sense of the word. To me the idea of individuality is non-existent. Theoretically, we talk about individuals. It sounds marvellous, but actually, are we individuals or repetitive machines? When we look at ourselves, deeply, seriously, are we individuals? If I may point out, either we discuss in abstraction, in theory, or we are concerned with revolution, a psychological revolution. A revolution, mutation, a deep radical change in man lies in his consciousness. Can that consciousness be transformed? That is the real question. P.J.: If you are speaking of the actual state as it is, each one of us sees within us an individual consciousness separate from the consciousness of another. We have to start with what actually is. And when we talk of a crisis in society and in man, the two being in a sense interchangeable, we realize that we are society. The problem then arises: How does one come to the realization of whether one is an individual or not? How does one proceed? Does one proceed through knowledge or through the negation of knowledge? And if there is negation of knowledge, what are the instruments required for negation? K: One has to ask what is one's consciousness made up of, what is its content? P.K.S.: When you say individual consciousness, are you referring to the individual mind? K: No, sir, I asked what is one's consciousness. Apparently, in that consciousness there is a deep crisis. Or is it asleep, pressurized or totally industrialized, as Dr. Illich says, by the guru industrialization, so that we are just non-existent, we just survive? I would like to ask, is one aware of one's total consciousness, not partial, not fragmentary, but the totality of one's own existence which is the result of society, culture, family name? And what is the origin of all thinking? That may be the beginning of our consciousness. What is my consciousness? My consciousness is made up of culture, ideas, traditions, propaganda, etc. The content makes up consciousness. Without content, there is no consciousness. If there is, it is a totally different dimension, and one can only apprehend or come upon that consciousness when the content is wiped away. So one has to be clear about what one is discussing: whether one is discussing theoretically or by taking up one's own consciousness and investigating it. That is the challenge. N. T.: Is consciousness part of our experience? K: Absolutely. N. T.: If it is part of our experience, is it not individualistic? K: Is your experience individual? N.T.: The experience concerns oneself only. K: What does that word `experience' mean to you? N.T.: To experience is to feel; it is feeling. K: No. The content, the structure, the semantic meaning of that word is `to go through'. But we go through and make what we have gone through into knowledge. N.T.: This `going through' is individualistic, is it not? K: Is it individualistic to experience? If I am a Hindu or Buddhist or Christian, I experience what I have been told. That is not individuality. If I am a devout orthodox Catholic, I experience Virgin Mary and I think it is my personal experience. It is not; it is the result of two thousand years of propaganda. S.P.: You seem to suggest that the word itself means indivisible and also, thereby, that any experience is a denial of individuality. K: I did not say that. S.P.: It is implied. Any experience, personal or collective, whether out of collective consciousness or personal consciousness, and the multiplicity of experiences put together create the feeling of the individual in each human being. This cannot be denied. K: Of course. But if I may ask, what is the function of the brain? I.I.: But would you consider it disrespectful if I use the noun in English and say I have knowledge of Krishnamurti? I have knowledge of you, but I don't know you. K: Can I ever say `I know you'? When we use the word `knowledge', we are using it in so many categories, so many complicated ways. I am using it in a very simple way - I know you, I recognise you, because I met you last year. But do I know, however intimately, my wife? I have slept with her, she has borne my children, but do I actually know her? That is, I do not know her because I have an image of her. I create all kinds of sexual sensory pictures and those pictures prevent me from knowing her, though I am very intimate with her physically. So I can never say to myself, I know somebody. I think that it is a sacrilege, an impudence. I know you the moment I have no barriers, no pictures of you as an individual, as a Doctor of Linguistics. So, if I approach you with a sense of compassion, in the deep sense of that word, then there is no knowing, there is only sharing. I.I.. I have to accept that, as the word `compassion' is used here. K: Compassion means passion for all. A.P.: But do we know ourselves? That is the ultimate question. K: That's it, sir. Do we know ourselves, and how do we know ourselves? What is the manner of knowing oneself? A.P.: The problem here is our incapacity to know ourselves directly, to deal with it with a compassionate response. When I see a cyclone in Andhra Pradesh, I feel personally involved because it is happening in the state in which I am living. When I read about a cyclone in Bangladesh, it is just an item of news for me. Now, when we say one world, it does not actually become experiential for us. This is really a part of the alienation process - alienation being a name to the fact that we do not know ourselves. Because we do not know ourselves, our relationship with the world also is a more distant relationship. P.J.: Let me put it this way. Is it a question of learning what the instruments of learning are? The deep-seated instruments of knowing are seeing, listening, feeling and learning. The probing into the significance of these instruments itself may throw some light not only on the nature of the instruments but also on the manner in which these instruments have been perverted to block their real function. K: Sir, would you agree that instead of using consciousness as a noun, you use it as a movement of time? I.I.: I would accept it for discussion, but then, if I may comment, I live in a world where I see a beautiful sunset as a picture postcard. I have made a complete study on the use of words. I found that one of the ten words heard by the typical person was a word heard as a member of a crowd, as public. And nine out of ten were words spoken to him or overheard by him while spoken to another. Today, for example, nine out of ten words heard by young people, according to this study, are words which have been programmed and only one is a personal word. I heard recently from a lady who wrote that she has taken credits for nineteen hours of consciousness. I am just saying - everything in this culture in which I live is industrialized. It is an additive way of education. P.J.: That is really the problem of knowledge - the additive process. I.I.: The danger of knowledge, not as a flow but as an additive process, makes me standardized. K: Sir, what is the relationship of consciousness to thought? What is the beginning of thought? How does that come into existence? What is the spring from which thought arises? There is perception, sensation, contact, then thought, desire and imagination involved in that. That is the origin of desire. So, is that the origin of thought, the beginning of thought, the movement of thought? P.J.: Is not thought the reaction to challenge? K: Yes. If I see the challenge, if I am aware of the challenge. If I am not aware, there is no challenge. P.J.: What is the reaction to challenge? K: Memory reacts. R.B.: But for thought to be aware of itself as a trap, is it necessary to see the origin of thought? K: Yes. Then you only register that which is absolutely necessary and not psychological structures. Why should I register your flattery or your insult? But I do. That registration emphasizes the ego. S.P.: What is that state of mind in which registration does not take place? K: You see, that is a theoretical question. S.P.: No. It is an actual problem. Otherwise one is in a trap. There is memory responding, and memory itself is registered even before I am aware. K: Then you are acting on reward and punishment. R.B.: Registering by long habit is so instantaneous. How can we learn to slow down the whole process? K: Have you ever tried writing down objectively every thought, not just those which are pleasant or unpleasant - I don't like that man, I like that woman, the whole business? Then you will find that you can slow down thought tremendously. Sir, my question is, why do we register psychologically at all? Is it possible to register only that which is absolutely, physically, necessary and not build up the psyche through registration? I.I.: I only know that by becoming older and working at it, one can cut down on registration. K: But that has nothing to do with age... I.I.: It has to do with living. K: That means it is a slow `process'. I object to that. I.I.: That's all I know. Sometimes one has the experience of a flash, lifting you to another level, being transformed, even like a phoenix from the ashes. K: Is it possible to accelerate the non-registering process that does not depend upon age, circumstances, environment, poverty, riches, culture? Can one see, have an insight into, the whole question of registration and end it psychologically? I.I.: I have to be corrected by you. It seems to me that there are several very great and very small schools, each projecting, suggesting, a certain way. K: And then we are back to systems. I.I.: I said I stand to be corrected. I would imagine that these offer us a ladder. Some ladders are too short for the level which some people have to reach, while others are so long that we can jump off the ladder earlier than the ladder ends. This is not for all, but for some people they are rather useful in the beginning. I can even imagine that they are useful in many instances - wisdom not to choose, not to search, during their whole life for the best ladder but to take one which does the job which luckily I have at my disposal. K: But I question whether it is a gradual movement. 1.I.: My school, my institution, my language, say to me the development of the gifts of the spirit are like the riverside of this struggle for virtue. At certain moments we must struggle, practise what you spoke of as virtue. But moments come in when suddenly a bubble comes and I am lifted out of my yesterday as if for ever. That does not mean my life must go on in the same direction to struggle again, but I do go back. I do know that there are some schools of thought, perhaps equally consistent, useful, for others where this will be considered very differently. K: If I may say so sir, there are no schools. One sees the logical reason of registration, the necessity of physical registration. If one sees clearly, has an insight into the psychological futility of registration, realizes it, it is finished. It is as thought if you see danger, a precipice, it is over. In the same way, if one profoundly sees the danger of psychological registration, then the thing is finished. I.I.: Is it not possible that for some people enlightenment comes in several ways? The Arabs have seven words for seven states, and for others it comes bang like sunrise, the sun comes out and there it is. K: I don't think it is a matter for the few or for the many. How do you listen? You tell me there are schools, degrees and I accept that. And another comes along and tells me it is not at all like that and I reject it because of my conditioning. Whereas, if I listened to him and to you, I can see with clarity that in the very act of listening, I have understood the implications of both statements. Do you understand? The listening itself frees me from both of you. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 5 PART 2 2ND SEMINAR MADRAS 14TH JANUARY 1978 'INSIGHTS INTO REGENERATION' P.J.: Could we discuss regeneration, its nature, and whether it is essential to man? And if it is essential to man and society then what is the place of self-knowing in this whole field? A.P.: The importance of our discussions so far has been to establish the limits of knowledge. I feel that the relevance of knowledge to the entire process of self-knowing has already been outlined in limits of growth, limits of knowledge. P.J.: Is knowledge and its limits dependent on the process of self-knowing? The problem of regeneration is not contained in the limits of knowledge; the latter is only one of the factors of regeneration. Self-knowing is also integral to it. Are these two independent? A.P.: Our approach has been to negate that which appeared to assume preponderant importance in our own development. It takes the form of pursuit of knowledge, a very subtle process which goes on inhibiting, distracting or distorting the mind from direct confrontation. P.J.: We are familiar with the additive process. In a sense the additive process is the extension of the field of knowledge. I am talking of knowledge as information. Are we talking of the limits of knowledge, independent of self-knowing or regeneration? A.P.: Of course not. P.K.S.: The problem of the regeneration of man is mostly connected with the limits of knowledge. We assume knowledge is information, not that kind of experience which is self-knowing, and we are asking, what can we know? The question also concerns the origins of knowledge. K: I don't know what you mean by regeneration - to be made anew, made afresh? We are talking about the transformation of man, the ending of his anxiety - his whole way of life; a life which is ugly - and out of that ending, a new thing being born. Is that what we mean by regeneration? If that is so, what is the relationship between knowledge and regeneration? Is knowledge a fixed point? Is it static, additive? Is the process of self-knowledge additive and does it, thereby, bring about regeneration? Is that what we are asking? Can knowledge which is accumulative, probably infinite, bring about regeneration? Then there is the understanding of oneself, the `Know Thyself'. The Hindus have said it, the Buddhists have said it in a different way, all religions have said it. Is that knowing yourself additive? Is the very substance of the self, knowledge, knowing being experience stored up as memory, all the things man has accumulated? What is it we are asking? Can we begin with the question, `Can I know myself?' Not according to some philosophers, but can I know myself? I would like to examine the word `to know'. Dr. Illich pointed out yesterday, `I have knowledge of you but I don't know you.' I have knowledge in the sense that I have met you, and so on. I have knowledge of you but can I ever know you? In the same way, I have knowledge about myself, limited knowledge, fragmentary knowledge, knowledge brought about by time. But can I know myself fundamentally, irrevocably? R.B.: What do you mean `irrevocably'? K: A tree is a tree; it is irrevocable. A pear tree does not become an apple tree. A.P.: This is where my difficulty arises. Even with regard to knowing oneself, verbalizing has a very important place. If that is taken away, will we have the capacity to know anything? I.I.: I am asking the same question. Knowledge, insight, which comes in a flash and can be interpreted logically later on, can be referred to in words; is that knowledge in your terminology? A.P.: The channel of insight may be non-verbal but our normal movement is perceiving and naming, and with naming comes recognition and what we call knowledge. So, actually, naming plays a preponderant part in knowledge. Self-knowledge may be in the field of insight. K: Are you asking if there is no verbalization, whether the `me' exists at all? I would say if verbalization does not exist, the self, the `me', the ego, ceases, comes to an end. Can there be a knowing that the word is not the thing? The word is not the thing, obviously. The word `tree' is not the actual fact. So if there is no verbalization, then what is the fact, what remains? Is it still the self? P.J.: How does one answer this? A.P.: You have jumped. G.N.: There are forms of knowledge akin to insight and some forms of insight which cannot be converted into knowledge through the additive process. The way one approaches it is very significant. Some types of knowledge have the taste of insight but they get reduced to knowledge. K.: We said we understood the meaning, the significance, of regeneration. How is man to regenerate, completely renew himself, like a phoenix? Does he depend on environment - social, economical? Or has regeneration as knowing nothing whatever to do with environmental pressures? We must go into that. We will come to a different kind of knowledge presently. Do we agree on the meaning of regeneration as a total, psychological, profound, revolution, in the sense that something new is born out of it? Now, is knowing oneself the central factor of regeneration? If that is so, then how am I to know myself - knowing that the word is not the thing, the description is not the described? If there is no verbalization, then what next? You have cut away, if you don't verbalize, the whole area of morality, ethics. To us words have become very important. Take the word violence; if I don't use that word and am free from verbalization with all its significance, what remains? Sir, why do I verbalize? I verbalize my feeling for you because I want to communicate to you. A.P.: Also with myself. That is the greatest danger. K: I am coming to that. First I verbalize what I feel to myself and then I verbalize to communicate. A.P.: In this there is a big trap. I feel the phenomenon of sorrow. I see somebody in pain, I can express that without feeling compassion in my heart. I live on words. Therefore, words are my biggest protection and they also become a barrier to self-knowledge. Unless I am able to deal with words, I cannot move. The human brain stores images, creates images, symbols, etc. K: Does it mean all our relationships - intellectual, sexual, between two human beings - are based on words, images, pictures? Is there thinking without verbalization? When I say to somebody I love you, do the words convey what I feel? The words are not the thing, but they need to be expressed and I use the words as a medium of communication. Now we are asking, how is man to regenerate himself without any cause, without any motive, without any influence of the environment - social, political, moral, religious. I think we ought to settle that and then proceed. What do you say, Dr. Illich? I.I.: I would like to ask you a question. Are words also part of the environment? K: Yes. I.I.: Therefore, when I use words, I also do something to the environment, besides being influenced by it. K: The word is also the environment and the word influences my thinking. If I am born in this particular part of the country, my whole cultural, development, progress, is based on this culture. The language itself is affecting me; it may be a barrier between you and me. I.I.: Like anything it can destroy two people. K: So, realizing that language can also become a barrier, I cut it. It is finished. I use it only to communicate. I.I.: Is there anything within me which has not been affected by language in the same way as my body is affected by breathing? Is there a point somewhere in me which the environment has not touched? K: Do you see what is happening, sir? We are already in communication with each other. Your question, `Is there something in this "me" which is not affected, touched, shaped, moulded by the environment' has already put us in communication. The Hindus say there is something. Dr. Illich wants to know if there is in `me' the structure of existence which is the `me', some spot, something which is not shaped, moulded, contaminated, pressurized by the environment. You are a scholar, a pundit - what would be your answer? P.K.S.: Those parts which are supposed to be affected by language, etc. are only the psychological `me'. That is the empirical development of the ego. But even before the development of the empirical ego, there should be a basis for this development. Otherwise language as environment would be futile. The word as environment affects me. It is not brought about after it has been affected by the environment; rather something is there already which is supposed to be affected. Now, if there is something prior to being affected by the environment, what is its character, can it be increased or decreased by the environment? If you believe that the environment makes the self, at the same time pre-supposing something which is prior to the influence of language, you are contradicting yourself. I think something exists prior to the environment affecting it. K: I don't quite follow you. R.B.: Prof. Sundaram says there is a substratum, essential nature, on which thought builds, the psychological, the empirical, `me'. Therefore, logically, there is an area which is unaffected by thought. K: So you are saying that there is in me, in my existence, in my life, an uncontaminated, unshaped state. Does that satisfy you? I.I.: I accept your words, I won't use other terms, and yet, since it cannot be affected by language, I can only speak in negative terms. This particular spot, something which is light, which throws sparks, is yet something about which there is no proof, that I can grasp. And when I speak about it, I dare to capture it in a word. Would you accept that? K: I don't think so, sir. P.J.: How do we explore this then? How do I find out whether one statement or the other is real? K: May I put it differently? I don't even ask that question, `Is there something in me which is not shaped by the environment?' All that I know is, unless a human being finds the springs of regeneration, and not the idea, the new is not possible. So my concern, then, is the word `environment', culture, society - all that is `me' and I am the product of all that. I am the entire product of all influences - religious, psychological, social. Regeneration is possible only when the influences from the outside or the influences which I am creating as a reaction come to an end. Then I can answer it. Until then I can only speculate. So I begin. I say it is absolutely necessary as a human being to bring about a revolution in the whole structure. Not at the biological level, because I can't grow a third arm; but is there a possibility of a total regeneration? You tell me `Know yourself,' that is, to have knowledge about yourself. I see the danger of knowledge, knowledge being accumulative, progressive, dependent on the environment and so on. Therefore, I understand the limitations of knowledge. I say to myself, I have understood this. So when I use the words `know myself', I see that knowledge, when verbalized, may be the cause which prevents me from enquiring deeply into myself. So I ask, can my brain, my mind, my whole structure, be free of words? A.P.: I think this is where the limits of knowledge lead you. K: Achyutji, you are missing the point. We have said knowledge is accumulative. Knowing myself may not be accumulative at all. A.P.: Verbalization is the quintessence of knowing. K: Can I use the word `knowledge' where necessary and in my enquiry be free of the word? Is that possible? S.P.: Are you saying there is an enquiry without the word? K: That's it. A.P.: When we enquire, the word is inevitable and it is an obstacle. K: Obviously. Dr. Illich's difficulty is, we are using a language which he is not used to. To us knowledge means something and to him it means something else. And he says, I don't follow you. So we must establish a linguistic, semantic communication. So I come to the point that I don't know the substratum, the foundation on which `I am'. I won't pre-suppose anything; I won't accept any authority including my own hope. So I ask, how am I to enquire into myself, what is the movement, the elan, `to know yourself? Not to have knowledge of yourself? P.J.: Could you explain a little more the distinction between knowledge of myself and knowing myself? K: I have knowledge of myself through my reactions, my feelings, through my responses to another in my relationship. I have been jealous, sensuous, angry. These are all reactions, but it is much more than that. All that I know is based on verbalization. I say I have been jealous; the word jealousy, with all its connotations prevents observation of that feeling which I have named as jealousy. So is it possible to observe without the word? Can there be only the feeling without the word, the word being the environment? There is feeling. In that feeling is the observer. In that there is division. That is, is the observer different from the observed? He divides the two. I am different from the thing observed. But in observing myself so long as the word is associated with the thing I am observing, it distorts the observation. So I ask, can I observe, be aware of the feeling, without naming it? Can I just observe? Can there be only observation without identification with the word? If so, we remove altogether all division as the opposite. So I eliminate one of the traditional factors that this division brings about - me and jealousy - and, therefore, observation is not verbal; there is only observation. A.P.: I have not come to that. K: Then how shall we communicate with each other? You have not wiped out the word. You have said verbalization is the barrier. How am I to tell you of that central factor in which there is no conflict, only observation? P.J.: Can one wipe out the word? How does one wipe out the word? K: I realize the word is not the thing. That is a deep understanding. When I say I love you, it is not just a word; it is beyond the word. Therefore, I am not caught in the word. I cannot wipe it out; words are necessary to communicate. But I am saying one eradicates it in oneself or it falls away when one sees the observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought, the experiencer is the experienced. Division comes to an end totally and, therefore, conflict comes to an end. A.P.: It is like the halting of the traffic light. I say that verbal communication stops like a traffic light and comes back again. K: Are you saying, I see this for an instant but then I am back again in the old grooves? R.B.: Can we put it another way? You mentioned jealousy. There may be a movement of jealousy, and if one watches it without the word, at that moment there is an abeyance of that thing. In self-knowing, there is not only the movement of jealousy but of an enormous content which has been built up. How is one to catch the whole thing without the word? K: Do you realize, actually, not theoretically, that the word is not the thing? R.B.: I do realize it at certain moments. K: That is not realization. It is like danger, like a bus hurtling down on you. R.B.: We are all conditioned to mix the two. It is a longstanding thing. I can say that at this moment the word is not the thing. K: No, it is the eternal truth. If that is so, and the word `jealousy' is not the state, can we look at jealousy without the word? Without all the association of the word? Look at it as though you were looking at it for the first time and not bring in all the associations connected with it? That requires great alertness, awareness. It has its own extraordinary discipline, it is uninfluenced. We are concerned with regeneration - whether a human being, without outside influence, can bring about this extraordinary quality of regeneration in his brain, his mind, his feeling. To understand that deeply, you must `know yourself'. So I ask, what is the word `know' apart from knowledge? You are already limiting it by saying, `I know.' Now, can I observe myself without the word, language, knowledge or recognition? Do you understand? I watch myself, and I am watching without analysis. I have this feeling of jealousy; it arises. There is an instant reaction, a verbalization of that feeling, which means I have brought into it the remembrance of that which has happened before and so I recognise it. If there is no recognition, then it is something new and that is the beginning of regeneration. A.P.: I notice in observing, the arising of recognition through the word, and I say it is the word which is giving stability to what I am observing because I am not different from that which I am observing. R.B.: But Krishnaji is saying there is no recognition because memory is eliminated and, therefore, the new is there. K: You say, `know yourself.' But how am I to know myself, observe what I am? Do I bring into that observation past memories, the hurts, the remembrances, and with those memories look at myself? That is my point. If I bring in these memories, then I am not looking, memories are looking, and memories are in action. Can there be an abeyance, can I put memories aside and observe? That may be the factor of regeneration because in that observation there is a breaking away from the past. S.P.: Once for all? K: That is greed. Look at it. I want to know myself because otherwise I have no foundation for anything. I know the limits of words. There is an observation of the word and an observation of the limits of knowledge. I see that when I use the words `know myself', I have already put it in a cup, blanketed it. So I don't use those words. Is there an observation of the movement of the self without the word, without recognition, without the previous experience which in observation distorts what is happening? I.I.: I can't, truly, humanly, look without being totally myself in looking. And, therefore, I can put the word in abeyance. But at times I need crutches. K: The moment you use the words `I need crutches', you will need them. I.I.: I accept your criticism of the word `need'. Now and then I find myself using crutches, and I won't, for this reason, despair. K: Achyutji, you were speaking of the red traffic light that stops you for the moment. Can all the past stop? But it is so strong that it comes back. Dr. Illich also says the same thing, that he needs crutches at moments. To know myself is very important. I see the limitations of knowledge, I see very, very clearly that the very word `know' is a dangerous word in the sense that it has tremendous associations with knowledge. So what have I left? I have understood the limitations of knowledge, I also see the Anglo-European word `feeling' and the danger of that word because I can invent a lot of feeling and a whole lot of froth. So I can also see the limitations of that. And at the end of this, where am I? I started out with regeneration, came to the limitations of knowledge, the limitations of feeling, the dangers associated with that and, at the end of it, I ask, `Do I know myself?' For, `myself' is the limitation of knowledge, limitation of the word `to know', the feeling and the entity who says I have to get rid of this and asks, `Who am I?' All this is the self, with its associations, with all the extravagant, fragmentary things involved in it. At the end of it, where am I? I can honestly then say with genuine affirmation - in the sense that I am not inventing it - that I am not accepting the authority of somebody else, that there is nothing to know. Which does not mean there is something else. All that I can say is there is nothing, which means there is not a thing, which means not a single movement of thought. So there is an ending, a stopping, to thought. There is not a thing. On that we have built all this - my attachments, my beliefs, my fears. On this nothing, everything is. Therefore that is unreal;this is real. So I have found a key to regeneration, the key being emptying the mind of all the past which is knowledge, the limitations of knowing, feelings and the content of my feelings. Would you call this meditation? I.I.: When I do it for myself, yes. K: Myself is a word. I.I.: When I do it, yes. K: Is that doing progressive or immediate? I.I.: It seems to be immediate and not progressive. K: That is right, keep it there. I.I.: But I agree there is a temptation to make it progressive, to transform it again into something you want. K: What does the word temptation mean? One of our difficulties is that we see all this intellectually and then make an abstraction of it, which is an idea, a conclusion, and then work with the conclusion. Have I really understood deeply the limitations of knowledge, knowledge meaning institutions, systems, everything? I would like to ask you, is there a regeneration taking place? Forgive me if I put you in a corner. We have all listened and say, this is true. I see regeneration is tremendously important. Have I captured it, tasted it, has it a perfume? Have I got it? Not in the sense of holding it. If we have not, then what are we all talking about? Are we merely ploughing in sand and never sowing? Dr. Illich, are we in communication with each other linguistically? I.I.: I think so. May I ask a question? I don't want to seem impudent. When you ask the question, is there a regeneration going on, I wanted to answer! I listen very attentively to the crow up there on the tree. K. Yes sir. I have also been listening to it. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 5 PART 3 2ND SEMINAR MADRAS 14TH JANUARY 1978 'INSIGHTS INTO REGENERATION' P.J.: Could we discuss the problem of the sorrow of man, the nature of compassion and meditation? I feel we are in a trap: being in sorrow and not understanding the nature of compassion. K: May I ask, what are your ideas or concepts about sorrow, meditation and love? A.P.: Sorrow is an inescapable part of life. We are helpless victims when a part of humanity is forced to live a subhuman life, with no hope of change in their way of life. Unless one sees some affirmative process, one feels completely lost. P.J.: You can't talk about the sorrow of another. A.P.: But it is my sorrow. I am not talking about another's. P.J.: Sorrow is something integral to one. A.P.: I am talking about sorrow. It is integral. Nothing can be more integral than the fact that there is no compassion in me as an authentic response. When I witness the sorrow of another, I am part of that sorrow. K: Sir, is there such a thing as my sorrow, your sorrow and his sorrow? P.J.: Sorrow is not a concept, not an idea. It is deeply in me. K: I wonder what we mean by the word `sorrow'. Let us go slowly, because it is rather important. What do we mean by sorrow, grief, pain? Every human being goes through this ugly business of sorrow. Some people think that it is a cleansing process, an enlightening process. Some give explanations which appear to satisfy them - you did something in the past, you are paying for it now. Strip away all these words; what remains is the actuality, the feeling of sorrow; not the word; not the connotation of that word, not the evocation of the images that word brings up. Now, what is this deep feeling that we call sorrow? My son dies, and there is a tremendous feeling. Is that sorrow? P.J.: It is sorrow. K: In that is involved self-pity, loneliness, a sudden realization that I have lost somebody and I am left alone. I suffer because he has not lived as long as I have lived and so on. But the root of this enormous sorrow is what man has carried through timeless centuries. P.K.S.: As a preliminary definition of the word `sorrow`, not the connotative definition, what is actually felt when you are in sorrow? I think there is some sense of privation, a want, and this produces a state of mind, a pang which is called sorrow. In it is a sense of limitation, finitude, helplessness. A.P.: If I may suggest, we human beings know pain, physical pain. Physical pain is a condition which we have to accept; we can do nothing about it. Sorrow is the exact equal of that -psychologically; that is, we are totally unable to do anything about it. We have to just take it and be with it. K: Sir, you meet the poor people next door, you have great sympathy for them. Perhaps you may feel guilty because you get used to their poverty, their endless degradation. Perhaps you may have great affection for them. Would you call the fact, man living in this appalling way, sorrow? I.I.: I do. I, at least, know that there are different kinds of sorrow in my life. One of them is that sorrow of which we speak: sorrow when I do something violent to somebody else, which takes away from somebody else. I live in society. So many things I cannot undertake without taking away big chunks from others. For instance, tomorrow morning I take the jet plane from Madras to Delhi and on this plane which I take for my benefit, I have calculated that I will grab out of the atmosphere more oxygen than a little herd of elephants from birth to their death can breathe. I will be co-responsible for an exploitation of many thousands of Indians, each one who in a sensible way pays his taxes and lives in a world dominated by the planes so that some of us can have that sense of importance of flying in a jet today. I do something which if I didn't, I would have to radically, totally change the way I live. I have not yet decided to make that change. In fact, I create for myself legitimate reasons by word-constructions for taking that plane, and in this sense I feel a very particular kind of sorrow which is the one about which I would want you to enlighten me most. K: We will discuss it, sir. As you said, there are different kinds of sorrow. There is your kind, what you described; then there is somebody losing a son, a father and mother; seeing appalling ignorance, and seeing that there is no hope for man in a country like this. And there is the sorrow, the deep agony of realizing you are nothing. There is also the sorrow of how man treats man and so on. Now, what does all this sorrow mean? According to Christian terms or Hindu terms, is there an end to sorrow or is it an everlasting thing? Is there an end to any sorrow at all? I.I.: Certainly there is no end to this sorrow as long as I am willing to participate in violence. K: Then I shut myself up. If I narrow down my life, `I won't do this, I don't do that,' then I would not be able to move at all. For myself I have faced this. I can see from what you say, that we exploit people. So what can I do? Before I answer, before we can discuss that question, could we ask what is love? Perhaps it may solve the problem and answer this question. I am asking what is love. Biologically, life is reproduction and all the rest of it. Is that love? I would like to go into it, if you don't mind; then, perhaps, we shall be able to answer the fundamental question, which is, whatever I do at present causes some kind of sorrow to another. The very clothes I wear is making somebody work for me. So I would like to approach this question from a different angle. The word `love' is loaded; misused, vulgarized, sexualized, anything you like. What then is love, because that may answer this gradual inaction that arises when I say, `I can't do this; if I do this, I am depriving somebody of that, I am exploiting somebody,' and out of that comes sorrow; perhaps we can have a dialogue about this feeling of love. Do I love my wife? Sir, let us go into it a little bit because this may resolve our problems of sorrow, exploitation, using other people, narrowing down our lives. I am trying to prevent myself from being reduced to narrow activity. So I want to ask this question, is everything biological? Is my love for my wife biological? R. Krishnaswamy: Yes. K: Would you say that to your wife? K.S.: Yes, sir. K: I am not being rude. I am not being personal. Then you are reducing it to a purely sensory reaction. K.S.: Yes, it begins like that and then we begin to verbalize it, romanticize it. K: Yes, it begins there and then you build up the picture, the image. Is that it? K.S.: I think that is true. The primitive man, the hunter, did not have any of these problems which we are facing now. Is my love for my child also this? Is this an extreme form of selfishness, because we want to perpetuate ourselves? K: You are saying, sir, that this state is not only biological, it is sensory. Sensory love may begin with desire, desire being seeing, perception, contact, sensation, thought, the image and desire; that is the process. You are saying love is desire, it is biological. I want to find out whether love exists at all apart from the sensory, apart from desire, attachment, jealousy and, therefore, hate. Is that love? If I told my wife it is all sensory, and if she is at all intelligent, she would throw something at me. We have reduced love to such a limited, ugly thing. Therefore, we don't love. Love implies much more than the word. It implies a great deal of beauty. It does not rest in the woman I love, but in the very feeling of love, which implies a relationship with nature, love of stars, the earth, stones, the stray dog, all that, and also the love of my wife. If you reduce it to desire and sensation, if you call it a biological movement, then it becomes a tawdry affair. Your wife treats you, and you treat her, as a biological necessity. Is that love? So I am asking, is desire, pleasure, love? Is sexual comfort love? I.I.: Is love communion? K: How can I commune with another if I have an image of her? I.I.: An image may be an obstacle to communion? K: Can I be free of the image I have of you, of my wife, of the professor, doctor and so on? Only then is there a possibility of communion. I don't have to use words. I.I.: And love, perhaps, is free communion? K: I would not like to say so, yet. We will come to it presently. P.K.S.: In a fundamental sense, love is the opposite of desire. What I mean is, desire insists on getting. Love insists on giving. K: You see, sir, you are categorizing, conceptualizing, you have already put it in a cage. P.K.S.: I only wanted to suggest that love is not merely biological; it is much more than that. It is giving, a sacrifice. K: Sir, if I have a wife, what is my relationship to her apart from sexual, apart from attachment, apart from all the rest of the traditional meanings of relationship? Am I really related to the lady? Relationship means to be in contact at all levels, not just the physical level which is desire, pleasure. Does it not imply, when I say, `I love you,' and I mean it, that you and I meet at the same level, meet with the same intensity, at the same moment? I.I.: Yes. K: That happens apparently only sexually, at the biological level. I question this whole approach to life, life in which there is this immense thing called love. Now, are we not concerned to find out what it is? Does not your heart, mind, say that you have to find out? Or, is everything reduced to a verbal level? N. T.: If love is sensual pleasure and based on the pursuit of desire, it is not love; love has to be based on compassion. K: But what is compassion? N.T.: Compassion itself is love. K: Sir, you have freedom with words. N.T.: Love is universal. K: I want to find out, I want to have this sense of love. As a human being it is like breathing; I must have it. N.T.: That sense of love is universal, not moved by desire. K: All right sir, don't think me impudent, don't think me rude. Have you got that love, or is this just theory? N.T.: It does not arise in the human mind. K: That is verbalizing it. I want to know as a human being, do you love anybody? N. T.: Not through a possessive type of love. K: Oh, no. You are all theorizing. N.T.: No, sir. K: You are a priest, you are a monk; I come to you and say, please, for god's sake, let me have the perfume of that which is called love. And you say love is compassion, compassion is love, you go around it. N.T.: Love in the absolute sense is present in all human beings. K: Is it there when you kill somebody, when Stalin kills twenty million people, when India fights Pakistan? Is there love in every human being? N.T.: Love is there in every human being. K: If there were love in every human being, do you think India would be like this - held in poverty, degradation, dishonesty, corruption? What are you all talking about? Prof. Subramaniam: Sir, if love means being related to another person at all levels, when I don't understand myself and when I don't love myself, how is it possible to love another? I am not talking about self-love. I don't find that I am relating myself at all levels to myself. When that is so, I realize that I am not related to another person, whether it is my wife or another, at all levels. K: So, as a human being, don't you want to come upon this, don't you want to find out? Don't you want to have a sense of this great thing? Unless you have it, I don't see the point of all these discussions, pujas, and all that is going on in this country. R.B.: I think the point is that when there is no relatedness inside oneself, when there are warring elements within oneself, there can't be love. K: Sir, I would rather put the question this way: If this thing, love, is merely a biological process and one sees it even intellectually as a shoddy little affair, and a human being has never had this perfume, don't you want to find out this love, this state of passion; don't you want to drink at that extraordinary fountain? Or have we mesmerized ourselves verbally so that we have become incapable of any movement outside the field of our own particular verbalization? The Christians, Dr. Illich will tell you much more easily than I, have said, `Love Jesus, love Christ, love your neighbour as you would love yourself,' and so on. I question that any religious approximation or dictum is love. One may go to the church, one may go to the temple and love god, if god exists. Is that love? R.B.: Sir, you started with the question of what is sorrow and followed it up with the question of what is love. Could you say what is the relationship between the two questions? K: Is love this constant battle, words, theories and living at that level? I personally can't imagine any human being not having this love. If he does not have it, he is dead. A.P.: Is that not the crux of the problem of regeneration? K: Yes, sir. If you haven't got love, how can you regenerate anything? If you don't look after the plant that you have just put in the earth, if you don't give it water, air, proper nourishment, affection, see that there is plenty of light, the plant won't grow. Let us leave love for the moment. Shall we go into what is meditation? P.J.: Without comprehending sorrow and love, we cannot know what is meditation. R.B.: But is that itself not the problem? Millions of people are not even asking what is love. I.I.: Is it, perhaps, also something so secret, hidden, personal? But it is so different because of its being concrete in each one of us. You spoke about our loving each other, some kind of close existence. K: Sir, I can belong to a community, a commune, and then feel close to the others because we are there at the same time. I.I.: Yes, but that has nothing to do with it. K: Yes. I.I.: But somewhere at the very deepest level, the marvellous, glorious thing which I believe makes for love is that, your life and my life at that moment are both made sacred, the forms of renewal of mutual presence. K: Forgive me, I wouldn't say that. I would say: When there is love, there is no `you' or `me,. I.I.: Sir, that could be easily understood. I know you don't mean it that way, but love is a symbiosis. K: No. I.I.: There is no `you' and there is no `me', but on the other hand, there is more of you and more of me. K: Sir, when there is great beauty like a mountain, the majesty of it, the beauty of it, the shade, the light, `you' don't exist. The beauty of that thing drives away the `you'. Do you follow what I am saying? I.I.: I follow what you are saying. K: At that moment, when there is no `me' because of the majesty of the hill, there is only that sense of great wondering glowing beauty. So, I say: Beauty is when I am not, with my problem, with my gods, with my biological love and all the rest of it. When I am not, the other is. I.I.: And yet - correct me if I am wrong - at that moment the transparent flame is burning higher and the stream of life is clearer, fresher, and the renewal of this world goes on. K: At that moment there is a new rejuvenation taking place, if you like to put it that way. I am putting it this way, that there is a sense of an otherness than me. I.I.: Yes. That otherness implies... K: The otherness is not the opposite. P.J.: May I then ask, what is it that makes the spring, the stream flow? K: I have seen the birth of the great river right in the hills. It starts with a few drops and then collects, and then there is a roaring stream at the end of it. Is that love? P.J.: What is it that makes the stream flow fully? K: I come to you and say, `Look, I don't know what love is, please teach me, help me, or let me learn what love is.' I say, attachment is not love, the mere biological pleasure with all its movements, with all its implications, is not love. So can you be free of attachment, negate it completely? Through negation you may come to the positive, but we won't do that. I come to you who are learned, who have studied, who have lived, suffered, who have children, and I say: `Please teach me, help me to understand love.' Don't say, `Love is consciousness without words,' and all that. I want this thing in me. Don't give me ashes. P.J.: What is the relationship of sorrow to love? Is there any relationship? K: You must relate sorrow, love and death. If you end attachment, end it. Do not say, `I will end it today but pick it up tomorrow.' End it completely and also jealousy, greed. Do not argue, but end it, which is death. Both biologically and psychologically the ending of something is death. So, will you give up, renounce - to use a traditional term - your status, position, attachments, beliefs, gods? Can you throw them into the river and see what happens? But you won't do this. Will renunciation give love, help you to understand the beauty of it? Please, sir, you are monks, you have studied, please tell me. P.K.S.: Renunciation, sir, can be of many kinds. Renunciation of selfishness certainly won't be love. K: Will my becoming a monk, giving up the world, taking a vow of celibacy, give me love? P.K.S.: No. One can be a monk, take vows and yet not have love. K: So what am I to do? You are a philosopher, you teach all this. Philosophy means love of truth. Are you giving me life? Are you giving me, helping me, to understand truth? P.K.S.: From your observations we obtained certain descriptions of love. K: I don't want descriptions of love. I want food. P.K.S.: We have got certain characteristics of love. One of these is unselfishness, the other is non-possessiveness. These are all positive aspects. Certain characteristics that you mention are positive, but the very nature of ourselves is that there is jealousy and greed. K: Right, sir. I am your disciple; I come to learn from you because you are a philosopher. I am not being rude, but I ask, sir, are you living it or are these only words? If you are, then there is a communion between us. I am fighting for a breath of this. I am drowning. What am I to do? I say to myself, nobody can help me. No guru, no book, nothing, will help me. So I discard the whole thing; I won't even touch it. Then I ask, what is love? Let me find out because if I don't have that flame, that love, life means nothing; I may pass examinations, become a great philosopher, but it is nothing. I must find out. I can only find out something through negation. Through negation I come to the positive; I don't start with the positive. If I start with the positive, I end up with uncertainty. If I start with uncertainty, then something positive occurs. I say, I know love is not merely a biological thing. I put the biological movement, desire, in its right place. So I am free from the biological explanation of love. Now, is love pleasure which means desire, will, pursuit of an incident which happened yesterday, the memory of that and the cultivation of that? Pleasure implies enjoyment, seeing the beauty of the world, seeing the beauty of nature; I put that also in its place. Then what is love? It is not attachment, obviously; it is not jealousy, possessiveness, domination; so I discard all that. Then I ask, what place has thought in relationship? Has it any place at all? Thought is remembrance, the response of knowledge, experience from which thought is born. So thought is not love. In that there is a denial of the total structure which man has built. My relationship to my wife is no longer based on thought, event, sensory desire, biological demand or attachment; it is totally new. Will you go through all this? Now I ask, what is love? It is the ending of everything that man has created in his relationship with another - country, race, language, clan. Does that ending mean death? P.K.S.: It is knowing the completion of life. K: No, no. I said the ending of thought in relationship. Is not that death? I.I.: Sir, could we not say I have never loved enough until the moment of my death? K: I want to invite death, not commit suicide. So death means an ending. I am attached to my wife and death comes and says, look, that is all over. Ending means death; ending of attachment is a form of death. The ending of jealousy, biological demands, is also death, and out of that may come the feeling called love. We are educated to believe that death is something at the end of our life. I am saying death is at the beginning of life, because death means ending. This ending is the ending of my selfishness. Therefore, out of this comes that extraordinary bird called love, the phoenix. I think if one has that sense of love, I can take the aeroplane. It doesn't matter if I take a bullock cart or an aeroplane, but I won't deceive myself. I have no illusions. I.I.: Is it also the end of sorrow? K: Yes. Sir, do you know the Latin word for sorrow? In it is involved passion. I know most human beings know what lust, biological pleasure and all the rest of it is. Are they actually aware of what sorrow is? Or is it something that you know, recognise, experience after it is over? Do I know sorrow at the moment my brother, my son, my wife, dies? Or is it always in the past? I.I.: I do not know the sorrow of my own injustice, which I feel is connected like the shadow of my own action. A single bullock cart - that's a very small affair. K: So I won't reduce it to that. Sir, you are saying, if I take the jet, specially the Jumbo, I am up there; when I take the bullock cart, I am down here. And if I walk, I am still further down. I.I.: Would it not be wisdom to learn, to act with sorrow and, therefore, keep sorrow also in its place? If I have the courage to act with the sorrow which I understand, then at the very same time, I will progressively eliminate from my life all those things which cast a very long shadow of sorrow. K: Sir, why should I carry sorrow? I.I.: Because I do injustice; otherwise how can I justify that which cannot be justified? K: No, I won't justify. I want to find out what is right action, not justify, not say I won't fly by jet. I want to find out what is right action under all circumstances. Right action may vary in different things, but it is always right. We are using the word `right' -correct, true, non-contradictory, not the action of self-interest; all that is implied in that word "right action". What is my right action? If I can find that out I have solved it, whether I go by aeroplane or by bullock cart or whether I walk. But what is right action in my life? Right action will come about when the mind is not concerned with the `me'. P.K.S.: Can I ask for the definition of meditation? Is it constant awareness? I.I.: There is no exercise of the mind about it but an awareness. K: The word `meditation' implies, according to the dictionary, to think over, ponder, to reflect upon, to enquire into something mysterious; not what we have made of it. P.K.S.: But could it not be applied to cases where something has been known to be true and ascertained to be true without any shadow of doubt? K: How can I ascertain something to be true? P.K.S.: For example, practice of love. K: Love is not something to practise. I.I.: No, in the sense of being aware of. K: No sir, I said ending of something. There is no practising the ending of something. I end my jealousy. I want to find out what love is. Obviously love is not jealousy. So end it without argument. Because my whole urge, my whole concern is to find this thing, I will come upon it. In the same way, I want to know what meditation is: Zen meditation, Burmese meditation, Indian meditation, Tibetan meditation, Hinayana meditation. Must I go through all this to find out what meditation is? Must I go to Japan, spend years in monasteries, practise, go to Burma, go to India, to all the gurus? I want to know what you understand by meditation. Would you agree, sir, that the basic principle, the essence of all this meditation is control? If you ask a Christian what is meditation, he will tell you one thing; if you ask an Indian guru, he will tell you something else. If you ask a man who has practised meditation for twenty-five years, he will tell you something else again. So, what is meditation? Is it control of the mind, or thought, and, therefore, control of action? Control implies choice. Choice implies no freedom at all. If I choose, there is no freedom. P.K.S.: Control is an important element in meditation. K: So you are saying control is part of meditation. Then who is the controller, the Higher Self, the atman, the super-consciousness, which are all put together by thought? Now, can I live a life without control? I.I.: Sir, for the purpose of this conversation, could we not say that meditation is the rehearsal of the act of dying? K: Forgive me, why should I have a rehearsal? I.I.: One day I will be called upon for a last time, and before I could really engage in that supreme activity which is to die... K: So why not die now? I.I.: Now, if it is the act of dying, I will be happy to put it that way. Only if I say to somebody that meditation means dying, and if I say that tomorrow morning I will have breakfast with you, people won't understand me; that is the reason I suggested the term. K: No, sir. I don't think we are meeting each other. The word `meditation' has now become the fashion in Europe. It is vulgarized, industrialized, money is made out of it. Wipe away all that. Is not meditation to come upon something sacred, not put together by thought which says, `This is sacred'? I mean sacred in the sense of something that is not contaminated by time, by the environment, something that is original. I am shy of these words, but please accept it. Is meditation an enquiry into that? I.I.: Into that of which we speak shyly? K: Yes, into that. My enquiry then must be completely undirected, unbiased. Otherwise, I will go off at a tangent. If I have a motive for meditation because I am unhappy and, therefore, I want to find that, then my motive dictates. Then I go off into illusions. I.I.: If I said the same thing in different terms: Meditation is the readiness for radical surprise, will you accept it? K: Yes, I accept it. So my concern in meditation is - have I a motive? Motive means movement. So I have a motive in meditation. Do I want a reward? I must be very clear that there is no search for reward or punishment, which means there is no direction. And also I must be very clear that no element creates an illusion. Illusion comes into being when there is desire, when I want something. I see the fact that the mind in meditation must be tremendously aware that it is not caught in any kind of self-hypnosis, self-created illusion. So part of meditation is to wipe away the illusory machine. And, if there is control, it is already directed. Therefore, it means, can I live a daily life in which there is absolutely no control? That means, no censor, saying `do this, do that'. All our life, from childhood, we are educated to control, to suppress, to follow. So can I live a daily life, not an abstract life, with my wife, with my friends, without any control, without direction, without movement? That is the beginning of meditation. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 6 PART 1 SEMINAR RISHI VALLEY 1ST FEBRUARY 1980 'INTELLIGENCE, COMPUTERS AND THE MECHANICAL MIND' K: We have been talking about the relationship between the brain and the computer: are they similar or intrinsically different, and what is the difference? There is very little difference as far as I understand. The brain which is the storehouse of memory, knowledge, is programmed according to a particular culture, religion, economic conditions and so on. The computer is also programmed by human beings. So there is great similarity between the two. The computer people are enquiring, if I understand it rightly, what is the difference then between the brain and the computer which also has been programmed, which is learning, correcting itself and learning more and more? It also is the storehouse of a certain kind of knowledge. Then, what is the essential difference between that and the brain? Or is there a totally different activity of the brain which is not comparable to the computer? Q: No computer has feelings. There is a difference between animate matter and inanimate matter. No computer has feeling of any kind or consciousness. So, there is a fundamental difference between the two. K: Then what is consciousness? Sriram: They have produced a computer programme and it was a psychiatrists' programme. They set up a booth into which people could go and communicate with this computer through the screen and they would say things to the computer such as I am having difficulties with my wife, she doesn't understand me; and the computer would produce answers and questions and psychoanalyse them. And when these people came out they were convinced that the computer understood them better than anyone else. And they wanted to go back to it, to be analysed by it again, and this was a machine which was not supposed to have feelings or understanding. K: But there are people who say the brain has a quality which is totally different from the computer. I accept it, and if I may explain it a little more, our brain works on the basis of experience and knowledge, and the brain or thought has created the psychological world. So the brain and the psyche are the same essentially but we have divided them. Thought has created the psyche with all psychological problems. Knowledge is the basis of all this. And the computer can produce exactly the same thing. Sir, could we for the moment forget the computer and examine the brain in ourselves - how it operates, what is the relationship between the capacity to think and the psychological structure - and then go back to the computer? As far as I see, I start with scepticism; for scepticism is the essential capacity to doubt what you are observing, what you are feeling. Now, I have this brain which has been cultivated through millennia. It is not my brain; it is the brain of humanity. Therefore, it is not I who am investigating. There is no `me' at all. I don't know if you have come to that point. A.C.: Sir, the brain is the only instrument we have for investigation. The brain as you have said is Limited, stupid. It is good with memory responses. K: Which is generally called intelligence. A.C.: Even people who work with the computer know how stupid it is. K: Don't bring in the computer yet. A.C.: Once you see the similarity between the brain and the computer, and you see how stupid the computer is, it is very easy to see the limitations of the brain. But the human brain is the only instrument we have. How can it possibly investigate what is beyond it? K: Absolutely not. A.C.: Then what exists? K: Only the movement of thought. A.C.: Which is the brain? K: Which is the brain, limited. A.C.: How can it investigate? K: Wait. First let us recognise that the brain has evolved from the primitive up to now. It is not my individual brain; it is the brain of humanity. It is so, logically. Therefore, the idea of the `me' is imposed by thought to limit itself to an action. A.C.: The idea of the `me' as an individual? K: To limit itself because it cannot possibly conceive the totality of humanity. It can conceive in theory but in reality it cannot see the wholeness of it. So, we recognise that thought which has created and cultivated the psyche is more important than the operations of the brain. A.C.: The cultivated brain is much more dangerous because the psyche has at its disposal a very efficient instrument. K: Psyche in the dictionary means the soul, the ecclesiastical concept of an entity which is not material. Thought has created the psyche and thought has also imagined or conceived that psyche as different from the brain. For me both are the same. The brain with all the activity of thought born of knowledge, etc. has created the psyche. A.C.: Are you saying the brain is also the seat of emotion? K: Of course, the seat of fear, anxiety, etc. The brain and the psyche are one. Follow the consequences. Do you see factually, not theoretically, that the brain with all the activity of thought, born of knowledge, is part of the same movement as the `psyche' and that thought has created the `I', the `me', separate from the rest of humanity, and thought has made the `me' more important than anybody else? G.N.: Are you saying that thought creates the psyche and thought divides the brain from the psyche, but brain and psyche go together? K: That is right, and in that process is created the `I'. G.N.: And that makes the brain mechanical? K: All knowledge is mechanical. Knowledge is a mechanical process of acquisition. I mean by mechanical, repetitive, which is experience, knowledge, thought, action. From that action you learn and you are back again. This repetitive process is mechanical, my brain is mechanical. Now is my psyche mechanical? Q: Why are we making the division between the psyche and the brain? K.: Thought controls the psyche - `I must not feel this.' `I must become that.' So the becoming is the psychological process invented by thought. And so the whole process is mechanical. A.P.: There is a mystique about human existence. K: I have no mystique. A.C.: I think the crucial thing is why the brain, the psyche, is mechanical. I find no difficulty in accepting this. K: They have also found that the brain, when it is in danger, produces its own mechanical reaction which will protect it. These are material processes. So, thought is a material process. Do you agree? Do you agree that the psyche is a material process? That is the crux. A.C.: I think what he is saying is that when the brain sees the totality, then thought ceases, the `I' ceases. K: I don't think the brain can see the totality. That is the point. The brain is evolved through time, time being knowledge, from the most primitive to the highly sophisticated. There is evolution in time, in knowledge. That is a material process. That thought has created the `I' with its psychological mess. I am not saying it is mystical and all that. Would you agree? SAT.: Now, what could be a non-material process? K: That which is non-matter, that which is no-knowledge, that which is not of time, that which has nothing to do with the brain. But it is speculation for you. Let us start with something factual. So, do we admit that all thinking in any form is a material process, whether we think of the eternal, of god or the supreme principle, it is material process? If you agree, then we can proceed. It takes a long time to come to this: The psyche, the brain, the I, are all a material process. A.C.: I want to know where you are taking me. K: I am going to help you to take the first step. I have only come to a point which is very simple. I said that the brain has evolved in time. Therefore, it is evolved with knowledge. So, knowledge is time, and time and knowledge are a mechanical process. And thought has created the psyche. Follow it; if everything is movement, thought, psyche, time - it is all a material movement - the brain cannot stand this constant movement. The brain functions with knowledge, and it must have security. See how the brain rejects the idea of constant movement. Watch it, watch yourself. You want a place where you can rest. The brain says I must have some place where I can stay put. So that becomes the `I'. Sir, if I am a beggar everlastingly wandering, there must be some place where I can rest, some place where there is security. Can the brain accept this constant, endless movement? It cannot accept it; in that there is no security. It is eternally moving within the area of time, knowledge. A.C.: Is it a question of accepting? K: No. See how the brain works. As a child needs security, the brain says, I can't keep this eternal movement. So, I must have some point where I can stay `quiet'. That is all. A.C.: That point you call the `I'. K: A fixed point. It does not matter; a house, a belief, a symbol, an attachment. Do you get it? So, whether it is illusory or actual, it needs a fixed point. A.C.: Then what? K: The brain cannot live with perpetual movement. Therefore, it must have a fixed point. There is danger in not accepting the movement which is life. See physically what happens. Can you accept life as a perpetual movement within the area of time and knowledge? Verbally you can, but actually can you say life is constant movement? Q: Is the brain itself responsible for this movement? K: It is. The brain is thought, knowledge and the psyche. Q: It creates the movement which it cannot stand. K: It is movement itself. Q: The instinct of the brain is to move towards security; and it is this instinct to avoid danger and to attach itself to security which makes it fix on something. K: Of course. Would you accept this whole movement within this area as energy caught within this? Q: Is it energy or does it require energy? K: It is energy, caught in movement. Right? And that energy is a material process. And a human being cannot live in the world and have a brain that is constantly in movement - he would go mad. A.C.: It seeks permanence, does not find it any more. K: Realizing this constant movement, it seeks security, a movement where it can be sure. That is all I am saying. A.C.: Is it important? K: It is important to establish that the `I' is the centre where it finds security. Call it whatever you like. Then it begins to discover it is insecure, and, therefore, it finds another security. There is only search for security. Take a child with a toy, and the other child says I must have that toy. That attachment to that toy and the pleasure of the toy is the beginning. The beginning is from the beginning of man. A.C.: The question is that energy. K: No, I said energy trapped. A.C.: How can you open the door in which energy is trapped? K: Now comes the real question. How long we have taken to come to this! Can we proceed from here? A.C.: You said energy is trapped in knowledge. Are yon making a distinction between energy and thought? K: No. The whole thing is energy trapped. Thought is energy, knowledge is energy, the whole movement is within the area of knowledge and time. That is all I am saying. A.C.: Then the next question obviously is that since thought and knowledge are limited, can energy stop expressing itself as thought? K: No, no, it cannot. Otherwise, I can't go to the office. A.C.: I talk of energy expressing itself as psychological memory. K: I know what you are trying to say, which is, can the psyche have no existence at all? Don't agree. If there is no content to the psyche - anxiety, attachment, fear, pleasure, which makes the psyche, which are all the products of thought - then what is life? A.C.: Which is the product of energy? K: Which is the product of energy trapped in time. You see that clearly. Therefore, thought is saying I must create order in this area. Therefore, that order is always limited; therefor, it is contradictory; therefore, it is disorder. A.C.: I am still not clear about energy and thought. It appears to me that you were saying that thought is limited but energy is not. K: I said energy is trapped. I didn't say any more than that. A.C.: You are saying energy is trapped, but if it is not trapped, it would be different. That is what I am asking. There is difference between energy and thought. K: That is theory. N.S.: Are you saying there is an energy which is not trapped in thought? K: I am going to show it to you. That question can only arise when we have seen this in its completeness. I am not sure we see this. N.S.: You said that thought is energy and that energy is trapped in thought. K: No, I didn't say that. The brain is the product of time, time is knowledge, experience - time, knowledge, thought. Thought is a material process. All that is energy. All that energy, that whole movement, is endless within this area. Therefore, the brain cannot stand it. It must have security. It finds it in knowledge or in illusion, or in an idea, whatever it is. It is always moving within this area. What is the next question? A.C.: The next question is energy is trapped, and is there an opening for that trapped energy? K: It is trapped. I don't say there is an opening. A.C.: Does it not imply that? K: No, sir. A trap is set to catch a fox. A.C.: It implies that something outside the trap can set the fox free. K: No. You miss my point. In here thought is trying to create order; that very order becomes disorder. That is what is happening actually - politically, religiously; that is the whole point. It is becoming disorder, more and more, because we are giving importance to thought. Thought is limited. Now, does the brain realize this? Does the brain realize that whatever it does is within its own limitation and, therefore disorder? We are stating it. And the next question is, is that theory or actual realization? A.C.: How can the brain which is all this realize it actually? K: Realize its limitation, that is all. Sir, what do you mean by the word `realise'? A.C.: What I mean is, the brain is only capable of thought; it realizes it as knowledge. K: Do you, as Asit, realize it in the sense that you realize pain? I know I have pain, there is complete knowledge of pain. Does the brain see its tremendous limitation? Let us begin again. What is perception? What is seeing? There is intellectual seeing; I understand, comprehend, discern. Then there is seeing through hearing, verbal hearing and capturing the significance. Then there is optical seeing. Now, is there a different perception which doesn't belong to any of these three? I am asking; I am not saying there is. I am sceptical. First see this: I see how my mind operates -intellectually, through hearing, optically. That is all I know. So, through these media, I say I understand or I act, which is a material process. Get the point? That is all. Now, is there any other perception which is not a material process? Sriram: Therefore, that is not part of the brain. K: I don't want to say that yet. Sriram: Is there another kind of perception which is not of the brain? K: Look, I understand through the intellect, reason and logic, and then there is hearing which is not only verbal but going beyond the words. Go step by step: Intellectual, audio, visual, optical, then touching or gestures, all these are material processes. That is all I am saying. Then I am asking myself, is there a perception which is not this? There may not be, but I am sceptical, so I am asking. Answer it. A.C.: I can ask this question, but I can't answer it. K: You will answer it presently. I want to find out. Don't say you can't answer. I won't accept it. Because by saying that you have already blocked yourself. A.C.: May I ask a question? In order to see something you have to be outside of it. K: We are coming to that. Look, so far we have said this is the only medium through which we understand. I don't know anything else. But I want to be quite sure this is the only way I understand. A. C.: When you say that, after you have understood completely that this is the only perception we know, that very statement has put you outside. Otherwise what does the word `understanding' mean? K: Is that the only medium through which I understand? Punishment, reward, all that is implied in this intellectual, optical, audio... all that. I know that these are the factors that help my brain to say, `Yes, I understand.' A.C.: Are you saying that understanding is also the same process? K: Wait sir. It is all within that. I see this is a material process and, therefore, it is still here. Don't go back to that, we are pushing away from it. So, I come to that point, my brain comes to that point, and it stops. Because it is questioning. It has questioned all this and that is the only thing - the brain, the material process. Now you come along and say let us enquire if there is any other process. And I say, `This is the only process I know. There may be no other process. Show it to me.' Don't repeat. You are going to repeat the same thing over and over again. I am trying to stop you from repetition. So, you are stuck. Remain stuck there. See what we have done? We have activated the brain to a tremendous extent. I don't know if you follow this. I wonder if you see. Alan Hooker: Taking the brain to its limit. K: Yes, we are taking it to its very limit. So, it is a tremendous thing. Now answer it. A.H.: What is the question? K: Is there a perception which is not of time? Perception so far has created disorder in our life. Is there a perception which will clear all that? Which means, is there a perception out of time? I am asking you. Q: We are stuck. K.: Be stuck there, be stuck. I wish you were. When you are really stuck, another perception is taking place. Q: But we are generally trying to get out of it. K: No, that is still the same old process - you are not stuck. Sarjit Siddhoo: After listening to you, there has been a great movement within the mind, in the brain, but as you have brought us to this point, this movement seems to have stopped. K: Is that it? Movement means time. Is there no movement in the brain? You get my point? Are you still moving? When you say you are stuck, it means all movement has stopped. Do you see it? Q: In trying to answer this question, does it not continue that movement? K: No, if you are stuck, there is no movement. It is like being stuck in quicksand - the body can't move. S.S.: Unfortunately, that movement has stopped and that silence is there very briefly. Then we are back again in the same movement. K: No, no. Then you are not stuck. Q: Are you suggesting that stopping is a permanent state? K: I am not suggesting anything. I am just saying you come to the point when your brain is being so tremendously activated that you can't go any further, you can't move back or forth. A.C.: Only one question remains. Have you activated the brain? K: Are you asking whether K has activated the brain, the brain which is not yours, nor mine, nor his? What do you say? Yes, we have activated it. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 6 PART 2 SEMINAR RISHI VALLEY 4TH DECEMBER 1980 'INTELLIGENCE, COMPUTERS AND THE MECHANICAL MIND' K: Asit and I have been talking about the relationship of the human mind to the computer. He is involved in the manufacture of computers. And we have been trying, in different parts of the world, wherever we met, to find out what is intelligence. Is there an action which the computer cannot possibly do, something far more penetrating than anything man can do externally. And our conversation has been going on for several years. So I thought this morning we should meet and go into this matter. A.C.: The Americans are developing super computers, and we as human beings have to, in a sense, do the same thing. We have to be more intelligent than the technology of the Americans to counteract the threat of that technology. And the technology is not only in computers, it is also in genetic engineering, cloning, biochemistry, etc. They are trying to control genetic characteristics completely. Since the brain has no nerves, during brain surgery the patient is conscious. One can communicate with him. I'm sure it's a matter of time before computer-brain interfaces are created. Then, in Russia, there is a great deal of research being done on the ability to read thoughts and transmit them to someone else. I would like to speculate a little bit, I am using the word `speculate' in the sense of seeing certain problems now which are solvable technologically in the next few years. I think it is important to do this because you are not merely talking to us but you are also talking to those in the centuries to come, to whom all this will be a reality. For example, consider the role of the teacher today. You can get a small computer, you put a magnetic strip in it and it will communicate in French with you, put another strip in and it is fluent in Arabic, Japanese, instantaneously. Suppose the strip could be put into a human brain; the problem is only the interface between the brain and the strip, because the brain operates as an electrical circuit. Then what happens to the role of the teacher? The next point is that in affluent societies, because of the tremendous increase in physical appliances like motor cars and washing machines, the body has deteriorated. Now, since more and more mental functions are going to be taken over by computer, the mind is going to deteriorate not only at the level of what you are talking about, but even in ordinary functioning. I see this as an enormous problem. How does one face this problem in a world which is moving in this direction? K: If learning can be done instantaneously, if I can be a linguist when I wake up in the morning, then what is the function of the brain? What is the function of the human being? P.J.: Is it not a problem of what is humanness? What is it to be a human being apart from all this? K: Apparently, a human being, as he is, is a mass of accumulated knowledge and reactions according to that knowledge. Would you agree to that? And as the machine, the computer is going to take charge of all that, what then is the human being? What is the function of a school then? Think a great deal about this. This is not something that needs quick response. This is tremendously serious. What is a human being if his fears, his sorrows, his anxieties are all wiped away by chemicals or by some implanted electric circuitry? Then what am I? I don't think we get the fullness of it. P.J.: If you take a strong tranquillizer, your anxieties are temporarily over. That is not arguable. But if you can clone, you can do anything. We are missing something in all this. I don't think we are getting to the central thing. There is something else also involved in this. K: Look, Pupulji, if my anxieties, fears, sufferings can be allayed and my pleasure increased, I ask then what is a human being? What is our mind? A.P.: Do I understand that while, on the one hand, man has developed these extraordinary capacities, there is also a corresponding process of deterioration in the mind which is a side-effect of super mechanization? A.C.: If you have a car and you stop walking, your body will deteriorate. So, if the computer takes over mental functions, the mind deteriorates. I mean just that. K: I don't think we understand the depth of what is happening. We are arguing over whether it can happen. It is going to happen. Then what are we? What is a human being then? And then, when the machine, the chemicals - I am using the word `computer' to include all that - when the computer is going to take us over completely and we no longer exercise our brains, they physically deteriorate, how shall we prevent that? What shall I do? I must exercise my brain. Now it is being exercised through pain, through pleasure, through suffering, anxiety, all the rest of it. But it is working. And when the machine and chemicals take over, it will cease to work. And if it is not working, it will deteriorate; because we have problems, it acts. Can we start with the assumption that these things are going to happen, whether we like it or not? They are happening, unless we are blind or uninformed. Then, let us enquire if the mind is deprived chemically of its problems or by the computer, whether it can survive at all. A.P.: I am not quite clear about one point. There is in each human being a feeling of a void, of emptiness, which needs to be filled. K: It will be filled by chemicals. A.P.: It cannot be filled. No, sir. K: Oh yes, it will be. A.P.: I am questioning that. There is a strange void in every human being. There is a seed that is groping. R.B.: What he is saying is that there will be other forms of LSD without the side-effects which will fill that gap. K: Take a pill and you will never feel the void. A.P.: At some point you have to see that there is something which will remain untouched. A.C.: What if you don't find that? A.P.: Before you come to that, the finding of that, at least you must posit a need for that. K: I am positing a need. A.P.: What is the need?. K: The need is for chemicals, and the computer is going to destroy me, destroy my brain. A.C.: I am saying something slightly different, that is, if this technology continues, there won't be any void in any human beings because eventually they may die out as a species. At the same time, as a human being, I feel there is something else which I don't know but want to find out. Is there something which is different, which needs to be preserved? Can I understand intelligence? How am I going to preserve that against all these dangers? K: Asit, it may not be preservation at all. Look, sir, let us take for granted that chemicals - the computer - is going to take man over. And if the brain is not exercised as it is being exercised with problems of anxieties, fears, etc., then it will inevitably deteriorate. And deterioration means man gradually becoming a robot. Then I say to myself, as a human being who has survived several million years, is he to end like this? It may be so - and probably will. A.C.: It seems to me that the movement of this technology is a very evil thing because there is a certain goodness which is being destroyed. K: Agreed. A.C.: The technology is created by human beings. There seems to be a movement of evil, and the evil thing is going to take over. K: Is that evil? Why do you call it evil? A.C.: Evil because it is destroying the world. K: But we are destroying ourselves. The machine is not destroying us. We are destroying ourselves. A.C.: So the question is how is man to create this technology and yet not be destroyed by it. K: That is right. The mind is deteriorating because it will not allow anything to penetrate its values, dogmas. It is stuck there. If I have a strong conviction or opinion, I am deteriorating. And the machine is going to help us deteriorate faster. That is all. So, what is a human being to do? Then I ask, what is a human being, deprived of all this, if he has no problems and is only pursuing pleasure? I think that is the root of it. This is what man seeks now, in different forms. And he will be encouraged in that by the machine, by the drug. The human being will be nothing, but involved in the pursuit of pleasure. A.C.: And the computer and television will provide the pleasure right in his home. We are saying there are not only computer scientists but there are also genetic scientists and multinationals engaged in entertainment electronics and they are going to converge to a point where man will end up either by destroying the capacity of the human brain or as a human being in a constant state of pleasure without any side-effects. And the pleasure will be obtained through the computer and chemicals, and direct relationships with other human beings will gradually disappear. K: Perhaps no chemists, no computer experts have gone so far as yet but we have to be ahead of them. That is what I feel. So, what is it that man has pursued all through his existence? From time immemorial what is the stream he has always followed? Pleasure? A.C.: Pleasure, but also the ending of sorrow. K: Pleasure, avoid the other, but essentially pleasure. A.C.: He pursues pleasure and at some point he sees the need not merely for pleasure, but in the negative sense, the ending of suffering. K: Which means pleasure. A.C.: Is the ending of suffering pleasure? K: No. You are missing my point. I want pleasure at any price and suffering is an indication to me that I am not having pleasure. Dispute it; don't accept it. A.C.: What I am saying is, historically man has always pursued pleasure. K: Which means what? Go on, analyse it. A.C.: The self has pursued it. A.P.: When you say `self', are you talking of the physical self or the psychological self? K: Both. I want to survive physically and psychologically, and to survive, I must do certain things, and to do certain things, they must be pleasurable. Sir, look into this very carefully. Ultimately man wants pleasure. The pursuit of god is pleasure. Right? Is that what is going to be encouraged by the machine, drugs - that man will be merely an entity that is concerned with pleasure? Is the conflict to find a balance between the two? Pleasure is the most destructive thing in life. I don't think you understand the significance of this. The conflict between good and evil has existed from time immemorial. The problem is to find a balance or a state where this conflict does not exist, which is pleasure. And pleasure is the most destructive thing in life. Right? A.P.: In terms of what you are saying, does the search for freeing the mind from bondage come into the realm of pleasure? A. C.: We, in fact, reduce everything to that: That is what human beings have done. Attachment, bondage create suffering. That is why we want freedom. Can we see that all human actions ultimately end in wanting happiness or pleasure, and they are enormously destructive? They have ended up in a technology which is also a pursuit of pleasure, which is self-destructive. There must be some other movement of the mind which is not seeking pleasure, which is not self-destructive, I don't know if there is, but there must be. K: Asit, let us get this clear between ourselves, you and I. It is a fact that human beings historically up to now have always been in conflict between good and bad; their ancient paintings indicate a struggle. The spirit of conquering pervades, which ends up in pleasure. I have looked at it and I realize instantly that the whole movement of man has been this. I don't think anybody can dispute this. I am saying the whole of it, not only physical, but also psychological. Self-preservation is also part of that movement. That is a fact. Is that destructive of the mind, of the brain? R.B.: Sir, what do you mean by good and evil when you say it is trying to balance the good and evil which is pleasure? K: You have seen those cave paintings, fifty thousand years old, paintings in the caves of France and Spain. There you see man struggling against the bull. R.B.: Yes. It exists everywhere in some form or other. K: Yes. This conflict between the two - what is called good, what is called evil - has existed from time immemorial. Right? And man has invented the good and the evil. Watch it, watch your own mind. Don't theorize. Look at yourself if you can, and see what is good and what is evil. The fact is never evil. Right? Anger is anger. But I say it is evil, Therefore, I must get rid of anger. But anger is a fact. Why do you want to name it bad and good? R.B.: Whether you name it bad or not, it can be terribly destructive. K: It can be very destructive, but the moment I have called it bad, it is something to be avoided, right? And the conflict begins. But it is a fact. Why do you call it anything else? P.J.: Take the pursuit of black magic. Would you say the pursuit of that in its very nature is evil or not? K: What do you call black magic? P.J.: Black magic is the pursuit of something with the intention of destroying another. K: Which is what we are doing, though we may not call it black magic; but what is war? P.J.: Let me go slowly; you are rushing us. What I speak about brings into operation, supposedly, powers which are not physical powers. K: I had seen here at Rishi Valley some years ago, under a tree, a figure of a man or a woman in which they had put pins. I asked what it was about, and they explained it to me. Now, there was the intention to hurt somebody. Between that and the intention to go to war, what is the difference? You are losing an awful lot, you are missing an awful lot. You are all so damn clever, that is what is wrong with you. Light is neither good nor bad. Which means what? Look, sir, the computer, the chemicals, are taking over man. This is neither good nor bad -it is happening. Of course, there is cruelty; of course, there is kindness. It is obvious. The mother beating up a child and somebody having compassion and saying, don't hurt anyone - there is a difference, that is obvious. Why do you call it good or bad? Why do you call it evil? I am objecting to the word, that is all. Can we move to something else, which is, pleasure is always in the known. I have no pleasure today but day after tomorrow it might happen. I like to think it will happen. I don't know if you see what I mean. Pleasure is a time movement. Is there pleasure that is not based on knowledge? My whole life is the known. I project the known into the future modifying it but it is still the known. I have no pleasure in the unknown. And the computer, etc. is in the field of the known. Now the real question is whether there is freedom from the known. That is the real question because pleasure is there, suffering is there, fear is there, the whole movement of the mind is the known. And it may project the unknown, theorize, but that is not a fact. So, computers, chemicals, genetics, cloning are all the known. So, can there be freedom from the known? The known is destroying man. The astrophysicists are going to space from the known. They are pursuing the investigation of the heavens, the cosmos, through instruments constructed by thought, and they are looking through those instruments and discovering the universe, watching what it is; it is still the known. P.J.: A very interesting thing struck me just now. The present mind of man, in the way it is functioning, is threatened. It is being destroyed. Either the machine takes it over and it is destroyed, or the other freedom from the known will also destroy its present functioning. The challenge is much deeper. K: Yes. That is what I said. You got it. What Pupul is saying is, if I understand rightly, the known in which our minds are functioning is destroying us. The known is also the future projections as the machine, drugs, genetics, cloning all that is born out of these. So both are destroying us. A.C.: She is also saying the mind of man has always moved in the known, in pursuit of pleasure. That has resulted in technology which will destroy it. Then she is saying that the other movement, which is freedom from the known, will also destroy the mind as we know it now. K: Yes. Freedom from the known? What are you saying? A.C.: There are two movements, she says. The movement of the known is leading to greater and greater destruction of the mind. The way out is freedom from the known, which is also destroying the movement of the known. K: Wait. Freedom is not from something. It is an ending. Do you follow? A.C.: Are you saying, sir, that this freedom from the known is of such a nature that you are not destroying this movement, that thought has its place, mind has its place? Are you saying in that there is freedom? K: I say there is only freedom, but not from the known. P.J.: I say the mind is functioning in a particular way, what we call the human mind operates in a certain way. That human mind is put under pressure by technological advances. This other, freedom from the known, also is totally destructive of this function of the mind. Therefore, a new mind - whether born of technology or one which is free of the known - is inevitable. They are the only two things; the present position is out. K: Let us be clear. Either there must be a new mind or the present thing is going to destroy the mind. Right? But the new mind can only exist actually, not theoretically; it can only exist when knowledge ends. Knowledge has created the machine and we live on knowledge. We are machines; we are now separating the two. The machine is destroying us. The machine is the product of knowledge; we are the product of knowledge. Therefore, knowledge is destroying us, not the machine. So, the question then is, can knowledge end? Not can there be freedom from knowledge? Then you are avoiding or escaping from knowledge. A.C.: The question is, can knowledge or the action born of knowledge end? Action out of knowledge can end. Knowledge can't end. K: It can. A.C.: Action out of knowledge? K: Action is freedom from knowledge. A.C.: Knowledge can't end. K: Yes, sir. P.J.: What do you mean when you say all knowledge ends K: Knowledge is the known, except technological knowledge. Can that knowledge end? Who is to end knowledge? The person who ends knowledge is still part of knowledge. So there is no entity apart from knowledge, which can end knowledge. Please go slowly. A.C.: There is only knowledge? K: There is only knowledge, not the ending of knowledge. I don't know if I am making myself clear. A.C.: So, sir, there is the tremendous force of self-preservation and there is only knowledge. And you are asking, can knowledge end, which means self-annihilation? K: No, I understand what you are saying. I am leaving now, for the moment, the ending of the self. I am saying the computer, which includes all technology, and my life are based on knowledge. So there is no division between the two. A.C.: I follow that. K: This is a tremendous thing. And so long as we are living in knowledge, our brain is being destroyed through routine, the machine, etc. So, the mind is knowledge. There is no question of saying it must free itself from knowledge. See that. There is only the mind which is knowledge. I am going to tell you something. You see, you have blocked yourself. Don't say it is impossible. If you say it is impossible, you couldn't have invented the computers. Move from there. The mind when it says it must be free, whatever it does, it is within the field of knowledge. So, what is the state of the mind that is completely aware, or knows, or is cognizant that it is entirely knowledge? I have moved. Don't you see it? Now what has taken place? Apparently knowledge is movement. Knowledge has been acquired through movement. So, knowledge is movement. So, time, all that, is movement. A.C.: You are speaking of the state of mind when time comes to a stop. K: That is freedom. Time is movement. Which means what? It is very interesting, sir. Let me put it together. Mind has invented the computer. I have used the word to include all that technology, genetics, cloning, chemicals. That is born from the knowledge which man has acquired. It is still the known, the product of the known, with its hypotheses, theory and refuting the theory and all that. Man has also done exactly the same thing as the machine. So, there is no division between the two. The mind is knowledge. Whatever it does will be born of knowledge - man's gods, his temples are born of knowledge. Knowledge is a movement. Can the movement stop? That is really freedom. That means perception is free from knowledge and action is not of perception, not out of knowledge. Perception of the snake, the danger is action, but that perception is based on centuries of conditioning about the snake. The perception that I am a Hindu, which has gone on for three thousand years is the same movement. And we are living in the field all the time. That is destructive, not the machine. Unless that machine of the mind stops - not the computer - we are going to destroy ourselves. So, is there a perception which is not born out of knowledge? Because when this movement stops, there must be action. A,C.: In other words, it is to act in the world, but nothing sticks, no marks are left. Nothing takes root. K: Which means what? A perception which is not of knowledge. Is there such perception? Of course, there is perception which cannot be computerized. Is this enquiry born out of the instinct for pleasure? We are all enquiring. P.J.: I don't know whether it is for pleasure or for something else. A C.: It doesn't matter whether the computer can do it or not. It is essential that we do it. P.J.: Which leads to the position that there is something to enquire into. K: You see how deep-rooted it is! A.C.: The question is, what is the mechanism of the mind, what is the structure of the mind which operates with perception, with insight, with no accumulation. K: But look what we have done - to come to that point, which is perception without record, how long it has taken. Why? Because we function in time. A.C.: In other words, what you are saying is that you don't have to go through this process. If we have come to this point, and do not act, it is very dangerous, much more dangerous than not having a discussion at all. K: That is what I am saying. It is a tremendous danger. Have you come to a point where you see what the mind has invented? -the machine which is the computer, drugs, chemicals, cloning, all this. It is the same as our minds. Our minds are as mechanical as that. And we are acting always in that area. And, therefore, we are destroying ourselves. It is not the machine that is destroying us. P.J.: One can say at the end of it, tapas, tapas, tapas. It means we have not done our homework. K: I am not sure if you are not back in time. You know, sir, a pianist once said, if you practise, you are practising the wrong thing. P.J.: It is not a question of practice. K: Pupulji, there are all the teachers. What are they going to do? Drop a bomb here? You follow what I mean? We are handling a bomb. It may go off any moment. I don't know if you realize this. It is a tremendous thing. A.C.: It is far more dangerous. K: This is really frightening. I wonder if you realize it. What will you do? This is real revolution. A.C.: And not only for teachers and students. K: Of course, of course. A.C.: I wanted to ask you, does the mind which has gone with you up to a point, the mind which reaches this point, become much more vulnerable to evil? K: I understand what you mean. We won't discuss it now. So, sir, the question is stopping movement, ending movement, not ending knowledge. This is the real question. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 6 PART 3 SEMINAR RISHI VALLEY 30TH DECEMBER 1980 'INTELLIGENCE, COMPUTERS AND THE MECHANICAL MIND' K: Would you accept that intelligence is not the product of thought? If intelligence is the product of thought, then intelligence is mechanical. Thought can never be non-mechanical. A.C.: Intelligence can be the product of thought. The computer scientists believe it. K: That's why they are investigating intelligence through thought. A.C.: They want to know what is intelligence, and therefore, they want to know what is the thinking process, because the thinking process for them is linked to intelligence. K: I am not saying it is so, or not. A.C.: So we have to enquire into what is thought and what is intelligence? K: If you once admit that intelligence is not the product of thought, then the thinker has no importance. A.C.: I think you are going too fast. If intelligence is not the product of thought, then thought has no importance. But negatively, it is important because, without understanding it, intelligence cannot come about. K: Yes. Thought is a mechanical process; therefore, keep it in its right place. But you want to find out what is intelligence. Don't introduce thought into it. Can we go into what that intelligence is which is never touched by thought? A.C.: Yes, I understand, How does one enquire into what is intelligence? K: Not by using thought to enquire. If you use thought you are blocking yourself. A.C.: I follow, in the sense that you are saying, don't use thought or the thinking process to enquire into what is intelligence. K: Because intelligence is not the product of thought. A.C.: I don't know that. If you say, don't use thought to enquire, then what do you want? K: That's just it. Let us go into it. But let us be quite sure that thought cannot produce intelligence. Thought has produced the atom bomb, it has produced war. But you are enquiring into something which thought cannot enquire into. You are enquiring into what is intelligence. We say it is not a product of thought. If it is, you are operating with thought. A.C.: I accept this; that's clear. I accept that you cannot use the tool - the thought process - to enquire into intelligence. Then how do you enquire? K: But first we must be quite sure that we accept that. A.C.: I can see that Now - for then everything would be intelligence, everything that is thought. And it is not intelligence. K: Of course. A.C.: I see that there is no such thing as inefficient thought, good thought, bad thought, that is quite clear. K: What the computer experts are doing in Japan is to enquire into thought. A.C.: That is why they are stuck because they never reach intelligence. K: Yes The Indians have tried to suppress thought, control thought. A.C.: Why have they said that? K: Because they feel if thought stops, the other may exist. Meditation to them is that. A.C.: That means they had an insight into this other thing? K: No. Look sir, perhaps the Buddha may have seen that intelligence is not thought. The other have spoken of how to suppress thought, control it. To them that is meditation. Which means what? That which is intelligence cannot be found through thought; therefore, suppress it. A.C.: Do you feel that they have some insight into this whole thing? If someone told you, suppress thought, contain it, wouldn't you feel that the person had some insight into it? Can one refine thought? K: Thought is as the child of a barren woman. Which means what? A.C.: It's not creative. The computer scientists are trying to create a computer like the human brain, but they can`t do it because they don't know the thinking process. I wonder whether Indians who are supposed to have investigated for five thousand years into the human mind, nirvana and the other, could get together to create this. K: Which two getting together? A.C.: The Indian mind and the mind of technology. K: Listen, the Buddha might have said there is intelligence that has nothing to do with thought. The rest of them read it or heard it; they translated that or repeated that. A.C.: So, there is no meaning to their investigation. K: It is the original man who said, `Look, I don't know what it is all about, but I'm going to find out.' That is research. A.C.: I follow; you have answered my question. We come back. You are saying the computer scientist is approaching it wrongly; he is approaching intelligence through the thinking process and he can never find it and, therefore, he is stuck. K: Which means the thinking process is mechanical. A.C.: Yes. K: Ah, be careful. Because thinking is based on knowledge. Right? Knowledge is limited. A.C.: Even if they understand the thinking process, they still want to understand intelligence. So we come back to the question: How does one enquire into intelligence? K: You can't because your enquiry is with the brain. The brain is conditioned to think. Is this clear? A.C.: Are you saying that if you really saw this clearly you don't enquire using the thought process? Then, is there any enquiry into intelligence? Intelligence is, it exists. K: No, no. Then you have to enquire into what it is to investigate. Can I discard the use of the brain, of thought - which is the brain, which is mechanical? There may be a part of the brain which is not mechanical - I don't know - but we can leave that for the moment. Intelligence is not the product of the brain as thought. A.C.: Then one discards thought. K: Not discards, one can't discard that. I want a baby. I can't produce a baby. So, what have you left when you are no longer using the brain to enquire? A.C.: But you talk of seeing and listening. Would you call that the use of the brain? K: Seeing is not the use of the brain. But I have seen the world through my thinking. I have seen what it has done in the word -atom bombs, destruction, etc., which is all the movement of thought. It has done evil things and good things. We will use evil and good for the moment. But that is not intelligence. A.C.: I follow. K. Thought can never beget intelligence. Therefore, I say to myself: I wonder whether I am approaching it wrongly. A.C.: You have shown me that you cannot reproduce human intelligence that way but you can simulate thought that way, and you can get to know the thought process that way. K: Yes, that's simple. A.C.: That in itself could be dangerous. K: That's what is happening. The computer will be able to think much better, quicker. A.C.: That in itself is dangerous. K: The fighter pilots have something inside the brain or outside. The moment they think and look, they shoot accurately. A.C.: Yes, they will look at the target and then the shooting takes place. K: If you are really clear that thought under no circumstances can have intelligence, then what is the instrument that will investigate? We have used thought to investigate; now I have discarded thought, in the sense that thought has its place but when I am enquiring into intelligence thought has no place. Thought cannot investigate into intelligence. If you tell this to computer experts they will say, what the hell are you talking about? Then what is the instrument which is not thought that can perceive, investigate, look into intelligence? A.C.: Seeing? Observing? K: Don't use those words. Use your own words. Then it will have more clarity. A.C.: There is nothing else except thought. K: That's it. So the battle. And that's why they are stumped; they are moving in the same circle. They use thought and they want to enquire into the process of thought. The process of thought is very clear - it is based on memory, memory is based on knowledge and so on. The brain is conditioned to that; it has operated for a million years on that basis and now these experts come along and try to investigate intelligence with their brains which are highly trained. But their enquiry is still based on knowledge which is limited. Therefore, their investigation can never find out. Now, is there any instrument that will see what intelligence is - or is there no instrument at all? Do you see what I am talking about? I have so far used the instrument of thought to investigate. Now we have discarded that. But I am still searching for an instrument to investigate. That means I am still in the same groove. A.C.: There is only thought. K: There is no process of investigation. Now, what is it that is not contaminated by thought, that has no past, no future, no time element in it? The time element is thought. The quality of mind that is not of time, not of tomorrow, not of yesterday, not of memory - that mind is an intelligent mind. A.C.: Why do you call it that? K: That is intelligence. A.C.: Why is that intelligence? K: I will show you in a moment. First of all we have given up thought, and there is no instrument that can investigate. A.C.: Yes, for the instrument would be thought. K: Thought may be waiting surreptitiously, unconsciously, to catch something. It cannot investigate that. If you admit that once, then what has happened to your brain? What has happened to your enquiry? You want to discuss intelligence. The moment you deny thought totally, that is intelligence. A.C.: I don't know what intelligence is. K: Why does one think one doesn't know? A.C.: Because obviously... K: Ah no, you are not answering my question. Because you are saying thought must know what intelligence is. But thought can never know. A.C.: Yes. K: Knowing means feeling, accumulating, acting. A.C.: I see that. K: If you follow that, there is no instrument of enquiry. A.C.: I follow that. K: Therefore, what? That state of the mind that has put away thought; it is not enquiring. So, what has happened? We will use another word - insight. Insight is not remembrance, it is not the accumulated knowledge which is thought. It has nothing to do with time. To see something instantly has nothing to do with time. A.C.: I see that. Are you saying that intelligence - insight - that state of mind does not exist if you approach it through the thought process? K: If you are clear - as clear as in the knowledge that a cobra is poisonous - that thought can never under any circumstances reach intelligence, you wipe away all enquiry. These people are using thought to create a machine that can think, a super computer, artificial intelligence. They are working to create a brain which will be like ours, which will be mechanical. They are using their brain, with their tremendous knowledge of the brain, to produce a brain which is based on thought. A.C.: In fact, they are using the model of the human brain to copy it. K: Which is thinking. I follow that. Do you see this as a fact? To see it as a fact is to see that thought under no circumstances can have the other. If thought is no longer the instrument of enquiry, then you have nothing else with which to enquire. You can't enquire. Then what is intelligence, that is not based on enquiry? Look sir, I want to enquire into truth. I don't know anything about it. I don't want to depend on anyone to find out. So, I have to discard all the past. I want to find out what is supreme intelligence - that is what they all want to find out - not casual intelligence. We want to find out what is supreme intelligence. So, can I discard everything that I know? The only instrument I have is thought. I can think clearly because I have been trained to think, not sentimentally but objectively. Thinking which can produce so-called intelligence is then on the same level as thinking that has produced war. Therefore, it is not intelligence. So, under no circumstances will thinking have a perception of that. I must be absolutely clear. If I am not clear, unconsciously, deeply, then thought is going to interfere. Before anything else, I want to clear the board. Is that possible? I see that what they are doing won't get them there. They will create mechanical, artificial intelligence which is like human intelligence that is capable of destroying the world. Right? Thinking, and all the instruments thought has invented to investigate into that - meditation, various types of silence, various types of self-denial - are out. The technologies won't accept that but true enquiry is that. And they haven't found it. They are anchored to Jesus or to the saint, which is thought, and from there they move through thought. They won't accept that thought can under no circumstances come to that. Then what have I left to see that thought, under any circumstances, can produce intelligence? A.C.: I understand that. It is not enough to see that thinking is not intelligence. K: That is fairly simple, but the implications of it, the inwardness of it... A.C.: When you say that intelligence is not the product of thought, it is clear. K: Because you have applied your brain. A.C.: But that is not enough. It does not mean that thought has found its proper place. To see something is not enough. K: No. To see that you don't know - we all think we know - to see that thought cannot produce intelligence which is non-mechanical, you didn't use thought. Thought is limited. You accepted the fact; there was no thinking; you understand. A.C.: I understand. My problem is slightly different. It is not enough to see that thinking is not intelligence. K: To accept that is fairly simple, but the implications of it? A.C.: That's what I want to know. K: If you pointed this out to the computer scientists, what would their reaction be? They would treat it as mystical. Yet, these are the people trying to find out. A.C.: Yes. These people are trying to find intelligence. But other people are also trying to find that - the people whom you have been talking to. K: They can't, they haven't. They react with thought. You have to apply your brain. A.C.: To see something is not enough. K: To see that you don't know - they all say they know. Progress in the last twenty years has been so rapid. They know; they wouldn't accept they don't know. I want you to see this. A.C.: The person who has listened to you, who sees what you say, does not become intelligent. I am talking of myself. K: But you don't have to investigate; it is all there. They want to investigate the point they want to reach. Their minds want to investigate where they want to go. When you see that thought is not the instrument, what will produce intelligence? Are you seeing the whole of it? Or are you seeing only in one direction? I don't know whether I am conveying something. That means, can the brain observe something whole without any kind of fragmentation? Intelligence is not fragmentation. The brain that investigates is fragmented, broken up. Whatever words you use, it functions in a very small field of knowledge. So, this cannot see it. Do you really feel this in your blood? A.C.: What does that mean, sir? K: This is something in which organized religions have no place. Why? A.C.: Because we see what has happened with organized religions. K: No, that means you are approaching it through reason - you see what is happening and from there you come to a conclusion. A.C.: I follow what you are saying; it is possible. K: You don't have the insight to see that is wrong. So, when you say that you are using reason, logic, you are turning to thought and through thought you come to a conclusion. Can you have insight which says without logic this is wrong? And having seen that it is wrong, use logic then? A.C.: I follow that. K: In the same way, sir, thought cannot do this. We use logic to communicate and we say it is quite clear. It is not Logic has made it very clear; so what do you do? We may have discussed it, gone into it, but you are still following the same way of thought - logic, reason, facts. Right? Do you see that? A.C.: In order to see that... K: First see that clearly and then it comes naturally. Don't put it the other way round. Don't say, to live like that I must do this. A1.C.: To see needs the right environment. K: This is our environment. Wherever you are, that is your environment. If you are in a hotel room in London, that's our environment. A.C.: If I am with you, it's different. If I am not with you, it's totally different. K: Of course. A.C.: The environment is different. K: No, not the environment. Here I am forcing you to look. "Forcing', in quotes, pushing you. There no one is pushing; they are all thinking the same way. A.C.: So, it becomes very important, and that is the trap: to have to be pushed. K: Yes. It is very important to go to a doctor, a right doctor if I can find him. I am stimulated. When the stimulation is one you are back to what your environment is. To see this is no stimulation. Either you see it or you don't see it. We have discussed this for over an hour and we are beginning to see the nature of it. If you had another couple of days here, steadily working, thinking, you'd be in it. A.C.: That's what I meant when I was talking to you, that's what I meant by environment. K: But if you treat it as a-drug... A.C.: Of course, I see that when I am with you it is different from when I am not with you. When I am away, it is completely overwhelmed and overpowered, but it does come back when I am with you. What can I do to see that it stays? K: As you have other things to do, I would meet you very often till you are soaked in it, soaked in the sense that you understand what I mean, not just repeat what I say. You are born in it. How will you transmit this to your associates? Would they listen to you? A.C.: No, they won't listen. This research into artificial intelligence will go on. Through thought they are going to produce a super computer better than `most people's brains'. They will do it and they will end up creating a world which will make the human mind obsolete. That is the threat to the human race. K: Will they consider that they have reached the mystery of intelligence then? A.C.: Yes. They will be able to reproduce anything that is mechanical, reproduce the thought process. That is the human brain, and that is frightening. What is most exciting is to investigate the nature of this intelligence and what can happen, not artificial intelligence. And I have been asking why in this environment I can feel a total change taking place. K: Suppose we were to discuss every day, could you stand it? A.C.: Yes. K: Careful. A.C.: I could stand it, but to carry it out is the problem. The problem is when I go out of the door. K: That means you haven't seen this. To see the danger of that, of thought, of the whole mechanistic process, the inwardness of it, is the very source of intelligence. THE WAY OF INTELLIGENCE CHAPTER 6 PART 4 SEMINAR MADRAS 31ST DECEMBER 1982 'INTELLIGENCE, COMPUTERS AND THE MECHANICAL MIND' Asit Chandmal: Sir, for the last two and a half years we have been talking about computers, the way they are progressing and the impact technology could have on the human mind and, therefore, the species. We have discussed its sociological impact and whether the computer can ever be like the human mind. The Government and the top computer scientists of Japan have decided to create a computer which will replicate the processes of the human brain and they have earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for this project. They call it the fifth generation of computers. They say that they will do it by 1990 and that the computer will speak and understand many languages. Now, the problem they are facing is this: They don't know what is intelligence. There is enough knowledge about the hardware with which computers are built. The brain is matter made up of hydrogen, carbon and other molecules and it operates essentially as an electrical circuit and through chemical reactions. The computer is made of silicon molecules and it also operates essentially as a collection of electrical circuits of chips. So they can now make these chips smaller and smaller and faster and faster, they can put away more memory, more logic, than human beings ever can. They can put in a tremendous amount of logic circuits, but still the computer cannot, does not respond the way a human being does because it thinks out things sequentially; it cannot perceive immediately, it can't work in parallel. So they say that if we can understand how the human mind works, we can simulate it in a computer. They admit they do not understand the human mind, the brain or intelligence. They say in order to understand intelligence, we must understand the thinking process, because then we could understand intelligence. They also do not understand how creativity operates. What is creativity? Most people say that the human mind has the ability to make a leap. So they are looking into what is intelligence and what is the thinking process and what is creativity because they feel that if they can understand this, they can reproduce it in a computer and that will give it intelligence and creativity. And you are saying that intelligence has nothing to do with thought. We know only the thinking process and they are going to find out about that and put it into a computer. K: You are almost certain they will do it? A.C.: They call it a major attack on the unknown, which is the mind, and they say this is our perception of the future - future industry, future technology and all that. The Americans are very worried about it. So IBM, all of them, are putting hundreds of millions of dollars in similar research. K: The Americans are doing it too! A.C.: There is an organization in America which most people don't know about, the National Security Agency. It has ten square miles covered with computers. It is so big it has its own university. It has more Ph.D's than all the universities in Europe, all geared towards defence work. They are also working on such computers but they don't get publicity. There is an incredible amount of money, and highly educated specialists are working on creating a machine which will perform like the human mind. So what I want to ask you is this: If they succeed in doing this, then as I see it, the present human mind has to eventually die out: it is obsolete; it cannot compete. In terms of evolution, it can't survive. So what is our response to this? Then again, if the present human mind is different from merely being a thinking machine, what is the difference? Is it creativity, is it intelligence, and if so, then what is creativity and what is intelligence? So shall we take the first question sir: Are our minds merely programmed thinking machines, are our minds mechanical? K: Where do we start in discussing, in exploring this? A.C.: I think we should start from the way we actually operate in our daily life. All action is based on thought and thought is a material process. It seems to me fairly clear that such a mind has to die out because it will be replaced by superior technology. K: Would you differentiate between the mind and the brain or would you only use the word `mind' to convey the wholeness of the human mind? A.C.: I am using the word `mind' in terms of what a human being is. He has a brain with thought, emotions and all the reactions. K: So you are using the word `mind' in the sense that it includes all the reactions, emotions, remembrances, the confusion, desire, pleasure, sorrow, affection. If all that is the mind, then what is the relationship between that and the brain? A.C.: What do you mean by the brain ? K: Is that brain an individual brain, or a result of the entire evolutionary process of the human being? A.C.: Physically, it is a separate brain. But are you saying that the cells in my brain or someone else's brain have the same content? K: Is the brain, which has evolved, my brain or the brain of this tremendous evolution? A.C.: It is obviously evolution. K: So it is not my brain; not my thinking. It is thinking. Whether it is a poor man or a rich man or a professor, it is thinking. You may think differently, I may think differently, but it is still thinking. Are you saying then that thinking is an integral part of the brain? A.C.: It seems to be. K: That is, that thinking has created all the human problems as well as technological problems. And thinking is trying to solve those problems and finds that it cannot. A.C.: And it says that it cannot because I am not thinking well enough. K: Thinking itself says that: It is general to all mankind, whether it is the top scientist or the poor ignorant villager, and that thinking has created war, division of people, churches, temples, mosques. It has created all those divisions and it tries to create one god, who is not divisible. In human relationship thought has created problems and it has not solved them. It cannot because thought itself is limited. Thought is the result of experience, knowledge, memory. Knowledge is never complete. Therefore, thought can never be complete. As knowledge is limited, thought must be limited, and that limited thought creates the problems. All limitations must create problems and then that very thought which has created the problem tries to solve the problem. So it cannot solve the problem. A.C.: Are you saying that problems are created because knowledge is limited and the instruments of knowledge are limited? K: And thought is limited because of knowledge. A.C.: Are you saying that thought is limited because it has not been able to know everything? K: Thought is the result of vast experience, memory, all that. You have seen the computer. It is a form of computer which has had a great deal of experience, a great deal of knowledge, and thought and knowledge are limited. P.J.: What is the distinction between thought and mind? K: They are both the same movements. A.C.: In other words, you are saying that all new knowledge is essentially contained in the old knowledge and is a result of thought. K: Of course. All knowledge is the result of thought. A.C.: Are you saying that discovering a new thing in physics or mathematics is not creativity; is the same limited knowledge increasing? K: Look, we must keep creation out for the moment, for it may have different meaning to you or to her. Let us be clear; all knowledge is limited. Scientists are adding; that will go on for the next thousand years, but still whatever is being added to must be limited because there is always something more to be added. A.C.: Is it limited at any given point of time? K: Of course. So, knowledge must always go with ignorance. Thought is born of knowledge. If you have no knowledge, you wouldn't think. You may reach a total state of amnesia or whatever it is called; you will be completely blank. A.C.: As you are saying that all knowledge is limited, I have to ask this question of creativity as we know it. Today, if somebody composes a new symphony or writes a new equation in physics, would you say that it is not creativity in the true sense? K: I won't call that creativity. I may be wrong. I am not laying down the law. A.C.: In that case, sir, you are in fact saying that our minds, as we know them and as they operate in our daily life, are entirely mechanical. In which case, that is what the Japanese are going to do - build a computer which has a vast storehouse of knowledge, and an extremely `intelligent', logical - deductive and inductive -brain much better than the human brain. So, what happens to our brain? P.J.: The human mind - which Krishnaji says is both the individual mind and the mind of mankind - has itself been a storehouse for the mind of mankind to probe into and draw out of. The memory bank of the computer can never be the memory bank of the racial mind. A.C.: Why do you say that? Q: The racial mind is the result of evolution. So, in a sense, while all the options within it may still be limited, all the options of the memory of mankind are available to it. A.C.: It may have more options, more memory than the computer, but essentially it is still doing the same thing - operating out of memory and knowledge. K: Of course, of course. A.C.: Computer scientists are saying that we can put a much vaster storehouse of knowledge in the computer by networking computers, etc. Now, superficially, that is true; no human being can remember everything in the encyclopaedia. So, outwardly, the memory of the computer is much better. In a much deeper sense, since it does not have subconscious or racial memories, the human brain can have much more access to knowledge and more memory, but it is still the same thing - access to more memory. K: Yes, sir, move from there. A.C.: And you say any act of that mind is not creative including the composing of symphonies, Einstein's discovery, writing poetry - none of that. It is all a projection of knowledge, memory, may be just permutations and combinations. K: Of course, of course. A.C.: The moment you accept that, the computer will definitely become superior to man, the human mind, in this function. A.P.: What you say is tantamount to saying that the evolutionary process of the brain has come to an end. A.C.: That is correct. A.P. Now, I question this. A.C.: I am saying that the mind as it is, the brain as it is, has come to an end because that particular brain is going to be replaced by a brain, the computer, which can perform these functions. A.P.: This is just a hypothesis. A.C.: It is not a hypothesis. Already it is performing a lot of functions far better than the human mind. It can't do all of them, so they are working on that. Why should you believe that matter made of hydrogen and carbon molecules is inherently superior to something made of silicon molecules or that the human brain's electrical circuits are inherently and forever superior to those of computers? K: Achyutji, Asit, would you agree on one point - that the computer has a cause as the human brain has a cause? Then what has a cause, has an end. Now, is there something which is causeless? If there is such a thing as a movement which is causeless, that is creation. R.R.: What you are saying is that there is an extraordinary mind. K: No I have not gone into it, yet. After forty or fifty thousand years, we have reached this point - the brain. The computer has reached this point. Between the two, there is not much difference; both are created by thought. A.P.: I am not willing to concede that that which the human brain has created has come into total possession of all the faculties of its creator: Is that what you are saying, Asit? K: No, sir. He does not say that. The computer cannot see the stars and look at the beauty of the stars. R.R.: But it can simulate it. K: Of course. But it hasn't the perception of the human eye looking at the heavens and saying what a marvellous night this is. R.R.: Why do you concede that point, Asit? A.C.: I did not concede it. In fact, they can simulate all that. K: Of course, they can simulate it. R.R.: Are you saying that because emotions are also the result of sensory perception and thought? K: Is there a perception which is not the product of thought? A.C.: Does the human mind have such a thing? K: Probably not. A.C.: The computer hasn't got it either. But they will have in twenty or thirty years' time - the computer will be superior to human beings. K: Of course, I am inclined to agree with you. P.J.: I am inclined to question you, sir. A.P.: If we observe the human mind which has gone into the making of the computer, you are assuming that it has exhausted its potential by creating the computer: Having created, having given birth to the baby, the mother dies. That is what you are saying. K: No, no. A.P.: I refuse to accept it. A.C.: Why do you refuse to accept it? Having given birth to nuclear weapons... those weapons will wipe out human beings. A.P.: Agreed. A.C.: So, having given birth to computers which are now designing and making new computers which will make better and faster computers, why do you say that they won't be able to destroy man who has made them? R.R.: And even if they did not destroy, why cannot the baby have all the potentialities of the mother? Rupert Sheldrake: So why do I need, the Japanese need, all the top computer scientists and the Japanese Government and twenty-five international companies need, to produce these computers if computers can already do it? A.C.: This is the target. Computers cannot already do it. R.S.: The fact is, it is a target but it is nothing. Alchemists for the past so many years have tried to create gold but they have failed. We are talking about what amounts to in the mind as fantasy. A.C.: Do you know what they are trying to do? Genetic scientists have got together with computer scientists. They are saying, why are you using silicon? The human brain has hydrogen and carbon molecules. So let us take hydrogen and carbon molecules, let us use brain cells to make computers: Another approach is: Our genes are programmed so that some cells become an eye, others become the nose and so on. If you can break that genetic code, you could programme it to become a brain or a computer. There is a lot of research going on in that. R.S.: I know about this research. I regard that as fantasy too, because I think the whole thing is based on false premises about the nature of the brain, about the nature of life and so on. But this would be sidetracking the main issue. I think I would rather come back to the point that in relation to producing bigger and better computers which may supersede certain powers of human beings, what is involved is human activity, call it thought or whatever you like. And these computers are the product of human activity. There is no doubt that many things human beings make exceed human capacities, but there is a limit. Machines can do many things which human beings can't do. Nevertheless, they are the products of human beings and it seems to me unlikely that in any sense these things would supersede human beings. They may supersede particular faculties of human beings. A.C.: What are the things they will not be able to supersede? R.S.: They have not yet superseded the ability to invent the fifth generation of computers. A.C.: Yes, but the Japanese cannot do it without computers. It is being done by the Japanese and by computers. And, if you actually measure it, perhaps 20 per cent of the effort will be human, 80 per cent will be that of the computer. R.S.: Well, everything we do today in the modern world is aided by machine. A.C.: What is it in a human being that you think cannot be done by machines in the next twenty-five or fifty years? R.S.: Well, it is a subject which we are now coming to -creativity. Let us take a smaller point - humour. And one of the most striking things is that most of us are not behaving like desiccated calculating machines. Most people lead their lives with a certain sense of humour. You see people laughing about all sorts of things. I have never seen a computer laugh. A.C.: If you heard the computer laugh, would you accept that it can do what human beings can? R.S.: No. You can get a tape recorder to laugh. A.C.: What will convince you? R.S.: Nothing. A.C.: You have made up your mind. R.S.: I am prejudiced. A.C.: Why are you prejudiced? If you see a baby, you will say that the baby will be capable, when it grows, of doing a lot of things which computers cannot do. But if a group of people design a new type of computer, you will say a priori that computers will never be able to do what the baby can do. Why? What is it in that baby that persuades you? R.S.: You see, there are a lot of things which we recognise and understand directly without being able to put everything into explicitly stored-up recognition programmes. I can recognise many different kinds of flowers, trees and animals. If I have to say how I recognise them, what is it that makes me recognize them, it will be very difficult for me to tell you. I think it will be difficult for you, too. K: But, sir, when you recognize, it is based on memory. A.C.: They are working on pattern recognition. There is tremendous research going into it today. Computers are beginning to recognise some things visually. R.S.: But there is a certain intuitive sense. A.C.: What is intuition? R.S.: It is notoriously difficult to say what intuition is. A.C.: It is just a word. Unless you know what it means, you cannot use that word. R.S.: No. You don't have to be able to spell out in mathematical formula whatever words mean. A.C.: Spell it out in words. What is intuition? R.S.: Intuition is grasping something more, seeing something more, insight into something which involves a direct kind of knowledge which does not have to go through a process of words, thought and action. A. C.: How do you know it has not gone through the process of word or thought? It could have done it subconsciously in your mind, the brain has been working on it, and it emerges instantaneously, and you call it intuition. It does not mean that it has not gone through the process of thought. R.S.: It may have gone through such processes. If, for everything I say, you are going to postulate hidden processes... A.C.: I am not postulating. R.S.: Yes, you are. P.J.: Sir, the problem seems to be that if the brain is a closed circuit only, then what Asit says is true. But the `but' comes in because the whole reason for our being here is, can there be an acceleration of the very capacity of the brain so that it ceases to be a process? Is the brain a closed circuit? R.S.: The trouble is, it takes a long time to answer these questions. I have my own theory about biology which would deny most of these basic premises. You see, the conventional theory of biology, including the conventional theory of the brain, starts from the assumption that there are simply mechanical, chemical or physical processes within the organism. Now, only 99 per cent of biology is based on this assumption, and therefore, the kind of language in which we speak is based on that kind of thinking. I disagree with the assumption, firstly, that the brain is a closed circuit. Secondly, that it works entirely mechanically or chemically or electrically and so on. So, I think we have a theory of life which says that living organisms are nothing but machines, and then we have a theory which says it has nothing to do with machines. Why can't we model them by machines? This is the basis of your argument, and it seems quite reasonable on the face of it, but there are a number of assumptions. P.J.: He posited three things: Whether the brain as it is today is a closed circuit; what is intelligence; and what creativity is. A.C.: I didn't say the brain was a closed circuit. K: May I ask a question, sir? Would you consider that the brain has infinite capacity? Don't say `no' right away. Let us use the word `capacity'. I don't like the word `capacity' because for us capacity is educated knowledge and all that. But if I can use that word, the brain has infinite capacity. Look what it has done in the technological world, including the computer. A.C.: You can't say that thought is limited and then say that the brain has infinite capacity. K: Yes, I am going to come to that. Thought has limited the brain, has conditioned the brain. Would you agree? I am a Hindu, I believe in all the superstitions, all the nonsense. Right? A.C.: You are separating thought and brain. K: No no I want to find out if the brain can ever be free from its own limitation, thought, knowledge, emotion. All right, call it thought. Can the brain which has been conditioned by thought, if that conditioning is somehow freed, it has got... A.C.: You can't say that. K: It may. You are understanding now? You have been to the moon, the brain has created cruise missiles, it has had extraordinary technological movement. Agreed? Now, is there an instrument which is not thought? This is not romantic speculation. I am just asking; I am not saying there is or there is not. You understand my question? Thought is a worn-out instrument. I think it has reached its limit, tether, because it has not solved the human problem. So, is there a way of looking which is not thought but which can instead of going out there, going to the heavens and all that, turn inwards? That inward movement is the infinite: R.R.: Still it has not solved the human problem. K: I am going to show it will. No, thought will not solve the human problems. Either it is a fact or it is not a fact. On the contrary, it is increasing human problems. Right? Q: Your question is: Is there anything other than thought which could be an instrument? K: Yes, you may not agree with what I am going to say presently. Then, perhaps, that instrument can look both outward and inward, and that is infinite. Q: Psychologists try to discover what is within; at least they profess to do this. K: I know, sir, what they say is all mechanical. Q: I accept what you say. K: Don't accept, sir. I hesitate to accept what I say too. I want first to be quite clear that thought has not solved human problems. It has solved technological, not human problems - my relationship with my wife, my relationship with the community, my relationship with the heavens, and all the rest of it. And thought tries to resolve these problems and it has made things worse. It is so obvious. So I am now asking, is there something which is not thought, which is not mechanical? A.C.: You are asking in other words what Pupulji was asking the other day: Is there a sensory perception without thought? K: Yes: Will you listen to something? Life is a movement, going out and coming in, like the tide. I create the world, and the world then controls me. And I react to the world. It is movement. Would you agree to that? Now, if you see the same thing as I see -not that you must - it is a movement out and in, this is our life, action and reaction, reward and punishment. Can this movement stop? P.J.: You have to move out of your closed circuit of the computer to even face that question. K: No not move out of the circuit. This is our life. Now, as long as this movement exists, I am caught in time, that is evolution. R.S.: Why not just say that is life, evolution? K: Yes, and that is: I am evolving. This movement gets better, worse, it is always movement. So, as long as this movement exists, I am mechanical. Q: Only mechanical? K: Yes, I see a woman and I want her: I see a garden, I want it. It is action and reaction, reward and punishment, punishment and reward. Where is intelligence in that? As long as you are caught in that, your intelligence is out; it is a mechanical intelligence: You hate me and I hate you back. A.C.: I follow that. K: If you accept that, intelligence is something totally different from thought. R.S.: If what you are saying is what I think it is, perhaps you could say it is cause and effect, action and reaction, instead of `mechanical'. K: Yes, yes. R.S.: Now there is a certain kind of low level activity, what people ordinarily call intelligence, which perhaps we can better call ingenuity, where, in order to get something you want - but you may not be able to get it in a straightforward way - you may have to resort to some fairly original way, some new kind of competence, making some bogus documents and so on. There is a certain kind of ingenuity which is not purely mechanical. It is subsumed down to a certain mechanical set of desires and within that is the framework of certain inventiveness. So the framework may be one of action-reaction but within that we exhibit considerable ingenuity and inventiveness. K: I would not call that intelligence. R.S.: No. But in ordinary language it is often called intelligence. An intelligent businessman is one who would think of ways of getting more of what he wants. K: Yes. I would not call that intelligence. R.S.: I would call it ingenuity or inventiveness. K: Call it inventiveness. I won't call it intuition because that is a different thing. R.S.: No, ingenuity. K: To be ingenious is solving problems of god, problems of heaven, problems of painting, etc. It is within the same area, in the same field. I may move from one corner to the other corner of the same field and I call that ingenuity and I say all that has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is something totally different. Q: Will you elaborate on what we call intelligence? K: I don't want to elaborate. Ingenuity, choice, cleverness, moving from one point to another, from one corner to another but within the same field, that is what we are doing. P.J.: That is the field of the known. K: Yes, yes. I don't want to use that word for the moment. A.C.: I was just wondering why we have evolved like that. K: It is essentially based on reward and punishment. A.C.: But I am asking what is the reason in particular that we have evolved like that? K: What was the cause of it? A.C.: It must have had tremendous advantage. K: Of course, it is completely secure. Secure in the sense, at least for the time being, but the time being creates wars. So we don't have to elaborate. Would you go along up to this point that this is not intelligence? A.C.: Yes. K: Right. Then let us enquire what is intelligence. If this is not a theory, if it is out of my system, that means the movement of reaction has stopped, and that is the movement of time. Agreed? A.C.: When you say time, I don't understand. K: Time in the sense I have evolved in this process. Q: That is the movement of life. K: Yes. And that is unintelligence. Therefore, don't call it intelligence. So, what is intelligence? As long as I am in this field there is no intelligence; it is adaptability. A.C.: But one has to respond. K: We will find out. If this is not intelligence, then we have to go into something quite different. Agreed? If I totally deny, not verbally but actually, this is not intelligence, then what happens to the mind which has been caught in this? Do you understand my question? As long as we are functioning in time, cause, effect, action, reaction, which is this movement of the tide going out and coming in, as long as my whole attitude to life is that and I refuse to move out of that, there is nothing to be said. But if I see that, that will not solve the problems of humanity; then I have to look in another direction. P.J.: What is this looking? K: My eyes have always been seeing in this direction only. And you come along and tell me, look in other directions. I can't because my eyesight has been so conditioned that I don't even turn round to look. So I must be first free of this. I can't look in any other direction if I am not free of this. P.J.: I want to ask you a question. Can I look at my own instrument? Can perception look at its own instrument? Can perception, which is a flow, see itself? K: Don't call it an instrument. P.J.: A faculty. K: No, I won't even call it a faculty. P.J.: Can perception perceive itself? K: Can perception see itself as perceiving? Perception seeing itself in action, in seeing itself a perception. P.J.: Don't bring in action. K: Perception seeing itself perceiving - then it is not perception. P.J.: You see, you posed a question which is totally unanswerable - that this movement, which is moving, reflects the movement... can I see the falsity of it and end it? I have always thought that a wrong question. It can never see that because perception is self-contained. K: Would you say this movement is the wandering of desire? P.J.: Yes. This movement is the wandering of desire. K: Can this desire be seen as a whole, not the object of desire, but desire itself? Can it see itself as a movement of attraction? P.J.: Instead, even without bringing in attraction, can desire see itself? K: To understand if desire can see itself, one must go into desire. Desire exists only when thought comes into sensation. A.C.: This question is very important. We are operating in that field. Anything operating in that field... P.J.: Can never deny that field. K: Of course. There is this movement. As long as I am in that movement, you cannot ask me to see it as the false and deny it. P.J.: Therefore, where do I look? K: You don't have to look. The thing is, stop this movement. Find out, discover for yourself how to end this movement. Is that possible at all? P.J. I think it is possible to cut. K: Be careful when you use the word `cut'. Who is the cutter? P.J.: Without the cutter. K: Therefore, what does that mean? Go on. Don't complicate the issue. Just see who is the cutter. There is no cutter. Then what happens? If there is no entity who can cut, stop, then... P.J.: It is just perceiving. K: That is all. There is only perceiving. There is not the perceiver perceiving nor the perceiver investigating what he is perceiving. There is only perception, right? Perception of that which is false. P.J.: The perceiving throws light on the false. There is only perceiving. K: There is only perceiving. Stick to that. Then we will enquire into what is perceiving. What is perception without the word, without the name, without remembrances, perceiving something which one calls intuition? I don't like to use that word, forgive me. Perception is direct insight. P.J.: Is the question one of being completely awake? K: Would you call that attention? P.J.: To be completely awake is attention. K: That is all. P.J: That the computer can never do. K: Asit is taking it in, he is not answering. Sir, is there an end to thought? Time must have a stop, right? A.C.: I understand. R.R.: Can I ask you a question: What happens when we perceive with insight? K: There is this perception of insight and the brain cells themselves change. Can your thought ever stop when your brain has been conditioned in time, in this movement... cause, effect, action, reaction and all that suddenly stops? Hasn't the brain undergone a radical change? Of course it has. R.R.: I have to ask you this question again. If there is such a seeing that the brain cells change, what happens after perceiving it? A.C.: Only the physical brain has changed and I am afraid it dies. K: That is why we are going into the question of consciousness. A.C.: Does this end with death? Then all that will be different from the computer... K: Sir, how will you translate all this to your friends who are computer experts? A.C.: They are going to continue doing what they are doing -trying to produce super-computers. P.J.: The question then comes in. How can man so accelerate the other to bring into being this new perception? A.C.: One can only see this movement and do nothing else. K: That is all. 1st Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk 2nd Talk is published in: The Book Of Life SRI LANKA 1ST PUBLIC TALK 8TH NOVEMBER 1980 First of all I would like to point out how difficult it is to communicate to another whose culture, whose background may be totally different. And if one may point out we are not talking about any philosophy, any theories, any new set of ideas or ideals. We are going to talk over together, as two friends, the problem of our daily living. To go into that very carefully, hesitantly and wisely, one must look around what is actually going on in the world, not only in this island, but also In Europe, America, China, Russia and India. There is great chaos in the world, disorder. Society is corrupt, immoral; there is great deal of injustice; there is poverty. All the nations are preparing for war, ready to kill each other in the name of religion, in the name of economics, in the name of their own national survival; they are willing to kill others for their own particular security. There is religious division in this country. You have the Hinayana and the Mahayana. In India there are innumerable gods and divisions, in Christianity also there are a great many divisions; the Catholics, the Protestants and the various other sects. There are national, religious, economic divisions all over the world. There is inflation, overpopulation, poverty, and all kinds of horrible things are happening in the world: nationalism with its technology is going to destroy man. These are facts. These are not the speaker's opinions or ideas. But they are the facts right in front of us, if you are willing to look, listen. And knowing all this, outwardly, what is the condition of man; not man in abstraction, not as an abstract idea, but man, you and I and another, what is our condition? I think it is important to understand our relationship between man and society. Society as it exists now, which is corrupt, there is a great deal of injustice, we are not properly governed. This society is created by man, by you, by us, by the many, by our great grandfathers and so on. This society is man-made and so it cam be altered, completely, radically. That alteration in society has always been a dream of man. There have been philosophers who have talked about it a great deal, written volumes of what society should be, from the ancient times to modern times. There have been revolutions in the West - the French, and the Communist revolution in Russia. They have all longer and striven, worked for a revolution to bring about an environmental change. The communists are doing it, the socialists and other leftists and in their own way the rightists are doing it, and this physical revolution has not produced any great change. These again are facts. They have brought a new set of hierarchy, a new set of rich people, new set of powerful, dominant, tyrannical people. But the pattern of society has somewhat changed, but essentially it has been as it has always been through millennia. In observing all these - and we are doing it together, please bear in mind if I might point out throughout these talks that we are thinking, looking, observing together. The speaker is not pointing out for you to listen, or not to listen, to pay attention or to disregard, but together you, each one of you and the speaker, together we are going to investigate, explore, why we live the way we are living, why human beings have deteriorated: there are a great deal of drugs, alcoholism, violence, every form of immoral activity going on. And together, please bear in mind, I'll repeat it many, many, many times that you are not listening to a talk by some strange man from another country, but together as two human beings, quietly, reasonably, sanely, examining, exploring together why man is in such a state - man includes naturally woman. So we are not talking about theories, beliefs, dogmas, and all that nonsense. To me, to the speaker, they have no basis for nationality. Together we are going to look at the society in which we live, and what to do about it. So the speaker in talking about it, is talking about you. He is not talking about something else, He is talking about a human being which is you, why such a human being who has lived through millennia after millennia, who has evolved through a great deal of experience, has acquired a great deal of knowledge - both technological and psychological knowledge, why we human beings are reduced to this present condition of chaos, misery, confusion. I hope that is very clear. That we are talking not about any theory, or doing any kind of propaganda, but we are talking over together about you; you being the rest of mankind. Mankind suffers, every human being in the world, wherever he lives suffers, goes through a great deal of anxiety, great uncertainty, constant striving, not only within himself, but also outwardly. He has great fears, depression, uncertainty, like you. So we are humanity, you are humanity. Please follow this, if you will kindly, if you will kindly listen to it. You know, listening is a great art. It is one of the great arts we have not cultivated: to listen completely to another. When you listen so completely to another, as I hope you are doing it now, you are also listening to yourself, listening to your own problems, to your own uncertainties, to your own misery, confusion, your desire for security, the gradual degradation of the mind, which is becoming more and more mechanical. We are talking over together what human beings are, which is you. So you psychologically are the world and the world is you. You may have dark hair, somewhat brown faces, others may be taller, fairer with eyes slanting, but wherever they live, in whatever climate, in whatever circumstances, affluent or not, every human being, like you, goes through all this turmoil, the noise of life without any beauty, never seeing the splendour in the grass, or the glory in the flower. So you and I and the others are the world, because you suffer, your neighbour suffers, whether that neighbour be ten thousand miles away, he is similar to you. Your culture may be different, your language may be different, but basically, inwardly, deeply, you are like another. And that's a fact. This is not a theory, this is not something that you have to believe. It is a fact. And so you u are the world and the world is you. I hope you are listening to it. As we said, we have lost the art of listening. To listen to a statement of that kind that you are the world and the world is you, probably you have never heard this before, and so it might sound very strange, illogical or unreal. So you partially listen and wish that I would go on talking more about other things; so you never actually listen to the truth of anything. If I may request you, please kindly listen not only to the speaker, but also listen to yourself, listen to what is happening, in your mind, in your heart, in your responses and so on. Listen to all that. Listen to the birds, listen to the car going by so that you become sensitive, alive, active. So if you will kindly so listen we can then proceed. Man has evolved from the ape and so on, according to the scientists, for many, many million years. Our brain is the result of many, many millennia of time. That brain, that human mind, is now so conditioned with fear, with anxiety, with national pride, with linguistic limitations, and so on. So the question then is, to bring about a different society in the world, you as a human being who is the rest of mankind, must radically change. That is the real issue, not how to prevent wars. That's also an issue, how to have peace in the worlds, that is secondary, all these are peripheral, secondary issues. The fundamental issue is, is it possible for the human mind, which is your mind, your heart, your condition, is that possible to be totally, fundamentally, deeply, transformed. Otherwise we are going to destroy each other, through our national pride, through our linguistic limitations, through our nationalism which the politicians maintain for their own benefit and so on. So I hope I have made the point very clear. That is, is it possible for you as a human being who is the rest of mankind psychologically, inwardly, you are like the rest of other human beings, living in the world, is it possible for your condition to change? Not change to what. Do you understand the question? We say to change, which means what? One asks change from this to what? If you ask that question, as you must, then you are projecting what should be. I wonder if you understand all this. May I go on? May I? I don't know if I am getting any response from anybody. Am I making any sense? Would you kindly tell me. Are we following each other? Or are you merely listening to a series of words, and getting involved in words, or are you following the depth of the meaning of these words? It's up to you. So we are saying, asking, enquiring together, because you are a human being like the rest of mankind, you have to listen to the speaker, what he says about you and you have to also listen, observe, look into yourself as we go along. So communication is possible only if you and the speaker are moving together. Not that you sit there uncomfortably, or comfortably, and just casually listen. This is a very serious matter, this is not an entertainment, nor an intellectual exchange of words or theories. We are dealing with actualities. The actual is what is happening in the world and in you. Right? Can we go on from there? First of all there are various groups of people in the West and probably in the East who say that man fundamentally cannot be changed. He has lived this way for millennia upon millennia, and it is impossible to change his condition. You can modify it, you can somewhat change it, but the human condition as he is, can never radically be changed. And there are those who say, change the environment, change the social structure, then man will be forced to change. That is what the communists have been saying: change the outward structure, the economic, social and so on, then man living in those conditions will change. Then there are those who say, have faith in god, and the greater the faith, the greater the resolution of your problems. And these three main factors, and of course there are many other minor sayers, they say, man as he is cannot be radically changed. There are those who say change the environment, and man will change, and the others, the so-called religious people, have faith, believe, and attend to all the things that god has said, then perhaps man will bring about a radical change in himself. All these systems have been tried over and over again in different forms, and under different names, but man, you, have remained more or less throughout millennia almost the same, the same in the sense you suffer, you are anxious, you are lonely, uncertain, insecure, fear and so on. When one recognizes these facts and they are facts, then the question is what is a man to do? Do you understand my question? Do you all understand English? Audience: Yes. K: At last! This absolute silence, which is good, which means that you are listening, is right, but are we communicating with each other? That is, are we together looking into the mirror which the speaker is putting in front of you and looking into that mirror which is yourself? Because what we are saying is about man's behaviour, man's innumerable turmoils of daily life, his relationship with another and so on. Unless all that is very, very clear, deeply laid, meditation has no meaning whatsoever. You understand? If our house is not in order - the house means you - not in order, you are trying to meditate either according to Zen or Tibetan or the Buddha or the Hindu or some other guru's latest invention of meditation. Then your meditation is merely leading to illusions. It has no reality. What has reality is that we lay in the right foundation, which is order in our life. We live disorderly; we live in contradiction; we say one thing and do another; we believe in something and do quite the opposite. We believe in some kind of god or whatever your deity is, and that belief has no reality in our daily life, whether you are a Christian or a Buddhist or whatever religion one may belong to. Those beliefs, dogmas, sayings, sanctions have no actual daily reality in our life. So you can brush all that aside, brush away ail your religious dogmas, beliefs, concepts, images and face life as it is and not escape through some fanciful romantic images. Perhaps some of you will object to all this. I am glad. If you object it means that at least we are thinking together. But if you object find out. Don't merely object. Obstinate questioning is essential for man's survival. Question not only the speaker, but also question your beliefs, your way of life, why you think this way, why you live this way. Persistent obstinate questioning which means doubting. Doubt is of great importance because if you doubt, it gives you tremendous energy. You begin to throw off the burdens which man, which you, the priests, the analysts, the psychologists, and others have imposed upon you. You begin to be free psychologically, at least somewhat. So please we are together investigating the human mind, the mind that has evolved through thousands and thousands of years. Now we have come to a point where we are going to destroy each other by our stupid nationalism or we are going to survive; survive in the sense regenerate free human beings without the burden of all the priests that have existed, that have imposed upon us various doctrines, theories, ideas. Nobody is going to save us, neither the priest nor the scientist, nor the politicians, nor the economist or the environmentalist. What will save mankind is you, you transforming yourself. So we begin slowly to go into that. First of all, life is a movement in relationship. You can't exist without relationship. Life is relationship and action. So we are going first to examine together what we mean by relationship? This is important because man cannot live by himself. He is always related to something or the other. He is related to another human being or related to an idea, to a concept, to an image but all that means a relationship between you and another. Right sirs? Please, come with me. Now, what is your relationship with another? That is one of the problems. Because our relationship with another, however intimate or not, has created this society in which we live. If you are greedy, envious, violent, we create this society of violence, greed and envy. So we must be very clear from the very beginning and find out what is relationship. Right sirs? Does all this interest you? Don't be casual about it. Does it deeply interest you to find out what relationship is? What your actual relationship is, your actual relationship with another? Or are you frightened? What is your relationship based on, whether it is with your wife, with your neighbour, with your government and so on? Because there must be an understanding in this relationship, not verbal or intellectual understanding, but the depth of relationship, the fullness of relationship. We are enquiring together into the question of relationship. Man cannot exist without relationship. Life is relationship and action. These two are fundamental to man. What is our present relationship with another? What is your relationship with your wife? Or your wife to the husband, or your relationship to the Buddhist priest, or the Hindu priest, or the Christian priest? What is your relationship? When you examine it closely, your relationship is based on images - the image that you have built about god, about Buddha, about your wife, your wife about you. That is a fact, isn't it? Right? Images between you and your wife, which is the most intimate, which is a daily occurrence, that image between the two people, man creates an image about his wife and the wife creates an image about him and the relationship is between these two images. Right? Would you agree to that? Yes? These images are built through daily contact, sex, irritation, comfort, and so on. Each one builds his own image about another and he has also an image about himself. He has also an image about god, about his religious deity, because when you create an image, in that image there is security, however false, however unreal, however insane. In that image that the mind has created there is security. When you create an image about your wife, or your wife about you, the image is not the actual. It is much more difficult to live with the actual and it is much easier to live with the image that you have. So relationship is between images and therefore there no relationship at all. Right? I hope you are following all this. This is a fact. The Christian worships an image. That image is created throughout the centuries by the priest, by the worshipper who says, I need comfort, I need security, I need somebody who will look after me: I am in a mess, I am confused, I am insecure and in the image I find security. We have become image worshippers, not the worshippers of truth, not the worshippers of righteous life, but worshippers of images, the national image with its flag, the image that you have about the scientist, about the government and so on. Image-making is one of the human failings. Is it possible to have no image about anything, but only live with facts, fact being that which is actually happening? You understand? Are we meeting each other? No. Somebody shakes his head! I am delighted, then we can discuss, you and I can go into it. Why does the mind create image? Life isn't an image. Life is strife, unfortunately. Life is constant conflict. Conflict is not an image. It is a fact, that which is happening, but why does the mind create images? Images mean, the speaker means by an image, a symbol, a concept, a conclusion, an ideal. These are all images -that is, what I should be, I am not this, but I would like to be that. That is an image projected by the mind in time, that is in the future. So that is unreal. What is real is what is actually taking place now in your mind. Can we go on from there? We are asking why does the mind create an image? Is it because in the image there is security? If I have a wife, which I haven't, I have a wife, I create an image about her. The very word 'wife' is an image. And I create that image because the wife is a living thing, changing, a living, vital human entity. To understand her requires much more attention, greater energy, but if I have an image about her it is much easier to live with that image. Are you following all this? First of all, have you not an image about yourself, that you are a great man or that you are not a great man, that you are this, that and so on? When you live with images, you are living with illusions, not with reality. Now, what is the mechanism of making images? All organized, accepted, respectable religions have always had some kind of image. And mankind with the help of the priest, has always worshipped the symbol, the idea, the concept and so on. In that worship he finds comfort, safety, security. But the image is the projection of thought. And to understand the nature of it, making images, you must understand the whole process of thinking. May we go into that? Right, sir? Will you come with me? Good! So we are asking, what is thinking? That's what you are doing all day long. Your cities are built on thinking, your armaments are based on thinking. The politicians are based on thinking, your religious leaders, everything in the world is based on thinking. The poets may write in beautiful words a verse, but the thinking process goes on. So one must enquire, if you are serious, if you are willing to go into the question, what is thinking. You are thinking now. We were saying image-making has been the habit of man, specially in the world of religion and he has also image about himself and we are asking why does the mind, your mind, make images? Is it because in images there is security, however false the images are, without any reality, in an illusion man apparently seeks security. So to understand image-making, which is so common to mankind, one has to go into the question of what is thought, thinking and the nature of thought. All thought. Thought has not created nature. The tiger, the river, the marvellous trees, the forest and the mountains, the shadows, valleys and the beauty of the earth, man has not created it. But man has created through thought the destructive machinery of war, man has brought about great medical surgical improvement, man has brought about through thought instant communication, and so on. Thought has been responsible for great deal of good and great deal of harm. That is a fact. And a man who is serious wants to enquire if thought is ever capable of reducing any of these problems. So we must ask if you are willing and serious enough to find out for yourself what is thinking. Thinking is the response of memory, stored up in the brain as knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience. Mankind has had thousands of experiences from which it has derived a great deal of knowledge, factual, illusory, neurotic, accumulated a great deal of knowledge. That knowledge as memory, is stored up in the brain. And when you ask a question, that memory responds as thought. This is a fact. We have discussed this matter with many scientists, some of them don't agree, others do and so on. You can find this out for yourself: that is, you have experience, you remember that experience which is knowledge and that knowledge with its memory projects thought. Is this clear? Right sir? No? Don't agree with me, please. Examine it for yourself. Look into yourself. If you have no experience, no knowledge, no memory, you can't think. So knowledge through experience, memory, and the response to a challenge which is thought, on that thought we live. Knowledge is always limited. There is no complete knowledge about anything. This is a fact. So thought is always limited. However beautiful, thought may build a cathedral, a marvellous statue, a great poem, great epic and so on, thought born of knowledge must always be limited because knowledge is always incomplete, knowledge is always in the shadow of ignorance. Right sirs? So thought has created these images, thought has created the image between you and your wife, thought has created the idea of nationality with its technology which is destroying the world and so on. Now we are asking is it possible to live a daily life without a single image. Thought must function to go from here to your home. You must have knowledge where your home is, the road you take and so on. That knowledge must exist otherwise you would get completely lost. Knowledge to speak a language is necessary, knowledge is necessary for the speaker to speak English and so on. But is it necessary to create an image at all? You understand my questions, sir? Can we live without a single image which means without any belief, which doesn't mean you lead a chaotic life, without any belief, without any ideal, without any concept which are all projections of thought, therefore all limited? Therefore action - this is a bit more complex, I don't know if you will understand all this. Which is, action based on thought is always complete. Therefore one has to ask, is there an action which under all circumstances is correct. Are we walking together? Yes? Are we keeping in step with each other on the same path or the speaker is walking by himself? Because this is a very serious matter, sir. Our minds are degenerating, becoming mechanical, lost, and that is why the youth is getting lost too. We are lost human beings; you may have a job, you may have a house, you may have all kinds oF things, but inwardly you are lost, you are uncertain, unclear. You don't know what to believe. So for that reason one must understand the full significance of thought. We have lived on thought. Everything we do is based on thought. And as thought is incomplete, our actions, our life is incomplete. Knowing it is incomplete, we try to fulfil in something which will give us a sense of completeness. So our life is a constant struggle, and we are saying that this conflict, this battle in ourselves and outwardly, it can end. It can end only when you understand yourself, not according to some priest, not according to some psychologist or some professor, but looking at yourself in the mirror. The mirror is your relationship. That is the mirror in which you can study yourself. Without knowing yourself - what you are, why you are, why you think these things, why you behave in such a way, you find in that mirror of relationship, all the answers. Sirs, you are the history of mankind, you are the story of mankind. You are the book in which you can read all about yourself, without any guide, without any priest, without any guru, without any philosopher. You can read that book which is yourself. Unless you read it very carefully, listen to all the nuances, all the activity that goes on, you will always be in constant battle, always suffer, always be afraid. And so it behoves an intelligent, earnest man to read the story of mankind which is the story of you. That story is not an image. It is part of it. You have to look. That means you have to listen very carefully to your thoughts, to your reactions, to your uncertainties, to your unhappiness, you have to listen to it. Find out. In listening is the answer. But you have to learn the art of listening which is not to interpret what you read, what you see, but to observe without any distortion, just to watch it. Have you ever watched a cloud? You must have. It is full of clouds in this country. Have you ever watched them? There they are, the grandeur, magnificent, with extraordinary light and beauty in them. When you watch a thing, you are always naming it. The very naming prevents the watching. You understand? All right, sirs? Our mind has become a slave to words: words are measurement and to observe without measurement, which is the word, then you see things exactly as they are. So to watch yourself, to see yourself exactly as you are without any distortion, without any direction, without any motive, just to watch it. You hear that statement and then you ask, "Tell me how to do it." Right? Isn't that your question? No? "Tell me how to do it". Now when you ask a question, how, why do you ask such a question? You understand what I am asking you? I have made a statement that in watching, listening to yourself carefully without any direction, without any motive, you begin to read the story of mankind which is yourself. That is real education, not merely acquiring degrees and knowledge of other things. Real education is this, to read your life in the book of mankind which is you, and to read that book, you have to watch every reaction, every thought that is so quickly changing, one thought pursuing another. You have to just watch it, not try to control it, not try to dominate it or push it aside, just watch it. Then you will say, that is very difficult to do it. And as it is difficult, please tell us how to do it. The method. When you ask such a question, what is implied in that? You want to know how to read that book. A child wants to know how to read the alphabet, he has to learn the alphabet. So he goes through, carefully he is taught how to write a, b, c, d and so on. In the same way, there is no 'how', just watch. The moment you. ask 'how', you ask for a system, a method; and when you practise the method, the system, in order to understand yourself, you are becoming mechanical. Yourself is a living thing and a living thing cannot be understood through a system. You have to watch it, move with it, understand it and that is very difficult to do for many people and therefore they say: tell me how to do it quickly. There is no quick way for all this. There is only patient observation of yourself. Patience means not to react quickly, not to project your ideas, your opinions, they are part of you, but observe your opinions. So you need a great deal of patience, a great deal of attention, to attend, but that requires interest. That requires that you are dissatisfied with things as they are. And so we will consider tomorrow the nature of our life as fear, pleasure, suffering and all that. We will go into it very carefully, and see if we cannot possibly end fear completely. Right sir. SRI LANKA 3RD PUBLIC TALK 15TH NOVEMBER 1980 We have only this talk and tomorrow, so we have to make a rapid survey, and we cannot possibly go into all the details of what we are going to talk about. But I am sure you will fill the gaps. As we were saying last Saturday and Sunday, one has to learn the art of listening, the art of seeing and the art of learning. Listening is not to interpret what you hear according to your own accustomed, easy ways, but rather try to find out not only what the speaker is saying, but also to listen to your own thoughts, to your own emotions, to your own reactions; not try to change them, not try to suppress them, but merely watch them. And so listening plays an important part if you are willing and serious enough to listen very attentively, patiently and quietly. And also, as we said, the art of seeing, not only with your visual eyes, with the optic responses, but also to see beyond the words, to read between the lines as it were, to see what lies behind the words, because the words are not the actuality. A description of the mountain is not the mountain, the flowing river, with all its vitality and the volume of water behind it, that river, the word 'river' is not that which is alive. So one has to observe very acutely, with great care, attentively. And the art of learning is quite a complex affair. The the art of listening, the art of seeing and the art of learning. We are accustomed to accumulate knowledge; knowledge through experience, memory stored up in the brain, and we are always functioning, learning within that field of the known. The known is the past modified by the present and continues in the future. Within that area, within that field we always function. And learning through action, through experience, storing it up as memory and functioning with that memory, skilfully or not. This is what our minds are always doing. From the known, the knowledge, act, learn, and from that action of learning, accumulating more. This is the cycle in which we are always functioning. If you observe this, this is an obvious fact. But there is a totally different kind of learning, a learning which is not accumulation. That we shall go into as we go along in our talk today and tomorrow. As we were saying, we have to read that book of which we are. We are the whole content of mankind, each one of us - mankind being the sorrow, pleasures, desires, anxieties, the pain, fears, nationalities, cultures: all that is in the book, the book which is us. The book is not different from us. We are the book. And I think it is very important if I may - if one may point out, to understand this: what you read is you, you are not different from that which you read; and if you interpret what you read according to your desire, according to your pleasure or fear, then you won't read the book at all. That fear, that anxiety, that suffering is part of you. So if one wants to read that book actually, one has to see that the observer, the reader, is that which he is reading. I wonder if we understand this. The observer is the observed. The thinker is the thought. There is no thinker apart from thought. This is a fact. The experiencer who thinks he must experience, and that which he experiences is the experiencer. But most of us think that thought is different from the thinker; so the thinker is always trying to control, suppress thought and so on. When one actually observes the thinker is the thought, then the division between the thinker and thought comes to an end and therefore conflict comes to an end. One hopes that we are together going into this, that you are not merely, if one may point out, that you are merely listening to a talk, to a series of words, but rather we are together walking on the same path, with the same step, with the same quietness and enquiry. So we can go into this, that there is no separation between the thinker and the thought. Thought makes the thinker and thought separates the thinker. The thinker then becomes a master who controls thought. And this control, this suppression, this discipline in thought is by the thinker which thought has created. Therefore thought is the thinker. So if this is clear, that there is no division between the thinker and thought. Where there is division, there must be conflict. That is a law. As there is division between the Muslim and the Hindu, the Buddhist and the other Buddhist, the division between the Catholics and the Protestants and so on. Where there is division nationally, religiously there must be conflict. Our minds are accustomed to conflict; from the moment we are born till we die, it is a perpetual struggle, perpetual strife, constant battle within oneself and outwardly, and if one realizes, not verbally, not intellectually, but the fact that the thinker is the thought and that there is no division between the two, therefore one begins to understand the nature of conflict and the ending of conflict. This evening we shall go into desire, pleasure, suffering and if there is time and the whole meaning and the significance of death. A man who is greatly concerned with humanity, with man's suffering, man's conflict, man's violence, and all the travail that man goes through in life, he must begin to enquire, as we are doing now together, into the nature and the structure of desire. Desire plays an immense part in our life. Desire as we grow a little more mature varies; the object varies, but desire is the same: whether you desire for a car, for a woman, for god, for an illumination, that desire is the same. There is no noble desire and ignoble desire, but only desire. Are we coming together? Are we understanding each other? So we are going together to examine very carefully the nature of desire. Because for us desire, with its will is the constant factor in life. Desire is will. Will is the summation of desire, and we operate, function with will: I must and I must not. This constant activity of will is the essence of desire. Right? May we go along? So together we are going to investigate and learn: learn, not merely repeat, but learn as we are investigating and moving. Do you understand what I mean? We are going to look into desire. In the very looking into desire you begin to see, have an insight into the nature of it. When you have an insight, comprehension of it, there is no need or necessity to repeat the structure of desire, which will become merely verbal. Am I making myself clear? No? If it is not very clear we will talk more about it before we go into it. When you look, examine a watch, undo it, look into it, see how it works, you are learning the movement of the watch. The learning how the watch works is not mere memory, you are learning the operation of it as it moves. Right? So we are now looking into desire. You know what desire is. Most people do. Desire, and non-desire. First, what is desire which plays such an important role in our life? Most religious groups, monks of various religious denominations, have always said, suppress or transmute desire: if you want to serve god, you must have no desire for the world, for a woman, for a man and so on. It has always been a suppressive process, a disciplining of desire. We are neither suppressing it, avoiding it or transmuting it. We are examining the nature of desire. There is no question of trying to avoid it, trying to look at it in order to escape from it. We are together going into the nature and structure of desire. So please understand that. We are not suppressing it, we are not avoiding it, we are not rationalizing it. We are merely examining very closely what is desire. If you understand the nature of it, there will be no question of suppressing it or avoiding it or rationalizing it. Is this clear? So we are asking what is desire. Obviously the word is not the feeling, the reaction. So we must be clear when we are using the word 'desire', that the word is not the reaction, that feeling of wanting. These are nice flowers, aren't they. You know we have so little beauty in life. There are beautiful trees around in this country, lovely clouds, marvellous flowers and orchids. We never see the beauty in them. We are too occupied with our own worries and problems and desires and anxieties. We never look at a sunset and enjoy the beauty of the light. We are losing not only the appreciation of outward beauty, but also perhaps very few of us have the inward beauty, the beauty that does not depend on things, on pictures, on statues, or on a sunset or on a tree. That beauty comes only when there is great love, compassion; not for something, in itself, per se. That is only a side issue. Though beauty one must have to enquire what is truth. Without that great sense of beauty you can never come upon that which is truth. So, what is desire? Man has been haunted by this and the conflict that lies in desire itself. We are together examining, exploring, learning the nature of this. Is not desire the beginning of perception, seeing? I will go into it very carefully, slowly. The seeing with your eyes, optical perception, seeing the flowers, the trees, the cars, the women, seeing the world. That is the beginning of desire: seeing, tasting, smelling. So, seeing a tree, a house, a car, a woman, a man, a lovely garden, seeing and touching it, contact with it, then sensation. Then thought, please listen, thought creates the image of you owning that garden, that car, this and that. Right? That is, seeing, contact, touching, then sensation. Then thought says or creates an image of you sitting in that car and driving it. Right? Is that clear? Seeing, contact, sensation, thought creating the image; then desire is born. When thought creates the image, that is the beginning of desire. Have you understood? Are we together, or not at all? No? Q: Yes. K: Sir, look at it, go into yourself, you will see this. It is a very simple fact: that the very seeing, contact, sensation, that is natural, normal, and also it is normal for thought to create an image of you having that shirt, the blue shirt or that particular robe and at that moment, creating the image, at that moment desire is born. You can see it for yourself. You see a nice trousers or robe, or something in the window - the seeing, going inside the shop, touching it, then thought saying, how nice it will look on me; you have formed the image, at that moment desire flowers. Right? So if you understand this very carefully that when thought creates an image, that is the beginning of desire, then can that image come to an end? Are you following? Are we together, again, or going off? I am not talking to myself. I can do this if I want to, the speaker wants to, in his room. But we are together going into this. You may not be accustomed to this explanation of what desire is. If you are not accustomed, then please listen, put away all your conditioning which says you must not desire, or you must desire, and all that. For the moment put all that aside and look at it very carefully. The moment thought creates the image of you in that car, in that shirt, in that robe, then desire begins. Now, can one learn the fact of seeing, contact, sensation and only that and not let thought create the image? Have you understood this? Come on sirs! Have you understood this? There is a discipline, that is, seeing, contact, sensation and the moment thought creates the image, desire. The discipline is to learn. The word 'discipline' comes from the Latin, disciple, a disciple is one who learns. What we have made of that word is to discipline means to copy, to imitate, to conform, to obey, to follow. All those deny totally learning. All right? So if one learns the fact that desire begins when thought interferes with sensation. You have had a great pleasure, suppose, yesterday, that incident of pleasure is recorded in the brain and desire says, I must have more of that pleasure. Right? So discipline means to learn. And we are learning together the nature of desire. Right? Have you understand, if one may ask, whether you have seen how the nature of desire comes? If you once see it, actually, there is never a question of suppression or trying to control it, or trying to change it. If you have understood how desire arises and be aware at that moment, to pay complete attention at that moment when thought creates the image, then there is no question of suppression, avoidance or rationalizing desire. Desire is pleasure. We are all slaves to pleasure - pleasure of possession, pleasure of power, not the power of great politicians, but the power you have over your wife, on your children, or your clerks, your underlings. The desire for power which most people have. That is a form of pleasure. And this pleasure man pursues endlessly. If you are not pleased with one thing, you go after another. If you are not pleased with your wife or husband, you change them. And this pursuit of pleasure is totally different from enjoyment. May I go on? Are you all awake, or asleep? Pleasure has been one of the driving factors in human life. Please understand because we are coming to something which is quite difficult. So we must understand pleasure; sexual pleasure, the pleasure of possession, the pleasure of money, pleasure that an ascetic has when he trains his body, completely controls it, the pleasure of belief; and the ultimate pleasure of a man is apparently what he believes in: he believes in god and that is such great pleasure that he doesn't want to be disturbed. We are now going to look into the nature of pleasure. As the speaker said, enjoyment is totally different from pleasure. When you see a beautiful sunset or a vast running river, there is a delight, there is beauty in it. The mind has recorded that water, the beauty in that water, the light in that water, the swift current in that water, and it has given great pleasure, and he wants it again, comes back to morrow to see that river again, hoping to have the same pleasure; or when you see a sunset, the glory of a flower. Enjoyment is not pleasure, because you enjoy and it is finished, but the moment it is recorded there is pursuit of what you have enjoyed, of what you have had pleasure in, is the continuation of the past through the present to the future. Have you understood this? This is our constant movement in life: desire and pleasure. Pleasure means the avoidance of punishment and holding on to that which is pleasurable. Therefore our minds function always within punishment and reward. If you are a religious person you think heaven is the ultimate pleasure because heaven then is the reward for doing good and living rightly and so on. If you are not doing the right thing there is the other place. There is always this reward and punishment. And is pleasure and desire love? That word 'love' has been so misused, so degraded, so spat upon, that it has lost its beauty. We associate love with sex. So we must ask whether love is pleasure or desire? Ask it, sirs. I am asking, the speaker is asking it, you have to ask yourself that question, and honestly answer it for yourself. We will go into it still further after going into the question of suffering. Man has lived with suffering, through centuries upon centuries and apparently he has never been able to end it. That is one of our accustomed ways of bearing with something unpleasant, something that gives us great pain and never finding a solution for suffering. There are various ways of suffering: not only loss of those whom you think you love, through death, but suffering is also losing a position; poverty, injustice, sense of incompleteness in oneself, the utter state of ignorance that man lives in though he has accumulated vast knowledge about the heavens and earth and of matter and technology, he is still ignorant and so breeds great suffering. So we live with suffering and we have accepted it. We have never said: can it end? There are those who give all kinds of explanations how to go beyond suffering: have faith in god, faith in your saviour, faith in the Buddha, faith in Krishna or whatever it is. So we have borne suffering endlessly and we are asking if suffering can end, not temporarily but completely, so that the mind which has struggled in pain, in sorrow has a totally different state, a different movement. A mind that suffers cannot think clearly, a mind that suffers cannot have love, a mind that suffers escapes into some fanciful images, a mind that suffers has no relationship with another, however intimate, they may live together, a mind that is suffering has no relationship. Suffering becomes an isolation. There is not only personal suffering, but also there is universal suffering, mankind suffering: suffers after the war, the shedding of tears of millions and millions of people, the mother losing a baby, the man who want to fulfil his ambition, who wants to be a great man and is incapable of it and therefore suffers. We have found comforting solutions for suffering. When one suffers one seeks comfort and that comfort may be an actuality or an illusion, in some romantic illusory fancy. We are asking if there is an end to sorrow. Don't say, please,if you are a Buddhist, we have heard this before: the Buddha said - which means what? You are merely repeating what someone else has said. But you haven't solved the problem. You are merely quoting somebody, however great he may be, he is not the solution of suffering. So please find out if sorrow can end. Without the ending of sorrow, there is no compassion. Why does one suffer? You all know what suffering is, but you have never asked why, and gone into it, not depending on anybody, not depending on the Buddha or what he said or what other religious leaders have said in another country. Put all that aside, because what they have said may be true or may not be true, but you as a human being suffer and if you don't solve that problem, end it, resolve it, your life becomes more and more mechanical, more and more repetitive and rather superficial. You may repeat, or read sacred books, and repeat the sacred statements, life becomes superficial more and more and more, which is what is happening. So it is important to enquire if sorrow will end. What is sorrow? Is it the loss of something - the loss of a job, the loss of your so-called loved ones, loss of prestige, power, position, money? What is sorrow? Is it self-pity? Examine it, please, as we are talking. The speaker is only a mirror expressing that which is in you, the book. And when you look at the mirror, the mirror is not important, but what you see in the mirror is important. Then you can throw away the mirror, destroy it, break it up, otherwise you make the mirror into an image. So what is sorrow? The loss of someone, the loneliness of man, the isolation of man, the grief that comes with having no relationship with another, and ultimately death. As we said,is it self-pity? Examine it, sir, don't be shy of these things. One has to be very precise in examining these things. Is it self-pity? The loss of someone in whom you have put all your affection, your care, your so-called -all that in someone, and that someone dies, goes away, runs away, rejects you and you feel so utterly miserable. That is one form of grief. The other, your mind has become so traditional, so repetitive, mechanical and you can't see something immediately, something that is true instantly. That is also great sorrow. As one grows older, there is disease, the body withers and the mind slowly loses its capacity. These are some of the factors, and looking at all these factors you will have to find out what is your reaction to these factors, how you respond, that is, you want power, you want money, you want position, you want justice, you want social revolution. You want to find, if you are really a serious, religious person, you want to find that timeless which is truth. And a mind that is confused, uncertain, insecure is always suffering. Is that also a factor that the mind has never found security? One may have security in a job, one may have security in the family, which I doubt, which one doubts always, a security in your belief, but there is no security in belief whatsoever, or in faith, because doubt destroys faith. Doubt tears apart all belief. But man at the end of all these explanations is suffering, not only for himself, but also sees the world with all its misery, confusion, poverty, ugliness, violence, wars. When one sees all that, that is also great sorrow. Can sorrow end? The speaker says it can. You cannot accept what he says, he is not an authority, he is not a guru, you are not his followers. The follower destroys the guru, the guru destroys the follower. So can one see the nature of suffering and not run away from it, not try to find comfort, not try to rationalize it by saying, in my last life I did this therefore I am paying for it. You know all those kind of tricks that man plays. Which all means, can you remain with that suffering without any movement of thought? The moment thought comes into being and says "I must find a way out of this", suffering still remains, you are merely running away from it. But if you remaIn completely immovable with that thing which you call suffering, then you will see that suffering completely ends and there is a totally different beginning. And we ought also to enquire together into what is death. Because that is part of our life - the living and the dying; the living with all its ugliness, its beauties, travail, anxieties, struggle, and death is an ending of the organism through disease, old age or an accident. Most human beings, whether religious or otherwise, are frightened of death. That is, they are living and so they say death can be postponed. Do you understand what I am saying? There is a gap between living, and a wipe gap of death. This is a fact. Why have we done this? Why has the mind separated death and living? Please find out. This is your problem. Find out in your heart, in your mind, if you are thinking, if you are alive, if you are active, not merely traditionally repeating, repeating, active, why has man throughout the ages separated living and the dying. Which means, time come in between. You understand, time? The time may be years or two days. There is an interval between living and dying, which is time. Right? Come on, sirs! Why? To find this out one has to enquire what is living and what is dying. You understand, sirs? Are we together, moving together? Or do you have explanations already about death, or you already believe in reincarnation, in karma, that you will be resurrected in heaven, and so on and so on. Which means you are so conditioned, your mind is so narrowed down to a belief, to a conclusion, that you are incapable of answering this question; which means your mind has become a slave to words, slave to beliefs, slave to some kind of comforting conclusions, ideas. So you will never understand why human beings have done this throughout millennia upon millennia, this division, this conflict, this fear. Therefore to enquire into that you must enquire what is living. Is there in living, in our daily life, the job from morning till night, 9 o'clock till 5 o'clock or 6 o'clock, day after day, month after month, and year after year, repeat, repeat, repeat: that is one part of living. The living with your family, with your wife, with your neighbour, conflict between you and your wife or husband, the sexual desires, their fulfilment, their pursuit, and the conflict that exists between two human beings everlastingly, and the conflict between 'what is' and 'what should be', the holding on to power, political, religious - think of a religious person having power. Do you understand how ridiculous it has become. So what is living? Please answer to yourselves. What is living? One continuation of strife, with occasional joy, the pursuit of pleasure, fear. That is, the whole of life, is that. Nobody can deny it. You don't have to go to any priest, any psychologist, to any guru, that is your life; mechanical, repetitive, traditional, believing in something which has no value. What is important is what you are doing, how you are acting, how you behave, all that. So that is what we call life: the living, the attachment to another with its fears, anxieties, jealousies. Where there is attachment there is corruption. When a man holds power and is attached to that power, he is breeding corruption. When a high priest holds a position, becomes the authority, he is inevitably cultivating corruption. You see all this happening under your eyes, under your nose. That is what our life is. You are afraid to let that go. The letting go of that is death. Right? That is what we consider death. You are attached to your money, your position, or you are very poor, where there is no justice, nothing, you are empty in yourself, insufficient. That is the living and you hold on to that. And that is the known. Right? That is the known, everybody knows that. And the unknown is death. You may say there is reincarnation, there is proof and so on and so on - we will go into that a bit later if we have time. So this is our life. While living can you end attachment? Attachment to a belief, to a person, to a family, to an ideal, to a particular tradition; can you let that go? Death is going to make you do that. One may be attached to a person very deeply because you are lonely, you need comfort, you need companionship, you can't stand alone. Therefore you depend, and dependence means attachment, and where there is attachment there is jealousy, anxiety, fear and all the action arising from that, which is corruption. Now death says end, you are going to die. While living can you end it? Do you understand my question? Oh, yes, you understand it very well. It is fairly simple. Suppose the speaker is attached to his position - god forbid! - he is not, but suppose he is, think of the corruption, how the mind gets corrupted. He must need an audience, he depends on an audience, he draws energy from the audience, the larger the better, so there is competition and all the horror involved in that. So the ending is the beginning of something totally new. The ending of attachment completely which is death; when you end it completely there is a totally different dimension of existence. Then what is death? We have looked into what is living with its chaos, misery, confusion, slight order, and the labour, endless labour. What is death? Death is not only the physical organism, the body getting old, diseased or accident, being misused, indulging endlessly, sensation, appetite, excitement and gradually withering, consciously, or withering in great pain, with various kinds of diseases. So is that what is death? The dying of the organism? We know that. We recognize it. We see it. But also we say there is something that cannot die, the soul, the Atman, that something which is permanent - these are the various beliefs - which, when you die, reincarnates. Some of you very deeply believe in all this, though some of you are Buddhists, etc. All religions offer various kinds of comfort; comfort is not truth, comfort is not the understanding of a mind that penetrates through all kinds of illusions, dogmas, rituals. So, is there something permanent in man, in you? If there is something permanent in you then that has a possibility of being born next life. Merely to believe in reincarnation has no meaning. If you believe in it, then what you do now today matters infinitely. Right? If you believe in reincarnation, because then what you do now either you will have a better position, a bigger house, you know all that - or be nearer heaven, which are all the same. So, is there something permanent in you, the 'me', the you, the mind that says I am permanent? Is there anything lasting, or is everything is moving, changing, there is nothing permanent? Is your relationship with another permanent, are your gods permanent, gods being put there by thought for your comfort, to escape from your mischief of daily life into something precious, which is an illusion? We are asking together, to find out for yourself if there is anything permanent in your life? The house is permanent, permanent unless an earthquake comes. The trees are permanent, the ocean, the rivers, the mountains are permanent. Apart from that is there anything permanent, lasting, enduring, in your life? The 'me', the 'I' the ego, has been put together by thought: The name, the form, the quality, the character, the idiosyncracies, the capacities, the talents and so on, all that is the result of your culture and certain forms of education. As there is nothing permanent, you are not permanent; a physical body you have, but your thoughts are not permanent, they are changing, constantly modifying; your beliefs, you take comfort in your beliefs and think there is security in your belief. That is why it is so hard to give up your beliefs. Belief is just a word, just an idea, a concept and you take refuge in that concept. That is not security. Have you watched your religious people, how secure they are in their position, in their belief, in their dogma? And that security is a form of illusion. So there is nothing whatsoever permanent. To realize that may be very depressing, melancholic, but it is not. When you see that fact that there is nothing enduring, that very seeing is intelligence, and in that intelligence there is complete security. That is not your intelligence or my intelligence, it is intelligence. As long as there is attachment, there must be corruption: to see the truth of it immediately and the ending of it immediately is intelligence. That intelligence is the only factor of security - not security, that's the wrong word - that intelligence, not being yours or another's is that intelligence of something infinite. Perhaps tomorrow we will talk about the nature of affection, love and compassion, and meditation. As we said, where there is suffering, there is no compassion; where there is compassion it has its own intelligence. SRI LANKA 4TH PUBLIC TALK 16TH NOVEMBER 1980 This is the last talk. We have been talking over together the last three times that we met here about the problems of human life, of existence, man's many, many psychological problems, political, religious, and worldly. As we said at the beginning of these talks, we are walking along together on the same road. The speaker is not leading you, he is setting the pace as you wish. And we talked about relationship, fear, pleasure and the ending of sorrow. We also talked about relationship and the importance of doubt, the importance of questioning, never accepting. This evening we would like to go into the question of what is religion, what is the magnitude of the mind, whether there is anything beyond the mind or there is only the things that thought has created, both outwardly and deeply inwardly. Thought has been used as an instrument for technological, scientific, medical purposes; thought has explored the universe, gone as far as Venus, Saturn. Man has landed on the moon and planted his little flag there. Man has gone into the space, under the earth, the seas. Man has exercised his immense capacity in the direction of outward control, controlling of space, controlling nature, the environment and so on. But man, that is you and I, the speaker, have not gone into the magnitude and the depth of the mind. The mind has got extraordinary capacity, as is seen in the world of technology; they are doing the most extraordinary things. And the East is merely imitating, improving, or copying. And we have never questioned what is the mind, what lies beyond the present consciousness. We have been able to fathom the enormous energy that lies in the mind. We are using the mind to mean not only the capacity, the working, the operations of the brain, but also your emotions, sensory responses, affection, love, all the human responses and reactions, and the capacity of the brain to learn, to forget, to record and act upon that which is learnt as knowledge, skilfully or not. This evening if we can, if you are interested, we will find out for ourselves what is the magnitude of the mind. It is an immense question. You may think it is rather impudent. And to talk about it may be, if we can use the word, sacrilegious. But we human beings, conditioned as we are, living in a small little circle of our own making, in a little corner of the vast earth, and fighting each other over that corner, who rules, who governs, who are the politicians, and the priests and so on. But to enquire very deeply into the immensity of the mind and its capacity, you must first be very clear that to investigate into that, there must be absolute silence. And the silence that is not brought about by thought, the silence that is not brought about as a reward or punishment; that silence has no motive. There are various types of silence, silence between two thoughts, the silence between two noises, the silence between two birds singing and stopping, the silence of the sea when it is utterly calm and the silence of an evening when the sun is about to set, that solemn hour with all its extraordinary sense of coming night. Man has searched for this silence beyond the words. And religion has tried to explain or give a rational meaning, or through many centuries of propaganda - the Christian propaganda, Buddhist propaganda, the Hindu, the Islamic and so on - have made man accept, believe, and so religiously has so conditioned him that he finds it almost impossible to go beyond that conditioning. He makes the best of that condition and tries to escape from that prison into some fanciful images, concepts, theories, theological investigation and so on. I hope we are following each other. And religion has become now merely a verbal statement, slogan, constant repetition that I am a Buddhist, that I am a Christian with all the different denominations in the Christianity, and the thousand gods of Hinduism or the god of the Islamic world. We have been told over and over again for thousands of years, so our brain is so heavily loaded and the man who enquires into what is truth, obviously cannot belong to any organized religion, to any belief, to any sectarian gods or to only one god. He must be free of all rituals, all the religious symbols, images, the authority of the highest priest and so on. Can the mind, your mind be so free? It is not free because it is seeking constantly security, not only physically but inwardly, psychologically, deeply within the recesses of the mind, thought is always seeking some kind of hope, some kind of comfort, security, a state of permanency. And in its search it falls into the traps of the priests all over the world with their organizations, with their rituals and so on. So can your mind be free of all that? Otherwise you are prisoners, you are not really human beings, you are just machines operating. We were the other day discussing with a computer specialist: the computer plays with a master chess player. The first two or three games the master beats the computer, and the computer after three or four games beats the master, because it is learning. When it is defeated it learns what move has caused the defeat; so it has experienced, learnt the first mistake, then the second mistake, experiences, learns and so on until it beats the master. You understand what we are saying? And we, the human mind, operates in the same way: experience, knowledge, memory, action; and from that action learn, more knowledge. So we repeat this constant cycle. So we are always moving from the known to the known and acting from the known, like the computer, the latest computers, which have the capacity to correct themselves, which can experience and learn and so go much faster than man in thought, in solving problems. So our minds operate more or less in the same way. Which is, our minds have become mechanical. If you are educated as an engineer, for the rest of your life you are thinking along those lines - how to build bridges, railways, buildings, aeroplanes and so on. Or if you are a surgeon, spend ten years learning medicine, then to operate and so on, and for the rest of your life you are a marvellous or rather shoddy little surgeon. Or you spend years and years reading various religious books of various denotations, and you become an expert at it, capable of arguing, but still moving from the known to the known. I hope you are following all this. Are you? And our life, our daily life is also mechanical, going to the office from 9 o'clock to 5 o'clock, repeating the same pattern, coming back home, sex, quarrels, ambition, vanity, superstition and so on. This is our life. And our brain, our mind is so conditioned to this and being conditioned we don't see the crisis that is in the conditioning itself. The world is changing so rapidly technologically, but morally, ethically, we are still what we were, perhaps little more modified, little more sophisticated, a little more 'putting on white gloves', treating each other very distantly. We are so heavily conditioned; to believe in god or not to believe in god. And believing in god or not, religions have played an extraordinary part in our life. There have been religious wars in Europe; inquisitions, torture in the name of god, in the name of whatever it is, excommunication. Perhaps only the Buddhist and the Hindu world has not encouraged killing; though I have been told in this country, Sri Lanka, you are eating meat and you call yourself Buddhist. The Buddha was supposed to have said 'don't kill'. You see that is what we are saying; religion is merely a make-believe. It has no reality. It has no depth, it is just a series of words, quotations, authority, which is totally unrelated to our daily life. Our daily life is violence, killing, that which is convenient for us, and we will kill man, animals, to satisfy our appetite. These are facts, not the speaker's invention. Look at your own lives - when you say you are a Buddhist, look at it. You are not Buddhist, you are just a label called Buddhist, but you are a human being like the rest of the world with all the travails, toil, confusion, misery, sorrow, pain and all that. So you are the world and the world is you. There is no discussion or argument about it. Psychologically you are the world and the world is you. When one realizes that fact, you become astonishingly responsible about what you think, what you do, how you behave. And our minds, as we said, has become what we are, we are our minds, we are our consciousness. Our consciousness is its content - fear, pain, pleasure, belief, I want, I don't, you know. Consciousness with its content is what we are. Now, meditation is the quietening of the content. Meditation is the emptying of our consciousness with all its content. Are the speaker and you going together? Even intellectually, even verbally? And there may be some of you who are not merely intellectually following, or verbally, but going deeper into it. Meditation, the word means to ponder over, think over: that is the dictionary meaning of that word. And a mind that is enquiring into what is meditation, not how to meditate, but what is meditation is far more important than how to meditate. There is the Tibetan meditation, Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese, Zen, all kinds of meditations. Each has its own particular system, with its own practices, breathing, not breathing, sitting in a certain posture, all the things that thought has put together as to what meditation should be. We are enquiring not only into what is religion, not the organized religion and all that nonsense, but what is a mind that is religious? And also we are enquiring into what is meditation. If a man has, as many of them have, for a couple of years practised Zen meditation, Hindu, and other forms invented or traditionally explained by the gurus, they are all based on control, discipline, practice, and having faith in that which the authority, the establishment, the guru has said. To the speaker all this is not meditation. You can meditate for 20 minutes a day and then for the rest of the day do your mischief. That is not meditation. You can belong to some group which has a peculiar meditation of its own: all kinds of things are happening in the name of meditation, all over the world, specially recently; the Indian gurus have taken this nonsense over to Europe and they are practising it, god knows why, probably to get more money, or to get more health, or to have better control of memory and so on. If you will kindly listen and go into the question of what is meditation and what is religion. You may remember that story which the speaker has often repeated, probably invented that story: there were two men walking along a street looking at all the trees, the houses, and the shadows and the well-built walls and all that. They were walking along and one of them picks up something, and looks at it and immediately his face becomes radiant, astonishingly beautiful, clear eyed, with a certain dignity, a sense of benediction. And the friend says "What has happened to you, what is it that you have picked up?" And the friend says "I think it is truth, at least part of it and I am going to keep it", and so he puts it into his pocket and the friend says "I think I can help you, we can begin to organize it." Have you understood the meaning of this? Right sirs? You have understood the meaning? That we depend on organizations, the organizations of the Post Office, and so on. Those are all necessary organizations. We depend on organizations for the psychological understanding of ourselves. We depend on groups or teachers, or leaders and so on. Neither the politicians, nor the scientists, nor the established religious people can ever solve the problems of humanity. Never. What you have created, the politicians,the religious organizations, all that is man-made, you have made it in your desire for comfort, for safety, for protection and so on. The man who is enquiring into the depth and meaning of religious mind, doesn't belong to any group or any organization, any so-called religious organization. Now can you abandon those now, not tomorrow, not say I will think about it? Then you will never do it. Sir, enlightenment is not of time, enlightenment doesn't come through years of practice, through years of renunciation, through years of asceticism. Time has no place for the religious mind. I wonder if you understand all this? And we, every human being in the world says, give me time to achieve that state of paradise, or drink the milk of paradise. So if we are enquiring, action is perception, seeing and acting immediately. I will explain that statement. What we do is, you makes a statement like, attachment leads to corruption. It is a statement made by the speaker. You hear it, you are attached and you say, of course there is a little corruption, but it is necessary and you are attached because you are lonely, want comfort and all the rest of it. Now when you hear, if you are sensitive, alert, watching, that very moment of perception which is the truth is action. That is giving up all attachment instantly. That is intelligence, not the cunning mind that can argue, put forth various opinions, doctrines, dialectical approach. All that is not intelligence. Intelligence is seeing; seeing for example that nationalism is a poison in the world and seeing the truth of it instantly and being free of nationalism. That freedom in action is intelligence. That intelligence is not yours or mine, it is the intelligence of truth operating in action. So meditation is the freedom from all measure. Do you understand that statement? Freedom from all measure. Our minds are always measuring; the more, the less, more powerful, less powerful, greedy, and I will be less greedy. Mind and the word meditation means also measure. Can the mind be free of measurement which is comparison, imitation, conformity? That's measurement. Without measurement, the technological world cannot exist. The whole of the west is dominated by the ancient Greek intellect. To them, measurement was absolutely the means of enquiry. Can your minds be free now of measurement - the more, the less, the should be and should not be - so that there is no movement of thought as measure? One wonders how much you are following all this? Or is this too much at one meeting? And as this is the last meeting one has to make a resume, compress everything in an hour and twenty minutes, or so. But if you will give your mind, which is your hearing, seeing, and learning, then you will see that our life is based on measurement. Ambition is measurement. Affection has become measurement. Love has no measure. But we don't know what love is. We know pleasure, desire, but desire and pleasure is not love. Now you hear that statement and you begin to question because you live on pleasure, desire, you have pictures of sexual activity, and you can't let that go. So you say, is this so, how can one give it up; which means you are not actually listening. You don't want to give up or you find reasons for not. You are moving away from the act of listening. And the speaker says, meditation is a movement without measurement. Do you understand the beauty of it? No. Silence of the mind is not measurable. It is only when the mind is absolutely quiet without a single movement of thought, that can only come about when you have understood the content of your consciousness. When that content, which is your daily life, your reactions, your hurts, your vanities, your ambitions, your subtleties and cunning deceptions, the unexplored part of your consciousness, all that must be observed; not take one by one by one and getting rid of one by one. You understand all this? I wonder. You know, sir, the speaker must go into something which I hope will make things clearer. Perhaps it may make it more difficult, more obscure, but one has to go into it. We are used to control and conflict. We are accustomed to the idea, to the concept that life is a strife, a struggle. We say, nature is constantly in struggle - the deer being killed by the tiger. So we are always comparing our struggle, our vanities, our violence to nature. Nature is orderly. There is only disorder when man interferes with it. This is so obvious you can see it. Man has killed fifty million whales. Think of such a horror. They are killing baby seals for profit, for money and so on. Can we go into ourselves very deeply, see the content at one glance, not bit by bit. That requires attention. I am going to go into what is attention. When the speaker says attention, you want to know what it is. He has to explain it. But if your minds were alert, you would know instantly what attention is. You can't cultivate attention. You can cultivate concentration. Concentration is focussing the energy of thought upon a particular point, resisting all other intrusions, directions, keeping thought focussed on one point. That is what is called generally concentration, the schoolboy learns that. He wants to look out of the window, the teacher says, pay attention, concentrate on your book. But the boy is much more interested in seeing the bird on the wing and the fly that is crawling up the wall, the lizard with its four feet hanging down, looking at all that. The looking at all that is attention, but the teacher says, pay attention to the book. Do you see the difference? Come on! So we must discern between attention and concentration. Our minds have been trained to concentrate, more or less. We are rather feeble about that too. As long as it gives you reward or helps avoid pain, you concentrate. That is, in focussing your thought on one point you have to discard every other movement of thought and thought is always pressing in. One wants to concentrate on that, but thought wanders off, and you have to pull it back. So there is constant struggle. There is the controller and the controlled. The controller is always saying that thought must be attentive, must concentrate, must do this, must not do that. There is division between the controller and the controlled. You are following all this? Please, follow, it's your life, don't go to sleep. If you really understand this you will see conflict ends, totally. If you really understand it, not verbally, not intellectually, but see the truth of it that the controller is the controlled, you will see that conflict ends totally. Thought has divided itself into the controller and that which he will control. It is still thought. Be clear on this point. One gets angry and then thought says, control, don't be angry. Is that anger different from the thought, or the mind that is angry? You understand? You are anger, not that you are different from anger. This is clear, isn't it? So the controller has been built by thought, thought which has cultivated this tradition that he is superior, he is different from the thought, from the controlled. Now if you observe it, the controlled is the controller. Thought wanders off and thought says, I must control. Thought says. So thought is the controller. You understand? So there is no control. This is a very dangerous statement if you don't understand it. The speaker has never controlled his emotions, his thoughts, all that, never, because right from the beginning he saw the controller is the controlled. There is conflict only when there is division. I wonder if you see all this. Do you see all this? Please understand this because meditation is not conflict. It is not that you must control, it is not that you mustn't measure, it is not that you must do this or that. That meditation comes naturally if you have put your house in order - your house, you, in order, which means there is no conflict in you, not a shadow of effort. This is asking the human mind an immense challenge. So meditation is the ending of all measurement. Measurement exists as long as the 'me' exists, as long as the I, me, exists with my pride, with my images, with my hurts, with my vanity, with my ambition, fears and all that, the 'me' that is put together by thought. As long as that me exists, which is the centre of measurement, which is the very centre of conflict, as long as that exists, meditation leads only to further illusion, further mischief. It has no meaning. So the ending of the 'me' is the beginning of wisdom and meditation. And the mind is completely quiet, not partly quiet. You know, we are always asking for peace of mind. There is no peace in the mind. Peace exists only when there is total absence of violence. There is violence if you are ambitious. Sir, these are all facts. Go into it. There is violence when you belong to any group - religious, national or otherwise. There is violence in your relationship. So putting the house in order is the first responsibility of a man who is really serious and committed to the investigation of meditation. Which means he must have a healthy body because the organism affects the mind. If you have got a heavy untrained body, your mind also becomes rather sloppy. These are all facts. These are common facts. Then we begin to enquire into what is religion because we may find that a mind that is free in that deep sense of that word is the religious mind. The religious mind has no problems. You understand? No, please, these are words because we are full of problems, not only problems with your family at home, problems when you are in the in office, problems whether you should vote for this person or that person, and all that. You have got so many problems. A problem means unresolved issue. That is, if you have been hurt from childhood, as most of us are, hurt inside, that wound we carry for the rest of our life and that becomes a tremendous problem because with that hurt goes fear, isolation, avoidance, withdrawing, and more fear. That is a problem. To end that problem immediately is to perceive who is hurt, what is hurt. What is hurt is the image that you have built about yourself. And when you see that, as you must see now, as the speaker is explaining, as long as you have an image, noble or ignoble, rather shallow, stupid, whatever it is, as long as you have an image you are going to be hurt. That's a fact. And you create an image about another or about yourself, because in that image you find certain security. You understand? You find security in the image thought has created, which means there is no security at all in that image, but you stick to that. Now you have heard that statement, and to see that image is corruption, and hearing it, end it. That is an act of supreme intelligence. It is the neurotic that sees danger and enters into the danger. A sane man, an intelligent man, in the sense we are using that word intelligent, sees the poison, the danger and acts immediately. So we are asking, what is religion. Man has always sought something beyond this life, beyond time, beyond all measurement, he has called it eternity, truth, immortality - not immortality - truth, something measureless, nameless, measureless. And there have been those who have said, "I'll lead you to it. We know and you don't know". This has been from the ancient days when the priest has assumed the authority, he knew and the layman didn't. The ancient Egyptians did this with their hierarchical priesthood. And we are doing exactly the same thing now. You want to find that which is nameless, that which has no word, that which has no form, that which is the whole universe, and you come along and say, "I'll lead you to it. I know and you don't". So beware of the man who says, "I know". So we have come to the point: man has sought something sacred; the serious man, not the superstitious man; the superstitious man worships an image, made by the hand or by the mind; the superstitious man follows certain rituals, accepts dogmas, believes in fantastic romantic nonsense. That is called religion, organized, hierarchical authority, all that. So if you brush aside all that, because that has no validity, because they are the product of thought. Thought may say, we have received it from the highest, it is still part of thought. And thought is limited, never complete because it is always the outcome of knowledge, there is no complete knowledge about anything, therefore it is always within the shadow of ignorance. So if you can brush aside all that, that means complete freedom inwardly, not the freedom not to obey the law, that's stupid. But to have no psychological problem whatsoever, which means you have released tremendous psychological energy. You understand what I am saying? We have got physical energy, which shows itself by going to the office everyday, tremendous energy you have to build a bridge, to do anything physically. But psychologically we are cripples because we have never gone into it, never questioned, never observed. And there must be freedom from all problems, and therefore freedom totally psychologically, in the very structure of the psyche. Silence is that energy. Silence is that emptiness; the emptiness of all the content of your mind. There is no 'how', there is no method; method, how, systems, are all the inventions of thought, therefore they are limited, therefore they are no good. But if you understand this, seeing the truth that no system can ever free the mind, when you see that, act, there is freedom instantly. And religion is the uncovering of that which is most holy, which has no name, which is the absolute truth, the origin of everything. We haven't time to go into all that for the moment. So then also you must enquire into what is love. Love is not pleasure, love is not desire. You have heard that: look at it, go into it, see it. When you see the truth of that there is immense beauty. And where there is that love, which has never touched jealousy, dependence, attachment, all that, then there is that love and compassion which is intelligence. So the mind then can go beyond all measure. That is, sir, the scientists are exploring the universe, the astrophysicists are going through thought, through telescopes, through various - you know, Apollo, you know various things going into space, through thought, through measurement, through constant observation of the stars and so on, they are trying to find what is the origin of all this, the universe: that is going outward into vast space and so on. But man has very rarely gone inward. And there he can find an immense immeasurable universe, which is this universe. For that there must be vast space in your mind. All that is meditation: putting the house in order first, complete order so that there is no conflict, no measure, and there in that house there is love, then the content of the mind which is it consciousness can be emptied totally of the 'I', which is me, the you. Then if you have gone that far the mind then becomes - is - it doesn't become, there is no becoming, becoming is still measure - the mind then is totally absolutely quiet, not for some period, or a length of time, but its state is to be quiet. And out of that quietness it can respond to thought and utilize thought. You understand? But it is always in a state of total quietness, emptiness of all its content. If you have gone that far then you will know, then there is that which is eternal, nameless. 2nd Public Talk - Talk Sri Lanka 1980 1st, 3rd and 4th Talk are published in: Sri Lanka Talks 1980 SRI LANKA 2ND PUBLIC TALK 9TH NOVEMBER 1980. 'THE BOOK OF LIFE' May we were continue with what we were saying yesterday evening? We said that the whole story of mankind is in you, the vast experiences, the deep-rooted fears, anxieties, sorrow, pleasure and all the beliefs that man has accumulated throughout the millennia. You are that book. That's what we said yesterday. And it is an art to read that book. It is not printed by any publisher. It is not for sale. You can't buy it in any book shop. You can't go to any analyst because his book is the same as yours; nor to any scientist. The scientist may have a great deal of information about matter, and the astrophysics, but his book, the story of mankind, is the same as yours. That book, we said yesterday afternoon. And without carefully, patiently, hesitantly reading that book, you will never be able to change the society in which we live, the society that is corrupt, immoral, there is a great deal of poverty, injustice and so on. Any serious man would be concerned with the things as they are in the world at present, with all the chaos, corruption, war - the greatest crime, which is war. In order to bring about a radical change in our society and its structure, one must be able to read the book which is yourself, and the society is brought about by each one of us, by our parents, grandparents and so on. All human beings have created this society and when the society is not changed, there will be more corruption, more wars and greater destruction of the human mind. That's a fact. So to read this book, which is yourself, one must have the art of listening to what the book is saying. That is, to listen to it, which means to listen implies not to interpret what the book is saying. Just observe it as you would observe a cloud. You can't do anythIng about the cloud, nor the palm leaves swaying in the wind, nor the beauty of a sunset. You cannot alter it, you cannot argue with it, you cannot change it. It is so. So one must have the art of listening to what the book is saying. The book is you, so you can't tell the book what is should reveal. It will reveal everything. So that must be the first art, to listen to the book. There is another art, which is the art of observation, the art of seeing. When you read the book which is yourself, there is not you and the book. Please understand this. There is not the reader and the book separate from you, the book is you. So you are observing the book, not telling the book what is should say. Am I making this clear? That is, to read, to observe all the reactions that the book reveals. To see very clearly without any distortion what the lines, the chapters, the verse, the poems, the beauty, the struggle, everything that is telling you, revealing. So there is the art of seeing, the art of listening. There is also another art; the art of learning. The computers can learn. They can be programmed and they will repeat what they have been told. If a computer plays with a master of chess, the master may beat it two or three or four times but it is learning. It avoids where it has made a mistake, it can correct it, so through experience it is learning so that after a few games the computer can beat the master chess player. That's how our mind works, our mind. We first experience accumulate knowledge, store it in the brain, then thought, as memory, and then action. From that action, you learn. And so the learning is the accumulation of further knowledge. So you begin again. Knowledge - experience, knowledge, memory and thought and action. This cycle is going on all the time with all of us. I hope I am making this clear that every action, either gives further knowledge, though the mind changes, modifies its past experience, and goes on. This is what a mind that is aware, awake is doing all the time, like a computer. Experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action, and the action modifies, or adds more knowledge, and you go on that way. Clear? So this is what we are doing all the time, which is called learning, learning from experience. This has been the story of man - constant challenge and response to that challenge. And that response can be equal to the challenge, or not quite up to the challenge, but it learns, and accumulates knowledge, and the next challenge it responds again more fully, or less fully. So this process is going on all the time in our minds, which is called learning. You learn a language. That is, you learn the meaning of the words, the syntax, the grammar, put sentences together and gradually accumulate a vocabulary and then, if you have got a good memory, you begin to talk that particular language which you have spent time on. This is the human process of learning. That is, always moving from knowledge to knowledge. And the book is the whole knowledge of mankind, which is you. Am I making all this clear? And either - please listen to this with a little care and patience - either you keep that circle going all the time, or find a way of moving out of that circle. I am going to show it to you in a minute. That is, we are always functioning from the past knowledge, modified by the present and moving forward. The forward is modified again which becomes the past, and this process is part of our life. Are we getting all this? I am making this, if you don't mind, I know you are probably very learned, very educated, but I am putting all this into very, very simple language; but the word is not the thing. Right? Ceylon, Sri Lanka - forgive me - is not the land, the beauty of the land, the palm trees, the river, the marvellous trees, and the fruit, and the flowers. So the word is not the thing. Please bear that in mind all the time we are talking together, that the word is not the thing. The word husband is not the man, it is a word. By word we measure. So please bear in mind throughout this talk, and the other two talks that are to take place and the discussion, public discussion, that the word is never the thing. The symbol is never the actual. The picture is not that which is. So if that is deeply rooted in our mind then words have very little significance. You follow? The thing matters, not the word. So, as I said, there is the art of seeing, the art of listening and the art of learning. The learning is movement from the past to the present, modified to the future, and that is experiencing, and so on. The whole cycle is what we call learning. That is, psychological learning as well as technological learning. Right? Which means what? The mind is never free from the known. Are we all getting somewhere together, or am I making this awfully difficult? It is not difficult. Probably, if the speaker may point out, you are not used to this kind of thinking, this kind of enquiry, constant moving forward. So, as we said, our learning is always within the field of the known. And so the mind becomes mechanical. Right? If I have a particular habit and I live with that habit my mind becomes mechanical. If I believe in something and I repeat, repeat, repeat, it becomes mechanical. So we are saying that we are living always within the area of the known. So our minds have become a network of words, never the actual, but words, words, words, and moving, changing, altering within the narrow, limited area of knowledge. So learning implies something totally different. We are going to go into it together. We have said very clearly, what is seeing, how to see the book, read the lines, the art of listening to the book, never distorting, never interpreting, choosing what you like, and don't like, what you appreciate and don't appreciate. Then you are not reading a book. Right? And we are saying also that we all live within the narrow limits of the known. And that has become our constant habit, therefore our mind, if you examine your mind, is repetitive, habitual, accustomed, you believe in god and you believe in god for the rest of your life. If anybody says there is no god, then you call him irreligious. So you are caught in habit. Now we are saying that is not learning at all. Learning is something entirely different. Learning means enquiring into the limits of knowledge and moving away from it. Right? This will be difficult, we will go into it as we go along. So there is the art of seeing, the art of learning, the art of listening, and the art of learning, never to be caught in the same pattern, or invent another pattern. The constant breaking down of patterns, the norms, the values, which doesn't mean living without any restraint. Society is now permissive, it doesn't mean that at all. This constant awareness of this pattern formation of the mind and breaking it down, so that the mind is constantly aware, alert. Right? Now with those three factors, listening, observing, learning, with those basic factors let's read the book together. You are reading the books with me. I am not reading your book, we are reading the human book, which is you and the speaker, and the rest of mankind. Clear? Please give a little attention to this because we live in a society that is so unhappy, that is in such conflict, struggle, strife, and there seems to be no end to it. And we are seeing if we know how to read that book, which is yourself, all conflict, all noise, travail, all that comes to an end. It is only then that there truth can come then into your field. It is only such a mind that is really a religious mind, not the believing mind,not the mind that does all kinds of rituals, not the mind that puts on strange garments, but the mind that is free after having read completely all the book. And it is only such a mind that receives the benediction of truth. It is only such a mind that can go infinitely far beyond time. So together, I mean together, we are reading the book, not the printed book, the book that is you. So it is your responsibility not merely to listen to what the speaker is saying, but also what the speaker is saying is your book, opening it chapter by chapter, page by page, until the very end, if you can travel that far. And we must travel together if we are to solve the human problems, as they exist. Together we can solve it, not one person. So what is the first chapter? Please think together, don't let me tell you. What is the first chapter in that book? That is, your book, and the first chapter in that book, the content of that chapter? All right, let's go on together. Apart from the physical existence, the physical organism with all the travail of the body, the disease, the laziness, the sluggishness, the lack of proper food, proper nourishment - apart from all that, what is the first movement? I am asking you. We are together exploring; I am not exploring and telling you, that would be very easy for you. But if we do it together it will be yours, and when you are able to read it you don't have to have a priest, you don't have to have a psychologist, you don't depend on anybody. You will begin to have that extraordinary freedom which gives you tremendous vitality, the vitality of psychological freedom. So please let us share this book together. Are you waiting for me? I am afraid you are because you have never even looked at yourself deeply. You may have looked at your face, combed your hair, powdered your face and all the rest of it, but you have never looked into yourself. But when you look into yourself don't you discover for yourself that you are a secondhand human being? It may be rather unpleasant to consider oneself a secondhand human being, but we are full of other people's knowledge - what somebody has said, what some philosopher, or some teacher or some guru has said, what the Buddha said, what Christ said an so on. We are all full of that. Also, if you have been to school, and college or university, there also you have been told what to do, what to think. So if you realize that you are a secondhand human being, then you can put aside that secondhand quality of the mind and look. The speaker will go on if you will kindly follow it, if you don't it's up to you. The first observation is that we live in contradiction, that there is no order in us. Order is not a blueprint, saying, order is putting the same thing in the same place everyday. But order implies something far greater than the mechanical discipline of a particular habit, norm, sanction. Right? We are saying order is something entirely different from the accepted normal discipline. The word discipline means, it comes from Latin and so on, which means to learn, not to conform, not to imitate, not to copy, obey, but to learn. You understand? is this clear? So one discovers in that book, the first chapter, that we live an extraordinarily confused, disorderly life - wanting one thing and denying that you want it, saying one thing and doing something else, thinking one thing and acting something else. So there is constant contradiction. Where there is contradiction, there must be conflict. Right? Are you following all this? Or are you bored with this? Come with me, sirs, please tell me are you following this, or not? Audience: Yes. K: Good! At last somebody says, yes. You are not following the speaker. You are following the book which is yourself, that you are living in a disorderly way, that you are in perpetual conflict. That conflict expresses itself as ambition, fulfilment, conformity, identification with a person, with a country, with an idea and never living with the actual. Right? So we live in disorder, both politically, religiously, in our family life. So we have to find out what is order. The book will tell you if you know how to read the book. It says you live in disorder. Follow it - turn the next page. There you will find what it means to live in disorder. If we don't understand the cause of disorder, order will never come into being. You are following all this? You know, it is like fighting a mass of people who don't understand a thing of all this, but it doesn't matter. It is the speaker's responsibility. So we find disorder exists as long as there is contradiction, not only verbal contradiction, but psychological contradiction. As we said, not being honest, absolute honesty, you say one thing, you mean it, to have great integrity. So if one understands the nature of disorder, not intellectually or verbally, but actually, the book is saying don't translate what you read into an intellectual concept, but read it properly. When you read it, it says your contradictions exist, and they can only end if you understand the nature of contradiction. Contradiction exists when there is division, like the Hindus and the Muslims, like the Jews and the Arabs, the communists and the non-communists, this constant divisive process between the various types of Buddhists, the various types of Hindus, Christians, and so on. Where there is division there must be conflict, which is disorder. When you understand the nature of disorder, out of that comprehension, out of the depth of understanding the nature of disorder, comes naturally order. Order is like a flower coming out naturally, and that order, that flower, never withers. Always there is order in one's life because you have really, deeply read the book, which says where there is division there must be conflict. Now have we read that book, those books so clearly, that we understand the nature of disorder? I'll go into it a little more deeply. The next chapter. The next chapter says as long as you are working from a centre towards the periphery, there must be contradiction. That is, as long as you are acting self-centredly, selfishly, egotistically, personally, narrowing the whole of this vast life into that little 'me', you will inevitably create disorder. The 'me' is a very small affair, put together by thought. Thought says my name, the form, the psychological structure and the image it has built about itself - 'I am somebody.' So as long as there is self-centred activity there must be contradiction, therefore there must be disorder. And the book says don't ask how not to be self-centred. Right? Please follow this carefully. The book says when you ask how, you are asking for a method. Then if you pursue that method, it is another form of self-centred activity. Got it? The book is telling you all this. I am not telling you this. The speaker is not translating the book for you. We are reading it together. As long as you belong to any sect, group, religion, you are bound to create conflict. This is difficult to swallow, because we all believe in something. You believe in god, another doesn't; another believes in the Buddha, another believes in Jesus, and Islam says there is only something else. So belief brings division in relationship between man and man. Though you believe in god, you are not living the life of god. You understand? Belief has no value. You don't believe the sun rises and sets, you never say, I believe the sun rises, or the sun sets. If it doesn't rise we will all be dead in three or four days. There is no need for belief when you are only concerned with facts, facts being that which is actually happening in your book. Please, come on sirs. Then the problem arises also, which I am going to go into presently, which is how you read the book, whether you are separate from the book. When you pick up a novel or a thriller, you are reading it as an outsider turning the pages over, with all the exciting story and so on. But here the reader is the book. You understand the difficulty. The reader is the book. He is reading it as though he is reading a part of himself. He is not reading a book. I wonder if you understand this? We will go into it as we go along. The book also says man has lived under authority - political, religious, the leader, the guru, the man who knows, the intellectual philosopher. He has always conformed to a pattern of authority. Please listen very carefully to what the book is saying, which is, there is the authority of law; whether you approve of that law or not there is the authority of law; there is the authority of the policemen, the authority of an elected government and there is the authority of the dictator. We are not talking about that authority. We are reading in the book about the authority that the mind seeks in order to be secure. The mind is always seeking security, the book says. And the books says, when you are seeking security psychologically, you are inevitably bound to create authority - the authority of the priest, the authority of the image, the authority of the man who says "I am enlightened, I will tell you." You understand all this? So it says be free of all that kind of authority, which means be a light to yourself, and don't depend on anyone for the understanding of life, for the understanding of that book. To read that book there is nobody between you and the book, no philosopher, no priest, no guru, no god, nothing. You are the book and you are reading it. So there must be freedom from the authority of another, whether the authority is of the husband or the wife, or the wife or the husband. It means to be able to stand alone, and most people are so frightened. The book, the next chapter says you have discussed, you have read, the first chapter of disorder and order and authority. The next chapter says life is relationship. Life Is relationship in action, not only relationship with your intimate person but you are related to the whole of mankind. Because you are like the rest of the human beings, wherever they may live, because he suffers, you suffer and all the rest of it. Psychologically you are the world and the world is you. Therefore you have tremendous responsibility. Then the book says in the next chapter, man has lived with fear from time immemorial - fear, not only fear of nature, fear of the environment, fear of disease, fear of accidents and so on, but also the much deeper layers of fear, the deeper, unconscious, untrodden waves of fear. We are going to read the book together till the chapter ends and says, "Watch it and you will be able to end it". We are going together to see, to read the book so carefully, so patiently, so that when you have come to the chapter your mind is free of all fear. The book again says, next page, what is fear? How does it arise, what is its nature? Why has man not solved this problem? Why does he live with it? Has he become accustomed to it? Has he accepted it as the way of life? Why has man, the human being, you, not resolved this problem so that your mind is totally free from fear? Because as long as there is fear you live in darkness. You may worship whatever you will, out of that darkness. Your worship is out of that darkness and therefore your worship is absolutely meaningless. So it is very important to read further into the nature of fear. Now, if you examine closely, if you read that book, every word of it, it asks you, how does fear arise? Is it remembrance of things past - the remembrance of some pain, of something which you have done, which you ought not to have done; a lie that you have told and you don't want it to be discovered and you are frightened that it might be discovered; an action that has corrupted your mind and you may be afraid of that corruption, of that action? Or you may be afraid of the future, or you may be afraid of losing a job, or of not becoming a prominent citizen in a particular little backyard of a country. So there are innumerable forms of fear. People are afraid of the dark, people are afraid of public opinion, people are afraid of death - we will deal with death later - people are afraid of not fulfilling, whatever that may mean. Apart from the fear of disease, one may have a great deal of physical pain and that pain is registered in the mind and one is afraid that pain might return. You know all this. So the book says go on, read more. What is fear? Is it brought about by thought? You are following all this? Is it brought about by time? I am healthy now, but as I grow older, I will be ill and I am frightened. That is time. Or is it thought that says anything might I happen to me, I might lose my job, I might go blind, I might lose my wife, whatever it is. Is that the root of fear -the book is asking you. So you say turn the page and you will find the answer in yourself. The speaker is not telling you. There, it says thought and time are the factors of fear. So it says thought is time. Right? So the question then is, the next page says: is it possible for the human mind, for you who are reading that book which is yourself, the book asks you, is it possible to be completely free of fear so that there is not a breath of fear? Which is what? I hope you are reading it with me, I am not reading it by myself. Have you got the energy to go with this? So it says again, don't ask for a method. Method means a repetition, a system; the system which you invent will not solve fear, because you are then following a system, not understanding the nature of fear. So don't look for a system, but only understand, understand the nature of fear. It says: what do you mean by understand? I am going into it. When it is that you say, even now, "Now I understand something"? What do you mean by that? Either you understand the verbal construction and the meaning of the word, which is a particular form of intellectual operation, or you see the truth of it. When you see the truth of this, then the thing disappears. You understand? When you see clearly for yourself that thought and time are the factors of fear, not as a verbal statement, but it is part of you, it is in your blood, in your mind, in your heart, that time is the factor, then you will see that fear has no longer a place, only time. You understand? I wonder if you have got that? Because fear has been brought about by time and thought. I am afraid of what might happen, I am afraid of my loneliness. I never examine my loneliness, what it means, but I am afraid of it, which means I run away from it, but that loneliness is my shadow, it pursues me. You can't run away from your shadow. So you have to have the patience of observation, which is not to run away but to observe, to look, to listen, to hear what that book is saying: it says time is the factor, not fear. So you have to understand time. You are following all this? Please, sirs, if you are tired, tell me. It's half past seven if you are tired we will stop for a few minutes and then continue. Are you tired? Yes, or no? Audience: No. K: How does it happen that you are not tired? You have had a long day in the office, from nine to five, or whatever it is - oh, today is a holiday, so you are not tired because you have a holiday. But you have an office and you will be tired. All right, you are not tired, let's go on. So it says, time is the factor, if you can understand time, then perhaps there will be an end to fear. So you have to ask what is the relationship between time and thought - the book is asking you: find out what is the relationship between time and thought. Thought is a movement from the known to the known. It is a movement: the past memories meeting the present, modifying itself and going on. This movement from yesterday to today to tomorrow is the movement of time, by sunrise and by sunset. There is also psychological time. That is, I have known pain, I hope I shall not have it, it might occur again, which is the movement of the past through the present modifying itself and the future. There is time by the watch. There is time inwardly - I hope to be; you are not, but you hope; you are violent but you hope to be non-violent. You are greedy, envious, but through time, through evolution, you will gradually get rid of it. So time is a movement from the past, present, future. Thought is also from the past, knowledge, memory, movement to the future. So time is thought. Right? Clear? The next question is much more difficult to answer. You have to have patience to move so far. Patience means - please understand I am using the word 'patience' in a particular sense. Patience means the absence of time. Generally patience means go slow, be patient, take time, don't react quickly, be quiet, take it easy, give the other fellow an opportunity to express himself, so on and so on. We are not using the word 'patience' in that sense. We are saying patience means the forgetting of time so that you can look, you can observe. But if you have time through which you are observing, you are impatient. You get what I am saying? I am saying something extraordinary. I'll go into it by myself later. So you have to have patience to read the chapter, which says time is the factor of fear. Thought is time. And as long as thought is functioning you are bound to be afraid. Right? Logically. So the next chapter says: is there a stopping to time, is there an ending to time? Time is a great factor in our life - I am, but I will be; I don't know, but I will know; I don't know this particular language but I will learn, give me time. Time will heal our wounds. Time blunts sensitivity. Time destroys relationship between man, woman. Time destroys understanding because understanding is immediate, not "I will learn to understand". So the book is saying time plays an extraordinarily important part in our life. Our brains have evolved through time. It is not your brain or my brain, but the human brain, the human brain which is you, you have identified that brain as your brain, as your mind. But it is not your mind or your brain, it is the human brain which has evolved through millions of years. So you see the brain, which is conditioned by time, can only operate in time. Right? You understand all this? So we are asking the brain to do something totally different. The book says your brain, your mind, functions in time. Time has played an important part in your life. Time is not the solution of any problem, except technological problems. Don't use time as a resolution of a problem, between you and your wife, between you and your job and so on. It is very difficult to understand this. Please give your mind to this, to read the book properly. So it says: can time end? If you don't end it fear will go on with all its consequences. And it says: don't ask how to end it. The moment you ask somebody how to end it, he has not read the book, he will give you a theory. I wonder if you understand this. So this is real meditation. You understand? This is real meditation, which is to enquire whether time can ever stop. The speaker says it can, and it does. Careful, please! The speaker says so, not your book. So if you say, the speaker says it ends, I hope it ends, and you believe in that hope, you are not reading the book, you are just living on words. And living on words doesn't dissolve fear. So you have to read the book of time, and go into it and explore the nature of time, how you react to time, how your relationship is based on time. I know you, which is time. You follow? Go into it. Which means also knowledge means time. But if you are using knowledge as a means of advancement, you are caught in time and therefore fear, anxiety, and the whole process goes on. To enquire into the nature of ending of time requires a silent mind, a mind that is free to observe, not frightened. You understand? Free to observe the movement of time in yourself, how you depend on it. You know, if somebody told you there is no such thing as hope - just listen carefully - there is no such thing as hope, you would be horrified, wouldn't you? Do you understand what I am saying? Hope is time. So you have to investigate the nature of time and realize that your brain and your mind and your heart, which are one, are functioning, conditioned in time. And therefore you are asking something totally different. You are asking the brain, the mind, to function differently and that requires great attention in your reading. You understand? So sirs, that is enough for this evening. We will go into matters of pleasure, death, birth, all that, next Saturday and Sunday. After that unfortunately we have to go to other places. 2nd Public Talk - Talk Sri Lanka 1980 1st, 3rd and 4th Talk are published in: Sri Lanka Talks 1980 SRI LANKA 2ND PUBLIC TALK 9TH NOVEMBER 1980. 'THE BOOK OF LIFE' May we were continue with what we were saying yesterday evening? We said that the whole story of mankind is in you, the vast experiences, the deep-rooted fears, anxieties, sorrow, pleasure and all the beliefs that man has accumulated throughout the millennia. You are that book. That's what we said yesterday. And it is an art to read that book. It is not printed by any publisher. It is not for sale. You can't buy it in any book shop. You can't go to any analyst because his book is the same as yours; nor to any scientist. The scientist may have a great deal of information about matter, and the astrophysics, but his book, the story of mankind, is the same as yours. That book, we said yesterday afternoon. And without carefully, patiently, hesitantly reading that book, you will never be able to change the society in which we live, the society that is corrupt, immoral, there is a great deal of poverty, injustice and so on. Any serious man would be concerned with the things as they are in the world at present, with all the chaos, corruption, war - the greatest crime, which is war. In order to bring about a radical change in our society and its structure, one must be able to read the book which is yourself, and the society is brought about by each one of us, by our parents, grandparents and so on. All human beings have created this society and when the society is not changed, there will be more corruption, more wars and greater destruction of the human mind. That's a fact. So to read this book, which is yourself, one must have the art of listening to what the book is saying. That is, to listen to it, which means to listen implies not to interpret what the book is saying. Just observe it as you would observe a cloud. You can't do anythIng about the cloud, nor the palm leaves swaying in the wind, nor the beauty of a sunset. You cannot alter it, you cannot argue with it, you cannot change it. It is so. So one must have the art of listening to what the book is saying. The book is you, so you can't tell the book what is should reveal. It will reveal everything. So that must be the first art, to listen to the book. There is another art, which is the art of observation, the art of seeing. When you read the book which is yourself, there is not you and the book. Please understand this. There is not the reader and the book separate from you, the book is you. So you are observing the book, not telling the book what is should say. Am I making this clear? That is, to read, to observe all the reactions that the book reveals. To see very clearly without any distortion what the lines, the chapters, the verse, the poems, the beauty, the struggle, everything that is telling you, revealing. So there is the art of seeing, the art of listening. There is also another art; the art of learning. The computers can learn. They can be programmed and they will repeat what they have been told. If a computer plays with a master of chess, the master may beat it two or three or four times but it is learning. It avoids where it has made a mistake, it can correct it, so through experience it is learning so that after a few games the computer can beat the master chess player. That's how our mind works, our mind. We first experience accumulate knowledge, store it in the brain, then thought, as memory, and then action. From that action, you learn. And so the learning is the accumulation of further knowledge. So you begin again. Knowledge - experience, knowledge, memory and thought and action. This cycle is going on all the time with all of us. I hope I am making this clear that every action, either gives further knowledge, though the mind changes, modifies its past experience, and goes on. This is what a mind that is aware, awake is doing all the time, like a computer. Experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action, and the action modifies, or adds more knowledge, and you go on that way. Clear? So this is what we are doing all the time, which is called learning, learning from experience. This has been the story of man - constant challenge and response to that challenge. And that response can be equal to the challenge, or not quite up to the challenge, but it learns, and accumulates knowledge, and the next challenge it responds again more fully, or less fully. So this process is going on all the time in our minds, which is called learning. You learn a language. That is, you learn the meaning of the words, the syntax, the grammar, put sentences together and gradually accumulate a vocabulary and then, if you have got a good memory, you begin to talk that particular language which you have spent time on. This is the human process of learning. That is, always moving from knowledge to knowledge. And the book is the whole knowledge of mankind, which is you. Am I making all this clear? And either - please listen to this with a little care and patience - either you keep that circle going all the time, or find a way of moving out of that circle. I am going to show it to you in a minute. That is, we are always functioning from the past knowledge, modified by the present and moving forward. The forward is modified again which becomes the past, and this process is part of our life. Are we getting all this? I am making this, if you don't mind, I know you are probably very learned, very educated, but I am putting all this into very, very simple language; but the word is not the thing. Right? Ceylon, Sri Lanka - forgive me - is not the land, the beauty of the land, the palm trees, the river, the marvellous trees, and the fruit, and the flowers. So the word is not the thing. Please bear that in mind all the time we are talking together, that the word is not the thing. The word husband is not the man, it is a word. By word we measure. So please bear in mind throughout this talk, and the other two talks that are to take place and the discussion, public discussion, that the word is never the thing. The symbol is never the actual. The picture is not that which is. So if that is deeply rooted in our mind then words have very little significance. You follow? The thing matters, not the word. So, as I said, there is the art of seeing, the art of listening and the art of learning. The learning is movement from the past to the present, modified to the future, and that is experiencing, and so on. The whole cycle is what we call learning. That is, psychological learning as well as technological learning. Right? Which means what? The mind is never free from the known. Are we all getting somewhere together, or am I making this awfully difficult? It is not difficult. Probably, if the speaker may point out, you are not used to this kind of thinking, this kind of enquiry, constant moving forward. So, as we said, our learning is always within the field of the known. And so the mind becomes mechanical. Right? If I have a particular habit and I live with that habit my mind becomes mechanical. If I believe in something and I repeat, repeat, repeat, it becomes mechanical. So we are saying that we are living always within the area of the known. So our minds have become a network of words, never the actual, but words, words, words, and moving, changing, altering within the narrow, limited area of knowledge. So learning implies something totally different. We are going to go into it together. We have said very clearly, what is seeing, how to see the book, read the lines, the art of listening to the book, never distorting, never interpreting, choosing what you like, and don't like, what you appreciate and don't appreciate. Then you are not reading a book. Right? And we are saying also that we all live within the narrow limits of the known. And that has become our constant habit, therefore our mind, if you examine your mind, is repetitive, habitual, accustomed, you believe in god and you believe in god for the rest of your life. If anybody says there is no god, then you call him irreligious. So you are caught in habit. Now we are saying that is not learning at all. Learning is something entirely different. Learning means enquiring into the limits of knowledge and moving away from it. Right? This will be difficult, we will go into it as we go along. So there is the art of seeing, the art of learning, the art of listening, and the art of learning, never to be caught in the same pattern, or invent another pattern. The constant breaking down of patterns, the norms, the values, which doesn't mean living without any restraint. Society is now permissive, it doesn't mean that at all. This constant awareness of this pattern formation of the mind and breaking it down, so that the mind is constantly aware, alert. Right? Now with those three factors, listening, observing, learning, with those basic factors let's read the book together. You are reading the books with me. I am not reading your book, we are reading the human book, which is you and the speaker, and the rest of mankind. Clear? Please give a little attention to this because we live in a society that is so unhappy, that is in such conflict, struggle, strife, and there seems to be no end to it. And we are seeing if we know how to read that book, which is yourself, all conflict, all noise, travail, all that comes to an end. It is only then that there truth can come then into your field. It is only such a mind that is really a religious mind, not the believing mind,not the mind that does all kinds of rituals, not the mind that puts on strange garments, but the mind that is free after having read completely all the book. And it is only such a mind that receives the benediction of truth. It is only such a mind that can go infinitely far beyond time. So together, I mean together, we are reading the book, not the printed book, the book that is you. So it is your responsibility not merely to listen to what the speaker is saying, but also what the speaker is saying is your book, opening it chapter by chapter, page by page, until the very end, if you can travel that far. And we must travel together if we are to solve the human problems, as they exist. Together we can solve it, not one person. So what is the first chapter? Please think together, don't let me tell you. What is the first chapter in that book? That is, your book, and the first chapter in that book, the content of that chapter? All right, let's go on together. Apart from the physical existence, the physical organism with all the travail of the body, the disease, the laziness, the sluggishness, the lack of proper food, proper nourishment - apart from all that, what is the first movement? I am asking you. We are together exploring; I am not exploring and telling you, that would be very easy for you. But if we do it together it will be yours, and when you are able to read it you don't have to have a priest, you don't have to have a psychologist, you don't depend on anybody. You will begin to have that extraordinary freedom which gives you tremendous vitality, the vitality of psychological freedom. So please let us share this book together. Are you waiting for me? I am afraid you are because you have never even looked at yourself deeply. You may have looked at your face, combed your hair, powdered your face and all the rest of it, but you have never looked into yourself. But when you look into yourself don't you discover for yourself that you are a secondhand human being? It may be rather unpleasant to consider oneself a secondhand human being, but we are full of other people's knowledge - what somebody has said, what some philosopher, or some teacher or some guru has said, what the Buddha said, what Christ said an so on. We are all full of that. Also, if you have been to school, and college or university, there also you have been told what to do, what to think. So if you realize that you are a secondhand human being, then you can put aside that secondhand quality of the mind and look. The speaker will go on if you will kindly follow it, if you don't it's up to you. The first observation is that we live in contradiction, that there is no order in us. Order is not a blueprint, saying, order is putting the same thing in the same place everyday. But order implies something far greater than the mechanical discipline of a particular habit, norm, sanction. Right? We are saying order is something entirely different from the accepted normal discipline. The word discipline means, it comes from Latin and so on, which means to learn, not to conform, not to imitate, not to copy, obey, but to learn. You understand? is this clear? So one discovers in that book, the first chapter, that we live an extraordinarily confused, disorderly life - wanting one thing and denying that you want it, saying one thing and doing something else, thinking one thing and acting something else. So there is constant contradiction. Where there is contradiction, there must be conflict. Right? Are you following all this? Or are you bored with this? Come with me, sirs, please tell me are you following this, or not? Audience: Yes. K: Good! At last somebody says, yes. You are not following the speaker. You are following the book which is yourself, that you are living in a disorderly way, that you are in perpetual conflict. That conflict expresses itself as ambition, fulfilment, conformity, identification with a person, with a country, with an idea and never living with the actual. Right? So we live in disorder, both politically, religiously, in our family life. So we have to find out what is order. The book will tell you if you know how to read the book. It says you live in disorder. Follow it - turn the next page. There you will find what it means to live in disorder. If we don't understand the cause of disorder, order will never come into being. You are following all this? You know, it is like fighting a mass of people who don't understand a thing of all this, but it doesn't matter. It is the speaker's responsibility. So we find disorder exists as long as there is contradiction, not only verbal contradiction, but psychological contradiction. As we said, not being honest, absolute honesty, you say one thing, you mean it, to have great integrity. So if one understands the nature of disorder, not intellectually or verbally, but actually, the book is saying don't translate what you read into an intellectual concept, but read it properly. When you read it, it says your contradictions exist, and they can only end if you understand the nature of contradiction. Contradiction exists when there is division, like the Hindus and the Muslims, like the Jews and the Arabs, the communists and the non-communists, this constant divisive process between the various types of Buddhists, the various types of Hindus, Christians, and so on. Where there is division there must be conflict, which is disorder. When you understand the nature of disorder, out of that comprehension, out of the depth of understanding the nature of disorder, comes naturally order. Order is like a flower coming out naturally, and that order, that flower, never withers. Always there is order in one's life because you have really, deeply read the book, which says where there is division there must be conflict. Now have we read that book, those books so clearly, that we understand the nature of disorder? I'll go into it a little more deeply. The next chapter. The next chapter says as long as you are working from a centre towards the periphery, there must be contradiction. That is, as long as you are acting self-centredly, selfishly, egotistically, personally, narrowing the whole of this vast life into that little 'me', you will inevitably create disorder. The 'me' is a very small affair, put together by thought. Thought says my name, the form, the psychological structure and the image it has built about itself - 'I am somebody.' So as long as there is self-centred activity there must be contradiction, therefore there must be disorder. And the book says don't ask how not to be self-centred. Right? Please follow this carefully. The book says when you ask how, you are asking for a method. Then if you pursue that method, it is another form of self-centred activity. Got it? The book is telling you all this. I am not telling you this. The speaker is not translating the book for you. We are reading it together. As long as you belong to any sect, group, religion, you are bound to create conflict. This is difficult to swallow, because we all believe in something. You believe in god, another doesn't; another believes in the Buddha, another believes in Jesus, and Islam says there is only something else. So belief brings division in relationship between man and man. Though you believe in god, you are not living the life of god. You understand? Belief has no value. You don't believe the sun rises and sets, you never say, I believe the sun rises, or the sun sets. If it doesn't rise we will all be dead in three or four days. There is no need for belief when you are only concerned with facts, facts being that which is actually happening in your book. Please, come on sirs. Then the problem arises also, which I am going to go into presently, which is how you read the book, whether you are separate from the book. When you pick up a novel or a thriller, you are reading it as an outsider turning the pages over, with all the exciting story and so on. But here the reader is the book. You understand the difficulty. The reader is the book. He is reading it as though he is reading a part of himself. He is not reading a book. I wonder if you understand this? We will go into it as we go along. The book also says man has lived under authority - political, religious, the leader, the guru, the man who knows, the intellectual philosopher. He has always conformed to a pattern of authority. Please listen very carefully to what the book is saying, which is, there is the authority of law; whether you approve of that law or not there is the authority of law; there is the authority of the policemen, the authority of an elected government and there is the authority of the dictator. We are not talking about that authority. We are reading in the book about the authority that the mind seeks in order to be secure. The mind is always seeking security, the book says. And the books says, when you are seeking security psychologically, you are inevitably bound to create authority - the authority of the priest, the authority of the image, the authority of the man who says "I am enlightened, I will tell you." You understand all this? So it says be free of all that kind of authority, which means be a light to yourself, and don't depend on anyone for the understanding of life, for the understanding of that book. To read that book there is nobody between you and the book, no philosopher, no priest, no guru, no god, nothing. You are the book and you are reading it. So there must be freedom from the authority of another, whether the authority is of the husband or the wife, or the wife or the husband. It means to be able to stand alone, and most people are so frightened. The book, the next chapter says you have discussed, you have read, the first chapter of disorder and order and authority. The next chapter says life is relationship. Life Is relationship in action, not only relationship with your intimate person but you are related to the whole of mankind. Because you are like the rest of the human beings, wherever they may live, because he suffers, you suffer and all the rest of it. Psychologically you are the world and the world is you. Therefore you have tremendous responsibility. Then the book says in the next chapter, man has lived with fear from time immemorial - fear, not only fear of nature, fear of the environment, fear of disease, fear of accidents and so on, but also the much deeper layers of fear, the deeper, unconscious, untrodden waves of fear. We are going to read the book together till the chapter ends and says, "Watch it and you will be able to end it". We are going together to see, to read the book so carefully, so patiently, so that when you have come to the chapter your mind is free of all fear. The book again says, next page, what is fear? How does it arise, what is its nature? Why has man not solved this problem? Why does he live with it? Has he become accustomed to it? Has he accepted it as the way of life? Why has man, the human being, you, not resolved this problem so that your mind is totally free from fear? Because as long as there is fear you live in darkness. You may worship whatever you will, out of that darkness. Your worship is out of that darkness and therefore your worship is absolutely meaningless. So it is very important to read further into the nature of fear. Now, if you examine closely, if you read that book, every word of it, it asks you, how does fear arise? Is it remembrance of things past - the remembrance of some pain, of something which you have done, which you ought not to have done; a lie that you have told and you don't want it to be discovered and you are frightened that it might be discovered; an action that has corrupted your mind and you may be afraid of that corruption, of that action? Or you may be afraid of the future, or you may be afraid of losing a job, or of not becoming a prominent citizen in a particular little backyard of a country. So there are innumerable forms of fear. People are afraid of the dark, people are afraid of public opinion, people are afraid of death - we will deal with death later - people are afraid of not fulfilling, whatever that may mean. Apart from the fear of disease, one may have a great deal of physical pain and that pain is registered in the mind and one is afraid that pain might return. You know all this. So the book says go on, read more. What is fear? Is it brought about by thought? You are following all this? Is it brought about by time? I am healthy now, but as I grow older, I will be ill and I am frightened. That is time. Or is it thought that says anything might I happen to me, I might lose my job, I might go blind, I might lose my wife, whatever it is. Is that the root of fear -the book is asking you. So you say turn the page and you will find the answer in yourself. The speaker is not telling you. There, it says thought and time are the factors of fear. So it says thought is time. Right? So the question then is, the next page says: is it possible for the human mind, for you who are reading that book which is yourself, the book asks you, is it possible to be completely free of fear so that there is not a breath of fear? Which is what? I hope you are reading it with me, I am not reading it by myself. Have you got the energy to go with this? So it says again, don't ask for a method. Method means a repetition, a system; the system which you invent will not solve fear, because you are then following a system, not understanding the nature of fear. So don't look for a system, but only understand, understand the nature of fear. It says: what do you mean by understand? I am going into it. When it is that you say, even now, "Now I understand something"? What do you mean by that? Either you understand the verbal construction and the meaning of the word, which is a particular form of intellectual operation, or you see the truth of it. When you see the truth of this, then the thing disappears. You understand? When you see clearly for yourself that thought and time are the factors of fear, not as a verbal statement, but it is part of you, it is in your blood, in your mind, in your heart, that time is the factor, then you will see that fear has no longer a place, only time. You understand? I wonder if you have got that? Because fear has been brought about by time and thought. I am afraid of what might happen, I am afraid of my loneliness. I never examine my loneliness, what it means, but I am afraid of it, which means I run away from it, but that loneliness is my shadow, it pursues me. You can't run away from your shadow. So you have to have the patience of observation, which is not to run away but to observe, to look, to listen, to hear what that book is saying: it says time is the factor, not fear. So you have to understand time. You are following all this? Please, sirs, if you are tired, tell me. It's half past seven if you are tired we will stop for a few minutes and then continue. Are you tired? Yes, or no? Audience: No. K: How does it happen that you are not tired? You have had a long day in the office, from nine to five, or whatever it is - oh, today is a holiday, so you are not tired because you have a holiday. But you have an office and you will be tired. All right, you are not tired, let's go on. So it says, time is the factor, if you can understand time, then perhaps there will be an end to fear. So you have to ask what is the relationship between time and thought - the book is asking you: find out what is the relationship between time and thought. Thought is a movement from the known to the known. It is a movement: the past memories meeting the present, modifying itself and going on. This movement from yesterday to today to tomorrow is the movement of time, by sunrise and by sunset. There is also psychological time. That is, I have known pain, I hope I shall not have it, it might occur again, which is the movement of the past through the present modifying itself and the future. There is time by the watch. There is time inwardly - I hope to be; you are not, but you hope; you are violent but you hope to be non-violent. You are greedy, envious, but through time, through evolution, you will gradually get rid of it. So time is a movement from the past, present, future. Thought is also from the past, knowledge, memory, movement to the future. So time is thought. Right? Clear? The next question is much more difficult to answer. You have to have patience to move so far. Patience means - please understand I am using the word 'patience' in a particular sense. Patience means the absence of time. Generally patience means go slow, be patient, take time, don't react quickly, be quiet, take it easy, give the other fellow an opportunity to express himself, so on and so on. We are not using the word 'patience' in that sense. We are saying patience means the forgetting of time so that you can look, you can observe. But if you have time through which you are observing, you are impatient. You get what I am saying? I am saying something extraordinary. I'll go into it by myself later. So you have to have patience to read the chapter, which says time is the factor of fear. Thought is time. And as long as thought is functioning you are bound to be afraid. Right? Logically. So the next chapter says: is there a stopping to time, is there an ending to time? Time is a great factor in our life - I am, but I will be; I don't know, but I will know; I don't know this particular language but I will learn, give me time. Time will heal our wounds. Time blunts sensitivity. Time destroys relationship between man, woman. Time destroys understanding because understanding is immediate, not "I will learn to understand". So the book is saying time plays an extraordinarily important part in our life. Our brains have evolved through time. It is not your brain or my brain, but the human brain, the human brain which is you, you have identified that brain as your brain, as your mind. But it is not your mind or your brain, it is the human brain which has evolved through millions of years. So you see the brain, which is conditioned by time, can only operate in time. Right? You understand all this? So we are asking the brain to do something totally different. The book says your brain, your mind, functions in time. Time has played an important part in your life. Time is not the solution of any problem, except technological problems. Don't use time as a resolution of a problem, between you and your wife, between you and your job and so on. It is very difficult to understand this. Please give your mind to this, to read the book properly. So it says: can time end? If you don't end it fear will go on with all its consequences. And it says: don't ask how to end it. The moment you ask somebody how to end it, he has not read the book, he will give you a theory. I wonder if you understand this. So this is real meditation. You understand? This is real meditation, which is to enquire whether time can ever stop. The speaker says it can, and it does. Careful, please! The speaker says so, not your book. So if you say, the speaker says it ends, I hope it ends, and you believe in that hope, you are not reading the book, you are just living on words. And living on words doesn't dissolve fear. So you have to read the book of time, and go into it and explore the nature of time, how you react to time, how your relationship is based on time. I know you, which is time. You follow? Go into it. Which means also knowledge means time. But if you are using knowledge as a means of advancement, you are caught in time and therefore fear, anxiety, and the whole process goes on. To enquire into the nature of ending of time requires a silent mind, a mind that is free to observe, not frightened. You understand? Free to observe the movement of time in yourself, how you depend on it. You know, if somebody told you there is no such thing as hope - just listen carefully - there is no such thing as hope, you would be horrified, wouldn't you? Do you understand what I am saying? Hope is time. So you have to investigate the nature of time and realize that your brain and your mind and your heart, which are one, are functioning, conditioned in time. And therefore you are asking something totally different. You are asking the brain, the mind, to function differently and that requires great attention in your reading. You understand? So sirs, that is enough for this evening. We will go into matters of pleasure, death, birth, all that, next Saturday and Sunday. After that unfortunately we have to go to other places. 1st Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk 2nd Talk is published in: The Book Of Life SRI LANKA 1ST PUBLIC TALK 8TH NOVEMBER 1980 First of all I would like to point out how difficult it is to communicate to another whose culture, whose background may be totally different. And if one may point out we are not talking about any philosophy, any theories, any new set of ideas or ideals. We are going to talk over together, as two friends, the problem of our daily living. To go into that very carefully, hesitantly and wisely, one must look around what is actually going on in the world, not only in this island, but also In Europe, America, China, Russia and India. There is great chaos in the world, disorder. Society is corrupt, immoral; there is great deal of injustice; there is poverty. All the nations are preparing for war, ready to kill each other in the name of religion, in the name of economics, in the name of their own national survival; they are willing to kill others for their own particular security. There is religious division in this country. You have the Hinayana and the Mahayana. In India there are innumerable gods and divisions, in Christianity also there are a great many divisions; the Catholics, the Protestants and the various other sects. There are national, religious, economic divisions all over the world. There is inflation, overpopulation, poverty, and all kinds of horrible things are happening in the world: nationalism with its technology is going to destroy man. These are facts. These are not the speaker's opinions or ideas. But they are the facts right in front of us, if you are willing to look, listen. And knowing all this, outwardly, what is the condition of man; not man in abstraction, not as an abstract idea, but man, you and I and another, what is our condition? I think it is important to understand our relationship between man and society. Society as it exists now, which is corrupt, there is a great deal of injustice, we are not properly governed. This society is created by man, by you, by us, by the many, by our great grandfathers and so on. This society is man-made and so it cam be altered, completely, radically. That alteration in society has always been a dream of man. There have been philosophers who have talked about it a great deal, written volumes of what society should be, from the ancient times to modern times. There have been revolutions in the West - the French, and the Communist revolution in Russia. They have all longer and striven, worked for a revolution to bring about an environmental change. The communists are doing it, the socialists and other leftists and in their own way the rightists are doing it, and this physical revolution has not produced any great change. These again are facts. They have brought a new set of hierarchy, a new set of rich people, new set of powerful, dominant, tyrannical people. But the pattern of society has somewhat changed, but essentially it has been as it has always been through millennia. In observing all these - and we are doing it together, please bear in mind if I might point out throughout these talks that we are thinking, looking, observing together. The speaker is not pointing out for you to listen, or not to listen, to pay attention or to disregard, but together you, each one of you and the speaker, together we are going to investigate, explore, why we live the way we are living, why human beings have deteriorated: there are a great deal of drugs, alcoholism, violence, every form of immoral activity going on. And together, please bear in mind, I'll repeat it many, many, many times that you are not listening to a talk by some strange man from another country, but together as two human beings, quietly, reasonably, sanely, examining, exploring together why man is in such a state - man includes naturally woman. So we are not talking about theories, beliefs, dogmas, and all that nonsense. To me, to the speaker, they have no basis for nationality. Together we are going to look at the society in which we live, and what to do about it. So the speaker in talking about it, is talking about you. He is not talking about something else, He is talking about a human being which is you, why such a human being who has lived through millennia after millennia, who has evolved through a great deal of experience, has acquired a great deal of knowledge - both technological and psychological knowledge, why we human beings are reduced to this present condition of chaos, misery, confusion. I hope that is very clear. That we are talking not about any theory, or doing any kind of propaganda, but we are talking over together about you; you being the rest of mankind. Mankind suffers, every human being in the world, wherever he lives suffers, goes through a great deal of anxiety, great uncertainty, constant striving, not only within himself, but also outwardly. He has great fears, depression, uncertainty, like you. So we are humanity, you are humanity. Please follow this, if you will kindly, if you will kindly listen to it. You know, listening is a great art. It is one of the great arts we have not cultivated: to listen completely to another. When you listen so completely to another, as I hope you are doing it now, you are also listening to yourself, listening to your own problems, to your own uncertainties, to your own misery, confusion, your desire for security, the gradual degradation of the mind, which is becoming more and more mechanical. We are talking over together what human beings are, which is you. So you psychologically are the world and the world is you. You may have dark hair, somewhat brown faces, others may be taller, fairer with eyes slanting, but wherever they live, in whatever climate, in whatever circumstances, affluent or not, every human being, like you, goes through all this turmoil, the noise of life without any beauty, never seeing the splendour in the grass, or the glory in the flower. So you and I and the others are the world, because you suffer, your neighbour suffers, whether that neighbour be ten thousand miles away, he is similar to you. Your culture may be different, your language may be different, but basically, inwardly, deeply, you are like another. And that's a fact. This is not a theory, this is not something that you have to believe. It is a fact. And so you u are the world and the world is you. I hope you are listening to it. As we said, we have lost the art of listening. To listen to a statement of that kind that you are the world and the world is you, probably you have never heard this before, and so it might sound very strange, illogical or unreal. So you partially listen and wish that I would go on talking more about other things; so you never actually listen to the truth of anything. If I may request you, please kindly listen not only to the speaker, but also listen to yourself, listen to what is happening, in your mind, in your heart, in your responses and so on. Listen to all that. Listen to the birds, listen to the car going by so that you become sensitive, alive, active. So if you will kindly so listen we can then proceed. Man has evolved from the ape and so on, according to the scientists, for many, many million years. Our brain is the result of many, many millennia of time. That brain, that human mind, is now so conditioned with fear, with anxiety, with national pride, with linguistic limitations, and so on. So the question then is, to bring about a different society in the world, you as a human being who is the rest of mankind, must radically change. That is the real issue, not how to prevent wars. That's also an issue, how to have peace in the worlds, that is secondary, all these are peripheral, secondary issues. The fundamental issue is, is it possible for the human mind, which is your mind, your heart, your condition, is that possible to be totally, fundamentally, deeply, transformed. Otherwise we are going to destroy each other, through our national pride, through our linguistic limitations, through our nationalism which the politicians maintain for their own benefit and so on. So I hope I have made the point very clear. That is, is it possible for you as a human being who is the rest of mankind psychologically, inwardly, you are like the rest of other human beings, living in the world, is it possible for your condition to change? Not change to what. Do you understand the question? We say to change, which means what? One asks change from this to what? If you ask that question, as you must, then you are projecting what should be. I wonder if you understand all this. May I go on? May I? I don't know if I am getting any response from anybody. Am I making any sense? Would you kindly tell me. Are we following each other? Or are you merely listening to a series of words, and getting involved in words, or are you following the depth of the meaning of these words? It's up to you. So we are saying, asking, enquiring together, because you are a human being like the rest of mankind, you have to listen to the speaker, what he says about you and you have to also listen, observe, look into yourself as we go along. So communication is possible only if you and the speaker are moving together. Not that you sit there uncomfortably, or comfortably, and just casually listen. This is a very serious matter, this is not an entertainment, nor an intellectual exchange of words or theories. We are dealing with actualities. The actual is what is happening in the world and in you. Right? Can we go on from there? First of all there are various groups of people in the West and probably in the East who say that man fundamentally cannot be changed. He has lived this way for millennia upon millennia, and it is impossible to change his condition. You can modify it, you can somewhat change it, but the human condition as he is, can never radically be changed. And there are those who say, change the environment, change the social structure, then man will be forced to change. That is what the communists have been saying: change the outward structure, the economic, social and so on, then man living in those conditions will change. Then there are those who say, have faith in god, and the greater the faith, the greater the resolution of your problems. And these three main factors, and of course there are many other minor sayers, they say, man as he is cannot be radically changed. There are those who say change the environment, and man will change, and the others, the so-called religious people, have faith, believe, and attend to all the things that god has said, then perhaps man will bring about a radical change in himself. All these systems have been tried over and over again in different forms, and under different names, but man, you, have remained more or less throughout millennia almost the same, the same in the sense you suffer, you are anxious, you are lonely, uncertain, insecure, fear and so on. When one recognizes these facts and they are facts, then the question is what is a man to do? Do you understand my question? Do you all understand English? Audience: Yes. K: At last! This absolute silence, which is good, which means that you are listening, is right, but are we communicating with each other? That is, are we together looking into the mirror which the speaker is putting in front of you and looking into that mirror which is yourself? Because what we are saying is about man's behaviour, man's innumerable turmoils of daily life, his relationship with another and so on. Unless all that is very, very clear, deeply laid, meditation has no meaning whatsoever. You understand? If our house is not in order - the house means you - not in order, you are trying to meditate either according to Zen or Tibetan or the Buddha or the Hindu or some other guru's latest invention of meditation. Then your meditation is merely leading to illusions. It has no reality. What has reality is that we lay in the right foundation, which is order in our life. We live disorderly; we live in contradiction; we say one thing and do another; we believe in something and do quite the opposite. We believe in some kind of god or whatever your deity is, and that belief has no reality in our daily life, whether you are a Christian or a Buddhist or whatever religion one may belong to. Those beliefs, dogmas, sayings, sanctions have no actual daily reality in our life. So you can brush all that aside, brush away ail your religious dogmas, beliefs, concepts, images and face life as it is and not escape through some fanciful romantic images. Perhaps some of you will object to all this. I am glad. If you object it means that at least we are thinking together. But if you object find out. Don't merely object. Obstinate questioning is essential for man's survival. Question not only the speaker, but also question your beliefs, your way of life, why you think this way, why you live this way. Persistent obstinate questioning which means doubting. Doubt is of great importance because if you doubt, it gives you tremendous energy. You begin to throw off the burdens which man, which you, the priests, the analysts, the psychologists, and others have imposed upon you. You begin to be free psychologically, at least somewhat. So please we are together investigating the human mind, the mind that has evolved through thousands and thousands of years. Now we have come to a point where we are going to destroy each other by our stupid nationalism or we are going to survive; survive in the sense regenerate free human beings without the burden of all the priests that have existed, that have imposed upon us various doctrines, theories, ideas. Nobody is going to save us, neither the priest nor the scientist, nor the politicians, nor the economist or the environmentalist. What will save mankind is you, you transforming yourself. So we begin slowly to go into that. First of all, life is a movement in relationship. You can't exist without relationship. Life is relationship and action. So we are going first to examine together what we mean by relationship? This is important because man cannot live by himself. He is always related to something or the other. He is related to another human being or related to an idea, to a concept, to an image but all that means a relationship between you and another. Right sirs? Please, come with me. Now, what is your relationship with another? That is one of the problems. Because our relationship with another, however intimate or not, has created this society in which we live. If you are greedy, envious, violent, we create this society of violence, greed and envy. So we must be very clear from the very beginning and find out what is relationship. Right sirs? Does all this interest you? Don't be casual about it. Does it deeply interest you to find out what relationship is? What your actual relationship is, your actual relationship with another? Or are you frightened? What is your relationship based on, whether it is with your wife, with your neighbour, with your government and so on? Because there must be an understanding in this relationship, not verbal or intellectual understanding, but the depth of relationship, the fullness of relationship. We are enquiring together into the question of relationship. Man cannot exist without relationship. Life is relationship and action. These two are fundamental to man. What is our present relationship with another? What is your relationship with your wife? Or your wife to the husband, or your relationship to the Buddhist priest, or the Hindu priest, or the Christian priest? What is your relationship? When you examine it closely, your relationship is based on images - the image that you have built about god, about Buddha, about your wife, your wife about you. That is a fact, isn't it? Right? Images between you and your wife, which is the most intimate, which is a daily occurrence, that image between the two people, man creates an image about his wife and the wife creates an image about him and the relationship is between these two images. Right? Would you agree to that? Yes? These images are built through daily contact, sex, irritation, comfort, and so on. Each one builds his own image about another and he has also an image about himself. He has also an image about god, about his religious deity, because when you create an image, in that image there is security, however false, however unreal, however insane. In that image that the mind has created there is security. When you create an image about your wife, or your wife about you, the image is not the actual. It is much more difficult to live with the actual and it is much easier to live with the image that you have. So relationship is between images and therefore there no relationship at all. Right? I hope you are following all this. This is a fact. The Christian worships an image. That image is created throughout the centuries by the priest, by the worshipper who says, I need comfort, I need security, I need somebody who will look after me: I am in a mess, I am confused, I am insecure and in the image I find security. We have become image worshippers, not the worshippers of truth, not the worshippers of righteous life, but worshippers of images, the national image with its flag, the image that you have about the scientist, about the government and so on. Image-making is one of the human failings. Is it possible to have no image about anything, but only live with facts, fact being that which is actually happening? You understand? Are we meeting each other? No. Somebody shakes his head! I am delighted, then we can discuss, you and I can go into it. Why does the mind create image? Life isn't an image. Life is strife, unfortunately. Life is constant conflict. Conflict is not an image. It is a fact, that which is happening, but why does the mind create images? Images mean, the speaker means by an image, a symbol, a concept, a conclusion, an ideal. These are all images -that is, what I should be, I am not this, but I would like to be that. That is an image projected by the mind in time, that is in the future. So that is unreal. What is real is what is actually taking place now in your mind. Can we go on from there? We are asking why does the mind create an image? Is it because in the image there is security? If I have a wife, which I haven't, I have a wife, I create an image about her. The very word 'wife' is an image. And I create that image because the wife is a living thing, changing, a living, vital human entity. To understand her requires much more attention, greater energy, but if I have an image about her it is much easier to live with that image. Are you following all this? First of all, have you not an image about yourself, that you are a great man or that you are not a great man, that you are this, that and so on? When you live with images, you are living with illusions, not with reality. Now, what is the mechanism of making images? All organized, accepted, respectable religions have always had some kind of image. And mankind with the help of the priest, has always worshipped the symbol, the idea, the concept and so on. In that worship he finds comfort, safety, security. But the image is the projection of thought. And to understand the nature of it, making images, you must understand the whole process of thinking. May we go into that? Right, sir? Will you come with me? Good! So we are asking, what is thinking? That's what you are doing all day long. Your cities are built on thinking, your armaments are based on thinking. The politicians are based on thinking, your religious leaders, everything in the world is based on thinking. The poets may write in beautiful words a verse, but the thinking process goes on. So one must enquire, if you are serious, if you are willing to go into the question, what is thinking. You are thinking now. We were saying image-making has been the habit of man, specially in the world of religion and he has also image about himself and we are asking why does the mind, your mind, make images? Is it because in images there is security, however false the images are, without any reality, in an illusion man apparently seeks security. So to understand image-making, which is so common to mankind, one has to go into the question of what is thought, thinking and the nature of thought. All thought. Thought has not created nature. The tiger, the river, the marvellous trees, the forest and the mountains, the shadows, valleys and the beauty of the earth, man has not created it. But man has created through thought the destructive machinery of war, man has brought about great medical surgical improvement, man has brought about through thought instant communication, and so on. Thought has been responsible for great deal of good and great deal of harm. That is a fact. And a man who is serious wants to enquire if thought is ever capable of reducing any of these problems. So we must ask if you are willing and serious enough to find out for yourself what is thinking. Thinking is the response of memory, stored up in the brain as knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience. Mankind has had thousands of experiences from which it has derived a great deal of knowledge, factual, illusory, neurotic, accumulated a great deal of knowledge. That knowledge as memory, is stored up in the brain. And when you ask a question, that memory responds as thought. This is a fact. We have discussed this matter with many scientists, some of them don't agree, others do and so on. You can find this out for yourself: that is, you have experience, you remember that experience which is knowledge and that knowledge with its memory projects thought. Is this clear? Right sir? No? Don't agree with me, please. Examine it for yourself. Look into yourself. If you have no experience, no knowledge, no memory, you can't think. So knowledge through experience, memory, and the response to a challenge which is thought, on that thought we live. Knowledge is always limited. There is no complete knowledge about anything. This is a fact. So thought is always limited. However beautiful, thought may build a cathedral, a marvellous statue, a great poem, great epic and so on, thought born of knowledge must always be limited because knowledge is always incomplete, knowledge is always in the shadow of ignorance. Right sirs? So thought has created these images, thought has created the image between you and your wife, thought has created the idea of nationality with its technology which is destroying the world and so on. Now we are asking is it possible to live a daily life without a single image. Thought must function to go from here to your home. You must have knowledge where your home is, the road you take and so on. That knowledge must exist otherwise you would get completely lost. Knowledge to speak a language is necessary, knowledge is necessary for the speaker to speak English and so on. But is it necessary to create an image at all? You understand my questions, sir? Can we live without a single image which means without any belief, which doesn't mean you lead a chaotic life, without any belief, without any ideal, without any concept which are all projections of thought, therefore all limited? Therefore action - this is a bit more complex, I don't know if you will understand all this. Which is, action based on thought is always complete. Therefore one has to ask, is there an action which under all circumstances is correct. Are we walking together? Yes? Are we keeping in step with each other on the same path or the speaker is walking by himself? Because this is a very serious matter, sir. Our minds are degenerating, becoming mechanical, lost, and that is why the youth is getting lost too. We are lost human beings; you may have a job, you may have a house, you may have all kinds oF things, but inwardly you are lost, you are uncertain, unclear. You don't know what to believe. So for that reason one must understand the full significance of thought. We have lived on thought. Everything we do is based on thought. And as thought is incomplete, our actions, our life is incomplete. Knowing it is incomplete, we try to fulfil in something which will give us a sense of completeness. So our life is a constant struggle, and we are saying that this conflict, this battle in ourselves and outwardly, it can end. It can end only when you understand yourself, not according to some priest, not according to some psychologist or some professor, but looking at yourself in the mirror. The mirror is your relationship. That is the mirror in which you can study yourself. Without knowing yourself - what you are, why you are, why you think these things, why you behave in such a way, you find in that mirror of relationship, all the answers. Sirs, you are the history of mankind, you are the story of mankind. You are the book in which you can read all about yourself, without any guide, without any priest, without any guru, without any philosopher. You can read that book which is yourself. Unless you read it very carefully, listen to all the nuances, all the activity that goes on, you will always be in constant battle, always suffer, always be afraid. And so it behoves an intelligent, earnest man to read the story of mankind which is the story of you. That story is not an image. It is part of it. You have to look. That means you have to listen very carefully to your thoughts, to your reactions, to your uncertainties, to your unhappiness, you have to listen to it. Find out. In listening is the answer. But you have to learn the art of listening which is not to interpret what you read, what you see, but to observe without any distortion, just to watch it. Have you ever watched a cloud? You must have. It is full of clouds in this country. Have you ever watched them? There they are, the grandeur, magnificent, with extraordinary light and beauty in them. When you watch a thing, you are always naming it. The very naming prevents the watching. You understand? All right, sirs? Our mind has become a slave to words: words are measurement and to observe without measurement, which is the word, then you see things exactly as they are. So to watch yourself, to see yourself exactly as you are without any distortion, without any direction, without any motive, just to watch it. You hear that statement and then you ask, "Tell me how to do it." Right? Isn't that your question? No? "Tell me how to do it". Now when you ask a question, how, why do you ask such a question? You understand what I am asking you? I have made a statement that in watching, listening to yourself carefully without any direction, without any motive, you begin to read the story of mankind which is yourself. That is real education, not merely acquiring degrees and knowledge of other things. Real education is this, to read your life in the book of mankind which is you, and to read that book, you have to watch every reaction, every thought that is so quickly changing, one thought pursuing another. You have to just watch it, not try to control it, not try to dominate it or push it aside, just watch it. Then you will say, that is very difficult to do it. And as it is difficult, please tell us how to do it. The method. When you ask such a question, what is implied in that? You want to know how to read that book. A child wants to know how to read the alphabet, he has to learn the alphabet. So he goes through, carefully he is taught how to write a, b, c, d and so on. In the same way, there is no 'how', just watch. The moment you. ask 'how', you ask for a system, a method; and when you practise the method, the system, in order to understand yourself, you are becoming mechanical. Yourself is a living thing and a living thing cannot be understood through a system. You have to watch it, move with it, understand it and that is very difficult to do for many people and therefore they say: tell me how to do it quickly. There is no quick way for all this. There is only patient observation of yourself. Patience means not to react quickly, not to project your ideas, your opinions, they are part of you, but observe your opinions. So you need a great deal of patience, a great deal of attention, to attend, but that requires interest. That requires that you are dissatisfied with things as they are. And so we will consider tomorrow the nature of our life as fear, pleasure, suffering and all that. We will go into it very carefully, and see if we cannot possibly end fear completely. Right sir. SRI LANKA 3RD PUBLIC TALK 15TH NOVEMBER 1980 We have only this talk and tomorrow, so we have to make a rapid survey, and we cannot possibly go into all the details of what we are going to talk about. But I am sure you will fill the gaps. As we were saying last Saturday and Sunday, one has to learn the art of listening, the art of seeing and the art of learning. Listening is not to interpret what you hear according to your own accustomed, easy ways, but rather try to find out not only what the speaker is saying, but also to listen to your own thoughts, to your own emotions, to your own reactions; not try to change them, not try to suppress them, but merely watch them. And so listening plays an important part if you are willing and serious enough to listen very attentively, patiently and quietly. And also, as we said, the art of seeing, not only with your visual eyes, with the optic responses, but also to see beyond the words, to read between the lines as it were, to see what lies behind the words, because the words are not the actuality. A description of the mountain is not the mountain, the flowing river, with all its vitality and the volume of water behind it, that river, the word 'river' is not that which is alive. So one has to observe very acutely, with great care, attentively. And the art of learning is quite a complex affair. The the art of listening, the art of seeing and the art of learning. We are accustomed to accumulate knowledge; knowledge through experience, memory stored up in the brain, and we are always functioning, learning within that field of the known. The known is the past modified by the present and continues in the future. Within that area, within that field we always function. And learning through action, through experience, storing it up as memory and functioning with that memory, skilfully or not. This is what our minds are always doing. From the known, the knowledge, act, learn, and from that action of learning, accumulating more. This is the cycle in which we are always functioning. If you observe this, this is an obvious fact. But there is a totally different kind of learning, a learning which is not accumulation. That we shall go into as we go along in our talk today and tomorrow. As we were saying, we have to read that book of which we are. We are the whole content of mankind, each one of us - mankind being the sorrow, pleasures, desires, anxieties, the pain, fears, nationalities, cultures: all that is in the book, the book which is us. The book is not different from us. We are the book. And I think it is very important if I may - if one may point out, to understand this: what you read is you, you are not different from that which you read; and if you interpret what you read according to your desire, according to your pleasure or fear, then you won't read the book at all. That fear, that anxiety, that suffering is part of you. So if one wants to read that book actually, one has to see that the observer, the reader, is that which he is reading. I wonder if we understand this. The observer is the observed. The thinker is the thought. There is no thinker apart from thought. This is a fact. The experiencer who thinks he must experience, and that which he experiences is the experiencer. But most of us think that thought is different from the thinker; so the thinker is always trying to control, suppress thought and so on. When one actually observes the thinker is the thought, then the division between the thinker and thought comes to an end and therefore conflict comes to an end. One hopes that we are together going into this, that you are not merely, if one may point out, that you are merely listening to a talk, to a series of words, but rather we are together walking on the same path, with the same step, with the same quietness and enquiry. So we can go into this, that there is no separation between the thinker and the thought. Thought makes the thinker and thought separates the thinker. The thinker then becomes a master who controls thought. And this control, this suppression, this discipline in thought is by the thinker which thought has created. Therefore thought is the thinker. So if this is clear, that there is no division between the thinker and thought. Where there is division, there must be conflict. That is a law. As there is division between the Muslim and the Hindu, the Buddhist and the other Buddhist, the division between the Catholics and the Protestants and so on. Where there is division nationally, religiously there must be conflict. Our minds are accustomed to conflict; from the moment we are born till we die, it is a perpetual struggle, perpetual strife, constant battle within oneself and outwardly, and if one realizes, not verbally, not intellectually, but the fact that the thinker is the thought and that there is no division between the two, therefore one begins to understand the nature of conflict and the ending of conflict. This evening we shall go into desire, pleasure, suffering and if there is time and the whole meaning and the significance of death. A man who is greatly concerned with humanity, with man's suffering, man's conflict, man's violence, and all the travail that man goes through in life, he must begin to enquire, as we are doing now together, into the nature and the structure of desire. Desire plays an immense part in our life. Desire as we grow a little more mature varies; the object varies, but desire is the same: whether you desire for a car, for a woman, for god, for an illumination, that desire is the same. There is no noble desire and ignoble desire, but only desire. Are we coming together? Are we understanding each other? So we are going together to examine very carefully the nature of desire. Because for us desire, with its will is the constant factor in life. Desire is will. Will is the summation of desire, and we operate, function with will: I must and I must not. This constant activity of will is the essence of desire. Right? May we go along? So together we are going to investigate and learn: learn, not merely repeat, but learn as we are investigating and moving. Do you understand what I mean? We are going to look into desire. In the very looking into desire you begin to see, have an insight into the nature of it. When you have an insight, comprehension of it, there is no need or necessity to repeat the structure of desire, which will become merely verbal. Am I making myself clear? No? If it is not very clear we will talk more about it before we go into it. When you look, examine a watch, undo it, look into it, see how it works, you are learning the movement of the watch. The learning how the watch works is not mere memory, you are learning the operation of it as it moves. Right? So we are now looking into desire. You know what desire is. Most people do. Desire, and non-desire. First, what is desire which plays such an important role in our life? Most religious groups, monks of various religious denominations, have always said, suppress or transmute desire: if you want to serve god, you must have no desire for the world, for a woman, for a man and so on. It has always been a suppressive process, a disciplining of desire. We are neither suppressing it, avoiding it or transmuting it. We are examining the nature of desire. There is no question of trying to avoid it, trying to look at it in order to escape from it. We are together going into the nature and structure of desire. So please understand that. We are not suppressing it, we are not avoiding it, we are not rationalizing it. We are merely examining very closely what is desire. If you understand the nature of it, there will be no question of suppressing it or avoiding it or rationalizing it. Is this clear? So we are asking what is desire. Obviously the word is not the feeling, the reaction. So we must be clear when we are using the word 'desire', that the word is not the reaction, that feeling of wanting. These are nice flowers, aren't they. You know we have so little beauty in life. There are beautiful trees around in this country, lovely clouds, marvellous flowers and orchids. We never see the beauty in them. We are too occupied with our own worries and problems and desires and anxieties. We never look at a sunset and enjoy the beauty of the light. We are losing not only the appreciation of outward beauty, but also perhaps very few of us have the inward beauty, the beauty that does not depend on things, on pictures, on statues, or on a sunset or on a tree. That beauty comes only when there is great love, compassion; not for something, in itself, per se. That is only a side issue. Though beauty one must have to enquire what is truth. Without that great sense of beauty you can never come upon that which is truth. So, what is desire? Man has been haunted by this and the conflict that lies in desire itself. We are together examining, exploring, learning the nature of this. Is not desire the beginning of perception, seeing? I will go into it very carefully, slowly. The seeing with your eyes, optical perception, seeing the flowers, the trees, the cars, the women, seeing the world. That is the beginning of desire: seeing, tasting, smelling. So, seeing a tree, a house, a car, a woman, a man, a lovely garden, seeing and touching it, contact with it, then sensation. Then thought, please listen, thought creates the image of you owning that garden, that car, this and that. Right? That is, seeing, contact, touching, then sensation. Then thought says or creates an image of you sitting in that car and driving it. Right? Is that clear? Seeing, contact, sensation, thought creating the image; then desire is born. When thought creates the image, that is the beginning of desire. Have you understood? Are we together, or not at all? No? Q: Yes. K: Sir, look at it, go into yourself, you will see this. It is a very simple fact: that the very seeing, contact, sensation, that is natural, normal, and also it is normal for thought to create an image of you having that shirt, the blue shirt or that particular robe and at that moment, creating the image, at that moment desire is born. You can see it for yourself. You see a nice trousers or robe, or something in the window - the seeing, going inside the shop, touching it, then thought saying, how nice it will look on me; you have formed the image, at that moment desire flowers. Right? So if you understand this very carefully that when thought creates an image, that is the beginning of desire, then can that image come to an end? Are you following? Are we together, again, or going off? I am not talking to myself. I can do this if I want to, the speaker wants to, in his room. But we are together going into this. You may not be accustomed to this explanation of what desire is. If you are not accustomed, then please listen, put away all your conditioning which says you must not desire, or you must desire, and all that. For the moment put all that aside and look at it very carefully. The moment thought creates the image of you in that car, in that shirt, in that robe, then desire begins. Now, can one learn the fact of seeing, contact, sensation and only that and not let thought create the image? Have you understood this? Come on sirs! Have you understood this? There is a discipline, that is, seeing, contact, sensation and the moment thought creates the image, desire. The discipline is to learn. The word 'discipline' comes from the Latin, disciple, a disciple is one who learns. What we have made of that word is to discipline means to copy, to imitate, to conform, to obey, to follow. All those deny totally learning. All right? So if one learns the fact that desire begins when thought interferes with sensation. You have had a great pleasure, suppose, yesterday, that incident of pleasure is recorded in the brain and desire says, I must have more of that pleasure. Right? So discipline means to learn. And we are learning together the nature of desire. Right? Have you understand, if one may ask, whether you have seen how the nature of desire comes? If you once see it, actually, there is never a question of suppression or trying to control it, or trying to change it. If you have understood how desire arises and be aware at that moment, to pay complete attention at that moment when thought creates the image, then there is no question of suppression, avoidance or rationalizing desire. Desire is pleasure. We are all slaves to pleasure - pleasure of possession, pleasure of power, not the power of great politicians, but the power you have over your wife, on your children, or your clerks, your underlings. The desire for power which most people have. That is a form of pleasure. And this pleasure man pursues endlessly. If you are not pleased with one thing, you go after another. If you are not pleased with your wife or husband, you change them. And this pursuit of pleasure is totally different from enjoyment. May I go on? Are you all awake, or asleep? Pleasure has been one of the driving factors in human life. Please understand because we are coming to something which is quite difficult. So we must understand pleasure; sexual pleasure, the pleasure of possession, the pleasure of money, pleasure that an ascetic has when he trains his body, completely controls it, the pleasure of belief; and the ultimate pleasure of a man is apparently what he believes in: he believes in god and that is such great pleasure that he doesn't want to be disturbed. We are now going to look into the nature of pleasure. As the speaker said, enjoyment is totally different from pleasure. When you see a beautiful sunset or a vast running river, there is a delight, there is beauty in it. The mind has recorded that water, the beauty in that water, the light in that water, the swift current in that water, and it has given great pleasure, and he wants it again, comes back to morrow to see that river again, hoping to have the same pleasure; or when you see a sunset, the glory of a flower. Enjoyment is not pleasure, because you enjoy and it is finished, but the moment it is recorded there is pursuit of what you have enjoyed, of what you have had pleasure in, is the continuation of the past through the present to the future. Have you understood this? This is our constant movement in life: desire and pleasure. Pleasure means the avoidance of punishment and holding on to that which is pleasurable. Therefore our minds function always within punishment and reward. If you are a religious person you think heaven is the ultimate pleasure because heaven then is the reward for doing good and living rightly and so on. If you are not doing the right thing there is the other place. There is always this reward and punishment. And is pleasure and desire love? That word 'love' has been so misused, so degraded, so spat upon, that it has lost its beauty. We associate love with sex. So we must ask whether love is pleasure or desire? Ask it, sirs. I am asking, the speaker is asking it, you have to ask yourself that question, and honestly answer it for yourself. We will go into it still further after going into the question of suffering. Man has lived with suffering, through centuries upon centuries and apparently he has never been able to end it. That is one of our accustomed ways of bearing with something unpleasant, something that gives us great pain and never finding a solution for suffering. There are various ways of suffering: not only loss of those whom you think you love, through death, but suffering is also losing a position; poverty, injustice, sense of incompleteness in oneself, the utter state of ignorance that man lives in though he has accumulated vast knowledge about the heavens and earth and of matter and technology, he is still ignorant and so breeds great suffering. So we live with suffering and we have accepted it. We have never said: can it end? There are those who give all kinds of explanations how to go beyond suffering: have faith in god, faith in your saviour, faith in the Buddha, faith in Krishna or whatever it is. So we have borne suffering endlessly and we are asking if suffering can end, not temporarily but completely, so that the mind which has struggled in pain, in sorrow has a totally different state, a different movement. A mind that suffers cannot think clearly, a mind that suffers cannot have love, a mind that suffers escapes into some fanciful images, a mind that suffers has no relationship with another, however intimate, they may live together, a mind that is suffering has no relationship. Suffering becomes an isolation. There is not only personal suffering, but also there is universal suffering, mankind suffering: suffers after the war, the shedding of tears of millions and millions of people, the mother losing a baby, the man who want to fulfil his ambition, who wants to be a great man and is incapable of it and therefore suffers. We have found comforting solutions for suffering. When one suffers one seeks comfort and that comfort may be an actuality or an illusion, in some romantic illusory fancy. We are asking if there is an end to sorrow. Don't say, please,if you are a Buddhist, we have heard this before: the Buddha said - which means what? You are merely repeating what someone else has said. But you haven't solved the problem. You are merely quoting somebody, however great he may be, he is not the solution of suffering. So please find out if sorrow can end. Without the ending of sorrow, there is no compassion. Why does one suffer? You all know what suffering is, but you have never asked why, and gone into it, not depending on anybody, not depending on the Buddha or what he said or what other religious leaders have said in another country. Put all that aside, because what they have said may be true or may not be true, but you as a human being suffer and if you don't solve that problem, end it, resolve it, your life becomes more and more mechanical, more and more repetitive and rather superficial. You may repeat, or read sacred books, and repeat the sacred statements, life becomes superficial more and more and more, which is what is happening. So it is important to enquire if sorrow will end. What is sorrow? Is it the loss of something - the loss of a job, the loss of your so-called loved ones, loss of prestige, power, position, money? What is sorrow? Is it self-pity? Examine it, please, as we are talking. The speaker is only a mirror expressing that which is in you, the book. And when you look at the mirror, the mirror is not important, but what you see in the mirror is important. Then you can throw away the mirror, destroy it, break it up, otherwise you make the mirror into an image. So what is sorrow? The loss of someone, the loneliness of man, the isolation of man, the grief that comes with having no relationship with another, and ultimately death. As we said,is it self-pity? Examine it, sir, don't be shy of these things. One has to be very precise in examining these things. Is it self-pity? The loss of someone in whom you have put all your affection, your care, your so-called -all that in someone, and that someone dies, goes away, runs away, rejects you and you feel so utterly miserable. That is one form of grief. The other, your mind has become so traditional, so repetitive, mechanical and you can't see something immediately, something that is true instantly. That is also great sorrow. As one grows older, there is disease, the body withers and the mind slowly loses its capacity. These are some of the factors, and looking at all these factors you will have to find out what is your reaction to these factors, how you respond, that is, you want power, you want money, you want position, you want justice, you want social revolution. You want to find, if you are really a serious, religious person, you want to find that timeless which is truth. And a mind that is confused, uncertain, insecure is always suffering. Is that also a factor that the mind has never found security? One may have security in a job, one may have security in the family, which I doubt, which one doubts always, a security in your belief, but there is no security in belief whatsoever, or in faith, because doubt destroys faith. Doubt tears apart all belief. But man at the end of all these explanations is suffering, not only for himself, but also sees the world with all its misery, confusion, poverty, ugliness, violence, wars. When one sees all that, that is also great sorrow. Can sorrow end? The speaker says it can. You cannot accept what he says, he is not an authority, he is not a guru, you are not his followers. The follower destroys the guru, the guru destroys the follower. So can one see the nature of suffering and not run away from it, not try to find comfort, not try to rationalize it by saying, in my last life I did this therefore I am paying for it. You know all those kind of tricks that man plays. Which all means, can you remain with that suffering without any movement of thought? The moment thought comes into being and says "I must find a way out of this", suffering still remains, you are merely running away from it. But if you remaIn completely immovable with that thing which you call suffering, then you will see that suffering completely ends and there is a totally different beginning. And we ought also to enquire together into what is death. Because that is part of our life - the living and the dying; the living with all its ugliness, its beauties, travail, anxieties, struggle, and death is an ending of the organism through disease, old age or an accident. Most human beings, whether religious or otherwise, are frightened of death. That is, they are living and so they say death can be postponed. Do you understand what I am saying? There is a gap between living, and a wipe gap of death. This is a fact. Why have we done this? Why has the mind separated death and living? Please find out. This is your problem. Find out in your heart, in your mind, if you are thinking, if you are alive, if you are active, not merely traditionally repeating, repeating, active, why has man throughout the ages separated living and the dying. Which means, time come in between. You understand, time? The time may be years or two days. There is an interval between living and dying, which is time. Right? Come on, sirs! Why? To find this out one has to enquire what is living and what is dying. You understand, sirs? Are we together, moving together? Or do you have explanations already about death, or you already believe in reincarnation, in karma, that you will be resurrected in heaven, and so on and so on. Which means you are so conditioned, your mind is so narrowed down to a belief, to a conclusion, that you are incapable of answering this question; which means your mind has become a slave to words, slave to beliefs, slave to some kind of comforting conclusions, ideas. So you will never understand why human beings have done this throughout millennia upon millennia, this division, this conflict, this fear. Therefore to enquire into that you must enquire what is living. Is there in living, in our daily life, the job from morning till night, 9 o'clock till 5 o'clock or 6 o'clock, day after day, month after month, and year after year, repeat, repeat, repeat: that is one part of living. The living with your family, with your wife, with your neighbour, conflict between you and your wife or husband, the sexual desires, their fulfilment, their pursuit, and the conflict that exists between two human beings everlastingly, and the conflict between 'what is' and 'what should be', the holding on to power, political, religious - think of a religious person having power. Do you understand how ridiculous it has become. So what is living? Please answer to yourselves. What is living? One continuation of strife, with occasional joy, the pursuit of pleasure, fear. That is, the whole of life, is that. Nobody can deny it. You don't have to go to any priest, any psychologist, to any guru, that is your life; mechanical, repetitive, traditional, believing in something which has no value. What is important is what you are doing, how you are acting, how you behave, all that. So that is what we call life: the living, the attachment to another with its fears, anxieties, jealousies. Where there is attachment there is corruption. When a man holds power and is attached to that power, he is breeding corruption. When a high priest holds a position, becomes the authority, he is inevitably cultivating corruption. You see all this happening under your eyes, under your nose. That is what our life is. You are afraid to let that go. The letting go of that is death. Right? That is what we consider death. You are attached to your money, your position, or you are very poor, where there is no justice, nothing, you are empty in yourself, insufficient. That is the living and you hold on to that. And that is the known. Right? That is the known, everybody knows that. And the unknown is death. You may say there is reincarnation, there is proof and so on and so on - we will go into that a bit later if we have time. So this is our life. While living can you end attachment? Attachment to a belief, to a person, to a family, to an ideal, to a particular tradition; can you let that go? Death is going to make you do that. One may be attached to a person very deeply because you are lonely, you need comfort, you need companionship, you can't stand alone. Therefore you depend, and dependence means attachment, and where there is attachment there is jealousy, anxiety, fear and all the action arising from that, which is corruption. Now death says end, you are going to die. While living can you end it? Do you understand my question? Oh, yes, you understand it very well. It is fairly simple. Suppose the speaker is attached to his position - god forbid! - he is not, but suppose he is, think of the corruption, how the mind gets corrupted. He must need an audience, he depends on an audience, he draws energy from the audience, the larger the better, so there is competition and all the horror involved in that. So the ending is the beginning of something totally new. The ending of attachment completely which is death; when you end it completely there is a totally different dimension of existence. Then what is death? We have looked into what is living with its chaos, misery, confusion, slight order, and the labour, endless labour. What is death? Death is not only the physical organism, the body getting old, diseased or accident, being misused, indulging endlessly, sensation, appetite, excitement and gradually withering, consciously, or withering in great pain, with various kinds of diseases. So is that what is death? The dying of the organism? We know that. We recognize it. We see it. But also we say there is something that cannot die, the soul, the Atman, that something which is permanent - these are the various beliefs - which, when you die, reincarnates. Some of you very deeply believe in all this, though some of you are Buddhists, etc. All religions offer various kinds of comfort; comfort is not truth, comfort is not the understanding of a mind that penetrates through all kinds of illusions, dogmas, rituals. So, is there something permanent in man, in you? If there is something permanent in you then that has a possibility of being born next life. Merely to believe in reincarnation has no meaning. If you believe in it, then what you do now today matters infinitely. Right? If you believe in reincarnation, because then what you do now either you will have a better position, a bigger house, you know all that - or be nearer heaven, which are all the same. So, is there something permanent in you, the 'me', the you, the mind that says I am permanent? Is there anything lasting, or is everything is moving, changing, there is nothing permanent? Is your relationship with another permanent, are your gods permanent, gods being put there by thought for your comfort, to escape from your mischief of daily life into something precious, which is an illusion? We are asking together, to find out for yourself if there is anything permanent in your life? The house is permanent, permanent unless an earthquake comes. The trees are permanent, the ocean, the rivers, the mountains are permanent. Apart from that is there anything permanent, lasting, enduring, in your life? The 'me', the 'I' the ego, has been put together by thought: The name, the form, the quality, the character, the idiosyncracies, the capacities, the talents and so on, all that is the result of your culture and certain forms of education. As there is nothing permanent, you are not permanent; a physical body you have, but your thoughts are not permanent, they are changing, constantly modifying; your beliefs, you take comfort in your beliefs and think there is security in your belief. That is why it is so hard to give up your beliefs. Belief is just a word, just an idea, a concept and you take refuge in that concept. That is not security. Have you watched your religious people, how secure they are in their position, in their belief, in their dogma? And that security is a form of illusion. So there is nothing whatsoever permanent. To realize that may be very depressing, melancholic, but it is not. When you see that fact that there is nothing enduring, that very seeing is intelligence, and in that intelligence there is complete security. That is not your intelligence or my intelligence, it is intelligence. As long as there is attachment, there must be corruption: to see the truth of it immediately and the ending of it immediately is intelligence. That intelligence is the only factor of security - not security, that's the wrong word - that intelligence, not being yours or another's is that intelligence of something infinite. Perhaps tomorrow we will talk about the nature of affection, love and compassion, and meditation. As we said, where there is suffering, there is no compassion; where there is compassion it has its own intelligence. SRI LANKA 4TH PUBLIC TALK 16TH NOVEMBER 1980 This is the last talk. We have been talking over together the last three times that we met here about the problems of human life, of existence, man's many, many psychological problems, political, religious, and worldly. As we said at the beginning of these talks, we are walking along together on the same road. The speaker is not leading you, he is setting the pace as you wish. And we talked about relationship, fear, pleasure and the ending of sorrow. We also talked about relationship and the importance of doubt, the importance of questioning, never accepting. This evening we would like to go into the question of what is religion, what is the magnitude of the mind, whether there is anything beyond the mind or there is only the things that thought has created, both outwardly and deeply inwardly. Thought has been used as an instrument for technological, scientific, medical purposes; thought has explored the universe, gone as far as Venus, Saturn. Man has landed on the moon and planted his little flag there. Man has gone into the space, under the earth, the seas. Man has exercised his immense capacity in the direction of outward control, controlling of space, controlling nature, the environment and so on. But man, that is you and I, the speaker, have not gone into the magnitude and the depth of the mind. The mind has got extraordinary capacity, as is seen in the world of technology; they are doing the most extraordinary things. And the East is merely imitating, improving, or copying. And we have never questioned what is the mind, what lies beyond the present consciousness. We have been able to fathom the enormous energy that lies in the mind. We are using the mind to mean not only the capacity, the working, the operations of the brain, but also your emotions, sensory responses, affection, love, all the human responses and reactions, and the capacity of the brain to learn, to forget, to record and act upon that which is learnt as knowledge, skilfully or not. This evening if we can, if you are interested, we will find out for ourselves what is the magnitude of the mind. It is an immense question. You may think it is rather impudent. And to talk about it may be, if we can use the word, sacrilegious. But we human beings, conditioned as we are, living in a small little circle of our own making, in a little corner of the vast earth, and fighting each other over that corner, who rules, who governs, who are the politicians, and the priests and so on. But to enquire very deeply into the immensity of the mind and its capacity, you must first be very clear that to investigate into that, there must be absolute silence. And the silence that is not brought about by thought, the silence that is not brought about as a reward or punishment; that silence has no motive. There are various types of silence, silence between two thoughts, the silence between two noises, the silence between two birds singing and stopping, the silence of the sea when it is utterly calm and the silence of an evening when the sun is about to set, that solemn hour with all its extraordinary sense of coming night. Man has searched for this silence beyond the words. And religion has tried to explain or give a rational meaning, or through many centuries of propaganda - the Christian propaganda, Buddhist propaganda, the Hindu, the Islamic and so on - have made man accept, believe, and so religiously has so conditioned him that he finds it almost impossible to go beyond that conditioning. He makes the best of that condition and tries to escape from that prison into some fanciful images, concepts, theories, theological investigation and so on. I hope we are following each other. And religion has become now merely a verbal statement, slogan, constant repetition that I am a Buddhist, that I am a Christian with all the different denominations in the Christianity, and the thousand gods of Hinduism or the god of the Islamic world. We have been told over and over again for thousands of years, so our brain is so heavily loaded and the man who enquires into what is truth, obviously cannot belong to any organized religion, to any belief, to any sectarian gods or to only one god. He must be free of all rituals, all the religious symbols, images, the authority of the highest priest and so on. Can the mind, your mind be so free? It is not free because it is seeking constantly security, not only physically but inwardly, psychologically, deeply within the recesses of the mind, thought is always seeking some kind of hope, some kind of comfort, security, a state of permanency. And in its search it falls into the traps of the priests all over the world with their organizations, with their rituals and so on. So can your mind be free of all that? Otherwise you are prisoners, you are not really human beings, you are just machines operating. We were the other day discussing with a computer specialist: the computer plays with a master chess player. The first two or three games the master beats the computer, and the computer after three or four games beats the master, because it is learning. When it is defeated it learns what move has caused the defeat; so it has experienced, learnt the first mistake, then the second mistake, experiences, learns and so on until it beats the master. You understand what we are saying? And we, the human mind, operates in the same way: experience, knowledge, memory, action; and from that action learn, more knowledge. So we repeat this constant cycle. So we are always moving from the known to the known and acting from the known, like the computer, the latest computers, which have the capacity to correct themselves, which can experience and learn and so go much faster than man in thought, in solving problems. So our minds operate more or less in the same way. Which is, our minds have become mechanical. If you are educated as an engineer, for the rest of your life you are thinking along those lines - how to build bridges, railways, buildings, aeroplanes and so on. Or if you are a surgeon, spend ten years learning medicine, then to operate and so on, and for the rest of your life you are a marvellous or rather shoddy little surgeon. Or you spend years and years reading various religious books of various denotations, and you become an expert at it, capable of arguing, but still moving from the known to the known. I hope you are following all this. Are you? And our life, our daily life is also mechanical, going to the office from 9 o'clock to 5 o'clock, repeating the same pattern, coming back home, sex, quarrels, ambition, vanity, superstition and so on. This is our life. And our brain, our mind is so conditioned to this and being conditioned we don't see the crisis that is in the conditioning itself. The world is changing so rapidly technologically, but morally, ethically, we are still what we were, perhaps little more modified, little more sophisticated, a little more 'putting on white gloves', treating each other very distantly. We are so heavily conditioned; to believe in god or not to believe in god. And believing in god or not, religions have played an extraordinary part in our life. There have been religious wars in Europe; inquisitions, torture in the name of god, in the name of whatever it is, excommunication. Perhaps only the Buddhist and the Hindu world has not encouraged killing; though I have been told in this country, Sri Lanka, you are eating meat and you call yourself Buddhist. The Buddha was supposed to have said 'don't kill'. You see that is what we are saying; religion is merely a make-believe. It has no reality. It has no depth, it is just a series of words, quotations, authority, which is totally unrelated to our daily life. Our daily life is violence, killing, that which is convenient for us, and we will kill man, animals, to satisfy our appetite. These are facts, not the speaker's invention. Look at your own lives - when you say you are a Buddhist, look at it. You are not Buddhist, you are just a label called Buddhist, but you are a human being like the rest of the world with all the travails, toil, confusion, misery, sorrow, pain and all that. So you are the world and the world is you. There is no discussion or argument about it. Psychologically you are the world and the world is you. When one realizes that fact, you become astonishingly responsible about what you think, what you do, how you behave. And our minds, as we said, has become what we are, we are our minds, we are our consciousness. Our consciousness is its content - fear, pain, pleasure, belief, I want, I don't, you know. Consciousness with its content is what we are. Now, meditation is the quietening of the content. Meditation is the emptying of our consciousness with all its content. Are the speaker and you going together? Even intellectually, even verbally? And there may be some of you who are not merely intellectually following, or verbally, but going deeper into it. Meditation, the word means to ponder over, think over: that is the dictionary meaning of that word. And a mind that is enquiring into what is meditation, not how to meditate, but what is meditation is far more important than how to meditate. There is the Tibetan meditation, Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese, Zen, all kinds of meditations. Each has its own particular system, with its own practices, breathing, not breathing, sitting in a certain posture, all the things that thought has put together as to what meditation should be. We are enquiring not only into what is religion, not the organized religion and all that nonsense, but what is a mind that is religious? And also we are enquiring into what is meditation. If a man has, as many of them have, for a couple of years practised Zen meditation, Hindu, and other forms invented or traditionally explained by the gurus, they are all based on control, discipline, practice, and having faith in that which the authority, the establishment, the guru has said. To the speaker all this is not meditation. You can meditate for 20 minutes a day and then for the rest of the day do your mischief. That is not meditation. You can belong to some group which has a peculiar meditation of its own: all kinds of things are happening in the name of meditation, all over the world, specially recently; the Indian gurus have taken this nonsense over to Europe and they are practising it, god knows why, probably to get more money, or to get more health, or to have better control of memory and so on. If you will kindly listen and go into the question of what is meditation and what is religion. You may remember that story which the speaker has often repeated, probably invented that story: there were two men walking along a street looking at all the trees, the houses, and the shadows and the well-built walls and all that. They were walking along and one of them picks up something, and looks at it and immediately his face becomes radiant, astonishingly beautiful, clear eyed, with a certain dignity, a sense of benediction. And the friend says "What has happened to you, what is it that you have picked up?" And the friend says "I think it is truth, at least part of it and I am going to keep it", and so he puts it into his pocket and the friend says "I think I can help you, we can begin to organize it." Have you understood the meaning of this? Right sirs? You have understood the meaning? That we depend on organizations, the organizations of the Post Office, and so on. Those are all necessary organizations. We depend on organizations for the psychological understanding of ourselves. We depend on groups or teachers, or leaders and so on. Neither the politicians, nor the scientists, nor the established religious people can ever solve the problems of humanity. Never. What you have created, the politicians,the religious organizations, all that is man-made, you have made it in your desire for comfort, for safety, for protection and so on. The man who is enquiring into the depth and meaning of religious mind, doesn't belong to any group or any organization, any so-called religious organization. Now can you abandon those now, not tomorrow, not say I will think about it? Then you will never do it. Sir, enlightenment is not of time, enlightenment doesn't come through years of practice, through years of renunciation, through years of asceticism. Time has no place for the religious mind. I wonder if you understand all this? And we, every human being in the world says, give me time to achieve that state of paradise, or drink the milk of paradise. So if we are enquiring, action is perception, seeing and acting immediately. I will explain that statement. What we do is, you makes a statement like, attachment leads to corruption. It is a statement made by the speaker. You hear it, you are attached and you say, of course there is a little corruption, but it is necessary and you are attached because you are lonely, want comfort and all the rest of it. Now when you hear, if you are sensitive, alert, watching, that very moment of perception which is the truth is action. That is giving up all attachment instantly. That is intelligence, not the cunning mind that can argue, put forth various opinions, doctrines, dialectical approach. All that is not intelligence. Intelligence is seeing; seeing for example that nationalism is a poison in the world and seeing the truth of it instantly and being free of nationalism. That freedom in action is intelligence. That intelligence is not yours or mine, it is the intelligence of truth operating in action. So meditation is the freedom from all measure. Do you understand that statement? Freedom from all measure. Our minds are always measuring; the more, the less, more powerful, less powerful, greedy, and I will be less greedy. Mind and the word meditation means also measure. Can the mind be free of measurement which is comparison, imitation, conformity? That's measurement. Without measurement, the technological world cannot exist. The whole of the west is dominated by the ancient Greek intellect. To them, measurement was absolutely the means of enquiry. Can your minds be free now of measurement - the more, the less, the should be and should not be - so that there is no movement of thought as measure? One wonders how much you are following all this? Or is this too much at one meeting? And as this is the last meeting one has to make a resume, compress everything in an hour and twenty minutes, or so. But if you will give your mind, which is your hearing, seeing, and learning, then you will see that our life is based on measurement. Ambition is measurement. Affection has become measurement. Love has no measure. But we don't know what love is. We know pleasure, desire, but desire and pleasure is not love. Now you hear that statement and you begin to question because you live on pleasure, desire, you have pictures of sexual activity, and you can't let that go. So you say, is this so, how can one give it up; which means you are not actually listening. You don't want to give up or you find reasons for not. You are moving away from the act of listening. And the speaker says, meditation is a movement without measurement. Do you understand the beauty of it? No. Silence of the mind is not measurable. It is only when the mind is absolutely quiet without a single movement of thought, that can only come about when you have understood the content of your consciousness. When that content, which is your daily life, your reactions, your hurts, your vanities, your ambitions, your subtleties and cunning deceptions, the unexplored part of your consciousness, all that must be observed; not take one by one by one and getting rid of one by one. You understand all this? I wonder. You know, sir, the speaker must go into something which I hope will make things clearer. Perhaps it may make it more difficult, more obscure, but one has to go into it. We are used to control and conflict. We are accustomed to the idea, to the concept that life is a strife, a struggle. We say, nature is constantly in struggle - the deer being killed by the tiger. So we are always comparing our struggle, our vanities, our violence to nature. Nature is orderly. There is only disorder when man interferes with it. This is so obvious you can see it. Man has killed fifty million whales. Think of such a horror. They are killing baby seals for profit, for money and so on. Can we go into ourselves very deeply, see the content at one glance, not bit by bit. That requires attention. I am going to go into what is attention. When the speaker says attention, you want to know what it is. He has to explain it. But if your minds were alert, you would know instantly what attention is. You can't cultivate attention. You can cultivate concentration. Concentration is focussing the energy of thought upon a particular point, resisting all other intrusions, directions, keeping thought focussed on one point. That is what is called generally concentration, the schoolboy learns that. He wants to look out of the window, the teacher says, pay attention, concentrate on your book. But the boy is much more interested in seeing the bird on the wing and the fly that is crawling up the wall, the lizard with its four feet hanging down, looking at all that. The looking at all that is attention, but the teacher says, pay attention to the book. Do you see the difference? Come on! So we must discern between attention and concentration. Our minds have been trained to concentrate, more or less. We are rather feeble about that too. As long as it gives you reward or helps avoid pain, you concentrate. That is, in focussing your thought on one point you have to discard every other movement of thought and thought is always pressing in. One wants to concentrate on that, but thought wanders off, and you have to pull it back. So there is constant struggle. There is the controller and the controlled. The controller is always saying that thought must be attentive, must concentrate, must do this, must not do that. There is division between the controller and the controlled. You are following all this? Please, follow, it's your life, don't go to sleep. If you really understand this you will see conflict ends, totally. If you really understand it, not verbally, not intellectually, but see the truth of it that the controller is the controlled, you will see that conflict ends totally. Thought has divided itself into the controller and that which he will control. It is still thought. Be clear on this point. One gets angry and then thought says, control, don't be angry. Is that anger different from the thought, or the mind that is angry? You understand? You are anger, not that you are different from anger. This is clear, isn't it? So the controller has been built by thought, thought which has cultivated this tradition that he is superior, he is different from the thought, from the controlled. Now if you observe it, the controlled is the controller. Thought wanders off and thought says, I must control. Thought says. So thought is the controller. You understand? So there is no control. This is a very dangerous statement if you don't understand it. The speaker has never controlled his emotions, his thoughts, all that, never, because right from the beginning he saw the controller is the controlled. There is conflict only when there is division. I wonder if you see all this. Do you see all this? Please understand this because meditation is not conflict. It is not that you must control, it is not that you mustn't measure, it is not that you must do this or that. That meditation comes naturally if you have put your house in order - your house, you, in order, which means there is no conflict in you, not a shadow of effort. This is asking the human mind an immense challenge. So meditation is the ending of all measurement. Measurement exists as long as the 'me' exists, as long as the I, me, exists with my pride, with my images, with my hurts, with my vanity, with my ambition, fears and all that, the 'me' that is put together by thought. As long as that me exists, which is the centre of measurement, which is the very centre of conflict, as long as that exists, meditation leads only to further illusion, further mischief. It has no meaning. So the ending of the 'me' is the beginning of wisdom and meditation. And the mind is completely quiet, not partly quiet. You know, we are always asking for peace of mind. There is no peace in the mind. Peace exists only when there is total absence of violence. There is violence if you are ambitious. Sir, these are all facts. Go into it. There is violence when you belong to any group - religious, national or otherwise. There is violence in your relationship. So putting the house in order is the first responsibility of a man who is really serious and committed to the investigation of meditation. Which means he must have a healthy body because the organism affects the mind. If you have got a heavy untrained body, your mind also becomes rather sloppy. These are all facts. These are common facts. Then we begin to enquire into what is religion because we may find that a mind that is free in that deep sense of that word is the religious mind. The religious mind has no problems. You understand? No, please, these are words because we are full of problems, not only problems with your family at home, problems when you are in the in office, problems whether you should vote for this person or that person, and all that. You have got so many problems. A problem means unresolved issue. That is, if you have been hurt from childhood, as most of us are, hurt inside, that wound we carry for the rest of our life and that becomes a tremendous problem because with that hurt goes fear, isolation, avoidance, withdrawing, and more fear. That is a problem. To end that problem immediately is to perceive who is hurt, what is hurt. What is hurt is the image that you have built about yourself. And when you see that, as you must see now, as the speaker is explaining, as long as you have an image, noble or ignoble, rather shallow, stupid, whatever it is, as long as you have an image you are going to be hurt. That's a fact. And you create an image about another or about yourself, because in that image you find certain security. You understand? You find security in the image thought has created, which means there is no security at all in that image, but you stick to that. Now you have heard that statement, and to see that image is corruption, and hearing it, end it. That is an act of supreme intelligence. It is the neurotic that sees danger and enters into the danger. A sane man, an intelligent man, in the sense we are using that word intelligent, sees the poison, the danger and acts immediately. So we are asking, what is religion. Man has always sought something beyond this life, beyond time, beyond all measurement, he has called it eternity, truth, immortality - not immortality - truth, something measureless, nameless, measureless. And there have been those who have said, "I'll lead you to it. We know and you don't know". This has been from the ancient days when the priest has assumed the authority, he knew and the layman didn't. The ancient Egyptians did this with their hierarchical priesthood. And we are doing exactly the same thing now. You want to find that which is nameless, that which has no word, that which has no form, that which is the whole universe, and you come along and say, "I'll lead you to it. I know and you don't". So beware of the man who says, "I know". So we have come to the point: man has sought something sacred; the serious man, not the superstitious man; the superstitious man worships an image, made by the hand or by the mind; the superstitious man follows certain rituals, accepts dogmas, believes in fantastic romantic nonsense. That is called religion, organized, hierarchical authority, all that. So if you brush aside all that, because that has no validity, because they are the product of thought. Thought may say, we have received it from the highest, it is still part of thought. And thought is limited, never complete because it is always the outcome of knowledge, there is no complete knowledge about anything, therefore it is always within the shadow of ignorance. So if you can brush aside all that, that means complete freedom inwardly, not the freedom not to obey the law, that's stupid. But to have no psychological problem whatsoever, which means you have released tremendous psychological energy. You understand what I am saying? We have got physical energy, which shows itself by going to the office everyday, tremendous energy you have to build a bridge, to do anything physically. But psychologically we are cripples because we have never gone into it, never questioned, never observed. And there must be freedom from all problems, and therefore freedom totally psychologically, in the very structure of the psyche. Silence is that energy. Silence is that emptiness; the emptiness of all the content of your mind. There is no 'how', there is no method; method, how, systems, are all the inventions of thought, therefore they are limited, therefore they are no good. But if you understand this, seeing the truth that no system can ever free the mind, when you see that, act, there is freedom instantly. And religion is the uncovering of that which is most holy, which has no name, which is the absolute truth, the origin of everything. We haven't time to go into all that for the moment. So then also you must enquire into what is love. Love is not pleasure, love is not desire. You have heard that: look at it, go into it, see it. When you see the truth of that there is immense beauty. And where there is that love, which has never touched jealousy, dependence, attachment, all that, then there is that love and compassion which is intelligence. So the mind then can go beyond all measure. That is, sir, the scientists are exploring the universe, the astrophysicists are going through thought, through telescopes, through various - you know, Apollo, you know various things going into space, through thought, through measurement, through constant observation of the stars and so on, they are trying to find what is the origin of all this, the universe: that is going outward into vast space and so on. But man has very rarely gone inward. And there he can find an immense immeasurable universe, which is this universe. For that there must be vast space in your mind. All that is meditation: putting the house in order first, complete order so that there is no conflict, no measure, and there in that house there is love, then the content of the mind which is it consciousness can be emptied totally of the 'I', which is me, the you. Then if you have gone that far the mind then becomes - is - it doesn't become, there is no becoming, becoming is still measure - the mind then is totally absolutely quiet, not for some period, or a length of time, but its state is to be quiet. And out of that quietness it can respond to thought and utilize thought. You understand? But it is always in a state of total quietness, emptiness of all its content. If you have gone that far then you will know, then there is that which is eternal, nameless. - Brockwood Park 1983 - 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk 1st Public Question And Answer Meeting 2nd Public Question And Answer Meeting 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk These are the actual transcripts of the talks. They differ in minor ways from the versions in the book. "THE WORLD OF PEACE" BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST PUBLIC TALK 27TH AUGUST 1983 First of all, if one may remind you, this is not an entertainment, it is not an intellectual feast, or intellectual stimulation, or some kind of romantic, sentimental nonsense. We are going to deal with the very, very complex problem of living together in this world - this world that has gone almost mad; there is such chaos and misery, the threat of war. And religions have played very little part in all this, in our daily life. And I think we ought to go together -together, not that the speaker will talk about various things - but together we ought to go into these matters, not that you listen and the speaker talks, but together. And so if we are going to work together, think together, perceive together and act together, one must, it appears, listen very carefully, not only to what is being said, but also to listen to our own reactions to what is being said -our reactions of approval or disapproval, our sense of restrictions, our resistances, our fears, and all the complexities of our reactions to any form of stimulation. And so the act of listening is very important if we are going together to explore, to think together, into the whole problem of our present day existence. We are very circumscribed, limited. Our brains have been so programmed and conditioned, so limited that most of us are unaware of this. We are conditioned linguistically, whether we are or not, that's a very serious subject into which we will go if we have time. We are conditioned, shaped, moulded by the environment, by tradition, by religion, by the solitude of our own illusions, our own imaginations, the solitude of our own aspirations, circumscribed, limited. So our brain - not that the speaker is an expert at it, but having listened to a great many people talk about the brain, specialists and others, one perceives that through this long process of evolution our brains are very, very limited. Apparently only a very small part of it acts or thinks or lives - the rest is in abeyance. That is what some of the specialists who have studied the quality of the brain and the workings of the brain have said. And also we can see for ourselves, without relying on the experts, that our life is very small. We are so concerned with ourselves, with our success, with our miseries, and all the turmoil of one's own limited life - the sorrow, the pain, the anxiety, the various forms of reactions which arise from our prejudices, our bias, our tendencies. All this does condition our brain, and so we never have the awareness of the whole of life, the whole of existence which is vast, immeasurable and tremendously potent. And if we could together, this morning, go easily and happily, and enquire into the quality of our own life - if you are willing -into the nature of our behaviour, into the whole process of our thought, if we could enquire together into all this. And not only enquire, but through the very enquiry, apply. Enquiry by itself has very little meaning. Enquiring into ourselves, into our environment, into the state of the world - mere enquiry, either intellectual or the enquiry of curiosity, of information, and so on, has very little effect on our lives. But if we enquire into ourselves, into the way of our thinking, why we think this way - why human beings who have lived on this beautiful earth for so many millenia are still what they are - unhappy, violent, ready to kill each other for some idiotic reasons. If we could go together into all this - and in the process of going together on this path, on this road which has no end and no beginning, then perhaps our meeting here will be worthwhile. But to merely listen year after year and not apply, has very little meaning. It is a waste of time and energy. So could we, this morning, be serious enough for at least an hour to look at this whole world in which we live, the world which we have created. This society is the result of our own complex life. You are conditioned by health, by environment, by our culture, by nationalism, and so on. Unless we break through all this conditioning, we will go on as we have been going on for thousands of years. And so violence will go on, corruption, each one seeking his own fulfillment and pursuing his own ambitions -isolated, and where there is isolation there must be conflict. And so could we this morning go into all this. One is asking this seriously because you have taken the trouble to come here. And it's no good merely talking about the ideas, the expressions, the reactions, but go into this with tremendous energy, vitality and see if it is possible to break down this conditioning so that the brain will have immense capacity. It has the capacity now, extraordinary capacity in the technological world - in the computers, the biological chemistry, genetic engineering and various forms of other activities from the outside to affect the brain. I don't know if you are aware of all this. Scientists in the various disciplines are trying desperately to bring about a change in man. And such change has been from the outside I hope we understand each other. They are trying through genetic engineering, to change the very genes themselves so that the human being is something entirely different. And the computer is taking over perhaps a great deal of our activity - again from the outside. The Communists have tried that, tried to control, changed the environment, hoping that man would change, through authority, through discipline, through complete obedience, and they have not succeeded. On the contrary, they are creating great misery in the world. So we are asking a most fundamental question, whether it is possible, not to be affected from the outside I hope we understand when I use the word the 'outside', whether the outside be god, music, art, or the external laws that are established by governments, and so on - all these outside agencies in various forms and disciplines are trying to force man to conform, to bring about a radical change in their behaviour so that man will live without wars, and so on. And also, on the other side, they are preparing for wars. Every government throughout the world is armed, ready to kill and be killed. So this is going on all the time around us. I am sure most of us are aware of all this. We are asking a totally different question. Religions have tried to change man, to tame him down - through fear, heaven and hell, and all the rest of it. And they have not succeeded either. These are all facts. It is not the speaker's imagination or bias. This is what is going on in the world around us, affecting through propaganda, through various forms of chemical engineering, and so on, to force man. And they have never succeeded, and they will never succeed because the psyche is far too strong, far too cunning, extraordinarily capable. So we are asking - you and the speaker are asking - I am not asking you, you are asking this question: since all outside influences, including the idea of god and ideologies, various forms of historical dialectical conclusions have not changed man, whether it is possible for human beings to change radically, fundamentally, without the external influence at all? You understand? Gurus throughout the world have not succeeded. They are all pretentious and seeking money. They can be put aside completely. They are not important. But what is important and essential to ask is, what will make each one of us, intellectuals, whether we are scientists, whether we are artists or various forms of activities, whether we are capable, fundamentally, deeply, to bring about a mutation in the very brain cells themselves? Have I made this question clear? We were talking the other day in New York to some scientists. After a great deal of discussion - it lasted over two hours - I asked them what would bring about a mutation in the brain cells themselves, not from the outside - genetic engineering, biochemistry - you follow all that. What will change the brain cells themselves which have been conditioned for thousands of years? I hope you are putting this question to yourselves. What would be your answer? If you are serious and earnest and passionate enough to put this question, what would be your answer? If you have thought a great deal about all this - either you would say, it is not possible, and so close the door for your further enquiry, or you would say, I really don't know, is it possible? We are in that position. We are not closing the door by saying, it is not possible -it's impossible. How can man, who has been so conditioned for thousands and thousands of years, through vast knowledge, experience - how can that brain transform itself? It's not possible! If you are serious and answer that way - "It's not possible" - then you have closed completely the avenue of enquiry. But if you are enquiring into it - that is, whether the brain, which has such extraordinary capacity in one direction, and so utterly limited, circumscribed, conditioned, programmed, to be a Catholic, Protestant, to be British, French and English, you know, and all the rest of it - whether that brain can be totally free - not free to do what you like. We're all doing that anyhow - pursuing our own pleasures, our own solitary ambitions, our own salvation if you are at all religiously minded, our own isolated pleasures and illusions. We do that every day of our life. That's a common occurrence for all of humanity, pursuing their own isolated, solitary illusions, stimulations, aspirations and ideologies. And that is what they call freedom. Surely, that is not freedom. Freedom requires a great deal of discipline. Please understand what we mean by that word. We will go into it in a minute - freedom implies great humility, innate inward discipline and work. We'll go into those three. Most of us are so arrogant because we rely so much on our knowledge. We are certain; our beliefs, our conclusions our desires are so strong that we have lost all sense of deep, natural humility. Again, it is a fact - how strong when a Frenchman says, "I'm a Frenchman" or when you say, "I'm British". I don't know if you have noticed - god-given race - and everyone feels this in every country. The other day an Indian was talking to us. He said, "We have the greatest culture in the world. We are the most highly civilized people." I said, "Yes, you are corrupt. You're superstitious. Your beliefs have no value at all. Your ideals, your religions are just a stack of words." He said, "Oh, but we are still the highest culture." I said, "All right." No, no. Please don't laugh. This applies to you too. So, when we identify ourselves with a country, with certain ideologies, with conclusions, concepts, then we are incapable of being humble. Because then only when you are enquiring in humility, you learn, you find out. And humility is necessary. Then you see things as they are, around you and in yourself. And discipline is constantly watching, watching your own reactions, continual observation, seeing what the source of your thought is, why you react in certain ways, what your biases are, your prejudices, your hurts, and so on. Constant watching brings its own natural discipline, order. That's what we mean by discipline. Not conformity, not following a certain pattern either established by society or by yourself, but the eternal watching of the world and of yourself. Then you see there is no difference between the world and yourself. That brings about naturally a sense of order. Therefore order is discipline, not the other way round. And work, not only physical work, which unfortunately most of us have to do - not if you are unemployed in this country - but also work in the sense of applying what you see to be true - apply it, not give a period of time between perception and action. If one sees, as the speaker has seen many, many years ago, as a boy, that nationalism was a poison - I hope you don't mind my saying all this - that he was no longer a Hindu, he just walked, he was no longer a Hindu -finished with all those superstitions and you know all that rubbish that goes on in every nationality. So, to live on this earth peacefully, in spite of the governments, requires a great deal of enquiry. To live peacefully demands great intelligence. Right sir? Can we go on like this? It is easy for the speaker to talk about all these things because that's his life. But merely listening to what is being said seems so futile. But the moment you apply: if you see something to be true - instant application, then that removes conflict altogether. Conflict exists only when there is a gap, a division between what you see to be actual, to be true, and all the implications of fear of your action. So there is an interval, a gap, a hiatus which brings about conflict. I hope you understand all this. May I go on? Or am I going on for myself? Are we following each other a little bit? We are not doing any kind of propaganda. We are not trying to convince you of anything - on the contrary, one must have doubt, scepticism, question, not only what the speaker is saying but question your own life, question, doubt your own beliefs. If you begin to doubt it gives certain clarity. It doesn't give you a feeling of great importance to yourself. Doubt is necessary in our exploration, in our enquiry into this whole problem of existence. And the question whether it is possible for human beings, who are perhaps somewhat neurotic, whether that neuroticism can be wiped away, become sane, rational - with such a brain, enquire. We are enquiring whether the brain cells can, without any influence from outside - governmental, environmental, religious and all the rest of it - can bring about a mutation in the brain cells? Is this question clear? Are we putting this question to ourselves? This is a serious problem. This cannot be answered by yes or no, affirmative or negative. One must look at this whole question as a whole; not as British, French or some kind of religious, superstitious nonsense, or according to your own particular discipline or profession. You must look at the whole of life as one unitary movement. You understand all this? If we do, then we can begin to ask - is it possible? And if we do ask that question, what difference does it make if a few of us bring about, perhaps, a mutation? What effect has it on the world? You know, that's the usual question. Right? I may change and you may change. A few of us may bring about a mutation, but what effect has that on the mass of people, on the governments, will they stop wars, and so on? I think that's a wrong question to put - what effect has it on others? That's a wrong question. Because then you are not doing the thing for itself, but how it will effect others? After all, beauty has no cause. Right? To do something for itself - for the love of itself, then it has an extraordinary effect - may or may not have. For example, we have talked for the last sixty years, unfortunately or fortunately - need I answer the question any further? One might ask, "How has it affected the world? You go to various parts of the world, has it changed anybody at all?" I think that is rather a foolish question. We might ask, "Why does a flower bloom? Why is there a solitary star in the heavens in the evening?" The man who has freed himself from his conditioning never asks that question. For in it there is compassion, with its great intelligence. So let us proceed. Can we proceed? You are not too tired? First of all, do we realize that we are conditioned; aware without any choice, aware that my brain is conditioned? Or you accept what another says and therefore say, "My brain is conditioned." You see the difference? If I am aware that my brain is conditioned, that has a totally different quality. But if you tell me that I am conditioned and then I realize that I am conditioned, then it becomes very, very superficial. I hope you are following all this. So are we aware that we are conditioned - as a Britain, by our experiences - we are not saying that it is right or wrong, we are going to find out - by our culture, by our tradition, by our environment, by all the religious propaganda for two thousand years as Christianity, or as Buddhism two thousand five hundred years ago, or Hinduism, perhaps longer? Are we aware? If you are aware, then you ask, why? Why is the brain conditioned? What is the nature of conditioning? Is it essentially experience and knowledge? Please go slowly with this. Experience conditions the brain. Right? Obviously. Do we meet each over there? And experience means knowledge - right? To learn to drive a car you need experience. You get into a car, drive it and gather through that experience knowledge, how to drive a car. Please listen carefully, if you will, kindly: is knowledge the basic factor of our conditioning? Knowledge being the repetition of certain tradition - right - and so on. Knowledge is necessary. Otherwise you couldn't go home, you couldn't drive a car, you couldn't go back to a job, if you have a job. So knowledge in one area, physical knowledge is necessary. But knowledge also conditions our brain - , knowledge being tradition, the being programmed as we are, by newspapers, by magazines, by constant repetition that you are British, British, British. Or when you go to France, it's the same old thing, French, French. Again when you go to India, again, Indian - this constant repetition. So the brain becomes dull, repetitive, mechanical. And perhaps that's a safe way of living but it's got tremendous danger. This repetition of various cultures, countries, is an isolating process and therefore division, therefore war - that's only one of the reasons for war. So are we aware that our brain is being programmed? Please don't look at others: look at yourself. If one is aware that one is programmed, conditioned, then one asks, "Is it knowledge?" And apparently it is knowledge. Then why do we live psychologically, why is the structure of the psyche essentially based on knowledge? You understand? Have I made the question clear? The psyche, the 'me', the self, is essentially a movement in knowledge, a series of knowledge which is a series of memories. Right? So we are a series of memories - so we are memory. Do you see that fact? Not that we are divine and, you know, all that blah that is trotted out by religion. But the actual fact is that we are nothing but memories. Most unpleasant discovery, isn't it! Or do you say, "Look, there is part of me which is not memory." The moment that you say that, it's already memory. I don't know if you see that. When I say I am not wholly the result of memories, that very statement implies that there is part of me which is not. And that part of me when I look at it, is also memory. So memories are the past, projected perhaps in the future, but it is still memory. Those memories are modified by the present and continue into the future, but is still a series of memories. Please don't let's become sentimental about all this - that's so meaningless or romantic. These are facts. What are you without memory, without all the remembrances of your achievement, of your wife, of your son, of your brother, family, memories of your travels, what you have done, what you have achieved? Right? They are all in the past. So memories are dead things. On those dead things we live. Right? Do see all this. Please we are not trying to persuade you to look at this, we are not trying to persuade you or convince you of anything. The speaker is not your guru. So don't follow anybody including the speaker. But look at these facts. Then the question arises: is it possible to live psychologically without a single memory? You understand? Put this question, please, to yourself. My brother, son, wife, husband, is dead. I remember all the incidents, happiness, you know, all the rest of it, intimate relationships. It is a vast reminiscence of the past, memory. And I live on that. I have a picture, photograph, and there is this constant stimulation from the photograph. So the 'me', the self, the ego is a movement of identification with memory. Right? I am a Christian, I am a Hindu, a Buddhist, an American, and so on. How tremendously attached we are to our identifications. That's our conditioning. And when you see that, not verbally, not as an idea, but actually see the fact, then there is action. Like when you have a violent toothache, there is action because it's there. But if you imagine you have a toothache, then that's quite a different process. So do we see clearly, without being persuaded, without being pushed into a corner, do we see very clearly for ourselves what we are - which is our conditioning, which is our consciousness. And seeing that, what is one to do? Clear? Can we go on from that? We've got another ten minutes. Have we reached that point? Please, have we all of us, or at least some of us, reached that point when we realize completely that we are conditioned and that conditioning is a vast series of movements, of memories. And memories are always the past, remembrance of things past which are then projected into the future, modified by the present, but still it is a movement of memories. Right? And these memories we call knowledge. Right? Then how does one look at these memories? You understand my question? How does one observe these memories? We have thousands of memories. Right? From childhood we have gathered them - pleasant, unpleasant, memories that are of our aspirations, memories of achievements, memories of pain, fear, great sorrow. These are all memories. And do we see these memories as different from the observer? You understand the question? We are observing. I am observing that I am a long series of memories. I've stated that - that I am memories; but there is in me the feeling that I'm not all that, there's something else that's observing. Right? Are you following? Are we together in this? So is the observer different from the observed? This is an old theme. Many of you probably have heard of it. "Ah, you say, well, you're trotting that out." But when you realize this fact, something extraordinary happens - not something mysterious, not parapsychological, and so on, and so on - something which ends conflict which is far more important then anything else. As long as there is division between the memories and the observer, this division creates conflict. Right? Division between the Arab and the Jews, between the British and the Falklands - may I mention the Falklands? Right? Between the Hindu and the Islamic world. Wherever there is division there must be conflict. Right? No, no, pursue that please. Wherever there is isolated action, isolated solitary pleasure, solitary aspirations, that very solitude is an act of separation. Therefore, that very person who pursues his particular ambition, his particular fulfillment, his aspirations, and so on, must inevitably create conflict, not only for himself but for others. So from this arises the question whether conflict of every kind, in our very being, can end? Because we live with conflict. You might say, "Well, all nature is in conflict. A single tree in a forest is fighting to achieve light, is struggling, fighting, squeezing out others. And human beings, born from nature, are doing the same thing." If you accept that, then you accept all the consequences of conflict - wars, confusion, brutality, ugliness, the nastiness of war. As long as you are British, French or an Indian you are inevitably going to create wars. Right? But you see this, and we don't do anything about it. So, to end conflict, which means to live with that peace which requires tremendous intelligence, is to understand the nature of conflict. I must stop for now. We will continue tomorrow morning, may we? Sorry to stop at this point. Not that it is an enticement for you to come tomorrow. Q: Can you just say something about when a memory comes it seems to come from outside and then you react. Say, you are embarrassed, then you remember something - at least I do. Do you understand? K: The gentleman says - memory is outside, comes from outside. You react to that memory and you strengthen that memory or you put aside that memory. Right? Are you different from memory? You see, that's the whole point. We are the result of this movement from the outer to the inner. Right? From the inner to the outer. Right? Have you not noticed - like the sea going out and coming in. We have created this monstrous society, and that society controls us. Right? And we try to change that society, through law, through governments, through all kinds of strikes, and all the rest of it, and then react to that. So it's a constant movement from the outer to the inner, from the inner to the outer. Right? It is one movement. It's not separate movement - water is water. It goes out and comes in. It's salt water. Now, the question arises from that, whether this movement can stop - action and reaction - you hit me and I hit you back. If you hate me, I hate you back. I own this particular piece of land and you fight for it. And I defend and I attack. You follow? This has been going on for millions of years - the ebb and flow of reaction. If you will, kindly put the question whether this movement can end. If that wasp stings me, I react, naturally. But why should I react if you flatter me, or insult me? So to ask this question, whether this movement of action and reaction can stop - to find an answer to that, one has to go a great deal into it. "THE WORLD OF PEACE" BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND PUBLIC TALK 28TH AUGUST 1983 May we go on where we left off yesterday. We were talking about conflict, not only in ourselves, but in the society in which we live -conflict between nations, between groups, between the various gurus, between ideologies, the communist ideology and the so-called democratic ideology. Apparently man has lived, throughout these centuries, in a state of constant conflict, struggle, fighting each other, killing each other, destroying that which he created and then rebuilding it again. This has been the historical process for the last five thousand years or more. Religions have also, except perhaps Buddhism and Hinduism, have created wars - a hundreds heretics, burnt them, destroyed them. And so man has lived on this earth without any peace. And to live in peace appears to be almost impossible - to live without conflict, without aggression, not only in personal relationships, but also with those with whom we don't agree, or have not the same belief, the same concepts, the same culture. There is this constant, endless, struggle, conflict. And one asks whether it is possible to live in this world utterly peacefully. Because it is only in peace that a flower can flower. It's only in peace that the human mind, the human brain can really be free. And why has man who has learned so much, who has acquired such extraordinary knowledge, experience, why can he not live in peace? As we said yesterday, this is not a talk, a lecture on a particular subject, to be informed, to be instructed. But we are together exploring this question. Not that the speaker explores, and you listen, but together, you and the speaker investigate, sanely without any bias, without any definite conclusions, to find out why we human beings cannot live on this beautiful earth with peace and without conflict. That is where we left off yesterday. There are various forms of chemical injections to make man peaceful. They are doing it now: in the totalitarian states they send them to hospitals, psychotherapeutic hospitals where they are drugged, kept peaceful. And also belief has also drugged us tremendously, to be peaceful. We all believe, if you are Christians, in some form of saviour. And that belief has kept us somewhat tamed. There have been attempts of every kind, throughout the world to help man to live peacefully. They have said: meditate, follow, obey, conform, don't hurt, love another - the whole religious instructions throughout the world. And yet, in spite of all that, and perhaps because of all that, man has not lived at peace with himself or created a society that's peaceful. Why? We are asking, you are also asking the question not only me. Are we different, each one of us, from the world outside of us? Are you, as British, or French or American, Russian or whatever nationality, group to which one belongs, or Indian, are we the rest of humanity - or separate individuals, struggling, separate souls, each one seeking his own fulfilment, his own happiness, his own salvation, identifying himself with something, noble, illusory, imaginary, and so on? Are we living in isolation on this earth, each one of us isolated, separated from the rest of mankind? And this separation, this so-called 'individualism' may be one of the causes why human beings do not live at peace, either in their relationships, or with his neighbour who might be next door, or a thousand miles away. Please, you and the speaker are putting these questions. I am not - the speaker is not putting the question for you to answer. This is a question which all of us have to face. Either we face it intelligently, rationally, sanely, or escape into some form of illusory peace. Peace can only exist if we have complete security, both outwardly and inwardly, psychologically and environmentally. We all want security, even the greatest scientist and the poorest very uneducated villager - all of us want security. Like every animal, every living thing needs security. And apparently we don't have security. We have sought it in religions, in beliefs, in ideologies, in some form of authority - followed them, and yet we remain separate. We are asking, is that one of the basic causes why human beings, thinking they are separate, isolated entities, each one seeking his own particular form of security, must inevitably come into conflict with others who are also seeking their own particular form of security? So we are asking a question, which is, are we separate from the rest of humanity? You understand my question? Are you separate? Are you an individual so that you as an individual are seeking your own happiness, your own pleasures, solitary in your illusions, in your particular form of imaginative hope? So this is a question that must be answered very carefully, gone into, by both of us. Because if that is the cause of it, it is, either the cause is rational, real, actual and then we have to deal with that, or it is really illusory. Each one of us has been brought up to think that we are individuals, separate. Is that a fact? Is our consciousness - which contains our behaviour, our reactions, our pleasures, fears, anxieties, sorrow and all the experiences, knowledge, all that is our consciousness, what you are, what each one of us is - is that consciousness different from the rest of humanity? You understand my question? When you travel around, when you observe without even travelling around, when you observe the world, all humanity goes through, more or less the same forms of suffering, anxiety, insecurity, they believe in some kind of illusory nonsense, full of superstitions, fears, and all the rest of it. Everywhere every human being goes through all this. Right? Insecure, uncertain, fearful, constantly in conflict, burdened with great sorrow - like those who live in this country. Right? This is a fact. So is your consciousness different from the rest of mankind? I may be an Arab, with my peculiar Islamic tradition, and as a human being, apart from the label as an Arab, I go through all the turmoil of life, like you do - pain, sorrow, jealousy, hate. So is there a difference, apart from labels, apart from culture, between you and me, as an Arab. Please consider all this. As we said yesterday, we are not trying to convince you of anything, doing any kind of propaganda, any kind of persuasion or stimulation. Because if you are capable of being persuaded, then another will come and persuade you differently. If you depend on propaganda, the same thing, another type of propaganda will show you. So one must be clear for oneself, absolutely, upon this matter. It is your psyche. And the psyche is the content of its own consciousness. And that consciousness is shared by all human beings, though outwardly you may have a different culture, different environment, different food, different clothes, more affluent, but essentially, deeply, most profoundly we are the rest of the world, and the world is us. Right? Be quite clear on this point. You may not like it because we have been brought up from childhood, perhaps right before childhood, in the very genes, that we are separate individuals. We are questioning that very thing, not only subjectively but objectively. If you examine without any bias, without any tradition, if your brain is eager to find out whether it is possible to live in this world with complete freedom and peace and therefore with order. One has to put this question. You may be a great scientist, a great painter, a marvellous poet, like Keats, but the scientist, the poet, the painter have their own sorrow, pain, anxiety like the rest of us. And as long as we think we are separate, conflict must exist -between the Arab and the Jew, as is happening in Beirut, between the black and the white, between the Muslim and the rest of the world. So please, consider this question seriously - exercise our brains, not accept. And if that is one of the causes of war, one of the causes of conflict between human beings, this fallacy that each one of us is entirely different, we are questioning that very thing. And if we are not, then we are the rest of mankind. You are the rest of mankind. With that goes tremendous responsibility which you may not like to have. We like to avoid responsibility. As long as one is violent, aggressive, you contribute to the rest of the world, to the rest of mankind's aggression, violence. This is natural, all this. So the question is, if you are the rest of mankind, you are the mankind, not part of mankind, you are the entire world - if you have that feeling, that truth of that, then your whole outlook is entirely different. Then you have totally abolished all division. Right? I wonder if you see the truth of this? Not the sentimentality of it, not a romantic, Utopian concept but the actuality of it, the fact of it. So let us examine it much more closely. Conflict exists as long, as we said, there is separation: between me and you, we and they. Conflict must exist in our relationships, between man and woman, of which we all know. Right? Between you and your wife, the wife and the husband, the family against the community, the community against the larger community and so on. So why is there conflict in our relationships? Please answer these questions. One is married, with children, or unmarried and all the human relationships - conflict exists as long as the husband or the wife or the man is pursuing his own sense of fulfilment, both sexually and in the world. Right? This is a fact, isn't it? The wife pursues her own particular form of pleasure and the man pursues his own, so actually they never meet, except perhaps in bed. That's a fact. Now is it possible to be free of this separation? Then one begins to enquire into the nature of what is called affection, into the nature of what is love - if you are interested in all this. If it bores you, you can always get up and go. But if you are serious, as we must be considering what the world has become - insane, disorderly, corrupt, heaven knows all the ugly things that are going on. If you are at all serious, looking at all this, one must inevitably ask: why, in close relationship where there is a sense of affection, tolerance, acceptance, there is conflict, divorce, hate - you know, the whole field of turmoil? Is it possible to live with another completely at peace? You are all married probably, aren't you, or have girl friends. What do you say to all this? It's your life; not the life of the speaker. It's your life and you have to answer these really serious questions, not evade them. As long as we are caught in this illusion of individuality however close our relationship with another, however intimate, however personal, companionship, escape from loneliness, this question must be answered. Because all life is relationship, with nature, with the universe, and with the tiniest little flower in the field; and also relationship with another human being. We cannot live without relationship. Even the monk, who has taken various forms of vows, is related. And in this relationship conflict seems to be all-pervasive. Therefore we must start very near to go very far. We must start where we are, with our family, with ourselves -whether we can live without conflict and therefore with peace. From this arises the question: how do you observe all this? How do you observe, when I say 'you', I'm not being personal, how do you observe this conflict - the present state of the world, the present relationship with each other - how do your observe it? It is very important to understand the nature and the structure of the observer. Right? May we go on with this? Are we together in all this, or am I talking to myself? I really would like to know. Are we going along the same path, along the same lane, taking a journey together, or you are ahead or I am far behind? Or are we walking together, perhaps hand-in-hand. If we are walking together, with the same step, looking at the world together, looking at our relationship together, and as friends we can question each other, we can doubt what we're saying without hurting each other because we're friends. And out of this friendship, we can understand the depth and the beauty of relationship in which there is no conflict. So relationship is extraordinarily important. It's our life. And as long as there is conflict, relationship becomes most destructive. Suppose I realize that - I am married, I'm not - suppose I realize that I am living with a woman and actually we are separate human beings, following parallel lines but never meeting inwardly, psychologically. Now, how do I observe that - the fact that we two are separate, each with his own ambition, his own greed, his own particular form of irritation you know, and all the rest of it - how do I observe it? Because in my observation, I may be biased, prejudiced. And so it is very important for me to find out the nature of the observer. Right? If I am not clear how to observe, in what manner to look, I may distort the whole thing. So I must enquire into the nature of the observer. Right? A great scientist - they all think they are great - a scientist, unless he is very clear both subjectively and objectively, when he looks through a microscope and all the rest of it, that he is observing without any bias, without any prejudice, the self doesn't enter into his observation, otherwise his observation will be distorted, untrue, non-factual. Right? So similarly, we have to be very clear of the nature of observation, who is the observer? Are we together in this? Who is the observer? You look at those trees, a field full of cows or sheep, you see the horizon lit up by the morning sun. How do you observe all that? - if you ever do! When you look at a tree or a house, your very perception of looking is blocked by the word you use. Right? You understand? I can look at a Frenchman and say, "Oh, he is a Frenchman." That means that all my prejudices, all my knowledge of the French comes in between me and observing a man who calls himself French. Right? So can I look at him without all the prejudices, antagonisms? Can you? So the observer is the past. Right? Are you following this? So the observer is full of his past knowledge, whether that knowledge is absurd, silly or actual, that knowledge is blocking my observation. Right? Are we following this? Now, to observe my relationship with my wife or husband, I must observe without any previous, accumulated incidents, knowledge, all that. Is that possible? You understand my question? Otherwise, I never see my wife for the first time. You understand? I'm always looking at her with all the memories of a thousand days. Now, is that a fact, that I am looking at another from the past knowledge - a living thing can never be observed with a limited knowledge. And knowledge is always limited. You understand? A living thing must be observed freely, without all the accumulation, experiences, knowledge. So is it possible for me to look at my wife or husband, or the girl friend or whatever you like, without the previous remembrances? Have you ever tried to look at a tree without the word 'tree', to look at a flower without the label so that you are actually observing what actually is, in which there is no subjective reaction? You are following all this? Are you? Or is this Greek or Chinese, better still. You see, our brain is a network of words, a network of remembrances. It is never free to look because it has been conditioned through identification. To us, identity is very important. I am Hindu, whatever that silly word may be, but it gives me a sense of assurance, a sense of security. I have roots in that - like the British, like the French, German, you know, the rest of the world. And can we look, observe, without any identity? You understand? Are you doing it now? Or are you going to try and do it when you go home? If, when you are listening to this and doing it now, perhaps you are sitting next to your wife, or husband - to do it now, the very action of perception is to destroy that division. Right? If you do it now, which means, action is not of time. You follow this? Look sir, I've heard this. I have paid attention to what I have heard. I am sitting next to my wife. I'm a serious person and I hope she is too. And I see that I am not looking at her freely, without any past incidents and all the rest of it. And to me it is important to have a relationship with her, or with him, in which there is no conflict because if I can live that way, I have peace in my heart and brain. So the very moment I hear this, the actual perception that I am in conflict and I am looking at her, or him, with all the accumulated memories which are all dead anyhow; and so I am looking at her. Action is the moment of perception of the fact, and not allowing time to interfere with the action. You understand? Am I conveying something? So for most of us, action implies conflict. I have to do something. I don't want to go to the office today from nine to five -god knows why you go anyway. See sir, what we're doing, how we are giving up an extraordinary life, life that is immense, is extraordinarily beautiful, that has great depth, unfathomable depth, and we spend our lives from nine to five. And our society demands that, governments demand it, and our wives demand it, because to be at home is rather a bore. So the whole structure of society is that our ethos is to work, and we miss the great width and the depth of life. So can I look at her, or him without any past remembrances? Will you do it now? See what it entails - do it, and you will find out how tremendously we are bound to the past. Our life is the past, that is, past memories. And apparently they have such a strong hold on our brain. And we say "It's impossible to look without the knowledge of yesterday". And so we give up and pursue the old way, quarrelling, nagging, fighting, miserable, unhappy - you know, the whole business of it. Whereas, if one actually sees the fact that conflict must exist between two human beings, and therefore with the rest of humanity, as long as there is this concept of 'individual', with his own particular memories. And seeing that is to act, not postpone action. When you postpone action, time is involved. Right? And during that postponement, other things take place; other complexities arise. I wonder if you are following all this? So action is perception and instant action so that your brain is not cluttered with problems. I do not know if you have gone into the question of problems. Why human beings have problems at all? The word 'problem' means something thrown at you. That's the actual meaning, the etymological meaning of that word, something thrown at you, which is a challenge. Our brains, from childhood, are trained to solve problems. Right? Poor child, at the age of two now they are teaching babies to count, how to learn a language. I don't know if you have followed all that. From childhood through school, college, university, business, family - everything has become a problem which must be solved. So we treat life as a vast problem, because our brain is trained that way. I don't know if you see all this. We never meet anything easily, happily, but it becomes a dreadful problem to be solved. So relationship has become a problem. You understand, sir. Are we together in all this? For god's sake, tell me, yes. And when we try to solve a problem - because our brains are trained that way, to solve problems - in the solution of that problem, we have other problems from that very solution. I don't know if you have noticed all this. Politically that is what is happening. You have the Falklands war and innumerable problems arising from it. So can you look at life, not as a problem, though problems exist, but have a mind that is free from problems? You understand the difference? Problems exist. I have a toothache, I have to go to the doctor. Problems of tax, follow? Problems exist. But if my brain is free of problems, then I can deal with those problems easily. But if my brain is trained, conditioned to deal with problems, I increase problems. Right? I wonder if you see this? There is a question, for example, about god. It's a problem, whether god exists or not. Most Christians believe that there is god. And Buddhists have no idea of god. He doesn't exist in their religious philosophy, and all the rest of it. But they make Buddha into a god, that's a different matter. Now, that's a problem. You believe and suppose I don't believe. Are you willing to look why god exists, if he does exist. Because I have no belief, one way or the other - suppose - actually I have no belief about it. Can you look at that question and find out why, throughout the ages, man has invented god - invented, I'm using that word purposely. I hope you won't get hurt. Man has invented it because he is frightened. He wants somebody, an outside agency to protect him, to give him security, to feel somebody out there is looking after you. That concept gives you great comfort. Whether that is an illusion or an actuality, doesn't matter. But as long as you have that kind of belief, it gives you great comfort. Now, if you strongly believe in all that, would you doubt it, question it, find out? Or are you so frightened, you won't even think about it. You understand? So, to find out whether there is something beyond man's measure, one must be free to enquire. As we enquired into relationship, one must be free to enquire, to observe. And if the observer, the enquirer is prejudiced, is convinced deeply, though he may pretend outwardly to examine, then his examination will be according to his conviction. So can the brain be free to look - to look at my wife, husband, to look at all the governments, my guru, the whole world around us - to look so carefully without the background of my tradition, values, judgements? The brain then is acting wholly, not in fragments. You understand? Scientists are saying, probably you know all this - if you know it, please forgive me for repeating it - only one very small part of the brain is functioning with most people and therefore this outlook on life is fragmentary. You understand? Only one part of my brain is actively sharing or actively operating throughout my life, only a part. And therefore the brain is not functioning wholly. Right? You understand the question? If it interests you, you want to find out whether the brain can operate holistically, completely, not just a part. Are you interested in that kind of question? Why? Is it curiosity, or just to argue about it? Or are you serious enough to say, I want to find out whether the brain which is now very limited - because all knowledge is limited. Right? You must be quite sure of that - all knowledge, whether it be the knowledge of the past or the knowledge of the future, knowledge is everlastingly limited. They are discovering more and more and more in the scientific world. No scientist can ever say, "My knowledge is complete". Right? So knowledge is always incomplete. And knowledge being incomplete, thought is incomplete. Because thought is born out of knowledge as memory and thought is limited. Right? Without memory you have no thought, without knowledge there is no existence as thought. And we only function, now, with the limited thought. Right? You understand? I wonder if you are following all this? My thought and your thought, the thought of the great scientist or the uneducated individual, his thinking is similar. Thinking is similar. They may express it differently but that thought is limited. So as long as our thinking is the basis of our action, the basis of our life, the brain can never function as a whole. Right? Logically see this, please. Our lives are fragmentary: I'm a businessman. I'm a scientist, I am a painter - right? - and so on and so on. We are all put in categories. Therefore our life is fragmentary because our thinking is limited and therefore it must inevitably be fragmentary. Would you accept this? Not accept it - see the fact of it, would you? You are all so doubtful, aren't you? Because we are cutting at the very root of our life, which is thinking. And we have built marvellous cathedrals, great architecture, great implements of war, the computers and so on, all the product of thought. And all the things in the cathedrals and the church are the product of thought. Right? Nobody can deny this - all the vestments, all the robes the priests put on, are copied, or part of it, from the Egyptians -thought has produced all this. And thought has also invented god. Now, the question is whether to eliminate thought altogether. And who is the entity who is going to eliminate all thought? It is still thought. Right? I wonder if you see that? Your meditation, if any of you indulge in that kind of stuff, is to eliminate thinking. But you never examine who is the eliminator, who is saying, "I mustn't think"? It's still thought who says "By Jove, if I don't think I might get something." And yet thought is necessary, knowledge is necessary in certain areas otherwise you can't get home, you can't write letters, you couldn't speak English and so on and so on. So thought has been the instrument of our fragmentation. And to so observe that, not say, "How to get rid of thought" but to observe the fact that thought is necessary in certain areas, and thought in the psychological world may not be necessary at all. In our relationship with each other, if thought is the instrument, which it is, then that very thought is the factor of divisiveness. To see it, not what to do about it. To see the danger of this, then you move away from danger. Like a precipice, like a dangerous animal, you run away. Similarly, thought is dangerous in the psychological world. I wonder if you see this? Though it is necessary in certain areas. Then, if you observe this very carefully, without any bias, then thought begins to realize its own place. "THE WORLD OF PEACE" BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST PUBLIC QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 30TH AUGUST 1983 We have to go into these questions. First of all if one may ask most respectfully, from whom do you expect the answers? It is good to question, not only the speaker or to question your friends, your wives and your husbands, question, to doubt, to enquire, to be sceptical. And when one puts a question, which is a challenge, to whom or from whom do you expect that challenge to be answered? Is it a challenge to oneself? Or are you challenging the speaker? There is a great deal of difference: when you are putting the question to yourself, to oneself, then you are really probing into it, putting your teeth into it. And if one is earnest and really deeply concerned then the answers can only be found in the question. The answer is not, if one may point out, separate from the question, it is not somewhere the answer is, and the question is somewhere else. So we are saying that in the very questioning is the answer. I hope we understand that. So we are together going to enquire into these questions. And in enquiring together we will find the answer. It is not that the speaker is going to answer, like a politician, he has got all kinds of answers, but here we are together enquiring into these questions. The question is far more important, is it not, than the answer. Why do I put a question to myself, or to the world, or to my friend? If I put a question rather superficially the answer will inevitably be superficial because my question is really not very important, to myself or to the world. But if I put a question and try to find the nature, what lies behind the question, then I am opening the question. It is like digging in a well, the more you dig the more water. So we are together, if I may point out again, we are going together to go into these questions. Is that all right? 1st QUESTION: How do you know what you are saying is true? Why do you ask me that question? Isn't it true that as long as there is national division, economic division, racial division, religious division, there must be conflict. That is a fact. Right? Would you accept that? So it is not what I say to be true, but the fact itself. Facts themselves show what the truth is. As we talked the other day about relationship: as long as there is this separation between two human beings, psychologically, there must be conflict. That is a fact. It is not what I say - how do I know what I say is true, but it is a fact that as long as I am ambitious and pursuing my particular form of pleasure, particular fulfilment, and my wife or husband, or girl friend does the same, we must inevitably end up in conflict. That is a fact. So it is not, how do I know what truth is. First of all let us look at facts. We are greatly prejudiced people. We have a great many prejudices. We have cultivated them, we have strengthened them by public opinion and so on, that our prejudices prevent understanding other people. Right? That is a fact. So can one be free of prejudices, free of certain opinions which become so very strong in our lives. And the question then arises: how is it possible for human beings to be free of prejudices? That we can discuss. That we can have a conversation, a dialogue and say, look I have prejudices, suppose I have them, and you have them, and so these prejudices, whether they are idealistic prejudices, capitalist prejudices, totalitarian prejudices, religious prejudices, they divide people. Right? This is a simple fact. And where there is division there must be conflict - the Arab and the Jew, the Islamic world and the rest of the world, those who are terribly bigoted and those who are not, must be in conflict. It is a fact. I have nothing to do with it. It isn't how do I know what I am saying is true, we are just facing facts. Now what is a fact? What do you think is a fact? That which has happened before, an incident, a car accident, that is a fact. Or what is happening now, sitting here, is a fact. But what will happen in the future may not be a fact. So fact implies that which has happened before: yesterday, walking along the lane, I met a viper, I saw it, it didn't bite me. That is a fact. And what is happening now, what I am thinking, what I am doing now, is a fact. And what I will do may not be a fact. It might happen, or might not happen. So if we are clear on what is a fact, and then what is an idea. You understand? Is an idea a fact? And the word 'idea', the Greek and so on, Latin, means to observe. The root meaning of that word 'idea' is to observe, to perceive, to see. What we do is see a fact and make an abstraction of it and then pursue the idea. Which means there is always the fact and a conclusion from the fact, and pursue the fact, pursue the conclusion, not the understanding of the fact. Am I making myself clear? So please it is not how do you know what you are saying is true, the speaker is merely pointing out facts. Those facts are not personal. If I say I am a Hindu and I stick to it, that is a fact. Whether it is an illusion, whether it is some kind of superstitious sentimental nonsense, that also is fact. You understand? Fact can be an illusion, or actual. But most of us live with illusions. I am an Indian - that is an illusion. And you are, if I may most gently point out, you are British - that is also an illusion. This tribal insular worship is destroying the world. That is a fact. As long as I am an Arab and you are something else, I am going to destroy you because I believe by destroying you I will go to heaven. Right? That is an illusion which they have accepted as a fact, and for that illusion they are willing to fight and kill, and destroy. Right? So can we always deal with facts? I am asking: can we always be with facts? Not translate the facts according to my prejudice, according to my belief, according to my neurotic illusions, however noble they are, can I look at these facts and understand what those facts are telling, saying? Suppose I had an accident in a car, can I look at that fact that I was rather careless, driving too fast, not paying complete attention to what I was doing because I was talking to my friend next to me - that is a fact. But I then say, "No, it is your fault" - you know, the other fellow is a fool! Now, it is a fact that we have ideals. Right? Don't you all have ideals? No? I wish we could have a dialogue, friendly, talk to each other. Don't you have ideals? I am afraid you do. Ideals. What are those ideals? Are they facts? The ideal that we must live peacefully. Right? The ideal that we must be - whatever it is, nonviolent, or the ideals of a communist, which are drawn from historical study, but those studies are prejudiced by my conditioning, so why do we have ideals at all? I know this is a dangerous thing to say because most of us live with these extraordinary ideals. We are questioning, please I am not saying you should or should not have ideals. I am saying, why do we have ideals, faiths, beliefs, as a Christian, as a Buddhist, as a Hindu, I am an American, you are British, you know, all the rest of it -why? Is it our brain is incapable of living without any illusion? What do you say to that? Is my brain capable, strong, vital, to understand things as they are and not create a future ideal? Ideal is non-existent. Right? All Christians and all religious people believe that you must not kill. Right? And probably the Christians have killed more than anybody else. Right? And the British. And the Islamic world have killed more - not so many as the Christians. And probably the Buddhists and the Hindus come on a lower scale because they are barbarians, they are uncivilized people. And so it goes on. And we know that ideals of every kind, faith, belief, divide people. That is a fact. So, can we be free of ideals, of faith, of being identified with one group and against another group which identifies with another group. You follow? Be free of all this. Could we - or is that impossible? If we could have a dialogue about this then we would exchange views - yes, it is possible, it is not possible, why is it not possible - you understand? Could we do that now? To have a free mind, free brain, that is not cluttered up with a lot of rubbish, a lot of illusions, is that possible? And some of you may say, no, it is not possible because I can't live without my beliefs. I must have my ideals, my faith, otherwise I am lost - with your faiths, with your beliefs, ideals you are already lost. That is a fact. You are very lost people. But whereas if we could have a dialogue, conversation, and say, why do I cling to my particular prejudice, particular ideal, and so on, why have I identified myself with them? Why do I identify myself with anything? You follow? Push it. Push it deeply to find out why we do all these things. Why we have allowed ourselves to be programmed. Why are we afraid of public opinion and so on and so on. So the question: how do you know what you are saying is true? I am afraid it has very little meaning. Truth is not something that is mysterious, truth is where you are. From there we can begin. Truth is I am angry, I am jealous, I am aggressive, I quarrel. That is a fact. So one must begin, if one may most respectfully point out, where one is. That is why it is important to know oneself, to have complete knowledge of oneself, not from others, not from psychologists, brain specialists and so on, but to know what you are. Because you are the story of mankind. Do you understand all this? If you know how to read that book which is yourself, then you know all the activities and the brutalities and the stupidities of mankind because you are the rest of the world. Right? Is that question clear? 2nd QUESTION: Is desire something fundamental in human beings? Without desire could we function in this world at all? Could we talk about this? Have a conversation: what is desire, why desire has become so important in our lives and why desire dominates and why desire changes its object from year to year. Right? You understand? Why? And all the various monks throughout the world, they are supposed to be serious people, dedicated, committed, they suppress their desires, they are tortured by their desires. Right? They may worship whatever symbol, whatever person, but desire is there burning like a fire. Right? This is a common fact. And to understand the whole nature of desire one must go into it very, very carefully. Let's talk about it together, shall we? Join me please. Why have human beings yielded to desire, to do everything that they wanted to do, on one side; and there are other human beings who say you must suppress desire? You understand this? The monks, the sannyasis of India, and the Buddhist monks, all say you must control your desire, or transform your desire to god. Do you understand all this? Turn your desire to the worship of your saviour, turn this desire that is so strong, take vows against it -vows of celibacy, vows of silence, vows of one meal a day. You understand? Have you ever been in a monastery? No? I was in one for some time for fun. And I watched, I listened, slept there, did the things they did. It was really a cruel affair. Take a vow of silence and never speak again - you understand what it means? Never look at a woman. Do you understand all this? Never look at the sky, the beauty of trees, the solitary tree in a field, never communicate what you are feeling to another. Do you understand all this? In the name of service, in the name of god, human beings have tortured themselves to find illumination, to find enlightenment, to find something or other, heaven. And that is a tremendously torturing affair. And desire is at the root of all this. Right? I wonder if you understand all this. Human beings in India, in the West, and the Far East, they have done everything to suppress this flame. I once met a man, an Indian, highly educated, he had been to the West, talked excellent English, very learned, and yet he had taken a vow never to enter into a married couple's house. Please, you may laugh at it. Because he said sex is an abomination; and when he said it is an abomination you could feel the tortures he had been through. You understand all this? Does it mean anything to you, all this? So to go into this question: what is desire? Why are there these two elements in life, the suppression, the control, and the other side to do what you want. There are the gurus who say do what you want, god will bless you, and of course they are very, very popular. And thousands go, offer everything they have - you know all that is happening in the world. So we must go into this question: what is desire and whether it is the fundamental urge of life, of living. Is this quite clear, up to now? So let's go into it. What is desire? You understand? We expanded desire, what is taking place in the world, night clubs, sex, free sex, do what you want to do, gurus help you to do what you want to do, really it releases all your inhibitions. Counter groups -you know. God, this world is mad all right! But they never ask the question apparently, I may be mistaken: what is the nature of desire? What is that entity that controls desire? You understand? The urge to have something, to possess something, and the entity that says, "Don't". Right? There is this battle going on: one desire opposing another desire. Right? Are we together in this? We are having a conversation, I am not making a sermon. We are having a dialogue together. Which is: why is there in human beings this dual process going on, opposite processes, wanting and not wanting, suppressing and letting go? You understand my question? Why is there this contradiction in us? Does the contradiction exist because we are not facing facts? Facts have no contradiction, it is a fact. I wonder if you understand? I am angry. That is a fact. I am violent. I am jealous, greedy. That is a fact. But when I say, "I am violent", there is immediately an idea I must not be violent. Right? And I must not be violent becomes the ideal, which is non-violence. So there is a battle between violence, which I am, and trying to be nonviolent. Why have we done this? The non-violence is non-fact. I know it is a fashion brought about through Tolstoy in India and so on, that we must all be non-violent. Whereas we are actually violent human beings. Would you admit that? Therefore why do we have its opposite? You understand? Is that an escape from fact? And if it is an escape from fact why do we escape? Is it because we do not know how to deal with the fact? I escape from something because I don't know what to do about it, but if I know what to do I can deal with it. So let's find out - oh, that takes too long! I will go into it. Let's find out how to deal with the fact only, not with its opposite. I am violent. And I have no opposite. Because that is non-fact, that has no validity at all. What has validity, what is truth, what is a fact, is I am violent. Right? And what does violence mean? Not only to do harm to another, throw a bomb and all the rest of things that are going on in the world, it also means comparison. Right? When I compare myself with you, who are clever, bright, noble and all the rest of it, then what takes place when I am comparing with you? Through comparison I make myself dull. Right? I wonder if you follow all this? Is this too much? Why do we compare? Of course you have to compare, if you have the money, between two cars, or between dresses and so on, that is inevitable. But why do I psychologically compare myself with anybody? Is it because I do not know how to deal with myself? You understand? When you say to a boy, you must be like your elder brother, as most parents do, what happens to that boy, who is B? When you are comparing B with A, what happens to B? Have you ever thought about it? I have two sons, A and B - or two girls, whatever it is. I am comparing A, the youngest boy to the older, and say, "You must be like him." What does that do to A? You understand? When I say you must be like B, what happens to A? Then he is imitating, conforming. You have set a pattern and this comparison is a form of violence. Right? I wonder if you see that. No? So imitation is violence. You have to go into this to see all the subtleties of it. So when you look at violence it opens itself more and more, what the content of that word is, and it reveals most extraordinary things. But if you are pursuing non-violence, which is illusory, which is non-factual, it has no meaning. I wonder if you see this? So, let's come back. Which really means: how do you observe violence? Is the observer different from the thing called violence? You understand? I am violent. That word indicates the reaction, and I have used that word because I have repeated it so often - to identify that particular reaction. Are you following? And by using that word constantly I am strengthening that feeling. So can I be free of the word and look? Do you understand all this? No, you don't. So let's come back. What is desire? How does it happen? And can that be understood, lived with, so that there is no suppression, no condemnation, or indulging in it? Right? To look at it, to understand it, so that when you understand something very clearly then it becomes simple. If I know how to dismantle a car, which I have done, not the modern cars, they are too complicated, then it is fairly simple to deal with any misbehaving, or something faulty. So it never frightens one. So let's look at this very carefully. What is desire? What is the root and the beginning of desire? Right sirs? Can we have a dialogue on it? We are asking what is the root of desire and can we observe that root and remain with that root? You understand? Not say it is right, or wrong, it is good to have desire, or what will human beings do without desire, and all that kind of question. Q: I have an answer to your question. I think separation from the mother is the root of desire. K: From the mother? The baby gets desire from the mother? Q: No, desire from the separation. K: Desire from the separation from the mother? Is that so? Is that true, a fact? We don't know. Don't go back to babies and children and mothers, and all that. That is a different question. We will deal with it when it arises. We are asking: what is the root of desire? You see something beautiful, a nice picture, a beautiful piece of furniture, jewelry. You see it in the window. What takes place? Let's go slowly. You see the particular jewel in the window. There is a reaction to that. Right? You go inside the shop and you ask the man to show you that particular jewel. You touch it. The you have a certain sensation. Right? That is, seeing, going inside and contact with your fingers, then sensation. Right? Seeing, contact, sensation. Then - please go slowly, you will see it for yourself - then thought imagines how lovely you would look with that jewel, on your hand, or round your neck, or in your ears. Right? So at that moment desire is born. Am I making myself clear? That is, it is natural to have this sensation - seeing that jewel in the window, going into the shop, handling it, sensation, a feeling. Then thought comes along, it is all done in a flash of a second, but thought comes along and says, "How lovely that would be on my finger. How lovely it would be if I owned that marvellous piece of jewelry." At that moment desire is born. Right? I wonder if you understand? If we could approach desire slowly, step by step, then we see how desire is born - seeing, contact, sensation. Then thought sees that car, touches it, goes round it, feels it, opens it up and then, sensation. Then thought says, "I'd like to have that car, sit in it, drive it." You understand? All this takes place instantly, now we are separating it step by step. So if you are aware of this whole process - seeing, contact, sensation, thought imagining you in the car and driving it off. You understand that? That moment is the birth of desire, when thought interferes with sensation. Got it? Is this a fact? Not what you say, is it true, is this a fact? This is a fact. You see a blouse, or a skirt, or a nice shirt in the window and you know, you go through the whole process in a flash of a second. But when you slow it down, like in a film, step by step, you see the whole movement of it - seeing, contact, sensation, thought with its image, then desire is born. Right? Are we clear on this? Not I am saying this, don't say, "What right have you to tell me that?" It is a fact. Then let's find out why thought does this. Why thought captures the sensation and makes an image of it. You understand what I am saying? Why? Now you see, why does thought do this? Q: Trapped in memory which likes to repeat itself. K: Yes, no. This is the habit, isn't it? This is our unconscious, unaware movement. Right? I see something, immediately - we never separate thought from sensation. You understand what I am saying? I wish you could. Am I talking sense or nonsense? You judge - please, you question what I am saying. So thought is more dominant than desire. Right? I wonder if you see that? Which is, thought shapes sensation. Right? You have had sex last night and thought is going on - the image, the picture, the wanting. So desire and thought go together. Right? Are you following? Is that so? Or is desire something totally different from thought? Or they are always going together like two horses. And then like two horses trotting along together, then thought says, "I must control". I wonder if you understand? So when one is aware of this movement of seeing, contact, sensation and thought capturing the sensation, creating an image, at that moment desire is born. Now can there be a hiatus, a gap, an interval, between sensation and the moment when thought captures sensation? You understand what I am saying? I see - one sees a car, a very good model, beautifully polished, beautiful lines and aerodynamic and all the rest of it. And you see it. The seeing, going round it, touching it, sensation. Why don't you stop there? Why does thought take over so quickly? If you are aware of this whole movement then there can be observation very clearly when thought begins to come in. Right? When you observe it so closely then thought hesitates. You follow? I wonder if you follow all this? So attention to all this denies totally any control. I wonder if you understand all this? After all, when I control my desire, the controller is another form of desire. Right? So one desire is in conflict with another desire. But if we understand the whole movement of desire then - you understand - there is a certain quality of discipline, not control. But the awareness, or the attention to this whole movement is its own discipline. Am I talking to myself? No, you haven't done any of this. It is all totally new. Q: Can I ask you a question about thought? When we go now from this tent, what do we do with our thoughts that they don't start? K: I explained this madam the other day. Thought is necessary in certain areas otherwise you and I couldn't speak English. Thought is necessary for you to go home, to do your job, your skill. Thought has built the extraordinary things of the world, cathedrals, atom bomb, the marvellous submarines. And also thought has created all the things that are in the cathedrals, the vestments, the robes - and all the rest of it, and also thought has created war - my country, your country, my tribe and your tribe. So all that we are saying is: thought is necessary in certain places, it is not necessary in other areas. That requires a great deal of observation, attention, care, to find out where thought is not necessary. Right? But we are so impatient, we want to get at it quickly, like taking a pill for a headache. But we never find out what is the cause of the headache. You understand? And all the rest of it. So if this is very clear, the origin and the beginning of desire, then that very clarity is its own order, then there is no discipline, desire. Right? Have I made this somewhat clear? Q: What is the difference between clarity of desire of buying something or to look for truth? K: The desire for a blue suit, blue shirt, blue blouse, whatever it is, and desire for truth are exactly the same, because they are both desire. I might desire a beautiful car, and you might desire for heaven, what is the difference? We are trying to understand desire, not the objects of desire. Your object may be to sit next to god, my object of desire may be to have a nice garden. But desire is common to both of us and we are trying to understand desire, not your heaven and my garden. If I understand desire then whether you have heaven - you follow? 3rd QUESTION: Jealousy and mistrust are poisoning my relationship with someone. Is there any solution other than isolating myself from every other human being except him? I wonder why you laughed. This is a common everyday human life. Right? How do you answer this question? If I put this question to you, how would you deal with it? What would be your reaction, your response to this question? Would you laugh? Would you say, "I am not jealous"? So let's go together into this very complex question, which is a human question. It is not something about heaven, or nirvana, or illumination. You know, sir, unless we keep our house in order, meditation and other things have no value. Right? If my house, which is me, is not in complete order, without any conflict, what is the point of meditation? It is another escape, another illusion. But when my house is in order, completely, without any shadow in my house, then meditation is something entirely different. But we think by meditating, god knows what, then your house will be in order. See how deceptive we are. So let's go into this. Jealousy and distrust, poisoning one's life, have I to isolate myself to be with her, or him? Why do we possess people? Right? Why? We are having a dialogue please. Why do I possess my wife? And my wife delights in possessing me. Why? Q: I need the status and there is a fear of being alone. K: Which means what? Sir, look: we are asking this question, to end jealousy, not just to go on and on and on for the rest of our life. Like desire, to understand it so fully, it becomes very simple. So I want to find out why I am jealous. Why I am jealous of my wife, or she is jealous of me. Is it that we want to possess each other? What does that mean? What am I possessing? The body? Please enquire with me sirs. The body, the organism and what is implied in possession? To dominate. Right? Doesn't it? Oh, come on sirs. I want to possess her - go into it: why do I want to possess? Because I am lonely, she gives me comfort, she is mine, legally, morally, the church has blessed it, or the Registrar has blessed it, and I hold her - why? Is it because I am lonely? If I am lonely I want to escape from that tremendous void of the word which I use, 'lonely', to escape from it - to which I escape too becomes all important. You understand? I escape from life by inventing god and I hold to that god because that is the only thing I have. So, I possess her, and what does that mean, in possessing somebody? Dominating, identifying myself with her - go slowly, enquire slowly. And it gives me a sense of power. Right? And at the end of all this I say she is mine. People like to be possessed -don't you? No? Can you say to your wife, "I don't possess you"? Oh, you people have never done anything. And I am jealous, which is, she is depriving me of my stability, my security when she goes away and talks to somebody else, or looks at somebody else, or does something or other with somebody else - I am at a loss. She has deprived me of my identity, driven me to my loneliness. And I hate all that. So I am jealous of her. Which means, jealousy implies hate, anger, violence, beating - god, don't you know all this? And I can't let her go and she can't let me go, and we live like that. Jealousy, distrust, feeling lonely deeply inside but trying to escape from it, that's my life, and that is what we call relationship, and that is what we call love. You understand sirs? So one asks a much deeper question: is love desire? Go on sirs. Is love pleasure? You have to answer that question, not I. It is your life not my life. And can each of us see this fact, what possession, domination, power, does to each of us? You - the man may see it first, or the woman may, then will she help him to see all this? And is he willing to listen to all this? You are following all this, or is this all strange to you? Will he, or she listen to each other, the basis of it, being afraid to lose - you understand? Afraid of losing one's security in relationship. And when that security is shaken I am jealous. Will my wife listen to me? And I say to her, "Look, old girl, I love you but I don't possess you" - could you say that? My golly! "I am free of you and you are free of me." Which doesn't mean free love and going off, you know, changing every year a new man or a new woman. But seeing the whole problem, not just jealousy, how to get rid of jealousy, or distrust, but seeing the whole problem of relationship, which is very complex, which demands subtlety, sensitivity. Q: I can see it. K: But will you do something about it? One can intellectually understand all this, verbally, which you call intellectually. What value has it when I carry on with jealousy for the rest of my life and that jealousy creates wounds in me psychologically? I am hurt inwardly and I carry on with that hurt, with that jealousy, with that distrust - is this the way to live? So merely to see it all intellectually has very little meaning. But if you say, "Look, I am jealous. Let's go into it. Let's find out whether it can end" - which means do I possess anything at all? Am I attached to anything? Attached to my wife, husband, attached to ideals, my future success - you know, attachment. When you are attached then there is jealousy, there is anxiety, there is pain. If you see that very clearly then the thing becomes very simple. But you don't want to see it clearly because we want to live the way we have lived for a million years. Right? Can we go on to the next question? Or do you want to escape from these questions? Q: Can I ask a question? How does one break free of habits? Once one has intellectually reached an understanding from such as one has just discussed, how does one break free of habit then? K: When one understands something verbally, so-called intellectually, how does one break that habit. That is the question the gentleman asked. What is habit? It is a repetition, isn't it? Cleaning one's teeth every morning, afternoon and evening, it becomes a routine, you don't pay attention, you just do it very quickly and get off. So the brain establishes a pattern, drinking, sex, whatever it is, it establishes a pattern, then repeats it, then it becomes mechanical. Right? Are you following all this? So the brain through constant habits has become what it is now - not active, alive. So the gentleman asks: how do you break a habit, whatever the habit? A habit to search for god, to go to some exotic guru who promises you everything and lets you do what you like - you know all the crazy things that are going on in the world. Now how do you break a habit? Without conflict - right? You understand? Let's say I have a habit, of what - give me a habit, would you please. Q: Smoking. K: Smoking is such an easy affair, that is an easy affair to stop. Q: Always giving the same answer. K: I hope I am not giving the same answer. It doesn't matter. I have a habit, smoking, scratching my head, keeping my mouth open, habit of thinking the same thing over and over and over again, or the habit of chattering. Let's take chattering. I am not only chattering with myself but I am always endlessly talking with others. Right? The other day somebody came to see me, it was an interview. I don't give interviews anymore but she insisted, she came. The moment she entered - please, it is none of you here - she began to talk, talk, talk, and when she left, "I am glad to have met you." We all chatter endlessly; not only some go back and forth but also chatter inwardly. That has become an extraordinary habit for most people, they can never be quiet, never be silent. Silence in the sense the brain completely still, but that is a different matter, we can go into it later. So this habit of chattering. How do I stop it? First of all, who is to stop it? Another chatterer who says, "I must stop this chattering but I will have my own chattering" - you understand? So who is to stop chattering? Fear? Seeing that it is a wastage of energy, chattering, chattering, then will you stop that? So we have to ask a question which is more serious: is there an entity outside of you, or inside of you, that will act as a brake upon chattering, that will say, "No I will not chatter"? Is it - please listen carefully - is it will, the decision not to chatter? And if it is will, what is will? The quintessence of desire - right? Right? Are you all tired? Q: No. K: All right. How quickly you answered. So, how do you stop a habit of chattering? First of all, if you stop it through will, through desire, that creates another conflict, doesn't it? And to stop chattering without conflict - you understand my question? - is that possible? I chatter. First of all I am not aware I am chattering. You point it out to me and say, "Old chap do stop chattering so much." And I get rather hurt by it but if I go beyond that and I say, "Now, in what manner am I to stop it?" Then I have got the orthodox means of will, or taking a drug that will quieten me down, and having been quietened I take another drug to keep me awake - and I keep on that routine. So I want to find out how to stop a habit, like chattering, keeping your mouth open, scratching yourself, all kinds of things, without any kind of effort. You understand my question? This is an important question. To do something without effort. Does it amuse you, it's fun. Will you do this? Find out your particular habit, aware of it, and say, now, can it be ended without any action of will, decision, compulsion, reward - you understand - reward and punishment they are the two elements we live on. So can I break that habit without any side effects. Right? Can we go into this? I will go into it. First of all am I aware of my habit, not that you point it out to me and then I realize it, but am I aware of my habits without somebody telling me of my habits. You understand? See the difference. If you tell me my habit then I either resist it, or say, yes, I must stop it. But if I see it for myself I am a step ahead, if I can so put it. Right? Now are we aware of our particular habit, chattering, we took that? Now what does that awareness mean? Awareness means to look at something without any reaction, without any choice. I am aware that I am chattering, that is first. Then to be aware, to watch it without any condemnation, justification or explanation, just to watch it. Will you do that? So that the old reactions don't come in, the old tradition doesn't come in and say, "I must stop it", I must do this, I must do that. So to watch the chattering very carefully. To watch it means without any reaction of past memories. This becomes very difficult. You understand? If I watch that tree in movement in the wind, it is a beautiful thing, And I don't like wind therefore I won't watch it. Similarly in a certain way, I can watch my chattering. The watcher is not different from chattering. So the watcher is not the structure of words, memories, he is just watching. You understand? Please this is rather complex and requires a great deal of enquiry. We watch things with our prejudices, with our opinions, with our memories, the whole structure of words. Right? We watch everything that way. Now can you watch without all that memory, structure? That is where the art comes in, the art of watching. Now I watch - there is a watching of my chattering. I am aware and in that awareness I am not seeking any reward or punishment, I am just watching. Which means what? I am giving complete attention at that moment. Right sirs? At that second all my energy, all my capacity and attention is there. Which means when there is complete attention, complete, not attention brought about by any form of desire, through any form of reward or punishment, just complete attention, then that habit has no place. You understand? Do it please, try it once. Now, you will say, yes, for the moment it is possible, I can see that can end, if I give complete attention to something there is an ending to it, but it comes back. Right? Are you following? It comes back, the chattering comes back. Then what is your reaction? I did it once, gave complete attention, and it seems to subside for the second, now if I give the same attention it will subside again. So you have become mechanical. I wonder if you see this? Do you understand this? I gave attention, complete attention, to my chattering. That flame of attention wiped away for a few minutes chattering. I have seen the thing works. Then the next moment, or next hour, whatever period of time, you begin to chatter and suddenly catch yourself and say, "I must pay attention." So again you repeat, again it disappears. So gradually what you are learning is paying attention, which means you are not attending. Have you understood what I am saying? If you are constantly reminding yourself to attend, it is not attention. But attention has no time - oh, I won't go into all this. If you give your complete attention, which means there is no wastage of energy, then the thing goes away. So your concern is not attention but wasting energy - you follow? We waste energy in a thousand ways, chattering is one of the ways. So, all right, I don't pay attention any more about chattering, but I am going to see how I waste my energy - right? I am going to pursue that. I am going to watch, learn, see where I am wasting energy. Oh, there are so many ways. Right? So my mind now is not becoming mechanical by the repetition that I must attend but it is moving. Right? All the time picking up new things. I wonder if you see all this? So that the brain becomes extraordinarily alert, and when it is so alert habits have no place. "THE WORLD OF PEACE" BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND PUBLIC QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 1ST SEPTEMBER 1983 There are several questions here and I hope this morning we can go through them. These questions are really problems. And to resolve problems a mind, or rather the brain, unless it is free from problems in itself, it cannot possibly solve the problems without raising other problems. Right? That is what politicians throughout the world are doing. They have got innumerable problems, war, atomic bombs and all the rest of it, their own position, their ambition, they represent the voter and so on and so on, their brains are full of their problems. And such a brain, as our brains also, are cluttered with so many problems, to resolve other problems, how can you solve them unless your brain is free from problems? I hope I am making this clear. If my brain is clouded with several problems, scientific, medical, health, sexual - so many problems human beings have, and other problems arise, how can I meet them? I only meet them with a brain that is not only trained to resolve problems but also heavy with problems. So shouldn't one enquire whether it is possible to be free of problems? And then any problem that arises we can meet freely. Is that possible? You understand my question? Suppose I have several personal problems, and my brain is worried and concerned and thinking about it all the time, and I meet other problems - problems being something thrown at me - I can only meet them according to my brain which is already heavy with problems. Right? Isn't it important - I am just asking - to have a mind, a brain which is really free from problems. Then life has problems, you can meet them freely. Am I making my position clear? This, as we said the other day, this is a dialogue between us, not a monologue by me but a dialogue where two of us are talking things over. Neither is trying to impress the other, or convince the other, or subtly persuading the other, but two friends talking over together. And I hope we are doing this, together look at these problems. If our brain is not free, then whatever problems arise we will meet them with the problems that we already have. So we are asking: is it possible for a brain to be free of problems? Is this all right? Am I putting a wrong question? Now how is a brain to be free of problems so that it can meet problems? How do you meet it? How do you meet problems with a free mind, a free brain? Do please let's talk it over together. From childhood we are trained to have problems, the whole of education is a series of problems, mathematical, relationship, teacher and the student, examinations - you know, the whole educational system becomes a problem. And we are trained to resolve problems. So our brain is trained, educated. Now can one uncondition the brain which has been trained to solve problems and is therefore never free? Am I making my question clear so that we are both understanding each other? Right? Is that possible? Please. Q: Is it not necessary first to free ourselves from very strong attachments. K: Sir, it is not a question of attachment for the moment. But I am just asking my brain from childhood, and your brain, is trained to have problems and to resolve problems. That is a fact. Such a brain meeting problems will always meet them with a brain that is cluttered. Right? Shouldn't it be free to meet problems? No? Now how do you propose to be free? What will you do? Q: Could it be that first we should recognize that by asking that question we are making it another problem. K: Not asking that person, yourself. Is it possible for me, for my brain, not to have a single problem so that it can meet the problems of life freely? This is really a very, very serious question. Q: Yes. K: Yes? It is so easy as that? Q: You have to look. K: Is your brain free from problems? Are you free from problems - health problems, mathematical, if you are a technician, you know, the whole world of technology with their problems, personal problems, problems of relationship, political problems, whether it should be a democratic or republican, a communist or a socialist, whether you believe in god or don't believe in god, whether you - you follow, our brain is so loaded. The more serious you are the more the burden becomes. So in what manner can the brain be entirely free from problems? You see we haven't thought about this at all. Does one demand the brain to be free from problems so that it can meet problems? Q: I have thought about it but that seems to create another problem. K: Yes, that is just it. You have thought about it and the very thinking about it creates another problem. Q: One has to ask whether thought can solve problems. K: Whether thought solves the problem and so on. Does this mean anything to each one of us? Or is it something that you haven't really given your mind to it? Q: A great many people enjoy their problems and they would find life very boring if they didn't have problems. K: Oh well that is a different matter. If you enjoy your problems good luck! That is a kind of neuroticism. Shall we go into this matter before answering all the questions -there are here about eight questions? Problems have conditioned our brain. Right? Have limited the brain. And do we see the importance that a brain that has been working on problems, problem after problem, is incapable of meeting any problem at all? Are we clear on that point, verbally even, intellectually? Q: I am not sure about that one. The brain has a stack of problems, you are saying it is incapable of meeting another problem freshly, coming to that problem. K: If the brain has problems and meets another problem, what happens? Q: It copes with it as it does cope with it - more or less badly, or better or worse. K: That is what is happening in the world. Q: That is the case. You cannot therefore say the brain cannot deal with problems just because it has problems. K: No, it can only deal with problems partially, limited. Q: Yes, I agree. K: And therefore more problems. Q: Yes, all right. K: That's all we are saying. Look at all the politicians in the world, that is a perfect example. They are creating one problem after another and merely never solving any problems. You have perfect examples here. Q: Yes, but what is it that we are demanding when we want some sort of absolute kind of solution? K: We are going to find out sir if there is, or there is not. Q: Oh, all right, fair enough. K: Or must we always live with increasing problems, multiplying problems? So can the brain be aware of itself - this is a very serious question if you want to go into it - can the brain be aware? - it has problems, personal, health, scientific, and so on and so on, multiple problems, many, many problems. And can we put aside and look at those problems first objectively, unemotionally, not taking sides and so on, without bias? Can we do that? Q: I don't know about the old mind, there is something happening which you can't cope with and making it into a problem of thought. K: Sir, you are not meeting my question - forgive me for pointing out. Q: The problem is only for our ego. K: Problems exist for the sustenance of our ego. All right. But what will you do about it? Oh, I see you can't deal with this. All right, let's go to our questions. Q: No, no. K: We will come back to it perhaps at the end of it. May we? Come back? Q: Is it possible that our problem is that we always want answers to the questions? As we sit here you are putting a question into this whole gathering and immediately many people are creating a duality by wanting an answer to the question, which is the way we always live? K: All right. You are going to get them. 1st QUESTION: What is the relationship between consciousness, mind, brain, thought, intellect, meditation and intelligence? Is awareness, attention still there when thought is not? Is awareness beyond time? Now how do you meet this problem? This is a problem. Right? This is a question - how do you meet that? Because this is a question that all of us put, if you are at all serious, if you have gone into all this, you say, what is the relationship of intellect, brain, mind, intelligence, consciousness and so on? How do you meet this problem? What is your approach to this problem, to these questions? Right? What is your approach? Either you say there is no relationship, each is something separate. Or, there is a relationship between them all. That remains a mere verbal statement. But to find out actually what is your answer? How do you respond to that question? Q: To observe your own conditioning. K: Yes, which means what? One has to ask who is the observer, is the observer different from the observed? So let's begin. Is awareness beyond time? That is the question. Is one aware of the relationship between consciousness, intellect, intelligence, brain and so on? What is awareness? Are we aware when we are sitting here of the tent - of the marquee - the number of poles there are holding up the marquee, aware of the person sitting next to us, the colour of the shirt, the skirt, whatever it is? Are we aware of all this? Or, not aware of it at the same time? You are aware of it partially, from time to time. Is that awareness? Or do you take the whole thing, observe the whole marquee, see the number of poles there are and so on, all together, and observe the various colours? So isn't awareness - begin very near. Right? I am aware of the room I live in, or the flat I live in, the single room, aware of the trees, the sky, the birds, the flowers, the beauty of the land and so on. Are we aware of all this? Or we are aware very, very rarely? If we are aware is it a partial awareness, see one thing only? Or being aware you see the causation and the consequences and the ending of the cause? You follow all this? Isn't all that implied in being aware? I am aware of my wife or husband. I'd better come back down back to that. There we begin to understand much more. I am aware of my wife. Is this awareness the memory of my wife? Please answer. You understand? I am aware of my wife - which means all the images I have built about my wife. Right? The various incidents, flatteries, sex, companionship and so on, all that is a continuous memory, adding all the time. Am I aware of these memories? Or those memories are so strong, so embedded, that there is no awareness of it objectively? You understand my question? Are we going along with each other? Is this too complex? No. All right. So am I aware of the memories which interfere, block, the awareness of my wife? So I ask naturally: can this block be put aside, wiped away so that I can be aware of my wife sensitively? So that the memories don't interfere all the time. If one sees the fact that in awareness if memory is functioning, then I am not aware at all? Memory is acting all the time. If I am aware that the memories are operating all the time, then I see how they block my relationship with my wife and therefore if I like the block, if I like it because it is much better, it is easier to live that way, then I keep it, but if one sees it is not necessary, it is dangerous in relationship, then the very fact of the danger puts away the block, the barrier. Is this clear? Now let's proceed from there. What is the relationship between consciousness, mind, brain, thought and so on, intelligence, intellect? What is relationship - to be related to something? Is it identification? I am related to my husband. Is that identification, or relationship? Please. If it is identification then it is not relationship. If I am identified as a Hindu there is no relationship in that identification. If I am identified with a particular island called Britain I have no relationship. So we have to distinguish, or separate, identification and relationship. Right? Now, are you doing it? So to find out what is relationship, without identification, that is very serious. You understand? Is that possible? I have identified with my wife, or with certain ideas and conclusions, and it is almost impossible to break that identification. I am that idea, I am that concept, therefore to ask such a question: what is the relationship between consciousness, mind, brain and so on, one has to go into this question, what is relationship? If it is not identification, then what is the relationship between consciousness, yours, mine or someone else's, what is the relationship between consciousness, the mind and so on? Now, first of all we have to enquire what is consciousness? To be conscious, not only to what is taking place around me but also to be consciousness inwardly, what are my reactions, the beliefs, the fears, the faiths, the hopes, the various forms of identification. Right? Suffering, pain, health, ill health, and so on. All that is my consciousness. Right sirs? Would you agree to that? Not agree, do we move together? Your consciousness, my consciousness, or someone else's consciousness, is all its content. Without its content consciousness, as we know it now, cannot be. Right? Agreed? We go along with that? Then we ask: what is the content? If I am a Hindu, or a Christian, or British, my consciousness is made up of British tradition, the Empire, the Queens and the Kings. Right? There are various traditions, culture, linguistic control, and I believe, I have faith, and so on. Right? That is the content of my consciousness if I am British, a Frenchman and so on. If I am not of the Western world then my consciousness also is faith, belief, suffering, pain, anxiety, like the rest of the world. So the question is: is my consciousness different from yours? If I suffer, if I have anxiety, if I believe in something - I may believe in something else, and you may believe, being Christian, in something else - but belief is common to both of us. Right? Suffering we all share. It is not my suffering only but you also suffer and so on. So consciousness apart from the physical environmental impressions, which are also part of consciousness, you may be tall, I may be short, I may be lighter skinned than you, or you may be lighter skinned than me, that is a superficial coating, but inwardly we are similar. Right? I know you will not like this but that is a fact. Right? Do we go as far as that? No. Q: Yes, yes. K: Verbally we will go. Q: No, beyond verbally. K: Intellectually you see the reason, the logic of it, but to feel it, to see the truth of it. Q: You have to trust us more. K: It is not a question of I trusting you, or you trusting me, it is a question - you see how we... Q: You are saying we don't see it. Maybe we are seeing it. I don't see how you can say that we are only seeing it intellectually. K: I don't know. I am asking sir. Q: Well I feel it is not only intellectual. K: Then sir, that means the idea of individual separation, psychologically, is non-existent. That means you have tremendous responsibility for the whole. If I feel tremendous responsibility I will not kill a Brazilian, an Arab, because he is part of me. I don't know if you go as far as that. And that is not pacifism - that is another conclusion. The fact is our consciousness is shared by all humanity. Now what is the relationship between consciousness, mind, brain and all the rest of it - meditation included, all right, include everything - what is the relationship between them all? Is the cord of relationship thought? As the pearls are held together by a thin nylon thread, are all these, consciousness, mind, brain and so on, held together by thought? Thought is the thin line, thin fibre that holds all this together? Please. So one has to go into the very question: why has thought become so extraordinary vibrant, alive, and full of activity? Right? Why? Is thought feeling? Is thought emotion? Of course it is. If I do not recognize an emotion, which is the activity of thought to recognize, then that emotion is not. You understand all this? So thought apparently is the main thread that holds the whole thing together? Is that so? Then what is the mind - this is really a very, very serious question - what is the mind? Is it part of the brain? Or is it outside of the brain? Q: Is it both? K: No. Sir don't be quick. Please this is much to serious a question to say yes, both, it is, it is not. How am I to find out? Q: Well, when you drive a motor car the actual passage of the motor car going across a road, along a road, the actual miles covered, do you say "Is that in the engine"? K: Yes sir. When you are driving a car you have to be aware of not only the approaching car but also you have to be aware of the side roads, you are aware or see three hundred or four hundred feet ahead. Q: Sir, I am not saying that at all. What I am saying is - it is getting a bit slack now I have made you lose your point, I am sorry. But what I interrupted by saying was, that when you are driving a car along the road the actual passage of the car going along the road, the actual miles covered, we don't normally talk about that as being inside the engine. Yet when we are discussing as we are now, talking about different functions of the mind, body, brain, organism, that sort of thing, we try to vitalize them, yet normally they proceed in sort of almost automatic sense as if the car is going along... K: Yes sir, I know they are automatic, they all work together. Now I want to understand when we use the word mind, when we use the brain, when we use the word consciousness, like an engine they are all working together. Q: Yes, with more or less degrees of functioning. Sometimes they are functioning very badly, other times in the same life time they are functioning very well. K: I would like to, if I may most respectfully point out, first of all are we aware that there is no separation between all this? Like driving a car the engine is working, taking you along. Q: Is it possible to be aware of no separation? K: Yes sir, that is what I am asking sir, is it all a single movement, a unitary movement in which there is no separation? You see you can't answer these questions. Q: The separation is only in thought. It isn't real. K: I would like to find out for myself, what is the mind? Is it part of the brain? How do I find out? Unless my brain is unconditioned I can't find out. Right? I can't find out anything unless there is freedom to look. But I am not free. My brain is conditioned as a Catholic, Protestant, Communist, Socialist, Democrat, or religiously and so on and so on, environmentally. As long as that is conditioned I can never find out what the mind is. I can say the mind is part of the brain or it is separate from the brain. This matter we have discussed with several so-called scientists. Some of them agree that it is outside the brain. Do you understand all this? Q: Yes. K: No, sir. Please sir, please sir, don't verbally, say yes. But the implication that it is something outside the brain and that the brain can only understand that when it is itself totally free. So I am not concerned whether it is outside, inside, far away or near, my chief concern is whether the brain can be free from its conditioning. Then there will be discovery of that which is true, not just invention. So I am asking - we are asking: what is the connection between them all? Is it all one single movement? To find that out one must begin very near, which is what I am. Right? What my thoughts are. What are you? May I ask that simple question, which is very complex, but we will start very simply - what are you? Q: Slaves. K: That is understood. No, sir. Seriously what are you? You are your name. Right? You are your tradition, you are your memories. Right? And so on. So you are all that. Right? Which is, you are consciousness. Right? You believe in, you don't believe, you have faith, your gods, your fears, pleasures, suffering, pain, and emotionalism and so on and so on, you are all that. Right? We agree to that? Or do we think we are something totally different? Q: That is what we are. It is a fact. K: That is a fact. Now what does that mean? When I say my name is K, I belong to India, or Britain, or this or that, I have faith and so on, what does all that mean? Does it all mean memory? Q: Consciousness. K: Which means, if you see that, or if you don't see it, we are the past. Right? Would you go along with that, even verbally? We are the past. The past is knowledge. Right? The past is memory. Right? Q: Yes. K: You are not learning anything from me please. I am just pointing out. So we are the series of movements in memory. Right? Q: Yes. K: See the implications of it. That we are not actively living human beings. You may go to the office every day for the next ten years, fifty years, or a factory, or do something or other. You are all that too. If I am a scientist I have accumulated knowledge through books, through experiments, through discussions, through various forms of hypothesis and conclusions, all those are the past. So I am the past. Right sir? I am memories. I am a dead entity psychologically. I wonder if you see that? Q: The moment I see that... K: Wait. Do we just see it, or is it just an idea? Sir this requires a great deal of work, a great deal of observation, patience, looking at things very, very carefully, impartially, objectively, without any sense of subjective reactions to it. That when once I realize that I am the whole movement of the past, not only it is a sudden shock to me but also the realization that there is nothing new in me. Q: You haven't proved it yet. K: I seem to be probing, you are not probing. Q: Sir, if you saw this a long time ago, how come it is a sudden shock to you? K: I said sir, suppose - sorry. Right? Q: Isn't the arc narrowed down very much whenever you do anything? When you talk about being aware of all the tent and everything, if I have to start vacuuming the carpet I have to narrow it all down, and gradually as I do that I get wrapped up in everything I am doing so that it is continually narrowing down. K: So we are narrowing down - the gentleman asks why do you, K, narrow down all this? It is the same thing sir, never mind. Sir, putting light, a strong electric light on a small thing you see very clearly - right - and from there move. But if you stay only there then it remains very, very small. Question: We can learn more from each other than by listening to K. Why don't you encourage people to hold group discussions on particular topics and have organized activities to facilitate dialogue and relationship? Q: Excuse me, we didn't quite finish the last question, I thought. Because you were saying we are the past and we are all these things, but what is that? It is like a lot of stuff on a table. What is the basis of that? That is what we should really get to. Not all that memory, that dead stuff. K: Sir, if I acknowledge that I am memory - right - then I remain with that memory - right - not just one particular memory but the whole movement of memory - right - then in that observation there is a perception that one asks: is it possible to live a life without memories except where it is necessary? Q: It is, yes. I was aware of that even as a child. K: What? Q: That it is possible just to be without memories. I have been aware of this. K: Is that so? Q: Yes, it is a fact. K: All right sir, then we have solved the problem. Q: Good, good. Go on to the next question. K: Then we have solved the problem that the brain, which has been conditioned by memory for a million, or forty or fifty thousand years, can live, function, act, in all relationship of life without bringing in this terrible past. If you can live that way, it is a most extraordinary thing to live that way. Right? 2nd QUESTION: We can learn more from each other than by listening to K. Why don't you encourage people to hold group discussions on particular topics and have organized activities to facilitate dialogues and discussions? Are you listening to K? Or are you listening to yourself? K is pointing out: listen to yourself, see how conditioned you are, not, I am telling you that you are conditioned but by listening to yourself you learn infinitely more than by listening to a lot of other people, including K. But when you listen to K he is not instructing you. He is putting up a mirror in front of you to see yourself. Right? And when you see yourself very clearly you can break the mirror, and the man who holds up the mirror. Right? So do we clearly see ourselves? If we depend on relationship, depend, or on dialogue or on associations and institutions to teach us, to help us, to make things clear - what we are - then we depend. And when we depend on others, whether it is on institutions, encounter groups, small groups and so on, what are you learning? And what do you mean by learning? Please this is again a very serious question. Learning, as we know, is accumulating knowledge. I have learned about myself - that I am all this, all the pain, the misery, the confusion, the extraordinary travail of life - I am all that. I have learnt it. That is, somebody has told me, or I have learnt about myself. So learning, as far as we know now, learning at school, learning about ourselves, is accumulating knowledge about ourselves. Right? And K says knowledge is the very root of disorder. Go slowly. Knowledge is necessary in the field of technology, in daily life, but psychologically knowledge is the very root of disorder, because knowledge is the past. Right? Knowledge is always, whether in the future or in the past, or in the infinite future, is always limited, always. Right? Because it is based on experience, hypothesis, conclusions, a chain - it is a constant addition instead of taking away therefore it is very limited. So can I look at myself without the previous knowledge or conclusion when I looked at myself? You understand my question? I have looked at myself all yesterday, or a few hours of yesterday and I find that I am this, that, the other thing; I am depressed by it or I am elated by it. All that is going on. That becomes yesterday's knowledge. And with that knowledge I observe myself again. Right? We do this. Right? So knowledge is bringing about constant repetition - mechanical, psychologically. And also if you go into the matter very carefully among the scientists and so on, they are also beginning to discover knowledge is a hindrance in certain areas of discovery. Right? So you are not learning or discovering anything from K. You are the storehouse of past history. That is a fact. You are the history of mankind. Right? And if you know how to read that book, you don't have to depend on anybody, on discussions, on relationship, or organized groups and all that kind of thing. Right? I am not saying you should not discuss, you should not have relationship, you should not have this or that. All that one is pointing out is that as long as you depend for your understanding yourself on others then you are lost. You have had leaders, haven't you? Religious leaders, political leaders, every kind of specialist who will tell you what to do, how to raise your children, how to have sex, you have had every kind of leader for the last hundred thousand years or more. And where are you at the end of it? Do ask these questions please. We are what we are because we have depended on others - somebody to tell us what to do, what to think, which means we are being programmed all the time. And to understand ourselves there is every opportunity through relationship, through discussions, but if you depend on them you are lost. Is this clear, this question? Not that you must agree with the speaker. But see the consequences of depending on others -depending on governments to bring order in this chaotic world, depending on a guru, depending on the priest, whether it is the pope or the local priest. You understand? So the question is really: one is the storehouse of all mankind. Right? One is the rest of mankind and if one looks at that very closely, with a great deal of hesitation, affection, then you begin to read what you are, which then is a flowering. But if you depend then you live with pain and anxiety and fear. 3rd QUESTION: While understanding what is being said and wanting to live differently, how is one to approach the problem of livelihood in this world of unemployment and limited opportunities? K: Have different governments, which means a government which is not limited to a particular group. Right? French government, English government, each concerned with is own limited area. So there it is. Sir, what is preventing us all working together - you understand - as one human being? We are divided by nationalities, religion, by the tradition and we hold on to that. There is no world economy. You understand, sir. I wonder if you have thought about all this. There is no world economy. Each country is concerned with its own economy - right - with its own laws, with its own individual identity to a particular piece of land. There can never be united Europe. Right? Because each nation will suffer something or other. Therefore unless we have a government which is not local, not insular - right - there will be unemployment, lack of opportunities and so on. But also another factor is coming into being, which is the computer. Computer is beyond all nationalities, all governments. It can outthink us. It can create its own god which we shall worship. There is a good joke about it, but it is not worth it. Shall I repeat it? Q: Yes. K: A man says to the computer there is no god, I have never believed in god. The computer says, "You have it now". So as long as we are Americans, British, French, Italians, Hindus, Communists and Socialists, we will never have peace in the world. There will always be unemployment, there will always be wars. For god's sake see all this. When you see the truth of it you are no longer identified with any country, with any group, with any religion. But one must have passion behind it, not just intellectual concepts. So as things are, problems of livelihood become more and more difficult. As things are, you will have more wars. I don't know if you have heard - I was only told about it the other day - in Russia a certain atomic bomb blew up and for twenty five thousand years an area of several hundred miles can never be cultivated, you can never approach it. You understand what I am saying? This is humanity. And nobody cares. You may have demonstrations, but the politicians know how to use those demonstrations. But unless each one of us who is listening really sees the danger of separation, like the Jew, the Arab, the Hindu, the Muslim, the British, we are going to live in perpetual insecurity, perpetual wars. Q: What is the difference between a university and a lunatic asylum? K: I don't know, you had better find out. Professors will object to that. Q: A professor is someone who professes to know. K: Sir, don't let's go off to universities and all that. Here is a serious problem. Q: They are the ones who make the atom bomb. Q: Will you shut up talking about nonsense. Q: Atom bombs are nonsense? Q: He is talking about it, we are coming there with him. I turn myself sick because I really do care sometimes. Shut up. Find out where we are going to put them. K: Again may I remind you, if you don't mind, may I remind one that we are talking about division, separation, between nations, between groups, between religions, between individuals. As long as this separation exists there is going to be more and more unemployment, not less. More wars. As long as we hold on to our ideologies, separate and so on. So if you want to live that way, live that way. Q: But even if we have no separate identity we have got to have some form of government surely? K: Of course sir. I said Sir some form of government which is not based on separative governments. Q: Who are going to be the politicians? K: Oh sir, first have, you see we want to organize it right away. You know there is a story - I think probably the speaker invented this story. I'll repeat it. Two people were walking along the road, they were friends. They had been talking about the world and so on and how dismal everything was, how boring, how tiresome, how vicious everything had become. They were talking about things and as they go along one of them sees something on the pavement and picks it up. And the very looking at it transforms him. He becomes extraordinarily vital, happy, a sense of tremendous energy. And the other fellow says, "What have you found? What was it that made you so extraordinarily beautiful suddenly". He said, "I have picked up truth." And the other fellow says, "Marvellous. Let's go and organize it." First sir, begin with ourselves, not what kind of governments will be, who the prime minister and who the chief treasurer will be, how many parliamentary governments. You follow? First let's begin with ourselves. If all of us who are here in this marquee really felt this in their heart, in their blood, we would have different governments in the world. We would put an end to wars, we wouldn't work for wars. Look, I am not saying anything, we are only pointing out one thing - our brains are conditioned. Whatever is conditioned is limited. Whatever is conditioned is separated, and this separation, this conditioning, is causing havoc in the world, which is a fact. And to stop that havoc in the world one must begin with oneself, not how to organize a new government. Am I conditioned? Am I thinking about myself endlessly from morning until night? In meditation - you follow? - in exercise, in doing all kinds of things. Right? I am more important then anybody else. I want all my desires fulfilled. I want to be somebody, recognized, so I am occupied with myself. The scientist may be occupied with his experiments but he is occupied with himself. Right? He is also ambitious, wants a marvellous position, recognized by the world, Nobel Prize. I know some of them, I have met them. One didn't get the Nobel Prize and the other got it - you ought to see the other fellow who didn't get it. How upset he was. Bitter, angry. You know, just like you and me, everybody else. Right? So sirs and ladies if you really want to live on this peaceful earth one has to begin very near which is yourself. 4th QUESTION: You talk about violence and freedom. But you say very little about law. Why is that? No civilized society can exist without laws. And laws sometimes have to be backed by force which means violence. What do you do when terrorists hold hostages? Do you let them be killed, or storm the building? Where does freedom come into all this. Laws. What is law? Law, doesn't it mean order basically? Either a society establishes certain laws, which are to bring about order, those very laws are broken by cunning people, by criminals, by criminals who employ excellent lawyers. You know all this, don't you? Now where does law, order begin? In the courts, with the police, with the superintendents and the intelligence group? Where does order begin? Please ask. Society is in disorder. Right? It is a fact. Corrupt, immoral and almost chaotic. And governments are trying to bring order in all that. We, you and another - we live in disorder - right - confused, uncertain, seeking our own security, not only one's own security but the security of one's own family and so on. Each one is creating through isolation, disorder - no? And where is law? With the police officer? With the lawyers? I have met several of them. They will protect the murderer, it is their job. A criminal pays them enormous sums. You understand all this sirs, don't you? Where is order, law in all this? So shouldn't we first face disorder? That is a fact, that we live in disorder and society is in disorder, governments are in disorder - no? If you have talked to some of the politicians, prime ministers, high up in the hierarchy of government, each one is after power - right sir - and position, hold on to certain concepts, identify with those concepts, ideologies and all the rest of it. All of us are working separately for oneself. We will come together in a great crisis like war. But the moment the crisis is over we are back to our old pattern. Right? So wouldn't you - I am just suggesting this - wouldn't you begin to find out if law which means complete order, whether you can live in complete order without any confusion. Sirs, put this question to yourself. So there is no contradiction, say one thing, do another, think one thing and act in another way. As long as we live in disorder, the society, the governments will be in disorder. Law implies justice. Right? Is there justice in the world? You are rich, I am poor. You have got bright minds, you can travel, you go abroad. You can do all kinds of things and I can't. Right? You are born to riches, you become the Prince of a country and for the rest of your life you are safe. And the poor chap down in the East End or the West End, he is poor - you know. So where is justice? Is there justice in the world? Examine all this. Justice implies equality. We all say equality before law. But that equality is denied by employing the highest paid lawyer and I can't afford the highest paid lawyer, so there is immediately inequality. So where do you find justice, law and order? There arises a very complex question, which is: admitting factually that there is no justice in the world - you are well placed, good reputation, cars, houses, mistresses and all the rest of it, marvellous furniture, and I live in a small hut. There is no equality. So one asks after facing the fact, one asks where does it exist at all? You are asking that question. I am not asking you to ask that question, you are asking that question. Where there is compassion there is equality, there is justice. Compassion implies intelligence. When there is that marvellous flame then there is no difference between the poor and the rich, between the well placed and those people who have nothing on god's earth. Q: As I asked the question may I ask another part of it? If one has this compassion, you say, then one also must accept the fact that for this compassion you will be killed. K: I will be killed. All right. I will be killed. What is wrong with being killed? Q: But most people would say that when you are dead you are not in a position to do something. K: Are we in a position to do something now? Q: Yes. K: What? To stop this threat of war; the neutron bombs exploding in a part of the country and you can never come near it for the next twenty five thousand years? Q: The peace groups, and people who have this compassion appear to be the first victims to be wiped out. K: I am not sure. The speaker has been threatened many times. Q: But you are not living in Central America. K: I am not. I have been there many years ago. But I am not there, neither in Honduras, Nicaragua or San Salvador. I can't do anything there. But I can do something here. Sir you are going off. I said compassion implies great intelligence. Compassion cannot possibly exist if you are identified with a group, with a particular form of worship or religious organization, if you go out to India and do some kind of social work, being attached to some church. That is not compassion. That is pity, sympathy. This is happening sirs. So first let's find out if we can be compassionate. To come to that point one must be extraordinarily alert to all the human frailties, to all the human limitations, which is one's own limitation because you are not separate from the rest of mankind. If once you see the truth of that then your whole attitude toward life and action and employment changes completely. "THE WORLD OF PEACE" BROCKWOOD PARK 3RD PUBLIC TALK 3RD SEPTEMBER 1983 May we continue where we left off last Sunday. First of all, if one may remind oneself, this is not a lecture on a particular subject with the intention of being informed, instructed. It's not a lecture. We are talking over together our human problems, not only the daily problems of our life, with all the travail of existence, but also we should go very much deeper, perhaps go together in the enquiry, what is beyond all time; what is the source, the origin, of all creation? And to enter into all that area one must begin, surely, with all the contents of our consciousness, with what we are - our reactions, our anxieties, loneliness, depression, elation, fears, the continuity of pleasure. And enquire also if it is possible to end all sorrow. And also we should enquire this morning, and perhaps tomorrow morning, the nature of dying, what is religion, meditation, and the whole limitation of time. We've got to cover a great deal in these two talks. So we must go very deeply into this matter, because we can always scratch on the surface as we generally do and find very little. But if we could go very, very deeply into the whole question of whether the content of our consciousness can ever come to an end; that is, the ending of all our wounds, psychological hurts, fears, beyond all the memories to which we cling, and the pain, the pleasure, the great deal of grief and sorrow - all that makes up our consciousness which is what we are. As most of us are concerned with ourselves, with our own achievements, with our own successes, failures and giving ourselves great importance in doing little things - whether all that can end and discover something totally new. Not only discover, but experience. One must be very careful in the usage of that word 'experience'. There is really nothing to experience. If you go beyond time, if that is possible, and beyond fear and so on, is there anything to experience? We are going to go into all this this morning and tomorrow morning, together. You are not merely listening to the speaker, to a lot of words, a lot of words put together into a sentence and ideas, but together we are going to enquire into all this and see if our brains which have been so heavily conditioned, programmed, whether those programmes can come to an end and no longer be programmed any more. All this requires a great deal of serious intention and considerable attention. And if we are willing, this morning and tomorrow, to give our interest, not only superficially but deeply give our attention to it, perhaps we can go together into all this and see if there is something infinite beyond all time. Can we do that this morning and tomorrow? First of all, do we realize that thought is a material process and therefore is limited? And any action based on that limitation must inevitably create conflict. And so thought is a material process. Matter is limited energy. And the whole content of our consciousness is the result of the material process of thought. Right? We have said over and over again for the last umpteen years that thought is a material process. And the content of our consciousness, with all the reactions and responses, and so on, are put together by the material process of thought which is limited. So our consciousness, which is what we are - whatever we think we are - is always limited. When one is concerned with oneself, with one's problems, with one's relationships, with one's status in society, and so on, this concern with oneself is a very small affair, a limited affair. Right? Do we actually see this or is it just an idea to be pursued, enquired into and then come to a conclusion, and accept that conclusion and say: "I am that". Or do we see immediately, instantly, that all the self-centred activity is very, very limited - whether it be in the name of religion, in the name of peace, in the name of leading a good life, and so on - this self-centred activity is always limited and therefore the cause of conflict. Do we actually realize that? Or is it merely an idea? Do we see the difference between the actuality and the idea? If one pursues the idea, then you are following some kind of illusion. But if one actually realizes the self-centred, egotistic activity is very, very, very small and separate and therefore the basic cause of conflict is the self. I wonder how many of us hear this and actually realize it. And the self, the psyche, the persona, is the whole content of our consciousness - which is our conditioning, which is our being programmed for millenia upon millenia, which is the whole structure of knowledge. Are we together in all of this? Or am I speaking Russian or Chinese? If the speaker is not indulging in Chinese or in a peculiar language and therefore there is no communication between us, but there should be clarity and communication when we are both looking at these enormous, complex problems of existence of our daily life - monotonous, boring, exciting, indulging, pursuing various forms of pleasure - and ultimately, whether one has a jolly good life or a miserable life, ultimately ending in death. Right? So our life generally is rather shallow. We try to give meaning to that shallowness, but that meaning too, that significance, is still shallow. So could we this morning, realizing all this, go and find out for ourselves, not be informed by the speaker, not be instructed by the speaker, but together explore what we are actually, and break down this limitation and go, if possible, further? Is this clear - what we are doing this morning and tomorrow - together? The content of our consciousness - one of the factors - is fear. And most of us know what fear is - whether it is superficial or deeply embedded in one's own recesses of our brain. We are all afraid of something. Right? So can that fear end psychologically? Begin with that. Then we can ask whether there are physical fears also and their relation to the psyche, psychological fears. So we are enquiring together into the nature of fear - not the various forms of fear. One may be afraid of death, one may be afraid of one's wife or husband, one may be afraid of various things. But we are concerned with fear itself, not fear of something or fear of the past or the future, but the actual reaction which is called fear. Are we together? So what is the cause, the root of fear? Is it thought and is it time? We must cover a great deal so we must be brief. Is it thought - thinking about the future or thinking about the past? And so, is thought one of the causes of fear? And is time also the cause -time, as growing old, as most of us are. The moment we are born we are already growing old. And time as future - not by the watch, by the day or by the year - but time as a movement from 'what is' to 'what should be', 'what might be', 'what has been', we said the whole movement of time, the psychological process of time - is that one of the causes of fear? The memory of some pain, both physical and psychological, which might have happened a couple of weeks ago; and remembering that and being afraid that it might happen again - which is the movement of time and thought. So time and thought - are they the causes of fear? Right? And this time which is thought, because thought as we said is the response of memory which is knowledge and experience, so knowledge is of time, and knowledge may be one of the causes of fear. I wonder if you are following - right? So we are saying, time, thought, knowledge, which are not separate, which is an actual unitary movement, that may be the cause of fear. And it is the cause of fear. Right? Then, when one realizes that, even intellectually, verbally, is it possible to end that fear? Right? What's your answer? You're waiting for me to instruct you. Therefore we are not working, thinking, investigating together. Right? You are waiting for the speaker to answer that question. And that means our brains have been conditioned, trained, educated to learn from somebody else, be instructed by another. And here we refuse to instruct you or to tell you what to do. We have no authority to tell you what to do, not like these ugly, beastly gurus. So we are together. Please, this is important to understand what it means, 'together.' Not you and I separately working - together look at it. Together see the whole movement of fear, what is involved in it. Why humanity has borne this fear for thousands of years and they have not solved it. They have transmitted it and accepted it as the norm of life, as a way of living. But if you begin to question, as we are doing now, question whether fear can ever end at all psychologically. Therefore we must understand the cause. And where there is a cause, there is an end. If one has some kind of disease and if, after diagnosis you find the cause, it can be ended. Similarly, if we can find the cause, the basic cause, the fundamental cause, then fear can end. Right? So together we are saying that time-thought, not two separate things, is the root of fear. Right? Q: Is not fear always preceded by desire? K: Desire is also part of fear. We went into that very carefully the other day - the nature of desire. Do you want me to go into it again? Q: No. K: Why do you say no? Have we understood the nature and the whole movement of desire? You see, please, we don't listen, not to the speaker, to ourselves. We never say, "What is desire? Why are we slaves to desire?" We said desire is sensation. That sensation -seeing, contact, sensation - then desire comes in. Which is, thought creates the image out of that sensation, then at that moment, second, desire is born. Clear? No, and I won't go into all of that because we went into it the other day very, very carefully and deeply - into the whole nature of desire. And desire also is one of the factors of fear. Desire is thought with its image. If you have a desire without any image, there is no desire. The seeing of a blue shirt or a skirt or whatever it is in the window, and entering into the window and touching it, sensation. Then thought creates the image of you having that shirt, then desire at that moment is born. So thought is essentially the movement of desire, and time-thought is the root of fear. Now, does one realize this actual fact? Then how do you observe that fact? I realize - suppose, I realize that thought, with all its complexity, and time also, is the root of fear. Then how do I realize it, feel it, be aware of it? You understand my question? Do I see it as something separate from me, time-thought, something separate from me or I am that? Is it all becoming rather complex? I am anger, am I not? Anger is not something separate from me. I am greed, envy, anxiety. Right? I like to think that is something separate over which I have control. But the actual fact is I am all that - even the controller is me. Right? So there is no division between greed, anger, jealousy, and so on - that is me, that is the observer. Right? Now, so how do I observe, how does one observe this fact that time-thought is fear? How do you observe it? You understand? How do you look at it - as something separate from you, or you are that? If you are that, and it's not separate from you -right - all action ceases, doesn't it? Before, I controlled, I suppressed, I tried to rationalize fear. Right? Now one sees that one is all that and therefore the whole movement of time and thought stops. Are we together, one of us or two of us? You see we are all so eager to act. One must act, but here you have to watch the whole thing without any sense of doing something. Right? Just to observe without any reaction or response to what you observe. Right? Then also we should go into the question why man has suffered. And whether there is an ending to suffering, not only the personal sorrow, but the sorrow of vast humanity. Right? Don't let's get sentimental about this, but actually all of us suffer in one way or another. The dull man suffers, the most intellectual, learned man, every human being on earth, including the leaders in Russia - every human being suffers. And we are asking a very serious question, whether that suffering can end. Or some of us enjoy suffering which becomes neurotic. So don't let's bother about the people who enjoy suffering, thinking that suffering in some way will help us to understand this universe, to understand life, and so on. Right? So, one suffers. My son is dead, gone. But the memory of it remains, the memory of his companionship, of my affection, love for him, and so on. Memory remains. And is that memory sorrow? Please, enquire together. I have lost my wife, or I am not as clever as you are, I am not as alert, sensitive, as you are and I suffer through that. Or I suffer in ten different ways. And is suffering, the shedding of tears, is that the loss, the actual loss, or the loss that brings about various memories, remembrances. You follow all this? Is that one, or perhaps the major cause of suffering? Man, including woman, man from the beginning of man, has had wars, has killed people. That has been our pattern of existence - war after war, killing thousands of people. Humanity has suffered. And we are still pursuing that path of war that has brought about tremendous sorrow for mankind. Right? And we have our own personal sorrow. Sorrow is the same whether it is yours or mine. I like to identify myself with my sorrow, and you like to identify yourself with your sorrow. But sorrow of yours and sorrow of mine is the same. The objects of sorrow may vary, but sorrow is sorrow -therefore it is not personal. I wonder if you realize this? Right? No, it is very difficult for one to see the truth of this. If you suffer and I suffer - you suffer for one reason and I suffer for another, and we identify ourselves with my particular one and you with yours, we divide ourselves and then find ways and means to suppress it, rationalize, and so on. But if we realize that sorrow is sorrow of all mankind, all humanity - and we are the rest of humanity because we have fears, sorrow, pleasure, anxiety, like the rest of mankind - if we realize sorrow is not my sorrow, that becomes such a small affair. Which is, we are the whole of mankind, we are the rest of mankind, and when there is suffering, suffering is man's suffering. Then you have a totally different approach to the problem. You understand? Not my suffering -'Please god help me how to get over it, how to understand it,' - I pray, and it all becomes so personal, a shoddy little affair. Right? But when it is the rest of mankind that has suffered, then suffering becomes an extraordinary thing that one has to look at very carefully. And if one human being understands the nature of suffering and goes beyond it, he then helps the rest of mankind. Right? Now is suffering a remembrance? The mother or the father whose son has been killed in your particular little war, recent war, Falklands - killed there. And the mother and the father remember all the things that he did - the death, the birth, the pictures, the photographs, all the incidents and accidents, and laughter, tears, scolding - you follow? So we are asking, please find out for yourselves whether sorrow is part of this continuity of memory. And if it is memory, don't reduce memory just to a few words. It is a tremendous content. And if it is memory, can that memory, not only of my particular son, but the memory of mankind's sorrow -memory which is sorrow - can that memory come to an end? You understand? Therefore one has to enquire, not into a particular memory, but the whole movement of memory. Right? We live on memories - we are memories. We are the word, the reaction to that word, the pleasure derived from the word, the remembrance of all the things that were. that symbol, that incident, accident has awakened, has stored up in the brain which is awakened when an incident takes place. Right? And memory is the past. Right? So we are the past. Can this whole movement of the past, which is time, which is thought, end? Not thought in our daily life, we're not talking of that, we're not talking when thought is used to drive a car, to write a letter, to write a poem, write this or that. There thought, knowledge is absolutely necessary. We are talking of this whole psychological movement which is based on memory. So we are asking a much deeper question which is: can the self, the 'me', the ego, all this self-centred activity which is the movement of memory, can that self end? Not by discipline, by control, by suppression or identification with something greater, which is still the movement of the self. Can that self end? You might then ask - if the self ends, what place is there, for me in society? What shall I do? Right? Right sir? First end it and then find out - not the other way around. This is a very, very serious question. Nobody can tell you in the world or beyond the world - perhaps most of us try to get instructions beyond the world. Nobody on earth can tell you how to end it. But if one observes all these facts without any reactions - I observe the fact that I am hurt psychologically because my daughter, my son, my father has done something which hurts me -if I can observe that hurt without a single resistance, without any action that I should not be hurt, or keep the hurt - most people do, all through their life they carry their hurt. But to observe this hurt, psychological wound, without any reaction to it, then one sees that hurts disappear altogether. Right? So in the same way, just to observe, to observe memory as it arises, see the nature of it, the evolution of it. The whole nature of activity of our daily life is based on this. And memory is very, very limited. Thought may invent the infinite, but thought being itself limited, its infinity is also limited, finite, but may pretend that it is infinite. So, all this implies complete freedom. Right? Not only freedom from something, but the quality of freedom that is not based on any reaction, any reward or punishment. To enquire into that also, one must understand the nature of death, dying. Are you interested in all this? Does it even amuse you? You see one must enquire very quietly, not hysterically, into this very complex problem. Dying or coming to an end is what we are concerned about, talking about, because it is part of our life. Not only are we born and all the education and all the troubles and all anxieties, and so on, but also death is part of our life - it is there, whether you like it or not; whether you are British or French - it is there; whether you are young, middle aged or old, disease, accident - it is there. And one must understand what it is, as one must understand life before death. We have been trying to understand together what is before death - fear, wounds, sorrow, pain, anxiety, labour, going to the office from morning till night. All that is part of our life, living, and also the ending of all that. One may have had a very good life, pleasant, successful, been somebody in the world, power, position, money, but the thing is there at the end. We like to postpone it as long and as far away as possible, put it away. So we are together going to enquire. The organism dies, naturally. It will live as long as possible if we treat it properly. We won't go into the question of health. I know you are all interested in health but we won't go into it now. What is it to die? Not jump over the bridge, not do something to kill yourself, but living as we are now, sitting here in the marquee, what is death - apart from the whole physical organism, the brain lacking oxygen withers away and there is death? But we are asking, is death an ending? Right? An ending to everything that I've had - my wife, my children, my books, my status, my power, my position - you know - all that is going to come to an end. And also, we must enquire into the question, which is the question of the East, which is reincarnation, to be reborn next time. So a series of lives till you reach whatever you reach - you know, the highest principle, and so on. They believe in that very strongly, but they don't deeply enquire what it is that continues. Right? Is it the 'me' that is going to continue or is there something beyond the 'me' that is going to continue? Right? And if there is something beyond 'me', my ideas, my opinions, my conclusions, and so on, which we talked about earlier. If that 'me' is the word, the name, the remembrances - is that going to continue? Right? Or there is a spiritual entity, the soul in the Christian world and the Buddhist world, the Hindu world have different words - will that continue? Then that thing which is beyond me or which is in me but the 'me' covers it up. Then if that is a spiritual entity, it must be beyond time and beyond death. Right? Therefore that cannot reincarnate. Right? So people like to believe all that because it is a great comfort. I shall be born next life. I've had a poor life - next life I'll have a better house. In another life I'll live in a bigger house or I'll be a king - or some rot or other. So if we put aside all that kind of illusory pursuits and face the fact that psychologically there is an ending, a complete ending. The 'me', with all its memories, has come to an end - that is dying. And we don't like that. And so we seek various forms of comfort, beliefs faith, resurrection and - you know, all that. Now, while living, can we end something without any cause, without any future - end something? You understand my question? Take for example: will you end all attachment - attachment to your name, attachment to your furniture, attachment to your wife, to your husband, to your garden, attachment to your ideas, prejudices, end all attachments while living? That is what is going to happen when you actually die. Right? So do it now and see what it means. That ending is tremendous, has tremendous quality behind it. There is no attachment to anything. That is freedom, and when there is that kind of freedom death has no fear. You understand? Because you are already living with death. The two are going together, living and dying. Do you see? No you don't. Do you understand the beauty of that? The quality of complete freedom from all fear. Because where there is attachment there is jealousy, anxiety, hate. And the more you are attached the more pain there is. You know all this. If you went and told your wife or husband, 'I am no longer attached to you,' what would happen? Does it deny love? Does it deny relationship? Is attachment love? Go on, enquire into all this and the deeper you enquire, the more vitality and security and strength one has. It hasn't derived from any drugs, any stimulation. We'll have to stop now and continue tomorrow morning. Please we are going to discuss tomorrow morning, very carefully what is the origin of all this, the beginning of all this. Why man has to go through all this misery, confusion, occasional pleasure and joy. Unless one understands creation from the very beginning, and in the understanding of that is tremendous sense of no time and no beginning and no end. "THE WORLD OF PEACE" BROCKWOOD PARK 4TH PUBLIC TALK 4TH SEPTEMBER 1983 This is the last dialogue together. We began this series of talks by asking why human beings living on this earth, such a beautiful earth, except on a rainy day like this - why we cannot live at peace with each other, why must we have wars, the economic, social, racial differences, and why we cannot live with each other -intimately or otherwise, with tranquility, a certain quality of serenity? And apparently that is not possible, because the vast majority of people throughout the world are very violent. They don't want peace - neither do the governments. They talk a great deal about it, but they are all preparing for everlasting war. And religions too have not given man peace. The tribal divisions, local gods and saviours, the religious hierarchy, all that has prevented -or we have created all this and therefore there is no peace on earth. Pacem in terris. And we have been talking over together if we can in our daily life, end conflict within ourselves, be free of any shadow of fear, end suffering, move away entirely from the self-centred activity which is one of the, perhaps, or the major causes of conflict - not only outwardly but also inwardly. And very, very few seem to be serious enough to go into this deeply and perhaps realize that there is a totally different way of living. And this morning, if we will, together, go into this question, not only of peace, but as we said, what is the origin, the beginning of all existence? Why man has become what he is - why we are, after millenia upon millenia, very, very primitive psychologically, barbarous. And technologically we are advanced tremendously. And that very technology is going perhaps to destroy us too. And we ought to go together this morning and enquire seriously: is it man's lot inevitably that he lives this way? Or has something gone wrong with the whole human evolution? Or is there something outside, beyond human measure, that if one can understand, go into it deeply, may perhaps open the door, open our eyes and perhaps our hearts, too, so that we may naturally, easily live a happy, serene life? That is what we are going to enquire into together this morning. First of all, we must understand the word 'experience'. Experience is a process of acquiring knowledge, becoming familiar with something. And this knowledge may be one of the fundamental reasons of our conflict, of our ignorance. Not the knowledge of outside, technological knowledge, scientific knowledge, medical knowledge, and so on, but the accumulated knowledge of humanity which is the whole burden of the past. That may be one of the basic causes of conflict. We have talked a bit about it and we'll go further into it. We ought to enquire together whether there is an outside agency beyond the measure of man - beyond man himself as a measure -an outside agency that we can appeal to, pray to, ask guidance. Or be with that so basically that we are that so that there is no outside agency. I hope we are together in this. This is, as we said the other day, and we have been repeating this many, many times - this is not a lecture, nor a sermon on Sunday morning - god forbid! Nor try to instruct, convince you, or do some kind of silly propaganda. If we could, both of us travel together, walk along together and see things as they are, and go beyond. Is man the measure of all things? Man being his consciousness, reactions, his memories - is he the measure? Or there is something outside of him that, if we can come into contact, may help us? Right? This has been the activity of religion. Throughout the world, from ancient of days, man sought something outside of himself, or has said: there is something divine in me, in the human, but it is covered over with his greed, with his envy, with his ambitions and cruelty, bestiality, and that can be stripped away, then that will be the abiding factor of righteous behaviour. Right? Are we together in this, following each other? And to strip away all the layers of our ugly, brutal, anxious, ambitious, aggressive life, there have been many, many systems, many incantations, many forms of rituals, magic. They have tried every form of physical torture - fasting, denying every sensory response, to come to this point where man can understand and live a different way of life. Scientists are also trying, through genetic engineering, through chemistry, other forms of drugs, to change man. And man has looked in every direction outwardly, and perhaps never inwardly. He may have superficially scratched the surface of his existence. But man has perhaps never, except for a few, deeply concerned and gone into himself for he is both matter and the movement of thought, which is also matter. And the instrument of investigation has been thought - to go in himself. And thought is not the right instrument, because thought itself is limited. Right? So religions throughout the world, organized and not organized, individual, separate groups and every form of attempt has been made to become enlightened - if I may use that word which has been so corrupted by the gurus. If we can put aside all the religious dogmas, faiths, systems, symbols, figures, rituals and all those incantations which have very little meaning now - perhaps they never had it - if we could put aside completely all of that and not belong to any group, to any spiritual authority - those two words 'spiritual authority' is the denial of spirituality. So if we could shove off all that, which means, be able to stand completely free, unafraid, so that we can enquire into the actual, if there is a dimension that is not the invention of thought. And then, what is religion? Right? We are going to go into all of this. What is the origin and the beginning of all existence, from the minutest cell to the most complex brain? Whether there was a beginning at all, and is there an end to all this? And also we are going to enquire together: what is creation? Now, to find out all this, to uncover all this, what kind of brain does one need? You understand? What kind of capacity, what kind of energy, what kind of passion is needed to really probe into all of this? You understand? To probe into something totally unknown, not preconceived, not caught in any sentimental, romantic illusion, there must be a quality of brain that's completely free. Right? Free from all its conditioning, from all its programming, from every kind of influence, and therefore highly sensitive and tremendously active. Right? Is that possible? Do you, taking part in a dialogue, do you have such a brain? Or is it very sluggish, lazy and living in its own self-conceit? Which is it? Because we are going to enquire into something that demands a mind, a brain that is extraordinarily alive, not caught in any form of routine, mechanical. Is that possible? Have we such a brain in which there is no fear, no self- interest, no self-centred activity? Otherwise it is living in its own shadow all the time. Right? It's living in its own tribal, limited environment, field. It's like an animal tied to a stake - the tether may be very long or very short, but it is tied to a post therefore its movement is limited. You may give it a very, very, very long rope, but the very length is an indication of limitation. A brain must have space. So what is space? Not only the space between here and there - space indicates 'without a centre'. Right? If you have a centre, and you move away from the centre to the periphery, however long, wide the periphery is, it is still limited. Right? Are we following each other? So, space indicates, does it not, where there is no centre and there is no periphery, there is no boundary. Have we such a brain that one doesn't belong to any thing, attached to anything - attached to one's experience, conclusions, hopes, ideals, and so on, so that the brain is really, completely free? Right? If it is burdened, you can't walk very far, you can't go very far. If it is crude, vulgar, self-centred, it cannot have measureless space. And space indicates - one is using the word very, very carefully - emptiness. Are you following? Does it interest you at all this? Are you sure, coming here in spite of the awful rain and wind, we are communicating with each other? We are trying to find out, aren't we, if it is possible to live in this world without any fear, without any conflict, with a tremendous sense of compassion which demands a great deal of intelligence. You cannot have compassion without intelligence. And that intelligence is not the activity of thought. One cannot be compassionate if one is attached to a particular ideology, to a particular narrow tribalism, or to any religious concept, for that limits. And compassion can only come, or be there, when there is the ending of sorrow, which is the ending of self-centred movement. Right? So space indicates emptiness, nothingness. And that space, because there is not a thing put by thought, that space has tremendous energy. This is what the scientists too are saying, only it is their conclusion, it is not the actual living of the scientist, because the scientist, like everybody else, every other human being, is greedy, out for himself, or he represents a government, or he is ambitious, and so on. He is just like anybody else, but he has got an extraordinary capacity for accumulating knowledge in a certain area. So the brain must have the quality of complete freedom and space. That is, one must be nothing. Whereas we are all something - analysts, psychotherapists, doctors - that's all right. But when we are therapists, when we are biologists, technicians, that very identification limits the wholeness of the brain. Right? Can we proceed from there? And then we can ask, only then can we ask really, what is meditation? Because if you ask what is meditation or try to meditate and follow all the systems whether it is Zen, a Buddhist form of meditation, Tibetan form of meditation, the Hindu, the Christian form which is rather limited, and all the latest gurus with their peculiar invitations to mysterious meditations, only on a condition you pay a lot of money for it. And there are all these forms of meditation. They are all based on making thought silent, making thought quiet, not rampant thought. Right? That is, there is a controller who is going to control through systems, through practice, through daily allotted time for quietness, and so on, and so on. There is always the controller watching. And the controller himself is the activity of thought. Right? So they are going round and round in a circle like a cat chasing its own tail. And that's called meditation. Now, meditation is something entirely different. Unless one has laid the foundation of order in our life - you understand, order, there cannot be order if there is fear, there cannot be order if there is any kind of conflict, unless our house, not the outer house, unless our inward house is in complete order, so there is great stability, no waffling around, great strength in that very stability, therefore in that order - then only one can ask what is true meditation. If the house is not in order, your meditation has very little meaning. Right? You can invent any kind of illusion, any kind of enlightenment, any kind of daily discipline - it will be still limited, illusory, because it is born out of disorder. Right? This is all logical, please, sane, rational. It is not something the speaker has invented for you to accept. Unless there is this kind of - may I use the word - 'undisciplined order' (that's a good word, I'm glad I thought of it just now!) - unless there is undisciplined order, meditation becomes very shallow and meaningless. So then, what is order? Thought cannot create order, because thought itself is disorder. Would you accept that? Do you see that? Because thought, based on knowledge, which is based on experience, all knowledge is limited, and so thought is also limited. And when thought tries to create order, it brings about disorder. Right? Do we see this actual fact? - not as a theory. Thought has created disorder, that is, it has created disorder through conflict of 'what is,' and 'what should be'. Right? The actual and the theoretical; yet there is only the actual and not the theoretical. And thought looks at the actual from a limited point of view. Right? And therefore its action must inevitably create disorder. Do we see this as a truth, as a law - or just an idea? You understand? I am greedy, suppose I am greedy, envious - that's 'what is; the opposite is not. But the opposite has been created by human beings, by thought as a means of understanding 'what is', and also as a means of escaping from 'what is'. Right? Are we walking together, communicating with each other? So there is only 'what is'. And when you perceive 'what is' without its opposite, then that very perception brings order. Are we together? As we were saying - our house must be in order. And this order cannot be brought about by thought. Thought creates its own discipline - do this, don't do that, follow this, don't follow that, be traditional or not traditional, and so on. Thought is the guide. One hopes to bring about order, but thought itself is limited, therefore it is bound to create disorder. If I keep on repeating for the rest of my life - I'm a British, British, or French, French, or would you like any other nationality, or a Hindu or Buddhist, whatever it is - that tribalism is very limited. And that tribalism is causing great havoc in the world. We don't go to the root of it, that is, to end tribalism, not how to create better wars. So similarly, we are saying, order can only come into being when thought, which is necessary in certain areas, has no place in the psychological world. And therefore in that world, that world itself is in order when thought is absent. Are we meeting each other? So meditation - the very word meditation means to measure -measure between 'what is' and 'what should be,' between 'what I am,' and, through meditation, 'what I will be'. So meditation, both in Sanskrit and Latin, and so on, is the quality of measurement, right - which is comparison. And comparison is disorder. Right? Do you need explanation of that? When I am comparing myself with you, which is, I am competing with you, I am trying to be better than you, then this is a constant conflict, isn't it? So is it possible to live without any comparison, not only biologically, physically, but much more psychologically, inwardly - never to compare oneself with anything, with anybody, so that the mind, the brain is free from this conflict of arrogance. Right? So then we can ask, what is meditation? Because it is necessary to have a brain that is absolutely quiet. The brain has its own rhythm - please, I am not a scientist, brain specialist but one has watched all this in oneself - which doesn't mean that the speaker is extraordinary. Don't let's become sentimental and personal. The brain is endlessly active, chattering from one subject to another, from one thought to another, from one association to another, from one state to another - it's constantly occupied. One is not aware of it generally. But when one is aware without any choice, choiceless awareness of this movement, then that very awareness, that very attention ends that chattering. Please do it, and you will see how simple it all is. So the quality of the brain is that it must be free - space and silence, silence psychologically. One is talking now. You and I are hearing each other, talking to each other. There, thought is being employed because we are all speaking English. But to speak out of this silence - do you understand what I am saying? Don't, please go off into some kind of fanciful imagination. This brings the question of language. Does language condition the brain? Have you ever thought about all this? Or is it all something totally new? Does English or French or whatever, Russian or Chinese, does the very usage of those words, does it shape the brain so that it becomes conditioned? Language does condition the brain. Right? If you talk to a Russian or to a Frenchman - of course if you talk to a British or an American speaking English - if you watch, their whole outlook is limited by the language they use. Right? Have you noticed all this? So to be free of the network of words! Right, sir? To use a language like English and not allow it to shape our outlook on the whole of existence. Right? I see you haven't done any of these things, so it's all something fanciful. So, not to be caught in the network of words, that's quite complex too. When you say, "I am a Communist", your whole reaction is different. As you have had a recent war in the Falklands, when you talk about Argentina, the label is more important than the person. So there must be freedom from the word. Then the brain is utterly quiet though it has its own rhythm. Right? Now what is, then, creation, what is the beginning of all this? Right? We are enquiring into that - the origin of the beginning of all life - not only our life, but the life of every living thing; the deep down whales, the dolphins, the little fish, the minute cells, the vast nature, the beauty of a tiger. Have you ever seen a tiger in a forest? No, of course you haven't seen it. It's really the most extraordinary animal. I won't go into it, that is, not this time. I nearly touched it, wild. And the living of man, from the minutest cell to the most complex man, with all his inventions, with all his illusions, with his superstitions, with his quarrels, with his wars, with his arrogance, vulgarity, with his tremendous aspirations and his great depressions - what is the origin of all this? Right? Now, meditation is to come upon this - not you come upon it -in that silence, in that quietness, in that absolute tranquility. The beginning - is there a beginning? And if there is a beginning, there must be an ending. Right? That which has a cause must end. If I have cancer, the cause is the disease, I must be operated on, then that would be the end of it or it would kill me. Right? Wherever there is a cause there must be an end. That's a law, that's natural. So is there a causation at all for the creation of man, the creation of all the way of life? You understand my question? Is there a beginning of all this? How are we going to find out? Religions have said there is god - god is the beginning and the end of all things. That's a very easy way of solving the problem. The Hindus have said it in one way, perhaps the Buddhists too, and Christianity said, god. Only the fundamental belief - man has been created four thousand, five hundred years ago. Right? It seems rather absurd because four thousand, five hundred years ago, the Egyptians invented the calendar, which means they must have been extraordinarily advanced, and so on. And if you are a fundamentalist, then you'll get angry with what is being said. And I hope none of us are any kind of fundamentalist. So what is creation - not the painter who creates the picture, not the poet, not the man who makes something out of marble? Those are all things manifested. Right? Is there something which is not manifest? Is there something, because it is not manifested, that thing has no beginning and no end? That which is manifested has a beginning, has an end. Right? We are the manifestations, aren't we? Not of divine something or other, we are the result. We are the result of thousands of years of so-called evolution, growth, development, and we also come to an end. That which is manifested can always be destroyed. But that which is not, has no time. Right? Now we are asking is there such a thing as something beyond all time? This has been the enquiry of philosophers, scientists, and religious people - to find out that which is beyond the measure of man, which is beyond time. Because if one can find, come, discover that, or see that, that is immortality. Right? That's beyond death. I wonder if you understand all this? Are you following all this? A little bit at least? Try to encourage me, please. I don't want your encouragement but you see this man has really sought, in various ways, in different parts of the world, through different beliefs. Because when one discovered that, or realized that, life then has no beginning and no end. Therefore it is beyond all concepts, beyond all hope. Do you follow? It is something immense. Now to come back to earth - you see we never look at life as a tremendous movement, our own life as a tremendous wide - with a great depth, a vastness. We have reduced our life to such a shoddy little affair. And life is really the most sacred thing in existence. To kill somebody is the most irreligious horror. To get angry, to be violent with somebody - the speaker has been angry only once and the person with whom he was angry has been reminding him, so he still carries on with the anger. You understand? Really? You see we never see the world as a whole because we are so fragmented, we are so terribly limited, so petty. And we never have this feeling of wholeness, you follow, where the things of the sea, things of the earth, the nature and the sky, is the universe, is part of us. Not imagined - you can go off in some kind of fanciful imagination and imagine that we are the universe, then you become cuckoo! But, to break down this small self-centred interest, to have nothing of that, then from there you can move infinitely. And meditation is this. Not just sitting cross-legged, or standing on your head, or doing whatever one does, but to have this feeling of complete wholeness and unity of life. And that can only come when there is love and compassion. You know, one of our difficulties is we have associated love with pleasure, with sex. And love also, for most of us, means jealousy, anxiety, possessiveness, attachment. That is what we call love. So is love attachment? Is love pleasure? Is love desire? Is love the opposite of hate? If it is the opposite of hate, then it is not love. Right? Do you see this? All opposites contain its own opposite. Right? When I try to become courageous, that courage is born out of fear. Right? I wonder if you understand this? No? So love cannot have its opposite. Love cannot be where there is jealousy, ambition, aggressiveness. And where there is that quality, then from that arises compassion; where there is that compassion there is intelligence. Not the intelligence of self-interest, not the intelligence of thought, not the intelligence of a great deal of knowledge, but compassion has nothing to do with knowledge. Then only is that intelligence which gives humanity security, stability, vast sense of strength. So we have come to the end of our dialogue and one hopes we shall meet again next year. Preface Publisher's Note Neither Time... The Path The Search The Immortal Friend The Song Of Life Parables Prose Poems FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT PREFACE The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, of which this volume is the first, is a true record for posterity of the works of this unique human being whose message represents no known organized religion, philosophy or ideology. History has often revealed that the life and experiences of a single human being can be of an unusual character from beginning to end and can have a significant influence on the lives of many others all over the earth. This is especially so if that person is unique as a thinker and teacher endeavoring to communicate the truth and meaning of human experiences that reach to the deepest level in all of us, as he has discovered them on his journey in search of the truth about life and living. In the life of such a being, as in the lives of many artists, there can be different creative periods, arising out of the experiences of a particular time. These may seem to differ widely in expression but are actually rooted in the same inward creative source, reflecting different insights at different periods of life. Some readers will find this to be true of these teachings and writings of J. Krishnamurti that have been published before over a period of sixty years in various parts of the world. During the more than half a century that Krishnamurti has been a public figure, travelling continually about the world, his message has been heard and read assiduously by thousands of people of all ages who have come to realize that the traditional religious, moral and ethical values have failed to bring about a peaceful and happy social order. Krishnamurti has provided us with a living restatement of truth, love and beauty - the fundamental essence of the truly religious life, a life free of superstition, greed and fear - which is the only source and foundation of lasting happiness for the individual and for peace and order in our world. K. & R. FOUNDATION FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT PUBLISHER'S NOTE J. Krishnamurti is well known throughout the world as a unique thinker and teacher. Many of his public talks and discussions as well as his personal writings have been published from time to time during the past sixty years; but a great number of these earlier publications have been out of print for years. The K. & R. Foundation, a California corporation, has as one of its purposes the republication, as originally published, of certain of the works of J. Krishnamurti. These will be contained in The Collected Works of Krishnamurti, of which this is the first volume. In all his writings, Krishnamurti touches on the fundamental truth at the core of all religions, but he gives it a new expression understandable in our time. His expression of this unique realization has naturally varied in the course of the years. There was a time in the very beginning when Krishnamurti expressed himself through poetry and in parables. These poetic writings represent a facet of Krishnamurti that is characterized by the intensity of his feelings and by his passionate appeal to the individual for self-realization of truth, each in his own unique, inimitable way. In this first volume of his poetry Krishnamurti uses a multitude of similes in describing his feelings that reflect everywhere the beauty and the wonder of nature. The effect of these descriptions is one of immense tenderness and great strength, of love of God and mankind, of acceptance and surrender at the same time. The language of Krishnamurti is that of a seer and a poet - inevitably it touches profoundly the human heart. FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 'NEITHER TIME...' Neither time nor space exists for the man who knows the eternal. Space and time are real for the man who is yet imperfect and space is divided for him into dimensions, time into past, present and future. He looks behind him and sees his birth, his acquisitions, all that he has rejected. That past is being continually modified by the future which is ever being added to it. From the past man turns his eyes to the future where death, the unknown, the darkness, the mystery, await him. Fascinated by these he can no longer detach himself from them. The mystery of the future holds for him the fulfillment of all his desires, which the past has denied to him, and in his dreams he flies to that brilliant horizon where happiness must exist, where he must seek it. No one will ever pierce the infinite mystery of the future -impenetrable in its evanescent illusion - neither magician, prophet nor God! But on the contrary it will be the mystery which will engulf man, which will not let him escape, which will break the mainspring of his life. Life is not to be approached through the past, nor through the mirage of the future. Life cannot be approached through intermediaries, nor conquered for another. That discovery can only be made in the immediate present - by the individual for himself and not for others - by the individual who has become the eternal "I". That eternal "I" is created by the perfection of the self - perfection in which all things are contained, even human imperfections. Man, not yet having achieved that condition of life in the present, lives in the past which he regrets, lives in the future where he hopes, but never in the present which he ignores. This is the case with all men. Balanced between the past and the future, the "I" is poised as a tiger ready to spring, as an eagle ready to fly, as the bow at the moment of releasing the arrow. This moment of equilibrium, of high tension, is "creation." It is the fullness of all life, it is immortality. The wind of the desert sweeps away all trace of the traveller. The sole imprint is the footstep of the present. The past, the future... sands blown by the wind. J. KRISHNAMURTI 1929 FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 'THE PATH' There is not a cloud in the sky; there is not a breath of wind; the sun is pouring down cruelly and relentlessly its hot rays; there is a mist caused by the heat, and I am alone on the road. On both sides of me there are fields melting into the far distant horizon; there is not a blade of grass that is green; there is not a flower breathing in this heartbroken country; everything is withered and parched; all crying with anguish of the untold and unutterable pain of ages. There is not a tree in the vast fields under whose shade a tender thing might grow up smiling, careless of the cruel sun. The very earth is cracked and gaping hopelessly with bared eyes at the pitiless sun. The sky has lost its delicate blue and it is grey with the heat of many centuries. Those skies must have shed gentle rain, this very earth must have received it, those dead plants, those huddled up bushes, those withered blades of grass must once have quenched their thirst. They are all dead, dead beyond all thought of life. How many centuries ago the soothing drops of rain fell I cannot tell, nor can those hot stones remember when they were happy in the rain, nor those dead blades of grass when they were wet. Everything is dead, dead beyond hope. There is not a sound; awful and fearsome silence reigns. Now and then, there is a groan of immense pain as the earth cracks, and the dust goes up and comes down, lifeless. Not a living thing breathes this stifling air; all things, once living, are now dead. The wide stream beside the road, which in former ages bubbled with mirth and laughter, satisfying many living things with its delicious cool waters, is now dead; the bed of the stream has forgotten when the waters used to flow over it, nor can those dead fish, whose bleached and delicate skeletons lie open to the blinding light, remember when they swam in couples exposing their exquisite, brilliant colours to the warm and life-giving sun. The fields are covered with the dead of many bygone ages, never can the dead vibrate again with the happy pulse of life. All is gone, all is spent, death has trapped in its cruel embrace all living things, all except me. I am alone on the road, not a soul in front of me; there may be many behind me, but I do not desire to look back upon the horror of sufferings of the past. On either side of this long and what seems to be an interminable highway of my life, there is desolate waste ever beckoning me to join its miserable quietude - death. In front of me the path stretches mile after mile, year after year, century after century, white in the blazing, pitiless sun; the road ever mounts, in an imperceptible inclination. The whiteness of this weary path, with the glittering sun, makes me almost blind; look where I may to rest my tired eyes, there is everywhere that immense ocean of blinding light, blatant in its intensity. The sun never goes to sleep but ruthlessly sheds his unwelcome and awful heat. The road is not all even, but, here and there, there are parts as smooth as a lake on a calm, peaceful day. This dreary path is even to the tread, but unexpectedly, like some unsatisfied storm, which suddenly bursts forth to triumph in its joy of destruction, the road is broken up and becomes merciless to the already bleeding feet. I cannot tell when it will again become smooth and encouraging; it may be at the next footstep, or after many years of toil and suffering. This bitter road cares not if it causes pain or pleasure; it is there for me to tread willingly or unwillingly. Who built this road of misfortune I cannot tell, nor can the road mention his name. It has existed for many centuries, nay for many millennia. Nobody but me has trodden it; it has been cut out for me to walk alone. Companions, friends, brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers have I had, but on this dreadful road they cannot exist. This path is like the jealous and exacting lover, hating his love to have other friends and other lovers. The road is my inexorable love, and it guards my love jealously, destroying all those who would accompany me or help me. Exacting in all things both small or great, it never releases me from its cruel, kind gaze. It embraces me with a strength that almost chokes me, and laughs with a knowing kindness as my feet bleed; I cannot go away from it, it is my constant and lonely love. I cannot look elsewhere but only at the long interminable path. At times it is neither kind nor unkind -indifferent as to whether I am happy or unhappy, whether I am in pain or in ecstasy, whether I am in profound sorrow or in deep adoration, indifferent to all things. It well knows that I cannot leave that enthralling path, nor can it depart from my sorrow-laden self. We are inseparable; it cannot exist without me nor I without it. We are one, yet I am different. Like the smile of a sweet spring morn the path beckons me to walk on it, and like the angry and treacherous ocean it cheats me of my momentary happiness. It holds me as I fall, in blissful embrace, making me forget the sorrow and the suffering of the past, kissing me with the kiss of a tender and loving mother whose only thought is to protect, and when I am in complete oblivion and ecstasy as that of a man who has drunk deep at the fountain of supreme happiness, it wakes me with a rude shock from my happy and ephemeral dream and pushes me roughly to my aching feet. Cruel and kind is my lonesome friend and lover, unexpected in her hard tyranny and in her delicious love. Does she like me, I do not care; does she dislike me, I do not care, but she is my only companion, nor do I desire any other. The sun is scorching me and the path makes me bleed. I leave no footprints on that hard road nor do I see the traces of any human being. So I am the only lover my path has had and I glory in my exclusiveness and separateness. I suffer unlike others, am happy unlike others, and my obstinacy in loving her is unlike any other lover the world has ever seen. I am breathless in my adoration of her, and no other worshipper can ever lay his sacrifice at her feet with greater willingness and with greater enthusiasm than I can. There is no follower with greater fanaticism; nor can there exist a greater devotee. Her cruelty only makes me love her more, and her kindness binds me closer and everlastingly to her. We live for each other and I alone can see her dear face, I alone can kiss her hand. No other lover has she besides me, no other friend. As the young bird that bursts forth from its restraining nest with its untried wings to enjoy the freedom and the beauty of the great world, so have I rushed forward on this path to enjoy the exhilaration of loving her in solitude away from others who might dare to look on her beauteous face. Many winds of many seasons have battered me, like a dead leaf blown hither and thither by autumnal winds, but I always have wandered back to this enticing path. Like a wave glittering in the hot ceaseless sunshine have I been dancing to the fierce winds; like a desert which is bound by no mountain, have I lain open to the sun; like the sands of the ocean, have my lives been. Never a peaceful rest, never has contentment filled my soul, never has joy penetrated my very being and never have I been comforted. No smile has ever compensated my longing; no face, sweet and gentle, has brought balm to my aching heart; no kind words have allayed my infinite suffering. Neither the love of the mother nor the wife nor the child has ever quenched my burning love; but all have deserted me and I have abandoned them all. Like some leprous thing have I wandered, alone and unwept for. Pain and sorrow have been my eternal and inseparable companions. Like a shadow has my grief clung to me; like one in everlasting pain have I wept bitter tears. Many a time have I longed for death and complete oblivion and neither has been granted to me; many a time have I looked death in its horrible face, tearing my heart and welcoming joyously the terror of so many, but it smiled and gave me a blessing; many a time, tired of wooing death, have I turned my face and footsteps to the altar of love and worship, but little comfort have I found; many a sacrifice, both of myself and of others, have I made in the hope of reaching the altar of contentment, but in vain; many a time have I dwelt in breathless adoration, but, like the scent of a delicately perfumed flower, has my adoration been wafted through centuries and left me listless, and still on my aching knees; many a time have I laid fragrant flowers at sacred feet, and no blessing have I received. Many a time have I offered to the numerous Gods of many lands and races, but the Gods have always been silent and Their look always averted; many a time have I been Their priest in Their sacred temples but the white robes have fallen off me and left me naked to the sun; many a holy lotus of the temple have I kissed in adoration of the Gods, but the lotus has withered in my hand. Many a time have I worshipped at the altars that the world has ever created, but with bowed head and silent have I returned. Many ceremonies have I performed, but my longing has never been satisfied; many rites have I delighted in, but there has been no joy, no hope. In many a temple have I been consecrated, but have received no comfort. Many a sacred book have I read, but knowledge was denied to me. Many a life have I spent in holiness, but my life has been dark. Many a window have I opened to gaze at the stars, but they parted not with their profound wisdom. Often have I lain awake looking into nothingness, looking for light, but darkness, intense darkness has ever reigned. Often, in many lives, have I deliberately followed, sometimes blindly, sometimes with open eyes, the humble teachers of the secluded village, but their teachings have left me at the foot of the lonesome hill. I have lived nobly and toiled laboriously; I have restrained myself and I have been without restraint. Often have I cried, with aching heart and with bitter tears for the Divine Hand to lead me, but no hand has aided me. I have struggled fiercely with humanity to gain the light, but the light and the humanity have I lost. I have meditated profoundly with eyes fixed on the goal, controlling all my emotions, searching for truth; but nothing was revealed to me. Many a time have I sought seclusion from my noisy brethren and tried to escape from their petty and ignoble thoughts and worries, from their false and uncouth emotions, from their little miseries and sorrows which they have created for themselves, from their cruel hate and their infantile pity, from their puerile affection and their fleeting compassion, from their unfair gossip and from their warm and selfish friendship, from their bitter quarrels and their loud rejoicings, from their vindictive anger and their soft love, from their talk of great things which they know not of, and their knowledge of the little things which they know so well, from their showering honours and their withering scorn, from their gross flattery and their obvious contumely, from their love desires and their petty aversions, from all that was human, and longing for all that was divine, noble and great; but wheresoever I have been, and wheresoever I go, humanity with its terrible agonies and crying pain has pursued me. Many a time I sought seclusion and solitude in the forest glade dim and peaceful, but I found it peopled with my thoughts and haunted with misery. Many a time have I thrilled at the beauty of the world, the soft spring and the harsh winter, the calm and glorious sunset and the heavenly and luminous stars, the waking morn and the dying evening, the tender moon and the soft light, the pitiless sun and the shadows numberless, the green grass, the velvety leaf, the fierce tiger, the gentle deer, the loathsome reptile, the dignified elephant, the magnificent mountains, the boisterous seas. I have enjoyed to the full the beauties that the world can give, but no joy have I found in them. I have wandered in the shady valleys and climbed the precipitous mountains. I have searched everywhere in vain and in pain. Many a time, in many a life, have I practiced Yoga through starvation, through physical torture, through self-denial, but I have not seen the seated God. Desires and false emotions have I annihilated; I have lived purely according to the sacred laws of many nations, I have done noble deeds which the world has praised and honoured, and it has showered me with earthly glories. I have never bowed my bleeding head to sorrow nor to temptation, and I have made pilgrimages to the earth's heavenly abodes; but always and everywhere have I found no true and lasting comfort. Visions have I had in the temples of Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, and in the sacred temples of holy India; their Gods have I worshipped, denying earthly happiness, renouncing father, mother, wife and child, offering sacrifices great and small, noble and petty, sacrificing my body and my very soul for the light to guide me; contentment has been denied me in all things I have done. I have loved divinely, I have suffered nobly, I have smiled joyously, I have danced rapturously in front of many Gods, I have been intoxicated with divinity, I have longed to be freed from this aching world. I have helped many though helping I needed most; I have healed many though healing I needed most; I have guided many though guidance I needed most; I have comforted when comfort I needed most. When in deep sorrow I have smiled, when joyous, I have grieved; losing, I was happy; gaining, I was miserable; and ever have I loved my God. Yet my soul is in utter chaos, yet I am pitiably blind, surrounded by darkness and unrealities, yet the pure light is denied me, yet healing comfort have I none, yet soothing contentment is withheld, yet blissful happiness is nowhere to be found, and I am alone, lonely as a fair wanderer in the sky. I am alone with myself. Tired of worship and adoration, tired of solitude and loneliness, tired of seeking and longing for divine happiness, tired of sacrifice and self-mortification, tired of searching for the light and the truth, tired of being noble and unselfish, tired of the struggle and the steep climb, tired of body and soul, I threw myself with a vigour and an uproar on to the material world, hoping thus to gain the ungainable and unfathomable. I became young and healthy, beautiful and passionate, free and joyous, gay with not a thought for the morrow, carefree and careless. I set about diligently and systematically to enjoy myself supremely and selfishly, heeding nothing but bodily pleasure and flashes of mental enjoyment. I set about to gain and to taste every experience both low and high that the mortal world could give me; nothing could be withheld from me, supreme pleasure was my sole aim. Often I was born rich to sleep in the lap of luxury and to enjoy the lull of flattery. Youth was on my side and beauty was not denied to me; with these two the world and its gross and unappetizing pleasures were ever open to me. Foremost in all that was boisterous and lively was I; the untold pleasures of youth had I from morning till night, nay till gentle dawn appeared in the dim east, surrounded by licentious youth. I was foremost in gaiety, no rival could I find in my extremes. The pleasures of bright Nineveh, of gay Babylon, of wondrous Egypt and sunburnt India, were ever at my call. I was showered with their honours, with their praise and their flattery. I drank deep the wine of merriment at the fountain of gaiety and satisfaction. Slaves and servants had I many, but never a master, not one. Desires, springing up like the glorious flowers of the tender spring, were immediately satisfied, never was there a curb to my whims and caprices. No sooner was there a thought of enjoyment, it was fulfilled at the next pleasurable moment. Love, of all kinds, was ever at my elbow; no pure thing was safe from me. I desecrated all chastity, scoffing at the high gods, spurning the humbly faithful of the human race. Rich and fragrant wine was always beside me with a slave to hand it to me. Surfeited with the throbs of gratification of man, in all the civilized countries, among all refined nations and races, I incarnated as a woman to relish the delicate raptures of being loved by passionate men. Never was I satisfied with the monotony of one lover and the love of one wooer, but many and innumerable adorers had I at my window. Languishing in my love, clamouring for more, I passed my life. All the sufferings of child-bearing, the joys of having a child, the grief of losing one, the pains and sorrows of old age and the neglect and indifference of former lovers, have I experienced, and have gloated over past memories, and cried over long lost admirers. Many a life, tired of licentious and free-loving woman, I became a sacred wife and gained the happiness of pure love. Children have I borne with pleasure and there never stirred in my heart, as of yore, the hate of suffering when I brought forth to the world an innocent being. The tender love of clinging children, their innocent smiles, their little sorrows and pains, their pure hearts, their dear and holy kisses, their delicate embraces, have I enjoyed, and have been thrilled at their welcome. A loving wife, a tender mother I became, and gloried in the feelings of love. Having gained that experience of womanhood, I turned once more to the free man with strong and brutal emotions. Passion rent my heart and I lay in the lap of luxury forgetful of sorrow and pain, oblivious to the suffering of any creature. I lived a life of selfish enjoyment, rich in gross experiences, wealthy in mortal pleasures, and the material world withheld nothing from me. But there was no satisfaction, no contentment, no blissful happiness, and my heart was as bare and desolate as the waste desert with no living thing to give beauty and rapture to it. I had tasted the wealth of the worlds, and I became a poor man, a beggar, wandering from house to house, denied and cursed at, dirty, tired, ugly, hideous in my own eyes, laughed and pointed at, hungry, fatherless, motherless, with no woman who dared to touch me, pitiable, riddled with known and unknown diseases, with bleeding feet; with a dirty sackcloth on my shoulders which served me as a robe on festal days, as a blanket when the cool night breezes blew, as a headgear when the blazing sun shone pitiless on my dirty head; and with a worn staff in my hand have I wandered through the rich and inhospitable streets of many nations. The wealthy shopkeepers welcomed me, each and all, when I was born in their gorgeous cities, with a curse and a howl, with a hit and a kick; I was chased by men and savage dogs. With faces averted the people passed, and their hands withheld the comfort which lay in their power to give. The villages and towns were alike; pitiless and with a hard heart the peoples of all nations passed me by. My bedchamber was some desolate and lonesome spot where no man or animal dared to come, loathing to breathe such foul air. Hunger always gnawing at my stomach, heat of the sun always burning me, cold winds of the north always biting me, frosts withering me, shivering with ague and pain, tottering with weariness, eaten by disease, have I wandered all over the earth, never meeting a smile, never a kind word, never a loving look. The dogs were happy; they were fed, they had someone to pet them, to comfort and care for them; but even the dogs howled at me. No house ever opened its door to my occasional knock; the holy priests chased me from their sacred temples. Children, stricken with horror, stopped crying when they beheld me. Mothers have held their infants closer at the distant sight of me, rushing with a shriek into their protecting homes. I seemed to spread pestilence and unhappiness; the very heavens clouded. The rivers dried up at my approach, as I went to quench my thirst; the trees gave me no fruit; the earth quaked at my advance and the stars disappeared at the sight of my unfortunate being. No gentle rain fell on my head, cleansing my impurities. Thus for many generations, among various nations, among strange people, alone and unhappy, like a lone cloud that hangs over the vale and the hill, that is chased and harried by wanton winds, have I wandered, miserable and loathed. Shelter and physical comfort have I not found for many ages; weary of body and desolate of soul, hunted like some vicious animal, have I sought seclusion, and in solitude, alas! misery ever dwelt with me. Like a dead leaf that is crushed by many a foot, have I suffered within this cruel and gruesome abode of the flesh, poor and dirty, without love and without hate, with complete indifference as to sorrow or pain, void of intelligence, famished and thirsty, all the glorious emotions that once kindled my heart dead for many an age. Blind of hope, despairing of my existence, crawling from human sight, detested and loathed by the youngest of humanity, have I sought, through this agony and through this interminable sorrow, through this torture of the physical body and through the privation of the soul, through this degradation and horror - crying and in eternal pain, for that light, for that comfort and for that happiness which was denied to me when sunk in gross riches, when wallowing in selfish contentment and caring for nothing except for my crude pleasures, which was withheld from me also when I attempted to lead the pure and noble life. For when I worshipped and dwelt in pure adoration, when life was a continual self-denial and self-mortification, when sin was abhorred by me, when, with head erect, I gazed always into the dim future for truth, when there was so much light around me, and yet profound and dismal darkness within me, when I loved purely and longed nobly, when I was thrilled at the simple name of God; in those lives of temple piety and harmlessness, no blissful contentment could I find. Part II Many and varied were my experiences, thoughts and emotions; innumerable passions, bestial and noble, fine sympathies and great loves; many a love, pure and selfish, many shades of gratification and fine and glorious feelings, much high intelligence and low cunning have I known; through many ages and through many centuries, through different nations and races, through every capacity, have I passed and gained the knowledge that the world can give to one who seeks and suffers. Yet where is that light which sages have seen, that truth which conquers all unrealities, that compassion which heals all suffering, that blissful contentment which brings eternal happiness to the sorrow stricken soul and that wisdom which guides the aching humanity? Wheresoever I have been, wheresoever I have groped, I have returned with an empty hand and grieving heart. Like an erring child that strays from its beloved mother, have I wandered far into the realms of despair and unrealities seeking the great reality, far from the lonely road have I departed in quest of that unconquerable longing and that unquenchable thirst; but I have been burnt with anguish, and with drooping head have I returned. No satisfaction or gratification have I found either amidst warring humanity or away from the madding crowd; happy or unhappy, elevated or degraded, in pain or in pleasure, there has always dwelt with me, like the dark shadow, a deep void which nothing could fill, an infinite longing which could not be satisfied; I have wandered blindly and wearily, asking every passer-by for that balm which would cure my aching heart; they gave of their best with a gentle smile and a blessing, but did not further my long quest. Where is that light and where is that infinite happiness? I am tired, tired with the wanderings of innumerable ages; I am weary, weary with the fatigue of many centuries; I am exhausted from lack of strength to struggle and to fight. My feet falter at each footstep; I can scarce drag myself along; I am almost blind with long and continuous use of my eyes through interminable eras; I am hairless, haggard and old. Pride and youth have gone from me; I am bent double with the weight and sorrow of my infinite pain; beauty, of which I once clamorously boasted, has deserted me and left me a monstrous horror. What has passed and what has been wrought through those long and insufferable years is beyond my memory, and my indifference is complete. I am desireless; no passion sways me; no affections tear me; emotions have lost their ancient and all-powerful influence over me; tender love is behind me far back in the distance; the exhilaration of action has been killed out of me; ambition, that spurs so many, either bringing laurels or dishonor, glory or shame, is buried in the distant past; pride that holds its head high amidst turmoil of noble and ignoble deeds, is vanished, never to reappear; fear, that overwhelms and holds men in thrall, is crushed; gruesome death, the awful and impartial companion of all, can no longer dismay me with its threatening stare. Yet there is a deep void of discontent and an everlasting longing for the almost unattainable. Can I ever reach the mountain top of blissful contentment and grasp the supreme happiness? Oh! Mighty Beings, have compassion on the lonely traveller who has voyaged through many stormy seas, travelled through many lands and passed through many sorrows! I am alone - come to my help you pitying and happy Beings! I have worshipped You, I have adored You, I have offered many a sacrifice at Your altars, and much have I endured to kiss Your sacred feet. Comfort me, Ye Masters of Wisdom, with those eyes of love and understanding. What have I done, and what must I do to reach the glory and the greatness? How long must this pitiable condition last? How long, oh Master, ere I behold Thy sacred beauty? How long must I walk on this long and lonely path? Is there an end to this interminable agony which burneth the very love for Thee? Why hast Thou turned away Thy rapturous face, and whither has gone that beatific smile that allays all suffering in all things? I have served the Great Ones and the needy world in a humble and despairing way; I have loved in a blind fashion all things, both small and great, and I have drunk at all the fountains of earthly wisdom. Never have I reached Thy feet. Like a glorious flower that has withered, that has lost its fragrance, its beauty and its tenderness, is the existence of my life; cheerless and desolate, like a dead tree that gives no cool shade to the weary traveler, I have given all, withholding nothing, and empty and hopeless have I remained. I have led the blind and the sorrow-stricken, myself being blind and sorrow-stricken. Why hast Thou not stretched Thy helping hand when I have stumbled? I am weary with asking; I have no hope; all seems to be dead, and utter darkness prevails. No tears fall, but yet I am crying, crying in infinite pain. No passer-by can help me in my pitiable plight, for there is no one but me on this long, long path that winds about like a mighty stream without a beginning and without an end. Desperate, like a madman, I wander on, knowing not whither to go, nor caring what becomes of me. The sun can no longer burn me. I am burnt to the very bone. Like a vast ocean which is boundless, is the glaring whiteness that surrounds me on all sides, and I can scarce distinguish the path which leads me to my ultimate happiness. Everything is left behind me: my companions, my friends and my love - I am desperately lonely. Oh! Master of Compassion, come to my rescue and lead me out of this profound darkness to pure light, and to the haven of immortality, and to the peaceful enlightenment. I seek the pure enlightenment that few Great Beings have attained. I seek the high Deliverer who will free me from this wheel of birth and death. I seek the Brother that will share with me His divine wisdom; I seek the Lover that will comfort me; I seek to lay my weary head in the lap of Compassion; I seek the Friend that will guide me; I seek to take refuge in the Light. The path gives no answer to my desperate calling; the cruel skies look down on me with complete indifference; the comforting echo does not exist, nor is there the dismal moan of many winds. profound silence reigns, save for the monotonous sound of slow breathing and the dragging of weary footsteps. There is no peace; there is a movement of thousands of invisible beings around me, as though they were mocking at my solitary suffering. The expectant hush that comes before a storm is my sole companion; only the annihilation of centuries replies to my continuous entreaties; isolation is complete and cruel. The path no longer speaks to me as of ancient days when she used to point out the right and the wrong, the true from the false, the essential from the unessential, the great from the petty. Now she is as silent as the grave. She has shown me a part of the way; but the rest I must tread by myself, before this beloved path must be left behind when I reach the mightier and more glorious path. She cannot enter there, she cannot be the signpost as of yore, but let me be satisfied with the thought of her guidance through many epochs and storms to that everlasting resting place. The path lies in front of me, gently and imperceptibly climbing, with never a curve and not a thing to obstruct its gentle slope. Like some gigantic snake, whose head and tail are unapproachable, whose eyes cannot perceive the end of its being, that lays itself in warm sand, heavy with killing, sleepy and contented, is the silent path. It appears to be breathing and sighing with some quiet and happy satisfaction, but now the sun steadily pours down his burning rays and drives away all thought from my mind. My only longing is to find some delightful cool shade where I could rest my weary body for a while; but an irresistible force pushes me and urges me on, never allowing me any respite. That power impels me to go forward with faltering footsteps. I cannot resist it. I am weak and exhausted, but I obey that eternal and powerful compelling. I take a step, totter and fall, like a swift bird that is wounded by the cruel arrow; I struggle and become unconscious. Slowly and wearily I wake up and gaze at the naked and bright heavens, and I desire to lie and rest where I am; but that mighty force pushes me onto my feet, as of yore, to walk on the neverending path. Lo, there is a solitary tree, many feet away, whose delicious shadow welcomes me. The leaves are tender, velvety, and fresh, as though the sudden healing breath of spring had but lately awakened the dead branches to joyous life and to delicate green foliage. Its shadow is thick, shutting out the searching sun. The fresh fragrant grass and the protecting tree smile with contentment on me, inviting me to share their happy abode. It is full of birds, joyous in their continuous chatter, calling to each other in playful tones. With failing strength I drag myself to enjoy the rare gift which the kind gods have granted to me. As I with pain approach, the whole tree bends down welcoming me, giving some of its vital strength; I crawl under its fragrant and whisper- ing shadow and gaze wearily into its cool depths. Sleep and exhaustion overcome me; I am asleep, lulled by the welcome twitterings of many birds and the gentle rustle of many leaves. I rest through happy moments of complete oblivion of all suffering and pain, and the ache of many ages. Might I lie here, always, in this soft light, soothed by the murmurings of living things, unruffled by inner and outer storms! Glorious would it be to lie everlastingly here and sleep, sleep, sleep..... I am burning, the sun is viciously glaring on me, revengeful of my momentary happiness. Where is my beloved tree and where are those happy birds with their happy song? Gaze as I may, nowhere can I find the tree of happiness. Gone, gone, and I am alone once again. Was it a dream? Was it the ancient unreality, taking a form that would give sure delight? Was it the pity of some kind God, or the cruel sport of a God unkind? Was it the great promise of the future? Or was it that some mighty Being desired to test the strength of my forbearance? Many vanishing realities have I followed only to hear their merciless laughter when I have grasped them; but here I thought that I was safe from their old and bitter sway, their barbarous persecution when I sought the lasting - the real. They have, then, pursued me even into this far and lonely place? With infinite caution have I learned to disentangle the real from the false, and when I thought I had mastered the supreme art, must I begin again at the bottom of the difficult ladder? When I commenced this path in the bygone ages, there was a firmness in my tread; now again decision rules my steps, a new enthusiasm is born in me, as of yore, when before the many sufferings and many sorrows I was eager to face the unknown, and anxious to test my strength against the unweary path. The joy of struggle is surging up in me to conquer the mighty and immortal happiness. The path with its great force need no longer impel me forward; I run faster, nor do my feet falter. I no longer lag behind. I am the Master of the path. No longer need it spur me to act, for I am action; I am willing and I walk in freedom. The path stretches mile upon mile, age upon age; steeper than of yore, narrower, more strenuous, the way winds precipitously, leaving behind the country of the past. Far below me lies the land of desolation and of immense sorrow, where Unreality, in many shapes and in many a guise, rules the great stricken dominions. Here, at this altitude, there reigns complete silence; the silence smiles on me; but as I walk unceasingly on this mountainous way, the recent joy is dead again, my weary feet falter as of old, and I long for that beloved tree which shared with me its happy shade and the soft wooing songs of the innumerable birds. That phantom tree gave me but the happiness of a fleeting moment, and yet I was gratified with that temporary joy. I beseech the same God who extended his fitful compassion over me, to grant me but a moment of shade, the happy song to lull the aching heart, and the companionship. If it was a dream of fantasy, let me once more embrace it and cling to it even though it be for a brief space! Though ephemeral was the taste of that momentary pleasure, grateful was the rest in the deep, cool shadows. Where art thou, my beloved, glorious unreality though thou be? Hast thou forgotten the weary traveler who sheltered in thy calm shade? Though thou hast been a false comfort, yet how I crave for thee, to sink once more in thy soft arms, forgetting all but my delicious comfort. Grant me thyself but this once, and I shall be thy love everlasting. I am weary; come to my aid, my beloved, with thy transient beauty. Lull me with thy false murmurings, and encourage me with thy untrue flattery. I am spent with beseeching and exhausted with weariness, and I am in utter despair. Far in the distance, there is a clump of trees surrounding a gay house, with a sweet and fragrant garden. I am in it enjoying the cool, and the bewitching smiles of many a beauteous maiden. I join in their fresh laughter and in their merry-making. Their pleasure-laden voices soothe me and the soft music lulls me to sleep. Here there is peace and quietness and complete forgetfulness. I am happy and contented, for in this abode of pleasure is the joy for which I have searched through innumerable ages; reality cannot exist but here. Am I not satisfied? Am I not surrounded by all that I desire? Why did I endure, why did I struggle? For here is balm to the aching heart and comfort to the comfortless. How long, or how many ages, or how many days, I have dwelt in this pleasurable abode, I cannot tell; nor can I count the happy hours that have been spent here. Once again the unquenchable longing is stirring in the depths of my heart; it has awakened anew and tortures me. I cannot rest in this house of gratification; the contentment which it promised has not been given to me; there is no happiness, no comfort within its walls. I have been deceived with unrealities; I have feasted on untruth; I have been guided by the light of false reason, and I have worshipped, as of yore, at the temple of darkness. I have cheated myself with the temporary and the impermanent; after many ages and much pain have I once again fallen a victim to the mocking gods. Again must I wander forth; again must I face the unyielding path. Once more I am in the blazing sun, once more do I feel the strength to face the long journey. Fresh enthusiasm and fresh hopes are surging in me; courage is born anew. The path of many ages smiles on me, promising once more to be the passage of light. Like a mighty tree that has bowed down before the stormy winds, but reasserts itself when they are stilled, and gazes again, with head erect, into the unfathomable skies, defiant and sparkling in the sun, so do I feel. Once more the joy of loneliness is pulsating through all my being, and the solitude, away from vain pleasures and the unmeaning crowd, is like a breath of fresh wind that blows from the mountains. I am alive once more eager to find the end of all sorrow, the glorious liberation. Happy is the man who struggles! Part III The long sinuous path lies in front of me, and all life has ceased to exist except for the one traveler on that lonely road. I am throbbing with the excitement of a new and strenuous conquest, like a general, proud and haughty, that marches into a vanquished town. I long for greater and more difficult battles to be won, and I cry for the lack of them. The solemn stillness breaks in upon my joy, and the grave quietness grips me. I am humbled by the vast expanse, and the pitiless skies threaten me; the pride of victory is broken, and its glory has departed; the terrible loneliness is gently and slowly overwhelming me. But the longing to attain the end is unabated; invincible is the strength, and the will to succeed is indomitable. For how many centuries I have travelled I cannot count for my memory is weary, but I have journeyed through many seasons. The path is as tired as he who treads it, and both are crying for the end, but both are willing, the one to lead, the other to follow. On either side of the road there arise in the far distance, at fitful intervals, tall and stately trees, tossing their bright heads in the sun, forgetting that they were like plants once upon a time. Birds of all feathers, of all hue and of all sizes, frequent them; their plaintive but happy cries reach my ears that have not heard a sound for many an age, except the sound of weary footsteps. As I approach those joyous creatures they are not afraid, but gaze with supreme indifference, continuing their songs. Under the shade, the green grass sways to the soft music of the wind among the leaves. The strong tree, the gay birds, and the humble grass, all welcome me and promise to lull me to sleep. It is so close, so fragrant, so peaceful to the worn eyes - I almost hesitatingly yield -but there arise in me the memories of other trees, other birds and other shades so deliciously welcoming, yet so deceitful. My beloved path smiles, watching and wondering what my actions will be, whether I shall choose again the shadows. It is cool under that tree, and blissful with the song of the birds and the soft music of the rustling leaves. Ah! let me stay but a fleeting moment and then let me pass on! The sun is hot and I am weary, and my body aches with the long journey. The refreshing shadows can do me no harm - let me but stay, Oh, thou inexorable path, for a happy second! Long sleepless nights have I passed with thee for many centuries, and dost thou grudge and deny me the sleep of but a passing moment? Canst thou not grant me this one pitiable desire? Whither hath fled thy love, thy infinite understanding? I implore thee not to turn away from me, but to answer to my call. A profound silence reigns. The wind has ceased to play with the leaves. The birds are quiet, quiet as death, and the mighty tree broods in deep thought. The shadows have deepened, there prevails a greater calm and greater cool; the green, tender grasses look on me with their small inquisitive eyes, debating in their little minds as to the cause of my unforeseen faltering, whispering to each other in encouragement at my plight. The path of many experiences and great understanding smiles on my struggling hesitation, with neither encouragement nor pleasure; it is a smile of wisdom and of knowledge, which says: "Thou mayest do what thou desirest, but repentance awaits thee." My choice is made. Like morning mist that is gently dispelled by the first warm rays of the slow-rising sun, so the magnificent tree of gratification fades gradually before me; the gay birds melt away as before a fast-approaching storm, and the green grass withers in the burning heat of the sun. There remains only a faint vestige of the past. The path leads on and I humbly follow. At irregular intervals along the roadside there arise trees, inviting me to taste of their bright-coloured and luscious fruit and enjoy its sweetness. It would soothe my parched throat and quench my burning thirst, but my path is rigorous, and I pass them by. Further on there are magnificent houses, places of pleasure and delight, their welcoming doors always open inviting the travel-worn pilgrim. An age and many lives lie between house and house, and the tired traveller is the too-willing victim of their charm. Craving for their enchanting shelter, many a time have I hesitated at their doorsteps, sometimes straying into them and coming out with shame to walk again with gladness on the clean, sunburnt path. The house of strong and selfish passions, with its gross gratifications and its impurities, have I entered, and have feasted on all that they could give. Oft have I passed with lingering footsteps the house of many false shadows, the house of satiety with its fleeting contentment, the house of flattery, and the house of learning, where false and fugitive facts lull the ignorant; but only to be enticed into the house of the love that limits, that is selfish, that is unkind, forgetting all except the one; the love that clings, the love that desires; the narrow love of the father, of the mother, the sister, the brother, and the child; the love that slowly and pitilessly destroys the nobler feelings; the love that contents itself with little things. Many a time have I crossed the threshold of the house of blissful ignorance, of the brilliant house of vain flattery, and of the dismal house of black hate and cunning deceit. Often have I fallen to the temptations of the imperishable house of intolerance, to the boisterous house of patriotism, that breeds venomous and warring hate, and the house of solitary and cold pride, that is unapproachable and untouchable. In the house of friendship that uproots the friendship of others and is consumed with jealousy, and in the house of concealed and talented vice, have I sojourned for many weary seasons. And I have visited the house of small wisdom that excludes all knowledge except of its own petty creation, and the house of little learning that understands little but condemns violently and clamorously all that is beyond its insignificant comprehension. Many a house of religion have I entered, dwelling within its narrow walls, sleeping in the lap of dark superstition, worshipping false gods, sacrificing innocent things at the temple's altars, and taking part in futile, religious wars and bitter persecution. Wandering into dark houses, have I sought light, and have strayed forth blind and comfortless. The sympathetic path ever understood me when I returned to its bare arms, with head bowed down, with shame gnawing at my heart; it ever welcomed me, promising to be my guide and my everlasting friend. I can see on each side of the long pathway many temptations in delightful shapes and forms, but they are not for me. Let others be enticed, but I will follow my ancient path. My sore need is to rest and to drink deep at the long-promised source, and no longer do I desire to quench my immemorial thirst at the shadowy fountains. Yet, as far as the eye can see, false things obstruct my view. Once I was able to talk quietly and for many an hour with my lonely companion, the path, but now it is silent, overwhelmed by sound. Once there was profound peace and tranquillity, but now the holy silence is broken by the barbarous tongues of the multitude. Yet through these clamorous scenes and continuous babble my path leads, and I follow without hesitation. How long I have travelled through the land of false fantasies I cannot say, but unerring, with a grave deliberation, have I adhered to my pathway. Always the path mounts, and with aching limbs have I climbed, clinging desperately; but never have I strayed and gone down into the dark valley. Many centuries have I struggled, resisting fleeting pleasures and inclinations; and yet in front of me there ever springs up temptation in new and varied forms to beguile me. True it is that I can never again be their victim, and yet. Ye pitiless gods, is there never an end to this goading misery and to this cruel and false land of passing desires? For how many an age have I trod this path of righteousness! Yet the end is still not in view. Or is this the goal of all my endurance? Nay, it cannot be, for I have seen, once upon a time, in a far bygone age, the summit of enlightenment. But for how many incarnations must I wander amidst sorrow and tribulation before I knock at the portals of bliss? Without demand, without question, and without lamentation, I must tread this path for another age. I am weary and sick at heart; incarnations of great misery and pain have I endured. Vain hopes and promises have made me strong; imperishable has been my desire for the goal; persistent has been my blind groping after truth, and indestructible my ardent enthusiasm. Can all my aching sorrow and my torture be in vain? Cannot my beloved path lead me to the mountain top, as it has constantly and faithfully promised? Still, after the exquisite pain and indescribable longing, does the pathway lead amidst a vast expanse of shadowy illusions. Why? Ah! what have I done and what have I left undone, what little things of life have I neglected, what sacrifices are there still to be offered, what still greater agonies must I bear? What still greater purifications must I undergo, what still fiercer burning must I sustain, and what still mightier experience of torture awaits me before I reach that abode of pure enlightenment and sacred content? The mother who bore me knew not what she did, and, had she known, the milk that she nourished me with so tenderly would have turned to poison, and would have spared me these neverending tortures. Happy would I have been to cease upon the midnight hour, but idle is it to moan and hurl myself against the inevitable. Blameless is my dear mother, and fruitlessly do I clamour against the pain of evolution. And in the end this groping must cease, this fumbling in the dark; for the door of knowledge must be found; there must be the light that guides, the truth that gives contentment, the enlightenment that brings calm happiness. Oh! I can no longer cry, my body is too feeble to stand, the strength is gradually ebbing out of me - my entire being revolts against the merciless void. Can no god turn his pitiful eyes on the lonesome, spent traveller? Ye Masters of Wisdom, have compassion and shed that infinite mercy that can heal and that can bring light to the wanderer in utter darkness. O, ye cool nights, compel the fiery sun to depart hence and, ye dark clouds, cover up the burning rays! Ah! for the strong hand that could lead and support me, the gentle voice that could comfort and encourage me, the embrace and the kiss that could make me forget! Forlorn am I and with a dying voice, I call... The voice of profound quietness answers me with complete silence, and the void echoes that dreadful stillness. My beloved path smiles on me, but, pitifully and on all sides, even among the boisterous houses of mirth, deep and awful quiet reigns, as on a night when some murderous deed is being enacted or when the churchyard grave opens its ponderous jaws as in a subdued yawn. I am exhausted, and I totter. The end of my very being draweth nigh. Within the mind's eye I seem to perceive the vision of the haven of perfect peace and the resting place for the weary and the travel-worn. Yet for how many an age must I still endure this pain of the mind, this surging dissatisfaction, this grief of ages and these woes of bodily suffering, I cannot tell. As far as the eye can scan, I see nothing but shifting and transient things. Yet at each footstep there throbs in me the assurance that the end of the long journey is at hand and approacheth like a ship at sea. May the deities that be above hasten me towards my destination! Suddenly the air has become still, breathless with some great expectation, and there is a hush like that which comes for a moment after a glorious sunset, when the whole world is in profound adoration. There is a deep silence as on a night when the distant stars waft their kisses to each other, there is an unexpected tranquillity as that of a sudden cessation in a thunderous storm, and there reigns a great peace as in the precincts of a sacred temple. Within me the pain and sorrow of ages is partly stilled; there is a faint and soothing murmuring in the air as my eyes softly close. All things animate and inanimate are resting from their weary toil. The whole world is peacefully asleep and dreaming sweet dreams. The sun, whose fiery rays have for so many ages burnt me ruthlessly, has suddenly become kind, and there is a coolness as that of a deep wooded forest. Divinity is taking shape within me. The path has become much steeper and I feebly climb the difficult ascent. As I mount this hill, the abodes of innumerable pleasures of the flesh, the houses of many desires and the green trees grow scarce, and as I reach the summit the enticing fantasies entirely vanish. The path ever ascends in a long straight line, the air is cooler and the climbing is easier. There is a fresh energy born within me and I surge forward with renewed enthusiasm. Far in the high distance my path vanishes into a thick grove of mighty and ancient trees. I dare not look behind or on either side, for the pathway has become precipitous and dangerously narrow. I traverse this perilous passage in a spent and dreamy condition, with my eyes ever fixed on the far-off vision, scarcely looking or caring where I tread. I am in great ecstasy, for the dim sight ahead of me has inspired a deep and lasting hope. With a light footstep I am running forward, fearful lest the happy image should dissolve and elude me, as it has done so often. There is not another traveller in front of me, but the pathway is smooth as though worn by thousands of footsteps through innumerable ages; it shines like a mirror; it is slippery. I tread as though walking in sleep, dreading to wake to false realities and transient things. The vision stands out clear and more distinct as I rapidly approach. The gracious Gods have at last answered my pitiful calls uttered in the wilderness. My long and sorrowful journey has come to an end and the glorious journey has begun. Far ahead there are other paths and other gateways, at whose doors I shall knock with greater assurance and with a more joyous and understanding heart. From this height I can behold all the paths that lie below me. They all converge to this point, though separated by immeasurable distances; many are the travellers on these lonely paths, but yet each traveller is proud in his blind loneliness and foolish separation. For there are many who follow him and many who precede him. They have been like me, lost in their own narrow path, avoiding and pushing aside the greater road. They struggle blindly in their ignorance, walking in their own shadow and, clinging desperately to their petty truths, they call forth despairingly for the greater truth. My path that has guided me through rough and storm-laden countries is beside me. I am gazing with welling tears at those weary and sorrow-eyed travellers. My beloved, my heart is broken at the cruel sight; for I cannot descend and give them divine water to quench their vehement thirst. For they must find the eternal source for themselves. But, ye merciful Gods, can I at least make their path smoother and alleviate the pain and the sorrow which they have created for themselves through ignorance and pitiful carelessness! Come all ye that sorrow, and enter with me into the abode of enlightenment and into the shades of immortality. Let us gaze on the everlasting light, the light which gives comfort, the light which purifies. The resplendent truth shines gloriously and we can no longer be blind, nor is there need to grope in the abysmal darkness. We shall quench our thirst, for we shall drink deep at the bubbling fountain of wisdom. I am strong, I no longer falter; the divine spark is burning in me; I have beheld in a waking dream, the Master of all things and I am radiant with His eternal joy. I have gazed into the deep pool of knowledge and many reflections have I beheld. I am the stone in the sacred temple. I am the humble grass that is mown down and trodden upon. I am the tall and stately tree that courts the very heavens. I am the animal that is hunted. I am the criminal that is hated by all. I am the noble that is honoured by all. I am sorrow, pain and fleeting pleasure; the passions and the gratifications; the bitter wrath and the infinite compassion; the sin and the sinner. I am the lover and the very love itself. I am the saint, the adorer, the worshipper and the follower. I am God. FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 'THE SEARCH' I have been a wanderer long In this world of transient things. I have known the passing pleasures thereof. As the rainbow is beautiful, But soon vanishes into nothingness, So have I known, From the very foundation of the world, The passing away of all things Beautiful, joyous and pleasurable. In search of the Eternal I lost myself in the fleeting. All things have I tasted in search of Truth. In bygone ages Have I known The pleasures of the transient world - - The tender mother with her children, The arrogant and the free, The beggar that wanders the face of the earth, The contentment of the wealthy, The woman of enticements, The beautiful and the ugly, The man of authority, the man of power, The man of consequence, the bestower and the guardian, The oppessed and the opressor, The liberator and the tyrant, The man of great possessions, The man of renunciation, the sannyasi, The man of activity and the man of dreams, The arrogant priest in gorgeous robes, and the humble worshipper, The poet, the artist and the creator, At all the altars of the world have I worshipped, All religions have known me, Many ceremonies have I performed, In the pomp of the world have I rejoiced, In the battles of defeat and victory have I fought, The despiser and the despised, The man acquainted with grief And agonies of many sorrows, The man of pleasure and abundance. In the secret recesses of my heart have I danced, Many births and deaths have I known, In all these fleeting realms have I wandered, In passing ecstasies, certain of their endurance, And yet I never found that eternal Kingdom of Happiness. Once I sought for Thee - - The imperishable Truth, The eternal Happiness, The culmination of all Wisdom - - On the mountain top, In the star-lit sky, In the shadows of the soft moon, In the temples of man, In the books of the learned, In the soft spring leaf, In the dancing waters, On the face of man, In the bubbling brook, In sorrow, in pain, In joy and ecstasy - - I did not find Thee. As the mountaineer that climbs great heights, Leaving his many burdens at each step, So have I climbed, Throwing aside all transient things. As the sannyasi with his robes of gold, With the begging bowl of happiness, So have I renounced. As the gardener who kills The destructive weed of the garden, So have I annihilated the self. As the winds, So am I free and untrammelled. Fresh and eager as the wind That seeketh the hidden places of the valley, So have I sought The secret abodes of my soul And purged myself of all things, past and present. As, suddenly, the robes of silence Fall over the noisy world, So, instantly, have I found Thee Deep in the heart of all things and in mine own. On the mountain path I sat on a rock, And Thou wert beside me and in me, All things being in Thee and in me. Happy is the man that findeth Thee and me In all things. In the light of the setting sun, Through the delicate lace of a spring tree, I beheld Thee. In the twinkling stars I beheld Thee. In the swift passing bird, Disappearing into the black mountain, I beheld Thee. Thy glory has awakened the glory in me. As I have found, O world, The Truth, the eternal Happiness, So do I desire to give. Come let us consider together, ponder together and be happy together; Let us reason together and bring forth Happiness. As I have tasted And know full well the sorrows and pains, The ecstasies and joys Of this fleeting world, So do I know your travail. The glory of a butterfly passeth in a day, So, O world, are thy delights and pleasures. As the sorrows of a child, So, O world, are thy sorrows and pains, Many pleasures leading to many sorrows, Many sorrows to greater sorrows, Continual strife and ceaseless small victories. As the delicate bud, suffering the long winter, Blossoms forth and gives delicious scent to the air, And withers away before the setting of the sun, So are thy struggles, thy achievements, and thy death - - A wheel of pain and pleasure, Birth and death. As I lost myself in the transient things In search of that eternal Happiness, So, O world, art thou lost in the fleeting. Awake and gather thy strength, Look about and consider. That unfading Happiness - - The Happiness that is the only Truth, The Happiness that is the end of all search, The Happiness that is the end of all questionings and doubt, The Happiness that brings freedom from birth and death, The Happiness that is the only law, The Happiness that is the only refuge, The Happiness that is the source of all things, The Happiness that gives eternal comfort, That true Happiness that is enlightenment - - Abides within thee. As I have gained strength, So would I give This Happiness. As I have gained affectionate detachment, So would I give This Happiness. As I have gained passionate dispassion, So would I give This Happiness. As I have conquered life and death, So would I give This Happiness. Throw aside, O world, thy vanities And follow me, For I know the way up the mountain, For I know the way through this turmoil and grief. There is only one One Truth, One Law, One Refuge, One Guide, To this eternal Happiness. Awake, arise, Consider and gather thy strength. As it is but for a night The birds rest on a tree, So have I communed with strangers, In my long journey Through many lands. Out of every sheaf of corn I drew a blade. Out of every day I gathered some advantage. From the full-laden tree I plucked a ripe fruit. My days are swifter Than the weaver's shuttle. III As one beholds through a small window A single green leaf, a small patch of the vast blue sky, So I began to perceive Thee, In the beginning of all things. As the leaf faded and withered, the patch covered as with dark cloud, So didst Thou fade and vanish, but to be reborn again, As the single green leaf, as the small patch of the blue sky. For many lives have I seen The bleak winter and the green spring. prisoned in my little room, I could not behold the entire tree nor the whole sky. I swore there was no tree, nor the vast sky - - That was the Truth. Through time and destruction My window grew large. I beheld Now, A branch with many leaves, And a greater patch of the blue with many clouds. I forgot the single green leaf, the small patch of the vast blue. I swore there was no tree, nor the immense sky - - That was the Truth. Weary of this prison, This small cell, I raged at my window. With bleeding fingers I tore away brick after brick, I beheld, Now, The entire tree, its great trunk, Its many branches, its thousand leaves, And an immense part of the sky. I swore there was no other tree, no other part to the sky - - That was the Truth. This prison no longer holds me, I flew away through the window. O friend, I behold every tree and the vast expanse of the limitless sky. Though I live in every single leaf and in every small patch of the vast blue sky, Though I live in every prison, looking out through every small casement - - Liberated am I. Lo! not a thing shall bind me - - This is the Truth. IV O world, Thou art seeking everywhere for Happiness. In every clime, Among all peoples, Among the animals and among the green trees, Beside the dancing waters, Upon the stately mountains, Amid the cool valleys, And in the sun-parched lands, Under the serene star-lit skies, In the radiance of the setting sun, In the freshness of the dawn - - All beings are searching for this Happiness. Though thy sons build impenetrable walls Around their country, Shutting out the happiness they seek, Though thy learned priests fight for the Gods they shall worship, Though the contentment of the wealthy be stagnating, Though the oppressed and the exploited be suffering, Though the man of thought has not found the eternal solution, Though the sannyasi, who renounces the world, has not gained enlightenment, Though the beggar, that wanders from house to house for kindness has not found shelter, Though thy people prefer the darkness of the night to the light of day, Though thy people turn night into day - - All are searching for that lasting Happiness. As the dreary tree longingly suffers for the spring and green happiness, So all thy people look for that lasting Happiness. The lady of fashion who depends on clothes and wealth, The woman who is painted, The girl who flirts, The man who seeks happiness in clothes, The man who drinks incessantly, The man who cannot be happy unless playing at something, The man who kills to enjoy, The priest in his gorgeous robes, The recluse with the loin cloth, The actor dressed to please the audience, The artist struggling to create, The poet who pours into words the immensity of his thoughts and dreams, The musician whose soul is thrilled with sound, The saint in his asceticism, The sinner, if there be one, who does not care for God or man, The bourgeois who is frightened of all things - - All these are searching for happiness. They buy and they sell, They build magnificent palaces, Surrounding themselves with all the beauty That money can buy, They plant gardens, the exquisite delight of the refined, They cover themselves with jewels, They quarrel and they are charming, They drink without restraint, They eat without restraint, They are virulent and pacific, They worship and curse, They love and hate, They die and are born again, They are cruel to man and beast, They destroy and create, They produce and annihilate - - Yet they are all seeking happiness, Happiness in transient things. The rose, beautiful and glorious, Dieth tomorrow. In search of happiness They build vast structures, Call them Churches, And enter therein, But it eludes them, as in the naked streets. They invent a God to satisfy themselves, But they never find in Him what they long for. The incense, the flowers, the candles, The gorgeous robes, the thrilling music, Are but enticements for that search. The deep note of the distant bell, The monotonous prayer, Calling, crying and begging, Are but the gropings in the dark For that lasting Happiness. In search of happiness They build cool, gigantic Temples, The product of many minds, The work of many hands; The chantings, the smoke of the camphor, The beauty of the sacred lotus, Do not satisfy their craving. In search of happiness They bribe, they corrupt, they make unholy The earth, the seas and mountains. Their graven images do not answer their call. As the mountain stream sweeps all things before it, So is their structure of happiness destroyed in an instant; They destroy each other in their jealous love. In search of happiness They give labels, pretty-sounding names To each other, And think they have found The source of Eternity, Solved the problem of their sorrow. In search of happiness They marry, rejoicing in their new-found happiness; They are happy as the flower That blossoms with the sun And dies with the sun. They change their love and renew their rejoicings. They are full and bubbling over With ecstasy, And, in an instant, Sorrow is the outcome of their fleeting joy. As the cloud, fully laden, that empties itself And vanishes from the heavens, Leaving again the barren sky, So is their love, that is full, That is powerful, that creates and destroys. Their love, so triumphant in the beginning, So strong with desires, So beautiful in the full bloom, So unrestrained in its fulfillment, Fades as the leaf. To be born again, Fading again as the leaf. As the sorrowing tree That has lost its happy leaves, So is the man Who sought happiness Through love. In solitude, In crowded streets, They search for happiness, All the world moans for happiness. The winds whisper, The storms threaten, But the man looks for happiness In the passing things, In the transient things, In the things that he can touch and perceive, And groans after the loss of his happiness, As the child that cries After the broken doll. For their happiness fades and withers As the tender leaf. Search their hopes, Their longings, Their desires, Their selfishness, Their quarrels and angers, Their dignities, Their ambitions, Their glories, Their rewards, Their distinctions - -There is disillusionment, There is vanity, There is unhappiness. Search their class distinctions, Their spiritual distinctions, Their limitations, Their openness, Their prejudices, Their embraces - -There is an uncertainty of purpose, There is an uncertainty of happiness. Wherever you may look, Wherever you may wander, In whatever clime you may abide, There is sorrow, there is pain, Unsatisfiable voids, Open aching wounds, bared and exposed, Or covered over With the panoply of great rejoicing. No man sayeth - -"My happiness is indestructible." There is everywhere decay and death, And the renewal of life. So are they that seek happiness in the passing - - Their happiness is of the moment. As the butterfly, that tasteth the honey of every flower, That dieth in the day, As the desert that is deluged with the rain Yet remaineth a weary land without a shadow - - So is their happiness As the sands of the sea are their actions In search of this happiness. As the aged and mighty tree That towers into the sky And is felled by the axe in a moment - - So is their happiness. They look to their happiness In the transient, In the fleeting, In the objective, And they find it not. Such is their fleeting and unsatisfied happiness. Can you grow the tree of Happiness on sand? The Happiness that will not fade by usage, That increases by action, That increases by feeling, That is born of Truth, That never decays, That knows no beginning, no end, That is free, The Happiness that is Eternal, They have never tasted. The Happiness that knows Of no loneliness, Of immense certainty, Of detachment, Of love that is free of persons, That is free from prejudices, That is not bound by tradition, That is not bound by authority, That is not bound by superstitions, That is of no religion. The Happiness That is not at the command of another, That is of no priest, That is of no sect, That requires no labels, That is bound by no law, That cannot be shaken by God or man, That is solitary and embraces all, That blows from the snow-clad mountains That blows from the hot desert, That burns, That heals, That destroys, That creates, That delights in solitude and in numbers, That fills the soul through Eternity. That is the God, The wife, the mother, The husband, the father, And the child. That is of no class, That is of the aristocracy of divinity, That is the refinement of the refined, That is a philosophy unto itself. That is as vast as the seas, That is open as the skies, That is profound as the lake, That is tranquil as the peaceful valley, That is serene as the mountain, That is beyond the shadow of death, That is beyond the limitations of birth, That is as the strength of the hills, That bears the fruit of many generations, That is the consummation of all desire, That is the ecstasy of purpose, That is the source of all existence, That is the well whose waters feed the worlds, That is the ecstasy, the joy, That is the dancing star of our being, That giveth divine discontentment, That is born of Eternity, That is the destruction of self, That is the pool of wisdom, That creates happiness in others That has dominion over all things - - Such happiness thou hast never tasted, O world. For thou hast been fed on the food of another, Thou hast been taught by the lips of another, Thou hast been taught to draw thy strength from another, Thou hast been taught that thy happiness lies in another, That thy redemption is at the hands of another, That wisdom is in the mouth of another, That Truth can only be attained through another, Thou hast been taught to worship the God of another, To adore at the altar of another, To discipline thyself to the authority of another, To shape thyself in the mould of another, To abide in the shadow of another, To grow in the protection of another, Thou hast been taught to lay thy foundations in another, To hear with the ears of another, To feel with the heart of another, To think with the mind of another; Thou hast been fed with the enticements of transient things, Thou hast been fed with the food that never satisfies, Thou hast been fed with the knowledge that disappears with strife. Thou hast been fed at the hands of the satisfied, With the false and the fleeting. Thou hast been nourished by laws, by governments, by philosophies, Thou hast been led, driven and exposed, Thou hast been sheltered under the shadow That changes from moment to moment, Thou hast been nurtured by false truths and false gods, Thou hast been stimulated by false desires, Thou hast been fed on false ambitions, Thou hast been fed with the fruits of the earth, O world. Thou hast been taught to seek Truth in the fleeting, Thou hast been nourished by the transient things, In these thou shalt never find that Happiness For which thy soul doth seek and suffer. But, As the diver plunges deep into the sea For the pearl, Risking his life in search of the transient, So must thou plunge deep down within thyself In search of Eternity. As the adventurous mountaineer that climbs to conquer, So must thou climb to that intoxicating height, Where thou seest all things in their true proportion. As the lotus that pushes heavenward through mire, So must thou push aside all transient things If thou wouldst discover that Kingdom of Happiness. As the majestic tree depends for its strength on its hidden roots, And plays with the great passing winds, So must thou establish thy hidden strength deep within thyself, And play with the passing world. As the swift-running river knows its source, So must thou know thine own being. As the soft blue lake whose depth no man knows, So must thy depth be unfathomable. As the seas contain a multitude of living things, So in thee are there hidden secrets of the worlds. As on the mountain side, at various altitudes, different flowers grow, So in thee are there degrees of beauty. As the earth is full of hidden treasures which no man hath seen, So in thee are hidden secrets, unknown to thyself. As the winds possess immense, inexhaustible power, So in thee lieth great unconquerable energy. As the mountain-tops dance in the light of the sun, So shalt thou dance in the light of thy knowledge. As there is an ever-changing vision on the winding mountain path, So in thee there is a constant unfoldment. As the distant star that scintillates of a dark night, So is he that hath discovered himself. In thee alone is the God, for there is no other God, Thou art the God that all religions and nations worship, In thee alone are joy, ecstasy, power and strength, In thee alone is the power to grow, to change and alter, In thee alone are the experiences of many ages gathered, In thee alone is the source of all things - - Love, hate, jealousy, fear, anger and sweetness - - In thee alone lies the power to create or to destroy, In thee alone is the beginning of all thought, feeling and action, In thee alone lies nobility, In thee alone is no loneliness. Thou art the master of all things. Thou art the source of all things. In thee alone lies the power to do good and to do evil, In thee alone lies the power to create Heaven and Hell, In thee alone lies the power to control the future and the present. Thou art the master of Time, In thee alone is the Kingdom of Happiness, In thee alone is the eternal Truth, In thee alone is the well of inexhaustible Love. O world, If thou wouldst know all the hidden secrets, The treasures of many ages, The experiences of many centuries, The accumulation of power of many generations, The thought of the past, The ecstasies, joys, sorrow and pain of bygone ages, And the great and foolish actions of the many lives that lie behind thee, The centuries of uncertainty and doubt, If thou wouldst know of the immense future, Of the great heights of joyous growth, Of the adventure of good and evil, Of the result of all thought, of all feelings, and of all actions, Of the many past lives and of the many future lives, If thou wouldst know of thy hates, of thy jealousies, Of thine agonies, of thy pleasures and pains, Of thine ecstatic love, of thy joyous rapture, Of thy burning devotion, of thy bubbling enthusiasm, Of thy joyous seriousness, of thine aching worship, Of thine unrestrained adoration, If thou wouldst concern thyself with the lasting, With the eternal, with the indestructible, With divinity, with immortality, With wisdom which is the pool of Heaven, If thou wouldst know of that everlasting Kingdom of Happiness, If thou wouldst know of that beauty that never fades or decays, If thou wouldst know of that truth that is imperishable and alone - - Then, O world, Look deep within thyself With eyes clear, if thou wouldst perceive all things. As the tranquil pool that reflects the heavens above, So shall all things find their reflection in thee. As the flower that blossoms forth in the warm sunshine, So must thou unfold if thou wouldst know thyself. As the eagle soars into the heavens, unrestrained and free, So must thou soar if thou wouldst know thyself. As the river that dances down to the sea, So must thou dance if thou wouldst know thyself. As the mountain is strong and full of power, So must thou be if thou wouldst know thyself. As the precious stone sparkles in the sun, So must thou shine if thou wouldst know thyself. As the mother is to the babe, tender with affection, So must thou be if thou wouldst know thyself. As the winds are free and untrammelled, So must thou be if thou wouldst know thyself. If thou wouldst taste of all these things, O world, And walk with me in the Kingdom of Happiness, Thou must be free from that poison of Truth - - Prejudice - - For thou art immense in thy prejudice, Both the ancient and the inexperienced. Thou must be free from that narrowness of tradition, The narrowness of custom, habit, feeling and thought, The narrowness of religion, worship and adoration, The narrowness of nation, The narrowness of family and of possession, The narrowness of love, The narrowness of friendship, The narrowness of thy God and of thy form of approach to Him, The narrowness of thy conception of beauty, The narrowness of thy work and of thy duty, The narrowness of thine achievements and glories, The narrowness of thy desires, ambitions and purpose, The narrowness of thy longings and satisfactions, The narrowness of thy discontentments and contentments, The narrowness of thy struggles and victories, The narrowness of thine ignorance and knowledge, The narrowness of thy teachings and laws, The narrowness of thine ideas and views - - Thou must be free from all these. Prejudice is as a shadow On the face of the mountain, As a dark cloud In the fair skies, As the withered rose That ceases to delight the world, As the blight that destroys The bloom of a ripe fruit, As the bird that has lost The power of its wings, As the man that hath no ears, Deaf to sweet music, As the man that hath no eyes, Blind to the gorgeous sunset, As the delights of experience To the man that is enfeebled. Prejudice is as the agitated lake That cannot reflect the beauty of the skies, As a barren rock of the mountain, As the weary land of a shadowless country, As the dry bed of the river That knows not the delights Of the waters of many summers, As the tree that has lost its green happiness, As the woman that is childless, As the breath of winter That withereth all things, As the shadow of death In a happy land. Prejudice is evil, It is a corrupter of the world, It is a destroyer of the beautiful, It is the root of all sorrow, It has its being in ignorance, It is a state of utter darkness where light cannot find its way, It is an abomination, A sin against truth. If thou wouldst know thyself, Thou must cut thyself free from this weed that binds thee, That suffocates thee, That destroys thy vision, That kills thine affection, That prevents thy thought. When thou art free, untrammelled, When thy body is controlled and relaxed, When thine eyes can perceive all things in their pure nakedness, When thy heart is serene and burdened with affection, When thy mind is well poised, Then, O world, The gates of that Garden, The Kingdom of Happiness, Are open. V From the ancient of times, From the very foundation of the earth, The end for all things Have I known. As the mighty river knows At the very beginning of its birth The end of its long journey, Though it wander through many lands, So have I known. As in the time of winter The barren tree Knows the coming joys of the spring, So have I known. Long have I wandered Through many lives, In many lands, Amidst many peoples, In search of this end I have known. As the stagnant pools that are purified With the coming rains, So had I remained Motionless, Till the hurricane of sorrow Cleansed me. Burdened have I been With many possessions, With the wealth of the world, With the comforts that bring stagnation. Rejoiced have I been In the satisfaction of a multitude of things, Till the storm of tears Washed away the pride of abundance. And as the lands of the desert Are without shadows, So had my life become. I worshipped at the altars Of way-side shrines, Whose Gods have denied me Of the end that I have known. Their priests held me In thrall By the magic of their words, By the intoxication of their incense. In the sheltering shadows of the temple walls I remained, in darkness Weeping for the end I have known. Till anew The whirlwind of pain Threw me out again On the open road. I created philosophies, and creeds, Complicated theories of life; I buried myself In the intellectual creations of man, Great in the arrogance thereof. As of a sudden The storm breaks, So was I left naked, Overwhelmed by the agony Of the transient things. Great was my love, Immense was the satisfaction thereof. I sang, I danced In the ecstasy of my love, But as fades the tender rose In the full days of summer, So my love withered In the full days of my enjoyment. I was as empty as the wide skies, I wept for the end I have known. Renouncing all, As naked as I came, I withdrew from the world of pleasure, In solitude, Under the great trees, In seclusion Of the peaceful valley, I sought for the end That my soul cried for, The end that I have known Through the ages of time. As the flower sleeps of a night, Withholding its glory For the joys of the morrow, So, gathering my strength, I delved deep Into the secret stores of my heart For the joy of discovery. As one beholds the light At the end of a dark passage, So I beheld The end of my search, The end I have known. As the builder Lays brick upon brick, For the edifice of his desire, So, from the ancient of times, from the very foundation of the earth, Have I gathered, The dust of experience, Life after life, For the consummation Of my heart's desire. Behold! My house is complete and full, And now I am free to depart. As the mighty river knows At the very beginning of its birth The end of its long journey, So have I known. As in the time of winter The barren tree Knows the coming joys of the spring, So have I known. From the ancient of times, From the very foundation of the earth, The end for all things Have I known. Lo! the hour has come, The hour that I have known. Liberated am l, Free from life and death, Sorrow and pleasure call me no more, Detached am I in affection, Beyond the dreams of the Gods am l. As the moon is full and serene In the days of harvest, So am I In the days of my Liberation. Simple as the tender leaf am I, For in me are many winters and many springs. As the dewdrop is of the sea, So am I born In the ocean of liberation. As the mysterious river Enters the open seas, So have I entered Into the world of Liberation. This is the end I have known. FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 'THE IMMORTAL FRIEND' Wherever I look, Thou art there. I am full of Thy glory. I am burning with Thy happiness. I weep for all men That do not behold Thee. In what manner Shall I show them Thy glory? I sat a-dreaming in a room of great silence. The early morning was still and breathless, The great blue mountains stood against the dark skies, cold and clear, Round the dark log house The black and yellow birds were welcoming the sun. I sat on the floor, with legs crossed, meditating, Forgetting the sunlit mountains, The birds, The immense silence, And the golden sun. I lost the feel of my body, My limbs were motionless, Relaxed and at peace. A great joy of unfathomable depth filled my heart. Eager and keen was my mind, concentrated. Lost to the transient world, I was full of strength. As the Eastern breeze That suddenly springs into being And calms the weary world, There in front of me Seated cross-legged, As the world knows Him In His yellow robes, simple and magnificent, Was the Teacher of Teachers. Looking at me, Motionless the Mighty Being sat, I looked and bowed my head, My body bent forward of itself. That one look Showed the progress of the world, Showed the immense distance between the world And the greatest of its Teachers. How little it understood, And how much He gave. How joyously He soared, Escaping from birth and death, From its tyranny and entangling wheel. Enlightenment attained, He gave to the world, as the flower gives Its scent, The Truth. As I looked at the sacred feet That once trod the happy Dust of India, My heart poured forth its devotion, Limitless and unfathomable, Without restraint and without effort. I lost myself in that happiness. My mind so easily and strangely Understood the Truth He longed for and attained. I lost myself in that happiness. My soul grasped the infinite simplicity Of Truth. I lost myself in that happiness. Thou art the Truth, Thou art the Law, Thou art the Refuge, Thou art the Guide, The Companion and the Beloved. Thou hast ravished my heart, Thou hast conquered my soul, In Thee have I found my comfort, In Thee is my truth established. Where Thou hast trodden, Do I follow. Where Thou hast suffered and conquered, Do I gather strength. Where Thou hast renounced, Do I grow, Dispassionate, detached. Like the stars Have I become. Happy is he that knoweth Thee Eternally. Like the sea, unfathomable Is my love. The Truth have I attained, And calm grows my spirit. But yesterday I longed to withdraw From the aching world Into some secluded mountain spot, Untrammelled, Free, Away from all things, In search of Thee. And now Thou hast appeared Unto me. I carry Thee in my heart. Look where I may, Thou art there, Calm, happy, Filling my world - - The embodiment of Truth. My heart is strong, My mind is concentrated, I am full of Thee. As the Eastern breeze That suddenly springs into being, And calms the weary world, So have I realized. I am the Truth, I am the Law, I am the Refuge, I am the Guide, The Companion and the Beloved. II Look where I may, Thou art there, Calm, happy, Filling my world - - The embodiment of Truth. As one beholds a light In the dark At a distance, I saw Thee. I have walked towards Thee Through many lives - - In sorrow, in joy, In doubt, in suspicion, Over thorns, over fair fields, On the pavements of crowded cities. I have known From the very foundation of the earth Of Thy glory, Of Thine existence, Of Thy beauty, that thrilled my soul. Never was I certain, Never was I allowed to be at peace With myself, With man, Or with the fair heavens. Out of the great uncertainty, Certainty was born. Like the Eastern breeze That suddenly springs into being And calms the weary world, So have I realized. I walk henceforth in Thy shadow. Because Thou art my eternal Companion, I am strong - - Strong as the stream That rushes down the mountain side. Because Thou art my counselor, I am unshakable, Because of Thee, I am full of wisdom, Because Thou hast sent me out, I am as nothing, as the passing wind, But because Thou hast shown Thyself to me, I am as the rivers That dance down to the sea. Because of Thy bidding, Whatever I do is for Thee. My heart is aflame, For I have come near unto Thee Everlastingly. Each breath is transforming me Into Thine image. Because Thou hast given me, I am full, Full as the ocean, Though all the rivers Do flow into it. Thy majesty has awakened The power in me To shout from the mountain tops Thy truth. Thy look Has burnt away The dross. I am pure. I am holy. What the rose is to the rose petal, So art Thou to me. As the mountain top That disappears into the clouds, So my love for Thee Disappears Into space. As on the sunlit sea the waters dance, Joyous in their ecstasy, So is my heart Dancing for love of Thee. As the small raindrop Mingles in the vast ocean, So have I lost Myself In Thee. As the shadows Grow of an evening, So has my soul Grown immense In Thy Light. My love for Thee Has awakened the love For all. I must bring the world To Thee. I must make Thee Their eternal Companion. They must know Thee As I know Thee - - The perfect, The simple, The glorified, The Fountain of Truth. Knowing Thee, They will set aside their toys, Their small worlds, their playthings, Their pomp, The entanglements Of their religions, Their rites, Their ceremonies. What is religion? What is worship? What are the temples And altars Of the world? Thou art the end Of all sorrow, Of all joy, Of all knowledge, Of all search. Thou art the goal of all things. In Thee alone lies Enlightenment - - The Happiness of the world. Look where I may, Thou art there, Calm, happy, Filling my world - - The embodiment of Truth. I am the Truth, I am the Law, I am the Refuge, I am the Guide, the Companion and the Beloved. III Through the austere dignity of the yellow robe Thou wert born unto me. Through the certainty of knowledge Thou hast appeared unto me. Through the immensity of happiness Thou hast shown Thyself unto me. Through the great silence of the morning Thou hast created the universe unto me. Through the sunlight of the world Thou hast carried me to the mountain top. And unto me Thou wert born. Over Thy head was the flame That burns away all sorrow, All pain, all anxiety. Thy face was like unto the rose petal, Perfect, soft, lovely, Youthful with the age of many centuries. In Thy face I beheld my own face. In Thine eyes was the laughter of Youth, The delight of the Spring, The joyous merriment of the world. The music of Thy flute Hath ravished my heart. There is born in me A new tender merriment. The sea of many waters Hath entered into my heart: The bubbling brook, The boisterous storm, The angry waters, The pleasant breeze. I smell the flowers at Thy feet, I behold the lane Where walks the world, The dust, the cow, And the cow-herd. The scent of the sacred flower fills the air, I hear the temple bells, And the laughter of the world. The jewels of the world Are in Thine eyes. The world weeps for Thee In their wild and merry dancing. O Love, with the flute, Thou art myself. O Beloved, Thou art the ecstasy of my soul. I have found Thee Through the happiness of many lives. O world, In thee I behold the face of my Beloved. IV He walked towards me and I stood still. My heart and soul gathered strength. The trees and the birds listened with unexpected silence. There was thunder in the skies - - Then, utter peace. I saw Him look at me, And my vision became vast. My eyes saw and my mind understood. My heart embraced all things, For a new love was born unto me. A new glory thrilled my being, For He walked before me, and I followed, my head high. The tall trees I saw through Him, Gently waving in welcome, The dead leaf, the mud, The sparkling water and the withered branches. The heavily laden and chattering villagers Walked through Him - ignorant and laughing, The barking dogs rushed, through Him, at me. A barrack of a house became an enchanted abode, Its red roof melting into the setting sun. The garden was a fairy land, The flowers were the fairies. Standing against the dark evening sky, I saw Him In His eternal glory. He walked before me Down the little narrow path, Always looking, while I followed. He was at the door of my room, I passed through Him. purified with a new song in my heart, I remain. He is before me forever. Look where I may, He is there. I see all things through Him. His glory has fllled me and awakened a glory that I have never known. An eternal peace is my vision, Glorifying all things. He is ever before me. V The sun was setting As I stood on a hill-top, Watching it disappear Behind the mountains. In the midst of that radiance, Clad in a cloud of yellow, Thou wert seated. The whole vast heaven paused in adoration. The sky, the clouds, In robes of yellow, Were Thy worshippers, Thy disciples. The mortal world joined in Thine adoration, Shouting with joy - - The birds, The distant valley, The passing vehicles Far away, The cricket, The grasshopper, The wind And the trees. The black mountains Stood amazed In their dance, Fearing their own Mighty sight. Then utter silence - - All things perceiving Thee As Thou art. In that great silence An immense desire Was born in me To bring the world to Thee, To Thy perfection And to Thy happiness. Thou art the only altar, Though men worship At the altars Of many temples. Thine is the only Imperishable Truth, Though men clothe it By many names. I love the world, And all the things thereof. I will bring the world To adore Thee, To worship Thee; For Thy beauty Is truth. Immense happiness Fills my being, For I have found Thee. Thou shalt not disappear Though a thousand suns Shall set over the mountain. As the sunset Grows more splendid From moment to moment, Changing constantly, So my desire For Thee Grows More glorious, More perfect. It shall fill The heart of all men, Till Thy perfection Be perceived. In Thine eye Is the whirlwind, The soft breeze, The sacred Himavat, The low plain, The happy valley, And the blue skies - -All things are in Thee. Thou art the happiness Of the world. The path of Happiness Is the path of Truth. VI O listen! I shall sing to thee the song of my Beloved. Where the soft green slopes of the still mountains Meet the blue shimmering waters of the noisy sea, Where the bubbling brook shouts in ecstasy, Where the still pools reflect the calm heavens, There thou wilt meet with my Beloved. In the vale where the cloud hangs in loneliness, Searching the mountain for rest, In the still smoke climbing heavenwards, In the hamlet towards the setting sun, In the thin wreaths of the fast disappearing clouds, There thou wilt meet with my Beloved. Among the dancing tops of the tall cypress, Among the gnarled trees of great age, Among the frightened bushes that cling to the earth, Among the long creepers that hang lazily, There thou wilt meet with my Beloved. In the plowed fields where noisy birds are feeding, On the shaded path that winds along the full, motionless river, Beside the banks where the waters lap, Amidst the tall poplars that play ceaselessly with the winds, In the dead tree of last summer's lightning, There thou wilt meet with my Beloved. In the still blue skies Where heaven and earth meet, In the breathless air, In the morn burdened with incense, Among the rich shadows of a noon-day, Among the long shadows of an evening, Amidst the gay and radiant clouds of the setting sun, On the path on the waters at the close of the day, There thou wilt meet with my Beloved. In the shadows of the stars, In the deep tranquillity of dark nights, In the reflection of the moon on still waters, In the great silence before the dawn, Among the whispering of waking trees, In the cry of the bird at morn, Amidst the wakening of shadows, Amidst the sunlit tops of the far mountains, In the sleepy face of the world, There thou wilt meet with my Beloved. Keep still, O dancing waters, And listen to the voice of my Beloved. In the happy laughter of children Thou canst hear Him. The music of the flute Is His voice. The startled cry of a lonely bird Moves thy heart to tears, For thou hearest His voice. The roar of the age-old sea Awakens the memories That have been lulled to sleep By His voice. The soft breeze that stirs The treetops lazily, Brings to thee the sound Of His voice. The thunder among the mountains Fills thy soul With the strength Of His voice. In the roar of a vast city, Through the shrill moan of swift passing vehicles, In the throb of a distant engine, Through the voices of the night, The cry of sorrow, The shout of joy, Through the ugliness of anger, Comes the voice of my Beloved. In the distant blue isles, On the soft dewdrop, On the breaking wave, On the sheen of waters, On the wing of the flying bird, On the tender leaf of spring, Thou wilt see the face of my Beloved. In the sacred temple, In the halls of dancing, On the holy face of the sannyasi, In the lurches of the drunkard, With the harlot and with the chaste, Thou wilt meet with my Beloved. On the fields of flowers, In the towns of squalor and dirt, With the pure and the unholy, In the flower that hides divinity, There is my well-Beloved. Oh! the sea Has entered my heart. In a day, I am living a hundred summers. O friend, I behold my face in thee, The face of my well-Beloved. This is the song of my love. VII As the rain cleanses The tree by the roadside, So the dust of ages Has been washed away in me. As the tree sparkles In the sun After the soft rain, So my soul delighteth In Thee. As the tree Looketh to its roots For its immense strength, So do I look to Thee Who art the root of my strength. As the smoke mounteth heavenwards In a straight column, Of a still evening So have I grown Towards Thee. As the little pool On the road Reflecteth the face of heaven, So my heart Reflecteth Thy happiness. As the solitary cloud That hangs over the mountain The envy of the valley, So have I hung, For generation after generation, In a lonely place. As the great cloud That hasteneth Before the mighty wind, So descend I Into the valley. Into the valley Where there is sorrow And transient happiness, Where there is birth and death, Where there is shadow and light, Where there is strife and a passing peace, Where there is comfort of stagnation, Where to think is to grieve, Where to feel is to create sorrow. Into that valley I shall descend, For I have conquered, For in me Thou art born. As the light pierces through darkness, So Thy truth Shall pierce the world. As the rain purifieth the earth And cleanseth all things thereof, So shall I cleanse the world With Thy truth. For many ages, Through many lives, Have I prepared, But now, Behold, the cup is full. The world shall drink of it. Man shall grow Into Thy divinity. Thy happiness shall shine On his face. For Thy messenger Shall go forth. I am he That openeth the heart of man, That giveth comfort. I am the truth, I am the Law, I am the Refuge, I am the Guide, the Companion and the Beloved. VIII O friend, Tell me of God. Where is He, by what manner do I find Him, Among what climes, in what abodes? Tell me, I am weary. Read the Vedas, Do tapas, meditate, Perform rites and ceremonies, Practice austerities and renounce, Pray at His temple, among flowers and incense, Bathe in the sacred rivers, Visit the holy places, Be a devotee and pure of intelligence, In Kailas is His abode - - There you will find Him, cried many. Obey the Law, Take refuge in the Order, Kill not, steal not and commit no sin, Go to the shrine, Enter Nirvana - - There you will find Him, cried many. Read the Holy Book, pray at His church - -there be many - -This church will lead you to Him but beware of that. Serve, sacrifice, Do not judge, be merciful, In Heaven is His throne - - There you will find Him, cried many. Read the only Book Of the only God, Visit His abode on earth, pray at the mosque, At the setting of the sun worship Him, Bahisht is his abode - - There you will find Him, cried many. Work, work for humanity, Serve, serve your fellow-creatures, Follow this but beware of that path, Do the will of God, Follow blindly for I hold the key to His abode. Grasp this opportunity He offers you, Sorrow and happiness lead to Him, If you do this, your search will end - - Then you will find Him, shouted many. I am weary, tired by the passage of time. Traveling on no path, I have come to Thee, Thou hast revealed Thyself to me. Oh! Thou art the round stone That grinds the rice in the peaceful village Amidst songs and laughter. Thou art the graven image That men worship in temples, With chants and solemn music. Thou art the dead leaf That lies torn on the dusty road Trodden by the weary traveller. Thou art the solitary pine That stands majestic On the lonely hill. Thou art the lame and mangy creature That comes to my door with a haunted look, hungry, That men abhor. Thou art the mighty elephant That is gaily robed, Carrying the nobles of the land. Thou art the naked beggar That wanders from house to house Wearily crying for alms. Thou art the great of the land That are rich in possessions and books, That are well-fed and satisfied. Thou art the priests of all temples That are learned, proud and certain. Thou art the harlot, the sinner, the saint and the heretic. My search is at an end, In Thee I behold all things. I myself, am God. IX Telling of beads - -they are but dead wood. Bathing in holy rivers - -they are but waters. Worshipping at temples - -they are but the walls of naked stone. Writing of books - -they are but flowers of words. Thinkest thou, O friend, to juggle with Me? As the lotus abides with the waters, So do I live with thee, eternally. Adorn Me with thy jewels, Clothe Me with thy garments, Feed Me with thy delicacies, Flatter Me with thy glories. Thinkest thou, O friend, to juggle with Me? As the lotus abides with the waters, So do I live with thee, eternally. Search for thy happiness in passing things, Pursue thy passionate trivialities, Drink deep for thy oblivion, Chase the butterfly from flower to flower. Thinkest thou, O friend, to juggle with Me? As the lotus abides with the waters, So do I live with thee, eternally. Rich is the shadow of a summer's day. Our journey ends, O friend, When thou and I meet, As the delicate spire climbs eagerly into the blue skies, O my Beloved, so my heart soars into space in search of Thee. As the butterfly tastes the hidden honey of the fast-fading flower, O my Beloved, so have I played with Thee among the manifested - - Changing, decaying. By offerings, by alms and by the building of many a temple, Have I sought to establish Thee. As the sparkling dewdrop that hangs on the tree-tops Above the world, To fade in the morning sun, So have my great foundations in the kingdoms of the manifest Been destroyed. As the stars of a night About me are Thy creations. By yoga, by austerities, Life after life, Have I chased Thee among the shadows of Thy manifestations. Ever eluding, ever enticing, ever disappointing, Have been my glimpses of Thee. But, my Beloved, my eternal love, O Thou, the desire of my heart, I have found Thee, in the unmanifest, In the indestructible. As the rainbow vanishes near the green earth, So has my search vanished among the flowers of Thy creation. In me Thou art established, Imperishable, ineffable, everlasting. O Beloved, Thou art established in the temple of my heart. I am the Beloved, the desire of all hearts, I am the playmate in the shadow of creation. XI In the quiet evening When the leaf is still, When the flower is weary of the day And the bud is rejoicing for the morrow, When the shadows are long And the smoke is mounting in a still column, When the world is breathless, Oh! with the lark I climbed To the abode of my Beloved. I have wandered far into the realms of the unreal In search of the real. Many births and many deaths have been my lot. With the setting of a single day Have I known many joys, many sorrows, But Thou hast eluded me, O Thou, the embodiment of Truth. I have brought to Thee all my experience, All my woes and my joys. I have worshipped with folded hands in many a temple, But at my eager approach faded the image of truth. I have loved and the glories of the earth have delighted me. I was full of knowledge, enjoying the admiration of the world. I adorned myself with priestly robes, But in silence the gods of my adoration looked down. As the mountain is to the valley - -distant, forbidding - - So hast Thou been to me. Thou hast ever remained with Thy face turned. Thou hast been as a star - -far away, unreal. Thou wert ever the image, I ever the worshipper. Not a man knew of Thine abode; Thou wert ever far away, fantastical, mysterious. Sometimes immense fear filled my heart, Often great hopes, At times complete indifference and weariness. Without Thee, I was as an empty shell. As the potter's wheel, I went round and round, Consumed by continual action. I brought to Thee the flower of my heart, The great delight of my mind, But as the dead leaf in autumn, I was torn and trodden down. As the tree on the mountain Grows in solitude and strength, Likewise, life after life, I grew in solitude and stature, I reached the mountain top. Till in the long last, O Guru of Gurus, I tore the veil that separated Thee from myself, That veil that set Thee apart. Now, my Beloved, Thou and I are one. As the lotus makes the waters beautiful, So Thou and I complete the perfection of Life. O Guru, Thy play is my play, Thy Love is my love. Thy smile has filled my heart, My work is Thy creation. Thou hast bowed to me, O Love, As I have bowed to Thee, Through countless ages. The veil of separation is torn, O Beloved, Thou and I are One. XII As the aspen leaf is aquiver With the breeze, So my heart dances with Thy love. As two mountain streams meet With a roar, Joyous in their exultation, So have I met Thee, O my Beloved. As the mountain top is aglow At the going down of the sun, Giving to the valley an immense desire, So hast Thou given glory to my being. As the valley is still at eventide, So hast Thou calmed my soul. My heart is filled With the love of a thousand years. Mine eyes Behold Thy vision. As the stars make the night beauteous, So hast Thou given beauty to my soul. As serene as the graven image Have I become. As the seed grows into a wondrous tree, The abode of many joyous birds, Giving soft shadows To the weary traveller, So has my soul grown In search of Thee. As a great river joins the sea, So to Thee have I come, Rich from my long journey, Full with the experience of an age. O Beloved, As the dewdrop Mingles with the honey Of the flower, So Thou and I have become one. O my Beloved, Now there is no separation, No loneliness, No sorrow, no struggle. Where'er I go I bring the glory of Thy presence. For, O Beloved, Thou and I are one. XIII As the small stream Gathers strength on its long journey, Feeding the lonely plains, the tall drooping trees, Dancing its way to the open seas, Attaining liberation - - So have I entered into Thee. Long has been the journey On this trackless path of time, Where every little snag Gives forth music and the sound of waters, Where every little pool Reflects the glory of heavens, to stagnate, Where every little peaceful spot Is burdened with the scent of decay. Long did I struggle To swim in the strong current; Many a time, exhausted, Have I been flung On the craggy banks of Time. Weary of all experience, Gathering strength from that very weariness, Have I run faster To where the open waters meet With a roar, The small mysterious streams. Liberated from Time, Without the limitation of Space, Have I become as the dewdrop That creates the vast seas. Oh! the lotus is unfolding its glory to the morning sun, I open my heart to Thee, O my Beloved. XIV Since I have met with Thee, O my Beloved, Never have I known loneliness. A stranger am I Amidst all peoples, In all lands. Amidst the multitude of strangers, Full am I As of the scent of jasmine. They surround me, But I know no loneliness. I weep for the strangers; How alone they are. Full of immense loneliness, Fearful, They take to themselves people As lonely as themselves. A guest am I In this world of transient things, Unfettered by the entanglements thereof. I am of no country, No boundaries hold me. O friend, I weep for thee. Thou layest thy foundation, But thy house perisheth on the morrow. O friend, Come with me, Abide in the house of my Beloved. Though thou shalt wander the earth, possessing nothing, Thou shalt be as welcome As the lovely spring, For thou bringest with thee The Companion of all. O friend, Live with me, My Beloved and I are one. XV It has been given to me, O friend, To see the face of my Beloved. His smile Has filled my heart. As the rivers of water Make constant music, O friend, So my being rejoices In the splendor of His love. As one beholds the mountain-top At the setting of the sun, Radiant and serene Above the darkening world, O friend, So the vision of my Beloved Has made me pure and at peace. As at the lifting of the dark cloud From the happy face of the mountain, O friend, So the shadow of life Has lifted At the approach of my well-Beloved. As the mists of the morn Are consumed by the warm rays, O friend, So my well-Beloved Has gathered me in, Dispelling the vision of emptiness. As the deep valley lies In the shadow of a great mountain, O friend, So I lie In the shadow of the hand Of my well-Beloved. As the rose Amidst many thorns, O friend, so am I Amidst passing things. As the day is made glorious By the darkness of the night, By the light of the day, O friend, So have I been made glorious. As the rivers are full After the great rains, O friend, So has my well-Beloved Burdened me with His love. The ages have awaited this hour. I have met with my Beloved. XVI O my Beloved, Thou art Liberation, The end of all desire, The consummation of love. O my Beloved, Thou art the unfading beauty of Truth, Thou art the accomplishment of all thought, Thou art the flower of all devotion. O my Beloved, O my Love, The sun is beyond the purple hills, And as a single star I have risen In Thine adoration. Thou and I, We have well met. O my Beloved, Art Thou not myself? Art Thou not the perfume of my heart? I am Thy Beloved, My Beloved art Thou. Thou art my companion of ages. I am Thy shadow, In the garden of eternity. XVII As divinity lies hidden in a flower, So my Beloved dwells in me. As thunder is among the mountains, So is my Beloved within my heart. As the cry of a bird in a still forest, So has the voice of my Beloved filled me. As fair as the morning, As serene as the moon, As clear as the sun, Is my love for my Beloved. As the sun goes down Beyond the purple hills, Amidst great clouds And the whispering breeze among the trees, So has my Beloved descended into me, To the rejoicing of my heart, To the glory of my mind. As of a dark night Man guides himself By the distant stars, So my Beloved guides me On the waters of life. Yea, I have sought my Beloved, And discovered Him seated in my heart. My Beloved beholds through mine eyes, For now my Beloved and I are one. I laugh with Him, With Him I play. This shadow is not of mine, It belongs to the heart of my Beloved, For now my Beloved and I are One. FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 'THE SONG OF LIFE' Make of thy desire the desire of the world, Of thy love the love of the world. In thy thoughts take the world to thy mind, In thy doings let the world behold thine eternity. Thou mayest draw the many waters of a well, But thou canst not quench the thirst of thy desires. Thy heart may hold the flower of its love, But with the coming of death the flower fadeth. Thy thoughts may soar to lofty purpose, But with anxious conflict they are caught in bondage. As an arrow shot by a strong arm, So let thy purpose strike deep into the everlasting. As the mountain stream, pure in its swiftness, So let thy mind race eagerly towards freedom. Awakened from the heart of love, My voice is the voice of understanding, Born of infinite sorrow. Who can say if thy heart be clean? Who can tell thee if thy mind be pure? Who can give thee the satisfaction of thy desire? Who can heal thee of the burning pain of satisfaction? Shall understanding be given Or the way of love be shown to thee? Shalt thou escape that fear which men call death? Canst thou put away the ache of loneliness Or run from the cry of anxiety? Canst thou hide thyself behind the laughter of music? Or lose thyself in merry rejoicings? Wisdom shall be born of understanding. She putteth forth her voice In the wilderness of utter confusion. A man saw the dancing shadows And went in search of the cause of so much beauty. Can Life die? Look into the eye of thy neighbour. The valley lies hidden in the darkness of a cloud, But the mountain top is serene In its gaze of the open sky. On the banks of a holy river A pilgrim repeats a ceaseless chant, And cloistered in a cool temple A man kneels, lost in a devout whisper. But, behold, under the heavy dust of summer Lies a green leaf. Who shall call thee out of thy prison house? Or tear away the bondage from thine eyes? A path mounts slowly up the mountain side, But who shall carry thee as his burden? I saw a lame man coming towards me, I shed tears of aching memory. In the far distance A lone star holds the sky. III The end is in the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure. Caught in the agony of Time, Maimed by the inward stress of growth, O Beloved, The Self of which thou art the whole Is seeking the way of illumined ecstasy. Fashioned in the poetry of balance, Gathering the riches of life's pursuit, O Beloved, The Self of which thou art the whole Is making its way to the heart of all things. In the secret sanctuary of desire, Through the recesses of enfolding love, O Beloved, The Self of which thou art the whole Dances to the Song of Eternity. By the visible and invisible infinity, In the round of birth and death, O Beloved, The Self of which thou art the whole Is bridging the space of separation. Confused in fervent worship, Deluded by the vain pursuits of thought, O Beloved, The Self of which thou art the whole Is being fused into the Incorruptible. As ever, O Beloved, The Self is still the whole. IV Listen, O friend, I shall tell thee of the secret perfume of Life. Life has no philosophy, No cunning systems of thought. Life has no religion, No adoration in deep sanctuaries. Life has no god, Nor the burden of fearsome mystery. Life has no abode, Nor the aching sorrow of ultimate decay. Life has no pleasure, no pain, Nor the corruption of pursuing love. Life is neither good nor evil, Nor the dark punishment of careless sin. Life gives no comfort, Nor does it rest in the shrine of oblivion. Life is neither spirit nor matter, Nor is there the cruel division of action and inaction. Life has no death, Nor has it the void of loneliness in the shadow of Time. Free is the man who lives in the Eternal, For Life is. V A thousand eyes with a thousand views, A thousand hearts with a thousand loves, Am I. As the sea that receiveth The clean and the impure rivers And heedeth not, So am I. Deep is the mountain lake, Clear are the waters of the spring, And my love is the hidden source of things. Ah, come hither and taste of my love; Then, as of a cool evening The lotus is born, Shalt thou find thy heart's own secret desire. The scent of the jasmine fills the night air; Out of the deep forest Comes the call of a passing day. The Life of my love is unburdened; The attainment thereof is the freedom of fulfillment. VI Love is its own divinity. If thou shalt follow it, putting aside the weary burden Of a cunning mind, Thou shalt be free of the fear Of anxious love. Love is not hedged about By space and time, By joyless things of the mind. Such love delights in the heart Of him who has richly wandered In the confusion of love's own pursuits. The Self, the Beloved, The hidden loveliness of all things, Is love's immortality. O, why needst thou seek further, Why further, friend? In the dust of careless love Lies Life's endless journey. VII Love Life. Neither the beginning nor the end Knows whence it comes. For it has no beginning and no end. Life is. In the fulfilling of Life there is no death, Nor the ache of great loneliness. The voice of melody, the voice of desolation, Laughter and the cry of sorrow, Are but Life on its way to fulfillment. Look into the eyes of thy neighbour And find thyself with Life; Therein is immortality, Life eternal, never changing. For him who is not in love with Life, There is the anxious burden of doubt And the lone fear of solitude; For him there is but death. Love Life, and thy love shall know of no corruption. Love Life, and thy judgment shall uphold thee. Love Life; thou shalt not wander away From the path of understanding. As the fields of the earth are divided, Man makes a division of Life And thereby creates sorrow. Worship not the ancient gods With incense and flowers, But Life with great rejoicing; Shout in the ecstasy of joy There is no entanglement in the dance of Life. I am of that Life, immortal, free; The Eternal Source. Of that Life I sing. VIII Seek not the perfume of a single heart Nor dwell in its easeful comfort; For therein abides The fear of loneliness. I wept, For I saw The loneliness of a single love. In the dancing shadows Lay a withered flower. The worship of many in the one Leads to sorrow. But the love of the one in many Is everlasting bliss. IX How easily The tranquil pool is disturbed By the passing winds. Nay, friend, Seek not thy happiness In the fleeting. There is but one way; That path lies in thyself, Through thine own heart. X A dream comes through a multitude of desires. When the mind is tranquil, Undisturbed by thought, When the heart is chaste With the fullness of love uncorrupted, Then shalt thou discover, O friend, A world beyond the illusion of words. Therein is unity of all Life. Therein is the silent Source Which sustains the dancing worlds. In that world there is neither heaven nor hell, Past, present nor future; Neither the deception of thought, Nor the soft whisperings of dying love. O, seek that world Where death does not dance in its shadowless ecstasy, Where the manifestations of Life Are as the shadows that the smooth lake holds. It lies about thee And without thee it exists not. XI As out of the deep womb of a mountain Is born a swift-running stream; So out of the aching depths of my heart Has come forth joyous love, The perfume of the world. Through the sunlit valleys rush the waters, Entering lake upon lake, Ever wandering, never still; So is my love, Emptying itself from heart to heart. As the waters move sadly Through the dark, cavernous valley; So has my love become dull Through the shame of easy desire. As the tall trees are destroyed By the strong rush of waters That have nourished their deep roots, So has my love torn cruelly The heart of its rejoicing. I have shattered the very rock on which I grew. And as a wide river Now escapes to the dancing sea, whose waters know no bondage; So is my love in the perfection of its freedom. XII O, rejoice! There is thunder among the mountains, And long shadows lie across the green face of the valley. The rains Bring forth green shoots Out of the dead stumps of yesterday. High among the rocks An eagle is building his nest. All things are great with Life. O friend, Life fills the world. Thou and I are in eternal union. Life is as the waters That satisfy the thirst of kings and beggars alike: The golden vessel for the king, For the beggar the potter's vessel Which breaks to pieces at the fountain. Each holds his vessel dear. There is loneliness, There is fear of solitude, The ache of a dying day, The sorrow of a passing cloud. Life, destitute of love, Wanders from house to house, With none to declare its loveliness. Out of the granite rock Is fashioned a graven image Which men hold sacred; But they tread carelessly the rock On the way That leads to the temple. O friend, Life fills the world. Thou and I are in eternal union. XIII Search out the secret pursuit of thy desire; Then thou shalt not live in illusion. What canst thou know of happiness, If in the vale of misery thou hast not walked? What canst thou know of freedom, If against thy bondage thou hast not cried aloud? What canst thou know of love, If from the entanglement of love Thou hast not sought deliverance? I saw the flowers blossom In the dark hours of a still night. XIV Does the raindrop hold in its fullness The raging stream? Does the raindrop in its loneliness Feed the solitary tree on the hill? Does the raindrop in its great descent Create the sweet sound of many waters? Does the raindrop in its pureness Quench the aching thirst? It is the unwise who chase The shadow of self in Life. And Life eludes them, For they wander in the ways of bondage. Wherefore the struggle in loneliness of division? In Life there is neither you nor I. XV I have no name; I am as the fresh breeze of the mountains. I have no shelter; I am as the wandering waters. I have no sanctuary, like the dark gods; Nor am I in the shadow of deep temples. I have no sacred books, Nor am I well-seasoned in tradition. I am not in the incense Mounting on high altars, Nor in the pomp of ceremonies. I am neither in the graven image Nor in the rich chant of a melodious voice. I am not bound by theories, Nor corrupted by beliefs. I am not held in the bondage of religions, Nor in the pious agony of their priests. I am not entrapped by philosophies, Nor held in the power of their sects. I am neither low nor high, I am the worshipper and the worshipped. I am free. My song is the song of the river Calling for the open seas, Wandering, wandering. I am Life. XVI Love not the shapely branch, Nor place its image alone in thy heart. It dieth away. Love the whole tree. Then thou shalt love the shapely branch, The tender and the withered leaf, The shy bud and the full-blown flower, The falling petal and the dancing height, The splendid shadow of full love. Ah, love Life in its fullness. It knoweth no decay. XVII Sorrow is soon forgotten And pleasure is bound by tears. None but the clear-eyed shall remember The deep wounds of their passing sighs. Sorrow is the shadow In the wake of pleasure. Desire is young in its anxious flight; The swiftness of its deeds Shall uncover the source of joy. The conflict of discontent is suffering; The inviting of sorrow Is the way to happiness. Life's dwelling place Is in the heart of man. XVIII Ah, the symphony of that song! The innermost shrine Is breathless with the love of many. The flame dances with the thoughts of many. The scent of burnt camphor fills the air; The careless priest drones a chant; The idol sparkles, seeming to move, Weary of such boundless adoration. A still silence holds the air. And on the instant A melodious song of infinite heart Brings untold tears to my eyes. In a white robe A woman sings to the heart of her love Of the travail she knew not, Of the laughter of children around her breast, Of the love that died young, Of the sorrow in a barren home, Of the solitude in a still night, Of life fruitless amidst the flowering earth. I cry with her. Her heart became mine. She leaves that abode of sanctity, Eager with the joy of worship on the morrow. I follow her through the eternity of time. O love, Thou and I shall wander On the open road of true love. Thou and I shall never part. XIX I have lived the good and evil of men, And dark became the horizon of my love. I have known the morality and immorality of men, And cruel became my anxious thought. I have shared in the piety and impiety of men, And heavy became the burden of life. I have pursued the race of the ambitious, And vain became the glory of life. And now I have fathomed the secret purpose of desire. XX Out of the fullness of thy heart Invite sorrow, And the joy thereof shall be in abundance. As the streams swell After the great rains, And the pebbles rejoice once again In the murmur of running waters, So shall thy wanderings by the wayside Fill the emptiness that createth fear. Sorrow shall unfold the weaving of life; Sorrow shall give the strength of loneliness; Sorrow shall open unto thee The closed doors of thy heart. The cry of sorrow is the voice of fulfillment, And the rejoicing therein Is the fullness of Life. XXI I look to none beside Thee, O my Beloved. Thou art born in me, And lo, there I take my refuge. I have read of Thee in many books. They tell me That there are many like unto Thee, That many temples are built for Thee, That there are many rites To invoke Thee. But I have no communion with them, For all these are but the shells Of man's thoughts. O friend, Seek for the Well-beloved In the secret recesses of thy heart. Dead is the tabernacle When the heart ceases to dance. I look to none beside Thee, O my Beloved. Thou art born in me, And lo, there I take my refuge. XXII My brother died; We were as two stars in a naked sky. He was like me, Burnt by the warm sun In the land where are soft breezes, Swaying palms, And cool rivers, Where there are shadows numberless, Bright-coloured parrots and chattering birds. Where green tree-tops Dance in the brilliant sun; Where there are golden sands And blue-green seas: Where the world lives in the burden of the sun, And the earth is baked dull brown; Where the green-sparkling rice fields Are luscious in slimy waters, And shining, brown, naked bodies Are free in the dazzling light: The land Of the mother suckling her babe by the roadside; Of the devout lover Offering gay flowers; Of the wayside shrine; Of intense silence; Of immense peace. He died; I wept in loneliness. Where'er I went, I heard his voice And his happy laughter. I looked for his face In every passer-by And asked each if he had met with my brother; But none could give me comfort. I worshipped, I prayed, But the gods were silent. I could weep no more; I could dream no more. I sought him in all things, In every clime. I heard the whispering of many trees Calling me to his abode. And then, In my search, I beheld Thee, O Lord of my heart; In Thee alone I saw the face of my brother. In Thee alone, O my eternal Love, Do I behold the faces Of all the living and all the dead. XXIII I tell thee, Orthodoxy is set up When the mind and heart are in decay. As the quiet pool of the woods Lies hidden under a green mantle, So is Life covered by the accumulation Of autumnal thought. As the soft leaf is heavy with the dust Of last summer, So is Life weary With a dying love. When thought and feeling are hedged about By the fear of corruption, Then, O friend, Thou art caught in the darkness Of a fading day. A tender leaf lies withering In the shadow of a great valley. XXIV As a flower holds the scent, So do I contain thee, O World, In my heart. Keep me within thy heart, For I am Liberation, The unending happiness of Life. As a precious stone Lies deep in the earth, So am I hidden Deep in thy heart. Though thou dost not know me, I know thee full well. Though thou dost not think of me, My world is filled with thee. Though thou dost not love me, Thou art my unchanging love. Though thou worshippest me In temples, churches and mosques, I am a stranger to thee; But thou art my eternal companion. As the mountains protect The peaceful valley, So do I cover thee, O World, With the shadow of my hand. As the rains come To a parched land, So, O World, Do I come With the scent of my love. Keep thy heart pure and simple, O world, For then thou shalt welcome me. I am thy love, The desire of thy heart. Keep thy mind Tranquil and clear, O World, For therein is thine own understanding. I am thine understanding, The fullness Of thine own experience. I sit in the temple, I sit by the wayside, Watching the shadows move From place to place. XXV Reason is the treasure of the mind, Love is the perfume of the heart; Yet both are of one substance, Though cast in different moulds. As a golden coin Bears two images parted by a thin wall of metal, So between love and reason Is the poise of understanding, That understanding Which is of both mind and heart. O life, O Beloved, In Thee alone is eternal love, In Thee alone is everlasting thought. XXVI As the spark That shall give warmth Is hid among the grey ashes, So, O friend, The light Which shall guide thee Under the dust Of thine experience. XXVII O friend, Thou canst not bind Truth. It is as the air, Free, limitless, Indestructible, Immeasurable. It hath no dwelling place, Neither temple nor altar. It is of no one God, However zealous be His worshippers. Canst thou tell From what single flower The bee gathereth the sweet honey? O friend, Leave heresy to the heretic, Religion to the orthodox; But gather Truth From the dust of thine experience. XXVIII As the potter To the joy of his heart Moulds the clay,; So canst thou create To the glory of thy being Thy future. As the man of the forest Cuts a path Through the thick jungle; So canst thou make, Through this turmoil of affliction, A clear path To thy freedom from sorrows, To thy lasting happiness. O friend, As for a moment The mysterious mountains Are concealed by the passing mists; So art thou hid In the darkness Of thy creation. The fruit of the seed thou sowest Shall burden thee. O friend, Heaven and hell Are words To frighten thee to right action; But heaven and hell exist not. Only the seeds of thine own actions Shall bring into being The flower of thy longing. As the maker of images Carves the human shape Out of granite, So, out of the rock Of thine experience, Hew thine eternal happiness. Thy life is a death; Death is a rebirth. Happy is the man Who is beyond the clutches Of their limitations. XXIX The mountain comes down to the dancing waters, But its head is hidden in a dark cloud. On the stump of a dead pine There grew a delicate flower. The substance of my love is Life And in its pathway there is no death. XXX Doubt is as a precious ointment; Though it burns, it shall heal greatly. I tell thee, invite doubt When in the fullness of thy desire. Call to doubt At the time when thine ambition Is outrunning others in thought. Awaken doubt When thy heart is rejoicing in great love. I tell thee, Doubt brings forth eternal love; Doubt cleanses the mind of its corruption. So the strength of thy days Shall be established in understanding. For the fullness of thy heart, And for the flight of thy mind, Let doubt tear away thine entanglements. As the fresh winds from the mountains That awaken the shadows in the valley, So let doubt call to dance The decaying love of a contented mind. Let not doubt enter darkly thy heart. I tell thee, Doubt is as a precious ointment; Though it burns, it shall heal greatly. XXXI Listen to me, O friend. Be thou a yogi, a monk, a priest, A devout lover of God, A pilgrim searching for happiness, Bathing in holy rivers, Visiting sacred shrines, The occasional worshipper of a day, A reader of many books, Or a builder of temples, My love aches for thee. I know the way to the heart of the Beloved. This vain struggle, This long toil, This ceaseless sorrow, This changing pleasure, This burning doubt, This burden of life: All these will cease, O friend. My love aches for thee. I know the way to the heart of the Beloved. Have I wandered over the earth, Have I loved the reflections, Have I chanted, rapt in ecstasy, Have I donned the robe, Have I listened to the temple bells, Have I grown heavy with study, Have I searched, Have I been lost? Yea, much have I known. My love aches for thee. I know the way to the heart of the Beloved. O friend, Wouldst thou love the many reflections, If thou canst have reality? Throw away thy bells, thine incense, Thy fears and thy gods; Set aside thy creeds, thy philosophies; Come, Put aside all these: I know the way to the heart of the Beloved. O friend, The simple union is the best. That is the way to the heart of the Beloved. XXXII Through the veil of Form, O Beloved, I see Thee, myself in manifestation. How unattainable are the mountains to the valley, Though the mountains hold the valley! How mysterious is the darkness That brings forth the watching stars, And yet the night is born of day! I am in love with Life. As the mountain lake Which receives many streams And sends forth great rivers, But holds its unknown depths, So is my love. Calm and clear, as the mountains in the morning Is my thought, Born of love. Happy is the man who has found the harmony of Life, For then he creates in the light of eternity. FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT PARABLES TOYS. A child Had arranged on the polished floor Its toys, neatly and with care. The drum, The bugles, The cannons, The soldiers, And an officer with much gold - - Undoubtedly a field-marshal - -The long train With its polished engine, A tiny airplane, A big automobile, These were on one side. On the other, A doll with curly hair, Dressed in the latest fashion, Its bare knees showing, Black polished shoes With silk stockings. A little further away, Men in long coats and top hats. A bag With a string To bind them all. The child had gone. Then up sprang a man In long coat, with his hat in hand: "I represent God, And all of you listen. I have discovered Heaven and Hell. All who obey Go to Heaven and to the paradise of Gods, But those who disobey To Hell and to great sorrows. I know who is fit and worthy of Heaven, I alone can give spiritual distinctions and spiritual titles, I alone can make a man happy or unhappy, I alone can introduce God to you, I alone know the path to Him, I am the priest of God." "I am the protector, the ruler And the dispenser of life, I, with my friends the merchants, Decide to wage wars, to kill and to slaughter, To protect you, my friends, from your enemies. Our country is above all. Woe to all who do not kill, Who do not wear uniform, Who are unpatriotic - -which I decide. God is on our side, He waves the only flag - -our flag - -" Roared the man with the sword and many ribbons. Then a large fat man spoke quietly: "You two may say what you please, I hold the monies. I am the dispenser of all things, Of temporal power, Of cruelty and kindness, Of progress and evolution, Without me nothing shall be decided. I am a man of great wealth, Thy wealth shalt be the only God, I have finished." Then the man whom nobody noticed, Spoke: "I can destroy all your Gods, Your theories and your wealth, Without me you can do nothing. You cannot talk to me of God When I am hungry, Feed me and I will listen to your Gods. You cannot make me Into cannon fodder. pay me and excite me And I shall fight. You are rich because of me, I toil for you, suffer for you, Go hungry for you and die for you, I am your food and your comfort, Your love and your destroyer, I am going to strip you of all these, Now I strike." Then the lady with bare knees - - "I am laughing Because each of you thinks You are the most important. Glorying in your own importance Where would you all be without me? Still in that Heaven or Hell Of which you spoke, O friend with the long coat. I am your sister, your mother, Your wife and your love. I am on the stage of your bestial amusement, I bear children - -the agony of it - -for your pleasure, I dress showing just enough For your pleasure, I paint and make a fool of myself For your pleasure, I covet your glances and long for your love, I desire children without you, I seek freedom in spite of you, I struggle to be free of your desires, To show my equality, I do things that astonish you, I shall usurp all your places, Your honors, your glories. You worship me, You desecrate me. I am a woman But your master." Then all began to talk, Advancing this complicated theory and that complicated theory, This solution and that solution, Class against class, Wealth against poverty, Hungry against the well-fed. A roar and utter chaos. The child came back, Gathered up its toys, Knocking down one or two In its hurry. Then it went out, Laughing. II There is a mountain, far beyond the plains and hills, whose great summit overlooks the dark valley and the open seas. Neither cloud nor deep mists ever hide its calm face. It is above the shadows of day and night. From the vast plain, no man can behold it. Some have seen it but there be few that have reached its feet. One in many thousand years gathers his strength and gains that abode of eternity. I speak of that mountain top, serene, infinite, beyond thought. I shout for joy! One day, a man beheld through the opening of a cloud, the calm face of the mountain. He stopped every passer-by, that would stay to give an answer, and inquired of the way that would lead him beyond the mists. Some said take this path, and others said take that path. After many days of confusion and toil, he arrived among the hills. A man, full in years, wise in the ways of the hills, said,"I know the way. You cannot reach the mountain, O friend, unless you are strengthened by the power that comes from the adoration of the image in yonder shrine." Many days passed in peaceful worship. Tired of worship, he asked of men that seemed great with under- standing. "Yea," said one,"I know the way. But if you would gain the fulfillment of your desire, carry this on you. It will uphold you in your weariness." He gave him the symbol of his struggle. Another cried,"Yea, I know the way. But many days of contempla- tion must be passed in the seclusion of a sanctuary, with my picture of eternity." "I know the way," said another,"But you must perform these rites, understand these hidden laws, you must enter the association of the elect and hold fast to the knowledge that we shall give you." "Be loud in the song of praise of the reflection that you seek," said another. "Come, follow me, obeying all things I say. I know the way," cried another. In the long last, the calm face of the mountain was utterly forgotten. Now he wanders from hill to hill, crying aloud,"Yes, I know the way, but. " There is a mountain far beyond the plains and hills whose summit overlooks the dark valley and the open seas. Neither cloud nor deep mists ever hide its calm face. It is above the shadows of day and night. One in many thousand years gathers his strength and gains that abode of eternity. I speak of that mountain top, serene, infinite, beyond thought. I shout for joy! III In my garden there is life and death, the laughter of many flowers and the cry of falling petals. A dead tree and a green tree look on each other. It is mid-summer and the shadows are dancing save about the dead tree. The song of waters shall not set it a-dancing, nor the rain bring forth the hidden leaves. Ah, it is so bare, so empty! Who shall nourish it, who shall caress it with life? The far skies look down on the dead and the living. Through the long suffering winter, lies concealed a seed of lovely promise. Cold winds, tearing gales, noisy storms, hold back the loveliness of the seed. Dark days and sunless hours deny the glory of the seed. With the soft breeze from the warm south the hidden seed awakens to life. The song of the birds over the blue skies calls the still seed to life. The scent of warm rain awakens deep memories of the seed to life. Through the burden of heavy earth, life breaks forth and rejoices. It grew by the dusty road-side among the lazy stones. With its single flower, it danced the day long. A boy, on his homeward way, uproots it and throws it away. Creation lies in the path of careless love. IV THE MAN AND THE MOON I would like to tell a story. Once upon a time there was a man who desired to understand the beauty of the moon and the softness of its rays and the causes of these things. So he went forth and gazed into the skies. Between him and the moon there was a lovely tree with a delicate branch and tender leaves. Forgetting the moon, he began to examine the delicate branch and the tender leaves and was lost in the thought of such delicacy, and when he looked up again, the moon had set. The understanding of life is more essential than the mere superficial knowledge of the machinery of life, though one must be acquainted with this also. V Once upon a time, when there was great understanding and in the world full rejoicing, there lived a gentle woman, full of years. One day, she found herself in a temple, before the altar made by the human hand. She was crying bitterly to heaven and none was there to comfort her. Till in the long last, a friend of God took notice of her and asked the reason for her tears. "God must have forgotten me. My husband is gracious and well. My children are full and strong. Many servants are there to care for us. All things are well with me and mine own. God has forgotten us." The friend of God replied, "God never forgets His children." When she came home, she found her son dead. She never cried. "God remembers me and mine own." VI The mountains look on the town and the town looks upon the sea. It was the time of many flowers and calm blue skies. In a big house, where the trees gathered around there lived a man, rich in the possession of things. He had visited the capitals of many lands in search of a cure. He was lame, scarcely able to walk. A stranger from the distant and sunny lands, came by chance to the town that looks upon the sea. The lame man and the distant stranger passed by, touching each other in a narrow lane. The lame man was healed, and the town whispered in amazement. On the next day, the man made whole was taken to prison for some immorality. VII There is a little town, sheltered in the shadow of a great mountain. There are many people in that town and only one street with numer- ous shops. The shop of gay and bright coloured flowers, to which people came with laughter in their hearts - The shop where they sell clothes, a delight to the vanity of the people who come out of it - The shop where they sell toys; grave men and little children enter in. Outside the large shop where food is sold, a beggar waits. There is a gloomy house which undertakes to rid the people of their dead. How prosperous are they that live within! - A house where they sell God; where they teach the people fear, and then the way to overcome their fear. In that house there are many dark corridors in which worshippers lose themselves. A man, in gorgeous robes, tells of the beauty of an unknown Deity. There is a well-built house where they keep in perfect order the dead creations of the past. One day when there many joyous shadows, and the people were delighted with his visit, for there came few strangers to that town. They feasted him in honour and the town rejoiced. They showed him their shops, their house of gloom and the gilded building where God was kept for sale. In the street there is a procession of mourners for the dead. The people looked to the stranger for a passing word of comfort, but behold, he laughs. For he is in love with Life and death passes him by. They understood him not but hurried him out of their gates. The stranger climbs to the mountain top, which overlooks that crowded town. VIII There was, once on a time, a man whose heart rejoiced in Life. He loved Life and therefore he loved all things. He was a friend to the meanest and to the greatest. For is not Life as the waters which satisfy the thirst of the wise and the foolish? Now this man was greatly sought after for his understanding in wisdom. One day, when the skies were blue and the sun was warm, the ants came out of their deep nests and wandered on the face of the land, so that the pathway was moving with them. In his far-seeing wisdom the lover of Life saw a man drowning in the smiling, blue lake. He hastened on the pathway, to save him from the dancing waters, thereby crushing many ants. The people were troubled, for said they, "How can this man be a true lover of Life when he destroys? How foolish we are to look to him for love." He wanders lonely among the mountains. Ah, how little they love! IX THE MASTER SINGER OF LIFE On the banks of a soft running river There was a village full of people but empty of life. Oh, the sorrow of it! Many were the tall temples with graven images, Gods moulded after the thought of man, Proud priests, soft of voice, loud in chants, Grave talkers of philosophy, under the cool trees; The cry of burden, the fear of sorrow, Complicated laws of religion, Morality made for others, The strong maintained by the weak. The naked and the clothed walked on the same narrow street, All in strife one against another, Their Gods, their laws and their love. They called the village the world. On a fair day, at the meeting of four roads, A man cried, "Listen, O people, There is a corruption, and a strife; The song of your life is impure. The Master Singer of Life Comes to this ancient village; Harken to the harmony of his song." The jasmine opens its heart to the dark night. "I am the Master Singer of Life, I have suffered long, I know. Keep pure the song in thy heart, Simple is the way. Be rid of the complexities of Gods, of religions and of beliefs therein. Bind not thy life with rites, with the desire after comfort. Be a lamp unto thyself. Thou shalt not then cast a shadow across the face of another. Life cannot be held in the bondage of fear. Be free, then there shall be the miracle of order. Love life, then there shall be no loneliness. Ah, listen to the voice of my love; I have suffered long, I know. I am free, eternally happy,; I am the Master Singer of Life." Softly falls the rain on the burning land. A few listened and greatly rejoiced. putting aside all things They freed life of all bondage. "Yea," cried the people, "But how shall we reconcile the beauty of our Gods with thy song? In what manner shall we fit thy sayings into the temples of our creation? Thou art the bringer of confusion. We shall have none of thee, Thou sayest things that we know not, What thou sayest is of the Devil, Away, away." The Master Singer of Life went on his way, And the people struggled with the problem of reconcilliation. X A FABLE Once upon a time - which is the way in which all true stories begin - there was a world in which all the people were sick and sad, and yet all of them were seeking to be released from their suffering and to find happiness. In search of this happiness they prayed, they worshipped, they loved and they hated, they married and made wars. They begot children as miserable as themselves and yet they taught those children that happiness was their right and their eventual goal. Then one day in the midst of this suffering world there rose a whisper, which grew into a shout, that a Great Teacher was coming who, because of his love for the world and because of his wisdom, would bring to those who were suffering, comfort in their sorrow, and would show all the people in the world how they might find the lasting happiness which all were seeking. And in order to spread widely the glad news of the coming of the Teacher, organizations and societies were formed, and men and women went throughout the world telling of the Teacher who would come. Some prayed to him that he would come more quickly. Some performed ceremonies in order to prepare the world to receive him. Some made profound studies of forgotten times, when other great Teachers had come and taught, so that by this study they might better understand him. Some proclaimed themselves his disciples in advance, so that when he came there might be some at least to stand around him and to understand him. Then one day he came. And he told the people of the world that he had come to bring them happiness, to heal their pain and to soothe their sorrows. He said that he himself, through much suffering and pain, had found his way to an abode of peace, to a Kingdom of eternal Joy. He told them that he had come to lead them and to guide them to that abode. But, he said, because the path leading to that Kingdom was steep and narrow, only those could follow him who were willing to set aside everything that they had accumulated in the past. He asked them to set aside their Gods, their religions, their rites and ceremonies, their books and their knowledge, their families and friends. And if they would do that, he said, he would provide them with food for the journey, he would satisfy their burning thirst with the living water he possessed, and would bring them into the Kingdom of Happiness where he himself dwelt eternally. Then those people, who for so many years had been preparing for the Teacher, began to feel uncomfortable and troubled. For they said: "This is not the teaching we expected and for which we have been preparing. How can we renounce all this knowledge which we have so painfully acquired? Without it the world would never understand the Teacher. How can we renounce all these splendid rites and ceremonies in the performing of which we find so much happiness and power? How can we renounce our families and friends when we need them so much? What teaching is this?" And they began to question among themselves: "Can this indeed be the Teacher whom we have been expecting? We never thought he would speak in this way and ask of us such renunciations." And those especially who had proclaimed themselves his disciples, because of their more intimate knowledge of his will, felt uncomfortable and troubled. Then after much thought and meditation light came to them and a solution of their difficulties. And they said: "lt is true that the Teacher comes to help the world, but we know the world better than he does and so we will act as his interpreters to the world." And so those who had knowledge said: "His call for renunciation does not apply to us because the world needs our knowledge and could not do without it, so for the sake of the world we shall go on seeking knowledge." And those who performed rites and ceremonies said: "We have of course renounced all rites and ceremonies for our own benefit, we have passed beyond any need of them, but for the sake of the world we shall continue to perform them, otherwise the world would suffer." So they continued to build Churches and Temples and to perform rites, all to help the world, and they were too busy to listen to the Teacher. And the only people who willingly renounced were those who gave up their homes and their families because they wanted freedom from duty and obligation. And they came to the Teacher and said: "We have left all to follow you, now find us an easy job where we can work for you and also earn a living." Some there were, a few, who set aside all things, and sat at the feet of the Teacher, and tried to learn from him how they might feed the hungry and satisfy the thirsty. These people thought that his wisdom was likely to prove more helpful to the world than their knowledge; that his simplicity might be more easily understood than their complications; that the Teacher might know best when he said that rites and ceremonies were not necessary for the finding of the happiness he came to give; that you could renounce your family and friends in your heart while not deserting them in the flesh. But the others reproached them for their selfishness and idleness. They said: "The world does not need the bread of the Teacher, but a particular kind of pastry for which we hold the recipe. It does not need water to quench its thirst, but the wine contained in our chalices. The words of your Teacher will not help the world, because they are too simple and the world cannot understand what they mean. We have complicated theories to solve the complicated problems of the world and the world can understand them." So there were few of those who had most eagerly announced the coming of the Teacher who listened to the teaching he gave. There were some who said: "This is not the Teacher we expected, so we will go on preparing for the coming of the real Teacher." And the others built up walls and barriers round him so that none could get to him unless they opened the gates. So in a few years he went away and then the same people hailed him as divinely inspired, and they built new Churches in his name and invented new and elaborate rites and ceremonies for his glory, and built a new religion upon the teaching he had not given. And the world continued to suffer and cry for help. FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT PROSE POEMS A HYMN. I have stood in Thy holy presence, I have seen the splendor of Thy face, I prostrate at Thy sacred feet, I kiss the hem of Thy garment, I have felt the glory of Thy beauty, I have seen Thy serene look. Thy wisdom has opened my closed eyes, Thine eternal peace has transfigured me. Thy tenderness, the tenderness of a mother to her child, the teacher to his pupil, I have felt. Thy compassion for all things, living and non-living, the animate and inanimate, I have felt. Thy joy, indescribable, has thrilled me, Thy voice has opened in me many voices. Thy touch has awakened my heart. Thine eyes have opened mine eyes. Thy glory has kindled the glory in me. O Master of Masters, I have yearned for this happy hour when I should stand in Thy holy presence, At last it has been granted unto me. I am happy, I am peaceful, peaceful as the bottom of a deep blue lake. I am calm, calm as the snow-clad mountaintop above the storm clouds. I have longed for this hour, it has come. I shall follow humbly in Thy footsteps along that path which Thy holy feet have trodden. I shall humbly serve the world, the world for which thou hast suffered, sacrificed and toiled. I shall bring that peace into the world. I have longed for this happy hour, it has come. Thine image is in mine heart, Thy compassion is burning in me, Thy wisdom guides me, Thy peace enlightens me, Thy tenderness has given me the power to sacrifice. Thy love has given me energy. Thy glory pervades my entire being. I have yearned for this hour, it has come, in all the splendor of a glorious spring. I am young as the youngest. I am old as the oldest. I am happy as a blind lover, for I have found my love. I have seen. I can never be blind, though a thousand years pass. I have seen Thy divine face everywhere, in the stone, in the blade of grass, in the giant pines of the forest, in the reptile, in the lion, in the criminal, in the saint. I have longed for this magnificent moment, it came and I have grasped it. I have stood in Thy presence. I have seen the splendor of Thy face. I prostrate at Thy sacred feet. I kiss the hem of Thy garment. II MY HEART DANCES WITH THY LOVE The mind well poised, Calm, serene, Free from the limitations of prejudice, My heart dances with Thy love, O Beloved. How can I forget Thy love? As well ask the rose To delight in summer's day Without its tender petals. How can I be separated from Thee, O Guru of Gurus? As well ask the waters of the sea To separate from its joyous waves. If in this world there is loneliness, Then, where art Thou, O my Love? As the sun fills the earth With dancing shadows and great open spots of light, So hast Thou filled my heart In great abundance. III FIND THY SOUL, O FRIEND Nay, canst thou tell me, O friend, Whence comes this mighty assurance And the purpose thereof? The cause of this ceaseless strife, This violent desire for many possessions, This immense longing for life, This never-ending struggle after the passing happiness? How quickly Fades the lovely rose. How easily O friend, Sorrow is begotten. O friend, Thou wilt find thy lasting happiness In no temple, In no book, Not in the intellect of man, Nor in the Gods of thy creation. Go not to holy places, Worship not in wayside shrines. How easily The tranquil pool is disturbed, And the reflection thereof. Nay, friend, Seek not thy happiness In passing things. Find thy soul, O friend, For there alone Abideth thy Beloved. IV TELL ME, WHICH IS THE REAL? How suddenly The still pool is disturbed! The passing wind Delights with the restless waters, The Insect Makes patterns, Annoying the tranquil waters. The reflections pass away, to be re-established again, The stately tree, The blue heavens, The swift bird, The heavy cloud, The tall house with many windows, Are there in the quiet pool. The sun through the green leaves, The distant stars, through immense space, My own face, so close, Are there established. O pool, My tears disturb thy waters. Tell me, Which is the real? V THE BEGGAR AT THE SHRINE As the beggar, Lean and hungry, Sits on the steps of the temple Shaking his empty bowl, So have I sat Crying for my empty heart To be filled. The worshippers On their way to the Shrine, With the habit of offering, With a smile, They gave me of their gifts. But on the morrow, With the beggers I took my place Once again, Sad and empty. VI COME AWAY As many scores of rivers Enter into the sea, So the understanding of the world Has come unto me. Immense longing Is born unto me, An aching love Is burning my heart, A passionate desire Is consuming my being. Come away, Come away, O world, From thy changing sorrows, From thy dying love. I have found the way. Come away, Come away, O world, From thy little Gods, From thy interpreters thereof. I have found the way. Come away, Come away, O world, From thy fleeting passions, From thy decaying achievements. I have found the way. Come away, Come away, O world, From thy prison of pain, From thy keepers thereof. I have found the way. Come away, Come away, O world, From thy burning desires, From thy agonies therein. I have found the way. Come away, Come away, O world, From the false, From the burdens thereof. I have found the way. Come away, Come away, O world, From thy kneeling, From the holding up of thy sad hands, The temple walls are falling. I have found the way. Come away, Come away, O world, For all things perish, Though thy soft tears Wash away thy memories. I have found the way. Seized am I With a burning passion To free thee From thy cage, For I have found the way. The bird is on the wing, And his voice fills my heart. The vast firmament, The limitless space, Enfold me. I am thy lover, I am thy teacher, Renounce all And follow me, For my way Is the way of Liberation. Come, Come away, O love, Sit beside me; I will teach thee The way to Happiness. VII WALK BY THE LIGHT OF MY LOVE AND THOU SHALT CAST NO SHADOW My well-Beloved and I Hold thee, O friend, In our heart. I speak to thee From the depths of my heart. I am united with my well-Beloved. I am as the petal to the rose; I am as the scent to the jasmine, My well-Beloved and I Are inseparable, indivisible. As the moon reflects the glory of the sun, So do I reflect the glory of my well-Beloved. As soft as the shade Of a moonlit night So is my love for thee, O friend. As the whirlwinds that sweep O'er the lands, So is my love That shall wipe out the darkness about thee. As the mountain streams That come down with a roar Into the valley, So let my love enter into thee. As the solitary tree Amidst the great mountains Withstands the raging winds, So shall my love uphold thee In times of strife and affliction. As the sea putteth forth mighty waves And conquereth all things So shall my love vanquish The travail of thy life. Yea, O friend, passing exceeding great Is my love for thee. Drink of it, thou shalt be no more thirsty. Eat of it, thou shalt know of no hunger. Bind it to thy heart, thou shalt not taste of sorrow. Write it down in the tablet of thy mind, Thou shalt be the son of wisdom and understanding. Walk by the light of my love, Thou shalt cast no shadow. O friend, Come unto me, I will show thee the way of love. Turn not thy head, Close not up thine ears, Seal not up thy heart, But come after me, I will lead thee To the abode of love. Oh! My heart acheth for thee, For thou dost not listen To the voice of my love. Why dost thou not answer to my call? Why dost thou walk away from me? Why dost thou hide thy face among the shadows? Why dost thou pursue the fleeting That engendereth in thee sorrow? Why dost thou hold thyself against me? Why art thou blind to my love? Why dost thou eat out of the hand of affliction? Ah! Answer me, For I am heavy with love. The love that begetteth sorrow, The love that killeth the smile on an open face, The love that changeth from moment to moment, The love that's lonely in its solitude, The love that's haughty and oppressive, The love that destroyeth the love for others, The love that binds and places a limitation, The love that's consumed with the fires of self, These thou shalt not taste of If thou walkest with me. O friend, What dost thou pursue? What's the purpose that leadeth thee on? What shadows entice thee on? What murmurings urge thee on? Whither goest thou? O friend, The divisions of people, The oppression of the poor, The wars of nations, The exploitation of the ignorant, The hatred of class against class, The strife after wealth, and the sorrow thereof, The intricacy of governments, The portioning of lands, All these cease to be In the clothing of love. Doth not the man of the fields, After the labours of the day, Seek the shelter of love? Doth not the man of multitudes of things Grow weary of his possessions And seek the shelter of love? Doth not the ruler of many peoples Suffer the loneliness of his ambitions And seek the shelter of love. Doth not the man of the temple, Caught up in the exhaustion of his worship, Seek the shelter of love? Yea, All are in search of the abode That giveth them the glory of love. But why dost thou contest, O friend, One against another, In the pursuit of love? Why this setting aside of joy In the hatred of one against another? Why this consuming envy That setteth one against another, And destroyeth utterly thy happiness? Oh! My heart aches for thee, O friend. Keep open wide thy heart, And let no dark shadows creep therein, For without love there shall be Desolation and a strife without an end. Keep pure thy heart, For with impurity There shall be affliction and travail. I tell thee That wherever thou art, Whatever be thy sorrow, Whatever be thy rejoicing, The way to the heart of the Beloved Is the way of love. For it leadeth thee to simplicity, And to the faith that conquereth. Understanding cometh by the way Of love, And knowledge therefrom. Yea, Love all and therein lose thyself. My well-Beloved and I Hold thee, O friend, In our heart. I speak to thee From the depth of my love. I am as the petal to the rose, I am as the scent to the jasmine. I am united with my well-Beloved; Come unto me: I am the heart of love. VIII MY HEART IS HEAVY WITH THY LOVE The red, red moon arose Eastward, o'er the dreaming sea. The dark palm sighs With the coming quiet of the night. The distant cry of a bird On its homeward flight, The soft ripple of cool waters Tapping the warm shores. A heart burdened Of frenzied joy, near pain. A heart of understanding is my need. A melodious song, Soft and plaintive, Cometh up from the deep shadows. Oppressive grows the quiet night air. As the far winking light In the dark temple tower, Above the worshippers And their groaning prayers, High above the silent Gods Amidst their gloomy abodes, So have I become, Free from the hand that wrought me, The conquerer of aching time And its sorrowing ways. O friend, Come away from the complications of belief, Destroy the monumental superstitions Of thy enslaving creed. But grow in the simplicity of thy heart, In the shadows of thy suffering. O Beloved, My heart is heavy with thy love. IX WHO SHALL GIVE THEE COMFORT Who shall give thee comfort In the days of thy trouble, In the days of thy sorrow? From whom shalt thou seek The consolation of thy heart, The satisfaction of thy mind, In the days of darkness, In the days of affliction? As the rain cometh And falleth on the land In due season, So, O friend, Sorrow descends on all, And it shall spare none. The poor who are humble in the ways Of life, The wealthy who are arrogant in their hearts, The oppressor who maketh the land to cry, The ruler who is far from the peoples, The ardent lover of God, The pursuer of fleeting pleasures; Yea, None shall be spared. Shall the offering of flowers In the temple Bring to thee the lasting comfort That thou seekest? Shall the chanting of many voices Chase away from thy heart The shadow that covereth it? Shall the perfume of incense Drive away from thy mind The anxiety that over-layeth it? Shalt thou forget the oppression Of thy heart By the consuming of drink? Shalt thou chase away the shadow By the company of many friends? Shall the multitude of rejoicings Bring to thee the consolation That thou seekest? Shall songs and music Entice thee away From thine affliction? Shall the fleeting love In its delight hold thee back From thine aching heart? O friend, As the dark cloud Blotteth out the sun And casteth shadows on the land, Sorrow shall encompass thee about And destroy the smile on thy face. In the days of mine illusion, When darkness lay about me, I sought to overpower The sorrow-laden heart With the multitude of rejoicings. Every abode of music knew me, Every flower of decay held me, Every jewel of the eye enticed me. The cool temples, With their great shadows And the cooing of many doves, Gave the passing comfort of a day. The Gods thereof played with me In the innocence of their greatness. They whispered to me of the life In the haven of their rest. The preachers thereof Lulled me to sleep By the words of their books, And the promises of reward For my good deeds. The perfume of the sacred flowers Gave to me of their comfort. As the leaf is The plaything of the winds, So was I the toy Of sorrow. As the cloud is chased By the cruel winds, So was I driven From shelter to shelter By the mutterings of affliction. But now, O friend, I am beyond The haven of the Gods. The limitations of the preachers, Of books, No longer bind me. As the soft breeze That plays about the temple, So have I become. Not a thing shall hold me, For sorrow is the companion Of the seekers of shelter. Yea, I have found The eternal abode of happiness, I have opened up The fountain of lasting joy. I am beyond sorrow, I am liberated. My Beloved abideth in me, We two are one. O friend, I tell thee, As behavior dwelleth with righteousness, So eternal happiness abideth in thine own heart. This vain search After the desires of thy heart Among the flowers of decay Holds thee in its shadows. Thou canst not escape This fury of sorrow In a moment of forgetfulness. No God will give thee The happiness thou seekest. No mutterings of sacred words Will loosen thee From the cords of affliction. There is no way To that abode of lasting happiness Save by the union of the self With the Beloved. Conceal not thy heart In the sanctity of thoughtlessness As the bird of prey From the open skies Examines the fields of the earth For its food, So thou must look into thy heart And destroy the shadows That are concealed therein, For in the shade Hides the self. There must never be a moment of ease Or the satisfaction of contentment, For thou shalt not behold The face of the Beloved In a heart heavy with stagnation. There must be revolt And great discontentment, For with these Thou shalt purify thy heart. Who shall give thee Of these things? Who will purify thee Of thy stagnation? Who shall uphold thee In thy ceaseless struggle? The perfume cometh forth From the heart of the lotus. O friend, I tell thee As behaviour dwelleth with righteousness, So eternal happiness abideth in thine own heart. X THE STRANGERS At the great heights Where the snow-clad mountains Meet the blue firmament, I met with two strangers. We talked awhile And separated, Never to meet again. As two ships, On the vast waters of the sea, pass each other, And the travellers thereof Wave to each other, Never to meet again, So were we On this sea of life. Often Have I felt sad At the passing by Of a stranger, In some lonesome spot. But yesterday, When the two strangers That I met with Disappeared Around the bend of a narrow path, My heart went with them, And they remained with me. Of what nationality, Of what faith, I know not, Nor care I. They were like unto me, Alone in a solitary place, Seeking new visions, Climbing greater heights, Struggling up dangerous paths, And going down to the valley Once again. This incessant struggle To reach the mountain top, Rarely attaining the glory thereof, But ever descending To the plains, Where man makes his abode, Has been my lot, Life upon life. But now, O strangers, I have reached the pinnacle Of the mysterious mountain. I know full well The struggles thereof, The great chasms that divide, The precipices That men Slip down I know full well The multitude of paths That encircle the mountain, But they meet all At the narrow ridge Beyond which All must climb upward If they would attain The mountain summit. There is only one path Leading upward Beyond that ridge Towards which all paths Come together. O strangers, I know not Where ye be, Through what joys, Through what struggles Ye are passing, But ye are myself. As two stars Of a sudden Come into being Of a dark night, So ye two Came into my vision And there ye are established. My heart is the heart Of my well-Beloved, It holdeth a multitude. O my strangers, Once again Ye and I shall meet, I dwell in the abode Which is the end Of all journey. To be united with the Beloved Is to love all, For in all Dwelleth the Beloved. XI THE SEARCH OF THE BELOVED O friend, I show the way That shall open thy heart To the welcome of thy Beloved. As the precious metal Is found at great depths And for the discovery thereof Thou must delve deep down Into the heart of the world, So thou must, If thou wouldst behold The face of the Beloved, Dive deep within thy heart And tear aside The veil upon veil That hides the glory, The Light of thy life. As a fire Is covered o'er With thick smoke Before it shall burst forth Into a roaring flame, So, O friend, Thy heart and mind Are in a cloud of darkness That can be dispelled Only by the desire Of thy deep purpose. O friend, Thy Beloved, The desire of thy heart, Is my well-Beloved. In times past There was a veil That separated Him from myself, But now I have destroyed This separation And welcomed Him into my heart. He abideth there And I am consumed With His love. I tell thee That my well-Beloved Is the Beloved of all. He and I are one, We are inseparable, Eternal and everlasting. Yea, I have found the way That shall offer unto thee the ecstasy Of purpose, That shall unfold unto thee the beauty Of life, That shall give happiness Unto all, That shall bring unto thee the comfort Of truth. As the spark That shall give warmth Is hid among the grey ashes, So, O friend, The light Which shall guide thee Is concealed Under the dust Of thine experience. O friend, Wait not for the dark shadows That shall fill the valley, Cutting off The sunlit view of the mountain, For by the light of day Thou canst see the path That shall lead thee To the great heights Where the mists of life Shall not confuse thee. This is the time When thou shouldst walk In the open light. The Beloved is with thee, For He and I are One. O friend, As in the time of winter Thou canst not sow the seeds That shall give thee The food for the coming year, So in time of darkness, Strife and confusion, Thou canst not lay up The lasting happiness That shall be the wellspring Of thy life. O friend, As in the springtime When every seed Shall shoot forth To the glory of its fulfillment, So in the days Of thy great rejoicing Every deed of thy thought, Every action of thy feeling Shall come forth To its full fruition, And it shall give thee The burden thereof. O friend, As in the time of decay, How sad it is That the green foliage Should wither and die, So grievous it is That in the time of desolation There be none to deliver thee From the shadows of thy creation. O friend, There is a time for all things. This is the time When thou shouldst walk In the open light. The Beloved is with thee For He and I are One. As a traveller In the full knowledge Of his voyage puts aside the things that shall weigh him down On his journey, So, O friend, Set aside all things That shall compass thee On thy journey In search of the Beloved. For without the Beloved There shall be no comfort There shall be no rejoicing, There will be no permanency But There shall be confusion, Strife and the conflict of purpose, A darkness and a searching, A misery and a travail. O friend, The Beloved is thyself. But to realize Him And to hold Him Fast in thy heart, Firm in thy mind, There must be no dark spot Hidden away In thy being. No false comforters, No pleasant Gods Who give thee counsel Of ease, No greeds that bind thee, No beliefs that shelter thee In their dark shadows; No thoughts, no affections that hold thee. O friend, pursue the self From shelter to larger shelter, From temple to greater temple, From desire to greater desire, From conceit to greater conceit. Mercilessly chase him Down the paths of his delights, Relentlessly question him Of his dying certainties. Till in the long last, O friend, Thou drivest him To the open light Where he shall cast no shadow, Where he shall be united With the Beloved. Then thou shalt realize The Beloved, Then thou shalt be Like unto myself. O friend, There is a time for all things. This is the time When thou shouldst walk In the open light. The Beloved is with me For He and I are One. XII THE BELOVED IN ALL My Beloved and I Are one. I come forth from Him, My being is in Him. Without Him I am As the cloud that wandereth from one shelter To another, That hath no resting place. In Him Is my rest. In Him Is my glory. For in Him All things exist And I in all. O friend, I tell thee Of the way to the heart Of the Beloved. For I am the Beloved. My Beloved and I Are One. As a dew drop Entereth the sea, So have I become one With my Beloved. The well-Beloved Is in all. All things are in the Beloved. The blade of grass That men do tread down, The great spreading tree That giveth shelter, The green reptile That men hold in terror, The fly that annoyeth The seller of the sweetmeat, The singing bird That delighteth the ear, The fierce lion That giveth fear To the heart of the forest, The simple barbarian That men hold up in contempt, The man of great knowledge That giveth satisfaction to many, The worshipper of many gods That wandereth from shrine to shrine. Life is one As my Beloved and I Are one. There is only one way To the heart of the Beloved. That path lieth Through thyself, Through thine own heart. Of that I tell thee. There be many forms Of His manifestation, But there is only one way, O friend, That leadeth me To the heart of my well-Beloved. In times When I obeyed The laws of the gods, Of the world, I walked on the paths That lead to their shrines, And there I was held in the power Of their small authority, But the fury of discontentment Drove me on, Never stayed I In the shelter Of the temple. As one wandereth From place to place In search of lasting comfort, So wandered I, Setting aside the comforts That gave me over to sleep, Till in the long last I opened my heart; There found I My well-beloved. Many will tell thee, O friend, That there be various works, Many ways To the approach of the Beloved. Yea, There be, But they all lead To one path, For there is only one way To the heart of the Beloved. Of that I tell thee. If thou wouldst discover My well-Beloved That abides in me, O friend, Then thou must Set aside all thy gods, Thy comforts, thy small authorities. Thou must cleanse thyself Of thy conceit of little knowledge. Thou must purify thyself Of thy heart and mind. Thou must renounce all Thy companions, Thy friends, thy family, Thy father, thy mother, Thy sister and thy brother. Yea, Thou must renounce all. Thou must destroy Thy self utterly, To find the Beloved. O friend, Wouldst thou walk In the light of a candle When I give thee The light of the Beloved? I tell thee My Beloved and I are one. I know the way. Come with me, I shall lead thee To my heart Where dwells the Beloved. There be many reflections That fade and die away, But I possess The truth That is everlasting. Of that I give thee, O friend. Why is there doubt In thy heart? Art thou happy in the shadows? Do men give thee The substance that shall satisfy thy hunger? Thou playest by the rivers Of water, But they quench not Thy burning thirst. Art thou content With the decaying? O friend, My heart is heavy with love For thee. Come to me And I shall give thee Of my love, That knoweth no alteration, That knoweth no decay, That withereth not, For my well-Beloved and I Are one. I come from Him, I tell thee Of the way that lieth hid In the heart of my Beloved. I shall open unto thee The gate That shall admit thee To the abode of my well-Beloved. That valley lieth in the shadow Of a deep cloud, And I dwell among The mountain tops. Yea, My well-Beloved and I are one. XIII I AM ALL I am the blue firmament and the black cloud, I am the waterfall and the sound thereof, I am the graven image and the stone by the wayside, I am the rose and the falling petals thereof, I am the flower of the field and the sacred lotus, I am the sanctified waters and the still pool, I am the tree that towereth among the mountains And the blade of grass in the peaceful lane, I am the tender spring leaf and the evergreen foliage. I am the barbarian and the sage, I am the pious and the impious, I am the godly and the ungodly, I am the harlot and the virgin, I am the liberated and the man of time, I am the renunciation and the proud possessor, I am the destructible and the indestructible. I am neither This nor That, I am neither detached nor attached, I am neither heaven nor hell, I am neither philosophies nor creeds, I am neither the Guru nor the disciple. O friend, I contain all. I am clear as the mountain stream, Simple as the new spring leaf. Few know me. Happy are they That meet with me. XIV I CANNOT TEACH YOU TO PRAY I cannot teach you to pray, O friend, Nor can I teach you to weep. I am not the God of your long prayers, Nor am I the cause of your many sorrows. They are made by the hand of man. Come with me, O friend, I will lead you To the fountain of Happiness. Laughter is as the honey In the heart of the scented flower. You shall drink of it In that garden of roses Where all desire ceases Save the desire to be like the Beloved. This pool of Wisdom Is not made by the hand of man, Nor are the steps leading down to its clear waters. There you will meet with every man, The brown, the white, The black, the yellow. In its pure waters, You will behold the face of my Beloved. Come, O friend, Leave all your passing joys, Your burning anxieties, Your aching sorrows, Your fading love, Your evergrowing desires. For all these lead but to prayer, To the cause of many tears. As the passing wind is the life of man, As the withering rose is the love of man, The glory and the strength Are gone in but a day. I have drunk deep at this pool. My Beloved has filled me With the delights of eternity. XV TRUTH Truth is neither evil nor good, Truth is neither love nor hate, Truth is neither the pure nor the impure, Truth is neither holy nor unholy, Truth is neither simple nor complex, Truth is neither of heaven nor hell, Truth is neither moral nor immoral, Truth is neither of the God nor of the devil, Truth is neither virtue nor vice, Truth is neither birth nor death, Truth is neither in religion nor without religion. Truth is as the waters - -it wanders, It has no resting place. For Truth is Life. I saw the mountain come down to the valley. XVI DESIRE IS LIFE Desire is Life. The fulfillment of Life Is the perfection of Desire. As the scent of a lone flower is desire That fades with the death of the flower, That has no being in itself But comes into rejoicing with Life; As the roaring waters rushing through the dark valley - -Hidden, boisterous, terrible - - So is desire. As angry as the waters seeking a release Is desire. Woe to him who is caught up therein. Through the dark valley Lie the open, smiling fields, And the scent of many flowers. The fear of desire Is the putting away of Life. XVII In the corruption of the known Man is stifled By his fear of the unknown. As a lone cloud is driven in search of a secluded valley, So, pursued by fear, Man creates out of the known The protection of the image of God. In that protection fear is multiplied. Strange is the way of the shadow of fear. The voice of fear calls out And man burdens the earth With the loveliness of a distant paradise And with the horror of a near hell. The shadow of fear covers the land. Between himself and his fear Man builds a temple for the image of his God, And in its dark shadows is born a religion of great panoply, Whose threat is conditioned by a loving priest. Against that fear which he calls death, Man seeks out a way for the furtherance of life, And in that search fear is the master of his love. The sacrifice of the unwise is out of the burden of fear. The burden of wealth is the fear of the rich. The poor are caught up in the desire for possession. Envy, hatred, ambition, pride of dignity, judgment of convention, The good, the evil, and the cruelty of binding morality, Are but the sign posts on the path of fear. If fear be the source of thought, Then shall there be darkness in the land. If the bubbling wellspring of love be corrupted by fear, Then its clear waters shall create a burning thirst In the mouth of man. Ah, friend, The loveliness of life is not the child of fear But it lies in the womb of understanding. Fear brings forth the tears of the world. Laughter rejoices in the wake of true love. A dried pool aches for the coming rains. XVIII Place not thy love in the scent of a decaying violet, But hold in thy heart that love which is Life, That love which is of the Beloved. As a great flame that defies all corruption So is this love of the Beloved. O friend, Why dost thou need the still weight of temples When Life dances in the street? O friend, Why dost thou hide in fear - - Of death, of loneliness, of sorrow - - When Life rejoices about thee in the swaying fields? O friend, Why dost thou seek the passing comfort When Life gives of its eternal understanding? O, be the creators of great mountains Rather than seek guides To lead thee up their dangerous ways. I am Life, I am the Beloved, The flame that defies all corruption. Ah, come with me, Walk in the way of Life - - Love which brings no death. XIX O friend, I am anxious for thee. The long race with time, The ceaseless dance with the winds of space, The burden of lonely sorrow And the gathering in of joy: They are over, and I await thee As the parched land the coming rains. The love that corrupts the form of its loveliness, Offerings to pacify the inward fear of thought, Vain hopes void of understanding, Visions and dreams ever in the semblance of man, Death that creates darkness in life: They are over, and I await thee As the lotus the cool night air. Hear me, O friend, I await thee, As the snowy peak in a still valley. XX In the choicest of valleys There is moaning and lamentation, In the great thoroughfares of men There is the laughter of changing sadness, In the melodious song There is the emptiness of fulfilled desire, Upon the lofty mountain There awaits the stillness of death. Wave upon wave Comes the action of men To break lonely upon the shores of vain glory. The whirlwind of young love Grows sad within the fold of a single day. Thought conquers the great regions of time, Only to return to the bondage Of a deceiving mind. Ah, desire is as young as the first ray of dawn, And sad as the procession of death to the grave; Struggle, the pursuit of fleeting pleasure, Toil, the dull pain of easy ambition, Gain, the gathering of the peculiar treasures of the rich, Domination, the cry of perverted judgment that holds the heart of the oppressor, Greed, the cruelty of privation that corrupts the growth of life, Fear, the eager search after the shelters of comfort, Worship, the deep forgetfulness from the confusion of many desires. To the music of the distant flute Flows the wide, ancient river, Fresh with young waters. Many chants are sung in praise of happiness, Many gods are invoked as guides to happiness, Many heavens are glorified as enticements to happiness, Many altars are built to happiness, Many rites are performed as offerings to happiness, Many benedictions are asked as protection for happiness, Many truths are extolled in anguish for happiness, Many virtues are sought in fear for happiness, Many possessions are gathered in hope of happiness, Many desires are gratified in expectation of happiness, Many sacrifices are made in quest of happiness, Many austerities are imposed in longing for happiness. Deep in the mire the seed of the lotus is in travail, The soft fragrance lies hid in the heart of the flower. XXI Listen! Life is one. It has no beginning, no end, The source and the goal live in your heart. You are caught up In the darkness of its wide chasm. Life has no creed, no belief, It is of no nation, of no sanctuary, Not bound by birth or by death, Neither male nor female. Can you bind the "waters in a garment" Or "gather the wind in your fists"? Answer, O friend. Drink at the fountain of Life. Come, I will show the way. The mantle of Life covers all things. XXII As the potter's vessels break to pieces, So are they broken who look for shelter, For therein lie sorrow and ever changing confusion. They that desire comfort Shall find desolation. Tears shall await those Who have established comfort in the loftiness of their purpose. I met a man in the shadow of a temple And I beheld my face in his tears. None shall wake thee from thy weariness And the sun shall have arisen and set Before thou walkest forth. The fatness of thy heart Shall blind thine eye in time of affliction, And as a man is lost in the darkness of the forest, So shall it be with thee If thou stayest in the sanctuary of a graven thought. Ah, friend, Great must be the burning fire To consume thy house of comfort, To increase thy devouring anxiety, For out of that confusion Shall be born full understanding. Take council with the whole For in the part there is decay. XXIII There is order in the freedom of Life But in bondage a great confusion. Smooth as the waters that delight In the burden of the pure eye of heaven, So is Life in the fullness of its freedom. Furious as the waters that are bound - - Filling the valley with deep anguish - - So is Life in the bondage of its confusion. Let Life paint of its loveliness On the canvas of thy being. Be thou the background for its fullness. And withhold it not its even flow. He who walks upright amidst confusion Is in love with Life. XXIV Ah, come sit beside me by the sea, open and free. I will tell thee of that inward calmness As of the still deep; Of that inward freedom As of the skies; Of that inward happiness As of the dancing waters. And as now the moon makes a silent path on the dark sea, So beside me lies the clear path of pure understanding. The groaning sorrow is hid under a mocking smile, The heart is heavy with the burden of corruptible love, The deceptions of the mind pervert thought. Ah, come sit beside me Open and free. As the even flow of clear sunlight, So shall thine understanding come to thee. The burdensome fear of anxious waiting Shall go from thee as the waters recede before the rushing winds. Ah, come sit beside me, Thou shalt know of the understanding of true love. As the mind drives the blind clouds, So shall thy brutish prejudice be driven by clear thought. The moon is in love with the sun And the stars fill the skies with their laughter. Oh, come sit beside me Open and free. XXV To a man of true purpose There is no renunciation; For he is not drawn away from the path of pure understanding By the confusion of experience, By the multitude of desires, By the deceitfulness of thought. He is not held by the fear of sacrifice: For the man of true purpose, Time creates not its wasteful abundance. I saw of an evening, Over a city of vast habitation, A bird swiftly flying towards its distant home. XXVI I walked on a path through the jungle Which an elephant had made, And about me lay a tangle of wilderness. The voice of desolation fills the distant plain. And the city is noisy with the bells of a tall temple. Beyond the jungle are the great mountains, Calm and clear. In the fear of Life The temptation of sorrow is created. Cut down the jungle - -not one mere tree, For Truth is attained By putting aside all that you have sown. And now I walk with the elephant. XXVII POEM The world moans and languishes, Thought is ashamed and made crooked. Love is a wilderness and a cruel confusion. The pure blossom of Life is turned to dust. How they suffer, how they despise! The anger of contempt breeds hatred, And affection is smitten in the midst of the street. The shadow of weariness lies on the face of man. His ambition is in the dust of decay, His doubt creates a darkness about him, His talk is as the sound of many hoofs On the smooth-paved roads Filling the silent house. His glory, his pomp, his rejoicings, Cover the empty spaces of his loneliness. The dark fear of death Snatches away the jewel in his eye. And as the spider weaves with delicate ease its web So man weaves the stuff of common events But is caught up in its exquisite confusion. His days are spent in the destruction of his handiwork. The song of the river, The wandering of the waters, And a dead tree in full summer. Ah, in the cruel confusion of purpose The pure blossom of Life lies withering. Who shall nourish it, who shall uphold it, Who shall awaken it to its sweet fragrance? My Beloved calls And the echo goes aching down the valley. XXVIII THE GARDEN OF MY HEART I am the path Leading to the sheltered garden Of thy heart, O world. I am the fountain That feeds thy garden, O world, With the tears Of my experience. I am the scented flower That beautifies thy garden, The honey thereof, The delight of thy heart. Destroy the weeds In thy garden, O world, And keep thy heart pure and strong, For there alone I can grow. Create no barriers In the garden of thy heart, O world, For in limitation I wither and die. I have a garden In my heart, O world, Where every flower Speaketh of thee. Open the gates Of thy garden of thy heart, O world, And let me in. Without me There shall be no shade, Nor the soft breeze From the cool mountains. I have a garden in my heart, O world, That hath no beginning And no end, Where the mighty Do sit with the poor, Where the Gods Do delight with the human. Open as the vast skies, Clear as the mountain stream, Strong as the tree in the wind, Is my heart. Come, O world, Gather thy flowers In the garden of my heart. XXIX Desire is life, And the freedom of life is the freedom from desire. Love is life, And the happiness of life is the incorruptibility of love. Thought is life, And union with life is the glory of a boundless mind. With the eternity of life, Inseparable, undecaying and immeasurable, I am in union: Mine immortality is my Beloved, The Beloved of all life. XXX O friend, Sorrow is the flower of understanding And it beareth the fruit of rejoicing. Out of the fullness of thy heart Invite sorrow And the joy thereof shall be in abundance. Sorrow shall bring forth love eternal, Sorrow shall unfold the weaving of Life, Sorrow shall give the strength of loneliness, Sorrow shall open the closed doors of thy heart, Sorrow shall conquer the spaces of eternity. Out of the fullness of thy heart Invite sorrow. As the streams swell After the great rains And the pebbles rejoice once again In the murmur of running waters, So shall the gatherings by the wayside Fill the emptiness that creates fear. The scent is coming on the breeze. Take not shelter In the abode of authority Where breed comfort and decay. Come away, come away. To go far, Thou must begin near. To climb high, Thou must begin low. The voice of sorrow is the song of fulfillment And the rejoicings therein The fullness of Life. 1st Colloquium - Creativity In Science Thought Can Never Be Creative 2nd Colloquium - Creativity In Science Creation Comes Out of Meditation LOS ALAMOS (USA) NATIONAL LABORATORY 1ST COLLOQUIUM 20TH MARCH 1984 'CREATIVITY IN SCIENCE' Introduction by M.R.Raju It is a privilege for me to introduce our speaker today... but, Mr Krishnamurti need no introduction. He is a world-renowned teacher. He has been giving lectures around the world for nearly sixty years now. The more than thirty books which he has had published are never out of date; they maintain their freshness. Dr Oppenheimer was a philosopher-scientist and a Sanskrit scholar. It is a most happy occasion, on the day of the official beginning of the Spring today, to have Mr Krishnamurti as our colloquium speaker. On behalf of the Laboratory, I want to express our appreciation to him for accepting our invitation, in spite of his busy schedule. So without taking any more precious time from the speaker, I invite Mr Krishnamurti to give his presentation. The title of the presentation is "Creativity in Science". Thank you very much for your attention. Sir, may I request you to present your talk? K: If I may say so, this is not a lecture. This is a conversation between you and the speaker. The subject, I believe, is Creativity in Science. Science, generally, means knowledge, accumulated knowledge through two or three hundred years, and increases more and more knowledge. And what relationship has creativity with knowledge? That is the subject I have been asked to talk about. What is knowledge? It is acquired through thousands of years through experience, stored in the brain as knowledge and memory. And from that memory thought arises. So knowledge is limited always, whether now or in the future. And so thought is always limited. And where there is limitation there is conflict. So what place has creativity with regard to science? Is there a relationship at all? Please, we are thinking together, we are questioning the very source, the very accumulative process of knowledge. Science means knowledge - Latin and so on. And can creativity in its deepest sense, in its profound activity, what place has creativity, or creation with regard to knowledge? We have given tremendous importance to knowledge, from the ancient times, from China, India, before the Christian civilization came into being they were tremendously respectful, worshipped knowledge. And knowledge, as we said before, is always limited because it is based on experience and so memory, thought, is limited. Thought has created the most extraordinary things in the world - all the great monuments, from the ancient of times, great art, vast technology in the present day, and the creation of a nuclear bomb and so on. Thought has brought about an extraordinary state in the world. Thought has created god, built the vast cathedrals of Europe, all the things that are in the museums - poetry, statues, and all the marvellous things that thought has done. Because thought is the outcome of knowledge, knowledge is science, expressed technologically or otherwise. Thought also has created wars - and we are faced with another war, maybe. And human beings for the last five thousand or more years have been killing each other in the name of god, in the name of peace, in the name of their own particular tribal country. Man has destroyed other human beings, now, in the present civilization where we are gathered here, where they are producing these enormous destructive things. That is the result of science which is knowledge. So what place has knowledge, science, in creation? Creation has been one of the most complex problems. Various religions say this is the source of creation, god, and so on. Each tribal country, which is called nationalism has its own particular expression, has its own tribal gods. And science which has produced extraordinary, marvellous things in the world, communication, computers, medicine, surgery, all that has been the result of thought, going to the moon and so on. So can thought ever be creative, in its most profound sense? What is creation? Must creation be always expressed, manifested? That which is manifested must be limited. We are the result of tremendous years, or centuries of endeavour, conflict, struggle, pain, sorrow, we are the result of all that. Our brains have infinite capacity, but it has been conditioned, not only religiously, but also nationally. You are all Americans, Chinese, Russians, and so on. We have divided the world geographically, religiously, culturally; and also we have divided human beings -the caucasians, the blacks and the browns, like us. And so thought has brought about tremendous conflict between human beings -that is a fact - not only between individuals, but also collectively. We have also suffered through wars, through pestilence, every form of disease. And science has been able to help or cure some of all that. But also science has produced most destructive instruments of war. Before you killed a man, perhaps in a war, two or three hundred people, or more, now you can destroy the whole world. Again based on ideals, ideologies, tribal glorification, which is nationalism. Taking all that, what we are after 45,000 years as homo sapiens, what are we, what have we become? And in this confusion, because most human beings are terribly confused, though they may not admit it, uncertain, not only seeking physical security, but also they want inward psychological security, in their relationships, with regard to the future and so on. So taking all this into consideration, our brains are specialized, conditioned by knowledge, and so our activities are conditioned, limited. Wherever there is limitation there must be conflict. When you divide the world into the Americans, the Asiatics, the Europeans, the Jew and the Arab, there must be conflict; not only wars but conflict between individuals, between man and woman. Considering all this, what place has creation? Knowledge can never be creative. We are going to question all this. Knowledge can bring about a better physical world, externally, and when we give such extraordinary importance to knowledge, which is the intellect - to us intellect is vital, important, essential, but intellect is also limited. We never look at life holistically, as a whole, not as a scientist, a physician, psychiatrist and so on, we are human beings first. And as human beings what are we, what have we become? After millenia upon millenia, are we civilized? I know you are all a very affluent society, you have a great man cars, marvellous country, beautiful roads and so on, but we, as human beings, what are we? And it is human beings that are capable of creation, not only as scientists but also in our daily life. Because after all what is important? We have forgotten, or we never had the art of living, not as scientists, as human beings. We are perpetually in conflict. And conflict, struggle, pain, anxiety, uncertainty, can such a brain be creative? Or creation is something entirely different? Please as we said, we are thinking together, if that is possible. Not that the speaker thinks and tells you all, but do we together as human beings think about these matters now? That is, to forget our professions, our vocations of imitation, and as human beings, can we be creative? First if we understand the significance of that then we can turn to science, religion and so on. Can we, as human beings, look at the world as we have made of it? I wonder if one realizes whether we are individuals at all. Because our consciousness, which is made up of our reactions, physical, biological reactions, our beliefs, our faith, all the prejudices that we have, multiplication of opinions, the fears, the insecurity, the pain, the pleasure, and all the suffering that human beings have born for thousands of years. All that is our consciousness. Our consciousness is what we are. And in this confusion, in this contradiction, can there be creation? And we share the consciousness of the entire humanity because you suffer, you have pleasures, beliefs, conclusions, opinions, and all the religious dogmas and faiths, which is shared by all human beings on this earth. So one questions whether we are individuals psychologically. You may be different, you may be tall, you may be short, but as human beings with our consciousness, are we different from the rest of mankind? We have never questioned all this. We trot along all the days of our lives accepting, imitating, conforming. When we rebel, we rebel outwardly: there have been revolutions - Russian, French, and thousands of revolutions have taken place. But inwardly we remain more or less as we have been for thousands of years. So taking all this, not intellectually but as a whole, are we creative? Or creation is something entirely different? You can invent a new method, discover, explore, break up the atom and so on and so on. It is all the activity of thought, cunning, capable, deceptive, creating illusions, and worshipping those illusions. After all, all religions are based on that. Thought has created god. The speaker is not an atheist but thought has created wars, murdered in the name of god millions of people, and thought has created all the things in the cathedrals, in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques. So can thought be creative? Because, as we said, thought is limited because it is based on knowledge, and knowledge is the result of vast experience. And so we are asking a really very fundamental question: whether thought can ever be creative? It can invent, it can produce new weapons of war, surgery, medicine and so on. And in our relationship with each other, man, woman, what place has thought in that? Is thought love? I know we say not, but if we look at ourselves and our relations with each other - husband, wife, and a boy and girl and so on - our relationship is based on the image you have built about her and she has built about him. That relationship is based on thought. So thought has been extraordinarily capable of certain things, and thought has also brought about the destruction of man, of human beings, like ourselves, dividing them into ideologies - the Russian ideology, democratic ideology and so on. So please, thought can never be creative because what it can manifest must be limited. And where there is limitation there must be conflict -between man and woman, between ideologies, between the Arab and the Jew, between the American and the Russian, this division, geographically, nationally, religiously. And conflict can never under any circumstances bring about a creativity of creation. So if thought is not the ground of creation then what is creation? When does it take place? Baking a bread is also creation, of a certain kind, having babies, also creation, and so on, all the way up. But surely creation can only take place when thought is silent. You may totally disagree with this. I hope you do! I am sure you do! Because to us thought is extraordinarily important, which means the intellect, which is only part of a human being. So the speaker says, creativity can never take place where there is the activity of thought. And the question then arises: can thought be quiet, can thought be tranquil, put aside for a while? Then who is it that helps thought to put it aside? It is still thought. I don't know if you are following all this. So it is a very complex process. And they have tried every method to quieten thought - drugs, tranquillizers, and also they have tried every form of meditation -the Zen meditation, the Tibetan, the Hindu, the Buddhist, and all the latest gurus with their nonsense, they have tried everything to quieten the thought. Because thought has its place, but psychologically, inwardly, can there be certain silence, quietness? And love is that silence, is that quality of great strength, quiet energy. So we are asking, is love the only factor that is creative? Not sex. I know we have reduced love to pleasure. And we have to ask what is love? If you once comprehend, perceive that thought can never, under whatever circumstances, be creative because thought is limited - of that there is no question. If we once see the truth of it then we can begin to ask, is there another instrument, another way of looking at life? Then we can begin to enquire: what is love? What is compassion? What is intelligence? Intelligence is part of that thought; intelligence has created Los Alamos. And what is the nature of love? Is it desire? Is it pleasure? Is it creating images -images about your wife, your husband? Is it the images of ideologies? So to find out, to discover, to come upon that extraordinary thing called love one must have a very clear understanding of our daily life. And that means psychologically, inwardly, we have no freedom. We talk about freedom, specially in this country, where you have experts to tell you what to do -specialists. I do not know but you must be aware of all this: how to bring up a baby, how to have sex, how to beautify yourself, what kind of exercise, and you have specialists in religions, in science, and so on. And this you call freedom. And as our time is very, very limited we cannot possibly go into the question more deeply: what is freedom. Without freedom there is no love. But we are not free. We are anxious, we are frightened of death, frightened of the future, we have carried this burden of fear for thousands of years. We are talking about psychological fears first, and physical fears later. So can such a brain which is so conditioned as a computer, can such a brain love? And creativity, whether in science, in biology and so on, where there is great activity of thought with its own peculiar intelligence, can that thought create, be creative? If not then how does creation take place? They have asked this question, religious people have asked this question, theologians. If you go to India, they will invent their own theory about creation; so do the Christians, Muslims, and all say, god, or some biological reason. So we are saying that creation is only possible where there is love. Then what is love? Love is not desire, love is not pleasure. Love is not religious entertainment. To understand the complexity of desire, the complexity of sorrow, and the enormous thing that we call death, all that is part of our life, our daily living. So is there freedom? Have we love? If there is love we will never kill another human being, never. And this whole world now is collecting armaments, every country wants the latest instrument of destruction. America is supplying it, England, Russia, Germany, and each country is producing its own deadly instruments; and amongst this chaos we want to have the spirit of creation, creativity. On one hand you produce most destructive instruments of war, on the other you talk about love, peace, and so on. We live in a state of contradiction, and where there is contradiction there must be conflict and therefore there can never be creation, or creativity. It is only when the brain is quiet, not controlled quietness. When the brain is absolutely silent, though it has its own rhythm. Man has enquired into this from the ancient of days: can the brain be utterly still for a while? Not everlastingly chattering, not probing, not enquiring, not searching, but quiet, still. And to understand that stillness one must understand what is meditation and so on. Meditation is not conscious meditation, because that is what you have been taught - conscious deliberate meditation, sitting cross legged, lying down, or repeating certain phrases, and so on. That is all deliberate conscious effort to meditate, which is part of desire. And the speaker says such meditation is nonsense. It is like desiring a good house, a good dress, and you desire to have a good peaceful mind, which is the same thing. Conscious meditation destroys, prevents the other form of meditation. To go into that we haven't time, because that requires extraordinary perception, without the word, without image. And so science is the movement of knowledge, gathering more and more and more. The 'more' is the measurement, and thought can be measured because thought is a material process. And knowledge has its own insight, its own limited creation, and therefore it brings conflict. But we are talking about holistic perception, in which the ego, the 'me', the personality doesn't enter at all. Then only there is this thing called creativity. Right sirs. [Comment by M R Raju] We have some time for a few questions, maybe for about fifteen minutes or so. If anybody would like to explore the subject further by asking any specific questions. Q: I was commenting that one category that you seem not to have dealt with in too much detail is the category of the will as opposed to thought. And could it not be that the problem, the source, the root problem, the source of the conflict is wrong use of the will rather than wrong thought? K: You have understood the question? What is will? Is it not the essence of desire? And the gentleman asks: do not will and thought go together. Q: I would make a distinction between the will, the capacity to make choices and thought. I would say they are not one and the same, there is a distinction between them. And the problem is in the will rather than in the thought. The thoughts, to a large extent, flow from the will. K: That's what I am saying, it is the same thing. Desire, we are saying, is will. Q: I would make will a little more fundamental than simply desire. It's at the very heart of our personality, of who we are, this capacity to make choice, to make choices. Let me ask another question. I have another issue that I am really concerned about and that is that there may be more than just human thought and human experience. There may be a bigger aspect to reality. And there may be other wills involved besides human wills. And that there may be a factor of what we might call supernatural evil at work in the world. And there may be a bigger conflict than many people may have given much thought to, much consideration to. K: So sir, what is the question? Q: OK. I am saying that regardless of how much attempts we make to quiet our thoughts. K: Sir, you can't quieten thought. I carefully explained. We haven't time. Sir, what is the question. Q: OK. As a human being how can I protect myself from supernatural evil? How can I protect from Satan's authority in this world? K: Supernatural evil, and protection from that. What is the relationship of the good with the evil? Are we good? What does goodness mean? And what do we mean by evil? Is evil related to goodness? Is love related to hate? If it is related then it is not love. If good is related to evil then it is not good. And are we controlled or shaped by external super-evil? I know this is an old, old theory; there is something beyond us which we haven't created that controls us, that shapes our life, and so on. Q: Well let me pose another question. I'll make it very brief. A: No, no. K: I am sorry, sir. Let's have some fun, shall we? Q: I have had trouble understanding what you mean by creativity. Could you dwell on that a bit? K: I don't mean anything by creativity, it was posed to me. Sir, whom are we questioning? Are you questioning the speaker, or questioning what he said, or are you questioning yourself? Which is, together we are questioning the whole problem of existence, with its creation, with its destruction, with its pleasures, the whole of life we are questioning. And we try to find an answer outside the question. But the answer lies in the question, not away from it. That depends how you regard the question. If we want a solution to the question, as most of us do, we have problems. And we are seeking solutions to the problems. Our brain is trained to the solution of problems from childhood. When a child goes to the school he has mathematical problems, problems of how to read and write. So our brains from childhood have been conditioned to the solution of problems, and so we never understand the problem itself, we want a solution for it. So what is a problem? The gentleman said the problem is will, and thought. Now who is going to answer that question? Or what is creativity? You can read books upon books, listen to professors, specialists, and then has one really, deeply, inwardly grasped the truth of something? What is truth, what is reality? The tiger is a reality, thought has not created it - thank god! Thought has not created nature. So reality is what we are, what we have made of ourselves. And we are incapable apparently of facing what we are, and transforming, bringing about a mutation in what we are -actually, not verbally, not theoretically. And then find out for oneself what is creation, what is creativity, what is love, what is the essence of compassion which is intelligence. To find that out for oneself, not selfishly because we are the rest of humanity. That's a marvellous thing to discover that, that we are the rest of humanity, psychologically, inwardly, though outwardly, externally we may be different. So when we understand this thing for ourselves, not be told everlastingly by professors, psychologists and so on, so that we have a clear perception of life, and the art of living, then we will ask nobody to tell us what to do. Q: Sir, you say that we are the rest of humanity. I am different from you, and I want to tell you that I am glad I am not you and I want to tell you that there is a difference between each person and the rest of humanity, that we are all individuals. You keep implying that we should be individuals, but then you say that we are the rest of humanity. We are not, I am not you, and I am glad of that. K: May I answer that question? The gentleman said, I am glad I am not you, that he is different from everybody else. Is that so? We will have to enquire, not say, "Yes, I am different from you". Don't you suffer? Don't you have conflicts, don't you have problems, don't you quarrel with each other? You have beliefs, don't you, conclusions, fears? Go to India, or Egypt, or anywhere else in the world they have exactly the same thing psychologically, inwardly. They suffer. It's right sir. Q: I do not suffer when you suffer. K: What sir? Q: I do not die when you die. I do not feel what you feel. K: I do not die when you die, I do not feel what you feel. But go beyond that a little bit further, deeper. When I die, what is death? You answer. Dying, biologically, physically one dies. Men on this earth have died by the million. And when you die and I die what does that mean? Who dies? The name, the person, the qualities, the images he has built about himself? What dies? Please sir, one has to go into this, not just say, "Well I am different from you" and just stop there. Of course we are different from you. Biologically we are different. You are tall, I am short, or I am black or you are blue. Of course there is a difference. You are a woman, I am a man. But inwardly, go into it. What are we, of which we are so proud? A series of memories we are, aren't we, remembrance of things past. We are a bundle of memories. And to find out if there is something sacred, real truth beyond all these words and impressions and reactions, there must be that quality of investigation, without prejudice, without a conclusion. Sir to go into these matters very carefully one has to have - not in one talk, you can't understand all this - it requires a great deal of enquiry on the part of all of us, not assertions - I believe and that is good enough for me. We must question the very nature of belief, the nature of conclusion, our ideologies. Q: Can you give some concrete examples of creativity from your point of view - some examples, maybe? I, for example, would say, that Einstein was creative in a certain way. Can you give some examples from your point of view. K: I have no point of view. I wouldn't have a point of view. I really mean it. It is not just clever response. Because I am not an Indian, I don't believe all that kind of stuff - not believe - I reject all that. Not that I am vain and superstitious and all that business. But I say, look what has happened to our human beings. And each one has a point of view, and he sticks to that point of view. And so there is perpetual division, conflict. And out of that conflict creation cannot exist. Q: You indicated that when we become very quiet the brain would have its own rhythm. Could you speak about that? K: Look sir, have you ever been, if I may most respectfully ask, have you ever been quiet? Literally really quiet, both physically and inwardly. The brain to be absolutely quiet - have you ever tried it? And the gentleman asks... right sir, you asked something sir? Q: I wanted to understand more clearly the reference you made to the rhythm which the brain exhibits. K: The brain is a muscle. Right? An extraordinary muscle, with immense capacity, infinite capacity. You can see what we human beings have produced. But when the brain is quiet in the sense psychologically, inwardly, which means no measurement - I won't go into all this. To have no measure, which means the brain doesn't compare so that there is no 'more'. You understand? May I put the question differently? Or rather state something. The now, the present, the now, contains the past and the future. The future is the present. The future is what we are. Right? It is so obvious. I am greedy for power, position, aggressive. I am that, now. And the future which is tomorrow, or a thousand tomorrows is what I am now. If there is no radical change in the now the future is what I am. Right? I wonder if you see. So death - I won't go into this. Q: Sir, you said many things that were true today such as limitations of the human thought, and about the all importance of love. But I am a little disappointed that you have not told us the real answer to these things. K: Oh, yes, I have answered. Q: The answer has been given to us by the infinite God who is the only creator. He has sent Jesus Christ to this earth who has shown us what love is by dying on the cross for us. And he is love, and he is the personification of love, and without knowing him you cannot know love. K: Sir, I don't want to know what god is. I don't want to know. What do you mean by knowing? Knowing implies remembrance. This morning we met, you have seen the speaker, his face, you remember it. You may not remember it. And the remembrance is the image you have built about the person. But the person, the thing may be totally different from the image you have built about him. It is so obvious. And we have built this extraordinary thing called god, each civilization, the past, the present and the future, have their own ideas about what god is. I believe in India there are 300,000 gods, and in the Christian world there is only one god. There you can play with 300,000 gods - choose any god you like and have fun. Please I am serious. It sounds rather silly but it is a fact. And when there is no fear inwardly - you understand - of dying, of insecurity, no fear whatsoever, psychologically and therefore biologically, then there is freedom. You understand? And in that freedom which is the essence of energy, and that energy may be called various names, who cares. Q: He said, "Be still and know that I am God", and Jesus Christ also said, "If you keep my commandments, ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free". K: I don't quite understand your question. Q: The question is, how you can have freedom without knowing Jesus Christ. K: I don't understand your question, sir. Q: Jesus Christ said, "I am the way, the truth and the life", he is the only way, the only truth, and the only life. Without him there is no truth and no life and it is the only way. K: Sir, forgive me, 2,000 years ago this was stated according to the Bible by disciples who wrote the thing after sixty years or more afterwards. This statement existed long before - every prophet, every guru, from the most ancient days have stated this. But what has that to do with our daily life? All the statements of all the religious books - there is a very complex problem in this. Those who live on books - here you have the Bible and the Islamic world has the Koran, and the Indian and the Chinese world, there are a thousand books, or half a dozen books is good enough. So those who rely on one book become terribly dogmatic. If you have watched it carefully; they were called heretics and burnt in the past. And those who depend on Marx, Lenin, and you can see what is happening there. And if you have several books, all called religious books, they are not so dogmatic, assertive. In India, for example, you can be a good person without believing in god, not doing any ritual, and all rituals become a form of entertainment anyhow, religious or otherwise. So sirs, if one is dogmatic, assertive, confirming one's own conclusions, then that is what is creating so much trouble, horror in the world. The Russians will not yield an inch in what they believe, their ideology; and those who are Christians and so-called democratic will not an inch either. So there is a war. And so please we are not stating anything, we are just observing and moving, not static. Therefore one has to have extraordinary vitality, energy. And we waste our energy in all the absurdities. Is that enough sir? Q: As I listened, I was thinking that our thoughts and our knowledge can bring us to the crux of the problem, bring us to the foot of the problem. And what I wanted to ask you, sir, is whether you considered it creativity when we stand at the foot of the problem to be able to divorce ourselves from all our knowledge, and all our past that has brought us to the problem, to walk away from that? K: No, sir, we cannot possibly put away all our knowledge. You must have knowledge to go from here to your house. You must have knowledge to write a letter. You must have knowledge to speak English, or French, or Italian, or Russian. Knowledge is necessary. Otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here. Q: In other words we wouldn't recognize the problem unless we had knowledge. K: Knowledge is necessary at a certain level, and I am questioning very deeply whether knowledge, psychological knowledge is necessary at all. Psychological knowledge - you understand what is implied - the self is the essence of knowledge, which is accumulated through various experiences, incidents, and so on. All that is knowledge, psychological knowledge. And therefore that is unnecessary. One can exist only in that state of freedom when you have relegated knowledge to its right place. Psychologically no recording of reactions. Suppose you insult me, why should I record it, why should the brain record that insult, or if you flatter me, why should you record it? The recording creates the self, the 'me', and so there is a division. Q: Then my question is: is it creativity to come to recognize a problem, having all this knowledge that has brought you to where you are, to be able to take a different step. To not be bound by what you know, but be able to walk away from that? K: Yes sir. What you are, is all this. Q: Yes, you are the recorded messages. K: Can there be freedom from all that. Then there is real creativity, that's what he says. Q: Thank you. K: Is that enough, sir? Raju: Thank you very much, sir. LOS ALAMOS (USA) NATIONAL LABORATORY 2ND COLLOQUIUM 21ST MARCH 1984 'CREATIVITY IN SCIENCE' K: There are here fifteen questions - which shall we take first? Shall we take the first one? "What is meditation and how is it related to creativity?" Could we take that first? Meditation is a very complex business. This is a dialogue between us. And I said it is a very complex business. The word meditation implies both in Sanskrit and in English, not only the brain concentrating on a certain subject, but also it implies a great deal of attention. But primarily meditation means, in Sanskrit, to measure. And also in English etymologically, I believe, it is to measure. The whole question of becoming is involved in it, which is to measure: I am this, I will be that. I am greedy, but I will gradually become non-greedy, which is a form of measurement, which is form of becoming. Both becoming in the affairs of the world and psychologically becoming. That is the whole question of measurement. The Greeks, the ancient Greeks - you know all about that, I don't have to go into it - were the originators of measurement. Without measurement there would be no technology. And the Asiatics specially in India, said measurement is illusion, measurement means limitation. I am translating, they didn't exactly say this, they put it differently. So measurement means comparison, to compare 'what is', 'what should be', the ideal, the fact, the fact becoming the ideal. All that is implied in meditation. And also in meditation is implied, the meditator and the meditation. If there is any difficulty in understanding what the speaker is saying jump on him, please. Because it is a very complex business. And specially some of the Indian gurus have brought this word into America and made a lot of money out of it. They are multi-millionaires, I have met them. They are appalling beings, they are all out for money. So to enquire into meditation, you have to enquire first not only measurement, but also this constant becoming something, psychologically. Human beings are violent, and the ideal to be in a state of non-violence, which is to become. Q: Do you set goals for your meditation? K: I am saying what is implied in the whole structure and the nature of meditation. It is not how to meditate but what is meditation, rather than how. I hope I am making myself clear. And also there is a question involved in that: who is meditating? And most of the systems of meditation, whether the Japanese, and the Hindus, and so on, Tibetan, there is always the controller and the controlled. Right? Are we meeting each other? So there is the controller controlling thought, to quieten the thought, to shape thought according to a purposeful direction. So there is the controller and the controlled. Who is the controller? Please, all this is implied in meditation, not merely to control one's thought as is generally understood in meditation, whether it is Zen meditation, or the most complex forms of meditation which take place in India, and elsewhere, there is always the director, the entity that controls thought. So they have divided psychologically the thinker and the thought. So the thinker separates himself from the whole activity of thought, and therefore in meditation is implied the controller controlling thought so as to make thought quiet. That is the essence of meditation, to bring about a state of brain - I won't use the mind for the moment - to make the brain quiet. I'll explain a little more and go into that. So there is a division between the controller and the controlled. Right? Who is the controller? Very few people have asked that question. They are all delighted to meditate, hoping to get somewhere - illumination, enlightenment and quietness of the brain, peace of mind and so on. But very, very few people have enquired: who is the controller? May we go on with that? The controller is also thought. The controller is the past, is the entity, or the movement of time as the past and measure. So there is the past who is the thinker, separate from the thought, and the thinker tries to control thought. Human beings have invented god - sorry, I hope you don't mind. You won't be shocked if I go into all this? A: No, go ahead. K: Human beings, out of their fear, invented god. And they tried to reach god, which is the ultimate principle, in India it is called Brahman, the ultimate principle. And meditation is to reach the ultimate. So meditation is really very, very complex, it is not just merely meditating for twenty minutes in the morning, twenty minutes in the afternoon, and twenty minutes in the evening -which is taking a siesta, not meditation at all. So if one wants to discover what is meditation one has to ask: why does one have to meditate? One realizes one's brain is constantly chattering, constantly planning, designing - what it will do, what it has done, the past impinging itself on the present, it is everlasting chattering, chattering, whether the scientific chatter - sorry! - or ordinary daily life chatter, like a housewife chattering endlessly about something or other. So the brain is constantly in movement. Now the idea of meditation is to make the brain quiet, silent, completely attentive, and in that attention find that which is - perhaps you will object to this word 'eternity' - or something sacred. That is the intention of those who really have gone into this question. The speaker has gone into this for the last sixty years or more. He has discussed this question with the Zen pundits, with the Zen patriarches, with the Hindus and Tibetan, and all the rest of the gang. I hope you don't mind my talking colloquially, do you? And the speaker refutes all that kind of meditation because their idea of meditation is to achieve an end. The end being complete control of the brain so that there is no movement of thought. Because when the brain is still, deliberately disciplined, deliberately sought after, it is not silent. It is like achieving something, which is the action of desire. I don't know if you follow all this. May I go on? So one has to enquire also, if one is interested in all this, what is desire? Not suppress desire, as the monks and the Indian sannyasis do, suppress desire, or identify desire with something higher -higher principle, higher image, if you are a Christian with Christ and so on. So one has to understand if one wants to find out what is meditation, one has to enquire into desire. All right, sirs? Q: Is desire the same as will? K: We will go into that in a minute. What is desire? Why man, human beings, a person, is so dominated by desire - desire to become rich, desire to become - you know various forms of desire. We are slaves to desire, which is a reaction. So what is desire? This is part of meditation. You understand? This is what the speaker is saying about meditation. That is, unless one understands the movement of time - right, may I go into all this? You are interested in all this? May I go on? A: Please, yes. K: It is fun if we begin to go into it. But if it merely intellectual excitement it has no value. So this very enquiry into what is meditation is part of meditation. So we are enquiring together what is meditation, what is desire. Desire is perception, contact, sensation. Right? The seeing something, a woman or a house, or a garden, or a lovely painting. Seeing, coming into contact with it, touching it, from that arising sensation, then what takes place? You understand? Seeing, contact, sensation. That's what actually takes place: when you go into a shop and you see a shirt that you want to buy, you see it, touch it, feel it, sensation, then what takes place? That is where the importance comes. Then thought gives shape to sensation, which is, "How would I look in that shirt?" You understand? So there is seeing, contact, sensation, then thought using the sensation as a means of self-gratification. Right? So can there be a hiatus, a gap between sensation, which is natural, healthy - unless one is paraylsed, of course - between that sensation and thought coming in and using it as a means of gratification. Have I made this clear? Q: Gratification being the desire to possess it? K: Desire to possess it, how would I look in it. Q: In relationship to myself. K: So thought creates the image of you in that shirt. That is desire and the intensification of that desire is will. I must have that. Q: So will is the actual realization or the implementation of desire? K: Desire, yes. Please, sir, this is a dialogue, it is not a matter of accepting something. Q: You don't mind if we speak out? K: No. If this is clear, whether it is possible to keep a wide gap, as it were, between sensation, which is healthy, normal, and thought creating the image of you in the car, of you in the shirt, creating the image which is the beginning of desire. I wonder if I am making it clear. So that is one part of meditation - to understand the nature of desire, not to suppress it ever. I don't know if you understand the discipline this requires - discipline in the sense not conformity but the discipline of understanding, the discipline of learning. Q: You are not going to turn off desire but merely to examine it more. K: To be aware of this whole movement of desire, how desire arises, and so on. Q: You are also saying to know it so well that you are able to impose a gap and the next step does not necessarily follow. To stop the step of implementation. K: If you do it actually as we are talking about it, if you do it actually you will see what goes on. Which is, seeing, sensation, contact, then thought giving an image to that sensation, and fulfilling that desire with all its complications, conflicts and so on. So where there is a gap between sensation and thought creating the image, that is silence. I don't know if you follow all this. Don't agree with me, that is fatal. Q: You make meditation sound like a very active enterprise and I think we normally think of meditation, or achieving a quiet mind, as being an inactive thing. K: You can take a drug to quieten the mind, you can concentrate - I won't go into that for a moment. You can do various forms and tricks to quieten the mind, quieten the brain. It is a brain that is dull. But a brain that has understood the implications and the complications of meditation, the brain becomes an extraordinary instrument. Q: So the quiet mind is not the empty mind? K: Sir, emptiness. To have an empty mind means, full of energy. Emptiness is energy. Please, we must go into this step by step - you don't mind, sir. Q: The quiet mind is perceiving things, is receiving sensory information from outside, but it is not manipulating those things? K: Yes. So also it has to understand time, not scientific time in the sense of a series of moments. What is time, not as a special subject studied by scientists or by others, but what is, in our daily life, time? Because unless we lay a foundation in our daily life that's firm, still, then meditation becomes a form of illusory deception. So I must understand desire, there is the understanding of desire. And also the understanding of time. What is time? Q: A means to become. Isn't time just a means to become something? K: Time is not only to become something. I am this, give me time and I will become that. I am violent, give me time, space, an interval, so that I will become a non-violent human being. That is part of time. And also time in our daily life is the accumulation of vast knowledge. Right? Time is also the future. So there is time - I am not a specialist please, forgive me if I am not. Q: Is time the perception of cause and effect? K: Where there is a cause the effect can be eradicated. So what is the source of time - time as a human being, not I was, I am, I will be? Time is also a movement to achieve the ultimate. I have one life, the whole Asiatics believe, I have one life and if I die I must have another life, it is called reincarnation, so that I will become better and better and better, life after life until I ultimately reach the highest principle, god or whatever you like to call it. So that is part of time. I am this, but I will be that. Is becoming a deception? You understand, sir, psychologically. Q: I don't understand - becoming is a deception? K: Yes. An illusion, if you like, to use a better word. Q: I will have to work hard to understand that. K: Yes, sir, that is part of meditation. Meditation is something extraordinary if you understand it. Q: It seems to obvious. We see ourselves change, so how can you say that becoming is an illusion? K: I am greedy. Suppose I am greedy, and my tradition, religion, intelligence says, minimize the thing, don't be everlastingly greedy, it is silly. So what has happened? I am, but I will be. You understand? I am violent, I will be non-violent. That is a movement in time. And in that movement I am still violent. I don't know if you understand. It is a dialogue between us, please. Q: We cannot change. K: Just listen to what I have said first. I am violent, and my tradition and all the people around me, the environment, tells me, religious books and so on and so on, society tells me, I must be non-violent. But I am violent. So what happens? There is a conflict between 'what is' and 'what should be'. Q: I see what you are saying. Q: Does that mean then that if I am violent and I want to make this change, this movement to non-violence I am making a violent act. K: There is no change at all. Q: You mean that... K: You are jumping on me too quickly! Let's slowly go into it. Q: It seems to me that there may be a change in degree. But you say that there is no change at all, it seems to me that denies the possibility of change in degree. K: Give me a chance, just a minute. I am violent. Human beings are violent - that is an historical fact. After ten thousand, or fifty thousand years, we are still violent human beings, derived from the animal and so on. The fact is I am violent. That is a fact. The nonviolence is non-fact. Right? It's an ideal, it's something, it is not. But this is a fact. But when I first pursue non-fact it creates more problems. So there is conflict between the fact and the non-fact. So what is important is to be free of violence, not achieve nonviolence. I don't know if you see that. So when I am trying to achieve non-violence I am sowing the seeds of violence all the time until I reach that. Which I call a deception, a delusion, an illusion. Right? I don't know if you follow this? Q: I don't see the difference between an absence of violence and non-violence. K: To achieve non-violence is a deception, I said. So my problem - problem means something thrown at you, the word etymologically means, something thrown at you. Now this is a question I have to resolve, violence. What is violence? Not only physical damage, to hurt somebody, it is also to get angry, also to hate. Right? Violence is also conformity. Yes, sir. Listen. Violence is also conformity. And violence is a vocation of imitation. I know it goes against all you think. So I have to understand violence. Why is there violence? Because I am conforming, imitating, angry, jealous, and I am aware of the whole structure of violence. Aware, and give complete attention to that. When you give complete attention to that, it is like a flame burning out the violence. Sir, as scientists, you give complete attention to something, and you find an answer to it. Right? It is only inattention that creates the problem. I don't know if you follow all this. Q: Sir, if I give complete attention to sensation, will I burn out desire? K: Yes, sir. Of course. Not burn out - you see. If you agree to that, if you see the logic of it, then why have we given such extraordinary importance to desire? The whole American public is told, "Fulfil". Right? "Don't inhibit" That's terrible. "Don't control, let go, do what you like." And we are creating such havoc in the world. That's a different matter. So when there is complete attention, which means gives your total energy to that fact of violence, that energy dissipates violence, the whole of it, not part of it. You understand? That is also meditation. Q: It seems to me that there has to be another objective. You surely would not advocate that the sole objective of meditation would be to achieve non-violence? I mean, that's negative. You must seek something else. What else do you seek? It seems to me that you have discussed, or mentioned one objective: to achieve non-violence. K: I took that is an example, sir. Q: However it is confusing me. If you give complete attention to violence in order to find non-violence... K: Ah, I am not doing that. I want to understand the nature of violence, as you want to understand the nature of the atom you have given your whole attention to the blasted thing. Of course. You have studied it, you went into it, you broke it up, Einstein, Oppenheimer and all the rest of them. Q: I think there is something that is really puzzling me - this whole concept of giving complete attention to anything is to me something that is almost inconceivable, and I would disagree that we have given our attention... K: How do you mean inconceivable, sir? Q: I don't know what you mean. K: What is the difference between attention and inattention? If you are disciplined along a certain line you give a great deal of attention to that. The rest of the time you are inattentive. This is a fact, a natural human fact. If I am terribly interested in something I give my attention to it, the rest of the time I am not attentive. Q: You may give attention to many different things. K: Sir, attention matters - not to different things. Q: It is the attention itself that matters? K: Of course. Q: Rather than what you are putting the attention on? K: The moment... Q: But it is the notion of complete attention. K: All right, sir, let us forget the word complete. Attention means complete. And also one has to understand oneself. Right, sir. This is the importance of meditation: time, desire, all the things I am. What am I? If I don't understand myself I may be deceiving myself all the time. I used to know a friend, who was an Indian, highly educated, been to Cambridge in England, and had a good position in India, and he became a judge. One morning he woke up and he said, "I pass judgement on these people, what is truth?" And it is part of the Indian tradition, specially among the Brahmins, to leave the family, and all that, and find out through meditation what truth is. He said that. So he went into the forest and all that, and for twenty five years he meditated to find out what truth was. So somebody brought him to one of the speaker's talks and he came to see the speaker afterwards, and he said, "Look, for twenty five years I have been deceiving myself". You understand, sir? You understand? Think of the courage of that man, etc. So we talked about it a great deal. Now unless I understand myself, what is the self, the ego, the person, the persona, the ethos and so on, I may meditate for the rest of my life and may be deceiving myself. You understand? I may be living in a vast series of illusions, thinking those are real. So I must understand myself. Therefore I can understand myself not according to some psychologist, Freud and all the rest of it - I must understand myself, not through somebody. Q: You can never be sure that you are not deluding yourself. K: I am going to show you, sir. I must know myself, not according to any philosophy, according to any scientist, according to any psychiatrist and so on, not according to any system. I am understanding the system, not myself. You see the difference? Now how do I understand myself without any deception, otherwise I have played a wrong game, at the end of it I am deceiving myself. So how do I learn to understand myself so completely so that there is not a shadow of deception, self-illusion? Is that all right, may I go on? This is a dialogue please. Q: What do you do with feeling in there? K: Feeling is thought, isn't it. If I feel I have to recognize the feeling. Leave that for the moment. Q: Sir, do we come back again to attention in terms of understanding myself? K: No. You are too quick! I want to understand myself. And I must understand myself so thoroughly that there is not a slightest deception, a tremendous integrity and honesty. Right? Otherwise there is no point. Can you go along with this? Honesty and integrity. I realize there must be honesty, integrity and specially scepticism. In the Christian world, the whole of Christianity is based on the Bible, the Saviour and so on, and Christianity doesn't allow any doubt. Right? The religious Christian - any doubt, any scepticism. If there was scepticism and doubt the whole thing would collapse. When we were in Italy, I know Italian somewhat -and I heard the Pope say, he was preaching something or other, "You must have more faith". And a friend of mine who was sitting next to me, said, "Look, this is what they are doing, cultivating faith to destroy any kind of enquiry". So tremendous honesty, which is very difficult, sir, and great integrity. Q: Another definition of faith in Christianity is trust, which is not a matter of destroying enquiry only, but having trust. K: Trust in whom? Who do you trust? Do you trust your wife, do you trust your husband, do you trust your president? Why do you trust? What do you mean by trusting? If there is doubt you are enquiring, asking, demanding. Q: You can trust and still enquire about the nature of God. K: Sir, trust means what? If I have a wife, I trust her because I love her. I know she won't do anything ugly to me, and I know I won't do anything ugly to her because I love her. Where there is love there is trust. You don't trust by itself, it means loving. Please, let's come back. So I must know myself. Without knowing myself deception of every kind is possible. Right sir? You agree to that? Honesty, integrity and scepticism, doubt. And that doubt must be kept on a leash - you know what a leash is, a dog kept on a leash, it must occasionally be free of the leash so that it can run. But if you keep it on the leash all the time it has no vitality, it isn't a dog any more. So we must have that quality. Right. Now how do I understand myself? This is part of meditation, you understand, sir? I understand myself through my relationship to the environment, to my wife, to my father, all that. In my relationship I see my reactions. Are we following each other? Is that all right so far? Do you approve? Because without relationship I don't exist, I cannot exist, I may withdraw into a monastery, but still I am related - related to the past, related to a concept of what Jesus says and so on, so I am always related. Right? In that relationship which is a mirror I see myself as I am, not as I should be, but actually what I am. Q: In terms of reactions? K: All my reactions. So that requires an extraordinary watchfulness. I wonder if you can do all this? So relationship is the mirror in which I see myself as I am, which is far more important than what I should be, because what I am can be transformed - not transformed, that word transformed means moving from one form to another form, but bring about a mutation. I'll use that word. So that is the mirror. So I am watching the mirror in my relationship. The mirror is my relationship. So I see that I am creating an image about people all the time. I have created an image about my wife. I have lived with her for forty, twenty, ten days, I have already created an image about her, and she has already created an image about me. Right? So these are facts. So our relationship is between these two images. Right? Are you nervous if I say all this? Is your wife here too? Q: If one measures oneself against the mirror of society - I may not have put that quite the way you would have done - the focus of my question is, what happens to one's self image if one changes the society? K: Now just a minute, sir. Who created the society? We created the society. We are aggressive, we are violent, we are greedy, our society is ourselves. Society is not different from me. I am not a communist. Q: If we move from one society to another. K: It is the same. It's like I am a Catholic and I become a Buddhist, it is the same movement. I have changed the name but Buddhism is much more intellectual, much more subtle, much more etc., etc., than Christianity. So moving from one religion, or one state to another, is the same. I am questioning, I am saying, to understand oneself one has to see what our relationship is to nature, the trees, the world of nature, the reality of nature, the beauty, the depth and the glory of nature, and also the society. I am related to society. And I say I am different from society. I say we are not -we have created this society. Right? That's a fact, sir, isn't it? Let me finish this. Just a minute, please. We have created this society. Thought has created this society, the culture of a particular society. We are the result of all that, it is our action that has created this society. We are greedy, we are aggressive, violent, we are possessive, uncertain, wanting security, physical as well as psychological. So we have this society, which is corrupt as we are corrupt - sorry, you may all not be. So it is our product. So unless I, part of this society, change radically, psychologically, there will be no change in society. That's a fact. The Communists - if I may use that word, may I? - I used to have a lot of Communist friends at one time, card-carrying communists, not easy-chair communists! They were real Communists. And we used to discuss a great deal in Paris and other places, and they would go up to a certain point and then say, "Sorry, Marx is the limit". Like the Fundamentalists in this country - the bible is their limit. You can't discuss with them, it is finished. So we are discussing meditation. And in that meditation what is creativity? That's the question. Now in relationship I see myself as I am. And also I see any movement to change what I am - please understand this, it's a little bit complex - any movement to change what I am is still in the same pattern. Right? I am - all right, let me put it differently. Who is it that is to change it? Right? I am greedy. Suppose I am greedy. In what manner do I change it? To change means to something else. Right? Q: So wanting to not be greedy is another form greed? K: That's just it. Not wanting to be greedy is another form of greed, of course. So how does that fact change? I discover in my relationship how greedy I am, how possessive I am, sexually, and all the rest of it, the attachment, with all the complexity of attachment, fear, jealousy, anxiety, hate; in that word all this is contained. All right, sirs? You are following all this? We are together in this, or am I just talking to myself? Q: Sir, you have indicated that watchfulness is needed to see these things. But how can we help the watchfulness to be strong enough to see? K: You can't help it. Sir, why are you a scientist? You want to be that. You spend years. I don't know how many years you spend to become a scientist, and you won't even give five minutes to this. I think to ask, if I may most respectfully point out, to ask how, is to ask for a system. Right? And system inevitably has a destructive quality inherent in it, entropy and the rest of it. So in my relationship I discover myself. Right? And then the next question is: what is attention and what is concentration? You are following all this, does it interest you, all this? Don't be polite. I don't care if I go. Q: Could we go back one notch to what we were talking about, the greed in various things, and trying to change them. Is that in the context of changing the sensation or changing the fulfilment of it? You say you are greedy, you mean you have the sensations. It looks like you can eliminate the fulfilment but still have the feeling. K: No, that is a different question. What is the feeling of greed? Possessiveness. Right? You have a marvellous house, I want that kind of house too. Q: That's the sensation then, want. Then you go out and get it. K: Yes, here in America it's, buy, buy, buy. Q: Go for the gusto! K: Yes. Then I have to go into the question of concentration and attention. What is concentration? Q: Concentration implies exclusion. K: Go into it, sir, look at it carefully. In a school the child is told from the teacher to concentrate - don't let your thoughts run away with you, don't look out of the window - you follow? If you are a religious Christian you focus on Jesus, or Christ, or whatever it is. If you are an Indian you do the same thing with different names. We are a slave to names. Right, sirs? So concentration implies exclusion. I am concentrating but thought keeps on wandering, so I have to control it. Right, sir? And then the question is: who is the controller? The controller is the controlled. I wonder if you see that. Right sirs? Q: Controlled - you mean controlled by his desires? K: No sir. The observer is the observed. Q: One thing I feel compelled to offer as a Christian - you mentioned that Christians concentrate on Christ, and although I attempt to be a Christian I am not a perfect one certainly, but one belief in Christianity is that one does not focus on an individual. And one thing that separates Christianity from other religions is that it is more altruistic. Instead of focusing on the self, Christianity focuses outwards, sacrificing yourself for others. K: More altruistic, as you put it... Q: I think there is a spread of feeling for all humanity. K: Sir, let's leave out altruistic. We are trying to find out what is meditation and creativity, for the moment. We can talk about the various forms of religions, they are put together by thought, there is no question about that. All the rituals, all the dogmas, all the beliefs and all that, is put together by thought. Q: Maybe I wasn't making myself clear. Q: Let's not get into religion, please. Q: I wasn't trying to defend a point. Q: No, let's stick with the subject. OK? Q: I think this relates to the subject. What is the difference between self and reflection? K: Forgive me if I brought in Christ. So we are talking about concentration. Concentration implies focusing your energy on a particular subject which is thought trying to concentrate on something. But thought is also vagrant, all the time wandering off. So there is conflict in that. Right? Back and forth. So one has to understand, if you are really interested in all this, what is conflict, why have human beings lived after so many thousands of years perpetually in conflict? It seems normal and you will say, "Yes, it is necessary to be in conflict to progress". What is progression? Are we progressing? Perhaps technologically, amazingly you are progressing. Otherwise are we progressing psychologically? Obviously not. We are what we have been for the last forty thousand years or more. So I have to understand what is concentration, which means exclusion, which means I live my life excluding everything, avoiding everything, resisting everything. You follow sir? So there is constant battle. And a brain in conflict wears itself out, loses its energy. Right? Agreed? This is so obvious, logical. So is it possible to live without conflict? You understand sir? You understand the depth of meditation, what is implied? Is it possible to live without conflict? The speaker says, yes. The speaker says, I am not boasting, he is not boasting or trying to be an example - he has a horror for all that kind of stuff -he says, yes, it is possible, he has done it. What is concentration? Why is there duality in us? Saying one thing, and doing something else, contrary to what you have said. And I am greedy, which is a contradiction. Right, agree sir? So in us there is duality all the time functioning. So duality is the cause of conflict. Is there duality at all? Q: There is duality in... K: Just listen one moment. We have to stop. Is there duality at all? There is duality; you are a woman, I am a man. I am tall, you are short or you are tall, I am short, or you are fair, I am dark, and so on; there is duality. There is sun rising, sun setting, darkness, light. There is duality. But psychologically is there duality at all, or only 'what is'? You understand, sir. There is only violence, not the opposite of it. The opposite of it is non-real, but we have made the opposite as real. And hence there is duality. I don't know if you are following all this. Heaven and hell, devil and god, you know, the whole psychological movement of duality we are discussing. And we are saying, the speaker is saying, there is no duality psychologically, there is only 'what is'. And if there is understanding of 'what is' then there is no duality. And therefore there is cessation of all conflict psychologically. Because meditation implies tremendous energy required, not just sitting in some silly corner and repeating something or other. There is a lovely story of a patriarch, wise and all that kind of thing, and a disciple comes to him and sits cross legged in front of him and closes his eyes. And the patriarch says, "My friend, what are you doing?" "Meditating, sir". He said, "Oh, is that so?" So he picks up two stones, the patriarch picks up two stones and rubs them together. The noise wakes him up, and the disciple says, "Sir, what are you doing?" "I am trying to make a mirror out of these two stones." And the disciple says, "Sir, you can rub them for the rest of your life you will never make a mirror." And so the patriarch says, "You can sit like that for the rest of your life..."! So concentration. Then what is attention? In concentration there is always a centre. Right? The centre is the 'me' - me concentrating. I don't know if follow all this. Concentration emphasizes the 'me', the self. And attention has no centre whatever. When I am attending there is attention. It is not "I am attending". So where there is attention the centre with its periphery, with its diameter, with its extension and so on, there is none of that. And out of that we have to enquire what is a silent brain. We have laid the foundation; that is, to understand oneself so completely there is no fear, psychologically, no fear whatever. Otherwise fear will create all kinds of illusions. Q: You talked about the mind and the brain, and you made very careful distinctions between them. K: I am coming to that, sir. I am taking a breather, sir, sorry! Where there is attention there is silence. But that silence is like a flame. You understand? Alive, burning - not burning anything away, it is like the sun, etc. So attention means complete cessation of the self. You try it: when you are attending you have forgotten yourself, there is no self. The self exists only when there is inattention, when there is no attention. Love is attention. I don't know if you see. Not sex, not pleasure, not desire, which Americans have reduced to sex, pleasure and all that. So attention means silence and that silence is love. Without love there is nothing. So then one asks: is there anything sacred, which thought has not touched at all? You understand? Is all life a material process? I don't know anything about god, I am not going to invent god, you understand. When there is no fear there is no invention for god, the origin of things. We will find out the origin of things when there is absolutely no fear, and the desire for any comfort, security. Right? Because they are all illusory. You understand? So when the brain is completely silent, and has that extraordinary energy, because it has now stopped chattering. I don't know if you follow all this? It has stopped chattering - please this is all logical, sane, rational, it is not some exotic Indian rubbish! I was brought up, when I left India at the age of nine. The speaker hasn't read any single religious book, or any philosophy, or any psychology. You may say, "You are a peculiar freak". A biological freak, I am not. So where the brain is absolutely quiet, and therefore empty of images, and it has got that energy, and is there anything sacred, which means is there anything that thought, man, in his endeavour, in his search, in his conflict, in his suffering, hopes for something. You understand? You understand all this, sir? Then if he hopes then he will create, then he will project out of his hope something which he immensely wants. So that is a deception. All this implies an insight. Insight is not the result of remembrance. If it is based on remembrance it is just another continuity of memory, thought. So insight is unrelated to thought, memory, experience and time, something in a flash you see the whole thing. This happens to all of you; if you are scientists that insight is partial. Forgive me for saying so. Like an artist, it is partial. We are talking of insight as an holistic movement. These are not words, please. To me they are not anyhow. So is there something that is beyond time, beyond measure, beyond all man's urges, desires, and so on. If one finds that life has a tremendous meaning. Right, sir? The speaker says there is. I can't prove it. Now this is meditation, and out of that is creation. Love, compassion, has its own intelligence and that compassion, love, intelligence is creativity. Because its creativity does not bring about destruction on the one side, building on the other. I don't know if I am making myself clear. And there is the last question. "If you were a director of the laboratory, with responsibility for the defence of the country, and recognizing the way things are, how would you direct the activities of the laboratory and research?" Thank god I am not! But if I am, would I put this question? Is the question a right question? Q: It is a question which is trying to find a connection between your theories and your beliefs of mankind and what we are all trying to do, and the practical everyday problems that exist. K: Yes sir. Everyday problems: earning a livelihood, sex, having children, or not having children, vocation, which is now becoming imitation, everyday problems of quarrels, disagreements, pain, hurts, suffering. This is our daily existence. And our brains are trained from childhood to solve problems. And we are saying, the solution prevents the understanding of the problem. Seeking a solution prevents the understanding of a problem. Sorry, because our brains are trained to solutions. I have a problem with my wife, and I would say, "What is the solution?" Divorce, or go to a lawyer, or adjustment, or run away. You know all that kind of stuff. But the problem is what - my assertions, my wishes, my fulfilment, and hers. Let's understand that, discuss it, finish with it. But if I am seeking a solution I never go into the question. The causation of problems can be ended not through a solution but the understanding of the problem itself. Sorry this requires a great deal. So the question is: if I am director - it is a wrong question because this should have been put right at the beginning, not now -at the beginning of killing man, one human being killing another human being in the name of religion, in the name of the country, in the name of god, in the name of the crown, and loyalty, my country as opposed to your country, my ideology opposed to your ideology, I am a devout Marxist - I am not - Leninist, and another is Catholic, and so we are at war with each other. That is the real question, not at the end of all this, what should I do? We have brought about this. We have divided the world - you are a Christian, I am a black, you are white, you are a caucasian, I am Chinese, or whatever the beastly thing is. We have divided, fought each other from the beginning of time. And the western civilization has killed more people than any other civilization. This is a fact, I am not against it, or for it. Sir a group of people like you in Los Alamos, have given your time for destruction, and also some of you do other things - laser, sun rays. You know all that. You are doing benefit on one side, a great deal of benefit, on the other side you are destroying every human being on earth because you have recognized my country, my responsibility, my defence. And the Russians are saying exactly the same thing on the other side. India is saying the same thing, which has immense poverty, building up armaments. So what is the answer to this? The answer to that, sir, for me, I may be wrong, subject to your correction. As a group of people who have gathered together in Los Alamos for one purpose, and if another group who says, look, let's forget all nationalism, all religions, let us as human beings solve this problem, how to to live together without destruction. If we gave time to all that, a group of dedicated, absolutely people who are concerned with all the things we have been talking about then perhaps something new can take place. Sir, we have never faced death. Oppenheimer, he knew Sanskrit, he said, "I have become death". You know that very well. And we don't understand death, either - which I haven't time to go into now. But we have become destroyers, and also benefit human beings at the same time. Right sir? Please, I am not asking you to do anything, I am not a propagandist. But the world is like this now. Nobody is thinking about a global outlook, a global feeling for all humanity - not my country, for god's sake. Sir, if you went around the world, as the speaker does, you would cry for the rest of your life. Pacifism is a reaction to militarism. That's all. The speaker is not a pacifist. He says, let's look at the cause of all this, the beginning of all this. And if the causation is there, if we all see together, the causation, then the thing is solved. But each one has different opinions about the causation and sticks to his opinion, his historical dialectism. So sirs, there it is. Q: I think you have convinced us... K: I am not convincing you of anything. Q: Quite right. I think we have seen from the silence of the audience, that you seem to have given us energy to understand the appreciate the problem. K: No, sir, it's not me. Q: But what I mean is that when once we really try to understand this and do something in that direction, somehow we seem to lack the necessary energy. So we are still not able to make as much progress as we would all like, but I would like to hear a few comments from you as to what it is that is really holding us. We can see it, we can see the house on fire, but still we are not able to do anything about stopping the fire. K: The house on fire, we think it is out there, it is in here. We have to put our house in order first, sir. Sorry, we have talked, they are looking at the clock. Foreword - 1983 - February 25th February 28th March 10th March 11th March 11th (continued) March 15th March 15th (continued) March 17th March 18th March 25th March 31st April 18th April 19th April 20th April 21st April 22nd April 23rd April 24th April 26th May 4th May 6th May 9th May 12th May 30th - 1984 - March 27th March 28th March 30th KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF HIS LAST JOURNAL FOREWORD BY MARY LUTYENS THIS BOOK is unique in that it is the only one of Krishnamurti's publications which records words spoken into a tape-recorder while he was quite alone. After the success of Krishnamurti's Journal, published in 1982, he was urged to continue it but, since by then his hand had become rather shaky (he was eighty-seven), it was suggested that instead of writing it, which would tire him, he should dictate it to himself. This idea appealed to him. However, he could not start at once because he was on the point of flying to India where he would have no time to himself. On his return to California, in February 1983, he dictated the first of the pieces contained in this volume into a new Sony tape-recorder. All the dictations except one were recorded from his home, Pine Cottage, in the Ojai Valley, some eighty miles north of Los Angeles. He would dictate in the mornings, while in bed after breakfast, undisturbed. Krishnamurti had first stayed at Pine Cottage with his brother in 1922, when it was lent to him by a friend, and it was there, in August, '22, that he underwent a spiritual experience that transformed his life. Soon afterwards, a Trust was formed to which money was subscribed to buy the cottage and six acres of surrounding land. In 1978 a beautiful new house was built incorporating the cottage in which Krishnamurti retained his original bedroom and a small sitting-room. His dictations were not as finished as his writings, and at times his voice would wander away from the recorder to become rather distant, so, unlike his Notebook and Journal, some slight editing has been necessary for the sake of clarity. The reader gets very close to Krishnamurti in these pieces - almost, it seems at moments, into his very consciousness. In a few of them he introduces an imaginary visitor who comes to question him and draw him out. The gist of Krishnamurti's teaching is here, and the descriptions of nature with which he begins most of the pieces may for many, who regard him as a poet as well as a philosopher, quieten their whole being so that they become intuitively receptive to what follows. There are repetitions, but these seem somehow necessary in order to emphasize his meaning, and they clearly show how every day was a completely new day to him, free from all burdens of the past. Strangely, the last piece, and perhaps the most beautiful, is about death. It is the last occasion on which we shall ever hear Krishnamurti discoursing to himself. Two years later he died in this same bedroom at Pine Cottage. M.L. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF BROCKWOOD PARK FRIDAY 25TH FEBRUARY, 1983 THERE IS A tree by the river and we have been watching it day after day for several weeks when the sun is about to rise. As the sun rises slowly over the horizon, over the trees, this particular tree becomes all of a sudden golden. All the leaves are bright with life and as you watch it as the hours pass by, that tree whose name does not matter - what matters is that beautiful tree - an extraordinary quality seems to spread all over the land, over the river. And as the sun rises a little higher the leaves begin to flutter, to dance. And each hour seems to give to that tree a different quality. Before the sun rises it has a sombre feeling, quiet, far away, full of dignity. And as the day begins, the leaves with the light on them dance and give it that peculiar feeling that one has of great beauty. By midday its shadow has deepened and you can sit there protected from the sun, never feeling lonely, with the tree as your companion. As you sit there, there is a relationship of deep abiding security and a freedom that only trees can know. Towards the evening when the western skies are lit up by the setting sun, the tree gradually becomes sombre, dark, closing in on itself. The sky has become red, yellow, green, but the tree remains quiet, hidden, and is resting for the night. If you establish a relationship with it then you have relationship with mankind. You are responsible then for that tree and for the trees of the world. But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity, with human beings. We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots. You must be extraordinarily sensitive to hear the sound. This sound is not the noise of the world, not the noise of the chattering of the mind, not the vulgarity of human quarrels and human warfare but sound as part of the universe. It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth. If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature we would never kill an animal for our appetite, we would never harm, vivisect, a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to heal our wounds, heal our bodies. But the healing of the mind is something totally different. That healing gradually takes place if you are with nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds. This is not sentiment or romantic imagination but a reality of a relationship with everything that lives and moves on the earth. Man has killed millions of whales and is still killing them. All that we derive from their slaughter can be had through other means. But apparently man loves to kill things, the fleeting deer, the marvellous gazelle and the great elephant. We love to kill each other. This killing of other human beings has never stopped throughout the history of man's life on this earth. If we could, and we must, establish a deep long abiding relationship with nature, with the actual trees, the bushes, the flowers, the grass and the fast moving clouds, then we would never slaughter another human being for any reason whatsoever. Organized murder is war, and though we demonstrate against a particular war, the nuclear, or any other kind of war, we have never demonstrated against war. We have never said that to kill another human being is the greatest sin on earth. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA MONDAY 28TH FEBRUARY, 1983 FLYING AT 41,000 feet from one continent to another you see nothing but snow, miles of snow; all the mountains and the hills are covered with snow, and the rivers too are frozen. You see them wandering, meandering, all over the land. And far below, the distant farms are covered with ice and snow. It is a long, tiresome flight of eleven hours. The passengers were chattering away. There was a couple behind one and they never stopped talking, never looked at the glory of those marvellous hills and mountains, never looked at the other passengers. Apparently they were absorbed in their own thoughts, in their own problems, in their chatterings. And at last, after a tedious, calm flight, in the dead of winter, you land at the town on the Pacific. After the noise and the bustle, you leave that ugly, sprawling, vulgar, shouting city and the endless shops selling almost all the same things. You leave all that behind as you go round the coast highway of the blue Pacific, following the seashore, on a beautiful road, wandering through the hills, meeting the sea often; and as you leave the Pacific behind and enter into the country, winding over various small hills, peaceful, quiet, full of that strange dignity of the country, you enter the valley. You have been there for the last sixty years, and each time you are astonished to enter into this valley. It is quiet, almost untouched by man. You enter into this valley which is almost like a vast cup, a nest. Then you leave the little village and climb to about 1,400 feet, passing rows and rows of orange orchards and groves. The air is perfumed with orange blossom. The whole valley is filled with that scent. And the smell of it is in your mind, in your heart, in your whole body. It is the most extraordinary feeling of living in a perfume that will last for about three weeks or more. And there is a quietness in the mountains, a dignity. And each time you look at those hills and the high mountain, which is over 6,000 feet, you are really surprised that such a country exists. Each time you come to this quiet, peaceful valley there is a feeling of strange aloofness, of deep silence and the vast spreading of slow time. Man is trying to spoil the valley but it has been preserved. And the mountains that morning were extraordinarily beautiful. You could almost touch them. The majesty, the vast sense of permanency is there in them. And you enter quietly into the house where you have lived for over sixty years and the atmosphere, the air, is, if one can use that word, holy; you can feel it. You can almost touch it. As it has rained considerably, for it is the rainy season, all the hills and the little folds of the mountain are green, flourishing, full - the earth is smiling with such delight, with some deep quiet understanding of its own existence. `You have said over and over again that the mind, or if you prefer it, the brain, must be quiet, must empty itself of all the knowledge it has gathered, not only to be free but to comprehend something that is not of time or thought or of any action. You have said this in different ways in most of your talks and I find this awfully difficult, not only to grasp the idea, the depth of it but the feeling of quiet emptiness, if I can use that word. I never could feel my way into it. I have tried various methods to end the chattering of the mind, the endless occupation with something or other, this very occupation creating its problems. And as one lives one is caught up in all this. This is our daily life, the tedium, the talk that goes on in a family, and if there isn't talking there is always the television or a book. The mind seems to demand that it should be occupied, that it should move from one thing to another, from knowledge to knowledge, from action to action with the everlasting movement of thought.' `As we pointed out, thought cannot be stopped by determination, by a decision of the will, or the urgent pressing desire to enter into that quality of quiet, still emptiness.' 'I find myself envious for something which I think, which I feel, to be true, which I would like to have, but it has always eluded me, it has always gone beyond my grasp. I have come, as I have often come, to talk with you: why in my daily life, in my business life, is there not the stability, the endurance of that quietness? Why isn't this in my life? I have asked myself what am I to do. I also realize I cannot do much, or I can't do anything at all about it. But it is there nagging. I can't leave it alone. If only I could experience it once, then that very memory will nourish me, then that very remembrance will give a significance to a really rather silly life. So I have come to enquire, to probe into this matter: why does the mind - perhaps the word brain may be better - demand that it should be occupied?' KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA TUESDAY 10TH MARCH, 1983 THE OTHER DAY as one was walking along a secluded wooded lane far from the noise and the brutality and the vulgarity of civilization, right away from everything that was put together by man, there was a sense of great quietness, enveloping all things -serene, distant and full of the sound of the earth. As you walked along quietly, not disturbing the things of the earth around you, the bushes, the trees, the crickets and the birds, suddenly round a bend there were two small creatures quarrelling with each other, fighting in their small way. One was trying to drive off the other. The other was intruding, trying to get into the other's little hole, and the owner was fighting it off. Presently the owner won and the other ran off. Again there was quietness, a sense of deep solitude. And as you looked up, the path climbed high into the mountains, the waterfall was gently murmuring down the side of the path; there was great beauty and infinite dignity, not the dignity achieved by man that seems so vain and arrogant. The little creature had identified itself with its home, as we human beings do. We are always trying to identify ourselves with our race, with our culture, with those things which we believe in, with some mystical figure, or some saviour, some kind of super authority. Identifying with something seems to be the nature of man. Probably we have derived this feeling from that little animal. One wonders why this craving, longing, for identification exists. One can understand the identification with one's physical needs -the necessary things, clothes, food, shelter and so on. But inwardly, inside the skin as it were, we try to identify ourselves with the past, with tradition, with some fanciful romantic image, a symbol much cherished. And surely in this identification there is a sense of security, safety, a sense of being owned and of possessing. This gives great comfort. One takes comfort, security, in any form of illusion. And man apparently needs many illusions. In the distance there is the hoot of an owl and there is a deepthroated reply from the other side of the valley. It is still dawn. The noise of the day has not begun and everything is quiet. There is something strange and holy where the sun arises. There is a prayer, a chant to the dawn, to that strange quiet light. That early morning, the light was subdued, there was no breeze and all the vegetation, the trees, the bushes, were quiet, still, waiting. Waiting for the sun to arise. And perhaps the sun would not come up for another half hour or so, and the dawn was slowly covering the earth with a strange stillness. Gradually, slowly, the topmost mountain was getting brighter and the sun was touching it, golden, clear, and the snow was pure, untouched by the light of day. As you climbed, leaving the little village paths down below, the noise of the earth, the crickets, the quails and other birds began their morning song, their chant, their rich worship of the day. And as the sun arose you were part of that light and had left behind everything that thought had put together. You completely forgot yourself. The psyche was empty of its struggles and its pains. And as you walked, climbed, there was no sense of separateness, no sense of being even a human being. The morning mist was gathering slowly in the valley, and that mist was you, getting more and more thick, more and more into the fancy, the romance, the idiocy of one's own life. And after a long period of time you came down. There was the murmur of the wind, insects, the calls of many birds. And as you came down the mist was disappearing. There were streets, shops, and the glory of the dawn was fast fading away. And you began your daily routine, caught in the habit of work, the contentions between man and man, the divisions of identification, the division of ideologies, the preparations for wars, your own inward pain and the everlasting sorrow of man. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA FRIDAY 11TH MARCH, 1983 IT WAS A cool fresh morning and there was the light that California alone has, especially the southern part of it. It is really quite an extraordinary light. We have travelled probably all over the world, most of the world at least, have seen various lights and clouds in many parts of the earth. The clouds in Holland are very close; here in California the clouds against the blue sky seem to hold the light everlastingly - the light that great clouds have, with their extraordinary shape and quality. It was a cool, very nice morning. And as you climbed the rocky path up to the great height and looked down into the valley and saw the row upon row of orange trees, avocados and the hills that surround the valley, it was as though you were out of this world, so completely lost were you to all things, to the weariness, to man's ugly reactions and actions. You left all that behind as you climbed up and up the very rocky path. You left behind far below you the vanity, the arrogance, the vulgarity of uniforms, decorations spread all over your chest, and the vanity and strange costumes of priests. You left all that behind. And as you went up you nearly trod on a mother with her dozen or more little baby quails and they scattered with chirping into the bushes. As you went on up and looked back, the mother had again gathered them round her and they were all quite secure under the wings of their mother. You had to climb hour after hour to reach the great height. Some days you saw a bear a little way off and it paid no attention. And the deer across the gully, they too seemed unconcerned. At last you reached the height of a rocky plateau, and across the hills to the south-west you saw the distant sea, so blue, so quiet, so infinitely far away. You sat on a rock, smooth, cracked, where the sun must for century upon century, without any regret, have cracked it. And in the little cracks you saw tiny little living things scurrying about, and there was that utter silence, complete and infinite. A very large bird - they call it a condor - was circling in the sky. Apart from that movement there was nothing astir except these tiny little insects. but there was that silence that exists only where man has not been before; it was so peaceful. You left everything behind in that little village so far below you. Literally everything: your identity, if you had any, your belongings, the possession of your experiences, your memories of things that had meant something to you - you left all that behind, down below there amidst the shining groves and orchards. Here there was absolute silence and you were totally alone. It was a marvellous morning and the cool air which was becoming colder wrapped round you, and you were completely lost to everything. There was nothing and beyond nothing. You should really forget the word meditation. That word has been corrupted. The ordinary meaning of that word - to ponder over, to consider, to think about - is rather trivial and ordinary. If you want to understand the nature of meditation you should really forget the word because you cannot possibly measure with words that which is not measurable, that which is beyond all measure. No words can convey it, nor any systems, modes of thought, practice or discipline. Meditation - or rather if we could find another word which has not been so mutilated, made so ordinary, corrupt, which has become the means of earning a great deal of money - if you can put aside the word, then you begin quietly and gently to feel a movement that is not of time. Again, the word movement implies time - what is meant is a movement that has no beginning or end. A movement in the sense of a wave: wave upon wave, starting from nowhere and with no beach to crash upon. It is an endless wave. Time, however slow it is, is rather tiresome. Time means growth, evolution, to become, to achieve, to learn, to change. And time is not the way of that which lies far beyond the word meditation. Time has nothing to do with it. Time is the action of will, of desire, and desire cannot in any way [word or words inaudible here] - it lies far beyond the word meditation. Here, sitting on that rock, with the blue sky - it is astonishingly blue - the air is so pure, unpolluted. Far beyond this range is the desert. You can see it, miles of it. It is really a timeless perception of that which is. It is only that perception which can say it is. You sat there watching for what seemed many days, many years, many centuries. As the sun was going down to the sea you made your way down to the valley and everything around you was alight, that blade of grass, that sumac [a wild bush], the towering eucalyptus and the flowering earth. It took time to come down as it had taken time to go up. But that which has no time cannot be measured by words. And meditation is only a word. The roots of heaven are in deep abiding silence. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA FRIDAY 11TH MARCH, 1983 (CONTINUED) IT WAS REALLY a most lovely clear beautiful morning. There was dew on every leaf. And as the sun rose slowly, quietly spreading over the beautiful land, there was great peace in this valley. The trees were full of oranges, small ones but many. Gradually the sun lit every tree and every orange. When you sat on that veranda overlooking the valley, there were the long shadows of the morning. The shadow is as beautiful as the tree. We wanted to go out, not in a car, but out among the trees, smell the fresh air and the scent of many oranges and the flowers, and hear the sound of the earth. Later on one climbed right to the very top of the hill, overlooking the wide valley. The earth doesn't belong to anyone. It is the land upon which all of us are to live for many years, ploughing, reaping and destroying. You are always a guest on this earth and have the austerity of a guest. Austerity is far deeper than owning only a few things. The very word austerity has been spoilt by the monks, by the sannyasis, by the hermits. Sitting on that high hill alone in the solitude of many things, many rocks and little animals and ants, that word had no meaning. Over the hills in the far distance was the wide, shining, sparkling sea. We have broken up the earth as yours and mine -your nation, my nation, your flag and his flag, this particular religion and the religion of the distant man. The world, the earth, is divided, broken up. And for it we fight and wrangle, and the politicians exult in their power to maintain this division, never looking at the world as a whole. They haven't got the global mind. They never feel nor ever perceive the immense possibility of having no nationality, no division, they can never perceive the ugliness of their power, their position and their sense of importance. They are like you or another, only they occupy the seat of power with their petty little desires and ambitions, and so maintain apparently, as long as man has been on this earth, the tribal attitude towards life. They don't have a mind that is not committed to any issue, to any ideals, ideologies - a mind that steps beyond the division of race, culture, that the religions man has invented. Governments must exist as long as man is not a light to himself, as long as he does not live his daily life with order, care, diligently working, watching, learning. He would rather be told what to do. He has been told what to do by the ancients, by the priests, by the gurus, and he accepts their orders, their peculiar destructive disciplines as though they were gods on this earth, as though they knew all the implications of this extraordinarily complex life. Sitting there, high above all the trees, on a rock that has its own sound like every living thing on this earth, and watching the blue sky, clear, spotless, one wonders how long it will take for man to learn to live on this earth without wrangles, rows, wars and conflict. Man has created the conflict by his division of the earth, linguistically, culturally, superficially. One wonders how long man, who has evolved through so many centuries of pain and grief, anxiety and pleasure, fear and conflict, will take to live a different way of life. As you sat quietly without movement, a bob cat, a lynx, came down. As the wind was blowing up the valley it was not aware of the smell of that human being. It was purring, rubbing itself against a rock, its small tail up, and enjoying the marvel of the earth. Then it disappeared down the hill among the bushes. It was protecting its lair, its cave or its sleeping place. It was protecting what it needs, protecting its own kittens, and watching for danger. It was afraid of man more than anything else, man who believes in god, man who prays, the man of wealth with his gun, with his casual killing. You could almost smell that bob cat as it passed by you. You were so motionless, so utterly still that it never even looked at you; you were part of that rock, part of the environment. Why, one wonders, does man not realize that one can live peacefully, without wars, without violence; how long will it take him, how many centuries upon centuries to realize this? From the past centuries of a thousand yesterdays, he has not learned. What he is now will be his future. It was getting too hot on that rock. You could feel the gathering heat through your trousers so you got up and went down and followed the lynx which had long since disappeared. There were other creatures: the gopher, the king snake, and a rattler (rattlesnake). They were silently going about their business. The morning air disappeared; gradually the sun was in the west. It would take an hour or two before it set behind those hills with the marvellous shape of the rock and the evening colours of blue and red and yellow. Then the night would begin, the night sounds would fill the air; only late in the night would there be utter silence. The roots of heaven are of great emptiness, for in emptiness there is energy, incalculable, vast and profound. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA TUESDAY 15TH MARCH 1983 THIS END OF the valley, particularly on this lovely quiet morning, was peaceful, there was no sound of traffic. The hills were behind you and the tallest mountain in this region was over 6,000 feet. This house is surrounded by orchards, bright yellow oranges, and the sky was blue without a single cloud. You could hear the murmur of bees among the flowers in the still quiet morning. The old oak tree [the Californian evergreen holm oak] behind the house was a great age; the strong winds had broken many dead branches. It has survived many storms, many summers of great heat and the cold winters. Probably it could tell you a lot of stories but this morning it was very quiet, there was no breeze. Everything around you was full of green and bright oranges, yellow and shining, and perfume filled the air - the perfume of jasmine. This valley is far from all the noise and the bustle of human traffic, of humanity, of all the ugly things that are going on in the world. The orange trees were just beginning to show their fresh young flowers. The scent of it would fill the valley in a week or two and there would be the hum of thousands of bees. It was a peaceful morning and beyond all this lay the sick world, a world that is becoming more and more dangerous, more and more corrupt, vastly dull in search of entertainment, religious and otherwise. The superficiality of existence is thriving. Money seems to be the greatest value in life, and with it naturally goes power, position and the sorrow of it all. `On such a beautiful morning I want to talk over with you a rather sad subject, frightening, the sense of apprehension that pervades humanity and myself. I would really like to understand, not merely intellectually or descriptively, why, with so many others, I dread the ending of life. `We kill so easily - it is called blood sport, shooting birds for amusement to show off one's skill, chasing the fox, killing by the million the things of the sea; death seems to be everywhere. Sitting on this quiet veranda, looking at those bright yellow oranges, it is difficult - or rather it seems so unseemly - to talk over something that is so frightening. Man throughout all the ages has never really solved or understood the thing called death. `Naturally I have studied various religious and scientific rationalizations, beliefs, and they assume realities; some of them are logical, comforting, but the fact remains that there is always the fear of the unknown. `I was discussing this fact with a friend of mine whose wife has recently died. He was a rather lonely man and he was inclined not only to live in his memories but also to find out for himself through seances, mediums and all that whether his wife, whom he really loved, had just evaporated into thin air, or was there still a continuity of her in another dimension, in another world than this? `He said, "Strangely enough I found that at one of these seances the medium mentioned my name and said that she had a message from my wife. And the message was something only known to her and me. Of course the medium may have read my thoughts or my wife may exist. That thought was in the air, the thought of that secret which was between us. I have asked many people of their experiences. It all seems so vain and rather stupid, including the message from my wife which was so trivial, so deeply meaningless." I don't want to discuss with you whether there is an entity of a person which continues after death. That is not my interest. Some say there is a continuity, others say there is total annihilation. This contradiction - annihilation, total ending of a person or the continuity of that individual - has been in all literature, from the ancients to the present day. But to me, all this is beside the point. Its validity is still in the realm of speculation, superstition, belief and the desire for comfort, hope. I am really not concerned with all that. I really mean this. I am at least quite certain of that. But I would like to have a dialogue with you, if I may, about what is the meaning of it all - this whole business of living and dying. Is it all utterly meaningless, vague, without any depth, without any significance whatsoever? Millions have died and millions will be born and continue and die. I am one of those. I always ask myself: what is the meaning of living and dying? The earth is beautiful, I have travelled a great deal, talked to many people who are supposed to be wise and learned, but they too die. `I have come a long way so perhaps you would be good enough to take time and have the quiet patience to talk over this subject with me.' `Doubt is a precious thing. It cleanses, purifies the mind. The very questioning, the very fact that the seed of doubt is in one, helps to clarify our investigation. Not only doubting what all the others have said, including the whole concept of regeneration, and the Christian belief and dogma of resurrection, but also the Asiatic world's acceptance that there is continuity. In doubting, questioning all that, there is a certain freedom which is necessary for our enquiry. If one can put all that aside, actually, not merely verbally but negate all that deep within oneself, then one has no illusion. And it is necessary to be totally free from any kind of illusion - the illusions that are imposed upon us and the illusions that we create for ourselves. All illusions are the things that we play with, and if one is serious then they have no place whatsoever, nor does faith come into all this. `So having set aside all that, not for the moment but seeing the falseness of all that, the mind is not caught in the falsehood that man has invented about death, about god, about all the rituals that thought has created. There must be freedom of opinion and judgement, for then only can one deliberately, actually, hesitantly explore into the meaning of daily living and dying - existence and the end of existence. If one is prepared for this, or if one is willing, or even better if one is actually, deeply concerned to find out the truth of the matter (living and dying is a very complex problem, an issue that requires a very careful examination) where should we begin? With life or with death? With living or with the ending of that which we call living?' `I am over fifty, and have lived rather extravagantly, keeping an interest in many, many things. I think I would like to begin - I am rather hesitant, I am rather doubtful where I should begin.' `I think we ought to begin with the beginning of existence, man's existence, with one's existence as a human being.' `I was born into a fairly well-to-do family, carefully educated and brought up. I have been in several businesses and I have sufficient money; I am a single man now. I have been married, had two children, who all died in a car accident. And I have never married again. I think I should like to begin with my childhood. From the beginning, like every other child in the world, poor or rich, there was a well developed psyche, the self-centred activity. It is strange, as you look back upon it, that it begins from very early childhood, that possessive continuity of me as J. Smith. He went through school, expanding, aggressive, arrogant, bored, then into college and university. And as my father was in a good business I went into his Company. I reached the top, and on the death of my wife and children, I began this enquiry. As happens to all human beings, it was a shock, a pain - the loss of the three, the memories associated with them. And when the shock of it was over I began to enquire, to read, to ask, to travel in different parts of the world, talking the matter over with some of the so-called spiritual leaders, the gurus. I read a great deal but I was never satisfied. So I think we ought to begin, if I may suggest, with the actual living - the daily building up of my cultivated, circumscribed mind. And I am that. You see, my life has been that. My life is nothing exceptional. Probably I would be considered upper middle class, and for a time it was pleasurable, exciting, and at other times dull, weary, and monotonous. But the death of my wife and children somehow pulled me out of that. I haven't become morbid but I want to know the truth of it all, if there is such a thing as truth about living and dying.' `How is the psyche, the ego, the self, the I, the person, put together? How has this thing come into being, from which arises the concept of the individual, the "me", separate from all others? How is this momentum set going - this momentum, this sense of the I, the self? We will use the word "self" to include the person, the name, the form, the characteristics, the ego. How is this self born? Does the self come into being with certain characteristics transmitted from the parents? Is the self merely a series of reactions? Is the self merely the continuity of centuries of tradition? Is the self put together by circumstances, through accidents, happenings? Is the self the result of evolution - evolution being the gradual process of time, emphasizing, giving importance to the self? Or, as some maintain, especially the religious world, does the outward shell of the self really contain within itself the soul and the ancient concept of the Hindus, of the Buddhists? Does the self come into being through the society which man has created, which gives strength to the formula that you are separate from the rest of humanity? All these have certain truths in them, certain facts, and all these constitute the self. And the self has been given tremendous importance in this world. The expression of the self in the democratic world is called freedom, and in the totalitarian world, that freedom is suppressed, denied and punished. So would you say that instinct begins in the child with the urge to possess? This also exists in the animals, so perhaps we have derived from the animals this instinct to possess. Where there is any kind of possession there must be the beginning of the self. And from this instinct, this reaction, the self gradually increases in strength, in vitality, and becomes well-established. The possession of a house, the possession of land, the possession of knowledge, the possession of certain capacities - all this is the movement of the self. And this movement gives the feeling of separateness as the individual. `Now you can go much further into details: is the you, the self, separate from the rest of mankind? Are you, because you have a separate name, a separate physical organism, certain tendencies different from another's, perhaps a talent - does that make you an individual? This idea that each one of us throughout the world is separate from another, is that an actuality? Or may the whole concept be illusory just as we have divided the world into separate communities, nations, which is really a glorified form of tribalism? This concern with oneself and the community being different from other communities, other selves - is that in actuality real? Of course you may say it is real because you are an American, and others are French, Russian, Indian, Chinese and so on. This linguistic, cultural, religious difference has brought about havoc in the world - terrible wars, incalculable harm. And also, of course, in certain aspects there is great beauty in it, in the expression of certain talents, as a painter, as a musician, as a scientist and so on. Would you consider yourself as a separate individual with a separate brain which is yours and nobody else's? It is your thinking, and your thinking is supposedly different from another's. But is thinking individual at all? Or is there only thinking, which is shared by all humanity, whether you are the most scientifically talented person or the most ignorant, primitive? `All these questions and more arise when we are considering the death of a human being. So would you, looking at all this - the reactions, the name, the form, the possessiveness, the impulse to be separate from another, sustained by society and by religion - would you in examining all this logically, sanely, reasonably, consider yourself to be an individual? This is an important question in the context of the meaning of death.' `I see what you are driving at. I have an intuitive comprehension, cognizance, that as long as I think that I am an individual, my thinking is separate from the thinking of others - my anxiety, my sorrow is separate from the rest of humanity. I have a feeling - please correct me - that I have reduced a vast complex living of the rest of mankind to a very small, petty little affair. Are you saying in effect that I am not an individual at all? My thinking is not mine? And my brain is not mine, separate from others? Is this what you are hinting at? Is this what you are maintaining? Is this your conclusion?' `If one may point out, the word "conclusion" isn't justified. To conclude means to shut down, to end - conclude an argument, conclude a peace after a war. We are not concluding anything; we are just pointing out, because we must move away from conclusions, from finality and so on. Such an assertion limits, brings a narrowness into our enquiry. But the fact, the observable rational fact, is that your thinking and the thinking of another are similar. The expression of your thinking may vary; you may express something in one way if you are an artist, and another person, who is not an artist, may express it in another way. You judge, evaluate, according to the expression, and the expression then divides you into an artist and a football player. But you, as an artist, and he, as a football player, think. The football player and the artist suffer, are anxious, have great pain, disappointment, apprehension; one believes in god and the other doesn't believe in god, one has faith and the other has no faith, but this is common to all human beings, though each one may think he is different. You may think my sorrow is entirely different from another's, that my loneliness, my desperation, are wholly opposite to another's. Our tradition is that, our conditioning is that, we are educated to that - I am an Arab, you are a Jew, and so on. And from this division there arises not only individuality but the communal racial difference. The individual identifying himself with a community, with a nation, with a race, with a religion invariably brings conflict between human beings. It is a natural law. But we are only concerned with the effects, not with the causes of war, causes of this division. `So we are merely pointing out, not asserting, not concluding, that you, sir, are the rest of humanity, psychologically, deeply. Your reactions are shared by all humanity. Your brain is not yours, it has evolved through centuries of time. You may be conditioned as a Christian, believe in various dogmas, rituals; another has his own god, his own rituals, but all this is put together by thought. So we are questioning deeply whether there is an individual at all. We are the whole of humanity; we are the rest of mankind. This is not a romantic, fantastic, statement, and it is important, necessary, when we are going to talk over together the meaning of death.' `What do you say to all this, sir?' `I must say I am rather puzzled by all these questions. I am not certain why I have always considered myself to be separate from you or from somebody else. What you say seems to be true but I must think it over, I must have a little time to assimilate all that you have said so far.' `Time is the enemy of perception. If you are going to think over what we have talked about so far, argue with yourself, discuss what has been said, analyse what we have talked over together, it is going to take time. And time is a brand new factor in the perception of that which is true. Anyhow, shall we leave it for the moment?' He came back after a couple of days and he seemed more quiet and rather concerned. It was a cloudy morning and probably it was going to rain. In this part of the world they need much more rain because beyond the hills there is a vast desert. It gets very cold here at night because of that. `I have come back after a couple of days of quiet thinking. I have a house by the sea, I live by myself. It is one of those little seaside cottages and you have in front of you the beach and the blue Pacific, and you can walk for miles on the beach. I generally go for long walks either in the morning or evening. After seeing you the other day I took a walk along the beach, probably about five miles or more, and I decided to come back and see you again. I was at first very disturbed. I couldn't quite make out what you were saying, what you were pointing out to me. Though I am rather a sceptical person about these matters, I allowed what you were saying to occupy my mind. It wasn't that I was inwardly accepting or denying it, but it intrigued me, and I purposely use the word "allow" - to allow it to enter into my mind. And after some deliberation I took a car and drove along by the coast and then turned inland and came here. It is a beautiful valley. I am glad to find you here. So could we continue with what we were talking about the other day? `If I understand it clearly, you were pointing out that tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought -accepts the idea that we are separate individuals; and as I thought more about it - I am using the word `thought` in its ordinary sense, thinking, rationalizing, questioning, arguing - it was as though I was having a discussion with myself, a prolonged dialogue, and I think I really do grasp what is involved in that. I see what we have done with the marvellous world we live in. I see the whole historical sequence. And after considerable to and fro of thought I really do understand the depth and the truth of what you said. So if you have time I would like to go much further into all this. I really came to find out, as you know, about death, but I see the importance of beginning with one's comprehension of oneself, and through the door of the self - if one can use the word - come to the question of what is death.' `As we were saying the other day, we share, all humanity shares, the sunlight [he had not said this; that sunlight is not yours or mine. It is the life-giving energy which we all share. The beauty of a sunset, if you are watching it sensitively, is shared by all human beings. It is not yours setting in the west, east, north or south; it is the sunset that is important. And our consciousness, in which is included our reactions and actions, our ideas and concepts and patterns, systems of belief, ideologies, fears, pleasures, faith, the worship of something which we have projected, our sorrows, our griefs and pain - all this is shared by all human beings. When we suffer we have made it into a personal affair. We shut out all the suffering of mankind. Like pleasure; we treat pleasure as a private thing, ours, the excitement of it and so on. We forget that man - including woman, of course, which we needn't repeat - that man has suffered from time beyond all measure. And that suffering is the ground on which we all stand. It is shared by all human beings. 'So our consciousness is not actually yours or mine; it is the consciousness of man, evolved, grown, accumulated through many, many centuries. In that consciousness is the faith, the gods, all the rituals man has invented. It is really an activity of thought; it is thought that has made the content - behaviour, action, culture, aspiration; the whole activity of man is the activity of thought. And this consciousness is the self, is the "me", the I, the ego, the personality and so on. I think it is necessary to understand this very deeply, not merely argumentatively, logically but deeply, as blood is in all of us, is part of us, is the essence, the natural process of all human beings. When one realizes this our responsibility becomes extraordinarily important. We are responsible for everything that is happening in the world as long as the content of our consciousness continues. As long as fear, nationalities, the urge for success, you know the whole business of it - as long as that exists we are part of humanity, part of the human movement. `This is utterly important to understand. It is so: the self is put together by thought. Thought is not, as we have said, yours or mine; thinking is not individual thinking. Thinking is shared by all human beings. And when one has really deeply seen the significance of this, then I think we can understand the nature of what it means to die. `As a boy you must have followed a small stream gurgling along a narrow little valley, the waters running faster and faster, and have thrown something, such as a piece of stick, into the stream and followed it, down a slope, over a little mound, through a little crevasse - followed it until it went over the waterfall and disappeared. This disappearance is our life. `What does death mean? What is the very word, the threatening feeling about it? We never seem to accept it.' KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA WEDNESDAY 16TH MARCH, 1983 (CONTINUING THE DIALOGUE OF 15TH MARCH 1983) `MAN HAS KILLED man in different states of mind. He has killed him for religious reasons, he has killed him for patriotic reasons, for peace, killed him through organized war. This has been our lot, killing each other endlessly. `Sir, have you considered this kind of killing, what sorrow has come to man - the immense sorrow of mankind which has gone on through the ages, the tears, the agony, the brutality, the fear of it all? And it is still going on. The world is sick. The politicians, whether left, right, centre, or totalitarian, are not going to bring about peace. Each one of us is responsible, and being responsible we must see that the slaughter comes to an end so that we live on this earth, which is ours, in beauty and peace. It is an immense tragedy which we do not face or want to resolve. We leave it all to the experts; and the danger of experts is as dangerous as a deep precipice or a poisonous snake. `So leaving all that aside, what is the meaning of death? What to you, sir, does death mean?' `To me it means that all I have been, all that I am, suddenly comes to an end through some disease, accident or old age. Of course I have read and talked to Asiatics, to Indians, for whom there is a belief in reincarnation. I don't know whether this is true or not, but as far as I can understand, death means the ending of a living thing; the death of a tree, the death of a fish, death of a spider, death of my wife and children, a sudden cutting off, a sudden ending of that which has been living with all its memories, ideas, pain, anxiety, joys, pleasures, seeing the sunset together - all that has come to an end. And the remembrance of all that, not only brings tears but also the realization of one's own inadequacy, one's own loneliness. And the idea of separation from one's wife and children, from the things that one has worked for, cherished, remembered, held on to, the attachments and the pain of attachment - all that and more ceases suddenly. I think we generally mean that; death means that. It is to me the ending. `There's a picture of my wife and the children on the piano in my cottage by the sea. We used to play the piano together. There is the remembrance of them in the picture on the piano, but the actuality has gone. Remembrance is painful, or remembrance may give one pleasure, but the pleasure is rather fading because sorrow is overriding. All that to me means death. `We had a very nice Persian cat, a very beautiful thing. And one morning it had gone. It was on the front porch. It must have eaten something - there it was, lifeless, meaningless; it will never purr again. That is death. The ending of a long life, or the ending of a new born baby. I had a small new plant once which promised to grow into a healthy tree. But some thoughtless, unobservant person passed by, trod on it, and it will never be a great tree. That is also a form of death. The ending of a day, a day that has been poor or rich and beautiful, can also be called death. The beginning and the ending.' `Sir, what is living? From the moment one is born until one dies, what is living? It is very important to understand the way we live - why we live this way after so many centuries. It is up to you, is it not, sir, if it is one constant struggle? Conflict, pain, joy, pleasure, anxiety, loneliness, depression, and working, working, working, labouring for others or for oneself; being self-centred and perhaps occasionally generous, envious, angry, trying to suppress the anger, letting that anger go rampant, and so on. This is what we call living - tears, laughter, sorrow, and the worship of something that we have invented; living with lies, illusions and hatred, the weariness of it all, the boredom, the inanities: this is our life. Not only yours but the life of all human beings on this earth, hoping to escape from it all. This process of worship, agony, fear has gone on from the ancient of days until now - labour, strife, pain, uncertainty, confusion, and joy and laughter. All this is part of our existence. `The ending of all this is called death. Death puts an end to all our attachments, however superficial or however deep. The attachment of the monk, the sannyasi, the attachment of the housewife, the attachment to one's family, every form of attachment must end with death. `There are several problems involved in this: one, the question of immortality. Is there such a thing as immortality? That is, that which is not mortal, for mortal implies that which knows death. The immortal is that which is beyond time and is totally unaware of this ending. Is the self, the "me", immortal? Or does it know death? The self can never become immortal. The "me", the I, with all its qualities is put together through time, which is thought; that self can never be immortal. One can invent an idea of immortality, an image, a god, a picture and hold to that and derive comfort from it, but that is not immortality. `Secondly (this is a little bit more complex): is it possible to live with death? Not morbidly, not in any form of self-destructiveness. Why have we divided death from living? Death is part of our life, it is part of our existence - the dying and the living, and the living and dying. They are inseparable. The envy, the anger, the sorrow, the loneliness, and the pleasure that one has, which we call living, and this thing called death - why separate them? Why keep them miles apart? Yes, miles of time apart. We accept the death of an old man. It is natural. But when a young person dies through some accident or disease, we revolt against it. We say that it is unfair, it shouldn't be. So we are always separating life and death. This is a problem which we should question, understand - or not treat as a problem, but look at, see the inward implications of, not deceptively. `Another question is the issue of time - the time involved in living, learning, accumulating, acting, doing, and the ending of me as we know it; the time that separates the living from the ending. Where there is separation, division, from here to there, from "what is" to "what should be", time is involved. Sustaining this division between that which is called death and that which is called life, is to me a major factor. `When there is this division, this separation there is fear. Then there is the effort of overcoming that fear and the search for comfort, satisfaction, for a sense of continuity. (We are talking about the psychological world not the physical world or the technical world.) It is time that has put the self together and it is thought that sustains the ego, the self. If only one could really grasp the significance of time and division, the separation, psychologically, of man against man, race against race, one type of culture against another. This separation, this division, is brought about by thought and time, as living and dying. And to live a life with death means a profound change in our whole outlook on existence. To end attachment without time and motive, that is dying while living. `Love has no time. It is not my love opposed to your love. Love is never personal; one may love another but when that love is limited, narrowed down to one person, then it ceases to be love. Where there really is love there is no division of time, thought and all the complexities of life, all the misery and confusion, the uncertainties, jealousies, anxieties involved. One has to give a great deal of attention to time and thought. Not that one must live only in the present, which would be utterly meaningless. Time is the past, modified and continuing as the future. It's a continuum and thought holds on, clings to this. It clings to something which it has itself created, put together. `Another question is: as long as human beings represent the entire humanity - you are the entire humanity, not representing it, just as you are the world and the world is you - what happens when you die? When you or another die, you and the other are the manifestation of that vast stream of human action and reaction, the stream of consciousness, of behaviour and so on: you are of that stream. That stream has conditioned the human mind, the human brain, and as long as we remain conditioned by greed, envy, fear, pleasure, joy and all the rest of it, we are part of this stream. Your organism may end but you are of that stream, as you are, while living, that stream itself. That stream, changing, slow at times, fast at others, deep and shallow, narrowed by both sides of the bank and breaking through the narrowness into a vast volume of water -as long as you are of that stream there is no freedom. There is no freedom from time, from the confusion and the misery of all the accumulated memories and attachments. It is only when there is the ending of that stream, the ending, not you stepping out of it and becoming something else, but the ending of it, only then is there quite a different dimension. That dimension cannot be measured by words. The ending without a motive is the whole significance of dying and living. The roots of heaven are in living and dying.' KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA THURSDAY 17TH MARCH, 1983 THE CLOUDS WERE very low this morning. It rained last night, not too much but it has left the earth watered, rich, nourished. Considering, on a morning like this with the hills floating among the clouds and with those skies, the enormous energy that man has expended on this earth, the vast technological progress in the last fifty years, all the rivers more or less polluted and the waste of energy in this everlasting entertainment, it all seems so strange and so sick. On the veranda this morning time is not very near to man, time as movement, time as going from here to there, time to learn, time to act, time as a means of changing from this to that in the ordinary things of life. One can understand that time is necessary to learn a language, to learn a skill, to build an aeroplane, to put together a computer, to travel around the world; the time of youth, the time of old age, time as the setting of the sun and of the sun rising slowly over the hills, the long shadows and the growth of a slowly maturing tree, time to become a good gardener, a good carpenter and so on. In the physical world, in physical action, time to learn becomes necessary and useful. Is it that we carry over, extend, the same usage of time into the psychological world? Extend this way of thinking, acting, learning into the world inside the skin, into the area of the psyche, as hope, as becoming something, as self-improvement? It sounds rather absurd - the changing from this to that, from `what is' to `what should be'. Time is necessary, one thinks, to change the whole complex quality of violence into that which is not violent. Sitting quietly by yourself, overlooking the valley, wide and long, you could almost count the rows of orange trees, the beautifully kept orchards. Seeing the beauty of the earth, of the valley, does not involve time, but the translation of that perception on to a canvas or into a poem needs time. Perhaps we use time as a means of escaping from `what is', from what we are, from what the future will be for ourselves and for the rest of mankind. Time in the psychological realm is the enemy of man. We want the psyche to evolve, grow, expand, fulfil, turn itself into something more than what it is. We never question the validity of such a desire, of such a concept; we easily, perhaps happily, accept that the psyche can evolve, flourish, and that one day there will be peace and happiness. But actually there is no psychological evolution. There is a humming bird going from flower to flower, brightness in this quiet light, with such vitality in that little thing. The rapidity of the wings. so fantastically rhythmical, steady; it seems it can move forward and backward. It is a marvellous thing to watch it, to feel the delicacy, the bright colour, and wonder at its beauty, so small, so rapid and so quickly gone. And there is a mocking bird on the telephone wire. Another bird is sitting on the top of that tree overlooking the whole world. It has been there for over half an hour, never moving, but watching, moving its little head to see that there is no danger. And it too has gone now. The clouds are beginning to move away from the hills, and how green the hills are. As we were saying, there is no psychological evolution. The psyche can never become or grow into something which it is not. Conceit and arrogance cannot grow into better and more conceit, nor can selfishness, which is the common lot of all human beings, become more and more selfish, more and more of its own nature. It is rather frightening to realize that the very word `hope' contains the whole world of the future. This movement from `what is' to `what should be' is an illusion, is really, if one can use the word, a lie. We accept what man has repeated throughout the ages as a matter of fact, but when we begin to question, doubt, we can see very clearly, if we want to see it and not hide behind some image or some fanciful verbal structure, the nature and the structure of the psyche, the ego, the `me'. The `me' can never become a better me. It will attempt to, it thinks it can, but the `me' remains in subtle forms. The self hides in many garments, in many structures; it varies from time to time, but there is always this self, this separative, self-centred activity which imagines that one day it will make itself something which it is not. So one sees there is no becoming of the self, there is only the ending of selfishness, of anxiety, of pain and sorrow which are the content of the psyche, of the `me'. There is only the ending of that, and that ending does not require time. It isn't that it will all end the day after tomorrow. It will only end when there is the perception of its movement. To perceive not only objectively, without any prejudice, bias, but to perceive without all the accumulations of the past; to witness all this without the watcher - the watcher is of time and however much he may want to bring about a mutation in himself, he will always be the watcher; remembrances, however pleasurable, have no reality, they are things of the past gone, finished dead: only in observing without the observer, who is the past, does one see the nature of time and the ending of time. The humming bird has come back again. A ray of sunlight through the broken clouds has caught it, flashing its colours and the long thin beak and the rapidity of those wings. The pure watching of that little bird, without any reaction, just watching it, is to watch the whole world of beauty. `I heard you the other day saying that time is the enemy of man. You explained something briefly about it. It seems such an outrageous statement. And you have made other similar statements. Some of them I have found to be true, natural, but one's mind never easily sees that which is actual, the truth, the fact, I was asking myself, and I have asked others too, why our minds have become so dull, so slow, why we cannot instantly see whether something is false or true? Why do we need explanations which seem so obvious when you have explained them? Why don't I, and any of us, see the truth of this fact? What has happened to our minds? I would like, if I may, to have a dialogue about it with you, to find out why my mind isn't subtle, quick. And can this mind, which has been trained and educated, ever become really, deeply, subtle, rapid, seeing something instantly, the quality and the truth or the falseness of it?' `Sir, let's begin to enquire why we have become like this. It surely has nothing to do with old age. Is it the way of our life - the drinking, the smoking, the drugs, the bustle, the weariness, the everlasting occupation? Outwardly and inwardly we are occupied with something. Is it the very nature of knowledge? We are trained to acquire knowledge - through college, university, or in doing something skilfully. Is knowledge one of the factors of this lack of subtlety? Our brains are filled with so many facts, they have gathered so much information, from the television and from every newspaper and magazine, and they are recording as much as they can; they are absorbing, holding. So is knowledge one of the factors that destroys subtlety? But you can't get rid of your knowledge or put it aside; you have to have knowledge. Sir, you have to have knowledge to drive a car, to write a letter, to carry out various transactions; you even have to have some kind of knowledge of how to hold a spade. Of course you do. We have to have knowledge in the world of everyday activity. `But we are speaking of the knowledge accumulated in the psychological world, the knowledge that you have gathered about your wife, if you have a wife; that very knowledge of having lived with your wife for ten days or fifty years has dulled your brain, has it not? The memories, the pictures are all stored there. We are talking of this kind of inward knowledge. knowledge has its own superficial subtleties: when to yield, when to resist, when to gather and when not to gather, but we are asking: doesn't that very knowledge make your mind, your brain, mechanical, repetitious from habit? The encylopaedia has all the knowledge of all the people who have written in it. Why not leave that knowledge on the shelf and use it when necessary? Don't carry it in your brain. `We are asking: does that knowledge prevent the instant comprehension, instant perception, which brings about mutation, the subtlety that isn't in the words? is it that we are conditioned by the newspapers, by the society in which we live - which, by the way, we have created, for every human being from past generations to the present has created this society whether in this part of the world or any other part? Is it conditioning by religions that has shaped our thinking? When you have strong beliefs in some figure, in some image, that very strength prevents the subtlety, the quickness. `Are we so constantly occupied that there is no space in our mind and heart - space both outwardly and inwardly? We need a little space, but you cannot have space physically if you are in a crowded city, or crowded in your family, crowded by all the impressions you have received, all the pressures. And psychologically there must be space - not the space that thought may imagine, not the space of isolation, not the space that divides human beings, politically, religiously, racially, not the space between continents, but an inward space that has no centre. Where there is a centre there is a periphery, there is a circumference. We are not talking of such space. `And is another reason why we are not subtle, quick, because we have become specialists? We may be quick in our own specialization, but one wonders, if one is trained, specialized, whether there is any comprehension of the nature of sorrow, pain, loneliness and so on. Of course you cannot be trained to have a good, clear mind; the word "trained" is to be conditioned. And how can a conditioned mind ever be clear? `So all these may be the factors, sir, that prevent us from having a good, subtle, clear mind.' `Thank you, sir, for seeing me. Perhaps, and I hope that, some of what you have said - not that I have understood it completely -but that some of the things you have said may take seed in me and that I will allow that seed to grow, to flourish without interfering with it. Perhaps then I may see something very rapidly, comprehend something without tremendous explanations, verbal analysis and so on. Good bye, sir.' KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA FRIDAY 18TH MARCH, 1983 AT THE BIRD feeder there were a dozen or more birds chirping away, pecking at the grains, struggling, fighting each other, and when another big bird came they all fluttered away. When the big bird left again they all came back, chattering, quarrelling, chirping, making quite a lot of noise. Presently a cat went by and there was a flurry, a screeching and a great to do. The cat was chased away - it was one of those wild cats, not a pet cat; there are a great many of those wild ones around here of different sizes, shapes and colours. At the feeder all day long there were birds, little ones and big ones, and then a blue-jay came scolding everybody, the whole universe, and chased the other birds away - or rather they left when it came. They were very watchful for cats. And as the evening drew close all the birds went away and there was silence, quiet, peaceful. The cats came and went, but there were no birds. That morning the clouds were full of light and there was promise in the air of more rain. For the past few weeks it had been raining. There is an artificial lake and the waters were right to the top. All the green leaves and the shrubs and the tall trees were waiting for the sun, which hadn't appeared bright as the Californian sun is; it had not shown its face for many a day. One wonders what is the future of mankind, the future of all those children you see shouting, playing - such happy, gentle, nice faces - what is their future? The future is what we are now. This has been so historically for many thousands of years - the living and dying, and all the travail of our lives. We don't seem to pay much attention to the future. You see on television endless entertainment from morning until late in the night, except for one or two channels, but they are very brief and not too serious. The children are entertained. The commercials all sustain the feeling that you are being entertained. And this is happening practically all over the world. What will be the future of these children? There is the entertainment of sport - thirty, forty thousand people watching a few people in the arena and shouting themselves hoarse. And you also go and watch some ceremony being performed in a great cathedral, some ritual, and that too is a form of entertainment, only you call that holy, religious, but it is still an entertainment - a sentimental, romantic experience, a sensation of religiosity. Watching all this in different parts of the world, watching the mind being occupied with amusement, entertainment, sport, one must inevitably ask, if one is in any way concerned: what is the future? More of the same in different forms? A variety of amusements? So you have to consider, if you are at all aware of what is happening to you, how the worlds of entertainment and sport are capturing your mind, shaping your life. Where is all this leading to? Or perhaps you are not concerned at all? You probably don't care about tomorrow. Probably you haven't given it thought, or, if you have, you may say it is too complex, too frightening, too dangerous to think of the coming years - not of your particular old age but of the destiny, if we can use that word, the result of our present way of life, filled with all kinds of romantic, emotional, sentimental feelings and pursuits, and the whole world of entertainment impinging on your mind. If you are at all aware of all this, what is the future of mankind? As we said earlier, the future is what you are now. If there is no change - not superficial adaptations, superficial adjustments to any pattern, political, religious or social, but the change that is far deeper, demanding your attention, your care, your affection - if there is not a fundamental change, then the future is what we are doing every day of our life in the present. Change is rather a difficult word. Change to what? Change to another pattern? To another concept? To another political or religious system? Change from this to that? That is still within the realm, or within the field of `what is'. Change to that is projected by thought, formulated by thought, materialistically determined. So one must enquire carefully into this word change. Is there a change if there is a motive? Is there a change if there is a particular direction, a particular end, a conclusion that seems sane, rational? Or perhaps a better phrase is `the ending of what is'. The ending, not the movement of `what is' to `what should be'. That is not change. But the ending, the cessation, the - what is the right word? - I think ending is a good word so let's stick to that. The ending. But if the ending has a motive, a purpose, is a matter of decision, then it is merely a change from this to that. The word decision implies the action of will. `I will do this; `I won't do that'. When desire enters into the act of the ending, that desire becomes the cause of ending. Where there is a cause there is a motive and so there is no real ending at all. The twentieth century has had a tremendous lot of changes produced by two devastating wars, and the dialectical materialism, and the scepticism of religious beliefs, activities and rituals and so on, apart from the technological world which has brought about a great many changes, and there will be further changes when the computer is fully developed - you are just at the beginning of it. Then when the computer takes over, what is going to happen to our human minds? That is a different question which we should go into another time. When the industry of entertainment takes over, as it is gradually doing now, when the young people, the students, the children, are constantly instigated to pleasure, to fancy, to romantic sensuality, the words restraint and austerity are pushed away, never even given a thought. The austerity of the monks, the sannyasis, who deny the world, who clothe their bodies with some kind of uniform or just a cloth - this denial of the material world is surely not austerity. You probably won't even listen to this, to what the implications of austerity are. When you have been brought up from childhood to amuse yourself and escape from yourself through entertainment, religious or otherwise, and when most of the psychologists say that you must express everything you feel and that any form of holding back or restraint is detrimental, leading to various forms of neuroticism, you naturally enter more and more into the world of sport, amusement, entertainment, all helping you to escape from yourself, from what you are. The understanding of the nature of what you are, without any distortions, without any bias, without any reactions to what you discover you are, is the beginning of austerity. The watching, the awareness, of every thought, every feeling, not to restrain it, not to control it, but to watch it, like watching a bird in flight, without any of your own prejudices and distortions - that watching brings about an extraordinary sense of austerity that goes beyond all restraint, all the fooling around with oneself and all this idea of self-improvement, self-fulfilment. That is all rather childish. In this watching there is great freedom and in that freedom there is the sense of the dignity of austerity. But if you said all this to a modern group of students or children, they would probably look out of the window in boredom because this world is bent on its own pursuit of pleasure. A large fawn-coloured squirrel came down the tree and went up to the feeder, nibbled at a few grains, sat there on top of it, looked around with its large beady eyes, its tail up, curved, a marvellous thing. It sat there for a moment or so, came down, went along the few rocks and then dashed to the tree and up, and disappeared. It appears that man has always escaped from himself, from what he is, from where he is going, from what all this is about - the universe, our daily life, the dying and the beginning. It is strange that we never realize that however much we may escape from ourselves, however much we may wander away consciously, deliberately or unconsciously, subtly, the conflict, the pleasure, the pain, the fear and so on are always there. They ultimately dominate. You may try to suppress them, you may try to put them away deliberately with an act of will but they surface again. And pleasure is one of the factors that predominate; it too has the same conflicts, the same pain, the same boredom. The weariness of pleasure and the fret is part of this turmoil of our life. You can't escape it, my friend. You can't escape from this deep unfathomed turmoil unless you really give thought to it, not only thought but see by careful attention, diligent watching, the whole movement of thought and the self. You may say all this is too tiresome, perhaps unnecessary. But if you do not pay attention to this, give heed, the future is not only going to be more destructive, more intolerable but without much significance. All this is not a dampening, depressing point of view, it is actually so. What you are now is what you will be in the coming days. You can't avoid it. It is as definite as the sun rising and setting. This is the share of all man, of all humanity, unless we all change, each one of us, change to something that is not projected by thought. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA FRIDAY 25TH MARCH, 1983 IT IS THE second day of a spring morning. It's lovely. It is extraordinarily beautiful here. It rained last night heavily and everything is again washed clean and all the leaves are shining bright in the sunlight. There is a scent in the air of many flowers and the sky is blue, dotted with passing clouds. The beauty of such a morning is timeless. It isn't this morning: it is the morning of the whole world. It is the morning of a thousand yesterdays. It is the morning that one hopes will continue, will last endlessly. It is a morning that is full of soft sunlight, sparkling, clear, and the air is so pure here, fairly high up the valley. The orange trees and the bright yellow oranges have been washed clean and they are shining as though it was the first morning of their birth. The earth is heavy with the rain and there is snow on the high mountains. It is really a timeless morning. Across the valley the far mountains enclosing this valley are eager for the sun, for it has been a cold night, and all the rocks and the pebbles and the little stream seem to be aware and full of life. You sit quietly far from everything and look at the blue sky, feel the whole earth, the purity and the loveliness of everything that lives and moves on this earth - except man of course. Man is what he is now after many thousands of centuries of time. And he will go on perhaps in the same manner; what he is now is what he will be tomorrow and a thousand tomorrows. Time, evolution, has brought him to what he is now. The future is what he is unless, of course, there is a deep abiding mutation of his whole psyche. Time has become extraordinarily important to man, to all of us -time to learn, time to have a skill, time to become and time to die, time both outwardly in the physical world and time in the psychological world. It is necessary to have time to learn a language, to learn how to drive, to learn how to speak, to acquire knowledge. If you had no time you couldn't put things together to bring about a house; you must have time to lay brick upon brick. You must have time to go from here to where you want to go. Time is an extraordinary factor in our life - to acquire, to dispense, to be healed, to write a simple letter. And we seem to think we need psychological time, the time of what has been, modified now and continuing in the future. Time is the past, the present and the future. Man inwardly pins his hope on time; hope is time, the future, the endless tomorrows, time to become inwardly - one is `this', one will become `that'. The becoming, as in the physical world, from the little operator to the big operator, from the nonentity to the highest in some profession - to become. We think we need time to change from `this' to `that'. The very words `change' and `hope' intrinsically imply time. One can understand that time is necessary to travel, to reach a port, to reach land after a long flight to the desired place. The desired place is the future. That is fairly obvious and time is necessary in that realm of achieving, gaining, becoming proficient in some profession, in a career that demands training. There, time seems not only necessary but must exist. And in the world of the psyche this same movement, this becoming, is extended. But is there psychological becoming at all? We never question that. We have accepted it as natural. The religions, the evolutionary books, have informed us that we need time to change from `what is' to `what should be'. The distance covered is time. And we have accepted that there is a certain pleasure and pain in becoming non-violent when one is violent, that to achieve the ideal needs an enormous amount of time. And we have followed this pattern all the days of our life, blindly, never questioning. We don't doubt. We follow the old traditional pattern. And perhaps that is one of the miseries of man -the hope of fulfilment, and the pain that that fulfilment, that hope, is not achieved, is not come by easily. Is there actually time in the psychological world - that is, to change that which is to something totally different? Why do ideals, ideologies, whether political or religious, exist at all? Is it not one of the divisive concepts of man that has brought about conflict? After all, the ideologies, the left, right or centre, are put together by study, by the activity of thought, weighing, judging, and coming to a conclusion, and so shutting the door on all fuller enquiry. Ideologies have existed perhaps as long as man can remember. They are like belief or faith that separate man from man. And this separation comes about through time. The `me', the I, the ego, the person, from the family to the group, to the tribe, to the nation. One wonders if the tribal divisions can ever be bridged over. Man has tried to unify nations, which are really glorified tribalism. You cannot unify nations. They will always remain separate. Evolution has separate groups. We maintain wars, religious and otherwise. And time will not change this. Knowledge, experience, definite conclusions, will never bring about that global comprehension, global relationship, a global mind. So the question is: is there a possibility of bringing about a change in `what is', the actuality, totally disregarding the movement of time? Is there a possibility of changing violence - not by becoming non-violent, that is merely the opposite of `what is'? The opposite of `what is' is merely another movement of thought. Our question is: can envy, with all its implications, be changed without time being involved at all, knowing that the word change itself implies time - not even transformed, for the very word transform means to move from one form to another form - but to radically end envy without time? Time is thought. Time is the past. Time is motive. Without any motive can there be - and we will use the word - change? Does not the very word motive already imply a direction, a conclusion? And when there is a motive there is actually no change at all. Desire is again a rather complex thing, complex in its structure. Desire to bring about a change, or the will to change, becomes the motive and therefore that motive distorts that which has to be changed, that which has to end. The ending has no time. Clouds are slowly gathering around the mountain, clouds are moving to blot out the sun and probably it will rain again, as yesterday. For here in this part of the world it is the season of rain. It never rains in the summer time; when it is hot and dry, this valley is desert. Beyond the hills the desert lies out there, open, endless and bleak. And at other times it is very beautiful, so vast in its space. The very vastness of it makes it a desert. When the spring disappears it gets hotter and hotter and the trees seem to wither and the flowers have gone and the dry heat makes all things clean again. `Why do you say, sir, that time is unnecessary for change?' `Let us together find out what is the truth of the matter, not accepting what one has said, or disagreeing, but together have a dialogue to explore into this matter. One is trained to believe and it is the tradition that time is necessary for change. That is correct, is it not? Time is used to become from what one is to something greater, to something more. We are not talking about the physical time, the time necessary to gain a physical skill, but rather we are considering whether the psyche can become more than what it is, better than what it is, reach a higher state of consciousness. That is the whole movement of measurement, comparison. Together we are asking, are we not, what does change imply? We live in disorder, confused, uncertain, reacting against this and for that. We are seeking reward and avoiding punishment. We want to be secure, yet everything we do seems to bring about insecurity. This, and more, brings about disorder in our daily life. You can't be disordered in business, for example, or negligent. You have to be precise, think clearly, logically. But we do not carry that same attitude into the psychological world. We have this constant urge to move away from "what is", to become something other than the understanding of "what is", to avoid the causes of disorder.' `That I understand,' the questioner said. `We do escape from "what is". We never consider carefully, diligently, what is going on, what is happening now in each one of us. We do try to suppress or transcend "what is". If we have a great deal of pain, psychologically, inwardly, we never look at it carefully. We want immediately to erase it, to find some consolation. And always there is this struggle to reach a state where there is no pain, where there is no disorder. But the very attempt to bring about order seems to increase disorder, or bring about other problems.' `I do not know if you have noticed that when the politicians try to resolve one problem, that very resolution multiplies other problems. This again is going on all the time.' `Are you saying, sir, that time is not a factor of change? I can vaguely comprehend this but I am not quite sure I really understand it. You are saying in fact that if I have a motive for change, that very motive becomes a hindrance to change, because that motive is my desire, my urge to move away from that which is unpleasant or disturbing to something much more satisfactory, which will give me greater happiness. So a motive or a cause has already dictated, or shaped the end, the psychological end. This I understand. I am getting a glimmer of what you are saying. I am beginning to feel the implication of change without time.' `So let us ask the question: is there a timeless perception of that "which is"? That is, to look at, to observe "what is" without the past, without all the accumulated memories, the names, the words, the reactions - to look at that feeling, at that reaction, which we call, let us say, envy. To observe this feeling without the actor, the actor who is all the remembrance of things that have happened before. `Time is not merely the rising of the sun and the setting, or yesterday, today and tomorrow. Time is much more complicated, more intricate, subtle. And really to understand the nature and the depth of time one has to meditate upon whether time has a stop -not fictitious time nor the imagination that conjures up so many fantastic, romantic probabilities - but whether time, really, actually, in the field of the psyche, can ever come to an end? That is really the question. One can analyse the nature of time, investigate it, and try to find out whether the continuity of the psyche is a reality or the desperate hope of man to cling to something that will give him some sort of security, comfort. Does time have its roots in heaven? When you look at the heavens, the planets and the unimaginable number of stars, can that universe be understood by the time-bound quality of the mind? Is time necessary to grasp, to understand, the whole movement of the cosmos and of the human being - to see instantly that which is always true? `One should really, if one may point out, hold it in your mind, not think about it, but just observe the whole movement of time, which is really the movement of thought. Thought and time are not two different things, two different movements, actions. Time is thought and thought is time. Is there, to put it differently, the actual ending of thought? That is, the ending of knowledge? Knowledge is time, thought is time, and we are asking whether this accumulating process of knowledge, gathering more and more information, pursuing more and more the intricacies of existence, can end? Can thought, which is after all the essence of the psyche, the fears, the pleasures, the anxieties, the loneliness, the sorrow and the concept of the I - I as separate from another - this self-centred activity of selfishness, can all that come to an end? When death comes there is the ending of all that. But we are not talking about death, the final ending, but whether we can actually perceive that thought, time, have an ending. `Knowledge after all is the accumulation through time of various experiences, the recording of various incidents, happenings, and so on; this recording is naturally stored in the brain, this recording is the essence of time. Can we find out when recording is necessary, and whether psychological recording is necessary at all? It is not dividing the necessary knowledge and skill, but beginning to understand the nature of recording, why human beings record and from that recording react and act. When one is insulted or psychologically hurt by a word, by a gesture, by an action, why should that hurt be recorded? Is it possible not to record the flattery or the insult so that the psyche is never cluttered up, so that it has vast space, and the psyche that we are conscious of as the "me", which again is put together by thought and time, comes to an end? We are always afraid of something that we have never seen, perceived - something not experienced. You can't experience truth. To experience there must be the experiencer. The experiencer is the result of time, accumulated memory, knowledge and so on. `As we said at the beginning, time demands quick, watchful, attentive understanding. In our daily life can we exist without the concept of the future? Not concept - forgive me, not the word concept - but can one live without time, inwardly? The roots of heaven are not in time and thought.' `Sir, what you say has actually, in daily life, become a reality. Your various statements about time and thought seem now, while I am listening to you, so simple, so clear, and perhaps for a second or two there is the ending and stopping of time. But when I go back to my ordinary routine, the weariness and the boredom of it all, even pleasure becomes rather wearisome - when I go back I will pick up the old threads. It seems so extraordinarily difficult to let go of the threads and look, without reaction, at the way of time. But I am beginning to understand (and I hope it is not only verbally) that there is a possibility of not recording, if I may use your word. I realize I am the record. I have been programmed to be this or that. One can see that fairly easily and perhaps put all that aside. But the ending of thought and the intricacies of time need a great deal of observation, a great deal of investigation. But who is to investigate, for the investigator himself is the result of time? I catch something. You are really saying; just watch without any reaction, give total attention to the ordinary things of life and there discover the possibility of ending time and thought. Thank you indeed for this interesting talk.' KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF BROCKWOOD PARK THURSDAY 31ST MARCH, 1983 IT HAD BEEN raining all day and the clouds hung low over the valley and the hills and the mountains. You couldn't see the hills at all. It is a rather gloomy morning but there are new leaves, new flowers, and the little things are growing fast. It is spring and there is all this cloud and gloom. The earth is recovering from the winter and in this recovery there is great beauty. It has been raining almost every day for the last month and a half; there have been great storms and winds, destroying many houses and land sliding down the hillside. All along the coast there is great destruction. In this part of the country everything seems to have been so extravagant. It is never the same from winter to winter, One winter you may have hardly any rain, and in other winters there may be most destructive rain, huge monstrous waves, the roads awash, and though it was spring the elements were never graceful with the land. There are demonstrations all over the country against particular kinds of war, against nuclear destruction. There are pros and cons. The politicians talk about defence, but actually there is no defence; there is only war, there is only killing millions of people. This is rather a difficult situation. It is a great problem which man is facing. One side wants to expand in its own way, the other is aggressively pushing, selling arms, bringing about certain definite ideologies and invading lands. Man is now posing a question he should have put to himself many years ago, not at the last moment. He has been preparing for wars all the days of his life. Preparation for war seems unfortunately to be our natural tendency. Having come a long way along that path we are now saying: what shall we do? What are we human beings to do? Actually facing the issue, what is our responsibility? This is what is really facing our present humanity, not what kinds of instruments of war we should invent and build. We always bring about a crisis and then ask ourselves what to do. Given the situation as it is now, the politicians and the vast general public will decide with their national, racial, pride, with their fatherlands and motherlands and all the rest of it, The question is too late. The question we must put to ourselves, in spite of the immediate action to be taken, is whether it is possible to stop all wars, not a particular kind of war, the nuclear or the orthodox, and find out most earnestly what are the causes of war. Until those causes are discovered, dissolved, whether we have conventional war or the nuclear form of war, we will go on and man will destroy man. So we should really ask: what are essentially, fundamentally, the causes of war? See together the true causes, not invented, not romantic, patriotic causes and all that nonsense, but actually see why man prepares to murder legally - war. Until we research and find the answer, wars will go on. But we are not seriously enough considering, or committed to, the uncovering of the causes of war. Putting aside what we are now faced with, the immediacy of the issue, the present crisis, can we not together discover the true causes and put them aside, dissolve them? This needs the urge to find the truth. Why is there, one must ask, this division - the Russian, the American, the British, the French, the German and so on - why is there this division between man and man, between race and race, culture against culture, one series of ideologies against another? Why? Why is there this separation? Man has divided the earth as yours and mine - why? Is it that we try to find security, self-protection, in a particular group, or in a particular belief, faith? For religions also have divided man, put man against man - the Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians, the Jews and so on. Nationalism, with its unfortunate patriotism, is really a glorified form, an ennobled form, of tribalism. In a small tribe or in a very large tribe there is a sense of being together, having the same language, the same superstitions, the same kind of political, religious system. And one feels safe, protected, happy, comforted. And for that safety, comfort, we are willing to kill others who have the same kind of desire to be safe, to feel protected, to belong to something. This terrible desire to identify oneself with a group, with a flag, with a religious ritual and so on, gives us the feeling that we have roots, that we are not homeless wanderers. There is the desire, the urge, to find one's roots. And also we have divided the world into economic spheres, with all their problems. Perhaps one of the major causes of war is heavy industry. When industry and economics go hand in hand with politics they must inevitably sustain a separative activity to maintain their economic stature. All countries are doing this, the great and the small. The small are being armed by the big nations -some quietly, surreptitiously, others openly. Is the cause of all this misery, suffering, and the enormous waste of money on armaments, the visible sustenance of pride, of wanting to be superior to others? It is our earth, not yours or mine or his. We are meant to live on it, helping each other, not destroying each other. This is not some romantic nonsense but the actual fact. But man has divided the earth, hoping thereby that in the particular he is going to find happiness, security, a sense of abiding comfort. Until a radical change takes place and we wipe out all nationalities, all ideologies, all religious divisions, and establish a global relationship -psychologically first, inwardly before organizing the outer - we shall go on with wars. If you harm others, if you kill others, whether in anger or by organized murder which is called war, you, who are the rest of humanity, not a separate human being fighting the rest of mankind, are destroying yourself. This is the real issue, the basic issue, which you must understand and resolve. Until you are committed, dedicated, to eradicating this national, economic, religious division, you are perpetuating war, you are responsible for all wars whether nuclear or traditional. This is really a very important and urgent question: whether man, you, can bring about this change in yourself - not say. `If I change, will it have any value? Won't it be just a drop in a vast lake and have no effect at all? What is the point of my changing?' That is a wrong question, if one may point out. It is wrong because you are the rest of mankind. You are the world, you are not separate from the world. You are not an American, Russian, Hindu or Muslim. You are apart from these labels and words, you are the rest of mankind because your consciousness, your reactions, are similar to the others. You may speak a different language, have different customs, that is superficial culture - all cultures apparently are superficial - but your consciousness, your reactions, your faith, your beliefs, your ideologies, your fears, anxieties, loneliness, sorrow and pleasure, are similar to the rest of mankind. If you change it will affect the whole of mankind. This is important to consider - not vaguely, superficially - in enquiring into, researching, seeking out, the causes of war. War can only be understood and put an end to if you and all those who are concerned very deeply with the survival of man, feel that you are utterly responsible for killing others. What will make you change? What will make you realize the appalling situation that we have brought about now? What will make you turn your face against all division - religious, national, ethical and so on? Will more suffering? But you have had thousands upon thousands of years of suffering and man has not changed; he still pursues the same tradition, same tribalism, the same religious divisions of 'my god' and `your god'. The gods or their representatives are invented by thought; they have actually no reality in daily life. Most religions have said that to kill human beings is the greatest sin. Long before Christianity, the Hindus said this, the Buddhists said it, yet people kill in spite of their belief in god, or their belief in a saviour and so on; they still pursue the path of killing. Will the reward of heaven change you or the punishment of hell? That too has been offered to man. And that too has failed. No external imposition, laws, systems, will ever stop the killing of man. Nor will any intellectual, romantic, conviction stop wars. They will stop only when you, as the rest of humanity, see the truth that as long as there is division in any form, there must be conflict, limited or wide, narrow or expansive, that there must be struggle, conflict, pain. So you are responsible, not only to your children, but to the rest of humanity. Unless you deeply understand this, not verbally or ideationally or merely intellectually, but feel this in your blood, in your way of looking at life, in your actions, you are supporting organized murder which is called war. The immediacy of perception is far more important than the immediacy of answering a question which is the outcome of a thousand years of man killing man. The world is sick and there is no one outside you to help you except yourself. We have had leaders, specialists, every kind of external agency, including god - they have had no effect; they have in no way influenced your psychological state. They cannot guide you. No statesman, no teacher, no guru, no one can make you strong inwardly, supremely healthy. As long as you are in disorder, as long as your house is not kept in a proper condition, a proper state, you will create the external prophet, and he will always be misleading you. Your house is in disorder and no one on this earth or in heaven can bring about order in your house. Unless you yourself understand the nature of disorder, the nature of conflict, the nature of division, your house, that is you, will always remain in disorder, at war. It is not a question of who has the greatest military might, but rather it is man against man, man who has put together ideologies, and these ideologies, which man has made, are against each other. Until these ideas, ideologies, end and man becomes responsible for other human beings, there cannot possibly be peace in the world. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA MONDAY 18TH APRIL, 1983 IT IS A new day and the sun won't be up for an hour or so. It is quite dark and the trees are silent, waiting for the dawn and the sun to rise behind the hills. There ought to be a prayer for dawn. It comes so slowly, penetrating the whole world. And here in this quiet secluded house, surrounded by orange trees and a few flowers, it is extraordinarily quiet. There are no birds as yet singing their morning song. The world is asleep, at least in this part of the world, far from all civilization, from the noise, the brutality, the vulgarity and the talk of politicians. Slowly, with great patience, the dawn begins in the deep silence of the night. It was broken by the mourning dove and the hoot of an owl. There are several owls here, they were calling to each other. And the hills and the trees are beginning to awaken. In silence the dawn begins, it gets lighter and lighter, and the dew is on the leaf and the sun is just climbing over the hill. The first rays of the sun are caught in those tall trees, in that old oak that has been there for a very, very long time. And the mourning dove begins with its soft mournful call. Across the road, across the orange trees, there is a peacock calling. Even in this part of the world there are peacocks, at least there are a few of them. And the day has begun. It is a wonderful day. It is so new, so fresh, so alive and full of beauty. It is a new day without any past remembrances, without the call of another. There is great wonder when one looks at all the beauties - those bright oranges with the dark leaves, and the few flowers, bright in their glory. One wonders at this extraordinary light which only this part of the world seems to have. One wonders as one looks at the creation which seems to have no beginning and no end - a creation not by cunning thought, but the creation of a new morning. This morning it is as it has never been before, so bright, so clear. And the blue hills are looking down. It is the creation of a new day as it has never been before. There is a squirrel with a long bushy tail, quivering and shy in the old pepper tree which has lost many branches; it is getting very old. It must have seen many storms, as the oak has in its old age, quiet, with a great dignity. It is a new morning, full of an ancient life; it has no time, no problems. It exists and that in itself is a miracle. It is a new morning without any memory. All the past days are over, gone, and the voice of the mourning dove comes across the valley, and the sun is now over the hill, covering the earth. And it too has no yesterday. The trees in the sun and the flowers have no time. It is the miracle of a new day. `We want continuity,' said the man. `Continuity is part of our life. Continuity of generation after generation, of tradition, of the things we have known and remembered. We crave continuity and we must have it. Otherwise what are we? Continuity is in the very roots of our being. To be is to continue. Death may come, there may be an end to many things but there is always the continuity. We go back to find our roots, our identity. If one has kept one's beginning as a family, probably one can trace it, generation after generation for many centuries, if one is interested in that kind of thing. The continuity of the worship of god, the continuity of ideologies, the continuity of opinions, values, judgements, conclusions - there is a continuity in all the things one has remembered. There is a continuity from the moment we are born until we die, with all the experiences, all the knowledge that man has acquired. Is it an illusion?' `What has continuity? That oak, probably two hundred years old, has a continuity until it dies or is chopped down by man. And what is this continuity which man wants, craves for? The name, the form, the bank account, the things remembered? Memory has a continuity, remembrances of that which has been. The whole psyche is memory and nothing else. We attribute to the psyche a great many things - qualities, virtues, ignoble deeds, and the exercise of many clever acts in the outer and the inner world. And if one examines diligently, without any bias or conclusion, one begins to see that our whole existence with the vast network of memories, remembrances, the things that have happened before, all have continuity. And we cling to that desperately.' The squirrel has come back. It has been away for a couple of hours; now it is back on the branch nibbling at something, watching, listening, extraordinarily alert and aware, alive, quivering with excitement. It comes and goes without telling you where it is going and when it is coming back. And as the day is getting warmer, the dove and the birds have gone. There are a few pigeons flying from one place to another in a group. You can hear their wings beating in the air. There used to be a fox here - one hasn't seen it for a long time. Probably it has gone away for ever. There are too many people about. There are plenty of rodents but people are dangerous. And this is a shy little squirrel and wayward as the swallow. Although there is no continuity except memory, is there in the whole human being, in the brain, a place, a spot, an area small or vast, where memory doesn't exist at all, which memory has never touched? It is a remarkable thing to look at all this, to feel your way sanely, rationally, see the complexity and the intricacies of memory, and its continuity which is, after all, knowledge. Knowledge is always in the past, knowledge is the past. The past is vast accumulated memory as tradition. And when you have trodden that path diligently, sanely, you must inevitably ask: is there an area in the human brain, or in the very nature and structure of a human being, not merely in the outer world of his activities but inwardly, deep in the vast quiet recesses of his own brain, something that is not the outcome of memory, not the movement of a continuity? The hills and the trees, the meadows and the groves, will continue as long as the earth exists unless man in his cruelty and despair destroys it all. The stream, the spring, from which it comes, have a continuity, but one never asks whether the hills and beyond the hills have their own continuity. If there is no continuity what is there? There is nothing. One is afraid to be nothing. Nothing means not a thing - nothing put together by thought, nothing put together by memory, remembrances, nothing that you can put into words and then measure. There is most certainly, definitely, an area where the past doesn't cast a shadow, where time, the past or the future or the present, has no meaning. We have always tried to measure with words something that we don't know. What we do not know we try to understand and give it words and make it into a continuous noise. And so we clog our brain which is already clogged with past vents, experiences, knowledge. We think knowledge is psychologically of great importance, but it is not. You can't ascend through knowledge; there must be an end to knowledge for the new to be. New is a word for something which has never been before. And that area cannot be understood or grasped by words or symbols: it is there beyond all remembrances. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA TUESDAY 19TH APRIL, 1983 THIS WINTER THERE has been constant rain, day after day practically for the last three months. It is rather an extravagance of California - either it doesn't rain at all or it rains to drown the land. There have been great storms and very few sunny days. It has been raining all yesterday and this morning the clouds are low down on the hills and it is rather gloomy. All the leaves are beaten down by the rain of yesterday. The earth is very wet. The trees and that magnificent oak must be asking where the sun is. On this particular morning with the clouds hiding the mountains and the hills almost down to the valley, what does it mean to be serious? What does it mean to have a very quiet serious mind - or, if you will, brain? Are we ever serious? Or do we always live in a world of superficiality, walking to and fro, fighting, quarrelling, violent over something utterly trivial? What does it mean to have a brain that is very awake, not limited by its own thoughts, memories and remembrances? What does it mean to have a brain that is free from all the turmoil of life, all the pain, all the anxiety and the endless sorrow? Is it ever possible to have a totally free mind, free brain, not shaped by influences, by experience and the vast accumulation of knowledge? Knowledge is time; learning means time. To learn to play the violin takes infinite patience, months of practice, years of dedicated concentration. Learning to acquire a skill, learning to become an athlete or to put together a good engine or to go to the moon - all this requires time. But is there anything to learn about the psyche, about what you are - all the vagaries, the intricacies of one's reactions and actions, the hope, the failure, the sorrow and joy - what is there to learn about all that? As we said, in a certain area of one's physical existence, gathering knowledge and acting from that knowledge, requires time. Is it that we carry that same principle, extend that same movement of time into the psychological world? There too we say we must learn about ourselves, about our reactions, our behaviour, our elations and depressions, ideations and so on; we think that all that requires time too. You can learn about the limited, but you cannot learn about the unlimited. And we try to learn about the whole field of the psyche, and say that needs time. But time may be an illusion in that area, it may be an enemy. Thought creates the illusion, and that illusion evolves, grows, extends. The illusion of all religious activity must have begun very, very simply, and now look where it is - with immense power, vast properties, great accumulation of art, wealth, and the religious hierarchy demanding obedience, urging you to have more faith. All that is the expansion, the cultivation and the evolution of illusion which has taken many centuries. And the psyche is the whole content of consciousness, is the memory of all things past and dead. We give such importance to memory. The psyche is memory. All tradition is merely the past. We cling to that and want to learn all about it, and think that time is necessary for that as in the other area. I wonder if one ever asks whether time has a stop - time to become, time to fulfil? Is there anything to learn about all that? Or can one see that the whole movement of this illusory memory, which appears so real, can end? If time has a stop, then what is the relationship between that which lies beyond time and all the physical activities of the brain as memory, knowledge, remembrances, experiences? What is the relationship between the two? Knowledge and thought, as we have often said, are limited. The limited cannot possibly have any relationship with the unlimited but the unlimited can have some kind of communication with the limited, though that communication must always be limited, arrow, fragmentary. One might ask, if one is commercially minded, what is the use of all this, what is the use of the unlimited, what can man profit by it? We always want a reward. We live on the principle of punishment and reward, like a dog which has been trained, you reward him when he obeys. And we are almost similar in the sense that we want to be rewarded for our actions, for our obedience and so on. Such demand is born out of the limited brain. The brain is the centre of thought and thought is ever limited under all circumstances. It may invent the extraordinary, theoretical, immeasurable, but its invention is always limited. That is why one has to be completely free from all the travail and toil of life and from self-centred activity for the unlimited to be. That which is immeasurable cannot be measured by words. We are always trying to put the immeasurable into a frame of words, and the symbol is not the actual. But we worship the symbol, therefore we always live in a limited state. So with the clouds hanging on the tree tops and all the birds quiet, waiting for the thunderstorm, this is a good morning to be serious, to question the whole of existence, to question the very gods and all human activity. Our lives are so short and during that short period there is nothing to learn about the whole field of the psyche, which is the movement of memory; we can only observe it. Observe without any movement of thought, observe without time, without past knowledge, without the observer who is the essence of the past. Just watch. Watch those clouds shaping and reshaping, watch the trees, the little birds. It is all part of life. When you watch attentively, with diligence, there is nothing to learn; there is only that vast space, silence and emptiness, which is all-consuming energy. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA WEDNESDAY 20TH APRIL, 1983 AT THE END of every leaf, the large leaves and the tiny leaves, there was a drop of water sparkling in the sun like an extraordinary jewel. And there was a slight breeze but that breeze didn't in any way disturb or destroy that drop on those leaves that were washed clean by the late rain. It was a very quiet morning, full of delight, peaceful, and with a sense of benediction in the air. And as we watched the sparkling light on every clean leaf, the earth became extraordinarily beautiful, in spite of all the telegraph wires and their ugly posts. In spite of all the noise of the world, the earth was rich, abiding, enduring. And though there were earthquakes here and there, most destructive, the earth was still beautiful. One never appreciates the earth unless one really lives with it, works with it, puts one's hands in the dust, lifting big rocks and stones - one never knows the extraordinary sense of being with the earth, the flowers, the gigantic trees and the strong grass and the hedges along the road. Everything was alive that morning. As we watched, there was a sense of great joy and the heavens were blue, the sun was slowly coming out of the hills and there was light. As we watched the mocking bird on the wire, it was doing its antics, jumping high, doing a somersault, then coming down on the same spot on the wire. As we watched the bird enjoying itself, jumping in the air and then coming down circling, with its shrill cries, its enjoyment of life, only that bird existed, the watcher didn't exist. The watcher was no longer there, only the bird, grey and white, with a longish tail. That watching was without any movement of thought, watching the flurry of the bird that was enjoying itself. We never watch for long. When we watch with great patience, watch without any sense of the watcher, watch those birds, those droplets on the quivering leaves, the bees and the flowers and the long trail of ants, then time ceases, time has a stop. One doesn't take time to watch or have the patience to watch. One learns a great deal through watching - watching people, the way they walk, their talk, their gestures. You can see through their vanity or their negligence of their own bodies. They are indifferent, they are callous. There was an eagle flying high in the air, circling without the beat of the wings, carried away by the air current beyond the hills and was lost. Watching, learning: learning is time but watching has no time. Or when you listen, listen without any interpretation, without any reaction, listen without any bias. Listen to that thunder in the skies, the thunder rolling among the hills. One never listens completely, there is always interruption. Watching and listening are a great art - watching and listening without any reaction, without any sense of the listener or the see-er. By watching and listening we learn infinitely more than from any book. Books are necessary, but watching and listening sharpen your senses. For, after all, the brain is the centre of all the reactions, thoughts and remembrances. But if your senses are not highly awakened you cannot really watch and listen and learn, not only how to act but about learning, which is the very soil in which the seed of goodness can grow. When there is this simple, clear watching and listening, then there is an awareness - awareness of the colour of those flowers, red, yellow, white, of the spring leaves, the stems, so tender, so delicate, awareness of the heavens, the earth and those people who are passing by. They have been chattering along that long road, never looking at the trees, at the flowers, at the skies and the marvellous hills. They are not even aware of what is going on around them. They talk a great deal about the environment, how we must protect nature and so on, but it seems they are not aware of the beauty and the silence of the hills and the dignity of a marvellous old tree. They are not even aware of their own thoughts, their own reactions, nor are they aware of the way they walk, of their clothes. It does not mean that they are to be self-centred in their watching, in their awareness, but just be aware. When you are aware there is a choice of what to do, what not to do, like and dislike, your biases, your fears, your anxieties, the joys which you have remembered, the pleasures that you have pursued; in all this there is choice, and we think that choice gives us freedom. We like that freedom to choose; we think freedom is necessary to choose - or, rather, that choice gives us a sense of freedom - but there is no choice when you see things very, very clearly. And that leads us to an awareness without choice - to be aware without any like or dislike. When there is this really simple, honest, choiceless awareness it leads to another factor, which is attention. The word itself means to stretch out, to grasp, to hold on, but that is still the activity of the brain, it is in the brain. Watching, awareness, attention, are within the area of the brain, and the brain is limited - conditioned by all the ways of past generations, the impressions, the traditions and all the folly and the goodness of man. So all action from this attention is still limited, and that which is limited must inevitably bring disorder. When one is thinking about oneself from morning until night - one's own worries, one's own desires, demands and fulfilments - this self-centredness, being very, very limited, must cause friction in its relationship with another, who is also limited; there must be friction, there must be strain and disturbances of many kinds, the perpetual violence of human beings. When one is attentive to all this, choicelessly aware, then out of that comes insight. Insight is not an act of remembrance, the continuation of memory. Insight is like a flash of light. You see with absolute clarity, all the complications, the consequences, the intricacies. Then this very insight is action, complete. In that there are no regrets, no looking back, no sense of being weighed down, no discrimination. This is pure, clear insight - perception without any shadow of doubt. Most of us begin with certainty and as we grow older the certainty changes to uncertainty and we die with uncertainty. But if one begins with uncertainty, doubting, questioning, asking demanding, with real doubt about man's behaviour, about all the religious rituals and their images and their symbols, then out of that doubt comes the clarity of certainty. When there is clear insight into violence, for instance, that very insight banishes all violence. That insight is outside the brain, if one can so put it.It is not of time. It is not of remembrance or of knowledge, and so that insight and its action changes the very brain cells. That insight is complete and from that completeness there can be logical, sane, rational, action. This whole movement from watching, listening, to the thunder of insight, is one movement; it is not coming to it step by step. It is like a swift arrow. And that insight alone can uncondition the brain, not the effort of thought, which is determination, seeing the necessity for something; none of that will bring about total freedom from conditioning. All this is time and the ending of time. Man is time-bound and that bondage to time is the movement of thought. So where there is an ending to thought and to time there is total insight. Only then can there be the flowering of the brain. Only then can you have a complete relationship with the mind. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA THURSDAY 21ST APRIL, 1983 THERE IS A cabin high among the hills, somewhat isolated although there are other cabins there. The cabin was among those gigantic marvellous old trees, the sequoias. * Some of them are said to have existed from the time of the ancient Egyptians, perhaps from Rameses the Second. They are really marvellous trees. Their bark is rose-coloured and bright in the morning sunlight. These trees cannot be burnt; their bark resists fire and I you can see where the old Indians built a fire round the tree; the dark mark of fire is still there. They are really quite gigantic in size, their trunks are enormous and if you sit very still under them in the morning light, with the sun among the tree tops, all the squirrels there will come up quite close to you. They are very inquisitive like the blue-jays, for there are jays too, blue, blue birds, always ready to scold you, asking why you are there, telling you that you are disturbing their area and should go away as quickly as possible. But if you remain quiet, watching, looking at the beauty of the sunlight among the leaves in the still air, then they will leave you alone, accept you as the squirrels do. It was not the season, so the cabins were empty and you were alone, and at night it was so silent. And occasionally the bears would come and you could hear their heavy bodies against the cabin. It could have been quite a savage place, for modern civilization had not quite destroyed it. You have to climb from the planes, in and out, up and up and up, until you reach this sequoia forest. There were streams rushing down the slope. It was so extraordinarily beautiful to be alone among these vast, very tall great trees, ancient beyond the memory and so utterly unconcerned with what was going on in the world, silent in their ancient dignity and strength. And in this cabin, surrounded by these old ageless trees, you were alone day after day, watching, taking long walks, hardly meeting anyone. From such a height you could see the planes, sunlit, busy; you could see the cars like small insects chasing one another. And up here only the real insects were busy about their day. There were a great many ants. The red ones crawled over your legs but they never seemed to pay much attention to you. From this cabin you fed the squirrels. There was one particular squirrel that would come every morning and you had a bag of peanuts and you would give them to it one by one: it would stuff it in its mouth, cross over the window-sill and come to the table with its bushy tail curled up, almost touching its head. It would take many of these shelled peanuts, or sometimes even the unshelled ones, and jump back across the window-sill down to the veranda and along the open space into a dead tree with a hollow in it which was its home. It would come perhaps for an hour or more wanting these peanuts, back and forth, back and forth. And it was quite tame by then, you could stroke it, it was so soft, so gentle, it looked with eyes of surprise and then friendship. It knew you wouldn't hurt it. One day, closing all the windows when it was inside and the bag of peanuts was on the table, it took the usual mouthful and then went to the windows and the door, which were all closed, and realized it was a prisoner. It came hopping along to the table, jumped on to it, looked at one and began to scold. After all, you couldn't keep that lively beautiful thing as a prisoner, so you opened the windows. It jumped down to the floor, climbed over the window-sill, went back to the dead trunk and came right back asking for more. From then on we were really great friends. After it had stuffed that hole full of peanuts, probably for the winter, it would go along up the trunks of the trees chasing other squirrels and would always come back to its dead trunk. Then sometimes of an evening it would come to the window-sill and sit there and would chatter, looking at me, telling me something of the day's work, and as it grew darker it said goodnight and jumped back to its home in the hole in the dead old tree. And the next morning early it would be there on the window-sill calling, chattering, and the day would begin. Every animal in that forest, every little thing, was doing the same - gathering food, chasing others in fun and in anger, and the big animals like the deer were curious and looked at you. And as you climbed to a moderate height and went along a rocky path, you turned and there was a big bear, black with four cubs, as large as large cats. It pushed them up a tree, the four of them, and they climbed up to safety, and then the mother turned round and looked at me. Strangely we weren't afraid. We looked at each other for perhaps two or three seconds or more and then you turned your back and went down the same path. Only then, when you were safe in your cabin, did you realize how dangerous had been this encounter with a mother bear with four cubs. Life is an endless process of becoming and ending. This great country was still unsophisticated in those days; it was not so terribly advanced technologically and there was not too much vulgarity, as there is now. Sitting on the steps of that cabin you watched and everything was active - the trees, the ants, the rabbits, the deer, the bear and the squirrel. Life is action. Life is a series of continuous, endless action until you die. Action born of desire is distorted, is limited, and this limited action must invariably, do what you will, bring about endless conflict. Anything that is limited must in its very nature breed many problems, crises. It is like a man, like a human being, who is all the time thinking about himself, his problems, his experiences, his joys and pleasures, his business affairs - completely self-centred. The activity of such a person is naturally very limited. One never realizes the limitation of this self-centredness. They call it fulfilment, expressing oneself, achieving success, the pursuit of pleasure and becoming something inwardly, the urge, the desire to be. All such activity must not only be limited and distorted but its successive actions in whatever direction must inevitably breed fragmentation, as is seen in this world. Desire is very strong; the monks and the sannyasis of the world have tried to suppress it, tried to identify that burning flame with some noble symbols or some image - identifying the desire with something greater - but it is still desire. Whatever action comes out of desire, may it be called noble or ignoble, is still limited, distorted. Now the blue-jay has come back; it is there after its morning meal, scolding to be noticed. And you threw it a few peanuts. It scolded first, then hopped down to the ground, caught a few of them in its beak, flew back on to the branch, flew off, came back scolding. And it too, day by day, became gradually tame. It came quite close with bright eyes, its tail up, the blue shining with such brightness and clarity - a blue that no painter can catch. And it scolded other birds. Probably that was its domain and it didn't want any intruders. But there are always intruders. Other birds soon came. They all seemed to like raisins and peanuts. The whole activity of existence was there. The sun now was high in the heaven and there were very few shadows, but towards the evening there will be long shadows, shapely, sculptured, dark with a smile. Is there an action not of desire? If we ask such a question, and we rarely do, one can probe, without any motive, to find an action which is of intelligence. The action of desire is not intelligent; it leads to all kinds of problems and issues. Is there an action of intelligence? One must always be somewhat sceptical in these matters; doubt is an extraordinary factor of purification of the brain, of the heart. Doubt, carefully measured out, brings great clarity, freedom. In the Eastern religions, to doubt, to question, is one of the necessities for finding truth, but in the religious culture of Western civilization, doubt is an abomination of the devil. But in freedom, in an action that is not of desire, there must be the sparkle of doubt. When one actually sees, not theoretically nor verbally, that the action of desire is corrupt, distorted, the very perception is the beginning of that intelligence from which action is totally different. That is, to see the false as the false, the truth in the false, and truth as truth. Such perception is that quality of intelligence which is neither yours nor mine, which then acts. That action has no distortion, no remorse. It doesn't leave a mark, a footprint on the sands of time. That intelligence cannot be unless there is great compassion, love, if you will. There cannot be compassion if the activities of thought are anchored in any one particular ideology or faith, or attached to a symbol or to a person. There must be freedom to be compassionate. And where there is that flame, that very flame is the movement of intelligence. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA FRIDAY 22ND APRIL, 1983 IT IS ABOUT 1,400 feet up here among the orchards, the orange and avocado, with the hills behind the house. The highest hill around here is about 6,500 feet. Probably it would be called a mountain and the old name is Topa Topa. The former Indians lived here: they must have been very odd and a rather nice race. They may have been cruel but the people who destroyed them were much more cruel. Up here, after a rainy day, nature is waiting breathlessly for another storm, and the world of flowers and the small bushes are rejoicing in this quiet morning, and even the leaves seem so bright, so sharply clear. There is a rose bush that is full of roses, bright red; the beauty of it, the perfume, the stillness of that flower is a marvel. Going down in the old car which has been kept well polished, the engine running smoothly - going down to the village, through the village, past all those small buildings, schools, and then the open space filled with avocados - going down through the ravine, curving in and out on a smooth road, so well made; then going up and up and up, perhaps over 5,000 feet: there the car stopped and there we were high up, overlooking all the hills which were very green, with bushes, trees and deep ravines. It seemed that we were up among the gods. Very few used that road, which went on through the desert to a big town miles away, far to your left. As you face the south you see the very far distant sea - the Pacific. It is so very still here. Though man has made this road, fortunately there is no imprint of man. There have been fires up here but that was years ago. You can see some burnt out stumps, black, but round them it has now become green. There have been heavy rains and everything is now in flower, purple, blue and yellow, with here and there bright red spots. The glory of the earth has never been so deeply passionate as up here. We sat on the side of the road which was quite clean. It was the earth; earth is always clean. And there were little ants, little insects, crawling, running all over the place. But there are no wild animals up here, which is strange. There may be at night - deer, coyotes and perhaps a few rabbits and hares. Occasionally a car passed by, and that broke the silence, the dignity and the purity of silence. This is really an extraordinary place. Words cannot measure the expanse, the rolling hills and the vast space, nor the blue sky and the distant desert. It was the whole earth. One hardly dared to talk there was such compelling silence, not to be disturbed. And that silence cannot be measured by words. If you were a poet you would probably measure it with words, put it into a poem, but that which is written is not the actual. The word is not the thing. And here, sitting beside a rock which was becoming warm, man did not exist. The rolling hills, the higher mountains, the great sweeping valleys, deep in blue; there was no you, there was nothing but that. From ancient times all civilizations have had this concept of measurement. All their marvellous buildings were based on mathematical measurement. When you look at the Acropolis and the glory of the Parthenon, and the hundred and ten floor buildings of New York, they have all had to have this measurement. Measurement is not only by the rule; measurement exists in the very brain: the tall and the short, the better, the more. This comparative process has existed for time beyond time. We are always comparing. The passing of examinations from school, college, university - our whole way of living has become a series of calculated measurements: the beautiful and the ugly, the noble and ignoble - one's whole set of values, the arguments that end in conclusions, the power of people, the power of nations. Measurement has been necessary to man. And the brain, being conditioned to measurement, to comparison, tries to measure the immeasurable - measuring with words that which cannot ever be measured. It has been a long process for centuries upon centuries -the greater gods and the lesser gods, measuring the vast expanse of the universe and measuring the speed of the athlete. This comparison has brought a great many fears and sorrows. Now, on that rock, a lizard has come to warm itself quite close to us. You can see its black eyes, its scaly back and the long tail. It is so still, motionless. The sun has made that rock quite warm, and the lizard, coming out of its cold night and warming itself, is waiting for some fly or insect to come along - it will measure the distance and snap it up. To live without comparison, to live without any kind of measurement inwardly, never to compare what you are with what you should be. The word `meditation' means not only to ponder, to think over, to probe, to look, to weigh; it also has a much deeper meaning in Sanskrit - to measure, which is `to become'. In meditation there must be no measurement. This meditation must not be a conscious meditation in deliberately chosen postures. This meditation must be totally unconscious, never knowing that you are meditating. If you deliberately meditate it is another form of desire, as any other expression of desire. The objects may vary; your meditation may be to reach the highest, but the motive is the desire to achieve, as the business man, as the builder of a great cathedral. Meditation is a movement without any motive, without words and the activity of thought. It must be something that is not deliberately set about. Only then is meditation a movement in the infinite, measureless to man, without a goal, without an end and without a beginning. And that has a strange action in daily life, because all life is one and then becomes sacred. And that which is sacred can never be killed. To kill another is unholy. It cries to heaven as a bird kept in a cage. One never realizes how sacred life is, not only your little life but the lives of millions of others, from the things of nature to extraordinary human beings. And in meditation which is without measurement, there is the very action of that which is most noble, most sacred and holy. The other day on the banks of a river [this is a memory from when he was at Benares on the banks of the Ganges] - how lovely are rivers; there isn`t only one sacred river, all rivers throughout the world have their own divinity - the other day a man was sitting on the banks of a river wrapt in a fawn coloured cloth. His hands were hidden, his eyes were shut and his body was very still. He had beads in his hands and he was repeating some words and the hands were moving from bead to bead. He had done this for many years and he never missed a bead. And the river rolled along beside him. its current was deep. It began among the great mountains, snowclad and distant; it began as a small stream, and as it moved south it gathered all the small streams and rivers and became a great river. In that part of the world they worshipped it. One does not know for how many years this man had been repeating his mantra and rolling the beads. He was meditating - at least people thought he was meditating and probably he did too. So all the passers-by looked at him, became silent and then went on with their laughter and chatter. That almost motionless figure - one could see through the cloth only a slight action of the fingers - had sat there for a very long time, completely absorbed, for he heard no other sound than the sound of his own words and the rhythm of it, the music of it. And he would say that he was meditating. There are a thousand others like him, all over the world, in quiet deep monasteries among the hills and towns and beside the rivers. Meditation is not words, a mantram, or self-hypnosis, the drug of illusions. It must happen without your volition. It must take place in the quiet stillness of the night, when you are suddenly awake and see that the brain is quiet and there is a peculiar quality of meditation going on. It must take place as silently as a snake among the tall grass, green in the fresh morning light. It must take place in the deep recesses of the brain. Meditation is not an achievement. There is no method, system or practice. Meditation begins with the ending of comparison, the ending of the becoming or not becoming. As the bee whispers among the leaves so the whispering of meditation is action. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA SATURDAY 23RD APRIL, 1983 THE CLOUDS ARE still hanging over the hills, the valley and the mountains. Occasionally there is an opening in the sky and the sun comes through, bright, clear, but soon it disappears. One likes this kind of morning, cool, fresh, with the whole world green around you. As the summer comes on the sun will burn all the green grass, and the meadows across the valley will be parched, dry, and all the grass with the bright green will have gone. In the summer all the freshness has gone. One likes these quiet mornings. The oranges are so bright and the leaves, dark green, are shining. And there is a perfume in the air from the orange blossom, strong, almost suffocating. There is a different kind of orange to be picked later on before the summer heat. Now there is the green leaf, the orange and the flower on the same tree at the same time. It is a beautiful world and man is so indifferent to it, spoiling the earth, the rivers and the bays and the fresh-water lakes. But let's leave all that behind and walk along a narrow path, up the hill where there is a little stream which in a few weeks will be dry. You and a friend are walking along the path, talking now and then, looking at all the various colours of green. What a variety there is, from the lightest green, the Nile green, and perhaps even lighter, bluer, to the dark greens, luscious, full of their own richness. And as you go along up the path, just managing to walk along together side by side, you happen to pick up something ravishingly beautiful, sparkling, a jewel of extraordinary antiquity and beauty. You are so astonished to find it on this path of so many animals which only a few people have trodden. You look at it with great astonishment. It is so subtly made, so intricate that no jeweller's hand can ever have made it. You hold it for some time, amazed and silent. Then you put it very carefully in your inside pocket, button it, and are almost frightened that you might lose it or that it might lose its sparkling, shining beauty. And you put your hand outside the pocket that holds it. The other sees you doing this and sees that your face and your eyes have undergone a remarkable change. There is a kind of ecstasy, a speechless wonder, a breathless excitement. When the man asks: `What is it that you have found and are so extraordinarily elated by?' you reply in a very soft, gentle voice (it seems so strange to you to hear your own voice) that you picked up truth. You don't want to talk about it, you are rather shy; the very talking might destroy it. And the man who is walking beside you is slightly annoyed that you are not communicating with him freely, and he says that if you have found the truth, then let's go down into the valley and organize it so that others will understand it, so that others will grasp it and perhaps it will help them. You don't reply, you are sorry that you ever told him about it. The trees are full of bloom. Even up here on the slight breeze coming up the valley you smell the orange blossom and look down the valley and see the many orange trees and feel the quiet, still, breathless air. But you have come upon something that is most precious, that can never be told to another. They may find it, but you have it, grasp it and adore it. Institutions and organizations throughout the world have not helped man. There are all the physical organizations for one's needs; the institutions of war, of democracy, the institutions of tyranny and the institutions of religion - they have had their day and they continue, and man looks up to them, longing to be helped, not only physically but inside the skin, inside the throbbing ache, the shadow of time and the far reaching thoughts. There have been institutions of many, many kinds from the most ancient of days, and they have not inwardly changed man. Institutions can never change man psychologically, deeply. And one wonders why man created them, for all the institutions in the world are put together by man, hoping that they might help him, that they might give him some kind of lasting security. And strangely they have not. We never seem to realize this fact. We are creating more and more institutions, more and more organizations - one organization opposing another. Thought is inventing all these, not only the democratic organizations or the totalitarian organizations; thought is also perceiving, realizing, that what it has created has not basically changed the structure, the nature of one's own self. The institutions, the organizations and all religions are put together by thought, by cunning, clever, erudite thought. What thought has created, brought about, shapes its own thinking. And one asks oneself, if one is serious, earnest in one's enquiry: why has not thought realized its own activity? Can thought be aware of its own movement? Can thought see itself, see what it is doing, both in the outer and the inner? There is really no outer and inner: the inner creates the outer, and the outer then shapes the inner. This ebb and flow of action and reaction is the movement of thought, and thought is always trying to overcome the outer, and succeeds, bringing about many problems; in solving one problem other problems arise. Thought has also shaped the inner, moulded it according to the outer demands. This seemingly endless process has created this society, ugly, cruel, immoral and violent. And having created it, the inner becomes a slave to it. The outer shapes the inner and the inner shapes the outer. This process has been going on for thousands upon thousands of years and thought seems not to realize its own activity. So one asks: can thought ever be aware of itself - aware of what it is doing? There is no thinker apart from thought; thought has made the thinker, the experiencer, the analyser. The thinker, the one who is watching, the one who acts, is the past, with all the inheritance of man, genetically, biologic- ally - the traditions, the habits and all accumulated knowledge. After all, the past is knowledge, and the thinker is not separate from the past. Thought has created the past, thought is the past; then thought divides the thinker and the thought, which the thinker must shape, control. But that is a fallacy; there is only thought. The self is the 'me', the past. Imagination may project the future but it is still the activity of thought. So thought, which is the outcome of knowledge, has not changed man and will never change him because knowledge is always limited and will always be limited. So again one asks: can thought become aware of itself, thought which has put together all our consciousness - action and reaction, the sensory response, the sensuality, the fears, the aspirations the pursuit of pleasure, all the agony of loneliness and the suffering which man has brought upon himself through wars, through his irresponsibility, through callous self-centredness? All that is the activity of thought, which has invented the limitless and the god who lives in the limitless. All that is the activity of time and thought. When one comes to this point one asks the old instrument, which is worn out, whether it can bring about a radical mutation in man, which is, after all, the brain. When thought realizes itself, sees where knowledge is necessary in the physical world and realizes its own limitation, it then becomes quiet, silent. Only then is there a new instrument which is not put together by time or thought, totally unrelated to knowledge. It is this instrument -perhaps the word instrument may be wrong - it is this perception which is always fresh, because it has no past, no remembrance; it is intelligence born of compassion. That perception brings a deep mutation in the very brain cells themselves, and its action is always the right action, clear, precise, without the shadow of the past and time. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA SUNDAY 24TH APRIL, 1983 IT IS A spring morning, a morning that has never been before and never will be again. It is a spring morning. Every little blade of grass, the camellias, the roses, all are blooming and there is perfume in the air. It is a spring morning and the earth is so alive, and up in this valley all the mountains are green and the tallest of them so extraordinarily vital, immovable and majestic. It is a morning that as you go along the path and look around at the beauty and the ground squirrels, every tender leaf of the spring is shining in the sun. Those leaves have been waiting for this the whole winter and have just come out, tender, vulnerable. And without being romantic, imaginative, there is a feeling of great love and compassion, for there is so much beauty, incorruptible. There have been a thousand spring mornings but never such a morning as this, so still, so quiet, breathless - perhaps it is with adoration. And the squirrels are out and so are the lizards. It is a spring morning and the air is festive; there are festivals all over the world because it is spring. The festivals are expressed in so many different ways but that which is can never be expressed in words. Everywhere, with the song and the dance, there is a deep feeling of spring. Why is it that we seem to be losing the highly vulnerable quality of sensitivity - sensitivity to all the things about us, not only to our own problems and turmoils? To be actually sensitive, not about something but just to be sensitive, to be vulnerable, like that new leaf, which was born a few days ago to face storms, rain, darkness and light. When we are vulnerable we seem to get hurt; being hurt we withdraw into ourselves, build a wall around ourselves, become hard, cruel. But when we are vulnerable without any ugly, brutal reactions, vulnerable to all the movements of one's own being, vulnerable to the world, so sensitive that there is no regret, no wounds, no self-imposed discipline, then there is the quality of measureless existence. We lose all this vulnerability in the world of noise and brutality, vulgarity and the bustle of everyday life. To have one's senses sharpened, not any one particular sense but to have all the senses fully awake, which does not necessarily mean to indulge - to be sensitive to all the movements of thought, the feelings, the pains, the loneliness, the anxiety - with those senses fully awakened, there is a different kind of sensation that goes beyond all the sensory or sensual responses. Have you ever looked at the sea, or at those vast mountains, the Himalayas, which stretch from horizon to horizon -have you ever watched a flower, with all your senses? When there is such observation there is no centre from which you are observing, there is no `me'. The `me', the limited observation of one or two senses, breeds the egotistic movement. After all, we live by the senses, by sensation, and it is only when thought creates the image out of the sensations that all the complexities of desire arise. On this morning, you look down into the valley, seeing the extraordinary spread of green and the distant town, feeling the pure air, watching all the crawling things of the earth, watching without the interference of the images thought has built. Now the breeze is blowing from the valley up the canyon and you turn as the path turns. Going down, there is a bob cat right in front of you, about ten feet away. You can hear it purring, rubbing itself against a rock, the hair sticking out of its ears, its short tail and extraordinary, graceful movement. It is a spring morning for it too. We walked together down the path and it was hardly making any noise except for its purring, highly enjoying itself, delighted to be out in the spring sunshine; it was so clean that its hair was sparkling. And as you watch it, the whole wild nature is in that animal. You tread on a dead branch which makes a noise, and it is off, not even looking behind it; that noise indicated man, the most dangerous of all animals. It is gone in a second among bushes and rocks and all the joy has gone out of it. It knows how cruel man is and it doesn't want to wait; it wants to be away, as far away as possible. It is a spring morning and it is peaceful. Aware that a man was behind it, a few feet away, that cat must have instinctively responded to the image of what man is - the man who has killed so many things, destroyed so many cities, destroyed culture after culture, ever pursuing his desires, always seeking some kind of security and pleasure. Desire, which has been the driving force in man, has created a great many pleasant and useful things; desire also, in man's relationships, has created a great many problems and turmoils and misery - the desire for pleasure. The monks and the sannyasis of the world have tried to go beyond it, have forced themselves to worship an ideal, an image, a symbol. But desire is always there like a flame, burning. And to find out, to probe into the nature of desire, the complexity of desire, its activities, its demands, its fulfilments - ever more and more desire for power, position, prestige, status, the desire for the unnameable, that which is beyond all our daily life - has made man do all kinds of ugly and brutal things. Desire is the outcome of sensation - the outcome with all the images that thought has built. And this desire not only breeds discontent but a sense of hopelessness. Never suppress it, never discipline it but probe into the nature of it - what is the origin, the purpose, the intricacies of it? To delve deep into it is not another desire, for it has no motive; it is like understanding the beauty of a flower, to sit down beside it and look at it. And as you look it begins to reveal itself as it actually is - the extraordinarily delicate colour, the perfume, the petals, the stem and the earth out of which it has grown. So look at this desire and its nature without thought which is always shaping sensations, pleasure and pain, reward and punishment. Then one understands, not verbally, nor intellectually, the whole causation of desire, the root of desire. The very perception of it, the subtle perception of it, that in itself is intelligence. And that intelligence will always act sanely and rationally in dealing with desire. So without too much talk this morning, without too much thinking, to be entirely enveloped by this spring morning, to live with it, to walk in it, is a joy that is beyond all measure. It cannot be repeated. It will be there until there is a knock on the door. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA TUESDAY 26TH APRIL, 1983 ONE SAW A bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world. Those marvellous, great animals of the sea, the whales, are killed by the million, and the tiger and so many other animals are now becoming endangered species. Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded. Some time ago, staying with a friend high in the hills, a man came and told the host that a tiger had killed a cow last night, and would we like to see the tiger that evening? He could arrange it by building a platform in a tree and tying up a goat, and the bleat of the goat, of the small animal, would attract the tiger and we could see it. We both refused to satisfy our curiosity so cruelly. But later that day the host suggested that we get the car and go into the forest to see the tiger if we could. So towards evening we got into an open car with a chauffeur driving us and went deep into the forest for several miles. Of course we saw nothing. It was getting quite dark and the headlights were on, and as we turned round, there it was sitting right in the middle of the road waiting to receive us. It was a very large animal, beautifully marked, and its eyes, caught by the headlights, were bright, scintillating. It came growling towards the car, and as it passed just a few inches from the hand that was stretched out, the host said, `Don't touch it, it is too dangerous, be quick for it is faster than your hand.' But you could feel the energy of that animal, its vitality; it was a great dynamo of energy. And as it passed by one felt an enormous attraction towards it. And it disappeared into the woods. [Krishnamurti tells of this meeting with a tiger more fully in his Journal, p.40] Apparently the friend had seen many tigers and had helped long ago in his youth to kill one, and ever since he had been regretting the terrible act. Cruelty in every form is now spreading in the world. Man has probably never been so cruel as he is now, so violent. The churches and the priests of the world have talked about peace on earth; from the highest Christian hierarchy to the poor village priest there has been talk about living a good life, not hurting, not killing a thing; especially the Buddhists and Hindus of former years have said, `Don't kill the fly, don't kill anything, for next life you will pay for it.' That was rather crudely put but some of them maintained this spirit, this intention not to kill and not to hurt another human being. But killing with wars is going on and on. The dog so quickly kills the rabbit. Or the man shoots another with his marvellous machines, and he himself is perhaps shot by another. And this killing has been going on for millennia upon millennia. Some treat it as a sport, others kill out of hatred, anger, jealousy, and organized murder by the various nations with their armaments goes on. One wonders if man will ever live on this beautiful earth peacefully, never killing a little thing, or being killed, or killing another, but live peacefully with some divinity and love in his heart. In this part of the world, which we call the West, the Christians have perhaps killed more than anyone else. They are always talking about peace on this earth. But to have peace one must live peacefully, and that seems so utterly impossible. There are arguments for and against war, the arguments that man has always been a killer and will always remain so, and those who maintain that he can bring about a change in himself and not kill. This is a very old story. The endless butchering has become a habit, an accepted formula, in spite of all the religions. One was watching the other day a red-tailed hawk, high in the heavens, circling effortlessly, without a beat of the wing, just for the fun of flying, just to be sustained by the air-currents. Then it was joined by another, and they were flying together for quite a while. They were marvellous creatures in that blue sky, and to hurt them in any way is a crime against heaven. Of course there is no heaven; man has invented heaven out of hope, for his life has become a hell, an endless conflict from birth to death, coming and going, making money, working endlessly. This life has become a turmoil, a travail of endless striving. One wonders if man, a human being, will ever live on this earth peacefully. Conflict has been the way of his life - within the skin and outside the skin, in the area of the psyche and in the society which that psyche has created. Probably love has totally disappeared from this world. Love implies generosity, care, not to hurt another, not to make another feel guilty, to be generous, courteous, and behave in such a manner that your words and thoughts are born out of compassion. Of course you cannot be compassionate if you belong to organized religious institutions - large, powerful, traditional, dogmatic, that insist on faith. There must be freedom to love. That love is not pleasure, desire, a remembrance of things that have gone. Love is not the opposite of jealousy, hate and anger. All this may sound rather Utopian, idealistic, something that man can only aspire to. But if you believe that then you will go on killing. Love is as real, as strong, as death. It has nothing to do with imagination, or sentiment, or romanticism; and naturally it has nothing to do with power, position, prestige. It is as still as the waters of the sea and as powerful as the sea; it is like the running waters of a rich river flowing endlessly, without a beginning or an end. But the man who kills the baby seals, or the great whales, is concerned with his livelihood. He would say, `I live by that, that is my trade.' He is totally unconcerned with that something which we call love. He probably loves his family - or he thinks he loves his family - and he is not very much concerned with how he gains his livelihood. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why man lives a fragmentary life; he never seems to love what he is doing - though perhaps a few people do. If one lived by the work one loves, it would be very different - one would understand the wholeness of life. We have broken up life into fragments: the business world, the artistic world, the scientific world, the political world and the religious world. We seem to think that they are all separate and should be kept separate. So we become hypocritical, doing something ugly, corrupt, in the business world and then coming home to live peacefully with our family; this breeds hypocrisy, a double standard of life. It is really a marvellous earth. That bird sitting on the tallest tree has been sitting there every morning, looking over the world, watching for a greater bird, a bird that might kill it, watching the clouds, the passing shadow, and the great spread of this rich earth, these rivers, forests and all the men who work from morning until night. If one thinks at all, in the psychological world, it is to be full of sorrow. One wonders too if man will ever change, or only the few, the very, very few. Then what is the relationship of the few to the many? Or, what is the relationship of the many to the few? The many have no relationship to the few. The few do have a relationship. Sitting on that rock, looking down into the valley, with a lizard beside you, you daren't move in case the lizard should be disturbed or frightened. And the lizard too is watching. And so the world goes on: inventing gods, following the hierarchy of god's representatives; and all the sham and the shame of illusions will probably go on, the thousand problems getting more and more complex and intricate. Only the intelligence of love and compassion can solve all problems of life. That intelligence is the only instrument that can never become dull, useless. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA WEDNESDAY 4TH MAY, 1983 IT IS A foggy morning, you can hardly see the orange trees which are about ten feet away. It is cold and all the hills and the mountains are hidden, and there is dew on the leaves. It will clear up later. It is early morning yet and the beautiful Californian sun and cool breeze will come a little later on. One wonders why human beings have always been so cruel, so ugly in their responses to any statement they don't like, aggressive, ready to attack. This has been going on for thousands of years. One hardly ever meets nowadays a gentle person who is ready to yield, totally generous and happy in his relationships. Last night there was the hooting of the owl; it was a great horned owl, it must be very large. And it waited for its mate to reply, and the mate replied from a distance and the hoot went down into the valley and you could hardly hear it. It was such a perfectly still night, dark, and strangely quiet. Everything seems to live in order, in its own order - the sea with its tides, the new moon and the setting of the full moon, the lovely spring and the warmth of summer. Even the earthquake of yesterday has its own order. Order is the very essence of the universe - the order of birth and death and so on. It is only man that seems to live in such disorder, confusion. He has lived that way since the owl began. Talking to the visitor sitting on the veranda, with the red climbing rose and a young wisteria and the smell of the earth and the trees, it seemed such a pity to discuss disorder. When you look around at those dark hills and the rocky mountain and hear the whisper of a stream which will soon be dry in summer, it all has such curious order that to discuss human disorder, human confusion and misery, seems so utterly out of place. But there he is, friendly, knowledgeable and probably given to thought. The mocking bird is on the telephone wire; it is doing what it generally does - flying into the air, circling and landing on the wire and then mocking at the world. This it does so often and the world apparently doesn't care. But the bird still mocks on. The fog is clearing, there is that spring sunshine and the lizard is coming out, warming itself on the rock, and all the little things of the earth are busy. They have their order, they have their pleasure, amusement. They all seem to be so happy, enjoying the sunshine, no man near to hurt them, to spoil their day. `If one may ask,' the visitor began, `what to you is the most important thing in life? What to you is the most essential quality that man must cultivate?' `If you cultivate, as you cultivate the fields of the earth, then it is not the most essential thing. It must happen naturally - whatever happens - naturally, easily, without any self-centred motives. The most important thing for each human being, surely, is to live in order, in harmony with all the things around him - even with the noise of the great towns, even with something that is ugly, vulgar, without letting it affect or alter the course of his life, alter or distort the order in which he is living. Surely, sir, order is the most important thing in life, or, rather, one of the most important.' `Why,' he asks, `should order be a quality of a brain that can act correctly, happily, precisely?' `Order isn't created by thought. Order isn't something that you follow day after day, practise, conform to. As the streams join the sea, so the stream of order, the river of order, is endless. But that order cannot be if there is any kind of effort, any kind of struggle to achieve, or to put aside disorder and slip into a routine, into various well defined habits. All that is not order. Conflict is the very source of disorder, is the very cause.' `Everything struggles, doesn't it? Those trees, they have struggled to exist, struggled to grow. The marvellous oak there behind this house, it has withstood storms, years of rain and hot sunshine, it has struggled to exist. Life is conflict, it is a turmoil, a storm. And you are saying, are you not, that order is a state in which there is no conflict? It seems almost impossible, like talking in a strange language, something utterly foreign to one's own life, one's own way of thinking. Do you, if I am not impudent, live in order in which there is no conflict whatsoever?' Is it very important, sir, to find out if another is living without effort, without conflict? Or would you rather ask if you, as a human being, who live in disorder, can find out for yourself the many causes - or perhaps there is only one cause - of this disorder? Those flowers know neither order nor disorder, they just exist. Of course, if they were not watered, looked after, they would die, and dying also is their order. The bright, hot sun will destroy them next month, and to them that is order.' The lizard has warmed itself on the rock and is waiting for the flies to come. And surely they will come. And the lizard with its quick tongue will swallow them. It seems to be the nature of the world: the big things live on little things, and the bigger live on the big. This is the cycle in the world of nature. And in that there is neither order nor disorder. But we know for ourselves from time to time the sense of total harmony and also the pain, the anxiety, the sorrow, the conflict. The cause of disorder is the everlasting becoming - to become, to seek identity, the struggle to be. As long as the brain, which is so heavily conditioned, is measuring, `the more', `the better', moving psychologically from this to that, it must inevitably bring about a sense of conflict, and this is disorder. Not only the words `more', 'better', but the feeling, the reaction of achieving, gaining - as long as there is this division, duality, there must be conflict. And out of conflict is disorder. Perhaps one is aware of all this, but being negligent of this awareness, one carries on in the same way day after day all the days of one's life. This duality is not only verbal but has the deeper division as the thinker and the thought, as the thinker separate from himself. The thinker is put together by thought, the thinker is the past, the thinker is knowledge, and thought too is born out of knowledge. Actually there is no division between the thinker and the thought, they are one inseparable unit; but thought plays a clever trick upon itself, it divides itself. Perhaps this constant division of itself, its own fragmentation, is the cause of disorder. Just to see, to realize, the truth of this, that the perceiver is the perceived, ends disorder. The mocking bird has gone and the mourning dove is there with its plaintive cry. And soon its mate joins it. They sit together on that wire, silent, motionless, but their eyes are moving, looking, watching for danger. The red-tailed hawk and the predatory birds who were there an hour or two ago have gone. Perhaps they will come back tomorrow. And so the morning ends and the sun now is bright and there are a thousand shadows. The earth is quiet and man is lost and confused. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA FRIDAY 6TH MAY, 1983 IT WAS A pleasant morning, cloudy, a slight nip in the air, and the hills were covered and quiet. There was a scent of orange blossom, not very strong but it was there. It is a peculiar, penetrating smell and it came into the room. And all the flowers this morning were ready for the sun to come out. The clouds would soon pass away and there would be bright sunshine later on. The car went through the little village, past the many small hamlets, the oil derricks, oil tanks, and all the activity around those oil fields, and at last you came to the sea. You passed again through a big town, not too big, past the various lemon and orange groves, and you came upon, not patches of strawberries, not small cabbage fields, but acres of them, miles of them - strawberries, celery, spinach, lettuce and other vegetables - miles of flat rich soil between the hills and the sea. Here everything is done on a grand scale, almost too extravagant - miles of lemons and oranges, walnuts and so on. It is a rich land, beautiful. And the hills were so friendly that morning. At last you came to the blue Pacific. It was like a pond this morning, so quiet, so extraordinarily still, and the morning light was on it. One should really meditate on that light, not directly on the sun but on the reflection of the sun on the glittering water. But the sea is not always like that; a month or two ago it rolled in fury, smashing the pier, destroying the houses around the beach, bringing havoc, even to the high road along it. Now they were repairing the smashed pier with all the lumber washed ashore, great quantities of it. Today, though, like a tamed animal, you could stroke it, you could feel the depth and the width and the beauty of this vast sea, so blue. Nearer the shore it was a Nile green. To go along that road beside the sea in the salty air was a most pleasant thing, just to see the hills, the waving grass and the vast sea of water. All this disappeared into the huge ugly town, a city that has spread for miles upon miles upon miles. It was not a very pleasant city, but people lived there and seemed to like it. I don't know if, sitting on the beach, you have ever watched the sea, watched the waves come and go. The seventh wave seems to be the largest, thundering towards the land. There is very little tide in the Pacific - at least not here, not like those tides that pull out many miles and come in so rapidly. Here there is always a little ebb and flow, coming in and going out, repeated for centuries upon centuries. If you can look at that sea, the sparkle of the dazzling light, and the clear water, with all your senses highly awakened to their excellence, in that observation there is not the centre as you, watching. It is a beautiful thing to watch that sea, and the sand, clean, washed every day. No footprint can remain there, even the little birds of the sea never leave their mark, the sea washes them away. The houses along the beach are small, tidy; probably very rich people live along there. But all that doesn't count for anything -their riches, their vulgarity, their smart cars. One saw a very old Mercedes with exhaust pipes outside the bonnet, three on each side. The owners seemed to be very proud of it, they had polished it, washed it, taken such great care of it. Probably they had bought that machine rather than many other things. You could still do a great many miles in it; it was well put together to last. Sitting on the shore watching the birds, the sky and hearing the distant sound of passing cars, it was a most beautiful morning.You went out with the ebb and came in with the tide. You went out far and came back again - this endless movement of in and out and out and in. You could see as far as the horizon where the sky met the waters. It was a big bay with blue and white water and tiny little houses all around it. And behind you were the mountains, range after range. Watching without a single thought, watching without any reaction, watching without identity, only endlessly watching, you really are not awake, you are absent minded, not all there; you are not you but watching. Watching the thoughts that arise and then fade away, thought after thought, thought itself is becoming aware of itself. There is no thinker watching the thought, the thinker is the thought. Sitting on the beach watching the people pass by, two or three couples and a single woman, it seems that all nature, everything around you, from the deep blue sea to those high rocky mountains, was also watching. We are watching, not waiting, not expecting anything to happen but watching without end. In that watching there is learning, not the accumulation of knowledge through learning that is almost mechanical, but watching closely, never superficially but deeply, with a swiftness and a tenderness; then there is no watcher. When there is a watcher it is merely the past watching, and that is not watching, that is just remembering and it is rather dead stuff. Watching is tremendously alive, every moment a vacancy. Those little crabs and those seagulls and all those birds flying by are watching. They are watching for prey, for fish, watching for something to eat; they too are watching. Somebody passes close by you and wonders what you are watching. You are watching nothing, and in that nothingness everything is. The other day a man who had travelled a great deal, seen a great deal, written something or other, came - an oldish man with a beard, which was well kept; he was dressed decently without the sloppiness of vulgarity. He took care of his shoes, of his clothes. He spoke excellent English, though he was a foreigner. And to the man who was sitting on the beach watching, he said he had talked to a great many people, discussed with some professors and scholars, and while he was in India he had talked to some of the pundits. And most of them, it seemed, according to him, were not concerned with society, not deeply committed to any social reform or to the present crisis of war. He was deeply concerned about the society in which we were living, though he was not a social reformer. He was not quite sure whether society could be changed, whether you could do something about it. But he saw what it was; the vast corruption, the absurdity of the politicians, the pettiness, the vanity, and the brutality that is rampant in the world. He said, `What can we do about this society? - not petty little reforms here and there, changing one President for another, or one Prime Minister for another - they are all of the same breed more or less; they can't do much because they represent the mediocrity, or even less than that, the vulgarity; they want to show off, they will never do anything. They will bring about potty little reforms here and there but society will go on in spite of them.' He had watched the various societies, cultures. They are not so very different fundamentally. He appeared to be a very serious man with a smile and he talked about the beauty of this country, the vastness, the variety, from the hot deserts to the high Rockies with their splendour. One listened to him as one would listen to and watch the sea. Society cannot be changed unless man changes. Man, you and others, have created these societies for generations upon generations; we have all created these societies out of our pettiness, narrowness, out of our limitation, out of our greed, envy, brutality, violence, competition, and so on. We are responsible for the mediocrity, the stupidity, the vulgarity, for all the tribal nonsense and religious sectarianism. Unless each one of us changes radically, society will never change. It is there, we have made it, and then it makes us. It shapes us, as we have shaped it. It puts us in a mould and the mould puts it into a framework which is the society. So this action is going on endlessly, like the sea with a tide that goes far out and then comes in, sometimes very, very slowly, at other times rapidly, dangerously. In and out; action, reaction, action. This seems to be the nature of this movement, unless there is deep order in oneself. That very order will bring about order in society, not through legislation, governments and all that business -though as long as there is disorder, confusion, the law, the authority, which is created by our disorder, will go on. Law is the making of man, as the society is - the product of man is law. So the inner, the psyche, creates the outer according to its limitation; and the outer then controls and moulds the inner. The Communists have thought, and probably still do, that by controlling the outer, bringing about certain laws, regulations, institutions, certain forms of tyranny, they can change man. But so far they have not succeeded, and they never will succeed. This is also the activity of the Socialists. The Capitalists do it in a different way, but it is the same thing. The inner always overcomes the outer, for the inner is far more strong, far more vital, than the outer. Can this movement ever stop - the inner creating the outer environment psychologically, and the outer, the law, the institutions, the organizations, trying to shape man, the brain, to act in a certain way, and the brain, the inner, the psyche, then changing, circumventing the outer? This movement has been going on as long as man has been on this earth, crudely, superficially, sometimes brilliantly - it is always the inner overcoming the outer, like the sea with its tides going out and coming in. One should really ask whether this movement can ever stop - action and reaction, hatred and more hatred, violence and more violence. It has an end when there is only watching, without motive, without response, without direction. Direction comes into being when there is accumulation. But watching, in which there is attention, awareness, and a great sense of compassion, has its own intelligence. This watching and intelligence act. And that action is not the ebb and flow. But this requires great alertness, to see things without the word, without the name, without any reaction; in that watching there is a great vitality, passion. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA MONDAY 9TH MAY, 1983 YOU WERE ALREADY fairly high up, looking down into the valley, and if you climb a mile or more up and up the winding path, passing all kinds of vegetation - live oaks, sage, poison oak - and past a stream which is always dry in the summer, you can see the blue sea far away in the distance, across range after range. Up here it is absolutely quiet. It is so still there isn't a breath of air. You look down and the mountains look down on you. You can go on climbing up the mountain for many hours, down into another valley and up again. You have done it several times before, twice reaching the very top of those rocky mountains. Beyond them to the north is a vast plain of desert. Down there it is very hot, here it is quite cold; you have to put something on in spite of the hot sun. And as you come down, looking at the various trees, plants and little insects, suddenly you hear the rattle of a rattle snake. And you jump, fortunately away from the rattler. You are only about ten feet away from it. It is still rattling. You look at each other and watch. Snakes have no eyelids. This one was not very long but quite thick, as thick as your arm. You keep your distance and you watch it very carefully, its pattern, its triangular head and its black tongue flickering in and out. You watch each other. It doesn't move and you don't move. But presently, its head and its tail towards you, it slithers back and you step forward. Again it coils up and rattles and you watch each other. And again, with its head and tail towards you, it begins to go back and again you move forward; and again it coils and rattles. You do this for several minutes, perhaps ten minutes or more; then it gets tired. You see that it is motionless, waiting, but as you approach it, it doesn't rattle. It has temporarily lost its energy. You are quite close to it. Unlike the cobra which stands up to strike, this snake strikes lunging forward. But there was no movement. It was too exhausted, so you leave it. It was really quite a poisonous, dangerous thing. Probably you could touch it but you are disinclined to, though not frightened. You feel that you would rather not touch it and you leave it alone. And as you come further down you almost step on a quail with about a dozen or more babies. They scatter into the nearby bushes, and the mother too disappears into a bush and they all call to each other. You go down and wait, and if you have the patience to watch, you presently see them all come together under the mother's wing. It is cool up there and they are waiting for the sun to warm the air and the earth. You come down across the little stream, past a meadow which is almost losing its green, and return to your room rather tired but exhilarated by the walk and by the morning sun. You see the orange trees with their bright yellow oranges, the rose bushes and the myrtle, and the tall eucalyptus trees. It is all very peaceful in the house. It was a pleasant morning, full of strange activities on the earth. All those little things alive, rushing about, seeking their morning food - the squirrel, the gopher. They eat the tender roots of plants and are quite destructive. A dog can kill them so quickly with a snap. It is very dry, the rains are over and gone, to return again perhaps in four months or more. AIl the valley below is still glistening. It is strange how there is a brooding silence over the whole earth. In spite of the noise of towns and the traffic, there is something almost palpable, something holy. If you are in harmony with nature, with all the things around you, then you are in harmony with all human beings. If you have lost your relationship with nature you will inevitably lose your relationship with human beings. A whole group of us sitting at table towards the end of the meal began a serious conversation as has happened several times before. It was about the meaning of words, the weight of the word, the content of the word, not merely the superficial meaning of the word but the depth of it, the quality of it, the feeling of it. Of course the word is never the actual thing. The description, the explanation, is not that which is described, nor that about which there is an explanation. The word the phrase, the explanation are not the actuality. But the word is used as a communication of one's thought, one's feeling, and the word, though it is not communicated to another, holds the feeling inside oneself. The actual never conditions the brain, but the theory, the conclusion, the description, the abstraction, do condition it. The table never conditions the brain but god does, whether it is the god of the Hindus, Christians or Muslims. The concept, the image, conditions the brain, not that which is actually happening, taking place. To the Christian, the word Jesus or Christ has great significance, great meaning, it evokes a deep sentiment, a sensation. Those words have no meaning to the Hindu, to the Buddhist, or to the Muslim. Those words are not the actual. So those words, which have been used for two thousand years, have conditioned the brain. The Hindu has his own gods, his own divinities. Those divinities, as the Christians', are the projections of thought, out of fear, out of pleasure and so on. It seems that language really doesn't condition the brain; what does is the theory of the language, the abstraction of a certain feeling and the abstraction taking the form of an idea, a symbol, a person - not the actual person but a person imagined, or hoped for, or projected by thought. All those abstractions, those ideas, conclusions, however strong, condition the brain. But the actual, like the table, never does. Take a word like `suffering'. That word has a different meaning for the Hindu and the Christian. But suffering, however described by words, is shared by all of us. Suffering is the fact, the actual. But when we try to escape from it through some theory, or through some idealized person, or through a symbol, those forms of escape mould the brain. Suffering as a fact doesn't and this is important to realize. Like the word 'attachment; to see the word, to hold it as if in your hand and watch it, feel the depth of it, the whole content of it, the consequences of it, the fact that we are attached - the fact, not the word; that feeling doesn't shape the brain, put it into a mould, but the moment one moves away from it, that is, when thought moves away from the fact, that very movement away, movement of escape, is not only a time factor, but the beginning of shaping the brain in a certain mould. To the Buddhist the word Buddha, the impression, the image, creates great reverence, great feeling, devotion; he seeks refuge in the image which thought has created. And as the thought is limited, because all knowledge is always limited, that very image brings about conflict - the feeling of reverence to a person, or to a symbol, or to a certain long-established tradition - but the feeling of reverence itself, divorced from all the external images, symbols and so on, is not a factor of conditioning the brain. There, sitting in the next chair, was a modified Christian. And when across the table one mentioned Christ one could immediately feel the restrictive, reverential reserve. That word has conditioned the brain. It is quite extraordinary to watch this whole phenomenon of communication with words, each race giving different significance and meaning to the word and thereby creating a division, a limitation, to the feeling which mankind suffers. The suffering of mankind is common, is shared by all human beings. The Russian may express it in one way, the Hindu, the Christian in another and so on, but the fact of suffering, the actual feeling of pain, grief, loneliness, that feeling never shapes or conditions the brain. So one becomes very attentive to, aware of, the subtleties of the word, the meaning, the weight of it. The universal, the global feeling of all human beings and their interrelationship, can only come into being when the words `nation', `tribe', `religion', have all disappeared. Either the word has depth, significance, or none at all. For most of us words have very little depth, they have lost their weight. A river is not a particular river. The rivers of America or England or Europe or India are all rivers. but the moment there is identification through a word, there is division. And this division is an abstraction of the river, the quality of water, the depth of the water, the volume, the flow, the beauty of the river. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA THURSDAY 12TH MAY, 1983 IT IS DAWN in these northern latitudes. In these latitudes dawn begins very early and lasts a long time. It is one of the most beautiful things on earth, the beginning of a dawn and the beginning of a day. After a stormy night, the trees battered about, the leaves shaken and dry branches broken, the long pursuing winds have cleansed the air, which is dry. The dawn was so slowly creeping over the earth; it had an extraordinary quality this morning, especially this morning - it is probably after the winds of yesterday. But this dawn on this particular day was something more than the dawn of other days. It was so utterly quiet. You hardly dared to breathe for fear of disturbing anything. The leaves were still, even the most tender leaves. It was as though the whole earth were holding its breath, probably in great adoration. And slowly the sun touched the top of the mountains, orange, yellow, and there were specks of light on other hills. And still there was great silence. Then the noises began - the song of birds, the red-tailed hawk hovering in the sky, and the dove began its mourning song - but the silence of the dawn was in the morning, in the whole earth. If you walk down below the hill, high across the valley, past the orange groves and some green lawns, past the tall slender eucalyptus, you come to a hill on which there are many buildings. It is an institute for something or other, and across the valley there is a long golf course, beautifully kept; we have played on it long ago. One has forgotten the course, the bunkers, but there it still is, very carefully maintained. One sees quite a lot of people with heavy bags playing on it. In the old days one had a bag of only six clubs but now there are about a dozen. It is getting too professional, too expensive. You come over to another hill, and there too there are several institutions, foundations, organizations of almost every kind. All over the world there are dozens of institutions, forums, inner and outer directive groups. Everywhere you go in the so-called free world there is every kind of institution, organization, forum, to do this and to do that, to bring peace to man, to preserve the wilderness, to save the various animals and so on. It is quite bewildering and quite common now - groups of this and groups of that, each group with its own leaders, its own presidents and secretaries, the man who started it and the others who followed him. It is quite extraordinary, all these little organizations and institutions. And slowly they begin to deteriorate; probably it is inherent in all institutions, including the institutions that help man outwardly, like the institutions for greater knowledge. Those are probably necessary, but one is rather startled that there are also these inner directed groups of various types which do different kinds of meditation. They are rather curious those two words `inner directed' - who is the director and what is the direction? Is the director different from the direction? We never seem to ask fundamental questions. There are organizations to help man in the physical world, controlled by men who in themselves have their problems and their ambitions and achievements, worshipping success, but that seems to be almost inevitable and that kind of thing has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. But are there institutions to study man or bring peace to man? Do various systems, based on some conclusion, actually help man? Apparently all the organizers in the world feel they do, but have they actually helped man to be free from his sorrow, pain, anxiety and all the travail of life? Can an outside agency, however exalted, however established in some kind of mystical ideational tradition, in any way change man? What will fundamentally bring about a radical change in man's brutality, end the wars he has been through and the constant conflict in which he lives? Will knowledge help him? If you like to use that word, evolution - man has evolved through knowledge. from ancient days he has gathered a great deal of information, knowledge about the world around him, above him, from the bullock cart to the jet, from the jet to going to the moon, and so on. There is tremendous advancement in all this. But has this knowledge in any way put an end to his selfishness, to his aggressive, competitive recklessness? Knowledge, after all, is to be aware of and to know all the things of the world, how the world was created, the achievements of man from the beginning to the present day. We are all well informed, some more, some less, but inwardly we are very primitive, almost barbarous, however cultured we may be outwardly, however well informed about many, many things, able to argue, to convince, to come to some decisions and conclusions. This can go on endlessly outwardly. There are dozens and dozens of specialists of every kind, but one asks seriously: can any kind of outside agency, including god, help man to end his grief, his utter loneliness, confusion, anxiety and so on? Or must he always live with that, put up with it, get used to it and say that it is part of life? The vast majority of mankind throughout the world tolerate it, accept it. Or they have institutions to pray to something outside - pray for peace, hold demonstrations for peace, but there is no peace in the heart of man. What will change man? He has suffered endlessly, caught in the network of fear, ever pursuing pleasure. This has been the course of his life, and nothing seems to change it. Instead of being cynical about it all, or bitter, or angry, it is like that, life is that, and we ask, how can all that be changed? Certainly not by an outside agency. Man has to face it, not avoid it, and examine it without asking for any aid; he is master of himself. He has made this society, he is responsible for it, and this very responsibility demands that he bring about a change in himself. But very few pay attention to all this. For the vast mass of people, their thinking is so utterly indifferent, irresponsible, seeking to fulfil their own selfish life, sublimating their desires but still remaining selfish. To look at all this is not being a pessimist or trying to be an optimist. One has to look at all this. And you are the only one who can change yourself and the society in which you live. That is a fact, and you can't escape from it. If you do escape from it then you are never going to have peace on this earth, never an abiding sense of joy, a sense of bliss. The dawn is over and a new day has begun. It is really a new day, a new morning. And when one looks around, one wonders at the beauty of the land and the trees and the richness of it. It is really a new day and the wonder of it is, it is there. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF BROCKWOOD PARK MONDAY 30TH MAY 1983 IT HAS BEEN raining here for over a month every day. When you come from a climate like California where the rains stopped over a month ago, where the green fields were drying up and turning brown and the sun was very hot (it was over 90' and would get hotter still, though they say it is going to be a mild summer) - when you come from that climate it is rather startling and surprising to see the green grass, the marvellous green trees and the copper beeches, which are a spreading, light brown, becoming gradually darker and darker. To see them now among the green trees is a delight. They are going to be very dark as the summer comes on. And this earth is very beautiful. Earth, whether it is desert or filled with orchards and green, bright fields, is always beautiful. To go for a walk in the fields with the cattle and the young lambs, and in the woods with the song of birds, without a single thought in your mind, only watching the earth, the trees, the sheep and hearing the cuckoo calling and the wood pigeons; to walk without any emotion, any sentiment, to watch the trees and all the earth: when you so watch, you learn your own thinking, are aware of your own reactions and do not allow a single thought to escape you without understanding why it came, what was the cause of it. If you are watchful, never letting a thought go by, then the brain becomes very quiet. Then you watch in great silence and that silence has immense depth, a lasting incorruptible beauty. The boy was good at games, really quite good. He was also good at his studies; he was serious. So one day he came to his teacher and said, `Sir, could I have a talk with you?' The educator said, `Yes, we can have a talk; let us go out for a walk.' So they had a dialogue. It was a conversation between the teacher and the taught, a conversation in which there was some respect on both sides, and as the educator was also serious, the conversation was pleasant, friendly, and they had forgotten that he was a teacher with a student; the rank was forgotten, the importance of one who knows, the authority, and the other who is curious. `Sir, I wonder if you know what all this is about, why I am getting an education, what part will it play when I grow up, what role have I in this world, why do I have to study, why do I have to marry and what is my future? Of course I realize I have to study and pass some sort of exams and I hope I will be able to pass them. I will probably live for some years, perhaps fifty, sixty or more, and in all those years to come what will be my life and the life of those people around me? What am I going to be and what is the point of these long hours over books and hearing the teachers? There might be a devastating war; we might all be killed. If death is all that lies ahead, then what is the point of all this education? Please, I am asking these questions quite seriously because I have heard the other teachers and you too pointing out many of these things.' `I would like to take one question at a time. You have asked many questions, you have put several problems before me, so first let us look at perhaps the most important question: what is the future of mankind and of yourself? As you know, your parents are fairly well off and of course they want to help you in any way they can. Perhaps if you get married they might give you a house, buy a house with all the things necessary in it, and you might have a nice wife - might. So what is it you are going to be? The usual mediocre person? Get a job, settle down with all the problems around you and in you - is that your future? Of course a war may come, but it may not happen; let us hope it does not happen. Let us hope man may come to realize that wars of any kind will never solve any human problem. Men may improve, they may invent better aeroplanes and so on but wars have never solved human problems and they never will. So let us forget for the moment that all of us might be destroyed through the craziness of super powers, through the craziness of terrorists or some demagogue in some country wanting to destroy his invented enemies. Let us forget all that for the moment. Let us consider what is your future, knowing that you are part of the rest of the world. What is your future? As I asked, to be a mediocre person? Mediocrity means to go half way up the hill, half way in anything, never going to the very top of the mountain or demanding all your energy, your capacity, never demanding excellence. `Of course you must realize also that there will be all the pressures from outside - pressures to do this, all the various narrow religious sectarian pressures and propaganda. Propaganda can never tell the truth; truth can never be propagated. So I hope you realize the pressure on you - pressure from your parents, from your society, from the tradition to be a scientist, to be a philosopher, to be a physicist, a man who undertakes research in any field; or to be a business man. Realizing all this, which you must do at your age, what way will you go? We have been talking about all these things for many terms, and probably, if one may point out, you have applied your mind to all this. So as we have some time together to go around the hill and come back, I am asking you, not as a teacher but with affection as a friend genuinely concerned, what is your future? Even if you have already made up your mind to pass some exams and have a career, a good profession, you still have to ask, is that all? Even if you do have a good profession, perhaps a life that is fairly pleasant, you will have a lot of troubles, problems. If you have a family, what will be the future of your children? This is a question that you have to answer yourself and perhaps we can talk about it. You have to consider the future of your children, not just your own future, and you have to consider the future of humanity, forgetting that you are German, French, English or Indian. Let us talk about it, but please realize I am not telling you what you should do. Only fools advise, so I am not entering into that category. I am just questioning in a friendly manner, which I hope you realize; I am not pushing you, directing you, persuading you. What is your future? Will you mature rapidly or slowly, gracefully, sensitively? Will you be mediocre, though you may be first class in your profession? You may excel, you may be very, very good at whatever you do, but I am talking of mediocrity of the mind, of the heart, mediocrity of your entire being.' `Sir, I don't really know how to answer these questions. I have not given too much thought to it, but when you ask this question, whether I am to become like the rest of the world, mediocre, I certainly don't want to be that. I also realize the attraction of the world. I also see that part of me wants all that. I want to have some fun, some happy times, but the other side of me also sees the danger of all that, the difficulties, the urges, the temptations. So I really don't know where I will end up. And also, as you pointed out on several occasions, I don't know myself what I am. One thing is definite, I really don't want to be a mediocre person with a small mind and heart, though with a brain that may be extraordinarily clever. I may study books and acquire a great deal of knowledge, but I may still be a very limited, narrow person. Mediocrity, sir, is a very good word which you have used and when I look at it I am getting frightened - not of the word but of the whole implications of what you have shown. I really don't know, and perhaps in talking it over with you it may clear things up. I can't so easily talk with my parents. They probably have had the same problems as I have; they may be more mature physically but they may be in the same position as I am. So if I may ask, sir, may I take another occasion, if you are willing, to talk with me? I really feel rather frightened, nervous, apprehensive of my capacity to meet all this, face it, go through it and not become a mediocre person. It was one of those mornings that has never been before: the near meadow, the still beeches and the lane that goes into the deeper wood - all was silence. There wasn't a bird chirping and the nearby horses were standing still. A morning like this, fresh, tender, is a rare thing. There is peace in this part of the land and everything was very quiet. There was that feeling, that sense of absolute silence. It was not a romantic sentimentalism, not poetic imagination. It was and is. A simple thing is all this is. The copper beeches this morning were full of splendour against the green fields stretching to the distance, and a cloud full of that morning light was floating lazily by. The sun was just coming up, there was great peace and a sense of adoration. Not the adoration of some god or imaginative deity but a reverence that is born of great beauty. This morning one could let go all the things one has gathered and be silent with the woods and the trees and the quiet lawn. The sky was a pale and tender blue and far away across the fields a cuckoo was calling, the wood pigeons were cooing and the blackbirds began their morning song. In the distance you could hear a car going by. Probably when the heavens are so quiet with loveliness it will rain later on. It always does when the early morning is very clear. But this morning it was all very special, something that has never been before and could never be again. `I am glad you have come of your own accord, without being invited, and perhaps if you are prepared, we can continue with our conversation about mediocrity and the future of your life. One can be excellent in one's career; we aren't saying that there is mediocrity in all professions; a good carpenter may not be mediocre in his work but in his daily, inward life, his life with his family, he may be. We both understand the meaning of that word now and we should investigate together the depth of that word. We are talking about inward mediocrity, psychological conflicts, problems and travail. There can be great scientists who yet inwardly lead a mediocre life. So what is going to be your life? In some ways you are a clever student, but for what will you use your brain? We are not talking about your career, that will come later; what we should be concerned about is the way you are going to live. Of course you are not going to be a criminal in the ordinary sense of that word. You are not, if you are wise, going to be a bully; they are too aggressive. You will probably get an excellent job, do excellent work in whatever you choose to do. So let us put that aside for a moment; but inside, what is your life? Inwardly, what is the future? Are you going to be like the rest of the world, always hunting pleasure, always troubled with a dozen psychological problems?' `At present, sir, I have no problems, except the problems of passing examinations and the weariness of all that. Otherwise I seem to have no problems. There is a certain freedom. I feel happy, young. When I see all these old people I ask myself, am I going to end up like that? They seem to have had good careers or to have done something they wanted to do but in spite of that they become dreary, dull, and they seem never to have excelled in the deeper qualities of the brain. I certainly don't want to be like that. It is not vanity but I want to have something different. It is not an ambition. I want to have a good career and all that business but I certainly in no way want to be like these old people who seem to have lost everything they like.' `You may not want to be like them but life is a very demanding and cruel thing. It won't let you alone. You will have great pressure from society whether you live here or in America or in any other part of the world. You will be constantly urged to become like the rest, to become something of a hypocrite, say things you don't really mean, and if you do marry that may raise problems too. You must understand that life is a very complex affair - not just pursuing what you want to do and being pigheaded about it. These young people want to become something - lawyers, engineers, politicians and so on; there is the urge, drive of ambition for power, money. That is what those old people whom you talk about have been through. They are worn out by constant conflict, by their desires. Look at it, look at the people around you. They are all in the same boat. Some leave the boat and wander endlessly and die. Some seek some peaceful corner of the earth and retire; some join a monastery, become monks of various kinds, taking desperate vows. The vast majority, millions and millions, lead a very small life, their horizon is very limited. They have their sorrows, their joys and they seem never to escape from them or understand them and go beyond. So again we ask each other, what is our future, specifically what is your`future? Of course you are much too young to go into this question very deeply, for youth has nothing to do with the total comprehension of this question. You may be an agnostic; the young do not believe in anything, but as you grow older then you turn to some form of religious superstition, religious dogma, religious conviction. Religion is not an opiate, but man has made religion in his own image, blind comfort and therefore security. He has made religion into something totally unintelligent and impracticable, not something that you can live with. How old are you?' `I'm going to be nineteen, sir. My grandmother has left me something when I am twenty-one and perhaps before I go to the university I can travel and look around. But I will always carry this question with me wherever I am, whatever my future. I may marry, probably I will, and have children, and so the great question arises - what is their future? I am somewhat aware of what the politicians are doing right throughout the world. It is an ugly business as far as I am concerned, so I think I won't be a politician. I'm pretty sure of that but I want a good job. I'd like to work with my hands and with my brain but the question will be how not to become a mediocre person like ninety-nine per cent of the world. So, sir, what am I to do? Oh, yes I am aware of churches and temples and all that; I am not attracted to them. I rather revolt against all that - the priests and the hierarchy of authority, but how am I going to prevent myself becoming an ordinary, average, mediocre person?' `If I may suggest, never under any circumstances ask "how". When you use the word "how" you really want someone to tell you what to do, some guide, some system, somebody to lead you by the hand so that you lose your freedom, your capacity to observe, your own activities, your own thoughts, your own way of life. When you ask "how" you really become a secondhand human being; you lose integrity and also the innate honesty to look at yourself, to be what you are and to go beyond and above what you are. Never, never ask the question "how". We are talking psychologically, of course. You have to ask "how" when you want to put a motor together or build a computer. You have to learn something about it from somebody. But to be psychologically free and original can only come about when you are aware of your own inward activities, watch what you are thinking and never let one thought escape without observing the nature of it, the source of it. Observing, watching. One learns about oneself much more by watching than from books or from some psychologist or complicated, clever, erudite scholar or professor. `It is going to be very difficult, my friend. It can tear you in many directions. There are a great many so-called temptations -biological, social, and you can be torn apart by the cruelty of society. Of course you are going to have to stand alone but that can come about not through force, determination or desire but when you begin to see the false things around you and in yourself: the emotions, the hopes. When you begin to see that which is false, then there is the beginning of awareness, of intelligence. You have to be a light to yourself and it is one of the most difficult things in life.' `Sir, you have made it all seem so very difficult, so very complex, so very awesome, frightening.' `I am just pointing all this out to you. It doesn't mean that facts need frighten you. Facts are there to observe. If you observe them they never frighten you. Facts are not frightening. But if you want to avoid them, turn your back and run, then that is frightening. To stand, to see that what you have done may not have been totally correct, to live with the fact and not interpret the fact according to your pleasure or form of reaction, that is not frightening. Life isn't very simple. One can live simply but life itself is vast, complex. It extends from horizon to horizon. you can live with few clothes or with one meal a day, but that is not simplicity. So be simple, don't live in a complicated way, contradictory and so on, just be simple inwardly.... You played tennis this morning. I was watching and you seem to be quite good at it. Perhaps we will meet again. That is up to you.' `Thank you, sir.' KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA TUESDAY 27TH MARCH 1984 ON THAT DRIVE from the airport through the vulgarity of large towns spreading out for many, many miles, with glaring lights and so much noise, then taking the freeway and going through a small tunnel, you suddenly came upon the Pacific. It was a clear day without a breath of wind but as it was early morning there was a freshness before the pollution of the monoxide gas filled the air. The sea was so calm, almost like an immense lake. And the sun was just coming over the hill, and the deep waters of the Pacific were the colour of the Nile, but at the edges they were light blue, gently lapping the shores. And there were many birds and you saw in the distance a whale. Following the coast road, there were very few cars that morning, but houses everywhere; probably very rich people lived there. And you saw the pleasant hills on the left when you arrived at the Pacific. There were houses right up among the hills and the road wound in and out, following the sea, and again came upon another town, but fortunately the highway didn't go through it. There was a naval centre there with its modern means of killing humanity. And you went along and turned to the right, leaving the sea behind, and after the oil wells, you drove further away from the sea, through orange groves, past a golf course, to a small village, the road winding through orange orchards, and the air was filled with the perfume of orange blossom. And all the leaves of the trees were shining. There seemed to be such peace in this valley, so quiet, away from all crowds and noise and vulgarity. This country is beautiful, so vast - with deserts, snowcapped mountains, villages, great towns and still greater rivers. The land is marvellously beautiful, vast, all inclusive. And we came to this house which was still more quiet and beautiful, recently built and with the cleanliness that houses in towns don't have. There were lots of flowers, roses and so on. A place in which to be quiet, not just vegetate, but to be really deeply, inwardly, quiet. Silence is a great benediction, it cleanses the brain, gives vitality to it, and this silence builds up great energy, not the energy of thought or the energy of machines but that unpolluted energy, untouched by thought. It is the energy that has incalculable capacity, skills. And this is a place where the brain, being very active, can be silent. That very intense activity of the brain has the quality and the depth and the beauty of silence. Though one has repeated this often, education is the cultivation of the whole brain, not one part of it; it is a holistic cultivation of the human being. A High school or Secondary school should teach both science and religion. Science really means the cultivation of knowledge, doesn't it? Science is what has brought about the present state of tension in the world for it has put together through knowledge the most destructive instrument that man has ever found. It can wipe out whole cities at one blow, millions can be destroyed in a second. A million human beings can be vaporized. And science has also given us a great many beneficial things -communication, medicine, surgery and innumerable small things for the comfort of man, for an easy way of life in which human beings need not struggle endlessly to gather food, cook and so on. And it has given us the modern deity, the computer. One can enumerate the many, many things that science has brought about to help man and also to destroy man, destroy the entire world of humanity and the vast beauty of nature. Governments are using the scientists, and scientists like to be used by governments for then they have a position, money, recognition and so on. Human beings also look to science to bring about peace in the world, but it has failed, just as politics and the politicians have failed to give them total security, peace to live and cultivate not only the fields but their brain, their heart, their way of living, which is the highest art. And religions - the accepted, traditional, superficial religions, creeds and dogmas - have brought about great damage in the world. They have been responsible for wars in history dividing man against man - one whole continent with very strong beliefs, rituals, dogmas against another continent which does not believe the same things, does not have the same symbols, the same rituals. This is not religion, it is just repetition of a tradition, of endless rituals that have lost meaning except that they give some kind of stimulus; it has become a vast entertainment. Religion is something entirely different. We have often spoken about religion. The essence of religion is freedom, not to do what you like, that is too childish, too immature and too contradictory, bringing great conflict, misery and confusion. Freedom again is something entirely different. Freedom means to have no conflict, psychologically, inwardly. And with freedom the brain becomes holistic, not fragmented in itself. Freedom also means love, compassion, and there is no freedom if there is not intelligence. Intelligence is inherent in compassion and love. We can go into this endlessly, not verbally or intellectually, but inwardly live a life of such a nature. And in a Secondary school or a High school, science is knowledge. Knowledge can expand endlessly, but that knowledge is always limited because knowledge is based on experience and that experience may be a theoretical, hypothetical result. Knowledge is necessary but as long as science is the activity of a separate group, or a separate nation, which is tribal activity, such knowledge can only bring about greater conflict, greater havoc in the world, which is what is happening now. Science with its knowledge is not for destroying human beings because scientists after all are human beings first, not just specialists; they are ambitious, greedy seeking their own personal security like all the other human beings in the world. They are like you and another. But their specialization is bringing great destruction as well as some benefit. The last two great wars have shown this. Humanity seems to be in a perpetual movement of destruction and building up again - destroy and build; destroy human beings and give birth to a greater population. But if all the scientists in the world put their tools down and said, `We will not contribute to war, to destroying humanity', they could turn their attention, their skill, their commitment to bringing about a better relationship between nature, environment and human beings. If there is some peace among a few people, then those few, not necessarily the elite, will employ all their skill to bring about a different world, then religion and science can go together. Religion is a form of science. That is, to know and to go beyond all knowledge, to comprehend the nature and immensity of the universe, not through a telescope, but the immensity of the mind and the heart. And this immensity has nothing whatsoever to do with any organized religion. How easily man becomes a tool of his own belief, his own fanaticism, committed to some kind of dogma which has no reality. No temple, no mosque, no church, holds truth. They are symbols perhaps but symbols are not the actual. In worshipping a symbol you will lose the real, the truth. But unfortunately the symbol has been given far greater importance than truth. One worships the symbol. All religions are based on some conclusions and beliefs, and all beliefs are divisive, whether political beliefs or religious. Where there is division there must be conflict. And a High school is not a place for conflict. It is a place for learning the art of living. This art is the greatest, it surpasses all other arts for this art touches the entire human being, not one part of him, however pleasant that may be. And in a school of this kind, if the educator is committed to this, not as an ideal, but as an actuality of daily life -committed, let's repeat again, not to some ideal, some Utopia, some noble conclusion, he can actually try to find out in the human brain a way of living that is not caught in problems, strife, conflict and pain. Love is not a movement of pain, anxiety, loneliness; it is timeless. And the educator, if he would stick at it, could instil in the students' acquisition of knowledge this true religious spirit which goes far beyond all knowledge, which is perhaps the very end of knowledge - not perhaps - it is the end of knowledge. For there must be freedom from knowledge to understand that which is eternal, which is timeless. Knowledge is of time, and religion is free from the bondage of time. It seems so urgent and important that we bring about a new generation, even half a dozen people in the world would make a vast difference. But the educator needs education. It is the greatest vocation in the world. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA WEDNESDAY 28TH MARCH 1984 THE PACIFIC DOES not seem to have great tides, at least not on this side of the Pacific along the coast of California. It is a very small tide, it goes in and goes out, unlike those vast tides that go out several hundred yards and come rushing in. There is quite a different sound when the tide is going out, when the flow of water is withdrawing, from when it is coming in with a certain sense of fury, a quality of sound totally different from the sound of the wind among the leaves. Everything seems to have a sound. That tree in the field, in its solitude, has that peculiar sound of being separate from all other trees. The great sequoias have their own deep lasting ancient sound. Silence has its own peculiar sound. And of course the endless daily chatter of human beings about their business, their politics and their technological advancements and so on, has its own sound. A really good book has its peculiar vibrations of sound. The vast emptiness also has its throbbing sound. The ebb and flow of the tide is like human action and reaction. Our actions and reactions are so quick. There isn't a pause before the reaction takes place. A question is put and immediately, instantly, one tries to seek an answer, a solution to a problem. There is not a pause between the question and the answer. After all, we are the ebb and flow of life - the outward and the inward. We try to establish a relationship with the outward, thinking that the inward is something separate, something that is unconnected with the outer. But surely the movement of the outer is the flow of the inward. They are both the same, like the waters of the sea, this constant restless movement of the outer and the inner, the response to the challenge. This is our life. When we first put together from the inward, then the inner becomes the slave of the outer. The society we have created is the outer, then to that society the inner becomes the slave. And the revolt against the outer is the same as the revolt of the inner. This constant ebb and flow, restless, anxious, fearful: can this movement ever stop? Of course the ebb and flow of the waters of the sea are entirely free from this ebb and flow of the outer and the inner - the inner becoming the outer, then the outer trying to control the inner because the external has become all important; then the reaction to that importance from the inner. This has been the way of life, a life of constant pain and pleasure. We never seem to learn about this movement, that it is one movement. The outer and the inner are not two separate movements. The waters of the sea withdraw from the shore, then the same water comes in, lashing the shores, the cliffs. Because we have separated the external and the inner, contradiction begins, the contradiction that breeds conflict and pain. This division between the outer and the inner is so unreal, so illusory, but we keep the external totally separate from the inner. Perhaps this may be one of the major causes of conflict, yet we never seem to learn - learn not memorize, learn, which is a form of movement all the time - learn to live without this contradiction. The outer and the inner are one, a unitary movement, not separate, but whole. One may perhaps intellectually comprehend it, accept it as a theoretical statement or intellectual concept, but when one lives with concepts one never learns. The concepts become static. You may change them but the very transformation of one concept to another is still static, is still fixed. But to feel, to have the sensitivity of seeing that life is not a movement of two separate activities, the external and the inward, to see that it is one, to realize that the interrelationship is this movement, is this ebb and flow of sorrow and pleasure, joy and depression, loneliness and the escape, to perceive non-verbally this life as a whole, not fragmented, not broken up, is to learn. Learning about it is not a matter of time, though, not a gradual process, for then time again becomes divisive. Time acts in the fragmentation of the whole. But to see the truth of it in an instant, then it is there, this action and reaction, endlessly - this light and dark, the beauty and ugliness. That which is whole is free from the ebb and flow of life, of action and reaction. Beauty has no opposite. Hate is not the opposite of love. KRISHNAMURTI TO HIMSELF OJAI CALIFORNIA FRIDAY 30TH MARCH 1984 WALKING DOWN THE straight road on a lovely morning, it was spring, and the sky was extraordinarily blue; there wasn't a cloud in it, and the sun was just warm, not too hot. It felt nice. And the leaves were shining and a sparkle was in the air. It was really a most extraordinarily beautiful morning. The high mountain was there, impenetrable, and the hills below were green and lovely. And as you walked along quietly, without much thought, you saw a dead leaf, yellow and bright red, a leaf from the autumn. How beautiful that leaf was, so simple in its death, so lively, full of the beauty and vitality of the whole tree and the summer. Strange that it had not withered. Looking at it more closely, one saw all the veins and the stem and the shape of that leaf. That leaf was all the tree. Why do human beings die so miserably, so unhappily, with a disease, old age, senility, the body shrunk, ugly? Why can't they die naturally and as beautifully as this leaf? What is wrong with us? In spite of all the doctors, medicines and hospitals, operations and all the agony of life, and the pleasures too, we don't seem able to die with dignity, simplicity, and with a smile. Once, walking along a lane, one heard behind one a chant, melodious, rhythmic, with the ancient strength of Sanskrit. One stopped and looked round. An eldest son, naked to his waist, was carrying a terracotta pot with a fire burning in it. He was holding it in another vessel and behind him were two men carrying his dead father, covered with a white cloth, and they were all chanting. One knew what that chant was, one almost joined in. They went past and one followed them. They were going down the road chanting, and the eldest son was in tears. They carried the father to the beach where they had already collected a great pile of wood and they laid the body on top of that heap of wood and set it on fire. It was all so natural, so extraordinarily simple: there were no flowers, there was no hearse, there were no black carriages with black horses. It was all very quiet and utterly dignified. And one looked at that leaf, and a thousand leaves of the tree. The winter brought that leaf from its mother on to that path and it would presently dry out completely and wither, be gone, carried away by the winds and lost. As you teach children mathematics, writing, reading and all the business of acquiring knowledge, they should also be taught the great dignity of death, not as a morbid, unhappy thing that one has to face eventually, but as something of daily life - the daily life of looking at the blue sky and the grasshopper on a leaf. it is part of learning, as you grow teeth and have all the discomfort of childish illnesses. Children have extraordinary curiosity. If you see the nature of death, you don't explain that everything dies, dust to dust and so on, but without any fear you explain it to them gently and make them feel that the living and the dying are one - not at the end of one's life after fifty, sixty or ninety years, but that death is like that leaf. Look at the old men and women, how decrepit, how lost, how unhappy and how ugly they look. Is it because they have not really understood either the living or the dying? They have used life, they waste away their life with incessant conflict which only exercises and gives strength to the self, the `me', the ego. We spend our days in such varieties of conflict and unhappiness, with some joy and pleasure drinking, smoking, late nights and work, work, work. And at the end of one's life one faces that thing called death and is frightened of it. One thinks it can always be understood, felt deeply. The child with his curiosity can be helped to understand that death is not merely the wasting of the body through disease, old age and some unexpected accident, but that the ending of every day is also the ending of oneself every day. There is no resurrection, that is superstition, a dogmatic belief. Everything on earth, on this beautiful earth, lives, dies, comes into being and withers away. To grasp this whole movement of life requires intelligence, not the intelligence of thought, or books, or knowledge, but the intelligence of love and compassion with its sensitivity. One is very certain that if the educator understands the significance of death and the dignity of it, the extraordinary simplicity of dying - understands it not intellectually but deeply -then he may be able to convey to the student, to the child, that dying, the ending, is not to be avoided, is not something to be frightened of, for it is part of one's whole life, so that as the student, the child, grows up he will never be frightened of the ending. If all the human beings who have lived before us, past generations upon generations, still lived on this earth how terrible it would be. The beginning is not the ending. And one would like to help - no, that's the wrong word - one would like in education to bring death into some kind of reality, actuality, not of someone else dying but of each one of us, however old or young, having inevitably to face that thing. It is not a sad affair of tears, of loneliness, of separation. We kill so easily, not only the animals for one's food but the vast unnecessary killing for amusement, called sport - killing a deer because that is the season. Killing a deer is like killing your neighbour. You kill animals because you have lost touch with nature, with all the living things on this earth. You kill in wars for so many romantic, nationalistic, political, ideologies. In the name of God you have killed people. Violence and killing go together. As one looked at that dead leaf with all its beauty and colour, maybe one would very deeply comprehend, be aware of, what one's own death must be, not at the very end but at the very beginning. Death isn't some horrific thing, something to be avoided, something to be postponed, but rather something to be with day in and day out. And out of that comes an extraordinary sense of immensity. 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk 5th Public Talk 1st Public Question & Answer 2nd Public Question & Answer 3rd Public Question & Answer - Alternative Versions - 1st Public Question & Answer 2nd Public Question & Answer 3rd Public Question & Answer LAST TALKS AT SAANEN 1985 1ST PUBLIC TALK SUNDAY, 7TH JULY, 1985 If one may, one would like to point out that we are a gathering of serious people who are concerned with daily life. We are not concerned whatsoever with beliefs, ideologies, suppositions, theoretical conclusions or theological concepts, nor are we trying to found a sect, a group of people who follow somebody. We are not, let's hope, frivolous but rather we are concerned together with what is happening in the world - all the tragedies, the utter misery, poverty - and our responsibility to it. One would also like to point out, if one may, that you and I, the speaker, are walking, taking a journey, together, not in an aeroplane high up at 30,000 or 40,000 feet, but walking along a quiet road, a long endless road all over the world where one sees appalling terrorism, the killing of people for no purpose, threatening people, kidnapping them, highjacking, murdering, wars. We don't seem to care very much. It is only when it happens very close to us that we become concerned, worried, fearful. When it is far away from us, we are more indifferent. This is what is happening in the world - economic division, religious division, political division and all the religious, sectarian divisions. There is a great deal of danger, hazard. One doesn't know what is going to happen in the future, not only in our own lifetime but in our children's and grandchildren's. The whole world is in a great state of crisis and the crisis is not only out there but also in each one of us. If you are at all aware of all this, what is the responsibility for it on the part of each one of us? One must have asked this question of oneself very often: what is one to do? Where should one begin? What should each one of us do, facing this terrible society in which we live, each concerned with himself, with his own fulfilment, with his own sorrow, with his own misery, economic struggle, and so on and so on? Each one of us is concerned with himself. What shall we do? Shall we pray to God -repeat prayers over and over and over again? Or belong to some sect, follow some guru, escape from the world, put on some medieval dress or modern robes of a peculiar colour? Can we withdraw from the world at all, like monks? Seeing all this, observing it intimately - not as something you have read about in the newspapers, or been told about by journalists, novels, television - what is the role of each one of us, the responsibility? As we said, we are not trying to entertain you, or trying to tell you what you should do - what each one of us should do. We have had leaders galore, political, economic, religious, sectarian, and they have been utterly helpless, they have their own theories, their own way, and there are thousands of people who are following them, all over the world. They have really enormous wealth, not only the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church but also the wealth of the gurus. It all ends up in money. So, if one may ask: what shall we do together? Or what shall we do as a single human being? Are we at all concerned, or are we seeking some peculiar satisfaction, gratification for ourselves? Are we committed to a certain symbol, religious or otherwise, and clinging to that, hoping that what lies behind that symbol will help us? This is a very serious question. It is becoming much more serious now, for there is the threat of war and then total uncertainty. May I, may the speaker, inform you of a conversation he had with a Mr X which continued for several days? Mr X has travelled all over the world, more or less, he told the speaker. He is fairly well read, has been to various institutions, sometimes joining them, and with a rush getting out of them. He followed one guru or another and gave them up. And for a few weeks he tried to become a monk, and that too he gave up. And he looked at the various political parties, at the whole spectrum of political activities, and at last he said, `I have come to talk with you. I would like to have a conversation with you, at the same level as I am, not that you are pretentious. I don't know your real position or what you are, though I have read something about you.' May I go on with this conversation? Does it interest you? And he said, `Let's talk things over together like two friends, you and l - like two friends who have lived together in the world, been through every kind of travail. What is it all about? Why is man born like this? Why has he become after many, many, many millennia what he is now - suffering, anxious, lonely, despairing, with disease, death and always the gods somewhere about? Let's forget all about those gods and talk together as two human beings, living in this world, in this marvellous country, on the earth which is so beautiful, which is the mother of all things.' And so this Mr X gave something of his inward thoughts, his outward activities. And he said, `What is all this about? Why are human beings, who are sophisticated, have educated themselves, who have become experts in technology and can argue the hind legs off a donkey, who can invent gods and goddesses and everything - why are human beings all over the world in perpetual conflict - not only with the environment, not only with their governments whom they have elected, or with some dogma invented by ancient priests? Why does each human being everlastingly, from the moment he is born till he dies, live in this conflict?' This was the first question he asked, this Mr X. Why? What is the cause of this conflict, not only outwardly but also most deeply, inwardly, subjectively, inside the skin as it were - why is he in conflict? Centuries before Christianity, the religions have talked endlessly about peace - be peaceful, be quiet, be gentle, generous, affectionate, loving. In spite of their propaganda this conflict goes on. Is there an answer to this question, a final, irrefutable answer? That is, can human beings in this world, living their daily life, going to the office, keeping a house, sex, children and all that, and also with this search, this longing for something much more than the mere material things of life - can they cease from conflict? Can this question ever be solved? Apparently man has not solved it, though he has lived on this earth for so many million years as a human being. `We have gathered tremendous experience,' Mr X was telling the speaker. `We have gathered a great deal of knowledge; we have gathered an immense amount of information technologically, but inwardly we remain barbarians, trying to kill each other, trying to compete with each other, to destroy each other.' So Mr X came all that way, a long distance by bus, train, aeroplane, and he said, `Answer this question: is there a cause for this conflict? And if there is a cause then let's discover what the cause is. Not that you are going to lead me or that you will tell me and I will accept, or that I will go and think about it and come to some kind of conclusion of my own, but rather together as two human beings - not one sitting on a platform and the other sitting down below - but together as two human beings who have gone through a great deal of life, the loneliness, the desperation, the anxiety, the uncertainty, wanting love and not finding it, or loving and not being satisfied with that, always pushing, pushing, pushing, always wanting to achieve something, whether it is heaven or illumination or enlightenment or to become a multimillionaire, which is more or less the same thing, never content, never knowing what peace is, never sitting quietly under a tree looking at the mountains, the rivers, the blade of grass and the beauty of the earth and sunlight, and the glory of an early morning - two human beings asking if there is a cause of this conflict.' So Mr X said to the speaker, `Let's talk, let us question each other, never accepting what the other says. I won't accept a thing from you, nor will you accept a thing from me. We are on the same level. You may be very clever, you may have a reputation which is nonsense, you may go round the earth, or a certain part of the earth, all that doesn't count. It has no value.' With which the speaker agreed whole-heartedly. `So let us explore this curse which man has borne from the beginning of time: why man, which includes woman please, lives this way; why man is in conflict in his own intimate relationships, sexually, in a family - the whole network of conflict.' So Mr X came again the next day, and we continued. We sat on the veranda on a beautiful day overlooking the valley with the great mountains round us, snow-capped, marvellous valleys, blue and lovely azure skies, and the sun glittering on the leaves, the dappled earth. Everything seemed so marvellously alive, pulsating, full of energy. There we were, he and the speaker, watching this great beauty and never being with the beauty, always watching it, never feeling the beauty with one's heart and mind, never being utterly sensitive to all the glory of the earth. He said, `We won't talk about beauty, this is your business, you tell me about it.' The speaker said he would a little later. `First let us explore together this question of conflict. We are asking: must human beings bear with it, get accustomed to it, hold it, never, never be able to put it completely aside, so that their brains can function as they should, completely untethered, completely free, not programmed, not conditioned?' So now the speaker is putting this question to you. And we also discussed, talked over, debated this point: what is the cause of it? We are taking a journey together, not my asking you to tell me, or I telling you. What is the cause of it? Every where there is struggle. You might say there is struggle in nature, the big animal lives on the smaller animal and so on. In a forest the little tree is struggling against the gigantic trees for light. You might say everywhere on earth, in nature, there is conflict, some kind of struggle going on, so why shouldn't we also go on in that way because we are part of nature? What human beings call conflict, may not be conflict out there; it may be the most natural way for nature to act: the hawk, the eagle kill the rabbit, bears kill salmon, the tiger kills something swiftly, or the cheetah; in nature killing, killing, killing goes on, and one might say that we are part of nature so it is inevitable that we should be in constant struggle. If one accepts that it is natural, inevitable, there is nothing more to be said about it; if we say it is natural, we will go on in that way because we are part of the whole earth, but if one begins to question it then where are you? Are you willing together to find out because we are supposed to be a little more active, intelligent than the trees, the tigers, the elephants (fortunately the elephants don't kill too many things, but they destroy trees). So, if we do not accept that conflict is the way of life, then what is one to do? Where does one start to understand the whole movement of conflict? How does one feel one's way into all this? One way, the speaker said to Mr X, is to analyse very carefully all the factors of conflict, one after the other - through self-analysis or being analysed by another, or accepting the advice of professors, philosophers, psychologists. But will analysis bring about the discovery of the cause, though it may bring you certain intellectual conclusions, or you may put all the analytical factors together and see the whole? Is that possible? Or is there a different approach to the question? I wonder if Mr X understands what the speaker is saying? The speaker is telling Mr X that analysis implies one who is the analyser - right? Therefore there is an analyser and the analysed, the subject and the object. Is there such a difference in oneself as the subject and the object? That is a question the speaker asks Mr X. You are Mr X. The analyser has been encouraged through education, through conditioning, through being programmed, to believe that he, the analyser, is completely different from that which he analyses, but the speaker says, `I am going to question this whole attitude towards analysis.' The speaker says, `I am not accepting what the professionals, including those people who come from Vienna, or the latest American psychologists, say about analysis.' The speaker tells Mr X, `I am not accepting any of those. I question it; I question not only the activity of analysis but who is the analyser. If you can understand the analyser first then what need is there for analysis?' You understand, sir? Am I going too fast? May we go together into this? I analyse myself. I have been angry, or greedy, or sexual, whatever it is, and in analysing it, that is, breaking it up and looking at it very carefully step by step, who is the observer? Is not the observer, the analyser, all the accumulated past remembrances? He is conditioned through experience, through his knowledge, his way of looking at life, his peculiar tendencies, his prejudices, his religious programming: all this is the past, all this is the background of his life, from childhood. He is the observer, he is the analyser, whether or not that background includes communal remembrance, racial remembrance, racial consciousness, he is the observer. And then the observer breaks it up into the observed and the observer, so that very division in analysis creates conflict. Are we together? You are Mr X, I am the speaker. Are we taking the same journey together? The speaker says that the moment there is a division between the analyser and the analysed there must inevitably be conflict of some kind, subtle, fatuous, without meaning, but it is a conflict - to overcome, conquer, suppress, transcend - all these are efforts in minor or major form. So one discovers that where there is division between the Swiss and the Germans, the French and the English, I and you, we and they - wherever there is division there must be conflict. Not that there is not division; the rich are very powerful. But if we create subjectively a division - I belong to this and you belong to that, I am a Catholic, you are a Protestant, I am a jew and you are an Arab - then there is conflict. So wherever there is division between two people, between man and woman, between God and earth, between `what should be' and `what is' - I wonder if Mr X is following all this, not only verbally, intellectually, which is meaningless, but with his heart, with his being, with his vitality, energy and passion - wherever there is division there is conflict. So one begins to discover the root of conflict. Is it possible for a human being living in a modern world, going to a job, earning a livelihood, business there, family here, aggressive in business and submissive to his wife - is it possible for him to live so that his life does not become a contradiction? Can that contradiction end? If not one will live in conflict, one becomes a hypocrite. If one likes to be a hypocrite, that is all right too, but if one wants to live very honestly, which is absolutely necessary, to live with great austere honesty, not to someone, not to one's country, not to one's ideal, but to say exactly what one means and mean what one says, not what others have said and which you repeat, or believe in something and do quite the opposite, that is not honesty - if one wants to live very honestly there can be no contradiction. Everyone talks about peace. Every government, every religion, and every preacher, including the speaker, talks about peace. And to live peacefully demands tremendous honesty and intelligence. So is it possible, living in the twentieth century, to live inwardly first, psychologically first, subjectively, and not have in oneself any kind of division? Please do enquire, search, ask with passion. Passion doesn't include fanaticism, passion doesn't demand martyrdom. It is not something you are so attached to that that very attachment gives you passion - you understand? That is not passion, it is being tied to something which gives you the feeling of passion, energy, like a donkey tied to a post; it can wander round and round and round but it is still held there. So could we, Mr X and the speaker, not telling each other what they should do, discover for themselves in all honesty, without any sense of deception, without any sense of illusion, whether it is possible to live in this world - in which you know all the horrors that are going on - without conflict, without division? Don't go to sleep, please, it is too early in the morning. If you are asked - you are Mr X - what would your answer be inwardly? If you are a Swiss, a Hindu, a Muslim, or follow some clique, or some group, or are the follower of some guru wouldn't you have to abandon all that completely? You may have a Swiss passport (the speaker has an Indian passport but he is not an Indian - they don't like that in India but we have told them several times not to belong to any cult, to any guru, to anything) - you are going to find this terribly difficult. At the end of it you stand alone, but there is the comprehension, the inward awareness, insight, into all that which is really nonsensical. Belonging to something, belonging to a group, belonging to some sect, may give one momentary satisfaction but that is all becoming rather weary, wretched and ugly. So can one not be attached to any of this - especially including what the speaker is saying? Strangely, your brain, though not the brain of another, is also the other - you understand? Your brain is like the brain of every other human being. It has immense capacity, immense energy. Look what they have done in the technological world. All the scientists in America are now concerned with Star Wars. We won't go into all that. The brain has this extraordinary energy if you concentrate on something, give your attention to something. They have given attention to killing other human beings, so the atom bomb came into being. Our brains are not ours, they have evolved through a long period of time, and in that evolution we have gathered tremendous knowledge, experience, but in all that there is very little of what is called love. I may love my wife, or my children, or my country. My country has been divided by thought, geographically, but it is the world. The world in which one lives is the entire world. So my brain which has evolved through a long period of time, that brain with its consciousness is not mine because my consciousness is shared with every other human being. Mr X is saying, `I have read something about what you have said, I am not repeating what you have said, but this is what I also feel. I see, wherever I have been, in every corner of the earth, that there are human beings who suffer pain, anxiety, desperate loneliness, and so our consciousness is shared by all other human beings.' Do you realize this - not intellectually but actually? If one really feels this, then there will be no division. I ask Mr X, `Do you see this reality, not a concept of it, not an idea of it, not the beautiful conclusion but the actuality of it? The actuality is different from the idea of actuality - right? You are sitting there, that is actual, but I can imagine that you are sitting there which is totally different.' So, our brain, which is the centre of our consciousness, with all the nervous responses, sensory responses, the centre of all our knowledge, all our experience, all our memory (your memory may be from another, but it is still memory; you may be highly educated, the other may have no education at all, may not even know how to read and write, but it is still part of the whole) - so your consciousness is shared by every human being on this earth. Therefore you are entire humanity. Do you understand, sirs? You are in actuality, not theoretically or theologically, or in the eyes of God - probably gods have no eyes! - but in actuality there is this strange irrevocable fact that we all go through the same mould, the same anxiety, hope, fear, death, loneliness that brings such desperation. So we are mankind. And when one realizes that deeply, conflict with another ceases because you are like me. So that is what we talked about, Mr X and Mr K. And we also continued about other things, for he was there for several days. But we first established a real relationship which is so necessary when there is any kind of debate, any kind of communication, not only verbal, for words don't convey profoundly what one desires to convey. So, at the end of the second day, we said, where are we? You, Mr X and Mr K, where are we in this? Have we brought about, not change, change implies time (we will go into that another time) - or have we merely gathered as we gather the harvest? We sow - that is, you have come here, which is part of sowing, and you have listened to K and Mr X - what have you gathered? Gathering means accumulation. You have gathered so much information - please follow this, we will stop presently, don't get sleepy or nervous. You have gathered so much information from professionals, from psychologists, from psychiatrists -gathered, gathered, gathered. The brain is like a magnet, gathering. And K asks Mr X, `Have you gathered also? If you have gathered then this becomes like any other meeting.' So K asks Mr X, `What have you gathered? Or are you free from gathering?' Please, if you have the patience, listen to this. Do we ever stop gathering? For practical things in life one has to gather, but to see where gathering is not necessary, that is where the art of living comes. Because if we are gathering, our brain is never free, is never empty - we won't go into the question of emptiness because that is a different matter - but are we aware that we are gathering, gathering, gathering as we gather habits? And when you have gathered so much it is very difficult to get rid of it. This gathering conditions the brain. Born in India, belonging to a certain type of people, tradition, religious, or very, very orthodox, you have gathered all that. And then to be free of all that takes immense enquiry, searching, looking, watching, awareness. So is it possible not to gather at all? Please consider this, don't reject it. find out. You have to gather knowledge to go to your house, to drive a car, to speak a foreign language, but inwardly is it necessary to gather at all? Enlightenment is not gathering. On the contrary it is total freedom from all that. Which is, after all, love, isn't it? I don't love you because I have gathered you. I have been sexually satisfied with you, or you are companionable, or I am lonely and therefore I depend on you; then that becomes a marketable thing; then we exploit each other, use each other, sell each other down the river. Surely that is not love, is it? Love is the quality of a brain that doesn't gather anything at all, and then what it says will be what it has discovered, not what other people have said. And in that there is tremendous passion, not lust, passion. But it is not fanaticism. I don't suddenly become a strict vegetarian or won't touch salt. The fanatics all have passion of a certain type but they have become violent, inclined to martyrdom, and all the rest of that business. So, the speaker, K, is asking Mr X to find out if you can live without gathering. You can't be told about it. We can enquire into it together, but the actuality of never gathering, the accumulated memory never operating, is really very subtle; it requires a great deal of enquiry. May we stop now? We have talked for an hour. You haven't talked but K has talked. We have established the basis of a communication with each other in which there is no superior and no inferior, one who knows and one who does not know. LAST TALKS AT SAANEN 1985 2ND PUBLIC TALK WEDNESDAY, 10TH JULY, 1985 May we continue with what we were talking about the other day? I think it is important to realize that this is not a personality cult. The person called K is not important at all. What is important is what he is saying, not what he looks like, his personality, and all the rest of that nonsense. So please, if one may point out carefully and definitely, the person who is speaking on the platform is in no way important. We talked the other day about various forms of conflict, what is the cause of it, why throughout the history of mankind, man, including of course woman, has lived in conflict and never solved that problem at all. Throughout the ages, during this long period of evolution, of many, many millennia, we are still in conflict with each other - conflict between man and woman, between human beings, between a group of people, between nations, sexes, religions. I am sure one is aware of all this. The terrorism, the brutality, the appalling cruelty, all the hideous things that are taking place in the world - who is responsible for all this? As we said the other day, this is a serious gathering, not just spending a good morning under a tent or listening to somebody; this is a serious, active, co-operative, definite gathering. We are asking this morning, who is responsible for all this? Responsibility implies care, attention, not only to what is taking place outwardly in the world, but also inwardly in all of us: who is responsible for this? Are the politicians responsible? That is, let them do what they want to do because we have elected them in a so-called Democratic society. In the Totalitarian states they are not elected, they just come to power and dominate the whole. So who is responsible? The religions? The Islamic world? The Christian world? The Hindu world? Buddhist and so on? Or are we responsible, each one of us? Please do consider this. Is each one of us, living in this world, in this environment, not only in lovely Switzerland but also all over the world, is each one of us - you sitting there, and the speaker here - are we responsible for all this? I hope you are putting this question to yourself - are you responsible for creating this appalling, dangerous world, brutal and terrifying world? If you have gone to various countries you see all this, enormous poverty, millions upon millions of poor people, starving, and those who are terribly rich, born to high position and for the rest of their lives keeping their riches, castles, mansions and so on. Who is responsible? Are we responsible for creating this society around us, the culture, the religion, the gods, all the rest of that ritualistic repetition and sensation, because we are angry, greedy, violent, disorderly, hating and only limiting our affection to a very, very, very few - has each one of us created this society in which we live? Is that so? Is each one of us responsible? You say,`I am sorry, I am not', or you may be indifferent to the whole thing as long as you are safe in a particular country, protected by frontiers. So, we come to a very serious question: what is order and what is disorder? Please, we are discussing, going together into this question. It is not that you will accept, or in any way acquiesce in what the speaker is saying, that would be utterly futile, but could we together take a very long journey, not only intellectually, verbally, but much more profoundly to discover why the society for which we are responsible is creating such terrible disorder and cruelty? Are we different from society, the thing we have created? Must there not be order first in our house - not only in the outer walls of the house and garden, but also in the inward world in which we all live, the subjective world, the psychological world? Is there disorder there? You understand my question? I hope the speaker is making it quite clear. As long as we live, each one of us, in disorder, psychologically, subjectively, inwardly, whatever we do will create disorder. The Totalitarian states have said that by changing society, the environment, forcing it, compelling it, they will change humanity, the human brain. They have not succeeded. There is constant dissent, revolt and all the rest of it. So, if you see this, that we have created this disorder, and this disorder is the society in which we live, then what shall we do? Where do you start? Do you want to change society as the social reformers do, the do-gooders, the men who want to alter laws, through terrorism, through compulsion? Or do you put your own house inwardly in order? Is the question clear? So, how shall I, or you, put our house in order? Because that is the only place I can start, not by outward reform, outward change of laws, forming United Nations. If I may digress a little bit, we were invited to speak at the United Nations last year and this year. One of their big shots got up after K had spoken and said, `At last after forty years of working in this institution, very hard, I have come to the conclusion that we must not kill each other.' Forty years! And we are the same, hoping something will happen out there, something that will compel us, force us, persuade us, drive us. We have depended on the outer - outer challenges, outer wars and so on. So, what shall we do? It is no good joining little communities, following some guru. That is total irresponsibility. Giving, surrendering, oneself to somebody who calls himself enlightened, leads you to... whatever he will lead you to, generally money - so how shall we start inwardly to bring about order? Order implies no conflict, doesn't it? No conflict in oneself, completely no conflict? We went into that question the other day, what is the cause of conflict? Volumes have been written about it. Psychologists, psychiatrists, therapeutists and so on have explained verbally; millions of words have been spilled over it, and yet we remain, all of us, in conflict. Where the mind, the brain is in disorder, which is the essence of conflict, that brain can never be orderly, simple, clear. That can be taken for granted as a law, like the law of gravity, the law that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west: where there is subjective or inward conflict there must be disorder. Look into it, please, carefully. And what is the nature of disorder? Not what is order, because a confused mind can invent order and say, `That is order.' A brain that is caught in illusions, as most people's are, will create its own order out of confusion - right? So, what is the nature of disorder? Why do we say there must be order and then be in disorder? Why do we separate the two? We say we realize that we are in disorder, which is fairly simple, and then we are seeking order out of that. The politicians know there is disorder and they are seeking order. Is this clear? Of course. Not only the politicians but each one of us knows that our life is in disorder. Going to the office in the morning from nine till five - what a life you lead! - struggling, fighting, ambitious, greedy, aggressive, climbing the ladder and then coming home and being very docile, submitting to your wife, or husband, or whoever it is. There is disorder in this, and all the time the brain is seeking order - all the time - because it cannot live in disorder; it cannot function clearly, beautifully, exquisitely, to its highest capacity when there is disorder. Therefore there is a slight search for order in all of us. So we are asking: why is there this division - wanting order and then living in disorder? I don't know if you are following all this. Don't be puzzled, it is very simple. We live in disorder, that is certain. Why bother about order? Let us see if we can clear up disorder. If you can clear it up then there is order. There is not this conflict between disorder and order. Look: it is fairly simple this. We are violent people, aggressive, not only physically but also psychologically, inwardly. We want to hurt people. We say things brutally about others. Violence is not merely physical action; violence is also psychological - aggressive, imitative, comparing oneself with another and so on, all that is a form of violence. We are, by nature from the animal, violent. And we don't stay with that, recognizing `I am violent; we invent nonviolence. We say, `I mustn't be violent'. Why bother with not being violent? You are violent. Let's see that, stay with that, hold with that, not move away from that, then we can examine it together and see how far we can go to dissipate it. But if you are constantly struggling to become non-violent you can't solve the problem, because when you are trying to become non-violent you are all the time sowing the seeds of violence. I am violent, I hope one day to be without violence, that one day is pretty far away, and during that interval I sow, I am still violent, perhaps not so much so but still violent. So, I say, don't let me bother with not being violent, let's understand violence, what is its nature, why it exists and is it possible to be free of it completely? That's much more interesting and vital than pursuing non-violence. So similarly it is important to understand disorder, and forget about order. Because if we understand, and move out of that intellectual, verbal understanding, then we can find out how to live a life which is completely non-violent. I hope we are clear on this matter. So, what is disorder? The brain is seeking order, it is not concentrated, attentive to discover what is disorder. This is a dialogue between you and the speaker. Don't wait for him to answer that question, then you will just repeat. If you can discover, find the truth of it, it is yours, then you can act, but if you merely listen to what the speaker is saying then you repeat, you don't know - `I don't understand, it is so difficult', and all the rest of that nonsense. So what is disorder? To say one thing and think another, to act in one way, and hide your own thoughts, feelings, in another way. That is only a very simple matter. That requires great honesty, to say things that you mean - not what others have told you, you mean. Probably all of you have read a great deal, so your brains are full of other people's knowledge, other people's concepts, prejudices, added to your own. So you repeat. You never sit down, or walk in the woods, and find out what is disorder. To find out, one has to have tremendous honesty - face things as they are. If I am afraid, I am afraid, I don't pretend I am not afraid. If I have told a lie, I say I have told a lie, not defend it. Face exactly what one is, not what one should be. Are we together in this? So gradually, or instantly, you find out for yourself the causation of any kind, either physical, or subjective, or psychological. Conflict exists when there are two opposing factors in life, the good and the bad. Is the good something totally separate from the bad? Or is the good partly bad? Am I making myself clear? No. What is bad? And what is good? Obviously to kill another is bad, in the name of God, in the name of another human being, etc., etc. And what is good? To be good. Are you waiting for my description? Probably you have never gone into all this. Is the good separate from the bad? Or does the good have its roots, its beginning in the bad - you under- stand? There are two elements in human beings, the good and the bad. The bad, let's say, is to be angry, the good is not to be angry. But I have known anger and when I say"I mustn't be angry, I will be good,' the good is born out of my anger. When I say, `I must be good' I have known the bad. If I don't know the bad I am the good. Not the goods! I am the good. I wonder if you understand this. That is, as long as I am violent I don't know what is the other. If I am not violent then the other is. So is the good born out of the bad? If it is born out of the bad, then the good is not good. Are we together in this? It seems rather mystifying, but please it is not. It is very simple. That is why I said, please let us think simply, clearly, without prejudice, without taking a bias. So love is not hate - right? If love is born out of hate then it is not love. Is that clear? The speaker does not hate anybody, but suppose he does, then he says, `l mustn't hate, I must love' - that is not love. It is still part of hate. It is a decision, it is an act of thought. And thought is not love. So, can we, each one of us, feeling the responsibility that we have created this society in which we live, which is monstrous, immoral beyond imagination - can each one of us, living in this world, in this society, be utterly free from disorder? That means the complete end of conflict, the end of this feeling of duality in us -duality, the opposing elements in us. So is it not a matter of being tremendously aware - aware of every thought? Can we be that? This leads up to a certain point: what is thought? What is thinking? If you are asked: what is thinking, what would be your answer? I am asking you, the speaker is asking you: what is thinking? And you begin to think. All our life is thinking and sensation. The child says, `My book', `That's my swing' - that is thinking. By thinking mankind has sent a rocket to the moon. But that thinking also put a flag up there. To go all that way to the moon and put up a flag! No, don't laugh. See what thought is doing. Thought has created the whole world of technology. Astonishing things are being done of which we have very little imagination, which we know very little about - the computer, the extraordinary submarines and so on and so on. All that has been done by thinking - right? And thought has built the most extraordinary buildings. When you write a letter you have to think, when you drive a car you have to think, so thinking has become extraordinarily important for all of us. Thinking is part of our programme. We have been programmed: I am a Catholic, you are a Protestant, I am a Muslim, you are a Hindu, you are a Communist, I am a Democrat - you follow? It is part of our conditioning. We are being programmed by newspapers, magazines, the politicians, the priests, the archbishop, the Pope - you know the whole thing, how we are being programmed. So thinking is what? Why do you think? Why do you think at all? Why don't you just act? You can't. First you design very carefully what you are going to do - is it right or wrong, is it as it should be or should not be? - and then your emotions, sensations say it is all right or all wrong, and you go and do it. All this is a process of thinking. Should I marry, should I not? That girl is right, that girl is not, or the other way round. Thinking has done an extraordinary amount of harm - war, hate, jealousy, wanting to hurt others. So what is thinking? The so-called good and the so-called bad thinking, right thinking and wrong thinking; it is still thinking. Oriental thinking and Western thinking; it is still thinking. What is thinking? Don't wait for me. Put to yourself that question. What is thinking? You cannot think without memory. Then what is memory? Go on. Put your brains into it. Remembrance, long association of ideas, long bundle of memories: I remember the house I lived in, I remember my childhood. That is what? The past. The past is memory. You don't know what will happen tomorrow but you can project what might happen. That is still the action of memory in time. How does memory come? This is all so simple. Memory cannot exist without knowledge. If I have knowledge of my accident in a car which happened yesterday - it didn't - that accident is remembered. But previous to that remembrance there was the accident, which was the knowledge - right? The accident becomes knowledge, then from that knowledge comes memory. If I had had no accident there would be no memory of an accident. So knowledge is based on experience, and experience is always limited, always. I can't experience the immensity of order of the universe. I can,t experience it, but I can imagine it. It is marvellous! Experience is limited and therefore knowledge is limited, whether in the future or now because more and more knowledge is being added. Scientific knowledge is based on that. Knowledge is always limited whether now or in the future, so memory is limited. So thought is limited. Right? This is where the difficulty is. Thought is limited. Whether it is noble or ignoble, religious, or non-religious, virtuous or not virtuous, moral or immoral, thought is still limited. Whatever thought does is limited. Are we together in this? So, can thought bring about order because thought itself, being limited, may be the source of disorder? I wonder if you capture this? You understand my question? Very interesting. Go into it. Anything that is limited must create disorder; if I am a Muslim, which is very limited, I must create disorder; if I am an Israeli, I must create disorder, or a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, and all the rest of it. So is thought the very root of disorder? Go into it, sir. Please be sceptical, don't accept a thing that the speaker says. find out, investigate, not tomorrow, but now sitting there, go into it, find out. Put your passion into it, not your fanaticism. Then you will begin to discover. So, as human beings, we have lived for millions of years in a state of violence, disorder, conflict - and all that is brought about by thought. All of it. So one begins to enquire: is there something else which is as active, as clear, as precise and energetic as thought? K discovered long ago that thought is very limited. Nobody told him; he discovered it, or came upon it. Then he began to ask, is there another instrument like that? Thought is within this brain, within this skull. The brain is the holder of all thought, all memories, all experience. It is also all emotion, sensation, nervous responses. It is the vast memory that is held there, racial, non-racial, personal - all that is there. And the centre of all that is thought. It may say, `No, it is something else', but that is still thought. When it says it is seeking super-consciousness, it is still thought. So one asks, K asks, is there another instrument, or not an instrument, a wave, a movement which is not of this kind? Are you asking this question? If you are asking it who is going to tell you? Be careful, please. This demands great subtlety, skill, because thought can be very deceptive. It says, `All right I have understood, thought is limited', but it is still active. And then it begins to invent: `I know thought is limited but God is limitless, and I am seeking God.' Thought is limited but it invents the rituals, the Middle Ages' robes of the monks and the priests and all the rest of it. So, can the brain use thought - act thoughtfully when it is necessary but otherwise, have no thought? You understand? Can the brain when necessary use thought? It is necessary to live with thought when you drive a car, when you eat, when you write a letter, when you do this or that. All that is the movement of limited thought - that is, when necessary, thought can act. But otherwise why should it chatter all day long? So, is there another instrument which is not thought at all -which is not put together by thought, or conceived by thought, or manufactured subtly by thought? Find out. That requires the understanding of time. May I go into it? You aren't tired? You have to understand what time is. Not the time of the rising and the setting of the sun, not the time of the new moon, not the time of day from morning until evening. Time is also all that happened in one's life, which are a thousand yesterdays, and all that might happen tomorrow. Time is horizontal and vertical. Time is the past, time is now, sitting here, and time is also tomorrow. And this is the cycle in which we are caught. A thousand yesterdays, many days in our life, and before we die there will be some more days. So this whole cyclical movement is time. Time is necessary to evolve from the little seed to the big tree, from the little baby to the grown-up man. There is physical time and also psychological time: I am this, but I will be that. To become that I need time. You are following all this? So, the brain lives in time. The brain has been cultivated, grown, evolved through time. This whole movement of life as we know it is time - right? We know what was yesterday. You may remember your childhood, you may remember your life twenty years ago or ten days ago, which is the past. That past is the present, slightly changed, slightly modified by present circumstances. Are you following or am I talking to myself? Another ten minutes please. Don't go to sleep or get bored. It is your life we are talking about, not my life. it is your life, your daily life - what it actually is, not what it should be. Your daily, monotonous, lonely, desperate, anxious, uncertain life. And that life is part of the movement of time. Time is also the coming to an end when I die. So we are concerned with time. I will have a better job if I keep at it; if I get more skilful I will have more money. All that is time. And yesterday, many yesterdays, being slightly modified by circumstances, by pressure, is now. All that has happened from a thousand yesterdays becomes slightly polished, slightly modified and goes to the future - right? The past modifying itself through the present becomes the future. So the future is now. I wonder if you see this? Please give it just a little time. One lived in India, with all the cultural, superstitious beliefs, dogmas, immense traditions, three to five thousand years old: one was brought up on that and one lived there in that little circle of Brahminism, and if one wasn't awake one remained there all the rest of one's life until one died. But circumstances, economic circumstances, travel, this and that, make one drop this; the tradition of three to five thousand years is changed through modification, which is through economy: I have to earn more money; my wife, my children, must have more clothes. But the past is still moving and becomes changed through circumstances, and the change goes on into the future. That is clear. So you ask; what is the future? Is it what you are now your future, modified, but still the future. There is a continuity from the past, slightly changing, to the future - right? We have lived on this earth as human beings, homo sapiens, for millions of years. We were savages then and we still are savages, but with clean clothes, shaved, washed, polished, but inwardly we hate each other, we kill each other, we are tribalists, and all the rest of it. We haven't changed very much. So the future is now, because what I have been I still am, modified, and I will go on like that. So the future is now and unless I break the cycle, the future will always be the now. I wonder if you understand this? It is not very difficult; please don't make it difficult. I have been greedy for the last thirty years and that greed becomes modified because I can't earn so much, satisfy myself, but I am still greedy; it goes on. So unless I stop greed now, tomorrow will be greedy. It is very simple. So, our question then is: can `what is', the past, change, end completely? Then you break the cycle. When you break the cycle the cells in the brain themselves change. We have discussed this matter with brain specialists - but don't bother with all that. You see, sir, I have lived ninety years - the speaker is ninety. Don't sympathize with me for God's sake. All that has happened during these ninety years, or fifty years, or ten years, or even ten days, is the past - memory, experiences, talking here, there, small audiences, big audiences, reputation and all that nonsense - and all that is in the past. And he feels important sitting on a platform, he has a reputation, and he must keep up that reputation. So he wants this reputation, this sitting on the platform, all that business, to continue - right? But he may get old - not may, he is old - and he may lose the audience because his brain might go gaga - no listen to it carefully, please listen; it is not a matter of laughter. It is funny, but just look at it. Unless he is free of the audience now, his reputation now - he will be stuck. So end it. He may go gaga next year, all right, but he has ended it. The brain has broken the cycle of time. The brain is composed of millions and millions of cells and those very cells mutate. There is a different species of cell because you have moved away from a certain direction to another direction. You follow? That is, you have been going north all your life. Somebody comes along and says, `Look, there is nothing in the north, for God's sake don't waste your energy on going north, go south or east.' The moment you turn east you have broken the pattern. You have broken the pattern which the brain cells have set and gone east. It is as simple as that, if one does it. You can play with words endlessly, write books endlessly, but once you see the nature of time, you see that we have changed through these millions of years very little. We are still killing each other, only in a more diabolical way. The atom bomb can wipe us out in a second, vaporize us. We won't exist, nothing will exist. But it is the same when a man killed another man two million years ago. We are still doing that. Unless we break the pattern we will do that same thing tomorrow. This is very simple. They killed with a club two thousand years ago, later on they invented the arrow. The arrow, they thought, would stop all wars. Now we have the terrible means of destruction of the present day. It is the same as two million years ago; we are still killing. That is the pattern the brain has accepted, has lived with; the brain has created the pattern. If the brain can realize for itself, not through pressure, compulsion, but realize for itself that time has no value in the movement of change, then you have broken the pattern. Then there is a totally different way of living. LAST TALKS AT SAANEN 1985 3RD PUBLIC TALK SUNDAY, 14TH JULY, 1985 May we continue with our conversation? We were talking about conflict and the causation of conflict. Conflict is growing more and more in the world, in every form, in every social section. We said that the cause of conflict is this constant opposition, not only within ourselves but also within the society in which we live. Society is what we have made it. I think that is fairly clear and obvious, because in ourselves we are, from the moment we are born till we die, in constant struggle, competition, conflict, with every form of destructive or positive attitudes, prejudices and opinions. This has been the way of our life, not only at the present period but also probably for the last two and a half million years. And we are still going on with this in the same pattern, the same mould - wars, more destructive than ever, division among nationalities, which is tribalism, religious divisions, family divisions, sectarian fragmentation and so on. If we may point out again this morning we are not here as an intellectual group, or a rather romantic, imaginative, sentimental assembly. You and the speaker are going to take a journey together, not he leading you or you following him but together, side by side, perhaps holding hands if necessary. We are taking a journey, rather complex, twisting, subtle and perhaps endless, a journey that has no beginning and no end. A journey as we understand it, has a beginning and an ending, something starts, goes on and then comes to an end, but perhaps it may not be at all like that. It may be a constant movement, not within the cycle of time but rather outside the field of momentum as we know it. So we are together. Please, the speaker must insist on this point. You are not merely the listeners, accepting or rejecting what he says, but rather in co-operation, in responsibility, walking together in step, not one behind the other, along the same path, or lane. So it is your responsibility as well as the speaker's not to accept or to deny, to agree or disagree. We have been brought up, educated, in this system of agreeing and disagreeing. We agree with some things, we disagree entirely with other things, so there is always this division - those who agree, do something together, and those who are opposed to what they are doing. Could we this morning banish from our brains altogether, entirely out of our blood, the idea of agreeing or disagreeing? Because if you agree with the speaker, and there are some who don't agree, then there is inevitably a conflict between the two. One may tolerate it, one may put up with it, accept it, but there is always this division - clear? So could we, seeing the consequences of agreeing and disagreeing, approving and disapproving, observe together, see together not only as far as we can what is happening externally - that is fairly simple because we are not told very much about what is actually going on in the political world, in the world of armaments, in the scientific world and all the technological worlds - but inwardly, subjectively, see exactly what is going on, not saying, `Well, this is bad, this is good. I accept this, I don't accept that,' but just observe, not having in that observation any prejudice? Can we do that? Can we observe ourselves, our conduct, our behaviour, the way we think, our reactions, our faiths, beliefs, conclusions and so on? Could we observe all that as it is, not as it should be, or as it must be, but just look at it? That requires a great deal of attention, the brain must be extraordinarily active to reject any kind of reaction in watching oneself because, after all, what other people have said about us, the professors, the psychologists, the psychiatrists and the gurus is what they say; it is not what we see of ourselves. I hope we are following each other. The words the speaker is using are very simple, words which we use daily in our conversation with each other. There is no jargon, no specialized linguistic, semantic jargon. We are talking things over together, as two friends using ordinary, daily language. So we are asking: can we see exactly what we are without taking sides about it, not agreeing and disagreeing, seeing the consequences of each attitude, assessing, evaluating, judging, but just observing as you observe the sky of an evening full of stars, and those mountains, majestic against the blue sky? Can we in the same way observe ourselves and our relationship to the world, and the world's relationship to us? It is a rather complex process. Are we together? Or am I marching ahead and leaving you behind? Could we go together, keeping in step? What are we? Why have we such deep-rooted self-interest? Not only self-interest outwardly - outwardly there is a certain necessity for self-interest otherwise one has to give up - but inwardly, psychologically, subjectively? Why is there such deep, impenetrable self-interest in all of us? Self-interest - you know what that word means? To be interested in oneself, one's own profits, one's own failures, one's own fragmentation, one's own prejudices, opinions, the whole content of one's life. Self-interest - why is it that we are so committed to that? Is it possible to live in this world without that self-interest - first psychologically and then seeing if it is possible externally? Are we together or am I talking over beyond that tent, over the fence? Have you ever noticed that we build a fence round ourselves: a fence of self-protection, a fence to ward off any hurts, a barrier between you and the other, between you and the family, and so on? There is a barrier between you and the speaker. Naturally. You don't know the speaker, the speaker doesn't know you, therefore you are rather politely listening, curious as to what the devil he is talking about and hoping you will get something out of it after sitting an hour or so in this hot tent, expecting something, curious, choosing what suits you, what doesn't suit you, listening partially, not entirely because one doesn't want to expose oneself to oneself, so naturally one creates either a very, very thin barrier, hardly any, or a definite wall. Why do we do that? Is that not also self-interest? And this self-interest must inevitably bring about fragmentation, to break up. Nationally, you can see the barrier - on one side England and the other side all Europe, and beyond it. There is this constant division, and where there is division there must be conflict, that is inevitable. Whether you have a very deep intimate relationship with your wife or husband, a girl or boy, and so on, where there is division there must be fragmentation, there must be conflict. That is a law - right? Whether you like it or not that is a law. But when one sees that, then the very seeing is the way of breaking down the barrier. So we must enquire: what does it mean to see? What does it mean to observe? I am observing myself - right? I am watching what I am, my recreations, my prejudices, my convictions, my idiosyncrasies, the traditions in which I have been brought up, the reputation, all that rubbish. I am watching. If I do not watch very, very carefully, listen to every sound that is going on in watching, then I set a direction in which I must go. You are following all this? Am I talking to myself. We were talking in Washington, America, and they clapped what I said, approving, encouraging. Here, you all sit very quietly. One doesn't know whether you are really walking together with the speaker, actually listening, or casually coming to a Sunday morning sermon. Instead of going to church you turn up here, either for amusement, or just to hear what that chap is saying, or, `Well I agree with him in some things but he is not quite right about other things.' We never look at the whole thing, the whole problem of life, the whole of existence from childhood to death. We never take the whole thing in and observe, learn, not accumulate knowledge, that is fairly simple, but learn what is happening in ourselves, the demands that we make upon each other, the hurts, the deep loneliness, the depression, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the fears, and all the pleasant things that we have, and also the suffering, and ultimately the pain of death. We never look at this whole movement as one, but rather we consider it fragmentarily. Now we are going to look together if we may, not only at what is the cause of this fragmentation but also whether the brain, which has been conditioned for millions of years to war, to conflict, to work, work, work all the time, endlessly chattering, divided as nationalities and so on - your god and my god, Eastern philosophy opposed to Western philosophy - whether the brain can put aside altogether the whole movement of agreeing and disagreeing, in which there is choice. I choose to go this way and you choose to go that way; I choose to believe in God, or no god, and you say, `No, sorry, I can't accept that, there must be God, because I believe it, I like it' - or `It is my tradition' - and so on. If we once recognize the division, the agreement, the disagreement, reward and punishment, then we can begin to look actually at ourselves, because ourselves is the world. What we are, the world is. If we are violent, suspicious, ungenerous, the world is like that. This is obvious because we have made this society, this monstrous, ugly, immoral world in which we live, with all the gods. It has become a great circus, a painful circus, or a pleasurable circus. So can we see exactly what we are without any distortion? What are we -psychologically, not biologically? Biologically we have been put together through millennia upon millennia. Psychologically, from the beginning of man, there has been violence, hate, jealousy, aggression, trying always to become something more, more, more, and much more than what we are. Is it that we are listening merely to the description or do we see the fact, not the idea of the fact? You understand? There is a difference between fact and the idea of the fact. That is, we have an idea, see something and then pursue the idea: `I shouldn't be like this, I must be like that.' That is an idea. When I see exactly what I am, that is a fact. Fact does not need an idea, a concept, an ideology. It is so. I am angry. That is a fact. But if I say, `I must not be angry', then it becomes an idea. Are we together in this? So what is it you are making out of this? Is it that you are concluding a set of ideas, or are you seeing the fact as it is - that we are jealous, aggressive, lonely, fearful and all the rest of it? The whole psyche, the persona, the ego, is all that, and all that is the past, the memories we have collected - right? I have been afraid, I know what fear is, and the moment that feeling arises I say, `That is fear.' That very saying `That it is fear' is an idea, not a fact. I don't know if you are following all this? Sir, the word tree is not the actual tree. The name K is not the actual K. The word is not the thing. So, when you observe, your brain is caught in a whole network of words, words, words. Can you look at yourself without the word? Oh, come on, sirs, play the game with me, will you? The ball is in your court. That is, can you look at your wife, at your husband, at your children, or your girl friend, or whatever it is, without the word? Without the image? That word, that image, is the division. Can you look at the speaker without the word? - the word being all the remembrances about the speaker, the reputation, what you have read or not read, and so on, but just observe. Which means one must grasp, understand, how the brain operates - your own brain, not the brain of philosophers, or the spiritual writers, or the priests or somebody or other. just observe yourself without the word, then you can look at certain facts, why human beings get hurt. That is very important to find out. From childhood we are hurt. There is always the pressure, always the sense of being rewarded and punished. You say something to me which I get angry about and that hurts me - right? So we have realized a very simple fact that from childhood we are hurt, and for the rest of our life we carry that hurt - afraid of being hurt further, or attempting not to be hurt, which is another form of resistance. So, are we aware of these hurts and of therefore creating a barrier round ourselves, the barrier of fear? Can we go into this question of fear? Shall we? Not for my pleasure, for it is you I am talking about. Can we go into it very, very deeply and see why human beings, which is all of us, have put up with fear for thousands of years? We see the consequences of fear - fear of not being rewarded, fear of being a failure, fear of your weakness, fear of your own feeling that you must come to a certain point and not being able to. Are you interested in going into this problem? It means going into it completely to the very end, not just saying, `Sorry, that is too difficult.' Nothing is too difficult if you want to do it. The word difficult prevents you from further action. But if you can put away that word difficult then we can go into this very, very complex problem. First, why do we put up with it? If you have a car which goes wrong you go to the nearest garage, if you can, and then the machinery is put right and you go on. Is it that there is no one we can go to who will help us to have no fear - you understand the question? Do we want help from somebody to be free of fear -from psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, or the priest, or the guru who says, `Surrender everything to me, including your money, then you will be perfectly all right'? We do this. You may laugh, you may be amused, but we are doing this all the time inwardly. So, do we want help? Prayer is a form of help; asking to be free from fear is a form of help. The speaker telling you how to be free of fear is a form of help. But he is not going to tell you how, because we are walking together, we are giving energy to discover for ourselves the causation of fear. If you see something very clearly, then you don't have to decide, or choose, or ask for help -you act - right? Do we see clearly the whole structure, the inward nature of fear? You have been afraid and the memory of it comes back and says that is fear. You understand what I am saying? So let's go into this carefully - not the speaker going into it and then you agreeing, or disagreeing, but you yourself taking the journey with the speaker, not verbally or intellectually, but delving, probing, investigating. We are finding out; we want to delve as you dig in the garden or to find water. You dig deep, you don't stand outside on the earth and say, `I must have water.' You dig or go to the river. So first of all, let's be very clear: do you want help in order to be free of fear? If you want help then you are responsible for establishing an authority, a leader, a priest. So one must ask oneself before we go into this question of fear, whether you want help. Of course you go to a doctor if you have pain, or a headache, or some kind of disease. He knows much more about your organic nature so he tells you what to do. We are not talking about that kind of help. We are talking about whether you need help, somebody to instruct you, to lead you, and to say, `Do this, do that, day after day and you will be free of fear.' The speaker is not helping you. That is one thing certain, because you have dozens of helpers, from the great religious leaders - God forbid! - to the lowest, the poor psychologist round the corner. So let us be very clear between ourselves that the speaker doesn't want to help you in any way psychologically. Would you kindly accept that? Honestly accept it? Don't say yes, it is very difficult. In all your life you have sought help in various directions, though some say, `No, I don't want help.' It requires not only outward perception to see what the demand for help has done to humanity. You ask help only when you are confused, when you don't know what to do, when you are uncertain. But when you see things clearly - see, observe, perceive, not only externally, but much more inwardly - when you see things very, very clearly you don't want any help; there it is. And from that comes action. Are we together in this? Let's repeat this if you don't mind. The speaker is not telling you how. Never ask that question how, for then there is always somebody giving you a rope. The speaker is not helping you in any way, but together we are walking along the same road, perhaps not at the same speed. Set your own speed and we will walk together. Clear? We are in accord? If you are not clear about demanding help you will have to go somewhere else. Probably you will. Or turn to a book, or turn to somebody, not towards the speaker. Sorry to depress you and say I won't stretch out my hand; that is not it. If we are walking together we are holding hands. There is no stretching out your hand and seeking help. Are we working together? Or am I working and getting hot about it? What is the cause of fear? Go slowly please. Cause. If you can discover the cause then you can do something about it, you can change the cause - right? If a doctor tells me, tells the speaker, he has got cancer - which he hasn't - but suppose he tells me that I have got cancer and says, `I can remove it easily and you will be all right', I go to him. He removes it and the cause comes to an end. So the cause can always be changed, rooted out. If you have got a headache you can find the cause of it; you may be eating wrongly, or smoking or drinking too much. Either you stop your drinking, smoking and all the rest, or you take a pill to stop it. The pill then becomes the effect which stops for the moment the causation -right? So cause and effect can always be changed, immediately or you take time over it. If you take time over it, then during that interval other factors enter into it. So you never change the effect, you continue with the cause. Are we together in this? So what is the cause of fear? Why haven't we gone into it? Why do we tolerate it, knowing the effect of fear, the consequences of fear? If you are not at all afraid psychologically, have no fear at all, you would have no gods, you would have no symbols to worship, no personalities to adore. Then you are psychologically extraordinarily free. Fear also makes one shrink, apprehensive, wanting to escape from it and therefore the escape becomes more important than the fear. Are you following? So we are going to go over it together to find out what is the cause of fear - the root cause of it. And if we discover it for ourselves, then it is over. If you see the causation, or many causes, then that very perception ends the cause. Are you listening to me, the speaker, to explain the causation? Or have you never even asked such a question? I have borne fear, as has my father, my grandfather, the whole race in which I am born, the whole community; the whole structure of gods and rituals is based on fear and the desire to achieve some extraordinary state. So, let us go into this. We are not talking about the various forms of fear - fear of darkness, fear of one's husband, wife, fear of society, fear of dying, etc. It is like a tree that has got many, many branches, many flowers, many fruits, but we are talking about the very root of that tree. The root of it - not your particular form of fear. You can trace your particular form to the very root. So we are asking: are we concerned with our fears, or with the whole fear? With the whole tree, not just one branch of it? Because unless you understand how the tree lives, the water it requires, the depth of the soil and so on, merely trimming the branches won't do anything; we must go to the very root of fear. So what is the root of fear? Don't wait for me to answer. I am not your leader, I am not your helper, I am not your guru - thank God! We are together, as two brothers, and I mean it, the speaker means it, it is not just words. As two good friends who have known each other from the beginning of time, walking along the same path, at the same speed, looking at everything that is around you and in you, so together we will go into it. Please, together. Otherwise it becomes just words, and at the end of the talk you will say, `Really what am I to do with my fear?' Fear is very complex. It is a tremendous reaction. If you are aware of it, it is a shock, not only biologically, organically, but also a shock to the brain. The brain has a capacity, as one discovers, not from what others say, to remain healthy in spite of a shock. I don't know all about it, but the very shock invites its own protection. If you go into it yourself, you will see. So fear is a shock -momentarily, or continuing in different forms, with different expressions, in different ways. So we are going to the very, very, very root of it. To understand the very root of it, we must understand time - right? Time as yesterday, time as today, time as tomorrow. I remember something I have done, of which I am shy, or nervous, or apprehensive, or fearful; I remember all that and it continues to the future. I have been angry, jealous, envious - that is the past. I am still envious, slightly modified; I am fairly generous about things but envy goes on. This whole process is time, isn't it? You understand? Say yes, for God's sake! No, don't say yes! Let's begin again. What do you consider is time? By the clock, sunrise, sunset, the evening star, the new moon with the full moon coming a fortnight later? What is time to you? Time to learn a skill? Time to learn a language? Time to write a letter? Time to go to your house from here? All that is time as distance - right? I have to go from here to there. That is a distance covered by time. But time is also inward, psychological: I am this, I must become that. Becoming that is called evolution. Evolution means from the seed to the tree. And also I am ignorant but I will learn. I don't know, but I will know. Give me time to be free of violence. You are following all this? Give me time. Give me a few days, a month, or a year and I will be free of it. So we live by time - not only going to the office every day from nine to five, God forbid, but also time to become something. Look, you understand all this? Right? Time, the movement of time? I have been afraid of you and I remember that fear; that fear is still there and I will be afraid of you tomorrow. I hope not, but if I don't do something very drastic about it I will be afraid of you tomorrow. So we live by time. Please, let's be clear about this. We live by time, which is, I am living, I will die. I will postpone death as long as possible; I am living and I am going to do everything to avoid death though it is inevitable. So psychologically as well as biologically we live by time. Is time a factor of fear? Please enquire. Time - that is, I have told a lie, I don't want you to know, but you are very smart; you look at me and say, `You have told a lie.' `No, no, I have not' - I protect myself instantly because I am afraid of your finding out that I am a liar. I am afraid because of something I have done, which I don't like you to know. Which is what? Thought, isn't it? I have done something which I remember, and that remembrance says, be careful, don't let him discover that you told a lie because you have got a good reputation as an honest man, so protect yourself. So, thinking and time are together. There is no division between thought and time. Please be clear on this matter, otherwise you will get rather confused later. The causation of fear is time/ thought, the root of it - right? Are we clear on this thing that time, that is, the past, with all the things that one has done, and thought, whether pleasant or unpleasant, specially if it is unpleasant, is the root of fear? This is an obvious fact. A very simple verbal fact. But to go behind the word and see the truth of this time/ thought, you will inevitably ask: how is thought to stop? It is a natural question, no? If thought creates fear, which is so obvious, then how am I to stop thinking? `Please help me to stop my thinking.' I would be an ass to ask such a question but I am asking it. How am I to stop thinking? Is that possible? Go on, sir, investigate, don't let me go on. Thinking. We live by thinking. Everything we do is through thought. We went into that carefully the other day. We won't waste time going into the cause, the beginning of thinking, how it comes - experience, knowledge, which is always limited, memory and then thought. I am just briefly repeating it. So, is it possible to stop thinking? Is it possible not to chatter all day long, to give the brain a rest, though it has its own rhythm, the blood going up to it, its own activity? Its own, not the activity imposed by thought - you understand? May I point out, may the speaker point out, that that is a wrong question. Who is it that stops thinking? It is still thought, isn't it? When I say, `If I could only stop thinking then I would have no fear', who is it that wishes to stop thought? It is still thought, isn't it, because it wants something else? So, what will you do? Any movement of thought to be other than what it is, is still thinking. I am greedy, but I must not be greedy - it is still thinking. Thinking has put together all the paraphernalia, all that business that goes on in churches. Like this tent it has been carefully put together by thought. Apparently thought is the very root of our existence. So we are asking a very serious question, seeing what thought has done, invented the most extraordinary things, the computer, the warships, the missiles, the atom bomb, surgery, medicine, and also the things it has made man do, go to the moon and so on. Thought is the very root of fear. Do we see that? Not how to end thought, but see actually that thinking is the root of fear, which is time? Seeing, not the words, but actually seeing. When you have severe pain, the pain is not different from you and you act instantly - right? So do you see as clearly as you see the clock, the speaker and your friend sitting beside you, that thought is the causation of fear? Please don't ask: `How am I to see?' The moment you ask how, someone is willing to help you, then you become their slave. But if you yourself see that thought/time are really the root of fear, it doesn't need deliberation or a decision. A scorpion is poisonous, a snake is poisonous - at the very perception of them you act. So one asks, why don't we see? Why don't we see that one of the causes of war is nationalities? Why don't we see that one may be called a Muslim, and another a Christian - why do we fight over names, over propaganda? Do we see it, or just memorize or think about it? You understand, sirs, that your consciousness is the rest of mankind. Mankind, like you and others, goes through every form of difficulty, pain, travail, anxiety, loneliness, depression, sorrow, pleasure - every human being goes through this - every human being all over the world. So our consciousness, our being, is the entire humanity. This is so. How unwilling we are to accept such a simple fact, because we are so accustomed to individuality - I, me, first. But if you see that your consciousness is shared by all other human beings living on this marvellous earth then your whole way of living changes. But you don't see that. You need argument, you need lots of persuasion, pressure, propaganda, which are all so terribly useless because it is you that has to see this thing for yourself. So, can we, each of us, who are the rest of mankind, who are mankind, look at a very simple fact? Observe, see, that the causation of fear is thought/time? Then the very perception is action. And from that you don't rely on anybody. The guru is like you. The leader may put on different robes and all the jewels, but strip him of all that and he is just like you and me, only he has achieved greater power, and we also want greater power, money, position, status. So could we look at all this, see it very clearly; then that very perception ends all this rubbish. Then you are a free person. LAST TALKS AT SAANEN 1985 4TH PUBLIC TALK WEDNESDAY, 17TH JULY, 1985 You heard all the announcements. May I also announce that I am going to talk? And also that you are going to share in the talk. It is not a solo, but together, and the speaker means together, not that he is leading you or helping you or trying to persuade you, but rather together, and that word is important - together we take a very, very long journey. It is rather a difficult path - l won't use that word, that is a dangerous word - a lane, a way that will be rather complex because we are going to talk about self-interest, austerity, conduct and whether it is possible in our daily life to end all sorrow. This is a very important question: why humanity after so many thousands and thousands of years has never been free from sorrow, not only each one's sorrow, the pain, the anxiety, the loneliness involved in that sorrow, but also the sorrow of mankind. We are going to talk about that. And also, if we have time, we are going to talk about pleasure, and also death. It is such a lovely morning, beautiful, clear blue sky, the quiet hills and the deep shadows, and the running waters, the meadow, the grove and the green grass, so should we talk over together what beauty is on such a lovely morning because that is also a very important question? Not the beauty of nature or the extraordinary vitality, dynamic energy of a tiger. You have probably only seen tigers in a zoo where the poor things are kept for your amusement. In some parts of the world where the speaker has been, he was close to a wild tiger, as close as two feet. We should go into this question because without beauty and love there is no truth. We ought to examine very closely the word beauty. What is beauty? You are asking that question and so is the speaker; we are both looking together, not only at the word, but at the implications of that word, at the immensity, the incalculable depth of beauty. We can talk about it, but the talk, the words, the explanations and the descriptions are not beauty. The word beauty is not beauty. Beauty is something totally different. So one must be, if one may point out, very alert to words because our brain works, is active, in a movement of words. Words convey what one feels, what one thinks, and the brain accepts explanations and descriptions because most of our brain structure is verbal. So one must go into it very, very carefully, not only with regard to beauty but also with regard to austerity and self-interest. We shall go into all these questions this morning, if we will. So we are asking ourselves: What is beauty? Is beauty in a person, in a face? Is beauty in museums, in painting - classical paintings, modern paintings? Is beauty in music - Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and all the noise that is going on in the world called music? Is beauty in a poem? In literature? Dancing? Is all that beauty? Or is beauty something entirely different? We are going into it together. Please, if one may respectfully point out, don't accept the words, don't merely be satisfied with the description and explanations, but let us, if we can, put from our brain all agreeing and disagreeing and look at it very carefully, stay with it, penetrate into the word. As we said, without that quality of beauty, which is sensitivity, there is no truth. That quality implies not only the beauty of nature - the deserts, the forests, the rivers and the vast mountains with their immense dignity, majesty, but also the feeling of it, not romantic imaginings and sentimental states - those are merely sensations. is beauty, then, we are asking, a sensation? Because we live by sensations - sexual sensation, with which goes pleasure, and also the pain involved in the feeling that it is not being fulfilled, and so on. So could we this morning put out of our brain all those words and go into this enormous, very complicated, subtle question: what is the nature of beauty? We are not writing a poem. When you look at those mountains, those immense rocks jutting into the sky - if you look at them quietly you feel the immensity of it, the enormous majesty of it, and for the moment, for the second, the tremendous dignity of it, the solidity of it, puts away all your thoughts, your problems - right? And you say, `How marvellous that is.' So what has taken place there? The majesty of those mountains, the very immensity of the sky and the blue and the snowclad mountains, drives away for a second all your problems. It makes you totally forget yourself for a second. You are enthralled by it, you are struck by it, like a child, who has been naughty all day long, or naughty for a while, which he has a right to be, and is given a complicated toy. He is absorbed by the toy until he breaks it. The toy has taken him over and he is quiet, he is enjoying it. He has forgotten his family, the `Do this, don't do that: the toy becomes the most exciting thing for him. In the same way, the mountains, the river, the meadows and the groves absorb you, you forget yourself. Is that beauty? To be absorbed by the mountains, by the river, or the green fields, means that you are like a child absorbed by a toy, and for the moment you are quiet, taken over, surrendering yourself to something. Is that beauty? Being taken over? You understand? Surrendering yourself to something great and that thing forcing you for a second to forget yourself? Then you depend, depend as the child does on a toy, or on the cinema or television, when for the moment you have identified yourself with the actor or actress. Would you consider that state - being taken over, surrendering, being absorbed - would you consider that that quiet second is beauty? When you go to a church or a temple or a mosque, the chanting, the rituals, the intonation of the voice, are carefully organized to create a certain sensation, which you call worship, which you call a sense of religiosity. Is that beauty? Or is beauty something entirely different? Are we understanding this question together? Is there beauty where there is self-conscious endeavour? Or is there beauty only when the self is not - when the me, the observer, is not? So is it possible without being absorbed, taken over, surrendering, to be in that state without the self, without the ego, without the me always thinking about itself. Is that at all possible, living in this modern world with all its specializations, its vulgarity, its immense noise - not the noise of running waters, of the song of a bird? is it possible to live in this world without the self, the me, the ego, the persona, the assertion of the individual? in that state, when there is really freedom from all this, only then is there beauty. You may say, `That is too difficult, that is not possible.' But I am asking: is it possible to live in this world without self-interest? What does self-interest mean? What are the implications of that word? How far can we be without self-interest and live here, in the bustle, the noise, the vulgarity, the competition, the personal ambitions, and so on and so on? We are going together to find out. Self-interest hides in many ways, hides under every stone and every act - hides in prayer, in worship, in having a successful profession, great knowledge, a special reputation, like the speaker. When there is a guru who says, `I know all about it. I will tell you all about it' - is there not self-interest there? This seed of self-interest has been with us for a million years. Our brain is conditioned to self-interest. If one is aware of that, just aware of it, not saying, `I am not self-interested or how can one live without self-interest?' but just be aware, then how far can one go, how far can one investigate into oneself to find out for ourselves, each one of us, how in action, in daily activity, in our behaviour, how deeply one can live without a sense of self-interest? So, if we will, we will examine all that. Self-interest divides, self-interest is the greatest corruption (the word corruption means to break things apart) and where there is self-interest there is fragmentation - your interest as opposed to my interest, my desire opposed to your desire, my urgency to climb the ladder of success opposed to yours. just observe this; you can't do anything about it -you understand? - but just observe it, stay with it and see what is taking place. If you have ever dismantled a car, as the speaker has done, you know all the parts, you learn all about it, you know how it works. (I am talking of the 1925 cars; at that period they were very simple, very direct, very honest, strong, beautiful cars.) And when you know about it mechanically, you can feel at ease; you know how fast to go, how slow, etc. So if we are aware of our own self-interest, we begin to learn about it - right? You don't say, `I must be against it, or for it, or how can I live without it or who are you to tell me about myself? When you begin to be aware choicelessly of your self-interest, to stay with it, to study it, to learn about it, to observe all the intricacies of it, then you can find out for yourself where it is necessary and where it is completely unnecessary. It is necessary for daily living - to have food, clothes and shelter and all the physical things - but psychologically, inwardly, is it necessary to have any kind of self-interest? For that let us investigate relationship. In our relationship with each other there is mutual self-interest. You satisfy me and I satisfy you; you use me and I use you. Where there is self-interest there must be fragmentation, breaking up - right? I am different from you - self-interest. What is relationship? Relationship to the earth, to all the beauty of the world, to nature and to other human beings and to one's wife, husband, girl friend, boy friend and so on: what is that bondage, what is that thing about which we say, `I am related'? Please investigate this together. Don't, please, rely on the description the speaker is indulging in. Let's look at it closely. What is relationship? When there is no relationship we feel so lonely, depressed, anxious - you know, the whole series of movements hidden in the structure of self-interest. What is relationship? When you say, `My wife', `My husband', what does it mean? When you are related to God, if there is a God, what does it mean? That word relationship is very important to understand. I am related to my wife, to my children, to my family. Let's begin there. That is the core of all society, the family. In the Asiatic world especially, family means a great deal; it is tremendously important to them - the son, the nephew, the grandmother, grandfather. It is the centre on which all society is based. So when one says, `My wife', `my girl', `my friend', what does that mean? Most of you are probably married, or have a girl friend or a boy friend. What does it mean to be related to them? What are you related to? Let's move away for a moment from the wife and husband. When you follow somebody, a guru, a prophet, a politician, the speaker, or some other person, what is it you are following, what is it that you are surrendering, giving up? Is it the image that you have created about the speaker or the guru, or the image you have in your brain that it is the right thing to do and therefore you will follow him? Is it the image, the picture, the symbol, that you have built and that you are following, not the person, not what he is saying? The speaker has been talking for the last seventy years. I am sorry for him! And unfortunately he has established some reputation, with the books and all that business, so you have naturally created an image about him and you are following that; not what the teaching says. The teaching says, `Don't follow anybody.' But you have built the image, and you are following that which you desire, which satisfies you, which is of tremendous self-interest - right? Now let's come back to the wife and husband. When you say, `My wife', what do you mean by that word, what is the content of that word, what is behind the word? Look at it. Is it all the memories, the sensations, pleasure, pain, anxiety, jealousy - is all that embodied in the word wife or husband? The husband is ambitious, wants to achieve a better position, more money, and the wife not only remains at home but has her own ambitions, her own desires. So there they are. They may get into bed together, but the two are separate all the time. Let's be simple with these facts, and honest. There is always conflict. One may not be aware of it and say, `Oh, no, we have no conflict between us', but scrape that a little bit with a heavy shovel, or with a scalpel, and you will find that the root of all this is self-interest. And there may be self-interest in the professionals. Of course there is - doctors, scientists, philosophers, priests, the whole thing is desire for fulfilment. We are not exaggerating, we are simply stating `what is', not trying to cover it up, not trying to get beyond it: there it is. That is the seed in which we are born, and that seed goes on flowering, growing till we die. And when we try to control self-interest, that very control is another form of self-interest. How cleverly self-interest operates. And it also hides behind austerity. So now we have to examine what we mean by austerity. What is austerity? The whole world, especially the religious world, has used that word, has laid down certain laws about it, specially for the monks in various monasteries. (In India there are no monasteries except for Buddhists. There are no organized monasteries, fortunately.) So what do we mean by that word austere with which goes great dignity? We looked up that word in the dictionary. It comes from Greek, to have a dry mouth, that is, dry, harsh, not just the mouth. Harsh. is that austere? Harsh: to deny oneself the luxury of a hot bath, to have few clothes, or to wear a particular form of robe, or take a vow to be celibate, to be poor or to fast or sit up straight endlessly, to control all one's desires. Surely all that is not austerity. It is all outward show. So is there an austerity that is not a sensation, that is not contrived, that is not cajoled, that does not say, `I will be austere in order to...'? Is there an austerity that is not visible at all to another? You are understanding all this? is there an austerity that has no discipline - that has a sense of a wholeness inwardly in which there is no craving, no breaking up, no fragmentation? With that austerity goes dignity, quietness. One has also to understand the nature of desire. That may be the root of the whole structure of self-interest. Desire. Are we together in this? Desire is a great sensation - right? Desire is the senses coming into activity. As we said earlier, sensation is of great importance to us - sensation of sex, sensation of new experience, sensation of meeting somebody who is well known. (I must tell you this lovely story. A friend of ours met the Queen of England and shook hands with her. After it was over a person came up to her and said, `May I shake hands with you because you have shaken hands with the Queen?'!) We live always by sensation - sensation of being secure - please watch it - sensation of having fulfilled, sensation of great pleasure, gratification and so on. What relationship has sensation to desire? Is desire something separate from sensation? Go into this, please. It is important to understand this thing. I am not explaining it. We are looking at it together. What is the relationship of desire to sensation? When does sensation become desire? Or are they inseparable? You follow? Do they always go together - right? Are you working as hard as the speaker is working? Or are you just saying, `Yes, go on with it'? Or have you heard this before and say, `Oh God, he has gone back to that again'? You know that the more you understand the activity of thought, the deeper you get to the root of thought; then you begin to understand so many things. Then you see the whole phenomenon of the world, nature, the truth of nature; then you ask, `What is truth?' I won't go into all that for the moment. Our life is based on sensation and desire, and we are asking: what is the actual relationship between the two? When does sensation become desire? You are following this? At what second does desire become dominant? I see a beautiful camera, with all the latest improvements. I lift it and look at it, and there is sensation of observation - seeing the beautifully made, very complex camera of great value as a pleasure of possession, a pleasure of taking photos. Then what is that sensation to do with desire? When does that desire begin to flower into action, and say, `I must have it'? Have you observed the movement of sensation, whether it is sexual, whether it is walking in the valleys or climbing the hills, overlooking all the world from a great height, or seeing a lovely garden when you have only a little lawn around your place? You see this; then what takes place that turns the sensation into desire? You are following all this? Please don't go to sleep. It is too lovely a morning. Stay with this question: what is the relationship of sensation to desire? Stay with it, do not try and find an answer, but look at it, observe it, see the implications of it; then you will discover that sensation, which is natural, is transformed into desire when thought creates the image out of that sensation. That is, there is a sensation of seeing that very expensive, beautiful camera; then thought comes along and says, `I wish I had that camera.' So thought creates the image out of that sensation and at that moment desire is born. Look at it yourself, go into it. You don't need any book, any philosopher, anybody - just look at it, patiently, tentatively, then you will come upon it very quickly. That is, sensation is a slave to thought, and thought creates an image, and at that moment desire is born. And we live by desire: `I must have this.' `I don't want it.' `I must become...' You follow? This whole movement of desire. Now what relationship has desire to self-interest? We are pursuing the same thread. As long as there is desire, which is creating the image out of sensation by thought, there must be self-interest. Whether I want to reach heaven, or become a bank manager, or a rich person, it is the same. Whether you want to achieve heaven or become rich it is exactly the same. If one person desires to be a saint and another to have some great skill it is exactly the same thing. One is called religious, the other is called worldly. How words cripple us. So we must come to the question: what is sorrow? Is it that sorrow exists as long as there is self-interest? Please go into it. If you understand all this you don't have to read a single book. If you really live with this thing, the gates of heaven are open - not heaven, you understand, that is just a form of speech. So I am asking a very serious question which has haunted man from the beginning of his existence: what is sorrow, the tears, the laughter, the pain, the anxiety, the loneliness, the despair? And can it ever end? Or is man doomed for ever to live with sorrow? Everyone on the earth, everyone, whether they are highly placed or nobody at all, everyone goes through this turmoil of sorrow, the shock of it, the pain of it, the uncertainty of it, the utter loneliness of it. The sorrow of a poor man who doesn't know how to read or write, has but one meal a day and sleeps on the pavement is like you; he has his own sorrow. There is the sorrow of millions of people who have been slaughtered by the powerful, by the bigoted, tortured by religions - the infidel and the believer - you understand all this? Christianity especially has murdered more people than anything else - sorry! So there is sorrow. What does that word mean? Is it a mere remembrance of something you have lost? You had a brother, son or wife, who died, and you have the picture, the photo of them on the piano, or mantelpiece, or next to your bed, and you have the memories of all those days when they were alive. Is that sorrow? Is sorrow engendered, cultivated by memory? You understand my question? When someone is cut down by death, by accident, old age, or whatever it is, and the memory continues, is that sorrow? Is sorrow related to memory? Come on, sirs. I had a son, or a brother, or a mother I liked - I will use the word like for the moment. I call that `like' love. I liked those people very much. I lived with them. I have chatted with them. We played together. All that memory is stored. And my son, my brother, my mother, or somebody, dies, is taken away, gone forever, and I feel a shock, I feel terribly lonely and shed tears. And I run off to church, temple, pick up a book, do this or that, to escape; or say, `I will pray and get over it. Jesus will save me.' You know all that business. Sorry, I am not belittling the word. Use the other words -Buddha or Krishna - it is the same thing with a different name, or the same symbol, the same content of the symbol. Symbols vary but they have the same content. So is sorrow merely the ending of the actuality of certain memories? The actuality that created, that brought together those memories has ended and therefore I feel I am lost. I have lost my son. Is that sorrow or is it self-pity (we are not being harsh), concerned more with my own memories, pain, anxiety, than with the ending of somebody? Is that sorrow self-interest? Please go into it. I cultivate that memory; I am loyal to my son; I am loyal to my former wife, though I marry a new wife. I am very loyal to the remembrance of those things that have happened in the past. Is that sorrow? Then there is the sorrow of failure - you know the whole momentum of self-interest identifying itself with that word and shedding tears. And these tears have been shed by man and woman for a million years. And we are still crying. Those at war are crying, shot to pieces because of an idea that they must dominate, they must be different. The idea. Thought is destroying each one of us. And think of all the people who have cried before you. So is there an end to sorrow? The word sorrow also implies passion. As long as there is self-interest identifying itself with those memories which are still there but of which the actuality has gone, that self-interest is part and parcel of the movement of sorrow. Can all that end? Where there is sorrow there cannot be love. So what is love? You know, we have entered into very, very serious subjects. It is not just something you play with for a Sunday or Wednesday morning. All this is something deeply serious. It is not galloping down the road. It is walking in the pathway slowly, watching things - watching, watching, watching, staying with things that disturb you, staying with things that please you, staying with things that are abstract - all the imaginings, all the things that the brain has put together, including God. It is the activity of thought. God didn't create us. We created God in our own image, which is - I won't go into this, it is so clear and simple. To talk about love also implies death. Love, death and creation. You understand? You can spend an hour on this because it is very, very serious. We are asking: what is creation? Not invention. Please differentiate between creation and invention. Invention is a new set of ideas, technological, psychological, scientific and so on. We are not talking about ideas. We are talking about very serious things: love, death and creation. This cannot be answered in five minutes. Forgive me. We will deal with it next Sunday. Not that I am inviting you. We will go into it, and also into what is religion, what is meditation and if there is something that is beyond all words, measure and thought - something not put together by thought, something that is inexpressible, infinite, timeless. We will go into all that. But one cannot come to it if there is fear, or lack of right relationships, you follow? Unless your brain is free from all that you cannot understand the other. LAST TALKS AT SAANEN 1985 5TH PUBLIC TALK SUNDAY, 21ST JULY, 1985 This will be the last talk at Saanen. May we continue with what we were talking about last time we met here? We were saying among other things that this is not a lecture; a lecture is meant to inform, to instruct on a particular subject. Nor is it an entertainment. Entertainment means amusing yourself, going to a cinema, or to a ritual in a church or temple, or mosque. Nor is this a mere matter of intellectual, theoretical - what word shall we use? - psychological pursuit. Rather it is a philosophical pursuit, for philosophy means love of truth, not talking about what has already been talked about, and we are not discussing or concerned with what others have said. We are together, you and the speaker, as two human beings - not this large audience, but you as a person and the speaker are having a conversation together, about their life, about their problems, about all the travail of life - their confusion, their fears, their aspirations, their desires to achieve success, either in the business world or in the so-called religious, spiritual world; that is, success in reaching Nirvana, Heaven, or Enlightenment is the same as success in the business world. I hope we understand each other. A man who is successful in life, making pots of money, grows, expands, changes and continues in the line of success. There is not much difference between that person and the man who is seeking truth. Both are seeking success. One you call worldly, the other you call non-worldly, spiritual, religious. We are not dealing with either of those. We are concerned with you as a human being. You and the speaker are having a conversation together. He means together, though you are sitting there and the speaker unfortunately is sitting up here. You and the speaker have been talking about relationship, between man and woman, boy and girl and so on. We have also been talking about fear, whether it is at all possible, living in the modern world, to be utterly free psychologically of all fear. We went into that very, very carefully. And we also talked about time, time by which we live, the cycle of time, which is the past being processed in the present and continuing in the future, the past being our whole background, racial, communal, religious, the experiences, the memories. All this is the background of all of us, whether we are born in the distant East or in Europe or in America. That background goes through changes, it is processed in the present and continues to the future. Human beings, you and another, are caught in this cycle. That has been going on for millions and millions of years. So the past going through the present, modifying itself, is the future. And that has been our evolution. Though biologically we have changed from a million years till now, psychologically, inwardly, subjectively we are more or less what we were a million years ago - barbarous, cruel, violent, competitive, egocentric. That is a fact. So the future is the present. Is this clear to you and to the speaker? The past modifying itself becomes the future, so the future is now, unless there is a fundamental, psychological change. And that is what we are concerned about: whether it is possible for human beings, you and another, to bring about a psychological mutation, a total psychological revolution in oneself, knowing that if we are hurt now, wounded psychologically now, as most people are, the future hurt is now. Is that clear? So is it possible for human beings, for you, to bring about a complete mutation? That mutation changes the brain cells themselves. That is, one has been going north all one's life, and some person comes along and says, `Going north has no importance at all, no value, there is nothing there. Go east, or west, or south.' And because you listen, because you are concerned, because you are deliberate, you go east. At that very moment when you turn and go east there is a mutation in the brain cells because going north has become the pattern, the mode, and when you go east you break the pattern - right? It is as simple as that. But that requires listening, not merely to words, not merely with the hearing of the ear, but listening without any interpretation, without any comparison, listening directly, without bringing in all your traditions, your background, your interpretation. Then that very listening breaks down your conditioning. And we also talked about seeing - seeing very, very clearly what is happening in the present world; wars and the most appalling things are going on everywhere. A million or two million years ago man killed with a club, then he invented an arrow. He thought that would stop all wars. Now you can vaporize millions and millions of people with one bomb. We have progressed tremendously outwardly, technologically. The computer is probably going to take over all our thinking. It will do far better than we can in a second. I don't know if you have gone into this question, but you should. What is going to happen to the human brain when the computer can do almost anything that you can do, except, of course, sex? And it can't look at the stars and say, `What a marvellous evening it is; it can't possibly appreciate what beauty is. So what is going to happen to the human brain? Will it wither when the laser computer can take over thinking for you? It will save a lot of labour. Either we will turn to entertainment or turn in a totally different direction, because psychologically, inwardly, we can go limitlessly. The brain has an extraordinary capacity, each one's brain. Look what technology has done. But psychologically, subjectively, we remain what we are, year after year, century after century: conflict, struggle, pain, anxiety and all the rest of it. That's what we talked about in the last four talks. And we also talked about thought: what is the nature of thinking, what is thinking? We went into that very carefully. All thought is memory, based on knowledge and knowledge is always limited, whether now or in the past or in the future. Knowledge is perpetually, eternally limited because it is based on experience which is also always limited. This morning we ought to talk together, you and the speaker, not the whole audience (there is no whole audience, there is only you and the speaker) - we ought to talk together about love, death, what is religion, what is meditation, and if there is anything beyond all human endeavour - or is man the only measure? Is there something beyond the structure of thought, is there something that is timeless? That is what we have to be concerned with, you and the speaker, this morning. All right? We live by sensation. We talked about that. Our whole structure is based on sensation - sexual, imaginative, romantic, fanciful and so on. And also, as we said, self-interest is the greatest corruption. And is sensation, that is, the stimulation of the senses - is sensation love? We are investigating this thing, you and the speaker, together. It is a long lane, you and the speaker are walking along together - not that he is ahead and you following, but together, in step; perhaps holding hands, friendly, neither dominating the other, not trying to impress each other. So you and the speaker are walking quietly, exploring, investigating, watching, listening, observing. So we are asking each other: what is love? That word has been spoilt, spat upon, degraded, so we must be very alert to the abuse of that word. What is love? Is it mere sensation? I love you and I depend on you, you depend on me; perhaps I will sell you and you sell me; I use you, you use me. If the speaker says `I love you' because you are a very big audience and feed my vanity and I feel happy, pleased, gratified - is that love? Is gratification, fulfilment, attachment, love? Is love put together by thought? You and the speaker are investigating together, so don't go to sleep on this lovely morning. Is love sensation? Is love gratification? Is love fulfilment? Dependence? Is love desire? Please don't agree or disagree. We went into that - how we always approach things by either agreeing or disagreeing. Could we put aside altogether from our vocabulary, from our brain, `I agree', or `l don t agree' and just face facts as they are, not only in the world, but also in ourselves? That demands great honesty, the urgency of honesty. Can we do that this morning - face things as they are? Then we can begin to question, enquire, into what love is. Is love desire? Previously in these talks, we went very deeply into the whole structure of desire. We haven't time to go into that again. Very briefly, desire is the result of sensation, and thought gives a shape, an image, to that sensation, and at that second when thought moulds the sensation, desire is born. So we are asking: is love desire? Is love thought? Please go into it. It is your life we are concerned with - our lives, our daily lives, not some spiritual life, not following some guru with his inanities, not putting on special robes, whether it be the robes of the Middle Ages or of the churches, or the robes of recent gurus. Is love merely the structure of thought? In our relationships with each other, man, woman, boy, girl and so on, when one says, `I love you', is it dependence? One is fulfilling oneself in another and therefore in that relationship thought comes in, and then the thought creates the image, and that image we call love. So we are asking: is love - it is unfortunate to have to use that word - is love put together by thought? Can there be love when there is ambition, when we are competing with each other? Is there love when there is self-interest? Please don't merely listen to the speaker. Listen to yourself. Find out for yourself. When you discover something through what actually is, you can go very far, but if you merely depend on another, his words, his books, his reputation, it is meaningless. Throw away all that and look at oneself. One has to have passion. Passion can exist, as we said the other day, only when suffering ends. Passion without fanaticism, for with fanaticism it becomes terrorism. All the fanatical movements in the world have tremendous passion. Fanaticism breeds passion. That passion is not the passion which comes into being when there is the ending of sorrow. We went into that. So we are asking: is love all this? Jealousy, which is in hate, anger, desire, pleasure and so on - is all that love? Dare we face all this? Are you and the speaker honest enough to discover for ourselves the perfume of that word? From that we ought to consider what place death has in our life. Death, talking about it, is not morbid. It is part of our life. From childhood maybe till we actually die, there is always this dreadful fear of dying. Aren't you afraid of death? We have put it as far away as possible. So let us enquire together what is that extraordinary thing that we call death. It must be extraordinary. Let us enquire without any kind of romantic, comforting, belief in reincarnation or life after death. Reincarnation is a marvellously comforting idea. If one believes in it sincerely, deeply, as millions do, then it matters what you do now, what you are now, what your conduct, what your daily life is, because if there is a continuity, then next life you will have a better castle, a better refrigerator, better car, better wife, or husband. So could we put that comforting idea aside? So what is death? First we must enquire into what is living - what do we mean by living? What do we mean by a good life? Is a good life having a lot of money, cars, changes of wives, or girls, or going from one guru to another and being caught up in his concentration camp? Please don't laugh, this is actually what is going on. Is a good life enjoyment, tremendous pleasure, excitement, a series of sensations, going to the office from morning till night for forty years? For God's sake, face all this. Working, working, and then dying. Is this what we call living - constant conflict, constant problems one after the other? In this life to which we cling, we have acquired a tremendous amount of information and knowledge about practically everything, and we cling to that knowledge. To those memories we have, we are deeply attached. All this is called living - pain, anxiety, uncertainty, and endless sorrow and conflict. And death comes through accident, old age, senility. That is a good word. What is senility? Why do you attribute it to old age? Why do you say, `He is a senile old man'? I may be. Are you senile? Senility is forgetfulness, repeating, going back to the old memories, half alive - right? That is generally called senile. The speaker has asked this question very often of himself. is senility an old age problem? Or does senility begin when you are repeating, repeating, repeating? You follow? When you are traditional, continue to go to the churches, temples, mosques, repeat, repeat, repeat. Christians kneel, and the other fellow touches his forehead to the ground, and the Hindus prostrate. So senility can be at any age - right? Ask yourself that question. Death can happen through old age, through an accident, through terrible pain, disease; and when it comes there is an end to all your continuity, to all your memories, to all your attachments, to your bank account, to your fame. So we ought to consider what is continuity and what is ending? May we go into that? What is it that continues and what is it that ends? Why are we so frightened of ending something, whether it be tradition, a habit, a memory, an experience? Not calculated ending, not ending something to achieve something else. You can't argue with death. There is a marvellous story of ancient India. I don't know if we have time for it because we have to talk about religion, meditation and whether there is something beyond all this human endeavour. All right, I will repeat that story very, very briefly. A Brahmana - a Brahmana, you understand, a Brahmana of Ancient India - has collected a lot of things, cows and all the rest of it, and he decides to give them away, one by one. And his son comes to him and says, `Why are you giving away all this?' He explains that when you collect a lot of things you must give them away and begin again. You understand the meaning of it, the significance? You collect and then give away everything that you have collected. (I am not asking you to do this.) So the boy keeps on asking that question. And the father gets angry with him and says, `I will send you to Death if you ask me any more questions.' And the boy says, `Why are you sending me to Death?' So when a Brahmana says he will do something, he must stick to it, he sends the boy to Death, and after talking to all the teachers, philosophers, gurus and all the rest of it, the boy arrives at the house of Death. (I am making it very, very brief.) And there he waits for three days. Follow the significance of all this, the subtlety of all this. He waits there for three days. Then Death comes along and apologizes for keeping him waiting because after all he is a Brahmana, so he apologizes and says, `I will give you anything you want, riches, women, cows, property, anything you want.' And the boy says, `But you will be at the end of it. You will always be at the end of everything.' And Death then talks about various things which the boy can't understand. It is really a marvellous story. So let's come back to realities. What is death? Is time involved in it? Is time death? I am asking you, please consider it. Time, not only by the watch, by the sunset and sunrise, but also psychologically, inwardly. As long as there is self-interest, which is the wheel of time, there must be death. So is time related to death? Oh, come on, sirs. If there is no time, is there death? Please, this is real meditation, not all the phoney stuff. for us time is very important - time to succeed, time to grow in that success, and bring about a change in that success. Time means continuity. I have been, I am, I will be. There is this constant continuity in us, which is time. If there is no tomorrow - may I enter into all this? This is a dangerous subject. Please pay attention if you are interested in it, otherwise yawn and rest at ease. If there is no tomorrow, would you be afraid of death? If death is now, instant, there is no fear, is there? There is no time. You are capturing what I am saying? So, as long as thought functions in the field of time - which it is doing all day long - there is inevitably the feeling that life might end and therefore I am afraid. So time may be the enemy of death. Or time is death. For instance, if the speaker is attached to his audience because out of that attachment he derives a great deal of excitement, sensation, importance, self-interest, or envy of a person who has a larger audience - if the speaker is attached, whether to an audience, to a book, to an experience, to a title, to a fame, then he is frightened of death. Attachment means time. I wonder if you understand all this? Attachment means time. So can I, can you, be completely free of attachment now? Not wait for death, but be free of that attachment completely now,? Yes, sir. Face that fact. So living is dying and therefore living is death. You understand what I am saying? Oh, come on, sirs. That is why one has to lay the foundation of understanding oneself not according to philosophers, psychiatrists, books and so on, but understand oneself, watch one's behaviour, one's conduct, one's habits - the racial, communal, traditional, personal accumulation we have collected through millennia upon millennia - know all that which is inside you. The knowledge, the awareness of that is not of time; it can be instant. And the mirror in which you see this is the relationship between you and another - to see in that relationship all the past, the present habits, the future; everything is there. To know how to look, how to observe, how to hear every word, every movement of thought, that requires great attention, watchfulness. So death is not in the future. Death is now when there is no time, when there is no me becoming something, when there is no self-interest, no egotistic activity, which is all the process of time. So living and dying are together always. You don't know the beauty of it. There is great energy in it. We live by energy. You take sufficient food, have the right diet and so on, and it gives a certain quality of energy. That energy is distorted when you smoke, drink and all the rest of it. The brain has extraordinary energy. And that extraordinary energy is required to find out for oneself, discover for oneself, and not be directed by another. So now we are going to enquire into what is religion? We have talked about fear, we have talked about psychological wounds, not to carry them for the rest of one's life. We have talked about the significance of relationship. Nothing can exist on earth without relationship, and that relationship is destroyed when each one of us pursues his own ambition, his own greed, his own fulfilment, and so on. We have talked about fear. We went together into the question of thought, time, sorrow and the ending of sorrow. And we have talked this morning about death. Now we are capable of, alive to finding out, what religion is because we have got the energy. You understand? Because we have put all that human conflict and self-interest aside. If you have done that it gives you immense passion and energy, incalculable energy. So what is religion? Is religion all the things that thought has put together? The rituals, the robes, the gurus, the perpetual repetition, prayers - is that religion? Or is it a big business concern? There is a temple in South India that makes a million dollars every third day. You understand what I am saying? Every third day that temple gathers one million dollars. And that is called religion. Is that religion? Going every Sunday morning to hear some preacher and repeating the ritual, is that religion? Or has religion nothing whatever to do with all that business? You can only ask this question when you are free from all that, not caught in the entanglement, in the performance, in the power, position, hierarchy of it all. Then only can you ask the question: what is religion? Is God created by thought, by fear? Is man the image of God? Or is God the image of man? Can one put all that aside in order to find out that which is not put together by thought, by sensation, by repetition, by rituals? Because all that is not religion - at least not for the speaker. All that has nothing to do with that which is sacred. What then is truth? Is there such a thing as truth? Is there such a thing - an absolute, irrevocable truth, not dependent on time, environment, tradition, knowledge, or what the Buddha said, or what somebody else said? The word is not the truth. Therefore there is no personal worship. K is not important at all. We are seeking what is truth. If there is any. And if there is something that is beyond time. The ending of all time. They have said that meditation, a quick mind, is necessary to come upon this. We are going to go into it, if you will allow me. What is meditation? The word means ponder over, according to the dictionary. To think over. It also has a different meaning in Sanskrit and in Latin, which is to measure. And to measure means comparison, of course. There is no measurement without comparison. So can the brain be free of measurement? Not measurement by the yard-stick, by kilometres, miles, but the measurement of becoming and not becoming, comparing, not comparing. You understand? Can the brain be free of this system of measurement? I need to measure to get a suit made. I need measurement to go from here to another place. Distance is measurement, time is measurement. Oh, come on. Can the brain be free of measurement? That is, comparison - have no comparison whatsoever so that the brain is totally free. This is real meditation. Is that possible, living in the modern world, making money, breeding children, sex, all the noise, the vulgarity, the circus that is going on in the name of religion? Can one be free of all that? Not in order to get something. To be free. So meditation is not conscious meditation. You understand this? It cannot be conscious meditation, following a system, a guru -collective meditation, group meditation, single meditation, according to Zen or some other system. It cannot be a system because then you practise, practise, practise, and your brain gets more and more dull, more and more mechanical. So is there a meditation which has no direction, which is not conscious, deliberate? find out. That requires great energy, attention, passion. Then that very passion, energy, the intensity of it, is silence. Not contrived silence. It is the immense silence in which time, space is not. Then there is that which is unnameable, which is holy, eternal. LAST TALKS AT SAANEN 1985 1ST PUBLIC QUESTION DIALOGUE ANSWER MEETING TUESDAY, 23RD JULY, 1985 I have been told that there are so many people who are sad leaving, ending, Saanen. If one is sad it is about time that we left! And as has been announced, we are leaving. This is the last session at Saanen. There are several questions that have been put. You can't possibly expect all those questions to be answered, there are too many. Probably it would take several days to answer them. The speaker has not seen these questions, he likes to come to them spontaneously, but they have been very carefully chosen. Before going into these questions which you have put, may I ask you some questions? May I? Are you quite sure? Why do you come here? That is a good question. What is the raison d'etre or the cause of your coming? is it curiosity? Is it the reputation the man, the speaker, has built for the last seventy years? Is it the beauty of this valley - the marvellous mountains, the flowing river and the great shadows and lovely hillside? What has brought you here? Is it that you are concerned with your daily life, the way you are living it, the problems that you have, probably of every kind, old age, death, sex - you know the whole invasion of problems our brain is so used to - and that you expect someone to tell you how to live, how to examine, what to do? Is that the reason you are here? Or is it that one wants to see what one actually is as we are sitting here, examine that very closely and see if we can go beyond it - is that the reason? So, as you cannot possibly answer all those questions, I am asking you, the speaker is asking you, what is it all about? These gatherings have been going on in Saanen for twenty-five years. A great deal of our life. And, if one may ask the question of you, what remains at the end of it all, what is the content of our life? Is there any breaking of the pattern? Or is the pattern or mould being repeated over and over and over again? One's constant concentrated habits seem so difficult to break - the habit of thought, the habit of one's everyday life. When we look at all that after twenty-five years, is there a breaking of that pattern in which we live? Or do we just carry on day after day, adding a little more, taking away a little more, and at the end of one's existence feeling regret that one has not lived differently? Is this the process we are going through? I am asking the question: what is it all about? Our life. All the appalling things that are happening around us, far away from this lovely land? Where are we as individuals in this whole pattern of existence? What is the residue that remains in the sieve? What remains in us? Are we aware of what is happening to us in our daily thought, aware of every emotion, reaction, response, habit? Or is it just flowing by like a river? Which would you like to answer first of these questions? (He reads them aloud.) What do you mean by creation? Various teachers, gurus, say that essentially they are giving the same teaching as you. What do you say? What is guilt? One is desperate because the actions that caused the guilt can never be eradicated. Can we start with the various teachers? Right? Various teachers, gurus, say that essentially they are giving the same teaching as you, What do you say? I wonder why they compare themselves with the speaker. I wonder why they should even consider that what the speaker is saying is what they are also saying. Why do they say these things? I know this is a fact, that in India, Europe and America, various trumped-up gurus, various groups, say, `We are also going towards the same thing, along the same river as you are.' This has been stated to me, to the speaker, personally, and we have discussed this matter with these gurus, with these local or foreign - what do you call them? - leaders. We have gone into this question. First of all, why do they compare what they are saying with K? What is the intention behind it? Is it to ride on the same band wagon? Is it because they think they may not be `quite quite' but by comparing themselves with K they might become `quite quite'? So in talking it over with some of them, we went into it. First of all I doubt what they are saying and I doubt the speaker's own experiences. There is a doubt, a disbelief, not saying, `Yes, we are in the same boat.' So could we approach this question with doubt, with a certain sense of scepticism on both sides? There are those who say we are rowing the same boat on the same river; perhaps they are far ahead and the speaker is far behind, but it is still the same river. So in speaking with them, you doubt, question, demand, push further and further, deeper and deeper, and at the end of it, the speaker has heard many of them say, `What you say is perfect, is the truth. You embody truth', and all that business. So they salute and go away saying, `We have to deal with ordinary people and this is only for the elite.' I said, `Double nonsense!' You understand? So why do we at all compare - my guru is better than your guru? Why can't we look at things as they are? Questioning, doubting, asking, demanding, exploring, never saying our side is better than your side, or this side is better than that side, or that we are all doing the same thing. The other day I heard, `What you are saying I am saying, what is the difference?' I said, `None at all.' We use the same language, English or french, a little bit of Italian, but the content, the depth that lies behind the words may be quite different. We are so easily satisfied with explanations, with descriptions, with a sense of all the eclat, all the glory, all the paraphernalia. Our brains don't work very simply. Have you ever watched, seen how your brain works? That is one of the questions I would like to ask you. Watched your brain in action as an outsider might watch it? You understand? Have you ever done it? Or is the brain carrying on with its old habits, beliefs, dogmas, rituals, business and so on - just mechanically carrying on? If I may ask, is your brain like that? Silence! Have you ever watched one thought chasing another thought, a series of associations, a series of memories, holding on to your own experience? The other day, in America, a person whom we have known for some time said that he lived according to his experience, what his experience has told him. His experience was real, actual, very deep, and that experience was all-important to him. And we said, `Why don't you doubt your experience, it may not be actual? It may be imaginary; it may be romantic, sentimental and all the rest of it. Why don't you doubt that very thing you say: "My experience tells me"?' One has not seen that person again - do you understand? So is it not necessary to be aware of all these things: why they compare, why they say we are all in the same boat? We may be in the same boat, probably we are, all of us. But why assume we are in the same boat? Can we not refuse to accept any guru, any leader, especially the speaker? Never accept anything psychologically except what we have watched in ourselves in our relationships, in our speech, the tone of voice, the words we use, all that. Can one all day, or some part of the day, be aware of all that? Then perhaps you won't need any guru, any leader, any book, including that of the speaker. Then, when one is really attentive, there is something totally different taking place. May we go on to the next question? Good Lord! Guilt. I don't have to read the question. It is all rather mixed up here. Why do we feel guilty? Many people do. It tortures their life. Then it becomes an enormous problem and that is the background of guilt for many, many people. Guilt in not believing, guilt in not being with the rest of the group. You know the feeling of guilt, not the word but the feeling behind that word - that we have done something wrong and feel remorseful, anxious, and therefore frightened, uncertain. This guilt is a very distorting factor in our life. This is obvious. So why do we have this feeling? Is it that we have not done something which is correct, which is not pragmatic, which is against what our environment has put together? The guilt of a man or woman who feels they haven't supported the war of their own country. You know the various forms of guilt and the causes of it. We are asking: why does this feeling exist? Is it because we are not responsible, not demanding excellence of ourselves? Now, just a minute, the speaker is asking, is it that we are lazy, indolent, inattentive and therefore slightly irresponsible? And facing that irresponsibility we feel guilty? Suppose I have followed somebody, my guru, who has indulged in all kinds of things, sex and so on, and I have done as he does, then he changes his mind, he becomes old and says, `No more', and his disciples say, `No more.' One has done all these things in order to follow that guru and then the guru says, `No more', and I feel I shouldn't have done those things, I have been wrong. You follow? The whole issue of guilt. How do we deal with it? That is more important. So let's find out what to do about it, shall we? Not investigate the causes of it, we know those. I have done something which is not proper, which is not correct, which is not true and I realize later that that reaction has been unfortunate, causing damage to myself and unhappiness to others and I feel guilty. So what shall we do when we have guilt? How would you deal with it? What is your approach to it? How do you come near the problem? Is it that you want it resolved, that you want it wiped away so that your brain is no longer caught in it? How do you approach it - with the desire to resolve it, to be free of it? How you approach a problem is very important, isn't it? If you have a direction for that problem, it must be solved this way or that way. Or if you have a motive, then that motive directs the issue. So do we approach a problem like guilt without any motive? You understand my question? Or do we always approach a problem with a motive? I wonder, are we meeting this thing together? Is it possible to approach a problem without any sense of the background knowledge which is motive, and look at it as though for the first time? Can we do that? So, there are two things involved: how you approach a problem and what is a problem. You have problems, don't you, many, many of them? Why? Not that we are condemning the problem or saying it must be solved this way or that way; we are questioning the problem itself, the word, and the content of that word, an issue, something which you have to answer, whether it is a business problem, family problem, sexual problem, spiritual problem - sorry, `spiritual' should be in quotes - problems as to what leader to follow. Why do we have problems? First let's examine the word problem. According to the dictionary, a problem means something thrown at you, something propelled against you, a challenge, a thing that you have to answer. Something thrown at you. And we call that a problem. Why does our brain have problems? May we go into it a little bit? Please don't accept anything the speaker says, anything. But let's examine it together. When you send a child to school, he has to learn to read and write. He has never read or written before, so writing and reading become a problem to him. And as he grows up his brain is being trained to problems. Obviously. The whole process of learning is a problem and so the brain is conditioned in problems. This is a fact. My wife becomes a problem, how to live, what to do, and so on and so on. Our brain, your brain, is conditioned, educated to live with problems. This is a fact, not an invention by the speaker. It is so. So our whole life becomes a problem. Can we look at this as a fact, not as an idea, or a theory, but as a fact and see what we can do - whether the brain can be free to solve problems, not approach them with a mind that is already crowded with problems? You understand my question? No? I have been to school where I am not interested in anything the teacher is saying. I am looking out of the window, enjoying myself, he bangs me on the head. I come to, and he says, `Write.' I say, `Good Lord, I must learn', and it becomes a problem to me. My whole education - I am not against education but I am pointing out - my whole education becomes a tremendous problem. So the brain from childhood is conditioned to live with problems - right? Now, our question is: is it possible to be free of problems and then attack problems, for I cannot resolve them unless the brain is free. If it is not free, in the solution of one problem other problems are created. So the speaker is asking: can we be free of problems first - uncondition the brain which has been educated to live with problems? Is it clear? At last. Now let's proceed. Is it possible to be free and then tackle problems? How do you answer that question? Do you say it is possible or do you say it is impossible? When you say it is possible or impossible you have already blocked yourself. You have already closed the doors. You have prevented yourself from investigating, going into the question. So here is the question again: is it possible to free the brain from the conditioning of its education? The speaker is going into it not to convince you of anything but just to show you. You are not to do anything. Just listen to what he is saying, not accepting or denying, just looking, listening. The brain is conditioned to this whole culture of problems. That is a nice word - culture of problems. And is the conditioned brain different from the observer? Is the brain, my brain, different from me who is analysing, looking, tearing, examining, accepting, not accepting - is that observer, the person who says, `I am looking at it', any different from the brain? It is a very simple question, don't complicate it. Is anger, greed, envy, different from me? Or am I anger? Anger is me. Greed is me. The quality is me. There is no difference. But culture, education, has made us separate them. There is envy: if I say I am different from it, that I must control it, or indulge in it, there is conflict. I don't know if you are following all this? Is envy me? is violence me? Violence is not something different from me; me is violent. Do you see this? Once one realizes this fact that there is no difference between the quality and me, then a totally different movement is taking place. There is no conflict. You understand? There is no conflict. As long as there is separation there is conflict in me. Now I realize this, that I am the quality. I am violence. I, the me, is greedy, envious, jealous and all the rest of it, so I have abolished altogether this division in me. I am that. I am that quality. So, can my brain remain with that fact, stay with that fact? Can my brain, which is so active, so alive, thinking, watching, listening, trying, making efforts - can that brain stay with the fact that I am that? Stay with it, not run away, not try to control, because the moment you control there is a controller and the controlled, therefore it becomes effort. Please, I am being very simple. If you really grasp this truth, this fact, you eliminate effort altogether. Effort means contradiction. Effort means, I am different from that. Can you see the actual fact, not the idea but the actuality that you are your quality, your anger, your envy, your jealousy, your hate, your uncertainty, your confusion - that you are that? Not acknowledge it verbally or verbally agree, then we don't meet each other, but actually see this fact and stay with it. Can you? When you stay with it, what is implied in that? Attention - right? No movement away from it. Just staying with it. If you have acute pain you can't stay with it, but if you stay with it psychologically, inwardly say yes, it is so - which means no movement away from the fact - then the essence is no conflict, then you have broken the pattern of the brain. The pattern says, `I must do something. What is the right thing to do? Who will tell me the right thing to do? I must go to a psychiatrist' - you know all that stuff that takes place. When once you see the fact, it is like holding a jewel, marvellously carved; you are looking at it, seeing all the inside, outside, how it is put together, the platinum, the gold, the diamonds. You watch it because you are the jewel, you are the centre of this most intricate, subtle jewel which you are. The moment one sees the fact the whole thing is different. So guilt - sorry I have gone away from it. We had to. Guilt. It is not a problem, you understand now. It is a fact. It is not something to be resolved, something to be got over. You feel guilty about something you have done; this is a fact, and you stay with it. When you stay with it, it begins - please listen - it begins to flower and wither away. You understand, sir? Like a flower, if you keep on pulling it up to see if the roots are working properly, it will never bloom, but once you see the fact, which is the seed, and then stay with it, it shows itself fully. All the implications of guilt, all the implications of its subtlety, where it hides, is like a flower blooming. And if you let it bloom, not act, not say, `I must do or must not do', then it begins to wither away and die. Please understand this. With every issue you can do that. About God, about anything. That is insight, not merely remembrance, adding. Is this clear? If you discover it, you see that it is so, then psychologically it is an enormous factor that frees you from all the past and present struggles and effort. Now for the first question: What do you mean by creation? Shall we go into that? It is a rather complex question. I will read it again. What do you mean by creation? What does the speaker mean? I would like to put that question to you. A lot of people talk about creation - the astrophysicists and the theoretical philosophers. God created and so on. This is a very serious question which the ancient Hindus and the ancient Hebrews have put, not merely recent scientists. This has been a tremendous issue that they want to understand. May we go into this? What is creation? When you ask that question you must also ask the question, what is invention? Is invention creation? To invent something new, is that creation? Careful please, don't agree or disagree, just look at it. Invention is based on knowledge - right? It is based on somebody else's previous experiments; all those experiments are knowledge in the present and you add to it. This is so. The man who invented the jet knew first all about the propeller and the internal combustion machinery; then from that knowledge he got an idea. I may be putting it incorrectly, or exaggeratedly, but this is so: from a great deal of knowledge, a new inspiration comes, and that inspiration is an invention. So we are adding all the time. And is that creation - something which is based on knowledge and the consequences of knowledge? Or has creation nothing to do with knowledge? Is creation a series of inventions in the universe? Obviously when they look at Mars, Mercury, Venus, Saturn and go beyond, they know what Venus is made of - various gases and so on and so on and so on - but what they have translated as gases is not Venus. You understand? Come on, sirs. The word Venus is not Venus. The gases constituting Venus are not that beauty which you see early in the morning or late in the evening. So we are asking, is invention totally different from creation? Which means that creation has nothing whatever to do with knowledge. You are going to find this rather difficult. If you don't mind, if you are not too tired, if you still have the energy to investigate, we will go into it. Don't accept what the speaker is saying, that would be terrible. It would destroy you. Don't merely say, yes, yes, yes. It would destroy your brain, as it has been destroyed by others. The speaker has no intention of destroying your brain, or adding to the already damaged brain. So he says have scepticism, question, don't accept or deny, just find out. We know what invention is - at least to the speaker it is very clear. That doesn't mean it is clear to you. We are asking, what is creation? Is creation related to man's endeavour? Is it related to all experiences? To the duration of time? Please examine all this. Which means, is it related to war, to killing, to business, to all the memories that man has accumulated, acquired, gathered? If it is, then it is still part of knowledge. Therefore it cannot be creation. Right? So what is creation? is it related - please listen, just listen, don't do anything about it - is it related to love? That is, love is not hate, jealousy, anxiety, uncertainty, the love of your wife, which is the love of the image you have built about her, or of your husband or girl friend, or the image you have built about your guru for whom you have great devotion, or the image of a temple, mosque, or church. So we are asking: is love necessary for creation? Or is love, which is also compassion, creation? And is creation or love related to death? You understand all these questions? I am sorry to ask, do you understand - I withdraw that. just listen. So is love free from all the human beings who have given specific meaning to that word? Free from all that. Is love related to death? And is love compassion and death? Is all that creation? Can there be creation without death? That is, ending. Ending all knowledge - Vedanta. You have heard that word, I am sure. The word Vedanta means the end of knowledge - the end of knowledge which is death, which means no time, timeless, which is love. You understand? Sorry, I won't repeat that. Stupid of me to repeat! So love, death. Love means compassion. Love, compassion mean supreme intelligence, not the intelligence of books and scholars and experience. That is necessary at a certain level but there is the quintessence of all intelligence when there is love, compassion. There cannot be compassion and love without death, which is the ending of everything. Then there is creation. That is, the universe, not according to the astrophysicists and scientists, is supreme order. Of course. Sunrise and sunset. Supreme order. And that order can only exist when there is supreme intelligence. And that intelligence cannot exist without compassion and love and death. This is not a process of meditation but deep, profound enquiry. Enquiry with great silence, not `I am investigating'. Great silence, great space. That which is essentially love and compassion and death is that intelligence which is creation. Creation is there when the other two are there, death and love. Everything else is invention. LAST TALKS AT SAANEN 1985 2ND PUBLIC QUESTION DIALOGUE ANSWER MEETING WEDNESDAY, 24TH JULY, 1985 Let's forget for the moment the questions. We will come back to them. What is happening to all of us, living in this world, which is quite terrible? If you have travelled at all you will see the dangers -airport explosions, terrorists, and all the rest of it. When you look at it all, how do you face the world? We may be old, but the coming generation, children, grandchildren, and so on, what is going to happen to them? Do you consider that at all? What is the future of the coming generation of which you are a part? How do we educate them, what is the purpose of education? Presumably we are all educated. You have been to school, college, university, if you are lucky, or we have been educating ourselves by looking at all these events that are taking place in the world and learning from them. But that learning is very limited, very small, narrow. And if one has children and grandchildren, how does one treat them? What is our response? Aren't we concerned about them at all? I believe there are about 500,000 children who run away from home in America, end up in New York, prostitution and all that - do you understand what it all means? In a country like this, part of the rest of the world, there is no poverty, no slums, there are literally no people starving. There are slums in America, England, France, and all those starving people in India and Asia; it is quite appalling, degrading. And when we look at ourselves and the future generation, what is going to happen? Is that same pattern going to be repeated? The same callousness? The irresponsibility of being trained in an army to kill thousands and thousands, and be killed? What is our responsibility? Or don't you want to think about all that at all? Are we only concerned with our own pleasure, with our own problems, with our own self-centred egotistic activity? This is really a very serious question, frightening, agonizing. When we look at all this, what do we do? Do we have proper schools? What place has knowledge in all this, whether it be theoretical or physical knowledge? What relationship have we to it all? The tortures. Every country has indulged in torturing other human beings. My mother may be tortured, my son, for some information, for some nationalistic, communistic or democratic reason. Do we shed tears? Or not being able to do anything about it, do we become cynical, bitter and throw in our hands? So, we have to consider all these things, not merely our own progress, our own happiness, our own self-centred activities. May we go on now with the questions? Maybe that will be more pleasant, less challenging, less demanding on our energies and the capacities of the brain. The brain has extraordinary capacity and energy if you have watched all the progress in the fields of medicine and surgery, technology, computers - tremendous advances, incalculable advances. And it is going on and on. In other directions the brain is very limited, and that limitation is being used by the technological world. We are being exploited ruthlessly. The Communists still have their concentration camps, and there are not only the concentration camps of tyrannies but also the concentration camps of the gurus. You don't mind my saying that? And the concentration camps of all the monks in the world. This is really a tremendous problem. When one understands something must one act on this understanding, or does the understanding act of itself Right? Question clear? Now what do we mean by understanding? We use that word so easily. So we must investigate, explore the meaning of the word. We are discussing, exploring together, the speaker is not answering the question. Together we are looking into the question. We are together investigating, digging into the meaning of words first, according to the dictionary, which is the common usage of the language. What do we mean by understanding, to understand something? To understand oneself, to understand how the computer, which is so marvellous, works, to understand the whole surgical process. What do we mean by that word? Is it purely intellectual, which is a quick communication between two people, or half a dozen people or a hundred people, a comprehension of the meaning of the word, quickly translated to the brain, and the intellect saying, `Yes, I understand'? That is, I have a problem, I have reasoned it out, I have come to a conclusion and I understand it. Or I understand how to dismantle a car and so on. So is understanding merely an intellectual affair, a theoretical affair about which I can talk endlessly, adding more ideas to it and thinking I am enlarging, growing? In that understanding is there any emotional quality? Is there something that says, `That is not quite, quite, quite, you must add more to it'? There is the intellect, there is emotion, there is action - right? Emotions exist naturally - one hopes - but when those emotions have become romantic, sentimental and very, very superficial, they must be recognized by the brain, therefore they are part of the brain - part of the sensation of feeling, sensation of imagination, of looking at a mountain, the beauty and the silence and the dignity and the majesty of it, and putting it on a canvas, or writing a poem about it. All that is still part of the activity of the brain. So is the intellect, which says, `I understand', the capacity to discern, to distinguish, to determine and take action and therefore dominating everything else? So we are asking, is understanding a whole movement, not an act of the brain only, an act of the intellect only? Do you understand my question? We will now have to examine what is action? What is it that one has to do? What determines action? What brings about action? What do we mean by action? To act. To do. Is that action based on an ideal, or on a theory, or a conclusion, dialectical or imaginative? That is, I act on an idea - right? So what is an idea? Why do we have so many ideas? We are investigating the word idea, not whether it is right or wrong. The scientists, the physicists and the theoretical philosophers want ideas, otherwise they feel lost. They want new ideas all the time. So we must examine what we mean by an idea. There is a fact. There is a clock there. It says ten to eleven, and that is a fact. And there are non-facts. The non-facts are totally away from the fact. Distance. And so there is the fact and the idea about the fact, and we pursue the idea, not the investigation into the fact. An idea becomes far more important than the fact. The Socialists, the Communists and others, left, right, centre, all have ideas, theories, conclusions, and they try to fit man into those ideas. And to make them fit they torture them, they say, `You can't do this, you can't do that.' So to them ideas become far more important than the human which is the fact. So, are we, each one of us, always moving away from the fact and pursuing an idea and acting according to that idea which probably has nothing to do with the fact? So what do we mean by acting? If you act according to your past memories, experiences, or some future ideological conclusion, that action, based on the past or on the future, is not an act. Are we making this clear? If we act according to certain memories, conclusions, experiences, knowledge, then we are acting from the past. The word act means do, not according to the past or according to the future. So the question is - go into this, it is very serious - is there an action which is not based on time? Don't be puzzled. Can one grasp the significance, the content, the deep meaning of the past, how the past, modified, projects itself into the future, and how if one acts according to the past or according to some future concept it is not action; it is merely memory, having come to certain conclusions, acting. So it is always caught in the field of time, in the cycle of time - right? Now we are asking, is there an action which is not based on time? Think it out, sirs. Think it out, don't wait for me, for the speaker, to explain; think it out. It is a very simple question, but has tremendous meaning behind it. That is, I have always acted according to my tradition. The tradition may be one day old, or five thousand years old. You know what tradition means, 'tradere' -hand over. So my parents, grandparents, a thousand parents, have handed over certain traditions, the consequences of their thought, their feeling, gradually seeping through various generations; and I am that, part of that. That is my background and I act according to that. Or I reject all that, saying, `How stupid', and look to the future; I must do this, I must not do it, according to some leader whom I follow. And I call both these action. But the speaker asks, is there an action which is not based on these two, an action which is not the process of the time? Sorry, you have to use your brains. What is one to do when one is asked that question: is there an action which is not caught in the wheel of time? How does one's brain react to that question - the brain which has been conditioned, shaped according to the past and the future, that is, caught in the field of time, in the network of time? The brain withdraws for the moment, is not able to answer; it says, `It is too much trouble, for goodness sake leave me alone. I am used to this pattern, it has brought its misery, suffering, but also there is the other compensating side to it. Don't ask these questions which are so difficult.' They are not difficult. The word difficult makes it difficult. So I won't use that word. But I have to find out if there is an action which is not of time. May I go into it? Do you want me to go into it? Action is related to love, not to memory. Memory, remembering the images, is not love; it is sensation through which I act, and sensation is not love. Therefore what is the relationship of love to action? You follow? Is love memory? We have met together, we have slept together, we have done all kind of things together, walked up the mountain, down the valley, round the hills, been companions, held hands, quarrelled - and that is called affection, love, but most of it is based on sensation, the image, and attachment. Without attachment I am lost, I feel terribly lonely. Feeling lonely, I am desperate, become bitter and all the rest of it. Is all that love? Obviously it is not. We went into it. So what is the relationship between love and action? Go on, sir. If love is in the field of time, then it is not love. So love is action - I wonder if you get this? There is not love first and action later. For the speaker -don't accept it - for the speaker there is no division between the perception, the quality of that love and action. When there is that quality it is action. It is not an intellectual process of determination or choice. It is an action of immediate perception. Now we must go on. Yesterday we only answered three questions and there are many more of them. You have said many things about violence. Would you allow one of your friends to be attacked in front of you? It is a good old question. What would you do if your sister was attacked in front of you? It is the same question. What would you do - you? Beat him up? Shoot him? Karate? You know what that word karate means? It has been explained to me. No self. No me. Not the military art of defending yourself. So what would you do? find out, sir. You are there, with your wife or husband or your girl friend, and somebody comes along and is violent towards your wife or husband. What would you do instinctively? You would attack, wouldn't you? Naturally. You would hit him. If you knew karate, or some kind of yoga tricks, you would trip him up. So this question is put to me, to the speaker - right? We know the normal reaction of people, violence. If you are violent I am going to be violent. If you are angry with me I am going to be doubly angry with you. If you call me an idiot, I say you are a greater one. And so on and so on. This question is put to me, to the speaker. This has been an old question, but I treat all questions as something new. What should I do? Are you waiting for me? If I have lived a violent life all my life then my response would naturally be violent. But if I have lived as I have without violence, not only physical violence but psychological violence, which is aggression, competition, comparison, imitation, conformity (that is all part of violence) - lived as K has lived - then when my friend, or my sister, or my wife, is attacked I would act as I have lived. A simple answer. You are not puzzled over this, are you? No. Another question: What is intell1gence? What is intelligence? What do you think is intelligence? One meaning of that word, if you looked into a good etymological dictionary, is interlegere, to read between the lines. Another meaning is to gather information of every kind and to discern among the various kinds of information what is correct. That depends on choice, on one's education, on one's way of life and so on. Then there is the intelligence of the body, if you let it alone. The body is an extraordinary instrument - how all the nerves are connected to the brain, how the liver works, the heart. From the moment it is born until it dies the heart keeps on beating. It is an extraordinary machine. If you have seen some of the photographs on television where they show the body, it is amazing what nature has done through a million or two million years. But we destroy the native intelligence of the body by doing all kinds of extravagant things - drinking, drugs, sex (though sex has its place) - you know the whole issue of it, ambition, greed, fighting, struggling, a tremendous strain on the body, heart failure: all that affects the brain, the nerves, the organism, and therefore the physical, biological instrument is gradually destroyed; it gradually withers and loses its vitality, its energy. If one leaves it alone, it looks after itself, you don't have to do a thing, except for a person like K who is ninety years old and so has to be a little careful. Then there is the intelligence of a clever physician, or a technologist, or a man who puts very, very complex machinery together, and the thousands of people who get together to send a rocket to the moon - that requires great intelligence and cooperation, a certain type of intelligence. There is also the very cunning, calculated, intelligence which has put together all the rituals of the world - the temples, the mosques, the churches -controlling people through their apostolic succession, sorry if you are a Catholic, forget what I am saying! (There is also in India a Sanskrit word for it, this handing down.) It demands great intelligence to control people, to make them believe in something that may or may not exist, to have faith, to be baptized. It is all very clever if you have watched it, very intelligent. The Communists are doing it; they have their god, Lenin, and after him Stalin, all the way down to the present gentlemen. So it is the same movement. All that is partially very intelligent. And the scientists, the theoretical physicists, are also partially very intelligent. Then what is a holistic intelligence? You understand? Intelligence which is whole, which is not fragmented. I am very intelligent in one direction, but in other directions I am dull. There is partial intelligence in various phases of life. But we are asking, is there an intelligence which is complete, which is not fragmented? Are you going to find out? Or am I going to find out and tell you? Please, am I going to answer that question or are you going to answer it? Is there an intelligence which is incorruptible, not based on circumstances, not pragmatic, not self-centred and therefore broken up, not whole? Is there an intelligence which is impeccable, which has no holes in it, which covers the whole field of man? To enquire into it the brain must be completely free of any conclusion, any kind of attachment, any kind of self-centred movement, self-interest, and therefore a brain that is totally free from fear, from sorrow. When there is the end of sorrow there is passion behind it. The word sorrow etymologically has a deeper meaning than merely shedding tears, pain and grief and anxiety. Passion is not for something. Passion is per se, for itself. A belief may invoke passion in me, or devotion to a symbol, a community, something I imagine, but all that is still very limited. So one has to discover, one has to come upon, this passion which is neither lust nor has any motive. Is there such passion? There is such passion when there is an end to sorrow. When there is an end to sorrow there is love and compassion. And when there is compassion, not for this or that, but compassion, then that compassion has its own supreme quintessence of intelligence. That is, it is neither of time, nor does it belong to any theories, to any technologies, to anybody; that intelligence is not personal or universal, nor the words round it. Is there any benefit to the human being in physical illness? Is there any benefit, reward, profit, to the human being in physical illness? In being ill? Now I put that question to you. I am sure most of us have been ill at one time or another, either mentally ill, that is an illness of the brain, which is neurotic, psychopathic and so on, or physically ill, some organ not functioning properly. Now just listen: what is the difference between illness and health? What is health? What is it to be extraordinarily well? The question is: is there any profit, benefit, from illness? What do you think? To that question the speaker would say there is - sorry! When you are ill, what are your reactions, responses? The desire when one is ill is to avoid pain, to take a pill quickly, or immediately go to a doctor, and he tells you what to do. You want to get over it quickly because you may lose your job, etc. etc. But if you are not afraid of illness, illness has quite a different meaning. The speaker, if I may be slightly personal, was paralysed for a month in Kashmir for various reasons; they overdosed the poor chap with antibiotics, and a few days later he was paralysed for a month. I thought that was final. I thought, there it is. The speaker wasn't frightened. He said, `All right, I'm paralysed for the rest of my life.' This actually happened. I am not exaggerating. They carried me, washed me and all the rest of it, for a whole month. You know what that means? Fortunately you don't. But if I had struggled against it and said, `What stupid doctors. I am anti-antibiotics', it would have made it worse and I would have learnt nothing from it; it wouldn't have cleansed my body, it wouldn't have benefitted me. The speaker has several times been very, very ill. I am not going into that. But if one is not afraid to remain with it, to stay with it, does not immediately rush to a doctor or to a pill, physical illness has a certain natural profit, benefit. You may have to take a pill later, but go at it slowly, patiently" observing what your reactions are, why there is this craze to be healthy, to have no pain, which makes you resist the illness. This self-interest may be one of the factors of illness. It may be the true reason for illness. Do you understand all this? Clear? Right. Why do you differentiate between the brain and the mind? I am afraid this has to be the last question. There are several left over but this has to be the last one. First of all what is the brain? Remember that we are not professionals; we are ordinary people who are not brain specialists. Though the speaker has talked to brain specialists, he is not, not underlined, a brain specialist. So we are asking each other what is the brain, not the physical biological structure of the brain, I don't know anything about all that. But what is this thing we live with which is in operation in our daily life, not superior consciousness or lower consciousness? You know that game. That is what the gurus play at. They help you to bring down the higher consciousness to lower consciousness, or through meditation, through following them, through repeating certain practices, to reach the higher consciousness. We are not doing all that kind of thing. We will come presently to what is consciousness. You don't mind going into all this? What then is the function, the daily function of our brain - your brain, not my brain, your brain, the human brain, whether you live in Switzerland, America, Russia or the Far East - what goes on in our daily life which is the exercise of the brain, exercise of thought, exercise of choice, exercise of decision and action? Wherever we live the activity of the brain plays a great role in our life. So what is this brain? We are amateurs, learning. Look at our own brain. Action and reaction. Sensation. Conditioned from the past - I am a Hindu, you are a Christian, I am a Buddhist, you are a Muslim and so on; I belong to this country and you belong to that country; I believe very strongly; I have come to certain conclusions, I stick to them; my prejudices and opinions are strong, and I am attached, I want to fulfil, I want to become something -you follow? That is our daily routine, and much more: the anguish of anxiety, tremendously depressing loneliness, and escaping from that loneliness through television, books, rituals, temple, church, mosque, God. Conflict. Conflict. Conflict. That is what the brain is caught up in all the time. This is not exaggerated. We are facing facts. It is so. The brain is the centre of all this - the memories, the nervous responses, the likes and dislikes - it is the very centre of all our existence, emotionally, imaginatively, art, science, knowledge. So that brain is very, very limited and yet it is extraordinarily capable. Technologically it has done incredible things, unimaginable fifty years ago. All that is the activity of the conditioned brain. And living within that conditioning - religious, political, business and so on - is very limited, concerned with oneself, self-serving. This is obvious. The brain says, `I am materialistic', and it says also, `No, no, I am better than that. There is a soul.' To use the Sanskrit word, `There is an Atman', and so on and so on. So consciousness is all that - right? People have written books and books about consciousness, professionals and nonprofessionals, but we are not professionals, we are dealing with what is. Consciousness is its content. What it contains makes consciousness. It contains anxiety, belief, faith, bitterness, loneliness, jealousy, hate, violence - you know, all the qualities, the experiences of human beings. That is, consciousness is not yours because every human being on this earth, whether the poorest, most ignorant, degraded, or the most highly sophisticated, educated, has these problems. They may put on robes and crowns and all that circus, but remove all that and they are like you and me. So we share the consciousness of every human being in the world. I know you won't accept this, it doesn't matter: this is a fact because you suffer and that villager in India who lives on one meal a day also suffers, not in the way you suffer, but it is still suffering. Your memories may be different from another's, but it is still memory. Your experience may be different, but it is still experience. So your consciousness is not yours. It is psychologically the consciousness of the entire humanity. You may be tall, you may be fair, I may be black, I may be purple, but still that consciousness is common to all of us - psychologically. So you are the entire humanity. You know what that means? If you accept it as an idea then you move away from the fact, from the truth of it, from the reality, the substance of it. When there is that reality, truth, that you are the rest of mankind, then the whole movement of life changes. You will not kill another, for then you are killing yourself. There was an American General - oh, I have forgotten his name. He was going to war and he faces the enemy. And he reports to the boss, `We have met the enemy. We are the enemy.' You understand? We have met the enemy across the field but we are the enemy, the enemy is us. So when there is this truth that you are the entire humanity, sleep with it, go into it, feel your way into it, don't deny it or accept it, but as the river flows, go into it. You will see what a deep transformation takes place, which is not intellectual, imaginative, sentimental or romantic. In that there is a tremendous sense of compassion, love. And when there is that, you act according to supreme intelligence. LAST TALKS AT SAANEN 1985 3RD PUBLIC QUESTION DIALOGUE ANSWER MEETING THURSDAY, 25TH JULY, 1985 There are too many questions to be able to answer all of them, but some of them have been chosen. I repeat, the speaker has not seen them. Before we go into those questions may I comment on something? People have been talking a great deal about art, about what is art. I believe the root meaning of that word is to put everything in its proper place. Can we talk a little bit about that first? What do you think is the greatest art, the supreme art? Is it the art of listening, hearing, seeing, observing, perceiving and learning? Please, together we are investigating into this question, not the speaker talking to himself. Let us begin with the art of hearing. We not only hear with the ears - words conveyed, vibrated to the brain; surely it is much more than that. Do we ever listen to anybody? Do you listen to your wife or husband, or your girl friend, really listen to what they are conveying, trying to say? Or do you translate what is being said into your own terminology, compare it with what you already know, judging, evaluating, agreeing, disagreeing? is that listening? The speaker is talking now, unfortunately; are you listening, actually paying attention to the meaning of words, to the content of the words, not translating, comparing, judging, agreeing, disagreeing - but just listening? Are you doing that now? Isn't it one of the most important things, how we listen to another? That other may be wearing too strong a perfume and you are repelled by it, or you like it, and this like and dislike of a perfume, or other factors, may prevent you from listening to what the other person has to say. If you have gone into this question rather deeply you will find it is one of the most difficult things to listen to another, completely. Are you doing it now? Or are you fidgety and so on? So there is an art of hearing, of listening - right? And there is an art of seeing - seeing things as they are. When you look at a tree, do you translate it immediately into words and say, `Tree'? Or do you look at it, perceive it, see the shape of it, see the beauty of the light on a leaf, see the quality of that tree? It is not man-made fortunately; it is there. So do we see ourselves as we are, without condemnation, without judgement, evaluation and so on, just see what we are, our reactions and responses, our prejudices, opinions - just see them, not to do anything about it but just observe them. Can we do that? So there is an art of seeing things as they are, without naming, without being caught in the network of words, without the whole operation of thinking interfering with perception. That is a great art. And also there is an art of learning, isn't there? What do we mean by learning? Generally learning is understood to mean memorizing, accumulating, storing up to use skilfully or not, learning a language, reading, writing, communicating and so on. The modern computers can do most of that better than we can. They are extraordinarily rapid. So what is the difference between us and the computer? The computer must be programmed. We also have been programmed in various ways: tradition, so-called culture, knowledge. And we have also been programmed to be Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Communist and all the rest of it. Is this all there is to learning? We are questioning. We are not saying that it is not. It is necessary to learn how to drive a car; to learn a language, and so on. But we are asking, is learning something much more? Are we together in this? Don't just look at me, please -the person is not very interesting. We are asking something, which is: is learning merely memorizing? for if that is all, then the computer can do better than us. But isn't learning something much more? Learning means constantly learning, not accumulating, not gathering in what one has seen, what one has observed, heard, learnt and storing it up. Learning means, to the speaker, a constant observation, listening, moving, never taking a stand, never taking a position, never going back to memory and letting memory act. That is a great art. Then there is the art of discipline. That word comes from disciple, one who learns from someone else, not necessarily from the teacher, from the guru - they are generally rather stupid - but to discipline oneself according to a pattern like a soldier, like a monk, like a person who wants to be very austere and disciplines his body: the whole process of control, direction, obedience, subservience and training. To me, to the speaker, discipline is a terrible thing. But if there is acute hearing, not only by the ear, but also deep listening to yourself, to everything that is happening around you, listening to the birds, to the river, to the forest, to the mountain, and observing the minutest insect on the floor, if you have good eyes to see it - all that constitutes a form of living which in itself becomes the discipline, there is constant movement. I will go back to the question. Phew! It is pretty hot here! We have had most marvellous days, three weeks of it, lovely mornings, beautiful evenings, long shadows and the deep blue valleys and the clear blue sky and the snow. We have had a marvellous three weeks. A whole summer has never been like this. So the mountains, the valleys, the trees and the river, tell us goodbye. Can we go on with our questions? I see that thought is responsible for my confusion. And yet in going into it, more thought is generated and there is no end to it. Please comment on this. Thought is associated with other thoughts - right? There is no single thought. It is a series of movements which we call thinking. I think about my shoes, then how to keep them clean; I polish them (which I do). So thought by itself cannot exist - that is, one thought without all the associations in connection with it. And thinking is the very life of us. That is so obvious. You couldn't be there and the speaker couldn't be here if we hadn't thought about it. We thought about it because there have been previous associations -reputation, books and all the `bla', and you come here and I come, the speaker comes. So there is no single thought by itself. This is important to uncover. Thought is always in relation to something else; and in pursuing one thought other thoughts arise. The speaker is polishing his shoes and looks out of the window and he sees those mountains and he is off! And he has to come back and polish his shoes. I want to concentrate on something and the thought shoots off in another direction. I pull it back and try to concentrate. This goes on all the time from childhood until we die. And the more I think about thought, the more thought there is: `I shouldn't think along those lines, I must think rightly, is there right thinking, is there wrong thinking, is there purposeful thinking, what is the purpose of my life', and so on? The whole process of thinking begins and there is no end to it. It has done the most extraordinary things. Technologically it has done the most appalling things, terrifying things. It has built all the rituals of every religion, and it has tortured human beings. It has expelled people from one part of the world to another, and so on and so on. Thought, whether Eastern or Western, is still thinking. It is not Eastern thinking and Western thinking, two separate things. Because thought is the thread - right? We are together? So the question is: is there an end to thought - not your way of thinking, or my way of thinking, or saying we are all thinking together, we are all moving in the same direction? We are asking whether thought can ever stop. Which is, is there an end to time? Thinking is the result of knowledge, memory. To acquire knowledge, one needs time. Even the computer, which is so extraordinary, has to be given a split second before it gallops out what it wants to say. So when we are asking whether thought can ever end, we are also asking whether there is a stop to time. It is a rather interesting question if you go into it. Time, what does that mean to us, not only psychologically but outwardly - sunset, sunrise, learning a language and so on and so on? You need time to go from here to there. Even the fastest train or aeroplane needs time to get here or there. So... please follow this - as long as there is a distance between `what is' and `what might be', `what I am' and `what I will be' - it may be a very short distance or centuries of distance - that distance can only be covered by time. So time implies evolution - right? You plant the seed in the earth, it takes a whole season to mature, grow, or a thousand years to become a full tree. Everything that grows or becomes needs time. Everything. So time and thought are not two separate movements. They are one solid movement. And we are asking whether thought and time have an end, a stop? How will you find out? This has been one of the problems confronting the human being from the beginning of man. This movement of time is a circle; time is a bondage. The hope, I hope, involves time. So man has asked not if there is timelessness but rather if there is an end to time. You understand the difference? This is really a very serious question. We are not enquiring into the timeless. We are enquiring whether time, which is thought, has a stop. Now how will you discover that? Through analysis? Through so-called intuition? That word intuition, which has been used so much, may be most dangerous, it may be our hidden desire. It may be our deeply rooted motive of which we are not aware. It may be the prompting of our tendency, our own idiosyncrasy, our own particular accumulation of knowledge. So we are asking if you put all that aside, has time a stop? And we asked, how will you find out? You, not the speaker or anybody else, because what others say has no importance. So, we have to enquire very, very deeply into the nature of time, which we did during the last few talks. We also went very deeply into the nature of thinking. Can all that come to an end? Or is it a gradual process? If it is a gradual process, the very gradualness is time, so it cannot be gradual - right? It cannot be `eventually'. It cannot be next weekend or tomorrow, or a few minutes later. It cannot be the next second either. All that allows time. If one really grasps all this, deeply comprehends the nature of thought the nature of time, discipline, the art of living - stay with it quietly, not cover it up by all kinds of movements, but stay with it - then there is a glimpse of its nature, an insight into it which is not related to memory, to anything. find out! The speaker can easily say, yes there is. That would be too childish. Unless we experiment - not just say yes, yes, or agree - unless we actually investigate, experiment, push it, go into it deeply, we can't come upon a strange sense of timelessness. The second question says: Please speak further on time and death. We have talked a great deal about time, thought, and what relationship time has to death. What relationship has thought, thinking, to this extraordinary thing called death? If one is frightened of death then one will never see the dignity, the beauty and the depth of death. Fear is caused by thought and time. We have been into that very carefully. Fear doesn't exist by itself. fear exists where there is a demand for security, not only biological, physical, security but much more. Human beings apparently insist, demand, require, to be psychologically secure. So we have to enquire into security, that is being safe, protected. Security means protection - right? I have to protect that which gives me security, whether it is security of position, security of power, security of a great many possessions. To have millions in the bank gives you a great sense of security. To possess a good chalet gives you security. Security also implies having a companion who will stand by you, who will help you, who will comfort you, who will give you what you want and what she wants. So in the family we seek security. In the community we seek it. In the nation, in the tribe, and that very tribalism, nationalism, prevent that security because there is war, one tribe killing another tribe, one group destroying another group. So physically it's becoming more and more difficult to be secure. The terrorists might come into this tent and blow us all up. We not only need physical security but also psychological security. Psychological security is the greatest demand. But we are asking: is there psychological security at all? Please ask yourself this really very, very serious question: is there inwardly, subjectively, inside the skin as it were, any security at all? I can rely on you as an audience and you can rely on me as the speaker. If the speaker seeks security in you and has nobody to talk to, then he feels terribly insecure. So is there psychological security at all? The world is changing constantly from day to day, it is in tremendous flux. It is so obvious. Physically one needs a little security to sit here, talk together, but that is gradually being restricted. You cannot do that in Communist countries. So one recognizes the fact that psychologically there is no security. That is the truth; there is no psychological security. I can believe, I can have faith, but you come along and tear it to pieces. The more I strengthen myself in belief the more that belief can be torn to pieces. I may have faith in something, in a symbol, in a person, but that can be pulled to pieces by argument, logic. So there is no psychological security at all. Though we have sought it, though we have tried to fulfil ourselves, done everything to be secure psychologically, at the end of it there is death. There is death. And death is the most extraordinary thing. Putting an end to long continuity. In that continuity we hope to find security because the brain can only function excellently when it is completely secure - secure from terrorism, secure in a belief, secure in knowledge and so on and so on. All that comes to an end when there is death. I may have hope for the next life and all that stuff, but it is really the ending of a long continuity. I have identified myself with that continuity. That continuity is me. And death says, `Sorry old boy that is the end.' And one is not frightened of death, really not frightened, for you are living constantly with death - that is, constantly ending. Not continuing and ending, but ending every day that which you have gathered, that which you have memorized, that which you have experienced. Time gives us hope, thought gives us comfort, thought assures us a continuity, and we say, `Well, in the next life...' But if I don't end this silliness now, the stupidity, the illusions, and all the rest of it, they will be there in the next life - if there is a next life. So time, thought, give continuity, and we cling to that continuity and therefore there is fear. And fear destroys love. Love, compassion and death. They are not separate movements. So we are asking: can we live with death, and can thought and time have a stop? They are all related. Don't separate time, thought and death. It is all one thing. Is it not violence and corruption to have physical security while others are starving? Who is asking this question? Please, the speaker is asking you, who has asked this question? Is it the man with physical security considering the poor, the starving, or is it the starving who are asking this question? If you and I are comfortable we can ask this question. If you and I are really very poor would we ask this question? You see, there are so many social reformers in the world, the do-gooders. I won't go into it now because we haven't time for it. Look at it carefully. Are they fulfilling themselves in social work, doing something for the poor? This question has been put to the speaker when he is in India - what are you doing for the poor? They are starving, you seem to be well fed, what do you do? So I am asking, who puts this question? The speaker is not avoiding the question. He has been brought up in poverty. Is it then the speaker when he was young, living in poverty, asking this question? There is poverty in the world; there are slums, appalling conditions. (There are no slums in Switzerland apparently. Thank God!) There are slums, ghettos, the very, very, very poor, one meal a day and all that. What do we do about it? That is really the question, isn't it? You may be wealthy, I may not be so wealthy, but the question is: what do we human beings, seeing all this, do about it? What is our responsibility? Are we concerned - please, we are not avoiding the question - are we concerned with poverty? Poverty. What does that mean? Physical poverty? Or psychological poverty? You understand? Being poor, psychologically, in the sense that you may have a lot of knowledge about the psyche but are still poor. The analyst is poor, and he is trying to correct the other person who is also poor. So what is poverty? To be poor, not to be sophisticated, to be ignorant. So what is ignorance? Is it the lack of reading a book, of writing, having only one meal a day, one cloth a day? Or does poverty begin first psychologically? If I am rich inwardly I can do something. If I myself am poor inwardly, poverty means nothing outside. So we have to understand not only what poverty is, but all that is involved in it - sympathy, generosity. If you have one shirt, you give it. Once the speaker was walking in the rain in India and a little boy came up and said, `Give me your shirt.' I said, `All right.' So I gave it to him. Then he said, `Give me your undershirt.' I said, `Just a minute. Come with me to the house. You can have anything you like, food, clothes, anything you like, within limits of course.' So he came with me, holding my hand; he was very poor, dirty. It was pouring and we walked together to the house. I left him, and went upstairs to get some clothes for him. And the boy went round the house, looking into every cupboard, all over the place. The person with whom the speaker was staying caught him and said, `What are you doing in this part of the house?' `He asked me to come in,' he said. `But he didn't ask you to come upstairs and look into everything. So why are you doing it?' And the boy got rather frightened and said, `My father is a robber.' He was casing the house. So we have to deal with poverty not only externally but also inwardly. Probably there would be no poverty in the world if all the nations got together and said we must solve this problem. They could. But nationalities divide them, communities divide them, religious beliefs divide them. So the whole world is opposed to the kind of action that puts aside all our nationalities, beliefs, religions and really helps by working all together to solve this problem of external poverty. Nobody will do this. We have talked to politicians, to higher people, but they are not interested. So begin with ourselves. How, can our limited brain grasp the unlimited, which is beauty and truth? What is the ground of compassion and intelligence and can it really come upon each one of us? Right? Question clear? How can our limited brain grasp the unlimited? It cannot, because it is limited. Can we grasp the significance, the depth, of the quality of the brain and recognize the fact - the fact not the idea - that our brains are limited by knowledge, by specialities, by particular disciplines, by belonging to a group, a nationality, and all the rest of it, which is basically self-interest, camouflaged, hidden, by all kinds of things - robes, crowns, rituals? Essentially, this limitation comes into being when there is self-interest. That is so obvious. When I am concerned with my own happiness, with my own fulfilment, with my own success, that very self-interest limits the quality of the brain and the energy of the brain - not, as we explained, that the speaker is a specialist in brains though he has talked to several professional people about it. That brain, for millions of years, has evolved in time, death, and thought. Evolution means, does it not, a whole series of time events? To put all the religious rituals together needs time. So the brain has been conditioned, limited by its own volition, seeking its own security, keeping to its own backyard, saying, `I believe', `I don't believe', `I agree', `I don't agree', `This is my opinion', `This is my judgement' - self-interest. Whether it is in the hierarchy of religion, or among the various noted politicians, or the man who seeks power through money, or the professor with his tremendous scholastic knowledge, or the gurus, all of whom are talking about goodness, peace, and all the rest of it, it is part of self-interest. Face all this. So our brain has become very, very, very small - not in its shape or its size, but we have reduced the quality of it which has immense capacity. Immense. Technologically, it has improved, and it also has immense capacity to go inwardly very, very, very deeply, but self-interest limits it. To discover for oneself where self-interest is hidden, is very subtle. It may hide behind an illusion, in neuroticism, in make-believe, in some family name. Uncover every stone, every blade of grass to find out. Either you take time to find out, which again becomes a bondage, or you see the thing, grasp it, have an insight into it instantly. When you have a complete insight it covers the whole field. So the questioner says, how can the brain, which is conditioned, grasp the unlimited, which is beauty, love and truth? What is the ground of compassion and intelligence, and can it come upon us -upon each one of us? Are you inviting compassion? Are you inviting intelligence? Are you inviting beauty, love and truth? Are you trying to grasp it? I am asking you. Are you trying to grasp what is the quality of intelligence, compassion, the immense sense of beauty, the perfume of love and that truth which has no path to it? Is that what you are grasping - wanting to find out the ground upon which it dwells? Can the limited brain grasp this? You cannot possibly grasp it, hold it, though you do all kinds of meditation, fast, torture yourself, become terribly austere, having one cloth, or one robe. The rich cannot come to the truth, neither can the poor, nor the people who have taken a vow of celibacy, of silence, of austerity. All that is determined by thought, put together sequentially by thought; it is all the cultivation of deliberate thought, of deliberate intent. As a person said to the speaker, `Give me twelve years and I'll make you see God.' So, as the brain is limited, do whatever you will, sit cross-legged, lotus posture, go off into a trance, meditate, stand on your head, or on one leg - whatever you do, you will never come upon it. Compassion doesn't come to it. Therefore one must understand what love is. Love is not sensation. Love is not pleasure, desire, fulfilment. Love is not jealousy, hatred. Love has sympathy, generosity and tact, but these qualities are not love. To understand that, to come to that, requires a great sense and appreciation of beauty. Not the beauty of a woman or of a man, or a cinema star. Beauty is not in the mountain, in the skies, in the valleys, or in the flowing river. Beauty exists only where there is love. And beauty, love is compassion. There is no ground for compassion; it doesn't stay at your convenience. That beauty, love, truth is the highest form of intelligence. When there is that intelligence there is action, clarity, a tremendous sense of dignity. It is something unimaginable. And that which is not to be imagined, or the unlimited, cannot be put into words. It can be described; philosophers have described it, but the philosophers who have described it are not that which they have described. So to come upon this great sense, there must be the absence of the me, the ego, egocentric activity, the becoming. There must be a great silence in one. Silence means emptiness of everything. In that there is vast space. Where there is vast space there is immense energy, not self-interested energy - unlimited energy. SAANEN 1ST PUBLIC QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 23RD JULY 1985 We are a bit early! I have been told there are so many people who are sad at leaving, ending Saanen. If one is sad it is about time that we left! And as has been announced we are leaving. This is the last session at Saanen. There are several questions that have been put, you can't possibly expect all those questions to be answered, there are too many. Probably it would take several days to answer them, and I don't think we will stand several days more. And the speaker has not seen these questions but they have been very carefully chosen. Before going into these questions which you have put, may I put you some questions? May I? Are you quite sure? Why do you come here? That is a good question. What is the reason d'etre, or the cause of your coming? We are asking the question. Is it curiosity? Is it the reputation the man, the speaker has built for the last eighty years? Is it the beauty of this valley? The marvellous mountains, the flowing river and the great shadows and lovely hillside, or the telesiege? What has brought us here? If it is serious, that is, we are concerned with our daily life, the way we are living it, the problems that we have, probably of every kind, old age, death, sex - you know the whole invasion of problems our brain is so used to. Does one expect, if one may ask seriously, for someone to tell how to live, how to examine, what to do, is that the reason you are here? Or is it when one wants to see what one is actually as we are sitting here, and examine that very closely and see if we can go beyond that, is that the reason? So as you cannot possibly answer all those questions, one asks -I am asking you, the speaker is asking you, what is it all about? You understand? The speaker has been in this valley for twenty eight years and the thing has been going on in this Saanen for twenty five years. A great deal of time, of our life. And, if one may ask the question of you, what at the end of it all, what remains, what is the content of our life? Is there any breaking of the pattern? Or the pattern or mould is being repeated over and over and over again? You understand my question? The constant concentrated habits that one has, they seem so difficult to break. The habit of thought, habit of one's everyday life. When we look at all that after twenty eight years, or twenty five years, is there a breaking of that pattern in which we live? Or just carry on day after day, adding a little more, taking away a little more, and at the end of one's existence regret, and feel guilty that one has not lived differently? Is this the process that we are going through? I am asking the question. Here are all the questions you have put to the speaker! What is it all about? Our life. All the things that are happening around us, the appalling things that are happening in Afghanistan and so on, is it all just out there, far away from this lovely land and so on? Where are we as individuals in this whole pattern of existence? Right? I am asking you. What is the residue that remains in the sieve? You know what a sieve is? When you wash vegetables or rice, other things. So what remains in us? So I have stopped asking questions. Are we aware what is happening to us in our daily thought, or is one aware of every emotion, reaction, response, habits? Or is it just flowing by like a river? 1st QUESTION:Which would you like to answer first of these questions? Question: What do you mean by creation? Question: Various teachers, gurus, say that essentially they are giving the same teaching as you. What do you say? You understand these questions? Question: What is guilt? One is desperate because the actions that caused the guilt can never be eradicated. Right? I can go on reading these questions. Which would you like to be answered first? The gurus? What is creation? Oh, I forgot. Guilt? Can we start with the various teachers? Right? Various teachers, gurus, say that essentially they are giving the same teaching as you. What do you say? Various teachers, gurus, say that essentially they are giving the same teaching as you. How do you respond to the question, to that statement? Right? I wonder why they compare themselves with the speaker. I wonder - one questions why they should even consider that what the speaker is saying is what we are also saying. Why do they say these things? I know this is a fact, both in India, Europe and in America, various trump of gurus, various groups, say, "Yes, we are also going to the same thing, along the same river as you are doing." This has been stated to me, to the speaker personally and we have discussed this matter with these gurus, with these local, or foreign - what do you call them? - leaders. We have gone into this question. First of all, why do they compare what they are saying with K? Why do they maintain that? You understand? What is the intention behind it? Is it to ride the same band wagon? - you understand? Is it because they think they may not be "quite quite' but by comparing themselves with K they might become "quite quite'? So in talking over with them, with some of them, we went into it. First of all I doubt what they are saying and I doubt the speaker's own experiences. There is a doubt, disbelief, not saying, "Yes, quite right, we are in the same boat." So if we could approach this question with doubt, with a certain sense of scepticism on both sides, those who say we are along the same - rowing the same boat on the same river, perhaps they are far ahead and the speaker is far behind but it is still the same river. So in speaking with them - as doubt, question, demand, and as you push further and further and further, deeper and deeper, they come to an end, and at the end of it, the speaker has heard many of them, "What you say is perfect, is the truth. You embody truth" and all that business. So they say, etc. And they salute and go away saying, "We have to deal with ordinary people so this is only for the elite." I said, "Double nonsense!" You understand? So why do we at all compare, not only between various - my guru is better than your guru - right? Why can't we look at things as they are? Questioning, doubting, asking, demanding, exploring -right? Never saying our side is better than your side, or this side is better than that side, or that we are all doing the same thing. The other day I heard, "What you are speaking so am I speaking, what is the difference?" I said, "None at all." We use the same language, English or French, a little bit of Italian, we use the same language, but the content, the depth that lies behind the word may be quite different. We are so easily satisfied with explanations, with descriptions, with a sense of, you know, all the eclat, all the glory, all the paraphernalia, and we are impressed by all that. Our brains don't work very simply. That is one of my questions I would like to ask you. Have you ever watched, seen how your brain works? Watched as an outsider watching your brain in action? You understand? Have you ever done it? Or the brain is carrying on in its old habits, beliefs, dogmas, rituals, or business and so on, just mechanically carrying on. If I may ask, is your brain like that? Silence! Have you ever watched one thought chasing another thought, a series of associations, a series of memories, holding on to your own experience? The other day, in America, a person whom we have known for some time said that that person lived according to his experience, his experience has told him-right? His experience was real, actual, very deep, and that experience is all important to him. [Noise of aeroplane] We can't compete with that! And we said why don't you doubt your experience, it may not be actual? It may be actual, it may be imaginary, it may be romantic, all the sentimentality and all the rest of it, why don't you doubt that very thing that you say,"My experience tells me'? - inwardly. And one has not seen that person again - do you understand? So is it not necessary to be aware of all these things: why they compare, why they say we are all in the same boat. We may be in the same boat, probably we are, all of us. But why assume we are in the same boat with you? You understand? Is it the desire to - oh, I don't know. You know all about it don't you? So can we not accept any guru, any leader, including especially the speaker? Never accept anything psychologically except that we have watched ourselves in our relationship, we have watched our speech, the voice, the tone of the voice, the words we use, all that. Can one be all day, or some time of the day, be aware of all that? And then perhaps you don't need any guru, any leader, any book, including that of the speaker. Then there is something totally different taking place when one is really attentive - right? 2nd QUESTION: Guilt. I don't have to read the question. It is all rather mixed up here. Why do we feel guilty? You know what that word means. Culpability. Culpa. Why do we feel guilty? Many people do. It tortures their life. Then it becomes an enormous problem and that is the background of guilt with many, many people. Guilt in not believing, guilt in not being the rest of the group, guilt, you know the feeling of guilt, not the word, the feeling behind that word that we have done something wrong and feel guilty about remorse, anxious, and therefore frightened, uncertain. And this guilt is a very distorting factor in our life. This is obvious. So why do we have this feeling? [Noise of train] At Brockwood there are no trains! No aeroplanes. We can talk quietly together. But you will miss these mountains. Probably that is why you are sad. We are asking why do we have this feeling of remorse? Is it that we have not done something which is correct? Which is not pragmatic? Which is not put together by environment against which we have to go? The guilt of a man who feels, or a woman who feels, he hasn't supported the war of his own country. You know the various forms of guilt and the causes of it. We are asking: why does this feeling exist? Is it because we are not responsible -you understand? We are not responsible, demanding the excellence of ourselves? You are following my... Now, just a minute, is it, the speaker is asking, is it that we are lazy, indolent, inattentive and therefore slightly irresponsible? And facing that irresponsibility we feel guilty? I have followed somebody, suppose I have followed somebody, my guru, who has indulged in all kinds of things, sex and so on, and I too have, as he does, but he changes his mind, he has become old and he says, "No more." and his disciples say, "No more." You understand? One has done all these things to follow that guru and the guru has got rather old and says, "No more" and I feel by Jove I shouldn't have done this, I have been wrong. You follow? The whole issue of guilt. Why and how do we deal with it? That is more important. How do we know, or feel, have the remorse, of being not what we are? And therefore doing things which cause us damage, and therefore [noise of aeroplane] - the mountains echo more noise, they create more noise - So let us find out how to deal with it. Let's find out what to do about it, shall we? Not investigate the causes of it, we know. I haven't done something which is not proper, which is not correct, which is not true and I realize later the action which has produced that is rather regrettable, unfortunate, causing unhappiness to others and I feel guilty. And various forms of the same thing having different causes - right? So what shall we do when we have guilt and how to deal with it - right? How would you deal with it? What is your approach to it? You understand my question? How do you come near the problem? Is it that you want it resolved, that you want it wiped away so that your brain is no longer caught in that? So how do you approach it? With the desire to resolve it? You understand? To be free of guilt? How do you come to it? That is very important, isn't it? How you approach a problem. If you have a direction for that problem, it must be solved that way, or that way, as long as there is a direction - you follow? Or a motive, then that motive or direction directs the issue. You understand? So do we approach a problem like this guilt without any motive? You understand my question? Or always approach any problem with a motive? Right? I wonder are we meeting this thing together? Is it possible to approach a problem without any sense of the background knowledge which is motive and look at as though for the first time? Can we do that? You understand? So there are two things involved: how you approach and what is a problem. Right? You have problems, don't you, many, many of them, why? Not only problems of money, sex [noise of aeroplane] - it is a lovely morning, clear blue sky without a cloud and they are having fun! What is a problem? Not that we are condemning the problem or saying it must be solved this way or that way, we are questioning the problem itself, the word, and the content of that word, an issue, something which you have to answer, whether it is a business problem, family problem, sexual problem, spiritual problem - sorry, quotes - "spiritual' problem, problems of whom to follow, leader, political - it is a problem. Why do we have problems? [Noise of aeroplanes] - could we ask them to go somewhere else? All right. So first let's examine the word problem. According to the dictionary, a problem means something thrown at you - right? Something propelled against you - right? A challenge, a thing that you have to answer - right? The meaning of that word is something thrown at you. Right? And we call that a problem. Why does our brain have problems? You understand my question? May we go into it a little bit? Right? Please don't accept anything the speaker says, anything. But let's examine it together. Let us explore into this question, the problem. From childhood when you are first [noise of aeroplane] - can we all shout at him to buzz off?! - from childhood, when you sent a girl or a boy to school, he has to learn how to read and write -right? Read, write and the child has never read or written, so writing, reading becomes a problem to him - right? And as he grows up his brain has been trained to problems - right? Obviously. School, I have to learn mathematics, chemistry, biology, science, physics, then whole college, high school, college, university, the whole process of that, learning all that is a problem and so the brain is conditioned in problems - right? This is a fact. My wife becomes a problem, to her I become a problem, business, God, everything is a problem. How to live, what to do, etc, etc, and so on and so on. Our brain, your brain is conditioned, educated to live with problems. This is a fact, not an invention by the speaker -right? It is so. So our whole life, living, becomes a problem. Right? So can we look at this as a fact, not as an idea, or a theory, but as a fact and see what we can do. Whether the brain can be free to solve problems, not approach it with a mind that is already crowded with problems. You understand my question? No? I have been to school. I have been to a school, there I am not interested in anything the teacher is saying. I am looking out of the window, enjoying myself, he bangs me on the head. And I come to. And he said, "Write". He holds my hand, guides it and I say, "Good Lord, I must learn" - you follow? - it becomes a problem to me - right? And I have to learn not only reading, writing, mathematics, geography, history, politics, you know, so my whole education - I am not against education but I am pointing out - my whole education becomes a tremendous problem. And if I can pass a Ph. D, become somebody, it is still a problem. So the brain from childhood is conditioned to live with problems - right? Now, our question is: is it possible to be free of problems and then attack problems - you understand? There are problems. But I cannot resolve them unless the brain is free. If it is not free, in the solution of one problem other problems are created, like in politics. I don't know if you are aware of it. The poor chaps solve one problem and there are a dozen problems involved in it. And they can't deal with a dozen problems and they move away from that and tackle something else and keep on with this - right? So the speaker is asking: can we be free of problems first, not uncondition the problem - uncondition the brain which has been educated to live with problems - right? Is it clear? At last. Now let's proceed. Is it possible? [Tape turns over] Answer me. Is it possible to be free and then tackle problems. [Noise of aeroplanes] Good Lord what a noisy place this is! How do you answer that question? Do you say it is possible? Or do you say, no it is impossible? When you say it is possible or impossible you have already blocked yourself. Right? You have already closed the doors. You have prevented yourself from investigating, going into the question. Right? So we are saying to free the brain from its educated world of problems, it is conditioned, can that brain be unconditioned? First I must understand the question, what the question involves. Investigate that. Then come to the point can it be free from its conditioning - you understand? What do you do? Or not do? Don't go to sleep please. What do you do, or not do? [Noise of train] That is, how do you listen to the noise of that train, the rattling, how do you listen to it? It is there. How do you listen to it? Do you resist it? Or, I won't tell you further. Do you resist it? Or do you say, "It is part of life, let it flow." You understand? This noise is going on, the rattle, the vulgarity, all the music, so-called music, it is pouring - right? Do you resist all that? Or let it flow, flow away - you understand? So here is a question: is it possible to free the brain from the condition of this education which has brought about a state in which the brain is conditioned, and to be free of that conditioning? May I go into it - right? I am going into it, the speaker is going into it not to convince you of anything, just to show. You pass by a window and you look at the window, the shop, look at all the dresses and all the things that are in it, and you go away from it and look at another shop. You are window shopping. You are not to do anything. Just find out what he is saying, listen to what he is saying. Not accepting or denying, just look, listen. The brain is conditioned to this whole culture of problems, it is conditioned to that. That is a nice word - culture of problems. And is the conditioned brain different from the observer? You understand my question? Is the brain, my brain different from me who is analysing, looking, tearing, examining, accepting, not accepting, is that observer - right? - the person who says, "I am looking at it", is he different from the brain? You understand my question? It is a very simple question, don't complicate it. Is anger, greed, envy, different from me? Or I am anger. Anger is me. Greed is me. The quality is me. There is no difference. But culture, education, has made us separate the two - right? There is envy. I am different from it, I must control it, or indulge in it - right? And thereby there is conflict. I don't know if you are following all this? Or is violence me? Violence is not something different from me, me is violent. Do you see this? Do we see this? Once one realizes this fact there is no difference from the quality of me, then there is a totally different movement taking place - right? There is no conflict. You understand? There is no conflict. As long as there is separation there is conflict in me - right? Now I realize this, that I am the quality. I am violence. I, the me, is greedy, envious, jealous and all the rest of it. So I have abolished altogether this division in me. I am that. Not I am the Supreme, or Sanskrit - I won't go into it. I am that quality. So can I, can my brain remain with that fact, stay with that fact? You understand my question? Can I stay, can my brain, which is so active, so alive, thinking, watching, listening, trying, effort, can that brain stay with the fact that I am that? You understand? Stay with it, not run away, not try to control, because the moment you control there is a controller and the controlled, therefore it becomes effort - right? Please I am very simple. If you really grasp this truth, this fact, you eliminate altogether effort. Effort means contradiction. Effort means I am different from that - you know, all that business. So once you see the actual fact, not the idea but the actuality that you are your quality, your anger, your envy, your jealousy, your hate, your uncertainty, your confusion, you are that. Not verbally acknowledge, or verbally agree, then we don't meet each other. But if you actually see this fact and stay with it, can you? When you stay with it, what is implied in that? Attention - right? No movement away from it - right? Just stay with it. Not, if you have acute pain you can't stay with it, but it you psychologically stay with it, inwardly say, yes, it is so. That means no movement - right? I wonder if you follow. No movement away from the fact. So when there is no movement away from the fact the essence is no conflict. Then you have broken the pattern of the brain - right? Because it says, "I must do something. What is the right thing to do? Who will tell me the right thing to do" - you follow? "I must go to a psychiatrist" - you know all that stuff that takes place. But when once you hold the jewel [noise of train] - oh! - it is like holding a jewel, marvellously put together, carved and you are holding it, you are looking at it, seeing all the inside, outside, how it is put together, the platinum, the gold, the diamonds, all that, you watch it, because you are the jewel, you are the centre of all this, most intricate, subtle jewel of which you are. The moment one sees that fact the whole thing is different. So guilt - sorry I have gone away from it. We had to. Guilt. It is not a problem, you understand, now. It is a fact. It is not a something to be resolved, something to be got over. You have done something, which is a fact, and you feel guilty, that is a fact, and you stay with it. Like a jewel you stay with it, a rather unpleasant jewel, but it is still a jewel. So you stay with it. When you stay with it, it begins to - please listen - it begins to flower and wither away. You understand Sir? Like a flower, if you keep on pulling, see if the roots are working properly, the flower will never bloom, but once you see the fact, which is the seed and then stay with it, then it shows itself fully. All the implications of guilt, all the implications of its subtlety, where it hides, it is like a flower blooming. And if you let it bloom, not act, say, "I must do, not do" then it begins to wither away and die. You understand? Please understand this. With every issue you can do that. About God, about anything. Then you have an insight into all that. That is insight. Not merely remembrance, adding. Is this clear? If you discover it, if it is so, it is something psychologically enormously a factor that frees you from all the past struggles and present struggles, and effort. 3rd QUESTION: What do you mean by creation? Shall we go into that? It is a rather complex problem. I will read the question again. What do you mean by creation? - what the speaker means. I would like to put you that question. A lot of people talk about creation - right? They are all talking about it. The astrophysicists and the philosophers, and the theoretical philosophers - right? God created and so on. This is a very serious question which the ancient Hindus, the ancient Hebrews have put this question, not merely recent scientists. This has been a tremendous problem, an issue that they want to understand. May we go into this? Are you interested in this? What is creation? When you ask that question you must also ask the question, what is invention? Is invention creation? Do you understand? I, in a laboratory, a scientist in a laboratory is experimenting. Right? And he comes upon something new. He patents it. Right? And makes money out of it and all the rest of it. The invention, that is to invent something new, is that creation? Careful please, don't agree or disagree, just look at it. Invention is based on knowledge - right? You are following this? It is based on somebody else's previous experiments, all those experiments are knowledge in the present and you add to it. This is so. The man who invented the jet, without the propeller. First he knew all about the propeller, internal combustion machinery, and the propeller, then that knowledge was not enough. He put aside that knowledge, waited, got an idea from the knowledge - you follow? First he had to have knowledge about the propeller, internal machinery, then a new idea came in, which is the jet - right? I may be putting it incorrectly, or exaggeratedly, but this is so. That is, the theoretical physicist, or scientist of every kind, first have knowledge, even minute knowledge - right? - or a great deal of knowledge, from that a new inspiration comes. And that inspiration is an invention. So we are adding all the time - right? And is that creation? - which is based on knowledge, and the consequences of knowledge - you understand? Is that creation? Or creation has nothing to do with knowledge? You understand my question? Either creation is a series of inventions in the universe, black hole or they discover something new and they are adding, adding to that previous knowledge. And obviously when they look at Mars, Mercury, Venus, Saturn and go beyond, they know what the - what Venus is made of, various gases and so on and so on and so on, but what they have translated as gases that is not Venus. You understand? Come on Sirs. The word Venus is not Venus. The gases made up, which constitutes Venus is not that beauty which you see early in the morning, or late in the evening. Right? So we are asking is invention totally different from creation? Which means creation has nothing whatever to do with knowledge. You are going to find this rather difficult, if you don't mind, if you will kindly, if you are not too tired, if you have still the energy to investigate, we will go into it. We are asking - we know what invention is. Don't accept what the speaker is saying, that would be terrible. It would destroy you. Merely say, yes, yes, yes. It would destroy your brain, as it has been destroyed by others. The speaker has no intention to destroy your brain, or add to the already damaged brain. Right? So he says have scepticism, question, don't accept or deny, just find out. We know what is invention, at least to the speaker it is very clear. That doesn't mean it is clear to you. We are asking what is creation? We have to answer this question in ten minutes. What is creation? Is it related to man's endeavour? Is it related to all his experiences? To the million years of duration of time? Please examine all this. Which means, is it related to war, to killing, to business, to all the memories that man has accumulated, acquired, accumulated, gathered? If it is then it is still part of knowledge - right? Therefore it cannot be creation. Right? So what is creation? Is it related - please listen, listen, don't do anything about it, you can't - is it related to love? That is, love is not hate, jealousy, anxiety, uncertainty, the love of your wife, which is the love of the image that you have built about your wife, or your husband, or girl friend, or the image you have built about your guru for whom you have great devotion, or for the image in a temple, mosque, and churches. So we are asking: is love necessary for creation? Or is love, which is also compassion, is that love compassion, creation? And is creation or love related to death? You understand all these questions? You understand? I am sorry to say do you understand - I withdraw that. Just listen. So is love free from all the human beings that have given specific meaning to that word? Free from all that. Is love related to death? And is love compassion and death? All that is creation? Can there be creation without death? That is ending. Ending all knowledge - Vedanta. You have heard that word I am sure. The word Vedanta means the end of knowledge, not all the theories, commentaries and all that. That is not. But the end of knowledge which is death, which means no time, timeless, which is love. You understand? Sorry, I won't repeat that. Stupid of me to repeat! So love, death. Love means compassion. Love, compassion means supreme intelligence, not the intelligence of books and scholars, experience. That is necessary at a certain level but that intelligence, quintessence of all intelligence, when there is love, compassion. There cannot be compassion and love without death, which is the ending of everything. Then there is creation. That is the universe, not according to the astrophysicists and scientists, but the universe is supreme order. Of course. Sunrise and sunset. Supreme order. And that order can only exist when there is supreme intelligence. And that intelligence cannot exist without compassion and love and death. This is not a process of meditation but deep, profound enquiry. Enquiry with great silence, not I am investigating. Great silence, great space, that which is essentially love and compassion and death, there is that intelligence which is creation. Creation is only - is there when the other two are there, death and love. Everything else is invention. SAANEN 2ND PUBLIC QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 24TH JULY 1985 Shall we go on with our questions? Let's forget for the moment the questions. We will come back to it. What is happening to all of us, living in this world, which is quite terrible? If you have travelled at all you will see the danger of travelling - airport explosions, terrorists, and all the rest of it. When you look at it all, how do you face the world? We may be old, but the coming generation, grandchildren, children and so on, what is going to happen to them? Do you consider that at all? What is the future of the coming generation, of which you are part? How do we educate them, what is the purpose of education? We are all presumably educated, you have been to school, college, university, if you are lucky, or we have been educating ourselves by looking at all these events that are taking place in the world and learning from that. But that learning is very limited, very small, narrow. And if one had children and grandchildren, or great, great grandchildren how do we treat them, what is our response? Aren't we concerned about them at all? I believe there are about 500,000 children who run away from home in America, end up in New York and prostitution and all that - do you understand what it all means? In a country like this, part of the rest of the world, there is no poverty, there are no slums, they are really literally no people starving. There are slums in America, in England, perhaps in Paris too, closer, and all those people in India and Asia, it is quite appalling, degrading. And when we look at ourselves and our future generation to come, what is going to happen to them? That same pattern being repeated? The same callousness? The irresponsibility of being trained in an army to kill thousands and thousands, and be killed? What is our responsibility? Or you don't want to think about all that at all? Or you are only concerned with our own pleasure, with our own problems, with our own self-centred egotistic activity? This is really a very serious question, frightening, agonizing. Either one becomes bitter, angry, or throws up one's hand. And when you look at all this, what is our responsibility? The agony of all that. Do you understand? What do we do? [Noise of aeroplane] Do you have proper schools. What place has knowledge in all this? Whether it be theoretical, physical knowledge, theoretical physicists and so on, what relationship have we to all this? The tortures. Every country has indulged in tortures of other human beings. My mother may be tortured - do you understand? My son, myself - not myself - may be tortured for some information, for some nationalistic, communistic [noise of train] or some democratic reasons. What is going on in Northern Ireland, Beirut and so on, Afghanistan. Do we shed tears? Or not being able to do anything become cynical, bitter and throw up our hands at all this? So we have to consider all these things, not merely our own progress, our own happiness, our own self-centred activities. May we go on with the questions. Maybe that will be more pleasant, less challenging, less demanding on our energies and capacities of the brain. The brain has extraordinary capacity, if you have watched all the progress of the technological world, the amount of energy, in the field of medicine - whether it is right or wrong, that is not our concern - in the field of technology, computers, surgery, eye operation, tremendous advances, incalculable advances. And it is going on and on. In other directions the brain is very limited, and that limitation is being used by the technological world. We are being exploited ruthlessly. There is a whole African tribe that are being deliberately killed through starvation, whole people moved from their country to another part of another country, far away from their own native land. The Communists have done it and they are still doing it, their concentration camps. Not only the concentration camps of tyrannies but also the concentration camps of the gurus - right? You don't mind my saying that? And the concentration camps of all the monks in the world. This is really a tremendous problem. 1st QUESTION: When one understands something must one act on this understanding, or does the understanding act of itself? When one understands something must one act on that understanding, or does the understanding itself act? Right? Question clear? Now what do we mean by - I haven't seen this question, all these questions, I like to come to it spontaneously, naturally - what do we mean by understanding? We use that word so easily. So we must investigate, explore the meaning of that word. We are discussing, exploring together, the speaker is not answering the question. Together we are looking into the question. We are together investigating, digging into the meaning of words first, according to the dictionary, which is a common usage of the language. What do we mean by understanding, to understand something? To understand oneself, to understand how the computer, which is so marvellous, how to work it, understand the whole surgical process - you understand? What do we mean by that word? Is it purely intellectual? I understand. Which is a quick communication between two people, or half a dozen people or a hundred people, it doesn't matter, a quick comprehension of the meaning of the word, quickly translated to the brain, instantly communicated to the brain and the intellect says, "Yes, I understand'. Right? That is, I have a problem, I have reasoned it out, I have come to a conclusion and I understand it. Or I understand how to dismantle a car and so on. That is, is understanding merely an intellectual affair, a theoretical affair about which theory I can talk endlessly, adding more ideas to it and think I am enlarging, growing, understanding. In that understanding is there any emotional quality? Do you understand my question? Is there something that says,"That is not quite, quite, quite, you must add more to it.' That is then, there is the intellect, there is emotion, there is action - right? Emotions exist naturally -one hopes - but either those emotions have become romantic, sentimental and very, very superficial, and feelings must be recognized by the brain, therefore it is part of the brain - right? -part of the sensation of feeling, sensation of imagination, sensation of imagination, of looking at a mountain, and the beauty and the silence and the dignity and the majesty of it and putting it on a canvas, or writing a poem about it. It is still part of the activity of the brain. All that. So is the intellect, which says, "I understand", apart from the rest of it? Or intellect, which is the capacity to discern, to distinguish, to determine and action? Right? And therefore the intellect dominates everything else. I am very clever - I hope I am not but suppose I am very clever, quick, intellectually, that dominates my whole life until I begin to old age, then I believe, then I become a Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, whatever it is. Then I play a game with myself. So we are asking [noise of train] we are asking is understanding a whole movement, not an act of the brain only, act of the intellect only? Do you understand my question? Is -we will now have to examine what is action? Right? What is it that one has to do, act? What determines action? Do you understand my question? What brings about action? What do we mean by action? To act. You understand my question? I won't ask if you understand. I won't ask any more. What do we mean by act? To do. Is that action based on an ideal, or on a theory, or a conclusion, historical conclusion, and on that conclusion, historical, romantic, dialectic, or imaginative, that is, let's put all that into one word -ideological. That is I act on an idea - right? So what is an idea? Why do we have so many ideas? The word idea, not it is right or wrong, but we are investigating into the question of idea. The scientists, the physicist, or the scientific theoretical philosophers, they want ideas, otherwise they feel lost. They want new ideas all the time. So we must examine what do we mean by an idea. I believe, the speaker believes it comes from the original Greek, which means to observe, to see. There is a fact. There is a clock there. It says ten to eleven, and that is a fact. And there are non-facts - right? And the non-facts are totally away from the fact -right? Distance. And so there is the fact and the idea about the fact. So we pursue the idea, not the investigation into the fact. An idea becomes far more important than the fact. The Socialist, the Communists, others, left, right, centre, they have ideas, theories, conclusions, historical, dialectical, Lenin, Stalin, or a philosopher like Adam Smith and American politicians, and they try to fit man into those ideas - right? And to make them fit they torture them, they say "You can't do this, you can't do" - you follow? So to them ideas become far more important than the human which is a fact. So, do we do this? Do we, each one of us, always move away from the fact? You understand? And pursue that fact - that idea and act according to that idea? Which probably has nothing to do with fact - right? So what do we mean by acting? Either you act according to your past memories, experiences, or some future ideological conclusion. The future and the past. So is your action based on the past, or on the future, therefore it is not an act. Right? Are we making this clear? If we act according to certain memories, conclusions, experiences, knowledge, then we are acting from the past. The word act means do. The doing, not according to the past, or according to the future. So the question is - go into this, it is very serious - is there an action which is not based on time? Don't be puzzled. If one grasps the significance, the content, the deep meaning of the past, how the past modified projects itself into the future, and if I act according to the past, it is not action, it is merely memory having come to certain conclusions acts. Or action takes place according to some future concept. So it is always caught in the field of time, in the cycle of time - right? Now we are asking is there an action which is not based on time? Think it out Sirs. Think it out, don't wait for me, for the speaker to explain, think it out. It is a very simple question, but has tremendous meaning behind it. That is, I have always acted according to my tradition. The tradition may be one day old, or five thousand years old. I have always acted according to that tradition. You know what tradition means, tradere, hand over. So my parents, grandparents, parents, a thousand parents, have handed over certain traditions, consequences of their thought, their feeling, gradually seeped through various generations, I am that, part of that. That is my background - a Brahmin, and all the rest of it. And I act according to that. Or I reject all that, say, "How stupid" and look to the future. I must do this, I must not do it, according to Lenin, Stalin, and all the rest of them, I will follow. And I call both these action. And I question is there an action which is not based on these two? Right? An action which is not the process of the time. You have to use, sorry, you have to use your brains. How does one - or what is one to do when you are asked that question? Is there an action which is not caught in the wheel of time? How does one's brain react to that question? Because the brain has been conditioned to that, shaped according to the past, the future. That is, caught in the field of time, in the network of time - right? So the brain withdraws for the moment, is not able to answer it, it says, "It is too much trouble, for goodness sake leave me alone. I am used to this pattern, it has brought its misery, suffering, but also there is the other compensating side to it, carry on. Don't ask these questions. Don't put these question which are so difficult." They are not difficult. The word difficult makes it difficult. So I won't use that word. But I have to find out an action -right? May I go into it? Do you want me to go into it? Action is related to love, not to memory. Memory, remembering, the images, is not love. Sensation upon which, or through which I act. So sensation is not love. Therefore... or what is the relationship of love for action? You follow? Is love memory? We are met together, we have slept together, we have done all kinds of things together, walked up the mountain, down the valley, round the hills, taken telesiege together, companions, quarrels, all the business. And that is called companionship, affection, love, holding hands, all that - right? Most of it is based on sensation, image, and attachment. Without attachment I am lost, I feel terribly lonely. Feeling lonely, I am desperate, either I become bitter and all the rest of it. Is all that love? We went into it. Obviously it is not. So what is the relationship between love and action? Go on Sir. If love is in the field of time, then it is not love. So love is action - I wonder if you get this. There is not love first and action later, or memory and all that. So for the speaker, don't accept it, for the speaker there is no division between the perception, the quality of that love. When there is that quality it is action. It is not an intellectual process of determination, or choice. I won't go into the more complicated. It is an action of immediate perception, action. Now we must go on. Yesterday we only answered three questions and there are many of them. 2nd QUESTION: You have said many times - You have said many things about violence. Would you allow one of your friends to be attacked in front of you? You have said many things about violence. Would you allow one of your friends to be attacked in front of you? It is a good old question. What would you do if your sister was attacked in front of you? Right? It is the same question. What would you do, you? Beat him up? Shoot him? Karate? [Laughter] You know what the meaning of that word karate means? It has been explained to me. No self. No me. Not the military art of defending yourself. So what would you do? Find out Sir. You are there, with your husband, with your girl friend, or your girl friend, you know all that. And somebody comes along and is violent towards your wife, or husband. What would you instinctively do? You would attack, wouldn't you? Naturally. You would hit him. If you knew karate, or some kind of yoga tricks, you would trip him up. So this question is put to me, to the speaker - right? We know the normal reaction of people, violence. If you are violent I am going to be violent. If you are angry with me I am going to be doubly angry with you. If you call me an idiot, and I say you are a greater one than me. And so on and so on. This question is put to me, to the speaker. This has been an old question. Not that the speaker is familiar with it, but it is a new question. I treat all questions as something new. What should I do? Are you waiting for me? Am I violent? If I have lived a violent life all my life - right? -then my response would be naturally violent. But if I have lived as I have without violence, not only physical violence but psychological violence, which is aggression, competition, comparison, imitation, conformity. That is all part of violence. As K has lived that way when my friend, or my sister, or my wife, is attacked - they are all dead anyhow, specially my sisters - so as I have lived I would act. You understand? It depends how I have lived. The art of living, which is the greatest art - not all the paintings, poems, that is part of art. But the greatest art is the art of living. Not according to somebody but to find out for oneself the supreme art. And if I am, if all my life, except once or twice I lost temper, that's all right, I may - one may get irritated because of noise, and all that. But the actual feeling of violence, if one has lived with violence one will act violently. If one has not lived a life which is not violence, he will meet the circumstances as they arise, and his action will depend how he has lived. A simple answer. Right? You are not puzzled over this, are you? No. 3rd QUESTION: What is intelligence? What is intelligence? What do you think is intelligence? The meaning of that word, if you looked into a good dictionary, etymological dictionary, it points out interlegere, to read between the lines. You understand? There is a space between two lines. To read between the lines. That is one meaning. The other meaning is to gather information of every kind and to discern among the various information what is the correct information. That depends on choice, on one's education, on one's way of life and so on. So there is the intelligence, there is the intelligence of the body - right? No? Am I talking to myself? You will join, together? There is the intelligence of the body if you let it alone, not take a lot of wine, you know, alcohol, drugs and live according to taste, sensation, then the body loses its own intelligence. The body is an extraordinary instrument - right? How all the nerves are connected to the brain, how the liver works - you follow? The heart. From the moment it is born until it dies the heart keeps on beating. It is an extraordinary machine -right? It is the product of a million years. Right? Tremendous - if you go into it, if you have seen some of the pictures, photographs, on television where they show the body, it is amazing what nature has done through a million years, or two million years. And we destroy the native intelligence of the body by doing all kinds of extravagant things. Drinking, sex has its place but you know the whole issue of it, ambitious, greedy, fighting, struggling, tremendous strain on the body, heart failure and the by-pass after a great operation, all that affects the brain, the nerves, the organism, therefore the physical, biological instrument is gradually destroyed, gradually withers and loses its vitality, its energy. Right? [Tape over] If one left it naturally alone, not depending on taste, it then looks after itself, you don't have to do a thing, except for a person like K it is ninety years old so it has to be a little careful. So, what is intelligence? There is the body intelligence - right? Imagine how the heart, the liver, the nerves, all the strain, the structure, the brain itself can defend itself. If there is any danger it reacts, certain glands, I don't know all about it but you can see it, how quickly it comes to defend itself. So there is the body intelligence. Let's leave that alone now. Then what is the intelligence that a clever physician, a technocrat, technologist, or the man who puts very, very, very complex machine together, who, thousands of people get together send a rocket to the moon, that requires intelligence, co-operation, see everything is perfect - right? That requires great intelligence and co-operation. [Noise of train] That requires great intelligence, a certain type of intelligence. And that intelligence which is very cunning, calculated, which has put together the whole rituals of the world - the temples, the mosques, the churches, that is also very clever, very intelligent, to control people through their apostolic succession, sorry if you are a Catholic forget what I am saying! All that. There is also in India a Sanskrit word for it, this handing it down, the original. Handing down his benediction, or his apostolic succession, that also demands quite a clever movement - right? That is also very intelligent, to control people, to make them believe in something that may or may not exist and to have faith, and to be baptized. You follow, the whole of it is very clever if you have watched it, very intelligent - which the Communists are doing - right? They have their god, Lenin, and below him Stalin, all the way down to the present gentlemen. So it is the same movement. And all that is also very intelligent, partially. And the scientists, the theoretical physicists, all are very partially intelligent. Right? Then what is a holistic intelligence? You understand? Which is whole, which is not fragmented. I am very intelligent in that direction but in other directions I don't care, I am dull. I am very good at the physical scientists, you know all that. So there is partial intelligence in various phases of life. And we are asking is there an intelligence which is complete - you understand? Which is not partial, which is not fragmented. Right? We are going to find out. Are you going to find out? Or am I going to find out and tell you? Please am I going to answer that question? Or are you going to answer it? Is there an intelligence which is incorruptible, not based on circumstances, pragmatic, self-centred and therefore broken up, fragmented, not whole? Is there an intelligence which is impeccable, which has no holes in it, which covers the whole field of man? Enquire into it. To enquire into it the brain must be completely free of any conclusion - right? Any kind of attachment - right? Any kind of self-centred movement, self-interest. Therefore a brain that is totally free from fear, sorrow and when there is the end of sorrow there is passion behind it. The word sorrow etymologically has a deeper meaning than merely shedding tears and pain and grief and anxiety. Passion is not for something. Passion per se, for itself. I may have passion for a belief - a belief may invoke in me passion. A symbol, a community, a devotion, an imagination. All that is still very limited. So there is first, one has to discover, one has to come upon this passion which is neither lust nor has any motive. You understand? Is there such passion? Or mere sensation, sensation, etc? There is such passion when there is an end to sorrow. When there is an end to sorrow there is love and compassion. And when there is compassion, not for this or that, but compassion, then that compassion has its own supreme quintessence, intelligence. That is neither of time, neither does it belong to any theories, to any technologies, to nobody, that intelligence is not personal or universal, or the words round it. 4th QUESTION: Oh Lord! Is there any benefit to the human being in physical illness? Is there any benefit, reward, profit, benefit to the human being in physical illness? Do you understand? Have I made this question clear? Shall I translate in French? Then I would have to do it in Italian. Listen well. [Translates the question into French and Italian] Is there any benefit to the human being in physical illness, in being ill? Now I put you that question. I am sure most of us have been ill at one time or another. Either mentally ill, that is brain, illness of the brain, which is neurotic, psychopathic and so on, or physical illness, some organ not functioning properly and therefore great illness. You may have cancer, terminal, or going to be operated and so on, it is illness. Now just listen. What is the difference between illness and health? What is health? And what is it to be extraordinarily well? Illness and good health. Right? The question is: is there any profit, benefit from illness, human illness? What do you think? To that question the speaker would say there is - sorry! But how you, when you are ill, how your brain is operating, - right? What are your reactions, responses? The desire when one is ill to avoid pain, taking a pill quickly, or immediately going to a doctor. And say - you know, if you have the money you pay and he tells you what to do and you go back to bed and you get over it. Right? So what - is there a benefit from being ill. [Noise of train] The speaker says there is. It is either purification of the body, when you have fever it burns out certain things, and you take a pill to stop that fever. You Check it and you want to quickly get over it because you may lose the job, you may etc. etc. So your intention is to get as quickly as well as possible - right? That is natural, apparently. Clear? You understand? So if you are not afraid of illness there - illness has quite a different meaning. The speaker, if I may slightly be personal, was paralysed for a month in Kashmir, North India, for various reasons, they overdosed the poor chap with antibiotics, a tremendous lot. So a few days later he was paralysed for a month. I thought that is final. Right? I thought there it is. I was, the speaker wasn't frightened - he said, "Yes, all right, paralysed for the rest of my life." This actually happened. I am not exaggerating. They carried me, washed me and all he rest of it, for a whole month. You know what that means. You don't. Fortunately you don't. So, but if I struggled against it and said, "For God's sake", - you follow? -"What stupid doctors. I am anti biotic, anti antibiotic!' and so on. I am struggling against this illness so it makes it worse and I have learnt nothing from it - right? It hasn't cleansed my body, it hasn't benefitted. But if I play with it - I have, the speaker has. He has been several times very, very ill. I am not going into that. But if one is not afraid to remain with it, to stay with it, not immediately rush to a doctor, to a pill, you may have to take it later but to go at it slowly, patiently, observing what your reactions are, why this craze to be healthy, to have no pain, then you are resisting the whole thing - right? This self-interest may be one of the factors of illness - right? It may be the true reason for illness. Do you understand all this? So illness, physical illness has certain natural profit, benefit and so on. Clear? Right. 5th QUESTION: Why do you differentiate between the brain and the mind? Why do you differentiate between the brain and the mind? I am afraid this has to be the last question. There are several left over but this has to be the last one. First of all what is the brain? Remembering that we are not professionals. We are ordinary people who are not brain specialists, including the speaker, though he has talked to brain specialists, but they go so far - but leave that. The speaker is not, not underlined, a brain specialist. So we are asking each other what is the brain, not the structure of the brain, physical biological structure of the brain, left side, right side, the left side has been used much more than the right side, the right side is the new brain -you follow? - can receive new information and so on. I don't know anything about it. It may be, may not be. But what is this thing that we live with? Which is in operation in our daily life. What is this function of the brain in our daily life, not superior consciousness, lower consciousness, bringing the superior consciousness down to the lower consciousness. You know that game. That is what the gurus play that game. They help you to bring down the higher consciousness to lower consciousness. Or from the lower consciousness through meditation, through following, through doing certain practices, reach the higher consciousness. We are not doing all that kind of thing. We will come to presently what is consciousness, later. You don't mind going into all this? What is the function, daily function of our brain? Your brain, not my brain, your brain, the human brain, whether you live in Switzerland, America, Russia, and so on, or in India, or the Far East, what goes on in our daily life which is the exercise of the brain, exercise of thought, exercise of choice, exercise of decision and action - we are not talking of action as I explained it, cut that out. So wherever we live the activity of the brain plays a great role in our life - right? So what is this brain? We are learning, amateurs. Look at our own brain. Action and reaction - right? Sensation. Conditioned from the past - I am a Hindu, you are a Christian, I am a Buddhist, you are a Muslim and so on. I belong to this country and you belong to that country. Right? I am Catholic, you are a Protestant, or a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or this or that. I believe very strongly. I have come to certain conclusions. I stick to that. My prejudices are strong, opinions are strong and I am attached, I want to fulfil, I want to become something - you follow? That is our daily routine, and much more. The anguish of anxiety, the bitterness of anxiety, the pragmatism of anxiety, the loneliness, tremendously depressing, and escaping from that loneliness through television, books, rituals, temple, church, mosque, - right? God. Conflict. Conflict. Conflict. Right? That is what the brain is caught up in all the time. It is not being exaggerated. We are facing facts. Right? It is so. So the brain is the centre of all this. The nerves, the memories, the nervous responses, like, dislike, I hate, I am hurt - follow? It is the very centre of all our existence, emotionally, imaginatively, art, science - you follow?knowledge -right? So that brain is very, very limited and yet it is extraordinarily capable - right? Technologically incredibly it has done things unimaginable fifty years ago. So all that is the activity of the brain. Conditioned, living within that conditioning, religious, political, business, surgical and so on. It is all very limited. Concerned with oneself. Self-interest, self-serving, in the name of God, in the name of all the rest of it - right? Are we clear? This is obvious. It says "I am materialistic" and also it says, "No, no, I am better than that. There is a soul." To use the Sanskrit, "There is an Atman" and so on and so on. So consciousness is that - right? People have written books and books about consciousness, professionals, non professionals, but we are not professionals, we are dealing with what is. Consciousness is its content - right? What it contains makes consciousness - right? It contains anxiety, belief, faith, bitterness, loneliness, jealousy, hate, violence, you know, all the qualities, the experiences of human beings. That is consciousness. That consciousness is not yours because they said it all. This is the difficulty, where you will find it difficult. Every human being on this earth whether they are the most poorest, ignorant, degraded, and the mostly highly sophisticated, educated, have these problems. They may put on robes and crowns and all the circus, but remove all that, they are like you and me. Conflict, annoyance -right? So we share the consciousness of every human being in the world. I know you won't accept it, but it doesn't matter, this is a fact, because you suffer and that villager in India which lives on one meal a day, two clothes, he also suffers, not in the way you suffer, but it is also not the way he suffers, but it is still suffering. Right? It is still suffering. Your memories may be different from the other but it is still memory. Your experience may be different from another but it is still experience. So your consciousness is not yours. It is the consciousness of the entire humanity psychologically. You may be tall, you may be fair, I may be black, I may be purple, but still that consciousness is common to all of us - right? - psychologically. So you are the entire humanity. Not Swiss and all that nonsense. You are the entire humanity. You know what that means? If you accept it as an idea then you are away, you move away from the fact, from the truth of it, from the reality, the substance of it. When there is that reality, truth, that you are the rest of mankind, you are the rest of mankind - You understand? - then the whole movement of life changes. You will not kill another. Then you are killing yourself. There was an American - oh, I have forgotten - a General at war. He was going to war and he faces the enemy. And he says, he reports to the boss, "We have met the enemy. We are the enemy." You understand? We have met the enemy across the fields but we are the enemy, the enemy is us. So when there is this truth that you are the entire humanity -sleep with it, go into it, feel your way into it, don't deny it or accept it, but as the river flows go into it. You will see what deep transformation takes place, which is not intellectual, nor imaginative, nor sentimental, romantic. In that sense there is tremendous sense of compassion, love. And when there is that you act according to that supreme intelligence. [Noise of train] SAANEN 3RD PUBLIC QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 25TH JULY 1985 There are too many questions to answer, all of them, but we have chosen - some of the questions have been chosen. The speaker has not seen them. Before we go into those questions may I comment on something? People have been talking a great deal about the art, about what is art. I believe the root meaning of that word is to put everything in its proper place. Can we talk a little bit about that first? What do you think is the greatest art, the supreme art? Is it the art of listening, the art of seeing, observing, perceiving and so on, and the art of learning? The art of hearing, the art of seeing, the art of learning. And what do we mean by seeing, observing, perceiving? I am asking. Please together we are investigating into these questions, not that the speaker is talking to himself. We are talking over together these questions, these issues that are confronting almost everywhere you go. [Noise of aeroplane] We will have to wait. So let us begin with the art of hearing. We not only hear with the ears, words conveyed, vibrated and so on to the brain, and surely it is much more than that. The art of hearing something. Like a child who listens to a very good story, he is consumed by the story, he is completely involved with the hero, or the heroine, he is excited, he is listening. Do we ever listen [noise of aeroplane] - we can't do anything I'm afraid - do we ever listen to anybody? Do you listen to your wife or husband, or your girl friend, really listen to what they are conveying, trying to say something? Or do we translate what is being said into our own terminology, compare it with what we already know, judging, evaluating, agreeing, disagreeing, the whole movement that goes on when you listen to another? Is that listening? The speaker is talking now, unfortunately, and are we listening, actually paying attention, to the words, to the meaning of words, to the content of words, not translating, comparing judging, agreeing, disagreeing, just listening? Are we doing that now? And isn't that one of the most important things, how, in what manner we listen to another? The other may be wearing too strong a perfume and you are repelled by it, or you like it, and this like and dislike of a perfume, or other factors, may prevent one from listening, listening to what the other person has to say. If you have gone into this question rather deeply you will find it is one of the most difficult things to listen to another, completely. Are we doing it now? Or we are fidgety and so on? So there is an art to listening - right? And there is an art to learn - no the art of seeing, the art of hearing: the art of seeing, seeing things as they are. When you look at a tree, do you translate it immediately into words and say, "Tree"? Or do you look at it, perceive it, see the shape of it, see the beauty of the light on a leaf, see the quality of a tree. It is not man-made fortunately, it is there. So do we see ourselves as we are, without condemnation, without judgement, evaluation and so on, just to see what we are, our reactions and responses, our prejudices, opinions, just to see them, that we indulge ourselves in opinions. Not to do anything about it but just to observe it - right? Can we do it? So there is an art of seeing things as they are, without naming, without being caught in the network of words, the whole operation of thinking interfering with perception. That's a great art. And also there is an art of learning. Isn't there? And what do we mean by learning? Generally it is understood that learning means memorizing, accumulating, storing up to use what you have stored up skilfully or not. That is generally called learning, memorizing. School, college, university, or some technological subject, or learning a language, reading, writing, communicating and so on. The modern computers can do all that better than we can. They are extraordinarily rapid. Right? So what is the difference between us and the computer? I am asking you. That's learning, being programmed. [Noise of train] We have also been programmed in various ways: tradition, so-called culture, knowledge and so on. We have also been programmed to be Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Tibetan and all the rest of it, Communist and so on. Is learning that's all? - just memorizing, repeating, is that learning? We are questioning. We are not saying that is not. It is necessary to learn how to drive a car. It is necessary to learn a language, if you are interested in languages and so on. And we are asking is all that learning? Or is learning something much more? Are we together in this? Don't just look at me, please - the person is not very interesting. We are asking something, that is: is learning merely memorizing? And if that is all then the computer can do better than us. And isn't learning something much more? Learning means constantly learning, not accumulating, not gathering in what one has seen, what one has observed, heard, learnt and storing it up. Learning means, to the speaker, a constant observation, listening, moving, never taking a stand, never taking a position, never going back to memory and let memory act - right? That is a great art. And the art of discipline. That word means to learn. It comes from the root disciple, one who learns from someone else. Not necessarily from the teacher, from the guru, they are generally rather stupid. But to discipline oneself according to a pattern, like a soldier, like a monk, like a person who wants to be very austere, disciplines his body - you understand? The whole process of control, direction, obedience, subservience and train yourself for that. That is generally understood to be discipline. To me discipline, to the speaker is a terrible thing. Because if you know how to - if there is acute hearing, not only by the ear, but also deeply listening to yourself, to everything that is happening around you, to listen to the birds, to the river to the forest, to the mountain, you follow, listening. And observing the minutest insect on the floor, if you can see it, if you have got good eyes. And learning. All that constitutes a form of living which in itself becomes the discipline, not that there is a person who disciplines himself - you understand? - but a constant movement. This is the art of living, in which there is no conflict whatsoever. So that where there is conflict, that conflict numbs the brain, destroys the brain. By this great art of living it is free, and in that freedom you don't need discipline, there is constantly movement - right? I will go back to the questions. Phew! It is pretty hot here! We have had most marvellous days, three weeks of it, lovely mornings, beautiful evenings, long shadows and the deep blue valleys and the clear blue sky and the snow. We have had a marvellous three weeks. The speaker has been here for twenty eight years. A whole summer has never been like this. So the mountains, the valleys, the trees and the river, tell us goodbye. Can we go on with our questions? 1st QUESTION: I see that thought is responsible for my confusion. Yet in going into it more thoughtfully - more - going into it more thought is - more thought is generated and there is no end to it. Please comment. I see thought - that thought is responsible for my confusion. And yet in going into it more thought is generated and there is no end to it. Please comment on this. Thought is associated with other thoughts. Right? There is no single thought. It is a series of movements which we call thinking -right? I think about my shoes, then how to keep them clean. I polish them, which I do. I look after things and so on. So thought by itself cannot exist - right? By itself, without all the associations in connection with that one thought. And thought is a movement on which we live. It is the very life of us, thinking - right? It is so obvious. You couldn't be there and the speaker couldn't be here if we hadn't thought about it. We thought about it because there have been associations previous, reputation, books and all the 'bla' and you come and I come, the speaker comes. So there is no single thought by itself. This is important to uncover, this. It's always in relation to something else. And in pursuing one thought other thoughts arise. The speaker is polishing his shoes and looks out of the window and he sees those mountains and he is off! And he has to come back and polish his shoes. So that goes on all the time, right? I want to concentrate on something and the thought shoots off in another direction. I pull it back and try to concentrate. This goes on all the time from childhood until we die. And the more I think about thought, the more thought there is. You understand? I shouldn't think along those lines, I must think rightly, is there right thinking, is there wrong thinking, is there purposeful thinking, what is the purpose of my life, and so on. The whole process of thinking begins. And there is no end to it. It has done the most extraordinary things. Technologically it has done the most appalling things, terrifying things. It has built all the rituals of every religion, and it has tortured human beings - right? It has expelled people from one part of the world to another, and so on and so on. Thought, whether Eastern or Western thinking, is still thinking. It is not Eastern thinking and Western thinking, two separate things. Because thought is the thread. Right? We are together. So the question is: is there an end to thought? Not your way of thinking, or my way of thinking, or saying we are all thinking together, we are all moving in the same direction. So we are asking whether thought can ever stop. Which is, is there an end to time? Which is thinking is the result of knowledge, memory. To acquire knowledge I need time, one needs time. Even the computer which is so extraordinary, the modern computer, you have to give it just a split second before it trots, gallops out what it wants to say. So thought is time. Right? So when we are asking whether thought can ever end, we are also asking at the same time whether there is a stop to time? It is rather an interesting question if you go into it. That is, the movement of time. Time, what does that mean to us? Not only psychologically but outwardly, sunset, sunrise, learning a language and so on and so on. You need time to go from here to there. Even the most fastest train needs time to get here, there, or aeroplane and so on. So as long - please follow this - as long as there is a distance between [noise of aeroplane] - as long as there is a distance between 'what is' and 'what might be', 'what I am', 'what I will be', that is a distance. It may be a very short distance, or centuries of distance. That distance can only be covered by time. So time implies evolution - right? You plant the seed in the earth, it takes a whole season to mature, grow, or a thousand years to become a tree and be full - right? Everything that grows, becomes, needs time - right? Everything. So time and thought, they are not two separate movements. They are one solid movement. [Noise of aeroplane] And we are asking whether thought and time have an end, a stop? You understand? - I said I wouldn't say it, I won't say it. How will you find out? This has been one of the problems confronting man from the beginning of man - right? He has asked this question. Can thought, time come to an end? Because he has asked it, in this movement of time, it is a circle - right? Time is a bondage. The hope, I hope, that involves time. So man has asked this question. Not if there is timelessness but rather if there is an end to time. You understand the difference? Right? [Noise of child crying] Shall we cry together? So this is really a very serious question. [Noise of child crying] - poor mother! We are not enquiring into the timeless. We are enquiring whether time has a stop, which is thought. Now how will you discover that? Through analysis? Through so-called intuition? That word intuition may be most dangerous, it may be my desire. [Noise of aeroplane] We were saying that word intuition may be the most dangerous word, that word has been used so much. [Noise of aeroplane] There are so many valleys in Switzerland, why this one specially?! The speaker once saw in California ten aeroplanes. The sun had set. Ten aeroplanes coming over the hills, with their exhaust, whatever they call it, I have forgotten the name of it for the moment, lit by the setting sun. It was the most beautiful sight. The whole sky was lit up. There wasn't noise, they were just coming over the mountain. We were saying that the word intuition is rather a risky word because it may be our hidden desire, it may be our unconscious, deeply rooted motive of which we are not aware, it may be the prompting of our own tendency, our own idiosyncrasy, it may be our own particular accumulation of knowledge. So we are asking if you put all that aside, has time a stop? And we asked, how will you find out? You, not the speaker or anybody else, because what others say has no importance. You may like the sound of the word, you may like the person, or you may say, "Well a whole group of us are together" - all that is rather infantile. But when you put this question to yourself, in what manner do you come to find out? So we have to enquire very, very deeply into the nature of time, which we did during the last few talks. And also we went very deeply into the nature of thinking. So can all that come to an end? Or is it a gradual process? You understand? If it is a gradual process, the very gradualness is time. So it cannot be gradual -right? It cannot be eventually. It cannot be next second either. You understand? It cannot be next weekend or tomorrow, or a few minutes later. All that allows time. If one really grasps all that, deeply comprehends the nature of thought, the nature of time, discipline, the art of living and so on, to stay with it quietly, not cover it up by all kinds of movements, but stay with it, then [Noise of aeroplane] - then there is a glimpse of it, an insight into it, which is not related to memory, nothing. Right? Find out! The speaker can easily say, yes there is. That would be too childish. But to - for the brain to understand its own movement [Noise of aeroplane] -unless we experiment, you understand? - not just say yes, yes, or agree, unless we actually investigate, experiment, push it, go into it deeply, unless you do that you can't come upon a strange sense of timelessness. Right. [Noise of aeroplane] I hope they will go to lunch! 2nd QUESTION: The second question says: Please speak further on time and death. We have talked a great deal about time, thought, and what relationship has time to death. What relationship has thought, thinking, with this extraordinary thing called death? If one is frightened of death then one will never see the dignity, the beauty and the depth of death. If you are frightened. Fear is caused by thought and time. We have been into that very carefully. Fear doesn't exist by itself. Fear exists where there is a demand for security, not only biological, physical security but much more. Psychologically human beings insist, demand, require, apparently to be psychologically secure. [Noise of child crying] One noise stops the other begins! So we have not only to enquire into security, that is being safe, protected. When there is security one is clear. Security means protection - right? I have to protect that which gives me security, whether it is security of position, security of power, security of a great many possessions - right? [Tape turns over] To have plenty -millions in the bank gives you great sense of security. To possess a good chalet gives you security. Security also implies having a companion who will stand by you - right - who will help you, who will comfort you, who will give you what you want and what she wants. So in the family we seek security. In the community we seek it. In the nation, in the tribalism we seek it and that very tribalism, nationalism prevents that security because there is war, one tribe killing another tribe, one group destroying another group. So physically it's becoming more and more difficult to be secure. The terrorists might come into this tent and blow all up. I would ask them, "Wait a minute, let's finish it, do it outside." So we not only need physical security but also psychological security. Psychological security is the greatest demand, not only the physical, right? So we are asking: is there psychological security at all? Please ask yourself this really very, very serious question: is there inwardly, subjectively, inside the skin as it were, psychologically is there security at all? I can rely on you as an audience and you can rely on me as the speaker. If the speaker sought security in you and he has nobody to talk to, then he feels terribly insecure. So is there psychological security at all? When there - or if there is no psychological security - right - then what is physical security, right? The world is changing constantly from day to day, it is in tremendous flux - right? It is so obvious. And physically also one needs a little security to sit here, talk together, but that is gradually being restricted - right? You cannot do this in Communist countries. [Noise of train] So if one recognizes the fact that psychologically there is no security - right? That is the truth, there is no psychological security. I can believe, I can have faith but you come along and tear it to pieces. You can if I am willing to listen. So the more I strengthen myself in belief the more I am capable of that belief being torn to pieces - right? I may have faith in something, in a symbol, in a person, by argument, logic, sanity, that can be pulled to pieces. So there is no psychological security at all. Though we have sought it, though we have tried to fulfil ourselves in it, all the things we have done, psychologically, to be secure. At the end of it there is death. Right? There is death. And death is the most extraordinary thing. Putting an end to long continuity. In that continuity we hope to find security. See the whole process of it. Because the brain can only function excellently when it is completely secure. Right? Secure in terrorism, as a terrorist, secure in my belief - right? Secure in my knowledge and so on and so on. All that comes to an end when there is death. Right? I may hope next life and all that stuff, but it is really the ending of a long continuity. I have identified myself with that continuity. That continuity is me. And death says, "Sorry old boy that is the end." - right? And one is not frightened of death, really not frightened. That means you are living constantly with death, that is constantly ending - right? Not continuing and ending, but ending every day that which you have gathered, that which you have memorized, that which you have experienced. So to live every day with that feeling of ending, not merely intellectually ending, but actually ending psychologically. That is time gives us the hope, thought gives us comfort, thought assures us a continuity, and you say, "Well next life". I will be as silly as I am now next life, if I don't end this silliness now - right? This stupidity, the illusions, and all the rest of it, if I don't end it now it will be there next life. If there is a next life. So time, thought, which gives continuity, and we cling to that continuity and therefore there is fear. And fear destroys love -right? So love, compassion and death. They are not separate movements. So we are asking: can one live with death and thought and time have a stop? They are all related. Don't separate time, thought and death. It is all one thing. 3rd QUESTION: Is it not violence and corruption to have physical security while others are starving? Is it not violence and corruption to have physical security while others are starving? Who is asking this question? Please, the speaker is asking you, who has asked this question? The man who has physical security and considering the poor, the starving, or the starving are asking this question? You understand my question? If you and I are comfortable then we can ask this question. If you and I are really very poor would we ask this question? You see there are so many social reformers in the world, the do-gooders. I won't go into it now because we haven't time for it. Look at it carefully. Are they fulfilling themselves in social work, doing something for the poor? This question has been put to the speaker when he is in India, what are you doing for the poor? They are starving, you seem to be well fed, what do you do? You understand these questions? So I am asking who puts this question? I - we are not avoiding or evading this question. We have been brought up, the speaker in poverty. Is that speaker when he was young, living in poverty, asking this question? So there is poverty in the world, slums, appalling conditions. There are no slums in Switzerland apparently. Thank God! There are slums, ghettos, the very, very, very poor, one meal a day and all that. What do we do about it? That is really the question isn't it? You may be wealthy, I may not be so wealthy, but the question is: what do we human beings seeing all this, what is our responsibility? Are we concerned - please we are not avoiding the question - are we concerned with poverty? Poverty. What does that mean? Where? Physical poverty? Or psychological poverty? You understand? Psychological poverty, psychologically being poor, in the sense you may have a lot of knowledge about the psyche but you are still poor. The analyst, he is poor, poor, and he is trying to correct the other person who is also poor. So what is poverty? To be poor, not to be sophisticated, ignorant. You understand? So what is ignorance? Is it the lack of reading a book, writing, having one meal a day, one cloth a day? Or poverty begins first psychologically and then you can crack everything outside. You understand? If I am rich inwardly I can do something. If I myself am poor inwardly, poverty means nothing outside. Then I want to help. So we have not only to understand what is poverty, the poor, sympathy, generosity, all that is involved in this. If you have one shirt you give it. Once the speaker was walking in the rain in India and a little boy came up and said, "Sir, give me some money." The speaker had no money. So then he said "Give me your shirt". I said, "All right". It was pouring. So I gave it to him. Then he said, "Give me your undershirt". I said, "Just a minute. Come with me to the house. You can have anything you like, food, clothes, anything you like, within limits of course." So he came with me, holding my hand, he was very poor, dirty. We walked together to the house. I left him, the speaker left him and went upstairs to get some clothes for the boy. And the boy went round the house, looking into every cupboard, all over the place. The person with whom the speaker was staying caught him and said, "What are you doing in this part of the house?" "Oh", he said, "He asked me to come in." "But he didn't ask you to come upstairs and look into all this. So why are you doing it?" And the boy got rather frightened and he said "My father is a robber." He was casing the house. You understand the phrase? So we have not only to deal with poverty externally, but also inwardly. Probably there would be no poverty in the world if all the scientists, if all the nations got together and said we must solve this problem. They could. But nationalities divide them, communities divide them, religious beliefs divide them - right? And nepotism, you know, somebody I know, I'll help you. So the whole world is opposed to this kind of action - right? That is to put aside all our nationalities, beliefs, religion and help, really work altogether to solve this problem of external poverty. But nobody will do this - right? We have talked to politicians, to higher people, but they are not interested - right? So begin with ourselves first. 4th QUESTION: How can our limited brain grasp the unlimited, which is beauty and truth? What is the ground of compassion and intelligence and can it really be - can it really become upon each one of us - and can it really become or be upon each one of us? How can our limited brain grasp the unlimited, which is beauty, love and truth? What is the ground of compassion and intelligence? And can it really come upon each one of us? Right? Question clear? How can our limited brain grasp the unlimited? It cannot, because it is limited. Once we grasp the significance, the depth of the quality of the brain and recognize the fact, the fact not the idea, the fact that our brains are limited by knowledge, by specialties, by particular discipline, by belonging to a group, nationalism, and all the rest of it, which is the basic - which is self-interest, camouflaged, hidden, all kinds of things, - robes, crowns, rituals. It is essentially, this limitation comes into being when there is self-interest. That is so obvious. When I am concerned with my own happiness, with my own fulfilment, with my own success and all the rest of it, that very self-interest limits the quality of the brain and the energy of the brain. Right? And, as we explained, not that the speaker is a specialist in brains though he has talked to several people about it, professionals, but it is still the brain, not their brain, but still yours and mine. That brain through millenia, millions of years, has evolved in time, death - right? - and thought. It has evolved. Evolution means, does it not, a whole series of time events. We have been the ape, now we are - that has taken two and a half million years, or more, or less. To put all the religious rituals together needs time. So the brain has been conditioned, limited by its own volition, seeking its own security, keeping to its own backyard, say, "I believe", "I don't believe", "I agree", "I don't agree", "This is my opinion", "This is my judgement" - self-interest. Whether it is in the hierarchy of religion among the various noted politicians who are talking about goodness, peace and all the rest of it, it is part self-interest. The man who seeks power through money, self-interest. And the professor with his tremendous scholastic knowledge, and so on and so on. And essentially the gurus. Face all this. So our brain has become very, very, very small. Not in the shape of it, in the size of it, but we have reduced the quality of the brain which has immense capacity. Right? Immense. Technological world has improved and also it has got immense capacity to go inwardly, very, very, very deeply. But self-interest limits the brain. To discover for oneself where self-interest is hidden, it is very subtle. Right? It may lie, hide behind an illusion, in neuroticism, in make-belief, in some family name and all the rest of it. To uncover every stone, every blade of grass to find out. Either you take time to find out, which again becomes a bondage, or you see the thing, grasp it, have an insight into it instantly. When you have a complete insight it covers the whole field. Right? So the questioner says, how can the brain which is conditioned grasp the unlimited, which is beauty, love and truth? What is the ground of compassion and intelligence, and can it come upon us -upon each one of us? Are you inviting compassion? Are you inviting intelligence? Are you inviting beauty, love and truth? Are you trying to grasp it? I am asking you. Are you trying to grasp what is the quality of intelligence, compassion, the immense sense of beauty, the perfume of love and that truth which has no path to it? Is that what you are grasping? Wanting to find out the ground upon which it dwells? Can the limited brain grasp this? You understand my question? You cannot possibly grasp it, hold it. You can do all kinds of meditation, fast, torture yourself. This has all been done. Become terribly austere, having one cloth, or one robe. During the Franciscan days, that is during the days of Florence, they dressed most elegantly. And Assisi, St.Francis of Assisi said, "No" and put on a brown cloth with a white cord. Haven't you noticed all that? There it is. The rich cannot come to the truth, neither the poor. Nor the people who have taken a vow of celibacy, silence, of austerity and so on and so on. Neither can they - right? It is all determined by thought, all put together sequentially in order to - this is all the cultivation of deliberate thought, of deliberate intent. As a person said to the speaker, "Give me twelve years and I'll make you see God." So as the brain is limited, do whatever you will, sit cross legged, Lotus posture, go off into a trance, meditate, stand on your head, or one leg, or whatever you do, you will never come upon it. Compassion doesn't come to it. Therefore one must understand what is love. Love is not sensation. Love is not pleasure, desire, fulfilment. Love is not jealousy, hatred. Love has sympathy, generosity, and tact and so on. All the qualities are not love. To understand that, to come to that requires a great sense and appreciation of beauty. Not the beauty of a woman or a man, or the cinema star with all the rest of it. Beauty is not in the mountain, in the skies, in the valleys, or in the flowing river. Beauty exists where the self is not. You can see the great old trees of three to five thousand years old in California, and see the majesty of that tree and say, "How marvellous" but the self hides behind that tree - right? So beauty exists only where there is love. And beauty, love is compassion. There is no ground for compassion, it doesn't stay at your convenience. And that beauty, love, truth is the highest form of intelligence. When there is that intelligence there is action, clarity, tremendous sense of dignity. It is something unimaginable. And that which is not to be imagined, or the unlimited, cannot be put into words. It can be described, philosophers have described it but the philosophers who have described are not that which they have described. So to come upon this great sense there must be the absence of the me, the ego, egocentric activity, the becoming. There must be the great silence in one. Silence means emptiness of everything. In that there is vast space. Where there is vast space there is immense energy, not self-interested energy, unlimited energy. May we get up? Introduction - 1978 - September 1st September 15th October 1st October 15th November 1st November 15th December 1st December 15th - 1979 - January 1st January 15th February 1st February 15th March 1st March 15th April 1st April 15th May 1st May 15th June 1st June 15th July 1st July 15th August 1st August 15th September 1st September 15th October 1st October 15th November 1st November 15th December 1st December 15th - 1980 - January 1st January 15th February 1st February 15th March 1st LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE INTRODUCTION These letters are not meant to be read casually when you have a little time from other things, nor are they to be treated as entertainment. These letters are written seriously and if you care to read them, read them with intent to study what is said as you would study a flower by looking at the flower very carefully its petals, its stem, its colours, its fragrance and its beauty. These letters should be studied in the same manner, not read one morning and forgotten in the rest of the day. One must give time to it, play with it, question it, enquire into it without acceptance; live with it for some time; digest it so that it is yours and not the writer's. J. Krishnamurti LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST SEPTEMBER, 1978 As I would like to keep in touch with all the schools in India, Brockwood Park in England, the Oak Grove School at Ojai, California, I propose to write and send a letter every fortnight to them all for as long as is possible. It is naturally difficult to keep in touch with them all personally, so, if I may, I would very much like to write these letters so as to convey what the schools should be, to convey to all the people who are responsible for them, that these schools are not only to be excellent academically but much more. They are to be concerned with the cultivation of the total human being. These centres of education must help the student and the educator to flower naturally. The flowering is really very important, otherwise the education becomes merely a mechanical process orientated to a career, to some kind of profession. Career and profession, as society now exists, is inevitable, but if we lay all our emphasis on that then the freedom to flower will gradually wither. We have laid far too much emphasis on examinations and getting good degrees. That is not the main purpose for which these schools were founded, which does not mean that academically the student will be inferior. On the contrary, with the flowering of the teacher as well as the student, career and profession will take their right place. Society, the culture in which we live, encourages and demands that the student must be orientated towards a job and physical security. This has been the constant pressure of all societies; career first and everything else secondary. That is, money first and the complex ways of our daily life second. We are trying to reverse this process because man cannot be happy with money only. When money becomes the dominant factor in life there is imbalance in our daily activity. So,if I may, I would like all the educators to understand this very seriously and see its full significance. If the educator understands the importance of this, and in his own life has given it its proper place, then he can help the student who is compelled by his parents and society to make a career the most important thing. So I would like with this first letter to emphasize this point and to maintain at all times in these schools a way of life that cultivates the total human being. As most of our education is the acquisition of knowledge, it is making us more and more mechanical; our minds are functioning along narrow grooves, whether it be scientific, philosophic, religious, business or technological knowledge that we are acquiring. Our ways of life, both at home and outside it, and our specializing in a particular career, are making our minds more and more narrow, limited and incomplete. All this leads to a mechanistic way of life, a mental standardization, and so gradually the State, even a democratic State, dictates what we should become. Most thoughtful people are naturally aware of this but unfortunately they seem to accept it and live with it. So this has become a danger to freedom. Freedom is a very complex issue and to understand the complexity of it the flowering of the mind is necessary. Each one will naturally give a different definition of the flowering of man depending on his culture, on his so-called education, experience, religious superstition - that is, on his conditioning. Here we are not dealing with opinion or prejudice, but rather with a non-verbal understanding of the implications and consequences of the flowering of the mind. This flowering is the total unfoldment and cultivation of our minds, our hearts and our physical well-being. That is, to live in complete harmony in which there is no opposition or contradiction between them. The flowering of the mind can take place only when there is clear perception, objective, non-personal, unburdened by any kind of imposition upon it. It is not what to think but how to think clearly. We have been for centuries, through propaganda and so on, encouraged in what to think. Most modern education is that and not the investigation of the whole movement of thought. The flowering implies freedom; like any plant it requires freedom to grow. We will deal with this in every letter in different ways during the coming year: with the awakening of the heart, which is not sentimental, romantic or imaginary, but of goodness which is born out of affection and love; and with the cultivation of the body, the right kind of food, proper exercise, which will bring about deep sensitivity. When these three are in complete harmony - that is, the mind, the heart and the body, then the flowering comes naturally, easily and in excellence. This is our job as educators, our responsibility, and teaching is the greatest profession in life. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH SEPTEMBER, 1978 Goodness can flower only in freedom. It cannot bloom in the soil of persuasion in any form, nor under compulsion, nor is it the outcome of reward. It does not reveal itself when there is any kind of imitation or conformity, and naturally it cannot exist when there is fear. Goodness shows itself in behaviour and this behaviour is based on sensitivity. This goodness is expressed in action. The whole movement of thought is not goodness. Thought, which is so very complex, must be understood, but the very understanding of it awakens thought to its own limitation. Goodness has no opposite. Most of us consider goodness as the opposite of the bad or evil and so throughout history in any culture goodness has been considered the other face of that which is brutal. So man has always struggled against evil in order to be good; but goodness can never come into being if there is any form of violence or struggle. Goodness shows itself in behaviour and action and in relationship. Generally our daily behaviour is based on either the following of certain patterns - mechanical and therefore superficial - or according to very carefully thought-out motive, based on reward or punishment. So our behaviour, consciously or unconsciously, is calculated. This is not good behaviour. When one realizes this, not merely intellectually or by putting words together, then out of this total negation comes true behaviour. Good behaviour is in essence the absence of the self, the me. It shows itself in politeness, in consideration for others, yielding without losing integrity. So behaviour becomes extraordinarily important. It is not a casual affair to be slurred over or a plaything of a sophisticated mind. It comes out of the depth of your being and is part of your daily existence. Goodness shows itself in action. We must differentiate between action and behaviour. Probably they are both the same thing but for clarity they must be separated and examined. To act correctly is one of the most difficult things to do. It is very complex and must be examined very closely without impatience or jumping to any conclusion. In our daily lives action is a continuous movement from the past, broken up occasionally with a new set of conclusions; these conclusions then become the past and one acts accordingly. One acts according to preconceived ideas or ideals, so one is acting always from either accumulated knowledge, which is the past, or from an idealistic future, a utopia. We accept such action as normal. Is it? We question it after it has taken place or before doing it but this questioning is based on previous conclusions or future reward or punishment. If I do this - I will get that, and so on. So we are now questioning the whole accepted idea of action. Action takes place after having accumulated knowledge or experience; or we act and learn from that action, pleasant or unpleasant, and this learning again becomes the accumulation of knowledge. So both actions are based on knowledge; they are not different. Knowledge is always the past and so our actions are always mechanical. Is there an action that is not mechanical, non-repetitive, non- routine and so without regret? This is really important for us to understand for where there is freedom and the flowering of goodness, action can never be mechanical. Writing is mechanical, learning a language, driving a car is mechanical; acquiring any kind of technical knowledge and acting according to that is mechanistic. Again in this mechanical activity there might be a break and in that break a new conclusion is formed which again becomes mechanical. One must bear in mind constantly that freedom is essential for the beauty of goodness. There is a non-mechanistic action but you have to discover it. You cannot be told about it, you cannot be instructed in it, you cannot learn from examples, for then it becomes imitation and conformity. Then you have lost freedom completely and there is no goodness. I think that is enough in this letter, but we will continue in our next letter with the flowering of goodness in relationship. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST OCTOBER, 1978 We must continue, if one may, with the flowering of goodness in all our relationship, whether it is the most intimate or superficial, or in ordinary daily matters. Relationship with another human being is one of the most important things in life. Most of us are not very serious in our relationships, for we are concerned with ourselves first and the other when it is convenient, satisfying or sensually gratifying. We treat relationship from a distance, as it were, and not as something in which we are totally involved. We hardly ever show ourselves to another, for we are not aware of ourselves fully and what we show to another in relationship is either possessive, dominating or subservient. There is the other and me, two separate entities sustaining a lasting division until death comes. The other is concerned with himself or herself so this division is maintained throughout life.Of course one shows sympathy, affection, general encouragement, but this divisive process goes on. And from this arises unsuitability, the assertion of temperaments and desires, and so there is fear and placation. Sexually there may be coming together but this peculiar almost static relationship of the you and the me is sustained, with the quarrels, the hurts, the jealousies and all the travail. All this is generally considered good relationship. Now can goodness flower in all this? And yet relationship is life and without some kind of relationship one cannot exist. The hermit, the monk, however they may withdraw from the world, are carrying the world with them. They may deny it; they may suppress; they may torture themselves, but they still remain in some kind of relation with the world, for they are the result of thousands of years of tradition, superstition and all the knowledge that man has gathered through millennia. So there is no escape from it all. There is the relationship between the educator and the student. Does the teacher maintain, whether knowingly or unknowingly, his sense of superiority and so always stands on a pedestal, making the student feel inferior, one who has to be taught? Obviously in this there is no relationship. From this arises fear on the part of the student, a sense of pressure and strain, and therefore the student learns, from his youth, this quality of superiority; he isis made to feel belittled, and so throughout life he either becomes the aggressor is continuously yielding and subservient. A school is a place of leisure where the educator and the one to be educated are both learning. This is the central fact of the school: to learn. We do not mean by leisure having time to oneself, though that is also necessary; it does not mean taking a book and sitting under a tree, or in your bedroom,reading casually. It does not mean a placid state of mind; it certainly does not mean being idle or using time for day-dreaming. Leisure means a mind that is not constantly occupied with something, with a problem, with some enjoyment, with some sensory pleasure. Leisure implies a mind that has infinite time to observe: observe what is happening around one and what is happening within oneself; to have leisure to listen, to see clearly. Leisure implies freedom, which is generally translated as doing as one desires, which is what human beings are doing anyhow, causing a great deal of mischief, misery and confusion. Leisure implies a quiet mind, no motive and so no direction. This is leisure and it is only in this state that the mind can learn, not only science, history, mathematics but also about oneself; and one can learn about oneself in relationship. Can all this be taught in our schools? Or is it something you read about and either memorize or forget? But when the teacher and the taught are involved in really understanding the extraordinary importance of relationship then they are establishing in the school a right relationship among themselves. This is part of education, greater than merely teaching academic subjects. Relationship requires a great deal of intelligence. It cannot be bought in a book or be taught. It is not the accumulated result of great experience.Know-ledge is not intelligence. Intelligence can use knowledge. Knowledge can be clever, bright and utilitarian but that is not intelligence. Intelligence comes naturally and easily when the whole nature and structure of relationship is seen.That is why it is important to have leisure so that the man or the woman, the teacher or the student can quietly and seriously talk over their relationship in which their actual reactions, susceptibilities, and barriers are seen, not imagined, not twisted to please each other or suppressed in order to placate the other. Surely this is the function of a school: to help the student to awaken his intelligence and to learn the great importance of right relationship. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH OCTOBER, 1978 It appears that most people spend a great deal of time in discussing mere verbal clarity and they do not seem to grasp the depth and content beyond the word. In trying to search out verbal clarity they make their minds mechanical, their life superficial and very often contradictory.In these letters we are not concerned with verbal understanding but with the daily facts of our lives. This is the central fact of all these letters: not the verbal explanation of the but the fact itself. When we are concerned with verbal clarity, and so a clarity of ideas, our daily life is conceptual and not factual.All the theories the principles, the ideals are conceptual. Concepts can be dishonest, hypocritical and illusory. One can have any number of concepts or ideals but they have nothing whatsoever to do with the daily happenings of our life. People are nurtured on ideals; the more fanciful they are, the more they are considered noble; but again the understanding of daily events is far more important than ideals. If one's mind is cluttered with concepts, ideals and so on, the fact,the actual happening can never be faced. The concept becomes a block. When all this is very clearly understood - not an intellectual, conceptual understanding - the great importance of facing a fact, the actual, the now, becomes the central factor of our education. Politics is some kind of universal disease based on concepts, and religion is romantic, imaginary emotionalism. When you observe what is actually going on, all this is an indication of conceptual thinking and an avoidance of the daily misery, confusion and sorrow of our life. Goodness cannot flower in the field of fear. In this field there are many varieties of fear, the immediate fear and the fears of many tomorrows. Fear is not a concept, but the explanation of fear is conceptual and these explanations vary from one pundit to another or from one intellectual to another. The explanation is not important but what is, is the facing of the fact of fear. In all our schools the educator and those responsible for the students, whether in the class, the playing field or their rooms, have the responsibility to see that fear in any form does not arise. The educator must not arouse fear in the student.This is not conceptual because the educator himself understands, not only verbally,that fear in any form cripples the mind,destroys sensitivity, shrinks the senses. Fear is the heavy burden which man has always carried. From this fear arise various forms of superstition - religious, scientific and imaginary. One lives in a make-believe world, and the essence of the conceptual world is born of fear. We said previously that man cannot live without relationship,and this relationship is not only his own private life but, if he is an educator, he has a direct relationship with the student. If there is any kind of fear in this, then the teacher cannot possibly help the student to be free of it.The student comes from a background of fear, of authority, of all kinds of fanciful and actual impressions and pressures.The educator too has his own pressures,fears.He will not be able to bring about the understanding of the nature of fear if he himself has not uncovered the root of his own fears.It is not that he himself must first be free of his own fears in order to help the student to be free, but rather that in their daily relationship, in conversation, in the class, the teacher will point out that he himself is afraid, as is the student too, and so together they can explore the whole nature and structure of fear. It must be pointed out that this is not a confessional on the part of the teacher. He is just stating a fact without any emotional, personal emphasis. It is like having a conversation between good friends. This requires a certain honesty and humility. Humility is not servility. Humility is not a sense of defeatism; humility knows neither arrogance nor pride. So the teacher has a tremendous responsibility, for it is the greatest of all professions. He is to bring about a new generation in the world, which again is a fact not a concept. You can make a concept of a fact, and so get lost in concepts, but the actual always remains. Facing the actual, the now, and the fear, is the highest function of the educator - not to bring about only academic excellence - but what is far more important, the psychological freedom of the student and himself. When the nature of freedom is understood, then you eliminate all competition; on the playing field, in the classroom. Is it possible to eliminate altogether the comparative evaluation, academically or ethically? Is it possible to help the student not to think competitively in the academic field and yet to have excellence in his studies, his actions and his daily life? Please bear in mind that we are concerned with the flowering of goodness which cannot possibly flower where there is any competition. Competition exists only when there is comparison, and comparison does not bring about excellence. These schools fundamentally exist to help both the student and the teacher to flower in goodness. This demands excellence in behaviour, in action and in relationship. This is our intent and why these schools have come into being; not to turn out mere careerists but to bring about the excellence of spirit. In our next letter we will continue with the nature of fear; not the word fear but the actual happening of fear. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST NOVEMBER, 1978 Knowledge will not lead to intelligence. We accumulate a great deal of knowledge about so many things but to act intelligently about what one has learned seems almost impossible. Schools, colleges and universities cultivate knowledge about our behaviour, about the universe, about science and every form of technological information. These centres of education rarely help a human being to live a daily life of excellence. Scholars maintain that human beings can evolve only through vast accumulations of information and knowledge. Man has lived through thousands and thousands of wars; he has accumulated a great deal of knowledge on how to kill, yet that very knowledge is preventing him from putting an end to all wars. We accept war as a way of life and all the brutalities, violence and killing as the normal course of our life.We know we should not kill another. This knowing is totality irrelevant to the fact of killing. Knowledge does not prevent killing animals and the earth. Knowledge cannot function through intelligence but intelligence can function with knowledge. To know is not to know and the understanding of this fact that knowledge can never solve our human problems is intelligence. Education in our schools is not only the acquisition of knowledge but what is far more important - the awakening of intelligence which will then utilize knowledge. It is never the other way round. The awakening of intelligence is our concern in all these schools and the inevitable question then arises: how is this intelligence to be awakened? What is the system, what is the method, what is the practice? This very question implies that one is still functioning in the field of knowledge. The realization that it is a wrong question is the beginning of the awakening of intelligence. The practice, the method, the system in our daily life make for a matter of routine, a repetitive action and so a mechanical mind. The continuous movement of knowledge, however specialized, puts the mind into a groove, into a narrow way of life. To learn to observe and understand this whole structure of knowledge is to begin to awaken intelligence. Our minds live in tradition. The very meaning of that word - to hand down denies intelligence. It is easy and comfortable to follow tradition, whether it is political, religious or self-invented tradition. Then one has not to think about it, one does not question it; it is part of tradition to accept and obey. The older the culture,the more the mind is bound to the past,lives in the past. The breaking down of one tradition will inevitably be followed by the imposition of another. A mind with many centuries of any particular tradition behind it refuses to let the old go and accept only when there is another tradition equally gratifying and secure. Tradition in all its various forms, the religious to the academic, must deny intelligence.Intelligence is infinite. Knowledge, however vast, is finite like tradition. In our schools the habit-forming mechanism of the mind must be observed and in this observation the quickening of intelligence is born. It is part of human tradition to accept fear. We live with fear, both the older and younger generation. Most are not aware that they live in fear. It is only in a mild form of crisis or a shattering incident that one becomes aware of this abiding fear.It is there. Some are aware of it, others shy away from it. Tradition says control fear, run away from it, suppress it, analyse it,act upon it,or accept it. We have lived for millennia with fear and we somehow manage to get along with it. This is the nature of tradition, to act upon it or run away from it; or sentimentally accept it and look to some outside agency to resolve it. Religions spring from this fear, and the politicians' compelling urge for power is born out of this fear. Any form of domination over another is the nature of fear. When a man or a woman possesses another there is fear in the background and this fear destroys every form of relationship. It is the function of the educator to help the student to face this fear, whether the fear of the parent, of the teacher or of the older boy, or the fear of being alone and the fear of nature. This is the central issue in understanding the nature and structure of fear, to face it. To face it not through the screen of words but to observe the very happening of fear without any movement away from it. The movement away from the fact is to confound the fact. Our tradition, our education, encourages control, acceptance or denial or very clever rationalization. As the teacher, can you help the student and yourself to face every problem that arises in life? In learning, there is neither the teacher nor the taught; there is only learning. To learn about the whole movement of fear one must come to it with curiosity which has its own vitality. Like a child who is very curious, in that curiosity there is intensity. It is the path of tradition to conquer what we do not understand, to beat it down, to trample it; or worship it. Tradition is knowledge and the ending of knowledge is the birth of intelligence. Now, realizing there is neither the teacher nor the taught but only the act of learning on the part of the grown-up and the student, can one, through direct perception of what is happening, learn this fear and all about it? You can if you will allow fear to tell its ancient story. Listen to it attentively without interference, for it is telling you the history of your own fear. When you so listen you will discover that this fear is not separate from you. You are that very fear, that very reaction with a word attached to it. The word is not important. The word is knowledge, the tradition; but the actual, the now that is happening, is something totally new. It is the discovery of the newness of your own fear. Facing the fact of fear, without any movement of thought, is the ending of fear. Not any particular fear but the very root of fear is disintegrated in this observation. There is no observer, only observation. Fear is a very complex business, as ancient as the hills, ancient as humankind and it has a very extraordinary story to tell. But you must know the art of listening to it and there is great beauty in that listening. There is only listening and the story does not exist. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH NOVEMBER, 1978 The word responsibility should be understood in all its significance. It comes from to respond, to respond not partially but wholly. The word also implies to refer back: respond to your background, which is to refer back to your conditioning. Responsibility is the action, as it is generally understood,of one's human conditioning. One's culture, the society in which one lives, naturally condition the mind, whether that culture is native or foreign. From this background one responds and this response limits our responsibility. If one is born in India, Europe, America or wherever, one's response will be according to religious superstition - all religions are superstitious structures - or nationalism, or scientific theories. These condition one's response and they are always limited, finite. And so there is always contradiction, conflict and the arising of confusion. This is inevitable and it brings about division between human beings. Division in any form must bring about not only conflict and violence but ultimately war. If one understands the actual meaning of the word responsible and what goes on in the world today, one sees that responsibility has become irresponsible. In understanding what is irresponsible we will begin to comprehend what is responsibility. Responsibility is for the whole, as the word implies, not for oneself, not for one's family, not for some concepts or beliefs,but for the whole of mankind. Our various cultures have emphasized separateness, called individualism, which has resulted in each one doing what he desires or being committed to his own particular little talent, however profitable or useful that talent may be to society. This does not mean what the totalitarians want one to believe, that only the State and the authorities who represent the State are important, not human beings The State is a concept, but a human being, though he lives in it, is not a concept. Fear is an actuality not a concept. A human being psychologically is the whole of mankind. He not only represents it but he is the whole of the human species. He is essentially the whole psyche of mankind. On this actuality various cultures have imposed the illusion that each human being is different. In this illusion mankind has been caught for centuries and this illusion has become a reality. If one observes closely the whole psychological structure of oneself one will find that as one suffers, so all mankind suffers in various degrees. If you are lonely, the whole humankind knows this loneliness. Agony, jealousy, envy and fear are known to all. So psychologically, inwardly, one is like another human being. There may be differences physically, biologically. One is tall,or short and so on but basically one is the representative of all mankind. So psychologically you are the world; you are responsible for the whole of mankind, not for yourself as a separate human being, which is a psychological illusion. As the representative of the whole human race, your response is whole not partial. So responsibility has a totally different meaning. One has to learn the art of this responsibility.If one grasps the full significance that one is psychologically the world, then responsibility becomes overpowering love. Then one will care for the child, not just at the tender age, but see that he understands the significance of responsibility throughout his life. This art includes behaviour, the ways of one's thinking and the importance of correct action. In these schools of ours responsibility to the earth, to nature and to each other is part of our education not merely the emphasis on academic subjects though they are necessary. Then we can ask what is the teacher teaching and what is the pupil receiving, and more widely - what is learning? What is the educator's function? Is it to teach merely algebra and physics or is it to awaken in the student - and so in himself - this enormous sense of responsibility? Can the two go together? That is, the academic subjects which will help in a career and this responsibility for the whole of mankind and life. Or must they be kept separate? If they are separate, then there will be contradiction in his life;he will become a hypocrite and unconsciously or deliberately keep his life in two definite compartments. Mankind lives in this division. At home he is one way and in the factory or the office he assumes a different face. We have asked if the two can move together.Is this possible? When a question of this kind is put one must investigate the implications of the question and not whether it is or it is not possible. So it is of the greatest importance how you approach this question. If you approach it from your limited background-and all conditioning is limited, then it will be a partial grasp of the implications in this You must come to this question afresh. Then you will find the futility of the question itself because, as you approach it afresh, you will see that these two meet like two streams making a formidable river which is your life, your daily life of total responsibility. Is this what you are teaching, realizing that the teacher has the greatest of all professions? These are not mere words but an abiding actuality not to be slurred over. If you do not feel the truth of this then you really should have another profession. Then you will live in the illusions that mankind has created for itself. So we can again ask: what are you teaching and what is the pupil learning? Are you creating that strange atmosphere in which actual learning takes place? If you have understood the enormity of responsibility and beauty of it, then you are totally responsible for the student - what he wears, what he eats, the manner of his talk and so on. From this question arises another, what is learning? Probably most of us have not even asked that question, or if we have asked it, our response has been from tradition, which is accumulated knowledge, knowledge which functions with skill or without skill to earn our daily living.This is what one has been taught, for which all the usual schools, colleges, universities,etc exist. Knowledge predominates, which is one of our greatest conditionings, and so the brain is never free from the known. It is always adding to what is already known, and so the brain is put into a straight-jacket of the known and is never free to discover a way of life which may not be based on the known at all. The known makes for a wide or narrow rut and one remains in that rut thinking there is security in it. That security is destroyed by the very finite known.This has been the way of human life up to now. So is there a way of learning which does not make life into a routine, a narrow groove? Then what is learning? One must be very clear about the ways of knowledge: first to acquire knowledge and then act from that knowledge - technological and psychological, or act, and from that action acquire knowledge? Both are acquisitions of knowledge. Knowledge is the past always. Is there a way of acting without the enormous weight of man's accumulated knowledge? There is. It is not learning as we have known it; it is pure observation - observation which is not continuous and which then becomes memory, but observation from moment to moment. The observer is the essence of knowledge and he imposes on what he observes that which he has acquired through experience and various forms of sensory reaction. The observer is always manipulating that which he observes, and what he observes is always reduced to knowledge. So he is always caught in the old tradition of habit-forming. So learning is pure observation - not only of the things outside you but also of that which is happening inwardly; to observe without the observer. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST DECEMBER, 1978 The whole movement of life is learning. There is never a time in which there is no learning. Every action is a movement of learning and every relationship is learning. The accumulation of knowledge, which is called learning and to which we are so accustomed, is necessary to a limited extent, but that limitation prevents us from comprehending ourselves. Knowledge is measurable, more or less, but in learning there is no measure. This is really very important to understand, especially if you are to grasp the full meaning of a religious life. Knowledge is memory and if you have observed the actual, the now is not memory. In observation memory has no place. The actual is what is actually happening. The second later is measurable and this is the way of memory. To observe the movement of an insect needs attention - that is if you are interested in observing the insect or whatever interests you. This attention again is not measurable. It is the responsibility of the educator to understand the whole nature and structure of memory, to observe this limitation and to help the student to see this. We learn from books or from a teacher who has a great deal of information about a subject and our brains are filled with this information. This information is about things, about nature, about everything outside of us and when we want to learn about ourselves we turn to books that tell about ourselves. So this process goes on endlessly and gradually we become secondhand human beings. This is an observable fact throughout the world and this is our modern education. The act of learning, as we have pointed out, is the act of pure observation and this observation is not held within the limitation of memory. We learn to earn a living but we never live. The capacity to earn a living takes most of our life; we have hardly any time for other things. We find time for gossip, to be entertained, to play, but all this is not living. There is a whole field which is the actual living, totally neglected. To learn the art of living one must have leisure. The word leisure is greatly misunderstood, as we said in our third letter. Generally it means not to be occupied with the things we have to do such as earning a livelihood, going to the office, factory and so on, and only when that is over is there leisure.During that so-called leisure you want to be amused, you want to relax,you want to do the things which you really like or which demand your highest capacity. Your earning a livelihood, whatever you do,is in opposition to so-called leisure. So there is always the strain, the tension and the escape from that tension, and leisure is when you have no strain. During that leisure you pick up a newspaper, open a novel, chatter, play and so on. This is the actual fact. This is what is going on everywhere. Earning a livelihood is the denial of living. So we come to the question - what is leisure? Leisure, as it is understood, is a respite from the pressure of livelihood. The pressure of earning a living or any pressure imposed on us we generally consider an absence of leisure, but there is a much greater pressure in us, conscious or unconscious, which is desire and we will go into that later. School is a place of leisure. It is only when you have leisure that you can learn. That is: learning can only take place when there is no pressure of any kind. When a snake or a danger confronts you there is a kind of learning from the pressure of the fact of that danger. The learning under that pressure is the cultivation of memory which will help you to recognise future danger and so becomes a mechanical response. Leisure implies a mind which is not occupied. It is only then that there is a state of learning. School is a place of learning and not merely a place for accumulating knowledge. This is really important to understand. As we said, knowledge is necessary and has its own limited place in life. Unfortunately this limitation has devoured all our lives and we have no space for learning. We are so occupied with our livelihood that it takes all the energy of the mechanism of thought, so that we are exhausted at the end of the day and need to be stimulated. We recover from this exhaustion through entertainment - religious or otherwise. This is the life of human beings. Human beings have created a society which demands all their time, all their energies, all their life.There is no leisure to learn and so their life becomes mechanical, almost meaningless. So we must be very clear in the understanding of the word leisure - a time, a period, when the mind is not occupied with anything whatsoever. It is the time of observation.It is only the unoccupied mind which can observe. A free observation is the movement of learning. This frees the mind from being mechanical. So can the teacher, the educator, help the student to understand this whole business of earning a livelihood with all its pressure? the learning that helps you to acquire a job with all its fears and anxieties and the looking on tomorrow with dread? Because he himself has understood the nature of leisure and pure observation, so that earning a livelihood does not become a torture, a great travail throughout life, can the teacher help the student to have a non-mechanistic mind? It is the absolute responsibility of the teacher to cultivate the flowering of goodness in leisure. For this reason the schools exist. It is the responsibility of the teacher to create a new generation to change the social structure from its total preoccupation with earning a livelihood. Then teaching becomes a holy act. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH DECEMBER, 1978 In one of the past letters we said that total responsibility is love. This responsibility is not for a particular nation or a particular group, community, or for a particular deity, or some form of political programme or for your own guru, but for all mankind. This must be deeply understood and felt and this is the responsibility of the educator. Almost all of us feel responsible for our family, children and so on, but do not have the feeling of being wholly concerned and committed to the environment around us, to nature, or totally responsible for our actions.This absolute care is love. Without this love there can be no change in society. The idealists, though they may love their ideal or their concept, have not brought about a radically different society. The revolutionaries, the terrorists, have in no way fundamentally changed the pattern of our societies. The physically violent revolutionaries have talked about freedom for all men, forming a new society, but all the jargons and slogans have further tortured the spirit and existence. They have twisted words to suit their own limited outlook. No form of violence has changed society in its most fundamental sense. Great rulers through the authority of a few have brought about some kind of order in society. Even the totalitarians have superficially established through violence and torture a semblance of order. We are not talking about such an order in society. We are saying very definitely and most emphatically that it is only the total responsibility for all mankind - which is love - that can basically transform the present state of society. Whatever the existing system may be in various parts of the world it is corrupt, degenerate and wholly immoral. You have only to look around you to see this fact. Millions upon millions are spent on armaments throughout the world and all the politicians talk about peace while preparing for war. Religions have declared over and over again the sanctity of peace, but they have encouraged wars and subtle kinds of violence and torture. There are innumerable divisions and sects with their rituals and all the nonsense that goes on in the name of god and religion. Where there is division there must be disorder, struggle, conflict - whether religious, political, economic. Our modern society is based on greed, envy and power. When you consider all this as it actually is - this overpowering commercialism - all this indicates degeneration and basic immorality. To radically change the pattern of our life, which is the basis of all society, is the educator's responsibility. We are destroying the earth and all the things on it are being destroyed for our gratification. Education is not merely the teaching of various academic subjects, but the cultivation of total responsibility in the student. One does not realize as an educator that one is bringing into being a new generation. Most schools are only concerned with imparting knowledge. They are not at all concerned with the transformation of man and his daily life, and you - the educator in these schools -need to have this deep concern and the care of this total responsibility. In what manner then can you help the student to feel this quality of love with all its excellence? If you do not feel this yourself profoundly, talking about responsibility is meaningless. Can you as an educator feel the truth of this? Seeing the truth of it will bring about naturally this love and total responsibility. You have to ponder it, observe it daily in your life,in your relations with your wife, your friends, your students. And in your relationship with the students you will talk about this from your heart, not pursue mere verbal clarity.The feeling for this reality is the greatest gift that man can have and once it is burning in you, you will find the right word, right action and correct behaviour. When you consider the student you will see that he comes to you totally unprepared for all this. He comes to you frightened, nervous, anxious to please or on the defensive, conditioned by his parents and the society in which he has lived his few years. You have to see his background, you have to be concerned with what he actually is and not impose on him your own opinions, conclusions and judgements. In considering what he is it will reveal what you are, and so you will find the student is you. And now can you in the teaching of mathematics, physics, and so on - which he must know for that is the way of earning a livelihood - convey to the student that he is responsible for the whole of mankind? Though he may be working for his own career, his own way of life, it will not make his mind narrow. He will see the danger of specialization with all its limitations and strange brutality. You have to help him to see all this. The flowering of goodness does not lie in knowing mathematics and biology or in passing examinations and having a successful career. It exists outside these and when there is this flowering, career and other necessary activities are touched by its beauty. Now we lay emphasis on one and disregard the flowering entirely. In these schools we are trying to bring these two together, not artificially, not as a principle or pattern you are following, but because you see the absolute truth that these two must flow together for the regeneration of man. Can you do this? Not because you all agree to do it after discussing and coming to a conclusion, but rather see with an inward eye the extraordinary gravity of this: see for yourself.Then what you say will have significance.Then you become a centre of light not lit by another. As you are all of humanity - which is an actuality, not a verbal statement - you are utterly responsible for the future of man. Please do not consider this as a burden. If you do, that burden is a bundle of words without any reality. It is an illusion. This responsibility has its own gaiety, its own humour, its own movement without the weight of thought. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST JANUARY, 1979 It appears that as we are concerned with education, there are two factors we must bear in mind at all times. One is diligence and the other is negligence. Most religions have talked about the activity of the mind, to be controlled, shaped by the will of God, or by some exterior agency; and devotion to some deity, made by the hand or by the mind, needs a certain quality of attention in which emotion, sentiment and romantic imagination are involved. This is the activity of the mind which is thought. The word diligence implies care, watchfulness, observation and a deep sense of freedom. Devotion to an object a person or a principle denies this freedom. Diligence is attention which brings about naturally infinite care, concern and the freshness of affection. All this demands great sensitivity. One is sensitive to one's own desires or psychological wounds, or one is sensitive to a particular person, watching his desires and responding quickly to his needs; but this kind of sensitivity is limited and can hardly be called sensitive. The quality of sensitivity of which we are talking comes about naturally when there is total responsibility which is love. Diligence has this quality. Negligence is indifference, sloth; indifference towards the physical organism, towards the psychological state and indifference to others. In indifference there is callousness. In this stage the mind becomes sluggish, the activity of thought slows down, quickness of perception is denied and sensitivity is a thing that is incomprehensible. Most of us are sometimes diligent but most often negligent. They are not really opposites. If they were, diligence would still be negligence. Is diligence the outcome of negligence? If it is, it is still part of negligence and therefore not truly diligent. Most people are diligent in their own self-interest, whether that self-interest is identified with the family, with a particular group, sect, or nation. In this self-interest there is the seed of negligence although there is constant preoccupation with oneself. This preoccupation is limited and so it is negligence This preoccupation is energy held within a narrow boundary. Diligence is the freedom from self-occupation and brings an abundance of energy. When one understands the nature of negligence the other comes into being without any struggle. When this is fully understood - not just the verbal definitions of negligence and diligence - then the highest excellence in our thought, action, behaviour will manifest itself. But unfortunately we never demand of ourselves the highest quality of thought, action and behaviour. We hardly ever challenge ourselves and if we ever do, we have various excuses for not responding fully. This indicates does it not, an indolence of mind, the feeble activity of thought? The body can be lazy but never the mind with its quickness of thought and subtlety. Laziness of the body can easily be understood. This laziness may be because one is overworked or over-indulged, or has played games too hard. So the body requires rest which may be considered laziness though it is not. The watchful mind, being alert, sensitive, knows when the organism needs rest and care. In our schools it is important to understand that the quality of energy which is diligence requires the right kind of food, the right kind of exercise,and enough sleep. Habit, routine, is the enemy of diligence - the habit of thought,of action, of conduct. Thought itself creates its own pattern and lives within it. When that pattern is challenged either it is disregarded or thought creates another pattern of security. This is the movement of thought - from one pattern to another, from one conclusion, one belief, to another. This is the very negligence of thought. The mind that is diligent has no habit; it has no pattern of response. It is endless movement, never coalescing into habit, never caught in conclusions. Movement has great depth and volume when it has no boundary brought about by the negligence of thought. As we are now concerned with education, in what manner can the teacher convey this diligence with its sensitivity, with its abundant care in which laziness of the spirit has no place? Of course it is understood that the educator concerned with this question and sees the importance of diligence throughout the days of his life. If he is, then how will he set about cultivating this flower of diligence? Is he deeply concerned with the student? Does he really take the total responsibility for these young people who are in his charge? Or is he merely there to earn a livelihood, caught in the misery of having little? As we pointed out in previous letters, teaching is the highest capacity of man. You are there and you have the students before you. Is it that you are indifferent? Is it that your own personal troubles at home are wasting your energy? To carry psychological problems from day to day is an utter waste of time and energy, indicating negligence. A diligent mind meets the problem as it arises, observes the nature of it and resolves it immediately. The carrying over of a psychological problem does not resolve the problem. It is a wastage of energy and the spirit. When you solve the problems as they arise, then you will find there are no problems at all. So we must come back to the question: as an educator in these or any other schools, can you cultivate this diligence? It is only in this that the flowering of goodness comes into being. It is your total, irrevocable responsibility, and in it is this love which will naturally find a way of helping the student. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH JANUARY, 1979 It is important that the teacher should feel secure both economically and psychologically in these schools. Some teachers may be willing to teach without much concern for their economic position; they may have come for the teachings and for psychological reasons, but every teacher should feel secure in the sense of being at home, cared for, without financial worries. If the teacher himself does not feel secure and therefore not free to give attention to the student and his security, he will not be able to be totally responsible. If the teacher is not in himself happy, his attention will be divided and he will be incapable of exercising his entire capacity. So it becomes important that we choose the right teachers, inviting each one to stay for some time at our schools to find out whether he or she can happily join in what is being done. This must be mutual. Then the teacher, being happy, secure, feeling that he is at home, can create in the student this quality of security, this feeling that the school is his home. Feeling at home implies, that there is no sense of fear, that he is protected physically, cared for and free? Protection, though the student may object to the idea of being protected, guarded, does not mean that he is held in a prison, confined and critically watched. Freedom obviously does not mean to do what one likes and it is equally obvious that one can never totally do what one likes. The attempt to do what one likes - so called individual freedom, which is to choose a course of action according to one's desire - has brought about social and economic confusion in the world. The reaction to this confusion is totalitarianism. Freedom is a very complex affair. One must approach it with utmost attention, for freedom is not the opposite of bondage or an escape from the circumstances in which one is caught. It is not from something, or avoidance of constraint. freedom has no opposite; it is of itself, per se. The very understanding of the nature of freedom is the awakening of intelligence. it is not an adjustment to what is, but the understanding of what is and so going beyond it. If the teacher does not understand the nature of freedom he will only impose his prejudices, his limitations, his conclusions on the student. Thus the student will naturally resist or accept through fear, becoming a conventional human being, whether timid or aggressive. It is only in the understanding of this freedom of living - not the idea of it or the verbal acceptance of it which becomes a slogan - that the mind is free to learn. A school, after all, is a place where the student is basically happy, not bullied, not frightened by examinations, not compelled to act according to a pattern, a system. It is a place where the art of learning is being taught. If the student is not happy he is incapable of learning this art. Memorizing, recording information, is considered learning. This brings about a mind that is limited and therefore heavily conditioned. The art of learning is to give the right place to information, to act skilfully according to what is learned, but at the same time not to be psychologically bound by the limitations of knowledge and the images or symbols that thought creates. Art implies putting everything in its right place, not according to some ideal. The understanding of the mechanism of ideals and conclusions is to learn the art of observation. A concept put together by thought, either in the future or according to the past, is an ideal - an idea projected or a remembrance.It is a shadow-play, making an abstraction of the actual. This abstraction is an avoidance of what is happening now. This escape from the fact is unhappiness. Now can we as teachers help the student to be happy in the real sense? Can we help him to be concerned with what is actually going on? This is attention. The student watching a leaf fluttering in the sun is being attentive. To force him back to the book at that moment is to discourage attention; whereas to help him to watch that leaf fully makes him aware of the depth of attention in which there is no distraction. In the same way, because he has just seen what attention implies, he will be able to turn to the book or whatever is being taught. In this attention there is no compulsion, no conformity. It is the freedom in which there is total observation. Can the teacher himself have this quality of attention? Then only can he help another. For the most part we struggle against distractions. There are no distractions. Suppose you daydream or your mind is wandering; that is what is actually taking place. Observe that. That observation is attention. So there is no distraction. Can this be taught to the students, can this art be learned? You are totally responsible for the student; you must create this atmosphere of learning, a seriousness in which there is a sense of freedom and happiness. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST FEBRUARY, 1979 As we have already pointed out several times in these letters, the schools exist primarily to bring about a profound transformation in human beings. The educator is wholly responsible for this. Unless the teacher realizes this central factor he will be merely instructing the student to become a businessman, an engineer, a lawyer, or a politician. There are so many of these who seem to be incapable of transforming either themselves or their society. Perhaps in the present structure of society lawyers and businessmen may be necessary, but when these schools came into being the intention was, and remains, to transform man profoundly. The teachers in these schools should really understand this, not intellectually,not as an idea, but because they see the full implication of this with their whole being. We are concerned with the total development of a human being, not merely with accumulating knowledge. Ideas and ideals are one thing, and fact, the actual happening, is another. The two can never come together. Ideals have been imposed upon facts and twist what is happening to conform to what should be, the ideal. The utopia is a conclusion drawn from what is happening and sacrifices the actual to conform to that which has been idealized. This has been the process for millennia and every student and all the intellectuals revel in ideations. The avoidance of what is, is the beginning of the corruption of the mind. This corruption pervades all religions, politics and education, all human relationship. The understanding of this process of avoidance and the going beyond it is our concern. Ideals corrupt the mind: they are born of ideas, judge- ments and hope.Ideas are abstractions of what is and any idea or conclusion about what is actually happening distorts what is happening, and so corruption takes place. It takes away attention from the fact, what is, and so directs attention to the fanciful. This movement away from the fact makes for symbols, images, which then take on all-consuming importance. This movement away from the fact is corruption of the mind. Human beings indulge in this movement in conversation, in their relationships, in almost everything they do. The fact is instantly translated into an idea or a conclusion which then dictates our reactions. When something is seen, thought immediately makes a counterpart and that becomes the real. You see a dog and instantly thought turns to whatever image you may have about dogs, and so you never see the dog. Can this be taught to the students: to remain with the fact, the actual happening now, whether psychologically or externally? Knowledge is not the fact; it is about the fact and that has its proper place, but knowledge prevents perception of what actually is; then corruption takes place. This is really very important to understand. Ideals are considered noble, exalted, of great purposeful significance, and what is actually happening is considered merely sensory, worldly and of lesser value. Schools the world over have some exalted purpose, ideal; so they are educating the students in corruption. What corrupts the mind? We are using the word mind to imply the senses, the capacity to think, and the brain that stores all memories and experiences as knowledge. This total movement is the mind. The conscious as well as the unconscious, the so-called super-consciousness - the whole of this is the mind. We are asking what are the factors, the seeds of corruption in all this? We said ideals corrupt. Knowledge also corrupts the mind. Knowledge, particular or extensive, is the movement of the past, and when the past overshadows the actual, corruption takes place. Knowledge, projected into the future and directing what is happening now, is corruption. We are using the word corruption to mean that which is being broken up, that which is not taken as a whole. The fact can never be broken up; the fact can never be limited by knowledge. The completeness of the fact opens the door to infinity. Completeness cannot be divided; it is not self-contradictory; it cannot divide itself. Completeness, wholeness, is infinite movement. Imitation, conformity, is one of the great factors of corruption of the mind; the example, the hero, the saviour, the guru, is the most destructive factor of corruption. To follow, to obey, to conform, deny freedom. Freedom is from the beginning, not at the end. It is not to conform, to imitate, accept first and eventually find freedom. That is the spirit of totalitarianism, whether of the guru or the priest. This is the cruelty, the ruthlessness, of the dictator, of the authority, of the guru or of the high priest. So authority is corruption. Authority is the breaking up of integrity, the whole, the complete - the authority of a teacher in a school, the authority of a purpose, of an ideal, of the one who says I know, the authority of an institution. The pressure of authority in any form is the distorting factor of corruption. Authority basically denies freedom. It is the function of a true teacher to instruct, point out, inform, without the corrupting influence of authority. The authority of comparison destroys. When one student is compared to another, both are being hurt. To live without comparison is to have integrity. Will you, the teacher, do this? LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH FEBRUARY, 1979 It seems that human beings have enormous amounts of energy. They have been to the moon, have climbed the highest peaks of the earth, they have had prodigious energy for wars, for the instruments of war, and great energy for technological development, to accumulate the vast knowledge that man has gathered, to work every day, energy to build the pyramids and to explore the atom. When one considers all this it is striking to realize the energy expended. This energy has gone into the investigation of external things, but man has given very little energy to enquiring into the whole psychological structure of himself. Energy is needed, both externally and inwardly, to act or to be totally silent. Action and non-action require great energy. We have used energy positively in wars, in writing books, in surgical operations, and to work beneath the seas. Non-action requires far more action than the so-called positive. Positive action is to control, to support, to escape. Non-action is the total attention of observation. In this observation that which is being observed undergoes a transformation. This silent observation demands not only physical energy but also a deep psychological energy. We are used to the former and this conditioning limits our energy. In a complete, silent observation, which is non-action, there is no expenditure of energy and so energy is limitless. Non-action is not the opposite of action. Going to work daily, year after year for so many years, which may be necessary as things are, does limit, but not working does not mean you will have boundless energy. The very slothfulness of the mind is a wastage of energy, as is the laziness of the body. Our education in any field narrows down this energy. Our way of life, which is a constant struggle to become or not to become, is the dissipation of energy. Energy is timeless and is not to be measured. But our actions are measurable and so we bring down this limitless energy to the narrow circle of the me. And having confined it, we then search for the immeasurable. This searching is part of positive action and therefore a wastage of psychological energy. So there is a neverending movement within the archives of the me. What we are concerned with in education is to free the mind of the me. As we have said on several occasions in these letters, it is our function to bring about a new generation free of this limited energy which is called the me. It must be repeated again that these schools exist to bring this about. In our previous letter we talked about the corruption of the mind. The root of this corruption is the me. The me is the image, the picture, the world that is passed from generation to generation, and one has to contend with this weight of tradition of the me. It is the fact - not the consequence of this fact or how the fact has come into being - which is fairly easy to explain; but to observe the fact with all its reactions, without motive which distorts the fact,is negative action. This then transforms the fact. It is important to understand this very deeply; not to act upon the fact but to observe what is. Every human being is wounded both psychologically and physically. It is comparatively easy to deal with the physical pain but the psychological pain remains hidden. The consequence of this psychological wound is to build a wall around oneself, to resist further pain and so become fearful or withdraw into isolation. The wound has been caused by the image of the me with its limited energy. Because it is limited it is hurt. That which is not measurable can never be damaged, can never be corrupted. Anything that is limited can be hurt but that which is whole is beyond the reach of thought. Can the educator help the student never to be psychologically wounded, not only while he is part of the school but throughout his life? If the educator sees the great damage that comes from this wound, then how will he educate the student? What will he actually do to see that the student is never hurt throughout his life? The student comes to the school already having been hurt. Probably he is unaware of this hurt.The teacher by observing his reactions, his fears and aggressiveness, will discover the damage that has been done. So he has two problems: to free the student from past damage and prevent future wounds. Is this your concern? Or do you merely read this letter, understand it intellectually, which is no understanding at all, and so are not concerned with the student? But if you are concerned, as you should be, what will you do with this fact - that he is wounded and you must prevent at all costs any further hurts? How do you approach this problem? What is the state of your mind when you face this problem? It is also your problem, not only the student's. You are hurt and so is the student. So you are both concerned: it is not a one-sided problem; you are as much involved as the student. This involvement is the central factor which you must face, observe. Merely to have a desire to be free of your past wound and hope never to be hurt again is a wastage of energy. Complete attention, the observation of this fact will not only tell the story of the wound itself, but this very attention dispels, wipes away the hurt. So attention is this vast energy which can never be wounded or corrupted. Please do not accept what is said in these letters. Acceptance is the destruction of truth. Test it - not at some future date, but test it as you read this letter.When you test it, not casually but with all your heart and being, then you will discover for yourself the truth of the matter. And then only will you be able to help the student to wipe away the past and have a mind that is incapable of being hurt. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST MARCH, 1979 These letters are written in a friendly spirit. They are not intended to dominate your way of thinking or to persuade you to conform to the way the writer thinks or feels. They are not propaganda. It is really a dialogue between you and the writer, two friends talking over their problems, and in good friendship there is never any sense of competition or domination. You too must have observed the state of the world and our society, and that there must be a radical transformation in the way human beings live,their relation to each other, their relation with the world as a whole and in every way possible. We are talking to each other, both being deeply concerned, not only with our own particular selves, but also with the students for whom you are wholly responsible. The teacher is the most important person in a school, for on her or him depends the future welfare of mankind. This is not a mere verbal statement. This is an absolute and irrevocable fact. Only when the educator himself feels the dignity and the respect implicit in his work,will he be aware that teaching is the highest calling, greater than that of the politician, greater than the princes of the world. The writer means every word of this and so please do not brush it aside as exaggeration or an attempt to make you feel a false importance. You and the students must flower together in goodness. We have been pointing out the corrupting or the degenerating factors of the mind. As the society is disintegrating, these schools must be centres for the regeneration of the mind. Not of thought. Thought can never be regenerated for thought is always limited, but the regeneration of the totality of the mind is possible. This possibility is not conceptual but actual when one has examined deeply the ways of the degeneration. In the previous letters we have explored some of these ways. We must now investigate also the destructive nature of tradition, of habit and the repetitive ways of thought. To follow, accepting tradition, seems to give a certain security to one's life, the outer as well as the inner.The search for security in every possible way has been the motive,the driving power of most of our actions. The demand for psychological security overshadows the physical security and so makes physical security uncertain. This psychological security is the basis of tradition passed on from one generation to another through words, through rituals, beliefs -whether religious, political or sociological. We seldom question the accepted norm but when we do question we invariably fall into a trap in a new pattern. This has been our way of life: reject one and accept another. The new is more enticing and the old is left to the passing generation. But both generations are caught in patterns, in systems and this is the movement of tradition. The very word implies conformity, whether modern or ancient. There is no good or bad tradition: there is only tradition, the vain repetition of ritual in all the churches, temples and mosques.They are utterly meaningless, but emotion, sentiment, romanticism, imagination lend them colour and illusion. This is the nature of superstition and every priest in the world encourages it. This process of indulging in things that have no meaning or investing in things without significance is a wastage of energy which degenerates the mind. One has to be deeply aware of these facts and that very attention dissolves all illusions. Then there is habit. There are no good habits or bad; only habit. Habit implies a repetitive action which arises from not being aware. One falls into habits deliberately or is persuaded through propaganda; or, being afraid, one falls into self-protective reflexes. It is the same with pleasure. This following of a routine, however effective or necessary in daily life, can lead, and generally does, to a mechanistic way of living. One can do the same thing at the same hour every day without it becoming a habit when there is an awareness of what is being done. Attention dispels habit. It is only when there is no attention that habits are formed. You can get up at the same time every morning and you know why you are getting up. This awareness may appear to another as a habit, good or bad, but actually for the one who is aware, is attentive, there is no habit at all. We fall into psychological habits or routine because we think it is the most comfortable way of living,and when you observe closely even with the habits formed in relationship,personal or other,there is a certain quality of indolence, carelessness and disregard. All this gives a false sense of intimacy, security and facile cruelty. There is every danger in habit:the habit of smoking, the repetitive action, the employment of words, thought or behaviour. This makes the mind utterly insensitive and the degenerating process is to find some form of illusory security such as a nation, a belief or an ideal and cling to it. All these factors are very destructive to real security. We live in a make-believe world which has become a reality. To question this illusion is to become either a revolutionary or to embrace permissiveness. Both these are factors of degeneration. After all, the brain with its extraordinary capacities has been conditioned from generation to generation into accepting this fallacious security, which has now become a deep-rooted habit. To break down this habit we go through various forms of torture, multiple escapes, or throw ourselves into some idealistic utopia and so on. It is the problem of the educator to investigate,and his creative capacity lies in observing very closely his deep-rooted conditioning and that of the student. This is a mutual process: not that you investigate your conditioning first and then inform the other of your discoveries, but explore together and find the truth of the matter. This demands a certain quality of patience; not the patience of time but perseverance and the diligent care of total responsibility. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH MARCH, 1979 We have become far too clever. Our brains have been trained to become verbally, intellectually, very bright. They are crammed with a great deal of information and we use this for a profitable career. A clever, intellectual person is praised, shown honour. Such people seem to usurp all the important places in the world: they have power, position, prestige. But their cleverness betrays them at the end. In their hearts they never know what love is or deep charity and generosity, for they are enclosed in their vanity and arrogance. This has become the pattern of all the highly endowed schools. A boy or girl, accepted in the conventional school, gets trapped in modern civilization and is lost to the whole beauty of life. When you wander through the woods with heavy shadows and dappled light and suddenly come upon an open space, a green meadow surrounded by stately trees, or a sparkling stream, you wonder why man has lost his relationship to nature and the beauty of the earth, the fallen leaf and the broken branch. If you have lost touch with nature, then you will inevitably lose relationship with another. Nature is not just the flowers, the lovely green lawn or the flowing waters in your little garden, but the whole earth with all the things on it. We consider that nature exists for our use, for our convenience, and so lose communion with the earth. This sensitivity to the fallen leaf and to the tall tree on a hill is far more important than all the passing of examinations and having a bright career. Those are not the whole of life. Life is like a vast river with a great volume of water without a beginning or an ending. We take out of that fast running current a bucket of water and that confined water becomes our life. This is our conditioning and our everlasting sorrow The movement of thought is not beauty. Thought can create what appears to be beautiful - the painting, the marble figure or a lovely poem - but this is not beauty. Beauty is supreme sensitivity, not to the sense of one's own pains and anxieties, but in encompassing the whole existence of man. There is beauty only when the current of the me has completely dried up. When the me is not, beauty is. With the abandonment of the self the passion of beauty comes into being. We have been talking over together in these letters the degeneration of the mind. We have pointed out for your examination and investigation some of the ways of this deterioration. One of its basic activities is thought. Thought is a breaking up of the wholeness of the mind. The whole contains the part, but the part can never be that which is complete.Thought is the most active part of our life. Feeling goes with thought. Essentially they are one though we tend to separate them. Having separated them we give great importance to feeling, to sentiment, to romanticism and devotion, but thought, like a string in a necklace, weaves itself through them all, hidden, alive, controlling and shaping. It is always there, though we like to think our deep emotions are essentially different. In this lies great illusion, a deception that is highly regarded and leads to dishonesty. As we said, thought is the actuality of our daily life. All so-called sacred books are the product of thought. They may be revered as revelation but they are essentially thought. Thought has put together the turbine and the great temples of the earth, the rocket, and the enmity in men. Thought has been responsible for wars, for the language one uses and the image made by hand or by the mind. Thought dominates relationship. Thought has described what love is, the heavens and the pain of misery. Man worships thought, admires its subtleties, its cunning, its violence, its cruelties for a cause. Thought has brought great advances in technology and with it a capacity for destruction. This has been the story of thought, repeated throughout the centuries. Why has humanity given such extraordinary importance to thought? Is it because it is the only thing we have, even though it is activated through senses? Is it because thought has been able to dominate nature, dominate its surroundings, has brought about some physical security? Is it because it is the greatest instrument through which man operates, lives and benefits? Is it because thought has made the gods, the saviours, the super-consciousness, forgetting the anxiety, the fear, the sorrow, the envy, the guilt? Is it because it holds people together as a nation, as a group, as a sect? Is it because it offers hope to a dark life? Is it because it gives an opening to escape from the daily boring ways of our life? Is it because not knowing what the future is, it offers the security of the past, its arrogance, its insistence on experience? Is it because in knowledge there is stability, the avoidance of fear in the certainty of the known? Is it because thought in itself has assumed an invulnerable position, taken a stand against the unknown? Is it because love is unaccountable, not measurable, while thought is measured and resists the changeless movement of love? We have never questioned the very nature of thought. We have accepted thought as inevitable, as our eyes and legs. We have never probed to the very depth of thought: and because we have never questioned it, it has assumed preeminence. It is the tyrant of our life and tyrants are rarely challenged. So as educators we are going to expose it to the bright light of observation. The light of observation not only instantly dispels illusion but the clarity of its light reveals the tiniest detail of that which is being observed. As we said, observation is not from a fixed point, from a belief, prejudice or conclusion. Opinion is a rather shoddy affair and so also is experience. The man of experience is a dangerous person because he is caught in the prison of his own knowledge. So can you observe with extraordinary clarity the whole movement of thought? This light is freedom: it does not mean that you have captured it and employed it for your convenience and benefit. The very observation of thought is the observation of your whole being and this very being is put together by thought. As thought is finite, limited, so are you. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST APRIL, 1979 We are still concerned with the wholeness of the mind. The mind includes the senses, the erratic emotions, the capacity of the brain and ever-restless thought. All this is the mind, including various attributes of consciousness. When the whole mind is in operation it is boundless, it has great energy and action without the shadow of regret and promise of reward. This quality of mind, this wholeness, is intelligence. Can this intelligence be conveyed to the student and help her or him to quickly grasp its significance? Surely it is the responsibility of the educator to bring this about. The capacity of thought is shaped and controlled by desire and so the capacity is narrowed down. This capacity is limited by the movement of desire: desire is the essence of sensation. Ambition limits the capacity of the brain, which is thought. This capacity is restricted by social and economic demands or by one's own experience and motive. It is narrowed down by an ideal, by the sanctions of various religious beliefs, by unending fear. Fear is not separate from pleasure. Desire - the essence of sensation - is shaped by environment, by tradition, by our own inclinations and temperament. And thus capacity or action that demands total energy is conditioned according to our comfort and pleasure. Desire is a compelling factor in our life, not to be suppressed or evaded, not to be cajoled and reasoned with, but rather to be understood. This understanding can only come into being through the investigation of desire and the observation of its movement. Knowing the impelling fire of desire, most religious and sectarian prohibitions have made it into something that must be suppressed, controlled or surrendered -handed over, as it were, to a deity or principle. The innumerable vows that people have taken totally to deny desire have in no way burned it out. It is there. So we must approach it differently, bearing in mind that intelligence is not awakened by desire. A desire to go to the moon brings about enormous technical knowledge, but that knowledge is limited intelligence. Knowledge is always specialized and therefore incomplete, whereas we are talking of intelligence which is the movement of the wholeness of the mind. It is with this intelligence that we are concerned and with the awakening of it in both educator and the student. As we said earlier, capacity is limited by desire. Desire is sensation, the sensation of new experience, of new forms of excitement, the sensation of climbing the highest peaks on earth, the sensation of power, of status.All this limits the energy of the brain. Desire gives the illusion of security, and the brain, which needs security, encourages and sustains every form of desire. So if we do not understand the place of desire, it brings about degeneration of the mind. This is really important to understand. Thought is the movement of this desire. Curiosity to discover is urged by desire for greater sensations and the illusory certainty of security. Curiosity has brought about the enormous amount of knowledge which has its importance in our daily life. Curiosity has significance in observation. Thought may be the central factor of degeneration of the mind, whereas insight opens the door to the wholeness of action. We will go into the full meaning of insight in the next letter but for now we must consider whether thought is a destructive factor to the wholeness of the mind. We have made the statement that it is. Do not accept it until you have thoroughly, freely examined it. What we mean by wholeness of the mind is infinite capacity and its total emptiness in which there is immeasurable energy. Thought by its very nature being limited, imposes its narrowness on the whole, and so thought is always in the forefront. Thought is limited because it is the outcome of memory and knowledge accumulated through experience. Knowledge is the past and that which has been is always limited. Remembrance may project a future. That future is tied to the past, so thought is always limited. Thought is measurable - the more and the less, the larger, the smaller. This measurement is the movement of time: I have been, I shall be. So thought when it predominates, however subtle, cunning and vital, perverts the wholeness and we have given to thought the greatest importance. If one may ask, after having read this letter, have you grasped the significance of the nature of thought and the wholeness of the mind? And if you have, can you convey this to the student who is your total responsibility? This is a difficult matter.If you have no light you cannot help another to have it. You may explain very clearly or define it in chosen words, but it will not have the passion of truth. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH APRIL, 1979 Any form of conflict, struggle, corrupts the mind - the mind being the wholeness of all our existence.This quality is destroyed when there is any kind of friction, any kind of contradiction. As most of us live in a perpetual state of contradiction and conflict, this lack of completeness makes for degeneration. We are concerned here to discover for ourselves whether it is at all possible to bring an end to these degenerating factors. Perhaps most of us have never thought about this; we have accepted it as a normal way of life. We have convinced ourselves that conflict brings growth - as competition - and we have various explanations for this: the tree struggles in the forest for light, the baby just born struggles for breath, the mother labours to deliver. We are conditioned to accept this and to live in this manner. This has been the way of our life for generations and any suggestion that perhaps there might be a way of life without conflict seems quite incredible. You may listen to this as some idealistic nonsense or reject it out of hand, but you never consider whether there is any significance in the statement that it is possible to live a life without a shadow of conflict. When we are concerned with the integrity and responsibility of bringing about a new generation, which as educators is the only function we have, can you investigate this fact? And in the very process of educating can you convey to the student what you are discovering for yourself? Conflict in any form is an indication of resistance. In a fast-flowing river there is no resistance;it flows around big boulders, through villages and towns. Man controls it for his own purpose. Freedom after all implies, does it not, the absence of the resistance that thought has built around itself? Honesty is a very complex affair. What are you honest about and for what reason? Can you be honest with yourself and so be fair to another? When one says to oneself that one must be honest, is that possible? Is honesty a matter of ideals? Can an idealist ever be honest? He is living in a future carved out of the past; he is caught between that which has been and that which ought to be and so he can never be honest. Can you be honest with yourself? Is that possible? You are the centre of various activities, sometimes contradictory; of various thoughts, feelings and desires which are always in opposition to each other. Which is the honest desire or thought and which is not? These are not mere rhetorical questions or clever arguments. It is very important to find out what it means to be totally honest because we are going to deal with insight and the immediacy of action. It is utterly important,if we would grasp the depth of insight, to have this quality of complete integrity, that integrity which is the honesty of the whole. One may be honest about an ideal, a principle or an ingrained belief. Surely this is not honesty. Honesty can only be when there is no conflict of duality, when the opposite does not exist. There is darkness and light, night and day; there is man, woman, the tall, the short and so on, but it is thought that makes them opposites, puts them in contradiction. We are expressing the psychological contradiction that mankind has cultivated. Love is not the opposite of hate or jealousy. If it were, it would not be love.Humility is not the opposite of vanity or pride and arrogance. If it were,it would still be part of arrogance and pride and so not humility. Humility is totally divorced from all this. A mind that is humble is unaware of its humility. So honesty is not the opposite of dishonesty. One can be sincere in one's belief or in one's concept but that sincerity breeds conflict and where there is conflict there is no honesty. So we are asking can you be honest to yourself?Yourself is a mixture of many movements crossing each other, dominating each other and rarely flowing together. When all these movements flow together then there is honesty. Again there is the separation between the conscious and unconscious, god and the devil; thought has brought about this division and the conflict that exists between these divisions. Goodness has no opposite. With this new understanding of what honesty is, we can proceed with the investigation of what is insight? This is utterly important because this may be the factor that may revolutionize our action and may bring about a transformation in the brain itself. We have said that our way of life has become mechanistic: the past with all the accumulated experience and knowledge,which is the source of thought, is directing, shaping all action. The past and the future are interrelated and inseparable and the very process of thinking is based upon this. Thought is ever-limited, finite; though it may pretend to reach heaven, that very heaven is within the frame of thought. Memory is measurable, as time is. This movement of thought can never be fresh, new, original. So action based on thought must ever be broken up, incomplete, contradictory. This whole movement of thought must be deeply understood with its relative place in the necessities of life, things that must be remembered. Then what is action which is not the continuance of remembrance? It is insight. Insight is not the careful deduction of thought, the analytical process of thought or the time-binding nature of memory. It is perception without the perceiver; it is instantaneous. From this insight action takes place. from this insight the explanation of any problem is accurate, final and true.There are no regrets, no reactions. It is absolute. There can be no insight without the quality of love. Insight is not an intellectual affair to be argued and patented. This love is the highest form of sensitivity - when all the senses are flowering together. Without this sensitivity - not to one's desires, problems and all the pettiness of one's own life - insight is obviously quite impossible. Insight is holistic. Holistic implies the whole, the whole of the mind. The mind is all the experience of humanity, the vast accumulated knowledge with its technical skills, with its sorrows, anxiety, pain, grief and loneliness. But insight is beyond all this. Freedom from sorrow, from grief,from loneliness, is essential for insight to be. Insight is not a continuous movement. It cannot be captured by thought. Insight is supreme intelligence and this intelligence employs thought as a tool. Insight is intelligence with its beauty and love. they are really inseparable: they are actually one. This is the whole which is the most sacred. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST MAY, 1979 After all, the school is a place where one learns not only the knowledge required for daily life but also the art of living with all its complexities and subtleties. We seem to forget this and become totally caught up in the superficiality of knowledge. Knowledge is always superficial and learning the art of living is not thought necessary.Living is not considered an art.When one leaves school one stops learning and continues to live on that which one has accumulated as knowledge. We never consider that life is a whole process of learning. As one observes life, daily living is a constant change and movement and one's mind is not quick and sensitive enough to follow its subtleties. One comes to it with ready-made reactions and fixations. Can this be prevented in these schools? It does not mean that one must have an open mind. Generally the open mind is like a sieve retaining little or nothing. But a mind that is capable of quick perception and action is necessary. That is why we went into the question of insight with its immediacy of action. Insight does not leave the scar of memory. Generally experience, as it is understood,leaves its residue as memory and from this residue one acts. Thus action strengthens the residue and so action becomes mechanical. Insight is not a mechanistic activity. So can it be taught in the school that daily life is a constant process of learning and action in relationship without strengthening the residue which is memory? With most of us the scar becomes all-important and we lose the swift current of life. Both the student and the educator live in a state of confusion and disorder, both outwardly and inwardly. One may not be aware of this fact and if one is, one quickly puts order into outward things but one is rarely aware of inner confusion and disorder. God is disorder. Consider the innumerable gods man has invented, or the one god, the one saviour, and observe the confusion this has created in the world, the wars it has brought about, the innumerable divisions, the separating beliefs, symbols and images. Isn't this confusion and disorder? We have become accustomed to this, we accept it readily, for our life is so wearisome with boredom and pain that we seek comfort in the gods that thought has conjured up. This has been our way of life for thousands of years. Every civilization has invented gods and they have been the source of great tyranny, wars and destruction. Their buildings may be extraordinarily beautiful but inside there is darkness and the source of confusion. Can one put aside these gods? One must if one is to consider why the human mind accepts and lives in disorder politically, religiously and economically. What is the source of this disorder, the actuality of it, not the theological reason? Can one put aside the concepts of disorder and be free to enquire into the actual daily source of our disorder, not into what order is but disorder? We can only find out what is absolute order when we have thoroughly investigated disorder and its source. We are so eager to find out what order is, so impatient with disorder that we are apt to suppress it, thinking thereby to bring about order. Here we are not only asking if there can be absolute order in our daily life but also whether this confusion can end. So our first concern is with disorder and what is its source. Is it thought? Is it contradictory desires? Is it fear and the search for security? Is it the constant demand for pleasure? Is thought one of the sources or the main reason for the disorder? It is not merely the writer but you who are asking these questions, so please bear this in mind all the time. You must discover the source, not be told the source and then verbally repeat. Thought, as we have pointed out, is finite, limited, and whatever is limited, however wide its activities may be, inevitably brings confusion. That which is limited is divisive and therefore destructive and confusing. We have gone sufficiently into the nature and structure of thought, and to have an insight into the nature of thought is to give it its right place and so it loses its overpowering domination. Is desire and the changing objects of desire one of the causes of our disorder? To suppress desire is to suppress all sensation -which is to paralyse the mind. We think this is the easy and quickest way to end desire but one cannot suppress it; it is much too strong, much too subtle. You cannot grasp it in your hand and twist it according to your wish - which is another desire. We have talked about desire in a previous letter.Desire can never be suppressed or transmuted or corrupted by the right and wrong desire. It remains always sensation and desire, whatever you do about it. Desire for enlightenment and desire for money are the same, though the objects vary. Can one live without desire? Or to put it differently, can the senses be supremely active without desire coming into it. There are sensory activities both psychological and physical. The body seeks warmth, food, sex; there is physical pain and so on. These sensations are natural but when they enter into the psychological field, the trouble begins. And therein lies our confusion. This is important to understand, especially when we are young. To observe the physical sensations without suppression or exaggeration and to be alert, watchful that they do not seep into the psychological inner realm where they don't belong - therein lies our difficulty. The whole process happens so quickly because we do not see this, have not understood it, have never really examined what actually takes place. There is immediate sensory response to challenge. This response is natural and is not under the domination of thought, of desire. Our difficulty begins when these sensory responses enter into the psychological realm. The challenge may be a woman or man or something pleasant, appetizing; or a lovely garden. The response to this is sensation and when this sensation enters the psychological field desire begins and thought with its images seeks the fulfilment of desire. Our question is how to prevent the natural physical responses from entering into the psychological? Is this possible? It is possible only when you observe the nature of the challenge with great attention and watch carefully responses. This total attention will prevent the physical responses entering into the inward psyche. We are concerned with desire and the understanding of it, not the brutalizing factor of suppressing, avoiding or sublimating. You cannot live without desire. When you are hungry you need food. But to understand, which is to investigate the whole activity of desire, is to give it its right place.Thus it will not be a source of disorder in our daily life. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH MAY, 1979 What man has done to man has no limit. He has tortured him, he has burned him, he has killed him, he has exploited him in every possible way - religious, political, economic. This has been the story of man to man; the clever exploit the stupid, the ignorant. All philosophies are intellectual and therefore not whole. These philosophies have enslaved man. They have invented what society should be and sacrificed man to their concepts; the ideals of the so-called thinkers have dehumanized man. Exploitation of another -man or woman - seems to be the way of our daily life. We use each other and each accepts this usage. Out of this peculiar relationship dependence arises with all its misery, confusion and the agony that is inherent in dependence. Man has been both inwardly and outwardly so treacherous to himself and to others, and how can there be love in these circumstances? So it becomes very important for the educator to feel total responsibility in his personal relationship not only to the student but to the whole of mankind. He is mankind. If he does not feel responsible for himself totally, then he will be incapable of feeling this passion of total responsibility which is love. Do you as an educator feel this responsibility? If not - why not? You may feel responsible for your own wife, husband or children and may disregard or feel no responsibility for another. But if you feel responsible in yourself completely you cannot but be responsible for the whole of man. This question - why you do not feel responsible for another is very important. Responsibility is not an emotional reaction, not something you impose upon yourself - to feel responsible. Then it becomes duty and duty has lost the perfume or the beauty of this inward quality of total responsibility. It is not something you invite as a principle or an idea to hold on to, like possessing a chair or a watch.A mother may feel responsible for her child, feel the child is part of her blood and flesh and so give all her care and attention to that baby for some years. Is this maternal instinct responsibility? It may be that we have inherited this peculiar attachment to the child from the first animal. It exists in all nature from the tiniest little bird to the majestic elephant. We are asking - is this instinct responsibility? If it were, the parents would feel responsible for a right kind of education, for a totally different kind of society. They would see that there were no wars and that they themselves flowered in goodness. So it appears that a human being is not concerned for another but is committed only to himself. This commitment is total irresponsibility. His own emotions, his own personal desires, his own attachments, his success, his advancement - these will inevitably breed ruthlessness both open and subtle. Is this the way of true responsibility? In these schools he that gives and he that receives are both responsible and so they can never indulge in this peculiar quality of separateness. The egotistic separateness is perhaps the very root of the degeneration of the wholeness of the mind with which we are deeply concerned. This does not mean that there is no personal relationship, with its affection, with its tenderness, with its encouragement and support. But when the personal relationship becomes all-important and responsible only to the few, then the mischief has begun; the reality of this is known to every human being. This fragmentation of relationship is the degenerating factor in our life. We have broken up relationship so that it is to the personal, to a group, to a nation, to certain concepts and so on. That which is fragmented can never comprehend the wholeness of responsibility. From the little we are always trying to capture the greater. The better is not the good and all our thought is based on the better, the more - better at exams, better jobs, better status, better gods, nobler ideas. The better is the outcome of comparison. The better picture, the better technique, the greater musician, the more talented, the more beautiful and the more intelligent depend on this comparison. We rarely look at a painting for itself,or at a man or woman for themselves. There is always this inbred quality of comparison. Is love comparison? Can you ever say you love this one more than that one? When there is this comparison, is that love? When there is this feeling of the more, which is measurement, then thought is in operation. Love is not the movement of thought. This measurement is comparison. We are encouraged throughout our life to compare. When in your school you compare B with A you are destroying both of them. So is it possible to educate without any sense of comparison? And why do we compare? We compare for the simple reason that measuring is the way of thought and the way of our life. We are educated in this corruption. The better is always nobler than what is, than what is actually going on. The observation of what is, without comparison, without the measure, is to go beyond what is. When there is no comparison there is integrity. It is not that you are true to yourself, which is a form of measurement, but when there is no measurement at all there is this quality of wholeness. The essence of the ego, the me, is measurement. When there is measurement there is fragmentation. This must be profoundly understood not as an idea but as an actuality. When you read this statement you may make an abstraction of it as an idea, a concept, and the abstraction is another form of measurement. That which is has no measurement. Please give your heart to the understanding of this. When you have grasped the full significance of this, your relationship with the student and with your own family will become something quite different. If you ask if that difference will be better, then you are caught in the wheel of measurement. Then you are lost. You will find the difference when you actually test this out. The very word difference implies measurement but we are using the word non-comparatively. Almost every word we use has this feeling of measurement so the words affect our reactions and reactions deepen the sense of comparison. The word and the reaction are interrelated and the art lies in not being conditioned by the word, which means that language does not shape us. Use the word without the psychological reactions to it. As we said, we are concerned with communicating with each other about the nature of the degeneration of our minds and so the ways of our life. Enthusiasm is not passion. You can be enthusiastic about something one day and lose it the next. You can be enthusiastic about playing football and lose interest when it no longer entertains you. But passion is something entirely different. It has no time lag in it. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST JUNE, 1979 As a rule parents have very little time for their children except when they are babies. They send them to the local or boarding schools or they allow others to look after them. They may not have time or the necessary patience to educate them at home. They are occupied with their own problems. So our schools become the children's home and the educators become the parents with all the responsibility. We have written about this earlier and it is not out of place to repeat it: home is a place where there is a certain freedom,a sense of being secure, provided for and sheltered. Do the children in these schools feel this? - that they are being carefully watched over, given a great deal of thought and affection, and concern for their behaviour, their food, their clothes and their manner? If so the school becomes a place where the student feels that he is really at home,with all its implications,that there are people around him who are looking after his tastes, the way he talks, that he is being looked after physically as well as psychologically, being helped to be free from hurts and fear. This is the responsibility of every teacher in these schools, not of one or two. The whole school exists for this, for an atmosphere in which both the educators and the students are flowering in goodness. The educator needs leisure to be quiet by himself, to gather the energy that has been expended, to be aware of his own personal problems and resolve them, so that when he meets the students again he does not carry the rumour, the noise of his personal turmoil. As we have pointed out earlier, any problem arising in our lives should be resolved instantly or as quickly as possible, for problems, when they are carried from day to day, degenerate the sensitivity of the whole mind. This sensitivity is essential. We lose this sensitivity when we are merely instructing the student in a subject. When the subject becomes the only importance, sensitivity fades away and then you really lose contact with the student. The student then is merely a receptacle for information. Thus your mind and the student's become mechanical. Generally we are sensitive to our own problems, to our own desires and thoughts and rarely to others. When we are constantly in contact with the students there is a tendency to impose our own images on them, or, if the student has his own strong image, there is conflict between these images. So it becomes very important that the educator should leave his images at home and become concerned with the images that parents or society have imposed on the student, or the image that he himself has created. It is only in function that there can be relationship and generally the relationship between two images is illusory. Physical and psychological problems waste our energy. Can the educator be physically secure in these schools yet be free of psychologic problems? This is really important to understand. When there is not this sense of physical security, uncertainty brings about psychological turmoil. This encourages dullness of the mind and so the passion that is so necessary in our daily life withers away and enthusiasm takes its place. Enthusiasm is a dangerous thing for it is never constant. It rises in a wave and is gone. This is mistaken for seriousness. You may be enthusiastic for some time about what you are doing, eager, active, but inherent in it is dissipation. Again it is essential that we understand this for most relationship is prone to this wastage. Passion is wholly different from lust, interest or enthusiasm. Interest in something can be very deep and you can use that interest for profit or for power, but that interest is not passion. Interest may be stimulated by an object or by an idea. Interest is self-indulgence. Passion is free of the self. Enthusiasm is always about something. Passion is a flame of itself. Enthusiasm can be aroused by another, something outside of you. Passion is the summation of energy which is not the outcome of any kind of stimulation. Passion is beyond the self. Have the teachers this sense of passion? - for out of this comes creation. In teaching subjects one has to find new ways of transmitting information without this information making the mind mechanical. Can you teach history - which is the story of mankind - not as the Indian, the English, American and so on, but as the story of man which is global? Then the educator's mind is always fresh, eager, discovering a wholly different approach to teaching. In this the educator is intensely alive and with this aliveness goes passion. Can this be done in all our schools? - for we are concerned with bringing about a different society, with the flowering of goodness, with a non-mechanistic mind. True education is this, and will you, the educators, undertake this responsibility? In this responsibility lies the flowering of goodness in yourself and in the student. We are responsible for the whole of mankind - which is you and the student. You have to start there and cover the whole earth. You can go very far if you start very near. The nearest is you and your student. We generally start with the farthest - the supreme principle, the greatest ideal, and get lost in some hazy dream of imaginative thought. But when you start very near, with the nearest, which is you, then the whole world is open, for you are the world and the world beyond you is only nature. Nature is not imaginary: it is actual and what is happening to you now is actual. From the actual you must begin - with what is happening now - and the now is timeless. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH JUNE, 1979 Most human beings are selfish. They are not conscious of their own selfishness; it is the way of their life. And if one is aware that one is selfish,one hides it very carefully and conforms to the pattern of society which is essentially selfish.The selfish mind is very cunning. Either it is brutally and openly selfish or it takes many forms. If you are a politician the selfishness seeks power, status and popularity; it identifies itself with an idea,a mission and all for the public good. If you are a tyrant it expresses itself in brutal domination. If you are inclined to be religious it takes the form of adoration, devotion, adherence to some belief, some dogma. It also expresses itself in the family; the father pursues his own selfishness in all the ways of his life and so does the mother. Fame, prosperity, good looks form a basis for this hidden creeping movement of the self. It is in the hierarchical structure of the priesthood, however much they may proclaim their love of God, their adherence to the self-created image of their particular deity. The captains of industry and the poor clerk have this expanding and benumbing sensuality of the self. The monk who has renounced the ways of the world may wander the face of the world or may be locked away in some monastery but has not left this unending movement of the self. They may change their names, put on robes or take vows of celibacy or silence, but they burn with some ideal, with some image, some symbol. It is the same with the scientists, with the philosophers and the professors in the university. The doer of good works, the saints and gurus, the man or the woman who works endlessly for the poor -they all attempt to lose themselves in their work but the work is part of it. They have transferred the egotism to their labours. It begins in childhood and continues to old age. The conceit of knowledge, the practised humility of the leader, the submitting wife and dominating man, all have this disease. The self identifies with the State, with endless groups, with endless ideas and causes but it remains what it was at the beginning. Human beings have tried various practices, methods, meditations to be free of this centre which causes so much misery and confusion, but like a shadow it is never captured. It is always there and it slips through your fingers,through your mind. Sometimes it is strengthened or becomes weak according to circumstances. You corner it here, it turns up there. One wonders if the educator, who is so responsible for a new generation, understands non-verbally what a mischievous thing the self is,how corrupting, distorting, how dangerous it is in our lives. He may not know how to be free of it, he may not even be aware it is there but once he sees the nature of the movement of the self can he or she convey its subtleties to the student? And is it not his responsibility to do this? The insight into the working of the self is greater than academic learning. Knowledge can be used by the self for its own expansion, its aggressiveness, its innate cruelty. Selfishness is the essential problem of our life. Conforming and imitation are part of the self, as is competition and the ruthlessness of talent. If the educator in these schools takes this question to his heart seriously, which I hope he does,then how will he help the student to be selfless? You might say it is a gift of the strange gods or brush it aside as being impossible. But if you are serious, as one must be, and are totally responsible for the student, how will you set about freeing the mind from this ageless binding energy? - the self which has caused so much sorrow? Would you not, with great care - which implies affection - explain in simple words what the consequences are when he speaks in anger, or when he hits somebody, or when he is thinking of his own importance? Is it not possible to explain to him that when he insists "this is mine" or boasts "I did it" or avoids through fear a certain action, he is building a wall, brick by brick, around himself? Is it not possible when his desires, his sensations overpower his rational thinking, to point out that the shadow of self is growing? Is it not possible to say to him that where the self is,in any guise, there is no love? But the student might ask the educator, "Have you realized all this or are you just playing with words"? That very question might awaken your own intelligence and that very intelligence will give you the right feeling and the right words as answer. As an educator you have no status; you are a human being with all the problems of life like a student. The moment you speak from status you are actually destroying the human relation. Status implies power and when you are seeking this, consciously or unconsciously, you enter a world of cruelty. You have a great responsibility, my friend, and if you take this total responsibility which is love, then the roots of the self are gone. This is not said as an encouragement or to make you feel that you must do this, but as we are all human beings, representing the whole of mankind, we are totally and wholly responsible whether we choose to be or not. You may try to evade it but that very movement is the action of the self. Clarity of perception is freedom from the self. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST JULY, 1979 The flowering of goodness is the release of our total energy. It is not the control or suppression of energy but rather the total freedom of this vast energy. It is limited, narrowed down by thought, by the fragmentation of our senses. Thought itself is this energy manipulating itself into a narrow groove, a centre of the self. Flowering of goodness can only blossom when energy is free, but thought, by its very nature, has limited this energy and so the fragmentation of the senses takes place.Hence there are the senses, sensations, desires and the images that thought creates out of desire. All this is a fragmentation of energy. Can this limited movement be aware of itself? That is, can the senses be aware of themselves? Can desire see itself arising out of the senses, out of the sensation of the image thought has created, and can thought be aware of itself, of its movement? All this implies - can the whole physical body be aware of itself? We live by our senses. One of them is usually dominant; the listening, the seeing, the tasting seem to be separate from each other, but is this a fact? Or is it that we have given to one or other a greater importance - or rather that thought has given the greater importance? One may hear great music and delight in it, and yet be insensitive to other things. One may have a sensitive taste and be wholly insensitive to delicate colour. This is fragmentation. When each fragment is aware only of itself then fragmentation is maintained. In this way energy is broken up. If this is so, as it appears to be, is there a non-fragmentary awareness by all the senses? And thought is part of the senses. This implies - can the body be aware of itself? Not you being aware of your own body, but the body itself being aware. This is very important to find out. It cannot be taught by another:then it is secondhand information which thought is imposing upon itself. You must discover for yourself whether the whole organism, the physical entity, can be aware of itself. You may be aware of the movement of an arm, a leg or the head, and through that movement sense that you are becoming aware of the whole, but what we are asking is: can the body be aware of itself without any movement? This is essential to find out because thought has imposed its pattern on the body, what it thinks is right exercise, right food and so on. So there is the domination of thought over the organism; there is consciously or unconsciously a struggle between thought and the organism. In this way thought is destroying the natural intelligence of the body itself. Does the body, the physical organism, have its own intelligence? It has when all the senses are acting together in harmony so that there is no straining, no emotional or sensory demands of desire. When one is hungry one eats but usually taste, formed by habit, dictates what one eats. So fragmentation takes place. A healthy body can be brought about only through the harmony of all the senses which is the intelligence of the body itself. What we are asking is: does not disharmony bring about the wastage of energy? Can the organism's own intelligence, which has been suppressed or destroyed by thought, be awakened? Remembrance plays havoc with the body. The remembrance of yesterday's pleasure makes thought master of the body. The body then becomes a slave to the master, and intelligence is denied. So there is conflict. This struggle may express itself as laziness, fatigue, indifference or in neurotic responses. When the body has its own intelligence freed from thought, though thought is part of it, this intelligence will guard its own well-being. Pleasure dominates our life in its crudest or most educated forms. And pleasure essentially is a remembrance - that which has been or that which is anticipated. Pleasure is never at the moment. When pleasure is denied, suppressed or blocked, out of this frustration neurotic acts, such as violence and hatred, take place. Then pleasure seeks other forms and outlets; satisfaction and dissatisfaction arise. To be aware of all these activities, both physical and psychological, requires an observation of the whole movement of one's life. When the body is aware of itself, then we can ask a further and perhaps more difficult question: can thought, which has put together this whole consciousness, be aware of itself? Most of the time thought dominates the body and so the body loses its vitality, intelligence,its own intrinsic energy, and hence has neurotic reactions. Is the intelligence of the body different from total intelligence which can come about only when thought, realizing its own limitation, finds its right place? As we said at the beginning of this letter, the flowering of goodness can take place only when there is the release of total energy. In this release there is no friction. It is only in this supreme undivided intelligence that there is this flowering. This intelligence is not the child of reason. The totality of this intelligence is compassion. Mankind has tried to release this immense energy through various forms of control, through exhausting discipline, through fasting, through sacrificial denials offered to some supreme principle or god, or through manipulating this energy through various states. All this implies the manipulation of thought towards a desired end. But what we are saying is quite contrary to all this. Can all this be conveyed to the student? It is your responsibility to do so. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH JULY, 1979 It is the concern of these schools to bring about a new generation of human beings who are free from self-centred action. No other educational centres are concerned with this and it is our responsibility, as educators, to bring about a mind that has no conflict within itself and end the struggle and conflict in the world about us. Can the mind, which is a complex structure and movement, free itself from the network it has woven? Every intelligent human being asks whether it is possible to end the conflict between man and man. Some have gone into it very deeply, intellectually: others, seeing the hopelessness of it, become bitter, cynical, or look to some outside agency to deliver them from their own chaos and misery. When we ask whether the mind can free itself from the prison it has created, it is not an intellectual or rhetorical question. It is asked in all seriousness; it is a challenge to which you have to respond not at your convenience or comfort, but according to the depth of that challenge. It cannot be postponed. A challenge is not asking whether it is possible or not, whether the mind is capable of freeing itself: the challenge, if it is worth anything at all, is immediate and intense. To respond to it you must have that quality of intensity and immediacy - the feeling of it. When there is this intense approach, then the question has great implications. The challenge is demanding the highest excellence from you, not just intellectually but with every faculty of your being. This challenge is not outside you. Please do not externalize it,which is to make a concept of it. You are demanding of yourself the totality of all your energy. That very demand wipes away all control, all contradiction and any opposition within yourself. It implies a total integrity, complete harmony. This is the essence of not being selfish. The mind with its emotional responses, with all the things that thought has put together, is our consciousness. This consciousness, with its content, is the consciousness of every human being, modified, not entirely similar, different in its nuances and subtleties, but basically the roots of its existence are common to all of us. Scientists and psychologists are examining this consciousness and the gurus are playing with it for their own ends. The serious ones are examining consciousness as a concept, as a laboratory process - the responses of the brain, alpha waves and so on - as something outside themselves. But we are not concerned with the theories, concepts, ideas about consciousness; we are concerned with its activity in our daily life. In the understanding of these activities, the daily responses, the conflicts, we will have an insight into the nature and structure of our own consciousness. As we pointed out, the basic reality of this consciousness is common to us all. It is not your particular consciousness or mine. We have inherited it and we are modifying it, changing it here and there, but its basic movement is common to all mankind. This consciousness is our mind with all its intricacies of thought - the emotions, the sensory responses, the accumulated knowledge, the suffering, the pain, the anxiety, the violence. All that is our consciousness. The brain is ancient and it is conditioned by centuries of evolution, by every kind of experience, by recent accumulations of increased knowledge. All this is consciousness in action in every moment of our life - the relationship between humans with all the pleasures, pains, confusion of contradictory senses and the gratification of desire with its pain. This is the movement of our life. We are asking, and this must be met as a challenge, whether this ancient movement can ever come to an end? - for this has become a mechanical activity, a traditional way of life. In the ending there is a beginning and then only is there neither ending nor beginning. Consciousness appears to be a very complex affair but actually it is very simple. Thought has put together all the content of our consciousness - its security, its uncertainty, its hopes and fears, the depression and elation, the ideal, the illusion. Once this is grasped -that thought is responsible for the whole content of our consciousness - then the inevitable question arises - whether thought can be stopped? Many attempts have been made, religious and mechanical, to end thought. The very demand for the ending of thought is part of the movement of thought. The very search for super consciousness is still the measure of thought. The gods, the rituals, all the emotional illusion of churches, temples and mosques with their marvellous architecture, is still the movement of thought. God is put in heaven by thought. Thought has not made nature. It is real. The chair is also real, and it is made by thought; all the things technology has brought about are real. Illusions are that which avoid the actual (that which is taking place now) but illusions become real because we live by them. The dog is not made by thought, but what we wish the dog to be is the movement of thought. Thought is measure. Thought is time. The whole of this is our consciousness. The mind, the brain, the senses are part of it. We are asking can this movement come to an end? Thought is the root of all our sorrow, all our ugliness. What we are asking for is the ending of these - the things that thought has put together - not the ending of thought itself but the ending of our anxiety, grief, pain, power, violence. With the ending of these, thought finds its rightful, limited place - the everyday knowledge and and memory one must have. When the contents of consciousness which have been put together by thought are no longer active, then there is vast space and so the release of immense energy which was limited by consciousness. Love is beyond this consciousness. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST AUGUST, 1979 Questioner: If I may ask you, what do you consider to be one of the most important things in life? I have thought about this matter considerably and there are so many things in life that all seem important. I would like to ask you this question in all seriousness. Krishnamurti: Perhaps it is the art of living. We are using the word art in its widest sense.As life is so complex, it is always difficult and confusing to pick one aspect and say it is the most important. The very choice, the differentiating quality, if I may point out, leads to further confusion. If you say this is the most important, then you relegate the other facts of life to a secondary position. Either we take the whole movement of life as one, which becomes extremely difficult for most people, or we take one fundamental aspect in which all the others may be included. If you agree to this, then we can proceed with our dialogue. Questioner: Do you mean to say that one aspect may cover the whole field of life? Is that possible? Krishnamurti: I It is possible. Let us go into it very slowly and hesitantly. First of all the two of us must investigate and not immediately come to some conclusion which is generally rather superficial. We are exploring together one facet of life and in the very understanding of it we may cover the whole field of life. To investigate we must be free of our prejudices, personal experiences, and predetermined conclusions. Like a good scientist we must have a mind unclouded by knowledge that we have already accumulated. We must come to it afresh and this is one of the necessities in exploration, the exploration not of an idea or series of philosophic concepts but of our own minds without any reaction to what is being observed. This is absolutely necessary; otherwise your own investigation is coloured by your own fears, hopes and pleasures. Questioner: Aren't you asking too much? Is it possible to have such a mind? Krishnamurti: The very urge to investigate and the intensity of it frees the mind from its colouring. As we said, one of the most important things is the art of living. Is there a way of living our daily life that is entirely different from what it normally is? We all know the usual. Is there a way of living without any control, without any conflict, without a disciplinary conformity? How do I find out? I can only find out when my whole mind is facing exactly what is happening now. This means I can only find out what it means to live without conflict, when what is happening now can be observed. This observation is not an intellectual or emotional affair but the acute, clear, sharp perception in which there is no duality. There is only the actual and nothing else. Questioner: What do you mean by duality in this instance? Krishnamurti: That there is no opposition or contradiction in what is going on. Duality arises only when there is an escape from what is. This escape creates the opposite and so conflict arises. There is only the actual and nothing else. Questioner: Are you saying that when something which is happening now is perceived, the mind must not come in with associations and reactions? Krishnamurti: Yes, that is what we mean. The associations and reactions to what is happening is the conditioning of the mind. This conditioning prevents the observation of what is taking place now. What is taking place now is free of time. Time is the evolution of our conditioning. It is man's inheritance, the burden that has no beginning. When there is this passionate observation of what is going on, that which is being observed dissolves into nothingness. The observation of the anger that is taking place now reveals the whole nature and structure of violence. This insight is the ending of all violence.It is not replaced by anything else and therein lies our difficulty. Our whole desire and urge is to find a definite end. In that end there is a sense of illusory security. Questioner: There is a difficulty for many of us in the observation of anger because emotions and reactions seem inextricably part of that anger. One doesn't feel anger without associations, content. Krishnamurti: Anger has many stories behind it. It isn't just a solitary event. It has, as you pointed out,a great many associations. These very associations, with their emotions, prevent the actual observation. With anger the content is the anger. The anger is the content; they are not two separate things. The content is the conditioning. In the passionate observation of what is actually going on - that is, the activities of the conditioning - the nature and structure of the conditioning are dissolved. Questioner: Are you saying that when an event is taking place there is the immediate, racing current of associations in the mind? And if one instantly sees this starting to happen, that observation instantly stops it and it is gone? Is this what you mean? Krishnamurti: Yes. It is really simple, so simple that you miss its very simplicity and so its subtlety. What we are saying is that whatever is happening - when you are walking, talking, "meditating" - the event that is taking place is to be observed. When the mind wanders, the very observation of it ends its chatter. So there is no distraction whatsoever at any time. Questioner: it seems as if you are saying that the content of thought essentially has no meaning in the art of living. Krishnamurti: Yes. Remembrance has no place in the art of living. Relationship is the art of living. If there is remembrance in relationship, it is not relationship. Relationship is between human beings, not their memories. It is these memories that divide and so there is contention, the opposition of the you and the me. So thought, which is remembrance, has no place whatsoever in relationship. This is the art of living. Relationship is to all things - to nature, the birds, the rocks, to everything around us and above us - to the clouds, the stars and to the blue sky. All existence is relationship. Without it you cannot live. Because we have corrupted relationship we live in a society that is degenerating. The art of living can come into being only when thought does not contaminate love. In the schools can the teacher be wholly committed to this art? LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH AUGUST, 1979 The greatest art is the art of living, greater than all things that human beings have created, by mind or hand, greater than all the scriptures and their gods. It is only through this art of living that a new culture can come into being. It is the responsibility of every teacher, especially in these schools, to bring this about. This art of living can come only out of total freedom. This freedom is not an ideal, a thing to take place eventually. The first step in freedom is the last step in it. It is the first step that counts, not the last step. What you do now is far more essential than what you do at some future date. Life is what is happening this instant, not an imagined instant, not what thought has conceived. So it is the first step you take now that is important. If that step is in the right direction, then the whole of life is open to you. The right direction is not towards an ideal, a predetermined end. It is inseparable from that which is taking place now. This is not a philosophy, a series of theories. It is exactly what the word philosophy means - the love of truth, the love of life.It is not something that you go to the university to learn. We are learning about the art of living in our daily life. We live by words and words become our prison. The words are necessary to communicate but the word is never the thing. The actual is not the word but the word becomes all-important when it has taken the place of that which is. You may observe this phenomenon when the description has become the reality instead of the thing itself - the symbol we worship, the shadow we follow, the illusion we cling to. And so words, the language, shape our reactions. Language becomes the compelling force and our minds are shaped and controlled by the word. The word nation, state, God, family and so on envelop us with all their associations and so our minds become slaves to the pressure of words. Questioner: How is this to be avoided? Krishnamurti: The word is never the thing. The word wife is never the person, the door is never the thing. The word prevents the actual perception of the thing or person because the word has many associations. These associations, which are actually remembrances, distort not only visual observation but psychological. Words then become a barrier to the free flow of observation. Take the words Prime Minister and clerk. They describe functions but the words Prime Minister have tremendous significance of power, status and importance whereas the word clerk has associations of unimportance, little status and no power. So the word prevents you from looking at both of them as human beings. There is ingrained snobbery in most of us, and to see what words have done to our thinking and to be choicelessly aware of it, is to learn the art of observation - to observe without association. Questioner: I understand what you say but again the speed of association is so instantaneous that the reaction takes place before one realizes it. Is it possible to prevent this? Krishnamurti: Is this not a wrong question? Who is to prevent it? Is it another symbol, another word, another idea? If it is, then one has not seen the whole significance of the enslavement of the mind by words, language. You see, we use words emotionally;it is a form of emotional thinking, apart from the use of technological words such as metres, numbers, which are precise. In human relationship and activity, emotions play a great part. Desire is very strong, sustained by thought creating the image. The image is the word, is the picture, and this follows our pleasure, our desire. So the whole way of our life is shaped by the word and its associations. To see this entire process as a whole isis to see the truth of how thought prevents perception. Questioner: Are you saying that there is no thinking without words? Krishnamurti: Yes, more or less. Please bear in mind that we are talking about the art of living, learning about it, not memorizing the words. We are learning; not we teaching and you becoming a silly disciple. You are asking if there is thinking without words. This is a very important question. Our whole thinking is based on memory, and memory is based on words, images, symbols, pictures. All these are words. Questioner: But what one remembers is not a word; it is an experience, an emotional event, a picture of a person or a place. The word is a secondary association. Krishnamurti: We are using the word to describe all this. After all, the word is a symbol to indicate that which has happened or is happening, to communicate or to evoke something. Is there a thinking without this whole process? Yes, there is,but it should not be called thinking. Thinking implies a cont- tinuation of memory but perception is not the activity of thought. It is really insight into the whole nature and movement of the word, the symbol, the image and their emotional involvements. To see this as a whole is to give the word its right place. Questioner: But what does it mean to see the whole? You say this often. What do you mean by it? Krishnamurti: Thought is divisive because in itself it is limited. To observe wholly implies the non-interference of thought - to observe without the past as knowledge blocking the observation. Then the observer is not, for the observer is the past, the very nature of thought. Questioner: Are you asking us to stop thought? Krishnamurti: Again, if we may point out, that is a wrong question. If thought tells itself to stop thinking, it creates duality and conflict. This is the very divisive process of thought. If you really grasp the truth of this, then naturally thought is in abeyance. Thought then has its own limited place.Thought then will not take over the whole expanse of life, which it is doing now. Questioner: Sir, I see what extraordinary attention is needed. Can I really have that attention, am I serious enough to give my whole energy to this? Krishnamurti: Can energy be divided at all? The energy expended in earning a livelihood, in having a family, and in being serious enough to grasp what is being said is all energy. But thought divides it and so we expend much energy on living and very little on the other. This is the art in which there is no division. This is the whole of life. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST SEPTEMBER, 1979 Why are we being educated? Perhaps you never ask this question, but if you do, what is your response to it? Many reasons are put forward for the necessity of being educated, arguments that are reasonable, quite necessary and mundane. The usual reply is to get a job, have a successful career, or to become skilful with your hands or with your mind. Great emphasis is laid upon the capacity of the mind to find itself a good, profitable career. If you are not intellectually bright then the skill of your hands becomes important. Education is necessary, it is said, to sustain society as it is, to conform to a pattern set by the so-called establishment, traditional or ultramodern. The educated mind has great capacity to gather information on almost any subject - art, science and so on. This informed mind is scholastic, professional, philosophical. Such erudition is greatly praised and honoured. This education,if you are studious,clever, swift in your learning, will assure you a bright future, the brightness of it depending on your social and environmental situation. If you are not so bright in this framework of education, you become a labourer, a factory worker or have to find a place at the bottom of this very complex society. This is generally the way of our education. What is education? It is essentially the art of learning, not only from books, but from the whole movement of life. The printed word has become consumingly all-important. You are learning what other people think, their opinions, their values, their judgements and a variety of their innumerable experiences. The library is more important than the man who has the library. He himself is the library and he assumes that he is learning by constant reading. This accumulation of information, as in a computer, is considered an educated, sophisticated mind. Then there are those who do not read at all, who are rather contemptuous of the other and are absorbed in their own self-centred experiences and assertive opinions. Recognising all this, what is the function of a holistic mind? We mean by the mind all the responses of the senses, the emotions -which are entirely different from love - and the intellectual capacity. We now give a fantastic importance to the intellect. We mean by the intellect the capacity to reason logically, sanely or without sanity, objectively or personally. It is the intellect with its movement of thought that brings about fragmentation of our human condition.It is the intellect that has divided the world linguistically, nationally,religiously - divided man from man. The intellect is the central factor of the degeneration of man throughout the world, for the intellect is only a part of the human condition and capacity. When the part is extolled, praised and given honours, when it assumes all-importance, then one's life which is relationship, action,conduct, becomes contradictory, hypocritical, then anxiety and guilt come into being.Intellect has its place, as in science, but man has used scientific knowledge not only for his benefit but to bring about instruments of war and pollution of the earth. The intellect can perceive its own activities which bring about degeneration but it is utterly incapable of putting an end to its own decline because essentially it is only a part. As we said, education is the essence of learning. Learning about the nature of the intellect, its dominance, its activities, its vast capacities and its destructive power is education. To learn the nature of thought,which is the very movement of the intellect, not from a book but from the observation of the world about you - to learn what exactly is happening without theories, prejudices and values, is education. Books are important but what is far more important is to learn the book, the story of yourself, because you are all mankind. To read that book is the art of learning. It is all there; the institutions, their pressures, the religious impositions and doctrines, their cruelty, their faiths. The social structure of all societies is the relationship between human beings with their greed, ambitions, their violence, their pleasures, their anxieties. It is there if you know how to look.The look is not inward. The book is not out there or hidden in yourself. It is all around you: you are part of that book. The book tells you the story of the human being and it is to be read in your relationships, in your reactions, in your concepts and values. The book is the very centre of your being and the learning is to read that book with exquisite care. The book tells you the story of the past, how the past shapes your mind, your heart and your senses. The past shapes the present, modifying itself according to the challenge of the moment. And in this endless movement of time human beings are caught. This is the conditioning of man. This conditioning has been the endless burden of man, of you and your brother. The philosophers, the theologians, the saints, have accepted this conditioning, have allowed the acceptance of it, making the best of it; or they have offered escapes into fantasies of mystical experiences, of gods and heavens. Education is the art of learning about this conditioning and the way out of it, the freedom from this burden. There is a way out which is not an escape, which does not accept things as they are.It is not the avoidance;of the conditioning, it is not the suppression of it. It is the dissolution of the conditioning. When you read this or when you hear it, be aware of whether you are listening or reading with the verbal capacity of the intellect or with the care of attention? When there is this total attention there is no past but only the pure observation of what is actually going on. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH SEPTEMBER, 1979 One is apt to forget or disregard the responsibility of the educator to bring about a new generation of human beings who are psychologically, inwardly free of miseries, anxieties and travail. It is a sacred responsibility, not to be easily set aside for one's own ambitions,status or power. If the educator feels such a responsibility - the greatness of it and the depth and beauty of that responsibility - he will find the capacity to instruct and to sustain his own energy. This demands great diligence, not a periodic, haphazard endeavour, and the very profound responsibility will kindle the fire that will maintain him as a total human being and a great teacher. As the world is rapidly degenerating, there must be in all these schools a group of teachers and students who are dedicated to bringing about a radical transformation of human beings through right education. The word right is not a matter of opinion, evaluation or some concept invented by the intellect. The word right denotes total action in which all self-interested motive ceases. The very dominant responsibility, the concern not only of the educator but also of the student, banishes self-perpetuating problems. However immature the mind, once you accept this responsibility that very acceptance brings about the flowering of the mind.This flowering is in the relationship between the student and the educator. It is not a one-sided affair. When you read this, please give your total attention and feel the urgency and intensity of this responsibility. Please do not make it into an abstraction, an idea, but rather observe the actual fact, the actual happening in the reading of this. Almost all human beings in their lives desire power and wealth. When there is wealth there is a sense of freedom, and pleasure is pursued. The desire for power seems be an instinct which expresses itself in many ways. It is in the priest, the guru, the husband or the wife, or in one boy over another. This desire to dominate or to submit is one of the conditions of man, probably inherited from the animal.This aggressiveness and the yielding to it pervert all relationships throughout life. This has been the pattern from the beginning of time. Man has accepted this as a natural way of life, with all the conflicts and miseries it brings. Basically measurement is involved in it - the more and the less, the greater and the smaller - which is essentially comparison. One is always comparing oneself with another, comparing one painting with another; there is comparison between the greater power and the lesser, between the timid and the aggressive. It begins almost at birth and continues throughout life - this constant measurement of power, position, wealth. This is encouraged in schools, colleges and universities. Their whole system of gradation is this comparative value of knowledge. When A is compared to B, who is clever, bright, assertive, that very comparison destroys A. This destruction takes the form of competition, of imitation and conformity to the patterns set by B. This breeds, consciously or unconsciously, antagonism, jealousy, anxiety and even fear; and this becomes the condition in which A lives for the rest of his life, always measuring, always comparing psychologically and physically. This comparison is one of the many aspects of violence. The word "more" is always comparative, as is the word "better". The question is, can the educator put aside all comparison, all measurement, in his teaching? Can he take the student as he is, not as what he should be, not make judgements based on comparative evaluations? It is only when there is comparison between the one called clever and the one called dull that there is such a quality as dullness. The idiot - is he an idiot because of comparison or because he is incapable of certain activities? We set certain standards which are based on measurement and those who do not come up to them are considered deficient. When the educator puts aside comparison and measurement, then he is concerned with the student as he is and his relationship with the student is direct and totally different. This is really very important to understand. Love is not comparative. It has no measurement. Comparison and measurement are ways of the intellect. This is divisive. When this is basically understood,not the verbal meaning but the actual truth of it - the relationship of teacher and student undergoes a radical change. The ultimate tests of measurement are the examinations with their fear and anxieties which deeply affect the future life of the student. The whole atmosphere of a school undergoes a change when there is no sense of competition, comparison. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST OCTOBER, 1979 It is one of the peculiarities of human beings to cultivate values. From childhood we are encouraged to set for ourselves certain deep-rooted values. Each person has his own long-lasting purposes and intents. Naturally the values of one differ from those of another. These are cultivated either by desire or by the intellect. They are either illusory, comfortable, consoling or factual. These values obviously encourage the division between man and man. Values are ignoble or noble according to one's prejudices and intentions. Without listing various types of values, why is it that human beings have values and what are their consequences? The root meaning of the word value is strength. It comes from the word valour. Strength is not a value. It becomes a value when it is the opposite of weakness. Strength - not of character which is the result of the pressure of society - is the essence of clarity. Clear thinking is without prejudices, without bias;it is observation without distortion. Strength or valour is not a thing to be cultivated as you would cultivate a plant or a new breed.It is not a result. A result has a cause and when there is a cause it indicates a weakness; the consequences of weakness are resistance or yielding. Clarity has no cause. Clarity is not an effect or result; it is the pure observation of thought and its total activity. This clarity is strength. If this is clearly understood, why have human beings projected values? Is it to give them guidance in their daily life? Is it to give them a purpose, for otherwise life becomes uncertain, vague, without direction? But the direction is set by the intellect or desire and so the very direction becomes a distortion.These distortions vary from man to man, and man clings to them in the restless ocean of confusion. One can observe the consequences of having values: they separate man from man and set one human being against another. Extended, this leads to misery, to violence and ultimately to war. Ideals are values. Ideals of any kind are a series of values, national, religious, collective, personal, and one can observe the consequences of these ideals as they are taking place in the world. When one sees the truth of this,the mind is freed of all values and for such a mind there is only clarity. A mind that clings to or desires an experience is pursuing the fallacy of value,and so becomes private, secretive and divisive. As an educator, can you explain this to a student: to have no values whatsoever but to live with clarity which is not a value? This can be brought about when the educator himself has felt deeply the truth of this.If he has not, then it becomes merely a verbal explanation without any deep significance. This has to be conveyed not only to the older students but also to the very young. The older students are already heavily conditioned through the pressure of society and of parents with their values; or they themselves have projected their own goals which become their prison. With the very young what is most important is to help them to free themselves from psychological pressures and problems. Now the very young are being taught complicated intellectual problems; their studies are becoming more and more technical; they are given more and more abstract information; various forms of knowledge are being imposed on their brains, thus conditioning them right from childhood. Whereas what we are concerned with is to help the very young to have no psychological problems, to be free of fear, anxiety, cruelty,to have care, generosity and affection. This is far more important than the imposition of knowledge on their young minds. This does not mean that the child should not learn to read, write and so on, but the emphasis is on psychological freedom instead of the acquisition of knowledge, though that is necessary. This freedom does not mean the child doing what he wants to do but helping him to understand the nature of his reactions, his desires. This requires a great deal of insight on the part of the teacher. After all, you want the student to be a complete human being without any psychological problems; otherwise he will misuse any knowledge he is given. Our education is to live in the known and so be a slave to the past with all its traditions, memories, experiences. Our life is from the known to the known, so there is never freedom from the known. If one lives constantly in the known there is nothing new, nothing original, nothing uncontaminated by thought. Thought is the known. If our education is the constant accumulation of the known then our minds and hearts become mechanical without that immense vitality of the unknown. That which has continuity is knowledge, is everlastingly limited. And that which is limited must everlastingly create problems. The ending of the continuity - which is time - is the flowering of the timeless. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH OCTOBER, 1979 Teachers or educators are human beings. Their function is to help the student to learn - not this or that subject only - but to understand the whole activity of learning; not only to gather information about various subjects but primarily to be complete human beings. These schools are not merely centres of learning but they must be centres of goodness and bring about a religious mind. All over the world human beings are degenerating to a greater or lesser extent. When pleasure, personal or collective, becomes the dominant interest in life - the pleasure of sex, the pleasure of asserting one's own will, the pleasure of excitement, the pleasure of self-interest,the pleasure of power and status, the insistent demand to have one's own pleasure fulfilled - there is degeneration. When human relationships become casual, based on pleasure, there is degeneration. When responsibility has lost its total meaning, when there is no care for another, or for the earth and the things of the sea, this disregard of heaven and earth is another form of degeneration. When there is hypocrisy in high places, when there is dishonesty in commerce, when lies are part of everyday speech, when there is the tyranny of the few, when only things predominate - there is the betrayal of all life. Then killing becomes the only language of life. When love is taken as pleasure, then man has cut himself off from beauty and the sacredness of life. Pleasure is always personal, an isolating process. Though one thinks pleasure is something shared with another, actually, through gratification, it is is an enclosing,isolating action of the ego,of the me. The greater the pleasure, the greater the strengthening of the me. When there is pursuit of pleasure,human beings are exploiting each other. When pleasure becomes dominant in our life, relationship is exploited for this purpose and so there is no actual relationship with another. Then relationship becomes merchandise. The urge for fulfilment is based on pleasure and when that pleasure is denied or has not found means of expression, then there is anger, cynicism, hatred or bitterness. This incessant pursuit of pleasure is actually insanity. All this indicates, does it not, that man, in spite of his vast knowledge, extraordinary capacities, his driving energy, his aggressive action, is on the decline? This is evident throughout the world - this calculated self-centredness with its fears, pleasures and anxieties. What then is the total responsibility of these schools? Surely they must be centres for learning a way of life which is not based on pleasure, on self-centred activities, but on the understanding of correct action, the depth and beauty of relationship, and the sacredness of a religious life. When the world around us is so utterly destructive and without meaning, these schools, these centres, must become places of light and wisdom. It is the responsibility of those who are in charge of these places to bring this about. As this is urgent, excuses have no meaning. Either the centres are like a rock round which the waters of destruction flow, or they go with the current of decay. These places exist for the enlightenment of man. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST NOVEMBER, 1979 In a world where mankind feels threatened by social upheavals, overpopulation, wars, terrifying violence, callousness, each human being is more than ever concerned with his own survival. Survival has implied living sanely, happily, without great pressure or strain. Each one of us translates survival according to his own particular concept. The idealist projects a way of life which is not the actual; the theoreticians, whether Marxist, religious, or of any other particular persuasion, have laid down patterns for survival; the nationalists consider survival possible only in a particular group or community. These ideologic differences, ideals and faiths are the roots of a division that is preventing human survival. Men want to survive in a particular way, according to their narrow responses, according to their immediate pleasures, according to some faith, according to some religious saviour, prophet or saint. All these can in no way bring security, in themselves they are divisive, exclusive, limited. To live in the hope of survival according to tradition, however ancient or modern, has no meaning. Partial solutions of any kind - scientific, religious, political, economic - can no longer assure mankind its survival. Man has been concerned with his own individual survival, with his family, with his group, his tribal nation, and because all this is divisive it threatens his actual survival. The modern divisions of nationalities, of colour, of culture,of religion are the causes of man's uncertainty of survival.In the turmoil of today's world uncertainty has made man turn to authority - to the political, religious or economic expert. The specialist is inevitably a danger because his response must always be partial, limited. Man is no longer individual, separate. What affects the few affects all mankind. There is no escape or avoidance of the problem. You can no longer withdraw from the totality of the human predicament. We have stated the problem, the cause and now we must find the solution. This solution must not depend on any kind of pressure - sociological, religious, economic, political or of any organization. We cannot possibly survive if we are concerned only with our own survival. All human beings the world over are interrelated today. What happens in one country affects the others. Man has considered himself an individual separate from others but psychologically a human being is inseparable from the whole of mankind. There is no such thing as psychological survival. When there is this desire to survive or to fulfil you are psychologically creating a situation which not only separates but which is totally unreal. Psychologically you cannot be separate from another. And this desire to be separate psychologically is the very source of danger and destruction. Each person asserting himself threatens his own existence. When the truth of this is seen and understood, man's responsibility undergoes a radical change not only towards his immediate environment but towards all living things. This total responsibility is compassion. This compassion acts through intelligence. This intelligence is not partial, individual, separate. Compassion is never partial. Compassion is the sacredness of all living things. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH NOVEMBER, 1979 We ought to consider very seriously, not only in these schools but also as human beings, the capacity to work together; to work together with nature, the living things of the earth, and also with other human beings. As social beings we exist for ourselves. Our laws, our governments, our religions all emphasize the separateness of man which during the centuries has developed into man against man. It is becoming more and more important, if we are to survive, that there be a spirit of co-operation with the universe, with all the things of the sea and earth. One can see in all social structures the destructive effect of fragmentation taking place - nation against nation, one group against another group, one family against another family, one individual against another. It is the same religiously,socially and economically.Each one is striving for himself, for his class or his particular interest in the community. This division of beliefs,ideals, conclusions and prejudices is preventing the spirit of co-operation from flowering. We are human beings, not tribal identities, exclusive, separate. We are human beings caught in conclusions, theories, faiths. We are living creatures, not labels. It is our human circumstance that makes us search for food, clothes and shelter at the expense of others. Our very thinking is separative and all action springing from this limited thought must prevent co-operation. The economic and social structure, as it is now, including organized religions, intensifies exclusiveness, separateness. This lack of cooperation ultimately brings about wars and the destruction of man. It is only during crises or disasters, that we seem to come together, and when they are over we are back to our old condition. We seem to be incapable of living and working together harmoniously. Is it because our brain, which is the centre of our thought, our feeling, has from ancient days become through necessity so conditioned to seek its own personal survival that this isolating, aggressive process has come about? Is it because this isolating process identifies itself with the family,with the tribe, and becomes glorified nationalism? Is not all isolation linked to a need for identification and fulfilment? Has not the importance of the self been cultivated through evolution by the opposition of the me and you, the we and they? Have not all religions emphasized personal salvation, personal enlightenment, personal achievement, both religiously and in the world? Has co-operation become impossible because we have given such importance to talent, to specialization, to achievement, to success - all emphasizing separateness? Is it because human co-operation has centred on some kind of authority of government or religion, around some ideology or conclusion, which then inevitably brings about its own destructive opposite? What does it mean to co-operate - not the word but the spirit of it? You cannot possibly co-operate with another, with the earth and its waters, unless you in yourself are harmonious, not broken up, non-contradictory; you cannot co-operate if you yourself are under strain, pressure, conflict. How can you co-operate with the universe if you are concerned with yourself, your problems, your ambitions? There can be no co-operation if all your activities are self-centred and you are occupied with your own selfishness, with your own secret desires and pleasures. As long as the intellect with its thoughts dominates all your actions, obviously there can be no cooperation, for thought is partial, narrow and everlastingly divisive. Co-operation demands great honesty. Honesty has no motive. Honesty is not some ideal, some faith.Honesty is clarity - the clear perception of things as they are. Perception is attention.That very attention throws light,with all its energy,on that which is being observed. This light of perception brings about a transformation of the thing observed. There is no system through which you learn to co-operate. It is not to be structured and classified. Its very nature demands that there be love and that love is not measureable, for when you compare - which is the essence of measurement -thought has entered. Where thought is, love is not. Now can this be conveyed to the student and can co-operation exist among educators in these schools? These schools are centres of a new generation with a new outlook, with a new sense of being citizens of the world, concerned with all the living things of this world. It is your grave responsibility to bring about this spirit of cooperation. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST DECEMBER, 1979 Intelligence and the capacity of the intellect are two entirely different things. Perhaps these two words derive from the same root but in order to clarify the full significance of compassion we must be able to distinguish the difference in meaning between the two. Intellect is the capacity to discern, to reason, imagine, to create illusions, to think clearly and also to think non-objectively, personally. Intellect is generally considered different from emotion, but we use the word intellect to convey the whole human capacity for thought. Thought is the response of memory accumulated through various experiences, real or imagined, which are stored as knowledge in the brain. So the capacity of the intellect is to think. Thinking is limited under all circumstances and when the intellect dominates our activities in both the outer and inner world, naturally our actions must be partial, incomplete. This brings about regret, anxiety and pain. All theories and ideologies are in themselves partial and when scientists, technicians and so-called philosophers dominate our society, our morals - and so our daily lives - then we are never faced with the realities of what is actually going on. These influences colour our perceptions, our direct understanding. It is the intellect that finds explanations, for wrong-doing as well as right-doing. It rationalizes misbehaviour, killing and wars. It defines good as an opposite of bad. The good has no opposite. If the good were related to the bad, then goodness would have in it the seeds of the bad. Then it would not be goodness. But the intellect is incapable, because of its own divisive capacity, to understand the fullness of the good. The intellect - thought is always comparing, evaluating, competing, imitating; so we become conforming, secondhand human beings. The intellect has given enormous benefits to mankind but it has also brought about great destruction. It has cultivated the arts of war but is incapable of wiping away the barriers between human beings. Anxiety is part of the nature of the intellect, as is hurt, for the intellect, which is thought, creates the image which is then capable of being hurt. When one understands the whole nature and movement of the intellect and thought, we can begin to investigate what is intelligence. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the whole. Intelligence is incapable of dividing the senses, the emotions, the intellect from each other. It regards them as one unitary movement. Because its perception is always whole, it is incapable of dividing man from man, of setting man against nature.Because in its very nature intelligence is whole, it is incapable of killing. Practically all religions have said do not kill but they have never prevented killing. Some religions have said that the things of the earth, including the living creatures, are put there for man's use -therefore kill and destroy. Killing for pleasure, killing for commerce, killing for nationalism,killing for ideologies, killing for one's faith, are all accepted as a way of life. As we are killing the living things of the earth and of the sea we are becoming more and more isolated and in this isolation we become more and more greedy, seeking pleasure, in every form. Intellect may perceive this but is incapable of complete action. Intelligence, which is inseparable from love, will never kill. Not to kill, if it is a concept, an ideal, is not intelligence. When intelligence is active in our daily life it will tell us when to cooperate and when not to. The very nature of intelligence is sensitivity and this sensitivity is love. Without this intelligence there can be no compassion. Compassion is not the doing of charitable acts or social reform; it is free from sentiment, romanticism and emotional enthusiasm. It is as strong as death. It is like a great rock, immovable in the midst of confusion, misery and anxiety. Without this compassion no new culture or society can come into being. Compassion and intelligence walk together; they are not separate. Compassion acts through intelligence. It can never act through the intellect. Compassion is the essence of the wholeness of life. reform; it is free from sentiment, romanticism and emotional enthusiasm. It is as strong as death. It is like a great rock, immovable in the midst of confusion, misery and anxiety. Without this compassion no new culture or society can come into being. Compassion and intelligence walk together; they are not separate. Compassion acts through intelligence. It can never act through the intellect. Compassion is the essence of the wholeness of life. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH DECEMBER, 1979 Human beings throughout the world have made the intellect one of the most important factors in our daily life. As one observes, the ancient Hindus, the Egyptians and the Greeks have all considered intellect the most important function in life. Even the Buddhists have given importance to it. In every university, college and school throughout the world, whether under a totalitarian regime or in so-called democracies, it has played a dominant role. We mean by the intellect, the capacity to understand, to discern, to choose, to weigh, all the technology of modern science. The essence of the intellect is - is it not? - the whole movement of thought. Thought dominates the world in both the outer life and the inner life. Thought has created all the gods of the world, all the rituals, the dogmas, the beliefs. Thought has also created the cathedrals, the temples, the mosques with their marvellous architecture, and the local shrines. Thought has been responsible for the neverending and expansive technology, the wars and their material, the division of people into nations,into classes and into races. Thought has been and probably still is the instigator of torture in the name of god, of peace, of order. It has also been responsible for revolution, for the terrorists, for the ultimate principle and pragmatic ideals. By thought we live. Our actions are based on thought, our relationships are also founded on thought, so intellect has been worshipped throughout the ages. But thought has not created nature - the heavens with their expanding stars, the earth with all its beauty, with its vast seas and green lands. Thought has not created the tree but thought has used the tree to build the house,to make the chair. Thought uses and destroys. Thought cannot create love, affection and the quality of beauty. It has woven a network of illusions and actualities. When we live by thought alone, with all its complexities and subtleties, with its purposes and directions, we lose the great depth of life, for thought is superficial. Though it pretends to delve deeply, the very instrument is incapable of penetrating beyond its own limitations. It can project the future but that future is born of the roots of the past. The things which thought has created are actual, real - like a table, like the image you worship - but the image, the symbol you worship is put together by thought, including its many illusions -romantic, idealistic, humanitarian. Human beings accept and live with the things of thought - money, position, status and the luxury of a freedom that money brings. This is the whole movement of thought and the intellect and through this narrow window of our life we look at the world. Is there any other movement which is not of the intellect and thought? This has been the enquiry of many religious, philosophical and scientific endeavours. When we use the word religion we do not mean the nonsense of belief, rituals, dogma and hierarchical structure.We mean by a religious man or religious woman those who have freed themselves from centuries of propaganda, from the dead weight of tradition, ancient or modern. The philosophers who indulge in theories, in concepts, in ideational pursuits cannot possibly explore beyond the narrow window of thought, nor will the scientist with his extraordinary capacities, with his perhaps original thinking, with his immense knowledge. Knowledge is the storehouse of memory and there must be freedom from the known to explore that which is beyond it. There must be freedom to enquire without any bondage, without any attachment to one's experience, to one's conclusions, to all the things man has imposed upon himself. The intellect must be still in absolute quietness without a tremor of thought. Our education now is based on the cultivation of the intellect, of thought and knowledge, which are necessary in the field of our daily action, but they have no place in our psychological relationship with each other for the very nature of thought is divisive and destructive. When thought dominates all our activities and all our relationships it brings about a world of violence, terror, conflict, and misery. In these schools this must be the concern of all of us - the young and the old. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST JANUARY, 1980 We ought to understand right from the beginning of this new year that we are primarily concerned with the psychological aspect of our life though we are not going to neglect the physical, biological side. What one is inwardly, will eventually bring about a good society or the gradual deterioration of human relationship. We are concerned with both aspects of life, not giving one or the other predominance, though psychologically - that is what we are inwardly - will dictate our behaviour, our relationship with others. We seem to give far greater importance to physical aspects of life, to everyday activities, however relevant or irrelevant, and wholly neglect the deeper and wider realities. So please bear in mind that in these letters we are approaching our existence from the inner to the outer, not the other way round. Though most people are concerned with the outer, our education must be concerned with bringing about a harmony between the outer and inner and this cannot possibly come about if our eyes are fixed only on the outer. We mean by the inner all the movement of thought, our feelings -reasonable and unreasonable, our imaginings, our beliefs and attachments - happy and unhappy - our secret desires with their contradictions, our experiences, suspicions, violence and so on. The hidden ambitions, the illusions,the mind clings to the superstitions of religion and the seemingly everlasting conflict within ourselves are also part of of our psychological structure. If we are blind to these or accept them as an inevitable part of our human nature, we will allow a society in which we ourselves become prisoners. So this is really important to understand. One is sure that every student throughout the world sees the effect of chaos around us and hopes to escape into some kind of outward order, though, in himself he may be in utter turmoil. He wants to change the outer without changing himself but he is the source and continuation of the disorder. This is a fact,nota personal conclusion. So we are concerned in our education with changing the source and continuation. It is human beings who create society, not some gods in some heaven. So we begin with the student. The very word implies studying, learning and acting. To learn not only from books and teachers, but to study and learn about yourself - this is basic education. If you don't know about yourself and are filling your mind with many of the facts of the universe, you are merely accepting and continuing the disorder. Probably as a student you are not interested in this. You want to enjoy yourself, pursue your own interests, are forced to study only under pressure, accept the inevitable comparisons and results with an eye fixed on some kind of career. This is your basic interest which seems natural, for your parents, and grandparents have followed the same path - job, marriage, children, responsibility. As long as you are safe you care little for what is happening around you. This is your actual relationship to the world, the world human beings have created. The immediate is far more real, important and demanding than the whole. Your concern and the educator's concern is and must be to understand the whole of human existence; not a part but the whole. The part is only the knowledge of human physical discoveries. So here in these letters we begin with you, the student, primarily and the educator who is helping you to know yourself. This is the function of all education. We need to bring about a good society in which all human beings can live happily in peace, without violence, with security. You as a student are responsible for this. A good society doesn't come into existence through some ideal, a hero or a leader, or some carefully planned system. You have to be good because you are the future. You will make the world, either as it is, modified, or as a world in which you and others can live without wars, without brutalities, with generosity and affection. So what will you do? You have understood the problem, which is not difficult; so what will you do? Most of you are instinctively kind, good and wanting to help, unless of course you have been too trodden down and twisted, which one hopes you are not. So what will you do? If the educator is worth his salt he will want to help you and then the question is, what will you do together to help you to study yourself, to learn about yourself and act? We will stop herewith this letter and go on in our next. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH JANUARY, 1980 To continue with what we were saying in our last letter, pointing out the responsibility to study, learn and to act. Since one is young and perhaps innocent, given to excitement and games, the word responsibility will seem rather frightening and a wearisome burden. But we are using the word to imply care and concern for our world. When we use this word the students must not feel any sense of guilt if they have not shown this care and attention. After all,your parents who feel responsible for you, that you should study and equip yourselves for your future life, do not feel guilty, though they may feel disappointed or unhappy if you do not come up to their expectations. We must clearly understand that when we use the word responsibility there must not be a feeling of guilt. We are taking a particular care in using this word,freed from the unhappy weight of a word like duty. When this is clearly understood, then we can use the word responsibility without its burden of tradition. So you are at school with this responsibility to study, to learn, to act. This is the main purpose of education. In our last letter we put the question "What will you do about yourself and your relationship with the world?" As we said, the educator,the teacher, is also responsible for helping you to understand yourself and so the world. We ask this question for you to find out for yourself what is your response. It is a challenge you must answer. You have to begin with yourself, to understand yourself, and in relation to that, what is the first step? Is it not affection? Probably when you are young you have this quality but very quickly we seem to lose it. Why? Is it not because of the pressure of studies, the pressure of competition, the pressure of trying to reach a certain standing in your studies,comparing yourselves with others and perhaps being bullied by other students? Do not all these many pressures force you to be concerned with yourself? And when you are so concerned with yourself, you inevitably lose that quality of affection. It is very important to understand how gradually circumstances, environment, the pressure of your parents or your own urge to conform, narrows the vast beauty of life to a small circle of yourself. And if you lose this affection while you are young there is a hardening of the heart and mind. It is a rare thing to keep this affection throughout life, without corruption. So this is the first thing you must have. Affection implies care, a diligent care in whatever you are doing; care in your speech, in your dress, in the manner of your eating, how you look after your body; care in your behaviour without the distinctions of superior or inferior; how you consider people. Politeness is consideration for others and this consideration is care, whether it is for your younger brother or oldest sister. When you care, violence in every form disappears from you - your anger, your antagonism and your pride. This care implies attention. Attention is to watch, observe, listen,learn.There are many things you can learn from books but there is a learning which is infinitely clear, quick and without any ignorance. Attention implies sensitivity and this gives depth to perception which no knowledge, with its ignorance can give. This you have to study, not in a book, but, with the help of the educator, learn to observe things around you - what is happening in the world. What is happening with a fellow student, what is happening in that poor village or slum and to the man who is struggling along that dirty street. Observation is not a habit. It isn't a thing you train yourself to do mechanically. It is the fresh eye of interest, of care, of sensitivity. You cannot train yourself to be sensitive. Again, when you are young you are sensitive, quick in your perceptions, but again this fades as you grow older. So you have to study yourself and perhaps your teacher will help you. If he doesn't it doesn't matter for it is your responsibility to study yourself and so learn what you are. And when there is this affection your actions will be born out of its purity. All this may sound very hard but it is not. We have neglected all this side of life. We are so concerned with our careers, with our own pleasures, With our own importance, that we neglect the great beauty of affection. There are two words that one must always bear in mind -diligence and negligence. We diligently apply our mind to acquiring knowledge from books, from teachers, spend twenty or more years of our life in that and neglect to study the deeper meaning of our own life. We have both the outer and the inner. The inner demands greater diligence than the outer. It is an urgent demand and this diligence is the affectionate study of what one is. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST FEBRUARY, 1980 Cruelty is an infectious disease and one must strictly guard oneself against it. Some students seem to have this peculiar infection and they somehow gradually dominate the others. Probably they feel it is very manly, for their elders are often cruel in their words, in their attitudes,in their gestures, in their pride.This cruelty exists in the world. The responsibility of the student and please remember with what significance we are using that word - is to avoid any form of cruelty.Once many years ago I was invited to talk at a school in California and as I entered the school a boy of ten or so was passing me with a large bird, caught in a trap, whose legs were broken.I stopped and looked at the boy without saying a word. His face expressed fear and when I finished the talk and came out the boy - a stranger - came up to me with tears in his eyes and said, "`Sir, it will never happen again." He was afraid that I would tell the headmaster and there would be a scene about it and as I didn't say a word to either the boy or the headmaster about the cruel incident, his awareness of the terrible thing he had done made him realize the enormity of the act. It is important to be aware of one's own activities and if there is affection then cruelty has no place in our life at any time. In western countries you see the birds carefully nurtured and later in the season shot for sport and then eaten. The cruelty of hunting, killing small animals, has become part of our civilization, like war, like torture, and the acts of terrorists and kidnappers. In our intimate personal relationships there is also a great deal of cruelty, anger, hurting each other. The world has become a dangerous place in which to live and in our schools any form of coercion, threat, anger must be totally and completely avoided for all these harden the heart and mind, and affection cannot co-exist with cruelty. You understand, as a student, how important it is to realize that any form of cruelty not only hardens your heart but perverts your thinking,distorts your actions. The mind, like the heart, is a delicate instrument, sensitive and very capable, and when cruelty and oppression touch it then there is a hardening of the self. Affection, love, has no centre as the self. Now having read this and having understood so far what is said, what will you do about it? You have studied what has been said, you are learning the content of these words; what then is your action? Your response is not merely to study and learn but also to act. Most of us know and are aware of all the implications of cruelty and of what it actually does both outwardly and inwardly, and leave it at that without doing anything about it - thinking one thing and doing just the opposite.This not only breeds a great deal of conflict but also hypocrisy. Most students do not like to be hypocrites; they like to look at facts but they do not always act. So the responsibility of the student isis to see the facts about cruelty and without any persuasion or cajoling understand what is implied and do something about it. The doing is perhaps a greater responsibility. People generally live with ideas and beliefs totally unrelated to their daily life and so this naturally becomes hypocrisy. So don't be a hypocrite - which doesn't mean you must be rude, aggressive or overly critical. When there is affection there is inevitably courtesy without hypocrisy. What is the responsibility of the teacher who has studied, learned, and acts toward the student? Cruelty has many forms. A look, a gesture, a sharp remark, and above all comparison. Our whole educational system is based on comparison. A is better than B and so B must conform to or imitate A. This in essence is cruelty, and ultimately its expression is examinations; so what is the responsibility of the educator who sees the truth of this? How will he teach any subject without reward and punishment, knowing that there must be some kind of report indicating the capacity of the student? Can the teacher do this? Is it compatible with affection? If the central reality of affection is there, has comparison any place at all? Can the teacher eliminate in himself the pain of comparison? Our whole civilization is based on hierarchical comparison both outwardly and inwardly which denies the sense of deep affection. Can we eliminate from our minds the better, the more, the stupid, the clever, this whole comparative thinking? If the teacher has understood the pain of comparison what is his responsibility in his teaching and in his action? A person who has really grasped the significance of the pain of comparison is acting from intelligence. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 15TH FEBRUARY, 1980 In all these letters we have been constantly pointing out that cooperation between the educator and the student is the responsibility of both. The word co-operation implies working together, but we cannot work together if we are not looking in the same direction with the same eyes and the same mind. The word same, as we are using it, under no circumstances implies uniformity, conformity or accepting, obeying, imitating. In co-operation with each other, working together, the student and the teacher must have a relationship which is essentially based on affection. Most people co-operate if they are building, if they are playing games, or are involved in scientific research, or if they are working together for an ideal,a belief or for some concept which is carried out for some personal or collective benefit; or they co-operate around an authority, religious or political. To study, learn, and act, co-operation is necessary between the teacher and the student. Both are involved in these. The educator may know many subjects and facts.In conveying them to the student,if there is not the quality of affection, it becomes a struggle between the two. But we are not only concerned with worldly knowledge but also with the study of oneself in which there is learning and action. Both the educator and the student are involved in this and here authority ceases. To learn about oneself the educator is not only concerned with himself but with the student. In this interaction with its reactions one begins to see the nature of oneself - the thoughts, the desires, the attachments,the identifications and so on.Each is acting as a mirror to the other; each is observing in the mirror exactly what he is because,as we pointed out earlier, the psychological understanding of oneself is far more important than the gathering of facts and storing them up as knowledge for skill in action. The inner always overcomes the outer. This must be clearly understood both by the educator and by the student. The outer has not changed man; the outer activities, physical revolution, physical control of the environment have not deeply changed the human being, his prejudices and superstitions; deeply human beings remain as they have been for millions of years. Right education is to transform this basic condition. When this is really grasped by the educator, though he may have subjects to teach, his main concern must be with the radical revolution in the psyche, in the you and the me. And here comes the importance of co-operation between the two who are studying, learning and acting together. It is not the spirit of a team, or the spirit of a family, or the identification with a group or nation. It is free enquiry into ourselves without the barrier of the one who knows and the one who doesn't This is the most destructive barrier, especially in matters of self-knowing. There is no leader and no led in this matter. When this is fully grasped and with affection - then communication between the student and the teacher becomes easy, clear and not merely at a verbal level. Affection carries no pressure, it is never devious. It is direct and simple. Having said all this, and if both of you have studied what has been said, what is the quality of your mind and heart? Is there a change which is not induced by influence or by mere stimulation which may give an illusory change? Stimulation is like a drug; it wears off and you are back where you were. Any form of pressure or influence also acts in the same way. If you act under these circumstances you are not actually studying and learning about yourself. Action based on reward and punishment, influence or pressure, inevitably brings about conflict. This is so. But few people see the truth of this and so they give up or say it is impossible in a practical world or that it is idealistic - some utopian concept. But it is not. It is eminently practical and workable. So do not be put off by the traditionalists, the conservatives, or those who cling to the illusion that change can only come from without. When you study and learn about yourself, there comes an extraordinary strength, based on clarity, which can withstand all the nonsense of the establishment. This strength is not a form of resistance or self-centred obstinacy or will, but is a diligent observation of the outer and the inner. It is the strength of affection and intelligence. LETTERS TO SCHOOLS VOLUME ONE 1ST MARCH, 1980 You come to these schools with your own background - be it traditional or free - with discipline or without discipline, obeying or reluctant and disobeying, in revolt or conforming. Your parents are either negligent or very diligent about you; some may feel very responsible, others may not. You come with all this trouble,with broken families, uncertain or assertive,wanting your way or shyly acquiescing but inwardly rebelling. In these schools you are free, and all the disturbances of your young lives come into play. You want your way and no one in the world can have his way. You have to understand this very seriously - you cannot have your own way. Either you learn to adjust with understanding, with reason, or you are broken by the new environment you have entered. It is very important to understand this. In these schools the educators carefully explain and you can discuss with them, have a dialogue, and see why certain things have to be done. When one lives in a small community of teachers and students it is necessary that they have a good relationship with each other, friendly, affectionate, and with a certain quality of attentive comprehension. No one, especially nowadays, living in a free society likes rules, and rules become totally unnecessary when you and the grown-up educator understand, not only verbally and intellectually but with your heart, that certain disciplines are necessary. The word discipline has been ruined by the authoritarians. Each craft has its own discipline, its own skill. The word discipline comes from the word disciple - to learn; not conform, not rebel, but to learn about your own reactions, your own background, their limitation, and to go beyond them. The essence of learning is constant movement without a fixed point. If its point becomes your prejudice, your opinions and conclusions and you start from this handicap, then you cease to learn. Learning is infinite. The mind that is constantly learning is beyond all knowledge. So you are here to learn as well as to communicate. Communication is not only the exchange of words, however articulate and clear those words may be; it is much deeper than that. Communication is learning from each other, understanding each other, and this comes to an end when you have taken a definite stand about some trivial or not fully thought-out act. When one is young there is an urge to conform, not to feel out of it; to learn the nature and implication of conformity brings its own peculiar discipline. Please always bear in mind when we use that word that both the student and the educator are in a relationship of learning, not assertion and acceptance. When this is clearly understood rules become unnecessary. When this is not clear, then rules have to be made. You may revolt against rules, against being told what to do or not to do, but when you quickly understand the nature of learning, rules will disappear altogether. It is only the obstinate the self-assertive,who bring about rules;thou shalt and thou shalt not. Learning is not born out of curiosity. You may be curious about sex: that curiosity is based on pleasure, on some kind of excitement, on the attitudes of others. The same applies to drink, drugs, smoking. Learning is far deeper and more extensive. You learn about the universe not out of pleasure or curiosity but out of your relationship to the world. We have divided learning into separate categories depending on the demands of society or your own personal inclination. We are not talking of learning about something, but the quality of the mind that is willing to learn. You can learn how to become a good carpenter or a gardener or an engineer, and when you have acquired the skill in these you have narrowed down your mind into a tool that can function perhaps skilfully in a certain pattern. This is what is called learning. This gives a certain security financially and perhaps that is all one wants, and so we create a society which provides what we have asked of it. But when there is this extra quality of learning not about something, then you have a mind and, of course,a heart that are timelessly alive. Discipline is not control or subjugation. Learning implies attention, that is to be diligent. It is only the negligent mind that is never learning. It is forcing itself to accept when it is shallow, careless, indifferent. A diligent mind is actively watching, observing, never sinking into secondhand values and beliefs. A mind that is learning is a free mind and freedom demands the responsibility of learning. The mind that is caught in self-opinion, entrenched in some knowledge, may demand freedom, but what it means by freedom is the expression of its own personal attitudes and conclusions, and when this is thwarted it cries for self-fulfilment. Freedom has no sense of fulfilment:it is free. So when you come to these schools, or to any school in fact, there must be this gentle quality of learning and with it goes a great sense of affection. When you are really deeply affectionate you are learning. Introduction - 1981 - November 15th December 15th - 1982 - January 15th February 15th October 1st October 15th November 1st November 15th December 1st December 15th - 1983 - January 1st January 15th February 1st February 15th October 1st October 15th November 1st November 15th LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 These letters are not meant to be read casually when you have a little time from other things, nor are they to be treated as entertainment. These letters are written seriously and if you care to read them, read them with intent to study what is said as you would study a flower by looking at the flower very carefully its petals, its stem, its colours, its fragrance and its beauty. These letters should be studied in the same manner, not read one morning and forgotten in the rest of the day. One must give time to it, play with it, question it, enquire into it without acceptance; live with it for some time; digest it so that it is yours and not the writer's. J. Krishnamurti LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH NOVEMBER 1981 Every profession has its discipline, every action has its direction and every thought has its end. This is the cycle in which the human mind is caught. Being a slave to the known, the mind is always trying to expand its knowledge, its action within that field, its thought seeking its own end. In all schools, discipline is regarded as a framework for the mind and its action, and in recent years there has been revolt against any form of control, restraint or moderation. This has led to every form of permissiveness, immodesty and the pursuit of pleasure at any cost. Nobody has any respect for anyone. It appears they have lost all form of personal dignity and deep integrity. Billions are spent on drugs, on destroying their own bodies and minds. This all-permissiveness has become respectable and accepted as the norm of life. To cultivate a good mind, a mind that is capable of perceiving the whole of life as one unit unbroken, and so a good mind, it is necessary that in all our schools a certain kind of discipline must exist. We must together understand the hated and perhaps despised words `discipline' and `rules'. To learn, you need to have attention, to learn there must be hearing not only with the ear, but an inward grasp of what is being said. To learn it is necessary to observe. When you hear or read these statements you have to pay an attention which is not compelled, not be under any pressure or expectation of reward or punishment. Discipline means to learn not to conform. If you want to be a good carpenter you must learn the proper tools to use with different kinds of wood and learn from a master carpenter. If you wish to be a good doctor you must study for many years, learn all the facts of the body and its many ways, cures, and so on. Every profession demands that you learn as much about it as you possibly can. This learning is to accumulate knowledge about it and act as skilfully as you can. Learning is the nature of discipline. Learning why one should be punctual to meals, the proper time for rest and so on, is learning about order in life. In a disorderly world where there is much confusion politically, socially, and even in religion, our schools must be centres of order and the education of intelligence. A school is a sacred place where all are learning about the complexity of life and its simplicity. So learning demands application and order. Discipline is never conformity, so don't be afraid of the word and rebel against it. Words have become very important in our life. The word god has become extraordinarily important to most people; or the word nation, or the name of a politician and so on. The word is the image of the politician; the image of god is built by thousands of years of thought and fear. We live with images created by the mind or by a skilful hand. To learn about these images, which one has accepted or self-created, demands self-awareness. Education is not only learning about academic subjects but to educate oneself. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH DECEMBER 1981 A school is a place of learning and so it is sacred. The temples, churches and mosques are not sacred for they have stopped learning. They believe; they have faith and that denies entirely the great art of learning, whereas a school like those to which this letter is sent, must be entirely devoted to learning, not only about the world around us, but essentially about what we human beings are, why we behave the way we do, and the complexity of thought. Learning has been the ancient tradition of man, not only from books, but about the nature and structure of the psychology of a human being. As we have neglected this entirely, there is disorder in the world, terror, violence and all the cruel things that are taking place. We have put the world`s affairs first and not the inner. The inner, if it is not understood, educated and transformed, will always overcome the outer, however well organized it may be politically, economically and socially. This is a truth which many seem to forget. We are trying politically, legally and socially to bring order in the outer world in which we are living, and inwardly we are confused, uncertain, anxious and in conflict. Without inward order there will always be danger to human life. What do we mean by order? The universe in the supreme sense has known no disorder. Nature, however terrifying to man, is always in order. It becomes disordered only when human beings interfere with it and it is only man who seems to be from the beginning of time in constant struggle and conflict. The universe has its own movement of time. Only when man has ordered his life, will he realize the eternal order. Why has man accepted and tolerated disorder? Why does whatever he touches decay, become corrupt and confused? Why has man turned from the order of nature, the clouds, the winds, the animals and the rivers? We must learn what is disorder and what is order. Disorder is essentially conflict, self-contradiction and division between becoming and being. Order is a state in which disorder has never existed. Disorder is the bondage to time. Time to us is very important. We live in the past, in past memories, past hurts and pleasures. Our thought is the past. It is always modifying itself as a reaction to the present, projecting itself into the future, but the deep-rooted past is always with us and this is the binding quality of time. We must observe this fact in ourselves and be aware of its limiting process. That which is limited must be ever in conflict. The past is knowledge derived from experience, action and psychological responses. This knowledge, of which one may be conscious or not aware, is the very nature of man's existence. So the past becomes all-important, whether it be tradition, experience or remembrance with its many images. But all knowledge, whether in the future or the past, is limited. There can be no complete knowledge. Knowledge and ignorance go together. In learning about this, that very learning is order. Order is not something planned and adhered to. In a school, routine is necessary but this is not order. A machine that is well put together functions effectively. The efficient organization of a school is absolutely necessary but this efficiency is not an end in itself to be confused with the freedom from conflict which is order. How will an educator, if he has deeply learned all this, convey to the student the nature of order? If his own inward life is in disorder and he talks about order, he will not only be a hypocrite, which in itself is a conflict, but the student will realize this is double talk and so will not pay the least attention to what is being said. When the educator is immovable in his understanding, that very quality the student will grasp. When one is completely honest, that very honesty is transmitted to another. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH JANUARY 1982 I think it is important to learn the art of thinking together. The scientists and the most uneducated human beings think. They think according to their profession, specialization, and according to their belief and experience. We all think objectively or according to our own particular inclination, but we never seem to think together, to observe together. We may think about something, a particular problem or a similar experience, but this thinking does not go beyond its own limitation. Thinking together not about a particular subject but the capacity to think together is entirely different. To think together is necessary when you are facing the great crisis that is taking place in the world, the danger, the terror, the ultimate brutality of war. To observe this, not as a capitalist, socialist, the extreme left or extreme right, but to observe it together demands that we comprehend not only how we have come to this rotten state, but also that we together perceive a way out. The business man or the politician looks at this problem from a limited point of view, whereas we are saying we must look at life as a whole not as British, French or Chinese. What does it mean to look at life as a whole? It means to observe the human being, ourselves, without any division of nationality, to see life as one single movement without a beginning and without an end, without time, without death. This is a difficult thing to understand because we think of the part not the totality. We divide, hoping to understand the whole from its part. The art of thinking together needs to be studied carefully, examined to see whether it is at all possible. Each one clings to his own way of thinking according to his own particular reactions, experience, prejudice. This is how we are conditioned, which prevents the capacity to think together. Thinking together does not mean to be of one mind. Our minds can come together about an ideal, an historical conclusion or some philosophic concept and work for that but this is essentially based on authority. Freedom is the essence of thinking together. You must be free from your concept, prejudice and so on. I also must be free and we come together in this freedom. It means dropping all our conditioning. It implies complete attention without any past. The present world crisis demands that we totally abandon our tribal instincts that have become our glorified nationalisms. Thinking together implies that we totally abandon self-interest identified as the British, the Arab, the Russian and so on. Then what is a human being to do facing this danger of separatism, of self-interest? There is the expansionist movement of one power or another, economically, politically, or of one or two bigoted, neurotic leaders. What is a human being to do confronted with this? Either you turn away from it and withdraw into indifference, or you join some political activity, or take refuge in some religious group. You cannot escape from this. It is there. What do I do? I refuse the present pattern of social structures, the nonsensical irreligious ways. I refuse all that. So I am totally isolated. This isolation is not an escape nor some form of ivory tower, some romantic illusion. Because I see the futility, the divisiveness, the pursuit of self-interest of nationalism, of expansionism, of the irreligious life, I reject the total destructiveness of this society. So I stand alone. As I am not contributing psychologically to the destructive consciousness of man, I am in the stream of that which is goodness, compassion and intelligence. That intelligence is acting, confronting the madness of the present world. That intelligence will be acting wherever the ugly is. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH FEBRUARY 1982 We ought to consider together what we mean by attention. Most of us learn what concentration is; from childhood we are compelled to concentrate on something which generally we don't like. This breeds a kind of rebellion from being forced to do something we dislike. Education has become a funnelling of many subjects into our brain, conditioning us to conform. Millions and millions throughout the world are being educated and are finding no jobs. The whole pattern of society in which we live has become so abnormal, so dangerous, that we must find a new way of living together. This requires sensitivity and very objective observation and thinking. One questions whether this concentration, which is the narrowing down of perception, will help to bring about a different quality of mind. For what are you being educated? What are you going to become as a human being? Mediocrity prevails from the highest political structure to the highest religious establishment. Are you being educated to fit into this pattern? Are you going to become a mediocre human being without any passion, in conflict with yourself and with the world? This is really a serious question you have to ask yourself. Can this concentrated, aggressive, competitive human being bring about a different order in our existence? As we said, we ought to consider what it means to be attentive. This may be the clue to a harmonious existence. As things are, the intellect, the whole activity of the brain, which is thinking, dominates our existence. This naturally brings about contradiction in ourselves, peculiar behaviour. When only one part of our whole being is in dominance, it will inevitably bring about neurotic behaviour. Attention is the awareness of this dominance of intellect, without the instinctive urge to control it, or allowing emotion to take its place. This awareness brings about subtlety, clarity of mind. There is a difference between concentration and attention. Concentration is to bring all your energy to focus on a particular point. In attention there is no point of focus. We are very familiar with one and not with the other. When you pay attention to your body, the body becomes quiet, which has its own discipline; it is relaxed but not slack and it has the energy of harmony. When there is attention, there is no contradiction and therefore no conflict. When you read this pay attention to the way you are sitting, the way you are listening, how you are receiving what the letter is saying to you, how you are reacting to what is being said and why you are finding it difficult to attend. You are not learning how to attend. If you are learning the how of attending, then it becomes a system, which is what the brain is accustomed to, and so you make attention something mechanical and repetitive, whereas attention is not mechanical or repetitive. It is the way of looking at your whole life without the centre of self-interest. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 1ST OCTOBER 1982 The future for every human being, including the young and the old, appears to be bleak and frightening. Society itself has become dangerous and utterly immoral. When a young person faces the world he is concerned and rather frightened of what will happen to him in the course of his life. His parents send him to school and, if they have money, to university and they are concerned that he should settle down to a job, marriage, children and so on. The parents, it appears all over the world, have very little time for their own children. After a few years from birth the parents have lost them; they have very little relationship with their children. They worry about their own problems, ambitions and so on and the children are at the mercy of their educators, who themselves need education. They may be academically excellent and they too are concerned that their students should reach the highest grades (again academically), that the school should have the best reputation, but the educators have their own problems. Their salaries, except in a few countries, are rather low and socially they are not highly regarded. So those who are being educated have rather a difficult time with their parents, their educators and their fellow students. Already the tide of struggle, of anxiety, fear and competition has set in. This is the world they have to face: a world that is overpopulated, under-nourished, a world of war, increasing terrorism, inefficient governments, corruption and the threat of poverty. This threat is less evident in affluent and fairly well- organized societies but it is felt in those parts of the world where there is tremendous poverty, overpopulation and the indifference of inefficient rulers. This is the world the young people have to face and naturally they are really frightened. They have an idea that they should be free, independent of routine, should not be dominated by their elders and they shy away from all authority. Freedom to them means to choose what they want to do, but they are confused, uncertain and want to be shown what they should do. In the eastern world the family, the parents, play a strong part in their lives. The family unit is still there. Though its young may earn a livelihood in different parts of the world, the family is the centre of their lives. This is fast disappearing in the Western world. So the student is caught between his own desire for freedom to do what he wants and the society which demands conformity to its own necessities that one become an engineer, a scientist, a soldier, or a specialist of some kind. This is the world they have to face and become a part of in their education. It is a frightening world. We all want security physically as well as emotionally and this is becoming more and more difficult and painful. So we of the older generation, if we at all care for our children, must ask what then is education? If the present education, as it is now universally, is to prepare them to live in perpetual striving, conflict and fear, we must ask what is the meaning of it all? Is life a movement, a flow of pain and anxiety with occasional flares of joy and happiness, and the shedding of unshed tears? Unfortunately we, the older generation, do not ask these questions and neither does the educator. So education, as it is now, is a process of facing a dreary, narrow and meaningless existence, but we want to give a meaning to life. Life has no meaning in itself, apparently, but we want to give it meaning and so invent gods, various forms of religion and other entertainments including nationalism and ways to kill each other to escape from our monotonous life. This is the life of the older generation and will be the life of the young. Now we the parents and educators have to face this fact and not escape into theories, seek further forms of education and structure. If your minds are not clear about what we are facing, we shall inevitably, consciously or unconsciously, slip into the inaction of what to do about it. There are a thousand people who will tell us what to do: the specialists and the cranks. Before we understand the vast complexity of the problem we want to operate upon it. We are more concerned to act than to see the whole issue. The real issue is the quality of our mind: not its knowledge but the depth of the mind that meets knowledge. Mind is infinite, is the nature of the universe which has its own order, has its own immense energy. It is everlastingly free. The brain, as it is now, is the slave of knowledge and so is limited, finite, fragmentary. When the brain frees itself from its conditioning, then the brain is infinite, then only there is no division between the mind and the brain. Education then is freedom from conditioning, from its vast accumulated knowledge as tradition. This does not deny the academic disciplines which have their own proper place in life. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH OCTOBER 1982 As we said, education must not only be efficient in academic disciplines but must also explore the conditioning of human conduct. This conduct is the result of many, many centuries of fear, anxiety, conflict and the search for security both inwardly and outwardly, both biologically and psychologically. The brain is conditioned by these processes. The brain is the result of evolution which is time. We are the result of this accumulated past both religiously and in our daily life. It is based on reward and punishment as an animal, a dog, is trained. Our brain is an extraordinary instrument of great energy and capacities. Look at what it has done in the outward world, in the world that surrounds us, It has divided into various races, religions and nationalities. It has done this to have security. It has sought this security in isolation religiously, politically, economically, in the unit of the family, in small communities and associations. It has sought this protective reaction in organizations and establishments. Nationalism has been one of the major causes of war. Our politicians are concerned with maintaining nationalism with its economy, thus isolating itself. Where there is isolation there must be opposition, aggression, and good relationship with other nations appears to be trade, exchange of arma- ments, the balance of power and maintaining power in the hands of the few. This is our government, whether totalitarian or democratic. We have sought to bring about order in our society through political action and so we have become dependent upon the politicians. Why have politicians become so extraordinarily important, like gurus, like the religious leaders? Is it because we have always depended on outside agencies to put our house in order, always depended on external forces to control and shape our lives? The external authority of a government, of parents, of every form of specialized leader seems to give us some hope for the future. This is part of our tradition of dependence and acceptance. This has been the long accumulated tradition which has conditioned our brain. Education has accepted its ways and so the brain has become mechanical and repetitive. Is not then the function of the educator to understand the tremendous accumulated energy of the past, though not denying its necessity in certain areas of our life? We are concerned, are we not, as educators, to bring about the flowering of a good human being? This is not possible when the past, however modified, continues. What then are the factors of our conditioning? What is it that is being conditioned and who is it that does the conditioning? When we ask this question are we aware of our own actual conditioning and from that awareness ask this question, which has great vitality, or are we asking a theoretical, problematical question? We are not concerned in any way with hypothetical questions: we are dealing with actualities the actual being, what is. We are asking what is the cause of this state of human beings. There may be one cause or many causes. Many little streams give their waters to a great river. The depth, the volume and the beauty are all-important, not tracing each little stream to its source. So we are concerned in our investigation with the totality of our existence, not a particular part of it. When we comprehend the vastness of life with its complexities, then only can we ask what is the cause of our conditioning. One feels it is important to understand first, not verbally or intellectually, but to perceive that life is the woman, the man, the child, the animals, the river, the sky and the forest all of it. To feel this, not the idea of it, but to see the immensity and beauty of it. If we do not grasp the significance of this that all the vast movement of life is one when we ask what is the cause of conditioning we bring about the fragmentation of life. So first realize that this movement of the skies, the earth, the human existence, is indivisible. Then only we come to the particular. When the heavens, the earth and human beings are one vast unitary process, then enquiry as to the cause of our conditioning will not be fragmentary, divisive. Then we can ask what is the cause: then the question has depth and beauty. To find the cause we must go together and enquire into the nature and structure of a human being. Apart from the biological, the organic, which left to itself has its own natural intelligence, its self-protective reactions, there is the whole psychological field the inward responses, inward hurts, the fears, the contradictions, the drive of desire, the passing pleasures and the weight of sorrow. This psyche when it is disorderly, confused and messy naturally affects the biologic existence. Then disease is psychosomatic. We are concerned, are we not, with the exploration of our inward nature which is very complex. This investigation is really self-education not to change what is, but to understand what is. Again this is important to grasp, important to live with this question. What is, is far more important than what should be. The understanding of what we actually are is far more essential than to transcend what we are. We are the content of our consciousness. Our consciousness is a complexity but its very substance is movement. This must be clearly understood that we are not dealing with theories, hypotheses, ideals, but with our own actual daily existence. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 1ST NOVEMBER 1982 As we have pointed out, we are deeply involved in our daily life as educators and human beings. We are first human beings and then educators: not the other way around. As a human being, with a special profession of education, the teacher's life is not only in the classroom but is involved with the whole outer world as well as inner struggles, ambitions and relationships. He is as conditioned as the student. Though their conditioning may vary, it is still a conditioning. If you accept it as inevitable and abide by it, then you are further conditioning others. There are many who accept this, trying to modify their limitations, but as educators you are concerned are you not? with bringing about a different social entity; a future generation which perceives the futility of wars and organized murder; a generation which is concerned with global interrelationship, without nationalistic isolation; a generation which is involved with truth. Surely this is the function of a true educator. The human consciousness is conditioned. Any thoughtful man would accept this fact but many of us are not aware of this and perhaps neither is the educator. To become aware of his conditioning and investigate whether it is possible to be free of its limitation, is one of the functions of a teacher. So we have to go into the question of what it is to be aware, to concentrate, to give total attention. It is very important to understand the meaning of these. Awareness implies sensitivity: to be sensitive to nature, to the hills, rivers and the trees around one; to be aware of that poor man walking down the road; to be sensitive to his feelings, his reactions, to his appalling and degrading poverty; to be sensitive to the man who is sitting next to you, or to the nervousness of your friend or sister. This sensitivity has in it no choice; it is not critical. There is no judgemental evaluation. Your are sensitive to the cloud about which you can do nothing. Is this sensitivity the result of time and practice? If you allow thought and practice, then that very thought and practice kill sensitivity. Learn to observe sensitively; learn what sensitivity implies; capture it rather than cultivate it. Don't ask how to capture it: grasp it. In the very perception you are sensitive. There is no resistance in sensitivity. Sensitivity is to the immediate and limitless. Concentration is the process of resistance. Every educator knows what it means to concentrate. The educator is concerned with stuffing the brain with knowledge of various subjects so that the student will pass examinations and get a job. The student also has this in his mind. The educator and the student are encouraging each other in the form of resistance which is concentration. So one is building the capacity to resist, to exclude and gradually one becomes isolated. Concentration is the focussing of one's energy on the blackboard or a book and avoiding distraction. The very word distraction implies concentration. Actually there is no distraction. There is only resistance which is called concentration and any movement away from that is considered distraction. So in this there is conflict, struggle and resistance. This resistance will inevitably bring about the limitation of the brain, which is our conditioning. To perceive this whole movement with sensitivity is to move into a different area which is to be attentive. What is it to be attentive? If we really grasp the significance of sensitivity, of awareness, the limitation of concentration not intellectually or verbally, but the actuality of such states, then we can ask what it is to be attentive. Attention involves seeing and hearing. We hear not only with our ears but also we are sensitive to the tones, the voice, to the implication of words, to hear without interference, to capture instantly the depth of a sound. Sound plays an extraordinary part in our lives: the sound of thunder, a flute playing in the distance, the unheard sound of the universe; the sound of silence, the sound of one's own heart beating; the sound of a bird and the noise of a man walking on the pavement; the waterfall. The universe is filled with sound. This sound has its own silence; all living things are involved in this sound of silence. To be attentive is to hear this silence and move with it. Seeing is a very complex affair. One sees casually with one's eyes and swiftly passes by, never seeing the details of a leaf, its form and structure, its colours, the variety of greens. To observe a cloud with all the light of the world in it, to follow a stream chattering down the hill; to look at your friend with the sensitivity in which there is no resistance and to see yourself as you are without the shades of denial or easy acceptance; to see yourself as part of the whole; to see the immensity of the universe this is observation: to see without the shadow of yourself. Attention is this hearing and this seeing, and this attention has no limitation, no resistance, so it is limitless. To attend implies this vast energy: it is not pinned down to a point. In this attention there is no repetitive movement; it is not mechanical. There is no question of how to maintain this attention, and when one has learned the art of seeing and hearing, this attention can focus itself on a page, a word. In this there is no resistance which is the activity of concentration. Inattention cannot be refined into attention. To be aware of inattention is the ending of it: not that it becomes attentive. The ending has no continuity. The past modifying itself is the future a continuity of what has been and we find security in continuity, not in endings. So attention has no quality of continuity. Anything that continues is mechanical. The becoming is mechanical and implies time. Attention has no quality of time. All this is a tremendously complicated issue. One must gently, deeply go into it. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH NOVEMBER 1982 We seem to think that education stops when we leave school or college. We don't seem to treat the whole of human existence as a process of self-education which is constant and perhaps neverending. So most of us limit education to a very short period and for the rest of our lives carry on in rather a muddle, learning only a few things that are absolutely necessary, falling into a routine and of course there is always death waiting. This is really our life marriage, children, work, passing pleasures, pain and death. If this is all our life, which apparently it is, then what really is the meaning of education? We never ask these fundamental questions; probably they are too disturbing. But as we are teachers in colleges and schools we must ask what is the purpose of education and learning. We know it gives us some sort of job but apart from the physical occupation with its responsibilities, what do we mean by teaching and the teacher? As it is generally understood, a teacher, having already studied certain subjects, informs the student about them. Does this constitute being a teacher just to pass on knowledge? So we are enquiring into the nature of the teacher and the taught. Who is a teacher? What are the implications of teaching apart from the curricula? Very few are dedicated teachers. They are dedicated to helping the students in their studies, but surely a teacher has far greater significance. Knowledge must inevitably be superficial. It is the cultivation of memory and employing that memory efficiently and so on. Knowledge being always limited, is it the function of the teacher to help the student to live all his life only within the limitations of knowledge? We must first realize that knowledge is always limited, as are all experiences. This employment of knowledge with its limitations can be very destructive. It is destructive in human relationships. In relationship knowledge, which is the accumulation of various incidents, experiences, reactions, cultivates the image of the other person and obscures the reality of that person and the relationship. When there is a continuity, a tradition, put together by knowledge and handed down from generation to generation, then the past, which is the accumulation of knowledge, obscures the actual living present. When knowledge becomes routine, mechanical, it makes the brain limited, rigid and insensitive. When knowledge is used for the support of nationalism through wars, then it becomes bestial, appallingly cruel and utterly immoral. Knowledge is not beauty, but knowledge is necessary to bore a well. The whole technological world is based on knowledge and that world is taking over our lives. If we allow knowledge to be the sole authority, and hope through knowledge to ascend, then we are living in a fatal illusion. We are saying that knowledge has its place in everyday life but when knowledge is the only substance of our life, then our life must be confined to mechanical activity. Is the communication of knowledge the only function of the teacher as it is now passing on information, ideas, theories and expanding these theories, discussing various aspects of them? Is this the only function of a teacher? If this is all a teacher is concerned with, then he is merely a living computer. But surely a teacher has far greater responsibility than this. He must be concerned with behaviour, with the human complexity of action, with a way of life which is the flowering of goodness. Surely he must be concerned with the future of his students and what is the future for these students? What is the future of man? What is the future of our consciousness which is so confused, disturbed, messy, in conflict? Must we perpetually live in conflict, sorrow and pain? When the teacher is not in communication with the student about all these matters, then he is merely a lively, clever machine perpetuating other machines. So we are asking a very fundamental question which is: what is a teacher? It is the greatest profession in the world, though the least respected, for if he is deeply and seriously concerned, the teacher is bringing about the unconditioning of the human brain not only his own but that of the student. He is conditioned and the student is conditioned. Whether he admits it or not this is a fact, and in relationship with the student he is helping both the student and himself to free consciousness from limitation. A relationship is a process of learning. A relationship is not a static affair but a living movement and so it is never the same. What it was yesterday it is not today. When yesterday dominates in relationship, then relationship is what it was, not a living thing. Love is not what it was. When the relationship between the teacher and the student has this element of companionship, of mutual unconditioning and humility, sensitivity and affection are natural. A teacher might say all this is impossible. When school authorities demand that there be fifty students in a class of every kind of idiocy, then what is a teacher to do? Obviously he cannot do anything. But we are talking about schools where this does not take place. There the teacher can establish this relationship and there he is deeply involved with the flowering of human beings. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 1ST DECEMBER 1982 It appears that very few teachers are aware of their great responsibility, not only to the parents, but also in their relationship to the students. What is this relationship? How does one regard this relationship? Is it communication of information? Is it the verbal statement of certain facts, and is the relationship superficial, casual and passing? Is the teacher an example? Am I as a teacher an influence? If I am an example that some of my students should follow, then I become a tyrant; then discipline becomes conformity. They imitate me, my ways, my gestures and so on. But I do not want them to follow me, to influence them. I want them to understand how all of us are influenced, moulded to conform to a pattern. My perception, my intention is to help my students to be free of every kind of influence, good or bad, so that they see for themselves what is right action. Not to be told what is right action but to have the capacity and drive to see the false and the true. That is, my concern is primarily to cultivate their intelligence so that they can meet life with all its complexities intelligently. I see this not as a goal but as an immediate reality. I know they are influenced by their parents, by their fellow students and by the world around them. Young people are easily influenced. They may rebel against it but consciously or unconsciously there is pressure and the strain of this pressure. So I ask my self as a teacher, and as a human being, in what manner can I bring about the character and energy of that intelligence? I begin to see that I must be both introvert and extrovert, in the world of action, and inwardly not be self-centred but turn my eyes and my hearing to the subtleties of life. That is, I must be able to protect and at the same time cultivate generosity, be both the receiver and the giver. I feel all this if I am a really dedicated teacher in the true sense of that word. To me it is not a profession; it is something that has to be done. So I become very much more aware of the world, what is happening there, and inwardly comprehend the necessity to go beyond and above self-centred interest. I see this as a whole movement, the outward and the inner, indivisible like the waters of the sea that come in and go out. Now my question is: how am I to help the student to be aware of this? Sensitivity implies being vulnerable. One is sensitive to one's reactions, to one's hurts, one's beleaguered existence: that is, one is sensitive about oneself and in this vulnerable state there is really self-interest and therefore the capability of being hurt, of becoming neurotic. It is a form of resistance which is essentially concentrated on the self. The strength of vulnerability is not self-centred. It is like the young spring leaf that can withstand strong winds and flourish. This vulnerability is incapable of being hurt, whatever the circumstances. Vul- nerability is without centre as the self. It has an extraordinary strength, vitality and beauty. As a human being, in myself and as a teacher, I see all this as clearly as possible, but as a teacher I am not all this. I am studying this, learning. As a teacher I am in relationship with my students and in that relation I am learning. In what manner am I to convey all this to my students who are conditioned, thoughtless, full of play, mischievous as normal children are? I teach subjects and am wondering if I can convey all this through mathematics, biology, physics. Or are they apart, something to be memorized? I see the other as not the cultivation of memory, so I have this problem: on the one hand the cultivation of memory in history and so on to pass examinations and ultimately for an occupation, and on the other I have a glimmer that intelligence is not mechanical, is not the cultivation of memory. This is my problem. I am asking myself if these two are separate? Or if intelligence, if it is awakened from the very beginning of one's life, can include memory and not be a slave to it? The greater includes the lesser. The universe contains the particular. But the particular cannot remain in its own narrow sphere. I am beginning to comprehend this important factor for I am a dedicated teacher who is using teaching as a steppingstone to something else. So I am wondering what to do with these children in front of me. They are not interested in all this. They are ready to bully each other, to compete with each other, are envious and so on. Now you who are the outsider, do you understand my problem? You have to because you are also a teacher in your own way at home, in the playing fields or in business. We are all teachers in some way or other, so don't just leave me with my problem. It is your problem too, so let us talk about it. We both see, I hope, that we are in this predicament: that the primary and greatest importance is to bring about this intelligence in all children and in the students for whom we are responsible. Don't leave me alone to solve this problem, so let us talk about it. First of all I want you and me to understand the problem. Leave the children and the student alone for the moment. Do we see that the student must eventually have an occupation and so he must understand the world, the necessities of the world, its implicit disorder and its increasing destruction and decline? He has to face this world not as a specialized entity, which makes him incapable of meeting the world. All this implies the acquisition of knowledge and the careful discipline of knowledge. As long as the world is what it is, he has to act in a certain direction and he is occupied most of the time with that, perhaps eight or ten hours a day. Also he has to study and learn about the whole psychological world which has not been explored by anyone. Those who have explored somewhat tell what they have discovered: this becomes knowledge and the student merely follows. This is not an accurate exploration into oneself. So you and I have this issue. You may be casually interested but I as a teacher am really concerned. I too am conditioned; I am not quite vulnerable in the definition which has been given here. I have my family problems etc, but my dedication supercedes them all. What am I to do or not to do? Does it demand no action but to create with other teachers the atmosphere of intent? The intent is not a goal to be achieved sometime later. The intent is the everpresent activity in which time is not involved at all. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH DECEMBER 1982 Intent is far more important than to achieve a goal, an end. Intent is not just an intellectual and ideologic conclusion but rather an active, living present. It is the wick that is burning in a bowl of oil. It cannot be extinguished, no breeze can blow it out. The wick is stout and the oil is not fed by any external influence or source. It has no cause and so the flame, the wick and the oil are everenduring. This is my intent as a dedicated teacher and it should be yours too as parents and of all humanity, for we are all concerned. The vital flame of intent is to bring about a good, intelligent, extremely capable, free human being. You cannot escape from this intention. You are involved in it as much as I am. You may shy away from it, disregard it, neglect it, but you are as much responsible as I am. The future is our responsibility so this is our immediate problem. My problem and yours is to cultivate the comprehensive intelligence from which all other things flow. I can see this in my mind's eye as the central factor, for no intelligent person, in the sense we are using that word, would ever want to hurt another intentionally. Such a person would treat all humanity as he would treat himself, without this terrible destructive division. I can also feel in some vague way, not sentimentally, that this intelligence is totally impersonal, neither yours nor mine. I can feel its tremendous attraction and its truth. Now in what manner can I cultivate this in my students and myself? I am using the wrong word cultivate: cultivation implies the activity of thought, it implies an achievement, a labour. So I am beginning to perceive that intelligence is totally different from the activity of thought. Thought has no relation to it. It cannot be born out of thought, for thought is always limited. Now having stated this, which is not a vague apprehension but a burning intention, I ask myself is it possible for me to convey to the student the quality of this intention? Can I do this through mathematics or biology, or any other subject? Knowing the students' brains are conditioned, limited, conforming, let us say I am a teacher of mathematics. Mathematics is order, infinite order. Order is the universe, is intelligence. Order is not static; it is a living movement. Our life is movement but we have brought about disorder in our life. So I am going to talk to the students not just about mathematics but about order in their and my life. Negation of disorder is order. A human being confused, disorderly, uncertain, in trying to establish order only creates more disorder. I see this very, very clearly so I am going to help them and in helping them I am helping myself. That order cannot be pursued as you can pursue mathematics step by step. So the first thing to realize is that thought can never bring about order, do what it will, through legislation, administration or compulsion. Mathematics is not disorder. Mathematics in itself is basically order. Order is independent of thought. Thought cannot put together order: the more it attempts it the greater the confusion. Thought is capable of seeing the order of mathematics but this order is not the product of thought. One can see the great majesty and beauty of a mountain but the human being who sees it may have no dignity, no majesty, no beauty. Now with all this I myself must study this order and disorder before I can convey it to my pupils. The study of a book on any particular subject is very different from the study of myself, who is disorderly, confused. The book reveals phrase by phrase, chapter by chapter, coming to some conclusion or other. The book is visible and one can spend perhaps years on the subject of the book. But I am not studying a book, I am studying a book that has not print on it, which cannot be read through another's eye. So I must find out how to study it. You are doing this with me too, so don't step aside. I am studying for my own interest and also to convey it to the student. It is not that I am studying for myself only. The book and the subject in itself are palpable, tangible. The words convey a certain definite meaning but to study this tenuous, living, changing subject which is my own quality of brain, which has lived and still lives in disorder, confusion and fear is far more difficult than reading a book. It requires swiftness, subtlety, moving without leaving an imprint. Do I have such a quality? In asking that question of myself I am not only studying who puts that question but also the intent behind the question? So I am studying the whole phenomenon very cautiously, never coming to a definite conclusion. This constant watchfulness, never allowing any shadow to slip by without careful observation, is making the brain, the whole activity of thought, quieten down without becoming dull. I take a rest and pick it up again. The rest is as important as the renewal of observation. I am capturing the perfume of that intelligence, the extraordinary subtlety of it, and so the whole physical organism is becoming more alive, aware, and is beginning to have a different rhythm. It is creating its own atmosphere. Now I can go to the class under a tree or in a room where I am supposed to teach mathematics, knowing that the students have to qualify in it, and for the first five or ten minutes I talk to them explaining very clearly what I have been studying how it is possible for them to study it too. I am teaching them the art of studying. I am really deeply interested in conveying to them my deep intention and they are enveloped in my ardour. I explain to them how I approach this question of intelligence step by step. I point out to them the order and beauty of a tree, which is not put together by thought. I insist that they see this clearly that nature and the heavens and the wild animals of the forest are not the product of thought, though thought may use them for its own convenience or destruction. Thought in its activity has brought about great destruction and also great passing beauty. During every opportunity, without boring myself and the students, I talk about these matters with humour and seriousness. This is my life for this intelligence is supreme. Order has no cause, therefore it is everlasting; but disorder has a cause and that which has a cause can end. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 1ST JANUARY 1983 Discontent does not necessarily lead to intelligence. Most of us have some kind of dissatisfaction and are not satisfied with most things. We may have money, position and some kind of prestige in the world, but there is always this worm of discontent. The more you have the more you want. Satisfaction is never satisfied. Discontent is like a flame: however much you feed it, it absorbs more. It is curious how easily satisfaction finds its temporary fulfilment and one holds onto it, though it soon fades and the wanting more comes back again. It appears this is the constant swing from one object of satisfaction to another, physically as well as inwardly. The `more' is the root of discontent. The flame of measurement leads either to satiety, indifference and neglect, or to a wider and deeper enquiry. In enquiry satisfaction is not the goal. Enquiry is its own source which is never emptied. It is like the spring well and it can never forget itself through any kind of satisfaction. This flame can never be smothered by any outward or inward activity of achievement. Most of us have this tiny flame which is generally smothered by some form of gain, but in order to allow this tiny flame to burn furiously, the measurement of the more must totally end. Then only the flame burns away all sense of gratification. As an educator I have been concerned with another problem. I cannot have a school all to myself. In a school I have many colleagues. Some are extremely bright I am not being patronizing. Others are of varying dullness, though all are what is called well-educated, having degrees and so on. perhaps one or two of us are trying to help the students to understand the nature of intelligence, but I feel that unless all of us are together cooperatively helping the student in this direction, those teachers who are not concerned with the cultivation of it will naturally act as an impediment. This is the problem of a few of us; this goes on most of the time in educational centres. So my problem is and again let me repeat this is not being said in any patronizing way how are we, the few, to deal with the many? What is our response to them? It is a challenge that must be met at all levels of our life. In all forms of government there is the division between the few and the many. The few may be concerned with the whole population and the many concerned with their own particular little interests. This happens all over the world and it is happening in the field of education. So how are we to establish a relationship with those of us who are not totally committed to the flowering of intelligence and goodness? Or is it all one problem to awaken the flame in the whole of the school? Of course the authoritarian attitude destroys all intelligence. The sense of obedience breeds only fear which in itself inevitably drives away the understanding of the true nature of intelligence. So what place has authority in a school? We have to study authority and not merely assert that there should be no authority but only freedom and so on. We have to study it as we study the atom. The structure of the atom is orderly. Obedience, following, accepting authority, whether it is blind or clear-eyed, must inevitably bring about disorder. What is the root of obedience which breeds authority? When one is in disorder, confusion, society becomes utterly chaotic; then that very disorder creates authority, as has happened so often historically. Is the root of accepting authority fear, being in oneself uncertain, without clarity? Then each human being helps to bring about the authority that will tell us what to do, as has happened in all religions, all sects and communities: the everlasting problem of the guru and the disciple, each destroying the other. The follower then becomes the leader. This cycle is forever repeating itself. We are studying together, in the real sense of the word, what is the causation of authority. If each one of us sees that it is fear, muddle-headedness, or some deeper factor, then the mutual study of it, verbal or non-verbal, has significance. In studying there may be an exchange of thought and the silent observation of the causation of authority. Then that very study uncovers the light of intelligence, for intelligence has no authority. It is not your intelligence or my intelligence. A few of us may see this deeply and really without any deception and it is our responsibility that this flame be spread wherever we are, either in school, at home or in bureaucratic government. Wherever you are, it has no abiding place. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH JANUARY 1983 Our brains are very old. They have evolved through countless experiences, accidents, death, and the continuity of the flowering of the brain has been going on for millennia. It has varieties of capacities, is ever active, moving and living in its own memories and anxieties, full of fear, uncertainty and sorrow. This is the everlasting cycle it has lived the passing pleasures and incessant activity. In this long process it has been conditioning itself, shaping its own way of life, adjusting itself to its own environment as few species have, combining hatred and affection, killing others and at the same time trying to find a peaceful life. It is shaped by the infinite activity of the past, always modifying itself, but the basic structure of reward and pain remains almost the same. This conditioning attempts to shape the outward world but inwardly it is following the same pattern, always dividing the me and the you, we and they, being hurt and trying to hurt: a pattern in which passing affection and its pleasure is the way of our life. To observe all this without value judgement it becomes necessary, if there is to be any deep, living change, to perceive the complexity of our life without choice: just to see exactly what is. `What is' is far more important than what should be. There is only what is and never what should be. What is can only end. It cannot become something else. The ending has greater significance than what is beyond ending. To search for what is beyond is to cultivate fear; to search for what lies beyond is to avoid, to turn away from what is. We are always chasing that which is not, something other than the actual. If we could see this and remain with what is, however unpleasant or fearful it may be, or however pleasurable, then observation which is pure attention, dissipates that which is. One of our difficulties is that we want to get on and one says to oneself,`I understand this then what?' The `what' is slipping away from what is. The 'what is' is the movement of thought. If it is painful, thought tries to avoid it, but if it is pleasurable, thought holds it and prolongs it, so this is one of the aspects of conflict. There is no opposite but only what actually is. As there is no opposite in the psychological sense, the observation of what is does not entail conflict. But our brains are conditioned to the illusion of the opposite. Of course there are opposites: light and dark, man and woman, black and white, tall and short and so on. But here we are trying to study the psychological field of conflict. The ideal breeds conflict. But we are conditioned by centuries of idealism, the ideal state, the ideal man, the prototype, the god. It is this division between the prototype and the actual which breeds conflict. To see the truth of this is not a judgemental evaluation. I have studied carefully what has been said in this letter. I understand the logic of it, the common sense of it, but the weight of the past is so heavy that the persistent, constant intrusion of cultivated illusion, of the ideal of what should be, is always interfering. I am asking myself whether this illusion can be totally dispelled, or should I accept it as an illusion and let it wither away? I can see that the more I struggle against it, the more I am giving life to it, and it is very difficult to remain with what is. Now as an educator, as both parent and teacher, can I convey this subtle and complex problem of conflict in human beings? What a wonderful life it would be without conflict, without problems. Or rather, as problems arise which seems to be inevitable to deal with them immediately and not live with them. The way of education so far has been to cultivate competition and thereby sustain conflict. So I see one problem after another piling up in my responsibility to the student. The difficulties drown me and so I begin to lose the vision of a good human being. I am using the word `vision' not as some ideal, not a goal in the future, but as the actual deep reality of goodness and beauty. It is not some fanciful dream, a thing to be achieved, but the very truth of it is a liberating factor. This perception is logical, reasonable and utterly sane. It has no overtones of sentimentality or romantic froth. Now I am faced with the total acceptance of what is and I see my students caught in the avoidance of the actual. So there is a contradiction here and if I am not careful and watchful in my relation with them I will bring about conflict, a struggle between them and me. I see, but they do not which is a fact. I want to help them to see. It is not my perception of truth, but for each one of them to see the truth which belongs to nobody. Any form of pressure is a distorting factor, as in giving or being an example, so I have to go at this very gently and interest them in investigating the ending of conflict whether it is possible or not. It has now taken me perhaps a week or more to understand this, to grasp the significance of it. I may not actually be living this but I have grasped the delicate device of it and it must not slip away from me. If they grasp even the perfume of this, it is as a living seed. I am discovering that patience has no element of time, whereas impatience is in the nature of time.I am not trying to achieve a result or come to a certain conclusion. I am not engulfed by all this; there is a regenerating factor. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 1ST FEBRUARY 1983 Freedom is very necessary in our life. Freedom is obviously not to do whatever you like, though this has been considered freedom and has been the way of our life. We feel thwarted, inhibited when our desires are denied. From this arises our resentments, our feeling that we are sat upon and so a continuous revolt. We have followed this course of life and we can see, if we are at all thoughtful,what it has brought to the world: utter chaos. Some of the psychologists have encouraged us to pursue our impulses without any restraint, to do what we like immediately, rationalizing such activity as necessary for each one's growth. This was actually the cry for many generations, though there was outward restraint, and now they call it freedom to allow the child to do what he wants, and so on up the ladder of his life, which is society. And perhaps now there will be an opposite swing: control, inhibit,discipline and the psychological restraint. This appears to be the story of mankind. Added to this is the computer and the robot: the technology that is developing in this direction, hoping to produce and probably will produce a computer with a human brain which may think faster and more accurately and thus give freedom from long hours of labour. The computer too is gradually taking over the education of our children. Highly qualified teachers and professors in their various subjects can inform the student without the actual presence of the teacher. This too will give us a certain freedom. Except in the totalitarian States, greater freedom is going to come to man and so perhaps allow him to do what he likes. Thus greater conflict may arise, greater misery and wars for man. When technology and computers with robots dominate and become part of our daily life, then what is to happen to the human brain which has been active so far in outward and physical struggle? Will the brain then become atrophied, working only a couple of hours or more? When relationship is between machine and machine, what is to happen to the quality and vitality of the brain? Will it seek some form of entertainment, religious or otherwise, or will it allow itself to explore the vast recesses of one's being? The industry of entertainment is gathering more and more strength and very little human energy and capacity is turned inwardly, so if we are not aware, the entertainment world is going to conquer us. So we must ask what is freedom? It is often said that freedom is at the end of drastic discipline and civilized control civilized in the sense of literature, art, museums and good food. This is merely the outward coating of a confused, declining human being. Is freedom a choice of entertainment? Is freedom choice at all? We always consider freedom as being from something: from bondage, anxiety, loneliness, despair and so on. Such consideration only leads to further and perhaps more refined states of misery, sorrow and the ugliness of hatred. Freedom is not choosing a leader, political or religious, to follow which obviously denies freedom. Freedom is not the opposite of slavery. Freedom is the ending: not giving continuity to what has been. Freedom in itself has no opposite. After having read this and studied it, what is my relationship not to the student and to my wife and children, but to the world? Really to understand the depth of freedom one needs a great deal of intelligence and perhaps love. But the activities of the world are not intelligent and neither is my group of children. I spend most of my day with them: have I this quality of freedom, with its intelligence and love? If I have this, my problem is very simple. That very quality will operate and what I thought to be a problem will cease to be one. But I really do not have this. I can pretend, put on a show of friendliness, but that is very shallow. My responsibility is immediate. I cannot say to myself that I will wait until I will achieve freedom and this affection, love. I literally have no time because my students are in front of me. I cannot become a hermit: that will not solve any problem, mine or the world's. I need lightning from heaven to break up this incrustation, this conditioning, to have this freedom and love; but there is no thunderbolt, no heaven. I can allow myself to come to an impasse and get depressed over the matter but that is an escape from the problem to completely enclose myself and thus be incapable of facing the actuality. As when I actually see the truth that there is no outside agent to help me in this dilemma, that no outside influence, no grace, no prayer will help in this matter, then perhaps I will have an uncontaminated energy. That energy may then be freedom and love. But have I the energy of intelligence to dismantle the things which human beings all over the world, of whom I am one, have built psychologically around themselves? Have I the persistence to go through all this? I am asking these questions of myself and I shall be asking my students in a more gentle and benevolent manner. I see the implications of all this quite clearly and I must tread very softly. The true answer lies in intelligence and love. If you have these qualities you will know what to do. One must realize the truth of this very deeply, otherwise we shall all be perpetuating in one form or another the confusion between man and man. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH FEBRUARY 1983 Intelligence is not the consequence of discipline. It is not a byproduct of thought. Thought is the result of knowledge and ignorance. There can be no discipline without love. The discipline of thought, though it has certain values, leads to conformity. Conformity is the way of discipline as it is generally understood to imitate and follow a pattern. Discipline really means to learn, not to bow down to a standard; from childhood we are told to mould ourselves according to a religious or social structure, to control ourselves, to obey. Discipline is based on reward and punishment. Discipline is inherent in every subject: If you want to be a good golfer or tennis player, it demands that you pay attention to every stroke, to respond quickly and gracefully. The very game has its intrinsic natural order. This instructive order has gone out of our life, which has become chaotic, ruthless, competitive, seeking power with all its pleasures. Discipline implies, does it not, learning the whole complex movement of life social, personal and beyond personal? Our life is fragmented and we try to understand each fragment or integrate the fragments. Recognizing all this, the mere imposition of discipline and certain concepts becomes rather meaningless, but without some form of control most of us go berserk. Certainly inhibitions hold us, compel us to follow tradition. One realizes that there must be a certain order in our life and is it possible to have order without any form of compulsion, without any pressure and essentially without reward or punishment? The social order is chaotic; there is injustice, the rich and poor and so on. Every reformer tries to bring about social equality, and apparently not one of them has succeeded. Governments try to impose order by force, by law, by subtle propaganda. Though we may put a lid on all this, the pot is still boiling. So we must approach the problem differently. We have tried in every sort of way to civilize, to tame man and this too has not been very successful. Every war indicates barbarism, whether it is a holy war or a political war. So we must come back to the question: can there be order that is not the result of contriving thought? Discipline means the art of learning. For most of us learning means storing up memory, reading a great many books, being able to quote from various authors, collecting words so as to write, speak or convey other people's ideas or one's own. It is to act efficiently as an engineer or a scientist, a musician or a good mechanic. One may excel in the knowledge of these things and thus make oneself more and more capable of having money, power and position. This is generally accepted as learning: to accumulate knowledge and to act from that; or, through action, to accumulate knowledge, which comes to the same. This has been our tradition, our custom, and so we are always living and learning in the field of the known. We are not suggesting there is something unknown but to have an insight into the activities of the known, its limitations, its dangers and its endless continuity. The story of man is this. We do not learn from wars: we repeat wars, and brutality and bestiality continue with their corruption. Only if we actually see the limitation of knowledge that the more we pile up, the more barbarous we are becoming can we begin to enquire into what is order that is not imposed externally or self-imposed, for both imply conformity and so endless conflict. Conflict is disorder. The apprehension of all this is attention, not concentration, and attention is the essence of intelligence and love. This naturally brings the order which has no compulsion. Now as educators, as parents which is the same is it not possible for us to convey this to our students and children? They may be too young to understand all that we have just read. We see the difficulties and these very difficulties will prevent us from grasping the greater issue. So I am not making this into a problem: I am just very much aware of what is chaos and what is order. These two have no relation to each other. One is not born out of the other. And I am not denying one or accepting the other. But the flowering seed of perception will bring right, correct action. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 1ST OCTOBER 1983 In every civilization there have been a few who were concerned and desirous of bringing about good human beings; a few who would not be involved in sacred structures or reform, but who would not harm another human being; who would be concerned with the whole of human life, who would be gentle, unaggressive and so would be truly religious entities. In modern civilization throughout the world, the cultivation of goodness has almost disappeared. The world is becoming more brutal, harmful, full of violence and deception. Surely it is our function as educators to bring about a quality of mind that is fundamentally religious. We do not mean belonging to some orthodox religion with all its fantastic beliefs, its repetitive rituals. Man has always tried to find something beyond this world of anxiety, suffering and endless conflict. In his search for that which is not of the world, he has invented, probably unconsciously, god and many forms of divinity, and the interpreters between himself and that which he has projected. There have been many interpreters, highly sophisticated, talented, learned. Historically from ancient of times this cycle has continued: god, the interpreter and the man. This is the real trinity in which human gullibility has been held. The world has been too much and each human being wants some comfort, security and peace. So humans have projected the essence of all this into an outside agency and that too we are discovering to be an illusion. Not being able to go beyond and above all the limitations of human struggle, we are returning to barbarism, destroying each other inwardly and outwardly. Can we as a small group begin to think upon these things and, freeing ourselves from all the invented superstitions of religion, discover what is a religious life and thus prepare the soil for the flowering of goodness? Without the religious mind there can be no goodness. There are three factors in understanding the nature of religion: austerity, humility and diligence. Austerity does not mean reducing all of life to ashes by severe discipline, suppressing every instinct, every desire and even beauty. Outward expression of this in the Asiatic world is the saffron robe and a loincloth. In the Western world it is taking vows of celibacy, utter obedience and becoming a monk. Simplicity of life was expressed in outer garments and a restricted, narrow cellular life, but inwardly the flame of desire and its conflict was burning steadily. That flame was to be put out by strict adherence to a concept, to an image. The book and the image became the symbols of a simple life. Austerity is not the outward expression of a conclusion based on faith but to understand the inward complexity, the confusion and the agony of life. This understanding, not verbal or intellectual, requires a very careful, watchful perception, a perception which is not the complexity of thought but clarity this clarity brings about its own austerity. Humility is not the opposite of vanity, is not bowing one's head to some abstract authority or to the high priest. It is not the act of surrender to a guru or to an image, which are both the same. It is not the total denial, a sacrifice, of oneself to some imaginary or physical being. Humility is not associated with arrogance. Humility has no sense of possessiveness inwardly. Humility is the essence of love and intelligence, it is not an achievement. And the other factor is diligence: it is for thought to be aware of its activities, its deceptions, its illusions; it is to discern the actual and the false in which what is actual is transformed into what it should be. It is to be aware of reactions to the world outside and to the inner whispering responses. It is not self-centred watchfulness, but to be sensitive to all relationship. Above and beyond all this is intelligence and love. When these exist all the other qualities will follow. It is like opening the gate to beauty. Now I come back as an educator and a parent to my stumbling question. My students and my children have to face the world which is everything other than intelligence and love. This is not a cynical statement but it is so, palpable and evident. They have to face corruption, brutality and utter callousness. They are frightened. Being responsible (I am using that word very carefully, and with deep intention), how are we to help them to face all this? I am not asking the question of anyone but I am putting it to myself so that in questioning I become clear. I am greatly troubled by this and I certainly do not want a comforting answer. In questioning myself, sensitivity and clarity are showing their beginnings. I feel very strongly about the future of these students and children, and by helping them to use words, intelligence and love, I am gathering strength. To help one boy or one girl to be like this is sufficient for me, for the river begins in the high mountains as a very small stream, lonely and far away, but it gathers momentum into a huge river. So one must begin with the very few. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH OCTOBER 1983 What we are the world is. In the family, in society, we have made this world with its brutality, cruelty and coarseness, its vulgarity and destruction of each other. We also destroy each other psychologically, exploiting one another for our desires and gratifications. We never seem to realize, unless each one of us undergoes a radical change, that the world will continue as it has for thousands of years, maiming each other, killing each other and despoiling the earth. If our house is not in order we cannot possibly expect society and our relationships to one another to be in order. It is all so obvious that we neglect it. We discard it as being not only simple but too arduous, so we accept things as they are, fall into the habit of acceptance and carry on. This is the essence of mediocrity. One may have a literary gift, recognised by the few, and work towards popularity; one may be a painter, a poet or a great musician, but in our daily lives we are not concerned with the whole of existence. We may perhaps be adding to the great confusion and misery of man. Each one wants to express his own little talent and be satisfied with it, forgetting or neglecting the whole complexity of man's trouble and sorrow. This again we accept and this has become the normal way of life. We are never an outsider and remain outside. We feel ourselves incapable of remaining outside or are afraid not to be in the current of the commonplace. As parents and educators, we make the family and the school of what we are. Mediocrity really means going only half-way up the mountain and never reaching the top. We want to be like everybody else and of course if we want to be slightly different we keep it carefully hidden. We are not talking of eccentricity: that is another form of self-expression, which is what everyone is doing in his own little way. Eccentricity is tolerated only if you are well-to-do or gifted, but if you are poor and act peculiarly you are snubbed and ignored. But few of us are talented; we are workers carrying on with our particular profession. The world is becoming more and more mediocre. Our education, our occupation, our superficial acceptance of traditional religion are making us mediocre and rather sloppy. We are concerned here with our daily life, not with the expression of talent or some capacity. As educators, which includes parents, can we break away from this plodding, mechanical way of living? Is it the unconscious fear of loneliness that makes us fall into habits: habit of work, habit of thought, the habit of general acceptance of things as they are? We establish a routine for ourselves and live as closely as possible to that habit, so gradually the brain becomes mechanical and this mechanical way of living is mediocrity. The countries that live on established traditions are generally mediocre. So we are asking ourselves in what way can mechanical mediocrity end and not form another pattern which will gradually become mediocre too? The mechanical usage of thought is the issue: not how to step out of mediocrity, but how man has given complete importance to thought. All our activities and aspirations, our relationships and longings, are based on thought. Thought is common to all mankind, whether the highly talented or the villager without any kind of education. Thought is common to all of us. It is neither of the East nor of the West, the lowlands or the highlands. It is not yours or mine. This is important to understand. We have made it personal and hence still further limited the nature of thought. Thought is limited but when we make it our own we make it still shallower. When we see the truth of this there will be no competition between the ideal thought and everyday thought. The ideal has become all-important and not the thought of action. It is this division which breeds conflict, and to accept conflict is mediocre. It is the politicians and the gurus who nourish and sustain this conflict and so mediocrity. Again we come to the basic issue: what is the response of the teacher and the parent, which includes all of us, to the coming generation? We may perceive the logic and the sanity of what is said in these letters, but the intellectual comprehension of it does not seem to give us the vital energy to propel us out of our mediocrity. What is that energy which will make us move now, not eventually, out of the commonplace? Surely it is not enthusiasm or the sentimental grasp of some vague perception, but an energy that sustains itself under all circumstances. What is that energy which must be independent of all outside influence? This is a serious question each is asking himself: is there such energy, totally free from all causation? Now let us examine it together. Dimension has always an end. Thought is the outcome of cause which is knowledge. That which has a dimension has an end. When we say we understand, it generally means an intellectual or verbal comprehension, but comprehending is to perceive sensitively that which is, and that very perception is the withering away of what is. Perception is this attention that is focussing all energy to watch the movement of that which is. This energy of perception has no cause, as intelligence and love have no cause. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 1ST NOVEMBER 1983 One is quite sure that the educators are aware what is actually happening in the world. People are divided racially, religiously, politically, economically, and this division is fragmentation. It is bringing about great chaos in the world wars, every kind of deception politically and so on. There is the spreading of violence and man against man. This is the actual state of confusion in the world, in the society in which we live, and this society is created by all human beings with their culture, their linguistic divisions, their regional separation. All this is breeding not only confusion but hatred, a great deal of antagonism and further linguistic differences. This is what is happening and the responsibility of the educator is really very great. He is concerned in all these schools to bring about a good human being who has a feeling of global relationship, who is not nationalistic, regional, separate, religiously clinging to the old dead traditions which have really no value at all. His responsibility as an educator becomes more and more serious, more and more committed, more and more concerned with the education of his students. What is this education doing actually? Is it really helping man, his children, to become more concerned, more gentle, generous, not to go back to the old pattern, the old ugliness and naughtiness of this world? If he is really concerned, as he must be, then he has to help the student to find out his relationship to the world, the world not of imagination or romantic sentimentality, but to the actual world in which all things are taking place. And also to the world of nature, to the desert, the jungle or the few trees that surround him, and to the animals of the world. Animals fortunately are not nationalistic; they hunt only to survive. If the educator and the student lose their relationship to nature, to the trees, to the rolling sea, each will certainly lose his relationship with man. What is nature? There is a great deal of talk and endeavour to protect nature, the animals, the birds, the whales and dolphins, to clean the polluted rivers, the lakes, the green fields and so on. Nature is not put together by thought, as religion is, as belief is. Nature is the tiger that extraordinary animal with its energy, its great sense of power. Nature is the solitary tree in the field, the meadows and the grove; it is that squirrel shyly hiding behind a bough. Nature is the ant and the bee and all the living things of the earth. Nature is the river, not a particular river, whether the Ganga, the Thames or the Mississippi. Nature is all those mountains, snowclad, with the dark blue valleys and range of hills meeting the sea. The universe is part of this world. One must have a feeling for all this, not destroy it, not kill for one's pleasure, not kill animals for one's table. We do kill the cabbage, the vegetables that we eat, but one must draw the line somewhere. If you do not eat vegetables, then how will you live? So one must intelligently discern. Nature is part of our life. We grew out of the seed, the earth, and we are part of all that but we are rapidly losing the sense that we are animals like the others. Can you have a feeling for that tree, look at it, see the beauty of it, listen to the sound it makes; be sensitive to the little plant, to the little weed, to that creeper that is growing up the wall, to the light on the leaves and the many shadows? One must be aware of all this and have that sense of communion with nature around you. You may live in a town but you do have trees here and there. A flower in the next garden may be ill-kept, crowded with weeds, but look at it, feel that you are part of all that, part of all living things. If you hurt nature you are hurting yourself. One knows all this has been said before in different ways but we don't seem to pay much attention. Is it that we are so caught up in our own network of problems, our own desires, our own urges of pleasure and pain that we never look around, never watch the moon? Watch it. Watch with all your eyes and ears, your sense of smell. Watch. Look as though you are looking for the first time. If you can do that, that tree, that bush, that blade of grass you are seeing for the first time. Then you can see your teacher, your mother and father, your brother and sister, for the first time. There is an extraordinary feeling about that: the wonder, the strangeness, the miracle of a fresh morning that has never been before, never will be. Be really in communion with nature, not verbally caught in the description of it, but be a part of it, be aware, feel that you belong to all that, be able to have love for all that, to admire a deer, the lizard on the wall, that broken branch lying on the ground. Look at the evening star or the new moon, without the word, without merely saying how beautiful it is and turning your back on it, attracted by something else, but watch that single star and new delicate moon as though for the first time. If there is such communion between you and nature then you can commune with man, with the boy sitting next to you, with your educator, or with your parents. We have lost all sense of relationship in which there is not only a verbal statement of affection and concern but also this sense of communion which is not verbal. It is a sense that we are all together, that we are all human beings, not divided, not broken up, not belonging to any particular group or race, or to some idealistic concepts, but that we are all human beings, we are all living on this extraordinary, beautiful earth. Have you ever woken up in the morning and looked out of the window, or gone out on the terrace and looked at the trees and the spring dawn? Live with it. Listen to all the sounds, to the whisper, the slight breeze among the leaves. See the light on that leaf and watch the sun coming over the hill, over the meadow. And the dry river, or that animal grazing and those sheep across the hill watch them. Look at them with a sense of affection, care, that you do not want to hurt a thing. When you have such communion with nature, then your relationship with another becomes simple, clear, without conflict. This is one of the responsibilities of the educator, not merely to teach mathematics or how to run a computer. Far more important is to have communion with other human beings who suffer, struggle, and have great pain and the sorrow of poverty, and with those people who go by in a rich car. If the educator is concerned with this he is helping the student to become sensitive, sensitive to other people's sorrows, other people's struggles, anxieties and worries, and the rows that one has in the family. It should be the responsibility of the teacher to educate the children, the students, to have such communion with the world. The world may be too large but the world is where he is; that is his world. And this brings about a natural consideration, affection for others, courtesy and behaviour that is not rough, cruel, vulgar. The educator should talk about all these things, not just verbally but he himself must feel it the world, the world of nature and the world of man. They are interrelated. Man cannot escape from that. When he destroys nature he is destroying himself. When he kills another he is killing himself. The enemy is not the other but you. To live in such harmony with nature, with the world, naturally brings about a different world. LETTERS TO THE SCHOOLS VOLUME 2 15TH NOVEMBER 1983 By watching perhaps you learn more than from books. Books are necessary to learn a subject whether it be mathematics, geography, history, physics or chemistry. The books have printed on a page the accumulated knowledge of scientists, of philosophers, of archaeologists and so on. This accumulated knowledge, which one learns in school and then through college or university, if one is lucky enough to go to university, has been gathered through the ages, from the very ancient of days. There is great accumulated knowledge from India, from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Greeks, the Romans and of course the Persians. In the Western world as well as in the Eastern world this knowledge is necessary to have a career, to do any job, whether mechanical or theoretical, practical or something that you have to think out, invent. This knowledge has brought about a great deal of technology, especially within this century. There is the knowledge of the so-called sacred books, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bible, the Koran and the Hebrew Scriptures. So there are the religious books and pragmatic books, books that will help you to have knowledge, to act skilfully, whether you are an engineer, a biologist or a carpenter. Most of us in any school, and particularly in these schools, gather knowledge, information, and that is what schools have existed for so far: to gather a great deal of information about the world outside, about the heavens, why the sea is salty, why the trees grow, about human beings, their anatomy, the structure of the brain and so on. And also about the world around you, nature, the social environment, economics and so much else. Such knowledge is absolutely necessary but knowledge is always limited. However much it may evolve, the gathering of knowledge is always limited. Learning is part of acquiring this knowledge of various subjects so that you can have a career, a job that might please you, or one that circumstances, social demands may have forced you to accept though you may not like very much to do that kind of work. But as we said, you learn a great deal by watching, watching the things about you, watching the birds, the tree, watching the heavens, the stars, the constellation of Orion, the Dipper, the Evening star. You learn just by watching not only the things around you but also by watching people, how they walk, their gestures, the words they use, how they are dressed. You not only watch that which is outside but also you watch yourself, why you think this or that, your behaviour, the conduct of your daily life, why parents want you to do this or that. You are watching, not resisting. If you resist you don't learn. Or if you come to some kind of conclusion, some opinion you think is right and hold on to that, then naturally you will never learn. Freedom is necessary to learn, and curiosity, a sense of wanting to know why you or others behave in a certain way, why people are angry, why you get annoyed. Learning is extraordinarily important because learning is endless. Learning why human beings kill each other for instance. Of course there are explanations in books, all the psychological reasons why human beings behave in their own particular manner, why human beings are violent. All this has been explained in books of various kinds by eminent authors, psychologists and so on. But what you read is not what you are. What you are, how you behave, why you get angry, envious, why you get depressed, if you watch yourself you learn much more than from a book that tells you what you are. But you see it is easier to read a book about yourself than to watch yourself. The brain is accustomed to gather information from all external actions and reactions. Don't you find it much more comforting to be directed, for others to tell you what you should do? Your parents, especially in the East, tell you whom you should marry and arrange the marriage, tell you what your career should be. So the brain accepts the easy way and the easy way is not always the right way. I wonder if you have noticed that nobody loves their work any more, except perhaps a few scientists, artists, archaeologists. But the ordinary, average man seldom loves what he is doing. He is compelled by society, by his parents or by the urge to have more money. So learn by watching very, very carefully the external world, the world outside you, and the inner world; that is, the world of yourself. There appear to be two ways of learning: one is acquiring a great deal of knowledge, first through study and then by acting from that knowledge. That is what most of us do. The second is to act, to do something and learn through doing, and that also becomes the accumulation of knowledge. Really both are the same: learning from a book or acquiring knowledge through action. Both are based upon knowledge, experience, and as we have said, experience and knowledge are always limited. So both the educator and the student should find out what actually learning is. For example you learn from a guru if he is at all the right kind, a sane guru, not the moneymaking guru, not one of those who want to be famous and trot off to different countries to gather a fortune through their rather unbalanced theories. Find out what it is to learn. Today learning is becoming more and more a form of entertainment. In some Western schools when they have passed high school, secondary school, the students do not even know how to read and write. And when you do know how to read and write and learn various subjects you are all such mediocre people. Do you know what the word mediocrity means? The root meaning is to go half way up the hill, never reaching the top. That is mediocrity: never demanding the excellent, the very highest thing of yourself. And learning is infinite, it really has no end. So from whom are you learning? From the books? From the educator? And perhaps, if your mind is bright, by watching? So far it appears you are learning from the outside: learning, accumulating knowledge and from that knowledge acting, establishing your career and so on. If you are learning from yourself or rather if you are learning by watching yourself, your prejudices, your definite conclusions, your beliefs, if you are watching the subtleties of your thought, your vulgarity, your sensitivity, then you become yourself the teacher and the taught. Then you do not depend inwardly on anybody, not on any book, not on the specialist though of course if you are ill and have some sort of disease you have to go to a specialist, that is natural, that is necessary. But to depend on somebody, however excellent he may be, prevents you from learning about yourself and what you are. And it is very, very important to learn what you are because what you are brings about this society which is so corrupt, immoral, where there is such enormous spreading of violence, this society which is so aggressive, each one seeking his own particular success, his own form of fulfilment. Learn what you are not through another but by watching yourself, not condemning, not saying `This is all right, I am that, I can't change' and carrying on. When you watch yourself without any form of reaction, resistance, then that very watching acts; like a flame it burns away the stupidities, the illusions that one has. So learning becomes important. A brain that ceases to learn becomes mechanical. It is like an animal tied to a stick; it can move only according to the length of the rope, the tether that is tied to the stick. Most of us are tied to a peculiar stake of our own, an invisible stake and rope. You keep wandering within the dimensions of that rope and it is very limited. It is like a man who is thinking about himself all day, about his problems, his desires, his pleasures and what he would like to do. You know this constant occupation with oneself. It is very, very limited. And that very limitation breeds various forms of conflict and unhappiness. The great poets, painters, composers are never satisfied with what they have done. They are always learning. It isn't after you have passed your exams and gone to work that you stop learning. There is a great strength and vitality in learning, especially about yourself. Learn, watch so that there is no spot that is not uncovered, looked at in yourself. This really is to be free from your own particular conditioning. The world is divided through its conditioning: you as an Indian, you as an American, you as a British, Russian, Chinese and so on. Out of this conditioning there are wars, the killing of thousands of people, the unhappiness and the brutality. So both the educator and the educated are learning in the deeper sense of that word. When both are learning there is no educator or one to be educated. There is only learning. Learning frees the brain and thought of prestige, position, status. Learning brings about equality among human beings. New Delhi - 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk Calcutta - 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk Madras - 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk Bombay - 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk 3rd Public Talk 4th Public Talk - Longer, Unedited Versions - New Delhi - 1st Public Talk New Delhi - 2nd Public Talk Calcutta - 1st Public Talk Calcutta - 2nd Public Talk Calcutta - 3rd Public Talk Calcutta - 4th Public Talk Madras - 1st Public Talk Madras - 2nd Public Talk Madras - 3rd Public Talk Madras - 4th Public Talk MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN NEW DELHI 1ST PUBLIC TALK 30TH OCTOBER, 1982 'THE ROOT CAUSE OF CONFUSION' This is not a lecture, but rather a conversation between two people, between you and the speaker, not on a particular subject, instructing and shaping your thought or opinions. We are two friends sitting in a park on a bench, talking over together our problems, friends who are concerned deeply with what is going on in the world, with the confusion, the chaos that exists throughout the world. I wonder if you have a friend with whom you talk, to whom you expose your own feelings, your concepts, your ideas, disillusionment, and so on. We are going to talk over together in that manner - exploring, enquiring, without any bias, in great friendship, which means, with great affection, respecting each other, without having some kind of hidden thought, hidden motives. First, let us look at what is happening around us, outwardly, without any bias, not as an Indian, not as a German, Englishman, American or Russian. We are human beings, whatever country we belong to. One observes countries going through a great deal of confusion, great uncertainty; there is chaos. People have no direction. But, unfortunately, we are conditioned, we are confused, uncertain, insecure, and we try to find a solution in the past, go back to our own traditions. This is what is happening throughout the world. There are the fundamentalists who accept the Bible as their authority, the fundamentalists of Islam who look to the Koran. There are the fundamentalists who look to Marx. So, when we are uncertain, confused, greatly disturbed, we look to the past, to some kind of authority, some kind of book, to find a direction. Now, in this country, as you observe, there are too many books, too many labels. So, here tradition is uncertain. You have all the leaders, all the gurus, but all the so-called saints have not helped mankind. What is the root cause of all this confusion? When one can find the cause, then one can end it. A cause has an end. We are asking what is the cause or what are the causes of this confusion, this lack of integrity, this sense of desperate degeneration. What is the root of all this? Most of us play with symptoms. We say it is due to overpopulation, bad government. Throughout the world it is the same - lack of leadership, lack of morality. These are all symptoms. One never asks what is the cause of all this. When we begin to enquire into the cause, each one of us will give different opinions. The more learned we are, the greater is the assertion of the cause or causes. But we are not very learned people. We are ordinary people, we are laymen, we are not very bright, very intelligent. But we are caught in this great turmoil that exists in the world and here in this country. Every nation, every group, is preparing for war. All countries, especially the industrial countries, are supplying armaments to the rest of the world. Nobody asks, `Why do we have to have wars, why do we have to kill each other, murder each other?' They are talking about stopping nuclear wars, but not ending all wars. Why have human beings reduced themselves to this condition? This is very important to ask. Why do we have to kill other people? Is it for your nation, for your particular group? We have accepted the idea of war as a historical process and it has become a reality. But the root of it is, we live in an illusion, illusion that our country must be protected. What is your country? What are you protecting - your house, your home, your ideas, your bank account? The whole world is degenerating, going to pieces, and we are not enquiring into fundamental causes. Now, what is the cause? Is it that you have so far looked to political leaders, religious leaders, economic leaders with their particular ideas, with their particular systems, to help you, so that you are always depending on others to guide you, to tell you what to do? Is that the root cause of this, or do you blame the environment? The environment is the government having no proper leader, no righteous guru. That is the environment -something outside of you. Is that the cause of this, which means that you have relied entirely on authority - the authority of tradition, authority of books, authority of leaders, gurus, and so on? When you depend, you gradually become weak, you become feeble. You are incapable of thinking clearly. This is a fact. Newspapers tell you what to think. All the meetings, the discourses that you attend, instruct. So the lack of self-reliance, the lack of a sense of responsibility for oneself - that may be the root cause of all this confusion. We have become irresponsible because we depend. Is it possible to be a light to oneself and not depend on a single person? You have to depend on the milkman, on the postman, on the policeman who keeps order at the crossroad. You depend on a surgeon, on a doctor. But inwardly, psychologically, one doesn't have to depend to think clearly for oneself, to observe one's own reactions and responses, if one can be completely a light to oneself. Do you understand what that means - to be a light to oneself? It is not self-confidence, not self-reliance. Self-confidence is part of selfishness. It is part of egotism. But to be a light to oneself requires great freedom, a very clear brain, not a conditioned brain. But to have an active brain, to challenge, to question, to doubt, that means to have energy. But when you depend on others, you lose energy. So, let us proceed from that. Is your mind, your brain, conditioned? Do you understand that word `conditioned'? From the moment we are born, the brain is being conditioned, shaped by tradition, by religion, by the literature you read, by the newspapers, by parents. the brain has lived for millions of years. It has had great many experiences. It has faced wars, sorrow, pleasure, pain, agony, great disturbances. And it is conditioned as a Hindu, as a Sikh, as a Muslim, as a Christian. Why is it conditioned? We are enquiring seriously whether your brain which is conditioned - if you are aware of it - can that conditioning be resolved? Do we see actually that we are conditioned? Do both of us agree to this at least? If you are conditioned, it means your being becomes mechanical - you repeat that you are a Hindu, you are a Muslim, you are a Marxist, and so on. Your brain becomes mechanical, repeating the same thing over and over again. So, first, do we, two of us, talking together as friends, realize actually that our brains are conditioned? Then we ask whether it is possible to free the brain from being a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Marxist. We are human beings, not labels. But labels count a great deal. That is what is going on. Where there is conditioning, there is no freedom. There cannot be love, there cannot be affection. It is imperative, absolutely essential for the future of humanity that we are concerned with the brain which is conditioned. If one is aware of that, then we can proceed to ask whether it is possible to free the brain. The relationship between the brain and the mind can come, is understood, when the brain is completely free. Then the brain is the mind. We will go into that later as we go along. We are conditioned, and we are asking whether it is possible to be free. Don't say it is or it is not, because that will be absurd; whereas if you are enquiring, then you are learning through investigation. Where do you begin to enquire whether it is possible to free the brain from its conditioning, to enquire whether it is possible not to be a Hindu or a Muslim or a Sikh, but a human being with all the travails of humanity, the anxieties, the uncertainties, the depth of sorrow and pain? Do you begin to enquire from the outside or do you begin to enquire from inside? That is, is the outside world different from the world in which we live inside? Do you understand that question? The society, the morals, the outward world - is that different from you or have you created it? Please look at this: The world is you and you are the world. It is very important to understand this. In our disorder, in our confusion, in our desire for security, we have created a world outside of us as society, which is corrupt, immoral, confused, everlastingly at war, because we in ourselves are confused, we are in conflict. So where do you begin, knowing that you have created this world? You have to begin with yourself, not with the alteration of the system, of the outer world. It means, not looking for a new leader, new system, new philosophy, new gurus, but looking at yourself as you are. Can you observe yourself as you would observe your face in a mirror? Can you observe your reactions, your responses, because your reactions and your responses are what you are. So let us begin to enquire there. Life is a process of relationship. There is no life without relationship. This is a fact. You may be a hermit, you may be a monk, you may withdraw from all society, but you are related. As a human being, you cannot escape from being related. You are related to your wife, to your husband, to your children, you are related to your government, you are related to the hermit who withdraws because you feed him, and he is related to his ideas. So relationship is the basis of human existence. Without relationship there is no existence. You are either related to the past, which is, to all the tradition, to all the memories, to the monks, or you are related to some future ideation. So relationship is the most important thing in life. Do you see the truth of that, not verbally, not intellectually, but actually with your heart and mind? We are enquiring what is your relationship with another, however intimate or not. Is it that you are from childhood hurt, wounded psychologically, and therefore, from that hurt. from that psychological wound, you bring about violence? The consequence of being hurt, inwardly wounded, is that you enclose yourself more and more in order not to be hurt. And your relationship with another then becomes very narrow, limited. We must first enquire whether it is possible to find out if you can never be hurt. What is the root of being hurt? What is the cause? When I say I am hurt, my pride is hurt, what does that mean? My teacher has hurt me, my parents have hurt me. We are all hurt. We are all wounded by an accident, by a word, by a look, by a gesture. So what is it that is hurt? You say I am hurt. What is that `I' which is being hurt? Is it not an image that you have built about yourself? We are asking a very serious question: What is it that is hurt? The brain has the capacity to create images. The images are the illusions. We have illusions, war is an illusion; we accept it. You accept killing another human being, another life, as part of the image which you have. You have many, many images. And one of the images is, I am being hurt. We are enquiring what is the entity that is being hurt. The entity is the image that I have built about myself. I think I am a great man and you come along and tell me, `Don't be an idiot.' I get hurt. Where there is comparison, there is hurt. When I compare myself with somebody who is more clever, more bright, more intelligent, that is, when there is measurement, there must be hurt. So please enquire whether you can live without comparison, without measurement. We are always comparing ourselves with someone. It begins at the school when the boy is told that he must be as good as his brother. That is comparison, that is measurement, and that process continues throughout life. So, is it possible to live without comparison, without measurement? This is a tremendously complicated question. Because, the word `better' is measurement. The word `more' is measurement. Self-improvement is measurement. Find out whether it is possible to live without measurement, which means, to live without comparison. Part of meditation is to enquire into not becoming; becoming is measurement. Is it possible in our relationship with each other, however intimate it is, not to have measurement? That means your brain must be active in your relationship; it must enquire into your relationship, whether in that relationship there is hurt and that hurt brings about greater fear, greater enclosure within oneself, and therefore isolation. And as long as there is isolation, either outwardly or inwardly, there must be conflict. We are saying the brain has been conditioned to isolation as a Hindu, as a Buddhist, and so on. To enquire into this question. whether the brain can resolve its own conditioning, we must enquire into relationship. What is your relationship with another, with your wife, with your husband, with your children? Begin there, near at home, not far away. You know, sirs, to go very far you must begin very, very near. To go very far you must put your house in order. Can you be aware, alert, so that you are watching your relationship and are learning from that awareness how you respond, what your reactions are? That is life, that is everyday life. That requires constant attention to every reaction, to every thought. But most of us are so lazy. We have become lazy because we are dependent on others. We have, as two friends, gone into the question of relationship, and we will enquire further into the nature of that relationship. Is the human brain your brain, or is it the brain of mankind? This is really a very serious question. Is your brain an individual brain or the brain of humanity? When you say it is my brain, when you say it is my consciousness, is it so? Or is it the consciousness of mankind? Enquire into it. You suffer, you are uncertain, you are anxious, you are in agony, pain. That is what you are. You have belief, knowledge, character, and that is what you are. And that is exactly what your neighbour is. He is suffering, he goes through agony, sorrow, pain, trouble. So, is your consciousness separate from the rest of mankind? No, of course not. If you admit that, if you see the truth of that, then are you an individual? You may think you are an individual because you are dark, you are short, because peripheral activity makes you think you are an individual, but deeply, are you not the rest of mankind? When you realize that, the truth of that, you will never kill another, because you are killing yourself. Then out of that comes great compassion, love. Audience: What is an impersonal action? Krishnamurti: What is an impersonal action? First of all, what is action? What do you mean by that word `action'? Either you act according to a pattern, or act according to some idea, act according to your experience which is the past, or act according to some ideal which is in the future, or act according to your knowledge which is the past, or act according to convenience. So what do you mean by that word? The word means acting, not having acted, or will act. But action means acting in the present. Whether that action is correct, true, actual, depends on the quality of your brain, of your heart, not just theory. So, sirs, enquire into what is action. We are all acting from morning till night. You are sitting there and the speaker is sitting here. And you listen and he is speaking - that is an action. If you listen, that is action, or if you don't listen, that is an action. How you listen is an action. What do you mean by impersonal? You see we have concepts. What do you mean by person - word, name, form? Are you an individual to call yourself personal and then ask, `Can I be impersonal?' Are you an individual? You all think you are individuals. Your whole tradition, religions, tell you that you are an individual. Are you? Are you not the result of centuries of human endeavour? You don't want to question all those things. You are afraid. If you are not an individual, what would happen to you? Individuality is a form of isolation and, therefore, we are all at each other's throat all our life. We have no love for each other. We talk about love of god, but we do not love each other. And besides, god is the invention of man. I know you all believe in god, but you have invented that entity. If god does exist, and if he has created us, what a miserable god he must be. You don't want to look at it that way. You worship an illusion and you like the illusion and think that in illusion there is security. And you are finding out there is no security in illusion. Your god has betrayed you and yet you worship him - the Christian god, the Hindu god, the Muslim god. It is all so absurd and childish. So, let us find out for ourselves if we can be a light to ourselves, not depend on anyone psychologically, inwardly, not depend on your wife, your husband, or your guru, or a book, but live a life, free, full of vitality, energy, so that your brain is acting, not mechanical. Our brains have become now a form of computer. Please do enquire into a different way of living. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN NEW DELHI 2ND PUBLIC TALK 31ST OCTOBER, 1982 'CONFLICT, DUALITY AND OBSERVATION' We are going to talk over together this evening many things. One does not listen to another actually. If you do listen, there is always a defence, there is always a resistance to anything that is said, to something new. There is an immediate reaction to resist because it might be disturbing. So, there is an art of listening: to listen to what is being said, not interpret what is being said to suit your own convenience, to your own traditional language, but to listen to the word, the meaning of that word, to see that we understand each other. To listen, one has to have not only a certain quality of attention but also a sense of affection, a sense of trying to understand what the other fellow is saying. Communication is possible at depth only when both of us are concerned about the same subject, about the same ideas, or concerned about a certain thing. Then we are both in communication with each other. But if you resist, as perhaps you are going to resist a great deal of what the speaker is going to say, then communication is not possible. One has to learn the art of listening. When you listen to music which you like, there is no resistance. You go with it, you shake your head, you clap your hands, you do all kinds of things to express your appreciation, your understanding of the quality of the music, and so on. There is no form of defence, no form of resistance; you are going with it; you are flowing with it. In the same way, kindly listen, not to be instructed, not to be told what to do, but to understand what is being said. So, please learn the art of listening, not to the speaker only, but to your wife, to your husband, to your children, to the birds, to the wind, to the breeze, so that you become extraordinarily sensitive in listening. When you listen, you catch up quickly, you don't have to have a lot of explanations, analyses and descriptions; you are flowing with each other. We are talking together as two friends sitting in a park, or in a wood, quiet, birds are singing, there's plenty of light coming through the leaves on the floor and there is a sense of appreciation of beauty. When you so listen, the miracle takes place. When you so listen, it is like sowing a seed. If the seed is vital, strong, healthy, and the ground is properly prepared, it inevitably grows. So one has to learn the art of listening. If you listen very, very carefully, you capture it so quickly, the meaning of what the other is saying. Perhaps many of you have listened to the speaker for a number of years, unfortunately; and you get used to it; you get used to his language, his gesture, how he looks and so on, and you gradually slip off. And you say, `Why haven't I, after years of listening to this man, changed?' It is because you have actually not listened with your heart, with your mind, with your whole energy. So, don't blame the speaker, but rather learn, if one may suggest most respectfully, the way of listening. There is great beauty in listening to a bird, to the wind among the leaves, and to a word that is spoken with depth, with meaning, with passion. We were saying yesterday that the future of man is at stake, and that man has no existence in isolation - isolation as a nation, isolation as a group, isolation in religion, isolation as an individual and isolation in consciousness. For most of us thinking is individual. You think there is a difference, a division - your opinion against my opinion, my thought against your thought, or your husband's thought, or your wife's thought. But thinking is not individual. Thinking is the ordinary factor from the poorest, ignorant man to the great Nobel prize winner, the scientist. They are both thinkers. But we have the idea that your thinking is yours, whereas thinking is the nature of man. Be clear on this point. When you think, it is not your individual thinking, it is the capacity of your brain to be active and respond in words, in form, and that is the nature of man. But we have reduced thinking to my thinking as opposed to your thinking. Most of us have got strong opinions, bias, conclusions. We have experienced so much and we think it is our experience, our conclusion. When a new outlook is put before you, you refuse to look. But thinking is the nature of man. Can we go on from that? When you observe what is going on in the world outside of you, you see that each country is isolating itself, each group is isolating itself - the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Tibetan, the Russian, the American, and so on, This factor of isolation is destroying the world, is separating humanity This is an actual fact that is taking place in the world. Then, inwardly, each of us think we are separate. Tradition, religion, all that has conditioned our thinking that we are separate human beings. We are separate in the sense you are a woman and I am a man, tall, short, white, black, and so on. But we are talking at depth; that is, human consciousness is general, is shared by all human beings. All human beings suffer, go through great agonies, shed tears, have the sense of loneliness, pain, anxiety, depression, uncertainty. The poorest and the most sophisticated, erudite human beings - all have this general factor. They all share this. This is so. So, our consciousness is not yours or mine. It is the consciousness of all human beings. It is very difficult for most people to see the reality of this, because we have been so conditioned. For Christianity, you are a separate soul. Here, among the Hindus, you reincarnate over and over again till you reach, god knows what. It is still the emphasis that you are a separate individual. Is that so? We are questioning. We have to find out, doubt, ask, which means you are listening without any defence, without any resistance to this truth. We are using the word correctly; it is the truth. You may, at the periphery, on the outside, have certain mannerisms, certain habits, certain tendencies, capacities, but if you move from the outer to the inner, we all share the same common issues. Unless we realize this, not verbally, not intellectually, but in our hearts, in our minds, in our blood, we are going to destroy each other. We are capable of listening to the actual fact that our consciousness is its content; our consciousness is made up of its content. Isn't it? Look, a great many books have been written about consciousness. There are specialists about consciousness; conferences about consciousness are held all over the world. One has to enquire into the nature of one's own consciousness, observe the content, because without the content there is no consciousness. Are you following all this? Consciousness is made up of one's beliefs, one's tendencies, one's secret desires, anxieties, loneliness, and so on. There is the content which makes up consciousness. Without the content, there is no consciousness as we know it. If you observe your own consciousness, that is what you are; your consciousness is what you are. Your fears, your desires, your pleasures, your loneliness, depression, anxiety and all that, that is what you are, what you believe. So the content makes the consciousness and that consciousness is conditioned. Since it is conditioned, it must be in conflict. Aren't you all in conflict of some kind or other, conflict being dissension between two people, conflict with oneself, what is and what should be? That is conflict. All human beings apparently are violent. The content of our consciousness is part of that violence. Conflict arises when there is duality. That is, I am violent, I should not be violent. Or I have the ideal of non-violence or of practising non-violence, but the fact is you are violent. That is a fact. The other is not a fact. We must go into this very carefully because we are trying to understand why human beings live perpetually in conflict, why there is a contradiction - I am, I should be; I am violent, I must become non-violent. The non-violence is an idea, is a concept, is not an actuality, because I am violent. This is a fact, an actuality. The other is non-fact, but we think the pursuit of non-violence will help us to become non-violent, that we will be free from violence. Let us understand the content of that word. What does violence mean? There is physical violence. You shoot with a gun, or you hit, or you throw a bomb, you slap, you injure. That is physical violence. What is psychological violence? - the inward anger, hatred, wanting to dominate people, not only physical domination, but the domination of ideas. I know, you don't know; I will tell you, and you will obey. That is domination. The gurus are violent because they are dominating people with their ideas, with their systems of meditation and all that. Please understand this. We are not attacking gurus. I am just pointing out that psychological dependence, imitation, conformity, domination, all that is inward violence. That is a fact. Can we deal with the fact and not with the idea of the opposite? There is no opposite. Right? There is an opposite as darkness and light, woman and man, tall and short, dark and white, and so on. Inwardly, is there a duality at all? Actually we are asking, `Is there a duality or only `what is"?' There is only `what is', that is, I am violent. Now, is it possible to be free of violence, not to become non-violent? Is this clear? This country has propagated this idea of non-violence. Being violent, they are propagating something which they are not. That means I am gradually, day by day, practising to become that, not to understand violence, but become something which I have called non-violence. Do you see the difference? Hence there is conflict. When I am observing, learning, enquiring into the fact, there is no conflict in my mind. But if my mind is all the time saying, `l must achieve non-violence', then there is conflict. But if I say I am violent, what is the root of violence, what is the nature of violence? I don't condemn it, I observe it. What is observation? Now, when you observe the full moon, do you observe it, do you see the beauty of that light, see the extraordinary quality of that light, or do you say it is a full moon and do something else? What do you mean by observing? Do you ever observe the snow clad mountain with all that grandeur, the beauty, the deep valleys full of dark shadows, the extraordinary majesty of that mountain? When you observe for a single moment, all your problems have gone, because the majesty of that mountain has driven away all your problems for a second. Have you noticed it? But your problems come back immediately. So we are going to talk over together what it means to observe. Now, suppose I am violent. How do I observe that violence? I want to understand the nature of that violence. I want to explore, discover the extraordinary factors that contribute to violence. How do I observe? First, is violence different from me? Do you understand my question? I am asking, is that violence, which I see when I say I am violent, is that violence different from me, or I am that violence? When you are angry, you are angry. It is not that you are different from anger. You are different from anger only when you want to control it, only when you say, `I must suppress it,' but are you actually different, separate from violence? Is that so? Has the word `violence' - separated through tradition, through constantly talking about violence and so on - created a separation from observation? The observer says, I am different from that, I am different from violence. We have to enquire who is the observer. The observer is the past, who has known what violence is. It is the past, it is knowledge, it is experience, it is all the stored-up memories. Those memories, those various forms of knowledge, and the movement of all that, is the past. Thought has divided itself as the past, the present, and the future. It has divided itself as the observer and the observed. Thought has said, `I am not violent, violence is not part of me.' But when you look at it closely, you are violent, you are angry, you are greedy, envious, competitive, depressed, you are all that. Right? The observer is not different from that which he is observing. Please understand this. This is very important because, if you really understand this with all your heart and your mind, with all your brain, conflict comes to an end; there is no duality at all. Forget all your books, the Vedanta and all the rest of it. The fact is, there is no opposite except physically. Psychologically, inwardly, there is only the fact. The fact is, one is violent and jealous, and so on. Now, can you observe the fact without its opposite, which thought has invented? Do you see this, to observe `what is'? In that observation, the observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought the experiencer is the experienced. But we have separated it. We are saying, `I must experience enlightenment,' or whatever it is you want to experience. So the thinker is the thought. There is no thinker without thought. The observer is the observed, the analyser is that which he is analysing. I can put it in ten different ways. But that is a fact: the observer is the observed. Therefore, you eliminate altogether the sense of duality inwardly. Then there is no question of suppressing it, escaping from it, analysing it. It is there. Then what takes place? What takes place when there is actually the realization of this truth that there is only the fact, not the invented opposite, only that which is? In that there is no division as the observer or the observed. Then what takes place? Do you understand my question? Man has lived in conflict from time immemorial. If you see the rock engravings or those caves in France and in certain parts of the world, you will see that there has always been this battle between the good and the bad, the good against the evil. This has been the history of man - conflict. We are asking if this conflict can end. If it ends, then he is a human being who is vital, creative, and he has something extraordinary. When there is this realization that you are violent, not that you are separate and violence is separate, but you are that, what takes place? You are brown, you have certain characteristics, you have troubles, you are a professor or a scientist - all that is not separate from you. So what takes place when this fact, this truth, is realized, not intellectually, not verbally, but deep down as fact, as truth? Have you not eliminated altogether the opposite? There is only this, and so live with that like a precious jewel that you have discovered; you are watching it, seeing the beauty of that jewel, the light, the many aspects of it as you are watching, which is part of yourself. Therefore, watching, observing, is extraordinarily important so that there is no division whatsoever between the watcher and that which is watched. Then you realize that nothing can be done about it. You are brown, you cannot change it. The fact is, when there is such observation, it is not the word, it is not the memory, it is something totally new. You are facing this new reaction, which you call violence, anew. That means, have you observed anything anew? Have you seen the moon, the new moon that is coming up, as though for the first time in your life? Have you looked at your wife or husband as though for the first time? Or do you just say she is my wife, he is my husband - just a mechanical observation? To observe requires great enquiry, energy, vitality, to see actually `what is'. We are now concerned with the elimination altogether of all kinds of conflict. Why do we have opinions? You have opinions, judgments, haven't you? Please enquire into this. Why do you carry opinions? It is a burden. I am a Brahmin you are not. I am a Sikh, you are not. I am a Muslim, you are not. Why do you have these opinions? It indicates a mind, a brain, that is so crowded with opinions it is becoming small, petty, narrow. It is not free to enquire, to look. Why is the human mind, the human brain, always occupied, never free, never quiet? Enquire into all this, because we have a tremendous crisis in the world and also a crisis in our consciousness, We should also talk over together, relationship. Why is it that in our relationship with each other, however intimate, sexual, however close, there is conflict? Why cannot two people live peacefully? Have you ever asked that question? Because this is very important. If I don't know how to live peacefully with my wife, with my husband, with my girl friend, I cannot live peacefully in the world. I may talk about peace, I may write a great deal about peace, go all over the world talking about peace, but I am quarrelling with my wife, or with my husband. So there is conflict in our relationship. Why? Do you want me to tell you or are you enquiring with the speaker? If you are really enquiring, it is a sharing, a moving together, not agreeing together, but thinking step by step, going together, like walking hand in hand on the lane where there is so much beauty, love and affection. Why is there this dissension, this division between man and man, woman and man, in our relationship? Have you noticed it? We are like two parallel lines, never meeting. We never say what we mean and stick to what we mean. We are going to find out together why in human relationship we have such desperate, ugly conflicts. I have my ambition, my desires, my problems. In my office, I am competitive, aggressive. I am pursuing my own direction and the wife is also pursuing her own ambition, and I dominate, which she resists. So we are asking why there is this conflict, because we two have to live together. We have sex, we have children, but we two are separate. Isn't it a fact? I dominate her or she dominates me, she bullies me, or I bully her. I scold her or she scolds me. I don't beat her but I am angry with her. I would like to beat her, but I am a little more controlled. You laugh; but these are all facts. But I am an individual, she is an individual. Each must have his own way -in habits, in desires. Then, how can two people live together? Which means, you have no love at all for your wife or your husband. Do you know what it means to love another? Have you ever loved anybody? Is love dependence? Is love desire? Is love pleasure? I don't love my wife; she doesn't love me. We are two separate individuals. We may meet sexually, otherwise we carry on in our own particular way. Do you understand, sirs? Does love exist in this country? Don't ask, `Does it exist in Europe?' When the speaker is in Europe, he talks about it there. But we are talking about it here as we are in this country, in this part of the world. Is there love in this country? Do you love anybody? Can love exist with fear, when each one is becoming something? Can love exist when I am becoming a saint and she is not, or she is becoming a saint and I am not, when each one is becoming? Please understand all this. It is your life. When each one is becoming something, how can there be love? Is it possible to love another without wanting a single thing from another, either emotionally, physically, in any way, not ask my wife for anything? Psychologically, she may care for my need, for I may bring money. I am not talking about that. But inwardly, love cannot exist where there is attachment. If you are attached to your guru, there is no love in your heart. This is very, very serious. Without love, there is no right action. We talk about action. We do so many kinds of social work. But when there is love in your heart, in your eyes, in your blood, in your face, you are a different human being. Whatever you do then has beauty, has grace, is a right action. All this may be excellent words you hear. But will you have this quality? It cannot be cultivated, it cannot be practised, it cannot be bought from your guru, from anywhere. But without that, you are dead human beings. So what will you do? Please do ask this question, find out for yourself why this flame does not exist, why you have become such paupers. Unless you put your house in order, your house, which is yourselves, there will be no order in the world. You may meditate for the rest of your life; but without that, your meditation has no meaning. So, please, most respectfully we are asking, what is your response? Audience: Well, sir, you have been talking about radical change for the last 50 years, and obviously there is not any radical change in the world. My question to you, then, is why do you talk? Krishnamurti: The gentleman asks, you have talked about fundamental change of human consciousness and so on for the last 50 years and obviously there is no change at all. Then the question is, why do you talk? The speaker is not talking for his amusement, for his fulfilment, for his encouragement. If he didn't talk, he would not feel depressed, he would not feel lacking something. Therefore, why do I talk? Have you ever asked why the lotus blooms? Have you, sir? Have you ever asked why a flower blooms, why it has so much beauty, why it has such marvellous colour, the depth and the smell and the glory of a simple flower? Maybe the speaker has been talking about compassion. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN NEW DELHI 3RD PUBLIC TALK 6TH NOVEMBER, 1982 'FACTORS OF DISORDER' If one may point out, we are probing together, questioning, doubting, asking, and this is not a lecture. We are together enquiring, taking a walk together into the whole field of existence, not dealing with a particular problem, but the problem of man, the problem of human beings. One of the factors in our existence is that we live in disorder. Apparently, after thirty, forty thousand years or more, we have not been able to live in total order in the universe; not relative order, but to have order within, under all circumstances, wherever we live - socially, politically, and so on. What is important is that we, you and I the speaker, should unfold the causes of disorder, not merely listen to the explanation or the description which the speaker might offer, but together think, observe, go into ourselves, not in any way selfishly or self-centredly, but look at our lives, look at what we have made of the world; why man, the human being, lives in perpetual disorder outwardly and inwardly. To enquire if it is possible to live in order inwardly first, then outwardly, not the other way round. But first, inwardly, deep within ourselves one can live in complete order. Also, we should be able to discuss, talk over together this evening, the problem of suffering and this enormous mystery of death. Beauty is complete order. But most of us have not that sense of beauty in our lives. We may be great artists, great painters, expert in various things, but in our own daily life, with all the anxieties and miseries, we live, unfortunately, a very disordered life. It is a fact. You may be a great scientist, you may be a very great expert in a subject, but you have your own problems, struggles, pain, anxieties and the rest of it. We are asking together, is it possible to live in complete order within, not impose discipline, control, but to enquire into the nature of this disorder, what are the causes, and to dispel, move away, wash away the cause? Then there is a living order in the universe. Order is not following a particular pattern of life, or following certain systems blindly or openly, but to enquire into ourselves and discover for ourselves; not to be told, not to be guided, but to unfold in ourselves the real causes of this disorder. So, what are the causes of this chaos, not only in the world outside of us, but also of our own inward psychological confusion which has produced disorder outwardly? Would you consider desire as one of the factors of disorder? What is desire? For most of us desire is a potent factor: desire drives us, desire brings about a sense of happiness or disaster. Desire changes with the objects of desire. Is desire one of the causes? Why is it that all religions, all so-called religious people, have suppressed desire? All over the world the monks, the sannyasis, have denied desire, though they are boiling inside. The fire of desire is burning, but they deny it by suppressing it or identifying that desire with a symbol, with a figure and surrendering that desire to the figure, to that person. But it is still desire. Most of us, when we become aware of our desires, either suppress or indulge it or come into conflict; the battle goes on. We are not advocating either to suppress it or to surrender to it or to control it. That has been done all over the world by every religious person. We are examining it very closely so that out of your own understanding of that desire, how it arises, its nature, out of that understanding, self-awareness of it, one becomes intelligent. Then that intelligence acts, not desire. First of all, are we aware, each one of us, of the extraordinary power of desire - desire for power, desire for certain things, desire for god, desire for enlightenment, desire to follow some system? Desire has so many aspects. It is as intricate as the weaving of a great master weaver. One has to look at it very very simply and then the complexity arises. But if you start with complexity, then you are not going further. If you start simply, then you can go very far. We are looking at it - the root and the beginning of desire. Have you ever noticed how our senses operate? Does one become aware of one's senses, not a particular sense, but the totality of the senses? - the feeling, the tasting, the hearing, the seeing - to have all these senses in operation fully? When all your senses are active, functioning, have you ever looked at a tree that way? Have you ever looked at the sea, the mountain, the hills and the valley with all your senses? If you do, then there is no centre from which you are looking. The whole of your sensory reactions are complete, not controlled, shaped, suppressed. Unless you understand this very clearly, it is a dangerous thing to say this because, for most of us,our senses are partial - we may have very good taste for clothes and a rotten taste for furniture! You know all that. Our senses are limited as we now live. Nobody, no religion, no other philosophers, have said this. All the senses have to flower and, in that flowering, perceive the beauty of the world. So, what are the causes of desire? Let us go into it very carefully. What is desire; How does it arise? It doesn't arise by itself. It arises through sensation, through contact, through seeing something - seeing a man or a woman, seeing a dress in a window, seeing a dress or a car or the great hills. There is immediate sensation. It is natural, healthy, to have such sensation, such response. Then what takes place? I see a beautiful woman, a beautiful man, a beautiful house, a beautiful dress. I see a beautiful shirt made most delicately. I go inside and touch the material. First seeing, then contact, and from that contact, sensation, right? Then what happens? Enquire into it: You have touched the shirt, you have the sensation of its quality, its colour. Up to now there has been no desire; there has been only sensation. Then what happens? You have touched that shirt or dress. Then thought creates the image of you in that shirt, in that car, in that dress. When thought creates that image, that is the moment desire is born. That is, desire begins when thought creates the image. I see a beautiful violin - I want to have it; the beauty of that sound that violin makes - I like to possess it. I look at it, touch it, get the sense of that old structure, and I would like to have it; that is, the moment thought enters into the field of sensation and creates the image, then desire begins. Now, the question is, whether there can be a hiatus, a gap; that is, have only sensation, and not let thought come and control sensation. That is the problem. Why does thought create the image and hold on to that sensation? Is it possible to look at the shirt, touch it - sensation - and stop, not allow thought to enter into it? Have you ever tried any of these? When thought enters into the field of sensation - and thought is also a sensation - then thought takes control of sensation, and desire begins. Is it possible to only observe, contact, sensation, and nothing else? Do you understand that? And discipline has no place in this because the moment you begin to discipline, that is another form of desire to achieve something. So one has to discover the beginning of desire and see what happens. Don't buy the shirt immediately, but see what happens. You can look at it; but we are so eager to get something, to possess a shirt, a man, a woman or some status that we have never the time, the quietness, to look at all this. So, desire is one of the factors of our disorder. We have been trained either to suppress or to change the object. But we have never looked at the moment of the flowering of desire. That is one of the causes of disorder in our life. Please bear in mind, we are not trying to control desire -that has been tried by all the so-called saints - nor are we talking of indulging desire, but we are looking at it like a flower, how it grows. Then, is fear one of the causes of disorder? Obviously, it is -fear of failure, fear of not being able to fulfil, fear of losing, fear of not gaining. We have every kind of fear. You have fear of the guru - have you ever noticed how you crawl in front of a guru? You kind of become inhuman, you are afraid. You want something from him and so you worship him. In that worship there is fear. So, there are multiple forms of fear. We are not talking of one particular form. We are asking what is the root of fear. If we can discover the root of fear, then the whole tree is there. Do you understand that? But if I am concerned with my particular little fear of darkness, or of my husband, wife, or something or the other, my brain is not involved in the discovery of the whole root. This is clear. So, what is the root of fear? How does it arise? This is a very complex problem. Every complex problem must be approached very simply, the simpler the better. Simpler means to say, `I don't know how to deal with fear.' Then you begin to discover. If you have already come to a conclusion as to what the root of fear is, then you never discover what the root is. But you have to approach fear very simply, the trunk and the root of fear, not the branches. We are asking what is the cause or the causation of fear. Would you say time is a factor of fear? Time - that is, I am living, I might die tomorrow, which is time, right? To go from here to your house, that requires time. There are only two kinds of time: time by the sunrise or sunset, time by the watch, time by the distance you have to cover, time that is physical. There is the other time which is psychological, inward: I am this, but I will be that; I am violent, but I am practising non-violence; I am brutal, but give me time, I will get over it; I hope I will meet my friend tomorrow. Hope implies time. Do you understand this? There is time by the watch, time as psychological becoming, climbing the ladder of becoming, that is, creating an ideal and then trying to reach that ideal: I am this but tomorrow I will be different; I have not reached the position of power, but give me time, I will get it - all that implies psychological time. Is that clear? So, one of the factors of fear is time. We must ask what is time, not by the watch, but time that we have: `I hope I will', which is measurement. Hope implies measurement. Time is movement, isn't it? When we begin to understand that there can be an end to fear completely, inwardly; then there is a possibility of being totally free from fear. To find that out, one must begin to enquire. Desire is one of the factors of disorder. Fear is one of the factors. Fear is time. Time is a movement from one point to another point, both physically and psychologically - I need time to learn a language. It may take a month, two months, or three months. To go from here to London takes time. To drive a car I need time. We need time there. But when we use that time to become something inwardly, we have moved over from the physical fact of learning a language to the psychological field, and I say to myself: I also need time to evolve, to become less violent. Do you understand this? I need time to learn a language and also I think I need time to get over violence, to bring about peace in the world. That is a movement in measurement. That is a movement which is thought. Thought is a movement and thought has created time. That is, I want to change `what is', and to change that I need time. So, desire, time, thought, are the factors which bring about fear. I have done something wrong two years ago, and that has caused pain, and I will not do the same thing again. Now, what is thought? The whole world is moving in the realm of thought. The technological world with all its extraordinary complexity is brought about by thought. Man has built the most extraordinary, complicated machines like the computer, the jet, and so on. It is also put together by thought. All the great cathedrals are put together by thought; all the temples and all the things that are in the temples and cathedrals are put together by thought. The rituals are invented by thought. The guru is invented by thought. When you say `I am a Sikh', it is thought conditioning itself as a Sikh and operating. So thought has become the most important factor in our life. In our relationship, thought dominates. Thought has created the problems of war, and thought then says, `I must have peace also', which is a contradiction. Do you understand? Why has thought become so extraordinarily important in the world? What is thought, what is the origin and the beginning of thought, and why does man depend on thought? All the great intellectuals, the great scientists, great philosophers, all the books that have been written, are all the result of thought, are based on thought. What is thought, by which we live? Is there a thought without knowledge? What is knowledge? There are several kinds of knowledge, but we will take two: knowledge you acquire by going to a school, college, a university, or by becoming an apprentice and gradually accumulating skill. If you want to be a carpenter, you must learn the grains of wood, what kind of wood to use, what instruments to use, and so on. If you want to be a scientist, you must have tremendous knowledge. Knowledge is born of experience. One scientist discovers something; another scientist adds to it or detracts from it. So, there is a gradual accumulation of knowledge. Now, is knowledge complete, or is knowledge always limited? Can the human thought which is born of knowledge, can that knowledge, be totally complete about anything? Knowledge is always limited. The Gita, the Upanishads, the Bible, they are all knowledge. And knowledge, whether it is given by a saint, by a politician, by a philosopher, is limited. So don't worship knowledge. If it is limited, as it is, then knowledge always lives with ignorance. So, thought is born out of knowledge. Do you understand this - the complexity of thought, the delicacy of thought, the extraordinary capacity of thought? In one direction, in the technological direction, it has invented the marvellous machinery, the dynamo, the piston engine, the jet, and so on, and on the other hand, thought has created wars. It has created instruments of war. We want to kill each other. If thought is the only instrument we have and that instrument is becoming blunt and creating problems, we are asking if there is another kind of instrument which is not thought. We see disorder in our lives, at whatever level we may live. You may have the greatest power on earth, be a politician or a guru, but you live in disorder inwardly. Therefore, whatever you touch, to it you bring disorder. You see this all over the country. There are many factors of disorder, and desire is one factor. We went into it - desire, time and thought. If you exercise thought to create order, you are still creating disorder. Do you understand? Our whole life is based on discipline. We have disciplined ourselves to do this and not to do that. The word `discipline' is, the root of it is, `to learn; not from somebody, but to learn from oneself, one's own reactions, one's own observation, and one's own activities and behaviour. But discipline never brings about intelligence. What brings about intelligence is observation, and being free from fear, and understanding the nature of desire. For example, if you understand desire, see the nature, structure, its vitality, and find out for yourself the sensation and when thought enters it, when you become aware of that, you are beginning to have intelligence, which is not your intelligence or my intelligence but intelligence. So, is it possible to be free of fear which is such a tremendous burden? You have listened. Are you free from it? If you are honest, you are not. Why? Because, you have not really investigated, gone into it step by step and said, `Let me find out' with your passion, with your guts, putting your vitality into it. You have not done that. You have just listened casually, you are afraid to look at it. And so you live with it, as with some horrible disease, you live with fear, and that is causing disorder. If you see that, you are already operating from intelligence. If you understand the nature of thought, the intricacies, the subtleties, the beauty of it, from that understanding the unfolding of a flower happens. It is unfolding - the beauty of the flower. Do you see the beauty of the flower, of the mountain, of a full moon on a leaf, the lights of silver on a piece of rock? Sir, what is beauty, not in a painting, but beauty in our life? What is the nature of sorrow, the ending of that burden, puffing away of sorrow? If you suffer pain, anxiety, ambition, and so on, you don't know what love is. You want to be ambitious, you want to have power, position, better house, better cars. Have you ever understood that a man who is ambitious has no love in his heart? And we are all very ambitious to achieve nirvana or to become a bank manager. To reach nirvana or moksha is the same thing as becoming manager of a bank because both are ambitions. To live a life of intelligence means no ambition but to be tremendously active. Sir, we have to talk over together the ending of sorrow, and what are the implications of death, and what is religion. Without religion you cannot create a new structure, a new society. What we have as religion is utter nonsense, meaningless. We have to enquire into the depth of that word. Because, only a new culture, a new civilization, can be born out of true religion, not all that paraphernalia that goes on in the name of religion. Religion is something entirely different. To have a religious life means to have compassion, love; it means the ending of sorrow, to find right relationship with each other. What most people want is not to be disturbed. They want to continue with their own particular pattern of life. So, please consider, give your energy, your capacity, to find out whether there is a different way of living on this earth. You don't love anybody. If you love somebody, then this country would not be in chaos as it is; and there won't be wars if we love people. Your books, your rituals, your japas have no meaning whatsoever because you have lost the most precious thing in life. You probably never had it: to love without jealousy, without possession. Love is not attachment. If all of us under this tent, if we all love, then there will be a different India tomorrow. You are all so verbal, you just use words, but find out why your life is empty, shallow, why you have no love, why there is no compassion, why you are a Hindu, a Sikh, and a Muslim. You have never asked these questions, sirs. Meditation is to ask these questions. Meditation is to find out the reality of these questions and the truth that lies behind these questions. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN NEW DELHI 4TH PUBLIC TALK 7TH NOVEMBER, 1982 'IN ENDING, THERE IS A NEW BEGINNING' It is necessary to talk about suffering and whether there is an end to suffering, and the meaning of death. That is part of our life. We should go also into the question of religion, what is implied in religion, what is a religious mind, and meditation. We will talk over together as two friends who have known each other for some time, not opposing each other, not defending or accusing, but enquiring, probing gently, because one discovers what is true only when there is no certainty. Those who begin with certainty end up in uncertainty. Those who begin with uncertainty, questioning, asking, doubting, probing, those end up with absolute certainty, not relative certainty. So, what is suffering; can it end? And if there is suffering, can there be love? Human beings throughout the world have suffered incredibly. The last two world wars and the previous 5,000 years in which there have been wars, practically every year, man, woman has shed innumerable tears. Man has suffered and is going on suffering. The poor in this country suffer. There is disease, pain, and the anguish of human existence. Life is not pleasant; life is a turmoil, agony. One becomes more and more aware of all this. One begins to see very clearly that all human beings bear the same burden, share the same sorrow; not a particular sorrow, not the sorrow of one's son dying or brother dying, or the wife or the husband leaving, but the sorrow which man has accumulated for thousands of years. Your sorrow is the sorrow of mankind, the sorrow of all human beings, whether you live in Russia or China or in this unfortunate country. We are questioning, asking the causes of sorrow, the pain of sorrow, the grief, the anxiety that comes with sorrow, the utter loneliness of sorrow. Like pleasure, sorrow is narrowed down as mine. When we are concerned with our own particular sorrow, we neglect, we disregard, we are not concerned with the sorrow of mankind, whereas our consciousness is the consciousness of humanity. One must understand this very clearly because, in understanding the nature of our consciousness, what we are, we begin to see that our pain, our loneliness, our depression, our joys, our beliefs, are shared by all humanity. You may believe in one kind of god and he may believe in another kind of god, but belief is common, belief is general, and that is our consciousness. That is what you are. The language you speak, the food you eat, the climate, the clothes, the education, the constant repetition of certain phrases, the loneliness, the ultimate fear of death, is the ground on which all humanity stands. You are the humanity. Your consciousness is not individual. It is the consciousness of all mankind with their myths, superstitions, with their images, fears, and so on. This is important to understand, not intellectually, not verbally, but with your heart, with your mind, because, when we come to the question of what is death, we must first understand the nature of our consciousness, the nature of what we are actually; not what we should be, but what we actually are in daily life. That actuality is shared by each and every human being in the world. When we are enquiring into the nature of sorrow, we are not discussing your particular, narrow, little pain and agony but the agony of mankind and you actually are mankind. This enquiry is not selfish. This enquiry opens up tremendous possibilities. Kindly listen, find out for yourself the nature of sorrow, why human beings all over the world have gone through tortures, sorrow. What is sorrow and why has not mankind put it off, thrown it off? Please ask this question of yourself. Why must you have some kind of sorrow, some kind of grief, pain, the sorrow of loneliness, though you may be married, have children? You are lonely people. You have separated yourself enormously. When there is a great grief, you realize how lonely you are. We are asking, is one of the causes of sorrow this loneliness? Loneliness is the result of our daily life. Each one of us, from the highest to the lowest, is completely convinced that he is a separate soul, separate entity, and all his activity is self-centred. The daily activity of this self-centredness will inevitably bring about solitude, loneliness, separatism, division. We are asking, is this isolation in our way of thinking, in our way of life, one of the causes of sorrow? And, is attachment the cause of sorrow? I am attached to my wife, to my son, to my memories, to my beliefs, to my experience. I am attached to that. I believe and I am attached to that belief, and when that belief is questioned, doubted, shaken, there is uncertainty, pain. Is that one of the causes of sorrow? Is it possible to be free of all beliefs, not one particular belief or one particular ideal, but to be totally free of all ideals, all beliefs? Please don't ask, `If one is free of belief and ideals, what do you replace it by?' That is a wrong question. See the truth that any belief, any ideal, divides people. I believe that god exists or does not exist. I believe in certain ideology - communist, socialist, capitalist, whatever it is, for which I am willing to fight, kill people. We believe because it gives us some sense of security. You may believe in god, as most of you do, because it gives you a sense of protection, guidance, security. The mind has invented, the brain has invented, various forms of security - nationalism, religious figures, and the so-called sacred books. They have all given a certain quality of security. Actually, there is no security at all. It is an illusion.To realize that belief, ideals and so on are very, very destructive, that they separate man from man, and to see the truth of it, is to become intelligent. Only in intelligence there is complete security, not in your beliefs, in your myths and ideals. To discover this intelligence and that intelligence is not yours or the speaker's, it is intelligence is to see the false as false and end the false. To see `what is' actually, not imagine and run away from it but to see actually what we are, and in that exploration there is the awakening of intelligence. So we are asking, is pain, the anguish, sorrow, brought about by our isolation of mind, of thought, of action? Is sorrow the result of our daily attachment, how we are attached to people? Please wake up to all this, see the truth of all this. Please explore the nature of attachment. It breeds anxiety, fear, pain, jealousy, hatred. All these are the consequences of attachment. You are attached to your wife or to your husband. See the consequences of it. You depend on each other, that dependence gives a form of security. When that person leaves or dies or runs away from you, you are then in pain, in agony, you have suspicion, hatred and sorrow. Don't you know aIl this? It is nothing new. This is an everyday fact of life. It may not happen to you, but it is happening to others, millions of others. In their relationship, there is sorrow, fear, agony. We are asking, is attachment one of the causes of this sorrow? I am attached to my son and he dies, and then I invent various forms of comfort. I never remain with sorrow. To remain, not to escape, not to seek comfort, not to run off to some form of entertainment, religious or otherwise, but to look at it, live with it, understand the nature of it - when you do that, sorrow opens the door to passion. You are not passionate people because you have never understood the nature of sorrow and the ending of sorrow. You have become very dull. You accept anything, accept sorrow, accept fear, you accept being dominated by politicians, by your guru, by all the books and traditions. That means you never want to be free and you are frightened to be free, frightened of the unknown. You invent various forms of consoling, illusory images and hopes. Now, after saying all this about sorrow, looking at it, when my son dies, I realize how I am attached to him, that I have lost him for ever and remain with that sorrow. Do you understand this? It is like a flower. It blooms, it opens up, and it withers away. It dies at the end of the day. It may die at the end of the week, but it withers away. You must give it an opportunity to flower - the flowering of sorrow and the ending of sorrow. Then you have passion, vitality, energy, drive. Where there is sorrow, there can be no love. A mind, a brain, that is in agony, that is lonely, self-centred, how can it love? Love is not emotional, love is not sentiment, romantic, fanciful, comforting thing. It is tremendously vital, as strong as death. When there is sorrow, love is not. Most human beings in the world suffer and never resolve the problems of suffering. So they do not know what it is to love. We have now reduced love to pleasure, sexual attachment and so on, to various forms of pleasure. We ought to ask, is love pleasure, is love desire, is love thought? Can love ever be cultivated? Without love, the sense of compassion, the flame of it, the intelligence of it, life has very little meaning. You may invent a purpose for life, perfection, you know all the rest of that business, but without this fundamental beauty of love, life has no meaning. Actually, your life, when you look at it, going to the office every day for the next 50 years, what does it all mean? - bringing little money, little power, breeding children, wrong kind of education and so perpetuating this incredible cruelty in the world. You may read all the books in the world, visit all the museums in the world,listen to talks like this from a different kind of speaker,but if there is not this quality, that extraordinary sense of beauty with its great sensitivity, life has very little meaning. Without this you become more and more mischievous, more and more chaotic in the world. Do you love anybody? Does that love contain jealousy, possessiveness, domination, attachment? Then that is not love. It is just a form of pleasure, entertainment. Where there is sorrow, there cannot be love, and therefore no intelligence. Love has its own intelligence. Compassion has its quality of this pure, unadulterated intelligence. When there is that, that intelligence operates in this world. That intelligence is not the result of thought; thought is a small affair. When you hear all this, when you see the truth of all this - If you do - does the perfume, the sense, of being completely loving happen, or do you go back to the old routine? Also we ought to talk over together the question of death. Like love, hate, pain, sorrow and fear, death is part of our life. You may postpone it, you may say I have ten years more to live, but at the end of it there is death waiting. All humanity fears death or rationalizes it away saying that death is inevitable. To understand the depth and the full significance of that extraordinary incident which we call death, you must understand the nature of our own consciousness, the nature of what you are. If you do not understand what you are actually, not descriptively, then death becomes a dreadful thing. If we are to go into the question of death, we must understand what you are - a name, a form, man or woman, with certain qualities, certain tendencies, idiosyncracies, desire, pain, anxiety, uncertainty, confusion. Out of this confusion, you invent something permanent - the Absolute, the Brahman or God. But what you actually are, is the movement of thought. That thought may invent the idea that you have got the spark of divinity in you, but it is still the movement of thought. So what are you apart from your physical reactions, differently educated, rich and poor? Actually, when you look at yourself, what are you? Aren't you all this? If there is something permanent in you, then why seek permanency in something else? Do you understand my question? As we said, begin with uncertainty, begin with not knowing. This is what you are. You know your face when you look in a mirror. Also, inwardly, you are all the struggle, the pain, the conflict, the misery, the confusion. That is what you are actually. That is the state of all human beings. So your consciousness is not yours but is the common ground on which all human beings stand and share. If that is clearly seen, then what is death? Death is the ending of everything: My pleasures, my memories, my experiences, my attachments, ideals, beliefs - all that end. But we do not like the ending; to us ending is pain. So we begin to invent, search for comfort in reincarnation. Don't you? You never ask what is it that reincarnates in the next life. What is it that reincarnates - your memories, your experiences, your hopes, a better life, better house? This is what you are now. You are going to incarnate in the next life. If you really, actually, deeply believe, feel that next life you are going to be born, then what you are doing now is all important. What you are doing now, what you think, what you feel, how you react matters enormously because that is going to shape your next life. But you don't believe. The actuality is your life now and,you are not willing to face it. Death is something to be avoided. You always ask what happens after death. But you have never asked what happens before death, what happens now in your life. What is your life? - working, office, money, pain, striving, climbing the ladder of success. That is your life. And death puts an end to all that. So, is it possible, while living, to end - end your attachment end your belief? To end, the beauty of ending something voluntarily without motive, without pleasure - can you do it? In ending, there is a new beginning. If you end, there is something, the doors are opened, but you want to be sure before you end that the door will open. So you never end, never end your motive. The understanding of death is to live a life, inwardly ending. Also now we ought to talk over together religion and meditation. What is religion? What is religion for most of you? -beliefs, rituals. If you are a Christian, you believe in a saviour, in a particular saviour, with all the rituals, with all the marvellous, beautiful architecture inside the churches, the great cathedrals. Have you seen a cathedral performing a mass? It is a great sight, with great beauty, with utter precision, to impress the poor people who believe and do all the rituals, puja, daily, and above all believe in god. That is what you call religion, which has absolutely nothing whatever to do with your daily life. All religions, organized or unorganised, have said, `Don't kill, love someone.' But you go on killing, you go on worshipping false gods which is your nationalism, your tribalism. So you are killing each other. That is what you all call religion. To find out the nature of a religious mind, you must put away all those childish things. Will you? Of course not. You will go on doing your puja, your ceremonies, become slaves to the priests. Religion has become a form of entertainment. Can you put away all that and not belong to any religion, neither be a Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim? Leave all that; that is a propaganda of centuries. Like a computer, you are being programmed. When you say, `I am a Hindu', you have been programmed for the last 5,000 years. When you are enquiring into the nature of religion, you must be free from all this. Will you? When there is freedom from all that is false, illusory, then you begin to enquire into what is meditation; not before. A mind in conflict, a brain in struggle, cannot possibly meditate. You may sit down for 20 minutes every day, but if the brain is in conflict, pain, anxiety, loneliness, sorrow, what is the value of your meditation? We are going to enquire into what is the meditation, not how to meditate. You have asked, `Tell me how to meditate', which is to give you a system, a method, a practice. Do you know what practising every day does to your brain? Your brain becomes dull, mechanical, it is tortured, making effort to achieve some silence, some state of experience. That is not meditation. That is just another form of achievement like a politician becoming a minister. In your meditation, you want to achieve illumination, silence. It is the same pattern repeated; only, you call it religious and the other calls it political achievement. There is not much difference. What is meditation, what does that word mean? If you look up the dictionary, you'll find it means to ponder over, to be able to think clearly, not with confusion, not with personal objectives, but clearly, to think. It needs clarity. Meditation also means measurement, to measure. We are always measuring, which is comparing - I am this, I will be that, I will be better - which is a form of measurement. The word `better' is measurement. To compare yourself with another is a measurement. When you tell your son or somebody that you must be like your elder brother, that is measurement. We live by measurement; we always compare. That is a fact. Our brain is conditioned to measure - I am this today, I hope I will be different in a year's time, not physically but psychologically. That is a measurement. Now, to live without measurement, to be totally, completely, free of all measurement, is part of meditation. Not that `I am practising this, I will achieve something in a year's time.' That is measurement which is the very nature of one's egotistic activity. In schools we compare, in universities we compare. We compare ourselves with somebody who is more intelligent, more beautiful physically - there is this constant measurement going on. Either you know it consciously or you are not aware of this movement of measurement. Meditation is the ending of measurement, ending of comparison, completely. See what is implied in it - that there is no psychological mark. Tomorrow is the measurement of what is in time. Do you understand this? So measurement, comparison, and the action of will must end completely. There is no action of will in meditation. Every form, every system, of meditation is an activity of the will. What is will? I will meditate, I will sit down quietly, control myself, narrow down my thoughts and practise - all that is the action of desire, which is the essence of will. In meditation there is no activity of the will. Do you understand the beauty of all this? When there is no measurement, no comparison, no achieving or becoming, there is the silence of the negation of the self. There is no self in meditation. So a mind, a brain, that is in the act of meditation is whole. The whole of life is meditation, not one period of meditation when you meditate. Meditation is the whole movement of living. But you have separated meditation from your life: It is a form of relaxation like taking a drug. If you want to repeat, repeat Coca Cola or any other cola which has the same effect to dull the mind, whereas in meditation, when there is no measurement, when there is no action of the will and mind, the brain is entirely free from all systems. Then there is a great sense of freedom. In that freedom there is absolute order, and that you must have in life. Then, in that state of mind, there is silence, not wanting, desiring to have a quiet mind, but there is freedom from measurement. In that freedom there is absolute order, there is silence. Then, is there something sacred, not invented by thought? There is nothing sacred in the temple, in the mosque, in the churches. They are all the inventions of thought. When you discard all that, is there something sacred that is nameless, timeless, something that is the outcome of great beauty and total order which begins in our daily life? That is why meditation is the movement of living. If you do not understand the basis of all this that is our life, our everyday reactions or behaviour, your meditation has no meaning whatsoever. You can sit on the banks of the Ganga or some place and do all kinds of tricks with yourself. That is not meditation. Meditation is something that is of daily life. It is your movement of life, and then there is in that movement freedom, order, and out of that flowers great silence. Only when you have come to that point, one finds there is something absolutely sacred. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN CALCUTTA 1ST PUBLIC TALK 20TH NOVEMBER, 1982 'THE HUMAN CONDITION' From the very beginning, we ought to establish our relationship. This is not a lecture as it is commonly understood. A lecture is a discourse on a particular subject by way of instruction. This is a conversation between you and the speaker. The speaker is not telling you what to do, what to think, how you should behave, and so on. This is a conversation between two people concerned with what is happening in the world, what is happening to man, not a particular man but man in the world; what is man doing to man, what he has done to other men, what is exactly happening in the world - not in any particular part of the world, but what is happening to man on the earth. To have a conversation with another, a friendly, serious communication with each other, we must learn how to listen. We hardly ever listen to another. We carry on with our own thoughts, with our own problems, with our own particular ideas and conclusions, and so it is very difficult to listen to another. We are suggesting that you listen. There is an art of listening. We are going to talk over together a great many things - the state of war, divided nations, divided groups, human relationship. We are going to talk over together the problems of fear, pleasure and the complexity of human thought. We are going to talk over together whether sorrow can ever end and the implications and the complexities of death. We are also going to talk over together what is religion, what is meditation, and if there is anything sacred, eternal. We are going to talk over together all these things. And one must have the art of listening to all this; not what you think with all your traditions, with all your knowledge, but to listen to another who is telling you something. Then communication becomes simple, easy. But if you are not thinking together, which is quite an arduous task, then you and the speaker will be thinking in two different directions. So there is an art of listening; not translating what the speaker is saying, but listening to the word, the content of the word, the significance and the depth of the word. We are using ordinary, daily language. There is no jargon, there is no specialized subject about which we are talking. We are talking of human beings and problems. The word has depth, meaning, and we are speaking in English, using the daily language without any mysterious words being used. It is important that you and the speaker establish a right relationship. He is not a guru. He is not going to inform you what to think, how to think, but together we are going to observe the activities of human beings right throughout the world, why they have become what they are. We are going to look together why man has become what he is -cruel, destructive, violent, idealistic and, in the world of technology, doing astonishing things of which most of us are unaware; why after thousands of years of wars, shedding tears, a human being, through a long period of time, is actually behaving in this manner. Man has divided the world into nationalities; man has divided the world into the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hindu, the Muslim and so on - religiously. Where there is division as the Arab and the Jew, the Hindu and the Muslim, and so on, where there is division, there must be conflict. This is a natural law, which is what is actually taking place in the world. Why is there this division? Who has brought this about? Why has man become what he is in spite of great experience, in spite of great knowledge, in spite of vast technological advancement; why has he remained more or less what he has been for 40,000 years; why? Is it because our mind, our brain, is programmed, like a computer? The computer is programmed by the professionals and it can repeat perhaps much quicker, more rapidly, than man, giving infinite information. Is it that every human being in this world has been programmed to be a Bengali, to be a Muslim, to be a Hindu, and so on? Is your brain programmed, thinking in a conventional, narrow, limited way? Our brain within the skull is limited. But it has the capacity of extraordinary invention, extraordinary technological advancement. Perhaps most of us do not know what is actually going on in the biological world, in the technological world, in the world of warfare, because most of us are concerned with our daily living, with our own particular problems, with our own fulfilments. So, we generally forget the vast advancement humanity is making in one direction, in the technological world, and totally, completely, neglecting the psychological world, the world of human behaviour, the world of consciousness. What are the causes of all this? Why are human beings being programmed as Christians for 2,000 years, believing in certain doctrines, certain beliefs, seeking only one saviour, and the Muslim also being programmed for the last 1,000 or more years to believe in certain principles and call himself a Muslim, and the Hindu being programmed perhaps for the last three to five thousand years. So our brains are conditioned. Does one ever realize how our brain is acting, thinking, looking? Where there is limitation, there must be conflict. Our brains are conditioned to be this or that, to behave in a certain manner, to enjoy, to suffer, to have a great burden of fear, uncertainty, confusion and the ultimate fear of death. We are conditioned to that and there is a whole group of people, professors, scholars, writers, including the communists with their guru Marx who say that the human brain will always be conditioned; it can never be free; you can modify that conditioning by environmental influence, by law. It can always be modified, changed here and there, but actually the human brain can never be free. Please understand the implication of that. Therefore, the totalitarian governments are controlling human thought and not allowing them to think freely, and if they do, they are sent to the psychiatric ward, to concentration camps. It is most important to find out for yourself whether the human brain which has been conditioned through experience, through knowledge, whether that brain can ever be free, have no fear, no conditioning. Where there is conditioning, there must be conflict, because all conditioning is limited. Is this clear? In talking over together, you are aware of your own thinking, your own reactions, your own responses, how they are limited, how they are conditioned, how you depend on past knowledge. You see how your life becomes very narrow, rather sloppy, confused, and there is the fear of insecurity. If one is aware of all one's own inward activities, one's thoughts, one`s feelings, one's reactions, then you will find out for yourself how conditioned you are, how limited you are. When you recognise that fact, then you realize the consequences of that conditioning, that limitation. Wherever there is limitation as Hindu or Muslim, there must be conflict. Wherever there is a division between husband and wife, there must be conflict. And human beings throughout the world, after all this evolution, are still in conflict with each other. Please consider all this because we are concerned with your life as a human being. And that life, our daily living, has become extraordinarily complex, extraordinarily dangerous, difficult, uncertain. The future of man is really at stake. This is not a threat, this is not a pessimistic point of view. The crisis is not only physical, but it is in our consciousness, in our being. So, talking over together, become aware of all this. In becoming aware, you begin to discover. You begin to find out for yourself how your life has become such pain, such anxiety, such uncertainty. If you are so aware, you can then proceed more deeply, but if you merely listen to the words, words have very little meaning. Words have certain significance, but if one lives in words, as most people do, in symbols, in myths, in romantic nonsense, then we make life more and more difficult, more and more dangerous, for each other. So, please listen to find out, to question, to doubt, so that your own brain becomes aware of itself. We are asking why human beings, who have developed the most marvellous technology the world has ever known, have remained more or less the same psychologically, inwardly, for the last 40,000 years. Inwardly, we have systems, we have ideals, we have all the so-called sacred books, but we have not radically brought about a change, a psychological revolution, and we are going to enquire into that - whether it is possible to bring about total mutation in the brain cells themselves. We are talking about the radical change of human behaviour so that man is not self-centred as he is, which is causing such great destruction in the world. If one is aware, then we can begin to ask whether that conditioning can be totally changed so that man is completely free. Now, he thinks he is free to do what he likes. Each individual thinks he can do what he likes, all over the world, and his freedom is based on choice because he can choose where to live, what kind of work he can do, choose between this idea and that idea, this ideal or that ideal, change from one god to another god from one guru to another, from one philosopher to another. This capacity to choose brings in the concept of freedom, but in the totalitarian state there is no freedom; you can't do what you want to do. It is totally controlled. Choice is not freedom. Choice is merely moving in the same field from one corner to another. Is this clear? Our brain being limited, we are asking, is it possible for the brain to free itself so that there is no fear? Then there is right relationship with all the neighbours in the world. Now we are going to enquire into the nature of our consciousness. Your consciousness is what you are - your belief, your ideals, your gods, your violence, fear, romantic concepts, your pleasure, your sorrow, and the fear of death and the everlasting question of man, which has been from time immemorial, whether there is something sacred beyond all this. That is your consciousness. That is what you are, You are not different from your consciousness. We are asking whether that content of consciousness can be transformed, can be totally changed. First, your consciousness is not yours. Your consciousness is the consciousness of all humanity, because what you think, your beliefs, your sensations, your reactions, your pain, your sorrow, your insecurity, your gods, and so on, are shared by all humanity. Go to America, go to England, Europe or Russia, China, you will find human beings suffer everywhere. They are frightened of death, they have beliefs, they have ideals. They speak a particular language, but their thinking, their reactions, their responses, generally are shared by all human beings. This is a fact that you suffer, your neighbour suffers; that neighbour may be thousands of miles away, but he suffers. He is as insecure as you are. He may have a lot of money but inwardly there is insecurity. A rich man in America, or the man in power, all go through this pain, anxiety, loneliness, despair. So, your consciousness is not yours any more than your thinking. It is not an individual thinking. Thinking is common, is general, from the poorest man, the most uneducated, unsophisticated man in a little, tiny village to the most sophisticated brain - the great scientists; they all think. The thinking may be more complex, but thinking is general, shared by all human beings. Therefore, it is not your individual thinking. This is rather difficult to see and to recognise the truth of it, because we are so conditioned as individuals. All your religious books, whether Christian or Muslim or another, all sustain and nourish this idea, this concept of an individual. You have to question that. You have to find out the truth of the matter. We are investigating together and we see that human consciousness is similar, is shared by all human beings. Therefore, there is no individual. He may be more educated than you, he may be taller, he may be shorter; outside he may be different, but inwardly he shares the ground of all humanity. This is a fact. But if you are frightened, if you are caught in the conditioning of being an individual, you will never understand the immensity and the extraordinary fact that you are the entire humanity. From that there is love, compassion, intelligence, but if you are merely conditioned to the idea that you are an individual, then you have endless complications because it is based on illusion, not on fact. The illusion may be of thousands of years, but it is still illusion. You are the result of your environment, you are the result of the language you speak, you are the result of the food you eat, the clothes, the climate, the tradition handed down from generation to generation - you are all that. You are the product of the society which you have created. Society is not different from you. Man has created the society, the society of greed, envy, hatred, brutality, violence, wars; he has created all that and he has also created the extraordinary world of technology. So, you are the world and the world is you. Your consciousness is not yours, it is the ground on which all human beings stand, all human beings think. So, you are actually not an individual. That is one of the realities, truth that one must understand. Do not accept what the speaker is saying, but question your own isolation, because individual means isolation. To separate oneself from another is isolation, like nations isolate themselves as Indians and all the rest of it. And they think that in isolation there is security. There is no security in isolation. But the governments of the world, representing the humanity of each country, are maintaining this isolation, and therefore they are perpetuating wars. If you recognise the truth, the fact that you are not an individual, that inwardly there is no division, that we all share the same problems, then the problem is: Can you, as a human being representing all humanity, bring about a fundamental, psychological, revolution? You might ask `If I, as a human being, change, will it affect in any way the rest of mankind? If I do change, if there is a change in a particular person, how will it affect the whole consciousness of mankind?' Please do put that question to yourself; even as a single isolated human being you are asking, `If I change, what effect has it in the world?' The question is, if you change fundamentally, you affect the whole consciousness of man. Napoleon affected the whole consciousness of Europe. Stalin affected the whole consciousness of Russia. The Christian saviour, he has affected the consciousness of the world, and the Hindus with their peculiar gods have affected the consciousness of the world. When you as a human being, radically transform psychologically, that is, be free of fear, have right relationship with each other, end sorrow and so on, which is a radical transformation, then you affect the whole consciousness of man. It is not an individual affair. It is not a selfish affair. It is not individual salvation; it is the salvation of all human beings of which you are. First, we must enquire what is relationship. Why is there, in human relationship with each other, such conflict, such misery, such intense sense of loneliness? From past history, from all the knowledge that has been acquired, studied, man has lived in conflict with each other. But relationship is existence: without relationship you cannot exist. In that existence there is conflict. Relationship is absolutely necessary. Life is relationship, action is relationship; what you think brings about relationship or destroys relationship. The hermit, the monk, the sanyasi - he may think he is separate, but he is related - related to the past, related to the environment, related to the man who brings him some grains, some food, some clothes. So life is relationship. We are going to explore together why human beings live in conflict with each other, why there is conflict between you and your husband, between the wife and the man. Because, where there is conflict in relationship, there is no love, there is no compassion, and there is no intelligence. Are you actually related? You may be related to a man, woman, sexually, but apart from that, are you related to anybody? Relation means non-isolation. That is, the man goes to the office every day of his life, to a factory, to some form of occupation, leaving the house at 8 o'clock, spends the whole day working, for 50, 60 years, and then dies. And there the man is ambitious, greedy, envious, struggling, competing; he comes home and the woman, the wife, is also competitive, jealous, anxious, going on in her own way. They may meet sexually, talk together, care somewhat, but they remain separate, like two railway lines never meeting. This is what we call relationship, which is an actuality. This is a fact of everyone's life, the perpetual division between two people, each holding on to his opinions, to his conclusions. The fact is, however intimate that relationship may be, there is always conflict, one dominating the other, one possessing the other, one jealous of the other. This is what we call relationship. Now, can that relationship which we know, be totally changed? Ask yourself this. Why is there conflict between two human beings, whether they are highly educated or not at all educated? They may be great scientists, but they are ordinary human beings, like you and another - fighting, quarrelling, ambitious. Why does this state exist? Is it not because each person is concerned about himself? So he is isolating himself. In isolation you cannot have right relationship. You hear this, but you will not do anything about it because we fall into a habit, into a rut, into a groove, into a narrow little life, and we put up with it, however miserable, unhappy, quarrelsome, ugly, it is. So, please enquire, question, doubt, whether it is possible to live with another with complete harmony without any dissension, without any division. If you really, deeply, enquire, you will find that you have created an image about your wife, and she has created an image about you. Each has built an image about the other, a picture about the other. These two pictures, images, words, are in relationship with each other. Where there is an image about another, a picture about another, there must be conflict. I am sure you all have an image about the speaker. I am quite sure of it. Why? You don't know the speaker. You can never know the speaker, but you have created an image about him: that he is religious, non-religious, he is stupid, he is very clever, he is beautiful, he is this, he is that. And with that image you look at the person. The image is not the person. The image is the reputation, and reputations are easily created; the reputation may be good or bad. But the human brain, the thought, creates the image. The image is the conclusion, and we live by images and imagination. The making of pictures has no place in love. We don't love each other; we may hold hands, we may sleep together, we may do this and ten different things, but we have no love for each other. If you had that quality, that perfume of love, there would be no wars. There will be no Hindu and Muslim, Jew and Arab. But you listen to all this and you still remain with your images. You still wrangle with each other, quarrel with each other. Your life has become so extraordinarily meaningless. I wonder how many of you realize that we are put together by thought. Your gods are put together by thought. All the rituals, all the dogmas, the philosophy, are all put together by thought, and thought is not sacred. Thought is always limited. Thought has created an image about you as the audience, about you as the wife and the husband, about you as the Indian and he as the American, and so on. It is these images which are unreal, which are dividing humanity. You should never call yourself an Indian, Russian or American; we are human beings. Then we should have no wars. We should have global government, global relationship, but you are not interested in all that. You hear all this, and if you don't change radically, you are bringing about destruction to the future generation. So, please give ear, give thought, attention, to what is going on outside you and also to what is going on inwardly, for the inward psyche conquers the outer environment. As you see it in Russia, we give such importance to the outer. We must have right society, right laws, feed the poor, be concerned about the poor, but the inward thought, inward feeling inward isolation, is separating man from man and you are responsible for this. Each one of you is responsible for this. Unless you, change fundamentally, inwardly, the future is very dangerous. Unless you fundamentally bring about a change in your daily life, have right relationship with each other, live correctly, not be ambitious and so on, there is no possibility for the ending of conflict between human beings. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN CALCUTTA 2ND PUBLIC TALK 21ST NOVEMBER, 1982 'THE MOVEMENT OF BECOMING' As one observes the world outside, there is greater and greater chaos in every country. And in this country it is fairly obvious; it is blatant, it is palpable. Where there is uncertainty, disturbance, lack of political credulity, knowing that politicians all over the world are making things far worse, knowing that religions throughout the world have lost all their meaning, seeing all this, there are those who have called themselves the fundamentalists; they go back to the Bible or to the Koran or to the various so-called religious scriptures, thinking that if they follow those books, there will be less chaos. This is what is happening the world over; going back to the past, holding on to certain beliefs, tradition. Most of us are doing this in some way or other. In a world that is very, very chaotic, disturbing, dangerous and preparing for war, one naturally wants some kind of security, outside of us or inside. There isn't much security in the outward world. You may be very rich, you may be very powerful politically, or you might find security in some dogma, in some belief, but in none of these there is absolute security. Man wants security. We must all have security - security in the sense of food, clothes and shelter. ALso we want security inwardly, something that will give us assurance, stability, a sense of strength. But there is no security in any belief, in any dogma, in any ideal. Not finding security in any of these, man turns to the past and hopes thereby to find some hope, some kind of words, to hold on to. I do not know if you have not noticed that the more you cling to some kind of conclusion, reasonable conclusion, logical conclusion or the conclusions of certain authorities, there is less energy. Where there is conclusion, there must be lack of energy because, when you come to a conclusion - which means, after discussing, arguing, come to a point which you think is right - then you shut the door to further enquiry, and that is what is happening in the world. We all want conclusions, whether there is god, whether there is going to be any peace, and so on. Lacking security inwardly and outwardly, lacking something on which we can totally rely, on which we can depend, which will give us comfort, a sense of well-being, we cling to some traditional conclusions and thereby lose that creative energy of enquiry. Enquiry means to penetrate, to investigate, to explore, to open the door, to find out further. But most of us have not that energy, and so we fall back upon something which we call tradition or some book or other. It seems to the speaker that we are not releasing creative energy to bring about a new culture, a new way of life, because the old brahmanical culture of this country has completely disappeared - a culture which we are not saying is good or bad; a culture that has existed perhaps three to five thousand years has completely gone overnight, disappeared altogether. And one questions, asks, why human beings who have lived with a particular culture for so long, why that culture has disappeared. Perhaps it was not a culture at all. It was only a series of words, traditions without any life behind them. So, in exploring together the condition of our mind and our heart, in investigating the nature of our brain which is the centre of all our actions, of all our feelings, of every thought, we see whether it is possible to release that creative energy. And we are going to go into this very carefully. There is an art of listening and there is an art of learning. Most of our learning is the accumulation of knowledge; not knowing mathematics, or biology, or physics, gradually we accumulate a great deal of information about physics and store it up in the brain, which becomes our knowledge about physics, mathematics or what you will. That is what we do, and that is what we call learning -accumulating a lot of knowledge about various subjects - as an engineer, as an astronomer, as a politician. We accumulate knowledge in order to act skilfully in the world as a carpenter, as a mason, as a doctor, knowledge is accumulated, from which we act either skilfully or not skilfully, efficiently or inefficiently. So we must enquire together into what is knowledge, what place knowledge has in our relationship with each other. Perhaps we have never questioned what is the place of knowledge in life apart from having an occupation, becoming a good scientist, doctor, engineer, and so on. We are asking a very serious question, which is, `What place has knowledge in human relationship?' Knowledge is always in the past. There is no future knowledge. Knowledge implies the process of time as the past. And this knowledge, both in the scientific world and human existence, is based on experience. This experience is gathered for millions of years or for the last 30 years. And that knowledge is used to accumulate further knowledge, further exploration, but knowledge is always in the past. There is no question about that. And knowledge is never complete about anything. That is a fact. So, our knowledge is stored in the brain as memory, and the response of that memory is thought. That is, experience either inherited or accumulated in the present becomes knowledge. Then that knowledge is memory, which is the past, and from that memory the reaction is thought. Is this clear? So thought is always limited. One has accumulated, say for example, scientific knowledge. That knowledge is being added to all the time, more and more. So scientific knowledge is never complete. Thought, whatever it does, is limited. We are saying categorically and definitely that knowledge is limited. Because there is no complete knowledge about anything, knowledge always goes with a shadow of ignorance. And any thought born of knowledge must inevitably be fragmentary, limited, finite; thought can invent something immeasurable, something beyond, infinite, but it is still the movement of thought. A person can invent god because he feels god is necessary for his comfort, for his security, but that god is the product of thought which is limited. We must be very clear on this point; you must see for yourself the fact, the truth, that thought, under all circumstances, whatever the thought, whether of the scientist or of the great philosopher, is always bound, narrow, limited. Thought has invented nationalities and, having created them, brings about division between people - the Muslim and the Hindu, the Jew and the Arab, the communist, the socialist, the capitalist, and so on. Thought has invented all this. All rituals are the product of thought. And thought has created problems like war, like conflict, and so on. Then thought tries to solve these problems. We see that thought, politically, religiously, and between human beings, has created innumerable problems. And thought says, `I will solve it.' In that solution, you are producing more problems. So life is becoming more and more complex, full of problems, because we think that thought is the only instrument and that thought is limited. Is this clear? We can then ask, is there a new instrument? What is the nature of thought? Thought is a material process because it is held in the very brain cells themselves. Whatever thought thinks about or invents, is the result of a material process. When thought creates god, it is still a material process. Thought is not sacred. if this is very clear, not verbally but deeply, profoundly, then we can ask, is there a new instrument? - not higher consciousness or lower consciousness; that is another invention of thought. We are going to find out together if there is a new instrument totally different from thought, which thought has not touched at all, because whatever thought touches must be limited and, being limited, it must inevitably create conflict, bring about fragmentation, as it has done in the world - religious fragmentation, political fragmentation, and so on. Is this clear? Can we go on from there? If you are at all serious, deeply concerned, if you have a great affection for humanity, you must have the energy to enquire; the drive, the passion, to find out. A new instrument is so absolutely necessary in this world which is degenerating day by day, destroying itself. By questioning the nature of thought, doubting, asking, probing, we are going to find out for ourselves that thought, at whatever level, is fragmentary, limited, finite, and this limitation has conditioned the brain. The brain has got extraordinary capacity as can be seen from what is happening in the technological world, but the capacity has been developed in one direction only and that is in the technological world - the doctor, the surgeon, the mathematician, the computer expert, and so on. But the human problems, which is our conflict with each other, our sorrow, pain, grief and endless conflict, the technological world can never solve. No politician, no system, no method, is concerned with all that. As ordinary human beings, we are going to find out for ourselves if there is or if there is not a new instrument which is not touched by thought, which is not the result of time, which is not caught in the process of evolution which is thought. We are going into this step by step, if you are willing, if you are serious. You must have great alertness, attention, capacity, sensitivity; you cannot be committed to any group, to any belief, to any dogma. You have to have a mind that is really global, not a petty little mind concerned with one's own little problems. In the greater, the lesser disappears. In the greater humanity, the few little human problems dissolve. Without understanding the vast complexity of the human brain and mind and head, you will never solve any problem. So please give your attention, care to find out for yourself, not repeat what the speaker says. The speaker has no value. He is just a telephone, but what he says perhaps may have importance. So find out. Have you ever tried to observe yourself, your wife, the tree across the road and that animal that goes by, without the word? Have you ever tried to look at a tree without naming it, without bringing all the past pictures about a tree, just to observe the tree without the word, to look at it? Have you ever done it? Have you ever looked at your wife or your husband or your politicians? Have you ever looked at them without the symbol? Can you look at the speaker without the word, without all the rubbish and all that reputation, look at him without the image that you have built about him? Perhaps, it will be easier to look at the speaker that way because he does not know you and you don't know him. But to look at your wife, at your husband, is much more difficult. Can you look at the animal without the picture, the image, the word? First, be aware whether you can see, observe, look, without a single word the picture, because then you will awaken your sensitiveness. You are not sensitive to the dust, to the squalor, to the misery, to the poverty; you have just accepted it. The poverty of this country can never be solved, is not ever going to be solved, unless you drop your nationalism completely. It will be solved only when you have understood the global relationship of man to man. Then there will be no frontiers. That you have probably not understood. So, I say that the first essential quality in investigation, in enquiry, in that one has to be extraordinarily sensitive. All religions have said: suppress your senses, suppress your feelings, so that you have gradually lost the sensitivity of the senses. The speaker is saying quite the contrary. The speaker is saying, `Awaken all your senses to their highest degree so that you look at the world with all your senses.' To look at the world with that immense feeling when all the senses are fully awakened, in that there is great, extraordinary sense of energy, beauty. In the investigation of another instrument, we see that the first thing is, man has become dull through repetition, through tradition, through the oppression of the environment; the environment is not merely nature; the environment is the politician, the guru and all that is going on around you. You have gradually lost all sensitivity, all energy to create, but we are talking of creation in the sense of bringing about something totally new, and to have that capacity, the drive, the beauty, one must have great sensitivity. You cannot have great sensitivity if every sense is not fully functioning, fully aware. Now, why have we destroyed ourselves? Religions have said, the scriptures of this country and the religious leaders have said, the Christian world has said, `Suppress desire, suppress your feelings, don't look at a woman, torture yourself; then only you find god or nirvana or moksha or whatever you want; only then you will be illumined; which is utter nonsense. How can you destroy the most extraordinary instrument that you have - the body, with all its senses, the beauty? It is an extraordinary instrument. These people say, `Suppress desire, don't yield to desire.' So we must understand the nature of desire. It is very important, in the investigation of a new instrument, to realize just that the old instrument, which is thought, is not solving any human problems. In the investigation of all that, we have now come upon this thing called desire. What is desire? Why have people said, suppress it, deny it? If you cannot identify it with something greater, it is always a problem of struggle. We are not advocating suppression, avoidance, escape, and all that. We are investigating together the nature of desire, how desire arises, why we are caught in it, why it has become so extraordinarily powerful. What is desire? You see a pleasant object, a beautiful object, a beautiful woman or a man. You desire him or her or that object. That is so. You see a nice car, polished, good lights, powerful, and you touch it, get inside, feel the pleasure of owning it if you can afford it. Then the desire is there. First, the object creates the desire, or desire exists apart from the object; which is, the object, car, creates the desire, or desire exists and the objects may vary. We are not discussing the objects of desire - to be a powerful minister or prime minister, governor, an executive or a talented violinist - but we are enquiring into the very structure and nature of desire. If we understand that, not verbally but factually, then there is never a question of suppressing it, never a question of controlling it. We have controlled, never understanding who is the controller. We have controlled desire, we have controlled our sex, we are brought up to control. And where there is desire, we are trying to understand it, explore it, probe into it, not control it. If this is clear, then we can go together into the understanding of the truth of desire, what place it has in life, or has it no place at all. So we cannot possibly start with any conclusion; that is, suppress desire or let desire run rampant. But we are slowly, hesitantly, carefully, probing into this which becomes an extraordinary factor in life and a torture too. What is the origin, the source, of desire? Go into it very very deeply to capture the whole movement of desire, the implication of it, the depth of it, the reality of it. If you had no senses, there will be no sensation. Sensation arises when you see something in the window of a shop, a shirt, a radio, or what you will. You see it -visual perception. Then you go inside that shop, touch the material, and from the touching of it, there is a sensation. This is very simple. You see the car, you touch it, you look at the lights, the polish - not the beauty of Indian cars, but some of the European cars are extraordinarily beautiful. Like an aeroplane, it is extraordinarily beautiful - and you touch it, you touch that shirt you see in the window, blue shirt, and by the very touch there is sensation. Then what happens? Then, if you observe very closely, thought says, `How nice it would be if I had that shirt on me, if I stepped into that car.' So, at that moment when thought creates the image out of the sensation, is the origin of desire. You see a beautiful tree, which man has not created. Man has created the cathedral, the mosque, the temple, and all the things therein; but he has not created the tree. He has not created nature, but man is destroying nature. Now, you look at a beautiful tree. You wish it were in your garden. And you see it. There is the sensation of the dignity, the shadows, the light on the leaf, the movement of the tree. Then sensation arises. And then thought says, `How nice it would be if I had that tree in my garden. When thought creates the image of that tree in your garden, at that second desire is born. Right? The fact is, it is natural to be sensitive, to have sensations. Otherwise you are paralysed. You must have sensation, you must have sensitivity in your fingers, in your eyes, in your hearing and looking, and you are sensitive to watch, to look - out of that looking, watching, observing, sensation inevitably arises. It must arise; otherwise you are blind, deaf. When there is sensation, then thought creates an image, and at that moment desire is born. Have you found it to be so? Or are you going to repeat just what the speaker has said or go back to your tradition and say we must suppress desire or say what you are talking is nonsense? If you really go into this question of desire, which is so important in life, then you will find out for yourself the origin, the beginning, of desire. Now, the question is to look at a car, at the shirt, at a woman, at a picture; there is arising of sensation. Find out whether thought can be in abeyance, not immediately create a picture, an image of you in that shirt, or in that car, and so on. Can there be a gap between sensation and thought impinging upon that sensation? Find out. It will make your mind, brain, alert, watchful. Also, we ought to talk over together, in the investigation of a new instrument, whether man can ever be free from fear. We are frightened of something, either of the past or of the future or of the living present, uncertain of the living activity, uncertain of the process of the present. We always have this fear. Man has never solved the problem; he has escaped from it. He has various means of suppressing it, denying it, escaping from it, but he has never solved this problem. When there is fear, dreadful activities take place, all kinds of wrong actions take place. Your whole body, your whole mind, shrinks when there is real danger of fear. This is a problem we must solve, not theoretically, but actually, and be completely free of fear. Is that possible? What is the cause of fear? Where there is a cause, there is always an end to that cause. This is logic, this is natural. I may have pain, the cause may be cancer. If I discover the cause, the pain will end, or it will be terminal. We investigate the cause through the symptom. We are looking together, not at the symptoms of fear - frightened of the dark, frightened of your parents or grandparents, frightened of your husband or wife, frightened of the politician, and so on. Those are all symptoms, the objects of fear, but we are asking what is the root of it. It is like cutting down a tree, it is like going to the very root of things. We are going to look at it. First, we are asking, is the cause of fear time? Look at it carefully. Is time a major cause of fear? That is, time being tomorrow, what might happen tomorrow, or what has happened yesterday or many thousand yesterdays, or what might happen now? You understand my question? Is time one of the factors of fear? I may have done something wrong last week, and what I have done has caused pain, and I hope it will not recur again. That is, the word `hope' implies the future. Are you following this? There is time by the watch, time by the sunrise and sunset, time as yesterday, today and tomorrow, time as yesterday's memories, experiences, modifying itself in the present and proceeding into the future. All that is time. Physical time - to cover a distance from here to there, from one point to another point, from this place to go to your home, that requires time. There is the so-called psychological time, the inward time. That is, `I hope I will get a better job at the end of the year, I hope I will be better, nobler or whatever it is, sometime later; I hope I will meet a nice man tomorrow.' So the word `hope' implies time. And another is the idea of better: I am this, but I will be better; I am violent but I will become non-violent. This process of `what is' and transforming `whit is' to something else is a process of time. Is this clear? So, time is a factor of fear. I am living, I have got full energy, but something, an accident, might kill me. I am warned that there is always death. So there is this sense of time, an interval. That interval is translated as the better, as hope, as self-improvement, and so on. I want to fulfil, I may not be able to fulfil. I apply for a job, I may not have the capacity for the job. So there is fear. Time is one of the factors of fear. We are not saying how to wipe away time. We are enquiring into the nature of fear. Then, is not thought, is not the process of thinking, another factor of fear? Look at it. I think I may die. I think that god exists, but you come along and threaten my belief, and I am frightened. So, thinking of the past incident, hoping that pain will not recur again, thinking about it and wishing that it will not happen again, is the movement of thought. So thought and time are the very root of fear. The physical time - to go from here to your house, that requires time - you cannot stop that. To learn a language, to learn any technique, requires time. We see that time is one of the factors of fear as well as thought. So thought is a movement. Is it not? Time is a movement. Is there actually, factually, psychological time at all? You understand my question? The problem of time is very important as the problem of thought. We live by time. All our knowledge is based on time - the struggle to become less violent, the struggle to become something, which is all measure. I an unhappy, violent, lonely, depressed, anxious. That is `what is'. That is a fact. Then comes the idea, `I must become something else from "what is." That becoming is time, as becoming from a clerk to a manager requires time. That same process of thinking we have brought over into the field of the psyche, into the field of thinking. That is, `I am violent, I will become non-violent', which is, you are allowing time to come, interfere. But when you say, `I am violent, I am going to understand it, look at it, watch it, go into it very quickly, deeply', there is no time. But if you are trying to become something else, there is time. It is the becoming, which is measure, that demands time. Say, for instance, if you compare yourself with somebody more intelligent, more bright, comparison is measurement. If you don't compare at all with anybody, including your great gods and saints and gurus and all the rest of it, then what happens? You are what you are. From there you start, but when you are comparing, trying to become something else, you never understand yourself, what you are. So time is a becoming, a becoming which is non-fact. That is,`I am violent, I must become non-violent.' The non-violence is not a fact, has no reality. Though you talk a great deal about it in this country, it does not exist. What exists is violence. If you forget the non-violence, then you can tackle violence, go into it. The understanding of violence can be long or very quick. Either your investigation of violence can take time because you are lazy, or you may say, `I will investigate it tomorrow, it is not important', and so on. But a man who is concerned with violence which is spreading all over the world, destroying humanity, wants to understand the depth of violence, he will understand it instantly. Where there is a becoming, you must have psychological time. That becoming is illusory. The fact is what exists, what you are at the moment - your anger, your reactions, your fears. Look at it. Time is a major factor of fear and also thought. You cannot stop physical time, but when you begin to understand the nature of time inwardly, the becoming and the non-becoming, and understand the whole movement of thought, not suppress it, deny it, say how am I to control thought, then who is the controller? The controller is another part of thought. If you are really, deeply, concerned with the nature of fear and the total ending of psychological fear, one has to go into the question of time in depth and also the nature and structure of thought. But if you say, `Please tell me a method to get rid of fear,' then you are asking a terribly wrong question because, the very question implies that you have not understood yourself, you have not looked at yourself. Death, conflict, pain, sorrow, pleasure, fear, meditation, all that is our life, and to understand it one must have vitality, strength and you will not have that energy if you are merely repeating words, if you cling to some belief, to some conclusions; that destroys all energy. Energy implies freedom; not what you like to do, but freedom. Only then you have extraordinary energy. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN CALCUTTA 3RD PUBLIC TALK 27TH NOVEMBER, 1982 'THE ENDING OF SORROW' We ought to talk over together this evening why human beings who have lived for over four thousand years, are behaving as they are, what has happened to them, what has happened to each one of us that we don't lead an orderly, sane, balanced life. We have created this society which is immoral, unethical, corrupt, destructive. Each one of us has contributed to it, and if there is to be a radical change in the social structure, we have to begin with ourselves, not with politics, not with Marxism or some kind of retreat from the present. We have to put order in our house first. We are disorderly, violent, confused, lonely. So we are going to talk over this evening what is total order, if there is any kind of love, what is compassion, whether sorrow can ever end, the sorrow of human beings right throughout the world. We are talking over together - you and the speaker - our problems amicably, without any resistance, not agreeing but exploring, investigating, seeing why we live such disorderly lives and why we accept things as they are. We are not advocating or talking about physical violence, physical revolution. On the contrary, such revolutions have never produced a good society. We are talking about human behaviour, why man is what he is. We cannot blame the environment, we cannot blame the politicians or the scientists. That is a very easy escape, but what we ought to be concerned with is why somewhat intelligent people, somewhat educated people, lead such disorderly lives. So our question is, what is disorder? A confused mind, a confused life, cannot find what is order. Could we together find out for ourselves what causes disorder in our lives, what brings about a society which is utterly disordered? What is disorder? What is the nature and the structure of disorder? There is disorder, isn't there? Where there is contradiction - saying one thing and doing something totally different - there is bound to be disorder. I wonder if one is aware of this. Then, there is conflict, disorder, when we are pursuing ideals -whether political ideals, religious ideals or our own projection of what we think we ought to be. That is, where there is division between actually what is happening in ourselves and neglecting that and pursuing an ideal, that is one of the causes of disorder. Another cause in the psychological, so-called inward life, is to pursue authority, the authority of a book, the authority of a guru, the authority of so-called spiritual people. We accept very easily authority in our inward life. Of course, you have to accept the authority of the scientists, of the technocrat, the doctor, the surgeon. But inwardly, psychologically, why do we accept authority at all? This is an important question to ask. We will come back to it. We are asking what are the causes of disorder. We said pursuing an ideal is disorder, accepting authority of another in the world of the mind, the inward psychological state, is disorder. One of the other causes of disorder is the everlasting attempt to become something inwardly. So, perhaps these and other causes bring about disorder. We are going to investigate each one of them. Why do we have ideals at all? What is an ideal? Originally the root meaning of that word `idea' was to observe, to look, to seek. But we have translated it as a projection of a particular concept brought about by thought, and that is the ideal and the ideal is far more important and the pursuit of that ideal becomes all-consuming when you totally neglect `what is.' `What is' is important. not the ideal. We are using the word, `what is,' in the sense what is actually happening, both outwardly and inwardly. We are violent, as most human beings are. To have an ideal of non-violence has no reality, has no validity, but what has validity, reality, is the fact that we are violent, and to deal with that violence not in terms of ideals and patterns. Perhaps, in this country, the pursuit of non-violence which is an illusion has deprived us of our energy to look at actually what is going on. We never look at `what is'. We want to change what is taking place to something else. This has been the process of centuries upon centuries. The political ideal, the religious ideal, the ideal that one has created for oneself, an end, a goal - and the goal, the end, the ideal, becomes extraordinarily important and not what is actually happening. That is, the `what is' is being transformed into `what should be'. Then there is struggle, there is disorder. Whereas, if we give our attention to `what is', and the `what is' is violence, hatred, antagonism, brutality, we can deal with it. We are concerned to discover the causes of disorder. We are saying that one of the major factors of disorder in life is trying to transform or change `what is` into `what should be'. The `what should be' is totally unreal, but `what is' is all-important. If I am greedy, I have to enquire into the nature of greed, whether that greed can really have an end or it must continue and not have the ideal of non-greed. To see the illusory nature of `what is', is the beginning of intelligence. Then there is division in us, there is duality, the opposite. Is there an opposite at all? There is opposite as light and darkness, tall and short, and so on. Basically, is there an opposite at all? We say there is an opposite in the world of psyche, in the world of spirit. We say there is the good and the bad, the good and the evil. Is good the opposite of evil? If it is the opposite, then it has its root in its own opposite. If evil is the opposite of the good, then that evil has a relationship with the good. The opposite is put together by thought. Either the good is totally divorced from evil or it is the outcome, the opposite, the invention, of thought as the good. So what is the good? Let us enquire into that. What is the good? According to the dictionary, the common usage of that word means good behaviour, good in the sense of being whole, not fragmented but having that sense or understanding of the nature of the wholeness of life, and in that there is no fragmentation as the evil. But if evil is the outcome of the good, then that evil has a relationship with the good. We are enquiring together if there is an opposite in our life, if there is hate and love. Can love have a relationship with hate, with jealousy? If hate has a relationship with love, then it is not love. Obviously. If I hate someone, and at the same time talk about love, it is incompatible. The two don`t meet. We are questioning, is there an opposite at all? Where there is an opposite, there must be conflict. I hate, and also I think I love him. The opposite of hate is not love. The opposite of hate is still hate. So, that is one of the factors of disorder in our life: the ideal, the opposite and the acceptance of so-called spiritual authority. There is the authority of law, the authority of government, the authority of a policeman, the authority of a good surgeon. But psychologically, inwardly, why do we accept authority - the authority of the priest, the authority of a book, the authority of a guru? When we follow somebody and be guided by somebody, guided what to believe and what not to believe, to accept his system of enlightenment and so on, what is happening to our own brain, to our own inward state? You are my guru. You tell me what to do, what to think, what to believe and the various steps I must take to attain enlightenment or whatever they call it, and I, rather gullible, want to escape from my life which is disorderly, corrupt, insecure. I trust the guru. I give him my life and say I surrender, I give part of my life in attaining that enlightenment. Why do I do that? Because I want some kind of security, some kind of assurance, that I will have some day some kind of happiness, some kind of release from my daily worries and misery. The guru gives you an assurance and you feel satisfied. But you never question the guru, you never doubt what he is saying, you never discuss with him; you accept. That has been the condition of human beings right throughout the world for millions of years. The interpreter between god and you, between that which is holy and you - and you, wanting comfort, security, will accept him without a single doubt. Now, to question spiritual authority - whether it is Christian authority or the spiritual authority of Islam with their book, or your guru with his statement - to question, to doubt it, is to rely entirely on yourself, be a light to oneself, and that light cannot be lit by another. It requires your questioning, your demanding, of not only the outer, the spiritual authority, but of yourself - why you believe - so that your own mind becomes clear, strong, vital, so that there is energy for creative activity. But when you follow somebody, your brain becomes dull, routine, mechanical, which is the very destructive nature of the human mind, or human brain. So please see why this disorder exists in our life, and when you begin to investigate into this disorder, then out of that disorder comes order. When there is the dissipation of causes of disorder, there is order. Then you don't have to pursue what is order. Order is virtue, order means freedom. We have to enquire also into what is freedom. We have said that where there is order in our life, total order, that order is virtue and that very order is freedom. The word `freedom' is misused by everybody. There is freedom from something and there is freedom. Freedom from something is not freedom. We will go into that. I am a prisoner, prisoner of my own ideas, of my own theories, of my own conceptions, and my brain is a prisoner to that. Then freedom is, to be free from my prison to fall into another prison. I free myself from one particular conditioning and, unknowingly or unconsciously, fall into another conditioning. So freedom is from something; from anger, from jealousy; all that is not freedom at all. Freedom means free, not from something. This requires a great deal of enquiry, which is, our brain is conditioned like a computer, programmed to be a Hindu, programmed to be a Muslim, Christian, and so on. The computer is programmed; our brain has been programmed for thousands of years, which is our conditioning. Freedom is the ending of that conditioning. Where there is an end to conditioning, then only there is freedom. Without having that freedom, there must be disorder. So the ideal, the opposite, the pursuit of spiritual authority and accepting the conditioning that we are Hindus, Muslims and so on - all that brings disorder. When there is an end to that, there is order. You will say that it is impossible, impossible not to follow somebody because you are so uncertain, so insecure, and you are willing to follow somebody so easily, which means your brain is becoming dull, inactive. You may be active physically, but psychologically, inwardly, you cease to be active. We ought to talk over together sorrow, whether there is an end to sorrow. When there is an end to sorrow, then only there is love, then only there is compassion. What is sorrow, grief, pain, a feeling of loneliness, the sense of isolation? What is the nature of sorrow? What is the cause of sorrow. which is pain, fear, a sense of desperate loneliness? Why have human beings, from time immemorial, suffered and are still suffering, not from physical pain, some fatal disease or a feeling of utter rejection, but from the nature of suffering inwardly - the pain, the fears and the escape from it? I wonder if we have realized that for the last thousand years there have been many wars, and how many people have cried, mothers have shed tears! The pain, the anxiety, the hope, all that constitute sorrow, and this sorrow exists in all the days of our life, and we never seem to be free of it, completely ending that sorrow. We together will go into this because, there is an end to sorrow. Sorrow comes with the loss of somebody, with the death of somebody. My son - I have lost him; there is grief and tears and great sense of loneliness. Then, in that state of shock, in that state of pain, anxiety, loneliness, I seek comfort, I want to escape from this agony. I escape through every form of entertainment, whether it is the drug, the alcohol, the temple, mosque or the church. I begin to invent all kinds of fanciful concepts. I lost him, he is dead, gone, and there is that pain. Can one remain with that pain? Can I look at that pain, hold it, hold it as a precious jewel - not escape, not suppress, not rationalize it, not seek the cause of it, but hold it as a vessel holds water? Hold this thing called sorrow, the pain, that is, I have lost my son and I am lonely, not to escape from that loneliness, not to suppress it, not to intellectually rationalize it, but to look at that loneliness, understand the depth of it, the nature of it. Loneliness is total isolation which is brought about through our daily activity of selfish ambitions or ideological ambitions, competitions, each one out for himself. Those are the activities which bring about loneliness. But if you run away from it, you will never solve sorrow. The very word `sorrow' etymologically means passion. Most of us have no passion. We may have lust, we may have ambition, we may want to become rich; we donate our energies to all that. But that does not bring about passion. Only with the ending of sorrow there is passion. That is total energy, not limited by thought. So it is important to understand the nature of suffering and the ending of it. The ending of it is to hold that sorrow, that pain, too. Look at it. It is a marvellous thing to know how to hold the pain and look at it, be with it, live with it, not get bitter, cynical, but to see the nature of sorrow. There is beauty in that sorrow, depth in that sorrow. We also have to talk over together what is love. What does that word mean to you? If you are asked in a drawing room what is the meaning of that word to you, what would you answer? What do you mean by that? I love playing golf, I love to read, I love my wife, I love god. Is that love? Do you love your wife? Do you love your husband? Do you love your friend? We are enquiring into what is love. This is very important to enquire because without love, life is empty. You may have all the riches of the earth, you may be a great banker, great scientist, mathematician, great technician, capable of great technology, but without love you are lost, an empty shell. Together we are going to find not what love is, but what is not love. That is, through negation come to the positive. Is jealousy love, jealousy in which there is attachment, anxiety? In jealousy there is hate. Is that love? You are attached to your family, you are attached to a person or an idea or a concept or a conclusion. What are the implications of your attachment? Suppose I am married, I am attached to my wife. What does it mean? Where there is attachment, there is fear. Where there is attachment, there is possessiveness. When there is attachment to an ideal, to a concept, to a belief, or to a person with all the consequences of jealousy, anger, hatred, suspicion, surely all that is not love. To understand the nature of love, is it possible to be totally free from attachment? Please ask this question of yourself. You are all attached to something or the other. If I may suggest, most respectfully, become aware of the consequences of that attachment. If you are attached to an ideal, you are always on the defensive, or aggressive. If you come to a conclusion, to hold on to that conclusion is to end all further enquiry. Where there is attachment, there must be pain. I am attached to my wife and she may run away, she may look at another man, or she may die. In attachment, there is always fear, there is always anxiety, suspicion, watching. Surely, that is not love. So, can one be totally free of all attachment? It is up to you, but when you are attached, there is no love. Because, in that attachment there is fear. Fear is not love. And the ambitious man who wants to climb the ladder of success has no love because he is concerned with himself, with his achievements, which is the gathering of power, position, prestige. How can such a man love another? He may have a family, children, but in that man there is no love. When you say, `I love god as the highest principle', is that also love? That god, that principle, the highest principle `Brahman', is the result of thought. God is invented by man. I am sure you won't like this. But you are attached to that concept: god exists. Then you ask who is the creator of all this misery. God hasn't created all this, has he? If he has, he must be an odd god, he must be a sadist god. All the gods in the world are invented by thought, and to find out what love is, there must be an end to sorrow, end to attachment, end to everything we are committed to inwardly. Where the self, the ego, the me is, love is not. You hear all this, and you will walk away from here with the same attachment, with the same convictions, and never enquire further because the more you enquire about all this, the more life becomes dangerous. Because you may have to give up a lot of things naturally, easily, not as self-sacrifice. You have to understand the nature of attachment and be free from it. You have to realize that when you see the truth of something, you are standing completely alone, and that you may perceive that, and of that you are frightened. You may believe, see the truth inwardly of the nature of attachment, but as you don't want to quarrel with your wife, or husband, you accept. Gradually you become hypocrites. Also we should discuss the nature of intelligence. Compassion has its own intelligence, love has its own intelligence. We are going to enquire into what is intelligence. Surely, it cannot be bought in books. Knowledge is not intelligence. Where there is love, compassion, it has the beauty of its own intelligence. Compassion cannot exist if you are a Hindu, or a Catholic, Protestant or a Buddhist, or a Marxist. Love is not the product of thought. In understanding the nature of love, compassion, which is to deny all that which is not, to see that which is false as false, is the beginning of intelligence. To see the truth in the false is the beginning of intelligence. To see the nature of disorder and end it, not carry on day after day but to end it - the ending is the immediate perception which is intelligence. We are enquiring into what is intelligence. Cleverness is not intelligence. Having a great deal of knowledge about various subjects - mathematics, history, science, poetry, painting - that is not the activity of intelligence. The investigator into the atom may have an extraordinary capacity of concentration, imagination, probing, questioning, formulating hypothesis after hypothesis, theory, after theory, but all that is not intelligence. Intelligence is the activity of the wholeness of life, and that intelligence is not yours or mine. It does not belong to any country or to any people, like love is not Christian love or Hindu love, and so on. So, please enquire into all this because our life depends on all this. We are unfortunate miserable people, always in travail, always in conflict. We have accepted it as the way of life. But in enquiring into all this, there is awakening of that intelligence, and when that intelligence is in operation, in action, there is only right action. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN CALCUTTA 4TH PUBLIC TALK 28TH NOVEMBER, 1982 'THE MEANING OF DAILY LIVING' We have been talking about so many things, so many human problems, and we ought to consider this evening several things more. You and the speaker have to think together, not agree, not disregard or reject. Thought has been responsible for all the miseries of human beings, though it has created in the world of technology most extraordinary things. It seems so utterly urgent and necessary that we should think together, cooperate together, find out for ourselves because there is no more any leader, no politician, no guru. We are utterly and totally responsible for ourselves. As the crisis is great, we ought to be able to think together, and apparently that is one of the most difficult things to do because each one of us has so many opinions, so many conclusions, which prevent our coming together. To think together means to put aside all your personal prejudices, bias, opinions and various forms of conclusions which actually prevent communication with each other. We could put all that aside and so find out for ourselves the truth, the actuality of life, look at it without any bias; not as a communist, Marxist, socialist, or belonging to some sect or religion or nationality, but together look very closely at our lives. Nobody is going to change our lives; no environment, no authority, no book. We have to look together at ourselves as we are and explore with great depth the meaning of existence, the meaning of our lives, the significance of our activities. Let us together look at the whole existence of our life. Going to the office day after day for the next 40/50 years and then dying at the end of it - the ugliness and brutality of it all. We should be able to look at this whole existence of our life, of each one's life, to observe it, not direct it, not to ask ourselves what is the goal, what should I do, but first to get acquainted, to understand ourselves, to understand what actually we are, why we do certain things, why we belong to this or to that. It is important that we look at our life. If you observe closely, you will see that your life is fragmented, broken up. Either you are a businessman or a doctor or a surgeon or an engineer, and in your own personal life there is always this division between you and another, however intimate. There is always this division, this struggle, this pain. Of course, there is some kind of joy, pleasure, but that is also part of life. Our life, as it is now, is broken up, fragmented, and this fragmentation takes place because our thinking is also fragmentary. Our thinking is the outcome of knowledge, and knowledge is always limited. Knowledge always goes hand in hand with ignorance. There is no complete knowledge about anything. Our thinking, which is born out of our knowledge, is always limited under all circumstances, whether you are a scientist or a psychologist or an engineer, and so on. So thought, thinking, is limited, circumscribed, and what is limited must inevitably, in its action, create fragmentation. Thought itself is the cause of all division, of all fragmentation. Unless one understands the nature and the structure of thought, one cannot go very far, and to go very far you must begin very near, which is you, how you think, what you think, and discover for yourself that thought always is limited. Thought can invent god, the immeasurable, the nameless, the invisible, the supreme, but it is still the product of thought. So thought is one of the major factors of our conflict, of our misery, of our sorrow. Unless one understands this basically, very deeply, not intellectually, not verbally or argumentatively or logically, unless you understand the nature of thinking, you cannot begin to discover for yourself a new instrument, a totally different instrument. Because, the only instrument we have now is thought, and thought has created incredible problems, most complex problems, and thought tries to solve those problems and thereby creates more problems. You must have noticed this politically, religiously, and so on. We must find together a new instrument, and that is what we are going to do when we talk about death, religion, meditation. And to understand, to discover, and to come upon something that is not man-made, that something must be beyond time, beyond all measure. It is much more important to understand what happens before death rather than what happens after death. We are always enquiring what happens after death, but we never enquire what is happening before death, not at the last day or the last minute but the way we live for thirty, forty, fifty years or more. Time is death, time - which is the inward time, the psychological time, the time that has created the idea of thought, `I hope to become something, I hope to become rich, I hope to become a saint, or a particular person.' The inward time, the psychological time of hope, of achievement, of that which is to change to become something else -all that involves time both physically and psychologically. We are talking about the psychological time, a time that is inside the skin as it were - that time is death. To think in terms of time is to bring about division, fragmentation, give the future greater significance than the present. Time is a movement invented by thought. Psychological time is invented by thought, and thought itself is the product of time. Thought is the product of time because man has acquired knowledge through long evolution; evolution implies time, and when we think in terms of time, we divide life, we fragment life - I am a Hindu, you are a Buddhist, I am a Muslim, you are a Christian, and so on. This fragmentation is the result of thought which itself is limited. And psychological time is invented by thought. When you say, `I am, I will be, I am this but I will one day be different,' that gap between what you are and what you should be or what you want to be, is time. When you have such time, there must be fragmentation. Life which is being lived now, in that life we have separated death from living. We never enquire deeply what happens long before death, what happens to our life. Very few people ask that. They are all concerned with what happens after death - whether you will live, whether you will meet your brother, and so on, but not with the long period of thirty, forty, fifty years which is far more important than what happens after. So, we are going to examine, observe, what our life is. Because, if we don't understand that profoundly, when you meet death, then you are frightened, then you are totally blind to everything. We ought to investigate our life which we live daily, whether it has any significance at all, whether it has any value, depth, beauty. Perhaps you go to the office from nine to five for the rest of your life. Have you ever thought about what a tragedy it is? And what are you working for? You will say, `My responsibility, my duty to my family, I must earn money, therefore I go to the office from nine to five for the next 60 years; then I retire, and then die. That is one of the factors of our daily existence. There, in the office or in the factory, you are struggling, you are competing, you want to become the manager, the clerk wants to become the executive, the priest wants to become the bishop, and so on. You come home, weary, insulted, bored. What do you call home - just the roof, half a dozen rooms, or one room? What is a home? Have you ever thought about all this? What does that word `home' mean to you? Is it just to live there, eat, sex, children, quarrelling, arguing, discussing, bullying each other or withdrawing from it all, becoming a monk, a sannyasi? You can't withdraw from life; you may put on different robes, but life is where you are, what you are, and during these 40/50 years, there is constant struggle, constant conflict, pain, little joy, the pursuit of pleasure and facing the inevitable death. That is our life, put in a nutshell. You can't deny it; it is so. Now this is the life of every human being on earth, whether he lives in an affluent society or under a dictatorship or in a totalitarian state, whether he is Marxist, Leninist or democrat. This is his life - pain, struggle, conflict, working from morning till night. Do you know what happens to such a human being, his capacity to think? This is the state of every human being, that is his consciousness. You are actually the rest of mankind. This is not a logical conclusion, this is a fact. You must understand this fact; otherwise, as we talk about death furthermore, you won't understand the significance of it, which is your consciousness with its content. The content is the belief, the dogma, the name, the form, the pain, anxiety, loneliness, depression, desire; all that is you. All that is what you are actually. This consciousness is the consciousness of all human beings. If you feel the depth of it, the extraordinary beauty of it, the strength of it, that you are the rest of mankind, that it is a fact, and when you feel it in your blood, in your heart, in your mind, then you are no longer an individual. I know it is difficult for you to swallow this or even to think about it because you are conditioned to be an individual, but you are not. You may be tall, you may be short or clever, and so on, but inside you are like the rest of mankind. If you are the rest of mankind, you are mankind. Then what is your responsibility to man? What is your responsibility to what is happening in the world? Probably, you have never asked this question of yourself. You say my responsibility is to my family, to my country. But the idea of your country is just another invention of thought. When you ask the question what is my responsibility to the rest of mankind, you have to find out for yourself what is your responsibility, what is right action. You can't escape from it. You may limit yourself to certain immediate responsibilities, but you as a human being who is the rest of mankind, you are also responsible for mankind. So your consciousness is not yours. It is shared by all human beings living on this earth. They all go through every kind of misery, every kind of suffering - pain, anxiety, despair and the feeling of utter loneliness. If you are at all aware of what is happening in the world, then you will have to ask yourself what is your responsibility, what is your action. Now, you think you are an individual, you think you are separate from the rest of mankind, and then you ask, `What happens to me after I die, do I not incarnate?' Let us examine that very closely. What are you? When you say, I want to be born next life, I believe in reincarnation, and so on, what is it that is going to be reborn? What are you? Let us examine it together dispassionately. You are the name, the form, the body. You are what you think, you are the result of your education, if you have had one. And the education is so rotten, it only conditions you to become some engineer, clerk, or this or that. You are not educated to understand the beauty, the wholeness of life. You are given a lot of knowledge so that you can act either skilfully or not, in the world. That is not education. That is one very small part of education. Education is the cultivation of the whole human being, the unfoldment, the flowering of a human mind, not crippling by specialization. So what are you? Are you a series of words, a series of ideas, a repetitive memory, a continuity of conviction? That is all. It is so. This is a verbal structure. But you will say that is not all, there is something much deeper. When you say there is something much deeper, god or atman or whatever you like to call it - the soul as the Christians do, and you call it by another name -when you say I am not all that, I am much more, there is a fragment of light in me; when you say there is something more than mere physical attributes, more than mere conclusions, concepts, beliefs and words, there is something beyond; when you say you are more than that, it is also the invention of thought, obviously. You are put together by thought. You call yourself a Hindu, and another calls himself a Muslim, and so on. All that division is the result of thought. You are actually a series of memories, a series of reactions and responses based on your knowledge, your experience, your quality of mind. That is what you are, which is essentially death. You are living in the past and the past is death. All knowledge is in the past, and therefore, when you live with knowledge which is the past, and as the past is over, what are you? Look at yourself as you would look in a mirror. That is what you are. And you say, `If I die, I incarnate in another', which is to carry the same thing over to the next life. If you do believe in future life, that is, next life, then what you do now matters more because next life you will pay for it. This is your conviction. This is what you cling to, a lot of memories which are dead ideas, which are also finished. So the content of your life is that. That is why this country which believes in so many things, so many beliefs, so many superstitions, believes in reincarnation. That is why here there is a slow dying. Now, the question then is, what is death? Please ask this question: Are you just the vast reservoir of memory, words, pictures, symbols? Is your consciousness the rest of mankind, that you are not an individual? That what you think, other people think, your thinking, is not individual and that there is only thinking? When you realize you are not an individual though you may have a different form, different shape of head, different jobs, and so on, but that inwardly you are like the rest of mankind, what does death mean then? Look, sir. Suppose I am all that - name, thought, education, physical responses, psychological reactions, all the inherited racial memories and personal memories, which is all in the past, I am all that and all human beings are that, all human consciousness is that, then what does it mean to die? Ask this question, sirs. Now we are living, repetitively active, mechanically active, as most people are; but you are active, you have got life, you have got feelings, you have got responses, sensations, and when death comes, all that is wiped out. That is what we call death, which is to end all the things you have held, your joys, your house, your bank account, your wife, your children; all that you end; you and your attachment, that is death. But you want to carry it over to the next life which is just an idea, vision, fulfilment. Please listen: While living, can you end attachment? Because, when you die, all attachment ends. But can you invite the ending of attachment? Do you understand this? That is ending. Ending is death. So, can you, while living, vigorous, active, end your attachment, end a particular habit voluntarily, easily, quietly? Because then, where there is an ending, there is a totally different beginning. When you end something like attachment, there is a different activity going on: to incarnate in the present now. That is creativity. It is up to you if you want to do all this. We ought to talk over together what is religion, what is a religious life, what is a religious mind. We are going to enquire together what is a religious life, what is meditation, and if there is anything that has not been touched by thought. Do you call the present religions all throughout the world as religious? You are a Hindu, you believe, your religion says this and that, you worship an idol; the Muslim does not, but he has his own form of worship. The Christian has his symbol - the rituals, the dogmas, the beliefs, the superstitions, all that. The hierarchical structure of a religious society, you call all that religion. Your belief is god. Unless you believe in god or some supreme principle, it is considered that you are not religious. We say to ourselves, `There must be something more, something which is protecting, which is giving, which is creating.' Thought creates the idea, based on books, tradition, being programmed to believe in god. That surely is not religion. Do you agree with that? Of course not. But that is not religion: your belief, your worship, going to the temple, to the mosque, to the church, repeating some phrases utterly divorced from daily life. To understand the daily life, to bring about a radical change in that life, to have a brain that is not superstitious - that is actually facing facts, facing what one is and going beyond `what is'. That is the beginning of what is a religious mind. To understand the whole meaning of daily living, which is the understanding of the relationship with each other, to love, to have that quality of love, to have that perfume. that beauty, that flame, that is religion. That is the religious mind, To live a life that has no conflict, that has the sense of compassion with love, with intelligence, that is a religious life. Compassion is intelligence. That is the religious life. But that is not enough. We have to understand much deeper things, which is what is meditation. What is meditation? Is it sitting in a certain posture, closing your eyes, repeating some phrases, some mantra? The word mantra means in Sanskrit, to ponder over, consider, not becoming. When you are not becoming, what are you? Also that word mantra means to resolve and put away self-centred activity. That is the real meaning of that word mantra. Now, look at what you have done with it. You repeat some words and call that mantra. As we said, a religious life is not becoming inwardly anything; we must go much deeper than that. Meditation is the ending of measurement. I will go into it. So what is meditation, not how to meditate. When you put the `how', when you use that word `how', that means, `give me a system, please tell me what to do, show me the path.' If you can remove that word `how' altogether from your mind, and then look at it, what is meditation? Systems, methods, practices, certain forms of discipline, breathing correctly, deeply, and so on, all that is not meditation. It is an exchange, a market place where the guru sells you something and you practise. We are going to see what meditation is. Meditation is not the practice of any system. Because, when you practise a system, your brain becomes atrophied, becomes dull. It is not alive, active. If you are really, deeply, concerned with meditation, then there is no system, no method. Practising every day, sitting half an hour quietly, is not meditation. Can you deny all that intelligently because you see the absurdity of practising a method, as it brings up a routine? Whereas in meditation, there must be freedom - freedom from fear, freedom from envy, greed, sorrow and all the psychological wounds and hurts one has received from childhood. One should be free from all that. So, we have to enquire first what it means to be aware. It means three things - what it means to be aware, what it means to concentrate, and what it means to attend. Because, all this is implied in meditation - to be aware, to be conscious of your environment, to be aware how you talk, how you walk, how you eat, what you eat; to be aware how you speak to another, how you treat another, as you are sitting there, to be aware of your neighbour, the colour of the coat, the way he looks. Without criticism just be aware. That gives you great sensitivity, empathy, so that your body is subtle, sensitive, aware of everything that is going on around you. To be aware without any choice, see where you are, looking at the speaker, looking all around you without a single choice, just look - to be aware. Then, let us look at concentration. When you concentrate, what happens? To control all thought except one thought, which is to concentrate on something, concentrate on a book, concentrate on what you are doing, concentrate which means, shut off all other thought except one thought, to centralize all thinking to a particular point - that is what generally concentration means. That is, while you are trying to concentrate, all other thoughts are wandering, pushing, coming in and out. So you build a resistance to every other thought except one thought, one idea. Look at it. That is generally what is called concentration. Then, there is attention. Have you ever attended to anything, given your whole energy, listened totally to another, completely attended? Not like a soldier who is drilled to attend, but if you understand the nature of awareness, concentration, then what is attention? If you are attending now completely to what is being said, in that attention there is no centre as the `me'. Are you so attending to what is being said? That is, giving all your energy, listening vibrantly, alive to attend? If you are, then you will find there is no centre as the `me' attending. Then, when you are attending so deeply, the brain becomes quiet, naturally. There is no chattering, there is no control. Who is the controller to control thought? The controller is another part of thought, isn't it? One part of thought says, `I am the witness, I am going to control my thought.' The controller is the controlled. In meditation there is no controller, there is no activity of will, which is desire. Then, the brain, the whole movement of the brain - apart from its own anxiety which has its own rhythm - becomes utterly quiet, silent. It is not the silence cultivated by thought. It is the silence of intelligence, the silence of supreme intelligence. In that silence comes that which is not touched by thought, by endeavour, by effort. It is the way of intelligence which is the way of compassion. Then that which is sacred is everlasting. That is meditation. Such a life is religious life. In that there is great beauty. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN MADRAS 1ST PUBLIC TALK 25TH DECEMBER, 1982 'THE NATURE AND CONTENT OF THOUGHT' We are going to talk over together a great many things relating to our daily life. This is not a lecture as it is commonly understood, but this is a conversation between two friends who are concerned not only with what is happening in the world externally, environmentally, but also with what is happening to the human being. What is happening to our brain, to our conduct; why have we human beings who have lived on this earth, perhaps million years or more, so degenerated without any stamina, without any integrity? We are not merely listening to a series of ideas or some conclusions or some new principles and values, but together you and the speaker are going to examine closely, hesitantly, carefully, what is happening in the external world, and what is happening to us in our own daily life, the inner life. So, we are having a conversation together about all this. If you hold on to your opinion however slight or obstinate, then it will not be possible to have a conversation or communicate with each other. That must be clearly understood from the very beginning of these talks, that you and the speaker are going to examine not from any religious point of view or as a communist, socialist, Marxist, conservative, or as belonging to the left or right, or belonging to any nation, but we are going to examine in freedom. To examine, one must have a free mind, not an opinionated mind, not a traditional mind, not belonging to any sect, to any order, to any religious group or to any institution. There are the threats of war, of nuclear or conventional war; there is decline of all religions; there is no moral activity; but most of us are living superficially, intellectually, never examining, never questioning, never doubting, all that is going on in the world. And to examine, probe, observe, requires a very clear mind and heart, a brain that is not held by any tradition. The brain is already conditioned. The human brain has evolved through millennia. If we are not aware of the activities of our own sensory responses, to examine,and to observe what is going on in the world becomes almost impossible. Let us talk together like two human beings, as friends, not imposing any ideas on each other, any dogmatic argumentative conclusions; as two friends who have known each other for some time, sitting under a lovely tree in a cool climate and looking at the world. What is the world? What is it that is happening out there? Who has created it? Why has man become what he is, thoughtless, careless, indifferent, without any love, brutal, violent? Why have we become like this? You might blame our inheritance, you might blame our environment, our culture or society. But who has created this society? Each one of us, the past generation and the present generation, is contributing to it. We have created this world, and there is no escape from that fact. Each one of us has contributed to that chaos, to the mess, the disorder, the anarchy that is going on. Thought has divided the world into nationalities, and nationalities are one of the causes of war. Nationality, devised by thought in its search for security, has divided the world into the British, the French, the Muslim, Pakistani, Russian, and so on, and thought has created war through this division and the preparations of war for killing other human beings; thought has been responsible for this. In its search to be safe, secure, to find somewhere or other a sense of safety, it begins with the family, community, then a larger group and a wider group, hoping thereby to find some kind of safety, protection, security. It begins with a small group and ends up in nationalities. All the governments are supporting this crazy system of dividing people into nationalities, into groups - as the Hindus and the Muslims, the Chinese and the Russians, the Americans and the British and the French, and so on. Thought has been responsible for the division of religions - the Christian, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Muslim, and so on. Thought has created the marvellous cathedrals, the great mosques and the lovely temples. Thought has put in these temples, mosques and churches the things that are invented by thought: the rituals, the dogmas, all the ceremonies, etc. Thought has also been responsible for the extraordinary development of techniques. Very few of us know actually what is going on in the technological world; the terrible things they are doing biologically, inventing great instruments of destruction of man - this is the vast unlimited movement of technology; and also thought has organized mass killings in the name of peace, in the name of the country, in the name of god. So, there is a great conflict going on, for which thought is responsible. Thought has brought about great hygienic benefits, communications, rapid transport, and all that. The brain is infinitely capable, and that capacity, that energy of thought has created this world of technology with all the problems it involves -social and environmental; and thought also has created havoc in our daily life, in our relationship with each other, between man and woman. We are saying that thought is responsible for all the miseries it has brought about in the world. Thought has also done great things to humanity. Please do not deny or accept what the speaker is saying. He is putting this forward for you to examine, to question, to doubt, not to accept nor to agree. So, we must together examine very carefully what is the source of thought, why thought has created such havoc in the world, whether thought can ever have as its companion love, or is love entirely different from the activities of thought. Is it possible to examine without any sense of authority, without any sense of belonging to any group, and go beyond the present confusion and chaos? Please listen; do not agree. but listen to find out. We have to be both the teacher and the disciple. The meaning of that word `disciple' is he who learns. Also we must be the teacher. The very act of learning gives us the responsibility to teach. So, we are going together to learn, not hold on to our own traditions, to our own opinions and conclusions; then that prevents us from learning, not from the speaker, but learning through observation, learning through the investigation of the nature of thought and the nature of the brain - not the physiological brain but the activities of a brain that is conditioned. So, first of all, we are going to examine together why the brain, which has evolved through thousands of years, which has gone through every kind of incident, accident, has become so limited. It is not limited in the technological world at all. It is moving with extraordinary rapidity. So, in one direction, in the direction of technology, the brain has infinite scope. The brain has put man on the moon, invented terrible things to kill human beings. Also technology has given man great comfort, hygiene, communication, and so on. But the brain is limited because it cannot go in any other direction but that direction. it is incapable at present to go inward, and if it can go in one direction, the outward direction, with such extraordinary vigour, extraordinary energy, then it can also go in the other direction, in the world of the psyche, the psychological world. We are going to enquire together into the whole psychological world: why after all these thousands of years we live in conflict with each other; why man has become so miserable, unhappy, anxious, uncertain, hypocritical, dishonest, corrupt, suffering a great deal. That is our inner world, the psychological realm into which very few have investigated deeply, profoundly. The psychologists, the theoreticians, the analysts, psychotherapists, have not solved all our human problems. They have written vast volumes about it, but we are still what we are. So, how do we investigate into something that is yourself, that is your consciousness? You are both the unconscious and the conscious, the whole realm of the inward activity which dictates the outer activity. If that inner activity is not in order, then you create a society as we have done, which is totally in disorder. You cannot create outward order unless there is inward order. Has one realized this fact, that the outward chaos, war, confusion, the brutality, the violence, the hatred, is the result of our own life, our own disorder, is the resulting conflict in our own consciousness? Can all this misery, confusion, conflict, anxiety, ever end? This question, whether it is possible to change radically the content of our consciousness, is far more serious than the nuclear war, or the neutron war, or whatever war that may be. The crisis is there, not in the world, not the nuclear war, not the terrible division, the brutality that is going on. The crisis is in our consciousness, the crisis is what we are, what we have become. Unless we meet that crisis, that challenge, we are going to perpetuate wars, destruction, and there will be outward chaos. When there is great disturbance outwardly, uncertainty, insecurity, man turns back to tradition like the Muslim world is doing. They go back to the Koran, and in the Christian, Hindu world there are so many books that they cannot go back to the books, but they go back to tradition. We have now got tribal gods at every corner because the world has become uncertain, dangerous, and we are all doing the same. We want to belong to some group, some sect, some local god. Now, how does one enquire into the psychological world, that is, into the world of consciousness? The content of that consciousness is what you are. That is not a dogmatic statement. That is not a conclusion but is a fact. What you are, is the content of your consciousness. Your beliefs, your opinions, your experiences, your illusions, superstitions, your gods, your fear, your pleasure and the loneliness, the sorrow, and the great grief and the fear of death. That is what you are. That is, the content of your consciousness is what you are. You can divide that content of your consciousness into various parts, invent a super consciousness, but it is still the content of your consciousness. You can meditate, sit cross-legged, do all those things, but it is part of your consciousness. And the content of your consciousness is put together by thought. Please examine this situation. We are saying, the content of your consciousness is put together by thought, by thinking, the thinking that you are a Hindu or a Christian, Marxist, Maoist or whatever you want to think. Thought, which is limited, has brought about limitations in consciousness. It can expand consciousness by thinking that it can expand and experiment in expansion. But it is still the activity of thought. The question is, whether your consciousness which is the activity of the brain - brain with all its sensory responses, brain which is the centre of thought - whether that thought has not brought about fear, whether thought which is also movement in time is not responsible for the whole content of our consciousness. We are saying thought is limited because it is the outcome of knowledge. It is the result, the end product of experience, knowledge stored in the brain as memory; the response of any challenge is thinking. And knowledge is always limited. There is no complete knowledge about anything. The scientific knowledge is limited. Every kind of knowledge in any field is limited -biological, sociological, technological, and in the world of religions with all their gods, and all gods are invented by thought. Examine it, please. Thought has invented all the gods on earth, and then thought worships that which it has invented, and this you call religion. The root meaning of that word is quite difficult, and it has not been established what the root of that word is. So, thought is limited and whatever its activity, it is always limited, and being limited, it must inevitably create problems - not only problems in the technological world but also problems in human relationship which is far more important to understand than the technological world because, we human beings are perpetually in conflict with each other, agreeing, disagreeing, believing, and not believing. It is a perpetual war between human beings. It is created by thought. And having created the problems, then thought tries to solve them and so increase the problems, which is what is actually happening. If one sees that, not intellectually, not as an idea or a conclusion but as an actuality, as a fact, then one can see that the only instrument that we have is thought. Please understand the nature and the content of thought. Thought is all the sensory responses, the imaginations, all the sexual symbols, the sexual pictures, and so on, the feeling of depression, elation, anxiety; all this is the result of limited thought, because thought is the outcome of limited knowledge. There is no complete knowledge about anything. We ask a totally different question, which is, `Is there a different instrument?' If thought is not the instrument to solve human problems, then what is the instrument? Thought is a worn out instrument, blunt instrument. It may be clever, it may solve certain problems; but the problems it has created in human beings and between human beings, the instrument of thought that we have used to solve our problems in our daily life, in relationship, that instrument is blunt, limited, worn out. Unless we find a new instrument, there can be no fundamental, radical, change of human psyche. So, we are going together to enquire into the nature of that instrument, the quality of it, the structure of it, the beauty of it. But before we can enquire, one must be absolutely clear that the instrument which we have now as thought, has reached its tether. It cannot solve the problem of human relationship, and in that human relationship there is conflict, and out of that conflict we have created this society through our greed, through our brutality, through our violence. We have to be absolutely, irrevocably, clear that thought is not the instrument to solve our human problems. We have tried every method of solving our human problems, surrendering ourselves to some ideals, to some guru, to some concept, to some conclusion -we have done all these things. We have followed all kinds of leaders - political, religious, various quacks, many gurus. And we are still what we are, slightly modified, little more observant, little more kindly, but basically, millennia after millennia, we are what we have been from the beginning of time. And the instrument that we have had, which is thought, can no longer solve our problems. This is very clear, and that requires great observation, questioning, doubting, asking, never accepting authority - the authority of the books, the hierarchical structure of our society, the authority of institutions, the authority of those who say , `I know.' A mind which is enquiring into the nature of a new quality and structure of a new instrument must be entirely free from authority, not the authority of the policeman, not the authority of the governments. So, a mind that is enquiring into something requires great sensitivity, freedom; that demands a brain that is stable, not wobbly, sloppy. I do not know if you have noticed how our minds are sloppy. We go from one guru to another, specially in this country. We tolerate anything - the dirt, the squalor, the corruption, the tradition that is dead, and all the temple buildings which are absolutely meaningless, spreading all over the world. You watch all this and you observe all this, and a mind, a brain, that is enquiring must be extraordinarily free, have great sensitivity. I don't know if you have not noticed how limited our senses are; senses, which is, the observing optically, visually, hearing - to hear another so completely that you understand immediately what is being said, to have sympathy, empathy, the feeling of cooperation, feeling of affection, feeling of love. We have not got it here. But you love god, you love going to a temple, putting on ashes, belonging to some tribal god, because you are frightened, and where there is fear, there is no freedom of enquiry. So, we are talking about our daily life, our conflicts, our loneliness, our despair, and none of those can be solved by thought. Then what is the instrument that will solve our problems? Don't wait for the speaker to tell you. Then the speaker becomes your guru, your leader, and the speaker does not want to be your guru, your authority; but go together, as two human beings concerned with humanity, because after all you are the rest of humanity. `The rest of humanity has also the same consciousness as yours. Every human being in the world suffers, is anxious, uncertain, confused, in tears, lonely. Your consciousness is not yours, it is as the rest of mankind. So you are mankind. It is not a mere intellectual, logical, analytical conclusion. It is a fact to be felt, realized, lived, that you are not a separate human being, that you are not an individual. That is a hard pill to swallow because we all think we are separate individuals with our own little brains. That is our conditioning, to think that each one of us is separate, but we are not. We are the result of thousands of years of humanity - their suffering, their loneliness, their despair, their excitement. their joy, their sex. What you think, others think, the great scientist thinks; so does the uneducated villager, poor and hungry, labouring from morning till night. So thinking is not your individual thinking. There is only thinking. You may think in one way, another may think another way. It is still thinking. So the thinking,consciousness is shared by all human beings. And when one really realizes the fundamental truth of it, then your whole activity changes. Then you are concerned with the whole humanity, which means your son, your neighbour, your wife, your husband, the man who is miles away. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN MADRAS 2ND PUBLIC TALK 26TH DECEMBER, 1982 'LIFE IS A MOVEMENT IN RELATIONSHIP' We are together having a conversation. We are walking down a lane, wooded, with plenty of shadows and birds singing; we are sitting down together and talking about the whole problem of existence which is very complex. We are not convincing each other about any subject, we are not trying to persuade each other, we are not trying to overcome the other through arguments or sticking dogmatically to one's own opinions, prejudices, but rather, together we are going to look at the world as it is and the world that is within us. Many volumes have been written about the world outside of us -the environment, the society, politics, economics, and so on, but very few have gone to the very length of discovering what we actually are. Why human beings are behaving as they are doing -killing each other, constantly in trouble, following some authority or the other, some book, some person, some ideal, and having no right relationship with their friends, with their wives, with their husbands and with their children; why human beings have become, after so many millennia, so vulgar, so brutal, so utterly lacking in care, consideration, attention to others, and denying the whole process of what is considered love. Outwardly, man has lived with wars for thousands and thousands of years. We are now trying to stop nuclear war but we will never stop wars. There has been no demonstration throughout the world to stop wars, but there are demonstrations against particular wars, and these wars have been going on - people being exploited, oppressed and the oppressor becoming the oppressed. This is the cycle of human existence with sorrow, loneliness, a great sense of depression, the mounting anxiety, the utter lack of security. There is no relationship with society or with one's own intimate persons, a relationship in which there is no row, no conflict, quarrels, oppression, and so on. This is the world we live in, which I am sure you all know. As we said yesterday, look at the activities of thought, because, we live by thought. All our actions are based on thought, all our contemplated efforts are based on thought - our meditations, our 76 worships, our prayer. Thought has brought about the division of nationalities which create wars, the division in religions as the Jew, as the Arab, the Muslim, the Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and so on. Thought has divided the world not only geographically but also psychologically, inwardly. Man is fragmented, broken up not only at the psychological, mechanical, level of his existence but also in his occupation. If you are a professor, you have your own small circle and live in that. If you are a businessman, you are in money making, or if you are a politician, you live within that area. And if you are a religious person, in the accepted sense of the word -doing various forms of puja, rituals, meditations, worshipping some idol, and so on - then also you live a fragmented life. Each fragment has its own energy, has its own capacity, has its own discipline, and each path plays an extraordinary role in contradicting the other path. You must know all this. This division - both outwardly, geographically, religiously, nationally, and the division that is between yourself and another, is such a waste of energy. It is a conflict: wasting our energy, quarrelling, dividing, each one pursuing his own thing, each one aspiring, demanding his own personal security, and so on. All action takes energy, all thinking takes energy. This energy which is so constantly being broken up is a wastage of energy. When one energy contradicts another, one action contradicts another action - saying one thing and doing another, which is obviously a hypocritical acceptance of life - there is wastage of energy. All such activities must invariably condition the mind, the brain. We are conditioned as a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, with all the superstitions, beliefs. We are conditioned, and there is no question about it. There is no argument that we are not conditioned; we are, religiously, politically, geographically. Until there is freedom from conditioning, freedom from the activities of thought which is creating great problems, those problems cannot possibly be solved. A new instrument is necessary to solve our human problems, and we are going to talk as we go along about it, but it is not for the speaker to tell you what the new quality of that instrument is; each one has to find for himself. That is why both of us must think together, if we can. That demands that both of us feel, enquire, search out, question, doubt, all these things that man has put together, all the things that we have created as barriers between each other. We as human beings living on this beautiful earth which is slowly being destroyed, living on this earth which is our earth - not the Indian earth or the British earth or the American earth - have to live intelligently, happily; but apparently, that is not possible because we are conditioned. This conditioning is like a computer: we are programmed. We are programmed to be Hindus, to be Muslims, to be Christians, Catholics, Protestants. For 2000 years the Christian world has been programmed and the brain has been conditioned through that programme, like the computer. So our brains are deeply conditioned and we are asking if it is at all possible to be free of that conditioning. Unless we are totally, completely, free of that limitation, mere enquiry or asking what is the new instrument which is not thought, has no meaning. First, one must begin very near to go very far. We want to go so far without taking the first step, and perhaps the first step may be that last step. Are we understanding each other, are we communicating with each other, or am I talking to myself? If I am talking to myself, I can do this in my own room. But if we are talking, having a conversation together, that conversation has significance when both of us meet at the same level, with the same intensity, at the same time. That is love. That is the real, deep friendship. To me this is not a lecture in the ordinary sense of the word. We are together trying to enquire and resolve human problems. That requires a great deal of enquiry because human problems are very, very complex. One must have the quality of patience, which is not of time. We are all impatient to get on - `tell me quickly something or other' - but if you have patience, that is, if you are not trying to achieve something, to arrive at some end, some goal, then enquire step by step into it. As we said, we are programmed. Our human brain is a mechanical process. Our thought is a materialistic process, and that thought has been conditioned to think as a Buddhist, as a Hindu, as a Christian, and so on. So our brain is conditioned. Is it possible to be free from that conditioning? There are those who say it is not possible, because they ask, how can a brain which has been conditioned for so many centuries upon centuries, how can that conditioning be wiped away completely so that the human brain is extraordinarily pristine, original, capable of infinite capacity? Many people assert this, and are merely satisfied in modifying the conditioning. But we are saying that this conditioning can be examined, can be observed, and there can be total freedom from that conditioning. To discover for ourselves whether it is possible or not, we have to enquire into our relationship. Relationship is the mirror in which we see ourselves as we are. All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth which is not related to something or other. Even the hermit, a man who goes off to a lonely spot, is related to the past, is related to those who are around him. There is no escape from relationship. In that relationship which is the mirror in which we can see ourselves, we can discover what we are, our reactions, our prejudices, our fears, depression, anxieties, loneliness, sorrow, pain, grief. We can also discover whether we love or there is no such thing as love. So, we will examine this question of relationship because that is the basis of love. That is the only thing we have now with each other. If you cannot find the right relationship, if you live your own particular narrow life apart from wife, husband, and so on, that isolated existence brings about its own destruction. Relationship is the most extraordinarily important thing in life, If we don't understand that relationship, we cannot possibly create a new society. We are going to enquire very closely into what is relationship - why human beings throughout their long existence of life have never had a relationship in which there is neither oppression, possessiveness, attachment, contradiction, and so on. Why is there always this division - man, woman, we and they? We are going to examine together. This examination can be intellectual or merely verbal, but such intellectual comprehension has no value at all. It is just an idea, it is just a concept, but if you can look at your relationship as a whole, then perhaps you can see the depth and the beauty and the quality of relationship. Right, sir? Can we go on? We are asking, what actually is the present relationship with each other, not theoretically, not romantically, not idealistically, which are all unreal, but the actual, daily relationship of man, woman, with each other? Are we related at all? There is the biological relationship; our relationship is sexual, pleasurable. Our relationship is possessiveness, attachment, various forms of intrusion upon each other. What is attachment? Why do we have such tremendous need for attachment? What are the implications of attachment? Why is one attached? When you are attached to anything, there is always fear in it, fear of losing it. There is always a sense of insecurity. Please observe it for yourself. There is always a sense of separation. I am attached to my wife. I am attached to her because she gives me pleasure sexually, gives me pleasure as a companion; you know all this, without my telling you. So, I am attached to her, which means I am jealous, frightened. Where there is jealousy, there is hatred. And is attachment love? That is one point to note in our relationship. Then, in our relationship each one has, through the years, put together an image about the other. Those images she and he have created about each other is the actual relationship. They may sleep together, but the fact is that he and she have an image about each other, and in that relationship of images, how can there be any actual, factual, relationship with another? All of us from childhood have built images about ourselves and about others. We are asking a very, very serious question - can one live without a single image in our relationship? Surely, you all have an image about the speaker, haven't you? Obviously you have. Why? You don't know the speaker, actually you don't know. He sits on a platform, talks, but you have no relationship with him because you have an image about him. You have created an image about him, and you have your own personal images about yourself. You have got so many images about politicians, about businessmen, about the guru, about this and that. Can one live profoundly without a single image? Image may be conclusion about one's wife, image may be a picture, sexual picture, image may be some form of better relationship, and so on. Why do human beings have images at all? Please ask this question of yourself. When you have an image about another, that image gives you a sense of security. Love is not thought. Love is not desire, love is not pleasure, love is not the movement of images, and as long as you have images about another, there is no love. And we ask, is it possible to live a life without a single image? Then you have a relationship with each other. As it is, it is like two parallel lines never meeting, except sexually. A man goes off to the office, ambitious, greedy, envious, trying to achieve a position in the business world, in the religious world, in the professional world, and the modern lady also goes off to the office, and they meet in their house to breed children. And then the whole problem of responsibility, problem of education, of total indifference, comes. It does not matter then what your children are, what happens to them. You want them to be like you - safely married, with a house, a job, etc. Right? This is our life, daily life, and it is really a sorrowful life. So, if one asks why human beings live by images - all your gods are images, the Christian god, the Muslim god and your god - you will see that they are created by thought, and thought is uncertain, fearful. There is no security in the things that thought has put together. Is it possible then to be free from our conditioning in our relationship? That is, to observe in the mirror of relationship attentively, closely, persistently, what our reactions are, whether they are mechanical, habitual, traditional. In that mirror you discover actually what you are. So, relationship is extraordinarily important. We have to enquire into what it is to observe. How do you observe yourself what you are, in the mirror of relationship? What does it mean to observe? This is really another important thing one has to find out. What does it mean to look? When you look at a tree, which is the most beautiful thing on the earth, one of the most lovely things on the earth, how do you look at it? Do you ever look at it, do you ever look at the new moon - the shape of the new moon, so delicate, so fresh, so young; have you ever looked at it? Can you look at it without using the word `moon'? Are you really interested in all this? I will go on like a river that goes on. You are sitting on the banks of the river looking at the river, but you don't become the river ever because you never take part of the river, you never join the beauty of the movement that has no beginning and no end. So please consider what it is to observe. When you observe a tree, or a moon, something outside you, you always use the word - the tree, the moon; can you look at that moon, the tree, without naming it, without using the word to identify? Can you look without the word, without the content of the word, without identifying the word with the tree or the thing? Now, can you look at your wife, at your husband, at your children, without the word `my wife', without an image? Have you ever tried it? When you observe without a word, without a name, without the form you have created about her or him, in that observation there is no centre from which you observe. Then find out what happens. The word is thought. Thought is born out of memory. So you have the memory, the word, the thought, the image interfering between you and the other. Right? But here is no thought, thought in the sense, the word, the content of the word, the significance of the word to look, to observe. Then, in that observation, there is no centre as `me' looking at `you'. Then only there is a right relationship with another. In that, there is a quality of learning, a quality of certain beauty, certain sensitivity. May we go on? Why do human beings throughout the world live in perpetual conflict? Please ask that question of yourself. You are in conflict. Your meditation is conflict, your worship is conflict. You have got various gods who are in conflict with each other and with you. Why do human beings throughout the world live in constant struggle, pain, conflict? What is conflict? What is the cause of conflict? Where there is a cause, that cause has an end. If I have a cause of pain, the doctor examines the cause and the symptom which is the pain. Then the cause may be removed. So where there is a cause or a causation, there must be an ending of that causation. So find out for yourself what is the cause of conflict by which man has lived from time immemorial. Don't wait for the speaker to tell you. Go into yourself as we are doing now. Find out what is the cause of this conflict, outside and inside. Is there one cause or many causes? If there are many causes, we can examine the many and slowly resolve each cause. One of the causes may be the constant attempt to become something - the becoming - I am this, I must be that; I am greedy and I hope I will not be greedy. That is to become something different from what I am: I am not beautiful but I will become beautiful; I am violent but I will become non-violent. So the becoming is a process of evolution. All becoming - whether the clerk becoming the manager, or the manager becoming the chairman - is a process of time which is evolution, from the low to the high. You plant a sapling which becomes a great tree, which is the evolution of the plant, of that tree. Is evolution one of the causes of conflict? That is, I am violent. All human beings apparently, most unfortunately, are violent. I am violent and I will become non-violent. The becoming from `what is' is a process of evolution which requires time, space. And we are asking, is evolution, this movement from `what is' to `what should be`, which is the movement of evolution, one of the causes of conflict? Is time one of the causes of conflict, that is, duality - light and dark, man, woman, physical world? There is duality between good cloth and bad cloth, between nice dress which is tasteful, good material and bad material, between a good car and a bad car. Obviously, physically there is a difference; there is duality. And we are asking, inwardly, psychologically, is there a duality at all? We are asking, does conflict exist as long as there is duality? Why have we psychologically, inwardly, duality? I am violent and I have thought I must not be violent, and so I invent an idea called non-violence which, in this country, is fashionable. And this fashion of non-violence is spreading all over the world, which has no meaning. Because violence is the fact, is real, non-violence is fiction. So there is only `what is', not `what should be', so that if one realizes that `what is' is a reality and not `what should be', then you can dispense with `what should be'. Then there is no duality. Do you understand this? The moment there is the idea `I must not' or `I should, or, I will, away from `what is', then there must be conflict. Does one perceive this intellectually or actually - that there is no opposite psychologically, inwardly, but only `what is'? You deal with `what is', not `what should be'. I am violent, and this idea of non-violence is fictitious, is hypocritical. It has no value because, in becoming non-violent, I am sowing the seeds of violence all the time. So there is only violence. What is the nature and the structure of violence, not only to get angry, to hit somebody, to kill somebody, not only the killing of human beings but killing animals, killing nature? Violence is also imitation, conformity, trying to be something which you are not. Can one look at that violence with all the content of that word, not just physical anger or physical expression of that anger but to look at the whole content of that word and hold it, look at it, and not move away from it, neither suppress it nor escape from it nor transcend it but just look at it as you would look at a precious jewel? When you so look at it, are you looking at it as something separate from you or what you observe is what you are? This is important to understand. We are violent. That violence, we have said, is different from `me'. Therefore, I try to change it to become something else. That violence is me. I am not different from violence, greed or hate or jealousy. Suffering is me, but we have separated anger, jealousy, loneliness, sorrow, as something separate from me so that I can control it, shape it, run away from it; but if that is me, I can do nothing about it but just observe it. So the observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought, the experiencer is the experienced. The two are not separate. So where there is division, there must be conflict. If I am separate psychologically from my wife, there is bound to be conflict. So time, evolution, the sense of the opposite, are the factors of violence. These are the other factors. All these factors are `me'. And `me' in essence is the cause of conflict. If I ask how am I to be free of `me', it is a wrong question, but observe the whole movement of conflict, not try to understand, but just observe, like you observe the marvellous movement of the skies, the ocean. Then it tells you all its content without your analysing. So a brain that is in conflict mechanically, psychologically, must inevitably bring about disorder in itself and so outwardly. Is it possible for human beings to be totally, completely, free of it? When there is that freedom, there is order, there is love, compassion, and that compassion is intelligence. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN MADRAS 3RD PUBLIC TALK 1ST JANUARY, 1983 'ON TIME' We have been talking over together, in a conversation between two people, the very complex process of our living from the time we are born till we die. We talked about whether it is possible at all to live a life without a single shadow of conflict - conflict in our relationship with each other, however intimate or far away. Conflict brings about disorder, and as long as each one of us lives in disorder, we cannot possibly bring about a psychological revolution in the structure of society. This evening we ought to talk over the nature of time, desire, fear, pleasure, and whether sorrow, which happens to be the lot of man throughout the world, has an end to it. Together you and the speaker are going to investigate the nature of time, explore desire which is very complex, and talk over together as to whether there is an end to sorrow. Because, where there is sorrow, there cannot be love, there can be no compassion, there can be no intelligence. So, it is important that you and the speaker meet at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity. Otherwise, there will be no possibility of communication. One hopes we will meet on the same level because, the speaker has no authority, he is not telling you what to do, or what you should do with your life; but when we are together, discussing, having a dialogue over a problem, that problem is the concern of both the speaker and you. It is your concern as well as that of the speaker. Merely to meet at a verbal level, as most of us do, has very little significance because we are concerned with not physical revolution, but psychological revolution - inward, radical, fundamental change. We have lived for millennia after millennia, for thousands of years, with sorrow, pain, anxiety, loneliness, despair, fear and the pursuit of wandering desire, and man has always asked if there is a stop to time. What is time? Time fundamentally means division, evolution, achievement, moving from here to there, the constant division as of yesterday, today and tomorrow - sun rising, sun setting, the full moon of a lovely evening and the time to meet your friend. Time is hope. Time is a very complex affair, and that requires patience. Patience is timeless; it is only impatience that has time. To enquire into the nature of time, one must have a great deal of patience, not impatience, not say `get on, I understand what you are talking about.' We have divided our life in a time movement. Movement is time. To go from here to there requires time. To learn a language requires time. To accumulate knowledge, to experience, looking forward to something as fear or as pleasure, the memories of yesterday, a thousand yesterdays, meeting the present, modifying and moving towards the future, all this is time. For a clerk to become the manager, to acquire any skill, requires time. The desire to experience something other than the usual experience and pursuit of that, is also time. Is there psychological time at all? Being violent, to become non-violent - that requires time. The pursuit of an ideal requires time. One has the fallacy that one will evolve into something totally different from `what is'. All this implies time. So we must together understand, not verbally, the feeling of time, the sense of time. Time is memory - the past as the observer, observer observing what is happening, translating what is happening to his own conditioning, to his own experience, and so on. Time essentially means division. So outwardly to change, we imagine time is necessary; that eventually man who is divided, who has divided himself into nationalities, will become international and gradually drop all nationalistic tendencies and have a global relationship. We think all that requires time. Time is fundamentally a process of division. Outwardly, physically, time is necessary - like the seed growing into a great tree, that requires time, years. There is a tree in California which is over 5,000 years old. To come to that age, there have been many many rains and storms and fires and lightning - which is all growth in time. We see that outwardly, physically, we need time; to acquire knowledge, the accumulating process of learning mathematics, physics or how to fly one of these jets, requires time. One cannot possibly escape from that time or try to find a stop to that kind of time. That will be utterly meaningless and foolish. Now, we are together going to enquire if there is psychological time at all. We think time is necessary to change from one psychological or one sensory response to another. We think time is necessary to be free of violence, to be free of envy. I am envious but I need time to be free of that particular pain or pleasure. We are questioning whether there is time at all psychologically. Do you understand my question? To build a house you need time. To be educated - if you must be educated - needs time. But we are enquiring into something much more important, much more essential, because we are conditioned to the idea or the concept or to the illusion that time is necessary to change `what is' to `what should be'. We, the speaker and you, are questioning that - whether time is at all necessary for a radical change. Have I stated the question clearly so that we all meet it? We said time is division, division as I am, I should be. `I should be' requires time. Right? We are questioning that. We said there is no such thing as becoming something or experiencing something. Does enlightenment, of which many people talk, demand time? We are questioning the most fundamental thing. All our philosophy, our life, all the sacred books, have said that time is necessary; you must go through various disciplines, various practices, in order to come near whatever you call god, an experience which is beyond all measure, a state of mind that has not been touched by time. We must go into the question very closely, whether there is psychological time at all. The moment you admit that there is psychological time, time being division, there must be conflict. I am violent, and to become non-violent I need time. There is a division immediately taking place. We are violent and we create the opposite. Where there is the opposite, there must be division and therefore, there must be conflict, and time is the cause of conflict. Look at it very simply. I am greedy, and to be non-greedy takes time. Where time comes into being, there must be conflict, and the becoming something is endless. We are asking, is there an end to violence in which there is no time at all? It is a very, very serious problem. We have accepted time, division, as a means of ending conflict. We are saying quite the contrary. Where there is division as `me' becoming something - the becoming something may be noble or whatever it is - that very division is the process of time; and that division, does it exist at all? That is, I am violent. That is the only fact I have. The other, non-violence, has no reality. It is just a concept, a structure of thought which cannot understand or end violence. It is the escaping process - the ideal. I am this, I will be that; that is measurement. All that implies psychological time. That is the illusion in which we live. We are questioning the reality of that. There is only `what is; there is only greed; there is only violence; there is only war. Now we will go into it very carefully. Human beings are violent. Is it not important to find out whether it can end immediately? Is it not important to end it, not say, `I must become non-violent'? When you become non-violent, that involves a period of time. During that period you are sowing the seeds of violence. Is it possible to end violence or greed, anger or whatever you will immediately? Can you end the whole entirely of violence? What is violence? It is not merely anger - to injure another, to hate, to criticize, to wound another both physically and psychologically, to imitate, to conform - not merely physical aggression but the whole movement of violence. Can that movement totally end? To find that out, one must understand time as division. I have divided, thought has divided `what is' into `what should be'. We are now asking whether it is possible to end violence, greed, what you will, immediately, so that it never comes up again. How do you observe violence? Violence is a sensory response. You have hurt me, I am wounded. My image about myself has been hurt. You might not physically hurt me, but you have wounded me inwardly because I have an image about myself as a great man or as a professor. That image has been hurt. To get over that hurt, I say, `Give me time.' All that is effort which is brought about by the division of time. So, is it possible to end violence so completely that it never comes back? That is why we are asking how do you look at, how do you perceive, violence. How do you look at a tree, the moon, the stars, the heavens and the beauty of night - how do you look at it? How do you look at your wife or your husband or your friend? Do you look at your wife or your husband or the tree or the moon or the rivers with the memories that you have had, with accumulated hurts, accumulated pleasures, companionship, stored in the brain as memory? Do you look at your wife and your husband with those memories? Memory is time. Where there is time, there must be division. Hence you have quarrels and all the rest of it in your relationship with another. It is of the highest importance to find out how to observe, to observe a tree, which is one of the most beautiful things on earth. How do you look at it? When you use the word `tree' or the species of tree, you are not looking. The word, the remembrance, prevents you from looking. You want to look at your wife. Probably you have never looked at her. You have looked at her as your wife, your possession, your pleasure, sexually and in other ways. You have looked at her with all the memories of the last ten days or ten years or fifty years. Those memories come between her and you, and she has also her memories. So, it is very important to find out whether. one can look at a wife or a husband or a tree or moon or the flowing waters of a great river without the word, without the name, which is the past. Can you look at violence or greed or whatever you will without the word? The moment you use the word `violence', you have already put it in time. The moment you use the word which we have used a thousand times before, as violence, that very word is the factor of time. Do you see this? Therefore you have already brought about a division. Now, can you observe your wife, your friend or the speaker without his reputation, look at him without any image? Can you look at your wife, at a tree, at a flower, without the movement of thought? The movement of thought is time. Thought divides as time divides. When you look, you are looking as the observer, who is the past, who is the word, who is the memory. The past divides, the past is time. It is in the mirror of relationship that you look at yourself as you would look in the mirror to look at your face. There you can perceive every movement of thought, every movement of reaction. So, the perceiver is the perceived, the analyser is the analysed. I want to experience something extraordinary. I am bored with all the experience I have had - sex and pleasure. I want to experience something ultra, something beyond all thought, and the experiencer is the experienced. A mind that does not demand experience is totally different. Therefore, we have to learn how to listen, how to observe, not accumulate how to listen, but just listen, just observe, without all the memory. Then you will see that which you observe, which is violence, and that there is no division between the observer and the observed. The observer is the violence. I wonder if you see that! When you are so alert, watching, observing, it is like putting great light on the thing which you observe. Then it disappears totally, never to return. Now, we ought to talk over together what is desire because, time, desire and thought are the major factors of fear. What is desire? What is the wandering nature of desire, desire which is never content, the desire that all religions have said, suppress? Why have religious leaders all over the world, and all the books, said we must suppress our desire; desire is all right for god, but to desire a woman, desire a house, desire the lovely things of the earth, the beauty of a painting, the beauty of a statue, a poem of Keats, that you must not desire? We have learnt through the ages the art of suppressing desire or yielding to desire. So, what is desire? - not the object of desire or the object creating the desire. Does the object create the desire or desire exists and the object varies? You must be clear on this point. You see a nice car, a nice shirt, a lovely house, a beautiful painting. That painting, house, the car, the woman, the man - does the object create the desire or desire exists and the objects don't matter? If the object creates desire, then it is a totally different investigation, but if desire exists and the nature of desire is not wandering from one thing to another, then it is difficult. We have to examine together what is the origin, the beginning, of desire; not how to control desire, not to suppress it, transcend it, but the beginning of it. If one can understand the origin, the source, of desire, then we can deal with it. If we don't ask the origin, the beginning, then we are merely trimming the branches of desire. So, what is desire? We live by sensation. The reaction of our sensory responses is the activity of sensation. I see you well dressed, clean, healthy, beautiful, or whatever you are. I see it. The seeing is the beginning of sensory responses. The seeing, observing, contact and sensation are the responses of the senses. Right? Then what happens? I see a beautiful house, a lovely chalet in the mountains, beautifully built, strong. I see it, contact, touch it actually, and the sensation from it. Then what happens? This is really important to understand. I see a beautiful woman or a beautiful man. The very seeing of that beauty is a sensation, is it not? Then, what is the next step that takes place? You see a beautiful something, a statue which has been created by love and skill and matter. As you see it, sensation arises. You touch it, then what happens? Please find out for yourself. Then thought comes in and says, `How beautiful; I wish I had that statue in my room, I wish I was in that car, I wish I had that house.' At that moment when thought takes charge of sensation, at that precise moment, desire is born. Do you understand this, sir? Sensation is normal, healthy, vital; otherwise you are dead. To suppress sensation means you are dead, and probably that is what has happened here in this country. You read the Gita and Upanishads and all the sacred books and you follow guru after guru, discipline your desire, control it, suppress it, escape, and so on. Whereas, we are saving something entirely different. Can you follow the sensation, the immediate association of thought with the object, then thought saying, `How nice it would be if I sat in that beautiful car which has tremendous power behind it'? - then begins desire. Now, is it possible for thought not to intervene, not immediately, thought saying `I will see myself in the car'? Is there an interval between sensation and thought, so that thought does not immediately take charge, so that there is a gap? If there is a gap, what happens? That requires extraordinary skill and attention, to see where sensations are important, because, if your senses are not alive, you cannot see the beauty of the earth, the movement of the sea. So sensations, the sensory responses, are essential for life, but when thought controls, shapes, gives identity to sensation, then at that precise moment desire is born. Can we find out, without control, without suppression, just see how thought is acting upon sensation, even verbally, even intellectually, and go into it very deeply, to have such alertness, such care, such affection, such love to see its nature, how desire is born? You have to see what thought is, how thought makes all life a problem. Thought is a material movement. Thought is limited because all knowledge, all experience, is limited. Thought springs from knowledge, experience, memory. And this whole process is limited. There is no complete knowledge about anything, can never be. Science, technology, is always adding more and more. So, time, desire, thought, are the factors of fear. I am afraid of what might happen to me because I have had an accident a couple of days ago or a year ago, and I am afraid it might happen again. I am watchful. There is fear. I am afraid of the dark, I am afraid of the wife, the husband, I am afraid of my boss. Aren't you all afraid? Don't be ashamed. It is the common lot of man. You may not want to acknowledge it, you may not want to face it, but you are frightened, and fear does terrible things to human beings. Mentally, psychologically, it narrows down, it curtails. It makes human beings so bound to authority, to some ideas. They have become so dependent, so attached, so inhuman. We are not talking about the many expressions of desire, of fear, but fear itself. We are not talking about the various aspects of fear, but the root of it. What is the root of fear? Is it not time and thought? That is, I am a clerk, I may never become a manager. I am a disciple, I can never become the guru if I want to be. I am ignorant in the deep sense of the word, deeply ignorant, which is, not knowing. That is ignorance - a movement that has no beginning and perhaps no end, and to understand that deep ignorance I imagine I need time, experience, accumulation, belief in reincarnation, and all the rest of it. So there is fear. We are asking each other what is the root of it all. Why has man, throughout the ages, from timeless beginning, carried this burden of fear? He has not been able to resolve it. He may go to all the temples, to all the churches, to all the gurus, various systems of meditation, but fear is always there. You may be blind to it, you may want to evade it, but it is always there in one form or another. We are asking, what is the root of it? The root of it is time and thought. I had pain a couple of weeks ago and I fear it might return again, which is time. There is the remembrance of that pain and the fear that it may happen again. My wife has hurt me, as I have hurt her, not physically, but inwardly, and I hope she won't hurt me more by word or a gesture or by a tear. I am afraid she might hurt me, so there is fear. Fear is time and thought. If one understands the nature of time and thought and the movement and the wandering of desire, understand in the sense see the truth of it instantly, not the verbal conclusion of it but the fact of it, the reality of it, the depth of it, the intensity of it, if you do see it so clearly, then you will never ask how is fear to end. Nor can you ask, `How can I control thought', or `How am I to stop thought', which are the causes of fear. You will never ask that question because you cannot ask that question about it. You actually see the truth. It is there. It is there for you to see, not to accept, to argue, analyse, discuss, take sides; you can't. This is like seeing the most beautiful thing on earth, which is there - an excellent sea, an excellent mind which is there, a heart that is always aflame, which is there. If you see it, then fear ends. And where there is the ending of fear, there is no god. It is out of our fear, out of our desire, that we invent the gods. When a man is without fear, then he is a totally different human being and he needs no god. And sirs and ladies, give your heart to consider all this - not your mind, not your intellect. Intellect has its place, but when you are examining something very, very seriously, the head must enter into its consideration. When the heart enters, that is when there is love to observe, love of watching, seeing; then, when you see the truth of desire, time and thought, there is no fear whatsoever. Then only there can be love. Fear and love cannot go together. Fear and pleasure go together, but not love and fear. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN MADRAS 4TH PUBLIC TALK 2ND JANUARY, 1983 'MEDITATION IS THE EXPRESSION OF DAILY ACTIVITY' Yesterday evening we talked about fear, the nature of fear and what brings about fear. We said time, desire, thought, are the causes of fear and man has lived with fear. We live with fear now -fear of the past, fear of the future of man, what is going to happen to man. Surely, the future of man is what he is now. If he does not radically change, psychologically, inwardly, the future is what he is now. That is guaranteed because there will be more wars, more instruments of wars, more destruction, more violence, more fragmentation of human beings into nationalities, and so on. The future is what we are now. It is so urgently necessary to bring about the psychological revolution. What does it mean to bring about a change - not move from one form, one system, one idea to another, but is it possible for human beings who have lived on this lovely earth for so many millennia to change? This evening we ought to talk over together whether sorrow can ever end - the sorrow of man; what is love, what is compassion, what is intelligence, the significance of death, and the whole question of meditation. We have lived with sorrow generation upon generation - the grief, the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of great anxiety, the sorrow of having no proper relationship with another, the sorrow of a mother, of a father losing a son, of a wife whose husband has been killed in war. Also there is the sorrow of ignorance. Sorrow has many forms. It is not just one incident called death, it is not just one happening in one's life, but a series of incidents, of accidents and experiences which contain pleasure and pain, the sorrow of this movement of reward and punishment, the sorrow of old age, the sorrow of illness, blindness, of deformed children. Man has carried the great weight of sorrow and tries to escape from it. He invents all kinds of theories, all kinds of possibilities, romantic concepts, but sorrow remains with man. I wonder if one has looked at what wars have done to man - how many women, fathers, brothers, sisters, have shed tears because one holds on to nationalism, racial prejudices, linguistic differences. All this is causing enormous sorrow in the world. There is not only personal sorrow, the loss of something, the loss of someone whom you loved, but the loss of never having a single, happy, original day, the pain of seeing poverty in this land and doing nothing about it. Man has carried this sorrow from time beyond measure. We still are burdened, fearful, anxious, lonely, aching with deep inward pain, the lack of success, lack of opportunity, lack of the things we all want. Is it possible to end this enormous burden carried by humanity and by those who are still in sorrow? What is sorrow? What is the cause of sorrow? Where there is a cause, there is an end. If I have cancer, the cause, the pain, then perhaps the cause can be removed. So, where there is a cause for anything, there is an end to that. The causation is a movement; it is not a fixed point. If you can understand and discover the cause of this burden of sorrow, then perhaps we can understand the nature of love; not love of god, not the love of the guru, not the love of some book or a poem but the love of human beings - the love of your wife, the husband, your children. To find that extraordinary perfume that is really the light of the world, one must understand the nature of suffering, the structure of suffering. I hope together we, you and the speaker, are going into this. Together we are investigating, not the speaker investigates and you listen, agree or disagree, accept or deny, but together we are exploring a very, very profound problem of humanity. One requires an unemotional approach to understand sorrow; not sentimentality, not a conclusion that sorrow will end, or that sorrow will always remain with mankind. We must together consider this question deeply. You can only consider this question when the mind is in the heart. We use our intellect to comprehend, to discern, to argue. We use the intellect to choose, to measure. And intellect is one of the faculties of the brain. If we are going to examine this extraordinary, profound, problem, mere intellect has very little place, and most of us are highly intellectual, highly educated, having this extraordinary quality of analysis. You in India can analyse anything on earth. You have got fairly subtle minds, whereas to comprehend sorrow, mere intellect cannot go very far. We are saying that all of us have the capacity to use our intellect, which is to understand, to discern, to argue, to choose, to weigh one against the other. This is the function of the intellect. And most of us having the capacity - if you are merely approaching this question of sorrow that way - then our intellect, our mind, dominates the process of investigation. Therefore it distorts. Whereas, is it possible to approach it with a holistic movement? We never approach anything as a whole. We never look at life as a whole. We have fragmented life, broken it up as the intellect, the emotions, love, and so on, and so we can never look at a problem wholly. The word `whole' also means healthy - a healthy mind, not a crippled mind, not a stagnant mind, but a mind which is whole, a sense of covering the earth and the skies and the beauty of all that. `Whole' means also `holy'. In investigating, exploring, this question, one needs to have that quality of a mind in the heart which is not romantic, idealistic, imaginative, but a very factual mind, tempered with the quality of love. When we use the word `holy`, we mean by that - mind in the heart, mind in the quality of love, which has nothing whatsoever to do with any ideals, with any obedience. There must be freedom to observe. So, together let us look at this question of what is sorrow and why man has put up with sorrow, why he has accepted it as he has accepted fear, as he has accepted pleasure, desire, all the things that man is surrounded with, both outwardly and inwardly. So, what is sorrow? What is the nature of it? In that thing called sorrow, there is pain, there is grief, there is a sense of isolation, a sense of loneliness in which there is no relationship. It is not only a physical shock but a great crisis in consciousness, in the psyche. I have lost my son; I am only taking that example. I have lost my son to whom I am attached. I want him to grow up into some businessman, have some kind of good substantial income, a house, and so on, and suddenly he has gone. What is that quality of suddenness, something which has given me great joy, great pain, great anxiety, concern about his future? All that movement - my affection, my concern, my care, my sense of helping him to have good taste, to live aesthetically - suddenly ends. Don't you know all these feelings? In every house there is this shadow of sorrow. There is sudden ending of my attachment, sudden ending of all my hope which I have invested in him, sudden in the sense of a deep shock and life becomes empty; either I become very cynical or find a rational explanation or plunge myself into some form of entertainment - drugs, trips and all the rest of it, or believe in some future life. This is the lot of human beings. What is this ending? What does it mean to end? Have we ever ended something without a motive, without a reward or punishment? Where there is an ending, there is a totally new beginning. But we never end. We end things if it is profitable or painful. Our life is based on reward and punishment, both outwardly and inwardly, but we never end anything without a cause. So, grief, loneliness, and sense of separation which is essentially time, identification, investment and all the things one has cultivated in another - all that ends and there is a shock and that shock I call sorrow. Now, can one remain with that, not escape, not seek comfort? Can you remain with that tremendous challenge without a single movement of thought, because sorrow is perhaps one of the greatest challenges, greatest demands on the human mind, on the human quality? And if you merely escape from it, run away, rationalize, then sorrow is your shadow, but with the ending of that, there is passion that is the very essence of energy. But very few of us have that passion. which is living, that passion which moves the universe. So we ought to look into what is love. That word has been so spoilt. We have given to that word such shallow meaning. One may say, I love my wife. One questions that love. That love may be attachment, that love may be seeking comfort, pleasure sexually, the pleasure of companionship, and so on. We are going to consider what is love, to see the depth of it, the beauty and the extraordinary quality of it. Love may be related to death. Surely, to find something true one must negate that which is not true, negate the false. To discover what is false and what is true and what is true in the false, one requires not only the capacity to think clearly but to demand, ask questions. So what is love? Would you say love is desire? Would you say love is pleasure? Would you say love is attachment? The speaker is asking these questions for you to answer to yourself; answer, not to deceive yourself, which is so easy to do. One may think that one is a marvellous human being, and that one is out of all this. But to find out that which is not love, that is negation, and it is the most positive action. We are asking, is desire love? Desire is a wandering movement, and is love wandering, unstable, weak, or is it something as strong, as vital as death? Is love pleasure, sexual pleasure, the pleasure of owning, dominating, possessing a person? Is that love? Is attachment to the person - my wife, my husband, my family, which means to hold on, cling to - is that love? Or,in attachment there is fear, jealousy, anxiety, hate? Where there is jealousy, there is hate. Is that love? Has hate any relationship with love? Is love the opposite of hate? Is the good opposite of that which is not good? If hate is the opposite of love, then hate has its root in love. All opposites have their root in their own opposites. Please examine your own life honestly and ask these questions. Desire, pleasure, attachment, jealousy, anxiety, fear of losing, is all that love? Can you be free of attachment, not at the last moment when death is there? Can you end attachment to another? See the implications of attachment, the consequences of attachment. Where there is jealousy, there is hate, anger. Is all that love? And what is compassion? - not the definition that you can look up in a dictionary. What is the relationship between love and compassion, or are they the same movement? When we use the word `relationship', it implies a duality, a separation, but we are asking what place has love in compassion, or is love the highest expression of compassion? How can one be compassionate if you belong to any religion, follow any guru, believe in something, believe in your scriptures, and so on, attached to a conclusion? When you accept your guru, you have come to a conclusion, or when you strongly believe in god or in a saviour, this or that, can there be compassion? You may do social work, help the poor out of pity, out of sympathy, out of charity, but is all that love and compassion? In understanding the nature of love, having that quality which is mind in the heart, that is intelligence. Intelligence is the understanding or the discovering of what love is. Intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with thought, with cleverness, with knowledge. You may be very clever in your studies, in your job, in being able to argue very cleverly, reasonably, but that is not intelligence. Intelligence goes with love and compassion, and you cannot come upon that intelligence as an individual. Compassion is not yours or mine like thought is not yours or mine. When there is intelligence, there is no me and you. And intelligence does not abide in your heart or your mind. That intelligence which is supreme is everywhere. It is that intelligence that moves the earth and the heavens and the stars, because that is compassion. Also we are going to talk over together this question of death - death being the ending, the ending of our memories, of our attachments, the bank account if you have one. You cannot carry it with you but you would like to have it till the last moment. So, what is death and who is it that dies? And what is life? Do you understand? Who is it that dies, and what does it mean to die? We are not talking of the ending of the physical organism, but we are enquiring into life, the ending of life and the great significance of what death means. What is life which we have separated from death? There is a gap 40, 50 or 100 years. We want to prolong our lives, as long as possible. Modem medicine, surgery, health, and all that helps to prolong one's life. I do not know for what, but one wants to prolong it. So what is life, your life or the life of the universe, life of the earth, life of nature, life which is the vast movement without a beginning and without an end? Don't fall back into the trap of your tradition. That is dead, as dead as a door nail. So we must examine when we talk about living, life, what that means - the life of a tree, the life of the fish in the water, the life of the beauty of a tiger, the life of the universe, this life that seems so extraordinarily vast, immense, measureless. Are we talking about that or your life? If you are talking about your life, what is that life? Going to the office from morning till night for 50, 60 years, having children, belonging to some sect, following some guru? Your life is conflict as pleasure, conflict as fear and the pursuit of pleasure and desire. This is your life. Is that what we are talking about, the ending of that life? What is important - before or after death? Life, the beauty of it, the energy, the pleasure of it, the immensity of it you have reduced to such shallow little `me'. Are you concerned about that, the `me' that is going to die? Is it your name, your form, how you look, your bank account, your ideals, your beliefs, your experiences? So what are you? Please look, question it, doubt it, ask it. Is that what you are frightened of -dying? Knowing that your body, that organism, is going to die? You may prolong it for a long time, but it is going to come to an end. Or you can say, `I have had a jolly good life, I don't mind dying.' We are asking, what is it that dies and what is it that clings to life? By life I mean going to office, sex, pain, pleasure, fighting each other, quarrelling, destroying each other. This is your life, whether you are young or old. Is that what you are afraid of ending? Or are you considering life as a whole, the life of the universe, which is so immense, so vast, so incalculable? Please enquire what you are, to which thought clings, to the image you have built about yourself. It is not the immortality of one's soul, of yourself. Yourself is built through time, your image as `me' from the moment you are born till now. And you accept that `me' as a reality; is it real at all or is it a series of words, series of memories, accidental experiences, which are all put together by thought, and is that `me' holding on to all this travail of life? If you are not holding it then life is something totally different. It is a vast incalculable movement. But that can only be seen when the self is not. Now we ought to ask a question: what is meditation? We are together going to examine what is meditation, not how to meditate, but what is the nature, the quality, the structure, the beauty of meditation. The word `meditation means to ponder over, to think over, to consider, to probe, to investigate, to look, according to the dictionary. And the word `meditation also means measurement, to measure. I believe in Sanskrit ma is to measure. Measurement means comparison. Have you ever considered how the ancient Greece in 450 B.C. exploded all over Europe? Greece was responsible for measurement; the Greeks invented measurement. Without measurement there can be no technology. And the Western world is capable of great technology, which has moved to Japan. The ancient Indians said that measurement is illusion; India exploded all over Asia. Don't be proud of it, it is all gone. You have lost the one thing that was so precious. You have lost the greatest jewel that you had ever had. So meditation means to think, to ponder, and also it means to measure. That is, I am this, I must be that; I am comparing myself with yourself who are clever, beautiful, lovely, and I am not; that is measurement. Following an example is measurement. Wherever there is comparison psychologically, meditation cannot be. Where there is measurement, comparison, there cannot be meditation. You can compare between two cars, between two materials, better cloth, better paper, better house, better food, but where the mind thinks in terms psychologically of the better, meditation is not possible. You can sit cross-legged, do all kinds of yoga, all kinds of control, but where there is control, there is measurement. Where there is control, there must be conflict and there must be measurement, and that is not meditation. Meditation is to live a diligent life. Meditation is not separate from daily living; it is not going off into a little corner, meditating for twenty minutes every day or every afternoon, every evening; that is just having a siesta. There is no system. System implies practice. Practice means measurement - from what you are to what you want to be, and you may be practising the wrong note. And probably you are. You call that meditation. That meditation is totally separate from your daily living. Find out whether it is possible to live a daily life of meditation which means no measurement at any time. In meditation, there is no control because the controller is the controlled. In meditation there is no will because will is desire. The essence of desire is will - `I will meditate, I will practise this day after day.' In meditation there is no effort at all because there is no controller. Meditation implies awareness, awareness of the earth, the beauty of the earth, the dead leaf, the dying dog, to be aware of your environment; to be aware of your neighbour; to be aware of the colours you carry, why you wear that colour and those beads, to be aware of that. To be aware of the beauty of the wind among the leaves, to be aware of your thoughts, your feelings, that is, to be aware without choice - just to be aware. That heightens your sensitivity - to observe diligently everything. When you say I will do something, do it, never forgetting what you have said. Do not say something you don`t mean. That is part of meditation. That is, to be aware of your feelings, your condition. your opinions, your judgments, and your beliefs so that in that awareness there is no choice - just to be aware of the beauty of the earth, the skies and the lovely waters. When you are so aware, then there is attention; to attend not only to see the speaker but also to what your wife is telling you or your husband is telling you or your children are telling you, what the politicians are telling you - their trickery, their search for power, position. When you so profoundly attend, there is no centre as the `me' to attend. That is also meditation. Then, if you have gone that far, if the mind has moved that far, then you ask what is religion. Religion is none of these things that you have - the temples and the content of the temples, the puja, the Tirupatis, the churches and all that is not religion. The rituals, the beliefs, they are put together by thought which is a material process and you worship that which thought has created, which is what you have created. Have you ever realized that all the rituals, these gods, you have created them out of your fear, out of your wanting security? I know you don't agree, but listen to it. You will go on doing it because your mind is conditioned, afraid, wants some kind of security, but a religious man does not belong to any group, to any religion, has no belief because his mind is free. Intelligence is the highest, supreme form of ultimate security, not the intelligence of the cunning thought. There is the intelligence of compassion. In that intelligence there is no doubt, no uncertainty, no fear. That intelligence is something immense and universal. And where there is attention, there is silence. If you attend now to what the speaker is saying, attend with your ears, with your eyes, with your nerves, with your whole body, if you so attend, then in that quality of attention there is silence, unfathomable silence. That silence has never been touched by thought, and only then that for which man has searched from time immemorial, something sacred, something nameless, supreme, comes. It is only that mind that is so utterly free from all the travails of life; it is only such a mind that can find the supreme. That means meditation, which is the expression of daily activity. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN BOMBAY 1ST PUBLIC TALK 22ND JANUARY, 1983 'WHERE THERE IS A CAUSE, THERE IS AN END' If one may like to point out, this is not a lecture to instruct on a particular subject or with a view to inform, not to instruct and teach, but we, you and the speaker, are searching out the various issues of our daily lives to see if there are any solutions for them. So it is your responsibility as well as that of the speaker to think together, for each of us to discover, find out for ourselves if we are meeting each other; not merely at the intellectual level or emotional, ideational level, but rather meet in a relationship that is enquiring, questioning. To question, enquire, one must be free of prejudices. Otherwise, enquiry has no value at all. Most of you are already committed to so many ideals, conclusions, opinions, and so we never meet. As the speaker has no beliefs, has no ideals, has no authority whatsoever, he can investigate easily, freely, happily, but if you also were free, you can also enquire, look into the vast conflicts of our society, of our governments, why human beings who have lived on this earth for perhaps forty, fifty thousand years or more have become what they are - dull, violent, superstitious. We are the society, we have created this society in which we live, and to bring about order in that society, our own house must be in order, which it is not. Our house, the house in which we live, is not the physical house, but it is the house of our struggle, conflict, misery, confusion, sorrow. That is our house, and we don't bring about order in that. Mere demand for outward order has little meaning. What we are concerned with deeply is why human beings are what they are, why they have become like this. The future is what they are now. If they don't change now, the future will be exactly what it is now, perhaps with certain modification, variation. If human beings don't radically, fundamentally, bring about a change in their own attitudes, in their own lives, which is to put order, then attending all these talks has very little meaning. If that is very clear, then we are together meeting at a certain level with the same intensity, at the same time; then communication becomes very simple. Because, obviously the speaker is here to say something, to explore something with you. If you hold on to your commitments, to your beliefs, to your gurus and all that, we can never meet each other. So, please, this is a talk or a conversation between two people, a dialogue of two friends who are concerned not only with their own private life but concerned with the world, concerned with what is happening in the world - the global disorder, the threat of wars, poverty, the violence and the destruction that is going on right through the world. We are responsible for all that. What is the problem? Why have we, throughout our life, problems - from the beginning, when we see the light, till we die? Why do we have problems - social problems, economic problems, mechanical problems, computer problems and our own problems in our daily life, in our relationship? Is it necessary to have problems? Is it possible to live without a single problem? If you have problems, obviously those problems act as friction and wear out the brain, and one gets old and so on. Human beings throughout the world have many, many problems. They live in problems. Their whole life is a movement of problems. Now we are asking: is it possible not to have problems? We are going to investigate the question, not say, `yes, it is possible to live without problems; that is not the point. The point is why do we have it, what is a problem, why the brain is always trying to solve problems. There are mechanical problems, mathematical problems, problems of design, problems in architecture, physics. In the technological field, there are many, many problems. That is inevitable. But why do we, in our life, in our relationship, in our own way of living, in our family, have problems? We see that in the technological world problems must exist. We live in a mechanical world. We are business people: we are doctors, surgeons, physicists, biologists, trained computer experts. And our brain is trained, educated, conditioned, to solve problems. We extend that same attitude to our daily life. Do you understand what I am saying? Suppose one is a computer expert. He has several problems there, and mechanically he has to solve those problems, which means his brain is trained, conditioned, educated, to solve problems. And we extend that same movement of solution of problems to the psychological field. The psychological field is the field of our relationship, our fears, anxiety, all the rest of it. We have got the same mentality that these have to be solved: these are problems that have to be solved, which means we look at life, at our daily living, from the point of view of our problems. You are trained or educated to solve problems. We try to solve one problem. In the solution of that one problem we add more problems. So we live with problems. We are saying something totally different, which is, to observe life not with a mind that is trained to solve problems, but to understand why the brain is conditioned, trained, educated, to solve problems, and why with that same movement we meet life. Now, we are going to look at the various issues of our life not with a brain that is trained to solve problems, but to observe the issues, not demanding an answer, not demanding a solution, because to live a life without a single problem is the most extraordinary life. It has immense capacity. It has tremendous energy. It is always renewing itself, but if you are always caught in the field of problems and the resolution of those problems, then you never move out of those problems. Is this clear? We are going to find out whether it is possible to look at any issue and not call it a problem, to look at any issue of our daily life and not label it as a problem but only to observe it, to be aware of the whole nature of that issue, the content of that issue; but if you approach it as a problem and therefore try to find an answer to it, you will increase the problem. Say, for example, it is important to have an unoccupied mind. It is only a brain that is unoccupied that can perceive something new, that is free, that has tremendous vitality. It is necessary to have a very quiet mind because it is only a quiet mind, unoccupied mind, a brain that can see things clearly, that can actually think totally differently. Now, you hear that it is necessary to have a quiet, still mind, then you ask, `how am I to get it?' Then you make a problem of it - `I need a quiet mind. My mind is occupied, restless, chattering all the time and how am I to stop it?' The desire to stop it brings about problems. How am I to do it is a problem. Have you understood this? But if you approach the question of that unoccupied mind without the how, then you will begin to see for yourself the nature of occupation, why it is occupied, why it is constantly dwelling on a particular thing. When you observe it, when you are aware of it, it is telling you the story. Do you understand this? First, we must be very clear that you and the speaker are treating life not as a problem but as a tremendous movement. If your brain is trained to solve problems, then you will treat this movement as a problem to be solved. Is it possible to look at life with all its questions, with all its issues, which is tremendously complex, to look at it not as a problem, but to observe it clearly, without bias, without coming to some conclusion which will then dictate your observation? You have to observe this vast movement of life, not only your own particular life, but the life of humanity, the life of the earth, the life of the trees, the life of the whole world - look at it, observe it, move with it, but if you treat it as a problem, then you will create more problems. Is this clear? What is our first issue in life, what is the first movement in our life, in the life of man? We are not talking about the petty little life which you lead, which we will come to presently, but the life that is around us, the vast, immense, complex movement of existence. What is it that strikes you first? What is it that has meaning, that has depth, that has a sense of vitality behind it? What would be your first observation, your first response, your first immediate enquiry? Perhaps you never ask this question. If you look at this vast extraordinary movement of life of which one is a part, what is the thing that you meet first? Would it be relationship, would it be your own particular concern about yourself, would it be your own fear, your own anxiety, your own particular, narrow, limited enquiry, your own search for god? What would be your first natural contact, natural demand? Don't we look at this vast movement of life from a narrow little window, that window being your own little self - your own worries, your own anxieties, your own sexual demands? Are you looking at this vast movement from no particular point of view, from no window, from no commitment, or are you so caught in a system, in a tradition, in knowing as a professor, as a philosopher, as a writer, as a soldier or as a specialist? Or do you look at it as a human being, the human being with so many questions, sorrows, pains, anxieties? How do you look at all this? When you put such a question among so many people, naturally each one has a different response. But as we are all human beings, we are the rest of mankind. We may have a certain background, certain tradition, certain long history. But primarily you are a human being, not a Christian, not a doctor, not a Buddhist, not a Hindu; you are primarily a human being related to all other human beings. Therefore, you are the rest of humanity. Your body may be different from another body, the physical organism may be different from other physical organism, but the body never says `I am', the body never says `I am something special; the body never says `my progress, my success, I must seek God', and all that. The body is never conscious that it is separate from somebody else. It is thought that says I am different. It is important to see how thought divides. So, that is the first thing that you notice when you look at this vast movement of life, how man has divided himself from another, separated himself from another, calling himself an American, a Jew, a Russian, an Arab, a Hindu, and all the rest of it. Don't you observe this extraordinary broken up human entity? Are you aware of that? In that, the first thing you see is how the world is divided geographically, nationally, racially, religiously. This division is causing immense conflict, this division is causing wars -the Hindu against the Muslim. the Russian against the Afghan, and so on. Isn't that the first thing you see in this world - how man has created this division? This division must exist because thought has created this division. Sir, if you are at all alert, aware, one sees what man has done to himself and what he has done to others. That is the first thing one observes - the destruction of this division, the breeding of wars through nationalism. One of the causes of war is nationalism, and one never treats this vast movement of life as one unit. We have lived that way for thousands of years, killing each other in the name of god, in the name of peace, in the name of the country, in the name of a flag, and we are still doing this after thousands of years. So one asks, what is wrong with man? Why is he doing this? He is extraordinarily clever in the technological world; he has invented the most extraordinary delicate instruments. But we are still carrying on most stupidly our own lives. So that is the first thing you notice. And one asks what is the cause of it. What is the cause of all this - this division, these wars, the structure of hierarchical authority in every country, in the religious world, in the political world, in the scientific world? It is all based on hierarchical principles - the authority of knowledge, authority of experience, and so on. Now, what is the cause of all this? Who is responsible? Please enquire. Because, where there is a cause, there is an end to that cause. If one has pain, the cause being cancer or what you will, then that pain can be ended or you are killed. So, wherever there is a cause, there is an end to that. That is a law, that is a principle. So we are asking: what is the cause of all this - this vast misery, unhappiness, the tremendous uncertainty? May we go into it together, not that I explain, you accept, but together, slowly, carefully, find out for ourselves what is the root of all this, what is the cause of all this? If we don't find it now, the future will be exactly the same, what you are now - wars, division, sorrow, pain, anxiety, uncertainty. So together let us find out what is the cause of this division. This division breeds wars, quarrels, perpetual conflict - conflict between man and woman, sexually, and so on. What is the root of all this, the cause of all this? If I may ask, how do you approach a question like that? How do you come near to it? Approach means to come near, to come into contact. This is a question put to you and are you looking at it as a problem to be resolved, or do you come even close to it? If you do, you are then open to the question, but if you keep away from the question, you are not open, you are not alive to the question. So we are together approaching this question with no direction, with no motive, because if there is a motive, then that motive dictates the answer, it distorts the perception. Suppose this is my question; I am putting this question to myself: `What is the root of all this?' I have no answer. I don't know, but I am going to find out. But to find out, I must be free, absolutely free from any kind of direction. Because, if I have a direction, a motive, hoping for some kind of reward, then that motive, that reward, is going to dictate my investigation. So one must be free to observe this question -what is the root of all this? Is it inevitable for every human being living on this beautiful earth that he must live in conflict, that he must live with anxiety, fear? If you accept that as inevitable, then there is no investigation. You have come to a conclusion and you have shut the door. Conclusion means the ending of investigation. The very word `conclusion` is to close, to end. If you come to any conclusion, then you cannot possibly answer. So one must be aware of how you approach this question. We are asking: is it thought? What is thought? Is thought yours. Is thought individual? Is your thinking separate from somebody else's thinking? Every person thinks - the most stupid, ignorant, downtrodden man in a village to the great scientist. So thinking is common to all of us. It is not your thinking separate from my thinking. But thinking is the movement of all mankind; it is not individual thinking. Do we see that? It is rather difficult to accept it or see it because we are so conditioned, we are so educated, so trained to think that my thinking is separate from yours, my opinion is different from yours. But opinion is opinion; it is not your opinion or my opinion. So, is thinking the root of all this misery, this destruction, this decline, this corruption, this decay? If it is, then can that movement of thought which has created such havoc in the world, end? It is thinking which has created the most extraordinary technological world, great instruments of war, extraordinary submarines, and so on. Also it has created all the religions in the world. It has built extraordinary cathedrals, mosques, temples and all the things that are in the temples, in the mosques, in the churches. Thought has invented all the rituals, invented the saviour in the Christian world, invented liberation or moksha or whatever you like to call it in this country. Also it has invented gods. The more you are uncertain, the more dangerous the world becomes. So thought must find a security, the sense of safety, certainty. And it creates gods - your god and my god, my god is better than your god, my guru is better than yours, and so on. Thought has been responsible for all this, If that is the cause, if thought is the cause of all this - our misery, our superstitions, our immense insecurity, uncertainty, and also thought has created the most extraordinary things - communications, surgery, medicines and so on, is there an end to it? You understand my question? Is there an end to thought? That is, if thought is responsible for all this technological world and the human world of misery, unhappiness, anxiety, if thought is the cause of all this, it must have an end. That is, if one has a certain disease brought about by various incidents, that disease has a cause, and that having been discovered, it can be treated and ended. Similarly, if thought is responsible for all this, for our daily confusion, misery, uncertainty, sorrow, and all these superstitions that thought has created around us, if thought is the cause, it has an end. If you say, tell me how to end thought, then you make a problem of it because your brain is trained, educated, to solve problems. As an expert in computers is trained to solve problems there, that same movement is extended into the psychological world. If thought is the cause of this, the question is not how to end it, but to understand the whole movement of thought. If you treat it as your thinking, and somebody else treats it as his thinking, then the issues are totally different. That leads to all kinds of illusion. Superstitions have no reality, but thinking is the ground upon which all human beings - the black, the white, the pink, the Muslim, the Hindu, the villager, the uneducated - stand. Then you move away from the idea that it is my thinking; you are then concerned with global thinking, not the Indian way of thinking. You are concerned really with the world, with all humanity, of which you are. You are not an individual. Individual means unique, undivided. You are not unique, you are totally divided, fragmented in yourself, you are the result of all the past generations. Your brain is not yours. It is evolved through thousands and thousands of years. But your religion, your scriptures, your everyday life, says you are separate from everybody else, and you are trained to accept it. You have never gone into it, you have never questioned it, doubted it, but you accept, and in that acceptance lies your problems. But if you look at it all as a vast movement of life of which you are a part, this movement that is limitless, that has no beginning and no end, then you begin to enquire into the nature of thought. Now, what is the origin of thought? Why is thought divided in its very nature, the very movement of thinking in itself, why is it divisive, fragmentary, limited? Since thought is perhaps the cause, don't ask, `Please tell me how to end the cause; then you are back into your old field of problems. If you try to solve this problem, you have other problems. Thought is creating problems. So you say, tell me how to stop them, how to stop thinking, and there are lots of people who will tell you how to stop thinking. And those people vary from each other - meditate, don't meditate, try this way, you know all that. So we multiply problems after problems. But look at this movement of thought with which man has lived for thousands upon thousands of years, and ask not how to end thought, but what is the nature of it, why has thought become so important. Because, thought implies knowledge. Ask what place has knowledge in life. We must stop now, we will continue tomorrow evening. But please, when you leave here, look at it, find out; that means an active brain, brain that is active, thinking, discussing, not just stuck in a narrow little groove of tradition of some system. One of the calamities in the world is that we are all getting old, not merely old in the body, but old mentally. Decay begins there inside first because we become mechanical. We never have the energy, vitality, passion, to find out. We have all been told what to do, we have all been instructed. This is not a place of instruction nor are you being told what to do. Here we are serious to find out a different way of living, and you can only find that out when you understand the nature of thought and the way of living in which thought is not important at all. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN BOMBAY 2ND PUBLIC TALK 23RD JANUARY, 1983 'THE GOOD MIND' May we continue with what we were talking about yesterday evening? We said the present condition of racial divisions, linguistic divisions, religious divisions, national divisions as Muslim and the Hindu, the Jew and the Arab, the American and the European, the Russian, the Chinese, and so on has brought about a great many wars. Where there is division there must be conflict, not only division between man and woman in their relationship, but also division as racial, religious and linguistic. Also we went into the question of why does this constant conflict between man and man exist, what is the root of it, what is the cause of all this chaos, anarchy, near anarchy, bad governments, each nation preparing for wars, one guru more important than the other, and so on. We are seeing this division throughout the world, and also historically it has existed for many, many centuries. What is the cause of it? Who is responsible for it? We said thought has divided man against man; thought has also created the most extraordinary architecture, painting, poetry and the whole world of technology, medicine, surgery, communications, computers, robots, and so on. Thought has brought about health, good medicine and various forms of human comfort. But thought also has created this vast division between man and man, and we ask what is the cause of all this, Who is responsible for all this? And we said, where there is a cause, there is an end. When you have a certain disease, the cause can be found of that disease, and the disease can be cured. So wherever there is a cause, there is an end to that cause. That is obviously a fact. If thought has created this confusion, this uncertainty, this perpetual danger, then what will happen if thought is not used? We are together investigating, asking why man throughout the world lives and perpetuates conflict not only within himself but outwardly - in society, in religion, in the economy, and so on. That thought is responsible for the mess, for the division, for all the misery of human beings, is fairly obvious. If one recognizes that fact, not as a theory or philosophical statement but the actual fact of it, that thought, however clever, however crafty, however erudite, is responsible for this mess, then what is man to do? That is where we left off yesterday. We said also that thought has created marvellous cathedrals, temples and mosques, and all the things that are in the temples, mosques and churches are the invention of thought. Thought has created god because thought seeks to find security. Finding uncertainty, insecurity, conflict, in this world, thought invents an entity, a principle, an ideal which gives it security, comfort; but that comfort, that security, is the invention of thought. It is very obvious, if you observe your own thinking, that thought has created this division and this conflict. Then we can ask a question: why does this conflict exist, why have we lived with conflict from immemorial times - conflict between the good and the bad, between `what is' and `what should be', the actual and the ideal? Why does man live in conflict? What is conflict? What is the nature of conflict? I do not know if some of you have seen those caves in the south of France where, 25, 30 thousand years ago, there is a picture of man fighting evil in the form of a bull, and so on. For thousands of years we have lived with conflict. To meditate, it becomes a conflict. Does conflict exist where there is comparison? Comparison means measurement. One compares oneself with another. Where there is comparison, there must be fear, there must be conflict. Can one live without comparison at all? We think that by comparing ourselves with somebody we are progressing. You want to be like your guru, you want to achieve enlightenment, position, you want a follower, you want to be respected, and so on. So, where there is a becoming psychologically, there must be conflict. Is it possible to live a life without any comparison and therefore without any conflict? We are questioning the whole process of psychological becoming. A child becomes an adult, then grows into manhood. To learn a language we need time, to acquire any skill we need time. We are asking, is becoming psychologically one of the reasons of conflict -the `what is' to be changed into `what should be' - `I am not good but I will be good, I am greedy, envious, but perhaps one day I will be free of all this.' Desire to become, which is measurement, which is comparison, is that one of the causes of conflict? There is another reason for conflict - which is, there is duality. We are examining something to understand the nature of conflict and to find out for ourselves if it is possible to be totally, completely, free of conflict. Conflict wears out the brain, makes the mind old. A man who has lived without conflict is an extraordinary human being. It is important to realize the necessity of understanding conflict. We see that measurement, comparison, brings about conflict. Also we have stated that there is duality. Some of your philosophers have stated that, posited that there is duality and that one of the reasons of this conflict is this duality. There is duality - night and morning, light and shade, tall and short, bright and dull morning, sun rising and sun setting. Physically there is duality: you are a woman and another is a man. But we are asking, is there psychological duality at all? Or is there only `what is'? I am violent, that is, there is only violence, not non-violence. The non-violence is just an idea. It is not a fact. Where there is violence and non-violence, there must be conflict. In this country, you are talking endlessly about non-violence, but probably you are also very violent people. The fact is, human beings throughout the world are violent. That is a fact. Violence means not only physical violence but also imitation, conformity, obedience, acceptance. There are other forms of violence, but there is only `what is'. But if you are conditioned to pursue non-violence while you are violent, that is, to move away from the fact, then you must have conflict. Whereas, if one dealt with `what is', there is only one fact - that is I am violent, and in the understanding of the nature and structure of violence there may be the ending of violence, but the ending of violence is not a problem. Our minds are trained, educated, to solve problems - mathematical problems, economic problems, political problems, and so on. Our brains are conditioned to deal mechanically with problems. And we make of life a series of endless problems psychologically. We went into that yesterday. So there is only fact, not the opposite. Is this very clear - that the ideal, the principle, that which you call the noble, are all illusions? What is fact is, we are violent, ignorant, corrupt, uncertain, and so on. Those are facts and we have to deal with facts. Facts don't create problems if you face them. I discover that I am violent, and I have no opposite to it. I reject totally the opposite, it has no meaning. There is only fact. Now, how do I deal with fact? How do I approach fact? How do I look at that fact? What is my motive in looking at the fact? What is the direction in which I want the fact to move? I must be aware of the nature and structure of the fact, I must be aware of the fact without choice. How does one deal with fact? That is, how do I observe the fact that I am violent? That violence is shown when I am angry, when I am jealous. If I am trying to compare myself with another, if I am doing all that, then it is impossible to face facts. A good mind faces facts. If you are in business, you face facts and deal with the fact, change the fact; you don't pretend that you will do something else away from the fact. Then you are not a good businessman. But here we are so ineffectual because we don't deal with facts. Psychologically, inwardly, we avoid them. We escape from them, or when we do discover them, we suppress them. So there is no resolution of any of them. From that, we ask something else, which is: What is a good mind? Is a mind good when it is full of knowledge? What is knowledge? We are all very proud of having knowledge, scholastic knowledge through experience, knowledge through incidents, accidents. Accumulated memory is knowledge. An experience can never be complete. Is a good mind a free, comprehensive, global, mind, or is a good mind parochial, narrow, nationalistic, traditional? A good mind is a free mind. It is not a contemporary mind. A good mind is not of time, a good mind is not concerned with time, with environment. It can deal with environment, it can deal with time, but in itself, it is totally free. Such a mind has no fear. Whereas, our minds have been so educated, so trained, that we are not original. There is no depth; knowledge is always superficial. We are concerned with the understanding of the human being, his mind, his action, his behaviour; his responses are limited because his senses are limited. Is it possible for him to be completely, wholly, free? One must have a good mind, not just accumulation of words, which does not mean a clever mind, crafty mind. We are very cunning, crafty, subtle, but that is not a good mind. So, is it possible for us, living in this modem world with all the activities that happen, the influences and newspapers and constant repetition, with our minds being programmed like a computer, as a Hindu, Sikh, and so on, to be strong, healthy, active, full of alertness? Such a mind is necessary. Only then is it possible to bring about a psychological revolution and so a new society, a new culture. I hope you are listening. It is important to know the art of listening: it is to listen, to see the truth of it and act. For us, we see something to be true, we understand logically, reasonably, very clearly, but we don't act. There is an interval between perception and action. Between the perception and action all other incidents take place. Therefore you will never act. If you see that violence in you is a fact and not try to become non-violent, which is non-fact, but if you perceive the nature of violence, the complexity of violence and listen to your own violence, it will reveal the nature of itself. Then there is the end of violence, completely. As we said earlier, a chattering mind is an unhealthy mind. It perpetually talks, not only about business problems, mathematical problems, and so on, but problems of one's relationship with husband, wife, children, with the neighbour. It is perpetually occupied, and such occupation will inevitably wear down, weigh down, the capacity of the brain. It is obvious. Is it possible not to chatter? When we realize this chattering and ask the question is it possible to stop it, then we make a problem of it. Our brains are trained to solve problems. So we solve it by saying I must not chatter, and I must try to control, and then the problem arises: Who is the controller? Is the controller different from the controlled? When a problem arises, you are ready to solve it, and brains like ours are trained to solve problems. In solving one problem, other problems increase. So, see a fact that you are violent and make the story of violence read itself; and it will, if your mind is quiet. But don't make a problem of it - `How is the brain to be quiet?' Is it possible to look, to observe, without any choice, to look at your greed, envy, ambitions, your arrogance? Have you not noticed how many people are arrogant? Not the politician, that is understood; he wants power, position, prestige. Where there is power, there is evil. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Now, are you arrogant? The man who is trying to become something psychologically is arrogant. A person is arrogant when he tries to become something which he is not. The becoming is the movement of arrogance. Sirs, look at it. It denies totally the sense of humility. When you are facing facts, then you have to be totally humble, not cultivate humility. Only the vain cultivate humility. When they are vain, arrogant, they may cultivate humility, but their humility is still arrogance. We are all treading the same path of becoming and therefore being utterly dishonest, pretending to be what we are not. Whereas, a good mind faces the fact, the fact that you are violent; arrogant. Nobody has to tell me that you are arrogant, it is so obvious. The way you talk, the way you behave, if one is at all awake, one sees the nature of arrogance. To see it, to comprehend it and to hold it, not try to escape from it, is to solve it. When there is perception of that which is, that is arrogance, that very perception demands immediate action. That is intelligence. If I see something dangerous - and violence is tremendous danger for a healthy, sane, rational, passionate mind - and if there is the perception of that, that very perception demands immediate action. That is the ending of it. Perception doesn't demand analysis. Perception is something actual, understanding it, looking at it, ending it, and then from there you can reason. That very reasoning will be logical. But if you begin with logic, reason, find out the cause, then you will take time and the cause will multiply. So, is it possible to live a life without a single problem? We are not talking of mathematical problems and so on, but problems of relationship. To have no problems in relationship - is that possible? You have problems with your wife, with your father, with your mother, with your children. Why? If the daily living is not in order, you can meditate till you are blue in the face, that meditation has no meaning. It is merely an escape; you might just as well take a drug and enjoy yourself. If you don't put your house in order, which is your relationship, if that house is not in order, then your society will not be in order. You must begin near to go very far. The near is your relationship. Why are problems there? Why do you have problems with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbour, with your government, with your community and all the rest of it, which is, what is relationship? Life is a movement in relationship. There is no escape from that. You may become a hermit, take vows, put on strange garbs and all the rest of it, thinking yourself extraordinary, exceptional, but you are related. To understand relationship is the most important thing in life; not god, not all these scriptures, but to understand the depth, the meaning, the beauty, the quality, of relationship. Now, are you being drowned by a lot of words or do you catch instantly the depth, the beauty, the quality of relationship without more explanation, more analysis, see the extraordinary importance of relationship? Do you see the beauty of relationship? Where there is no relationship, there is disorder. So let us look at it together in order to arrive at or listen to something serious. You know most of us have homes, have houses, flats, and we own them and possess them. It is our home. We never realize that we are also guests in that house. Do you understand the meaning of that? You can be a guest in a house, in your own house. Do you understand what it means? That means one must be a teacher as well as a disciple. There is no teacher outside of you. You are the teacher and also you are the disciple who is learning from the teacher, not from the teacher as a guru. But you are learning and teaching. You are the owner of your house and also you are the guest of your house. That means you look after the house, you care for the house, you care for whoever is in the house because you are a guest. The speaker has travelled all over the world for the last sixty years, and wherever he is, he is a guest. That means he is always adjusting himself like a river with great volume of water behind it, and every boulder, every rock, it goes round it. The guest is like that. Let us get back. Relationship is one of the most important things in life. Why have we made it such a confusion and such misery? What is relationship? The word implies being in contact, not only physical contact, not sexual contact - that you all know - but to be in contact mentally, emotionally, inwardly, with another so that there is no division in that contact. That is relationship. But we have not got that contact. You are ambitious and your wife also is ambitious. You want this and she wants something else. She may be right and you may be wrong. She wants to live in a marvellous house and you say `Please, for god's sake; she wants to be popular and you don't care. You are a scholar, a professor in your own little groove, and she has also her own little groove. So you are never in contact with each other except sexually. This is a fact. And you call that relationship. You have an image about her or she has an image about you. Where does love come into all this? Do you understand my question? When one says to one's wife, I love you, what does it mean? I don't know whether you say it at all. I doubt it. But if you do say it, what does it mean to love another? Relationship means to love another. What does that word mean? I love this or I love that, I love god, I love my guru. What does that love mean? Is it based on reward and punishment? Look at it sirs, because we are always caught between the two - reward and punishment. I follow the guru because he is going to promise me heaven, give me comfort. We are caught in this. Is relationship a reward and punishment process? Is love a movement of that? Think it out. To meet your wife or your husband, your children, your neighbour, at the same time, at the same level, with the same intensity, that is love. Do you understand this? To meet somebody, you must meet him at the same time, at the same level, with the same intensity. Then that is relationship, but if you are ambitious, you follow the path, becoming noble, ignoble and all the rest of it, and she also follows another path. Naturally you may be married, you may have children and all the rest of it, but you never meet. That breeds a sense of desperate loneliness. Don't you know all this? I have no relationship with anyone - with my wife, with my boss, with my foreman - I have no relationship at all with anybody, because I am self-centred. So that self-centredness and the lack of relationship brings about great loneliness. Discovering that loneliness, we then make out of that loneliness a problem - what am I to do when I am lonely? Your brain is ready to solve the problem. But you never rest with the loneliness, you never enquire the cause of it. Where there is love, there is no loneliness. Where there is love in your heart, there is no problem. Having stated that, don't make it into a problem. Look at the fact. The fact is that we are not sensitive, that we don't have the depth of beauty. The fact is that we don't love; we don't look at it, try to remain with it, to see `that is so', not try to rationalize it. It is so, that I don't love my wife; you know what it means to say that to yourself. You should cry. I want to cry for you all. Sirs, it is like two parallel lines never meeting and therefore increasing conflict day after day till you die. See the fact that there is no love in your heart, to have the mind in your heart. We think love can be achieved, cultivated. Love is not something to cultivate. Either there is or there is not. If there is not, look at it, hold it, realize what you are without love in your heart; it then becomes a machine - insensitive, vulgar, coarse, only concerned with sex and pleasure. Sirs, please, I am not harassing you, I am not scolding you. I am just pointing out what is happening. Your knowledge, your books, have destroyed you because love is not found in the books. It does not lie with knowledge. Knowledge and love don't go together. Then you say: `I know my wife', but that is your knowledge which is your image about her. That knowledge is put together by thought, and thought is not love. So, having stated all this, do you have love in your heart or is it something romantic, nonsensical, impractical, valueless? It does not give you any money; that is so. Having heard all this, is there a comprehension of the depth of that word so that your mind is in the heart? Then you have right relationship. When you have right relationship, which means love, you can never go wrong. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN BOMBAY 3RD PUBLIC TALK 29TH JANUARY, 1983 'IS THERE A PSYCHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION' We must together perceive for ourselves what is truth and what is false; not to be told what is false or what is true, what is ignorance and what is knowledge, but to find for ourselves a quiet corner in ourselves, living in this dreadful city, living in small spaces, working all day long, commuting, going to great distances in crowded trains and buses. We must find for ourselves a quiet corner, not in a house or in a garden or an empty lane but deep within ourselves, and from there act, live, and find out for ourselves what is beauty, what is time, the nature and the movement of fear, the pursuit of pleasure and the ending of sorrow. We must have such a corner, not in the mind but in the heart, because then, where there is affection and love, intellect, understanding, comes clarity, and from that there is action. But most of us live such strenuous, conflicting, lives with much pressure around us. If we don't find for ourselves some inward space, a space not created by thought, a space uncontaminated, clear, in which there is a light which is not lit by another, a light to ourselves so that we are totally free, we are not free human beings. We think we are free. We think we are free because we can choose, because we can do what we want, but freedom is something entirely different from the desire to do what we want. So we must together find for ourselves without guidance, without help, without any outside agency telling us what to do, how to behave, what is right action, and find in ourselves a space that has no ending and no beginning. First of all, what is beauty? You may ask, what has that to do with our daily life? Our daily life is rather ugly, self-centred; our daily life is a conflict, pain, anxiety, and that sense of desperate loneliness. That is our daily life. To understand that, one must have a great sense of perception, seeing actually what is going on. One of the factors of our life is time. We are going to find out what is time, what part time plays in our life; and whether time which is the process of division, time which is a beginning and an ending, time which is becoming, whether that time - apart from chronological time, apart from the time of sun rising, sun setting, the beauty of the full moon and the slip of new moon - as a path includes or excludes beauty. This is important for us to understand because we have lost all sense of an aesthetic way of living. We have lost the sense of natural beauty, not the beauty of the face only or the good taste in clothes, and so on, but the quality of beauty. Beauty cannot exist without life. Beauty is not of time. Creation is not of time. So, time is a great factor in our life. There is time by the watch, the chronological time and the time to learn a language, a skill, a time to achieve in this world - become from a clerk to the executive person, and so on. There is time in that direction. Is there time psychologically, that is, inwardly? Is there time which means a progress from here to there, in the sense of becoming more noble, more free of greed, anger, violence? Time is evolution. From the seed to a tree, from a baby to manhood, the growth, the becoming, all that implies time. Time has evolution. Now we are going to question together whether there is psychological evolution at all. This is important because time and thought are the root of fear. Fear cannot end or fade away or dissipate if you don't understand the nature of time and the nature of thought which are the roots of all fear. We are examining together the nature of time. There is physical time, the new moon becoming the full moon, the seed growing into a great gigantic tree. Time is necessary to learn a language, a skill; time is necessary to accumulate knowledge. You may learn a language within a week or six months. To go from here to your house takes time; from one point to another. All physical movement, physical activity, learning, requires time. The psyche, that is, the bundle of all your thinking, of all your feelings, of all your conclusions, beliefs, gods, hope, fear, all that is a bundle, that is your consciousness, that is what you are. That is what your consciousness is. Your consciousness is made of all these things - your gods, your knowledge, your faith, your hope, your fears, your pleasures, your conclusions, your loneliness and the great fear of sorrow, pain. We are asking whether that consciousness has evolution at all. Evolution means becoming, that is, I am greedy, envious, violent. Can greed evolve into non-greed? Or anger, loneliness, become gradually something else? All our tradition, all our religious training, our belief, our faith, and all the so-called sacred literature tell you that you will become something. If you make an effort, if you strive after, if you meditate, you will move from this to that, from `what you are' to `what you should be'. That is evolution. Now the speaker is denying all that. The speaker is saying greed can never become better greed. There is only the ending of something, not becoming something. Most of you probably believe in reincarnation. Why do you believe in it? That is, from this life to next life, where you have better opportunities, where you will be a little bit nobler, where you have a little more comfort, more enlightenment; that is, from `what you are' to become `what you should be'. That is called evolution. The speaker is questioning that. He says there is no such thing as psychological evolution. You have to understand the nature of that statement, what is implied - that there is no movement as the evolution of the psyche which means there is no becoming. I don't become noble, I don`t achieve enlightenment if I practise, if I strive, if I deny this or control, and so on, which is gradation in achievement. So one has to understand the nature of time; time, as we said, essentially means to divide, break; time implies a beginning and an ending. So we are going to talk over together the nature of fear; whether fear can end now or it must end gradually. We are used to the idea that gradually we will be rid of fear, which is, `I am afraid, but give me time, I will get over it.' Can fear disappear through time or is the very time itself the root of fear? What is the root of fear? What is fear? You all know what fear is - fear of not becoming, not achieving, fear of the dark, fear of authority, fear of your wife or husband; fear has many many aspects. We are not concerned with the many facets of fear or with the wiping away of one or two fears. It is like cutting the branches of a tree, but if you want to destroy the tree, you must uproot the tree, go to the very root of it. So look at that fear. What is fear - fear of an accident, fear of disease, and ultimate fear which is of death or the fear of living? Fear is much too deep to surrender it or to dispel it or to control it or to suppress it. One must enquire into the root of it. What is the root of fear? Is it not time, is it not remembrance, is it not an experience which you have had which was painful and the fear of it recurring again, fear of disease - are not all these the symptoms? We are not dealing with symptoms. We are concerned whether it is possible to uproot totally all fear. If that is clear, then we are concerned not with a particular fear, not your own special neurotic fear but with the nature, the structure, the cause of fear, because where there is a cause, there is an end. So we are together going to find out the cause. One of the causes of fear is time. That is, the future, fear of what might happen, fear of the past which is time, which is a remembrance, which is thought. We are asking: are time and thought the root of fear are they the cause of fear? I am afraid of what might happen, that is, the future. Or I am afraid of something that has happened in the past that might happen again, that is, the past invading the present, modifying itself and going on. So time is one of the factors of fear. Now, I am asking whether thought is also a factor of fear, and if there is a difference between time and thought. Time is division as yesterday, today and tomorrow, the remembrance of the past projecting into the future, and we are afraid of that which might happen. Now, is thought one of the causes or the cause of fear? So what is thought? What is thinking? The most ignorant who does not know how to read or write, who lives in a small village, poverty-ridden, unhappy, he thinks too as you think, as the scientist thinks. Thinking is shared by all. It is not your thinking, it is not individual thinking. We are asking: is thought one of the factors of fear? We are investigating what is thinking. Thinking is shared by all humanity, whether the most educated, sophisticated, rich, powerful, and all the rest of it, or by the most simple, ignorant, half-starving person. It is common to all. Therefore it is not your thinking. You may express your thinking differently and I may express it in different words, but the fact is that we both think, and thinking is not yours or mine. It is thinking. So what is thinking? Why has it become so extraordinarily important in your life? Please understand this. Give your mind to this. Because love and thinking cannot go together. Compassion is not the product of thought. Love cannot exist in the shadow of thought. Love is not remembrance. Please give your heart and mind to the understanding of this - that thinking is common to all of us. It is not individual thinking. You may express it and another may express it differently, most scholastically, and another may not, but thinking is shared by all. So what is thinking? When that question is put to you, you begin to think, don't you? Or do you listen to the question? If you listen to the question, which is, your mind is not interfering with your conclusions, with your ideas, and so on, if you are listening with all your attention, which means with all your senses totally awakened, then you will see for yourself what is the origin of thinking. The origin of thinking is experience. Experience gives knowledge, whether it is scientific knowledge or the knowledge about wife or husband. Experience, knowledge, stored in the brain as memory and response of memory, is thinking. This is very simple. It is a fact. You cannot think if there is no memory, if there is no knowledge, if there is no experience. So thinking is a process of time, because knowledge is a process of time and knowledge can never be complete. Therefore thought can never be complete; you must always be fragmented. So fear is the child of thought. So thought and time are the factors of fear. Now, is thought different from time, or is thought time? Thought is a movement, is it not? It is a material process. Whatever thought has done is material. Your gods are created by thought, your rituals are created by thought. All the things that go on in the name of religion are created by thought. The gods, the gurus, everything is created by thought. Thought is limited, fragmented, because knowledge is limited, and all action then becomes limited. Where there is limitation, there must be fear. So we are asking, do thought and time work together or are they different? Or is there only thought which is divided as time, as progress, as evolution, as becoming? Sirs, please explore all this. Search out. Don't let your brains become dull by knowledge. Life is both intellect, emotion, senses. But if you let thought dominate them all, as you do, then our life becomes fragmented, shallow, empty. We ought to talk over together what is love. Would you say that you love somebody, love without attachment, love without jealousy? If there is attachment, there is no love. If there is any kind of antagonism, hate, love cannot exist. Where there is fear, love cannot exist. Where there is ambition, love cannot exist; where there is power of any kind, the other cannot be. If you have power over your wife or if you possess your husband or if you are ambitious, then love is not. We are asking, do you love, because without love, suffering will go on. We have to search out, seek out whether there is a possibility of ending sorrow, because all these are linked together. Sorrow is not different from fear. Sorrow is not different from thought. Sorrow is not different from hate, the wounds, the psychological wounds that we receive. They are all related to each other. It is one issue, not separate issues. It is something that you have to approach wholly, not partially. But if you approach it intellectually, ideally or idealistically, romantically, then you don't see the wholeness of life. So we are searching out if there is a possibility of ending sorrow. Fear, pleasure and sorrow have existed from time beyond thought. Man has always had these three factors in life - fear, the pursuit of pleasure and sorrow, and apparently he has not gone beyond that. He has tried every method, every system that you can think of, tried to suppress it, tried to escape from it, tried to invent the gods and surrender all this to that invention, but that has not worked either. So we must find out whether sorrow can end, whether we can understand the nature of sorrow, the causes of sorrow. Is the cause different from fear, is the cause different from pleasure, pleasure of achievement, pleasure of talent, pleasure of wealth? Let us find out whether sorrow and fear can ever end. The pursuit of pleasure is infinite, is endless, the pleasure of achievement, the pleasure of being attached to somebody, whether that attachment is to a person, to an idea or to a conclusion. While you are pursuing that pleasure, there is always the shadow of fear with it. Where there is fear, there is sorrow. But they are all together. They are all interrelated, and one must deal with them all wholly, not separately. Be clear that we are not dealing with sorrow separately as though it was something different from fear. We are looking, searching out the nature of sorrow and the ending of sorrow, because where there is sorrow, there is no love. Sorrow expresses itself in so many ways - the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of seeing this vast country where there is poverty, corruption, utter disregard for another human being, carelessness. When you watch all this day after day, that is also sorrow, the utter neglect by all the politicians all over the world. They only want power, position, and where there is power, there is evil. And sorrow is the loss of someone you love. Sorrow of losing, sorrow of ending something you have cherished, something that you have held on to, the sorrow of doubt, the sorrow of seeing one's own life such an empty shell, meaningless existence. You may have money, sex, children, be very fashionable, rich, but it is an empty life. There is no depth in it. Seeing that, perceiving the nature of it, is also sorrow. So can sorrow end? It is not your sorrow. It is also mine and another's. Don't deal with sorrow as your particular precious stuff. It is shared by all humanity. Deal with it not as your particular sorrow, your private quiet sorrow, but as the sorrow of all human beings, whether you are a man or a woman, rich or poor, sophisticated or at the height of your excellence. Please don't deal with all these factors like fear, pleasure, sorrow, love, and so on as something separate from each other. You must approach this whole thing wholly, not fragmentarily. If you approach it fragmentarily, you will never solve it. So, look at greed, pain, sorrow, as a whole movement of life, not something different from life. This is our daily life. To find whether there is an end to all this - to misery, to conflict, pain, sorrow and fear - one must be able to perceive them, one must be able to be aware of them. We must understand what is perception, how to look. Is the observer who looks at all this - the poverty, the loneliness, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the suffering - different from all that or is the observer all that? I will explain this. We have separated the `me', who is the observer, from that which he is observing. I say I am suffering and I say to myself that suffering must end, and to end it, I must suppress it, I must escape from it, I must follow a certain system. So, I am different from fear, from pleasure, from pain, sorrow. Are you different from all that? Or you may think that there is something in you which is totally different from all that. If you think that, it is part of your thought, and therefore there is nothing sacred there. So, is the observer different from the observed? When you are angry, envious, brutal, violent, are you not all that? The meditator is the meditation. Please sir, think about it. The observer is the observed. See the importance of this. Before, we have divided the observer from the observed. That means there is a division between that and the other. So, there was conflict. You could then control it, suppress it, fight it, but if you are that, if you are sorrow, if you are fear, if you are pleasure, you are the conglomeration of all this. To realize that fact is a tremendous reality; therefore, there is no division, and therefore there is no conflict; the observer is the observed. Then a totally different action takes place, a totally different chemical action takes place. It is not an intellectual achievement, not the intellectual concept of the truth but to see the fact, the truth of it, that you are not different from your qualities, you are not different from your anger, jealousy, hatred, but you are all that, You know what happens when you realize that, not verbally but inwardly? Find out. Are you waiting for me to tell you? I won't. You see how your mind works. You are waiting for me to tell you; you don't want to find out. If I tell you, then you will say yes, right or wrong, but you will go on, but find out for yourself the actual truth of it, that the observer is the observed, the watcher is the watched, that you are the whole bundle of your consciousness, the content of your consciousness is what you are and the content of that consciousness is put together by thought. Now, to find out, not the ending of thought, but to find out how to observe the content, when you observe without the division, then a totally different action takes place. Where there is love, there is no observer. There is no you and the one that you love. There is only that quality of love. MIND WITHOUT MEASURE TALKS IN BOMBAY 4TH PUBLIC TALK 30TH JANUARY, 1983 'WHAT IS A RELIGIOUS MIND?' We ought to talk over together the significance of death, about what is religion and meditation. Before going into all that, I wonder if one is aware of what is happening to our minds, to our brain; if one is aware of the extraordinary things that the brain, which is the seat of thought, has brought about. Technologically we have progressed, advanced so rapidly, and psychologically our behaviour, our attitudes, our actions, are more or less un-evolved. We are still aggressive, brutal, cruel, thoughtless, for thousands and thousands of years. Apparently man is still behaving more or less as he behaved 40,000 years ago. If we had that same energy, that same intensity, as one used in the technological world, if we could go very, very deeply into ourselves and go beyond ourselves, the brain has infinite capacity there too. But very few have taken that journey, very few have gone into this question whether the mind, the brain, can ever be totally free, and therefore enquire very deeply, search out what lies beyond, if there is anything beyond thought. Some of you perhaps have heard of genetic engineering. The genetic experts say that they assume a factor, a creative element, handed out from the father to the offspring, certain tendencies, qualities. `They are saying, since man has not changed for thousands of years, they assume that he can be changed through genetic interference. It is a very complex question which we are not going to discuss. But we must understand what is going on, that as human beings have not deeply changed their characteristics, their way of life, their violence, they are hoping through certain chemical process and so on to change the genes, the factors that transmit certain characteristics from the father to the son. Also we should consider what is happening in the computer world. We cannot neglect all this: the genetic engineering and what is happening in the computer world. They are trying to create a mechanical intelligence, ultimate intelligence through the computer which will then think much more rapidly, more accurately, and inform the robots what they should do. This is happening already and they are trying to bring about a machine, a computer, which has ultimate intelligence. So, there is on one side genetic engineering, on the other the computer acting as human beings, inventing generation after generation of computer, improving, and so on. I won't go into all that. So what is going to happen to the human mind? What is going to happen to us when the computer can do almost everything that we do? It can meditate, it can invent gods, much better gods than yours, it can inform, educate your children far better than the present teacher, and it will create a great deal of leisure for man. Are you understanding the nature of all this, the significance of all this? That is, what is going to happen to our minds? When the computer and genetic engineering are rapidly advancing, what is going to happen to us? We would have more leisure, the computer plus the robot will do a great many things that we are doing now in our factories, in our offices, and so on. Then man will have more leisure. How will he use that leisure? Please go into this with me for a while. If the computer can outthink you, remember far more than you do, calculate with such astonishing speed and give you leisure, either you pursue the path of pleasure which is entertainment - cinemas, religious entertainments, you know all the industry of entertainment, including the gurus - or psychological search, seeking out inwardly and finding out for oneself a tremendous area that is beyond all thought. These are the only two possibilities left for us -entertainment or delving into the whole structure of the psyche and acting. Now we are asking what is our human mind, our brain. We are going to find out for ourselves. We first begin by asking what is the significance of death. It is the question of all humanity whether we are very young or very old. What is the meaning, the significance, of the extraordinary thing called death? Yesterday evening, we talked about several things including what is love, compassion; what is the relationship of life which is not only the whole human existence, what is its relationship to love, to death and to the whole search of man for thousands of years to find something that is beyond all thought. We have to understand the meaning of death because we are all going to die. That is absolute certainty. We are so afraid of it or we rationalize it. You say `yes', I accept it, I accept death as I accept pain, as I accept sorrow, as I accept loneliness; I also accept death, which is to submit, to suffer death, to allow the whole of existence of a human being to come to an end, either through disease, through old age or through some incident. We never find out while we are living what it means to die, to understand the depth of it. You are looking at it as an incident of life, as a fact of life, as violence is a fact of life, as hatred is a fact of life. If we are at all reasonable, sane, we must look at this question of death in similar manner, not accept it, not just say it is inevitable or try to find out what lies beyond death, but to observe the nature of dying. What does death mean to most of us? Surely it means the ending, both organically and biologically, of all the things that we have held here, of all the wounds, pains, sacrifice, resistance, loneliness, despair - all that coming to an end, which means, either there is a continuity of the self, the `me', or the ending of the `me'. We said death is an ending. You can believe in reincarnation, as most of you perhaps do. If you do, you have to ask the question, what is it that continues? Is there a continuity or is there constant change - breaking, ending, beginning? If you believe - as most people perhaps in India believe - that you are going to be reborn, then what is it that is going to be reborn? Surely not the physical body, but if you believe in that, it is a continuity of what you are now, continuity of your beliefs, your activities, your greed, and so on, that is the bundle which is the consciousness, which is the self. That self, which is essentially consciousness, is put together by thought, your greed, your envy; your religious beliefs, superstitions, your anger, and so on; all those are the activities of thought. You are the result of a continuous movement of thought. If you believe in reincarnation and all that, you must find out if it is an illusion or a reality. If you are your name, your form, your ideas, your conclusions, your experiences, are they the factors of continuity as the `me' in the next life? What is that `me'? Each one of us, we think, is a separate entity; we think we are so-called individuals. What is that individuality - the name, the form, what you remember, your attitudes, your loneliness, your pain, your anxiety, your chaos, your sorrow and uncertainty? You may live in a nice house or in a small room or a nice flat but you are all that. You are the bank account. When you are attached to a bank account, you are the bank account; when you are attached to a house, you are the house; when you are attached to your body, you are that. You may have lovely furniture, and it may be marvellous furniture, and if you are attached to that, you are that furniture. So you are all that. When you are attached to a chair, to a person, to an idea, to an ideal, to a personal experience, what are the implications of that attachment? Why are you attached, because death says you cannot be attached, that is the end of it. You may believe in the future, but death says you have ended, your attachment is over, your bank account is over, your guru and all your following is over. So what is it that continues, that is reborn -memories, ideas? Which is what? - something dead, or is there no continuity at all? Think, search out, please. Continuity means that which is going on modifying itself. You are becoming something, and achieving it and wanting more. Continuity implies security, certainty. Are you certain about anything? Is there security in your ideas? We want continuity. We hope to have continuity because, in continuity we thing there is security. One has been married for ten years, fifteen years or fifty years, there is certain continuity, but in that continuity there is conflict, misery, unhappiness, all the rest of that. So there is no continuity at all. There is constant change if you are aware of it. Either that can be superficial or a total mutation, change. That which has existed completely undergoes a change. One must find out for oneself what is the truth of this matter. One cannot be convinced by argument, by so-called evidence, and so on. One cannot be convinced of anything. One has to search out, seek and find what is true and what is illusion. We have lived with this illusion that we are separate entities, whereas if you examine very closely, your consciousness, which is you is shared by all humanity. They suffer as you suffer, they are as uncertain as you are; they are lonely, miserable, confused, anxious, as you are. So your consciousness is not yours. It is the consciousness of all humanity. You are the entire humanity. It is not mere logical conclusion or observation. That is a fact. We have been trained, educated, both religiously and educationally, that we are separate individuals. We are frightened that individuality should come to an end. With such a thought, such concept as an individual, when one approached the question of death, there is immense fear of ending. But if one sees the reality, the truth that you are the rest of mankind, then what is death? Have you ever enquired what is the nature of ending, not ending to begin something, but ending? That is, you are attached, that is a common fact; attached to your children, attached to your husband, wife, attached to something or other. Death comes along and wipes away that attachment. You cannot carry your money to heaven. You may like to have it till the last moment, but you cannot take it with you, and death says no. So can we, while living understand the nature of attachment with all its fear, jealousy, anxiety, possessive feeling; while living, be free of attachment? While you are alive, to end something voluntarily, easily without any pressure, without any reward or punishment, to end, in that there is great beauty. Then one understands the nature of freedom. In the ending, there is a beginning, something new. There is an ending, and when there is an ending, there is that feeling of total freedom from all the burden that humanity has carried for centuries. You listen to all this, smile, nod your head and agree, but you will go on being attached. That is the easiest way, the most comforting and the most painful, but you will go on. And you call that practical. Whereas, if you understand the nature of ending, you end your ambition in a very, very competitive world, understand the ending of your arrogance, your pride, your status. When this so-called organism ends, the content of consciousness of humanity goes on unless you bring about a radical change in that consciousness, a mutation, so that you are no longer in that stream of selfishness; you are no longer caught, engaged, put in the prison of attachment, uncertainty, and so on. There is a totally different way of living. Also we should talk about religion. It is a very complex question. Together we are going to find out a mind that is religious, not the mind that does puja, all the ceremonies, beliefs, and all that. That is not religion. Those are all the inventions of thought. God is your invention because you find life so dull, boring. It is such a pain. So you invent god who is all-perfect, all-loving; you worship that, and you worship that which you have put together by thought. So thought is deceiving you. But you will go on because you love to live in illusion. We must find out what is a religious mind, because a religious mind brings about a new world, a new civilization, a new culture, a new outburst of energy. One must find out for oneself what is a religious mind, not be told, not be directed, not be explained to. So what is a religious mind? You can only find out if you deny totally all the present religious structure, religious beliefs and ideas, because it is only a free mind that can find out what is the quality of the religious mind. First of all, one can see very clearly that freedom is essential, not freedom from something. A prisoner wants freedom, which means first he is caught in a prison, then he wants freedom to leave that prison. That is only a reaction. That reaction is not freedom. Freedom implies the total ending of all illusions, of all beliefs, of all your accumulated wants, desires. A religious mind is a sane, healthy, factual mind; it faces facts, not ideas. The speaker can go on explaining what is a religious mind. Perhaps you will accept the definitions or deny the definitions; and merely arguing, analysing, questioning, may help, but it may not necessarily bring about a religious mind. So one has to have a great humility, a sense of not knowing. Also a religious mind acts, because it is compassionate. That action is born of intelligence. Intelligence, love, compassion, all go together. That is meditation. Don't suddenly sit up properly. That has no meaning. You may sit cross-legged, breathe properly, practise various systems; that is not meditation. We are going to enquire, search out for ourselves, what is meditation. The word `meditation means, according to a good dictionary, to ponder over, to think over, to look closely, to come in touch with, not something sublime invented by thought, but come close and touch your daily life. That is the ordinary dictionary meaning of that word `meditation. Also meditation implies measurement. That is the meaning of that word. So we begin by asking, why do we measure? What do we mean by measurement? Why is there in our mind and heart this constant measurement? Measurement means comparison. I compare myself with you, wanting to be like you, wanting to be like your guru, like your highest example, whatever it is. Why do we compare at all in life? We say we compare in order to make progress. We are always comparing. You are beautiful, I am not. I want to be as beautiful, as powerful as you are. We want to be as enlightened as you are. There is always this competition of comparison between us. We are never free of that movement, but if we are free, then what are we? Do you understand my question? Is it possible to be free of comparison, is it possible to end comparison? If you don`t compare, then you throw away a great burden that has no reality. Because, then you are what you are. From there you can begin, but if you are always comparing, becoming somebody else, then you are fundamentally unhappy anxious, frightened, and all the rest of it. So please ask the question of yourself, whether you can live without comparison, without any form of measurement which is quite difficult, because we are trained, educated, convinced, that we are this but we will become that. The becoming is a form of measurement. To live without a single movement of measurement is part of meditation. Most people who meditate follow various systems. Each one has his own guru and he has laid down certain systems of meditation, and you practise, repeat certain words over and over again and you call that meditation. When you repeat over and over again, what is happening to your brain? You become more and more dull. You become a machine and you think that is meditation. You will go on doing it in spite of what the speaker is saying. In enquiring what is meditation, there can be no system, no effort. Effort means conflict. Can you be free of systems, practice, realizing the fact that your brain, your senses, become dull? Can you be free of systems? Can the mind, the brain, realize what it means to follow somebody, to obey what somebody else tells you to do because he calls himself a guru? All those things have destroyed the beauty of a religious mind. Meditation is none of these things, yoga included. Then what is meditation? You want experience. You are craving for some strange experience, so-called spiritual experience. You have enough of experiences in this world, of pain, anxiety, sorrow, and you say we want something more, greater experience. Experience has nothing whatsoever to do with meditation. To experience, there must be an experiencer, and if there is an experiencer, that experiencer is the continuity of past memories which is the self. Meditation is the understanding of the whole structure of the `me', the self, the ego, and whether it is possible to be totally free of the self, not seek some super-self. The super-self is still the self. So meditation is something which is not a cultivated, determined, activity. There must be freedom, and where there is freedom, there is space. Have we space apart from the physical world? Have we, living in Bombay, space? Hardly. We live in a little flat or a little room, and our minds gradually accept that little space. We are talking of space which has no walls. You know, when you look at the sea, when the smog has gone and you see the far horizon, the vast disc, and when you look up at the stars and see their extraordinary brightness and the vast space and the space that you have in your mind, how small it is, how narrow it is; that space in your heart and mind is so controlled, shaped, put together. There is hardly any space in you. To understand that which is sacred, there must be vast space in you, not out there in the sea. Space is not separation. Space is not division. When you divide, there is space between you and your wife, between you as India and another country, but that is not space. The space inwardly can only exist when there is no conflict whatsoever. Then when there is that vast limitless space of the mind, then only in that space there is energy, not the energy and friction of thought, because that energy is born out of freedom. When there is that space and silence and that immeasurable energy, then there is that which is utterly nameless, measureless, timeless; then there is that which is sacred. But to find that, one must have great love, great compassion, which must begin at home. You must love your wife, your children, your husband. Love cannot exist with attachment. If it is attachment, then you have all the problems of life. So, sirs and ladies, it is your life. Either you bring about a great radical, psychological revolution in yourself or the experts of the genetic world are going to make you do something. Then you will become merely machines. Then life will have very little meaning. But there is great significance, great meaning, if you are aware what love is, compassion and intelligence. Then out of that comes great silence and vast space. All that cannot exist if there is any shadow of selfishness. And this is meditation, and not the repetition of words, not the discipline of will, but the discipline of order which comes when there is no conflict. NEW DELHI 1ST PUBLIC TALK 30TH OCTOBER, 1982 If one may point out, this is not a lecture as it is commonly understood, a discourse on a particular subject with its instructions. This is not a lecture, but rather a conversation between two people, between you and the speaker, not on a particular subject, instructing, guiding and shaping your thought or opinions. We are two friends sitting in a park on a bench talking over together their problems. So please bear that in mind throughout the talks, tomorrow and next weekend that two friends, you and the speaker, who who are concerned deeply with what is going on in the world, their confusion, the chaos, almost anarchy that exists throughout the world. But we are talking over together what is happening in this part of the world. I wonder if you have a friend with whom you talk, with whom you expose your own feelings, your own concepts, your ideas and disillusionment and so on. If you have such a friend, and I hope you have, if you have such a friend with whom you are discussing, you are talking over together, neither one nor the other is trying to persuade the other, persuade, guide, or shape his particular thought. So if you are willing, we are going to talk over together in that manner, exploring, enquiring, never accepting what another says, never expressing one's own strong opinions, but rather without any bias, in great friendship, which means with great affection respecting each other, without any arriere pensee, that is, having some kind of hidden thought, hidden motive. So we are together this evening going to enquire, not asserting, because in this enquiry there is no authority. The speaker has no authority, he is not your guru. Thank god! He is not a lecturer, asserting certain points of view, or introducing a new kind of philosophy, or ideas. This must be made perfectly clear, that he is not an authority, but rather together we are going to enquire into what is happening in this country. That is, what is happening not only outwardly, in the world of politics, economics, business and the environment, but also we are going to talk over together as two friends their own inward life - their confusion, their misery, their suffering and so on. So please we are both, you and the speaker, are responsible, as two friends, not the speaker is lecturing, telling you what to do, or what to think, or proposing a new set of systems, ideologies, and so on. Both of us are equal, both of us are concerned with our own lives, and the lives of others. So first let us look at what is happening around us, outwardly, without any bias, not as an Indian, not as a German, Englishman, American, or Russian, we are human beings, whatever country we belong to. We are human beings facing a very dangerous world, facing a great deal of uncertainty, confusion, and when the mind is confused we seek some kind of authority as a means of security. So we are first going to consider, if you will, what is happening here. As one observes, the country is going through a great confusion, great uncertainty; there is chaos, people have no direction, but unfortunately we are conditioned when we are confused, uncertain, insecure, to try to and find a solution in the past, go back to our old traditions. This is what is happening throughout the world. There are the fundamentalists who accept the Bible as their authority, the fundamentalists of Islam who look to the Koran, there are the fundamentalists who look to Marx. So when we are uncertain, confused, greatly disturbed, we look to some kind of authority, some kind of book, to the past, to find a direction. Now in this country, as you observe, there are not many books - or rather too many books, too many leaders. So our tradition is uncertain. All the leaders, all the gurus, all the so-called saints have not helped mankind because we are actually what we are at the moment. So what is the root cause of all this confusion? Because when one can find the cause then we can end it. A cause has an end. Right? I hope we are following each other. So we are asking, what is the cause, or causes, of this confusion, this lack of integrity, this sense of desperate degeneration, what is the root of all this. Most of us play with symptoms; we say it is the overpopulation, bad governments, right throughout the world it is the same, lack of leadership, lack of morality. These are all symptoms, but one never asks, what is the cause of all this. And when you begin to enquire into the cause of it, each one of us will give different opinions; the more learned you are the greater assertion of the cause, or causes. But we are not very learned people, we are ordinary people, we are laymen, we are not very bright, very intelligent, but we are caught in this, in this great turmoil that exists in the world and here. There are wars, every nation, every group, is preparing for war. I wonder if you are aware of all this. Every country, specially the industrial countries, are supplying armaments to the rest of the world. The other day in London on television an industrialist was being interviewed, and the industrialist said, 'We send abroad eighty per cent of our armaments and twenty per cent we keep.' This is happening in all the industrial countries. And nobody says, 'Why do we have to have war? Why do we have to kill each other, murder each other?' They are talking about stopping nuclear war, but not ending all wars. Why? Why have human beings reduced themselves to this condition? Please, this is very important to ask. Why do you have to kill other people, for what? For your nation? For your particular group? The idea of war is a great historical process which we have accepted, and it has become a great reality, but the root of it is we live in an illusion, an illusion that our country must be protected. What is your country? Please ask these questions. What are you protecting? Your house? Your hope? Your ideas? Your bank account? And the whole world is degenerating, going to pieces, and we are not enquiring into fundamental causes. So we are going together, as two friends, please bear this in mind, as two friends, who are not against each other, who are friendly, who have a certain affection for each other, and are facing this problem, which is, why have we human beings become what we are, confused, uncertain, following any leader that comes along, the country breaking up, fragmentation going on, the Sikhs, the Hindus, the Muslims and so on, what is the cause of this? Are you waiting for the speaker to tell you? Or, is your mind, your brain active enough to enquire, not depend on the speaker to tell you? We will talk over together, which means your mind, your brain must be as active as that of the speaker. And it can only be active if you are not saying, I am Hindu, Buddhist, whatever it is. We are free to enquire. Enquiry means first looking what is actually going on, not a theory of what is going on, actually observing with your heart, with your mind, with your capacity, with your energy to look. Now what is the cause of it? Is it that we have looked to others to help us, we have looked to political leaders, religious leaders, economic leaders, with their particular ideas, with their particular systems, so that you are always depending on others to guide you, to tell you what to do. Is that the root cause of this? Or do you blame the environment? You understand my question? Do you blame the environment? That is, the government, no proper leader, no righteous guru, those are all the environment, something outside of you. Is that the cause of this? Which means that you have relied entirely on authority: authority of tradition, authority of books, authority of leaders, gurus and so on. So when you depend you gradually become weak, you become feeble, you are incapable of thinking clearly because you depend. This is a fact. Newspapers tell you what to think, all the meetings that you attend, the discourse, instruct. So self-reliance, the sense of responsibility for oneself, not depending on another, that may the root cause of this, that we have become irresponsible because we depend. You understand the fact of this? Just a minute, sir, you can ask questions perhaps at the end of the talk, if we have time, but please quietly, you and I are talking over together. The speaker is not asserting a thing, he doesn't want you to follow him, he is not your guru, he is not your leader, but you and I, the speaker, who wants to show a different way of living, not that you must accept it, but enquire, put your mind and heart into this to find out why we have become what we are, so utterly selfish, utterly self-concerned. And in that state of mind and brain you ask, what is the root cause of all this, you are incapable of enquiry, finding out because our conditioning is to depend, to be directed, to be told what to do, what to believe. This is a fact, isn't it? So is it possible to be a light to oneself, and not depend on a single person? Of course you depend on the milkman, on the postman, on the policeman who keeps order at a crossroad, you depend on a surgeon, on a doctor, but inwardly, psychologically to think clearly for oneself, to observe one's own reactions and responses. And ask if one can be completely a light to oneself. You understand what that means, to be a light to oneself. Not self-confidence, not self-reliance, self-confidence is a part of selfishness, it is a part of egotism, but to be a light to oneself which requires great freedom, a very clear brain, not a conditioned brain. We will go into the activity of the brain, what is the relationship of the brain to the mind - we will go into all that presently. But one must be very active, not merely intellectually, which is verbally, active with one's ideas. The speaker does not mean that. To have an active brain, to challenge, to question, to doubt, that means to have energy, but when you depend on others you lose energy. That's what is happening. So we are asking if this is the root cause of all this confusion, uncertainty, insecurity, this breaking up of this country into parties, which is all indicates a state of chaos. And we are responsible for it. Each one of us is responsible for what is happening. So we are going together seriously, amicably, with a great sense of affection for each other, to enquire and see if we cannot go beyond all this. So you are here for that purpose, not to be instructed, not to be told or given a direction. We have had all that in the past, and the result is this utter lack of personal responsibility. So let's proceed from there. This is the cause. Where there is a cause there is an end. If I have cancer, which is the cause of my pain, it can be removed. So where there is a cause to any problem, there is an end to that problem. But we must be very clear of the causation of a particular problem, or many problems. Not just merely explain away verbally the problems. So please we are listening to each other, actively, without any bias. If that is the cause of this present degeneration of mankind, then can this degeneration be put an end to? That's the problem. So is your mind, your brain, conditioned? You understand that word, being conditioned? When we are born, from the moment we are born the brain is being conditioned, shaped, by tradition, by your religion, by the literature you read, by the newspapers, by your parents, you are being conditioned. The brain is conditioned. It has lived for millions of years, it has had a great many experiences, it has faced wars, sorrow, pleasure, pain, agony, great disturbance, and it is conditioned as a Hindu, it is conditioned as a Sikh, as a Muslim, as a Christian. Why is it conditioned? Please enquire with me. Why is one's brain conditioned - if you are aware that it is conditioned. You are conditioned, aren't you? You call yourself a Hindu, and I call myself a Muslim - why? Your parents, your books, have told you, you are a Hindu, I am a Muslim. That is, years of propaganda, two thousand years of Christianity, the repetition of a certain formula, rituals, has conditioned the brain; the Muslim's brain is also conditioned, like the Hindu brain, with his rituals, with his authority, with his knowledge of previous instructions and so on. So we are enquiring, please listen to this, we are enquiring seriously, whether your brain, which is conditioned, if you are aware of it, can that condition be resolved. Do we both of us see actually that we are conditioned? Right? Do we both of us agree to this at least? Yes? If you are conditioned it means you are being conditioned, it becomes mechanical. Right? You repeat that you are a Hindu, I am Muslim, I am a Marxist and so on. So your brain becomes mechanical, routine, repeating the same thing over and over again, like, war is necessary, leadership is necessary, you must depend - a child depends on his mother up to a certain age but after that he leaves - but we, through dependency, even when we are grown-up become infantile. Right? So we are concerned first whether the brain can be freed from its conditioning. You understand, if it is conditioned, the speaker as a Muslim and you as a Hindu are going to have war, we will fight each other, we will kill each other. That's what is happening. And if you like to live in a state of perpetual war, that's your affair; but if you are serious, concerned with human existence, with the future of man, one must learn whether it is possible to free the brain from its conditioning. There is a whole group of people who say the brain cannot be freed from conditioning, it will always be conditioned but modify it. That is one of the theories of communism, of Marxism, that the brain can never be free from its conditioning and therefore condition it in a new way, which is Marxism, read what Marx has said, accept him as your god -perhaps not as god - as your saint and so on. If I am a Christian, I have been conditioned, I accept the Bible, and so on. So first do we realize, the two of us talking together as friends, do we realize actually that our brains are conditioned? Then we will ask, if we are serious, whether it is possible to free the brain from being a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Marxist. We are human beings, not labels, but labels count a great deal. That's what is going on - the Sikhs wanting their own petty little affair. So first, please realize as two friends who are talking over together, great friendship, that our brains are conditioned, and we see the consequences of being conditioned: where there is conditioning there is no freedom, there cannot be love, there cannot be affection. So it is imperative, absolutely essential for the future of humanity that we are concerned with the brain which is conditioned. If one is aware of that then we can proceed whether it is possible to free the brain. The relationship between the brain and the mind exists, is realized when the brain is completely free, then the brain is the mind. We will go into that later as we go along. So we are conditioned. And we are asking, whether it is possible to be free. Don't say, it is, or, it is not, because that would be absurd. Whereas if you are enquiring then you are learning, not being instructed, you are learning for yourself through enquiry, through investigation. Right? So let's find out. Where do you begin? Where do you begin to enquire whether it is possible to free the brain from its conditioning? You understand? That is, you are enquiring whether it is possible not to be a Hindu, or a Muslim, or a Sikh, but a human being, with all the travail of humanity, the anxieties, the uncertainties, with the depth of sorrow and pain. So where do you begin? Do you begin to enquire from the outside, or do you begin to enquire from inside? You understand my question? That is, is the outside, the world, not the physical world, not nature, but the world which humanity has created, is that world different from the world in which you live inside? Do you understand my question? The society, the morals, the systems, the outward world, is that different from you? Or, you have created it, you who want security, you who want to have different status, the more powerful, the less powerful, the more greedy and the less greedy, the religious saint and the ordinary man - you have created all this. So please look at this: the world is you, and you are the world. Right? Is that a fact to you, or just an idea? You understand, it is very important to understand this. We, in our disorder, in our confusion, in the desire for security, we have created a world outside of us, a society which is corrupt, immoral, confused, everlastingly at war, because we ourselves, in ourselves, we are confused, we are in conflict, we want to kill somebody out of anger, violence, because we want to protect our image as Hindus. Right? And the Muslim wants to protect his image as a Muslim, and the Christian does the same thing. The speaker has just returned from Europe. He has visited many countries; each country says, British, British, British; French, French, French. Right? They never consider as human beings, but isolated entities, isolated groups. That's part of our conditioning. So the speaker is asking, where do you begin, knowing that you have created this world. So we have to begin with yourself, not with the alteration or systems of the outer world, which is not looking for a new leader, new system, new philosophy, new gurus, but looking at yourself, as you are. So can you observe yourself as you would observe your face in a mirror? You understand my question? Can you observe your reactions, your responses? Because your reactions and your responses are what you are. So let's begin there to enquire. Life is a process of relationship. There is no life without relationship. You understand? This is a fact. You may be a hermit, you may be a monk, you may withdraw from all society, but you are related, as a human being you cannot escape from being related. Right? Is this clear? You are related to your wife, to your husband, to your children. You are related to your government, you are related to the hermit who withdraws because you feed him, and he is related to his ideas. So relationship is the basis of human existence. Without relationship there is no existence. You are either related to the past, which is to all the tradition, to all the memories, to all the books, or you are related to some future ideation. So relationship is the most important thing in life. Do we see that? Not verbally, not intellectually but actually with your heart and mind, do you see the truth of that? So we are enquiring, what is your relationship with another, however intimate or not. Go on, sir, we are enquiring, sir, don't go to sleep. What's your relationship? Is it that we are from childhood hurt, wounded, psychologically? Are you wounded, hurt, therefore from that hurt, from that psychological wound you bring about violence? And the consequence of being hurt inwardly, wounded, is that you enclose yourself more and more not to be hurt. And your relationship with another then becomes very narrow, limited. So we must first enquire whether it is possible to find out whether you can never be hurt. So we are enquiring, what is the root of being hurt, what is the cause of it. When I say, I am hurt, my pride is hurt, what does that mean? My teacher has hurt me, my parents have hurt me - we are all hurt, we are all wounded, by an accident, by a word, by a look, by a gesture. So what is it that is hurt? When you say, I am hurt - what is that 'I' which is being hurt? Is it not an image that you have built about yourself? Haven't you got images? The brain is always - what a noisy town this is. All right let's go on. Probably it is a demonstration against this meeting! The whole world wants to demonstrate about something or other. So we are asking a very serious question: what is it that is hurt. The brain has the capacity to create images. The images are the illusions we have, illusions like war, it is an illusion, we accept it. We accept killing another human being, another life, as part of the image which we have. We have many, many images, and one of the images is, I am being hurt. So we are enquiring what is the entity that is being hurt. The entity is the image that I have built about myself. Right? I think I am very clever, a great man; you come along and tell me 'Don't be an idiot', I get hurt. Where there is comparison there is hurt. You follow all this? When I compare myself with somebody who is more clever, more bright, more intelligent, that is, when there is measurement there must be hurt. So please enquire whether you can live without comparison, without measurement. You understand my question? We are always comparing ourselves with somebody. It begins at the school level, when the boy is told he must be as good as his brother, that is the comparison, that is measurement. And that process continues throughout life. So is it possible, please enquire - it is possible to live without comparison, without measurement? This is a tremendously complicated question because the word 'better' is measurement, the word 'more' is measurement, 'self-improvement' is measurement. So find out whether it is possible to live without measurement, which means without comparison. Part of meditation is to enquire into not becoming, which is measurement. We will go into that when we come to that. So is it possible in our relationship with each other, however intimate it is, not to have measurement? That means your brain must be active in your relationship, not just routine: she is my wife - or husband - you know, carry on like a machine. So one must enquire into our relationship, whether in that relationship there is hurt, and that hurt brings about greater fear, greater enclosure within oneself, and therefore isolation. You follow? Isolation, each country is isolating itself - Britain is isolated, France is isolated, America is isolated, in their way of looking at life. So where there is isolation there must be conflict. If I am a Jew and you are an Arab, which is, you are isolated as an Arab, and I am isolated as a Jew, we are going to fight. So please see the importance of this. As long as there is isolation, either outwardly, or inwardly, there must be conflict. And we are asking, the brain has been conditioned in isolation as a Hindu, as a Buddhist and so on. So to enquire into this question, whether the brain can resolve its own conditioning, one must enquire into relationship. What is your relationship with another, with your wife, with your husband, with your children. Begin there, near at home, not far away. You know, sirs, to go very far you must begin very, very near. To go very far you must put your house in order. So can you be aware, alert, so that you are watching your relationship, and learning from that awareness how you respond, what are your reactions. That is life, that's everyday life. And that requires constant attention to every reaction, every thought, but most of us are so lazy, and we have become lazy because we are dependent on others. So please, as two friends, we have gone into a certain question of relationship, and we will enquire further into the nature of that relationship, whether the human brain, whether it is your brain or it is the brain of mankind. This is really a very serious question: is your brain an individual brain, or, the brain of humanity? When you say, it's my brain - when you say, it's my consciousness, is it your consciousness, individual consciousness, or, it is the consciousness of mankind. I will go into it very, very briefly now, you can enquire into it. You suffer, you are uncertain, you believe, you are anxious, you are in agony, pain. That's what you are, your belief, your knowledge, your character, that's what you are. And that's exactly what your neighbour is, he suffers, he goes through agonies, sorrow, pain, trouble. Right? So is your consciousness separate from the rest of mankind? No, of course not. So please if you admit that, if you see the truth of that, then are you an individual? You may think you are an individual because you are dark, short, peripheral activity makes you think you are an individual. But deeply, are you not the rest of mankind. So when you realize that, the truth of that, you will never kill another because you are killing yourself. Then out of that comes great compassion, love. We have talked for an hour. Do you want to ask questions? Q: What is an impersonal action? K: What is an impersonal action. First of all, what is action? What do you mean by that word 'action'? Either you act according to a pattern, or act according to some idea, act according to your experience, which is the past, act according to your knowledge, which is the past, or act according to some ideal which is in the future, or act according to your convenience. So what do you mean by that word? The word means acting, not having acted, or will act. But action means acting in the present, whether that action is correct, true, actual, depends on the quality of your brain, of your heart, not just theory. First, therefore, please sirs, enquire into what is action. We are all acting from morning until night. You are sitting there, and the speaker is sitting here, you are listening and he is speaking, that's an action, whether you listen, that's an action, or whether you don't listen, that's an action, how you listen is an action, whether you are actually listening or you think you are listening. And what do you mean by 'impersonal'? You see we have concepts. What do you mean by 'person', what do you mean by that word 'person'? The word, name, the form, are you an individual and then ask, can I be impersonal, are you an individual? I know you all think you are individuals. You whole tradition, religious and in every other way tells you are an individual - are you? Are you not the result of centuries of human endeavour? You see you don't want to question all those things. You are afraid if you are not an individual, what would happen to you. Individuality is a form of isolation, and therefore we are all at each other's throat all the years of our life. We have no love for each other. We talk about the love of god, but we don't love each other. And besides god is the invention of man. Right? I know you are all believers in god probably, but you have invented that entity. If god does exist, and if he has created us, what a miserable god he must be. Right? You don't want to look at it that way. You worship an illusion, and you like the illusion. You think in illusion there is security, and you are finding out there is no security in illusions. Your god has betrayed you, and yet you worship him. The Christian god, the Hindu god, the Muslim god - you follow? It's all so absurdly childish. So please, sirs, let's find out for ourselves, if we can be a light to ourselves, not depend on anyone psychologically, inwardly. Not depend on your wife, or your husband, or your guru, on a book, but to live a life free, full of vitality, energy, so that your brain is active, not mechanical. Our brains have become now a form of computers, but the computer is far more efficient, far more quick. We will go into that if we have time. So please do enquire into a different way of living. I think that's enough, sir, for this evening. NEW DELHI 2ND PUBLIC TALK 31ST OCTOBER, 1982 May we continue with what we were talking about yesterday evening? Communication with each other, to communicate something to another, unless they are really willing to listen, however friendly, however good intentioned, unless one is able to listen to another, communication becomes rather limited, misunderstood and apt to be misguided. So we are going to talk over together this evening many things; and one has to use words to communicate, of course unless we are extraordinarily telepathic, without words we can communicate, I am afraid that is not possible, but words are necessary. Each one uses words rather casually, without much intonation, quality behind that word, and one doesn't listen to another actually. If you do listen there is always a defence, there is always a resistance to anything that is said, something new, and perhaps over which you have not thought, so the immediate reaction is to resist, or not listen, because it might be disturbing. So there is an art of listening. That is to listen to what is being said, not interpret what is being said to your own convenience, to your own traditional language, but if you understand English, I hope some of you do, then to listen to the word, the meaning of that word, to see if we understand each other. And to listen one has to have not only a certain quality of attention but also a sense of affection, a sense of trying to understand what the other fellow is saying. A communication is possible at depth, as well as superficially, when both of us are concerned about the same subject, or the same idea, the same concern about a certain thing, then we are both in communication with each other. But if you resist, as perhaps you are going to resist a great deal to what the speaker is going to say, then communication is not possible. And as you are all good enough to come to the talk - I don't know why, but you are here. So one has to learn the art of listening. When you listen to music which you like, there is no resistance, you go with it, you shake your head, you clap your hands, you do all kinds of things to express your appreciation, your understanding, your understanding of the quality of the music and so on. There, there is not any form of defence, any form of resistance, you are going with it, flowing with it. So please in the same way kindly listen, not to be instructed, not to be told what to do, but to understand what is being said, not the person who is saying it, but what is being said. If you are merely concerned with the person, that is, with the speaker, and not with what is being said, then you are not in communication with him. So forget the person altogether. He is just a telephone. You understand? So that you are actually listening to what is being said, and discover for yourself if you are resisting, and why you are resisting. One resists or there is a defence because you don't want to be disturbed, or you are not accepting anything new, you don't want anything new, or you don't really care what is being said. So please, as we are going to talk over together like two friends, please listen very carefully. Learn the art of listening, not to the speaker only, but to your wife, to your husband, to your children, to the birds, to the wind, to the breeze, so that you become extraordinarily sensitive in listening. And when you listen you capture quickly, you don't have to have a lot of explanations and analysis and descriptions, you are flowing with it. So please as we are talking together as two friends, sitting in a park, or in a wood, quiet, birds are singing, plenty of dappled light coming through the leaves on the floor, and there is a sense of appreciation of beauty, and when you so listen the miracle takes place - when you listen. It is like sowing a seed and the if the seed is vital, strong, healthy, and the ground is properly prepared, it inevitably grows. So if one may point out, one has to learn the art of listening. And if you listen very, very carefully you capture it so quickly, the meaning of what the other is saying. Perhaps many of you have listened to the speaker for a number of years, unfortunately, and you get used to it. You get used to his language, his gesture, how he looks and so on, and you gradually slip off. And you say, 'Why haven't I, after years of listening to this man, changed?' - because they have actually not listened with their depth, with their heart, with their mind, with their whole energy. So don't blame the speaker but rather learn, if one may suggest most respectfully, the way of listening. There is great beauty in listening, to a bird, to a wind among the leaves, and to a word that is spoken with depth, with meaning, with passion. We were saying yesterday that the future of man is at stake. And the future man has no existence in isolation - isolation as a nation, isolation as a group, isolation in religions, isolation as an individual, and isolation in consciousness. For most of us thinking is individual. What I think, what you think, there, there is a difference, a division, your opinion against my opinion, my thought against your thought, or your husband's thought, your wife's thought. So thinking is not individual. Thinking is the ordinary factor of the poorest, ignorant man, and the greatest Noble prize winner, scientist, they both think. But we have the idea that your thinking is yours, but whereas thinking is the nature of man. Clear, this point? So when you think, it is not your individual thinking, it is the capacity of the brain to be active and respond in words, in thought. This is the nature of man. But we have reduced it as, my thinking opposed to your thinking, or you agree with my thinking, or I agree with your thinking. This must be made very clear in these talks: we are thinking together, it is not your thinking and you accept my thinking. We are thinking together, which is very difficult because for most of us we have got strong opinions, biased, conclusions, we have experienced so much, so we think it is our experience, our conclusion. So when a new outlook is put before you, you refuse to look at it. So thinking is the nature of man, it is not your thinking or my thinking. This must be seen very clearly. You observe when you talk to a poor, illiterate, ignorant man, he is also thinking according to his knowledge, his perception, his activity, as the scientist, the greatest scientist, he thinks according to his experience, to his knowledge, and discovers something new and so on. This is the general factor of all human beings that thinking is not yours or mine, it is thinking. Can we go on from there? We understand each other, at least even intellectually, even verbally? And when you observe what is going on in the world, outside of you, each country is isolating itself, each group is isolating - the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Tibetan, the Russian, the American, and so on, the Chinese, I don't have to enumerate all the names. This is what is happening, each group is isolating, one follows one particular guru, another, another guru, and so on. This factor of isolation is destroying the world, is separating humanity. This is an actual fact that is taking place in the world. Then inwardly each of us thinks we are separate. Tradition, religion, all that has conditioned our thinking that we are separate human beings. Of course we are separate in the sense that you are a man, you are a woman, I am a man, or I am a woman, you are a man, tall, short, light, black and so on, but we are talking at a depth. That is, human consciousness is general, is shared by all human beings, all human beings suffer, go through great agonies, shed tears, have this sense of loneliness, pain, anxiety, depression, uncertainty - the poorest and the most sophisticated, erudite human being, all have this general factor, they all share this. This is so. So our consciousness is not yours or mine, it is the consciousness of all human beings. This is very difficult for most people to see this, and to see the reality of it because we have been so conditioned - in Christianity you are a separate soul, here you are atman, you reincarnate over and over again until you reach god knows what. It is still the emphasis that you are separate, individual - is that so? We are questioning it. Therefore you have to find out, question, doubt, ask. Which means you are listening without any defence, without any resistance to this truth - we are using the word correctly. It is the truth. You may at the periphery, on the outside, have certain mannerisms, certain habits, certain tendencies, capacities, but if you move from the outer to the inner we all share the same common issues. So unless we realize this, not verbally, not intellectually, but in our heart, in our minds, in our blood, we are going to destroy each other, which is going on. So are we capable of listening to this fact - not your opinions about the fact, but the actual fact that our consciousness, which is the content -our consciousness is made up of its content, isn't it. Are you all puzzled? Are we all thinking together, or we are off to somewhere else? Look: a great many books have been written about consciousness, there are specialists about consciousness, conferences about consciousness, all over the world, and scholars, experts who have studied, not themselves, but other poor victims, they meet and discuss. But we are not professionals, at least I am not, but one has enquired into the nature of one's own consciousness, observed the content of it, because without the content there is no consciousness. Right? Are you following all this? Are we moving together? Consciousness is made up of one's beliefs, one's tendencies, one's secret desires, anxieties, beliefs, loneliness, and so on. That is the content which makes up consciousness; without the content there is no consciousness as we know it. If you observe your own consciousness, that is, what you are - your consciousness is what you are - your fears, your desires, your pleasures, your loneliness, depression, anxiety and all that, that is what you are, what you believe - you believe that you are god, you are that, and so on. So the content makes consciousness. And that consciousness is conditioned, and since it is conditioned it must be in conflict. Aren't you all in conflict, of some kind or another? Conflict being dissension between two people, conflict with oneself, 'what is' and 'what should be', that's a conflict. A man who is violent, as all human beings apparently are violent, the content of our consciousness is part of that violence. And conflict arises when there is a duality. That is, I am violent, I should not be violent; or I have the ideal of non-violence, which this country loves - the idea of non-violence, or practising non-violence, but the fact is you are violent. That's a fact. The other is not a fact. I wonder if you see this. We must go into this very carefully because we are trying to understand why human beings live perpetually in conflict. Why there is a contradiction - I am, I should be, I am violent, I must become non-violent. And the non-violent is an idea, is a concept, is not an actuality because I am violent. Do you see this actuality, this is a fact? The other is non-fact. But we have created, or we think the pursuit of non-violence will help us to become non-violent, we will be free from violence. This is rather important, go into it, I will go into it slowly. I am violent, human beings are violent. I am violent, let's understand the content of that word. What does violence mean? There is physical violence, you with a gun shoot me, or you hit me, or you throw a bomb at me, you slap me, you injure me - that's a physical violence. What is psychological violence? The inward anger, hatred, wanting to dominate people. Right? Not only physical domination but the domination of ideas -I know, you don't know, I will tell you and you will obey. That's domination. I wonder if you follow all this. The gurus are violent because they are dominating people with their ideas, with their system of meditation and all that business. Please understand this, we are not attacking the gurus, they can jump in the lake or swim, whatever they want, but I am just pointing out what violence is, the psychological dependence, imitation, conformity, domination, all that is inward violence. That's a fact. Can we deal with the fact and not with the idea of the opposite, only deal with facts, and there is no opposite. Right? There is an opposite as darkness and light, woman and man, tall and short, black and white and so on, there is a difference, but inwardly is there duality at all? Do you understand, are we following each other, or am I talking to myself? We are trying to understand why human beings live in conflict, and whether it is at all possible to be totally free of conflict, then the brain works astonishingly, then there is great energy, vitality, passion. But a mind that is constantly in conflict, not only wears down physically but also the brain becomes weak, worn out, old age and so on. So we are concerned this evening to understand why human beings live in conflict, not only with each other - the Arab and the Jew, the Muslim and the Hindu, and all that - but also in our relationship with each other. And actually we are asking, is there a duality, or only 'what is'? You understand my question? There is only 'what is', that is, I am violent. Now is it possible to be free of violence, not to become non-violent? Is this clear, are we meeting each other? Are we meeting each other? May I go on? Q: We are not clear. K: You see, here, this country has propagated this idea of nonviolence. Being violent they are propagating something which they are not, and if you ask them, 'I am practising non-violence' - you understand, practising. That means I am gradually, day by day, practising to become that, not to understand violence but to become something which I have called non-violence. See the difference? And hence there is conflict. Right? When I am observing, learning, enquiring into the fact there is no conflict, but if my mind is all the time saying, I must achieve non-violence, then there is conflict. But if I say, look, I am violent, what is the root of violence, what is the nature of violence, I don't condemn it, I observe it. Now, wait a minute, here it is very important to understand what we mean by observing. Now when you observe the full moon, do you observe it, do you see the beauty of that light, you see the grandeur, the extraordinary quality of that light, or do you say, 'Yes, it's a full moon' and you do something else? So what do we mean by observing? Do you ever observe the mountain, with all that grandeur, majesty, the snow-cap, and the deep valleys full of dark shadows, the extraordinary majesty of mountains. When you observe for a single moment all your problems have gone because the majesty of that has driven away all your problems, for a second. Have you noticed this? But the old problems come back immediately. So we are going to talk over together, what does it mean to observe. Now suppose I am violent, how do I observe that violence, because I want to understand the nature of that violence, I want to explore, discover, the extraordinary factors that contribute to violence, so how do I observe it. First, is violence - please listen to this - is violence different from me? Right? You understand my question? I am asking, is that violence, which I see when I say, I am violence, is that violence difference from me, or I am that violence. When you are angry, you are angry, it is not you are different from anger. You are different from anger only when you want to control it, only when you say, I must suppress it. But are you actually different, separate, from violence? Please you must go into this very carefully because most people say, I am different from that object which I call violence. Is that so? Is the word 'violence' separated? You understand? Through tradition, through constant talking about violence and so on, the word itself has created a separation from observation. I wonder if you are following all this. Are your brains working actively, as the speaker is? I'll go on if you are interested, it's up to you to find out. So the observer says, I am different from that, I am different from violence. So we have to enquire who is the observer. Right? The observer is the past who has known what violence is. It is the past, it is the knowledge, is the experience, is all the stored-up memories; those memories, those various forms of knowledge, and the movement of all that is the past. Thought has divided itself as the past, the present and the future. Right? So thought has divided itself as the observer and the observed. Right? Thought has said, I am not violent, but violence is not part of me. But when you look at it very closely, you are violent, you are angry, you are greedy, envious, competitive, depressed, you are all that. Right? You are not the watcher, the observer is not different from that which he is observing. Please understand, this is very important because this will, if you really truly understand this with your heart, with your mind, with all your being, conflict comes to an end because there is no duality at all. Forget all your books, Vedanta and all the rest of it, the fact is there is no opposite except physically. Psychologically, inwardly there is only the fact. The fact is, one is violent, angry, jealous, hatred and so on. Now to observe the fact without its opposite which thought has invented. Right, do you see this? To observe 'what is'. In that observation the observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought. Right? The experiencer is the experience. But we have separated it. We are saying, I must experience enlightenment, or I must experience - whatever you want to experience. So the thinker is the thought, there is no thinker without thought. The observer is the observed, the analyser is that which he is analysing. I'll put it in ten different ways, but that is the fact, the observer is the observed, therefore you eliminate altogether the sense of duality inwardly. Then there is no question of suppressing it, escaping from it, analysing it, it is there. Then what takes place? Do you understand? Are we together, at least a little bit, half of the way? What takes place when there is the actual realization of this truth, that there is only the fact, not the invented opposite, only that which is? In that there is no division as the observer and the observed, then what takes place? You understand? Have you ever done this, or is it just all theories to you? You understand my question? Man has lived in conflict from time immemorial; if you see those caves in France, in certain parts of the world, there is always the battle between the good and the bad, the good against the evil. Right? This has been the history of man, conflict. And we are asking if this conflict in man can end, then he is a human being, vital, creative, you understand, he is something extraordinary. And when there is this realization that you are violent, not you separate and violence is separate, you are that. You are brown, you have certain characteristics, you have troubles, you are a professor, scientists, all that you are, all that is not separate from you. So what takes place when this fact, this truth is realized? Not intellectually, not verbally, but deep down as a fact, as truth, what takes place? Have you not eliminated altogether the opposite, there is only this. And - please follow this - and to live with that, like a precious jewel that you have discovered and you are watching it. See the beauty of that jewel, the light, the facets, the many aspects of it, as you are watching it, which is part of yourself. Therefore the watching, observing is extraordinarily important. So that there is no division whatsoever between the watcher and that which is watched. Then you realize nothing can be done about it. You are brown, you can't change it; you have dark hair, you can't change it - of course you can change it by various colours and so on. But the fact when there is such observation it is not the word, it's not the memory, it is something totally new, you are facing this new reaction which you have called violence anew. That is, have you ever observed anything anew? Have you seen the moon, the new moon that is coming up, as though for the first time in your life? Have you looked at your wife, or your husband, as though for the first time? Have you? Or, she is my wife, he is my husband, you know, just a mechanical observation. So to observe requires great enquiry, energy, vitality to see actually 'what is'. So we are now concerned with the elimination altogether of all kinds of conflict. That is, why do we have opinions? You understand my question? You have opinions, haven't you, judgements, why? Political opinions, religious opinions. Please enquire, don't just listen to what the speaker is saying, enquire into this. Why do you carry opinions, it is a burden? I am a Brahmin, you are not, I am a Sikh, you are not, I am a Muslim - you follow. Why these opinions? It indicates a mind that is, or a brain which is so crowded with opinions it is becoming small, petty, narrow. It is not free to enquire, look. So we must go into this question why human minds, the human brain is always occupied, never free, never quiet. You are practising quietness, that's your meditation. It's like a pianist practising the wrong note. You understand this? So enquire into all this, please, because we are reaching a crisis, or we have a crisis in the world, a tremendous crisis, and also crisis in our consciousness, in us. And we also ought to talk over together, as we talked yesterday, that life is a process of relationship. Why in our relationship with each other, however intimate, sexual, however close, why there is conflict, why two people cannot live peacefully. Have you ever asked that question? Why? Because it is very important, if I don't know how to live peacefully with my wife, with my husband, with my girl friend, whatever you like, I cannot live peacefully in the world. I may talk about peace, I may write a great deal about peace, go all over the world talking about peace, but I am quarrelling with my wife, or with my husband. So there is conflict in our relationship, why? Please enquire. Do you want me to tell you, or are you enquiring with the speaker? See the difference. You are waiting - actually the truth - you are waiting for me to tell you. But if you are really enquiring it is a sharing, a moving together. So we are thinking together, that's so important. Not agreeing together, but thinking, step by step, going together, like walking hand in hand down a lane, where there is so much beauty, love and affection. Why is there this dissension, this division between man and man, and woman and man, in our relationship? Have you noticed? They are like two parallel lines never meeting; you may sleep with your wife or your husband - or is that not mentioned publicly? Would you kindly tell me, is it not mentioned publicly? In this country it is kind of hidden, secret, keep it closed, don't talk about it, everybody shies away from it, not from the act, but talking, looking. We are such hypocrites. We never say what we mean and stick to what you mean. So we are going to find out together why in human relationship we have such desperate, lonely, ugly conflicts. I am not married, suppose I am married - I have my ambition, my desires, my problems, in my office I am competitive, aggressive, I am pursuing my own direction, and the wife also is pursuing her own. Right? Ambitious, or not ambitious, too docile and I dominate and she resists, you know the whole game. So we are asking, why is there this conflict because we two have to live together, we have sex, we have children, but we two are separate. Right? This is a fact, isn't it. I dominate or she dominates me, she bullies me or I bully her, I scold her or she scolds me, I don't beat her but I am angry with her - I'd like to beat her but I am a little more controlled. No, sir, you laugh, these are all facts. But I am an individual, she is an individual, each must have his own way, sexually, in habits, in our desires - how can two people live together like that? Which means you have no love at all, for your wife or your husband. Do you know what it means to love another? Have you ever loved anybody? Is love dependence? Is love desire? Is love pleasure? I don't love my wife, she doesn't love me, we are two separate individuals, we may meet sexually but otherwise we carry on our own particular way. You understand, sir? Does love exist in this country? Don't say, does it exist in Europe. When the speaker is in Europe he talks about it, but we are talking about it here as we are in this country, in this part of the world. Is there love in this country? Do you love anybody? Can love exist with fear? When each one is becoming something - I am becoming a saint and she is not, or she is becoming a saint, I am not. When each one is becoming something - you understand? Please understand all this. It's your life. And when each one is becoming something how can there be love? So what will you do? You understand my question? I have talked about it, what will you do? Get up and go home and forget all about it, or will you enquire if it is possible to love another without wanting a single thing from another, neither emotionally, physically, in any way, not ask my wife for anything psychologically - she may cook my meal, I may bring money, I am not talking about that, but inwardly. Love cannot exist where there is attachment. If you are attached to your guru there is no love in your heart. So this is very, very serious. Without love there is no right action. When there is love, whatever you do is right action. We talk about action, we do social work, but when there is love in your heart, in your eyes, in your blood, in your face, you are a different human being. Whatever you do then has beauty, has grace, is right action. All this may be excellent words that you hear, but will you have this quality? It cannot be cultivated, it cannot be practised, it cannot be bought from your guru, from anybody, but without that you are dead human beings. So what will you do? Sir, please, do ask this question, find out for yourself, why this flame doesn't exist in you. Why you have become such paupers. You see unless we put our house in order - our house which is ourselves - there will be no order in the world. You may meditate for the rest of your life, without that your meditation has no meaning. So please most respectfully we are asking, what will you do after hearing all this, what's your response? Q: I want to ask something. K: Yes sir? Q: (Inaudible) K: You didn't listen sir, forgive me for pointing out. You haven't listened to what the speaker has said previously. That thought is not yours or mine. Q: I realize that it is not mine, it is not his, it is thought. So he does what he thinks. K: No, sir. If you and I realize that thought is shared by all humanity, then there is no different thoughts, there is no you agreeing, I disagreeing. We'll go into it another time. Q: Wouldn't that be love? K: No, sir. Q: You have been talking about radical change for the last fifty years, and I wonder sometimes, obviously there is no radical change in the world. K: All right. Then why do you talk, is that it? Q: Quite, precisely. K: The gentleman asks - are you all interested suddenly in this? You have all become very active suddenly! The gentleman asks -this will be the last question, please - the gentleman asks, you have talked probably over fifty years, you have talked about fundamental change of human consciousness and so on and so on, for the last fifty years and more, and there is no change at all. Then the question is, why do you talk. I am not - the speaker is not talking for his amusement, for his fulfilment, for his encouragement, or if he didn't talk he wouldn't be depressed, he wouldn't feel lacking something. The speaker has tried not to talk for a year, therefore why do I talk. You understand? Have you ever asked why the lotus blooms, have you ever asked it? Have you, sir? Now just a minute, have you? Q: You look very self satisfied. K: Don't let this become an argument, please. Have you ever asked a flower why it grows, why it has so much beauty, why it has such marvellous colour, the depth and the smell and the glory of a simple flower? Or the speaker may be talking out of compassion -may be. But he is not talking for his self-fulfilment. CALCUTTA 1ST PUBLIC TALK 20TH NOVEMBER, 1982 From the very beginning, we ought to establish our relationship. This is not a lecture as it is commonly understood. A lecture is a discourse on a particular subject by way of instruction. This is a conversation between you and the speaker. The speaker is not telling you what to do, what to think, how you should behave and so on. But he is having a conversation between you, as a person sitting there, and the speaker, here. He is sitting on a platform for the convenience of others, but he has no authority. This is a conversation between two people concerned with what is happening in the world, what is happening to man, not a particular man, but man in the world. What is man doing to man, what he has done to other men. And we are going to talk over together amicably, dispassionately, objectively. So please, together, we are going to think of what is exactly happening in the world, not in any particular part of the world, but what is happening to man on the earth. To have a conversation with another, a friendly, serious communication with each other, we must learn how to listen. We hardly ever listen to another. We carry on with our own thoughts, with our own problems, with our own particular ideas and conclusions, and so it is very difficult to listen to another. And we are suggesting that you listen. There is an art of listening. We are going to talk over together a great many things: the state of war, divided nations, divided groups, human relationship. We are going to talk over together the problems of fear, pleasure and all the complexity of human thought. And we are going to talk over together whether sorrow can ever end, and the implications and the complexities of death. And we are also going to talk over together what is religion, what is meditation, and if there is anything sacred, eternal. We are going to talk over together all these things. And one must have the art of listening to all this; not what you think with all your traditions, with all your knowledge, but to listen to another who is telling you something. And then communication becomes simple, easy. But if you are not thinking together, which is a quite an arduous task, then you and the speaker will be thinking in two different directions. So there is an art of listening, not translating what the speaker is saying but to listen to the word, the content of the word, the significance and the depth of the word. The speaker is going into many of these problems step by step, slowly, clearly, objectively. And one must listen to the word as both of us perhaps understand English; we are using ordinary, daily language. There is no jargon, there is no specialized subject about which we are talking. We are talking of human beings and their problems, not a particular human being, but humanity as a whole. Is this all right sir? Is this all right? Can you all hear? Audience: Yes. K: Yes? Yes! As I said, the word has great depth, the meaning of it, and as we are speaking in English, using the daily language without any mysterious words being used, it is important that you and the speaker establish a right relationship. He is not a guru. He is not going to inform you what to think, how to think, but we are together going to observe the activities of human being rights throughout the world: why they have become what they are, after 40 thousand years of evolution, why man is killing each other, destroying each other, exploiting each other, why man has divided the world into nationalities as the Jew, the Arab, the Hindu, Muslim and so on. We are going to look at all this because it is important to look, to observe, not from a particular point of view as a Bengali, as an Indian, or as a European or Russian or Chinese or American. We are going to look together why man has become what he is: cruel, destructive, violent, idealistic; and in the world of technology are doing astonishing things of which most of us are unaware; why after thousands of years of wars, shedding tears, why a human being through a long period of time, why he is actually behaving in this manner. So, please, we are thinking together, not agreeing together, nor resisting what is being said, nor accepting, but observing, looking as you would look at a map, exactly what is going on. Man has divided the world into nationalities; man has divided the world into the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hindu, the Muslim and so on, religiously. Where there is division, as the Arab and the Jew, the Hindu and the Muslim and so on, where there is division, there must be conflict. This is a natural law, which is what is actually taking place in the world. Why is there this division? Who has brought this about? Please, I hope you are thinking together, you and the speaker. You are not just listening to him, merely accepting or rejecting what he is saying. This is your problem, the problem of humanity. And as we are human beings, at least we hope so, as we are human beings, we must consider all these questions. Doubt, investigate, never accepting what the authorities or what the gurus or the sacred books, including the speaker, never accepting, questioning, doubting, asking. If you merely accept or reject you remain where you are without bringing about a radical mutation in this whole psyche, in the whole content of consciousness. So, please, if one may ask most respectfully, please let us think together. You are walking down a lane, not in the lanes of Calcutta, but in a nice, quiet wooded place with clean air, and we are talking over together as two friends the problems which, as a human being, he faces and the problems of humanity. So we are talking together; we are listening to each other. It's a dialogue between you and the speaker. Dialogue means conversation between two people; as there is such a large audience, that is not possible. But one can talk to each other though there are 1000 or 2000 people here. So why has man - it includes the woman naturally - become what he is in spite of great experience, in spite of great knowledge, in spite of vast technological advancement, why have we remained more or less what we have been for 40,000 years, why? Is it because our mind, our brain is programmed, like a computer. The computer is programmed by the professionals and it can repeat, perhaps much quicker than man, more rapidly, giving infinite information and so on. Is it that every human being in this world has been programmed to be a Bengali, to be a Muslim, to be a Hindu and so on, so on, so on? So is your brain programmed - that is, to think in a conventional, narrow, limited way? Because our brain within the skull is limited, but it has the capacity of extraordinary invention, extraordinary technological advancement. Perhaps most of us do not know what is actually going on in the biological world, in the technological world, in the world of warfare, because most of us are concerned with our daily living, with our own particular problems, with our own fulfilments, and so we generally forget the vast advancement humanity is making in one direction, in the technological world, and totally, completely neglecting in the psychological world, in the world of human behaviour, in the world of consciousness. So we are together going to discover the causes of all this. That is why human beings, being programmed as Christians for 2,000 years, believing certain doctrines, certain beliefs, stating there is only one saviour, and the Muslim also has been programmed for the last 1000 or more years to believe in certain principles, call himself Muslim, and the Hindus have been programmed perhaps for the last three to five thousand years. So our brains are conditioned. I wonder if one ever realizes how our brain is acting, thinking, looking. So, where there is limitation, there must be conflict. We are going to go into all this. That is, our brains are conditioned to be this or that, to behave in a certain manner, to enjoy, to suffer, to have great burden of fear, uncertainty, confusion and the ultimate fear of death. So we are conditioned to that. And there is a whole group of people, professors, scholars, writers who say, including the communist with their guru Marx, they say the human brain will always be conditioned. It can never be free. You can modify that conditioning by environmental influence, by law and so on. It can always be modified, changed here and there, but actually the human brain can never be free. Please understand the implication of that. Therefore the totalitarian governments are controlling human thought, they are not allowing them to think freely and if they do, they are sent to the psychiatric ward, and so on, to concentration camps. But we are asking please do pay a little attention to this. It is most important for you to find this out for yourself which is, whether the human brain which has been conditioned through experience, through knowledge, whether that brain can ever be free to have no fear, no conditioning. Where there is conditioning, there must be conflict because all conditioning is limited. Right? Is this clear? Are we meeting each other? Audience: [inaudible] K: Just a minute, sir, please; you ask questions perhaps at the end of the talk if there is time. But I'm asking - but the speaker is asking if you are following him at all, or at the end of the long day you're tired and may not be listening at all. So he may be talking to himself. So please be good enough since you are here to pay attention to what is being said because it's your life, not the speaker's life. It is your daily conflicting, confused existence with all the sorrow, with all the pain and grief. So, please in talking over together, you are aware of your own thinking, your own reactions, your own responses, how they are limited, how they are conditioned, how you depend on past knowledge. And so our life become very narrow, rather sloppy, confused and there is the fear of insecurity. If one is aware at all of one's own activities - our inward activities, your thoughts, your feelings, your reactions, then you will find out for yourself how conditioned you are, how limited you are, and when you recognize that fact, then you realize the consequences of that conditioning, that limitation. Wherever there is limitation as a Hindu or Muslim, there must be conflict. Wherever there is a division between husband and wife, there must be conflict. And human beings, throughout the world, after all this evolution are still in conflict with each other, not only the conflict of war, the preparation for war, the new machines that are killing, may kill millions of people with one blow. So, please most respectfully, consider all this because we are concerned with your life as a human being. And that life, our daily living, has become extraordinarily complex, extraordinarily dangerous, difficult, uncertain. The future of man is really at stake. This is not a threat; this is not a pessimistic point of view. The crisis is not only physical but the crisis is in consciousness, in our being. So please in talking over together, become aware of all this. So in becoming aware, you begin to discover: you begin to find out for yourself how your life has become such pain, such anxiety, such uncertainty. If you are so aware, you can then proceed further, deeply, more and more but if you merely listen to the words - and words have very little meaning; words have certain significance, but if one lives in words, as most people do, in symbols, in myths, in romantic nonsense, then we make life more and more difficult, more and more dangerous for each other. So please be good enough to listen, to find out, to question, to doubt, so that your own brain becomes aware of itself. So we are asking why human beings who have developed the most marvellous technology the world has ever known: easy communication, electricity, sanity and so on; we don't have to go into all that. But psychologically, inwardly, we remain as we have been more or less for the last 40,000 years. Inwardly, I wonder if one realizes that: we have systems, we have ideals, we have all the so-called sacred books which are not sacred at all, they are just words. Why human beings, which is you, have not radically brought about a change, a psychological revolution, and we are going to enquire into that. And whether it is possible to bring about total mutation in the brain cells themselves. I hope this is clear that we are talking about human condition and whether that condition can be radically changed, bring about a mutation in that, not transformation. Transformation means transforming from one form to another form. But we are talking about the radical change of human behaviour so that he is not terribly self-centred as he is, which is causing such great destruction in the world. If one is aware - and one hopes that you are - aware of your conditioning, then we can begin to ask whether that conditioning can be totally changed so that a man is completely free. Now he thinks he is free to do what he likes. Each individual thinks he can do what he likes, all over the world, and his freedom is based on choice, because he can choose where to live, what kind of work he can do, choose between this idea and that idea, this ideal or that ideal, change from one god to another god, from one guru to another, one philosopher from another. This capacity to choose brings in the concept of freedom. But in the totalitarian states, there is no freedom, you can't do what you want to do. It is totally controlled. So choice is not freedom. Choice is merely moving in the same field from one corner to another. Is this clear? I hope you are following all that is being said. So our brain being limited, we are asking is it possible for the brain to free itself so that there is no fear, completely no fear? We have right relationship with each other - man, woman. Right relationship with all the neighbours in the world. So we are going to ask the nature of our consciousness. Our consciousness is what you are: your belief, your ideals, your gods, your violence, fear, myths, romantic concepts, your pleasure, your sorrow, and the fear of death, and the everlasting question of man which has been from time immemorial, whether there is something sacred beyond all this. That is your consciousness. That is what your are. You are not different from your consciousness. So we are asking whether the content of the consciousness can be totally changed. First your consciousness is not yours. Your consciousness is the consciousness of all humanity, because what you think, your beliefs, your sensations, your reactions, your pain, your sorrow, your insecurity, your gods and so on is shared by all humanity. Go to America, go to England, Europe or Russia, China, human beings suffer: they are frightened of death, they have beliefs, they have ideals, they speak a particular language but the thinking, the feeings, the reactions, the responses generally is shared by all human beings. This is a fact not merely the invention or speculation of the speaker. This is a fact that you suffer; your neighbour suffers; that neighbour may be thousands of miles away, he suffers. He is insecure, as your are. You may have a lot of money, but inwardly there is insecurity. So is a rich man in America or the man in power, they all go through this pain, anxiety, loneliness, despair. So your consciousness is not yours any more than your thinking is not individual thinking. Thinking is common, is general, from the poorest man, the most uneducated, unsophisticated man in a little tiny village to the most sophisticated brain, the great scientist, they all think. They may think differently. Their thinking may be more complex, but thinking is general, shared by all human beings. Therefore it is not your individual thinking. This is rather difficult to see and recognize the truth of it, because we are so conditioned as individuals. All your religious books whether Christian or Muslim or another religious books, they all sustain and nourish this idea, concept of an individual. You have to question that. You have to find out the truth of the matter. And we are investigating together, and we see that every human being in the world, however miserable, however low the structure of society, and the great philosophers of the world, great scientists all think. And again human consciousness is similar, is shared by all human beings. Therefore there is no individual, outside, peripheral. He may be more educated, he may be taller, he may be shorter, outside, outside the skin as it were, he may be different. But inwardly he shares the ground of all humanity. This is a fact if you examine it very closely, but if you are frightened, if you are caught in the conditioning of being an individual, you will never understand the immensity and the extraordinary fact that you are the entire humanity. From that there is love, compassion, intelligence, but if you are merely conditioned to the idea that you are individual, then you have endless complications because it is based on illusion, not on fact. The illusion may be thousands of years, but it is still illusion. You are the result of your environment; you are the result of the language you speak; you are the result of the food you eat, the clothes, the climate, the tradition handed down from generation to generation; you are all that. You are the product of the society which you have created. Society is not different from you. Man has created the society, the society of greed, envy, hatred, brutality, violence, wars; he has created all that and also he has created the extraordinary world of technology. So you are the world and the world is you. So you are the world and the world is you; your consciousness is not yours, it is the ground which all human beings share; all human beings think. So you are actually not an individual. That's one of the realities, truth that one must understand, not accept what the speaker is saying, but question your own isolation because individual means isolation, to separate himself from another, like nations isolate themselves as Indians, all the rest of it. And they think in isolation there is security. There is no security in isolation. But the governments of the world, representing humanity of each country, they are maintaining this isolation, and therefore they are perpetuating wars. So if you recognize the truth, the fact that you are not an individual - you may be short, you may be tall, but inwardly there is no division. We all share the same problems. When you recognize that truth, and I hope you do, then the problem is, can you, as a human being representing all humanity, bring about a fundamental, psychological revolution? You might say if I, as a human being, change, will it affect in any way the rest of mankind? That is the usual question. I may change; I may radically bring about a mutation in the mind which we'll go into presently. If I do change, if there is a change in a particular person, how will it affect the whole consciousness of mankind? Please do put that question to yourself. Even as a single isolated human being, which you are not, even if you think so, you are asking, if I change, what effect has it in the world? You know they are making experiments in the scientific world, of which perhaps some of you may have heard. We were talking with one of those people who are experimenting that certain rats in a particular place, say for instance, a group of rats in London: they are experimenting with that group of rats. If one generation of rats learn a particular lesson very slowly, it takes many generations to learn completely but the next generation learns much quicker. It is not genetic transformation; it is not genetic action, but a generation of 5 or 10 rats, the last generation, the latest generation learns the lesson far quicker, in a couple of days. Now they are doing the same experiment in Australia, same experiment in America and other places: those rats which have learnt much quicker in London affect the whole group of rat's consciousness. You understand this? Am I making it clear? Audience: No. K: No. Now easily you say, 'no'. One group of rats, one generation learns a lesson very slowly. The next generation learns a little faster and so on. The last generation - say 25 generations -the last generation learns the lesson in a couple of hours. Now what they have learnt in a couple of hours is transmitted to all the rats in the world. They are experimenting with that. And it is not a genetic transformation, but a group consciousness is being affected. You understand this? That is simple enough. I'm not going to explain further. If you don't understand, you'd better study. So the question is: if you change fundamentally, you affect the whole consciousness of man. Napoleon affected the whole consciousness of Europe. Stalin affected the whole consciousness of Russia, and human beings all over the world like the Christian saviour, he has affected the consciousness of the world, and the Hindus with their peculiar gods have affected the consciousness of the world. So, when you as a human being radically transform psychologically, that is, be free of fear, have right relationship with each other, the ending of sorrow, and so on, which is radical transformation - which we shall go into presently - then you affect the whole consciousness of man. So it is not an individual affair. It is not a selfish affair. It is not individual salvation. It is the salvation of all human beings of which you are. So, first then we must enquire what is relationship? Why in human relationship with each other there is such conflict, such misery, such intense sense of loneliness. We are going to enquire together into that. Enquire means to investigate, to question, to doubt, about our relationship between man and woman, between your nearest neighbour and the farthest neighbour. Why is there such conflict? From the past history, from all the knowledge that has been acquired, studied, man has lived in conflict with each other. But relationship is existence. Without relationship you cannot exist. In that existence there is conflict. But relationship is absolutely necessary. Life is relationship; action is relationship; what you think brings about relationship or destroys relationship. The hermit, the monk, the sannyasi, he may think he is separate, but he is related: related to the past, related to the environment, related to the man who brings him some grains, some food, some clothes. So life is relationship. Without life, without that interaction in relationship, there is no existence. So we are going together to explore why human beings live in conflict with each other? Why there is conflict between you and your husband, between the wife and the man? Why? Please ask this question of yourself. Though the speaker may put the question, you are putting the question. Find out. Let's enquire together, because where there is conflict in relationship there is no love, there is no compassion and there is no intelligence. We will go into the word 'intelligence', 'compassion', and 'love'. But one wonders whether in this country, as in other countries, there is love at all? So we are exploring together what is relationship? Are you actually related in the sense - of course, blood relationship and so on - you may be related to a man, woman, sexually, but apart from that, are you related to anybody? Relation means non-isolation. That is, the man goes to the office everyday of his life, to a factory, to some form of occupation, leaving the house at 9 o'clock or 6 o'clock, spending the whole day working, working for 50, 60 years, and then dies, and there the man is ambitious, greedy, envious, struggling, competing, comes home and the woman, the wife is also competitive, jealous, anxious, ambitious, going on in her own way. They may meet sexually, talk together, care somewhat, have children, but they remain separate, like two railway lines never meeting. And this is what we call relationship, which is an actuality. This is not the speaker's invention. It is not his opinion or conclusion, but this is a fact of everyone's life, the perpetual dissension between two people, each holding to his opinions, to his conclusions. The word 'conclusion' means putting an ends to an argument. 'I conclude that there is god'. Therefore I've put myself in a position, I have ended the argument; I conclude. So, please do not conclude, that is, bringing something to an end, argument. We are not concluding; we are observing the fact. The fact is, however intimate that relationship may be, there is always conflict. One dominating the other; one possessing the other; one jealous of the other. And so this is what we call relationship. Now, can that relationship which we know now, can that relationship be totally changed? Ask yourself this. Why is there conflict between two human beings, whether they are highly educated or not at all educated. They may be great scientists, but they are ordinary human beings, like you and another - fighting, quarrelling, ambitious. And why does this state exist? Is it not because each person is concerned with himself? So, he is isolating himself. In isolation you cannot have right relationship. You understand, this is so terribly obvious. You hear this, but you will not do anything about it because we fall into habit, we fall into a rut, into a groove, into a narrow little life, and we put up with it, however miserable, unhappy quarrelsome, ugly it is. So, please enquire, question, doubt whether it is possible to live with another with complete harmony, without any dissension, without any division. If you really, deeply, enquire, you will find that you have created an image about her, and she has created an image about you. These two images - you understand the image? - the image is the picture of living together for 20 years, the nagging, the cruel words, the indifference, the lack of consideration and so on, and on. Each has built an image about the other, a picture about the other. These two pictures, images, words, are in relationship with each other. You understand all this? So where there is an image about another, a picture about another, there must be conflict. I am sure you all have an image about the speaker. I am quite sure of it. Why? You don't know the speaker. You can never know the speaker, as you don't know your husband, your wife. But you have created an image about him. That is, religious, non-religious, he is stupid, he is very clever, he is beautiful, he is this, he is that. And with that image you look at the person. The image is not the person. The image is the reputation, and reputations are easily created, reputation which may be good or bad. But the human brain, the thought creates the image. The image is a conclusion, and we live by images. And the image, the imagination, the making of pictures has no place in love. We don't love each other. We may hold hands; we may sleep together, do this and the other, ten different things, but we have no love for each other. If you had that quality, that perfume of love, there would be no wars. There will be no Hindus, Muslims, Jew and Arab. But you listen to all this and you will still remain with your images. You still wrangle with each other, quarrel with each other, dissent. You understand, our life has become so extraordinarily meaningless. I wonder how many of you realize this. We are put together by thought. Your gods are put together by thought. All the rituals, all the dogmas, the philosophy are all put together by thought, and thought is not sacred. Thought is always limited, which we will talk about perhaps tomorrow, why thought is limited. And so thought has created the image, about you as the audience, about you as the wife and the husband, about you as the Indian and you as the American and so on. It is these images which are unreal, that are separating humanity. If you never call yourself an Indian, and I never call myself a Russian, or an American but we are human beings, we should then have no wars. We should have global government, global relationship, but you are not interested in all that. You remain mediocre, forgive me if I use that word. The word 'mediocre' means a man who has only climbed half way up the hill, who has never climbed right to the top, psychologically, not in the business world or the technological world. You hear all this and if you don't change radically, you are bringing about destruction for the future generation. So, please give ear, give thought, attention to what is going on outside you and also what is going on, which is much more important, inwardly, for the inward psyche conquers the outer environment, as you see it in Russian. We give such importance to the outer: we must have right society, right laws, feed the poor, be concerned with the poor, which we are not saying we should not be, but the inward thought, inward feelings, inward isolations are separating man against man, and you are responsible for this. Each one of us is responsible for this. Unless you change fundamentally, inwardly, the future is very dangerous. They are preparing for nuclear war, which means if a nuclear bomb - the neutron bomb - falls over New York, 10 million people are vaporized. There is no existence of those 10 million people; they have vanished completely from the earth, and those who remain are wounded, their eyes melt. And there is only one doctor for 10 thousand people. They are preparing for all this, and this country too. And you are responsible for all this. Unless you fundamentally bring about a change in your daily life, to have right relationship with each other, to live correctly, not ambitious and so on, then only there is it possible for the ending of conflict between human beings. Right, sirs. May I go? CALCUTTA 2ND PUBLIC TALK 21ST NOVEMBER, 1982 May we now continue with what we were talking about yesterday evening? We were saying, weren't we, that this is a conversation between us, not a lecture. A lecture is a discourse on a particular subject intended to give you information. But this is not a lecture. We are talking over together, amicably, in conversation, observing what is happening in the world, not only externally, outside of us, but also we were talking about what is happening to man inwardly, psychologically. And as one observes in the world outside, there is greater and greater chaos practically in every country and in this country it is fairly obvious, it is blatant, it is palpable. And where there is uncertainty, disturbance, the lack of political credulity, knowing that the politicians all over the world are making things far worse, knowing that religions throughout the world have lost all their meaning, seeing all this, there are those who have called themselves the fundamentalists: they are those who go back to the Bible or to the Koran or to the various scriptures, so-called religious, thinking that if they follow those books, there will be less chaos. This is what is happening the world over, going back to the past, holding on to certain beliefs, tradition, and these books are incorruptible; they speak the truth and so on. Most of us are doing this in some way or another. In a world that is very, very chaotic, very disturbing, dangerous and the preparation for wars, one naturally wants some kind of security, outside of us or inside. There is not much security in the outward world. You may be very rich, you may be very powerful politically, or you may be one of those gurus who are making a lot of money, or you might find security in some dogma, in some belief; but in none of these is there absolute security. Man wants security. We must all have security - security in the sense of food, clothes and shelter. But also we want security inwardly, something that will give us assurance, stability, a sense of strength, and there to there is no security, in any belief, in any dogma, in any ideal. And not finding security in any of these, man turns to the past, and hopes thereby to find some ray, some kind of words, traits to hold on to. I do not know if you have noticed that the more you cling to some kind of conclusion, reasonable conclusion, logical conclusion or the conclusions of certain authorities, where there is conclusion there must be lack of energy because when you come to a conclusion, which means after discussing, arguing, come to a point which you think is right, conclude it, then you shut the door for further enquiry. And that is what is happening in the world. We all want conclusions: whether there is god, whether there is going to be any peace and so on and when you conclude, which means to bring about an end to various arguments, suggestions, ideas, then when you have those conclusions, you are bound to lose energy, because you have shut the door against further enquiry, further exploration. And perhaps that is what is happening in this country and the world over. That is, lacking obviously security inwardly and outwardly, security in the sense, something on which we can totally rely, on which we can depend, which will give us comfort, a sense of well-being; not having that, we cling to some traditional conclusions and thereby lose that creative energy of enquiry. Enquiry means to penetrate, to investigate, to explore, to open the door to find out further. But most of us have not that energy, that drive, and so we fall back upon something which we call tradition or some book or other. And in these talks today and the next weekend, we are not giving any formula, any panacea, any sense of certainty, but together, you and the speaker are in friendly conversation, exploring, so that we release our own energy and not depend on anybody, on any book, on any person or any idea, belief. It seems to the speaker, that we are not releasing the creative energy to bring about a new culture, a new way of life, because the old Brahmanical culture of this country has completely disappeared. A culture - we are not saying what is good or bad - a culture that has existed perhaps five to three thousand years has completely gone overnight, disappeared altogether. And one questions, asks, why human beings who have lived with a particular culture for so long, that culture has disappeared. Perhaps it was not a culture at all; it was a series of words, traditions, without any life behind them. So, together in exploring the condition of our mind and heart, in investigating the nature of the brain which is the centre of all our actions, of all our feelings, of every thought, whether it is possible, surrounded by chaos, uncertainty, danger, whether each one of us can release that creative energy, and we are going to go into this very carefully this evening. As we said yesterday, there is an art of listening and there is an art of learning. Most of our learning is the accumulation of knowledge: not knowing mathematics or biology or physics, gradually we accumulate a great deal of information about physics and store it up in the brain which becomes our knowledge about physics, mathematics or what you will. That is what we do, and that is what we call learning, accumulating a lot of knowledge about various subjects as an engineer, as an astronomer, and if you will, unfortunately as a politician. We accumulate knowledge in order to act skilfully in the world as a carpenter, as a mason, as a doctor. That's what we do - knowledge accumulated from which we act either skilfully, or not skilfully, efficiently or inefficiently. So we must enquire together what is knowledge? What place has knowledge? What place has knowledge in our relationship with each other? Please, we are enquiring into this, don't merely just listen to the speaker. If you merely casually hear the words that the speaker is using, then it will become very shallow, empty. We are already full of other people's knowledge. But you have never perhaps questioned what is the place of knowledge in life, apart from having an occupation, becoming a good scientist, doctor, engineer and so on. We are asking a very serious question which is, what place has knowledge in human relationship? Let me talk, if you don't mind, and then perhaps if there is time you can ask questions. Is that all right? We are asking, what place has knowledge in human relationship? Knowledge is always in the past. There is no future knowledge. Knowledge implies the process of time as the past. Right? That's clear? And this knowledge, both in the scientific world and in human existence is based on experience. And this experience is gathered for millions of years, or for the last 300 years with the scientists. And that knowledge is used to accumulate further knowledge, further exploration, but always knowledge is in the past. There is no question about that. And knowledge is never complete about anything. Right? Are we going together in this? Please we are not agreeing; you are not just listening, we are thinking together. We are saying that knowledge is incomplete always. There is no complete knowledge about anything. That's a fact. So, our knowledge is stored in the brain as memory, and the response of that memory is thought. That is experience, either inherited or accumulated in the present, that becomes knowledge, then that knowledge is memory, which is the past, and from that memory, the reaction is thought. Is this clear? Can we go on from that? So thought is always limited. Right? I have accumulated - one has accumulated, say for example, scientific knowledge. That knowledge is being added to all the time: more and more and more they are discovering. And so scientific knowledge is never complete. Right? So thought, whatever it does, is limited. Perhaps some of you will reject this, but if you would kindly investigate it, go together to look at it, not take a definite stand about it, but let us think it over together. We are saying categorically and definitely that knowledge being limited, because there is no complete knowledge about anything, knowledge always goes with the shadow of ignorance. And any thought born of knowledge must inevitably be fragmentary, limited, finite; but thought can invent something immeasurable, something beyond all, infinite, but it is still the movement of thought. Right? A person can invent god because he feels god is necessary for his comfort, for his security, but that god is the product of thought which is limited. Please we must be very clear on this point, not that you agree with the speaker which will be useless, but if you for yourself see the fact, the truth, that thought under all circumstances, whatever the thought of the scientist is, or the great philosophers, it is always bound, narrow, limited. Thought has invented nationalities, and thought having created them, brings about division between people - the Muslim and the Hindu, the Jew and the Arab, the Communist, the Socialist, the capitalist and so on. Thought has invented all this. Our society, however corrupt it is, as it is in this country, not that corruption doesn't exist in other countries, but in this country one can see so blatantly, and this corruption is invented by thought. All the ritual is the product of thought, whether the military rituals or the religious rituals, they are all forms of entertainment invented by thought. And thought has created problems like war, like conflict and so on. Then thought tries to solve these problems. Right? Are you following all this? Are you interested in all this? Could you tell me? Perhaps a little bit. Probably you have not thought about it at all. You have not gone into all this. You've just accepted thought as the only instrument man has. And that instrument has created havoc in the world. A good carpenter, when he finds his instruments are useless, throws them away and tries to find new instruments, but we don't. We see that thought, politically, religiously, as human beings between each other, thought has created innumerable problems. And thought politically, religiously says, 'I will solve it.' And in that solution, you are producing more problems. So life is becoming more and more complex, more and more full of problems because we think that thought is the only instrument; and that thought is limited. Right? Is this clear, not verbally clear, but clear for yourself, so that we can then ask, is there a new instrument? You follow? We find all over the world even the greatest scientist, greatest - whatever they are, are beginning to question - because the speaker has talked with many of them - are beginning to question the nature of thought. Thought is a material process because thought is held in the brain - in the very brain cells themselves. So thought is a material process. So whatever thought thinks about or invents is the result of a material process. So when thought creates god, it is still a material process. Thought is not sacred. So, if this is very clear, not verbally but deeply, profoundly, then we can ask is there a new instrument. Not higher consciousness or lower consciousness, I don't mean that at all; that is another invention of thought. The higher consciousness and bring it down to the lower consciousness. You know all that game one plays, which is still the product and process of thought. So, we are going to find out together if there is a new instrument totally different from thought, which thought has not touched at all, because whatever thought touches must be limited, and being limited it must inevitably create conflict, bring about fragmentation, as it has done in the world: religious fragmentations, political fragmentations and so on. Is this clear? Can we go on from that? Right sir? Well if you are merely accepting the words or just accepting the words, you can't go much further, but if you are really deeply concerned with humanity, deeply concerned with what is happening in the world, profoundly concerned with the future of man, that is, future of your children, grand-children, you must inevitably ask this question, if you are at all serious, deeply concerned, if you have great affection for humanity. But you see most of us have not the energy to enquire, have not the drive, the passion to find out, so we turn to Marx, Lenin, or the Bible or the Koran and those will never give energy for the discovery of the new instrument which is so absolutely necessary in this world, which is degenerating day by day, destroying itself. So please, together, we are going to find out without any shadow of doubt, by questioning the very nature of thought, by questioning, doubting, asking, probing and finding out for ourselves that thought, at whatever level is fragmentary, limited, finite, and this limitation has conditioned the brain. The brain has got extraordinary capacity, as can be seen in what is happening in the technological world, extraordinary capacity, but the capacity has only been developed in one direction, that is, the technological world: the doctor, surgeon, mathematician, the computer experts and so on. But the human problems, which is our conflict with each other, our sorrow, pain, grief and endless conflict, the technological world can never solve, they are not concerned with it at all. No politician, no system, no method is concerned with all that. So we, as ordinary human beings, are going to find out for ourselves if there is, or if there is not a new instrument which is not touched by thought, which is not the result of time, which is not caught in the process of evolution, which is thought. We are going to ask, we are going into it, step by step, if you are willing, if you are serious. You must be series, which doesn't mean you must not laugh, which doesn't mean you must torture your body as the religions advocate. You must have great alertness, attention, capacity, sensitivity, you cannot be committed to any group, to any belief, to any dogma. You have to have a mind that is really a global mind, not a petty little mind concerned with one's own little problems. In the greater, the lesser disappears. That is, in the greater humanity, the few little human problems are solved, but we are trying to solve human problems without understanding the vast complexity of the human brain and mind and heart, then you will never solve any problem. So please give your attention, care to find out for yourself, not repeat what the speaker says. The speaker has no value. He is just a telephone, but what he says perhaps may have importance. So please find out. Have you ever tried to observe yourself, your wife, the tree across the road and that animal that goes by, without the word? Have you ever tried to look at a tree without naming it, without bringing all the past pictures about a tree - just to observe the tree without the word, which is thought, to look at it. Have you ever done it? No, of course not. Have you ever looked at your wife or your husband or your limited politician, have you ever looked at them without the word, without the picture, without the symbol? Will you look at the speaker without the word - will you? Without all the rubbish and all that reputation which is loathsome anyhow, look at him without the image that you have built about him. Can you do it? Perhaps it will be easier to look at the speaker that way because he doesn't know you, and you don't know him. So perhaps it is easier, but to look at your wife, at your husband, at the tree, at the animal without the picture, the image, the word, which is not identification with the tree, of course. Obviously if you identify yourself with the tree, you are the tree. Right? Are you following all this? Or am I talking to myself? So first, to be aware whether you can see, observe, look, without a single word, picture, because then you will awaken your sensitiveness. We are not sensitive; we have accepted; we are not sensitive to the dirt, to the squalor, to the misery, to the poverty. We just accept it. The poverty of this country can never be solved, it's not ever going to be solved unless you drop your nationalism completely. It will be solved only when you have understood the global relationship of man to man. Then there will be no frontiers. But you are not probably interested in this. So, we are saying that the first essential quality in the investigation, in the enquiry, if there is another instrument, the first thing is, one has to be extraordinarily sensitive. That is, all religions have said suppress your senses. Right? Suppress your feelings, everything, suppress it, so that we have gradually lost the sensitivity of the senses. The speaker is saying quite the contrary. We live by senses, and perhaps some have developed a particular sense. But the speaker is saying to awaken all your senses to their highest degree so that you look at the world with all your senses. You understand what I am talking about? To look at the world with that immense feeling when all the senses are fully awakened. In that there is a great extraordinary sense of energy, beauty. So that in the investigation of another instrument, we see the first thing is that the man who has become dull through repetition, through tradition, through the oppression of the environment - the environment is not merely nature, the environment is the politician, the guru, all that's going on around you. And we are oppressed by all that. So we have gradually lost all sensitivity, all energy to create. And we are using that word create, not creating a picture, a poem, literary works, but we are talking of creation in the sense of bringing about something totally new. And to have that capacity, the drive, the beauty, one must have great sensitivity. And you cannot have great sensitivity if every sense is not fully functioning, fully aware. Now why have we destroyed our senses? You understand my question? Religions have said, the Christian world and the scriptures of this country, and the religious leaders have said, 'suppress desire, suppress your feelings; don't look at a woman; torture yourself, then only will you find god, or nirvana or moksha or whatever you want. Only then, you will be illumined,' - which is utter nonsense. How can you destroy the most extraordinary instrument that we have, the body, with all its senses, the body which is - if you have gone into it - such an extraordinary instrument. So these people say, 'suppress desire; don't yield to desire but if you have desire, identify it with the saviour, with Krishna or whatever the religious gods be in the world.' I wonder if you have realized in this country, somebody calculated, there are three hundred thousand and thirty gods. Perhaps it is better than having one god, you can have more fun with the many. Right? Don't be so serious! So we must understand the nature of desire; it is very important in the investigation of a new instrument, realizing the old instrument, which is thought, is not solving any human problems. So in the investigation of that, we have come upon this thing called desire. What is desire? Why have people said, 'suppress it, deny it, if you cannot identify it with something greater'. It is always a problem of struggle. So we are not advocating suppression, avoidance, escape and all that, of desire. We are investigating together the nature of desire, how desire arises, why we are caught in it, why it has become so extraordinarily powerful. Right? So we are together going into the question of what is desire? What is desire? You see a pleasant object, a beautiful object, a beautiful woman or a man, you desire him or her or that object. That is so. You see a nice car, polished, good lines, powerful, and you touch it, get inside, feel the pleasure of owning it, if you can afford it - perhaps not in this country, never mind. And the desire is there. First the object creates the desire or desire exists apart from the object - you are following all this - which is the object 'car' creates the desire, or desire exists and the objects may vary. So we are not discussing the objects of desire: to be a powerful minister or prime minister, Governor, executive or a talented violinist, but we are enquiring into the very structure, nature of desire. If we understand that, not verbally but factually then there is never a question of suppressing it, never a question of controlling it. Please listen carefully to what the speaker is saying. We have controlled, never understanding who is the controller. We have controlled desire. We have controlled our sex. We are brought up to control. And where there is desire, we are trying to understand it, explore it, probe into it, not control it. If this is clear, then we can go together into the understanding, the truth of desire. What place it has in life, or no place at all? So we cannot possibly start with any conclusion. That is 'suppress desire' or 'let desire run rampant?' But we are together slowly, hesitantly, carefully probing into this which has become an extraordinary factor in life and a torture too. So we are asking: what is desire? What is the origin, the source of desire? Please, you are thinking with me, not just listening to the explanation the speaker is going to give. You are thinking, actively participating in this search of the origin of desire, whether the object creates the desire, or it is independent totally of all objects. Is it clear? Can we go on? Please sirs, and ladies, it is very important to understand this, to go into it very, very deeply, to capture the whole movement of desire, the implications of it, the depth of it, the reality of it. If you had no senses, there would be no sensation. Sensation arises when you see something in the window of a shop, a shirt, a robe, a radio, or whatever or what you will. You see it, visual perception. Then you go inside that shop, touch the material, and from the touching of it there is a sensation. Right? This is simple. You see the car, you touch it, you look at the lines, the polish - not the beauty of Indian cars but some of the European cars are extraordinarily beautiful, like an aeroplane, it is extraordinarily beautiful. And you touch it, you touch that shirt you see in the window, a blue shirt, and by the very touching there is a sensation. This is quite obvious. There is sensation. Then what happens? We are thinking together. You are not accepting what I am saying. You touch that shirt, look at that radio, television, whatever it is and the very touching, looking creates a sensation. Then if you observe very closely thought says, 'how nice it would be if I had that shirt on me, if I stepped into that car.' At that moment when thought creates the image out of the sensation is the origin of desire. Right? Are you following all this? I see a beautiful tree which man hasn't created. He has created the cathedral, the mosque, the temple and all the things therein. He has created all that, but he has not created the tree; he has not created nature, but man is destroying nature. So you look at a beautiful tree. You wish it were in your garden. And you see it; there is the sensation of the dignity, the shadows, the light on the leaf, the movement of the tree. Then sensation arises. Then thought says, 'How nice it would be if I had that tree in my garden.' When thought creates the image of that tree in your garden, at that second, desire is born. Right? So the question then is; it is natural to be sensitive, to have sensations, otherwise you are paralysed. You must have sensation; you must have sensitivity in your fingers, in your eyes, in your hearing and looking, and when you are sensitive you watch, you look and out of that looking, watching, observing, sensation inevitably arises, it must, otherwise you are blind, deaf. Now when there is sensation, then thought creates an image and at that moment desire is born. Right? Have you found this to be so? Or you are going to repeat just what the speaker has said? Or go back to your tradition and say, 'we must suppress desire' or, 'what you are talking about is nonsense. All our religious books have said...' -I don't know why you read all these religious books, anyhow. So if you really go into this question of desire, which is so important in life, then you will find out for yourself the origin, the beginning of desire. Now the question is to look at a car, at a shirt, at a woman, at a picture, there is arising of sensation, and find out whether thought can be in abeyance, not immediately create a picture, immediately create an image of you in that shirt, or in that car and so on. Can there be a gap between sensation and thought impinging upon that sensation? You understand this question? Find out. It will make your mind - brain alert, watchful. And also we ought to talk over together, in the investigation of a new instrument, whether man can ever be free from fear? We are all frightened about something or other, frightened ultimately of death. We will talk about that perhaps next weekend, if we have time. We are all frightened about something, either of the past, of the future or the present, the living present, uncertain of the living activity, the process of the present. We always have this fear. Aren't you afraid? Perhaps you are not afraid of your wife, because you may dominate her and so on, or you may be afraid of the politician. Have you ever noticed how you behave in front of a minister? Have you ever noticed it? How you crawl in front of him, go almost on your knees to him as you do to a guru? Haven't you noticed all this? So one has this burden of fear. Man has never solved the problem; he has escaped from it; he has various means of suppressing it, denying it, escaping from it, but he has never solved this problem. And when there is fear, dreadful activities take place, all kinds of wrong actions take place. Your whole body, your whole mind shrinks when there is real danger of fear. So this is a problem we must solve, not theoretically, but actually, finish completely with fear. Is that possible? Right? We are going to enquire together into that question, not take any dogmatic stand or say, 'it cannot' or 'it can'. We are together probing, looking into the nature of fear, the cause of it, the root of it, the beginning of it, not the various branches of fear, nor the many, many leaves of fear. You understand this? We are looking or trying to find out what is the root of fear? When we find that out the branches wither away, the leaves disappear; they dry up. So please, if you are not tired, give your attention to this question: whether it is possible to be totally, completely free of fear, so that when you walk out of this place, you are really free of fear, fear of - you know, death and all that. That means you must apply your brain, be active in the investigation of it. What is the cause of fear? Where there is a cause there is always an end to that cause. Right? This is logic; this is natural. I may have pain, the cause may be cancer. And if I discover the cause, the pain will end, or it will be terminal. It may kill me but I must discover the cause; like all good doctors, they want to know the cause, so they investigate through the symptoms the cause. So we are looking together, not at the symptoms of fear, dark, frightened of the dark, frightened of your parents, or grandparents, frightened of your husband or wife, frightened of the politician and so on. Those are all symptoms, the objects of fear, but we are asking what is the root of it? It is like cutting down a tree, and I hope you never cut a tree down. It is like going to the very root of things. Now we are going to look at it. So first we are asking, is the cause of fear time? T-I-M-E. Look at it carefully. Don't accept whatever the speaker says, question it, doubt it, ask. The speaker has no authority. He is not important -the person, but what he says is - find out. Is time one of the major causes of fear. That is, time being tomorrow, what might happen tomorrow or what has happened yesterday or many thousand yesterdays, or what might happen now? You understand my question? Is time the factor of fear, one of the factors? I may have done something wrong last week and what I have done has caused pain, and I hope it will not recur again. That is the word 'hope' implies the future. Are you following this? So time by the watch, time by the sunrise and sunset, time as yesterday, today and tomorrow, time as yesterday's memories, experiences, modifying itself in the present and proceeding to the future. All that is time -physical time, to cover a distance from here to there, from one point to another point, from this place to go to your home, that requires time. So there is physical time, and there is so-called psychological time, the inward time. That is, I hope I will get a better job at the end of the year. I hope I will be better, nobler or whatever it is, sometime later. I hope I meet a nice man tomorrow. So the word 'hope' implies time. Right? Or another is the idea of 'better'. I am this, but I will be better. I am violent but I will become non-violent. So this process of 'what is' and transforming 'what is' to something else is a process of time. Right? Is this clear? So time is a factor of fear. I am living; I am full of energy but something, an accident might kill me? I am well, but there is always death. So there is this sense of time, an'interval. That interval is translated as the better, as hope, as self-improvement and so on. I want to fulfil; I may not be able to fulfil. I apply for a job; I may not have the capacity for the job. So there is fear. So time is one of the factors of fear. Right? We are not saying how to wipe away time. We are enquiring into the nature of fear. Then, is not thought, is not the process of thinking another factor of fear? Look at it. I think I may die. I think that god exists, but you come along and threaten my belief. I am frightened. So thought, thinking of the past incident, hoping that pain will not recur again, thinking about it and wishing that it will not happen again, is the movement of thought. Right? So thought and time are the very root of fear. You cannot stop time, the physical time, from here to your house you require time, you cannot stop that. Time to learn a language. To learn any technique requires time. And we see that time is one of the factors of fear as well as thought. Right? So thought is a movement. Isn't it? Time is a movement. Are you understanding all this? Are we together or you and I are far apart? Sir, I don't know what has happened to your brain, to your capacity to investigate. Let's go on. Is there actually factually psychological time at all? You understand my question? Is there in me, in my feeling, actually, is that time invented? No, I'll show you what I mean. It's quarter past seven, oh - quarter past six. Are you tired? Shall I go on with it? Audience: Yes, yes. K: You mean to say you are not tired? A: No, no. K: Why? A: (Laughter) K: Ah, no, sir, just listen. I'm asking a serious question, don't just laugh it off. Why? A: Inaudible. K: No, no sir, just listen to the question. Don't immediately answer. If you have been working, investigating, active, exercising every capacity that you have to find out, you would be tired; you should be tired. Which shows you have just listened casually, played around with words. So I'm asking you, the problem of time is very important, as the problem of thought. We live by time. All our knowledge is based on time. The struggle to become less violent, to struggle to become something, which is all measure. I mustn't go into all this. Are you following all this? Sir, look: I am this; I am what I am. That is 'what is'. I am unhappy, violent, lonely, depressed, anxious, that's what one is; that is a fact. Then comes the idea I must become something else from 'what is'. That 'becoming' is time, as becoming from a clerk to a manager, that requires time. That same process of thinking we have brought over into the field of the psyche, into the field of consciousness, into the field of feeling, thinking. That is, I am violent, I will become non-violent, which is you are allowing time to come, interfere. But when you say, 'I am violent, I am going to understand it, look at it, watch it, go into it very quickly, deeply,' there is no time. But if you are trying to become something else, there is time. Right? The becoming, which is measure, that demands time. Say for instance, if you compare yourself with somebody, more intelligent, more bright, more etc., if you compare, comparison is measurement. If you don't compare at all with anybody, including your great gods and saints and gurus and all the rest of it, don't compare at all, then what happens? You are what you are, from there you start. But when you are comparing, trying to become something else you will never understand your self, what you are. So time is a becoming. A becoming which is non-fact. That is, I am violent, I must become non-violent. The non-violence is not a fact, has no reality. You talk a great deal about it in this country. It doesn't exist. What exists is violence. And if you forget the nonviolence then you can tackle violence, go into it. And the understanding of violence can be long or very quick, either the investigation can take time because you are lazy, or you say, 'Well, I'll investigate it tomorrow, it's not important', and so on. But a man who is concerned with violence, which is spreading all over the world, more and more, destroying humanity, if he is concerned and wanting to understand the depth of violence he will understand it instantly. So where there is a becoming you must have psychological time. That becoming is illusory. The fact is what exists, what you are at the moment: your anger, your reactions, your fears, look at it. So time is a major factor of fear, and also thought. You cannot stop physical time. When you begin to understand the nature of time inwardly, the becoming, and not becoming, and understand the whole movement of thought - understand it, not suppress it, deny it, how am I to control thought. Those are all absurd questions, because who is the controller? The controller is another part of thought. I won't go into that, we haven't time. So if you really, deeply are concerned with the nature of fear and the total ending of psychological fear, one has to go into the question of time in depth and also the nature and structure of thought. But if you say, 'Please tell me a method to get rid of fear,' then you are asking a terribly wrong question, because the very question implies that you have not understood yourself, you have not looked at yourself. So we will talk about sorrow, love and compassion. We will talk next Sunday perhaps, on what is religion? What is the nature of the religious mind, and what is meditation, and if there is something sacred beyond all thought. We must investigate all that, because that is all life: death, the conflict, pain, sorrow, pleasure, fear, meditation, all that is our life, and we don't understand all that. And to understand it one must have vitality, strength, and you will not have that energy if you are merely repeating words, if you cling to some belief, to some conclusion, that destroys all energy. Energy implies freedom, not what you like to do but freedom. Only then can you have extraordinary energy. Right, sir. CALCUTTA 3RD PUBLIC TALK 27TH NOVEMBER, 1982 May we go on with what we were talking about in the last two talks? First of all I would like to remind you, if I may, this is not an intellectual entertainment, nor some kind of romantic ideological rubbish. We are dealing with our daily life, with our relationship with each other, and also what is happening in the world, and the turmoil, the disorder, the lack of care. People are treated brutally, and governments seem to have no control over the populous. This is happening all over the world, but more so in this country. And we ought to talk over together this evening why human beings who have lived for over forty thousand years, why human beings are behaving as they are? What's happened to them? What's happened to each one of us that we don't lead an orderly sane, balanced life? We have created this society which is immoral, unethical, corrupt, destructive. We have created it. Each one of us has contributed to it. And if there is to be a radical change in the social structure, we have to begin with ourselves, not with politics, not with Marxism or some kind of retreat from the present. We have to put order in our own house first. We are disorderly, violent, confused, lonely, all that. And so please, we are going to talk over together this evening not only what is order, total order, if there is any kind of love, what is compassion, whether sorrow can ever end, the sorrow of human beings right throughout the world. So we are going to talk over together these things. As we pointed out in the last two talks this is not a lecture -lecture being, being informed, directed about a particular subject. We are talking over together, you and the speaker, our problems, amicably, without any resistance, not agreeing but exploring, investigating, seeing why we live such disorderly lives and why we accept things as they are. We are not advocating or talking about physical violence, physical revolution. On the contrary, such revolutions have never produced a good society. We are talking about human behaviour, why man is what he is. We cannot blame the environment; we cannot blame the politicians or the scientists. That is a very easy escape. But what we ought to be concerned with is why, we somewhat intelligent people, somewhat educated people with families, with all the daily work that one goes through, why we lead such disorderly lives? What is disorder? Please, as I said, this is a conversation between you and the speaker. So please take part in it, don't just casually listen but share in it, partake in our conversation. We cannot talk to such a large group, but you as a human being, you and the speaker can talk over together. So our question is: what is disorder? A confused mind, a confused life, cannot find what is order, because the brain is confused, we are uncertain and to merely search for an order, an orderly life is rather thoughtless, foolish, whereas if we could together find out for ourselves what causes disorder in our lives, and so what brings about a society which is utterly disorderly. So please, we are talking over together. You are sharing the problem with the speaker. It's not that you are merely listening to some ideas but sharing, partaking in the conversation between us. That must be quite clear from the beginning, that you are as much responsible for what is happening in the world. And we are going to investigate together why we live such disorderly lives, and what is our responsibility towards what is happening in the world. What is disorder? What is the nature and the structure of disorder? There is disorder - isn't there - where there is contradiction: say one thing and do something totally different; think one thing and act quite the opposite. I wonder if one is aware of that. Then, there is conflict, disorder, when we are pursuing ideals, whether political ideals, religious ideals or our own projection of what we think we ought to be. That is, where there is division between what is actually going on and try to change that according to a certain pattern, certain ideals, certain attitudes and convictions, that is, where there is division between actually what is happening in ourselves and neglecting that and pursuing an ideal, that is one of the causes of disorder. Another cause is to pursue in a psychological, so-called inward life, pursue authority: the authority of a book, the authority of a guru, the authority of so-called spiritual people. We accept very easily the authority in our inward life. Of course you have to accept the authority of the scientist, of the technocrat, of the doctor, the surgeon, but inwardly, psychologically, why do we accept authority at all? Please, this is an important question to ask. We'll come back to it. We are asking what are the causes of disorder? We said pursuing an ideal is disorder, accepting authority of another in the world of spirit, in the world of the mind, inward psychological state. And one of the other causes of disorder is this everlasting attempt to become something inwardly. So these, perhaps and other causes bring about disorder. So we are going to investigate each one of them. Why do we have ideals at all? There are the political ideals, and in the communist world the theoretician translating Marx or Lenin according to their inclination, their study, their historical search. So we are asking - and I hope you are asking too - why do we have ideals at all? And what is an ideal? The word 'idea', originally the root meaning of that word is to observe, to see, to look. But we have translated it as a projection of a particular concept, brought about by thought, and that is the ideal, and the ideal is far more important and the pursuit of that ideal becomes all consuming when you totally neglect 'what is', 'what is' is important, not the ideal. We are using the word 'what is' in the sense what is actually happening both outwardly and inwardly. When we are violent, as most human beings are, to have an ideal of non-violence has no reality, has no validity, but what has validity, reality is the fact that we are violent and to deal with that violence, not in terms of ideals and patterns, but to understand the cause or causes of violence. Perhaps in this country the pursuit of non-violence, which is an illusion, has deprived us of our energy to look actually at what is going on. I hope we are talking over together this problem. We never look at 'what is'. We want to change what is taking place to something else. This has been the process for centuries upon centuries. The political ideals, the religious ideal, the ideals that one has created for oneself, an end, a goal, and the goal, the end, the ideals become extraordinarily important and not what is actually happening? That is, 'what is' being transformed into 'what should be'. There is the struggle, there is disorder. Whereas if we understand, give our attention to 'what is', that is, 'what is' is violence, hatred, antagonism, brutality, and to deal with it. So, we are concerned to discover the causes of disorder. So we are saying one of the major factors in life, which is disorder, is trying to transform or change 'what is' into 'what should be'. The 'what should be' is totally unreal, but 'what is' is all important. If I am greedy, to enquire into what is the nature of greed, whether that greed can really have an end or must it continue, but to have the ideal of non-greed seems so utterly nonsensical, and yet we are brought up on this. So to see the illusory nature of 'what is' is the beginning of intelligence. Then, there is division in us; there is duality, the opposite. Is there an opposite at all? There is opposite as light and darkness, there is tall and short, different ways outside, but basically is there an opposite to greed, to violence? You are following all this I hope. We are asking if there is an opposite? That is, in the world of the psyche, in the world of the spirit, psychologically, is there an opposite at all? We say there is the good and the bad, the good and the evil. I do not know if some of you have been to Europe and various caves there, about thirty thousand, forty thousand years ago, man still had this problem: in their paintings there is the evil on the one side in various forms, and there is the good on the other, and there is battle between the two. We are asking, please think together in this matter; not accept what the speaker is saying but question, ask, doubt, enquire if there is an opposite at all, apart from the physical side of it, inwardly. Is good, the good, is it the opposite of evil? If it is the opposite then the good has its root in its own opposite. Is this clear? Have I to explain everything? All right. I'll explain. The good and the bad. If evil is the opposite of the good, then that evil has a relationship with the good. Right? Because it's the opposite. The opposite is put together by thought. Either the good is totally divorced from evil or it is the outcome, the opposite, the invention of thought as the good. Are you following this or not? So what is the good? Let's enquire into that. What is the good? According to the dictionary, which is the common usage of that word, it means good behaviour, good in the sense, being whole, not fragmented, but having that sense, or understanding the nature of wholeness of life, and in that there is no fragmentation as the evil. But if the evil is the outcome of the good, then that evil has a relationship with the good. Right? Are we following this at all with each other? Yes? Good. So we are enquiring together if there is an opposite in our life? If there is hate and love, can love have a relationship with hate, with jealousy? If it has a relationship with love, then it is not love. Obviously. If I hate someone, I hope I don't - if I hate someone, and at the same time talk about love, it is incompatible, the two don't meet. So we are questioning if there is an opposite at all, but only 'what is'. Where there is an opposite, there must be conflict. I hate and also I think I love. The opposite of hate is not love. The opposite of hate is still hate. Right? So that's one of the factors in our life of disorder: the ideal, the opposite and the acceptance of spiritual, so-called spiritual authority. There is the authority of law, the authority of a government, the authority of a policeman, the authority of a good surgeon. But psychologically, inwardly, why do we accept authority? - the authority of the priest, the authority of a book, the authority of a guru. Why? When we follow somebody and are guided by somebody, guided in what to believe, what not to believe, to accept his system of enlightenment and so on and so on, what is happening to our own brain, to our own inward search? You understand my question? I follow you as my guru, you're not, but I try. You are my guru. You tell me what to do, what to think, what to believe and the various steps I must take to attain whatever they call it - enlightenment. And I, rather gullible, want to escape from my life which is disorderly corrupt, insecure, I trust the guru. I give him my life and say 'I surrender; I give part of my life in attaining that enlightenment', whatever it is understood to mean. So why, why do I do that? - which you are doing in different forms. Why? Is it not because I want some kind of security, some kind of assurance that I will have some day some kind of happiness, some kind of release from my daily worries and miseries. The guru gives you an assurance, and you feel satisfied. But you never question the guru; you never doubt what he is saying; you never discuss with him; you accept. That has been the condition of human beings right throughout the world for millions of years. The interpreter between god and you, between that which is holy and you, he assumes he knows it; he assumes he has realized it and he is going to tell you what to do. And you, wanting comfort, security will accept him without a single doubt. Have you ever talked, discussed with your guru? Have you, if you have one? Never, I am quite sure of it. He wouldn't have it. He would say, 'You know nothing about it; I will tell you.' Now, to question spiritual authority, whether it is the Christian authority or the spiritual authority of Islam with their book or you with your guru with his statements, to question, to doubt it, so that you rely entirely on yourself, to be a light to oneself, a light that cannot be lit by another. That requires your questioning, your asking, your demanding not only the outer, the spiritual authority but of yourself, why you believe so that your own mind becomes clear, strong, vital, so that there is energy for creative activity. But when you follow somebody your brain becomes dull, routine, mechanical which is the very destructive nature of the human mind - of the human brain. So please we are not telling you what to do, but see what you are doing. See why this disorder exists in our life, and when you begin to investigate into that disorder, then out of that disorder comes order. When there is the dissipation of the whole causes of disorder, there is order. Then you don't have to pursue what is order. Order is virtue: order means freedom. So we have to enquire also into what is freedom. You understand what we have said that where there is order in our life, total order, that order is virtue and that very order is freedom. The word 'freedom' is misused by everybody. There is freedom from something, and there is freedom. Freedom from something is not freedom. We will go into that. I am a prisoner, prisoner of my own ideas, of my own theories, of my own concepts and so on, and my mind - brain is a prisoner to that. And then freedom is to be free from my prison, to fall into another prison. I free myself from one particular conditioning and unknowingly or unconsciously fall into another conditioning. So freedom is from something, from anger, from jealousy, all that; that is not freedom at all. Freedom means to be free, not from something. This requires a great deal of enquiry, which is, our mind, our brain is conditioned like a computer. As we said the other day we are programmed, programmed to be a Hindu, programmed to be a Muslim, Christian and so on. The computer is programmed. So our brains have been programmed for thousands of years, which is our conditioning. Freedom is not the dissolution of that conditioning but the ending of that conditioning. Where there is an end to my conditioning then only is there freedom. I wonder if you are understanding all this? Are we together in this at all? So without having that freedom there must be disorder. So, the ideal, the opposite, the pursuit of spiritual authority, and accepting the conditioning we are Hindu, Muslim, and so on, all that brings about disorder. When there is an end to that, there is order. You will say that is impossible: it is impossible not to follow somebody because we are so uncertain, so insecure. And you are willing to follow somebody so easily, which means your brain is becoming dull, inactive. You may be active physically but psychologically, inwardly, you cease to be active. Then we ought to talk over together suffering, whether there is an end of sorrow. When there is an end to sorrow, then only there is love, then only there is compassion. So we are going to enquire together into this question, whether it is possible to end all sorrow. What is sorrow, grief, pain, the feeling of loneliness, the sense of isolation? So we are enquiring, you and the speaker together, not intellectually or verbally, but to find out for ourselves, for each one of us whether sorrow can ever end? What is the nature of sorrow? What is the cause of sorrow, which is pain, tears, a sense of desperate loneliness, what is the cause of it? We are going together to enquire into it. So sir, please share with the speaker. Don't just go to sleep; enquire with him why human beings from time immemorial have suffered and are still suffering, not from physical pain, some fatal disease or feeling utterly rejected. We are talking about the nature of suffering inwardly - the pain, the tears, and the escape from it. I wonder if we have ever realized that for the last five thousand years there have been wars, killing each other and how many people have cried, shed tears, for those who have been killed, maimed. I was - the speaker was once taken to a hospital by a friend, another doctor, where the results of war were in hospital. People had no arms and legs. Some had no eyes. Imagine how their mothers must have cried. The pain, the anxiety, the hope, all that constitutes sorrow. And this sorrow has existed in all the days of our life, and we never seem to be free of it, completely ending sorrow. So together, if you will, we'll go into this, because there is an end to sorrow. Sorrow comes with the loss of somebody, with the death of somebody, my son, I have lost him. There is grief and tears and a great sense of loneliness. Then in that state of shock, in that state of pain and anxiety, loneliness, I seek comfort; I want to escape from this agony; then I escape through every form of entertainment, whether it be drugs, alcohol, the temple, the mosques or the church, I want to escape from this. So I begin to invent all kinds of fanciful concepts. Whereas I have lost him, he is dead, gone. And there is that pain. Can one remain with that pain, can one look at that pain, hold it, you hold it as a precious jewel, not escape, not suppress, not rationalize, but to look, to look at the sorrow in oneself, not analyse it, not rationalizing it, not seeking the cause of it but as a vessel holds water so hold this thing called sorrow, the pain. That is, I have lost my son, and I am lonely, not to escape from that loneliness, not to suppress it, not to intellectually rationalize it, but to look at that loneliness, understand the depth of it, the nature of it. Loneliness is total isolation which is brought about through our daily activity of selfish ambitions or ideological ambitions, competition, each one out for himself. Those are the attributive causes which bring about loneliness. But if you run away from it, you will never solve sorrow. The very word 'sorrow' has etymologically passion, the word 'passion'. Most of us have no passion. We may have lust; we may have ambition; we may want to become a rich man, we devote our energies to all that. But that does not bring about passion. Only with the ending of sorrow, there is passion. It is that total energy, not limited by thought. So it is important to understand the nature of suffering and the ending of it. The ending of it is to hold that sorrow, that pain. Look at it. It's a marvellous thing to know how to hold the pain and look at it, be with it, live with it, not get bitter, cynical, but to see the nature of sorrow. There is beauty in that sorrow, depth in that sorrow. So we ought also to talk over together what is love. What does that word mean to you? If you were asked in a drawing room, in your room, what is the meaning of that word to you, what would you answer? You might if you are an intellectual, say, 'What do you mean by that? I love playing golf. I love to read. I love my wife. I love god.' Is that love? Do you love your wife? Do you love your husband? Do you love your friend? So we are enquiring into what is love. This is really very important to enquire into because without love life is empty. You may have all the riches of the earth. You may be a great banker, great scientist, mathematician, great technician, capable of great technology, but without love you are lost, an empty shell. So together we are going to find out not what love is, but what is not love. That is, through negation come to the positive. You understand what I am saying? Through negating what is not, that very negation is the positive. Is jealousy love? Jealousy in which there is attachment, anxiety, in jealousy there is hate, is that love? You are attached to your family; you are attached to a person or an idea or a concept or a conclusion, you are attached. What are the implications of attachment? Suppose I am married; I am attached to my wife. What does it mean? Where there is attachment, there is fear. Where there is attachment, there is suspicion. Where there is attachment, there is possessiveness. Because through attachment to an ideal, to a concept, to a belief, or to a person, when there is attachment, with all the consequences of jealousy, anxiety, hatred, suspicion, surely all that is not love. So to understand the nature of love, is it possible to be totally free from attachment? Please ask this question of yourself. You are all attached to something or other. If I may suggest, most respectfully, become aware of the consequences of that attachment. If you are attached to an ideal you are always on the defensive or aggressive. If you come to a conclusion and to hold on to that conclusion is to end all further enquiry. The communist, the socialist and so on, they have all come to a conclusion according to Marx, Lenin, and so on. They have stopped. They have brought an end to their thinking capacity, to their enquiry, to their doubt. So, where there is attachment, there must be pain. I am attached to my wife and she may run away, she might look at another man or she might die. So in attachment, there is always fear, there is always anxiety, suspicion, watching. Surely that is not love, is it? So can one be totally free of all attachment? It's up to you, but when you are attached, there is no love, because in that attachment there is fear. Fear is not love. And the ambitious man who wants to climb the ladder of success has no love, because he is concerned with himself, with his achievements, with his gathering of power, the position, the prestige. How can such a man love another? He may have a family, children, but that's all normal, natural to have children - but in that man there is no love. And when you say I love god or the highest principle, is that love? That god, that principle, the highest principle 'Brahmin' is the result of thought. God is invented by man. I am sure you won't like this. But you are attached to that concept - god exists. Then you ask, 'Who is the creator of all this misery'. God hasn't created this, has he? If he has, he must be rather an odd god, he must be a strange sadistic god. So, all the gods in the world are invented by thought. And to find out what love is, as we said there must be an end to sorrow, an end to attachment, end to everything we have committed to inwardly. Where the self, the ego, the 'me' is, love is not. You hear all this my friend, you hear all this, and you will walk away from here with the same attachment, with the same convictions and never enquire further because the more you enquire into all this, the more life becomes dangerous because you may have to give up a lot of things naturally, not as self sacrifice, naturally, easily you may have to give up. If you understood the nature of attachment and are free from it, if you tell your wife, 'I am no longer attached to you', she may perhaps throw a brick at you or say 'what nonsense'. So you have to realize that when you see the truth of something, you are standing completely alone. And you may perceive that, and from that you are frightened. You may believe, you may see the truth in the nature of attachment, but as you don't want to quarrel with your wife or husband, you accept. So gradually we become hypocrites. And also we should discuss, if there is time, the nature of intelligence. Compassion has its own intelligence. Love has its own intelligence. We are going to enquire into what is intelligence, if you are not tired. Surely it cannot be bought in books. Knowledge is not intelligence. Please, this may be a little arduous to go into, so please give your attention, if you are willing; I'm not asking you to force yourself to do something that you don't want to do, because where there is love, compassion, it has the beauty of its own intelligence. Compassion cannot exist if you are a Hindu, a Catholic, Protestant, a Buddhist, or a Marxist. Love is not the product of thought. In understanding the nature of love, compassion, which is to deny all that which is not. To see that which is false as false is the beginning of intelligence. To see the truth in the false is the beginning of intelligence. To see the nature of disorder and end it, not carry on day after day, but end it. The ending is the immediate perception which is intelligence. So we are enquiring into what is intelligence. Cleverness is not intelligence. Having a great deal of knowledge about various subjects, mathematics, history, science, poetry, painting, to be able to paint and all the rest of it, that is not the activity of intelligence. The investigator into the atom, he may have extraordinary capacity of concentration, imagination, probing, questioning, asking, hypothesis after hypothesis, theory after theory, all that is not intelligence. Intelligence is the activity of the wholeness of life, not broken up, fragmented. And that intelligence is not yours or mine, it doesn't belong to any country, to any people, like love is not Christian love or Hindu love and so on. So, please enquire into all this. Because our life depends on all this. We are unfortunate, miserable people, always in travail, always in conflict. We have accepted it as a way of life. But in enquiring into all this there is the awakening of that intelligence. When that intelligence is in operation, in action, there is only right action. Tomorrow we will talk over together death, meditation and if there is something beyond all thought, if there is something enduring, something sacred, something immeasurable. We are going to discuss that tomorrow. Right, sirs. CALCUTTA 4TH PUBLIC TALK 28TH NOVEMBER, 1982 This is the last talk. We have been talking about so many things, so many human problems and we ought to consider this evening several things more, seeing what the world is, what is taking place in the world - the corruption, the violence, the total disregard for the people by the politicians, and the gurus have nothing to say any more except repeat some worn out phrases and slogans. Considering all this, we ought together, you and the speaker, think together, not agree, not disregard or reject, but together think because thought has built this world. Thought has been responsible for all the miseries of human beings, though it has created in the world of technology most extraordinary things. And it seems so utterly urgent and necessary that we should think together, cooperate together, find out for ourselves because there is no leader any more, there is no politician, no guru. We are utterly totally responsible for ourselves. And so as the crisis is great we should be able to think together, and apparently that is one of the most difficult things to do because each one of us has so many opinions, so many conclusions which prevent our coming together. To think together means to put aside all your personal prejudices, bias, opinions and various forms of conclusions which actually prevent communication with each other. If we could, this evening, put all that aside, even for an hour, and think together to find out for ourselves the truth, the actuality of life, to look at it without any bias, not as a communist, marxist, socialist or belonging to some sect or religion or nationality, but together look very closely at our lives. Nobody is going to change our lives; no environment, no authority, no book. So we have to look together at ourselves as we are and explore deeper with great depth the meaning of existence, meaning of our lives, the significance of our activities. So please, if one may point out this is not a lecture, the speaker is not telling you what to do but together, you and the speaker, enter into the realm of thought. Because thought has brought about great technology and also great wars, great misery, great sorrow, and thought has also brought about great hygiene, surgery and all that. So please together this evening we are going to penetrate into the whole existence of man, not one aspect of it, not as a religious man or a worldly man, as a scholar or as a monk or as a woman or man; but together look at the whole existence of our life: going to the office day after day for the next forty, fifty years and then dying at the end of it, or going to the factory with all that noise, ugliness and brutality of it all. We should be able to look at this whole existence of our life, of each one's life, to look at it, to observe it, not direct it, not to ask ourselves what is the goal, what should I do. But first to get acquainted, to understand ourselves, to understand what actually we are, why we do certain things, why we belong to this or to that. So it is important that we look at our life. If you observe closely, our life is fragmented, broken up. Either you are a businessman or a doctor or a surgeon, or an engineer and in your own life, personal life there is always this division between you, however intimate, and another. There is always this division, this struggle, this pain. Of course there is some kind of joy, pleasure, but that is also part of life. Our life, as it is now, is broken up, fragmented and this fragmentation takes place because our thinking is also fragmentary. Our thinking which is the outcome of knowledge, and knowledge is always limited, and knowledge always goes hand in hand with ignorance, there is no complete knowledge about anything, and so our thinking which is born out of knowledge is always limited, under all circumstances, whether you are a scientist, or a psychologist, or an engineer and so on. So thought, thinking, is limited, circumscribed, and what is limited must inevitably in its action create fragmentation. You are following this? Thought itself is the cause of all division, of all fragmentation, and unless one understands the nature and the structure of thought you cannot go very far. And to go very far you must begin very near, which is you: how you think, what you think. And to discover for yourself that thought always is limited; it can invent god, the immeasurable, the nameless, the supreme, but it is still the product of thought. And so thought is one of the major factors of our conflict, of our misery, or our sorrow. We have gone into it briefly during the other talks, but unless one understands this basically, very deeply, not intellectually, not verbally, or argumentatively, or logically, unless you understand the nature of thinking and then begin to discover for yourself a new instrument, a totally different instrument. Because the only instrument we have now is thought. And thought has created incredible problems, most complex problems, and thought tries to solve those problems, and thereby increases more problems. You must have noticed this, politically, religiously and so on. So we must find together a new instrument, and that is what we are going into when we talk about death, religion, meditation, and to understand, to discover, to come upon something that is not man-made, that must be something beyond time, beyond all measure. We are going to discover it, we are going to talk about it, communicate with each other. But we must understand the position of thought, the value of thought, the activities which thought brings about in which there is division, there is fragmentation. If this is very clear we can look at our life, at our own personal circumscribed life. Because it is much more important what happens before death rather than what happens after death. Is this clear? We are always enquiring what happens after death but we never enquire what is happening before death, not at the last day or the last minute but the way we live for thirty, forty, fifty years or more and then die. Time - please listen to all this, if you care to - time is death. Time - we are talking about time which is the inward time, the psychological time - the time that has created the idea of thought. I hope to become something, I hope to become rich, I hope to become a saint, or a spiritual person. Time is a movement, apart from the time by the watch, by the sunset, and so on or the time from one point to another. Now all that requires time - to learn a language and so on. We are saying that time, the inward time, the psychological time of hope, of achievement of that which is to change it to become something else. All that involves time both physically and psychologically. We are talking about the psychological time, a time that is inside the skin as it were - that time is death. To think in terms of time is to bring about division, as we pointed out, fragmentation, and make the future - give the future greater significance than the present. Are you following all this a little bit? Yes? When I ask 'yes', you are not encouraging me. Please, you are not encouraging me, I am asking if we are together walking together in the same road, in the same lane, perhaps hand in hand, not that you are walking ahead of me or behind me, but together we are walking on the same pleasant lane full of shadows, scented air, and the beauty of the trees. So when I ask, please, it is only to find out whether we are walking together, thinking together, cooperating together. As I said - the speaker said time which is a movement, invented by thought - psychological time is invented by thought and thought itself is the product of time, that is, it is the product of time because man has acquired knowledge through long evolution, evolution implies time and when we think in terms of time we divide life, we fragment life. I am a Hindu, you are a Buddhist, I am Muslim, you are a Christian and so on. This fragmentation is the result of thought which itself is limited. And psychological time is invented by thought. When you say, I am, I will be, I am this but I will one day be different, that gap between 'what is' and 'what should be' or what you want to be, is time. When you have such time there must be fragmentation. And life which is being lived now, in that life we have separated death from living. Right? I'll go into it. As we said we never enquire deeply what happens long before death? What happens to our life? But very few people ask that. They are all concerned with what happens after death - whether you will live, whether you will meet your brother, and so on and so on. But not the long period thirty, forty, or fifty years which is far more important than what happens after. So we are together going to examine, observe what our life is. Because if we don't understand that profoundly, then when you meet death - which I hope you won't for a very long time - then you are frightened, then you are totally blind to everything. So we ought together investigate our life which we live daily, whether it has any significance at all, whether it has any value, depth, beauty. What is our life, what is your daily life? Perhaps you go to the office from nine to five for the rest of your life. Have you ever thought what a tragedy it is, and working for what. You will say, my responsibility, my duty to my family, I must earn money, therefore I go to the office from nine to five for the next sixty years. Then you retire, to die. That is one of the factors of our daily existence. There in the office, or in the factory, you are struggling, you are competing, you want to become the manager: the clerk wants to become the executive, the priest wants to become the Bishop and so on. You come home, weary, insulted, bored, and you come home. What do you call home? Just the roof, half a dozen rooms or one room? What is a home? Have you ever thought about all this? What does that word home mean to you? Just to live there, eat, sex, children, quarrelling, discussing, arguing, bullying each other, or withdrawing from it all - becoming a monk, a sannyasi? You can't withdraw from life, you may put on different robes, but life is where you are, what you are. And during these forty, fifty years, there is constant struggle, constant conflict, pain, a little joy, the pursuit of pleasure, and facing the inevitable death. That is our life, to put it in a nutshell. You can't deny it, it is so. Now this is the life of every human being on earth, whether they live in an affluent society or under a dictatorship or in a totalitarian state, whether they are Marxist, Leninist or democrats. This is their life - pain, struggle, conflict working from morning till night. Do you know what happens to such human beings, their capacity to think? How can you think clearly, think as a human being, who is actually the rest of humanity? This is the state of every human being, that is his consciousness. So you are actually the rest of mankind. This is not a logical conclusion, this is a fact. We went into it the other day, because you must understand this fact otherwise you won't understand as we talk about death, furthermore you won't understand the significance of it. Which is your consciousness with its content; the content is the belief, the dogmas, the name, the form, the pains, anxieties, loneliness, despair, depression, desire, all that is you. All that is what you are, actually. This consciousness is the consciousness of all human beings. This is logical but if you merely reduce it to logic and then conclude then it has no value. But if you feel the depth of it, the extraordinary beauty of it, the strength of it, that you are the rest of mankind. That is a fact and when you feel it in your blood, in your heart, in your mind then you are no longer an individual. I know it is difficult for you to swallow this or even to think about it because you are conditioned to be an individual but you are not. You may be tall, you may be short or clever and so on, on the peripheral level, on the outside, but inside you are like the rest of mankind. So if you are the rest of mankind - you are the mankind - then what is your responsibility to man? What is your responsibility to what is happening in the world? Probably you have never asked this question of yourself. You say my responsibility is to my family, to my country. But the idea of your country is just another invention of thought. So please examine your daily life. And when you ask the question, what is your responsibility to the rest of mankind? The rest of mankind is destroying itself. You may live safely in Calcutta - I doubt it. In this filthy city, poverty ridden country, each one is destroying the other and exploiting and all the rest of it. So you have to find out for yourself what is your responsibility, what is right action in front of all this? You can't escape from it. You may limit yourself to certain immediate responsibilities, but you are a human being who is the rest of mankind, so you are also responsible for mankind. So your consciousness is not yours, it is shared by all human beings living on this earth. They all go through every kind of misery, every kind of suffering - pain, anxiety, despair and the feeling of utter loneliness. So if you are at all aware of what is happening in the world, then you will have to ask yourself what is your responsibility, what is your action. And as we have not time to go into that, what is right action in front of this perhaps we would talk about it in Madras and other places and if you are interested read some rotten book, it will tell you about it. So now you think you are an individual, you think you are separate from the rest of mankind. And then you ask, what happens to me after I die? Do I not incarnate? So let us examine that very closely. What are you? When you say I want to be born next life, I believe in reincarnation and so on, what is it that is going to be reborn? What are you? Please examine it. Let's examine it together dispassionately. You are the name, the form, the body; you are what you think, you are the result of your education, if you have one. And the education is so rotten, it only conditions you to become some engineer, clerk, or this or that. They don't educate you to understand the beauty, the wholeness of life. They only give you a lot of knowledge so that you can act either skilfully or not in the world. That is not education. That is one part, a very small part of education. Education is the cultivation of the whole human being, the unfoldment, the flowering of a human mind, not crippled by specialization. Again, we haven't time to go into that. So what are you? Are you a series of words - please listen - a series of ideas, a repetitive memory, a continuity of conviction? That is, all this is a verbal structure. Right? But you say, 'That is not all, there is something much deeper' -that is what you will say - when you say, there is something deeper, god or Atman or whatever you like to call it, the soul, as the Christians do, and you call it by another name, when you say, 'I am not all that, I am much more, there is a fragment of light in me', when you say there is something more than mere physical attributes, more than mere conclusion, concepts, beliefs and words, words, words, you say, there is something more beyond, more than that; when you say you are more than that, it is also the invention of thought obviously. So you are put together by thought. Obviously. You call yourself a Hindu, and another calls himself a Muslim and so on. All the division is the result of thought. So you are actually a series of memories, a series of reactions and responses based on your knowledge, your experience, your quality of mind. That is what you are, which is essentially death. Right? You are living in the past and the past is death. All knowledge is in the past and therefore when you live with knowledge, which is the past, and as the past is over, gone, what are you? Go on look at yourself, don't look at me. Look at yourself as you would look in a mirror. So that is what you are. And you say, if I die, incarnate in another life, which is to carry the same thing over to the next life a lot of words, a lot of experience, a lot of memories, better houses or if you want more money and so on. But if you do believe in a future life, that is next life, then what you do now matters more because next life you will pay for it. This is your conviction. This is what you cling to: a lot of memories which are dead, gone, ideas which are also finished, they are also dead. So your content of your life is what? That is why this country which believes in so many things, so many beliefs, so many superstitions, believes in reincarnation. That is why here there is slow dying. Now, the question then is, what is death? Please ask this question, what is death? That is, you are just a vast reservoir of memories, words, pictures, symbols. Your consciousness is the rest of mankind. You are not an individual. What you think, other people think, your thinking is not individual. There is only thinking. So when you realize you are not an individual - you may have a different form, different shape of head, jobs and so on, those are physical peripheral activities - but inwardly you are like the rest of man. So what does death mean then? Are you following this somewhat? Look sir: suppose I am all that, which is a fact - name, form, education, physical responses, psychological reactions, all the inherited racial memories and personal memories, which is all in the past. I am all that and all human beings are that, all human consciousness is that. So what does it mean to die? Ask these questions, sirs? Now we are living, active. You may be repetitively active, mechanically active, as most people are, but you are active, you have got life, you have got feelings, you have got responses, sensations, and when death comes all that is wiped out. The brain cells themselves, for lack of air and so on, decay. That is what we call death ,which is to end all the things you have held, your jewels, your house, your bank account, your wife, your children, all that you end, your attachments, that is death. But you want to carry it over to the next life, which is just an idea, vision, fulfilment. So please listen: while living to end attachment, for example - because when you die all attachment ends. But can you invite the ending of attachment? You understand this, you are following this? That is ending, ending is death. So can you, living vigorously, actively, end your attachment, end a particular habit voluntarily, easily, quietly, because then, where there is an ending, there is a totally different beginning? Not as a human being with all your peculiar ideas and so on - when you end something like attachment, there is a different activity going on. So to incarnate in the present now - you understand this - that is creative activity. It is up to you sirs if you want to do all this. We ought to talk over together what is religion. What is a religious life, what is a religious mind? Shall we go into it, even those of you who have got sannyasi robes and all that. Shall we go into this? I am not tired, to me this is - never mind what it is to me. The origin of that word, etymologically, is not clear. Originally it meant to bind yourself to some higher principle, bind yourself to some noble idea. But even that is discarded now. So the root meaning of that word is not clear. So we can forget the dictionary meaning, which is the common usage of that word. Now, we are going to enquire, together, what is religion, what is a religious life, what is meditation, and if there is anything that has not been touched by thought. The present religions, all throughout the world - do you call those religious? Do you? You are a Hindu, you believe, your religion says this and that, your books, you worship an idol, the Muslim does not, he has his own form of worship. The Christian has his symbol - the rituals, the dogmas, the beliefs, the superstitions all that. The hierarchical structure of a religious society, right, you follow all this? You call all that religion. Your belief is god: unless you believe in god or some supreme principles it is considered that you are not religious. But your gods have been put together by thought. Right? Because our life is so miserable, so uncertain, so ugly, we say to ourselves there must be something more, something which is protecting, which is giving, which is creative. So thought creates the idea based on books, tradition, being programmed to believe in god - programmed - that surely is not religion. Do you agree to that? Of course not. But that is not religion: your belief, your worship, going to the temple, to the mosque, to the church, repeating some phrases, utterly totally divorced from daily life. To understand the daily life, to bring about a radical change in that life, to have a brain that is not superstitious that is actually facing facts, facing what one is, and going beyond 'what is', that is the beginning of a religious mind, not all the superstition, not the torturing of the body. That is what tradition has done: you cannot come to illumination or god, without brutalizing, destroying, denying your body. But inside the flame of desire is there, burning. So to understand the whole meaning of daily living, which is the understanding of relationship, relationship with each other, to love, to have that quality of love which is not, that I love my wife or some other thing, to have that perfume, that beauty, that flame. That is religion. That is a religious mind. And with that understanding that all religions as they exist now, with their constant repetition of phrases, rituals, genuflecting and so on and so on, is not religion. But to live a life that has no conflict, that has the sense of compassion with love with intelligence - compassion is intelligence - that is the religious life. But that is not enough. We have to understand much deeper things, which is, what is meditation? Is it sitting in a certain posture, closing your eyes and repeating some phrases - mantra. The word mantra means, I believe, in Sanskrit,to ponder over, consider, not becoming. You understand? Meditate on that, not becoming, which means - I wonder if you understand this. When you are not becoming, what are you? And also that word mantra, ponder over not becoming, and also resolve, put away all self centred activity. That is the real meaning of that word mantra. Now look what you have done with it. You repeat some words and call that mantra. So as we said, a religious life is that - not becoming inwardly, anything. Then we must go much deeper than that. Meditation means, the word, to ponder over, to think over, according to the dictionary. And we are adding to that to ponder over, think over and we are adding to that the ending of measurement. I will go into it. You are not tired? Are you really interested in all this? Oh, god, you are not. I wish you were. I wish you would give your life to this, not to what is being said but give your life to find out how to live correctly, truly, orderly, and an orderly life cannot exist without love and compassion. Give your life to that, not to some cult. So what is meditation, not how to meditate. When you put the 'how', when you use that word 'how' that means give me a system, please tell me what to do, show me the path. So if you can remove that word 'how' altogether from your mind, then look at it: what is meditation? Systems, methods, practices, certain forms of discipline, breathing correctly, deeply and so on, is not meditation. It is just you are practising something. Somebody told you if you do this, you will get that. It is an exchange, a market place where the guru sells you something and you practice. So we are going to see what meditation is. Meditation is not the practice of any system. Because when you practise a system your brain becomes atrophied, becomes dull. It is not alive, active. So if you are really deeply concerned with meditation then there is no system, no method, practising, every day sitting half an hour quietly, is not meditation. It may relax you. It is like going to bed, lying down after a good meal. Sorry to make you put it at that level. It is. So if you deny all that, intelligently because you see the absurdity of practising a method because it brings up a routine, your mind is already caught, is mechanical, and you are making it more mechanical, more drugged, more conditioned. Whereas in meditation there must be freedom: freedom from fear - we went into all this. Freedom from envy, greed, sorrow and all the wounds one has received from childhood, psychological wounds and the hurts. One should be free from all that. So we have to enquire, first, what does it mean to be aware. Three things: what does it mean to be aware, what does it mean to concentrate, and what does it mean to attend? Because this is implied in meditation. To be aware: to be aware, to be conscious of your environment; to be aware how you talk, how you walk, how you eat, what you eat; to be aware how you speak to another, how you treat another; to be aware as you are sitting there, to be aware of your neighbour, the colour, the coat, the way he looks, without criticism, just be aware. That gives you great sensitivity, empathy, so that your body is subtle, sensitive, aware of everything that is going on around you. To be aware without any choice. You understand this? To be aware, see where you are, looking at the speaker, looking all around you without a single choice, just to look, to be aware. Then concentration. When you concentrate what happens? To control all thought except one thought, which is to concentrate on something, concentrate on a book, concentrate on what you are doing, concentrate, which means, shut off all other thought except one thought, to centralize all thinking to a particular point. That is what generally, concentration means. That is, while you are trying to concentrate, all other thoughts are wandering, pushing, coming in and out, and so you build a resistance to every other thought except one thought, or one page, one symbol, one idea. Look at it? That is generally what is called concentration. That's clear. Then attention. Have you ever attended to anything? Given your whole energy, listened totally to another, completely attended, not like a soldier who is drilled to attend but if you understand the nature of awareness, concentration, then attention. To attend completely. If you are attending now completely to what is being said, in that attention there is no centre as the 'me'. You understand this? Are you so attending to what is being said? That is, giving all your energy, your listening, vibrantly alive to attend. If you are, then you will find there is no centre as the 'me' attending. Then when you are attending so deeply the brain becomes quiet, naturally. There is no chattering, there is no control. The idea of controlling thought, who is the controller to control thought, it is another part of thought, isn't it? One part of thought says, I am the witness, I am going to control my thought. The controller is the controlled. You understand all this? So in meditation there is no controller, there is no activity of will, which is desire. Then the brain, the whole movement of the brain apart from its own activity, which has its own rhythm, becomes utterly quiet, silent. It is not the silence cultivated by thought. It is the silence of intelligence, silence of supreme intelligence. In that silence that which is nameless comes, nameless is. That is sacred, immovable, is not touched by thought, by endeavour, by effort. It is the way of intelligence which is the way of compassion. Then that which is sacred is everlasting. That is meditation. Such a life is a religious life. In that there is great beauty. MADRAS 1ST PUBLIC TALK 25TH DECEMBER 1982 I don't know why you are all here. I wonder why you have gathered here. We have an important question to ask: why each one of us is here, with what intention, with what purpose, and at the end of the talk, what you have gathered for yourself? We are going to talk over together a great many things relating to our daily life, relating to all the events that are taking place on this unfortunate earth. So this is not a lecture. A lecture generally means gathering information, collecting some data with a view to instruction. So, this is not a lecture as it is commonly understood, but this is a conversation between us. A conversation between two friends who are concerned not only with what is happening in the world externally, environmentally, but also what is happening to the human being. We are going to talk first, about what is happening to our brain, to our conduct, why human beings who have lived on this earth, perhaps a million years or a more recent discovery, between 30,000 or 40,000 years, why after all this so-called evolution, passing through so many wars, one religion after another, one government after another, why we human beings throughout the world have so degenerated, without any stamina, without any integrity. And we are, as I said, going to talk over together, you are not merely - if I may point out most respectfully - you are not merely listening to a series of ideas or some form of conclusions or some new principles and values, but together you and the speaker are going to examine closely, hesitantly, carefully, what is happening in the external world, and what is happening to us in our own daily life, the inner life. So, please, we are having a conversation together about all this. If you hold on to your opinion however slight, or dogmatic, stubborn or obstinate or come to some definite conclusions, then it will not be possible to have a conversation, or communicate with each other. That must be clearly understood from the very beginning of these talks, that you and the speaker are going to examine, not from any religious point of view or as a communist, socialist, marxist, conservative, left and right, or belonging to any nation. We are going to examine. To examine one must have a free mind, not an opinionated mind, not a traditional mind, not belonging to any sect, to any order, to any religious group or to any institution. Then one cannot possibly examine closely what is happening in the world outside us. There are the threats of war, nuclear or the conventional war: the decline of all religions; there is no moral activity, but most of us are living superficially, intellectually, never examining, never questioning, doubting all that is going on in the world. And to examine, to probe, to observe, requires a very clear mind and heart, a brain that is not held by any tradition, or a brain that is already conditioned, a brain that has evolved through millennia. And if we are not aware of the activities of our own brain, our own sensory responses, examination and the observation of what is going on in the world, becomes almost impossible. So, please, even for this evening, let us talk together like two human beings, friendly, not imposing any ideas on each other, any dogmatic argumentative, conclusions, but as two friends who have known each other for some time, sitting under a lovely tree in a cool climate and looking at the world. What is the world? What is it that is happening out there? Who has created it? Why has man become what he is, thoughtless, careless, indifferent - without any love, brutal, violent? Why have we become like this? You might blame it on our inheritance, you might blame it on the environment, on the culture, on the society. But who has created this society? Each one of us, the past generation after generation, and the present generation is contributing to it. So, we have created this world, and there is no escape from that fact. Each one of us has contributed to that chaos, to the mess that is going on, the disorder, the anarchy. So, thought has divided the world into nationalities, and nationalities are one of the causes of war, nationalities devised by thought in its search for security has divided the British, the French, the Indian, the Muslim, Pakistan, the Russian and so on, and thought has created war through this division. And the preparations of war for killing other human beings, thought has been responsible for this. In its search to be safe, secure, to find somewhere or other a sense of safety, it begins with the family, community, then a large group and a wider group hoping thereby to find some kind of safety, protection, security, and so it begins with the small and ends up in nationalities. And all the governments are supporting this crazy system of dividing people into nationalities, into groups - as the Hindus and the Muslims the Chinese and the Russians, the Americans and the British and the French of course, and so on. Thought has been responsible for the division of religions - the Christian, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Muslim and so on. Thought has created the marvellous cathedrals, the great mosques and the lovely temples. And thought has put in these temples, mosques and churches the things that are invented by thought - the rituals, the dogmas, all the ceremonial vesture, thought has been responsible for. And thought has created the problems of division, the problems that arise through division, between the Jew and the Arab, one group against another group. Thought has been responsible for the extraordinary development of technique, technology. Very few of us know actually what is going on in the technological world, the terrible things they are doing biologically, inventing great instruments for the destruction of man - vast unlimited movement of technology. And thought has organized mass killing in the name of peace, in the name of the country, in the name of god. So there is great conflict going on for which thought is responsible. We will presently investigate together what is thinking, what is the nature of thought. But first we must examine the activity and the result of thought, thinking. Thought has brought about great hygienic benefits, communication, rapid transport and all that. The brain is infinitely capable; and that capacity, that energy of thought has created this world of technology, with all the problems it involves, social, environmental; and thought also has created havoc in our daily life, in our relationship with each other, between man and woman. So, we are saying that thought is responsible for all the misery it has brought about in the world. Please do not deny or accept what the speaker is saying. He is putting that forward for you to examine, to question, to doubt, not to accept nor to agree, but to look, to examine, to care. Thought has also done great things for humanity. So, we must together examine very carefully what is the source of thought, why thought has created such havoc in the world, whether thought can ever have as its companion love, or love is entirely different from the activities of thought. So, please, together without any sense of authority, without any sense of belonging to any group - either the Marxist, Capitalist or democratic, belonging to no religion, no sects, totally uncommitted. Then only is it possible to examine and to go beyond the present confusion and chaos. So, please listen, not agree, but listen to find out. We have to be both the teacher and the disciple. The word disciple - the meaning of that word disciple means he who learns. And also we must be the teachers. The very act of learning gives us the responsibility to teach. So, we are going together to learn, not hold on to our old traditions, to our old opinions and conclusions, that prevents us from learning, not from the speaker but learning through observation, learning through the investigation of the nature of thought and the nature of the brain, not the physiological brain but the activities of a brain that is conditioned. So, first of all, we are going to look together, why the brain which has evolved through thousands of years, which has gone through every kind of experience, pleasurable, painful, and every kind of incident, accident - why that brain had become so limited, not limited in one direction, which is in the technological world. It is not limited there at all. It is moving with extraordinary rapidity. So in one direction, in the direction of technology, the brain has infinite power. That is obvious. The brain has put man on the moon, invented terrible things to kill human beings, and also technology has given man great comfort, hygiene, communication, and so on. But the brain is limited because it cannot go in any other direction but that direction. That is, it is incapable at present of going inwardly. And if it can go in one direction with such extraordinary vigour, extraordinary energy that has been put into the technological world, if it can go in the other direction, that is not in the direction of amusement, entertainment but in the world of the psyche, the psychological world, then it has an extraordinary infinite capacity, both outwardly, that is the technological world, and the inward, the psychological world. But we have not given that same consideration, the same enquiry, the same doubt, scepticism, questioning, demanding, challenging into what we are. So, we are going to enquire together into the whole psychological world, why after all these thousands of years, why we live in conflict with each other, why man has become so miserable, unhappy, anxious, uncertain, hypocritical, dishonest, corrupt, suffering a great deal. That is our inner world, the world of the psyche, the psychological realm into which very few have investigated deeply, profoundly. And the psychologists, the theoreticians, the analysts, psychotherapists, they have not solved any of our human problems. They have written vast volumes about it, but we are still what we are. So, how do we investigate into something that is yourself, that is your consciousness? You are both the unconscious and the conscious, the whole realm of the inward activity which dictates the outer activity. If that inner activity is not in order, then you create a society as we have done, which is totally in disorder; as any fool can see. You cannot create outward order unless there is inward order. We are not going to discuss what is order now. We will as we go along. But one has to realize this fact, that the outward chaos, war, confusion, the brutality, the violence, the hatreds, is the result of our own life, our own disorder, the conflict in our own consciousness, the disorder of our daily life, the disorder in our relationship with each other, the perpetual row that goes on between human beings. And can all this misery, confusion, conflict, anxiety, and so on, can it ever end? This question is far more serious than the nuclear war, or the neutron war, whatever war that be, whether it is possible to change radically the content of our consciousness. The crisis is there, not in the world. Please understand all this. The crisis is not in the world, not the nuclear war, not the terrible division, the brutality that is going on. The crisis is in our consciousness, the crisis is what we are, what we have become. Unless we meet that crisis, that challenge, we are going to perpetuate wars, destruction, and there will be outward chaos. I wonder if we realize when there is great disturbance outwardly, uncertainty, insecurity, we turn to tradition, turn back to tradition, like the Muslim world is doing. They go back to the Koran, and in the Christian world they go back to the bible. Fortunately in the Hindu world there are so many books they can't go back to the books, but they go back to tradition, to tribalism. They have now got tribal gods at every corner because the world has become uncertain, dangerous. And we are all doing the same. We want to belong to some group, some sect, some local god. The other day we were told by a friend who has investigated into the gods of India. He told us there are 330,000 gods in this country - I suppose it's better than having one. Then you can have fun with them all. Now how does one enquire into the psychological world? That is, into the world of consciousness, the content of that consciousness is what you are. That is not a dogmatic statement. That is not a conclusion, that is a fact. What you are is the content of your consciousness: your beliefs, your opinions, your experiences, your illusions, superstitions, your gods, your fear, your pleasure and the loneliness, the sorrow, and the great grief and the fear of death. That is what you are. That is, the content of your consciousness is what you are. You can divide that consciousness into various parts, invent a super consciousness, super-super-super, but it is still the content of your consciousness. You can meditate, sit cross-legged, do all those things, but it is part of your consciousness. And the content of your consciousness is put together by thought. Please examine this. The speaker asks most respectfully, don't throw it out and say I agree or I don't agree. Just examine it, find out. Please do not stick to your old opinions, conclusions or what the books have said. We are saying the content of your consciousness is put together by thought, by thinking, thinking that you are a Hindu or a Christian, Marxist, Maoist or whatever you want to think. Thought which is limited has brought about limitations in consciousness. It can expand consciousness by thinking that it can expand and experiment in expansion. But it is still the activity of thought. Right, sirs? Are we together in this? We are not saying dogmatically. We are saying please examine it, don't agree, but question whether your consciousness which is the activity of the brain, brain with all its sensory responses, brain which is the centre of thought, whether that thought has not brought about fear, whether that thought which is also movement in time, whether that thought is not responsible for the whole content of our consciousness. And we are also saying, thought is limited because it is the outcome of knowledge. It is the result, the end product of experience, knowledge stored in the brain as memory and the response of any challenge is thinking. And knowledge is always limited. There is no complete knowledge about anything. Right? The scientific knowledge is limited. Every kind of knowledge in any field, biological, sociological, technological and the world of religion with all their gods, and all gods in the world are invented by thought. Examine it please. Don't reject it. Don't say he is preaching whatever he is preaching. He is not. Examine it. All the gods on earth man has invented, thought has invented, and then thought worships that which it has invented and this you call religion. That word religion, when we talk about it, the root meaning of that word is quite difficult and it has not been established what the root is of that word. So, thought is limited and whatever its activity is always limited, and being limited, it must inevitably create problems, not only problems in the technological world but also the problems in human relationship, which is far more important to understand than the technological world because we human beings are perpetually in conflict with each other, agreeing, disagreeing, believing and not believing, one dogmatic opinion against another opinion, one idea, one ideal against another ideal. It is perpetual war between human beings. It is created by thought. And having created the problems then thought tries to solve them and so increases the problems, which is what is actually happening. If one sees that, not intellectually, not as an idea or a conclusion but as an actuality, as a fact, then one can ask a totally different question, which is, the only instrument that we have, which is thought - please understand the nature and the content of thought, thought is all sensory responses, all the imagination, all the sexual symbols, the sexual pictures, and so on, the feeling of depression, elation, anxiety, all this is the result of limited thought, because thought is the outcome of limited knowledge. There is no complete knowledge about anything. Then, if thought is not the instrument to solve human problems, then what is the instrument? You understand my question? Are we together understanding this, or am I just talking to myself, or are you listening to what is being said? It is up to you. Take it or leave it. This is really a very important question to ask, because thought is a worn out instrument, a blunt instrument. It may be clever, it may solve certain problems, but the problems it has created in human beings and between human beings, the instrument that we have used to solve our problems in our daily life in relationship, that instrument is blunt, limited, worn out. Unless we find a new instrument, there can be no fundamental, radical change of the human psyche. So, we are going together to enquire into the nature of that instrument, the quality of it, the structure of it, the beauty of it. But before we can enquire, one must be absolutely clear that the instrument which we have now as thought, has reached its tether. It cannot possibly solve our human relationship. And in that human relationship there is conflict and out of that conflict we have created this society through our greed, through our brutality, through our violence. Unless one is absolutely, irrevocably clear that thought is not the instrument to solve our human problems - we have tried every method of solving our human problems: surrendering ourselves to some ideals, to some guru, to some concept, to some conclusion -we have done all these things, we have followed all kinds of leaders: political, religious, various quacks who are gurus. We have done everything, and we are still what we are, slightly modified, a little more observant, a little more kindly, but basically, millennia after millennia, we are what we have been from the beginning of time. And the instrument that we have had, which is thought, that instrument can no longer solve our problems. If this is very clear, and that requires great observation, questioning, doubting, asking, never accepting authority: the authority of the books, the hierarchical structure of our society, the authority of institutions, the authority of those who say, I know, you don't know, I will tell you. A mind which is enquiring into the nature of a new quality and structure of a new instrument must be entirely free from authority; not the authority of the policeman, not the authority of the governments, however rotten they are, however corrupt, thoughtless. So, a mind that is enquiring into something that requires great sensitivity, freedom, that demands a brain that is stable, not wobbly, sloppy. I don't know if you have noticed how are our minds are sloppy. We go from one guru to another, especially in this country. We tolerate anything: the dirt, the squalor, the filth, the corruption, the tradition that is dead, and all the temple buildings which are absolutely meaningless, spreading all over the world. I believe they are building temples in America. What a lovely idea. And Europe. One nonsense going to the other kind of nonsense. You watch all this and you observe all this, and a mind, a brain that enquires must be extraordinarily free, and have great sensitivity. I don't know if you have noticed how limited our senses are - senses - which is, the observing optically, visually, hearing, to hear another so completely that you understand immediately what is being said, to have sympathy, empathy, the feeling of cooperation, feeling of affection, feeling of love. We have not got it here. But you love god. You love going to a temple, putting on ashes, belonging to some tribal god, because you are frightened, and where there is fear there is no freedom of enquiry. So, please we are going into this very, very seriously if you will. This is not an entertainment, this is not something you come for one day and forget the rest of the year. We are concerned, We are talking about our daily life, our conflicts, our loneliness, our despair, and none of those can be solved by thought. Then what is the instrument that will solve our problems? Don't wait for the speaker to tell you. Then the speaker becomes your guru, your leader, and the speaker does not want to be your guru, your authority. But together, as two human beings, concerned, caring, concerned with humanity, because after all you are the rest of humanity, because your consciousness with its content is the rest of humanity. The rest of humanity has also the same consciousness as yours. They suffer. Every human being in the world suffers, is anxious, uncertain, confused, in tears, lonely like you. Your consciousness is not yours, it is the rest of mankind. So you are mankind. It is not a mere intellectual, logical, analytical conclusion. It is a fact to be felt, realized, lived, that you are not a separate human being, that you are not an individual. That is a hard pill to swallow because we all think we are separate individuals with our own little brains. That is our conditioning to think that each one of us is separate, but we are not. We are the result of thousands of years of humanity - their suffering, their loneliness, their despair, their excitement, their joy, their sex. What you think, others think. The great scientist thinks, so does the uneducated villager, poor, hungry, labouring from morning till night, he also thinks. So thinking is not your individual thinking. It is only thinking. You may think in one way, another may think another way. It is still thinking. So the thinking consciousness is shared by all human beings. And when one really realizes that, the fundamental truth of it, then our whole activity changes. Then you are concerned with the whole of humanity, which means your son, your neighbour, your wife, your husband, your man who is miles away. So sirs, let us stop this evening and continue tomorrow evening in our enquiry, and ask whether there is a different kind of instrument, a different kind of activity which is not the activity of thought. Don't invent. Let us find out. Don't come to any conclusion but enquire, question, doubt. To have a subtle mind, quick mind, a brain that is active, not bogged down by tradition, by conclusions, by ideals, so that you and the speaker can talk about it, enquire into it very, very deeply. MADRAS 2ND PUBLIC TALK 26TH DECEMBER 1982 May we continue with what we were talking about yesterday evening. We were saying that this is not a lecture, with a view to conveying information. We are together having a conversation, you as a separate human being, if you are separate at all, with the speaker. We are walking down a lane, wooded, plenty of shadows and birds singing and we sit down together and talk about the whole problem of existence, which is very complex. And as we have been friends for a long time, we have many days to talk over these things. And we are neither convincing each other about any subject. We are not trying to persuade each other, we are not trying to overcome the other through arguments or sticking dogmatically to one's own opinion, prejudices but rather together, and I hope you are doing the same with me, together we are going to look at the world as it is and the world that is within us. Many volumes have been written about the world outside of us: the environment, the society, politics, economics, and so on but very few - as far as I know, but one may be mistaken - but very few have gone to the very length of discovering what we actually are. Why human beings are behaving as they are doing - killing each other, constantly in trouble with each other, following some authority or another - some book, some person, some ideal, and having no right relationship with their friends, with their wives, with their husbands and with their children. Why human beings have become after so many millennia, so vulgar, so brutal, utterly lacking care, consideration, attention to others, and denying the whole process of what is considered love, if we at all have that quality. And outwardly there are wars - man has lived with wars for thousands and thousands of years. We are trying to stop nuclear war but we will never stop wars. There has been no demonstration in the world to stop wars, but they demonstrate against a particular war. And these wars have been going on - people being exploited, oppressed and the oppressor becoming the oppressed. This is the cycle of human existence with sorrow, loneliness, a great sense of depression, the mounting anxiety, the utter lack of security, and there is no relationship with society or with one's own intimate persons - a relationship in which there is no row, conflict, quarrels, oppression and so on. This is the world in which we live - which I am sure you all know; or we are unaware of it, or we don't want to know. Most of us are unaware of what is actually happening. And the scientists, the biologists, the philosophers have their own separate existence apart from the rest of us. And throughout these millennia our brains are conditioned; conditioned by knowledge. Please as we said yesterday, please don't reject or accept anything that the speaker says. Question it, doubt it, be sceptical and above all don't be influenced by the speaker because we are so easily influenced, we are so gullible. And if we are to have a conversation together and to talk seriously about these matters, one must have a mind and a brain that is free to examine, free from bias, from any conclusion, from any opinion or obstinate, from any conclusion that is definite. One must have a brain that is constantly enquiring, questioning, doubting. It is only then perhaps that we can have a relationship with each other and so communicate with each other easily. Words are meant to communicate. You may translate the meaning of the words differently but if you are speaking as we are in English, words have a definite meaning. And together as we said yesterday, look at the activities of thought because we live by thought: all our actions are based on thought, all our contemplated efforts are based on thought - our meditations, our worships our prayer. And thought has brought about the division of nationalities which breed wars, the division in religions as the Jew, the Arab, the Muslim, the Christian, the Hindu and the Buddhist and so on. Thought has divided the world not only geographically but also psychologically inwardly. Man is fragmented. Man is fragmented - when I use 'man', please ladies I mean you too - man is fragmented, broken up not only at the psychological, mechanical level of his existence but also in his occupation. If you are a professor, you have your own small circle and live in that. If you are a businessman, if you have multinational business, you may travel but you are still in business, money making, or if you are a politician, you live within that area. And if you are a religious person, in the accepted sense of the word - doing various forms of puja, rituals, meditations, worshipping some idol and so on. We all live a fragmented life. Each fragment has its own energy, has its own capacity, has its own discipline, and each part plays an extraordinary role in contradicting the other part. You must know all this. And this division, both outwardly, geographically, religiously, nationally, and the division that is between oneself and another, is such a waste of energy and conflict: wasting our energy, quarrelling, dividing, each one pursuing his own thing, each one aspiring, demanding his own personal security and so on. This extraordinary energy for all action takes energy, all thinking takes energy. This energy which is constantly being broken up is a waste of energy. When one energy contradicts another, one action contradicts another action - saying one thing and doing another, which is obviously a hypocritical acceptance of life. All such activities must invariably condition the mind, the brain. We are conditioned as a Hindu, with all the superstitions, beliefs - you know all this - what a Hindu is, what a Roman Catholic is, what a Protestant is, what a Christian is, what a Buddhist is and so also the Islamic world. We are conditioned and there is no question about it, there is no argument that we are not conditioned. We are, both religiously, politically, geographically. And as we were talking about yesterday, until there is freedom from conditioning, the activities of thought which are creating great problems and those problems thought cannot possibly solve, as we pointed out yesterday. And a new instrument is necessary to solve our human problems and we are going to talk about it as we go along. But as we said, it is not for the speaker to tell you what the new quality of that instrument is; why each one has to find for himself. That is why both of us must think together, if we can. That demands, that both of us feel, enquire, search out, question, doubt all the things that man has put together, all the things that we have created, the barriers between each other. So we, as human beings, living on this beautiful earth which is slowly being destroyed, living on this earth which is our earth, not the Indian earth or the British earth or the American earth, it is our earth, to live intelligently, happily. But apparently that is not possible because we are conditioned. This conditioning is like a computer. We are programmed. We are programmed to be Hindus, to be Muslims, to be Christians, Catholics, Protestants. For 2000 years the Christian world has been programmed and the brain has been conditioned through that programme, like the computer. So our brains are deeply conditioned and we are asking if it is at all possible to be free of that conditioning. Unless we are totally, completely, free from that limitation, mere enquiry or asking what is the new instrument which is not thought, has no meaning. First one must begin very near to go very far. But most of us don't want to begin very near because we are all idealistic. We want to go so far without taking the first step, and perhaps the first step may be the last step. Are we understanding each other, are we communicating with each other or am I talking to myself? If I am talking to myself, I can do that in my own room. But if we are talking, having a conversation together, that conversation has significance when both of us meet at the same level, with the same intensity at the same time. That is love, that is real deep friendship. So please, this is not a lecture in the ordinary sense of the word. We are together trying to enquire and resolve our human problems. That requires a great deal of enquiry because human problems are very, very complex. One must have the quality of patience which is not of time. We are all impatient to get on: tell me quickly something or other. But if you have patience, that is, not trying to achieve something, not to arrive at some end, some goal but step by step enquire into it. As we said, we are programmed. Our human brain is a mechanical process. Our thought is a materialistic process, and that thought has been conditioned to think as a Buddhist, as a Hindu, as a Christian and so on. And so our brain is conditioned. And whether it is possible to be free from that conditioning? Do you understand? There are those who say it is not possible; and they are not stupid people but very intelligent people. They say it is not possible because how can a brain which has been conditioned for so many centuries upon centuries, how can that conditioning be wiped away completely so that the human brain is extraordinarily pristine, original, capable of infinite capacity. Many people assert this, and are merely satisfied in modifying it, modifying the conditioning. But we are saying that this conditioning can be examined, can be observed and there can be total freedom from that conditioning. And to discover for ourselves whether it is possible or not, we have to enquire into our relationship. Relationship is the mirror in which we see ourselves as we are. All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth that is not related to something or other. Even the hermit that abandons the world and goes off to a lonely spot, is related to the past, is related to those who are around him. There is no escape from relationship. And in that relationship, which is the mirror in which we can see ourselves, in that relationship we can discover what we are: our reactions, our prejudices, our fears, depressions, anxieties, loneliness, sorrow, pain, grief. And we can also discover whether we love or if there is no such thing as love. So we are together, if you will, if you are serious enough to examine this question of relationship, because that is the basis of life. That is the only thing we have with each other. And if we cannot find the right relationship, if we live our own particular narrow life apart from wife, husband and so on, that isolated existence brings about its own destruction. So relationship is the most extraordinarily important thing in life. If we don't understand that relationship, we cannot possibly create a new society. You may have physical revolutions, communists, Mao, or other forms of physical revolution, as it has been observed in Russia, where there has been great revolution -the same old cycle is being repeated with always the elite on top. You know the whole business. So relationship is important. So we are going to enquire very closely into what is relationship? Why human beings throughout the long existence of their lives have never had a relationship in which there is neither oppression, possessiveness, attachment, contradiction and so on. Why there is always this division - man, woman, we and they. We are going to examine it together. This examination can be intellectual or merely verbal which is an intellectual concept of what relationship is, trying to understand intellectually what that relationship is, but such intellectual comprehension has no value at all. It is just an idea, it is just a concept, but if you can look at our relationship as a whole, then perhaps we can see the depth and the beauty and the quality of relationship. Right sir? Can we go on? So we are asking what actually is the present relationship with each other, not theoretical, not romantic, not idealistic which are all unreal, but the actual, daily relationship of man, woman with each other? Are we related at all? There is the biological sex - may I use that word without all of you getting excited about it, especially in this country that word is rather doubtful, we never talk about it. It is hidden, but we are going to talk about it. So please forgive me if I do. Our relationship is sexual, pleasurable. Our relationship is either possessiveness, attachment, various forms of intrusions upon each other. And if we examine one quality in that relationship, which is attachment, what is attachment? Why do we have such tremendous need for attachment? We are either attached to a person, to a belief, to some form of conclusion. What are the implications of attachment? If one is attached to a person, to one's wife, to one's family, what are they? The complication, the extraordinary nature of attachment. Why is one attached? When you are attached to anything, there is always fear of losing it. There is always a sense of uncertainty. Please observe it for yourself. There is always a sense of separation: I am attached to my wife. I am not married, but suppose I am. I am married, I am attached to her because she gives me pleasure, sexually, gives me pleasure as a companion, she gives me pleasure as a cook, you know all the rest of it without my telling you. So I am attached to her, which means I am jealous, frightened and the consequence of attachment is a continuation of fear, of losing, jealousy, anxiety. Where there is jealousy there is hatred. And is attachment love? That is one point, in our relationship. In our relationship each one has, through the years, put together an image about each other. Those images, she and he have created about each other is the actual relationship. Right? They may sleep together, but the fact is that you and she have an image about each other, and in that relationship of images, how can there be any actual, factual relationship with another? We have, all of us from childhood, built images about ourselves and about others. And we are asking a very, very serious question: in our relationship can one live without a single image? Surely you all have an image about the speaker, haven't you? Obviously you have. Why? You don't know the speaker; actually you don't know him. He sits on a platform, talks - but you have no relationship with him because you have an image about him. You have created an image about him, and you have your own personal images about yourself. You have got so many images; about politicians, about business men, about the guru, about this and that. You understand my question? Can one live profoundly without a single image? An image may be conclusion about one's wife, an image may be a picture, a sexual picture, an image may be some form of better relationship and so on. Why do human beings have images at all? Please, sir, ask this question of yourself: why do you have an image about the speaker? If you can answer that very honestly, go into it, perhaps you may solve the image you have built about your wife, or your husband, or your children. When you have an image about another, that image gives you a sense of security. Right sir? Please examine what the speaker is saying, because this is very important. Love is not thought. Love is not desire, love is not pleasure, love is not the movement of images, and as long as you have an image about another, there is no love. And one asks, is it possible to live a life without a single image? Then you have a relationship with each other. As it is now, it is like two parallel lines, our relationship, two parallel lines never meeting, except sexually. A man who goes off to the office and the modern lady also goes off to the office. The man is ambitious, greedy, envious, trying to achieve a position in the business world, in the religious world, the professor, and the woman goes off too to earn a livelihood. And they meet in their house to breed children. And then comes the whole problem of responsibility, problem of education, of total indifference. It does not matter what your children are, what happens to them. You want them to be like you safely married, a house, a job. Right? And the education conditions the poor student, the poor child, as you the parents are conditioned and this process has been going on for millennia upon millennia. This is our life, our daily life and it is really a sorrowful life. So one asks why human beings live by images - all your gods are images: the Christian god, the Muslim god and your god, they are created by thought because thought is uncertain, fearful. There is no security in the things that thought has put together, and the thing it has created as an image, that you worship. Such an illusory trick thought plays upon each other. So is it possible to be free from our conditioning in our relationship? That is, to observe in the mirror of relationship attentively, closely, persistently, what our reactions are; whether they are mechanical, habitual, traditional. And in that mirror you discover actually what you are. So relationship is extraordinarily important. How do you observe what you are in the mirror of relationship? So we have to enquire into what it is to observe? Suppose you are married and you have a wife, and in that relationship that relationship is the mirror in which you see what you are; actually what you are, not theoretically, that you have some special consciousness, that there is something in you which is divine and all that kind of nonsense, actually what you are, then how do you observe? Do you understand? How do you observe yourself, what you are, in the mirror of relationship? What does it mean to observe? This is really another important thing one has to find out. What does it mean to look? When you look at a tree, which is the most beautiful thing on earth, one of the most lovely things on earth, when you look at a tree, how do you look at it? Do you ever look at it? Do you ever look at the new moon, the slip of the new moon, so delicate, so fresh, so young. Have you ever looked at it? Can you look at it without using the word 'moon'? Are you following all this? Are you interested in all this? Would you kindly tell me, are you really interested in all this? I will go on like a river that goes on. You are sitting on the bank of the river looking at the river, but you don't become the river ever, because you never take part of the river, you never join the beauty of a movement that has no beginning and no end. So please consider what it is to observe. When you observe a tree, or a moon, something outside of you, you always use the word 'tree', the 'moon', and can you look at that moon, the tree the flower with all its colour, and can you look at it without naming it, without using the word to identify? Can you look without the word, without the content of that word, without identifying the word with the tree or the thing? Now can you look at your wife, at your husband, at your children without the word my wife, without an image? Have you ever tried it? No. When you observe without a word, without a name, without the form you have created about her or him, in that observation, there is no centre from which you observe. Are you following all this? I don't think you are. That does not matter. You have not even tried to look at your pet politician without the word, without the form, without all the associations you have got. Can you look at the speaker, observe without your image, without the name? Then find out what happens? The word is thought. Thought is born out of memory. So you have the memory, the word, the thought, the image interfering between you and the other. Right? So there is no thought, thought in the sense of the word, the content of the word, the significance of the word to look, to observe. Then in that observation, there is no centre as 'me' looking at 'you'. Right? Then only is there a right relationship with another. In that, there is a quality of love, a quality of a certain beauty, a certain sensitivity, but if you constantly have an image about another there is no communication, there is no love, there is no depth of that word. So to look at another without the image, and the image is our conditioning. That is, we are conditioned, we are programmed. The Christian world has been programmed for 2000 years, the Muslim world for 1400 years and perhaps the Hindu world five to three thousand years. And during those periods of time, which is called evolution, our brains have been conditioned by immense knowledge, great experience. Time and space has brought about the extraordinary quality of the brain. The speaker is not a brain specialist. The speaker does not want to be a specialist of any kind, even a religious specialist. But if you can observe your own activity of thought, that is, thought to observe itself, not you observe thought. You see the difference. Because you are put together by thought: your form, your name, your qualities, your fears, your anxieties, your nationality, your peculiar tendencies and so on and so on, are put together by thought. That is your consciousness, as we were saying yesterday. Psychologists, we were told this afternoon, they don't believe in consciousness. They only see matter and the reaction to matter, sensation and adjustment; adjustment to the present existence, whether slightly neurotic, that is the result of various causes, remove those causes and you adjust yourself to the present society, to the present misery. And we are saying our conditioning is so deep, and to understand it one must understand the nature of effort. May we go on. You are not tired? Are you sure, you are not tired? You should be, because if you are actively co-operating in this, your brain must be active, questioning, asking, looking, experimenting as you are going on, now, not tomorrow. But all that needs attention, care, watching, and so you must be tired. But I will go on. Why do human beings throughout the world live in perpetual conflict? Please ask that question of yourself. You are in conflict. Your meditation is conflict, your worship is conflict. You have got various gods who are in conflict with each other and with you. Why human beings throughout the world live in constant struggle, pain, conflict. What is conflict? What is the cause of conflict? Where there is a cause, that cause has an end. You understand this? If I have a cause of pain, the doctor examines me and if I have cancer he examines the cause and the symptom which is the pain -then that cause may be removed or it may be terminated. So where there is a cause or a causation, there must be an ending of that causation. So if you can find out, not be instructed - the speaker is not instructing - but if you can find out for yourself what is the cause of conflict by which man has lived from time immemorial. What is the cause of it? Don't wait for the speaker to tell you. Go into yourself as we are doing now, find out what is the cause of this conflict outside and inside. Is there one cause or many causes? If there are many causes, we can examine the many and slowly resolve each cause; or there may be only one cause. You understand my question? So are there many causes for conflict? Or is there only one cause? One of the causes may be the constant attempt to become something - the becoming. Please, this is very important to understand. The becoming - I am this, I must be that; I am greedy, and I hope I will not be greedy. That is, to become something different from what I am. I am not beautiful, but I will become beautiful; I am violent but I will become non-violent. So the becoming is a process of evolution. You understand all this? Don't look so vague sir. All becoming - whether the clerk becoming the manager, or the manager becoming the chairman is a process of time which is evolution, from the low to the high. You plant a sapling which becomes a great tree, which is the evolution of that plant, of that tree. And, please listen if you are interested, is evolution one of the causes of conflict? You understand my question? That is, I am violent - all human beings apparently, most unfortunately are violent - and I am violent and I will become nonviolent. The becoming from 'what is' is a process of evolution which requires time, space. Right? You are following all this? And we are asking, is evolution, this movement from 'what is' to what 'should be', which is the movement of evolution, is that one of the causes of conflict? Right? Is time one of the factors of conflict? Is duality one of the causes of conflict? That is, there is duality - light and dark, man, woman, you know duality, the physical world, in that physical world there is duality between good cloth and bad cloth, between a nice dress, which is tasteful, good material and bad material, between a good car and a bad car. Obviously, physically, there is a difference. There is duality. And we are asking, inwardly, psychologically, is there a duality at all? I am violent. When I try to become non-violent there is duality. And we are asking does conflict exist as long as duality? And why have we psychologically, inwardly duality? I am violent and I have thought I must not be violent, and so I invent an idea called non-violence, which in this country is fashionable. And this fashion of non-violence is spreading all over the world, which has no meaning of course. Because violence is the fact, is real. Nonviolence is fiction. Right? So there is only 'what is', not 'what should be', so that if one realizes that 'what is' is reality and not 'what should be', then you can dispense with 'what should be'. Then there is no duality. You understand this? The moment there is the idea 'I must not' or 'I should', or 'I will', away from 'what is', then there must be conflict. Does one perceive this intellectually or actually that there is no psychologically, inwardly, the opposite, only 'what is'? When there is only 'what is' you deal with 'what is', not with 'what should be'. Right? I am violent and this idea of non-violence is fictitious, is hypocritical. It has no value because in becoming non-violent I am sowing the seeds of violence all the time. So there is only violence, not, what is violence. What is the nature and the structure of violence, not only to get angry, to hit somebody, to kill somebody, not only the killing of human beings but killing animals, killing nature. Fifteen million whales have been killed by man. Do you understand all this? Violence is also imitation, conformity, trying to be something which you are not. So can one look at that violence with all the content of that word, not just physical anger or physical expression of that anger but to look at the whole content of that word and hold it, not move away from it, just hold that feeling, look at it, and not move away from it, neither suppress it, nor escape from it, nor transcend it but just look at it as you would look at a precious jewel. And when you look at it, are you looking at it as something separate from you or, what you observe is what you are? You understand my question? Please, this is important to understand. If some of you are tired don't listen, just go to sleep. This is important to understand. We are violent. That violence we have said is different from 'me'. Therefore I try to change it to become something else. That violence is 'me'. I am not different from violence, greed is part of me, I am not different from violence, greed, or envy, hate or jealousy. Suffering is me but we have separated anger, jealousy, loneliness, sorrow as something separate from me. So I can control it, shape it, run away from it, but if that is 'me', I can do nothing about it but just observe it. I wonder if you understand it? So the observer is the observed; the thinker is the thought, the experiencer is the experienced. The two are not separate. So where there is division there must be conflict. If I am separate from my wife, of course physically I am separate, but if I am separate psychologically from my wife there is bound to be conflict. So time, evolution, the sense of the opposite are the factors of violence. These are the many and other factors, all these factors are 'me'. So 'me' in essence is the cause of conflict. I wonder if you understand this? If one asks, how am I to be free of 'me', which is a wrong question, but to observe the whole movement of conflict, not translate it, not try to understand, just to observe, like you observe the marvellous movement of the skies, the ocean. Then it tells you all its content without your analysing. So a brain that is in conflict mechanically, psychologically, must inevitably bring about disorder in itself and so outwardly. Conditioning, which we will go into again next week end, whether it is possible for human beings to be totally, completely free of it? When there is that freedom, there is order, there is love, compassion and that compassion is intelligence. MADRAS 3RD PUBLIC TALK 1ST JANUARY 1983 May I wish you all a happy New Year. I hope you will have a happy New Year. We have been talking over together our daily problems, not theories, not speculative philosophy or some romantic, imaginative life. We have been talking over together as a conversation between two people, the very complex process of our living from the time we are born till we die. We went into several things in the last two talks, two conversations, and perhaps, it will be right to remind you if I may, that this is not a lecture as it is commonly understood, to inform and to instruct on a particular subject, but this is a conversation between two people, between you and the speaker, about the life they live, their pleasures, their fears, their sorrows, and the perpetual conflict between human beings. We talked about whether it is possible at all to live a life without a single conflict -conflict in our relationship with each other, however intimate or far away. We went into that question very carefully, whether it is possible in the modern world with all the terrible things that are happening, whether human beings in their relationship with another, to live a life without a single shadow of conflict. Conflict, we have said, brings about disorder and as long as we live each one of us in disorder, we cannot possibly bring about a radical psychological revolution in the structure of society. We went into that too. I think this evening, we ought to talk over together the nature of time, desire, fear and whether sorrow, which man has lived with, can ever end? So we will talk over together as two friends, not as the speaker sitting on the platform, that is only for convenience, two people talking over this very complex problem of time, desire, fear, pleasure, and whether sorrow, which happens to be the lot of man throughout the world, whether it has an end to it. So please, the speaker is not directing you on what to think, or agree with what he is saying, but we are together going into this problem. Together, not you listen to the speaker or agree or disagree, but together you and the speaker investigate the nature of time, because it is very important to understand the nature of time. And also we ought to explore desire which is very complex, and we ought to talk over together too, whether there is an end to sorrow because where there is sorrow there cannot be love, there can be no compassion, there can be no intelligence. So it is important that you and the speaker meet at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity, otherwise there will be no possibility of communication. I hope this is clear. That to understand another, to understand with your heart, not with one's intellect, which is necessary, but to meet another like the speaker there must be a communication, not merely verbal but a communication of the mind and the heart, intelligence in the heart. The word heart is not merely a physical organ but the whole nature of that word, to have the mind, which is an extraordinary affair, in the heart. But most of us listen to words, to ideas, agree or disagree, analyse, speculate and so on, but we never meet at the same time at the same level, with the same intensity. Then there is real, deep, profound communication; then words become rather meaningless, though they have to be used and the words have definite meaning. The construction of a phrase, of a sentence must be naturally grammatical, but to meet another in communication, there must be no barrier. That means you or the speaker must have no prejudice, no bias, not committed to any philosophy to any conclusion, but meet in freedom. And to meet in freedom requires a great deal of intelligence, a great deal of enquiry. One hopes this evening, we will meet on the same level because the speaker has no authority, he is not telling you what to do, or what you should do with your life; but when we are together, discussing, having a dialogue over a problem, that problem is the concern of both the speaker and you, or you and the speaker. It is your concern as well as that of the speaker. And to merely meet at a verbal level, as most of us do, has very little significance, because we are concerned with a psychological revolution, not physical revolution, psychological, inward radical, fundamental change. We have lived for millennia upon millennia - thousands of years with sorrow, pain, anxiety, loneliness, despair, fear and the pursuit of wandering desire, and man is always asked if there is a stop to time? And we are going to talk over together the nature of time. What is time? Time fundamentally means division, distribution, evolution, achievement, moving from here to there - that is, this constant division as of yesterday, today and tomorrow, sun rising, sun setting, the full moon of a lovely evening and time, meeting your friend, time is hope. Time is a very, very complex affair and that requires a patient... patience is timeless. Do you understand what we are talking about? It is only impatience that has time. Are we meeting each other somewhere? So to enquire into the nature of time one must have a great deal of patience; not impatience, not say, get on with it, I understand what you are talking about, let us get on. Because we live by time. We have divided our life in a time movement. Movement is time. To go from here to there requires time. To learn a language requires time. To accumulate knowledge, to experience, to have pleasure, looking forward to something as fear or as pleasure, the memories of yesterday, of a thousand yesterdays, meeting the present, modified and moving towards the future. This is all time. Time for a clerk to become the manager, to acquire any skill - all this requires time. And the desire to experience something other than the usual experience, the pursuit of that is also time. And whether there is psychological time at all. That is, being violent, to become non-violent, that requires time. The pursuit of an ideal requires time. Time means evolution both physical as well as one imagines or one has the fallacy that one will evolve into something totally different from 'what is'. All this implies time. Time to realize, to become illumined, which the speaker is questioning. So we must together understand, not verbally but the feeling of time, the sense of time. Time is memory - the past as the observer, the observer observing what is happening, translating what is happening to his own condition, to his own experience, and so on. So we need time, bearing in mind that time essentially means division. Division implies distribution, and you need time to learn a skill. The scientist needs a great deal of time to enquire into matter, into astrophysics. So outwardly to change, we imagine time is necessary. Eventually man who is divided, who has divided himself into nationalities, will eventually become international and gradually drop all nationalities and have a global relationship. We think all that requires time. We must evolve towards that. I hope this is being made clear. So time which is fundamentally a process of division, outwardly, physically is necessary - like the seed growing into a great tree that requires time, years. There is a tree in California which is over 5,000 thousand years old. To come to that age, many, many rains and storms and fires and lightening, which is all the growth in time. Are we together in all this? Are we following each other, sharing with each other? If we are, we see that outwardly, physically, we need time. Time to acquire knowledge, the accumulating process of learning, mathematics, physics or how to fly one of these jets. All that requires time. One cannot possibly escape from that time or try to find a stop to that kind of time. That would be utterly meaningless and foolish. But if you could enquire into the nature of time to become something inwardly. You can become through diligent work, a clerk or a worker becoming a foreman or a manager. There all that is time. To go from here to there, for a plant to grow into a great magnificent tree, the seasons of winter, spring, summer, autumn is the division of time. Now we are together going to enquire if there is psychological time at all? Do you understand my question? The time that we think is necessary to change from one psychological or sensory responses, to another. We think time is necessary to be free of violence, time is necessary to be free of envy: I am envious but give me time to be free of that particular pain or pleasure. So we are questioning whether there is time at all psychologically? Do you understand my question? Right sirs? Are we meeting each other? Otherwise my talking and your sitting here has no meaning. So we are not discussing or having a conversation about the necessity of physical time. To build a house you need time. To be educated, if you must be educated, needs time. But we are enquiring into something much more important, much more essential because we are conditioned to the idea or to the concept or to the illusion that time is necessary, from 'what is', to 'what should be'. We, the speaker and you, are questioning that, whether time is at all necessary for a radical change? Do you understand? Have I stated the question clearly so that we all meet it? We said time is division, time is distribution, division as 'I am', 'I should be'. That is a division and 'I should be' requires time. Right? We are questioning that. We said is there such a thing as becoming something or experiencing something? Enlightenment, of which many people talk, does that demand time? We are questioning a most fundamental thing. You understand sirs, because all our philosophy, our life, all the books that you read - the so-called sacred books are no more sacred than any other book - they have all said that time is necessary. You must go through various disciplines, various practices in order to come near whatever you like to call it - god, an experience which is beyond all measure, a state of mind that has not been touched by time. So we must go into this question very closely whether there is psychological time at all. The moment you admit that there is psychological time, time being division, there must be conflict. Right? I have divided violence, which I am, which all human beings apparently are, and to achieve non-violence there is a division immediately taking place. You understand sirs? We are violent and we must be the opposite. Where there is the opposite, there must be division and therefore there must be conflict. And time is the enemy, is the cause of conflict. I wonder if you understand all this. Don't look so vague please. Don't be so puzzled. Look at it very simply. I am greedy, which perhaps you are not, I am greedy and to be non-greedy takes time. We said time is division. You understand that? So where time comes into being, there must be conflict, and the becoming something is endless. Do you understand that? Now we are asking, is there an end to violence in which there is no time at all. You understand my question? Come on, somebody say, yes. Don't say, yes, for the fun of it. It is a very, very serious problem. We have accepted time, division, as a means of ending conflict. We are saying quite the contrary. Where there is division as 'me' becoming something, the becoming something is noble or whatever it is, that very division is the process of time, and that division, does it exist at all? That is, I am greedy, that is the only fact I have. The other, non-greed, nonviolence has no reality. It is just a concept, a structure of thought which cannot understand or end violence. It is an escaping process - the ideal. All right? Are we together in this? I am afraid we are not. You are full of ideals, a bag full of them, and you will never under any circumstances achieve the ideals because they are still the invention of thought. As we went into the nature of thought which is limited because all knowledge is limited. We talked about it considerably. One doesn't want to make it too complex. Greed, measurement, comparison - 'I am this', 'I will be that', which is measurement, all that implies psychological time. That is the illusion in which we live. We are questioning the reality of that. There is only 'what is: there is only greed, there is only violence, there is only war. And can war end, killing each other in the name of god, in the name of ideals, in the name of countries, god and all the rest of it? Now we will go into it very carefully. I am violent. When I say 'I', I mean all humanity. You are violent. Human beings are violent. Is it not important to find out whether it can end immediately? Isn't it important? Not to say, I must become nonviolent. When you become non-violent that means a period of time. During that period you are sowing the seeds of violence, which is so obvious. Like man saying I am trying to be non-violent. Do you understand all this? I will go on. So is it possible to end violence or greed, whatever you will, anger immediately - the whole entirety of violence? So what is violence? Not merely anger, to injure another, to hate, to criticize, to wound another both physically and psychologically, to imitate, to conform, not merely physical aggression but the whole movement of violence, can that movement totally end? And to find that out one must understand time as division. I have divided, thought has divided 'what is' into 'what should be'. I am ignorant, not in the scholastic sense, I am ignorant but I will be enlightened some day. So we are now asking whether it is possible to end violence, greed, what you will, immediately, so that it never comes up again. Aren't you interested in that to find out? Are you really? If you are interested what do you give? If you buy something, you must give something. Right? You must give money, you must make a gesture, you must do something - not say, yes, I want to end it, which means, to end it you have to think, you have to work, you have to be passionate about it, not just casually saying, yes. That is why I said in the beginning, we must meet at the same level, at the same time, with the same intensity. Then we can communicate profoundly, not verbally, but with a mind in the heart, which means intelligence operating with love. How do you observe violence? Violence is a sensory response. You have hurt me, I am wounded. My image about myself has been hurt. You might not physically hurt me but you have wounded me inwardly because I have an image about myself as a great man or some professor or some idiotic person. And that image has been hurt. And to get over that hurt, give me time. I work not to be hurt, I will be aware, I will be careful, listen carefully and so on. You see all that is effort, which is brought about by the division of time. Clear? So is it possible to end violence so completely it never comes back? That is why you are asking, how do you look, how do you perceive violence? How do you look at a tree, the moon, the stars, the heavens and the beauty of the night, how do you look at it? How do you look at your wife or your husband or your friend? Do you look at your wife, or your husband or the tree or the moon or the rivers with the memories that you have had, with the accumulated hurts, accumulated pleasures, companionship, stored in the brain as memory? Do you look at your wife, and your husband with those memories? So memory is time. Right? So where there is time, there must be division. And hence you have row after row, quarrels and all the rest of it in your relationship with another. So it is of the highest importance to find out how to observe. How to observe a tree, which is one of the most beautiful things on earth, how do you look at it? When you use the word tree or the species of tree, you are not looking. Right? The word, the remembrance prevents you from looking. I want to look at my wife. Probably you have never looked at her. I have looked at her as my wife, my possession, my pleasure, sexually and otherwise. I have looked at her with all the memories of the last ten days or ten years or fifty years. And those memories come between her and me, and she has also her memories. So it is very important to find out whether one can look at a wife or a husband or a tree or the moon or the flowing waters of a great river without the word, without the name, which is the past. You understand all this? So can you look at violence or greed or whatever you will without the word? The moment you use the word 'violence', you have already put it in time. Do you understand this? The moment you use the word, which we have used a thousand times before, as violence, that very word is the factor of time. Do you see this? And therefore you have already brought about a division. Now can you observe your wife, your friend or the speaker now? Can you observe him without his reputation, without any image, look at him, can you? Or the image that you have built about the poor chap is so strong that you cannot possibly see him as he is, or you see him impudently, say, 'Who are you you to tell us?' So can you look at your wife, at a tree, at a flower without the movement of thought? The movement of thought is time. Thought divides as time divides. When you look, you are looking without the observer, who is the past, who is the word, who is the memory. That past divides, the past is time. To look at yourself, as you look in the mirror to look at yourself, and that mirror, which is physical, the mirror in which you look is the mirror of relationship. There you can perceive every movement of thought, every movement of reaction. So the perceiver is the perceived, the analyser is the analysed. I want to experience something extraordinary. I am bored with all the experience I have had - sex and pleasure. I want to experience something ultra, ultra, something beyond all thought, and the experiencer has projected what he wants to experience and therefore the experiencer is the experienced. I wonder if you understand all this? A mind that does not demand experience is totally different. Therefore we have to learn how to listen, how to observe, not accumulate how to listen, just listen, just observe with all the memory. Then you will see that which you observe, which is violence, there is no division between the observer and the observed. The observer is the violence. Right? I wonder if you see that. And when you are so alert, watch, observe, it is like putting a great light on the thing which you observe, then it disappears totally, never to return. Now we ought to talk over what is desire? Because time and desire and thought are the major factors of fear. Time as tomorrow, what might happen to me, time as not achieving, not becoming. We went into that. And we are saying time, desire, thought, are the major factors of fear. So we ought to talk over together, have a dialogue between two friends who have known each other for some time, happily, easily without trying to convince one or the other, what is desire, the wandering nature of desire, desire which is never content, the desire that all religions have said, suppress it? We are going to examine together the nature of that desire. Why have religious leaders, who are really phony leaders, why have religious leaders all over the world and all the books and all the rest of it, why have they said we must suppress or desire for god? That is all right to desire for god, for illumination, that is perfectly all right; but to desire a woman, desire a house, desire the lovely things of the earth, the beauty of a painting, the beauty of a statue, a poem of Keats, there you must not desire. It will lead you astray, it will lead you to temptation, and we have learnt through the ages the art of suppressing desire or yielding to desire. So we are together, if you are not tired, we will go into this question of desire. What is desire? Not the object it desires or the object creating the desire. You understand? The object creating the desire or the desire exists and the object varies. You understand? You must be clear on this point. Gosh, there is so much to talk about in all this, aren't you tired? You see a nice car, a nice shirt, a lovely house, a beautiful painting. That painting, house, the car, the woman, the man - does the object create the desire or the desire exists and the objects don't matter? If the object creates desire then it is a totally different investigation. But if desire exists and the wandering nature of desire from one thing to another. So we have to examine together what is desire? What is the origin, the beginning of desire, not how to control desire, not suppress it, transcend and all that kind of stuff, but the beginning. If one can understand the origin, the source of desire, then we can deal with it. But if we don't ask the origin, the beginning then we are merely trimming the branches of desire. Is this clear? So together we are going to examine what is desire? We live by sensation. Our sensory responses, their reaction is the activity of sensation. Right? I see you, well dressed, clean, healthy, beautiful or whatever you are. I see it. The seeing is the beginning of sensory responses. You are following this obviously. It is not complicated. So the seeing, observing, contact and sensation, which are the responses of the senses. Right? Is this clear? Then what happens? You understand? I see a beautiful house, a lovely chalet in the mountains, beautifully built, strong: see it, contact, actually touch it and from there sensation. Then what happens? This is really important to understand. I see you, a beautiful woman. I am not tempted so don't bother. I see a beautiful woman or a beautiful man, if you are a woman. The very seeing of that beauty - nice, clear, intelligent face, is a sensation, isn't it? Then what is the next step that takes place? Think quickly for god's sake, move. I'll show you. You see I have to tell you, which is a pity. That is why - please - you become second hand human beings. But if you saw it for yourself you are completely out of that mediocrity. You see a beautiful something, a statue which has been created by love and skill and matter. Then as you see it, sensations arise, you touch it, then what happens? Please listen, find out for yourself. Please listen, sir. Then thought comes in and says, how beautiful, I wish I had that statue in my room, I wish I was in that car, I wish I had that house. Right? At that moment when thought takes charge of sensation, at that precise moment, desire is born. Do you understand this, sirs? We will go into this a little more. Sensation which is normal, healthy, vital, otherwise you are dead. To suppress sensation means you are dead and probably that is what happened here in this country. You read the Gita and the Upanishads and all the sacred books and you follow guru after guru, discipline your desires, control, suppress, escape and so on. Whereas we are saying something entirely different, if you can follow this a little bit. Sensation, then immediate association of thought with the object. Right? That is, sensation, seeing the car, thought then says, how nice it would be if I sat in there, it is a beautiful car and has tremendous power behind it - not the Indian cars - and beautifully made, then begins desire. Right? You understand this? Now is it possible for thought not to intervene? You understand my question? Not immediately thought saying, it will see itself in the car. Is there a hiatus, an interval between sensation and thought not immediately taking charge? You understand this? So that there is an interval, a gap. If there is a gap, what happens? That requires extraordinary skill and attention. Right sirs? To see where sensations are important, because if your senses are not alive you cannot see the beauty of the earth, the movement of the sea. So sensations, the sensory responses are essential for life, but when thought controls, shapes, gives identity to sensation, then at that precise movement desire is born. Can we find out, without control, without suppression, just to see how thought is acting upon sensation, just to see it, even verbally, even intellectually, but to go into it very deeply, to have such alertness, such care, such attention, such love to see the nature - how desire is born. Then you have to see what thought is, how thought makes all life a problem, which we went into the other day. And also thought is a movement, material movement. Right? Perhaps you have not enquired or gone into this - not gone into it in the sense, read about it, by professionals who have written books about it, but you can watch yourself, which is far more exciting, far more real, then you are dealing with something actual. Thought, as we said, is limited because all knowledge, all experience is limited, and thought springs from knowledge, experience, memory, thought. And this whole process is limited. There is no complete knowledge about anything, can never be: science, technology is always adding more and more. So time, desire, thought, are the factors of fear. I am afraid what might happen to me because I have had an accident a couple of days ago or a year ago and I am afraid it might happen again. I am watchful. There is fear. I am afraid of the dark. I am afraid of the wife, the husband, I am afraid of my boss. Aren't you all afraid? Aren't you? Don't be ashamed, it is the common lot of man. You may not want to acknowledge it, you may not want to face it, but you are frightened and fear does terrible things to human beings: mentally, psychologically, it narrows down, it curtails, ii makes human beings so bound to authority, to some ideas. They have become so dependent, so attached, so inhuman. So we are not talking about the many expressions of desire, of fear, but fear itself. Not afraid of your wife, or husband, afraid of losing a job, afraid of past pains, hoping that they will never occur again. We are not talking about the various aspects of fear, but the root of it. What is the root of fear? Isn't it time and thought? That is, I am a clerk, I may never become a manager. I am a disciple, I can never become the guru, if I want to be. I am ignorant in the deep sense of the word, not ignorance of the book. Deep ignorance which is not knowing myself wholly. That is ignorance - a movement, that is 'me' that has no beginning, perhaps no end. And to understand that deep ignorance I not only need time, I imagine I need time and also I need experience, accumulation, reincarnation and all the rest of it. So there is fear. So we are asking each other what is the root of it all? Why has man, throughout the ages, past, timeless, beginning, why has he carried this burden of fear? He hasn't been able to resolve it. He may go to all the temples, to all the churches, to all the gurus, various try various systems of meditation but fear is always there. You may be blind to it, you may want to evade it but it is always there, in one form or another. So we are asking what is the root of it. The root of it is time and thought. Of course. Is that clear? Must I go into it? I had pain a couple of weeks ago and I fear it might return again, which is time. Right? You understand, it is time, isn't it? It is the remembrance of that pain and it might happen again. And the fear is hoping it would not happen again. My wife - I am not married - my wife has hurt me, as I have hurt her, not physically, inwardly, and I hope she won't hurt me more by word or gesture or by a tear. I am afraid she might hurt me, fear. So fear is time and thought. If one understands the nature of time and thought and the movement and the wandering of desire -understand in the sense, see the truth of it instantly, as we went into time, we went into desire, see the actual truth of it, not the verbal conclusion of it, the fact of it, the reality of it, the depth of it, the intensity of it - if you do see it so clearly then you will never ask, how is fear to end, nor ask, can I control thought, or say, how am I to stop thought - which are the causes of fear. You will never ask that question, because you can't ask a question about what you actually see, the truth. It is there. It is there for you to see, not to accept, to argue about, analyse, discuss, take sides, you can't. It is like seeing the most beautiful thing on earth, which is there. An excellency, an excellent mind which is there. A heart that is always aflame, which is there. If you see it, then fear ends. And where there is the ending of fear, there is no god. You understand? It is out of our fear, out of our desire, we invent the gods. When a man in whom there is no fear, completely no fear, then he is a totally different human being and he needs no god. Sirs and ladies give your heart to consider all this. Not your mind, not your intellect. Intellect has its place, but when you are examining something very, very seriously, the heart must enter into its consideration. When the heart enters, that is when there is love to observe, love of watching, seeing, then when you see the truth of desire, time and thought, then there is no fear whatsoever. Then only, there can be love. Fear and love cannot go together. Fear and pleasure go together but not love and fear. MADRAS 4TH PUBLIC TALK 2ND JANUARY 1983 This is the last talk. Yesterday evening we talked about fear, the nature of fear and what brings about fear. We said, time, desire, thought are the contributory causes of fear. And man has lived with fear. We live with fear now: feature of the future, the past, fear of the future of man, what is going to happen to man. Surely the future of man is what he is now. It is so obvious. If he does not radically change, not society, not the various forms of governments, but if he does not radically change psychologically, inwardly, the future is what he is now. That is guaranteed because there will be more wars, more instruments of war, more destruction, more violence, more fragmentation of human beings into nationalities and so on. The future is what we are now. And we said during all these talks, that it is so urgently necessary to bring about this psychological revolution, to bring about a change, not move from one form, one system, one idea to another but whether it is possible for human beings who have lived on this lovely earth for so many millennia, whether it is possible for them to change. And this evening I think we ought to talk over together whether sorrow can ever end, the sorrow of man. And what is love, what is compassion, and what is intelligence? We ought to talk over together also the significance of death. And if we have time, we ought to talk over the whole question of meditation. We have lived with sorrow generation upon generation: the grief, the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of great anxiety, the sorrow of having no proper relationship with another, the sorrow of a mother, a father losing a son, a wife whose husband has been killed in war, decorated as a hero with lots of medals on his chest. And also there is the sorrow of ignorance. Sorrow has many forms. It isn't just one incident called death, it isn't just one happening in one's life, but a series of incidents, a series of accidents and experiences which both contain both pleasure and pain, the sorrow of this movement of reward and punishment, the sorrow of old age, the sorrow of illness, blindness and deformed children. Man has carried a great weight of sorrow and we try to escape from it. We invent all kinds of theories, all kinds of possibilities, romantic concepts, flowering in ideations. But sorrow remains with man. I wonder if one has looked at what wars have done to man. How many women, fathers, brothers, sisters have shed tears because one holds on to nationalism, racial prejudices, linguistic differences. All this is causing enormous sorrow in the world. There is not only personal sorrow, the loss of something, the loss of someone whom you loved - if you love at all - the loss of never having a single, happy, original day, the pain of seeing poverty in this land and people doing nothing about it. So man has carried this sorrow from time beyond measure. And we are still burdened, fearful, anxious, lonely, aching with deep inward pain, the lack of success, lack of opportunity, lack of the things we all want. So we ought together this evening consider whether it is possible to end this enormous burden carried by humanity and by those who are still in sorrow. What is sorrow? As we said yesterday, what is the cause of sorrow? Where there is a cause, there is and end. If I have cancer, the cause, the pain, then perhaps the cause can be removed. So where there is a cause for anything, there is an end to that. A causation is a movement, it is not a fixed point. And if you can understand and discover the cause of this burden of sorrow, then perhaps we shall understand the nature of love; not love of god, not the love of the guru, not the love of some book or a poem but the love of human beings, the love of your wife, husband, your children. To find that extraordinary perfume that is really the light of the world, one must understand the nature of suffering, the structure of suffering. I hope we are together, you and the speaker, going into this. Please, together we are investigating, not the speaker investigates and you listen, agree or disagree, accept or deny, but together to explore a very, very profound problem of humanity. One requires an unemotional approach to it, not sentiment, not a conclusion that sorrow will end, or that sorrow will always remain with mankind. We must together, if you will, consider this question deeply. You can only consider this question when the mind is in the heart. We use our intellect to comprehend, to discern, to argue. We use the intellect to choose, to measure. And so intellect is one of the faculties of the brain. And if we are going to examine this extraordinary, profound problem, mere intellect has very little place, and most of us are highly intellectual, highly educated, have extraordinary - especially in India - extraordinary qualities of analysis. You can analyse anything on earth. You have fairly subtle minds, not all naturally. And to comprehend sorrow, mere intellect cannot go very far. You understand sirs, what we are saying; that all of us have the capacity to use our intellect, which is to understand, to discern, to argue, to choose, to weigh one against the other. This is the function of the intellect. And most of us have that capacity. And if you are merely approaching this question of sorrow, then your mind, your intellect dominates the process of investigation, therefore it distorts. Whereas is it possible to approach it with a holistic movement? Do you understand? We never approach anything as a whole. We never look at life as a whole. We have fragmented life, broken up as the intellect, the emotions, love and so on, broken it up, and so we can never look at a problem wholly. The word 'whole' means not only complete, not only the feeling that parts are included in it, but the parts don't make the whole. 'Whole' also means healthy - a healthy mind, not a crippled mind, not a stagnant mind - a mind which is whole, a sense of covering the earth and the skies and the beauty of all that. 'Whole' means also 'holy'. So we never approach with that quality of mind. And in investigating, exploring this question, one needs to have that quality of a mind in the heart, which is not romantic, idealistic, imaginative, but a very factual mind, tempered with the quality of love. When we use the word 'heart' we mean by that -mind in the heart, mind in the quality of love, which has nothing whatsoever to do with any ideas, with any ideals, with any obedience. There is no guru. There must be freedom to observe. So together, let us look at this question. Together. What is sorrow, and why has man put up with sorrow, why has he accepted it as he has accepted fear, as he has accepted pleasure, desire, all the things that man is surrounded with, both outwardly and inwardly. We are not talking over together, not having a dialogue about the various types of sorrow. I might have lost my son and you might have lost your bank account, suddenly discover that all your belief in god has no meaning, all the temples contain nothing but words and stones and are probably dirty. So you have to have a very clear, direct, uncluttered observation of this. Are we together in this? If we are, which I am rather sceptical about, I hope you don't mind, if we are, then what is sorrow? What is the nature of it? In that thing called sorrow there is pain, there is grief, there is a sense of isolation, a sense of loneliness in which there is no relationship. It is not only a physical shock but it is a great crisis in the consciousness, in the psyche. I have lost my son. I am only taking that as an example. I have lost my son to whom I am attached. I wanted him to grow up into some beastly business man, to have some kind of good substantial income, a house and so on. In him I have emulated myself - you understand this word, you are following what I am saying - and suddenly he has gone. What is that quality of suddenness? The sudden ending of something which has given me great joy, great pain, great anxiety, concern about his future. And all that movement: my affection, my concern, my care, my sense of helping him to have good taste, to live aesthetically because where there is deep aesthetic sensitivity, that is the highest moral, highest ethics, and suddenly he is gone. Don't you know all these feelings? I hope not your son, or your wife or your mother or father but in every house there is this shadow of sorrow. There is a sudden ending, a sudden ending of my attachment, a sudden ending of all my hopes, which I have invested in him, a sudden sense of not only deep shock, life becomes empty, either one becomes very cynical or finds a rational explanation or plunges oneself into some form of entertainment, drugs, drinks and all the rest of it, or believe in some future life. This is the lot of all human beings. So what is this ending? Are we together in this a little bit? What does it mean to end? Have we ever ended something without a motive, without a reward or punishment - to end? Because where there is an ending there is a totally new beginning. But we never end. We end things if it is profitable or painful. Our life is based on reward and punishment, both outwardly and much more inwardly, but we never end something without a cause. So grief, loneliness and a sense of separation, which is essentially time, which we went into yesterday: time, identification, investment and all the things one has cultivated in another, all that ends and there is a shock, and that shock I call sorrow. Now can one remain with that, not escape, not seek comfort, because that is the most silly thing to do, not go off to a temple or run after some guru, but to remain with that tremendous challenge without a single movement of thought? Because sorrow is perhaps one of the greatest challenges, greatest demand on the human mind, on the human quality, and if you merely escape from it, run away, rationalize, then that which has a tremendous depth to it.. then sorrow is your shadow but with the ending of that, there is passion, not lust but the passion that is the very essence of energy. But very few of us have that passion, very few of us have that passion which is living, not occasionally, but that passion which moves the universe. So we ought to look into what is love. That word has been so spoilt. Romantic woman calls it the love of god, the love of my guru, the love of my painting, the love of my book. You understand? We have given to that word such a shallow meaning. One may say, I love my wife. One questions that love. That love may be attachment, that love may be seeking comfort, pleasure sexually, pleasure of companionship and so on. So we are going to consider what is love. Because in trying to see the depth of it, the beauty and the extraordinary quality of it, love may be related to death. So we are going together to look at it. Please, this is not a lecture in view of instruction, but together as two human beings facing a world which is becoming so dangerous, one must ask this question. Surely to find something true, one must negate that which is not true, negate the false. You may then say, to each person the false is different. To each person that which is illusory, that is, which is not objective, rational, sane. So to discover what is false and what is true, and what is true in the false, one requires not the capacity to think clearly only, but the demand, asking, questioning. So what is love? Would you say, love is desire? Would you say, love is pleasure? Don't shake your heads. It is meaningless. Would you say, love is attachment? Please, the speaker is asking these questions for you to answer to yourselves, answer not to deceive yourselves, it is so easy to deceive oneself. One may think one is a marvellous human being, you are out of all this. But to find out that which is not love, that negation is the most positive action. We are asking is desire love? Is it? We went into the question of desire yesterday. We won't go into it again now, if you don't mind. Is desire love? Desire is a wandering movement, and is love wandering, unstable, weak, or is it something as strong, as vital as death? Is love pleasure: sexual pleasure, the pleasure of owning, dominating, possessing a person? Is that love? Is attachment to the person - my wife, my husband, my family, attached which means to hold on, cling to. Is that love? Or in attachment there is fear, jealousy, anxiety, hate. Where there is jealousy, there is hate. Is that love? Has hate any relationship with love? Is love the opposite of hate? Is the good the opposite of that which is not good? Ask these questions sir. If hate is the opposite of love, then hate has its root in love. All opposites have their root in their own opposites. Are you getting tired? So please examine your own life, not listen to what the speaker is saying. Examine, each one of you, your own life honestly and ask these questions. Desire, pleasure, attachment, jealousy, anxiety, fear of losing, is all that love? So can you be free of attachment, not at the last moment when death is there? Can you end attachment to another? See the implications of attachment, the consequences of attachment. Fear, anxiety, jealousy - where there is jealousy there is fear, hate, anger and more, when there is attachment, and is all that love? And what is compassion? Not the definition, you can look it up in a dictionary. What is compassion? What is the relationship between love and compassion, or they are the same movement? When we use the word 'relationship', it implies a duality, a separation, but we are asking what place has love in compassion, or is love the highest expression of compassion? How can you be compassionate if you belong to any religion, follow any guru, believe in something, believe in your scriptures, in your guru and so on, attached to a conclusion? When you accept your guru, you have come to a conclusion, or when you strongly believe in god or in a saviour or in this or that, can there be compassion? You may do social work, help the poor, out of pity, out of sympathy, out of charity, but is all that love and compassion? So in understanding the nature of love, having that quality, which is mind in the heart. That is, intelligence, which is a very complex question, intelligence is the understanding or the discovering of what love is. Intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with thought, with cleverness, with knowledge. You may be very clever in your studies, in your job, in being able to argue very cleverly, reasonably, but that is not intelligence. Intelligence goes with love and compassion. And with that intelligence, if there is, if you have come upon it, and you cannot come upon it as an individual; compassion is not yours or mine, like thought is not yours or mine. Where there is intelligence, there is no me and you. And intelligence does not abide in your heart or your mind, that intelligence, which is supreme is everywhere. It is that intelligence that moves the earth and the heavens and the stars because that is compassion. We ought to talk over together what is death? Are you interested in all this - not interested, that is a stupid word. Are you concerned about all this, or you have grown too old? The young are already old, some of them. And hearing all this, what will you do with it? Just as you leave, forget all this and fall back to your daily monotonous, mediocre life? Ask these questions sirs and ladies. And also we are going to talk over together this question of death - death being the ending: the ending of our memories, of our attachments, your bank account if you have one. You can't carry it with you but you like to have it till the last moment. So what is death, and who is it that dies? And what is life? Do you understand? Life: who is it that dies and what does it mean to die? We are not talking of the ending of the physical organism, but we are enquiring into life, the ending of life and the great significance of what death means. What is life which we have separated from death? There is a gap of forty, fifty or a hundred years. We want to prolong our lives as long as possible. Modern medicine, surgery, health and all that helps to prolong one's life. I do not know for what, but one wants to prolong it. So what is life; your life or the life of the universe, life of the earth, life as nature, life which is the vast movement without a beginning and without an end? Don't fall back into the trap of your tradition. That is dead, as dead as a door nail. And when you follow tradition you are already dying, or perhaps you are already dead. So we must examine when we talk about living, life, what does that mean? The life of a tree, the life of the fish in the water, the life of the beauty of a tiger, the life of the universe, this life that seems so extraordinarily vast, immense, without measureless depth. Are we talking about that or your life, yours? If you are talking about your life, what is that life? Going to the office from morning till night for fifty, sixty years, breeding children, your life, belonging to some sect, following some guru? And of course, you believe in that guru so tremendously, you follow him. And conflict from morning till night: conflict as pleasure, conflict as fear and the pursuit of pleasure and desire. This is your life. Is that what we are talking about, the ending of that life? What is important: what lies beyond death, or long incidents of life in your life? What is important: before or after death? If living, life, the beauty of it, the energy of it, the passion of it, the immensity of it, which you have reduced to such a shallow little 'me'. Are you concerned about that, the 'me' that is going to die? I would like to prolong this living. One would like, and this living, we never question, look, ask, doubt, find out, but we mechanically carry on and we are concerned about that 'me', you, dying. What is the 'me', what is the 'you'? Is it a series of words? Examine it, for god's sake, look at it. Is it your name, your form, how you look, your bank account, your ideals, your beliefs, your experiences? You believe in god, and that belief is you, who have created god. So what are we? Please look, question it, doubt it, ask. Is that what you are frightened of - dying? Knowing your body which is the most extraordinary instrument, badly treated, tortured, drugged, unhealthy - that body, that organism is going to die. You may prolong it for a long time but it is going to come to an end. Or you can say if you are very successful in any field, you can say, I have had a jolly good life, I don't mind dying. So we are asking what is it that dies, and what is it that clings to life? By life, I mean office, sex, pain, pleasure, fighting each other, quarrelling, destroying each other. This is your life, whether you are young or old. Is that what you are afraid of ending? Or are you considering life as a whole, life of the universe, which is so immense, so vast, so incalculable? That is, that life is there, as well as here, as well as this little life you have - this torture, this anxiety, this conflict, this misery, occasional spurts of joy and clarity. So please, enquire what you are, to which thought clings, to the image you have built about yourself. You see, sirs, it is not the immortality of one's soul, of yourself. 'Yourself' is built through time. Your reward as 'me' from the moment you are born till now. And you accept that 'me' as a reality, and is it real at all, or is it a series of words, a series of memories, accidental experiences which are all put together by thought, and is that 'me' holding on to all this travail of life? If you are not holding it, then life is something totally different: it is a vast incalculable movement. But that can only be seen when the self is not. Now we ought to ask, what is meditation? May we go on? You are not too tired? If you are tired just get up, please, and go quietly, without disturbing others, because we are going to enquire into something that demands all your attention, that demands your care, your profound consideration. So we are together going to examine what is meditation, not how to meditate, that is the silliest question, but what is the nature, the quality, the structure, the beauty of meditation. The word 'meditation' means to ponder over, to think over, to consider, to probe, to investigate, to look, according to the dictionary. And the word 'meditation' also means measurement, to measure. I believe in sanskrit 'ma' is to measure. And also it has another meaning. So meditation, as it is said in a good dictionary is, to ponder over, think over, consider, look, observe, feel, move, and also it means to measure. Measurement means comparison. Have you ever considered the ancient Greece 450 BC exploded all over Europe. Greece was responsible for measurement. I don't know history but we can observe. They invented measurement. And without measurement there can be no technology. And the western world is par excellence, highest, capable of great technology, which has moved to Japan. India, the ancient Indians said that measurement is illusion because - now the speaker is saying - all measurement is limited. If there was complete measurement, then there would be instant perfection of all technology. So India exploded all over Asia. Don't be proud of it, it is all gone. You have lost the one thing that was so precious. You have lost the greatest jewel that you have ever had. So meditation means to think, to ponder, and also it means to measure. That is, measurement: I am this, I must be that. I am comparing myself with you, how clever, beautiful, lovely, and I am not, that is measurement. Following an example is a measurement. Following an ideal is measurement. Wherever there is comparison psychologically, meditation cannot be. You understand all this? Where there is no comparison, where there is no measurement, that I will achieve one day peace or god or illumination or all that stuff - the word used here is self-realization, I do not know what it means: realizing the self, you invent a lot of words and you stick to them. So where there is measurement, comparison, there cannot be meditation. You can compare between two cars, between two materials, a cloth, better paper, better houses, better food, but where the mind thinks in terms psychologically of better, meditation is not possible. You can sit cross-legged, do all kinds of yoga, all kinds of control, where there is control there is measurement. I wonder if you see all this. Are you getting tired? Sorry, allow me another five minutes, it's all over then. So to meditate: in meditation there must be no effort. What you call meditation is to repeat some words, repeat a mantra. I have been told the meaning of that word is to ponder over not becoming, which is not measuring. And also it means to absolutely deny all self-centred activity. I believe that is the root meaning of that word: not becoming and totally not living in a self-centred way. You can repeat all the words, mantras, breathe properly, you know, follow system after system, if one system does not suit you, take another system, methods, go off to Japan to learn Zen, or the latest guru will tell you how to meditate,'a All that implies control. Where there is control, there must be conflict and there must be measurement and that is not meditation. We are going to go into a little bit. Meditation is to live a diligent life. Meditation is not separate from daily living. It is not going off into a little corner, meditating for twenty minutes every day or every afternoon, every evening; that is just having a siesta - you know what a siesta is? Having a sleep in the afternoon. So there is no system. System implies practice. Practice means measurement - from what you are to what you want to be. And you may be practising the wrong note. And probably you are. And you call that meditation. And that meditation is so totally separate from your daily living. So find out whether it is possible to live a daily life of meditation, which means no measurement at any time. It is dangerous, what the speaker is saying, so please understand it very carefully. In meditation there is no control, because the controller is the controlled. I went into it the other day, I won't go into again now. In meditation there is no will because will is desire. The essence of desire is will - 'I will meditate, I will practice this day after day, discipline'. In meditation there is no effort at all because there is no controller. And meditation implies awareness: awareness of the earth, the beauty of the earth, the dead leaf, the dying dog, the dog that is diseased, not just awareness of something or the other, to be aware of your environment; to be aware of your neighbour; to be aware of the colours you carry, why you wear that colour and those beads, to be aware of that; to be aware of the beauty of the wind among the leaves; to be aware of your thoughts, your feelings. That means to be aware without choice - just to be aware. That hightens your sensitivity. To observe diligently everything. When you say, I will do something, do it, never forgetting what you have said. Do not say something you don't mean. That is part of meditation. That is, to be aware of your feelings, your conditioning, your opinions, your judgments, and to your beliefs, so that in that awareness, there is no choice - just to be aware of the beauty of the earth, the skies and the lovely waters. And when you are so aware, then there is attention. To attend: to attend to what the speaker is saying, not only to the speaker but to what your wife is telling you, or your husband is telling you or your children are telling you, what the politicians are telling you - their trickery, their search for power, position; to attend. When you so profoundly attend, there is no centre as the 'me' to attend. That is also meditation. Then if you have gone that far with your mind - not your mind -if you have moved that far, if the mind has moved that far, then what is religion? Religion is none of these things that you have: the temples, and the content of the temples, the puja, the Tirupatis, the churches, all that is not religion. The rituals, the beliefs that are put together by thought, which is a material process and you worship that which thought has created, which is what you have created. Have you ever realized all the gods, you have created them out of your fear, out of your wanting security, and the rituals day after day, puja, the mass is another form of entertainment. I know you don't agree, but listen to it. You will go on doing it because your mind is conditioned, afraid, wants some kind of security, if not here perhaps somewhere else. So a religious man does not belong to any group, to any religion, has no belief, because his mind is free, unafraid, because intelligence is the highest supreme form of ultimate security, not the intelligence of the cunning thought. Intelligence of compassion. And that intelligence has no doubt, no uncertainty, no fear, which is something immense in the universe. And where there is attention, there is silence. If you attend now to what the speaker is saying, attend with your ears, with your eyes, with your nerves, with your whole body, attend, then in that quality of attention there is great silence, unfathomable silence. That silence has never been touched by thought. And only then, which man has searched from time immemorial, something sacred, something nameless, supreme. It is only that mind that is utterly free from all the travails of life, it is only such a mind that can find the supreme. That means meditation, which is the expression of daily activity. - Saanen - Chapter 1 - 1st Public Talk Chapter 2 - 2nd Public Talk Chapter 3 - 3rd Public Talk Chapter 4 - 4th Public Talk Chapter 5 - 5th Public Talk Chapter 6 - 6th Public Talk Chapter 7 - 7th Public Talk - Amsterdam - Chapter 8 - 1st Public Talk Chapter 9 - 2nd Public Talk - Longer, Unedited Versions - Saanen 1st Public Talk Saanen 2nd Public Talk Saanen 3rd Public Talk Saanen 4th Public Talk Saanen 5th Public Talk Saanen 6th Public Talk Saanen 7th Public Talk Amsterdam 1st Public Talk Amsterdam 2nd Public Talk THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 12TH JULY 1981 I see some of my old friends are here - and I am glad to see you. As we are going to have seven talks we should go into what I am going to say very carefully, covering the whole field of life, so please be patient those of you who have heard the speaker before, please be tolerant if the speaker repeats himself, for repetition has a certain value. Prejudice has something in common with ideals, beliefs and faiths. We must be able to think together; but our prejudices, our ideals and so on, limit the capacity and the energy required to think, to observe and examine together so as to discover for ourselves what lies behind all the confusion, misery, terror, destruction and tremendous violence in the world. To understand, not only the mere outward facts that are taking place, but also the depth and the significance of all this, we must be able to observe together - not you observing one way and the speaker another, but together observe the same thing. That observation, that examination, is prevented if we cling to our prejudices, to our particular experiences and our particular comprehension. Thinking together is tremendously important because we have to face a world that is rapidly disintegrating, degenerating, a world in which there is no sense of morality, where nothing is sacred, where no one respects another. To understand all this, not only superficially, casually, we have to enter into the depths of it, into what lies behind it. We have to enquire why it is that after all these millions of years of evolution, man, you and the whole world, have become so violent, callous, destructive, enduring wars and the atomic bomb. The technological world is evolving more and more; perhaps that may be one of the factors causing man to become like this. So, please let us think together, not according to my way or your way, but simply using the capacity to think. Thought is the common factor of all mankind. There is no Eastern thought, or Western thought; there is only the common capacity to think, whether one is utterly poor or most sophisticated, living in an affluent society. Whether a surgeon, a carpenter, a labourer in the field, or a great poet, thought is the common factor of all of us. We do not seem to realize that thought is the common factor that binds us all. You think according to your capacity, to your energy, your experience and knowledge; another thinks differently according to his experience and conditioning. We are all caught in this network of thought. This is a fact, indisputable and actual. We have been `programmed' biologically, physically and also `programmed' mentally, intellectually. We must be aware of having been programmed, like a computer. Computers are programmed by experts to produce the results that they want. And these computers will outstrip man in thought. These computers can gather experience, and from that experience learn, accumulate knowledge, according to their programme. Gradually they are going to outstrip all our thinking in accuracy and with greater speed. Of course they cannot compose as Beethoven, or as Keats, but they will outstrip our thinking. So, then, what is man? He has been programmed to be Catholic, protestant, to be Italian or British and so on. For centuries he has been programmed - to believe, to have faith, to follow certain rituals, certain dogmas; programmed to be nationalistic and to go to war. So his brain has become as a computer but not so capable because his thought is limited, whereas the computer, although being also limited, is able to think much more rapidly than the human being and can outstrip him. These are facts, this is what actually is going on. Then what becomes of man? Then what is man? If the robots and the computer can do almost all that the human being can do, then what is the future society of man? When cars can be built by the robot and the computer - probably much better - then what is going to become of man as a social entity? These and many other problems are facing us. You cannot any more think as Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. We are facing a tremendous crisis; a crisis which the politicians can never solve because they are programmed to think in a particular way - nor can the scientists understand or solve the crisis; nor yet the business world, the world of money. The turning point, the perceptive decision, the challenge, is not in politics, in religion, in the scientific world, it is in our consciousness. One has to understand the consciousness of mankind, which has brought us to this point. One has to be very serious about this matter because we are really facing something very dangerous in the world - where there is the proliferation of the atomic bomb which some lunatic will turn on. We all must be aware of all this. One has to be very very serious, not flippant, not casual but concerned, to understand this behaviour and how human thought has brought us all to this point. We must be able to penetrate very carefully, hesitantly, with deep observation, to understand together what is happening both out there and inwardly. The inward psychological activity always overcomes the outer, however many regulations, sanctions, decisions you may have outwardly, all these are shattered by our psychological desires, fears and anxieties, by the longing for security. Unless we understand that, whatever outward semblance of order we may have, inward disorder always overcomes that which is outwardly conforming, disciplined, regularized. There may be carefully constructed institutions -political, religious, economic - but whatever the construction of these may be, unless our inward consciousness is in total order, inward disorder will always overcome the outer. We have seen this historically, it is happening now in front of our eyes. This is a fact. The turning point is in our consciousness. Our consciousness is a very complicated affair. Volumes have been written about it, both in the East and in the West. We are not aware of our own consciousness; to examine that consciousness in all its complexity one has to be free to look to be choicelessly aware of its movement. it is not that the speaker is directing you to look or to listen to all the inward movement of consciousness in a particular way. Consciousness is common to all mankind.Throughout the world man suffers inwardly as well as outwardly there is anxiety, uncertainty, utter despair of loneliness; there is insecurity, jealousy, greed, envy and suffering. Human consciousness is one whole; it is not your consciousness or mine. This is logical, sane, rational: wherever you go, in whatever climate you live, whether you are affluent or degradingly poor, whether you believe in god, or in some other entity, belief and faith are common to all mankind - the images and symbols may be totally different in various localities but they stem from something common to all mankind. This is not a mere verbal statement. If you take it as a verbal statement, as an idea, as a concept, then you will not see the deep significance involved in it. The significance is that your consciousness is the consciousness of alI humanity because you suffer, you are anxious, you are lonely, insecure, confused, exactly like others, though they live ten thousand miles away. The realization of it, the feeling of it - the feeling in your guts - is totally different from the mere verbal acceptance. When you realize that you are the rest of mankind, it brings a tremendous energy, you have broken through the narrow groove of individuality the narrow circle of me and you, we and they. We are examining together this very complex consciousness of man, not the European man, not the Asiatic man or the Middle East man, but this extraordinary movement in time that has been going on in consciousness for millions of years. Please do not accept what the speaker is saying; if you do it will have no meaning. If you do not begin to doubt, begin to question, be sceptical to enquire, if you hold on to your own particular belief, faith, experience or the accumulated knowledge, then you will reduce it all to some kind of pettiness with very little meaning. If you do that you will not be facing the tremendous issue that is facing man. We have to see what our actual consciousness is. Thought and all the things that thought has put together, is part of our consciousness - the culture in which we live, the aesthetic values, the economic pressures, the national inheritance. If you are a surgeon or a carpenter, if you specialize in a particular profession, that group consciousness is part of your consciousness. If you live in a particular country with its particular tradition and religious culture, that particular group-consciousness has become part of your consciousness. These are facts. If you are a carpenter you have to have certain skills, understand the nature of wood and the tools of the trade, so you gradually belong to a group that has cultivated these special skills and that has its own consciousness -similarly the scientist, the archeologist, just as the animals have their own particular consciousness as a group. If you are a housewife you have your own particular group consciousness, like all the other housewives. Permissiveness has spread throughout the world; it began in the far West and has spread right through the world. That is a group-conscious movement. See the significance of it; go into it for yourself, see what is involved in it. Our consciousness includes, in the much deeper consciousness, our fears. Man has lived with fear for generation after generation. He has lived with pleasure, with envy, with all the travail of loneliness, depression and confusion; and with great sorrow, with what he calls love and the everlasting fear of death. All this is his consciousness which is common to all mankind. Realize what it means: it means that you are no longer an individual. This is very hard to accept because we have been programmed, as is the computer, to think we are individuals. We have been programmed religiously to think that we have souls separate from all the others. Being programmed our brain works in the same pattern century after century. If one understands the nature of our consciousness, then the particular endeavour of the `me' that suffers has become something global, then a totally different activity will take place. That is the crisis we are in. We have been programmed; being programmed we can learn - occasionally have an insight - and our brain repeats itself over and over again.just see the actual fact of that: one is a Christian, or a Buddhist or a Hindu; one is against Communism, one is a Communist or a Democrat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And in this state of repetition there is an occasional breakthrough. So, how shall a human being - who is actually the rest of mankind - how shall he face this crisis, this turning point? How will you as a human being, who has evolved through millennia upon millennia, thinking as an individual - which is actually an illusion - face a turning point, see what actually is and in that very perception move totally in another direction? Let us understand together what it means to look - to look at the actuality of thought. You all think, that is why you are here. You all think and thought expresses itself in words, or through a gesture, through a look, through some bodily movement. Words being common to each one of us, we understand through those words the significance of what is being said. Yet thought is common to all mankind - it is a most extraordinary thing if you have discovered that, for then you see that thought is not your thought, it is thought. We have to learn how to see things as they actually are - not as you are programmed to look. See the difference. Can we be free of being programmed and look? If you look as a Christian, a Democrat, a Communist, a Socialist or a Catholic or a protestant - which are all so many prejudices - then you will not be able to understand the enormity of the danger, the crisis, that we are facing. If you belong to a certain group, or follow a certain guru, or are committed to a certain form of action, then, because you have been programmed, you will be incapable of looking at things as they actually are. It is only if you do not belong to any organization, to any group, to any particular religion or nationality, that you can really observe. If you have accumulated a great deal of knowledge from books and from experience, your mind has already been filled, your brain is crowded with experience, with your particular tendencies and so on - all that is going to prevent you from looking. Can we be free of all that to look at what is actually happening in the world? - at the terror and the terrible religious sectarian divisions, one guru opposed to another idiotic guru, the vanity behind all that, the power, the position, the wealth of these gurus, it is appalling. Can you look at yourself - not as a separate human being but as a human being who is actually the rest of mankind? To have such a feeling means that you have tremendous love for human beings. When you are able to see clearly, without any distortion, then you begin to enquire into the nature of consciousness, including the much deeper layers of consciousness. You have to enquire into the whole movement of thought, because it is thought that is responsible for all the content of consciousness, whether it is the deep or the superficial layers. If you had no thought there would be no fear, no sense of pleasure, no time; thought is responsible. Thought is responsible for the beauty of a great cathedral, but thought is also responsible for all the nonsense that takes place inside the cathedral. All the achievements of the great painters, poets, composers, are the activity of thought: the composer; inwardly hearing the marvellous sound, commits it onto paper. That is the movement of thought. Thought is responsible for all the gods in the world, all the saviours, all the gurus; for all the obedience and devotion; the whole is the result of thought which seeks gratification and escape from loneliness. Thought is the common factor of all mankind. The poorest villager in India thinks as the chief executive thinks, as the religious leader thinks. That is a common everyday fact. That is the ground on which all human beings stand. You cannot escape from that. Thought has done marvellous things to help man but it has also brought about great destruction and terror in the world. We have to understand the nature and the movement of thought; why you think in a certain way; why you cling to certain forms of thought; why you hold on to certain experiences; why thought has never understood the nature of death. We have to examine the very structure of thought - not your thought because it is fairly obvious what your thought is, for you have been programmed. But if you enquire seriously into what thinking is, then you enter into quite a different dimension - not the dimension of your own particular little problem. You must understand the tremendous movement of thought, the nature of thinking - not as a philosopher, not as a religious man, not as a member of a particular profession, or a housewife - the enormous vitality of thinking. Thought is responsible for all the cruelty, the wars, the war machines and the brutality of war, the killing, the terror, the throwing of bombs, the taking of hostages in the name of a cause, or without a cause. Thought is also responsible for the cathedrals, the beauty of their structure, the lovely poems; it is also responsible for all the technological development, the computer with its extraordinary capacity to learn and go beyond man-s thought. What is thinking? It is a response, a reaction, of memory. If you had no memory you would not be able to think. Memory is stored in the brain as knowledge, the result of experience. This is how our brain operates. First, experience; that experience may have been from the beginning of man, which we have inherited, that experience gives knowledge which is stored up in the brain; from knowledge there is memory and from that memory thought. Prom thought you act. Prom that action you learn more. So you repeat the cycle. Experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action; from that action learn more and repeat. This is how we are programmed. We are always doing this: having remembered pain, in the future avoid pain by not doing the thing that will cause pain, which becomes knowledge, and repeat that. Sexual pleasure, repeat that. This is the movement of thought. See the beauty of it, how mechanically thought operates. Thought says to itself: `I am free to operate.' Yet thought is never free because it is based on knowledge and knowledge is obviously always limited. Knowledge must also be always limited because it is part of time. I will learn more and to learn more I must have time. I do not know Russian but I will learn it. It may take me six months or a year or a lifetime. Knowledge is the movement of time. Time, knowledge, thought and action; in this cycle we live. Thought is limited, so whatever action thought generates must be limited and such limitation must create conflict, must be divisive. If I say that I am a Hindu, that I am Indian, I am limited and that limitation brings about not only corruption but conflict because another says, `I am a Christian' or `I am a Buddhist', so there is conflict between us. Our life from birth to death is a series of struggles and conflicts from which we are always trying to escape, which again causes more conflict. We live and die in this perpetual and endless conflict. We never seek out the root of that conflict, which is thought, because thought is limited. Please do not ask, `How am I to stop thought?' - that is not the point. The point is to understand the nature of thought, to look at it. THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 2 2ND PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 14TH JULY 1981 We were saying that human consciousness is similar in all human beings. Our consciousness, whether we live in the East or West, is made up of many layers of fears, anxieties, pleasures, sorrows and every form of faith. Occasionally, perhaps, in that consciousness there is also love, compassion, and from that compassion a totally different kind of intelligence. And always there is the fear of ending, death. Human beings throughout the world from time immemorial have tried to find out if there is something sacred, beyond all thought, something incorruptible and timeless. There are the various group consciousnesses; the businessmen with their consciousness, the scientists with theirs and the carpenter with his, these are of the content of consciousness and are the product of thought. Thought has created wonderful things; from the extraordinary technology of computers, to telecommunication, to robots, surgery and medicine. Thought has invented religions; all the religious organizations throughout the world are put together by thought. Thought has invented the computer. You must understand the complexity and the future of the computer; it is going to outstrip man in his thought; it is going to change the structure of society and the structure of government. This is not some fantastic conclusion of the speaker, or some fantasy, it is something that is actually going on now, of which you may not be aware. The computer has a mechanical intelligence; it can learn and invent. The computer is going to make human labour practically unnecessary - perhaps two hours work a day. These are all changes that are coming. You may not like it, you may revolt against it, but it is coming. Thought has invented the computer, but human thought is limited and the mechanical intelligence of the computer is going beyond that of man. It is going to totally revolutionize our lives. So what will a human being be then? These are facts, not some specialized conclusions of the speaker. When we consider what the capacity of the computer is, then we have to ask ourselves: what is a human being to do? The computer is going to take over most of the activities of the brain. And what happens to the brain then? When a human being's occupation is taken over by the computer, by the robot, what becomes of the human? We human beings have been `programmed' biologically, intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, through millions of years, and we repeat the pattern of the programme over and over again. We have stopped learning: and we must enquire if the human brain, which has been programmed for so many centuries, is capable of learning and immediately transforming itself into a totally different dimension. If we are not capable of that, the computer, which is much more capable, rapid and accurate, is going to take over the activities of the brain. This is not something casual, this is a very very serious, desperately serious matter. The computer can invent a new religion. It could be programmed by an expert Hindu scholar, by a Catholic, by a protestant or a Muslim, and it would turn out a marvellous structure for a new religion! And we, if we are not aware of what is happening, we will follow that new structure which has been turned out by the computer. See the seriousness of all this, please. Our consciousness has been programmed for thousands and thousands of years to think of ourselves as individuals, as separate entities struggling, in conflict from the moment we are born until we die. We are programmed to that. We have accepted that. We have never challenged it; we have never asked if it is possible to live a life absolutely without conflict. Never having asked it we will never learn about it. We repeat. It is an innate part of our existence to be in conflict - nature is in conflict: that is our argument - and we consider that progress is only through conflict. Religious organizations throughout history have maintained the idea of individual salvation. We are questioning very seriously whether there is an individual consciousness; whether you, as a human being, have a separate consciousness from the rest of mankind. You have to answer this, not just play with it. Having been brought up, programmed, conditioned, to be individuals, then our consciousness is all this activity of thought. Fear and the pursuit of pleasure are the movement of thought. The suffering, anxiety, uncertainty and the deep regrets, wounds, the burden of centuries of sorrow, are all part of thought. Thought is responsible for what we call love, which has become sensual pleasure, something to be desired. As we said, and we will repeat it over and over again until we are quite sure of it, we are thinking together, the speaker is not telling you what to think. He is not making propaganda - it is a horrible thing, propaganda. He is not telling you how to act, what to believe, but together, we are investigating the catastrophe that is taking place in the world outside of us, the utter ruthlessness and violence, and also inwardly in each human being the extraordinary conflict that is going on. Together we are examining. It is not - if one may point out - that you are merely listening to some ideas or conclusions; we are not talking about ideas, conclusions or beliefs. We are looking at this world that human beings have produced, for which all of us are responsible. We must be clear in our understanding - at whatever level that understanding be, whether it is intellectual understanding, which is merely verbal, or the understanding of deep significance so that that understanding acts -that we have come to a point where we have to make a decision, not by the exercise of will, but the decision that will naturally come when we begin to understand the whole nature and structure of the world, both externally and internally. That perception will bring about a decision, an action. Thought has created the problems which surround us and our brains are trained, educated, conditioned, to the solving of problems. Thought has created the problems, like the division between nationalities. Thought has created the division and the conflict between various economic structures; thought has created the various religions and the divisions between them and therefore there is conflict. The brain is trained to attempt to solve these conflicts which thought has created. It is essential that we understand deeply the nature of our thinking and the nature of our reactions which arise from our thinking. Thought dominates our lives, whatever we do; whatever action takes place, thought is behind that action. In every activity, whether it is sensual or intellectual, or biological, thought is operating all the time. Biologically, through centuries, the brain has been programmed, conditioned - the body acts in its own way, the action of breathing, the beat of the heart and so on - so, if you are a Catholic, a Hindu, or a Buddhist, you repeat that conditioning over and over again. Thought is a movement in time and space. Thought is memory, the remembrance of past things. Thought is the activity of knowledge, knowledge which has been gathered together through millions of years and stored as memory in the brain. If you observe the activity of your thinking you will see that experience and knowledge are the basis of your life. Knowledge is never complete, it must always go together with ignorance. We think knowledge is going 10 solve all our problems, whether the knowledge of the priest, the guru, the scientist, the philosopher, or the latest psychiatrist. But we have never questioned whether knowledge in itself can solve any of our problems - except perhaps technological problems. Knowledge comes through time. To learn a language you need time. To learn a skill or to drive a car efficiently takes time. The same movement of time is brought over to the psychological field; there too we say, `I must have time to learn about myself.' `I must have time in order to change myself from `what I am' to `what I should be.' Bringing over the activity of the external world into the psychological world means that time is a great factor in our life -tomorrow, the past and the present. Time is thought. Time is required in the acquisition of knowledge through experience, both externally in the world and inwardly. That is the way we have been programmed. Being so programmed we consider time is necessary to bring about a deep, fundamental change in the human structure. We employ time as thought - `I am this, I shall be that.' You would also say in the technical world: `I do not know how to construct a computer but I will learn., Time, knowledge, memory, thought, they are a single unit; they are not separate activities but a single movement. Thought, the outcome of knowledge, must everlastingly be incomplete and therefore limited, because knowledge is incomplete. Whatever is limited must bring about conflict. Nationality is limited. Religious belief is limited. An experience which you have had, or which you are longing for, is limited. Every experience must be limited. Questioner: Why? Krishnamurti: Because there are more experiences. I may have an experience sexually, or the experience of the possession of wealth, the experience of giving everything up and going into a monastery - those experiences are all limited. Thought, being limited, creates problems - national, economic and religious divisions; then thought says, `I must solve them.' So thought is always functioning in the resolution of problems. And the computer, a mechanism which has been programmed, can outstrip all of us because it has no problems; it evolves, learns, moves. Our consciousness has been programmed as an individual consciousness. We are questioning whether that consciousness, which we have accepted as individual, is actually individual at all. Do not say: `What will happen if I am not an individual?' Something totally different may happen. You may have an individual training in a particular trade, in a particular profession, you may be a surgeon, a doctor, an engineer, but that does not make you an individual. You may have a different name, a different form - that does not make individuality; nor the acceptance that the brain through time has affirmed: `I am an individual, it is my desire to fulfil, to become through struggle.' That so-called individual consciousness, which is yours, is the consciousness of all humanity. If your consciousness, which you have accepted as separate, is not separate, then what is the nature of your consciousness? part of it is the sensory responses. Those sensory responses are naturally, necessarily, programmed to defend yourself, through hunger to seek food, to breathe, unconsciously. Biologically you are programmed. Then the content of your consciousness includes the many hurts and wounds that you have received from childhood, the many forms of guilt; it includes the various ideas, imaginary certainties; the many experiences, both sensory and psychological; there is always the basis, the root, of fear in its many forms. With fear naturally goes hatred. Where there is fear there must be violence, aggression, the tremendous urge to succeed, both in the physical and the psychological world. In the content of consciousness there is the constant pursuit of pleasure; the pleasure of possession, of domination, the pleasure of money which gives power, the pleasure of a philosopher with his immense knowledge, the guru with his circus. pleasure again has innumerable forms. There is also pain, anxiety, the deep sense of abiding loneliness and sorrow, not only the so-called personal sorrow but also the enormous sorrow brought about through wars, through neglect, through this endless conquering of one group of people by another. In that consciousness there is the racial and group content; ultimately there is death. This is our consciousness - beliefs, certainties and uncertainties, anxiety, loneliness and endless misery. These are the facts. And we say this consciousness is mine! Is that so? Go to the Far East, or the Near East, America, Europe, anywhere where human beings are; they suffer, they are anxious, lonely, depressed, melancholic, struggling and in conflict - they are just the same as you. So, is your consciousness different from that of another? I know it is very difficult for people to accept - you may logically accept it, intellectually you may say, `Yes, that is so, maybe.' But to feel this total human sense that you are the rest of mankind requires a great deal of sensitivity. It is not a problem to be solved. It is not that you must accept that you are not an individual, that you must endeavour to feel this global human entity. If you do, you have made it into a problem which the brain is only too ready to try to solve! But if you really look at it with your mind, your heart, your whole being totally aware of this fact, then you have broken the programme. It is naturally broken. But if you say, `I will break it,` then you are again back into the same pattern. To the speaker this is utter reality, not something verbally accepted because it is pleasant; it is something that is actual. You may have logically, reasonably and sanely examined and found that it is so; but the brain which has been programmed to the sense of individuality is going to revolt against it (which you are doing now). The brain is unwilling to learn. Whereas the computer will learn because it has nothing to lose. But here you are frightened of losing something. Can the brain learn? That is the whole point; so now we have to go into this question of what learning is. Learning for most of us is a process of acquiring knowledge. I do not know the Russian language but I will learn it. I will learn day after day, memorizing, holding on to certain words, phrases and the meanings, syntax and grammar. If I apply myself I can learn almost any language within a certain time. To us, learning is essentially the accumulation of knowledge or skill. Our brains are conditioned to this pattern. Accumulate knowledge and from that act. When I learn a language, there knowledge is necessary. But if I am learning psychologically about the content of my mind, of my consciousness, does learning there imply examining each layer of it and accumulating knowledge about it and from that knowledge acting - following the same pattern as learning a language? If the brain repeats that pattern when I am learning about the content of my consciousness, it means that I need time to accumulate knowledge about myself, my consciousness. Then I determine what the problems are and the brain is ready to solve them - it has been trained to solve problems. It is repeating this endless pattern and that is what I call learning. Is there a learning which is not this? Is there a different action of learning, which is not the accumulation of knowledge? You understand the difference? Let me put it differently: from experience we acquire knowledge, from knowledge memory; the response of memory is thought, then from thought action, from that action you learn more, so the cycle is repeated. That is the pattern of our life. That form of learning will never solve our problems because it is repetition. We acquire more knowledge which may lead to better action; but that action is limited and this we keep repeating. The activity from that knowledge will not solve our human problems at all. We have not solved them, it is so obvious. After millions of years we have not solved our problems: we are cutting each other's throats, we are competing with each other, we hate each other, we want to be successful, the whole pattern is repeated from the time man began and we are still at it. Do what you will along this pattern and no human problem will be solved, whether it be political, religious or economic, because it is thought that is operating. Now, is there another form of learning; learning, not in the context of knowledge, but a different form, a non-accumulative perception-action? To find out we have to enquire whether it is possible to observe the content of our consciousness and to observe the world without a single prejudice. Is that possible? Do not say it is not possible, just ask the question. See whether, when you have a prejudice, you can observe clearly. You cannot, obviously. If you have a certain conclusion, a certain set of beliefs, concepts, ideals, and you want to see clearly what the world is, all those conclusions, ideals, prejudices and so on will actually prevent it. It is not a question of how to get rid of your prejudices but of seeing clearly, intelligently, that any form of prejudice, however noble or ignoble will actually prevent perception. When you see that, prejudices go. What is important is not the prejudice but the demand to see clearly. If I want to be a good surgeon I cannot do so with ideals or prejudices about surgeons; I must actually perform surgery. Can you see that a new form of action, a new form of non-accumulative knowledge, is possible which will break the pattern, break the programme, so that you are acting totally differently? The way we have lived, over millions of years, has been the repetition of the same process of acquiring knowledge and acting from that knowledge. That knowledge and action is limited. That limitation creates problems and the brain has become accustomed to solving the problems which knowledge has repeatedly created. The brain is caught in that pattern and we are saying that that pattern will never, in any circumstance, solve our human problems. Obviously we have not solved them up till now. There must be a different, a totally different, movement, which is a non-accumulative perception-action. To have non-accumulative perception is to have no prejudice. It is to have absolutely no ideals, no concepts, no faith - because all those have destroyed man, they have not solved his problems. So: have you a prejudice? Have you a prejudice which has something in common with an ideal? Of course. Ideals are to be accomplished in the future, and knowledge becomes tremendously important in the realizing of ideals. So, can you observe without accumulation, without the destructive nature of prejudice, ideals, faith, belief and your own conclusions and experiences? There is group consciousness, national consciousness, linguistic consciousness, professional consciousness, racial consciousness, and there is fear, anxiety, sorrow, loneliness, the pursuit of pleasure, love and finally death. If you keep acting in that circle, you maintain the human consciousness of the world. just see the truth of this. You are part of that cOnsciousness and you sustain it by saying, `I am an individual. My prejudices are important. My ideals are essential' -repeating the same thing over and over again. Now the maintenance, the sustenance and the nourishment, of that consciousness takes place when you are repeating that pattern. But when you break away from that consciousness, you are introducing a totally new factor in the whole of that consciousness. Now, if we understand the nature of our own consciousness, if we see how it is operating in this endless cycle of knowledge, action and division - a consciousness which has been sustained for millennia - if we see the truth that all this is a form of prejudice and break away from it, we introduce a new factor into the old. It means that you, as a human being who is of the consciousness of the rest of mankind, can move away from the old pattern of obedience and acceptance. That is the real turning point in your life. Man cannot go on repeating the old pattern, it has lost its meaning, - in the psychological world it has totally lost its meaning. If you fulfil yourself, who cares? If you become a saint, what does it matter? Whereas, if you totally move away from that you affect the whole consciousness of mankind. THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 3 3RD PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 16TH JULY 1981 I would like to repeat that we are not trying to convince you of anything - that must be clearly understood. We are not trying to persuade you to accept a particular point of view. We are not trying to impress you about anything;nor are we doing any propaganda. We are not talking about personalities, or who is right and who is wrong, but rather trying to think out, to observe, together, what the world is and what we are, what we have made of the world and what we have made of ourselves. We are trying together to examine both the inward and the outward man. To observe clearly one must be free to look - obviously. If one clings to one's particular experiences, judgements and prejudices, then it is not possible to think clearly. The world crisis which is right in front of us demands, urges, that we think together so that we can solve the human problem together, not according to any particular person, philosopher, or particular guru. We are trying to observe together. It is important to bear in mind all the time that the speaker is merely pointing out something which we are examining together. It is not something one-sided but rather that we are co-operating in examining, in taking a journey together and so acting together. It is very important to understand that our consciousness is not our individual consciousness. Our consciousness is not only that of the specialized group, nationality and so on, but it is also all the human travail, conflict, misery, confusion and sorrow. We are examining together that human consciousness, which is our consciousness, not yours or mine, but ours. One of the factors that is demanded in this examination is the capacity of intelligence. Intelligence is the capacity to discern, to understand, to distinguish; it is also the capacity to observe, to put together all that we have gathered and to act from that. That gathering, that discernment, that observation, can be prejudiced; and intelligence is denied when there is prejudice. If you follow another, intelligence is denied; the following of another, however noble, denies your own perception, denies your own observation -you are merely following somebody who will tell you what to do, what to think. If you do that, then intelligence does not exist; because in that there is no observation and therefore no intelligence. Intelligence demands doubting, questioning, not being impressed by others, by their enthusiasm, by their energy. Intelligence demands that there be impersonal observation. Intelligence is not only the capacity to understand that which is rationally, verbally explained but also implies that we gather as much information as possible, yet knowing that that information can never be complete, about anybody or anything. Where there is intelligence there is hesitation, observation and the clarity of rational impersonal thinking. The comprehension of the whole of man, of all his complexities, all his physical responses, his emotional reactions, his intellectual capacities, his affection and his travail, the perceiving of all that at one glance, in one act, is supreme intelligence. Intelligence has not, so far, been able to transcend conflict. We are going together to see if it is possible for the brain to be free from conflict. We live with conflict from the time we are born and will continue co do so until we die. There is the constant struggle to be, to become something spiritually, so-called, or psychologically; co become successful in the world; to fulfil - all that is the movement of becoming: I am this now but I will reach the ultimate destination, the highest principle, whether that principle be called god, Brahman, or any other name. The constant struggle whether co become, or to be, is the same. But when one is trying to become, in various directions, then you are denying being. When you try to be you are becoming also. See this movement of the mind, of thought: I think; am, and being dissatisfied, discontented, with what I am, I try to fulfil myself in something; I drive towards a particular goal; it may be painful, but the end is thought to be pleasurable. There is this constant struggle to be and to become. We are all trying to become; physically, we want a better house, a better position with more power, higher status. Biologically, if we are not well we seek co become well. psychologically, the whole inward process of thought, of consciousness, the whole drive, inwardly, is from the recognition that one is actually nothing, and by becoming, to move away from that. psychologically, inwardly, there is always the escape from `what is`, always the running away from that which I am, from that with which I am dissatisfied to something which will satisfy me. Whether that satisfaction is conceived as deep contentment, happiness, or enlightenment, which is a projection of thought, or as acquiring greater knowledge, it is still the process of becoming - I am, I shall be. That process involves time. The brain is `programmed' to this. All our culture, all our religious sanctions, everything says: `become'. It is a phenomenon to be seen all over the world. Not only in this Western world but in the East, everyone is trying to become, or to be, or to avoid. Now: is this the cause of conflict, inwardly and outwardly? Inwardly there is this imitation, competition, conformity with the ideal; outwardly there is this competition between so-called individuals of one group against another group, nation against nation. Inwardly and outwardly there is always this drive to become and to be something. We are asking: is this the basic cause of our conflict? Is man doomed - as long as he lives on this marvellous earth - to perpetual conflict? One can rationalize this conflict, say nature is in conflict, the tree struggling to reach the sun is in conflict, and that that is part of our nature, because, through conflict, through competition, we have evolved, we have grown into this marvellous human being that we are - this is not being said sarcastically. Our brain is programmed to conflict. We have a problem which we have never been able to resolve. You may neurotically escape into some phantasy and in that phantasy be totally content, or you may imagine that you have inwardly achieved something and be totally content with that: an intelligent mind must question all this, it must exercise doubt, scepticism. Why have human beings, for millions of years, from the beginning of man up to the present time, lived in conflict? We have accepted it, we have tolerated it, we have said it is part of our nature to compete, to be aggressive, to imitate, to conform; we have said that it is part of the everlasting pattern of life. Why is man, who is so highly sophisticated in one direction, so utterly unintelligent in other directions? Does conflict end through knowledge - knowledge about oneself, or about the world, knowledge about matter, learning more about society so as to have better organizations and better institutions, acquiring more and more knowledge? Will that solve our human conflict? Or is it that freedom from conflict has nothing whatsoever to do with knowledge? We have a great deal of knowledge about the world, about matter and the universe; we have also a great deal of historical knowledge about ourselves: will that knowledge free the human being from conflict? Or has freedom from conflict nothing to do with analysis, with discovering the various causes and factors of conflict? Will analytical discovery of the cause, or many causes, free the brain from conflict - the conflict which we have while we are awake during the daytime and the conflict carried on while we are asleep? We can examine and interpret dreams, we can go into the whole question of why human beings dream at all; will that solve conflict? Will the analytical mind analysing very clearly, rationally, sanely into the cause of conflict, end conflict? In analysis the analyser tries to analyse conflict, and in doing so separates himself from conflict - will that solve it? Or is it that freedom has nothing whatsoever to do with any of these processes? If you follow somebody who says: `I will show you the way; I am free from conflict and I will show you the way' - will that help you? This has been the part of the priest, the part of the guru, the part of the so-called enlightened man - `Follow me, I will show you; or, `I will point out the goal to you.' History shows this through millennia upon millennia, and yet man has not been able to solve his deep-rooted conflict. Let us find out together - not agree, not as an intellectual verbal concept - if there is a perception, an action, that will end conflict, not gradually, but immediately. What are the implications of that? The brain being programmed to conflict is caught in that pattern. We are asking if that pattern can be broken immediately, not gradually. You may think you can break it through drugs, through alcohol, through sex, through different forms of discipline, through handing oneself over to something - man has tried a thousand different ways to escape from this terror of conflict. Now, we are asking: is it possible for a conditioned brain to break that conditioning immediately? This may be a theoretical, non-actual, question. You may say it is impossible, it is just a theory, it is just a wish, a desire, to be free of this conflict. But if you examine the matter rationally, logically, with intelligence, you see that time will not solve this conditioning. The first thing to realize is that there is no psychological tomorrow. If you see actually, not verbally, but deeply in your heart, in your mind, in the very very depths of your being, you will realize that time will not solve this problem. And that means that you have already broken the pattern, you have begun to see cracks in the pattern we have accepted of time as a means of unravelling, breaking up, this programmed brain. Once you see for yourself, clearly, absolutely, irrevocably, that time is not a freeing factor then already you begin to see cracks in the enclosure of the brain. Philosophers and scientists have said: time is a factor of growth, biologically, linguistically, technologically, but they have never enquired into the nature of psychological time. Any enquiry into psychological time implies the whole complex of psychological becoming - I am this, but I will be that; I am unhappy, unfulfilled, desperately lonely but tomorrow will be different. To perceive that time is the factor of conflict then that very perception is action; decision has taken place - YOU do not have to decide - the very perception is the action and decision. There are multiple forms of conflict, there are thousands of opinions so there are thousands of forms of conflict. But we are not talking about the many forms of conflict but about conflict itself. We are not talking about your particular conflict - I don,t get on with my wife, or in my business, or this or that - but the conflict of the human brain in its existence. Is there a perception - not born of memory, not born of knowledge - that sees the whole nature and structure of conflict; a perception of that whole? Is there such perception at all - not analytical perception, not intellectual observation of the various types of conflict, not an emotional response to conflict? Is there a perception not of remembrance, which is time, which is thought? Is there a perception which is not of time or thought, which can see the whole nature of conflict, and with that very perception bring about the ending of conflict? Thought is time. Thought is experience, knowledge, put together in the brain as memory. It is the result of time - `I didn't know a week ago but I know now.' The multiplication of knowledge, the expansion of knowledge, the depth of knowledge, is of time. So thought is time - any psychological movement is time. If I want to go from here to Montreux, if I want to learn a language, if I want to meet somebody at a distant place, time is required. And that same outer process is carried on inwardly - `I am not, I will be'. So thought is time. Thought and time are indivisible. And we are asking the question: is there a perception which is not of time and thought - a perception that is entirely out of the pattern to which the brain has been accustomed? Is there such a thing that perhaps alone is going to solve the problem? We have not solved the problem in a million years of conflict; we are continuing the same pattern. We must find, intelligently, hesitantly, with care, if there is a way, if there is a perception which covers the whole of conflict, a perception which breaks the pattern. The speaker has put this question forward. Now how shall we meet this together? He may be wrong, irrational, but after you have listened to him very carefully, it is your responsibility as well as the speaker`s, to see if it is so, if it is possible. Do not say: `Well it is not possible because I have not done it; it is not within my sphere; I have not though t enough about it; or, I do not want to think about it at all because I am satisfied with my conflict and because I am quite certain one day humanity will be free of conflict.' That is all just an escape from the problem. So are we together being aware of all the complexities of conflict, not denying it. It is there, it is there as actually as pain in the body. Are we aware without any choice that it is so and at the same time ask the question as to whether there is a different approach altogether? Now, can we observe - it does not matter what it is - without the naming, without the remembrance? Look at your friend, or your wife, or whomever it is, observe that person without the words `my wife' or `my friend' or `we belong to the same group' - without any of that - observe so that you are not observing through remembrance. Have you ever directly tried it? Look at the person without naming, without time and remembrance and also look at yourself - at the image that you have built about yourself, the image that you have built about the other; look as though you were looking for the first time - as you might at a rose for the first time. Learn to look; learn to observe this quality which comes without all the operation of thought. Do not say it is not possible. If you go to a professor, not knowing his subject but wanting to learn from him (I am not your professor), you go to listen. You do not say: `I know something about it,' or `You are wrong,' or `You are right,' or `I don't like your attitude.' You listen, you find out. As you begin to listen sensitively, with awareness, you begin to discover whether it is a phoney professor using a lot of words, or a professor who has really gone into the depths of his subject. Now, can we together so listen and observe, without the word, without remembrance, without all the movement of thought? Which means, complete attention; attention, not from a centre but attention which has no centre. If you have a centre from which you are attending, that is merely a form of concentration. But if you are attending and there is no centre, it means that you are giving complete attention; in that attention there is no time. Many of you, fortunately or unfortunately, have heard the speaker for many years and one sees that this breaking of the `programme' of the brain has not come about. You repeatedly listen to that statement year after year and it has not come about. Is it because you want to attain, to become, to have that state in which the pattern of the brain has been broken? You have listened, and it has not come about, and you are hoping that it will come about -which is another form of striving to become. So you are still in conflict. So you brush it all aside and say you will not come here any more because you have not got what you want - `I want that but have not got it.' That wanting is the desire to be something and is a cause of conflict. That desire comes from the `programmed' brain. We are saying: to break that programme, that pattern, observe without the movement of thought. It sounds very simple, but see the logic of it, the reason, the sanity, of it, not because the speaker says so, but because it is sane. Obviously one must exercise the capacity to be logical, rational and yet know its limitation; because rational, logical thinking is still part of thought. Knowing that thought is limited, be aware of that limitation and do not push it further because it will still be limited however far you go, whereas if you observe a rose, a flower, without the word, without naming the colour, but just look at it, then that look brings about great sensitivity, breaks down this sense of heaviness of the brain, and gives extraordinary vitality. There is a totally different kind of energy when there is pure perception, which is not related to thought and time. THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 4 4TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 19TH JULY 1981 Order is necessary in our everyday activity; order in our action and order in our relationship with each other. One has to understand that the very quality of order is totally different from that of discipline. Order comes through directly learning about ourselves -not according to some philosopher or some psychologist. We discover order for ourselves when we are free from all sense of compulsion, from all sense of determined effort to obtain order along a particular path. That order comes very naturally. In that order there is righteousness. It is order, not according to some pattern, and not only in the outward world, which has become so utterly chaotic, but inwardly within ourselves where we are not clear, where we are confused and uncertain. Learning about ourselves is part of order. If you follow another, however erudite, you will not be able to understand yourself. To find out what order is we must begin to understand the nature of our relationships. Our life is a movement in relationship; however much one may think one lives alone, one is always related to something or other, either to the past or to some projected image in the future. So, life is a movement in relationship and in that relationship there is disorder. We must examine closely why we live in such disorder in our relationships with each other - however intimate or superficial. The speaker is not trying to persuade you to think in a particular direction, or put any kind of persuasive, subtle pressure on you. On the contrary, we are together thinking over our human problems and discovering what our relationship with each other is and whether in that relationship we can bring about order. To understand the full meaning of relationship with each other, however close, however distant, we must begin to understand why the brain creates images. We have images about ourselves and images about others. Why is it that each one has a peculiar image and identifies himself with that image? Is the image necessary, does it give one a sense of security? Does not the image bring about the separation of human beings? We have to look closely at our relationship with wife, husband or friend; look very closely, not trying to avoid it, not trying to brush it aside. We must together examine and find out why human beings throughout the world have this extraordinary machinery that creates images, symbols, patterns. Is it because in those patterns, symbols and images, great security is found? If you observe you will see that you have an image about yourself, either an image of conceit which is arrogant, or the contrary to that. Or you have accumulated a great deal of experience, acquired a great deal of knowledge, which in itself creates the image, the image of the expert. Why do we have images about ourselves? Those images separate people. If you have an image of yourself as Swiss or British or French and so on, that image not only distorts your observation of humanity but it also separates you from others. And wherever there is separation, division, there must be conflict - as there is conflict going on all over the world, the Arab against the Israeli, the Muslim against the Hindu, one Christian church against another. National division and economic division, all result from images, concepts, ideas and the brain clings to these images - why? Is it because of our education, because of our culture in which the individual is most important and where the collective society is something totally different from the individual? That is part of our culture, part of our religious training and of our daily education. When one has an image about oneself as being British or American, chat image gives one a certain security. That is fairly obvious. Having created the image about oneself that image becomes semi-permanent; behind that image, or in that image, one tries to find security, safety, a form of resistance. When one is related to another, however delicately, however subtly, psychically or physically, there is a response based on an image. If one is married or related intimately with somebody, an image is formed in one's daily life; whether one is acquainted for a week or ten years, the image is slowly formed about the other person step by step; every reaction is remembered, adding to the image and stored up in the brain so that the relationship - it may be physical, sexual, or psychical - is actually between two images, one's own and the other's. The speaker is not saying something extravagant, or exotic, or fantastic, he is merely pointing out that these images exist. These images exist and one can never know another completely. If one is married or one has a girl friend, one can never know her completely; one thinks one knows her because having lived with that person one has accumulated memories of various incidents various irritations and all the occurrences which happen in daily life; and she also has experienced her reactions and their. images are established in her brain. Those images play an extraordinarily important part in one's life. Apparently very few of us are free from any form of image. The freedom from images is real freedom. In that freedom there is no division brought about by images. If one is a Hindu, born in India with all the conditioning to which one is subject, the conditioning of the race, or of a particular group with its superstitions, with its religious beliefs, dogmas, rituals - the whole structure of that society - one lives with that complex of images, which is one`s conditioning. And however much one may talk about brotherhood, unity, wholeness, it is merely empty words having no actual daily meaning. But if one frees oneself from all that imposition, all the conditioning of all that superstitious nonsense, then one is breaking down the image. And also in one's relationship, if one is married or lives with somebody, is it possible not to create an image at all - not to record an incident which may be pleasurable or painful, in that particular relationship, not to record either the insult or the flattery, the encouragement or discouragement? Is it possible not to record at all? Because if the brain is constantly recording everything that is happening, psychologically, then it is never free to be quiet, it can never be tranquil, peaceful. If the machinery of the brain is operating all the time it wears itself out. This is obvious. It is what happens in our relationships with each other - whatever the relationship is - and if there is constant recording of everything then the brain slowly begins to wither away and that is essentially old age. So in investigating we come upon this question: is it possible in our relationships with all their reactions and subtleties, with all their essential responses, is there a possibility of not remembering? This remembering and recording is going on all the time. We are asking whether it is possible not to record psychologically, but only to record chat which is absolutely necessary? In certain directions it is necessary to record. For example, one must record all chat which is necessary to learn mathematics. If I am to be an engineer I must record all the mathematics related to structures and so on. If I am to be a physicist I must record that which has already been established in that subject. To learn to drive a car I must record. But is it necessary in our relationships to record, psychologically, inwardly, at all? The remembrance of incidents past, is that love? When I say to my wife, `I love you,' is that from a remembrance of all the things we have been through together -the incidents, the travail, the struggles, which are recorded, stored in the brain - is that remembrance actual love? So is it possible to be free and not to record psychologically at all? It is only possible when there is complete attention. When there is complete attention there is no recording. I do not know why we want explanations, or why it is that our brains are not swift enough to capture, to have an insight into, the whole thing immediately. Why is it that we cannot see this thing, the truth of all this, and let that truth operate and therefore cleanse the slate and have a brain that is not recording at all psychologically? But most human beings are rather sluggish, they rather like to live in their old patterns, in their particular habits of thought; anything new they reject because they think it is much better to live with the known rather than with the unknown. In the known there is safety - at least they think there is safety, security -so they keep on repeating, working and struggling within that field of the known. Can we observe without the whole process and machinery of memory operating? What is love? This is a very complex question; all of us feel we love something or other, abstract love, love of a nation, love of a person, love of god, love of gardening, love of overeating. We have abused the word love so greatly that we have to find out basically what love is. Love is not an idea. Love of god is an idea, love of a symbol is still an idea. When you go to the church and kneel down and pray, you are really worshipping, or praying to, something which thought has created. So, see what is happening, thought has created it - actually this is a fact - and you worship that which thought has created; which means you are worshipping, in a very subtle way, yourself. This may seem a sacrilegious statement, but it is a fact. That is what is happening throughout the world. Thought creates the symbol with all the attributes of that symbol, romantic or logical and sane; having created it you love it, you become totally intolerant of any other thing. All the gurus, all the priests, all the religious structures, are based on that. See the tragedy of it. Thought creates the flag, the symbol of a particular country, then you fight for it, you kill each other for it; your nation will destroy the earth in competition with another nation, and so the flag becomes a symbol of your love. We have lived for millions of years that way and we are still extraordinarily destructive, violent, brutal, cynical human beings. When we say we love another, in that love there is desire, the pleasurable projections of the various activities of thought. One has to find out whether love is desire, whether love is pleasure, whether in love there is fear; for where there is fear there must be hatred, jealousy, anxiety, possessiveness, domination. There is beauty in relationship and the whole cosmos is a movement in relationship. Cosmos is order and when one has order in oneself one has order in one's relationships and therefore the possibility of order in our society. If one enquires into the nature of relationship one finds it is absolutely necessary to have order, and out of that order comes love. What is beauty? You see the fresh snow on the mountains this morning, clean, a lovely sight. You see those solitary trees standing black against that white. Looking at the world about us you see the marvellous machinery, the extraordinary computer with its special beauty; you see the beauty of a face, the beauty of a painting, beauty of a poem - you seem to recognize beauty out there. In the museums or when you go to a concert and listen to Beethoven, or Mozart, there is great beauty -but always out there. In the hills, in the valleys with their running waters, and the flight of birds and the singing of a blackbird in the early morning, there is beauty. But is beauty only out there? Or is beauty something that only exists when the `me' is not? When you look at those mountains on a sunny morning, sparkling clear against the blue sky, their very majesty drives away all the accumulated memories of yourself - for a moment. There the outward beauty, the outward magnificence, the majesty and the strength of the mountains, wipes away all your problems - if only for a second. You have forgotten yourself. When there is total absence of yourself beauty is. But we are not free of ourselves; we are selfish people, concerned with ourselves, with our importance or with our problems, with our agonies, sorrows and loneliness. Out of desperate loneliness we want identification with something or other and we cling to an idea, to a belief, to a person, especially to a person. In dependency all our problems arise. Where there is psychological dependency, fear begins. When you are tied to something corruption begins. Desire is the most urgent and vital drive in our life. We are talking about desire itself, not desire for a particular thing. All religions have said that if you want to serve god you must subjugate desire, destroy desire, control desire. All the religions have said: substitute for desire an image that thought has created -the image that the Christians have, that the Hindus have and so on. Substitute an image for the actual. The actual is desire - the burning of it and they think that one can overcome that desire by substituting something else for it. Or, surrender yourself to that which you think is the master, the saviour, the guru - which again is the activity of thought. This has been the pattern of all religious thinking. One has to understand the whole movement of desire; for obviously it is not love, nor yet compassion. Without love and compassion, meditation is utterly meaningless. Love and compassion have their own intelligence which is not the intelligence of cunning thought. So it is important to understand the nature of desire, why it has played such an extraordinarily important part in our life; how it distorts clarity, how it prevents the extraordinary quality of love. It is important that we understand and do not suppress, do not try to control it or direct it in a particular direction, which you think may give you peace. Please bear in mind that the speaker is not trying to impress you or guide and help you. But together we are walking a very subtle, complex path. We have to listen to each other to find out the truth about desire. When one understands the significance, the meaning, the fullness, the truth of desire, then desire has quite a different value or drive in one's life. When one observes desire, is one observing it as an outsider looking at desire? Or is one observing desire as it arises? Not desire as something separate from oneself, one is desire. You see the difference? Either one observes desire, which one has when one sees something in the shop window which pleases one, and one has the desire to buy it so that the object is different from `me', or else the desire is `me', so there is a perception of desire without the observer watching desire. One can look at a tree. `Tree' is the word by which one recognizes that which is standing in the field. But one knows that the word `tree' is not the tree. Similarly one's wife is not the word. But one has made the word one's wife. I do not know if you see all the subtleties of this. One must very clearly understand, from the beginning, that the word is not the thing. The word `desire' is not the feeling of it - the extraordinary feeling there is behind chat reaction. So one must be very watchful that one is not caught in the word. Also the brain must be active enough to see that the object may create desire - desire which is separate from the object. Is one aware that the word is not the thing and that desire is not separate from the observer who is watching desire? Is one aware that the object may create desire but the desire is independent of the object? How does desire flower? Why is there such extraordinary energy behind it? If we do not understand deeply the nature of desire we will always be in conflict with each other. One may desire one thing and one's wife may desire another and the children may desire something different. So we are always at loggerheads with each other. And this battle, this struggle, is called love, relationship. We are asking: what is the source of desire? We must be very truthful in this, very honest, for desire is very very deceptive, very subtle, unless we understand the root of it. For all of us sensory responses are important - sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing. And a particular sensory response may for some of us be more important than the other responses. If we are artistic we see things in a special way. If we are trained as an engineer then the sensory responses are different. so we never observe totally, with all the sensory responses. We each respond somewhat specially, divided. Is it possible to respond totally with all one's senses? See the importance of that. If one responds totally with all one's senses there is the elimination of the centralized observer. But when one responds to a particular thing in a special way then the division begins. Find out when you leave this tent, when you look at the flowing waters of the river, the light sparkling on the swiftness of the waters, find out if you can look at it with all your senses. Do not ask me how, for that becomes mechanical. But educate yourself in the understanding of total sensory response. When you see something, the seeing brings about a response. You see a green shirt, or a green dress, the seeing awakens the response. Then contact takes place. Then from contact thought creates the image of you in that shirt or dress, then the desire arises. Or you see a car in the road, it has nice lines, it is highly polished and there is plenty of power behind it. Then you go around it, examine the engine. Then thought creates the image of you getting into the car and starting the engine, putting your foot down and driving it. So does desire begin and the source of desire is thought creating the image, up to that point there is no desire. There are the sensory responses, which are normal, but then thought creates the image and from that moment desire begins. Now, is it possible for thought not to arise and create the image? This is learning about desire, which in itself is discipline. Learning about desire is discipline, not the controlling of it. If you really learn about something it is finished. But if you say you must control desire, then you are in a totally different field altogether. When you see the whole of this movement you will find that thought with its image will not interfere; you will only see, have the sensation and what is wrong with that? We are all so crazy about desire, we want to fulfil ourselves through desire. But we do not see what havoc it creates in the world - the desire for individual security, for individual attainment, success, power, prestige. We do not feel that we are totally responsible for everything we do. If one understands desire, the nature of it, then what place has it? Has it any place where there is love? Is love then something so extraordinarily outside of human existence that it has actually no value at all? Or, is it that we are not seeing the beauty and the depth, the greatness and sacredness of the actuality of it; is it that we have not the energy, the time to study, to educate ourselves, to understand what it is? Without love and compassion with its intelligence, meditation has very little meaning. Without that perfume that which is eternal can never be found. And that is why it is important to put the `house' of our life, of our being, of our struggles, into complete order. THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 5 5TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 21ST JULY 1981 We have to consider together whether the brain, which is now only operating partially, has the capacity to function wholly, completely. Now we are only using a part of it, which one can observe for oneself. One can see that specialization, which may be necessary, brings about the functioning of only a part of the brain. If one is a scientist, specializing in that subject, naturally only one part of the brain is functioning; if one is a mathematician it is the same. In the modern world one has to specialize, and we are asking whether, even so, it is possible to allow the brain to operate wholly, completely. And another question we are asking is: what is going to happen to humanity, to all of us, when the computer out-thinks man in accuracy and rapidity - as the computer experts are saying it will? With the development of the robot, man will only have, perhaps, two hours of work a day. This may be going to happen within the foreseeable future. Then what will man do? Is he going to be absorbed in the field of entertainment? That is already taking place: sports are becoming more important; there is the watching of television; and there are the varieties of religious entertainment. Or is he going to turn inwardly, which is not an entertainment but something which demands great capacity of observation, examination and non-personal perception? These are the two possibilities. The basic content of our human consciousness is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of fear. Is humanity increasingly going to follow entertainment? One hopes these Gatherings are not a form of entertainment. Now, can the brain be totally free so as to function wholly? -because any specialization, any following of a certain path, a certain groove or pattern, inevitably implies that the brain is functioning partially and therefore with limited energy. We live in a society of specialization - engineers, physicists, surgeons, carpenters and the specializations of particular beliefs, dogmas and rituals. Certain specializations are necessary, such as that of the surgeon or carpenter, but in spite of that can the brain function completely, wholly, and therefore have tremendous energy? This is, I think, a very serious question into which we have to enquire together. If one observes one's own activity one finds that the brain functions very partially, fragmentarily, with the result that one's energy becomes less and less as one grows older. Biologically, physically, when one is young one is full of vitality; but as one is educated, and then follows a livelihood that needs specialization, the activity of the brain becomes narrowed down, limited and its energy becomes less and less. Though the brain may have to have a certain form of specialization - not necessarily religious specialization because that is superstition - as a surgeon for example, can it also operate wholly? It can only operate wholly, with all the tremendous vitality of a million years behind it, when it is completely free. Specialization, which is now necessary for a livelihood may not be necessary if the computer takes over. It will not take over surgery, obviously. It will not take over the feeling of beauty, as when looking at the evening stars, but it may take over other functions altogether. Can the human brain be totally free, without any form of attachment - attachment to certain beliefs, experiences and so on? If the brain cannot be totally free it will deteriorate. When the brain is occupied with problems, with specialization, with a livelihood, it is in limited activity. But when the computer takes over, this activity will become less and less and therefore it will gradually deteriorate. This is not something in the future, it is actually happening now if one observes one's own mental activity. Can your consciousness, with its basic content of fear, the pursuit of pleasure with all the implications of grief, pain and sorrow, being hurt inwardly and so on, become totally free? We may have other forms of consciousness, group consciousness, racial consciousness, national consciousness, the consciousness of the Catholic group, the Hindu group and so on but basically the content of our consciousness is fear, the pursuit of pleasure, with the resultant pain, sorrow and ultimately death. These comprise the central content of our consciousness. We are together observing the whole phenomenon of human existence, which is our existence. We are mankind, because our consciousness, whether as a Christian living in the Western world, or as a Muslim in the Middle East, or a Buddhist in the Asiatic world, is basically fear, the pursuit of pleasure and the never ending burden of pain, hurts, sorrow. One's consciousness is not personal to oneself. This is very difficult to accept because we have been so conditioned, so educated, that we resist the actual fact that we are not individuals at all, we are the whole of mankind. This is not a romantic idea, it is not a philosophical concept, it is absolutely not an ideal; examined closely, it is a fact. So we have to find out whether the brain can be free from the content of its consciousness. Sirs, why do you listen to the speaker? Is it that in listening to the speaker you are listening to yourself? Is that what is taking place? The speaker is only pointing something out, acting as a mirror in which you see yourself, see the actuality of your own consciousness; it is not the description which the speaker is pointing out, which becomes merely an idea if you do no more than follow it. But if through the description, you yourself actually perceive your own state of mind, your own consciousness, then listening to the speaker has a certain importance. And if at the end of these talks you say to yourself: `I have not changed; why? It is your fault. You have spoken for fifty years perhaps, and I have not changed', is it the fault of the speaker? Or you say: `I have not been able to apply it; naturally it is the fault of the speaker`. Then you become cynical and do all kinds of absurd things. So please bear in mind that you are listening not so much to the speaker as looking at your own consciousness through the description in words - which is the consciousness of all humanity. The Western world may believe in certain religious symbols and certain rituals; the Eastern world does likewise, but behind it all there is the same fear, the same pursuit of pleasure, the same burden of greed, pain, of being hurt and wanting to achieve - all of which is common to the whole of humanity. So, in listening we are learning about ourselves, not just following the description. We are actually learning to look at ourselves and therefore bringing about a total freedom in which the whole of the brain can operate. After all, meditation, love and compassion are the operation of the whole of the brain. When there is the operation of the whole there is integral order. When there is integral, inward order, there is total freedom. It is only then that there can be something which is timelessly sacred. That is not a reward; that is not something to be achieved; that which is eternally timeless, sacred, comes about only when the brain is totally free to function in wholeness. The content of our consciousness is put together by all the activities of thought; can that content ever be freed so that there is a totally different dimension altogether? So let us observe the whole movement of pleasure. There is not only biological, including sexual, pleasure, there is also pleasure in possessions, pleasure in having money, pleasure in achieving something that you have been working towards; there is pleasure in power, political or religious, in power over a person; there is pleasure in the acquisition of knowledge, and in the expression of that knowledge as a professor, as a writer, as a poet; there is the gratification that comes about through leading a very strict, moral and ascetic life, the pleasure of achieving something inwardly which is not common to ordinary man. This has been the pattern of our existence for millions of years. The brain has been conditioned to it and therefore has become limited. Anything that is conditioned must be limited and therefore the brain, when it is pursuing the many forms of pleasure, must inevitably become small, limited, narrow. And probably, unconsciously realizing this, one seeks different forms of entertainment, a release through sex, through different kinds of fulfilment. Please observe it in yourself, in your own activity in daily life. If you observe, you will see that one,s brain is occupied all day with something or other, chattering, talking endlessly, going on like a machine that never stops. And in this way the brain is gradually wearing itself out - and it is going to become inactive if the computer takes its place. So, why are human beings caught in this perpetual pursuit of pleasure - why? Is it because they are so utterly lonely? Are they escaping from that sense of isolation? Is it that they have been, from childhood, conditioned to this? Is it because thought creates the image of Pleasure and then pursues it? Is thought the source of pleasure? For example, one has had some kind of pleasure, eating very tasty food, or sexual pleasure, or the pleasure of being flattered and the brain registers that pleasure. The incidents which have brought about pleasure have been recorded in the brain, and the remembrance of these incidents of yesterday, or last week, is the movement of thought. Thought is the movement of pleasure; the brain has registered incidents, pleasurable and exciting, worth remembering, and thought projects them into the future and pursues them. So the question then is: why does thought carry on the memory of an incident that is over and finished? Is not that part of our occupation? A man who wants money, power, position, is perpetually occupied with it. Perhaps, the brain is similarly occupied with the remembrance of something of a week ago which gave great pleasure, being held in the brain, which thOught projects as future pleasure and pursues. The repetition of pleasure is the movement of thought and therefore limited; therefore the brain can never function wholly, it can only function partially. Now the next question that arises is: if this is the pattern of thought, how can thought be stopPed, or rather, how can the brain stop registering the incident of yesterday which gave delight? That is the obvious question, but why does one put it? Why? Is it because one wants to escape from the movement of pleasure, and that that very escape is yet another form of pleasure? Whereas if you see the fact that the incident which gave great delight, pleasure, excitement, is over, that it is no longer a living thing, hut something which happened a week ago - it was a living thing then but it is not so now - can you not finish with it, end it, not carry it over? It is not how to end it or now to stop it. It is just to see factually how the brain, how thought, is operating. If one is aware of that, then thought itself will come to an end. The registering of pleasure is ended, finished. Fear is the common state of all mankind, whether you live in a small house or in a palace, whether you have no work or plenty of work, whether you have tremendous knowledge about everything on earth or are ignorant, or whether you are a priest or the highest representative of god, or whatever, there is still this deep rooted fear which is common to all mankind. That is a common ground on which all humanity stands. There is no question about it. It is an absolute, irrevocable fact, it cannot be contradicted. As long as the brain is caught in this pattern of fear its operation is limited and therefore can never function wholly. So it is necessary, if humanity is to survive completely as human beings and not as machines, to find out for oneself whether it is possible to be totally free from fear. We are concerned with fear itself, not with the expressions of fear. What is fear? When there is fear, is there at that very moment a recognition as fear? Is that fear describable at the moment the reaction is taking place? Or does the description come after? `After' is time. Suppose one is afraid: either one is afraid of something, afraid of something chat one has done in the past which one does not want another to know, or something has happened in the past which again awakens fear, or is there a fear by itself without an object? At the second when there is fear does one call it fear? Or does that happen only afterwards? Surely it is after it has happened. Which means that previous incidents of fear which have been held in the brain are remembered immediately after the reaction takes place; the memory says `That is fear'. At the immediacy of the reaction one does not call it fear. It is only after it has happened that one names it as fear. The naming of it as fear is from the remembrance of other incidents that have arisen which have been named fear. One remembers those fears of the past and the new reaction arises which one immediately identifies with the word fear. That is simple enough. So there is always the memory operating on the present. So; is fear time? - the fear of something which happened a week ago, which has caused that feeling which we have named as fear and the future implication that it must not happen again; yet it might happen again, therefore one is afraid of it. So one asks oneself: is it time that is the root of fear? So what is time? Time by the watch is very simple. The sun rises at a certain time and sets at a certain time - yesterday, today and tomorrow. That is a natural sequence of time. There is also psychological, inward time. The incident which happened last week, which has given pleasure, or which awakened the sense of fear, is remembered and projected into the future - I may lose my position, I may lose my money, I may lose my wife - time. So is fear part of psychological time? It looks like it. And what is psychological time? Not only does physical time need space, but psychological time needs space also - yesterday, last week, modified today, tomorrow. There is space and time. That is simple. So, is fear the movement of time? And is not the movement of time, psychologically, the movement of thought? So thought is time and time is fear - obviously. One has had pain sitting with the dentist. It is stored, remembered, projected; one hopes not to have that pain again - thought is moving. So fear is a movement of thought in space and time. If one sees that, not as an idea, but as an actuality (which means one has to give to that fear complete attention at the moment it arises) then it is not registered. Do this and you will find out for yourself. When you give complete attention to an insult, there is no insult. Or if somebody comes along and says, `What a marvellous person you are' and you pay attention it is like water off a duck's back. The movement of fear is thought in time and space. That is a fact. It is not something described by the speaker. If you have observed it for yourself, then it is an absolute fact, you cannot escape from it. You cannot escaPe from a fact, it is always there. You may try to avoid it, you may try to suppress it, try every kind of escape, but it is always there. If you give complete attention to the fact that fear is the movement of thought, then fear is not, psychologically. The content of our consciousness is the movement of thought in time and space. Whether that thought is very limited, or wide and extensive, it is still a movement in time and space. Thought has created many different forms of power in ourselves, psychologically, but they are all limited. When there is freedom from limitation there is an astonishing sense of power, not mechanical power but a tremendous sense of energy. It has nothing to do with thought and therefore that power, that energy cannot be misused. But if thought says, `I will use it', then that power, that energy, is dissipated. Another factor which exists in our consciousness is sorrow, grief, pain and the wounds and hurts that remain in most human beings from childhood. That psychological hurt, the pain of it, is remembered, it is held on to; grief arises from it; sorrow is involved in it. There is the global sorrow of mankind which has faced thousands and thousands of wars, for which millions of people have cried. The war machine is still with us, directed by politicians, reinforced by our nationalism, by our feeling that we are separate from the rest, `we' and `they', `you' and `me'. It is a global sorrow which the politicians are building, building, building. We are ready for another war and when we prepare for something there must be some kind of explosion somewhere - it may not be in the Middle East, it may happen here. As long as we are preparing for something we are going to get it - it is like preparing food. But we are so stupid that all this goes on -including terrorism. We are asking whether this whole pattern of being hurt, knowing loneliness and pain, resisting, withdrawing, isolating ourselves, which causes further pain, can come to an end; whether the grief, the sorrow of losing some precious belief that we have held, or the disillusionment that comes when we lose somebody we have followed, for whom we have struggled, surrendered ourselves, can also come to an end? Is it possible ever to be free of all this? It is possible if we apply ourselves, not just endlessly talk about it. As it is we realize that we are hurt psychologically from childhood, we see all the consequences of that hurt, which we resist, from which we withdraw, not wanting to be hurt any more. We encourage isolation and therefore build a wall round ourselves. In our relationships we are doing the same thing. The consequences of being hurt from childhood are pain, resistance, withdrawal, isolation, deeper and deeper fear. And as the speaker has said, there is the global sorrow of mankind; human beings have been tortured through wars, tortured under dictatorships, totalitarianism, tortured in different parts of the world. And there is the sorrow of my brother, son, wife, running away, or dying; the sorrow of separation, the sorrow that comes about when one is deeply interested in something and the other is not. In all this sorrow there is no compassion, there is no love. The ending of sorrow brings love - not pleasure, not desire, but love. Where there is love there is compassion with which comes intelligence, which has nothing whatever to do with the `intelligence' of thought. We have to look very closely at ourselves as humanity, at why we have borne all these things all our lives, at why we have never ended this condition. Is it part indolence, part habit? We generally say: `It is part of our habit, part of our conditioning. What am I to do about it? How am I to uncondition myself? I cannot find the answer; I will go to the guru next door' - or further away, or the priest, or this or that. We never say: `Let us look at ourselves closely and see if we can break through it, like any other habit.' The habit of smoking can be broken, or that of drugs and alcohol. But we say: `What does it matter. I am getting old anyhow, the body is destroying itself, so what does little more pleasure matter?' So do we carry on. We do not feel utterly responsible for all the things we do. We either blame it on the environment, on society, on our parents, on past hereditary; we find some excuse but never apply ourselves. If we really have the urge, the immediate urge, to find out why we are hurt, it can be done. We are hurt because we have built an image about ourselves. That is a fact. When one says, `I am hurt', it is the image that one has about oneself that is hurt. Somebody comes along and puts his heavy boot on that image and one gets hurt. One gets hurt through comparison: `I am this but somebody else is better'. As long as one has an image about oneself one is going to get hurt. That is a fact and if one does not pay attention to that fact, but retains an image of oneself of any kind somebody is going to put a pin into it and one is going to get hurt. If one has an image about oneself as addressing large audiences and being famous, having gained a reputation which one wants to maintain, then someone is going to hurt it - somebody else with a bigger audience. If one gives complete attention to the image one has about oneself - attention, not concentration but attention - then one will see that the image has no meaning and it disappears. THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 6 6TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 23RD JULY 1981 I think we ought to talk over together, going into it rather deeply, the implication of sorrow, so as to find out for ourselves whether sorrow and love can exist together. And also what is our relationship to the sorrow of mankind? - not only to our own personal daily grief, hurt, pain, and the sorrow that comes with death. Mankind has suffered thousands of wars; there seems to be no end to wars. We have left it to the politicians, all over the world, to bring about peace, but what they are doing, if you have understood them, will never bring peace. We are all preparing for war. The preparations are going to have some kind of blow up somewhere in the world. We human beings have never been able to live in peace with each other. We talk about it a great deal. The religions have preached peace - Peace on earth and goodwill - but apparently it has never been possible to have peace on earth, on the earth on which we live, which is not the British earth or the French earth, it is our earth. We have never been able to resolve the problem of killing each other. Probably we have violence in our hearts. We have never been free from a sense of antagonism, a sense of retaliation, never free from our fears, sorrows, wounds and the pain of daily existence; we never have peace and comfort, we are always in travail. That is part of our life, part of our daily suffering. Man has tried many many ways to be free of this suffering without love; he has suppressed it, escaped from it, identified himself with something greater, handed himself over to some ideal, or belief or faith. Apparently this sorrow can never end; we have become accustomed to it, we put up with it, we tolerate it and we never ask ourselves seriously, with a great sense of awareness, whether it is possible to end it. We should also talk over together the immense implications of death. Death is part of life, though we generally postpone or avoid even talking about it. It is there and we ought to go into it. And we should also enquire whether love - not the remembrance of pleasure which has nothing to do with love and compassion -whether love with its own peculiar all-comprehending intelligence can exist in our life. First of all: do we, as human beings, want to be really free from sorrow? Have we ever actually gone into it, faced it and understood all the movement of it, the implications involved in it? Why is it that we human beings - who are so extraordinarily clever in the technological world - have never resolved the problem of sorrow? It is important to talk this question over together, and find out for ourselves whether sorrow can really end. We all suffer in various ways. There is the sorrow for death of someone, there is the sorrow of great poverty - which the East knows very well - and the great sorrow of ignorance - `ignorance' not in the sense of book knowledge but the ignorance of not knowing oneself totally, the whole complex activity of the self. If we do not understand that very deeply then there remains the sorrow of that ignorance. There is the sorrow of never being able to realize something fundamentally, deeply - though we are very clever at achieving technological success and other successes in this world. We haver never been able to understand pain, not only physical pain, but the deep psychological pain, however learned or not very erudite we may be. There is the sorrow of constant struggle, the conflict from the moment we are born until we die. There is the personal sorrow of not being beautiful outwardly or inwardly. There is the sorrow of attachment with its fear, with its corruption. There is the sorrow of not being loved and craving to be loved. There is the sorrow of never realizing something beyond thought, something which is eternal. And ultimately there is the sorrow of death. We have described various forms of sorrow. The basic factor of sorrow is self-centred activity. We are all so concerned with ourselves, with our endless problems, with old age, with not being able to have a deep inward yet global outlook. We all have images of ourselves and of others. The brain is always active in day dreaming, being occupied with something or other, or creating pictures and ideas from the imagination. From childhood one gradually builds the structure of the image which is `me'. Bach one of us is doing this constantly; it is that image, which is `me', that gets hurt. When the `me' is hurt there is resistance, the building of a wall round oneself so as not to be hurt any more; and this creates more fear and isolation, the feeling of having no relationship, the encouraging of loneliness which also brings about sorrow. After having described the various forms of sorrow, can we look at it without verbalization, without running away from it into intellectual adaptation to some form of religious or intellectual conclusion? Can we look at it completely, not moving away from it, but staying with it? Suppose I have a son who is deaf or blind; I am responsible, and it gives sorrow knowing that he can never look at the beautiful sky, never hear the running waters. There is this sorrow: remain with it, do not move away from it. Or suppose I have great sorrow for the death of someone with whom I have lived for many years. Then there is this sorrow which is the essence of isolation; we feel totally isolated, completely alone. Now, remain completely with that feeling, not verbalizing it, not rationalizing it, or escaping from it, or trying to transcend it - all of which is the movement that thought brings about. When there is that sorrow and thought does not enter into it at alI - which means that you are completely sorrow, not trying to overcome sorrow, but totally sorrow - then there is the disappearance of it. It is only when there is the fragmentation of thought that there is travail. When there is sorrow, remain with it without a single movement of thought so that there is the wholeness of it. The wholeness of sorrow is not that I am in sorrow, I am sorrow - and then there is no fragmentation involved in it. When there is that totality of sorrow, no movement away from it, then there is the withering away of it. Without ending sorrow how can there be love? Strangely we have associated sorrow and love. I love my son and when he dies I am full of sorrow - sorrow we associate with love. Now we are asking: when there is suffering can love exist at all? But is love desire? Is love pleasure - so that when that desire, that pleasure, is denied, there is suffering? We say that suffering as jealousy, attachment, possession, is all part of love. That is our conditioning, that is how we are educated, that is part of our inheritance, tradition. Now, love and sorrow cannot possibly go together. That is not a dogmatic statement, or a rhetorical assertion. When one looks into the depth of sorrow and understands the movement of it in which is involved pleasure, desire, attachment, and the consequences of that attachment, which bring about corruption when one is aware without any choice, without any movement, aware of the whole nature of sorrow, then can love exist with sorrow? Or is love something entirely different? We ought to be clear that devotion to a person, to a symbol, to the family, is not love. If I am devoted to you for various reasons, there is a motive behind that devotion. Love has no motive. If there is a motive it is not love, obviously. If you give me pleasure, sexually, or various forms of comfort, then there is dependency; the motive is my dependence on you because you give me something in return; and as we live together I call that love. Is it? So one questions the whole thing and asks oneself: where there is motive can love exist? Where there is ambition, whether in the physical world, or in the psychological world - ambition to be on top of everything, to be a great success, to have power, religiously, or physically - can love exist? Obviously not. We recognise that it cannot exist and yet we go on. Look what hapPens to the brain when we play such tricks. I am ambitious, I want to be spiritually next to god, specially on his right hand; I want to achieve illumination - you know, aU that deception; you cannot achieve illumination; you cannot possibly achieve that which is beyond time. Competitiveness, conformity, jealousy, fearfulness, hate, all that is going on, psychologically, inwardly. We are either conscious of it, or we deliberately avoid it. Yet I say to my wife or father, whoever it is, `I love you.' What happens when there is such deep contradiction in my life, in my relationship? How can that contradiction have any sense of deep integrity? And yet that is what we are doing until we die, can one live in this world without ambition, without competitiveness? Look at what is happening in the outward world. There is competition between various nations; the politicians are competing with each other, economically, technologically, in building up the instruments of war; and so we are destroying ourselves. We allow this to go on because we are also inwardly competitive. As we pointed out, if a few really understand what we have been talking about for the last fifty years, and are really deeply involved and have brought about the end of fear, sorrow and so on, then that will affect the whole of the consciousness of mankind. Perhaps you are doubtful whether it will affect the consciousness of mankind? Hitler and his kind have affected the consciousness of mankind - Napoleon, the Caesars, the butchers of the world have affected mankind. Also the good People have affected mankind - I do not mean respectable people. The good are those who live life wholly, not fragmented. The great teachers of the world have affected human consciousness. But if there was a group of people who had understood what we have been talking about - not verbally but actually living life with great integrity - then it would affect the whole consciousness of man. This is not a theory. This is an actual fact. If you understand that simple fact you will see that it goes right through; television, newspapers, everything, is affecting the consciousness of man. So love cannot exist where there is a motive, where there is attachment, where there is ambition and competitiveness, love is not desire and pleasure. Just feel that, see it. We are going into all this so as to bring about order in our life -order in our `house', which has no order. There is so much disorder in our life and without establishing an order that is whole, integral, meditation has no meaning whatsoever. If one's `house' is not in order one may sit in meditation, hoping that through that meditation one will bring about order; but what happens when one is living in disorder and one meditates? One has fanciful dreams, illusions and all kinds of nonsensical results. But a sane, intelligent, logical man, must first establish order in daily life, then he can go into the depths of meditation, into the meaning and the beauty of it, the greatness of it, the worth of it. Whether we are very young, middle aged or old, death is part of our life, just as love, pain, suspicion, arrogance, are all part of life. But we do not see death as part of our life; we want to postpone it, or put it as far away from us as possible, so we have a time interval between life and death. What is death? This question is again rather complex. The Christian concept of death and suffering and the Asiatic conclusion about reincarnation are just beliefs and like all beliefs they have no substance. So put those aside and let us go into it together. It may be unpleasant; you may not want to face it. You are living now, healthily, having pleasure, fear, anxiety and tomorrow there is hope and you do not want to be concerned with the ending of all this. But if we are intelligent, sane, rational, we have to face not only the living and all the implications of the living, but also the implications of dying. We must know both. That is the wholeness of life in which there is no division. So what is death apart from the physical ending of an organism that has lived wrongly, addicted to drink, to drugs and over indulgence or asceticism and denial? The body goes through this constant battle between the opposites, it has not a balanced harmonious life, but one of extremes. Also the body goes through great stress imposed by thought. Thought dictates and the body is controlled thereby; and thought being limited brings about disharmony. it causes us to live in disharmony physically, forcing, controlling, subjugating, driving the body - this is what we are all doing including fasting for political or religious reasons, which is violence. The body may endure all this for many years, reaching old age and not getting senile. But the body will inevitably come to an end, the organism will die; is that what death is? Is the coming to an end of the organism, either through some disease, old age or accident, what we are concerned about? Is it that thought identifies itself with the body, with the name, with the form, with all the memories, and says, `Death must be avoided'? Is it that we are afraid of the coming to an end of a body that has been looked after, cared for? Perhaps we are not afraid of that especially, perhaps slyly anxious about it, but that is not of great importance. What is far more important for us is the ending of the relationships that we have had, the pleasures that we have had, the memories, pleasant and unpleasant, all of which make up what we call living - the daily living, going to the office, the factory, doing some skilful job, having a family, being attached to the family, with all the memories of that family, my son, my daughter, my wife, my husband, in the family unit - which is fast disappearing. There is the feeling of being related to somebody, though in that relationship there may be great pain and anxiety; the feeling of being at home with somebody; or not at home with anybody. Is that what we are afraid of? - the ending of my relationships, my attachments, the ending of something I have known, something to which I have clung, something in which I have specialized all my life, - am I afraid of the ending of all that? That is the ending of all that is `me' - the family, the name, the home, the tradition, the inheritance, the cultural education and racial inheritance, all that is `me', the `me' that is struggling or that is happy. Is that what we are afraid of? - the ending of `me', which is the ending, psychologically, of the life which I am leading, the life which I know with its pain and sorrow. Is that what we are afraid of? If we are afraid of that and have not resolved that fear, still death inevitably comes, then what happens to that consciousness, which is not your consciousness but the consciousness of mankind, the consciousness of the vast whole of humanity? As long as I am afraid as an individual with my limited consciousness, it is that that I am afraid of. It is that of which I am scared. One realizes that it is not a fact that one's consciousness is totally separate from that of everybody else - one sees that separateness is an illusion, it is illogical, unhealthy. So one realizes, perhaps in one's heart, in one's feeling, that one is the whole of mankind - not an individual consciousness, which has no meaning. And one has lived this kind of life, which is pain, sorrow, anxiety, and if one's brain has not transformed some of all that, one's life is only a further confusion to the wholeness. But if one realizes that one's consciousness is the consciousness of mankind, and that for the human consciousness one is totally responsible, then freedom from the limitation of that consciousness becomes extraordinarily important. When there is that freedom then one is contributing to the breaking down of the limitation of that consciousness. Then death has a totally different meaning. One has lived a so-called individual life, concerned about oneself and one's problems. Those problems never end, they increase. One has lived that kind of life. One has been brought up, educated, conditioned, to that kind of life. You come along as a friend - you like me, or you love me - you say to me: `Look, your consciousness is not yours; you suffer as other people suffer'. I listen to it and I do not reject what you say, for it makes sense, it is sane and I see that in what you have told me there can Perhaps be peace in the world. And I say to myself: `Now, can I be free from fear?I see that I am responsible, totally, for the whole of consciousness. I See that when I am investigating fear I am helping the total human consciousness to lessen fear. Then death has a totally different meaning. I no longer have phantasies that I am going to sit next to god, or that I am going to heaven through some Peculiar nebula. I am living a life which is not my particular life. I am living a life of the whole of humanity and if I understand death, if I understand grief, I am cleansing the whole of the consciousness of mankind. That is why it is important to understand the meaning of death and perhaps to find that death has great significance, great relationship with love, because where you end something love is. When you end attachment completely then love is. THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 7 7TH PUBLIC TALK SAANEN 26TH JULY 1981 We have talked about the complex problem of existence, about the forming of images in our relationships with each other and the images which thought projects and which we worship. We have talked about fear, pleasure and the ending of sorrow and the question of what love is, apart from all the travail that is involved in so-called love. We have talked about compassion with its intelligence and about death. We ought now to talk about religion. Many intellectuals, throughout the world, shy away from the subject of religion. They see what religions are in the present world, with their beliefs, dogmas, rituals and the hierarchical set-up of their established existence; and they rather scoff at and run away from anything to do with religion. And as they age and come near to that threshold called death, they often revert to their old conditioning: they become Catholics or pursue some guru in India or japan. Religion throughout the world has lost its credibility and no longer has any significance in daily life. The more you examine, the more you are aware of the whole content of all the religious structures, the more sceptical you become about the whole business and like the intellectuals, you have nothing to do with them. And those who are not sceptical, treat religions romantically, emotionally, or as a form of entertainment. If one puts aside the intellectual, the romantic and sentimental attitudes towards religions, one can then begin to ask, not with any naivety, but with seriousness: what is religion? - not looking for the mere meaning of that word, but deeply. Man, from ancient times, has always thought that there must be something beyond ordinary daily life, the ordinary misery, confusion and conflict of daily life. In his search he has invented aU kinds of philosophies, created all kinds of images - from those of the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Hindus to modern times - always getting caught apparently in some kind of delusion. He deludes himself and out of those delusions he creates all kinds of activities. If one could brush all that aside, not hypnotizing oneself, being free from illusion, then one can begin to examine, enquire very profoundly if there is something beyond all the contagion of thought, all the corruption of time, if there is something beyond one's usual existence in space and time and if there is any path to it, or no path, and how the mind can reach it, or come to it. If one asks that of oneself then how shall one set about it? Is any kind of preparation necessary -discipline, sacrifice, control, a certain period of preparation and then advance? First of all it is important to understand that one should be free of all illusions. So, what creates illusions? Is it not the desire to reach something, to experience something out of the ordinary -extrasensory perception, visions, spiritual exPeriences? One must be very clear as to the nature of desire and understand the movement of desire, which is thought with its image and also have no motive in one's enquiry. It may seem very difficult to have no intention, to have no sense of direction so that the brain is free to enquire. There must be order in one's house, in one's existence, in one's relationships, in one's activity. Without order, which is freedom, there can be no virtue. Virtue, righteousness, is not something that is intellectually cultivated. Where there is order there is virtue; that order is something that is living, not a routine, a habit. Secondly: is there something to be learnt? Is there something to be learnt from another? One can learn from another, history, biology, mathematics, physics; the whole complex knowledge of the technological world one can learn from another, from books. Is there something to be learned from psychology about our lives, about that which is eternal? - if there is something eternal. Or is it that there is nothing to learn from another because all the human experience, all the psychological knowledge that humanity has gathered together for millions of years, is within oneself. If that is so, if one's consciousness is that of the whole of mankind then it seems rather absurd, rather naive, to try to learn from somebody else about oneself. It requires complete clarity of observation to learn about ourselves. That is simple. So there is no psychological authority and no spiritual authority, because the whole history of mankind, which is the story of humanity, is in oneself. Therefore there is nothing to exPerience. There is nothing to be learnt from somebody who says: `I know' or, `I will show you the path to truth' - from the priests throughout the world, the interpreters between the highest and the lowest. To learn about, to understand, oneself, all authority must be set aside. Obviously. authority is part of oneself, one is the priest, the disciple, the teacher, one is the experience and one is the ultimate - if one knows how to understand. There is nothing to be learnt from anybody, including the speaker; especially one must not be influenced by the speaker. One has to be free to enquire very, very deeply, not superficially. One may have done all the superficial enquiry during the last five or fifty years, and have come to the point when one has established order, more or less, in one's life, and as one goes along one may establish greater order, so that one can ask: what is the religious mind which can understand what meditation is? Within the last fifteen years, that word meditation has become very popular in the West. Before that, only very few, who had been to Asia, enquired into the Eastern forms of meditation. The Asiatics have said that only through meditation can you come to, or understand, that which is the timeless, which has no measure. But during recent years, those who have nothing to do but call themselves gurus, have come over to the West bringing that word. It has become a word that has made meditation seem like a drug. There are also the various systems of meditation - the Tibetan, the Hindu, the Japanese Zen, and so on. These systems have been invented by thought and thought being limited the systems must inevitably be limited. And also they become mechanical, for if you repeat, repeat, your mind naturally goes dull, rather stupid and utterly gullible. It is common sense all this, but there is such eagerness to experience something spiritual, either through drugs, through alcohol, or by following a system of meditation which it is hoped will give some kind of exciting experience; there is such boredom with the daily life of going to the office for the next forty years and at the end of it to die. There is such boredom with the established religions that when somebody comes along with some fantastic notions people fall for them. This is happening; this is not exaggeration, this is not attacking anybody personally but a statement of the nonsense that is going on. So, if one is sufficiently aware of all this one will have put it aside, for it is utterly meaningless; one does not have to go to India, or Tibet, or to Rome, if one uses common sense and has a critical mind that is questioning what others say and also questioning oneself. It is important to question anything that one considers to be correct, noble, or a real experience and it is essential to maintain a mind that is capable, rational, sane, free from all the illusions and any form of self-hypnosis. Then what is a human being? The human being has lived on thought; all the architecture, all the music, the things that are inside the churches, the temples and mosques, they are all invented by thought. All our relationships are based on thought, though we say, `I love you', it is still based on the image which thought has created about another. Thought, to the human being, is astonishingly important; and thought itself is limited; its action is to bring about fragmentation - the fragmentation between people - my religion, my country, my god, my belief as opposed to yours, all that is the movement of thought, space and time. Meditation is the capacity of the brain which is no longer functioning partially - the brain which has freed itself from its conditioning and is therefore functioning as a whole. The meditation of such a brain is different from the mere contemplation of one conditioned as a Christian or a Hindu, whose contemplation is from a background, from a conditioned mind. Contemplation does not free one from conditioning. Meditation demands a great deal of enquiry and becomes extraordinarily serious in order not to function partially. By partially is meant to function in a particular specialization or particular occupation that makes the brain narrow in accepting beliefs, traditions, dogmas and rituals, all of which are invented by thought. The Christians use the word `faith' - faith in god, in providence so that things will come out all right. The Asiatics have their own forms of faith - karma, reincarnation and spiritual evolution. Meditation is different from contemplation in the sense that meditation demands that the brain acts wholly and is no longer conditioned to act partially. That is the requirement for meditation, otherwise it has no meaning. So the question is: is it possible to live in this world, which demands certain forms of specialization, a skilful mechanic, mathematician, or housewife, yet to be free from specialization? Suppose I am a theoretical physicist and have spent most of my life in mathematical formulation, thinking about it, questioning it, cultivating considerable knowledge about it, so that my brain has become specialized, narrowed down and then I begin to enquire into meditation. Then in my enquiry into meditation I can only partially understand the significance and the depth of it because I am anchored in something else, in the theoretical physics of my profession; anchored there I begin to enquire theoretically whether there is meditation whether there is the timeless; so my enquiry becomes partial again. But I have to live in this world; I am a professor at a university; I have a wife and children, I have that responsibility and perhaps I am also ill; yet I want to enquire very profoundly into the nature of truth, which is part of meditation. So the question is: is it possible to be specialized as a theoretical physicist and yet leave it at a certain level so that my brain (the brain which is the common brain of all humanity) can say: yes, it has that specialized function but that function is not going to interfere? If I am a carpenter, I know the quality of the wood, the grain, the beauty of the wood and the tools with which to work it. And I see that that is natural and I also see that the brain that has cultivated the speciality cannot possibly understand the wholeness of meditation. If as a carpenter I understand this, the truth of it, that I, as a carpenter have a place, but also that that specialization has no place in the wholeness of comprehension, in the wholeness of understanding meditation, then that specialization becomes a small affair. So then we begin to ask: what is meditation? First of all, meditation demands attention, which is to give your whole capacity, energy, in observation. Attention is different from concentration. Concentration is an effort made by thought to focus its capacity, its energy, on a particular subject. When you are in school you are trained to concentrate, that is to bring all your energy to a particular point. In concentration you are not allowing any other kind of thoughts to interfere; concentration implies the controlling of thought, not allowing it to wander away but keeping it focused on a particular subject. It is the operation of thought which focuses attention, focuses energy, on that subject. In that operation of thought there is compulsion, control. So in concentration there is the controller and the controlled. Thought is wandering off; thought says it should not wander off, and I bring it back as the controller who says, `I must concentrate on this.' So there is a controller and the controlled. Who is the controller? The controller is part of thought and the controller is the past. The controller says,-I have learnt a great deal and it is important for me, the controller, to control thought.' That is: thought has divided itself as the controller and the controlled; it is a trick that thought is playing upon itself. Now, in attention there is no controller, nor is there the controlled, there is only attention. So a careful examination is required into the nature of concentration with its controller and the controlled. All our life there is this controller - `I must do this, I must not do that, I must control my desires, control my anger, control my impetus.' We must be very clear in understanding what con- centration is and what attention is. In attention there is no controller. So, is there in daily existence, a way of living in which every form of psychological control ceases to exist? - because control means effort, it means division between the controller and the controlled; I am angry, I must control my anger; I smoke, I must not smoke and I must resist smoking. We are saying there is something totally different and this may be misunderstood and may be rejected altogether because it is very common to say that aIl life is control -if you do not control you will become permissive, nonsensical, without meaning, therefore you must control. Religions, philosophies, teachers, your family, your mother, they all encourage you to control. We have never asked: who is the controller? The controller is put together in the past, the past which is knowledge, which is thought. Thought has separated itself as the controller and the controlled. Concentration is the operation of that. Understanding that, we are asking a much more fundamental question, which is: can one live in this world, with a family and responsibilities, without a shadow of control? See the beauty of that question. Our brain has been trained for thousands of years to inhibit, to control, and now it is never operating with the wholeness of itself. See for yourself what it is doing; watch your own brain in operation, rationally, critically examining it in a way in which there is no deception or hypnosis. Most of the meditations that have been put forward from the Asiatic world involve control; control thought so that you have a mind that is at peace, that is quiet, that is not eternally chattering. Silence, quietness and the absolute stillness of the mind, the brain, are necessary in order to perceive and to achieve this these forms of meditation, however subtle, have control as their basis. Alternatively you hand yourself over to a guru, or to some ideal and you can forget yourself because you have given yourself over to something and therefore you are at Peace, but again it is the movement of thought, desire and the excitement of attaining something you have been offered. Attention is not the opposite of concentration. The opposite has its root in its own opposite. If love is the opposite of hate, then love is born out of hate. Attention is not the opposite of concentration, it is totally divorced from it. Does attention need effort? That is one of our principal activities; I must make an effort; I am lazy, I do not want to get up this morning, but I must get up, make an effort. I do not want to do something but I must. See how extraordinary it is that we cannot catch the significance of this immediately. It has to be explained, explained, explained. We seem to be incapable of direct perception of the difference between concentration and attention; unable to have an insight into attention and be attentive. When does attention take place? Obviously not through effort. When one makes an effort to be attentive, it is an indication that one is inattentive and is trying to make that inattention become attention. But to have quick insight, to see instantly the falseness of all religious organizations, so that one is out of them. To see instantly that the observer is the observed and therefore one makes no effort, it is so. Effort exists when there is division. Does it not indicate that one's brain has become dull because one has been trained, trained, so it has lost its pristine quickness, its capacity to see directly without all the explanations and words, words, words. But unfortunately one has to go into this because one's mind, one's brain, cannot, for example grasp instantly, that truth has no path; it is unable to see the immensity of that statement, the beauty of it and put aside all paths so that one's brain becomes extraordinarily active. One of the difficulties is that one has become mechanical. If one's brain is not extraordinarily alive and active it will gradually wither away. Now one's brain has to think, it has to be active, if only partially, but when the computer can take over all the work and most of the thought, operating with a rapidity which the brain cannot, then the brain is going to wither. This is happening, it is not an exaggerated statement of the speaker, it is happening now and we are unaware of it. In concentration there is always a centre from which one is acting. When one concentrates one is concentrating for some benefit, for some deep rooted motive; one is observing from a centre. Whereas in attention there is no centre at all. When one looks at something immense - like the mountains with their extraordinary majesty, the line against the blue sky and the beauty of the valley - the beauty of it for a moment drives out the centre; one is for a second stunned by the greatness of it. Beauty is that perception when the centre is not. A child, given a toy, is so absorbed by it that he is no longer mischievous, he is completely with the toy. But he breaks the toy and he is back to himself. Most of us are absorbed by our various toys; when the toys go, we are back to ourselves. In the understanding of ourselves without the toy, without any direction, without any motive, is the freedom from specialization which makes the whole of the brain active. The whole of the brain when it is active is total attention. One is always looking or feeling with part of the senses. One hears some music, but one never really listens. One is never aware of anything with all one's senses. When one looks at a mountain, because of its majesty, one's senses are fully in operation, therefore one forgets oneself. When one looks at the movement of the sea or the sky with the slip of a moon, when one is aware totally, with all one's senses, that is complete attention in which there is no centre. Which means that attention is the total silence of the brain, there is no longer chattering, it is completely still - an absolute silence of the mind and the brain. There are various forms of silence - the silence between two noises, the silence between two notes, the silence between thoughts, the silence when you go into a forest -where there is the great danger of a dangerous animal, everything becomes totally silent. This silence is not put together by thought, nor does it arise through fear. When one is really frightened one's nerves and brain become still - but meditation is not that quality of silence, it is entirely different. Its silence is the operation of the whole of the brain with all the senses active. It is freedom which brings about the total silence of the mind. It is only such a mind, such a mind-brain, that is absolutely quiet - not quietness brought about by effort, by determination, by desire, by motive. This quietness is the freedom of order, which is virtue, which is righteousness in behaviour. In that silence alone is there that which is nameless and timeless. That is meditation. THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 8 1ST PUBLIC TALK AMSTERDAM 19TH SEPTEMBER 1981 Most unfortunately there are only two talks and so it is necessary to condense what we have to say about the whole of existence. We are not doing any kind of propaganda; we are not persuading you to think in one particular direction, nor convince you about anything - we must be quite sure of that. We are not bringing something exotic from the East like the nonsense that goes on in the name of the gurus and those people who write strange things after visiting India - we do not belong to that crowd at all. And we would like to point out that during these two talks we are thinking together, not merely listening to some ideas and either agreeing or disagreeing with them; we are not creating arguments, opinions, judgements, but together - I mean together, you and the speaker -we are going to observe what the world has become, not only in the West but also in the East where there is great poverty, great misery, with enormous overpopulation, where the politicians, as here in the West, are incapable of dealing with what is happening. All politicians are thinking in terms of tribalism. Tribalism has become glorified nationalism. We cannot therefore rely on any politicians, on any leaders, or on any books that have been written about religion. We cannot possibly rely on any of these people, nor on the scientists, the biologists, or the psychologists. They have not been able to solve our human problems. I am quite sure you agree to all that. Nor can we rely on any of the gurus who unfortunately come to the West and exploit people and get very rich, they have nothing whatsoever to do with religion. Having said all this it is important that we, you and the speaker, think together. We mean by thinking together not merely accepting any kind of opinion or evaluation but observing together, not only externally what is hapPening in the world, but also what is happening to all of us inwardly, psychologically. Externally, outwardly, there is great uncertainty, confusion, wars, or the threat of war. There are wars going on now in some parts of the world; human beings are killing each other. That is not happening in the West, here, but there is the threat of nuclear war, and the preparation for war. And we ordinary human beings do not seem to be able to do anything about all that. There are demonstrations, terrorism, hunger strikes and so on. There is one tribal group against another and the scientists are contributing to that, and the philosophers, though they may talk against it, are inwardly continuing to think in terms of nationalism, according to their own particular careers. So that is what is actually going on in the outward world, which any intelligent human being can observe. And inwardly, in our own minds and in our own hearts, we ourselves are also very confused. There is no security, not only, perhaps, for ourselves but for the future generation. Religions have divided human beings as the Christians, the Hindus, the Muslims, and the Buddhists. So considering all this, observing objectively, calmly without any prejudice, it is naturally important that together we think about it all. Think together, not having opinions opposing other sets of opinions, not having one conclusion against another conclusion, one ideal against another ideal, but rather thinking together and seeing what we human beings can do. The crisis is not in the economic world, nor in the political world; the crisis is in consciousness. I think very few of us realize this. The crisis is in our mind and in our heart; that is, the crisis is in our consciousness. Our consciousness is our whole existence. With our beliefs, with our conclusions, with our nationalism, with all the fears that we have, it is our pleasures, the apparently insoluble problems and the thing that we call love, compassion; it includes the problem of death - wondering if there is anything hereafter, anything beyond time, beyond thought and if there is something eternal: that is the content of our consciousness. That is the content of the consciousness of every human being, in whatever part of the world he lives. The content of our consciousness is the common ground of all humanity. I think this must be made very clear right from the beginning. A human being living in any part of the world suffers, not only physically but also inwardly. He is uncertain, fearful, confused, anxious without any sense of deep security. So our consciousness is common to all mankind. Please do listen to this. You may be hearing this for the first time so please do not discard it. Jet us investigate it together, let us think about it together, not when you get home but now: your consciousness, what you think, what you feel, your reactions, your anxiety, your loneliness, your sorrow, your pain, your search for something that is not merely physical but goes beyond all thought, is the same as that of a person living in India or Russia or America. They all go through the same problems as you do, the same problems of relationship with each other, man, woman. So we are all standing on the same ground of consciousness. Our consciousness is common to all of us and therefore we are not individuals. Please do consider this. We have been trained, educated, religiously as well as scholastically, to think that we are individuals, separate souls, striving for ourselves, but that is an illusion because our consciousness is common to all mankind. So we are mankind. We are not separate individuals fighting for ourselves. This is logical, this is rational, sane. We are not separate entities with separate psychological content, struggling for ourselves, but we are, each one of us, actually the rest of human kind. Perhaps you will accept the logic of this intellectually, but if you feel it profoundly then your whole activity undergoes a radical change. That is the first issue we have to think about together: that our consciousness, the way we think, the way we live, some perhaps more comfortably, more affluently, with greater facility to travel than others, is inwardly, psychologically, exactly similar to that of those who live thousands and thousands of miles away. All is relationship, our very existence is to be related. Observe what we have done with our relationships with each other, whether intimate or not. In all relationship there is tremendous conflict, struggle - why? Why have human beings, who have lived for over a million years, not solved this problem of relationship? So let us this morning think together about it. Let us observe together actually what the relationship between a man and a woman is. All society is based on relationship. There is no society if there is no relationship, society then becomes an abstraction. One observes that there is conflict between man and woman. The man has his own ideals, his own pursuits, his own ambitions, he is always seeking success, to be somebody in the world. And the woman is also struggling, also wanting to be somebody, wanting to fulfil, to become. Each is pursuing his or her own direction. So it is like two railway lines running parallel, never meeting, except perhaps in bed, but otherwise - if you observe closely - never actually meeting psychologically, inwardly. Why? That is the question. When we ask why, we are always asking for the cause; we think in terms of causation, hoping that if we could understand the cause then perhaps we would change the effect. So we are asking a very simple but very complex question: why is it that we human beings have not been able to solve this problem of relationship though we have lived on this earth for millions of years? Is it because each one has his own particular image put together by thought, and that our relationship is based on two images, the image that the man creates about her and the image the woman creates about him? So in this relationship we are as two images living together. That is a fact. If you observe yourself very closely, if one may point out, you have created an image about her and she has created a picture, a verbal structure, about you, the man. So relationship is between these two images. These images have been put together by thought. And thought is not love. All the memories of this relationship with each other, the pictures, the conclusions about each other, are, if one observes closely without any prejudice, the product of thought; they are the result of various remembrances, experiences, irritations and loneliness, and so our relationship with each other is not love but the image that thought has put together. So if we are to understand the actuality of relationships we have to understand the whole movement of thought, because we live by thought; all our actions are based on thought, alI the great buildings, the cathedrals, churches, temples and mosques of the world are the result of thought. And everything inside these religious buildings - the figures, the symbols, the images - are all the invention of thought. There is no refuting that. Thought has created not only the most marvellous buildings and the contents of those buildings, but it has also created the instruments of war, the bomb in all its various forms. Thought has also produced the surgeon and his marvellous instruments, so delicate in surgery. And thought has also produced the carpenter, his study of wood and the tools he uses. The contents of a church, the skill of a surgeon, the expertise of the engineer who builds a beautiful bridge, are all the result of thought - there is no refuting that. So one has to examine what thought is and why human beings live on thought and why thought has brought about such chaos in the world - war and lack of relationship with each other - and examine the great capacity of thought with its extraordinary energy. We must also see how thought has, through millions of years, brought such sorrow for mankind. Please observe this together, let us examine it together. Do not just oppose what the speaker is saying, but examine what he is saying together so that we understand what is actually happening to all of us human beings, for we are destroying ourselves. Thought is the response of the memory of things past; it also projects itself as hope into the future. Memory is knowledge; knowledge is memory of experience. That is, there is experience, from experience there is knowledge as memory, and from memory you act. From that action you learn, which is further knowledge. So we live in this cycle - experience, memory, knowledge, thought and thence action - always living within the field of knowledge. What we are talking about is very serious. It is not something for the weekend, for a casual listening, it is concerned with a radical change of human consciousness. So we have to think about all this, look together, and ask why we human beings, who have lived on this earth for so many millions of years, are still as we are. We may have advanced technologically, have better communication, better transportation, hygiene and so on, but inwardly we are the same, more or less - unhappy, uncertain, lonely, carrying the burden of sorrow endlessly. And any serious man confronted with this challenge must respond; he cannot take it casually, turn his back on it. That is why these meetings are very, very serious because that is why we have to apply our minds and our hearts to finding out if it is possible to bring about a radical mutation in our consciousness and therefore in our action and behaviour. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, and there is nothing sacred whatsoever about thought. Thinking is materialistic, it is a process of matter. And we have relied on thinking to solve all our problems in politics and religions and in our relationships. Our brains, our minds, are conditioned, educated to solve problems. Thinking has created problems and then our brains, our minds, are trained to solve them with more thinking. All problems are created, psychologically and inwardly, by thought. Follow what is happening. Thought creates the problem, psychologically; the mind is trained to solve problems with further thinking, so thought in creating the problem then tries to solve it. So it is caught in a continuous process, a routine. Problems are becoming more and more complex, more and more insoluble, so we must find out if it is at all possible to approach life in a different way, not through thought because thought does not solve our problems; on the contrary thought has brought about greater complexity. We must find out - if it is possible or not - whether there is a different dimension, a different approach, to life altogether. And that is why it is important to understand the nature of our thinking. Our thinking is based on remembrance of things past - which is thinking about what happened a week ago, thinking about it modified in the present, and projected into the future. This is actually the movement of our life. So knowledge has become all-important for us but knowledge is never complete. Therefore knowledge always lives within the shadow of ignorance. That is a fact. It is not the speaker's invention or conclusion, but it is so. Love is not remembrance. Love is not knowledge. Love is not desire or pleasure. Remembrance, knowledge, desire and pleasure are based on thought. Our relationship with each other, however near, if looked at closely, is based on remembrance, which is thought. So that relationship - though you may say you love your wife or your husband or your girl friend - is actually based on remembrance, which is thought. And in that there is no love. Do you actually see that fact? Or do you say,-What a terrible thing to say. I do love my wife? - but is that so? Can there be love when there is jealousy, possessiveness, attachment, when each one is pursuing his own particular direction of ambition, greed and envy, like two parallel lines never meeting? Is that love? I hope we are thinking together, observing together, as two friends walking along a road and seeing what is around us, not only what is very close and immediately perceived, but what is in the distance. We are taking the journey together, perhaps affectionately, hand in hand - two friends amicably examining the complex problem of life, neither of them leader or guru, because when one sees actually that our consciousness is the consciousness of the rest of mankind, then one realizes that one is both the guru and the disciple, the teacher as well as the pupil, because all that is in one,s consciousness. That is a tremendous realization. So as one begins to understand oneself deeply one becomes a light to oneself and not dependent on anybody, on any book or on any authority -including that of the speaker - so that one is capable of understanding this whole problem of living and of being a light to oneself. Love has no problems and to understand the nature of love and compassion with its own intelligence, we must understand together what desire is. Desire has extraordinary vitality, extraordinary persuasion, drive, achievement; the whole process of becoming, success, is based on desire - desire which makes us compare ourselves with each other, imitate, conform. It is very important in understanding the nature of ourselves co understand what desire is, not to suppress it, not to run away from it, not to transcend it, but to understand it, to see the whole momentum of it. We can do that together, which does not mean that you are learning from the speaker. The speaker has nothing to teach you. Please realize this. The speaker is merely acting as a mirror in which you can see yourself. Then when you see yourself clearly you can discard the mirror, it has no more importance, you can break it up. To understand desire requires attention, seriousness. it is a very complex problem co understand why human beings have lived on this extraordinary energy of desire as on the energy of thought. What is the relationship between thought and desire? What is the relationship between desire and will? We live a great deal by will. So what is the movement, the source, the origin, of desire? If one observes oneself one sees the origin of desire; it begins with sensory responses; then thought creates the image and at that moment desire begins. One sees something in the window, a robe, a shirt, a car, whatever it is - one sees it, sensation, then one touches it, and then thought says, `If I put on that shirt or dress how nice it will look' - that creates the image and then begins desire. So the relationship between desire and thought is very close. If there were no thought there would only be sensation. Desire is the quintessence of will. Thought dominates sensation and creates the urge, the desire, the will, to possess. When in relationship thought operates - which is remembrance, which is the image created about each other by thought - there can be no love. Desire, sexual or other forms of desire, prevent love - because desire is part of thought. We should consider in our examination the nature of fear because we are all caught in this terrible thing called fear. We do not seem to be able to resolve it. We live with it, become accustomed to it, or escape from it through amusement, through worship, through various forms of entertainment, religious and otherwise. Fear is common to all of us, whether we live in this tidy, clean country, or in India where it is untidy, dirty and overpopulated. It is the same problem, fear, which man has lived with for thousands and thousands of years and which he has not been able to resolve. Is it possible - one is asking this question most seriously - is it at all possible to be totally, completely, free of fear, not only the physical forms of fear but the much more subtle forms of inward fear - conscious fears and the deep undiscovered fears which we have never even known were there? Examination of these fears does not mean analysis. It is the fashion co turn to the analyst if you have any problem. But the analyst is like you and me, only he has a certain technique. Analysis implies there is an analyser. Is the analyser different from that which he analyses? Or is the analyser the analysed? The analyser is the analysed. That is an obvious fact. If I am analysing myself, who is the analyser in me who says, `I must analyse'? It is still the analyser separating himself from the analysed and then examining that which is to be analysed. So the analyser is that which he is analysing. They are the same. To separate them is a trick played by thought. But when we observe, there is no analysis; there is merely the observing of things as they are - the observing of that which actually is, not analysing that which is, because in the process of analysing we can deceive ourselves. If you like to play that game you can, and go on endlessly until you die, analysing, and never bringing about a radical transformation within yourself. Whereas to look at the present as it is - not as a Dutchman, an Englishman, or a Frenchman or as this or that - to see what is actually happening, is pure observation of things as they are. To observe what fear is, is not to examine the cause of fear, which implies analysis and going further and further back into the origin of fear. It is to learn the art of observing and not translating or interpreting what you observe, but just observing, as you would observe a lovely flower. The moment you take it to pieces the flower is not. That is what analysis does. But observe the beauty of a flower, or the evening light in a cloud, or a tree by itself in a forest, just observe. So similarly, we can observe fear and what is the root of fear - not the various aspects of fear. We are asking if it is at all possible to be free of fear, absolutely. Psychologically, inwardly, what is the root of fear? What does fear mean? Does not fear arise from something that has given you pain in the past which might happen again in the future? Not what might happen now because now there is no fear. You can see for yourself that fear is a time process. Something that happened last week, an incident which brought psychological or physical pain, and from that there is fear that it might happen again tomorrow. Fear is a movement in time; a movement from the past through the present, modifying the future. So the origin of fear is thought. And thought is time, it is the accumulation of knowledge through experience, the response of memory as thought, then action. So thought and time are one; thought and time are the root of fear. That is fairly obvious. It is so. Now it is not a question of stopping thought or time. Of course it would be impossible to stop them because the entity who says, `I must stop thought' is part of thought. So the idea of stopping thought is absurd. It implies a controller who is trying to control thought and such a controller is created by thought. Please just observe this; OBSERVATION IS AN ACTION IN ITSELF, it is not that one must do something about fear. I wonder if you understand this? Suppose I am afraid about something or other, darkness, my wife running away, loneliness, or this or that. I am frightened, deeply. You come along and explain to me the whole movement of fear, the origin of fear, which is time. I had pain; I went through some accident or incident that caused pain, that is recorded in the brain, and the memory of that past incident produces the thought that it might happen again, and therefore there is fear. So you have explained this to me. And I have listened very carefully to your explanation, I see the logic of it, the sanity of it, I do not reject it; I listen. And that means that listening becomes an art. I do not reject what you are saying, nor accept, but I observe. And I observe that what you tell me about time and thought, is actual. I do not say, `I must stop time and thought', but having had it explained to me, I just observe how fear arises, that it is a movement of thought, time. I just observe this movement and do not move away from it, I do not escape from it but live with it, look at it, put my energy into looking. Then I see that fear begins to dissolve because I have done nothing about it, I have just observed, I have given my whole attention to it. That very attention is like bringing light on fear. Attention means giving all your energy in that observation. Why is it that man pursues pleasure? Please ask yourself why. Is pleasure the opposite of pain? We have all had pain of different kinds, both physical and psychological. Psychologically, most of us from childhood have been wounded, hurt; that is pain. The consequence of that pain has been to withdraw, to isolate oneself so as not to be further hurt. From childhood, through school, by comparing ourselves with somebody else who is more clever, we have hurt ourselves, and others have hurt us through various forms of scolding, saying something brutal, terrorizing us. And there is this deep hurt with all its consequences, which are isolation, resistance, more and more withdrawal. And the opposite of that we think is pleasure. Pain and the opposite of it is pleasure. Is goodness the opposite of that which is not good? If goodness is the opposite, then that goodness contains its own opposite. Therefore it is not good. Goodness is something totally separate from that which is not goodness. So is pleasure something opposite to pain? Is it a contrast? We are always pursuing the contrast, the opposite. So one is asking, is pleasure entirely separate, like goodness, from that which is not pleasurable? Or is pleasure tainted by pain? When you look closely at pleasure it is always remembrance, is it not? You never say when you are happy, `How happy I am', it is always after; it is the remembrance of that which gave you pleasure, like a beautiful sunset, the glory of an evening, full of that extraordinary light, it gave great delight. Then that is remembered and pleasure is born. So pleasure is part of thought too - it is so obvious. The understanding of relationship, fear, pleasure and sorrow, is to bring order in our house. Without order you cannot possibly meditate. Now the speaker puts meditation at the end of the talk because there is no possibility of right meditation if you have not put your house, your psychological house, in order. If the psychological house is in disorder, if what you are is in disorder, what is the point of meditating? It is just an escape. It leads to all kinds of illusions. You may sit cross-legged or stand on your head for the rest of your life but that is not meditation. Meditation must begin with bringing about complete order in your house - order in your relationships, order in your desires, pleasures and so on. One of the causes of disorder in our life is sorrow. This is a common factor, a common condition, in all human beings. Everyone goes through this tragedy of sorrow, whether in the Asiatic world or in the Western world. Again this is a common thing we all share. There is not only so-called personal sorrow but there is the sorrow of mankind, the sorrow which wars have brought about - five thousand years of historical records and every year there has been a war, killing, violence, terror, brutality, the maiming of people, people who have no hands, no eyes - the horrors and the brutality of wars which have brought incalculable misery to mankind. It is not only one,s own sorrow but the sorrow of mankind; the sorrow of seeing a man who has nothing whatsoever, just a piece of cloth, and for the rest of his life he is going to be that way - not so much in these Western countries, but in the Asiatic world it is like that. And when you see that person there is sorrow. There is also sorrow when people are caught an illusion, like going from one guru to another, escaping from themselves. It is a sorrow to observe this, the clever people going off to the East, writing books about it, finding some guru - so many fall for that nonsense. There is the sorrow that comes when you see what the politicians are doing in the world - thinking in terms of tribalism. There is personal sorrow and the vast cloud of the sorrow of mankind. Sorrow is not something romantic, sentimental, illogical; it is there. We have lived with this sorrow from time measureless, and apparently we have not resolved this problem. When we suffer we seek consolation, which is an escape from the fact of sorrow. When there is that grief, you try every form of amusement and escape, but it always is there. Apparently humanity has not resolved it. And we are asking the question: is it possible to be free of it completely? Not avoiding it, not seeking consolation, not escaping into some fanciful theory, but is it possible to live with it. Understand those words `to live with it: they mean not to let sorrow become a habit. Most people live with sorrow, with nationalism, which is most destructive, they live with their own separate religious conclusions, they live with their own fanciful ideas and ideals, which all again bring conflict. So live with something, live with sorrow, not accepting it, not becoming habituated to it - but look at it, observe it without any escape, without any question of trying to go beyond it, just `hold it in your hand' and look. Sorrow is also part of the tremendous sense of loneliness: you may have many friends, you may be married, you may have all kinds of things, but inwardly there is this feeling of complete loneliness. And that is part of sorrow. Observe that loneliness without any direction, without trying to go beyond it, without trying to find a substitute for it; live with it, not worship it, not become psychotic about it, but give all your attention to that loneliness, to that grief, to that sorrow. It is a great thing to understand suffering because where there is freedom from sorrow there is compassion. One is not compassionate as long as one is anchored to any belief, to any particular form of religious symbol. Compassion is freedom from sorrow. Where there is compassion there is love. With that compassion goes intelligence - not the intelligence of thought with its cunning, with its adjustments, with its capacity to put up with anything. Compassion means the ending of sorrow and only then is there intelligence. THE NETWORK OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 9 2ND PUBLIC TALK AMSTERDAM 20TH SEPTEMBER 1981 We are like two friends sitting in the park on a lovely day talking about life, talking about our problems, investigating the very nature of our existence, and asking ourselves seriously why life has become such a great problem, why, though intellectually we are very sophisticated, yet our daily life is such a grind, without any meaning, except survival - which again is rather doubtful. Why has life, everyday existence, become such a torture? We may go to church, follow some leader, political or religious, but the daily life is always a turmoil, though there are certain periods which are occasionally joyful, happy, there is always a cloud of darkness about our life. And these two friends, as we are, you and the speaker, are talking over together in a friendly manner, Perhaps with affection, with care, with concern, whether it is at all possible to live our daily life without a single problem. Although we are highly educated, have certain careers and specializations yet we have these unresolved struggles, the pain and suffering, and sometimes joy and a feeling of not being totally selfish. So let us go into this question of why we human beings live as we do, going to the office from nine until five or six for fifty years, and always the brain, the mind, constantly occupied. There is never a quietness, there is never peace, but always this occupation with something or other. And that is our life. That is our daily, monotonous, rather lonely, insufficient life. And we try to escape from it through religion, through various forms of entertainment. At the end of the day we are still where we have been for thousands and thousands of years. We seem to have changed very little, psychologically, inwardly. Our problems increase, and always there is the fear of old age, disease, some accident that will put us out. So this is our existence, from childhood until we die, either voluntarily or involuntarily die. We do not seem to have been able to solve that problem, the problem of dying. Especially as one grows older one remembers all the things that have been the times of pleasure, the times of pain, and of sorrow, and of tears. Yet always there is this unknown thing called death of which most of us are frightened. And as two friends sitting in the park on a bench, not in this hall with all this light, which is rather ugly, but sitting in the dappling light, the sun coming through the leaves, the ducks on the canal and the beauty of the earth, let us talk this over together. Let us talk it over together as two friends who have had a long serious life with all its trouble, the troubles of sex, loneliness, despair, depression, anxiety, uncertainty, a sense of meaninglessness - and at the end of it always death. In talking about it, we approach it intellectually - that is, we rationalize it, say it is inevitable, not to fear it or escape from it through some form of belief in the hereafter, or reincarnation, or, if you are highly intellectual, telling yourself that death is the end of all things, of our existence, our experiences, our memories, be they tender, delightful, plentiful; the end also of pain and suffering. What does it all mean, this life which is really, if we examine it very closely, rather meaningless? We can, intellectually, verbally, construct a meaning to life but the way we actually live has very little meaning. Living and dying is all we know. Everything apart from that is theory, speculation; meaningless pursuit of a belief in which we find some kind of security and hope. We have ideals projected by thoughts and we struggle to achieve them. This is our life, even when we are very young, full of vitality and fun, with the feeling that we can do almost anything; but with youth, middle and old age supervening, there is always this question of death. You are not merely, if one may point out, listening to a series of words, to some ideas, but rather together, I mean together, investigating this whole problem of living and dying. And either you do it with your heart, with your whole mind, or else partially, superficially - and so with very little meaning. First of all we should observe that our brains never act fully, completely; we use only a very small part of our brain. That part is the activity of thought. Being in itself a part, thought is incomplete. The brain functions within a very narrow area, depending on our senses, which again are limited, partial; the whole of the senses are never free, awakened. I do not know if you have experimented with watching something with all your senses, watching the sea, the birds and the moonlight at night on a green lawn, to see if you have watched partially or with all your senses fully awakened. The two states are entirely different. When you watch something partially you are establishing more the separative, egotistically centred attitude to living. But when you watch that moonlight on the water making a silvery path with all your senses, that is with your mind, with your heart, with your nerves, giving all your attention to that observation, then you will see for yourself that there is no centre from which you are observing. Our ego, our personality, our whole structure as an individual, is entirely put together from memory; we are memory. Please, this is subject to investigation, do not accept it. Observe it, listen. The speaker is saying that the `you', the ego, the `me', is altogether memory. There is no spot or space in which there is clarity - you can believe, hope, have faith, that there is something in you which is uncontaminated, which is god, which is the spark of that which is timeless, you can believe all that, but that belief is merely illusory. All beliefs are. But the fact is that our whole existence is entirely memory, remembrances. There is no spot or space inwardly which is not memory. You can investigate this; if you are enquiring seriously into yourself you will see that the `me', the ego, is all memory, remembrances. And that is our life. We function, live, from memory. And for us, death is the ending of that memory. Am I speaking to myself or are we all together in this? The speaker is used to talking in the open, under trees, or in a vast tent without these glaring lights, then we can have an intimate communication with each other. As a matter of fact there is only you and I talking together, not this enormous audience in a vast hall, but you and I sitting on the banks of a river, on a bench, talking over this thing together. And one is saying to the other, we are nothing but memory, and it is to that memory that we are attached - my house, my property, my experience, my relationship, the office or the factory I go to, the skill I like being able to use during a certain period of time - I am all that. To all that, thought is attached. That is what we call living. And this attachment creates all manner of problems; when we are attached there is fear of losing; we are attached because we are lonely with a deep abiding loneliness which is suffocating, isolating, depressing. And the more we are attached to another, which is again memory, for the other is a memory, the more problems there are. I am attached to the name, to the form; my existence is attachment to those memories which I have gathered during my life. Where there is attachment I observe that there is corruption. When I am attached to a belief, hoping that in that attachment there will be a certain security, both psychologically as well as physically, that attachment prevents further examination. I am frightened to examine when I am greatly attached to something, to a person, to an idea, to an experience. So corruption exists where there is attachment. One`s whole life is a movement within the field of the known This is obvious. Death means the ending of the known it means the ending of the physical organism, the ending of aU the memory which I am, for I am nothing but memory - memory being the known. And I am frightened to let all that go, which means death. I think that is fairly clear, at least verbally. Intellectually you can accept that logically, sanely; it is a fact. The Asiatic world believes in reincarnation, that is that the soul, the ego, the `me', which is a bundle of memories, will be born next time to a better life if they behave rightly now, conduct themselves righteously, live a life without violence, without greed and so on, then in the next reincarnation they will have a better life, a better position. But a belief in reincarnation is just a belief because those who have this strong belief do not live a righteous life today. It is just an idea that the next life will be marvellous. They say that the quality of the next life must correspond to the quality of the present life. But the present life is so tortuous, so demanding, so complex, that they forget the belief, and struggle, deceive, become hypocrites, and accept every form of vulgarity. That is one response to death, believing in the next life. But what is it that is going to reincarnate? What is it that will continue? What is it that has continuity in our present daily life? It is the remembrance of yesterday's experiences, pleasures, fears, anxieties, and that continues right through life unless we break it and move away from that current. Now the question is: is it possible, while one is living, with all the energy, capacity and turmoil, to end, for example, attachment? Because that is what is going to happen when you die. You may be attached to your wife or husband, to your property. You may be attached to some belief in god which is merely a projection, or an invention, of thought, but you are attached to it because it gives a certain feeling of security however illusory it is. Death means the ending of that attachment. Now while living, can you end voluntarily, easily, without any effort, that form of attachment? Which means dying to something you have known - you follow? Can you do this? Because that is dying together with living, not separated by fifty years or so, waiting for some disease to finish you off. It is living with all your vitality, energy, intellectual capacity and with great feeling, and at the same time for certain conclusions, certain idiosyncrasies, exPeriences, attachments, hurts to end, to die. That is, while living, also live with death. Then death is not something far away, death is not something that is at the end of one`s life, brought about through some accident, disease or old age, but rather an ending to all the things of memory - that is death, a death not separate from living. Also we should consider as two friends sitting together on the banks of a river, with the clear water flowing - not muddied, polluted water - seeing the movement of the waves pursuing each other down the river, why religion has played such a great part in people's lives from the most ancient of times until today? What is a religious mind, what is it like? What does the word `religion' actually mean? Because historically civilizations have disappeared, and new beliefs have taken their place, which have brought about new civilizations and new cultures - not the technological world of the computers, the submarines, the war materials, nor the businessmen, nor the economists, but religious people throughout the world have brought about a tremendous change. So one must enquire together into what we mean by `religion'. What is its significance? Is it mere superstition, illogical and meaningless? Or is there something far greater, something infinitely beautiful? To find that, is it not necessary - we are talking this over together as two friends - is it not necessary to be free of all the things which thought has invented about religion? Man has always sought something beyond the physical existence. He has always searched, asked, suffered, tortured himself, to find out if there is something which is not of time, which is not of thought, which is not belief or faith. To find that out one must be absolutely free, for if you are anchored to a particular form of belief, that very belief will prevent investigation into what is eternal - if there is such a thing as eternity which is beyond all time, beyond all measure. So one must be free - if one is serious in the enquiry into what religion is - one must be free of all the things that thought has invented about that which is considered religious. That is, all the things that Hinduism, for example, has invented, with its superstitions, with its beliefs, with its images, and its ancient literature such as the Upanishads - one must he completely free of all that. If one is attached to all that then it is impossible, naturally, to discover that which is original. You understand the problem? If my mind, my brain is conditioned by Hindu superstitions, beliefs, dogmas and idolatry, with all the ancient tradition, then it is anchored to that and cannot move, it is not free. Similarly, one must be free totally from all the inventions of thought, the rituals, dogmas, beliefs, symbols, saviours and so on of Christianity. That may be rather more difficult, that is coming nearer home. But all religions, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, are the movement of thought continued through time, through literature, through symbols, through things made by the hand or by the mind - and all that is considered religious in the modern world. To the speaker that is not religious. To the speaker it is a form of illusion, comforting, satisfying, romantic, sentimental but not actual. Religion must affect the way we live, the significance of life, for then only is there order in our life. Order is something that is totally disassociated from disorder. We live in disorder - that is, in conflict, contradiction, saying one thing, doing another, chinking one way and acting in another way; that is contradiction. Where there is contradiction, which is division, there must be disorder. And a religious mind is completely without disorder. That is the foundation of a religious life - not all the nonsense that is going on with the gurus with their idiocies. It is a most extraordinary thing how many gurus have come to see the speaker, some of them because they think I attack them. They want to persuade me not to attack, they say what you are saying and what you are living is the absolute truth, but it is not for us because we must help those people who are not as fully advanced as you are. You see the game they play - you understand? So one wonders why some Western people go to India, follow these gurus, get initiated - whatever that may mean -put on different robes and think they are very religious. But strip them of their robes, stop chem and enquire into them, and they are just like you and me. So the idea of going somewhere to find enlightenment, of changing your name to some Sanskrit name, seems strangely absurd and romantic, without any reality - but thousands are doing it. Probably it is a form of amusement without much meaning. The speaker is not attacking. Please let us understand that: we are not attacking anything, we are just observing - observing the absurdity of the human mind, how easily we are caught; we are so gullible. A religious mind is a very factual mind; it deals with facts, with what is actually happening with the world outside and the world inside. The world outside is the expression of the world inside; there is no division between the outer and the inner. A religious life is a life of order, diligence, dealing with that which is actually within oneself, without any illusion, so that one leads an orderly, righteous life. When that is established, unshakeably, then we can begin co enquire into what meditation is. Perhaps that word did not exist in the Western world, in its present usage until about thirty years or so ago. The Eastern gurus have brought it over here. There is the Tibetan meditation, Zen meditation, the Hindu meditation, the particular meditation of a particular guru - the yoga meditation, sitting cross legged, breathing - you know all that. All that is called meditation. We are not denigrating the people who do all this. We are just pointing out how absurd meditation has become. The Christian world believes in contemplation, giving themselves over to the will of god, grace and so on. There is the same thing in the Asiatic world, only they use different words in Sanskrit, but it is the same thing - man seeking some kind of everlasting security, happiness, peace, and not finding it on earth, hoping that it exists somewhere or other -the desperate search for something imperishable - the search of man from time beyond measure. So we should enquire together, deeply, into what meditation is and whether there is anything sacred, holy - not the thing that thought has invented as being holy, that is not holy. What thought creates is not holy, is not sacred, because it is based on knowledge, and how can anything that thought invents, being incomplete, be sacred? But all over the world we worship that which thought has invented. There is no system, no practice but the clarity of perception of a mind that is free to observe, a mind which has no direction, no choice. Most systems of meditations have the problem of controlling thought. Most meditation, whether the Zen, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian, or that of the latest guru, tries to control thought; through control you centralize, you bring all your energy to a particular point. That is concentration, which means that there is a controller different from the controlled. The controller is thought, memory, and that which he is controlling is still thought - which is wandering off, so there is conflict. You are sitting quietly and thought goes off; you are like a schoolboy looking out of the window and the teacher says, `Don't look out of the window, concentrate on your book.' We have to learn the fact that the controller is the controlled. The controller, the thinker, the experiencer, are, we think, different from the controlled, from the movement of thought, from the experience. But if we observe closely, the thinker IS the thought. Thought has made the thinker separate from thought, who then says, `I must control.' So when you see that the controller is the controlled you totally remove conflict. Conflict exists only when there is the division. Where there is the division between the observer, the one who witnesses, the one who experiences and that which he observes and experiences, there must be conflict. Our life is in conflict because we live with this division. But this division is fallacious, it is not real, it has become our habit, our culture, to control. We never see that the controller is the controlled. So when one realizes that fact - not verbally, not idealistically, not as a Utopian state for which you have to struggle, actually in one's life that the controller is the controlled, the thinker is the thought - then the whole pattern of one's thinking undergoes a radical change and there is no conflict. That change is absolutely necessary if one is meditating because meditation demands a mind that is highly compassionate, and therefore highly intelligent, with an intelligence which is born out of love, not out of cunning thought. Meditation means the establishment of order in one's daily life, so that there is no contradiction; it means having rejected totally alI the systems of meditation so that one's mind is completely free, without direction; so that one's mind is completely silent. Is that possible? Because one is chattering endlessly; the moment one leaves this place one will start chattering. One's mind will continue everlastingly occupied, chattering, thinking, struggling, and so there is no space. Space is necessary to have silence, for a mind that is practising, struggling, to be silent is never silent. But when it sees that silence is absolutely necessary -not the silence projected by thought, not the silence between two notes, between two noises, between two wars, but the silence of order - then in that silence, truth, which has no path to it, exists. Truth that is timeless, sacred, incorruptible. That is meditation, that is a religious mind. SAANEN 1ST PUBLIC TALK 12TH JULY 1981 I see some of my old friends are here - I am glad to see you. I am sorry we are having bad weather - this is Switzerland! As we are going to have six or seven talks we should go into what I am going to say very carefully, in detail, covering the whole field of life. So please those who have heard the speaker before please be patient, please have some kind of tolerance, if one may repeat, repetition has certain value. And as we are going to discuss, or talk over together, the many problems of our lives, it is important that we hear each other carefully, affectionately, with a sense of comprehension, not only the verbal meaning but what lies behind the word. Prejudice has something in common with ideals, beliefs and faith. And as we are going to talk over together, observing the state of the world together, and what is happening in the outward world and also in the inward, psychological world of man, we must be able to think together. In thinking together our prejudices, our ideals and so on prevent the capacity and the energy required to think together, to observe together, to examine together, to discover for ourselves what lies behind all this confusion, misery, terror, destruction, tremendous violence; to understand all this, not only the mere outward facts that are taking place but also to understand the depth of all this, the significance of all this, we must be able together to observe - not you observing one way and the speaker another, but together observe the same thing. And that observation, that examination is prevented if we cling to our prejudices, to our particular experience, to our particular comprehension. So if we are to think together, and the thinking together becomes tremendously important because we have to face a world that is rapidly disintegrating, degenerating, where there is no sense of morality, nothing sacred in life, no one respects another. And to understand all this, not only superficially, casually, but we have to enter into the depths of it, into what lies behind all this, why after all these millions and millions of years of evolution, why man, you and the whole world whether it is East, or West, or North, or South, why man has become like this - violent, callous, destructive, facing wars, the atomic bomb and all the technological world is becoming more and more, evolving. And perhaps that technological improvement may be one of the factors why man has become like this. So please let us think together, not according to my way or your way, but the capacity to think. Thought is the common factor of all mankind. There is no Eastern thought, or Western thought, there is only the capacity to think, whether one is utterly poor or greatly sophisticated living in an affluent society, whether he is a surgeon, a carpenter, a labourer in the field, or a great poet, thought is the common factor of all of us. We don't seem to realize that. Thought is the common factor that binds us all. You may think differently, according to your capacity, to your energy, to your experience and knowledge; another thinks according to his experience, to his knowledge, to his conditioning. So we are all caught in this network of thought. This is a fact, indisputable and actual. And to understand all the chaos in the world - and as we have been programmed both biologically, physically, programmed mentally, intellectually, one must be aware of this being programmed, like a computer. The computer has been programmed by the experts who programme it according to what they want. The speaker has talked a great deal with the professionals, the computer builders, and they are advancing so rapidly that these computers which have been programmed will outstrip man in thought. These computers learn - please follow all this. If you want to find out more about it you can discuss, read about them. These computers can learn, gather experience, and from that experience learn, accumulate knowledge according to being programmed. So gradually they are going to outstrip all our thinking, more accurately, with greater speed and so then what is man? I hope you are understanding all this. The computer experts, some of them are so frightened when the computer can do almost anything the human being can do. Of course it cannot write, compose as Beethoven, or as Keats and so on but it will outstrip our thinking. So we human beings have been programmed to be Catholics, to be Protestants, to be Italians, to be British, Swiss and so on. For centuries we have been programmed - to believe, to have faith, to follow certain rituals, certain dogmas, we have been programmed to be nationalists, we have been programmed to have wars. So our brain has become as the computer and it is not so capable because its thought is limited, whereas the computer being also limited but being able to think much more rapidly than human beings, it will outstrip us. So these are facts, this is what actually is going on, especially in California, England and so on. Then what becomes of man? Then what is man? You understand my question? If the machines can do almost all that human beings can do, robots and the computer, what is the future society of man? When cars can be built by the robot and the computer, probably much better, then what is going to become of man as a social entity? These and many other problems are facing us. We cannot any more think as Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims and so on. We are facing a tremendous crisis; a crisis which the politicians can never solve because they are programmed to think in a particular way; nor can the scientists solve or understand the crisis; nor the business world, the world of money. So the crisis, the turning point is in our consciousness. Right? Please follow this step by step because we are going into it very carefully. The turning point, the perceptive decision, the challenge, whatever word you may like to use, is not in politics, in religion, in the scientific world, but one has to understand the consciousness of mankind, which has brought us to this point. One has to be very serious about this matter because we are really facing something very dangerous in the world, where the proliferation of the atomic bomb, where some lunatic will turn it on. We all must be aware of all this. So, unless one is very, very serious, not flippant, not casual but is concerned with the whole of humanity, and to understand this human behaviour, human thought that has brought us all to this point, we must be able very carefully, hesitantly, with great observation, understand together what is happening both out there and inwardly. The inward psychological activity always overcomes the outer, however much you may have regulations, sanctions, decisions outwardly, lay down certain rules, regulations, all these are shattered by our psychological desires, fears, anxieties, the longing for security, the fear of loneliness. Unless we understand all that, however much we may have outward semblance of order, that inward disorder always overcomes that which is outwardly conforming, disciplined, regularized. I hope we understand this clearly. One may have carefully constructed institutions, politically, religiously, economically, whatever the construction of these be, unless our inward consciousness is in total order that disorder will always overcome the outer. We have seen this historically, it is happening right now in front of our eyes. This ia a fact. (Noise of train.) There is our good old train! That train is as regular as we come here! It is quite amusing, isn't it? There is a great deal of humour in this but we won't go into that for the moment. So please be serious even for this hour, if you cannot be serious all the time at least give your being serious whilst you are here. As we said, the turning point is in our consciousness. Our consciousness is a very complicated affair. Volumes have been written about it both in the East and in the West. We are not aware of our own consciousness and to examine that complicated consciousness one has to be free to look, to be choicelessly aware of its movement. And that is what we are going to do together. When we use the word 'together', it is not that the speaker is directing you to look at it in a particular way, or to listen to all the movement, the inward movement of our consciousness. We are together looking at consciousness, which is not yours or mime, theirs or his. Consciousness is common to all mankind. All mankind whether they live in the Far East or the Near East, or in the far West, that consciousness, with all its content, is common to all mankind. When you go to India, or the Far East, there they suffer inwardly as well as outwardly, as here. They are anxious, uncertain, utterly despairingly lonely, as you are here. They have no security, they are jealous, greedy, envious, suffering. And in the West it is the same thing. So human consciousness is one whole, it is not your consciousness or mine. It is the consciousness of humanity. Please understand this. It is logical, sane, rational because wherever you go, in whatever climate you live, whether you are affluent or degradingly poor, whether you believe in god, or in christ or in some other entity, the belief, the faith is common to all mankind. The picture may vary, the image may be different, the symbol may be totally different from another but that is common to all mankind. This is not a mere verbal statement. If you take it as a verbal statement, as an idea, as a concept, then you will not see the depth of it, the deep significance involved in this. The significance is that your consciousness is the consciousness of all humanity because you suffer, you are anxious, you are lonely, insecure, confused, exactly like another who lives ten thousand miles away from you. The realization of it, the feeling of it, the feeling in your guts, if I may use that word, is totally different from mere verbal acceptance of that. When one realizes that you are the rest of mankind, you have a tremendous energy, you have broken through the narrow groove of individuality, the narrow circle of me and you, they and we. And we are going to examine together this very, very complex consciousness of man, not the European man, not the Asiatic man or the Middle East man, but this extraordinary movement that has been going on for millions of years as conscious movement in time. Please don't accept what the speaker is saying for then it will have no meaning, but if you begin to doubt, begin to question, be sceptical to enquire, not hold on to your own particular belief, faith, experience or the accumulated knowledge that you have been given, or that you have, and reduce it all to some kind of petty little 'me'. If one may point out very respectfully, you are not facing the tremendous issue that is facing man. So we are thinking together - I mean together - not you think one way, I think another, together as human beings confronted with this tremendous danger of existence of the whole of humanity. Because the atom bomb, the wars, whether in the Middle East or somewhere else, the terror that is spreading all over the world, the kidnapping, the killing, the brutality of it all, we as human beings are responsible for all this. So we have to examine very closely and carefully the state of consciousness. We understand the meaning of that word to be conscious, to be aware, to recognise, to see what our actual consciousness is. First thought and all the things that thought has made, put together, is part of our consciousness, the culture in which we live, the aesthetic values, the economic pressures, the national inheritance. If you are a surgeon, a carpenter, specialize in a particular profession, that group consciousness is part of your consciousness - right? You understand what we are saying? Are we making it difficult? We are not scholars, at least the speaker is not. We are dealing with human existence with all its complexities. If you live in a particular country with its particular tradition, with its religious culture and so on, that particular form has become part of your consciousness, the group consciousness - right? - the national consciousness, the particular professional consciousness. These again are facts. If you are a carpenter you have to have certain skills, understand the wood, the nature of the wood, the instrument, so you gradually belong to a group that has cultivated this special particular form and that has its own consciousness; like the scientist, like the archeologist, like the animals have their own particular consciousness as a group and so on and so on, that is part of your consciousness. Right? Please see the fact of this for yourself. If you are a housewife you have your own particular consciousness, like all the other housewives, it is a group consciousness. Permissiveness has spread throughout the world; it began in the West, far West and has spread right through the world. That is a group conscious movement - right? See the significance of it. Please understand, go into it for yourself, see what is involved in it. They are discovering scientifically, they are experimenting with certain animals, say in England and say in Australia, and those animals learn much quicker there because one set of animals, like rats, have learnt after twenty generations certain actions, and the twenty fifth or twenty eighth learn much more rapidly. And in Australia these rats have learnt much quicker without going through all the experiments - you understand all this? So it is not a genetic transformation, genetically evolving, but there is the group consciousness that is operating - you understand this? I hope you understand this. The Catholic consciousness: one group believes in something, that begins to activate, live, spread - you understand? So our consciousness is not only a group, national, economic consciousness, a professional consciousness, but also much deeper consciousness which is our fears. Man has lived with fear for generation after generation, with pleasure, with envy, with all the travail of loneliness, with depression, confusion. Watch it in yourself as we are talking. And with great sorrow, with what he calls love and the everlasting fear of death. This is his consciousness, not only the professional, the group, the national, but all the rest of it, which is common to all mankind. Do you realize what it means, that you are no longer - please don't resist this, look at it - you are no longer an individual. This is very hard to accept because we have been programmed like the computer to think we are individuals. We have been programmed religiously to think that we have souls separate from all the others. And being programmed our brain works in the same pattern century after century. So if one understands the nature of our consciousness, the particular endeavour, the 'me' that suffers, that has become something global, then a totally different activity will take place. That is the crisis we are in. We have been programmed by the computer. Like a computer, being programmed, we can learn, occasionally have an insight and being programmed our brain repeats itself over and over and over again - right? Just see the actual fact of that: that I am a Christian, I am a Buddhist, I am a Hindu, I am against Communism, Democrat - you follow? - repeat, repeat, repeat. And in this state of repetition there is an occasional break through. So how shall a human being who is actually the rest of mankind, how shall he face this crisis, this turning point? How will you as a human being, who has evolved through millenia upon millenia, thinking as an individual, which is, actually, if you observe, you are not an individual, it is an illusion - you know, like any neurotic person it is very difficult for him to give up certain belief deeply rooted in him. So are we prepared as human beings to face a turning point, see what actually is and that very perception is the decision to move totally in another direction. So first let us understand together what it means to look: to look at our mind, at our brain, at the actuality of thought. You all think, that is why you are here. You all think and thought expresses itself in words and those words are means to communicate, either through a gesture, through a look, through some bodily movement, to express what you are thinking briefly, or through the usage of words, the words being common to each one of us, we understand through those words the significance of what is being said. And thought being common to all mankind - it is a most extraordinary thing if you discover that. Then you say it is not your thought, it is thought. And so we have to observe, or rather learn about how to see things actually as they are, not being programmed to look. Do you see the difference? Can we be free of being programmed and look? If you look as a Christian, as a Democrat, as a Communist, as a Socialist, as a Catholic, as a Protestant - which are all so many prejudices - then we shall not be able to understand the enormity of the danger, the crisis, that we are facing. If you belong to a certain group, or follow a certain guru - and I hope none of you do, forgive me if I say that - or committed to a certain form of action, then you will be incapable because you have been programmed, you will then be incapable of looking at things actually as they are. So can we look together? Because the speaker doesn't belong to any organization, to any group, to any particular religion, no nationality, etc. etc. It is only then you can observe. If you have learnt a great deal, accumulated a great deal of knowledge from books, from experience and so on, your mind has already been filled, your brain is crowded with your experience, with your particular tendency and so on. All that is going to prevent you from looking. Can we be free of all that to look? To look at what is happening actually in the world. That is the criteria, the terror and all that, the terrible religious sectarian divisions. One guru opposed to another idiotic guru, the vanity behind all that, the power, the position, the wealth of these gurus, it is appalling. Now look at it. In the same way to be free to look at what we have been programmed. If you are an engineer you have spent years and years and years learning all the implications of being an engineer, that is part of your consciousness. If you have followed a certain guru, that is part of your consciousness. That is part of your being programmed as a Catholic and so on and so on and so on. Can you look at yourself, not as a separate human being but a human being that is actually the rest of mankind? To have such a feeling means that you have tremendous love for human beings. Then when you are able to see clearly without any distortion, then you begin to enquire into the nature of consciousness, not only professional and all the rest of it, the group, but also much deeper layers of consciousness. We have to enquire into the whole movement of thought because thought is responsible for all the content of consciousness, whether it is the deeper layers of consciousness or the superficial layers, all the content - the professional, the group, the particular religious programme, all that is the movement of thought - right? If you had no thought there would be no fear, no sense of pleasure, no time; thought is responsible. Right? Not only responsible for the beauty of a marvellous cathedral, but thought is also responsible for all the nonsense that is inside the cathedral. All the great paintings, the poems, the music, all that is the activity of thought: perceiving the sound, hearing the marvellous sound and transmitting it on paper. That is the movement of thought. The poet imagining, like Keats, and putting into words the marvellous Odes of Keats, and thought is responsible for all the gods in the world, all the saviours, all the gurus and all the obedience, following, the whole works is the result of thought, which may be turned into pleasure, gratification, escape from loneliness and all that. Thought is the common factor of all mankind. The poorest villager in India or in the Asiatic world, thinks, as the business man, the chief executive thinks, as the religious head thinks. That is a common everyday fact. That is the ground on which all human being stand. You cannot escape from that. And we have to find out whether thought has brought about not only great things in the world like surgery, communication, satellites, you know what technologically it has done in the world, and also thought has been responsible for the division of man - the American, the Russian, the English, the French, the Swiss, the Muslim - you follow? - thought has been responsible for the division of man. Thought has been responsible for the division of all religions - right? Obviously. If there was no thought there would be no religions, as organized now, baptism, you know, all that stuff. So thought has done marvellous things to help man but also thought has brought about great destruction, terror in the world. So we have to understand the nature and the movement of thought. Why you think in a certain way. Why you cling to certain forms of thought. Why you hold on to certain experiences. Why thought has never understood the nature of death and so on and so on. When you are serious, and not relying on some philosopher, brain specialist and so on, you can watch it for yourself, which is: why thought, which has done extraordinary things to help man, and also why thought at the same time brings about such degradation, degeneration, destruction - right? We have to enquire: what is thought? Not why you think in a particular way, we will come to that later. But we are examining the very structure of thought, not your thought because it is fairly obvious what your thought is because you have been programmed, as an engineer, as a poet, as a scientist, as a housewife, as a scholar, as a religious man, a guru, you have been trained, trained, trained. And if you begin to look at your particular programmed brain, you are limiting your outlook - right? But if you enquire seriously into what is thinking then you enter into quite a different dimension. Not the dimension of your particular little problem, which we will come to a little later but first you must understand the tremendous movement of thought, the nature of thinking, not as a philosopher, not as a religious man, not as a particular profession, or a housewife or this or that, but the enormous vitality of thinking - right? Is this clear? Shouldn't we stop here? It is half past eleven. Can you tolerate more? Because probably you are merely listening to the speaker, you are not actually working. You are not actually listening, watching, examining, exploring into yourself. Because we are again programmed to listen to somebody. Please there is no teacher and the taught. There is no prophet and the disciple. There is no guru and his follower, the one who knows and the one who does not know; but only a human being in travail. It is only the man who has stepped out of all this knows what is truth. We will come to that much later. So since it is half past eleven shall we go on with it? Let's continue the day after tomorrow with this: thought is responsible for all the cruelty, the wars, the war machines and the brutality of war, the killing, the terror, the throwing bombs, taking hostages in the name of a cause, or without a cause. Thought is also responsible for the cathedrals, the beauty of their structure, the lovely poems, it is also responsible for all that. Thought is also responsible for all the technological development, the computer with its extraordinary capacity to learn and go beyond man: thought. So we have to enquire into thought. What is thinking? Thinking is a response, a reaction to memory - right? If you had no memory you wouldn't be able to think. Memory is stored in the brain as knowledge, as knowledge which has come through experience. Listen carefully to this. This is how our brain operates. The speaker is not a brain expert - thank God! - nor a neurological expert but you can watch it, how you act for yourself without going to any professor, without any psychologist and so on, you can watch the operation of your own brain. First experience, that experience may have been from the beginning of man, which we have inherited, that experience gives knowledge, then that knowledge is stored up in the brain, from knowledge there is memory and from that memory thought. From thinking you act - right? So from that action you learn more. So you repeat the cycle. Experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action, from that action learn more and repeat. You follow this? Right? So this is being programmed - right? We are always doing this: having remembered pain, in the future to avoid pain, and not do the thing that will cause pain, which becomes knowledge, repeat that. Sexual pleasure, repeat that. This is the movement of thought. Please this is clear, see the beauty of it, how mechanically thought operates. And thought says to itself, "I am free to operate". Thought is never free because it is based on knowledge and knowledge is always limited, obviously. Right? Watch it please, carefully watch it. Knowledge must be always limited because knowledge is part of time - right? I will learn more and to learn more I must have time. I do not know Russian but I will learn Russian. It may take me six months or a year or whatever time. So knowledge is the movement of time. Right? So time, knowledge and thought and action, in this cycle we live. So thought is limited, obviously, so whatever action that thought does must be limited, and any form of limitation of thought must create conflict - right? Anything that is limited must be divisive - right? Come on Sirs! That is, if I say I am a Hindu, I am Indian, that is limited and that limitation brings about not only corruption but conflict because you say "I am a Christian", "I am a Buddhist". I am this -which is limitation, so there is conflict between us. You understand? Yes? Thought is always limited because knowledge and ignorance always go together - right? - and thought is the child of knowledge and therefore it is limited, and whatever its action is, that action must be limited and therefore it must bring conflict. And our life from birth to death is a series of struggles and conflict and we are always trying to escape from that conflict, which again becomes another conflict. So we live and die in this perpetual endless conflict. And we never ask the root of that conflict, which is thought, because thought is limited. Please don't say, "How am I to stop thought?" - that is not the point. The point is to understand the nature of thought, to look at it. I think that is enough. May I get up now? SAANEN 2ND PUBLIC TALK 14TH JULY 1981 Shall we continue where we left off yesterday - or the day before, sorry? We were saying, weren't we, that human consciousness is similar in all human beings. Our consciousness, whether we live in the East or West, is made up of many layers of fears, anxieties, pleasures, sorrow, beliefs, every form of faith and perhaps in the content of that consciousness there is also love, compassion, and from that compassion a totally different kind of intelligence. And always there is this fear of ending, which is death. And also human beings throughout the world from time immemorial have sought, have tried to find out if there is something sacred beyond all thought, something that is incorruptible, timeless and so on. And also we were saying, there is not only group consciousness, like the business people with their consciousness, the scientists with theirs, and the carpenter with his, and so on, all these layers or the content of consciousness are the product of thought. Thought has created extraordinary things technologically, from the extraordinary computers, to communication, to robots and so on, surgery, medicine - if you like that kind of medicine. And also thought has invented religions. Please don't be angry or impatient, or irritated when we point out certain things, when we say all the religious organizations throughout the world are put together, invented, brought together by thought. And thought has invented the computer. We must understand the complexity and the future of the computer. The computer is going to outstrip man in his thought; the computer is going to change the structure of society, the structure of government, the structure of society. This is not some fantastic conclusion of the speaker, or some fantasy, this is actually going on now, of which we are not aware. The computer can learn, invent and has a mechanical intelligence. The computer is going to make employment of human beings practically unnecessary. Perhaps human beings may have to work a couple of hours a day. Please these are all facts that are coming. You may not like it, you may revolt against it but it is coming. And thought has invented it, and human thought is limited, but the mechanical intelligence of the computer is going to outstrip man. So what is a human being then? You are following all this? These are facts, not some specialized conclusion of the speaker. As we pointed out the day before yesterday, we have talked to several computer experts and all the rest of it. It is going to revolutionize totally our lives. And when you consider what its capacity is, then we have to ask ourselves: what is a human being to do? It is going to take over all the activities of the brain, most of it. And what happens to the brain then? You understand? Please follow this a little bit. They are concerned about a human being whose occupation is taken over by the computer, by the robot and so on, then what becomes of the human? We have been programmed biologically, intellectually, emotionally, psychologically through a million years, and we repeat over and over again the same pattern. As we pointed out the other day, we have stopped learning. We will go into that question of what is learning. Whether the human brain which has been programmed for so many, many centuries, whether it is capable of learning and immediately transforming itself into a totally different dimension. If we are not capable of that, the computer, which is much more capable, more rapid, more accurate, is going to take over the activities of the brain - right? See the importance of this please. This is not something casual, this is very, very serious, desperately serious. The computer can invent a new religion. It can be programmed by an expert Hindu scholar, by the Catholic, by the Protestant, by the Muslim, and it will turn out a marvellous structure for a new religion. And we, if we are not at all aware of what is happening, will follow that new programmed structure which has been put forward by the computer. See the seriousness of all this, please. So our consciousness has been programmed for thousands and thousands of years. And we have been conditioned, programmed, wired - if you like to put it that way - to think as individuals, to think as separate entities struggling, struggling, in conflict, from the moment you are born until you die. We are programmed to that. We have accepted that. We have never challenged, we have never asked if it is possible to live a life totally absolutely without conflict. We have never asked it and therefore we will never learn about it. We repeat. It is part of our existence to be in conflict, nature is in conflict - that is our argument - and progress is through conflict. That's what we have been programmed with for millions of years. And religious organizations throughout the world have maintained this individual salvation. And we are questioning very seriously whether there is an individual consciousness, whether you, as a human being, have a separate consciousness from the rest of mankind. You have to answer this, not just play with it. My consciousness and yours, if we have been brought up, programmed, conditioned to be individual, then my consciousness is all this activity of thought - fear is thought, we will go into that presently. Pursuit of pleasure is the movement of thought. And the suffering, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the deep regrets, wounds, the burden of centuries of sorrow, is part of thought. Thought is responsible for all this. What we call love has become sensual pleasure, something to be desired, and so on. So as we ended up last time we met here, we went somewhat briefly into the whole movement and the nature of thought. Please as we said, and we will repeat it over and over again until we are quite sure of it, that we are thinking together and the speaker is not telling you what to think. He is not doing propaganda, it is a horrible thing, propaganda. He is not telling you how to act, what to think, what to believe, and so on, but together we are investigating the catastrophe that is taking place in the world outside of us, the utter ruthlessness, violence, thought and all the rest of it, and also inwardly in each human being the extraordinary conflict that is going on. Together we are examining, taking the journey together, perhaps hand in hand. So it is not, if one may point out, that you are merely listening to some ideas, to some conclusions: we are not talking about conclusions, beliefs, ideas. We are together looking at this world that human beings have produced, for which all of us are responsible. So first we must be clear in our understanding, at whatever level that understanding be, whether it is intellectual understanding, which is merely verbal, or the understanding of the deep significance and that understanding acts. We have come to a point where we have to make a decision -not by the exercise of will, but the decision that naturally will take place when we begin to understand the whole nature and the structure of the world outside of us and inside. That perception will bring about a decision, action. Right? So first let us examine together what thought is. Though the speaker has repeated several times what thought is but each time when we talk about it you discover something new. Unless you do it together, not merely listen to what the speaker is saying, if you are doing it together then you will, for yourself, discover the truth and the significance and the limitation of thought. Thought has created the problems which surround us. And our brains are trained, educated, conditioned to solving problems. Please understand this. Thought has created the problems, like division between nationalities, thought has created the division and therefore the conflict between various economic structures, thought has created, invented various religions and divided them and therefore there is conflict. And the brain is trained to solve these conflicts which thought has created. I wonder if you see all this. Can we go on? Do we understand this problem together? And unless we deeply understand the nature of our thinking, the nature of our reactions, which is part of our thinking; and thought dominates our lives, whatever we do, whatever action takes place, thought is behind that action. Every activity whether it is sensual activity, or intellectual activity or merely biological, physical activity, thought is operating all the time. Biologically through centuries it has been programmed, conditioned - the body acts in its own way, breathes, but the brain which has evolved through millenia upon millenia, that has been programmed to a certain pattern, which is obvious. If you are a Catholic, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or whatever it is, you repeat it over and over and over again. And, as we asked the other day, what is thought? Why has thought become so extraordinarily important in our lives? Is there an action which is not born of thought? We have to enquire into all this, it is not just ask these questions and wait for somebody else to answer. Nobody is going to answer them. And if you put the question to yourself and are serious in the question, you will break the pattern. I will show you as we go along. The speaker will go into it. Thought is the movement of time. I will go very carefully into it. Please let us go together into it. Thought is the movement of time and space. Which is: thought is memory, the remembrance of past things. Thought is the activity of knowledge, knowledge which has been gathered together through millions and millions of years and stored as memory in the brain. Please the speaker is not an expert on the brain. But if you observe your own activity you will see that experience and knowledge is the basis of our life. And knowledge is never complete, it must always go together with ignorance. See the importance of this, please understand this. Knowledge we think is going to solve all our problems, whether it is the knowledge of the priest, the guru, the scientist or the philosopher, or the latest psychiatrist. But we have never questioned whether knowledge in itself, not about something - you understand the difference? - whether knowledge in itself can solve any of our problems, except perhaps technological problems. So we must go into it. Knowledge comes through time. If one has to learn a language you need time. If you have to learn a skill you need to have time. If you want to drive a car efficiently, you have to learn about it. That requires time. You have the knowledge of how to drive, how to do something skilfully if you are a carpenter, or a surgeon, or to put together a computer you must have knowledge, which means time. That same movement, which is the movement of time, is brought over to the psychological field; there too we say, "I must have time to learn about myself". "I must, in order to change myself from 'what is ' to what should be', I must have time". The same activity as in the technological world, we have brought over that same movement into the psychological world. You are following all this? Which means that time is a great factor in our life - the tomorrow, the past and the present. So time is thought. Time is the acquisition of knowledge through experience both there in the world, and here inwardly, it requires time. That is what we have been programmed. You are following this? Are we understanding each other a little bit? So, being programmed that time is necessary to bring about a deep, fundamental change in human structure, we employ thought -right? Which is: I am this, I shall be that. As you would say in the technical world, "I do not know how to put together a computer but I will learn". So time, knowledge, memory, thought: they are a single unit, they are not separate activities, they are a single movement. And thought, being of time, must be limited - right? Thought, the outcome of knowledge, and knowledge being incomplete, thought must everlastingly be incomplete, therefore limited - right? And whatever is limited must bring about conflict. Nationality is limited. A religious belief is limited. An experience which you have had, or which you are longing for, is limited. Every experience - I don't want to go into that for the moment, it is too complicated - every experience must be limited. Questioner: Why? K: Because there are more experiences. I may have an experience sexually, the experience of the possession of wealth, the experience of giving up and going to a monastery - they are all limited. So knowledge is limited. And so thought is limited. Thought, being limited, creating problems, national divisions, economic divisions, religious divisions, racial divisions, which is happening in the world, and therefore bringing tremendous conflict, and having created the problem thought says, "I must solve it". And so it is always functioning in the resolution of problems - you understand? I wonder if you get this? See what we are doing. And the computer, which has been programmed, can outstrip all of us because it has no problems, it evolves, learns, moves. I won't go into that for the moment. So: our consciousness which we have been programmed as the individual consciousness - right? - we are questioning whether that consciousness which you have accepted as individual is actually individual at all. We are thinking together. Don't resist it. Don't say, "What will happen if I am not individual?". Something totally different may happen, but as long as we have been programmed through time endlessly that we are individual, our consciousness is individual, is that so? You may have a skilful individual training in a particular trade, in a particular profession, you may be a surgeon, a doctor, an engineer, and so on, that doesn't make you an individual. You may be tall, short, black, white, purple - whatever colour it is - but that doesn't make you an individual. You may have a different name, a different form - does that make individuality? Or the acceptance of the brain that has through time said, "I am an individual, it is my desire to fulfil, to become, to struggle" - so we are examining that so-called individual consciousness, which is yours, whether that individual consciousness is not the consciousness of the entire humanity, apart from the training as a doctor, as a surgeon - you know, all that. Is consciousness, your consciousness, which you have accepted as separate, is it so and what is the nature of your consciousness? Please, as we said, look at it, together. The consciousness that we think is separate from the rest of mankind, that consciousness is the sensory responses, part of it, sensory responses. And also those sensory responses are naturally, necessarily programmed: to defend oneself, to be hungry, to breathe unconsciously - you are doing this. So that biologically you are programmed. Then the content of your consciousness is the many hurts, the wounds that one has received from childhood until now, the many forms of guilt. I am beginning slowly, we are going to expand it. The various conclusions, ideas, imaginary certainties, the many experiences, both sensory, sexually and other forms of psychological experiences, and there is always the basis, the root of fear in its multiple forms. Please we are looking at it together, your own consciousness, which is you. Fear, and with it naturally goes hatred, where there is fear there must be violence, aggression, the tremendous urge to succeed, both in the physical world as well as in the psychological world; fear has many factors which we will go into when we are talking about fear. And the constant pursuit of pleasure - pleasure of possession, pleasure of domination, the pleasure of money which gives power, the pleasure of a philosopher with his immense knowledge, the guru with his circus. Pleasure again has innumerable forms. And then there is also sorrow, pain, anxiety, the deep sense of abiding, endless loneliness, and not only the so-called personal sorrow but also the enormous sorrow mankind has brought about through wars, through neglect, through this endless sense of conquering one group of people by another. And in that consciousness there is the racial group content, and ultimately there is death. This is our consciousness: belief, certainties, and uncertainties, great sense of anxiety, loneliness, sorrow and endless misery. This is the fact. And we say this consciousness is mine. Is that so? You go to the far East, or the Near East, India, America, Europe, anywhere you go where human beings are, they suffer, they are anxious, lonely, depressed, melancholic, struggling, conflict, the same, like you, similar to you. So is your consciousness different from another? I know it is very difficult for people - you may logically accept this, which is intellectually, verbally you say, "Yes, that is so, maybe", but to feel this total human sense that there is no humanity except you, you are the rest of mankind, that requires a great deal of sensitivity, it is not a problem to be solved - you understand? It isn't that I must accept that I am not an individual and how am I to feel this global human entity? Then you have made it into a problem, and the brain is ready to solve the problem! Do this. Don't do that. Go to a guru. You know, all the circus that goes on. But if you really look at it with your mind, with your heart, with your whole being, totally aware of this fact, then you have broken the programme. It is naturally broken. But if you say, "I will break it", you are again back into the same pattern. I wonder if you understand this? Shall I go over it again? Is it necessary for the speaker to repeat this? Please don't accept this because the speaker feels this. To him this is utter reality, not something verbally accepted because it is pleasant. But it is something that is actual. Then, if that is so, which is logically reasonably, sanely examined and see that it is so, but the brain which has been accustomed to this programme of the individuality is going to revolt against it - which you are doing now. Which is -listen - which is the brain is unwilling to learn - right? Whereas the computer is willing to learn because it has nothing to lose. Here we are frightened of losing something. And if you don't understand this we can go into it over and over again, but a serious person confronting the world situation, the world catastrophe, the terror, the atom bomb, the endless competition between nations, that is destroying human beings, that is destroying us, each one. And the decision comes when you perceive the truth that you are not an individual. So can the brain learn? That is the whole point. So we have to go into this question of what is learning. You understand? Learning for most of us is a process of acquiring knowledge - right? I do not know Russian but I will learn. I will learn day after day, learning, memorizing, holding on to certain phrases, words, the meanings, syntax, verbs, regular verbs and all the rest of it. I apply and can learn any language within a certain time. So to us learning is essentially the accumulation of knowledge, skill and so on. That is, our brains are conditioned to this pattern - right? Accumulate knowledge and act. Right? That is what we do. So, look, are we learning? When I learn a language, I am learning, there knowledge is necessary. But am I learning psychologically about the content of my mind, of my consciousness, and learning there implies examining each layer of it, accumulating knowledge about it and from that knowledge act. The same pattern as the other - you are following? And I am questioning, that is only a part of learning. If the brain is repeating this pattern, learning a language, learning about the content of my consciousness is similar because I need time, which means I am accumulating knowledge about myself, my consciousness. And then I determine what the problems are and the brain is ready to solve the problems because it has been trained to solve problems - right? So I am repeating this endless pattern and that is what I call learning - right? I go to a guru, if I am silly enough and he will tell me what to do, what not to do, be initiated -all that tommy rot that goes on! So what does it mean to learn? Is there a learning which is not this? You understand? We are enquiring. Please don't say there is no other way than this, or, "Tell us the other way", but together we are doing it. So you are not learning from me. The speaker has nothing to tell you. But together we are looking. This is the pattern the brain has been programmed to, always accumulating knowledge, and knowledge has become so astonishingly important. And we don't see that knowledge in itself is limited. Now we are going to find out if there is a different action of learning, which is not accumulation of knowledge. You understand the difference? Please somebody say yes or no! Let me put it differently: experience, from experience knowledge, from knowledge memory, memory, the response of memory is thought, then thought acts, from that action you learn more, so you repeat the cycle - right? This is the pattern of our life. And we are saying that form of learning will never solve our problems, because it is repetition - you understand? More knowledge, better action, but that action is limited and so on, keep repeating. That is clear. Right? And the activity of that knowledge will not solve our human problems at all. It is so obvious, we haven't solved them. After five million years we haven't solved our problems: we are cutting each other's throat, we are competing with each other, we hate each other - not here - we want to be a success, we want to have - you know, the whole pattern is being repeated from the time man began and we are still there. So this pattern has not solved the problems - right? Is that clear? Do what you will along this pattern and no human problem will be solved, either politically, religiously, economically because it is thought that is operating. Now, is there another form - we will use the word for the moment - of learning? Learn, not in the context of knowledge, but a different form of non-accumulative action - let's call it that way. Right? Non-accumulative perception-action. So we have to enquire whether it is possible to observe the content of our consciousness, to observe the world and my consciousness without a single prejudice - right? Is that possible? Don't say it is not possible, how am I to get rid of prejudice - just ask the question. See whether when you have a prejudice you can observe clearly - right? You cannot, obviously - right? If I have a certain conclusion, a certain set of beliefs, concepts, ideals, and I want to see clearly what the world is, all my conclusions, ideals, prejudices and so on will actually prevent it. It is not how to get rid of my prejudices but to see clearly, intelligently, that any form of prejudice, however noble or ugly, any form of prejudice will actually prevent perception. When you see that prejudice goes. What is important is not the prejudice but the demand to see clearly - right? I wonder if you are meeting me? If I want to be a good surgeon I can't become a good surgeon with all my ideals and prejudices about surgeons, I have to actually do it. So can you see that a new form of action, a new form of non-accumulative knowledge, is only possible and therefore breaks the pattern, breaks the programme so that you are acting totally differently. Have I put the question clearly? (Gosh, I am struggling so much to put it clearly. No, I am not struggling, sorry.) Is this clear? That is: the way we have lived over millions of years has been the repetition of the same process of acquiring knowledge and acting from that knowledge, which is limited. And that limitation creates problems and the brain has become accustomed to solving the problems which knowledge has created. So it is caught in that pattern. And any form of learning is to add more to it. And we are saying that pattern will never under any circumstances solve our human problems. It is so obvious, because we have not solved them up to now. There must be a different, a totally different, movement, which is: the non-accumulative perception-action. And to have the non-accumulative perception is to have no prejudice. It is to have absolutely no ideals, no concepts, no faith, because all those have destroyed man, they have not solved the problems. Do you understand? Are you doing it now? Otherwise there is no point in just listening to the nonsense. Unless you do it, it has no meaning. You grow old and die. You may attend these Conferences year after year, and it is nice to meet each other, but... So: have you a prejudice? Have you a prejudice which has something common with ideals? Of course. Right? Ideals are the future, to be accomplished, and ideals become tremendously important in the process of knowledge. So can you observe without accumulation the destructive nature of prejudice, ideals, faith, belief, and your own conclusions and experiences? Can you do this? Don't ask the speaker, "Have you done it?" Otherwise the speaker wouldn't be here. So please understand this. There is group consciousness, we went into it, I am not talking irrelevantly, I want to point out something. There is group consciousness, national consciousness, linguistic consciousness, and professional consciousness, racial consciousness, and fear, anxiety, loneliness, pursuit of pleasure, sorrow, love, death, all that is part of it - right? If you are keeping on acting in that circle, you maintain the human consciousness of the world - you understand? Just see the truth of this. Because you are part of that consciousness and if you sustain it by saying, "I am an individual. My prejudices are important. My ideals are essential" - you follow? "My guru is a better guru than the other guru" and so on and so on, you are repeating the same thing over and over again. Now the maintenance, the sustenance and the nourishment of that consciousness comes when you are repeating that pattern, you sustain it. But when you break away from that consciousness, you are introducing a totally new factor in the whole of that consciousness. You understand? Please understand this: they are experimenting, as the speaker pointed out the other day, with various forms of group consciousness. They haven't come to that. If one group has learnt something quickly, the animals that belong to that group learn much quicker because the consciousness of that group is enlivened by a new factor. You understand? Now if we understand the nature of our own consciousness, see how it is operating in this endless cycle of knowledge, action, division and so on, that consciousness has been sustained for millenia, millions of years, if when you see the truth that any form of prejudice, all this is a form of prejudice, and break away from it, you give a new factor into the old. You understand what I am saying? Which means are you, as a human being, who is the rest of mankind, of whose consciousness you are, and whether you can move away from the old pattern, the old pattern of obedience, acceptance, you know, all that, that is the real turning point in our life. Because man cannot go on repeating this pattern, it has lost its meaning, except in the biological and technical world. In the psychological world it has totally lost its meaning. If you fulfil, who cares? If you become a saint, what does it matter? You follow? Whereas if you totally move away from that you affect the whole of consciousness of mankind. Right, that's enough. SAANEN 3RD PUBLIC TALK 16TH JULY 1981 May we continue where we left off the day before yesterday? I would like, if I may, to repeat what we said a little bit. We are not trying to convince you of anything. That must be clearly understood. We are not trying to persuade you to accept a particular point of view, nor trying to impress you about anything. We are not doing any propaganda - that is dreadful, for and against, and so on. We are not talking about personalities, or who is right and who is wrong, but rather trying to think out together, which seems to be the most difficult thing to do: to observe together what the world is and what we are, what we have made of the world and what we have made of ourselves. We are trying together to examine both the inward and the outward man. And to observe clearly one must be free to look. If one clings to one's particular experience, opinion, judgement, prejudice, then it is not possible to think together. And the world crisis which is right in front of us demands, urges us to think together so that we can solve the human problem together, not according to any particular person, to a particular philosopher, to a particular guru, to any particular person. We are trying, looking, observing together. And this is important to bear in mind all the time, that the speaker is merely pointing out and we are together examining it. So it is not one sided but rather co-operating together and examining, taking a journey together and so act together. As we pointed out, our consciousness is not our consciousness, our individual consciousness. This is very important to understand because our consciousness is not only the specialized group, the national and so on, but also all the travail, the conflicts, the misery, the confusion, sorrow and so on. And we are examining together that consciousness, which is the human consciousness, which is our consciousness, not mine but ours. Now one of the factors that is demanded in this examination is that one has to have the capacity of intelligence. According to the dictionary meaning, intelligence means to discern, to understand, to distinguish. And also it means observing, gathering, putting it together all which we have gathered and act from that. That gathering, that discernment, that observation, can be prejudiced and then that intelligence is denied when there is prejudice. And that intelligence, if you follow another that intelligence is denied: following another, however noble, however this or that, denies your own perception, denies your own observation, you are merely following somebody who will tell you what to do, what to think and so on. And if you do that, that intelligence doesn't exist because in that intelligence there is no observation. Intelligence demands doubt, questioning, not being impressed by persons, by their enthusiasm, by their energy. Intelligence demands that there must be impersonal observation. And intelligence is not only the capacity to understand that which is rationally explained verbally but also it demands that we gather as much information as possible, knowing that information can never be complete about anybody, about anything, and therefore where there is that intelligence there is hesitation, rational impersonal thinking, observation and clarity of thinking. Intelligence also implies the comprehension of the whole; the whole of man, all his complexities, all his physical responses, his emotional reactions, his intellectual capacity, his affection, his travail, all that, to perceive all that at one glance and act, that is supreme intelligence. And intelligence has not so far been able to transcend conflict -right? And we are going this morning, together, to see if it is possible if the brain can be free from conflict, because we have lived with conflict from the time we are born until we die. The constant struggle to be, or to become, to become something, so-called spiritually, psychologically or in the world, which is, to become successful, to fulfil, that is the whole movement of becoming. I am this but I will be that. And the ultimate reaching, destination, direction, is towards the highest principle, whether that principle is called God, Brahmin, or any other name one gives to it. This constant struggle to become, or to be. Both are the same. When one is trying to become in various directions, then you are denying being. And when you try to be you are becoming also. See this movement of the mind, of thought: I am, I think I am, and being dissatisfied with what I am, discontented with what I am, I try to fulfil in something, or drive towards a particular direction, pleasurable, it may be painful but at the end pleasurable. So there is this constant struggle to be and to become. What is it that we are trying to become, all of us? Physically we want more money, better house, better position, more power, more money, a better status. Biologically, if one is not well, to become well. Psychologically, that is the whole inward process of thought, consciousness, the whole drive, inwardly, is from the perception or the recognition that one is nothing, actually, but to become, move away from that, through education, through university - if one is so-called lucky enough to go to any university - get a good career, job, that will give you position, money, etc. etc. Psychologically, inwardly, there is always the escape from 'what is', always running away from that which I am, with which I am dissatisfied to something which will satisfy me. Whether that satisfaction is deep contentment, happiness, a projection of thought as enlightenment, as acquiring greater knowledge, this is the process of becoming - I am, I shall be - right? That involves time. Now the brain is programmed to this. All our culture, all our religious sanctions, everything says become - right? You see this phenomenon all over the world. It is not only in this Western world but in the East and Far East, and West, everyone is trying to become, or be, or avoid, and so on. Is this the cause of conflict, inwardly and outwardly? Inwardly there is this imitation, conformity, competition with the ideal. And also outwardly there is this competition between so-called individuals of one group against another group, nation against nation and so on. So inwardly and outwardly there is this drive to be and become something. We are asking: is this the basic cause of our conflict? Or man is doomed forever as long as he lives on this marvellous earth, doomed to perpetual conflict? One can rationalize this conflict, say nature is in conflict, the tree struggling to reach the sun is in conflict, and that is part of our nature because through conflict, through competition, we have evolved, we have grown into this marvellous human being that we are. This is not being said sarcastically, this is what most of us do think. So our brain is programmed to conflict. And we have never been able to resolve this problem. You may neurotically escape into some phantasy and hold on to that phantasy and be totally content. Or imagine that you have inwardly achieved something and be totally content with that. And any questioning, any doubt, any scepticism that must be exercised by an intelligent mind, must question all this: why human beings after millions and millions of years, from the beginning of man, we have lived with conflict. There are in those caves where man is fighting evil in the form of a boar, or this or that. From the ancient times of the Sumerians, there has been conflict, the Egyptians and so on up to the present evolution of man he has lived in conflict. We have accepted it, we have tolerated it, we have said it is part of our nature to compete, to be aggressive, to imitate, to conform, is part of this everlasting pattern of conflict. Please we are observing together. I am not - the speaker is not verbally putting a map of conflict and you accept that map, but rather together we are observing the conflict in ourselves and outwardly - right? Since our brains have been programmed to this conflict, like a computer that is programmed, but the computer can learn, can discover its own fallacies, its own mistakes and correct them. A highest mathematician can inform or programme the computer with all his theories and so on, and the computer being so programmed discovers new theorems. This has been proved, not programmed by the professor, it has the capacity to learn, to discover, which is a mechanical, perhaps, intelligence. They are trying to bring about ultra intelligence machines which go far beyond our human brain. And our human brain has not solved this problem for ourselves but the machine has solved it. You follow all this? So why is man who is so highly sophisticated in one direction, so utterly unintelligent in other directions? Does conflict end through knowledge? Please put these questions to yourself. Knowledge about knowing oneself, or knowledge about the world, knowledge about matter. The world, the society, learning more about society, better organizations, better institutions and so on, will that solve our human conflict - acquiring more and more knowledge? Or the freedom from conflict has nothing whatsoever to do with knowledge? You are following all this? Please together we are thinking this out, not the speaker talking to himself, he can do that in his own room, if he wants to, but together we are working this out. We have knowledge, a great deal of knowledge about the world, matter, about the universe, and also a great deal of historical knowledge about ourselves. The whole of history is the story of mankind. And if we know how to read that book, which is me, myself, my consciousness, I may have tremendous knowledge about myself, and will that knowledge free the human being from conflict? You understand? Please go along with me. Or it has nothing to do with analysis, discovering the various causes and factors of conflict. We can go into that. Will the cause, or many causes, through analytical discovery, will that free the brain from conflict, conflict not only while we are awake during the daytime, but also this conflict carried on when we are asleep? You can examine the dreams, interpret dreams, go into the whole nature of why human beings dream at all, and will that solve conflict? Will the analytical mind, brain analysing very clearly, rationally, sanely the cause of conflict, there are many causes, many factors of conflict, will that analysis end conflict? Analysis being not only time but the analyser separating himself from the object, which is conflict, and then try to analyse that conflict, so separating himself from conflict - you follow? Will that solve it? Or it has nothing whatsoever to do with any of these processes. That is, analysis, discovering the cause, and trying to force ourselves to be free from that cause, or through various examinations acquiring a great deal of knowledge about ourselves, will that solve the problem of conflict? Or following somebody who says, "I will show you the way. I am free from conflict but I will show you the way" - will that help you? This has been the part of the priest, part of the guru, part of the so-called enlightened man - 'Follow me, I will show you. Or I will point out to you the goal'. And we have had all these through millenia upon millenia, history shows this and yet man has not been able to solve that one deep rooted conflict. Right? Let us together find out, not agree, not a verbal indication, not an intellectual verbal concept, let's find out together if there is a perception, an action that will end conflict, not gradually, end it immediately. You understand my question? Please first understand the question. What are the implications of that question? The brain being programmed, or wired, programmed to conflict. It is caught in that pattern. You can see it for yourself. And we are asking if that pattern can be broken immediately, not gradually. Either you think you break it through drugs, through alcohol, through sex, through different forms of discipline, through different forms of handing oneself over to something, man has tried a thousand different ways to escape from this terror of conflict - right? And we are asking: is it possible for a brain so conditioned to break that conditioning immediately? Right? This is maybe a theoretical, non-actual question. You may say it is impossible, it is just a theory, it is just a wish, a desire to be free of this. But if you examine the thing rationally, logically, which is part of our intelligence, time will not solve this conditioning - right? That is the first thing to realize, not tomorrow, there is no psychological tomorrow - I won't go into that for the moment - that implies time. If one sees actually, not verbally, deeply in one's heart, in one's mind, in the very, very depths of one's being time will not solve this problem. That means you have already broken the pattern, beginning to see the cracks in the pattern because we have accepted time - right? - as a means of unravelling, breaking up this programmed brain. So when you observe clearly that time, under no circumstances, will free the brain from time - I mean by time, as it is now conditioned, programmed, I will examine it, make efforts to break it, uncondition it, all that process involves time - right? So when you do that you are caught in the same pattern, you have not moved away from it - right? But once you clearly for yourself see absolutely, irrevocably, that time is not a factor then already you begin to see the cracks in the world, in the enclosure of the brain -right? Are you doing it now? Because philosophers and scientists have said time is a factor of growth, biologically, linguistically, technologically, time is necessary, but they never go - perhaps some may have, we don't know - never enquired into the nature of psychological time. And this enquiry into time implies the whole psychological becoming - right? I am this, but I will be that. I am unhappy, unfulfilled, desperately lonely but tomorrow will be different. So is our brain, which is common to all mankind, it is not your brain, you may have certain peculiarities, tendencies, but this brain of mine and yours has evolved through time, it is not my brain. Biologically it is so, it is not my brain. And that brain has been evolving through centuries to come to this point through conflict. Are we moving together? Do we see together the rationality of it, the logic of it, that our consciousness is not ours but human consciousness - which we went into very carefully the other day. And to realize that it is the human consciousness, you have already broken the pattern of individual consciousness. Right? So if one realizes that time is a factor of conflict then that very perception is action, decision has taken place, you don't have to decide, the very perception is the action and decision. Right? Please we have to work together, it is not just you listen and agree or disagree, we are working together. Now there are multiple forms of conflict, as there are a thousand opinions so there are a thousand ways of conflict. We are not talking about the many forms of conflict but conflict itself. Not my particular conflict - I don't get on with my wife, or with my businessman, or this or that - but the conflict of the human brain in its existence. Is there a perception - please just first listen, you may not agree or agree, but just listen first - is there a perception not born of memory, not born of knowledge, a perception that sees the whole nature of conflict, the whole nature, the nature and the structure of conflict, the perception of that whole, is there such perception at all? You understand my question? Not analytical perception, not intellectual observation of the conflict, various types of conflict, nor an emotional response to conflict, but we are asking: is there a perception not of remembrance, which is time, which is thought, is there a perception which is not of time or thought, which can see the whole nature of conflict, and that very perception is the ending of that conflict? That is my question. You understand the question? That is, thought is time - right? Do you see that? Thought. Thought is memory, knowledge, experience put together in the brain as memory. All that is the result of time. "I didn't know a week ago but I know" and so on, the multiplication of knowledge, the expanse of knowledge, the depth of knowledge is of time. So thought is time. Right? Obviously. Any movement, any psychological movement is time - right? It is not - don't agree with me, it is so. If I want to go from here to Montreux I must use time. If I want to learn a language, time. If I want to meet somebody at a distant place it requires time. That time can be shortened or lengthened. And the same process, the outer process is carried inwardly. "I am not, I will be" - and the expanse of that. So thought is time. Thought and time are indivisible. Can we go on? Do we see this fact? And we are asking a question: is there a perception which is not time and thought? That perception is entirely out of the pattern of the brain which has been accustomed to certain patterns, certain moulds, certain ways. Is there such a thing? And perhaps that alone is going to solve the problem. Because we have not solved the problem in a million years of conflict, we are continuing the same pattern. We must find intelligently, hesitantly, with care, if there is a perception which covers the whole of conflict and that very perception breaks the pattern. Right? Now how shall we meet this together? You understand? The speaker has put this question forward. He may be wrong, he may be silly, irrational, but after you have listened to him very carefully, if you have listened, it is our responsibility, yours as well as mine, as well as the speaker, to see if it is so, if it is possible -right? Not say, "Well it is not possible because I haven't done it. It is not within my sphere. I haven't thought enough about it. Or I don't want to think about that way at all because I am satisfied with my conflict because I am quite certain one day humanity will be free of conflict." That is all just an escape from the problem - right? Are we together in this now? Together being aware of all the complexities of conflict, aware, not denying it, it is there, it is there as actual as pain in the body, it is there, one is aware of it, aware without any choice, it is so. And at the same time asking the question whether there is a different approach to this altogether? You understand? Now can we observe - it doesn't matter what it is - without the word, without the naming, without the remembrance? You understand? Can you do it? To look at your friend, or your wife, or whatever it is, to observe the person, without the word 'my wife', 'my friend', we belong to the same little group, without any of that, to observe. Which is, not observing through remembrance. Can we do that? Have you ever directly tried it? Now as you are sitting there, can we do it together? That is, not only look at the person without naming, without time and remembrance, and also at ourselves - you understand? The image that we have built about ourselves, the image that we have built about the other, to look at that image as though you were looking at it for the first time, looking at a rose for the first time. Will you do that? That is, to learn to look. Learn to observe this quality without all the operation of thought. Don't say it is not possible. Sirs, it is like going to a professor not knowing his subject but you want to learn from him. I am not your professor. You want to learn from him. So you go to him and listen. You don't say, "I know something about it", or "You are wrong", or "You are right", or "I don't like your look". You listen, you find out. And as you begin to listen sensitively, with awareness, you begin to discover whether he is a phoney professor with a lot of words, or a professor that has really gone into the depths of himself. You understand? Now can we together so listen and observe, without the word, without remembrance, without all the movement of thought? Which means, complete attention - right? Attention not from a centre to attend, but attention which has no centre. Of course, if you have a centre from which you are attending, that is merely a form of concentration. But if there is no centre but you are attending, which means you are giving your complete attention, in that attention there is no time. Right? I wonder if you see this? Suppose I am listening to you. You are telling me a story. A story which is a story of myself, a story of mankind. You are telling me that story and I am listening to you because I don't know anything about it. But as I am listening not only to what you are saying verbally, to communicate what you think, but in that very sensitive attention to listening I am not only listening to the words but I have gone beyond the words, I am capturing the depth of the meaning of what you are saying. You understand? Are we doing this? Many of you, unfortunately or fortunately, have heard the speaker for many years. And you see this breaking the programme of the brain has not come about. And you repeat that statement year after year, it hasn't come about. Is it because - please listen - is it because you want to attain, become, have that state of brain in which the pattern has been broken - you follow? That is, you have listened, it has not come about, and you are hoping it will come about. Which is another form of becoming. Right? So you are still in conflict. And you brush me aside and say you won't come here any more because you haven't got what you want. "I want that but haven't got it". So the wanting is the becoming. I wonder if you see all this. The desire to be something is the beginning of conflict. And that desire is part of the programmed brain. And we are saying to break that pattern, observe without the movement of time, thought. It sounds very simple, but see the logic of it, the reason, the sanity of it, not because the speaker says so, it is sane. So one must exercise the capacity to be logical, rational and know its limitation, because rational thinking, rational observation is still part of thought, and knowing that thought is limited, be aware of that limitation and don't push it further because it will still be limited however far you go. Whereas if you say: "Can I observe a rose, a flower without the word, without the colour, just look at it?", that look brings about great sensitivity, breaks down this sense of heaviness of the brain, and gives extraordinary vitality because thought has its own energy through conflict, obviously. But there is a totally different kind of energy when there is pure perception, which is not related to thought, time. Right? I think that is enough for this morning, isn't it? SAANEN 4TH PUBLIC TALK 19TH JULY 1981 I hope you are all warm! The Ice Age is coming! The speaker has talked about meditation and the things involved in meditation at the end of the talks because he feels that unless we put the house in order meditation has very little value. Meditation is really quite important if one knows or understands the deep meaning of meditation. And he has purposely put it at the end of the talks because order in our lives must be established righteously before we can even think about meditation and that which is eternally sacred. And so we will talk this morning about order, and we have talked about it also during the last three talks. And order is necessary, order in our action, order in our relationship with each other, order in our daily, everyday activity. And to understand the very quality of order, which is totally different from discipline -discipline, the root of it, is to learn, not to conform, not to obey, not to imitate, but rather the order that comes through learning, learning about ourselves, not according to some philosopher, some psychologist, but to discover order for ourselves, which is free from all sense of compulsion, from all sense of determined effort, or order along a particular direction. And to discover that order which comes very naturally and therefore in that order there is righteousness, not according to some pattern, but order not only in the outward world which has become so utterly chaotic because in ourselves we are not clear, we are confused, uncertain. And so to learn about ourselves, and that learning is part of order. And to learn about oneself, not according to some psychologist however erudite, however verbal, but if you follow another you will not be able to understand yourself. And it is necessary to understand ourselves in order to have order. We live in disorder, both outwardly, politically, religiously, socially and also economically, except in the technological world we live in some kind of chaotic, meaningless existence. To find out what is order we must begin to understand, if we may point out, the nature of our relationship. We live, and our life is a movement in relationship; we cannot possibly live alone because however one may think one lives alone one is always related to something or other, either to the past, or some projected image in the future. So life is a movement in relationship. And in that relationship there is disorder. And we must together examine closely why we live in our relationship with each other, however intimately or superficially, why we live in such disorder in our daily life. As we have been pointing out during the past three talks, we are thinking together, the speaker is not pointing out anything, or trying to persuade you to think in a particular direction, or put any kind of persuasive subtle pressure on you. On the contrary, we are together thinking over our problems, human problems, thinking together and discovering what our relationship with each other is. Whether in that relationship there is order. Whether in that relationship we can bring about order. And so to understand the full meaning of relationship with each other, however close, however distant, we must begin to think, we must begin to understand why the brain creates images. I hope we are following each other. Why we have images about ourselves and images or pictures about others, why in us, each one has a peculiar image and identifies oneself with that image, why human beings throughout the world have created an image about themselves, whether that image is necessary, whether that image gives one a sense of security, whether that image does not bring about separative action, and in relationship, intimate or otherwise, why this image exists, for images separate human beings. Please, we are thinking together, I am not telling you how to think or what to think. The speaker is not pointing out but together we are investigating into this very complex problem of relationship. If we could look closely at our relationship with our wife, husband, friend, or whatever it is, and look at it very closely, not try to avoid it, not try to brush it aside but if we could together examine it and find out why human beings throughout the world have this capacity, this extraordinary machinery, that creates images, that creates symbols, patterns, and in those patterns, symbols, images, one finds great security. We have to examine that together. If you observe, and I hope you don't mind the speaker pointing this out to you, if you observe one has an image about oneself. Either one has an imagination of conceit, arrogance, or the contrary to that. Or one has accumulated a great deal of experience, acquired a great deal of knowledge which in itself creates the image. Why do we have images about ourselves? Please put that question to yourself and look at it. Whether those images do not separate people. If you have an image as a Swiss or a British, or French and so on, do not those images not only distort our observation of humanity but also do they not separate? And therefore wherever there is separation, division, there must be conflict; as there is conflict going on in the Middle East, the Arab against the Israelite, the Muslim against the Hindu, the Christian against all the rest of the world. This is going on. There is not only national division, economic division, which are all images, concepts, ideas, and the brain clings to these images - why? Is it because of our education? Is it because of our culture where the individual is the most important, where the collective society is something totally different from the individual. That is part of our culture, part of our religious training, part of our daily education. And when one has an image about oneself as being British, and so on, having that image gives one certain security. This is fairly obvious. That is, having created the image about oneself and that image becomes permanent, semi permanent, and behind that image or in that image one tries to find security, safety, a form of resistance. Right? And when one is related to another, however delicately, however subtly, however physically, biologically, there is a response both psychologically as well as sensory, based on this image. Again, that is a fact. If one observes, if you are married or living with somebody, in our daily life the image is formed, whether you are acquainted or live with a person for a week or ten years, the image is slowly formed step by step, every reaction is remembered, stored up in the brain so the image is formed about my wife and the wife about the husband - right? Are we following this? And the relationship may be physical, sexual, sensory but actually the relationship is between these two images - right? The speaker is not saying something extravagant, or exotic, or fantastic, but he is merely pointing out - or rather together we are learning that these images exist. And these images exist because we can never know another completely. If I am married or have a girl-friend, I can never know my wife completely, I think I know her because after having lived with that person I have accumulated various incidents, various irritations and all the rest of it which happen in daily life, and she has also gathered those reactions, and those reactions with their images are established in the brain -right? And those images play an extraordinarily important part in our life. Apparently very few of us are free of any form of image. The freedom from images is real freedom - right? Because then in that freedom there is no division brought about by images. If I am a Hindu, born in India - which the speaker is but he is not a Hindu -suppose the speaker is born in India with all the conditioning that goes on, the conditioning of the race, a particular group with their superstitions, with their religious beliefs, dogmas, rituals, the whole structure of society, he lives with that image, which is his conditioning. And however much he may talk about brotherhood, unity, wholeness - those are merely words, they have no actual daily meaning. But if he frees himself from all that imposition, all that conditioning, all that superstitious nonsense then he is breaking down the image. And also in his relationship, if he is married or lives with somebody, is it possible not to create an image at all? You understand? That is, not to record an incident which may be pleasurable or painful in that particular relationship, not to record either the insult or the flattery, the encouragement or discouragement - you follow? All that is taking place in our daily relationship, is that possible not to record at all? Are we meeting each other? Because if the brain is constantly recording everything that is happening to it psychologically, then it is never free to be quiet, it can never be tranquil, peaceful. If the machinery is operating all the time it wears itself out, which is obvious. And this is what happens in our relationship with each other, whether that relationship is as a politician, as a guru, as a disciple, whatever the relationship is, if there is constant recording of everything then the brain slowly begins to wither away and that is essentially old age -right? So we are asking together, I am not putting the question to you, but together we are investigating and we come upon this question: whether it is possible in our relationship with all its reactions and subtleties, with essential responses, whether there is a possibility of not remembering? That is: is it necessary to explain further? Suppose I am married and my wife bullies me, flatters me, encourages me and so on and so on and so on; it is our daily education that is responsible for this remembrance, remembrance of that irritation, remembrance of that encouragement, remembrance of that depression which she or the other person feels and lives in that depression, therefore it feels separated. You follow? This recording is going on all the time. And we are asking psychologically whether it is possible not to record, but only record that which is absolutely necessary? The brain records because it is necessary in one direction. That is, it must record all the things it may learn mathematically. If I am to be an engineer I must know, record all the mathematics, the pressures and so on and so on, I must record. If I am to be a physicist I must record all the previous physicists and what they have said. If I am to learn to drive a car I must record and so on. But we are asking whether it is necessary to psychologically, inwardly, record in our relationship at all? - Right? This remembrance of things past, is that love? When I say to my wife, "I love you", is that a remembrance of all the things we have been through together - remembrance, the incidents, the travail, the troubles, the struggles, which are all being recorded, stored in the brain and when I say I love my wife, is that remembrance actual love? Do you understand my question? So is it possible to be free and not to record at all? Please don't wait for an answer from the speaker whether it is possible or not, but let us together find out. That is, it is only possible not to record when there is complete attention. Right, I will show you. I don't know why we want explanations. Why our brains are not swift enough to capture, have an insight into the whole thing immediately. Why we cannot see this thing, the truth of all this, and let that truth operate and therefore cleanse the slate, to have a mind, a brain that is not recording at all psychologically. But as most human beings are rather sluggish, rather like to live in their old patterns, in their particular habit of thought, anything new they reject because it is much better to live with the known rather than with the unknown. In the known there is safety, at least we think there is safety, we think there is security in the known so we keep repeating, walking, struggling within that field of the known. And to discover together an observation without the whole process of the machinery of memory operating. Now you have put that question to me and we have put the question to you: is it possible in our relationship with each other, intimate or not, is it possible not to create an image about each other? Because that image, the remembrance of things past, which is the image, divides people. It is not only the image, but if I am ambitious, competing, trying to become chief executive, or psychologically something or other, and my wife is also doing something else equally in other directions, how can we have a relationship? You understand my question? This is actually what is going on in the modern world: the man and the woman, each is seeking his own particular career, their own ambitions, separate ambitions, greed, envy, success, identification, and perhaps they meet in a bed and they call that relationship. So observing all this in one's daily life, one inevitably asks: is there a relationship which is not actually based on this? Then one has to enquire very closely and deeply, what is love? Are you waiting for me to tell you? This is a very complex question, because all of us feel we love something or other, not only the abstract love, love of a nation, love of a people, love of god, love of gardening, love of overeating; we have abused that word so terribly. So we have to find out basically what is love. You see love is not an idea - right? Love of god is an idea, love of a symbol is still an idea. When you go to the church and kneel down and pray, you are really worshipping, or praying to something which thought has created - right? And so, see what happens, thought has created it, actually this ia a fact, and you worship that which thought has created, which means you are worshipping in a very subtle form yourself - right? I know this is probably a sacrilegious statement but it is a fact. That is what is happening throughout the world. Thought creates the flag, the symbol of a particular country, then you fight for it, you kill each other, will destroy the earth in competition with another nation, and so the flag becomes a symbol of our love. And similarly there is the religious love, the devotion to a symbol. Again see what thought does. You create the symbol, thought creates the symbol with all the attributes of that symbol, romantic, logical, sane, and having created it you love it, you become totally intolerant of any other thing. Again thought having created it, thought which is your own particular education, conditioning, and you worship that, which is you are worshipping yourself. That is how all the gurus exist in the world, all the priests, all the religious structure is based on that. See the tragedy of it. Because we have lived for millions and millions of years we are still extraordinarily destructive, violent, brutal, cynical human beings. And also when we say we love another, in that love there is desire, pleasure, projections of various activities of thought. So one has to look into and find out whether love is desire, whether love is pleasure, whether in love there is fear. Because where there is fear there must be hatred - right? Please, I am not telling you all this, you know all this. Where there is fear there must be jealousy, anxiety, possessiveness, domination. So to understand the depth of relationship and the beauty of relationship, because there is beauty in relationship. The whole cosmos is a movement in relationship; cosmos means order and when one has order in oneself one has order in one's relationship, and therefore order in our society. So one must enquire in this relationship if we find it is absolutely necessary to have order, and therefore out of that order comes love. One must enquire into what is desire. Right? Desire to become something, desire to reach illumination, god, desire for this or that. So this has been one of the problems, perhaps the problem, for human beings. Must I go into all this? You see one must ask something else too: what is beauty? You see the snow, the fresh snow on the mountains this morning, clean, a lovely sight if you are not too cold! And those solitary trees standing black against that white. And looking at the world about us, the marvellous machinery, the extraordinary computer with its special beauty, and the beauty of a face, the beauty of a painting, beauty of a poem - we seem to recognize beauty out there in the museums, when you go to a concert and listen to Beethoven, or Mozart, or whatever you listen to, there is great beauty. Always out there, in the hills, in the valleys, in the running waters, and the flight of birds and the singing of a blackbird in the early morning, but is there beauty only out there? Or is beauty something that only exists when the 'me' is not? You understand? When you look at those mountains on a sunny morning, clear against the blue sparkling sky - I am not being romantic - the very majesty of that drives away all the accumulated memories of yourself for a moment - haven't you noticed that? There the outward beauty, the outward magnificence, the majesty and the strength of that mountain wipes away all your problems, everything for a second out of you. You have forgotten yourself. Where there is total absence of yourself beauty is. But we are not free of ourselves. We are terribly selfish people, concerned with ourselves, with our problems, with our agonies, with our sorrows, with our loneliness. And out of that desperate loneliness we want identification with something or other. Out of that loneliness we cling to somebody, to a belief, to an idea, to a person, specially to a person. And in that dependency all our problems arise. And where there is dependency, psychologically, fear begins. When you are tied to something corruption begins - right? So one must go into this question of what is desire, because that is the most urgent, vital drive in our life. We are not talking about the desire for a particular thing but desire itself, not for something. Let's go into it very carefully. Because as one must know, all religions have said that if you want to serve god subjugate desire, destroy desire, control desire. And all religions have said substitute for that desire the image thought has created - right? The image that the Christians have, the Hindus and all the rest of it. You substitute an image for the actual. Follow all this. The actual is desire, the burning of it. And one thinks one can overcome that by substituting that for something else. This has been the pattern of all religious thinking. Or, surrender yourself to that which you think is the master, the guru, is the symbol, etc., which again is the activity of thought. I don't know if you are following all this. So one has to very carefully understand the whole movement of desire. For obviously desire is not love, desire isn't compassion. Without love and compassion meditation becomes utterly meaningless because love and compassion have their own intelligence, it is not the intelligence of cunning thought. So let us together - the speaker means together, not the speaker explains and you follow, then you will be merely followers. Whereas if both of us together, step by step, understand the nature of desire, why it has played such extraordinary importance in our life, how it distorts clarity, how it prevents the extraordinary quality of love and so on. It is important that we understand and not suppress, not try to control it, nor to direct it in a particular direction which may give you peace and all the rest of it, but rather examine together, please together, the nature and the movement of desire. Shall we go on? You are not tired? It is nice and warm in here! Please bear in mind the speaker is not trying to impress you, guide you, help you, nothing. But together we are walking, perhaps hand in hand, along a very subtle, complex path. And one has to listen to each other. One has to listen to find out the truth about desire. When one understands the truth, the significance, the meaning, the fulness, the truth of desire, then desire has quite a different value or drive in one's life. And also one must look at something else too: which is, when you observe desire, are you observing it as an outsider looking at desire? You understand? Or you are observing desire as it arises? Not desire something separate from you, you are desire. You see the difference? Either I observe desire, which I have when I see something in the window which pleases me, and I have the desire to buy it, and then the object is different from me. Right? But the object is different but desire is me - right? So there is a perception of desire without the observer watching desire. Am I making this somewhat clear? No. All right I will explain. I can look at a tree. The tree is the word by which I recognize that which is standing in the field. But I also know that the word is not the tree - right? The word is not the tree. My wife is not the word - right? But I have made the word my wife. I don't know if you see all the subtleties of all this. So I must very clearly understand from the beginning the word is not the thing. The word 'desire' is not the feeling of it - right? The extraordinary energy there is behind that reaction. So I must be very watchful that I am not caught in the word. And also the brain must be active enough to see that the object may create desire - right? - but there is a desire which is separate from the object. You are following all this? Are we together in this? Are we so aware that the word is not the thing? That desire is not separate from the observer who is watching desire? That the object may create desire but there is desire independent of the object - right? And each one has a separate desire - the religion, one's god, and so on and so on. So one must be aware of all this. So we are going to find out what is desire, not the object in the window or on the road, or the person I see, but how does desire arise? Right? How does desire flower? Why is there such extraordinary energy behind it? Please we are together in this, not I explain and you follow but together we are moving because this has a great importance in relationship. If we don't understand deeply the nature of desire we will always be in conflict with each other. I may desire one thing and my wife may desire another. My children may desire something totally different. So we are always at loggerheads with each other. And this battle, this struggle, is called love, relationship. We are asking: what is the source of desire? How does desire begin? And we must be very truthful in this, very honest, because it is very, very deceptive, very subtle unless we understand the root of it. For most of us, all of us, sensations are important, sensory responses - right? The touch, the taste, the smell, the hearing. And for most of us a particular sensory response is more important than the other responses. If we are artistic we see something specially. If we are trained as an engineer or this or that, then the sensory responses are different and so on. So we never observe with all the sensory responses totally. We respond, or observe in our responses about something special, divided. Now let's find out if it is possible to respond totally with all your senses. See the importance of that. That is, if one responds totally with all one's senses there is the elimination of a centralized observer. I wonder if you are following all this? Right? But when we respond to a particular thing separated, then in that separation begins the division - right? Find out when you go out of this tent, when you look at the river, the flowing waters, the light on the waters, the swiftness of the waters, find out if you can look at it with all your senses. Don't ask me how, then that becomes mechanical. You understand? But if you say let me look at it, find out. That is, to educate ourselves in the understanding of the sensory responses which will be total. I must come back to something else - sorry. That is only part of it. We are asking what is the source of desire? As we said, sensory responses - we will begin with sensory responses. You see something, the seeing brings about a response. You see a green shirt, or a green dress, the seeing awakens the response. Then the contact takes place - right? Then from that contact thought creates the image of you in that dress, or you in that car, or you in that house. So watch it, go slowly into this. Sensory responses, the seeing, the hearing, the tasting, sensory responses, then the contact, not only with the eye but touching it, then thought creating the image of you in that shirt, or in that dress, or in that car and then the desire arises. You follow this? The seeing of a car in the road, nice lines, highly polished, etc., the power behind it, then I touch it, feel around it, go around it, examine the engine. Then thought creates the image of me getting into the car and starting the ignition, putting my foot down and driving it. Just see it. This is actually what goes on - right? So desire begins, the source of desire is when thought creates the image, up to then there is no desire. There is sensory responses, contact, which is normal, all right, healthy, but then thought creates the image and from that second begins desire. You follow? I see a beautiful vase; feel the shape of it, the beauty of it, the Grecian and all the rest, I won't go into it. And touching it, looking at it, the beauty of it, and gradually creating the image, wanting it begins. If this is clear then the question is: is it possible for thought not to create the image? You understand this? This is learning about desire, which in itself is discipline. You understand? Learning about it is discipline, not the controlling of desire. I wonder if you understand this? Is this clear? Learning about desire, if you learn about something it is finished. But whereas if you say you must control desire, then you are totally in a different field altogether. But if you say look, I understand now that when thought creates the image, at that second desire begins. Now is it possible to see the whole of this movement, the whole of it, not just sections of it, when you see the whole of it you will understand that thought will not interfere with its image but only you see, have sensation, what is wrong with that? Are you understanding? No, you don't! Because you see we are all so crazy about desire, we want to fulfil ourselves through desire - right? But we don't see what havoc desire has created in the world. Desire for individual security, desire for individual attainment, success, power, position, prestige -you follow? We don't feel we are totally responsible for everything we do. And if one understands desire, the nature of it, then what place has desire? Or has it any place where there is love? Is love something so extraordinarily outside of human existence that it has really actually no value at all? Or because we have not seen the beauty and the depth and the greatness, sacredness of this word -not the word - of the actuality of it, that we haven't the energy, time, to study, to educate ourselves to understand what it is. Because without love and compassion with its intelligence, meditation has very little meaning. And without that perfume that which is eternal can never be found. And that is why it is important to put our house, the house in which we dwell, not only in the house outwardly but the house of our life, of our being, of our struggles, there to bring complete order. Finished! SAANEN 5TH PUBLIC TALK 21ST JULY 1981 We have got three more talks - today, Thursday and Sunday. We have to cover quite a bit during these three talks. First we have to consider together whether the brain, which is now only operating partially, whether that brain has the capacity to function wholly, completely. I do not know if you have gone into that question at all. Because we are only using now a part of it. One can observe this for oneself without going to any specialist. One can see that any specialization, which may be necessary, whether that specialization does not bring about the functioning of only a part of the brain: if one is a scientist, specialized in that subject, naturally only one part of him is functioning; or if one is a mathematician and so on. And we are asking whether - together we are asking, I am not imposing the question on you, we must ask this question: whether the brain, though in the modern world one has to specialize, whether it is possible to allow the brain to operate wholly, completely. That is one of the problems that we are going to discuss this morning. And the other problem is: what is going to happen to humanity, to all of us, when the computer which will outthink man accurately, much more quickly, rapidly - as the computer experts are saying it can - with the help of the robot man will then only have a couple of hours of work a day. This is going to happen within the next five, ten, twenty years. Then what will man do? Either he is going to follow the entertainment field, which is already taking place: sports are becoming more and more important, if you watch the television. Entertainment in different forms, football, you know all that is happening. And also religious entertainment. Either humanity is going to follow the whole movement of entertainment; or he is going to turn inwardly, which is not an entertainment, which demands much greater capacity of observation, examination, non-personal perception and so on inwardly. These are the two possibilities. And this is happening already, the entertainment world is going to take over - the cinemas, you know, all the rest of it. Or the computer can formulate a new religion, putting all the religions together, synthesize, bring out something totally new. And humanity - which is another form of entertainment - will follow that, or enter into something totally different. That is one problem. And the other is the whole content of our consciousness is basically fear, pleasure, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of fear, and the suffering of mankind. That is the basic content of our human consciousness with its varieties. Right? These are the three problems that man is facing. If humanity is going to follow entertainment, it is very simple. And one hopes these Gatherings are not a form of entertainment. And also whether the brain can be totally free so as to function wholly, because any specialization, any following a certain path, a certain groove, certain pattern, must inevitably make the brain function partially and therefore limited energy. I hope we are thinking together about all this. And we live in a world of specialization - engineers, physicists, surgeons, carpenters - you know, the whole mechanical world. And also specialization of a particular belief, of a particular dogma, rituals, they are all specializations. And those certain specializations, which are necessary, like surgeons, carpentry, and so on, whether in spite of that specialization, whether the brain can function completely, wholly, not partially, and therefore have tremendous energy. I hope we are following each other. We are thinking together - right? Is this a problem at all to any of us? Or the speaker is imposing the problem onto you? We have so many problems, I don't know why we have so many problems, but don't let us add another problem to already innumerable other problems. This is, I think, a very serious question into which we have to enquire together. If one observes one's own activity you will find more and more that the brain functions only, operates only very partially, very, very little. And therefore our energy becomes less and less and less, as we grow older. Biologically, physically, when we are young we are full of this vitality, but as we get educated, follow a livelihood and need specialization, that brain becomes small, narrow, limited, and therefore the energy becomes less and less and less, but it has its own vitality - right? So we are asking whether that brain, though it may have to have a certain form of specialization, not necessarily religious, because that is superstition, we can put all that out, whether, suppose I am a surgeon, I have to specialize, whether in spite of that the brain can operate wholly. It can only operate wholly, completely with all the tremendous vitality of a million years behind it, only when it is completely free. Is this somewhat clear? Are we meeting each other? As a question - we are going to enquire whether the brain can ever be totally free, in spite of the specialization, which is necessary for a livelihood. And it may not be necessary if the computer takes over. It won't take over surgery, obviously. It won't take over the feeling of beauty, looking at the evening stars, Orion, Pleiades and so on, but it may take over other functions altogether -right? So can the human brain be totally free? You understand my question? - without any form of attachment? - attachment of any kind, physical, attachment to certain beliefs, experience and so on. Can the brain be so completely free? If the brain cannot be so totally free it will begin to deteriorate, because when it is occupied with problems, with specialization, livelihood and so on and so on, it is active. The brain is active, but when the computer takes over this activity the brain will have less and less problems and therefore it will gradually deteriorate - right? This is happening, it is not something in the future, this is actually happening now when you observe one's own activity - right? So the question is we have to find an answer to whether the brain can be totally free, and therefore function altogether, not partially - right? And whether our consciousness, with its content, basically fear, the pursuit of pleasure and all the implications of that, grief, pain and sorrow, being hurt inwardly and so on, that is the basic content of one's consciousness. You may have other forms of consciousness, a group consciousness, racial consciousness, national consciousness, the consciousness of a particular group, the consciousness of the Catholic group, the Hindu group and so on and so on, but basically the consciousness with its content is fear, pleasure, the pursuit of pleasure, pain, sorrow, death - right? This is the central content of our consciousness - right? We are thinking together, please. Right? We are thinking together, examining together. The speaker is not laying down anything. We are together observing the whole phenomenon of existence, human existence, that is our existence. As we pointed out earlier, we are mankind because our consciousness, whether it is as a Christian living in the Western world, or in the Middle East, or in the Asiatic world, that consciousness, its content is basically fear, pursuit of pleasure, pain, hurts, sorrow and the never ending burden of all this - right? So our consciousness is not personal, mine. This is very difficult to accept because we have been so conditioned, so educated, that we resist this actuality, which means we are not individuals at all, we are the whole of mankind. This is not a romantic idea, it is not a philosophical concept, it is not absolutely an ideal; if one examines it closely it is a fact. So we are going together to find out whether the brain can be free from the content of its consciousness - right? Sirs, why do you listen? Why do you listen to the speaker? Or in listening to the speaker you are listening to yourself - right? Is that what is taking place? The speaker is only pointing out, acting as a mirror in which you see actually yourself. The actuality of one's own consciousness, not the description which the speaker is pointing out, not the description which becomes merely an idea, if you merely follow the description. But through the description you yourself perceive actually your own state of mind, brain, your own consciousness, then the listening to the speaker has a certain importance. But if you are merely listening to the speaker as a telephone, then it has very little value - right? So please don't say to yourself at the end of these talks and questions and answers, "I haven't changed. Why have I not changed? It is your fault. You have spoken for sixty years perhaps and I have not changed." Is it the fault of the speaker? Or you have not been able to apply it? So if you don't apply it naturally it is the fault of the speaker! Then you become cynical and do all kinds of absurd things. So please bear in mind that we are listening not to the speaker but through the description and the words we are looking at our own consciousness, which is the consciousness of all humanity. The Western world may believe in a certain symbol, religiously, certain figure, certain rituals; and the Eastern world also has the same thing but behind it the same fear, the same pursuit of pleasure, grief, pain, being hurt, wanting this - the whole of that is the movement of common humanity - right? So in listening we are learning about ourselves, not following the description and therefore learning the description, but actually learning to look and therefore bringing about a total freedom in which the whole of the brain can operate - right? After all sirs, meditation, love and compassion is the operation of the whole of the brain. When there is the operation of the whole there is integral order. And when there is integral, inward order there is total freedom. And it is only then that there can be something which is timelessly sacred. That is not a reward; that is not something to be achieved; but it comes about, that which is eternally timeless, sacred, only when the brain is totally free to function wholly, and in that wholeness there is order and so freedom. So, after stating that let us proceed to find out together whether the content of our consciousness, which is the operation of thought - right? - the content is put together by all the activities of thought, which we will go into, and whether that content can ever be free so that there is a totally different dimension altogether. Right? First let us observe together the whole movement of pleasure. There is not only biological, sexual pleasure, there is pleasure in possession, pleasure in having money, pleasure in achieving something that you have been working towards, there is pleasure in power, political, religious, power over a person, power in acquisition of knowledge, and the expression of that knowledge as a professor, as a writer, as a poet, the gratification that comes about through knowledge, and the pleasure of leading a very strict, moral, aesthetic life, the pleasure of achieving something inwardly which is not common to ordinary man. And this has been the pattern of our existence for millions of years - right? Our brain is conditioned to it, therefore our brain has become limited - right? I wonder if you see this? Anything that is conditioned must be limited and therefore the brain, when it is pursuing these forms and many other forms of pleasure, it must inevitably become small, limited, narrow. And probably unconsciously realizing this one seeks different forms of entertainment, a release through sex, through different kinds of fulfilment and so on - right? Please observe it in yourself, you are not listening to me, you are listening to yourself, to your own activity of daily life. And if you observe, your brain is occupied all day with something or other, chattering, talking, endlessly - you follow? - that is going on, like a machine that never stops. And so the brain is gradually wearing itself out, and it is going to be inactive if the computer is going to take its place - you follow? All the things computers will do. So why is man, human beings, caught in this perpetual pursuit of pleasure, why? Please find out, let's find out. Is it because he is so utterly lonely? Escape from that sense of isolation? Is it that he has been, from childhood, conditioned to this? Is it because thought creates the image of pleasure and then pursues it? You are following? So can we ask together whether thought is the source of pleasure? Right? Is it? Find out. That is, one has had some kind of pleasure, either eating very tasty food, sexual, or the sense of being flattered and so on and so on, thought - or rather the brain has registered it. These incidents which have brought about pleasure have been recorded in the brain, and the remembrance of that pleasure of yesterday, or last week, that remembrance is the movement of thought - right? And so thought is the movement of pleasure - right? Thought has registered that incident, pleasurable, exciting, worthwhile to remember, and it is stored, held, attached, and thought projects in the future and pursues it - right? So the question then is: why does thought or memory of an incident that is over, finished, carry on? Is that part of our occupation? A man who wants money, power, position, is perpetually occupied with it. Perhaps similarly the brain is occupied with this question of remembrance of something a week ago which gave great pleasure, being held in the brain and thought projects future pleasure and pursues it. This is the repetition of pleasure which is the movement of thought and therefore limited. Right? I wonder if we see this. And therefore the brain can never function wholly, it can only function partially. Now the next question that arises is: what am I to do? If this is the pattern of thought, how can thought be stopped? Or how can the brain not register that incident of yesterday which gave me delight? That is the obvious question. Right? Now why do you put such a question? Just investigate it. Why? Is it because you want to escape from the movement of pleasure, and that very escape is another form of pleasure? You understand? Right? Whereas if you say, look, this is a fact. The fact is the incident which gave great delight, pleasure, excitement, and the fact is over, it is not a living thing of that which happened a week ago. It was a living thing then but now it is not - right? Can you finish last week's pleasure, entertainment, excitement, finished, end it, not carry it over? It is not how to end it. It is not how to stop it. But just see the fact how the brain is operating, how thought is operating. If one is aware of that thought itself will come to an end. That is the registering of last week's pleasure is ended, finished. Right? Please sirs, if we don't do this don't accuse the speaker of not making it clear, and therefore becoming cynical, or being helped to be cynical. And the other problem is fear. Again this is the common ground of all mankind, whether you are living in a small house, or in a palace, whether you have no work or have plenty of work, whether you have tremendous knowledge about everything on earth, or whether you are a priest, whether you are the highest representative of god, or whatever it is, there is still this deep rooted fear in all mankind. That is a common ground on which all humanity stands. There is no question about it. That is an absolute, irrevocable fact, it cannot be contradicted. It is a fact. And again as long as the brain is caught in this pattern of fear its operation is limited - right? And therefore it can never function wholly. So it behoves us, it is necessary if humanity is to survive completely as human beings not as machines, one must find out for oneself whether it is possible to be totally free from this fear, not only physical fears of losing a job, of getting hurt, of having pain which has been experienced last week, and carry on with that remembrance of that pain, and therefore hoping that pain will not recur and fear involved in it. There is a biological fear and deep psychological rooted fears. You are looking at yourself, not at the speaker. The speaker is not important. What is important is to look at the content of our consciousness with its fear. We are not talking about the various forms of fear - fear of old age, fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of anxiety, fear which breeds hate, fear of not arriving, not achieving, not fulfilling, not reaching Nirvana, or whatever you want to reach spiritually. We are not talking about the objects of fear but fear itself - right? See the difference. We are afraid about something, or fear of something. Fear of yesterday, or fear of tomorrow, which is fear of time - right? I want to go into that a little bit. So we are talking about fear itself, not the expressions of fear -clear? What is fear? When there is fear, is there any sense - no, let me put it differently: When there is fear, at that very moment is there a recognition as fear? Do you understand my question? There is fear in me, suppose. Is that fear describable at the moment it is taking place, the reaction, or after? The after is time - right? I wonder if you see this. Right? Are we meeting together in this? I am afraid - suppose I am afraid. Either I am afraid about something, or I am afraid of something that I have done in the past which I don't want you to realize, or know, or something has happened in the past which again awakens that fear. Or is there a fear by itself without the object? And when there is fear at the second do you call it fear? Or only after it has come? Do you understand all this? It is surely after it has happened. Which means what? The memory of other incidents of fear has been held in the brain and the moment that reaction which takes place, the memory says "That is fear" - right? Are we together in this? I will explain again. Gosh, how we depend on explanations! How terrible! I recognize that at the immediacy of that feeling, you don't call it fear. It is only after it has happened that I name it as fear. The naming of it as fear is the remembrance of other incidents that have arisen which have caused fear - right? I remember those fears of the past and the new feeling arises and I immediately identify it with the word fear - right? That is simple enough. So there is always the memory operating on the present. So we are enquiring: what is fear? Is fear time? Fear of that something which happened a week ago, which has caused that feeling which I have named as fear, and the future implications that it must not happen again, and it might happen therefore I am afraid of it - you follow? So I am asking myself and you are asking yourself: is it time that is the root of fear? Right? Are you getting bored with all this? Are you getting bored with all this? No? I hope not. So what is time? Do you understand this? Time by the watch is very simple. There is sunrise at a certain time and the sun sets at a certain time. And yesterday, today, tomorrow. That is a natural sequence of time. There is also psychological time in us. That is, the incident which happened last week, which has given pleasure, or which awakened the sense of fear, and the remembrance of that projecting not only in the present being modified, but the future, I may not have a job, I may lose my position, I may lose my money, I may lose my wife - you follow? - time. So is fear part of time? Right? It looks like it. Right? And what is psychological time? There is time by the clock, obviously. If one has to catch a train, it is fixed, there is time. To go from here to there requires time, and so on. Time implies space - right? Not only physical time which needs space, there is also psychological time which needs space -yesterday, last week, modified today, tomorrow. There is space and time - right? That is simple. So is fear the movement of time? And is not the movement of time psychologically the movement of thought? You are following all this? Please this is very good education for each one of us. So thought is time - right? Time is fear. Obviously. I have had pain sitting with the dentist. I remember it, stored, projected, hope not to have that pain again - thought is moving. Which is, time of yesterday's pain, held and not wanting it again. So fear is a movement in space and time which is thought. Right? If one sees that not as an idea but as an actuality, which means one has to pay attention to that pain, that fear which happened last week, to give to that fear complete attention at the moment it arises then it is not registered. Do this and you will find out for yourself. When you give complete attention to an insult, there is no insult. Or if somebody comes along and says, "What a marvellous person you are", and if you pay attention it is like water on a duck's back -right? So please see the truth of this for yourself, that when you realize, time, space, thought is the movement of fear, that is a fact, not described by the speaker, but if you have observed it for yourself that is an absolute fact, you can't escape from it. You can't escape from a fact, it is always there. You may try to avoid it, you might try to suppress it, do every kind of escape, but it is always there - right? And if you give complete attention to the fact, the fact is not, psychologically. You understand? So the content of our consciousness is the movement of thought, time and space. Whether that space is very limited, or wide, extensive, it is still a movement of time, space, thought. (Noise of jet plane.) It has now gone behind the other mountain. I hope you have observed something. The extraordinary mechanical power of that instrument - right? The tremendous power. And thought has created it. Thought has created different forms of power in ourselves but they are all limited. And when there is freedom from this limitation there is an astonishing sense of power, not mechanical power, a tremendous sense of energy, much more than that jet. It has nothing to do with thought and therefore that power, that energy cannot be misused. But if thought says, "I will use it", then that power, that energy is dissipated. We have got five minutes more left. We must also talk over together the other factor which exists in our consciousness, which is sorrow, grief, pain and the wound, the hurts that exist in most human beings from childhood. The hurt, from that hurt, psychological hurt, the pain of it, the remembrance of it, the holding on to it, and the grief that arises from it, and also there is sorrow involved in it; and also there is the global sorrow of mankind which has faced thousands and thousands of wars, millions and millions of people have cried. And this war machine is still going on, directed by the politicians, by our nationalism, by our feeling that we are separate from the rest, 'we and they', 'you and me'. That is a global sorrow which the politicians are building, building, building. And we are ready for another war - I hope there won't be, but when you are preparing for something there must be some kind of explosion somewhere. It may not be in the Middle East, it may happen here, as long as you are preparing for something you are going to get it - it is like preparing food. But we are so - if I may use the word without disrespect - we are so stupid to allow all this to go on: terrorism - you know, the whole of it. So, we are asking - and perhaps we shall continue with it the day after tomorrow - we are asking whether this whole pattern of being hurt, lonely, pain, resistance, withdrawal, isolation, which causes further pain, grief, sorrow of my son's death, sorrow of losing something, losing some precious belief that I have held, the disillusionment that comes when I have followed somebody, one has given one's life, one's endeavour, struggled for somebody, surrender oneself to somebody, and then get disillusioned and from that pain, anxiety, uncertainty, sorrow. You have noticed all this. That is the pattern of our consciousness. When one asks: is it possible ever to be free, ever, of all this? It is possible if we apply, not endlessly talk about it. If I realize that I am hurt from childhood, psychologically and see all the consequences of that hurt, the consequences are I resist, I withdraw, I don't want to be hurt anymore, I encourage isolation and therefore I am building a wall round myself; and my wife also is hurt and she is doing the same thing - right? I don't know if you realize all these things. So that is, the consequences of being hurt from childhood are pain, resistance, withdrawal, isolation, more and more, deeper and deeper fear. And the global sorrow of mankind - I don't know if you have ever thought about it even. How man, human beings, have been tortured through wars, tortured under dictatorship, Totalitarianism, tortured in different parts of the world. And also there is the sorrow of my brother, son, wife, running away, or dying, and the sorrow of separation, the sorrow that comes about when one is interested in something completely and the other is not - you are following? In this sorrow there is no compassion, there is no love. And the ending of sorrow brings love, not pleasure, not desire, love. And where there is love there is compassion. With compassion comes intelligence, which has nothing whatever to do with the intelligence of thought. So one has to look very closely at ourselves as humanity, why we have born all these things all our lives, why we have never ended it. Is it part of our indolence, part of our habit? And if you say, "It is part of our habit, part of our conditioning. What am I to do about it? Let's talk about it. How am I to uncondition myself?" Keep at it. That is what we are all doing. "I can't find the answer, I will go to the guru next door" - or further away, or the priest, or this or that. We never say: Look, let me look at myself closely and see if one can break through it, like any habit. If you have a habit of smoking, it can be broken very easily, or drugs, alcohol. But we say what does it matter. I am getting old anyhow, the body is destroying itself, so a little more pleasure, what does it matter? So we carry on. We don't feel utterly responsible for all the things we do. We either blame it on the environment, on society, on our parents, on past hereditary, it is genetic - some excuse but never apply it. And if one really has the urge, the immediate urge to find out why I am hurt, why one is hurt. One is hurt because one has built an image about oneself. That is a fact. When you say, "I am hurt" - it is the image that you have about yourself. Somebody comes along and puts his heavy boot on that image and you get hurt. You get hurt through comparison: I am this but somebody else is better. As long as one has an image about oneself you are going to get hurt. That is a fact. But if you pay attention to that fact that as long as you have an image of any kind somebody is going to put a pin into it. As long as I have an image about myself, because I address lots of people, a big audience, become stupidly famous in the world and all that rot that goes on with reputation, and I want to maintain it, you are going to hurt it. Somebody else has a bigger audience - you follow? So I get hurt. So if you give complete attention to the image you have about yourself, attention, not concentration, give attention, then you will see the image has no meaning, it disappears. Right, we will stop there. We will continue the day after tomorrow. SAANEN 6TH PUBLIC TALK 23RD JULY 1981 We have covered most of the problems of our life, the complicated existence. And we also ought to go into whether it is possible to end sorrow. I think we ought to talk it over together and go into it rather deeply and find out for ourselves what are the implications of sorrow, and whether sorrow and love can exist together. And what is our relationship to the sorrow of mankind, not only our own personal daily grief, hurt, pain, and sorrow that comes with death? And also, as we were pointing out the other day, mankind has suffered thousands of wars, wars that seem to have no end. We have left it to the politicians all over the world to bring about peace, and what they are doing, if you have followed them, will never bring peace. We are all preparing for war. When you prepare you are going to have some kind of blow up, whether in the Middle East, here in the West, Far West or in Asia. And we human beings have never been able to live in peace with each other. We talk about it a great deal. The religions have preached, talked, about peace - peace on earth and goodwill and so on. But apparently that has never been possible - to have peace on earth, on the earth on which we live, which is our earth, and not the British earth and the French earth and so on, it is our earth. And apparently we have never been able to resolve the problem of killing each other. Probably we have violence in our heart. We have never been free from any sense of antagonism, any sense of retaliation, never free from our fears, sorrows, wounds and the pain of daily existence. Except for the very, very rich and the people who have position, apparently all the rest of us can never have peace, comfort, always in travail. That is part of our life, part of our daily suffering. And this suffering, without love man has tried many, many ways to be free of it, he has suppressed it, escaped from it, identified himself with something greater, handed himself over to some idea, some ideals, beliefs and faith and so on. But apparently this sorrow can never end. We have become accustomed to it, we put up with it, we tolerate it, we never ask ourselves seriously, with a great sense of awareness, whether it is possible to end sorrow. And we also should talk about, together talk over the whole immense implications of death because death is part of life, though we have postponed, avoided even talking about it, it is there. So we ought to go into that too. And whether love, not the remembrance of pleasure which has nothing to do with love and compassion, whether that love and compassion with its own peculiar all-comprehending intelligence, whether that love can exist in our life. These are the problems or questions which we are going to talk over together this morning. First of all do we, as human beings, want to be really free from sorrow? Or we have never actually gone into it, faced it and understood all the movement of it, what are the implications involved in it, why human beings, who are so extraordinarily clever in their technological world, why sorrow has never been resolved. I think it is important to talk it over together this question, and to find out for ourselves whether sorrow can really end. We all suffer, in different ways. There is the sorrow of death of someone, there is the sorrow of great poverty which the East knows very well, great sorrow of ignorance - we use the word 'ignorance' in the sense not of book knowledge but the ignorance of not knowing totally oneself, the whole complex activity of the self. And if we don't understand that very deeply there is the sorrow of that ignorance. And there is the sorrow of never being able to realize something fundamentally, deeply, though we are very clever at achieving technological success and success in this world. And also we have never been able to understand pain, not only physical pain but also the deep psychological pain. One is sure that one knows all these things, one is aware of all this, however learned or not very erudite, we know all these things: that there is personal sorrow of not being beautiful outwardly or inwardly, there is the sorrow of constant struggle, conflict from the moment we are born until we die, there is the sorrow of attachment with its fear, with its corruption, and there is the sorrow of not being loved and asking, craving to be loved, and there is the sorrow of never realizing something beyond thought, that which is eternal. And ultimately there is the sorrow of death. Now we have described various forms of sorrow. And the factor of sorrow is self centred activity - right? We are all so concerned with ourselves, with our endless problems, with old age, not being able to have a global deep inward outlook. And together this morning can we go into it, not verbally, intellectually, but actually realize the sorrow that one has had, or that one is having, and the sorrow of the whole world. Physical pain one can understand, do something about it, and perhaps not register it, not record it. I do not know if you have ever tried that. You may have had pain last week and finished with that pain when that pain is over, not record it. That is possible if you go into it very carefully, it is possible to have physical pain and end it the moment it is over, not carry the remembrance of it at all. It is possible so that that pain does not interfere or bring about neurotic activity in our daily life, and not make that as an excuse to hurt others. And we bear psychological pain. We all have, as we pointed out the other day, images of ourselves and about others. The brain is always active in either daydreaming, being occupied with something or other, or imagining, creating from that imagination pictures, ideas, and gradually from childhood one builds this structure of the image which is me. And each one of us is doing this constantly, and it is that image that gets hurt, which is me. Right? As we pointed out, when one is hurt there is this resistance, which is building a wall round oneself not to be hurt anymore and therefore more fear and isolation, and the feeling of having no relationship and encouraging loneliness which brings about sorrow also. I hope we are together thinking, following this and not merely listening to a series of words and ideas which will become rather boring. But if we actually see, are aware how this hurt, with all its consequences, is part of our life, and whether those wounds can ever disappear completely because if that doesn't disappear completely it is part of our sorrow. Are you following this? Are we thinking together? And there is this pain of isolation, separateness. Not only as a race, as a community, as a nation, but also isolating ourselves as an individual, and all the consequences, the travail, the misery of that individual. And our activity is always self centred, which is one of the factors of isolation. Now the question then is, after having described the various forms of sorrow, whether we can look at it without verbalization, without running away from it, or by intellectual adaptation to some other form of a religious or intellectual conclusion, but to look at it completely, not move away from it, stay with it. You understand? What we mean by that is, suppose I have a son who is deaf and dumb, who may die, and I am responsible, I have produced him. And it gives sorrow knowing that he can never look at the beautiful sky, never hear the running waters. And there is this sorrow, to remain with it, not move away from it. You understand? Are you following? That is, I have this great pain, this sorrow, either of his deformity, or the death of someone with whom I have lived for many years and the ending of that person. There is this sorrow. Sorrow is the essence of isolation - right? I wonder if you understand that? Right? When we are totally isolated, completely alone and that feeling is sorrow. Now to remain completely with that feeling, not verbalize it, rationalize it, escape from it, transcend it, all the movement that thought brings about. Are we meeting each other? So that when there is that sorrow, and when thought doesn't enter into it at all, which means that you are completely sorrow, not that you are trying to overcome sorrow, you are totally sorrow. And when there is that totality of it then there is the disappearance of it. It is only when there is fragmentation then there is travail. You understand this? Are we meeting each other? So when there is sorrow, to remain with it without a single movement of thought, and the wholeness of sorrow is not that I am in sorrow, I am sorrow. So there is no fragmentation involved in sorrow. So when there is that totality of that, and there is no movement away from that, then there is the withering away of it -right? Are we together in this? You see without ending sorrow how can there be love? We have associated sorrow and love strangely together. I love my son and when he dies I am full of sorrow. So we have associated sorrow with love. Now we are asking when there is suffering can love exist at all? We are asking then: is love desire? Is love pleasure? And when that desire, that pleasure, is denied, there is suffering. And we say suffering as jealousy, attachment, possession and all that is part of love. That is our conditioning, that is how we are educated, that is part of our great inheritance, tradition. Now we are asking: love and suffering cannot possibly go together. Right? That is not a dogmatic statement, a rhetorical assertion, but when one looks into the depth of sorrow and understands the movement of it, in which is involved pleasure, desire, attachment, and the consequences of that attachment which brings about corruption, if we are tied to anything it will bring corruption inevitably. And when one is aware without any choice, without any movement, aware of the whole nature of sorrow, then can love exist with sorrow? You understand? Or love is something entirely different? I think we ought to be clear that devotion to a person, to a symbol, to the family, to something or other, is not love - right? Please, is it? I am devoted to you for various reasons, there is a motive behind that devotion. Love has no motive - right? If there is a motive it is not love, obviously. If you give me pleasure, sexually, various forms of comfort, dependency, the motive is I depend on you because you give me something in return. And as we live together I call that love. Is it? So one questions where there is motive can love exist? And where there is ambition, whether in the physical world, or in the psychological world; ambition to be on top of everything, to be a great success, to have power, religiously, or physically; where there is aggression, competitiveness, jealousy, can love exist? Obviously, not. But we recognize it cannot exist and yet we go on. Look what happens to our brain when we are playing such kinds of tricks. I say, "I love you", I have a motive behind that love. I am ambitious, I want to be spiritually next to god, specially on his right hand! I want to achieve illumination - you know, all that deception. You cannot achieve illumination. You cannot possibly achieve that which is beyond time. But that is our constant endeavour, psychologically. So I am ambitious, competitive, conforming, jealous, fearful, hating, all that is going on psychologically, inwardly. Either we are conscious of it, or deliberately avoiding it. And yet I say to my wife or father, or whatever it is, "I love you". So what happens when there is such deep contradiction in my life, in my relationship? How can that contradiction have any sense of deep integrity? You are following all this? And yet this is what we are doing until we die. So can there be no ambition and yet live in this world - go to the office, factory, being a Shop Steward - oh, you may not know that word - the ambition of a guru - you understand? Can one live in this world without ambition, without competition? Look what is happening in the outward world. There is competition between various nations, which is taking place, please look at what is happening in the world for god's sake. The politicians are competing with each other, economically, technologically, in the instruments of war, they are competing and so we are destroying ourselves. We allow this to go on because we are also inwardly competitive. When we realize the politicians are never going to solve a thing, but if we are totally responsible for ourselves and have this deep integrity then we affect the consciousness of the world. As we pointed out, if a few of us really understand this whole movement of what we have been talking about for the last sixty years, and if a few of us are really deeply involved and have brought about the end of fear, sorrow and so on, it will affect the whole consciousness of mankind? You are doubtful whether it will affect the consciousness of mankind? Hitlers have affected the consciousness of mankind - right? Napoleon, the Ceasars, the butchers of the world have affected mankind. And also the good people have affected mankind. I mean good people, not respectable people, but the good being those who live a life wholly, not fragmented. And the great teachers of the world have affected human consciousness. Individuals have affected human consciousness. But if there were a group of people who understand all this, what we have been talking about, not verbally but actually live that life with great integrity, then it will affect the whole consciousness of man. This is not a theory; this is an actual fact, because great warriors have affected mankind. If you understand that simple fact you will see it goes right through: television, newspapers, everything is affecting the consciousness of man. So love cannot exist where there is a motive, where there is attachment, where there is ambition and competitiveness, and love is not desire and pleasure. Just feel that, see it. And also what is the relationship between human beings when death occurs, when death takes place? Right? Let's talk about it together. Because we are going through all this in order to bring about order in our life - right? Order in our house, which has no order, where there is so much disorder in our life. And without establishing an order that is whole, integral, meditation has no meaning whatsoever. See the logic of it. Right? Because if my house is not in order I may sit in meditation, hoping that through meditation I will bring order. But what happens when I am living in disorder and I meditate? I have fanciful dreams and illusions and all kinds of nonsensical results. But a sane man, intelligent, logical, must first establish order in daily life, then we can to into the depths of meditation together, and the meaning of that meditation, the beauty of it, the greatness of it, the worth of it and so on. We have also to understand what death is. Whether we are very young, middle aged or old, it is part of our life, as love is part of our life, pain is part of our life, agony, suspicion, arrogance, all that is part of our life. But we do not take death as part of our life. We want to postpone it, put it as far away from us as possible, to have a time interval, space between the living and the dying. So we ought to, together, go into this question, which is again rather complex, what death is. If you have observed, and I am sure you have, all religions have somehow avoided this question. Avoided it in the sense, in the Christian world it is, you know, somebody suffers for you. And in the Asiatic world there is the whole idea that you have lived in the past, you will die and be born next life. If you are going to be born next life, live rightly now, lead a righteous life, lead a life which doesn't harm, hurt others, which is not cruel and so on. But those who believe in an after life, in the Asiatic world don't care a pin about leading a righteous life. It is just a belief and like all beliefs it has no substance. So putting all that aside, the Christian concept of death and suffering, and the Asiatic conclusion about reincarnation, karma, that which you sow you will pay, that is part of that Asiatic concept, putting those two aside, the Christian and the Asiatic, concern or explanation or lack of confrontation with death, let us together go into it. It may be unpleasant because nobody wants to face that. You are living now, healthily, having pleasure, fear, anxiety, there is the tomorrow, hope, all that. And one doesn't want to be concerned with the other thing which is the ending of all this. So if we are intelligent, sane, rational, we have to face not only the living, the implications of the living, but also the implications of dying. We must know both. That is the wholeness of life, in which there is no division. So what is death, apart from the physical ending, biological usage of an organism that has lived wrongly, drinks, drugs, over indulgence, asceticism, denial, you know this constant battle between the opposites, not a balanced harmonious living, but extremes, and so the body goes through a great struggle imposed by thought? I don't know if you realize that: thought dictates and the body is controlled by thought, and thought being limited, as we went into, so everything it does brings about disharmony. And we live in disharmony physically, forcing it, controlling it, subjugating it, driving it - this is what we are all doing. Fasting, you know, Northern Ireland, for political or religious reasons, it is the same thing, violence. The body can endure for many years, old age, not get senile. And as the body will inevitably come to an end, the organism will die, is that what is death? Is the organism coming to an end, either through some disease, old age, accidents, it will come to an end, and is that what we are concerned about with death? Is it - please follow this - is it thought identifies itself with the body, with the name, with the form, with all the memories, and says "Death must be avoided"? So is that what we are afraid of? The coming to an end of a body that has been looked after, cared for, if you care for it, dies? I don't think we are afraid of that specially. We are a little bit slyly anxious about it but that is not of great importance. But what is far more important for us is to end the relationships that we have had, the pleasures that we have had, the memories, pleasant and unpleasant, the thing that we call living - right? The daily living, going to the office, factory, doing some skilful job, having a family, being attached to the family, with all the memories of that family, my son, my daughter, my wife, my husband, that unit, which is fast disappearing but there is that feeling of being related to somebody, though in that relationship there is great pain, anxiety and all the rest of it, it is there. I am at home with somebody. Or you are not at home with anybody. If you are not at home with anybody, then that has its own sorrow. So is that what we are afraid of? The ending of my relationship, my attachments, the ending of something I have known, something to which I have clung, something in which I have specialized all my life, and all that I am afraid of ending - right? That is, the ending of all that is me - right? All that, the family, the name, the form, the tradition, the inheritance, cultural education, the racial inheritance, all that is me, me that is struggling, me that is happy - is that what we are afraid of? The ending of me, which is all that? Which is, the ending psychologically of the life which I am leading, the life which I know psychologically with its pain, sorrow, all that, is that what we are afraid of? And if we are afraid of that, and have not resolved that fear, death inevitably comes, and what happens to that consciousness -please listen - what happens to that consciousness which is not your consciousness, which we went into very thoroughly, it is the consciousness of mankind, consciousness of the vast humanity, not my consciousness - we went into that very carefully and I won't go into it now, I haven't time. So please see as long as I am afraid as an individual with my limited consciousness, it is that that I am afraid of - right? Are you following this? It is that which I am scared of. And to avoid that I go through all kinds of nonsense, Gabriel and you know all that stuff. And I realize, one realizes that is not a fact - right? It is not a fact that my consciousness is totally separate from everybody else - right? It is an illusion, it is an absurdity, it is illogical, it is unsanitary, if I can use that word, unhealthy. So - follow this carefully - I realize this, perhaps in my heart, in my feeling, I realize that I am the whole of mankind, not an individual consciousness, that is too silly, illogical, it has no meaning. And I, who have lived this kind of life, which is pain, which is sorrow, which is anxiety, all that, if my brain has not transformed some of all that, my life is only further confusion to the wholeness. You understand? I wonder if you understand this? But if I live it, realize that my consciousness is the consciousness of mankind, and for the human consciousness I am totally responsible, then freedom from the limitation of that consciousness becomes extraordinarily important, because then I am contributing or I am breaking down the limitation of that consciousness. So death has a totally different meaning. You are following? Are we meeting each other? Look sirs: I have lived a so-called individual life, concerned about myself, my problems. And those problems never end, they are increasing. I live that kind of life. I have been brought up, educated, conditioned to that kind of life. You come along and tell me pleasantly, as a friend, or you like me, or you love me, you tell me: look, your consciousness is not yours. You suffer, so do other people suffer and so on. I have gone into this. So you tell me all that. I listen to it and it makes sense to me. I won't reject what you say because it makes logical sense, sanity and I see in what you have told me that perhaps there can be peace in the world. So I have listened to you, and I say to myself, now can I be free from fear? Right? Because I am responsible totally for the whole of consciousness - right? So when I am investigating fear and the moving away from fear I am helping the total human consciousness to lessen fear. You understand? Is this somewhat clear? Then death has a totally different meaning. Not that I am going to sit next to god or I am going to heaven through some peculiar nebulae, but I am living a life which is not my particular life. I am living a life of the whole of humanity and if I understand death, if I end grief, I am cleansing the whole of the consciousness of mankind. That is why it is important to understand the meaning of death. And perhaps death has great significance, great relationship with love because where you end something love is. When you end completely attachment, then love is. Right? Right sirs. SAANEN 7TH PUBLIC TALK 26TH JULY 1981 We have been talking about the complex problem of existence. We have talked about forming images in our relationship with each other, the images which thought has projected and which we worship. We have also talked about fear, pleasure and the ending of sorrow. We have also gone into the question of what is love, without all the travail that is involved in that word. We have also talked about compassion with its intelligence. And we ought now, this morning, to talk about what is religion. Most of the intellectuals throughout the world shy away from that word. They see what religions are in the present world, with their beliefs, with their dogmas, with their rituals, and the hierarchical set-up of the established religion. And they rather scoff at it and run away from anything to do with religion. And as they get older, get very near that threshold called death, they begin to revert to their old conditioning: they either become Catholics or pursue some guru, or trot off, if they have money, to India or to Japan. And religion throughout the world has lost totally its creditability, it no longer has any significance in daily life. They may go to the marvellous cathedrals, churches, and all the things that go on in them, but their heart isn't in it. The more you examine, the more you criticize, the more one is aware of the whole content of all the religious structure, one becomes very sceptical, very doubtful of the whole business. And so the intellectuals have nothing to do with it. And those who are not, either treat it romantically, emotionally, or something you go to to be entertained. But if one puts aside all the intellectual, the romantic, sentimental attitude towards religion, one can then begin to ask, not with any naivety but with seriousness, in which is included doubt, one begins to ask: what is religion - not the mere meaning of that word, the etymological meaning, but deeply, what is religion? Man, from the ancient of times, has always thought that their must be something beyond the ordinary daily life, the ordinary misery, confusion, conflict of daily life. And in his search he has invented all kinds of philosophies, all kinds of images, created all kinds of images from the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Hindus to modern times, but he always gets caught apparently in some kind of illusion. He begins to delude himself. And out of that illusion he begins to create all kinds of activities. And again, if we could brush all that aside, because we have examined it sufficiently, gone into it fairly deeply, with all the contemporary religions, then one begins to ask oneself: what is, and if there is something, beyond all the contagion of thought, all the corruption of time? If there is something beyond the usual existence in space and time. And if we begin to ask that of ourselves, how shall we set about it? Is any kind of preparation necessary? Discipline, sacrifice, control, all that - a certain period of preparation and then advance. And we are asking ourselves, we are thinking together, if there is anything beyond, and if one does not hypnotize oneself, if one is free from illusion, then one can begin to examine, enquire very profoundly, what is truth and if there is any path to it, or there is no path, or how can the mind reach that, or come to it? So we are going together this morning, together, to enquire, explore into these problems. First of all it is important to understand, is it not, that one should be free of all illusions, otherwise the mind remains in various forms and varieties of illusions. So what creates illusions? Is it not desire, wanting to reach something, wanting to experience something, wanting to have, desiring something out of the ordinary, extra-sensory perception, visions, spiritual experiences, and so on. So one must be very clear as to the nature of desire, which we talked about considerably in the past talks, and understand the movement of desire, which is thought with its image, which we went into, and also to have no motive in our enquiry. That is very difficult: to have no intention, to have no sense of direction, then the brain is free to really enquire. Again, we have been into these problems right through our talks. We said there must be order in our house, in our existence, in our relationship, in our activity. Without that order, which is freedom, there can be no virtue. Virtue, righteousness, is not something that is intellectually cultivated. Where there is order there is virtue, and the order is something that is living, not a routine, a habit. And another point is: is there something to be learnt? We are thinking together please. Is there something to be learnt from another? You can learn from another history, biology, mathematics, physics, the whole technological world with all its complex knowledge, you can learn from another, from a book, from one who has already studied all that. And is there something to be learned from another psychologically? Please, this is an important question that we must investigate together: to learn from another psychologically about ourselves, about that which is eternal, if there is something eternal. Or there is nothing to learn from another because all the human experience, all the psychological knowledge that one has, that humanity has gathered together for millions of years, is within oneself. You are following? Therefore if that is so, that is, we are the rest of mankind, our consciousness is the whole of mankind, and our consciousness is that. And it seems rather absurd and rather naive to go out and learn from somebody else about ourselves, because it requires a clarity of observation to learn about ourselves. That is simple. There is no psychological authority and therefore there is no spiritual authority, because the whole history of mankind, which is the story of humanity, is in us. Right? Therefore there is nothing to experience. I wonder if you see this. There is nothing to be learnt from somebody who says, "I know". Or, "I will show you the path to truth". This has been the whole trend of the priests throughout the world. They are the interpreters between the highest and the common. From the ancient of days they have played this game. And to learn about, to understand ourselves, all that authority must be set aside - right? Obviously. Because that authority is part of us. We are the priests, we are the disciples, we are the teachers, we are the experience, we are the ultimate, if we know how to understand - right? So there is nothing to be learnt from somebody, including the speaker, specially from the speaker, because one greatly accepts other people's influence, impressions - right? So one has to be free to enquire. And to enquire very, very deeply, not superficially because we have done all the superficial enquiry during the last six or sixty years, and we have come to the point when we say we have more or less established order in our life, more or less, and as we go along we will establish greater order, then we can ask: what is the religious mind which can understand what is meditation? -which we are going into. Within the last perhaps ten, fifteen years, that word has become very popular in the West. Before only very few who had been to Asia or India talked and enquired into their form of meditation, because the Asiatics and the Hindus have said - we will call the Hindus and the Asiatics one word - Asiatics - the Asiatics have said only through meditation can you come to, understand that which is timeless, which has no measure. But during the last ten or fifteen years those who have nothing to do call themselves gurus, come over to the West and have brought that word. It became a word that rather made it like a drug. The word 'meditation' actually means, the dictionary meaning, to think over, ponder over, be concerned with and so on. And these people who brought that word from the East sold it to those gullible people, you paid for it, paid for the mantras which they brought, and you gradually learned their tricks. And also you learnt the various mantras which they brought along. You know the word, I am sure, like guru, mantra, meditation, is part of the daily common coin. The word 'mantra' in Sanskrit, I believe, means consider, ponder over, meditate, in not becoming. You understand? - not becoming. And also that word means to put aside all self-centred activity. Mantra means that. Which is, ponder over, meditate on not becoming and put away altogether the self-centred activity - right? That is the real meaning of that word mantra. You cannot sell that. You cannot go to somebody and say, "Give me money and I will tell you". And those people who have done it have become enormously rich people, it has become something commercial. And also there have been various systems of meditation - the Tibetan, the Hindu, the Japanese, Zen and so on and so on. Right? And these systems have been invented by thought, obviously. And thought being limited the systems must inevitably be limited. And also they become mechanical if you repeat, repeat, repeat, your mind naturally goes dull, rather stupid and utterly gullible. Right? It is common sense all this, but we are all so eager to experience something spiritual, either through drugs, through alcohol, or follow a system that you hope will give you some kind of exciting experience because we are bored with our own daily life, going to the office for the next forty years, at the end of it die, we are bored with all that. We are bored with our present religions and so somebody comes along and brings some fantastic notions and we fall for it. This is happening. We are not exaggerating, we are not attacking anybody personally but we are just examining the nonsense that is going on. So if one is sufficiently aware of all this and has put aside all this, because it is utterly meaningless, you don't have to go to India, or to Tibet, or god knows somewhere else, or even to Rome, because if one uses not only common sense but has a critical mind, a mind that is questioning, not only what others say but also questioning yourself, which is far more important, not to accept anything that you yourself see that it is correct or noble or real experience, to question it, to have a mind that is capable, rational, sane, that is essential. And to have a mind that is free from all the illusions, a form of self-hypnosis. If that is possible in a world that has more or less gone mad, violent, terror, wars, the atomic bomb and the computer that is going to take over all the activities of thought. Then what is a human being? The human being has lived on thought; all the architecture, all the music, the things that are inside the churches, the temples and mosques, they are all put there by thought, invented by thought. All our relationship is based on thought, though we say, "I love you", it is still part of the image which thought has created about another. So thought to us is astonishingly important, and thought itself, as we have examined very carefully, is limited, it has the capacity to break up, to bring about fragmentation between people, as my religion, my country, my god, my belief and so on and so on, all that is the movement of thought: thought, space, and time, which we talked about. Now together, if we have gone that far, we can begin to examine what is actually meditation. The Christian form of that is contemplation. Contemplation is different from meditation. Meditation is the capacity of the brain, which is no longer functioning partially - which we talked about also - but the brain that has freed itself from its conditioning and therefore functioning as a whole, such a brain is different from mere contemplation. I can be conditioned as a Christian, a Hindu, whatever you will, and also contemplate from my background, from my conditioning. That contemplation does not free my conditioning. But meditation demands, and therefore it becomes extraordinarily serious, and it requires a great deal of enquiry and attention not to function partially, which we again explained carefully. By partially we mean in a particular specialization, or to function in a particular occupation, to narrowly make the brain, or allow the brain to accept beliefs, traditions, dogmas, rituals, which are only partial. All those are invented by thought. The Christians have this word 'faith'. And if one has faith in god, or whatever you will, things will be all right, or things will come out all right! This has been the slogan for two thousand years. And the Asiatics have their own form of faith - karma, reincarnation, evolution, time and so on. So meditation is different from contemplation in the sense that meditation demands that the brain is no longer conditioned to act partially but wholly. Right? That is the requirement for meditation, otherwise meditation has no meaning. So the question then is: is it possible, living in this world, which demands certain forms of specialization; a skilful carpenter, skilful mechanic, skilful mathematician, or a very skilful housewife, it doesn't matter, living in this world which demands this and yet to be free from specialization. I wonder if we are together in this? Suppose I am a physicist, that is, theoretical physicist and I have spent my life, most of my life in formulating mathematically, thinking about it, questioning it, asking, cultivating a tremendous knowledge about it, and my brain has become specialized, narrowed down, and yet I begin to enquire into meditation. Right? And in my enquiry into meditation I can only partially understand the significance and the depth of that word because I am anchored in something else - right? I wonder if we are meeting each other? Right? I am anchored in my theoretical physics as my profession; anchored there I begin to enquire theoretically whether there is the timeless, whether there is meditation and so on. So my enquiry becomes partial again - right? But I have to live in this world, I am a professor at some university. I have got a wife, children, I have the responsibility of all that and perhaps I am also ill. I have got the responsibility of all that, and yet I want to enquire very profoundly into the nature of truth, which is part of meditation. So my approach is partial. So my question is: is it possible to be specialized as a carpenter and yet leave it at a certain level so that my brain, the brain which is common brain to all humanity - this is very difficult for people to accept, your brain is not your brain, it has been growing for millions of years, accumulating all kinds of things, and so on, knowledge, it is not yours, your consciousness is not your consciousness, which you readily accept but you would rather resist when we say that your brain is not yours, it has grown through space and time, which is common to all humanity. This we won't go into now. So my question is: being specialized, can my brain say, yes it has its function but that function is not going to interfere - right? I wonder if you are understanding all this? I am a carpenter, I know the quality of wood, the tools, the grain, the beauty of the wood and so on. I say, yes, that is natural, I must have that, but the brain that has cultivated the speciality cannot possibly understand the wholeness of meditation - right? If I as a carpenter understand this, the truth of it, that I as a carpenter have a place, but that specialization has no place in the wholeness of comprehension, in the wholeness of understanding meditation. If I see the truth of that then specialization becomes a small affair. Right? Are we meeting? So then we begin to ask: what is meditation? Why certain parts of the world, the Asiatic world, have given importance to this word. Asia is not geographically separate from the rest of the world - it is geographically separate but Asia is you and me - right? Because we are part of humanity, part of our consciousness, we are the rest of humanity. So when one part of humanity has given a great deal of time for two or three four thousand years, as the Egyptians have done, as the Hindus have done, it is part of our enquiry to find out. First of all meditation demands attention - right? To attend, which is to give your whole capacity, energy, in observation. Attention is different from concentration. I hope you are following all this. Are we together in this? Concentration is an effort made by thought to focus its capacity as energy on a particular point - right? That is concentration. When you are in a school the teacher says, concentrate on your book, don't look out of the window, look at your beastly book. And you are trained to concentrate, that is. to bring all your energy to a particular point. Which means in that concentration you are not allowing any kind of other thoughts to interfere, that is to control; concentration implies controlling thought, not to wander away - right? I hope you are following this -but to focus your thought on a particular subject, on a particular page, on a particular picture. Which is, thought says that it is important to focus my attention, focus my energy on that - right? It is the operation of thought. I wonder if you see. It is the operation of thought in which there is compulsion, control, which says, "Look". So in concentration, please understand this carefully if you don't mind, in concentration there is the controller and the controlled -right? My thought is wandering off, I say it should not wander off, I bring it back, the controller who says, "I must concentrate on this". So there is a controller and the controlled - right? Who is the controller? The controller is part of thought, the controller is the past - right? The controller who says, "I have learnt a great deal and it is important for me, the controller, to control thought." That is, thought has divided itself as the controller and the controlled, so it is a trick that thought is playing upon itself. I wonder if you see all this. Please we must understand this very carefully because in attention there is no controller, nor the controlled, there is only attention. So it requires a careful examination into the nature of concentration with its controller and the controlled - right? All our life there is this controller - I must do this, I must not do that, I must control my desires, control my anger, control my impetus -you know, control, control. Therefore I have gradually learnt to inhibit myself and there are those people who say, "Don't inhibit, do whatever you like" - right? That is the game also being played by the gurus. So one must be very clear in understanding what is concentration and what is attention. As we are pointing out, in attention, that is to attend, there is no controller. Please understand this because as we are going to find out presently: is there a way of living our daily life in which there is no controller? Right? That is part of meditation. I wonder if you see. This is a question one must ask oneself. Is there, in daily existence, a way of living in which every form of control doesn't exist at all, because control means effort, control means division between the controller and the controlled. I am angry, I must control my anger. I smoke, I must not smoke and I must resist smoking - right? And so on and so on. What we are saying is something totally different and therefore it may be misunderstood and may be rejected altogether, which is very common because we say all life is a control. If you don't control you will become permissive, nonsensical, it has no meaning, therefore you must control - right? Religions, philosophy, your teachers, family, mother, control. But we have never enquired into who is the controller. The controller is put together in the past, the past is the knowledge, which is thought, thought has separated itself as the controller and the controlled. And concentration is all that. And in understanding that we are asking a much more fundamental question, which is: can one live in this world with a family and all the rest of it, without a shadow of control? Right? First of all, see the beauty of that question. Because our brain has been trained for thousands of years to inhibit, to control, control, it is never operating with the wholeness of the brain - right? See what it is doing for yourself. You are not learning from me, from the speaker, you are watching your own brain in operation, rationally, a critical examination in which there is no deception, hypnosis and so on. And most of the meditations that have been put forward from the Asiatic world, are to control; control thought so that you have a mind that is at peace, you have a mind that is quiet, not eternally chattering. Because silence, quietness, absolute stillness of the mind, brain, is necessary in order to perceive - right? Therefore all the types of meditation, however subtle, have the basis to control; or hand yourself over to some guru, to some ideal - right? And forget yourself because you have given yourself over to something and therefore you are at peace. Which is again the movement of thought, desire and the excitement of something you have offered and have been accepted. You follow all this? So whereas attention is something entirely different. It is not the opposite of concentration - right? If it is the opposite then the opposite has its root in its own opposite - right? If love is the opposite of hate, then love is born out of hate - right? I wonder if you see this? Any opposite has its root in its own opposite. So we are saying that attention is not the opposite of concentration, it is totally divorced from it. So we are going to enquire together, what is attention. Does it need effort? Right? That is one of our principal activities, I must make an effort. I am lazy, I don't want to get up this morning but I must get up. Make an effort - right? I don't want to do something but I must. (I am getting tired of this.) See how extraordinary it is that we cannot catch the significance of this immediately. It has to be explained, explained, explained. We seem to be incapable of direct perception between concentration and attention. Right? To have an insight into attention and be attentive. We will go into it. When does attention take place? Obviously not through effort. When you make an effort to be attentive, it is an indication that you are inattentive and trying to make that inattention become attention - you understand? (I am tired of these explanations.) Personally I have never learned about any of all this nonsense. Personally nobody explained all this to me, thank god! Personally I have never read about all this, it wouldn't be authentic, it would have no meaning. But to have quick insight, you understand? To see instantly the falseness of all religious organizations, all of them, and therefore you are out of it. To see instantly that the observer is the observed and therefore no effort, it is so. It is only effort exists when there is division. You are following? So does it indicate that our brains have become so dull because we have been trained, trained, so it has lost its pristine quickness, its capacity to see directly without all the explanations and words, words, words. But unfortunately one has to go into this because our minds, our brains cannot grasp instantly for example that truth has no path. You understand? To see the immensity of that statement, the beauty of that statement and put aside all paths - the Asiatic, the Western, North, South, East, West, so that your brain becomes extraordinarily active. One of the difficulties is that we are becoming mechanical. The computer is learning more and quicker than we are learning. The computer can go so far ahead of us. And so if our brains are not extraordinarily alive and active, our brains will gradually wither away, because now we exist because we have to think, we have to be active partially, but when the computer can take all the work, most of the thought, and operate at a rapidity which the brain cannot, then the brain is going to wither - you understand? Please realize all this, this is happening, it is not an exaggerated statement of the speaker, it is happening now. We are unaware of it. So we are enquiring into what is attention. In concentration there is always a centre from which you are acting - right? You can see it. This is clear? When I concentrate, I am concentrating for some benefit, for some deep rooted motive, for something to gain and so on, which is, from a centre I am observing. Whereas in attention there is no centre at all. When you look at something immense, like the mountains, their extraordinary majesty, the beauty of the valley, the line against the blue sky, the beauty of it for a moment drives out the centre - haven't you noticed this? And you are for a second stunned by the greatness of it. Beauty is that perception when the centre is not. You understand? Like a child given a toy, he is so absorbed by the toy he is no longer being mischievous, he is completely with the toy. But he breaks the toy and he is back to himself. Right? So most of us are absorbed by various toys. And when the toys go we are back to ourselves. Now in the understanding of ourselves without the toy, that understanding without any direction, without any motive, that very understanding is the freedom from specialization which makes the whole of the brain active. Now the whole of the brain when it is active is total attention. Now I'll point out something else. We are always looking or feeling with one of the senses - right? I like the taste of something, or hear some music, but one never listen, one never looks at anything with all one's senses - right? Have you ever done it? Oh go on, sirs. When you look at a mountain, because of its majesty, your senses are fully in operation, therefore you forget yourself -you understand? Now when you look at the movement of the sea or the waters, or the sky and the slip of a moon, when you look at it totally, with all your senses, that is complete attention in which there is no centre. Which means that attention is total silence of the brain that is no longer chattering, completely still. Is it taking place with you now? Is your brain completely still? Because we are talking about a stillness, an absolute silence of the mind, of the brain. Because there are various forms of silence - the silence between two noises, the silence between two notes, the silence between thoughts - right? The silence when you go into a forest, where there is great danger, of a dangerous animal, everything becomes totally silent. I don't know if you have noticed - no you haven't, here you have killed everything. So this silence is not put together by thought, or through fear. When you are really frightened your whole body, your nerves, your brain becomes still - haven't you noticed it? Oh Lord! So this is not that quality of silence, it is entirely different. It is the operation of the whole of the brain with all its sense active, it is that freedom which brings about total silence of the mind. And it is only such a mind, such a brain - mind-brain, I don't want to divide it into two for the moment, we will stick to the brain - such a brain that is absolutely quiet, not brought about by effort, by determination, by desire, by motive, it is the freedom of order, which is virtue, righteousness in behaviour; and in that silence alone there is that which is nameless and timeless. That is meditation. AMSTERDAM 1ST PUBLIC TALK 19TH SEPTEMBER 1981 Most unfortunately there are only two talks and so we have to condense what we have to say about the whole existence of life. We are not doing any kind of propaganda; we are not persuading you to think in one particular direction, nor convince you about anything. We must be quite sure of that. We are not bringing something exotic from the East, all that nonsense that goes on in the name of the gurus and those people who write strange things after visiting India. We do not belong to that crowd at all. But we would like to point out that during these two talks we are thinking together; not merely listening to the talks, listening to some ideas, either agreeing or disagreeing with those ideas, we are not creating any kind of arguments, opinions, judgements, but together - I mean together, you and the speaker are going to observe what the world has become, not only in the Western world but also in the East where there is a great deal of poverty, great misery, an enormous amount of population, where the politicians, as here in the West, are incapable of dealing with what is happening. They are all politicians thinking in terms of tribalism. Tribalism has become the glorified nationalism. And we cannot therefore rely on any politicians, or on any leader, or on any books that have been written about religion. We cannot possibly rely on any of these people, neither the scientists, nor the biologists, nor the psychologists. They have not been able to solve our human problems. I am quite sure you agree to all that. Nor can we rely on any of the gurus. Unfortunately these people come to the West and exploit people and get very rich, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with religion. Having said all that, it is important that we, you and the speaker, think together. We mean by thinking together not merely accepting any kind of opinion or evaluation but together observe, not only externally, that is, what is happening in the world, but also what is happening to all of us inwardly, psychologically. Externally, outwardly there is great uncertainty, confusion, wars, or the threat of war. There are wars going on in some part of the world, human beings are killing each other. That is not happening in the West, here, but there is the threat of the nuclear war, the bomb, and the preparation for war. And we ordinary human beings do not seem to be able to do anything about all that. There are demonstrations, terrorism, hunger strikes and so on and so on. This is what is actually going on in the outward world; one tribal group against another tribal group; the West, America against another country and so on. The scientists are contributing to all that, and the philosophers, though they may talk against all that but inwardly they continue in terms of nationalism, according to their own particular career and so on. So that is what is actually going on in the outward world, which any intelligent human being can observe. And inwardly, in our own minds and in our own hearts, we are also very confused. There is no security, not only perhaps for ourselves but for our future, our future generation. Religions have divided human beings as the Christian, the Hindus, the Muslims and the Buddhists and so on. So considering all this, looking objectively, calmly without any prejudice, observing, it is naturally important that we think about all this together. Think together: not have opinions opposing another set of opinions; or one conclusion against another conclusion, one ideal against another ideal; but rather think together and see what we human beings can do. The crisis is not in the economic world, nor in the political world, but the crisis is in our consciousness. I think very few of us realize that: the crisis is in our mind and in our heart. That is, the crisis is in our consciousness. Our consciousness, which is our whole existence with our beliefs, with our conclusions, with our nationalism, with all the fears that one has, the pleasures, the apparently insoluble problem of sorrow, the thing that we call love, compassion, and the problem of death, if there is anything hereafter, and the question of meditation, beyond time, beyond thought, if there is something eternal. That is the content of our consciousness. That is the content of every human being, whether they live in this country or in Asia, in India or in America or Russia. The content of our consciousness is the common ground of all humanity. I think this must be made very clear right from the beginning. As a human being living in this part of the world, he suffers, not only physically but also inwardly. He is anxious, uncertain, fearful, confused, anxious, without any sense of deep security. It is the same in Asia, with every human being there, it is the same in India, it is the same in America, in Russia. So our consciousness is common to all mankind. Please do listen to this. You may be hearing this for the first time and so don't please discard it. Let's investigate it together, let's think about it together. Not when you get home but now. That your consciousness - what you think, what you feel, your reactions, your anxiety, your loneliness, your sorrow, your pain, the search for something that is not merely physical but goes beyond all thought, is the same as a person living in India or Russia or America. They go through the same problems as you do, the same problems of relationship with each other, man, woman. So we are all standing on the same ground, consciousness. Our consciousness is common to all of us. And therefore we are not individuals. Please do consider this. We have been trained, educated, religiously as well as scholastically, that we are separate souls, individuals, striving for ourselves, but that is an illusion because our consciousness is common to all mankind. So we are mankind. We are not separate individuals fighting for ourselves. This is logical, this is rational, sane. So we are not separate entities with separate psychological content, struggling for ourselves. But we are, each one of us is actually the rest of human kind. So logically, perhaps you will accept it intellectually, but if you feel that profoundly, then our whole activity undergoes a radical change. That is the first issue that we have to think together about: that our consciousness, the way we think, the way we live, perhaps more comfortably, affluently, with greater facility to travel and so on, apart from that inwardly, psychologically you are exactly similar to those who live thousands and thousands of miles away. And so we have to think about these problems together. First the problem of relationship: all life is relationship, the very existence is to be related. And when you observe what we have done with our relationship with each other, whether it is intimate or not, whether between two human beings, man and woman, in that relationship there is tremendous conflict, struggle - why? Why have human beings who have lived for over a million years, why have they not solved this problem of relationship? That is, two people living together without conflict, apparently we have not solved it. So if we could this morning perhaps for an hour, think together about it. Let's together observe actually what is that relationship between a man and a woman, because all society is based on relationship. There is no society if here is no relationship, society becomes then an abstraction. So we should together, this morning, consider together what actually our relationships are. If one observes it closely there is conflict between man and woman. The man has his own ideals, his own pursuits, his own ambition, he is always seeking success, to be somebody in the world. And also the woman is struggling, also wanting to be somebody, wanting to fulfil, to become. Each is pursuing his own direction. So it is like two railway lines running parallel, but never meeting, perhaps in bed but otherwise, if you observe closely they never meet actually, psychologically, inwardly - why? That is the question. When we ask why, we are always asking for the cause; we think in terms of causation, hoping thereby if we could understand the cause then perhaps we would change the effect. May I ask now - you all understand English I hope. If not I am talking to myself, which is rather absurd. One has not been in this country for ten years but one is glad to be back here again, but if we don't understand English then I am afraid our communication is not possible. So one hopes that you understand English as clearly as possible. Unfortunately one can speak in French or Italian but that would be equally difficult. So we are asking a very simple but very complex question: why is it that we human beings have not been able to solve this problem of relationship though we have lived on this earth for millions and millions of years? Is it because each one has his own particular image put together by thought, and our relationship is only based on two images; the image that the man creates about her and the image the woman creates about him? So we are in this relationship two images living together. That is a fact. If you observe very closely yourself, if one may point out, you have created an image about her, and she has created a picture, a verbal structure about you, the man. So relationship is between these two images. These images have been put together by thought. And thought is not related to love. Is thought love? Are all the memories of this relationship with each other, the remembrances, the pictures, the conclusions about each other, are if one observes closely without any prejudice, are the product of thought, are the result of various remembrances, experiences, irritations, loneliness. And so our relationship with each other is not love but the image that thought has put together. So we have to examine, if we are to understand the actuality of relationship, we have to understand the whole movement of thought because we live by thought, all our actions are based on thought; all the great buildings of the world are put together by thought, all the cathedrals, churches, temples and mosques are put there by thought, constructed by thought. And what is inside all these religious buildings - the inside, the figures, the symbols, the images - are all the inventions of thought. There is no refuting that. So thought has created not only the most marvellous architectural buildings and the contents of those buildings, but also it has created the instruments of war, the bomb, various forms of that bomb. Thought has also put together the surgeon, the marvellous instruments, so delicate in surgery. And also thought has made the carpenter, he must study the wood, the instruments and so on. So thought has done all this. The content of a church and the surgeon, the expert engineer who builds a beautiful bridge, are all the result of thought. There is no refuting that however much one may argue. So one has to examine what is thought. Why human beings live on thought. Why thought has brought about such chaos in the world -war, lack of relationship with each other, the great capacity of thought with its extraordinary energy. And also what thought has done through millions of years, bringing sorrow for mankind. Please observe this together, let's examine it together. Don't let's oppose what the speaker is saying but let's examine what the speaker is saying together so we understand what is actually happening to all human beings. We are destroying ourselves. So we have to go very carefully into the question of thought. Thought is the response of memory. Memory is not only the remembrance of things past but also thought which projects itself as hope in the future. So thought is the response of memory, memory is knowledge, knowledge is experience. That is, there is experience, from experience there is knowledge, from knowledge there is memory, or remembrance, and from memory you act. So from that action you learn, which is further knowledge. So we live in this cycle - experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action. In this cycle human beings live, always living within the field of knowledge. I hope this is not boring you. If you are bored, I am sorry. If you want something romantic, sentimental, something that pleases you, I hope you won't listen. But what we are talking about is very serious. It is not something for the weekend, for a casual listening because we are concerned with the radical change of human consciousness. So we have to think about all this, look together, see if it is possible why human beings who have lived on this earth for so many millions of years are still as we are. We may have advanced technologically, better communication, better transportation, hygiene and so on, but inwardly we are the same, more or less; unhappy, uncertain, lonely, carrying the burden of sorrow endlessly. And any serious man confronted with this challenge must respond, he can't take it casually, turn his back on it. That is why this meeting and tomorrow morning's meeting is very, very serious because we have to apply our minds and our hearts to find out if it is possible to radically bring about a mutation in our consciousness and therefore in our action and behaviour. So as we were saying, thought is born of experience, knowledge and so there is nothing whatsoever sacred about thought. It is materialistic, it is a process of matter, thinking. And we have relied on that, on thought to solve all our problems, political, religious, relationship and so on. And our brains, our minds are conditioned, educated to solve problems. Thought has created the problem and then our brains, our minds, are trained to solve problems. If you have an engineering problem you solve it; a problem of disease one solves it and so on. Our minds are trained to solve problems. These problems are created by thought psychologically, inwardly. You follow what is happening? Thought creates the problem psychologically and the mind is trained to solve problems, so thought creating the problem thought then tries to solve the problem. So it is caught in the same old process, a routine. So problems are becoming more and more complex, more and more insoluble. So we must find, if it is at all possible, if there is a different way of approaching this life, not through thought because thought has not solved our problems. On the contrary thought has brought about greater complexity. We must find if it is possible, or if it is not possible, if there is a different dimension, a different approach to life altogether. And that is why it is important to understand the nature of thought, the nature of our thinking. Our thinking is based on remembrance, remembrance of things past. Which is, thinking about what happened a week ago, thinking about it modified in the present, and projected into the future. This is the movement of our life, which is an actuality. So knowledge has become all important for us but knowledge is never complete. Knowledge about anything is still incomplete, will always be incomplete. Therefore knowledge always goes with ignorance, knowledge always lives within the shadow of ignorance. That is a fact. It is not the speaker's invention, or conclusion, but that is so. So love is not knowledge. Love is not remembrance. Love is not desire or pleasure. Desire, pleasure, remembrance are based on thought. So our relationship with each other, however close, however near, if you look at it closely, is based on remembrance, which is thought. So in that relationship actually, though one may say you love your wife or your husband or your girl friend and so on, it is actually based on remembrance, which is thought. Therefore in that there is no love. Would you actually see that fact? Or do we say, 'What terrible things you are saying. I do love my wife' - but is that so? Can there be love when there is jealousy, possessiveness, attachment, when each one is pursuing his own particular ambition, greed, envy, direction, like two parallel lines never meeting. Is that love? So one has to enquire if one is to pursue the problem of existence seriously, profoundly, one must examine what is desire. Why human beings have been driven by desire. Can the speaker go on with all this? Sorry, you have to bear this but it is your fault that you are here! And perhaps also the speaker's! I hope we are thinking together, observing together, as two friends walking along that road and seeing what is around us; not only what is very close, what is immediately perceived, but also what one sees in the distance; because we are taking the journey together, perhaps affectionately, hand in hand, or as two friends amicably examining the very complex problem of life in which there is no leader, there is no guru, because when one sees actually that our consciousness is the consciousness of the rest of mankind then we realize we are both the guru and the disciple, the teacher as well as the pupil, because we are all that, it is all in our consciousness. That is a tremendous realization. So that as one begins to understand oneself deeply one becomes a light to oneself and not depend on anybody, on any book, on any authority, including that of the speaker, so that we are capable of understanding this whole problem of living and be a light to ourselves. So we must examine together desire, because if desire is love then desire creates problems. Love has no problems, and to understand the nature of love, compassion, with its own intelligence, we must understand together what is desire. Desire is extraordinary vitality, extraordinary persuasion, drive, achievement, and the whole process of becoming, success, is based on desire - desire which makes us compare with each other, imitate, conform. So it is very important in understanding the whole nature of ourselves to understand what desire is, not to suppress it, not to run away from it, not to transcend it, but to understand it, to look at it, to see the whole momentum of it. We can do that together, which doesn't mean that you are learning from the speaker. The speaker has nothing to teach you. Please realize this. The speaker is merely acting as a mirror in which you can see yourself. And then when you see yourself clearly you can discard the mirror, it has no importance, you can break it up. So to understand desire requires attention, seriousness, it is a very complex problem: why human beings have lived on this extraordinary energy of desire as the energy of thought. What is the relationship between thought and desire? What is the relationship between desire and will? Because we live a great deal by will. So what is the movement, the source, the origin of desire? If one observes oneself one sees the origin, the beginning of desire begins with sensation, sensory responses, sensory responses with its contact, sensation, then thought creates the image, at that moment begins desire. Please let's look at it very closely. One sees something in the window, a robe, a shirt, a car, a scarf, whatever it is. You see it: sensation, then touching it; and then thought saying, "If I put that shirt or that dress on how nice it will look" - it creates the image and then begins desire. Right? Do you follow all this? See it for oneself, it is fairly simple. You see something very nice, there is the sensation crated through nervous responses, optical response, then thought saying, "How nice I would look with that dress" - or shirt, or coat, or whatever it is, then desire begins. So the relationship between desire and thought is very close. If there was no thought there would only be sensation; not all the problems, created by desire. I hope we are meeting each other. So desire is the quintessence of will. So thought dominates sensation and creates the urge, the desire to possess. Right? Am I talking to myself, or are you all in it? Perhaps all this may be new to you, but we have to think about all these things together, not as separate individuals with his own particular conclusions but together observe all this and be very clear about all this. So where in relationship thought operates, which is remembrance, creating the image about each other, where there is that image created by thought there can be no love. Or where there is desire, sexual or other forms of desire, prevents - because desire is part of thought - prevents love. And also we should consider in our examination together the nature of fear, because we are all caught in this terrible thing called fear. We don't seem to be able to resolve it. We live with it, become accustomed to it, or escape from it; through amusement, through worship, through various forms of entertainment, religious and otherwise. So we must together examine again the nature and the structure of fear. Please, fear is common to all of us, whether you live in this tidy, clean country, or in India where it is untidy, dirty, overpopulated, and so on. It is the same problem, fear. And man has lived with it for thousands and thousands of years, and we haven't been able to resolve it. Is it possible - one is asking this question most seriously - is this at all possible to be totally completely free of fear, not only physical forms of fear but much more subtle forms of fear inwardly. Conscious fears and the deep undiscovered fears, fears that are deeply in our consciousness which we have never even examined that they are there. Examination does not mean analysis. I know it is the fashion that if you have any problem turn to the analyst. I hope there aren't any here! And the analyst is like you and me, only he has got a certain technique. But we must examine what is observation and analysis. Analysis implies there is an analyser. Is the analyser different from that which he analyses? Or the analyser is the analysed? You understand the question? The analyser is the analysed. That is an obvious fact. I am analysing myself but who is the analyser in me who says, "I must analyse"? It is still the analyser separating himself from the analysed, and then examining that which is going to be analysed. Right? So the analyser is that which he is examining, analysing. Both are the same. It is a trick played by thought. So when we observe there is no analysis, merely to observe things as they are. To observe actually what is, not to analyse 'what is' because in the process of analysis one can deceive oneself. And if you like to play that game you can go on endlessly until you die, analysing, and never bringing about a radical transformation within oneself. Whereas observation, to look, to look at the present world as it is, not as a Dutchman, Englishman, or French or this or that, but to see actually what is happening: that is observation, pure observation of things as they are. So we have to examine or observe what fear is, not what is the cause of fear, we will look at that presently, not what is the cause of fear which implies analysis, going further, further back, the origin of fear, we will find that out in a minute; but to learn the art of observing, not translating what you observe, or interpreting what you observe but just to observe, as you would observe a lovely flower. The moment you tear it to pieces the flower is not. That is what analysis is. But to observe the beauty of a flower, the light in a cloud, the evening light, a tree by itself in a forest, just to observe it. So similarly if we can to observe fear. What is the root of fear, not the various aspects of fear? Right? Can we go on with this? That is, suppose I am afraid. Suppose - I am not - suppose I am afraid - I must make this point very clear. What the speaker says he lives, otherwise he wouldn't get up on a platform and talk about it. He has done it for sixty years, he wouldn't deceive himself, one can, but he has gone into it very, very deeply. So what he says is what to him is a fact, not just an illusion, an escape. So we are asking if it is at all possible to be free of fear, absolutely. Psychologically, inwardly, what is the root of fear? What does fear mean? Fear of something that has given you pain, fear of what might happen. That is, the past or what might happen in the future. Right? Not what might happen now because now there is no fear. But you can see for yourself fear is a time process. Right? Fear of something that has happened last week, an incident which has brought psychological pain, or physical pain, and the fear that it might happen again tomorrow; losing a job, not achieving something you want, not achieving illumination and all that stuff. So fear is a movement in time. Right? A movement from the past through the present, modifying itself to the future. So the origin of fear is thought. Right? And thought is time, because thought is the accumulation of knowledge through experience, memory, response of memory, thought, action. So thought, time, are one, and thought, time, is the root of fear. Right? That is fairly obvious. It is so. Now it is not a question of stopping thought or time. Of course it would be impossible to stop it because who is the entity that says, "I must stop thought"? Which would be absurd because that entity is part of thought. Are you following all this? So this idea of stopping thought is impossible. That implies a controller who is trying to control thought. The controller is created by thought. So please just listen to this, just observe. The observation is an action in itself, not that one must do something about fear. You get it? I wonder if you understand this? Look: suppose I am afraid about something or other, darkness, my wife running away, or I am lonely, or this or that. I am frightened, deeply. You come along and tell me, you explain to me the whole movement of fear, the origin of fear, which is time. I had pain, or I went through some accident, incident that has caused fear, recorded it in the brain and that memory of that past incident might happen again, and therefore there is fear. So you have explained this to me. And I listen very carefully to your explanation, I see the logic of it, the sanity of it, I don't reject it, I listen. And that means listening becomes an art. I don't reject what you are saying, nor accept, but observe. So I observe that what you tell me about time, thought, is actual. I don't say, "I must stop time and thought", but you have explained to me, don't do that, but just observe how fear arises, it is a movement of thought, time. Just observe this movement. And don't move away from it, don't escape from it, live with it, look at it, put your energy in your looking. Then you will see that fear begins to resolve because we have done nothing about it, we have just observed, you have given your attention to it. That very attention is like bringing light on fear. Attention means giving all your energy in that observation. Is this clear somewhat? Q: It is important also... K: Sir, unfortunately we have only two talks, I wish there were more talks. If you begin to ask questions we will come to something different. But I hope you don't mind if I go on. May I? So observation without analysis implies giving your total attention to a problem. The problem which is relationship; the problem which is fear; and also we have to go into the problem of pleasure. May I ask what time it is? Q: Quarter past twelve. K: Quarter past twelve. We have talked for an hour. Do you want to continue another half hour, twenty minutes? Can you bear it? Audience: Yes. K: It's up to you, not to me, sirs. Also - sir, would you mind not taking photographs. Please, this is very serious all this. This is not something you play with for a day and drop it. It concerns our lives, our whole existence. And if you are at all serious we must give our attention to all this. Why is it that man has pursued pleasure? Please ask yourself why. Is pleasure opposite to pain? Please go into it a little bit. We have all had pain of different kinds, both physical and psychological. Psychologically most of us from childhood have been wounded, hurt, that is pain. And the consequences of that pain has been to withdraw, isolate oneself, not to be further hurt. We are hurt from childhood, through school, by comparing ourselves with somebody else who is more clever. We have hurt ourselves, and others have hurt us through various forms of scoldings, hurting, saying something brutal, terrorizing us. And there is this deep hurt with all its consequences, which is isolation, resistance, more and more withdrawing. And the opposite of that we think is pleasure. Pain and the opposite of it is pleasure. Is that so? So we have to examine closely if you have the energy, if you have the time, if you want to, is goodness opposite of that which is not good? If goodness is the opposite, then that goodness contains its own opposite. Right? Therefore it is not good. Goodness is something totally separate from that which it is not. Right? So is pleasure - please just listen to this if you don't mind, one is asking this most respectfully - is pleasure something opposite of pain? Or it is a contrast? Right? And we are always pursuing the contrast, the opposite. So one is asking, is pleasure separate entirely, like goodness, which is not pleasure? You understand? Or is pleasure tainted by pain? So when you look closely at pleasure it is always remembrance, isn't it? One never says when one is happy, "How happy I am", it is always after, the remembrance of that thing which gave you pleasure and the remembrance of that pleasure; like a sunset, when you look at the glory of the evening, full of that extraordinary light, it gives great pleasure, great delight. Then that is remembered, then pleasure is born. So pleasure is part of thought too. It is so obvious. So the next problem is - it is very complex, like all our human problems - is it possible to end all sorrow? Because where there is sorrow there is no love. Where there is sorrow obviously there cannot be intelligence. We will go into that word, which is a very complex word, intelligence. You know the understanding of relationship, fear, pleasure and sorrow, is to bring order in our house. Without order you cannot possible meditate. You understand that word? Unfortunately that word has been brought to the West by the Eastern people. Now the speaker puts meditation at the end of the talks because there is no possibility of right meditation if you have not put your house, your psychological house, in order. If the house is in disorder, psychological house, what you are, if that house is not in order what is the point of meditating? It is just an escape. It leads to all kinds of illusions. And you may sit cross legged or stand on your head for the rest of your life but that is not meditation. Meditation must begin with bringing about complete order in your house; order in your relationship, order in one's desires, pleasure and so on. And also one of our causes of disorder in our life is sorrow. This is a common factor, common reality in all human beings. Everyone goes through this tragedy of sorrow, here or in the Asiatic world or in the Western world. Again this is a common thing we all share. There is not only so-called personal sorrow but there is the sorrow of mankind, sorrow which wars have brought about; five thousand years of historical record, every year there has been a war, killing each other, violence, terror, brutality, maiming people, people have no hands, eyes and so on, the horrors and the brutality of wars, which has brought incalculable misery to mankind. It is not only one's own sorrow but the sorrow of mankind, the sorrow when you see a man who has nothing whatsoever, just a piece of cloth and for the rest of one's life he is going to be that way. Not in these Western countries but in the Asiatic world it is like that. And when you see that person there is sorrow. There is also sorrow when people are caught in illusion; like going from one guru to another, which is escaping from yourself. That is a sorrow, to observe this. The clever people going off to the East, writing books about it, paging some guru, and we all fall for that nonsense. That is also sorrow. Sorrow that comes when you see what the politicians are doing in the world. Thinking in terms of tribalism, that is also sorrow. So there is personal sorrow and the vast cloud of sorrow of mankind. Sorrow is not something romantic, sentimental, illogical, it is there. My sons dies and it has shattered one's life. And we have lived with this sorrow from time measureless. And apparently one has not resolved this problem. When one suffers one seeks consolation, which is an escape from the fact of sorrow. When there is that grief, you try every form of amusement, escape, but it is always there. And apparently humanity has not resolved it. And we are asking the question: whether it is possible to be free of it completely? Not avoiding it, not seeking consolation, not escaping into some fanciful theory, but to live with it. Just let's understand what we mean by that word to 'live with it', not to let it become a habit like most people do; they live with nationalities, which is most destructive, they live with their own separate religious conclusions, they live with their own fanciful ideas and ideals, and that again brings their own conflict. So if you live with something, to live with sorrow, not accept it, not become habituated to it; that is, to look at it, to observe it without any escape, without any question of trying to go beyond it, just to hold it in your hand and look. Which is, sorrow is also part of this tremendous sense of loneliness, you may have many friends, you may be married, you may have all kinds of things but inwardly there is this feeling of complete loneliness. And that is part of sorrow. To observe that loneliness without any direction, without trying to go beyond it, without trying to find a substitute for it; to live with it, not worship it, not become psychotic about it. Which means to give all your attention to that pain, to that grief, to that sorrow. So when my son dies, or somebody whom I think I love, dies, there is great grief, and without running away from it just to... It is a great thing to understand suffering because then where there is freedom from sorrow there is compassion. And one is not compassionate as long as you are anchored to any belief, to your particular form of religious symbol, compassion is freedom from sorrow. And where there is compassion there is love, and with that compassion goes intelligence - not the intelligence of thought with its cunning, with its adjustments, with its capacity to put up with anything. Compassion means the ending of sorrow and only then is there intelligence. We will continue tomorrow if you don't mind, taking about death, what happens, if anything happens after death, and what is the significance of death, and what is meditation. That is if you can bear it until tomorrow. (Clapping) Please don't clap. May I most respectfully request that you don't clap. By clapping you are not encouraging me. You are clapping because you understand it for yourself. AMSTERDAM 2ND PUBLIC TALK 20TH SEPTEMBER 1981 I am afraid this is the last talk. Like two friends sitting in the park on a lovely day talking about life, talking about their problems, investigating seriously the very nature of their existence and asking themselves seriously why life has become such a great problem; why, though intellectually you are very sophisticated, yet our daily life is such a grind, without any meaning, except survival, which again is rather doubtful, why life, everyday existence, has become such a torture. One may go to church, follow some leader politically or religiously, but the daily life is always a turmoil, though there are certain periods which are occasionally joyful, happy, but there is always a cloud of darkness about our life. And these two friends talking together, as we are, you and the speaker, we are talking over together in a friendly manner, perhaps with affection, with care, with concern, whether it is at all possible to live a life, our daily life without a single problem. And though we are highly educated, have certain careers, specialized, yet we have these unresolved struggles, pain, suffering, joy and sometimes a great feeling of not being totally selfish. And together, if we can this morning, go into this question why human beings live as we do live - go to the office from nine o'clock until five or six for the next fifty years; or be occupied all the time, not only with our own problems, but also the brain, the mind is constantly occupied, there is never a quietness, there is never peace, there is always this occupation with something or other. And that is our life. That is our daily, monotonous rather lonely insufficient life. And we try to escape from it through religion, through various forms of entertainment. At the end of the day we are still where we were for the last thousand and thousand years. We seem to have changed very little psychologically, inwardly. And our problems increase, and always there is the fear of old age, disease, some accident that will put us out. So this is our existence, from childhood until we die, either voluntarily or involuntarily die. And we don't seem to have been able to solve that problem also, the problem of living and the problem of dying. Specially as one grows older one remembers all the things that have been; the times of pleasure, the times of pain, the times of sorrow, the times of tears. But always there is this unknown thing called death of which most of us are frightened. And as two friends sitting in the park on a bench, not in this hall with all this light and so on, which is rather ugly, but sitting on a bench in the park with sunlight, and the dappling light, the sun coming through the leaves, the ducks on the canal and the beauty of the earth, talking over together. And that's what we are going to do, talking over together as two friends who have had a long life, a long serious life with all the troubles; the troubles of sex, loneliness, despair, depression, anxiety, uncertainty, a sense of meaninglessness to all this. And there is always at the end of all this, death. And in talking about it, either we intellectually approach it; that is, rationalize it, say it is inevitable, don't be frightened, or escape through some form of belief, the hereafter as the Asiatics believe, reincarnation, or if you are highly intellectual this is the end of all things, end of all our existence, our experiences, our memories, tender, delightful, plentiful. And also with it goes the great pain and the suffering. What does it all mean, this life which is really, if one examines very closely, rather meaningless? One can intellectually, verbally construct a meaning to life, but the way we live has very little meaning actually. So there is thing called living and dying. That is all we know. Everything apart from that becomes a theory, a speculation; or a pursuit of a belief in which one finds some kind of security, hope. But those beliefs are also very shallow, rather meaningless, as all beliefs are. Or you have ideals projected by thought, and struggle to achieve those ideals. This is our life; whether we are very young, full of vitality, fun, a sense that one can do almost anything, but even then with youth, middle age and old age, there is always this question of death, dying. Can we, this morning, talk over together this? Please, as we pointed out yesterday, we are thinking about it together. You are not merely, if one may point out, listening to a series of words, to some ideas, but rather together, I mean together, investigate this whole problem of living and dying. And either one does it with one's heart, with one's whole mind, or partially, superficially, and so with very little meaning. So first of all we should look: our brains never act fully, completely, we only use a very small part of our brain. That part is the structure of thought. That part being in itself a part and therefore incomplete, as thought is incomplete, so the brain functions within a very narrow area, depending on our senses, which again our senses are partial, never all the senses free, awakened. I do not know if you have not experimented with watching something with all your senses; watching the sea, the birds and the moonlight at night on a green lawn; if you have not watched partially or with all your senses fully awakened. The two states are entirely different. When you watch something partially you are establishing more the separative, egotistic attitude and living. But when you watch that moonlight on the water making a silvery path with all your senses, that is, with your mind, with your heart, with your nerves, giving all your attention to that observation, then you will see for yourself that there is no centre from which you are observing. So can we observe what is living, the actuality, and what does it mean to die - together? Our life, daily life, is a process of remembrances. Our brain, mind is entirely memory. Right? Are we together in it? You see the difficulty is that I am not sure that we are understanding each other. I don't know how much English you know, and that is not an insulting statement, whether we understand English completely, what the speaker is saying. Or you are partially listening, partially understanding English, and so attention wandering off and so one looks rather dazed from here! The language that the speaker is using is very ordinary non-specialized language. It is simple English. So I hope we understand each other. We are saying we are - we, our ego, our personality, our whole structure - entirely put together as memory, we are memory. Right? Please this is subject to investigation, don't accept it. Observe it, listen. The speaker is saying, the you, the ego, the me, is altogether memory. There is no spot or space in which there is clarity. Or you can believe, hope, have faith that there is something in you which is uncontaminated, which is god, which is a spark of that which is timeless, you can believe all that. But that belief is merely illusory; all beliefs are. But the fact is that our whole existence, we are entirely memory, a remembrance. There is no spot or space inwardly which is not memory. You can investigate this, if you have time, perhaps not this morning because we have a lot to cover, but if you are enquiring seriously into yourself you will see that the 'me', the ego, is all memory, remembrances. And that is our life. We function, live from memory. And for us death is the ending of that memory. Right? Am I speaking to myself, or are we all together in this? You see the speaker is used to talking in the open, under trees, or in a vast tent without these glaring lights; and one can then have an intimate communication with each other. As a matter of fact there is only you and me talking together, not all this enormous audience in a vast hall, but you and I sitting on the banks of a river, on a bench, talking over this thing together. And one is saying to the other, we are nothing but memory, and it is to that memory that we are attached: my house, my property, my experience, my relationship, the office I go to, the factory, the skill I like being able to gather during a certain period of time; I am all that. And to that, thought is attached. That's what we call living. And this attachment, with all its problems, because when you are attached there is fear of losing, we are attached because we are lonely, deep abiding loneliness which is suffocating, isolating, depressing. And the more we are attached to another, which is again memory, the other is a memory - my wife, my husband, my children, are physically different from me, psychologically the memory of my wife, I am attached to that, to the name, to the form, my existence is attachment to that memory which I have gathered all my life. Where there is attachment I recognize, observe there is corruption. When I am attached to a belief, hoping in that attachment to that belief there will be certain security, both psychologically as well as physically, that attachment not only prevents further examination, but I am frightened to examine even when I am greatly attached to something - to a person, to an idea, to an experience. So corruption exists where there is an attachment. And one's whole life is a movement within the field of the known. This is obvious. And death means the ending of the known. Right? Ending of the physical organism, ending of all the memory of which I am. I am nothing but memory, memory being the known. And I am frightened to let all that go, which means death. I think that is fairly clear, at least verbally. Intellectually you can accept that. Logically, sanely, that is a fact. So the question is: why human beings throughout the world, though they believe, some of them, in the Asiatic world, in the rebirth of themselves in the next life; the next life being much more dignified, more prosperous, better houses, better position. So those who believe in reincarnation, that is, the soul, the ego, the 'me', which is a bundle of memories being born next life; the next life is a better life because if I behave rightly now, conduct myself righteously, live a life without violence, without greed and so on, the next life I will have a better life, better position. But that is, the next life, a belief in reincarnation, is just a belief because those who have this strong belief don't live a righteous life today. Right? You are following all this? It is just an idea that the next life will be marvellous. The beauty of the next life must correspond to the beauty of the present life. But the present life is so tortuous, so demanding, so complex, we forget the belief and struggle, deceit, hypocrisy, every form of vulgarity and so on. That is one aspect of death, that is, believing in something next life. But those who do not accept such theory, though they are trained to compile evidence of reincarnation, which is rather absurd too - you understand all this - because what is it that is going to reincarnate? What is it that has continuity? You understand my question? Are we talking together? What is it that has continuity in life, in our daily life? It is the remembrance of yesterday's experience, pleasures, fears, anxieties and there is that continuity right through life unless we break it and move away from that current. Right? Now the question is: is it possible while one is ling, with all the turmoil, with that energy, capacity, to end, say for example, attachment? Because that is what is going to happen when you die. You may be attached to your wife, to your husband, to your property - not to property, that is dangerous - we are attached to some belief, belief in god. That belief is merely a projection, or an invention of thought, but we are attached to it because it gives a certain feeling of security however illusory it is, we are attached to that. Death means the ending of that attachment. Now while living can we end voluntarily, easily, without any effort, that form of attachment? Which means dying to something we have known. You follow? Can we do this? Because that is living and dying together, not separated by a hundred years, or fifty years, waiting for some disease to push us off. But living with all our vitality, energy, intellectual capacity, with the greater feeling, to end certain conclusions, certain idiosyncrasies, experiences, attachments, hurts, to end it. That is, while living also living with death. You understand this? Are we meeting each other? So that death is not something far away, death is not something that is at the end of one's life, through some accident, disease, old age, but rather living, to all the things of memory, ending that, which is death. That means death is not separate from living. Also, as we said yesterday, we should consider together, sitting on the banks of a river on a bench, water flowing, clear, not muddied, polluted water, seeing all the movement of the waves pursuing each other down the river, we also as two friends sitting there, talk together about what is religion. Why has religion played such a great part in our lives from the ancient of times until today? What is a religious mind like? What does the world 'religion' actually mean? Because historically, not that one has read a great deal about it but one has observed how civilizations disappear, to be reborn again with a different religion, religions have brought about new civilizations, new culture; not the technological world, not the computers, the submarines, the war materials; nor the businessman, nor the economists; but religious people throughout the world have brought about a tremendous change. So one must enquire together what we mean by that world 'religion'. What is its significance, whether it is mere superstition, illogical, meaningless? Or there is something far greater, something much more infinitely beautiful. And to find that is it not necessary - we are talking over together as two friends - is it not necessary to be free of all the things thought has invented as religion? You understand my question? I want to find out what is the significance of religion. What is the depth of it? What is its end? Because man has always sought something beyond the physical existence. He has always looked, searched, asked, suffered, tortured himself to find out if there is something which is not of time, which is not of thought, which is not belief or faith. And to find that out one must be absolutely free, otherwise if you are anchored to a particular form of belief that very belief will prevent investigation into what is eternal, if there is such a thing as eternity which is beyond all time, beyond all measure. So one must be free, if one is serious in the enquiry into what is religion, one must be free of all the things that thought has invented, put together about that which is considered religious. That is, all the things that Hinduism has invented, with its superstitions, with its beliefs, with its images, and the ancient literature as the Upanishads and so on, one must be completely free of all that. If one is attached to all that then it is impossible, naturally, to discover that which is original. You understand the problem? That is, if my mind, my brain is conditioned by the Hindu superstition, beliefs, dogmas, idolatry, with all the ancient tradition, my mind then is anchored to that, therefore it cannot move, it is not free. Therefore one must be free completely from all that - being a Hindu. Right? Similarly, one must be free totally from all the inventions of thought, as the rituals, dogmas, beliefs, symbols, the saviours and so on of Christianity. That may be rather difficult, that is coming near home. Or if you go to Ceylon or the Tibetan, the North, Buddhism, with all their idolatry, as the idolatry of Christianity, they too have this problem: being attached as security to the things thought has invented. So all religions, whether Christianity, Muslim, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, they are the movement of thought continued through time, through literature, through symbols, through things made by the hand or by the mind, all that is considered religious in the modern world. To the speaker that is not religion. To the speaker it is a form of illusion, comforting, satisfying, romantic, sentimental but not actual, because religion must affect life, the way we live, that is the significance of life. Because only when there is order, as we talked about yesterday, in our life. Order is something that is totally disassociated with disorder. We live in disorder, that is, in conflict, contradiction, say one thing, do another, think one thing and act another, that is contradiction. Where there is contradiction which is division, there must be disorder. And a religious mind is completely without disorder. That is the foundation of religious life, not all the nonsense that is going on with the gurus with their idiocies. You know it is a most extraordinary thing: many gurus have come to see the speaker; many of them because they think I attack the gurus. You understand? They want to persuade me not to attack. They say, what you are saying and what you are living is the absolute truth, but not for us, because we must help those people who are not as fully advanced as you are. You see the game they play. You understand? So one wonders why the Western world, or some of the Western people go to India, follow these gurus, get initiated - whatever that may mean - put on different robes and think they are terribly religious. But strip them of their robes, stop them and enquire into their life, they are just like you and me. So the idea of going somewhere to find enlightenment, changing your name to some Sanskrit name, seems so strangely absurd and romantic without any reality, but thousands are doing it. Probably it is a form of amusement without much meaning. I am -the speaker is not attacking. Please let's understand: we are not attacking anything, we are just observing; observing the absurdity of the human mind, how easily we are caught, we are so gullible. So a religious mind is a very factual mind, it deals with facts. That is, facts being what is actually happening, with the world outside, and the world inside. The world outside is the expression of the world inside, there is no division between the outer and the inner - that is too long to go into. So a religious life is a life of order, diligence, dealing with what is actually within oneself, without any illusion so that one leads an orderly, righteous life. When that is established, unshakably then we can begin to enquire what is meditation. Perhaps that word did not exist about twenty years ago, or thirty years ago in the Western world. The Eastern gurus have brought it over here. There is the Tibetan meditation, Zen meditation, the Hindu meditation, the particular meditation of a particular guru, the meditation of yoga, sitting cross legged, breathing, you know, all that. All that is called meditation. We are not denigrating the people who do all this. We are just pointing out how absurd meditation has become. The Christian world believe in contemplation, giving themselves over to the will of god, grace and so on. They have the same thing in the Asiatic world, only they use different words in Sanskrit, but it is the same thing: man seeking some kind of everlasting security, happiness, peace, not finding it on earth, hoping it exists somewhere or other, the desperate search for something imperishable. This has been the search of man from time beyond measure. The ancient Egyptians, the ancient Hindus, Buddhists and so on, and some of the Christians, have followed this. So to enquire together, to go into, deeply into, what is meditation and whether there is anything called sacred, holy: not the thing that thought has invented as being holy, that is not holy. What thought creates is not holy, is not sacred because it is based on knowledge, and knowledge being incomplete, and whatever thought invents, how can that be sacred. But we worship that which thought has invented all over the world. So together, having established, some partially, others completely, totally, order in their life, in their behaviour, in which there is no contradiction whatsoever, having established that, and rejected, totally rejected, all the various forms of meditation, their systems, their practices because when you practise you are repeating over and over and over again, like a pianist when he practises he may be practising the wrong note. You understand? So it is easy to conform to a pattern, to obey something somebody has said that will help you to reach the highest state of whatever it is. So you practise, you accept systems because you want to get something other than 'what is'. Now we are saying quite the contrary. There is no system, no practice; but the clarity of perception of a mind that is free, which has no direction, no choice, but free to observe. Most meditations have this problem, which is controlling thought. The one who practises is different from that which he is practising. I hope you are following all this, if it interests you. So most meditation, whether the Zen, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian, or the latest guru, is to control your thought because through control you centralize, you bring all your energy to a particular point. That is, concentrate. Which is, there is a controller different from the controlled. Are you following all this? Which is, the controller is the past, which is still thought, still memory, and that which he is controlling is still thought, which is wandering off, so there is conflict. You are sitting quietly and thought goes off, you want to concentrate, like a schoolboy looking out of the window and the teacher says, "Don't look out of the window, concentrate on your book". And we do the same thing. So one has to learn the fact, the controller is the controlled. Is that clear? Must all this be explained, step by step? That is - I'll explain, please. The controller, the thinker, the experiencer, we think is different from the controlled, from the movement of thought, from the experiencer and the experience, we think these two are different movements. But if you observe closely, the thinker is the thought. Thought has made the thinker separate from thought, which then he says, I must control. You are following all this? This is so logical, so sane. So when the controller is the controlled, then you remove totally conflict. Conflict exists only when there is division. Right? Between you and the Germans, between the Israelis and the Arabs. Where there is nationalistic, or economic, or social division there must be conflict. So inwardly where there is the division between the observer, the one who witnesses, the one who experiences is different from that which he experiences, there must be conflict. And our life is conflict because we live with this division. But this division is fallacious, is not real, it has become our habit, our culture, to control. We never see the controller is the controlled. Right? Do you get all this? So when one realizes that, not verbally, not idealistically, not as a utopian state for which you have to struggle, but to observe it actually in one's life that the controller is the controlled, the thinker is the thought, then the whole pattern of our thinking undergoes a radical change because there is no conflict. And that is absolutely necessary if you are meditating because meditation demands a mind that is highly compassionate. And therefore highly intelligent, the intelligence which is born out of love, not out of cunning thought. So meditation means the establishment of order in our daily life, in which there is no contradiction. Then rejecting totally all the systems, meditations, all that, because the mind must be completely free, without direction, and also it means a mind that is completely silent. Is that possible? Because we are chattering endlessly; the moment you leave this place I know you will start chattering. So our minds are everlastingly occupied, chattering, thinking, struggling, and so there is no space. Space is necessary to have silence. For a mind that is practising, struggling, wanting to be silent is never silent. But when it sees that silence is absolutely necessary, not the silence projected by thought, not the silence between two notes, between two noises, between two wars, but the silence of order. And when there is that absolute silence, not cultivated silence, which is what must meditations try to do, cultivate silence; that is, cultivate thought which is never silent. I don't know if you see the absurdity of it. So when there is that silence then one discovers - sorry, one doesn't discover - in that silence truth, which has no path to it, exists. Truth then is timeless, sacred, incorruptible. That is meditation, that is a religious mind. ON LOVE THE DEMAND TO be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. This seeking for security is inviting insecurity. Have you ever found security in any of your relationships? Have you? Most of us want the security of loving and being loved, but is there love when each one of us is seeking his own security, his own particular path? We are not loved because we don't know how to love. What is love? The word is so loaded and corrupted that I hardly like to use it. Everybody talks of love - every magazine and newspaper and every missionary talks everlastingly of love. I love my country, I love my king, I love some book, I love that mountain, I love pleasure, I love my wife, I love God. Is love an idea? If it is, it can be cultivated, nourished, cherished, pushed around, twisted in any way you like. When you say you love God what does it mean? It means that you love a projection of your own imagination, a projection of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you think is noble and holy; so to say, `I love God', is absolute nonsense. When you worship God you are worshipping yourself - and that is not love. Because we cannot solve this human thing called love we run away into abstractions. Love may be the ultimate solution to all man's difficulties, problems and travails, so how are we going to find out what love is? By merely defining it? The church has defined it one way, society another, and there are all sorts of deviations and perversions. Adoring someone, sleeping with someone, the emotional exchange, the companionship - is that what we mean by love? That has been the norm, the pattern, and it has become so tremendously personal, sensuous, and limited that religions have declared that love is something much more than this. In what they call human love they see there is pleasure, competition, jealousy, the desire to possess, to hold, to control and to interfere with another's thinking, and knowing the complexity of all this they say there must be another kind of love, divine, beautiful, untouched, uncorrupted. Throughout the world, so-called holy men have maintained that to look at a woman is something totally wrong: they say you cannot come near to God if you indulge in sex, therefore they push it aside although they are eaten up with it. But by denying sexuality they put out their eyes and cut out their tongues for they deny the whole beauty of the earth. They have starved their hearts and minds; they are dehydrated human beings; they have banished beauty because beauty is associated with woman. Can love be divided into the sacred and the profane, the human and the divine, or is there only love? Is love of the one and not of the many? If I say,`I love you', does that exclude the love of the other? Is love personal or impersonal? Moral or immoral? Family or non-family? If you love mankind can you love the particular? Is love sentiment? Is love emotion? Is love pleasure and desire? All these questions indicate, don't they, that we have ideas about love, ideas about what it should or should not be, a pattern or a code developed by the culture in which we live. So to go into the question of what love is we must first ideals and ideologies of what it should or should not be. To divide anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with life. Now how am I going to find out what this flame is which we call love - not how to express it to another but what it means in itself? I will first reject what the church, what society, what my parents and friends, what every person and every book has said about it because I want to find out for myself what it is. Here is an enormous problem that involves the whole of mankind, there have been a thousand ways of defining it and I myself am caught in some pattern or other according to what I like or enjoy at the moment - so shouldn't I, in order to understand it, first free myself from my own inclinations and prejudices? I am confused, torn by my own desires, so I say to myself, `First clear up your own confusion. Perhaps you may be able to discover what love is through what it is not.' The government says, `Go and kill for the love of your country'. Is that love? Religion says, `Give up sex for the love of God'. Is that love? Is love desire? Don't say no. For most of us it is - desire with pleasure, the pleasure that is derived through the senses, through sexual attachment and fulfilment. I am not against sex, but see what is involved in it. What sex gives you momentarily is the total abandonment of yourself, then you are back again with your turmoil, so you want a repetition over and over again of that state in which there is no worry, no problem, no self. You say you love your wife. In that love is involved sexual pleasure, the pleasure of having someone in the house to look after your children, to cook. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don't like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence. So what you are really saying is, `As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don't I begin to hate you. As long as I can rely on you to satisfy my demands, sexual and otherwise, I love you, but the moment you cease to supply what I want I don't like you.' So there is antagonism between you, there is separation, and when you feel separate from another there is no love. But if you can live with your wife without thought creating all these contradictory states, these endless quarrels in yourself, then perhaps - perhaps - you will know what love is. Then you are completely free and so is she, whereas if you depend on her for all your pleasure you are a slave to her. So when one loves there must be freedom, not only from the other person but from oneself. This belonging to another, being psychologically nourished by another, depending on another - in all this there must always be anxiety, fear, jealousy, guilt, and so long as there is fear there is no love; a mind ridden with sorrow will never know what love is; sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. And so love is not to do with pleasure and desire. Love is not the product of thought which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active present. It is not `I will love' or `I have loved'. If you know love you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect nor disrespect. Don't you know what it means really to love somebody - to love without hate, without jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what he is doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing - don't you know what it means? Where there is love is there comparison? When you love someone with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your body, with your entire being, is there comparison? When you totally abandon yourself to that love there is not the other. Does love have responsibility and duty, and will it use those words? When you do something out of duty is there any love in it? In duty there is no love. The structure of duty in which the human being is caught is destroying him. So long as you are compelled to do something because it is your duty you don't love what you are doing. When there is love there is no duty and no responsibility. Most parents unfortunately think they are responsible for their children and their sense of responsibility takes the form of telling them what they should do and what they should not do, what they should become and what they should not become. The parents want their children to have a secure position in society. What they call responsibility is part of that respectability they worship; and it seems to me that where there is respectability there is no order; they are concerned only with becoming a perfect bourgeois. When they prepare their children to fit into society they are perpetuating war, conflict and brutality. Do you call that care and love? Really to care is to care as you would for a tree or a plant, watering it, studying its needs, the best soil for it, looking after it with gentleness and tenderness - but when you prepare your children to fit into society you are preparing them to be killed. If you loved your children you would have no war. When you lose someone you love you shed tears - are your tears for yourself or for the one who is dead? Are you crying for yourself or for another? Have you ever cried for another? Have you ever cried for your son who is killed on the battlefield? You have cried, but do those tears come out of self-pity or have you cried because a human being has been killed? If you cry out of self-pity your tears have no meaning because you are concerned about yourself. If you are crying because you are bereft of one in whom you have invested a great deal of affection, it was not really affection. When you cry for your brother who dies cry for him. It is very easy to cry for yourself because he is gone. Apparently you are crying because your heart is touched, but it is not touched for him, it is only touched by self-pity and self-pity makes you hard, encloses you, makes you dull and stupid. When you cry for yourself, is it love - crying because you are lonely, because you have been left, because you are no longer powerful - complaining of your lot, your environment - always you in tears? If you understand this, which means to come in contact with it as directly as you would touch a tree or a pillar or a hand, then you will see that sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time. I had my brother three years ago, now he is dead, now I am lonely, aching, there is no one to whom I can look for comfort or companionship, and it brings tears to my eyes. You can see all this happening inside yourself if you watch it. You can see it fully, completely, in one glance, not take analytical time over it. You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this shoddy little thing called `me', my tears, my family, my nation, my belief, my religion - all that ugliness, it is all inside you. When you see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow. Sorrow and love cannot go together, but in the Christian world they have idealized suffering, put it on a cross and worshipped it, implying that you can never escape from suffering except through that one particular door, and this is the whole structure of an exploiting religious society. So when you ask what love is, you may be too frightened to see the answer. It may mean complete upheaval; it may break up the family; you may discover that you do not love your wife or husband or children - do you? - you may have to shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple. But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity. So if you can eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower which man always hungers after. If you have not got love - not just in little drops but in abundance - if you are not filled with it - the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love? Will any authority, any method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is not love. Can you say, `I will practise love. I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practise being kind and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others?' Do you mean to say that you can discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out of the window. By practising some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of nonviolence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love. In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty. Beauty is not something you see - not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind. But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems. So we reach the point: can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader - come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset? It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive - passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can come into being only when there is total self-abandonment. A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it - to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many. Like a flower that has perfume you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes trouble to breathe it deeply and look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden, or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and therefore it is sharing with everybody. Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent. To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict. You may ask, `If I find such a love, what happens to my wife, my children, my family? They must have security.' When you put such a question you have never been outside the field of thought, the field of consciousness. When once you have been outside that field you will never ask such a question because then you will know what love is in which there is no thought and therefore no time. You may read this mesmerized and enchanted, but actually to go beyond thought and time - which means going beyond sorrow -is to be aware that there is a different dimension called love. But you don't know how to come to this extraordinary fount - so what do you do? If you don't know what to do, you do nothing, don't you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means that you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no centre at all. Then there is love. Introduction Brockwood Park 1979 - 1st Question - The Self 2nd Question - Security 3rd Question - Emotion 4th Question - Words 5th Question - Insight Ojai, 1st meeting 1980 - 6th Question - Education 7th Question - Knowledge 8th Question - Pain Ojai, 2nd meeting 1980 - 9th Question - Truth 10th Question - Violence 11th Question - Hope 12th Question - Living 13th Question - Facts Ojai, 3rd meeting 1980 - 14th Question - Creativity 15th Question - Action 16th Question - Images 17th Question - Reincarnation Ojai, 4th meeting 1980 - 18th Question - Fear 19th Question - Injustice 20th Question - Fragmentation 21st Question - Attention 22nd Question - Chattering Saanen, 1st meeting 1980 - 23rd Question - Enlightenment Saanen, 2nd meeting 1980 - 24th Question - Right Living 25th Question - Recording 26th Question - Death Saanen, 3rd meeting 1980 - 27th Question - Discontent 28th Question - Inattention 29th Question - Understanding 30th Question - Sex 31th Question - Authority Saanen, 4th meeting 1980 - 32nd Question - To Be Quiet 33rd Question - Illumination 34th Question - Extra-Sensory Experiences 35th Question - Insight Saanen, 5th meeting 1980 - 36th Question - Beyond Measure 37th Question - Consciousness 38th Question - Mediocrity 39th Question - Attachment - Brockwood Park, 1st meeting 1980 - 40th Question - Schools And Foundations 41st Question - Responsibility 42nd Question - Urgency To Change 43rd Question - Symbols 44th Question - Thought And Consciousness - Brockwood Park, 2nd meeting 1980 - 45th Question - Compassion 46th Question - Corruption 47th Question - A Minority 48th Question - Faith And Prayer 49th Question - Helping Others 50th Question - Freedom QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS INTRODUCTION At the beginning of a question and answer meeting at Brockwood Park Krishnamurti said: To quest is to seek: Together we are going to seek, find, discover the right answer. This is not the Delphic Oracle! Together we are going to find out the meaning and significance of the question and also seek the answer. There is no authority here. I happen to sit on a platform for convenience so that everybody can see, but that little height does not give me any authority whatsoever. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 1ST QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 28TH AUGUST 1979 'THE SELF' Question: Is it possible ever to be free of self-centred activity? Is there a real self apart from the self-created image? What do we mean by the self? If you ask somebody what the self is, he would say, "It is all my senses, my feelings, my imagination, my romantic demands, my possessions, a husband, a wife, my qualities, my struggles, my achievements, my ambitions, my aspirations, my unhappiness, my joys" - all that would be the self. You can add more words but the essence of it is the centre, the `me', my impulses - "I am impelled to go to India to find truth" and so on. From this centre all action takes place: all our aspirations, our ambitions, our quarrels, our disagreements, our opinions, judgements, experiences, are centred in this. This centre is not only the conscious self acting outwardly but also the deep inner consciousness which is not open and obvious; it is all the different levels of consciousness. Now the questioner asks: Is it possible to be free of this centre? Why does one want to be free of it? Is it because the centre is the cause of division? That is, the-`me' is the active element that is operating all the time; it is the same `me' with different names, with a different coloured skin, with a different job, with a different position in the hierarchical social structure - you are Lord so-and-so, somebody else is a servant - it is the same 'me' dividing itself into all these different categories - socially, economically and religiously. Where there is this division there must be conflict - the Hindu as opposed to the Muslim, the Jew, the Arab, the American, the English, the French. That is physically obvious and it has brought about tremendous wars, great agony, brutality and violence. The self identifies with an ideal - noble or ignoble - and fights for that ideal. But it is still `the ego trip'. People go to India trying to find spirituality; they put on different fancy dress but they have only changed the garb, the clothes; essentially they are each the `me' operating, all the time struggling, endeavouring grasping, denying, being deeply attached to their experiences, ideas, opinions and longings. And as one lives one observes that this centre, this 'me', is the essence of all trouble. Also one observes that it is the essence of all pleasure, fear and sorrow. So one asks, "How am I to get rid of this centre so as to be really free - absolutely, not relatively?" It is fairly simple to be relatively free; one can be a little unselfish, a little concerned with social welfare, with the difficulties of others, but the centre is always there biting hard, brutal. Is it possible to be absolutely free of that centre? First of all see that the greater the effort that is made to be free of the centre, the more that very effort strengthens the centre, the self. For those who go off into meditation of various kinds, trying to impose something upon themselves, the 'me' that identifies with that effort is captured by that and says: "I have achieved", but that `me' is still the centre. To be free there must be no effort; which does not mean doing what one likes, for that is still the movement of the self. So what is one to do? If you are not to make an effort, because you see the truth that the more effort you make the greater the travail of the centre, then what is one to do? The questioner asks: Is there a real self apart from the self created by thought with its images? Many people ask that. The Hindus have said that there is a highest principle which is the self. We imagine also that there is a real self apart from the `me'. You all, I am sure, feel there is something else beyond this `me', which has been called the higher self, the sublime or the supreme self. The moment we use the word `self', or use any word to describe that which is beyond the self, the `me', it is still the self. Is it possible to be free of the self? - without becoming a vegetable, without becoming absent-minded, somewhat mad? Which means: is it possible to be totally free from attachment? -which is one of the attributes, one of the qualities, of the self. One is attached to one's reputation, to one's name, to one's experiences. One is attached to what one has said. If you really want to be free of the self it means no attachment; which does not mean you become detached, indifferent, callous, shut yourself away, which is another activity of the self. Before, it was attached; now it says, "I won't be attached. That is still the movement of the self. When you are really, without effort, deeply, basically, not attached, then from that deep sense of no attachment comes responsibility. Not responsibility to your wife, to your children, but the deep sense of responsibility. Will you do it? That is the question. We can talk everlastingly, put it into different words, but when it comes to testing it, acting, we do not seem to want to do it; we prefer to go on as we are, with the status quo slightly modified but carrying on with our quarrels. To be free from your own experience, from your own knowledge, from your own accumulated perception - it is possible if you go at it. And it does not take time. That is one of our excuses. We must have time to be free. When you see that one of the major factors of the self is attachment and you see what it does in the world, and what it does in your relationship with another, quarrels, separation, all the ugliness of relationship - if you see the truth of attachment, then you are free from it. Your own perception sets you free. Will you do it? QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 2ND QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 28TH AUGUST 1979 'SECURITY' Question: Can there be absolute security for man in this life? This is a very serious question; we all want security, both physical and principally, psychological. If we were psychologically secure, certain, then we might not be so concerned with physical security. The search for psychological security is preventing physical security. The questioner asks: Is there absolute security for us human beings? We must have security - like a child clinging to its mother; if the mother and the father do not pay enough attention to the baby, do not give it affection and care, then the brain and nerves of the baby are affected. The child must have physical security. Now, why do we demand psychological security? There is the psyche, demanding security; but is there psychological security at all? We want security in our relationships - my wife, my children, the family unit. In that attachment we think there is a certain security, but when we find that there is no security there we soon break away and try to find it elsewhere. We try to find security in a group, in the tribe - that glorified tribe that is the nation. And yet that nation is against another nation. Thinking that security, psychologically, is in a person, in a country, in a belief, in your own experience, is the same as demanding physical security. In demanding psychological security we have divided ourselves: the Hindu, the Muslim, the Jew, the Arab, the believer in Jesus, the believer in something else - in all of them there is the demand for security. Psychological security has been sought in these illusions; the various illusions of being secure in Catholicism, in Buddhism, in Hinduism, in Judaism, Islam and so on which have created nothing but illusory securities because they are all fighting each other. The moment you see this you do not belong to anything. When you see the truth that the mind, or thought, has sought security in illusions, that very perception brings intelligence. One seeks security in one's belief in Hinduism and in being a Hindu, with all the nonsensical superstitions and gods and rituals that are involved. But that opposes another group of people who have different superstitions, different gods, different rituals. These two opposing elements may tolerate each other but they are essentially antagonistic. There is conflict between the two and one has sought security in the one or the other. And then one realizes that they are both based on illusions. To see that, is intelligence; it is like seeing a danger. A man who is blind to danger is an idiot, there is something wrong with him. But one does not see the danger of these illusions in which one seeks security. The man in whom intelligence is in operation sees the danger. In that intelligence there is absolute security. Thought has created all the various forms of illusion - nationalities, class, different gods, different beliefs, different dogmas, different rituals and the extraordinary religious superstitions that pervade the world - and in them it has sought security. And one does not see the danger of this security, of this illusion. When one sees the danger - not as an idea but as an actual fact - that seeing is intelligence, the supreme form of absolute security. So there is absolute security: it is to see the truth in the false. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 3RD QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 28TH AUGUST 1979 'EMOTION' Question: Emotions are strong. Our attachments are strong. How does looking and seeing reduce the strength and power of these emotions? Trying to control, suppress, or sublimate emotions and attachments in no way reduces the conflict, does it? Are one's emotions so extraordinarily strong that they act? First one has to be conscious, aware, to know or recognise, to see, that one's emotions are strong and also that one is attached. When one is so conscious, what takes place? One is conscious of one's attachment, or of one's strong emotions of hate, jealousy, antagonism, like and dislike. Now, do they, being so strong, overshadow and control one's actions? One is examining, looking at the emotions and attachments which are apparently very strong and one sees that they act as barriers to clear unconfused thinking, to clear action, Is one aware of that or does one take it for granted? Does one say, "Yes I have very strong emotions, I am terribly attached, but it does not matter, it is part of life. I do not mind struggling. I do not mind having quarrels with everybody"? Now when one says one is aware, what does one mean by that - to know, to recognise? Is thought recognising the attachment? One says, "Yes, I am attached" - is it the activity of thought that says, "I am attached"? When one says, "I am attached", is it an idea or is it a fact? The fact is not the idea. This microphone: I can create an idea of it but the microphone is a fact. I can touch it, see it. So,is my attachment a concept, a conclusion, or is it a fact? Now, when you observe the fact, not the idea, not the conclusion about the fact, but the fact itself, is the fact different from you who are observing the fact? When you are observing the fact through an idea, or through a conclusion that you have heard from somebody, you are not looking at the fact. If you are looking at the fact you are not verbalizing the fact. So, how do you look at it? As something separate from yourself? Is attachment something different from yourself or is it part of yourself? The microphone is something apart from yourself, but attachment, the emotion, is part of yourself. Attachment is the `me'. If there is no attachment there is no 'me'. So awareness of your emotions, your attachments, is part of your nature, part of your structure. If you are looking at yourself there is no division, there is no duality as the `me' and attachment. There is only attachment, not the word but the fact, the feeling, the emotion, the possessiveness in attachment. That is a fact; that is `me'. So, what am I to do with the `me'? When there was division between `me' and attachment I could try to do something about it; I could try to control it, I could say, "I must suppress it", - which we do all the time. But if it is `me', what can I do? I cannot do anything; I can only observe. Before, I acted upon it; now I cannot act upon it because it is `me'. All I can do is observe. Observation becomes all important, not what I do about it. So there is observation, not, "1 am observing". There is only observation. If in that observation I begin to choose and say, "I must not be attached", I have already moved away, I am no saying that it is not `me'. In observation there is no choice, there is no direction, there is just pure, absolute, observation, and then the thing that is being observed dissolves. Before, you resisted it, you controlled it, you suppressed it, you acted upon it; but now in that observation all energy is centred. It is only when there is the lack of that energy that there is attachment. When there is complete observation without any interference of thought - why should thought come in? - you are just observing as you observe the thing that you call the fly. Just observe in the same way your emotions and attachments, then there is the gathering of all energy in that observation. Therefore there is no attachment. It is only the unintelligent who are attached, it is only those who do not see the full implications of attachment who are attached. They pervade the world, they are the stronger element in the world and we are caught in that. But when you come to examine this closely, then you are no longer caught in that and you are no longer dissipating energy in something which has no meaning. Your energy is now centred completely in observation, therefore there is total dissipation of attachment. Test it, do it and you will find out. You have to examine the thing very, very closely so that your mind is absolutely clear in the observation. It is only the unaware who jump over the cliff. The moment you are aware of danger, move. Attachment is a danger because it breeds fear, anxiety, hate and jealousy, being possessed and being not possessed - the whole of that is a tremendous danger. And when you see that danger there is action. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 4TH QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 28TH AUGUST 1979 'WORDS' Question: Why does the mind so readily accept trivial answers to deeply felt problems? Why does one accept a trivial explanation where a deep problem is concerned? Why does one live in words? That is the real problem. Why have words become so immensely important? One suffers, goes through great agonies and someone comes along and gives explanations and in these explanations one seeks comfort. There is god, there is reincarnation, there is this, there is that, there is something else. One accepts the word, the explanation, because it gives one comfort; the belief gives one comfort when one is in agony, in a state of anxiety. The explanations by philosophers, by psychologists, by priests, by gurus and teachers - it is on these that one lives; which means that one lives secondhand. One is a secondhand person and one is satisfied, The word `god' is a symbol. Symbols become extraordinarily important, like the flag. Why does the mind do this? One reads a great deal about what other people have thought; one sees on the television what is taking place. It is always others, somebody else out there, telling one what to do. One's mind is crippled by this and one is always living at secondhand. One has never asked: "Can I be a light to myself - not the light of someone else, the light of Jesus or the Buddha?" Can one be a light to oneself? Which means that there is no shadow, for to be a light to oneself means it is never put out by any artificial means, by circumstances, by sorrow, by accident. Can one be that to oneself? One can be that to oneself only when one's mind has no challenge because it is so fully awake. But most of us need challenges because most of us are asleep -asleep because we have been put to sleep by all the philosophers, by all the saints, by all the gods and priests and politicians. One has been put to sleep and one does not know that one is asleep; one thinks that is normal. A man who wants to be a light to himself has to be free of all this. One can be a light to oneself only when there is no self. Then that light is the eternal, everlasting, immeasurable light. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 5TH QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 28TH AUGUST 1979 'INSIGHT' Question: Is not insight intuition? Would you discuss this sudden clarity which some people have. What do you mean by insight and is it a momentary thing or can it be continuous? In the various talks the speaker has given he has used the word `insight'. That is to see into things, into the whole movement of thought, into the whole movement, for example, of jealousy. It is to perceive the nature of greed, to see the whole content of sorrow. It is not analysis, not the exercise of intellectual capacity, nor is it the result of knowledge. Knowledge is that which has been accumulated through the past from experience, stored up in the brain. There is no complete knowledge, therefore with knowledge there is always ignorance, like two horses in tandem. If observation is not based on knowledge, or on intellectual capacity or reasoning, exploring and analysing, then what is it? That is the whole question. The questioner asks: is it intuition? That word `intuition' is rather a tricky word which many use. The actuality of intuition may be the result of desire. One may desire something and then a few days later one has an intuition about it. And one thinks that that intuition is extraordinarily important. But if one goes into it rather deeply one may find that it is based on desire, on fear, or on various forms of pleasure. So one is doubtful about that word, especially when used by those people who are rather romantic, who are rather imaginative, sentimental and seeking something. They would certainly have intuitions, but they would be based on some obvious self-deceptive desire. So for the moment put aside that word intuition. Then what is insight? It is: to perceive something instantly, which must be true, logical, sane, rational. Insight must act instantly. It is not that one has an insight and does nothing about it. If one has an insight into the whole nature of thinking there is instant action. Thinking is the response of memory. Memory is experience, knowledge, stored up in the brain. Memory responds: where do you live? - you answer. What is your name? - there is an immediate response. Thought is the result or the response of the accumulation of experience and knowledge, stored as memory. Thought is based upon, or is the outcome of, knowledge; thought is limited because knowledge is limited. Thought can never be all-inclusive; therefore it is everlastingly confined, limited, narrow. Now, to have an insight into that, means that there is an action which is not merely the repetition of thought. To have an insight into, say, the nature of organizations means that one is observing without remembrances, without argumentation, pro and con; it is just to see the whole movement and nature of the demand for organization. One has an insight into it, and from that insight one acts. And that action is logical, sane, healthy. it is not that one has an insight and then acts the opposite, then it is not insight. Have an insight, for example, into the wounds and hurts that one has received from childhood. All people are hurt for various reasons, from childhood until they die. There is this wound in them, psychologically. Now, have an insight into the whole nature and structure of that hurt. You are hurt, wounded psychologically? You may go to a psychologist, analyst, psychotherapist, and he may trace why you are hurt; from childhood, your mother was this and your father was that and so on, but by merely seeking out the cause, the hurt is not going to be resolved. It is there. The consequences of that hurt are isolation, fear, resistance, so as not to be hurt more; therefore there is self-enclosure. You know all this. That is the whole movement of being hurt. The hurt is the image that you have created for yourself about yourself. So as long as that image remains you will be hurt, obviously. Now, to have an insight into all that - without analysis - to perceive it instantly, then that very perception is insight; it demands all your attention and energy; in that insight the hurt is dissolved. That insight will dissolve your hurt completely, leaving no mark, and therefore nobody can hurt you any more. The image that you had created about yourself no longer exists. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 6TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 6TH MAY 1980 'EDUCATION' Question: What is the significance of history in the education of the young? If one has read history it is fairly clear that man has struggled against nature, conquered it, destroyed and polluted it; man has struggled against man; there have always been wars. Man struggles to be free and yet he becomes a slave to institutions and organizations from which in turn he tries to break away, only to form another series of institutions and organizations. There is an everlasting struggle to be free. The history of mankind is the history of tribal wars, feudal and colonial wars, the wars of the kings and nations; and it is all still going on; the tribal mind has become national and sophisticated - but it is still the tribal mind. The history of man includes its culture; it is the story of the human being who has gone through all kinds of suffering, through various diseases, through wars, through religious beliefs and dogmas, persecution, inquisition, torture in the name of god, in the name of peace, in the name of ideals. And how is all that to be taught to the young? If it is the story of mankind, the story of human beings, then both the educators and the young are the human beings; it is their story, not merely the story of kings and wars, it is a story of themselves. How can the educator help the student to understand the story of himself, which is the story of the past, of which he is the result? That is the problem. If you are the educator and I am the young student, how would you help me to understand the whole nature and structure of myself - myself being the whole of humanity, my brain the result of many million years? it is all in me, the violence, the competition, the aggressiveness, the brutality, the cruelty, the fear, the pleasure and occasional joy and that slight perfume of love. How will you help me to understand all this? it means that the educator must also understand himself and so help me, the student, to understand myself. So it is a communication between the teacher and myself; and in that process of communication he is understanding himself and helping me to understand myself. it is not that the teacher or the educator must first understand himself and then teach - that would take the rest of his life, perhaps - but that in the relationship between the educator and the person to be educated, there is a relationship of mutual investigation. Can this be done with the young child, or with the young student? in what manner would you set about it? That is the question. How would you as a parent go into this, how would you help your child to understand the whole nature and structure of his mind, of his desires, of his fears - the whole momentum of life? it is a great problem. Are we prepared, as parents and teachers, to bring about a new generation of people, for that is what is implied - a totally different generation of people with totally different minds and hearts? Are we prepared for that? If you are a parent, would you give up for the sake of your child drink, cigarettes, pot, you know, the whole drug culture and see that both you and the child are good human beings? The word `good' means well-fitting - psychologically, without any friction, like a good door - you understand? like a good motor. Also, `good' means whole, not broken up, not fragmented. So, are we prepared to bring about, through education, a good human being, a human being who is not afraid - afraid of his neighbour, afraid of the future, afraid of so many things, disease, and poverty? Also, are we prepared to help the child and ourselves to have integrity? The word `integrity' also means to be whole and to say what you mean and not say one thing and do something else. Integrity implies honesty. Can we be honest if we have illusions and romantic and speculative ideals and strong beliefs? We may be honest to a belief but that does not imply integrity. As it is, we bring children into the world, spoil them till they are two or three, and then prepare them for war. History has not taught human beings; how many mothers must have cried, their sons having been killed in wars, yet we are incapable of stopping this monstrous killing of each other. If we are to teach the young we must have in ourselves a sense of the demand for the good. Good is not an ideal; it is to be whole, to have integrity, to have no fear, not to be confused; these are not ideals, they are acts. Can we be factual and so bring about a good human being through education? Do we really want a different culture, a different human being, with a mind that is not confused, that has no fear, that has this quality of integrity? QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 7TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 6TH MAY 1980 'KNOWLEDGE' Question: Why is knowledge, as you have said, always incomplete? When one is observing, is one aware that one is observing, or only aware of the thing that is being observed? Does awareness lead to analysis? What is psychological knowledge? Whom do you expect to answer these questions, the Delphic oracle, the highly elevated priest, the astrologers, the soothsayers, the readers of tea leaves? Whom do you expect to answer these questions? But since you have put these questions, we can talk them over together. Not that I, the speaker, will answer them and then you accept or deny and go away dissatisfied, saying, "I've wasted my morning". If we could seriously talk over these questions, so that we both penetrate into the problem, then it will be your own answer, not the answer of someone you have heard answer these questions. You can talk about cancer, and not have it; but if you have it, you are involved in it, in its pain, anxiety and fear. Why is knowledge always incomplete? What is knowledge and what do we mean when we say "I know". You may say,"I know my wife or my husband or my girl or boy friend". Do you really know them? Can you ever know them? Do you not have an image about them? Is the image the fact? So, to know is very limited. Scientific knowledge is also limited; scientists are trying to find out what is beyond matter; although they have accumulated a great deal of knowledge they have not been able to find out so far. Knowledge and ignorance always go together; the unknown and the known. Scientists say: through matter we will find that which may be beyond. But we human beings are matter. Our minds are matter. Why do we not go into this, for if the mind can go through itself, the possibility of coming upon that which is the origin of all things, is much more likely? Knowledge of oneself is also limited. If I seek to know myself I can study psychology, I can discuss with the psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychobiologists. But that knowledge is always limited. But if I penetrate into this entity called myself, then there is a possibility of going infinitely beyond. This is a very important thing without which life has very little meaning other than the cycle of pleasure and pain, reward and punishment - the pattern in which we live. That psychological knowledge which we have acquired has created the patterns in which we are caught. Knowledge, whether it is physiological or psychological, must always be limited. When one is observing, is one aware that one is observing; or only aware of the thing being observed? Does the awareness lead to analysis? What do we mean by observing? There is visual external observation - the observation of the tree - and also inward observation. There is the external hearing with the ear and also hearing inwardly. When we observe, do we really observe or do we observe with the word? That is: I observe the thing we call a tree and I say `tree'. I observe with the word. Now, can we find out if it is possible to observe without the word? - for the word has become more important than the seeing. The husband observes his wife, or a wife her husband, with all the memory, pictures, sensations and irritations. They never directly observe. Can we observe a person with whom we live intimately without the image, without the picture, without the idea? Perhaps we are able to perceive the thing which we call the tree, without the word. That is fairly easy, if you have gone into it. But to observe the person with whom you live without the activation of the memory about that person is not so easy. This observation, through the image, through the accumulated memory, is no relationship at all. It is a relationship of one picture with another picture and that is what we call relationship. But if you examine it closely you will see that it is not relationship; it is the idea of one against the idea of another. So can we observe without making an abstraction or idea of what we observe? This is what is meant by psychological knowledge; I build up, psychologically, a great deal of knowledge about my wife, correctly or incorrectly, depending on my sensitivity, depending on my ambition, greed, envy, depending on my self-centred activity. That knowledge is preventing the actual observation of the living person. And I never want to meet that living thing because I am afraid. It is much safer to have an image about that person than to see the living thing. My psychological knowledge prevents pure observation. Now, can one be free of that? Can the machinery that builds these images come to an end? I have these images about my wife, they are there; that is a tremendous fact, like a stone around my neck. How am I to throw it away? Is the stone, the image around my neck, different from the observer? Is that image, that weight around my neck, different from the observer who says, "I have these images". Is the observer who says, "I have these images and, how am I to get rid of them?" different from the images he observes? Obviously not. So the observer is the image-maker who is making these images and then separating himself from them, saying, "What am I to do about them?" That is the way we live, that is the pattern of our actions, that is our conditioning to which we are accustomed, so we naturally accept it. But we are saying something entirely different, which is that the observer is the observed. We have to enquire into what the observer is. The observer is the result of all his experiences; he is his knowledge, his memories, his fears, his anxieties - the past. The observer is always living in the past; although modifying himself all the time to meet the present, he is still rooted in the past. There is this movement of time, the past modifying itself in the present and going on to the future. This is the psychological momentum or movement of time. When we observe, we are observing through the image which we have created about that thing or that person, Can we observe the thing or person without that image? That means; can the observer be absent in observation? When we look at a person whom we know very intimately there arises the image; the more intimately we know them the more definite the image. Can we look at that person without the image? Which means: can we look at that person without the observer? That is pure observation. Does this awareness lead to analysis? Obviously not. What do we mean by analysis and who is analysing? Suppose I am analysing myself; who is the analyser? Is the analyser different from me? Obviously not. We are eliminating the very structure of conflict between human beings, the conflict that exists as long as there is division. it is the division in myself which creates the division outside. There is a division in myself if I say I am a Hindu. The identification with the image of being a Hindu gives me security. So I hold on to it, which is nonsense, for there is no security in an image. And the Muslim and the Arab and the Jew, do the same. So we are at each other's throats. When the observer, psychologically, is the observed, there is no conflict, because there is no division. See this clearly: our minds have been trained and educated to have this division; that `I' and the thing observed are different - my anger and my jealousy are different from me; therefore I must do something about them, control them, suppress them, go beyond them, act upon them. But when anger and jealousy are `me', what has happened? There is the elimination of conflict. The pattern has been broken. The pattern, which is the conditioning of my mind, has been broken. It is the ending of something and the beginning of something else. If the pattern is broken and the struggle is ended what then takes place? A new momentum, a new movement, takes place. You can observe a tree and the word `tree' interferes; the moment you see it you say, "There's a tree", or a butterfly, a deer, or the mountain or river; there is immediate reaction. That reaction can be observed and perhaps put aside so that there is just observation of the tree, the beauty of the line of it, the grace of it, the quality of it. Now, do the same with a person with whom you have lived, with whom you have been intimate - observe without a single image about that person. Then relationship is something extraordinary. Suppose a wife has no image about her husband; what then is the relationship for the husband? The husband is violent and the wife is not violent. Is there any relationship - except perhaps through the senses, sexually - is there any relationship? Obviously not, but they are living in the same house. So what will the husband do? First of all that is a most extraordinary way of living, in which there may perhaps be real, profound love. The wife has no images about her husband, but he has images, ideas all the time, piling up. They are living in the same house. What takes place? She is free, he is not. He wants her to have an image about him, for he is used to that. ~o the most destructive relationship goes on till she says, "Enough". Does she divorce him, leave him? Perhaps, since she has no images about him, a totally different atmosphere has been brought about in the house. He is beginning to be aware because she is immovable - you understand? - and he is moving all around. When he meets something that is immovable, something happens to him. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 8TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 6TH MAY 1980 'PAIN' Question: Does not thought originate as a defence against pain? The infant begins to think in order to separate itself from physical pain. Is thought - which is psychological knowledge - the result of pain, or is pain the result of thought? How does one go beyond the defences developed in childhood? Put a pin into a leg and there is pain; then there is anxiety that the pain should end. That is the momentum of thinking, the nervous reaction; then comes identification with that reaction and one says: "I hope it will end and I must not have it in the future". All that is part of the momentum of thinking. Fear is part of pain; is there fear without thought? Have you ever experimented with dissociating thought from pain? Sit in a dentist's chair for some time and watch the things going on; your mind observing without identifying. You can do this. I sat in the dentist's chair for four hours; never a single thought came into my mind. How does one go beyond the defences cultivated in childhood? Would one go to a psychoanalyst? One may think that is the easiest way and one may think that he will cure all the problems arising from one's childhood. He cannot. He may slightly modify them. So what will one do? There is nobody one can go to. Will one face that? There is nobody. Has one ever faced that fact that there is nobody one can go to? If one has cancer one can go to a doctor, that is different from the psychological knowledge that one has developed during childhood which causes one to become neurotic; and most people are neurotic. So, what is one to do? How is one to know, in a world that is somewhat neurotic, in which all one's friends and relations are slightly unbalanced, that one is also unbalanced? One cannot go to anybody; so what is taking place in one's mind now that one no longer depends on others, on books, on psychologists, on authority? What has happened to one's mind if one actually realizes that one cannot possibly go to anybody? Neuroticism is the result of dependence. One depends on one's wife, on the doctor; one depends on God or on the psychologists. One has established a series of dependences around one, hoping that in those dependences one will be secure. And when one discovers that one cannot depend on anybody, what happens? One is bringing about a tremendous psychological revolution; one is usually unwilling to face it. One depends on one's wife; she encourages one to be dependent on her; and vice versa. That is part of one's neurosis. One does not throw it out, one examines it. Can one be free of it, not depending on one's wife - psychologically, of course? One will not do it because one is frightened; one wants something from her, sex or this or that. Or she encourages one with one's ideas, helps one to dominate, to be ambitious, or says one is a marvellous philosopher. But see that the very state of dependence on another may be the cause of the deep psychological neurosis. When one breaks that pattern, what happens? One is sane! One must have such sanity to find out what truth is. Dependence has been from childhood, it has been a factor against pain and hurt, a factor for comfort, for emotional sustenance and encouragement - all that has been built into one, one is part of that. This conditioned mind can never find out what truth is. Not to depend on anything means one is alone; all one, whole - that is sanity, that sanity breeds rationality, clarity, integrity. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 9TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 8TH MAY 1980 'TRUTH' Question: There is a prevalent assumption these days that everything is relative, a matter of personal opinion, that there is no such thing as truth or fact independent of personal perception. What is an intelligent response to this belief? Is it that we are all so personal that what I see, what you see, is the only truth? That my opinion and your opinion are the only facts we have? That is what the question implies; that everything is relative; goodness is relative, evil is relative, love is relative. If everything is relative (that is, not the whole complete, truth) then our actions, our affections, our personal relationships are relative, they can be ended whenever we like, whenever they do not please us. Is there such a thing as truth apart from personal belief, apart from personal opinion? Is there such a thing as truth? This question was asked in the ancient days by the Greeks, by the Hindus and by the Buddhists. It is one of the strange facts in the Eastern religions that doubt was encouraged - to doubt, to question - and in religion in the West it is rather put down, it is called heresy. One must find out for oneself, apart from personal opinions, perceptions, experiences, which are always relative, whether there is a perception, a seeing, which is absolute truth, not relative. How is one going to find out? If one says that personal opinions and perceptions are relative then there is no such thing as absolute truth, all is relative. Accordingly our behaviour, our conduct, our way of life, is relative, casual, not complete, not whole, fragmentary. How would one find out if there is such a thing as truth which is absolute, which is complete, which is never changing in the climate of personal opinions? How does one's mind, the intellect, thought, find out? One is enquiring into something that demands a great deal of investigation, an action in daily life, a putting aside of that which is false - that is the only way to proceed. If one has an illusion, a fantasy, an image, a romantic concept, of truth or love, then that is the very barrier that prevents one moving further. Can one honestly investigate what is an illusion? How does illusion come into being? What is the root of it? Does it not mean playing with something which is not actual? The actual is that which is happening, whether it is what may be called good, bad or indifferent; it is that which is actually taking place. When one is incapable of facing that which is actually taking place in oneself, one creates illusions to escape from it. If one is unwilling or afraid to face what is actually going on, that very avoidance creates illusion, a fantasy, a romantic movement, away from that which is. That word `illusion' implies the moving away from that which is. Can one avoid this movement, this escape, from actuality? What is the actual? The actual is that which is happening, including the responses, the ideas, the beliefs and opinions one has. To face them is not to create illusion. Illusions can take place only when there is a movement away from the fact, from that which is happening, that which actually is. In understanding that which is, it is not one's personal opinion that judges but the actual observation. One cannot observe what is actually going on if one's belief or conditioning qualifies the observation; then it is the avoidance of the understanding of that which is. If one could look at what is actually taking place, then there would be complete avoidance of any form of illusion. Can one do this? Can one actually observe one's dependency; either dependency on a person, on a belief, on an ideal, or on some experience which has given one a great deal of excitement? That dependence inevitably creates illusion. So a mind that is no longer creating illusion, that has no hypotheses, that has no hallucinations, that does not want to grasp an experience of that which is called truth, has now brought order into itself. it has order. There is no confusion brought about by illusions, by delusions, hallucinations; the mind has lost its capacity to create illusions. Then what is truth? The astrophysicists, the scientists, are using thought to investigate the material world around them, they are going beyond physics, beyond, but always moving outward. But if one starts inwards one sees that the `me' is also matter. And thought is matter. If one can go inwards, moving from fact to fact, then one begins to discover that which is beyond matter. Then there is such a thing as absolute truth, if one goes through with it. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 10TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 8TH MAY 1980 'VIOLENCE' Question: How can we take responsibility for what is happening in the world while continuing to function in our daily life? What is right action with regard to violence and when faced with violence? Is that which is happening in the world outside different from that which is happening inside? In the world there is violence, extraordinary turmoil, crisis after crisis. There are wars, division of nationalities, religious differences, racial and communal differences, one set of systematized concepts against another. Is that different from what is going on inside us? We are also violent, we are also full of vanity, terribly dishonest, putting on different masks for different occasions. So it is one movement like the tide going out and the tide coming in. We human beings have created what is going on outside and that cannot possibly be changed unless we human beings change. That is the root of it. We want to do something in the world, have better institutions, better governments etc, but we never say we have created that. Unless we change that cannot change. After the millions of years we have lived, we are just the same. We have not changed fundamentally and we continue to create havoc in the world. The fact is, one is the world; not as an idea but actually. Do you see the difference between the idea and the actuality? One has heard the statement that one is the world and one makes an idea, an abstraction of it. And then one discusses the idea, whether it is true, or false and one has lost it. But the fact is, one is the world; it is so. So one is responsible for changing it. That means, one is responsible, completely, for the way one lives one's daily life. Not try to modify the chaos that is going on, decorate it or join this group or that group or institution, but as a human being, who is the world, go through a radical transformation oneself; otherwise there can be no good society. Most of us find it difficult to change, to give up smoking, for example. There are institutions that will help one not to smoke! See how one depends on institutions. So, can one find out why one does not change, why one does not, when one sees something wrong - `wrong' in quotes - end it, immediately? Is it that one hopes that somebody else will bring order in the world and then one can just slip into it? Is it that we are indolent, psychologically lazy, ineffectual? How many years one spends in acquiring certain techniques, going through high school, college, university, becoming a doctor, yet one will not spend a day to bring about a change in oneself. So one's responsibility is to bring about a radical change in oneself, because one is the rest of humanity. The next question is: What is right action with regard to violence and when faced with violence? Violence is anger, hatred, conformity, irritation, obedience. The denial of all that is the opposite of that. Is it possible to be free of the violence that is part of one's life, inherited, probably from the animal - not relatively free, but completely free? That means to be free of anger; it means, not only to be free of anger, but to have no anger in the mind. Or, to be free of conformity - not outward conformity, but conformity through comparison. One is always comparing, psychologically - I was, I will be, or I am, something. A mind which is always comparing, judging, is aggressive. If the mind is free from imitation, conformity and comparison then from that there is right action. Can the mind be absolutely free of all violence? If it is, then when it meets violence, what is its response? If one meets violence, face to face, what is the action that takes place? Can one judge what one is going to do when one meets it? The brain when faced with violence, undergoes a rapid chemical change; it reacts much quicker than the blow. One's whole body reacts and there is immediate response; one may not hit back, but the very presence of anger or hatred causes this response and there is action. In the presence of a person who is angry see what takes place if one is aware of it and does not respond. The moment one is aware of the other person's anger and one does not react oneself, there is quite a different response. One's instinct is to respond to hate by hate, to anger by anger, there is the welling up chemically which creates in the system the nervous reactions; but quieten all this in the presence of anger, and a different action takes place. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 11TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 8TH MAY 1980 'HOPE' Question: The hope that tomorrow will solve our problems prevents our seeing the absolute urgency of change. How does one deal with this? What do you mean by the future, what is future? If one is desperately ill, tomorrow has meaning; one may be healed by tomorrow. So one must ask, what is this sense of future? We know the past; we live in the past, which is the opposite movement; and the past, going through the present, modifying itself, moves to that which we call the future. First of all, are we aware that we live in the past - the past that is always modifying itself, adjusting itself, expanding and contracting itself, but still the past - past experience, past knowledge, past understanding, past delight, the pleasure which has become the past? The future is the past, modified. So one's hope of the future is still the past moving to what one considers to be the future. The mind never moves out of the past. The future is always the mind acting, living, thinking in the past. What is the past? It is one's racial inheritance, one's conditioning as Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Catholic, American and so on. It is the education one has received the hurts the delights, as remembrances. That is the past. That is one's consciousness. Can that consciousness, with all its content of belief, dogma, hope, fear, longing and illusion, come to an end? For example, can one end, this morning, completely, one's dependence on another? Dependence is part of one's consciousness. The moment that ends, something new begins, obviously. But one never ends anything completely and that non-ending is one's hope. Can one see and end dependence and its consequences, psychologically, inwardly? See what it means to depend and the immediate action taking place of ending it. Now is the content of one's consciousness to be got rid of bit by bit? That is, get rid of anger, then get rid of jealousy, bit by bit. That would too long. Or, can the whole thing be done instantly, immediately? for taking the contents of one's consciousness and ending them one by one, will take many years, all one's life perhaps. Is it possible to see the whole and end it - which is fairly simple, if one does it? But one's mind is so conditioned that we allow time as a factor in change. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 12TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 8TH MAY 1980 'LIVING' Question: What does it mean to see the totality of something? Is it ever possible to perceive the totality of something which is moving? Can one see the totality of our consciousness completely? Of course one can. One's consciousness is made up of all its content; one's jealousy, nationality, beliefs, experiences and so on; they are the content of this thing called consciousness and the core of that is `me', the self. Right? To see this thing entirely means giving complete attention to it. But one rarely gives complete attention to anything. If one gives complete attention at the very core, the self, one sees the whole. The questioner also asks, which is interesting: "Is it ever possible to perceive the totality of something which is moving?" Is the self moving? Is the content of your consciousness moving? It is moving within the limits of itself. What is moving in consciousness - attachment or the fear of what might happen if one is not attached? Consciousness is moving within its own radius, within its own limited area. That one can observe. Is one's consciousness with its content living? Are one's ideas, one's beliefs, living? What is living? Now, is the remembrance of the experience one has had, living? The remembrance, not the fact; the fact is gone. Yet one calls the movement of remembrance living. The experience which is gone is remembered; and that remembrance is called living. That one can watch; but not that which is gone. So what one calls living is that which has happened and gone. That which has gone is dead; that is why one's mind is so dead. That is the tragedy of one's life. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 13TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 8TH MAY 1980 'FACTS' Question: Is there a state that has no opposite? And may we know and communicate with it? Are there opposites, except such opposites as man, woman, darkness, light, tall, short, night and day? Is there an opposite to goodness? If it has an opposite it is not good. I wonder if you see that. Goodness, if it has an opposite must be born out of that opposite. What is an opposite? We have cultivated opposites and we say, good is the opposite of bad. Now, if they have a relationship with each other, or are the outcome of each other, then good is still rooted in bad. So, is there the opposite at all? One is violent; thought has created non-violence, its opposite, which is non-fact; but the ending of violence is quite a different state from non-violence. Mind has created the opposite in order either to escape from action or to suppress violence. All this activity is part of violence. But if one is only concerned with facts, then facts have no opposites. One hates; one's mind, one's thought and society say one should not hate, which is the opposite. The opposites are born out of each other. So, there is only hate, not its opposite. If one observes the fact of hate and all the responses to that fact, why should one have an opposite? The opposite is created by thought which leads to a constant struggle between hate and non-hate, between fact and thought. How is one to get over one's hate? If the fact alone remains and not its opposite, then one has the energy to look at it. One has the energy not to do anything about it and the very fact is dissolved. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 14TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 3RD QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 13TH MAY 1980 'CREATIVITY' Question: What is true creativity and how is it different from that which is so considered in popular culture? What is generally called creativity is man-made - painting, music, literature, romantic and factual, all the architecture and the marvels of technology. And the painters, the writers, the poets, probably consider themselves creative. We all seem to agree with that popular idea of a creative person. Many man-made things are most beautiful, the great cathedrals, temples and mosques; some of them are extraordinarily beautiful and we know nothing of the people who built them. But now, with us, anonymity is almost gone. With anonymity there is a different kind of creativity, not based on success, money - twenty-eight million books sold in ten years! Anonymity has great importance; in it there is a different quality; the personal motive, the personal attitude and personal opinion do not exist; there is a feeling of freedom from which there is action. But most man-made creativity, as we call it, takes place from the known. The great musicians, Beethoven, Bach and others, acted from the known. The writers and philosophers have read and accumulated; although they developed their own style they were always moving, acting or writing, from that which they had accumulated - the known. And this we generally call creativity. Is that really creative? Or is there a different kind of creativity which is born out of the freedom from the known? Because when we paint, write, or create a marvellous structure out of stone, it is based on the accumulated knowledge carried from the past to the present. Now, is there a creativity totally different from the activity that we generally call creativity? Is there a living, is there a movement, which is not from the known? That is, is there a creation from a mind that is not burdened with all the turmoils of life, with all the social and economic pressures? Is there a creation out of a mind that has freed itself from the known? Generally we start with the known and from that we create, but is there a creative impulse or movement taking place that can use the known, but not the other way round? In that state of mind, creation, as we know it, may not be necessary. Is creativity something totally different, something which we can all have - not only the specialist, the professional, the talented and gifted? I think we can all have this extraordinary mind that is really free from the burdens which man has imposed upon himself. Out of that sane, rational, healthy mind, something totally different comes which may not necessarily be expressed as painting, literature or architecture. Why should it? If you go into this fairly deeply, you will find that there is a state of mind which actually has no experience whatsoever. Experience implies a mind that is still groping, asking, seeking and therefore struggling in darkness and wanting to go beyond itself. There is a complete and total answer to the question if we apply our minds and our hearts to it; there is a creativity which is not man-made. If the mind is extraordinarily clear without a shadow of conflict, then it is really in a state of creation; it needs no expression, no fulfilment, no publicity and such nonsense. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 15TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 3RD QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 13TH MAY 1980 'ACTION' Question: You have said that in the very seeing there is action. Is this action the same as the expression of action? In the very observation there is action. Observe greed without any distortion, without motive, without saying, "I must go beyond it" - just observe the movement of greed. That very observation sees the whole movement of it, not just one particular form of greed, but the whole movement of greed. If in observing greed, or hatred, violence or whatever it is, the observation is completely non-directive, then there is no interval between the seeing and the acting. Whereas we normally have intervals - seeing, then concluding and extracting an idea and then carrying out that idea, in which there is the interval between the arising of ideas and the acting on those ideas. It is in this time interval that all kinds of other problems arise, whereas the seeing is the very act of ending greed. Now, the questioner asks: "Is this action the same as the expression of action?" That is, you see, a snake, a cobra. There is the instant expression of self-preservation, which is natural; the self-protective instinct is immediate, to run away or to do something about it. There the seeing has expressed itself in physical action. But we are talking of observation with the whole of our mind, not partially observing, as we normally do; to be so attentive that the whole of the mind is giving complete attention. Such attention implies that there is no centre from which you are attending. When you concentrate it is from a centre, from a point; therefore it is limited, restricted, narrow; whereas attention has no centre, everything in your mind is alive, attending. Then you will find out that there is no point from which you are attending; in that attention there is no border, whereas concentration has a border. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 16TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 3RD QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 13TH MAY 1980 'IMAGES' Question: For the making of images to end, must thought also end? Is one necessarily implied in the other? Is the end of image-making really a foundation upon which one can begin to discover what love and truth are? Or is that ending the very essence of truth and love? We live by the images created by the mind, by thought. These images are continuously added and taken away. You have your own image about yourself; if you are a writer you have an image about yourself as a writer; if you are a wife or a husband, each has created an image about himself or herself. This begins from childhood, through comparison, through suggestion, by being told you must be as good as the other chap, or you must not do, or you must; so gradually this process accumulates. And in our relationships, personal and otherwise, there is always an image. As long as the image exists, you are liable to be either wounded, bruised or hurt. And this image prevents there being any actual relationship with another. Now the questioner asks: Can this ever end, or is it something with which we have to live everlastingly? And he also asks: In the very ending of the image, does thought end? Are they interrelated, image and thought? When the image-making machinery comes to an end, is that the very essence of love and truth? Have you ever actually ended an image - voluntarily, easily, without any compulsion, without any motive? Not, "I must end the image I have of myself, I will not be hurt". Take one image and go into it; in going into it, you discover the whole movement of image-making. In that image you begin to discover there is fear, anxiety; there is a sense of isolation; and if you are frightened you say, "Much better keep to something I know than something I do not know". But if you go into it fairly seriously and deeply, you enquire as to who or what is the maker of this image, not one particular image but image-making as a whole. Is it thought? Is it the natural response, natural reaction, to protect oneself physically and psychologically? One can understand the natural response to physical protection, how to have food, to have shelter, to have clothes, to avoid being run over by a bus and so on. That is a natural, healthy, intelligent response. In that there is no image. but psychologically, inwardly, we have created this image which is the outcome of a series of incidents, accidents, hurts, irritations. Is this psychological image-making the movement of thought? We know that thought does not, perhaps to a very large degree, enter into the self-protective physical reaction. But the psychological image-making is the outcome of constant inattention which is the very essence of thought. Thought in itself is inattentive. Attention has no centre, it has no point from which to go to another point, as in concentration. When there is complete attention there is no movement of thought. It is only to the mind that is inattentive that thought arises. Thought is matter; thought is the outcome of memory; memory is the outcome of experience and that must always be limited, partial. Memory, knowledge, can never be complete, they are always partial, therefore inattentive. So when there is attention there is no image-making, there is no conflict; you see the fact. If when you insult me or flatter me and I am completely attentive, then it does not mean a thing. But the moment I am not paying attention, thought, which is inattentive in itself, takes over and creates the image. Now the questioner asks: Is the ending of image-making the essence of truth and love? Not quite. Is desire love? Is pleasure love? Most of our life is directed towards pleasure in different forms, and when that movement of pleasure, sex etc, takes place we call that love. Can there be love when there is conflict, when the mind is crippled with problems, problems of heaven, problems of meditation, problems between man and woman? When the mind is living in problems, which most of our minds are, can there be love? Can there be love when there is great suffering, physiological as well as psychological? Is truth a matter of conclusion, a matter of opinion, of philosophers, of theologians, of those who believe so deeply in dogma and ritual, which are all man-made? Can a mind so conditioned know what truth is? Truth can only be when the mind is totally free of all this jumble. Philosophers and others never look at their own lives; they go off into some metaphysical or psychological world, about which they begin to write and publish and become famous. Truth is something that demands extraordinary clarity of mind, a mind that has no problem whatsoever, physical or psychological, a mind that does not know conflict. Even the memory of conflict must end. With the burden of memory we cannot find truth. It is impossible. Truth can only come to a mind that is astonishingly free from all that is man- made. Those are not words to me, you understand? If it was not something actual, I would not speak, I would be dishonest to myself. If it were not a fact I would be such a terrible hypocrite. This requires tremendous integrity. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 17TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 3RD QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 13TH MAY 1980 'REINCARNATION' Question: Would you please make a definite statement about the non-existence of reincarnation since increasing `scientific evidence' is now being accumulated to prove reincarnation is a fact. I am concerned because I see large numbers of people beginning to use this evidence to further strengthen a belief they already have, which enables them to escape problems of living and dying. Is it not your responsibility to be clear, direct and unequivocable on this matter instead of hedging round the issue? We will be very definite. The idea of reincarnation existed long before Christianity. It is prevalent almost throughout India and probably in the whole Asiatic world. Firstly: what is it that incarnates; not only incarnates now, but reincarnates again and again? Secondly: the idea of there being scientific evidence that reincarnation is true, is causing people to escape their problems and that causes the questioner concern. Is he really concerned that people are escaping? They escape through football or going to church. Put aside all this concern about what other people do. We are concerned with the fact, with the truth of reincarnation; and you want a definite answer from the speaker. What is it that incarnates, is reborn? What is it that is living at this moment, sitting here? What is it that is taking place now to that which is in incarnation? And when one goes from here, what is it that is actually taking place in our daily life, which is the living movement of incarnation - one's struggles, one`s appetites, greeds, envies, attachments - all that? Is it that which is going to reincarnate in the next life? Now those who believe in reincarnation, believe they will be reborn with all that they have now - modified perhaps - and so carry on, life after life. Belief is never alive. But suppose that belief is tremendously alive, then what you are now matters much more than what you will be in a future life. in the Asiatic world there is the word `karma' which means action in life now, in this period, with all its misery, confusion, anger, jealousy, hatred, violence, which may be modified, but will go on to the next life. So there is evidence of remembrance of things past, of a past life. That remembrance is the accumulated `me', the ego, the personality. That bundle, modified, chastened, polished a little bit, goes on to the next life. So it is not a question of whether there is reincarnation (I am very definite on this matter, please) but that there is incarnation now; what is far more important than reincarnation, is the ending of this mess, this conflict, now. Then something totally different goes on. Being unhappy, miserable, sorrow-ridden, one says: "I hope the next life will be better". That hope for the next life is the postponement of facing the fact now. The speaker has talked a great deal to those who believe in and have lectured and written about reincarnation, endlessly. It is part of their game. I say,"All right, Sirs, you believe in it all. If you believe, what you do now matters". But they are not interested in what they do now, they are interested in the future. They do not say: "I believe and I will alter my life so completely that there is no future". Do not at the end of this say that I am evading this particular question; it is you who are evading it.I have said that the present life is all-important; if you have understood and gone into it, with all the turmoil of it, the complexity of it - end it, do not carry on with it. Then you enter into a totally different world. I think that is clear, is it not? I am not hedging. You may ask me: "Do you believe in reincarnation?" Right? I do not believe in anything. This is not an evasion I have no belief and it does not mean that I am an atheist, or that I am ungodly. Go into it, see what it means. It means that the mind is free from all the entanglements of belief. In the literature of ancient India there is a story about death and incarnation. For a Brahmin it is one of the ancient customs and laws, that after collecting worldly wealth he must at the end of five years give up everything and begin again. A certain Brahmin had a son and the son says to him, "You are giving all this away to various people, to whom are you going to give me away; to whom are you sending me?" The father said, "Go away, I am not interested". But the boy comes back several times and the father gets angry and says, "I am going to send you to Death" - and being a Brahmin he must keep his word. So he sends him to Death. On his way to Death the boy goes to various teachers and finds that some say there is reincarnation, others say there is not. He goes on searching and eventually he comes to the house of Death. When he arrives, Death is absent. (A marvellous implication, if you go into it.) Death is absent. The boy waits for three days. On the fourth day, Death appears and apologizes. He apologizes because the boy was a Brahmin; he says, "I am sorry to have kept you waiting and in my regret I will offer you three wishes. You can be the greatest king, have the greatest wealth, or you can be immortal". The boy says, "I have been to many teachers and they all say different things. What do you say about death and what happens afterwards?" Death says: "I wish I had pupils like you; not concerned about anything except that". So he begins to tell him about truth, about the state of life in which there is no time QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 18TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 4TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 15TH MAY 1980 'FEAR' Question: I am not asking how fear arises - that you have already explained but rather, what is the actual substance of fear? What is fear itself? Is it a pattern of physiological reaction and sensation, tightening of muscles, surging of adrenalin and so forth; or is it something more? What am I to look at when I look at fear itself? Can this looking take place when fear is not immediately present? What is fear itself? We are generally afraid of something, or of a remembrance of something that has happened, or of a projection of a reaction into the future. But the questioner asks: What is the actual nature of fear? When one is afraid, both physiologically as well as psychologically, is it not that one has a feeling of danger, a feeling of total isolation called loneliness, deep, abiding, lasting loneliness? All reactions are to something; one is afraid of the snake, or one is afraid of the return of some pain one has had. So it is either fear of an actual thing or of the remembrance of something that has happened in the past. But apart from the psychological reactions which one knows as fear is there fear in itself, not fear of something? Is there fear per se? Or does one only know fear in relation to something else? If it is not in relation to something, is it fear? One knows fear in relation to something, from something, or towards something, but if you eliminate that, is there actual fear, which you can examine? The mind, the brain, need complete security in order to function well, healthily, sanely. Not finding security in anything, in a relationship, in an idea, in a belief - an intelligent mind rejects all that - yet it still looks for complete security. Not finding it, fear comes into being. Is there something totally and completely secure and certain, not the certainty of beliefs, dogmas, rituals and ideas, which can all be abolished when new ideas, dogmas and theories replace them? Putting aside all that, does the mind, the brain, seeking a security that is intelligible and not finding it, feel deep-rooted fear? So, apart from the ordinary kinds of fear, is the mind creating fear itself, because there is nothing valid, nothing that is whole? Is that the substance of fear? Can the mind in itself have no fear? Thought - which is part of the function of the mind and brain - desiring security, has created various illusions, philosophical and theological. Not finding it there, it either creates something beyond itself in which it hopes to find total security, or the mind itself is so totally complete that it has no need for fear. We are not talking of getting rid of fear or suppressing fear; we are asking, can the mind in itself have no cause or substance or reaction which brings fear? Can the mind ever be in a state - that word `state' implies static, it is not that - can it ever have a quality where it has no movement reaching out, where it is completely whole in itself? This implies understanding meditation. Meditation is not all the nonsense that is going on about it. It is to be free from fear, both physiological and psychological, otherwise there is no love, there is no compassion. As long as there is fear, the other cannot take place. To meditate - not to reach something - is to understand the nature of fear and go beyond it - which is to find a mind that has no remembrance of something which has caused fear, so that it is completely whole. Then there is the other part of this question: Can this looking take place when fear is not immediately present? One can recall fear and the recalling of that fear can be observed. One had fear in the past and one can summon it; but it is not actually the same because fear exists a moment after, not at the actual moment; it is a reaction that one calls fear. But at the actual moment of great danger, at the moment of facing something that may cause fear, there is no fear, there is nothing. Then there is a recollection of the past, then the naming of it, and saying, "I am afraid", with all the tightening of the muscles, the secretion of adrenalin. One can recall a past fear and look at it. The observing of that fear is important because either one puts it outside of oneself or one says, "I am that fear" - there is not oneself apart from the fear observing it; one is that reaction. When there is no division between oneself and fear, but only the state of that reaction, then something entirely new takes place. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 19TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 4TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 15TH MAY 1980 'INJUSTICE' Question: When one sees in the world no demonstrable universal principle of justice, one feels no compelling reason to change oneself or the chaotic society outside. One sees no rational criteria by which to measure the consequences of actions and their accountability. Can you share your perception on this matter with us? Is there justice in the world? This has been a question that all the philosophers have gone into, spinning a lot of words about it. Now, is there justice in the world, rational, sane, justice? You are clever, I am not. You have money, I have not. You have capacity and another has not. You have talent, you can enjoy and I have been born poor. One has a crippling disease and the other has not. Seeing all this, we say; there must be justice somewhere. We move from lack of justice to an idea of justice - God is just. But the fact remains that there is terrible injustice in the world. And the questioner wants to know: "If there is no justice, why should I change? There is no point in it. Why should I change in this chaotic world where the dictators are supreme; their very life is injustice, terrorizing millions of people?" Seeing all that, there is no rational cause for me to change. I think that is not a rational question, if I may say so. Do you change because you are under pressure, or because you are rewarded - change brought about by reward and punishment? Human beings are so irrational, right through the world and you as a human being, are as the rest of humanity. And as you are the rest of mankind, you are responsible; not because you see so much injustice in the world, how the crooks get away with everything, or because you contrast the marvellous churches and great riches with the millions and millions who are starving. Change is not brought about through compulsion, through reward and punishment. The mind itself sees the absurdity of all this; it sees the necessity of change, not because God or the priest or somebody tells one to change. One sees the chaos around one and that chaos has been created by human beings; I am as these human beings; I have to act, it is my responsibility and a global responsibility. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 20TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 4TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 15TH MAY 1980 'FRAGMENTATION' Question: Can we die, psychologically, to the self? To find out is a process of choiceless awareness. In order to observe choicelessly, it seems we must have ended or died to the ego,`me'. The question is: How can I observe, in my current state of fragmentation? It is like the `I' trying to see the `I'. This is an impossible paradox; please clarify. Do not quote me - or anybody - for then it is not yours and you become a secondhand human being, which we all are. That is the first thing to realize, because that distorts our thinking. We are the result of millions of years of the pressure of other people's thinking and propaganda. If one is not free of all that, one can never find the origin of things. The questioner asks: How can I observe in my current state of fragmentation? You cannot. But you can observe your fragmentation. In observing yourself you discover that you are looking with certain prejudices. And you forget to look at yourself and go into the question of prejudice. You become aware of your prejudice; can you look at it without any sense of distortion, without choice? Just observe the prejudices; let prejudice tell you the story, not you tell the story about prejudice; let prejudice unroll itself; the cause of prejudice, the image, conclusions and opinions. So you begin to discover in looking at prejudice that you are fragmented and that that fragmentation is brought about by thought; naturally, therefore, you begin to be aware of the movement of thought. You are confused; what is this confusion? Who has created this confusion, in you and outside of you? Observing confusion, you begin to be aware of the movement of thought, of the contradictory nature of thought; let the whole thing unroll itself as you watch. The story is there but you do not read the story; you are telling the book what it should say. It is not that it is the history of yourself; it is the history of mankind. You cannot have insight if it is merely the response of memory. Organized religion is not religion. All the nonsense that goes on, the rituals, dogmas, theories and the theologians spinning out new theories - that is not religion. Now what makes one say that it is not religion? Is it merely a thoughtful examination of all the religions, their dogmas, their superstitions, their rituals, their ignorance, and saying at the end of it, "This is nonsense"? Or is it that one sees immediately that any form of propaganda or pressure, is never a religion? One sees this immediately and therefore one is out of it. But if one is merely examining various religions and then coming to a conclusion, that conclusion will be limited, it can be broken down, by argument, by superior knowledge. But if one gets an insight into the nature of the religious structures which man has invented, then the mind is immediately free of it. If one understands the tyranny of one guru - they are tyrants, because they want power, position; they know; others do not know - then one has seen the tyranny of all gurus. So one does not go from one guru to another. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 21ST QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 4TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 15TH MAY 1980 'ATTENTION' Question: What is the relationship of attention to thought? Is there a gap between attention and thought? You know what concentration is - from childhood, we are trained to concentrate. Concentration is the narrowing down of all energy to a particular point and holding to that point. A boy in school looks out of the window at the birds and the trees, at the movement of the leaves, or at the squirrel climbing the tree. And the teacher says: "You are not paying attention, concentrate on the book; or, "Listen to what I am saying". This is to give far more importance to concentration than to attention. If I were the teacher I would help him to watch; I would help him to watch that squirrel completely; watch the movement of the tail, how its claws act, everything. Then if he learns to watch that attentively, he will pay attention to the book. Attention is a state of mind in which there is no contradiction. There is no entity, or centre, or point, which says, "I must attend". It is a state in which there is no wastage of energy, whereas in concentration there is always the controlling process going on - "I want to concentrate on that page", but thought wanders off and you pull it back - a constant battle going on. Attention is something totally different from concentration. The questioner asks: What is the relationship of attention to thought? None, obviously. I do not know if you follow that. Concentration has a relationship to thought, because thought directs, "I must learn", "I must concentrate in order to control myself". Thought gives direction from one point to another point. Whereas, in attention, thought has no place, there is simply attending. And the further part of the question: Is there a gap between attention and thought? Once you have grasped the whole movement of thought, you do not put this question. You have to understand what thought is, see what it is and how it comes into being. There is no thought if there is total amnesia. But unfortunately, or fortunately, you are not in a state of amnesia. You want to find out what thought is, what place it has in life, so you begin to examine thinking. Thinking takes place as a reaction of memory. Memory responds to a challenge, to a question, to an action, or in relation to an idea or to a person. You may have trodden on some insect that has bitten you. That pain is registered and stored in the brain as memory; it is not actual pain, the pain is over, but the memory remains. So next time you are careful, for there has been the experience of pain, which has become knowledge, which responds as thought. Memory is thought. Knowledge, however deep, however extensive, must always be limited. There is no complete knowledge. Thought is always particular, limited, divisive; in itself it is incomplete and can never become complete. It can think about completeness; it can think about wholeness, but thought itself is not whole. Whatever thought creates, philosophically or religiously, it is still partial, limited, fragmentary and is part of ignorance. Knowledge can never be complete, it must always go hand in hand with ignorance. If you understand the nature of thought and understand what concentration is, then you will realize that thought cannot attend because attention is the giving of all your energy without any limitation or restraint of thought. If you are attending, what takes place? There is no `you' attending. There is no centre that says: "I am attending". You are attending because it is your life. If you are serious and giving attention, you will soon find out that all your problems have gone -at least for the moment. To resolve problems is to attend. It is not a trick. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 22ND QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA 4TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 15TH MAY 1980 'CHATTERING' Question: Why is my mind chattering, so restless? Have you ever asked that question, for yourself? Why is your mind so restless, always chattering, going from one thing to another, moving from one entertainment to another? Why is your mind chattering? And what will you do about it? Your immediate impulse is to control it: "I must not chatter". The controller who says, "I must not chatter", is in itself part of chattering. Do you see the beauty of it? So what will you do? You can examine the causes of chattering, how chattering is part of the mind being occupied. The mind, including the whole structure, the brain, must be occupied with something - with sex, with television, with cooking, with cleaning the house, with football, with going to church, always occupied. Why must it be occupied? If it is not occupied are you not rather uncertain, do you not fear being unoccupied? You feel empty, you feel lost, you begin to realize that there is tremendous loneliness inside. So, to avoid that deep loneliness, with all its agony, the mind occupies itself with everything else except that. And then that becomes the occupation. From being occupied with all these outward things, it says, "I am lonely, that is my trouble. How am I to get over it?" And you think about how miserable you are - so back to chattering. Then ask, why is the mind chattering, with never a moment when it is quiet, never a moment when there is complete freedom from any problem? Again that mental occupation is the result of your education, of the social nature of your life. But when you realize that your mind is chattering and look at it, staying with it, then you will see what happens. Your mind is chattering. All right, watch it. You say, "All right, chatter". You are attending, which means you are not trying not to chatter, not saying, "I must not", or suppressing it; you are just attending to chattering. If you do, you will see what happens; your mind is clear and probably that is the state of a `normal', healthy human being. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 23RD QUESTION SAANEN 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 23RD JULY 1980 'ENLIGHTENMENT' Question: There are so many gurus today, both in the East and in the West, each one pointing his own way to enlightenment. How is one to know if they are speaking the truth? When a guru says he knows, he does not. When an Eastern guru or a man in the West says: "I have attained Enlightenment" - then you may be sure that he is not enlightened; enlightenment is not to be attained. It is not something that you reach step by step as if you were climbing a ladder. Enlightenment is not in the hands of time. It is not, "I am ignorant but if I do certain things I will come to enlightenment" - whatever that word may mean. What is time? Time is necessary to go from here physically to another place. Psychologically, is time necessary at all? We have accepted that it is and it is part of our tradition and training; I am this but I will be that. What I will be will never take place because I have not understood `what is'. The understanding of `what is' is immediate; you do not have to analyse, go through tortures. One does not like to use the word `enlightenment', it is so loaded with the meaning given by all these gurus. They do not know what they are talking about; not that the speaker knows, that would be silly on his part, but one sees what is involved when they talk about achieving enlightenment, step by step, practising, so that the mind becomes dull, mechanical, stupid. Whether they are Eastern or Western gurus, doubt what they are saying, doubt also what the speaker is saying - much more so, because although he is very clear about all these matters it does not mean that he is the only person who knows, which is equally absurd. The mind must be free from all authority - no followers, disciples and patterns. The questioner asks: How is one to know that these gurus are speaking the truth? How do you know whether the local priests, the bishops, the archbishops and the popes are speaking the truth? Instead of going off to India accepting those gurus, consider first, how do you know whether they are speaking the truth? May be they are all engaged in some kind of guile which means money, position, authority, giving initiations and all the rest of it. Question them, ask them, "Why have you put yourself in authority?" Doubt everything they say and you will soon find that they will throw you out. it once happened that a very famous guru came to see the speaker. He said; "I am a guru with many followers. I began with one and now I have a thousand and more, both in the West and in the East, especially in the West. I cannot withdraw from them; they are part of me and I am part of them. They have built me and I have built them." The disciples build the guru, the guru builds the disciples and he cannot let them go. In this way authority in the `spiritual' world is established. See the danger of it. Where there is authority in the field of the mind and heart there is no love -spurious love maybe, but there is no sense of that depth of affection, love and care. To find out who is speaking the truth, do not seek but question. Truth is not something you come by. Truth comes only when the mind is totally and completely free from all this. Then you have compassion and love; not for your guru, not for your family, not for your ideals or your saviour, but love, without any motive, which acts through intelligence. And you think that truth is something you buy from another! The Eastern and the Western gurus all quote the old saying: "You must be a light unto yourself". It is an ancient and very famous saying in India. And they repeat it, adding, "You cannot be a light unto yourself unless I give it to you". People are so gullible; that is what is wrong. They all want something - the young and the old. For the young the world is too cruel, for them what the older generations have made of the world is too appalling. They have no place in it, they are lost, so they take to drugs and drink; all kinds of things are going on in the world with the young; communes, sexual orgies, chasing off to India, to gurus, to find somebody who will tell them what to do - somebody whom they can trust. They go there, young, fresh, not knowing; and the gurus give them the feeling that they are being protected and guided - that is all they want. They cannot get it from their parents, from their local priests, from the psychologists, because their parents, the local priests and psychologists are equally confused. They go off to this dangerous country, India, and there they are caught by the thousand. They are seeking comfort, somebody to say, "I am looking after you. I will be responsible for you. Do this. Do that", and it is a very happy, pleasant state, for they are also told, "You can do what you like, indulge in sex, in drink - go on". Equally, the older generation are in the same position, only they express it with more sophistication. They are the same, the young and the old all over the world. But nobody can give guidance, can give light, to another. Only you yourself can do that; but you have to stand completely alone. That is what is frightening for the old and the young. If you belong to anything, follow anybody, you are already entering into corruption. Understand that very deeply, with tears in your eyes: when there is no guru, no teacher and no disciple, there is only you as a human being living in this world -the world, the society, which you have created. And if you do not do something for yourself, society is not going to help you. On the contrary, society wants you to be what you are. Do not belong to anything, not to any institution or organization; do not follow anybody, be not a disciple of anybody. You are a human being living in this terrible world; a human being who is the world and the world is you. You have to live there, understand it, and go beyond yourself. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 24TH QUESTION SAANEN 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 24TH JULY 1980 'RIGHT LIVING' Question: I work as a teacher and I am in constant conflict with the system of the school and the pattern of society. Must I give up all work? What is the right way to earn a living? Is there a way of living that does not perpetuate conflict? This is a rather complex question and we will go into it step by step. What is a teacher? Either a teacher gives information about history, physics, biology and so on, or he himself is learning together with the pupil about himself. This is a process of understanding the whole movement of life. If I am a teacher, not of biology or physics, but of psychology, then will the pupil understand me or will my pointing out help him to understand himself? We must be very careful and clear as to what we mean by a teacher. Is there a teacher of psychology at all? Or are there only teachers of facts. Is there a teacher who will help you to understand yourself? The questioner asks: I am a teacher. I have to struggle not only with the established system of schools and education, but also my own life is a constant battle with myself. And must I give up all this? Then what shall I do if I give up all that. He is asking not only what right teaching is but he also wants to find out what right living is. What is right living? As society exists now, there is no right way of living. You have to earn a livelihood, you marry, you have children, you become responsible for them and so you accept the life of an engineer or a professor. As society exists can there be a right way of living? Or is the search for a right way of living merely a search for Utopia, a wish for something more? What is one to do in a society which is corrupt, which has such contradictions in itself, in which there is so much injustice - for that is the society in which we live? And, not only as a teacher in a school, I am asking myself: what shall I do? Is it possible to live in this society, not only to have a right means of livelihood, but also to live without conflict? Is it possible to earn a livelihood righteously and also to end all conflict within oneself? Now, are these two separate things: earning a living rightly and not having conflict in oneself? Are these two in separate, watertight compartments? Or do they go together? To live a life without any conflict requires a great deal of understanding of oneself and therefore great intelligence - not the clever intelligence of the intellect - but the capacity to observe, to see objectively what is happening, both outwardly and inwardly and to know that there is no difference between the outer and the inner. It is like a tide that goes out and comes in. To live in this society, which we have created, without any conflict in myself and at the same time to have a right livelihood - is it possible? On which shall I lay emphasis - on right livelihood or on right living, that is, on finding out how to live a life without any conflict? Which comes first? Do not just let me talk and you listen, agreeing or disagreeing, saying "It is not practical. It is not like this, it is not like that saying, "It is not practical. It is not like this, it is not like that" - because it is your problem. We are asking each other: is there a way of living which will naturally bring about a right livelihood and at the same time enable us to live without a single shadow of conflict? People have said that you cannot live that way except in a monastery, as a monk; because you have renounced the world and all its misery and are committed to the service of God, because you have given your life over to an idea, or a person, an image or symbol, you expect to be looked after. But very few believe any more in monasteries, or in saying, "I will surrender myself". If they do surrender themselves it will be surrendering to the image they have created about another, or which they have projected. It is possible to live a life without a single shadow of conflict only when you have understood the whole significance of living -which is, relationship and action. What is right action - under all circumstances? Is there such a thing? Is there a right action which is absolute, not relative? Life is action, movement, talking, acquiring knowledge and also relationship with another, however deep or superficial. You have to find right relationship if you want to find a right action which is absolute. What is your present relationship with another - not the romantic, imaginative, flowery and superficial thing that disappears in a few minutes - but, actually, what is your relationship with another? What is your relationship with a particular person? - perhaps intimate, involving sex, involving dependence on each other, possessing each other and therefore arousing jealousy and antagonism. The man or the woman goes off to the office, or to do some kind of physical work, where he or she is ambitious, greedy, competitive, aggressive to succeed; he or she comes back home and becomes a tame, friendly, perhaps affectionate husband or wife. That is the actual daily relationship. Nobody can deny that. And we are asking: is that right relationship? We say no, certainly not, it would be absurd to say that that is right relationship. We say that, but continue in the same way. We say that that is wrong but we do not seem to be able to understand what right relationship is - except according to the pattern set by ourselves, by society. We may want it, we may wish for it, long for it, but longing and wishing do not bring it about. We have to go into it seriously to find out. Relationship is generally sensuous - begin with that - then from sensuality there is companionship, a sense of dependence on each other; then there is the creating of a family which increases dependence on each other. When there is uncertainty in that dependence the pot boils over. To find right relationship one has to enquire into this great dependence on each other. Psychologically why are we so dependent in our relationships with each other? Is it that we are desperately lonely? Is it that we do not trust anybody -even our own husband or wife? On the other hand, dependence gives a sense of security; a protection against this vast world of terror. We say: "I love you." In that love there is always the sense of possessing and being possessed. And when that situation is threatened there arises all the conflict. That is our present relationship with each other, intimate or otherwise. We create an image about each other and cling to that image. The moment you are tied to another person, or tied to an idea or concept, corruption has begun. That is the thing to realize and we do not want to realize it. So, can we live together without being tied, without being dependent on each other psychologically? Unless you find this out you will always live in conflict, because life is relationship. Now, can we objectively, without any motive, observe the consequences of attachment and let them go immediately? Attachment is not the opposite of detachment. I am attached and I struggle to be detached; which is: I create the opposite. The moment I have created the opposite conflict comes into being. But there is no opposite; there is only what I have, which is attachment. There is only the fact of attachment - in which I see all the consequences of attachment in which there is no love -not the pursuit of detachment. The brain has been conditioned, educated, trained, to observe what is and to create its opposite: "I am violent but I must not be violent" - therefore there is conflict. But when I observe only violence, the nature of it - not analyse but observe - then the conflict of the opposite is totally eliminated. If one wants to live without conflict, only deal with `what is', everything else is not. And when one lives that way - and it is possible to live that way - completely to remain with `what is' then `what is' withers away. Experiment with it. When you really understand the nature of relationship, which only exists when there is no attachment, when there is no image about the other, then there is real communion with each other. Right action means precise, accurate action, not based on motive; it is action which is not directed or committed. The understanding of right action, right relationship, brings about intelligence. Not the intelligence of the intellect but that profound intelligence which is not yours or mine. That intelligence will dictate what you will do to earn a livelihood; when there is that intelligence you may be a gardener, a cook, it does not matter. Without that intelligence your livelihood will be dictated by circumstance. There is a way of living in which there is no conflict; because there is no conflict there is intelligence which will show the right way of living. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 25TH QUESTION SAANEN 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 24TH JULY 1980 'RECORDING' Question: Is it possible to be so completely awake at the moment of perception that the mind does not recall the event? In the question is the answer; we are going to enquire into it. Is it possible not to record at all, one's failures, despairs, anxieties, all the things that are going on inside and outside, so that the mind is always free? It is the function of the brain to record. Someone says to me: "You are an idiot", and the brain instantly records it. I do not like it because I have an image about myself that I am not an idiot and you call me an idiot and I am hurt. That is recording. The hurt exists as long as I have an image about myself - everybody will tread on that image. And there is hurt, the brain has recorded it. The recording is to build a wall round myself so as not to be hurt any more. I am afraid, so I shrink within myself, build a wall of resistance and I feel safe. Now the questioner asks: Is it possible not to record that hurt at the moment when I am called an idiot? Is it possible not to record at all, not only the hurt but flattery? Is it possible not to record either? The brain has been trained to record for in that recording there is safety, security, a sense of vitality; in that recording the mind creates the image about oneself. And that image will constantly get hurt. Is it possible to live without a single image about yourself, or about your husband, wife, children, firm, or about the politicians, the priests, or about the ideal - not a single shadow of an image? It is possible, and if it is not found you will always be getting hurt, always living in a pattern in which there is no freedom. When you give complete attention there is no recording. It is only when there is inattention that you record. That is: you flatter me; I like it; the liking at that moment is inattention therefore recording takes place. But if when you flatter me I listen to it completely without any reaction, then there is no centre which records. You have to go into the question of what attention is. Most of us know what concentration is; from one point to another point - from one desire, one hope, to another. You concentrate on your job. You concentrate in order to control the mind, in order to achieve a certain result. In that concentration there must be conflict because as you are concentrating, thoughts come pouring in and you try to push them off. This constant struggle with intruding thought is concentration; whereas in attention there is no struggle and no point from which you are attending. Have you ever given attention to anything? - which means there is no thought, no movement, no interpretation or motive, just attending completely. Concentration is from point to point and therefore there is resistance; attention has no centre from which you are attending; attention is all-inclusive, there is no border to it. Concentration inevitably brings about resistance, you shut yourself up, avoid noises, avoid interruptions; your whole brain is centred on a point, a point which may be excellent or not. In concentration there is the division between the controller and the controlled. The controller is the thought which says, "I must control that", therefore the controller is the controlled. Put it differently: the thinker is the thought, for there is no separation between thought and the thinker. You eliminate altogether the division when you realize that the thinker is the thought, that the controller is the controlled. When you actually see the truth of this there comes attention; in attention there may be concentration in which you concentrate on doing something, but it comes from attention. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 26TH QUESTION SAANEN 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 24TH JULY 1980 'DEATH' Question: In your talks you speak of death as total annihilation; also you have said that after death there is immortality, a state of timeless existence. Can one live in that state? I did not use the word annihilation; I have said that death is an ending - like ending attachment. When something ends, like attachment, something totally new begins. When one has been accustomed to anger all one's life, or greed or aggression and one ends it, something totally new happens. One may have followed a guru, with all the gadgets he has given one; one realizes the absurdity of it, and one ends it. What happens? There is a sense of freedom from the burden which one has been uselessly carrying. Death is like ending an attachment. What is it that has continued through life? One puts death in opposition to living. One says death is at the end of life; an end that may be ten or fifty years away - or the day after tomorrow. One hopes it will be ten years or more, but this is one's illusion, one's desire, a kind of momentum. One cannot understand how to face death without understanding or facing living, for death is not the opposite of living. Much more important than asking the question: how to face death or, what is immortality or, whether that immortality is a state in which one can live, is the question of how to face life, how to understand this terrible thing called living? Because living as one does, is meaningless. One may try to give meaning to life, as most people do, saying life is this, or life must be that, but putting aside all these romantic, illusory, idealistic nonsenses, life is one's daily sorrow, its competition, despair, depression, agony - with the occasional flash of beauty and love. That is one's life; can one face it and understand it so completely that one is left with no conflict in life? To do that is to die to everything that thought has built up. Thought has built one's vanity, thought has said, "I must achieve, become somebody, struggle, compete". That is what thought has put together, which is one's existence. One's gods, churches, gurus, rituals, all that is the activity of thought, a movement of memory, experience, knowledge stored up in the brain, a material process. And when thought dominates one's life, as it does, then thought denies love. Love is not a remembrance. Love is not an experience. Love is not desire or pleasure. Living that way, dominated by thought, one has separated from life that thing called death, which is an ending, and one is frightened of it. If one denies everything in oneself which thought has created - and this requires tremendous grit - what has one? One is with death; living is dying and so renewal. One is trained to be an individual - me as opposed to you, my ego against your ego. But the fact is that one is the entire humanity. One goes through what every other human being goes through, all one's sexual appetites, indulgences, sorrow, great hope, fear, anxiety, the immense sense of loneliness - that is what every human being has, that is one's life. One is the entire humanity, one is not individual. One likes to think one is, but one is not. There is a life in which there is no centre as `me', a life, therefore, walking hand in hand with death; and out of that sense of ending totally, time has come to an end. Time is movement, movement is thought, thought is time. When one asks: "Can one live in that eternity?" - one cannot understand. See what one has done. "I want to live in eternity, to understand immortality" - which means the `I' must be part of that. But what is the `I'? A name, a form, and all the things that thought has put together; that is what the `I' actually is, to which one clings. And when death comes through disease , accident, old age, how scared one is. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 27TH QUESTION SAANEN 3RD QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 25TH JULY 1980 'DISCONTENT' Question: I am dissatisfied with everything. I have read and thought a great deal but my discontent with the whole universe is still there. What you talk about makes me more discontented, more disturbed, more troubled. I now feel frustrated, antagonistic to you. What is wrong with what you are saying? Or is something wrong with me? One observes what is happening in the world, one sees the over population, the pollution, corruption and violence, in practically every country and one tries to find an answer. One may be discontented, not only with what the speaker is saying but with everything around one - with one's job, with one's wife or husband, with one's girl or boy friend and much else. One is discontented. And that is the common lot for most of us. Either that discontent becomes a consuming flame, or it is dampened down by seeking some kind of satisfaction in various activities of life. Instead of allowing discontent to become a consuming flame, most of us almost destroy it. We are so easily satisfied, so gullible, so ready to accept, that gradually our discontent withers away and we become the normal mediocre human being, without any vitality, without any energy, without any urge to do anything. The questioner implies that he has been through all that; he has read and thought about life a great deal, he has probably been all over the world and has not found an answer to this discontent. People who are thoughtful, aware of what is happening around them and in themselves, are aware that politics, science and religion have not answered any of our deep human problems. We have technologically evolved and developed but inwardly we are discontented. The questioner, listening to the speaker, is even more disturbed, more discontented and antagonistic and asks what is wrong with what the speaker is saying - or is there something wrong with himself? Instead of accepting and sitting quietly and saying yes, he is antagonistic to the speaker; he does not accept. One must be very clear as to whether this discontent has a cause, because if it has a cause then it is seeking contentment, satisfaction, gratification. The discontent creates the opposite, the wish to be contented, to be satisfied, to be completely bourgeois. If what one wants, when one is discontented, is to find something with which one can be completely contented, so that one is never disturbed, then one will find a way to obtain contentment and discontent will wither and be gone. Perhaps that is what most of us are doing. You have been to this or to that talk, you come here wanting some kind of satisfaction, some kind of certainty and assurance, some gratifying truth. Most of us find satisfaction very easily; in the kitchen, in some aspect of religion, or in politics. So gradually and inevitably the mind is narrowed down, made small when its capacity is so immense. If one is not satisfied with anything, discontented with the whole universe - as the questioner puts it - not just dissatisfied at the level of having no house or money, then that discontent has no cause; it is discontent in itself, not because of something. Such people are rare who have this flame of discontent. Perhaps such a person comes here, listens, and that discontent increases, it becomes all-consuming. So what shall he do when he is totally dissatisfied with the whole structure of thought? He is in an immovable state. He is not seeking, he is not wanting, he is not pursuing something or other; he is aflame with this thing. And the speaker is also immovable. What he says is so; not because he is dogmatic, superstitious, romantic or self-assertive. He says that if you comprehend consciousness with its content and the freeing of that consciousness of its content there is a totally different dimension. He has said this for fifty years, not because he has invented it, but because it is so. There are these two entities, one is completely discontented, nothing satisfies him, words, books, ideas, leaders, politics, nothing and so he is in an immovable state, and the other is equally immovable, he will not budge, he will not yield. What happens? Two human beings, one from the depth of his mind and heart is totally dissatisfied and the other also from the depth of his mind and heart says, "It is so; then these two entities meet. This is not something romantic, invented out of imagination. This is so. But if one feels antagonistic to the other, then he has already moved. He has not remained completely dissatisfied. The moment he says, "I am antagonistic to you and to that of which you speak", he has moved away from what is burning. He has already softened. Still the other has no antagonism; he says, "It is so". When the first person meets the speaker without antagonism, without wanting something from him, he is alight. Then both are the same. Fire is fire. It is not your fire, my fire, it is fire. When the fire is dampened, the are different. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 28TH QUESTION SAANEN 3RD QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 25TH JULY 1980 'INATTENTION' Question: One realizes deeply the importance of awareness of one's inner and outer actions, yet one slips into inattention so easily. Must there be a Krishnamurti, the books, the cassettes, to keep one alert? Why? Why this gap between understanding and immediate action? Why is inattention so easy, so common? It is taking place all the time. To be aware of what is happening inside the skin and what is happening outside the skin - must there be somebody to remind you of it? Clothes do not make a man; by putting on robes a monk does not become a saint. Either the clothes remind you that one must be constantly aware - then you depend on the clothes - or without these outward garments can you be aware and not slip into inattention? Is awareness, whatever it is, to be cultivated, developed through practice, through saying: "I must be aware", and meditating on that awareness or having some kind of thing to remind one of it constantly - whether a picture or a hair shirt which is so uncomfortable that one is constantly reminded to be aware? Let us find out what it means to be aware. One cannot know everything that is happening in the world; what the politicians are doing, what the Secret Service is doing, what the army or the scientists are doing; one does not know what one's neighbour is doing, nor what one's wife or husband is doing inwardly. One cannot know everything. But one can know, or become aware, of one's own life inwardly. Now, is that inner movement different from the outer movement? Is that which is outside - the pollution, the corruption, the chicanery, the deception, the hypocrisy, the violence - is that very different from oneself inwardly? Or is it a constant movement, like the tide going in and out? Can one be aware of this movement - see and observe it? Can one in the process of observing this flow this unitary movement, make any choice? In this movement is awareness based on choice? Can one observe this movement - which is oneself and the world, for the world is oneself - without any choice? That observation is awareness, which one does not have to cultivate, about which one does not have to have somebody to remind one, neither books, nor tapes. Once one sees for oneself the truth that this movement out there and the movement in here are essentially similar one does not need any reminders. It is this same movement that has created the world, the society, the army, the navy, the scientist, the politician, and that movement is oneself. Can one seriously, not deceiving oneself, go very very deeply into this awareness without choice; observing it without any direction? One has to be extremely watchful. Naturally, that awareness cannot be constant. But to be aware that it is not constant, is to be aware of inattention. To be aware of inattention is attention. One cannot reasonably, sanely, say: "I am going to be alert from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep" - one cannot, unless one is neurotic and practises saying: "I am going to be aware, I am going to be aware" - then it becomes words and has no meaning. But if one sees that attention, awareness, cannot be maintained all the time - which is a fact - then inattention, not being attentive, has its value, has its meaning; because in inattention you discover that you are not attentive. The questioner asks: Why is there a gap between understanding and immediate action? What does one mean by understanding? Somebody explains the nature and the structure of the atom, one listens carefully and says, "Yes, I understand what you are saying". Or one listens to a philosopher and says, "Yes, I understand the basis of your theories". All that is intellectual discernment, understanding. That is the function of the intellect - to discern, to evaluate, to analyse. At that level one says, "I understand". The questioner asks: Why is there a gap between understanding of that kind and immediate action? One has deeply to understand that the word never is the thing, the explanation is never the actuality. Now, understanding takes place when the mind is quiet, not merely at the intellectual level. You are telling me something, something serious, philosophic. if my mind is chattering, wandering away, I cannot fully comprehend what you are saying. So I must listen to you, not translate what you are saying, or interpret what you are saying, or listen partially because I am frightened of what you might say, for then the mind is disturbed, moving, changing, volatile. Whereas, if I really want to listen to what you are saying, the mind must be quiet. Then there is a depth of understanding which is not merely intellectual or verbal. When there is profound perception of what is being said, false or true - and one can discover the truth in the false - then in that state of silent understanding action is naturally immediate, there is no gap between the two. When one is standing on the edge of a precipice, one does not argue, the intellect does not say let us discuss, think about it; one jumps away from the danger. There is immediate action of self-protection, which is healthy, natural, normal. One does not stand in front of a bus which is running one down, or stand looking at a dangerous snake, or animal. It is a natural, instinctive, response to save oneself. If perception is complete -which can only take place when the mind is quietly listening, not accepting, not denying but listening - then that perception and action are the same. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 29TH QUESTION SAANEN 3RD QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 25TH JULY 1980 'UNDERSTANDING' Question: I have understood the things we have talked over during these meetings, even if only intellectually. I feel they are true in a deep sense. Now when I go back to my country shall I talk about your teachings with friends? Or since I am still a fragmented human being will I only produce more confusion and mischief by talking about them? All the religious preachings of the priests, the gurus, are promulgated by fragmented human beings. Though they say, "We are high up", they are still fragmented human beings. And the questioner says: I have understood what you have said somewhat, partially, not completely; I am not a transformed human being. I understand, and I want to tell others what I have understood. I do not say I have understood the whole, I have understood a part. I know it is fragmented, I know it is not complete, I am not interpreting the teachings, I am just informing you what I have understood. Well, what is wrong with that? But if you say: "I have grasped the whole completely and I am telling you" - then you become an authority, the interpreter; such a person is a danger, he corrupts other people. But if I have seen something which is true I am not deceived by it; it is true and in that there is a certain affection, love, compassion; I feel that very strongly - then naturally I cannot help but go out to others; it would be silly to say I will not. But I warn my friends, I say, "Look, be careful, do not put me on a pedestal". The speaker is not on a pedestal. This pedestal, this platform, is only for convenience; it does not give him any authority whatever. But as the world is, human beings are tied to something or other - to a belief, to a person, to an idea, to an illusion, to a dogma - so they are corrupt; and the corrupt speak and we, being also somewhat corrupt, join the crowd. Seeing the beauty of these hills, the river, the extraordinary tranquillity of a fresh morning, the shape of the mountains, the valleys, the shadow how everything is in proportion, seeing all that, will you not write to your friend, saying, "Come over here, look at this?" You are not concerned about yourself but only about the beauty of the mountain. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 30TH QUESTION SAANEN 3RD QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 25TH JULY 1980 'SEX' Question: Why does sex play such an important part in each one's life in the world? There is a particular philosophy, especially in India, called Tantra, part of which encourages sex. They say through sex you reach Nirvana. It is encouraged, so that you go beyond it - and you never do. Why has sex become so important in our life? It has been so, not only in the present period, but always. Why has sex been so deeply embedded in man? - apart from producing children, I am not talking of that. Why? Probably it is the greatest pleasure a human being has. Demanding that pleasure, all kinds of complications arise; volumes have been written with explanations of the psychological complications. But the authors have never asked the question as to why human beings have made this thing so extremely important in their lives. Our life is in a turmoil, it is a constant struggle, with nothing original, nothing creative - I am using the word `creative' very carefully. The painter, the architect, the wood-carver, he may say he is creative. The woman who bakes bread in the kitchen is said to be creative. And sex, they say, is also creative. So what is it to be creative? The painters, the musicians and the Indian singers with their devotion, say that theirs is the act of creation. Is it? You have accepted Picasso as a great painter, a great creator, putting one nose on three faces, or whatever he does. I am not denying it or being derogatory, I am just pointing it out. That is what is called creation. But is all that creativeness? Or is creativeness something totally different? You are seeing the expression of creativeness in a painting, in a poem, in prose, a in a statue, in music. It is expressed according to a man's talent, his capacity great or small; it may be modern Rock or Bach - I am sorry to compare the two! - they are quite incomparable. We human beings have accepted all that as creative because it brings fame, money, position. But I am asking: is that creativity? Can there be creation, in the most profound sense of that word, so long as there is egotism, so long as there is the demand for success, money and recognition - supplying the market? Do not agree with me please. I am just pointing out. I am not saying I know creativity and you do not; I am not saying that. I am saying we never question these things. I say there is a state where there is creation in which there is no shadow of self. That is real creation; it does not need expression, it does not need self-fulfilment; it is creation. Perhaps sex is felt to be creative and has become important because everything around us is circumscribed, the job, the office, going to the church, following some philosopher, some guru. All that has deprived us of freedom and, further, we are not free from our own knowledge; it is always with us, the past. So we are deprived of freedom outwardly and inwardly; for generation upon generation we have been told what to do. And the reaction to that is: I'll do what I want, which is also limited, based on pleasure, on desire, on capacity. So where there is no freedom, either outwardly or inwardly, specially inwardly, we have only one thing left and that is called sex. Why do we give it importance? Do you give equal importance to being free from fear? No. Do you give equal energy, vitality and thought to end sorrow? No. Why? Why only to sex? Because that is the easiest thing to hand; the other demands all your energy, which can only come when you are free. So naturally human beings throughout the world have given this thing tremendous importance in life. And when you give something, which is only one part of life, tremendous importance, you are destroying yourself. Life is whole, not just one part. If you give importance to the whole then sex becomes more or less unimportant. The monks and all those who have denied sex have turned their energy to god but the thing is boiling in them, nature cannot be suppressed. But when you give that thing all-importance, then you are corrupt. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 31ST QUESTION SAANEN 3RD QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 25TH JULY 1980 'AUTHORITY' Question: What do you mean when you ask us to think together? Do you intend that everybody who listens to you should think with you at the same time? Don't you think that this is acting as a guru, leading people to follow your ideas, thoughts and conclusions? The word 'guru' is a discredited word. I believe that the true meaning is one who dispels ignorance, not one who adds his ignorance to yours. It has other meanings also. There have always been Western gurus from ancient times; the priests, acting between you and what they call god or the saviour. This has also existed in India. The questioner says: When the speaker asks us to think together, is he not setting himself as a guru? So let us examine what it means when the speaker says 'think together'. Thinking together is not accepting what the speaker is saying. It is not agreeing with or accepting the ideas, the conclusions which he may have. The speaker, in fact, has no conclusions. But he says 'think together' in the sense that both of us observe together. Observe, and let us find out what it means to observe. That does not give him any authority. You can make him into an authority, which would be unfortunate, but he does not have any authority and he denies any kind of following. If he were laying down any conclusions, ideals and so on and was accepting disciples, then he would be in a state of corruption. For the last fifty years he has been saying this. So there is no sense of authority in this. It is very simple: if he were prejudiced, if he had all kinds of nauseating, compulsive, neurotic conclusions, it would mean that he wanted to force them on you. But he constantly says let us share together what we are observing, out there and in here. That is all. Apparently you seem to be incapable of standing alone: that word 'alone' means all one. When you are really alone, not contaminated, when you are really free, you are the whole human entity, the human world. But we are frightened to be alone; we always want to be with somebody or with an idea or an image. To be alone is not solitude, solitude has its own beauty, to walk alone in the woods, alone along the river not hand in hand with somebody or other - but alone in solitude, which is different from aloneness.If you are walking by yourself, you are watching the sky, the trees, the birds, the flowers and all the beauty of the earth, and also, perhaps, you are watching yourself - not having a dialogue with yourself, not carrying your burdens with you; you have left those behind. Solitude reveals you loneliness, your vanity, your sense of depression. When you have finished with solitude there is the other, aloneness, which is not a conclusion or a belief - it is not propaganda, telling you what it means to look. Aloneness is not pushing you in any direction; when you are directed or when you are guided, you become a slave and therefore you lose freedom, totally, from the very beginning. Freedom is not at the end, it is at the beginning. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 32ND QUESTION SAANEN 4TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 26TH JULY 1980 'TO BE QUIET' Question: You seem to object even to our sitting quietly everyday to observe the movement of thought. Is this, by your definition, a practice, a method and therefore without value? Now the questioner asks: What is wrong with sitting quietly every morning for twenty minutes, in the afternoon another twenty minutes and perhaps another twenty minutes in the evening or longer - what is wrong with it? By sitting quietly you can relax, you can observe your thinking, your reactions, your responses and your reflexes. What is the motive of those who sit quietly by themselves, or together in a group? What is the motive behind the desire to sit quietly for half an hour every day? Is it not important to find out why you want to do this? Is it because somebody has told you that if you sit quietly you will have parapsychological experiences, that you will attain some kind of peace, some kind of understanding, some kind of enlightenment, or some kind of power? And, being rather gullible, you pay thousands of dollars to receive instructions and a mantra which you can repeat. Some people have paid thousands of dollars to a man who will give them something in return - specially a Sanskrit word - and they repeat it. You pay something and you receive something in return; what is the motive behind it? Why are you doing this? Is it for a psychological reward? Is it that by sitting quietly you attain some kind of super-consciousness? Or is it that you want that which has been promised by your instructor? So it is important - before we plunge into all this - to find out what is your motive, what it is that you want. But you do not do that. You are so eager and gullible; somebody promises something and you want it. If you examine the motive, you see that it is a desire to achieve something - like a businessman's desire to earn a lot of money. That is his urge. Here the psychological urge is to have something that a guru, or an instructor, promises. You do not question what he promises, you do not doubt what he promises. But if you ask the man who is offering you something: Is it worthwhile? Is it true? Who are you to tell me what to do? then you will find that sitting quietly, without understanding your motive, leads to all kinds of illusory psychological trouble. If that is the intention of sitting quietly, it is not worth it. But if while sitting quietly without any motive, or walking quietly by yourself or with somebody, you watch the trees, the birds, the rivers and the sunshine on the leaves, in that very watching you are also watching yourself. You are not striving, not making tremendous efforts to achieve something. Those who are committed to a certain kind of meditation find it very hard to throw that off because the mind is already conditioned; they have practised this thing for several years and there they are stuck. And if somebody comes along and says: "What nonsense all this is" they may, at a rare moment, become rational and say: "Yes, perhaps this is wrong; then begins the trouble, the conflict, between what they have found rationally for themselves and that which they have been practising for the last ten years - a struggle that is called progress, spiritual progress! The mind is always chattering, always pursuing one thought or another, one set of sensory responses after another set of responses. In order to stop that chattering you try to learn concentration, forcing the mind to stop chattering and so the conflict begins again. This is what you are doing; chattering, chattering, talking endlessly about nothing. Now, if you want to observe something, a tree, a flower, the lines of the mountains, you have to look, you have to be quiet. But you are not interested in the mountains, or the beauty of the hills and the valleys and the waters; you want to get somewhere, achieve something, spiritually. Is it not possible to be quiet, naturally - to look at a person, or to listen to a song, or to listen to what somebody is saying quietly, without resistance, without saying, "I must change, I must do this, I must do that", just to be quiet? Apparently that is most difficult. So you practise systems to be quiet. Do you see the fallacy of it? To practise a method, a system, a regular everyday routine, as a result of which you think the mind will at last be quiet; but it will never be quiet; it is mechanical, it has become set in a pattern, dull and insensitive. You do not see all that; you want to get something - an initiation! Oh, it is all so childish. If you listen quietly, not saying the speaker is right or wrong, or saying, I am committed to this, I have promised not to give it up; I am this, that, the other thing", but listen to what is being said without resistance, then what you are doing is your own discovery, then your mind in the very process of investigation becomes quiet. So can we, ordinary people, with all our troubles and turmoils, be quiet and listen to all the prattlings of our own movements of thought? Is it possible to sit, or stand, or walk quietly, without any promptings from another, without any reward or desire for extraordinary super-physical sensory experiences? Begin at the most rational level; then one can go very far. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 33RD QUESTION SAANEN 4TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 26TH JULY 1980 'ILLUMINATION' Question: What is enlightenment? To be enlightened about what? Please let us be rational. For instance, one is enlightened about one's relationship with another. That is, one has understood that one's relationship with another is based on one's image about the other, however intimate. That image has been put together through many years of constant reaction, indifference, comfort, nagging, all that goes on between man and woman. So the relationship is between the two images. That is what one calls relationship. Now, if one perceives the truth of this, one says one is enlightened about it. Or, one is enlightened about violence; one sees clearly, without distortion, the whole movement of violence. Or one sees how sorrow arises, and the ending of sorrow is that one is enlightened about it. But we do not mean that. We mean something else: "I am enlightened, I will tell you about it, come to me". If we really go into what enlightenment, illumination, the voice of truth, is, then we must go carefully into the question of time. The so-called enlightened people have said that you come to it through time, gradually, life after life - if you believe in reincarnation - until you come to the point when you are enlightened - about everything. They say it is a gradual process of experience, knowledge, a constant movement from the past to the present and the future, a cycle. Now, is enlightenment, the ultimate thing, a matter of time? Is it? Is it a gradual process, which means a process in time, the process of evolution, the gradual becoming? We must understand the nature of time, not chronological time, but the psychological structure which has accepted time: "I hope ultimately to get there". The desire, which is part of hope, says, "I will ultimately get there". The so-called enlightened people are not enlightened, for the moment they say, "I am enlightened", they are not. That is their vanity. It is like a man saying, "I am really humble" - when a man says that you know what he is. Real humility is not the opposite of vanity. When vanity ends the other is. Those who have said they are enlightened, say you must attain it, step by step, practise this, do that, don't do this; become my pupil, I'll tell you what to do, I'll give you an Indian name, or a new Christian name, and so on. And you, an irrational human being, accept this nonsense. So you ask, what is that supreme enlightenment? A mind that has no conflict, no sense of striving, of going, moving and achieving. One must understand this question of psychological time, the constant becoming, or not becoming - which are the same. When that becoming is rooted in the mind it conditions all your thinking, all your activity; then it is a matter of using time as a means of achieving. But, is there such a thing as becoming? "I am violent, I will be non-violent". That means that becoming is an idea. I am violent and I project the idea of not being violent, so I create duality; the violent and non-violent, and so there is conflict. Or I say, "I must control myself, I must suppress, I must analyse, I must go to a psychologist, I must have a psycho-therapist". Without creating the opposite the fact is violence. The fact. The non-violence is non-fact. If you see the truth that if I am violent, the concept of non-violence brings about this conflict between the opposites, the non-fact has no value. Now to observe the whole movement of violence, anger, jealousy, hatred, competition, imitation, conformity, do so without any direction, without any motive. If you do that, there is the end of violence, which is immediate perception and action. So, one can see that illumination, the sense of ultimate reality, is not of time. This goes against the whole psychology of the religious world, the Christians with their souls, with their saviours, with their ultimate. Perception is action, not perception, interval, then action. In the interval there arises the idea. The mind, the brain, the whole human nervous and psychological structure, can be free of this burden of a million years of time so that you see something clearly and therefore that action is invariably immediate. That action will be rational, not irrational. That action can be explained logically, sanely. That ultimate thing, which is truth, is not to be achieved through time. It can never be achieved; it is there; or it is not there. -- Page 73 -- QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 34TH QUESTION SAANEN 4TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 26TH JULY 1980 'EXTRA-SENSORY EXPERIENCES' Question: People talk of experiences beyond the senses. There seems to be a fascination in such experiences but the lives of those who claim to have had them seem to be as mediocre as before. What are these experiences? Are these experiences part of enlightenment, or a step towards it? And if so, what is enlightenment? It is strange, is it not, that you are always talking about enlightenment, about what the speaker has said, or what somebody else has said? You never say: "Look, it is my life. I am in great pain, sorrow; how am I to resolve all this?". Everywhere the speaker has been, there has always been this kind of question. You do not question how you will live in this world which is so corrupt, where there is no justice; and you are part of all that. Why do we not ask a really deep fundamental question about ourselves? Why is it we never ask: "I don't seem to have loved; I know all the descriptions of love; I know when I say to my girl friend or my wife, `I love you' - I know it is not love, it is sex, sensory pleasure, desire, companionship; I know that all that is not that bloom that flowers, that has beauty, that has creativeness"? But you ask about enlightenment - why? Is it that you are frightened, that you cannot bear to see what you are - the shoddiness, the ugliness, the pettiness, the vulgarity, the mediocrity of it all? And, if you discover what you actually are, you say please help me, tell me what to do. The father figure comes into being then. Apparently we never face ourselves. We avoid it at any cost. That is why we become so irrational and why we are exploited by all these people. It is really a tragedy: grown up people - at least we think we are grown up - playing with all this, and not coming to the root of things, which is ourselves. We have to be forced, urged, compelled to face ourselves, by somebody. We never, never under any circumstance face this thing; that is why there is no change in us. Life, the living of everyday, is a vast, tremendous, experience, with its joys, pleasures, anxieties, its burden of sorrow and injustice all around us; and the poverty, overpopulation, pollution; and the lack of energy in ourselves. Life is such a complex experience. Yet we are bored with it. We cannot face it. We do not feel responsible for it. We separate ourselves from all this. That separation is fallacious, unreal, irrational, because we are that, we have created that, each one of us. We are part of all that and we do not want to face it. So being bored, being exhausted by the trivialities of life, we go and ask somebody, pay him, to initiate us, to give us a new name, in the hope of having new experiences. So, we must understand the nature of our daily living, the daily irritations, the daily angers, boredom, loneliness and despair. Yet, instead of facing all that, understanding it, cleaning it up, we want super-extra-sensory experiences, when we have not even understood the activity of the daily response of the senses. When one has really understood and lived so that the life of everyday boredom, loneliness, the ache for something better, is cleansed away; when one is free of all that and the depths are cleared, when the foundation is laid, then when one goes beyond it one will see that a mind that is asking for extrasensory experiences is still in the state of being conditioned by the senses. Then there is a mind that has no experience whatsoever. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 35TH QUESTION SAANEN 4TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 26TH JULY 1980 'INSIGHT' Question: Insight is a word now used to describe anything newly seen, or any change of perspective. This insight we all know. But the insight you speak of seems a very different one. What is the nature of the insight of which you speak? If you have understood with insight, your whole daily life will be affected. The first part of the question refers to the sort of experiments carried out on monkeys. Hang up a bunch of bananas and a monkey takes a stick and beats it and the bananas drop; the monkey is said to have insight. There is the other monkey who piles furniture together, one piece on top of another; by that means he reaches the bananas. That is also called insight. There are also experiments with rats; they have to do all kinds of tricks, press this button or that button in order to get at food. That is also called insight. Through experiment, through trial and error, through constantly trying this button and the other button the right button is ultimately pressed and the door of the trap is opened. This process of so-called insight is essentially based on knowledge and that is what we are all doing. You may not call it insight, but it is the actual process of our activity. Try this; if it does not suit, try that. Medically, physically, sexually and so-called spiritually we are doing this all the time. Trying, experimenting and achieving, which becomes acquired knowledge, and from that knowledge we act. This is called insight. We are referring to an insight which is something entirely different. When the monkey pushes that button and achieves a result, his brain has recorded, memorized, that button as giving that result; it becomes automatic. Then the experimenter changes the button. The monkey presses the original button but it does not work so he gets disturbed. This is what happens to you. Through experiment, through trial, you find a way of living, which suits you. That then is called insight. That insight is based on the repetition of knowledge. Knowledge is acquired or discarded. That insight is always based on knowledge, and knowledge is the past. There is no knowledge of the now or of the future. The brain is accustomed to one button, to one pattern; it will not accept basic change, it does not know where it is, like the monkey; if the buttons are constantly changed it gives up; it will not move; it is paralysed and does not know what to do. You can see all this in your own self; not knowing what to do, you rush off asking somebody what buttons to press. We are talking about something very serious. This constant change, happening throughout the world, brings about a sense of paralytic inaction. One cannot do anything. One can go into a monastery, but that is too immature, too childish when you are facing something tremendous. So, unless there is a change in the brain cells themselves, the mere pressing of buttons is the same process repeated. Unless the brain - which is composed of a million, a trillion, or whatever number of cells - undergoes a radical change it will be repeating the old pattern, modifying itself, uncertain, insecure, in a paralysing state of inaction, and, being paralysed it will go off to ask somebody else for help. This is what we are doing. Can those brain cells change - not by being operated upon, not by being given new drugs, not as a result of entering into new modes of scientific investigation? If not we will keep on endlessly repeating this pattern of certainty, uncertainty, certainty, uncertainty. I say they can be changed. This movement from certainty to uncertainty and vice versa, is a pattern of time. The brain is used to that - that is why there are all these questions about enlightenment, systems and so on. The speaker says they can be changed, rationally, not in some illusory, fanciful, romantic manner. The brain, the mind and so the nerves, the whole, can observe itself. Which means no direction, no motive. When there is no motive or direction, the movement has already changed. The brain is accustomed to function with motives and when there is no motive in observation one has changed the whole momentum of the past. When there is no motive, no direction, the mind becomes absolutely quiet. There is inward observation and that observation is insight. Therefore the pattern to which the brain cells have been accustomed has been broken. We are brought up on ideals - the greater, the nobler, the better. The ideal has become more important than `what is'. `What is' and the ideal are opposed and must breed conflict. Look what you are doing: the ideal is the creation of thought in order to overcome `what is', or to use the future as a lever to change `what is'. You are using non-fact to deal with fact. Therefore there is no result; that way there can never be change. It is so simple once you see it. Discard the ideal because it is valueless and observe only the fact. The discarding of the ideal has changed the pattern of the brain cells; the brain has lived in that pattern and now the pattern is broken. One has lived in the hope that one will gradually change; then one sees that gradualness is really the same thing repeated, modified, repeated, modified, repeated - therefore there is no basic change. When you see that, the whole structure of the brain has changed: that is insight. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 36TH QUESTION SAANEN 5TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 27TH JULY 1980 'BEYOND MEASURE' Question: I think I can solve my problems. I do not need any help. I have the energy to do it, but beyond this I come to receive - and if you do not like that word, to share something measureless to man, something that has great depth and beauty. Can you share that with me? One's problems can be solved without the help of others; they are created by oneself in relationship to another; and however subtle, however superficial or great they can be solved if one applies one's mind and heart to resolving them - that is if one is not slack and lazy. But the questioner wants to go much further. He comes here to share something he calls `measureless to man' (in Coleridge's words), something beyond all measure, something that is not given in churches. The first thing is to be clear as to what we mean by measure - because he uses the word `measureless'. Distance can be measured. So-called progressive evolution can be measured. One was this yesterday; through meeting the present yesterday is modified and gives the movement to the future. That can be measured. Thought is a material process which can be measured -the superficiality of one's thinking, the deeper and the deepest thoughts. The more and the less can always be measured. Comparison is a process of measurement. Imitation and conformity can be measured. As long as there is measurement the mind can only function in that measurement. The mind, the brain, through training and custom have fallen into the habit of measurement. Is there something which is not measurable? Is there such a thing? Can the mind, the brain, and the heart, they are all one, can that whole structure be free of measurement? The brain - which has evolved through time, millions and millions of years - is the common brain of humanity. We may not like to realize this because we are accustomed to the idea that our brains are individual. That concept of individuality has been the tradition through millennia. That brain is constantly measuring -the more, the less, the better and the best - it is constantly functioning in that pattern. But the questioner comes to share something measureless to man. How then are we going to find out if there is something beyond all measure, that is beyond all time - because time is measurement? Time is movement. Thought is movement. Time is thought. Thought is born out of memory, experience, knowledge. This is a material process because in the very cells of the brain memories are stored. Everything that the brain creates is a material process. Insight is total perception of the whole complex movement of measurement. You can only have that insight when you perceive without previous knowledge, for if you are using knowledge then it is comparative, it is measurable. Insight is not measurable. When there is measureless insight the unfolding of the whole movement of comparison is not only seen but ends immediately. You can test it; you do not have to accept the speaker's word for it. So: what is beyond measure? To find out there must be freedom from fear, the deep-rooted, conscious or unconscious fears. Fear is something that can be observed and resolved, because the root of fear - not the various branches and the leaves of that tree - is time. One is afraid of tomorrow. One is afraid of what has happened. The physical pain which one has had is gone but the fear that it might occur again remains. Psychologically one has done something wrong, dishonourable and there is fear. Psychologically, fear is time: "I am afraid of dying. I am living now but I dread what might happen; that is the measurement of time. The root of fear is time and thought. To have an insight into that is the ending of fear totally. The ending of fear means the understanding of time and the ending of sorrow. If the mind and the brain, are cleared of sorrow and fear then there may be something other. But we want to be assured of it, we want it guaranteed, like a good watch: that is the commercial mentality. There is no guarantee and that is the beauty of it. This one has to do for itself, not for a reward. And that is very difficult for most people. If one is given something in exchange it is an act of measurement. So, can the mind be free of all measurement - especially in your relationship to another, which is more difficult? When one is free of all measurement then something totally different takes place. When that which has taken place beyond measure is described, it is no longer measureless. You can describe the mountain, the shape of it, the line of it, the shadows; you can paint it, make a poem about it, but all that is not the mountain. We sit in the valley and say, "Please tell us about the mountain." We do not walk there. We want to be comfortable. There is something beyond all measure. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 37TH QUESTION SAANEN 5TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 27TH JULY 1980 'CONSCIOUSNESS' Question: What is our consciousness? Are there different levels of consciousness? Is there a consciousness beyond the one of which we are normally aware? Is it possible to empty the content of consciousness? One may use words and give descriptions, but what is named and described is not the fact; so do not be caught in the description. What is our consciousness? It is to be conscious of, to be aware of, what is going on, not only outside but inside; it is the same movement. Our consciousness is the product of our education, our culture, racial inheritance and the result of our own striving. All our beliefs, our dogmas, rituals, concepts, jealousies, anxieties, pleasures, our so-called love - all that is our consciousness. It is the structure which has evolved through millennia after millennia -through wars, tears, sorrow, depression and elation: all that makes up our consciousness. Some people say you cannot change consciousness. You can modify it, you can polish it, but you have to accept it, make the best of it; it is there. Without the content, consciousness, as we know it, does not exist. The questioner asks: Is it possible to empty consciousness of all content - the sorrow, the strife, the struggle, the terrible human relationships, the quarrels, anxieties, jealousies, the affection, the sensuality? Can that content be emptied? If it is emptied, is there a different kind of consciousness? Has consciousness different layers, different levels? In India the Ancient people divided consciousness into lower, higher and yet higher. And these divisions are measured, for the moment there is division there must be measurement, and where there is measurement there must be effort. Whatever level consciousness may have, it is still within consciousness. The division of consciousness is measurement, therefore it is thought. Whatever thought has put together is part of consciousness, however you choose to divide it. It is possible to empty the content of consciousness completely, The essence of this content is thought, which has put together the `me' - the `me' who is ambitious, greedy, aggressive. That `me' is the essence of the content of consciousness. Can that `me' with all this structure of selfishness be totally ended? The speaker can say, "Yes, it can be ended, completely". It means that there is no centre from which you are acting, no centre from which you are thinking. The centre is the essence of measurement, which is the effort of becoming. Can that becoming end? You may say: "Probably it can, but what is at the end of it, if one ends this becoming?" First of all find out for yourself if this becoming can end. Can you drop, end, something which you like, that gives you some deep pleasure, without a motive, without saying, "I can do it if there is something at the end of it"? Can you immediately end something that gives you great pleasure? You see how difficult this is. It is like a man who smokes, his body has been poisoned by nicotine and when he stops smoking the body craves for it and so he takes something else to satisfy the body. So can you end something, rationally, clearly, without any motive of reward or punishment? Selfishness hides in many ways, in seeking truth, in social service, in selling oneself to a person, to an idea, to a concept. One must be astonishingly aware of all this, and that requires energy, all the energy that is now being wasted in conflict, in fear, in sorrow, in all the travails of life. That energy is also being wasted in so-called meditation. It requires enormous energy, not physical energy, but the energy that has never been wasted. Then consciousness can be emptied and when it is emptied one may or may not find there is something more, it is up to oneself. One may like something more to be guaranteed but there is no guarantee. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 38TH QUESTION SAANEN 5TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 27TH JULY 1980 'MEDIOCRITY' Question: Why is it that almost all human beings, apart from their talents and capacities, are mediocre? I know I am mediocre. I do not seem to be able to break through this mediocrity. Are you aware that you are mediocre? Answer it for yourself. Mediocre means neither high nor low, just hovering in between. The great painters, the great musicians, the great architects, have extraordinary capacities and talents but in their daily life they are like you and me, like everybody else. If you are aware that you are mediocre, what does it mean? You may have great talent as a writer, a painter, sculptor, musician, teacher, but that is all outward dress, outward show hiding inward poverty. Being poor inwardly we are always striving to be something nobler. Trying to fill that insufficiency with the latest gossip of politics, with the latest rituals, the latest meditations, the latest this and that, is all an act of mediocrity. This sense of mediocrity shows itself in outward respectability. And there is the other revolt against mediocrity, the hippies, the long haired, the unshaved, the latest fallouts; it is the same movement. Or you join a community, because inwardly there is nothing in you; by joining you become important, and there is action. When you are aware of this mediocrity, this utter sense of insufficiency, this sense of deep frustrating loneliness, you see it is covered over by all kinds of activities. If you are aware of that, then what is this loneliness, this insufficiency? How do you measure this insufficiency? - for this measurement is limitless; you go on measuring, measuring, measuring; it is unending. Now, can that comparative observation end? If so, is there insufficiency? This mediocrity, that all of us seem to have, can be broken through when there is no sense of comparison, of measurement. That gives you an immense freedom. Where there is complete psychological freedom there is no sense of mediocrity. You are out of that class altogether - a totally different state of mind exists. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 39TH QUESTION SAANEN 5TH QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 27TH JULY 1980 'ATTACHMENT' Question: Attachment brings about a kind of emotional exchange, a human warmth, which seems a fundamental need. Detachment produces coldness, lack of affection, a break in relationship; it can also deeply hurt others. Something seems to be wrong with this approach. What do you say? The word `attach' means to cling, to hold, to have the feeling that you belong to somebody and that somebody belongs to you. Cultivating detachment breeds lack of affection, a coldness, a break in relationship; it is the cultivation of the opposite. Naturally it will. If detachment is the opposite of attachment, then that detachment is an idea, a concept, a conclusion that thought has brought about as a result of realizing that attachment produces a lot of trouble, a lot of conflict, jealousy and anxiety. So thought says, "It is much better to be detached." Detachment is a non-fact, whereas attachment is a fact. When there is attachment, to cultivate detachment is a movement towards illusion and in that illusion you become cold, hard, bitter, isolated without any sense of affection. That is what we are all doing: living in non-fact. Can you face the fact that you are attached - not only to a person, to an idea, to a belief, but to your own experiences, which is much more dangerous? Your own experiences give you a sense of excitement, a sense of being alive. If one is aware that one is attached one sees all the consequences of that attachment - anxiety, lack of freedom, jealousy, anger, hatred. In attachment there is also a sense of safety, a sense of stability, a sense of being guarded, protected. And so there is the possessor and the possessed and hence there must be jealousy, anxiety, fear and all the rest. Now, do you see the consequences of all that - not the description of it but the actuality of it? I am attached to you out of my loneliness and that attachment, arising from loneliness, says, "I love you". I feel a communication because you are also in the same position. Two people cling to each other out of their loneliness, out of their depression, out of their unhappiness. So what happens? I am clinging not to you, but to the idea, to something which will help me to escape from myself. You may be attached to an experience, to an incident, which has given you great excitement, a great sense of elation, a sense of power, a sense of safety and you are clinging to that. That experience, which you have had, what is it? That experience is registered in the mind and you hold it. That something you are holding on to is dead and you also are becoming dead. If you see all this, without any direction, without any motive, just observe it, then you will see that insight shows the whole thing as on a map. When once there is that insight the thing disappears completely, you are not attached. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 40TH QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 2ND SEPTEMBER 1980 'SCHOOLS AND FOUNDATIONS' Question: You have spoken so much against organizations, so why do you have schools and foundations? And why do you speak? A group of us saw the necessity of having a school. `School' comes from the Greek word for leisure - leisure in which to learn, a place where students and teachers can flower, a place where a future generation can be prepared, because schools are meant for that, not just merely to turn out human beings as mechanical, technological instruments - though jobs and careers are necessary -but also flower as human beings, without fear, without confusion, with great integrity. And how to bring about such a `good' human being? - I am using the word `good' in its proper sense, not in the respectable sense, but in the sense of a whole human being, not fragmented, not broken up. Although it is very difficult to find teachers who are `whole', we are trying in India (where there are five or six schools), in California, in Canada and here, to see that these schools are real centres of understanding, of comprehension of life. Such places are necessary; that is why we have these schools. We may not always succeed but perhaps after ten years one or two people may come out of them as total human beings. The Foundations in America, Canada, India and here exist merely to publish books, to organize these gatherings, to help the schools - not as centres of `enlightenment' and all that business. And nobody is making a profit out of them. Now why do I speak? This has often been asked. "Why do you go on wasting your energy after fifty years when nobody seems to change? Why do you bother about it? Is it a form of self-fulfilment? Do you get energy talking about these things, and so depend on the audience?" We have been through all that several times. First of all, I do not depend on you as a group who come to listen to the speaker. The speaker is not attached to a particular group nor is it necessary for him to have a gathering. Then what is the motive? I think when one sees something true and beautiful, one wants to tell people about it, out of affection, out of compassion, out of love. And if there are those who are not interested, that is all right, but those who are interested can perhaps gather together. Can you ask the flower why it grows, why it has perfume? It is for the same reason the speaker talks. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 41ST QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 2ND SEPTEMBER 1980 'RESPONSIBILITY' Question: You say that fundamentally my mind works in exactly the same way as everyone else's. Why does this make me responsible for the whole world? What the speaker said was, that wherever you go, throughout the world, human beings suffer, are in conflict, they feel anxiety and uncertainty. Both psychologically and physically there is very little security; there is fear, there is loneliness, despair and depression. This is the common lot of human beings whether they live in China, Japan, India, America, Russia or here - everybody goes through this. It is their life. And as a human being you are the whole world psychologically. You are not separate from the man who is suffering, anxious and lonely, in India or in America. You are the world and the world is you. This is a fact which very few people realize, not a philosophical concept, an idea, but a fact - as when you have a headache. And when one realizes that profoundly, then the question arises: what is my responsibility? We are asking each other this question, please. When you realize that, not verbally but in your blood, that you are no longer an individual -which is a great shock for most people, we think our minds, our problems, our anxieties are all ours, personally - when one sees the truth of this matter, then what is our responsibility? What is our responsibility globally - not only for our family, wife and children -but for the whole of mankind, because we are mankind? We have our illusions, our images of God, our images of heaven, our rituals, exactly like the rest of the world, only with different names, but the pattern is the same. What is your reaction when you feel that you are humanity? How do you respond to the challenge? How do you meet any challenge? If you meet it from your old individual conditioning, your response will naturally be totally inadequate and fragmentary, it will be rather shoddy. So you have to find out what your response is to this great challenge. Does your mind meet it greatly, or with your fears, your anxieties, the little concerns about yourself? The responsibility depends upon the response to the challenge. Is it just a flutter, a romantic appeal, or something profound that will transform your whole way of looking at life? Then you are no longer British, American, French. Will you give up all that? Or merely play with the idea that it is a marvellous Utopian concept? QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 42ND QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 2ND SEPTEMBER 1980 'URGENCY TO CHANGE' Question: When I listen to you there is an urgency to change. When I return home it fades. What am I to do? What are you to do? Is the urgency to change due to, or influenced by, the speaker? While you are here you are driven into a corner but when you leave that is so no longer. It means that you are being challenged, influenced, driven, persuaded, and when that is gone you are where you were. Now, what is one to do? Please let us think out the right answer to this. What is one to do? I come to this gathering from a distant place. It is a lovely day. I have put up a tent and I am really interested. I have read, not only what the speaker has said, but a great deal besides. I know the Christian and Buddhist concepts, the Hindu mythology, and I have also done different forms of meditation, the T.M., the Tibetan, Hindu and Buddhist. But I am dissatisfied with all those, so I come here and I listen. Now am I prepared to listen completely? I cannot listen completely if I bring all my knowledge here with me. I cannot listen or learn, or comprehend, completely if I belong to some sect, if I am attached to one particular concept and if I also want to add to that what is said here. I must come, if I am serious, with a free mind, with a mind that says, "Let's find out, for God's sake", not, "I want to add what you are saying to what I already know". So what is one's attitude going to be? The speaker has been saying constantly: freedom is absolutely necessary. Psychological freedom first, not the physical freedom which you have in the democratic, if not in the totalitarian, countries. Inward freedom can only come about when one understands one's conditioning, the conditioning which is both social and cultural, religious, economic and physical. Can one be free of that - of the psychological conditioning? Me first, everybody else second! What is difficult in all this is that we cling to something so deeply that we are unwilling to let go. One has studied various things and one is attracted to a particular psychological school. One has gone into it, studied it and found out that there is a great deal in it and one sticks to it. And then one comes here and listens and adds what one has heard to that. So it all becomes a melange, a mixture of everything. Are we not doing that? Our minds become very confused. And for the time being when you are here that confusion is somewhat pushed away or diminished, but when you leave, it is back again. Can one be aware of this confusion, not only while you are here but when you are at home - that is much more important? So what does it all indicate? We have the intelligence to solve technological problems: the problem-solving mind. We all have that, but it is not intelligence. The capacity to think clearly, objectively, and to be aware of the limitation of thinking, that is the beginning of intelligence. We worship thinking; the more cleverly we can think, the greater we see ourselves as being. Whereas if we could observe our own confusion, our own individual narrow way of looking at life, if we could be aware of all that, we would see how thought is perpetually creating problems. Thought creates the image and that image divides - to see that requires intelligence. To see psychological dangers is intelligence. But apparently we do not see those things. That means somebody has to goad you all the time, push you, drive you, ask you, persuade you, beg you to make you aware of yourself; and then to move from there, not just stay there. And I am afraid nobody is going to do that for you, not even the most enlightened human being, because then you become his slave. Vitality, physical and psychological energy, is, as you are now, being dissipated in conflict, in worry, in chattering, in endless gossip not only with others but with oneself. This endless chattering! It all dissipates the psychological energy that is needed to observe ourselves in the mirror of relationship - we are all related to somebody or other - and so discover our illusions, images, absurdities and idiocies. Then out of that observation comes freedom and the intelligence which will show the way of life. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 43RD QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 2ND SEPTEMBER 1980 'SYMBOLS' Question: I derive strength from concentrating on a symbol. I belong to a group that encourages this. Is this an illusion? Do not belong to anything! Sir, see the reason of this: we cannot stand alone, we want support, we want the strength of others, we want to be identified with a group, with an organization. The Krishnamurti Foundation is not such an organization, it merely exists to publish books and so on. But there is this idea that we must be part of something, for belonging to something gives one strength. The questioner says that he derives strength from concentrating on a symbol. We all have symbols. The Christian world is filled with symbols and images, with concepts, beliefs, ideals, dogmas, rituals, and it is the same in India. Now when one belongs to a large group which adores the same symbol, one derives enormous strength from it; it creates a feeling that at last one is understanding something beyond the symbol. First, we invent the symbol - see how our minds work - the image in the church or in the temple, or the letters in the mosque, and in worshipping that which we have created out of our thought, we derive strength. See what is happening. The symbol is not the actuality. The actuality may never exist, but the symbol satisfies and gives us vitality by looking at it, thinking about it, being with it. Surely that which has been created by thought must be illusion. If you create me as being your guru - I refuse to be a guru, it is too absurd, because I see how the followers destroy the guru and the guru destroys the followers - but if you create an image about me, about the speaker, then the whole business begins; to me it is an abomination. Thought is the mischief maker in this. All the images it has created in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques, are not truth, are not actual. They have been invented by us and by the priests, out of our fear, out of our anxiety and uncertainty of the future. We have created a symbol and we are caught in it. So first realize that thought will always create the things which give satisfaction, psychologically, which give comfort. The reassuring image is a great comfort; it may be a total illusion - and it is - but it gives comfort and therefore we will never look beyond the illusion. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 44TH QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 2ND SEPTEMBER 1980 'THOUGHT AND CONSCIOUSNESS' Question: What is the relationship between thought and consciousness? why do we seem unable to go beyond thought? What is thought and what is consciousness? Are the two different? When you say what is the relationship between thought and consciousness, it implies, does it not, that there are two different entities, or two different movements? First we have to consider together what thought is, for it is upon this whole question of thinking that all our conduct, our activities, are based. Thought is part of our emotions, sentiments, reactions and the recognition of those reactions. And what is consciousness? To be conscious of something, to be aware of, to be able to recognise, to understand, that is the whole field in which the mind is in operation, and that is more or less what we mean by consciousness. The questioner asks: What is the relationship between the two? All our activities are based on thought, with its images, past remembrances or future projections and the enormous activity in every direction, technological, psychological, physical. And our relationship with each other is based on thought, the thought which has created your image about another and the other's image about you. That thought surely is based on knowledge, experience, memory. The reaction of that memory is thinking. And experience, knowledge, memory and the movement of thought is a material process. So thought is always limited because knowledge is always limited. There is no complete knowledge about anything - except the ending of knowledge, which is a different matter. So where there is the operation of knowledge and the movement of memory, thought is limited, finite, definite. And what part does thought play in consciousness? All the knowledge which we have accumulated, all the experiences, not only the personal but the collective memories, genetic responses, the accumulated experience of generation after generation, all the travail, anxiety, fear and the pleasures, the dogmas, the beliefs, the attachments, the pain of sorrow - all that is our consciousness. You can add to or take away from it but it is still the movement of thought as consciousness. One can say there is a super consciousness but it would still be part of thought. Consciousness is in constant movement, breaking up the `you' and the `me'. Our consciousness is made up of its content; without that content what is our consciousness? Is there a consciousness totally differing from that which is made up of the various activities of thought which we call consciousness? To come to that point one has to find out if thought can end, not temporarily, not between two thoughts as a gap, or a period of silence or unconscious movement. Can thought ever end? This has been the problem of those serious people who have gone into it very deeply through meditation. Can thought, which is so enormously powerful, which has got such a volume of energy behind it, energy created through millennia - in the scientific field, the economic, religious, social and personal fields - can all that activity come to an end? Which means: can those things that thought has built into our consciousness, of which we are made up, which are the content of consciousness, end? Why do we want to end it? What is the motive behind this desire to end thought? Is it that we have discovered for ourselves how thought creates such great travail, great anxiety for the future, from the past, in the present, and brings about such a sense of utter isolation and loneliness? When you ask that question: "Can thought come to an end?" are you seeking a method to end it, a system which you practise day after day so as to end thought? If you practise day after day, that very practise intensifies thought - naturally. So what is one to do? One realizes the nature of thought, its superficiality, the intellectual games it plays. One knows how thought divides, divides into nationalities, into religious beliefs and so on; and the perpetual conflict it produces from the moment we are born until we die. Is that the reason why you want to end thought? One has to be very clear about the motive for wanting to end thought - if that is possible - because the motive will dictate and direct. One can live in the illusion that thought has come to an end. Many people do, but that illusion is merely another projection of thought which desires to end itself. Thought and the things that thought has built as consciousness with its content, can all that come to an end? If the speaker says it can, what value has that? None whatever. But can one realize the nature of consciousness and the movement of thought as a material process and observe it - can one do this? Can one observe the movement of thought, not as an observer looking at thought, but thought itself becoming aware of its own movement; the awakening of thought and thought itself observing its movement? Take a very simple example, greed: observe it as it arises in one and then ask oneself, "Is the observer, is the thinker, different from thought?" To observe thinking is fairly easy. I separate myself as an observer and watch my thinking, which most of us do. But this division is illusory, is fallacious, because the thinker is thought. So can the observer be absent in his observation? The observer, the thinker is the past - the remembrances, images, knowledge, experiences, all the things that he has accumulated in time is the observer. The observer names a reaction as greed and in naming it he is already caught in the past. By the very naming of the reaction we call greed, we have established it in the past. Whereas if there is no naming but pure observation - in which there is no division as the observer and the observed, the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experience - then what takes place? Our conditioning is to make this division between the observer and the observed and that is why we take such enormous trouble to control the thing that is observed. I am greedy, that is the reaction. But we say, "I am different from greed and therefore I can control it, I can operate on it, I can suppress it, I can enjoy it, I can do something about it". The fact is, the thinker is the thought. There is no thinker without thought. So observe without past memories and reactions projecting themselves immediately in observation; observe purely, without any direction, without any motive; then one will find, if one has gone into it deeply, that thought does come to an end. Thought is a movement and time is a movement, so time is thought. This is real meditation: for thought to see its own movement, how it arises, how it creates the image and pursues that image; it is to observe so that there is no recognition of what is being observed. To make it very simple: observe a tree without naming it, without wondering to what use it can be put, just observe it. Then the division between the tree and you comes to an end - but you do not become the tree, I hope not! The word with the neurological responses creates the division. That is, can one observe one's wife or another, without the word and so without the image and all the remembrances of that relationship? - which is, to observe purely? Then, in that observation, which is complete attention, has not thought come to an end? This requires a great deal of attention, step by step watching, like a good scientist who watches very, very carefully. When one does that, thought does come to an end and therefore time has a stop. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 45TH QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 4TH SEPTEMBER 1980 'COMPASSION' Question: Does compassion spring from observation, or thought? Is not compassion an emotional feeling? I do not know how to answer this. What is compassion? Is it emotion, something romantic? Does it expend itself in some kind of social work? One has to find out what compassion is, what love is. Is love desire? Is love pleasure? And can there be love where there is ambition? Can there be love when one is trying to become something - not only in the outward world but also psychologically where there is this constant struggle to be or to become something? Can there be love when there is jealousy and violence; when there is division between you and me? Can there be love when you are nationalistic? In this nationalistic division and the division of beliefs, images, can there be love? Of course there can be no love when there is such division. But all of us are so heavily conditioned, and we accept that conditioning as normal. What is the relationship of love to sorrow? Can suffering and love go together - not only personal suffering but the enormous suffering of mankind, the suffering that wars have brought about and are still bringing about, the suffering of people living in totalitarian states - can there be love when there is suffering? Or is it only with the ending of suffering that there is passionate compassion? After stating all this, where are we? Is love just an ideal - something which we do not know and therefore want to have: that extraordinary sense of great compassion? But we will not pay the price for it. We would like to have this marvellous jewel but are unwilling to make a gesture, do something that will bring it about. If you want peace you must live peacefully, not be divided into nations with wars and all the hideousness that is going on. So what price do we pay for this, not coins and paper, but inwardly? How deeply, profoundly, do I see that nationalism, that all division, must end in myself as a human being? Because one human being -whether you or I - is like the rest of the world, psychologically. We all suffer, we all go through agonies, we all go through great fears, uncertainties, confusion, we are all caught in absurd religious nonsense. We are that. Can we see the totality, not as an idea, not as something longed for, but as a fact, as a burning, actual, daily fact? Then out of that perception the responsibility of compassion comes. Compassion goes with great intelligence. That intelligence is not the operation of knowledge. Knowledge can solve many problems, intellectual and technical, but intelligence is something entirely different. Please do not accept what I am saying, just look at it. You may have read a great deal, be capable of great arguments and of solving problems, but the problem-solving mind is not the intelligent mind. Intelligence comes with compassion, with love. And when that intelligence is an action of compassion it is global, not a particular action. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 46TH QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 4TH SEPTEMBER 1980 'CORRUPTION' Question: Why do you say attachment is corruption? Are we not attached to those we love? Does this need explanation? When you are attached to an idea, to a concept, to an ideal as the Communists are, or the Catholics, is there not the beginning of corruption? When I am tied to a belief, to a god, to an image or to a person, is there not the beginning of corruption? Please Sirs, it is not what I say - just look at it for yourselves. Is attachment love? If I were attached to you as an audience (God forbid!) I would be exploiting you, deriving great comfort from you, fulfilling myself. Is that not corruption? When I am attached to my wife, to my friend, to a piece of furniture or whatever it is, corruption begins: I have to guard it, I have to protect it, and so comes fear. Fear begins with attachment. I may derive pleasure in that attachment, comfort, encouragement, but there is always the shadow of fear in it, anxiety, jealousy and possessiveness; people like to be possessed and to possess. Is that not corruption because in that there is a sense of fear, anxiety, that I might lose it? So can one live in this world without any sense of attachment to anything? - to one's beliefs, dogmas, gods, to all the various symbols, ideologies and images and to the furniture, house, experiences? Which does not mean that one becomes detached. When there is an attempt to be detached then detachment is part of attachment, because the opposite has its roots in its own opposite. Is that clear? So when one understands the nature of attachment, the consequences of it, sees the whole movement of it, not just one particular attachment to a person, to an idea, or to a piece of furniture, but comprehend and have insight into this whole movement of attachment - then attachment drops away immediately without any conflict. Then perhaps one has love -because love, fear and jealousy cannot go together. ANSWER MEETING 4TH SEPTEMBER 1980 'A MINORITY' Question: You say, "We are the world", but the majority of the world seem to be heading for mass destruction. Can a minority of integrated people outweigh the majority? Are you, are we, that minority? Is there one among us who is totally free of all this? Or are we partially contributing to the hatred of each other, psychologically? You may not be able to stop one country attacking another, but psychologically, are you free of your common inheritance, which is your tribal glorified nationalism? Are we free from violence? Violence exists where there is a wall around ourselves. Do please understand all this. And we have built ourselves walls, fifteen feet high and ten feet thick. All of us have these walls around us. From that arises violence and this sense of immense loneliness. So the minority and the majority are you. If a group of us have psychologically transformed ourselves fundamentally we will never ask this question, because we are then something entirely different. ANSWER MEETING 4TH SEPTEMBER 1980 'FAITH AND PRAYER' Question: Christian mystics describe certain forms of mental prayer in which they speak to God, or what they call God. They say that in such prayer something tremendous happens which they call union with God. They are convinced that this is not an illusion. Are they deceiving themselves? Then what is faith? It appears to give people the power to do extraordinary things. When you are a nationalist it gives you extraordinary power to kill others. Look what they are doing! So can an illusion give you enormous vitality and strength to do extraordinary things? Apparently it does. Look what the Christian missionaries have done in the world because they believe in something. That belief may be totally unreal, an image that the mind has created, but they believe in it and are attached to it and they want to convert all the others in the world to the same belief. They put up with extraordinary discomforts, with disease and every kind of hardship. And those mystics who talk to God through prayer - I don't know what God is, nobody knows - they have an image that there is a supreme entity and that through prayer, through faith, through dedication, through devotion, you can move mountains. Look at what America, Russia, India and all the other countries are doing. They have tremendous faith in their country, in their nationalism, and they are building a vast technological world to destroy the others, who are doing exactly the same thing. To go to the moon, what enormous energy it needed, what technological capacity, faith; the Americans first on the moon with their flag! In the Christian world faith has taken the place of doubt. Doubt is very cleansing, it purifies the mind. If you doubt your experiences, your opinions, you are free to observe clearly. In the Eastern world, in Buddhism and Hinduism, doubt is one of the major factors, it is demanded that you doubt, question, you must not accept: be a light unto yourself, a light that cannot be given to you by anyone. (Of course, now, in India and Asia it has all gone to pieces, they are just like anybody else, they are becoming merchants.) Great strength does not come through prayer, it does not come through illusion, faith; it comes through clarity, through the mind that can see clearly; and that clarity does not come and go. When you see something clearly - for instance that nationalism is the most destructive thing in the world - then you are finished with it. And the ending of that burden gives you vitality, energy, strength. Similarly if you are totally free of all attachments it gives you the strength of love, and that can do much more than all the other experiences and prayers. To escape through an illusion, through a symbol, through an ideal is an easy way out. But to see exactly what we are and go beyond demands a great deal of energy, perception and action; it is much more arduous. It means that we have to become astonishingly aware in all our activities and feelings. But we are unwilling to do all that. We think that through some easy prayer we can talk to God. God is, after all, put together by thought: the Christian God, the Hindu gods; the Buddhists have no gods but they have their own images. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 49TH QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 4TH SEPTEMBER 1980 'HELPING OTHERS' Question: I have been a member of a Gurdjieff group. I find it has given me a background to better understanding of what you are saying. Should I continue with such a group in order possibly to help others, as I was helped? Or does a group make for fragmentation? This is an extraordinary idea, this idea of helping others, as though you have comprehension, beauty, love and truth, the whole world of order, and that great immense sense of wholeness. If you have that you do not talk about helping others. Why do we want to belong to something? - belong to some sect, some group, some religious body? Is it because it gives us strength? Is it that we cannot stand alone? The word `alone' means all one. Is it that we need encouragement, need somebody to tell us this is the right way? The questioner says: As I belong to a certain group, it has helped me to understand you. Understand what? Me? Do please look at it. Understand what we are talking about? Do we need interpreters to understand what we are talking about? - to be kind, to love, to have no sense of nationality? Does it need anybody to tell us that? Why do we depend on others, whether the other be an image in a church, in a temple or mosque, or the preacher, the psychologists? Why do we depend on others? If we do depend on others psychologically we become secondhand people, which we are. The whole history of mankind is in us - the story of mankind is not in books except for outward things; the whole history is here. And we do not know how to read it. You understand what I am saying? You are the book. But when you read the book as a reader it has no meaning. But if you are the book and the book is showing you, telling you the story, then you will not depend on a single person, you will be a light unto yourself. But we are all waiting for a match, the fire of another, to kindle the light. Perhaps that is why you are all here. And that is where the tragedy lies, because we cannot see clearly for ourselves. Before we help others we have to see clearly, for God's sake! It is like the blind leading the blind. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 50TH QUESTION BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 4TH SEPTEMBER 1980 'FREEDOM' Question: What is freedom? Many philosophers have written about freedom. We talk of freedom - freedom to do what we like, to have any job we like, freedom to choose a woman or a man, freedom to read any book, or freedom not to read at all. We are free, and what do we do with that freedom? We use that freedom to express ourselves, to do whatever we like. More and more life is becoming permissive -you can have sex in the open park or garden. We have every kind of freedom and what have we done with it. We think that where there is choice we have freedom. I can go to Italy or France: a choice. But does choice give freedom? Why do we have to choose? If you are very clear, perceive purely, there is no choice. Out of that comes right action. It is only when there is doubt and uncertainty that we begin to choose. So choice, if you will forgive my saying so, prevents freedom. The totalitarian states have no freedom at all, because they have the idea that freedom brings about the degeneration of man. Therefore they control, suppress - you know what is happening. So what is freedom? Is it based on choice? Is it to do exactly what we like? Some psychologists say, if you feel something, do not suppress, restrain or control it, but express it immediately. And we are doing that very well, too well. And this is also called freedom. Is throwing bombs freedom? - just look what we have reduced our freedom to! Does freedom lie out there, or here? Where do you begin to search for freedom? In the outward world, where you express whatever you like, the so-called individual freedom, or does freedom begin inwardly, which then expresses itself intelligently outwardly? You understand my question? freedom exists only when there is no confusion inside me, when I am psychologically and religiously not to be caught in any trap - you understand? There are innumerable traps: gurus, saviours, preachers, excellent books, psychologists and psychiatrists; they are all traps. And if I am confused and there is disorder, must I not first be free of that disorder before I talk of freedom? If I have no relationship with my wife, my husband or another - because our relationships are based on images - there is conflict which is inevitable where there is division. So should I not begin here, inside me, in my mind, in my heart, to be totally free of all fears, anxieties, despairs and the hurts and wounds that one has received through some psychic disorder? Watch all that for oneself and be free of it! But apparently we have not the energy. We go to another to give us energy. By talking to a psychiatrist we feel relieved -confession and all the rest of it. Always depending on somebody else. And that dependence inevitably brings conflict and disorder. So one has to begin to understand the depth and the greatness of freedom; one must begin with that which is nearest, oneself. The greatness of freedom, real freedom, the dignity, the beauty of it, is in oneself when there is complete order. And that order comes only when we are a light to ourselves. MADRAS CONVERSATION WITH P. JAYAKAR AND A. PATWARDHAN 18TH DECEMBER 1982 'THE BOOK OF ONESELF' Pupul Jayakar: Yesterday you were talking about reading the book of yourself, which is the book of mankind. And you asked a question: with what instrument will I look? Now this book is never complete, as you are reading you are creating it. And in the very observing of something the future is also being created. In this state of flux there are one or two questions which first have to be clarified. That is, what is the nature of what is seen? Because unless we are clear on the nature of what is seen the instrument which sees it can never be clear. So can we go into it? This instrument and the nature. We have talked about 'what is' from the first time we met you, but what is the nature of this 'what is'? J Krishnamurti: I think if I may begin: the whole history of man from two million years, or forty thousand years, is part of our consciousness, is part of our story. We, as a human being, we are the whole history of man. I don't know if you would grant that. If you grant that then the instrument with which I can read this vast complex history, the only instrument I have is the action of thought. Thought is the only instrument I have. Just a minute, let me finish. And thought has built all the past accumulation, past experience, superstitions, beliefs, the tyrannies, the wars, and the human mind is the residue, the storehouse of all that. The various gods, the various rituals, the whole movement of man in time is in the background of every human being. If once you accept that, or see the fact of it, or refute it, then we can start from there. Unless we are clear about that how to read the book of this immense complicated knowledge comes later. I hope I am making myself clear. PJ: No. Obviously, Krishnaji, human heritage is my heritage. K: Yes. PJ: The two are not separate. K: No. But very few are willing to accept that even. PJ: No, Krishnaji, at one level I am sure most people will accept that. K: I doubt it. PJ: The whole development of man, of human heritage, all that has taken place... K: Yes, yes. PJ: ...ideas which have formulated the brain, in a sense, they don't belong to a single person. K: Wait, wait, Pupulji. But if you asked any of them, any people, I am sure they wouldn't - first of all have thought about this. If they begin to think about it I am not sure they would see the fact of it. That is what I want - if I may - to establish that first. Then we can proceed, if you and Achyutji and a few of us see the truth of it, not the argument of it, not the verbal structure of it, but that we are, we carry with us all the time the vast human heritage. If that is so then we can proceed. A. Patwardhan: Sir, but would you not concede that though all this may have been accumulated through thought... K: No, through time and thought. AP: We get it through time and thought, when I say that I am the inheritor of the entire past of man, it is not a thought process or anything like that, it is not in that way. The way in which I am the inheritor of it all is not as verbalized thought, or... K: Let us hold. Do you as a human being, having studied history of the world and so on, do you admit or see the truth that you are the result, and that you hold the whole human heritage and that vast complex book of the story of man? AP: Right. K: Not right as argument. AP: No sir, it is a fact. K: It's a fact. Either that fact can be an argumentive fact, argumentive, a conclusion, a concept, or it is so. It is so in my blood, in my thoughts, in my life. AP: That is why I say, sir, if it is in my blood, and if it is in the whole being, then it is not a sequential purpose, it is a totality. K: It is so. AP: It is a totality. K: Yes. Don't use the word 'totality', it is so. AP: It is so. K: Now. We if we three at least see the truth of it then from there we can proceed. That is all my point. Not raise this question at the end of the discussion or dialogue that may take place. PJ: It is as much a truth as the fact that the human body has evolved - let me put it this way, is a universal... K: ...phenomena. PJ: ...phenomena. K: Of course. PJ: It is in that context that I say I accept I am the human heritage. K: Right. Now from there proceed. I am - in me abides the whole story of man: his sorrows, his anxieties, his loneliness, his miseries, his happiness, his experiences, and so on and so on. This vast story. PJ: Yes. K: Then the question, which you raised just now, which we raised the other day: what is the instrument with which I read that book? PJ: I have placed two questions. K: Yes. PJ: Before even I go to what is the instrument with which I read that book, what is it that I read? Please let me. What is it that I read? I say I am... K: As you are reading it is changing. PJ: It is changing. K: As you are reading it is moving, living. PJ: As I am reading the future is also coming into existence, or it is being projected. K: No, wait a minute. When you use the word 'future', the past -right - meeting the present modifying itself becomes the future. PJ: And the very thought that arises now contains in it the germ of the future. K: Contains in it the germ of the future when there is no alteration. PJ: We start with what actually takes place: it contains the germ of the future. So first of all we have to be clear what is the nature of this 'what is' which we have talked about. K: What? PJ: What is the nature of 'what is'? K: No, you are going to something else, Pupulji. Forgive me if I point out something. If I am the totality of mankind, if I am the storehouse - I won't use the totality - if I am the storehouse of all human endeavour, and I am not aware of it, I don't know the nature of it, the content of it, and I want to study it, I want to learn, if it is possible, the nature of consciousness, not as mine, the consciousness of man which is the past. PJ: You see the moment you say that, that I am reading the consciousness of man and not my consciousness... K: There is no 'your consciousness'. PJ: Look what takes place. The moment you say you are reading the consciousness of man the attitude to that reading has undergone a total change. K: A total change. That's right. Agreed. But if you insist, or if one is under the illusion that this consciousness is mine, separate from every other consciousness - which most people believe, or perhaps many of the psychologists believe - then we are moving in two different directions. AP: Obviously. PJ: But there seems a trap there. K: Yes, I know the trap there. PJ: The trap is we say we are the history of mankind but when we start investigating consciousness... K: Which is the storehouse of man. PJ: ...but if you were objectively looking at the history of man... K: Which is the consciousness of man. PJ: ...you would read it one way, that book. If it was in twelve encyclopaedias you would read it one way. K: Ah, I'm not talking of encyclopaedias. PJ: But you would look at it one way. K: I know what you are saying. PJ: The moment you see it as something which sprouts within me, within my consciousness, immediately my response to it is of a totally different nature. K: That's is what I was coming to naturally. If it is - if one sees one's consciousness as universal - if we can use that word, such a large word - that the consciousness which exists in me is the consciousness of all human beings - right - if you accept that after logical examination and investigation, then our whole activity of perception changes. Right? PJ: Yes. K: Now, do I regard this consciousness as mine? We must be clear on that point. And not your's or anybody's, it is my private ground, my private property. PJ: I would say that consciousness of mankind is revealed on my private ground. K: Now just a minute. Just a minute. You are saying, by understanding my consciousness I recognize that it is the consciousness of man, of all human beings. All right then, I go along with that. But I mustn't insist that it's mine. PJ: The only thing which I can come with you so far is to say what is revealed, I cannot say that it is unique to me. K: Unique to you PJ: It is part of the total consciousness of man. K: But... PJ: But it is revealed within my ground. K: I understand what you are saying. PJ: And my relationship to it is very different. K: I understand. Simply: are you saying in the understanding, in the observation, investigation of my consciousness, which I had thought to be separate from everybody else, in that investigation there is the discovery that this, what I have called my consciousness, is not my private ground, but it is the consciousness which is the rest of man. PJ: You see, sir... K: If we agree to that I agree. Go on. PJ: No, because this is not so. You see the observing of that which arises has no place in it for this other state, that it is the consciousness of mankind. K: What is this? I haven't quite followed. PJ: The observing of that which arises, after all you can't observe something which doesn't arise, the arising in consciousness of... K: ...loneliness. PJ: ...loneliness and the observing of loneliness doesn't bring into it all these other factors that it is the loneliness of mankind. It is loneliness. K: Take any factor, sorrow. In investigating my sorrow, my loneliness, which I have been scrupulously taking in my courtyard, my private ground, there is the discovery that it is the rest of man. All men are lonely, all people suffer. I discover something tremendous. Not the little, the potty little consciousness which is mine. The discovery that it is the whole of mankind is an enormous - you follow - perception. PJ: What brings that perception about? Let us take it minutely through a microscope. Loneliness arises, or sorrow arises: there is an observing of that thing we call sorrow. What brings in this other element? K: Which element? PJ: That the observing is not the observing of my petty sorrow, but the observing of the sorrow of mankind. K: No, I don't observe. Look, Pupulji: I have seen, and you all must have seen, it is not my seeing and therefore superior, I have seen wherever you go this factor is there: loneliness and sorrow are linked together. Go to America, it is there, in Europe it is there, in China, Russia, India, anywhere you go this factor is shared by all of us. To realize that, just a logical conclusion, even to admit to oneself how extraordinary this thing is shared by all of us, is a great - a change has already taken place. PJ: Yes. K: Right? PJ: Yes. Can we proceed. I still go back to these two things. K: Let's go back. PJ: One is if you say with what instrument... K: I'm coming to that a little later. PJ: But I again ask, what is it that has to be observed? K: I understand. I understand. I observe sorrow, loneliness, sorrow, they are synonymous those two. PJ: Which are emotional responses to a situation. K: To a crisis. PJ: To a crisis, to a situation. I suddenly have a feeling of shrinking, a feeling... K: Yes. A feeling of some great loss. PJ: And I look. K: No, no. Not you, you don't look. PJ: That's what I want to come to. K: Let's be clear. Suppose one has lost a great friend, or a wife whom you really loved, or a person whom you loved, and there is the ending of that person: what has actually taken place there? The ending of all your relationship with that person. And suddenly realizing how utterly lonely you are because that has been the only relationship that has meant something. And suddenly that has gone. And there is the sense of loss. Now just hold a minute. Either I remain, either I remain with it, that is, I don't let thought or any other feeling interfere with that state. I don't want to escape from it, suppress it, analyse it. This is an extraordinary phenomena which I have suddenly discovered that with the loss of that person, or with the loss of some profound conclusion, concept which I have held most dear, suddenly that has been shattered. And then I realize what an extraordinary state of mind has come to an end. Right? Come to an end. I can invent a future, invent, but all those are inventions, but there is an ending without any future. Right? Now can this mind remain with that fact? Not as an observer observing the fact, the observer is the fact, the observer is that state, there is no division between the observer and the thing he is observing. Right? Am I making myself clear? He is the suffering, he is that ending. It's like a jewel that you are looking, holding. And the moment you want to part with it you have entered into a different state of consciousness, into a different state altogether. PJ: I understand. K: Now the history of mankind is my history. Right? Right? PJ: Yes, yes. K: I want to read that book because it is a most extraordinary book. It has not been written, there is no chapter, first or tenth chapter, there are no paragraphs, it is a tremendous movement. Right? PJ: Can the mind, any mind contain the enormity of it? K: Now wait a minute, we must begin here. What is the mind -may I go into that - what is the mind and what is the brain? Now may I go on with it a little? Please question as we go along. The brain has infinite capacity. Look what it has done in the technological world, something incredible. Right? But psychologically it has been conditioned through evolution -evolution being time. PJ: Through that concept? K: Of course. PJ: Not through it, through the concept of time. K: Of course. No, no. Just a minute, go slowly into this, carefully. Seeing that the brain has extraordinary capacity, as shown in the technological world. I mean what they are doing is incredible. And in the other direction, in the psychological realm, it hasn't moved at all, perhaps a centimetre, less than a centimetre. And because it has not moved, it has not flowered, it is conditioned, it is limited. And the mind is not limited. PJ: When you talk of mind, you speak of what? K: This is difficult. I'll go into it. The whole, the mind of the universe, the mind of nature, you follow, everything that has been created is the movement of the mind. PJ: Everything that has been created. K: And is creating. PJ: And is in the process. K: All this. Therefore there is no limit to creation. I don't know if you understand AP: Are you suggesting, sir, that when we say that I am the entire heritage of man, it is not the brain that can take in this fact? K: It is the brain that takes in the fact because I have communicated through words, through thought, and you are looking at it through thought and through words, therefore the communication is verbal and thought. Sir, don't let's go back to that for the moment. AP: I am trying to pin myself down to this fact that at present whatever I understand I understand through the brain. K: Ah! PJ: You see he has moved to another dimension of thought altogether, which if I understand it is this: the brain has done tremendous things in the field of technology, psychologically it is static. The reading of the book... K: Yes, that's the whole point. PJ: ...of mankind - I asked a question, can a single brain contain it, and you came to the brain and the mind. That the brain being limited and not having moved can only move within its own circle. The mind being the very source of creation has no limits. K: That's right. PJ: And therefore this whole history of man is - if I may put it. K: Go on, put it any way you like. PJ: But you say one thing which I would like to point to, when you talk of mind it is all that is created and in the process of creating. K: Yes. That is, Pupil, let's be clear on this point. Careful, careful. Thought has created in this world, in the physical world, the churches, the cathedrals, the temples, the mosques, and all the things that are in the mosques, temples; thought has created wars; thought has created the conflict between man and man. Right? Thought is responsible for all this. And because thought in itself is limited it cannot - thought cannot perceive a mind that is immeasurable. But thought tries to understand it. Right? Obviously, because that is its function, which is mechanical function of reducing everything to its limited fragmentary activity. Right? And we are saying that as long as that brain is conditioned it can never understand the immensity of the nature of the mind. Right? PJ: Yes. K: If you see, the responsibility then is to uncondition the brain, uncondition the limitation which thought has imposed upon it. I've got it! PJ: Sir, here is something I would like to ask. Is it to uncondition the brain which is conditioned and cannot move out of its groove, or to end the brain, the movement of the brain? K: It comes to the same thing. PJ: No, sir. The perception is in the mind itself. K: What is this, what is this? Careful, careful. PJ: I want to ask you something. Is it the deconditioning of the brain which it finds itself unable to do? K: No, no. PJ: Let me finish. K: Yes, yes, I understand. PJ: Or is it to hold the brain in abeyance so that the perception which is the mind can operate? K: You are putting in modern language what the old traditions say, 'there is in me god. There is in me some element which is not contaminated, which then operates on that.' PJ: You have drawn the difference between brain and mind. K: I have said that. PJ: You have drawn the distinction between the conditioned and the... K: ...and the unconditioned. PJ: ...and the non-conditioned. K: Yes. PJ: Between that which has an ending... K: I haven't talked about ending. PJ: Everything which is in the brain as it functions is fragmented. K: Yes. Limited, fragmented. PJ: Let's cut out ending, but it is fragmented. You have talked of a state of fragmented... K: Wait a minute. I said we must differentiate the two words, words. Careful. The two, the meaning of the words. And I say that the brain which is limited cannot understand what the mind is. It can only apprehend, be aware of it, when there is no conditioning. PJ: But you went further. In speaking of... K: Later. I shouldn't have spoken. PJ: But you have spoken. K: I know, unfortunately. Because as a matter of fact Dr Bohm and a few others, we were discussing the very same matter. You understand, Pupil, this is really very interesting. Leave the mind alone for the moment. When you once you see what extraordinary capacity the brain has, in the technological, scientific, communication world, surgery, they have transplanted a heart made by man - I don't know if you read about it? PJ: Yes. K: I mean, and the biological experiments, it is incredible what is going on, which is the activity of thought. Thought is limited because knowledge is limited. Now can thought ever be free from its limitation? It can't. Right? Thought can never be free from its limitation because it is born out of limitation. I don't know if you would see this. PJ: May I ask a question? What is the distinction between thought and the brain? K: Thought is the activity of the brain. PJ: Is there anything in the brain apart from thought? K: I won't fall into that trap! You are now going back to the old... PJ: No, I am not, sir, I am not. If you accept that the brain has this tremendous potential. K: And we are only using a very, very small part. PJ: Obviously. Even at the ordinary level, not talking of anything like that. If you could do with the psyche what you have done with technology... K: That's all I am saying. I mean then the universe is open to you. PJ: It's just that. K: Yes, that's all I am saying. If the brain has been able to do such extraordinary things technologically, if the brain can free from the limitations of the psyche, it is incredible what it can do. Then I am saying the brain is the mind when it is totally free. The capacity - no, I shouldn't use the word 'capacity' - then there is no sense of division, it is the sense of whole, completeness, wholeness. That's all. I don't want to enter in that. You understand what I am saying? PJ: I understand. Now if I may go further. If the brain has had that thrust, that drive, that insight, the energy to pursue technology, why is it... K: ...that it hasn't turned the other way? PJ: ...that they go up into space and are prepared to die, it is not that it is a question of death, or disappear or disintegration. K: No, there is a great deal behind it: national pride, hero, praise by the country. They are not prepared to die, they have been propagandized to die in the name of your country: or in the name of god, in the name of the saviour, what they have done, burnt people, tortured people. PJ: No, you are not answering what I am saying. What is that element which enabled man, gave him the curiosity, curiosity to drive in the other direction? K: The other direction, yes. I think our education is responsible for it. Because we have all emphasized, every culture, except perhaps a few dead cultures, that you must earn a livelihood, work, work, work. And to do that study, you know, memorize, repeat, repeat, repeat. That's all we do. This morning I met some of the students - forgive me if some of you are here. They haven't thought about anything except this - mathematics, history, geography, and if you ask them to move a little away from that they are lost. AP: Even among the scientists, there are only a few who go to the impossible question. K: But, sir, even those are... AP: Very few. I say similarly today in the present crisis of the survival of humanity there is sufficient motivation - I say motivation deliberately - I say there is sufficient ground for man to say that this is the most intolerable predicament for man, and the brain must be explored. K: No, sir. They are exploring the activity of the brain. PJ: Not of the psyche. AP: No, we are now, we must understand after all that every activity of the psyche is personal to the brain cells. K: No, no. Just a minute, sir, don't go into the business of what the brain is. What we are saying is very simple, sir. The brain has extraordinary capacity, extraordinary capacity - I don't like to use the word 'capacity' because that means based on experience, and capacity based on experience is not capacity. Sorry! There is a different kind of movement which is not based on experience, knowledge. That's a different matter. The brain has done extraordinary things. And psychically, psychologically it has not moved an inch after all these forty thousand years. Now if there is a breakthrough of that cycle then I am saying there is no division between the mind and the brain, and the energy of the brain - I will use that, energy of the brain. You understand? The energy of the brain has done the technological world. PJ: Yes, but it has never been released for this. K: For the other. AP: No, sir, what I want to understand is, after all I think the word energy is much better than the word motivation because it is really energy. K: I said that. AP: It is the energy of attention. K: No, sir, don't say attention of anything, just energy for the moment. Psychologically my energy is practically nil. And I am saying that when that limitation has been broken down, or broken through, then there is a totally different energy, which no is channelled through technology which is merely the activity of thought, and therefore that energy is limited. Right? AP: I am making a very simple statement: that where you point out the limitations of thought, I say that man has within him an energy which can transcend the limit of thought, and that is the energy of attention. K: No. Don't. PJ: If we are trying to get to as vast a field as possible, perhaps the word attention again limits it because we have used the word so often in the past, that I think it is better to drop the word. AP: Drop the word. There is no bother about dropping the word. K: I am only saying, sir... AP: We must feel that we have a faculty other than thought to pursue the mind. K: No, I won't accept that. You see he is introducing again the same old pattern, which is there is a faculty which is hidden, which is the energy of god, whatever you like to call it. AP: I am saying I am looking at the real, I am looking at the tree. K: Which is what? AP: Which is just plain attention. K: No, it is energy. AP: Energy. K: Keep to that word, keep to that word. Man has used the energy of thought in technology. Right? Right? It is the energy of thought, therefore limited. AP: Right, quite right. K: Now the breaking down of the psyche is not the energy of thought. AP: Agreed. K: Right? AP: That's obvious. K: Ah, no, sir, it is not obvious. AP: It is, sir. PJ: Let me probe a little more. K: Yes. Come down. PJ: The instruments man has, let us examine those instruments. One is thought. The others are the senses themselves. K: Sensory responses. PJ: Sensory responses. K: The sensitivity of the senses. PJ: Yes. K: Sensitivity of the senses and thought, which are both the same. AP: How, sir? PJ: This is what I would like to get at. The sensitivity of the senses and thought are the same? K: I'll show it to you in a minute. I have just caught something. It may be wrong. So I want to look at it myself. I don't accept what I say. I didn't mean that! I want to examine this. The sensitivity of the senses. Our senses are controlled by thought. Right? Right? PJ: No. K: Just a minute, don't say, no. Don't take any definite stand. PJ: No, I am not saying when you make a statement... K: I have made a statement, I am going to see if it falls, I'll drop it. If you take a stand... PJ: No. K: That's right. I see the senses are now shaped, controlled by thought. That is, my sense of taste, if I like it thought comes in. PJ: Saying, I want more of it. K: If I feel something or other thought comes in and says, 'Look, be careful, that is painful, don't go through there'. So is there - I am just asking - is there a movement of all the senses, the total senses, without the interference of thought? Just look at the question first before we throw it out or accept it. That is, have you ever looked at the movement of the sea, movement of the sea, not the movement of trees, the vast movement of the tides, the beauty of the waves, the enormous power of the waves, with all your senses and eye looking? In that there is no interference of thought. Now when thought interferes with the senses it must inevitably limit it or control it. I am right. I am going to stick to this. PJ: Then what you say is right. No, I'm not wanting to argue with you with what you have said just now. There is a challenge, and my senses respond according to the conditioning of the mind, but there is a response of the senses... K: Partial, always partial because thought is always watching, controlling it, trying to say, 'I must', 'I must not', 'This is wrong', 'That is right'. PJ: No, but forgive me. Once, it was some instance, it can be water reflected in water. K: What is this? What is this? PJ: It can be like water being reflected in water. That is, there can be a state of sensitivity when there is nothing contained in those senses. K: Yes, all right, go on. PJ: So, I want to push one more thing. I won't ask you if you jump down my throat. K: I won't! PJ: That is, there is some connection between the senses - you see, sir. It is a little confused, I am not myself very clear about it. K: All right. PJ: You look about when you think of your brain, you think of it as there. K: You think of it as somewhere in the head. PJ: Somewhere in the head. K: And told by the scan. PJ: But when the senses do not operate from thought, do not contain thought... K: Contain thought? PJ: Do not contain thought, the place of operation changes. K: That's right. PJ: That is all I am saying. I didn't want to put it into words. K: Of course, it is simple enough. When the senses are observing completely, heightened senses, and when you look at the movement - I am taking purposefully the seeing - or one of those extraordinary sights of the Himalayas, when there is not a cloud or a breath, the line, the sky line of the hills against the blue, it is an extraordinary sight. When you look at the sea completely that way there is no centre, there is no thought. Right? The moment thought comes in there is a centre in the senses. Right? PJ: We are part of thought, we are part of the senses. K: Yes. PJ: Is there a third movement? K: Yes, that's the whole point. AP: What is that? Repeat. PJ: I said we have talked of thought, we have talked of the senses, and now I ask him is there a third movement. K: This is difficult. Is there an instrument - not instrument - is there an action, a movement, a state - state in the sense not a static state - which is not the movement of thought? That is what you are asking, right? PJ: Not a movement of thought, not a movement of the senses. K: Wait, wait, let's look at it carefully. Look at those two words: thought and no movement of the senses. When you observe the sea with all your senses there is no sensory movement. Right? Right? Of course. The senses are not aware that they are heightened. Right? I wonder if I have made myself clear. Yes, anything that is excellent is not aware of its own excellency. Goodness in the highest sense has no sense of being good. PJ: You see, what you are saying is... K: Yes, I stick to this. PJ: You see, Krishnaji, you are taking - let me... K: Go on, darling. PJ: You are taking the essence of all thought, the essence of all senses, and it is essence itself then is the instrument. K: No. Leave it for the moment. I understand what you are saying. Now first of all I would like to get this clear between ourselves. When there is the heightened excellency of the senses, the senses are not aware they are aware. Awareness takes place that the senses are fully aware when thought comes in. PJ: Already it has... K: It has already gone. Right? Now when thought is aware of its own tremendous limitation, then it has broken through. But to realize that, it is not verbal, not thought, to see thought has no place in the movement of - I mustn't go into this, steady! Now wait a minute, what are we trying to get at? PJ: We are reading the story of mankind. K: See how far we have got. PJ: And asking what is the instrument with which we read. K: I will tell you. The story of mankind is an endless movement. It had no beginning and no end. If you once grant that -right? It has no ending. But my brain being limited is looking for its ending. Right? So I am approaching the book with 'where is the end of all this?' PJ: The search is for the ending. K: Of course, of course. But to realize there is no end. You know what it means? Then you enter into something called love. Love has no end. I may love my wife, she dies, or I die, but the thing called love has no end. But I have identified myself with my wife and when she dies my love has gone - or I love somebody else, which then becomes pleasure and all the rest of it. I don't want enter into all that. So how do I read the book? That's the question. How do I read the book? You don't read at all. Right? There is no book to read if you have come to that point. PJ: Without coming to that point the other is... K: You merely examine, analyse, change, move, change the chips in the same field. Right? When you have come to this really deep point that this book has no end and no beginning, which means you are that book. Not that you become eternal, which is dangerous again. But that life as this movement has no end, it is then the universe. Right? Then the cosmos is this whole thing. PJ: Time for you to end. K: Oh, yes. Ten past five. Have we been talking nonsense? PJ: No, sir. K: Pupulji, if somebody heard all this, somebody who is serious of course. It is all so extraordinarily wild - but it is not. I am just saying. It is not wild, it is very logical, very clear - at least to me -clear and can be stated in Sorbonne, or Harvard, or in Delhi, it will stand water. Right? The Roots Of Psychological Conflict Chapter 2 Cleansing The Mind Of The Accumulation Of Time Chapter 3 Why Has Man Given Supreme Importance To Thought? Chapter 4 Breaking The Pattern Of Ego-Centred Activity Chapter 5 The Ground Of Being, And The Mind Of Man Chapter 6 Can Insight Bring About A Mutation Of The Brain Cells Chapter 7 Death Has Very Little Meaning Chapter 8 Can Insight Be Awakened In Another Chapter 9 Senility And The Brain Cells Chapter 10 Cosmic Order Chapter 11 The Ending Of 'Psychological' Knowledge Chapter 12 The Mind In The Universe Chapter 13 Can Personal Problems Be Solved, And Fragmentation End - Longer, Unedited Versions - Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 1 1ST APRIL 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'THE ROOTS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CONFLICT' KRISHNAMURTI: How shall we start? I would like to ask if humanity has taken a wrong turn. DAVID BOHM: A wrong turn? Well it must have done so, a long time ago, I think. K: That is what I feel. A long time ago... It appears that way -why? You see, as I look at it, mankind has always tried to become something. DB: Well possibly. I was struck by something I once read about man going wrong about five or six thousand years ago, when he began to be able to plunder and take slaves. After that, his main purpose of existence was just to exploit and plunder. K: Yes, but there is the sense of inward becoming. DB: Well, we should make it clear how this is connected. What kind of becoming was involved in doing that? Instead of being constructive, and discovering new techniques and tools and so on, man at a certain time found it easier to plunder his neighbours. Now what did they want to become? K: Conflict has been the root of all this. DB: What was the conflict? If we could put ourselves in the place of those people of long ago, how would you see that conflict? K: What is the root of conflict? Not only outwardly, but also this tremendous inward conflict of humanity? What is the root of it? DB: Well, it seems that it is contradictory desires. K: No. Is it that in all religions, you must become something? You must reach something? DB: Then what made people want to do that? Why weren't they satisfied to be whatever they were? You see, the religion would not have caught on unless people felt that there was some attraction in becoming something more. K: Isn't it an avoidance, not being able to face the fact, and therefore moving to something else - to more and more and more? DB: What would you say was the fact that people couldn't stay with? K: The Christians have said, Original Sin. DB: But the wrong turn happened long before that. K: Yes, long before that. Long before that, the Hindus had this idea of Karma. What is the origin of all this? DB: We have said that there was the fact that people couldn't stay with. Whatever it was, they wanted to imagine something better. K: Yes, something better. Becoming. DB: And you could say that they began to make things technologically better, then they extended this, and said, `I too must become better.' K: Yes, inwardly become better. DB: All of us together must become better. K: That's right. What is the root of all this? DB: Well, I should think it is natural in thought to project this goal of becoming better. That is, it is intrinsic in the structure of thought. K: Is it that the principle of becoming better outwardly has moved to becoming better inwardly? DB: If it is good to become better outwardly, then why shouldn't I become better inwardly? K: Is that the cause of the conflict? DB: That is getting towards it. It's coming nearer. K: Is it coming nearer? Is time the factor? Time - as `I need knowledge in order to do this or that'? The same principle applied inwardly? Is time the factor? DB: I can't see that time by itself can be the only factor. K: No, no. Time. Becoming - which implies time. DB: Yes, but we don't see how time is going to cause trouble. We have to say that time applied outwardly doesn't cause any difficulty. K: It causes a certain amount - but we are discussing the idea of time,inwardly. DB: So we have to see why time is so destructive inwardly. K: Because I am trying to become something. DB: Yes, but most people would say that this is only natural. You have to explain what it is that is wrong about becoming. K: Obviously, there is conflict, in that when I am trying to become something, it is a constant battle. DB: Yes. Can we go into that: why is it a constant battle? It is not a battle if I try to improve my position outwardly. K: Outwardly, no. It is more or less all right outwardly, but when that same principle is applied inwardly it brings about a contradiction. DB: And the contradiction is.? K: Between `what is' and `becoming what should be'. DB: The difficulty is, why is it a contradiction inwardly and not outwardly? K: Inwardly it builds up a centre, doesn't it, an egotistic centre? DB: Yes, but can we find some reason why it should do so? Does it build up when we do it Outwardly? It seems it need not. K: It need not. DB: But when we are doing it inwardly, then we are trying to force ourselves to be something that we are not. K: Yes. That is a fact. Is it that one's brain is so accustomed to conflict that one rejects any other form of living? DB: But why have people come to the conclusion that conflict is inevitable and necessary? K: What is the origin of conflict? DB: I think we touched on that by saying that we are trying to force ourselves. When we are a certain thing that we want to be, we also want to be something else, which is different; and therefore we want two different things at the same time. Would that seem right? K: I understand that. But I am trying to find out the origin of all this misery, confusion, conflict, struggle - what is the beginning of it? That's why I asked at the beginning: has mankind taken a wrong turn? Is the origin, `I am not I'.? DB: I think that is getting closer. K: Yes, that's it. And the `I' - why has mankind created this `I', which must, inevitably, cause conflict? `I' and `you', and `I' better than `you', and so on, and so on. DB: I think it was a mistake made a long time ago, or, as you call it, a wrong turn, that having introduced separation between various things outwardly, we then kept on doing it - not out of ill will but simply through not knowing better. K: Quite. DB: Not seeing what we were doing. K: Is that the origin of all this conflict? DB: I am not sure that it is the origin. What do you feel? K: I am inclined to observe that the origin is the ego, the `me', the`I'. DB: Yes. K: If there is no ego, there is no problem, there is no conflict, there is no time - time in the sense of becoming or not becoming; being or not being. DB: But it might be that we would still slip into whatever it was that made us make the ego in the first place. K: Wait a minute. Is it that energy - being so vast, limitless - has been condensed or narrowed down in the mind, and the brain itself has become narrowed because it couldn't contain all this enormous energy? You are following what I am saying? DB: Yes. K: And therefore the brain has gradually narrowed down to `me', to the `I'. DB: I don't quite follow that. I understand that that is what happened, but I don't quite see all the steps. You say energy was enormous and the brain couldn't handle it, or decided that it couldn't handle it? K: It couldn't handle it. DB: But if it can't handle it, it seems as if there is no way out. K: No, just a minute. Go slowly. I just want to enquire, push into it a little bit. Why has the brain, with all thought, created this sense of `me', `I'? Why? DB: We needed a certain sense of identity to function. K: Yes, to function. DB: To know where we belong. K: Yes. And is that the movement which has brought the `me'? The movement of the outer? I had to identify, with the family, the house, the trade or profession. All this gradually became the `me'? DB: I think that this energy that you are talking about also entered into it. K: Yes, but I want to lead up to that slowly. DB: You see, what you say is right, that in some way this sense of the `me' gradually strengthened, but by itself that wouldn't explain the tremendous strength that the ego has. It would only be a habit then. The ego becoming completely dominant required that it should become the focus of the greatest energy; of all the energy. K: Is that it? That the brain cannot hold this vast energy? DB: Let's say that the brain is trying to control this - to bring it to order. K: Energy has no order. DB: But if the brain feels it can't control something that is going on inside, it will try to establish order. K: Could we say that the brain, your brain, his brain, her brain, has not just been born; it is very, very old? DB: In what sense? K: In the sense that it has evolved. DB: Evolved, yes, from the animal. And the animal has evolved. So let's say that in a sense this whole evolution is somehow contained in the brain. K: I want to question evolution. I understand, say, evolution from the bullock cart to the jet. DB: Yes. But before you question, we have to consider the evidence of man developing through a series of stages. You can't question that, can you? K: No, of course not. DB: I mean, physically it is clear that evolution has occurred in some way. K: Physically, yes. DB: And the brain has got larger, more complex. But you may question whether mentally evolution has any meaning. K: You see, I want to abolish time, psychologically. You understand? DB: Yes, I understand. K: To me that is the enemy. And is that the cause, the origin of man's misery? DB: This use of time, certainly. Man had to use time for a certain purpose, but he misused it. K: I understand that. If I have to learn a language, I must have time. B: But the misuse of time by extending it inwardly... K: Inwardly: that is what I am talking about. Is that the cause of man's confusion - introducing time as a means of becoming, and becoming more and more perfect, more and more evolved, more and more loving? You follow what I mean? DB: Yes, I understand. Certainly if we didn't do that, the whole structure would collapse. K: That's it. DB: But I don't know whether there is not some other cause. K: Just a minute. I want to go into that a little bit. I am not talking theoretically, personally. But to me the idea of tomorrow doesn't exist psychologically - that is, time as a movement, either inwardly or outwardly. DB: You mean psychological time? K: Yes, psychological time, and time outwardly. Now if psychological time doesn't exist, then there is no conflict, there is no `me', no `I', which is the origin of conflict. Outwardly, technologically man has moved, evolved. DB: And also in the inward physical structure. K: The structure, everything. But psychologically we have also moved outward. DB: Yes, we have focused our life on the outward. Is that what you are saying? K: Yes. We have extended our capacities outwardly. And inwardly it is the same movement as outwardly. Now if there is no inward movement as time, moving, becoming more and more, then what takes place? You understand what I am trying to convey? Time ends. You see, the outer movement is the same as the inward movement. DB: Yes. It is going around and around. K: Involving time. If the movement ceases, then what takes place? I wonder if I am conveying anything? Could we put it this way? We have never touched any other movement than the outer movement. DB: Generally, anyway. We put most of our energy into the outer movements. K: And psychological movement is also outward. DB: Well, it is the reflection of that outward movement. K: We think it is inward but it is actually outward, right? DB: Yes. K: Now if that movement ends, as it must, then is there a really inward movement - a movement not in terms of time? DB: You are asking, is there another kind of movement which still moves, but not in terms of time? K: That's right. DB: We have to go into that. Could you go further? K: You see, that word movement means time. DB: Well, it really means to change from one place to another. But anyway there is still the notion of something which is not static. By denying time you don't want to return to something static, which is still time. K: Let's say, for instance, that one's brain has been trained, accustomed, for centuries to go North. And it suddenly realizes that going North means everlasting conflict. As it realizes that, the brain itself changes - the quality of the brain changes. DB: All right. I can see it will wake up in some way to a different movement. K: Yes, different. DB: Is the word flow any better? K: I have been going North all my life, and there is a sudden stoppage from going North. But the brain is not going East or South or West. Then conflict ceases - right? Because it is not moving in any direction. DB: So that is the key point - the direction of movement. When the movement is fixed in direction, inwardly, it will come to conflict. But outwardly we need a fixed direction. K: Of course we do. That's understood. DB: Yes. So if we say the brain has no fixed direction, then what is it doing? Is it moving in all directions? K: I am a little bit hesitant to talk about this. Could one say, when one really comes to that state, that it is the source of all energy? DB: Yes, as one goes deeper and more inward. K: This is the real inwardness; not the outward movement becoming the inner movement, but no outer or inner movement... DB: Yes, we can deny both the outward and the inner, so that all movement would seem to stop. K: Would that be the source of all energy? DB: Yes, perhaps we could say that. K: May I talk about myself a little bit? DB: Yes. K: First about meditation. All conscious meditation is no meditation - right? DB: What do you mean by conscious meditation? K: Deliberate, practised meditation, which is really premeditated meditation. Is there a meditation which is not premeditated - which is not the ego trying to become something -or being able to negate? DB: Before we go ahead, could we suggest what meditation should be. Is it an observation of the mind observing? K: No. It has gone beyond all that. I am using the word meditation in the sense in which there is not a particle of any sense of trying consciously to become, to reach a level. DB: The mind is simply with itself, silent. K: That is what I want to get at. DB: Not looking for anything. K: You see, I don't meditate in the normal sense of the word. What happens is that I wake up meditating. DB: In that state? K: One night in India I woke up; it was a quarter past twelve, I looked at the watch. And - I hesitate to say this because it sounds extravagant - the source of all energy had been reached. And that had an extraordinary effect on the brain. And also physically. I'm sorry to talk about myself but, you understand, literally, there was no division at all; no sense of the world, of `me'. You follow? Only this sense of a tremendous source of energy. DB: So the brain was in contact with this source of energy? K: Yes, and as I have been talking for sixty years, I would like others to reach this - no, not reach it. You understand what I am saying? All our problems are solved. Because it is pure energy from the very beginning of time. Now how am I - not `I', you understand - how is one not to teach, not to help, or push - but how is one to say, `This way leads to a complete sense of peace, of love'? I am sorry to use all these words. But suppose you have come to that point and your brain itself is throbbing with it - how would you help another? You understand? Help - not words. How would you help another to come to that? You understand what I am trying to say? DB: Yes. K: My brain - but not mine - has evolved. Evolution implies time, and it can only think, live in time. Now for the brain to deny time is a tremendous activity, for any problem that arises, any question is immediately solved. DB: Is this situation sustained or is it only for a period? K: It is sustained, obviously, otherwise there is no point in it. It is not sporadic or intermittent. Now how are you to open the door, how are you to help another to say,`Look, we have been going in the wrong direction, there is only non-movement; and, if movement stops, everything will be correct'? DB: Well, it is hard to know beforehand if everything is going to be correct. K: Let's go back to what we began with. That is, has mankind taken a wrong turn, psychologically, not physically? Can that turn be completely reversed? Or stopped? My brain is so accustomed to this evolutionary idea that I will become something, I will gain something, that I must have more knowledge and so on; can that brain suddenly realize that there is no such thing as time? You understand what I am trying to say? DB: Yes. K: I was listening the other day to a discussion on television about Darwin, his knowledge and what he achieved - his whole theory of evolution. It seems to me that this is totally untrue psychologically. DB: It seems that he has given evidence that all species have changed in time. Why is that untrue? K: Of course. It is obvious. DB: It is true in one respect, although I think it would be untrue to say the mind evolved in time. K: Of course. DB: But physically it seems clear there has been a process of evolution, and that this has increased the capacity of the brain to do certain things. For example, we couldn't be discussing this if the brain had not grown larger. K: Of course. DB: But I think you are implying that the mind is not originating in the brain. Is that so? The brain is perhaps an instrument of the mind? K: And the mind is not time. Just see what that means. DB: The mind does not evolve with the brain. K: The mind not being of time, and the brain being of time - is that the origin of conflict? DB: Well, we have to see why that produces conflict. It is not clear to say that the brain is of time, but rather that it has developed in such a way that time is in it. K: Yes, that is what I meant. DB: But not necessarily so. K: It has evolved. DB: It has evolved, so it has time within it. K: Yes, it has evolved, time is part of it. DB: It has become part of its very structure. K: Yes. DB: However, the mind operates without time, although the brain is not able to do so. K: That means that God is in man, and God can only operate if the brain is quiet, if the brain is not caught in time. DB: Well, I wasn't meaning that. I see that the brain, having a structure of time, is not able to respond properly to mind. That's really what seems to be involved here. K: Can the brain itself see that it is caught in time, and that as long as it is moving in that direction, conflict is eternal, endless? You follow what I am saying? DB: Yes. Does the brain see it? K: Has the brain the capacity to see in what it is doing now -being caught in time - that in that process there is no end to conflict? That means, is there a part of the brain which is not of time? DB: Not caught or functioning in time? K: Can one say that? DB: I don't know. K: That would mean - we come back to the same thing in different words - that the brain is not being completely conditioned by time, so there is a part of the brain that is free of time. DB: Not a part, but rather that the brain is mainly dominated by time, although that doesn't necessarily mean it couldn't shift. K: Yes. That is, can the brain, dominated by time, not be subservient to it? DB: That's right. In that moment it comes out of time. I think I can see this - it is dominated only when you give it time. Thought which takes time is dominated, but anything fast enough is not dominated. K: Yes, that's right. Can the brain - which has been used to time - can it see in that process that there is no end to conflict? See, in the sense of realizing this? Will it realize it under pressure? Certainly not. Will it realize it under coercion, reward or punishment? It will not. It will either resist or escape. So what is the factor that will make the brain see that the way it has been functioning is not correct? (Let's use that word for the moment.) And what will make it suddenly realize that it is totally mischievous? What will make it? Certainly not drugs or some kind of chemical. DB: None of these outward things. K: Then what will make the brain realize this? DB: What do you mean by realize? K: Realize that the path along which the brain has been going will always be the path of conflict. DB: I think this raises the question that the brain resists such a realization. K: Of course, of course. Because it has been used to the old path, for centuries! How will you make the brain realize this fact? If you could make it realize that, conflict is finished. You see, people have tried fasting, austerity, poverty, chastity in the real sense, purity, having a mind that is absolutely correct; they have tried going away by themselves; they have tried practically everything that man has invented, but none of these ways has succeeded. DB: Well, what do you say? It is clear that people pursuing these outward goals are still becoming. K: Yes, but they never realize that these are outward goals. It means denying all that completely. DB: You see, to go further, I think that one has to deny the very notion of time in the sense of looking forward to the future, and deny all the past. K: That's just it. DB: That is, the whole of time. K: Time is the enemy. Meet it, and go beyond it. DB: Deny that it has an independent existence. You see, I think we have the impression that time exists independently of us. We are in the stream of time, and therefore it would seem absurd for us to deny it because that is what we are. K: Yes, quite, quite. So it means really moving away - again this is only words - from everything that man has put together as a means of timelessness. DB: Can we say that none of the methods that man uses outwardly is going to free the mind from time? K: Absolutely. DB: Every method implies time. K: Of course. It is so simple. DB: We start out immediately by setting up the whole structure of time; the whole notion of time is presupposed before we start. K: Yes, quite. But how will you convey this to another? How will you, or `X', convey this to a man who is caught in time and will resist it, fight it, because he says there is no other way? How will you convey this to him? DB: I think that you can only convey it to somebody who has gone into it; you are not likely to convey it at all to somebody you just pick up off the street! K: So then, what are we doing? As that cannot be conveyed through words, what is a man to do? Would you say that to resolve a problem as it arises you have to go into it immediately, because otherwise you may do the most foolish thing and delude yourself that you have resolved it? Suppose I have a problem, any psychological problem - can the mind realize, resolve it immediately? Not deceive itself, not resist it - you understand? But face it, and end it. DB: Well, with a psychological problem, that is the only way. Otherwise we would be caught in the very source of the problem. K: Of course. Would that activity end time, the psychological time that we are talking about? DB: Yes, if we could bring this immediate action to bear on the problem, which is the self. K: One is greedy, or envious. To end immediately greed, attachment, and so on, will that not give a clue to the ending of time? DB: Yes, because any action which is not immediate has already brought in time. K: Yes, yes. I know that. DB: The ending of time is immediate - right? K: Immediate, of course. Would that point out the wrong turn that mankind has taken? DB: Yes, if man feels something is out of order psychologically he then brings in the notion of time, and the thought of becoming, and that creates endless problems. K: Would that open the door to this sense of time having no place inwardly? Which means, doesn't it, that thought has no place except outwardly? DB: You are saying that thought is a process which is involved in time. K: Wouldn't you say that thought is the process of time? Because thought is based on experience, knowledge, memory and response, which is the whole of time. DB: Let's try to put it that thought, as we have generally known it, is in time. K: Thought as we know it now is of time. DB: Yes. I would agree, generally speaking. K: Generally speaking, thought is time. DB: It is based on the notion of time. K: Yes, all right. But to me, thought itself is time. DB: Thought itself creates time, right. K: Does it mean, when there is no time there is no thought? DB: Well no thought of that kind. K: No. There is no thought. I want just to go slowly. DB: Could we say that there is a kind of thought which we have lived in which has been dominated by time? K: Yes, but that has come to an end. DB: But there may be another kind of thought which is not dominated by time... I mean, you were saying, you could still use thought to do some things. K: Of course, outwardly that's so. DB: We have to be careful not to say that thought is necessarily dominated by time. K: Yes. I have to go from here to there, to my house; that needs time, thought, but I am not talking of that kind of time. DB: So let's make it clear that you are talking of thought which is aimed at the mind, whose content is the order of the mind. K: Yes. Would you say knowledge is time? DB: Well, yes... K: All knowledge is time. DB: Yes, in that it has been known, and may project into the future, and so on. K: Of course, the future, the past. Knowledge - science, mathematics, whatever it is - is acquired through time. I read philosophy, I read this or that, and the whole movement of knowledge involves time. See what I mean! DB: I think we are saying that man has taken a wrong turn and got caught in this kind of knowledge, which is dominated by time because it has become psychological knowledge. K: Yes. So he lives in time. DB: He lives in time because he has attempted to produce knowledge of the nature of the mind. Are you saying that there is no real knowledge of the mind? Would you put it that way? K: The moment you use the word `knowledge', it implies time. When you end time, in the sense we are talking about, there is no knowledge as experience. DB: We have to see what the word `experience' means. K: Experience, memory. DB: People say, `I learn by experience, I go through something.' K: Which is becoming! DB: Well, let's get it clear. You see there is a kind of experience, for example, in one's job, which becomes skill and perception. K: Of course, but that is quite different. DB: But we are saying there is no point in having experience of the mind, psychological experience. K: Yes, let's put it that way. psychological experience is in time. DB: Yes, and it has no point, because you cannot say, `As I become skilled in my job I will become skilled in my mind, or skilled fundamentally'. K: Yes. So where is this leading? I realize that knowledge is time; the brain realizes it, and sees the importance of time in a certain direction, and that there is no value in time at all in another direction. It is not a contradiction. DB: I would put it that the value of time is limited to a certain direction or area, and beyond that, it has no value. K: Yes. So what is the mind or the brain without knowledge? You understand. DB: Without psychological knowledge? K: Yes, I am talking psychologically. DB: It is not so much that it is caught in time as that it is without psychological knowledge to organize itself. K: Yes. DB: So we are saying that the brain field must organize itself by knowing psychologically all about itself. K: Is then the mind, the brain, disorder? Certainly not. DB: No. But I think that people being faced with this might feel there would be disorder. K: Of course. DB: I think what you are saying is that the notion of controlling yourself psychologically has no meaning. K: So knowledge of the `me' - the psychological knowledge - is time. DB: Yes, I understand the totality of knowledge is `me', is time. K: So then what is existence without this? There is no time, there is no knowledge in the psychological sense, no sense of `me', then what is there? To come to that point most people would say, `What a horror this is.' DB: Yes, because it seems there would be nothing. K: Nothing. But if one has come to that point, what is there? Would you say, because there is nothing, it is everything? DB: Yes, I would accept that. I know that. That is true, it has all. K: No meditation, nothing. DB: No thing. K: No thing, that's right. DB: A thing is limited, and this is not a thing because there are no limits... At least, it has everything in potential. K: Wait, Sir. If it is nothing, and so everything, so everything is energy. DB: Yes. The ground of everything is energy. K: Of course. Everything is energy. And what is the source of this thing? Or is there no source of energy at all? Is there only energy? DB: Energy just is. Energy is `what is'. There is no need for a source. That is one approach, perhaps? K: No. If there is nothing, and therefore everything, and everything is energy... We must be very careful because here, the Hindus have this idea too, which is that Brahman is everything. You understand? But that becomes an idea, a principle, and then functioning is once more in the brain. But the fact of it is, there is nothing, therefore there is everything, and all that is cosmic energy. But what started this energy? DB: We are not talking of time. K: I know we are not talking of time, but you see the Christians would say, `God is energy and He is the source of all energy.' No? DB: But the Christians have an idea of what they call the Godhead, which is the very source of God too. K: And also the Hindus, the Arabic and the Jewish worlds have this. Are we going against all that? DB: It sounds similar in some ways. K: And yet not similar. We must be careful. DB: Many things like this have been said over the ages. K: Then is one just walking in emptiness? Is one living in emptiness? DB: Well, that is not clear. K: There is nothing, and everything is energy. What is this? DB: Well, is there something within the energy? K: This is not different from energy. This. But the thing that is inside says, `I am totally different from that'. DB: The `I' encloses itself and says, `I am different, I am eternal.' K: Why has it done this? Why has the separation arisen? Is it because outwardly I identify with a house and so on, and that identification has moved inwardly? DB: Yes. And the second point was that once we established a notion of something inward, then it became necessary to protect that. And therefore that built up the separation. K: Of course. DB: The inward was obviously the most precious thing, and it would have to be protected with all our energy. K: Does it mean then that there is only the organism - which part of energy? There is no `me' at all, except the passport name and form; otherwise nothing. And therefore there is everything and therefore all is energy? DB: Yes, the form has no independent existence. K: No. There is only the form. That's all. DB: There is also the energy, you say. K: That is part of energy. So there is only this, the outward shape. DB: There is the outward form in the energy. K: Do you realize what we have said, Sir? Is this the end of the journey? DB: No, I should think not. K: Has mankind journeyed through millennia to come to this? That I am nothing, and therefore I am everything, and all energy. DB: Well it can't be the end, in the sense that it might be the beginning. K: Wait. That is all I wanted you to begin with. The ending is the beginning - right? Now I want to go into that. You see, in the ending of all this - the ending of time, we will call it briefly - there is a new beginning. What is that? Because otherwise this seems so utterly futile. I am all energy and just the shell exists, and time has ended. It seems so futile. DB: Yes, if we stop there.... K: That's all. DB: I think that really this is clearing the ground of all the debris, of all the confusion. K: Yes. So the ending is a beginning. But what is that? Beginning implies time also. DB: Not necessarily. I think we said there could be a movement which had no time. K: That is all. I want to make it clear. DB: Yes, but it is hard to express. It is not a question of being static, but in some sense the movement has not the order of time. I think we would have to say that now. K: Yes. So we will use the word `beginning' and deprive it of time. DB: Because ending and beginning are no special time. In fact they can be any time or no time. K: No time. Then what takes place? What is happening? Not to me, not to my brain. What is happening? We have said that when one denies time there is nothing. After this long talk, nothing means everything. Everything is energy. And we have stopped there. But that isn't the end. DB: No. K: That is not the end. Then what is going on? Is that creation? DB: Yes, something like that. K: But not the art of creating like writing or painting. DB: Perhaps later we can discuss what we mean by creating. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 2 2ND APRIL 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'CLEANSING THE MIND OF THE ACCUMULATION OF TIME' KRISHNAMURTI: We were saying that psychological time is conflict, that time is the enemy of man. And that enemy has existed from the beginning of man. And we asked, why has man from the beginning taken a `wrong turn', a `wrong path'? And, if so, is it possible to turn man in another direction in which he can live without conflict? Because, as we said yesterday, the outer movement is also the same as the inner movement. There is no separation between inner and outer. It is the same movement. And we asked whether we were concerned deeply and passionately to turn man in another direction so that he doesn't live in time, with a knowledge only of the outer things. The religions, the politicians, the educators have failed: they have never been concerned about this. Would you agree to that? DAVID BOHM: Yes. I think the religions have tried to discuss the eternal values beyond time but they don't seem to have succeeded. K: That is what I want to get at. To them it has been an idea, an ideal, a principle, a value, but not an actuality, and most of the religious people have their anchor in a belief, in a principle, in an image, in knowledge, in jesus or in something or other. DB: Yes, but if you were to consider all the religions, say the various forms of Buddhism, they try to say this very thing which you are saying, to some extent. K: To some extent but what I am trying to get at is: why has man never confronted this problem? Why haven't we said `Let's end conflict'? Instead we have been encouraged because through conflict we think there is progress. DB: It can be a certain source of stimulus to try to overcome opposition. K: Yes, Sir, but if you and I see the truth of this, not in abstraction, but actually, deeply, can we act in such a way that every issue is resolved instantly, immediately, so that psychological time is abolished? And as we asked yesterday, when you come to? that point where there is nothing and there is everything, where all that is energy - when time ends, is there a beginning of something totally new? Is there a beginning which is not enmeshed in time? Now how shall we discover it? Words are necessary to communicate. But the word is not that thing. So what is there when all time ends? Psychological time, not time of... DB: ...time of day. K: Yes. Time as the `me', the ego, and when that completely comes to an end, what is there that begins? Could we say that out of the ashes of time there is a new growth? What is that which begins - no, that word `begins' implies time too. DB: Whatever we mean, that which arises. K: That arises, what is it? DB: Well, as we said yesterday, essentially it is creation, the possibility of creation. K: Yes, creation. Is that it? Is something new being born? DB: It is not the process of becoming. K: Oh, no, that is finished. Becoming is the worst, that is time, that is the real root of this conflict. We are trying to find out what happens when the `I', which is time, has completely come to an end. I believe the Buddha is supposed to have said `Nirvana'. And the Hindus call it Moksha. I don't know whether the Christians call it Heaven... DB: The Christian mystics have had some similar state... K: Similar, yes. But you see, the Christian mystics, as far as I understand it, are rooted in jesus, in the Church, in the whole belief. They have never gone beyond it. DB: Yes, well that seems so. As far as I know anyway. K: Now we have said belief, attachment to all that is out, finished. That is all part of the `I'. Now when there is that absolute cleansing of the mind from the accumulation of time, which is the essence of the `me', what takes place? Why should we ask what takes place? DB: You mean it is not a good question? K: I am just asking myself, why should we ask that? Is there behind it a subtle form of hope? A subtle form of saying, I have reached that point, there is nothing. Then that's a wrong question Wouldn't you consider that so? DB: Well, it invites you to look for some hopeful outcome. K: If all endeavour is to find something beyond the `me', the endeavour and the thing that I may find are still within the orbit of `me'. So I have no hope. There is no sense of hope, there is no sense of wanting to find anything. DB: What is then moving you to enquire? K: My enquiry has been to end conflict. DB: Yes, we have then to be careful. We are liable to produce a hope of ending conflict. K: No, no; there is no hope. I end it. The moment I introduce the word `hope' there is a feeling of the future. DB: Yes, that is desire. K: Desire - and therefore it is of time. So I - the mind - puts all that aside completely; I mean it, completely. Then what is the essence of all this? Is my mind still seeking, or groping after something intangible that it can capture and hold? If that is so, it is still part of time. DB: Well, that is still desire. K: Desire and a subtle form of vanity. DB: Why vanity? K: Vanity in the sense `I have reached'. DB: Self-deception. K: Deception and all forms of illusion arise from that. So it is not that. I am clearing the decks as we go along. DB: Essentially it seems that you are clearing the movement of desire in its subtle forms. K: In its subtle forms. So desire too has been put away. Then there is only mind - right? DB: Yes, but then we have to ask what is meant by nature, if all is mind, because nature seems somewhat independent. K: But we have also said that all the universe is the mind. DB: You mean to say nature is the mind? K: Part of the mind. DB: The universal mind? K: Yes. DB: Not a particular mind? K: The particular mind then is separate, but we are talking of mind. DB: You see, we have to make it clear, because you are saying that nature is the creation of universal mind, though nevertheless nature has a certain reality. K: That is all understood. DB: But it is almost as if nature were the thought of the universal mind. K: it is part of it. I am trying to grope towards the particular ind coming to an end; then there is only the Mind, the universal mind -right? DB: Yes. We have been discussing the particular mind groping through desire, and we said if all of that stopped... K: That is just my point. If all that has completely come to an end, what is the next step? Is there any next? We said yesterday, there is a beginning, but that word implies part of time. DB: We won't say so much beginning, perhaps ending. K: The ending, we have said that. DB: But now is there something new? K: Is there something which the mind cannot capture? DB: Which mind, the particular or the universal? K: The particular has ended. DB: Yes. You are saying the universal mind cannot capture it either? K: That is what we are finding out. DB: Are you saying there is a reality - or something - beyond universal mind? K: Are we playing a game of peeling off one thing after another? Like an onion skin, and at the end there is only tears and nothing else? DB: Well, I don't know. K: Because we said there is the ending, then the cosmic, the universal mind, and, beyond, is there something more? DB: Well, would you say this `more' is energy? That energy is beyond the universal mind? K: I would say yes, because the universal mind is part of that energy. DB: That is understandable. In a way the energy is alive, you are saying? K: Yes, yes. DB: And also intelligent? K: Wait a minute. DB: In some way... In so far as it is mind. K: Now if that energy is intelligent, why has it allowed man to move away in the wrong direction? DB: I think that that may be part of a process, something that is inevitable in the nature of thought. You see if thought is going to develop, that possibility must exist. To bring about thought in man... K: Is that the original freedom for man? To choose? DB: No, that is, thought has to have the capacity to make this mistake. K: But if that intelligence was operating, why did it allow this mistake? DB: Well, we can suggest that there is a universal order, a law. K: All right. The universe functions in order. DB: Yes, and it is part of the order of the universe that this particular mechanism can go wrong. If a machine breaks down, it is not disorder in the universe, it is part of universal order. K: Yes. In the universal order there is disorder, where man is concerned. DB: It is not disorder at the level of the universe. K: No. At a much lower level. DB: At the level of man it is disorder. K: And why has man lived from the beginning in this disorder? DB: Because he is still ignorant, he still hasn't seen the point. K: But he is part of the whole, yet in one tiny corner man exists, and has lived in disorder. And this enormous conscious intelligence has not... DB: Yes, you could say that the possibility of creation is also the possibility of disorder. That if man had the possibility of being creative, there would also be the possibility of a mistake. It could not be fixed like a machine, always to operate in perfect order. The intelligence would not have turned him into a machine that would be incapable of disorder. K: No, of course not. So is there something beyond the cosmic order, mind? DB: Are you saying that the universe, that that mind, has created nature which has an order, which is not merely going around mechanically? It has some deeper meaning? K: That is what we are trying to find out. DB: You are bringing in the whole universe as well as mankind. What makes you do this? What is the source of this perception? K: Let's begin again: there is the ending of the `me' as time, and so there is no hope; all that is finished, ended. In the ending of it, there is that sense of nothingness. And nothingness is this whole universe. DB: Yes, the universal mind, the universal matter. K: The whole universe. DB: What led you to say that? K: Ah. I know. To put it very simply: division has come to an end. Right? The division created by time, created by thought, created by this education, and so on - all that. Because it has ended, the other is obvious. DB: You mean that without the division then the other is there -to be perceived? K: Not to be perceived, but it is there. DB: But then how does one come to be aware that it is there? K: I don't think one becomes aware of it. DB: Then what leads you to say it? K: Would you say it is? Not, I perceive it, or it is perceived. DB: Yes. It is. K: It is. DB: You could almost say that it is saying it. In some sense, you seem to be suggesting that it is what is saying. K: Yes. I didn't want to put it - I am glad you put it like that! Where are we now? DB: We are saying that the universe is alive, as it were, it is mind, and we are part of it. K: We can only say we are part of it when there is no `I'. DB: No division. K: No division. I would like to push it a little further; is there something beyond all this? DB: Beyond the energy, you mean? K: Yes. We said nothingness, that nothingness is everything, and so it is that which is total energy. It is undiluted, pure, uncorrupted energy. Is there something beyond that? Why do we ask it? DB: I don't know. K: I feel we haven't touched it - I feel there is something beyond. DB: Could we say this something beyond is the ground of the whole? You are saying that all this emerges from an inward ground? K: Yes, there is another - I must be awfully careful here. You know one must be awfully careful not to be romantic, not to have illusions, not to have desire, not even to search. It must happen. You follow what I mean? DB: We are saying the thing must come from that. Whatever you are saying must come from that. K: From that. That's it. It sounds rather presumptuous. DB: You are actually seeing it. It is not that you look at it and say, that is what I have seen. K: Oh, no. Then it is wrong. DB: There isn't a division. Of course, it is easy to fall into delusion with this sort of thing. K: Yes, but we said delusion exists as long as there is desire and thought. That is simple. And desire and thought are part of the `I', which is time. When desire and time are completely ended, then there is absolutely nothing, and therefore that is the universe, that emptiness, which is full of energy. We can put a stop there... DB: Because we haven't yet seen the necessity for going beyond the energy. We have to see that as necessary. K: I think it is necessary. DB: Yes, but it has to be seen. We have to bring out why it is necessary. K: Why is it necessary? Tentatively, there is something in us that is operating, there is something in us much more - much - I don't know how to put it - much greater. I am going slowly, slowly. What I am trying to say is, I think there is something beyond that. When I say `I think', you know what I mean. DB: I understand, yes. K: There is something beyond that. How can we talk about it? You see, energy exists only when there is emptiness. They go together. DB: This pure energy you talk about is emptiness. Are you suggesting there is that which is beyond the emptiness, the ground of the emptiness? K: Yes. DB: Would that be something in the way of a substance? You see the question is, if it is not emptiness, then what is it? K: I don't quite follow your question. DB: Well, you say something beyond emptiness, other than emptiness. I think we can follow to the energy and the emptiness. Now if we suggest something other to that, to the emptiness... K: This something other. DB: Yes, then that other must be different from the emptiness. Something other to emptiness, which therefore is not emptiness. Does that make sense? K: Then it is substance. DB: Yes, that is what is implied: if it is not emptiness, it is substance. K: Substance is matter, is it not? DB: Not necessarily, but having the quality of substance. K: What do you mean by that? DB: Matter is a form of substance in the sense that it is energy, but having the form of substance as well, because it has a constant form and it resists change. It is stable, it maintains itself. K: Yes. But when you use the word `substance', meaning beyond emptiness, does that word convey that meaning? DB: Well, we are exploring the possible meaning of what you want to say. If you are saying it is not emptiness, then it would not be substance as we know it in matter. But we can see a certain quality which belongs to substance in general; if it has that quality, we could use the word substance, extend the meaning of the word substance. K: I understand. So could we use the word `quality'? DB: The word `quality' is not necessarily the emptiness, energy could have the quality of emptiness, you see. And therefore it is something else. Something other might have the quality of substance. That is the way I see it. And is that what you are trying to say? K: There is something beyond emptiness. How shall we tackle it? DB: Firstly, what leads you to say this? K: Simply the fact that there is. We have been fairly logical all along, we have not been caught in any illusions so far. And can we keep that same kind of watchfulness, in which there is no illusion, to find out - or, not find out - that which is beyond emptiness? To come down to earth. Come down to earth in the sense to be communicated. You follow what I mean? DB: Yes. Well we could come back to the question before: why hasn't it come down? K: Why hasn't it come down? Has man been ever free from the `I'? DB: No. Not generally speaking. K: No. And it demands that the `I' ends. DB: I think we could look at it this way: that the ego becomes an illusion of that substance. You feel the ego is a substance too in some way. K: Yes, the ego is substance. DB: And therefore that substance seems to be... K: ...untouchable. DB: But that ego is an illusion of the true substance - it may be that the mind tries to create some sort of illusion of that substance. K: That is an illusion. Why do you relate it to the other? DB: In the sense that if the mind thinks it already has this substance, then it will not be open... K: Of course not. Can that thing ever be put into words? It is not a question of avoiding something, or trying to slither out of some conclusion. But you see, so far we have put everything into words. DB: Well, I think that once something is properly perceived, then after a while the words come to communicate it. K: Yes, but can that be perceived? And therefore be communicable? Is this beyond.? DB: This thing beyond, would you say also it is alive? Life beyond emptiness, is that still life? Living? K: Living, yes. Oh, yes. DB: And intelligent? K: I don't want to use those words. DB: They are too limited? K: Living, intelligence, love, compassion; they are all too limited. You and I are sitting here. We have come to a point and there is that thing which perhaps later on might be put into words without any sense of pressure, and so without any illusion. Don't you see beyond the wall? - the word, I mean? We have come to a certain point, and we are saying there is something still more - you understand? There is something behind all that. Is it palpable? Can we touch it? Is it something that the mind can capture? You follow? DB: Yes. Are you saying it is not? K: I don't think it is possible for the mind to capture it... DB: Or grasp it.? K: Grasp it, understand... for the mind even to look at it. You are a scientist, you have examined the atom, and so on. Don't you, when you have examined all that, feel there is something much more, beyond all that? DB: You can always feel that there is more beyond that, but it doesn't tell you what it is. It is clear that whatever one knows is limited. K: Yes DB: And there must be more beyond. K: How can that communicate with you, so that you, with your scientific knowledge, with your brain capacity can grasp it? DB: Are you saying it can't be grasped? k: No. How can you grasp it? I don't say you can't grasp it. Can you grasp it? DB: Look, it is not clear. You were saying before that it is ungraspable by... K: Grasp, in the sense, can your mind go beyond theories.? What I am trying to say is, can you move into it? Not move, in the sense of time and all that. Can you enter it? No, those are all words. What is beyond emptiness? Is it silence? DB: Isn't that similar to emptiness? K: Yes, that is what I am getting at. Move step by step. Is it silence? Or is silence part of emptiness? DB; Yes, I should say that. K: I should say that too. If it is not silence, could we - I am just asking - could we say it is something absolute? You understand? DB: Well, we could consider the absolute. It would have to be something totally independent; that is what `absolute' really means. It doesn't depend on anything. K: Yes. You are getting somewhere near it. DB: Entirely self moving, as it were, self active. K: Yes. Would you say everything has a cause, and that has no cause at all? DB: You see, this notion is already an old one. This notion has been developed by Aristotle, that this absolute is the cause of itself. C: Yes. DB: It has no cause, in a sense. That is the same thing. K: You see the moment you said Aristotle... it is not that. How shall we get at this? Emptiness is energy, and that emptiness exists in silence, or the other way round, it doesn't matter - right? Oh, yes, there is something beyond all this. Probably it can never be put into words. But it must be put into words. You follow? DB: You are saying that the absolute must be put into words, but we feel it can't be? Any attempt to put it into words makes it relative. K: Yes. I don't know how to put all this. DB: I think that we have a long history of danger with the absolute. people have put it in words, and it has become very oppressive. K: Leave all that. You see, being ignorant of what other people have said, Aristotle and the Buddha, and so on, has an advantage. You understand what I mean? An advantage in the sense that the mind is not coloured by other people's ideas, not caught in other people's statements. All that is part of our conditioning. Now, to go beyond all that! What are we trying to do? DB: I think, to communicate regarding this absolute, this beyond. K: I took away that word `absolute' immediately. DB: Then whatever it is; the beyond emptiness and silence. K: Beyond all that. There is beyond all that. All that is something, part of an immensity. DB: Yes, well even the emptiness and silence is an immensity, isn't it? The energy is itself an immensity. K: Yes, I understand that. But there is something much more immense than that. Emptiness and silence and energy are immense, really immeasurable. But there is something - I am using the word, `greater', than that. DB: I am just considering. I am looking at it. One can see that whatever you say about emptiness, or about any other thing, there is something beyond. K: No, as a scientist, why do you accept - not accept, forgive me for using that word - why do you even move along with this? DB: Because we have come this far step by step, seeing the necessity of each step. K: You see all that is very logical, reasonable, sane. DB: And also, one can see that it is so right. K: Yes. So if I say there is something greater than all this silence, energy - would you accept that? Accept in the sense that up to now we have been logical. DB: We will say that whatever you speak of there is certainly something beyond it. Silence, energy, whatever, then there is always room logically for something beyond that. But the point is this: that even if you were to say there is something beyond that, still you logically leave room for going again beyond that. K: No. DB: Well why is that? You see, whatever you say, there is always room for something beyond. K: There is nothing beyond. DB: Well that point is not clear, you see. K: There is nothing beyond it. I stick to that. Not dogmatically or obstinately. I feel that is the beginning and the ending of everything. The ending and the beginning are the same - right? DB: In which sense? In the sense that you are using the beginning of everything as the ending? K: Yes. Right? You would say that? DB: Yes. If we take the ground from which it comes, it must be the ground to which it falls. K: That's right. That is the ground upon which everything exists, space... DB: ...energy... K: ...energy, emptiness, silence, all that is. All that. Not ground, you understand? DB: No, it is just a metaphor. K: There is nothing beyond it. No cause. If you have a cause then you have ground. DB: You have another ground. K: No. That is the beginning and the ending. DB: It is becoming more clear. K: That's right. Does that convey anything to you? DB: Yes, well I think that it conveys something. K: Something. Would you say further, there is no beginning and no ending? DB: Yes. It comes from the ground, goes to the ground, but it does not begin or end. K: Yes. There is no beginning and no ending. The implications are enormous. Is that death - not death in the sense, I will die, but the complete ending of everything? DB: You see at first you said that the emptiness is the ending of everything, so in what sense is this more, now? Emptiness is the ending of things, isn't it? K: Yes, yes. Is that death, this emptiness? Death of everything the mind has cultivated. This emptiness is not the product of the mind, of the particular mind. DB: No, it is the universal mind. K: That emptiness is that. DB: Yes. K: That emptiness can only exist when there is death - total death - of the particular. DB: Yes. K: I don't know if I am conveying this. DB: Yes, that is the emptiness. But then you are saying that, in this ground, death goes further? K: Oh, yes. DB: So we are saying the ending of the particular, the death of the particular, is the emptiness, which is universal. Now are you going to say that the universal also dies? K: Yes, that is what I am trying to say. DB: Into the ground. K: Does it convey anything? DB: Possibly, yes. K: just hold it a minute. Let's see it. I think it conveys something, doesn't it? DB: Yes. Now if the particular and the universal die, then that is death? K: Yes. After all, an astronomer says everything in the universe is dying, exploding, dying. DB: But of course you could suppose that there was something beyond. K: Yes, that is just it. DB: I think we are moving. The universal and the particular. First the particular dies into the emptiness, and then comes the universal. K: And that dies too. DB: Into the ground, right? K: Yes. DB: So you could say the ground is neither born nor dies. K: That's right. DB: Well, I think it becomes almost inexpressible if you say the universal is gone, because expression is the universal. K: You see - I am just explaining: everything is dying, except that. Does this convey anything? DB: Yes. Well it is out of that that everything arises, and into which it dies. K: So that has no beginning and no ending. DB: What would it mean to talk of the ending of the universal? What would it mean to have the ending of the universal? K: Nothing. Why should it have a meaning if it is happening? What has that to do with man? You follow what I mean? Man who is going through a terrible time. What has that got to do with man? DB: Let's say that man feels he must have some contact with the ultimate ground in his life, otherwise there is no meaning. K: But it hasn't. That ground hasn't any relationship with man. He is killing himself, he is doing everything contrary to the ground. DB: Yes, that is why life has no meaning for man. K: I am an ordinary man; I say, all right, you have talked marvellously of sunsets, but what has that got to do with me? Will that or your talk help me to get over my ugliness? My quarrels with my wife or whatever it is? DB: I think I would go back, and say we went into this logically starting from the suffering of mankind, showing it originates in a wrong turning, that leads inevitably... K: Yes, but man asks, help me to get past the wrong turn. Put me on the right path. And to that one says, please don't become anything. DB: Right. What is the problem then? K: He won't even listen. DB: Then it seems to me that it is necessary for the one who sees this to find out what is the barrier to listening. K: Obviously you can see what is the barrier. DB: What is the barrier? K: `I'. DB: Yes, but I meant more deeply. K: More deeply, all your thoughts, deep attachments - all that is in your way. If you can't leave these, then you will have no relationship with that. But man doesn't want to leave these. DB: Yes, I understand. What he wants is the result of the way he is thinking. K: What he wants is some comfortable, easy way of living without any trouble, and he can't have that. DB: No. Only by dropping all this. K: There must be a connection. There must be some relationship with the ground and this, some relationship with ordinary man. Otherwise, what is the meaning of living? DB: That is what I was trying to say before. Without this relationship... K: ...there is no meaning. DB: And then people invent meaning. K: Of course. DB: Even going back, the ancient religions have said similar things, that God is the ground, so they say seek God, you know. K: Ah, no, this isn't god. DB: No, it is not god, but it is saying the same. You could say that `god` is an attempt to put this notion a bit too personally perhaps. K: Yes. Give them hope, give them faith, you follow? Make life a little more comfortable to live. DB: Well, are you asking at this point: how is this to be conveyed to the ordinary man? Is that your question? K: More or less. And also it is important that he should listen to this. You are a scientist. You are good enough to listen because we are friends. But who will listen among the other scientists? I feel that if one pursues this we will have a marvellously ordered world. DB: Yes. And what will we do in this world? K: Live. DB: But, I mean, we said something about creativity... K: Yes. And then if you have no conflict, no `I', there is something else operating. DB: Yes, it is important to say that, because the Christian idea of perfection may seem rather boring because there is nothing to do! K: We must continue this some other time, because it is something that has got to be put into orbit. DB: It seems impossible. K: We have gone pretty far. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 3 8TH APRIL 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'WHY HAS MAN GIVEN SUPREME IMPORTANCE TO THOUGHT?' KRISHNAMURTI: What shall we talk about? DAVID BOHM: One point relating to what we discussed before; I was reading somewhere that a leading physicist said that the more we understand the universe, the more pointless it seems, the less meaning it has. And it occurred to me that in science there may be an attempt to make the material universe the ground of our existence, so that it may have meaning physically but not... K: ...any other meaning. Quite. DB: And the question that we might discuss is this ground which we were talking about the other day. Is it any different to mankind, as the physical universe appears to be? K: Let's get the question clear. DB: Not only physicists hut geneticists, biologists, have tried to reduce everything to the behaviour of man - atoms, genes, you know, DNA molecules, and so on. And the more they study it, then the more they feel it has no meaning, it is just going on. Though it has meaning physically, in the sense that we can understand it scientifically, it has no deeper meaning than that. K: I understand that. DB: And, of course, perhaps that notion has penetrated because in the past people were more religious and felt that the ground of our existence was in something beyond matter - God, or whatever they wished to call it. And that gave them a sense of deep meaning to the whole of their existence, which has now gone away. That is one of the difficulties of modern life, the sense that it doesn't mean anything. K: So have the religious people invented something which has a meaning? DB: They may well have done so. You see, feeling that life has no meaning, they may have invented something beyond the ordinary. Something which is eternal... K: ...timeless, nameless. DB: ...and independent, absolute. K: Seeing that the way we live, genetically and all the rest of it, has no meaning, some clever erudite people said, `We will give it a meaning'. DB: Well, I think it happened before that. In the past people somehow gave meaning to life, long before science had been very much developed, in the form of religion. And science came along and began to deny this religion. K: Quite. I understand that. DB: And people no longer believe in the religious meaning. perhaps they never were able to believe in it entirely anyway. K: So, how does one find out if life has a meaning beyond this? How does one find out? They have tried meditation: they have tried every form of self torture, isolation, becoming a monk, a sannyasi and so on. But they may also be deceiving themselves thoroughly. DB: Yes. And that is in fact why the scientists have denied it all, because the story told by the religious people is no longer plausible, you see. K: Quite. So how does one find out if there is something more than the mere physical? How would one set about it? DB: We have been discussing the notion of some ground which is beyond matter, beyond the emptiness. K: But suppose you say it is so, and I say that is another illusion. DB: The first point is, perhaps we could clear this up: you see, if this ground is indifferent to human beings, then it would be the same as scientists' ground in matter. K: Yes. What is the question? DB: Is the ground indifferent to mankind? You see, the universe appears to be totally indifferent to mankind. It is immense vastness, it pays no attention, it may produce earthquakes and catastrophes, it might wipe things out, it is essentially not interested in mankind. K: I see what you mean, yes. DB: It does not care whether man survives or does not survive -if you want to put it that way. K: Right. I understand the question. DB: Now I think that people felt that God was a ground who was not indifferent to mankind. You see, they may have invented it, but that is what they believed. And that is what gave them possibly... K: ...tremendous energy. Quite. DB: Now I think the point is, would this ground be indifferent to mankind? K: How would you find out? What is the relationship of this ground to man, and man's relationship to it? DB: Yes, that is the question. Does man have some significance to it? And does it have significance to man? May I add one more point? I was discussing with somebody who was familiar with the Middle East and traditions of mysticism; he told me that in these traditions they not only say that what we call this ground, this infinite, has some significance, but that what man does has ultimately some significance. K: Quite, quite. Suppose one says it has - otherwise life has no meaning, nothing has any meaning - how would one find out? Suppose you say this ground exists, as I said the other day. Then the next question is: what relationship has that to man? And man to it? How would one discover, or find out, or touch it - if the ground exists at all? If it doesn't exist, then really man has no meaning at all. I mean, I die and you die and we all die, and what is the point of being virtuous, what is the point of being happy or unhappy, of just carrying on? How would you show that the ground exists? In scientific terms, as well as the feeling of it, the non-verbal communication of it? DB: When you say scientific do you mean rational? K: Yes, rational, logical, sane. DB: So, something that we can actually touch. K: Not touch, - better than touch - sense. Many can come to it. DB: Yes, it is public. K: It isn't just one man's assertion. But it would be scientific. I think it can be shown, but with all things one must do it, not just talk about it. Can I - or you - say the ground exists? The ground has certain demands: which are, there must bc absolute silence, absolute emptiness, which means no sense of egotism in any form -right? Would you tell me that? Am I willing to let go all my egotism, because I want to prove it, I want to show it, I want to find out if what you are saying is actually true? So am I willing to say,`Look, complete eradication of the self'? DB: I think I can say that perhaps in some sense one is willing, but there may be another sense in which the willingness is not subject to one's conscious effort or determination. K: No, wait. So we go through all that. DB: We have to see that... K: It is not will, it is not desire, it is not effort. DB: Yes, but when you say willingness, it contains the word `will', for example. K: Willingness, in the sense, go through that door. Or, am I, are we, willing to go through that particular door to find that the ground exists? You ask me that. I say, agreed, I will. I will not in the sense of exercising will and all that. What are the facets or the qualities or the nature of the self? We go into that. You point it out to me and I say, `Right' - can we do it? Not be attached, not have fear - you follow? - the whole business of it. No belief, absolute rationality - you know - observation. I think if ten people do it, any scientist will accept it. But there are no ten people. DB: I see. We have to have the thing done together publicly... K: ...that's it... DB: ...so that it becomes a real fact. K: A real fact, in the sense that people accept it. Not something based on illusion, belief, and all the rest of that. DB: A fact; that which is actually done. K: Now, who will do this? The scientists want to say that the thing is all illusory, nonsense. But there are others who say, `It is not nonsense, there is a ground. And if you do these things it will be there.' DB: Yes, but I think that some of the things you say may not in the beginning entirely make sense to the person you talk with. K: Yes, quite, because he isn't even willing to listen. DB: But also his whole background is against it. You see, the background gives you the notion of what makes sense and what doesn't. Now, when you say, for example, one of the steps is not to bring in time... K: Ah, that's much more difficult. DB: Yes, but it is fairly crucial. K: But wait. I wouldn't begin with time, I would begin at the schoolboy level. DB: But you are going eventually to reach those more difficult points. K: Yes. But begin at the schoolboy level and say `DO these things.' DB: Well what are they? Let's go over them. K: No belief. DB: A person may not be able to control what he believes, he may not know what he believes. K: No, don't control anything. Observe that you have belief, you cling to the belief, belief gives you a sense of security and so on. And that belief is an illusion, it has no reality. DB: You see, I think if we were to talk to scientists like that they might say they were not sure about it, because they believe in the existence of the material world. K: You don't believe the sun rises and sets. It is a fact. DB: Yes, but the scientist believes. You see, there have been long arguments about this, there is no way to prove that it exists outside my mind, but I believe it anyway. This is one of the questions which arises. Scientists actually have beliefs. One will believe that this theory is right, and the other believes in a different one. K: No. I have no theories. I don't have any theories. I start at the schoolboy level by saying, `Look, don't accept theories, conclusions, don't cling to your prejudices.' That is the starting point. DB: Perhaps we had better say, don't hold to your theories, because somebody might question you if you say you have no theories. They would immediately doubt that, you see. K: I have no theories. Why should I have theories? QUESTIONER: If I am a scientist, I would also say I don't have theories. I don't see that the world which I construct for my scientific theories is also theoretical. I would call it fact. K: So we have to discuss what are facts? Right? I would say that facts are what is happening, actually happening. Would you agree to that? DB: Yes. K: Would the scientists agree to that? DB: Yes. Well, I think that the scientists would say that what is happening is understood through the theories. You see, in science you do not understand what is happening, except with the aid of instruments and theories. K: Now, wait, wait. What is happening out there, what is happening here? DB: Let's go slowly. First, what is happening out there. The instruments and theories are needed even to... K: No. DB: ...have the facts about what is out there... K: What are the facts out there? DB: You cannot find out without some kind of theory. K: The facts there are conflict, why should I have a theory about it? DB: I wasn't discussing that. I was discussing the facts about matter, you see, which the scientist is concerned with. He cannot establish those facts without a certain theory, because the theory organizes the facts for him. K: Yes, I understand that. That may be a fact. You may have theories about that. DB: Yes. About gravitation, atoms - all those things depend on theories in order to produce the right facts. K: The right facts. So you start with a theory. DB: A mixture of theory and fact. It is always a combination of theory and fact. K: All right. A combination of theory and fact. DB: Now, if you say we are going to have an area where there isn't any such combination... K: That's it. Which is, psychologically I have no theory about myself, about the universe, about my relationship with another. I have no theory. Why should I have? The only fact is, mankind suffers, is miserable, confused, in conflict. That is a fact. Why should I have a theory about it? DB: You must go slowly. You see, if you are intending to bring in the scientists, this has to be scientific... K: ...I will go very slowly... DB: ...so that we don't leave the scientists behind! K: Quite. Leave me behind! DB: Well, let's accept `part company' - right? The scientists might say yes, psychology is the science with which we look inwardly, to investigate the mind. And they say various people -like Freud, and Jung and others - have had theories. Now we will have to make it clear why it has no point to make these theories. K: Because theory prevents the observation of what is actually taking place. DB: Yes, but outside it seemed that the theory was helping that observation. Why the difference here? K: The difference? You can discover that, it is simple. DB: Let's spell it out. Because if you want to bring in scientists you must answer this question. K: We will answer it. What is the question? DB: Why is it that theories are both necessary and useful in organizing facts about matter, outwardly, and yet inwardly, psychologically, they are in the way, they are no use at all. K: Yes. What is theory? The meaning of the word, theory? DB: Theory means to see, to view, a kind of insight. K: To view? That's it. A way of looking. DB: And the theory helps you to look at the outside matter. K: Theory means to observe. DB: It is a way of observing. K: Can you observe psychologically what is going on? DB: Let's say that when we look at matter outwardly, to a certain extent we do the observing. K: That is, the observer is different from the observed. DB: Not only different, but their relationship is fixed, relatively at least, for some time. K: So we can move now, a little. DB: This appears to be necessary in order to study matter. Matter does not change so fast, and it can be separated to some extent. We can then make a fairly constant way of looking. It changes but not immediately, it can be held constant for a while. K: Yes. DB: And we call that theory. K: As you said, theory means a way of observing. DB: it is the same as `theatre' in Greek. K: Theatre, yes, that's right. It is a way of looking. Now, where do we start? A common way of looking, an ordinary way of looking, the way of looking depending on the viewpoint of each person - the housewife, the husband? What do you mean by the way of looking? DB: The same problem arose in the development of science. We began with what was called common sense, a common way of looking. Then scientists discovered that this was inadequate. K: They moved away from it. DB: They moved away, they gave up some parts of it. K: That is what I am coming to. The common way of looking is full of prejudice. DB: Yes, it is arbitrary, and dependent on your background. K: Yes, all that. So can one be free of one's background, one's prejudice? I think one can. DB: The question is whether a theory of psychology would be any help in doing this. The danger is that the theory itself might he a prejudice. If you tried to make a theory... K: That is what I am saying. That would become a prejudice. DB: That would become a prejudice because we have nothing - we have not yet observed anything to found it on. K: So the common factor is that man suffers - right? That is the common factor. And the way of observing matters. DB: Yes. I wonder whether scientists would accept that as the most fundamental factor of man. K: All right. Conflict? DB: Well, they have argued about it. K: Take anything, it doesn't matter. Attachment, pleasure, fear. DB: I think some people might object, saying we should take something more positive. K: Which is what? DB: Simply, for example, some people might have said that rationality is a common factor. K: No, no, no! I won't call rationality a common factor. If people were rational they wouldn't be fighting each other. DB: We have to make this clear. Let's say in the past somebody like Aristotle might have said rationality is the common factor of man. Now your argument against it is that men are not generally rational. K: No, they are not. DB: Though they might be, they are not. So you are saying that is not a fact. K: That's right. DB: I think commonly scientists would say that there are many different human beings and that the common factor of mankind is that they are all striving for happiness. K: Is that the common factor? No. I won't accept that - that many human beings are trying for happiness. Q: No. Human beings are all different. K: Agreed. Stay there. Q: What I am saying is that this is the common theory, which people believe to be a fact. K: That is, each person thinks he is totally different from others. Q: Yes. And they are all independently struggling for happiness. K: They are all seeking some kind of gratification. Would you agree to that? DB: That is one common factor. But the reason I brought up rationality was that the very existence of science is based on the notion that rationality is common to man. K: But each person is seeking his own individuality. DB: But, you see, science would be impossible if that were entirely true. K: Quite. Q: Why? DB: Because everybody would not be interested in the truth. The very possibility of scientific discovery depends on people feeling that this common goal of finding the truth is beyond personal satisfaction, because even if your theory is wrong you must accept that it is wrong, though it is not gratifying. That is, it becomes very disappointing for people, but they accept it, and say, well, that is wrong. K: I am not seeking gratification. I am a common man. You have brought up that scientists take for granted that human beings are rational. DB: At least when they do science. They may agree that they are not very rational in private life, but they say that at least they are capable of being rational when they do scientific work. Otherwise it would be impossible to begin. K: So outwardly, in dealing with matter, they are all rational. DB: At least they try to be, and they are to some extent. K: They try to be, but they become irrational in their relationships with other human beings. DB: Yes. They cannot maintain it. K: So that is the common factor. DB: Yes. It is important to bring out this point - that rationality is limited, and, as you say, the fundamental fact is that more generally they cannot be rational. They may succeed in some limited area. K: That's right. That is a fact. DB: That is a fact, though we don't say it is inevitable, or that it can't be changed. K: No. It is a fact. DB: It is a fact that it has been, it has happened, it is happening. K: Yes. I, as a common human being, have been irrational. And my life has been totally contradictory, and so on, which is irrational. Now can I as a human being change that? DB: Let's see how we could proceed from the scientific approach. This would raise the question, why is everybody irrational? K: Because we have been conditioned that way. Our education, our religion, our everything. DB: But that won't get us anywhere, because it leads to more questions: how did we get conditioned and so on K: We can go into all that. DB: But I meant that following that line is not going to answer. K: Quite. Why are we conditioned that way? DB: For example, we were saying the othEr day that perhaps man took a wrong turning, established the wrong conditioning. K: The wrong conditioning from the beginning. Or, seeking security - security for myself, for my family, for my group, for my tribe - has brought about this division. DB: Even then you have to ask why man sought this security in the wrong way. You see, if there had been any intelligence, it would have been clear that this whole thing has no meaning. K: Of course, you are going back to taking the wrong turn. How will you show me we have taken a wrong turning? DB: Are you saying that we want to demonstrate this scientifically? K: Yes. I think the wrong turn was taken when thought became all important. DB: What made it all important? K: Now let's work it out. What made human beings enthrone thought as the only means of operation? DB: Also it would have to be made clear why, if thought is so important, it causes all the difficulties. These are the two questions. K: That is fairly simple. So thought has been made king, supreme. And that may be the wrong turn of human beings. DB: You see, I think that thought became the equivalent of truth. People took thought to give truth, to give what is always true. There is the notion that we have knowledge - which may hold in certain cases for some time - but men generalize, because knowledge is always generalizing. When they got to the notion that it would always be so, this crystallized the thought of what is true. This gave thought supreme importance. K: You are asking, aren't you, why has man given thought such importance? DB: I think he has slipped into it. K: Why? DB: Because he did not see what he was doing. You see, in the beginning he did not see the danger... Q: Just before, you said that the common ground for man is reason... K: Scientists say that. Q: If you can show a person that something is true... K: Show it to me. It is true I am irrational. That is a fact, that is truth. Q: But for that you don't need reason. Observation is sufficient for that. K: No. One goes and fights. One talks about peace. One is irrational. Dr. Bohm is pointing out that scientists say man is rational but the fact is that everyday life is irrational. Now we are asking, show us scientifically why it is irrational. That is, show man in what way he has slipped into this irrationality; why human beings have accepted this. We can say it is habit, tradition, religion. And the scientists also, they are very rational in their own field, but irrational in their lives. Q: And you suggested that making thought the king is the main irrationality? K: That is right. We have reached that point. DB: But how did we slip into making thought so important? K: Why has man given importance to thought as the supreme thing? I think that is fairly easy. Because that is the only thing he knows. DB: It doesn't follow that he would give it supreme importance. K: Because the things I know - the things thought has created, the images, all the rest of it - are more important than the things I don't know. DB: But you see, if intelligence were operating he would not come to that conclusion. It is not rational to say that all that I know is all that is important. K: So, man is irrational. DB: He slipped into irrationality to say, all that I know is all that is important. But why should man have done this? K: Would you say that the mistake is made because he clings to the known, and objects to anything unknown? DB: That is a fact, but it is not clear why he should. K: Because that is the only thing he has. DB: But I am asking why he was not intelligent enough to see this. K: Because he is irrational. DB: Well, we are going around in circles! K: I don't think so. DB: Look, every one of these reasons you give is merely another example of man's irrationality. K: That is all I am saying. We are basically irrational, because we have given thought supreme importance. Q: But the step before that is that the thought has built up the idea that I exist? K: Ah, that comes a little later; we have to go step by step. Q: Surely for the `me', the only thing that exists is thought. K: Would the scientists accept that? DB: The scientist feels he is investigating the real nature of matter, independent of thought, ultimately independent anyway. He wants to know the way the universe is. He may be fooling himself, but he feels that it wouldn't be worth doing unless he believes he is finding an objective fact. K: So would you say that through the investigation of matter he is trying to find something, he is trying to find the ground? DB: That's exactly it. K: But wait! Is that it? DB: Precisely, yes. K: Now the religious man says you cannot find it by becoming terribly rational in your life. He doesn't accept that he is rational but says he is irrational in contradiction, and so on. So either he will have to clear up that first - step by step, or he can do the whole thing at one blow. Right? One accepts that one is irrational. DB: But there is a difficulty. If you accept you are irrational, you stop, because you say, how can you begin? K: Yes. But if I accept I am irrational - wait a minute -completely, then I am rational! DB: You will have to make that more clear. You could say that man has been deluding himself into believing that he is already rational. K: I don't accept that. DB: Now if you don't accept this delusion, then you are saying that rationality will be there. K: No, I don't accept it. The fact is, I am irrational and, to find the ground, I must become extremely rational in my life. That's all. Irrationality has been brought about by thought creating this idea of me as separate from everybody else. So can I, being irrational, find the cause of irrationality and wipe it out? If I can't do that, I cannot reach the ground which is the most rational. Would a scientist who is investigating matter accept that the ground exists at all? DB: Well, tacitly he is assuming that it does. K: It does. Mr. `X' comes along and says it does exist. And you, the scientists say `Show it.' Mr. `X' says I will show it to you. A scientist meets with other scientists, experimenting and being rational in that area, although irrational in his own life. First become rational in your life, begin here, rather than there. What would you say to all that? This must be done without effort without desire, without will, without any sense of persuasion, otherwise you are back in the game. DB: Let's try to put it like this: even in science you could no pursue the science fully unless you were rational. K: Somewhat rational. DB: Somewhat rational, but, eventually, the failure of rationality blocks science anyway. Scientists cling to their theories, and they become jealous and so on. K: That's it, that is all. The irrationality overcomes them. DB: So then you could say you might as well look at the source the whole irrationality. K: That is what I am saying. DB: But now you have to make it clear that it really can be done. K: Oh yes, I am showing it to you. I say, first recognize, see, observe, be aware that you are totally irrational. DB: The word `totally' will cause trouble, because if you we totally irrational you couldn't even begin to talk. K: No, that is my question. I say one is totally irrational. First recognize it. Watch it. The moment you admit there is some part of me that is rational, who wants to wipe away the irrationality. DB: ...It is not that, but there must be sufficient rationality understand what you are talking about. K: Yes, of course. DB: Essentially, I would rather put it that one is dominated by one's irrationality, even though there is enough rationality discuss the question. K: I question that. DB: You see, otherwise we couldn't begin to talk. K: But listen. We begin to talk. A few of us begin to talk because we are willing to listen to each other, we are willing to say, we'll set aside any conclusions we have; we are willing to listen to each other. DB: That is part of rationality. K: With some of us perhaps, but the vast majority is not willing to listen to us, because we are concerned, serious enough to find out if the ground exists. That gives us rationality to listen to each other. DB: Listing is necessary for rationality. K: Of course. Are we saying the same thing? DB: Yes. K: The scientist, through the examination of matter, hopes to reach the ground. We and `X' and `Y' say, let us become rational in our life. Which means that you and I, and `X' and `Y' are willing to listen to each other. That's all. The very listening is the beginning of rationality. Some people won't listen to us or to anybody. So can we, who are listening, be somewhat rational, and begin? That is all my point. This is being terribly logical, isn't it? So can we proceed from there? Why has man brought about this irrationality in his life? A few of us can apparently throw off some part of irrationality, become somewhat rational and say, now, let's start. Let us start to find out why man lives this way. Now what is the common dominant factor in all our lives? Obviously it is thought. DB: Yes, that is so. Of course many people might deny that and say it is feeling, or that something else is the major factor. K: Many people might say that, but thought is part of feeling. DB: Yes, but that is not commonly understood. K: We will explain it. Feeling - if there was no thought behind it, would you be able to recognize it? DB: Yes, I think this is a major difficulty, in communication with some people. K: So we begin. There may be some who don't see this, but I want the free `X' and `Y' to see it, because they have become somewhat rational, therefore they are listening to each other. They can say thought is the main source of this current. DB: Then we have to say, what is thought? K: I think that is fairly simple. Thought brings about irrationality. DB: Yes, but what is it? How do you know you are thinking? What do you mean by thinking? K: Thinking is the movement of memory, which is experience, knowledge, stored in the brain. DB: Suppose we want to have rationality which includes rational thought. Is rational thought only memory? K: Wait a minute. Let's be careful. If we are completely rational, there is total insight. That insight uses thought, and then it is rational. DB: Then thought is not only memory? K: No, no. DB: Well, I mean since it is being used by insight... K: No, insight uses thought. DB: Yes, but what thought does is not just due to memory now. K: Wait a minute. DB: Outwardly thought runs on its own, it runs like a machine on its own, and it is not rational. K: Quite right. DB: But when thought is the instrument of insight... K: Then thought is not memory. DB: It is not based on memory. K: No, not based on memory. DB: Memory is used, but it is not based on memory. K: Then what? Thought being limited, divisive, incomplete, can never be rational... DB: Without insight. K: That's right. Now, how are we to have insight which is total rationality? Not the rationality of thought. DB: I should call it rationality of perception. K: Yes, rationality of perception. DB: Then thought becomes the instrument of that, so it has the same order. K: Now how am I to have that insight? That is the next question. Isn't it? What am I to do, or not to do, to have this instant insight, which is not of time, which is not of memory, which has no cause, which is not based on reward or punishment? It is free of all that. Now how does the mind have this insight? When I say, I have the insight, that is wrong. Obviously. So how is it possible for a mind which has been irrational, and has become somewhat rational, to have that insight? It is possible to have that insight if your mind is free from time. DB: Right. Let's go slowly because you see, if we go back to the scientific, even common sense point of view, implicitly time is taken as the ground of everything in scientific work. In fact even in ancient Greek mythology Chronos, the god of time, produces his children and swallows them. That is exactly what we said about the ground; everything comes from the ground and dies to the ground. So, in a way, mankind long ago began to take time already as the ground. K: Yes. And then someone comes along and says time is not the ground. DB: That's right. So until now even scientists have been looking for the ground in time - and everybody else too! K: That is the whole point. DB: Now you say time is not the ground. Somebody might say this is nonsense, but we say, we will stay open to that, although some people might easily dismiss it right away. Now if you say time is not the ground, we don't know where we are. K: I know where I am. We will go into it. Q: Is time the same movement as this thought which we described first? K: Yes, time is that. Time is thought. DB: Let's go slowly again on that, because there is, as we have often said, chronological time. K: Of course, that is simple. DB: Yes, but in addition we are thinking. You see, thinking takes time chronologically, but in addition it projects a kind of imaginary time... K: ...which is the future. DB: Which is the future and the past as we experience it. K: Yes, that is right. DB: That time which is imagined is also a kind of real process of thinking. K: It is a fact. DB: It is a fact that it takes time, physically, to think, but we also have time when we can imagine the whole past and future. K: Yes, which are facts. DB: So let's say that this time is not the ground, perhaps not even physically. K: We are going to find out. DB: Yes, but we feel it to be the ground, because we feel that we, as the self, exist in time. Without time there could be no `me'. K: That's it. DB: `I' must exist in time. K: Of course, of course. DB: Eternally being something, or becoming something. K: Becoming and being are in the field of time. Now can the mind, which has evolved through time... Q: What do you mean by mind then? K: Mind - the brain, my senses, my feeling, all that is the mind. DB: The particular mind, you mean. K: Particular mind, of course, I am talking of the mind that has evolved through time. DB: Even its particularity depends on time. K: Time, of course, and all the rest of it. Now we are asking, can that mind be free of time, to have an insight which is totally rational, which then can operate on thought? That thought is totally rational, not based on memory. Agreed? DB: Yes. K: Now how am I - as `X' and `Y' - to be free of time? I know I need time to go from here to there, to learn a lesson, a technique, etc. I understand that very clearly, so I am not talking about that time. I am talking about time as becoming. DB: As being. K: Of course, becoming is being. I start from being to become. DB: And being something in myself. Being better, being happier. K: Yes, the whole thing - the more. Now can I, can my brain investigating to find out if the ground exists, can my whole mind be tree of time? We have now separated time. The time which is necessary, and the time which is not necessary. That is, can my brain not function as it has always done, in time as thought? Which means, can thought come to an end? Would you accept that? DB: Yes, but could you make that more clear? We can see that the first question is, can my brain not be dominated by the function of thought? K: Yes, which is time. DB: And then, if you say thought comes to an end... K: No! Can time as thought come to a stop? DB: Psychological time comes to a stop. K: Yes, I am talking of that. DB: But we will still have the rational thought. K: Of course. That is understood. We have said that. DB: We are discussing the thought of conscious experience. Q: Of becoming and being... K: And the retention of memory; you know, the past, as knowledge. Oh, yes, that can be done. DB: You really mean the memory of experiences? K: The memory of experiences, hurts, attachments, the whole of it. Now can that come to an end? Of course it can. This is the point: it can come to an end when the very perception asks, what is it? What is hurt? What is psychological damage? The perception of it is the ending of it. Not carrying it over, which is time. The very ending of it is the ending of time. I think that is clear. `X' is hurt, wounded from childhood. And he, by listening, talking, discussing, realizes that the continuation of the hurt is time. And to find out the ground, time must end. So he says, can my hurt end instantly, immediately? DB: Yes, I think there are some steps in that. You say, he finds that hurt is time, but the immediate experience of it is that it exists on its own. K: I know, of course. We can go into that. DB: That simply is something on its own. K: Which means, I have created an image about myself and the image is hurt, but not me. DB: What do you mean by that? K: All right. In the becoming, which is time, I have created an image about myself. DB: Well, thought has created that image. K: Thought has created an image through experience, through education, through conditioning, and made this image separate from me. But this image is actually `me', although we have separated the image and the me, which is irrational. So, in realizing that the image is `me', I have become somewhat rational. DB: I think that will not be clear - because if I am hurt I feel the image is `me'. K: The image is you. DB: The person who is hurt feels that way, you see. K: All right. But the moment you operate on it you separate yourself. DB: That's the point. Now the first feeling is that the image is `me' hurt, and the second feeling is that I draw back from the image in order to operate on it... K: ...which is irrationality. DB: ...because it is not correct. K: That's right. DB: And that brings in time, because I say it will take time to do that. K: Quite right. So by seeing that, I become rational, and act. The act is to be free of it immediately. DB: Let's go into that. The first thing is that there has been a hurt. That is the image, but at first I don't separate it. I feel identified with it. K: I am that. DB: I am that. But then I draw back, and say that I think there must be a `me' who can do something. K: Yes, can operate on it. DB: Now that takes time. K: That is time. DB: That is time, but I mean, I am thinking it takes time. Now I have to go slowly. If i don't do that, that hurt cannot exist. K: That's right. DB: But it is not obvious in the experience itself that this is so. K: First let's go slowly into it. I am hurt. That is a fact. Then I separate myself - there is a separation - saying, I will do something about it. DB: The `me' who will do something is different. K: Different, of course. DB: And he thinks about what he should do. K: The `me' is different because it is becoming. DB: It projects into the future a different state. K: Yes. I am hurt. There is a separation, a division. The `me', which is always pursuing the becoming, says, I must control it. I must wipe it out. I must act upon it, or I will be vengeful, hurtful. So this movement of separation is time. DB: We can see that now. The point is, there is something here that is not obvious. A person is thinking that the hurt exists independently of `me', and I must do something about it. I project into the future the better state and what I will do. Let's try to make this very clear, because you are saying that there is no separation. K: My rationality discovers there is no separation. DB: There is no separation, but the illusion that there is a separation helps to maintain the hurt. K: That's right. Because the illusion is, I am becoming. DB: Yes. I am this and will become that. So I am hurt and I will become non-hurt. Now that very thought maintains the hurt. K: That's right. Q: Is the separation not already there when I become conscious and say I am hurt? K: I am hurt. Then I say, I am going to hit you because you have hurt me, or I say, I must suppress it - or I create fear, and so on. Q: But isn't that feeling of separation there from the moment I say I am hurt? K: That is irrationality. Q: That is irrational already? K: Yes, when you say, does not the separation exist already when I say `I am hurt'. DB: It does, but I think that before that happens you get a kind of shock. The first thing that happens is a mild shock, a pain or whatever, which you identify with that shock. Then you explain it by saying `I am hurt', and that immediately implies the separation to do something about it. K: Of course. If I am not hurt I don't know anything about separation or not separation. If I am hurt, I am irrational as long as I maintain that hurt and do something about it, which is to become. Then irrationality comes in. I think that is right. DB: Now if you don't maintain it, what happens? Suppose you say, I won't go on with this becoming? K: Ah, that is quite a different matter. It means I am no longer thinking, no longer observing, or using time as an observation. DB: You could say that is not your way of looking. It is not your theory any more. K: That's right. DB: Because you could say time is a theory which everybody adopts for psychological purposes. K: Yes. That is the common factor; time is the common factor of man. And we are pointing out time is an illusion... DB: Psychological time. K: Of course, that is understood. DB: Are you saying that when we no longer approach this through time, then the hurt does not continue? K: It does not continue, it ends - because you are not becoming anything. DB: In becoming you are always continuing what you are. K: That's right. Continuing what you are, modified... DB: That is why you struggle to become. K: We are talking about insight. That is, insight has no time. Insight is not the product of time, time being memory, etc. So there is insight. That insight being free of time acts upon memory, acts upon thought. That is, insight makes thought rational, but not thought which is based on memory. Then what the devil is that thought? No. Wait a minute. I don't think thought comes in at all. We said insight comes into being when there is no time. Thought -which is based on memory, experience, knowledge - that is the movement of time as becoming. We are talking of psychological and not chronological time. We are saying to be free of time implies insight. Insight, being free of time, has no thought. DB: We said that it may use thought. K: Wait. I am not sure. Just go slowly. It may use thought to explain, but it acts. Before, action was based on thought. Now, when there is insight, there is only action. Why do you want thought? Because insight is rational, action is rational. Action becomes irrational when it is acting from thought. So insight doesn't use thought. DB: Well, we have to make it clear because in a certain area it has to use thought... If, for example, you want to construct something you would use the thought which is available on how to do it. K: But that is not insight. DB: But even so you may have to have insight in that area. K: Partial. The scientists, the painters, the architects, the doctors, the artists and so on have partial insight. But we are talking of `X' and `Y', who are seeking the ground; they are becoming rational, and we are saying insight is without time, and therefore without thoughts, and that insight is action. Because that insight is rational, action is rational. Forgive me, I am not making myself an example, I am talking in all humility. That boy, that young man in 1929 dissolved the Order of the Star. There was no thought. People said, `Do this', `Don't do that', `Keep it', `Don't keep it'. He had an insight; dissolved it. Finished! Why do we need thought? DB: But then you used some thought in dissolving the Order to say, when to do it, how to do it. K: That word is used merely for convenience, for communication with other people. DB: But still some thought was needed. K: The decision acts. DB: I didn't mean about the decision. The primary action did not require thought; only that which followed. K: That is nothing. It is like moving a cushion from there to there. DB: Yes, I understand that. Then the primary source of action does not involve thought. K: That is all I wanted to say. DB: But it sort off filters through into... K: ...it is like a wave. Q: Does not all thought undergo a transformation in this process? K: Yes, of course. Because insight is without time, therefore the brain itself has undergone a change. DB: Yes, now could we talk about what you mean by that? K: Does it mean that every human response must be viewed by, or must enter into insight? I will tell you what I mean. I am jealous. Is there an insight which will cover the whole field of jealousy and so end it? End envy, greed, and all that is involved in jealousy. You follow? Irrational people go step by step - get rid of jealousy, get rid of attachment, get rid of anger, get rid of this, that and the other. Which is a constant process of becoming - right? But insight, which is totally rational, wipes all that away. DB: Right. K: Is that a fact? Fact, in the sense that `X' and `Y' will never be jealous again; never! DB: We have to discuss that, because it is not clear how you could guarantee it. K: Oh, yes, I will guarantee it! DB: If it can reach those who are able to listen... K: Which means that to find the ground the first thing is to listen. DB: You see, scientists cannot always listen. Even Einstein and Bohr were not able at a certain point to listen to each other. Each one was attached to his particular view. K: They brought their irrationality into operation. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 4 10TH APRIL 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'BREAKING THE PATTERN OF EGO-CENTRED ACTIVITY' KRISHNAMURTI: I would like to ask a question which may lead us to something: what will make man change, deeply, fundamentally, radically? He has had crisis after crisis, he has had a great many shocks, he has been through every kind of misfortune, every kind of war, personal sorrow, and so on. A little affection, a little joy, but all this doesn't seem to change him. What will make a human being leave the way he is going, and move in a totally different direction? I think that is one of our great problems, don't you? Why? If one is concerned, as one must be, with humanity, with all the things that are going on, what would be the right action to move man out of one direction to another? Is this question valid? Has it any significance? DAVID BOHM: Well, unless we can see this action, it won't have much significance. K: Has the question any significance? DB: What it means is, indirectly, to ask what is holding people. K: Yes, same thing. DB: If we could find out what is holding people in their present direction... K: Is it the basic conditioning of man, this tremendous egotistic attitude and action, which won't yield to anything? It appears to change, it appears to yield, but the centre remains the same. perhaps this may not be in the line of our dialogue over the last two or three days, but I thought we might start with this. DB: Have you some notion of what is holding people? Something that would really change them? K: I think so. DB: What is it then? K: What is it that is blocking? Do we approach through environmental conditioning, from the outer to the inner, and discover from man's outer activities, the inner? And then discover that the outer is the inner, the same movement, and then go beyond it to see what it is? Could we do that? DB: When you say outward, what do you mean? Do you mean the social conditions? K: The social conditioning, the religious conditioning, education, poverty, riches, climate, food; the outer. Which may condition the mind in a certain direction. But as one examines it a little more, the psychological conditioning is also from the outer, somewhat. DB: It is true that the way a person thinks is going to be affected by his whole set of relationships. But that doesn't explain why the conditioning is so rigid, and why it holds. K: That is what I am asking too. DB: Yes. If it were merely outward conditioning, one would expect it to be more easily changed. For example, you could have some other outward condition. K: They have tried all that. DB: Yes, the whole belief of Communism was that with a new society there would be a new man. But there have been none! I think that there is something fundamentally in the inward that holds, that resists change. K: What is it? Will this question lead us anywhere? DB: Unless we actually uncover it, it will lead nowhere. K: I think one could find out, if one applied one's mind. I am just asking: is this question worthwhile, and is it related to what we have been discussing? Or shall we take up something else in relation to what we have been talking about? DB: Well, I think that we have been talking of bringing about an ending to time, an ending to becoming. And we talked of coming into contact with the ground, through complete rationality. But now we could say that the mind is not rational. K: Yes, we said man is basically irrational. DB: This is perhaps part of the block. If we were completely rational, then we would of necessity come to this ground. Would that be right? K: Yes. We were talking the other day about the ending of time. The scientists, through the investigation of matter, want to find out that point. Also the so-called religious people have endeavoured to find out - not only verbally - if time can stop. We went into that quite a bit, and we say it is possible for a human being, who will listen, to find out through insight the ending of use insight is not memory. Memory is time, memory is knowledge stored up in the brain, and so on. As long as that is in operation there is no possibility of having insight into Total insight, not partial insight. The artist, the musician, they all have partial insights and therefore they still time-bound. It is possible to have a total insight, which is the ending of the `me' because the `me' is time? Me, my ego, my resistance, my hurts, all that. Can that `me' end? It is only when that ends that there is total insight. That is what we discovered. And we went into the question, is it possible for a human being to end totally this whole structure of the `me'? We said yes, and went into it. Very few people will listen to this because it is perhaps too frightening. And the question then arises: if the `me' ends, what is there? just emptiness? There is no interest in that. But if one is investigating without any sense of reward or punishment, then there is something. We say that something is total emptiness, which is energy and silence. Well that sounds nice, but it has no meaning to an ordinary man who is serious and wants to go beyond it, beyond himself. And we pushed it further: is there something beyond all this? And we say there is. DB: The ground. K: The ground. Is it that the beginning of this enquiry is to listen? Will I, as a human being, give up my egocentric activity completely? What will make me move away from that? What will make a human being move away from this destructive, self-centred activity? If he will move away through reward, or punishment, then that is just another thought, motive. So discard that. Then what will make human beings renounce - if I may use the word - renounce it completely without motive? You see, man has tried everything in this direction - fasting self-torture in various forms, abnegating himself through belief and denying himself through identification with something greater. All the religious people have tried it, but the `me' is still there. DB: Yes. The whole activity has no meaning, but somehow this does not become evident. People will move away from something which has no meaning, and makes no sense, ordinarily speaking. But it seems that the perception of this fact is rejected by the mind. The mind is resisting it. K: The mind is resisting this constant conflict, and moving away from it. DB: It is moving away from the fact that this conflict has no meaning. K: People don't see that. DB: Also the mind is set up purposefully to avoid seeing it. K: The mind is avoiding it. DB: It is avoiding it almost on purpose, but not quite consciously, like the people of India who say they are going to retire to the Himalayas because nothing can be done. K: But that is hopeless. You mean to say that the mind, having lived so long in conflict, refuses to move away from it? DB: It is not clear why it refuses to give it up; why the mind does not wish to see the full meaninglessness of the conflict. The mind is deceiving itself, it is covering up. K: The philosophers and so-called religious people have emphasized struggle, emphasized the sense of striving, control, effort. Is that one of the causes why human beings refuse to let go of their way of life? DB: Possibly. They hope that by fighting or struggling they will achieve a better result. Not to give up what they have, but to improve it by struggle. K: Man has lived for two million years; what has he achieved? More wars, more destruction. DB: What I am trying to say is that there is a tendency to resist seeing this, but also to go back to hoping that the struggle will produce something better. K: I am not quite sure if we have cleared this point; that the intellectuals - I am using the word respectfully - the intellectuals of the world have emphasized this factor of struggle. DB: Many of them have, I suppose. K: Most of them. DB: Karl Marx. K: Marx and even Bronowski, who talk of more and more struggle, of acquiring more and more knowledge. Is it that the intellectuals have such extraordinary influence on our minds? DB: I think people do this without any encouragement from intellectuals. You see, struggle has been emphasized everywhere. K: That is what I mean. Everywhere. Why? DB: Well, in the beginning people thought it would be necessary because they had to struggle against nature in order to survive. K: So struggling against nature has been transferred to the other? DB: Yes, that is part of it. You see you must be a brave hunter, and you must struggle against your own weakness to become brave. Otherwise you can't do it. K: Yes, that's it. So is it that our minds are conditioned, shaped, held, in this pattern? DB: Well that is certainly true, but it doesn't explain why it is so extraordinarily hard to change it. K: Because I am used to it. I am in a prison, but I am used to it. DB: But I think that there is a tremendous resistance to moving away from it. K: Why does a human being resist this? If you come along and point out the fallacy, the irrationality of this, and you show the whole cause and effect, give examples, data, everything else? Why? DB: That is what I said, that if people were capable of complete rationality they would drop it, but I think that there is something more to the problem. You see, you may expose the irrationality of it but there is something more, in the sense that people are not fully aware of this whole pattern of thought. Having had it exposed at a certain level, it still continues at levels that they are not aware of. K: But what would make them aware? DB: That is what we have to find. I think people have to become aware that they have this tendency to go on with the conditioning. It might be mere habit, or it might be the result of many past conclusions, all operating now, without people knowing it. There are so many different things that keep people in this pattern. You might convince somebody that the pattern makes no sense, but when it comes to the actual affairs of life he has a thousand different ways of proceeding which imply that pattern. K: Quite. Then what? DB: Well, I think that a person would have to be extremely interested in this to break all that down. K: Then what will bring a human being to this state of extreme interest? You see, they have even been offered heaven as a reward if they do this. Various religions have done this, although that becomes too childish. DB: That is part of the pattern - reward. Ordinarily the rule is that I follow the self-enclosed pattern except when something really big comes up. K: A crisis. DB: Or when a reward is to be obtained. K: Of course. DB: That is a pattern of thinking. people must in some way believe that it has value. If everybody were able to work together and suddenly we were able to produce harmony, then everybody would say, fine, I will give up myself. But in the absence of that, I had better hold on to what I have! That is the sort of thinking. K: Hold on to what is known. DB: I don't have much, but I had better hold on to it. K: Yes. So are you saying that if everybody does this, I will do it? DB: That is the common way of thinking. Because as soon as people begin to start to cooperate in an emergency, then a great many people go along. K: So they form communes. But all those have failed. DB: Because after a while this special thing goes away and they fall back to the old pattern. K: The old pattern. So I am asking, what will make a human being break through this pattern? QUESTIONER: Isn't it related to the question we dealt with before - time and no time? K: But I know nothing about time, I know nothing about all this, it is just a theory to me. Yet the fact is, I am caught in this pattern and I can't let it go. The analysts have tried it, the religious people have tried it, everybody has tried to make human beings intelligent - but they have not succeeded. Q: But they don't see that the very attempt at letting go the pattern or ending the conflict is still strengthening the conflict. K: No, that is just a theory. Q: But you can explain that to them. K: You can explain. As we said, there are a dozen very rational explanations. At the end of it we fall back to this. Q: Well, you only fall back to that if you have not really understood it. K: Have you understood it when you say that? Why haven't I, or you, said `finished'! You can give me a thousand explanations, and all probably a bit irrational, but I say, have you done it? Q: I don't even understand the question, when you ask, have I done it? K: I am not being personal. You have given an explanation of why human beings can't move away from this pattern, or break through it. Q: No, I give you more than the explanation. K: What do you give me? Q: If I observe something to be correct, then the description of the observation is more than just explanation. K: Yes, but can I observe this clearly? Q: Well, that is the problem. K: So help me to see it clearly. Q: For that there must be an interest. K: Please don't say `must'. I haven't got an interest. I am interested, as Dr. Bohm pointed out just now, when there is a tremendous crisis such as war. Then I forget myself. In fact, I am glad to forget myself, to give the responsibility to the generals, to the politicians. Under a crisis I forget, but the moment the crisis goes away I am back to my pattern. That is happening all the time. Now, I say to myself, what will make me relinquish this pattern, or break through it? Q: Isn't it that one must see the falseness? K: Show it to me. Q: I can't, because I have not seen it. K: Then what shall I do as a human being? You have explained to me ten thousand times how ugly it is, how destructive it is, and so on, but I fall back to this pattern all the time. Help me, or show me how to break the pattern. You understand my question? Q: Well then you are interested? K: All right. Now what will make me be interested? Pain? Q: Sometimes it does for a moment, but it goes away. K: So what will make me as a human being so alert, so aware, so intense that I will break through this thing? Q: You state the question in terms of an action, breaking through, relinquishing. Isn't it a matter of seeing? K: Yes. Show me, help me to see, because I am resisting you. My pattern, so deeply ingrained in me, is holding back - right? I want proof, I want to be convinced. Q: We have to go back to this question - why do I want to have proof? Why do I want to be convinced? K: Because someone says that this is a stupid, irrational way of looking. And he shows us all the effects of it, the cause of it, and we say, yes but we can't let go! DB: You may say that is the very nature of `me', that I must fulfil my needs no matter how irrational they are. K: That is what I am saying. DB: First I must take care of my own needs, and then I can try to be rational. K: What are our needs then? DB: Some of the needs are real and some are imaginary but... K: Yes, that's it. The imaginary, illusory needs sway the other needs. DB: But you see, I may need to believe I am good and right, and to know that I will be always there. K: Help me to break that! DB: I think I have to see that this is an illusion. You see, if it seems real, what can I do? Because if I am really there, I need all this, and it is foolish to talk of being rational if I am going to vanish, break down or something. You have proposed to me that there is another state of being where I am not there - right? And when I am there, this doesn't make any sense! K: Yes, quite. But I am not there. Suppose as a human being, heaven is perfect, but I am not there; please help me to get there. DB: No, it is something different. K: I know what you are saying. Q: Can one see the illusory nature of that very demand that I want to go to heaven? Or I want to be enlightened, or I want to be this, I want to be that? But this very question, this very demand is... K: This demand is based on becoming, on the more. Q: That is illusory. K: No. You say that. DB: You haven't demonstrated it to me, you see. K: That is an idea to you. It is just a theory. Show me. Q: Well, are we willing really to explore the question? K: We are willing on one condition - that we find something at the end of it. See how the human mind works. I will climb the highest mountain if I can get something out of it. Q: Can the mind see that this is the problem? K: Yes, but it can't let go. Q: Well if it sees... K: You are going round and round in circles! DB: It sees the problem abstractly. K: That is it. Now why do I see it abstractly? DB: First of all, it is a lot easier. K: Don't go back to that. Why does my mind make an abstraction of everything? DB: Let's begin by saying that to a certain extent it is the function of thought to make abstractions outwardly, but then we carry them inwardly. It is the same sort of thing as before. K: Yes. So is there something else - I am just asking - that we are missing in this altogether? That is, if I may point out, we are still thinking in the same old pattern. DB: The question itself contains that pattern, doesn't it? K: Yes, but the pursuit of the pattern is traditional. DB: I mean that in framing this question, the pattern has continued. K: Yes, so can we move away altogether from this, and look at it differently. Can the human mind say, all right, we have tried all this - Marx, Buddha, everybody has pointed out something or other. But obviously after a million years, we are still somehow caught in that pattern - saying we must be interested, we must listen, we must do this, and so on. DB: That is still time. K: Yes. Then what happens if I leave all that, actually leave it? I won't even think in terms of it. No more explanations, or new twists, that are the same old twists! So I say let's leave that area completely and look at the problem differently, the problem being why do I always live in this centre of `me'? I am a serious human being; I have listened to all this and after fifty years I know all the explanations - what I should, should not do, etc. Can I say, all right, I will discard all that? That means I stand completely alone. Does that lead anywhere? DB: Possibly, yes. K: I think it does lead somewhere. DB: It seems to me that basically you are saying leave all this knowledge of mankind behind. K: That is what I am saying. DB: Apparently it is out of its place. K: Yes. Leave all the knowledge, and experiences, explanations, causes that man has created - discard all that. Q: But you are still left with the same mind. K: Ah! I have not such a mind. It is not the same mind. When I discard all this, my mind has changed. My mind is this. Q: No, isn't the mind also the basic set-up? K: Which I have discarded. Q: But you can't discard that. K: Oh, yes. Q: I mean this is an organism. K: Now, wait a minute. My organism has been shaped by knowledge, by experience. And more knowledge which I have acquired as I have evolved, as I have grown. As I have gathered more and more, it has strengthened me, and I have been walking on that path for millennia. And I say, perhaps I may have to look at this problem totally differently - which is not to walk on that path at all, but to discard all knowledge I have acquired. DB: In this area, in this psychological place. K: Psychologically, of course. DB: At the core, at the source, knowledge is irrelevant. K: Yes. DB: Further down the line it becomes relevant. K: Of course. That is understood. Q: But I have one question. The mind at the beginning of its evolution was in that same position. The mind at the beginning of whatever you call man was in that position. K: No. I don't accept that. Why do you say that? The moment it comes into being, it is already caught in knowledge. Would you say that? DB: I think it is implicit in the structure of thought. K: That is just it. DB: First of all, to have knowledge about the outward, and then to apply this to the inward, without understanding that it was going to be caught in it. Therefore it extended that knowledge into the area of psychological becoming. Q: Well, if the mind started new, it would go through the same mistake again. K: No, certainly not. Q: Unless it has learnt. K: No, I don't want to learn. You are still pursuing the same old path. I don't want to learn. please, just let me go into this a little bit. DB: We should clear this up because on other occasions you have said it is important to learn, even about observing yourself. K: Of course. DB: Now you are saying something quite different. It should be made clear why it is different. Why is it that you have given up the notion of learning at this stage? K: At this stage, because I am still gathering memory. DB: But there was a state when it was important to learn about the mind. K: Don't go back. I am just starting. I have lived for sixty, eighty, or a hundred years. And I have listened to all this - the teachers in India, the Christians, the Muslims; I have listened to all the psychological explanations, to Freud, Marx and everybody. DB: I think we should go a bit further. We agree that is all negative stuff, but in addition perhaps I have observed myself, and learned about myself. K: Myself, yes, add that. And, at the end of it, I say perhaps this is a wrong way of looking at it. DB: Right. Having explored that way, we finally are able to see it might be wrong. K: Perhaps. DB: Well I would say that in some sense perhaps it was necessary to explore that way. K: Or not necessary. DB: It may not have been, but given the whole set of conditions it was bound to happen. K: Of course. So now I have come to a point when I say discard - we will put in that word - all that knowledge, because that hasn't led me anywhere, in the sense that I am not free of my egocentricism. DB: But that alone isn't enough because if you say it hasn't worked, you can always hope or suppose that it may. But in fact you could see that it can't work. K: It can't work. I am definite on that. DB: It is not enough to say it hasn't worked, actually it cannot work. K: It cannot work because it is based on time and knowledge, which is thought. And these explanations are based on thought - to acquire knowledge and so on and so on. Would you say that? DB: As far as we have gone we have based them on knowledge and thought. And not only thought, but the habitual patterns of skill are an extension of thought. K: So I put those aside, not casually, not with an interest in the future - but seeing the same pattern being repeated and repeated; different colours, different phrases, different pictures, different images - I discard all that totally. Instead of going North, as I have been going for millennia, I have stopped and am going East, which means my mind has changed. DB: Has the structure of the `me' gone? K: Obviously. DB: Without insight into it? K: No. I won't bring in insight for the moment. DB: But there was insight to do that. I mean to say that to consider doing it was an insight. The insight was the thing that worked. K: I won't bring in that word. DB: When you said that the whole thing could not work, I think that is an insight. K: For me. I see it cannot work. But then we go back again to how do I acquire insight, and all that. DB: But leaving that aside and just saying that it was an insight, the question of how to acquire it is not the point. K: It is an insight that says `out'. Q: Out to the pattern. K: No, finished with this constant becoming through experience, knowledge, patterns. Finished! Q: Would you say that the kind of thinking afterwards, is a totally different kind of thinking? Evidently one still must think. K: I am not sure. Q: Well you may call it something else. K: Ah, I won't call it anything else. Please I am just fishing around. After having lived a hundred years, I see everybody pointing out the way to end the self, and that way is based on thought, time, knowledge. And I say, sorry, I know all that, I have used that. I have an insight into that; therefore it falls away. Therefore the mind has broken the pattern completely. Not going North but East, you break the pattern. Now, all right. Suppose Dr. Bohm has this insight, and has broken away from the pattern. Please let us help another human being to come to that. Don't say you must be interested, you must listen, then fall back - you follow? What is your communication with another human being, so that he hasn't got to go through all this mess? What will make me absorb so completely what you have said, so that it is in my blood, in my brain, everything, so that I see this thing? What will you do? Or is there nothing to do - you follow my question? Because if you have that insight it is a passion, it is not just a clever insight, nor is it possible to sit back and be comfortable; it is a passion that won't let you sit still, you must move, give - whatever it is. What will you do? You have that passion or this immense insight. And that passion must, like a river with a great volume of water flowing over the banks, move in the same way. Now, I am a human being, ordinary, fairly intelligent, well read, experienced. I have tried this, that and the other thing, and I meet someone who is full of this, and I say, why won't I listen to him? Q: I think we do listen. K: Do we? Q: Yes, I think so. K: just go very, very slowly. Do we so completely listen that there is no resistance, no saying why, what is the cause, why should I? You follow what I mean? We have been through all that. We have walked the area endlessly, back and forward from corner to corner, North, South, East, West. And `X' comes along and says, look there is a different way of living, something totally new; which means listening completely. Q: If there is a resistance one does not see the resistance. K: Don't begin all over again on why you resist. I will show you your resistance, by talking. You know. But yet you go back. Q: Krishnaji, did not your initial question go beyond this, when you asked, let's leave the listening, the rationality, the thought. K: Yes, but that is just an idea. Will you do it? `X' comes along and says, `Look, eat this.' Q: I would eat it if I could see it. K: Oh, yes, you can see it, very clearly. We said, don't go back to the pattern. See! Then you say, how am I to see? which is the old pattern.just see! `X' refuses to enter that pattern. Q: The pattern of explanation? K: Knowledge, all that. He says come over, don't go back. Q: Krishnaji, to talk about a normal situation in the world; there are a number of people who ask one with similar words to see, put thought aside; if one would really look at this thing one would see it. That is what the priests tell us. So what is the difference? K: No, I am not a priest. I have left all that. I have left the church, the gods,jesus, the Buddhas, the Krishnas, I have left all that, Marx, Engels, all the analysts, all the pundits, everybody. You see, you haven't done that. Ah, you say, no, I can't do it until you show me there is something else beyond all that. And `X' says, `Sorry.' Has that any meaning? DB: Yes. I think that we say, leave all the knowledge behind. But knowledge takes many subtle forms which we don't see. K: Of course. You are full of this insight and you have discarded all knowledge because of that. And another keeps on paddling over the pool of knowledge. And you say, leave it. The moment we enter into explanations we are back in the game. And you refuse to explain. You see, explanations have been the boat in which to cross to the other shore. And the man on the other shore says there is no boat. But `X' says, cross! He is asking something impossible, isn't he? DB: If it doesn't happen right away, then it is impossible. K: Absolutely. He is asking something impossible for one to do. I am meeting `X', who is immovable. Either I have to go round him, avoid him or go over him. I can't do any of that. But `X' won't leave me alone, in the sense that I have met something immovable. And it is there night and day with me. I can't battle with it because there is nothing to get hold of. So what happens to me when I meet something that is completely solid, immovable, absolutely true, what happens to me? Is that the problem? That we have never met something like that? We may climb the Himalayas, but Everest is always there. In the same way, perhaps human beings have never met something irrevocable. Something absolutely immovable. Either we are terribly puzzled by it, or we say, well we can't do anything about it. Walk away from it. Or it is something that we must investigate -you follow - we must capture. Which is it? Here is a solid thing. I am confronted by it. As I said, I might run away from it, which I generally do. Or worship it. Or try to understand what it is. When I do all these things, I am back in the old pattern. So I discard that. When meeting `X', who is immovable, I see what the nature of it is. I am movable, as a human being, but `X' is immovable. The contact with it does something, it must. It is not some mystic, occult stuff but it is simple, isn't it? Q: Sir, it functions like a magnet, but it doesn't break something. K: No, because you haven't let go the pattern. It is not `X's' fault. Q: I didn't say it was. K: No, the implication is that. Therefore you are back, you are dependent. Q: What is taking place? K: I am saying, you meet `X; what happens? Q: You said, an effort to understand. K: Ah, there you are, lost. You are back in the old pattern. You see it, you feel it, you know it, you recognize it. It doesn't matter what word you use, it is there. DB: Well, can't you say that `X' communicates the absolute necessity of not going on with the old pattern, because you see it absolutely can't work. K: Yes put it in your own words. All right. DB: And therefore that is unalterable, immovable - is that what you mean? K: Yes, I am movable; `X' is immovable. DB: Well, what is behind `X', what is working in `X' is immovable. Wouldn't you say that? K: What is working is something of a shock at first, naturally. I have been moving, moving, moving, then I meet something that is immovable. Suddenly something takes place, obviously. You can see what takes place. `X' is not becoming, and I am becoming. And `X' has been through explanations and all the rest of it, and he shows that becoming is painful. (I am putting it quickly, in a few words.) And I meet that. So there is the sensitivity - all right, let's put it the other way. The explanations and the discarding of all the explanations have made me sensitive. Much more alert. When I meet something like `X', naturally there is a response not in terms of explanation or understanding. There is a response to that. There is bound to be. Explanations have been given over and over again. I have listened, but either they have made me dull, or I begin to see that explanations have no value at all. So in this process I have become extraordinarily sensitive to any explanation. I am allergic! There is a danger in this too, because, you know, people have said when you go to the guru he gives; so be silent and you will receive. That's an illusion, you know. Well, I have said enough. DB: I could just say that when one sees that this whole process of time and knowledge and so on won't work, then it stops. Now, this leaves one more sensitive - right? K: Yes, the mind has become sharp. DB: All this movement was getting in the way. K: Yes, psychological knowledge has made us dull. DB: It has kept the brain moving in an unnecessary way. Q: All knowledge? DB: Well, no. You could say in some sense that knowledge needn't make you dull, I suppose, if it starts from the clarity of where we don't have this knowledge at the core... K: Yes. You remember we said too, in our discussions, that the ground is not knowledge. DB: You see the first thing is, it creates emptiness. K: That's it. DB: But not yet the ground, not immediately the ground. K: That's right. You see, we have discussed all this; I hear it on the tape, it is printed in a book, and I say, yes I get it. By reading it, I have explained, I have acquired knowledge. Then I say, I must that. DB: The danger is that there is great difficulty in communicating a book because that is too fixed. K: But that is what generally happens. DB: But I think that the main point, which could communicate it, is to see that knowledge, in all its forms, subtle and obvious, cannot solve the psychological problem; it can only make it worse. But then there is another energy which is involved. K: You see now what is happening? If any trouble arises I go to a psychologist. In any family trouble I go to somebody who will tell me what to do. Everything around me is being organized, and making me more and more helpless. That is what is happening. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 5 12TH APRIL 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'THE GROUND OF BEING, AND THE MIND OF MAN' DAVID BOHM: Perhaps we could go further into the nature of the ground; whether we could come to it and whether it has any relationship to human beings. And also whether there could be a change in the physical behaviour of the brain. KRISHNAMURTI: Could we approach this question from the point of view, why do we have ideas? And is the ground an idea? That is where we must first be clear. Why have ideas become so important? DB: Perhaps because the distinction between ideas, and what is beyond ideas, is not clear. Ideas are often taken to be something more than ideas; we feel they are not ideas but a reality. K: That is what I want to find out. Is the ground an idea, or is it imagination, an illusion, a philosophic concept? Or something that is absolute, in the sense that there is nothing beyond it? DB: How can you tell that there is nothing beyond it? K: I am coming to that. I want to see whether we look at that, or perceive that, or have an insight into that, from a concept. Because after all the whole Western world - perhaps also the Eastern world - is based on concepts. The whole outlook and religious beliefs, are based on that. But do we approach it from that point of view or as a philosophic investigation - philosophic, in the sense, love of wisdom, love of truth, love of investigation, the process of the mind? Are we doing that when we discuss, when we want to investigate, explain, or find out what that ground is? DB: Well, perhaps not all the philosophers have been basing their approach on concepts, although certainly philosophy is taught through concepts. Certainly it is very hard to teach it except through concepts. K: What then is the difference between a religious mind and a philosophic mind? You understand what I am trying to convey? Can we investigate the ground from a mind that is disciplined in knowledge? DB: Fundamentally, inherently, we say that the ground is unknown. Therefore we can't begin with knowledge, and we have suggested we start with the unknown. K: Yes. Say for instance `X' says there is such a ground. And all of us, `Y' and `Z', say, what is that ground, prove it, show it, let it manifest itself? When we ask such questions, is it with a mind that is seeking, or rather that has this passion, this love for truth? Or are we merely saying let's talk about it? DB: I think that in that mind there is the demand for certainty; we want to be sure. So there is no enquiring. K: Suppose you state that there is such a thing, that there is the ground; it is immovable, etc. And I say, I want to find out. Show it, prove it to me. How can my mind, which has evolved through knowledge, which has been highly disciplined in knowledge, even touch that? Because that is not knowledge, it is not put together by thought. DB: Yes, as soon as we say, prove it, we want to turn it into knowledge. K: That's it! DB: We want to be absolutely certain, so that there can be no doubt. And yet, on the other side of the coin, there is also the danger of self-deception and delusion. K: Of course. The ground cannot be touched as long as there is any form of illusion, which is the projection of desire, pleasure or fear. So how do I perceive that thing? Is the ground an idea to be investigated? Or is it something that cannot be investigated? DB: Right. K: Because my mind is trained, disciplined, by experience and knowledge, and it can only function in that area. And someone comes along and tells me that this ground is not an idea, is not a philosophic concept; it is not something that can be put together, or perceived by thought. DB: It cannot be experienced, it cannot be perceived or understood through thought. K: So what have I? What am I to do? I have only this mind that has been conditioned by knowledge. How am I to move away from all that? How am I, an ordinary man, educated, well-read, experienced, to feel this thing, to touch it, to comprehend it? You tell me words will not convey that. You tell me you must have a mind that is free from all knowledge, except that which is technological. And you are asking an impossible thing of me, aren't you? And, if I say I will make an effort, then that also is born out of the self-centred desire. So what shall I do? I think that is a very serious question. That is what every serious person asks. DB: At least implicitly. They may not say it. K: Yes, implicitly. So you, on the other side of the bank, as it were, tell me that there is no boat to cross in. You can't swim across. In fact you can't do anything. Basically, that is what it comes to. So what shall I do? You are asking me, you are asking the mind, not the general mind but... DB: ...the particular mind. K: You are asking this particular mind to eschew all knowledge. Has this ever been said in the Christian or the jewish worlds? DB: I don't know about the jewish world, but in some sense the Christians tell you to give your faith to God, to give over to jesus, as the mediator between us and God. K: Yes. Now Vedanta means the end of knowledge. And being a Westerner, I say, it means nothing to me. Because from the Greeks and all that, the culture in which I have lived has emphasized knowledge. But when you talk to some Eastern minds, they acknowledge in their religious life that a time must come when knowledge must end; the mind must be free of knowledge. Vedanta is the whole way of looking. But it is only a conceptual, a theoretical understanding. But to a Westerner, it means absolutely nothing. DB: I think that there has been a Western tradition which is similar, but not as common. For example, in the Middle Ages there was a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, which is on that line, although it is not the main line of Western thought. K: So what shall I do? How shall I approach the question? I want to find it. It gives meaning to life. It is not that my intellect gives meaning to life by inventing some illusion, some hope, some belief, but I see vaguely that this understanding, coming upon this ground, gives an immense significance to life. DB: Well, people have used that notion of God to give significance to life. K: No, no. God is merely an idea. DB: Yes, but the idea contains something similar to the Eastern idea that God is beyond knowing. Most people accept it that way, though some may not. So there is some sort of similar notion. K: But you tell me that the ground is not created by thought. So you cannot under any circumstances come upon it through any form of manipulation of thought. DB: Yes, I understand. But I am trying to say that there is this problem, danger, delusion, in the sense that people say, `Yes, that is quite true, it is through a direct experience of jesus that we come upon it, not through the thought of God, you see!' I am not able to express their view accurately. possibly, the grace of God? K: The grace of God, yes. DB: Something beyond thought, you see. K: As a fairly educated, thoughtful man, I reject all that. DB: Why do you reject it? K: Because it has become common, first of all, common in the sense that everybody says that! And also there may be in it a great sense of illusion created by desire, hope, fear. DB: Yes, but some people do seem to find this meaningful although it may be an illusion. K: But if they had never heard of jesus, they wouldn't experience jesus. DB: That seems reasonable. K: They would experience something different that they have been taught. In India I mean... QUESTIONER: But don't the more serious people in the religions say that essentially God, or whatever that is, the Absolute, the ground, is something that cannot be experienced through thinking? Also they might go so far as to say it cannot be experienced at all. K: Oh, yes, I have said it cannot be experienced. `X' says it cannot be experienced. Let's say, I don't know. Here is a person who says there is such a thing. And I listen to him, and not only does he convey it by his presence, but through the word. Although he tells me to be careful; the word is not the thing; but he uses the word to convey that there is this something so immense that my thought cannot capture it. And I say, all right, you have explained that very carefully, and how is my brain, that is conditioned, disciplined in knowledge, how is it to free itself from all that? Q: Could it free itself by understanding its own limitation? K: So you are telling me thought is limited. Show it to me! Not by talking or memory, experience or knowledge; I understand that, but I don't capture the feeling that it is limited, because I see the beauty of the earth, I see the beauty of a building, of a person, of nature. I see all that, but when you say thought is limited, I don't feel it. It is just a lot of words which you have said to me. Intellectually I understand. But I have no feeling for it. There is no perfume in it. How will you show me - not show me - how will you help me - not help - aid me, to have this feeling that thought itself is brittle, it is such a small affair? So that it is in my blood - you understand? When once it is in my blood, I have got it. You don't have to explain it. Q: But isn't that the possible approach, not to talk about the ground, that at the moment is far too removed, but rather to look directly at what the mind can do. K: Which is thinking. Q: The mind is thinking. K: That is all I have. Thinking, feeling, hating, loving - you know all that. The activity of the mind. Q: Well, I would say we don't know it, we only think we know it. K: I know when I am angry. I know when I am wounded. It is not an idea, I have got the feeling, I am carrying the hurt inside me. I am fed up with the investigation because I have done it all my life. I go to Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam - and I say I have investigated, studied, looked at them. I say these are all just words. How do I as a human being have this extraordinary feeling about it? If I have no passion, I am not investigating. I want to have this passion that will explode me out of this little enclosure. have built a wall around myself, a wall, which is myself. An man has lived with this thing for millions of years. And I have been trying to get out of it by studying, by reading, by going to gurus, by all kinds of things, but I am still anchored there. And you talk about the ground, because you see something that is breathtaking, that seems so alive, so extraordinary. And I am here, anchored in here. You, who have `seen' the ground, must do something that will explode, break up this centre completely. Q: I must do something, or you must? K: Help me! Not by prayer, and all that nonsense. You understand what I am trying to say? I have fasted, I have meditated, I have renounced, I have taken a vow of this and that. I have done all those things. Because I have had a million years of life. And at the end of the million years I am still where I was, at the beginning. This is a great discovery for me; I thought I had moved on from the beginning, by going through all this, but I suddenly discover I am back at the same point where I started. I have had more experience, I have seen the world, I have painted, I have played music, I have danced - you follow? But I have come back to the original starting point. Q: Which is me and not me. K: Me. I say to myself, what am I to do? And what is the human mind's relationship to the ground? perhaps if I could establish a relationship it might break up this centre, totally. This is not a motive, not a desire, not a reward. I see that if the mind could establish a relationship with that, my mind has become that - right? Q: But hasn't mind then already become that? K: Oh, no. Q: But I think you have just wiped away the greatest difficulty in saying there is no desire. K: No, no. I said I have lived a million years... Q: But that is an insight. K: No. I won't accept insight so easily as that. Q: Well, let me put it this way: it is something much more than knowledge. K: No, you are missing my point. My brain has lived for a million years. It has experienced everything. It has been Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Muslim; it has been all kinds of things, but the core of it is the same. And someone comes along and says, look there is a ground which is... something! Am I going back to what I have already known - the religions, etc? I reject all that, because I say I have been through it all, and they are like ashes to me at the end of it. DB: Well, all those things were the attempt to create an apparent ground by thought. It seemed that through knowledge and thought, people created what they regarded as the ground. And it wasn't. K: It wasn't. Because man has spent a million years at it. DB: So long as knowledge enters the ground, that will be false? K: Of course. So is there a relationship between that ground and the human mind? In asking that question, I am also aware of the danger of such a question. DB: Well, you may create a delusion of the same kind that we have already gone through. K: Yes. I have played that song before. Q: Are you suggesting that the relationship cannot be made by you, but it must come.? K: I am asking that. No, it may be that I have to make a relationship. My mind now is in such a state that I won't accept a thing. My mind says I have been through all this before. I have suffered, I have searched, I have looked, I have investigated, I have lived with people who are awfully clever at this kind of thing. So I am asking the question, being fully aware of the danger of it, as when the Hindus say, God is in you, Brahman is in you - which is a lovely idea! But I have been through all that. So I am asking if the human mind has no relationship to the ground, and if there is only a one-way passage, from that to me... DB: Surely that's like the grace of God then, that you have invented. K: That I won't accept. DB: You are not saying the relationship is one way, nor are you saying it is not one way. K: Maybe; I don't know. DB: You are not saying anything. K: I am not saying anything. All that I `want' is this centre to be blasted. You understand? For the centre not to exist. Because I see that the centre is the cause of all the mischief, all the neurotic conclusions, all the illusions, all the endeavour, all the effort, all the misery - everything is from that core. After a million years, I haven't been able to get rid of it; it hasn't gone. So is there a relationship at all? What is the relationship between goodness and evil? Consider it. There is no relationship. DB: It depends on what you mean by relationship. K: Contact, touch, communication, being in the same room... DB: ...coming from the same root. K: Yes. Q: But are we then saying that there is the good, and there is the evil? K: No, no. Let's use another word; whole, and that which is not whole. It is not an idea. Now is there relationship between these two? Obviously not. DB: No, if you are saying that in some sense the centre is an illusion. An illusion cannot be related to that which is true, because the content of the illusion has no relation to what is true. K: That's it. You see, that is a great discovery. I want to establish relationship with that. `Want; I am using rapid words to convey something. This petty little thing wants to have relationship with that immensity. It cannot. DB: Yes, not just because of its immensity, but because in fact this thing is not - actually? K: Yes. Q: But I don't see that. He says the centre is not actual, but I don't see that the centre is not actual. DB: Not actual, in the sense of not being genuine but an illusion. I mean, something is acting but it is not the content which we know. K: Do you see that? Q: You say the centre must explode. It does not explode because I don't see the falseness in it. K: No. You have missed my point. I have lived a million years, I have done all this. And at the end of it I am still back at the beginning. Q: So you say the centre must explode. K: No, no, no. The mind says this is too terribly small. And it can't do anything about it... It has prayed, it has done everything. But the centre is still there. And someone tells me there is this ground. I want to establish a relationship with that. Q: He tells me there is this thing, and also says that the centre is an illusion. DB: Wait, that is too quick. K: No. Wait. I know it is there. Call it what you like, an illusion, a reality, a fiction - whatever you like. It is there. And the mind says, it is not good enough; it wants to capture that. It wants to have relationship with it. And that says, `Sorry, you can't have relationship with me.' That's all! Q: Is that mind which wants to be in connection, in relationship with that, the same mind which is the `me'? K: Don't split it up, please. You are missing something. I have lived all this. I know, I can argue with you, back and forth. I have a million years of experience, and it has given me a certain capacity. And I realize at the end of it all there is no relationship between me and truth. And that's a tremendous shock to me. It is as if you have knocked me out, because my million years of experience say, go after that, seek it, pray for it, struggle for it, cry, sacrifice for it. I have done all that. And suddenly it is pointed out that I cannot have relationship with that. I have shed tears, left my family, everything, for, that. And that says, `No relationship'. So what has happened to Me? This is what I want to get at. Do you understand what I am saying -what has happened to me? To the mind that has lived this way, done everything in search of that, when that says, `You have no relationship with me'. This is the greatest thing... Q: It is a tremendous shock to the `me', if you say that. K: Is it to you? Q: I think it was, and then... K: Don't! I am asking you, is it a shock to discover that your brain, and your mind, your knowledge, are valueless? All your examinations, all your struggles, all the things that you have gathered through years and years, centuries, are absolutely worthless? Do you go mad, because you say you have done all this for nothing? Virtue, abstinence, control, everything - and at the end of it, you say they are valueless! Do you understand what this does to you? DB: I mean, if the whole thing goes, then it is of no consequence. K: Absolutely, you have no relationship. What you have done or not done is absolutely of no value. DB: Not in any fundamental sense. It has relative value, relative value only within a certain framework, which in itself has no value. K: Yes, thought has relative value. DB: But the framework in general has no value. K: That's right. The ground says, whatever you have done `on earth' has no meaning. Is that an idea? Or an actuality? Idea being that you have told me, but I still go on, struggling, wanting, groping. Or is it an actuality, in the sense that I suddenly realize the futility of all that I have done. So, one must be very careful to see that it is not a concept; or rather that one doesn't translate it into a concept or an idea, but receive the full blow of it! Q: You see, Krishnaji, for hundreds of years, probably since man has existed, he has pursued what he calls God, or the ground. K: As an idea. Q: But then the scientific mind came along, and also said it is just an idea, it is just foolish. K: Oh, no! The scientific mind says that through investigating matter we will perhaps come upon the ground. DB: Yes, many feel that way. Some would even add, investigate the brain, you see. K: Yes. That is the purpose of investigating the mind, not to blast each other off the earth, with guns. We are talking of `good' scientists, not governmental scientists, but those who say, we are examining matter, the brain and all that, to find out if there is something beyond all this. Q: And many people, many scientists, would say that they have found the ground; the ground is empty, it is emptiness; it is an energy which is different from man. K: Now, is that an idea, or an actuality to them, which affects their life, their blood, their mind, their relationship with the world? Q: I think it is just an idea. K: Then I am sorry, I have been through that. I was a scientist ten thousand years ago! You follow? I have been through all that. If it is merely an idea, we can both play at that game. I can send the ball to you, it is in your court, and you can send it back to me. We can play that. But I have finished with that kind of game. DB: Because, in general, what people discover about matter does not seem to affect them deeply, psychologically. K: No, of course not. DB: You might think that if they saw the whole unity of the universe they would act differently, but they don't. Q: You could say that it has affected some of their lives. You see the whole Communist doctrine is built on the idea (which they think is a fact) that whatever is, is just a material process, which is essentially empty. So then man has to organize his life and society according to those dialectical principles. K: No, no, dialectical principles are opinion opposing another opinion; man hoping, out of opinions, to find the truth. DB: I think we should leave this aside. There are ways of looking at different meanings of the word dialectical - but one needs to see reality as a flowing movement; not to see things as fixed, but to see them in movement and interconnection. I think that you could say that whatever way people managed to look at it, after they saw this unity it didn't fundamentally change their lives. In Russia, the same structures of the mind, if not worse, hold as elsewhere. And wherever people have tried this, it has not actually, fundamentally, affected the way they feel and think, and the way they live. Q: You see, what I wanted to say is that the dismissal of the pursuit of the ground has not had any shocking effect on people. K: No! I am not interested. It has given me a tremendous shock to discover the truth, that all the churches, prayers, books, have absolutely no meaning - except how we can build a better society, and so on. DB: If we could manage to bring this point to order, then it would have great meaning - to build a good society. But as long as this disorder is at the centre, we can't use that in the right way. I think it would be more accurate to say that there is a great potential meaning in all that. But it does not affect the centre, and there is no sign that it has ever done so. Q: You see what I don't understand is that there are many people who in their life have never pursued what you call the ground. K: They are not interested. Q: Well, I am not so sure. How would you approach such a person? K: I am not interested in approaching any person. All the works I have done - everything I have done - the ground says are valueless. And if I can drop all that, my mind is the ground. Then from there I move. From there I create society. DB: I think you could say that as long as you are looking for the ground somewhere by means of knowledge, then you are getting in the way. K: So to come back to earth; why has man done this? DB: Done what? K: Accumulated knowledge. Apart from the necessity of having factual knowledge in certain areas, why has this burden of knowledge continued for so long? DB: Because in one sense man has been trying to produce a solid ground through knowledge. Knowledge has tried to create a ground. That is one of the things that has happened. K: Which means what? DB: It means illusion again. K: Which means that the saints, the philosophers, have educated me - in knowledge and through knowledge - to find the ground. Q: To create a ground. You see, in a way, there used to be all these periods when mankind was caught in superstition. And knowledge was able to do away with that. K: Oh, no. Q: To some extent it was. K: Knowledge has only crippled me from seeing truth. I stick to that. It hasn't cleared me of My illusions. Knowledge may be illusory itself. Q: That may be, but it has cleared up some illusions. K: I want to clear up all the illusions that I hold - not some. I have got rid of my illusion about nationalism; I have got rid of illusion about belief, about this, about that. At the end of it, I realize my mind is illusion. You see, to me, who have lived for a thousand years, to find all this is absolutely worthless, is something enormous. DB: When you say you have lived for a thousand years, or a million years, does that mean, in a sense, that all the experience of mankind is.? K: ...is me. DB: ...is me. Do you feel that? K: I do. DB: And how do you feel it? K: How do we feel anything? Wait a minute, I will tell you. It is not sympathy, or empathy, it is not a thing that I have desired, it is a fact, an absolute, irrevocable fact. DB: Could we share that feeling, perhaps? You see, that seems to be one of the steps that is missing, because you have repeated that quite often as an important part of the whole thing. K: Which means that when you love somebody there is no, me, - it is love. In the same way, when I say I am humanity, it is so; it is not an idea, it is not a conclusion, it is part of me. DB: Let's say it is a feeling that I have gone through all that, all that you describe. K: Human beings have been through all that. DB: If others have gone through it, then I also have gone through it. K: Of course. One is not aware of it. DB: No, we separate. K: If we admit that our brains are not my particular brain, but the brain that has evolved through millennia... DB: Let me say why this doesn't communicate so easily: everybody feels that the content of his brain is in some way individual, that he hasn't gone through all that. Let's say that somebody, thousands of years ago, went through science or philosophy. Now how does that affect me? That is what is not clear. K: Because I am caught in this self-centred, narrow little cell, which refuses to look beyond. But you as a scientist, as a religious man, come along and tell me that your brain is the brain of mankind. DB: Yes, and all knowledge is the knowledge of mankind. So that in some way we have all knowledge. K: Of course. DB: Though not in detail. K: So you tell me that, and I understand what you mean, not verbally, not intellectually; it is so. But I come to that only when I have given up ordinary things, like nationality, etc. DB: Yes, we have given up the divisions, and we can see that the experience is of all mankind. K: It is so obvious. You go to the most primitive village in India, and the peasant will tell you all about his problems, his wife, children, poverty. It is exactly the same thing, only he is wearing different clothes or whatever! For `X', this is an indisputable fact; it is so. He says, all right, at the end of all this, of all these years, I suddenly discover that it is empty. You see, we don't accept it, we are too clever. We are so soaked with disputations and arguments and knowledge. We don't see a simple fact. We refuse to see it. And `X' comes along and says, see it, it is there: then the immediate machinery of thought begins - and says, be silent. So I practise silence! I have done that for a thousand years. It has led nowhere. So there is only one thing, and that is to discover that all that I have done is useless - ashes! You see that doesn't depress one. That is the beauty of it. I think it is like the phoenix. DB: Rising from the ashes. K: Born of ashes. DB: In a way it is freedom, to be free of all that. K: Something totally new is born. DB: Now what you said before is that the mind is the ground, it is the unknown. K: The mind? Yes. But not this mind. DB: In that case it is not the same mind. K: If I have been through all that, and come to a point when I have to end all that, it is a new mind. DB: That's clear, the mind is its content, and the content is knowledge, and without that knowledge it is a new mind. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 6 15TH APRIL 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'CAN INSIGHT BRING ABOUT A MUTATION OF THE BRAIN CELLS?' DAVID BOHM: You have said that insight changes the brain cells, and I wonder if we could discuss that? KRISHNAMURTI: As it is constituted, the brain functions in one direction: memory, experience, knowledge. It has functioned in that area as much as possible, and most people are satisfied with it. DB: Well, they don't know of anything else. K: And also they have placed knowledge in supreme importance. If one is concerned with fundamental change, where does one begin? Suppose `X' feels he will go along a certain direction set by mankind. He has been going there century after century, and he asks himself what is radical change; if it is in the environment, or in human relationships; if it is a sense of love, which is not in the area of knowledge. Where is it to begin? You understand my question? Unless there is some mutation taking place inside here, inside my mind, the brain, I may think I have changed, but it is a superficial change, and not a change in depth. DB: Yes. What is implied there is that the present state of affairs involves not only the mind but also the nervous system and the body. Everything is set in a certain way. K: Of course. That is what I meant, the whole movement is set in a certain way. And along that pattern I can modify, adjust, polish a little more, a little less and so on. But if a man is concerned with radical change, where is he to begin? As we said the other day, we have relied on the environment or society and various disciplines to change us, but I feel these are all in the same direction. DB: In so far as they all emanate from this thing, the way the mind and body are set, they are not going to change anything. There is a total structure involved which is in the brain, in the body, in the whole of society. K: Yes, yes. So what am I to do? What is `X' to do? And in asking this question, what is there to change? DB: What exactly do you mean by `what is there to change'? What is to be changed? K: Yes, both; what is there to be changed, and what is there to change? Basically, what is there to change? `X' sees that he can change certain things along this way, but to go much further than that, what is one to do? I am sure man has asked this question. You must have asked it. But apparently the mutation hasn't taken place. So what is `X' to do? He realizes the need for a radical revolution, a psychological revolution; he perceives that the more he changes, it is the same thing continuing; the more he enquires into himself, the enquiry remains the same, and so on. So what is there to change; unless `X' finds a way to change the brain itself? DB: But what will change the brain? K: That's it. The brain has been set in a pattern for millennia! I think it is no longer `what' should I change. It is imperative that I change. DB: So it is agreed that there must be a change, but the question is still, how can the brain change? K: One must come to that point. If this question is put to you as a scientist, or as a human being who is involved in science, what would your answer be? DB: I don't think science can deal with it, because it doesn't go far enough. It can't possibly probe that deeply into the structure of the brain. Many questions are positing the relationship of brain and mind, which science has not been able to resolve. Some people would say that there is nothing beyond the brain... K: ...Purely materialistic; I understand all that. DB: If it is not materialistic, then for the moment science has very little to say about it. perhaps some people would try to, but science generally has been most successful, most systematic, in dealing with matter. Any attempt to do otherwise is not very clear. K: So you would tell `X', to change inside in the brain cells, etc. My immediate answer to that is, how? Everybody asks that. It is not a matter of faith. It is not a matter of changing one pattern to another pattern. So you leave me without any direction - right? You leave me without any instrument that can penetrate this. DB: Except that you are implying there is something beyond the brain, in putting that question. We don't know. The very statement implies that insight is somehow beyond the brain, else it couldn't change the brain. K: Yes. So how am I to capture it? Maybe I can't capture it... DB: ...but how will it come about? You are saying that something that is non-material can affect matter. This is the implication. K: I am not sure. DB: I think that clearing this up, would make more clear what your question is. It is somewhat puzzling if you don't. K: All that you have said to me is, insight changes, brings about mutation in the brain. Now you explain what insight is, which is not a result of a progressive knowledge, not progressive time, not a remembrance. This insight may be the real activity of the brain. DB: All right. Let's put it differently. The brain has many activities which include memory, and all these that you have mentioned. In addition there is a more inward activity, but it is still the activity of the brain. K: It may be the same. DB: You see, in putting this, something seems to be not quite clear. K: Yes. We must be very clear that it is not the result of progressive knowledge; it is not come by through any exercise of will. DB: Agreed. I think people can generally see that insight comes in a flash, it does not come through will. Those who have considered it at all can see that. Also, that chemistry will probably not bring it about. K: I think most people who are concerned see that. But how am I, as `X', to have this insight? I see your logic, I see your reason. DB: In some ways it may disturb people. It is not clear what the logic is, what is going to make this change in the brain. Is it something more than the brain, or is it something deeper in the brain? This is one of the questions. K: Of course. DB: It is not quite clear logically. QUESTIONER: Are you saying that there is a function of the brain which acts without reference to its content? K: Yes, to the past, to the content. DB: This is a good question. Is there a function in the brain which is independent of the content? Which is not conditioned by the content, but that might still be a physical function? K: I understand. Is this the question? Apart from the consciousness with its content, is there in the brain an activity which is not touched by consciousness? DB: By the content; yes. K: Content is the consciousness. DB: Yes, but sometimes we use the word in another sense. Sometimes we imply that there could be another kind of consciousness. So if we call it `content' it would be more clear. K: All right. A part of the brain which is not touched by the content. DB: Yes, this suggests that it may be possible for the brain to change. Either the brain is entirely controlled by its content, or in some way it is not conditioned. K: That is a dangerous concept! DB: But it is what you are saying. K: No. See the danger of it. See the danger of admitting to oneself that there is a part of the brain... DB: ...an activity... K: ...all right, an activity of the brain which is not touched by the content. DB: It is a possible activity. It may be that it has not been awakened. K: It has not been awakened. That's right. Q: But what is the danger? K: That is simple enough. The danger is that I am admitting there is God in me, that there is something superhuman; something beyond the content which therefore will operate on it, or that will operate in spite of it. Q: But which part of the brain sees the danger? K: Let us go slowly. Which part of the brain sees the danger? Of course it is the content that sees the danger. Q: Does it? K: Oh, yes, because the content is aware of all the tricks it has played. DB: This is similar to many of the old tricks. K: Yes. DB: Those tricks we have discussed before - the assumption of God within, the imagination of God within. There is a danger here obviously. Q: But could the brain, seeing the danger, make that statement nevertheless? Because that statement might be pointing to the right direction. DB: Even though it is dangerous, it may be necessary to do so; it may be on the right track. K: The unconscious, which is part of the content, may capture this, and say, `Yes' - so it sees the danger instantly. Q: It sees its own trap. K: Yes, it sees the trap which it has created. So it avoids that trap. That is sanity: to avoid a trap is sanity. Is there an activity which is totally independent of the content? Then, is that activity part of the brain? DB: Is it a natural activity of the brain? Material in the brain. K: Which means what? DB: Well, if there is such a natural activity, it could awaken somehow, and that activity could change the brain. K: But would you say it is still material? DB: Yes. There could be different levels of matter, you see. K: That is what I am trying to get at. Right. DB: But you see, if you think that way, there could be a deeper level of matter which is not conditioned by the content. For example, we know matter in the universe is not conditioned by the content of our brains generally. There could be a deeper level of matter not conditioned in that way. K: So it would still be matter, refined, or `super', or whatever; it would still be the content. DB: Why do you say that? You see, you have to go slowly. Do you say that matter is content? K: Yes. DB: Inherently? But this has to be made clear, because it is not obvious. K: Let's discuss it. Let's grip this. Thought is matter. DB: Well, thought is part of the content, part of the material process. Whether it exists independently as matter is not so clear. You can say, water is matter; you can pour water from one glass to another, it has an independent substance. But it is not clear whether thought could stand as matter by itself, except with some other material substance like the brain in which it takes place. Is that clear? K: I don't quite follow. DB: If you say water is matter, then it is clear. Now if you say, thought is matter, then thought must have a similar independent substance. You say air is matter - right? Or water is matter. Now waves are not matter, they are just a process in matter. Is it clear what I mean? K: Yes. A wave is a process in matter. DB: A material process. Is thought matter or is it a process in matter? Q: May one ask, is electricity considered to be matter? DB: In so far as there are electron particles it is matter, but it is also a movement of that, which is a process. Q: So it is two things. DB: Well you can form waves of electricity, and so on. Q: Waves would be the matter, but not the electrical action. DB: The electrical action is like the waves, but the electricity consists of particles. K: What is the question we are now asking? DB: Is thought a material substance, or is it a process in some other material substance - like the brain? K: It is a material process in the brain. DB: Yes, scientists would generally agree with that. K: Let's stick to that. DB: If you say it is matter, they would become very puzzled. K: I see. Q: It doesn't exist apart from the brain cells. It resides in the brain. K: That is, thought is a material process in the brain. That would be right. Then can that material process ever be independent? DB: Independent of what? K: Independent of something that is not a material process. No, wait a minute, we must go slowly. Thought is a material process in the brain. We all agree about this? DB: Yes, you would get very wide agreement on that. K: Then our question is, can that material process in the brain bring about a change in itself? DB: Yes, that is the question. K: In itself. And if that material in itself can change, it would still be a material process. Right? DB: Yes. Thought is always apparently going to be a material process. K: And therefore it is not insight. We must come back to that. DB: You are saying that insight is not a material process? K: Go slowly. We must be careful in using words. Thought is a material process in the brain; and any other movement, springing from that material process, is still material. DB: Yes, it has to be. K: Right. Is there another activity which is not a material process? DB: Of course people have asked that question for ages. Is there spirit beyond matter? K: Spirit, Holy Ghost! Is there some other activity of the brain which cannot be related to the material process? DB: Well, it cannot depend upon it. Insight cannot depend on the material process, as it would then be just another material process. K: Insight cannot depend on the material process, which is thought. DB: But you were putting it the other way round, that the material process may depend on insight, may be changed by insight. K: Ah, wait. The material process is dependent on it, but insight is not dependent on that process. DB: Now many people would not see how something non-material would affect something material. K: Yes, quite. DB: It might be easily agreed that something non-material is not affected by matter, but then how does the operation work the other way? K: What do you say? The brain thought, with its content, is a material process. Any activity from it is still part of that. Now is insight part of that too? DB: We have agreed on its independence of that; it can't be part of it. But it can still act within the material process, that's the crucial thing. K: Yes. That's right. Insight is independent of the material process, but yet it can act upon it. DB: Let's discuss that a little. Generally speaking, in science, if `A' can act on `B' there is usually reciprocal action of `B' on `A'. We don't find situations where `A' acts on `B', but `B' never acts on `A'. K: I see, I see. DB: This is one of the difficulties you have raised. We don't find this elsewhere; in human relations, if I can act on you, you can act on me - right? K: Yes, we see that human relationships are interaction. DB: Yes, mutual relationships. K: And in those relationships there is response, and so on. Now, if I don't respond to your action, I am independent of it. DB: But you see, science generally finds that it is not possible to have a one-sided action. K: Quite. So we are continually insisting that the material process must have a relationship to the other. DB: An action, anyway. Relationship is an ambiguous word here. If you said action it would be more clear. K: All right. The material process must be able to act on the non-material, and the non-material must act on the material. DB: But that would make them both the same. K: Exactly! Q: Not necessarily. One could envisage that insight is a much larger movement than the material process of the brain, and therefore that the larger movement can act on the smaller movement, but the smaller cannot act on the larger. K: Yes, we are saying the same thing. DB: The small movement has no significant action on the larger movement. You can have a situation that if you drop a rock in the ocean, the ocean absorbs it with no significant change. K: Yes. Q: So then they would still have a two-way action but only one action would be significant. K: No, no. Don't enter into that too quickly, let us be careful. Love has no relationship to hate. DB: Again there is this word `relationship'. Would you, for example, say that hate has no action on love? K: They are independent. DB: Independent, they have no action on each other. K: Ah, it is a very important thing to discover this. Love is independent of hate. Where there is hate the other cannot exist. DB: Yes, they can't stand side by side, acting on each other. K: They can't. So when scientists say, if `A' has a relationship to `B', then `B' must have a relationship to `A', we are contradicting that. DB: Not all scientists have said that; a few have said otherwise -I don't like to bring in Aristotle... K: Bring him in! DB: He said there is an unmoved mover, that God is never moved by matter; he is not acted on by matter, but he acts. Do you see? That is an old idea then. Since Aristotle's time, science has thrown out this concept, and said that it is impossible. K: If I see clearly that love is independent of hate, hate cannot possibly act on love. Love may act on hate, but where hate is, the other cannot be. DB: Well, those are two possibilities. Which are you saying? K: What are the two possibilities? DB: You said, one possibility is that love may act on hate, and the other is that they have no action at all on each other. K: Yes. DB: But which? K: I understand. No, love cannot act on hate. DB: Right. They have no relationship. But perhaps insight could, you see. K: We have to be quite clear on this point. Violence, and being without violence, are two entirely different factors. One cannot act upon the other. DB: In that case you could say that the existence of the one is the non-existence of the other, and there is no way in which they can act together. K: That's right. DB: They cannot be there together. K: Absolutely. I'll stick to that. So when this material process is in action, the other cannot exist. DB: What is `the other' this time? Insight? K: Yes. DB: That denies what we were saying before; that there is an action from insight on the material process. K: Now, steady, yes. Where there is violence the other - I hate to use the word `non-violence' - is not. DB: Peace, or harmony? K: Where there is violence, peace cannot exist. But where there is peace, is there violence? No, of course not. So peace is independent of violence. Q: You have said many, many times that intelligence can act upon thought; insight can affect thought, but it doesn't work the other way round. You have given many examples of this. K: Intelligence can wipe away ignorance, but ignorance cannot touch intelligence - right? Where there is love, hate can never exist. Can love wipe away hate? DB: We said that this doesn't seem to be possible, because hate appears to be an independent force. K: Of course it is. DB: It has its own momentum, you see, its own force, its own movement. Q: I don't quite get this relationship of love and hate with the earlier discussion of insight. DB: There seem to bc two different areas. Q: Thought is a movement, and insight seems to be non-movement, where everything seemingly is at rest, and it can observe movement. DB: That is what we are trying to get at, the notion of something which is not affected by anything else. Q: Aren't you then saying, in looking at love and hate, that there is good and there is evil, and that evil is a completely separate, independent force? DB: Well, it is independent of good. Q: But is the process in the mind, or is it related to insight? DB: We are coming to that. Q: Take light and darkness. Light appears, and the darkness is gone. DB: Good and evil; love and hate; light and darkness - when one is, the other can't be, you see. That is all we are saying so far. Q: Do you mean, in a single brain? DB: In any brain, yes, or in any group, or anywhere. Whenever there is hate going on in a group, there is not love. K: Something has just come to my mind. Love has no cause. Hate has a cause. Insight has no cause. The material process, as thought, has a cause. Right? DB: Yes, it is part of the chain of cause and effect. K: Can that which has no cause ever act upon that which has a cause? DB: It might. We can see no reason why that which has no cause might not act on something that has a cause. There is no obvious reason. It won't happen the other way round. What has a cause cannot act on that, which has no cause, because that would invalidate it. K: That's right. But apparently the action of insight has an extraordinary effect on the material process. DB: It may for example wipe out some causes. K: As insight is causeless, it has a definite effect on that which has cause. DB: Well, it doesn't necessarily follow, but it is possible. K: No, no, I don't say it is possible. DB: I am saying we haven't quite seen why it is necessary. There is no contradiction when we say the word possible. K: All right, I see. As long as we are clear on the word possible. We must be careful. Love is without cause, and hate has a cause. The two cannot co-exist. DB: Yes. That is true. That is why there is a difference between love and insight. That is why it doesn't follow necessarily that if something has no cause it will act on something that has a cause. That is what I was trying to say. K: I just want to explore a little more. Is love insight? DB: As far as we can see it is not the same. Love and insight are not identical, are they? Not exactly the same thing. K: Why? DB: Insight may be love, but, you see, insight also occurs in a flash. K: It is a flash of course. And that flash alters the whole pattern, operates on it, uses the pattern, in the sense that I argue, reason, use logic, and all that. I don't know if I am making myself clear? DB: I think that once the flash has operated, the pattern is different, and would therefore be more rational. The flash may make logic possible, because you may have been confused before the flash. K: Yes, yes! Aristotle may have come to all this by logic. DB: Well, he may have had some insight! We don't know. K: We don't know, but I am questioning it. DB: We really don't know how his mind operated because there are only a few books that have survived. K: Would you say by reading some of those books that he had insight? DB: I haven't really read Aristotle directly; very few people have because it is hard. Most people read what other people have said about Aristotle. A few phrases of his are common, like `the unmoved mover'. And he has said some things which suggest that he was quite intelligent, at least. K: What I am trying to say is that insight is never partial; I am talking of total, not partial, insight. Q: Krishnaji, could you explain that a little? What do you mean by `not partial' insight? K: An artist can have a partial insight. A scientist can have a partial insight. But we are talking about total insight. I: You see the artist is also a human being, so... K: But his capture of insight is partial. Q: It is directed to some form of art. So you mean that it illuminates a limited area, or subject. Is that what you mean by partial insight? K: Yes. Q: Then what would be total insight? What would it encompass? K: The total human activity. DB: That is one point. But earlier on, we were asking whether this insight would illuminate the brain, the activity of the brain. In that illumination, it seems that the material activity of the brain will change. Would that be correct? We must get this point clear, then we can raise the question of totality. Are we saying that insight is an energy which illuminates the activity of the brain? And that in this illumination, the brain itself begins to act differently. K: You are quite right. That's all. That is what takes place. Yes. DB: We say the source of this illumination is not in the material process; it has no cause. K: No cause. DB: But it is a real energy. K: It is pure energy. Is there action without cause? DB: Yes, without time. Cause implies time. K: That is, this flash has altered completely the pattern which the material process has set. DB: Could you say that the material process generally operates in a kind of darkness, and therefore it has set itself on a wrong path? K: In darkness, yes. That is clear. The material process acts in ignorance, in darkness. And this flash of insight enlightens the whole field, which means that ignorance and darkness have been dispelled. I will hold to that. DB: You could say, then, that darkness and light cannot co-exist for obvious reasons. Nevertheless the very existence of light is to change the process of darkness. K: Quite right. Q: But what contributes the flash? K: We haven't come to that yet. I want to go step by step into this. What has happened is that the material process has worked in darkness, and has brought about confusion, and all the mess that exists in the world. But this flash of insight wipes away the darkness. Which means that the material process is not then working in darkness. DB: Right. But now let's make another point clear. When the flash has gone, the light continues. K: The light is there, the flash is the light. DB: At a certain moment the flash is immediate, but then, as you work from there, there is still light. K: Why do you differentiate flash from light? DB: Simply because the word `flash' suggests something that happens in one moment. K: Yes. DB: You see, we are saying that insight would only last in that moment. K: We must go slowly. DB: Well, it is a matter of language. K: Is it merely a matter of language? DB: Perhaps not, but if you use the word `flash', there is the analogy of lightning, giving light for a moment, but then the next moment you are in darkness, until there is a further flash of lightning. K: It is not like that. DB: So what is it? Is it that the light suddenly turns on, and stays on? K: No. Because when we say `stays on' or `goes off', we are thinking in terms of time. DB: We have to clear this up, because it is the question everybody will put. K: The material process is working in darkness, in time, in knowledge, in ignorance and so on. When insight takes place there is the dispelling of that darkness. That is all we are saying. Insight dispels that darkness. And thought, which is the material process, no longer works in darkness. Therefore that light has altered - no, it has ended - ignorance. DB: So we say that this darkness is really something which is built into the content of thought. K: The content is darkness. DB: That's right. Then that light has dispelled that ignorance. K: That's right. Dispelled the content. DB: But still we have to be very careful, in case we still have content in the usually accepted sense of the word; you know, all kinds of things. K: Of course. DB: So we can't say that the light has dispelled all the content. K: It has dispelled the centre of darkness. DB: Yes, the source, the creator of darkness. K: The self Right? It has dispelled the centre of darkness which is the self. DB: We could say that the self, which is part of the content -that part of the content which is the centre of darkness, which creates it and maintains it - is dispelled. K: Yes, I hold to that. DB: We see now that this means a physical change in the brain cells. That centre, that content which is the centre, is a certain set, form, disposition of all the brain calls, and it in some way alters. K: Obviously! You see, this has enormous significance, in our relationship with our society, in everything. Now the next question is, how does this flash come about? Let's begin the other way round. How does love come about? How does peace come about? Peace is causeless, violence has cause. How does that causeless thing come about when my whole life is causation? There is no `how' - right? The `how' implies a cause, so there is no `how'. Q: Are you saying that since it is without cause, it is something that just exists.? K: No, I don't say that it exists. That is a dangerous statement. Q: It has to exist at some point. K: No. The moment you say it exists, it is not. DB: You see, the danger is that it is part of the content. K: The question you put was about a mutation in the brain calls. That question has been put after a series of discussions. And we have come to a point when we say that the flash, that light, has no cause; that the light operates on that which has cause, which is the darkness. That darkness exists as long as the self is there, it is the originator of that darkness, but light dispels the very centre of darkness. That's all. We have come to that point. And therefore there is a mutation. Then I say that the question of how do I get this flash of insight, how does it happen, is a wrong question. There is no `how'. Q: There is no `how', but there is darkness and there is light. K: Just see first there is no `how'. If you show me how, you are back into the darkness. Right? DB: Yes. K: It is a tremendous thing to understand that. I am asking something else, which is, why is it that we have no insight at all? Why is it that this insight doesn't start from our childhood? DB: Well, the way life is lived... K: No, I want to find out. Is it because of our education? Our society? I don't believe it is all that. You follow? DB: What do you say then? K: Is it some other factor? I am groping after this. Why don't we have it? It seems so natural. DB: At first, one would say something is interfering with it. K: But it seems so natural. For `X', it is quite natural. Why isn't it natural for everyone? Why isn't it possible? If we talk about blockages, education, etc., which are all in the realm of causation, then to remove the blockages implies another cause. So we keep on rolling in that direction. There is something unnatural about all this. Q: If you would say that there are blocks... K: I don't want to use that; it is the language of the darkness. Q: Then you could say that the blocks prevent the insight from acting. K: Of course. But I want to move away from these blockages. DB: Not exactly blockages, but we used the words `centre of darkness', which we say is maintaining darkness. K: Why isn't it natural for everybody to have this insight? DB: That is the question. K: Why is love not natural to everybody? Am I putting the question clearly? DB: I think, to make it more clear, some people might feel that it is natural to everybody, but being treated in a certain way they gradually get caught in hate. K: I don't believe that. DB: Then you would have to suppose that the young child meeting hate would not respond with hate. K: Yes, that's right. DB: Most people would say that it is natural for the young child meeting hate to respond with hate. K: Yes, this morning I heard that. Then I asked myself why? Now just a minute. `X' has been put under all these circumstances, which could have produced blockages, but `X' wasn't touched by them. So why is it not possible for everybody? DB: We should make it clear why we say it would be natural not to respond to hate with hate. K: All right. Limit it to that. DB: Even when one hasn't thought about it. You know, the child is not able to think about all this. Some people would say it is instinct, the animal instinct... K: ...which is to hate... DB: ...well, to fight back. K: To fight back. DB: The animal will respond with love, if you treat him with love, but if you treat the animal with hate he is going to fight back. K: Of course. DB: He will become vicious. K: Yes. DB: Now some people would say that the human being in the beginning is like that animal, and later he can understand. K: Of course. That is, the human being's origins were with the animal, and the animal, the ape or the wolf... DB: ...the wolf will respond with love too. K: And we are saying, why... DB: Look, almost everybody feels that what I said is true, that when we are very young children, we are like the animal. Now you are asking, why don't all young children immediately fail to respond to hate with hate? K: That means, is it the fault of the parents? DB: What you are implying is that it is not entirely that. There must be something deeper. K: Yes, I think there is something quite different. I want to capture that. DB: This is something that would be important. K: How do we find out? Let's have an insight! I feel that there is something totally different. We are attacking it from a causational point of view. Would it be right to say that the beginning of man is not animal? DB: Well, that is not clear. The present theory of evolution is that there have been apes, developing; you can follow the line where they become more and more like human beings. Now when you say that the beginning of man is not animal, it is not clear. K: If the beginning of man is the animal, therefore that instinct is natural and then it is highly cultivated. DB: Yes, that instinct is cause and effect. K: Cause and effect, and it becomes natural. But someone comes along and asks `Is it?' DB: Let's try to get this clear. K: I mean, scientists and historians have said that man began from the ape, and that, as all animals respond to love and to hate, we as human beings respond instantly to hate by hate. DB: And vice versa, to love by love. K: At the beginning there were a few people who never responded to hate, because they had love. Those people implanted this thing in the human mind. Right? That where love is, hate is not. And that has also been part of our inheritance. Why have we cultivated the response of hate to hate? Why haven't we cultivated the other? Or is the other - love - something that cannot be cultivated? DB: It is not causal. Cultivation depends on a cause. K: On thought. So why have we lost the other? We have cultivated very carefully, by thought, the concept of meeting hate by hate, violence by violence, and so on. Why haven't we moved along with the other line? With love, that is causeless? You follow my question? DB: Yes. K: Is this a futile question? DB: One doesn't see any way of proceeding. K: I am not trying to proceed. DB: We have to understand what made people respond to hate with hate... K: ...To `X', the other seems so natural. So if that is so natural to him, why isn't it natural to everyone else? It must be natural to others! You know this ancient idea, which is probably in existence in the jewish and in the Indian religions, and so on, that the manifestation of the highest takes place, occasionally. That seems too easy an explanation. Has mankind moved in the wrong direction? Have we taken a wrong turn? DB: Yes, we have discussed this before, that there has been a wrong turning. K: To respond to hate by hate, violence by violence, etc. DB: And to give supreme value to knowledge. Q: Wouldn't another factor also be the attempt to cultivate the idea of love? The purpose of the religions has been to produce love, and better human beings. K: Don't go into all that. Love has no cause, it is not cultivatable. Full stop. Q: Yes, but,the mind doesn't see that. K: But we have explained all that. I want to find out why, if it is natural to `X', it isn't natural to others. I think this is a valid question. DB: Another point is to say that you could see that the response of hate to hate makes no sense anyway. So why do we go on with it? Because many believe in that moment that they are protecting themselves with hate, but it is no protection. K: But to go back to that question: I think it is valid. `X' is without cause, `Y' is caught in cause. Why? You understand? Is it the privilege of the few? The elite? No, no. Let's look at it another way. The mind of humanity has been responding to hate with hate, violence by violence, and knowledge by knowledge. But `X' is part of humanity, and he does not respond to hate by hate, like `Y' and `Z'! They are part of `X's' consciousness, part of all that. DB: Why is there this difference? K: That is what I am asking. One is natural, the other is unnatural. Why? Why the difference? Who is asking this question? The people, `Y' and `Z', who respond to hate by hate, are they asking the question? Or is `X' asking the question? Q: It would seem that `X' is asking this question. DB: Yes, but you see we were also just saying that they are not different. We say they are different, but also that they are not different. K: Of course. They are not different. DB: There is one mind. K: That's it, one mind. DB: Yes, and how does it come that another part of this one mind says no? K: That's the whole thing. How does it come about that one part of the mind says we are different from another? Of course, there are all kinds of explanations, and I am left with the fact that `A' `B' and `C' are different from `X' `Y' and `Z'. And those are facts -right? Q: They appear to be different. K: Oh, no. Q: They are actually different. K: Absolutely; not just apparently. DB: I think the question we want to come back to is, why do the people who cultivate hate say that they are different from those who don't? K: Do they say that? DB: I think they do, in so far as they would admit that if there was anybody who didn't cultivate hate, they must be different. K: Yes, that is clear - light and darkness, and so on. But I want to find out if we are moving in the right direction. That is, `X' has given me that gift, and I have not carried that gift. You follow what I mean? I have cultivated one response, but not carried this. Why? If a father has responded to hate by hate, why has the son not responded in the same way? DB: I think it is a question of insight. K: Which means that the son had insight right from the beginning. You follow what I am saying? Right from childhood, which means what? DB: What? K: I don't want to enter into this dangerous field yet! DB: What is it? Perhaps you want to leave that. K: There is some factor that is missing. I want to capture it. You see, if that is an exception, then it is silly. DB: All right. Then we agree that the thing is dormant in all human beings; is that what you want to say? K: I am not quite sure that is what I want to say. DB: But I meant that the factor is there in all mankind. K: That is a dangerous statement too. DB: That is What you were saying. K: I know, but I am questioning. When I am quite sure, I will tell you. DB: All right. We tried this, and we can say it seems promising but it is a bit dangerous. This possibility is there in all mankind, and in so far as some people have seen it. K: Which means God is in you? DB: No, it is just that the possibility of insight is there. K: Yes, partly. I am questioning all this. The father responds to hate by hate; the son doesn't. DB: That happens from time to time. K: No, consistently from the beginning - why? DB: It must depend on insight, which shows the futility of hate. K: Why did that man have it? DB: Yes, why? K: And why if this seems so terribly natural to him, is it not natural to everybody? As water is natural to everybody. DB: Well, why isn't insight present for everybody from the beginning? K: Yes, that is what I am asking. DB: So strongly that even maltreatment cannot affect it. K: Nothing can affect it, that is my point. Maltreatment, beating, being put into all kinds of dreadful situations hasn't affected it. Why? We are coming to something. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 7 17TH APRIL 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'DEATH HAS VERY LITTLE MEANING' KRISHNAMURTI: Are we saying that human beings are still behaving with the animal instincts? DAVID BOHM: Yes, and that the animal instincts, it seems, may be overpowering in their intensity and speed, and especially with young children. It may be that it is only natural for them to respond with the animal instinct. K: So that means, after a million years, that we are still instinctively behaving like our ancestors? DB: In some ways. probably our behaviour is also complicated by thought; the animal instinct has now become entangled with thought, and it is getting in some ways worse. K: Far worse. DB: Because all these instincts of hatred now become directed and sustained by thought, so that they are more subtle and dangerous. K: And during all these many centuries we haven't found a way, a method, a system - something that will move us away from that track. Is that it? DB: Yes. One of the difficulties, surely, is that when people begin to be angry with each other, their anger builds up and they can't seem to do anything about it. They may try to control it, but that doesn't work. K: As we were saying, someone - `X' - behaves naturally in a way that is not a response to the animal instinct. What place has this kind of insight in human society? None at all? DB: In society as it is, it cannot be accommodated, because society is organized under the assumption that pain and pleasure are going to rule. You could say that friendliness is a kind of animal instinct too, for people become friendly for instinctive reasons. And perhaps they become enemies for similar reasons. So I think that some people would say that we should be rational rather than instinctive. There was a period during the 18th century, the Age of Reason, when they said man could be rational, could choose to be rational, in order to bring about harmony everywhere. K: But he hasn't done so! DB: No, things got worse, leading to the French Revolution, to the Terror and so on. But, after that, people didn't have so much faith in reason as a way of getting anywhere, or coming out of conflict. K: So where does that lead us? We were talking really about insight that actually changes the nature of the brain itself. DB: Yes, by dispelling the darkness in the brain, insight allows the brain to function in a new way. K: Thought has been operating in darkness, creating its own darkness and functioning in that. And insight is, as we said, like a flash which breaks down the darkness. Then when that insight clears the darkness, does man act, or function, rationally? DB: Yes, man will then function rationally, and with perception, rather than by rules and reason. But there is a freely flowing reason. You see, some people identify reason with certain rules of logic which would be mechanical. But there can be reason as a form of perception of order. K: So we are saying, are we, that insight is perception? DB: It is the flash of light which makes perception possible. K: Right, that's it. DB: It is even more fundamental than perception. K: So insight is pure perception, and from that perception there is action, which is then sustained by rationality. Is that it? DB: Yes. K: That's right. DB: And the rationality is perception of order. K: So, would you say, there is insight, perception and order? DB: Yes. K: But that order is not mechanical because it is not based on logic. DB: There are no rules. K: No rules; let's put it that way; it's better. This order is not based on rules. This means insight, perception, action, order. Then you come to the question, is insight continuous, or is it by flashes? DB: We went into that, and felt it was a wrong question, so perhaps we can look at it differently. It is not time binding. K: Not time binding. Yes, we agreed on that. So now let's get a little further. We said, didn't we, that insight is the elimination of the darkness which is the very centre of the self, the darkness that self creates? Insight dispels that very centre. DB: Yes. With the darkness, perception is not possible. It's blindness in a way. K: Right, then what next? I am an ordinary man, with all my animal instincts, pleasure and pain and reward and punishment and so on. I hear you say this, and I see what you are saying has some kind of reason, logic and order. DB: Yes, it makes sense as far as we can see it. K: It makes sense. Then how am I to have reason in my life? How am I to bring it about? You understand that these words which are difficult, are all of them time binding. But is that possible? DB: Yes, without time, you see. K: Is it possible for man with his narrow mind, to have this insight, so that pattern of life is broken? As we said the other day, we have tried all this, tried every form of self-denial, and yet that insight doesn't come about. Once in a while there is a partial insight, but that partial insight is not the whole insight, so there is still partial darkness. DB: Which doesn't dispel the centre of the self. It may dispel some darkness in a certain area, but the source of the darkness, the creator, the sustainer of it, is still there. K: Still there. Now what shall we do? But this is a wrong question. This leads nowhere. We have stated the general plan, right? And I have to make the moves, or make no moves at all. I haven't the energy. I haven't the capacity to see it quickly. Because this is immediate, not just something that I practise and eventually get. I haven't the capacity, I haven't the sense of urgency, of immediacy. Everything is against me: my family, my wife, society. Everything. And does this mean that I eventually have to become a monk? DB: No. Becoming a monk is the same as becoming anything else. K: That's right. Becoming a monk is like becoming a businessman! I see all this, verbally as well as rationally, intellectually, but I can't capture this thing. Is there a different approach to this problem? I am always asking the same question, because I am caught in the same pattern. So, is there a totally different way? A totally different approach to the whole turmoil of life? Is there a different manner of looking at it? Or is the old way the only way? We have said that as long as the centre is creating darkness, and thought is operating in that darkness, there must be disorder, and society will be as it is now. To move away from that, you must have insight. Insight can only come about when there is a flash, a sudden light, which abolishes not only darkness but the creator of darkness. DB: Yes. K: Now I am asking if there is a different approach to this question altogether, although an old response seems so absolute. DB: Well possibly. When you say it seems absolute, do you want a less absolute approach? K: I am saying that if that is the only way, then we are doomed. DB: You can't produce this flash at will. K: No, it can't be produced through will, through sacrifice, through any form of human effort. That is out; we know we have finished with all that. And also we agreed that to some people - to `X' - this insight seemed so natural and we asked why is it not natural to others? DB: If we begin with the child, it seems natural to the child to respond with his animal instincts, with great intensity which sweep him away. Darkness arises because it is so overwhelming. K: Yes, but why is it different with `X'? DB: First of all it seems natural to most people that the animal instincts would take over. K: Yes, that's right. DB: And they would say the other fellow, `X', is unnatural. K: Yes. DB: So that is the way mankind has been thinking, saying that if there are indeed any people who are different they must be very unusual and unnatural. K: That's it. Human beings have been responding to hatred by hatred, and so on. There are those few, perhaps many, who say that is not natural or rational. Why has this division taken place? DB: If we say that pleasure and pain, fear and hate, are natural, then it is felt that we must battle to control these, otherwise they will destroy us. The best we can hope for is to control them with reason, or through another way. K: But that doesn't work! Are people like `X', who function differently, the privileged few, by some miracle, by some strange chance event? DB: Many people would say that. K: But it goes against one's grain. I would not accept that. DB: Well, if that is not the case, then you have to say why there is this difference. K: That is what I am trying to get at, because `X' is born of the same parents. DB: Yes, fundamentally the same, so why does he behave differently? K: This question has been asked many times, over and over again in different parts of the world. Now why is there this division? QUESTIONER: Is the division really total? You see, even the man who responds to hatred with hatred, nevertheless sees that it doesn't make sense, is not natural and should be different. K: It should be different, but he is still battling with ideas. He is trying to get out of it by the exercise of thought which breeds darkness. Q: I just want to say that the division does not seem to be so entire. K: Oh, but the division is entire, complete. Q: Well, then, why are people not simply saying, let's continue to live that way, and let's enjoy it to the last moment? K: Because they can't see anything except their own darkness. Q: But they want to get out of it. K: Now wait a minute. Do they want to get out of it? Do they actually realize the state they are in, and deliberately want to get out of it? Q: They are ambivalent about it. They want to go on getting the fruits of it, but they have a sense that it is wrong, and that it leads to suffering. DB: Or else they find they can't help it. You see, when the time comes to experience anger or pleasure, they can't get away. K: They can't help it. Q: But they want to get out of it, although they are helpless. There are forces which are stronger than their will. K: So what shall we do? or is this division false? DB: That's the point. We had better talk of a difference between these two approaches. This difference is not fundamental. K: I don't think they have anything in common. DB: Why? You say the difference is false, although fundamentally people are the same, but a difference has developed between them. Perhaps most people have taken a wrong turning. K: Yes, let's put it that way. DB: But the difference is not intrinsic, it is not structural, built in like the difference between a tree and a rock. K: Agreed. As you say, there is a difference between a rock and a tree, but it is not like that. Let's be simple. There are two responses. They start from the source; one has taken one direction, and the other has taken a different direction. But the source is the same. Why haven't all of them moved in the right direction? DB: We haven't managed to answer that. I was just saying that if one understands that, then going back to the source, one does not have to take the wrong turn. In a sense we are continually taking this wrong turn, so if we can understand this, then it becomes possible to change. And we are continually starting from the same source, not going back in time to a source. K: Just a minute, just a minute. DB: There are two possible ways of taking our statement. One is to say that the source is in time, that far back in the past we started together and took different paths. The other is to say that the source is timeless, and we are continually taking the wrong turn, again and again. Right? K: Yes, it is constantly the wrong turn. Why? Q: This means that there is the constant possibility of the right turn. K: Yes, of course. That's it. If we say there is a source from which we all began, then we are caught in time. DB: We can't go back. K: No, that is out. Therefore it is apparent that we are taking the wrong turn all the time. DB: Constantly. K: Constantly taking the wrong turn. But why? The one who is living with insight and the other who is not living with insight - are these constant? The man who is living in darkness can move away at any time to the other. That is the point. At any time. DB: Then nothing holds him, except constantly taking the wrong turn. You could say the darkness is such that he doesn't see himself taking the wrong turn. K: Are we pursuing the right direction, putting the right question? Suppose you have that insight, and your darkness, the very centre of darkness, has been dispelled completely. And I, a serious, fairly intelligent human being, listen to you. And whatever you have said seems reasonable, rational, sane. I question the division. The division is created by the centre which creates darkness.Thought has created it. DB: Well, in darkness, thought creates the division. K: From the darkness a shadow is thrown; it makes a division. DB: If we have that insight, we say there is no division. K: Yes. And man won't accept that, because in his darkness there is nothing but division. So we, living in darkness, have created the division. We have created it in our thoughts... DB: We are constantly creating it. K: Yes, always wanting to live constantly in a state in which there is no division. That movement, however, is still the movement of darkness. Right? DB: Yes. K: How am I to dispel this continuous, constant darkness? That is the only question, because, as long as that exists, I create this constant division. You see, this is going round in circles. I can only dispel the darkness through insight, and I cannot have that insight by any effort of will, so I am left with nothing. So what is my problem? My problem is to perceive the darkness, to perceive the thought that is creating darkness, and to see that the self is the source of this darkness. Why can't I see that? Why can't I see it even logically? DB: Well, it's clear logically. K: Yes, but somehow it doesn't seem to operate. So what shall I do? I realize for the first time that the self is creating the darkness which is constantly breeding division. I see that very clearly. DB: And the division produces the darkness anyway. K: Vice versa, back and forth. And from all that, everything begins. I see that very clearly. What shall I do? So I don't admit division. Q: Krishnaji, aren't we introducing division again, never the less, when we say there is the man who needs insight? K: But man has insight. `X' has insight, and he has explained very clearly how darkness has vanished. I listen to him, and he says your very darkness is creating the division. Actually, there is no division, no division as light and darkness. So he asks me, can you banish, can you put away this sense of division? DB: You seem to be bringing back a division by saying that, by saying that I should do it, you see. K: No, not `should'. DB: In a way you are saying that the thought process of the mind seems spontaneously to produce division. You say, try to put it aside, and at the same time it is trying to make division. K: I understand. But can my mind put away division? Or is that a wrong question? Q: Can it put away division as long as it is divided? K: No, it can't. So what am I to do? Listen. `X' says something so extraordinarily true, of such immense significance and beauty that my whole being says `Capture it'. That is not a division. I recognize that I am the creator of division, because I am living in darkness, and so out of that darkness I create. But I have listened to `X', who says there is no division. And I recognize that is an extraordinary statement. So the very saying of that to one who has lived in constant division has an immediate effect. Right? DB: I think that one has to, as you say, put away the division... K: I will leave that; I won't put it away. That statement that ere is no division - I want to get at that a little bit. I am getting somewhere with it. `X' s' statement from this insight, that there is no division has a tremendous effect on me. I have lived constantly in division, and comes along and says there is no division. What effect has it on me? DB: Then you say there is no division. That makes sense. But on the other hand it seems that the division exists. K: I recognize the division, but the statement that there is no division has this immense impact on me. That seems natural, doesn't it? When I see something that is immovable, it must have some effect on me. I respond to it with a tremendous shock. DB: You see, if you were talking about something which was in front of us, and you said, `No, it is not that way', then that would, of course, change your whole way of seeing it. Now you say this division is not that way. We try to look and see if that is so - right? K: I don't even say, `Is that so? `X' has very carefully explained whole business, and he says at the end of it that there is no division. And I am sensitive, watching very carefully, and realizing that I am constantly living in division. When `X' makes that statement it has broken the pattern. I don't know if you follow what I am trying to explain? It has broken the pattern, because he has said something which is so fundamentally true. There is no God and man. Right, Sir, I stick to that. I see something - which is, where hatred exists the other is not. But, hating, I want the other. So constant division is born out of darkness. And the darkness is constant. But I have been listening very carefully, and `X' makes a statement which seems absolutely true. That enters into me, and the act of his statement dispels the darkness. I am not making an effort to get rid of darkness, but `X' is the light. That's right, I hold to that. So it comes to something, which is, can I listen with my darkness - in my darkness, which is constant? In that darkness, can I listen to you? Of course I can. I am living in constant division which brings darkness. `X' comes along and tells me there is no division. Right. Now why do you say you can listen in the darkness? K: Oh, yes, I can listen in darkness. If I can't I am doomed. DB: But that is no argument. K: Of course that is no argument, but it is so! DB: Living in darkness is not worthwhile. But now we say that it is possible to listen in the darkness. K: He, `X', explains to me very, very carefully. I am sensitive, I have been listening to him in my darkness, but that is making me sensitive, alive, watching. That is what I have been doing. We have been doing it together. And he makes a statement that there is absolutely no division. And I know that I am living in division. That very statement has brought the constant movement to an end. Otherwise, if this doesn't take place I have nothing - you follow? I am perpetually living in darkness. But there is a voice in the wilderness, and listening to that voice has an extraordinary effect. DB: Listening reaches the source of the movement, whereas observation does not. K: Yes, I have observed, I have listened, I have played all kinds of games all my life. And I now see, that there is only one thing. That there is this constant darkness and I am acting in the darkness; in this wilderness which is darkness; whose centre is the self. I see that absolutely, completely; I can't argue against it any more. And `X' comes along and tells me this. In that wilderness a voice says there is water. You follow? It is not hope. There is immediate action in me. One must realize, that this constant movement in darkness is my life. You follow what I am saying? Can I, with all the experience, with all the knowledge which I have gathered over a million years, suddenly realize that I am living in total darkness? Because that means I have reached the end of all hope. Right? But my hope is also darkness. The future is out altogether, so I am left with this enormous darkness, and I am there. That means, the realization of that is the ending of becoming. I have reached that point and `X' tells me this is natural. You see, all the religions have said this division exists. DB: But, they say it can be overcome. K: It is the same pattern repeated. It doesn't matter who said it, but the fact is somebody in this wilderness is saying something, and in that wilderness I have been listening to every voice, and to my own voice, which has created more and more darkness. Yet, this is right. That means doesn't it, that when there is insight there is no division? DB: Yes. K: It is not your insight or my insight, it is insight. In that there is no division. DB: Yes. K: Which brings us to that ground we spoke of... DB: What about the ground? K: In that ground there is no darkness as darkness, or light as light. In that ground, there is no division. Nothing is born of will, or time, or thought. DB: Are you saying that light and darkness are not divided? K: Right. DB: Which means to say there is neither. K: Neither, that's it! There is something else. There is a perception that there is a different movement, which is `nondualistic'. DB: Non-dualistic means what? No division. K: No division. I won't use `non-dualistic'. There is no division. DB: But nevertheless there is movement. K: Of course. DB: What does that mean now, without division? K: I mean by movement, that movement which is not time. That movement doesn't breed division. So I want to go back, lead to the ground. If, in that ground, there is neither darkness nor light, no God or the son of God - there is no division - what takes place? Would you say that the ground is movement? DB: Well, it could be, yes. Movement is undivided. K: No. I say there is movement in darkness. DB: Yes, but we said there is no division of darkness and light, and yet you said there is movement. K: Yes. Would you say the ground is endless movement? DB: Yes. K: What does that mean? DB: Well, it is difficult to express. K: Keep on going into it; let's express it. What is movement, apart from movement from here to there, apart from time - is there any other movement? DB: Yes. K: There is. The movement from being to becoming, psychologically. There is the movement of distance, there is the movement of time. We say those are all divisions. Is there a movement which in itself has no division? When you have made that statement that there is no division, there is that movement surely? DB: Well, are you saying that when there is no division that movement is there? K: Yes, and I said, `X' says that is the ground. DB: Right. K: Would you say it has no end, no beginning? DB: Yes. K: Which means again time. DB: Can one say that movement has no form? K: No form - all that. I want to go a little further. What I am asking is, we said that when you have stated there is no division, this means no division in movement. DB: It flows without division, you see. K: Yes, it is a movement in which there is no division. Do I capture the significance of that? Do I understand the depth of that statement? A movement in which there is no division, which means no time, no distance as we know it. No element of time in it at all. So I am trying to see if that movement is surrounding man? DB: Yes, enveloping. K: I want to get at this. I am concerned with mankind, humanity, which is me. `X' has made several statements, and I have captured a statement which seems so absolutely true - that there is no division. Which means that there is no action which is divisive. DB: Yes. K: I see that. And I also ask, is that movement without time, etc? It seems that it is the world, you follow? DB: The universe. K: The universe, the cosmos, the whole. DB: The totality. K: Totality. Isn't there a statement in the jewish world, `Only God can say I am'? DB: Well, that's the way the language is built. It is not necessary to state it. K: No, I understand. You follow what I am trying to get at? DB: Yes, that only this movement is. K: Can the mind be of that movement? Because that is timeless, therefore deathless. DB: Yes, the movement is without death; in so far as the mind takes part in that, it is the same. K: You understand what I am saying? DB: Yes. But what dies when the individual dies? K: That has no meaning, because once I have understood there is no division... DB: ...then it is not important. K: Death has no meaning. DB: It still has a meaning in some other context. K: Oh, the ending of the body; that's totally trivial. But you understand? I want to capture the significance of the statement that there is no division, it has broken the spell of my darkness, and I see that there is a movement, and that's all. Which means death has very little meaning. DB: Yes. K: You have abolished totally the fear of death. DB: Yes, I understand that when the mind is partaking in that movement, then the mind is that movement. K: That's all! the mind is that movement. DB: Would you say that matter is also that movement? K: Yes, I would say everything is. In my darkness I have listened to `X'. That's most important. And his clarity has broken my spell. When he said there is no division, he abolished the division between life and death. I don't know if you see this? DB: Yes. K: One can never say then, `I am immortal'. It is so childish. DB: Yes, that's the division. K: Or, `I am seeking immortality'. Or, `I am becoming'. We have wiped away the whole sense of moving in darkness. Q: What then would be the significance of the world? Is there a significance to it? K: The world? Q: With man. DB: Society, do you mean? Q: Yes, it seems that when you make that statement, there is no division, and life is death - what then is the significance of man with all his struggle.? K: Man in darkness. What importance has that? It is like struggling in a locked room. That is the whole point. DB: Significance can only rise when the darkness is dispelled. K: Of course. Q: The only significance is the dispelling of the darkness. K: Oh, no, no! DB: Aren't we going to say that something more can be done besides dispelling the darkness? K: have listened very carefully to everything that you, who have sight, say. What you have done is to dispel the centre. In darkness I could invent many things of significance; that there is light, here is God, there is beauty, there is this and that. But it is still in the area of darkness. Caught in a room full of darkness, I can invent a lot of pictures, but I want to get something else. Is the mind the one who has this insight - who therefore dispels darkness and has understanding of the ground which is movement without time - is that mind itself the movement? DB: Yes, but it isn't the totality. The mind is the movement, but we are saying movement is matter, movement is mind. And we were saying that the ground may be beyond the universal mind. You said earlier that the movement, that the ground, is more than the universal mind, more than the emptiness. K: We said that; much more. DB: Much more. But we have to get this clear. We say that the mind is this movement. K: Yes, mind is the movement. DB: We are not saying that this movement is only mind? K: No, no, no. DB: That is the point I was trying to get correct. K: Mind is the movement - mind, in the sense, `the ground'. DB: But you said that the ground goes beyond the mind. K: Now just a minute: what do you mean by `beyond the mind'? DB: just going back to what we were discussing a few days ago: we said we have the emptiness, the universal mind, and then the ground is beyond that. K: Would you say beyond that is this movement? DB: Yes. The mind emerges from the movement as a ground, and falls back to the ground; that is what we are saying. K: Yes, that's right. Mind emerges from the movement. DB: And it dies back into the movement. K: That's right. it has its being in the movement. DB: Yes, and matter also. K: So, what I want to get at is, I am a human being faced with this ending and beginning. And `X' abolishes that. DB: Yes, it is not fundamental. K: It is not fundamental. One of the greatest fears of life, which is death, has been removed. DB: Yes. K: You see what it does to a human being when there is no death? It means the mind doesn't age - the ordinary mind I am talking about. I don't know if I am conveying this. DB: Let's go slowly. You say the mind does not age, but what if the brain cells age? K: I question it. DB: But how can we know that? K: Because there is no conflict, because there is no strain, there is no becoming, no movement. DB: This is something that it is hard to communicate with certainty about. K: Of course. You can't prove any of this. DB: But the other, what we have said so far... K: ...can be reasoned. DB: It is reason, and also you can feel it. But now you are stating something about the brain cells that I have no feeling for. It might be so; it could be so. K: I think it is so. I won't discuss it. When a mind has lived in the darkness and is in constant movement there is the wearing out, the darkness and is in constant movement there is the wearing out, the decay of the cells. DB: We could say that this conflict will cause cells to decay. But somebody might argue that perhaps even without conflict they could decay at a slower rate. Let's say if you were to live hundreds of years, for example, in time the cells would decay no matter what you did. K: Go into this slowly. DB: I can readily accept that the rate of decay of the cells could be cut down when we get rid of conflict. K: Decay can be slowed down. DB: Perhaps a great deal. K: A great deal. Ninety per cent. DB: That we could understand. But if you say a hundred per cent, then it is hard to understand. K: Ninety per cent. Wait a minute. It can be very, very greatly slowed down. And that means what? What happens to a mind that has no conflict? What is that mind, what is the quality of that mind which has no problem? You see, suppose such a mind lives in pure unpolluted air, having the right kind of food and so on, why can't it live two hundred years? DB: Well it is possible; some people have lived for a hundred and fifty years, living in very pure air, and eating good food. K: But you see, if those very people who have lived a hundred and fifty years, had no conflict, they might live very much longer. DB: They might. There was a case I was reading of a man in England who lived to be a hundred and fifty. And the doctors became interested in him. They wined and dined him, and then he died in a few days! K: Poor devil! Q: Krishnaji, you generally say that anything that lives in time, also dies in time. K: Yes, but the brain, which has had insight, has changed the cells. Q: Are you implying that even the organic brain does not live in time any more? K: No, don't bring in time yet. We are saying that insight brings about a change in the brain cells. Which means that the brain cells are no longer thinking in terms of time. Q: Psychological time? K: Of, course, that is understood. DB: If they are not so disturbed, they will remain in order and perhaps they will break down more slowly. We might increase the age limit from one hundred and fifty to two hundred years, provided one also had healthy living at all levels. K: Yes, but all that sounds so very trivial. DB: Yes, it doesn't seem to make much difference, although it is an interesting idea. K: What if I live another hundred years? We are trying to find out what effect this extraordinary movement has on the brain. DB: Yes. If we say the brain is in some way directly enveloped in this movement; that would bring it to order. But there is a real direct flow, physically. K: Not only physically. DB: But also mentally. K: Yes, both. It must have an extraordinary effect on the brain. Q: You talked earlier about energy. Not the everyday energy... K: We said that that movement is total energy. Now this insight has captured, seen, that extraordinary movement, and it is part of that energy. I want to come much closer to earth; I have lived with the fear of death, fear of not becoming, and so on. Suddenly I see there is no division, and I understand the whole thing. So what has happened to my brain - you follow? Let,s see something. See this whole thing, not verbally, but as a tremendous reality, as truth. With all your heart, mind, you see this thing. That very perception must affect your brain. DB: Yes. It brings order. K: Not only order in life but in the brain. DB: People can prove that if they are under stress the brain cells start to break down. And if you have order in the brain cells, then it is quite different. K: I have a feeling, Sir - don't laugh at it; it may be false, it may be true - I feel that the brain never loses the quality of that movement. DB: Once it has it. K: Of course. I am talking of the person who has been through all this. DB: So probably the brain never loses that quality. K: Therefore it is no longer involved in time. DB: It would no longer be dominated by time. The brain, from what we were saying, is not evolving in any sense, it is just a confusion. You can't say that man's brain has evolved during the last ten thousand years. You see science, knowledge, has evolved, but people felt the same about life several thousand years ago as they do now. K: I want to find out: in that silent emptiness that we went through, is the brain absolutely still? In the sense, no movement. DB: Not absolutely. You see, the blood is going in the brain. K: We are not talking of that. DB: What kind of movement are we discussing? K: I am talking of the movement of thought, the movement of any reaction. DB: Yes. There is no movement in which the brain moves independently. You were saying that there is the movement of the whole, but the brain does not go off on its own, as thought. K: You see, you have abolished death, which is a tremendously significant thing. And so I say, what is the brain, the mind, when there is no death. You follow? It has undergone a surgical operation. DB: We said the brain normally has the notion of death continually there in the background, and that notion is constantly disturbing the brain, because the brain foresees death, and it is trying to stop it. K: To stop the ending of itself, and so on. DB: It fore sees all that, and thinks it must stop it, but it can't. K: It can't. DB: And therefore it has a problem. K: A constant struggle with it. So all that has come to an end. What an extraordinary thing has taken place! How does it affect my daily life, because I have to live on this earth? My daily life is aggression, this everlasting becoming, striving for success - all that has gone. We will pursue this but we have understood a great deal today. DB: In bringing in the question of daily life you might bring in the question of compassion. K: Of course. Is that movement compassion? DB: It would be beyond. K: That's it. That's why one must be awfully careful. DB: Then again, compassion might emerge out of it. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 8 19TH APRIL 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'CAN INSIGHT BE AWAKENED IN ANOTHER?' KRISHNAMURTI: We were discussing what it is for the brain to have no movement. When a human being has been pursuing the path of becoming, and has gone through all that, and this sense of emptiness, silence and energy, he has abandoned almost everything and come to the point, the ground. So how does this insight affect his daily life? What is his relationship to society? What is his action with regard to war, and the whole world - a world that is really living and struggling in darkness? What is his action? I would say, as we agreed the other day, that it is non-movement. DAVID BOHM: Yes, we said before that the ground was movement without division. K: Without division. Yes, quite. DB: In some sense it seems inconsistent to say non-movement, while you say the ground is movement. K: Yes, the ground is movement. Would you say an average, educated, sophisticated man, with all his unpleasant activities, is constantly in movement? DB: Well, a certain kind of movement. K: A movement in time. DB: Yes. K: A movement in becoming. But we are discussing the man who has trodden that path (if I may use that word), and come to that point. From there, what is his action? We said, for the moment, non-action, non-movement. What does that mean? DB: It means, as you said, not taking part in this process of becoming. K: Of course, that is obvious. If he doesn't take part in this process, what part does he play? Is it one of complete non-action? DB: It is not clear why you should call it non-action. We might think that it was action of another kind, which is not part of the process of becoming. K: It is not becoming. DB: But it may still be action. K: He still has to live in the world. DB: In one sense, whatever you do is action, but his action is not directed towards the illusory process, it is not involved in it, but would be directed towards what underlies this illusory process. It would be directed perhaps towards considering the wrong turning which is continually coming out of the ground. Right? K: Yes, yes. You see, various religions have described a man who has been saved, who is illuminated, who has achieved something or other. They have described very clearly, especially in Hindu religious books, how he walks, how he looks, how he talks, the whole state of his being. I think that is merely a poetic description which... DB: You think it is imagination? K: I think a great deal of it is imagination. I have discussed this point with some, and it is not like that, not imagination. Somebody who describes it, knows exactly what it is. DB: Well, how should he know? It is not clear. K: So what is a man of that kind? How does he live in this world? This is a very interesting question, if you go into it deeply. There is a state of non-movement. That is, the non-movement which we have gone into. DB: You see, it is not clear exactly what you mean by non-movement. K: One becomes poetic but I am trying to avoid that! Although it would be right, even poetically: it is like a single tree in a field. There is no other tree, but that tree, whatever the name of that tree is, it is there. DB: But why do you say, `non-movement'? K: It is non-moving. DB: The tree stands of course. K: A tree is a living, moving thing. I don't mean that. DB: The tree in a sense is moving, but in relation to the field it stands. That is the picture we get. K: You see, someone comes to you, because you have gone from the beginning to the end. And now you are at the end with a totally different kind of movement, which is timeless, and all that. You are in that. I come to you and ask, `What is that state of mind? What is the state of your mind, that has walked on that path and ended something, that has totally moved out of darkness?' DB: If you say it is non-movement, are you implying that it is constant? K: It must be... But what do you mean by constant? Continuous? DB: No, no. K: Do you mean that it is.? QUESTIONER: ...static? K: Oh, no! DB: To stand firm, to stand together as a whole. That is really its literal meaning. K: Is that it? DB: That is the picture you have got of the tree as well. That is the picture which the tree in the field suggests. K: Yes, I know. That is too romantic and poetic, and it becomes rather deceptive. It is a nice image, but let's move from it. What is that mind? The quality of that mind that has started from beginning, and pursued the becoming, and gone through all that centre of darkness which has been wiped away? That mind must be entirely different. Now what does such a mind do, or not do, in the world which is in darkness? DB: Surely the mind does not do a thing; it does not enter into the movement of that world. K: Agreed. DB: And in a sense we say that it is constant - not fixed, but it does not move. K: Is it static? DB: No, it's not static. It is constant - which in a sense is also movement. There is a constancy which is not merely static, which is also, at the same time, movement. K: We said that movement was not the becoming movement. DB: Yes, but the ground movement which is completely free. K: What has happened to that mind? Let's go into it a little bit. It has no anxiety and no fear. You see the words `compassion' and `love' are beyond that. Right? DB: But they may emerge out of this ground. K: The mind being nothing, not a thing, and therefore empty of knowledge, would it always be acting in the light of insight? DB: It would be pervaded, if not always, by the quality of insight. K: Yes, that is what I mean. DB: Well `always' brings in time, you see. K: Remove the word. DB: I would use `constantly'. K: Yes, constantly; let's use the word `constant'. DB: It is a bit better, but not good enough. K: Yes. Let's use that word. It is acting constantly in that light, in that flash of insight. I think that is right. So what does that mean in one's daily life? How does one earn a livelihood? DB: That, surely, would be another point. You would have to find a way to stay alive. K: Stay alive. So that is why I am saying this: as civilization grows, begging is not allowed. DB: Is criminal. You have to find some way to stay alive. K: So what will he do? He has no profession, no special skill, no coin with which he can buy. DB: Well, wouldn't it be possible for this mind to earn enough to get what is needed to stay alive? K: How? Q: Why has he no skill to earn a livelihood? K: Why should he have skill? Why must one have skill to earn a livelihood? You say that, and another man says, `Why should I have skill of any kind?' I am just discussing, enquiring into this. DB: Suppose you had to take care of yourself, you would need a certain skill. If you were by yourself in a cave, you know... K: Ah, I don't want a cave! DB: I know. But, whoever it is, he has to live somewhere; he needs some skill to find the food which he needs. You see, if everybody were to say no skill is needed then the human race would perish. K: I am not sure. DB: Well, what would happen then? K: That is what I am coming to. Skill implies, as we said, knowledge; from knowledge, comes experience, and gradually one develops a skill. And that skill gives one an opportunity to earn a livelihood, either meagre or rich. But this man says, there may be a different way of living and earning. We are used to a pattern, and he says, `Look, that may be totally wrong'. DB: It depends what you mean by skill. For example, suppose he has to drive a car, surely that takes some skill? K: Yes. DB: Is he going to do without that? K: I had better go carefully into the word `skill'. DB: Yes. I mean skill could have a bad meaning - like being very clever at getting money. K: So this man is not avaricious, he i; not money-minded, he is not storing up for the future, he hasn't any insurance. But he has to live. When we use the word `skill' to mean driving a car... DB: ...or being a carpenter... If all those skills were to vanish, life would be impossible. K: The whole thing would collapse. DB: Yes. K: I am not sure. Do we mean that kind of skill must be denied? DB: It couldn't mean that. K: No. That would be too silly. DB: But then people become very skilful at getting other people to give them money, you see! Q: Is it that now we have made a division between living and skill, skill and working, living and earning a livelihood? K: That's it! I need to have food, I need to have clothes, and shelter. Q: But is the division necessary? As society is built now, we have a division between living and working. K: We have been through all that. We are talking of a man who has been through all this, and has come back to the world, and says, `Here I am'. What is his relationship to society, and what is he to do? Has he any relationship to society? DB: Well, not in a deep or fundamental sense, although there is a superficial relationship that he has to have. K: All right. A superficial contact with the world. DB: He has to obey the laws, he has to follow the traffic signals. K: Quite. But I want to find out, what is he to do? Write? Talk? That means skill. DB: Surely that kind of skill need not be harmful? K: I am just asking. DB: Like the other skills; like carpentry. K: Yes. That kind of skill. But what is he to do? I think if we could find out the quality of a mind that has been through all that from the beginning to the end, all that we have talked of in our recent discussions; that man's mind is entirely different, yet he is in the world. How does he look upon it? You have reached and come back - these are approximate terms - and I am an ordinary man, living in this world. So what is your relationship to me? Obviously none, because I am living in a world of darkness and you are not. So your relationship can only exist when I come out of it - when darkness ends. DB: Yes. K: Then there is only that; there is not a relationship. But now there is division between you and me. And I look at you with my eyes, which are accustomed to darkness and to division. But you are not. And yet you have to have some contact with me. You have to have, however superficial, however slight, a certain relationship with me. Is that relationship compassion, and not something translated by me as compassion? From my darkness I cannot judge what compassion is. Right? DB: Yes. That follows from that. K: I don't know what your love is, what your compassion is because my only love and compassion has been this. And so, what do I do with you? DB: Who are we talking about now? It is not clear to me whom we are discussing! K: You or `X', have been through all that, and come back. DB: Then why hasn't `Y' done so? K: `Y' has not. `Y' asks, `Who are you? You seem so different. Your way of looking at life is different.' And what will `Y' do with `X'? That is the question. Not what will `X' do to `Y'. I don't know if I am making it clear. DB: Yes, I understand. What will `Y' do with `X'? K: Our question until now has been what will `X' do with `Y', but I think we were putting the wrong question. What will `Y' do with `X'? I think what would happen generally is that `Y' would worship, kill or neglect him. Right? DB: Yes. K: If `Y' worships `X' then everything is very simple. He has the goodies of the world. But that doesn't answer my question. My question is not only what will `Y' do to `X', but what will `X' do with `Y'? `X's' demand is, `Look, walk out of this darkness; there is no answer in the darkness, so walk out.' It doesn't matter, whatever phrase we use - walk out, dispel it, get rid of it, etc. And `Y' then says, `Help me, show me the way', and is back again in darkness -you follow? So what will `Y' do to `X'? DB: I can't see that `Y' can do very much, except what you mentioned - to worship, or to do something else. K: To kill or neglect `X'. DB: But if compassion works in `X'... K: Yes, `X' is that. He won't even call it compassion. DB: No, but we call it that. Then `X' will work to find a way to penetrate the darkness. K: Wait! So `X's job is to work on darkness? DB: To discover how to penetrate darkness. K: In that way he is earning a living. DB: Well, possibly. K: No. I am talking seriously. DB: It depends on whether people are willing to pay him for it. K: No joking. Seriously. DB: It is possible. K: Probably `X' is the teacher. `X' is out of society. `X' is unrelated to this field of darkness and saying to the people who are caught in it, `Come out'. What's wrong with that? DB: Nothing is wrong with that. K: That is his means of livelihood. DB: It's perfectly all right as long as it works. Of course, if there were a lot of people like `X', there would have to be some limit. K: No, Sir. What would happen if there were lots of people like `X'? DB: That is an interesting question. I think there would be something revolutionary. K: That's just it. DB: The whole thing would change. K: Yes. If there were lots of people like that, they would not be divided. That is the whole point, right? DB: I think that even if ten or fifteen people were undivided they would exert a force that has never been seen in our history. K: Tremendous! That's right. DB: Because I don't think it has ever happened, that ten people have been undivided. K: That is `X's' job in life. He says that is the only thing. A group of those ten `X's' will bring a totally different kind of revolution. Will society stand for that? DB: They will have this extreme intelligence, and so they will find a way to do it, you see. K: Of course. DB: Society will stand for it, because the `X's' will be intelligent enough not to provoke society, and society will not react before it is too late. K: Quite right. You are saying something which is actually happening. Would you say then that the function of many `X's' is to awaken human beings to that intelligence which will dispel the darkness? And that this is `X's' means of livelihood? DB: Yes. K: Then there are those people who in darkness cultivate this and exploit people, but there are `X's' who don't exploit. All right. That seems very simple, but I don't think it is all that simple. DB: Right. K: Is that the only function of `X'? DB: Well it is really a difficult function. K: But I want to find out something much deeper than mere function. DB: Yes function is not enough. K: That's it. Apart from function, what is he to do? `X' says to `Y', `Listen; And `Y' takes time, and gradually, perhaps, at some time he will wake up and move away. And is that all `X' is going to do in life? DB: That can only be an outcome of something deeper. K: The deeper is all that; the ground. DB: Yes, the ground. K: But is that all he is to do in this world? just to teach people to move out of darkness? DB: Well, that seems to be the prime task at the moment, in the sense that, if this doesn't happen, the whole society will sooner or later collapse. We could ask whether he needs to be in some sense more deeply creative. K: What is that? DB: Well, it is not clear. K: Suppose `X' is you, and you have an enormous field in which to operate, not merely teaching me but having this extraordinary movement which is not of time. That is, you have this abounding energy, and you have produced all that to teach me to come out of darkness. DB: That can only be a part of it. K: So what does the rest do, you follow? I don't know if I am conveying this. DB: Well, this is what I tried to suggest by talking of some creative action, beyond this, taking place. K: Yes, beyond this. You may write, you may preach, you may heal, you may do this and that, but all those activities are rather trivial. But you have something else. Have I reduced you, `X', to my pettiness? You can't be so reduced. My pettiness says, `You must do something. You must preach, write, heal, do something to help me to move.' Right? You comply to the very smallest degree, but you have something much more than that, something immense. You understand my question? DB: Yes. So what happens? K: How is that immensity operating on `Y'? DB: Are you saying that there is some more direct action? K: Either there is more direct action, or `X' is doing something totally different to affect the consciousness of man. DB: What could this be? K: Because `X' is not `satisfied' with merely preaching and talking. That immensity which he is must have an effect, must do something. DB: Are you saying `must' in the sense of the feeling of needing to do it, or are you saying `must' in the sense of necessity? K: It must. DB: It must necessarily do so. But how will it affect mankind? You see, when you say this, it would suggest to people that there is some sort of extrasensory effect that spreads. K: That is what I am trying to capture. DB: Yes. K: That is what I am trying to convey. DB: Not merely through the words, through the activities or gestures. K: Let's leave the activity alone. That is simple. It is not just that, because that immensity must... DB: ...Necessarily act? There is a more direct action? K: No, no. All right. That immensity necessarily has other activities. DB: Other activities at other levels? K: Yes, other activities. This has been translated in the Hindu teachings as various degrees of consciousness. DB: There are different levels or degrees of acting. K: All that too is a very small affair. What do you say, Sir? DB: Well, since the consciousness emerges from the ground, this activity is affecting all mankind from the ground. K: Yes. DB: You see many people will find this very difficult to understand. K: I am not interested in many people. I want to understand you, `X' and me, `Y'. That ground, that immensity, is not limited to such a petty little affair. It couldn't be. DB: The ground includes physically the whole universe. K: Yes, the whole universe, and to reduce all that to... DB: ...these little activities... K: ...is all so silly. DB: I think that raises the question of what is the significance of mankind in the universe, or in the ground? K: Yes, that's it. DB: Because even the best of these little things that we have been doing have very little significance on that scale. Right? K: Yes, this is just opening the chapter. I think that `X' is doing something - not doing, but by his very existence... DB: ...he is making something possible? K: Yes. When you read of Einstein, he has made something possible, which man hadn't discovered before. DB: We can see that fairly easily because it works through the usual channels of society. K: Yes, I understand that. What is `X' bringing apart from the little things? Putting it into words makes it sound wrong. `X' has that immense intelligence, that energy, that something, and he must operate at a much greater level than one can possibly conceive, which must affect the consciousness of those who are living in darkness. DB: Possibly so. The question is, will this effect show in any way? You know, manifestly. K: Apparently not. If you hear the television or radio news, and know what is happening all over the world, apparently it is not doing so. DB: That is what is difficult, and a matter of great concern. K: But it must have an effect. It has to. DB: Why do you say it has to? K: Because light must affect darkness. DB: perhaps `Y' might say that, living in darkness, he is not sure that there is such an effect. He might say perhaps there is, but I want to see it manifest. Not seeing anything and still being in darkness, he then asks, what shall I do? K: I understand that. So are you saying that `X's' only activity is just writing, teaching etc? DB: No. Merely that it may well be that the activity is much greater, but it doesn't show. If only we could see it! K: How would it be shown? How would `Y', who wants proof of it, see it? DB: `Y' might say something like this: many people have made a similar statement, and some of them have obviously been wrong. But one wants to say it could be true. You see, until now, I think the things we have said make sense, and they follow to a certain extent. K: Yes, I understand all that. DB: And now you say something which goes much further. Other people have said things like that and one feels that they were on the wrong track, that they, or at least some of these people, were fooling themselves. K: No. `X' says, we are being very logical. DB: Yes, but at this stage logic will not carry us any further. K: It is very reasonable! We have been through all that. So `X's, mind is not acting in an irrational way. DB: You could say that, having seen the thing was reasonable, so far, `Y' may have some confidence that it could go further. K: Yes, that is what I am trying to say. DB: Of course, there is no proof. K: No. DB: So could we explore? K: That is hat I am trying to do. Q: What about the other activities of `X'? We said he has the function of teaching, but also that `X' has other activities. K: He must have. Necessarily must. Q: But what? K: I don't know; we are trying to find that out. DB: You are saying that somehow he makes possible an activity of the ground in the whole consciousness of mankind which would not have been possible without him. K: Yes. Q: His contact with `Y' is not only verbal. `Y' listens but there is some other quality... K: Yes, but `X' says all that is a petty little affair. That is, of course, understood, but `X' says there is something much greater. Q: The effect of `X' is perhaps far greater than can be put in words. K: We are trying to find out what that greater is that must necessarily be operating. Q: Is it something that appears in the daily life of `X'? K: Yes. In his daily life `X' is apparently doing fairly small things - teaching, writing, book-keeping, or whatever. But is that all? It seems so silly. DB: Are you saying that in the daily life `X' does not look so different from anybody else? K: No, apparently not. DB: But there is something else going on which does not show. Right? K: That's it. When `X' talks it may be different, he may say things differently but... DB: ...That is not fundamental, because there are so many people who say things differently from others. K: I know. But the man who has walked through all that right from the beginning! If such a man has the whole of that energy to call upon, to reduce it all to these petty little things seems ridiculous. DB: Let me ask a question: Why does the ground require this man to operate on mankind? Why can't the ground, as it were, operate directly on mankind to clear things up? K: Ah, just a minute, just a minute. Are you asking why the ground demands action? DB: Why does it require a particular man to affect mankind? K: Oh, that I can easily explain. It is part of existence, like the stars. Q: Can the immensity act directly on mankind? Does it have to inform a man to enter the consciousness of mankind? K: We are talking about something else. I want to find out if `X' says, I am not going to be reduced only to writing and talking; that is too small and petty. And the other question is, why does the ground need this man? It doesn't need him. DB: But when he is here, the ground will use him. K: That is so. DB: Well, would it be possible that the ground could do something to clear this up? K: That is what I want to find out. That is why I am saying, in different words, that the ground doesn't need the man, but the man has touched the ground. DB: Yes. K: So the ground is using him, let's say employing him. He is part of that movement. Is that all? Do you follow what I mean? Am I asking the wrong questions? Why should he do anything? Except this? DB: Well, perhaps he does nothing. K: That very doing nothing, may be the doing. DB: Doing nothing makes possible the action of the ground. It may be that. In doing nothing which has any specified aim... K: That's right. No specified content which can be translated into human terms. DB: Yes, but still he is supremely active in doing nothing. Q: Is there an action which is beyond time, for that man? K: He is that... Q: Then we cannot ask for a result from that man. K: He is not asking for results. Q: But `Y' is asking for a result. K: No. Perhaps `X' says, I am concerned to talk, etc., which is a very small thing. But there is a vast field which must affect the whole of mankind. DB: There is an analogy which may not be very good but we can consider it. In chemistry, a catalyst makes possible a certain action without itself taking part, but merely by being what it is. K: Yes, is that what is happening? Even that is a small affair. DB: Yes. Q: And even there `Y' would say it isn't happening, because the world is still in a mess. So is there a truth in the world for the activity of that man? K: `X' says he is sorry, but that is no question at all I am not interested in proving anything. It isn't a mathematical or a technical problem to be shown and proved. `X' says that he has walked from the beginning of man to the very end of man, and that there is a movement which is timeless. The ground which is the universe, the cosmos, everything. And the ground doesn't need the man, but the man has come upon it. And he is still a man in the world, who says, `I write and do something or other,' not to prove the ground, not to do anything. `X' does that just out of compassion. But there is a much greater movement which necessarily plays a part in the world. Q: Does the greater movement play a part through `X'? K: Obviously, `X' says that there is something else operating which cannot possibly be put into words. He asks, `What am I to do?' There is nothing which a man like `Y' will understand. He will iMmediately translate it into some kind of illusory thing. But `X' says there is something else. Otherwise it is all so childish. DB: I think the general view which people are developing now is that the universe has no meaning, that it moves any old way, things just happen, and none of them has any meaning. K: None of them has meaning for the man who is here, but the man who is there, speaking relatively, says it is full of meaning, and not invented by thought. All right, let's leave the vastness, and all that. `X' says, perhaps there will be ten people with this insight and that might affect society. It will not be communism, socialism, this or that political reorganization. It will be totally different, and based on intelligence and compassion. DB: Well, if there were ten, they might find a way to spread this much more. K: That's what I am trying to get at. DB: What do you mean? K: `X' brings the universe, but I translate it into something trivial. DB: Are you saying that if the whole of mankind were to see this that would be something different? K: Oh, yes, of course! DB: Would it be new... K: ...It would be paradise on earth. DB: It would be like an organism of a new kind. K: Of course. But you see, I am not satisfied with this. DB: Well, what is it? K: I am not `satisfied' in leaving this immensity to be reduced to some few words. It seems so stupid, so incredible. You see man, `Y', is concerned with concepts like `show me', `prove it to me', `what benefit has it?', `will it affect my future?' You follow? He is concerned with all that. And he is looking at `X' with eyes that are accustomed to this pettiness! So, he reduces that immensity to his pettiness, and puts it in a temple and has therefore lost it completely. But `X' says, I won't even look at that; there is something so immense, please do look at it. But `Y' is always translating it by wanting demonstration, proof or reward. He is always concerned with that. `X' brings light. That's all he can do. Isn't that enough? DB: To bring the light which would allow other people to be open to the immensity? K: Is it like this? We only see a small part, but that very small part extends to infinity? DB: That small part of what? K: No. We see immensity only as a very small thing. And that immensity is the whole universe. I can't help but think that it must have some tremendous effect on `Y; on society. DB: Certainly the perception of this must have an effect, but it seems that this is not in the consciousness of society at the moment. K: I know. DB: But you are saying still the effect is there? K: Yes. Q: Are you saying that the perception of even a small part is the infinity? K: Of course, of course. Q: Is it in itself the changing factor? DB: Do you think it is possible that a thing like this could divert the course of mankind away from the dangerous path it is taking? K: Yes, that is what I think. But to divert the course of man's destruction somebody must listen. Right? Somebody - ten people -must listen! DB: Yes. K: Listen to that immensity calling. DB: So the immensity may divert the course of man. The individual cannot do it. K: Yes. The individual cannot do it, obviously. But `X' who is supposed to be an individual, has trodden this path, and says, `Listen'. But man does not listen. DB: Well, then, is it possible to discover how to make people listen? K: No, then we are back! DB: What do you mean? K: Don't act; you have nothing to do. DB: What does it mean not to do a thing? K: I realize, as `Y', that whatever I do - whether I sacrifice, practise, renounce - whatever I do, I am still living in that circle of darkness. So `X' says, `Don't act; you have nothing to do.' You follow? But that is translated by `Y', who does everything except wait and see what happens. We must pursue this, Sir, otherwise it is all so hopeless from the point of view of `Y'. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 9 1ST JUNE 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'SENILITY AND THE BRAIN CELLS' KRISHNAMURTI: I would like to talk over with you, and perhaps with Narayan [Mr G. Narayan, Principal of the Rishi Valley School in India.] too, what is happening to the human brain. We have a civilization that is highly cultivated, and yet at the same time barbarous, with selfishness clothed in all kinds of spiritual garbs. Deep down, however, there is a frightening selfishness. Man's brain has been evolving through millennia upon millennia, yet it has come to this divisive, destructive point, which we all know. So I am wondering whether the human brain - not a particular brain, but the human brain - is deteriorating? Whether it is just in a slow and steady decline? Or whether it is possible in one's lifetime to bring about in the brain a total renewal from all this; a renewal that will be pristine, original, unpolluted? I have been wondering about this, and I would like to discuss it. I think the human brain is not a particular brain; it doesn't belong to me, or to anyone else. It is the human brain which has evolved over millions of years. And in that evolution it has gathered tremendous experience, knowledge and all the cruelties, vulgarities and brutalities of selfishness. Is there a possibility of its sloughing off all this, and becoming something else? Because apparently it is functioning in patterns. Whether it is a religious pattern, a scientific, a business, or a family pattern, it is always operating, functioning in small narrow circles. Those circles are clashing against each other, and there seems to be no end to this. So what will break down this forming of patterns, so that there is no falling into other new patterns, but breaking down the whole system of patterns, whether pleasant or unpleasant? After all, the brain has had many shocks, challenges and pressures upon it, and if it is not capable of renewing or rejuvenating itself, there is very little hope. You follow? DAVID BOHM: You see, one difficulty might present itself. If you are thinking of the brain structure, we cannot get into the structure, physically. K: Physically we cannot. I know, we have discussed this. So what is the brain to do? The brain specialists can look at it, take the dead brain of a human being and examine it, but it doesn't solve the problem. Right? DB: No. K: So what is a human being to do, knowing it cannot be changed from outside? The scientist, the brain specialist and the neurologist explain various things but their explanations, their investigations, are not going to solve this. DB: Well, there is no evidence that they can. K: No evidence. DB: Some people who do bio-feedback think that they can influence the brain, connecting an instrument to the electrical potentials in the skull and being able to look at them; you can also change your heart beat and blood pressure and other things. These people have raised the hope that something could be done. K: But they are not succeeding. DB: They are not getting very far. K: And we can't wait for these scientists and bio-feedbackers -sorry! - to solve the problem. So what shall we do? DB: The next question is whether the brain can be aware of its own structure. K: Can the brain be aware of its own movement? And can the brain not only be aware of its own movement, but itself have enough energy to break all patterns and move out of them? DB: You have to ask to what extent the brain is free to break out of patterns? K: What do you mean? DB: Well, you see, if you begin by saying that the brain is caught in a pattern, it may not be so. K: But apparently it is. DB: As far as we can see. It may not be free to break out. It may not have the power. K: That is what I have said: not enough energy, not enough power. DB: Yes, it may not be able to take the action needed to get out. K: So it has become its own prisoner. Then what? DB: Then that is the end. K: Is that the end? DB: If that is true, then that is the end. If the brain cannot break out then perhaps people would choose to try some other way to solve the problem. NARAYAN: When we speak of the brain, in one sense it is connected to the senses and the nervous system; the feedback is there. Is there another instrument to which the brain is connected which has a different effect on the brain? K: What do you mean by that? Some other factor? N: Some other factor in the human system itself. Because, obviously, through the senses the brain does get nourishment, but still that is not enough. Is there some other internal factor which gives energy to the brain? K: You see, I want to discuss this. The brain is constantly occupied with various problems, with holding on, attachment, and so on. It is constantly in a state of preoccupation. That may be the central factor. And, if it is not in occupation, does it go sluggish? If it is not occupied, can it maintain the energy that is required to break down the patterns? DB: Now the first point is that if the brain is not occupied, somebody might think that it would just take things easy. K: Become lazy and all that! I don't mean that. DB: If you mean not occupied, but still active... K: Of course. I mean that. DB: Then we have to go into what is the nature of the activity. K: Yes. This brain is so occupied with conflicts, struggles, attachments, fears and pleasures. And this occupation gives to the brain its own energy. If it is not occupied, will it become lazy, drugged, and so lose its elasticity, as it were? Or will that unoccupied state give the brain the required energy to break the patterns? DB: What makes you say this might happen? We were discussing the other day that when the brain is kept busy with intellectual activity and thought, it does not decay and shrink. K: As long as it is thinking, moving, living. DB: Thinking in a rational way; then it remains strong. K: Yes. That is what I want to get at too. Which is, as long as it is functioning, moving, thinking rationally... DB: ...it remains strong. If it starts irrational movement, then it breaks down. Also if it gets caught in a routine it begins to die. K: That's it. If the brain is caught in any routine - the meditation routine, or the routine of the priests. DB: Or the daily life of the farmer... K: ...the farmer, etc., it must gradually become dull. DB: Not only that, but it seems to shrink. K: To shrink physically. DB: Perhaps some of the cells die? K: To shrink physically, and the opposite to that is the eternal occupation with business - by anyone who does a routine job... thinking, thinking, thinking! And we believe that that also prevents shrinking. DB: Surely experience seems to show that it does, from measurements that have been made. K: Yes, it does. That's it. DB: The brain starts to shrink at a certain age. Now that is what they have discovered, and just as when the body is not being used the muscles begin to lose their flexibility... K: So, take lots of exercise! DB: Well, they say exercise the body and exercise the brain. K: Yes. If it is caught in any pattern, any routine, any directive, it must shrink. DB: Could we go into what makes it shrink? K: That is fairly simple. It is repetition. DB: Repetition is mechanical, and doesn't really use the full capacity of the brain. K: One has noticed that people who have spent years and years in meditation are the most dull people on earth. And also with lawyers and professors there is ample evidence of all that. N: It is suggested that rational thinking postpones senility. But rational thinking itself can sometimes become a pattern. DB: It might. Rational thinking pursued in a narrow area might become part of the pattern too. K: Of course, of course. DB: But is there some other way? K: We will go into that. DB: But let's clear up things about the body first. You see, if somebody does a lot of exercise for the body, it remains strong, but it can become mechanical. K: Yes. DB: And therefore it would have a bad effect. N: What about the various traditional religious instruments -yoga, tantra, kundalini, etc? K: I know. Oh, they must shrink! Because of what is happening. Take yoga for example. It used not to be vulgarized, if I may use that word. It was kept strictly to the very few, who were not concerned about kundalini and all that, but who were concerned with leading a moral, ethical, so-called spiritual life. You see, I want to get at the root of this. DB: I think there is something related to this. It seems that before man was organized into society, he was living close to nature, and it was not possible to live in a routine. K: No, it was not. DB: But it was completely insecure. K: So we are saying that the brain itself becomes extraordinarily alive - is not caught in a pattern - if it lives in a state of uncertainty? Without becoming neurotic! DB: I think that is more clear when you say not becoming neurotic - then certainty becomes a form of neurosis. But I would rather that the brain lives without having certainty, without demanding it, without demanding certain knowledge. K: So are we saying that knowledge also withers the brain? DB: Yes, when it is repetitious and becomes mechanical. K: But knowledge itself? DB: Well, we have to be very careful there. I think that knowledge has a tendency to become mechanical. That is, it gets fixed, but we could always be learning, you see. K: But learning from a centre, learning as an accumulative process! DB: Learning with something fixed. You see, we learn something as fixed, and then you learn from there. If we were to be learning without holding anything permanently fixed... K: Learning and not adding. Can we do that? DB: Yes, I think to a certain extent we have to drop our knowledge. You see, knowledge may be valid up to a point, and then it ceases to be valid. It gets in the way. You could say that our civilization is collapsing because of too much knowledge. K: Of course. DB: We don't discard what is in the way. N: Many forms of knowledge are additive. Unless you know the previous thing, you can't do the next thing. Would you say that kind of knowledge is repetitive? DB: No. As long as we are learning. But if we hold some principle, or the centre, fixed, and say it cannot change, then that knowledge becomes mechanical. But, for example, suppose you have to make a living. People must organize society, and so on, and they need knowledge. K: But there we add more and more. DB: That's right. We may also get rid of some. K: Of course. DB: Some gets in the way, you see. It is continually moving there. K: Yes, but I am asking, apart from that, about knowledge itself. DB: Do you mean knowledge without this content? K: Yes; the knowing mind. DB: Which merely wants knowledge, is that what you are saying? Knowledge for its own sake? K: Yes. I want to question the whole idea of having knowledge. DB: But again, it is not too clear, because we accept that we need some knowledge. K: Of course, at a certain level. DB: So it is not clear what kind of knowledge it is that you are questioning. K: I am questioning the experience that leaves knowledge, that leaves a mark. DB: Yes, but what kind of mark? A psychological mark? K: Psychological, of course. DB: You are questioning this, rather than knowledge of technique and matter, and so on. But you see, when you use the word knowledge by itself, it tends to include the whole. K: We have said that knowledge at a certain level is essential; there you can add and take away and keep on changing. But I am questioning whether psychological knowledge is not in itself a factor of the shrinking of the brain. DB: What do you mean by psychological knowledge? Knowledge about the mind, knowledge about myself? K: Yes. Knowledge about myself, and living in that knowledge, and accumulating that knowledge. DB: So if you keep on accumulating knowledge about yourself or about relationships... K: ...yes, about relationships. That's it. Would you say such knowledge helps the brain, or makes the brain somewhat inactive, makes it shrink? DB: Brings it into a rut. K: Yes. DB: But one should see what it is about this knowledge that makes trouble. K: What is this knowledge that makes so much trouble? In relationship, that knowledge creates trouble. DB: Yes, it gets in the way because it fixes. K: If I have an image about someone, that knowledge is obviously going to impede our relationship. It becomes a pattern. DB: Yes, the knowledge about myself and about him and how we are related, makes a pattern. K: And therefore that becomes a routine and so it loses its energy. DB: Yes, and it occurred to me that routine in that area is more dangerous than routine in, say, the area of daily work. K: That's right. DB: And if routine in ordinary work can shrink the brain, then in that area it might do some worse thing, because it has a bigger effect. K: Can the brain, in psychological matters, be entirely free from this kind of knowledge? Look! I am a businessman, and get into the car, bus, taxi or tube train, and I am thinking about what I am going to do, whom I am going to meet in connection with business. My mind is all the time living in that area. Then I come home; There is my wife and children; sex and all that. That also becomes a psychological knowledge from which I am acting. So there is the knowledge of my business, and also the knowledge with regard to my wife and my reactions in relationship. These two are in contradiction, unless I am unaware of them, and just carry on. If I am aware of these two, it becomes a disturbing factor. DB: Also people find that this is a routine. They get bored with it, and they begin to... K: ...divorce, and then the whole circus begins! DB: They may hope that by becoming occupied with something else they will get out of their boredom. K: Yes, by going to church, etc. Any escape is an occupation. So I am asking whether this psychological knowledge is not a factor of shrinkage of the brain? DB: Well, it could be a factor. K: It is. DB: If knowledge of your profession or skill can be a factor, then this psychological knowledge is stronger. K: Of course. Much stronger. N: When you say psychological knowledge you are making a distinction between psychological knowledge and, let us say, scientific knowledge or factual knowledge? K: Of course, we have said that. N: But I am a little wary of the claim that scientific knowledge and other types of factual knowledge help to extend the brain, to make it bigger. That in itself doesn't lead anywhere. Though it postpones energy. K: Dr. Bohm makes this very clear. Rational thinking becomes merely routine; I think logically, and therefore I have learned the trick of that, but I keep on repeating it. N: That is what happens in most forms of rational thinking. K: Of course. DB: I think that there is a dependence on being faced with continual problems. K: Of course. DB: You see, lawyers may feel that their brains will last longer, because they are presented with constantly different problems, and therefore they cannot think entirely according to routine! K: But, just a minute! They may have different clients with different problems, but they are acting from fixed knowledge. DB: They would not say entirely, they have got to find new facts, and so on. K: They are not functioning entirely in routine but the basis is knowledge - precedence and book knowledge and experience with various clients. DB: But then you would have to say that some other more subtle degeneration of the brain takes place, not merely shrinkage. K: That's right. That's what I want to get at. DB: You see, when a baby is born, the brain cells have very few cross connections; these gradually increase in number, and then, as a person approaches senility, they begin to go back. So the quality of those cross connections could be wrong. If, for example, we repeated them too often, they would get too fixed. N: Are all the brain functions confined to rational forms, or are there some functions which have a different quality? DB: Well, it is known that a large part of the brain deals with movement of the body, with muscles, with various organs and so on, and this part does not shrink with age, although the part that deals with rational thought, if it is not used, does shrink. Then there may be other functions that are totally unknown; that is, very little is actually known about the brain. K: What we are saying is that we are only using one part of the brain. There is only partial activity, partial occupation, either rational or irrational. But as long as the brain is occupied it must be in that limited area. Would you say that? DB: Then what will happen when it is not occupied? We can say that it may tend to spend most of the time occupied in the limited set of functions which are mechanical, and that this will produce some subtle degeneration of the brain tissue, since anything like that will affect the brain tissue. K: Are we saying that senility is the result of a mechanical way of living? Of mechanical knowledge, so that the brain has no freedom, no space? DB: That is the suggestion. It is not necessarily accepted by all the people who work on the brain. They have shown that the brain cells start to die around the age of thirty or forty at a steady rate, but this may be a factor. I don't think their measurements are so good that they can test effectively how the brain is used. You see, they are merely rough measurements, made statistically. But you want to propose that this death or degeneration of the brain cells comes from the wrong way of using the brain? K: That's right. That is what I am trying to get at. DB: Yes, an there is a little bit of evidence from the scientists, although I think that they don't know very much about it. K: You see, scientists, brain specialists, are, if I may put it simply, examining things outside, but not taking themselves as guinea-pigs, and not going into that. DB: Mostly, you see, except for those who do bio-feedback, they are trying to work on themselves in a very indirect way. K: Yes, but I feel we haven't time for all that. DB: It is too slow, and it isn't very deep. K: So let's come back to the realization that any activity which is repeated, which is directed in the narrow sense, any method, any routine, logical or illogical, does affect the brain. We have understood that very clearly. Knowledge at a certain level is essential, but psychological knowledge about oneself, one's experiences, etc. becomes routine. The images I have about myself also obviously become routine, and all that helps to bring about a shrinkage of the brain. I have understood all that very clearly. And any kind of occupation, apart from the mechanical... no, not mechanical... DB: ...physical. K: ...apart from physical occupation, brings about shrinkage of the brain. Now how is this process to stop? And if it does stop, will there be a renewal? DB: I think that some brain scientists would doubt that the brain cells could be renewed, and I don't know that there is any proof one way or the other. K: I think they can be renewed. That is what I want to get at. DB: So we have to discuss that. N: Are you implying that mind is different from the brain, that mind is distinct from the brain? K: Not quite. DB: You have spoken of universal mind. N: Mind, in the sense that one has access to this mind, and it is not the brain. Do you consider that a possibility? K: I don't quite follow this. I would say that the mind is all-inclusive. When it is all-inclusive, of brain, emotions - all that; when it is totally whole, not divisive in itself, there is a quality which is universal. Right? N: One has access to it? K: Not one: no, you can't reach it. You can't say, I have access to it. N: I am only saying access. One doesn't possess it, but... K: You can't possess the sky! N: No, my point is, is there a way of being open to it and is there a function of the mind through which the whole of it can become accessible? K: I think there is. We may come to that presently if we can stick to this point: We are asking now, can the brain renew itself, rejuvenate, become young again without any shrinkage at all? I think it can. I want to open a new chapter and discuss this. psychologically, knowledge that man has acquired is crippling it. The Freudians, the Jungians, the latest psychologist, the latest psychotherapist, are all helping to make the brain shrink. Sorry! I don't mean to give offence.... N: Is there a way of forgetting this knowledge then? K: No, no. Not forgetting. I see what psychological knowledge is doing and I see the waste; I see what is taking place if I follow that line. It is obvious. So I don't follow that avenue at all. I discard analysis altogether. That is a pattern we have learnt, not discard analysis altogether. That is a pattern we have learnt, not only from the recent psychologists and psychotherapists but also through the tradition of a million years of analysis, of introspect, or of saying, `I must', and `I must not', `This is right and that is wrong'. You know the whole process. I personally don't do it, and so I reject that whole method. We are coming to a point, which is direct perception and immediate action. Our perception is generally directed by knowledge, by the past, which is knowledge perceiving, and with action arising, acting from that. This is a factor of shrinking of the brain, of senility. Is there a perception which is not time binding? And so action which is immediate? Am I making myself clear? That is, as long as the brain, which has evolved through time, is still living in a pattern of time, it is becoming senile. If we could break that pattern of time, the brain has broken out of its pattern, and therefore something else takes place. N: How does the brain break out of the pattern of time? K: We will come to that, but first let's see if we agree. DB: Well, you are saying that the brain is the pattern of time, and perhaps this should be clarified. I think that what you mean by analysis is some sort of process based on past knowledge, which organizes our perception, and in which we take a series of steps to try to accumulate knowledge about the whole thing. And now you say that this is a pattern of time, and we have to break out of it. K: If we agree that this is so, the brain is functioning in a pattern of time. DB: Then we have to ask, what other pattern is possible? K: But wait... DB: What other movement is possible? K: No. First let's understand this, not merely verbally, but let's actually see that it is happening. That our action, our way of living, our whole thinking, is bound by time, or comes with the knowledge of time. DB: Certainly our thinking about ourselves, any attempt to analyse ourselves, to think about ourselves, involves this process. K: This process, which is of time. Right? N: That is a difficulty: when you say knowledge and experience, they are a certain cohesive energy or force that binds you. K: Which means what? Time binding! N: Time binding and... K: ...and therefore the pattern of centuries, of millennia, is being repeated. N: Yes. But I am saying that this has a certain cohesive force. K: Of course, of course. All illusions have an extraordinary vitality. N: Very few break through. K: Look at all the churches and what immense vitality they have. N: No, apart from these churches, one's personal life, it has a certain cohesive force that keeps one back. One can't break away from it. K: What do you mean, it keeps you back? N: It has a magnetic attraction, it sort of pulls you back. You can't free yourself of it unless you have some instrument with which you can act. K: We are going to find out if there is a different approach to the problem. DB: When you say, a different instrument, that is not clear. The whole notion of an instrument involves time, because if you use any instrument, it is a process which you plan. K: Time; that's just it. N: That is why I use the word `instrument; I mean, it is effective. K: It has not been effective. On the contrary, it is destructive. So do I see the very truth of its destructiveness? Not just the theory, the idea, but the actuality of it. If I do, then what takes place? The brain has evolved through time, and has been functioning, living, acting, believing in that time process. But when one realizes that all this helps to make the brain senile, when one sees that as true then what is the next step? N: Are you implying that the very seeing that it is destructive is a releasing factor? K: Yes. N: And there is no need for an extra instrument? K: No. Don't use the word instrument. There is no other factor. We are concerned to end this shrinkage and senility and in asking whether the brain itself, the cells, the whole thing, can move out of time? I am not talking about immortality, and all that kind of stuff Can the brain move out of time altogether? Otherwise deterioration, shrinkage and senility are inevitable, and even when senility may not show, the brain cells are becoming weaker, and so on. N: If the brain cells are material and physical, somehow or other they have to shrink through time; indeed it can't be helped. The brain cell, which is tissue, cannot in physical terms be immortal. DB: perhaps the rate of shrinkage would be greatly slowed down. If a person lives a certain number of years, and his brain begins to shrink long before he dies, then he becomes senile. Now if the deterioration would slow then... K: ...not only slow down, Sir. DB: ...Well, regenerate... K: ...be in a state of non-occupation. DB: I think Narayan is saying that it is impossible for any material system to last for ever. K: I am not talking about lasting for ever - though I am not sure if it can't last for ever! No, this is very serious, I am not pulling anybody's leg. DB: If all the cells were to regenerate in the body and in the brain, then the whole thing could go on indefinitely. K: Look, we are now destroying the body, through drink, smoking, overindulgence in sex and all kinds of things. We are living most un-healthily. Right? If the body were in excellent health, maintained right through - which means no heightened emotions, no strain, no sense of deterioration, the heart functioning normally - then why not! DB: Well... K: ...which means what? No travelling, and all the rest of it.... DB: No excitement. K: If the body remains in one quiet place I am sure it can last a great many more years than it does now. DB: Yes, I think that is true. There have been many cases of people living for a hundred and fifty years in quiet places. I think that is all you are talking about. You are not really suggesting something lasting for ever? K: So the body can be kept healthy, and since the body affects the mind, nerves, senses and all that, they also can be kept healthy. DB: And if the brain is kept in the right action... K: ...yes, without any strain. DB: You see the brain has a tremendous affect on organizing the body. The pituitary gland controls the entire system of the body glands; also all the organs or the body are controlled by the brain. When the mind deteriorates, the body starts to deteriorate. K: Of course. DB: They work together. K: They go together. So can this brain - which is not `my' brain - which has evolved through millions of years, which has had all kinds of destructive or pleasant experiences... DB: You mean it is a typical brain, not a particular brain, peculiar to some individual? When you say `not mine', you mean any brain belonging to mankind, right? K: Any brain. DB: They are all basically similar. K: Similar: that is what I said. Can that brain be free of all this? Of time? I think it can. DB: Perhaps we could discuss what it means to be free of time. You see, at first the suggestion that the brain be free of time might sound crazy, but, obviously, we all know that you don't mean that the clock stops. K: Science fiction and all that! DB: The point is, what does it really mean to be psychologically free of time? K: That there is no tomorrow. DB: But wp know there is tomorrow. K: But psychologically... DB: Can you describe better, what you mean when you say `no tomorrow'? K: What does it mean to be living in time? Let's take the other side first, because then we come to the other. What does it mean to live in time? Hope; thinking and living in the past, and acting from the knowledge of the past; images, illusions, prejudices - they are all an outcome of the past. All that is time, and that is producing chaos in the world. DB: Well, suppose we say that if we are not living psychologically in time, we may still order our actions by the watch. The thing that is puzzling is if somebody says, I am not living in time, but I must keep an appointment. You see? K: Of course; you can't sit here for ever. DB: So you say, I am looking at the watch, but I am not psychologically extending how I am going to feel in the next hour, when I have fulfilment of desire, etc. K: I am just saying that the way we are living now is in the field of time. And there we have brought all kinds of problems and suffering. Is that right? DB: Yes, but it should be made clear why this necessarily produces suffering. You are saying that if you live in the field of time suffering is inevitable. K: Inevitable. DB: Why? K: It is simple. Time has built the ego, the `me', the image of me sustained by society, by education, which has built through millions of years. All that is the result of time. And from there I act. N: Yes. DB: Towards the future psychologically; that is, towards some future state of being. K: Yes. Which means that the centre is always becoming. DB: Trying to become better. K: Better, nobler, or anything else. So all that, the constant endeavour to become something psychologically, is a factor of time. DB: Are you saying that the endeavour to become produces suffering? K: Obviously. It is simple. All that is divisive. It divides me from others, and so you are different from me. And when I depend on somebody, and that somebody is gone, I feel lonely and miserable. All that goes on. So we are saying that any factor of division, which is the very nature of the self, must inevitably cause suffering. DB: Are you saying that through time the self is set up, and then the self introduces division and conflict and so on? But that if there were no psychological time, then perhaps this entire structure would collapse, and something entirely different would happen? K: That's it. That is what I am saying. And therefore the brain itself has broken up. DB: Well, that is the next step - to say that the brain has broken out of that rut, and perhaps could then regenerate. It doesn't follow logically, but still it could be so. K: I think it does follow logically. DB: Well, it follows logically that it would stop degenerating. K: Yes. DB: And are you adding further that it would start to regenerate? K: You look sceptical? N: Yes, because the whole human predicament is bound to time. K: We know that. N: Society, individuals, the whole structure. K: I know, I know. N: It is so forceful that anything feeble doesn't work here. K: What do you mean - `feeble'? N: The force of this is so great that what has to break through must have tremendous energy. K: Yes. N: And no individual seems to be able to generate sufficient energy to be able to break through. K: But you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, if I may point this out. When you use the word `individual', you have moved away from the fact that our brain is universal. N: Yes, I admit that. K: There is no individuality. N: That brain is conditioned this way. K: Yes, we have been through all that. It is conditioned this way through time. Time is conditioning - right? It is not that time has created the conditioning, time itself is the factor of conditioning. So can that time element not exist? (We are talking about psychological time, not the ordinary physical time.) I say it can. We have said that the ending of suffering comes about when the self, which is built up through time, is no longer there. A man who is actually going through agony might reject this. But when he comes out of the shock of it, if somebody points out to him what is happening, and if he is willing to listen, to see the rationality, the sanity of it, and not to build a wall against it, he is out of that field. The brain is out of that time-binding quality. N: Temporarily. K: Ah! There again when you use the word `temporary', it means time. N: No, I mean that the man slips back into time. K: No, he can't. He can't go back if he sees that something is dangerous, like a cobra, or any other danger, he cannot go back to it. N: That analogy is a bit difficult, because the structure itself is that danger. One inadvertently slips into it. K: When you see a dangerous animal, there is immediate action. It may be the result of past knowledge and experience, but there is immediate action for self-protection. But psychologically we are ware of the dangers. If we become as aware of these dangers as we are aware of physical dangers, there is an action which is not time-binding. DB: Yes, I think you could say that as long as you could perceive this danger you know you would respond immediately. But you see, if you were to use that analogy of the animal, it might be an animal that you realize is dangerous, but he might take another form that you don't see as dangerous! K: Yes. DB: Therefore there would be a danger of slipping back if you didn't see this. Or illusion might come in some other form. K: Of course. DB: But I think the major point you are making is that the brain is not belonging to any individual. K: Yes, absolutely. DB: And therefore it is no use saying that the individual slips back. K: No. DB: Because that already denies what you are saying. The danger is rather that the brain might slip back. K: The brain itself might slip back, because it has not seen the danger. DB: It hasn't seen the other forms of the illusions. K: The Holy Ghost taking different shapes! All this is the real root of time. DB: Time, and separation as individuality, are basically the same structure. K: Of course. DB: Although it is not obvious in the beginning. K: I wonder if we see that. DB: It might be worth discussing that. Why is psychological time the game illusion, the same structure as individuality? Individuality is the sense of being a person who is located here somewhere. K: Located and divided. DB: Divided from the others. He extends out to some periphery, his domain extends out to some periphery, and also he has an identity which extends over time. He wouldn't regard himself as an individual if he said `Today I am one person, tomorrow I am another'. So it seems that we mean by individual somebody who is in time. K: I think that this idea of individuality is a fallacy. DB: Yes, but many people may find it hard to be convinced that it is a fallacy. There is a common feeling that, as an individual, I have existed at least from my birth if not before, and go on to death, and perhaps later. The whole idea of being an individual is to be in time. Right? K: Obviously. DB: To be in psychological time, not just the time of the clock. K: Yes, we are saying that. So can that illusion that time has created individuality be broken? Can this brain understand that? DB: I think that, as Narayan said, there is a great momentum in the brain, which keeps rolling, moving along. K: Can that momentum stop? N: The difficulty comes here. The genetic coding is intrinsic to a person. He seems to function more or less unconsciously, driven by this past momentum. And suddenly he sees, like a flash, something true. But the difficulty is that it may operate only for a day - and then he is again caught in the old momentum. K: I know that. But it says the brain will not be caught. Once the mind or the brain is aware of this fact, it cannot go back. How can it? N: There must be another way of preventing it from going back. K: Not preventing: that means also time. You are still thinking in terms of prevention. N: Prevention, in the sense of the human factor. K: The human being is irrational. Right? And as long as he is functioning irrationally, he says of any rational factor, `I refuse to see it'. N: You are suggesting that the very seeing prevents you from slipping back. This is a human condition. DB: I wonder if we should go further into this question about prevention. It may be important. N: There are two aspects. You see the fallacy of something, and the very seeing prevents you from slipping back, because you see the danger of it. DB: In another sense you say you have no temptation to slip back, therefore you don't have to be prevented. If you really see it, there is no need for conscious prevention. N: Then you are not tempted to go back. K: I can't go back. If for example I see the fallacy of all the religious nonsense, it is finished! DB: The only question which I raise is that you may not see this so completely in another form. N: It may come in different shapes... DB: ...and then you are tempted once again. K: The mind is aware, it is not caught. But you are saying that it is. N: Yes, in other shapes and forms. K: Wait Sir. We have said that perception is out of time, is seeing immediately the whole nature of time. Which to use a good old word, is to have an insight into the nature of time. If there is that insight, the very brain cells, which are part of time, break down. The brains cells bring about a change in themselves. You may disagree, you may say, `prove it.' I say this is not a matter of proof, it is a matter of action. Do it, find out, test it. N: You were also saying the other day, that when the consciousness is empty of its content... K: ...the content being time... N: ...that leads to the transformation of the brain cells. K: Yes. N: When you say consciousness is empty of the content there... K: ...there is no consciousness as we know it. N: Yes. And you are using the word insight. What is the connection between the two? DB: Between what? N: Consciousness and insight. You have suggested that when consciousness is empty of its content... K: Be careful. Consciousness is put together by its content. The content is the result of time. DB: The content also is time. K: Of course. DB: It is about time as well, and it is actually put together by time, also it is about time. But if you have an insight into that, the whole pattern is gone, broken. The insight is not of time, not of memory, is not of knowledge. N: Who has this insight? K: Not `who'. Simply, there is an insight. N: There is an insight and then the consciousness is empty of its content... K: No, Sir. No. N: You are implying that the very emptying of the content is insight? K: No. We are saying time is a factor which has made up the content. It has built it up, and it also thinks about it. All that bundle is the result of time. Insight into this whole movement, which is not `my' insight, brings about transformations in the brain. Because that insight is not time-binding. DB: Are you saying that this psychological content is a certain structure, physically, in the brain? That in order for this psychological content to exist, the brain over many years has made many connections of the cells, which constitute this content? K: Quite, quite. DB: And then there is a flash of insight, which sees all this, and that it is not necessary. Therefore all this begins to dissipate. And when it has dissipated, there is no content. Then, whatever the brain does is something different. K: Let us go further. Then there is total emptiness. DB: Well, emptiness of the content. But when you say total emptiness, you mean emptiness of all this inward content? K: That's right. And that emptiness has tremendous energy. It is energy. DB: So could you say that the brain, having had all these connections tangled, has locked up a lot of energy? K: That's right. Wastage of energy. DB: And when they begin to dissipate, that energy is there. K: Yes. DB: Would you say that it is as much physical energy as any other kind? K: Of course. Now we can go on in more detail, but is this principle, the root of it, an idea or a fact? I hear all this physically with the ear, but I may make it into an idea. If I hear it, not only with the ear, but in my being, in the very structure of myself, what happens then? If that kind of hearing doesn't take place, all this becomes merely an idea, and I spin along for the rest of my life playing with ideas. If there was a scientist here, bio-feedback or another brain specialist, would he accept all this? Would he even listen to it? DB: A few scientists would, but obviously the majority would not. K: No. So how do we touch the human brain? DB: All this will sound rather abstract, to most scientists, you see. They will say, it could be so; it is a nice theory, but we have no proof of it. K: Of course. They would say it doesn't excite them very much because they don't see any proof. DB: They would say, if you have some more evidence we will come back later, and become very interested. So you see, you can't give any proof, because whatever is happening, nobody can see it with their eyes. K: I understand. But I am asking, what shall we do? The human brain - not `my' brain or `your', the brain - has evolved through a million years. One biological `freak' can move out of it, but how do you get at the human mind generally to make it see all this? DB: I think you have to communicate the necessity, the inevitability of what you are saying. Say if a person sees something happening before his eyes he says, `That's so'. Right? K: But it requires somebody to listen, somebody who says, `I want to capture it, I want to understand this, I want to find out.' You follow what I am saying? Apparently that is one of the most difficult things in life. DB: Well, it is the function of this occupied brain - that it is occupied with itself and it doesn't listen. N: In fact one of the things is that this occupation starts very early. When you are young it is very powerful, and it continues all through your life. How can we, through education, make this clear? K: The moment you see the importance of not being occupied -see that as a tremendous truth - you will find ways and methods to help educationally, creatively. No one can be told, copy and imitate, for then he is lost. DB: Then the question is, how is it possible to communicate to the brain, which rejects, which doesn't listen? Is there a way? K: Not if I refuse to listen. You see, I think meditation is a great factor in all this. I feel we have been meditating although ordinarily people wouldn't accept this as meditation. DB: They have used the word so often... K: ...that its meaning is really lost. But true meditation is this: the emptying of consciousness. You follow? DB: Yes, but let's be clear. Earlier you said it would happen through insight. Now are you saying that meditation is conducive to insight? K: Meditation is insight. DB: It is insight already. Then is it some sort of work you do? Insight is usually thought of as the flash, but meditation is more constant. K: We must be careful. What do we mean by meditation? We can reject the systems, methods, acknowledged authorities, because these are often merely traditional repetitions - time-binding nonsense. N: Do you think some of them could have been original, could have had real insight, in the past? K: Who knows? Now meditation is this penetration, this sense of moving without any past. DB: The only point to clear up is that when you use the word meditation, you mean something more than insight, you see. K: Much more. Insight has freed the brain from the past, from time. That is an enormous statement... DB: Do you mean that you have to have insight if you are going to meditate? K: Yes, that's right. To meditate without any sense of becoming. DB: You cannot meditate without insight. You can't regard it as a procedure by which you will come to insight. K: No. That immediately implies time. A procedure, a system, a method, in order to have insight is nonsensical. Insight into greed or fear frees the mind from them. Then meditation has quite a different quality. It has nothing to do with all the gurus' meditations. So could we say that to have insight there must be silence? DB: Well, that is the same; we seem to be going in a circle. K: For the moment. DB: Yes, my mind has silence. K: So the silence of insight has cleansed, purged, all that. DB: All that structure of the occupation. K: Yes. Then there is no movement as we know it; no movement of time. DB: Is there movement of some other kind? K: I don't see how we can measure that by words, that sense of a limitless state. DB: But you were saying earlier that nevertheless it is necessary to find some language, even though it is unsayable! K: Yes - we will find that language. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 10 7TH JUNE 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'COSMIC ORDER' KRISHNAMURTI: We left off the other day by saying that when the mind is totally empty of all the things that thought has put there, then real meditation begins. But I would like to go more deeply into that matter, to go back a bit, and find out if the mind, the brain, can ever be free from all illusion and forms of deception. Also whether it can have its own order - an order not introduced by thought, effort or any endeavour to put things in their proper place. And also, however much damaged the brain is by shock and all kinds of situations, whether it can heal itself completely. So first let's begin by asking if there is an order which is not made by man or by thought - which is not the result of calculated order out of disturbance, and therefore still part of the old conditioning? DAVID BOHM: Are you referring to the mind? I mean, you can say the order of nature exists on its own. K: The order of nature is order. DB: Yes, it is not made by man. K: But I am not talking of such. I am not sure that it is that kind of order. Is there cosmic order? DB: Well, that is still the same thing, in a sense, because the word `cosmos' means order, but the whole order, which includes the order of the universe and the order of the mind. K: Yes. What I am trying to find out is whether there is order which man can never possibly conceive? DB: Well, how are we going to discuss it? K: I don't know. What is order? NARAYAN: There is mathematical order, the highest kind of order known to any discipline. K: Would the mathematicians agree that mathematics is complete order? N: Yes, mathematics itself is order. DB: I think it depends on the mathematician. But there is a well-known mathematician called Von Neumann who defined mathematics as the relationship of relationships. Really he meant, by relationship, order. It is order working within the field of order itself, rather than working on some object. K: Yes, that is what I am trying to get at. DB: So the most creative mathematicians are having a perception of this, which may be called pure order; but of course it is limited, because it has to be expressed mathematically, in terms of formulae or equations. K: Of course. Is order part of disorder, as we know it? DB: What we mean by disorder is another question. It is not possible to give a coherent definition of disorder, because it violates order. Anything that actually happens has an order, but you can call a certain thing disorder if you like. K: Are you saying that anything that happens is order? DB: Has an order. If the body is not functioning rightly, even if cancer is growing, there is a certain order in the cancer cell; it is just growing according to a different pattern, which tends to break down the body. Nevertheless the whole thing has a certain kind of order. K: Yes, yes. DB: It has not violated the laws of nature, although relative to some context you could say it is disorder, because, if we are talking of the health of the body, then the cancer is called disorder. But in itself... K: Cancer has its own order. DB: Yes, but it is not compatible with the order of the growth of the body. K: Quite. So what do we mean by order? Is there such a thing as order? DB: Order is a perception; we can't get hold of order. N: I think that generally when we refer to order it is in relation to a framework, or in relation to a certain field. Order always has that connotation. But when you say the order of order, as in the study of mathematics, we are going away from this limited approach to it. DB: You see most mathematics start with the order of the numbers, like 1, 2, 3, 4, and build on that, in a hierarchy. But you can see what is meant by the order of the numbers. There is for example a series of relationships which are constant. In the order of the numbers, you have the simplest example of order. N: And a new order was created with the discovery of zero! Are mathematical order and the order in nature, part of a bigger field? Or are these localized forms? K: You see the brain, the mind, is so contradictory, so bruised, that it can't find order. DB: Yes, but what kind of order does it want? K: It wants an order in which it will be safe, in which it won't be bruised, be shocked, or feel physical and psychological pain. DB: The whole point of order and mathematics is not to have contradiction. K: But the brain is in contradiction. DB: And something has gone wrong. K: Yes, we have said that the brain took a wrong turn. DB: You see, if the body is growing wrongly we have a cancer cell, which means two contradictory orders - one being the growth of the cancer, and the other the order of the body. K: Yes. But can the mind, the brain, be totally free of all organized order? DB: You mean by organized order, a fixed or imposed pattern? K: Yes. Imposed or self-imposed. We are trying to investigate whether the brain can ever be free from all impositions, pressures, wounds, bruises and trivialities of existence which are pushing it in different directions. If it cannot, meditation has no meaning. DB: You could go further, and say that probably life has no meaning if you cannot free it of all that. K: No, I wouldn't say that life has no meaning. DB: The pattern goes on indefinitely. K: If it goes on as it has done, indefinitely, for millennia, life has no meaning. But I think there is a meaning and to find out, the brain must be totally free. DB: What is the source of what we call disorder? It is like a cancer going on inside the brain, moving in a way which is not compatible with the health of the brain. K: Yes. DB: It grows as time goes on, it increases from one generation to another. K: Each generation repeats the same pattern. DB: It tends to accumulate through tradition with every generation. K: How is this set, accumulated pattern, to end, to be broken through? DB: Could we ask another question? Why does the brain provide the soil for this stuff to grow on? K: It may be merely tradition or habit. DB: But why does the brain stay in that? K: It feels safe. It is afraid of something new taking place, because in the old tradition it finds refuge. DB: Then we have to question why the brain deceives itself. This pattern involves the fact that the brain deceives itself about disorder. It doesn't seem able to see it clearly. N: In my mind there is intelligence behind order which makes use of it. I have a certain purpose for which I create an order, and when the purpose is over I set aside that order or pattern. So order has an intelligence which works it out. That is the usual connotation. But you are referring to something else. K: I am asking whether this pattern of generations can be broken, and why the brain has accepted that pattern in spite of all its conflicts and misery. N: I am saying the same thing in a different way. When an order has served its purpose, can it then be put aside? K: Apparently it can't. We are speaking psychologically. It can't. The brain goes on, repeating fears, sorrow, miseries. Is it so heavily conditioned that it cannot see its way out of it, because, by constant repetition, the brain has become dull? N: The momentum of repetition is there? K: Yes. That momentum makes the mind mechanical. And in that sluggishness it takes refuge and says, `It's all right, I can go on. That's what most human beings do. DB: That is part of the disorder. To think in that way is a manifestation of disorder. K: Of course. N: Do you connect order with intelligence? Or is order something that exists on its own? DB: Intelligence involves order; it requires the perception of order in an orderly way, without contradiction. But I think that, in the terms of this discussion, we ourselves don't create this; we don't impose this order, but rather it is natural. K: Yes. I am the ordinary man. I see that I am caught. My whole way of living and thinking is out of this enormous length of time. Time is my whole existence. In the past, which cannot be changed, I take refuge. Right? DB: Well I think that if we were to talk to the so-called ordinary man, we would find he doesn't really understand that time is something that happens to him. K: I am saying an ordinary man can see, after talking over with another, that his whole existence is based on time. And the mind takes refuge in time - in the past. DB: What does that mean exactly? How does it take refuge? K: Because the past cannot be changed. DB: Yes, but people also think of the future. It is common to think that the future can change. The Communists have said, give up the past, we are going to change the future. K: But we can't give up the past, even if we think we can. DB: Then if even those who try not to take refuge in the past, can't give it up, it seems that whatever we do, we are stuck. K: So the next step is, why does the brain accept this way of living? Why doesn't it break it down? Is it through laziness or that in breaking it down it has no hope? DB: That is still the same question, of going from past to future. K: Of course. So what is the brain to do? This is applicable to most people, isn't it? DB: We haven't understood why, when people see that their behaviour is disorderly or irrational, they try to give up the past, but find they cannot. K: Wait, Sir. If I give up the past, I have no existence. If I give up all my remembrances, I have nothing; I am nothing. DB: I think some people like the Marxists would look at it a little differently. Marx said that it is necessary to transform the conditions of human society and that this will remove the past. K: But it has not done so. It cannot be done. DB: That is because when man tries to transform it he still works from the past. K: Yes, that's what I am saying. DB: If you say, don't depend on the past at all, then, as you have asked, what are we going to do? K: I am nothing: is that the reason why we cannot possibly give up the past? Because my existence, my way of thinking, my life, everything, is from the past. And if you say, wipe that out, what have I left? DB: I think you could say that obviously we have to keep certain things from the past, like useful knowledge. K: Yes, we have been through all that. DB: But you could ask, suppose we keep that useful part of the past, and wipe out all aspects of the past which are contradictory? K: Which are all psychologically contradictory. Then what is left? Just going to the office? There is nothing. Is that the reason why we cannot give it up? DB: There is still a contradiction in that, because if you say, `what is left', you are still asking from the past. K: Of course. DB: Are you simply saying that when people talk of giving up the past, they are just not doing it, but merely turning this into another question which avoids the issue? K: Because my whole being is the past; it has changed or been modified, but its roots are in the past. DB: Now if you said, `All right, give all that up and in the future you will have something quite different, and better', would people then be attracted to this? K: But `better' is still from the past. DB: But people want to be assured of at least something. K: That is just it. There is nothing. The ordinary human being wants something to which he can cling. DB: He may feel, not that he is clinging to the past, but reaching for something. K: If I reach something it is still the past. DB: Yes, it has its roots in the past, but that is not often obvious, because people say it is a big, new revolutionary situation. K: As long as I have my roots in the past there cannot be order. DB: Because the past is pervaded with disorder. K: Yes. And is my mind, my brain, willing to see that there is absolutely nothing if I give up the past? DB: And nothing to reach for. K: Nothing. There is no movement. Sometimes people dangle a carrot in front of me and, foolishly, I follow it. But I see that there are really no carrots, no rewards or punishments. Then how is this past to be dissolved? Because otherwise I am still living in the field of time that is man-made. So what shall I do? Am I willing to face absolute emptiness? DB: What will you tell somebody who is not willing to face this? K: I am not bothered. If somebody says that he can't do all this, I say, `Well, carry on'. But I am willing to let my past go completely. Which means there is no effort or reward; nothing. And the brain is willing to face this extraordinary and totally new state of existing in nothingness. That is appallingly frightening. DB: Even these words will have their meaning rooted in the past. K: Of course. We have understood that; the word is not the thing. The mind says it is willing to do that, to face this absolute emptiness, because it has seen for itself that all the places where it has taken refuge are illusions... DB: I think this leaves out something that you brought up earlier - the question of the damage of scars to the brain. K: That is just it. DB: The brain that isn't damaged could possibly let go the past fairly readily. K: Look, can I discover what has caused damage to the brain? Surely one of the factors is strong, sustained emotions, like hatred. DB: probably a flash of emotion doesn't do so much damage, but people sustain it. K: Of course. Hatred, anger and violence not only shock but wound the brain. Right? DB: And getting excessively excited. K: Of course; and drugs, etc. The natural response doesn't damage the brain. Now the brain is damaged; suppose it has been damaged through anger? DB: You could even say that nerves probably get connected up in the wrong way, and that the connections are too fixed. I think there is evidence that these things will actually change the structure. K: Yes, and can we have an insight into the whole nature of disturbance, so that the insight changes the cells of the brain which have been wounded? DB: Well, possibly it would start them healing. K: All right. That healing must be immediate. DB: It may take time in the sense that, if wrong connections hade been made, it is going to take time to redistribute the material. The beginning of it, it seems to me, is immediate. K: All right. Can I do that? I have listened to `X', I have carefully read, I have thought about all this, and I see that anger, violence, hatred - any excessive emotion - bruises the brain. And insight into this whole business brings about a mutation in the cells. It is so. Also the nerves - the adjustments, will be as rapid as possible. DB: Something happens with cancer cells. Sometimes the cancer suddenly stops growing, and it goes the other way, for some reason that is unknown. But a change must have taken place in those cells. K: Could it be that the brain cells change fundamentally, and the cancer process stops? DB: Yes. Fundamentally it stops, and begins to dismantle. K: Dismantle, yes that is it. N: You are saying that insight sets into motion the right kind of connections, and stops the wrong connections? DB: And it even dismantles the wrong connections. N: So a beginning is made, and it is made now. DB: At one moment. K: That is the insight. N: But there is no time involved, because the right movement has started now. There is another thing which I want to ask about the past: for most people, the past means pleasure. K: Not only pleasure but the remembrance of everything. N: One starts disliking pleasure only when it becomes stale, or leads to difficulties. One wants pleasure all the time. K: Of course. N: It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between pleasure and the staleness or the difficulties that it brings. K: Pleasure is always the past; there is no pleasure at the moment it is happening. That comes in later, when it is remembered. So the remembrance is the past. But I am willing to face nothingness which means to wipe out all that! N: But I am saying that the human being, even though he understands what you are saying, is held back in this field. K: Because he is not willing to face this emptiness. Pleasure is not compassion. pleasure is not love, pleasure has no place in compassion. But perhaps if there is this mutation, compassion is stronger than pleasure. DB: Even the perception of order may be stronger than pleasure. If people are really concerned with something, the pleasure plays no role at that moment. N: But what happens to a man in whom pleasure is dominant? K: We have already discussed this. As long as he is unwilling to face this extraordinary emptiness, he will keep on with the old pattern. DB: You see, we have to say that this man had a damaged brain too. It is brain damage which causes this emphasis on pleasure, as well as the fear and the anger. K: But the damaged brain is healed when there is insight. DB: Yes. But I think many people who would understand that hate and anger are products of the damaged brain would find it hard to see that pleasure also is the product of the damaged brain. K: Oh, yes, but of course it is. DB: Can we say there is a true enjoyment, which is not the product of the damaged brain, which is confused with pleasure.? N: If pleasure gives rise to anger, anger is part of the damaged brain. K: And also the demand for pleasure. So do you have an insight into how very destructive the past is to the brain? Can the brain itself see, have an insight into this, and move out of it? N: You are saying that the beginning of order comes from insight? K: Obviously. Let's work from there. N: May I put it in a different way? Is it possible to gather a certain amount of order in a pattern sense, artificially, so that it gives rise to a certain amount of insight? K: Ah! You cannot find truth through the false. N: I am asking it purposefully because many people seem to lack the energy that is required for insight. K: You are tremendously keen to earn a livelihood, to earn money, to do anything in which you are really interested. If you are interested vitally in this transformation, etc., you have the energy. May we go on? I, as a human being, have seen that this insight has wiped away the past, and the brain is willing to live in nothingness. Right? We have come to this point several times from different directions. Now let's go on. Now there isn't a thing put there by thought. There is no movement of thought, except factual knowledge which has its own place. But talking psychologically, there is no movement in the mind or of thought. There is absolutely nothing. DB: You mean no feeling either? You see, the movement of thought and feeling is together. K: Wait a minute. What do you mean here by feeling? DB: Well, usually people might say, all right, there is no thought, but they have various feelings. K: Of course we have feelings. DB: These are sensations. And also there are the inner feelings. K: Inner feelings of what? DB: It is hard to describe them. Those that can easily be described are obviously the wrong kind, such as anger and fear. K: Is compassion a feeling? DB: probably not. K: No, it is not a feeling. DB: Though people may say they feel compassionate! Even the very word suggests it is a form of feeling. Compassion has in it the word `passion', which is feeling. This is a difficult question. We could perhaps question what we usually recognize as feelings? K: Let's go into that a little bit. What do we mean by feelings? Sensations? DB: Well, people don't usually mean that. You see, sensations are connected with the body. K: So you are talking of feelings which are not of the body? DB: Yes, or which - in the old days - would have been described as of the soul. K: The soul, of course. That is an easy escape but it means nothing. DB: No. K: What are the inner feelings? pleasure? DB: Well, in so far as you could label it, that description would not be valid. K: So what is valid? The non-verbal state? DB: It may be a non-verbal state... something analogous to a feeling which isn't fixed, that can't be named. N: You are saying it is not feeling, it is similar to feeling, but it is not fixed? DB: Yes. I am just considering that that could exist if we say that there is no thought. I am trying to clarify this. K: Yes, there is no thought. DB: What does that really mean? K: What it really means is, thought is movement, thought is time. Right? In that emptiness there is not time or thought. DB: Yes, and perhaps no sense of the existence of an entity inside. K: Absolutely, of course. The existence of the entity is the bundle of memories, the past. DB: But that existence is not only thought thinking about it, but also the feeling that it is there; you get a sort of feeling inside. K: A feeling, yes. There is no being. There is nothing. If there is a feeling of the being continuing... DB: Yes, even though it doesn't seem possible to verbalize this... It would be a state without desire. How can we know if this state is real, is genuine? K: That is what I am asking. How do we know, or realize that this is so? In other words, do you want proof of it? N: Not proof, but communication of that state. K: Now wait a minute. Suppose someone has this peculiar compassion, how can he communicate it Lo me, if I am living in pleasure and all that? He can't! N: No, but I am prepared to listen to him. K: Prepared to listen, but how deeply? The man says there is no being. And one's whole life has been this becoming. And, in that state, he says there is no being at all. In other words, there is no `me'. Right? Now you say, `Show it to me'. It can be shown only through certain qualities that it has, certain actions. What are the actions of a mind that is totally empty of being? Actions at what level? Actions in the physical world? N: Partly. K: Mostly that. All right, this man has got this sense of emptiness, and there is no being. He is not acting from self-centred interests. His actions are in the world of daily living, and you can judge whether he is a hypocrite, whether he says something and contradicts it the next moment, or whether he is actually living this compassion and not just saying, `I feel compassionate'. DB: But if one is not doing the same, one can't tell. K: That's right. That is what I am saying. N: We can't judge him. K: You can't. So how can he convey to us in words that peculiar quality of mind? He can describe, go round it, but he can't give the essence of it. Dr. Bohm, for example, could discuss with Einstein; they were on the same level. And he and I can discuss. If one has this sense of not being, of emptiness, the other can go very close, but can never enter that mind unless he has it! N: Is there any way of communicating, for one who is open, but not through words? K: We are talking of compassion. It is not, `I feel compassionate'. That is altogether wrong. You see, in daily life such a mind acts without the `me', without the `ego'. Therefore it might make a mistake, but it corrects immediately; it is not carrying that mistake. N: It is not stuck. K: Not stuck. But we must be very careful here not to find an excuse for wrong! So we come to that point that we discussed earlier; what then is meditation? Right? For the man who is becoming, meditation has no meaning whatsoever. That is a tremendous statement. When there is not this being or becoming, what is meditation? It must be totally unconscious, totally uninvited. DB: Do you mean, without conscious intention? K: Yes, I think that is right. Would you say - I hope this doesn't sound silly - that the universe, the cosmic order, is in meditation? DB: Well, if it is alive, then we would have to look at it that way. K: No, no. It is in a state of meditation. DB: Yes. K: I think that is right. I stick to that. DB: We should try to go further into what is meditation. What is it doing? N: If you say that the universe is in meditation, is the expression of it order? What order can we discern which would indicate cosmic or universal meditation? K: The sunrise and sunset; all the stars, the planets are order. The whole thing is in perfect order. DB: We have to connect this with meditation. According to the dictionary, the meaning of meditation is to reflect, to turn something over in the mind, and to pay close attention. K: And also to measure. DB: That is a further meaning, but it is to weigh, to ponder, it means, measure, in the sense of weighing. K: Weighing, that's it. ponder, think over, and so on. DB: To weigh the significance of something. Now is that what you mean? K: No. DB: Then why do you use the word? N: I am told that, in English, contemplation has a different connotation from meditation. Contemplation implies a deeper state of mind. DB: It is hard to know. The word `contemplate' comes from the word temple, really. K: Yes, that's right. DB: Its basic meaning is, to create an open space. K: Is that an open space between God and me? DB: That is the way the word arose. K: Quite. N: The Sanskrit word Dhyans doesn't have the same connotation as meditation. K: No. N: Because meditation has the overtones of measurement, and probably, in an oblique way, that measurement is order. K: No, I don't want to bring in order - let's leave the word order out. We have been through that, and beaten it to death! DB: Why do you use the word meditation? K: Don't let's use it. DB: Let's find out what you really mean here. K: Would you say, a state of infinity? A measureless state? DB: Yes. K: There is no division of any kind. You see we are giving lots of descriptions, but it is not that. DB: Yes, but is there any sense of the mind being in some way aware of itself? Is that what you are trying to say? At other times you have said that the mind is emptying itself of content. K: What are you trying to get at? DB: I am asking whether it is not only infinite, but if something more is involved? K: Oh, much more. DB: We said that content is the past which is making disorder. Then you could say that this emptying of content in some sense is constantly cleaning up the past. Would you agree to that? K: No, no. DB: When you say the mind is emptying itself of content... K: Has emptied itself. DB: All right, then. When the past is cleaned up, then you say that is meditation. K: That is meditation; no, contemplation... N: Just a beginning. K: Beginning? N: The emptying of the past. K: That emptying of the past, which is anger, jealousy, beliefs, dogmas, attachments, etc., must be done. If that is not emptied, if any part of that exists, it will inevitably lead to illusion. The brain or the mind must be totally free of all illusion, illusion brought by desire, by hope, by wanting security, and all that. DB: Are you saying that when this is done, it opens the door to something broader, deeper? K: Yes. Otherwise life has no meaning; it is just repeating this pattern. N: What exactly did you mean when you said that the universe is meditation? K: I feel that way, yes. DB: Could we say first of all that the universe is not actually governed by its past? You see, the universe creates certain forms which are relatively constant, so that people who look at it superficially only see that, and it seems then to be determined from the past. K: Yes, it is not governed by the past. It is creative, moving. DB: And then this movement is order. K: Would you, as a scientist, accept such a thing? DB: Well as a matter of fact I would! K: Are we both crazy? Let's put the question another way: is it really possible for time to end - the whole idea of time as the past -chronologically, so that there is no tomorrow at all? There is the feeling, the actual reality, psychologically, of having no tomorrow. I think that is the healthiest way of living - which doesn't mean that I become irresponsible! That would be too childish. DB: It is merely a question of physical time, which is a certain part of natural order. K: Of course; that is understood. DB: The question is whether we have a sense of experiencing past and future or whether we are free of that sense. K: I am asking you, as a scientist, is the universe based on time? DB: I would say no, but you see the general way... K: That is all I want. You say no! And can the brain, which has evolved in time.? DB: Well, has it evolved in time? Rather it has become entangled in time. Because the brain is part of the universe, which we say is not based on time. K: I agree. DB: thought has entangled the brain in time. K: All right. Can that entanglement be unravelled, freed, so that the universe is the mind? You follow? If the universe is not of time, can the mind, which has been entangled in time, unravel itself and so be the universe? You follow what I am trying to say? DB: Yes. K: That is order. DB: That is order. And would you say that it is meditation? K: That is it. I would call that meditation, not in the ordinary, dictionary sense of pondering, and all that, but a state of meditation in which there is no element of the past. DB: You say the mind is disentangling itself from time, and also really disentangling the brain from time? K: Yes, would you accept that? DB: Yes. K: As a theory? DB: Yes, as a proposal. K: No, I don't want it as a proposal. DB: What do you mean by theory? K: Theory - when somebody comes along and says, this is real meditation. DB: All right. K: Wait. Somebody says, one can live this way; life has an extraordinary meaning in it, full of compassion, etc., and every act in the physical world can be corrected immediately, and so on. Would you, as a scientist, accept such a state, or say that the man who talks of it is cuckoo? DB: No, I wouldn't say that. I feel it is perfectly possible; it is quite compatible with anything that I know about nature. K: Oh, then that's all right. So one is not an unbalanced cuckoo! Of course putting all this into words is not the thing. Right? That is understood. But can it be communicated to another? Now can s me of us get to this, so that we can communicate it, actually? THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 11 18TH SEPTEMBER 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'THE ENDING OF `PSYCHOLOGICAL' KNOWLEDGE' KRISHNAMURTI: What makes the mind always follow a certain pattern? Always seeking? If it lets go of one pattern it picks up another; it keeps on functioning all the time like that. One can give explanations why it does so - for protection, for safety, from indifference, certain amount of callousness, a disregard of one's own flowering, etc. But it is really very important to explore deeply why our minds are always operating in a certain direction. We said that one comes, after going through travail, investigation, and insight, to a blank wall. And that blank wall can only wither away, or be broken down, when there is love and intelligence. Before we go into that, I would like to ask why human beings, however intelligent, however learned, however philosophical and religious, always fall into this groove of pattern seeking. DAVID BOHM: Well, I think the groove is inherent in the nature of the accumulated knowledge. K: Are you saying then that knowledge must invariably create a groove? DB: perhaps it is not inevitable but it seems to develop this way in mankind, if we are referring to psychological knowledge, that is to say... K: Obviously we are talking of that. But why does the mind not become aware of it - see the danger of this mechanical repetition, and the fact that there is nothing new in it? See how we keep on doing it? DB: It seems to me that the groove, or the accumulated knowledge, seems to have a significance far beyond what its significance is. If we say that we have knowledge of some object, like the microphone, that has some limited significance. But knowledge about the nation to which you belong seems to have immense significance. K: Yes. So is this attribution of significance the cause of the narrowing down of the mind? DB: Because this knowledge seems to have a tremendous value beyond all other values, it makes the mind stick to that. It seems the most important thing in the world. K: In India, there is this philosophy that knowledge must end -you know it, of course, the Vedanta. But apparently very, very, few people do end knowledge and talk from freedom. DB: You see, knowledge generally seems to be extremely important, even when a person may say verbally that it should end... K: You mean I am so stupid that I don't see that this psychological knowledge has very little significance, and so my mind clings to it? DB: I wouldn't quite put it that a person is that stupid, but rather say that his knowledge stupefies the brain. K: Stupefied, all right. But the brain doesn't seem to extricate itself. DB: It is already so stupefied that it can't see what it is doing. K: So what shall it do? I have been watching for many years people attempting to become free from certain things. This is the root of it, you understand? This psychological accumulation which becomes psychological knowledge. And so it divides, and all kinds of things happen around it and within it. And yet the mind refuses to let go. DB: Yes. K: Why? Is that because there is safety or security in it? DB: That is part of it, but I think in some way that knowledge has taken on the significance of the absolute, instead of being relative. K: I understand all that, but you are not answering my question. I am an ordinary man, I realize all this, and the limited significance of knowledge at different levels, but deeper down inside one, this accumulated knowledge is very destructive. DB: The knowledge deceives the mind, so that the person is not normally aware that it is destructive. Once this process gets started, the mind is not in a state where it is able to look at it because it is avoiding the question. There is a tremendous defensive mechanism or escape from looking at the whole issue. K: Why? DB: Because it seems that something extremely precious might be at stake. K: One is strangely intelligent, capable or skilled in other directions but here, where the root is of all this trouble, why don't we comprehend what is happening? What prevents the mind from doing this? DB: Once importance has been given to knowledge, there is a mechanical process that resists intelligence. K: So what shall I do? I realize I must let go the accumulated, psychological knowledge - which is divisive, destructive and petty - but I can't. Is this because of lack of energy? DB: Not primarily, though the energy is being dissipated by the process. K: Having dissipated a great deal of energy, I haven't the energy to grapple with this? DB: The energy would come back quickly if we could understand this. I don't think that is the main point. K: No. So what shall I do, realizing that this knowledge is inevitably forming a groove in which I live? How am I to break it down? DB: Well, I am not sure that it is generally clear to people that this knowledge does all that; or that the knowledge is knowledge. You see, it may seem to be some `being', the `self', and `me'. This knowledge creates the `me', and the `me' is the experience as an entity, which seems not to be knowledge but some real being. K: Are you saying that this `being' is different from knowledge? DB: It appears to be; it feigns a difference. K: But is it? DB: It isn't, but the illusion has great power. K: That has been our conditioning. DB: Yes. Now the question is, how do we get through that to break down the groove, because it creates the imitation, or a pretension, of a state of being? K: That is the real point, you see. This is man's central movement. It seems so utterly hopeless. And realizing the hopelessness I sit down and say I can't do anything. But if I apply my mind to it, the question arises, is it possible to function without psychological knowledge in this world? I am rather concerned about it; it seems the basic issue that man must resolve, all over the world. DB: That is right. But you may discuss with somebody, who thinks it seems reasonable. But perhaps his status is threatened, and we have to say that that is psychological knowledge. It doesn't seem to him that it is knowledge, but something more. And he doesn't see that his knowledge of his status is behind the trouble. At first sight knowledge seems to be something passive, which you could use if you wanted to, and which you could just put aside if you wished, which is the way it should be. K: I understand all that. DB: But then the moment comes when knowledge no longer appears to be knowledge. K: The politicians and the people in power wouldn't listen to this. And neither would the so-called religious people. It is only the people who are discontented, who feel they have lost everything, who will listen. But they don't always listen so that it is a real burning thing. How does one go about this? Say, for instance, I have left Catholicism and protestantism, and all that. Also I have a career and I know that it is necessary to have knowledge there. Now I see how important it is not to be caught in the process of psychological knowledge, and yet I can't let it go. It is always dodging me; I am playing tricks with it. It is like hide and seek. All right! We said that is the wall I have to break down. No, not I - that is the wall that has to be broken down. And we have said that this wall can be broken down through love and intelligence. Aren't we asking something enormously difficult? DB: It is difficult. K: I am this side of the wall, and you are asking me to have that love and intelligence which will destroy it. But I don't know what that love is, what that intelligence is, because I am caught in this, on this other side of the wall. I realize logically, sanely, that what you are saying is accurate, true, logical, and I see the importance of it, but the wall is so strong and dominant and powerful that I can't get beyond it. We said the other day that the wall could be broken down through insight - if insight does not become translated into an idea. DB: Yes. K: When insight is discussed, there is the danger of our making an abstraction of it; which means we move away from the fact, and the abstraction becomes all important. Which means, again, knowledge. DB: Yes, the activity of knowledge. K: So we are back again! DB: I think the general difficulty is that knowledge is not just sitting there as a form of information, but is extremely active, meeting and shaping every moment according to past knowledge. So even when we raise this issue, knowledge is all the time waiting, and then acting. Our whole tradition is that knowledge is not active but passive. But it is really active, although people don't generally think of it that way. They think it is just sitting there. K: It is waiting. DB: Waiting to act, you see. And whatever we try to do about it, knowledge is already acting. By the time we realize that this is the problem, it has already acted. K: Yes. But do I realize it as a problem, or as an idea which I must carry out? You see the difference? DB: Knowledge automatically turns everything into an idea, which we must carry out. That is the whole way it is built. K: The whole way we have lived. DB: Knowledge can't do anything else. K: How are we to break that, even for a second? DB: It seems to me that if you could see, observe, be aware - if knowledge could be aware of itself at work... The point is that knowledge seems to work unawares, simply waiting, and then acting, by which time it has disrupted the order of the brain. K: I am very concerned about this because wherever I go this is what is happening. It is something that has to be resolved. Would you say the capacity to listen is far more important than any of this, than any explanations, or logic? DB: It comes to the same problem. K: No, no. It doesn't. I want to see if there is a possibility that when I listen completely to what you are saying, the wall has broken down. You understand? Is there - I am trying to find out, Sir - I am an ordinary man and you are telling me all this, and I realize what you are saying is so. I am really deeply involved in what you are saying, but somehow the flame isn't lit; all the fuel is there, but the fire is not. So what shall I do? This is my everlasting cry! DB: The brain has the capacity to listen; we have to question whether the ordinary man is so full of opinions that he can't listen. K: You can't listen with opinions; you might just as well be dead. DB: I think knowledge has all sorts of defences. Is it possible for, say, the ordinary man to have this perception? That is really what you are asking, isn't it? K: Yes. But there must be a communication between you and that man, something so strong that the very act of his listening to you, and you communicating with him, operates. DB: Yes, then you have to break through his opinions, through the whole structure. K: Of course. That is why this man has come here - for that. He has finished with all the churches and doctrines. He realizes that what has been said here is true. When you communicate with him, your communication is strong and real, because you are not speaking from knowledge or opinions. A free human being is trying to communicate with this ordinary man. Now can he listen with that intensity which you, the communicator, are giving him? He wants to listen to somebody who is telling the truth, and in the very telling of it, something is taking place in him. Because he is so ardently listening, this happens. It is rather like you as a scientist, telling one of your students something. You are telling him about something which must be enormously important, because you have given your life to it. And has given up much just to come here. Is it the fault of the communicator that the listener does not receive it instantly? Or is the listener incapable of hearing it? DB: Well, if he is incapable of listening, then nothing can be done. But let's say there is somebody who comes along who has got through some of these defences, although there are others that he is not aware of - that is something less simple than what you have described. K: I feel it is dreadfully simple somehow. If one could listen with all one's being, the brain would not be caught in the groove. You see, generally, in communication, you are telling me something and I am absorbing it, but there is an interval between you telling and my absorbing. DB: Yes. K: And that interval is the danger. If I don't absolutely absorb, listen with all my being, it is finished. Is listening difficult because in this there is no shadow of pleasure? You are not offering any pleasure, any gratification. You are saying this is so; take it. But my mind is so involved in pleasure that it won't listen to anything that is not completely satisfactory or pleasurable. I realize too the danger of that. Of seeking satisfaction and pleasure, so I put that aside too. There is no pleasure, no reward, no punishment. In listening, there is only pure observation. So we come to the point, is pure observation, which is actually listening, love? I think it is. Again, if you state this, then my mind says `Give it to me. Tell me what to do.' But when I ask you to tell me what to do,I am back in the field of knowledge. It is so instantaneous. So I refuse to ask you what to do. Then where am I? You have referred to perception without any motive or direction. Pure perception is love. And in that perception love is intelligence. They are not three separate things, they are all one thing. You pointed all this out very carefully, step by step, and I have come to that point that I have a feeling for it. But it goes away so quickly. Then the question begins, `How am I to get it back?' Again, the remembrance of it, which is knowledge, blocks. DB: What you are saying is that every time there is a communication, knowledge begins to work in many different forms. K: So you see it is enormously difficult to be free of knowledge. DB: We could ask, why doesn't knowledge wait until it is needed? K: That means to be psychologically free of knowledge, but, when the need arises, to act from freedom, not from knowledge. DB: But knowledge comes in to inform your action, although it is not the source. K: That is freedom from knowledge. And being free, it is from freedom and not from knowledge that one communicates. That is, from emptiness there is communication. When we use words, they are the outcome of knowledge, but they are from that state of complete freedom. Now, suppose I, as an ordinary human being, have come to that point where there is this freedom, and from it communication takes place - will you, as an eminent scientist, communicate with me without any barrier? You follow what I am saying? DB: Yes. There is this freedom from knowledge when knowledge is seen to be information. But ordinarily it seems more than information, and knowledge itself does not see that knowledge is not free. K: It is never free. And if I am going to understand myself, I must be free to look. How will you communicate with me, who have come to a certain point where I am burning to receive what you are saying, so completely that psychological knowledge is finished? Or am I fooling myself about being in that state? DB: Well, that is the question: knowledge is constantly deceiving itself. K: So is my mind always deceiving itself? Then what shall I do? Let's come back to that. DB: Again I think the answer is to listen. K: Why don't we listen? Why don't we immediately understand this thing? One can give all the superficial reasons why - old age, conditioning, laziness, and so on. DB: But is it possible to give the deep reason for it? K: I think it is that the knowledge which is the `me' is so tremendously strong as an idea. DB: Yes, that is why I tried to say that the idea has tremendous significance and meaning. For example, suppose you have the idea of God; this takes on a tremendous power. K: Or if I have the idea that I am British, or French, it gives me great energy. DB: And so it creates a state of the body which seems the very being of the self Now the person doesn't experience it as mere knowledge... K: Yes, but are we going round and round and round? It seems like it. DB: Well, I was wondering if there is anything that could be communicated about that overwhelming power that seems to come with knowledge... K: ...and with identification. DB: That seems to be something that would be worth looking into. K: Now what is the root meaning of `identification'? DB: Always the same. K: Always the same, that's right. That's right! There is nothing new under the sun. DB: You say the self is always the same. It tries to be always the same in essence, if not in detail. K: Yes, yes. DB: I think this is the thing that goes wrong with knowledge. It attempts to be involved with what is always the same, so it sticks, you see. Knowledge itself tries to find what is permanent and perfect. I mean, even independent of any of us. It is like building it into the cells. K: From this arises the question, is it possible to attend diligently? I am using `diligence' in the sense of being accurate. DB: Actually it means to take pains. K: Of course. To take pains, take the whole of it. There must be some other way round all this intellectual business. We have exercised a great deal of it and that intellectual capacity has led to the blank wall. I approach it from every direction, but eventually the wall is there, which is the `me', with my knowledge, my prejudice, and all the rest of it. And the `me' then says, `I must do something about it. Which is still the `me'. DB: The `me' wants always to be constant, but at the same time it tries to change. K: To put on a different coat. It is always the same. So the mind which is functioning with the `me' is always the same mind. Good Lord, you see, we are back again! We have tried everything - fasting, every kind of discipline - to get rid of the `me' with all its knowledge and illusions. One tries to identify with something else, which is the same thing. One then comes back to the fundamental question, what will make the blank wall totally disappear? I think this is only possible when the man who is blocked can give total attention to what the free man is saying. There is no other means to break down the wall - not the intellect, not the emotions, nor anything else. When somebody who has gone beyond the wall, who has broken it down, says, `Listen, for God's sake listen,' and I listen to him with my mind empty, then it is finished. You know what I am saying? I have no sense of hoping for anything to happen, or anything to come back, or concern with the future. The mind is empty, and therefore listening. It is finished. For a scientist to discover something new, he must have a certain emptiness from which there will be a different perception. DB: Yes, but only in the sense that usually the question is limited, and so the mind may be empty with regard to that particular question, allowing the discovery of an insight in that area. But we are not questioning this particular area. We are questioning the whole of knowledge. K: It is most extraordinary when you go into it. DB: And you were saying the end of knowledge is the Vedanta. K: That is the real answer. DB: But generally people feel they must keep knowledge in one area to be able to question it in another. You see it might worry people to ask, with what knowledge do I question the whole of knowledge? K: Yes. With what knowledge do I question my knowledge? Quite. DB: In a way, we do have knowledge, because we have seen that this whole structure of psychological knowledge makes no sense, that it is inconsistent and has no meaning. K: From that emptiness that we were talking of, is there a ground or a source from which all things begin? Matter, human beings, their capacities, their idiocies - does the whole movement start from there? DB: We could consider that. But let's try to clarify it a little. We have the emptiness. K: Yes, emptiness in which there is no movement of thought as psychological knowledge. And therefore no psychological time. DB: Though we still have the time of the watch... K: Yes, but we have gone beyond that; don't let's go back to it. There is no psychological time, no movement of thought. And is that emptiness the beginning of all movement? DB: Well, would you say the emptiness is the ground? K: That is what I am asking. Let's go slowly into this. DB: Earlier on, we were saying that there is the emptiness, and beyond that is the ground. K: I know, I know. Let's discuss this further. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 12 20TH SEPTEMBER 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'THE MIND IN THE UNIVERSE' KRISHNAMURTI: We talked the other day about a mind that is entirely free from all movement, from all the things that thought has put there, the past, and the future, and so on. But before we go into that I would like to discuss man's being caught in materialistic attitudes and values, and to ask, what is the nature of materialism? DAVID BOHM: Well, first of all materialism is the name of a certain philosophical... K: I don't mean that. I want to explore this. DB: Matter is all there is, you see. K: That is, nature and all human beings, react physically. This reaction is sustained by thought. And thought is a material process. So reaction in nature is a materialistic response. DB: I think the word `materialistic' is not quite right. It is the response of matter. K: The response of matter; let's put it that way. That is better. We are talking about having an empty mind, and we have come to that point when the wall has been broken down. This emptiness and what lies beyond it, or through it - we will come to that, but before doing so, I am asking, is all reaction matter? DB: Matter in movement. You could say that there is evidence in favour of that, that science has found a tremendous number of reactions which are due to the nerves. K: So would you say that matter and movement are the reactions which exist in all organic matter? DB: Yes, all matter as we know it goes by the law of action and reaction, you see. Every action has a corresponding reaction. K: So action and reaction are a material process, as is thought. Now, to go beyond it is the issue. DB: But before we say that, some people might feel that there is no meaning in going beyond it. That would be the philosophy of materialism. K: But if one is merely living in that area it is very, very shallow. Right? It has really no meaning at all. DB: perhaps one should refer to one thing that people have said - that matter is not merely action and reaction, but may have a creative movement. You see, matter may create new forms. K: But it is still in that area. DB: Yes. Let's try to make it clear. We have to see that there are very subtle forms of materialism which might be difficult to pin down. K: Let's begin. Would you consider that thought is a material process? DB: Yes. Well, some people might argue that it is both material, and something beyond material. K: I know. I have discussed this. But it is not. DB: How can we say that simply, to make it clear? K: Because any movement of thought is a material process. DB: Well, we have to amplify this so that it is not a matter of authority. As an observation, one sees that thought is a material process. Now how are you going to see that? K: How could one be aware that thought is a material process? I think that is fairly clear. There is an experience, an incident which is recorded, which becomes knowledge. And from that knowledge, thought arises and action takes place. DB: Yes. So we say that thought is that. It is still coming from the background. So are you saying that something new coming into being is not part of this process? K: Yes, if there is to be something new, thought, as a material process, must end. Obviously. DB: And then it may take it up later. K: Later, yes. Wait, see what happens later. So we say all action, reaction and action from that reaction is movement of matter. DB: Yes, very subtle movement of matter. K: So as long as one's mind is within that area, it must be a movement of matter. So is it possible for the mind to go beyond reaction? That is the next step. As we said earlier one gets irritated, and that is the first reaction. Then the reaction to that, the second reaction, is `I must not be'. Then the third reaction is, `I must control or justify'. So it is constantly action and reaction. Can one see that this is a continuous movement without an ending? DB: Yes. The reaction is continuous, but it seems at a certain moment to have ended, and the next moment appears to be a new movement. K: But it is still reaction. DB: It is still the same but it presents itself differently. K: It is exactly the same always... DB: But it presents itself as always different, always new. K: Of course. That's just it. You say something, I get irritated, but that irritation is a reaction. DB: Yes, it seems to be something suddenly new. K: But it is not. DB: But one has to be aware of that, you see. Generally the mind tends not to be aware of it. K: We are sensitive to it, alert to the question. So there is an ending to reaction if one is watchful, attentive; if one understands not only logically, but having an insight into this reacting process, it can of course come to an end. That is why it is very important to understand this, before we discuss what is an empty mind, and if there is something beyond this, or whether in that very emptying of the mind there is some other quality. So is that empty mind a reaction? A reaction to the problems of pain and pleasure and suffering? An attempt to escape from all this into some state of nothingness? DB: Yes, the mind can always do that. K: It can invent. Now we have come to the point of asking whether this quality of emptiness is not a reaction. Right, Sir? Before we go further, is it possible to have a mind that is really completely empty of all the things that thought has put together? DB: So that thought ceases to act. K: That's it. DB: On the one hand, perhaps you could say that reaction is due to the nature of matter, which is continually reacting and moving. But then is matter affected by this insight? K: I don't quite follow. Ah, I understand! Does insight affect the cells of the brain which contain the memory? DB: Yes. The memory is continually reacting, moving, as does the air and the water, and everything around us. K: After all, if I don't react physically I am paralysed. But to be reacting continuously is also a form of paralysis. DB: Well, the wrong kind of reaction! Reaction around the psychological structure. But assuming that the reaction around the psychological structure has begun in mankind, why should it ever stop? Because reaction makes another and another, and one would expect it to go on for ever, and that nothing would stop it. K: Only insight into the nature of reaction ends psychological reaction. DB: Then you are saying that matter is affected by insight which is beyond matter. K: Yes, beyond matter. So is this emptiness within the brain itself? Or is it something that thought has conceived as being empty? One must be very clear. DB: Yes. But whatever we discuss, no matter what the question is, thought begins to want to do something about it, because thought feels it can always make a contribution. K: Quite. DB: Thought in the past did not understand that it has no useful contribution to make, but it has kept on in the habit of trying to say that emptiness is very good. Therefore thought says, I will try to bring about the emptiness. K: Of course. DB: Thought is trying to be helpful! K: We have been through all that. We have seen the nature of thought, and its movement, time, and all that. But I want to find out whether this emptiness is within the mind itself, or beyond it. DB: What do you mean by the mind? K: The mind is the whole - emotions, thought, consciousness, the brain - the whole of that is the mind. DB: The word `mind' has been used in many ways. Now you are using it in a certain way, that it represents thought, feeling, desire and will - the whole material process. K: Yes, the whole material process. DB: Which people have called non-material! K: Quite. But the mind is the whole material process. DB: Which is going on in the brain and the nerves. K: The whole structure. One can see that this materialistic reaction can end. And the next question I am asking is whether that emptiness is within or without. (Without, in the sense of being elsewhere.) DB: Where would it be? K: I don't think it would be elsewhere, but I am just putting the question... DB: Well, any such thing is a material process. K: It is in the mind itself. Not outside it. Right? DB: Yes. K: Now what is the next step? Does that emptiness contain nothing? Not a thing? DB: Not a thing, by which we mean anything that has form, structure, stability. K: Yes. All that, form, structure, reaction, stability, capacity. Then what is it? Is it then total energy? DB: Yes, movement of energy. K: Movement of energy. It is not movement of reaction. DB: It is not movement of things reacting to each other. The world can be regarded as made up of a number of things which react to each other and that is one kind of movement: but we are saying it is a different kind of movement. K: Entirely different. DB: There is no thing in it. K: No thing in it, and therefore it is not of time. Is that possible? Or are we just indulging in imagination? In some kind of romantic, hopeful, pleasurable sensation? I don't think that we are, because we have been through all that, step by step, right up to this point. So we are not deceiving ourselves. Now we say that emptiness has no centre, as the `me', and all the reactions. In that emptiness there is a movement of timeless energy. DB: When you refer to timeless energy, we could repeat what we have already said about time and thought being the same. K: Yes, of course. DB: Then you were saying that time can only come into a material process? K: That's right. DB: Now if we have energy that is timeless but nevertheless moving... K: Yes, not static... DB: Then what is the movement? K: What is movement from here to here? DB: That is one form. K: One form. Or from yesterday to today, and from today to tomorrow. DB: There are various kinds of movement. K: So what is movement? Is there a movement which is not a movement? You understand? Is there a movement which has no beginning and no end? Unlike thought which has a beginning and an end. DB: Except you could say that the movement of matter might have a beginning and no ending; the reactive movement. You are not speaking of that? K: No, I am not talking of that. Thought has a beginning and thought has an ending. There is a movement of matter as reaction, and the ending of that reaction. DB: In the brain. K: Yes. But there are various kinds of movements. That is all we know. And someone comes along and says there is a totally different kind of movement. But to understand that, we must be free of the movement of thought, and the movement of time, to understand a movement that is not... DB: Well there are two things about this movement. It has no beginning and no end, but also it is not determined as a series of successions from the past. K: Of course. No causation. DB: But you see, matter can be looked at as a series of causes; it may not be adequate. But now you are saying that this movement has no beginning and no ending; it is not the result of a series of causes following one another. K: So I want to understand verbally a movement that is not a movement. I don't know if I am making it clear? DB: Then why is it called a movement if it is not a movement? K: Because it is not still, it is active. DB: It is energy. K: It has tremendous energy; therefore it can never be still. But in that energy it has stillness. DB: I think we have to say that the ordinary language does not convey this properly, but the energy itself is still, and also moving. K: But in that movement is a movement of stillness. Does it sound crazy? DB: The movement can be said to emerge from stillness. K: That's right. You see, that is what it is. We said that this emptiness is in the mind. It has no cause and no effect. It is not a movement of thought, of time. It is not a movement of material reactions. None of that. Which means, is the mind capable of that extraordinary stillness without any movement? When it is so completely still, there is a movement out of it. DB: I think I mentioned before that some people, like Aristotle, had this notion in the past; we discussed it. He talked about the unmoved mover, when trying to describe God, you see. K: Ah, God, no. I don't want to do that! DB: You don't want to describe God, but some sort of notion similar to this has been held in the past by various people. Since then it has gone out of fashion, I think. K: Let's bring it into fashion, shall we?! DB: I am not saying that Aristotle had the right idea. It is merely that he was considering something somewhat similar, though probably different in many respects. K: Was it an intellectual concept or an actuality? DB: This is very hard to tell because so little is known. K: Therefore we don't have to bring in Aristotle. DB: I merely wanted to point out that the concept of a movement of stillness wasn't crazy, because other very respectable people had had something similar. K: I am glad! I am glad to be assured that I am not crazy! And is that movement out of stillness the movement of creation? We are not talking of what the poets, writers and painters call creation. To me, that is not creation; just capacity, skill, memory and knowledge operating. Here I think this creation is not expressed in form. DB: It is important to differentiate. Usually we think creation is expressed in form, or as structure. K: Yes, structure. We have gone beyond being crazy, so we can go on! Would you say that this movement, not being of time, is eternally new? DB: Yes. It is eternally new in the sense that the creation is eternally new. Right? K: Creation is eternally new. You see that newness is what the artists are trying to discover. Therefore they indulge in all kinds of absurdities, but few come to that point where the mind is absolutely silent, and out of that silence there is this movement which is always new. The moment when that movement is expressed... DB: ...the first expression is in thought? K: That is just it. DB: And that may be useful, but then it gets fixed, and becomes a barrier. K: I was told once by an Indian scholar that before people began to sculpt the head of a god, or whatever, they had to go into deep meditation. At the right moment they took up the hammer and the chisel. DB: Then it came out of the emptiness. There is another point, you see. The Australian aborigines draw figures in the sand, so that they don't have permanency. K: That is right. DB: Perhaps thought could be looked at that way. You see, marble is too static, and remains for thousands of years. So although the original sculptor may have understood, the people who follow see it as a fixed form. K: What relationship has all this to my daily life? In what way does it act through my actions, through my ordinary physical responses, to noise, to pain, various forms of disturbance? What relationship has the physical to that silent movement? DB: Well, in so far as the mind is silent, the thought is orderly. K: We are getting on to something. Would you say that the silent movement, with its unending newness, is total order of the universe? DB: We could consider that the order of the universe emerges from this silence and emptiness. K: So what is the relationship of this mind to the universe? DB: The particular mind? K: No; mind. DB: Mind in general? K: Mind. We went through the general and the particular, and beyond that there is the mind. DB: Would you say that is universal? K: I don't like to use the word universal. DB: Universal in the sense of that which is beyond the particular. But perhaps that word is difficult. K: Can we find another word? Not global. A mind that is beyond the particular? DB: Well you could say it is the source, the essence. It has been called the absolute. K: I don't want to use the word `absolute', either. DB: The absolute means literally that which is free of all limitations, of all dependence. K: All right, if you agree that `absolute' means freedom from all dependence and limitation. DB: From all relationships. K: Then we will use that word. DB: It has unfortunate connotations. K: Of course. But let's use it for the moment just for convenience in our dialogue. There is this absolute stillness, and in or from that stillness there is a movement, and that movement is everlastingly new. What is the relationship of that mind to the universe? DB: To the universe of matter? K: To the whole universe: matter, trees, nature, man, the heavens. DB: That is an interesting question. K: The universe is in order; whether it is destructive or constructive, it is still order. DB: You see, the order has the character of being absolutely necessary; in a sense it cannot be otherwise. The order that we usually know is not absolutely necessary. It could be changed; it could depend on something else. K: The eruption of a volcano is order. DB: It is order of the whole universe. K: Quite. Now in the universe there is order, and this mind which is still is completely in order. DB: The deep mind, the absolute. K: The absolute mind. So, is this mind the universe? DB: In what sense is that the universe? We have to understand what it means to say that, you see. K: It means, is there a division, or a barrier, between this absolute mind and the universe? Or are both the same? DB: Both are the same. K: That is what I want to get at. DB: We have either duality of mind and matter, or they are both the same. K: That's it. Is that presumptuous? DB: Not necessarily. I mean that these are just two possibilities. K: I want to be quite sure that we are not treading upon something which really needs a very subtle approach - which needs great care. You know what I mean? DB: Yes. Let's go back to the body. We have said that the mind which is of the body - thought, feeling, desire, the general and the particular mind - is part of the material process. K: Absolutely. DB: And not different from the body. K: That's right. All the reactions are material processes. DB: And therefore what we usually call the mind is not different from what we call the body. K: Quite. DB: Now you are making this much greater in saying, consider the whole universe. And we ask if what we call the mind in the universe is different from what we call the universe itself? K: That's right. You see why I feel that in our daily life there must be order, but not the order of thought. DB: Well, thought is a limited order, it is relative. K: That's it. So there must be an order that is... DB: ...free of limitation. K: Yes. In our daily life we have to have that - which means no conflict, no contradiction whatsoever. DB: Let's take the order of thought. When it is rational it is in order. But in contradiction the order of thought has broken down, it has reached its limit. Thought works until it reaches a contradiction, and that's the limit. K: So if in my daily life there is complete order, in which there is no disturbance, what is the relationship of that order to the never ending order? Can that silent movement of order, of that extraordinary something, affect my daily life, when I have inward psychological order? You understand my question? DB: Yes. We have said, for example, that the volcano is a manifestation of the whole order of the universe. K: Absolutely. Or a tiger killing a deer. DB: The question then is whether a human being in his ordinary life can be similar. K: That's it. If not, I don't see what is the point of the other - the universal. DB: Well, it has no point to the human being. You see, some people would say, who cares about the universe. All we care about is our own society, and what we are doing. But then that falls down, because it is full of contradiction. K: Obviously. It is only thought which says that. So that universe, which is in total order, does affect my daily life. DB: Yes. I think that scientists might ask how. You see, one might say, I understand that the universe is constituted of matter, and that the laws of matter affect our daily life. But it is not so clear how it affects the mind; and if there is this absolute mind which affects the daily life. K: Ah! What is my daily life? Disorderly, and a series of reactions. Right? DB: Well, it is mostly that. K: And thought is always struggling to bring order within that. But when it does that, it is still disorder. DB: Because thought is always limited by its own contradictions. K: Of course. Thought is always creating disorder, because it is itself limited. DB: As soon as it tries to go beyond the limit, that is disorderly. K: Right. I have understood, I have gone into it, I have an insight into it, so I have a certain kind of order in my life. But that order is still limited. I recognize that, and I say that this existence is limited. DB: Now some people would accept that, and say `Why should you have more?' K: I am not having more. DB: But others might say, `We would be happy if we could live in a material life, with real order.' K: I say, let's do it! It must be done! But in the very doing of it, one has to realize it is limited. DB: Yes, even the highest order that we can produce is limited. K: And the mind realizes its limitation and says, let's go beyond it. DB: Why? Some people would say, why not be happy within those limits, continually extending them, trying to discover new thoughts, new order? The artist will discover new forms of art, the scientists a new kind of science. K: But all that is always limited. DB: There is often the feeling that we can go this far, and accept that this is all that is possible. K: You mean the feeling that we must accept the human condition? DB: Well, people would say that man could do much better than he is doing. K: Yes, but all this is still the human condition, a little reformed, a little better. DB: Some people would say enormously reformed. K: But it is still limited! DB: Yes. Let's try to make clear what is wrong with the limitation. K: In that limitation there is no freedom, only a limited freedom. DB: Yes. So eventually we come to the boundary of our freedom. Something makes us react, through reaction we fall back into contradiction. K: Yes, but what happens when I see that I am always moving within a certain area.? DB: Then I am under the control of the forces. K: The mind inevitably rebels against that. DB: That is an important point. You see the mind wants freedom. Right? K: Obviously. DB: It says that freedom is the highest value. So do we accept that, and see it just as a fact? K: That is, I realize that within this limitation I am a prisoner. DB: Some people get used to it and say, `I accept it.' K: I won`t accept it! My mind says there must be freedom from prison. I am a prisoner, and the prison is very nice, very cultured and all the rest of it. But it is still limited, although it says, there must be freedom beyond all that. DB: Which mind says this? Is it the particular mind of the human being? K: Ah! Who says there must be freedom? Oh, that is very simple. The very pain, the very suffering demands that we go beyond. DB: This particular mind, even though it accepts limitation, finds it painful. K: Of course. DB: And therefore this particular mind feels somehow that it is not right. But it can't avoid it. There seems to be a necessity of freedom. K: Freedom is necessary, and any hindrance to freedom is retrogression. Right? DB: That necessity is not an external necessity due to reaction. K: Freedom is not a reaction. DB: The necessity of freedom is not a reaction. Some people would say that having been in prison you reacted in this way. K: So where are we? You see, this means there must be freedom from reaction, freedom from the limitation of thought, freedom from all the movement of time. We know that there must be complete freedom from all that, before we can really understand the empty mind, and the order of the universe, which is then the order of the mind. We are asking a tremendous lot. Are we willing to go that far? DB: Well, you know that non-freedom has its attractions. K: Of course, but I am not interested in these attractions. DB: But you asked the question, are we willing to go that far? So it seems to suggest that there may be something attractive in this limitation. K: Yes. I have found safety, security, pleasure in non-freedom. I realize that in pleasure or pain there is no freedom. The mind says, not as a reaction, that there must be freedom from all this. To come to that point and to let go without conflict, demands its own discipline, its own insight. That's why I said to those of us who have done a certain amount of investigation into all this, can one go as far as that? Or do the responses of the body - the responsibilities of daily action, for one's wife, children, and all that - prevent this sense of complete freedom? The monks, the saints, and the sannyasis have said, `You must abandon the world.' DB: We went into that. K: Yes. That is another form of idiocy, although I'm sorry to put it like that. We have been through all that, so I refuse to enter again into it. Now I say are the universe and the mind that has emptied itself of all this, one? DB: Are they one? K: They are not separate, they are one. DB: So you are saying that the material universe is like the body of the absolute mind. K: Yes, all right. DB: It may be a picturesque way of putting it! K: We must be very careful also not to fall into the trap of thinking that the universal mind is always there. DB: How would you put it then? K: Man has said that God is always there; Brahman, or the highest principle, is always present, and all you have to do is to cleanse yourself, and arrive at that. This is also a very dangerous statement, because then you might say, there is the eternal in me. DB: But I think that is projecting. K: Of course! DB: There is a logical difficulty in saying it is always there because `always' implies time, and we are trying to discuss something that has nothing to do with time. So we can't place it as being here, there, now or again! K: We have come to the point that there is this universal mind, and the human mind can be of that when there is freedom. THE ENDING OF TIME CHAPTER 13 27TH SEPTEMBER 1980 CONVERSATION WITH PROF. DAVID BOHM 'CAN PERSONAL PROBLEMS BE SOLVED, AND FRAGMENTATION END?' KRISHNAMURTI: We have cultivated a mind that can solve almost any technological problem. But apparently human problems have never been solved. Human beings are drowned by their problems: the problems of communication, knowledge, of relationships, the problems of heaven and hell; the whole human existence, has become a vast, complex problem. And apparently through out history it has been like this. In spite of his knowledge, in spite of his centuries of evolution, man has never been free of problems. DAVID BOHM: Yes, of insoluble problems. K: I question if human problems are insoluble. DB: I mean, as they are put now. K: As they are now, of course, these problems have become incredibly complex and insoluble. No politician, scientist, or philosopher is going to solve them, even through wars and so on! So why have human beings throughout the world not been able to resolve the daily problems of life? What are the things that prevent the complete solution of these problems? Is it that we have never turned our minds to it? Is it because we spend all our days, and probably half the night, in thinking about technological problems so that we have no time for the other? DB: That is partly so. Many people feel that the other should take care of itself. K: But why? I am asking in this dialogue whether it is possible to have no human problems at all - only technological problems, which can be solved. But human problems seem insoluble. Is it because of our education, our deep-rooted traditions, that we accept things as they are? DB: Well, that is certainly part of it. These problems accumulate as civilization gets older, and people keep on accepting things which make problems. For example, there are now far more nations in the world than there used to be, and each one creates new problems. K: Of course. DB: If you go back in time... K: ...a tribe becomes a nation... DB: And then the group must fight its neighbour. K: Men use this marvellous technology to kill each other. But we re talking about problems of relationships, problems of lack of freedom, this sense of constant uncertainty and fear, the struggle to work for a livelihood for the rest of one's life. The whole thing seems so extraordinarily wrong. DB: I think people have lost sight of that. Generally speaking they accept the situation in which they find themselves, and try to make the best of it, trying to solve some small problems to alleviate their circumstances. They wouldn't even look at this whole situation seriously. K: But the religious people have created a tremendous problem for man. DB: Yes. They are trying to solve problems too. I mean everybody is caught up in his own little fragment, solving whatever he thinks he can solve, but it all adds up to chaos. K: To chaos and wars! That is what we are saying. We live in chaos. But I want to find out if I can live without a single problem for the rest of my life. Is that possible? DB: Well, I wonder if we should even call these things problems, you see. A problem would be something that is reasonably solvable. If you put the problem of how to achieve a certain result, then that presupposes that you can reasonably find a way to do it technologically. But psychologically, the problem cannot be looked at in that way; to propose a result you have to achieve, and then find a way to do it. K: What is the root of all this? What is the cause of all this human chaos? I am trying to come to it from a different angle, to discover whether there is an ending to problems. You see, personally, I refuse to have problems. DB: Somebody might argue with you about that and say that maybe you are not challenged with something. K: I was challenged the other day about something very, very serious. That is not a problem. DB: Then it is a matter of clarification. part of the difficulty is clarification of the language. K: Clarification, not only of language, but of relationship and action. A problem arose the other day which involved lots of people, and a certain action had to be taken. But to me personally it was not a problem. DB: We have to make it clear what you mean, because without an example, I don't know. K: I mean by a problem something that has to be resolved, something you worry about; something you are questioning, and endlessly concerned with. Also doubts and uncertainties, and having to take some kind of action which you will regret at the end. DB: Let's begin with the technical problem where the idea first arose. You have a challenge, something which needs to be done, and you say that is a problem. K: Yes, that is generally called a problem. DB: Now the word problem is based on the idea of putting forth something - a possible solution - and then trying to achieve it. K: Or, I have a problem but I don't know how to deal with it. DB: If you have a problem and you have no idea how to deal with it... K: ...then I go round asking people for advice, and getting more and more confused. DB: This would already be a change from the simple idea of a technical problem, where you usually have some notion of what to do. K: I wonder if we do? Surely technical problems are fairly simple. DB: They often bring challenges requiring us to go very deeply and change our ideas. With a technical problem, we generally know what we have to do to solve it. For example, if there is lack of food, what we have to do is to find ways and means of producing more. But with a psychological problem, can we do the same? K: That is the point. How do we deal with this thing? DB: Well, what kind of problem shall we discuss? K: Any problem which arises in human relationships. DB: Let's say that people cannot agree; they fight each other constantly. K: Yes, let's take that for a simple thing. It seems to be almost impossible for a group of people to think together, to have the same outlook and attitude. I don't mean copying each other, of course. But each person puts his opinion forward and is contradicted by another - which goes on all the time, everywhere. DB: All right. So can we say that our problem is to work together, to think together? K: Work together, think together, co-operate without the involvement of monetary issues. DB: That is another question, whether people will work together if they are highly paid. K: So how do we solve this problem? In a group, all of us are offering different opinions, and we don't meet each other at all. And it seems almost impossible to give up one's opinions. DB: Yes, that is one of the difficulties, but I am not sure that you can regard it as a problem, and ask, what shall we do to give up opinions. K: No, of course. But that is a fact. So observing that, and seeing the necessity that we should all come together, people still cannot give up their opinions, their ideas, their own experiences and conclusions. DB: Often it may not seem to them like an opinion, but the truth. K: Yes, they would call it fact. But what can man do about these divisions? We see the necessity of working together - not for some ideal, belief, some principle or some god. In various countries throughout the world, and even in the United Nations they are not working together. DB: Some people might say that we not only have opinions, but self-interest. If two people have conflicting self-interests, there is no way, as long as they maintain their attachment to these, that they can work together. So how do we break into this? K: If you point out to me that we must work together, and show me the importance of it, then I also see that it is important. But I can't do it! DB: That's the point. It is not enough even to see that cooperation is important, and to have the intention of achieving this. With this inability there is a new factor coming in. Why is it that we cannot carry out our intentions? K: One can give many reasons for that, but those causes and reasons and explanations don't solve the problem. We come back to the same thing - what will make a human mind change? We see that change is necessary, and yet are incapable or unwilling to change. What factor - what new factor - is necessary for this? DB: Well, I feel it is the ability to observe deeply whatever it is that is holding the person and preventing him from changing. K: So is the new factor attention? DB: Yes, that is what I meant. But also, we have to consider what kind of attention. K: First let's discuss what is attention. DB: It may have many meanings to different people. K: Of course, as usual, there are so many opinions! Where there is attention, there is no problem. Where there is inattention, every difficulty arises. Now without making attention itself into a problem, what do we mean by it? Can we understand it, not verbally, not intellectually, but deeply, in our blood? Obviously attention is not concentration. It is not an endeavour, an experience, a struggle to be attentive. You must show me the nature of attention, which is that when there is attention, there is no centre from which `I' attend. DB: Yes, but that is the difficult thing. K: Don't let's make a problem of it. DB: I mean that people have been trying this for a long time. I think that there is first of all some difficulty in understanding what is meant by attention, because of the content of thought itself When a person is looking at it, he may think he is attending. K: No, in that state of attention there is no thought. DB: But how do you stop thought then? You see, while thinking is going on, there is an impression of attention - which is not attention. But one thinks, one supposes that one is paying attention. K: When one supposes one is paying attention, that is not it. DB: So how do we communicate the true meaning of attention? K: Or would you say rather that to find out what is attention, we should discuss what is inattention? DB: Yes. K: And through negation come to the positive. When I am inattentive, what takes place? In my inattentiveness, I feel lonely, depressed, anxious, and so on. DB: The mind begins to break up and go into confusion. K: Fragmentation takes place. And in my lack of attention, I identify myself with many other things. DB: Yes, and it may be pleasant - but it can be painful too. K: I find, later on, that what was pleasing becomes pain. So all that is a movement in which there is no attention. Right? Are we getting anywhere? DB: I don't know. K: I feel that attention is the real solution to all this - a mind which is really attentive, which has understood the nature of inattention and moves away from it! DB: But first, what is the nature of inattention? K: Indolence, negligence, self-concern, self-contradiction - all that is the nature of inattention. DB: Yes. You see, a person who has self-concern may feel that he is attending but he is simply concerned with himself. K: Yes. If there is self contradiction in me, and I pay attention to it in order not to be self-contradictory, that is not attention. DB: But can we make this clear, because ordinarily one might think that this is attention. K: No, it is not. It is merely a process of thought, which says, `I am this, I must not be that'. DB: So you are saying that this attempt to become, is not attention. K: Yes, that's right. Because the psychological becoming breeds inattention. DB: Yes. K: Isn't it very difficult, Sir, to be free of becoming? That is the root of it. To end becoming. DB: Yes. There is no attention, and that is why these problems are there. K: Yes, and when you point that out, the paying attention also becomes a problem. DB: The difficulty is that the mind plays tricks, and in trying to deal with this, it does the very same thing again. K: Of course. Can the mind, which is so full of knowledge, self-importance, self-contradiction, and all the rest of it, come to a point where it finds itself psychologically unable to move? DB: There is nowhere for it to move. K: What would I say to a person who has come to that point? I come to you. I am full of this confusion, anxiety, and sense of despair, not only for myself but for the world. I come to that point, and I want to break through it. So it becomes a problem to me. DB: Then we are back; there is again an attempt to become, you see. K: Yes. That is what I want to get at. So is that the root of all this? The desire to become? DB: Well, it must be close to it. K: So how do I look, without the movement of becoming, at this whole complex issue of myself? DB: It seems that one hasn't looked at the whole. We did not look at the whole of becoming, when you said, `How can I pay attention?' part of it seemed to slip out, and became the observer. Right? K: Psychological becoming has been the curse of all this. A poor man wants to be rich, and a rich man wants to be richer, it is all the time this movement of becoming, both outwardly and inwardly. And though it brings a great deal of pain and sometimes pleasure, this sense of becoming, fulfilling, achieving psychologically, has made my life into all that it is. Now I realize that, but I can't stop it. DB: Why can't I stop it? K: Let's go into that. Partly I am concerned in becoming because there is a reward at the end of it; also I am avoiding pain or punishment. And in that cycle I am caught. That is probably one of the reasons why the mind keeps on trying to become something. And the other perhaps is deep rooted anxiety or fear that if I don't become something, I am lost. I am uncertain an insecure, so the mind has accepted these illusions and says, I cannot end that process of becoming. DB: But why doesn't the mind end it? Also we have to go into the question of being trapped by these illusions. K: How do you convince me that I am caught in an illusion? You can't, unless I see it myself I cannot see it because my illusion is so strong. That illusion has been nurtured, cultivated by religion, by the family, and so on. It is so deeply rooted that I refuse to let it go. That is what is taking place with a large number of people. They say, `I want to do this but I cannot'. Now given that situation, what are they to do? Will explanations, logic and all the various contradictions, theories, help them? Obviously not. DB: Because it all gets absorbed into the structure. K: So what is the next thing? DB: You see, if they say, `I want to change', there is also the wish not to change. K: Of course. The man who says, `I want to change', has also at the back of his mind, `Really, why should I change?' They go together. DB: So we have a contradiction. K: I have lived in this contradiction, I have accepted it. DB: But why should I have accepted it? K: Because it is a habit. DB: But when the mind is healthy, it will not accept a contradiction. K: But our mind isn't healthy. The mind is so diseased, so corrupt, so confused, that even though you point out all the dangers of this, it refuses to see them. So how do we help a man who is caught in this to see clearly the danger of psychological becoming? Let's put it that way. psychological becoming implies identification with a nation, a group, and all that business. DB: Yes, holding to opinions. K: Opinions and beliefs; I have had an experience, it gives me satisfaction, I am going to hold on to it. How do you help me to be free of all this? I hear your words - they seem quite right, but I can't move out of all that. I wonder if there is another factor, another way of communication, which isn't based on words, knowledge, explanations and reward and punishment. Is there another way of communicating? You see, in that too there is danger. I am sure there is a way which is not verbal, analytical or logical, which doesn't mean lack of sanity. DB: Perhaps there is. K: My mind has always communicated with another with words, explanations and logic, or with suggestion. There must be another element which breaks through all that. DB: It will break through the inability to listen. K: Yes, the inability to listen, the inability to observe, to hear, and so on. There must be a different method. I have met several men who have been to a certain saint, and in his company they say all problems are resolved. But when they go back to their daily life, they are back in the old game. DB: There was no intelligence in it, you see. K: That is the danger. That man, that saint, being quiet and nonverbal in the presence of that saint they feel quiet, and think that their problems are resolved. DB: But this is still from the outside. K: Of course. It is like going to church. In an ancient church, or cathedral, you feel extraordinarily quiet. It is the atmosphere, the structure - you know; the very atmosphere makes you feel quiet. DB: Yes, it communicates what is meant by quietness, nonverbally. K: That is nothing. It is like incense! DB: It is superficial. K: Utterly superficial; like incense, it evaporates! So we push all that aside, and then what have we left? Not an outside agency, a god, or some saviour. What have I left? What is there that can be communicated, which will break through the wall that human beings have built for themselves? Is it love? That word has become corrupted, loaded, dirty. But cleansing that word, is love the factor that will break through this clever analytical approach? Is love the element that is lacking? DB: Well, we have to discuss it; perhaps people are somewhat chary of that word. K: I am chary beyond words! DB: And, therefore, as people resist listening, they will resist love too. K: That is why I said it is rather a risky word. DB: We were saying the other day that love contains intelligence. K: Of course. DB: Which is care as well; we mean by love that energy which also contains intelligence and care; all that... K: Now wait a minute: you have that quality and I am caught in my misery, anxiety, etc., and you are trying to penetrate with that intelligence this mass of darkness. How will you do it? Will that act? If not, we human beings are lost. You follow, Sir? Therefore we have vented jesus, Buddha, Krishna - images which have become meaningless, superficial and nonsensical. So what shall I do? I think that is the other factor. Attention, perception, intelligence and love - you bring all this to me, and I am incapable of receiving it. I say, `It sounds nice; I feel it, but I can't hold it'. I can't hold it, because the moment I go outside this room, I am lost! DB: That really is the problem. K: Yes, that is the real problem. Is love something outside, as heaven - and all that stuff is outside. Is love something outside, which you bring to me, which you awaken in me, which you give me as a gift - or, in my darkness, illusion and suffering, is there that quality? Obviously not, there can't be. DB: Then where is it? K: That's just it. Love is not yours or mine; it is not personal, not something that belongs to anyone; love is not that. DB: That is an important point. Similarly you were saying that isolation does not belong to any one person, although we tend to think of isolation as a personal problem. K: Of course. It is common ground for all of us. Also, intelligence is not personal. DB: But again, that goes contrary to the whole of our thinking, you see. K: I know. DB: Everybody says this person is intelligent, and that one is not. So this may be one of the barriers to the whole thing, that behind the ordinary everyday thought there is deeper thought of mankind, but we generally feel divided, and say these various qualities either belong to us, or they don't belong to us. K: Quite. It is the fragmentary mind that invents all this. DB: It has been invented, but we have picked it up verbally and non-verbally, by implication, from childhood. Therefore it pervades, it is the ground of our thoughts, of all our perceptions. So this has to be questioned. K: We have questioned it - that grief is not my grief, grief is human, and so on. DB: But how are people to see that, because a person who is experiencing grief feels that it is his personal grief? K: I think it is partly because of our education, partly our society and traditions. DB: But it is implicit in our whole way of thinking. Then we have to jump out of that, you see. K: Yes. To jump out of that becomes a problem, and then what am I to do? DB: Perhaps we can see that love is not personal. K: Earth is not English earth, or French earth, earth is earth! DB: I was thinking of an example in physics: if the scientist or chemist is studying an element such as sodium, he does not say it is his sodium, or that somebody else studies his sodium. And of course they compare notes, etc. K: Quite. Sodium is sodium. DB: Sodium is sodium, universally. So we have to say that love is love, universally. K: Yes. But you see my mind refuses to see that, because I am so terribly personal, terribly concerned with `me and my problems'. I refuse to let that go. When you say sodium is sodium, it is very simple; I can see that. But when you say to me that grief is common to all of us, this is difficult. DB: This can't be done with time, but it took quite a while for mankind to realize that sodium is sodium, you see. K: Is love something that is common to all of us? DB: Well, in so far as it exists, it has to be common. K: Of course. DB: It may not exist, but if it does, it has to be common. K: I am not sure it does not exist. Compassion is not `I am compassionate'. Compassion is there, is something that is not `me'. DB: If we say compassion is the same as sodium, it is universal. Then every person's compassion is the same. K: Compassion, love, and intelligence. You can't have compassion without intelligence. DB: So we say intelligence is universal too! K: Obviously. DB: But we have methods of testing intelligence in particular people, you see. K: Oh, no. DB: But perhaps that is all part of the thing that is getting in the way? K: Part of this divisive, fragmentary way of thinking. DB: Well, there may be holistic thinking, although we are not in it yet. K: Then holistic thinking is not thinking; it is some other factor. DB: Some other factor that we haven't gone into yet. K: If love is common to all of us, why am I blind to it? DB: I think partly because the mind boggles; it just refuses to consider such a fantastic change of concept in a way of looking. K: But you said just now that sodium is sodium. DB: You see, we have a lot of evidence for that in all sorts of experiments, built up through a lot of work and experience. Now we can't do that with love. You can't go into a laboratory and prove that love is love. K: Oh, no. Love isn't knowledge. Why does one's mind refuse to accept a very obvious factor? Is it the fear of letting go my old values, standards and opinions? DB: I think it is probably something deeper. It is hard to pin down, but it isn't a simple thing, although what you suggest is a partial explanation. K: That is a superficial explanation, I know. Is it the deep rooted anxiety, the longing to be totally secure? DB: But that again is based on fragmentation. K: Of course. DB: If we accept that we are fragmented, we will inevitably want to be totally secure, because being fragmented we are always in danger. K: Is that the root of it? This urge, this demand, this longing to be totally secure in our relationship with everything? To be certain? Of course, there is complete security only in nothingness! DB: It is not the demand for security which is wrong, but the fragmentations. The fragment cannot possibly be secure. K: That is right. Like each country trying to be secure, it is not secure. DB: But complete security could be achieved if all the countries got together. The way you have put it sounds as if we should live eternally in insecurity, you see. K: No, we have made that very clear. DB: It makes sense to ask for security, but we are going about it the wrong way. How do we convey that love is universal, not personal, to a man who has lived completely in the narrow groove of personal achievement? It seems the first point is, will he question his narrow, `unique' personality? K: People question it; they see the logic of what we are discussing, yet, curiously, people who are very serious in these matters, have tried to find the wholeness of life through starvation, through torture - you know, every kind of way. But you can't apprehend or perceive or be the whole through torture. So what shall we do? Let's say I have a brother who refuses to see all this. And as I have great affection for him, I want him to move out of fragmentation. And I have tried to communicate with him verbally, and sometimes non-verbally, by a gesture or by a look; but all this is still from the outside. And perhaps that is the reason why he resists. Can I point out to my brother that in himself this flame can be awakened? It means he must listen to me, but my brother refuses to listen. DB: It seems that there are some actions which are not possible. If a person is caught in a certain thought such as fragmentation, then he can't change it, because there are a lot of other thoughts behind it. K: Of course. DB: Thoughts he doesn't know. He is not actually free to take this action because of the whole structure of thought that holds him. K: So how do I help - I use that word with great caution - my brother? What is the root of all this? We talk of his becoming aware - but all that is verbal; it can be explained in different ways -the cause, the effect, and all the rest of it. After I explain all this, he says, `You have left me where I am'. And my intelligence, my affection, says `I can't let him go'. Which means, am I putting pressure on him? I am not using any kind of pressure, or reward; my responsibility is that I can't let another human being go. It is not the responsibility of duty and all that dreadful stuff But it is the responsibility of intelligence to say all that to him. There is a tradition in India that one who is called the Maitreya Buddha took a vow that he would not become the ultimate Buddha until he had liberated other human beings too. DB: Altogether? K: Yes. You see, the tradition hasn't changed anything. How can one, if one has that intelligence, that compassion, that love, which is not of a country, a person, an ideal or a saviour, transmit that purity to another? By living with him, talking to him? You see it can all become mechanical. DB: Would you say that this question has never really been solved? K: I think so. But we must solve it, you follow? It has not been solved, but our intelligence says, solve it. No, I think intelligence doesn't say solve it; intelligence says these are the facts, and perhaps some will capture it. DB: Well, it seems to me that there are really two factors: one is the preparation by reason to show that it all makes sense; and from there possibly some will capture it. K: We have done that, Sir. The map has been laid out, and he has seen it very clearly; the conflicts, the misery, the confusion, the insecurity, the becoming. All that is extremely clear. But at the end of the chapter he is back at the beginning. Or perhaps he has a glimpse of it, and his craving to capture that glimpse and hold on to it becomes a memory. You follow? And all the nightmare begins! In showing him the map very clearly, can we also point out to him something much deeper than that, which is love? He is groping after all this. But the weight of body, brain, tradition - all that draws him back. So it is a constant battle - and I think the whole thing is so wrong. DB: What is wrong? K: The way we are living. DB: Many people must see that by now. K: We have asked whether man has taken a wrong turning, and entered into a valley where there is no escape. That can't be so; that is too depressing, too appalling. DB: I think some people might object to that. The very fact that it is appalling does not make it untrue. I think you would have to give some stronger reason why you feel that to be untrue. K: Oh, yes. DB: Do you perceive in human nature some possibility of a real change? K: Of course. Otherwise everything would be meaningless; we'd be monkeys, machines. You see, the faculty for radical change is attributed to some outside agency, and therefore we look to that, and get lost in that. If we don't look to anybody, and are completely free from dependence, then solitude is common to all of us. It is not an isolation. It is an obvious fact that when you see all this - the stupidity and unreality of fragmentation and division - you are naturally alone. That sense of aloneness is common, and not personal. DB: Yes, but the ordinary sense of loneliness is personal in the sense that each person feels it is his own. K: Loneliness is not solitude; it is not aloneness. DB; I think all the fundamental things are universal, and therefore you are saying that when the mind goes deep, it comes into something universal. K: That's right. DB: Whether or not you call it absolute. K: The problem is to make the mind go very, very deeply into itself. DB: Yes. Now there is something that has occurred to me. When we start with a particular problem our mind is very shallow, then we go to something more general. The word `general' has the same root as `to generate', the genus is the common generation... K: To generate, of course. DB: When we go to something more general, a depth is generated. But going on, still further, the general is still limited because it is thought. K: Quite right. But to go profoundly, requires not only tremendous courage, but the sense of constantly pursuing the same stream. DB: Well, that is not quite diligence; that is still too limited, right? K: Yes, diligence is too limited. It goes with a religious mind in a sense that it is diligence in its action, its thoughts and so on, but it is still limited. If the mind can go from the particular to the general and from the general... DB: ...to the absolute, to the universal. But many people would say that is very abstract, and has nothing to do with daily life. K: I know. Yet it is the most practical thing, and not an abstraction. DB: In fact, it is the particular that is the abstraction. K: Absolutely. The particular is the most dangerous. DB: It is also the most abstract, because you only get to the particular by abstracting. K: Of course, of course. DB: I think that this may be part of the problem. People feel they want something that really affects us in daily life; they don't just want to get themselves lost in talking, therefore, they say, `All these vapid generalities don't interest us'. It is true that what we are discussing must work in daily life, but daily life does not contain the solution of its problems. K: No. The daily life is the general and the particular. DB: The human problems which arise in daily life cannot be solved there. K: From the particular, it is necessary to move to the general; from the general to move still deeper, and there perhaps is the purity of what is called compassion, love and intelligence. But that means giving your mind, your heart, your whole being to this enquiry. We have talked now for a long time, I think we have reached somewhere. OJAI 1ST CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 1ST APRIL, 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' JK: Sir, how shall we start this? DB: I understand you have something to say. JK: On lots of things but I do not know how to start it. DB: Oh. JK: Sir, I would like to ask if humanity has taken a wrong turn. DB: A wrong turn? Well it must have done so, a long time ago, I think. K: That is what I feel. A long time ago mankind must have turned. DB: Yes. K: I am just enquiring. DB: It appears that way. K: It appears that way - why? You see, as I look at it, mankind has always tried to become something - the becoming. DB: Well possibly. You see I think I was struck by something I read a long time ago about a man going wrong when he began to be able to plunder and take slaves about five or six thousand years ago. And then after that his main purpose of existence was to just exploit and plunder and take slaves. K: Yes, but the sense of inward becoming. DB: Well yes, we should make it clear how this is connected. What kind of becoming was involved in doing that? Instead of being constructive and discovering new techniques, and metals, and so on, they found it easier to plunder their neighbours and take slaves at a certain point. K: Yes, yes, all that. DB: Now what did they want to become? K: That is, conflict has been the root of all this. DB: What was the conflict? You see if we could put ourselves in the place of the people a long time ago, how would you see that conflict? K: What is the root of conflict, not only outwardly, but also this tremendous inward conflict of humanity? What is the root of it? DB: Well, it seems it would be contradictory desires. K: No. Is it that we are all trying, in all religions it has been that you must become something? You must reach. DB: Yes, well what made people want to do that? Why weren't they satisfied to be whatever they were? You see the religion would not have caught on unless people felt that there was some attraction to becoming something more. K: Isn't it an avoidance or rather, not being able to face the fact and change the fact, but rather move to something else, more and more and more. DB: Yes. Well what would you say was the fact that people couldn't stay with? K: What is the fact that people could not stay with? The Christians said, the original sin. DB: Yes, well that is already a long time - it happened long before that. K: Long before that. I am just saying. Long before that. The Hindus have this idea of Karma. What is the origin of all this? DB: Well we have said that there is a fact that people couldn't stay with. But whatever it was they wanted to imagine something better. K: Yes, something better. Becoming more and more and more. DB: Yes. And you could say that technologically they began to make techniques to make things better which made sense, and then they extended this, without knowing it, and said 'I too must become better, all of us must'. K: Yes, inside becoming better. DB: All of us together must become better. K: That's right. What is the root of all this? DB: Well I should thing it is natural in thought to project this goal of becoming better, that it is intrinsic in the structure of thought. K: Is it becoming better outwardly - the principle of becoming better outwardly, move to the inside, trying to become better. DB: Yes, well that's clear that man didn't know any reason why he shouldn't do that. K: I know, of course. DB: He say, if it is good to become better outwardly then why shouldn't I become better inwardly. K: Is that the cause of it? DB: Well, that is getting towards it. It's coming nearer. K: It is coming nearer? Is time the factor? Time as 'I need knowledge in order to do - it doesn't matter, whatever it is - I need time for that'. The same principle applied inwardly. DB: It is the same general idea to say that we project something better outwardly which requires time and therefore the same must be done inwardly. K: Is time the factor? DB: Well time by itself I can't see is the only factor. K: No, no. Time, becoming which implies time. DB: Yes, but one would have to ask a question here: time by itself - we don't see how it is going to cause trouble. We have to say time applied outwardly causes no difficulty. K: It causes a certain amount, but inwardly the idea of time. DB: Yes, so we have to see why is time so destructive inwardly. K: Because I am trying to become something. DB: Yes but if I could say that most people would say that is only natural. We have to say what is it about becoming that is wrong. K: In that there is conflict. DB: Yes. O.K. So we see that then. K: Obviously in that when I am trying to become something it is a constant battle. DB: Yes. Can we go into that: why it is a constant battle. K: Oh, that is fairly simple. DB: It is not a battle if I try to improve my position outwardly. K: Outwardly, no. DB: It is not obvious. Yes, but it would be good to bring it out very much in the open why it is a battle when we are trying to do something inwardly. K: Are we asking why it is that it is more or less all right outwardly, but inwardly when that same principle is applied it brings about a contradiction. DB: Yes. And the contradiction is? K: Between 'what is' and the 'becoming what should be'. DB: Yes, but then outwardly it would appear there is a contradiction too because we have a certain situation here and we try to make it into something else. Now that seems all right. K: That seems normal. DB: The difficulty is why is it a contradiction inwardly and not outwardly, or the other way round? K: Inwardly it builds up, doesn't it, a centre, an egotistic centre. DB: Yes, but if we could find some reason why it should do that. Does it do it when we do it outwardly? It seems it needn't do. K: It needn't do. DB: Yes. Now when we are doing it inwardly then we are trying to force ourselves to be something that we are not. Right? K: Yes. DB: And that is a fight. That is clear. K: That is a fact. DB: But it seems outwardly it needn't be a fight. Because matter will allow itself to be shaped - you know, from what is to what it should be. K: Is it one's brain is so accustomed to conflict that one rejects any other form of living? DB: Well that must have come later. K: I understand that, I understand that. DB: After a while people come to the conclusion that conflict is inevitable and necessary? K: But the origin of conflict, we are going into it. What's the origin of conflict? DB: I think we touched on it by saying we are trying to force ourselves, on the one hand I think when we are a certain thing that is what we want to be, and then we also want to be something else, which is different and therefore we want two different things at the same time. Would that seem right? K: I understand that. But I am trying to find out the origin of all this misery, confusion, conflict, struggle - what is the beginning of it? That's why I asked at the beginning: has mankind taken a wrong turn? Is the origin 'I am not I'? DB: Well, that might be getting closer. I think that is getting closer to separation between 'I am not I'. K: Yes, that's it. And the 'I' - why has mankind created this 'I', which must inevitably cause conflict? 'I' and you, and me better and so on and so on and so on. DB: I think that was a mistake made a long time ago, or as you call it a wrong turn, that again having introduced separation between various things outwardly we then, not knowing better, kept on doing. Not out of ill will but simply not knowing better. K: Quite, quite, quite. DB: Not seeing what they are doing. K: Is that the origin of all this? DB: Well it is close. I am not sure that it is the origin. What do you feel? K: I am inclined to observe that the origin is that, the ego, the 'me', the 'I'. DB: Yes. K: If there is no ego there is no problem, there is no conflict, there is no time - time in the sense of becoming, not becoming, being or not being. DB: But it might be that we would still slip into whatever it was that made us make the ego in the first place. K: Is it - wait a minute, wait a minute - is it energy being so vast, limitless, has been condensed or narrowed down in the mind, and the brain itself has become narrowed down because it couldn't contain all this enormous energy - you are following what I am saying? DB: Yes. K: And therefore gradually narrowed down to me, to the 'I'. DB: I don't quite follow that. I understand that that is what happened but I don't quite see all the steps. If you say energy was very broad, very big, and the brain you say can't handle it, or it decided it couldn't handle it? K: It couldn't handle it. DB: But if it can't handle it, it seems as if there is no way out them? K: No, no, Just a minute. Wait, wait, wait. Slowly. I just want to enquire, push into it a little bit. Why has the brain, with all thought and so on, created this sense of 'me', 'I'? Why? Outwardly, the family, you follow, outwardly it had to be that way. DB: Well we needed a certain sense of identity to function. K: Yes, to function. To function, to have a trade, function. DB: To know where you belong. K: Yes, and so on. And is that the movement that has brought that in? The movement of the outer, where I had to identify - the family, the house and so on gradually became the me? DB: Yes, well I think that this energy that you are talking about also entered into it. K: Yes, I want to lead up to it slowly. I have got an idea inside I'll show you a little later. DB: Somehow - you see certainly what you say is right that in some way this gradually strengthened but by itself that wouldn't explain the tremendous strength that the ego has. It would only be a habit then. The ego becoming completely dominant required that it become the focus of the highest energy, you know, the greatest energy, of all the energy? K: Is that it? That the brain cannot hold this vast energy? DB: Well let's say the brain is trying to control this, to bring it to order. K: Energy has no order. DB: You see if the brain feels it can't control something that is going on inside, it will try to establish order. K: Sir, could we say that the brain, your brain, his brain, her brain, is not just born, it is very, very old? DB: Well, I would have to see what that means anyway. In what sense? K: In the sense it has evolved. DB: Evolved, yes, from the animal. K: From the animal and so on. DB: And the animal has evolved and so let's say that in the sense that this whole evolution is somehow contained in the brain. K: I want to question evolution. I understand say, from the bullock cart to the jet - I understand that, that evolution. DB: Yes. But before you question we have to consider that there is evidence of the development of a series of steps, man developing through a series of stages - you can't question that, can you? K: No, of course not, of course not. DB: I mean physically it is clear that evolution has occurred in some way. K: Physically, yes. DB: And the brain has got larger. K: Quite. DB: More complex. You may question whether mentally evolution has any meaning. I understand that. K: You see sir, I want to avoid time. DB: Right. Go ahead. K: Psychologically, you understand? DB: Yes, I understand. K: To me that is the enemy. DB: Yes, I understand that very well. K: You understand that? DB: Yes. K: Well that is something! And is that the cause of it? DB: I don't know what we mean by cause but it is one point. K: No, the origin of man's misery? DB: Well this use of time certainly. Man had to use time for a certain purpose and he misused it. K: I understand that. I mean if I had to learn a language I must have time. DB: But the misuse of time by extending it inwardly. K: Inwardly, that is what I am talking about. DB: Yes. To the essence. K: Is that the cause of this - man's confusion - introducing time as a means of becoming, and becoming more and more perfect, more and more evolved, more and more loving? You follow what I mean? DB: Well, yes I understand. Certainly if we didn't do that the whole structure would collapse. K: Collapse, that's it. DB: But whether there is not some other cause still, I don't know. K: Just a minute. I want to go into that a little bit. If I - no, I am not talking theoretically, personally. To me the idea of tomorrow doesn't exist psychologically. DB: Right. K: That is, time is a movement either inwardly or outwardly. Right? DB: You mean psychological time? K: Yes psychological time and time outwardly. DB: Yes. And certain relation between those two. K: Now if the psychological time doesn't exist then there is no conflict, there is no me, there is no 'I' which is the origin of conflict. Do you understand sir what I am trying to get at? Outwardly we moved, evolved - this microphone and so on. DB: And also in the inward physical structure. K: The structure, everything. But psychologically we have also moved outwardly. DB: Yes, we have focused our life on the outward. Is that what you are saying? K: Yes. DB: We have turned our attention to the outward. K: No. I have extended my capacities outwardly. DB: Yes we have developed outwardly. K: And inwardly it is the same movement outwardly. DB: Yes, whatever we do outwardly we do inwardly. K: Yes. I don't know whether I am conveying this. DB: I understand that in order to develop outwardly in a certain way through time and mechanism we have to adopt that inward structure. K: Yes, now if there is no inward movement as time, moving, becoming more and more, then what takes place? You understand what I am trying to convey? DB: Yes. Well then if we say this whole movement of time ceases - whatever that means - the word 'ceases' is wrong because that is time. K: Time ends. DB: Without the movement of time that the energy is... K: You see the outer movement is the same as the inward movement. DB: Yes. Whatever you do outwardly you must do inwardly. That seems correct. K: And it is the same movement. DB: Yes. It is going around and around. K: Yes, yes, involving time. DB: Yes. K: If that movement ceases then what takes place? I wonder if I am conveying anything. Are we talking nonsense? I don't think I am talking nonsense. Sir, could we put it this way: we have never touched any other movement than the outer movement. DB: Yes, well generally anyway. We put most of our energy into the outward movements. K: Outward, and psychologically is also outward. DB: Well it is the reflection of the outward movement. K: We think it is inward but it is actually outward - right? DB: Yes. K: Now if that movement ends, as it must, then is there a really inward movement - movement not in terms of time? DB: You want to say: is there another kind of movement? K: Yes. DB: It still moves but not in terms of time. K: That's right. DB: We have to go into that. Could you go further. K: You see that word movement means time. DB: Well it means to change place from one place to another really. But anyway still you have some notion which is not static. By denying time you don't want to return to something static, which still is time. K: You see one's brain has been trained, accustomed, for centuries to go North, let's say for instance. And it suddenly realizes going North is everlasting conflict. As it realizes it moves East. In that movement the brain itself is changing. Right? DB: Well something changes, yes. K: The quality of the brain changes. DB: All right. Well I can see it will wake up in some way to a different movement. K: Yes, different. A different movement again - you see. DB: Is the word flow any better? K: If I am not going North, and I have been going North all my life, and there is a stoppage from going North, but it is not going East, or South or West, then conflict ceases. Right? Because it is not moving in any direction. DB: All right. So that is the key point - the direction of movement. When the movement is fixed in direction, inwardly it will come to conflict. Outwardly we need a fixed direction. K: Of course we do. That's understood. DB: Yes. So if we say it has no fixed direction then what is it doing? Is it moving in all directions? K: I am hesitant to talk about this a little bit. Could one say when one really comes to that state, that is the source of all energy? DB: Yes, as you go deeper, more inwardly. K: This is the real inwardness, not the outward movement becoming the inner movement but when there is no outer and inner movement. DB: Yes, we can deny both the outward and the inner, so that it would seem to stop movement. K: Would that be the source of all energy? DB: Yes, well perhaps we could say that. K: May I talk about myself a little bit? DB: Yes. K: It sounds so ridiculous. DB: No, it doesn't actually. It seems to make sense so far. K: First of all conscious meditation is no meditation. Right? DB: What do you mean by conscious meditation? K: That is deliberate meditation, practice and deliberate, which is really premeditated meditation. Right? Is there a meditation which is not premeditated? Which is not the ego trying to become something, or the ego not trying to negate negatively or positively. DB: Yes. Now before we go ahead could we suggest somewhat what meditation should be. Is it an observation of the mind observing? K: No, no, no. It has gone beyond all that. DB: Yes. So... K: Sorry! DB: You used the word meditation. K: I am using meditation in the sense in which there is not a particle of endeavour, a particle of any sense of trying to become, consciously reach a level and so on. DB: The mind is simply with itself, silent. K: That is what I want to get at. DB: Not looking for anything. K: You don't mind, we two are talking. You see I don't meditate in the normal sense of the word. What happens with me is - I am not talking personally, please: I wake up meditating. DB: In that state. K: And one morning, one night in Rishi Valley I woke up - a series of incidents had taken place, meditation for some days - I woke up one night, in the middle of the night, it was really a quarter past twelve, I looked at the watch. And I hesitate to say this because it sounds extravagant and rather childish: that the source of all energy had been reached. And that had an extraordinary effect on the brain, and also physically. Sorry to talk about myself but you understand. Wait a minute, I don't mind now I am in it. And literally any sense of the world and me and that - you follow? - there was no division at all only this sense of tremendous source of energy. I don't know if I am conveying it. DB: So the brain was in contact with this source of energy? K: Yes. Now, coming down to earth, as I have been talking for sixty years, I'd like to, not help, I'd like another to reach this - no, not reach it - you understand what I am saying? Because all our problems are resolved, political, religious, every problem is resolved because it is pure energy from the very beginning of time. Now how am I - not I, you understand - how is one to - not teach, not help, not push, pressure - how is one to say, 'This way leads to a complete sense of peace, love and all that'? I am sorry to use all these words. Sir, you have it sir, suppose you have come to that point and your brain itself is throbbing with it, how would you help me? You understand? Not words, how would you help me to come to that? You understand what I am trying to say? DB: Yes. K: My brain, brain, not mine, the brain has evolved. Evolution implies time and it can only think, live in time. Now for it to deny time is a tremendous activity of having no problems. Any problem that arises, any question is immediately solved. It has no duration, of a problem. DB: Well is this sustained? Is this situation sustained or is it for that period? K: It is sustained, obviously, otherwise there is no point in it. It is not sporadic, intermittent and all that. Now how are you to open the door, shut, however, how are you to help me to say, 'Look, we have been going in the wrong direction, there is only another non-movement, and if that takes place, you follow, everything will be correct.' It sounds silly all this. DB: Well yes. I think I can't know if everything is going to be correct. It is hard to know beforehand if everything is going to be correct. But the movement would have value anyway. Certainly it should make a big difference. K: Sir, let's go back to what we began with. That is, has mankind taken a wrong turn, psychologically, not physically? DB: Yes, we went into that - the turn in various ways. K: Can that turn be completely reversed? Or stopped? Say, my brain is so accustomed to this evolutionary idea that I will become something, I will gain something, I must have more knowledge and so on and so on, can that brain realize suddenly there is no such thing as time? You understand what I am trying to say? DB: Yes. K: I was listening the other day to Darwin on the television, his voyage, and what he achieved and so on and so on, his whole evolution. DB: Oh, Darwin, yes. K: It seems to me that is a wrong thing psychologically. Totally untrue. DB: Once again it seems that he has given evidence that these species have changed in time. Now why is that untrue? K: Of course it was obvious. DB: Yes it is true in that regard. I think it would be untrue to say the mind evolved in time. K: Of course. DB: But physically it seems clear there has been a process of evolution and this has increased the capacity of the brain to do certain things. But for example we couldn't be discussing this if the brain had not grown larger. K: Of course sir, I understand all that. DB: But I think you are implying that the mind is not originating in the brain. Is that so? The brain is perhaps an instrument for it, of the mind? K: The mind. And the mind is not time. DB: The mind is not time. K: Just see what it means. We are getting nearer. DB: It does not evolve with the brain. K: Sounds odd, doesn't it? DB: It would sound odd to persons not used to it, In the past people used to accept this idea quite easily. K: The mind not being of time, and the brain being of time - is that the origin of conflict? DB: That may be an important point. K: You understand sir what that means? The Hindus say the Atman, the highest Principle is in man, which is the mind. I may be translating wrongly, interpreting it wrongly. And the brain is of time. I am putting it, they may not put it that way. So is that the origin of conflict? DB: Well we have to see why that produces conflict. It is not clear to say even that the brain is of time, but rather it has developed in such a way that time is in it. K: Yes, that is what I meant. DB: But not necessarily so. K: It has evolved. DB: It has evolved so it has time within it. K: Yes as it has evolved, time is part of it. DB: It has become part of its very structure. K: Yes. DB: And that was necessary. And now however the mind operates without time, the brain therefore is not able to. K: No. You see that means god is in man and god can only operate if the brain is quiet, if the brain is not caught in time. DB: Well, I wasn't meaning that. I was saying that the brain having a structure of time is not able to respond properly to mind. That's really what seems to be involved there. K: Can the brain itself see that it is caught in time and as long as it is moving in that direction conflict is eternal, endless? You follow what I am saying? DB: Yes. Now does the brain see? K: Yes, has the brain the capacity to see that what it is doing now, caught in time, in that process there is no end to conflict. DB: Yes. Wouldn't you say the brain is not totally caught in time it can awaken to another, to see. K: That means, is there a part of the brain which is not of time. DB: Not caught in time. Some function. K: Can one say that? DB: I don't know. K: That means - we come back to the same thing in different words - that the brain, not being conditioned by time completely, so there is a part of the brain... DB: Well not a part but rather the brain functions dominated by time but that doesn't necessarily mean that it couldn't shift. The general tendency is for time to dominate the brain. K: Yes. That is, can the brain dominated by time not be subservient to it? DB: That's right. In that moment it comes out of time. And it is dominated only - I think I can see this - it is dominated only when you give it time, you see thought which takes time is dominated but anything fast is not dominated. K: Yes, that's right. When the brain which has been used to time, can it see that in that process there is no end to conflict, can it see this? See in the sense can it realize it? Will it realize it under pressure? Certainly not. Will it realize it under coercion and a reward, punishment or any of that kind? It will not. It will either resist or escape and all the rest of it. Right? So what is the factor that will make the brain see the way it has gone is not correct - let's use the word for the moment. And what will make it suddenly realize that it is totally mischievous? You follow what I am saying? What will make it? Drugs? DB: Well it's clear that won't work. K: Certainly not drugs. Some kind of chemical? DB: None of these, these are all outward things. K: Sir, I want to be clear. These are all outward pressures. Then what will make the brain realize this? DB: What do you mean by realize? K: Realize in the sense, that path which it has been going on will always be the path of conflict. DB: Yes, well I think this raises the question that the brain is resisting such a realization. K: Of course, of course. Because it is used to that, for centuries. How will you make the brain realize this fact? You understand sir? If you could do that it is finished. You see they have tried, you must have talked to many people, they have tried fasting, no sex, austerity, poverty, chastity in the real sense, purity, having a mind that is absolutely correct; they have tried going away by themselves; they have tried everything practically that man has invented, but none of them have succeeded. DB: Well what do you say? It is clear that these are all outward goals, they are still becoming. K: Yes, but they never realize it is outward. DB: Everyone of those is an attempt to break the process of becoming. K: Yes, that's right. So it means denying completely all that. DB: You see to go further I think one has to deny the very notion of time in the sense of looking forward to the future, and all the past. K: That's just it sir, that's just it. DB: That is the whole of time and always. K: Time is the enemy. Meet it and go beyond it. DB: To deny that that is an independent existence. You see I think we have the impression that time exists independently of us. We are in the stream of time and therefore it would seem absurd for us to deny it because that is what we are, you see. K: Yes, quite, quite. So it means really moving away - again words - from everything that man has put together as a means of timelessness. DB: Yes, well we can say that none of the methods that man uses outwardly are going to. K: Absolutely not. DB: Every method implies time. K: Of course, of course. It is so simple, clear. DB: You start out immediately by setting up the whole structure of time, the entire notion of time is presupposed before you start. K: Yes, quite. How will you convey this to me? How will you or 'X' to a man who is caught in time and will resist it, fight it, he says, there is no other way, and so on, how will you convey this to him? DB: I think that you can only - I mean even though time is not the point - unless somebody has looked at this, you know, and gone into it, you are not likely to convey it at all to somebody you just pick up off the street. K: So, then what are we doing? As that cannot be conveyed through words, then what is a man to do? DB: I think that both the word and beyond the word, you know, is part of the communication, conveyance. K: Would you say sir, to resolve a problem immediately as it arises - one has to go into that because you can resolve it immediately, you may do the most foolish thing. DB: Well you may think you are resolving it. K: Yes, yes, I am saying that. You may do the most foolish thing or think you have resolved it. DB: Because you can get the sense of the immediate from time, from thought because thought gives the sense of now. K: Not allow time. Suppose I have a problem, any problem, it doesn't matter, a psychological problem: can the mind realize, resolve it immediately? Not deceive myself, not resist it - you understand, all that. To face it and end it. DB: Well a psychological problem, that is the only way. K: I am talking about a psychological problem. DB: Otherwise we would be caught in the very source of the problem. K: Of course, of course, of course. Would that activity end time, psychological time we are talking about. DB: If we could bring this immediate action to bear on what you call the problem, which is the self. K: Sir, one is greedy, or envious, to end it immediately - greed, attachment, and so on, there are a dozen things. Sir what I am trying to convey is: will that not give a clue to the ending of time? DB: Yes, because any action which is not immediate has already brought in time. K: Yes, yes. I know that. DB: The ending of time is immediate - right? K: Immediate, of course. Would that point out the wrong turn that mankind has taken? DB: Yes, to bring in time and thought to mediate psychologically. K: Yes, we are talking psychologically, keep to that. DB: If man feels something is out of order psychologically then he then brings in the notion of time and the thought of becoming, and that creates endless problems. K: Would that open the door - it's a phrase - would that open the door to this sense of, time has no place inwardly? You see, which means sir, doesn't it, thought has no place except outwardly. DB: If you are going to say thought is a process which is involved in time... K: Of course it is. DB: Yes, I mean not everybody has used that idea, used it that way. K: Wouldn't you say thought is the process of time? Because thought is based on experience, knowledge, memory and response, which is the whole of time. DB: Yes, but still we have often discussed a kind of thought that would be a response to intelligence. But thought as we have generally known it - let's try to put it that thought as we have generally known it is in time. K: Thought as we know it now is of time. DB: Yes. Well possibly people may have known it a little differently from time to time. But I would say generally speaking. K: Generally speaking as of now, thought is time. DB: Yes, it is based on the notion of time, time is first. K: Yes, all right. To me itself is time. DB: Thought itself creates time, right. K: Does it mean when there is no time there is no thought? DB: Well, no thought of that kind. K: No, there is no thought - I want to just go slow, slow. DB: Because otherwise we may contradict some other things, you see. K: I know all that. DB: Could we say there is a kind of thought which has been dominated by time - you know - which we have lived in. Right? K: Yes. It has come to an end. DB: There may be another kind of thought which is not dominated by time, you know, because you were saying you could still use thought to do things. K: Of course sir, that's so. DB: We have to be careful not to say that thought is necessarily dominated by time. K: No. I have to go from here to there, to my house, that needs time, thinking, all the rest of it. I am not talking of that kind of time. DB: So let's make it clear that you are thinking of thought which is aimed at the mind, whose content is the order of the mind. K: Yes, yes. DB: And we will say that that thought clearly is time. K: Yes. Would you say knowledge is time? DB: Yes, well knowledge... K: All knowledge is time. DB: Well in so far as has been known and may project into the future and so on. K: Of course, the future, past. Knowledge is time. Through time it has acquired knowledge - science, mathematics, whatever it is, philosophy. I read philosophy, I read this or that. So the whole movement of knowledge is involved in time. Right? See what that means. DB: You see, I think again we... K: Understood that knowledge is how to make a chair... DB: Well not only that but I think you say that man has taken a wrong turn and got caught in this kind of knowledge, which is dominated by time because it is psychological knowledge. K: Yes. So he lives in time. DB: He lives in time because he has attempted to produce knowledge of the nature of the mind. Now you saying that the mind has no real knowledge of the mind. Would you put it that way? There is no knowledge of the mind, would you put it that way? K: The moment you use the word 'knowledge', it implies time. DB: Yes, you are saying the mind is not of time. K: No. When you end time, in the sense we are talking about there is no knowledge as experience. DB: We have to see what the word 'experience' means. K: Experience, memory, experience. DB: Well people say, 'I learn by experience, I go through something.' K: Which is becoming. DB: Well let's get it clear. You see there is a kind of experience you get in your job, which becomes skill and perception. K: Of course, that is quite different sir. DB: We are saying there is no point in having experience of the mind, of psychological experience. K: Yes, let's put it that way. That is, psychological experience is in time. DB: Yes, and it has no point because you cannot say, 'As I become skilled in my job, I will become skilled in my mind'. K: Right. DB: In a certain way you do become skilled in thinking but not become skilled fundamentally. K: Yes. So you understand, sir, where this is leading to? Suppose I realize knowledge is time, the brain realizes it, and sees the importance of time in a certain direction, and no value of time at all in another direction, it is not a contradiction. Right? DB: Yes, well right, O.K. I would put it that the value of time is limited to a certain direction or area and beyond that it has no value. K: Yes. So what is the mind or the brain without knowledge? You understand? DB: Without knowledge, psychological knowledge? K: Yes, I am talking psychologically. DB: Yes, it is not so much that it is time but without psychological knowledge to organize itself. K: Yes. DB: So we are saying the brain field must organize itself by knowing psychologically all about itself. K: Is then the mind, the brain disorder? Certainly not. DB: No. But I think people might feel, being faced with this, that there would be disorder. K: Of course. DB: You see, I think that what you are saying is the notion of controlling yourself psychologically has no meaning. K: So knowledge of the 'me' is time. DB: Yes, well the knowledge... K: The psychological knowledge. DB: Yes, I understand that, that knowledge of 'me', is the whole totality of knowledge, is 'me', is time. K: Yes. So then what is existence without this? DB: Yes. K: You understand? DB: Yes. O.K. K: There is no time, there is no knowledge in the psychological sense, no sense of 'me', then what is there? To come to that point most people would say, 'What a horror this is.' DB: Yes, well it seems there would be nothing. K: Nothing. DB: It would be rather dull! It is either frightening or it is all right. K: But if one has come to that point what is there? Again it sounds rather trite and sloganish but it is not. Would you say because there is nothing it is everything? DB: Yes, I would accept that. I know that. That is true, it has all. K: No, it is nothing, that's right. DB: No thing. K: No thing, that's right. DB: So far as a thing is limited and this is not a thing because there are no limits. I mean at least it has everything in potential. K: Wait sir. If it is nothing and so everything, so everything is energy. DB: Yes. The ground of everything is energy. K: Of course. Everything is energy. And what is the source of this thing? Or is there no source at all of energy? There is only energy. DB: Energy just is. Energy is 'what is'. There is no need for a source. That is one approach. K: No. If there is nothing and therefore there is everything, and everything is energy - we must be very careful because here the Hindus have this idea too, which is Brahman is everything. You understand sir? That becomes an idea, a principle and then carried out and all that. But the fact of it is, if there is nothing therefore there is everything and all that is cosmic energy. But what started this energy? DB: Is that a meaningful question? K: No. What began? DB: But we are not talking of time. K: I know we are not talking of time but you see the Christians would say, 'God is energy and He is the source of all energy.' No? DB: Yes. K: And his son came to help the world, all bla. Now is that... DB: Well the Christians have an idea of what they call the Godhead, which is the very source of God too. K: And also the Hindus have this. I mean the Arabic world and the Jewish world also have this. Are we going against all that? DB: It sounds similar in some ways. K: And yet not similar. We must be awfully careful. DB: Many things like this have been said over the ages. It is a familiar notion, yes. K: Then is one just walking in emptiness? One is living in emptiness? DB: Well that is not clear. K: There is nothing and everything is energy. What is this? DB: Well this is a form within the energy. K: So this is not different from energy? This. DB: The body, yes. K: But the thing that is inside says, 'I am different from that'. DB: You must make that clearer. K: The 'I' says, 'I am totally different from all this'. DB: The 'I' encloses itself and says, 'I am different, I am eternal.' K: Why has it done this? DB: Well we went into that because it began, this notion of separation. K: Why has the separation arisen, is it because outwardly I identify with a house and so on and that has moved inwardly? DB: Yes. And the second point was that once we established a notion of something inward then it became necessary to protect that. K: To protect that and all the rest of it. DB: And therefore that built up the separation. K: Of course. DB: The inward was obviously the most precious thing and it would have to be protected with all your energy. K: I understand sir. Does it then mean there is only the organism living, which is a part of energy? There is no K at all, except the Passport, the name and form, otherwise nothing. And therefore everything and therefore all energy. You follow sir? DB: Yes, the form has no independent existence. K: No, no. There is only the form, that's all. DB: There is also the energy, you say. K: That is part of energy. DB: Yes. K: So there is only this, the outward shape. DB: There is the outward form in the energy. K: Do you realize what we have said sir? Is this the end of the journey? DB: No, I should think not. K: Has mankind journeyed through millennia to come to this: that I am nothing and therefore I am everything and all energy? DB: Well it can't be the end in the sense that it might be the beginning. K: Wait, wait, that is all I am saying. That is what I wanted you to begin with. That is the only - the ending then is the beginning. Right? Now, I want to go into that a little bit. You see the ending of all this, the ending of time we will call it briefly, is that there is a new beginning. What is that? Because this seems so utterly futile for a moment. DB: What? K: I am all energy and just the shell exists, and time has ended. I am just taking that. It seems so... DB: I understand that if you stop there... K: That's all. DB: I think that really is clearing the ground of all the debris, of all the confusion. K: Yes. So the ending is a beginning. What is that? Beginning implies time also. DB: Not necessarily. I think that we said there could be a movement which had no time. K: That is why I want to make it clear. DB: Yes but it is hard to express. It is not a question of static, of being static but in some sense the movement has not the order of time. I think we would have to say that now. K: Yes. So we will use the word 'beginning' and deprive it of time. DB: Yes, because ending and beginning are no special time. In fact they can be any time or no time. K: No time. DB: That's right, no time. K: What takes place? What happens? What is then happening? Not to me, not to my brain. What is happening? DB: You mean to energy? K: Sir, we have said when one denies time there is nothing. After this long talk - nothing means everything. Everything is energy. And we stopped there. But that isn't the end. Right? DB: No. K: No. That is all. That is not the end. Then what is going on? Sir, can we carry on tomorrow. I think we had better stop. I want to go on with it but we had better stop. DB: O.K. K: Is that creation? DB: Yes, something like. K: Not the art of creating, writing. DB: Yes, well if we discuss what we mean by creation. K: We will do it tomorrow. OJAI 2ND CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 2ND APRIL, 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' K: I hope you had a good rest. In our dialogue between yourself and myself we were saying time is conflict. DB: Yes, psychological time. K: Time is the enemy of man. And that enemy has existed from the beginning of man. And we said why has man from the beginning taken a wrong turn, a wrong path - in quotes. And if so is it possible to turn man in another direction in which he can live without conflict? Because, as we said yesterday, the outer movement is also the same as the inner movement, there is no inner or outer. It is the same movement carried on inwardly. And if we were concerned deeply and passionately, to turn man in another direction so that he doesn't live in time, but has a knowledge of the outer things. And the religions have failed; the politicians, the educators, they have never been concerned about this. Would you agree to that? DB: Yes, I think the religions have tried to discuss the eternal values beyond time but they don't seem to have succeeded. K: That is what I wanted to get at. To them it was an idea, an ideal, a principle, a value, but not an actuality. DB: Yes, well some of them claim that to some of them it may have been an actuality. K: But you see most of the religious people have their anchor in a belief. DB: Yes. K: An anchor in a principle, in an image, in knowledge, in Jesus or in something or other. DB: Yes, but if you were to consider all the religions, say the various forms of Buddhism, they try to say this very thing which you are saying, to some extent. K: To some extent, but what I am trying to get at is: why has man never confronted this problem? Why hasn't he, all of us, why haven't we said, let's end conflict? Or rather we have been encouraged because through conflict we think there is progress. DB: Yes, to overcome opposition. K: Yes, DB: It can be a certain source of stimulus to try to overcome opposition. K: Yes sir. And if you and I saw the truth of this, not in abstraction but actually deeply, can we act in such a way that every issue is resolved instantly, immediately, so that time is abolished? DB: Psychological time. K: We are talking about psychological time. And as we said yesterday, when you come to that point when there is nothing and there is everything, and all that is energy, and when time ends, is there a beginning of something totally new? That's where we came up to yesterday. DB: And if there isn't then the whole thing falls flat. I mean it only drives you back into the world. K: Is there a beginning which is not enmeshed in time? Now how shall we discover it? Words are necessary to communicate. But the word is not that thing. So what is there when all time ends? Psychological time, not the time of... DB:... time of day. K: Yes. Time is the 'me', the 'I', the ego, and when that completely comes to an end what is there that begins - could we say that, out of the ashes of time, there is a new growth? What is that? We came to that point yesterday. What is that which begins -no, that word 'begins' implies time too. DB: Whatever we mean, that which arises. K: That arises, what is it? DB: Well we were discussing yesterday that essentially it is creation, the possibility of creation. K: Yes, we said creation. Is that it? That is, is something new being born each - not time, you see - something new is taking place. DB: It is not the process of becoming, you see. K: Oh no, that is finished. Becoming is the worst, that is time, that is the real root of this conflict. We are trying to find out what happens when the 'I', which is time, has completely come to an end. I believe the Buddha is supposed to have said, Nirvana. DB: Nirvana? K: Nirvana. And the Hindus call it Moksha. I don't know, the Christians may call it Heaven or whatever it is. DB: The Christian mystics have had some similar... K: Similar yes. But you see the Christian mystics as far as I understand it, they are rooted in Jesus, in the Church, in the whole belief. They have never gone beyond it. DB: Yes, well that seems so. As far as I know anyway. K: Say, like a man like Teilhard de Chardin, he was great, you know all the rest of it, he was a deep believer. Now we have said belief, attachment to all that is out, finished. That is all part of the 'I'. Now when there is that absolute cleansing of the mind of the accumulation of time, which is the essence of the 'me', what takes place? Why should we ask what takes place? DB: You mean it is not a good question? K: I am just asking myself. Why should we ask that? Is there behind it a subtle form of hope? A subtle form of saying, what, I have reached that point, there is nothing. That's a wrong question. Wouldn't you consider that. DB: Well it invites you to search out - it invites you to look for some hopeful outcome. K: If all endeavour is to find something beyond the 'me', that endeavour and the thing that I may find is still within the orbit of 'me' - right? DB: Yes. K: So I have no hope. There is no sense of hope, there is no sense of wanting to find anything. DB: What then is moving you to enquire? K: My enquiry has been to end conflict. DB: Yes, we have to then be careful. You are liable to produce a hope of ending conflict. We are liable to fall into the hope of ending conflict. K: No, no there is no hope. I end it. DB: There is no hope. K: The moment I introduce the word 'hope' there is a feeling of the future. DB: Yes, that is desire. K: Desire, and therefore it is of time. So I - the mind puts all that aside completely, I mean it, completely. Then what is the essence of all this? Do you understand my question? What is the -no, I have put the wrong question, sorry. Is my mind still seeking, or groping after something intangible that it can capture and hold? And if that is so, it is still part of time. DB: Well that is still desire. K: Desire and a subtle form of vanity. DB: Why vanity? K: Vanity in the sense 'I have reached'. DB: Self deception. K: Deception, and all forms of illusion arise from that. So it is not that. I am cleaning the decks as we go along. DB: Essentially it seems that you are cleaning the movement of desire in its subtle forms. K: In its subtle forms. So that too has been put away. Then as we said the other day, in another discussion, there is only mind. Right? DB: Yes, we left the question somewhat unsettled because we had to ask what is meant by nature, if there is only mind, because nature seems somewhat independent. K: But we also said all the universe is the mind. DB: You mean to say nature is the mind. K: Part of mind. DB: The universal mind. K: Universal mind. DB: Not a particular mind. K: The particular mind then is separate but we are talking of Mind. DB: You see we have to make it clear because you are saying that nature is the creation of universal mind which nevertheless nature has a certain reality. K: That is all understood. DB: But it is almost as if nature was the thought of the universal mind. K: It is part of it. Sir I am trying to grope after - if the particular mind has come to an end, then there is only the Mind, the universal mind. Right? DB: Right. Yes, well if it has - we have been discussing the particular mind groping through desire and we said if all of that has stopped... K: That is just my point. If all that has completely come to an end, what is the next step? Is there any next? We said yesterday, there is a beginning, and that word also implies part of time. DB: We won't say, so much beginning, perhaps ending. K: The ending, we have said that. DB: Ending, right. But now is there something new? K: Is there something which the mind cannot capture? DB: Which mind, the particular or the universal? K: The particular has ended. DB: Yes. You are saying the universal mind cannot capture it either? K: That is what I am finding out. DB: Are you saying there is a reality beyond universal mind? Or something? K: Sir, are we playing a game of peeling off one thing after another? Like an onion skin and at the end there is only tears and nothing else? DB: Well, I don't know. K: Because we said there is the ending, then the cosmic, the universal mind, and behind is there something more? DB: Well would you say this 'more' is energy? K: We said that. DB: But you mean the energy is beyond the universal mind? K: I would say yes because the universal mind is part of that energy. DB: I understand that. That is understandable. K: That is understandable. At last! DB: Well in a way the energy is alive, you are saying? K: Yes, yes. DB: And also intelligent? K: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. DB: In so far as it is mind. K: Now if that energy is intelligent, why has it allowed man to move away in the wrong direction? DB: I think that that may be part of a process, something that was inevitable in the nature of thought. You see if thought is going to develop that possibility must exist. K: Oh. DB: To bring about thought in man... K: Is that the original freedom for man? DB: What? K: To choose? DB: No, that is, thought has to have the capacity to make this mistake. K: But if that intelligence was operating, why did it allow this mistake? DB: Well you can suggest anyway that there is a universal order, a law. K: All right sir. The universe function in order. DB: Yes, and this is part of the order of the universe that this particular mechanism can go wrong. If a machine breaks down it is not disorder in the universe, it is merely part of universal order. K: Yes. In the universal order there is disorder, where man is concerned. DB: It is not disorder at the level of the universe. K: No, no. At a much lower level. DB: At the level of man it is disorder. K: Disorder. And why has he lived from the beginning of man, why has he lived in this disorder? DB: Because he is still ignorant, he still hasn't seen the point. K: But if he is part of the whole and in one tiny corner man exists and has lived in disorder. And this enormous conscious intelligence - not conscious, this enormous intelligence has not... DB: Yes, well you could say that the possibility of creation is also the possibility of disorder. That if man had the possibility of being creative and there would also be the possibility of a mistake or something. It could not be fixed like a machine, to always operate in perfect order. K: No, no. DB: I mean the intelligence would not have turned him into a machine. K: No, of course not. DB: That would be incapable of disorder. K: So is there something beyond the cosmic order, mind? DB: Are you saying that the universe, that that mind has created nature which has an order that is not merely just going around mechanically? It has some deeper meaning. K: That is what we are trying to find out. DB: You are bringing in the whole universe as well as mankind. Well what makes you do this? What is the source of this perception? K: The source of what? DB: Of what you said. K: What? DB: About the universe and about the mind. K: We said just now - let's begin again: there is the ending of the 'me' as time, and so there is no hope, all that is gone, finished, ended. In the ending of it there is that sense of nothingness, which is so. And nothingness is this whole universe, DB: Yes, the universal mind, the universe of matter. K: Yes, the whole universe. DB: I am just asking: what lead you to say that? K: Ah! I know. To put it very simply: division has come to an end. Right? The division created by time, created by thought, created by this education and so on and so on, all that, because it has ended, it is obvious, the other. DB: You mean without the division then the other is there to be perceived. K: Not to be perceived, it is there. DB: But then how do you come to be aware that it is there? K: Quite. How do you come to be aware that - I don't think you become aware of it. DB: Then what leads you to say it? K: Would you say it is, not, I perceive it, or, it is perceived. DB: No. It is. K: It is. DB: You could almost say that it is saying it. In some sense you seem to be suggesting that it is what is saying. K: Yes. DB: Right? K: Yes. I didn't want to put it - I am glad you put it like that! DB: I mean it is implied in what you are saying. K: Where are we now? DB: Well we say that the universe is alive, as it were, it is mind and we are part of it. K: We can only say we are part of it when there is no 'I'. DB: No division. K: No division. I would like to push it a little further, which is: is there something beyond all this? DB: Beyond the energy, you mean? K: Yes. We said nothingness and everything, that nothingness is everything and so it is that which is total energy. It is undiluted pure uncorrupted energy - right. Is there something beyond that? Why do we ask it? DB: I don't know. K: I feel we haven't touched - I feel there is something beyond. DB: Could we say this something beyond is, as it were, the ground of the whole. You are saying that this all emerges from an inward ground? K: Yes, there is another - I must be awfully careful here. Sir, you know one must be awfully careful not to be romantic, not to have illusions, not to have desire, not even to grope. It must happen. You follow what I mean? DB: We are saying the thing must come from that. Whatever you are saying must come from that. K: From that. That's it. It sounds rather presumptions. DB: Without your actually seeing it - it is not that you look at it and say that is what I have seen. K: Oh no. Then it is wrong. DB: There isn't a division or anything. Of course it is easy to fall into delusion into this sort of thing. K: Of course. But we said delusion exists as long as there is desire and thought. That is simple. And desire and thought is part of the 'I', which is time and all that. When that is completely ended then there is absolutely nothing and therefore that is the universe, that emptiness which is full of energy. We can put a stop there for the time. DB: Yes, because we haven't yet seen the necessity for going beyond the energy, you see. K: Yes. DB: We have to see that as necessary. K: I think it is necessary. DB: Yes but it has to be seen. We have to bring that out, why is it necessary? K: Why is it necessary? Tentatively: there is something in us that is operating, there is something in us much more - I don't know how to put it - much greater. Let me, sir. I am going slowly, slowly. What I am trying to say is: wait a minute. I think there is something, sir, beyond that. When I say 'I think', you know what I mean. DB: I understand, yes. K: There is something beyond that. How can we talk about it? You see energy exists only when there is emptiness - right? DB: Yes. Well. K: Together they go. DB: This pure energy is emptiness. This pure energy you talk about is emptiness. K: Emptiness. DB: Not filled with something. K: No. Now beyond that emptiness, not in terms of beyond. Beyond means more, further, time. DB: Yes. Inwardly. K: I don't know how to put it that way. DB: But are you trying to suggest that there is that which is beyond the emptiness, the ground of the emptiness? K: Yes. DB: Would that be something in the nature of a substance? You see the question is if it is not emptiness then what is it? K: I don't quite follow your question. DB: Well you say something beyond emptiness, you know, other than emptiness. K: I said there is emptiness which is energy. DB: And beyond that. K: Now, wait a minute. Are you all hanging on my words? What do you say sir? DB: I think we can follow to the energy and the emptiness. Now if we suggest something other to that, to the emptiness... K: Oh yes, there is something other. DB: Yes, then that other must be different from the emptiness. K: Yes sir. I have got it. DB: Non-emptiness. Is that right? K: What did you say just now? DB: I said something other to emptiness, which therefore is not emptiness, does that make sense? K: Then it is substance. DB: Yes that is what seemed to be implied: if it is not emptiness it is substance. K: Substance is matter, is it? DB: Not necessarily but having quality of substance. K: What do you mean by that? DB: Well, you see matter is a form of substance in the sense that it is... K: Matter is energy. DB: It is energy but having the form of substance as well because it has a constant form and it resists change, it is stable, it maintains itself. K: Yes. But when you use the word 'substance', beyond emptiness, does that word have a meaning then? DB: Well we are exploring the possible meaning of what you want to say. If you are saying it is not emptiness then it would not be substance as we know it in matter but we can see a certain quality which belongs to substance in general, if it has that quality we could use the word substance, extend the meaning of the word substance. K: I understand. So could we use the word 'quality'? DB: Well the word 'quality' is not necessarily the emptiness, energy could have the quality of emptiness, you see. K: Yes I see. DB: And therefore something other might have the quality of substance. That is the way I see it. And is that what you are trying to say? K: Sir, there is something beyond emptiness. How shall we tackle it? DB: Firstly, what leads you to say it? What leads you to say this? K: Simply the fact that there is. We have been fairly logical all along, reasonable and fairly sane. So we have not been caught in any illusions so far. Right? And can we keep that same kind of watchfulness in which there is no illusion to find out - not find out - for that which is beyond emptiness to come down to earth? Come down to earth in the sense to be communicated. You follow what I mean? DB: Yes. Well we could come back to the question before: why hasn't it come down? K: Why hasn't it come down? Has man been ever free from the 'I'? DB: No, well not generally speaking, no. K: No. And it demands that the 'I' end. DB: I think we could look at it this way: that the ego becomes an illusion of that substance. You feel the ego is a substance too in some way. K: Yes, the ego is substance, quite right. DB: And therefore that substance seems to be... K:... untouchable. DB: But that ego is an illusion of true substance. You see the mind tries to create some illusion of that substance. K: That is an illusion, why do you relate it to the other? DB: In the sense that if the mind thinks it already has this substance then it will not be open to it. K: Of course, of course. Can that thing ever be put into words? I am not saying I am avoiding it - you follow? It is not a question of avoiding or trying to slither out of some conclusion. But you see so far we have put everything into words. DB: Yes, well I think that once something can be perceived it can generally be put into words. If anything can be properly perceived then after a while the words come to communicate it. K: Yes, but can that be perceived and therefore communicable? DB: This thing beyond, would you say also it is alive? K: Eh? DB: Is life beyond emptiness, is that still life? K: Is that still alive? DB: Living. K: Living, yes. Oh yes. DB: And intelligent? K: I don't want to use those words. DB: That is too limited? K: Living, intelligence, love, compassion, it is all too limited. Sir, you and I are sitting here, we have come to a point and there is that thing which perhaps later on might be put into words, without any sense of pressure or intimation, without any sense of verbal communication, and so without any illusion, don't you see beyond the wall? You know what I mean? We have come up to a certain point and we are saying there is something still more - you understand? There is something behind all that. Is it palpable, you can touch it, is it something that the mind can capture? You follow? DB: Yes. Are you saying it is not? K: I don't think it is possible for the mind to capture it - capture, you understand? DB: Yes, or grasp it. K: Grasp it, understand, for the mind to look at it even. Sir, you are a scientist, you have examined the atom and so on and so on, don't you, when you have examined all that, don't you feel there is something much more beyond all that? DB: You can always feel there is more beyond that but it doesn't tell you what it is. K: No, no, but you know there is something much more. DB: It is clear that whatever you know it is limited. K: Yes. DB: And there must be more beyond. K: How can that communicate with you so that you, with your scientific knowledge, with your brain capacity and so on and so on, how can you grasp it? DB: Now are you saying it can't be grasped? K: No, no. Can you grasp it? I don't say you can't grasp it - can you grasp it? DB: Look, it is not clear. You were saying before that it is ungraspable by... K: Grasp in the sense, can your mind, highly trained, capable of perception, you know, beyond theories and so on - what am I trying to tell you? I am trying to say: can you move into it? Not move - you understand, move means time and all that. Can you -what am I trying to say? Can you enter it? No, those are all words. Sir, what is beyond emptiness? Is it silence? DB: Isn't that similar to emptiness? K: Yes, that is what I am getting at, move step by step. Is it silence? Or is silence part of emptiness? DB: Yes, I should say that. K: I should say that too. If it is not silence - just a minute sir, I am just asking: could we say it is something absolute? You understand? DB: Well we could consider the absolute. It would have to be something totally independent, that is what it really means, absolute. It doesn't depend on anything. K: Yes, sir. I am glad. You are getting somewhere near it. DB: Entirely self moving, as it were, self active. K: Yes. Would you say everything has a cause and that has no cause at all? DB: You see this notion is already an old one. This notion has been developed by Aristotle, that this absolute is the cause of itself. K: Yes. DB: It has no cause in a sense. That is the same thing. K: You see the moment you said Aristotle, it is not that. How shall we get at this? Emptiness is energy and that emptiness exists in silence or the other way round, it doesn't matter - right? DB: Right. K: Oh yes, there is something beyond all this. Probably it can never be put into words. DB: As far as we can tell anyway. K: But it must be put into words. DB: Yes. K: You follow? DB: You are saying the absolute must be put into words, and yet we feel it can't be. Any attempt to put it into words makes it relative. K: Yes. I don't know how to put all this. DB: I think we have a long history of danger with the absolute. People have put it in words and it has become very oppressive. K: Leave all that. You see being ignorant of what other people have said - you follow? - Aristotle and the Buddha and so on - it has an advantage. You understand what I mean? It is an advantage in the sense that the mind is not coloured by other people's ideas, it is not caught in other people's statements. And that is part of our conditioning and so on, all that. Now to go beyond all that. What are we trying to do, sir? DB: Well I think to communicate regarding this absolute, this beyond. K: I took away that word immediately. DB: Then whatever it is, what is beyond emptiness and silence. K: Beyond all that. There is beyond all that. DB: The difficulty is... K: All that is something, part of an immensity. DB: Yes, well even the emptiness and silence is an immensity, isn't it? The energy is itself an immensity. K: Yes, I understand that. But there is something much more immense than that. Sir, emptiness and silence and energy is immense, it is really immeasurable. But there is something - I am using the word 'greater' than that. I can't put it, I don't know. Why do you accept all this? DB: Well I am just considering. I am looking at it, I mean, but one can see that whatever you say about emptiness, or about any other thing, that there is something beyond. K: No, as a scientist, why do you accept - not accept, forgive me for using that word - why do you even move with the other chap? DB: Yes, well because we have come this far step by step, seeing the necessity of each step. K: You see all that is very logical, reasonable, sane. DB: And also, one can see that it is so, right. K: Yes. So if I say there is something greater than all this, silence, energy, would you accept that? Accept in the sense that up to now we have been logical. DB: We will say that anything you say, there is certainly something beyond it. Whatever you say - carry whatever you say to silence, energy, whatever, then there is always room logically for something beyond that. K: Beyond that, yes. DB: That is not the final. K: That is not the end. DB: But even if you were to say there is something - the point is this: that even if you were to say there is something beyond that, but still you logically leave room for going again beyond that. K: No, no, no. DB: Well that is the question. K: That is the point. DB: Well why is that? You see whatever you say there is always room for something beyond. K: Of course, of course. There is nothing beyond. DB: Yes, well that point is not clear you see because... K: There is nothing beyond it. I stick to that. Not dogmatically or obstinately. I feel that is the beginning and the ending of everything. Sir, just in ordinary parlance, in ordinary communication, the ending and the beginning are the same. Right? DB: In which sense? K: Yes sir, I see something in this. DB: You mean in the sense that you are using the beginning of everything as the ending of everything. K: Yes. Right? You would say that? DB: Yes, if we take the ground from which it comes it must be the ground to which it falls. K: That's right. That is the ground. DB: All right. K: Upon which... DB: Well that is a figure of speech. K:... upon which everything exists, space... DB:... energy... K:... energy, emptiness, silence, all that is on that - not ground, you understand? DB: No, it is just a metaphor. K: There is nothing beyond it. DB: This ground has no cause. K: No cause, of course. If you have a cause then you have ground. DB: You have another ground. K: No, no, that is the beginning and the ending. DB: It is becoming more clear. K: That's right. Does that convey anything to you? DB: Yes, well I think that that conveys something. K: Something. Would you say further: there is no beginning and no ending? DB: Yes. It comes from the ground, goes to the ground, but it does not begin or end, right. K: Yes, there is no beginning and no ending. Right? DB: Yes. K: The implications are enormous. Is that sir, death - not death in the sense, I will die - is that complete ending of everything? DB: Yes, well you see at first you would have said that the emptiness is the ending of everything, so in what sense is this more now? K: I am trying to get at thing. DB: We began with emptiness is the ending of things, isn't it? K: Yes, yes. Is that death? DB: What? K: This emptiness? DB: Well that... K: Death of everything the mind has cultivated. DB: Right, then in what sense is it not then? Why is it not? K: That emptiness is not the product of the mind, of the particular mind. DB: Yes, it is the universal mind. K: That emptiness is that. DB: Yes. K: That emptiness can only exist when there is death of the particular. DB: Yes, the particular goes. K: When there is total death of the particular. DB: Yes. K: I don't know if I am conveying this. DB: Yes that is the emptiness, but then you are saying that in this ground that death goes further? K: Oh yes, oh yes. DB: So you are saying the ending of the particular, the death of the particular is the emptiness, which is universal. Now are you going to say that the universal also dies? K: Yes sir, that is what I am trying to say. DB: Into the ground. K: Does it convey anything? DB: Possibly, yes. K: Just hold it a minute. Let's see it. I think it conveys something sir, doesn't it? DB: Yes, of course it is hard to... K: Yes. DB: Now if the particular and the universal die then that is death, yes? K: Yes sir. After all, I don't know, I am not an astrologer - not astrologer - an astronomer, everything in the universe is dying, exploding, dying. DB: Yes, but of course you could suppose that there was something beyond, you know. K: Yes, that is just it. DB: I think we are moving. The universal and the particular -first the particular dies into the emptiness and then comes the universal. K: And that dies too. DB: Into the ground, right? K: Yes, sir. DB: So you could say the ground is neither born not dies. K: That's right. DB: Well I think it becomes almost inexpressible if you say the universal is gone because expression is the universal. K: You see, I am just explaining: everything is dying, except that. Does this convey anything? DB: Yes. Well it is out of that that everything arises and into which it dies. K: So that has no beginning and no ending. DB: Yes. Well what would it mean to talk of the ending of the universal? What would it mean to have the ending of the universal you see? K: Nothing. Why should it have a meaning if it is happening? What has that to do with man? You follow what I mean? DB: Yes. K: Man who is going through a terrible time and all the rest of it, what has that got to do with man? DB: Well let's call it that man feels he must have some contact with the ultimate ground in his life otherwise there is no meaning. K: But it hasn't. That ground hasn't any relationship with man. DB: Apparently not. K: No. He is killing himself, he is doing everything contrary to the ground. DB: Yes, that is why life has no meaning for man. K: So I am asking, I am an ordinary man: I say all right you have talked marvellously, it sounds excellent, what has that got to do with me? How will that or your talk help me to get over my ugliness? My wife quarrels with me - or whatever it is. And after your excellent talk... DB: Well I think I would go back and say we went into this logically starting from the suffering of mankind, showing it originates in a wrong turning and that leads inevitably... K: Yes but help me, he says, to get to the right turn. Put me on the right path. And to that you say, please don't become anything. You see, sir? DB: Right. What is the problem then? K: He won't even listen to you. DB: Yes, well now it seems to me that it is necessary for the one who sees this to find out what is the barrier to listening. K: Obviously you can see what is the barrier. DB: What is the barrier? K: 'I'. DB: Yes but I meant more deeply so that... K: More deeply, all your thoughts, you know, deep attachments and all that is in your way. If you can't leave that then you will have no relationship with that. But he doesn't want to leave all that. DB: Yes, I understand that. But what he wants is the result of the way he is thinking. K: What he wants is some comfortable, easy way of living without any trouble, and he can't have that. DB: No. Well only by dropping all this. K: There must be a connection otherwise... DB: A connection. K: There must be some relationship with the ground and this, with ordinary man otherwise what is the meaning of living? DB: Yes, well that is what I was trying to say before that without that... K:... there is no meaning. DB: And then people invent meaning. K: Of course. Billy Graham does it everyday. DB: Well even going back, the ancient religions have said similar things that god is the ground and they say seek god, you know. K: Ah no, this isn't god. DB: Yes, it is not god but it is playing the same - you could say that god is an attempt to put this notion a bit too personally perhaps. K: Yes. Give them hope, give them faith, you follow? Make life a little more comfortable to live. DB: Well are you asking first, at this point: how is this to be conveyed to the ordinary man? Is that your question? K: Yes more or less. And also it is important that he should listen to this. DB: Yes, I meant exactly that. K: You are a scientist. You are good enough to listen because we are friends. But who will listen among your friends? They will say, what the hell are you talking about? I feel, sir, if one pursues this we will have a marvellously ordered world. DB: Yes. And what will we do in this world? K: Live. DB: Yes but I mean we said something about creativity. K: Yes. And then if you had no conflict, no 'I', there is something else operating. DB: Yes, it is important to say that because the Christian idea of having a perfection may seem rather boring because there is nothing to do. K: That reminds me of a good joke! You are waiting for the joke? A man dies and goes to St Peter and St Peter says, 'You have lived a fairly good life, you have not cheated too much, but before you enter into this heaven I must tell you one thing: here we are all bored. We are all awfully serious, god never laughs. And every angel is moody, oppressed and unless you want to enter this world, hesitate.' But he says, 'Before you come in perhaps you would like to go down below and see what it is like. And then come and tell me. It's up to you.' So St Peter says, 'Ring that bell, the lift will come up. You get into it and go down.' So the chap rings the bell and goes down and the gates open. And he is met by the most beautiful girls etc., etc., etc. And he said, 'By Jove, this is the life. May I go up and tell Peter?' And so he rings the bell and gets into the lift and goes up and says, 'Sir it was very good of you to offer me the choice. I prefer down below.' And Peter says. 'I thought so!' So he rings the bell and goes down, opens the gate, two people meet him and beat him up. Push him all around and so on. He said, 'Just a minute, a minute ago I came here, you treated me like a king.' 'Ah, you were a tourist then!' (Laughter) Sorry. From the sublime to the ridiculous, which is good too. Sir we must continue this some other time, because it is something that has got to be put into orbit. DB: It seems impossible. K: We have gone pretty far. OJAI 3RD CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 8TH APRIL, 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' Krishnamurti: What shall we talk about? Dr Bohm: Did you have something? K: I haven't thought about it. B: One point relating to what we said before on the other days: I was reading somewhere that a leading physicist said that the more we understand the universe the more pointless it seems, the less meaning it has. K: Yes, yes. B: And it occurred to me that in science maybe an attempt to make the material universe the ground of our existence, and then it may have meaning physically but it does not have meaning... K:... any other meaning, quite. B: And the question that we might discuss is this ground which we were talking about the other day. Is it any different to mankind, as the physical universe appears to be? K: A good question. Let's get the question clear. I have understood it but explain it a little bit more. B: Well if we go into the background that we were discussing at lunch. Not only physicists but geneticists, biologists, have tried to reduce everything to the behaviour of matter - atoms, genes, you know, DNA. And the more they study it then the more they feel it has no meaning, it is just going on. Though it has meaning physically in the sense that we can understand it scientifically, it has no deeper meaning than that. K: I understand that. B: And that, of course, perhaps that notion has penetrated because in the past people felt the religious people were more religious and felt that the ground of our existence is in something beyond matter - in god, or whatever they wished to call it. And that gave them a sense of deep meaning to the whole of our existence, which meanwhile has gone away. That is one of the difficulties of modern life, the sense that it doesn't mean anything. K: So have the religious people invented something which has a meaning? B: They may well have done so. You see, feeling that life has no meaning, they may have invented something beyond the ordinary. K: Yes. B: Something which is eternal... K:... timeless, nameless. B:... and independent, absolute. K: Seeing the way we live genetically and all the rest of it, has no meaning, and so some clever erudite people said, 'We will give it a meaning'. B: Well I think it happened before that. In the past people somehow gave meaning to life long before science had been very much developed in the form of religion. And science came along and began to deny this religion. K: Quite. I understand that. B: And people no longer believe in the religious meaning. Perhaps they never were able to believe in it entirely anyway. K: So, how does one find out if life has a meaning beyond this? How does one find out? They have tried meditation: they have tried every form of self torture, isolation, becoming a monk, a sannyasi and so on and so on. But they may also be deceiving themselves thoroughly. B: Yes. And that is in fact why the scientists have denied it all because the story told by the religious people is not plausible, you see. K: Quite, quite. So how does one find out if there is something more than the mere physical? How would one set about it? B: Yes, well what I was thinking was that we had been discussing the past two days the notion of some ground which is beyond, matter beyond the emptiness. K: Yes, but suppose you say it is so and I say that is another illusion. B: Yes but the first point is, perhaps we could clear this up: would this ground possibly - you see if this ground is indifferent to human beings then it would be the same as scientists' ground in matter. K: Yes. What is the question? Is the ground different... B: Indifferent. K: Indifferent. B: Indifferent to mankind, then you see the universe appears to be totally indifferent to mankind. It goes in immense vastness, it pays no attention, it may produce earthquakes and catastrophes, it might wipe us out, it essentially is not interested in mankind. K: I see what you mean, yes. B: It does not care whether man survives or does not survive - if you want to put it that way. K: Right. I get the question. B: Now I think that people felt that god was a ground who was not indifferent to mankind. You see they may have invented it but that is what they believed. And that is what gave them possibly... K:... tremendous energy, quite. B: Now I think the point would be: would this ground be indifferent to mankind? K: Quite. How would you find out? What is the relationship of this ground to man? What is its relationship with man and man's relationship to it? B: Yes, that is the question. Does man have some significance to it? And does it have significance to man? K: By Jove, quite, quite. B: If I may add one more point: that I was discussing once with somebody who was familiar with the Middle Eastern traditions of mysticism and he said that in their they not only say that what we call this ground, this infinite, you know, has some significance. Remember they feel that what man does has ultimately some significance. K: Quite, quite. Join us somebody! Suppose one says it has, otherwise life has no meaning, nothing has any meaning, how would one, not prove, how would one find out? Suppose you say this ground exists, as the other day I said it. Suppose somebody, you say it, and then the next question is: what relationship has that to man? And man's relationship to it, how would you find out? How would one discover, or find out, or touch it, if the ground exists at all? If it doesn't exist then really man has no meaning at all. I mean I die and you die and we all die and what is the point of being virtuous, what is the point of being happy or unhappy, just carry on. How would you show the ground exists? In scientific terms as well as the feeling of it, the non verbal communication of it? B: Yes, well you say scientific you mean rational? K: Rational. B: So something that we can actually touch. K: Yes. Not touch, sense - better than touch, sense. Scientifically, we mean by that, rational, logical, sane, many can come to it. B: Yes, it is public. K: Yes. And it isn't just one man's assertion. B: Yes, I think that is fair. K: That would be scientific. I think that can be shown. Because we said from the very beginning that if half a dozen of us actually freed ourselves, etc., etc., etc. - I think it can be shown but with all things one must do it, not just verbally talk about it. Can I - or you say the ground exists and the ground has certain demands: which are, there must be absolute silence, absolute emptiness, which means no sense of egotism in any form. Right? Would you tell me that. Am I willing to let go all my egotism because I want to prove it, I want to show it, I want to find out if what you are saying is actually true, so am I willing - all of us, ten of us - willing to say, 'Look, complete eradication of the self'? B: Yes, I think that I can say that perhaps in some sense one is willing but there may be another sense in which the willingness is not subject to your conscious effort or determination. K: No, wait. So we go through all that. B: We have to see that... K: It is not will, it is not desire, it is not effort. B: Yes but when you say willingness it contains the word 'will' for example. K: Willingness in the sense go through that door. Or am I or are we willing to go through that particular door to find that the ground exists? You ask me that. I say, agreed, I will. I will in the sense of not exercising will and all that - what are the facets or the qualities or the nature of the self? So we go into that. You point it out to me and I say, 'Right' - Can ten of us do it? Not be attached, not have fear, not have - you follow? - the whole business of it. Have no belief, absolute rational - you know - observation. I think if ten people do it any scientist will accept it. But there are no ten people. So one man's assertion becomes... B: I see. We have to have the thing done together publicly... K:... that's it. B:... so that it becomes a real fact. K: A real fact. A real fact in the sense that people accept it. Not based on illusion, Jesus, belief and all the rest of that. B: Yes, well a fact. what is actually done. K: Now, who will do this sir? The scientists want to say that the thing is all illusory, nonsense, and there are others, 'X' says 'It is not nonsense, there is a ground.' And 'X' says, 'If you do these things it will be there.' B: Yes. Now I think that some of the things that you say may not entirely in the beginning make sense to the person you talk with. You see. K: Yes, quite, because he isn't even willing to listen. B: Yes, but also his whole background is against it. K: Of course, of course. B: You see the background gives you the notion of what makes sense and what doesn't. Now if you say for example, one of the steps is not to bring in time, you see. K: Ah, that's much more difficult. B: Yes but that is fairly crucial. K: But wait. I wouldn't begin with time, I would begin at the schoolboy level. B: Yes. But you are going eventually reach those more difficult points. K: Yes. Begin at the schoolboy level and say, look, do these things. B: Well what are they? Let's go over them. K: No belief. B: A person may not be able to control what he believes, he may not know what he believes. K: No, don't control anything. Observe. B: Yes. K: That you have belief, you cling to that belief, belief gives you a sense of security and so on and so on. And that belief is an illusion, it has no reality. B: Yes. You see I think if we were to talk to a scientist like that he might say, 'I am not sure about that', because he says 'I believe in the existence of the material world.' K: Yes, you don't believe the sun rises and sets. It is a fact. B: Yes, but he believes - you see there have been long arguments about this, there is no way to prove that it exists outside my mind but I believe it anyway. This is one of the questions which arises. You see scientists actually have beliefs. One will believe that this theory is right, and the other believes in that one. K: No. I have no theories. I don't have any theories. I start at the schoolboy level by saying, Look, don't accept theories, conclusions, don't cling to your prejudices and so on and so on.' That is the starting point. B: Yes, well perhaps we had better say don't hold to your theories you see because somebody might question you if you say you have no theories, they would immediately doubt that. K: I have no theories. Why should I have theories. Q: You see Krishnaji if I am a scientist I would also say I don't have theories. I don't see that the world which I construct for my scientific theories is also theoretical. I would call it fact. K: So we have to discuss what are facts? Right? What are facts? I would say what are facts, is that which is happening. Actually happening. Would you agree to that? B: Yes. K: Would the scientists agree to that? B: Yes. Well I think that the scientists would say that what is happening is understood through theories. You see in science you do not understand what is happening except with the aid of instruments and theories. K: Now, wait, wait, wait. What is happening out there, what is happening here. B: All right, but let's go slowly. First what is happening out there. The instruments and theories are needed to even.... K: No, I am not - no. it? B: To have the fact about what is out there... K: What are the facts out there? B:... you cannot do it without some kind of theory. K: The facts there are conflict, why should I have a theory about B: I wasn't discussing that. I was discussing the facts about matter, you see, which the scientist is concerned with. K: Yes. All right. B: He cannot establish that fact without a certain minor theory. K: Perhaps. I wouldn't know that. B: You see, because the theory organizes the fact for him. Without that it would really fall into... K: Yes. I understand that. That may be a fact. You may have theories about that. B: Yes. About gravitation, atoms - all those things depend on theories in order to produce the right facts. K: The right facts. So you start with a theory. B: A mixture of theory and fact. It is always a combination of theory and fact. K: Yes, all right. A combination of theory and fact. B: Now if you say we are going to have an area where there isn't any such combination... K: That's it. Which is psychologically I have no theory about myself, about the universe, about my relationship with another. I have no theory. Why should I have? The only fact is mankind suffers, miserable, confused, in conflict. That is a fact. Why should I have a theory about it? B: You must go slowly. You see if you are intending to bring in the scientists, this is to be scientific... K: I will go very slowly. B:... so that we don't leave the scientists behind! K: Quite. Or, leave me behind. B: Well let's accept 'part company' - right? The scientists might say yes, psychology is the science with which we try to look inwardly, to investigate the mind. And they say biased people have had theories such as Freud, and Jung and other people - I don't know all of them. Now we have to make it clear why it has no point to make these theories. K: Because theory prevents the observation of what is actually taking place. B: Yes, but outside it seemed the theory was helping that observation. Why the difference here? K: Yes. The difference? You can do that, it is simple. B: Well let's spell it out. Because if you want to bring in scientists you must answer this question. K: Yes sir. We will answer it. The question is: why should -what is the question? B: Why is it that theories are both necessary and useful in organizing facts about matter, outwardly and yet inwardly, psychologically they are in the way, they are no use at all. K: Yes. What is theory? B: Yes. Well... K: The meaning of the word, theory. B: Theory means to see, to view, a kind of insight. K: To view? That's it. B: A view, a way of looking. K: A way of looking. B: And the theory helps you to look at the outside matter. K: Well, can you - theory means to observe. B: It is a way of observing. K: A way of observing. Can you observe psychologically what is going on, observe? B: Yes, now let's say that when we look at matter outwardly to a certain extent we fix the observing. K: That is the observer is different. B: Not only different but their relationship is fixed, relatively at least, for some time. K: Yes, that's right. We can move now, a little. Move. B: This appears to be necessary to study matter. Matter does not change so fast and it can be separated to some extent, and we can then make it a fairly constant way of looking at changes but not immediately, it can be held constant for a while. K: Yes. B: And we call that theory. K: As you said, theory means, the actual meaning of the word, is a way of observing. B: It has the same root as theatre in Greek, you see. K: Theatre, yes, that's right. It is a way of looking. Now what is - now where do we start? A common way of looking, an ordinary way of looking, the way of looking depending on each person - the housewife, the husband, the money-maker - what do you mean the way of looking? B: Well the same problem arose in the development of science. We began with what was called common sense... K:... common sense B:... a common way of looking. Then scientists discovered that this was inadequate. K: The moved away from it. B: The moved away, they gave up some parts of it. K: That is what I am coming to. The common way of looking is full of prejudice. B: Yes, it is arbitrary. K: Arbitrary. B: Depends on your background. K: Yes, all that. So can I be free of my background, my prejudice? B: Yes. K: I think one can. B: You could say that when it comes to looking inwardly - you see the question is whether a theory of psychology would be any help in doing this. The danger is that the theory itself might be a prejudice. If you tried to make a theory... K: That is what I am saying. That would become a prejudice. B: That would become a prejudice because we have nothing - we have not yet observed anything to found it on. K: So the common factor is that man suffers. Right? That is a common factor. And the way of observing matters. B: Yes. K: Right? B: I wonder whether scientists would accept that as the most fundamental factor of man. K: All right. Conflict? B: Well they have argued about it. K: Take anything, it doesn't matter. Attachment, pleasure, fear. B: I think some people might object saying we should find something more positive. K: Which is what? B: Simply, for example some people might have said that rationality is a common factor. K: No, no, no. I won't call rationality a common factor. If they were rational they wouldn't be fighting each other. B: We have to make this clear. You see let's say in the past somebody like Aristotle might have said rationality is the common factor of man. Now your argument against it is that men are not generally rational. K: No, they are not. B: Though they might be they are not. K: That's it. B: So you are saying that is not a fact. K: That's right. Q: I think commonly scientists would say that the common factor for mankind is, that there are many different human beings and that they are all striving for happiness. K: Is that the common factor? No. I won't accept that. Many human beings are striving for happiness. Q: No. Human beings are all different. K: Agreed. Stay there. Q: That is what I am saying. That there is the common theory which people believe to be a fact. K: That is, each person thinks he is totally different from others. Q: Yes. And they are all independently striving for happiness. K: They are all seeking some kind of gratification. Right? Would you agree to that. B: Yes that is one. But the reason I brought up rationality was that the very existence of science is based on the notion that rationality is common to man. K: I know, but that is why I didn't want you to bring that in. Each person seeking his own individuality. B: But you see science would be impossible if that were entirely true, you see. K: Quite. Q: Why? B: Well because everybody would not be interested in the truth, you see. The very possibility of doing science depends on people feeling that this common goal of people finding the truth is beyond personal satisfaction because even if your theory is wrong you must accept that it is wrong though it is not gratifying. That is, it becomes very disappointing for people but they accept it, and say, 'Well, that is wrong'. K: I am not seeking gratification. I am a common man. Q: Well it is something, for example, which is written into many Constitutions of many countries, and that is why I brought it up. It seems to be a common belief. K: No, I think what Dr Bohm has brought up, which is, scientists take for granted human beings are rational. B: When they do science. K: Science. B: They may agree that they are not very rational in private life, but they say that at least they are capable of being rational when they do scientific work. Otherwise it would be impossible to begin. K: So outwardly in dealing with matter they are all rational. B: At least they try to be and they are to some extent. K: They try to be. They become irrational in their relationship with other human beings. B: Yes. They cannot maintain it. K: So that is the common factor. B: Yes. O.K. It is important to bring out this point: that rationality is limited and that you say the fundamental fact is more generally they cannot be rational. They may succeed in some limited area. K: That's right. That's right. Now can I - that is a common factor. That is a fact. B: That is a fact though we don't say it is inevitable or that it can't be changed. K: No. It is a fact. B: It is a fact that it has been. K: That is happening. B: Yes, it has happened. It is happening. K: Yes. I, as a common human being, have been irrational. And my life has been totally contradictory and so on and so on, which is irrational. Now can I as a human being change that? B: Yes. Let's see how we could proceed from the scientific approach. Now this would raise the question, why is everybody irrational? K: Because we have been conditioned that way. Our education, our religion, our everything. B: Well that won't get us anywhere because it leads to more questions: how did we get conditioned and so on. K: We can go into all that. B: Yes, but I meant that following that line is not going to answer. K: Quite. Why are we conditioned that way? B: For example we were saying the other day that perhaps man took a wrong turning. K: Yes. B: That established the wrong conditioning. K: The wrong conditioning right from the beginning. Or seeking security - security for myself, for my family, for my group, for my tribe, has brought about this division. B: Yes, but even then you have to ask why man sought this security in the wrong way. You see if there had been any intelligence it would have been clear that the whole thing has no meaning. K: Of course you are going back to taking the wrong turn. How will you show me we have taken a wrong turning? B: Yes. You are saying we want to demonstrate this scientifically, is that what you are saying? You want to continue this demonstration? K: Yes. I think the wrong turn was taken when thought became all important. B: Yes, and what made it all important? K: Now let's think it out. What made thought - what made human beings enthrone thought as the only means of operation? Why have they enthroned thought? Right? B: Yes. Also it would have to be made clear why, if thought is so important, it causes all the difficulties. These are the two questions. K: That is fairly simple. B: Well we have gone over that but I am saying that if we are presenting it to somebody else we have to go into that. K: That is fairly simple. So thought has been made king, supreme. And that may be the wrong turn of human beings. B: Yes, you see I think that thought became the equivalent of truth. You see people took thought to give truth, to give what is always true. At a certain stage that when there may be the notion that we have knowledge, which may hold in certain cases for some time, but men generalize because knowledge is always generalizing and when they got to the notion that it would be always so this gave the thought of what is true, you see. This would give thought this supreme importance. K: Why has man given - you are asking, aren't you - why has man given thought such importance? Is that it? B: I think he has slipped into it. K: Why? B: Because he did not see what he was doing. You see, in the beginning he did not see the danger. Q: Just before you said that the common ground for man is reason so... K: Scientists say that. Q: Yes. So if you can prove something to be true it is even more important than you have happiness. K: I don't quite follow. Q: If you can show to a person that something is true... K: Show it to me. It is true I am irrational. That is a fact, that is true. Q: Yes, but for that you don't need reason, observation is sufficient to do that. K: No. I am irrational. I go and fight. I talk about peace. I am irrational. Q: That is all irrational. So why do I say that the reason is so important when I am not reasonable? K: No. What Bohm is pointing out is: scientists say man is rational. The fact of everyday life is irrational. Now we are saying -he is asking: show me why it is irrational, scientifically. That is, show me in what way I have slipped into this irrationality, why human beings have accepted this. We can say it is habit, tradition, religion; and the scientists also, they are very rational there, in the scientific field, but very irrational in their lives. Q: And you suggested that making thought the king is the main irrationality. K: Yes. That is right. We have reached that point. I want to be clear. B: Yes, but then how did we slip into making thought so important? K: Why has man given importance to thought as the supreme thing? Why? I think that is fairly easy. Because that was the only thing he knew. B: It doesn't follow that he would give it supreme importance. K: Because the thing I know is more important than the things I don't know - the things thought has created, the images, all the rest of it. B: But you see if man were - if intelligence were operating he would not come to that conclusion. It is not rational to say that all that I know is all that is important. K: That is why he is irrational. B: Yes. It slipped into irrationality to say 'All that I know is all that is important.' But why should man have made that mistake? K: Would you say that that mistake is made because he clings to the known and objects to anything unknown? B: Well that is a fact but it is not clear why he should. K: Because that is the only thing that I have. B: Well you see I am asking why he was not intelligent enough to see that this... K: Because we are irrational. B: Well we are going around in circles. K: I don't think we are going in circles. B: Look: every one of these reasons you give is merely another form of irrationality. K: That is all I am saying. We are basically irrational. And that is irrationality has arisen because we have given thought supreme importance. Q: But the step before that, isn't that thought has built up the idea that I exist? K: Ah, that comes a little later. I don't want to enter into that because he says you have to go step by step. Q: Well I felt that that step really comes before because - can I? K: Yes sir. You say what you like, we are in America. Q: It is for the 'me', for the 'me' it is the only thing that exists is thought. K: Would the scientists accept that? B: No, scientists feel they are investigating the real nature of matter, you know, independent of thought, independent ultimately anyway. He wants to know the way the universe is. He may be fooling himself but he feels that otherwise it wouldn't be worth doing unless he believed that he was finding an objective fact. K: So would you say through matter, through the investigation of matter he is trying to find something, he is trying to find the ground. B: That's exactly it. K: Wait, wait. Is that it? B: Precisely, yes. K: Now the religious man, like 'X', the religious man Mr 'X', he says you can find it by becoming terribly rational in your life. Right? Which is, etc., I needn't go into it. He says, 'I don't accept I am rational' - the religious man starts. 'I am irrational, I contradict' and so on and so on. So I will have to clear up that first, step by step, clear up. Or I can do the whole thing at one blow. Right? I accept I am irrational. B: Well yes. There is a difficulty: if you accept you are irrational, you stop because you say how are you going to begin. Right? K: Yes. B: If... K: If I accept I am irrational - wait a minute - completely, I am rational! B: Yes, well you will have to... K: You understand of course. B: You will have to make that more clear. You see I think you could say that man has been deluding himself into believing that he is already rational. K: I don't accept that. B: Yes. Now if you don't accept this delusion then you are saying that rationality will be there. K: No, I don't accept it. The fact is I am irrational. B: Right. K: And to find the ground I must become terribly rational in my life. That's all I start with. And irrationality has been brought about by thought creating this idea of me as separate from everybody else, etc., etc. So can I, being irrational, find the cause of irrationality and wipe it out? If I can't do that I cannot reach the ground which is the most rational. Would a scientist who is investigating matter, to come upon the ground, he may not accept the ground exists at all. B: Well tacitly he is assuming that it does. K: It does. Mr 'X' comes along and says it does exist. And you, the scientist, says, 'Show it.' Mr 'X' says 'I will show it to you. First become rational in your life'. Not there, don't as a scientist meeting with another scientist, experimenting and all the rest of the be rational there, and irrational in your life. Begin there rather than there. What would you say to all that? B: Right. Well... K: This must be done without effort, without desire, without will, without any sense of persuasion, otherwise you are back in the game. Q: Krishnaji are you supposing, or are you saying that the scientist can be rational here? K: He says they are. B: They are to some extent. K: Of course. He says that. Sir when scientists meet about something they are very rational. Q: To some extent. K: To some extent, yes. B: Well eventually their personal relations come in and so on. K: That's is. They become irrational because of their jealousies and ambitions. B: Well also because they are attached to their theories and so on. Q: Also the basic irrationality of them is that they think what they discover is the truth. K: No, he doesn't say that. Through the investigation of matter they hope to come upon the ground. B: They may be wrong but that is what they hope for. K: They must otherwise what is the point of investigating matter? Q: Maybe there is no point. B: In addition of course it is important for practical purposes and so on. K: Practical purposes, yes for inventing guns and all the rest of it, submarines and super missiles. B: Well also new energy sources and so on. K: Of course, of course, that is only part of it. B: That is part of it but in addition it may have an interest in itself but we have to say that - let's try to put it like this: even in science you could not pursue the science fully unless you were rational. K: Yes, somewhat rational. B: Somewhat rational, but in fact eventually the failure of rationality blocks science anyway. Scientists alter their theories and they become jealous and so on. K: That's it. Or the irrationality overcomes them. B: They cannot keep the irrationality out. K: That's it. B: So then you could say you might as well look at the source of the whole irrationality. K: That's it. That is what I am saying. B: That is the only possibility. K: Yes. B: But now you have to make it clear that it really can be done, you see. K: Oh yes, I am showing it to you. I say first recognize, see, observe, be aware - or whatever word - that you are totally irrational. B: Well the word 'totally' will cause trouble because if you were totally irrational you couldn't even begin to talk, you see. K: No, that is my question. I say you are totally irrational. First recognize it. Watch it. If the moment that you admit there is some part of you which is rational - right - who wants to wipe away the irrationality... B: It is not that but there must be sufficient rationality to understand what you are talking about. K: Yes, of course. B: Essentially I would rather put it that you are dominated by your irrationality, that irrationality dominates even though there is enough rationality to discuss the question. K: I question that. B: You see otherwise we couldn't even begin to talk. K: No, but listen. Just a minute, just a minute. We begin to talk, you, a few of us begin to talk because we are willing to listen to each other, we are willing to say 'I'll set aside any conclusion I have', and so on, we are willing to listen to each other. B: That is part of rationality. K: No, with us, but the vast majority are not willing to listen to us because we are concerned, serious enough to find out if the ground exists. Right? That gives us rationality to listen to each other. B: Yes. Well listening is essential for rationality. K: What? B: Listening is necessary for rationality. K: Of course. Are we saying the same thing? B: Yes. K: Because as the scientist - wait a minute - as the scientist through the examination of matter, the investigation of matter hopes to reach the ground, we, 'X', 'Y', 'Z', say let us become rational in our life. Which means you and I and 'X', 'Y', 'Z' are willing to listen to each other. That's all. The very listening is the beginning of rationality. Mr Carter, Mr K, they won't even listen to us, not even the Pope, or anybody. So can we, who are listening, be rational somewhat and begin? That's all my point. This is all being terribly logical, isn't it? So can we proceed from there? Why has man brought about this irrationality in his life, and a few of us can apparently throw off some part of irrationality and become somewhat rational, 'X', 'Y', 'Z', and those rational people say, 'Now, let's start.' Right? Let us start to find out why man lives this way, both the scientists and me, because he is a man, he is not just a scientist. Now what is the dominant factor in his life, the common, dominant factor in all human beings' lives, apart from 'X', 'Y', 'Z' who are rational, including them, what is the dominant current in his life? Obviously thought. B: Yes, that is so. Of course many people would, might deny that and say that it is feeling or something else is the major... K: Many people might say that but thought is part of feeling. B: Right. That is not commonly understood. K: We will explain it. Senses, feeling, if there was no thought behind it you wouldn't be able to recognize those senses. B: Yes. I think this is a major difficulty in communication with some people. K: Yes, so we begin. Leave the some people, I want the three 'X', 'Y', 'Z' to see this and 'X', 'Y', 'Z', because they listen to each other, because they have become somewhat rational, therefore they are listening to each other, can say thought is the main source of this current. B: Yes, well we have to say what is thought. K: I think that is fairly simple. B: Well, what is it? K: Thought brings about irrationality. B: Yes, but what is it? How do you know you are thinking? What do you mean by thinking? K: Thinking is the movement of memory, memory which is experience, knowledge stored up in the brain. Which you and I -we know all this. Q: You see Krishnaji at this moment we are also thinking partly but nevertheless it seems that this kind of thinking is not just memory. K: Oh yes, it is memory, sorry. No, no, I don't go further, I stop just here. B: Suppose we want to have rationality which includes rational thought. K: That is just it. B: But rationality must include rational thought. K: Of course. B: Is rational thought only memory? K: Rational thought if it is - now wait a minute, careful! B: Yes. Right. K: Wait a minute. If we are completely rational there is total insight. That insight uses thought and then it is rational. B: Then it is rational. K: My god, yes. B: Then thought is not only memory? K: No, no. B: Well, I mean since it is being used by insight. K: No, insight uses thought. B: Yes, but what thought does is not just due to memory now. K: Wait a minute. B: You see, I see it this way. K: Quite right. B: Ordinarily thought runs on its own, it runs like a machine on its own, it is not rational. K: Quite right. B: But when thought is the instrument of insight then you see it would be the difference between... K: Agreed, agreed. Then thought is not memory. B: It is not based on memory. K: No, not based on memory. B: Memory is used, but it is not based on memory. K: That's right. Then what? 'X', 'Y', 'Z', who are fairly rational, who have seen this point that thought being limited, divisive, incomplete, can never be rational. B: Without insight. K: That's right. Now how is 'X', 'Y', 'Z', to have insight? Which is total rationality. Not the rationality of thought. B: It is rationality of perception, I should say. I should call it rationality of perception. K: Perception. B: To perceive rational order. K: Yes, rationality of perception. B: Then thought becomes the instrument of that, so it has the same order. K: Now how am I to have that insight? That is the next question, isn't it? What am I to do? Or not do, to have this instant insight, immediate insight, which is not of time, which is not of memory, which has no cause - right - which is not based on reward or punishment, it is free of all that. Now how do I in discussing with 'X', 'Y', 'Z', who want to come upon the ground, how do I, how does the mind have this insight? When I say, 'I have the insight', that is wrong. Obviously. So how is it possible for a mind, which has been irrational, and has somewhat become rational, 'X', 'Y', 'Z', and that 'X','Y' 'Z', asks is it possible to have that insight? Yes it is possible to have that insight if your mind is free from time. B: Right. Let's go slowly, because you see, let me say, that if we go back to the scientific point of view, even common sense, I think that implicitly time is taken as the ground of everything in scientific work. K: Yes. B: And common sense. In fact even in ancient Greek mythology you see Chronus the god of time produces his children and swallows them. That is exactly what we said about the ground, everything comes from the ground and dies to the ground. So in a way mankind began to take time already as the ground. K: Yes. B: Long ago, right. K: Yes, that is right. And you come along and say time is not the ground. B: That's right. So up until now even scientists have been looking for the ground somewhere in time, and everybody else too. K: Yes sir, that is the whole point. B: Now you say time is not the ground. K: Go on, this is very interesting. B: This of course somebody might say is nonsense but we say OK, we will stay open to that. Right? K: No, we, 'X', 'Y', 'Z', are open to it. B: We are going to be open to it but I am saying some people might easily dismiss it right away. K: Of course. Science fiction writers may accept it! B: Well they may, some of them, yes. K: I was only joking. B: Now if you say time is not the ground, this seems to leave us, well, let us say we don't know where we are. K: I know where I am. We will go into it. B: Yes. Q: Is time the same movement as this thought which we described first? K: Yes, time is that. Time is thought. B: Yes, well, let's go slowly again on that because there is, as we have often said, chronological time. K: Of course, that is simple. B: Yes but in addition we are thinking. You see thinking takes time chronologically but in addition it projects a kind of imaginary time... K:... which is the future B:... which is the future, the past as we experience it. K: Yes, that is right. B: That time which is imagined, which is also a kind of real process of thinking. K: Which is a fact. B: It is a fact. It is taking time physically, to think, but we also have the time we can imagine the whole past and future. K: Yes, which are facts. B: So let's say that this time is not the ground, perhaps not even physically. K: We are going to find out. We are going to find out. B: Yes. But we feel it to be the ground because we feel that we, as the self, I as the self, exist in time. Without time there could be no me. K: That's it. B: I must exist in time. K: Of course, of course. B: Eternally being something or becoming something. K: Becoming and being are in the field of time. Now can the mind, which has evolved through time... Q: That is a strange statement. K: Why? Q: What do you mean by mind then? K: Mind - the brain, my senses, my feeling all that is the mind. B: The particular mind, you mean? K: Particular mind, of course, I am talking not the mind which is - I am talking of 'X', 'Y', 'Z',s' mind. That mind has evolved through time. Right? B: Well even its particularity depends on time. K: Time, of course and all the rest of it. Now we are asking: can that mind be free of time to have an insight which is totally rational, which then can operate on thought, which will be rational? That thought is not based on memory. Right? B: Right. K: Now how am I - 'X' - 'X' says how am I to be free of time? I know I need time to go from here to there, to learn a lesson, a technique and so on. I understand that very clearly, so I am not talking about that time. I am talking about the time as becoming. B: Or as being. K: Of course, becoming is being. I start from being to become. B: And being something in myself, you see. K: Right sir. B: Being better, being happier. K: Yes, the whole thing - the more. B: The more. K: Now can I, can my brain investigating to find out if the ground exists, can my brain, can I, can my whole mind be free of time? Yes. We have now separated time. The time which is necessary, and the time which is not necessary. That is, can my brain not function as it has always in time as thought? Right? Which means can thought come to an end? Right? Would you accept that? B: Yes, well could you make that more clear. You see we could see that the first question is, that can my brain not be dominated by the function of thought? K: Yes, which is time. B: Time. And then if you say thought comes to an end... K: No, can time as thought come to a stop? B: Psychological time comes to a stop. K: Yes, I am talking of that. B: But we will still have the rational thought. K: Of course. That is understand. We have said that. We are leaving that. B: We are discussing the thought of conscious experience. Q: Of becoming and being. B: Of becoming and being. K: And the retention of memory, you know, the past, as knowledge. Oh, yes, that can be done. B: You really mean the memory of experiences? K: The memory of experiences, hurts, attachments, the whole of it. Now can that come to an end? Of course it can. Now this is the point: it can come to an end when the very perception asks, what is it, hurt? B: Yes. K: Damaged psychologically, the perception of it is the ending of it. Not carrying it over, which is the time. The very ending of it is the ending of time. Is that? I think that is clear. Or not clear? All right, I am hurt. 'X' is hurt, wounded from childhood, for various reasons, you know all that. And he, by listening, talking, discussing with you, realizes that the continuation of the hurt is time. Right? And to find out the ground, time must end. So he says can my hurt end instantly, immediately. B: Yes, I think there are some steps in that. You say he finds that hurt is time but the immediate experience of it is that it exists on its own. K: I know, of course, of course. We can go into that. B: That simply is something on its own. K: Which is, I have created an image about myself and the image is hurt but not me. B: What do you mean by that? K: All right. In the becoming, which is time, I have created an image about myself. Right? B: Well thought has created that image. K: Thought has created an image through experience, through education, through conditioning, that this image is separate from me. Wait a minute, I will explain it. This image is actually me. B: Yes. K: But we have separated the image and the me, which is irrational. B: Right. K: So in realizing that the image is me, I have become somewhat rational. B: Yes, well you see I think that that will not be clear because if a person is hurt he feels the image is me. K: The image is you. B: The person who is hurt feels that way. K: All right. But the moment you operate on it you separate yourself. B: That's the point. Now the first feeling is the image is me, and the second feeling is I draw back from the image in order to operate on it. K: Which is irrationality. B: Because it is not correct, eh? K: That's right. Right? B: And that brings in time because I say it will take time to do that. K: Quite right. So by becoming, by seeing that I become rational and in the act, the act is to be free of it immediately. B: Yes, well let's go into that. You see, we say we have drawn back - the first thing is that there has been a hurt. Right? That is the image but at first I don't separate it. I feel identified with it. K: I am that. B: I am that. But then I draw back and say that I think there must be a me who can do something. K: Yes, can operate on it. B: Right. Now that takes time. K: That is time. B: That is time, but I mean I am thinking it takes time. Now if I don't do that, now you see I have to go slowly. That hurt cannot exist. K: That's right. B: But it is not obvious in the experience itself that this is so. K: First, let's go slowly into it. I am hurt. That is a fact. Then I separate myself, there is a separation saying 'I will do something about it'. B: The 'me' who will do something is different. K: Is different. Of course. B: And he thinks about what he should do. K: The 'me' is different because it is becoming. I don't want to complicate it. B: Well, yes, it projects into the future a different state. K: Yes. I am hurt. There is a separation, a division. The 'me', which is always pursuing the becoming, says, 'I must control it. I must wipe it. I must act upon it, or I will be vengeful, hurtful' - and all the rest of it. So this movement of separation is time. B: Yes, we can see that now. Now the point is - there is something here that is not obvious. A person is thinking the hurt exists independently of me and I must do something about it. I project into the future the better state and what I will do. You see, let's try to make it very clear because you are saying that there is no separation. K: My rationality discovers there is no separation. B: There is no separation but the illusion that there is a separation helps to maintain the hurt. K: That's right. Because the illusion is 'I am becoming'. B: Yes. I an this and I will become that. K: Yes. B: So I am hurt and I will become non hurt. Now that very thought maintains the hurt. K: That's right. Q: But isn't that feeling of separation there when I become conscious and say, 'I am hurt'? K: I am hurt. Then I say, 'I am going to hit you because you have hurt me. Or I say, 'I must suppress it', I create fear and so on. Q: But isn't that feeling of separation there from the moment I say, 'I am hurt'? K: That is irrationality. Q: That is irrational already? K: Already. When you say does not the separation exist already when I say 'I am hurt'. B: Well it does, but I think that before that happens you get a kind of shock. The first thing that happens is a kind of shock, a pain or whatever which you identify with that shock and then you explain it by saying 'I am hurt' or whatever and that immediately implies the separation to do something. K: Of course. Of course. If I am not hurt I don't know anything about separation or not separation. Q: Well something might happen to me. K: Yes, he has said a shock, any kind of shock. Q: But at the moment I say I am hurt, then in that moment I have already separated myself from that fact which... K: No, no, no. I don't - all that I know is that I am hurt. Right? I don't say I have already separated myself. Q: No, I am not saying that. Isn't that implied? K: No. I am just hurt. I am irrational as long as I maintain that hurt and do something about it, which is to become. Then irrationality comes in. I think that is right. B: Now if you don't maintain it, what happens? Suppose you say, 'OK, I won't go on with this becoming.' K: Ah, that is quite a different matter. Which means I am no longer observing using time as an observation. B: You could say that is not your way of looking. K: Yes. B: It is not your theory anymore. K: That's right. B: Because you could say time is a theory which everybody adopts for psychological purposes. K: That's right. That is a common factor, time is the common factor of man. And we are pointing out time is an illusion. B: Psychological time. K: Of course, that is understood. B: Are you saying that when we no longer approach this through time then the hurt does not continue? K: Does not continue, it ends. B: It ends. K: Because you are not becoming anything. B: In becoming you are always continuing what you are. K: That's right. Continuing what you are, modified and... B: That is why you struggle to become. K: And all the rest of it. We are talking about insight. That is, insight has no time. Insight is not the product of time, time being memory, remembrance and so on and so on. So there is insight. That insight being free of time acts upon memory, acts upon thought which is rational. That is, insight makes thought rational. Right? B: Right. K: Not thought which is based on memory. Then what the devil is that thought? B: What? Q: That is the question. K: No. Wait a minute sir. I don't think thought comes in at all. We said insight comes into being when there is no time. Thought which is based on memory, experience, knowledge, that is the movement of time as becoming. We are talking psychologically, not the other. We are saying to be free of time implies insight. Insight being free of time, it has no thought. B: We said that it may use thought. K: Wait, wait. I am not sure. Just go slowly. B: You are changing, yes. K: It may use thought to explain but it acts. Before action was based on thought, now when there is insight there is only action. Why do you want thought? Because insight is rational therefore action is rational. Action becomes irrational when it is acting from thought. So insight doesn't use thought. B: Well we have to make it clear because in a certain area it has to use thought. You see if for example you want to construct something you would use the thought which is available as to how to do it. K: But that is not insight. B: Yes, but even so you may have to have insight in that area. K: Partial. We said the other day when we were discussing that the scientists, the painters, the architects, the doctors, the artists and so on, they have partial insight. We are talking of 'X', 'Y', 'Z', who are seeking the ground, they are becoming more - not more - they are becoming rational and we are saying insight is without time and therefore without thoughts, and that insight is action. Because that insight is rational action is rational. Q: Could this action be thought? K: No. Sir, just a minute. Forgive me I am not making myself into an example, I am talking in all humility. That boy, that young man in 1929 dissolved the Order. There was no thought. People said 'Do this, don't do that', 'Keep it', 'Don't keep it'. He had an insight, finished. I dissolved it. Why do we need thought? Q: You don't need thought. K: Ah! We do, we employed thought to do something. B: But then you used some thought in dissolving the Order. Say, when to do it, how to do it. K: That is merely for convenience, for other people and so on. B: But still some thought was needed. K: The decision acts. B: I didn't say about the decision. The primary action did not require thought, only that which follows. K: That is nothing. It is like moving a cushion from there to there. B: Yes, I understand that. The primary source of action does not involve thought. K: That is all I wanted. B: But it sort of filters through into... K: It is like a wave. Q: Does not all thought undergo a transformation in this process? Before it was... K: Yes, of course, of course. Because insight is without time therefore the brain itself has undergone a change. B: Yes, now could we talk about what you mean by that? K: What time is it? B: Yes, you see we must refer to time! It is twenty five past five. K: I think we will have to stop for a bit here. B: Perhaps another day. K: My head is buzzing. B: Next time. K: I think this is good. So does it mean, sir, every human response must be viewed, or must enter into insight? I will tell you what I mean. I am jealous. Is there an insight which will cover the whole field of jealousy, so end that - envy, greed, and all that is involved in jealousy. You follow? We irrational people say, step by step, get rid of jealousy, get rid of attachment, get rid of anger, get rid of this, that and the other. Which is a constant process of becoming. Right? And the insight, which is totally rational, wipes all that away. Right? B: Right. K: Is that a fact? Fact in the sense 'X', 'Y', 'Z', will never again be jealous, never. B: Yes, well we have to discuss that because it is not clear how you could guarantee that. K: Oh yes, I will guarantee it! We had better stop. Isn't your head aching too? OJAI 4TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 10TH APRIL, 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' J Krishnamurti: Would it be all right if we start, you and I, and later on they can join in? I would like to ask a question which may lead us to something: what will make man, a human being, change, deeply, fundamentally, radically? He has had crisis after crisis, he has had a great many shocks, he has been through every kind of misfortune, every kind of war, personal sorrow, and so on, a little affection, a little joy, but all this doesn't seem to change him. What will make a human being leave the way he is going and move in a totally different direction? I think that is one of our great problems, don't you? Dr Bohm: Yes. What you say is true. K: Why? If you were concerned, as one must be, if one is concerned with humanity, with human beings, with all the things that are going on, what would be the right action that would move him out of one direction to another? Is this question valid? Has it any significance? B: Well unless we can see this action it won't have much significance. K: Has the question any significance? B: Well what it means is, really indirectly, to ask what is holding people. K: Yes, same thing. B: The same question. If we could find out what is holding people in their present direction. K: Is it the basic conditioning of man, the basic being this tremendous sense of egotistic attitude and action, which won't yield to anything? B: Well if you say it won't yield to anything... K: Apparently it doesn't seem to yield at all. It appears to change, it appears to yield, it appears sometimes to say yes, but the centre remains the same. Perhaps this may not be in the line of our dialogue for the last two or three days, two or three times, but I thought we might start with that. If that is of no value, if that doesn't lead anywhere... B: Well have you some notion of what is holding people? Something that would really change them? K: I think so. B: What is it then? K: I mean this has been the question of serious human beings: what is it that is blocking? Do we approach it through environmental conditioning, from the outer to the inner and discover from the outer his activities, the inner? And then discover that the outer is the inner, the same movement, and then go beyond it to see what it is? Could we do that? B: Right. K: I wonder if I am making myself clear? B: When you say outward, what do you mean? Do you mean the social conditions? K: The social conditioning, the religious conditioning, education, poverty, riches, climate, food, the outer. Which may condition the mind in a certain direction, but as one examines it a little more the psychological conditioning is also from the outer, somewhat. B: Well it is true that the way a person thinks is going to be affected by his whole set of relationships. But that doesn't explain why it is so rigid, why does it hold? K: That is what I am asking too. B: Yes. If it were merely outward conditioning one would expect it to be more easily changed. K: Easily changed. B: For example you could put some other outward condition. K: They have tried all that. B: They have tried it, the whole belief of Communism was that would - with a new society there would be a new man. K: New society, new man, yes. But there have been none! B: Well I think that there is something fundamentally in the nature of the inward that holds, which resists change. K: What is it? Will this question lead us anywhere? B: Unless we actually uncover it, it will lead nowhere. K: I think one could find out if one applied one's mind. I think one can. I am just asking: is this question worthwhile and is it related to what we have been talking about the last two or three times that we met? Or shall we take up something else in relation to what we have been talking about? B: Well I think that we have been talking about bringing about an ending to time, ending to becoming. And we said that to come into contact with the ground and through complete rationality. But now we could say that the mind is not rational. K: Yes, we said man is basically irrational. B: This is perhaps part of the block. If you were completely rational then we would of necessity come to this ground. Right? Would that be fair? K: Yes. You were not here the other day but we were having a dialogue about the ending of time. Both the scientists through investigation of matter want to find out that point, and also the so-called religious people, not only verbally but they have endeavoured to find out if time can stop. We went into that quite a bit and we say it is possible for a human being, who will listen, to find out through insight the ending of time. Because insight is not memory. Memory is time, memory as experience, knowledge stored up in the brain and so on, as long as that is in operation there is no possibility of having insight into anything. Total insight, not partial insight. The artist has a partial insight, the scientist, the musicians and so on, they all have partial insights and therefore they are still time-bound. Is it possible to have a total insight? It is only possible - we went into that step by step - which is the ending of the 'me', because the 'me' is put together by thought, thought is time, 'me' is time - me and my ego, my resistance, my hurts, all that. Can that 'me' end? It is only when that ends there is total insight. Right? That is what we discovered. Right? And we went into the question; is it possible for a human being to end totally this whole structure of the 'me'. We said yes, and went into it. And very few people will listen to this because it is perhaps too frightening. And the question then arises: if the 'me' ends what is there? Just emptiness? There is no interest in that. But if one is investigating without any sense of reward or punishment, then there is something. We say that something is total emptiness, which is energy and silence. Well, you say that is very nice, it sounds nice but it has no meaning to an ordinary man who is serious and wants to go beyond it, beyond himself. And we pushed it further: is there something beyond all this. Right sir? B: Yes. K: And we said there is. B: The ground. K: The ground. You were perhaps here at the beginning. And the last thing, if I remember rightly, will people listen to this? Is it the beginning of this enquiry is to listen. That is, I think, where we left off it I remember rightly. So - I had forgotten all that, I have just remembered it! So I started with this question, the question which I just began. Let's forget that question. We will come back to it perhaps a little later. Will I, as a human being, give up my egocentric activity completely? What will make me move away from that? Not me, that is only a way of talking. What will make a human being move away from this destructive, self-centred activity? It comes to the same thing. If he will move away through reward then that is just another - with it goes punishment. So discard that. Then what will make you, a human being - if I may use the word 'renounce' without reward - renounce it completely? Right sir? You see man has tried everything in this direction - fasting, self torture in various forms, abnegating himself through belief, denying himself through identification with something greater, with - so on and so on. All the religious people have tried it but it is still there. B: Yes. I think it becomes clear that the whole activity has no meaning, it has no sense, but somehow this does not become evident, you see. People will move away from something which has no meaning, and makes no sense, ordinarily speaking. K: Yes. B: But it seems that the perception of this fact is rejected by the mind, you see the mind is resisting it. K: The mind is resisting this constant conflict, it is moving away from this conflict. B: Yes. It is moving away from the fact that this conflict has no meaning. K: They don't see that. B: Not only that but the mind is set up purposely to avoid seeing it. K: The mind is avoiding it. B: It is avoiding it almost on purpose but not quite consciously. You said sometimes, for example, that it avoids it consciously like the people of India who say they are going to retire to the Himalayas because nothing can be done. K: Oh, that is hopeless. You mean to say, sir, that the mind having lived so long in conflict refuses to move away from it? B: It is not clear why it refuses. It refuses to give it up, right. K: The same thing, refuses to give it up. B: It is not clear why the mind does not wish to see the full meaninglessness of the conflict. The mind is deceiving itself, it is continually covering up. K: The philosophers and the so-called religious people have emphasized struggle, emphasized the sense of striving - control, make effort. Is that one of the causes why human beings refuse to let go of their way of life? B: Well that may be. They hope by fighting or struggling they will achieve a better result. Not to give up what we have but to improve it by struggle. K: You can see man has lived for two million years, what has he achieved? More wars, more destruction. B: What I am trying to say is that there is a tendency to resist seeing this, but to continually go back to hope - to hope that the struggle will finally produce something better. K: I am not quite sure if we have cleared this point: that the intellectuals of the world - I am using the word respectfully - the intellectuals of the world have emphasized this, this factor of struggle. B: Well I don't know if all of them have. Many of them have I suppose. K: Most of them. B: Karl Marx. K: Yes Marx and even Bronowsky who says through acquiring more and more knowledge, more and more struggle. Is it that they have had such extraordinary influence on our minds? B: Well I think people do that without any encouragement from intellectuals. You see struggle has been emphasized everywhere. K: That is what I mean. Everywhere. Why? B: Well in the beginning people thought it would be necessary, they had to struggle against nature to live. K: So struggling against nature has been transferred to the other? B: Yes, that is part of it. To become brave. You see you must be a brave hunter, you must struggle against your own weakness to be a brave hunter. K: Yes, that's it, that's it. B: Otherwise you can't do it. K: So is it that our minds are conditioned, or shaped, or held, in this pattern? B: Well that is certainly true but it doesn't explain why it is so extraordinarily hard to change it. K: Because I am used to it. I am in a prison. I am used to it. B: Yes, but I think that there is a tremendous resistance to moving away from that. K: Why? Why does a human being resist this? If you come along and point out the fallacy of this, the irrationality of this, and you show the whole cause and effect and examples, data, everything else. B: That is what I said that if people were capable of complete rationality they would drop it, but I think that there is something more to it. K: More to it? B: To the problem. You see you may expose the irrationality of it and for one thing people may say well what happens is that there is something more in the sense that people are not fully aware of this whole pattern of thought. Having had it exposed at a certain level it still continues at levels that people are not aware of. K: Yes, but what would make them aware? B: Well that is what we have to find. I think that people have to become aware that they have this tendency to go on with the conditioning; it might be mere habit, or it might be the result of many past conclusions, all operating now without people knowing it. There are so many different things that keep people in this pattern, so abstractly you might convince somebody that the pattern makes no sense but when it comes to the actual affairs of life he has a thousand different ways of proceeding which imply that pattern. K: Quite. Then what? B: Well I think that a person would have to be extremely interested in this to break all that down. K: Then what will bring a human being to be extremely interested? You see they have offered heaven as a reward if you do this. Various religions have done this, but that becomes too childish. B: Well that is part of the pattern, reward. You see somebody might say, 'I follow my self-enclosed pattern except when some great thing comes up.' You see people do that thing in a real emergency, they drop the self-enclosed pattern. K: You can see that. B: Ordinarily the rule is that I follow the self-enclosed pattern except when something really big comes up. K: A crisis. B: Or reward is to be obtained. K: Of course. B: Something special is needed to get out of it, and then you fall back in when that special thing is passed. K: Now why? Why? B: Well that is a pattern of thinking. I think that people must in some way think that it has value, people believe - you see if everybody were able to work together and suddenly you were able to produce harmony, then everybody would say fine, I would give up myself, but saying that in the absence of that I had better hold on to what I have. That is the sort of thinking. K: Hold on to what is known. B: I don't have much but I had better hold on to it because if everybody was suddenly to become harmonious then maybe I could leave it. K: Yes. So are you saying if everybody does this I will do it? B: That is the common way of thinking. Because as soon as people begin to start to cooperate in an emergency then a great many people go along. K: So they form communes. But all those have failed. B: Because after a while this special thing goes away and they fall back to the old pattern. K: The old pattern. So I am asking what will make a human being break through this pattern? Go on sirs. Q: Isn't it related to the question we dealt with last time again -time and no time. You see when there is conflict... K: But I know nothing about time, I know nothing about all that, it is just a theory to me. But the fact is I am caught in this pattern and I can't let it go. The analysts have tried it, the religious people have tried it, everybody has tried to make human beings -the intelligent people - let this go but they apparently have not succeeded. Q: But they don't see that the very attempt at letting it go, or to end the conflict, is still strengthening the conflict. K: No, that is just a theory. Q: No, you can explain that to them. K: You can explain. As we said there are a dozen explanations, very rational. At the end of it I fall back to this. Q: Well you only fall back to that if you have not really understood it. K: Have you understood it when you say that? Why haven't I or you, or Moody, said finished? You can give me a thousand explanations and all probably a bit irrational and I say yes, very nice, have you done it, or what? Q: I don't even understand the question. When you ask me, have you done it? K: No, I am not being personal. Have you, when you have given an explanation why human beings can't move away from this pattern, or break through it, you give me some explanation. Q: No, I give you more than the explanation. K: What do you give me? Q: If I observe something to be correct, then the explanation of the observation is more then just an explanation. K: Yes. I have accepted this. I can't observe this clearly. Q: Well what is the problem. K: So help me to see it clearly. Q: For that there must be an interest. K: Don't say there must. I haven't got an interest. I am interested, as he pointed out just now, when there is a tremendous crisis such as war, I forget myself. In fact I am glad to forget myself, I give the responsibility to the Generals, to the politicians. Under a crisis, I forget but the moment the crisis goes away I am back to my pattern. That is happening all the time. Now I say to myself what will make me relinquish this, the pattern, or break through it? Q: Isn't it that one must see the falseness. K: Show it to me sir. Q: I can't because I have not seen it. K: Then what shall I do as a human being? You have explained to me ten thousand times how ugly it is, how destructive it is and so on and so on. And you have pointed out in a crisis, etc., etc., but I fall back to this pattern all the time. Right? Help me or show me how to break the pattern. You understand my question? Q: Well then you are interested. K: All right. Now what will make me interested? Pain? Q: I don't know. Usually it doesn't. Sometimes it does for a moment but it goes away. K: So what will make me as a human being so alert, so aware, so intense that I will break through this thing? Q: Sir you state the question in terms of an action, breaking through, relinquishing. Isn't it a matter of seeing? K: Yes. Show me, help me to see, because I am resisting you. My pattern, so deeply engrained in me, is holding back. Right? I want proof, I want to be convinced. Right? Q: I am convinced but I don't see. Q: We have to go into this question: why do I want to have proof? Why do I want to be convinced? K: Because you say to me this is a stupid, irrational way of living. And you show me all the effects of it, the cause of it and I say yes but I can't let go. B: Well as a matter of fact I feel that it may well be that all this is irrational but since I am there this doesn't change anything. You see you may say that is the very nature of me, that I must fulfil my needs no matter how irrational they are. K: Sir, sir, that is what I am saying. B: So irrationality eventually cannot prevail because you see first I must take care of my own needs and then I can try to be rational. K: What are my needs then? B: Some of the needs are real and some are imaginary, but... K: Yes, that's it. The imaginary, the illusory needs sway the other needs. B: But you see I may need to believe I am good and right and know that I will be always there. K: Help me to break that, sir. B: I think I have to see that this is an illusion. You see if it seems real then I can say, what can I do, because if I am really there I need all this, and it is foolish to talk of being rational if I am going to vanish, break down or something. You see you have proposed to me that there is another state of being where I am not there. Right? And when I am there this doesn't make any sense! K: Yes, quite. But I am not there. Suppose as a human being, heaven is perfect, but I am not there, please help me to get there. B: No, no, it is something different. K: I know what you are saying. Q: You see can one see the illusory nature of that very demand that I want to go to heaven? That very question - or I want to be enlightened, or I want to be this, I want to be that - but this very question, this very demand is... K: My demand is based on becoming. Q: Right. K: The more. Q: That is illusory. K: No. You say that. B: You haven't demonstrated it to me you see. K: That is an idea to you. It is just a theory. Show me. Q: Well are you willing to really explore into this question? K: I am willing on one condition. I lay my condition actually because I want to find at the end of it something. See how the human mind works. Q: That's just it. K: I will climb the highest mountain if I can get something out of it. Q: Can the mind see that this is the problem? K: Yes, but it can't let go. Q: Well if it sees... K: No, no, you are going round and round in circles. B: It sees the problem abstractly. That is it sees it... K: That is it. Now why do I see it abstractly? B: Well, first of all it is a lot easier. K: Don't go back to that. Why does my mind make an abstraction of everything? B: Let's begin by saying that to a certain extent that is the function of thought to make abstractions outwardly, then we carry them inwardly. It is the same sort of thing as before. K: Yes. So is there a way - I am just asking - is there something else that we are missing in this altogether? That is we are still thinking, if I may point out, still thinking the same old patterns. Right? B: Well I think the question itself contains that pattern doesn't it? K: Yes. But the pattern - the pursuit of the pattern is traditional. B: Yes, but I mean that even in framing this question the pattern has continued. K: Yes, so can we move away altogether from this, and look at it differently - can we? That is we are still saying, listen to me, you must be interested, don't ask - you follow? Move away from that altogether. Can I move away from all that? Can the human mind say, all right, we have tried all this - Marx, Buddha, you follow? Everybody has pointed out something or other, we have tried, after a million years, obviously. And we are still somehow caught in that pattern, saying you must be interested, you must listen, you must do this and so on. B: That is still time. K: Yes. Leave all that. Then what happens if I leave all that, actually leave it? I won't even think in terms of it. I wonder if I am making myself clear? Q: Is the action of leaving all that... K: Not action. I know you have told me all that, I know all that. The religious people have said it, Marxists, you follow, everybody, and you add some more explanations, a new twist but it is the same old twist. So I say let's leave that area completely and look at the problem differently. Q: The problem which is? K: Which is: why do I always live in this centre of me, me, me? Well sirs? Would it be, I am a serious man, a serious human being, I have listened to all this, after sixty years, or fifty years. All the explanations I know, what I should, should not do and so on and so on, can I say, all right, I will discard all that. That means I stand completely alone. Does that lead anywhere? B: Possibly, yes. I say possibly. K: I think it does lead somewhere. B: It seems to me that basically you are saying, leave all this knowledge of mankind behind. Right? K: That is what I am saying. B: Apparently it is out of its place. K: Yes. Leave all the knowledge and experience and explanations, causes that man has created as human beings, discard all that. Q: But you are still left with the same mind. K: Ah! I have not such a mind. It is not the same mind. Q: Well then it is not clear what you are saying. K: Oh yes. When I discard all this my mind has changed. My mind is this. Q: No, isn't the mind also the basic set-up? K: Which I have discarded. Q: But you can't discard that. K: Oh yes. Q: I mean this is an organism. K: Now wait a minute. My organism has been shaped by the knowledge, by experience. Right? Q: To some extent. K: Yes. And more knowledge which I have acquired, as I have evolved, as I have grown, as I have experienced, gathered more and more, it has strengthened me, and I have been walking on that path for millennia. And I say, perhaps I may have to look at this problem totally differently. Which is not to walk on that path at all. Discard all knowledge I have acquired. Sorry. B: In this area, in this psychological place. K: Psychologically, of course. B: At the core, at the source, knowledge is irrelevant. K: Yes sir. B: Further down the line it becomes relevant. K: Of course. That is understood. Q: But I have one question. The mind at the beginning of its evolution, or at the beginning, was in that same position. The mind at the beginning of whatever you call man was in that position, it didn't have any knowledge. K: No. I don't accept that. Why do you say that? The moment it comes into being it is already formed in that. It is already caught in knowledge. Q: I don't quite understand. K: Would you say that. B: Well I think it is implicit in the structure of thought. K: Yes sir, that is just it. B: First of all to have knowledge about the outward, and then to come inward and therefore without understanding that it was going to be caught in it. It was good enough, developed enough to think about the inward, then it would extend that knowledge outward to the inward into the area of psychological becoming. Q: Well you see, if the mind could start anew, it would go through the same mistake again. K: No. No. Certainly not. Q: Unless it has learnt. K: No. I don't want to learn. You are still pursuing the same old path. That is what I am objecting to. Q: I think I just have the problem of choosing the right words. K: I don't want to learn - no sir, please just let me go into this a little bit. B: We should clear this up because on other occasions you have said it is important to learn, even about observing yourself. K: Of course, of course. B: Now you are saying something quite different. It should be clear that if it is different, why? Why is it that you have given up the notion of learning at this stage? K: At this stage because I am still gathering memory. B: Yes, but there was a state when it was important to learn about the mind. K: Don't go back. Just a minute. I am just starting. I have lived for sixty years or eighty years, or a hundred years. And I have listened to all this - the preachers in India, the teachers in India, the Christians, the Muslims, I have listened to all the explanations, psychological explanations, the cause, Freud, Marxist, everybody. B: I think we should go a bit further. That is all the negative stuff but in addition perhaps I have observed myself and learned about myself. K: Myself, yes, add that. B: Add that too, right. Q: Add K. K: All that. And at the end of it I say perhaps this is a wrong way of looking at it. Right? B: Right. Having explored that way we finally are able to see it might be wrong. K: Perhaps. B: Well I would say that in some sense perhaps it was necessary to explore that way. K: Or not necessary. B: It may not have been but given the whole set of conditions it was bound to happen K: Of course. So now I have come to a point when I say all that knowledge - we will put in that word - discard it. Because that hasn't lead me anywhere - lead me in the sense that I am not free of my egocentricism. B: Well that alone isn't enough because if you say it hasn't worked you can always hope that it may, suppose it may. But in fact you could see that it can't work. K: It can't work. Oh, I am definite on that. B: It is not enough to say it hasn't worked but actually it cannot work. K: It cannot work. Q: I am not definite on that. Isn't that just the difficulty? K: It cannot work because it is based on time and knowledge, which is thought. And these explanations are based on thought -acquire knowledge and so on and so on. Would you say that? B: Well as far as we have gone we have based it on knowledge and thought and not only thought but also the habitual patterns of skill, all that which is an extension of thought. K: So when I put those aside, not casually, not with an interest in the future, but I see the same pattern being repeated, repeated, repeated, different colours, different phrases, different pictures, different images - I discard all that totally. Instead of going North, as I have been going for millennia, I have stopped and am going East, which means my mind has changed. Q: Has the structure of the 'me' gone? K: Obviously. Q: Without insight into it? K: No. I won't bring in insight for the moment. B: But there was insight to do that. I mean to say that to consider doing it was an insight. The insight was the whole thing that worked. K: I won't bring in that word. B: When you said it, that the whole thing cannot work, well I think that is an insight. K: For me. I see it cannot work. But you see then we go back to that again: how do I acquire insight and all that. B: But leaving all that aside and just saying that it was an insight, but the question of how to acquire it is not the point. K: It is an insight that says, out. Q: Out to the pattern. K: No, finished with this constant becoming through experience, knowledge - you follow - patterns, finished. Q: Well would you say that that kind of thinking afterwards is a totally different kind of thinking? Evidently you must still think. K: I am not sure. Q: Well you may call it something else. K: Ah, I won't call it anything else. Please I am just fishing around. Which is after having lived a hundred years and I see everybody pointing out the way to end the self, and that way is based on thought, time, knowledge. And I say sorry, I know all that, I have an insight - I'll use that - I have an insight into that, therefore it falls away. And therefore the mind has broken the pattern completely. Now, all right. Dr Bohm has achieved this - not achieved - has got this insight and broken away the pattern. Please help another human being to come to that. Don't say you must be interested, you must listen, you must - then you fall back - you follow? How will -no, not 'how'. What is your communication with another human being so that he hasn't got to go through all this mess? You follow my question? How will you - not 'how' - what will make me absorb so completely what you have said, so that it is in my blood, in my brain, in my way, everything, so that I see this thing, what will you do? Or there is nothing to do? You follow me? Because if you have the insight it is a passion, it is not just a clever insight, now sit back and be comfortable, it is a passion, and this passion won't let you sit still, you must move, give whatever it is. What will you do? You have that passion. Exercise that passion of this immense insight. And that passion must, like a river with a great volume of water flows over the banks, in the same way that passion must move. Now, I am a human being, ordinary, fairly intelligent, read, experienced, tried this, that and the other thing, and I meet this 'X' and I say - and he is full of this - why won't I listen to him? Q: I think you do listen. Q: But that is the old question Krishnaji. Q: Krishnaji I listen. K: Do you? Q: Yes, I think so. K: Just go very, very slowly. Do you so completely listen that there is no resistance, no saying why, what is the cause, why should I - you follow what I mean? We have been all through all that. We have walked the area endlessly, back and forth from corner to corner, North, South, East, we have walked all over the area. And 'X' comes along and says, 'Look, there is a different way of living, different, something totally new' - which means, please listen, will you so completely that you - you know. Q: If there is a resistance one does not see the resistance. K: Don't go back to school. I am not being rude. Q: What do you mean? K: Begin again all over again - explain why you resist. Q: But one doesn't see the resistance. K: Then I will show you your resistance, by talking - you know. But yet you go back. Q: Krishnaji, did not your initial question go beyond this, when you asked, let's leave the listening, the rationality, the thought. K: Yes sir, but that is just an idea - will you do it? 'X' comes along and says 'Look, eat this.' Q: I would eat it if I could see it. K: Oh yes, you can see it, very clearly you can see it. Q: The 'me'... K: That's what I am preventing - he said don't go back to the pattern. See it. Then you say: 'How am I to see?' - which is the old pattern. Just see! 'X' refuses to enter that pattern. Q: The pattern of explanation? K: Knowledge, all that. He says come over, don't go back. Q: Krishnaji, to talk about a normal situation in the world. You have quite a number of people who ask you with similar words to see, put thought aside, if you would really look at this thing you will see it. I mean that is what the priests tell you. So what is the difference? K: No, no, no. I am not a priest. 'X' isn't a priest. 'K' says, I have left all that. I have left the church, the gods, Jesus, the Buddhas, the Krishnas, I have left all that, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, all the analysts, all the pundits, everybody. You see you haven't done that. 'X' says, do that. Ah, you say, no, I can't do it until you show me there is something else beyond all that. And 'X' says, 'Sorry.' Has that any meaning sir? B: Yes. You see I think that if you say leave all the knowledge behind, but knowledge takes many subtle forms which you don't see. Right? You see even... K: Of course. You are full of this insight and you have discarded all knowledge because of that. And I keep on puddling over the pool of knowledge. And you say, leave it. The moment you enter into explanations we are back into the game. And you refuse to explain. It's rather good. Yes sir. You see explanations have been the boat on which to cross to the other shore. And the man on the other shore says there is no boat. Cross! Now 'X' says that. He is asking me something impossible. Right? B: If it doesn't happen right away then it is impossible. K: Absolutely. He is asking me something impossible for me to do. (Noise of bees buzzing) B: The bees are very active, it's so warm. K: I am meeting 'X' who is immovable. Either I have to go round him, avoid him, or go over him. I can't do any of that. But 'X' absolutely refuses to enter into the game of words. Then what am I, who have played games with words, what am I to do? 'X' won't leave me alone. Right sir? Leave me alone in the sense he may leave personally, but in the sense that I have met something immovable. And it is there might and day with me. I can't battle with it because there is nothing I can get hold of. So what happens to me? Go on sirs: what happens to me when I meet something that is completely solid, immovable, absolutely true, what happens to me? Is that the problem, that we have never met - sorry, I am just putting that - never met something like that? You may climb the Himalayas but Everest is always there. In the same way perhaps human beings have never met something irrevocable, something absolutely immovable. Either I am terribly puzzled by it, or I say, well I can't do anything about it. Walk away from it. Or it is something that I must investigate. You follow? I must capture it. Right? Which is it? Q: But then we are back in the old pattern. K: No, no. No. Q: I want to investigate. K: Here is a solid thing. I am confronted by it. As I said, I might run away from it, which I generally do. Or worship it. Or try to understand what it is. When I do all those things I am back into the old pattern. So I discard that. When meeting 'X' who is immovable I see what the nature of it is. I wonder if I am? I am movable, as a human being, but 'X' is immovable. The contact with it does something, it must. It is not some mystic, it is not some occult stuff and all that kind of thing, but it is simple, isn't it? Q: Sir, it functions like a magnet, which is why everyone is in this room. But it doesn't break something. K: No, because you haven't let go the pattern. It is not his fault, 'X's' fault. Q: I didn't say it was. K: No, the implication is that. Q: No. K: When you use the word 'magnet', it means that, attraction. Q: It has that effect. K: No. Therefore you are back, you are dependent. Q: What is taking place? K: I understand. I am saying you, Moody, meet 'X', what happens? Q: You said effort to understand. K: Ah, there you are, lost. You are back into the old pattern. Q: But even the language of meeting suggests that you have.. K: No, no, don't break up the words. Meet, face, you see it, you feel it, you know it, you recognize, it doesn't matter what word you use, it is there. B: Well can't you say that if 'X' communicates the absolute necessity of not going on with the old pattern because you see it absolutely cannot work. K: Yes sir, put it in your own words. All right. B: And that is unalterable, what is immovable - is that what you mean? K: Yes sir. I am movable: 'X' is immovable. B: Well what is behind 'X' is immovable. Wouldn't you say that, what is working in 'X'. K: What is working is something of a shock first, naturally. I have been moving, moving, moving, then I meet something that is immovable. Suddenly something takes place, obviously. Not something, you can see what takes place. 'X' is not becoming and I am becoming. And 'X' has been through explanations and all the rest of it and he shows that becoming is painful. I am putting it quickly, in a few words. And I meet that. So there is the sensitivity - all right, let's put it the other way. The explanations and the discarding of many, many - all the explanations - has made me sensitive, obviously. Much more alert. When I meet something like 'X' naturally there is a response not in terms of explanation or understanding. There is a response to that. No? Bound to be. If I am a musician, I like Beethoven, or Mozart or whatever it is, and I have listened, listened, listened, it makes me sensitive to music. So in the same way explanations have been given over and over and over again. I have listened but it has made me either dull or I begin to see explanations have no value at all. So in this process - I am using the word - in this process I have become extraordinarily sensitive to any word of explanation. I am allergic! There is a danger in this too because you know people have said when you go to the guru he gives - you know - be silent and you will receive. That's an illusion, you know. Well I have said enough. B: Could I just say that when you see that this whole process of time and knowledge and so on won't work then it stops, you see. Now then this leaves one more sensitive. Right? K: Yes sir. The mind has become sharp. B: Because all this movement is getting in the way. K: Yes. I think psychological knowledge has made us dull. B: Yes, it has kept the brain moving in an unnecessary way. It is clear. Q: All knowledge. B: Well no. You could say in some sense that knowledge needn't make you dull, I suppose, but if it starts from the clarity of where we don't have this knowledge at the core... K: Yes sir. You remember we said too in our discussion, the ground is not knowledge. B: You see the first thing is it creates emptiness. K: Yes sir, that's it. B: But not yet the ground. But not immediately the ground. K: That's right. You see we have discussed all this. I hear it on the tape, it is printed in a book, and I say, yes I get it. By reading it I have explained, you have explained, I have acquired knowledge. Then I say I must have that. B: Well the danger is it is very difficult to communicate this in a book, you see, because it is too fixed. K: But that is what generally happens. B: But I think that the main point, which could communicate it, is to see that knowledge in all its forms, subtle and obvious, cannot solve the psychological problem, it can only make it worse. But then there is another energy which is involved. K: You see now what is happening? If any trouble arises I go to a psychologist. If any family trouble I go to somebody who will tell me what to do. Everything around me is being organized and making me more and more and more helpless. Right? Which is what is happening. B: Yes, well that is part of the same trend to organize our lives in more and more detail. K: What time is it? B: Twenty past five. K: Five twenty? I think we had better stop, don't you? Shall we meet again? B: On Saturday, we suggested. K: Yes, let's do it Saturday. B: The same time. OJAI 5TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 12TH APRIL, 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' J Krishnamurti: Anything you have to say sir? Dr Bohm. Well I thought perhaps we could go on - we raised several questions after these discussions. One was the nature of this ground that we discussed, whether we could come to it and whether it has any interest in human beings. And also we discussed the possibility that there could be a change in the physical behaviour of the brain. K: Could we approach this question from the point of view: why have ideas - because is the ground an idea? That is what I want first be clear - why have ideas become so important? B: Well I should say that perhaps because the distinction between ideas and what is beyond ideas is not clear. Ideas are often taken to be something more than ideas, that we feel it is not an idea but actually a reality. K: That is what I want to find out. Is it an idea, or is it an imagination, an illusion, a philosophic concept? Or something that is absolute in the sense that there is nothing beyond it? B: How can you tell that there is nothing beyond it? K: I am coming slowly. I want to see whether we look at that, or we perceive that, or have an insight into that from a concept. Because after all the whole Western world, and perhaps also the Eastern world, is based on concepts. Their whole outlook, their religious beliefs, are all based on that, and in the Asiatic world too. But do we approach it from that point of view? A philosophic investigation - philosophic in the sense love of wisdom, love of truth, love of investigation, the process of the mind. Are we doing that when we discuss, or when we want to investigate or explain, or find out what that ground is? B: Yes, well perhaps not even all the philosophers have been basing themselves on concepts. Certainly philosophy is taught through concepts. K: Yes, I am just questioning that. B: Whether all the philosophers really wanted to base everything on concepts is another question. K: I didn't say all, sir. B: Most of them. K: Most of them! B: And certainly it is very hard to teach it except through concepts. K: So I just want to know. What then is the difference between a religious mind and a philosophic mind? You understand what I am trying to convey? Perhaps I am not doing it properly. Do we investigate the ground from a mind that is disciplined in knowledge? B: Yes, well fundamentally we say that the ground is unknown inherently. K: That's what I want to know. B: Therefore we can't begin with knowledge. Many years ago we had a discussion in London and we suggested we start with the unknown. K: Yes, yes. Say for instance 'X' says there is such a ground. And all of us, 'X', 'Y', 'Z' and 'A', 'B', 'C' say what is the ground, prove it, show it, let it manifest itself. And when we ask such questions, is it a mind that is seeking, or rather that has this passion for truth, the love of truth? You follow? Or merely we say let's talk about it? B: I think that in that mind there is the demand for certainty which says show itself, I want to be sure. So therefore there is not enquiry, no? K: No. Suppose you state that there is such a thing, there is the ground, immovable and so on. And 'X', I will take the part of 'X', 'X' says, 'I want to find out, show it to me. Prove it to me.' How can my mind which has evolved through knowledge, which has been highly disciplined in knowledge, even touch that, because that is not knowledge, that is not put together by thought. B: Yes, as soon as you say, prove it, you want to turn it into knowledge. K: That's it. Prove it to me. Show it to me. B: To be absolutely certain knowledge is what you want. K: That's it. B: So that there can be no doubt. And yet of course there is also the danger of self-deception and delusion, the other side. K: Of course. We have been through all that very carefully. Right from the beginning we said the ground cannot be touched as long as there is any form of illusion, which is the projection of desire, pleasure, fear and all that. B: I merely meant to say that the person who says prove it, is also trying to protect it against those illusions. But it is a vain hope. K: So how do I, as an 'X', perceive that thing? That is what I want. Is the ground an idea to be investigated? Or is it something that cannot be investigated? B: Right. K: Because my mind is trained, disciplined, by experience and knowledge, and it can only function in that area. And you come along and tell me that this ground is not an idea, it is not a philosophical concept, it is not something that can be put together by thought, or perceived by thought. B: Yes, or understood by thought. K: Yes, understood by thought. Then what am I to do? B: Yes, you are even adding more in some sense because the person says that I want to find that by experience, not only thought but also experience. K: Of course. B: It cannot be experienced, it cannot be perceived, or understood through thought. K: Yes. So what have I? I have only this mind that has been conditioned by knowledge. How am I, as an 'X', to move away, to move away from all that? Because there are more philosophers than religious people. Sorry! B: Well there are very few true philosophers too. K: There are very few religious people too. B: Very few of either. K: I am just making a joke of it. B: Well I don't know, you could say compare the number of people who call themselves philosophers, call themselves religious, far more call themselves religious. It doesn't matter. It doesn't count. K: So how am I, an ordinary man, educated, read, experienced, to feel this thing, to touch it, to comprehend it? You tell me words will not convey that. You tell me you must have a mind that is free from all knowledge, except technological, the other kind of knowledge. And you are asking me an impossible thing, aren't you? And if I say, I will make an effort, then that also is born out of the self-centred desire. So what shall I do? I think this is not a spurious question. It is a very serious question. This is what everybody asks - everybody in the sense, I mustn't use a general term, that serious people ask. B: At least implicitly. They may not say it. K: Yes, implicitly. So you on the other side of the bank as it were, tell me that there is no boat to cross. You can't swim across. In fact you can't do anything. Basically that is what it comes to. So what shall I do? You are asking me to free - you are asking the mind, not the general mind but this mind... B:... the particular mind. K: You are asking this particular mind to eschew all knowledge. My god, sir! Has this been said in the Christian world, or in the Jewish world? B: I don't know about the Jewish world. But in some sense the Christians tell you to give your faith to god, to give up all your personal, to give over to Jesus and let him... K: Yes, they have said that, only through Jesus. B: He is the mediator between us and god. K: Yes. But what I am trying to find out is: has, say for instance, Vedanta means the end of knowledge - you know that, of course. The ending of knowledge. B: It could mean that I suppose. I don't know Sanskrit that well. K: I have discussed... B: Veda by itself means knowledge. K: It means the end of that. B: That means the end of it, yes. K: And being a Westerner, I say it means nothing to me. Because from the Greeks and all that, this culture in which I have lived is emphasizing knowledge. Last night Bronoski was talking again about evolution of man and all that. B: They reshoed it? K: Yes. When you talk to an Eastern mind - I am talking of the minds who have studied, not just the usual ones - they know, they acknowledge in their religious life that a time must come when knowledge must end. Vedanta is the whole way of looking. They would immediately understand that the mind must be free of knowledge. But it is only a conceptual, a theoretical understanding. But as a Westerner, it means absolutely nothing to me. B: Well, in the beginning. I think there has been a Western tradition which is similar but not as common. Like in the Middle Ages there was a book written called 'The Cloud of Unknowing', which is on that line, but that is not the main line of Western thought. K: No, that is what I am saying: it is not the line of Western thought. So what shall I do? How shall I approach the question? I want to find it, not only find it, it gives meaning to life - not my intellect gives meaning to life by inventing some illusion, or some hope, some belief, but I see vaguely, that this understanding, or coming upon this ground, gives an immense significance to life. B: Yes, well people have used that notion of god to give significance to life. K: No, no. God is merely an idea. B: Yes but the idea contains something similar to the Eastern idea that god is beyond knowing. Most people accept it that way. K: Yes. B: Though some may not. So there is some sort of similar notion. K: But you tell me this is not created by thought. So you cannot under any circumstances come upon it through any form of manipulation of thought. B: Yes, I understand what you are saying. I am trying to say that there is this problem, danger, delusion, in the sense that in the West people say, 'Yes, that is quite true, it is through a direct experience of Jesus that we come upon it, not through thought', you see. K: I mean after all a direct experience of Jesus... B: Well those are my words, they might not even talk that way, I don't know. I am not able to express their view accurately. The grace of god. K: The grace of god, yes. B: Something beyond thought, you see. K: As a fairly educated man, fairly thoughtful man, I reject all that. B: Yes, why do you reject it? K: Because it has become common, first of all. Common in the sense that everybody says that. And also there may be, or perhaps there is, in it a great sense of illusion created by desire, hope, fear. B: Yes. Some people do seem to find this meaningful, it may be an illusion but... K: But if they had never heard of Jesus, never heard of Jesus, they wouldn't experience Jesus. B: That seems reasonable. K: They would experience what they had been taught. In India I mean Jesus... B: That seems to be the weak point that the particular form of Jesus must be due to their having heard that idea. K: Of course, of course, obviously. When you are daily pounded with, Jesus is your Saviour - I mean, naturally. B: I mean it would be interesting if someone who had never heard of Jesus would have this experience. That would be some sort of proof that there was more to it. Q: But wouldn't you also say that there are some more serious people in the religions who would say that essentially what they want to say is that also god, or whatever that is, the absolute, or the ground is something that cannot be experienced through thinking or also they might even go so far as to say it cannot be experienced at all. K: Oh yes, I have said it cannot be experienced. 'X' says it cannot be experienced. Q: I think the essence of some religions would say that too. K: All right, I don't know. Here is a person who says there is such a thing. And I listen to him and I see not only does he convey it by his presence, he conveys it also through the word. And he tells me, be careful, the word is not the thing. But he uses the word to convey something to me which I vaguely capture, that there is this something so immense that my thought cannot capture it. And I say, all right, you have explained that very carefully and how am I, whose brain is conditioned that way, in knowledge, disciplined, how is it to free itself from all that? Q: Could it free itself by understanding its own limitation? K: Understanding what? Q: That itself, that thought itself could understand that whatever it is doing it is bound by some natural limitation. K: So you are telling me, thought is limited. Show it to me. Not by saying memory, experience, knowledge, all knowledge - I understand all that, but I don't capture the feeling that it is limited, because I see the beauty of the earth, I see the beauty of a building, of a person, of nature, I see all that; but when you say thought is limited I don't feel it. It is just a lot of words which you have told me. Q: Well it does require serious investigation. K: No, I have investigated it. I have investigated that thought is limited. Obviously. You don't need the investigation, it is so clear. Q: I see. You are saying that thought sees it normally indirectly? K: No, no. I am saying, I see that. Intellectually I understand it. It is so obvious. But I have no feeling for it. You understand? There is no perfume in it. Q: That is what I would say is indirect understanding. K: No, it is not even understanding - it means nothing. Q: It is just more knowledge. K: Yes. It means nothing. How will you show me - not show me - how will you help me - not help - aid me to have this feeling that thought itself is brittle, it is such a small affair, so that it is in my blood - you understand? When once it is in my blood I have got it - you don't have to explain it. Q: But isn't that the possible approach, not to talk about the ground, that at the moment is far too removed. K: That is far away. Q: But rather look directly at what the mind can do. K: Which is thinking. Q: The mind is thinking. K: That is all I have. Thinking, feeling, hating, loving - you know all that. The activity of the mind. I know that very well, you don't have to tell me. Q: I would say you don't know it, you only think you know it. K: Oh no. You think so. I know it. I have seen it. I have captured it. I know when I am angry. I know when I am wounded. It is not an idea, I have got the feeling, the hurt is carrying inside me. I want to get at this. You understand sir? Am I conveying anything? I am fed up with the investigation because I have done it all my life. I go to the Hindu business and I say I have investigated, studied it, looked at it, Buddhism, this and the other, Christianity, Islam and so on. I say these are all just words. How do I as a human being have this extraordinary feeling about it? You understand? I wonder if I am conveying anything - am I? Because if I have no passion behind it, it is just... Q: What does the feeling spring from? K: I am not investigating. I want to have this passion that will explode me out of this little enclosure. You understand? I have built a wall round myself, cultured, fairly respectable, educated, a wall, which is myself. And I have lived with this thing for millions of years. And I have lived trying to get out of it by studying, by reading, by going to gurus, by all kinds of things I have done. And I am still anchored there. And you talk about the ground because you see something that is breathtaking, that seems so alive, extraordinary and so on. And I am here, anchored in here. You, who have seen the ground - see in quotes - must do something that will explode, break up this thing completely. Q: I must do something, or you must do something? K: Help me! Not by prayer and all that nonsense. You understand what I am trying to say? I have fasted, I have meditated, I have given up, I have taken a vow of this and that, I have done all those things. Because I have had a million years of life. And at the end of the million years I am still where I was, at the beginning - which is a great discovery for me. You understand? I thought I had moved from the beginning, at the beginning by going through all this, but I suddenly discover I am back at the same point where I started; I have more experience, I have seen the world, I have painted, I have played music, I have danced. You follow? But have come back to the original starting point. Q: Which is me and not me. K: Yes, me. I say to myself what am I to do? And what is the human mind's relationship to the ground? That is what you are saying. Perhaps if I could establish relationship it might break up this centre, totally. You follow? It is not a motive, it is not a desire, it is not a reward. I see if the mind could establish a relationship with that my mind has become that. Right? Q: But hasn't the mind then already become that? K: Oh, no. Q: But Krishnaji I think you have just wiped away the greatest difficulty in saying there is no desire, there is no... K: No, no. I said I have lived a million years. Q: But that is an insight. K: No. I won't accept insight so easily as that. Q: Well let me put it this way: it is something much more than knowledge. K: No, no, you are missing my point. My brain has lived for a million years. It has experienced everything. It has been a Buddhist, it has been a Hindu, a Christian, it has been a Muslim, it has been all kinds of things, but the core of it is the same. Right? And you come along and say, look there is a ground which is -something. Are you going back to what I have already known? You follow? Hindus, Buddhists. If you do I reject all that because I say I have been through all that. They are like ashes to me at the end of it. B: Well all of those things were the attempt to create apparent ground by thought. It seemed that through knowledge and thought, through Buddhism, and various other ways, people created what they regarded as the ground. And it wasn't. K: It wasn't. Because I have spent a million years at it. B: So as long as knowledge enters the ground that will be false? K: Of course. So can I - I am just asking - is there a relationship between that and the human mind? In asking that question I am also aware of the danger of such a question. B: Yes. Well you may create a delusion of the same kind that we have already gone through. K: Yes. I have played that before, that song. Q: Are you suggesting that the relationship cannot be made by you, but it must come... K: I am asking that. No, it may be I have to make a relationship. My mind now is in such a state that I won't accept a thing. Q: But the bridge, if there is such a thing. K: My mind says I have been through all this before. I have suffered, I have searched, I have looked, I have investigated, I have lived with people who are awfully clever at this kind of thing, and so on and so on. So I am asking this question being fully aware of the danger of that question. Because that is what the Hindus say, god is in you, Brahman is in you, which is a lovely idea. I have been through all that. So I am asking 'X', if the human mind has no relationship to it, and that there is only a one way passage, from that to me... B: Well that's like the grace of god then. K: You see. B: That you have invented. K: That I won't accept. Q: And also we are back again into the area of ideas. K: No. They may be. So I am rejecting the explanation - the grace of god. B: You are not saying the relationship is one way, nor are you saying it is not one way. K: Maybe, I don't know. B: You are not saying anything. K: I am not saying anything. All that I want is - want in quotes -this centre to be blasted. You understand? For the centre not to exist. Because I see that centre is the cause of all the mischief, all the neurotic conclusions, all the illusions, all the endeavour, all the effort, all the misery, everything is from that core. After a million years, I haven't been able to get rid of it, it hasn't gone. So is there a relationship at all? What is the relationship between goodness and evil, or bad? Right? It comes to the same thing. There is no relationship. B: It depends upon what you mean by relationship. K: All right. Contact, touch, communication, being in the same room. B: Coming from the same root. K: Yes, same root. Q: But Krishnaji, are we then saying that there is the good and that there is the evil? K: No, no. Don't. Goodness - use another word, whole, and that which is not whole. It is not an idea. Now, is there relationship between these two? Obviously not. B: Yes, well if you are saying that in some sense the centre is an illusion - an illusion cannot be related to that which is true because the content of the illusion has no relation to what is true. K: That's it, that's it. You see that is a great discovery. I want to establish relationship with that - want, I am using rapid words to convey this thing - this petty little thing wants to have relationship with that immensity. It cannot. B: Yes, it is not just because of its immensity but because in fact this thing is not actually. K: Yes. Q: But I don't see that. K: What do you mean? Q: He say the centre is not actual. And that is part of my difficulty - I don't see the centre is not actual. B: Actual in the sense of being genuine and not an illusion. I mean something is acting but it is not the content which we know. K: Do you see that? Q: No. He says the centre must explode. It does not explode because I don't see the falseness in it. K: No, no, no. You have missed my point. I have lived a million years, I have done all this. And at the end of it I am still back at the beginning. Q: Well you say the centre then must explode. K: No, no, no. The mind says this is too damn small. Q: Right. K: And it can't do anything about it. It has prayed, it has done everything. It is still there. Q: Right. K: And he comes along and tells me there is this thing. I want to establish a relationship with that. Q: He tells me there is this thing and he also tells me that the centre is an illusion. B: Wait, that is too quick. K: No. Wait. I know it is there. Call it what you like. Q: Yes. K: An illusion, a reality, a fixation - whatever you like. It is there. And the mind says it is not good enough, it wants to capture that. Therefore it wants to have that relationship with it. And that says, 'Sorry, you can't have relationship with me.' That's all! Q: Krishnaji, is that mind that wants to be in connection, wants to have a relationship with that, is that the same mind which is the 'me'? K: Yes, yes. No, don't split it up sir. You are missing something. I have lived all this. Don't argue with me. I know, I can argue with you, back and forth. I have a million years of experience and it has given me a certain capacity. And I realize at the end of it all there is no relationship between me and truth. Right? And that's a tremendous shock to me. You follow? It is like you have knocked me out because all my millions of years of experience says go after that, seek it, search for it, pray for it, struggle for it, cry for it, sacrifice. I have done all that. And suddenly 'X' says, you cannot have relationship with that. You understand? You are not feeling the same as I am. I have shed tears, left my family, everything for that. And that says, 'Sorry'. So what has happened to me? That is what I want to get at. You understand sir? Do you understand what I am saying? What has happened to the mind that has lived this way, done everything that man has done in search for that, and that says, one morning, 'You have no relationship with me'. Sir, this is the greatest thing. Right? I don't know if you follow what I mean. Q: This is a tremendous shock to the 'me', if you say that. K: Is it to you? Q: I think it was and then... K: Don't - I am asking you: is it a shock to discover that your brain, and your mind, your knowledge is valueless? All your examinations, all your struggles, all the things that one has gathered through years and years, centuries, absolutely worthless. Either I go mad, because I say, 'My god, I have done all this for nothing? My virtue, my abstinence, my control, everything and at the end of it you say they are valueless.' Sir, you understand what it does to me? You don't see it. B: I mean if the whole thing goes then it is of no consequence. K: Because what you have said, which is that absolutely you have no relationship. What you have done, not done, what you have, is absolutely of no value. You understand sir? B: Not in any fundamental sense. It has relative value. It has only relative value within a certain framework, in which itself has no value. K: Yes, thought has relative value. B: But the framework in general has no value. K: That's right. Whatever you have done on earth - in quotes -has no meaning, the ground says. Is that an idea? Or an actuality? You understand? Idea being that you have told me but I still go on, struggling, wanting, groping; but it is an actuality, in the sense that I suddenly realize the futility of all that I have done. So I must be very careful - when I use the word 'I' it doesn't mean - I must be very careful to see that it is not a concept, or rather that I don't translate into a concept, an idea, but receive the full blow of it! Where are we? Q: You see Krishnaji for hundreds of years, probably since mankind existed, man has pursued this, what he calls god or the ground. K: As an idea. Q: As an idea for many people it was very... K: No, for all people. It must be. Q: But anyhow then science came along, the scientific mind came along and also told that mind that it is just an idea, it is just foolish. K: No, no, no. Scientific mind says through investigating matter we will perhaps come upon the ground. B: Many feel that way, yes. K: Many. B: Well some would even add investigate the brain, you see. K: Yes. That is the purpose of investigating the mind, not to blast each other off, guns and all that. They say as a scientist - we are talking of good scientists, like him and so on - good, not a governmental scientist, but a good scientist says, 'We are examining matter, the brain and all that, to find out if there is something beyond all this.' Q: And many people, many scientists, would say that they have found the ground - the ground is empty, it is emptiness, it is an energy which is indifferent to man. K: Now, is that an idea, or an actuality to them, which affects their life, their blood, their mind, their relationship with the world? Q: Well I think it is just an idea. K: Then, I am sorry, I have been through that. I was a scientist ten thousands years ago! You follow, I have been through all that. If it is merely an idea we can both play at that game. I can send the ball to you, it is in your court, and you can send it back to me. We can play that. But I have finished with that kind of game. B: Because in general what people discover about matter does not seem to affect them deeply, psychologically. K: No. Of course not. B: Though you might think that if they saw the whole unity of the universe they would act differently, but they don't. K: They wouldn't be competing for the Nobel prize and so on. Q: You could even say that it has affected some of their lives. You see the whole Communist idea is built on the idea of what they think is the fact that whatever is, is just a material process, which is essentially empty and then man has to organize his life and has to organize society according to those dialectical principles. K: No, no. Dialectical principles are one opinion opposing another opinion, hoping out of opinions to find the truth. B: Well I think we should leave this aside. There are different ways of looking at different meanings of the word dialectal - but it also means to see reality as a flowing movement, not to fix things, not to see things fixed but to see them in movement and interconnection. I think that you could say that whatever way people managed to look at it, after they saw this unity it didn't fundamentally change... K:... their lives. B: In Russia the same structures of the mind hold as elsewhere, if not worse. And wherever people have tried this it has not actually fundamentally affected the way they feel and think and the way they live. Q: Well you see what I wanted to say is the dismissal of the pursuit of the ground has not had any shocking effect on people. K: No, no. I am not interested. I am the people, it has given me a tremendous shock to discover the truth, not ideas, discover all the churches, all the prayers, all the books have absolutely no meaning - except they have a meaning so that we can build a better society and so on and so on. B: If we could manage to bring this point to order then it would have a great meaning - to build a good society. K: From there I start creating a society. B: But as long as this disorder is at the centre we can't use that in the right way. I think it would be more accurate to say that there is a great potential meaning in all that but as long as it does not affect the centre and there is no sign that it has ever done so. Q: You see what I don't understand Krishnaji is that there are many people who in their life have never pursued what you call the ground. K: The are not interested. Q: Well I an not so sure. How would you approach such a person? K: I am not interested in approaching any person. I am interested - not interested - all the works I have done, good, everything I have done, the ground says are valueless. And if I can drop all that my mind is the ground. Then from there I move. From there I create society. Sorry! B: Well I think that you could say that as long as you are looking for the ground somewhere by means of knowledge then you are getting in the way. K: So sir, to come back to earth: why has man done this? B: Done what? K: Accumulated knowledge. Apart from the necessity of knowledge in certain areas, why has this burden of knowledge continued for so long? B: Because in one sense man has been trying to produce a solid ground through knowledge. Knowledge has tried to create a ground. That is one of the things that has happened. K: Which means what? B: It means illusion again. K: Which means the saints, the philosophers, have educated me in knowledge and through knowledge to find the ground. B: But in fact even to create a ground by using knowledge... K: Yes sir, I understand that very well. But 'X' says... Q: To create a ground. You see in a way before we have had in societies of mankind there were all these periods where mankind was caught in the craziest superstition and there knowledge was able to do away with that. K: Oh no. Q: To some extent it was. K: Ah! Knowledge has only crippled me from seeing truth. Sorry I stick to that. It hasn't cleared me of my illusions. Knowledge may be illusory itself. Q: That may be but it has cleared up some illusions. K: I want to clear up all the illusions that I hold - not some. I have got rid of my illusion about nationalism; I have got rid of illusion about belief, about Christ, about this, about that. At the end of it I realize my mind is illusion. Sorry! You see to me, who has lived for a thousand years, to find it is absolutely worthless, it is something enormous. B: When you say you have lived for a thousand years or a million years, does that means in a sense that all the experience of mankind is... K:... is me. B:... is me. Do you feel that? K: I do. B: And how do you feel it? K: I feel it like - you know, how do you feel anything? Wait a minute, I will tell you. It is not sympathy, or empathy, it is not a thing that I have desired, that I am all humanity, it is a fact, an absolute, irrevocable fact to me. B: Yes, well perhaps if we could share that feeling. You see that seems to be one of the steps that is missing, because you have repeated that quite often as an important part of the whole thing. K: Which means sir that when you love somebody there is no -what? - there is no me, it is love. In the same way, when I say I am humanity, it is so, it is like that finger. It is not an idea, it is not a conclusion, it is part of me. B: Well let's say it is a feeling that I have gone through all that, all that you describe, all those million years. K: Human beings have been through all that. B: If others have gone through it then I also have gone through it. K: Of course. But one is not aware of it. B: No, we separate. K: If we admit that our brains are not my particular brain but the brain that has evolved through millennia. B: Well let me say why this doesn't communicate so easily: everybody feels that the content of his brain is in some way individual, that he hasn't gone through all that. Let's say that somebody thousands of years ago went through science or philosophy. Now how does that affect me? That is what is not clear. K: Because I am caught in this self-centred narrow little cell, which refuses to look beyond. B: That is the thing which has been going on. K: But you come along and tell me, as a scientist, as a religious man, that your brain is the brain of mankind. B: Yes and all knowledge is the knowledge of mankind. So that in some way we have all knowledge. K: Of course. B: Not in detail, of course. K: So you tell me that, and I understand what you mean, not verbally, not intellectually, I know - not know, it is so. But I come to that only when I have given up ordinary things like nationality, you know. B: Yes we have given up the divisions and we can see that our experience is of all mankind. K: It is so obvious sir. You go to the most primitive villager in India and he will tell you all about his problems, his problems, his wife, children, poverty. It is exactly the same thing, only here he is wearing different trousers, kimono, or whatever it is. For 'X' it is an indisputable fact, it is so. And he says, all right, at the end of all this, a million years, I suddenly show, discover, or show that it is empty. You see sir, we don't accept it. We are too clever, we are so soaked with disputations and arguments and knowledge. We don't see a simple fact. We refuse to see it. And 'X' comes along and says, 'See it, it is there', and immediately the whole machinery of thought begins. So they say, be silent. So I practise silence. I have done that for a thousand years. It has lead nowhere. So there is only one thing and that is to discover all that I have done is useless. They are ashes. You see sir that doesn't depress one. That is the beauty of it. I think it is like the Phoenix. B: Rising from ashes. K: Born out of ashes. B: Well in a way it is freedom to be free of all that. K: Something totally new is born. B: Now what you said before is that the mind is the ground, it is the unknown. K: The mind? Yes. But not this mind. B: In that case it is not the same mind. K: Sir, if I have been through all that and come to a point when I have to end all that, it is a new mind. B: That's clear. The mind is its content, and the content is knowledge and without that knowledge it is a new mind. OJAI 6TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 15TH APRIL, 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' Dr Bohm: Yesterday I was discussing with some people in San Francisco and they said you had said that insight changes the brain cell. They were very interested but I wasn't able to say a lot more. I wonder if we could discuss that. Krishnamurti: As it is constituted the brain functions in one direction, memory, experience, knowledge. And it has functioned in that area as much as possible. And most people are satisfied with it. B: Well they don't know of anything else. K: Of anything else. And also they have placed knowledge in the supreme importance, and so on and so on. If one is concerned with fundamental change, where does one begin? Suppose 'X' feels he will go along a certain direction set by mankind. And he has been going there century after century, and when he asks himself what is radical change, is it in the environment, is it in the human relationship, is it a sense of love which is not in the area of knowledge and so on? Where is it to begin? You understand my question? Unless there is some mutation taking place inside here, inside my mind, the brain, I may think I have changed, or it may be a superficial change, but it won't be change in depth. B: Yes, well I think the first thing is to say that what is implied there is that the present state of affairs involves not only the mind but also the nervous system, the body, all is set in a certain way. K: Of course. Yes that is what I meant, the whole movement is in a certain way. And along that way I can modify, adjust, polish, a little more, a little less and so on, but if a man is concerned with a very radical change, where is he to begin? As we said the other day we relied on the environment to change us, society to change us, various forms of disciplines and so on, but I feel they are all the same direction. B: Well, yes in so far as they all emanate from this thing, the way the mind is set, the body is set, they are not going to change anything. There is a total structure involved which is in the brain, in the body, in the whole of society. K: Yes, yes. So what am I to do? What is 'X' to do? And in asking this question, what is there to change? You understand sir? B: What do you mean by that, what is there to change? What is to be changed? K: Yes, what is to be changed? Both, what is there to be changed and what is there to change? B: To make the change, do you mean? K: To make the change, yes. Not only to make the change but... B:... to undergo the change? K: Yes, basically what is there to change? I see, 'X' sees he can change certain things along this way, but go much further than that - what is one to do? I am sure man has asked this question. You must have asked it. But apparently the mutation hasn't taken place. So what is 'X' to do? He realizes the need for a radical revolution, a psychological revolution, he perceives the more he changes it is the same thing continued, the more he enquires into himself the enquiry is still the same, and so on and so on. So what is there to change? Unless 'X' finds a way to change the brain itself... B: But what will change the brain? K: That's it, that's it. The brain that has been set in a pattern for millennia. I think it is no longer what should I change, it is imperative that I change. B: So in discussing yesterday it was agreed that there must be a change but the question is how can the brain change? K: One must introduce, come to that point. If this question is put to you as a scientist, or as a human being who is involved in science, what would your answer be? B: I don't think science can deal with that because it doesn't go far enough, it can't possibly probe that deeply into the structure of the brain anyway. Many questions are positing the relationship of brain and mind, which science has not been able to resolve. Some people would say that there is nothing beyond the brain. K: Purely materialistic, I understand all that. B: If it is not materialistic then for the moment science has very little to say about it. May be some people would try to but science generally has been most successful, most systematic, in dealing with matter, any attempt to do otherwise is not very clear. K: You tell me - I am 'X' - you tell me, inside change in the brain cells and so on. My immediate answer to that is, how? B: Yes, that is what everybody asks. K: That's it. Everybody asks that. It is not a matter of faith. It is not a matter of changing the pattern to another pattern. So you leave me without any direction. Right? You leave me without any instrument that can penetrate this. B: Except you are implying that there is something beyond the brain, it seems clear, in putting that question. We don't know. The very statement implies that insight is somehow beyond the brain else it couldn't change the brain. K: Yes. So how am I to capture it? I can't capture it but... B:... how will it come about? K: Yes, how is this to come about? B: I think one should clear up: are you saying that something which is non-material can affect matter, this is the implication. K: I am not sure. B: I think clearing this up would make it more clear what your question is. It is somewhat puzzling if you don't. K: All that you have said to me is, insight changes, brings about mutation in the brain. Now you explain what insight is, which is not a result of progressive knowledge, it is not a progressive time, which is not a remembrance, which may be the real activity of the brain. B: All right. Let's put it differently: the brain has many activities which include memory and all these that you have said, and in addition there is a more inward activity, but it is still the activity of the brain. K: Then it would be the same. B: Yes that is what is not clear, you see - in putting this thing something seems to be not quite clear. K: Yes. We must be very clear that it is not the result of progressive knowledge, it is not come by through any exercise of will. B: Yes. I think people can generally see that insight comes in a flash, it does not come through will. Those who have considered it at all can see that. Also that probably chemistry won't bring it about, drugs, you know. K: I think most people see that. B: Those who are concerned. K: Some people do see it. How am I, 'X', to have this insight. I see your logic, I see your reason. B: In some ways it may disturb people, it is not clear what the logic is, what is going to make this change in the brain, is it something more than the brain, is it something deeper in the brain? This is one of the questions. K: Of course. B: It is not quite clear logically. Q: Are you saying sir that there is a function of the brain which acts without reference to its content? K: To the past, to the content. Q: It acts without it. But that this isn't something which is changing the whole brain, coming into the brain, but it is a capability of the brain to... B: That is a good question, yes. It is on the right line as far as I see it. Is there a function in the brain which is independent of the content, which is not conditioned by the content, but it might still be a physical function? K: Yes, I understand. Sir, is this the question? Apart from the consciousness with its content, is there in the brain an activity which is not touched by consciousness? B: By the content, yes. K: By the content - content is the consciousness. B: Yes, but sometimes you use it in another sense. Sometimes you talk of consciousness, that there could be another kind of consciousness. K: Yes, we will leave that. B: So if we call it content it would be more clear. K: All right. A part of the brain which is not touched by the content. B: All right then. That suggests that it may be possible for the brain to change. Either the brain is entirely controlled by its content, or in some way it is not that conditioned, it has some... K: That is a dangerous thing. B: But that is what you are saying. K: You see the danger of it. I am moving away from it. I see the danger of admitting to myself, and so of trying to tell somebody else, admitting to myself that there is a part of the brain... B: An activity. K:... all right, an activity of the brain which is not touched by the content. B: It is a possible activity. It may be that has not been awakened. K: It has not been awakened. That's right. Q: But what is the danger? K: That is simple enough. The danger is that I am admitting there is god in me, that there is some super human, something beyond the content and therefore that will operate on this, or that will operate in spite of this. Q: But which part of the brain sees the danger? Is it that part... K: Slowly, slowly. Which part of the brain that sees the danger - of course the content sees the danger. Q: Does it? K: Oh yes because the content is aware of all the tricks it has played. B: It is similar to many of the old tricks. K: Yes. Go ahead sir. B: Those tricks we have discussed before - the assumption of god within and the imagination of god within, therefore the apparent proof, there is a danger obviously. Q: But you see could the brain seeing the danger make that statement nevertheless, because that statement nevertheless might be pointing to the right direction. B: The point is that even though it is dangerous it may be necessary to do so, it may be on the right track. K: No, no. The danger is that it is not only traditional, not only that man has thought about it and previous to 'X' said that this thing exists, therefore the unconscious, which is part of the content, is capturing that and says, 'Yes' - so it sees the danger instantly. Q: It sees its own trap. K: Yes, it sees the trap which it has created. Right sir? So it avoids that trap. That is sanity: to avoid a trap is sanity. Is there an activity which is totally independent of the content? That activity, is it part of the brain? B: Is it a natural activity of the brain? Material in the brain. K: Which means what? B: Well if there is such a natural activity it could awaken somehow and that activity could change the brain, it could change. K: But would you say it is still material? B: Yes. There could be different levels of matter you see. K: That is what I am trying to get at. Right? B: Right. But you see, if you think that way, there could be a deeper level of matter which is not conditioned by the content. For example we know matter in the universe is not conditioned by the content of our brains generally. There could be a deeper level of matter not conditioned in that way which could... K: So it would still be matter, refined or super or whatever, it is still - what I am trying to find out is that it would still be the content. B: Why do you say that? You see you have to go slowly because do you say matter is content? K: Yes. B: Inherently but that has to be cleared up because it is not obvious. K: Let's discuss it. Let's grip this. Thought is matter. B: Well thought is part of the content, it is part of the material process. Whether it exists independently as matter is not so clear. If you say water is matter then you can pour water from one glass to another, it has an independent substance, but it is not clear whether thought could stand as matter by itself except with some other material substance like the brain in which it takes place. Is that clear? K: I don't quite follow. B: If you say water is matter then it is clear. You could take water and it stands inside whatever it is, in the ocean. Now if you said thought is matter then thought must have a similar independent substance. K: I don't quite follow this. Sorry. B: You said air is matter. Right? Water is matter. Now waves are not matter, they are just a process in matter. Is that clear what I mean? K: Yes. A wave is a process in matter. B: A material process. Is thought matter, or is it a process in matter? K: Ah! Q: May one ask, is electricity considered matter? B: In so far as there are electron particles it is matter but it is also a movement of that, which is a process. Q: So it is two things. B: Well you can form waves of electricity and so on. Q: Waves would be the matter but not the electrical action. B: Well the electrical action is like the waves but the electricity consists of particles. K: Sir, what is the question you have just asked me? B: Is thought matter, or is it a process in matter? For example, in the matter of the brain. K: Is thought... B: Is thought a material substance, or is it a process in some other material substance, like the brain? K: It is a material process in the brain. B: Yes, scientists would generally agree with that. K: Let's stick to that. B: If you said it was matter they would become very puzzled. K: I see. Q: It doesn't exist apart from the brain cells. It resides in the brain. K: That is, thought is a material process in the brain. That would be right. Then is that material process independent - can that material process ever be independent? B: Independent of what? K: Independent of something that is not a material process - no, wait a minute, I must go slowly. I know what I am trying to express. I must be careful That's all I know. Right? A material process in the brain. B: Yes, OK. K: To which we all agree. B: Yes, you would get very wide agreement on that. K: Yes. Our question is: can that material process in the brain bring about a change in itself. B: That is the question, yes. K: In itself, and if that material in itself can change it would still be a material process. B: Yes. K: Right? B: Well thought is always going to be apparently a material process. K: So it will still be a material process. And therefore it is not insight. We must come back to that. B: You are saying that insight is not a material process? That is what you are saying. K: Go slow. I must be careful of using the right words. Thought is a material process in the brain and any other movements springing from that material process is still material. B: Yes, it has to be. K: Has to be, right. And is there another activity which is not a material process? B: Well of course people have asked that question for ages. Is there spirit beyond matter, right? K: Spirit, Holy Ghost! Is there a material process in the brain, is there some other activity which - it cannot be related to this, to the material process. B: Well it cannot depend on it. Insight cannot depend on the material process as it would be just another material process. K: It cannot depend on it. Insight is not dependent on the material process, which is thought. B: But you were saying it the other way round: that the material process may depend on insight, may be changed by insight. K: Ah, wait, wait. The material process is dependent on it, and not that dependent on this. B: Yes, that is what you are saying, isn't it? K: Yes. Slowly, slowly. B: Now you see, generally speaking people would not see how something non-material could affect something material, you see. K: Yes, quite. B: It might be easily agreed that something non-material is not affected by matter but then how does the operation work the other way? K: What do you say? The brain, thought is a material process, with its content. Any activity from that is still part of that. Now is insight part of that? B: Well we have agreed it is independent of that. It takes place independently of that, it can't be part of it. K: That's right. B: There's something the other way. But it can still act within the material process, that's the crucial thing. K: Yes, That's right. That's right. It is independent of the material process but yet it can act upon the material process. B: Well let's discuss that a little. You see... K: Yes, be careful, we mustn't enter into the Holy Spirit! B: Generally speaking in science if A can act on B it is usually reciprocal action of B on A. We don't find situations where A acts on B and B never acts on A. K: I see, I see. B: This is one of the difficulties you have raised. K: I understand. But B can act on A. B: But generally we don't find this elsewhere, we generally find that if B acts on A then A can act on B. In human relations if I can act on you, you can act on me - right? K: Yes. But if I don't act - we say human relationships are interaction. B: Yes, mutual relationships. K: Mutual relationship. In that relationship there is response and so on. Now if I don't respond to your action, I am independent of it. B: Yes. I think that if we are trying to make this clear in science: you see science generally finds that this situation is not possible to have a one-sided action. K: Quite. I have understood it. So we are continually insisting that the material process must have a relationship to... B: Well an action. You see relationship is an ambiguous word here. If you said action it would be more clear. K: All right. The material process... B:... must be able to act. K:... must be able to act on the non-material, and the non-material must act on the material. B: But that would make them both the same. K: Exactly! Exactly! Q: Not necessarily. Could one envisage may be that insight is a much larger movement than the material process of the brain, and therefore that much larger movement can act on the smaller movement but the smaller movement cannot act on the larger movement. K: Yes, we are saying the same thing. B: The small movement has no significant action on the larger movement. You can have a situation that if you drop a rock in the ocean, you know the ocean absorbs it with no significant... K: Quite, quite. Q: Well then they would still have an action amongst themselves but there is only one action that is significant K: No, no, be careful. Don't enter into that too quickly. Sir, love has no relationship to hate. B: Well, again it is the word 'relationship'. You see would you say hate has no action on love? K: They are independent. B: Independent, they have no action on each other. Right. K: Ah, this is a very important thing to discover. Love is independent of hate. Where there is hate the other cannot exist. Right? B: Yes. K: Right? B: Yes, they can't stand side by side acting on each other. K: No, they can't. So when you scientists say A must have a relation to B, B must have a relation to A - right? We are contradicting that. Love is... B: Well not all scientists have said that but of course a few have said otherwise - I don't like to bring in Aristotle, but he said... K: Bring in Aristotle, both of you. B:... there is an unmoved mover, you see, he says that god is never moved by matter, he is not acted on by matter but he acts. Do you see? So that is an old idea then. Since that time science has thrown out Aristotle and said that is impossible. K: If I see clearly that love is independent of hate, hate cannot possibly act on love, love may act on hate, or where hate is the other cannot be. B: Well those are two possibilities, which are you saying? K: What are the two possibilities? B: Well you said, one is that love may act on hate, and the other is that they have no action at all on each other. K: Yes. B: Which? K: I understand. No sir, love cannot act on hate. B: Right. They have no relationship. But perhaps insight could. K: Slowly. I am moving, edging my way into it. I want to be quite clear on this point. Violence and to be without violence are two entirely different factors. Right? B: Right. K: The one cannot act upon the other. B: Well in that case you could say that the existence of the one is the non-existence of the other, and there is no way to act together. K: That's right. B: They cannot be there together. K: Absolutely. I'll stick to that. So where there is this material process in action, the other cannot exist. B: Well then you are going to say - what is the other this time, insight or... K: Yes. Q: Well then that sounds as if insight cannot change that material process. K: Eh? B: Well that denies what we were saying before that there is an action from insight on the material process. K: Now steady, yes. Where there is violence the other is not. Right? Non-violence, I hate to use that word, whatever it is. B: Peace. K: Peace. B: Or order, harmony, right? K: Where there is violence peace cannot exist. But where there is peace, is there violence? No, of course not. So peace is independent of the other. B: Yes. K: Now we are saying the material process, being independent of insight... B: No, we didn't say that. We said it might depend on insight. K: Suppose for the moment... independent of insight then insight cannot act on the other. B: That's true, yes. If that is the case. K: If that is the case. Q: Sir you have said many, many times that intelligence can act upon thought, insight can act, can affect thought, but it doesn't work the other way round. You have said this in many forms. K: If intelligence can wipe away ignorance, but ignorance cannot touch intelligence. Right? Where there is love hate can never exist. Right? B: Well as long as there is love. K: Yes I am saying that. Can love wipe away hate? B: Well we said that doesn't seem to be possible. K: It doesn't seem possible. B: Because hate seems to be an independent force. K: Of course it is. Q: Is there a question of volume then? B: What? Q: Is there a question of volume, in other words if love can't wipe away hate, can there be enough units of love to supplant hate? Are we talking about a physical possibility? B: Well I think that hate goes on its own independently. K: I have come back. B: It has its own momentum, you see, its own force, its own movement. Q: I don't quite get this relationship of this love and hate, independence with this other discussion of insight. B: That is what we have been trying to get at. There seems to be two different areas. Q: It is an exploration really. Q: Thought is a movement and insight seems to be a non-movement where everything seemingly is at rest and it can observe movement. B: Yes, that is what we are trying to get at, the notion of something which is not affected by anything else. Q: Or anything else can affect it. Q: Aren't you then saying, if you look at this love/hate thing, aren't you in essence saying there is good and there is evil, and evil is a completely separate independent force on its own? B: Well, it is independent of good. Q: But isn't the process in the mind, or is it related to insight? B: Well we are coming to that. Q: Well take light and darkness, light appears and the darkness is gone. Q: Well in a way it is just like the pattern of duality, isn't it? When you say there is good and there is evil and they are completely separate, if one is completely independent of the other... B: Well when one is the other can't be, you see. That is all that we are saying so far. Q: There is no relationship. Q: Do you mean in a single brain? B: In any brain, yes, or in a group, or anywhere. Well whenever there is hate going on in a group there is not love. K: Sir, I have just thought of something - not thought of it, it just came to my mind. Love has no cause. Right? Hate has a cause. Insight has no cause. Right? The material process, as thought, has a cause. B: Yes, it is part of the chain of cause and effect, yes. K: That which has no cause, can it act ever upon that which has a cause? B: Well it might. We see that the insight might act to change the... K: I just want to go slowly. B: Yes. We can see no reason why that which has no cause might not act on what has a cause. There is no obvious reason. It won't happen the other way round. What has a cause cannot act on what has no cause because the would deny the whole thing. K: Yes, that's right. But apparently the action of insight has an extraordinary effect on the material process. B: Yes, so as to change the whole causal - it may wipe out some causes for example. K: It wipes out - I know what it wipes out, slowly - -as insight is causeless, which is not born out of cause, that insight has a definite effect on that which has cause. B: Yes, well it doesn't follow but it is possible. I mean you put it as if it followed necessarily but it doesn't follow, so far it doesn't follow but we say it is possible. K: No, no I don't say it is possible. B: I am saying we haven't quite seen why it is necessary. K: Let's say that it is possible, I can't admit possibility in this. B: Well we are just saying that there is no contradiction when we say the word possible, I merely mean that there is no contradiction in saying that insight acts on... K: All right, I see. As long as we are clear on the word 'possible'. We must be careful here. Love being without cause, and hate has a cause, the two cannot co-exist. B: Yes. That is true. That is why there is a difference between love and insight. That is why it doesn't follow necessarily that if something has no cause it will act on something that has a cause. That is what I was trying to say. K: I just want to explore a little more. Is love insight? B: Well as far as we can see it is not the same exactly. Love is not identically the same as insight, is it? K: Love is - what is the question? B: Well you asked is love insight. K: Yes, I asked that. B: At first sight we see that they are not necessarily exactly the same thing. K: Why? B: Insight may be love but you see insight also occurs in a flash for example. K: It is a flash of course. And that flash alters the whole pattern. B: That's right. K: But that flash operates on the whole pattern, uses the pattern in the sense, argue, reason, logic and all that. I don't know if I am making myself clear. B: Well I think once the flash has operated then the pattern is different and therefore it would be more rational. K: No, what I am trying to say is: you have a flash but you can be logical B: The flash may make logic possible because you may have been confused before the flash. K: Ah, yes, yes sir. Aristotle may have come to all this by logic. B: Well he may have had some insight, we don't know. K: We don't know but I am questioning it. B: Well we really don't know how his mind operated because there are only a few books that survived. K: Would you say he had insight by reading a few of his books? B: I haven't really read Aristotle directly, very few people have because it is hard. Very few people have actually read Aristotle, what he directly said. Most people read what other people said about Aristotle. There are a few phrases of Aristotle which are common - the unmoved mover. And he has seen some things which suggest that he was quite intelligent, at least. K: What I am trying to say is that insight is not partial ever. I am talking of total insight, not partial insight. Q: Krishnaji, could you explain that a little bit more? What do you mean by not partial insight? K: An artist can have a partial insight. A scientist can have a partial insight. I am talking - 'X' is talking about total insight. Q: Not an insight bound by a certain area. K: It is total insight. Q: You see the artist is also a human being, so... K: But his capture of insight is partial. Q: Is that necessarily so? Q: It is directed to art, painting or whatever the art is. So you mean an insight that illuminates a limited area, or subject, is that what you mean by partial insight? K: Yes. Q: Yes, it concerns music or whatever. Then what would be total insight, it would encompass what? K: The total human activity. Right sir? B: Well that is one point. But coming back we were discussing before that this insight would illuminate the brain, the activity of the brain, and in that illumination it seems that the activity of the brain, the material activity of the brain will change. Would that be fair? K: Let's go slowly. B: Yes, we must get this point clear, then we could raise the question of totality. Now we are saying that insight is an energy perhaps which illuminates the activity of the brain. And in that illumination the brain itself begins to act differently. K: That's right sir. That's all. You are quite right. That is what takes place. Yes. B: This illumination, we say its source is not in the material process, it has no cause. K: It has no cause. B: But it is a real energy. K: It is pure energy. That's right, sir. B: Pure energy. It is like saying - well we know the lightening flash has a cause but it flashes on the ground which is not connected with the cause of what is on the ground. K: Quite, quite. Q: Iron filings, all halter-skelter, and you put a magnet and suddenly they are all in order. B: Well that's a cause, that is the magnetic field acting as a cause, you see. K: Yes, sir, that's quite right. Which means is there action without cause? B: Yes, without time, cause implies time. K: Time, of course. That is, this flash has altered completely the pattern which the material process has set. B: Yes. Could you say that the material process generally operates in a kind of darkness and therefore it has set itself in a wrong path. K: Darkness, yes. The material process naturally sir, it is quite simple. That is clear. The material process acts in ignorance, in darkness. Right? And this flash enlightens the whole field. Which means ignorance, darkness has been dispelled. Right. I will hold to that. B: Well then you could say then in that sense darkness and light cannot co-exist for obvious reasons. K: Obviously. B: Nevertheless the very existence of light is to change the process of darkness. K: Quite right. I hold to that. Quite right. Q: But what contributes the flash? K: What? B: What will produce the flash? K: Wait, I haven't come to that yet. I want to go step by step, into this, otherwise we will get... B: Yes. Now we must make it very clear that you are saying that the process, the material process of the brain can depend on this flash which has no cause, which therefore is outside the chain of ordinary material process. K: Yes, yes. B: That is as far as we can say. K: What has happened is that the material process has worked in darkness and has brought about such confusion and all the rest of it, the mess that exists in the world. And this flash wipes away the darkness. Right? Which means what? The material process then is not working in darkness. Right? B: Right. Yes. But now let's make another point clear. Here is the flash but it seems the light will go on. K: The light goes on. B: The flash has gone but the light is going on, right? K: The light is there, the flash is the light. B: We have to consider, you see you have the flash now, right. At a certain moment, the flash is immediate but then as you work from there there is still light. K: Why do you differentiate flash from light? B: Well just simply the word 'flash' suggests something that happens in one moment. K: Yes. B: We should clear this up. You see we are saying that your insight would only last in that moment. Let's clear it up. K: Yes. Q: Can we call it sudden light? K: Just a minute. I must go slowly. What is this sir? B: Well it is a matter of language. K: Is it merely a matter of language? B: Maybe not, but if you use the word 'flash', like a flash of lightening gives light for that moment but then the next moment you are in darkness until the next flash of lightening. K: It is not like that. B: Right. So what is it? Is it that the light suddenly turns on and stays on? The other view is to say that the light suddenly flashes on and stays on. K: No. Because when we put that question 'stays on and goes off', you are thinking in terms of time. B: Yes, well we have to clear this up because it is the question everybody will put. K: The material process is working in darkness, in time, in ignorance and so on, in knowledge, ignorance, all that. When that insight takes place there is the dispelling of that darkness. That is all we are saying. Q: But the material process... K: Wait, sir, I am coming to it. It dispels that darkness. And thought, which is the material process, is no longer working in darkness, therefore that light has altered, has ended, no, has ended ignorance. B: So we say this darkness is really something which is built into the content of thought. K: The content is darkness. B: That's right. K: By Jove. B: Then that light has dispelled that ignorance. K: That's right sir. That's right. Dispelled the content. B: But still we have to be very careful, you still have content in the usually accepted sense of the word, like you know all kinds of things. K: Of course, of course. B: So we can't say it has dispelled all the content. K: It has dispelled the centre of darkness. B: Yes, the source, the creator of darkness. K: The self. Right? It has dispelled the centre of darkness which is the self. B: Well we could say that a certain content, the self is part of the content and that part of the content which is the centre of darkness, which creates it and maintains it, is dispelled. K: Dispelled. Yes. The centre of darkness, which has maintained the darkness, has been dispelled. I hold to that. Going on slowly. B: We say now that means a physical change in the brain cells. That centre, that content which is the centre is a certain set form, disposition of all the brain cells and that in some way alters. K: Of course sir, obviously. You see sir, this is so, it has enormous significance. Right? That is in our relationship with our society, in everything. Now the next question is, which Mrs Lilliefelt put, is: how does this flash come about? Let's begin the other way round. How does love come about? How does peace come about? Which is, peace being causeless, violence is cause, how does that causeless thing come about when my whole life is causation? There is no 'how'. Right? There is no 'how'. The 'how' implies a cause, so there is no 'how'. I must stop here a bit. Q: Are you saying that since it is without cause it is something that just exists and that... K: No, I don't say that it exists. That is a dangerous statement. Immediately. Q: It has to exist at some point. K: No. The moment you say it exists it is not. B: Well you see the danger is that that is part of the content. K: Be careful in these things. Q: If you are using it as content. But if you were saying - or if I can make the next statement: it, say, is, and the mind is blocked, the brain is blocked from something that is without cause, or without any time quality, but the brain is blocked. K: Don't use those words, no. No, no. We have gone through all that. You are beginning all over again. We have gone through all that. The question Dr Bohm put, posed, was: why do you say insight changes, brings about a mutation in the brain cells? That was the question. That question has been put after a series of discussions. And we have come to a point when we say that flash, that light, has no cause, and that light operates on that which has cause, which is the darkness, which is, that darkness exists as long as the self is there, is the originator of that darkness, that light dispels the very centre of darkness. That's all. We have come to that point. And therefore there is a mutation and so on and so on. Then the question, when Mrs Lilliefelt put that question how do I get it, how does it happen. Right? That's all. I say that is a wrong question. There is no 'how'. Q: There is no 'how' but there is darkness and there is light. K: Just see first there is no 'how'. If you show me how you are back into the darkness. Right. B: Right. K: That's a tremendous thing to understand that. I am asking something else, a question sir, which is: why is it that we have no insight at all, why is it that it doesn't start from our childhood, this insight? You follow what I am talking about? B: Well the way life is lived... K: No, I want to find. Is it our education? Is it our society? Is it our - I don't believe it is all that. You follow? B: What do you say then? K: Am I making myself clear? It is some other factor. I am groping after it. I am groping after this, which is why don't we have it, it seems so natural? B: Yes, well at first one would say something is interfering with it. K: I don't want to go back. It seems so natural. For 'X' it is quite natural. Why isn't it natural for A, B, C, D, all the twenty six letters? Why isn't it possible? If we say blockage, education, which are all causes - right? B: Yes. K: Then to remove the blockages implies another cause. So we keep on rolling in that direction. There is something unnatural about all this. Q: If you would say there are blocks... K: I don't want to use that, that is the language of the darkness. Q: Then you could say that the blocks prevent the insight from acting. K: Of course. But I want to move away from these blockages. B: Not exactly blockages, but we used the words centre of darkness, which we say is maintaining darkness, that something is going on. K: To 'X' it seems so natural. Why isn't it natural to everybody? You follow what I am talking about? B: That is the question. K: That is the question I am asking. And you say blockages, the self, the society, environment, genetic inheritance - I say those are all causes. Now why isn't it natural to everybody? Right sir? Why is not love natural to everybody? Am I putting the question? B: Well I think to make it more clear: you see some people might feel it is natural to everybody, but being treated in a certain way they gradually get caught in hate. K: I don't believe that. B: Well then you would have to ask: suppose you were to say that the young child meeting hate would not respond with hate. Why is that not natural? K: Yes, that's right. B: Yes, that is your question. Most people would say that it is natural for the young child meeting hate to respond with hate. K: Yes, this morning I heard that. Then I asked myself why? B: If you say it would be natural to meet hate without hate... K: It seems so natural. Now just a minute sir. 'X' has been put under all these circumstances - right - which could have produced blockages, which could have produced all the rest of it - but 'X' wasn't touched by it. You follow? Why is it not possible for everybody? B: We should make it more clear why we say it would be natural immediately not to respond to hate with hate. K: All right. Limit it to that. B: Even thought one hasn't thought about it, you know the child is not able to think about all this. K: Is it possible to act - what is it? B: Is it possible, meeting hate not to respond with hate, even though a young child, who hasn't thought about it, he doesn't know. K: Yes right. Interesting this. B: Because some people would say it would be instinct, the animal instinct... K: Which is to hate. B: Well, to fight back. K: To fight back. B: The animal will respond with love if you treat him with love, but if you treat the animal with hate he is going to fight back. K: Of course. B: He will become very vicious. K: Yes. B: Now some people would say that the human being in the beginning is like that animal and later he can understand. Right? K: Of course. That is, the human being began his origin with the animal and the animal, the ape or any other animal, the wolf... B: The wolf will respond with love too. K: And we are saying: why... B: Look, almost everybody feels that what I said is true, that we are like the animal when we are young children. Now you are saying why didn't the young child, why don't all children respond immediately, fail to respond to hate with hate? K: That means, is it the fault of the parents? B: Well what you are implying is that it is not entirely that, that there is something deeper. K: Yes sir. I think there is something quite different. I want to capture that. B: This is something that would be important. K: How do you find out? Let's have an insight! I feel that there is something totally different. We are attacking it from a causational point of view. Would it be right sir, just a question mark, would it be right to say that the beginning of man is not animal? B: Well that is not clear, you see. The present theory of evolution which has been followed, there have been apes, developing, you can follow the line where they become more and more like human beings. K: Yes, I know. B: Now when you say the beginning of man is not animal, then it is not clear. K: I am asking. And therefore if the beginning of man is the animal therefore we have that instinct highly cultivated and that instinct is natural. B: Yes, that instinct is cause and effect. K: Yes, cause and effect and it becomes natural. And someone comes along and says, 'Is it?' B: Right. Let's try to get this clear then. Let's make this clear because... K: I mean from all the scientific and historical and all the archaeologists, they say man began from the ape. B: Yes, began from other animals. K: And that as all animals respond to love and to hate, we as human beings, respond instantly to hate by hate. B: And vice versa, to love by love. Q: Could we say that that is a question which cannot possibly be answered by scientists? K: We are scientists. B: It depends what you mean. Q: I mean it in that sense that you see science tries to explain things to primary causes, and the biologist would say, well this kind of instinct has died out, it has died a natural death because man responded to hate with love. B: Well that is one view, you could say that it would not have been helpful for survival to respond to hate with love, that it would have been a selection of people who responded to hate with hate. Q: That is why I feel it is not a question of that kind which can be answered by such an approach. K: So at the beginning there were people, or there were half a dozen people who never responded to hate because they had love, and those people, one or two had implanted this thing in the human mind also. Right? That where love is the other is not. And that has also been part of our inheritance. Right? Because those few said this, that. And why haven't we as human beings cultivated to respond to hate by hate, why haven't we cultivated the other? And the other is not cultivatable. Q: They have tried to cultivate it. K: No, it is not cultivatable. B: It is not casual. It cannot be, cultivation depends on a cause. K: On cause. So why have we lost that? If this is so. Q: But when you ask why we have lost it, that implies that we have had it sometime. K: No, no. You have missed it. B: Some have had it. K: Yes. Some, I said that, some 'X', 'Y', 'Z', or A, B, C, when man began implanted in man this thing, love, which is causeless, which will not respond to hate. All right. That has been implanted. And we have cultivated very carefully by thought, respond to hate by hate, violence by violence, and so on. Why haven't we moved along with the other line? You follow my question? B: Yes, K: Is this a futile question sir? B: One doesn't see any way of proceeding. K: I am not trying to proceed. B: We have to understand what made people respond to hate with hate, why they didn't... K: To 'X' the other seems so natural. To 'X' he never even thought about the other. So if that is so natural to 'X', why isn't it natural to 'Y' and so on? If he is a freak then there is no answer. That is a stupid way of pushing him off. If it is natural to 'X' it must be natural to others, why isn't it natural? You follow my question? Why? You know this ancient idea which is probably in existence in the Jewish religion and in the Indian religions and so on, that the manifestation of the highest takes place, occasionally. That seems too easy an explanation. Have we moved in the wrong direction? B: What do you mean by that? K: We have taken the wrong turn. B: You mean mankind? Yes, we have discussed that before, that there has been a wrong turning. K: To respond to hate by hate, violence by violence and so on. B: And giving supreme value to knowledge. Q: Wouldn't another factor also be the attempt to cultivate the idea of love? K: Who says that? Q: Well people in literature, people have always tried to really produce love and better human beings. B: That is the purpose of religion. Q: It is the purpose of religion. K: Wipe it out by one - if it is cultivatable, by what, thought? Thought is a material process. Don't go into all that. Love has no cause, it is not cultivatable, full stop. Q: Yes, but you see the mind doesn't see that. K: But we explained all that sir. I want to go into something, forgive me, not that, I want to find out if it is natural to A, B, C, why isn't it natural to 'X' 'Y'? I think this is a valid question. Right? B: Even another point is to say that you could see that the response of hate to hate just makes no sense anyway, why do we go on with it? Because people may believe in that moment that they are protecting themselves with hate, but it is no protection. K: Oh, please give me some insight! It is a very good question sir. I think it is valid. A, B, C, are born without cause and 'X', 'Y', 'Z' are caught in cause. They walk along that way and those don't walk along that way. So why not 'X' 'Y' 'Z'? You understand? I keep on. Is it the privilege of the few? The elite? No, no. Let's begin the other way round sir. I hope it doesn't bore you. B: No, go ahead. K: 'X's' mind is the mind of humanity. We have been through that. The mind of humanity has been responding to hate with hate, violence by violence, knowledge by knowledge and so on. And A, B, C are part of humanity, but A, B, C do not respond to hate by hate, they are part of me, they are part of 'X's' conscience, part of all that. Please. B: Why is there this difference? K: Yes sir, that is what I am asking. One is natural, the other is unnatural. Why? Why the difference? Who is asking this question? Just a minute. Who is asking this question? The people, 'X' 'Y' 'Z' who respond to hate by hate, are they asking the question? Or A, B, C are asking the question. Q: It would seem that A, B, C are asking this question. B: It appears that way, that A, B, C have asked the question. K: A, B, C are asking the question, yes. B: But you see we were also just saying that they are not different. K: They are not different. B: We say they are different but also they are not different. K: Of course. They are not different. Just a minute, just a minute. 'X', 'Y', 'Z' say A, B, C are different. A, B, C say they are not different. Right? We are not different. Which means what? How do you respond to it? Don't think about it. A, B, C, 'X', 'Y', 'Z'. 'X', 'Y', 'Z' don't put this question, only A, B, C put this question. And A, B, C say we are part of you. B: There is one mind. K: That's it, one mind. B: Yes and how does it come that another part of this one mind says, no? K: That's the whole thing. How does it come about that one part of the mind says we are different from A, B, C? Of course there are all kinds of explanations - Karma, reincarnation, blah, blah, blah. Remove all those explanations, what am I left with, the fact that A, B, C are different from 'X', 'Y', 'Z'. And those are facts. Right? Q: They appear to be different. K: Oh no, they are absolutely different, not appear. B: There is a contradiction because you said before that A, B, C are saying they are not different. K: I must be clear. A, B, C do not respond to that. B: I think the question we wanted to be sure we come back to is: why do the people who cultivate hate say that they are different from those who don't. K: Do they say that? B: I think they do in so far as they would admit that there was anybody who didn't cultivate hate, then they would say they must be different. K: Yes, because that is clear - light and darkness and so on. But I want to find out are we moving in the right direction? That is, A, B, C have given me that gift and I have not carried that gift. You follow what I mean? I have carried the other gift but not this -why? Q: Did you say sir that it is implanted in all of us? K: Of course. If man began there, with the animal, somebody there must have said, look. Q: But in A, B, C it is natural and in the others it is latent but has never come out, is that it? K: I am asking that. Right sir? B: Right. K: My father - I am talking respectfully - was responding to hate by hate, why has the son not responded in the same direction? B: I think it is a question of insight. K: Which means what? He had insight right from the beginning. You follow what I am saying. Right from childhood, which means what? B: What? K: That - I don't want to enter into this dangerous field yet. B: What is it? Perhaps you want to leave that. K: There is some factor that is missing sir. I want to capture it. You see if that is an exception then it is silly. B: All right then we agree that the thing is dormant in all human beings - is that what you want to say? K: I am not quite sure that is what I want to say. B: But I meant that the factor is there in all mankind. K: That is a dangerous statement too. B: That is what you were saying. K: I know, but I am questioning, when I am quite sure I will tell you. B: All right. We tried this and we can say it seems promising but it is a bit dangerous. This possibility is there in all mankind and in so far as some people have seen it. K: Which means god is in you? B: No, it is just that the possibility of insight is there. K: Yes, partly. I am questioning all this sir. The father responds to hate by hate, the son doesn't. B: Yes, well that happens from time to time. K: No, consistently from the beginning - why? B: Well it must depend on insight which shows the futility of hate. K: Why did that chap have it? B: Yes, why? K: And he says this seems so terribly natural, what is natural it must be to everybody. Water is natural to everybody. B: Yes, well why isn't insight present for everybody from the beginning? K: Yes, that is all I am asking. B: So strong that even maltreatment cannot affect it. K: Nothing can affect it, that is my point. I am getting at it slowly. Maltreatment, beating, being put into all kinds of situations, it hasn't affected it. Why? You follow sir? Wait a minute. We had better stop. We are coming to something. OJAI 7TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 17TH APRIL, 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' Krishnamurti: Shall we start from where we left off? Dr Bohm: All right. K: Or something new? B: What do you suggest? K: I don't know. Are we saying sir that human beings are still behaving with the animal instincts? B: Yes, I think we were discussing that the other day and the animal instincts, it seems, may apparently be overpowering in their intensity and speed, and especially with young children. It may seem that it is only natural for them to respond with the animal instinct. K: So that means that we are still, after a million years or ten million years, or whatever years, we are still instinctively behaving like our ancestors? B: Well in some ways. Probably it is complicated by thought, the animal instincts have now become entangled with thought and it is getting in some ways worse. K: In some ways far worse. B: Because all these instincts of hatred now become directed by thought and sustained by thought so that they are more subtle and more dangerous. K: And during all these many, many centuries we haven't found a way, a method, a system or something that will move us away from that track. Is that it? B: Well that is one point, yes. That is one of the difficulties, surely. When people begin to get angry with each other, their anger builds up and they can't seem to do anything about it. They may try to control it but then that doesn't work. K: 'X', as we were saying, behaves, let's suppose, naturally, which is not responding to the animal instincts. What place has such insight, we will call it, in human society? B: Yes, well... K: None at all? B:... in the society as it is it cannot be accommodated because society is organized under the assumption that pleasure and pain and fear are going to rule, except when you control it. Say, friendliness is a kind of animal instinct too, people that become friendly for instinctive reasons. K: People have become? B: Friendly sometimes for reasons similar to animal instinct and may become enemies for similar reasons. So I think that some people would say that we should be rational. If we want to answer your question you see there is a period during the 18th century, the age of reason, when they said man could be rational, he could choose to be rational, bring about harmony everywhere. K: But he hasn't. B: But it got worse, it led to the French revolution and to the terror and so on. But after that people didn't have so much faith in reason as a way of getting anywhere, coming out of it. K: So where does that lead us? We were talking really about insight, that it actually changes the nature of the brain itself. B: Yes, we discussed that yesterday: by dispelling the darkness in the brain, it allowed the brain to function in a new way. K: Yes. Thought has been operating in darkness, creating its own darkness and functioning in that. And insight is like, as we said, a flash which breaks down the darkness. And then that insight, clearing the darkness, then does it act, function, rationally? B: Yes we went into that: man will then function rationally in a sense of perception - we discussed - rather than by rules and reason. But there is a freely flowing reason. You see some people identify reason with certain rules of logic which would be mechanical. K: Which would be mechanical, yes. B: But reason as a form of perception of order. K: So we are saying, are we, that insight is perception? B: It is even the flash of light which makes perception possible. K: Right, that's right. B: It is even more fundamental than perception. K: So insight is pure perception and from that perception there is action, which is then sustained by rationality. Is that it? B: Yes. K: That's right. B: The rationality being perception of order, I would say. K: So would you say: insight, perception and order? B: Yes. K: That order is not mechanical. B: Yes. K: Because it is not based on logic. B: There are no rules. K: No rules, let's put it that way, it's better. It is not based on rules. Then that means insight, perception, action, order. Then you come to the question: is insight continuous, or is it by flash? B: We went into that and said it was a wrong question. K: Yes. B: We have to look at it differently. K: So it is not time... B:... not time-bound. K: Not time binding, yes we said that. So now let's get a little further. That means we said, didn't we, insight is the elimination of darkness which is the very centre of the self, which is the self creates this darkness. Right? And so insight dispels that very centre. B: Yes, with the darkness perception is not possible. K: Quite. B: It's blindness in a way. K: Right, then what next? How - no! I am an ordinary man with all my animal instincts, pleasure and pain and reward and punishment and so on, I hear you say this, and I see what you are saying has some kind of reason, logic, and order. B: Yes, it makes sense as far as we can see. Right? K: It makes sense. Then how am I to have it in my daily life? How am I to bring about - you understand these are words which are difficult, all these words are time-binding - but is that possible? B: Yes, without time, you see. K: Is it possible for me, with my narrow mind, with my etc., to have this insight so that pattern of life is broken? As we said, sir, the other day, we have tried all this; every form of self-denial and yet that insight doesn't come about. I may have once in a while a partial insight, but the partial insight is not the whole insight so there is still partial darkness. B: If it doesn't dispel the centre of the self, it is not adequate. It may dispel some darkness in a certain area but the source of the darkness, the creator, the sustainer of it is still there. K: Yes, still there. Now what shall I do? This is a wrong question. This leads nowhere. So we have stated the general plan. Right? And I have to make the moves, or make no moves at all. I haven't the energy. I haven't the capacity to see it quickly. Because this is immediate, not just something I practise and get it. Right? I haven't the capacity, I haven't got that sense of urgent immediacy. Everything is against me: my family, my wife, society, everything. And does it mean that I eventually have to become a monk? B: No. Becoming a monk is the same as becoming anything else. K: That's right. So becoming a monk is as becoming a businessman. Quite. That's rather good! I see all this, verbally as well as rationally, intellectually, but I can't capture this thing. And you don't help me. You, 'X' doesn't help me, I am just left. Is there a different approach to this problem? I am always asking the same question because I am caught in the same pattern. So I am asking myself is there a totally different way - I am using that word for the moment - a totally different way of moving, or approaching, the whole turmoil of life? You follow sir? B: Yes. K: Is there a different manner of looking at it? Or is this the only way? You follow? B: Yes. K: We are saying as long as the centre is creating darkness, and thought is operating in that darkness, there must be disorder, there must be everything as society now is. And to move away from that you must have insight. Insight can only come about when there is a flash, a sudden light which abolishes not only darkness but the creator of darkness. B: Yes. K: Now I am asking - that seems so absolute. Right? - and I am asking myself is there a different approach to this question altogether? B: Well possibly. When you say it seems absolute, do you want a less absolute approach? K: It is so. B: It is so, but I mean, it was not clear what you meant by it seems so absolute. K: I mean there is no other. B: There is no other way. K: Yes, there is no other way. B: But you say maybe there is another way. Are you suggesting that there is another way? K: I am asking if that is the only way, then I am doomed. B: You can't produce this flash at will. K: Oh, we have been through that, it can't be produced through will, through sacrifice, through every form of human effort. That is out, we have finished with all that. We finished with all that two or three weeks ago. And also we came to a point, to 'X' this insight seemed so natural and why is it not natural to others? That was one of the points we raised. B: Yes. K: Why is it natural to 'X' and not so to others? If we could find that sir. B: Yes. Well let's say that if you begin with the child, it seems natural to the child to respond with his animal instincts, with great intensity which sweep him away. Darkness arises because it is so overwhelming. K: Yes, but why is that with 'X'? B: First of all it seems natural to most people that this would happen, that the animal instincts would take over. K: Yes, that's right. That seems so natural. B: Very natural and they would say the other fellow is unnatural. K: Yes. B: Right. And therefore that is the way mankind has been thinking, saying that if there are indeed any other people they must be very unusual and unnatural. K: That's it. That is, human beings have been acting according to this pattern, one pattern, responding to hatred by hatred and so on. There are those few, perhaps many, who say that is not. Why has this division taken place? If this is natural, that is, hate, what is one battling against? B: Yes, if you say pleasure and pain, fear and hate, are natural, then the people say we must battle to control it because it will destroy us. You see they say the best we can hope for is to control it with reason or with another way. K: But that doesn't work. B: We have gone into all that. K: So I must... B: Now you say, someone else says the other way is natural. K: If that is natural, are the few, the privileged, by some miracle, by some strange chance event? B: Yes, some people, many people say that, many people would say that they are unusual in some way. K: No, that goes against one's grain. I wouldn't accept that. B: Yes, well if that is not the case then you have to say why is there this difference. K: Yes, that is what I am trying to get at. Because 'X' is born of the same parents. B: Yes, you say they are fundamentally the same but why do they behave differently? K: Differently, yes. This question has been asked many times, over and over again in different parts of the world. Now why? Why is there this division? I can't find out. Q: Is the division really total? You see because even that man you say responds to hatred with hatred, he nevertheless sees that it doesn't make sense. He also sees that it is wrong. But even so he says it is natural, he at the same time say it is not natural, it should be different. K: It should be different but he is still battling with ideas, with thought. Q: That's right but it is not entirely natural. If it were entirely natural he would say, 'OK, that's just the way we live'. He wouldn't even try to get out of it. You see what I am saying? K: Yes, I understand that. But he is trying to get out of it by the exercise of thought which breeds darkness. Q: But he doesn't understand that. K: And we have explained to him. Q: Well I just want to say that the division does not seem to be so entire. You see. K: Oh yes sir, the division is entire, complete. We talked about this the other day. Q: Well why are people not saying 'Well look here, let's live that way, let's kill each other and let's enjoy it to the last moment'? K: Because they can't see anything except their own darkness. Q: But they want to get out of it. K: Now wait a minute sir. Do they want to get out of it? Q: At least they say so. K: Do they actually realize the state they are in and deliberately want to get out of it? Q: I think so. Q: They are ambivalent about it. They want to go on getting the fruits of it but they have a sense it is wrong, that it leads to suffering for them. B: Or else they find they can't help it. You see when the time comes to get angry, or pleasure, they can't get away. K: They can't help it. We have been through it. Q: But they want to get out of it, they can't help it. They are helpless, there are forces which are stronger than even their will. K: So what shall we do? Or this division is false. B: That's the point. We had better call it a difference between these two. This difference is not fundamental. One idea is to say it is a difference which is absolute, there is nothing in common. K: I don't think there is anything in common. B: Why? But if you say the difference is false, or the division is false, you say fundamentally they are the same, but a difference has developed between them. It would mean if you say the division is false, yet you say fundamentally, you mean fundamentally they are the same, but a difference has developed between them. Perhaps one has taken a wrong turning. K: Let's put it that way, yes. B: But the difference is not intrinsic, it is not structural, you know, built in like the difference between a tree and a rock. K: Right. Yes. B: A tree cannot become a rock. K: Yes, as you say there is a vast difference between a rock and a tree but it is not like that. Then what? Are we trying to find out sir, let's be simple, are we trying to find out: there are two, they start from the source and one has taken one direction and the other has taken another direction. Right? But the source is the same. Why haven't all of them moved in the right direction? B: Yes, we haven't answered that. We haven't managed to answer that. K: Yes, we are trying to answer that. Let's get back to that. B: I was just saying that if you understand that, then going back to the source you do not have to take the wrong turn. In some sense we are continually taking the wrong turn, so if we can understand this wrong turn, then it becomes possible to change. K: Yes sir. That is, we start from the same source. 'A' takes one turn... B: We are continually starting from the same source, not going back in time to a source. K: Just a minute, just a minute. B: There are two possible ways of taking your statement. One is to say the source is in time, far back in the past, we started together and we took different paths. The other is to say the source is timeless and we are continually taking the wrong turn, again and again. Right? K: Yes. We cut out time, therefore it is constantly the wrong turn. B: Constantly the wrong turn, yes. K: Why? Q: Which means there is the constant possibility of the right turn. K: Yes, of course. That's it. We are getting a little more clear. That is if we say the source from which we all began, then we are caught in time. B: You can't go back. K: You can't go back. That is out. Therefore it is we apparently are taking the wrong turn all the time. B: Constantly. K: Constantly, let's put it that way. Constantly taking the wrong turn, why? The one - I am just going into it a little bit - the one who is not operating, the one who is living with insight and the other not living with insight, these are constant. And the man who is living in darkness can move away at any time to the other. That is the point: at any time. B: Yes. K: Right? B: Then nothing holds him, except taking the wrong turn constantly. You could say the darkness is such that he doesn't see himself taking the wrong turning. K: Is this right sir? Are we pursuing the right direction, right question? You have that insight, suppose you have that insight, and your darkness, the very centre of darkness has been dispelled completely. And I listen to you. I am a serious, fairly intelligent, not neurotic, human being, I listen to you. And whatever you have said seems so reasonable, rational, sane. I question the division sir, you follow? I question the division. The division is created by the centre which creates darkness. Right? B: Yes. It is the same as the other divisions, it is thought. K: Thought has created this division. The other man says there is no division. I don't know if I am? B: Yes, well in the darkness thought creates this division. K: You say, you who have the insight, etc., you say there is no division. B: From the darkness a shadow is thrown, it makes a division. K: Yes. And I won't accept that because in my darkness there is nothing but division. So I, living in darkness, have created the division. I think that is right. As I have created it in my thoughts... B: I am constantly creating it. K: Yes, constantly creating division, that's right, constantly creating division and so I am always wanting to live constantly in a state in which there is no division. Right? B: Yes. K: But that movement is still the movement of darkness. Right? B: Yes. K: How am I to dispel this continuous, constant darkness? That is the only question because as long as that exists I create this constant division. Right? B: Yes. K: You see, this going round and round in circles. Which is, I can only dispel the darkness through insight, and I cannot have that insight by any effort, will and so on and so on, so I am left with nothing. Right? So what is my problem? My problem is to perceive the darkness, to perceive the thought that is creating darkness and to see that the self is the source of this darkness. Why can't I see that? Why can't I see it even logically? B: Well it's clear logically. K: Yes but somehow that doesn't seem to operate. So what shall I do? I realize sir, for the first time that the self is creating the darkness which is constantly breeding division. I see that very clearly. B: Yes and the division produces the darkness anyway. K: Vice versa, back and forth. And from all that everything begins. Now I see that very clearly. What shall I do? So I don't admit division. Right sir? Q: Krishnaji, aren't we introducing division again, nevertheless, when we say there is the man who needs insight? K: He has insight. 'X' has insight and he has explained to me very clearly how darkness is banished. I listen to him and he says, your very darkness is creating the division. Actually there is no division, no division as light and darkness. So can you, he asks me, can you banish, can you put away this sense of division? B: You seem to be bringing back a division by saying that, by saying that I should do it, you see. K: No, not 'should'. B: In a way you are saying that the thought process of the mind seems to spontaneously produce division, you say try to put it aside, at the same time it is trying to making division. K: No sir. I understand that question. But can my mind put away division? Or is that a wrong question? Q: Can it put away division as long as it is divided? K: No, it can't, so what am I to do? Q: We are introducing division again. K: No, no, no. Listen: he says something so extraordinarily true, which has immense significance and beauty and my whole being says 'Capture it'. It is not a division. Q: The division seems to be immediate, you know when I feel there is something which I want to capture. K: No, no. I recognize that I am the creator of division. Right sir? Because I am living in darkness and so out of that darkness I create. But I have listened to 'X' who says there is no division. And I recognize that is an extraordinary statement. So in saying that to me, who has lived in division, constant division, that very saying has an immediate effect on me. Right? B: I think that one has to - well if you say, put away the division... K: I will leave that, I won't put it away. That statement... B: Which statement? K: That there is no division. B: That there is no division, yes. No division, right. K: Yes. B: And therefore there is no need to think division. K: No. No. I want to get at this a little bit. I am getting somewhere with it. Your statement that there is no division, because you have this insight, etc., etc. That very statement has a tremendous effect on me. I have lived constantly in division and you come along and say, after discussing, you say there is no division. What effect has it on me? You understand my question? It must have some impact on me otherwise what is the good of talking, you are saying anything. B: But then you say there is no division. That makes sense. And on the other hand it seems that the division exists. K: I recognize the division, but your statement that there is no division has a tremendous impact on me. That seems so natural, isn't it? When I see something that is immovable, it must have some effect on me. When you say, 'It is so' - you follow sir, what I am trying to get at? I respond to it with a tremendous shock. I wonder if I am conveying anything. B: You see if you were talking about something which was say in front of us and you said, 'No, it is not that way' and then you see we would look at it and say, 'No, it's not that way', you see, and then that would, of course, change your whole way of seeing it. Now you say this division is not that way. We try to look and see if that is so. Right? K: I don't even say, 'Is that so?' You who have very carefully explained the whole business, and you say at the end of it that there is no division. You understand? And I am sensitive, watch very carefully and all the rest, realize I am constantly living in division, when you make that statement it has - I think it has broken the pattern. I don't know if you follow what I am trying to explain. Q: You say at least for that moment it breaks the pattern. K: It has broken the pattern, because he has said something which is so fundamentally true: there is no god and man. Right sir, I stick to that. I see something in that. Which is, we said the other day where hate exists the other is not. Right? But hating I want the other. Right? So constant division - division is born out of darkness. And the darkness is constant. And you come along and tell me, because I have been very carefully listening to you, I am not just a casual listener, I'm not just a person who just says, 'I have come this afternoon, tell me all about it' - it has been my life time. And you make a statement which seems so absolutely true. You follow sir? That enters into me therefore this act has dispelled darkness. The act of his statement dispels the darkness. I wonder if I am capturing something. I think it does. I am not making an effort to get rid of darkness but you are the light. That's right sir, I hold to that. So it comes to something which is: can I listen with my darkness, in my darkness, which is constant, in that darkness can I listen to you? Of course I can. Q: Krishnaji, is it then still darkness? K: No, no don't bother. I am living in constant division which brings darkness. Somebody, 'X', comes along and tells me there is no division old boy, look at it. B: Right. Now why do you say you can listen in the darkness? K: What? B: You have just said you can listen in the darkness. K: Yes sir. B: Right. That needs some... K: Oh yes, I can listen in darkness. If I can't I am doomed. B: But that is no argument. K: Of course that is no argument but that is so. If I am constantly living darkness... B: That's clear. We have gone into it, constantly living in darkness is not worthwhile. But now we say that it is possible to listen in the darkness. K: Yes sir. Yes sir. Listen. It isn't that - of course sir. Q: This holds with what you say that there is no division. K: Listening is not division. Q: Right. If that were I could not listen. K: But I am in division. No, sir, you are missing the point. He says there is no division. He is the flag to me. I wonder if I am making it clear? Oh no. Q: Can we make it a little bit more clear? K: He, 'X', says insight, he explains very, very carefully to me what insight is - I won't go into all that over and over again. He explains to me very, very carefully. I am sensitive, I have been listening to him in my darkness but that is making me sensitive, alive, watching. That is what I have been doing. We have been doing that together. And he makes a statement: there is absolutely no division. And I know that I am living in constant division. That very statement has put the constant movement to an end. I wonder. Yes sir. Otherwise if this doesn't take place I have nothing. You follow? I am perpetually living in darkness. A man, a voice in the wilderness and listening to that voice has an extraordinary effect in wilderness. B: Listening reaches the source of the movement, whereas observation does not. K: Yes sir, I have observed, I have listened, I have played all kinds of things all my life. And I have done everything that human beings have invented, or is inventing. And I now see there is only one thing, that there is this constant darkness and I am acting in the darkness, in this wilderness which is darkness, whose centre is the self. I see that absolutely. I mean absolutely, completely, you can't argue against it any more. And you come along and tell me this. Sir, see what happens? Yes, sir. In that wilderness a voice says there is water. You follow? It is not hope, there is immediate action in me. Yes. Which is, sir, would you say one must realize, understand, any word, that this constant movement in darkness is my life. Would I admit that sir? You follow what I am saying? Can I realize with all my experience, with all my knowledge, with all my etc., of a million years, suddenly realize that I am living in total darkness? Nobody will admit that. Because that means I have reached the end of all hope. Right? My hope is also darkness. You have cut the future altogether. You understand? So I am left with this enormous darkness and I am there. No, sir. That means, the realization of that is the ending of becoming. Right? And I have reached that point and 'X' tells me, naturally sir. You see all of them, all the religions have said this division exists. God and son of god. B: Yes, well they say it can be overcome. K: It is the same pattern repeated. B: Yes. I don't know whether the Indian religions haven't said this. K: I wouldn't know but I have discussed with some pundits, I doubt it. No, no, I doubt it very much. It doesn't matter who said it but the fact is somebody in this wilderness is saying something and in that wilderness I have been listening, listening to every voice. Right sir? And my own voice, which has created more and more darkness. Yes, this is right. That means sir, does it: when there is insight there is no division. B: Yes. K: It is not your insight or my insight, it is insight. In that there is no division. B: Yes. K: Which means sir, do I understand this, that the ground, which we talked about... B: What about the ground? K: In that ground there is no darkness as darkness, no light as light. What is that? On that ground, or in that ground, there is no division and so it is not - we have been through all that, just recapture it - it is not born of will or time, or thought and all that. So in that ground... B: Are you saying light and darkness are not divided? K: Right. B: Which means to say that there is neither. K: Neither, that's it, that's it. There is something else. You see, you come along and tell me this extraordinary fact. To me it is an extraordinary fact. I realize it with all my being that what you say is true - true not merely verbally but it is so. And I see - not I see -there is a perception that there is a different movement which is non-dualistic. B: Non-dualistic means what? No division? K: No division. I won't use non-dualistic - they use that in India. There is no division. B: But nevertheless there is movement. K: Movement, of course. B: What does that mean, now without division? K: Movement, I mean by that movement that it is not time. That movement doesn't breed division. So I want to go back to the ground. Lead to that. If there is neither darkness nor light, which is really a tremendous division. Right? On that ground there is no division. That ground is not god, or the son of god, there is no division. So what takes place? Would you say sir, that the ground is movement? B: Well it could be, yes. Movement that is undivided, without division. K: No. I say there is movement in darkness. B: Yes but we said there is no division of darkness and light, and yet you said there is movement. K: Yes. Would you say the ground is endless movement? B: Yes. K: What does that mean? B: Well, it is not clear - it is difficult to express. K: I think one can go into it, let's express it. I am off somewhere else, just a minute, come back. What is movement sir, apart from here to there, apart from time, is there any other movement? B: Yes. K: There is. The movement from being to becoming, psychologically. There is the movement of distance, there is the movement of time. We say those are all divisions. Is there a movement which is non-divisive - no, which in itself has no division? There is when you have said that statement. You follow sir? When you have made that statement that there is no division, it is that movement surely? Right? B: Well, you are saying that when there is no division then that movement is there. Right? K: Yes. And I said, 'X' says that is the ground. B: Right. K: Would you say - these are words - it has no end, no beginning? B: Yes. K: Which means again time. Q: Can one say that movement has no form. K: All that, no form, we are not talking. I want to go a little further. What I am asking is; we said when you have stated that there is no division, which means no division in movement. B: Yes. It flows without division, you see. K: Yes. When you accept that you have pointed out to me something, it is a movement in which there is no division. B: Yes. K: Do I capture the significance of that? You understand what I mean? Do I understand the depth of that statement? A movement in which there is no division, which means no time, no distance as we know it, no element of time in it at all. So I am trying to see sir is that movement, is it pushing man - wait a minute, I am just using wrong words - is it surrounding man? B: Yes, enveloping. K: Enveloping man. You understand? B: Yes. K: I want to get at this. I am concerned with man, with mankind, humanity, which is me. You have made, 'X' - it doesn't matter - 'X' has made several statements and I have captured a statement which seems so absolutely true: that there is no division. And which means there is no action which is divisive. B: Yes. K: Right? B: Yes. K: I see that. And also I see: is that movement without time, etc., it seems that is the world. You follow? B: The universe. K: The universe, the cosmos, the whole. B: The totality. K: Totality. You know, isn't there a statement sir in the Jewish world, 'Only god can say, I am'? B: Well that's the way the language goes. The language is built that way. It is not necessary to state it. K: No, I understand. You follow what I am trying to get at? B: Yes. K: What am I trying to say? B: Well that only this movement is. K: You see sir, can the mind be of that movement? Because that is timeless, therefore deathless. B: Yes, the movement is without death. K: Death. B: In so far as the mind takes part in that it is the same. K: You understand what I am saying? B: Yes. But what dies when the individual dies? K: It has no meaning even because then once I have understood there is no division... B: Then it is not important. K:... death has no meaning. B: It still has a meaning in some other context. K: Oh, the ending of the body, that's totally trivial. But you understand? I wanting to capture the significance of your statement saying there is no division, has broken the spell of my darkness, and I see that there is a movement and that's all. Which means death has very little meaning. B: Yes. K: You have abolished totally the fear of death. B: Yes, I understand that when the mind is partaking in that movement then the mind is that movement. K: That's all. The mind is that movement. B: Would you say that matter is also that movement? K: Yes sir, I would say everything. In my darkness I have listened to you. That's most important. And your clarity has broken my spell. When you have said there is no division, you have abolished the division between life and death. I don't know if you see this? B: Yes. K: One can never say then 'I am immortal'. You follow sir? It is so childish. B: Yes, that's the division. K: Or, 'I am seeking immortality'. Or, 'I am becoming' - you have wiped away the whole sense of moving in darkness. I wonder if you get this? Yes, sir. Q: What then would be the significance of the world? Is there a significance to it? K: The world? Q: With man. B: Society, do you mean? Q: Yes, it seems that when you make this statement, there is no division, and life is death, what then is the significance of man with all his struggle, with all his... K: None. He is in darkness. What importance has that? It is like struggling in a locked room. That is the whole point. B: Significance can only arise when the darkness is dispelled. K: Of course. Q: The only significance is the dispelling of the darkness. K: Oh no, no. No. B: Aren't we going to say that something more can be done besides dispelling darkness? K: All that you have done to me, who has listened very carefully to everything that you, who have insight, etc., you have dispelled the centre. So in darkness I can invent a lot of significances, that there is light, there is god, there is beauty, there is this, that, it is still in the area of darkness. Caught in a room full of darkness and I can invent a lot of pictures. I want to get something else. Which is: is the mind of the one who has this insight, therefore dispelled darkness and therefore has understanding of that ground, which is movement without time and so on, then that mind itself is that movement. B: Yes, but it isn't the totality. The mind is the movement but we are saying movement is matter, movement is mind. K: Yes sir. Yes sir. B: And we were saying that the ground may be beyond the universal mind. You were saying earlier that the movement, that the ground is more than the universal mind still, more than the emptiness. K: We said that, much more. B: Much more. But it contains - we have got to get it clear. We say the mind is this movement. K: Yes, mind is this movement. B: We are not saying that this movement is only mind. K: No, no, no. B: That is the point I was trying to get clear. K: Mind is the movement - mind in the sense the ground. B: But the ground goes beyond the mind, is what you said. K: Now just a minute: what do you mean by beyond the mind? B: Just going back to what we were discussing a few days ago: we said we have the emptiness, the universal mind and then the ground is beyond that, yes. K: Would you say beyond that is this movement? B: Yes. The movement from which - the mind emerges from the movement as a ground and falls back to the ground, that is what we are saying. K: Yes, that's right. Mind emerges from the movement. B: And it dies back into the movement. K: That's right. It has it being in the movement. B: Yes and matter also. K: Quite. So, sir, what I want to get at is: I am a human being faced with this ending and beginning, and you abolish that. B: Yes it is not fundamental. K: It is not fundamental. You have removed one of the greatest fears of life which is death. B: Yes. K: You see what it does to a human being when there is no death? Which means the mind doesn't age, the ordinary mind I am talking about. I don't know if I am conveying this. B: Let's go slowly. You say the mind doesn't age, but what if the brain cells age? K: I question it. B: Yes. How can we know that? K: Because there is no conflict, because there is no strain, there is no becoming, movement. You follow? B: Yes, well this is something that it is hard to communicate certainty about. K: Of course. You can't prove any of this. B: But the other, what we have said so far... K:... can be reasoned. B: It is reason and also you can feel it yourself. But now you are stating something about the brain cells about which I have no feeling for. It might be so, it could be so. K: I think it is so. I want to discuss it. Does a mind, which has lived in the darkness - a mind which has lived in the darkness is in constant movement. B: Yes. K: Therefore there is the wearing out of the cells, decay. B: We could say that this conflict will cause cells to decay but somebody might argue that perhaps even without conflict they could decay at a slower rate. Let's say if you were to live hundreds of years, for example, in time the cells would decay no matter what you would do. K: Go into this slowly. B: I can readily accept that the rate of decay of cells could be cut down when you get rid of conflict. K: Slowed down. B: Slowed down. K: Decay can be slowed down. B: Perhaps a great deal. K: A great deal. Ninety per cent. B: That we can understand. But if you say a hundred per cent, then it is hard to understand. K: Ninety per cent. Wait a minute. It can be very, very greatly slowed down. And that means what? What happens to a mind that has no conflict, ninety per cent, or eighty per cent, what is that mind - mind in the sense of what is the quality of that mind which has no problem? You see sir suppose such a mind lives in pure air, unpolluted, etc., etc., the right kind of food and so on and so on, why can't it live two hundred years? B: Well it is possible, some people are said to have lived up to a hundred and fifty, living in very pure air and good food. K: But you see those very people who have lived a hundred and fifty years, if they had no conflict they might live very much longer. B: Yes, they might. There was a case I was reading of a man in England who lived to a hundred and fifty, it was recorded. And the doctors became interested in him, they invited him to London and wined and dined him and then he died in few days. K: Poor devil! Q: Krishnaji normally you say that anything that lives in time also dies in time. K: Yes but the brain, which has had insight has changed the cells. Q: Are you implying in a way that even the organic brain... K: Yes sir. We said that. We went into that. Q:... does not live in time any more. K: No, don't bring in time yet. We are saying that insight brings about a change in the brain cells, we said that. Which means the brain cells are no longer thinking in terms of time. Right sir? Q: Psychological time? K: Of course, that is understood. B: If they are not so disturbed they will remain in order and perhaps they will break down more slowly, we might increase the age limit from one hundred and fifty to two hundred provided you also had healthy living all round. K: Yes. That all sounds so damn trivial, all that. B: Yes, it doesn't seem to make much difference. It is an interesting idea. K: What if I live another hundred years, what? B: Yes, well the men who lived to one hundred and fifty beyond that there was nothing unusual. K: What we are trying to find out is: what effect has this extraordinary movement on the brain, you understand sir? B: Yes. If we say the brain in some way directly enveloped in this movement. K: Yes, it is. B: That would bring it to order. But there is a direct flow, physically. K: Not only physically. B: But also mentally, both. K: Yes, both. It must have an extraordinary effect on the brain. Q: You talked earlier about energy, Krishnaji. An energy, not the everyday energy but some very... K: We said that movement is total energy, we have been saying all that. Now this insight has captured, seen that extraordinary movement and it is part of that energy. I want to come much closer to earth, which is I have lived with the fear of death, fear of not becoming and so on, suddenly I see there is no division and I understand this whole thing. So what has happened to my brain? You follow? Sir, see something. You see this whole thing as not verbally, you see it as a tremendous reality, truth, not just with all your heart, mind, you see this thing. That very perception must affect your brain. B: Yes. It brings order. K: Not only order in life but... B: I mean order in the brain. K:... in the brain. B: The brain cells now - people can prove that if you are under stress the brain cells start to break down. It is proved. And if you have order in the brain cells then it is quite different. K: I have a feeling sir, don't laugh at it, it may be false, it may be true. I feel that the brain never loses the quality of that movement. I don't know if you see. B: Once it has it. K: Of course. I am talking of the person who has been through all this and so on. B: So probably it never loses that quality. K: Therefore it is no longer involved in time. B: It would no longer be dominated by time. The brain, from what we were saying, is not evolving in any sense, it is just confusion. You can't say that man's brain has evolved since the last ten thousand years. K: What? B: You can't say there was any real evolution in the last ten thousand years of the brain because if you go back it is the same. You see science, knowledge, has evolved but people felt the same about life several thousand years ago as they do now. K: Sir I want to find out: which is in that silent emptiness what we went through, is the brain absolutely still? You understand my question? B: Well not absolutely because... K: In the sense no movement. B: Yes we have discussed this before. You see the blood is flowing inside the brain. K: Yes, we are not talking of that. B: What kind of movement are we discussing? K: I am talking of the movement of thought, movement of any reaction. B: Yes. There is no movement in which the brain moves independently. You were saying there is the movement of the whole but the brain does not go off on its own, like thought, you see. K: You see you have done a tremendous act, which is you have abolished death, which is a tremendous thing, in significance, you follow, sir? And so I say what is the brain, the mind, the brain, when there is no death? You follow? It has undergone a surgical operation. B: We talked about the brain normally has the notion of death continually there in the background and now that notion is disturbing the brain constantly. K: Yes sir. B: Because the brain foresees that death and it is trying to stop it. K: The ending of itself and so on and so on. B: It foresees all that and says it must stop it and it can't. K: It can't. B: And therefore it has a problem. K: Constant struggle with it. B: In the background. K: So all that has come to an end. What an extraordinary thing you have done. You follow what I am saying. How does that affect my daily life? Because I have to live on this earth. How does it affect my life? My daily life. My daily life is aggression, this everlasting becoming, successful, all that has gone. What an extraordinary thing has taken place. You follow sir? The last day tomorrow, Saturday. We will pursue this but we have understood a great deal today. B: In bringing in this question of daily life you might bring in the question of compassion. K: Of course, of course, all that. You see sir, is that movement -you see compassion becomes rather - is that movement compassion? B: It would be beyond. K: That's it. That's why one must be awfully careful. B: Then again compassion might emerge out of it. K: Of course if you haven't got that. We had better stop. OJAI 8TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 19TH APRIL, 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' Krishnamurti: We left off with non movement. Dr Bohm: Yes. K: A human being who has been pursuing the path of becoming and has gone through all that and went through this sense of emptiness, silence, energy, and abandoned almost everything and comes to the point, the ground. And has this insight, how does all that affect his daily life? That was what we came to. B: Yes, that was the question. K: What is his relationship to society, what is his action with regard to war and the whole world - a world that is really living in darkness and struggling in darkness, what is his action? Right? I would say, sir, as we discussed the other day, it is non-movement. What does that mean? B: Yes, well we said before that the ground was movement without division. K: Without division, I forgot that, yes, quite right. B: In some sense it seems inconsistent to say non-movement while you say the ground is movement. K: The ground is movement, yes. I forgot all that. Would you say an ordinary, average man, educated, sophisticated, with all his unpleasant activities, he is constantly in movement. Right? B: Well a certain kind of movement. K: I mean a movement in time. B: Yes. K: A movement in becoming. And we are saying the man who has trodden - if I may use that word - that path and come to that point, and from there what is his action? We said for the moment, whatever that may mean, non-action, non-movement. What does that mean? B: Well it means, as you said, not taking part in this process. K: Yes, that, of course, that is obvious. If he doesn't take part in this process, what part does he play? Would you say a complete non-action? What does that mean? I see something but I am trying to put it into words. B: Well it is not clear why you should call it non-action, we might think that it was action of another kind which is not part of the process of becoming. K: It is not becoming. B: But it may still be action. K: He still has to live here. B: Well there is one sense that whatever you do is action, his action is not directed towards the illusory process, it is not involved in it, but it would be directed towards what underlies this illusory process. It would be directed, like we were discussing the other day the wrong turning which is continually coming out of the ground. Right? K: Yes, yes. You see various religions have described a man who has been saved, who is illuminated, who has achieved something or other. They have described very clearly what he is, how he walks, specially in Hindu religious books, there it is stated very clearly, I believe, how he looks, how he walks, the whole state of his being. I think that is merely a poetic description of something which is... B: You think it is imagination? K: I'm afraid a great deal of it is imagination. I have discussed this point with some and it is not like that, that is no imagination. Somebody who described it knew exactly what it was. B: Well how should he know? It is not clear. K: I don't want to personally, he said 'You are that' - I said 'Buzz off'. So what is a man of that kind, how does he live in this world? It is a very interesting question, this, if you go into it rather deeply. I think that is right, sir. There is a state of non-movement. That is, the non-movement which we have gone into. B: You see it is not clear exactly what you mean by non-movement. K: One becomes poetic, I am trying to avoid that. You see would it be right sir, even poetically: it is like a single tree in a field. There is no other tree but that tree, whatever the name of that tree is, it is there. B: Well why do you say non-movement? K: It is non-moving. B: The tree stands of course. K: A tree is a living, moving thing. I don't mean that. B: The tree in some sense is moving but in relation to the field it stands. That is the picture we get. K: You see I come to you, you have gone from the beginning to the end. And now you are at the end with a totally different kind of movement, which is timeless and all that. B: I agree. K: But you are in that, you are that. I come to you and say, 'What is that state mind of mind' - I think that is right - 'What is the state of your mind, that has walked on that path and ended something, totally moved out of darkness, what is the state of that mind?' B: If you say it is non-movement are you implying it is constant? K: It must be. Constant in the sense - what do you mean by constant? B: Well it can have many meanings, but... K: Continuous? B: No, no. K: Do you mean that it is... B:... static? K: Oh no. B: To stand firm, to stand together as a whole, you see. That is really its literal meaning. K: Is that it? B: That is the picture you have got of the tree as well, you know. That is the picture which the tree in the field suggested. K: Yes, I know. That is too romantic and poetic and it becomes rather deceptive. It is a nice image but let's move from it. What is the mind sir, what is that mind - I think we have to go through that - what is the mind, the quality of that mind that has started from the beginning and pursued the becoming, went through all that, the centre of darkness has been wiped away, that mind must be entirely different. No? Now what does such a mind do, or not do, in the world which is in darkness? Sorry, it sounds... B: Yes, well the mind does not do a thing, it does not enter into the movement of that world. K: Agreed. B: And in that sense we say that it is constant, not fixed but does not move. K: Static? B: No it's not static, it is constant which in a sense is also movement. There a constancy which is not merely static, which is also at the same time movement. K: We said that movement, not the becoming movement. B: Yes but the ground movement. K: Yes, let's call it the ground movement. B: Which is completely free. K: What has happened to that mind? Let's go into it a little bit. It has no anxiety, no fear and all the rest of it. You see the word 'compassion' and 'love' is beyond that. Right? B: Yes, well. That may emerge out of this ground. K: The mind being nothing, not a thing, and therefore empty of knowledge - sorry all this sounds so... unless you have followed it right from the beginning. B: You have to go through it otherwise it makes no sense. K: No sense. Empty of knowledge. Would it be always acting in the light of insight? B: Yes, well, it would be pervaded, well not always but it should be of the quality of insight. K: Yes, that is what I mean. B: Well 'always' brings in time, you see. K: Remove the word. B: I would use constantly. K: Yes constantly, yes, let's use the word 'constant'. B: It is a bit better but not good enough. K: Yes. Let's use the word 'constant'. It is acting constantly in that light, in that flash - we will use that word - in that flash of insight. I think that is right. So what does that mean in one's daily life? Earn a livelihood. B: Well, I mean that would be another point. You would have to find a way to stay alive. K: Stay alive. So that is why I am saying this: as civilization grows, begging is not allowed. B: Is criminal. You have to find some way to stay alive. K: I am just asking: What will you do? He has no profession. No skill because - knowledge and all that - he has no coin with which he can buy. B: Well wouldn't it be possible for this mind to earn enough to get what is needed to stay alive? K: How? Q: Why has he no skill to earn a livelihood? K: Why should he have skill? Q: To earn a livelihood. K: Why? Why must you have skill to earn a livelihood? You say that and another man says, 'Why should I have skill of any kind?' - I am just discussing, enquiring into it - why should I have any skill to earn a livelihood? B: Well suppose you had to take care of yourself anyway, you would need a certain skill. You see suppose you were by yourself in a cave, you know. K: Ah, I don't want a cave! B: I know. But whoever it is, you have to live somewhere, you need some skill to find the food which you need, you see if everybody were to do this then the human race would perish. K: I am not sure sir. B: Well what would happen then? K: That is what I am coming to. B: Right, right. At first sight it would seem that if everybody would say no skill is needed. K: No, because skill implies as we said, knowledge, from that knowledge experience and gradually develop a skill. And that skill gives you an opportunity to earn a livelihood, meagre or a great deal. And this man says, there may be a different way of living and earning. We are used to that pattern - right sir? And he may say, 'Look, that may be totally wrong'. B: It depends what you mean by skill. Say for example, suppose he has to drive a car, well that takes some skill, you see. He may want to drive. K: Yes. B: Is he going to do without that? K: I had better go carefully into the word 'skill'. B: Yes. I mean skill could have a bad meaning by being very clever at getting money. K: So this man is not avaricious, he is not money-minded, he is not storing up for the future, he hasn't any insurance, but he has to live, and when we use the word 'skill', as driving a car... B:... or a carpenter - a carpenter has skill. If all those skills were to vanish it would be impossible. K: The whole thing would collapse. B: Yes. K: I am not sure - do we mean by that, that kind of skill must be denied? B: No, it couldn't mean that. K: No. That would be too silly. B: But then people become very skilful at getting other people to give them money, you see! K: That might be the game. That may be it! As I am doing! Q: I wish you were more skilled at that! K: Sufficient unto the day. Q: Is it that now we have made a division between living and skill, skill and working, living and earning a livelihood? K: It is that, it is that. I need to have food, I need to have clothes and a shelter. Q: But is the division necessary? K: It is not division, I need it. Q: Yes, but as the society is built now we have a division between living and working. K: We have been through all that. We are talking of a man who has been through all this and has come back - come back - to the world and says, 'Here I am'. What is his relationship to society and what is he to do? Right sir? Has he any relationship to society? B: Well not in a deep sense. In a fundamental sense no, although there is a superficial relationship he has to have. K: All right. A superficial contact with the world. B: He has to obey the laws, he has to follow the traffic signals. K: Quite. But I want to find out sir, what is he to do? Write, talk, that means skill. B: Well is that the kind you don't think is necessary? Is that skill - well that kind of skill need not be harmful, you see. K: I am just asking. B: The same as the other skills, carpentry. K: Yes. That belong to that kind of skill. But what is he to do? I think if we could find out, sir, the quality of a mind that has been through from that from the beginning to the end, you know the last five or six discussions we have had, we went through all that step by step to the very end, and that man, that man's mind is entirely different, and he is in the world. How does he look upon the world? You have reached and come back - these are terms - and I am an ordinary man, living in this world, what is your relationship to me? Obviously none because I am living in a world of darkness and you are not. So your relationship can only exist when I come out - when darkness ends. B: Yes. K: Then there is only that, there is not a relationship, there is only that. But now there is division between you and me. And I look at you with my eyes which are accustomed to darkness and to division. And you don't. And yet you have to have some contact with me. You have to have, however superficial, however slight, a certain relationship with me. Is that relationship compassion - not translated by me as compassion? Not say, 'Oh it shows you are not compassionate if you don't do this'. So I am not looking from my darkness at you who may be compassionate. So I cannot judge what your compassion is. Right? B: That follows from that, yes. K: I don't know what your love is, what your compassion is because my only love and compassion has been this. And so what do I do with you? B: Which one are we talking about now? It is not clear to me which one we are discussing. K: You, 'X', have been through all that and come back. B: Yes and 'Y' has not. K: 'Y' has not. 'Y' says to you, 'Y' asks - I asked this just now, I have forgotten it. I would say sir, 'Y' says, 'Who are you? You seem so different, your way of looking at life is different. Who are you'? And what will 'Y' do with you, 'X'? That is the question. Not what you will do to me, but what will I do with you? I don't know if I am making it clear. B: Yes I understand, what will 'Y' do, what will 'Y' do with 'X', I mean what will he do? K: Our question has been what will 'X' do with 'Y'. On the contrary, I think we are putting the wrong question. What will 'Y' do with 'X'? I think what would happen generally is I would worship him, kill him, or neglect him. Right? B: Yes. K: If 'Y' worships 'X' then everything is very simple. He has the goods. He has the goodies of the world. But that doesn't answer my question. My question is not only what will 'Y' do to 'X' but will 'X' do with 'Y'? 'X's' demand is to say, 'Look, walk out of this darkness, there is no answer in this darkness so walk out.' - it doesn't matter, whatever phrase we use, dispel it, get rid of it, etc., etc. And 'Y' then says 'Help me, show me the way' - I am back again, you follow? So what will 'Y' do to 'X'? B: Well I can't see that 'Y' can do very much except what you said to worship, or to do something else. K: Kill him or neglect him. B: But if 'X' has compassion, if compassion works in 'X' - right? K: Yes, 'X' is that. He won't even call it compassion. B: No but we call it that, then 'X' will work to find a way to penetrate the darkness. K: Wait: so 'X's' job is to work on darkness? B: Well to discover how to penetrate darkness. K: In that way he is earning a living. B: Well possibly. K: Ah. No, no. I am talking seriously. B: It depends on whether people are willing to pay him for it. K: No, I am taking seriously. B: Well it is possible. K: Probably that is. 'X' is the teacher. 'X' is out of society, out of darkness. 'X' is unrelated to this field of darkness and 'X' is asking, teaching, saying to the people of darkness, 'Come out'. What's wrong with that? B: Well nothing is wrong with that. K: That is his means of livelihood. What's wrong with that? B: It's perfectly all right as long as it works, it is perfectly all right. K: It seems to work! B: Of course if there were a lot of people like 'X' there would be some limit. K: No sir. What would happen if there were lots of people like 'X'? B: That is an interesting question, yes. K: What would happen? B: Well then I think there would be something revolutionary. K: That's just it. B: The whole thing would change. K: That is just it. If there were lots of people like that they would not be divided. That is the whole point, right? B: I think that even if ten or fifteen people were undivided they would exert a force that had never been seen in our history. K: Tremendous. That's right. B: Because I don't think it has ever happened, that ten people were undivided. K: That is 'X's' job in life. He says that is the only thing. A group of those ten 'X's' will bring a totally different kind of revolution. Right? Will society stand for that? B: They will have this extreme intelligence and so they will find a way to do it, you see. K: Of course, of course. B: Society will stand for it because they will be intelligent enough to not to provoke society and society will not react before it is too late. K: Quite right, quite right. You are saying something that is actually happening. So what happens? Would you say then that the function of many 'X's' is to awaken human beings to that intelligence which will dispel the darkness? And that is his means of livelihood. Right? B: Yes. K: Then there are those people who in darkness cultivate this, exploit people, and there are 'X's' who don't exploit people. All right. That seems very simple. But I don't think it is all that simple. B: Right. K: Is that the only function of 'X'? That seems very simple, doesn't it? B: Well it is a difficult function, it is not so simple. K: The function may be complicated but that can easily be solved. But I want to find out something much deeper that mere function. B: Yes, well function is not enough. K: That's it. Apart from function, what is he to do? 'X' says to 'Y', listen, and 'Y' takes time and all the rest of it and gradually, perhaps once, sometime he will wake up and move away. And is that all 'X' is going to do in life? - in life, you understand sir? Is that all? B: Well that can only be an outcome of something deeper. K: The deeper is all that. B: What? K: The ground. B: The ground and so on, yes. K: But is that all he has to do in this world? Just to teach people to move out of darkness? B: Well that seems to be the prime task at the moment, in the sense that if this doesn't happen the whole society will sooner or later collapse anyway. But he needs to be in some sense creative, more deeply, I think. K: What is that? B: Well that is not clear. K: Sir, suppose you are 'X' and 'Y' - 'X' is you and has an enormous field in which you operate, not merely teaching me, but you have this extraordinary movement which is not time and all that. That is, you have this abounding energy and you have produced all that to teach me - you follow - to move out of darkness. B: Yes, well that can only be a part of it. K: So what does the rest do, you follow? I don't know if I am conveying this. B: Well that is what I tried to mean by some creative action, beyond this is taking place. K: Yes, beyond that. You may write, you may preach, you may heal, you may do this and that, but all those are all rather trivial. Right sir? Trivial, it is a very small business. But you have something else. Have I reduced you, 'X', to my pettiness? You can't. My pettiness says, 'You must do something. You must teach, you must write, you must heal, you must do something to help me to move.' Right? You comply to the very smallest degree, but you have something much more immense than that. You understand my question? B: Yes. So what? K: How is that operating on 'Y'? B: On 'Y'? K: How is that immensity operating on 'Y' apart from darkness -I don't know if I am conveying this? B: Well are you saying that there is some more direct action? K: Either there is more direct action, or 'X' is doing something totally different to affect the consciousness of man. B: Yes, all right. What could this be? K: Because you are not satisfied, in quotes, merely preaching, talking, and all that petty stuff. That immensity which you are must affect, must do something. B: Are you saying that it must in the sense of a feeling that you need to do it, or are you saying must in the sense of necessity? K: It must. B: It must necessarily do so. Right? But how will it affect mankind? You see when you say this, it would suggest to people that there is some sort of extrasensory effect, you know that it spreads. K: That is what I am trying to capture. B: Yes. K: That is what I am trying to convey. B: Not merely through words, through the activities or gestures. K: Sir, leave the activity alone. That is simple. That is peanuts! B: It is only to make it clear what you mean to say, that it is not that. K: It is not that. B: Not just that. K: Not just that. Because that immensity must - must... B: Necessarily then, necessarily act? K: I wonder if you see what I am trying to get at sir. B: You are saying that there is a more direct action. K: No, no. All right. That immensity necessarily has other activities. B: Yes, other activities in other ways, at other levels, other... K: Yes, other activities. Which has been translated in the Hindu and perhaps a little bit as, various degrees of consciousness. B: There are different levels of acting. K: Levels. B: Or degrees. K: That too is a very small affair. You follow? What do you say sir? B: Well since the consciousness emerges from the ground that this activity is affecting all mankind from the ground. K: Yes. B: You see many people will find this very difficult to understand, of course. K: I am not interested in many people. I want to understand you, 'X' and I, 'Y', that ground, that immensity, is not limited to such a potty little affair. It couldn't. B: Yes, well the ground includes physically the whole universe. K: The whole universe, yes, and to reduce all that to... B:... to these little activities. K: It sounds so silly. B: Yes, well I think that raises the question of what is the significance of mankind in the universe, or in the ground? K: Yes, that's it. That's it. B: Because these little things are very little, even the best that we have been doing has very little significance on that scale. Right? K: Yes. I think - think in quotes, this is just opening the chapter - I think that 'X' is doing something - not doing, by his very existence... B:... that he is making something possible? K: Yes. Einstein, when you were a scientist, has made something possible, which man hadn't discovered before. B: We can see that fairly easily because that works through the usual channels of society. K: Yes, that I understand. I can see that. What is this man bringing apart from the little things? What is he bringing? Would you say, sir, - putting it into words it sounds wrong - 'X' has that immense intelligence, that energy, that something and he must operate at a much greater level than one can possibly conceive, which must affect the consciousness of those who are living in darkness. B: Well possibly so. The question is will this effect show in any way, you know, manifestly? K: Apparently it doesn't - if you heard the morning news! See television and all the rest of the world, apparently it is not doing it. B: Yes, that is what is difficult, it is a matter of great concern. K: But it must affect sir. B: It has to. K: It has to. B: Well why do you say it has to? K: Because light must affect darkness. B: Yes. Well you say, well perhaps 'Y' might say he is not sure, living in darkness he is not sure that there is such an effect. He might say maybe there is, I want to see it manifest. But not seeing anything and still being in darkness, he says what shall I do? K: I understand that. So are you saying: 'X's' only activity is just that? B: No. Merely that it may well be that the activity is much greater but you know it hasn't shown. If we could see it. K: How would it be shown? How would 'Y', who wants proof of it... B: Well not proof but just to be shown. Let's say 'Y' might say something like this: many people have made a similar statement and some of them have obviously been wrong and you know one wants to say it could be true. You see until now I think the things we have said make sense and you know they follow to a certain extent. K: Yes, I understand all that sir. B: And now you are saying something which goes much further and other people have said things like that and one feels they were on the wrong track, you know, that they were fooling themselves, certainly some of these people were. K: No. No. 'X' says we are being very logical B: Yes but at this stage logic will not carry us any further. K: It is very reasonable, rational, we have been through all that. So 'X's' mind is not acting in any irrational way. B: Well you could say that having seen that the thing was reasonable so far, 'Y' may have some confidence that it may go further. K: Yes that is what I am trying to say. B: Of course there is no proof. K: No. B: So we could explore. K: That is what I am trying to do. B: Yes. Q: What about the other activities of 'X'? We said 'X' has a function, teaching, but we said 'X' has other activities. K: May be. Must have. Necessarily must. Q: Which are what? K: I don't know, we are trying to find that out. B: Well you are saying that somehow he makes possible - the way I understand it - an activity of the ground in the whole consciousness of mankind which would not have been possible without him. K: Yes. B: That is what I understand. K: Yes. Q: His contact with 'Y' is not verbal, only verbal. It is not that 'Y' has to listen but some other quality... K: Yes but 'X' says that is all a petty little affair. That is of course understood but 'X' says there is something much greater than all that. Q: The effect of 'X' is far greater than perhaps can be put into words. K: We are trying to find out what is that greater that must necessarily be operating? Q: Is it something that appears in the daily life of 'X'? K: Yes. Daily life of 'X' is apparently doing the petty little stuff - teaching, writing, book-keeping, or whatever it is. Is that all? You follow what I mean? It seems so silly. B: Are you saying that in the daily life 'X' does not look so different from anybody else? K: No, he apparently is not. B: But there is something else going on... K: Yes. B:... which does not show, right? K: That's it. When 'X' talks it may be different, he may say things differently but... B:... that is not fundamental because there are so many people who say things. K: I know. B: Well there are people who say things differently from other people. K: But the man who has walked through that right from the beginning to the end, he is entirely different and when he says something, that is also different, but I am not concerned about that. Let's leave that. We are asking: such a man has the whole of that energy to call upon, and to reduce all that energy to this petty little place seems so ridiculous. B: Yes, well let me ask a question. You see why does the ground require this man to operate on mankind? You see why can't the ground, as it were, operate directly in mankind to clear things up? K: Ah, just a minute, just a minute. Are you asking why does the ground demand action? B: Why does it require a particular man, you see? K: Oh, yes, that I can easily explain. It is part of existence, like the stars. Q: Can the immensity act directly on mankind? Does it have to inform a man to enter the consciousness of mankind? K: We are talking about something else. I want to find out, 'X' wants to say, I am not going to be reduced to writing, talking, that is too petty, too small. We will do that, but leave that alone. And the question is, as you put, is why does the ground need this man? It doesn't need him. B: Yes but when he is here the ground - if he is here then the ground will use him. K: That is all. B: Well would it be possible that the ground could do something to clear up this... K: That is what I want to find out. That is why I am asking in different words. The man, the ground doesn't need man but the man has touched the ground. B: Yes. K: So the ground is using him, let's call it, is employing him. He is part of that movement. Is that all? Do you follow what I mean sir? Am I asking the wrong questions? Why should he do anything? Except this? B: Well perhaps he does nothing. K: That very doing nothing may be the doing. B: Well in doing nothing it makes possible the action of the ground. It may be that. In doing nothing which has any specified aim... K: That's right. Specified content which can be translated into human terms. B: Well yes, but still he is supremely active in doing nothing. K: Yes. All this sounds... Q: Is there an action which is beyond time for that man? K: He is that. Q: Then we cannot ask for a result of that man. K: He is not asking results. Q: But 'Y' is asking for a result. K: No. He says I am not concerned with 'Y'. I am only concerned, 'X' says I am only concerned to talk, or do something in a petty little way, that is a very small thing and I am not bothered about that. But there is a vast field which must affect the whole of mankind. B: Well there is an analogy which may not be very good but we can consider it. In chemistry a catalyst makes possible a certain action without itself taking part. K: Yes. B: But merely by being what is it. K: Yes, what it is. Is that is what is happening? Even that is a small affair. B: Yes. Q: And even there 'Y' would say it isn't happening because the world is still in a mess. So is there a truth in the world for the activity of that man? K: 'X' says he is sorry that is no question at all. I am not interested in proving anything. Right? It isn't a mathematical problem or technical problem to be shown and proved. He says this is so. I have walked from the beginning of man to the very end of man and this is there, there is a movement which is timeless. Right? The ground which is the universe, the cosmos, everything. But the ground doesn't need the man but the man has come upon it. Right? And he is still a man in the world. Right? And that man says 'I write and do something or other.' - not to prove the ground, not to do anything but just out of 'X's' compassion he does that. But there is much greater movement which necessarily must play a part in the world. Q: Does the greater movement play a part through 'X'? K: Obviously, obviously. If there were ten 'X's' of course it would be... I think we are pursuing something which may have no value at all. B: What do you mean, no value? Why do you say no value? K: Value in the sense - 'X' may only see - I am not saying this out of vanity, out of escape - 'X' says there is something else operating which cannot possibly be put into words. That may be a slight escape but he says 'What am I to do?' There is nothing which a man like 'Y' will understand. He will immediately translate it into some kind of illusory thing. But 'X' says there is. Right? Sir, it must be. Otherwise it is all so childish. B: Well, I think that 'Y' might say it doesn't follow that the universe isn't something childish or trivial. But if you say it isn't trivial. K: No, it is not trivial. B: No, but I think the general view which people are developing now is that the universe has no meaning. K: Yes, yes. B: That it moves any old way, all sorts of things happen and none of them have any meaning. K: None of them have meaning for the man who is here, but the man who is there, speaking relatively, says it is full of meaning, not invented by thought and all that but it has got - the word meaning has no meaning there. All right sir. Leave the vastness and all that. Which means 'X' says, the occupation with pettiness and perhaps there will be ten people who will join the game, and that might affect the society -which will not be communism, socialism, this, that, the other. It might be totally different, based on intelligence, compassion and all the rest of it. B: Well if there were ten they might find a way to spread much more, you see. K: That's what I am trying to get at. I can't get it. B: What do you mean? K: Sir you bring the universe and I translate it into - you understand sir? B: Well if the whole of mankind were to see this, are you saying then that that would be something different? K: Oh, yes sir. Of course. B: Would it be a new... K:... it would be paradise on earth. B: It would be like an organism of a new kind. K: Of course. I think we had better stop there. What time is it? B: Ten past five K: I think we had better stop there sir. You see I am not satisfied with this. B: Well what is it? K: I am not satisfied, in quotes satisfied, in leaving this immensity to be reduced to some few words. You follow? It seems so stupid, incredible. You see man, 'Y' is concerned with 'show me, prove it to me, what benefit it has, will I get my future...' - you follow? He is concerned with that. And he is looking at 'X' with the eyes that are so accustomed to this pettiness. So either he reduces that immensity to his pettiness and puts it in a temple, and has therefore lost it completely. But 'X' says I won't even look at that. There is something so immense that 'X' says please do look at this, and 'Y' is always translating it into 'show it to me', 'prove it to me', 'will I have a better life' - you follow? He is concerned always with that. 'X' brings light. That's all he can do. Isn't that enough? We had better stop there sir. I would like to have a go with you at this sometime, maybe later. B: To bring the light which would allow other people to be open to the immensity. K: You see, is it like this sir? We only see a small part but that very small part extends to infinity. That means endless. B: Endless, yes. Small part of what? K: No. That immensity we see only as a very small thing. And that immensity is the whole universe. I can't help but think that it must have some immense affect on 'Y', on society. B: Yes. Well certainly the perception of this must have an effect but it seems that this is not in the consciousness of society at the moment. K: I know. B: But you are saying still the effect is there? K: Yes sir. Q: Are you saying that the perception of even a small part is not the infinity? K: Of course, of course. Q: It is in itself the changing factor? K: I think we had better stop here. B: Well, I don't want to raise a question but do you think it is possible that a thing like this could divert the course of mankind away from the dangerous course he is taking? K: Yes sir, that is what I am thinking too. But to divert the course of man's destruction somebody must listen. Right? Somebody - ten people must listen. B: Yes. K: Listen to that immensity calling. B: So the immensity may divert the course of man, yes. The individual cannot do it. K: Yes, the individual cannot do it, obviously. But the individual, but 'X', who is supposed to be an individual, has trodden this path and says, 'Listen', but they don't listen. B: Well then is it possible to discover how to make people listen? K: No, we are back. Sir, we had better stop. B: What do you mean? K: Don't act, you have nothing to do. B: What does it mean not to do a thing? K: Sir I realize as 'Y' that whatever I do, whatever I do, sacrifice, give up, practise, whatever I do I am still living in that circle of darkness. Right? So 'X' says, 'Don't act, you have nothing to do.' You follow? That is translated. I'll wait. You do everything except wait and see what happens. I must pursue this sir. It is all so hopeless, hopeless from the point of view of 'Y', not to 'X'. BROCKWOOD PARK 9TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 1ST JUNE 1980 'THE ENDING OF TIME' Krishnamurti: Sir, I would like to talk over with you, and perhaps with Narayan too, what is happening to the human brain. I will go into it a little bit. You have a highly cultivated civilization and yet at the same time barbarous, great selfishness clothed in all kinds of spiritual garbs - holy spirit, holy ghost and all the rest of it, but deeply, deep down, heightening, frightening selfishness. And man's brain has been evolving through millennia upon millennia and it has come to this point: divisive, destructive and so on, which we all know. So I was wondering whether the human brain, not a particular brain but the human brain, is deteriorating? Whether it is capable of revival, renewal or it is a slow, steady decline? And whether it is possible in one's lifetime to bring about in itself a total renewal from all this, a renewal that will be pristine, original, unpolluted? I have been wondering about it and I thought we needed to discuss it. And I think the human brain is not a particular brain, it doesn't belong to me or to anyone else, it is the human brain which has evolved ten million, or five million, or three million years. And in that evolution it has gathered tremendous experience, knowledge and all the cruelties and the vulgarities and the brutalities of selfishness. Is there a possibility of it sloughing off, throwing off all this and becoming something else. Because apparently it is functioning in patterns, whether it is a religious pattern or a scientific pattern or a business pattern or a family pattern, it is always operating, functioning in a very small narrow circle. And those circles are clashing against each other. And there seems to be no end to this. You follow? Bohm: Yes. K: So what will break down this forming of patterns, not falling into other new patterns, but breaking down the whole system of patterns, whether pleasant or unpleasant? After all the brain has had so many shocks, so many challenges, so many pressures on it and if that brain is not capable in itself to renew, to rejuvenate itself, there is very little hope. You follow? B: You see one difficulty might present itself that if you are thinking of brain's structure, we cannot get into the structure physically. K: Physically you cannot. I know, we have discussed this. So what is it to do? I mean the brain specialists can look at it, take a dead brain of a human being and examine it, but it doesn't solve the problem. Right? B: No. K: So what is a man, or a human being, to do knowing it cannot be changed from outside or the scientist and the brain specialists, and the nerve specialist, neurologist and all that, explain the thing but it is there, their explanation, their investigation, is not going to solve this. Right. B: Well, yes, there is no evidence that it can. K: No evidence, all right. I'll put it a little more congenially. B: Some people may have thought so. Some people who do biofeedback think that they can influence the brain, by connecting an instrument to the electrical potentials in the skull and being able to look at them, you can also change your heart beat and your blood pressure and various other things. They have raised the hope that something could be done. K: But they are not succeeding. B: They are not getting very far. K: But we can't wait for these scientists and bio-feedbackers -sorry! - to solve the problem. So what shall we do? B: Well then the next question is: whether the brain can be aware of its own structure. K: Yes, that is the first question. Can the brain be aware of its own movement? And the other question is: can the brain, not only be aware of its own movement, can the brain itself have enough energy to break all patterns and move out of it? B: Yes, well you have to ask whether the brain can do that. You see to what extent is the brain free to break out of patterns? K: What do you mean? B: Well, you see if you begin by saying the brain is caught in a pattern, it may not be so. K: Apparently it is, apparently. B: As far as we can see. It may not be free to break out. K: I understand. B: It may not have the power. K: That is what I said, not enough energy, not enough power. B: Yes, it may not be able to take the action needed to get out. K: So it has become its own prisoner. Then what? B: Well then that is the end. K: Is that the end? B: If that is true then that is the end. Say if the brain cannot break out then perhaps people would choose to try some other way, I don't know, to solve the problem. Narayan: When we speak of the brain in one sense the brain is connected to the senses and the nervous system, the feedback is there. Is there another instrument to which the brain is connected which has a different effect on the brain? K: What do you mean by that sir? Some other factor? N: Some other factor in the human system itself. Because obviously through the senses the brain does get nourishment, but still that is not enough. Is there some other internal factor which gives energy to the brain? K: You see, sir, I think - I want to discuss this. The brain is constantly in occupation, the body's problems, holding on, attachment and so on, so it is constantly in a state of occupation. That may be the central factor. And if it is not in occupation does it go sluggish? That is one factor. If it is not in occupation can it maintain the energy that is required to break down the patterns? I don't know if I am making myself clear? B: Yes. Now the first point is that if it is not occupied somebody might think that it would just take it easy. K: No, of course not, then it becomes lazy and all that. I don't mean that. B: If you mean not occupied but still active.. K: Of course, I mean that. B:.. we have to go into what is the nature of the activity. K: That's what I want to go into. If this brain which is so occupied with conflicts, struggles, attachments, fears, pleasures, you know, all that, and this occupation gives to the brain its own energy. Right? If it is not occupied, will it become lazy, drugged and so lose its elasticity, as it were, or if it doesn't become lazy and so on will that unoccupied state give to the brain the required energy to break? B: Yes, well if you ask a question, you see what makes you say this will happen? It says something about the brain - we were discussing the other day that when the brain is kept busy with intellectual activity and thought, then it does not decay and shrink, you see. K: Yes, as long as it is thinking, moving, living. B: Thinking in a rational way, then it remains strong. K: Yes. That is what I want to get at too. Which is, as long as it is functioning, moving, thinking rationally.. B:.. it remains strong. If it starts irrational movement then it breaks down. Also if it gets caught in a routine it begins to die. K: That's it. That is, if the brain is caught in a routine, either the mediation routine, or the routine of the priests.. B: Or the daily life of the farmer. K:.. the farmer and so on and so on, it must gradually become dull. B: Not only that but it seems to shrink. K: To shrink physically. B: Perhaps some of the cells die. K: That is what we were discussing the other day, yes. To shrink physically. And the opposite to that is this eternal occupation with business - as a lawyer, as a doctor as a - you follow? - a scientist, thinking, thinking, thinking. And we think that also that prevents shrinking. B: Well it does. Well at least experience seems to show it does, the measurements they made. K: Yes, it does too. That's it. Excuse the word 'farmer'. B: Whatever it is, the routine clerical worker and anybody who does a routine job. K: Anybody. B: Yes, his brain starts to shrink at a certain age. Now that is what they discovered and just as the body not being used the muscles begin to lose their.. K:.. so take lots of exercise! B: Well, they say exercise the body and exercise the brain. K: Yes. If it is caught in any pattern, any routine, any directive too, it must shrink. B: It is not clear why. Could you go into what makes it shrink, you see. K: That is fairly simple. It is repetition. B: Well repetition is mechanical and doesn't really use the full capacity of the brain. K: One has noticed the people who have spent years and years in meditation are the most dull people on earth. And also those lawyers and professors and all the rest of them, you can see them, there is ample evidence of all that. N: The only thing that article seems to say that rational thinking postpones senility. But rational thinking itself becomes a pattern at some time. B: Well it might. They didn't carry it that far you see, but rational thinking pursued in a narrow area might become part of the pattern too. K: of course, of course. B: But if you say that there is some other way. K: We will go into that, I want to go into that. B: But let's clear up about the body first. You see if somebody does a lot of exercise for the body it remains strong, but it might become a mechanical.. K:.. mechanical, of course, of course. B: And therefore it would have a bad effect. K: You see yoga.. N: What about the various, if I may use the word, religious instruments - the traditional religious instruments, yoga, tantra, kundalini, etc. K: I know, oh, they must shrink. Because you see what is happening, yoga, take for example, it was not vulgarised, if I may use that word. It was kept strictly to the very, very few, who were not concerned about kundalini and all that kind of stuff, who were concerned with leading a moral, ethical so-called spiritual life, with ordinary exercise, but not this fantastic gymnastics. You see I want to get at the root of this, sir. B: I think there is something related to this. It seems that before men organized into society, he was living close to nature and it was not possible to live in a routine. K: No, it was not. B: But it was insecure, completely insecure. K: So are we saying, that is what I want to get at - are we saying the brain becomes extraordinarily - is not caught in a pattern because if the brain itself lives in a state of uncertainty.. B: Well.. K:.. without becoming neurotic. B: Well I think that is more clear when you say not becoming neurotic, then certainty becomes a form of neurosis. K: Neurosis, of course. B: But I would rather say the brain lives without having certainty, without demanding it. K: Yes, without demanding certainty. B: Yes, without demanding certain knowledge. K: So are we saying that knowledge also withers the brain? B: Well when it is repetitious and becomes mechanical, yes. K: But knowledge itself? B: Well, yes, we have to be careful there. K: I know. B: I think that knowledge has a tendency to become mechanical. That is, to get fixed, but we could be always learning, you see. K: But learning from a centre, learning as an accumulation process. B: Learning I think with something fixed. You see you learn something as fixed and then you learn from there. If we were to be learning without holding anything permanently fixed. K: That is, learning and not adding. Can you do that? B: Yes, well you see I think to a certain extent we have to drop our knowledge. Knowledge may be valid up to a point and then it ceases to be valid, it gets in the way. You could say that our civilization is collapsing from too much knowledge. K: Of course. B: We don't drop what is in the way. N: Many forms of knowledge are additive. Unless you know the previous thing you can't do the next thing. Would you say that kind of knowledge is repetitive? B: No. As long as you are learning. But if you hold some principle fixed and say it cannot change, you see if you hold the centre fixed or anything fixed then that knowledge becomes mechanical. But if you say you have got to keep on learning. K: Learning what? B: Whatever you are doing. Say for example, suppose you have to make a living. People must organize the society and all kinds of things, they need knowledge. K: But there you add more and more. B: That's right. You may also get rid of some. K: Of course. B: Some gets in the way, you see. It is continually moving there. K: Yes, but I am asking apart from that, knowledge itself. B: Well yes. Do you mean knowledge without this content. K: Yes, the knowing mind. B: Mind which merely wants knowledge, is that what you are saying? - for its own sake. K: Yes. I want to question, if I may, the whole idea of having knowledge. B: Yes, but again it is not too clear because you see we accept that we need knowledge. K: Of course, at a certain level. B: It is not clear what kind of knowledge it is that you are questioning. K: I am questioning the experience that leaves knowledge, leaves a mark. B: Yes, but again you say that the experience of driving a car -we want to make it clear. What kind, it leaves a mark psychologically, you mean? K: Psychologically, of course. B: Rather than knowledge of technique and matter and so on. But you see when you use the word knowledge by itself it tends to include the whole. K: We have said that knowledge at a certain level is essential, there you can add and take away and keep on changing, moving, there; but I am questioning whether psychological knowledge is not in itself a factor of the shrinking of the brain. B: What do you mean by psychological knowledge? Knowledge about the mind, knowledge about myself? K: Yes. Knowledge about myself and living in that knowledge, and accumulating that knowledge. B: So if you keep on accumulating knowledge about yourself or about relationships.. K:.. yes, about relationships. Yes that is it. Would you say such knowledge helps the brain, makes the brain somewhat inactive, makes the brain shrink? B: Brings it into a rut. K: Yes. B: But one should see why, what is it about this knowledge that makes so much trouble? K: What is this knowledge that makes so much trouble? In relationship that knowledge does create trouble. B: Yes, it gets in the way. K: In the way, yes. B: Because it fixes. K: If I have an image about him and I am related to him, that knowledge is obviously going to impede - it becomes a pattern. B: Yes, well the knowledge about myself and about him and how we are related, it makes a pattern. K: Yes, and therefore that becomes a routine and so it loses it.. B: Yes, and it occurred to me you see that routine in that area is more dangerous than routine in say the area of daily work. K: That's right. B: And if routine in ordinary work can shrink the brain then in that area it might do some worse thing because it has a bigger effect. K: So, can the brain, in psychological matters, be entirely free from knowledge, from this kind of knowledge? That is, sir, look: I am a businessman and I get into the car, or bus or a taxi, or the tube, and I am thinking what I am going to do, whom I am going to meet, a business talk, and my mind is all the time living in that area. I come home, there is a wife and children, sex and all that, that also becomes a psychological knowledge from which I am acting. So there is the knowledge of my business and contacts and all that, and also there is the knowledge with regard to my wife, and myself and my reactions: these two are in contradiction. Or I am unaware of these two and just carry on. If I am aware of these two it becomes a disturbing factor. B: Well, also people find that it is a routine and they get bored with it and they begin to.. K:.. divorce and then the whole circus begins. B: They may hope that by becoming occupied with something else they will get out of their.. K:.. yes, go to church, etc., etc. Any escape is an occupation. So I am asking whether this psychological knowledge is not a factor of the shrinkage of the brain? Sorry! B: Well, yes, it could be a factor. K: It is. It is. B: If knowledge of your profession can be a factor, then this knowledge is stronger. K: Of course, of course. Much stronger. N: When you say psychological knowledge you are distinguishing, making a distinction between psychological knowledge and let us say scientific knowledge or factual knowledge? K: Of course, we have said that. N: But I am a little wary about this article and the fact that scientific knowledge and other types of factual knowledge helps to extend or make the brain bigger. That in itself doesn't lead anywhere. Though it postpones energy. K: What? N: Well exercising rational thinking. K: Dr Bohm explained very carefully: rational thinking becomes merely routine. I think logically and therefore I have learned the trick of that and I keep on repeating it. N: That is what happens to most forms of rational thinking. K: Of course. B: I think that say they depend on being continually faced with unexpected problems. You see as they said lawyers will beg that their brains last longer because they are faced with constantly different problems and therefore they cannot make it entirely routine, you see. Perhaps eventually they could but it would take a while. K: But sir, just a minute, just a minute. They may have different clients with different problems, but they are acting from knowledge. B: They would say not entirely, they have got to find new facts and so on. K: Of course, they are not entirely but the basis is knowledge -precedence and book knowledge and various experiences with various clients. B: But then you would have to say that some other more subtle degeneration of the brain takes place, not merely shrinkage. K: That's right. That's what I want to get at. B: You see there is also what is known, that when a baby is born the brain cells have very few cross connections, then they gradually increase in number, then as a person approaches senility they begin to go back. So the quality of those cross connections could be wrong. As another example but it would be too subtle to show up in these measurements but if for example, if you repeated them too often, they would get too fixed. N: Are all the brain functions confined to rational forms, or are there some functions which have a different quality? B: Well, it is known, for example, that a large part of the brain deals with movement of the body and so on, with muscles and with various organs, and this part does not shrink with age, but the part that deals with rational thought if it is not used does shrink. Then there may be other functions that are totally unknown, that is, very little is known actually about the brain. N: Which we don't touch. Is there a possibility of that sort? K: Narayan, what we are saying, what I am trying to explain: we are only using one part, or very partially the brain, and that partial activity is the occupation, either rational or irrational, or logical and so still using the part. And as long as the brain is occupied it must be in that limited area. Would you say that? B: Well, then what will happen when it is not occupied? K: We will go into that in a minute. B: Well we can say that it may tend to spend most of the time occupied in that limited set of functions which are mechanical and that will produce some subtle degeneration of the brain tissues since anything like that will affect the brain tissue. K: Are we saying that senility is the result of mechanical way of living? Mechanical knowledge and so the brain has no freedom, no space, no sense of.. B: Well, that is the suggestion. It is not necessarily accepted by all the people who work on the brain. They have shown that the brain cells start to die around the age of thirty or forty at a steady rate but this.. K: Be careful! B:.. but this may be a factor but I don't think their measurements are so good they can test for effect as to how the brain is used. You see they are merely rough measurements made statistically. And so you want to propose that this death of the brain cells, or the degeneration, will come from the wrong way of using the brain? K: That's right. That is what I am trying to get at. B: Yes, and there is a little bit of evidence in favour of this from the scientists. K: Thank god! B: But I think that the brain scientists don't know very much about it. K: Sir, you see scientists, brain specialists, are, if I may use a rather easy word, they are going out, examining things outside, but not taking themselves as guinea pigs and going through that. B: Well mostly you see except for those who do bio-feedback, they are trying to work on themselves in a very indirect way. K: Yes. Well I feel we haven't time for all that stuff. B: Yes, that is too slow and it isn't very deep. K: Not very deep. So let's come back to the point. I realize that any activity which is repeated, any action that is directed in the narrow sense, any method, any routine, logical or illogical, does affect the brain and so on and so on. We have understood that very clearly. And knowledge at a certain level is essential, and also psychological knowledge about oneself, one's experiences, all that, also becomes routine, the images I have about myself obviously are a routine, and so that helps to bring about a shrinkage of the brain. I have understood all that very clearly. Now I say to myself, any kind of occupation apart from the mechanical - not mechanical.. B: Physical. K:.. physical occupation, the occupation with oneself, that obviously does bring about shrinkage of the brain. Now how is this process to stop? And when it does stop will there be a renewal? B: Yes, I think again that some brain scientists would doubt that the brain cells could be renewed, but I don't know that there is any proof one way or the other. K: I think they can be renewed. That is what I want to get at. B: So we have to discuss that. N: I want to put this question because in one discussion between you in Ojai you are implying that mind is different from the brain, mind is distinct from the brain. K: Not quite. Did I? N: Yes, the possibility of mind as distinct from the brain. B: It was universal mind. N: Mind in the sense that one has access to this mind and it is not the brain. Do you consider that possibility? K: I don't quite follow this. I would say that the mind is all-inclusive. N: Yes. K: When it is all-inclusive, brain, emotions, all that, when it is totally whole, not divisive in itself, there is a quality which is universal. Right? N: One has access to it? K: Not one, you can't reach it, no. You can't say, I have access to it. N: I am saying access, one doesn't possess it but.. K: You can't possess the sky. N: No, my only point is: is there a way of being open to it and is there a function of the mind, the whole of it, which is accessible through education? K: I think there is. We will come to that presently if you can stick to this point. We have reached a certain point in our discussion. Don't go back and repeat it again. We are asking now, having understood all that, after this discussion, can the brain itself renew, rejuvenate, become young again without any shrinkage at all? I think it can. I want to open a new chapter and discuss it. I think it can. Psychologically knowledge that man has acquired is crippling it. The Freudians, the Jungians, or the latest psychologist, the latest psychotherapist, are all helping to make the brain shrink. Sorry! I hope there is nobody here. N: Is there a way of forgetting this knowledge then? K: No, no. Not forgetting. I see what they are doing and I see the waste, I see what is taking place if I follow that line. I see it, obviously. So I don't follow that avenue at all. So I discard altogether analysis. That is a pattern we have learnt, not only from the recent psychologists and psychotherapists but also it is the tradition of a million years, to analyze, introspect, say, 'I must' and 'I must not', 'This is right, this is wrong' - you know the whole process. I personally don't do it and so I reject that whole method. We are coming to a point, which is: direct perception and immediate action. Because our perception is directed by knowledge - the past perceives and so the past, which is knowledge, perceiving and acting from that is a factor of shrinking, senility. Shrinking the brain. So is there a perception which is not time-binding? Right, sir? And so action which is immediate. Am I making myself clear? That is, sir, the brain has evolved through time, and it has set the pattern of time in action. And as long as the brain is active that way it is still living in a pattern of time and so becoming senile. If we could break that pattern of time, then the brain has broken out of its pattern and therefore something else takes place. I don't know if I am making myself clear? N: How does it break out of the pattern? K: I will come to that but first let's see if it is so. B: Yes, well you are saying that the pattern is the pattern of time. K: The pattern of time. B: Perhaps this should be clarified. I think that what you mean by analysis is some sort of process based on past knowledge which organizes your perception and you take a series of steps to try to accumulate knowledge about the whole thing. And now you say this is a pattern of time and you have to break out of it. You have to say what is that. K: If we agree to that, if we say this is so: the brain is functioning in a pattern of time. B: Yes. Now then you have to ask, you see I think most people would ask: what other pattern is possible? K: Wait, wait, wait. B: What other movement is possible? K: No. First let's understand this. B: Sorry. K: Not merely verbally but actually see that it is happening. That our action, our way of living, our whole thinking, is bound by time. Or comes with the knowledge of time. B: Yes, well certainly our thinking about ourselves, any attempt to analyze yourself, to think about yourself, involves this process. K: Process, which is of time. Right? N: That is a difficulty: when you say knowledge and experience, they have a certain cohesive energy, force, it binds you. K: Which is what, which is what? Time-binding. N: Time-binding and.. K:.. and therefore the pattern of centuries, millennia, is being repeated. N: Yes. What I am saying is that this has a certain cohesive force. K: Of course, of course. All illusions have an extraordinary vitality. N: Very few break through. K: Look at all the churches, what immense vitality they have. N: No, apart from these churches, one's personal life has a certain cohesive, it keeps you back. You can't break away from it. K: And what happens if you do then - what do you mean it keeps you back? N: It has a magnetic attraction, it sort of pulls you back. You can't free yourself of it unless you have some instrument with which you can act. K: We are going to find out if there is a different approach to the problem. B: I mean when you say a different instrument that is not clear. The whole notion of an instrument involves time because you use an instrument - any instrument is a process which you plan. K: Time, that's just it. N: That is why I use the word instrument, I mean it is effective. K: This has not been effective. N: Not been effective, no. K: On the contrary, it is destructive. So do I see the very truth of its destructiveness? Not just theories, ideas, but the actuality of it. If I do, then what takes place? The brain, which has evolved through time, and has been functioning, living, acting, believing, all that in that time process, and when one realizes that helps to make the brain senile - I won't go into all that - now if you see that as true, then what is the next step? N: Are you implying that the very seeing that it is destructive is a releasing factor? K: Yes. N: And there is no need for an extra instrument? K: No. Don't use the word instrument. N: I am putting it because.. K: He keeps on repeating the word instrument. There is no other factor. You see I am concerned - I am using the word not personally - I am concerned to end this shrinkage and senility and asking whether the brain itself, the cells, the whole thing, can move out of time? Not immortality, I am not talking about all that kind of stuff. Move out of time altogether, otherwise deterioration, shrinkage, senility is inevitable. Senility may not show but the brain cells are becoming weaker and so on. N: If the brain cells are material and physical, somehow or other they have to shrink through time, indeed it can't be helped. The brain cell which is tissue cannot be in physical terms immortal. B: Perhaps the rate of shrinkage would be greatly slowed down. If a person say lives a certain number of years and his brain begins to shrink long before he dies, then he becomes senile. Now if it would slow down then.. K:.. not only slow down, sir. B:.. well, regenerate, if you wish. K: No, be in a state of non-occupation. B: Well I think Narayan is saying that it is impossible for any material system to last for ever. K: I am not talking about lasting for ever. I am not sure if it can't last for ever. No, this is very serious, I am not pulling anybody's leg. B: If all the cells were to regenerate perfectly in the body and in the brain, then the whole thing could go on indefinitely. K: Look sir: we are now destroying the body, drink, smoke, sex - over indulgence in sex, all kinds of things. We are living most unhealthily. Right? If the body were in excellent health, maintained right through, which is no heightened emotions, no strain on the body, no sense of deterioration in the body, the heart functioning healthily, normally - you know - why not? B: Well.. K: Which means what? No travelling! No travelling and all the rest of it. B: No excitement. K: If the body remains in one quiet place I am sure it can last a great any more years than it does now. B: Yes, I think that is true. There have been cases of people living say to one hundred and fifty in quiet places. But I think that is all you are talking about. You are not talking about something for ever really. K: So the body can be kept healthy and since the body affects the mind, nerves, senses and all that, that also can be kept healthy. B: And if the brain is kept in the right action.. K: Yes, without any strain. B: You see the brain has a tremendous affect on organizing the body. The pituitary gland controls the entire system of the body glands and also all the organs of the body are controlled in that way and so on. When the mind deteriorates the body starts to deteriorate. K: Of course, of course. B: It works together. K: They go together. So can this brain which is not my brain, but the brain which has evolved through millions of years, which has had all kinds of destructive experiences, pleasant and all the rest of it, can that brain.. B: You mean it is a typical brain not a peculiar brain, peculiar to some individual. When you say not mine, any brain belonging to mankind. Right? K: Any brain. B: They are all basically similar. K: Similar, that is what I said. Can that brain be free of all this, of time? I think it can. B: If we could discuss what it means to be free of time, you see at first sight that might sound crazy because obviously we all know that you don't mean that the clock stops or anything. K: Science fiction and all that nonsense. B: The point is what does it really mean to be psychologically free of time? K: That there is no tomorrow. B: But I mean you know there is tomorrow. K: But psychologically. B: Can you describe that better, what do you mean when you say, no tomorrow? K: Sir, what does it mean to be living in time? Let's take the other side first before we come to the other. What does it mean to live in time? Hope, thinking, living in the past, and acting from the knowledge of the past, the images, the illusions, the prejudices, they are all an outcome of the past, all that is time. And that is producing in the world chaos. B: Yes, well suppose we say if you are not living psychologically in time, then you may still order your actions by the watch but the thing that is puzzling is that suppose somebody says, 'I am not living in time but I must make an appointment' - you see. K: Of course, you can't sit here for ever. B: So you say I am looking at the watch but I am not psychologically extending how it is going to feel in the next hour, when I have fulfilment of desire, or whatever. K: So I am just saying the way we are living now is in the field of time. And there we have brought all kinds of problems, suffering, all that. Right? B: Yes, it should be made clear why this produces suffering necessarily. Say, if you live in the field of time you are saying suffering is inevitable. K: Inevitable, inevitable. B: Why? K: It is simple. Which is, time has built the ego, the 'me', the image of me, sustained by society, by the parents, by education, that is built after millions of years, that is the result of time. And from there I act. B: Towards the future? K: Towards the future. B: Towards the future psychologically, that is towards some future state of being. Right? K: Yes. Which is, the centre is always becoming. B: Trying to become better. K: Better, nobler, or the other way round. So all that, this constant endeavour to become something psychologically, is a factor of time. B: Are you saying that produces suffering? K: Obviously. Why? Oh my Lord, why? Because it is simple , it is divisive. It divides me and so you are different from me, and me, when I depend on somebody and that somebody is lost, or gone, I feel lonely, miserable, unhappy, grief, suffering. All that goes on. So we are saying any factor of division which is the very nature of the self, that must inevitably suffer. B: Are you saying that through time the self is set up, organized, and then the self introduces division and conflict and so on. But if there were no psychological time then maybe this entire structure would collapse and something entirely different would happen? K: That's it. That is what I am saying. And therefore the brain itself has broken out. B: Well, that is the next step to say that the brain has broken out of that rut and maybe it could regenerate then. It doesn't follow logically, but still it could. K: I think it does follow logically. B: Well, it follows logically that it would stop degenerating. K: Yes. B: And you are adding further that it would start to regenerate. K: Yes. You look sceptical! N: Yes, because the whole human predicament is bound to time. K: Yes, we know that. N: Society, individuals, the whole structure. K: I know, I know. N: It is so forceful that anything feeble doesn't work here. K: What do you mean feeble? N: The force of this is so great that if you have to break through, whatever comes must have greater energy. K: Yes. N: And no individual seems to be able to generate this energy to be able to break through. K: Ah, you have got the wrong end of the stick, if I may point out. When you use the word 'individual'.. N: A human being. K:.. then you have moved away from the fact that our brain is universal. N: Yes, I admit that. K: There is no individuality. N: That brain is conditioned this way. K: Yes, we have been through all that. It is conditioned this way through time. Time is conditioning. Right? It is not that time has created the conditioning, time itself is the factor of conditioning. So can that time element not exist? - psychologically we are talking about, not in the ordinary physical time. I say it can. And we said the ending of suffering comes about when the self, which is built up through time, is no longer there. For a man who is actually going through agony, going through a terrible time, he might reject this, he is bound to reject it, but when he comes out of the shock of this, and somebody points out to him, and if he is willing to listen, if he is willing to see the rationality of it, not build a wall against it, but see for himself the sanity of it, he is out of that field, the brain is out of that time-binding quality. N: Temporarily. K: Ah! There again, when you use the word 'temporary' it means time. N: No, he slips back into time. K: No, you can't. You can't go back, if you see something dangerous and go back to it, you can't. Like a cobra, like whatever danger it is, you cannot. N: But the difficulty is the analogy is a bit difficult because the structure is that. You inadvertently slip into it. K: When you see a dangerous animal, there is immediate action. It may be the result of past knowledge, past experience, but there is immediate action, self-protection. Psychologically we are unaware of the dangers. And if we become as aware of the dangers as we are aware of a physical danger there is an action which is not time-binding. B: Yes, I think that you could say that as long as you could perceive this danger you know you will respond immediately. But you see if you were to use this analogy of the animal, there might be an animal that you realize is dangerous, but then he might take another form that you don't see as dangerous. K: Yes. B: Therefore there would be a danger of slipping back if you didn't see. This time illusion might come in in some other form. K: Of course. B: But I think the major point is that you are saying that the brain is not belonging to any individual. K: Yes, sir, absolutely. B: And therefore it is no use saying that the individual slips back, you see. K: No. B: That already denies what you are saying. But rather the danger might be that the brain might slip back. K: Which is the brain itself might get back because it itself has not seen the danger. B: Hasn't seen the other form of the illusions. K: The Holy Ghost taking different shapes. B: But you see, yes, well I think that is the point. K: Sir, that is the real root of it, time. B: Well you see time and separation as individuality are basically the same structure. K: Of course. B: Although it is not obvious in the beginning. K: I wonder if you see that. B: It might be worth discussing that. Why is time the same illusion, the same structure as individuality? That is psychological time. You see individuality is the sense of being a person who is located here somewhere. K: Located and divided. B: Divided from the others. He extends out to some periphery, his domain extends out to some periphery and also he has an identity which goes over time. He wouldn't regard himself as an individual unless he had an identity, if he said, today I am one person, tomorrow I am another. So he has to be, it seems we mean by individual somebody who is in time. K: I think that is such a fallacy, this idea of individuality. B: Yes, on the other hand many people may find that very hard to be convinced that it is a fallacy. K: Of course, many people find everything very hard. B: There is a common feeling that as an individual I have existed at least from my birth if not before, and go on to death and perhaps later. The whole idea of being an individual is to be in time. Right? K: Obviously, sir, obviously. B: Therefore to be in psychological time. K: Of course, we are saying that. B: Not just clock time. K: So if that illusion could be broken, that time has created individuality, which is erroneous. B: Yes, through time the notion of individuality has arisen. K: Of course. Can this brain understand that? B: Well I think that as Narayan said, that say there is a great momentum in any brain, which keeps rolling, moving along. K: Can that momentum stop for a minute? Sorry, not a minute. Can that stop? Not for a minute. N: The difficulty comes actually in this: it is intrinsic to you, the genetic coding and you seem to function more or less unconsciously, you are driven by this kind of past momentum. And suddenly you see, as it were, like a flash something true. But the difficulty is it operates for some time in the sense that it may operate for a day, but then there is the fact we are again caught in the old momentum. It is a human experience. K: I know that. But I say it will not be caught. N: That is why I say this can't be a feeble thing. K: Don't use the word feeble or strong. Once you see the mind, or the brain is aware of this fact it cannot go back. How can it? N: There must be another way of preventing it from going back. K: Not preventing, that means also time. You are still thinking in prevention. N: Prevention in the sense, as a human factor. K: The human being is irrational. Right? And as long as he is functioning irrationally any other rational factor he says, 'I refuse to see it'. N: From what you are saying you are suggesting that the very seeing prevents you also from going back, from slipping. This is a human condition. B: I wonder if we should ask this question about prevention. You see it may be a question. N: It has both the aspects. You see the fallacy of something and the very seeing prevents you from slipping back. Because you see the danger of it. B: In another sense you say you have no temptation to slip back, therefore you don't have to be prevented. If you really see it there is no need to be prevented. N: Then you are not tempted to go back. K: I can't go back. If I see the fallacy of all the religious nonsense, it is finished. B: The only question which I raise is that you may not see it in another form. You see.. N: It may come in different shapes. B:.. and then you are tempted once again. K: The mind is aware, it is not caught. But you are saying it does. N: In other shapes and forms, sir. There is another thing I want to ask: is there a faculty in the human system which has this function as it were, and so it has some effect, or some transforming effect on the brain? K: We have said that. N: No, we have not said that. K: Wait sir. We have said that perception is out of time, seeing immediately the whole nature of time. Which is to have, to use a good old world, to have an insight into the nature of time. If you have that insight into the nature of time, not you, if there is an insight into the nature of time the very brain cells which are part of time break down. The brain cells bring about a change in themselves. That is what this person is saying. You may disagree, you may say prove it. I say this is not a matter of proof, it is a matter of action. Do it, find it, test it. N: You were also saying the other day that when the consciousness is empty of its content.. K: The content is time. N: You said that leads to the transformation of the brain cells. K: Yes. N: When you say consciousness is empty of the content there.. K:.. there is no consciousness as we know it. N: Yes. And again you are using the word insight. What is the connection between the two? There is an obvious connection. B: Between what? N: Consciousness. When you have suggested that consciousness is empty of its content.. K: Careful! Consciousness is put together by its content. The content is the result of time. Now just.. B: The content also is time. K: Of course. B: It is about time as well. K: Of course. B: It is also actually put together by time. K: Actually put together by time and also it is about time, as he pointed out. If you have an insight into that the whole pattern is gone, broken. N: Yes, if.. K: The insight, which is not of time, which is not of memory, which is not of knowledge, etc., etc. N: Who has this insight? K: Not me. There is an insight. N: There is an insight and the word insight has a positive connotation. You have an insight and then the consciousness is empty of its content as a negative kind of.. K: No, sir, no. N: You are implying that the very emptying of the content, the emptiness of the content, is insight. K: No, no. We are saying time is a factor which has put the content, which has made up the content. It has made up and it also thinks about. All that is a bundle, is the result of time. Now insight into this whole movement, it is not my insight. N: No, it is insight. K: Insight, that brings about transformation in the brain. Because it is not time-binding, that insight. B: If you say this content, the psychological content, is a certain structure physically in the brain, you may say that in order for this psychological content to exist the brain over many years has made many connections of the cells, which constitute this content. K: Quite, quite. B: And then there is a flash of insight which sees all this and sees that it is not necessary and therefore all this begins to dissipate. And when that has dissipated there is no content. Then you say whatever the brain is doing is something different. K: Which is, sir, go further, which is then there is total emptiness. We won't go into it. Which we went into the other day. B: Yes, well emptiness of that content. But when you say total emptiness you don't mean you don't see the railway, but you mean emptiness of all this inward content. K: That's right. That emptiness has tremendous energy. It is energy. B: So could you say that the brain having had all these connections tangled up has locked up a lot of energy? K: That's right. Wastage of energy. B: Then when they begin to dissipate that energy is there. K: Yes. B: Would you say that is as much physical energy as any other kind? K: Of course, of course. Now you have heard all this, Narayan, we can go on more in detail, but you have heard the principle, the root of it: is it an idea or a fact? N: An idea has no.. K: No, I am asking you, don't dodge it. Is it an idea or a fact? I hear all this. I have heard it with the hearing of the ear so I make it into an idea, but if I hear it, not only with the hearing of the ear but hear it in my being, in the very structure of myself, I hear this statement, what happens then? If that doesn't take place it becomes merely an idea and we can spin along for the rest of one's life playing with idea. But if that sense of - you know. So Sir, we are more or less, you and I, and Narayan perhaps, more or less a captured audience. If there was a scientist, biofeedback or another brain specialist, would they accept this? Would they even listen to all this? B: Maybe a few would but obviously the majority would not. K: No. So what? You see how do we affect - I am using the word affect - how do we touch the human brain? B: Yes. Well, the way it will sound to most scientists is that it will sound rather abstract, you see. They will say it could be so, it is a nice theory. K: Good boy, it is nice. B: We have no proof of it. K: Of course, of course. B: Therefore they would say, OK, it doesn't excite me very much because I don't see any proof. I think that is the way the more favourable ones would look at it. Let's say they would say, if you have some more evidence we will come back later, and become very interested. So you see you can't give any proof because you know whatever is happening nobody can see it, with their eyes. K: Of course. I understand. But I am asking: what shall we do? Our mind, our brain, is not my brain. Right? It is the human brain which has evolved through a million years. One freak, or one biological freak, can move out of it - perhaps, or does - how do you get at the human mind to make him see this? B: Well I think you have to communicate the necessity of what you are saying, that it is inevitable. You have to communicate the necessity of what you are saying, that it is inevitable. Say if somebody sees something, you know, you explain it to him and he sees it happening before his eyes he says, 'That's so'. Right? K: But sir, that requires somebody to listen. B: Yes. K: Somebody who says I want to capture it, I want to understand this, I want to find out. You follow what I am saying? Apparently that is one of the most difficult things in life. B: Well it is the function of this occupied brain that it is occupied with itself and it doesn't listen. N: In fact one of the things is that this occupation seems to start very early. When you are young it is very powerful and it continues through all your life. How do you through education make this.. K: Oh, that is a different matter. I would say I would work at it differently, if you are asking how to set about it I will tell you. The moment you see the importance of not being occupied, you yourself see that as a tremendous truth, you will find ways and methods to help them. That is creative, you can't just be told and copy and imitate, then you are lost. B: Well then the question is: how is it possible to communicate to the brain, which rejects, which doesn't listen? K: I understand, that is what I am asking. B: Yes, well is there a way? K: No. If I refuse to listen, well, go to the pope and tell him all this he would say.. Sir, I think we had better stop, don't you? You see, sir, I think meditation is a great factor in all this. I feel we have been meditating. Ordinary people wouldn't accept this as meditation. B: They have used the word so often.. K:.. it is really lost. Sir, that is one of the things. Something real, made vulgar, common, is gone. Yoga was something extraordinary, only for the, if I may use the word without being misunderstood, the very few; now it has become common, a way of earning a livelihood. It's gone. So meditation is this, sir, the emptying of consciousness. You follow? B: Yes, but let's be clear. Before you said it would happen through insight, you see. Now are you saying meditation is conducive to insight. K: Meditation IS insight. B: It is insight already. Then it is some sort of work you do, you see insight is usually thought of as the flash. K: Yes, insight is a flash. B: But also meditation is a more constant.. K: Now we must be careful. What do we mean be meditation? B: That's the question, yes. K: We can reject the systems, the methods, the authorities, the acknowledged Zen, Tibetan, Hindu, Buddhist, we can reject all that, because it is obviously merely traditional repetition, time-biding nonsense. For me it is not.. N: Do you think some of them could have been original, some of them could have had original insight? K: If they had they wouldn't belong to Christians, Hindu, Buddhist, they wouldn't be anything. N: In the past? K: Who knows? Now meditation, sir, is this penetration. You follow? I don't know if I am using the right word. It is this sense of moving without any past. B: The only point to clear up is that when you use the word meditation, you mean something more than insight, you see. It seems to mean something a bit more. K: A bit more, much more! Because insight has freed the brain from the past, from time. That is an enormous statement. Meditation as we know it is becoming, and any sense of becoming is still time, therefore there is no sense of becoming. B: But that seems to mean that you have to insight if you are going to meditate. Right? K: Yes, sir, that's right. B: You cannot meditate without insight. K: Of course. B: You can't regard it as a procedure by which you will come to insight. K: No. That immediately implies time. A procedure, a system, a method to have insight sounds so nonsensical. Insight into greed, into fear, into all that, frees the mind from all that. Then meditation has quite a different quality. It has nothing to do with all the guru's meditations. Right? So that is what? Would we say, sir - it is the wrong word - to have insight there must be silence? B: Well, that is the same, we seem to be going in a circle. K: For the moment. B: My mind has silence, yes. K: Silence. So the silence of insight has cleansed - cleansed, purged, all that. B: The structure of the occupation. K: Yes. Then meditation, oh lord, what is it? There is no movement as we know it - movement means time and all that. It is not that kind of movement. B: Some other kind? K: I don't see how we can measure that by words. You see that sense of limitless state. B: But you were saying that nevertheless it is necessary to find some language, even though it is unsayable. K: We will find the language. We had better stop, it is too late. Shall we continue next Sunday? BROCKWOOD PARK 10TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 7TH JUNE 1980 'THE ENDING OF TIME' Krishnamurti: Let's forget the audience. We are not performing for your amusement. I think we left off the other day, if I remember rightly, when the mind is totally empty of all the things that thought has put there, then begins real meditation - if I remember rightly. But I would like to go further in that matter - I would like to go back a bit and find out if the mind, if the brain, can ever be free, not only from all illusion, any form of deception but whether it can have its own order - the order not introduced by thought or make an effort, an endeavour to put things in their proper place. And also whether the brain, however much damaged it is, and most brains are damaged by shock, by all kinds of stimulations, whether that brain can heal itself completely. That is what I would like to go into. So first let's begin by asking, if I may ask: is there an order which is not man-made, which is not the result of calculated order out of disturbance, an order that is probably very satisfying and so it is still part of the old conditioning, is there an order which is not man-made, thought-made? Bohm: Are you referring to the mind? I mean you can say the order of nature exists on its own. K: The order of nature is order. B: Yes, it is not made by man. K: But I am not talking of such. I don't think I want to - I am not sure that it is that kind of order. Is there cosmic order? B: Well, right that is still the same thing in a sense because the word cosmos means order, but the whole order. K: The whole order, I mean that. B: Which includes the order of the universe and the order of the mind? K: Yes. What I am trying to find out is: is there an order which man can never possibly conceive? You follow? Because any concept is still within the pattern of thought. So is there order which is not.. B: Well, how are we going to discuss it? K: That is what I want to discuss. I think we can. What is order? Narayan: I thought we were just discussing it.. K: We were discussing what? N: At the table. K: At lunch time. N: At lunch. There is mathematical order. And generally mathematical order is the order of science, or sort of behind any particular order. That is the highest kind of order known to any discipline. K: Would the mathematicians agree that mathematics is complete order? N: Yes, mathematics itself is order. K: Would they agree to that? B: Well I think it depends on the mathematician, but there is a well known mathematician called von Neumann who defined mathematics as the relationship of relationships, which really he meant by relationship, order. To say that it is order working within the field of order itself and not on something else. K: Order working in the field of order, yes. B: Rather than working on some object. K: Yes, yes, that is what I am trying to get at. B: So the most creative mathematicians are having a perception of this, which may be called pure order, but of course it is limited because it has to be expressed mathematically.. K: Of course, of course. B: In terms of formulae or equations. K: Is order part of disorder as we know it? B: Well that is another question, what we mean by disorder. It is not possible to give a coherent definition of disorder because this order is inherent. K: What? B: You cannot give a coherent account because this order violates order. Anything that actually happens has an order. Now you can call a certain thing disorder if you like. K: Are you saying that anything that happens is order? B: Has some order. K: Has some order. B: You see if you say the body is not functioning rightly, say cancer is growing, now that is a certain order in the cancer cell, it is just growing in a certain way. K: A different pattern. B: A different pattern which tends to break down the body, but the whole thing is a certain kind of order. K: Yes, yes. B: It has not violated the laws of nature. K: Yes, yes. B: But relative to some context you could say it is disorder because if we are talking of the health of the body then the cancer is called disorder. K: Quite, quite. B: But in itself.. K: Cancer has its own order. B: But it is not compatible with the order of the growth of the body. K: Quite. So what do we mean by order? Is there such a thing as order? B: Well order is a perception - we can't get hold of order. N: I think generally when we say order it is in relation to a framework or in relation to a certain field. Order always has that connotation. And when you say order of order, as the study of mathematics, some aspects of mathematics, we are going away from the limited approach to order. B: We are not ordering things any more. You see most mathematics start with the order of the numbers, like 1, 2, 3, 4, and builds on that way, in a hierarchy. But then you can see what is meant by the order of the numbers, there is a series of relationships which are constant for example. You see in the order of the numbers you have the simplest example of order. N: And a new order was created with the discovery of zero, a new set of order came into being. And is mathematical order and the order in nature a part of a bigger field? Or it is a localised form? K: You see the brain, the mind is so contradictory, so bruised, it can't find order. B: Yes, but what kind of order does it want? K: It wants an order in which it will be safe. It won't be bruised, it won't be shocked, it won't feel the pain of physical or psychological pain. B: The whole point of order is not to have contradiction. K: That's right. B: That is the whole purpose of mathematics. K: But the brain is in contradiction. B: Yes, and in some ways something has gone wrong, we said it took a wrong turn. K: It took a wrong turn, we think, yes. B: You see you could say that if the body is growing wrongly we have a cancer cell, which is two contradictory orders: one is the growing of the cancer and the other is the order of the body. K: Yes. But I am just asking because I want to go into something, which is: can the mind, the brain, be totally free of all organized order? B: Yes. You have to ask why you want it to be free of organized order and what you mean by organized order. K: Then it becomes a pattern. B: You mean by organized order a fixed order. K: Yes, a fixed order, or fixed pattern. B: Imposed. K: Imposed or self-imposed. Because we are trying to investigate, at least I am trying to find out whether the brain can ever be free from all the impositions, pressures, wounds, bruises, all the trivialities of existence, pushing it in different directions, whether it can be completely free of all that. If it cannot, meditation has no meaning. B: Yes, but you could go further and say probably life has no meaning if you cannot free it of all that. K: No, I wouldn't say life has no meaning. B: It goes on indefinitely. K: Indefinitely like that, yes. If it goes on as it has done indefinitely for millennia, life has no meaning. But to find out if it has a meaning at all, and I think there is a meaning, the brain must be totally free of all this. B: Well that is what you call disorder. You see, what is the source of what we call disorder? We could say it is like a cancer, almost going on inside the brain. It is moving in a way which is not compatible with the health of the brain. K: Yes. B: It grows as time goes on, it increases from one generation to another. B: Now you say.. K: One generation produces the same pattern being repeated. B: It tends to accumulate from one generation to another through tradition. Now we say - it is almost the same question to ask how are we going to stop these cancer cells from taking over. K: That is what I want to get at. How is this pattern, which has been set, and which has for generation after generation accumulated, how is that to end, be broken through? That is the real question that is at the back of my mind. B: Could we ask another question: why does the brain provide the soil for this stuff to go on, to grow? K: It may be merely tradition, habit. B: Well, why does it stay in that, you see? K: It may be that it is so afraid of a new pattern, of something new taking place because in the old tradition it takes refuge. It feels safe. B: Yes, well you see then we have to question why does the brain deceive itself? It seems that this pattern of disorder involves the fact that the brain deceives itself about this disorder. It doesn't seem to be able to see it clearly. N: When you say order, in my mind there is intelligence behind order which makes use of it. I have a certain purpose, I create an order and when the purpose is over I set aside that order. So order has an intelligence which works it out. In usual parlance that is the connotation. But you are referring to something else. K: I am asking whether this pattern of generations can be broken and why the brain has accepted that pattern in spite of all the conflicts, misery and goes on in the same way, and is it possible to break that pattern? That is all I am really asking. N: Yes, I am saying the same thing in a different way. If an order has served its purpose can it be put aside because it is no longer.. K: Apparently it can't. N:.. it is no longer useful or adequate. K: Apparently it can't. Psychologically we are talking of, it can't, it doesn't. Take an ordinary human being like any of us, it goes on repeating fears, sorrow, misery, all that is part of its daily meal. And Dr Bohm asked, why does it go on, why doesn't it break through? And we said is it so heavily conditioned that it cannot see its way out of it? Or it may be merely the constant repetition so the brain has become dull. N: The momentum of repetition is there? K: Yes. That momentum of repetition makes the mind sluggish, mechanical. And in that mechanical sluggishness it takes refuge and says, 'It's all right, I can go on'. That's what most human beings do. B: Well that is part of the disorder, to think that way is a manifestation of disorder. K: Of course. N: Do you connect order with intelligence? Or is order something that exists on its own? Any kind of intelligence. B: Intelligence certainly involves order, intelligence requires the perception of order in an orderly way, without contradiction. But I think that in the terms that we were discussing before that we ourselves don't create this, we don't impose this order but rather it is natural. K: Yes. Sir, let's come back. I am the ordinary man. I see that I am caught with my whole way of living; my thinking and my attitudes and so on, beliefs, is the result of enormous length of time. Time is, as we went into it the other day, my whole existence. In the past, which cannot be changed, I take refuge. Right? B: Yes. Well I think that if we were to talk to the ordinary man, the first thing he would feel is he doesn't really understand that time is something that happens to him. K: We went into that. I am saying an ordinary man either sees, after talking over with you, I see that my whole existence is based on time. Which is, time is the past and in that the brain takes refuge. B: What does that mean exactly? How does it take refuge? K: Because the past cannot be changed. B: Yes we agreed that. But then people also think that the future, you see it is common to think the future can change, the Communists have said, give up the past, we are going to change. K: But I can't give up the past. We only think we can give up the past. B: Yes, well that is the second point that even those who try to give up the past, those who don't want to take refuge in the past, still can't give it up. K: That is just my point. B: So it seems which ever way you do it you are stuck. K: So the next step is: why does the brain accept this way of living, and why doesn't it break it down? Right? Is it laziness? Is it that in breaking it down it has no hope? B: Yes, well that is still the same question. K: Of course it is the same question. B: Going from past to future. K: So what is it to do? I think this is applicable to most people, isn't it? So what is there to be done? B: We haven't understood why it does this. It is not clear. Say this behaviour is disorderly, irrational and so on, and people have said, 'OK, let's give up the past but we find we can't' - why can't we? K: Why can't we give up the past? Wait, sir. If I give up the past I have no existence. B: Well you have to clarify that because some people would say.. K: It is simple: if I give up all my remembrances, all my etc., etc., I have nothing, I am nothing. B: I think some people would look at it a little differently, like the Marxists. Marx himself said that it is necessary to transform the conditions of human existence and that will remove this past, you see. K: But it has not done this. It cannot be done. B: Well that is because when he tries to transform it he still works from the past. K: Yes, that is what I am saying. B: If you say, don't depend on the past at all, then as you say, what are we going to do? K: I am nothing. Is that the reason why we cannot possibly give up the past? Because my existence, my way of thinking, my life, everything is from the past. And if you say, wipe that out, what have I left? B: Yes, well I think you could say we obviously have to keep certain things from the past like useful knowledge and technology. K: Yes, we went through all that. B: Now you could ask, suppose we keep that part of the past and wipe out all the parts of the past which are contradictory. K: Which are all psychological, contradictory and so on. What is left? Just going to the office? There is nothing left. Is that the reason why we cannot give it up? B: Well there is still a contradiction in that because you see if you say what is left, you are still asking for the past. K: Of course, of course, of course. B: I mean are you saying simply that when people say they are giving up the past, they just simply are not doing it. K: They are not doing it. B: They are merely turning it into another question which avoids the issue. K: Because my whole being is the past, modified, changed, but it has its roots in the past. B: Now if you told somebody 'Ok, give all that up and in the future you will have something quite different, better', then people would be attracted. K: But 'better' is still from the past. B: If you say that but you see perhaps it could even be open and creative. You see people want to be assured of at least something. K: That is just it. There is nothing. You want to be assured, the common man, a human being, wants something to which he can cling to, can hold on to. B: Reach for. K: Reach. B: They feel not that they are clinging to the past but they are reaching for something. K: If I reach something it still is the past. B: The past yes, but that is not often obvious because people say it is a big new revolutionary situation. But it has its roots in the past. K: That is what I am asking. As long as I have my roots in the past there cannot be order. B: Because the past is pervaded with disorder? K: Yes, disorder. And is my mind, my brain, willing to see that there is absolutely nothing? If I give up the past - you follow, sir? B: Yes, you say there is nothing to reach for. K: Nothing, I mean there is no movement, therefore I cannot possibly give up the past. So people dangle in front of me a carrot and I, like a silly person, I follow it. So if I have no carrots, nothing as a reward or punishment, how is this past to be dissolved? Because otherwise I am still living in the field of time. And therefore it is still man-made. So what shall I do? Am I willing to face absolute emptiness? Right, sir? B: Well, what will you tell somebody who is not willing? K: I am not bothered. If somebody says, 'I am sorry I can't do all this nonsense' - you say, 'Well, carry on'. But I am willing to let my past go completely, which means there is no effort, no reward, no punishment, no carrot, nothing. And the brain is willing to face this extraordinary state, totally new to it, of being, of existing in a state of nothingness. That is appallingly frightening. B: Even these words will have their meaning rooted in the past. K: Of course. We have understood that, the word is not the thing. B: But that is because of the fear, because from the roots in the past this notion of nothingness is.. K: My brain says, 'I am willing to do that'. I am willing to face this absolute nothingness, emptiness because it has seen for itself all the refuges, the various places where it has taken refuge are illusions, so it has finished with all that. B: I think this leaves out something. You have also brought up the question of the damage of the scars to the brain. K: That's just it. B: The brain if it wasn't damaged possibly could do that fairly readily. K: Look: can I discover what has caused damage to the brain? One of the factors is strong emotions. B: Strong sustained emotions. K: Strong sustained emotions, like hatred. B: Probably a flash of emotion doesn't do it but people keep it up. K: Of course. Hatred, anger, a sense of violence must obviously, they are not only a shock but they wound the brain. Right? B: Well, excessive excitation too. Getting excessively excited by other means. K: Of course, drugs and all that stuff. Excessive excitement, excessive anger, violence, hatred, all that. The natural response doesn't damage the brain. Right? Now my brain is damaged, suppose, it has been damaged through anger. B: You could even say probably that nerves get connected up in the wrong way and the connections are too fixed. I think there is evidence that these things will actually change the structure. K: The structure, yes, yes. That is, can I have an insight into the whole nature of disturbance, anger, violence, they are all part of the same. Can I have an insight into that? And so that insight changes the cells of the brain which have been wounded. B: Well possibly it would start them healing, yes. K: Yes. All right. Start them healing. That healing must be immediate. B: In some way it may take time in the sense that if wrong connections have been made it is going to take time to redistribute the material. The beginning of it, it seems to me, is immediate. K: Make it that way, all right. Can I do this? I have listened to you, I have carefully read, I have thought about all this and I see that anger, violence, hatred, all those excessive - or any form of excitement - and so on, does bruise the brain. And the insight into this whole business does bring about a mutation in the cells. It is so. And the nerves and all their adjustments will be as rapid as possible. B: Something happens with cancer cells. Sometimes the cancer suddenly stops growing and it goes the other way, for some reason that is unknown but a change must have taken place in those cells. K: Would it be, sir - if I may ask, I may be on the wrong track - when the brain cells change, a fundamental change there, the cancer process stops? B: Yes, fundamentally it stops and it starts to dismantle. K: Dismantle, yes that is it. So. N: You are saying it sets into motion the right kind of connections? B: Yes. N: And stops the wrong connections? B: Or even starts to dismantle the wrong connections. N: So a beginning is made and it is made now. B: At one moment. K: That is the insight. N: But there is no question of time involved because the right movement has started. B: Yes. K: What, what? N: There is no time involved because the right movement has started now. K: Of course, of course. N: But there is another thing which I want to ask about the past: for most people the past means pleasure. K: Not only past pleasures, the remembrance of all the things. N: One starts disliking pleasure only when it becomes stale, or it leads to difficulties but one wants pleasure all the time. K: Of course, of course. N: Now it is very difficult to distinguish between pleasure and the staleness or the difficulties it brings in because on wants to keep the pleasure afresh and not have the staleness or the problems it brings. I mean the normal human being - I am asking what is your attitude to pleasure? K: What do you mean, my attitude? N: How does one deal with this immense problem of pleasure in which most people are caught because it is the past. K: Pleasure is always the past but there is no pleasure at the moment it is happening. It comes in later when it is remembered. So the remembrance is the past. And I, as a human being, am willing to face nothingness, which means wipe out all that. N: How does one wipe out this tremendous instinct for pleasure? It almost seems to be an instinct. K: No, we went into that. Which is: what is the nature of pleasure? What is pleasure? It is a constant remembrance of things past which have happened. B: And also the expectation that it will happen. K: Of course, always from the past. B: You have usually made this distinction of pleasure and enjoyment. K: Yes, I did. N: Of course you have made a distinction, but I am saying, still the human being, even though he understands what you are saying, he is sort of held back in this field. K: No, Narayan, because he is not willing to face this emptiness. Pleasure is not compassion. Pleasure is not love. But perhaps if there is this mutation compassion is stronger than pleasure. I don't know if you see. So pleasure has no place in the compassion. B: Even the perception of order may be stronger than pleasure. If people are really concerned about something, the pleasure plays no role at that moment. N: Yes, that is what I am trying to imply because it has a certain strength which can keep that in its place. K: Compassion has got tremendous strength, an incalculable strength, pleasure is nowhere in it. N: But what happens to a man in whom pleasure is dominant? K: We said that. As long as he is unwilling to face this extraordinary emptiness he will keep on with the old pattern. B: You see we have to say that this man had a damaged brain too. There is a certain brain damage which causes this emphasis on sustained pleasure as well as the fear and the anger and the hate. K: But the damaged brain is healed when there is insight. B: Yes. But I think many people would say, 'I understand that hate and anger and so on are products of the damaged brain', but they would find it hard to say that pleasure is the product of the damaged brain. K: Oh yes, of course it is. B: Whereas if you say there is that true enjoyment which is not the product of the damaged brain, which is confused with pleasure.. N: That is the difficulty because if pleasure gives rise to anger, anger is part of the damaged brain. K: And also the demand for pleasure. B: Which may give rise to anger and hatred and fear. K: Of course. If I can't have the pleasure I want I begin to get annoyed. I feel frustrated and all the rest of it follows. So do I, do you, as a human being, have an insight into the past, how very destructive it is to the brain, and the brain itself sees it and has an insight into it and moves out of that? N: You are saying the beginning of order comes from insight? K: Obviously. Let's walk from there. N: May I put it in a different way? Is it possible to gather a certain amount of order in a pattern sense, not artificially, so that it gives rise to a certain amount of insight? K: Ah! You cannot through the false find truth. N: I am saying it on purpose because for many people the energy that is required for insight or the keenness is lacking. K: You are tremendously keen to earn a livelihood, to earn money, to do something if you are interested in something. If you are interested vitally in this transformation, etc., you have the energy. May we go on, sir? I, as a human being, I have seen this insight has wiped away really the past, and the brain is willing to live in nothingness. We have come to this point several times from different directions. From there I want to go on; may we? There isn't a thing which thought has put there. There is no movement of thought, except thought, knowledge and all that which has its own place. But we are talking of the psychological state of mind where there is no movement of thought, there is absolutely nothing. B: You mean also no feeling, you see the movement of thought and feeling is together. K: Wait a minute. What do you mean by feeling there? B: Well then usually people might say, well, OK, there is no thought, but they may have various feelings. K: Of course, I have feelings. The moment you put a pin in to me.. B: These are sensations. And also the inner feelings. K: Inner feelings of what? B: It is hard to describe them, you see, those that can be easily described are obviously the wrong kind such as anger and fear. K: Is compassion a feeling? B: Probably not K: No, it is not a feeling. B: Though people may say they feel compassionate. K: Of course, of course. B: But even the very word suggests it is a form of feeling. K: Of course, I feel compassionate. B: Compassion has the word passion in it which is a feeling. It can be taken in that meaning. And you see it is a difficult question. You could say what we usually call feelings anyway, those things that could be recognized as feelings, you know of a describable character. K: Sir, let's go into that a little bit. What do we mean by feeling? Sensations? B: Well, people don't usually mean that. You see sensation is connected with the body. K: Body, senses. B: The inner organs of the body. K: So you are saying feelings which are not of the body. B: Yes, or which are said to belong - you see in the old days they would have said they are of the soul, you see. K: The soul, of course. That is an easy escape but it means nothing. B: No. K: What are the inner feelings? Pleasure? B: Well in so far as you can label it that way it is clear that it is not valid there. K: So what is valid? The non-verbal state. B: It may be a non-verbal state which includes something that seems - would it have something analogous to a feeling which wasn't fixed, you see? That you couldn't name. N: You are saying it is not a feeling, it is similar to feeling but it is not fixed? B: Yes. I am just considering that could exist. K: I don't follow. B: If you say that there is no thought, I am trying to clarify it. K: Yes, there is no thought. B: Somebody could say, 'OK, I understand, I am not thinking, I am not talking, I am not figuring out what to do'. K: Oh, no. B: We have to go further. What does it really mean? K: All right. What it really means is: thought is movement, thought is time. Right? There is no time and thought. B: Yes, well perhaps no sense of the existence of an entity inside. K: Absolutely, of course. The existence of the entity is the bundle of memories, the past. B: But that existence is not only thought thinking about it but also the feeling that it is there, inside, you get a sort of feeling. K: The feeling, yes. There is no being. Otherwise, you follow, there is nothing. If there is a feeling of the being continuing.. B: Yes, even though it doesn't seem verbalizable. K: Of course. I wonder if you are caught in an illusion that there is such a state. B: Well it may be. It would be a state without will, without.. K: Of course. All those are gone. B: Now, how do we know that this state is real, is genuine? K: That is what I am asking. How do I know, or realize, or state, that it is so? In other words you want proof of it. B: Well at least.. N: Not proof, communication of that state. B: Not proof. K: Now wait a minute. How can you communicate with me, suppose you have this peculiar compassion, how can you communicate to me who is living in pleasure and all that? You can't. N: No, but I am prepared to listen to you. K: Therefore, prepared to listen - how deeply? N: To the extent my listening takes me to. K: Which means what? N: That is all I could say. K: No, no. It is very simple. You will go as long as it is safe, secure. N: No, not necessarily. K: The man says there is no being. And one's whole life has been this becoming, being and so on. And in that state he says there is no being at all. In other words, there is no me. Right sir? Now you say, 'Show it to me'. It can be shown only through certain qualities it has, certain actions. What are the actions of a mind that is totally empty of being? What are the actions? Wait a minute. Actions at what level? Actions in the physical world? N: Partly. K: Mostly that. N: Not mostly, partly. K: No, I am asking is that partial where - all right, this mam has got this sense of emptiness and there is no being, so he is not acting from self-centred interest. So his actions are in the world of daily living. That's all, you can judge only there, whether he is a hypocrite, whether he says one thing and contradicts it the next moment, or whether he is actually living this compassion - not 'I feel compassionate'. B: Well if you are not doing the same you can't tell, you see. K: That's just it. That's what I am saying. N: I can't judge you there. K: You can't. So how can you convey to me in words that peculiar quality of a mind? You can describe, you know go round it, but you can't give the essence of it. I mean David, for example, he can discuss with Einstein, they are on the same level. And he and I can discuss up to a certain point and if he has this sense of not being, empty, I can go very close but I can never enter or come upon that mind unless I have it. N: Is there any way of communicating but not through words for one who is open? K: We said compassion. It is not as David put it just now, it is not 'I feel compassionate'. That is altogether wrong. You see after all in daily life such a mind acts without the 'me, without the ego, and therefore it might make a mistake but it corrects it immediately, it is not carrying that mistake. N: It is not stuck. K: Stuck. We must be very careful here not to find an excuse for wrong. So sirs, we come to that point, as we said the other day, what is then meditation? Right? The becoming man, or the being man, who meditates, has no meaning whatsoever. That is a tremendous statement. When there is this not becoming, not being, then what is mediation? It must be totally unconscious. Right sir? Totally uninvited. B: Without conscious intention, is what you mean. K: Yes, without conscious intention. Yes, I think this is right. Would you say, sir - it sounds silly but - the universe, cosmic order, is in meditation? B: Well if it is alive then you would have to look at it that way. K: No, no, it is in a state of meditation. B: Yes. K: I think that is right. I stick to that. B: We should try to go over what is meditation, what is it doing? N: If you say the universe is in meditation, is the expression of it order? What order can we discern, which would indicate cosmic meditation or universal meditation? K: The sunrise and sunset is order, all the stars, the planets, the whole thing is in perfect order. B: We have to connect this with meditation. K: He is bringing the word 'order'. B: You see, according to the dictionary the meaning of meditation is to reflect, to turn something over in your mind and to pay close attention. K: And also to measure. B: That is a further meaning but it is to weigh, to ponder, it means measure in the sense of weighing. K: Weighing, that's it. Ponder, think over and so on. B: To weigh the significance of something. Now is that what you mean? K: No. B: Then why do you use the word, you see? N: I am told that in English contemplation has a different connotation from meditation. Contemplation implies a deeper state of mind, whereas meditation is.. K: To contemplate. N: That's what I was told. B: It is hard to know. The word contemplate comes from the word 'temple' really. K: Yes, that's right. B: To make an open space really is its basic meaning. To create an open space so you can look at it. K: Is that open space between god and me? B: That is the way the word arose. K: Quite. N: From temple, space? B: Which means an open space. N: The Sanskrit word 'dhyana' doesn't have the same connotation as meditation. K: Dhyana, no. N: Because meditation has the overtones of measurement and probably in an oblique way that measurement is order. K: No, I don't want to bring in order, leave the word order out, we have been through that, we have beaten that to death. B: I just asked why you used the word meditation. K: Don't let's use the word meditation. B: Let's find out what you really mean here. K: Would you say, sir, a state of infinity, a measureless state? B: Yes. K: There is no division of any kind. You see we are giving lots of descriptions, but it is not that. B: Yes, but is there any sense of the mind being in some way aware of itself, you see, is that what you are trying to say? At other times you have said that the mind is emptying itself of content. K: Yes. What are you trying to get at? B: Well I am trying to get at that it is not merely infinite but it seems that something more is involved. K: Oh, much more. B: But in this emptying of content, we said that this content is the past which has become disorder. Then you could say that in some sense it is constantly cleaning up the past. Would you agree to that? K: It is constantly cleaning up the past? B: Yes. K: No, no. B: When you say the mind is emptying itself of content.. K: Has emptied itself. B: Has emptied itself. All right, then you say when the past is cleaned up, then you say that is meditation. K: That is meditation, no, contemplation.. N: Just a beginning. He is at the beginning. K: Beginning? N: The emptying of the past. K: That must be done. Emptying the past which is anger, jealousy, beliefs, dogmas, attachments, all that is the content. If any part of that exists it will inevitably lead to illusion. Right? So we said that. The brain or the mind must be totally free of all illusion - illusion brought by desire, by hope, by wanting security and all that. B: Are you saying when that is done this opens the door to something broader, deeper? K: Yes. Otherwise life has no meaning, just repeating this pattern. I want to go into this. It is five o'clock. N: What exactly did you mean when you said the universe is in meditation? You are trying to convey something when you say that the universe is in meditation. K: I feel that way, yes. Meditation is a state of 'non-movement movement'. B: All right, yes. N: Is it.. B: Could we say first of all the universe is not actually governed by its past. That is the first point. K: Yes, sir, yes sir. B: It is free and creative. K: It is creative, moving. B: And then this movement is an order. K: Would you, as a scientist, accept such a thing? B: Yes. Well, as a matter of fact I would! K: Are we both crazy? B: You see the universe creates certain forms which are relatively constant, so that if people who look at it superficially only see that, it seems to be then determined from the past. K: Yes. Sir, put the question the other way: is it really possible for time to end - time being the past, time, the whole idea of time, to have no tomorrow at all? Of course there is tomorrow, you have to go to a talk in the morning and I have to, and so on; there is tomorrow but the feeling, the actual reality of having no tomorrow. I think that is the healthiest way of living. Which doesn't mean that I become irresponsible - that is all too childish. B: It is merely a question of physical time, it is a certain part of natural order. K: Of course, that is understood. B: Which we still have in mind but the question is whether we have a sense of experiencing past and future or whether we are free of that sense. K: Sir, is the universe, as a scientists I am asking you, based on time? B: I would say, no, but you see the general way it has been formulated.. K: That is all I want, you say no. B: Yes. K: And can the brain which has evolved in time.. B: Well, has it evolved in time, you see, that is a way of talking but it has become entangled in time. K: Entangled, all right. B: Entangled in time in some way because if you say the universe is not based on time, the brain is part of the universe. K: I agree. B: It can't be based merely on time. K: No. The brain in the sense, thought. B: Thought has entangled the brain in time. K: In time. All right. Can that entanglement be unravelled, freed, so that the universe is the mind? You follow? If the universe is not of time, can the mind which has been entangled in time, unravel itself and so be the universe? You follow what I am trying to say? B: Yes. K: That is order. B: That is order. Now would you say that is meditation? K: That is it. Now I would call that meditation. Not in the ordinary dictionary sense of pondering over and all that, that is a state of meditation in which there is no element of the past. B: You say the mind is disentangling itself from time and also really disentangling the brain from time. K: Yes, sir. Would you accept that? B: Yes. K: As a theory. B: Yes, as a proposal. K: No, I don't want it as a proposal. B: What do you mean by theory? K: Theory as somebody comes along and says this is real meditation. B: All right. K: Wait. Somebody says one can live this way and life has an extraordinary meaning in it, full of etc., etc, compassion and so on, and every act in a world, in the physical world, can be corrected immediately and so on and so on. Would you, as a scientist, accept such a state, or say this man is cuckoo? B: No, I wouldn't say that, no. I feel it is perfectly possible, it is quite compatible with anything that I know about nature. K: Oh, then that's all right. So one is not an unbalanced cuckoo? B: No. Part of the entanglement is that science itself has put time into a fundamental position which helps to entangle it still further. K: We had better stop, sir. Shall we continue some more? B: When do you want to continue? K: Next Sunday. B: I am going to be in America next Sunday. K: Oh, when do you go to America? B: Thursday. K: Well, we can't. B: Except by television! K: Yes, very simple. B: In the autumn, in September? K: Yes, September. Of course putting it into words is not the thing. Right? That is understood. But can it be communicated to another? B: Yes, well I think that the point about communication of this is to bring it about. K: Of course. Now can some of us get to this so that we can communicate actually? We had better stop. BROCKWOOD PARK 13TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 18TH SEPTEMBER 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' Krishnamurti: May we continue with where we left off the other other day? What makes the mind always follow a certain pattern, always seeking, if it lets go of one pattern it picks up another pattern, and so on, it keeps on functioning all the time within that, why? One can give explanations and can see why it does: for protection, for safety, for slackness, indifference, a certain amount of callousness, total disregard to one's own flowering and so on. But I think it is very important to find out why our minds are always operating in a certain direction. We came to the point when we said that one comes, after one has been through all kinds of travail, investigation, and insight, one comes to a blank wall, and that blank wall can only wither away or be broken down when there is love and intelligence. That is where we came to the other day. But before we go into that I would like to ask: why do human beings, however intelligent, however learned, however philosophical and religious, they always fall into this groove. Bohm: Yes, well I think the groove is inherent in the nature of the accumulated knowledge. K: Are you saying then that knowledge invariably must create a groove? B: Perhaps not 'must', but it has in the way it has developed in mankind. Knowledge, psychological knowledge that is to say. K: We are talking of that, obviously. B: But psychological knowledge I would agree must create a groove. K: But why does the mind not be aware of it, see the danger of it, see its mechanical repetition and therefore there is nothing new in that, and it keeps on doing it. B: You see I think when we were discussing this accumulation of knowledge which really constitutes a groove because.. K: Yes, constitutes a groove, but why? B: You see I think it is the same question, if you merely think of the accumulation of knowledge making a groove then you don't see why a person should stay in it, you see. K: Yes, that is what I am asking. B: It seems to me that the groove, or the knowledge accumulated, has a significance far beyond, seems to have a significance far beyond, what its real significance is, that carries a necessity. If we say we have knowledge of some object, like the microphone, that has some limited significance. Now knowledge about your nation, the nation to which you belong seems, seems to have immense significance. K: Yes, yes. So is this significance the cause of this narrowing down of the mind? B: Well, it holds the mind, this knowledge has a tremendous value beyond all other values. It makes the mind stick to that because it seems the most important thing in the world. K: In certain philosophies, certain concepts and so on in India, there is this philosophy that knowledge must end - you know it, of course, the Vedanta. But apparently very, very, very few people do end knowledge and talk from freedom. B: Well, I would come back to that point, you see knowledge generally seems to be extremely important, worth holding on to. You see though a person may verbally say it should end.. K: But.. B: Knowledge about the self. K: Yes. You mean I am so stupid that I don't see this knowledge has very little significance essentially, psychological knowledge, and yet my mind clings to it? B: Yes, I wouldn't quite put it that a person is that stupid but rather to say that this knowledge stupefies the brain. K: Yes, all right, call it that. B: I mean that the brain being caught in this knowledge becomes stupefied. K: Stupefied, all right, but it doesn't seem to extricate itself. B: Because it is already so stupefied that it can't see what it is doing. K: So what shall it do? I have been watching this for many years, why human beings think or attempt to become free from certain things, and yet this is the root of it. You understand? This accumulation, psychological accumulation which becomes psychological knowledge and so it divides and all kinds of things happen around it and within it. And yet the mind refuses to let go. B: Yes. K: Is it that it doesn't see? Or it has given to knowledge such immense importance? B: Yes, that is what I mean, yes. K: Why? Is that because there is safety in it? Or security in it? B: Partly. That is part of it but it seems to be a source of security but you see I think in some way knowledge has taken on the significance of the absolute, you see, to say that knowledge should be properly relative. But this knowledge of the mind, psychological knowledge of the self or the associated knowledge. K: I understand all that, sir, but you are not answering my question. I am an ordinary man, I realize all this and I realize the significance and the value of knowledge in different levels, but deeper down inside one, this accumulated knowledge is very, very destructive. B: That is true, but there is self-deception and the knowledge deceives the mind so that the person is not normally aware that it is destructive. K: Is that why human beings cling to it? B: Well, they can't really. We don't know exactly how they got started on it, once it gets started the mind is generally in a state in which it is not able to look at this because it is avoiding the question, there is a tremendous defensive mechanism to escape looking at the whole question. K: Why? B: Because it seems something supremely precious might be at stake. K: One is strangely intelligent in other directions, capable and efficient, skilled, having a great deal of skill, but here, where the root of all this trouble is, why don't we comprehend it fully? What prevents the mind? You say it has given importance to knowledge. I acknowledge that, it is so, but yet it holds on. You must know this. B: But I think once this has happened there is a mechanical process that resists intelligence. K: So what shall I do? What shall I do as an ordinary man, I realize technological knowledge and all the rest of it, but knowledge which I have accumulated, which is divisive, which is destructive, which is rather petty, and yet I hold on to that and I realize I must let it go but I can't? What shall I do? I think this is the average person's problem - a problem which arises when we are a little bit serious about all this. Is it the lack of energy? B: Not primarily. You see the energy is being dissipated by the process. K: Dissipated, I understand that. Having dissipated a great deal of energy I haven't got the energy to grapple with this. B: That could come back quickly if we could get out of this. The energy is constantly being dissipated and a person may be a little worn down but he could recover if this would stop. I don't think it is the main point. K: No, that is not the main point. So what shall I do, as a human being, realizing that this knowledge is naturally, inevitably forming a groove in which I live, my next question is: how am I to break it down? B: Well, I am not sure that it is clear in general to people that this knowledge is doing all this, and also that the knowledge is knowledge. You see it may seem to be some being, the self, the me, this knowledge is experienced as some entity, this knowledge creates the me and the me is now experienced as an entity which is not knowledge, but some real being. Right? K: Are you saying this being is different from knowledge? B: It appears to be, it feigns difference. K: But is it? B: It isn't but it has a very powerful ability. K: But that has been my conditioning. B: That is true. Now the question is, how do we get through that to break down the groove? K: That is the real point, you see. B: Because it creates an imitation or a pretension of a state of being. K: Look: there are several hundred million Catholics, thousands and millions and millions of Chinese. You follow? This is their central movement. It seems so utterly hopeless. And realizing the hopelessness I sit back and say, I can't do anything. But if I apply my mind to it then the question arises: is it possible to function without psychological knowledge in this world? I am rather concerned about it because I think wherever one goes, whether it is California, India, or here or anywhere else, it is this central issue that must be resolved. B: That is right. But you see you may discuss this, or tell this to somebody, and he may say it looks reasonable perhaps, but let's say that his status is threatened. Now we have to say that is psychological knowledge. It doesn't seem to him that it is knowledge but something more. K: I know all that. B: Now he does not see that his knowledge of his status is behind the trouble. Knowledge seems to be at first sight something passive, something which you know, which you could use if you wanted to and which you could fail to use if you don't want to, just put it aside, you see, which is the way it should be. K: I understand all that. B: But when the moment comes, knowledge no longer appears to be knowledge. You see how would you, if you were to talk to some politician - I think once somebody wanted you to talk to Mao Tze Tung - you would probably get nowhere. K: No! The politicians and the people in power wouldn't even listen to me. The religious people won't listen to you, the so-called religious people. It is only the people who are discontented, who are frustrated, who feel they have lost everything, perhaps those will listen. But they won't listen so that it is a real burning thing. How does one go about it? Say for instance, I have left Catholicism and Protestantism and all that nonsense, and also I have a career, I know it is necessary to have knowledge there, but I have come to a point, as a human being, living in this world, I see how important it is not to be caught in the process of knowledge, psychological knowledge, and yet I can't let it go. It is always dodging me, I am playing tricks with it. It is like hide and seek. All right. From there we said that is the wall I have to break down. We are approaching it differently. That is the wall I have to break down - not 'I' - that is the wall that has to be broken down. And we said that wall can be broken down through love and intelligence. Aren't we asking something enormously difficult? B: Well, it is difficult. K: I am behind, this side of the wall, and you are asking me to have that love and intelligence which will destroy the wall. But I don't know what that love is, what that intelligence is, because I am caught in this, on this side of the wall. And I realize what you are saying is accurate, true, logical, and I see the importance of it, but the wall is so strong and dominant and powerful that I can't get beyond it. And we said the other day that the wall can be broken down through insight - we went into that. That insight becomes an idea. B: Yes. K: It is not an actuality and you say, 'Yes, I understand it, I see it', but when you describe the insight, whether it is possible, how it is brought about and so on, I immediately make an abstraction of it, which means I move away from the fact and the abstraction becomes all important. Which means knowledge. B: Yes, well it is the activity of knowledge. K: So I am back again. B: Well I think the general difficulty is this: that knowledge is not just sitting there as a form of information but it is extremely active, meeting every moment and shaping every moment according to the past knowledge, so even when we raise this issue knowledge is all the time waiting and then acting. K: All the time waiting, yes. B: One point is that our whole tradition is that knowledge is not active but passive, it is really active but people don't generally think of it that way. K: Of course. B: They think it is just sitting there. K: It is waiting. B: It is waiting to act, you see. And anything you try to do about it, knowledge is already acting. By the time you realize that this is the problem it has already acted. K: Yes. Do I realize it as a problem, or an idea which I must carry out? You see the difference? B: Yes, the first point is that knowledge automatically turns everything into an idea which you must carry out. That is the whole way it is built. Right? K: That is the whole way I have lived. B: Knowledge can't do anything else. K: How am I to break that even for a second? B: It seems to me that if you could see, observe, be aware, if knowledge could be aware of itself at work, the point is that knowledge seems to work unawares, you see, it is just simply waiting there and then acts and by that time it has disrupted the order of the brain. K: I am very concerned about this because wherever I go this is what is happening. And it has become a problem, not for me, but it is something that has to be resolved. Would you say the capacity to listen is far more important than any of this, any explanations, any logic, to listen? B: It comes to the same problem. K: No, no. It doesn't. I want to see if there is a possibility that when I listen, listen to what you are saying so completely the wall has broken down. You understand? I am trying to find out sir. I am an ordinary man and you are telling me all this, and I realize what you are saying is so. And I am concerned about it, I am really deeply involved in what you are saying. And somehow the flame isn't lit, all the fuel is there but the fire isn't there. So what, as an ordinary man, what shall I do? This is my everlasting cry. B: If it is the capacity to listen then we have the question of say the ordinary man is full of opinions, you see, so he can't listen. K: You can't listen with opinions, you might be just as well dead. B: You see I think knowledge has all sorts of defences. If you are thinking of trying to spread, make it possible for people, say the ordinary man, to have this perception, that is really what you are asking, isn't it? K: Yes. B: At least those who are interested. Now I think knowledge has a tremendous number of defences, it is against perceiving this. It has evolved in such a way that it resists, is built so as to resist seeing this, so it has opinions which also act immediately. K: I understand that, sir. But I want to find, not a drug, not a medicine, not a way, but there must be a communication between you and me who is the ordinary man, a communication so that the communication is so strong that very act of listening to you and you communicating with me operates. B: Right. K: You follow? B: Yes, then you have to break through this opinion, through the whole structure. K: Of course, of course. That is why I have come here. As an ordinary man I have come for that. I have left all the churches and all that stuff, I have thrown them miles away, years away, I have finished with all that. I have just come here and I realize all that has been said here is true and I am burning to find out. When you communicate with me your communication is so strong, so real. You follow? You are not speaking from knowledge, you are not speaking from opinion and all the rest of it. You are really a free human being who is trying to communicate with me. B: Right. K: And can I listen with that intensity which, you the communicator, is giving me? B: Well, we would have to ask, is the ordinary man full of that? K: No, he is not. He wants the pub. No, I said I am an ordinary man but I have moved away from all that, I have come here. I have left all that. I also realize in opinions I can grow, multiply, gather opinions, which is partly prejudice and all the rest of it, I realize all that. And I want to listen to somebody who is telling the truth and in the very telling of it something is taking place in me. I don't know if you understand. And because I am so ardently listening it happens. I wonder if I am conveying anything. After all you, a great scientist, I am one of your students, you want to tell me something. You are telling me about something which I know must be enormously important because you have given your life to it, and as a student I have given up so much just to come here. Is it the fault of you who are communicating with me that I don't receive it instantly? You understand? Or is it my fault that I am incapable of really listening to you? B: Well, whichever it is, but suppose the difficulty is that I am incapable of listening,then what can be done? K: No, nothing can be done. You see that is the difficulty. If I am incapable of listening because I am full of prejudices, opinions, and judgements, defences and all the rest of it has built up, and then, of course, I won't listen to you. B: Well let's say there is somebody who comes along who has got through some of these defences and so on, but perhaps there are others that he is not aware of, you see. There is something not quite so simple as that. K: I think it is simple. I feel it is dreadfully simple somehow. I think it is that if I could listen with all my being, with all my attention, it takes place. It is as simple as that, I think. You see, sir, you are telling me something and I am absorbing it, so there is an interval between my telling and your absorbing. I don't know if I am conveying it? B: Yes. K: And in that interval is the danger. If I didn't absorb it absolutely, listen to it with all my being, it is finished. Is it because in this there is no shadow of pleasure? You follow what I am saying? You are not offering me any pleasure, any gratification. You are saying, it is so, take it. But my mind is so involved in pleasure it must be pleasurable to listen. You follow what I mean? B: Yes. K: I won't listen to anything that is not completely satisfactory. I realize too the danger of that. B: Danger? K: Of seeking satisfaction and pleasure and all that. I say, 'All right, I won't, I see what I am doing' - so I put that aside too. No pleasure, no reward, no punishment, in listening but there is only pure observation. So we come back to that point: is pure observation, which is actually listening, is that pure observation love? I think it is. Again you have stated it and then my mind says - I am fairly ordinary, I have come here - my mind immediately says, 'Give it to me. Tell me what to do'. You see when I ask you, 'Tell me what to do', I am back in the knowledge, in the field of knowledge. It is so instantaneous. So I refuse to ask you what to do. Then where am I? You have told me perception without any motive, direction, pure perception is love. And in that perception/love is intelligence. They are not three separate things, they are all one thing. I have a feeling for it. Because you have lead me very carefully - not lead me - you have pointed out very carefully step by step, and I have come to that point, I have a feeling for it. I am sensitive enough by listening to all this, to come to that point when I have a feeling and say, 'By Jove, that is so'. But it goes away so quickly. Then begins, 'How am I get it back?' Again the remembrance of it, which is knowledge, blocks. B: Well what you are saying is that every time there is a communication, knowledge gets to work in many different forms. K: So you see it is enormously difficult to be free of knowledge. B: It seems we could ask why doesn't knowledge wait until it is needed? K: Ah, that requires, sir - that means to be psychologically free of knowledge but when the occasion arises you are acting from freedom, not from knowledge.. B: But knowledge comes in as information. K: Yes. B: It informs your action but it is not the source. K: That is, to put it rather succinctly, freedom from knowledge, and being free it is from freedom one communicates, not from knowledge. I wonder if I am making this clear? B: Yes. K: That is, from emptiness there is communication. One may use the word, or language, which is the outcome of knowledge, but it is from that state of complete freedom. B: Yes. Knowledge, communication, takes place but it is concerning the question of knowledge as the irrelevance of knowledge, of psychological knowledge, that is the communication. K: Yes. Now, sir, can I communicate with you from freedom? Suppose I, as a human being, have come to that point where there is complete freedom from knowledge and from that freedom a communication, using words, takes place. Right? Now will you, as a scientist, of great scientific eminence and all the rest of it, will you - please, I am being polite - will you communicate with me, can I communicate with you without any barrier? You follow what I am saying? B: Yes. K: You understand what I am saying, I am not trying to.. Can I communicate with another - or rather let me put it the other way. Can that man who is free, totally free from knowledge, but uses knowledge merely as a means of communication, can I be in such a state of mind to receive that communication? B: Yes, well if knowledge is seen to be information, you see knowledge ordinarily seems more than information, it seems that knowledge itself does not ordinarily see that knowledge is not free. K: It is never free. B: No, but it may seem it at first sight, you are free to use your knowledge, you see. K: Of course. B: But it isn't free and any activity of knowledge is part of the un-freedom. K: Of course. If I am going to understand myself I must be free to look at myself. B: And knowledge has pressures in it to prevent you. K: Knowledge prevents me from looking then. That is so obvious. Sorry! B: Well I mean it may be obvious at this stage, but I am saying that generally people don't see that. Let's leave that aside. K: If I am full of opinions and judgements and evaluations and to look at myself I must be somewhat free from it to look. It is so clear. B: Yes, but I mean probably one tends to say that there are certain kinds of knowledge which are harmful like prejudice and then you say there are other kinds which are not harmful. K: The whole business. B: The whole thing is one structure, yes. It is impossible to have prejudice in one part without having it in the other. K: How will you communicate with me who have come to a certain point when I am really grasping - not grasp - burning to receive what you are saying, so completely it is finished? Am I, having come here, am I in that state really? Or am I fooling myself? B: Well that is the question: knowledge is constantly deceiving itself. K: Of course. B: Well I think I would say that knowledge, it is not even that I am deceiving myself but knowledge has a built-in tendency to deceive itself. K: So, sir, is my mind always deceiving itself? B: The tendency is it's constantly there when knowledge is operating psychologically. K: So what shall I do? Come back to that. B: Well, there is the question of deceiving oneself. Again I think it is the same point: to listen. K: Why don't we listen, sir? Why don't we immediately understand this thing, instantly, immediately, why? One can give the reasons why but that doesn't - old age, conditioning, laziness, ten different things. B: Well that is superficial. K: Meaningless. B: But would it be possible to give the deep reason for it? K: We come back to the same thing. You see I think, sir, is it that the knowledge which is the 'me'.. B: Yes, that is the point, yes. K:.. the knowledge which is the 'me' is so tremendously strong as an idea, not as a fact? B: Yes, I understand it is an idea. That is what I tried to say, that the idea has tremendous significance and meaning. For example, suppose you have the idea of god, this takes on a tremendous power. K: Or like I am British, or French, it gives me great energy. B: And so it creates a state of the body which seems to be the very being of the self. Now the person doesn't experience it as mere knowledge but at first feels something very powerful which doesn't seem to be knowledge. K: Yes. Are we going round and round and round? It seems like it. B: Well I was wondering if there is anything that could be communicated about that overwhelming power that seems to come with knowledge. K: And with identification. B: With identification. That seems to be something that would be worth looking into. K: What does the word - I have forgotten - the root meaning of identification? B: Well, always the same. K: Always the same, that's right. That's it, you see! It is always the same. There is nothing new under the sun. B: That is the essence of it. You say the self is always the same. It tries to be always the same in essence if not in details. K: Yes, yes. B: I think this is the thing that goes wrong with knowledge that knowledge attempts to be knowledge of what is always the same, you see, so it holds, you see. K: Of course, it is always the same. B: And knowledge itself tries to find what is permanent and perfect and always the same. I mean even independent of any of us you see. It is built into, like the cells, you see. K: From this arises a question: is it possible to attend? I am trying to use the word diligent. Is it possible to diligently attend? Diligence in the sense of being accurate. B: Literally it means to take pains. K: To take pains, of course. To take pain, take the whole if it. Sir, there must be some other way round all this intellectual business. We have exercised a great deal of intellectual capacity and that intellectual capacity has led to the blank wall. I approach it from every direction and eventually the wall is there, which is the 'me', with my knowledge, my prejudice, and all the rest of it - me. And the 'me' then says, 'I must do something about it' - which is still the me. We all know that. B: Well the 'me' wants to be always the same at the same time it tries to be different. K: Put on a different coat. It is always the same. So the mind which is functioning with the 'me' is always the same mind. Good Lord, you see, sir, back again! B: You see, 'always the same' gives a tremendous force. Now is it possible to leave go of that 'always the same', you know? K: You see, we have tried everything - fasting, every kind of thing to get rid of the 'me with all its knowledge, with all its illusions and so on. One tries to identify with something else, which is the same. A serious man has done all this and comes back to the fundamental question: what will make this wall totally disappear? I think, sir, that it is only possible when I can give my total attention to what you are saying. There is no other means to break down the wall - not the intellect, not the emotions, not any of these things. When somebody who is beyond the wall, has gone beyond, broken down the wall, says, 'Listen, for god's sake listen'. Can I listen to you - when I listen to you my mind is empty. So it is finished. You follow what I am saying? B: You see I think generally that one would feel OK, it is finished, but something will happen in its own time. K: I have no sense of hoping to come back, to have it in the future, or - it is empty and therefore listening. It is finished. We had better stop, we have come to a point. Five minutes is enough. I would like to go on differently. You are a scientist, to discover something new, you must have a certain emptiness from which there will be a different perception. B: Yes, but I think there is a difference in the sense that usually the question is limited and so the mind may be empty with regard to that question. K: That particular question, yes. B: Allowing for discovery and insight in that question. K: But can that mind, which has been specializing, therefore enquiring into something it becomes empty and rom that emptiness you discover something new. I understand that. But without any specialization, does this emptiness hold every other - I don't know. B: Well, I think one has to ask - we are not questioning this particular area but rather we are questioning the whole of knowledge. K: Knowledge, yes. B: And.. K: It is most extraordinary when you go into it. B: As you were saying, the end of knowledge is the Vedanta. K: That is the real answer. B: But if a person can take this scientific attitude and question the whole of knowledge.. K: Oh, of course, of course. B: But generally people would feel they must keep knowledge in one area to be able to question it in another. You see this is something that might worry people to say, with what knowledge do I question that knowledge? K: Yes. With what knowledge I question my knowledge? Quite. B: In a way we do have knowledge because we have seen that this whole structure, we have gone through it logically and rationally and seen that the whole structure makes no sense, that it is inconsistent and has no meaning. The structure of psychological knowledge has no meaning, it has been done already. K: Would you then from there, from that emptiness: is there a ground or a source from which all things begin? Matter, human beings, their capacities, the whole movement starts from there. B: We could consider that certainly. But let's try to clarify it a little. We have the emptiness. K: Yes, emptiness in which there is no movement of thought as knowledge, of course. B: As psychological knowledge. K: Of course, I understand that. B: So, well then.. K: And therefore no time. B: No psychological time. K: Yes, no psychological time. B: Though we still have the watch. K: Yes. We have gone beyond that, don't let's go back to it. B: The words are often confusing, they carry wrong meanings. K: Psychological time. There is no psychological time, no movement of thought. And is that emptiness the beginning of all movement? B: Well, would you say the emptiness is the ground then? K: That is what I am asking. Let's go slowly into this. Shall we postpone this for another day? B: Well perhaps it should be gone into more carefully. K: We had better stop. B: Well just one thing: in California we were saying there is the emptiness and beyond that is the ground. K: I know, I know. B: We leave it for the time. K: When do we meet again? B: It is two days from now, on Saturday. K: The day after tomorrow. B: Yes. K: Right, sir. BROCKWOOD PARK 14TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 20TH SEPTEMBER 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' Krishnamurti: We talked the other day about a mind that is entirely free from all movement, from all the things that thought has put there, that thought has brought about, has experienced, the past and the future and so on. But before we go into that I would like to ask, what is materialism? Bohm: Materialism. K: Man is caught in this materialistic attitude and values and experiences. What is the nature of materialism? B: Well, consider first of all materialism is the name of a certain philosophical.... K: I don't mean that. B: No. K: I don't mean a certain philosophical saying but I want to find out. B: Matter is all there is. K: I want to go into that a little bit. That is, all nature, all human beings react physically. This reaction is sustained by thought. And thought is a natural process. So reaction as in nature, in animals, in human beings, is the materialistic response. B: Well, I think the word materialistic is not quite right. It is the response of matter. K: The response of matter, let's put it that way. All right. The response of matter. That's better. Let me repeat it again, let's be clear. We are talking about having an empty mind and we have come to that point when the wall has been broken down and this emptiness and what lies beyond it, or through it, and so on, we will come to that, but before I begin with that, as I said: is all reaction matter? B: Matter in movement. K: Matter in movement. B: Well that is the suggestion. You could say there is a lot of evidence in favour of that, that science has found a tremendous number of reactions which are due to the nerves. K: Yes, all that. So would you call matter and movement the reactions which exist in all organic matter? B: Yes, it is necessary - all matter as we know it goes by the law of action and reaction. Every action has a corresponding reaction. K: So action and reaction is a material process, as thought is. Now to go beyond it is the question, that is the point. B: Yes. Now some people might say it has no meaning to go beyond it. That would be the philosophy of materialism: there is no meaning to go beyond it. K: Beyond it, that's right. But if one is merely living in that area it is very, very shallow. Right? It has really no meaning at all. But if one recognizes thought as a material process and reaction and action are matter and movement. B: Yes. Perhaps one should say one other thing that some people have said that matter is not merely action and reaction but it may have a creative movement. You see matter may create new forms. K: Matter may create new forms, but it is still within that area. B: Yes. Let's try to make it clear what is the difference. We have to see there are very subtle forms of materialism which might be difficult to pin down. K: Let's begin: would you consider, or agree or see that thought is a material process. B: Yes. Though some people might argue that it is both material and something beyond material. K: I know. I have discussed this. But it is not. B: How can we say that simply to make it clear? K: Because any movement of thought is a material process, whether it is beyond. B: Well we have to make it clear so that it is not a matter of authority. From observation one sees that thought is a material process, now how are would one see that? K: How would one be aware of all that? Aware that it is a material process. I think that is fairly clear. There is an experience, an incident, recorded, which becomes knowledge, from that knowledge thought arises and action takes place. B: Yes. So we say thought is that. K: Any assertion that is beyond is still thought. B: It is still coming from the background. So if we say that something new coming into there is not part of this process, is that what you are saying? K: Yes, if there is to be something new, thought, as a material process, must end. Obviously. B: And then it may take it up later. K: Later, yes. Wait, see what happens later. So could we say, all reaction and action, action from that reaction is movement of matter. B: Yes, very subtle movement of matter. K: Yes, very subtle movement of matter. So as long as one's mind is within that area it must be a movement of matter. B: Yes, well let's proceed from there then. K: So is it possible for the mind to go beyond reaction? That is the next step obviously. As we said yesterday morning in our discussion with the group, one gets irritated and that is the first reaction. Then the reaction to that, the second reaction to that is 'I must not'. Then the third reaction, 'I must control' - or justify or whatever it is. So it is constantly action and reaction. Can one see it is a movement, a continuous movement without an ending? B: Yes. The reaction is actually continuous but it seems at a certain moment to have ended and the next moment appears to be a new moment. K: But it is still reaction. B: It is still the same but it presents itself differently. K: That's right. B: It is always the same. K: It is exactly the same always. B: It presents itself as always different. K: Of course. B: Always new. K: That is just it. You say something, I get irritated, but that irritation is a reaction. B: Yes, it seems to be something suddenly new. K: Suddenly new. But it is not. B: It is not. But one has to be aware of that. K: Of course, of course. B: Generally the mind tends not to be aware of it. K: But after discussing a great deal and talking one can. B: We are attentive to it. K: Yes, we are sensitive to it, alert to the question. So there is an ending to reaction if one is watchful, attentive, understand not only logically but have an insight into this reacting process all the time, it can of course come to an end. That is why it is very important, I think, to understand this, before we discuss what is an empty mind and if there is something beyond, or in that very emptying of the mind there is some other quality. So is that empty mind a reaction? You follow sir? A reaction to the problems of pain and pleasure and suffering, and the reaction to that is to escape from all this into some state of nothingness. B: Yes, well the mind can always do that, it can fail to notice pain and pleasure. K: It can invent. Of course, of course. That becomes an illusion. Now we are not talking - because we went into the question of illusions and said desire is the beginning of illusion. Now we have come to the point that this quality of emptiness is not a reaction. That must be absolutely sure. Right sir? Now before we go further into this: is it possible to have a mind that is really completely empty of all the things that thought has put together? B: Well, then thought ceases to react. K: That's it. B: Thought being a material process, on the one hand perhaps you could say that perhaps the reaction is due to the nature of matter which is continually reacting and moving, but then is matter affected by this insight? K: I don't quite follow. Ah, I understand. Does insight affect the cells of the brain which contains the memory? B: Yes. The memory is continually reacting, moving, as does the air and the water, everything around us. Now if nothing happened we should say, why would it ever stop? K: Quite. After all sir, physically if I don't react I am paralysed. One is paralysed. But the reacting continually is also a form of paralysis. B: Yes, well the wrong kind of reaction. K: Yes. B: Reaction around the psychological structure. K: Yes, we are talking psychologically always. B: But now assuming that the reaction around the psychological structure has begun in mankind why should it ever stop, because one reaction makes another and another. K: It is like a chain, endless. B: One would expect it to go on for ever unless something will stop it. Right? K: Nothing will stop it. Only the insight into the nature of reaction ends psychological reaction. B: Yes, but then you are saying that matter is affected by insight, which is beyond matter. K: Yes, beyond matter. Didn't we discuss this matter also in Ojai? B: Yes. K: So is this emptiness within the brain itself? Or something thought has conceived as being empty? One must be very clear on this. B: Yes. But whatever is discussed, no matter what the question is, thought begins to want to do something about it because thought feels it can always make a contribution. K: Quite. B: That might be useful, eh? So thought in the past did not understand that there are areas where it has no useful contribution to make, but it keeps on in the habit of trying to say emptiness is very good, therefore thought says I will try to help bring about emptiness. K: Of course. B: Thought is trying to be helpful. K: We have been through all that. B: Yes. K: We have seen the nature of thought, what is its movement, time, and all that. We have been through all that. I want to find out, I have come to a point: is this emptiness within the mind itself, or beyond it? B: What do you mean by the mind, do you see. K: The mind being the whole, emotions, thought, consciousness, the brain, the whole of that is the mind. B: The mind has been used in many ways, that word. Now you are using it in a certain way, which is that it represents thought, feeling, desire and will - the whole material process. K: Yes, the whole material process. B: Which people have called non-material. K: Quite. The mind is the whole material process. B: Which is going on in the brain and the nerves. K: The whole of it. B: Yes. K: The whole structure. One can see this reaction, this materialistic reaction can end. And the next question I am asking is: is that emptiness within or without? And without in the sense it is elsewhere. B: Where would it be? K: I don't think it would be elsewhere but I am just putting it. B: Well any such thing is part of the material process. You see here and there are distinctions made within the material process. K: Yes, that is right. That is what I wanted to get at. It is there. It is in the mind itself. Not outside it. Right? B: Yes. K: Now what is the next step? Is that emptiness - does that emptiness contain nothing, not a thing? B: Yes, well not a thing, meaning anything that has form, structure, stability. K: Yes, all that, form, structure, reaction, naturally. B: Yes it is stability and reaction. K: Form, structure, capacity, reaction - all that. Or it contains none of that. Then what is it? Is it then total energy? B: Yes, movement of energy. K: Movement of energy. It is not movement of reaction. B: It is not movement of things reacting to each other. Because the world can be regarded as made up of a large number of things which react to each other and that is one kind of movement. But we are saying it is a different kind of movement. K: Entirely different. B: Which has no thing in it. K: No thing in it and therefore not of time - right? Is that possible? Or are we just indulging in imagination? Indulging in some kind of romantic, hopeful, pleasurable, sensation? I don't think we are because we have been through all that step by step by step right up to this point. So we are not deceiving ourselves. Now we say that emptiness has no centre - right? - as the 'me' and all the reactions and so on. It is in that emptiness there is a movement of timeless energy. B: Yes, when you say timeless energy - we could say what we have already said that time and thought are the same. K: Yes, of course. B: Then you were saying that time can only come into a material process. K: Time can only come into a material process, that's right. B: Now if we have an energy that is timeless but nevertheless moving... K: Yes, it is not static. B: It is moving. K: It is moving. B: Yes, now what is the movement? K: Sir, what is movement? From here to there. B: That is one form. K: One form. Or from yesterday to today, and from today to tomorrow. B: Yes, there are various kinds of movement. K: So what is movement? Is there a movement - I am asking, I want to question it - is there a movement which is not a moving? Just a minute. You understand? Is there a movement which has no beginning and no end? Because thought has a beginning and an end. B: Except, we could say that the movement of matter might have a beginning and no ending, the reactive movement - you are not talking of that? K: No, I am not talking of that. B: So it is not enough to say it has no beginning and no end -right? K: We must go back then to the other. That is, thought has a beginning and thought has an ending. There is a movement of matter as reaction and the ending of that reaction. B: Yes, in the brain. K: In the brain. But there are these various kinds of movements. That is all we know. And someone comes along and says there is a totally different kind of movement. But to understand that I must be free of the movement of thought, material process and all that, the movement of time, to understand a movement that is not... B: Well there are two things: it has no beginning and no end but also it is not determined as a series of successions from the past. K: No causation. B: It is not a series of causes, one following the other. K: Of course. No causation. B: But you see matter can be looked at as a series of causes, though it may not be adequate. But you were saying that this movement has no beginning and no ending, it is not the result of a series of causes, one following another without end. K: So, sir I want to understand, verbally even, a movement that is not a movement. I don't know if I am making it clear. B: Then why is it called a movement if it is not a movement? K: Because it is not still, it is not - it is active. B: It is energy. K: It has tremendous energy, therefore it can never be still. But it has got in that energy a stillness. B: Yes, the energy itself - I think that we have to say that the ordinary language does not convey it properly, but the energy itself is still and also moving. K: Yes, but in that movement it is a movement of stillness. Does it sound crazy? B: The movement can be said to emerge from stillness. K: That's right. You see that is what it is sir. We said that this empty mind, this emptiness is in the mind. That emptiness has no cause and no effect. It is not a movement of causation. It is not a movement of thought, time. It is not a movement of material reactions; none of that. Which means: is the mind capable of that extraordinary stillness without any movement? And when it is so completely still there is a movement out of it. It sounds crazy. B: Well it needn't sound crazy. In fact I think I mentioned before that some people have had this notion in the past - such as Aristotle - we discussed it. He talked about the unmoved mover -that is the way he tried to describe god. K: Ah, god, no. I don't want to do that. B: You don't want to describe god but I mean some sort of notion similar to this has been held in the past by various people, but since then it has gone out of fashion, I think. K: Out of fashion. Let's bring it into fashion, shall we! B: I am not saying that Aristotle had the right idea, it is merely that he was considering something somewhat similar, though probably different in many cases. K: Was it an intellectual concept or an actuality? B: This is very hard to tell because so little is known. K: Therefore we don't have to bring in Aristotle. B: I merely wanted to say it to point out that it wasn't crazy because other very respectable people have had something similar. K: I am glad! I am glad to be assured I am not crazy! B: Because you did ask if it was crazy. K: And is that movement out of stillness, is that the movement of creation? Not the creation of the artist, the poets and the writers and all the painters call creation - to me that is not creation, just a capacity and skill and memory and knowledge operating there. Here I think this creation is not expressed in form. B: Yes, that is important. Usually we think creation is expressed as form or as structure. K: Structure, yes. B: Now, then this is difficult, what does it mean? K: We have gone beyond being crazy so we can go on. Would you say, sir, this movement, not being of time, is eternally new? B: Yes. It is eternally new in the sense that the creation is eternally new. Right? K: Creation is eternally new. You see I think that is what the artists are trying to find out. B: Yes, that's true, yes. K: Therefore they indulge in all kinds of various absurdities, but to come to that point where the mind is absolutely silent, completely silent, out of that silence there is this movement which is always new, eternally new. And the moment when that movement is expressed... B: Yes, the first expression is in thought - right? K: That is just it. B: And that may be useful but then it gets fixed. Then it may become a barrier. K: I was told, once by an Indian philosopher, an Indian scholar, that before they began to sculpture a head of a god, or whatever it is, they had to have deep meditation, go into deep meditation. At the right moment they took up the hammer and the chisel. B: To have it come out of the emptiness. K: The emptiness. B: There is another point. The Australian aborigines draw figures in the sand so they don't have permanency. K: That is right. B: If thought could be looked at that way. You see the marble is already too static, it stays there for thousands of years. So although the original sculptor may have understood, the people who follow see it as a fixed form. K: Sir, what relationship has all that to my daily life? What way does that act through my action, through my ordinary physical responses? There are no psychological responses but there are physical responses, to noise, to pain, various forms of disturbances, physical disturbances. What relationship has the physical to that silent movement? B: Yes, well in so far as the mind is silent then the thought is orderly. K: Yes, it is orderly. Ah, we are getting on to something. Would you say that silent movement with its unending newness, is total order of the universe? B: Yes, we could consider that the order of the universe emerges from this silence and emptiness. K: So what is my relationship, what is the relationship of this mind to the universe? B: The particular mind? K: No, mind. B: Mind in general. K: Mind, the general and the particular we went through and beyond that, there is the mind. B: Well would you say that is universal? K: Universal mind. That universal mind - I don't like to use the word universal. B: In the sense, that which is beyond the particular and general would usually be called universal mind. But it may be that the word is difficult, eh? K: Can we find a different word? Global, no. A mind that is beyond a particular. No. B: Well you could say it is the source, the essence. I don't know what you could say. It has been called the absolute. K: I don't want to use that word absolute either. B: But in the sense - the absolute means literally that which is free of all limitations, of all dependence, right? K: All right, if you agree that absolute means freedom from all dependence, from all limitations. B: From all relationships. K: Then we will use that, all right. B: It has unfortunate connotations. K: Of course, of course. Let's use that word for the moment for our convenience, in our dialogue. There is this absolute stillness and in that stillness or from that stillness there is a movement and that movement is everlastingly new. And what is the relationship of that mind to the universe? B: To the universe of matter? K: Yes, the universe, the whole universe. Matter, trees, nature, man, the heavens. B: Yes, well that is an interesting question. K: That is in order, the universe is in order, whether it is destructor or constructive, it is still order. B: Well it is necessary order. You see the order has the character of being absolutely necessary. In a sense it cannot be otherwise. The order that we usually know is not absolutely necessary, it could be changed, it could depend on something else, any ordinary order is contingent, it depends on something. K: The eruption of a volcano is order. B: It is order of the whole universe, it is necessary considering the whole universe, it cannot be otherwise. K: Quite. Now in the universe there is order and this mind which is still, is completely in order. B: The deep mind, the absolute. K: The absolute mind. So is this mind, the universe? B: Well that is the question. In what sense is that the universe? We have to understand in what sense, what it means to say that. K: Or it means sir, is there a division, or a barrier, between this absolute mind and the universe? Or are both the same? B: Both are the same, right. K: That is what I want to get at. B: We have either duality of mind and matter, or they are both the same. K: That's it. Is that presumptions? B: Not necessarily, no. I mean these are just two possibilities. K: I want to be quite sure we are not treading on something which really needs very, very, subtle, great care, you know what I mean? B: Yes. Well if you go back to the body. We have said the body is physical, it is material. And we said the mind of the body - the mind which is in the body - thought, feeling desire, the general and the particular are part of the material process. K: Absolutely, the material process. B: Not different from the body. K: That's right. All the reactions are material processes. B: And therefore what we usually call the mind is not different from what we usually call the body. K: Quite, quite. B: Now you are making this much greater in saying consider the whole universe. And we say what we call the mind in the universe, is it different from what we call the universe itself? K: That's right. You see that's why I feel in our daily life there must be order, not the order of thought. B: Well thought is a limited order, it is relative. K: That's it. So an order that is... B:... free of limitation. K: Free of limitation, yes. In my daily life I have to have that, which means no conflict whatsoever, no contradiction, no, all the rest of that. B: Well if we take the order of thought. You see when it is rational it is in order; in contradiction the order of thought has broken down, it has reached its limit. Thought works until it reaches a contradiction and that's the limit. K: So if in my daily life there is complete order in which there is no disturbance, what is the relationship of that order to the never ending order? Can that silent movement of order, of that extraordinary something, can that affect my daily life when I have deep inward psychological order? You understand my question? B: Yes. We have said, for example, the volcano is a manifestation of the whole order of the universe. K: Absolutely. A tiger killing a deer. B: The question is then, whether a human being in his daily life can be similar. K: Similar. That's it. If not I don't see what is the point of the other. B: Well it has no point to the human being. K: That's it. B: Then you would fall back into the human being trying to make his own purpose out of himself, out of his thoughts. You see I think some people would say who cares about the universe, all we care about is our own society, what we are doing. But then that falls down because it is full of contradiction. K: Obviously. It is only thought that says that. So that universe, which is in total order, does affect my daily life. B: Yes. I think, that scientists might ask how. You see people might say, 'OK. I understand that the universe is constituted of matter, the laws of matter affect your daily life,' - but we are saying it is not so clear how it affects the mind - you know if there is this absolute mind which affects the daily life. K: Ah! What is my daily life? A series of reactions and disorder. Right? B: Yes. K: I am making it very quick, brief. B: Well it is mostly that. K: Mostly. And ought is always struggling to bring order within that. B: Yes. K: And when it does that, it is still disorder. B: Because thought is limited. K: Of course. B: Always limited by its own contradictions. K: Of course. Thought is always creating disorder because it is itself limited. B: As soon as it tries to go beyond the limit, that is disorderly. K: That is disorderly. Right. I have understood, I have gone into it, I have an insight into it, so I have a certain kind of order in my life. But that order is still limited. I recognize that and as long as matter, this existence, I say it is limited. B: Now some people would accept that and say why should you have more. K: Ah, I am not having more. B: But I mean some people would say, 'I would be happy if I could bring this limited order, seeing that we have so much disorder now, if we could live in a material life with real order.' K: I say, let's do it! Of course that must be done. But in the very doing of it one has to realize it is limited. B: Yes, even the highest order you can produce is limited. K: Limited. And the mind realizes its limitation and says, let's go beyond it. B: Why? Some people would say, why not be happy within those limits, continually extending them, saying we can discover new thoughts, new order, the order will discover new forms of art, the scientists new kind of sciences. K: But it is always limited. B: Though we have to go slowly because I think some people would go this far and say that that is all that is possible. K: I like the human condition, let's accept it, and make the best of it. B: They say, we could do much better than we are doing. K: Yes, but it is still the human condition, a little reformed, a little better. B: Some people would say enormously reformed. K: But it is still limited. B: Yes. Well let's try to make it clear because what is wrong with limitation? K: In that limitation there is no freedom, it is a limited freedom. B: Yes. So eventually we come to the boundary of our freedom - but let's try to put it clearly. Something not known to us makes us react and this would inevitably fail because through reaction we would fall back into contradiction. K: Yes, but when I see sir, that I am always moving within a certain area... B: Therefore I am under the control of the forces. K: Forces and the limited. The mind inevitably rebels against that. B: That is an important point. You see the mind wants freedom. Right? K: Obviously. B: Yes, it says that is the highest value, yes. So do we accept that and say that is just a fact? K: That is, a prisoner, I realize I am a prisoner within this limitation. B: Some people get used to it and say, 'I accept it'. K: I won't accept it. My mind says there must be freedom from prison. I am a prisoner and the prison is very nice, very cultured and all the rest of it, but it is still limited and it says there must be freedom beyond all that. B: Yes, which mind says this? Is it the particular mind of the human being? Or? K: Ah! Who says there must be freedom? Oh, that is very simple. The very pain, the very suffering, the very all that, demands that we go beyond. B: This particular mind even though it accepts limitation, finds it painful. K: Of course. B: And therefore this particular mind feels somehow that it is not right. K: Yes. B: It can't avoid it. It seems to be a necessity of freedom. K: Freedom is necessary. B: Is necessary, yes. K: And any hindrance to freedom is retrogression. Right. B: That necessity is not an external necessity due to reaction. K: Freedom is not a reaction. B: The necessity of freedom is not a reaction. Some people would say that having been in prison you reacted in this way. No? K: So where are we? You see sir, that means there must be freedom from reaction, freedom from the limitation of thought, freedom from all the movement of time. You know, all that, there must be complete freedom from all that, before I can really understand the empty mind and all that, and order of the universe, which is then the order of the mind. We are asking a tremendous lot! Am I willing to go that far? B: Well you know the non-freedom has its attractions. K: Of course. I am not interested in its attraction. B: But you asked the question: am I willing to go that far. So it seems to suggest that there may be something attractive in this. K: I am sure. I have found safety, security, pleasure in non-freedom. I realize in that pleasure, pain, there is no freedom and the mind says, not as a reaction, says there must be freedom from all this. To come to that point and to let go without conflict, demands its own discipline, its own insight. That's why I said those of us who have given a certain amount of time, thought and investigation into all this, can one go as far as that? Or there are the responses of the body, responses of daily demand, the responsibilities of daily action - wife, children, and all that - is that what is holding and preventing this sense of complete freedom? And the monks, the saints and the sannyasis have said, 'You must abandon the world.' B: We went into that. K: Yes, we have gone into that. That again is another form of idiocy. Sorry to put it like that. We have been through all that so I refuse to enter again into all that. Now I say is that universe and the mind that has emptied itself of all this, are they one? B: Are they one? K: One. They are not separate, they are one. B: Yes, it sounds as if you are saying that the material universe is like the body of the absolute mind. K: Yes, all right, all right. All right. B: It may be a picturesque way of putting it! K: We must be very careful also not to fall into the trap that the universal mind is always there. B: Yes, well how would you put it then? K: They have said that: god is always there and god - Brahman, or that highest principle, is always there and all you have to do is to cleanse yourself and arrive at that. Do all kinds of things to come there. Which is also a very dangerous statement because then you say, there is the eternal in me. B: Well I think thought is projecting. K: Of course, sir, of course. B: But suppose - how would you put it, there is a logical difficulty in saying it is always there, because that implies time and it is there every minute and we are trying to discuss what has nothing to do with time. K: Nothing to do with time. B: So we can't place it as being here, there, now, or then. K: Sir, we have come to a point, that there is this universal mind, and the human mind can be of that when there is freedom. I think that is enough, isn't it? B: Yes, what time is it? K: We are going by time, all right! B: Well that should be enough. K: That should be enough. B: You want to continue next week, on Saturday? K: We will see. BROCKWOOD PARK 15TH CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM 27TH SEPTEMBER 1980 `THE ENDING OF TIME' Krishnamurti: Sir, I would like to discuss, have a dialogue about something which we were talking about the other day. We have cultivated a mind that can solve almost any technological problem. And apparently human problems have never been solved. Human beings are drowned by their problems: the problems of communication, the problems of knowledge, problems of relationship, problems of heaven and hell - you know, the whole human existence has become a vast complex problem. And apparently throughout history it has been like this. And man in spite of his knowledge, in spite of his centuries of evolution, he has never been free of problems. Bohm: Yes, well really of insoluble problems. I would add insoluble problems. K: I question if human problems are insoluble. B: Well I mean as they are put now. K: As they are, of course, now these problems have become so complex, and so incredibly insoluble, as things are. No politician, or scientist, or philosopher is going to solve them except through wars and so on. So why has the mind of human beings throughout the world, why have they not been able to resolve human daily problems of life? What are the things that prevent the solution of these problems, completely? Is it that we have never turned our minds to it? Because we spend all our days and probably half the night in thinking about technological problems that we have no time for the other? B: Well that is only partly so. Many people feel that the other should take care of itself. I think many people don't give a lot of attention to these problems. K: Why, why? I am rather concerned about this because in a school like this, or with all the people we talk to, the human problems remain constant. And I am questioning, asking, in this dialogue, whether it is possible to have no problems at all - human problems, apart from technological problems, that can be solved. But human problems seem insoluble - why? Is it our education? Is it our deep rooted tradition that we accept things as they are? B: Yes, well that is certainly part of it. These problems accumulate as civilization gets older, people keep on accepting things which make problems. For example there are now far more nations in the world than there used to be and each one creates new problems. K: Of course. B: If you go back to a certain period of time... K: Every potty little tribe becomes a nation. B: And then they must fight their neighbour. K: Of course, of course. They have this marvellous technology to kill each other. But we are talking about human problems, human problems of relationship, human problems of lack of freedom. This sense of constant uncertainty, fear and all that, you know, the human struggle and working for a livelihood for the rest of your life. It all seems so extraordinarily wrong, the whole thing. B: Yes, well I think people have lost sight of that. Generally speaking they sort of, as you say, accept the situation in which they find themselves and try to make the best of it, like trying to solve some little problems to alleviate their situation. They wouldn't even look at this whole big situation very seriously. K: But the religious people have created a tremendous problem for man. B: Yes. They are trying to solve problems too. I mean everybody is often his own little fragment solving whatever he thinks he can solve, and it all adds up to chaos. K: Chaos, that's what I am saying. We live as human beings in chaos. I want to find out if I can live without a single problem for the rest of my life. Is that possible? B: Well I wonder if we should even call these things problems. A problem would be something that would be reasonably solvable. If you put a problem of how to achieve a certain result then that presupposes that you could reasonably find a way to do it, technologically. I don't think, psychologically, the problem can be looked at that way. To propose a result you have to achieve and then find a way to do it. K: What is the root of all this? What is the cause of all this human chaos? B: We have been discussing this for a long time. K: I am trying to come to it from a different angle: whether there is an ending to problems. You see personally I refuse to have problems. B: Well somebody might argue with you about that saying that maybe you are challenged with something. K: It is not a problem. I was challenged the other day about something very, very serious. B: It is a matter of clarification then. Part of the difficulty is clarification of the language. K: Clarification. Not only language, it is a question of relationship and action. A certain problem arose the other day which involved lots of people and so on, and a certain action had to be taken. Personally to me it was not a problem. B: Well, we have to make it clear what you mean because I don't know without an example. K: I mean by problem something that has to be resolved, something you worry about, something you are endlessly concerned and questioning, answering, doubt, uncertain, and take some kind of action at the end which you will regret. B: Let's begin with the technical problem where the idea first arose. Saying you have a challenge, something which needs to be done, and you say that is a problem. K: Yes, that is generally called a problem. B: Now the word problem is based on the idea of putting forth something, a possible solution and then trying to achieve it. K: Or, not. I have a problem but I don't know how to deal with it. B: Then if you have a problem and you have no idea of how to deal with it, then... K: So I go round asking people, getting more and more confused. B: That would already be a change from the simple idea of a technical problem where you usually have some notion of what to do. K: I wonder if we do. B: What? K: Technical problems are fairly simple. B: They often bring challenges requiring you to go very deeply and change your ideas. K: That is what I am trying to get at. B: Even a technical problem may do that. But now you say - if it were anything like a technical problem, either you would say, 'Well I can see generally what I have to do to solve this' - if you say there is lack of food, generally what you have got to do is produce more and more food, find ways and means of doing it. K: We can do that. B: And also we could discover entirely new ideas and so on. Now we have a psychological problem, can we do the same? K: Yes, that is the point. How do we deal with this thing? B: Well what kind of problem shall we discuss? K: Human problems. B: Human - what sort? K: Any problem that arises in human relationships. B: Well let's say people cannot agree, they fight each other constantly. K: Yes, let's take that for a very simple thing. In our discussions here with a group of people, it seems to be almost impossible to think together, to have the same outlook, the same attitude, not copying each other, but an attitude which seems so normal, healthy. And each person puts his opinion forward and he is contradicted by another. And so this goes on all the time in the world, and here. B: All right. Now we say our problem is to work together, to think together. K: Yes, work together, think together, to co-operate together without a monetary issue involved in it. B: Yes, well that is another question that people will work together if they are paid highly. K: Yes, of course, you can see that happening. B: But given a situation where this is not what we want then we have a problem. K: Yes, that is right. Now how do we solve such a problem? I offer my opinion, you offer, and he and so on, all of us are offering an opinion and so we don't meet each other at all. So what shall we do? It seems almost impossible to give up one's opinions. B: Yes, that is one of the difficulties. I don't think - if you say it is my problem to give up my opinions, it doesn't make sense. That is what I was trying to say, I am not sure you can regard it as a problem, saying what shall I do to give up my opinions. K: No, of course. But that is a fact. So observing that and seeing the necessity that we should all come together, and when this is put forward to the others it becomes a problem to them. B: That is because people find it hard to give up opinions. K: That's it. Opinions, frequency of their ideas, their own experiences, their conclusions, their ideals, you know all that. B: Even it may not seem like an opinion at that point, they feel it is true. K: They call it fact. B: Fact or truth. K: So, what shall we do? If you see that it is important that human beings work together, not for some ideal, for some belief, or for some god, or for some principle, but the importance of working, the necessity of working together. I mean, in the United Nations they are not working together. In India they are not working together. No people in any country feel or work together. B: Yes, well some people might say that we have got not only opinions, but self-interest. K: Self-interest. B: Which is very similar and so on. K: All that, and it becomes a problem. B: Well it is called a problem. If two people have self-interest which is different, then there is no way in my view that they can, as long as they maintain that, that they can work together. K: Agreed. Suppose in a place like this, we are a group of people, and it is important that we all work together. Even in a small village, small country, whatever it is, we all must work together. And apparently that becomes almost incredibly difficult. B: Yes, now how do you break into this? K: That is what I want to discuss. B: Let's discuss it. K: If you point that out to me, that we must work together, and show to me the importance of it, and I also see it is important but I can't do it. B: That's the point, that it is not enough even to see it is important and have the intention to do it. Ordinarily when we say 'I see the importance and I have the intention to do it' - I go and do it. So there is a new factor coming in here that a person sees something is important, he intends to do it and he can't do it. K: That's it, and that creates a problem to him. B: To everybody. K: Yes, to everybody. B: But why is it that we cannot carry out our intentions? We see the importance, knowing we want to do it and yet we can't do it. It seems puzzling. K: One can give many reasons for that but those causes and reasons and explanations don't solve the problem, don't solve the issue. What will - we come back to the same thing - what will make a human mind change? Seeing it is necessary and yet incapable or unwilling to change. What factor is necessary in this? Some new factor is necessary. B: Well I feel it is a perception of the ability to observe this whatever it is that is holding the person, preventing him from changing. K: So is the new factor attention? B: Yes, that is what I meant, attention but then if you are going to break into this in a group of people, what kind of attention do you mean? K: We can discuss that. What is attention, we can discuss that. B: It may have many meanings, to different people. K: Of course, that is obvious as usual - as usual so many opinions about attention. Could we, you and I, see what attention is? I feel as somebody wrote this morning, a letter came, in which the person says: where there is attention there is no problem; where there is inattention everything arises. Now without making attention into a problem, what do we mean by that? So that I understand it, not verbally, not intellectually but deeply, in my blood I understand the nature of attention in which no problem can ever exist. Obviously it is not concentration. B: Yes, we went into that. K: We have gone into that. Obviously it is not an endeavour, an experience, a struggle to be attentive. But you show me the nature of attention which is, when there is attention there is no centre from which I attend. B: Yes, but that is a difficult thing. K: Don't let's make a problem of it. B: I meant that I have been trying that for a long time. I think that there is first of all some difficulty by what is meant by attention because the content of thought itself when the person is looking at it he may think he is attending. K: No, in that state of attention there is no thought. B: But how do you stop thought then? You see while thinking is going on there is an impression of attention which is not attention. That is one thinks, one supposes that one is paying attention. K: No, no. When one supposes one is paying attention, that is not attention. B: But that is what often happens. So how do we communicate what is the true meaning of attention? K: Or would you say: to find out what is attention could we discuss what is inattention? B: Yes. K: Through negation come to the positive. When I am inattentive, what takes place? When I am inattentive? B: All sorts of things take place. K: No, but much more than that. In my inattentiveness - if there is such a word as inattentiveness - I feel lonely, desperate, depressed, anxious and so on. B: The mind begins to break up and go into confusion. K: Fragmentation takes place. Or in my lack of attention I identify myself with so many other things. B: Yes, and it may also be pleasant. K: Of course. It is always pleasant. B: But it may be painful too. K: I find later on that that which was pleasing becomes pain. B: Pain, yes. K: So all that is a movement in which there is no attention. Right? Are we getting anywhere? B: I don't know. K: I think - I feel that attention is the real solution to all this. A mind that is really attentive, which has understood the nature of inattention and moves away from it. B: Yes, now what is the nature of inattention? K: The nature of inattention? Indolence, negligence, this self-concern, the self contradiction, all that, is the nature of inattention. B: Yes. A person who has self-concern may feel that he is attending to the concerns of himself. He feels he has got problems, then paying attention to them. K: Ah, I see you are using it, quite, quite. If there is self-contradiction in me, and then I pay attention to it in order not to be self-contradictory, that is not attention. B: But can you make it clear because ordinarily one might think that that is attention. K: No, that is not, it is merely a process of thought, which says, 'I am this, I must not be that'. B: Then you are saying this attempt to become is not attention. K: Yes, that is right. B: Because it is not based on... K: The psychological becoming breeds inattention. B: Yes, and the person may thing he is attending to something but he is not, when he is engaged in this process. K: Isn't it very difficult sir, to be free of not becoming? That is the root of it. To end becoming. B: Yes. K: Does this convey anything? Are we getting anywhere, sir? Or are we going round and round in circles? You see most human beings have problems of one kind or another. Apart from technological problems which can be solved, apparently human problems are not soluble. And I say, why? B: Well we have just answered it: because they are not really paying attention to them. K: No, but then paying attention becomes a problem. B: I know it does. But I am saying there is no attention and that is why these problems are there. K: Yes. And then you point that out and it becomes a problem. B: Yes. That is the question, to stop it. The difficulty is that the mind plays tricks and in trying to deal with this it does the very same thing again. K: Of course, of course. So let's come back. Is the mind, which is so full of knowledge, self-importance, self-contradiction, and all the rest of it, that mind, the human mind, has come to a point where it finds itself psychologically that it can't move. B: There is nowhere for it to move, yes. K: So what? What would I say to a person who has come to that point? I wonder if I am moving along, or are we not? B: Well I think it is beginning to focus the question. K: I come to you. I am full of this confusion, anxiety, and sense of despair, not only facing what the world is, but also in myself. I come to that point and I want to break through it. So it becomes a problem to me. B: Well then we are back, there is an attempt to become again. K: Yes. That is what I want to get at. So is that the root of all this, this desire to become? B: Yes, well it must be close to the root, it keeps on coming in without notice. The inattention is such that you would say that I am looking at my problem and my problem is always becoming, so I say I want to stop becoming, which again is inattention. K: Which again becomes a problem. So how do I regard, or look, without the movement of becoming, at this whole complex issue of myself? B: Well it seems that one has to look at the whole, we did not look at the whole of becoming, when you said, how can I pay attention. Part of it seemed to slip out and became the observer. Right? K: Sir, look, becoming has become the curse - psychologically -the curse of this. A poor man wants to be rich and a rich man wants to be richer, and it is this movement all the time of becoming, becoming, both outwardly and inwardly. And though it brings a great deal of pain and sometimes pleasure, this sense of becoming, fulfilling, achieving psychologically, has made my life into all that it is. Now I realize that but I can't stop it. B: Yes, but one thing is, why can't I stop it? K: Let's go into that a little bit. You see partly it is because I am always concerned in becoming that there is a reward at the end of it and I am always avoiding pain, punishment. And in that cycle I am caught. That is probably one of the reasons why the mind keeps on trying to become something. And the other perhaps is deep rooted anxiety, fear if I don't become, be something I am lost, and I am uncertain, insecure. So the mind has accepted these illusions and says I cannot end that. B: Then why doesn't the mind end it? Also we have to go into the question into saying that there is no meaning to these illusions. K: How do you convince me that I am caught in an illusion? You can't, unless I see it myself. I cannot see it because my illusion is so strong. That illusion has been nurtured, cultivated by religion, by family and so on and so on, it is so deeply rooted that I refuse to let that go. B: Well then it seems impossible. K: That is what is happening. That is what is taking place with a large number of people. They say, 'I want to do this but I cannot'. Now given that situation, what is one to do? Is it explanations, logic, all the various contradictions, and logic and so on, will that help him? Obviously not. B: Because it all gets absorbed into the structure. K: Obviously not. So what is the next thing? B: Well I would question, if he says, 'I want to change', there is also the wish not to change. K: Of course. The man who says, 'I want to change' has also at the back of his mind 'Really, why should I change?' They go together. B: So we get a contradiction. K: That is what I mean, a contradiction. I have lived in this contradiction, I have accepted this contradiction. B: So why should I have accepted it. K: Because it is a habit. B: But I meant, when the mind is healthy it will not accept a contradiction. K: But our mind isn't healthy. Our minds are so diseased, so corrupt, so confused, that even though you point out all the dangers of this, it refuses to see it. So how do we, suppose I am a man in that position, how do we help him to see clearly the danger of becoming? Let's put it that way. Psychologically becoming, which implies identification with a nation, with all that business. B: Yes, holding to opinions. K: Opinions, beliefs, I have had an experience, it gives me tremendous satisfaction, I am going to hold on to it. I have had knowledge - all that. How do you help me, such a person, to be free of all that? Your words, you explanations, your logic, everything says, quite right, but I can't move out of that. I wonder if there is another factor, another way of communication, which isn't based on words, knowledge, explanations and reward and punishment. You follow? Is there another way of communicating, which we were talking about at table for a brief moment? You see in that too, there is a danger. I think there is, I am sure there is, a way of communicating which is not verbal, which is not analytical, logical, which doesn't mean lack of sanity, but I am sure there is another way. B: Perhaps there is. K: Now how do you communicate with me, who is caught in this trap, non-verbally, so that I grasp it deeply, that breaks away everything else? You follow? Is there such a communication? My mind has always communicated with another with words, with explanations, with logic, with analysis, either compulsive, or with suggestion and so on. My mind has been caught in all that. There must be another element which breaks through all that, otherwise it is impossible. B: It will break through the inability to listen. K: Yes, the inability to listen, the inability to observe, to hear and so on. There must be a different method. You see, I met a man once, obviously many men, who have been to a place with a certain saint and in his company they say all our problems are resolved. Just a minute. And when they go back to their life, back to the old game. B: Yes, well there was no intelligence in it. K: You see the danger. That man, that saint, being quiet, nonverbal, in his very presence, they feel quiet. You follow what I am saying? And they feel their problems are resolved. B: But it is still from the outside. K: Of course. Still it is like, of course it is, like going to church. And in a good ancient church, or a cathedral, you feel extraordinarily quiet. It is the atmosphere, it is the structure, you know, all that, the very atmosphere makes you be quiet. B: Yes, well it communicates what is meant by quietness, I think, but it gets across the communication which is non-verbal. K: No, that is nothing. It is like incense. B: It is superficial. K: Utterly superficial, like incense, it evaporates! So we push all that aside, then what have we left? Not an outside agency, a god, or some saviour, push all that aside, and what have I left? What is there that can be communicated, which will break through the wall which human beings have built for themselves? As we said sir, at the lunch table a couple of hours ago, is it love? Of course that word is corrupted, loaded, become dirty; but cleansing that word, is that the factor that will break through all this clever analytical approach, is that the element that is lacking? B: Well we have to discuss it, you see maybe people are somewhat chary of this word. K: I am chary beyond words! B: And therefore as people resist listening, they will resist love too. K: Of course. That is why I said it is rather a risky word. B: We were saying the other day also that love contains intelligence. K: Of course. B: Which is care as well and if we meant by love that energy which also contains intelligence and caring, all that. K: That we went through the other day. Now wait a minute, you have that quality and I am caught in my misery, my anxiety and so on, and you are trying to penetrate with that intelligence, this mass of darkness. How will you do it? Will that act? If not we human beings are lost. You follow sir? Therefore they have invented Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, they bring love, you follow? Which has become so utterly meaningless, superficial and nonsensical. So what shall I do? I think that is the factor sir. Attention, perception, intelligence and love. You bring it to me and I am incapable of receiving it. And I say, 'It sounds nice, I feel it but I can't hold it,' - I can't hold it because the moment I go outside this room I am lost. B: Well that really is the problem. K: Yes sir. That is the real problem. Is love something outside? You understand what I am saying? Like a saviour is outside, and heaven is outside and all that stuff. But is love something - I am using that word very carefully - something outside of me, which you bring to me, which you awaken in me, which you give me as a gift; or it is in my darkness, in my illusion, suffering, is there that quality? Obviously not, there can't be. B: Then where is it? K: That's just it. It must be there - now wait a minute; love is not yours or mine, it is not personal, it is not something that belongs to a person, and doesn't to the other; love is that. B: This is an important point. Like in one of the discussions you were saying, that isolation does not belong to any one person, it is something that everybody can look at, and whereas we tend to think of isolation as my personal problem. K: No, no, of course not. It is common ground for all of us. B: But it may be a clue because if somebody is looking for love and he is saying, this must be my love, you have got it and I haven't - that is his way of thinking. K: No, no. Intelligence is not personal. B: But again it goes contrary to the whole of our thinking. K: I know. B: Everybody says this person is intelligent and that one is not. And saying that if I have like intelligence, I must declare it for myself. K: Of course. B: So this may be one of the barriers to the whole thing, that people behind the ordinary everyday thought there is deeper thought of mankind, which is that these qualities, that we are all divided and these various qualities either belong to us or they don't belong to us. K: Quite, quite. It is the fragmentary mind that invents all this. B: It has all been invented, we have picked it up verbally and non-verbally from childhood and by implication, therefore it pervades, it is the ground of our thoughts, of all our perceptions. So this has to be questioned. K: We have questioned it, we have questioned that grief is not my grief, grief is human. B: But how are people to see that because a person who is caught in grief feels that it is his grief. Doesn't that seem right? K: Yes. I think it is partly because of our education, partly our society, tradition. B: But it is also implicit in our whole way of thinking. K: Yes, quite right. So we come back. B: Then we have to jump out of that. K: Yes. But 'jump out of that' becomes a problem and then what am I to do? B: But perhaps we can see that love is not personal, love does not belong to anybody any more than any other quality. K: Earth is not English earth or French earth, earth is earth. B: I was thinking of an example in physics: if the scientist or chemist is studying an element such as sodium, he does not say it is his sodium and somebody else studies theirs and they somehow compare notes. K: Quite. Sodium is sodium. B: Sodium is sodium universally. So we have to say love is love universally. K: Yes. But you see my mind refuses to see that because I am so terribly personal, terribly 'me and my problems' and all that. I refuse to let that go. When you say sodium is sodium, it is very simple, I can see that. But when you say to me, grief is common to all of us - sodium is grief! B: But this can't be done with time, but it took quite a while for mankind to realize that sodium is sodium. K: That is what I want to find out sir: is love something that is common to all of us? B: Well in so far as it exists it has to be common. K: Of course, of course. B: It many not exist but if it does it has to be common. K: I am not sure it does exist. B: Yes, right. K: Like, compassion is not 'I am compassionate' - compassion is there, it is something not me, compassion. B: Well if we say compassion is the same as sodium, it is universal. K: Universal. B: Then every person's compassion is the same. K: And compassion, love, and intelligence. You can't be compassion without intelligence. B: So we say intelligence is universal too. K: Obviously. B: But we have methods of testing intelligence in particular people. K: Oh, no! B: But that is all part of the thing that is getting in the way, yes? K: Part of this divisive, fragmentary way of thinking. And thinking is fragmentary. B: Well, there may be holistic thinking, we are not yet in it. K: Yes. Then holistic thinking is not thinking, it is some other factor. B: Some other factor that we haven't gone into yet. K: So if love is common to all of us, why am I blind to it? B: Well, I think partly the mind boggles, it just refuses to consider such a fantastic change of concept in a way of looking. K: But you said just now that sodium is sodium. B: But people feel uneasy about transferring - you have got a lot of evidence for that in all sorts of experiments. K: Salt is salt, whether it is English salt or... B: But that was built up through a lot of work and experience, now we can't do that here with love. K: Oh no. Love isn't knowledge. B: You can't go into a laboratory and prove that love is love. K: Why does one's mind refuse to accept a very obvious factor, why? Is it the fear of letting my old values, standards, opinions, all that, to let go? Again you follow? B: I think it is probably something deeper. It is hard to pin down but it isn't a simple thing. I mean that is a partial explanation. K: That is a superficial explanation. I know that. Is, sir, is it the deep rooted anxiety, or the longing to be totally secure? B: But that again is based on fragmentation. K: Of course, of course. B: If we accept that we are fragmented we will inevitably want to be totally secure. Right? Because being fragmented you are always in danger. K: Is that the root of it? This urge, this demand, this longing to be totally secure in my relationship with everything, to be certain? B: Yes, but even so you could say that in some way you have often said that that could be reasonable in the sense that you say the search for security - the real security is found in nothingness, is what you have said. K: Of course, in nothingness there is complete security. B: It is not the demand for security which is wrong but the demand that the fragment be secure. The fragment cannot possibly be secure. K: That is right. Like each country trying to be secure it is not secure. B: But complete security could be achieved if all the countries got together. K: Of course, of course, no tribulation, of course there would be. B: So the way you have put it sounds as if we should live eternally in insecurity. K: No, no. We have made that very clear. B: It makes sense to ask for security but we are going about it the wrong way. K: Yes, that's right. How do you convey that love is universal, not personal, to a man who has lived completely in the narrow groove of personal achievement? B: Well it seems the first point is, will he question his narrow, his unique personality? K: They question it - I have discussed this so much - they question it, they see the logic of it, they see the illogic of all this, and yet. You see curiously people who have been very serious in these matters, have tried to find the wholeness of life through starvation, through torture, through - you know every kind of way. The haven't, they imagine they have. B: That is again... K: You can't apprehend or perceive or be the whole through torture. Torture includes discipline, you know, all the rest of it. So what shall we do? I have a brother who refuses to see all this. And as I like him, as I have lived with him, I have a great affection for him, I want him to move out of it. And I have tried to communicate with him verbally and sometimes non-verbally, by a gesture, by a look, but all this is still from the outside. And perhaps that is the reason why he resists. Being my brother, for whom I have a great affection, if I can help my brother for whom I have a great affection - I won't use the word 'help' - if I can point out that in himself this flame can be awakened, which means he must listen to me. B: Yes, well. K: Back again. But my brother refuses to listen. B: It seems that there are some actions which are not possible. If a person is caught in a certain thought such as fragmentation then he can't change it because there are a lot of other thoughts behind it. K: Of course, of course. B: Ones he doesn't know. He is not actually free to take an action there because of the whole structure of thought that holds him. So we have to find some place where he is free to act, to move, which is not controlled by the conditioning. K: So how do I - I use the word 'help' with great caution - help my brother? He knows my affection for him, he is aware of my -and all the rest of it. What is the root of all this? We said becoming aware - all that is verbal, all that can be explained in ten different ways - the cause, the effect and all the rest of it. After explaining all this he says, 'You have left me where I am'. And my intelligence, my affection, love says 'I can't let him go'. You follow? I can't say, 'Well, go to hell' and move off. I can't let him go. Which means, am I putting pressure on him? I am not putting any kind of pressure, any kind of reward, none of that. I can't. My responsibility is that I can't let another human being go. It is not the responsibility of duty and all that kind of filthy stuff. But it is the responsibility of intelligence which says all that. B: Well that is clear that the whole thing would have no meaning if you would let him go. K: No. B: Then it would be going back into fragmentation. K: Sir, there is a tradition in India, and probably in Tibet, there is one called the Maitreya Buddha who took a vow that he would not become the ultimate Buddha until he has liberated human beings too. B: Altogether? K: Yes. You see the tradition hasn't changed anything. How can I - how can one, if he has that intelligence, that compassion, that love, which is not of a country, or person or ideal, saviour and all that nonsense, but has that purity of that - can that be transmitted to another? Or living with him, talking to him - you see it all becomes mechanical. B: Well would you say this has never really been solved, this question? K: I should think so sir. But we must solve it. You follow? It has not been solved but our intelligence says, solve it. No, I think intelligence doesn't say, solve it, intelligence says, these are the facts and perhaps some will capture it. B: Well it seems to me that there are really two factors: one is the preparation by reason to show that it all makes sense; but from there possibly some will capture it. K: We have done that sir. You started telling me - you laid the map out very clearly and I have seen it very clearly, all the rivers, the conflicts, the misery, the confusion, the insecurity, the becoming, all that is very, very, very clear. At the end of the chapter I am back at the beginning. Or I have got a glimpse of it and that becomes my craving to capture that glimpse and hold on to it and not lose it. Then that becomes a memory. You follow? And all the nightmare begins. In your showing me the map very clearly you have also pointed out to me something much deeper than that, which is love. And by your person, by your reasoning, by your logic, I am groping, seeking after that. But the weight of my body, my brain, my tradition, all that draws me back. So it is a constant battle. You follow sir? And I think the whole thing is so wrong. B: What is wrong? K: The way we are living, the whole thing is so wrong. B: Well I think many people must see that by now. At least a fair number. K: I remember we were talking once in Ojai whether man has taken a wrong turning, entered into a valley where there is no escape. That can't be sir, that is too depressing, too appalling. B: At least I think some people might object to that. The very fact it is appalling does not make it untrue. I think you would have to say some stronger reason why you feel that to be untrue. K: Oh yes. B: Do you perceive in human nature some possibility of a real change? K: Of course sir, otherwise it would be meaningless, we'd be monkeys, machines. You see, and that faculty to a radical change is attributed to some outside agency and therefore we look to that and get lost in that. If we don't look to anybody and be completely free from all that, that solitude is common to all of us. I don't know if I am making myself clear? B: Yes. K: It is not an isolation, it is an obvious fact that when you see all this and say, this is so ugly, unreal, so stupid, you are naturally alone. And that sense of aloneness is common. B: Yes. Of course the ordinary sense of loneliness is in the sense that each person feels it is his own loneliness. K: Loneliness is not solitude, not aloneness, good Lord! B: I think one could say that all the fundamental things are universal and therefore you are saying that when the mind goes deep it comes into something universal. K: Universal, that's right. B: Whether you call it absolute. K: And that is the problem: to make the mind go very, very deeply into itself. B: Yes, there is one thing that occurred to me. When we start with our particular problem it is very shallow, then we go to something more general - the word general has the same root as to generate. K: To generate, of course. B: The genus is the coming generation, so as you go to something more general you go to the deep, the depth of what is generated. K: That's right, sir. B: And going from that, still further, the general is still limited because it is thought. K: Thought, quite right. But sir, to go so profoundly it requires tremendous, not only courage, but the sense of constant pursuing the same stream. B: Yes, well that is not quite diligence, that is still too limited, right? K: Yes, diligence is too limited - that goes with a religious mind in the sense that it is diligent in its action, in its thoughts, in its activities and so on, but that is still limited. I think that is right sir. If the mind can go from the particular to the general and from the general... B:... to the absolute, to the universal. K: Move away from that. B: Well you see many people would say that is all very abstract and has nothing to do with daily life. K: I know. It is the most practical thing. Not that it is an abstraction. B: In fact it is the particular that is the abstraction. K: Absolutely. The particular is the most dangerous. B: It is also the most abstract because you only get to the particular by abstracting. K: Of course, of course. B: But I think that may be part of it, you see people feel they want something that really affects us in daily life, we don't just want to get ourselves lost in talking. Therefore they say all these vapid generalities don't interest us. K: These are abstractions. B: Instead of getting into the real solid concrete realities of daily life. Now I mean it is true that it must work in daily life, but daily life does not contain the solution of its problems. K: No. The daily life is the general life. B: The general and the particular. K: And the particular. B: The problems which arise in daily life cannot be solved there, as the human problems. K: From the particular move to the general, from the general move away still deeper, and there perhaps is this purity of that thing called compassion, love and intelligence. But that means giving your mind to this, your heart, your mind, your whole being must be involved in this. We had better stop. Sorry. We have gone on for a long time. Have we reached somewhere? B: Possibly so. K: I think so. Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 - Longer, Unedited Versions - Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 - Related Talks - New Delhi, November 1982 - 3rd Public Talk New Delhi, November 1982 - 4rd Public Talk THE FLAME OF ATTENTION INTRODUCTORY PAGE 'Observation, like a flame of attention, it wipes away hate.' 'Observation is like a flame which is attention, and with that capacity of observation, the wound, the feeling of hurt, the hate, all that, is burnt away, gone.' THE FLAME OF ATTENTION CHAPTER 1 1ST PUBLIC TALK AT NEW DELHI 31ST OCTOBER 1981 I would like to point out that we are not making any kind of propaganda, for any belief, for any ideal or for any organization. Together we are considering what is taking place in the world outside of us. We are looking at it not from an Indian point of view, or from a European or American, or from any particular national interest. Together we are going to observe what actually is going on in the world. We are thinking together but not as having one mind. There is a difference between having one mind and thinking together. Having one mind implies that we have come to some conclusion, that we have come to certain beliefs, certain concepts. But thinking together is quite different. Thinking together implies that you and the speaker have a responsibility to look objectively, non-personally, at what is going on. So we are thinking together. The speaker, though he is sitting on a platform for convenience, has no authority. Please, we must be very clear on this point. He is not trying to convince you of anything. He is not asking you to follow him. He is not your guru. He is not advocating a particular system, particular philosophy, but that we observe together, as two friends who have known each other for some time, who are concerned not merely about our private lives, but are together looking at this world which seems to have gone mad. The whole world is arming, spending incredible amounts of money to destroy human beings, whether they live in America, Europe, or Russia, or here. It is taking a disastrous course which cannot possibly be solved by politicians. We cannot rely on them; nor on the scientists they are helping to build up the military technology, competing each against another. Nor can we rely on the so-called religions; they have become merely verbal, repetitive, absolutely without any meaning. They have become superstitions, following mere tradition, whether of five thousand years or two thousand years. So we cannot rely on the politicians who are throughout the world seeking to maintain their position, their power, their status; nor can we rely on the scientists, who each year, or perhaps each week, are inventing new forms of destruction. Nor can we look to any religion to solve this human chaos. What is a human being to do? Is the crisis intellectual, economic, or national, with all the poverty, confusion, anarchy, lawlessness, terrorism and always the threat of a bomb in the street? Observing all that, what is our responsibility? Are you concerned with what is happening in the world? Or are you merely concerned with your own private salvation? Please consider all this very seriously, so that you and the speaker observe objectively, what is taking place, not only outwardly, but also in our consciousness, in our thinking, in the way we live, in our actions. If you are not at all concerned with the world but only with your personal salvation, following certain beliefs and superstitions, following gurus, then I am afraid it will be impossible for you and the speaker to communicate with each other. We must be clear on this point. We are not concerned at all with private personal salvation but we are concerned, earnest- ly, seriously, with what the human mind has become, what humanity is facing. We are concerned as human beings, human beings who are not labelled with any particular nationality. We are concerned in looking at this world and what a human being living in this world has to do, what is his role? Every morning, in the newspapers, there is some kind of murder, bomb outrage, destruction, terrorism, and kidnapping; you read it every day and you pay little attention to it. But if it happens to you personally then you are in a state of confusion, misery and asking somebody else, the government or the policeman, to save you, to protect you. And in this country, when you look, as the speaker has for the last sixty years, watching all the phenomena in this unfortunate country, you see the poverty, which never seems to be solved, the over population, the linguistic differences, one community wanting to break away from the rest, the religious differences, the gurus who are becoming enormously rich, with their private aeroplanes which you are accepting blindly you see that you are not capable of doing anything about it. This is a fact. We are not dealing with ideas, we are dealing with facts, with what is actually taking place. And, if we are to observe together, we must be free of our nationalism. We human beings are interrelated, wherever we live. please realize this, how serious, how urgent it all is. For in this country people have become lethargic, totally indifferent to what is going on, utterly careless, only concerned about their own little salvation, little happiness. We live by thought. What is the operation, or the process and the content of thinking? All the temples result from thought; and all that goes on inside the temples, the images, all the puja, all the ceremonies, are the result of thought. All the sacred books Upanishads, the Gita and so on are the result of thought, the expression of thought in print, to convey what somebody else has experienced or thought about. And the word is not sacred. No book in the world is sacred, simply because it is the result of man's thought. We worship the intellect. Those who are intellectual are seen as apart from you and me who are not intellectual. We respect their concepts, their intellect. Intellect, it is thought, will solve our problems, but that is not possible, it is like developing one arm out of proportion to the rest of the body. Neither the intellect, nor the emotions, nor romantic sentimentality, are going to help us. We have to face things as they are, to look at them very closely and see the urgency of doing something immediately, not leaving it to the scientist, the politician and the intellectual. So, first of all, let us look at what the human consciousness has become; because our consciousness is what we are. What you think, what you feel, your fears, your pleasures, your anxieties and insecurity, your unhappiness, depressions, love, pain, sorrow and the ultimate fear of death are the content of your consciousness; they are what you are they are what makes you, the human being. Unless we understand that content and go beyond it if it is possible we shall not be able to act seriously, fundamentally, basically, to bring about a transformation, a mutation, in this consciousness. To find out what right action is we must understand the content of our consciousness. If one`s consciousness is confused, uncertain, pressurized, driven from one corner to another, from one state to another, then one becomes more and more confused, uncertain, and inse- cure; from that confusion one cannot act. So one depends on somebody else which man has done for thousands of years. It is of primary importance to bring about order in ourselves; from that inward order there will be outward order. We are always seeking outward order. We want order in the world established through strong governments, or through totalitarian dictatorships. We all want to be pressurized to behave rightly; remove that pressure and we become rather what we are in the present India. So it becomes more and more urgent on the part of those who are serious, who are facing this terrible crisis, to find out for ourselves what our consciousness is and to free that consciousness of its content, so that we become truly religious people. As it is we are not religious people, we are becoming more and more materialistic. The speaker is not going to tell you what you are, but together, you and the speaker, are going to examine what we are and find out whether it is possible to radically transform what we are. So we are going to observe first the content of our consciousness. Are you following all this? Or are you too tired at the end of the day? You are under pressure all day long, all the week long pressure at home, pressure in your job, economic and religious pressure, pressure from government and from the gurus who impose their beliefs, their idiocy, on you. But here we are not under pressure. Please realize this. We are as two friends talking over together our sorrows, our hurts, our anxieties, our uncertainty, insecurity and how to find security, how to be free of fear and whether our sorrows can ever end. We are concerned about that. Because if we do not understand that and look at it very clearly, we will bring about more confusion in the world, more destruction. perhaps all of us will be vaporized by an atom bomb. So we have to act urgently, seriously, with all our heart and mind. This is really very, very important, for we are facing a tremendous crisis. We have not created nature, the birds, the waters, the rivers, the beautiful skies and the running streams, the tiger, the marvellous tree; we have not created them. How that has come about is not for the moment under review. And we are destroying the forests, we are destroying the wild animals; we are killing millions and millions of them every year certain species are disappearing. We have not created nature the deer, the wolf but thought has created everything else. Thought has created the marvellous cathedrals, the ancient temples and mosques and the images that are in them. Thought having created these images in the temples, the cathedrals, the churches, and the inscriptions in the mosques, then that very thought worships that which it has created. So, is the content of our consciousness brought about by thought which has become so all-important in our lives? Why has the intellect, the capacity to invent, to write, to think, become important? Why have not affection, care, sympathy, love, become more important than thought? So first let us examine together what thinking is. The structure of the psyche is based on thought. We have to examine what thinking is, what thought is. I may put it into words but you see it for yourself; it is not that the speaker indicates and then you see it, but in talking over together you see it for yourself. Unless we understand very carefully what thinking is we shall not be able to understand, or observe, or have an insight into the whole content of our consciousness, that which we are. If I do not understand myself, that is, my consciousness, why I think this way, why I behave that way, my fears, my hurts, my anxieties, my various attitudes and convictions, then, whatever I do will bring more confusion. What is thinking to you? When somebody challenges you with that question, what is your response? What is thinking and why do you think? Most of us have become secondhand people; we read a great deal, go to a university and accumulate a great deal of knowledge, information derived from what other people think, from what other people have said. And we quote this knowledge which we have acquired and compare it with what is being said. There is nothing original; we only repeat, repeat, repeat. So that when one asks: what is thought? what is thinking? we are incapable of answering. We live and behave according to our thinking. We have this government because of our thinking, we have wars because of our thinking all the guns, the aeroplanes, the shells, the bombs, all result from our thinking. Thought has created the marvels of surgery, the great technicians and experts, but we have not investigated what thinking is. Thinking is a process born out of experience and knowledge. Listen to it quietly, see if that is not true, actual; then you discover it for yourself as though the speaker is acting as a mirror in which you see for yourself exactly what is, without distortion; then throw the mirror away or break it up. Thinking starts from experience which becomes knowledge stored up in the cells of the brain as memory; then from memory there is thought and action. Please see this for yourself, do not repeat what I say. This sequence is an actual fact: experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action. Then from that action you learn more; so there is a cycle and that is our chain. This is the way we live. And we have never moved away from this field. You may call it action and reaction, but we never move away from this field the field of the known. That is a fact. Now the content of our consciousness is all the things which thought generates. I may think, oh, so many ugly things; I may think there is god in me; which is again the product of thought. We must take the content of our consciousness and look at it. Most of us from childhood are hurt, wounded, not only at home but at school, college and university and later in life, we are hurt. And when you are hurt you build a wall around yourself and the consequence of that is to become more and more isolated and more and more disturbed, frightened, seeking ways not to be hurt further; your actions from that hurt are obviously neurotic. So that is one of the contents of our consciousness. Now what is it that is hurt? When you say, `I am hurt` not physically but inwardly, psychologically, in the psyche what is it that is hurt? Is it not the image you have, or the picture you have, about yourself? All of us have images about ourselves, you are a great man, or a very humble man; you are a great politician with all the pride, the vanity, the power, the position, which create that image you have of yourself. If you hold a doctorate or if you are a housewife, you have a corresponding image of yourself. Everyone has an image of himself, it is an indisputable fact. Thought has created that image and that image gets hurt. So is it possible to have no image about yourself at all? When you have an image about yourself, you create a division between yourself and another. It is important to understand very deeply what relationship is; you are not only related to your wife, to your neighbour, to your children, but you are related to the whole human species. Is your relationship to your wife merely sensory, sexual relationship, or is it a romantic, convenient companionship? She cooks and you go the office. She bears children and you work from morning until night for fifty years, until you retire. And that is called living. So you must find out very clearly, carefully, what relationship is. If your relationship is based on hurt then you are using the other to escape from that hurt. Is your relationship based on mutual images? You have created an image about her and she has created an image about you; the relationship then is between these two images which thought has created. So, one asks; is thought love? Is desire love? Is pleasure love? You may say no, and shake your head, but actually you never find out, never investigate and go into it. Is it possible for there to be no conflict at all in relationship? We live in conflict from morning until night. Why? Is it part of our nature, or part of our tradition, part of our religion? Each one has an image about himself: you have an image about yourself and she has an image about herself, and many other images her ambition, her desire to be something or other. And also you have your ambitions, your competitiveness. You are both running parallel, like two railway lines, never meeting, except perhaps in bed, but never meeting at any other level. What a tragedy it has become. So it is very important to look at our relationships; not only your intimate relationships but also your relationship with the rest of the world. The world outside is interrelated, you are not separate from the rest of the world. You are the rest of the world. People are suffering, they have great anxieties, fears, they are threatened by war, as you are threatened by war. They are accumulating vast armaments to destroy each other and you never realize how interrelated we are. I may be a Muslim and you may be Hindu; my tradition says, `I am a Muslim' I have been programmed like a computer to repeat `I am a Muslim' and you repeat `I am Hindu'. You understand what thought has done? The rest of the world is like you, modified, educated differently, with different superficial manners, perhaps affluent or not, but with the same reactions, the same pains, the same anxieties, the same fears. Please give your mind, your heart, to find out what your relationship is with the world, with your neighbour and with your wife or husband. If it is based on images, pictures, remembrances, then there will inevitably be conflict with your wife, with your husband, with your neighbour, with the Muslim, with the Pakistani, with the Russian you follow? And the content of your consciousness is the hurt which you have not resolved, which has not been completely wiped away; it has left scars and from those scars you have various forms of fears which ultimately lead to isolation. Each one of us is isolated, through religious traditions, through education, through the idea that you must always succeed, succeed, succeed, become something. And also beyond our relationship with each other, intimate or otherwise, we are interrelated whether you live here or anywhere else in the world. The world is you and you are the world. You may have a different name, different form, different kind of education, different position, but inwardly we all suffer, we all go through great agonies, shed tears, are frightened of death, and have a great sense of insecurity without any love or compassion. So how do you listen to this fact? That is, how do you listen to what is being said? The speaker is saying that you are the rest of mankind, deeply; you may be dark, you may be short, you may put on saris, but those are all superficial; but inwardly the flow, whether I am an American, a Russian or Indian, the flow is the same. The movement of all human beings is similar. So you are the world and the world is you, very profoundly. One has to realize this relationship. You understand I am using the word `realize' in the sense that you must be able to observe it and see the actual fact of it. So from that arises the question: how do you observe? How do you look at your wife or your husband, or your Prime Minister? How do you look at a tree? The art of observation has to be learnt. How do you observe me? You are sitting there, how do you look at me? What is your reaction? Do you look at the speaker, thinking he has a reputation? What is your reaction when you see a man like me? Are you merely satisfied by the reputation he has which may be nonsensical, it generally is by how he has come to this place to address so many people, by whether he is important and what you can get out of him. He cannot give you any government jobs, he cannot give you money because he has no money. He cannot give you any honours, any status, any position, or guide you, or tell you what to do. How do you look at him? Have you looked at anybody, freely, openly, without any word, without any image? Have you looked at the beauty of a tree, at the flutter of its leaves? So can we learn together how to observe? You cannot observe, visually, optically, if your mind is occupied as most of our minds are occupied with the article you have to write next day, or with your cooking, your job, or with sex, or occupied about how to meditate, or with what other people might say. How can such a mind, being occupied from morning until night, observe anything? If I am occupied with becoming a master carpenter, then I have to know the nature of various woods, I have to know the tools and how to use them, I have to study how to put joints together without nails, and so on. So my mind is occupied. Or, if I am neurotic, my mind is occupied with sex, or with becoming a success politically or otherwise. So how can I, being occupied, observe? Is it possible not to have a mind so occupied all the time? I am occupied when I have to talk, when I have to write something or other, but the rest of the time why should my mind be occupied? Computers can be programmed, as we human beings are programmed. They can, for instance, learn, think faster and more accurately, than man. They can play with a grand chess master. After being defeated four times, the master beats the computer four times, on the fifth or sixth time the computer beats the master. The computer can do extraordinary things. It has been programmed you understand? It can invent, create new machines, which will be capable of better programming than the previous computer, or a machine that will be ultimately `intelligent'. The machine will itself, they say, create the ultimate `intelligent' machine. What is going to happen to man when the computer takes the whole thing over? The Encyclopaedia Britannica can be put in a little chip and it contains all that knowledge. So what place will knowledge then have in human life? Our brains are occupied, never still. To learn how to observe your wife, your neighbour, your government, the brutality of poverty, the horrors of wars, there must be freedom to observe. Yet we object to being free because we are frightened to be free, to stand alone. You have listened to the speaker; what have you heard, what have you gathered words, ideas, which ultimately have no meaning? Have you seen the importance for yourself of never being hurt? That means never having an image about yourself. Have you seen the importance, the urgency, of understanding relationship and having a mind that is not occupied? When it is not occupied it is extraordinarily free, it sees great beauty. But the shoddy little mind, the secondhand little mind, is always occupied about knowledge, about becoming something or other, enquiring, discussing, arguing, never quiet, never a free unoccupied mind. When there is such an unoccupied mind, out of that freedom comes supreme intelligence but never out of thought. THE FLAME OF ATTENTION CHAPTER 2 4TH PUBLIC TALK AT NEW DELHI 8TH NOVEMBER 1981 Before we go into the question of meditation we ought to discuss, or share together perhaps that is the right word the importance of discipline. Most of us in the world are not disciplined, disciplined in the sense that we are not learning. The word `discipline' comes from the word disciple, the disciple whose mind is learning not from a particular person, a guru, or from a teacher, or preacher, or from books but learning through the observation of his own mind, of his own heart, learning from his own actions. And that learning requires a certain discipline, but not the conformity most disciplines are understood to require. When there is conformity, obedience and imitation, there is never the act of learning, there is merely following. Discipline implies learning, learning from the very complex mind one has, from the life of daily existence, learning about relationship with each other, so that the mind is always pliable, active. To share together what meditation is, one must understand the nature of discipline. Discipline as ordinarily understood implies conflict; conforming to a pattern like a soldier, or conforming to an ideal, conforming to a certain statement in the sacred books and so on. Where there is conformity there must be friction, and therefore wastage of energy. One`s mind and one's heart, if in conflict, can never possibly meditate. We will go into that; it is not a mere statement which you accept or deny, but something we are enquiring into together. We have lived for millennia upon millennia in conflict, conforming, obeying, imitating, repeating, so that our minds have become extraordinarily dull; we have become secondhand people, always quoting somebody else, what he said or did not say. We have lost the capacity, the energy, to learn from our own actions. It is we who are utterly responsible for our own actions not society or environment, nor the politicians we are responsible entirely for our actions and for learning from them. In such learning we discover so much because in every human being throughout the world there is the story of mankind; in us is the anxiety of mankind and the fears, loneliness, despair, sorrow and pain; all this complex history is in us. If you know how to read that book then you do not have to read any other book except, for example, books on technology. But we are negligent, not diligent, in learning from ourselves, from our actions, and so we do not see that we are responsible for our actions and for what is happening throughout the world and for what is happening in this unfortunate country. One must put one's house in order, because nobody on earth, or in heaven, is going to do it for one, neither one's gurus, nor one's vows, nor one's devotion. The way one lives, the way one thinks, the way one acts, is disorderly. How can a mind that is in disorder perceive that which is total order as the universe is in total order? What has beauty to do with a religious mind? You might ask why all the religious traditions and the rituals never referred to beauty. But the understanding of beauty is part of meditation, not the beauty of a woman or a man or the beauty of a face, which has its own beauty, but about beauty itself, the actual essence of beauty. Most monks, sannyasis and the so-called religiously inclined minds, totally disregard this and become hardened towards their environment. Once it happened that we were staying in the Himalayas with some friends; there was a group of sannyasis in front of us, going down the path, chanting; they never looked at the trees, never looked at the beauty of the earth, the beauty of the blue sky, the birds, the flowers, the running waters; they were totally concerned with their own salvation, with their own entertainment. And that custom, that tradition, has been going on for a thousand years. A man who is supposed to be religious, must shun, put aside, all beauty, and his life becomes dull, without any aesthetic sense; yet beauty is one of the delights of truth. When you give a toy to a child who has been chattering, naughty, playing around, shouting, when you give that child a complicated toy he becomes totally absorbed in it, he becomes very quiet, enjoying the mechanics of it. The child becomes completely concentrated, completely involved with that toy; all the mischief has been absorbed. And we have toys, the toys of ideals, the toys of belief, which absorb us. If you worship an image of all the images on earth none is sacred, they are all made by man's mind, by his thought then we are absorbed, just as the child is absorbed in a toy, and we become extraordinarily quiet and gentle. When we see a marvellous mountain, snowcapped against the blue sky and the deep shadowed valleys, that great grandeur and majesty absorb us completely; for a moment we are completely silent because its majesty takes us over, we forget ourselves. Beauty is where `you' are not. The essence of beauty is the absence of the self. The essence of meditation is to enquire into the abnegation of the self. One needs tremendous energy to meditate and friction is a wastage of energy. When in one's daily life there is a great deal of friction, of conflict between people, and dislike of the work which one does, there is a wastage of energy. And to enquire really most profoundly not superficially, not verbally one must go very deeply into oneself, into one's own mind and see why we live as we do, always wasting energy, for meditation is the release of creative energy. Religion has played an immense part in man's history. From the beginning of time he has struggled to find truth. And now the accepted religions of the modern world are not religions at all, they are merely the vain repetition of phrases, gibberish and nonsense, a form of personal entertainment without much meaning. All the rituals, all the gods specially in this country where there are, I do not know how many, thousands of gods are invented by thought. All the rituals are put together by thought. What thought creates is not sacred; but we attribute to the created image the qualities that we like that image to have. And all the time we are worshipping, albeit unconsciously, ourselves. All the rituals in the temples, the pujas, and all that thought has invented in the Christian churches, is invented by thought: and that which thought has created we worship. Just see the irony, the deception, the dishonesty, of this. The religions of the world have completely lost their meaning. All the intellectuals in the world shun them, run away from them, so that when one uses the words the `religious mind', which the speaker does very often, they ask: `Why do you use that word religious?' Etymologically the root meaning of that word is not very clear. It originally meant a state of being bound to that which is noble, to that which is great; and for that one had to live a very diligent, scrupulous, honest life. But all that is gone; we have lost our integrity. So, if you discard what all the present religious traditions, with their images and their symbols, have become, then what is religion? To find out what a religious mind is one must find out what truth is; truth has no path to it. There is no path. When one has compassion, with its intelligence, one will come upon that which is eternally true. But there is no direction; there is no captain to direct one in this ocean of life. As a human being, one has to discover this. One cannot belong to any cult, to any group whatever if one is to come upon truth. The religious mind does not belong to any organization, to any group, to any sect; it has the quality of a global mind. A religious mind is a mind that is utterly free from all attachment, from all conclusions and concepts; it is dealing only with what actually is; not with what should be. It is dealing every day of one's life with what is actually happening both outwardly and inwardly; understanding the whole complex problem of living. The religious mind is free from prejudice, from tradition, from all sense of direction. To come upon truth you need great clarity of mind, not a confused mind. So, having put order in one's life, let us then examine what meditation is not how to meditate, that is an absurd question. When one asks how, one wants a system, a method, a design carefully laid out. See what happens when one follows a method, a system. Why does one want a method, a system? One thinks it is the easiest way, does one not, to follow somebody who says, `I will tell you how to meditate'. When somebody tells one how to meditate he does not know what meditation is. He who says, `I know', does not know. One must, first of all, see how destructive a system of meditation is, whether it is any one of the many forms of meditation that appear to have been invented, stipulating how you should sit, how you should breathe, how you should do this, that and the other. Because if one observes one will see that when one practices something repeatedly, over and over again, one's mind becomes mechanical; it is already mechanical and one adds further mechanical routine to it; so gradually one's mind atrophies. It is like a pianist continually practicing the wrong note; no music comes of it. When one sees the truth that no system, no method, no practice, will ever lead to truth, then one abandons them all as fallacious, unnecessary. One must also enquire into the whole problem of control. Most of us try to control our responses, our reactions; we try to suppress or to shape our desires. In this there is always the controller and the controlled. One never asks: who is the controller, and what is that which one is trying to control in so-called meditation? Who is the controller who tries to control his thoughts, his ways of thinking and so on? Who is the controller? The controller surely is that entity which has determined to practice the method or system. Now who is that entity? That entity is from the past, is thought based on reward and punishment. So the controller is of the past and is trying to control his thoughts; but the controller is the controlled. Look: this is all so simple really. When you are envious you separate envy from yourself. You say: `I must control envy, I must suppress it' or you rationalize it. But you are not separate from envy, you are envy. Envy is not separate from you. And yet we play this trick of trying to control envy as though it was something separate from us. So: can you live a life without a single control? which does not mean indulging in whatever you want. Please put this question to yourself: can you live a life which is at present so disastrous, so mechanical, so repetitive without a single sense of control? That can only happen when you perceive with complete clarity; when you give your attention to every thought that arises not just indulge in thought. When you give such complete attention then you will find out that you can live without the conflict which arises from control. Do you know what that means to have a mind that has understood control and lives without a single shadow of conflict? it means complete freedom. And one must have that complete freedom to come upon that which is eternally true. We should also understand the qualitative difference between concentration and attention. Most of us know concentration. We learn at school, in college, in university, to concentrate. The boy looks out of the window and the teacher says, `Concentrate on your book.' And so we learn what it means. To concentrate implies bringing all your energy to focus on a certain point; but thought wanders away and so you have a perpetual battle between the desire to concentrate, to give all your energy to look at a page, and the mind which is wandering, and which you try to control. Whereas attention has no control, no concentration. It is complete attention, which means giving all your energy, your nerves, the capacity, the energy of the brain, your heart, everything, to attending. Probably you have never so completely attended. When you do attend so completely there is no recording and no action from memory. When you are attending the brain does not record. Whereas when you are concentrating, making an effort, you are always acting from memory like a gramophone record repeating. Understand the nature of a brain that has no need of recording except that which is necessary. It is necessary to record where you live, and the practical activities of life. But it is not necessary to record psychologically, inwardly, either the insult, or the flattery and so on. Have you ever tried it? It is probably all so new to you. When you do, the brain, the mind, is entirely free from all conditioning. We are all slaves to tradition and we think we are also totally different from each other. We are not. We all go through the same great miseries, unhappiness, shed tears, we are all human beings, not Hindus, Muslims, or Russians those are all labels without meaning. The mind must be totally free; which means that one has to stand completely alone; and we are so frightened to stand alone. The mind must be free, utterly still, not controlled. When the mind is completely religious it is not only free but capable of enquiring into the nature of truth to which there is no guide, no path. It is only the silent mind, the mind that is free, that can come upon that which is beyond time. Have you not noticed if you have observed yourself that your mind is eternally chattering, eternally occupied with something or other? If you are a Sannyasi your mind is occupied with god, with prayers, with this and that. If you are a housewife, your mind is occupied with what you are going to have for the next meal, how to utilize this and that. The businessman is occupied with commerce; the politician with party politics; and the priest is occupied with his own nonsense. So our minds are all the time occupied and have no space. And space is necessary. Space also implies an emptiness, a silence, which has immense energy. You can make your mind silent through taking a drug; you can make your thought slow down and become quieter and quieter by some chemical intake. But that silence is concerned with suppressing sound. Have you ever enquired what it is to have a mind that is naturally, absolutely, silent without a movement, that is not recording except those things that are necessary, so that your psyche, your inward nature, becomes absolutely still? Have you enquired into that; or are you merely caught in the stream of tradition, in the stream of work and worrying about tomorrow? Where there is silence there is space not from one point to another point as we usually think of it. Where there is silence there is no point but only silence. And that silence has that extraordinary energy of the universe. The universe has no cause, it exists. That is a scientific fact. But we human beings are involved with causes. Through analysis you may discover the cause of poverty in this country, or in other countries; you may find the cause of over population, the lack of birth control; you may find the cause why human beings are divided between themselves as Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and so on. You may find the cause of your anxiety, or the cause of your loneliness; you may find these causes through analysis but you are never free from causation. All our actions are based on reward or punishment, however finely subtle, which is a causation. To understand the order of the universe, which is without cause, is it possible to live a daily life without any cause? That is supreme order. Out of that order you have creative energy. Meditation is to release that creative energy. It is immensely important to know and to understand, the depth and beauty of meditation. Man has always been asking, from timeless time, whether there is something beyond all thought, beyond all romantic inventions, beyond all time. He has always been asking: is there something beyond all this suffering, beyond all this chaos, beyond wars, beyond the battle between human beings? Is there something that is immovable, sacred, utterly pure, untouched by any thought, by any experience? This has been the enquiry of serious people, from the ancient of days. To find that out, to come upon it, meditation is necessary. Not the repetitive meditation, that is utterly meaningless. There is a creative energy which is truly religious, when the mind is free from all conflict, from all the travail of thought. To come upon that which has no beginning, no end that is the real depth of meditation and the beauty of it. That requires freedom from all conditioning. There is complete security in compassionate intelligence total security. But we want security in ideas, in beliefs, in concepts, in ideals; we hold on to them, they are our security however false, however irrational. Where there is compassion, with its supreme intelligence, there is security if one is seeking security. Actually where there is compassion, where there is that intelligence there is no question of security. So there is an origin, an original ground, from which all things arise, and that original ground is not the word. The word is never the thing. And meditation is to come upon that ground, which is the origin of all things and which is free from all time. This is the way of meditation. And blessed is he who finds it. THE FLAME OF ATTENTION CHAPTER 3 2ND PUBLIC TALK AT BENARAS 26TH NOVEMBER 1981 The speaker is not giving a lecture; you are not being talked at, or being instructed. This is as a conversation between two friends, two friends who have a certain affection for each other, a certain care for each other, who will not betray each other and have certain deep common interests. So they are conversing amicably, with a sense of deep communication with each other, sitting under a tree on a lovely cool morning with the dew on the grass, talking over together the complexities of life. That is the relationship which you and the speaker have we may not meet actually there are too many of us but we are as if walking along a path, looking at the trees, the birds, the flowers, breathing the scent of the air, and talking seriously about our lives; not superficially, not casually, but concerned with the resolution of our problems. The speaker means what he says; he is not just being rhetorical, trying to create an impression; we are dealing with problems of life much too serious for that. Having established a certain communication between ourselves unfortunately it has to be verbal communication, but between the lines, between the content of the words, there is, if one is at all aware, much deeper, more profound relationship we ought to consider the nature of our problems. We all have problems sexual, intellectual, the problems of relationship, the problems which humanity has created through wars, through nationalism, through the so-called religions. What is a problem? A problem means something thrown at you, something that you have to face, a challenge, minor or major. A problem that is not resolved demands that you face it, understand it, resolve it and act. A problem is something thrown at you, often unexpectedly, either at the conscious level or at the unconscious level; it is a challenge, superficial or deep. How does one approach a problem? The way you approach a problem is more important than the problem itself. Generally, one approaches a problem with fear or with a desire to resolve it, to go beyond it, to fight against it, escape from it, or totally neglect it, or else one puts up with it. The meaning of that word approach is to come as close as possible, to approximate. Having a problem, how does one approach it? Does one come near it, close to it, or does one run away from it? Or does one have the desire to go beyond it? So long as one has a motive, the motive dictates one's approach. If one does not approach a problem freely one is always directing the solution according to one's conditioning. Suppose one is conditioned to suppress a certain problem, then one's approach is conditioned and the problem is distorted; whereas, if one approaches it without a motive and comes very close to it, then in the problem itself is the answer, an answer which is not something away from the problem. It is very important to see how one approaches a problem, whether it be a political problem, a religious problem or a problem of intimate relationship. There are so many problems; one is burdened with problems. Even meditation becomes a problem. One never actually looks at one`s problems. Yet why should one live burdened with problems? Problems which one has not understood and dissolved, distort all one`s life. It is very important to be aware of how one approaches a problem, observing it and not trying to apply a solution; that is, to see in the problem itself, the answer. And that depends upon how one approaches it, on how one looks at it. It is very important to be aware of one`s conditioning when one approaches it and to be free of that conditioning. What is perception, what is seeing? How do you see that tree? Look at it for the moment. With what sight do you see it? Is it solely an optical observation, just looking at the tree with the optical reaction, observing the form, the pattern, the light on the leaf? Or do you, when you observe a tree, name it, saying, `That is an oak' and walk by? By naming it you are no longer seeing the tree the word denies the thing. Can you look at it without the word? So, are you aware how you approach, how you look at, the tree? Do you observe it partially, with only one sense, the optical sense; or do you see it, hear it, smell it, feel it, see the design of it, take the whole of it in? Or, do you look at it as though you are different from it of course, when you look at it you are not the tree. But can you look at it without a word, with all your senses responding to the totality of its beauty? So perception means not only observing with all the senses, but also to see, or be aware of whether there is a division between you and that which you observe. Probably you have not thought anything about all this. It is important to understand this, because we are going to discuss presently the approach to fear and the perceiving of the whole content of fear. It is important to be aware of how you approach this burden which man has carried for millennia. It is easier to perceive something outside of you, like a tree, like the river, or the blue sky, without naming, merely observing, but can you look at yourself, the whole content of your consciousness, the whole content of your mind, your being, your walk, your thought, your feeling, your depression, so that there is no division between all that and you? If there is no division there is no conflict. Wherever there is division there must be conflict: that is a law. So in us, is there a division as between the observer and the thing observed? If the observer approaches fear, greed, or sorrow, as though it was something different from himself which he has to resolve, suppress, understand, go beyond, then division and all the struggle comes into it. Then how do you approach fear; do you perceive fear without any distortion, without any reaction to escape, suppress, explain, or even analyse? Most of us are afraid of something or of many things; you may be afraid of your wife or your husband, afraid of losing a job, afraid of not having security in old age, afraid of public opinion which is the most silly form of fear afraid of so many things darkness, death and so on. Now we are going to examine together, not what we are afraid of, but what fear is in itself. We are not talking about the object of fear, but about the nature of fear, how fear arises, how you approach it. Is there a motive behind one's approach to the problem of fear? Obviously one usually has a motive; the motive to go beyond it, to suppress it, to avoid it, to neglect it; and one has been used to fear for the greater part of one's life so one puts up with it. If there is any kind of motive one cannot see it clearly, cannot come near it. And when one looks at fear does one consider that fear is separate from oneself, as if one was an outsider looking inside, or an insider looking out? But is fear different from oneself? Obviously not nor is anger. But through education, through religion, one is made to feel separate from it, so that one must fight it, must get over it. One never asks if that thing called fear is actually separate from oneself. It is not, and in understanding that, one understands that the observer is the observed. Supposing one is envious. One may think the envy is different from oneself but the actual fact is that one is part of it. One is part of the envy, as one is part of greed, anger, suffering, pain; so that pain, suffering, greed, envy, anxiety or loneliness is oneself. One is all that. First see that logically it is so. And seeing it logically, does one make an abstraction of what one sees, so that it becomes an idea, a mere semblance of the fact? One makes an abstraction, an idea that one should escape from it, and then one works on the basis of that idea; and that prevents one from observing very closely what fear is. But if one does not make an abstraction but sees it as a fact, then one approaches it without any motive. One observes it as something not different from oneself; one understands the combination. One observes it as part of oneself, one is that, there is no division between oneself and that; therefore one`s observation is that the observer is the observed; the observed is not different from oneself. So what is fear? Come very close to it. Because one can only see it very clearly if one is very near. What is fear? Is it time as a movement of the past, the present modified and continued? One is the past, the present and also the future. One is the result of the past, a thousand years and more; one is also the present with its impressions, its present social conditions, its present climate, one is all that and also the future. One is the past, modified in the present, continued in the future; that is inward time. And also there is outward time, time by the watch, by the rising and setting of the sun; the succession of the morning, the afternoon, the evening. It takes outward time to learn a language, to learn the skill to drive a car, to become a carpenter, an engineer, or even a politician. There is time outwardly, to cover the distance from here to there, and there is also time as hope, inward time. One hopes to become nonviolent which is absurd. One hopes to gain, or avoid, pain or punishment, one hopes to have a reward. So there is not only time outwardly, physically, but there is also time inwardly, psychologically. One is not this but one will become that; which means time. The physical time is actual, it is there, it is eleven o`clock or twelve o`clock, now. But inwardly, psychologically one has assumed there is time: that is, `I am not good but I will be good. ` Now one is questioning that inward time, questioning whether there need be such inward time. When there is time inwardly there is fear. One has a job, but one may lose that job, which is the future, which is time. One has had pain and hopes one will never have such pain again. That is the remembrance of the pain, and the continuation of that memory, hoping there will be no future pain. So one asks, is not time part of fear? Is not inward time fear? And is not another factor of fear thought? One thinks about one's pain, which one had last week, and which is now recorded in the brain; one thinks one might have that pain again tomorrow. So there is the operation of thought, which says: `I have had that pain, I hope not to have it again.` So thought and time are part of fear. Fear is a remembrance, which is thought and it is also time, the future. I am secure now, I may be insecure tomorrow, fear arises. So time plus thought equals fear. Now just see the truth of it in yourself, not listening to me, to the speaker and verbalizing and remembering it; but actually see that is a fact, not an abstraction as an idea. You have to be aware of whether it is by hearing you have made up an idea, made an abstraction of what you have heard into an idea, or whether you are actually facing the fact of fear, which is time and thought. Now, it is important how you perceive the whole movement of fear. Either you perceive by negating it, or you perceive it without the division as me and fear, perceiving that you are fear, so you remain with that fear. There are two ways of negating fear; either by totally denying it, saying, `I have no fear' which is absurd or negating it by perceiving that the observer is the observed so that there is no action. We normally want to negate fear, negate it in the sense of getting over it, running away from it, destroying it, finding some way of comforting ourselves against it all forms of negation; such negation is acting upon it. Then there is a totally different form of negation, which is the beginning of a new movement, in which the observer is the observed, fear is `me'. The observer is fear. Therefore he cannot do anything about it; therefore there is a totally different kind of negation which means a totally different beginning. Have you realized that when you act upon it you strengthen it? Running away, suppressing, analysing, finding the cause, is acting upon it. You are trying to negate something as if it was not you. But when you realize you are that and that therefore you cannot act or do anything about it, then there is non-action and a totally different movement taking place. Is pleasure different from fear? Or is fear pleasure? They are like two sides of the same coin when you understand the nature of pleasure, which is also time and thought. You have experienced something very beautiful in the past and it is recorded as memory and you want that pleasure repeated; just as you remember the fear of a past event and want to avoid it. So both are movements of the same kind although you call one pleasure and the other fear. Is there an end to sorrow? Man has done everything possible to transcend sorrow. He has worshipped sorrow, run away from sorrow, has held sorrow to his heart, has tried to seek comfort away from sorrow, has pursued the path of happiness, holding on to it, clinging to it in order to avoid suffering. Yet man has suffered. Human beings have suffered right through the world throughout ages. They have had ten thousand wars think of the men and women who have been maimed, killed and the tears that have been shed, the agony of the mothers, wives, and all those people who have lost their sons, their husbands, their friends through wars, for millennia upon millennia, and we still continue, multiplying armaments on a vast scale. There is this immense sorrow of mankind. The poor man along that road will never know a good clean bath, clean clothes or ride in an aeroplane; all the pleasures that one has, he will never know. There is the sorrow of a man who is very learned and of a man who is not very learned. There is the sorrow of ignorance; there is the sorrow of loneliness. Most people are lonely; they may have many friends, a lot of knowledge, but they are also very lonely people. You know what that loneliness is, if you are at all aware of yourself a sense of total isolation. You may have a wife, children, a great many friends, but there comes a day or an event that makes you feel utterly isolated, lonely. That is tremendous sorrow. Then there is the sorrow of death; the sorrow for someone you have lost. And there is the sorrow which has been gathering, which has been collecting, through the millennia of mankind's existence. Then there is the sorrow of one's own personal degeneration, personal loss, personal lack of intelligence, capacity. And we are asking whether that sorrow can ever end? Or does one come to sorrow with sorrow and die with sorrow? Logically, rationally, intellectually, we can find many reasons for sorrow, there are all the many explanations according to Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity or Islam. But in spite of the explanations, the causes, the authorities that seek to explain it all away, sorrow still remains with us. So, is it possible to end that sorrow? For if there is no end to sorrow there is no love, there is no compassion. One has to go into it very deeply and see if it can ever end. The speaker says there is an end to sorrow, a total end to sorrow; which does not mean that he does not care, that he is indifferent or callous. With the ending of sorrow there is the beginning of love. And you naturally ask the speaker: how? How is sorrow to end? When you ask `how?' you want a system, a method, a process. That is why you ask. `Tell me how to get there. I will follow the path, the road.' You want direction, when you say: `How am I to end sorrow?' That question, that demand, that enquiry says, `Show me.' When you ask how, you are putting the wrong question, if I may point out, because you are only concerned with getting over it. Your approach to it is: tell me how to get over it. So you never come near it. If you want to look at that tree you must come near it to see the beauty of it, the shade, the colour of the leaf, whether or not it has flowers you must come near it. But you never come near sorrow. You never come near it because you are always avoiding it, running away from it. So, how you approach sorrow matters very greatly, whether you approach it with a motive to escape, to seek comfort and avoid it, or whether you approach and come very, very close to it. Find out whether you come very close to it. You cannot come close to it if there is self pity or if there is the desire to somehow find the cause, the explanation; then you avoid it. So it matters very much how you approach it, come near it, and how you see it, how you perceive sorrow. Is it the word `sorrow' that makes you feel sorrow? Or is it a fact? And if it is a fact do you want to come close to it so that sorrow is you? You are not different from sorrow. That is the first thing to see that you are not different from sorrow. You are sorrow. You are anxiety, loneliness, pleasure, pain, fear, the sense of isolation. You are all that. So you come very close to it, you are it, therefore you remain with it. When you want to look at that tree you come to it, you look at every detail, you take time. You are looking, looking, looking, and it tells you all its beauty. You do not tell the tree your story, it tells you, if you watch it. In the same way if you come near sorrow, hold it, look at it, not run away from it, see what it is trying to tell you, its depth, its beauty, its immensity, then if you remain with it entirely, with that single movement, sorrow ends. Do not just remember that and then repeat it! That is what your brains are accustomed to do: to memorize what has been said by the speaker and then say, `How shall I carry that out?' Because you are it, you are all that and therefore you cannot escape from yourself. You look at it and there is no division between the observer and the observed, you are that, there is no division. When there is no division you remain entirely with it. It requires a great deal of attention, a great deal of intensity, clarity, the clarity of the mind that sees instantly the truth. Then out of that ending of sorrow comes love. I wonder if you love anything. Do you? Do you love anything? Your wife, your children, your so-called country; do you love the earth, love the beauty of a tree, the beauty of a person? Or are you so terribly self-centred that you never have any perception of anything at all? Love brings compassion. Compassion is not doing some social work. Compassion has its own intelligence. But you do not know anything of all that. All that you know are your desires, your ambitions, your deceptions, your dishonesty. When you are asked most profound questions, which stir you up, you become negligent. When I ask you a question of that kind, whether you love somebody, your faces are blank. And this is the result of your religion, of your devotion to your nonsensical gurus, your devotion to your leaders not devotion, you are frightened, therefore you follow. At the end of all these millennia you are what you are now; just think of the tragedy of all this! That is the tragedy of yourself, you understand. So ask yourself, if one may suggest it, walking along that path with you as a friend: do you know what love means? Love that does not demand a thing from another. Ask yourselves. It does not demand a thing from your wife, from your husband nothing, physically, emotionally, intellectually is demanded from another. Not to follow another, not to have a concept, and pursue that concept. Because love is not jealousy, love has no power in the ordinary sense of that word. Love does not seek position, status, power. But it has its own capacity, its own skill, its own intelligence. 26 November 1981 THE FLAME OF ATTENTION CHAPTER 4 2ND PUBLIC TALK AT MADRAS 27TH DECEMBER 1981 We were talking yesterday about conflict. We were saying that we human beings have lived on this beautiful earth, with all its vast treasures, with its mountains, rivers and lakes, during millennia and yet we have lived in perpetual conflict. Not only in outward conflict with the environment, with nature, with each other, but also inwardly, so-called spiritually. And we are still in constant conflict, from the moment we are born until we die. We put up with it; we have become accustomed to it; we tolerate it. We find many reasons to justify why we should live in conflict; we think conflict, struggle, everstriving, means progress outward progress, or inward achievement towards the highest goal. There are so many forms of conflict: the man who is struggling to achieve some result, the man who is struggling with nature, trying to conquer it. What we have reduced this world to! Such a beautiful world it is, with its lovely hills, marvellous mountains, tremendous rivers. After three thousand years of human suffering, human struggle, obeying, accepting, destroying each other, this is what we have reduced it to; a wilderness of wild thoughtless human beings who do not care for the earth, nor for the lovely things of the earth, nor the beauty of a lake, a pond, of the swift running river; none seem to care. All that we are concerned with is our own little selves, our own little problems, and this, after three to five thousand years of so-called culture. We are going to face facts this afternoon. Life has become extraordinarily dangerous, insecure, utterly without any meaning. You may invent a lot of meaning, of significance, but actual daily Life, be it lived for thirty, forty or a hundred years, has lost all meaning except to gather money, to be somebody, to be powerful and so on. I am afraid this has to be said. No politician, nor any form of politics, whether of the left, right or centre, is going to solve any of our problems. Politicians are not interested in solving problems; they are only concerned with themselves and with keeping their position. And the gurus and the religions have betrayed man. You have read the Upanishads, the Brahma sutras, the Bhagavad Gita to no effect. It is the guru's game to read them aloud to audiences that are supposed to be enlightened, intelligent. You cannot possibly rely on the politicians, on the government, nor upon the religious scriptures, nor upon any guru whatsoever, because they have made this country what it is now. If you seek further for leadership it will also lead you up the wrong path. And, as no one can help you, no one, you have to be responsible for yourselves totally, completely responsible for your conduct, for your behaviour, for your actions. It is necessary and important to find out whether we can live without any conflict in our lives both inwardly and outwardly. We must ask, why, after all these millennia, human beings have not solved the problem of conflict, with each other and in themselves? This is a very important question to ask: why do we submit to, and succumb to conflict, which is the struggle to become something, or not to become something, the struggle to achieve a result, personal advancement, personal success, trying to fulfil something of your desires, the conflict of war, the preparations for war of which you may not be aware? There is conflict between man and woman, sexually and in their daily relationships. Apparently, this conflict is not only at the conscious level, but also deep down in the very recesses of the mind. There is conflict in pretension, in trying to be something which you are not and the conflict that exists in trying to achieve heaven, god, or whatever you like to call that thing that you adore and worship; the conflict in meditation, struggling to meditate, struggling against lethargy, indolence. Our life from the very beginning, from the time we are born until we die, is in perpetual conflict. We must find out together why man, you as a human being, representing all the world, has tolerated conflict, put up with it, become habituated to it. We are considering together most seriously whether it is possible to be completely free of all conflict; because conflict, consciously or unconsciously, inevitably brings about a society that is ourselves extended, a society in conflict. Society is not an abstraction, it is not an idea, society is relationship between man and man. If that relationship is in conflict, painful, depressing and anxious, then we create a society which represents us. It is a fact. The idea of society, the idea, is not actual society. Society is what we are with each other. And we are asking whether this conflict can ever end? What is conflict? When we do not accept that which actually is, when we escape to something called an ideal, the opposite of that which is, then conflict is inevitable. When one is incapable of looking at and observing what one is actually doing and thinking, one avoids that which is and projects an ideal, then there is conflict between `that which is' and `what should be'. I am not talking for my own pleasure but to convey, if you are serious, that there is a way of living in which there is no conflict whatever. If you are interested in it, if you are concerned about it, if you want to find out a way of living that is without that sense of vain effort, then please do listen carefully, not to what the speaker is saying, but listen to the fact, the truth of what is being said, so that it is your own observation. It is not that the speaker is pointing something out but that we are looking together. It is no use for the speaker just to talk to blank faces, or to people who are bored. Since you have taken the trouble to come and sit here under the beautiful trees, then do pay attention, for we are talking over together serious matters. We were saying: conflict exists when we disregard what is actually taking place and translate what is taking place into terms of an ideal, into terms of `what should be', into a concept which we have accepted, or which we ourselves have created. So when there is this division between 'what is' and 'what should be' there must inevitably be conflict. This is a law not the speaker's law but it is a law. So we are going to investigate why human beings have never faced that which is and have always tried to escape from it. This country has always talked about non-violence. Nonviolence has been preached over and over again, politically, religiously, by various leaders that you have had non-violence. Non-violence is not a fact; it is just an idea, a theory, a set of words; the actual fact is that you are violent. That is the fact. That is `what is'. But we are not capable of understanding `what is` and that is why we create this nonsense called non-violence. And that gives rise to the conflict between `what is' and `what should be'. All the while you are pursuing non-violence you are sowing the seeds of violence. This is so obvious. So, can we together look at 'what is' without any escape, without any ideals, without suppressing or escaping from `what is'? We are by inheritance from the animal from the ape and so on violent. Violence takes many forms, not merely brutal action, striking each other. Violence is a very complicated issue; it includes imitation, conformity, obedience; it exists when you pretend to be that which you are not. We are violent. That is a fact. We get angry, we conform, we imitate, we follow, we are aggressive and aggression takes many forms, the polite, gentle aggressiveness, with a kid glove, persuading you through affection. That is a form of violence. Compelling you to think along a particular line, that is violence. Violence is also the acceptance of yourself as something that you are not. Understand that violence is not just getting angry or beating each other up, that is a very shallow form of violence. Violence is very, very complex and to understand it, to go into the very depths of it, one must see the fact first and not just affirm `We should be non-violent'. There is only that which is, which is violence. Non-violence is non-fact, not a reality, it is a projection of thought in order to escape from, or to accept violence and pretend that we are becoming non-violent. So, can we look at violence free from all that, free from escape, free from ideals, from suppression, and actually observe what violence is? So we have to learn together how to observe. There is no authority in this investigation, but when your mind is crippled by authority, as it is, it is very difficult to be free and so able to look at violence. It is important to understand how to observe, to observe what is happening in the world the misery, the confusion, the hypocrisy, the lack of integrity, the brutal actions that are going on, the terrorism, the taking of hostages and the gurus who have their own particular concentration camps. Please, do not laugh, you are part of all that. It is alI violence. How can anyone say: `I know, follow me'. That is a scandalous statement. So we are asking: what is it to observe? What is it to observe the environment around you, the trees, that pond in the corner there, made beautiful within this year, the stars, the new moon, the solitary Venus, the evening star by itself, the glory of a sunset? How do you watch such beauty, if you have ever watched it at all? You cannot watch, observe, if you are occupied with yourself, with your own problems, with your own ideas, with your own complex thinking. You cannot observe if you have prejudice, or if there is any kind of conclusion which you hold on to, or your particular experience that you cling to it is impossible. So how do you observe a tree, this marvellous thing called a tree, the beauty of it, how do you look at it? How do you look now, as you are sitting there, surrounded by these trees? Have you ever watched them? Have you seen their leaves, fluttering in the wind, the beauty of the light on the leaf; have you ever watched them? Can you watch a tree, or the new moon, or the single star in the heavens, without the word, moon, star, sky without the word? Because the word is not the actual star, the actual moon. So can you put aside the word and look that is, look outwardly? Now can you look at your wife, your husband, without the word, without all the remembrance of your relationship, however intimate it has been, without all the built up memory of the past, be it ten days, or fifty years? Have you ever done it? Of course not. So will you please let us learn together how to observe a flower. If you know how to look at a flower, that look contains eternity. Do not be carried away by my words. If you know how to look at a star, a dense forest, then you see in that observation that there is space, timeless eternity. But to observe your wife, or your husband, without the image you have created about her or him you must begin very close. You must begin very close in order to go very far. If you do not begin very close you can never go very far. If you want to climb the mountain, or go to the next village, the first steps matter, how you walk, with what grace, with what ease, with what felicity. So we are saying that to go very, very far, which is eternity, you must begin very close, which is your relationship with your wife and husband. Can you look, observe, with clear eyes, without the words `My wife', or `My husband', `My nephew', or 'My son', without the memory of all the accumulated hurts, without all the remembrance of things past? Do it now as you are sitting there, observe. And when you are capable of observing without the past, that is observing without all the images you have built about yourself and about her, then there is right relationship between you and her. But now, as you have not observed each other, you are like two railway lines, never meeting. That is your relationship. I wonder if you are aware of all this? We are learning together how to observe that tree, to sit next to your neighbour observing the colour of his shirt, the colour of her sari, the type of face; observing without criticism, without like or dislike, just observing. Now with such observation can you look at your violence, that is, at your anger, irritation, conformity, acceptance, getting used to the dirt and the squalor around your houses, can you so observe all that? When you do you bring all your energy to observing; and when you so observe your violence you will find, if you have gone into it, if you do it, that that violence because you have brought all your energy to observe totally disappears. Do not repeat if I may most respectfully request do not repeat what you have just heard. By repeating what the speaker has said it becomes secondhand; just as by repeating the Upanishads, the Brahmasutras and all the printed books, you have made yourselves secondhand human beings. You do not seem to mind, do you? You are not even ashamed of it, you just accept it. That acceptance is part of this complex problem of violence. So we are saying that when there is no duality it is possible to live without conflict. There is no actual duality when you reach a certain state of consciousness there is only 'what is'. Duality only exists when you try to deny, or to escape from, `what is' into `what is not'. Is this clear? Are we all together in this matter? People have talked to me a great deal about all these matters, your philosophers, Vedanta pundits and scholars. But these, like ordinary people, live in duality. (Not physical duality, man and woman, tall and short, light and dark skin, that is not duality.) And there is the idea that conflict is necessary because we live in duality and therefore those who are free from the opposites are the enlightened people. You invent a philosophy around that. You read about it, accept it; you read all the commentaries and you are stuck where you are. Whereas the speaker is saying there is actually no duality now; freedom from duality is not when you reach some `spiritual heights; you will never reach `spiritual heights' if you have dualities now, nor yet in some future reincarnation or at the end of your life. The speaker is saying there is only `what is', there is nothing else. `What is' is the only fact. Its opposite is non-fact, it has no reality. I hope this is very clear, even if only logically, with reason. If you are exercising your reason, your capacity to think logically, `what is', is obviously more important to understand than `what should be'. And we cling to `what should be` because we do not know how to deal with `what is'. We use the opposite as a lever to free ourselves from 'what is'. So there is only `what is' and therefore there is no duality. There is only greed and not non-greed. When you understand the depth of violence without escaping from it, without running away to some idiotic ideals of non-violence, when you look at it, when you observe it very closely, which is to bring to it all the energy you have wasted in pursuing the opposite when you try to suppress it, it is a wastage of energy which is conflict there is no conflict. Please understand this. Suppose one is envious, envious of another who is very clever, bright, intelligent, sensitive, who sees the beauty of the earth and the glory of the sky, who enjoys this lovely earth, yet to oneself it means nothing. One wants to be like him. So one begins to imitate him, the way he walks, the way he looks, the way he smiles; yet one is still greedy. Though one has been educated from childhood not to be greedy one has not understood that `not' is merely the opposite of what one is. One has been educated, conditioned; the books one has been given have said there is duality, and one has accepted that. It is very difficult to break that conditioning. One's conditioning from childhood prevents the understanding of this very simple fact, which is: there is only 'what is'. Good is not the opposite of bad. If good is born out of bad then the good contains the bad. Think it out, work at it, exercise your brains, so as to live always with `what is', with that which is actually going on, outwardly and inwardly. When one is envious, live with that fact, observe it. Again, envy is a very complex process, it is part of competition, the desire for advancement, politically, religiously and in business. One has been brought up with that, and to break that tradition, demands a great deal of observation; not making of it the opposite of tradition; just observe what tradition is. I hope the speaker is making it very clear. You are all traditional people and you repeat psychologically, even intellectually, what you have been told; your religions are based on that. So when once you see the fact, that there is only `what is', and observe with all the energy that you have, then you will see that 'what is` has no value or importance, it is totally non-existence. One has been told from childhood to be good. The word `good' is an old fashioned word, but it is really a beautiful word. Good means to be correct, correct in your speech, correct in your behaviour not according to an idea of what is correct. Correct means to be precise, accurate, not pretentious. But one is not good. And one's parents, teachers and educators say, `Be good', so there is created a conflict between what one is and what one should be. And one does not understand the meaning of that word; that word is again very, very subtle, it demands a great deal of investigation. Good means also to be completely honest, which means one behaves not according to some tradition or fashion, but with the sense of great integrity, which has its own intelligence. To be good also means to be whole, not fragmented. But one is fragmented, brought up in this chaotic tradition. What is important is not what goodness is, but why one`s brain is caught in tradition. So one has to understand why the brain, which is again very subtle, which has great depth in itself, why such a brain has followed tradition. It has followed it because there is safety, security, because one is following what one's parents have said and so on. That gives one a sense of safety, protection a false safety and protection. One thinks it is safe but it is unreal, it is illusory. One will not listen to the speaker because one is frightened to be without tradition and to live with all one's attention. Your belief in god is your ultimate security. See what thought has done! It has created an image of god which you then worship. That is self-worship. Then you begin to ask who created the earth, who created the heavens, the universe and so on. So your tradition begins to destroy the human mind. It has become repetitive, mechanical, it has no vitality, except to earn money, go to the office every morning for the rest of your life and then die at the end of it. So it is important to find out whether you can be free of tradition and so live without a single conflict, living every day with `what is' and observing 'what is', not only out there but inwardly. Then you will create a society that will be without conflict. 27 December 1981 THE FLAME OF ATTENTION CHAPTER 5 5TH PUBLIC TALK AT BOMBAY 6TH FEBRUARY 1982 The average person wastes his life; he has a great deal of energy but he wastes it. He spends his days in the office, or in digging the garden, or as a lawyer or something, or he leads the life of a sannyasi. The life of an average person seems, at the end, utterly meaningless, without significance. When he looks back, when he is fifty, eighty, or ninety, what has he done with his life? Life has a most extraordinary significance, with its great beauty, its great suffering and anxiety, the accumulating of money in working from eight or nine in the morning until five for years and years. At the end of it all, what have we done with life? Money, sex, the constant conflict of existence, the weariness, the travail, unhappiness and frustrations that is all we have with perhaps occasional joy; or perhaps you love someone completely, wholly, without any sense of self. There seems to be so little justice in the world. Philosophers have talked a great deal about justice. The social workers talk about justice. The average man wants justice. But is there justice in life at all? One is clever, well placed, with a good mind and is good looking; having everything he wants. Another has nothing. One is well educated, sophisticated, free to do what he wants. Another is a cripple, poor in mind and in heart. One is capable of writing and speaking; a good human being. Another is not. This has been the problem of philosophy with its love of truth, love of live. But perhaps truth is in life, not in books, away from life, not in ideas. Perhaps truth is where we are and in how we live. When one looks around, life seems so empty and meaningless for most people. Can man ever have justice? Is there any justice in the world at all? One is fair, another is dark. One is bright, aware, sensitive, full of feeling, loving a beautiful sunset, the glory of a moon, the astonishing light on the water; one sees all that and another does not. One is reasonable, sane, healthy and another is not. So one asks, seriously, is there justice in the world at all? Before the law all are supposedly equal, but some are `more equal' than others who have not sufficient money to employ good lawyers. Some are born high, others low. Observing all this in the world there is apparently very little justice. So where is justice then? It appears that there is justice only when there is compassion. Compassion is the ending of suffering. Compassion is not born out of any religion or from belonging to any cult. You cannot be a Hindu with all your superstitions and invented gods and yet become compassionate you cannot. To have compassion there must be freedom, complete and total freedom, from all conditioning. Is such freedom possible? The human brain has been conditioned over millions of years. That is a fact. And it seems that the more we acquire knowledge about all the things of the earth and heaven, the more do we get bogged down. When there is compassion, then with it there is intelligence, and that intelligence has the vision of justice. We have invented the ideas of karma and reincarnation; and we think that by inventing those ideas, those systems about something that is to happen in the future, that we have solved the problem of justice. Justice begins only when the mind is very clear and when there is compassion. Our brains are very complex instruments. Your brain, or the speaker's brain, is of the brain of humanity. It has not just developed from when you were born until now. It has evolved through endless time and conditions our consciousness. That consciousness is not personal; it is the ground on which all human beings stand. When you observe this consciousness with all its content of beliefs, dogmas, concepts, fears, pleasures, agonies, loneliness, depression and despair, it is not your individual consciousness. It is not the individual that holds this consciousness. We are deeply conditioned to think that we are separate individuals; but it is not your brain or mine. We are not separate. Our brains are so conditioned through education, through religion, that we think we are separate entities, with separate souls and so on. We are not individuals at all. We are the result of thousands of years of human experience, human endeavour and struggle. So, we are conditioned; therefore we are never free. As long as we live with or by a concept, a conclusion, with certain ideas or ideals, our brains are not free and therefore there is no compassion. Where there is freedom from all conditioning which is, freedom from being a Hindu, a Christian, a Muslim or a Buddhist, freedom from being caught up in specialization (though specialization has its place) freedom from giving one's life entirely to money then there can be compassion. As long as the brain is conditioned, which it is now, there is no freedom for man. There is no 'ascent' of man, as some philosophers and biologists are saying, through knowledge. Knowledge is necessary; to drive a car, to do business, to go to from here to your home, to bring about technological development and so on, it is necessary; but not the psychological knowledge that one has gathered about oneself, culminating in memory which is the result of external pressures and inward demands. Our lives are broken up, fragmented, divided, they are never whole; we never have holistic observation. We observe from a particular point of view. We are in ourselves broken up so that our lives are in contradiction in themselves, therefore there is constant conflict. We never look at life as a whole, complete and indivisible. The word `whole' means to be healthy, to be sane; it also means holy. That word has great significance. It is not that the various fragmented parts become integrated in our human consciousness. (We are always trying to integrate various contradictions.) But is it possible to look at life as a whole, the suffering, the pleasure, the pain, the tremendous anxiety, loneliness, going to the office, having a house, sex, having children, as though they were not separate activities, but as a holistic movement, a unitary action? Is that possible at all? Or must we everlastingly live in fragmentation and therefore for ever in conflict? Is it possible to observe the fragmentation and the identification with those fragments? To observe, not correct, not transcend, not run away from or suppress, but observe. It is not a matter of what to do about it; because if you attempt to do something about it you are then acting from a fragment and therefore cultivating further fragments and divisions, Whereas, if you can observe holistically, observe the whole movement of life as one, then conflict with its destructive energy not only ceases but also out of that observation comes a totally new approach to life. I wonder if one is aware of how broken up one's daily life is? And if one is aware, does one then ask: how am I to bring all this together to make a whole? And who is the entity, the `I', who is to bring all these various parts together and integrate them? That entity, is he not also a fragment? Thought itself is fragmentary, because knowledge is never complete about anything. Knowledge is accumulated memory and thought is the response of that memory and therefore it is limited. Thought can never bring about a holistic observation of life. So, can one observe the many fragments which are our daily life and look at them as a whole? One is a professor, or a teacher, or merely a householder, or a sannyasi who has renounced the world; those are fragmented ways of living a daily life. Can one observe the whole movement of one's fragmented life with its separate and separative motives; can one observe them all without the observer? The observer is the past, the accumulation of memories. He is that past and that is time. The past is looking at this fragmentation; and the past as memory, is also in itself the result of previous fragmentations. So, can one observe without time, without thought, the remembrances of the past, and without the word? Because the word is the past, the word is not the thing. One is always looking through words; through explanations, which are a movement of words. We never have a direct perception. Direct perception is insight which transforms the brain cells themselves. One's brain has been conditioned through time and functions in thinking. It is caught in that cycle. When there is pure observation of any problem there is a transformation, a mutation, in the very structure of the cells. We have created time, psychological time. We are masters of that inward time that thought has put together. That is why we must understand the nature of time which man has created psychological time as hope, time as achievement. Why have human beings, psychologically, inwardly, created time - time when one will be good; time when one will be free of violence; time to achieve enlightenment; time to achieve some exalted state of mind; time as meditation? When one functions within the realm of that time one is bringing about a contradiction and hence conflict. Psychological time is conflict. It is really a great discovery if one realizes the truth that one is the past, the present and the future; which is time as psychological knowledge. One creates a division between our living in our consciousness and the distant time which is death. That is, one is living with all one's problems and death is something to be avoided, postponed, put at a great distance which is another fragmentation in one's life. To observe holistically the whole movement of life is to live both the living and the dying. But one clings to life and avoids death; one does not even talk about it. So not only has one fragmented one's life, superficially, physically, but also one has separated oneself from death. What is death; is it not part of one's life? One may be frightened, one may want to avoid death and to prolong living, but always at the end of it there is death. What is living? What is living,which is our consciousness? Consciousness is made up of its content; and the content is not different from consciousness. Consciousness is what one believes, one's superstitions, ambitions, one's greed, competitiveness, attachment, suffering, the depth of loneliness, the gods, the rituals all that is one's consciousness, which is oneself. But that consciousness is not one's own, it is the consciousness of humanity; one is the world and the world is oneself. One is one's consciousness with its content. That content is the ground upon which aIl humanity stands. Therefore, psychologically, inwardly, one is not an individual. Outwardly one may have a different form from another, yellow, brown, black, be tall or short, be a woman or a man, but inwardly, deeply, we are similar perhaps with some variations, but the similarity is like a string that holds the pearls together. We must comprehend what living is, then we can ask what dying is. What is before is more important than what happens after death. Before the end, long before the last minute, what is living? Is this living, this travail and conflict without any relationship with each other? This sense of deep inward loneliness; that is what we call living. To escape from this so-called living, you go off to churches, temples, pray and worship, which is utterly meaningless. If you have money you indulge in extravagance the extravagance of marriage in this country. You know all the tricks you play to escape from your own consciousness, from your own state of mind. And this is what is called living. And death is the ending. The ending of everything that you know. The ending of every attachment, all the money you have accumulated which you cannot take with you; therefore you are frightened. Fear is part of your life. And so whatever you are, however rich, however poor, however highly placed, whatever power you have, whatever kind of politician you are, from the highest to the lowest crook in politics, there is the ending, which is called death. And what is it that is dying? The `me' with all the accumulations that it has gathered in this life, all the pain, the loneliness, the despair, the tears, the laughter, the suffering that is the `me' with all its words. The summation of all this is `me'. I may pretend that I have in 'me' some higher spirit, the atman, the soul, something everlasting, but that is all put together by thought; and thought is not sacred. So this is our life; the `me' that you cling to, to which you are attached. And the ending of that is death. It is the fear of the known, and the fear of the unknown; the known is our life, and we are afraid of that life, and the unknown is death of which we are also afraid. Have you ever seen a man or a woman frightened of death? Have you ever seen closely? Death is the total denial of the past, present and the future, which is `me'. And being frightened of death you think there are other lives to be lived. You believe in reincarnation probably most of you do. That is a nice, happy projection of comfort, invented by people who have not understood what living is. They see living is pain, constant conflict, endless misery with an occasional flare of smile, laughter and joy, and they say `We will live again next life; after death I will meet my wife' or husband, my son, my god. Yet we have not understood what we are and what we are attached to. What are we attached to? To money? If you are attached to money, that is you, the money is you. Like a man attached to old furniture, beautiful l4th century furniture, highly polished and of great value, he is attached to that; therefore he is the furniture. So what are you attached to? Your body? If you were really attached to your body you would look after that body, eat properly, exercise properly, but you don't. You are just attached to the idea of the body the idea but not the actual instrument. If you are attached to your wife it is because of your memories. If you are attached to her she comforts you over this and that, with all the trivialities of attachment, and death comes and you are separated. So one has to enquire very closely and deeply into one's attachment. Death does not permit one to have anything when one dies. One's body is cremated or buried, and what has one left? One`s son, for whom one has accumulated a lot of money which he will misuse anyway. He will inherit one's property, pay taxes and go through all the terrible anxieties of existence just as one did oneself; is that what one is attached to? Or is one attached to one's knowledge, having been a great writer, poet or painter? Or is one attached to words because words play a tremendous part in one's life? Just words. One never looks behind the words. One never sees that the word is not the thing, that the symbol is never the reality. Can the brain, the human consciousness, be free of this fear of death? As one is the master of psychological time, can one live with death not separating death off as something to be avoided, to be postponed, something to be put away? Death is part of life. Can one live with death and understand the meaning of ending? That is to understand the meaning of negation; ending one's attachments, ending one's beliefs, by negating. When one negates, ends, there is something totally new. So, while living, can one negate attachment completely? That is living with death. Death means the ending. That way there is incarnation, there is something new taking place. Ending is extraordinarily important in life to understand the depth and the beauty of negating something which is not truth. Negate, for example one`s double talk. If one goes to the temple, negate the temple, so that your brain has this quality of integrity. Death is an ending and has extraordinary importance in life. Not suicide, not euthanasia, but the ending of one's attachments, one's pride, one's antagonism, or hatred, for another. When one looks holistically at life, then the dying, the living, the agony, the despair, the loneliness and the suffering, they are all one movement. When one sees holistically there is total freedom from death not that the physical body is not going to be destroyed. There is a sense of ending and therefore there is no continuity there is freedom from the fear of not being able to continue. When one human being understands the full significance of death there is the vitality, the fullness, that lies behind that understanding; he is out of the human consciousness. When you understand that life and death are one they are one when you begin to end in living then you are living side by side with death, which is the most extraordinary thing to do; there is neither the past nor the present nor the future, there is only the ending. THE FLAME OF ATTENTION CHAPTER 6 1ST PUBLIC TALK AT NEW YORK 27TH MARCH 1982 It should be understood that we are not trying to convince you of anything. We are not making any kind of propaganda; nor putting forward new ideas or some exotic theory or fantastic philosophy; nor are we putting forward any kind of conclusion, or advocating any kind of faith. Please be quite convinced of that. But together, you and the speaker are going to observe what is happening in the world, not from any particular point of view, nor from any linguistic, nationalistic or religious attitude. We are together, if you will, going to observe, without any prejudice, freely, without distorting, what is actually happening throughout the world. It is important that we understand that we are simply observing, not taking sides, not having certain conclusions with which to observe; but observing freely, rationally, sanely, why human beings throughout the world have become what they are, brutal, violent, full of fantastic ideas, with nationalistic and tribalistic worship, with all the divisions of faiths, with all their prophets, gurus and all those religious structures which have lost all meaning. Such observation is not a challenge, nor does it bring you the experience of something. Observation is not analysis. Observation, without distortion, is seeing clearly, not from any personal or ideological point of view; it is to observe so that we see things as they are, see both outwardly and inwardly, what is actually taking place externally and how we live psychologically. We are talking over together as two friends walking in a quiet lane, on a summer's day, observing and conversing about their problems, their pain, sorrows, miseries, confusions, uncertainties, the lack of security, and seeing clearly why human beings throughout the world are behaving as they do; we are asking why, after millennia upon millennia, human beings continue to suffer, to have great pain psychologically, to be anxious, uncertain and frightened, having no security, outwardly or inwardly. There is no division between the outer and the inner, between the world which human beings have created outwardly, and the movement which is taking place inwardly it is like a tide, going out and coming in, it is the same movement. There is no division, as the outer and the inner, it is one continuous movement. To understand this movement we must examine together our consciousness, what we are, why we behave the way we do, being cruel and having no actual relationship with each other. We must examine why, after millennia upon millennia, we are living in constant conflict and misery and why religions have totally lost their meaning. We are going to take our human existence as it is and observe it and actually find out for ourselves if there is any possibility of a radical change in the human condition not superficial change, not physical revolution, none of which has brought about a fundamental, radical, change in the psyche. And we are going to find out whether it is possible for the conflict, struggle, pain and the sorrow of our daily life to end. We are going to observe together and see if it is possible to be radically free of all this torture of life, with its occasional joy. This is not a lecture; you are partaking, sharing, in this observation. We are not using any particular jargon, or any special linguistic references. We are using simple, daily English. Communication is only possible when both of us are together one must emphasize the word `together' all the time as we examine our lives and why we are what we have become. What place has knowledge in the transformation of man? Has it any place at all in that transformation? Knowledge is necessary in daily living, going to the office, exercising various skills and so on; it is necessary in the technological world, in the scientific world. But in the transformation of the psyche, of which we are, has knowledge any place in it at all? Knowledge is the accumulation of experience not only personal experience but the accumulation of past experience which is called tradition. That tradition is handed down to each one of us. We have accumulated not only individual, personal, psychological knowledge, but the psychological knowledge that has been handed down and conditioned man through millennia. We are asking whether that psychological knowledge can ever transform man radically, so that he is a totally unconditioned human being. Because if there is any form of conditioning, psychically, inwardly, truth cannot be found. Truth is a pathless land, and it must come to one when there is total freedom from conditioning. There are those who accept and say that the conditioning of man is inevitable, and that he cannot possibly escape from it. He is conditioned and he can no more than ameliorate or modify that conditioning. There is a strong element of Western thought that maintains this position. Man is conditioned by time, by evolution, genetically and by society, by education, and by religion. That conditioning can be modified but man can never be free from it. That is what the Communists and others maintain, pointing out historically and factually that we are all conditioned, by the past, by our education, by our family and so on. They say that there is no escape from that conditioning, and therefore man must always suffer, always be uncertain, always follow the path of struggle, pain and anxiety. What we are saying is quite different; we are saying that this conditioning can be totally eradicated, so that man is free. We are going to enquire into what this conditioning is, and what freedom is. We are going to see whether that conditioning, which is so deeply rooted, in the deep recesses of the mind, and also active superficially, can be understood, so that man is totally freed from all sorrow and anxiety. So first we must look at our consciousness, what it is made of, what is its content. We must question whether that content of consciousness, with which we identify ourselves as individuals, is in fact individual consciousness. Or is this individual consciousness, which each one of us maintains as separate from others, individual at all? Or is it the consciousness of mankind? Please, listen to this first. You may totally disagree. Do not reject, but observe. It is not a question of being tolerant tolerance is the enemy of love; just observe, without any sense of antagonism what we are saying: the consciousness with which we have identified ourselves as individuals, is it individual at all? Or is it the consciousness of humanity? That is, consciousness, with all its content of pain, remembrance, sorrow, nationalistic attitudes, faith, worship, is constant right throughout the world. Everywhere you go, man is suffering, striving, struggling, anxious, full of uncertainty, agony, despair, depression, believing all kinds of superstitious religious nonsense. This is common to all mankind, whether in Asia or here or in the West. So, your consciousness, with which you have identified yourself as your `individual' consciousness, is an illusion. It is the consciousness of the rest of mankind. You are the world and the world is you. Please, consider this, see the seriousness of it, the responsibility that is involved in it. You have struggled all your life, as an individual, something separate from the rest of humanity, and when you discover that your consciousness is the consciousness of the rest of mankind, it means you are mankind, you are not individual. You may have your own particular skill, tendency, idiosyncrasy, but you are actually the rest of mankind, because your consciousness is the consciousness of every other human being. That consciousness is put together by thought. That consciousness is the result of millennia upon millennia of thought. Thought has always been most extraordinarily important in our lives. Thought has created modern technology, thought has created wars, thought has divided people into nationalities, thought has brought about separate religions, thought has created the marvellous architecture of ancient cathedrals, temples and mosques. The rituals, the prayers, all the circus if I may use that word that goes on in the name of religion, is put together by thought. Consciousness is the activity of thought and thought has become so immensely important in our lives. We have to observe what thinking is, that has brought about such extraordinary confusion in the world. Thought plays a part in our relationships with each other, intimate or not. Thought is the source of fear. We have to observe what place thought has in pleasure, what place it has in suffering and whether thought has any place at all in love. It is important to observe the movement of thought per se. Observing the movement of thought is a part of meditation. Meditation is not just some absurd repetition of words, spending a few minutes at it morning, afternoon an and evening. Meditation is part of life. Meditation is to discover the relationship of thought and silence; the relationship of thought and that which is timeless. Meditation is part of our daily life, as death is part of our life, as love is part of our life. It is fairly simple, when you are asked a question, which is familiar, to reply immediately. You are asked your name, your reply is instantaneous; because you have repeated your name so often it comes easily. But if you are asked a complicated question, there is an interval between the question and the answer. During that interval, thought is investigating and finally finding an answer. But when you are asked a very deep question and you reply, `I do not know', there is an end to thought. Very few people actually say, `I do not know', they pretend to think they know. Probably many of you believe in god. That is the last hope, the last pleasure, the ultimate security. And when you actually ask yourself the question, seriously, with great earnestness: do you really know god, do you really believe? then if you are honest, you say `Really, I do not know.` Then your mind is really observing. The accumulation of experience stored up in the brain as memory is knowledge and the reaction to that memory is thought. Thought is a material process there is nothing sacred about thought. The image we worship as sacred, is still part of thought. Thought is always divisive, separative, fragmentary, and knowledge is never complete, about anything. Thought, however sublime or however trivial, is always fragmentary, is always divisive, because it is derived from memory. All our actions are based on thought, therefore all action is limited, fragmentary, divisive, incomplete it can never be holistic. Thought, whether of the greatest genius, of daily activity of thought, is always limited, fragmentary, divisive. Any action born out of that thought must bring about conflict. There are the nationalistic, tribal divisions, to which the mind clings in its search for security. That very search for security brings about wars. The search for security is also the activity of thought; so there is no security in thought. The essence of the content of our consciousness is thought. Thought has brought about a structure in consciousness, of fear, of belief. The idea of a saviour, faith, anxiety, pain all that is put together by thought and is the content of consciousness. We are asking whether that content of consciousness can be wiped away so that there is a totally different dimension altogether. It is only in that dimension that there can be creativeness; creativeness not within the content of consciousness. So, let us look at one of the contents of our consciousness, which is relationship between human beings. Between a man and a woman, why is there such conflict in that relationship, such misery, and constant division? It is important to enquire into this, because man exists in relationship; there is no saint, hermit or monk, who is not related, though he may withdraw into a monastery or go to some Himalayan cave he is still related. It is important to understand why human beings never live in peace in relationship, why there is this terrible struggle and pain, jealousy, anxiety, and to see whether it is possible to be free of all that and therefore be in real relationship. To find out what real relationship is demands a great deal of enquiry, observation. Observation is not analysis. This is again important to understand, because most of us are accustomed to analysis. We are observing the actual relationship of man to man and woman, between two human beings; asking why there should be so much struggle, anxiety, pain. In the relationship of two human beings, be they married or not, do they ever meet, psychologically? They may meet physically, in bed, but inwardly, psychologically, are they not like two parallel lines, each pursuing his own life, his own ambition, his own fulfilment, his own expression So, like two parallel lines, they never meet, and therefore there is the battle, the struggle, the pain of having no actual relationship. They say they are related, but that is not true, that is not honest, because each one has an image about himself. Added to that image each one has an image of the person he lives with. Actually we have two images or multiple images. He has created an image about her, and she has created an image about him. These images are put together through the reactions which are remembered, which become the image, the image you have about her and she has about you. The relationship is between these two images which are the symbols of the remembrances, the pain. So actually there is no relationship. So one asks: is it possible not to have any image about another at all? So long as one has an image about her and she has about oneself, there must be conflict, because the cultivation of images destroys relationship. Through observation can one discover whether it is possible not to have an image about oneself or about another completely not to have images? As long as one has an image about oneself, one is going to get hurt. It is one of the miseries in life, from childhood through school, college, university and right through life, one is constantly getting hurt, with all its consequences and the gradual process of isolation so as not to get hurt. And what is it that is hurt? It is the image that one has built about oneself. If one were to be totally free of all images, then there would be no hurt, no flattery. Now most people find security in the image they have built for themselves, which is the image that thought has created. So we are asking, observing, whether this image built from childhood, put together by thought, a structure of words, a structure of reactions, a process of remembrances long, deep, abiding incidents, hurts, ideas, pain can end completely for only then can you have any kind of relationship with another. In relationship, when there is no image, there is no conflict. This is not just a theory, an ideal; the speaker is saying it is a fact. If one goes into it very deeply, one finds that one can live in this monstrous world and not have a single image about oneself; then one's relationships have a totally different meaning there is no conflict whatsoever. Now please, as you are listening to the speaker, are you aware of your own image and the ending of that image? Or are you going to ask: 'How am I to end that image?' When you ask 'how', see the implication in that word. The `how' implies that somebody will tell you what to do. Therefore that somebody, who is going to tell you what to do, becomes the specialist, the guru, the leader. But you have had leaders, specialists, psychologists, all your life; they have not changed you. So do not ask `how' but find out for yourself whether you can be free of that image, totally. You can be free of it when you give complete attention to what another says. If your wife or your friend, says something ugly and if at that moment you pay complete attention, then in that attention there is no creation of images. Then life has a totally different meaning. We are observing our consciousness, with its content. The content, like the hurt, like relationship, makes our consciousness. Another content of our consciousness is fear; we live with fear, not only outwardly but much more deeply, in the dark recesses of the mind, there is deep fear, fear of the future, fear of the past, fear of the actual present. We ought to talk over together whether it is possible for human beings, living in this world as it is at the present time threatened by wars, living our daily life to be totally, completely, free of all psychological fear. Probably most of you may not have asked such a question. Or you may have done so and tried to find a way of escaping from fear, or suppressing it, denying it, rationalizing it. But if you are really observing deeply the nature of fear, then you have to look at what fear is, actually see what the contributing causes of fear are. Most of us are frightened, frightened of tomorrow, frightened of death, frightened of your husband or your wife or your girlfriend; of so many things are we frightened. Fear is like a vast tree with innumerable branches; it is no good merely trimming the branches, you must go to the very root of it and see whether it is possible to eradicate it so completely that you are free of it. It is not a question of whether we will always remain free of fear; when you have really eradicated the roots, when there is no possibility of fear entering into your psychological life. One of the reasons for fear is comparison, comparing oneself with another. Or comparing oneself with what one has been and what one would like to be. The movement of comparison is conformity, imitation, adjustment; it is one of the sources of fear. Has one ever tried never to compare oneself with another, either physically or psychologically? When one does not compare then one is not becoming. The whole of cultural education is to become something, to be something. If one is a poor man one wishes to become a rich man if one is a rich man one is seeking more power. Religiously or socially one is always to become something. In this wanting, in this desire to become, there is comparison. To live without comparison is the extraordinary thing that takes place when one has no measure. As long as one measures psychologically there must be fear, because one is always striving and one may not achieve. Another reason for fear is desire. We have to observe the nature and structure of desire and why desire has become so extraordinarily important in our lives. Where there is desire, there must be conflict, competition, struggle. So it is important, if you are at all serious and those who are serious, really live, for them life has tremendous significance, responsibility to find out what desire is. Religions throughout the world have said, `Suppress desire'. Monks not the sloppy religious people, but those who have committed themselves to a certain form of religious organization in their particular faith have tried to transfer or sublimate desire in the name of a symbol, a saviour. But desire is an extraordinarily strong force in our lives. We either suppress, run away from or substitute the activities of desire, we rationalize, seeing how it arises, what is the source of it. So let us observe the movement of desire. We are not saying it must be suppressed, run away from, or sublimate whatever that word may mean. Most of us are extraordinary human beings. We want everything explained, we want it all very neatly set out in words or in a diagram, and then we think we have understood it. We have become slaves to explanations. We never try to find out for ourselves what the movement of desire is, how it comes into being. The speaker will go into it, but the explanation is not the actuality. The word is not the thing. One must not be caught in words, in explanations. The painting of a mountain on a canvas is not the actual mountain. It may be beautifully painted, but it is not that extraordinary deep beauty of a mountain, its majesty against the blue sky. Similarly the explanation of desire is not the actual movement of desire. The explanation has no value so long as we do not actually see for ourselves. Observation must be free, without a direction, without a motive, in order to understand the movement of desire. Desire arises out of sensation. Sensation is contact, the seeing. Then thought creates an image from that sensation; that movement of thought is the beginning of desire. That is, you see a fine car and thought creates the image of you in that car and so on; at that moment is the beginning of desire. If you had no sensation you would be paralysed. There must be the activity of the senses. When the sensation of seeing or touching arises, then thought makes the image of you in that car. The moment thought creates the image there is the birth of desire. it requires a highly attentive mind to see the importance of total sensation not one particular activity of the senses followed by the activity of thought creating an image. Have you ever observed a sunset with the movement of the sea with all your senses? When you observe with all your senses, then there is no centre from which you are observing. Whereas, if you cultivate only one or two senses then there is fragmentation. Where there is fragmentation there is the structure of the self, the 'me'. In observing desire as one of the factors of fear, see how thought comes in and creates the image. But if one is totally attentive then thought does not enter into the movement of sensation. That requires great inward attention with its discipline. Another of the factors of fear is time psychological time, not time as sunrise and sunset, yesterday and today and tomorrow, but psychological time, as yesterday, today and tomorrow. Time is one of the major factors of fear. It is not that time as movement must stop but that the nature of psychological time be understood, not intellectually or verbally but actually observed psychologically, inwardly. We can be free of time or be slaves of time. There is an element of violence in most of us that has never been resolved, never been wiped away so that we can live totally without violence. Not being able to be free of violence we have created the idea of its opposite, non-violence. Non-violence is non-fact violence is a fact. Non-violence does not exist except as an idea. What exists, `what is', is violence. It is like those people in India who say they worship the idea of non-violence, they preach about it, talk about it, copy it they are dealing with a non-fact, non-reality, with an illusion. What is a fact is violence, major or minor, but violence. When you pursue non-violence, which is an illusion, which is not an actuality, you are cultivating time. That is, `I am violent, but I will be non-violent`. The `I will be' is time, which is the future, a future that has no reality, it is invented by thought as an opposite of violence. It is the postponement of violence that creates time. If there is an understanding and so the ending of violence, there is no psychological time. We can be masters of psychological time; that time can be totally eliminated if you see that the opposite is not real. The 'what is' has no time. To understand `what is', requires no time, but only complete observation. In the observation of violence, for example, there is no movement of thought but only holding that enormous energy which we call violence, and observing it. But the moment there is a distortion, the motive of trying to become non-violent, you have introduced time. Comparison, with all its complexity, desire and time, are the factors of fear deep-rooted fear. When there is observation, and therefore no movement of thought merely observing the whole movement of fear there is the total ending of fear; and the observer is not different from the observed. This is an important factor to understand. And as you observe, completely, there is the ending of fear, the human mind then is no longer caught in the movement of fear. If there is fear of any sort, the mind is confused, distorted and therefore it has no clarity. And there must be clarity for that which is eternal to be. To observe the movement of fear in oneself, to watch the whole complexity, the weaving of fear, and to remain with it so completely, without any movement of thought, is the total ending of it. 27 March 1982 THE FLAME OF ATTENTION CHAPTER 7 1ST PUBLIC TALK AT OJAI 1ST MAY 1982 From the very beginning, understand that we are not instructing anybody about anything; we are not bringing up some kind of idea, belief or conclusion, to convince you of anything; this is not propaganda. Rather, I think it would be good if we could, during these talks, think over together, observe and listen together to the whole movement of one life, whether it is in South Africa, South America, North America, Europe or Asia. We are dealing with a very complex problem that needs to be studied most carefully, hesitantly, without any direction, without any motive, so as to observe, if we can, the whole outward happening of our life. What is happening outside of us is the measure by which we will be able to understand ourselves inwardly. If we do not understand what is actually going on in the external world, outside the psychological field, we will have no measure by which to observe ourselves. Let us together observe without any bias, as American, Argentinian, British, French, Russian, or Asian; let us observe without any motive which is rather difficult and see clearly, if we can, what is going on. As one travels around the world, one is aware that there is a great deal of dissension, discord, disagreement, disorder; a great deal of confusion, uncertainty. One sees the demonstrations against one particular form of war and the extensive preparations for war; the spending of untold money on armaments; one nation against another preparing for eventual war. There are the national divisions. There is the national honour, for which thousands are willing and proud to kill others. There are the religious and sectarian divisions: the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hindu, the Mohammedan, the Buddhist. There are the various sects, and the gurus, with their particular following. There is the spiritual authority in the Catholic and the Protestant world, there is the authority of the book in the Islamic world. So everywhere there is this constant division leading to disorder, conflict and destruction. There is the attachment to a particular nationality, a particular religion, hoping thereby to find some kind of outward or inward security. These are the phenomena that are taking place in the world, of which we are all part I am sure that we all observe the same thing. There is isolation taking place, not only for each human being, but the isolation of groups which are bound by a belief, by a faith, by some ideological conclusion; it is the same in totalitarian states and in the so-called democratic countries with their ideals. Ideals, beliefs, dogmas and rituals are separating mankind. This is actually what is going on in the external world and it is the result of our own inner psychological living. We are isolated human beings and the outward world is created by each one of us. We each have our own particular profession, our own particular belief, our own conclusions and experiences, to which we cling and thereby each one is isolating himself. This self-centred activity is expressed outwardly as nationalism, religious intolerance, even if that group consists of seven hundred million people, as in the Catholic world and at the same time each one of us is isolating himself. We are creating a world divided by nationalism, which is a glorified form of tribalism; each tribe is willing to kill another tribe for their belief, for their land, for their economic trade. We all know this; at least, those who are aware, who listen to the radio, see the television, the newspapers and so on. There are those who say that this cannot be changed, that there is no possibility of this human condition being transformed. They say that the world has been going on like this for thousands and thousands of years and is created by the human condition and that condition can never possibly bring about a mutation in itself. They assert that there can be modification, slight change, but that man will ever be basically what he is, bringing about division in himself and in the world. There are those all over the world who advocate social reform of various kinds, but they have not brought about a deep fundamental mutation in the human consciousness. This is the state of the world. And how do we look at it? What is our response to it, as human beings? What is our actual relationship, not only with each other but with this external world; what is our responsibility? Do we leave it to the politicians? Do we seek new leaders, new saviours? This is a very serious problem which we are talking over together. Or do we go back to the old traditions; because human beings, unable to solve this problem, return to the old habitual traditions of the past. The more there is confusion in the world, the greater is the desire and urge of some to return to past illusions, past traditions, past leaders, past so-called saviours. So if one is aware of all this, as one must be, what is one's response, not partial, but total response, to the whole phenomenon that is taking place in the world? Does one consider only one's own personal life, how to live a quiet, serene, undisturbed life in some corner; or is one concerned with the total human existence, with total humanity? If one is only concerned with one's own particular life, however troublesome it is, however limited it is, however much it is sorrowful and painful, then one does not realize that the part is of the whole. One has to look at life, not the American life or the Asiatic life, but life as a whole; holistic observation; an observation that is not a particular observation; it is not one's own observation, but the observation that comprehends the totality, the holistic view of life. Each one has been concerned with his own particular problems - problems of money, no job, seeking one`s own fulfilment, everlastingly seeking pleasure; being frightened, isolated, lonely, depressed, suffering, and creating a saviour outside who will transform or bring about a salvation for each one of us. This has been the tradition in the Western world for two thousand years; and in the Asiatic world the same thing has been maintained in different words and symbols, different conclusions; but it is the same individual's search for his own salvation, for his own particular happiness, to resolve his own many complex problems. There are the specialists of various kinds, psychological specialists, to whom one goes to resolve one`s problems. They too have not succeeded. Technologically the scientists have helped to reduce disease, to improve communication; but also they are increasing the devastating power of the weapons of war; the power to murder vast numbers of people with one blow. The scientists are not going to save mankind; nor are the politicians, whether in the East or West or in any part of the world. The politicians seek power, position, and they play all kinds of tricks on human thought. It is exactly the same thing in the so-called religious world; the authority of the hierarchy; the authority of the Pope, the archbishop, the bishop and the local priest, in the name of some image which thought has created. We, as human beings separated, isolated, have not been able to solve our problems; although highly educated, cunning, self-centred, capable of extraordinary things outwardly, yet inwardly, we are more or less what we have been for thousands of years. We hate, we compete, we destroy each other; which is what is actually going on at the present time. You have heard the experts talking about some recent war; they are not talking about human beings being killed, but about destroying airfields, blowing up this or that. There is this total confusion in the world, of which one is quite sure we are all aware; so what shall we do? As a friend some time ago told the speaker: 'You cannot do anything; you are beating your head against a wall. Things will go on like this indefinitely; fighting, destroying each ocher, competing and being caught in various forms of illusion. This will go on. Do not waste your life and time.' Aware of the tragedy of the world, the terrifying events that may happen should some crazy person press a button; the computer taking over man's capacities, thinking much quicker and more accurately what is going to happen to the human being? This is the vast problem which we are facing. One's education from childhood as one passes through school, college and university, is to specialize in some way or another, to accumulate a great deal of knowledge, then get a job and hold on to it for the rest of one's life; going to the office, from morning till evening and dying at the end of it all. This is not a pessimistic attitude or observation; this is actually what is going on. When one observes that fact, one is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, it is so. And one asks, if one is at all serious and responsible: what is one to do? Retire into a monastery? form some commune? Go off to Asia and pursue Zen meditation or some other form of meditation? One is asking this question seriously. When one is confronted with this crisis it is a crisis in consciousness, it is not over there outside of one. The crisis is in oneself. There is a saying: we have seen the enemy and the enemy is ourselves. The crisis is not a matter of economics, of war, the bomb, the politicians, the scientists; the crisis is within us, the crisis is in our consciousness. Until we understand very profoundly the nature of that consciousness, and question, delve deeply into it and find out for ourselves whether there can be a total mutation in that consciousness, the world will go on creating more misery, more confusion, more horror. Our responsibility is not in some kind of altruistic action outside ourselves, political, social or economic; it is to comprehend the nature of our being. to find out why we human beings who live on this beautiful earth have become like this. Here we are trying, you and the speaker, together, not separately, together, to observe the movement of consciousness and its relationship to the world, and to see whether that consciousness is individual, separate, or if it is the whole of mankind. We are educated from childhood to be individuals, each with a separate soul; or we have been trained, educated, conditioned to think as individuals. We think that because we each have a separate name, separate form, that is, dark, light, tall, short, and each with a particular tendency, that we are separate individuals with our own particular experiences and so on. We are going to question that very idea, that we are individuals. It does not mean that we are some kind of amorphous beings, but actually question whether we are individuals, though the whole world maintains, both religiously and in other ways, that we are separate individuals. From that concept and perhaps from that illusion, we are each one of us trying to fulfil, to become something. in that effort to become something we are competing against another, fighting another, so that if we maintain that way of life, we must inevitably continue to cling to nationalities, tribalism, war. Why do we hold on to nationalism with such passion behind it? which is what is happening now. Why do we give such extraordinary passionate importance to nationalism which is essentially tribalism? Why? Is it because in holding on to the tribe, to the group, there is a certain security, an inward sense of completeness, fullness? If that is so, then the other tribe also feels the same; and hence division and hence war, conflict. If one actually sees the truth of this, not as something theoretical and if one wants to live on this earth which is our earth, not yours or mine then there is no nationalism at all. There is only human existence; one life; not your life or my life; it is living the whole of life. This tradition of individuality has been perpetuated by the religions both of the East and the West; salvation for each individual, and so on. It is very good to have a mind that questions, that does not accept; a mind that says: `We cannot possibly live any more like this, in this brutal, violent manner'. Doubting, questioning, not just accepting the way of life we have lived for perhaps fifty or sixty years, or the way man has lived for thousands of years. So, we are questioning the reality of individuality. Is your consciousness really yours? to be conscious means to be aware, to know, to perceive, to observe the content of your consciousness includes your beliefs, your pleasures, experiences, your particular knowledge which you have gathered either of some particular external subject or the knowledge you have gathered about yourself; it includes your fears and attachments; the pain and the agony of loneliness, the sorrow, the search for something more than mere physical existence; all that is the content of your consciousness. The content makes the consciousness; without the content there is not consciousness as we know it. Here there is no room for argument. It is so. Now, your consciousness which is very complex, contradictory, with such extraordinary vitality is it yours? Is thought yours? Or is there only thinking, which is neither Eastern nor Western thinking, which is common to all mankind, whether rich or poor, whether the technician with his extraordinary capacity or the monk who withdraws from the world and is consecrating himself to an idea? Wherever one goes, one sees suffering, pain, anxiety, loneliness, insanity, fear, the seeking after security, being caught in knowledge and the urge of desire; it is all of the ground on which every human being stands. One's consciousness is the consciousness of the rest of humanity. It is logical; you may disagree; you may say, my consciousness is separate and must be separate; but is it so? If one understands the nature of this then one sees that one is the rest of mankind. One may have a different name, one may live in a particular part of the world and be educated in a particular way, one may be affluent or very poor, but when one goes behind the mask, deeply, one is like the rest of mankind aching, lonely, suffering, despairing, neurotic; believing in some illusion, and so on. Whether in the East or the West, this is so. One may not like it; one may like to think that one is totally independent, a free individual, but when one observes very deeply, one is the rest of humanity. One may accept this as an idea, an abstraction, as a marvellous concept; but the idea is not the actuality. An abstraction is not what is actually taking place. But one makes an abstraction of that which is, into an idea, and then pursues the idea, which is really non-factual. So; if the content of my consciousness and yours is in itself contradictory, confused, struggling against another, fact against non-fact, wanting to be happy, being unhappy, wanting to live without violence and yet being violent then our consciousness in itself is disorder. There is the root of dissension. Until we understand that and go into it very deeply and discover total order, we shall always have disorder in the world. So a serious person is not easily dissuaded from the pursuit of understanding, the pursuit of delving deeply into himself, into his consciousness, not easily persuaded by amusement and entertainment which is perhaps sometimes necessary pursuing consistently every day into the nature of man, that is, into himself, observing what is actually going on within himself. From that observation, action takes place. It is not: what shall I do as a separate human being but an action which comes out of total holistic observation of life. Holistic observation is a healthy, sane, rational, logical, perception that is whole, which is holy. Is it possible for a human being, like any one of us who are laymen, not specialists, laymen, is it possible for him to look at the contradictory, confusing consciousness as a whole; or must he look at each part of it separately? One wants to understand oneself, one's consciousness. One knows from the very beginning that it is very contradictory; wanting one thing, and not wanting the other thing; saying one thing and doing another. And one knows that beliefs separate man. One believes in Jesus, or Krishna or something, or one believes in one's own experience which one holds on to, including the knowledge which one has accumulated through the forty or sixty years of one's life, which has become extraordinarily important. One clings to that. One recognizes that belief destroys and divides people and yet one cannot give it up because belief has strange vitality. It gives one a certain sense of security. One believes in god, there is an extraordinary strength in that. But god is invented by man. God is the projection of our own thought, the opposite to one's own demands, one's own hopelessness and despair. Why does one have beliefs at all? A mind that is crippled by belief is an unhealthy mind. There must be freedom from that. So, is it possible for one to delve deeply into one's consciousness not persuaded, not guided by psychologists, psychiatrists and so on to delve deeply into oneself and find out; so that one does not depend on anybody including the speaker? In asking that question, how shall one know the intricacies, the contradictions, the whole movement of consciousness? Shall one know it bit by bit? Take for instance the hurt that each human being suffers from childhood. One is hurt by one's parents, psychologically. Then hurt in school, in university through comparison, through competition, through saying one must be first-class at this subject, and so on. Throughout life there is this constant process of being hurt. One knows this and that all human beings are hurt, deeply, of which they may not be conscious and that from this all the forms of neurotic action arise. That is all part of one's consciousness; part hidden and part open awareness that one is hurt. Now, is it possible not to be hurt at all? Because the consequences of being hurt are the building of a wall around oneself; withdrawing in one's relationship with others in order not to be hurt more. In that there is fear and a gradual isolation. Now we are asking: is it possible not only to be free of past hurts but also never to be hurt again, not through callousness, through indifference, through total disregard of all relationship? One must inquire into why one is hurt and what is being hurt. This hurt is part of one's consciousness; from it various neurotic contradictory actions take place. One is examining hurt, as one examined belief. It is not something outside of us, it is part of us. Now what is it that is hurt and is it possible never to be hurt? Is it possible for one to be a human being who is free, totally, never hurt by anything, psychologically, inwardly? What is it that is hurt? One says, that it is I who am hurt. What is that 'I'? From childhood one has built up an image of oneself. One has many, many images; not only the images that people give one, but also the images that one has built oneself; as an American, that is an image, or as a Hindu or as a specialist. So, the I is the image that one has built about oneself, as a great or a very good man and it is that image that gets hurt. One may have an image of oneself as a great speaker, writer, spiritual being, leader. These images are the core of oneself; when one says one is hurt, one means the images are hurt. If one has an image about oneself and another comes along and says: don't be an idiot, one gets hurt. The image which has been built about oneself as not being an idiot, is `me' and that gets hurt. One carries that image and that hurt, for the rest of one's life always being careful not to be hurt, warding off any statement of one's idiocy. The consequences of being hurt are very complex. From that hurt one may want to fulfil oneself by becoming this or that so as to escape from this terrible hurt; so one has to understand it. Now is it possible to have no image about oneself at all? Why does one have images about oneself? Another may look very nice, bright, intelligent, clear-faced, and one wants to be like him; and if one is not, one gets hurt. Comparison may be one of the factors of being hurt, psychologically; then, why does one compare? Can one live a life in the modern world without a single image? The speaker may say it is possible that it can be done. But it requires a great deal of energy if one is to find out whether it is possible never to be hurt and further whether it is possible to live a life without a single belief; for it is belief which is dividing human beings so that they are destroying each other. So, can one live without a single belief and never have an image about oneself? That is real freedom. It is possible, when one is called an idiot and has an image about oneself, to give total attention to that statement as it is said, for when one has an image about oneself and one is called an idiot, one reacts instantly. As the reaction is immediate, give attention to that immediacy. That is, listen very clearly to the suggestion that one is an idiot, listen to it attentively, when one listens with complete attention, there is no reaction. It is the lack of listening acutely that brings up the image and hence the reaction. Suppose I have an image about myself, because I have travelled all over the world, etcetera. You come along and say, look, old boy, you're not as good as the other guru, or the other leader, or some other teacher, some other idiot; you are yourself an idiot. I listen to that completely, give complete attention to what is being said. When there is total attention, there is no forming of a centre. It is only inattention that creates the centre. A mind which has been slack, a brain which has been confused, disturbed, neurotic, which has never actually faced anything, which has never demanded of itself its highest capacity, can it give such total attention? When there is total attention to the statement that one is an idiot it has totally lost all significance. Because when there is attention there is not a centre which is reacting. 1st May 1982 THE FLAME OF ATTENTION CHAPTER 8 3RD PUBLIC TALK AT SAANEN 15TH JULY 1982 Apparently we are always concerned with effects; psychologically we are always trying to change or modify these effects, or results. We never enquire very deeply into the cause of these effects. All our ways of thinking and acting have a cause, a ground, a reason, a motive. If the cause were to end, then what is beyond? One hopes you will not mind being reminded again that the speaker is completely anonymous. The speaker is not important. What is important is to find out for yourselves if what is being said is true or false, and that depends on intelligence. Intelligence is the uncovering of the false and totally rejecting it. Please bear in mind that together, in co-operation, we are investigating, examining, exploring into these problems. The speaker is not exploring, but you are exploring with him. There is no question of following him. There is no authority invested in him. This must be said over and over again as most of us have a tendency to follow, to accept, especially from those whom you think somewhat different or spiritually advanced all that nonsense. So please, if one may repeat over and over again: our minds and our brains are conditioned to follow as we follow a professor in a university; he informs and we accept because he certainly knows more of his subject than perhaps we do but here it is not a matter of that kind. The speaker is not informing you or urging you to accept those things that are said; but rather we should together, in co-operation, investigate into these human problems, which are very complex, need a great deal of observation, a great deal of energy and enquiry. But if you merely follow you are only following the image that you have created about him or about the symbolic meaning of the words. So please bear in mind all these facts. We are going to enquire together into what intelligence is. Is thought, our thinking, the way we act, the whole social, moral, or immoral, world in which we live, the activity of intelligence? One of the factors of intelligence is to uncover and explore; explore into the nature of the false, because in the understanding of the false, in the uncovering of that which is illusion, there is the truth, which is intelligence. Has intelligence a cause? Thought has a cause. One thinks because one has past experiences, past accumulated information and knowledge. That knowledge is never complete, it must go hand in hand with ignorance, and from this ground of knowledge with its ignorance thought is born. Thought must be partial, limited, fragmented, because it is the outcome of knowledge, and knowledge can never be complete at any time. Thought must always be incomplete, insufficient, limited. And we use that thought, not recognizing the limitation of it; we live endlessly creating thoughts, and worshipping the things that thought has created. Thought has created wars and the instruments of war, and the terror of war. Thought has created the whole technological world. So, is thought, the activity of thought, which is to compare, to identify, to fulfil, to seek satisfaction, to seek security which are the result of thinking intelligent? The movement of thought is from the past to the present to the future which is the movement of time and thought has its cunningness, with its capacity to adjust itself, as no animal does except the human being. So thought has causation, obviously. One wants to build a house; one wants to drive a car; one wants to be powerful, well-known; one is dull, but one will be clever, one will achieve, one will fulfil; all that is the movement of the centre from which thought arises. It is so obvious. Through the obvious we are going to penetrate to that which may be difficult. But first we must be very clear about the obvious. There is a cause and an effect, an effect that may be immediate or postponed. The movement from the cause to the effect is time. One has done something in the past which was not correct; the effect of that may be that one pays for it immediately, or perhaps in five years' time. There is cause followed by an effect; the interval, whether it is a second or years, is the movement of time. But, is intelligence the movement of time? Think it over, examine it, because this is not a verbal clarification, it is not a verbal explanation; but perceive the reality of it, the truth of it. We are going into the various aspects of our daily living not some Utopian concept, or some ideological conclusion according to which we shall act we are investigating our lives, our lives which are the lives of all humanity; it is not my life or your life; life is a tremendous movement; and in that movement we have separated off parts which we call individual selves. We are saying that where there is a cause, the effect can be ended with the ending of the cause. If one has tuberculosis it is the cause of one's coughing and loss of blood; that cause can be cured and the effect will disappear. All one's life is the movement of cause and effect: you flatter me, I am delighted and I flatter you. You say something unpleasant, I hate you. In all this movement there is cause and effect. Of course. We are asking: is there a life, a way of living, without causation? But first we must understand the implications of ending. One ends anger or greed in order to achieve something else; that ending leads to further cause. What is it to end? Is ending a continuation? One ends something and begins something else which is another form of the same thing. To go into this very deeply one has to understand the conflict of the opposites, the conflict of duality. One is greedy and for various social or economic reasons one must end it. In the ending of it one wants something else, which then is a cause. The something else is the result of the greed. In ending the greed one has merely replaced it by something else. One is violent by nature; violence has been inherited from the animal and so on. One wants to end violence because one feels it is too stupid. In trying to end violence one is trying to find a field which is non-violent, which has no shadow of violence in it. But one has not really ended violence, one has only translated that feeling into another feeling, but the principle is the same. If we go into this matter very carefully, deeply, it will affect our daily life; it may be the ending of conflict. Our life is in conflict, our consciousness is in conflict, it is confused, contradictory. Our consciousness is the result of thought. Thought is subject to causation, our consciousness is subject to causation. One observes that all one's complex life with its contradictions, its imitation and conformity, its various conclusions with their opposites, is all a movement of causation. Can one end that causation by will, by a desire to have an orderly life? If one does, then that life is born out of causation because one is disorderly. Discovering the disorderliness of one's life and wishing to have an orderly life, is in the chain of causation, one sees, therefore, that it will not be orderly. What is order? There is obviously the order of law which is based upon various experiences, judgements, necessities, conveniences, in order to restrain the ill-doer. That which we call social order, ethical order, political order, has essentially a basis of cause. Now we are asking, inwardly, psychologically, has order a cause? Do we recognize, see, that our lives are disorderly, contradictory, conforming, following, accepting, denying what we may want and accepting something else? The conflict between the various opposites is disorder. Because we accept one form of thought as order, we think its opposite is disorder. The opposite may create disorder, so we live always within the field of these opposites. So, will disorder end completely in our lives if we want order? One wants to live peacefully, to have a pleasant life with companionship and so on; that want is born out of disorder. The cause of the opposite is its own opposite. One hates, one must not hate; therefore one is trying not to hate, not to hate is the outcome of one's hate. If there is no hate it has no opposite. Thought has created disorder. Let us see that fact. Thought has created disorder in the world through nationalism, through faiths, one is a Jew another is an Arab one believes and another does not believe. Those are all the activities of thought, which in itself is divisive; it cannot bring unity because in itself it is fragmented. That which is fragmented cannot see the whole. One discovers that one's consciousness is entirely in disorder and one wants order, hoping thereby one will end conflict. There is a motive; that motive is the cause of my desire to have an orderly life. The desire for order is born there out of disorder. That desired order perpetuates disorder which is happening in political, religious and other fields. Now one sees the cause of disorder; one does not move away from disorder. One sees the cause of it, that one is contradictory, that one is angry; one sees the confusion. One sees the cause of it. One is not moving away from the cause or the effect. One is the cause and one is the effect. One sees that one is the cause and that things that happen are oneself. Any movement away from that is to perpetuate disorder. So, is there an ending without a future? An ending of `what is` that has no future? Any future projected by my demand for order is still the continuation of disorder. Is there an observation of my disorder and an ending of it without any cause? One is violent. There is violence in all human beings. The cause of that violence is essentially a self-centred movement. Another is also violent because he is self-centred. Therefore there is a battle between us. Thought is not pursuing non-violence, which is a form of violence. If one sees that very clearly then one is only concerned with violence. The cause of that violence may be so many contradictory demands, so many pressures and so on. So there are many causes and one cause of violence is the self. The self has many aspects, it hides behind many ideas; one is an idealist because that appeals to one and one wants to work for that ideal, but in the working for that ideal one is becoming more and more important and one covers that up by the ideal; the very escape from oneself is part of oneself. This whole movement is the cause of violence. An idealist wants to kill others because by killing them there may be a better world-you know all that goes on. Our life is conditioned by many causes. Is there a way of living, psychologically, without a single cause? Please enquire into this. It is a marvellous enquiry; even to put that question demands some deep searching. One wants security, therefore one follows a guru. One may put on his robes or copy what he says, but deeply one wants to be safe. One clings to some idea, some image. But the image, the idea, the conclusion, the guru, can never bring about security. So one has to enquire into security. Is there such a thing as security, inwardly? Because one is uncertain, confused and another says he is not confused, one holds on to him. One's demand is to find some kind of peace, hope, some kind of quietness in one's life. He is not important but one's desire is important. One will do whatever he wants and follow him. One is silly enough to do all that but when one enquires into the cause of it one discovers, deeply, that one wants protection, the feeling of being safe. Now, can there ever be security, psychologically? The very question implies the demand for intelligence. The very putting of that question is an outcome of intelligence. But if one says there is always security in one's symbol, in one's saviour, in this, in that, then one will not move away from it. But if one begins to enquire, to ask: is there security..? So, if there is a cause for security, it is not secure, because the desire for security is the opposite of security. Has love a cause? We said intelligence has no cause, it is intelligence, it is not your intelligence, or my intelligence. It is light. Where there's light there is not my light or your light. The sun is not your sun or my sun; it is the clarity of light. Has love a cause? If it has not, then love and intelligence go together. When one says to one's wife or one's girl friend, `I love you', what does it mean? One loves god. One does not know anything about that being and one loves him; because there is fear, there is a demand for security, and the vast weight of tradition and the 'sacred' books encourage one to love that about which one knows nothing. So one says `I believe in god'. But if there is the discovery that intelligence is total security, and that love is something beyond all causation, which is order, then the universe is open because the universe is order. Let us go into the question of what intelligent relationship is; not the relationship of thought with its image. Our brains are mechanical - mechanical in the sense that they are repetitive, never free, struggling within the same field, thinking they are free by moving from one corner to the other in the same field, which is choice, and thinking that choice is freedom, which is merely the same thing. One's brain, which has evolved through ages of time, through tradition, through education, through conformity, through adjustment, has become mechanical. There may be parts of one's brain which are free but one does not know, so do not assert that. Do not say: `Yes, there is part of me that is free; that is meaningless. The fact remains that the brain has become mechanical, traditional, repetitive, and that it has its own cunningness, its own capacity to adjustment, to discern. But it is always within a limited area and is fragmented. Thought has its home in the physical cells of the brain. The brain has become mechanical, as is exemplified when I say, `I am a Christian or I am not a Christian; I am a Hindu; I believe; I have faith; I do not have faith, it is all a mechanical repetitive process, reaction to another reaction, and so on. The human brain being conditioned, has its own artificial, mechanical intelligence like a computer. We will keep that expression mechanical intelligence. (Billions and billions of dollars are being spent to find out if a computer can operate exactly like the brain.) Thought, which is born of memory, know- ledge, stored in the brain, is mechanical; it may have the capacity to invent but it is still mechanical invention is totally different from creation. Thought is trying to discover a different way of life, or a different social order. But any discovery of a social order by thought is still within the field of confusion. We are asking: is there an intelligence which has no cause and which can act in our relationships not the mechanical state of relationship which exists now? Our relationships are mechanical. One has certain biological urges and one fulfils them. One demands certain comforts, certain companionship because one is lonely or depressed and by holding on to another perhaps that depression will disappear. But in one's relationships with another, intimate or otherwise, there is always a cause, a motive, a ground from which one establishes a relationship. That is mechanical. It has been happening for millennia; there appears always to have been a conflict between woman and man, a constant battle, each pursuing his or her own line, never meeting, like two railway lines. This relationship is always limited because it is from the activity of thought which itself is limited. Wherever there is limitation there must be conflict. In any form of association one belongs to this group and another belongs to another group there is solitude, isolation; where there is isolation there must be conflict. This is a law, not invented by the speaker, it is obviously so. Thought is ever in limitation and therefore isolating itself. Therefore, in relationship, where there is the activity of thought there must be conflict. See the reality of it. See the actuality of this fact, not as an idea, but as something that is happening in one's active daily life divorces, quarrels, hating each other, jealousy; you know the misery of it all. The wife wants to hurt you, is jealous of you, and you are jealous; which are all mechanical reactions, the repetitive activity of thought in relationship, bringing conflict. That is a fact. Now how do you deal with that fact? Here is a fact: your wife and you quarrel. She hates you, and also there is your mechanical response, you hate. You discover that it is the remembrance of things that have happened stored in the brain, continuing day after day. Your whole thinking is a process of isolation and she also is in isolation. Neither of you ever discovers the truth of the isolation. Now how do you look at that fact? What are you to do with that fact? What is your response? Do you face this fact with a motive, a cause? Be careful, do not say, `My wife hates me', and smother it over although you also hate her, dislike her, don't want to be with her, because you are both isolated. You are ambitious for one thing, she is ambitious for something else. So your relationship operates in isolation. Do you approach the fact with reason, with a ground, which are all motives? Or do you approach it without a motive, without cause? When you approach it without a cause what then happens? Watch it. Please do not jump to some conclusion, watch it in yourself. Previously you have approached this problem mechanically with a motive, with some reason, a ground from which you act. Now you see the foolishness of such an action because it is the result of thought. So, is there an approach to the fact without a single motive? That is, you have no motive, yet she may have a motive. Then if you have no motive how are you looking at the fact? The fact is not different from you, you are the fact. You are ambition, you are hate, you depend on somebody, you are that. There is an observation of the fact, which is yourself, without any kind of reason, motive. Is that possible? If you do not do that you live perpetually in conflict. And you may say that that is the way of life. If you accept that as the way of life, that is your business, your pleasure. Your brain, tradition and habit, tell you that it is inevitable. But when you see the absurdity of such acceptance then you are bound to see that all this travail is you yourself; you are the enemy, not her. You have met the enemy and discovered it is yourself. So, can you observe this whole movement of `me', the self, and the traditional acceptance that you are separate which becomes foolish when you examine the whole field of the consciousness of humanity? You have come to a point in understanding what intelligence is. We said that intelligence is without a cause, as love is without a cause. If love has a cause, it is not love, obviously. If you are `intelligent' so that the government employs you, or `intelligent' because you are following me, that is not intelligence, that is capacity: Intelligence has no cause. Therefore, see if you are looking at yourself with a cause. Are you looking at this fact that you are thinking, working, feeling, in isolation and that isolation must inevitably breed everlasting conflict? That isolation is yourself; you are the enemy. When you look at yourself without a motive, is there `self'? self as the cause and the effect; self as the result of time, which is the movement from cause to effect? When you look at yourself, look at this fact, without a cause, there is the ending of something and the beginning of something totally new. 15 July 1982 THE FLAME OF ATTENTION CHAPTER 9 3RD PUBLIC TALK AT BROCKWOOD PARK 4TH SEPTEMBER 1982 Consider what is happening on this earth where man has brought about such chaos, where wars and other terrible things are going on. This is neither a pessimistic nor an optimistic point of view; it is just looking at the facts as they are. Apparently it is not possible to have peace on this earth or to live with friendship and affection for each other in our lives. To live at peace with oneself and with the world, one needs to have great intelligence. It is not just to have the concept of peace and strive to live a peaceful life which can merely become a rather vegetating life but to enquire whether it is possible to live in this world, where there is such disorder, such unrighteousness if we can use that old fashioned word with a certain quality of mind and heart that are at peace within themselves. Not a life everlastingly striving, in conflict, in competition, in imitation and conformity; not a satisfied or a fulfilled life; not a life that has achieved some result, some fame, some notoriety, or some wealth; but a life that has a quality of peace. We ought to go into it together to find out if it is at all possible to have peace not just peace of mind which is merely a small part to have this peculiar quality of undisturbed though tremendously alive tranquillity, with a sense of dignity and without any sense of vulgarity. Can one live such a life? Has one ever asked such a question, surrounded as one is by total disorder? One must be very clear about that fact; that there is total disorder outwardly every morning one reads in a newspaper of something terrible, of aircraft that can travel at astonishing speed from one corner of the earth to the other without having to refuel, carrying a great weight of bombs and gases that can destroy man in a few seconds. If one observes all this and realizes what man has come to, one may feel that in asking this question one has asked the impossible and say that it is not at all possible to live in this world inwardly undisturbed, having no problems, living a life utterly unself-centred. Talking about this, using words, has very little meaning unless one finds, or comes upon, through communicating with each other, a state that is utterly still. That requires intelligence, not phantasy, not some peculiar day-dreaming called meditation, not some form of self-hypnosis, but intelligence. What is intelligence? It is to perceive that which is illusory, that which is false, not actual, and to discard it; not merely to assert that it is false and continue in the same way, but to discard it completely. That is part of intelligence. To see, for example, that nationalism, with all its patriotism, isolation, narrowness, is destructive, that it is a poison in the world. And seeing the truth of it is to discard that which is false. That is intelligence. But to keep on with it, acknowledging it as stupid, is essentially part of stupidity and disorder it creates more disorder. Intelligence is not the clever pursuit of argument, of opposing contradictory opinions as though through opinions, truth can be found, which is impossible but it is to realize that the activity of thought, with all its capacities, with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary ceaseless activity, is not intelligence. Intelligence is beyond thought. To live peacefully one has to examine disorder. Why do we human beings, who are supposed to be extraordinarily evolved, extraordinarily capable in certain directions, why do we live with and tolerate such disorder in our daily lives? If one can discover the root of this disorder, its cause and observe it carefully, then in the very observation of that which is the cause is the awakening of intelligence. Observation of disorder, not the striving to bring about order. A confused disorderly mind, a state of mind which is contradictory, yet striving to bring about order, will still be disorder. One is confused, uncertain, going from one thing to another, burdened with many problems: from such a way of living, one wants order. Then what appears to be order is born out of one's confusion and therefore it is still confused. When this is clear, what then is the cause of disorder? It has many causes: the desire to fulfil, the anxiety of not fulfilling, the contradictory life one lives, saying one thing, doing something totally different, trying to suppress one thing and to achieve something else. These are all contradictions in oneself. One can find many causes, the pursuit of causes is endless. Whereas one could ask oneself and find out if there is one root cause. Obviously there must be. The root cause is the-'self' the 'me', the `ego', the personality put together by thought, by memory, by various experiences, by certain words, certain qualities which produce the feeling of separateness and isolation; that is the root cause of disorder. However much the self tries not to be the self it is still the effort of the self. The self may identify with the nation, but that very identification with the greater is still glorified self. Each one of us does that in different ways. The self is put together by thought; that is the root cause of this total disorder in which we live. When one observes what causes disorder and one has become so accustomed to disorder and has always lived in such disorder, that one accepts it as natural one begins to question it and go into it and see what is the root of it. One observes it, not doing anything about it, then that very observation begins to dissolve the centre which is the cause of disorder. Intelligence is the perception of that which is true; it puts totally aside that which is false; it sees the truth in the false and realizes that none of the activities of thought is intelligence. It sees that thought itself is the outcome of knowledge which is the result of experience as memory and that the response of memory is thought. Knowledge is always limited that is obvious-there is no perfect knowledge. Hence thought, with all its activity and with all its knowledge, is not intelligence. So one asks: what place has thought in life considering that all our activity is based on thought? Whatever we do is based on thought. All relationships are based on thought. All inventions, all technological achievement, all commerce, all the arts, are the activity of thought. The gods we have created, the rituals, are the product of thought. So what place have knowledge and thought in relation to the degeneration of man? Man has accumulated immense knowledge, in the world of science, psychology, biology, mathematics and so on. And we think that through knowledge we will ascend, we will liberate ourselves, we will transform ourselves. Now, we are questioning the place of knowledge in life. Has knowledge transformed us, made us good? again, an old fashioned word. Has it given us integrity? Is it part of justice? Has it given us freedom? It has given us freedom in the sense that we can travel, communicate from one country to another. We have better systems of learning, as well as the computer and the atom bomb. These are all the result of vast accumulated knowledge. Again we ask: has this knowledge given us freedom, a life that is just, a life that is essentially good? Freedom, justice and goodness; those three qualities formed one of the problems of ancient civilizations, who struggled to find a way to live a life that was just. The word `just' means to have righteousness, to act benevolently, with generosity, not to deal with hatred or antagonism. To lead a just, a right kind of life, means to lead a life not according to a pattern, not according to some fanciful ideals, projected by thought; it means to lead a life that has great affection, that is true, accurate. And in this world there is no justice; one is clever, another is not; one has power, another has not; one can travel all over the world and meet prominent people; another lives in a little town, in a small room, working day after day. Where is there justice there? Is justice to be found in external activities? One may become the prime minister, the president, the head of a big intercontinental corporation, another may be for ever a clerk, way down below. So, do we seek justice externally, trying to bring about an egalitarian state all over the world that is being tried, thinking that it will bring about justice or, is justice to be found away from all that? Justice implies a certain integrity, to be whole, integral, not broken up, not fragmented. That can only take place when there is no comparison. But we are always comparing better cars, better houses, better position, greater power and so on. Comparison is measurement. Where there is measurement there cannot be justice. And where there is imitation and conformity, there cannot be justice. Following somebody, listening to these words, we do not see the beauty, the quality, the depth of these things; we may superficially agree but we walk away from them. But the words, the comprehension of the depth of them must leave a mark, a seed; for justice must be there, in us. Talking to a fairly well known psychologist the speaker used the word goodness. He was horrified! He said: `That is an old-fashioned word, we do not use it now.' But one likes that good word. So what is goodness? It is not the opposite of that which is bad. If it is the opposite of that which is bad then goodness has its roots in that opposite. So goodness is not related to the other, that which we consider bad. It is totally divorced from the other. One must look at it as it is, not as a reaction to the opposite. Goodness means a way of life which is righteous, not in terms of religion, or morality or an ethical concept of righteousness, but in terms of one who sees that which is true and that which is false, and sustains that quality of sensitivity that sees it immediately and acts. The word `freedom' has very complex implications. When there is freedom there is justice, there is goodness. Freedom is considered to be the capacity to choose. One thinks one is free because one can choose to go abroad, one can choose one's work, choose what one wants to do. But where there is choice, is there freedom? Who chooses? And why does one have to choose? When there is freedom, psychologically, when one is very clear in one's capacity to think subjectively, impersonally, very precisely, not sentimentally, there is no need for choice. When there is no confusion then there is no choice. So what is freedom? Freedom is not the opposite of conditioning; if it were, it would merely be a kind of escape. Freedom is not an escape from anything. A brain that has been conditioned by knowledge is always limited, is always living within the field of ignorance, is always living with the machinery of thought so that there can be no freedom. We all live with various kinds of fear - fear of tomorrow, fear of things that have happened in many yesterdays. If we seek freedom from that fear, then freedom has a cause and is not freedom. If we think in terms of causation and freedom, then that freedom is not freedom at all. Freedom implies not just a certain aspect of one's life but freedom right through; and that freedom has no cause. Now, with all this having been stated let us look at the cause of sorrow and enquire whether that cause can ever end. All have suffered in one way or another, through deaths, through lack of love, or, having loved another, receiving no return. Sorrow has many, many faces. Man from the ancient of times, has always tried to escape from sorrow, and still, after millennia, we live with sorrow. Mankind has shed untold tears. There have been wars which have brought such agonies to human beings, such great anxiety and apparently they have not been able to be free from that sorrow. This is not a rhetorical question, but, is it possible for a human brain, human mind, human being, to be totally free from the anxiety of sorrow and all the human travail with regard to it? Let us together walk along the same path to find out if we can, in our daily life, put an end to this terrible burden which man has carried from time immemorial. Is it possible to come upon the ending of sorrow? How do you approach such a question? What is your reaction to that question? What is the state, the quality of your mind, when a question of that kind is put to you? My son is dead, my husband is gone, I have friends who have betrayed me; I have followed in great faith, an ideal and it has been fruitless after twenty years. Sorrow has such great beauty and such pain in it. How does one react to that question? Does one say,`I don't want even to look at it. I have suffered, it is the lot of man, I rationalize it and accept it and go on.' That is one way of dealing with it. But one has not solved the problem. Or one transmits that sorrow to a symbol and worships that symbol, as is done in Christianity; or as the ancient Hindus have done, it is one's lot, one's karma. Or in the modern world one says one's parents are responsible for it, or society, or it is the kind of genetically inherited genes that have caused one's suffering, and so on. There have been a thousand explanations. But explanations have not resolved the ache and the pain of sorrow. So, how do you approach this question? Do you want to look at it face to face, or casually, or with trepidation? How do you approach, come near, very near, such a problem? Is sorrow different from the observer who says,-I am in sorrow: When he says, `I am in sorrow', he has separated himself from that feeling, so he has not approached it at all. He has not touched it. Can you cease to avoid it, not transmute it, not escape from it, but come with greatest closeness to it? Which means, you are sorrow. Is that so? You may have invented an ideal of freedom from sorrow. That invention has postponed, separated you further from sorrow; but the fact is, you are sorrow. Do you realize what that means? It is not that somebody has caused you sorrow, not that your son is dead therefore you shed tears. You may shed tears for your son, for your wife, but that is an outward expression of pain or sorrow. That sorrow is the result of your dependence on that person, your attachment, your clinging, your feeling that you are lost without him. So, as usual, you try to act upon the symptom, you never go to the very root of this great problem, which is sorrow. We are not talking about the outward effects of sorrow if you are concerned with the effects of sorrow you can take a drug and pacify yourself. We are trying together to find for ourselves, not be told and then accept, but actually find for ourselves the root of sorrow. Is it time that causes pain the time that thought has invented in the psychological realm? You understand my question? Questioner: What do you mean by psychological time? K: Do not ask me what psychological time is. Ask that question of yourself. Perhaps the speaker may prompt you, put it into words, but it is your own question. One has had a son, a brother, a wife, father. They are gone. They can never return. They are wiped away from the face of the earth. Of course, one can invent a belief that they are living on other planes. But one has lost them; there is a photograph on the piano or the mantelpiece. One's remembrance of them is in psychological time. How one had loved them, how they loved me; what help they were; they helped to cover up one's loneliness. The remembrance of them is a movement of time. They were there yesterday and gone today. That is, a record has been formed in the brain. That remembrance is a recording on the tape of the brain; and that tape is playing all the time. How one walked with them in the woods, one's sexual remembrances, their companionship, the comfort one derived from them. All that is gone and the tape is playing on. This tape is memory and memory is time. If you are interested, go into it very deeply. One has lived with one's brother or son, one has had happy days with them, enjoyed many things together, but they are gone. And the memory of them remains. It is that memory that is causing pain. It is that memory for which one is shedding tears in one's loneliness. Now, is it possible not to record? This is a very serious question. One enjoyed the sunrise yesterday morning, it was so clear, so beautiful among the trees casting a golden light on the lawn with long shadows. It was a pleasant lovely morning and it has been recorded. Now the repetition begins. One has recorded that which happened, which caused one delight and later that record like a gramophone or tape recorder is repeated. That is the essence of psychological time. But is it possible not to record at all? The sunrise of today, look at it, give one's whole attention to it, the moment of golden light on the lawn with the long shadows, and not record it, so that no memory of it remains, it is gone. Look at it with one's whole attention and not record; the very attention of looking negates any act of recording. So, is time the root of sorrow? Is thought the root of sorrow? Of course. So memories and time are the centre of one's life, one lives on them and when something happens which is drastically painful, one returns to those memories and one sheds tears. One wishes that he or she whom one has lost had been here to enjoy that sun when one was looking at it. It is the same with all one's sexual memories, building a picture, thinking about it. All that is memory, thought and time. If one asks: how is it possible for psychological time and thought to stop? it is a wrong question. When one realizes the truth of this not the truth of another but your own observation of that truth, your own clarity of perception will that not end sorrow? Is it possible to give such tremendous attention that one has a life without psychological recording? It is only where there is inattention that there is recording. One is used to one's brother, son or wife; one knows what they will say; they have said the same thing so often. One knows them. When one say 'I know them' one is inattentive. When one says, `I know my wife', obviously one does not really know her because you cannot possibly know a living thing. It is only a dead thing, the dead memory, that one knows. When one is aware of this with great attention, sorrow has a totally different meaning. There is nothing to learn from sorrow. There is only the ending of sorrow. And when there is an ending of sorrow then there is love. How can one love another love, have the quality of that love when one's whole life is based on memories; on that picture which one has hung over the mantelpiece or placed on the piano; how can one love when one is caught in a vast structure of memories? The ending of sorrow is the beginning of love. May I repeat a story? A religious teacher had several disciples and used to talk to them every morning about the nature of goodness, beauty and love. And one morning, just as he is about to begin talking, a bird comes on to the window,sill and begins to sing, to chant. It sings for a while and disappears. The teacher says: `The talk for this morning is over'. NEW DELHI 1ST PUBLIC TALK 31ST OCTOBER, 1981 If one may I would like to point out that we are not doing any kind of propaganda for any belief, for any ideal, for any organization. We are together considering what is taking place in the world outside of us. We are looking at it not from an Indian point of view, or from a European or American, or from any conclusion, or any particular national interest, but together we are going to observe what actually is going on in the world. We are thinking together but not having one mind. There is a difference between having one mind and thinking together. Having one mind implies that we have come to some conclusion, that we have come to certain beliefs, certain concepts. That is implied, more or less, in having one mind. But thinking together is quite different. Thinking together implies that you and the speaker have a responsibility to look objectively, non-personally, at what is going on. So we are thinking together. The speaker though he is sitting on a platform for convenience has no authority. Please we must be very clear on this point. He is not trying to convince you of anything. He is not asking you to follow him. He is not your guru, thank god! He is not advocating a particular system, particular philosophy, but to observe together, as two friends who have known each other for some time, who are concerned not about their private life, which we will discuss later on, but together they are looking at this world which seems to have gone mad. The world that is preparing for war, where each nation is piling up armaments, spending millions and millions and millions of dollars, or rupees, or whatever it is. There is the atom bomb, the nuclear bomb, and also the computer. There are these two problems which we have to face together. That means you and the speaker, nonpersonally, not attached to any particular belief, to any nation, but to observe clearly, objectively, what is happening. The whole world is arming, spending incredible amounts of money to destroy human beings, whether they live in America, Europe, or Russia, or here. They are taking a disastrous course which cannot possibly be solved by politicians. The politicians throughout the world are making a mess of things. So we cannot possibly rely on them, nor on the scientists. They are helping to build up the military technology, armaments; competing one country against another. Nor can we rely on so-called religions, they have lost all their meaning. They have become merely verbal, repetitive, absolutely without any meaning. It has become a superstition, following mere tradition, whether it be five thousand years or two thousand years. So you cannot rely on politicians who are throughout the world seeking to maintain their position, their power, there status. Nor can we rely on scientists because they are inventing each year, or perhaps each week, new forms of destruction. Nor can we look to any religion to solve this human chaos. I hope we understand that. And what is a human being like us to do? Is the crisis intellectual, economic; or national, with all the poverty, confusion, anarchy, lawlessness, terrorism, always the threat of a bomb in the street? Realizing all that, observing all that, what is our responsibility? I am not at all sure that you are interested in all this. Whether you are concerned with what is happening in the world. Or are you merely concerned with your own private salvation? Please do consider all this very seriously. To think together, that is you and the speaker observe objectively what is taking place not only outwardly, but also in our consciousness, in our thinking, in the way we live, in our action. If we are not at all concerned with the world but only with our personal salvation, following certain beliefs and superstitions, following gurus, then I am afraid it will be impossible for you and the speaker to communicate with each other. We must be clear on this point. We are not concerned at all with private personal salvation, but we are concerned earnestly, seriously, with what the human mind has become, what humanity is facing, that is human beings, human beings who are not Indians, or Russians, or Americans, human beings who are not labelled as Indians and so on. We are concerned in looking at this world and what part a human being living in this world has to do, what is his role? I do not know if you are aware, though you may read a great deal in the newspapers, and every morning in the newspapers there is some kind of murder, bomb, destruction, terrorism, kidnapping, and you read it every day and you pay little attention to it. But if it happens to you personally then you are all in a state of confusion, misery and asking somebody else, the government or the policeman to save you, to protect you. Right? And in this country when you look, as the speaker has been here for the last sixty years watching all this phenomena that is going on in this unfortune country, poverty, which never seems to be solved, over population, the linguistic differences, one community wanting to break away from the rest of the community, the religious differences, the gurus who are becoming enormously rich, private aeroplanes; and you are following all this blindly, accepting it, not being capable to do anything about all this. These are facts. And we are not dealing with ideas, we are dealing with facts, what is actually taking place. And, if we are to think together, look together, observe, we must be free of our nationalism. We are interrelated. That is, we are human beings whether we live in America, here or anywhere. Please realize this, how serious, urgent it all is. And has this country become lethargic, totally indifferent to what is going on, utterly careless, only concerned about their own little salvation, little happiness? So in order to observe and so discover what to do, we must think together. The question then is: what is thinking? You understand? What is the operation, or the process, or the content of thinking? Because we live by thought. All the temples are put there by thought. The inside of the temples, the images, all the puja, all the ceremonies, are the result of thinking. All the sacred books that you have -Upanishads, Gita and so on - are the result of thought, the expression of thought into words, to convey what somebody else has experienced or thought about. So the word is not sacred. No book in the world is sacred because it is the result of thinking, of thought. Right? That is clear. And we worship the intellect. Those who are intellectual are apart from you and me who are not intellectual. Their ideas, their concepts, the way they write, we respect their intellect. And they either become bitter, angry, or attacking, because intellect they think will solve our problems, but it is not possible because it is like developing one arm out of proportion to the rest of the body. So neither the intellect, nor emotions, nor romantic sentimentality is going to help us. We have to face things as they are, to look at it very closely and the urgency of it, we have to do something immediately, not leave it to any scientist, politician and so on. So are we, you and the speaker, thinking together, not agreeing together, not having the same opinion, or judgement, but looking at this world that human beings, you, your grandparents, we all have contributed to this? Right? So first of all let us look at what the human consciousness has become, because our consciousness is what we are. What you think, what you feel, your fears, your pleasures, your anxieties, insecurity, your unhappiness, depressions, love, pain, sorrow and the ultimate fear of death. That is the content of our consciousness, which you are. Right? Your content of your consciousness makes the human being. Unless we understand the content of that and go beyond it, if it is possible, we shall not be able to act seriously, fundamentally, basically, to bring about a transformation, a mutation in this consciousness. I hope we are communicating with each other because I am not talking to myself. If I want to talk to myself I can do it in my room. But please for god's sake please let's both of us look at all this and find out for ourselves what to do, what is our responsibility in this chaos. To find out what is right action we must understand the content of our consciousness. That is clear. If my consciousness is confused, uncertain, pressurized, driven from one corner to the other, from one state to another, I become more and more confused, uncertain, insecure, and from that confusion I cannot act. So I depend on somebody else, which we have done for millions of years. I do not know if you have noticed that as long as you are under somebody's thumb you behave. You were under the thumb of the British at one time, you behaved extraordinarily well because there was fear behind that. When you remove the thumb, we have anarchy, confusion, everybody doing what he likes. An engine driver arrives two hours late - nobody cares. So our thinking is based on reward and punishment. If you are rewarded you behave properly, or if you are punished you behave properly. Right? This is the traditional conduct of a human being right throughout the world; it is not only in this country but everywhere. But here it is worse, nobody seems to care. And to bring about order, not only in ourselves, which is the primary importance because from that order there will be outward order. I do not know if you have noticed we are always seeking outward order. We want order in the world established through dictatorships, or strong governments, or through totalitarianism dictatorship. We all want to be pressurized to behave rightly. Remove that pressure and we become rather what we are in the present India. So please this is a serious talk, it is not a lecture as it is commonly understood. This is a talk of two friends, or several friends sitting together amicably, with affection, with care, with their hearts and minds looking, trying to find out what they have to do in this world, the world that has gone mad, insane, a country like this which is so appallingly poor. You are buying four hundred thousand million dollars worth of aeroplanes from France. You know all this. You read it in all your papers every morning and you feel irresponsible. We feel it has gone out of our hands, out of our control. So it becomes more and more serious on the part of the so-called intellectuals, on those who are serious, who are facing a terrible crisis, it becomes more and more urgent, necessary, that we find out for ourselves, not from books, not from your gurus, or from your ancient books, but to find out what our consciousness is and to be able to free the content of that consciousness so that we become truly religious people. We are not religious people, we are becoming more and more materialistic. So together, and the speaker means together, we are going to examine, investigate, the content of our consciousness. That content makes you what you are. And without understanding the content of that you cannot possibly bring about right action, not possibly able to face the crisis that is in front of us. Please understand this. The speaker is not trying to convince you of anything. This is a terribly serious matter. So what is the content of your consciousness? What are you? We are going to learn together what we are. The speaker is not going to tell you what you are, but together, you and the speaker, are going to examine what we are. Whether it is possible to radically transform what we are. So we are going to observe first the content of our consciousness. Right? Are you following all this? Or are you tired at the end of the day? You know you are under pressure all day long, all the week long: pressure at home, pressure in your jobs, economic pressure, religious pressure, government pressure, the gurus who impose their beliefs, their idiocy on you. We are under pressure. And here we are not under pressure. Please realize this. We are two friends talking over together our sorrows, our hurts, our anxieties, our uncertainty, insecurity, and how to find security, how to be free of fear, whether our sorrows can ever end. We are concerned about that. Because if you don't understand that, look at it very clearly, we will bring about more confusion in the world, more destruction. Perhaps all of us will be vaporized by an atom bomb. So we have to act urgently, seriously, with all our hearts and mind. This is really very, very important, we are facing a tremendous crisis. So together let us look. We have looked at the world, the world which we have created, which thought has brought about. We must understand something too: we have not created nature - the trees, the birds, the waters, the rivers, the beautiful skies and the running streams, the tiger, the marvellous tree, we have not created them. Who created it is a different matter - don't say god created it. How it has come about is a different matter, it is not for the moment under view, but we have created everything else. We have destroyed the forests, we are destroying animals, the wild animals, millions and millions of them we are killing every year. Certain species are disappearing. So we have not created nature: the deer, the wolf, but thought has created everything else. Thought has created the marvellous cathedrals, the ancient temples and mosques and the things that are in them. And thought having created the image in the temple, in the cathedral, in the churches, and the inscription in the mosques, then that very thought worships that which it has created. Do you understand all this? You are following all this? Well, it is up to you. So is the content of our consciousness brought about by thought? You understand my question? Why has thought become all important in our lives? Why has thought, which is the intellect, the capacity to invent, to write, to think, to do, thought, why has it become important? Why has not affection, care, sympathy, love, why have those not become extraordinarily more important than thought? We are going to find out. So first let us examine together what is thinking, because our structure, both the psyche as well as outwardly is based on thought, thinking. Please, right? So we have to examine what is thinking, what is thought. Right? Don't go to sleep. I may put it into words but you are observing it, seeing it for yourself, not the speaker indicates and then you see, it but in talking over together you see it for yourself. Right? You all understand English, don't you? I am afraid I don't speak any other language, any other Indian language. I speak several European languages but no Indian languages. So what is thinking? Unless we understand what is thinking very carefully we shall not be able to understand, or observe, or have an insight into the whole content of our consciousness, of which we are. If I don't understand myself, that is, my consciousness, why I think this way, why I behave that way, my fears, my hurts, my anxieties, my various attitudes and convictions, if I don't comprehend all that whatever I do will bring more confusion. Right? That is clear. So first I have to understand what is thinking. How do you answer it? What is thinking to you? When I ask you that question, somebody challenges you with that question, what is your response, what is thinking? Why do you think? You know most of us have become secondhand people because we read an awful lot, go to university if you are lucky, accumulate a great deal of knowledge, information, what other people think, what other people have said, and you quote them. You compare what is being said with what you have already learnt. There is nothing original but repeat, repeat, repeat. Right? So when one asks: what is thought, what is thinking, you are incapable of answering. Questioner: But sir, there is the problem... K: Yes, sir, yes sir, we will go into problems presently. This is a tremendous problem: what is thinking? And we live, act, behave according to our thinking. We have set up this government according to our thinking, we have wars because of our thinking -all the cannons, the aeroplanes, the shells, the bombs, everything is put there by thought. Thought has created the marvellous surgeons, the extraordinary technicians, marvellous carpenters, plumbers, thought has brought about these experts, but we have never investigated what is thinking. So we are going to do it together. I am not the expert, I am not your guru. I am sitting here, a little higher up for convenience. I am not your authority or your guru. But we are thinking together, investigating together. So thinking is a process born out of knowledge, experience. Listen to it quietly, first listen to me and then see if that is not true, actual, then you discover it for yourself as though the speaker is acting as a mirror in which you see for yourself exactly what is, without distortion, then you can throw the mirror away or break it up. You understand? Thinking is first, experience, knowledge, knowledge stored up in the brain as memory, from memory the reaction is thought and action. Experience, knowledge, memory, stored in the brain, in the cells of the brain, then thought and action. Right? No, please see this for yourself, not repeat what I say. This is an actual fact: experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action; from that action you learn more. So you are caught in this cycle. Right? You are following this? Experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action, and from that action learning more, so we are caught in this cycle. That is our chain. Right? Questioner: That is reaction, not action. K: Sir. I beg your pardon. Questioner: That is reaction, not action. K: It doesn't matter. Call it reaction, action, it doesn't matter. This is the way we live. And we have never moved away from this field. You may call it action, reaction, whatever you like but we have never moved away from this field. We have always lived within the field of the known. That's a fact. Now the content of our consciousness is all the things which thought has put in it. I may think - oh, so many ugly things - I may think there is god in me, which is again the product of thought. I may think that whatever you think is there. So I am going to take one by one the content of our consciousness and look at it. Most of us from childhood are hurt, wounded, not only at home but at school, college, university and later in life we are all wounded, hurt. And when you are hurt you build a wall round yourself. Are you following all this? And the consequences of that hurt are to become more and more isolated, more and more disturbed, frightened, not to be hurt further, and your actions from that hurt are obviously neurotic. So that is one of the contents of your consciousness. So what is it that is hurt? When you say, 'I am hurt' - not physically but inwardly, psychologically, the psyche, what is it that is hurt? Questioner: I have built an image of myself and that is hurt. K: How do you know? Are you repeating? Questioner: No. Because I have such an image. K: All right. Now I mustn't enter into discussion because there are too many people. Right sir. If you and I were alone then we can discuss, have a dialogue, but you cannot possibly have a dialogue with so many people, so I hope you do not mind if I do not answer your particular question. We are asking: what is it that is hurt? The image that you have, or the picture that you have about yourself. All of us have images about ourselves. Right? Either you are a great man, or a very humble man, or you are a great politician, you follow, the pride, the vanity, the power, the position, etc., that creates an image of you. Or if you are a PhD, you have a certain image; if you are a housewife you have a certain image about yourself. Everybody has an image about himself. Right? That is an indisputable fact. And that image gets hurt and thought has identified or created that image. Right? And that image gets hurt. You are following all this? So is it possible - please listen - is it possible not to have an image about yourself at all? See what happens when you have an image about yourself: you create a division between each other. Look at it carefully. I will go into it. What is your relationship with your wife? Have you any relationship with your wife, with your neighbour, with your rulers? When you ask what is relationship - suppose I am married - thank god I am not - but suppose I am married - please listen, this is important. Don't laugh it away, for god's sake look at it carefully, it is your life. We are wasting our lives, we are destroying our lives. It is important to understand relationship because we are interrelated to the world. You are not only related to your wife, to your neighbour, to your children but you are related to the whole human species. One has to understand very deeply what is relationship. Is it merely sensory, sexual relationship? Or is it merely romantic, convenient companionship? You cook and I go to the office. You bear children and I work from morning until night for the next fifty years, until I retire, in a beastly little office. And that is called living. So I must find out very clearly, carefully, what is relationship. Because if my relationship is based on hurt then I am using the lady or the man to escape from that hurt. Right? I wonder if you see all this. So I must look at relationship. If I am married, what is my relationship to my wife? Is it based on mutual images? You understand? I have created an image about her and she has created an image about me, and the relationship is between these two images which thought has put together. Right? Do you understand all this? So is thought love? Is desire love? Is pleasure love? You may say, no, no, you shake your head but actually you never find out, never investigate, go into it. So together we will discover what is relationship, and in that relationship can there be no conflict at all? You understand my question? We live in conflict from morning until night, why? Is that part of our nature, part of our tradition, part of our religion? Or each one has an image about himself: my wife has an image about herself, and I have an image about myself, she has not only an image about herself, she has other images: her ambition, the desire to be something or other. And also I have my ambitions, my competitiveness. You follow? So we are running parallel, like two railway lines running parallel, never meeting, except perhaps in bed but never meeting at any other level. You are understanding all this? What a tragedy it has become. For god's sake wake up. Questioner: (Inaudible) K: Oh, golly, how eager you are to ask questions. You don't even listen. You are ready to ask. You don't look at yourself. You don't want to find out what your relationship is. What your relationship to the world is. Questioner: (Inaudible) K: Sir, please forgive me, we cannot possibly answer your question, or this gentleman's question, remarks, if I do then we enter into something quite different. We are two friends, talking over together. So please it is important to understand this question of relationship. The world outside is interrelated, you are not separate from the rest of the world. You are the rest of the world. They are suffering, they have great anxieties, fears, they are threatened by war, as you are threatened by war. They are accumulating vast armaments to destroy each other and we never realize how interrelated we are. I may be a Muslim and you may be a Hindu, but my tradition says, 'I am a Muslim' - which is I have been programmed like a computer to repeat 'I am a Muslim' and you repeat 'I am a Hindu'. You understand what thought has done? So it is very important to look at our relationship, not only my intimate relationship but also my relationship with the rest of the world. The rest of the world is like you, modified, educated differently, superficial manners, perhaps affluent or not but the same reactions, the same pains, the same anxieties, the same fears. That is why, please give your mind, your heart to find out what your relationship is with the world, with your neighbour and with yourself, with your wife or husband. If it is based on images, pictures, remembrances then there will be inevitably conflict with your wife, with your husband, with your neighbour, with the Muslim, with Pakistan, with Russia. You follow? You don't see the urgency of all this. And the content of your consciousness is the hurt which you have not resolved, which has not been completely wiped away, it has left scars and from those scars you have various forms of fears which ultimately leads to isolation, because each one of us is isolated, through tradition, religious traditions, through education, through this idea that you must always succeed, succeed, succeed, become something. And also in our relationship with each other, intimate or otherwise, whether you live here or live in America or Russia, we are interrelated. So the world is you and you are the world. You may have a different name, different form, different kind of education, different position, but inwardly we all suffer, we all go through great agonies, shed tears, frightened of death, great sense of insecurity, without any love, compassion. So how do you observe, or listen to this fact? You understand? That is, how do you listen to what is being said? The speaker is saying that you are the rest of mankind deeply, you may be dark, you may be short, you may put on saris, but those are all superficial educated traditions, but inwardly the common, the flow, whether I am an American, a Russian or Indian, the flow is the same. The movement of human beings is similar. Right? So we are the world and the world is you very profoundly. And one has to realize this relationship. You understand I am using the word 'realize' in the sense that you must be able to observe it and see the actual fact of it. So from that arises the question: how do you observe? How do you look at things? How do you look at your wife? Or your husband, or your Prime Minister? How do you look at a tree? You understand? Because the art of observation has to be learnt. Oh god, there is so much to talk about. All right. How do you observe me? You are sitting there, how do you look at me? What is your reaction? Do you look at me, at the speaker because he has got a reputation? What is your reaction when you see a man like me? Or are you merely satisfied by looking at the reputation he has, which may be nonsensical, it generally is, how he has come to this point to address so many people, whether he is important and what you can get out him. He can't give you any government jobs, he can't give you money because he has no money. He can't give you any honours, any status, any position, or guide you, tell you what to do. How do you look at him? Have you looked at anybody freely, openly, without any word, without any image? Questioner: Probably never. K: Never. Have you looked at a tree, the beauty of a tree, the flutter of the leaves? So can we learn together how to observe? You cannot observe, not only visually, optically, if your mind is occupied. Right? As most of our minds are occupied: the article I have to write next day, I am occupied with my cooking, I am occupied with my job, I am occupied about sex, I am occupied about how to meditate, I am occupied about what other people might say. So my mind is occupied, from morning until night. Now can such a mind, being occupied, observe anything? You are following? If I am occupied with becoming a marvellous carpenter, not a politician, not a guru - just a carpenter, a master carpenter, not one of your amateur carpenters who is not really an artist - if I want to be a first-class carpenter I have to know the texture of the wood, I have to know the instruments, how to use the instruments, I have to study how to put joints together without a nail and so on and so on. So my mind is occupied. Or if I am neurotic my mind is occupied with sex, or becoming a success. So how can I, being occupied, observe? Right? So is it possible not to be occupied all the time? I am occupied when I have to talk, when I have to write something or other, but the rest of the time why should I be occupied? You understand this? This leads to a very important question, which is - you know something about computers, you have heard of them? The computers can be programmed as we human beings are programmed, the computers can be programmed. Take for instance, it can learn, think faster, more accurately than man. It can play with a grand chess master. After being defeated four times, the master beats the computer four times, on the fifth time or sixth time the computer beats the master. The computer can do extraordinary things. I won't go into all that. It has been programmed. You understand? It can invent, create new machines which will be better programmed than the first programme. A machine that will be ultimately intelligent, not created by man. The machine will itself create the ultimate intelligent machine. You don't know anything. Please, the speaker has been talking, discussing with a great many computer experts in California and other places, and what is going to happen to man. You understand? What is going to happen to man, or to woman, when the computer takes the whole thing over? The Encyclopaedia Britannica can be put in a little chip and it contains all that knowledge. So what place has knowledge in a human life? So we are saying our brains are occupied, never still. So to learn how to observe your wife, your neighbour, your government, the poverty, the brutality of poverty, the beastliness of wars, there must be freedom to observe. You see we object to being free because we are frightened to be free, to stand alone. So that is one of the things in our consciousness: hurt, relationship, this immense occupation. Now you have listened to the speaker for nearly an hour and a quarter. Right? What have you heard? Or what have you gathered? Words, ideas, which ultimately have no meaning? Right? But what have you gathered? Have you seen for yourself, never to be hurt? That means never to have an image about yourself. And have you seen the importance, the urgency of understanding the relationship and having a mind that is not occupied? You understand? When it is not occupied it is extraordinarily free, it sees great beauty. But the shoddy little mind, the secondhand little mind is always occupied, about knowledge, about becoming something or other, enquiring, discussing, arguing, never a quiet, free, unoccupied mind. When there is such a mind, out of that freedom comes supreme intelligence, not out of thought. So tomorrow we will continue with the content of our consciousness. NEW DELHI 4TH PUBLIC TALK 8TH NOVEMBER, 1981 This is the last talk. We were going to talk over together the question of meditation. Before we go into that question, the last three talks have been, if you have followed them earnestly and seriously, bringing about order in our house. The order in which we do not live, we live in disorder, as we talked about it yesterday; and we went into the question of desire, freedom from fear, and the nature of pleasure, and also we talked yesterday about the ending of sorrow, and from that ending passion, not lust, passion, love and compassion arise, with the ending of sorrow. And that compassion has its own immense energy, great intelligence. That is what we talked about yesterday evening. We ought to discuss or share together, perhaps that is the right word, share together what is discipline. Because most in the world are not disciplined in the sense that they are not learning. The word 'discipline' comes from the word disciple, the disciple who learns, whose mind is learning, not from a particular person, a guru, or from a preacher, or teacher, or from books, he is learning through the observation of his own mind, of his own heart, learning from his own actions. And that learning requires certain discipline, not conformity as most disciplines are understood. Conformity, obedience and imitation, so that you are never in the act of learning, you are merely following. Whereas the word discipline is to learn, learn from the very complex mind one has, from life of daily existence, learn about relationship with each other so the mind is always pliable, active. So we ought to understand when we are going to share together what meditation is, we must understand this question of discipline. Ordinary discipline implies conflict: conforming to a pattern, like a soldier, conforming to an ideal, conforming to a certain statement in the sacred books and so on and so on. Where there is conflict there must be friction, there must be wastage of energy. I hope we are sharing all this together. It is not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with what is being said. But together we are sharing in this question of discipline and responsibility. And in understanding conflict, a mind, or your heart, if it is in conflict it can never possibly meditate. We will go into that. It is not a mere statement which you accept or deny, but we are enquiring together into this question. We have lived for millennia upon millennia in conflict, conforming, obeying, imitating, repeating, so that our minds have become extraordinarily dull. We have become secondhand people because we are always quoting somebody else, what somebody said or did not say. So we have lost the capacity, the energy to learn from our own actions, for which we are utterly responsible, not society or environment, or politicians, we are responsible entirely for that, and from there learn. And in learning we discover so much more because we are after all, every human being throughout the world, in him is the story of mankind; the mankind is his anxiety, his fears, his loneliness, his despairs, his sorrows, pain, this tremendous complex history is in us, If you know how to read that book then you don't have to read a single book except books on technology. But we are negligent, we are not diligent in learning from ourselves, from our actions. And so we are not responsible for our actions, we are not responsible for what is happening throughout the world and what is happening in this unfortunate country. So if we share together this question of discipline then we can go to the next problem, the next question. As we said, we must put our house in order and nobody on earth, or in heaven, is going to put our house in order, neither your gurus, nor your vows, nor your devotion because our house is in disorder: the way we live, the way we think, the way we act. Unless that house is in order, which is to understand disorder, which we went into yesterday, how can a mind that is in disorder perceive that which is total order, as the universe is in total complete order? And also we ought to share together the question of beauty. You might ask what has beauty to do with a religious mind? You might ask all our tradition, our rituals and so on have never talked about beauty. So meditation is part of the understanding of beauty, not the beauty of a woman or a man, but what is beauty? We must understand this very deeply because it doesn't exist except in tradition, in ancient sculpture in this country. We only too willingly destroy trees, birds, flowers. So we must enquire together, share together, this question of what is beauty. We are not talking about the beauty of a person, a face, it has its own beauty, but what is actually the essence of beauty? Because most monks and sannyasis and those religiously inclined minds totally disregard this. They become hardened towards their environment. Once it happened that we were staying in the Himalayas with some friends and there were a group of sannyasis in front of us, going down the path, chanting; they never looked at the trees, never looked at the beauty of the earth, the beauty of the blue sky, the birds, the flowers, the running waters, but were totally concerned with their own salvation, with their own entertainment. And that custom, that tradition, has been going on for a thousand years. A man who is supposed to be religious must shun, put aside all beauty; and our lives become dull, without any aesthetic sense because beauty is one of the delights of truth. So what is beauty? I hope you have the energy this evening to sit quietly to go into it even though we may speak an hour and a half because we have to deal with a great many things this evening. Have you ever noticed when you give a toy to a child who has been chattering, naughty, playing around, shouting, when you give a child a complicated toy he is totally absorbed in it, he is very quiet, enjoying the mechanics of it. There the toy has absorbed the child. Follow all this please, step by step, if you will, because we are sharing this thing together. The toy has absorbed the mischief of the playing of the child, he becomes completely concentrated, completely involved with that toy. And we grown-up people, we have toys of belief, we have toys of ideals, we have toys of every kind, which absorb us. If you worship some image, and all images are created by the hand or the mind, there is no image on earth which is sacred because they are all made by your hand and by your mind, by your thought. And when we are so absorbed, as the child is absorbed in a toy, we become extraordinarily quiet, gentle. And when you see a marvellous mountain, snowcapped against the blue hills, blue sky and the deep shadow in the valleys, that great grandeur, majesty of a mountain absorbs you completely, for a moment you are completely silent because the majesty of that mountain takes you over, you forget yourself by the beauty of that line against the blue sky. So surely beauty is where you are not. You understand what has been said? The essence of beauty is the absence of the self. And the question of meditation is having put the house in order to meditate, that is the word to ponder over, to think over, to enquire into the abnegation of the self. And also we ought to share together the energy, the energy that is required in meditation. You need tremendous energy to meditate. So we ought to go into that question of energy. Friction is not energy. When we are in our daily life there is a great deal of friction, conflict between people, the work which we don't like to do, there is a wastage of energy. Please we are sharing together, this is not a lecture. This is a conversation between us, a conversation between two friends who are enquiring into this complex problem of meditation and what is religion? And to enquire really most profoundly, not superficially, not verbally, but go very deeply into oneself, into one's mind, why we live as we do, wasting immense energy. Meditation is the release of creative energy, which we will go into. So first let us look at what we call religion. Religion has played an immense part in history. From the beginning of time man has struggled to find out what truth is. And the accepted religion of the modern world is no religion at all, it is merely vain repetition of phrases, gibberish nonsense, it is a form of personal entertainment without much meaning. All the rituals, all the gods, specially in this country where there are I don't know how many thousands of gods, all the gods are invented by thought, all the rituals are put together by thought. And what thought creates is not sacred, but we attribute what thought has created in the image the qualities that we like that image to have. So we are worshipping unconsciously ourselves. You understand this? What thought has created in the temples, in the rituals, in the pujas, and all that business, and what thought has invented in the Christian churches, is all put together by thought, invented by thought. And that which thought has created we then worship it. Just see the irony, the deception, the dishonesty of this! So the religions of the world have completely lost their meaning. All the intellectuals - forgive me using that word - all the intellectuals in the world shun it, run away from it. And when you use the words the 'religious mind', which the speaker uses very often, they say, 'Why do you use that word religion?' Etymologically the root meaning of that word is not very clear. Originally it meant to bind, to bind with that which is noble, with that which is great, and to be bounded to that which is great you had to live a very diligent, scrupulous honest life. All that is gone. We have lost our integrity. So what is religion? If you discard all the present existing religious traditions and their images, their symbols, then what is religion? To find out what is a religious mind, your mind to have the sense of religiosity, one must find out what truth is. Truth has no path to it. There is no path. You have to find out. Your mind with compassion, with its intelligence, will come upon that which is eternally true. But there is no direction, there is no captain to tell you in this ocean of life, or give you direction. You, as a human being, have to discover this. So you cannot belong to any cult, to any group, whether they are Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, or whatever they are, you have to abandon all that if you want to come upon truth. And it is the religious mind that doesn't belong to any organization, to any group, to any sect, it has the quality of a global mind. So religion, a religious mind is a mind that is utterly free from all attachment, from all conclusions, concepts, it is dealing only with what actually is, not, what should be, what must be. It is dealing everyday of one's life with what actually is happening both outwardly and definitely inwardly, to understand the whole complex problem of living. So the mind must be free from prejudice, from tradition, from all the sense of direction too, because to come upon truth you need a clarity of mind, not a confused mind. So we have talked about discipline, we have talked about beauty, which doesn't exist in our hearts or in our minds. How can one live without this quality of beauty, which is love. You may accumulate all the pictures in the world, go to all the museums, see the latest painter, or read the latest poem, but if you have no beauty in your heart, in your mind, which is the essence of love, one has wasted one's life. So having put order in our life, let's then examine, share together, what is meditation? Not how to meditate, that is an absurd question. When you ask how, you want a system, a method, a design carefully laid out. See what happens - please do pay attention to all this - see what happens when you are following a method, a system. Why do you want a system, a method? It is the easiest way isn't it, to follow somebody who says, 'I will tell you how to meditate'. When anybody tells you how to meditate he doesn't know what meditation is. The man who says, 'I know', doesn't know. But in enquiring into this really very, very complex question of meditation we must first of all see how destructive a system of meditation is, whether it is Zen meditation, or the dozen forms of meditation that apparently you have invented, or in the West they are all concerned with the form of meditation - how you should sit, how you should breathe, how you should do this, that and the other. And we poor fools follow them. Because if you observe that when you practise something repeatedly over and over again your mind becomes mechanical, which already is mechanical and you add more mechanical routine to it. So gradually your mind atrophies. Please do pay attention to what the speaker is saying. It is like a pianist practising the wrong note. So if you see the truth that no system, no method, no practice, will ever lead to truth, then you abandon all these as fallacious, unnecessary. So we must also enquire when we meditate, when you do, if you do, this whole problem of control. Most of us control our responses, our reactions, we try to suppress, control desires, we try to shape our desires. There is always the controller and the controlled. We never ask: who is the controller, and what is that that we are controlling in so-called meditation? Who is the controller, who tries to control his thought, his ways of thinking and so on? Who is the controller? The controller surely is that entity which has determined to practise, to control, the entity. Now who is that entity? That entity is put there by the past, by thought, by reward and punishment. So the controller is the past. Right? Are you following all this? That controller is trying to control his thoughts but the controller is the controlled. Do you see this? Look: this is all so childish really. When you are envious, jealous, violent, when you are envious you have separated envy from yourself. Then you say, 'I must control envy, I must suppress it' - or rationalize and so on. But you are not separate from envy, you are envy. Envy is not separate from you. Right? That is so obvious. And yet we play this trick, that we try to control envy as though it was something separate from us. So please listen: can you live a life without a single control, which doesn't mean indulging in whatever you want. Please put this question to yourself: whether you can live a life, which is already so disastrous, so mechanical, so repetitive, whether you can live without a single sense of control. That can only happen when you perceive clearly every action. When you give your attention to every thought that arises, not just indulge in it, every reaction. When you give complete attention to all that then you will find out that you can live a life without a single conflict. Do you know what that means to a mind that has never had conflict, or understood conflict and lives without a single shadow of conflict? It means complete freedom. And one must have that total freedom to enquire or come upon that which is eternally true. And also we should talk over, share together, the qualitative difference between concentration and attention. Most of us know concentration. We learn it at school, in college, in university, to concentrate. The boy looks out of the window in the school and the teacher says, 'Concentrate on your book.' And so we know what it means. To concentrate implies bringing all your energy to focus on a certain point, and thought wanders away, so you have a perpetual battle between the desire to concentrate, to give all your energy to look at a page, but your mind is wandering, and you try to control it. Whereas attention has no control, no concentration. It is complete attending, which means giving all your energy, your nerves, your capacity of the energy of the brain, your heart, everything, giving attention to something. Probably you have never done it. Probably you have never so completely attended. You know when you attend so completely there is no recording. You understand my statement? For god's sake! When you are attending the brain doesn't record. Whereas when you are concentrating, making effort, the brain is recording and therefore you are always acting from memory, like a gramophone record repeating. You understand all this? Whereas if you know, if you understand the nature of a brain that needs no recording except what is necessary. It is necessary to record where I live. It is necessary to record various activities of life. But not to record psychologically, inwardly, either the insult, the flattery, all that, nothing to record inwardly. Have you ever done it? Have you ever tried it? It is all so new to you. So that the brain and the mind is entirely free, entirely free from all conditioning, because our brains, our minds are conditioned through education, through culture, through environmental influences, by the food, by the clothes, by the climate, our minds are conditioned. We are Hindus, or Muslims, or Sikhs, or some rot like that. So we are all slaves to tradition and we think we are all so totally different from each other. We are not. We all go through great miseries, unhappiness, shed tears, we are all human beings. not Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Russians and all the rest of it - those are all labels without meaning. So the mind must be totally free. That means one has to stand completely alone. And to stand alone we are frightened. And meditation apparently is a lot of repetition of mantras, prayers, and all that. You mean to say by repeating some words, a mantra, you are going to achieve something? What happens when you constantly repeat, repeat, repeat? You might just as well repeat Coco Cola, only you pay for them more than for the Coco Cola, or Pepsi Cola, or whatever it is. No, please see what your mind has become, for god's sake look at it. So none of those, whatever the mantra, whatever the word - the word is never the thing, the symbol is never the actual - so the mind must be free from all that. Then we can proceed. Then the mind becomes utterly still, not controlled. And meditation then is a mind which is completely religious, not this phoney religion, but a mind that is not only free but enquiring into the nature of truth. There is no guide to truth, no path to truth. And it is only the silent mind, the mind that is free, that can find out, can come upon what which is beyond time. There are different forms of silence: the silence between two noises, the silence between two notes, the silence between two thoughts, the silence that you desire, that you cultivate, by practice, by control, those are all artificial, cultivated silences of thought and desire. So one must enquire into what is silence? Have you noticed, if you have observed yourself that your mind is eternally chattering, eternally occupied with something or other. If you are a Sannyasi your mind is occupied with god, with prayers, with this, with that. If you are a housewife, it is occupied with the next meal, what you are going to have, how to utilize this and that, it is occupied. If you are a businessman, you know what that is. And if you are a politician, then you also know exactly what they are. (Laughter) Don't laugh please, it is not a matter of laughing. You are not observing your own life. And the priest is occupied with his own nonsense. So our minds are all the time occupied. An occupied mind has no space. And space is necessary. So let's find out what space is. Space is from one point to another point, which is from here to there, space also implies time. Right? Space implies an emptiness. And that which is empty has immense energy. So we have to enquire, share together, the nature of silence. You can make your mind silent through a drug, by some chemical pill, you can make your thought slow down by some chemical intake so the thought becomes quieter and quieter. Those are all experimental ways of making the mind quiet, silent. But that silence is concerned with sound. Are you all interested in all this? Does it means anything to you, all this? Or am I just prattling to myself? Have you ever enquired what it is to have a mind that is absolutely silent without a movement, a mind that is not recording except those things that are necessary? So that your psyche, your inward nature becomes absolutely still. Have you enquired into all that? Or are you merely caught in the stream of tradition, in the stream of work, labour, and worrying about tomorrow? So where there is silence there is space, not from one point to another point. Where there is silence there is no point but only silence. And that silence has that extraordinary energy of the universe. Just a minute, I will go into it. The universe - you know what the word universe is - it has no cause, it exists. This is a scientific fact. No cause. But we human beings have causes. And through analysis you can discover the cause of poverty in this country, or in other countries, you can find out the cause of over population, the lack of birth control, you can find out the cause why human beings have divided themselves into Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, and all the rest of it. You can find out the cause of your anxiety, you can find out the cause for your loneliness. But you may find the cause through analysis but you never are free from the causation. You are following? All our action is based on reward or punishment, however finely subtle, however deeply flattering. That is, our actions are based on that, which is a causation, a cause. So to understand order of the universe, which is without cause, is it possible to live a daily life without any cause? And that is supreme order. Then out of that order you have creative energy. The technicians, the inventors, the scientists have certain limited energy of creation. Have you ever noticed the scientists of this world? They are specialized, they know their subject extraordinary well, and in that area, in that field they live. They may have wives and children and all the rest of it, but that is all secondhand, that is all part of a necessary life but the mind is occupied, inventive, theorizing, a hypothesis, testing it, moving it further. And we are talking about creative energy, not the scientific inventive energy. Meditation is to release that creative energy, not through some kind of awakening of Kundalini, and all that kind of stuff, those who talk about Kundalini don't know what it is. You don't talk about those things. So we have to enquire what is this creative energy, because we have lost it. We have lost it completely. Have you ever noticed that those who go out of this country, some of them, the Indians, are doing extraordinarily well: they are great scientists, great businessmen away from this country. Haven't you noticed it? There are a great many writers now, outside. I do not call those creative energy. Creative energy is necessary for a religion, because religion transforms social order, historically it is so. Every culture is born anew out of a new religion, not in the old repetition of dead tradition. So it is immensely important to know, to understand the depth and the beauty of meditation. And man has always been asking, from timeless time, whether there is something beyond all thought, beyond all romantic inventions, beyond all time? He has always been asking is there something beyond all this suffering, beyond all this chaos, beyond the wars, beyond the battle between human beings, is there something that is immovable, sacred, utterly pure, untouched by any thought, by any experience? This has been the enquiry of serious religious people, from the ancient of days. To find that out, to come upon it, meditation is necessary. Not the repetitive meditation, that is utterly meaningless. There is a creative energy which is truly religious energy, when the mind is free from all conflict, from all the travail of thought. Thought has its place - I couldn't go from here to the house if I didn't think. Thought is necessary, as knowledge is necessary at a certain level. But in the enquiry into the origin of all things, the beginning of all things, we say, 'Yes, God' - that is an easy word but god is the invention of man, the invention of thought, you have created god, god hasn't created you. If god created you to lead a miserable life, god is not worth it. You understand? Apparently god wants you to live a rotten life, but god is the invention of thought. We have attributed to it all our noble sentiments. But to find out beyond god, to come upon that which has no beginning, no end, that is the real depth of meditation and the beauty of it. That requires freedom from all conditioning. So what is the origin of all this? What is the origin of all our sorrows, what is the origin of all our suffering, aching, anxiety, seeking security? There is complete security in compassionate intelligence. Total security. But we want security in ideas, in beliefs, in concepts, in ideals, we hold on to them, that is our security. However false, however irrational it is. So where there is compassion there is supreme intelligence, there is security, if one is seeking security. When you are compassionate, when there is that intelligence, there is no question of security. So there is an origin, the original ground from which all things start, and that original ground is not the word. The word is never the thing. And meditation is to come upon that ground, which is the origin of all things, and which is free from all time. This is the way of meditation. And blessed is he who finds it. MADRAS 2ND PUBLIC TALK 27TH DECEMBER 1981 May we continue with what we were talking about yesterday evening? I am afraid that noise has been going on all day, you will have to put up with it. Appropo of that so-called music, you have had Muslim rule over seven hundred years in this country. They didn't make any dent on the Hindu mind. Then you have had one hundred and fifty years of British rule. Perhaps they made a little dent on the Hindu mind. Since you have had freedom for the last nearly forty years you have torn everything to pieces. You have had five to three thousand years of so-called culture, and the moment you have had freedom, whatever that word may mean to most of you, you have torn that cloth that was woven during those three thousand, five thousand years, torn it all to pieces, and you are living in a state of chaos, without any kind of culture, without any kind of responsibility, without any integrity. And that is the result: worshipping local gods, tribal superstitions, even the so-called fairly educated people. So after having said that with regard to that noise, which is called music, let's proceed with what we were talking about yesterday. I hope that is all right. Unfortunately the wind is blowing from that direction. We were talking yesterday about conflict. We were asking whether human beings who have lived on this beautiful earth, with all the vast treasures of this earth, with their mountains, rivers and lakes, during all these millennia human beings have lived in perpetual conflict. Not only outwardly with the environment, with nature, but also with each other, and inwardly, so-called spiritually, we have been in constant conflict, from the moment we are born until we die we are in conflict. And we put up with it; we have become accustomed to it; we tolerate it. We find many reasons why we should live in conflict, because we think conflict, struggle, ever striving means progress: outward progress, or inward achievement towards the highest goal. There are various forms of conflict: the man who is struggling to achieve some result, the man who is in conflict, struggles with nature, trying to conquer it. (Noise of music) I am so sorry - what you have reduced this country to, such a beautiful country, India is: lovely hills, marvellous mountains, tremendous rivers. Three thousand to five thousand years of human suffering, human struggle, obeying, accepting, destroying each other, and this is what we have reduced it to: a wilderness of wild thoughtless human beings, who do not care for the earth, nor for the lovely things of the earth, nor the beauty of a lake, a pond, of the swift running river, none of us seem to care. All that we are concerned with is our own little selves, our own little problem. And this, after three to five thousand years of so-called culture. I wonder if you realize what you as human beings have done in this country. It is most unfortunate that all this has to be said. One wants to cry with what we are doing in this country; what other countries are doing, perhaps more or less the same - the other countries also have loud music, nonsensical entertainments, but when we are concerned with this country we shouldn't compare with other countries. That is a political escape, not facing facts. And we are going to face facts this afternoon. Because life has become extraordinarily dangerous, insecure, utterly without any meaning. You may invent a lot of meanings, significance, but actual daily life - it may be lived for thirty, forty, hundred years it has lost all meaning except to gather money, to be somebody, to be powerful and so on. I am afraid this has to be said. As we were saying yesterday, no politicians, or any politics, whether it is left, right or centre, is going to solve any of our problems. Politicians are not interested in solving problems. They are only concerned with themselves and keeping their position. And the gurus and religions have betrayed man. You have followed the Upanishads, read them rather, the Upanishads, the Brahmasutras and Bhagvad Gita, and it's the guru's game to read them aloud to an audience that are supposed to be enlightened, intelligent. So you cannot possibly rely on the politicians, that is, government; nor upon the religious scriptures, not upon any guru whatsoever because they have made this country what it is now. If one seeks further leadership they will also lead you up the wrong path. That is what we were saying yesterday afternoon. And as no one can help us, no one, we have to be responsible for ourselves totally, completely: responsible for our conduct, for our behaviour, for our actions and all that. And we are going to talk about conflict this afternoon: whether it is possible to live in a world that is becoming more and more chaotic, more and more insecure and dangerous, whether we can be free of conflict both outwardly and inwardly. Please, as we said yesterday, this is not a lecture but rather that we are together, perhaps with my little help, we are together investigating, exploring whether we can live without a single conflict in our life. And it is necessary and important to find out if we can so live. (More loud noise of music) I think the wind will die down! One must ask after all this millennia, why human beings have not solved the problem of struggle, conflict amongst themselves, with each other, in themselves? This is a very important question to ask: why we admit to and succumb to conflict? You know what conflict is? The struggle to become something, or not to become something, the struggle to achieve a result, personal advancement, personal success, try to fulfil something of your desires; the conflict of war, the preparations for war, of which you may not be aware. They are inventing dreadful machines to kill each other, kill us, and the competition involved in our desires to succeed. The conflict between man and woman, sexually in their daily relationship. Apparently this conflict is not only conscious, if one is at all aware but also deep down in the very recesses of our mind: conflict of pretension, trying to be something when you are not, conflict that exists in trying to achieve heaven, god, or whatever you like to call that thing that you adore, worship, conflict in meditation, struggle to meditate, struggle against lethargy, indolence. So our life is from the very beginning, from the time we are born until we die, it is a perpetual conflict. We are in conflict with that. (Noise of music) And they don't care whether other human beings suffer from their music, to their noise. It is not music. So we must find out together why man, you as a human being, representing all the world - we went into that a little yesterday, you are the rest of the world - why we human beings have tolerated, put up with, become habituated to conflict? Please don't go to sleep. We are thinking over together most seriously whether it is possible to completely be free of all conflict; because conflict, consciously or unconsciously will inevitably bring about a society that is ourselves extended. Society is not an abstraction, it is not an idea, society is relationship between man and man. If that relationship is in conflict, painful, depressing, anxious, painful, then we create a society which represents us. It is a fact. Please look at it carefully. Society isn't something out there. Society, the idea of society, the idea is not actual society; society is what we are with each other. And we are asking whether this conflict can ever end? What is conflict? When conflict is, when we do not accept what actually is, and escape to something called an ideal, the opposite of 'what is', then conflict is inevitable. Are we meeting each other? That is, when I am incapable of looking actually and observing what actually I am doing, thinking, acting, this is 'what is; and I project an ideal, so there is conflict between 'what is' and 'what should be'. You are following all this? I hope so. Sir, I am not talking for my pleasure. I am not trying to fulfil myself in talking, or build up a kind of reputation. I don't believe in any of those things. We are talking to convey, if we are serious, that there is a way of living in which there is not a spot of conflict. If you are interested in it, if you are concerned about it, if you want to find out a way of living that is without that sense of vain effort, then please do listen carefully, not to what I am saying, not to what the speaker is saying, but listen to the fact, the truth of what is being said, which is your own observation because we are together investigating. It is not what the speaker is pointing out but together we are looking. Please do pay attention to this. It is no fun for the speaker just to talk to blank faces, or people who are bored. Since you have taken the trouble to come and sit here under the beautiful trees, it is nice, but we are here to talk over together serious matters. So we were saying conflict exists when we disregard what is actually taking place and translate what is taking place in terms of an ideal, in terms of 'what should be', in a concept which we have accepted, or which we ourselves have created. So when there is a division between 'what is' and 'what should be' there must inevitably be conflict. This is a law. Not the speaker's law but it is the law; like an apple or a fruit falls from the tree, that is a law; so similarly this is a law. So we are going to investigate why human beings have never faced 'what is' and are always trying to escape from that. This country has always talked about non-violence. That is right, isn't it? (Noise of birds) Even the birds agree! This has been preached over and over again, politically, religiously, by all the various leaders that you have had - non-violence: which is not a fact, just an idea, a theory, a set of words, but the actual fact is that you are violent. That is the fact. That's what is. And we are not capable of understanding 'what is' and that is why we create this nonsense called non-violence. Right? So that becomes a conflict between 'what is' and 'what should be'. And while you are pursuing non-violence you are sowing the seeds of violence all the time. That is again so obvious. So can we together look at 'what is' without any escape, without any ideals, without suppressing or escaping from 'what is'? We are by inheritance from the animal, from the ape and so on, we are violent. Violence takes many forms, not merely brutal action, hitting each other; violence is a very complicated issue. Violence is imitation, conformity, obedience; violence is when you are not and pretend what you are supposed to be; that is a form of violence. Please see the reason of all this, the logic of all this. It is not just that we are making statements for you to accept or deny. We are walking down a path, in a forest, in the lovely woods, together and investigating, talking over together like two friends, about violence. And so we are talking about it amicably, without any persuasion, without any sense of resolution of the problem. We are talking together, we are observing together. We are walking along the same path, not your path or my path but the path of investigation into these problems. We are violent. That is a fact. We get angry, we conform, we imitate, we follow, we are aggressive and aggression takes many forms - a polite, gentle aggressiveness, with a kid glove, persuading you through affection. That is a form of violence. Compelling you to think along a particular line, that is violence. Violence is the acceptance of something that you are not. So please understand violence isn't just getting angry or beating up each other, that is nothing, that is a very shallow form of violence. Violence is very, very complex and to understand it, to go into the very depths of it, one must see the fact first and not, "We should be non-violent". I hope this is very clear. We are communicating with each other, therefore if there is no understanding in our communication we must stop and go back. Communication means understanding together of a particular problem, using the words, as we are talking in English, that we both understand. There is only 'what is', which is violence, and not non-violence, that is non-fact, not a reality, it is a projection of thought to escape, or to accept violence and pretend that we are becoming nonviolent. This country has played that game for centuries. So can we look at violence freed from all that: from escape, from ideals, from suppression, but actually observe what violence is. So we have to learn together how to observe. We are not teaching you, you are not the speaker's followers, he is not your guru, thank god; but we are merely walking together, investigating, there is no superior or inferior in this investigation. There is no authority in this investigation, but when your mind is crippled with authority, as you are, it is very difficult to be free of all that and look at violence. So it is important to understand how to observe. To observe what is happening in the world: the misery, the confusion, the hypocrisy, the lack of integrity, the brutal actions that are going on in the world, the terrorists, the people who are taking hostages and the gurus who have their own particular concentration camps. Please, don't laugh, you are part of all that. It is all violence. How can anyone say, "I know, follow me"? That is a scandalous statement. So we are together observing what violence is. So we are asking: what is it to observe? What is it to observe the environment around you; the trees, that pond in the corner there, made beautiful within this year, the stars, the new moon, the solitary Venus alone, the evening star by itself, the glory of a sunset, how do you watch it, if you have ever watched at all? You cannot watch, observe if you are occupied with yourself, with your own problems, with your own ideas, with your own complex thinking, you cannot observe. Right? You cannot observe if you have prejudice, or if there is any kind of conclusion which you hold on to, or your particular experience that you cling to, then it is impossible to observe. So how do you observe a tree, this marvellous thing called a tree, the beauty of it, how do you look at it? How do you look at it now as you are sitting there surrounded by these trees? Have you ever watched them? Have you seen their leaves, fluttering in the wind, the beauty of the light on the leaf, have you ever watched it? So can you watch a tree, or the new moon, or the single star in the heavens, without the word, the moon, the star, the sky, without the word? Because the word is not the actual star, the actual moon. So can you put aside the word and look? Right? That is outwardly. Can you look at your wife without the word? Without all the remembrance of your relationship however intimate it has been, without all that builtup memory of ten days, or ten years, or fifty years, can you look at your wife, or your husband, without the memory of the past? Have you ever done it? Of course not. So will you please let us learn together how to look, how to observe a flower. If you know how to look at a flower, that contains eternity. Don't be carried away by my words. If you know how to look at a star, a dense forest, then you see in that observation there is space, timeless eternity. So we must together find out how to observe: to observe your wife or your husband without the image you have created about her or about him. You must begin very close - you understand - you must begin very close in order to go very far. But if you don't begin very close you can never go very far. If you want to climb the mountain or go to the next village on your feet, the first steps matter, how you walk, with what grace, with what ease, with what felicity. So we are saying that to go very, very far, which is eternity, you must begin very close, which is your relationship with your wife and husband. Can you look, observe with clear eyes your wife or your husband, without the words 'My wife', or 'my husband', 'My nephew', or 'My son', without the word, without all the accumulated hurts with all the remembrance of things past, can you look? Do it now as you are sitting there, observe. And when you are capable of observing without the past, that is all the images you have built about yourself and about her, then there is right relationship between you and her. Now, as we have not observed each other, it is like two railway lines never meeting. That's our relationship. I wonder if you are aware of all this? If you are aware what actually our relationship is. We are together learning how to observe that tree, sitting next to your neighbour, the colour of the shirt, the colour of the sari, the type of the face, observe without criticism, without like or dislike, just to observe. Now when such observation takes place can you look at your violence; violence being anger, irritation, conformity, acceptance, getting used to some noise, some dirt, the squalor around your houses, can you look at all that? So when you so look you bring all your energy, you bring all your energy to observe, and when you so observe your violence you will find, if you have gone into it, if you do it, that violence because you have brought all your energy to observe, that violence totally disappears. Don't repeat, if I may most respectfully request, don't repeat what you have heard. By repeating what the speaker has said you become secondhand human beings. By repeating the Upanishads, the Brahmasutras and all the printed books, you have made yourself secondhand human beings. You don't seem to mind, do you? You are not even ashamed of it, you just accept it. That acceptance is part of this complex problem of violence. So we are saying that it is possible to live without conflict, when there is no duality. There is no duality now, not when you reach a certain state of consciousness. There is no actual duality, there is only 'what is'. You understand? Duality only exists when you deny, or try to escape from 'what is' into 'what is not'. Is this clear? Are we all together in this matter? I know your philosophy, Vedanta and all that stuff, I don't know anything about it, but people have talked to me a great deal about all these matters, pundits, scholars and ordinary people, they live in duality. Right? Not physical duality, there is man, woman, tall, short, light skin, dark skin, you know all that, that is not duality. But the idea that conflict is necessary because we live in duality and therefore those who are free from the opposite are the enlightened people. You invent a philosophy around that. And you read about it, accept it, read all the commentaries and you are stuck where you are. Whereas the speaker is saying there is no duality actually; not when you reach spiritual heights, you will never reach spiritual heights if you have dualities now, not in some future incarnation or at the end of your life. The speaker is saying there is only 'what is', there is nothing else. 'What is' is the only fact. Its opposite is non-fact, it has no reality. I hope this is very clear, even logically, with reason. If you are exercising your reason, your capacity to think logically, 'what is' is more important to understand than 'what should be'. And 'what should be' we cling to because we don't know how to deal with 'what is'. We use the opposites as a lever to free ourselves from 'what is'. You are following all this? I hope you are. So there is only 'what is' and therefore there is no duality, there is no opposite: there is only greed and not non-greed. When you understand the depth of violence without escaping from it, running away to some idiotic ideals, as non-violence, when you look at it, when you observe it very closely, which is to bring all the energy which you have wasted in pursuing the opposite, which is a wastage of energy, when you try to suppress it, it is a wastage of energy which is conflict. But when you observe 'what is' there is no conflict. Please understand this. Suppose I am envious, envious of you who are very clever, bright, intelligent, sensitive, see the beauty of the earth and the glory of the sky, and I don't see it. And you enjoy this lovely earth and to me it means nothing. Then I want to be like you. So I begin to imitate you, the way you walk, the way you look, the way you smile, the way you look at the heavens. I am greedy. Right? But I have been educated from childhood not to be greedy. The 'not' is the opposite of what I am. I have been educated, conditioned, all the books have said there is duality, or some books - that is not important, the books have said it. And I have accepted it. And it is very difficult for me to break that conditioning, so I begin to discuss with you, cleverly; there is duality, books have said it, my guru has told me. So my conditioning from childhood prevents the understanding of this very simple fact, which is, there is only 'what is'. Goodness is not the opposite of the bad. If good is born out of the bad then goodness contains the bad. You understand? Think it out sirs, work at it. Let's exercise our brains. So to always live with 'what is', with what actually is going on outwardly and inwardly. When I am envious, I live with that fact, I observe it. Again envy is a very complex process, part of competition, the desire for advancement, politically, religiously, business. And I have been brought up in that; to break that tradition in which I have been brought up demands a great deal of observation, not run away to the opposite of tradition. Just to observe what tradition is. You understand all this? I hope the speaker is making it all very clear. You are all traditional people. That is, you are repeating psychologically, even intellectually what you have been told. Your whole religion is based on that. And there they are. So when once you see the fact, that there is only 'what is', and to observe with all the energy that you have, that fact, then you will see that fact has no value or importance, it is totally non existent. You are following this? Look sirs: one has been told from childhood to be good. The word 'good' is an old fashioned word, but it is really a beautiful word. Good means to be correct; correct in your speech, correct in your behaviour, not according to an idea of what is correct. Correct means to be precise, accurate, not pretentious. I am not good -suppose I am not. And my parents, my teacher, my educator says, "Be good" - so I have created a conflict between I am and what I should be. I don't understand the meaning of that word, because that word again is very, very subtle, it demands a great deal of investigation into that word. Good means also to be completely honest, to have great integrity, which means one behaves not according to some tradition, fashion, but behaving with the sense of integrity, which has its own intelligence. And also goodness means to be holistic, to be whole, not fragmented. I am all that, fragmented - suppose I am - fragmented, traditional, brought up in this chaotic tradition. What is important is not what is goodness, why my brain is caught in tradition - that is more important than being good. You understand? So I have to understand why the brain, which is again very, very subtle, has great depth to it in itself, why such a brain has followed tradition. It has followed because it is safe, there is security because I am following what my parents have said and so on, that gives one a sense of safety, protection - a false protection: I think it is safe but it is unreal, it is illusory, and I won't listen to you because I am frightened to be without tradition. Which means to live with all your attention. So it is possible, if you go into it very carefully, to live a life without a shadow of conflict. Because those of you who believe in god, I am sure you all do, don't you, if god created you he must have meant that you must have a rotten life - right? But you have created god; that is a fact. God is your ultimate security and you believe in that. See what thought has done: created an image of god and then you worship that god which is self worship. You understand? Oh, you people don't. Then you begin to ask who created the earth, who created the heavens, the universe and so on. So your tradition begins to destroy the human mind. It is a repetition, it becomes mechanical, it has no vitality, except to earn money, go to the office every morning for the rest of your life and then die at the end of it. So it is important to find out whether you, as a human being, who is the rest of humanity - we went into that the other day, your consciousness is the consciousness of the rest of man because every man throughout the world suffers, is anxious, depressed, lonely, uncertain, confused like you; your consciousness is like any other consciousness. And so when you live without a single conflict but only living everyday with 'what is' and observing 'what is', not only out there but inwardly, then you will create a society that will be without conflict. Right sirs. OJAI 1ST PUBLIC TALK 1ST MAY 1982 I would like to point out, if I may, this is not a weekend entertainment. We are going to deal with the whole of life, with all its complex problems, and not a particular subject. This is not a lecture; that is, to talk about a particular subject in view of giving information. I think it would be good if we could, from the very beginning of these talks - and there will be, I believe, six of them and four question and answer meetings - if we could from the very beginning understand that we are not instructing anybody anything; we are not bringing up some kind of ideas or beliefs or some conclusions to convince you of anything. This is not a propaganda; but rather, if we could, during all these talks, think over together, observe together, listen to the whole movement of one life, whether it is in South Africa, South America, Europe or America or Asia. We are dealing with a very, very complex problem that needs to be studied very carefully, hesitantly, without any direction, without any motive, to observe, if we can, the whole outward happening of our life. Because if we don't understand what is happening outside of us, which is the measure by which we will be able to understand ourselves, if we do not understand what is actually going on in the world, the external world, outside the skin as it were, outside the psychological field, we will have no measure by which to observe ourselves. So first, if we may, let us together observe. I mean by that word to look carefully without any bias, as an America or Argentine or British, or French or Russian, to observe - or Asia, forgot, sorry - to observe without any motive; which is rather difficult. To see clearly, if we can, what is going on. As one observes and travels around the world, there is a great deal of dissension, discord, disagreement, disorder; a great deal of confusion, uncertainty; there are the demonstrations against one particular form of war. There is terrorism; the preparation for wars; spending untold money on armaments. There are the national divisions: one nation against another preparing for eventual war. And there are the religious sectarian divisions: the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hindu, the Islamic world, the Buddhist. And there is this constant division in the world. Where there is division there must be dissension, conflict. We see this all over the world. And there is the national honour, for which one is proud and willing to kill others. There are the various sects, gurus, with their particular following. There is the spiritual authority: the Catholic world, the Protestant world, not so much in the Buddhist and the Hindu world, but there is the authority of the book in the Islam. So wherever there is this dissension, disorder, there is not only conflict, destruction of each other, and the attachment to a particular nationality, hoping thereby to find some kind of security, physical outward security. This is the phenomenon that is taking place in the world, of which one is sure that we all observe the same thing: one group against another group. And so there is isolation taking place, not only for each human being, but the isolation of groups. Which is, bound by a belief, by a faith, by some ideological conclusion, as in the totalitarian states and in the so-called democratic world with their ideals; so the ideals, beliefs, dogmas, rituals are separating mankind. This is actually what is going on in the world. The external world is the result of our own psychological world. This outward world is created by each one of us. Because we are isolated human beings. We have our own particular profession, our own particular belief, our conclusions and experiences, to which we cling, and so gradually each one is isolating himself. There is self-centred activity, which is expressed outwardly as the nation, belonging to some religious group, whether that group has 700 million people as the Catholic world has, each one of us is isolating himself. And so we are producing or creating a world externally through nationalism, which is a glorified form of tribalism; and each tribe is willing to kill another tribe for their belief, for their land, for their economic trade and so on, and so on, and so on. We all know this; at least, those of us who are aware; who listen to all the radios, television, newspapers and so on. And there are those who say, this cannot be changed at all, there is no possibility of human conditioning being transformed. The world has been going on like this for thousands and thousands of years and this world is created by the human condition and that condition can never possibly be transformed, bring about a mutation in itself. They assert that there can be modification, slight change, but man will ever be what he is; in conflict with each other, murdering each other; and bringing about a division in himself and in the world. And there are those who have tried social reform of various kinds all over the world; but they too have not brought about deep fundamental mutation in the human consciousness. This is the state of the world. And how do we look at it? What is our response to it, as human beings? Not to the technological world; the computers, and all those extraordinary things the human brain is inventing; but what is actually our relationship, not only with each other but with this external world; what is our responsibility? Do we leave it to the politicians? Do we seek new leaders? Please, this is a very serious problem which we are discussing, talking over together. New saviours, or go back to the old tradition, because human beings, unable to solve this problem, return to the old habitual tradition of the past? Which is also what is happening. The more there is confusion in the world, the more desire and urge to return to some past illusions, past tradition, past leaders, past so-called saviours. So if one is aware of all this, as one must; what is our response to all this? Not a partial but total response to the whole phenomena that is going on, taking place in the world. Do we only consider our own personal lives? How to live a quiet, serene, undisturbed life in some corner; or are we concerned with the total human existence, with the total humanity? If we are only concerned with our own particular life, however troublesome it is, however limited it is, however much it is sorrowful and painful, then one does not realize the part is the whole. So one has to look at life, not the American life or the Asiatic life, but life as a whole; holistic observation. The observation that is not a particular observation; it's not my observation or your particular observation, but the observation that comprehends the totality, the holistic view of life. Each one of us has been concerned with his own particular problems: problems of more money, no job, seeking one's own fulfillment, seeking everlastingly pleasure; frightened, isolated, lonely, depressed, suffering, and creating, being personal, a saviour outside who will transform or bring about a salvation for ourselves, for each one of us. This tradition has been going on in the Western world for two thousand years: and the Asiatic world, which is probably the explosion from India or the East, has also maintained the same thing in different words, different symbols, different pictures, different conclusions: but it is the same individual's search for his own salvation, for his own particular happiness, to resolve his many complex problems. That what each one of us is trying to do. If we cannot solve our particular problem, there are the specialists of various kinds, psychological specialists to whom one goes to resolve our problems. They too have not succeeded. Nor the scientists. On the contrary. Technologically the scientists have helped enormously - less disease, better communication, sanitation and so on and so on. And also the scientists are maintaining the war. Scientists are responsible for all the gadgets of war. They are responsible for murdering millions and millions of people at one blow. So scientists are not going to save mankind, nor the politicians, whether in the East or West, or in the middle part of the world. They seek power, position, and they play all kinds of tricks on human thought. You know all this. And in the Western world we elect them - god knows how we elect them. And in the Russian world you don't, they are a totalitarian dictatorship, complete prison. And it is exactly the same thing in the religious world, so-called religious world. The authority of the hierarchy, the authority of the pope, the bishops, the archbishop and the local priest in the name of some image which thought has created. And we, as human beings separated, isolated, we haven't been able to solve our problems. We are highly educated, cunning, self-centred, capable of extraordinary things outwardly. But inwardly we are more or less what we have been for a million years: we hate, we compete, we destroy each other; which is what is going on actually at the present moment. You have heard the experts talking about the recent war, they are not talking about human beings being killed, but destroying airfields, blowing up this or that. So there is this total confusion in the world, of which one is quite sure we are all aware of. And from that arises the question: what shall we do? As a friend once some time ago told the speaker, you can't do anything. You are beating your head against a wall. It will go on like this for the next million years; fight, kill, destroy each other, competition, caught in various forms of illusion. This will go on. Don't waste your life and time. This tragedy, the terrifying events that may happen by some crazy person pressing a button; or the computer taking over man's capacities, thinking much quicker, more accurately; and the computer too may destroy the human being, the human mind, the human brain; because the computer, the robot can do all kinds of things as they are doing in Japan. So what is going to happen to human beings? So this is the vast problem which we are facing. And our education from childhood till we pass, if we are lucky, through college, university, is to specialize in some form or another, accumulate a lot of knowledge, store it up in the brain and act, get a job and hold on to the job skilfully, if you can, for the rest of one's life; going to the office, from morning till the evening and dying at the end of it all. This is not a pessimistic attitude or observation; this is what actually is going on. When one observes the actuality, the fact, one is neither depressed, optimistic or pessimistic, it is so. And one asks, if one is at all serious and responsible: what is one to do? Retire into monasteries? Form some commune? Go off to Asia and pursue Zen meditation or other forms of meditation? One is asking seriously this question. When you are confronted with this crisis in consciousness, the crisis is not over there outside of us. The crisis is in us. You know that saying, "we have seen the enemy and the enemy is us". So the crisis is not economic, war, the bomb, the politicians, the scientists, but the crisis is within us, the crisis is in our consciousness. Until we understand very profoundly the nature of that consciousness, and question, delve deeply into it and find out for ourselves whether there can be a total mutation in that consciousness, the world will go on creating more misery, more confusion, more horror. So our responsibility is not some kind of altruistic action, political, or economic, but to comprehend the nature of our being; why we human beings, we have lived on this beautiful lovely earth, why we have become like this. So if you are willing, if it is your responsibility, we can perceive together the nature of our consciousness, the nature of our being. This is not, as we said, a lecture. A lecture being a dissertation on a particular subject giving or pointing out information; that's what one means by a lecture. But here we are trying together, you and the speaker together, not separately, together, to observe the movement of this consciousness and its relationship to the world, whether that consciousness is individual, separate, or that consciousness is the whole of mankind. Do you understand? We are educated from childhood to be individuals, with your separate soul - if you believe in that kind of stuff - or you have been trained, educated, conditioned to think as an individual. We think because you have a separate name, separate form, that is dark, light, tall, short, fair, black, and so on, and your particular tendency, we think we are separate individuals, our own particular experiences and so on. Now we are going to question that very idea: whether we are individuals. It doesn't mean that we are a kind of amorphous beings, but actually are we individuals, though the whole world maintains, both religiously and in other ways, that we are separate individuals. And from that concept, and perhaps from that illusion, each one of us trying to fulfil, become something. In that becoming something we are competing against another, fighting another. So if we maintain that way of life, we must inevitably cling to nationalities, tribalism, war. Why do we hold on to nationalism? The passion behind it; which is what is happening now - the British against the Argentines, the Jew against the Arab, Arab against the Jew, and so on. Why do we give such extraordinary passionate importance to nationalism; which is essentially tribalism? Why? Is it because in tribalism, holding on to the tribe, to the group, there is certain security; not only physical security but psychological security, inward sense of completeness, fullness. If that is so, then the other tribe also feels the same; and hence division and hence war, conflict. If one actually sees the truth of this, not theoretically; and if one wants to live on this earth, which is our earth, not yours or mine, American or the Russian or the Hindu, it's our earth to live on, then there is no nationalism at all. There is only human existence. One life; it's not your life or my life, it's living the whole of life. And this tradition of individuality has been perpetuated by religions both in the East and in the West; individual saviour for each individual, and so on, so on. Now is this so? You know, it is very good to doubt, very good to have a mind that questions, doesn't accept; a mind that says, we cannot possibly live any more like this, in this brutal, violent manner. So doubt, questioning, has extraordinary importance; not just accept the way of life one has lived perhaps for 50, 60 or 30 years, or the way one has lived for a million years. So we are questioning the reality of individuality. Is your consciousness - do we understand by the meaning of that word, to be conscious, the content of your consciousness, to be conscious means to be aware, to know, to perceive, to observe - is your consciousness with its content, the content being your belief, your pleasure, your experience, your particular knowledge which you have gathered, either through some particular external subject or the knowledge you have gathered about yourself, your fears, the attachments, the pain, the agony of loneliness, the sorrow, the search for something more than mere physical existence; all that is one's consciousness with its content, the content makes the consciousness. Without content there is not the consciousness as we know it. Here there is no room for argument. It is so. Your consciousness, which is very complex, contradictory, with such extraordinary vitality, that consciousness, is it yours? Is thought yours? Or there is only thinking, which is neither East nor West, there is only thinking, which is common to all mankind, whether they are rich or poor, technically, technicians with their extraordinary capacity, or the monk who withdraws from the world and is consecrating himself to an idea, is still thinking. Is this consciousness common to all mankind - common in the sense not degrading? Is this consciousness yours or also the rest of mankind? Wherever one goes, one sees suffering, pain, anxiety, loneliness, insanity, fear, seeking security, caught in knowledge; the urge of desire, loneliness, it is common, it is the ground on which every human being stands. Your consciousness is the consciousness of humanity, the rest of humanity. It's logical; you may disagree; you may say, my consciousness is separate, and it must be separate; but is it so? If one understands the nature of this, that you are the rest of mankind, though we may have a different name, we may live in different parts of the world, educated in different ways, affluent or very poor, when you go behind the mask deeply, you are like the rest of mankind: aching, loneliness, suffering, despair, neurotic; belief, believing in some illusion, and so on. Whether you go to the East or West, this is so. You may not like it; you may like to think that you are totally independent, free individual. But when you observe very deeply, you are the rest of humanity. You may accept this as an idea, an abstraction, as a marvellous concept; but idea is not the actual. An abstraction is not what actually is taking place. But most of us make an abstraction of 'what is' into an idea, and then pursue the idea, which is really non-factual. So, if that is so, that is, if my consciousness and yours, with all its content - the content in itself is contradictory, confused, struggling against each other; fact and non-fact; wanting to be happy, being unhappy; wanting peace, living without violence and yet being violent - our consciousness in itself is disorder. It is the root of dissension. And until we understand, go into it very deeply, and discover total order, we shall have always disorder in the world. So a serious person, I mean by that word, not easily dissuaded from the pursuit of understanding, the pursuit of delving deeply into himself, into his consciousness, which is the common consciousness of all man; a man who is not easily persuaded by amusement, entertainment, which is perhaps sometimes necessary, but to pursue consistently every day into the nature of man, that is, into yourself, to observe what is actually going on within oneself; and from that observation action takes place. Not, what shall I do as a separate human being, but action which comes out of total, holistic observation of life. By that word holistic we mean, a healthy, sane, rational, logical, and a perception that is whole, which is holy, h-o-l-y. We are using that word in that sense, holistic. Now is this possible? Is it possible for a human being like us who are laymen, not specialists, laymen, is it possible for us to look at this, look at the contradictory, confusing consciousness as a whole; or must we take each part of it? Please just listen for a few minutes, if you are interested. I want to understand myself, my consciousness. I know from the very beginning it's very contradictory; wanting one thing, and not wanting the other thing; saying one thing and doing another. I know belief separates man. I believe in whatever it is, Jesus or Krishna or something, or I believe in my own experience which I hold on to; or the knowledge which I have accumulated through 60 years or 40 years or 10 years, that becomes extraordinarily important. I cling to that. So I recognize belief destroys and divides people. And yet I can't give it up because belief has strange vitality. It gives me a certain sense of security. I believe in god, there's an extraordinary strength in that. But god is invented by man. If we are all, as some people believe, we are all the children of god, god must be an extraordinary human being, extraordinary person, because if we observe what we are, we are miserable entities, and god must be also rather miserable about all this. So god is the projection of our own thought, our own demands, our own hopeless despair and opposite of all that. Or I believe in some form of gurus, you know, all that, belief. Why do we have beliefs at all? A mind that is crippled by belief is an unhealthy mind. There must be freedom. That's again a very complex problem; what is freedom? - which we won't go into now. So, is it possible for me, for you, to delve deeply into this consciousness, not persuaded, not guided by psychologists, psychiatrists and so on, to delve deeply into ourselves and find out; so that we don't depend on anybody, including the speaker. In asking that question, how shall we know the intricacies, the contradictions, the whole movement of consciousness? Shall we know it bit by bit, take for instance, we took just now belief. And also in our consciousness, we are hurt. Each human being from childhood is hurt. Is hurt by the parents, psychologically I am talking about. Hurt in the school, through comparison, through competition, through saying, you must be first-class at this subject, and so on, in college, university, and life, this constant process of being hurt. We all know this. We are all human beings, we are hurt, deeply; of which we may not be conscious. And, from that hurt, there are all forms of neurotic actions. That's part of our consciousness; part of our hidden or open awareness that one is hurt. Now is it possible not to be hurt at all? Because it's a very important question to ask. Because the consequences of being hurt are building a wall round oneself, withdrawing in our relationship with each other in order not to be hurt more. In that there is fear, a gradual isolation. Now we are asking: is it possible not only to be free of past hurts but also never to be hurt again; not through callousness, through indifference, through total disregard of all relationship, but rather enquire why and what is it that is being hurt? This hurt is, as we said, part of our consciousness; from which various neurotic contradictory actions take place. So we are examining, as we examined belief, we are examining hurt, which is part of our consciousness - please, it is not something outside of us, it's part of us. Now what is it that is hurt and is it possible never to be hurt? Do you understand, a human being that's free, total, never to be hurt by anything psychologically, inwardly? Isn't it an important question? And what is that is hurt? We say, that is me, I am hurt. What is that me? From childhood one has built up, built an image of oneself. We have many, many images; not only the images that people give us, but also the images that we ourselves have built: as an American, that's an image; as a Hindu, as a specialist. So, the 'me' is the image that I have built about myself, as a great man, or I am very good at this or that, and that image gets hurt. Right? You have an image: you are a marvellous cook, a marvellous carpenter, great talker; I am not! Great talker, writer, spiritual being, a leader; we have created these images for ourselves. We have other images, which we won't go into for the moment. These images are the whole of me; when I say I am hurt, we mean the image is hurt. If I have an image about myself - which I have not -if I have one, you come along and tell me, don't be an idiot, I get hurt. That is, the image which I have built about myself as not being an idiot, a silly ass, you come along and say, you are, and that hurts me. And I carry that image, that hurt, for the rest of my life. Careful not to be hurt, warding off any statement of my idiocy. (Laughter) Don't laugh; it's your problem, not mine. Please, it's very serious, because the consequences of being hurt are very complex. And from that hurt we may want to fulfil, we may want to become this or that to escape from this terrible hurt. So one has to understand it. And is it possible not to have an image about oneself at all? Why do you have images about yourself? You may look very nice, bright, intelligent, clear-faced, and I want to be like you; and if I am not, I get hurt. So comparison may be one of the factors of being hurt, psychologically. Then, why do we compare? You understand all these questions? So can one live a life in the modern world without a single image? The speaker may say, it is possible; it can be done. But that requires the understanding of relationship. What is relationship? -Have we got time to go into that? We have talked over an hour. You must be tired. If you are treating this as an entertainment, intellectual or otherwise, then it is just an amusement, something to do on Saturday morning. But if you are serious, in the deep sense of that word, committed to the solution of the human problems, then your brain must be as active as that of the speaker, not just accept a lot of words. Perhaps some of you are not used to all of this; because we think along the old traditional lines, habits, and take the easiest way of life. But this requires a great deal of energy; so that you find out whether it is possible never to be hurt. And whether it is possible to live a life without a single belief; which is dividing the world and human beings and so destroying each other. The South Americans believe in one thing and the Asiatic, the Western world believes something else. The ideas, the ideals, the ideologies, are destroying human beings. So whether one can live without a single belief; and to discover, never to be hurt, which means not to have an image about yourself; as a Hindu, as a Buddhist, as a Catholic, as a Protestant, as a professor; you may profess, you may teach, you may inform, but the image you have created about yourself as a professor, not what you profess, you understand? Is that possible? That's real freedom. And it is possible when I am called an idiot, because I've an image about myself, if I have one - to give total attention to that statement as it is said. You understand? When I have an image about myself, and you call me an idiot, I react instantly. The reaction is immediate. As the reaction is immediate, to give attention to that immediacy. You understand? Am I making myself clear? That is, to listen very clearly to the idea that I am an idiot. You called me an idiot; to listen to it attentively, when you listen completely, there is no reaction. It is the lack of listening acutely that creates the image. Have you understood this? Suppose I have an image myself about myself, because I have travelled all over the world etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I have an image about myself. You come along and say, look, old boy, you're not as good as the other guru, or the other leader, or some other teacher, some other idiot. You are in yourself an idiot. I listen to that completely, give complete attention to what is being said. When there is total attention, there is no forming of a centre. It's only inattention that creates the centre. You have understood this? Can one give such attention? You understand? A mind which has been so slack, a brain which has been confused, disturbed, neurotic, which has never actually faced anything, which has never demanded of itself its highest capacity; which is total attention. And when there is total attention to the statement that I am an idiot, it has lost totally all its significance. Because when there is attention there is not a centre which is reacting. I have finished for this morning. I believe we meet tomorrow morning. May I get up please? SAANEN 3RD PUBLIC TALK 15TH JULY 1982 May we continue where we left off the day before yesterday? We were talking about causation and the effects of that cause. We always apparently are concerned with the effects, the results, and try to change or modify the results, the effects. But apparently we never enquire very deeply into the cause of these effects. We went into that a little bit the other day and I think it is important to go into them quite deeply. We also said that intelligence has no cause. And all our actions, our ways of thinking have always a ground, a reason, a motive. And if one ends the cause then what is beyond cause? That's what we were talking about the day before yesterday. One hopes you will not mind being reminded again that the speaker is totally, completely anonymous. The speaker is not important. What is said is important and to find out for oneself if what is being said is true or false depends on one's intelligence. We said intelligence is the uncovering of the false and totally rejecting the false. So please bear in mind during all these talks and question and answer meetings that together, in co-operation, we are investigating, examining, exploring into these problems. The speaker is not exploring but you are exploring with him. So there is no question of following him. There is no authority invested in him. I think this must be said over and over again as most of us are prone, have a tendency to follow, to accept, specially from those whom you think somewhat different or spiritually advanced, or all that nonsense. So please, if one may repeat it over and over again, because our minds and our brains are conditioned to follow, as you follow a professor in a university, he informs you and you accept because he certainly knows mathematics more than perhaps we do. But here it is not a matter of that kind. We are not informing you. We are not urging you to accept those things that are said, but rather together in cooperation investigate into these human problems, which are very complex, need a great deal of observation, a great deal of energy and enquiry. But if you merely follow you are only following the image that you have created about him or about the symbolic meaning of the words. So please bear in mind all these facts. So we are going to enquire together what is intelligence? We are not defining what is intelligence. The dictionary probably has several meanings to it. Intelligence according to accepted good dictionaries, says it is gathering together information, reading between the lines, which are all the activity of thought. And is thought intelligent? Is thought, our thinking, the way we act, the whole social, moral world in which we live, or immoral world in which we live - is all that the activity of intelligence? Then we begin to enquire into what is intelligence? We said one of the factors is to uncover, explore, not say this is false and reject it, but explore the nature of the false because in the understanding of the false, in the uncovering of that which is illusion, there is the truth which is intelligence. So we have inquired together, together, into the nature of intelligence. Has intelligence a cause? Thought has a cause - right? One thinks because one - the very word 'because' implies causation - one thinks because one has past experiences, past accumulated information and knowledge, that knowledge is never complete, that knowledge must go hand in hand with ignorance, and from this ground of knowledge with its ignorance thought is born. And that thought must be partial, limited, fragmented because it is the outcome of knowledge, and as knowledge can never be complete at any time, therefore thought must be incomplete, insufficient, limited. And we use that thought not recognizing the limitation of it, and living in thought and creating thoughts, the things which thought has created and worshipping the things that thought has created. Thought has created wars and the instruments of war. Thought has created the whole technological world, the terror and so on. We have gone into that previously. So is thought, the activity of thought, which is to compare, to identify, to fulfil, to seek satisfaction, to seek security, which is the result, the cause of thinking - and is thought intelligent? Please, you understand my question? Don't wait for the speaker to tell us; we are together looking at this question of thought, its place, its activity in relationship to intelligence. We live by thought, yesterday, tomorrow and today. Is this movement from the past through the present, to the future, which is the movement of time and thought, that movement with its cunningness, with its capacity to adjust itself as no other animal does except a human being - is that movement of thought born of the past, is that intelligence? Will that produce confusion? So thought has a causation, obviously. I want to build a house; I want to drive a car; I want to be powerful, well-known. I am dull, but I'll be clever. I will achieve, I will fulfil - all that is the movement of the centre from which thought arises. Right? It is so obvious. Through the obvious we are going to penetrate which may be different. But first we must be very clear of the obvious, that which has a cause and an effect, that effect may be immediate or postponed. The movement from the cause to the effect is time. Are you listening? I have done something in the past which was not correct; it is not correct because of various causes, and the effect of that may be that I pay for it immediately, or perhaps five years later. So where there is a cause and there is an effect, the interval, whether it is the shortest interval, a second or years, is the movement of time. So is intelligence the movement of time? Please think it over, examine it because this is not a verbal clarification, it is not a verbal explanation, but the perception of the reality of it, the truth of it. Because we are going to go into various aspects of our life, our daily living, not some Utopian concept, or some ideological conclusion according to which we shall act, but in investigating our lives, our lives are the lives of all humanity, it is not my life or your life, life is a tremendous movement and in that movement we have separated a part of it and call ourselves individuals. We went into that the other day very carefully. So we are saying, asking, where there is a cause there is an ending. If I have tuberculosis the cause is my coughing and the blood and all the rest of it, and that cause can be cured and the effect will disappear. Please follow this carefully, examine this carefully - I won't use the word follow, forgive me. We are saying where there is a cause the effect can be ended with the ending of cause. Right? And all our life is the movement of causation: I like you, you are my friend. You flatter me, I am delighted. I flatter you. You say something unpleasant, I hate you. In all this movement there is a causation - right? Of course. We are asking: is there a life, a living without causation? We must understand first the implications of ending. You understand? I end anger or greed in order to achieve something else. I love you because you are my audience. That is, you flatter me, I fulfil myself in talking to you, and I feel sad or depressed when there is no audience. So there is always a cause and an ending. So we are enquiring: what is it to end? Is ending a continuation, a continuation? I end something and begin something else, which is another form of the same thing. Are you following? We must go slowly, we must go into it very carefully. You see to go into this very deeply one has to understand the conflict of the opposites - right? The conflict of duality. I am greedy, one is greedy and for various, social, economic, moral reasons one must end it. In the ending of it there is a cause because I want something else. The something else is the result of the cause. I have not really ended the greed, but I have replaced the greed by something else - right? I am violent, one is violent by nature because that violence has been inherited from the animal and so on, we won't go into that. We are violent human beings. The cause of that violence may be very complex but the result of that complex causation is violence. I want to end violence because I think it is too stupid. And so in ending I am trying to find a field which is non-violent, which has no shadow of violence in it. But I haven't really ended violence, only I have transmuted or translated that feeling into another feeling but the feeling is the same. Have you got it? I wonder if you capture this? Are we co-operating together in this? We will put it in ten different ways. You see if thought has cause, which it has, then the ending of cause doesn't mean thoughtlessness. Or something totally different. If it is something totally different then it has no cause - right? Please understand this. Don't go to sleep please. This is not an intellectual entertainment or verbal exchange, but if we go into it very carefully, deeply, it will affect our daily life because that may be the ending of conflict. Because our life is in conflict, our consciousness is in conflict, it is messy, confused, contradictory. And our consciousness is the result of thought - right? And because thought has a causation our consciousness has a cause. And what has a cause, and the movement of that cause as effect is time. We went into that. Is there a way of observing without cause? You understand my question? I want to observe all my complex life, my contradictions, one's imitation, conformity, the various conclusions with their opposites, all that is a movement of causation - right? Of course. I can end that causation by will, by a desire to have an orderly life. The orderly life may be born out of a causation - right? Because I am disorderly. So when discovering the disorderliness of my life and wishing to have an orderly life that orderly life has a causation, and therefore it is not orderly - right? Is this clear? It is a very complex subject and I hope you will have patience to go into it. So has intelligence a cause? Obviously not. Right? I will go into it. What is order? There is the order of law based upon various experiences, judgements, necessities, convenience, to keep out the ill-doers and so on. So what we call order, social order, ethical order, political order and so on has essentially a basis, a background, a cause. Now we are asking: has order a cause? We are going to investigate together. Now do we recognise, see, how our lives are disorderly? Disorderly being contradictory, conforming, following, accepting, denying what we may want and accepting something else. The conflict between the various opposites, that is disorder. Right? Because I accept one form of thought as order, but I think also its opposite. The opposite may create disorder so I am living always within the field of these opposites - right? So will disorder end, completely end in my life, in our lives, if I want order? I want to live peacefully, I want to have a pleasant life, companionship and so on and so on, that desire is born out of this disorder. Get it? So the opposite is born out of this, out of its own opposite. I am angry, I hate, I mustn't hate, therefore I must try not to hate, and not to hate is the outcome of my hate - right? If there is no hate it has no opposite - right? So the ending of hate has no result. I wonder if you capture all this? I see not. You see thought has created disorder. Let's see that fact. Thought has created disorder in the world through nationalities, through division, I am a Jew, you are an Arab, I believe and you don't believe - you follow? Those are all the activities of thought, which in itself is divisive, in itself, it can't bring unity, because in itself it is divisive, fragmented. That which is fragmented cannot see the whole - right? So I discover that my consciousness is entirely in disorder and I want order, hoping thereby I will end conflict. There is a motive. That motive is the cause of my desire to have an orderly life - right? So order is born there out of disorder -right? Therefore that order perpetuates disorder, which is happening in the political, religious and other fields. I wonder if you see that? Now let's go back. Now I see the cause of disorder. I don't want to move away from disorder. I see the cause of it, that I am contradictory, that I am angry, the confusion, I see it. I see the cause of it. I am not moving away from the cause or the effect. I am the cause and I am the effect. Do you see that? I am the cause and the things that happen is myself also. So any movement away from that is disorder - right? I wonder if you get it? So the ending without a future - right? The ending of 'what is' has no future. Any future projected by my demand for order is still the continuation of disorder. So is there an observation of my disorder and the ending of it without any cause? You get it? You understand? I am violent. One is violent. One wants to be famous. One wants so many things. And there is violence in human beings. The cause of that violence is essentially a self-centred movement -right? Right? You want, you are violent because you are self-centred. I am also violent because I am self-centred. Therefore there is a battle between us - right? This is obvious. So there is violence in you. Thought is not pursuing non-violence, which is a form of violence. If you see that very clearly then there is only the concern with violence. The cause of that violence, as we said, may be so many contradictory demands, so many pressures and so on and so on, we can go into all that but I don't want to go into all that for the moment. So there are many causes. One cause of violence is this self. The self being, it has many aspects, it hides behind many ideas, I am an idealist because that appeals to me and I want to work for that ideal, but in the working for that ideal I am becoming more and more important, or I cover up that by the ideal and the very escape from myself is part of myself - right? This whole movement is the factor of violence. I want to kill others because by killing them there may be a better world - you know all the stuff that goes on. So is there an observation of disorder, seeing the cause of that disorder, and the ending of it without ending of it? You understand my question? Is this clear or not? Perhaps I smoke. It is a habit. A habit which I want to break, I want to break it because I want to be healthy, it is affecting my heart and my brain, my activity and so on and so on, therefore I want to end it. There is a motive behind it - right? I am really not ending it. I substitute smoking for something else, which is habit - right? So is there an ending of habit, an ending of it completely? Not replacing it by something else? Goodness, I have explained it in ten different ways. Is this clear? Can we move away from that? So our life has many causes, the living. Is there a way of living without a single cause? Please enquire into this. It is a marvellous enquiry even, to put that question demands some deep searching to find out. I want security therefore I follow my guru. I am not following, I want security, I may put on his robes or copy what the man says and so on and so on but deeply I want to be safe. And I cling to some idea, some picture, some image. And the image, the idea, the conclusion, the person can never bring about security. So I have to enquire into security. Is there such a thing as security? Not physically, outwardly, there must be outwardly, inwardly I am talking about. Because I am uncertain, confused and you say, you are not confused, I will hold on to you. Because my demand is to find some kind of peace, hope, some kind of quietness in my life. You are not important but my desire is important. I worship you. I will do whatever you want to say, I will follow you. I am silly enough to do all that but the moment I enquire into the cause of it I discover deeply I want this protection, this feeling "I am safe". Now is there security psychologically - or rather can there ever be security psychologically? The very question implies the demand for intelligence. You understand? Putting that very question is an outcome of intelligence. But if you say, "No, there is always security in my symbol, my saviour, in this, in that" - then you won't move away from it. But if you begin to enquire, look, then you are bound to ask is there security? So if there is a cause for security, it is not secure - right? Because the cause is more important than the desire for security. So has intelligence a cause? We have come back to that. Right? Of course not. So has love a cause? Come on, you must answer this question. Look at it sirs, please take time, look at it very closely, let us go into it very carefully. We said intelligence has no cause, therefore it is not your intelligence and my intelligence, it is intelligence. It is light. Where there is light there is no your light or my light; the sun is not your sun or my sun. It is light, the heat, the clarity of light. Has love a cause? If it has not then love and intelligence go together. You follow? You see this? When one says to one's wife or one's girl-friend, "I love you", what does it mean? I love god -one loves god. Why? You don't know anything about that bird and you love him, because there is fear, there is a demand for security, there is the vast weight of tradition, the book says so, it gives you comfort - right? So you say, "I believe in god". But if there is no fear and the discovery that intelligence is total security, and that love is something beyond all causation - you understand? - which is order. And then the universe is open, because the universe is order - right? This is all clear. Let us go into the question of what is intelligent relationship? Not the relationship of thought with its image. We will go into that. We will have to go into this a little more. Our brains are mechanical - right? Mechanical being repetitive, never being free, struggling within the same field, thinking it is free by moving from one corner to the other in the same field, which is choice, and thinking that choice is freedom, which is repeated. "I am free because I can choose to go to Zurich." But if I lived in Russia I cannot. Whatever place I wanted to go to there. Right? So one's brain, which has evolved through time - right? - of course, that brain is not yours or mine, it is brain. Right? And that brain has become through ages, through tradition, through education, through conformity, through adjustment, mechanical. You can observe this in yourself. There may be parts of brain which may be free but we don't know. Don't assert that. Don't say, "Yes, there is part of me that is free", that is meaningless. But the fact remains that the brain has become mechanical, traditional, repetitive which has its own intelligence - right? Isn't it? Do you see that? No? It has - I won't use the word intelligence - it has its own cunningness, its own capacity to adjustment, to discern. But it is always within a limited area because thought itself is fragmented. And thought has its home in the brain, in the cells and so on. So, scientists are saying the same thing in different words. Now, the brain has become mechanical. I am a Christian. I am a Hindu, I believe, I have faith, and I don't have faith, I am not a Christian - you follow? Which is all repetitive process, which is reaction to another reaction, which is mechanical. Now this brain, the human brain, has been conditioned, and being conditioned it has created its own artificial, mechanical intelligence. I will keep that word - mechanical intelligence. Like a computer. They are trying to investigate, spending billions and billions of dollars and money to find out if a computer can be exactly like the brain. Probably they will. So we are asking: is thought, which is born out of my memory, knowledge and so on, in the brain, and so thought is mechanical - right? It may invent but it is still mechanical. Invention is totally different from creation. I mustn't enter into that. So the brain being almost, with an occasional flare, totally different from the mechanical process, but essentially it is repetitive, mechanical. And thought is trying to discover a way of a different life, a different social order. Thought is trying to discover it - right? And the discovery of a social order by thought is still within the field of confusion - right? We are asking then: is there an intelligence which has no cause and therefore from that intelligence act in our relationship, and not the mechanical state of relationship which exists now? Are you all getting tired? (Audience: No.) It is too easy to say you are not tired. Look sirs: our relationship is mechanical. I have certain biological urges and you fulfil them. I demand certain comforts, certain companionship because I am lonely, I am depressed and by holding on to you perhaps that depression will disappear. That is my relationship with you, intimate or otherwise, has a cause, a motive, a ground from which I establish a relationship with you - right? Biological, sex and so on. That is mechanical. This has been happening for a million years, which is, there is a conflict between a woman and a man, a constant battle, each pursuing his own line, never meeting, like two railway lines which never meet. This relationship is the activity of thought and therefore limited. And wherever there is limitation there must be conflict - right? Any form of association, I belong to this group, and you belong to another group - association. You belong to this group - so where there is separate associations there is solitude, isolation, where there is isolation there must be conflict - right? This is a law, not invented by the speaker, it is so. Right? So thought is ever in limitation and therefore isolating itself. Therefore in relationship where there is activity of thought there must be conflict. Get it? No, but see the reality of it. See the actuality of this fact, not as an idea, as a something that is happening in my life, in one's active daily life: divorces, quarrels, hating each other, jealousy. You know all about it. The misery of it all. The wife wants to hurt you, is jealous of you, and you are jealous - you follow? Which are all reactions, which are repetitive and therefore the activity of thought in relationship must be mechanical and therefore brings conflict. Right? That is a fact. Now how do you deal with a fact? Do you understand my question? Here is a fact: my wife and I quarrel. She hates me. And also - you follow? - the response, the mechanical response, the hate. And I discover that it is the remembrance of things that have happened and that memory is stored in the brain, it continues day after day. And my whole thinking is a process of isolation - right? And she also is isolating. We never discover the truth of the isolation. That wherever there is isolation of any kind, putting on purple robes, or green robes - you follow? - must be a factor of isolation, nationalism and so on, and it must breed conflict. Now that is a fact. Now how do I look at that fact? What am I to do with that fact? You understand my question? Please, I am not answering, you are answering, you are questioning it, you are putting this question to yourself. What is your response? How do you face this fact? With a motive? With a cause? Please, be careful, don't say, "No". My wife hates me. And I smother it over but I also hate her, dislike her, don't want to be with her, because we both of us are isolated. That is a fact. I am ambitious, she is ambitious, for something else. So we are operating in our relationship in isolation. Now what happens? I face the fact. You are facing the fact, not I. You are facing the fact. Do you approach it, the fact, with reason, with a ground, with a motive? So how do you approach it? Without a motive? Without cause? When you approach it without a cause what then happens? Please watch it. Please don't jump to something, watch it in yourself. So far I have mechanically approached this problem with a motive, with some reason, a ground from which I act. And I see the foolishness of such an action because it is the result of thought and so on. So then is there an approach to the fact without a single motive? That is, I have no motive. She may have a motive, or I may have a motive and she has not. Then if I have no motive how am I looking at the fact? The fact is not different from me - right? I am the fact. I am ambition, I am hate, I depend and so on, dependent on somebody, I am that. So there is an observation of the fact which is myself. And the observation of the fact, which is myself, without any kind of reason, motive. Is that possible? If I don't do that I live perpetually in conflict. And you may say that is the way of life. If you accept that is the way of life, that is your business. That is your pleasure. That is what your brain, tradition, habit tells you, that is the inevitable. But when you see the absurdity of such acceptance then you are bound to ask this question. All this travail is myself, I am the enemy, not you. I have met the enemy and discovered it is me. So can I observe this whole movement of me, the self, separate, isolated, tradition, the acceptance that I am separate, which becomes foolish when you examine the whole field of consciousness of humanity. I am the entire humanity, which we went into, consciousness, my consciousness is common. So I have come to a point in understanding what is intelligence. We said intelligence is without a cause, as love is without a cause. If love has a cause, it is not love, obviously. If I am intelligent because the government asks me, I am intelligent because I am following you, I am intelligent because I have worked in a factory, I have a great skill. We don't call all that intelligence, that is capacity. Intelligence has no cause. Therefore am I looking at myself with a cause? You understand? Are you following this? An I looking at this fact that I am thinking, working, feeling, in isolation? And that isolation must inevitably breed everlasting conflict. And that isolation is myself. I am the enemy, not the Argentines, or the Russians. I am the enemy. Now how do I look at myself without a motive? When I look at myself without a motive, is there myself? Myself is the cause, the effect, myself is the result of time, which is movement from cause to effect. So when I look at myself, at this fact, without any cause, there is the ending of something and the beginning of something totally new. Right? We had better stop now. BROCKWOOD PARK 3RD PUBLIC TALK 4TH SEPTEMBER 1982 We have got two talks, today and tomorrow morning. I think we ought to talk over together whether it is at all possible to live at peace in this world. Considering what is happening on the earth, where man is living, he has brought about a great deal of chaos -wars and the terrible things that are going on in the world. This is not a pessimistic or optimistic point of view but just looking at the facts as they are. Apparently it is not possible to have peace on this earth, to live with friendship, with affection, with each other in our lives. And to live at peace, to have some peace with oneself and the world, one needs to have a great deal of intelligence. Not just the word peace and strive to live a peaceful life, which then becomes merely a rather vegetating life, but to enquire whether it is possible to live in this world where there is such disorder, such unrighteousness - if we can use the old fashioned word - whether one can live at all with a certain quality of a mind and a heart that is at peace with itself. Not everlastingly striving, striving in conflict, in competition, in imitation and conformity but to live not, a satisfied life, not a fulfilled life, not a life that has achieved some result in this life, some fame or some notoriety, or some wealth but to have a quality of peace. We ought to talk about it together. We ought to go into it co-operatively to find out if it is at all possible for us to have such peace, not peace of mind, that just will be a piece, a small part, but to have this peculiar quality of undisturbed but tremendously alive, undisturbed, tranquil, quiet, with a sense of dignity, without any sense of vulgarity, whether one can live such a life. I do not know if one has asked such a question, surrounded by total disorder. I think one must be very clear about that: there is total disorder outwardly, every morning you read a newspaper there is something terrible. Aeroplanes that can travel at such astonishing speed from one corner of the earth to the other without having to refuel, carrying great weight of bombs, gases that can destroy man in a few seconds. To observe all this and to realize what man has come to, and in asking this question you may say that is impossible. It is not at all possible to live in this world utterly, inwardly undisturbed, to have no problems, to live a life utterly not self centred. How shall we talk about this? Talking, using words, has very little meaning but to find out through the words, through communicating with each other, to find or discover, or come upon, a state that is utterly still. That requires intelligence, not a phantasy, not some peculiar day dreaming called meditation, not some form of self hypnosis but to come upon it, as we said, requires intelligence. So we have to ask: what is intelligence? As we said the other day, to perceive that which is illusory, that which is false, not actual, and to discard it, not merely assert that is false and continue in the same way, but to discard it completely. That is part of intelligence. To see, for example, nationalism, with all its peculiar patriotism, isolation, narrowness, is very destructive in this world, it is a poison in the world, and seeing the truth of it is to discard that which is false. That is intelligence. But to keep on with it, acknowledging it is stupid but keep on, that is essentially part of stupidity and disorder. It creates disorder. So intelligence is, is it not, we are talking over together, I am not saying it is, or it is not, we are investigating very seriously into this question: what is intelligence which alone can bring about in one's life complete order and peace? And we said that can come about only when there is this extraordinary quality of intelligence. And intelligence is not the clever pursuit of argument, of opposing knowledge, contradictory opinions and through opinions find truth, which is impossible but to realize that the activity of thought, with all its capacities, with all its subtleties, is an extraordinary waste of thought. It is not intelligence. Intelligence is beyond thought. Please don't agree with the speaker. We are looking at it, going into it. So one has to find out in order to live peacefully what is disorder? Why we human beings, who are supposed to be extraordinarily evolved, which I doubt, extraordinary capable in certain directions, why they live and tolerate disorder in their daily life. If we can discover the root of this disorder, the cause, and observe it carefully, that very observation of that which is the cause, in that observation there is the awakening of intelligence. Not that there should be order and striving to bring about order. That is, a confused disorderly mind, brain or activity of one's life, that disorder, that state of mind which is contradictory, opposing, such a mind seeking order will still be disorder. I don't know if we comprehend it? I am confused, uncertain, going from one thing to another, burdened with many problems, such a life, such a mind, such a way of living, from there I want order. Then my order is born out of my confusion, and therefore it is still confused. I don't know if we see this? Right? When I chose order out of disorder, the choice is still based on disorder. When this is clear, then what is disorder, the cause of it? As we said, it has many causes, the desire to fulfil, the anxiety of not fulfilling, the contradictory life one lives, saying one thing, doing totally different things, trying to suppress and to achieve something. These are all contradictions in oneself. And one can find out many causes but the pursuit of searching, of search of causes is endless. Whereas if we could ask ourselves: is there one cause out of all these many causes, is there one root cause? Obviously there must be. And we are saying that the root cause of this is the self, the me, the ego, the personality, which in itself is put together by thought, by memory, by various experiences, by certain words, certain qualities and so on. That feeling of separateness, isolation, that is the root cause of this disorder. However that self tries not to be self it is still the pursuit of the self - right? The self may identify with the nation, that very identification with the larger is still glorified self. And each one of us is doing that in different ways. So there is the self, which is put together by thought, that is the root cause of this total disorder in which we live. If you say it is impossible to get rid of the self, that is a wrong question. But when we observe what causes disorder, and as one has become so accustomed to disorder, one has lived in such disorder, we accept it as natural but when we begin to question it and go into it, and see that is the root of it, to observe it, not to do anything about it, then by that very observation begins to dissolve the centre which is the cause of disorder. Right? Are we following all this together? And we said intelligence is the perception of that which is true, putting aside totally that which is false, and seeing the truth in the false, and realizing all the activities of thought is not intelligence because thought itself is the outcome of knowledge, which is the result of experience, as memory and the response of that memory is thought. And so knowledge is always limited. That is obvious. There is no perfect knowledge. So thought, with all its activity and with its knowledge is not intelligence. Right? So what we are asking is: what place has knowledge in life? Because all our life is based on thought. Whatever we do is based on thought. That is clear. All our activities are based on thought, our relationship is based on thought. Our inventions, the technological and the non-technological is still the activity of thought. The gods we have created, and the rituals, the mass and the whole circus of all that is the product of thought. So what place has knowledge in the degeneration of man? Please you must go into this. You must ask this question. Can we proceed? We have accumulated immense knowledge, in the world of science, psychology, biology, mathematics and so on and so on, a great deal of knowledge. And we think through knowledge we will ascend, we will liberate ourselves, we will transform ourselves. And we are questioning what is the place of knowledge in life? Has knowledge transformed us, made us good? - again, an old fashioned word. Has it given us integrity? Is it part of justice? Has it given us freedom? Of course it has given us freedom in the sense that we can travel, communicate from one country to another. It is all based on knowledge and thought. Better communication, better systems of learning and so on, the computer and the atom bomb. All that is the result of a great deal of accumulated knowledge. And has this knowledge given us freedom, a life that is just, a life that is essentially good? So we are again examining those three words: freedom, justice and goodness. This has been one of the problems, those three words, in the ancient people who have always struggled to find out if you can live a life that is just. That word 'just' means to be righteous, to have righteousness, to act benevolently, to act with generosity, not deal with hatreds, antagonisms. You know what it means to lead a just, a right kind of life? Not according to a pattern, not according to some fanciful projected ideals by thought, but a life that has great affection, a life that is just, true, accurate. And in this world there is no justice. You are clever, I am not. You have power, I haven't. You can travel all over the world, meet all the prominent people, and I live in a little town, work day after day, live in a small room. Where is there justice there? And is justice to be found in external activities? That is, you may become the prime minister, the president, the head of a big intercontinental business, great corporations. I may be for ever a clerk, way down below, a soldier. So do we seek justice out there, which is, we are trying to bring about an egalitarian state, all over the world they are trying it, thinking that will bring about justice. Or justice is to be found away from all that. Please when I am asking, you are asking this question, not the speaker. The speaker is only putting into words that which we are enquiring into. Justice involves a certain integrity, to be whole, integral, not broken up, not fragmented, which can only take place when there is no comparison. But we are always comparing, better cars, better houses, better position, better power and so on. That is measurement. Where there is measurement there cannot be justice. You are following all this? Please see it. Where there is imitation, conformity, there cannot be justice, following somebody. We listen to these words, we don't see the beauty, the quality, the depth of these things, and we may superficially agree and walk away from it. But the words, the comprehension of the depth of it must leave a mark, a seed, justice must be in there, in us. And also the word 'goodness', it is a very old fashioned word. One hardly ever uses that word any more. The other day we were talking to some psychologist, fairly well known and one used that word. He was horrified! He said, "That is an old fashioned word, don't use that word." But one likes that good word. So what is goodness? It is not the opposite of that which is bad. If it is the opposite of that which is bad then goodness has its roots in badness. I don't know if one realizes this. Anything that has an opposite must have its roots in its own opposite - right? So goodness is not related to that which we consider bad. It is totally divorced from the other. So we must look at it as it is, not in a reaction to the opposite, as a reaction to the opposite. Right? Goodness implies a quality of deep integrity. Integrity is to be whole, not broken up, not inwardly fragmented. And goodness also means a way of life which is righteous, not in terms of church, or morality or ethical concept of righteousness, but a person who sees that which is true and that which is false, and sustains that quality of sensitivity that sees it immediately and acts. And the word 'freedom' is a very complex word. When there is freedom there is justice, there is goodness. So we have to enquire together what is freedom? Please sirs, we are going together in this, not just you are listening to the speaker. If you are merely listening to the speaker and getting some ideas out of it - I hope you are not - if you are merely listening to it then it becomes another lecture, another sermon and one is fed up with all that kind of stuff. Why don't you just go to church? But if the words ring a bell, if the words awaken the depth of that word, if the word opens up a door through which you see the enormity of that word, not, "I want to be free from my anger" - that is all rather... or "I have a headache and I must be free from it". or I have a relationship which is rather tiresome, boring and I want to get a divorce. Freedom for us has been the capacity to choose. Because one chooses one thinks one is free - right? That is so. Because you can choose to go abroad, you can choose your work, you can choose what you want to do, but in the Totalitarian world you cannot do all that. There they stamp it all down, they want you to conform, obey, follow. In the so-called Democratic world there is still the choice of so-called freedom. Where there is choice, is there freedom? Please go into it. Who chooses? And why does one have to choose? When one is very clear in one's capacity to think objectively, impersonally, not sentimentally, very precise, there is no need for choice, when there is freedom. That is, when there is no confusion then there is no choice. It is only a confused mind that chooses. This is so. Look at yourself. When you choose between two parliamentarians, you don't know for whom to vote, so you choose one whom you like, who sounds rather good verbally, but you know all that game. So what is freedom? Freedom is not the opposite of imprisonment - right? Then again it becomes a totally different kind of escape. So freedom is not escape from anything. That means a brain that has been conditioned by knowledge, knowledge is always limited and therefore always living within the field of ignorance, such brains which is the machinery of thought, through thought there can be no freedom. I wonder if we understand all this? That is, we all live with a certain kind of fear - fear of tomorrow, fear of things that have happened in many yesterdays. And we seek freedom from that fear. So freedom has a cause. That is, "I am afraid", I have found the cause of that fear and now I have got rid of that fear, therefore I am free. Where there is a cause the effect can end, like a disease, if one has, and the enquiry into that disease and the cause of that disease, then that disease can be cured. So if we think in terms of causation and freedom, then that freedom is not freedom at all. Freedom implies not just in a certain period of one's life but freedom right through one's life, and therefore freedom has no cause. Are you following this? Now with all this being stated let's look at the cause of sorrow and whether that cause can ever end. Because man, all of us, have suffered in one way or another, through deaths, through lack of love, or having love for another and not receiving in return, sorrow has many, many faces. And man has tried to escape from sorrow, from the ancient of times. And we still live after all these million years, we still live with sorrow. Man has shed, or woman too, man has shed untold tears. There have been wars which have brought such agony to human beings, great anxiety and apparently we have not been able to be free from that sorrow. This is not a rhetorical question but is it possible for a human brain, human mind, human being, to be totally free from the anxiety of sorrow and all the human travail with regard to it? So let's go together, walk along the same path to find out. Along the same road, let's walk together to see if we can in our daily life end this terrible burden which man has carried from the time he has lived until now. How do you approach such a question? We are asking, the question is: the ending of sorrow. How do you approach it? What is your reaction to that question? What is the state of your mind, your quality when a question of that kind is put to us? My son is dead, my husband is gone, I have friends who have betrayed me, I have followed and it has been fruitless after twenty years. Sorrow has such a great beauty and pain in it. Now how does each one of us react to that question? Do we say, "I don't want even to look at it. I have suffered, it is the lot of man, I rationalize it and accept it and go on." That is one way of dealing with it. But you haven't solved the problem. Or you transmit that sorrow to a symbol, and worship that symbol, as is done in Christianity. Or as the ancient Hindus have done, it is your lot, your karma. Or in the modern world you say your parents are responsible for it, or your society, or you inherited genetically some kind of genes and you have to suffer for it, and so on. There have been a thousand explanations. But these explanations have not resolved the ache and the pain of sorrow. So how do I approach this question? Do we want to look at it face to face? Or casually? Or with trepidation? How do I approach such a problem. Approach means come near to the problem, very near. That is, is sorrow different from the observer who says, "I am in sorrow." When he says, "I am in sorrow" he has separated himself from that feeling, so he has not approached it at all. He has not touched it. So can we not avoid it, not transmit it, not escape from it, but come with such closeness to it, which means, I am sorrow? Is that so? Like I am anger. I am envy. But I have also invented an idea of non-envy. That invention has postponed, put it off further but the fact is I am envy, I am sorrow. Do you realize what that means? Not somebody has caused me sorrow, not my son is dead therefore I shed tears. I will shed tears for my son, for my wife, for whoever it is, but that is an outward expression of that pain of loss. That loss is the result of my dependence on that person, my attachment, my clinging to it, my feeling I am lost without him. So as usual we try to act upon the symptoms, we never go to the very root of this enormous problem which is sorrow. So we are not talking about the outward effects of sorrow. If you are you can take a drug and pacify yourself very quietly, or take a pill and pass off for the rest of your life - not for the rest of your life, you can end it. But we are trying together to find for ourselves, not be told and then accept, but actually find for ourselves the root of it. Is it time that causes pain? Time not by the watch, or by the day, or sun rise, sunset, but the time that thought has invented in the psychological realms? You understand my question? Questioner: What do you mean by psychological time? K: I will explain sir, have a little patience. We are asking a very serious question. You are not asking me what is psychological time. You are asking that question yourself. Perhaps the speaker may prompt you, put it into words but it is your own question. I have had a son, a brother, a wife, father, whatever it is, mother, and I have lost. They are gone. They can never return. They are wiped away from the face of the earth. Of course I can invent they are living on other planes, you know all that. But I have lost them, there is a photograph on the piano, or the mantelpiece. My remembrance of them is time. How they loved me, how I loved them. What a help they were. And they helped to cover up my loneliness. And the remembrance of them is a movement of time. They were there yesterday and gone today. That is, the record has taken place in the brain - you understand? A remembrance is a recording on the tape of the brain - right? And that record is playing all the time. How I walked with them in the woods, my sexual remembrances, their companionship, the comfort I derived from them, all that is gone and the recording is going on. And this recording is memory, memory is time. Please listen to this, if you are interested, go into it very deeply. If you are interested, I am not asking you to. I have lived with my brother, my son, I have had happy days with them, enjoyed many things together but they are gone. And the memory of them remains. It is that memory that is causing pain, for which I am shedding tears in my loneliness. Now is it - please find out - is it possible not to record? This is a very serious question. I have enjoyed the sun yesterday morning early, so clear, so beautiful among the trees, casting a golden light on the lawn with long shadows. It has been a pleasant, lovely morning. And it has been recorded. And I have enjoyed the morning. How beautiful it was. Now the repetition begins. You understand? I have recorded that which has happened which caused me delight and that record, like a gramophone or tape recorder, it is repeated. That is the essence of time. And is it possible not to record at all? That sunrise of yesterday, look at it, give your whole attention to it, and not record it, it has gone, that moment of light, that golden light on the lawn with long shadows is gone, but the memory of it remains. Look at it and not record. The very attention of looking wipes away recording. So we are asking is time the root of sorrow? Is thought the root of sorrow? Of course. So thought and time are the centre of my life right? I live on that. And when something happens which is so drastically painful, I return to that pattern, to those memories and I shed tears. I wish he had been here to enjoy that sun when I was looking at it. Don't you know all this? It is the same with all our sexual memories, building a picture, thinking about it. All that is part of time and thought. If you ask how it is possible for time and thought inwardly to stop - again that is a wrong question. But when one realizes the truth of this, not the truth of another but your own observation of that truth, your own clarity of perception, will that end sorrow? That is, part of sorrow is my loneliness. I may be married, have children, responsibilities, belong to a club, play golf and all the rest of it, if one is lucky. And there I must record, recording there is knowledge, I must have knowledge. But that sunrise in the cloudless sky and the blue, and the shadows, numberless - I am not quoting Keats! - what need there be to record that? It is ended. So to find out how to live a life without psychological recording do you understand? To give such tremendous attention. It is only where there is inattention there is recording. I am used to my brother, to my son, to my wife, to my mother. I know what they will say. They have said so often the same thing. They have repeated, they have scolded. I know them. When I say "I know them" I am inattentive. When I say, "I know my wife", obviously I don't really know her because a living thing you cannot possibly know. It is only a dead thing that you can know. That is the dead memory that you know. So when one is aware of this with great attention, sorrow has totally a different meaning. There is nothing to learn from sorrow. There is only the ending of sorrow. And when there is an ending of sorrow then there is love. How can I love another, have the quality of that love, when my whole life is based on memories, on that picture which I have hung on the mantelpiece, put up on the piano, how can I love when I am caught in a vast structure of memories? So the ending of sorrow is the beginning of love. Tomorrow I think we ought to talk over together the nature of death and meditation. That is enough for this morning. May I repeat a story? A teacher, a religious teacher, had several disciples and used to talk to them every morning, about the nature of goodness, beauty, love. And one morning he gets on the rostrum and as he is just about to begin talking a singing bird comes, alights on the window sill and begins to sing, chant. And he sings for a while and disappears. So the teacher says, "The sermon for this morning is over." May I get up please? NEW DELHI 3RD PUBLIC TALK 6TH NOVEMBER, 1982 If one may point out that we are probing together, questioning together, doubting, asking, and this is not a lecture. We are together enquiring, taking a walk together into the whole field of existence, not dealing with a particular problem but the problem of man, the problem of human beings. And one of the factors in our existence is that we live in disorder. And apparently after thirty, forty thousand years or more we have not been able to live in total order, like the universe which is in complete order, absolute order, not relative order, but order that under all circumstances, wherever we live, socially, politically, and so on, to have within oneself order. And we are going to probe into that question, together. Please bear in mind, if I may repeat again and again, the person, the speaker, is in no way important. The personality of the speaker has no place in this whatsoever. But what is important is that we, you and I, the speaker, should unfold the causes of disorder, not merely listen to the explanation or the description which the speaker might offer, but together think, observe, go into ourselves, not in any way selfishly, or self-centredly, egotistically, but to look at our lives, to look what we have made of the world, why man, the human being, lives in perpetual disorder outwardly and inwardly. One may like to live in disorder, then that's quite a different matter, but to enquire if it is possible to live inwardly first, then outwardly, not the other way round, but first inwardly, deep within ourselves, if we can live in complete order. And also we should be able to discuss, talk over together this evening, the problem of suffering, and this enormous mystery of death, because we have only one more gathering here. After tomorrow we disperse, so if we have time this evening we will talk about all these things. Beauty is complete order. But most of us have not that sense of beauty in our life. We may be great artists, great painters, expert in various things, but in our own daily life, with all the anxieties and miseries, we live, unfortunately, a very disordered life. That's a fact. Even the great scientists, they may be very good, expert in their subject, but they have their own problems, struggles, pain, anxiety, like the rest of us. So we are asking together, is it possible to live in complete order within. Not imposed, disciplined, controlled, but to enquire into the nature of this disorder, what are the causes of it, and to dispel, move away, wash away the causes, then there is a living order like the universe. Order is not a blueprint, a following of a particular pattern of life, or following certain systems, blindly or openly, but to enquire into ourselves and discover for ourselves, not be told, not to be guided, but to unfold in ourselves the real causes of this disorder. So, please, this is a talk between you and the speaker, an exchange. We can't exchange with words with so many people, but we can each one of us think together. Not think according to my way or your way, but the capacity to think clearly, objectively, nonpersonally so that we both are capable of meeting each other so that we can communicate with each other happily, easily, with some sense of affection and beauty. So we are asking, you and the speaker, are asking what are the causes of this chaos, not only in the world outside of us, which is the result of our own inward psychological mess, confusion, disorder, which has produced disorder outwardly, what are the causes of it. Would you consider desire is one of the factors? We are going to go into this: desire, fear, pleasure and thought. We will go into it step by step, slowly, we will take time. So we have to enquire closely and rather hesitantly, is desire one of the factors. So we are asking, what is desire. For most of us desire is a potent factor, desire drives us, desire brings about a sense of happiness or disaster. Desire varies in its search, desire changes with the objects of its desire. You are following all this, I hope. So we have to think together. Is desire one of the causes? And what is desire? Why is it that all religions, all so-called religious people have suppressed desire? All over the world the monks and the sannyasis have denied desire, though they are boiling inside the fire of desire is burning, they deny it by suppressing it, or identifying with a symbol, with a figure, and surrendering that desire to that figure, to that person, but it is still desire. I hope you are all following all this. And most of us have, when we become aware of our desires, either we suppress or indulge, or come into conflict with it - desire for this and desire not to have it. The battle that goes on with all of us when there is the drive of desire. So we should together happily, if we can, easily enquire into the nature of desire. We are not advocating either to suppress it or to surrender to it, or to control it, that has been done all over the world by every religious person, you know, all the rest of it. So we are examining it very closely so that your own understanding of that desire, how it arises, its nature, out of that understanding, self- awareness of it, one becomes intelligent. Then that intelligence acts, not desire. So we are going to go into this carefully. First of all are we aware, each one of us, as two people talking together, of the extraordinary power of desire - desire for power, desire for certainty, desire for god - if you like that kind of stuff -desire for enlightenment, desire to follow some system. Desire has so many aspects, it is as intricate as the weaving of a great master weaver. So one has to look at it very, very simply, and then the complexity arises. But if you start with complexity then you will not go any further. You understand? If you start simply then you can go very far. So we are looking at it, at the root and the beginning of desire. Have you ever noticed how our senses operate? Does one become aware of our senses - not a particular sense by the totality of the senses? You understand my question? Senses, the feeling, the tasting, the hearing, to have all those senses in operation fully. And when all your senses are active, functioning, have you ever looked at a tree in that way, have you ever looked at the sea, the mountains, the hills and the valleys with all your senses? Do you understand my question? If you do then there is no centre from which you are looking at things. The whole of your sensory reactions are complete, not controlled, shaped, suppressed. Unless you understand this very clearly it is a dangerous thing to say this because for most of us our senses are partial, either we have very good taste for clothes and rotten taste for furniture. You know all this. So our senses are limited, as we now live. Nobody, no religious or other philosophers have said this: unless you allow all the senses to flower and with their flowering perceive the beauty of the world. Then one of the causes of desire is disorder. I am going to go into it - we are going to go into it very carefully. Up to now it is clear, is it, we are together in this. What is desire? What is the cause of it, how does it arise? It doesn't arise by itself. It arises through sensation, through contact, through seeing something, seeing a man or a woman, seeing a dress in the window, seeing a beautiful garden with the great hills, there is immediate sensation. That's clear. Then what happens? It is natural, healthy to have such sensation, such response. Then what takes place? I see a beautiful -what would you like? - a beautiful woman, a beautiful man, a beautiful house, a beautiful dress - I see it - a beautiful shirt, made most delicately. I go inside and touch the material: seeing, then contact, from that contact sensation. Right? Then - please listen to this - then what happens? Enquire with me. We are enquiring, please enquire. You have touched the shirt, you have the sensation, of its quality, its colour. Up to now there has been no desire. There has been only sensation. Right? Then what happens? Now, you are waiting for me to tell you. Please look at it carefully - don't answer me - please look at it for yourself. Because you see unless you discover this with your heart and mind it is not yours, you just repeat what somebody has said. That's what is destroying this country. You all quote other people - the Gita, the Upanishads or some other book. I was going to say, 'rotten book'. And you repeat, but you never discover, it's never yours, it's somebody else's, therefore you become secondhand human beings. Whereas if you discover it yourself it is an extraordinary freedom that comes. So we are asking when the senses discover a nice dress, shirt, or a car, then what takes place? You have touched that shirt or dress, then thought - please listen - then thought creates the image of you in that shirt, in the car, in that dress; when thought creates that image that is the moment desire is born. You are following all this? You are following all this, sirs? I am not telling you, you are discovering it. That is, desire begins when thought creates the image. I see a beautiful violin, a Stradivarius, I want to have that, the beauty of that sound that the violin makes, I would like to possess it. I look at it, touch it, the sense of that old structure and I would like to have it. That is, the moment thought enters into the field of sensation, creates the image then desire begins. Now the question then is - please listen to it - whether there can be a hiatus, that is, the sensation and not let thought come and control the sensation. That's a problem. You understand? Not the suppressing of desire. Why has thought created the image and holds that sensation? You understand? Is it possible to look at that shirt, touch it, sensation and stop, not for thought to enter into it? Have you ever tried any of this? No, I'm afraid you haven't. When thought enters into the field of sensation - and thought is also a sensation, which we will go into presently - when thought takes control of sensation then desire begins. And is it possible to only observe, contact, sensation, and nothing else? You understand my question? If you put that question to yourself and discover that discipline has no place in this, because the moment when you begin to discipline that's another form of desire to achieve something. You are following all this? So one has to discover the beginning of desire. And see what happens. Don't buy the shirt immediately, or the dress, but see what happens. You can look at it, but we are so eager to get something, to possess something, the shirt, the man or a woman or some status, we are so eager. We have never time, quietness to look at all this. So desire is one of the factors of our disorder. We have been trained either to control, suppress, change desire, the object of desire. But we have never looked at the movement, the flowering of desire. So that's one of the causes of our disorder in life. Please bear in mind we are not trying to control desire, that's been tried by all the so-called saints and all the rest of it, nor indulge in desire, but to understand it, like looking at a flower, how it grows. You understand all this. Are you all asleep? Then is fear one of the causes of disorder? Obviously. Fear: fear of failure, fear of not being able to fulfil, fear of losing, fear of not gaining. We have every kind of fear - fear of the guru. Have you ever noticed how you crawl in front of a guru? You kind of become, I don't know, inhuman, you are afraid, you want something from him, so you worship him, and in the worship there is fear. So there are multiple forms of fear. We are not taking one particular form. We are asking what is the root of fear, if we can discover the root of fear then the whole tree is dead. You understand? But if I am concerned with my particular little fear of darkness, or of my husband, or something or other, my brain is not involved in the discover of the whole root of it. This is clear, so we can go on. So what is the root of fear? How does it arise? It's a very complex problem. And every complex problem must be approached very simply, the simpler the better. The simpler means, I don't know how to deal with the root of fear, I don't know. Then you begin to discover. But if you have already come to a conclusion, the root of fear is this, this, that, then you never discover what the root is - but if you approach fear very simply, the trunk and the root of fear, not the branches. So we are asking what is the cause, or the causation of fear. Would you say time is a factor of fear - Time. That is, I am living, I might die tomorrow, which is time. Time to go from here to your house, that requires time. So there are only two kinds of time, time by the sunrise and sunset, time by the watch, time by the distance you have to cover, time, that is, physical time. Right? Is that clear? That is, time by the watch, by the sunrise and sunset, darkness and dawn. That's physical time. There is the other time which is psychological, inward: I am this but I will be that. I am violent, but I am practising non-violence, which is nonsense. I am brutal but give me time I will get over it. So there is psychological time. You understand this? I hope I will meet my friend tomorrow, hope implies time. You understand all this? Are we thinking together? There is time by the watch, time, psychological becoming, climbing the ladder of becoming. That is, creating an ideal, and then try to reach that ideal. You understand this? Of course. All that implies psychological time. Right? Is this clear? I am this, but tomorrow I will be different. I haven't reached the position of power, but give me time I will get it. So one of the factors of fear is time: I am living but I might die in a week's time. Right, is this clear? So what is time? Am I making this complex? Are you following all this? So we must ask, what is time, not by the watch, but time that we have - I hope, I will, which is measurement. You are following all this? You understand? Hope implies measurement. Now time is a movement, isn't it. Are you following all this? Does it interest you, all this? Because we will come to a point presently when you begin to understand that there can be an end to fear, completely, inwardly. Begin always inwardly, but not outwardly. That there is a possibility of being totally free from fear. And to find that out one must begin to enquire. So we say desire is one of the factors of disorder, fear is one of the factors, fear is time, isn't it. Are you quite sure you understand this because otherwise we can't go further. Time is a movement from one point to another point, both physically and psychologically. Right? I need time to learn a language, it may take me a month, or two moths, or three months, to go from here to London takes time, to drive a car I need time. So - please watch this in yourself - we need time there so we use that time to become something inwardly. You understand? We have moved over from the physical fact of learning a language and I also say to myself, as I need time there I need time also to evolve, to become, to be less violent. Right? You understand this question? I need time to learn a language, and also I think I need time to get over violence, to bring about peace in the world. So that is a movement in measurement. Right? I wonder if you understand all this. So what is movement, which is thought. Right? You are following all this? Thought is a movement, and thought has created time, not to learn a language, but to become something. Right? That is, I want to change 'what is', and to change that I need time, as I need time to learn a language. You have understood this? Gosh, are you all asleep? So time - desire, time, thought, are the factors which bring about fear. I have done this something wrong two years ago, and it has caused pain, and I hope I will - hope - I will not do the same thing again. You understand this? Clear? So desire, time, thought. Now what is thought? The whole world is moving in the realm of thought, all the technological world with all its extraordinary complexity is brought about by thought. Right? They have built the most extraordinary complicated machines, like the computer, like the jet, and so on, it's all put together by thought. Right? All the great cathedrals are put together by thought, all the temples, and all the things that are in the temples, in the cathedrals are put together by thought. The rituals are invented by thought. Right? The guru is invented by thought. Right? You are a Sikh and I am not, but when you say, 'I am a Sikh' it is thought conditioning itself as a Sikh and operating there. So thought has become the most important factor in our life. In our relationship thought dominates. I don't know if you have noticed all this. Thought has created the problems of war. Right? And thought then says, I must have peace also - which is contradiction. You understand? So we must understand why thought has become so extraordinarily important in the world. And that's the only instrument we have, at least we think we have. Right? Are we together so far? Yes sir? Q: I understand. K: Good luck to you! So what is thought? What is the origin and the beginning of thought? And why man so depends on thought, all the great intellectuals, great scientists, great philosophers, all the books that have been written are all the results, whether it is the Bible, the Koran, or your Upanishads and so on, even Marx, are based on thought. And thought - what is thought, by which we live? Now we will explain it, but you are discovering it, I am not telling you, so don't wait to be told, for god's sake, don't wait, then you become worthless human beings. So is there thought without knowledge? You understand my question? What is knowledge? There are really several kinds of knowledge but we will take two. Knowledge you have by going to a school, college, university, or becoming an apprentice, and gradually accumulating skill. If I want to be a carpenter I must learn the grain of the wood, what kind of wood and so on, the instrument I use, I must learn, acquire a great deal of knowledge. Are you following all this? If I want to be a scientist I must have tremendous knowledge. Right? Knowledge is born of experience. Right? One scientist makes an experience, that is, discovers something, another scientist adds to it, or detracts from it, so there is a gradual accumulation of knowledge. Right? Now is knowledge complete? Or is knowledge always limited? You understand my question? Please answer yourself. Can the human thought, which is born of knowledge, can that knowledge be total, complete about everything? Of course not. Right? Knowledge can never be complete about anything. So knowledge is always limited. The master weavers of this country, they produce the most marvellous things but they are learning, adding, learning. So knowledge is always limited. The Gita, the Upanishads, the Bible, they are all the knowledge of history that people have written and so on. That's irrelevant. So knowledge, whether it is given by a saint, by a politician, by a philosopher, is limited. So don't worship knowledge. So if it is limited, as it is, then knowledge always lives with ignorance. You follow all this? So thought is born out of knowledge. Right? That is, I experience a motor accident, and it is recorded in the brain as painful, or whatever it is, and that memory, that experience is stored in the brain as memory, and next time I drive I am jolly careful. Right? That is, experience, knowledge, from that experience, stored in the brain as memory, and from that memory, thought. If there is no memory at all, what happens? You follow, you are in a state of amnesia. You understand? So thought is always limited. Right? There is no supreme thought, noble thought, or ignoble thought, it is limited, and because it is limited whatever it does must produce conflict in human relationship. You understand this? Are you working as hard as the speaker is doing, or are you just listening casually? If you understand the very complexity of thought, the delicacy of thought, the extraordinary capacity of thought - capacity of thought in one direction. Look what thought has done technologically. Have you ever looked at any marvellous machinery, a dynamo, a piston engine, the jet? Technologically we are progressing with lightening speed because partly we want to kill each other. So thought has created wars, thought has created the instruments of war, thought has also created all the extraordinary good things of life - sanitation, health, surgery, communication and so on. Thought is responsible for all this, but also thought has created problems. Right? So we are asking if thought is the only instrument we have, and that instrument is becoming blunt and creating problems, and the problems it has created are being solved by thought. You understand? Therefore it creates more problems. You understand all this? So we are asking - I don't know if you will understand this - we are asking if there is another kind of instrument which is not thought? You understand my question? Thought is limited, and thought is not your thought or my thought, it is thought, it is not individual thinking, it is thinking, whether you are rich, a great scholar, or poor village person who doesn't know how to read a book, how to read or write, but he still thinks. So now we see that disorder in our life, at whatever level we live, you may have the greatest power on earth as a politician, as a guru, they live in disorder inwardly, and therefore whatever they touch they bring disorder. You see that all over the country politically. And the many factors of disorder are desire - we went into it carefully - time, and thought. And if you exercise thought to create order you are still creating disorder. Is this clear? I wonder if you understand all this? Our whole life is based on discipline, like soldiers which are disciplined day after day, month after month, we discipline ourselves to do this and not to do that. The word 'discipline', the root of it, is to learn, not from somebody, to learn from oneself, one's own reactions, one's own observation, one's own activities and behaviour. But discipline never brings about intelligence. What brings about intelligence is observation and being free from fear - being free from. Now understanding the nature of desire, for example, if you understand it, see its nature and its structure, its vitality and find out for yourself the sensation and when thought enters into it, when you become aware of that, you are beginning to have intelligence, which is not your intelligence or my intelligence, it is intelligence. So is it possible after listening to this talk, both of us, is it possible to be free of fear, which is a tremendous burden on humanity? Now you have listened to it, are you free from it? If you are honest you are not, why? Go on, enquire, why. Because you have not really investigated, gone into it step by step, and said, let's find out, put your passion, your guts, your vitality into it, not accept it. You haven't done that, you have just listened casually, you haven't said, look, I am afraid of my husband, my wife, whatever it is you are afraid of. Look at it, bring it out and look at it. But we are afraid to look at it, and so we live with it, like some horrible disease, we live with fear. And that's causing disorder. If you see that you are already operating from intelligence. It is now nearly seven o'clock, shall we have time to enquire further into what is suffering, what is love, what is compassion, and also we ought to enquire into what is death. Q: How can we achieve thoughtlessness? K: How to achieve thoughtlessness - you have achieved it! You have perfectly achieved it, you have become machines, you never think properly, you have never gone into it. And you want to find out how to be still further asleep, how to be really thoughtless which is a wrong question. If you understand the nature of thought, the intricacies, the subtleties, the beauty of thought, from that understanding, the unfolding of a flower, nothing matters then. You don't say, how am I to gain this or that, it is unfolding, like a flower and you see the beauty of it. Do you see the beauty of a flower, of the mountain, of a full moon on a leaf, the light, silver, on a piece of rock? So one has also to enquire, what is beauty - not in a painting or something, beauty in our life. There are too many things to talk about. We haven't touched sorrow and the ending of that burden, putting away sorrow altogether, then only you have compassion. If you suffer, if you have pain of anxiety, ambition and so on, you don't know what love is. But you want to be ambitious, you want to have power, position, better house, better cars, better, better, better. Have you ever understood that a man who is ambitious has no love in his heart. How can he? And we are all very ambitious, to achieve nirvana, or to become the bank manager. Both the same thing. You understand? To reach nirvana, or moksha, heaven, is the same as becoming manager of a bank, because both are ambitious. So to live a life of intelligence which means no ambition, but yet be tremendously active. You people don't know anything about all this. So, sir, we have to talk over together the ending of sorrow, what are the implications of death, and what is religion. Without religion you cannot create a new structure, a new society, but what we have as religion is utter nonsense, meaningless nonsense in our life. We repeat some shloka, or whatever you do, that's not religion; reading the Gita everyday until you die is not religion, or quoting some book is not religion, or following a guru is not religion, or doing some rituals day after day, day after day. So we have to enquire into the depth of that word because a new culture, a new civilization can be born only out of a really true religion, not all this paraphernalia that goes on in the name of religion. So I don't know when we are going to do it. Q: (Inaudible) K: You see how angry we get. Q: What is the real meaning of life? K: No, sir, please listen, sir, just listen. How angry you get, how defensive you get, you don't even look at your repetitions, or whatever you repeat, you don't say, why am I doing this, what is the reason, what lies behind all this. You follow tradition and therefore you think that is religion. You know in India somebody calculated three hundred thousand gods. It is perhaps better than having one god, you can choose anything you like. But god - the worship of god, or saying, 'I believe in god', is not religion. Religion is something entirely different. To have a religious life means to have compassion, love, the ending of sorrow, to find right relationship with each other, but you are not interested in all that. Really you are not deeply, profoundly, passionately interested in order to find out. What most people want is not to be disturbed with their own particular pattern, way of life. And you get angry, or violent, when you say, look, just look at what you are doing. Have you ever noticed the totalitarian states, what they are doing: anybody who dissents, disagrees, is sent to somewhere or other. You do exactly the same thing. So please consider, give your energy, your capacity to find out if there is a different way of living on this earth. So perhaps when we meet tomorrow... Q: One question. Q: I have one too. K: He is the first! Q: My question is I don't think it is possible for a human being to live without desire, fear... K: Sir, I have understood. Have it your own way, sir. You have said it is not possible, I never said live without desire, I never said it. I have said understand desire, look into the nature of desire, explore, probe into this urge of desire. And you translate it as, 'to live without desire'. I never said that. You were going to say something, sir? Q: Why should tradition be discouraged? Why should not the religious books, the Gita be read, they should be read and then meditated upon. K: Why do you take for granted that they are all true? Why is a book, printed, a book is always printed lines, why do you take it all as though something terribly serious? Ask yourself, sir, why. Why is a book, the Koran, your own particular book, or the Bible, and so on, that gentleman's saint's books, why do you take it all to dreadfully serious? Has it affected your life? Q: It has affected the life of many of us. K: Oh yes, sir, look at the catastrophe that is going on in this country. This is so hopeless. And you have poverty, incredible poverty in this country, anarchy, disorder, your own lives are in disorder and you talk about some book. Those books haven't in the least affected your lives. You don't love anybody, do you? You do? If you loved somebody this country wouldn't be in chaos as it is, and in the world there would be no wars if we loved people. So your books, your rituals, have no meaning whatsoever because you have lost the most precious thing in life, you have never probably had it, to love without jealousy, without possession, possessing. Love is not attachment. If we all loved, all of us under this tent, if you all loved it would be a different India tomorrow. Q: But last time you said... K: Oh, please, sir, just listen. You people don't even listen, you are all so intellectual. No, sorry, I withdraw that word. You are all so verbal, you just use words. But to find out why your life is empty, shallow, why you have no love, why there is no compassion, why you are a Hindu and a Sikh and a Muslim, you never ask these questions. Sir, meditation is to ask these questions. Meditation is to find out the reality of these questions, the truth that lies behind these questions. Right, sirs. NEW DELHI 4TH PUBLIC TALK 7TH NOVEMBER, 1982 This is the last talk. I wonder if you are glad of it! We ought to talk over together, as we have done in the last three meetings, about isolation of nationalities, which are creating one of the causes of war, and the isolation of each individual from the rest of mankind. We also talked about how hatred, specially in this country, is spreading more and more. We also discussed how human beings get hurt, and that wound we carry all our lives, and its consequences, we went into that too. And we talked about relationship, which is the most important thing in life. Why in that relationship there is always conflict. Without relationship there is no life, life is a movement in relationship. We went into that very carefully. And we talked about various images and illusions and myths that man has created, and how these images, illusions, are destroying humanity - the illusion of nationality, the illusion of our own special gods, the illusions of past people who have given some kind of advice, which we don't live. And also yesterday we talked about fear, whether it is possible for humanity, for each one of us, to entirely and completely be free of fear. We went into that very, very carefully: what are the contributory causes of fear, and we pointed out the various streams that bring the great river of fear. And humanity, which has lived on this earth for millions of years, perhaps not as we are now, but perhaps only forty thousand years, we have never been able to be rid of fear; we have pursued pleasure, not only sexual pleasure, the pleasure of possession, domination, the pleasure of attachment, the pleasure of power. And I think it is necessary this evening to talk about suffering, whether there is an end to suffering, or must humanity, that is you and all of us, maintain and nourish suffering. And also we ought to talk over together, if time will allow, the meaning of death, because that is part of our life. And we should go into the question of religion, what is implied in religion, what is a religious mind, and meditation. So we will talk over together as two friends, friends who have known each other for some time, not opposing each other, not defending, or accusing, but enquiring, probing, gently because it is only one discovers what is truth when there is no certainty. Those who begin with certainty end up in uncertainty. Those who begin with uncertainty, questioning, asking, doubting, probing, those only end up with absolute certainty, not relative certainty, but absolute certainty. So please as two friends don't start with certainty, don't be sure that god exists, that your particular religion is all right, that all the books, the so-called sacred books are right, and hold on to them. They have no meaning in life. We are enquiring together into the question of suffering. What is suffering, whether it can end, and if there is suffering can there be love. And human beings throughout the world have suffered incredibly, the last two world wars and the previous five thousand years in which there have been wars practically every year. Man, woman, has shed innumerable tears. This is not sentiment, or romantic imaginary state, this is actuality. Man has suffered, and he is going on suffering: the poor in this country, the disease, the pain and the anguish of human existence. Life isn't pleasant, life is a turmoil, agony. One becomes more and more aware of all this. One begins to see very clearly that all human beings bear the same burden, share the same sorrow, not a particular sorrow, not the sorrow of one's son dying, or brother dying, or the wife or the husband leaving, but the sorrow which man has accumulated for thousands of years. We are concerned with the understanding of that sorrow. Please don't translate this statement that we are concerned with individual, my sorrow. Your sorrow is the sorrow of mankind, the sorrow of all human beings whether they live in Russia, America, or China, or in this unfortunate country. We are dealing, questioning, asking, the cause of sorrow, the pain of sorrow, the grief, the anxiety that comes with sorrow, the utter loneliness of sorrow. You understand? Like pleasure, sorrow is narrowed down as mine, but we forget when we are concerned with our own particular sorrow, we neglect, we disregard, we are not concerned with the sorrow of mankind. Because our consciousness, as we talked about some meetings ago, our consciousness is the consciousness of humanity. One must understand this very clearly because in understanding the nature of our consciousness, that is what we are, our pain, our loneliness, our depression, our joys, our beliefs, are shared by all humanity. They may believe in one kind of god and you may believe in another kind of god, but belief is common, belief is general, and that is our consciousness, that's what you are - the language you speak, the food you eat, the climate, the clothes, the education, the constant repetition of certain phrases, the loneliness, the ultimate fear of death, is the ground on which all humanity stands. And you are that humanity. My friend and I are talking together, and I am pointing out to my friend who is sitting with me, as you are sitting there, that this consciousness is not individual, it is the consciousness of all mankind, with their myths, superstitions, with their images, fears and so on. This is important to understand, not intellectually, not verbally, but to understand this with your heart, with your mind. Because when we come to the question of what is death we must first understand the nature of our consciousness, the nature of what you are actually, not what you should be - what you actually are in daily life. And that actuality is shared by all and every human being in the world. So when we are enquiring into the nature of sorrow we are not discussing your particular narrow little pain and agony, but the agony of mankind of which you actually are. So this enquiry is not selfish, this enquiry opens up tremendous possibilities. So please kindly listen, find out for yourself the nature of sorrow, why human beings all over the world have gone through torture of sorrow. What is sorrow? And why has mankind never put it off, thrown it off? Please ask this question of yourself: why you must have some kind of sorrow, some kind of grief, pain, the sorrow of loneliness, though you may be married, have children, we are lonely people, we have separated ourselves so enormously that we feel when there is a great grief you realize how lonely you are. So we are asking, is one of the causes of sorrow, this loneliness. Please enquire, go into it with the speaker. Loneliness is the result of our daily life, each one of us is completely convinced that he is a separate soul, separate entity, and all his activity is self-centred, from the highest to the lowest it is self-centred, selfish. And the daily activity of this self-centredness, will inevitably bring about sorrow, loneliness, separatism, division. And we are asking, is this isolation in our way of thinking, in our way of life, is that one of the causes of sorrow? And is attachment the cause of sorrow? I am attached to my wife, to my son, to my memories, to my beliefs, to my experience, I am attached to them. I believe, and I am attached to that belief, and when that belief is questioned, doubted, shaken, there is uncertainty, pain. And is that one of the causes of sorrow? So is it possible to be free of all beliefs, not one particular belief, or one particular ideal, but to be totally free of all ideals, all beliefs? Please don't say, if one is free of beliefs and ideals what do you replace it by. That's a wrong question. See the truth that any belief, any ideal, divides people. It is not an actuality. I don't believe the sun rises and the sun sets, it is so, it is a fact. But I believe that god exists, or doesn't exist, I believe in certain ideologies - communism, socialist, conservatism, whatever it is, capitalist - I believe in certain ideology for which I am willing to fight, kill people. So to be entirely, completely free of all beliefs because that is freedom. And we believe because it gives us a sense of security. You may believe in god, as most of you do, because it gives you a sense of protection, guidance, security. The mind has invented, the brain has invented various forms of security -nationalism, religious figures, the various so-called sacred books, they all give a certain quality of security. And actually there is no security in it at all, it is an illusion. So to realize that belief, ideals and so on are very, very destructive, they separate man from man. And to see the truth of it is to become intelligence. And only in intelligence there is complete security, not in your beliefs, in your myths and ideas. So to discover this intelligence, and that intelligence is not yours or the speaker's, it is intelligence. That is, to see the false as false, and end the false. To see 'what is' actually, not imaginatively, don't run away from it, to see actually what we are, and explore into it. And in that exploration there is the awakening of intelligence. So we are asking is sorrow, the cause of sorrow, the pain, the anguish, is it brought about by our isolation of mind, of thought, of action? And is sorrow the result of our daily attachment, how we are attached to people. Please wake up to all this, see the truth of all this. And to explore what is the nature of attachment: it breeds anxiety, fear, pain, jealousy, hatred, all these are the consequences of attachment. If I am attached to my wife, or to my husband, see the consequences of it, you depend on each other, and so that dependence gives a form of security, and when that person leaves, or dies, or runs away from you, you are then in pain, in agony of suspicion, hatred, and sorrow. Don't you know all this? This is nothing new, all this, this is the everyday fact of life. It may not happen to you but it is happening to others, millions of others. In their relationship there is sorrow, fight, agony. And we are asking is attachment one of the causes of this sorrow. I am attached to my son and he dies, and then I invent various forms of comfort. I never remain with sorrow. You understand all this? To remain with it, not escape with it, not seek comfort, not run off to some form of entertainment, religious or otherwise, but to look at it, live with it, understand it, the nature of it. When you do, sorrow opens the door to passion - not to lust, passion. You are not passionate people because you have never understood the nature of sorrow and the ending of sorrow. We have become very dull, we accept things, we accept sorrow, we accept fear, we accept being dominated by politicians, by your guru, by all the books and tradition. That means you never want to be free. And you are frightened to be free, frightened of the unknown, so you invent various forms of consoling illusory images and hopes. Now after saying all this about sorrow, looking at it, when my son dies, I realize why I am attached to him, that I have lost him for ever, and remain with that sorrow. You understand? It is like a flower, it blooms, it opens up and it withers away, it dies at the end of the day - it may die at the end of a week, but it withers away. You must give it an opportunity to flower: the flowering of sorrow and the ending of sorrow, then you have passion, you have vitality, energy, drive. Where there is sorrow there can be no love. Your books may talk about it, your Gita - do they talk about love? I question it - do they? Just investigate sir, don't tell me they do, that means nothing. A mind, a brain that is in agony, that is lonely, self-centred, how can it love? Love is not emotion, love is not sentiment, a romantic, fanciful, comforting thing. It is tremendously vital, as strong as death. And when there is sorrow, love is not. And as most human beings in the world suffer, and never resolve the problem of suffering, so they do not know what it is to love. We have now reduced love to pleasure - sexual, attachment, and so on, various forms of pleasure. So we have to ask is love pleasure, is love desire, is love thought, can love ever be cultivated? Of course not. And without love, this sense of compassion, the flame of it, the intelligence of it, life has very little meaning. You may invent a purpose for life, perfection, and you know, all the rest of that business, but without this fundamental beauty of life, life has no meaning. Actually your life, when you look at it, going to the office every day for the next fifty years, what does it all mean? Getting a little money, a little power, breeding children, the wrong kind of education, and so perpetuating this incredible cruelty in the world. You may read all the books in the world, all the museums in the world, listen to talks like this from a different kind of speaker, but if there is not this quality, that extraordinary sense of beauty with its great sensitivity, life has very little meaning; even for the top people, the princes of the land, the people in power, without this they become more and more mischievous, more and more chaotic in the world. You hear all this, and do you love anybody? Or does that love contain jealousy, possessiveness, domination, attachment? Then that's not love, it's just a form pleasure, entertainment. So where there is sorrow there cannot be love, and therefore no intelligence. Love has its own intelligence, compassion has its quality of this pure unadulterated intelligence. When there is that, this intelligence operates in this world. That intelligence is not the result of thought. Thought is a small affair. So when you hear all this, when you see the truth of all this, if you do, does the perfume, the sense of loving completely another, or will you go back to the old routine? And also we ought to talk over together the question of death. Which is not a morbid question, which is not a useless question; like love, like pain, sorrow, fear, death is part of our life. You may postpone it, you may say, I have ten years more to live, but at the end of it there is death waiting. Again all humanity fears death, or they rationalize it away, saying that death is inevitable, what comes out of the earth dies in the earth. And together you and the speaker are going to enquire into the nature of dying, what does it mean, why we are so frightened of it. First, as we said, to understand the depth and the full significance of that extraordinary incident which is called death, we must enquire, or rather we must understand the nature of our own consciousness. Do you understand this? The nature of what you are. If you don't understand what you are actually, not descriptively or merely explanatory, but actually what you are, if you don't understand that then death becomes a dreadful thing. Then you may worship death in different forms, which some do. So first before we can go into the question of death we must understand ourselves, what we are. What are you? A name, a form, man or woman, with certain qualities, certain tendencies, idiosyncrasies, desires, pain, anxiety, uncertainty, confusion, and out of this confusion you invent something permanent, the absolute, the Brahman, or god. But what actually you are is the movement of thought. That thought may invent that you have got the spark of divinity in you, but it is still the movement of thought. So what are you, apart from your physical reactions, man and woman, differently educated, rich and poor, actually when you look at yourself, what are you? Aren't you all these things? Don't invent something, that you have some great divinity in you - that's just an invention, it's not an actuality. If there is something permanent in you, then why seek permanency somewhere else? You understand my question? Oh, you don't follow all this. So as we said, begin with uncertainty, begin with not knowing, which is what we are. You know that very well. You know your face when you look in the mirror, that's what you are. But also inwardly you are all the struggle, the pain, the conflict, the misery, the confusion, that's what you are actually. That is the state of all human beings. So your consciousness is not yours. It is the common ground on which all human beings stand and share. If that is clearly, the truth of it is clearly seen, then what is death? You follow all this? Death is the ending of everything - my pleasure, my memory, my experience, my attachments, ideals, beliefs, all that ends. That's what you are. That ends. But we don't like the ending. To us ending is pain. So we begin to invent, search for comfort in reincarnation. That's what most of you believe, don't you. You have never asked what it is that incarnates next life. What is it that incarnates? Your memories? Your experiences? Your hopes? A better life, better house, becoming a great ruler? This is what you are now, you are going to incarnate next life. If you really actually, deeply believed, felt that the next life you are going to be born, then what you are doing now is all important. Right? What you are doing now, what you think, what you feel, how you react, because that is going to be born rightly, correctly, happily next life. You don't believe, you just believe in reincarnation, it's not an actuality. Actuality is your life now, and we are unwilling to face it. So death is something to be avoided. We always ask, what happens after death, but we never ask what happens before death. You understand my question? What happens now in our life, what is our life? Working, working, working, office, money, pain, striving, climbing the ladder of success. That's our life. And death puts an end to all that. So please listen to all this. Is it possible while living to end - end your attachment, end your belief. I know you can't end your bank account, if you have one, but to end. You understand the beauty of ending something voluntarily, without motive, without pressure. So in ending there is a new beginning. If you end, the doors are open, but you want to be sure before you end that the door will open so you never end. End your motive. So the understanding of death is to live a life psychologically, begin inwardly, end it. And also now we ought to talk over together religion and meditation. What is religion? The origin of that word is rather doubtful, etymologically speaking, the origin, the beginning, the root meaning of that word, is very doubtful. One has looked up various dictionaries, but the root meaning of it is uncertain. So we will accept the word religion, what we generally call religion. What is religion for most of you? Belief, rituals - if you are a Christian, belief in a saviour, in a particular saviour, with all the rituals, with all the marvellous dressing, the beautiful architecture inside the churches, the great cathedrals. I do not know if you have seen a cardinal performing a mass, it is really a great sight, great beauty, the utter precision, to impress the poor people. And that's belief, dogma, rituals, your daily puja, if you do puja daily, and above all you believe in god. That's what you call religion, which has absolutely nothing whatever to do with your daily life. All religions, organized or unorganized religions, have said, don't kill, love somebody. So you go on killing, you go on worshipping false gods, which is your nationalism, your tribalism, the Sikh, the Muslim, the Hindu, it's all tribalism. So you are killing each, and that's what you all call religion. Isn't that so? So to find out the nature of a religious mind you must put away all those childish things. Will you? Of course not. You will go on, do your puja, your ceremonies, become slaves to the priests. Religions has become a form of entertainment. That entertainment may be very sacred, as you consider, but it is still entertainment because it is not affecting your life in any way. So can you put away all that and not belong to any so-called religion, neither be a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, leave all that - that's propaganda of centuries. Like a computer you have been programmed. Of course you are. When you say, 'I am a Hindu', you have been programmed for the last five thousand years. So when you are enquiring into the nature of religion, you must be free from all this. Will you? No, of course not. Because then when there is freedom from all that is false, illusory, then you begin to enquire into what is meditation - not before. You understand? A mind in conflict, a brain in struggle, cannot possibly meditate. You may sit down quietly for twenty minutes every day, or every afternoon, night, whatever it is, but if the brain is in conflict, pain, anxiety, lonely, sorrow, what is the value of your meditation? So we are going to enquire into what is meditation. Not how to meditate, you have asked how to meditate, which is to give you a system. Right? A method, a practice. Do you know what practising does every day to your brain? Repeating, practising, your brain becomes dull, mechanical, not active, alive, full of vitality - it is tortured, making effort to achieve some silence, some state of experience. That's not meditation, that's just another form of achievement, like a politician becoming a minister. In your meditation you want to achieve illumination, silence, it's the same pattern repeated only you call it religious, the other calls it political achievement - not much difference. So we are going to enquire together, it doesn't matter if we go over an hour, what is meditation. Are you tired? Q: No. K: You must be, don't tell me you are not - well, it's up to you. What is meditation? What does that word mean? The word, the meaning of the word. If you look up in a dictionary you will find it means to ponder over, to think over, to be concerned, to look, to ponder over. That's what it means. That's what the dictionary says. And the word 'meditation' also implies measurement, to measure. Right? We are going to go into this. First the word implies to be able to think clearly, not with confusion, not personally, but objectively, clearly, to think, which we have done, if you have followed very carefully, during the last three talks. So it needs clarity. And meditation also means measurement, to measure. We are always measuring, which is comparing - I am this, I will be that, which is a form of measurement. I will be better - the word 'better' is measurement. You are following all this? You so easily nod your heads, please don't. That is to compare yourself with another is a measurement. When you tell your son, or somebody, you must be like your elder brother, that's measurement. So we live by measurement. We are always comparing. That's a fact, isn't it. So our brain is conditioned to measure - I am this today, I hope I will be different in a year's time - not physically but psychologically. That is a measurement. Now to live without measurement is part of meditation, totally completely free of all measurement. Not, I am practising this, I will achieve something in a year's time - that is measurement, which is the very nature of one's egotistic activity. In schools we compare, in universities we compare, and we compare ourselves with somebody who is more intelligent, more beautiful physically. There is this constant measurement going on. Either you know it consciously, or you are not aware of this movement of measurement. So meditation is the ending of measurement, ending of comparison, completely. You understand this? See what is implied in it. That there is no psychological tomorrow. Yes sir. Tomorrow is the measurement of 'what is' in time. Do you understand all this? So measurement, comparison, and the action of will must end completely - there is no action of will in meditation. Every form, every system of meditation is an activity of the will - will, I will meditate, I will sit down quietly, control myself, narrow down my thoughts, practise - that is the action of desire which is the essence of will. So in meditation there is no activity of the will. You understand the beauty of all this? When there is no measurement, no comparison, not achieving, not becoming, there is the silence of the negation of the self. There is no self in meditation, not, 'tell me how to meditate, I have tried the Zen meditation, the Tibetan form of meditation, the Buddhist form of meditation, the Hindu, and the latest gurus who offer systems of meditation', they are all forms of the action of will, which is a form of desire. So a mind, a brain that is in the act of meditation, which is the whole of life is meditation, not one period when you meditate -meditation is the whole movement of living. But we have separated - at least you have separated meditation from your life. It is a form of relaxation, take a drug. If you want to repeat, repeat Coca-Cola, or any other Cola, it is the same effect, it dulls the mind. Whereas meditation, when there is no measurement, when there is no action of the will, and the brain is in entirely free from all systems, then there is great sense of freedom. And in that freedom there is order, absolute order, and that you must have in life. Then in that state of mind there is silence, not invented silence, not the seeking of silence, not wanting, desiring to have a quiet mind. That's too childish. But when there is this freedom from measurement, which is the activity of the self, to become something more and more and more, then in that freedom of absolute order there is silence. Then is there something sacred, not invented by thought? There is nothing sacred in the temples, in the mosques, in the churches -they are all the inventions of thought. So when you discard all that, is there something sacred? That is, nameless, timeless, something that is the outcome of great beauty, and total order, which begins in our daily life. That's why meditation is the movement of living, it's life. If you don't understand the basis of all this, that is, our life, our everyday reactions, our behaviour, all that, your meditation has no meaning whatsoever. You can sit on the banks of the Ganga, or some kind of place, do all kinds of tricks with yourself, that's not meditation. Meditation is something that is of daily life, it is a movement of life. And when there is in that movement freedom, order, and out of that flowers a great silence and then only then, if you have come to that point, one finds there is something absolutely sacred. - Discussion With Buddhists, Varanasi - Chapter 1 - 1st Discussion Chapter 2 - 2nd Discussion Chapter 3 - 3rd Discussion - Varanasi 1985 - Chapter 4 - 1st Public Talk Chapter 5 - 2nd Public Talk Chapter 6 - 3rd Public Talk Chapter 7 - Discussion With Campers - Rishi Valley 1985 - Chapter 8 - 2nd Dialogue With Teachers Chapter 9 - 3rd Dialogue With Teachers - Madras 1986 - Chapter 10 - 2nd Public Talk Chapter 11 - 3rd Public Talk - Longer, Unedited Versions - Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 1 7TH NOVEMBER 1985 1ST DISCUSSION WITH BUDDHISTS VARANASI First Participant (P1): [The chief participant in these discussions with Buddhists (P1) is Pandit Jagannath Upadhyaya.] So far as I have understood, you say that life has no purpose or aim and therefore there is no path to tread. Therefore each person is faced with every moment by itself. If the moment is to be understood, then the same moment is the moment of action, knowledge and desire. Is this understanding correct? KRISHNAMURTI (K): If I may point out, we are not discussing what is correct or not correct. Sir, this is a subject that requires a great deal of inquiry. P1: If you say that this is not a question of correctness or otherwise, you are creating a problem for the people who want to understand. K: No. On the contrary, I am saying that Panditji and all of us, including myself, are going to investigate. I don't say, `That is right, this is wrong', but together we are going to go into it. P1: How can there be a human being who does not decide what is correct or incorrect, what is good or not good? K: We will come to that. I don't say there is no goodness. Goodness may be entirely different from your goodness and my goodness. So let us find out which is really the good - not yours or mine, but that which is good... P2: ...in itself. K: Yes. P1: You are introducing an uncertainty into one's way of looking at things or one's philosophical outlook. K: Yes, but if you start with certainty, you end up with uncertainty. P1: This also sounds very paradoxical - that you start with certainty and end up with uncertainty. K: Of course. This is daily life. So, sir, because you raised a question which implies time, thought, action, could we begin by first going into the question of what is time? Not according to the Buddha, or to some scripture, but what is time? He will interpret it one way, the scientists will say that it is a series of small actions, thoughts and so on. Or you might say, well, time is death, time is living, or thought is time. Right? So, could we, for the time being, put aside what other people have said, including the Buddha, including what I have said or haven't said - wipe all that out - and say, `Now, what is time?' Is this the only problem we have in life - time - not only a series of events, but being born, growing, dying, time as the past, future and present? We live in time. The moment we hope, it is time - I hope to be, I hope to become, I hope to become enlightened; all that implies time. Acquiring knowledge implies time, and the whole of living from birth to death is a problem of time. Right, sir? Am I making myself clear? So what is it that we call time? P1: You have spoken about this many times, but I want to say that the moment which is knowledge, action, as well as desire, is a moment in which there is no time. K: Wait, wait. Can you divide this instant from the rest? P1: In the instant of attention or observation, there is no time. K: What do you mean, observation and attention? Sorry to be so analytical. But if we are to understand each other we must be clear about the meaning of these two words - attention and observation. What takes place actually when you observe? - not theoretically. When you observe that tree, that bird, that woman, that man, what takes place? P2: In that moment of observation, if it is real observation... K: Is it? I am asking. When he uses the word observation, what does he mean by that? I may mean one thing, he may mean another, she may mean yet another thing. P2: But you are asking Panditji what he means by observation. K: And what he means by attention... Sir, may I ask a question? Could we start to discuss, to have a dialogue, a conversation on a word, which is really very, very good deliberation? You know the meaning of that word deliberate? The word comes from libra which in Greek means balance, weigh. You have the same thing in the Zodiac - Libra. And from libra comes the word liberate. And also it comes from the word 'deliberare' which in Italian means `to sit down, talk over, take counsel with each other, weigh together. It is not you offering an opinion and I offering another opinion, but both of us taking counsel together, both of us weighing because we want to find the truth of it. Not I will find it and then tell you - that does not exist in that word deliberate. Sir, when the Pope is elected in Rome, in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, they deliberate - the doors are locked, nobody can get out, they have their own places for toilet, restaurant, food; everything is arranged for a fortnight or for some days. Within those set days they must settle. That is called deliberation. So could we start, both of us, as though we know nothing? P3: It is difficult for Panditji. K: It is not difficult. I know nothing; our knowledge is merely memory. What's the point of it? I am saying knowledge may be the greatest danger in the world; it may be the greatest hindrance. To further knowledge we are adding, the scientists are adding. That which is added to is always limited. P2: Of course. If it is complete, you cannot add to it. K: Yes. Therefore your knowledge is always limited, and if you discuss from that limitation, you end up in limitation. P2: And the so-called certainty is that limitation. K: Yes, limitation. P1: We have heard quite a bit from you and understood certain things; but if the understanding has to be at a deeper level, then someone like you has the responsibility of making that known, since we are at different levels. K: All right, all right. But the man says, K says, leave your moorings, let us float together. P1: How can we counsel together when we are at two different levels? K: I don't admit that. I don't admit that we are at two levels. P1: We have a complaint against you that... K:...that I am a poor surgeon! P1:...physician, yes. Because there are all the difficulties and conflicts outside. People like me who have the privilege of coming to you receive some light, but the physician is not able to say how to cope with those things which are outside and solve the difficulties there. K: So you want to solve first the difficulties out there, and then approach the problems in here. Is that it? P1: No, I want to solve them both together. K: I do not admit the division. P1: Yes, I accept that. K: The world is me, I am the world. Now, from there how do we solve the problem? P1: Let us say I don't make a difference between outer and inner things. K: First make sure of that. Do you actually see that, or is it theoretical? P1: For me it is theoretical. K: Sir, first of all, theory to me has no value. Forgive me, sir. I see what is happening in the world - war, nationalities, killing, all the appalling things that are happening - actually happening. I am not imagining it; I see it happening under my nose. Now, who created it? P1: Human beings. K: Do you admit that we all of us have created that? P2: Yes, of course. K: All right. So, if all of us have created it, then we can change that. Now, in what manner will you bring about the change? Sir, I met the other day in New York, a scientist, a doctor who has become a philosopher. He said this is all talk, the real question is: can the cells in the brain bring about a mutation in themselves - not through drugs, not through various genetic processes, but can the brain cells themselves say: This is wrong - change! Do you understand, sir? Can the brain cells themselves, uninfluenced, undrugged, see what they have created and say: This is wrong -mutate! P1: But you distinguish the brain from the mind. K: Yes, may be silly, but I have made a difference because the brain is the very centre of our sensations. P4: Sir, that was my question the day before yesterday also: Should we wait for that mutation? K: You can't. It will go on. P4: Will it come automatically? K: No P4: So we should try for that. K: What will you do, sir? You see that a mutation is necessary. Right? P4: Yes, everyone agrees with that. K: Now, what will change that? - in the cells, not just ideas. The very cells of the brain contain all the memories of the past. Can those cells, without pressure, without influence, without chemicals, say: That is the end of that; I will change? P2: No: If there is no influence, no pressure, it means it is taking place by itself. K: No. Listen to it. The brain cells hold all the memories, all the pressures, all the education, all the experience, everything - it is the centre of knowledge. Right? P2: Yes, it is loaded. K: Loaded with knowledge of two and a half million years. We have tried everything - chemicals, torture, every form of experience to bring about a change inside the skull; we have not succeeded. There is genetic engineering, there is every form of experiment being done to change this inside, they haven't succeeded. They haven't so far; they may in a thousand years. So I say to myself, why does this brain depend on all this - chemicals, persuasion, pleasure? Is it waiting to be released? I say, `No, sorry, that is another form of escape.' P2: Waiting for something else. K: Yes. So, can the brain cells, with all the past memories, put an end to all that now? That is my question. What do you say, sir? P1: I have another question. I have to teach my students and I do it through a logical process - rationally so many things are explained. At the same time I realize the limitation of that, especially having come into contact with you - that this is all artificial, theoretical, very limited. Then, when we come to you, we hear what is good, and we go from one fine point to another, but I find at the end of it all that we are still nowhere near the truth. So it just means that instead of going round in that circle of logic we go round in this, but it makes no difference. K: Yes, sir, these are all just explanations and we move from that logic to this logic. So, do we see that logic has a limitation? Now, can I leave that logic without going to another logic, because I see at the very beginning that logic has limitation - whether it is superfine logic or plain common sense? P1: No, the two cannot be compared because the other is entirely logical, which we understand is limited, but here it is not just logic as we get bits of insight, bits of light; but we keep moving around with these little bits. There is no comprehension. K: All right. If that is so - which I question - is it that you want complete insight? Your question implies that. P1: We should be satisfied with what we are getting, but we need that happiness which shapes thought. We get little bits of insight, not the whole. K: I am not talking of happiness; I am talking of insight. Will you listen to it? I will present the whole, I will show you logically the whole. Will you listen - not say yes, this is right, this is wrong? Sir, practically every writer, painter, scientist, poet, guru - they all have a limited insight. You and I come along and say, `Look, this is limited, and I want the real, complete, full insight; not partial.' Right? P1: We need to understand this. What is full insight? Is it an experience? K: No, I doubt if it is an experience. It is not an experience. P2: Then it has to come from within. K: No, you see, you are already stipulating what should happen. P2: It cannot be anticipated. K: You cannot lay down laws about it. You cannot say it is experience; it is not. P2: You were going to tell us how all this will be a whole. K: Not all this; the parts do not make the whole. I am as damned logical as any of you. I am just saying, you are approaching it wrongly. That is my point; don't say it is an experience; it is based on knowledge. What is based on knowledge is invention, not creation. P6: Sir, he is not saying it is experience based on knowledge, but it has to be real, proved. K: It is not that I experience something; it is real. I don't understand your difficulty. Somebody comes along and tells me a story. I listen with rapt attention. It is a beautiful story, lovely language, style; I am enraptured by it, I listen to the story, and it goes on and on day after day, and I am consumed by the story. So the story ends by saying, `It stops here.' P5: The story doesn't end for us; the problem continues. K: You are my friend. I want to tell you that people have limited insight, which is obvious. Your friend here says, I will tell you in what manner you can have the whole insight. Will you listen to him? Don't argue,just listen. You give rice to the beggar; he didn't expect anything from you, but you give it. In the same way, he is giving me a gift and he says, `Take it, don't ask me why you are being given it, who is giving it; just take it.' So I am telling you, insight is not dependent on the intellect, it is not dependent on knowledge, it is not dependent on any form of remembrance, and it is not dependent on time. Enlightenment is not dependent on time. Time, memory, remembrance, cause - they don't exist; then you have insight, complete insight. Sir, like two ships passing each other at night, one says to the other, `This is it,' and passes on. What will you do? P4: Sir, does it come through gradual practice or is it instantaneous? K: Practice means memory, time. P4: So it can only be instantaneous. K: Oh no, no, sir, just listen. He tells me this and he disappears. He has left with me a tremendous jewel and I am watching the beauty of it. I am not saying, why did he give it to me, who is he, and so on. He has given it to me and he said, `Take it, my friend, live with it, and if you don't want it, throw it away.' And I never see him again. I am enthralled by the jewel and that jewel begins to reveal things I have never seen before, and that jewel says, `Hold me more closely, you will see much more.' But I say, `I have got my wife, my children, my college, my university, my job; I can't do this.' So you put it on the table come back in the evening and you look at it. But the jewel is fading, so you have to hold it, you have to cherish it, love it, watch it, care for it. I am not trying to convince anybody of anything. We see that our knowledge is very limited, and knowledge may be the very danger, it may be the poison in all of us. Sir, I met the other day, just before I came to India, three computer experts - the very, very latest. They are going deeper into artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence can do most of the things that human beings can do - argue, have tremendous knowledge, much more than any of us. It will include British knowledge, European knowledge, French knowledge, Russian knowledge, all the Upanishads, all the Gitas, all the Bibles, the Korans, everything, and it will act - it will tell you what to eat, what not to eat, when to go to bed for your health, when you cannot have sex, everything you can do; it has already begun. And what is going to happen to the human brain if that machine can do everything I can do, except have sex or look at the stars? What is the point of the human being? And the entertainment industry -football, tennis, all these things - here too, unfortunately, it is very strong. So if man is caught in all the entertainment, which includes all the religious entertainment, then where is man? Sir, this is a very serious question; it is not just casual talk. P2: This question would not arise if there is mutation in the brain which is then far ahead of the present brain, because the present brain is memory and the machine has a far better memory. K: A little chip like that holds 600 million words. P2: All the libraries of the world will be in the machine. K: They have got it, haven't they? Therefore, why should I go to the library, why should I listen to all this stuff? Therefore, entertainment. P2: Or mutate. K: That's it. This is the question I have been asking. P2: So we are back to the question. P1: Does meditation have a place in all this? K: Yes. Sir, is there a meditation which is not contrived, which is not deliberate, which does not say practise, practise, practise, which had nothing to do with all this? Because, that way I practise to become a rich man, I have a deliberate purpose. So it can't be meditation as we do it now. So, perhaps there is a meditation which has nothing to do with all this - and I say there is. P2: Shall we stop here? K: Yes, we stop - like the story. THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 2 9TH NOVEMBER 1985 2ND DISCUSSION WITH BUDDHISTS VARANASI Krishnamurti (K): Is there something sacred, something long-lasting, and not conditioned by commerce? Is there something in India, in this part of the world? First Participant (P1: There is certainly something in this country which is not influenced by external factors. K: That was not my question. Is there something here which does not exist anywhere else - not influenced, not corrupted, not made ugly by all the circus that goes on in the name of religion? Is there something already here, for which - if it exists - one has to give one's whole mind and heart - to preserve? You understand, sir? P1: I cannot say, because in some sense I have not experienced this in a tangible way; nor can I say whether other people have. But my study of ancient texts gives me a certain certitude that there is something which can be experienced in a clear way. K: I'm asking, Panditji, if there is something enduring, which is not bound by time, evolution and all that. It must be very, very sacred. And if it exists, then one must give one's life to it, protect it, give vitality to it - not by doctrines and knowledge, but by the feeling of it, the depth of it, the beauty of it, the enormous strength of it. That's what I'm asking. P1: We desire to find such a thing, but have not been able to do so. And our experience is such that we find ourselves tangled in many theories, in many traditions, many systems. Occasionally we hear a clear voice that speaks about this in a compelling way. That voice comes from you, but we are in some way unable to reach it. The whole phenomenon is like some huge fair with a lot different chaotic voices offering solutions. K: You're not answering my question: is there or is there not? Not tradition, not a kind of historical process of ancient culture diminishing, being destroyed by commercialism, but the great impetus which was set going by some power, some intelligence? That power, that intelligence - does it exist now? I'm repeating the same thing in different words. P2: If I have to answer your question, then I would say that what you're talking about - that thing - is life. K: I'm asking a very simple question; don't complicate it. India exploded over the whole of Asia, like Greece exploded over the whole of Western culture. I'm not talking about India geographically, but as part of the world. It spread like wildfire. And it had the tremendous energy of something original something enormous; it had the power to move things. Does that exist here, or is it all in abeyance? Does it exist at all now? P3: I don't know, sir. I think it exists. K: Why? Why do you think that? P3: Sometimes it appears, but not usually. K: It's like a breath of fresh air. If that air is constantly flowing, it's always fresh. P3: It is always flowing, it is always fresh, but the contact with persons is not always there. K: I understand that, but it's not good enough. P2: Why do you want to connect it geographically with this part of the world? K: Geographically - I'll tell you. All ancients, as far as I understand, worshipped mountains. The gods came from there for the Greeks; and for the ancient Sumerians, again the mountains, the sense of something holy there. Then you come to the Himalayas -it's all in the Dakshinamurti Stotra. The monks lived there, meditated there. Is it there still, or is it being commercialized? P3: It is there, it cannot be commercialized. The commercialization is something else. K: Is it there? P3: Yes. K: Why do you say yes? P3: Because it is there. It is... K: Sir, you are there, physically. I can theorize how the body is constructed, but you are still there - to touch, to feel, to see, to actually see you are sitting there. Is there such a thing? P3: Yes, it is there, actually there. It is there. K: It is no good telling me, `It is there, it is there.' If it is there, why has this part of the world been so corrupt, so appalling? You don't realize what I'm saying. P3: From the beginning I am saying that it is there, but the relationship, the contact, with the masses... K: I'm not talking about the masses. It's you, you... P3: With the persons... K: With you... P3: It is diminished. K: Why has it decreased, why has it diminished, why has it become something small? P3: People are not interested. K: So what does that mean? P3: They're more interested in commerce. K: Yes. So it's gone. That doesn't matter. Let's leave that question. Or is it this tremendous self-interest - self-interest in the form of knowledge, in the form of Buddhism, Hinduism? It is all basically self-interest. And that self-interest is increasing tremendously in the world, and that is the door which shuts the other out. You understand? Sir, some time ago three very clever people - they were scientists - came to Brockwood, and we were talking. They are trying to find artificial intelligence. If they can find that, then we are all gone. Your knowledge, your Vedas, your Upanishads and your Geeta - everything is gone, because the machine can repeat it much better than you and I can ever do. P1: The question which you just posed presents a wonderful opportunity to ask a counter question. And the counter question is: What you say appeals to us, but how are we, in today's society, going to find it, experience it, and share it? K: You can't experience it. To experience it there must be an experiencer. He has had a thousand experiences; he adds another to it - that's my whole point. It's not an experience; it's not something that I and you experience. It's there like electricity. I can admire it, worship it, but it's there. P1: Human beings have only one gift, that is the ability to experience, and you are snatching that away. After that what are we to hold on to? K: I'm not snatching anything away, but I see that experience is a very small affair. I experience; then what? Experience gives you knowledge of how to climb a mountain. We depend on experience, but that thing can't be experienced. You can't experience water; it is there. I can experience sex; I can experience something hitting me; I can experience somebody praising me. P4: Water is there, but I only know it through experience of it. K: You only know because you perceive it. You know the quality of it; you float on it; but all that is part of your knowledge of it. P2: But if I had no knowledge, I wouldn't have any experience. K: What you call experience is based on sensory perception. And our sensory perceptions are partial, never complete. Now, to observe with all your senses alert - that's not an experience. Sir, I look at that piece of cloth and say it's red, because I've been conditioned to call it red. If you'd been conditioned to call it purple, you'd call it purple. The brain is always conditioned by our experience, by our sensory responses - how to argue, how to deny and all the rest of it. If I happen to be a Catholic my whole attitude towards religion is Jesus, Virgin Mary and all the rest of it. You are a Hindu or Buddhist - sorry, I'm not comparing - and everything is from that conditioning. Therefore, when you say experience, or you must learn this or do that, it's all from a brain which has become small, conditioned. P3: We again come to that point we discussed. We understand about conditioning, self-interest, and so on. There is the possibility of moving away, and then we just stop there. K: Why, sir? P3: Or should I say that the moving away is not absolutely possible? K: Or remain where you are - you understand? - and not move away. Remain where you are and see what happens. That is, sir, you never stay whole, abide with what is. P3: Yes, that is obvious. K: Wait, sir, wait, wait. We never stay there. We're always moving, moving. Right? I am this, I will be that - it's a movement away from what is. P3: Either we stay where it is, or stay out of the movement. K: What is the movement? P3: Change, force... K: Then we have to understand what is time, the movement in time. P3: Yes. K: We have to enquire what is time - that which we live daily: time as past, time as present, time as future. So what is time? You understand, sir? It requires a lot of time to learn Sanskrit, to enquire into the earliest doctrines, various literatures - what the ancients said, what the Buddha said, what Nagarjuna said, and so on. To learn a skill requires time, to cover a distance from here to there requires time. Everything we do requires time. Then we must inquire: What is time? P4: Time is the means of achieving. K: Yes, success, failure, acquiring a skill, learning a language, writing a letter, covering a distance from here to there and so on. To us that is time. What is time? P4: It's a movement in the mind, a subtle, incessant movement of the mind. K: Then what is the brain? What is the mind? Don't invent. Look at it. What is the brain? P5: It's very difficult to make out the difference between the brain and the mind. The involuntary, almost incessant way of thoughts pouring into unknown stimuli, is what accounts for time. K: No, sir, you are not listening. There's time by the clock: to cover a distance, to learn a language, it requires time. And also we have lived on this earth for two and a half million years. There's been a tremendous evolution, which is time. What do you mean by time? P4: All that you've just mentioned is physical time. But the real problem of time seems to hinge on how it works within the psyche. There is something unresolved that we want to resolve. K: Sir, before we talk of the mind, if I may humbly suggest, what is the brain? P4: The brain is possibly the physical base or biological structure of the mind. K: The brain is the centre of all our action, centre of all our sensory responses; it is the centre of all thinking, inside the skull. What is the quality of the brain that is asking the question: what is time? How do you receive the question? P1: We have understood after discussing with you that it is only total attention that will bring about a total transformation. That's where the problem begins. K: Would you mind if I say something? Time is the past, time is now; and the now is controlled by the past, shaped by the past. And the future is a modification of the present. I'm putting it dreadfully simply. So the future is now. Therefore the question is: If all time is contained in the now, all time - past, present and future - then what do we mean by change? P1: The word `change' does not have any meaning. K: No, wait. The now contains all time. If that's a fact - a fact, not a theory, not some kind of speculative conclusion - that all time is contained in the now, this is the future, this is the present. There is no movement towards or for. There is no movement. Movement implies time, right? So there is no change. Change becomes idiotic. Then I am what I am: I am greedy, and I say yes. P1: There is a wide difference between you and us; we may be saying the same thing. K: Oh, no, no. I don't admit anything of the kind. P1: You are saying that all time is now. I also say the same thing: All time is now. But my saying and your saying are two totally different things. K: Why? P4: Because he says it from logic and speculation. K: That's it. That means time is operating. P1: How can we remove this difficulty? P4: Panditji, answer the question: How can we break this stream in which we flow? P1: The stream is broken through logic. There is a big gulf between you and us. I understand what you're saying speculatively. The problem is: How do we remove this gulf? Because, we have reached a certain meeting, in the sense of understanding. K: I'll tell you. No, I'll show you. Please, I'm not a guru. Is this a fact? - time is now; all time is contained in now, at this second. Really, this is a most extraordinary thing: to see that the future, the past, is now. Is that a fact - not an idea of the fact? P4: There are two things: perceiving and conceiving. Now I am conceiving, not perceiving. K: So what's the point of it? P4: No point, but I would like to go on from here - from conception to perception. K: Conception is not a fact. P4: Conception is not a fact; perception is a fact, and we are all caught up in conception, in time. The simultaneity of conception and time has to be broken. One has to get away from... K: Who gets away? P4: I mean, for perception to operate. K: The very word `operation' means time. P6: Just a minute. If I may come in at this point and say one thing: If all time is in the now, then there is nothing else. K: Which means what? P6: That you stop looking. K: Now you're already preconceiving. P6: I'm not preconceiving. If all time is now... K: That may be the most extraordinary thing, if you go into it. That may be the essence of compassion. That may be the essence of amazing, undefinable intelligence. You can't say all time is now if it isn't a reality. The other things don't matter. I don't know if I am making myself clear. Sir, if all time is contained in the now, there's no movement. What I do now, I'll do tomorrow. So tomorrow is now. What am I to do if the future - tomorrow - is now? I'm greedy, envious, and I'll be envious tomorrow. Is there a possibility of ending that greed instantly? P1: That is very difficult. K: It's not difficult at all. I see that if I am greedy today, envious today, tomorrow I'll be greedy and envious unless something happens now. It is very important that something happen now. So can I change, mutate, now? There is a movement which is not of time if there is a radical mutation. You understand, sir? Two and a half million years ago we were barbarous. We are still barbarous; wanting power, position, killing each other, envious, comparing, all that. You've put me this challenge: All time is now. I have no escape points, I've no gates through which I can escape from this central fact. I say to myself: My god, if I don't change now, tomorrow will be the same, or a thousand tomorrows. So, is it possible for me to totally mutate now? I say yes. P4: Can you tell us how? K: Not how, sir. The moment you say how, you are already in the process of time: I tell you this, this, this, and you say I will do this, this to get to that. You can't get it because you are what you are now. P6: That means that in the listening to that statement of yours, `All time is now`, there is a quality of acquisitiveness. K: Of course. P6: So the listening has to be purified. K: So, sir, there is no knowledge, there is no meditation, there is no discipline. Everything stops. May I put the question differently? Suppose for instance I know I'm going to die. There is a time interval between now and death: that is, I will die on the first of January. (I'm not actually going to die on the first of January!) Doctors have told me say, that I have terminal cancer and I can't survive the first of January. So I've got a couple of months to die. If all time is now, I am dying. So I don't have time; I don't want time. So death is now. Can the human brain live with death all the time? You understand? I'm going to die - that's certain. And I say, For god's sake wait a minute. But if I realize the fact that all time is now - that means death and living are together; they are never separate. So knowledge is dividing me - knowledge that I'm going to die at the end of January - and I get frightened; I say, Please, please, wait, wait, wait, I've got to leave a will, I've got to do this, I've to do that. But if I live with death, I'm doing it all the time; that is, I draw up my will. I'm dying now, that means I'm living. I'm living and death is next door; there's no divorce or separation between living and dying. Can you do this, sir, or is it impossible? That means death says, `You can't take anything with you.' Your knowledge, your books, your wife and children, your money, your character, your vanity, all that you've built up for yourself - everything goes at the end with death. You may say there's a possibility you'll reincarnate. But I'm asking you: Can you live now without the least attachment to anything? Why postpone this - which is attachment - until the sickbed? Be free of attachment now. P6: May we sit silently with you? (K assents) P1: You had started the discussion with the question: What is this thing, and, is there this thing in this country? Is this that thing? K: (nods, then after a long silence) See, it's not difficult. It's so simple. I don't want personally any reputation; I don't want a sense of `I know and you don't know.' By nature I'm a very humble man, very shy, respectful, gentle. So what do you want? You understand, sir? If you can start at that level... Right. That's enough. Let me tell you a joke. There were three holy men in the Himalayas - of course, it has to be the Himalayas! Ten years pass, one of them says: `Oh, what a lovely evening this is!' Another ten years pass and the other man says, `I hope it will rain.' Another ten years pass and the third man says: `I wish you two would be quiet.' THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 3 11TH NOVEMBER 1985 3RD DISCUSSION WITH BUDDHISTS VARANASI KRISHNAMURTI (K): Sir, I would like to ask several questions. Is there a line, a demarcation, where self-interest ends and where a state which is not self-interest begins? We all have self-interest; it is in knowledge, in language, in science, in every part of our life. In every way of our life there is self-interest, and that has created havoc. And how far does it extend? And where do we draw the line and say: here it is necessary, there it is not necessary at all? - in daily life; not in science, in mathematics, in knowledge. I am talking factually, not theoretically. First Participant (P1: This question is very difficult to answer if you lay down certain conditions, like the difficulties we meet with in society; but if you do not lay down conditions, then I shall try to answer. K: All right, I remove the conditions. Not remove; life is this. I am not laying down the condition, I am not laying down the law, the way you should think, but life shows me that in every work in every part of the world self-interest is dominant. We play with religion, we play with K as a plaything, we play with all kinds of things, but the thread of self-interest is very, very strong, and I ask myself, where does it begin, and, is there an end to it. Where does it start, where does it end, or is there no end at all? God is my self-interest, so are ceremonies, scholarship, science. The man in the corner who sells tobacco there, is full of self-interest. P1: There is some book learning that underlies my answer, but I will try to answer from my experiences as an individual human being. K: Yes, as a human being - even from your books, from your studies, you must have, they must all have, asked this question in different ways. P1: When I try to understand myself, look at myself as I am, factually, then I put myself into certain categories. When I try to discover myself in action, in my relationship to other people, then I find an element of self-interest, and I can, with some effort, try to be free of this self-interest, and I do unburden myself to a certain extent. K: But that is also self-interest. P1: When I try to establish my existence, my being, then my actions become more self-centred, and to the extent to which I unburden myself, the self-interest decreases. K: No, you are missing my point. I want to make it very, very simple. The more simply we think, the better the action, the better the way of looking at things. From childhood the problems begin -I have to go to school, I have to read and learn, I have to learn mathematics. The whole of life becomes a problem because, basically, I meet life as a problem. In the English language a problem means something thrown at you. Problema comes from Greek; it means something hurled at you and you have to reply to it. So, from childhood, my brain is conditioned to live with problems and solve problems - and those problems can never be solved. I keep this going, problem after problem; all my life becomes a problem, living becomes a problem. And I say, I don't want to live that way, it is wrong to live that way. So I am asking myself, does self-interest create the problem, or can the mind, brain, be free of problems and therefore tackle problems? You see the difference? I don't know if I am making myself clear. It is a fact that I have to go to school, learn, read, and so on. My brain gradually gets conditioned to living with problems, the brain becomes the problem - everything becomes a problem. So I come to you to solve the problem the brain has, which may be linked with self-interest. P1: Creating or receiving problems and trying to solve them has become a rule of life for us, and this way of doing things nurtures my being. K: Therefore your being is a problem. But you are missing my point. Your being is the identity with the country, with the literature, with the language, with the gods; you are identified, therefore you have taken root in a place, therefore that becomes the being. There is no separate being apart from that - no spiritual being, god-being - I don't believe in all that; I am entirely sceptical. So I say to myself, why have I, or you, made life, which is meant to be lived like a tree growing beautifully, into this? I can't live that way, I won't live that way. Whether god exists, etc. - I am totally indifferent to all that, I totally discard all that, and I say to myself, I won't live the way you are living; I won't. I will go away to the mountains rather than live that way. You have destroyed living, you have destroyed living by knowledge, by science, by computers - you have destroyed my living. I can retire into the mountains, but that makes no meaning. P1: Why are you so keen to safeguard what you call living? Suppose I betray it, I break it, what difference does it make? K: I am not saying I want to live; that is not my point. I say, why do I live this way? I am not safeguarding it by asking this. Why have I to go through all this appalling process? Sex becomes a problem, eating becomes a problem, everything is a problem. And I don't want to have problems, which does not mean that I deny life. I don't want problems, therefore I meet problems. Because my brain won't work in problems, I can meet all problems. P1: As I understand it, you are saying that problems should not enter, problems should not constrain your being. You don't want to deny life, but you want not to be affected by problems. K: No, no. You have thoroughly misunderstood me. I am saying, from birth to death life is treated like a problem: school, college, university, then job, marriage, sex, children - one of them is naughty or a genius and I utilize or exploit that boy and keep going all my life. Death then becomes a problem. Then I say, is there a living further, reincarnation and all that? You see what humanity has done? This is life. Why can't my brain be simple enough, free enough to say this is a problem and solve it? That is, the brain is free to solve it, not add another problem to it. P2: If I may say so, sir, the problem does not come from outside; the problem arises in this brain, which feeds on this problem, which creates this problem. Why doesn't it immediately destroy it at that very instant? K: Because it has not solved any problem. P1: Does the brain have that capacity of ending? K: Yes, but I must distinguish, make clear one point. The brain is the centre of all our nerves, all our sensations, all our reactions, our knowledge, our relationships, quarrels and all that. It is the centre of our consciousness, and that consciousness we treat as mine - my consciousness. I say, it is not mine; it is not personalized as K. And it is not yours because every human being on earth goes through this torture - pain, sorrow, pleasure, sex, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, hoping for something better and so on; that is our consciousness. So that consciousness is not yours; it is human. It is humanity. I am humanity - not all of you plus me. I am humanity. P3: It seems to me that we know of two kinds of action: one which is thought out by the brain, calculated, and which therefore invariably contains the seed of self-interest, is motivated by self-interest. I don't think the brain is capable of doing anything that does not contain in it the seed of self-interest, because it is the instrument meant for that purpose. But there is also spontaneous action which we experience occasionally, which is born just out of love, not as a product of thinking. And because man does not know what to do with this kind of action, because there is nothing he can do about that kind of action, he has cultivated the other - he has cultivated what his brain can do well, what it can calculate, what it can achieve, and the whole world is therefore filled with such activity, such action. And that has become our life. And the other, which is the vital, is occasional. K: I am not coming to that for the moment. The mind is different from the brain - totally dissociated - has no relationship whatsoever. Love has no relationship with self-interest. Don't bring in love for the moment. The fact is that love may exist. We may have sympathy, empathy, affection, pity - but that is not love, so I leave that aside. That's all for the moment. Love and self-interest cannot exist together. Problems and love cannot exist together. Therefore problems have no meaning if the other exists. If the other is, problems are not. P3: I am not sure if they cannot co-exist. They are independent; but I think even a person who has self-interest and who has problems, occasionally acts without the interference of the brain -out of love. So I would not say that the existence of the brain denies love completely. K: Sir, I say it is like having occasionally a bad egg. I want a good egg every day - not occasionally. So I am asking you all, where does self-interest begin and where does it end? Is there an end to self-interest? Or is all action born out of self-interest? Don't tell me, `occasionally; I am not interested in that. Occasionally I look out of the window and that window is very narrow; I am in a prison. So please follow me for a minute. There is a tremendous order in the universe. A black hole is a part of that order. Wherever man enters he creates disorder. So I say, can I, as a human being who is the rest of humanity, create order in myself first? Order means no self-interest. P4: Sir, the problem is, it is not easy to deny on the basis of a common consciousness the nucleus that comes to shape itself as the limited self, the acquisitive self, for which all the problems are real, not imaginary. I mean I have disease, I have death - in what way could these be considered as no problems? K: Are you saying that the self is the problem? Why do we make it a problem? Why do you say the self is the problem? perhaps we make it into a problem and then say, how am I to get out of it? We don't look at the problem. We don't say, the self is the problem, let me understand it, let me look at this jewel without condemning it. The very condemnation is the problem. Do you follow what I mean? Therefore, I won't condemn it, I won't suppress it, I won't deny it, I won't transcend it; but let me first look at it. P4: Sir, consider a person who has a thorn in his body and is feeling pain. The pain of the thorn is similar to the constraints and problems impinging upon the self. K: No, sir. If I have a thorn in my foot, I look at it first, I know the pain. I ask myself, why did I tread on it, why wasn't I aware of it? What is wrong with my observation, my eyes? Why didn't I see where I was going? I know if I saw it, I wouldn't touch it. Therefore I didn't see it. When the pain is there, then I act. I didn't see the thing that was in front of my foot. So my observation is at fault. So I say, what happened to my brain which didn't see that? Probably it was thinking of something else. Why was it thinking of something else when I am on the path? So you see, sir? P5: But in the case of psychological problems, the observer and what is observed are hopelessly entangled. K: No. We are going off to something else. Let us stick to one problem, one issue. Where does self-interest begin and where does it end, and is there an ending to it at all? And if it ends, what is that state? P6: May I hazard an answer? Probably, self-interest begins with the self itself and the self comes with the body. K: I am not sure. P6: They go together. The idea of `I'-ness and my coming into being, they go together. K: You say so, but I don't say so. P6: To my mind the very notion of self begins with the coming into being of this body, and the self and self-interest go together. Self-interest can only end when the self ends. And a part of the self remains so long as the body remains. So, in an ultimate sense, it can only end with death. Short of that, we can only refine self-interest with the gradual perceiving of it, but we cannot wholly deny it so long as the body exists. That is how I see it. K: I understand. They are discovering in science that when the baby is born and suckling, it feels secure and it begins to learn who are the friends of the mother, who treat her differently, who are against her; it begins to feel all this because the mother feels it. It comes through the mother - who is friendly, who is not friendly. The baby begins to rely on the mother. So there it begins. It felt very safe in the womb, and suddenly, put out in the world it begins to realize that the mother is the only safety. There it begins to be secure. And that's our life. And I question whether there is security at all. P2: Sir, in the Mexican earthquake, babies were found alive eleven days after being buried completely under the earth and there was no damage to the newborn ones. And the Mexican ambassador was telling me, the child, when it was taken out of that dark place, behaved exactly as it does when it comes out of the womb. K: It was like being still in the womb. P3: Sir, the instinct of self-preservation is there in the animal too, but when it evolved into man, he started creating problems. The animal does not create problems. If we believe what the scientists say, that man evolved from the animal, then he has all the instincts which the animal has. The essential difference is that man has in addition the ability to think, and this ability to think has also created all those problems. And what you are asking is, can we use this ability not to create problems but to do something entirely different? K: Yes, sir that's right. P7: The brain is the source of all problems. It has created the self and also all the problems. You suggest that the brain can end the problems. Then what is the difference between that brain which has ended and the mind? P6: You said that the brain is the source of problems and out of the brain comes the ending of problems. With that ending, the brain that remains thinks, perceives, receives intimations. What is the actual difference between that brain and the mind? K: I understand, I understand. Just a minute. See, you are asking a question that involves death. Before I can answer that question I must answer what death is. There is an Italian proverb that says: All the world is going to die, perhaps even I too! Do you see the joke of it? So, what is death? We know what is birth, mother, father, all the rest of it, and the baby is born and goes through this extraordinary tragedy. It is a tragedy; it is not something happy, joyous, free. It is a bigger tragedy than any Shakespeare ever wrote. So I know what is birth. Now, what is death? I am asking this; you tell me. P1: When we were discussing time the other day, you spoke of a `now' in which was all time, both living and death. The brain, having the capacity to see the flow of living, also has the capacity to reveal that ending which is death. That is the answer. K: I said, living is attachment, pain, fear, pleasure, anxiety, uncertainty, the whole bag, and death is out there, far away. I keep a careful distance. I have got property, books, jewels; that is my life. I keep it here and death is there. I say, bring the two together, not tomorrow, but now - which means end all this now. Because that's what death is going to say. Death says you can't take anything with you; so invite death - not suicide - invite death and live with it. Death is now, not tomorrow. P1: There is something lacking in this. I may be able to invite death now and the brain may be still for a time, but the whole thing comes back again; then the problem of life comes back. K: No, no. I am attached to him, he is a friend of mine, I have lived with him, we walked together, We played together, he is my companion, and I am attached to him. Death says to me, You can't take him with you. So death tells me, Free yourself now, not ten years later. And I say, Quite right, I will be free of him. Though I am still his friend, I am not dependent on him at all. Because, I can't take him with me. What's wrong with that? You are not arguing against that? P5: Which means, sir, you have to end all gratification... K: No, I am not saying that. I said, attachment. P5: All attachment... K: That's all. P8: Sir, is it possible to end that so long as the two bodies exist? K: Oh, yes, sir. Our bodies are not tied together; they are two separate bodies. Psychologically I take him as a friend and get slowly attached to him inwardly. I am not attached to him outwardly because he goes one way and I go another - he drinks, I don't, and so on. But still he is a friend of mine. And death comes and says you can't take him with you. That is a fact. So I say, All right, I will be detached now. P3: Sir, isn't it that the problem comes not because you get pleasure from your friend or your wife, but because you begin to use that pleasure as a fulfilment for yourself, and therefore you want a continuity of that and you want to possess that person? K: Yes. Therefore, what is relationship? I won't go into it, we have no time. You see, sir, you are not meeting my point. I asked you where self-interest begins and ends. Is ending more important than anything else? - ending? And what is then that state in which there is no self-interest at all? Is it death? - which means an ending. Death means ending - ending everything. So it says, `Be intelligent, old boy, live together with death.' P3: Which means die but keep the body. The other death is coming anyway. K: Body? Give it to the birds or throw it into the river. But psychologically, this tremendous structure I have built I can't take with me. P3: Is it an instinct, sir? Is it an inheritance through the genes? K: Yes, probably. But animals don't think this way; I have watched several animals. P3: No, therefore I am not sure if it is an instinct. K: That's all I am saying. Don't reduce it to an instinct, sir. P8: What was the joke you were going to tell us? K: A man dies and meets his friend in heaven. They talk and he says, `If I am dead, why do I feel so awful?' THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 4 18TH NOVEMBER 1985 1ST PUBLIC TALK IN VARANASI I WONDER WHY you are all here. Why have we all gathered here on the banks of the Ganga? If one asked that question seriously, what would be your answer? Is it merely that you have heard this man talk several times before, therefore you say, let's go and hear him? What is the relationship of what he says to what you do? Are they two separate things? - you just listen to what he has to say and carry on with your daily life? Have you understood our question? We two, like two old friends sitting under a tree, are going to talk over together not some abstract, theoretical problems, but our daily life which is far more important. We have got so many problems: how to meditate, which guru to follow - if you are a follower - what kind of practice you should do, what kind of daily activity you should go through, and so on. And also, what is our relationship to nature - to all the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the plains and the valleys? What is our relationship to a flower, to a bird that passes by? And, what is our relationship with each other -not with the speaker but with each other - with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with the environment, with your neighbour, your community, the government, and so on? What is our relationship to all this? Or are we just isolated, self-concerned, intensely interested in our own way of life? We are asking all these questions as true friends, not as a guru. The speaker has no intention whatsoever to impress you, to tell you what to do or to help you. Please bear this in mind right through the talks. He has no intention whatsoever to help you. I will tell you why, the reason, the logic of it. You have had a great many gurus, thousands of them, a great many helpers - Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, every kind of leader - not only political, but so-called religious. You have had leaders of the major kind and the minor. And where are you at the end of this long evolution? We are supposed to have lived on this earth for a million years, and during that long evolution we have remained barbarians. We may be cleaner, quicker at communication, have better hygiene, transportation and so on, but morally, ethically and - if I may use that word - spiritually, we are still barbarians. We kill each other not only in war, but also by words, by gestures. We are very competitive. We are very ambitious. Each is concerned with himself. Self-interest is the dominant note in our life - concern with our own well-being, security, possessions, power, and so on. Aren't we concerned with ourselves - spiritually, religiously, in business? Right through the world we are all concerned with ourselves. That means isolating ourselves from the rest of humanity. That is a fact; we are not exaggerating. We are not saying something that is not true. Wherever you go - the speaker has been all over the world and still goes round - what is happening? Increase in armaments, violence, fanaticism and the great, deep sense of insecurity, uncertainty and separateness - you and I - is a common note of mankind. Please, we are facing facts, not theories, not some kind of distant theoretical, philosophical statements. We are looking at facts. Not my facts as opposed to your facts but facts. Every country in the world, as you must all know, is gathering armaments - every country, however poor, however rich. Right? Look at your own country - the immense poverty, disorder, corruption, you all know that, and the gathering of armaments. It used to be a club to kill another, now you can vaporize mankind by the million with one atom bomb or neutron bomb. An immense revolution is going on, of which we know very little. The technological process is so rapid, that overnight there is something new. But ethically we are what we have been for a million years. You understand the contrast? Technologically we have the computer which will outthink man, which can invent new meditations, new gods, new theories. And man - that is, you and I - what is going to happen to our brains? The computer can do almost anything that human beings can, except, of course, have sex or look at the new moon. This is not some theory; it is happening now. So, what is going to happen to us as human beings? We want entertainment. Probably this is part of your idea of entertainment, coming here, sitting listening and agreeing or disagreeing, and going back home to carry on with your life; it's a part of entertainment, as going to church, the temple, the mosque, or football or cricket in this country. Please, this is not an entertainment. You and I, the speaker, must think together, not just sit quietly and absorb some strange atmosphere, some punya; sorry, it is not like that at all. We are going to think together sanely, logically, look at the same thing together. Not how you look and I look, but together observe our daily life, which is far more important than anything else - observe it every minute of our day. So first we are going to think together, not merely listen, agree or disagree, which is very easy. One wishes strongly that you could put aside agreement and disagreement! That is very difficult for most people who are too eager to agree or disagree. Our reactions are so quick, we classify everything - religious man, irreligious man, mundane, and so on. So if you could, this morning at least, put aside completely agreement and disagreement and merely observe together, think together. Will you do it? - Put aside altogether your opinion and my opinion, your way of thinking and the other person's way of thinking and merely observe together, think together. Agreement and disagreement divide people. It is illogical to say, `Yes, I agree with you' or, `I do not agree with you', because you are either projecting, holding on to your opinion, your judgement, your evaluation, or discarding what is said. So could we this morning,just for amusement, for entertainment if you like, forget our opinions, our judgements, our agreements or disagreements and have a good clear brain - not devotional or emotional or romantic, but a brain that does not get involved in all the complications of theory, opinion, admission and dissension. Could we do that? So let us proceed. What is thinking? Every human being in the world, everyone from the most ignorant, most crude, from the very, very small person in a little village to the most highly sophisticated scientist, has something in common - thinking. We all think - the villager who has never read anything, never been to a school, college or university, and most of you here who have been educated. The man who sits in the Himalayas by himself, he also thinks. And this thinking has been going on right from the beginning. So you must first ask the question: what is thinking? What is it that you think about? Will you answer that question first - not from books, not from the Gita or the Upanishads or the Bible or the Koran. What is thinking? We live by thinking. Our daily action is based on thinking. You may think one way, and another may think another way, but it is still thinking. So, what is it? Can you think if you have no memory? Can you think backwards and forward, -what you will do tomorrow or the next hour, or what you have done yesterday or this morning? - which in the technological world of the computer is called architecture. So we must find out, together, not the Indian way of thinking or the European way of thinking, or the particular way of thinking of the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian or any other sect, but what is thinking. Unless we really understand the process of thinking, our life is always going to be very, very limited. So, we must very deeply, seriously, examine this whole process of thinking which shapes our life. Man has created god by his thinking; god has not created man. It must be a very poor god who created these human beings who are fighting each other perpetually. So, what is thinking and why have we made problems of it? Why do we have problems in our life? We have plenty of them -political problems, financial problems, economic problems, the problems of one religion against another, problems by the thousands. What is a problem and what is the meaning of the word problem? According to the dictionary, it means something thrown at you, a challenge, something you've got to look at, face. You can't dodge it, you can't run away from it, you can't suppress it; it's there like a sore thumb. Why is it that all our life, from the moment we are born till we die, we have problems - about death, about fear, about a hundred things? Are you asking this question, or am I asking it for you? From the moment you are born you have problems. You go to school - there, you have to read, write, and that becomes a problem to the child. A little later he has to learn mathematics, and that becomes a problem. And the mother says, `Do this, and don't do that,' and that becomes a problem. So from childhood we are bred in problems, our brain is conditioned in problems; it's never free from problems. As you grow, become adolescent, have sex, learn how to earn money, whether to follow society or not - all this becomes a problem. And in the end you yield to society, to the environment. Every politician in the world solves one problem and thereby creates other problems. Haven't you noticed all this? The human brain - what is inside this skull -itself has problems. So can the brain ever be free of problems to solve problems? Do you understand my question? If the brain is not free of problems, then how can it solve any problem? This is logical. Right? So, your brain, which carries memories, which has acquired tremendous industrial knowledge, has been nurtured, educated, to have problems. We are asking now if that brain can be free of problems first, so that it can then solve problems. Can you be free of problems first? Or is that impossible? Our brain is conditioned in the various narrow religions; it is conditioned by specialization, by the environment in which we live, by our education, by poverty or richness, by the vows you have taken as monks. (I do not know why, but you have taken them and it becomes a torture, a problem.) So our brains are extraordinarily conditioned as businessman, housekeeper, and so on. And from that narrow point of view we look at the world. So we have to go into this question not only of having problems but also of what is thinking. Why do we think at all? Is there a different way of action? Is there a different manner of approaching life, of daily living, that doesn't require thinking at all? First, we'll have to look very closely, together; find out for ourselves, and then act. So, we are going to go into that. What is thinking? If you didn't think, you would not be here. You have made arrangements to come here at a certain time, and you have also made arrangements to go back. That is thinking. What is thinking philosophically? Philosophy means the love of truth, the love of life - not passing some examination at a university. So let us find out, together, what is thinking. If you had no memory of yesterday, no memory at all of any kind, would you think? Of course not - you can't think if you have no memory, right? So what is memory? You did something yesterday, and that is registered in the brain, and according to that memory you think and act. You remember somebody flattering you, remember somebody hurting you, saying ugly things about you. That is, memory is the outcome of knowledge. Now, what is knowledge? This is rather difficult. We all accumulate knowledge; the great scholars, the great professors, scientists, acquire tremendous knowledge. So what is knowledge? How does it come about? Knowledge comes when there is experience. You are in an accident in a car - that becomes an experience. From that experience you have knowledge. And from that knowledge you have memory. From memory you have thought. Right? So, what is experience? It is that incident, the accident in a car, which is registered in the brain as knowledge. Experience, knowledge, memory, thought: this is logical - not my way of looking at it or your way of looking at it. So, all experience, whether it is god's experience or your experience, is limited. The scientists are adding to it more and more every day, and that which is added to is always limited, right? I know little, and I must know more - you are adding. Your experience of something is always limited as there's something more to be added. So experience is limited, knowledge is limited -for ever. Therefore, memory is limited, and so thought is limited, right? And where there is limitation, there is division - as the Sikh, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Christian, the democrat, the republican, the communist. They're all based on thought, and therefore all the governments are limited, all your activity is limited. Whether you think most abstractly or try to be very noble, it is still thinking, right? So, from that limited quality of thinking, as thinking is always limited, our actions are limited. Now, from that you begin to enquire very carefully: can thought have its right place and have no other place at all? You understand my question? So, is there an action which is free of limitation? That is, thinking being limited, we have reduced the whole universe into a very small affair. We have made our life into such a small affair, like thinking - I must be this, I must not be that, I must have power. You follow? We have reduced the enormous quality of life into a very small, petty little affair. So, is it possible to be free of thought? Which means, I must think to come here; if I am a bureaucrat, I must think in terms of bureaucracy; if I go to the factory and turn the screw, I must have certain knowledge. Why should I have knowledge about myself? -the higher self, lower self and all that? Why should I have knowledge about that? It's very simple - it's self-interest; I'm only concerned with myself actually. We may pretend to have brotherhood, we may talk about peace, play with words, but we're always self-centred. So, from that arises the question: With this self-centredness, which is essentially deep selfishness, can there be a change at all? Can we be utterly selfless? So we have to enquire: what is the self? What are you apart from your name and profession, your vows, following some guru? What are you? Or I'll put it another way - are you your name, are you your profession, are you part of the community, part of the tradition? Don't repeat what the Geeta says, what the Upanishads say or somebody says; that's futile. Actually, what are you? Is this the first time this question has been put to you - what are you? Aren't you your fear, aren't you your name, aren't you your body? Aren't you what you think you are, the image you have built about yourself? Aren't you all that? Aren't you your anger? Or is the anger separate from you? Come on, sirs, aren't you your fears, your ambitions, your greed, your competition, your uncertainty, your confusion, your pain, your sorrow - aren't you all that? Aren't you the guru you follow? So, when you identify yourself with that, aren't you all that? Or are you something higher up - superself, superconsciousness? If you say you have superconsciousness, a higher self, that's also part of thinking; therefore, what you call higher thinking, higher self, is still very small. So, what are you? I'm saying, you're a bundle of all that is put together by thought. Whatever you think, you are. You may invent all kinds of stuff, but that invention too is what you are. Right? Putting it all together it is called me, myself, my ego, my personality, my higher self, my god. And I invent all this kind of stuff. Who has put all this together? Or is there only one structure? Who has divided all this? Who has said I'm a Hindu or I'm a Muslim? Is it merely propaganda? Who created the division between countries? Thought? Or is it desire, the longing to be identified, to be safe? I'm asking you most respectfully, who has created this division? Is it thought? Of course, but behind thought there is something else. Who is doing all this, apart from thought? What is the desire, what is the urge, what is the movement behind it? Security, isn't it? I want to be secure; that's why I follow a guru. I want to be secure in my relationship with you, with my wife - she is my wife, -secure, protected, safe. The desire, the urge, the response, the reaction, is for safety - I must be safe, secure. We all want security, but we never question: is there security at all? Is there any place where I can say I'm safe? You distrust your wife, your wife distrusts you. You distrust your boss because you want his place. It is all common sense. You may laugh at it now but each human being in the world wants to have a place where he can be safe, secure, where there is no competition, where he is not pushed around, where he is not harassed. Don't you want all that? But you never ask: is there security at all? If you want security, you must also ask the question: Is there security at all? Then the question arises: Why do you want security? Is there security in your thinking? Is there security in your relationship -with your wife and with your children? Is there security in your job? You may be a professor, carefully protected, but there are higher professors; so you want to become the vice-chancellor. So where is security? There may be no security at all.Just think about it, sir, see the beauty of that - having no desire for security, having no urge, no feeling of any kind in which there is security. In your homes, in your offices, in your factories, in your parliaments and so on, is there security? Life may not have security; life is meant to be lived, not to create problems and then try to solve them. It's meant to be lived, and it will die. That's one of our fears - to die, right? So, this morning, have we learned from each other - not helped each other - have we learned, have we heard at all what the speaker is talking about? Have you heard with the ear, seen the facts of the world which is you - for the world is you? Or are they all ideas? There is a difference between fact and idea; the idea is never the fact. The word `microphone' is not the microphone, this thing in front of the speaker. But we have made the word the thing. So the Hindu is not you - the word is not you. You are the fact, not the word. So, can we see the word and see that the word is not the thing? The word `god' is not god. The word is different, totally, from the reality. So, we are asking most respectfully: what have you learned this morning, actually learned, so that you will act, not say yes, quite right, and go home and carry on as before. The world is in great chaos. I don't know if you realize it; there is great trouble in the world, great misery. You are confused, therefore you are creating all this in the world around you. If you don't alter yourself, the world cannot alter, change. Because, in the world, everywhere you go, every human being goes through the same phenomenon as you are going through - uncertain, unhappy, fearful, insecure, wanting security, trying to control, saying that your guru is better than my guru, and so on. You understand, sir? The speaker is not an optimist or a pessimist. We are presenting you with facts, not newspaper facts. We are talking together about your life, not the life of a guru, or an emperor, or somebody or other. We are talking together about your life. Your life is like that of the rest of the world. Human beings are terribly unhappy, uncertain, miserable, unemployed by the millions, in poverty, hunger, sorrow, pain,just like you; you're not different from them. You may call yourself Hindu or Muslim or Christian or what you like, but consciously, inwardly, you are just like the rest of the world. You may be dark brown, they may be light brown, have a different government, but every human being shares this terrible world. We have made the world - you understand? We are society. If you want society to be something different, you have to start, you have to bring order to your house, the house which is you. THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 5 19TH NOVEMBER 1985 2ND PUBLIC TALK IN VARANASI MAY WE GO on with what we were talking about yesterday? As we said, we are taking a long journey together, in a train a very long journey, right throughout the world, and that journey began two and a half million years ago. During that long interval of time and distance, we've had a great many experiences, and those experiences are stored in our brain, either in the conscious or in the unconscious, deeper layers of it. And, together, you and the speaker are going to examine explore. Not that the speaker alone talks - we're talking together. The speaker is putting it into words, and the words have a very significant meaning - not just the vocabulary, but the depth of the word, the significance of the word, the meaning of the word. As you and the speaker are taking the journey together, you can't just go to sleep. You can't just say, `Yes, I agree' or `I disagree'. We went into that; we are not agreeing or disagreeing. We are merely looking out of the window, seeing what extraordinary things man has gone through, what experience, what pain, what sorrow, what unbearable things man has created for himself and for the world. We are not taking sides, pro and con, left, right or centre - please understand this very carefully. This is not a political meeting, this is not an entertainment; this is a serious gathering. If you want to be entertained, you should go to a cinema or a football match. This is a very serious meeting as far as the speaker is concerned. He has talked all over the world: unfortunately or fortunately he may have created a reputation, and probably you are coming here because of that reputation, but that has no value at all. So, we are going to examine together, sitting together in that train, taking an infinitely long journey. We are not trying to impress you, we are not trying to force you to look at something. We are looking at our daily life and all the background of a million years. One must listen to all the whispers, hear every moment, see everything as it is - not as you would wish it to be but actually what you see out of the window of the train as it goes along - the hills, the rivers, the stretch of water and all the beauty around you. Shall we talk about beauty for a while? Would it interest you? It's a very serious subject, like everything in life. Probably you have never asked what beauty is. For the moment we are going to enquire into what it is because you are passing in that train the most wonderful scenery - the hills, the rivers, the great snowclad mountains, deep valleys, and not only things outside you, but also the inward structure and nature of your own being - what you think, what you feel, what your desires are. One has to listen to all this - not only to our own inward thoughts, feelings, and our opinions and judgements, but also to the sound of what other people are saying - what your wife is saying, what your neighbour is saying; listen to the sound of that crow, feel the beauty of the world, the beauty of nature. Not just say yes, right, wrong, this is what I think, this is what I should not think, or merely follow some tradition, but very quietly, without any reaction, see the beauty of a tree. So together, we're going to talk about beauty. What is beauty? Have you been to museums, some of you? Probably not. I won't take you around the museums; I am not a guide. But instead of looking at the pictures, and statues of the ancient Greeks, ancient Egyptians, Romans and the moderns, we are looking, asking, inquiring, demanding to find out what is beauty. Not the form, not a woman or a man or small child that is extraordinarily beautiful -all children are - but what is beauty? I'm asking the question, sir. Please answer it to yourself first, or have you never thought about it? Not the beauty of a face, but the beauty of a green lawn, of a flower, of the great mountains with the snow covering them, and the deep valleys, and the still tranquil waters of a river. All that is outside you and you say, `How beautiful that is!' What does that word `beauty' mean? It's very important to find that out, because we have so little beauty in our daily life. If you go through Benares you will know all about it - the filthy streets, the dust, the dirt. And seeing all this, as also the tenderness of a leaf or the tender generosity of human beings, you enquire deeply about this word that is used by poets, painters and sculptors, as you are asking yourself now. What is this quality of beauty? Do you want me to answer it or will you answer it? The gentleman says, you answer it because we don't know. Why? Why don't you know? Why haven't we enquired into this enormous question? You have your own poets, from the ancient people to now. They write about it, they sing about it, they dance, and you say you don't know what beauty is. What a strange people you are! So, what is beauty? The same question put in different words is what are you? What is the nature and structure of you, apart from the biological factor? That is very closely related to what is beauty. When you look at a mountain, snowcapped, deep valleys, blue, deep hills, what do you feel, what's your real response to all that? Aren't you, for a second or for a few minutes, absolutely shocked by it, by the greatness, the immensity of the green valley, the extraordinary light and the blue sky against the snowclad mountains? What happens to you at that moment when you look at that - the grandeur, the majesty of those mountains? What do you feel? Do you, for the moment, or for a few minutes, exist at all? You understand my question? Please don't agree; look at it very closely. At that moment when you look at something grand, immense, majestic, for a second you don't exist - you've forgotten your worries, your wife and your children, your job, all the messiness of your life. At that moment you are stunned by it. For that second, the grandeur has wiped out all your memory, just for a second, and then you come back. What happens during that second when you are not there? That is beauty - you understand? - when you are not there. With the grandeur, the majesty of a mountain or a lake, or that river early in the morning making a golden path, for a second you've forgotten everything. That is, when the self is not, there is beauty. Where you are not, with all your problems and responsibilities, your traditions and all that rubbish, then there is beauty. Like a child with a toy, as long as the toy is complex and he plays with it, the toy absorbs him, takes him over. The moment the toy is broken, he's back to whatever it was he was doing. We are also like that. We are absorbed by the mountain; it's a toy for us for a second, or for a few minutes; then we go back to our world. And we are saying, without a toy, without being absorbed by something greater, can you be free of yourself? You understand my question? You don't understand this; you're too clever; you are covered with a lot of knowledge, experience, and so on. That's what's the matter with all of you - too much learning. You're not simple enough. If you are very simple, deeply simple in yourself, you will discover something extraordinary. We have talked over beauty for a while. Now let us look at ourselves. We have created the world - you, the speaker, his forefathers, the past generations. What is it all about? - killing each other, maiming each other, dividing: my god, your god. Why is this society so ugly, so brutal, so cruel? Who has created this monstrous world? I am not being pessimistic or optimistic, but look at the world, the things that are going on outside of you: poor countries buying armaments, your country buying armaments, and immense poverty, competition - who has created all this? Will you say god has created it? He must be a messy god. So who created this society, who put it together? Haven't you put it together? Not only you, but your father, your great-grandfather, the past generations of a million years - they have created this society through their avarice, envy, competition. They have divided the world economically, socially, religiously. Face the facts, sir. We have put this society together, we are responsible for it - not god, not some external factors, but each one of us has created this society. You belong to this group and I belong to another group; you worship one god and I worship another god: you follow one guru and I follow another. So we have divided society, and we have divided it not only socially, but also religiously. Geographically we have divided the world - Europe, America, Russia; we have divided culture - western culture and eastern culture; we have divisions in government - socialist, democratic, republican, communist, and so on. You understand, sir, how our brain works? It divides, divides, divides. Haven't you noticed this fact? And out of this division comes conflict. So you have created this society; you are this society. So, unless you change radically, you'll never change it. The communists have tried to change it, forcing man, secretly, viciously, to submit to various forms of compulsion. You must know all this: this is history. So where there is division, there must be conflict; that's the law. And apparently we like conflict, we live in perpetual conflict. So we must go back and find out what is the cause of all this. Is it desire? Is it fear? Is it pleasure? Is it the avoidance of all pain and therefore guilt? Let us begin to find out for ourselves what is desire. That is the basis - desire to have power, desire to achieve, desire to become somebody. We are not against desire, we are not trying to become somebody. We are not against desire, we are not trying to suppress desire or transcend desire, like the monks. We must, together, understand what is desire. Are you interested to find out what is the root of desire? Do you want me to explain? But explanation is not the thing, the description is not that. When one describes a marvellous tree, the description is not the tree. We use words to convey something to each other, but the words, the descriptions, are not the fact. The word `wife' is not the wife. If you can understand that simple fact, you will treat her better. So, what is desire and why does it dominate us? What is its place, what is its nature? Monks the world over suppress desire or want to transcend desire or identify it with certain images, certain symbols, certain rituals. But what is desire? Have you ever asked that question? Or do you yield to desire, whatever the consequences? We live by sensation, don't we? - better food, better house, better wife. Sensation is a part of life, so is sex - it's a sensation, a pleasure, and we have a great many pleasures, pleasure of possession and so on. Sensation is an extraordinarily important part of our existence. If you have no sensation you are dead, right? All your nerves go, your brain withers. We live by sensation, sensation being touch, feeling, like running a nail suddenly into your finger -that's sensation; you call it pain. Tears, laughter, humour are all part of sensation. You want more power, more money, and `the more' is part of sensation. Every second, every response -intellectual, theoretical, philosophical - is part of sensation. We live by sensation - be clear on that - that is, by the senses responding: good taste, bad taste; it's bitter, it's sweet. Sensation is natural, it is inevitable, it is part of life. What happens when you have a sensation? When you see something very beautiful - a car, a woman, a man, or a lovely house - what happens? You have seen that lovely house, seen the gardens, seen the beauty of the landscape, and how the house is built, with styled grace and a sense of dignity. Then thought comes along, makes an image of that sensation, and then says, `I wish I had that house.' At that moment desire is born. When sensation is given a shape, a form, then, at that second, desire is born. When I see something I don't have, like a house or a car, then sensation becomes dominant. When thought gives it an image, when thought comes along and says, `I wish I had it', at that moment desire is born. Right? You understand the subtlety of it, the depth of it? When thought gives a form, a structure, an image to sensation, at that second desire is born. Now the question is, can sensation not be caught by thought, which is also another sensation? You understand, sir? After sensation, take time before thought gives it a shape - have an interval between sensation and thought giving it a shape. Do it, and you'll learn a lot from that. So I'm saying, when there is time in between sensation and thought - an interval, long or short - you'll understand the nature of desire. In that there is no suppression, no transcending. Sir, if you drive a car, not knowing the mechanism of it, you are always a little nervous that something might go wrong. But if you have dismantled that car and put it together very carefully, known all the parts, then you're master of the machinery, then you're not afraid, for you can put it together again. So, if you understand the nature of desire, the way desire begins, then you are not afraid of it, then you know what to do with it. There's something else which you and the speaker should talk over together. We have lived for thousands of years, and we have never understood the nature of fear. What is the source of fear, what is the cause of fear? We have apparently never ended fear -biological fear as well as psychological fear, inward fear - fear of death, fear of not having, not possessing, fear of loneliness - we have so many fears. Out of these fears you create gods, you create rituals, spiritual hierarchies, gurus, all the temples of the world. And we're asking, what is fear? Not your particular form of fear, not my fear and your fear, but fear? As I said, if you understand the machinery of a car, you're not afraid of it. So if you know, realize, understand the nature of fear, the cause of it, the root of it, then you will transcend fear, and fear is gone. We are going to do that this morning. We are asking, what is fear, what is the cause of it - not how to end it, not how to transcend it, control it, suppress it, and run away from it, as you're doing, but what is the cause, the source of it? Think it out, sir, go into it for a minute. Take your fear, your particular fear, or fears; what is the root of them? - security? desire for more? If you haven't found it, you ask somebody like the speaker what the cause is. Will you listen? Will you actually listen? I will explain, but the explanation is not the thing. Does the word `fear' evoke fear in you? Fear is a fact; the word is not the fact. So the explanation is not a means to end fear. We have to examine then what is time, because time is fear: tomorrow something might happen, my house might fall down, my wife might turn to another man, my husband might go off - and I'm in fear. Fear of the past, fear of the future, fear of the present: I have been that, I won't be that, but I am not that now - that whole process is a movement in time. From here to there is a movement, and it needs time. All movement is time. The past shapes the present. The past is operating now, and the future is shaped by the present - modified. Circumstances change, certain incidents happen, so the past is modified, changed, altered, and the future is what happens now. All time - the past, the present and the future - is contained in the now. This applies to life; it is not just a theory. You were something yesterday; an incident takes place today that changes, modifies, slightly alters the past, and the future is what you are now, modified. That is, the past, the present and the future are now; tomorrow is now. If there is no mutation now, you'll be exactly the same as you've been before. I think I am a Hindu, with all the circus romp behind it, and I'll be a Hindu tomorrow. That is logical. Therefore what you do now matters much more than what you will do tomorrow. So, what are you going to do if tomorrow is now? That is a fact; it is not my theory or your theory, it's a fact. I am greedy now, and if I don't do anything about it now, I'll be greedy tomorrow. Can you stop being greedy today? Will you? No, of course not. So you will be what you have been. This has been the pattern of humanity for millions of years. You don't mind killing. Be honest. You don't mind killing, you subscribe to it, you want your country to be strong. Right? Don't be ashamed of it - this is a fact. And so you gather armaments. If you don't stop being an Indian now, you'll be an Indian tomorrow. So I'm asking, what will you do now? Stop being an Indian, will you? Do you know what the implications are? - not the passport, not the paper - but not being associated with any religion, any group; they are all phoney anyhow. Is that possible? Will you do it? Do you see that if there is no mutation now, today, you'll be exactly the same tomorrow? This is not being optimistic or pessimistic; this is a fact. Do you understand the seriousness of it? If there is no radical mutation now, I'll be the same tomorrow. So time is a factor in fear. And fear is a common factor of all mankind. Can that fear - not one branch of it - but the root of fear be totally demolished? - that is, to have no fear of any kind. The speaker says it is eminently possible; that it can be done radically. The speaker is saying that fear can be totally ended. Don't say it is for the illumined one and all that nonsense. You can end it if you put your brain, your heart into it - completely, not partially. And then you will see for yourself what immense beauty there is in it; a sense of utter freedom - not freedom of a country or of some government, but the sense of the enormity of freedom, the greatness of freedom. Will you do it - today, now? From today, seeing the cause of fear, end it. As long as there is fear - biologically, physically, psychologically - it destroys us. So, if one may ask, after listening to this fact, not theory, what are you going to do? Time is the factor of fear and thought; so if you don't change now, you won't ever change. It is constant postponement. THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 6 22ND NOVEMBER 1985 3RD PUBLIC TALK IN VARANASI WE ARE GOING TO talk over together a great many things this morning, and, as we said, we're not the only speaker; you and the speaker are sharing all the issues that we are going to discuss. We are participating in them, not just listening casually. In the last two talks we've dealt with many things: fear and all the travail of man, the problems that we have, which we never seem to resolve; we went into that carefully. The problems exist because our minds are filled with problems; therefore there is no freedom to look at any problem. Also we went into the question of thought - why thought has made this life so utterly impossible. Thought has brought about a great deal of conflict, wars for two and a half million years, which means practically every year we kill each other - in the name of god, in the name of patriotism, my country against your country, our religion against your religion, and so on. And we also talked about the nature of thought, why thought divides men or brings them together to do a certain project, like going to the moon. To build that rocket, you probably had to have over 300,000 people, all of them doing their little job perfectly. Either we get together in a crisis like war which is born of hatred, or we come together on some national issue, or when there is a great calamity like an earthquake, or volcanic eruption. Apart from that, we never get together. Now, this morning, if I may most respectfully suggest, we should all get together, as we are all sitting together, and gather energy so that we can think out very clearly the various issues we are going to raise together. That means to activate our brains which are rather sluggish, slow, monotonous, repetitive. So we are together keeping our brains alert. We have not only to keep the physical organism active because that gives energy, but to have a very clear, active brain. Not a specialized brain as a philosopher, as a scientist, as a physicist, and so on. Those specialized brains become very narrow. Philosophy, according to the dictionary, means the love of truth, the love of life, the love of wisdom - not just adding more and more theories or quoting somebody and explaining what they have quoted. I don't know if you've ever gone into the question of learning, what it is to learn. Now we are going to find out together what it means. We generally take learning to mean memorizing. All through school, college and university you memorize. And that memory can be used to earn a livelihood, to gain power, possessions, prestige, patronage, and so on. Is there another kind of learning? We know the ordinary kind of learning - at school, college, university or learning a skill to become an excellent carpenter or a plumber or a cook. So, what is learning? Have you ever thought about it? When you're memorizing, your brain is filled with memories. That's simple. Memory multiplies, keeps you somewhat alert, you learn more and more and more. So the speaker is asking you - is there a different kind of learning altogether, which is not merely memorizing. This is a very important question because the brain records every incident, every kind of memory. When you're hurt it is recorded, but you never enquire who is hurt; we'll come to that presently. So the brain is recording; see the importance of that. It has to record, otherwise you and I wouldn't be here. So the brain is constantly recording discarding. Now, is it necessary to record? You have an incident in a car - an accident; it is instantly recorded, because you are hurt or your car is damaged. The brain has the capacity, the energy, not only to record but also to safeguard itself. And we are asking: is it necessary to record everything? Or can we record only that which is necessary and nothing else? Have you put this question to yourself? The brain records for its own security, otherwise you and I wouldn't be sitting here. You have recorded how long it took you to come here and so on. We're asking, is it necessary to record certain things, and totally unnecessary where the psyche is involved? You understand my question, sir? Is it necessary when you are flattered or when you're insulted to record it? Is it necessary to record these things? The recording builds up the psyche. This is a very serious question. The psyche, which is made up of various elements, characteristics, ethos, is contained in the brain, which we call consciousness. In that consciousness, memories, fears, etc., are contained. So we're asking again, is it necessary to build up the psyche? The psyche means the self, the self being all the memories, the activities of thought, imagination, fascination, fear, pleasure, sorrow, pain. It is recording that makes up the whole psyche, the `I', the persona. So we're asking, Is it necessary to record so as to build up the self? Have you ever thought about this, looked at it or investigated it, gone into this question of recording as you would into various philosophical, religious matters? It may be necessary to record certain things and totally unnecessary to record others - see the beauty of it - so that the brain is not always conditioned in memory, so that the brain becomes extraordinarily free, but active. That is the first question. So, learning is not to record. We have discussed this matter with psychiatrists in New York. They were fascinated with the idea of not recording, so that the brain cells themselves mutate. Our brains are built up of cells and so on - I'm not a professional - and in the brain cells are the memories. And we live on those memories - the past and all the remembrances that one has. And the older you get the more you go back, further and further, till you die. And it is important to learn to find out whether the brain needs to record everything. Forgetting, and not recording, are two entirely different matters. When you are hurt, not physically but psychologically, inwardly, you say `I am hurt.' You are all hurt, aren't you? From childhood till you grow old and die, you are being hurt all the time. You say, `I can't stand any more hurts, I've been hurt so much. I'm frightened.' I build a wall around myself, isolate myself - all these are the consequences of being hurt. Now, who is being hurt? You say, `It's me.' Then what is `me'? You just say `me', `I', the ego, any word that comes, but you don't investigate who is the `I', who is the persona. Who are you - a name, a degree if you are fortunate or unfortunate enough, a job, a house or a flat, and a title after a name? There are the images you have built about yourself, so that when you say you are hurt, the images about yourself are hurt. But all those images are you -you're a physicist, you're a doctor, you're a philosopher, you're an MP, or an engineer. Have you ever realized how someone is always introduced by his profession? So the self, the psyche, the persona, is the image which you have built about yourself. You have built an image about your wife, and she builds an image about you - and these images have relationship. See what is happening. The images have relationship - not the persons but the images - and you live on that. So you never know your wife or your husband or your friend. Or you don't care to know, but you have the image. So the question is: can you live without a single image? See the implications of it, the beauty of it, the freedom of it. We ought to talk over together why we make all this effort in life. Why do we make such an immense effort to do anything? We make tremendous efforts to meditate, to live, to fight, to battle with one another - opinion against opinion, judgement against judgement, I agree with you, I disagree with him. Why all this effort? For what? - for money, for your family, for affection, to feel that you must be loved by somebody? When you ask that question, then you must ask, what is love? Is love effort? - I must love you, therefore I am going to make an effort about it. Can there be love when there is ambition? Sir, please, this is serious; this is not for somebody who doesn't care, who just wants his own way. Is love ambition, is it greed, is it self-centredness? Is love the opposite of hate? You know, we have always been fighting - the good fighting the bad, all through life. You see it in paintings symbolizing the good and symbolizing the devil. In Greek mythology and other mythologies it is the white bull against the black bull or good fighting evil in different shapes, symbols and so on. We still do that - the good fighting the bad. Is the good separate from the bad? Is the good born out of the bad? If the good is related to the bad, then it's not good. If the good is born of, comes from, the bad, then it's not good. That is simple, isn't it? But if the bad is totally divorced from the good, if there is no relationship between the good and the bad, then there is only the bad and the good, totally divorced from each other. Therefore they can't fight. So then we have to enquire, what is the good? And you have to ask, can love contain hate? Or, has hate nothing to do with love -therefore there is no relationship between the two, therefore they can't fight each other? This is an important question for you to understand, go into. You always say, `I have not been good today, but I will be good tomorrow,' or, `I have been angry today, but I will not be angry tomorrow.' This is the relative relationship between the good and the bad. Love has nothing whatsoever to do with jealousy; love has nothing whatsoever to do with hate. Where there is hate, pleasure, anxiety, and so on, love cannot exist. And the speaker questions whether you love anybody at all. What is love? How does it come about? Do you really ask that question, or am I asking it for you? Can love exist where there is sorrow? Most of us are in sorrow of some kind or other - failing in an exam, failing to be successful in business or in politics, or in your relationship with your wife, or in your relationship with somebody upstairs - which may be your guru or some other imaginative figure. So when you can't succeed you are depressed, you are sorrowful. Or you are sorrowful because you live in a small little village and you don't know how to read and write, you don't know how to drive a car, or you have no hot bath or you wear one dirty cloth. The man in a position high up on the ladder - he suffers too. So, everyone on this earth - everyone - from the richest to the poorest, from the most powerful to the least powerful, suffers. Suffering is not yours, because everyone suffers. It's not my suffering; it's suffering. I wonder if you understand that? My son dies and I get terribly upset. I weep and I say, `My god, I've lost my son,' and that becomes a perpetual problem. I weep every time I see a little boy or a little girl. And I go through the pain of loneliness, sorrow. If there is sorrow, there is no love. Please realize this. If I suffer, suffer, suffer, it's part of self-pity, self-concern, it's: `My sorrow is different from your sorrow', like `My guru is stronger than your guru', or `My god is different from your god'. So, is there an end to sorrow? Or must mankind go through this sorrow all its life? The speaker says it can end. Otherwise there is no love. I'm shedding tears all the time, I suffer, and you come along and tell me, `Every human being on earth suffers; it is not your suffering, we all share it.' I refuse to accept such a statement because I love my sorrow, I'm happy in my sorrow, and I want to be separate in my sorrow. To get a feeling of this requires a great deal of enquiry, persuasion, talking over, saying, `It is not quite yours. Have a little bit of it, but it isn't quite yours'. That means no self-pity, and it means you are really sharing the burden of sorrow for all the rest of mankind. Go on, sir, think about it, look at it; you are part of humanity; you are not separate from humanity. You may have a better position, better degrees, better money, but you are part of mankind, your consciousness is part of mankind. Your consciousness contains all the things that you have thought about, imagined, feared, and so on. Your consciousness is that, and that is also the consciousness of mankind. Mankind has fear, sorrow, pain, anxiety, tears, uncertainty, confusion. Every human being on earth has all this, and you are like the rest. So you are not individuals. I know my body is different from your body - you are a woman, I'm a man. But we are in the world as one unit. When you feel that relationship, you are the rest of mankind. Then something totally different takes place, not just words, imaginings, but the feeling of it, the enormity of it. We ought to talk about death. Sorry, on a lovely morning, sitting under the trees, quiet - no train crossing the bridge - to talk about death may seem morbid, may seem ugly. Now together, we're going to examine it, share it - not you just listening and I talking. So, what is death? Why are we so frightened of it? Why do we keep death for ten years later or twenty years later or a hundred years later? Then, you have not only to ask what is death and dying, but also what is living. What is your life? - office from nine to five, as a clerk, as a governor, a factory worker or whatever it is, for the rest of your life, except when you retire as a gaga old man. And your life is breeding children, sex, pleasure, pain, sorrow, anxiety, problem after problem - illness, doctors, caesarean operations, pain in giving birth. This is your life. Do you deny that? And you call this living. You support it, you enjoy it, you want more and more of it. Right? And you put death as many years away as possible. And in that distance of time you are building up the same pattern over and over. Your children, your grandchildren, all live in that same pattern which you call living. So I say to myself, why not bring that which you call death into living? You can't take anything with you - not even all that your guru has said and all that you have tried to live up to, nor your furniture, your wife, your children, nor all the silver you have collected, all the money in the bank. So, as you cannot take anything with you, why not let life and death meet? You understand what I'm saying? Why not let death come today? Not suicide - I'm not talking about that. Why not be totally free of attachment now - which is death? Be totally detached - today, not tomorrow. Tomorrow is death. So, why can't I be free of my attachments now so that living and dying are together all the time? I wonder if you see the beauty of it. That gives you an immense sense of freedom. So living and dying are together, always. It's not something to be frightened about. If the brain can do that, then there is a totally different quality to the brain. It has no hooks, it has no sense of the past, the future, the present. It is living - it is really an endless way of living. That is, every day is a new day. Don't mistake what I'm talking about - the future is now. There is no `I shall be born again next life'. That is an idea to which you're attached. It gives you great comfort, but if you believe in reincarnation, then you must act rightly now, because next life you are going to pay for it or be rewarded. It's a very comforting idea, but it is meaningless. Because, if you act rightly now, righteousness has no reward. Righteousness is righteousness, not what you are going to get out of it. That is a merchandizing attitude, a mechanical attitude. We should talk about religion. What is religion? Sir, this is one of the important questions in life. There are temples all over India, mosques all over the world, churches all over the world and their priests beautifully decorated, beautifully garbed, all medallions and so on. This has been one of the problems from the most ancient times: the priest and the king - the priest wanted power, the king also wanted power. But the priest was stronger because he was the one who wrote, read, and the king had to obey him because he was supposed to be the wiser man. And gradually the king said, `This is not good enough,' and so there was a war between the priest and the king. This is historical; you will find it in different books. The word `religion' had a very complicated meaning at one time, but now it has become a symbol, a ritual, a superstition. Is this religion, or is religion something entirely different, something which has nothing to do with rituals, with symbols, because all these have been invented by man? Because priests wanted power, position, they put on new hats, new clothes and grew long beards or shaved their heads - and all this is called religion. To an ordinary, thoughtful, fairly intelligent man, it is rubbish, total rubbish. If he discards all that, really discards it totally, puts away being a Hindu with all its superstitions, symbols, worship, prayer, then he is a serious man; he is not a wordmonger. Sir, the speaker is not laying down the law. Let us talk about it, let us investigate, let us go into it together. Our brains are chattering all the time. Haven't you noticed it? - Chattering, chattering, chattering or imagining, perpetually in action. There is never a moment of silence. And silence is also repetition - `Ram, Ram' or whatever you may repeat. When you repeat something mechanically, as you repeat the word, gradually the brain, through repetition, becomes dull and quiet; and that quietness is something marvellous to you. You think you've achieved some tremendous thing and you go around repeating this to others, and the poor gullible people say, `Yes, yes'. Your meditation is a series of achievements. Can you discard all that nonsense? For the speaker it is complete nonsense, it is like going to the circus. We have to enquire what is meditation and what is silence. Silence allows space. You can't be silent in time. We have to go into this question of meditation, space, time, and whether there is an ending to time. We are not telling you how to meditate. Don't ask how to meditate. It is like telling a carpenter how to build a beautiful cabinet. If he is a good carpenter, you don't have to tell him. Your meditation now is achievement. The word `meditation' means `to ponder over, think, weigh, look at carefully'. It also means `to measure', from ma in Sanskrit. When you compare - `I was this today, I'll be that tomorrow' - that is measurement. Measurement has no place in meditation. Measurement is necessary in all technologies - whether you build a chair or the most complicated rocket to go to the moon. We are saying, meditation implies total freedom from all comparison and measurement - and this is difficult. Meditation is something that is marvellous if you know what to do. The meditator is different from meditation. As long as you are the meditator, there is no meditation, because the meditator is concerned about himself - how he is progressing, what he is doing. In meditation there is no meditator at all. See for yourself the beauty, the depth, the subtlety of it. The practice of meditation is not meditation - sitting and making the mind more and more dull, and saying, `Yes, I've spent an hour.' (By the way, sir, don't touch my feet - that's most undignified, as a human being. You can hold my hand, but not the feet; it's inhuman, undignified.) So meditation is something that cannot be practised as you practise a violin, a piano. To practise means you want to reach a certain level of perfection. But in meditation there is no level, nothing to be achieved. Therefore there is not a conscious, deliberate meditation; it is a meditation which is totally undirected, totally - if I may use the word - `unconscious'. It is not a deliberate process. Let's leave it at that. We can spend a lot of time on this -an hour, a whole day, the whole of your life to find this out. Now let us talk about space. Because meditation is that - space. We have no space in the brain. There is space between two struggles, between two thoughts, but it is still within the sphere of thought. So, what is space? Does space contain time? Or does time include all space? We talked about time. If space contains time, then it is not space. Then it is circumscribed, limited. So, can the brain be free of time? Sir, this is such an important, immense question; you don't seem to gather it. If life, all of life, is contained in the now, do you see what it means? All humanity is you. All humanity - because you suffer, he suffers; his consciousness is you; your consciousness, your being, is him. There is no you and me that limits space. So, is there an end to time - not to the clock which you wind and it stops, but to the whole movement of time? Time is movement, a series of incidents. Thought is also a series of movements. So time is thought. So we are saying, if space contains time, it is not space. So, is there an end to time? Which means, is there an end to thought; which means, is there an end to knowledge; is there an end to experience? - which is total freedom. And this is meditation. Not sitting and looking - that's childish. This demands not only a great deal of the intellect, but insight. The physicist, the artist, the painter, the poet and so on have a limited insight. We are talking about a timeless insight. This is meditation, this is religion, and this is the way to live, if you want to, all the rest of your days. THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 7 21ST NOVEMBER 1985 DISCUSSION WITH THE CAMPERS VARANASI KRISHNAMURTI (K): This is supposed to be a conversation between us. You are going to question me, question the speaker; we are going to have a discussion, a deliberation, take counsel together, weigh together, consider together, balance things together. It is not that one person answers your question or your queries; not that the speaker considers and then you agree - that is rather childish - but, rather, we are going to have a conversation together. probably, you are not used to this - really to talk to somebody openly, frankly; probably you never do, even to your wife or husband or somebody closely related. You put on your mask, you pretend. If you could, put aside all that this morning and consider what questions we have, what we would like to talk over together, what you are most concerned with; not just some absurd stuff, but rather, what you really want to find out. Before we begin to discuss - how do you approach a question? You understand what I am asking? How do you regard a question, a problem; how do you weigh the problem; how do you come very close to the problem? We cannot expect the speaker to answer your question because in the question itself may be the answer. Do you understand? So, whatever the question we are going to discuss this morning, let us examine it first, not wait for an answer. Have we understood this fact, or is it mysterious? I have got a question for you - I am not going to answer it -Why do you separate living, your daily living from your ideas of the spiritual? Why do you divide the two? Why do you separate the so-called religious life and the monotonous, lonely, daily life? You answer my question. First participant (P1): Because it needs a different kind of energy. The spiritual life and the ordinary, mundane life involve two different kinds of energy. K: That is, two different kinds of energy - one for the so-called spiritual, religious life, and another kind of energy for the mundane life. Now, I am not going to answer the question. Let us find out if what you are saying is a fact. You say that those people who are religious, who put on those funny robes, need a kind of energy quite different from that of a man who travels around and makes money or of the poor man in the village. Why do you divide the two? May I put that question? Energy is energy, right? - whether it be electrical energy or motor-driven energy or solar energy or the energy of a river in flood. So why do you divide energy? Is it that the man with a beard, strange clothes, has more energy, or that he is trying to concentrate his energy on a particular issue? You understand, sir? P2: There are various kinds of energy: one is the energy of thought, which can be stilled; there is another, the energy of insight, which does not get stilled, and there is yet another, the energy of mind which brings about compassion and other things. K: Certainly not. P2: Pardon, sir? K: Sir, we are talking it over, I am not laying down the law. Would you mind listening. P2: What is the relationship of the three aspects of energy, of thought, of insight, and of mind? K: You answer it. P3: May I sir? K: Why not? You have a right to answer him. P3: Just because we want to be comfortable, we divide energy into various compartments. I do not think there can be many types of energy. Energy can be only one. K: Yes, I should have thought so myself. You see how we divide everything. We divide spiritual energy, mental energy, the energy of insight, the energy of thought. P3: Then it gets so complicated. K: I know it complicates it, doesn't it? Why not be very simple? The energy of the body, the energy of sex, the energy of thought, it is all energy. It is one thing; only we divide it. Why? Find out, madam, why do we divide it? P4: We are conditioned to divide it. K: Yes, sir. Why are you conditioned? Why do you accept this division? India-Pakistan, Russia-America - why do you divide all this? Tell me. P5: The division is a reality. K: Of course it is a reality. Why do you make obvious statements, sir? P5: There is a difference between the truth and the reality. K: All right, what do you call reality? P5: What we see. K: Therefore, you say that reality is right in front of you, right? - It is what you see visually, optically. Is the tree a reality? P5: Yes, sir. K: All right, is what you think a reality? P5: Sometimes we have to think. K: Is your wife a reality? I am asking you a question: what do you mean by `my wife'? P6: There is the psychological attitude that I have towards my wife and there is the reality of my wife who has her own psychology. K: Are you saying, sir - if I may put it in my own words - that the image of your wife, the image which you have built up, is different from your wife; is that it? P6. It may happen sometimes that the image coincides with the reality of what my wife is. K: Have you looked at your wife? Have you seen her, enquired into her ambitions, her anxiety, the pain of bearing children and all the rest of it? Have you considered what the wife is? You have built an image about her, haven't you? P6: Not necessarily. K: I do not say necessary or unnecessary. It is a fact that you, if you are married, or if you have some friend, build an image about her? Don't you? Not necessarily, but it takes place, right? P6: Yes, sir. K: I am not trying to brow-beat you, sir, but each one has an image about the other. You have an image about me, otherwise you would not be here. So we create an image about another, depending on our temperament, depending on our knowledge, depending on our illusions, depending on our fantasies, and so on. We build an image about people: you have an image about the prime minister, you have an image about the person who is speaking to you. So we are asking a much deeper question, which is: can you live a daily life without images? P7: The images that we build up are generally in relationship with ourselves. I build up an image around me. K: Yes, you have an image about yourself. P7: Yes, and if we can achieve that state which you have been talking about - effacing the centre, the self - then the images would automatically drop. Then one can live without the image. K: So, when you talk about relationship, what do you mean by that word? Sir, please, just listen quietly before you answer. Take a little breather. What is your relationship with another? You understand the word `relationship'? To be related - I am related to him through blood: he is my father, my brother, whatever it is. What do you mean by that word `relationship'? Carefully, sir, do not be so quick; go slowly. P7: I am not using the word `relationship' in that sense. K: I am talking in that sense. P8: My care and concern for my friends, for my parents, for my children, including hatred - all that is included. K: Do you really care? Or is it just an idea that you should care? If I may politely ask you, what do you mean by the word `related' -not what meaning you give to it, the meaning according to the dictionary. P9: Contacts through the actual, not through words or images. K: Sir, I am asking you a question; do not kick it around. What do you mean by related? I am related to him - what does that mean? P10: I think when I say I am related, I become a part of that. K: Are you a part of your wife? P10: Yes, partially. K: Not total or partial. I am asking, what do you mean by the word `related'? P11: Sir, being associated with day-to-day life, a network of expectations from each other, duties and obligations. K: Oh, God, you make it so very complex, don't you? I am just asking you what you mean by that word per se - for itself - not what you think it should be. P12: Close touch; getting attached; to have something in common. If I have an image about you, then I have a relationship with you. K: Do you have a relationship with me? P12: Yes. K: In what way? I am asking this seriously, sir; do not throw it aside. P12: When I am looking at you without an image, I have relationship at that moment with you. K: You really have not thought about it, sir. You are just throwing out words. P13: I think we have diverted from the original question. K: I know, I know. So, sir, let us go back. I will come back to this word; it is a very important word in our life. Why do we divide the spiritual and the mundane? We divide India against Pakistan; we divide various religions - Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and so on; we divide, divide, divide. Why? Do not answer; just look at it, sir. We are taking counsel together; we are looking at the same problem together - why do we divide? Of course, there is a division between man and woman; or, you are tall, I am short; you are brown or white, I happen to be black - but that is natural, isn't it? I won't go into all that. So why do we divide? P14: Because we have different ideas and different feelings and different interests, and we want to stick to them. K: Why do you want to stick to them? P14: Because we are selfish and we have self-interest. K: Do not reduce everything to selfishness. Why do we divide, I am asking. Who is dividing? P15: The mind itself first divides into the inner perception and then the outer perception. K: Sir, is that your own experience, or are you quoting somebody? P15: Half-half. K: Could we please be serious for a while and face these facts? Why have we divided the world around us - Pakistan, India, Europe, America, Russia and so on? Who has made all these divisions? P16: I think it is ego, it is thought. K: Are you guessing? Why don't we look at the facts first? We have different ideologies, different beliefs: one section of the world believes in Jesus, the other section believes in Allah, some other section believes in the Buddha, another section believes in something else; who has made all these divisions? P17: It is we, mankind. K: That means you. P17: Yes, sir. K: You have divided the world. P17: Yes, sir. K: Why? Why have you divided it? P18: Fear and security. K: Are you sure of what you are saying! P19: We divide ourselves because we derive pleasure from this division. K: If you are being killed by the other party, is that also pleasure? Don't make casual remarks because this is not an entertainment; I am not here to entertain you. So if you will kindly listen, I am asking you a question: who has divided the world into this? Has not man done this? You have done it - because you are a Hindu or a Muslim or a Sikh or some other sect, right? Man wants security, so he says, I belong to the Buddhists: that gives me identity, that gives me strength, that gives me a sense of place where I can stay. Why do we do this? Is it for security; because if I lived as a Hindu in a world of Muslims, they would kick me around? Or if I lived as a Protestant in Rome, I would find it awfully difficult because Rome is the centre of Catholicism, right? Who has done all this - made this colossal mess? You have done it, he has done it, she has done it. What will you do about it?Just talk about it? You don't want to act; you say, Let us carry on. P20: You have no intention to help us but, when we are here, we find that you help us. How does that happen? K: Too bad. I do not want to help anybody. It is wrong to help another, except surgically, with food, and so on. The speaker is not your leader; we have said it a thousand times all over Europe, America and here. P20: You may not help us, but you make us understand things. K: No! We are having a conversation together. In that conversation we may begin to see things clearly for ourselves. Therefore nobody is helping you; it is a conversation. P21: Yes, sir. K: Don't say, `Yes sir'. Did you hear what I said -that the speaker is not here to help you in any way? He is not your guru, you are not his follower. The speaker says all that is an abomination. P22: Why is there so much cruelty in nature that one being has to eat another in order to survive? K: A tiger lives on smaller things, right? So the big things eat little things. And you are asking why nature is so cruel. P22: No, sir. Why is there so much cruelty in nature? K: First of all, why is there so much cruelty in nature? - that is natural, perhaps. Don't say there is cruelty in nature. Why are you so cruel? Why are human beings cruel? P23: I want to get rid of my pain and sorrow; therefore, if anybody hurts me, I also react or respond in a similar manner. K: Sir, have you ever considered that all human beings suffer -all human beings in the world, whether they live in Russia, America, China, India, Pakistan, wherever it is? All human beings suffer. P23: Yes, sir. K: Now, how do you solve that suffering? P23: I am interested in my own suffering. K: What are you doing about it? P23: I have come here to be enlightened by you. K: What shall we do together, sir, together? Not I help you or you help me; what shall we do together to get rid of sorrow? P23: I don't know, sir. K: Are you sure? P23. Yes sir. K: No, no, answer carefully; this is a very serious question. Are you sure you don't know how to be free of sorrow? P23: Yes, sir. I do not know how to get rid of my sorrow. K. Just a minute, just a minute - remain in that state. Would you listen sir, please? He said a very serious thing. He said, `I really don't know how to be free of sorrow.' When you say, `I don't know,' is it that you are waiting to know? You understand my question? P23: Yes, sir. K: I don't know but I may be expecting some kind of answer. Therefore when I am expecting, I step out of not knowing. P23: What does it mean - stay in not knowing? K: I will tell you what it means; I am not helping you. It is a very serious matter when you say I am not helping you, because we have been helped for so many thousands of years. Sir, when you say `I don't know,' what does that mean? I don't know what Mars is. He is an astro-physicist, and I go to him to find out what Mars is. P23: But I am not interested in Mars. K: I know you are not interested in Mars; nor am I. But I am taking that as an example. I don't know what Mars is, and I go to an astro-physicist and say, `Sir, tell me what Mars is.' He tells me that Mars is various combinations of gas and all the rest of it, and I say, `That is not Mars; your description of Mars is different from Mars.' So I ask you, when you say `I don't know,' what do you mean by that - `I don't know'? I am not waiting for an answer -which may be crooked, which may be false, which may be illusory, therefore I am not expecting, right? Are you in that state - `I don't know'? P24: We are stunned when we remain in that state. K: Remain in that state. I don't know how to swim in the Ganga. P25: I cannot do anything about it. K: You cannot. When you do not know what is the cause of suffering, how it can be ended - you don't know, right? So remain in that state and find out. When you put a question you expect an answer, don't you? Be honest, be simple. You expect an answer from a book, from another person or from some philosopher -somebody to tell you the answer. Would you put a question and listen to the question? You understand what I am saying? When you put a question, would you wait for the question to reveal itself? I know if I can understand the question properly, I will find the answer. So the answer may be in the question. That is, I put a question to you; don't try to find an answer, but find out if you have understood the question - the depth of the question or the superficiality of the question or the meaninglessness of the question. Would you look at the question first? So I am suggesting, sir, if you put a question to the speaker, the speaker says the question itself has vitality, energy, not the answer because the answer is in the question. Right? Find out. The question contains the answer. P26: An intelligent mind can put a right question. I feel I am not intelligent at all so how can I ask a right question? K: You cannot. But you can find out why you are not intelligent. He is intelligent, I am not. Why? Is intelligence dependent on comparison? You understand, sir? Did you listen to my question? P27: Many times we find an answer to our question, but we require somebody else's approval of that answer. K: So the answer is not important but the approval of another is important. P28: The correct answer is important, and therefore approval of the correct answer is required. K: By whom? By your friends, who are equally unintelligent? By whom do you want the approval - public opinion? the governor, the prime minister or high priests? From whom do you want approval, sir? You don't think at all; you just repeat, repeat. P29: Sir, I remain with the situation `I don't know', but it is tiresome. K: Why is it tiresome? P29: I try to find out. K: Don't try to find out. Here is a question: Why has man - why have we - made such a mess of the world, mess of our lives, mess of other people's lives? You understand, sir? It is a mess, it is a confusion; why? Listen to the question, go into the question. Have you ever held in your hands a marvellous jewel? You look at it, don't you? You see the intricacies of it, how beautifully it is put together, what extraordinary skill has gone into it, right? The silversmith must have had marvellous hands. The jewel is very important; you look at it, you cherish it, you put it away in the case and look at it, don't you? P29: I want to have it. K: Yes, you have it in your hand, sir; I am saying you look at it. Your marvellous picture is painted by somebody or other and you look at it. It is in your room, it is yours - you just do not hang it and forget it; you look at it. In the same way, if I ask you a question, look at it, listen to the question. But we are so quick to answer it, so impatient. So I am suggesting, sir, look at it, take time, weigh it, see the beauty of the question. It may be an utterly unimportant question. Do it, sir. Then you will find that the question itself has a tremendous energy. P30: Why do we not change? K: Why, sir? Why don't you change. P30: I don't know, but I do not change. K: Are you satisfied where you are? P30: No. K: Then change! P31: Sir, I would like to ask a question, please. There is a teacher in a class in which some boy is naughty. In order to put him right, he has to punish him. Should he go through that exercise of punishment, which means violence? K: What do you mean by the word `violence'? Don't be quick, sir. What do you mean by violence? Hitting each other - would you call that violence? I hit you, you hit me back - that is a form of violence, isn't it? The grown-up person hits his child - that is a form of violence. Killing another is a form of violence, harassing another is a form of violence, trying to imitate another is a form of violence, right? Would you agree to that? Imitating, conforming to the pattern of another - that is violence, right? So I am asking you, how will you stop psychological violence and physical violence? Don't say people; how will you stop it? P32: Sir, why is there variety in nature? K: Thank god! Why do you bother about nature? Why are you concerned with nature? P32: I am seeing the variety. K: Don't you see the variety here? P32: I see it even outside. K: What are you going to do about it? P32: I want to know why. K: Sir, I would request you to study yourself first, know yourself first. You know about everything outside you, but you know nothing about yourself. This has been an old question. The Greeks have put it in their own way; the Egyptians, the ancient Hindus have said too - know yourself first. Will you start with that? P33: I am always putting this question to myself. Why am I in the bondage of physical pain? I keep on asking this question, but I don't get any answer. K: You may be going to the wrong doctor. Sir, I know people who go from doctor to doctor. They have plenty of money, so they are trotting around from one doctor to another. Do you do that, or is it psychological pain? P33: Physical as well as psychological. K: Which is important? Which is a greater pain? P33: When the physical pain is extreme, surely it is the physical pain that is important. K: Sir, you have not answered my question. To what do you give importance? P33: At the moment when I am suffering, I give importance to that. K: You have not answered my question, sir, have you? I am asking you which is more important - psychological pain or physical pain? P33: What do you mean by psychological pain? K: I will tell you. Pain of fear, pain of loneliness, pain of anxiety, pain of sorrow and so on - all that is in the psyche. Now, to what do you give importance - to the psychological or to the physical pain? P33: Psychological. K: Do you, really? P33: Yes, sir. K: Are you being obstinate, sir? If you give importance to the psychological pain, who is going to be the doctor? P33: I. K: What do you mean by `I'? You are the pain. You are not different from the `I'. The `I' is made up of pain, anxiety, boredom, loneliness, fear, pleasure - all that is the `I'. P34: If I have understood that there is urgency to be aware all the time, how is it that I remain in that state only for a very short while during the day? K: Because you don't understand what it means to be aware. Sir, here is a question. It is a fact that the various centres of the KFI [The Krishnamurti Foundation, India] constantly and continuously stress and spread that they are the centre of K's teaching. So now when we have the Buddha's teaching, Christ's teaching and Krishnamurti's teaching, are these so-called teachings of K going to meet the same fate as those of the Buddha and Christ? Have you understood the question? Sir, K has thought a great deal about the word `teaching'. We thought of using the word `work' - ironworks, big building works, hydroelectric works, you understand? So I thought `work' was very, very common. So we thought we might use the word `teaching', but it is not important - the word - right? The teachings of the Buddha nobody knows. I have asked them about the original teachings of the Buddha, but nobody knows. And Christ may have existed or may not have existed. That is a tremendous problem, whether he existed at all. We have discussed with great scholars about that. I would not go into it. And will K's teachings also disappear like the rest? You understand my question? P35: I have not said it. K: Of course you have not said it; somebody has written it. Therefore it is interesting. The questioner says - probably you also think - that when K goes, as he must go, what will happen to the teaching? Will it go as the Buddha's teachings, which have been corrupted? You know what is happening; will the same fate await K's teaching? You have understood the question? It depends upon you, not upon somebody else. It depends upon you - how you limit it, how you think about it, what it means to you. If it means nothing except words, then it will go the way of the rest. If it means something very deep to you, to you personally, then it won't be corrupted. You understand? So it is up to you, not up to the centres and information centres and all the rest of that business. It depends upon you, whether you live the teachings or not. P36: Has the truth its own power? K: It has, if you let it alone. P37: Sir, that question was put by me. May I clarify the question - what I mean by that? K: Yes, sir, what is the question? P37: Now, my question is this: You have so many times repeated for 70 years that you do not convince anybody of anything, you are not a teacher, you do not teach anything to anybody. Now I say that the centres of the KFI - whose president you are - they invite the public, `Come here, here are the teachings of Krishnamurti; you study here what he has to say. He has discovered so many things. Please come here and try to study.' You say you work as a mirror; when I use the mirror, does the mirror help me? K: Yes. P37: It does help me, the light is helping me. Are these things not your teachings? So there is no harm if you say you are teaching something, you are clearing something. You yourself say that you work as a mirror; anything which works as a mirror is definitely helping me. K: Yes, sir. P37: That is my question. K: Sir, in all his talks K has emphasized the fact that he is merely a mirror - right? - that he is merely a mirror reflecting what your life is. And he has also said you can break up that mirror if you have seen yourself very clearly; the mirror is not important. But what has happened throughout the world? They all want to be on the bandwagon. You know what that means? All want to share in the circus. So I say, please don't bother,just listen to the teachings; if somebody wants to form a little centre in Gujarat, let him do it, but he has no power to say that he represents K, that he is a follower. He can say anything he likes, he is free to do what he likes. We are not imposing on anybody that they should do this or do that. Say, for instance, he starts by buying videos and all the rest of it and collects a few friends in his house. That is his affair. We are not saying, `Don't do this, do that.' If anybody did that, I would say, `Sorry, do not do it.' But they like to do it, they like to be interpreters, gurus in their little way. You know the game you all play. So if you want to do that, you are welcome to do it. The Foundation - unfortunately, I happen to belong to it, or fortunately - says you are free to do what you like - you understand, sir? Buy books, read books, burn books of K, do anything you like. It is in your hands. If you want to live it, live it; if you don't want to live it, it is all right, it is your business. Is this clear once and for all? P37: Yes, sir. K: The Foundation has no authority over your life, to tell you what not to do, or to say: `This is the centre from which all radiation goes,' like a radio station or a television station; we are not saying that. All we are saying is: Here is something which may be original, or may not be original; here is something for you to look at. Take time to read it; take time to understand it. If you are not interested, throw it away; it does not matter. If you like to live that way, live it. If you do not, just drop it. Don't make a lot of noise around you. Do you understand what I am saying, sir? Don't make a circus of it, a song-and-dance - don't say that you have understood and will tell others all about it. Right, sir? It is time to stop. Now, if I may ask, what have you got out of this morning's talk, discussion? Nothing or something? I am just asking, sir, what has flowered in you after this morning? Like a flower blooms overnight, what has bloomed in you? What has come out of you? P38: That we should have the habit of thinking together. K: Did you really think together? P38: Yes, I did. K: Together - you and I - or were you talking to yourself? P38: I was talking to myself also. K: Yes. So I am just asking - you don't have to tell the speaker anything - I am just asking politely, if I may: We have met for over an hour, talked together, said many things according to our opinions; at the end of the journey this morning, where are you? -where we started, where we ended, or is there a new flowering? I am not going to say where you are. That will be impudence on my part, right? It is an extraordinary world, sir! You don't seem to realize it is a marvellous world, the earth - beautiful, rich, vast plains, deserts, rivers, mountains and the glory of the land. This is an unique country. But human beings are set to kill each other for the rest of their lives. If you go on like this, you will keep on repeating the pattern: killing, killing, killing. You may repeat the most marvellous poems in Sanskrit (I do too), but all that is not worth a cent if you don't live it. That is all, sir. THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 8 7TH DECEMBER 1985 2ND DIALOGUE WITH TEACHERS, RISHI VALLEY Krishnamurti (K): May I raise a very difficult question? How would you, if you had a son here or a daughter, want to educate them, to bring about a holistic life? You've got so many students here - capable, intelligent. Through what means, what kind of attitude, what kind of verbal explanation, would you educate them in a holistic way of living? I mean by `holistic', whole, unbroken, not splintered up, not fragmented, as most of our lives are. So my question is, if I may put it to you, how do you bring about a holistic way of living, an outlook that's not fragmented in specializations? First Teacher (T1): Sir, first we must be holistic ourselves. K: That's understood, sir. But first of all, you are educators here, including myself (if you will permit me). I am happy in Rishi Valley, I like the place, the beauty of it, the hills, the rocks, the flowers, the shadows on the hills. I am one of the educators here; parents send me one of their children and I want to see that they live a life that is whole. Whole means good. `Good', not in the ordinary sense of that word; not the traditional word `good: a good boy, a good husband - that's all very limited. The word `good' has much greater significance when you relate goodness to wholeness. Good, then, has the quality of being extraordinarily generous; good has that sense of not wanting to hurt another consciously; good, in the sense that it is correct - not only for the moment, correct all the time. Correct in the sense that it does not depend on circumstances; if it is correct now, it will be correct a hundred years later or ten days later. Correctness with goodness is not related to environment, circumstances, pressures and so on. From that comes right action. So, goodness and a holistic way of living go together. In what manner am I going to see that the boy grows in goodness and a holistic way of living? Do we rely on each other? Is it an individual problem, or is it a problem of the whole school, the whole body? So the action must be comprehensive - not that that gentleman thinks one way and I think another way about goodness; it must be a cohesive action. Now, is that possible? Sir, in the word `holistic' is implied not the orthodox, the organized, but that quality of religion which we will go into presently. How am I, living here as an educator, to bring this about? T2: The first thing we have to do is to make the child feel secure in his relationship. It seems to me that unless the child feels secure in his relationship, with me and the place, nothing can happen. T3: I want to find out whether what you say is really what I want to do. If I feel that is really what I want to do, then I must find out what I mean by that, what is the content of my feelings. T4: Would it be necessary, if you and I are working together in the school, to find out, not what I mean by that or what you mean, but rather find out if there is something that is valid for all of us? Not because we stick to an idea or come together around an idea, but in the investigation we say together, "This is it." K: Sir, do we understand what it means to live a holistic life? Or is it a theory? T3: Sir, perhaps we merely understand by contrast. We see fragmentation in ourselves... K: If you see fragmentation or breaking up in yourself, then you have the problem of how to get rid of it, how to be whole. I don't want a problem about it. Then I have already broken it up. T3: Despite that, the fact remains that we are fragmented. K: Just a minute. I know I am fragmented; my whole thinking process is fragmented. And also I know I mustn't make a problem of it because then that's another fragmentation. T3: My feeling of fragmentation is itself a problem - I don't make a problem; I see a problem. K: I understand. I realize I am fragmented, but I don't want to make a problem of it. T3: But, sir, doesn't it mean that when I see that I am fragmented, it is a problem? K: That's what I want to get at, which is - I see I am fragmented: I say one thing and I do another, think one thing and contradict what I think. And I also see very clearly that I mustn't make a problem of it. T3: Perhaps I don't see that clearly. K: That's what I want to discuss. If I make a problem of it, I am already further fragmenting. T3: But there is an in-between stage. K: I don't want that. I am fragmented, broken up in different ways. If I make a problem of it, saying to myself, I must not be fragmented, that very statement is born out of fragmentation. Something born of fragmentation is another form of fragmentation. But my brain is trained to make problems. So I must be aware of the whole cycle of it. So what am I to do? T1: You say to that, `I should not make a problem of it.' Do we have a choice, or is it automatic? When we see the fragmentation within us, we say, `I would not like to make a problem of it.' K: See the truth, not `I will not make a problem.' I see the fact that if I make a problem of it, it's another fragmentation. That's all. I see it. I don't say, I mustn't get rid of it or I must get rid of it, so what am I to do? T1: Is there anything to be done in this case? K: I am going to show you presently. Don't be so eager, if you don't mind my saying so. T1: The way I see it, there is nothing to be done except actually watching, observing. K: Just a minute, sir. Don't come to that conclusion. What am I to do? T1: Observe. K: Don't tell me, sir. These are words. Seeing that I am fragmented, aware that whatever I do is another kind of fragmentation, what is left for me? You don't put yourself in that position; you have already come to a conclusion. So conclusion is another fragmentation. I have this question: Is there a way of living holistically in which is involved the quality of a religious mind, deep goodness, without any mischief, without any duality? Am I making it complicated? T5: No, sir. K: Why not, sir? My whole being thinks dualistically. It's always in opposition in the sense that I want to do this and yet I mustn't do it; I should do it, but I don't like to do it, and so on. It always takes opposing positions. So, what is left for me? I see all this at a glance, or through analysis. And I see it is like that. Then my question is: what am I to do? Don't tell me: you should or shouldn't - I don't accept anything from you; I am very sceptical by nature. T1: You are asking the question: what am I to do? When there is observation, no question arises. K: Are you doing it? T1: Yes. K: Are you doing it? If you are not doing it and you say we must try, you are in contradiction, therefore duality, therefore fragmentation, and hence no goodness. T6: As soon as you say or think about a holistic state of goodness, you are already in contradiction. K: No, you are not in contradiction. You are only putting it into words. What's your action when you want to educate your student in this goodness? The school has a certain reputation, a certain eclat - a feeling about it. And there is a certain atmosphere in this valley. And I sent you my son, hoping that you will help him to grow in this holistic way of life. I am communicating, I am not contradicting. T5: It is in the way I posit the question that the contradiction arises. K: I understand. We are trying to investigate the question, not lay down laws about it. At least I'm not. I really want to find out what way I can help the student. I may not be holistic. Don't say: first I must be holistic, and then I can teach. Then you are dead. Then that will take an eternity. If you say: I must first be holistic, then you have stymied yourself. Sir, I am not saying anything. I really don't know what to do with these children whose parents want them to join the IIT [Indian Institute of Technology] or something or other. And I've got the tremendous opposition of society - the father, the mother, the grandfather, wanting the boy to have a job and all that. How am I to bring this about? You don't answer me. T4: Krishnaji, I am not answering the question how am I to bring this about; I'm looking at fragmentation. K: What does that mean? Follow it out - I am fragmented, the boy is fragmented. Right, sir? T4: Right. K: Then what's the relationship between me and the boy? T4: We are learning together. K: Don't use phrases quickly. What's my relationship with the student who is fragmented like myself? T7: I am not different from him. K: Of course you are different from him - you teach maths; he doesn't know any. Don't say you are not different from him. T4: There is no relationship at all if I am fragmented. K: please, sir, answer my question: I am fragmented, and I am your student. What's our relationship? Or, is there any relationship at all? Or, are we on the same level? T5: It can only be a fragmented relationship. K: What is actually my relationship? T5: There doesn't seem to be any. K: That's all. How can fragments have a relationship? T6: Why not? K: Are you really asking me that question? T6: Yes. K: You answer it, You ask me a question, and I am too eager to reply to it. So it goes on between you and me: I answer it and then you counter it; then I counter it, and so on. He asks me a question and he expects me to answer it, and I say: I won't answer it because in the question itself is the answer. So, can we look at the question and wait for it to flower? My question is very, very serious. The question itself contains the answer if you let it flower, if you let it alone, not cover it immediately with a response. Your response is already conditioned, already personal. So leave the question. If the question has depth, significance, vitality, then the question unfolds. Now, sir, is there truth? Does truth exist? You don't know, if you're honest; so we leave the question. Let's look at the question, and the question begins to unfold: Is there truth, or only active, vital, illusion? I won't go into that. If the question has depth, if the question has a sense of great vitality - because you are asking the question in great inward searching - let the question answer itself. It will if you leave it alone. Now I am coming back to my original question. T8: I have a child come to me. I am fragmented, he is fragmented. So there is no relationship? K: Are you sure there is no relationship, or are you just saying it? T8: I think I am sure there is no relationship in the fragmented state, and I find that any response that I give to the student would itself be a fragmented response. K: Yes. Stop there. Then, what will you do? Whatever relationship I have is still fragmented. Is that a reality or a verbal statement? T8: It seems a reality to me. K: Either it is real in the sense that the microphone is real; that's not an illusion. The word microphone is not that. I don't know if you get the quality of it. So we must come back. What am I to do, sir? You tell me. T8: Am I fooling myself that I can give a holistic education? K: We are going to find out, you and I, whether it is possible to do it or not. The first statement is: we are fragmented. Let's stick to that. We are both fragmented, and I don't know what to do. What does that mean to you - I don't know; I don't know what to do? Then, I must investigate. When I say, I don't know, I really mean I don't know. Or, am I waiting for somebody else to tell me, so I will know? Which is it? T8: At the moment the latter. K: Is there a state of the brain when it says: I really don't know? I am not waiting for him to answer, or expecting someone else to tell me. All these are states when I am waiting for an answer. But no one can answer this because they are all fragmented. Therefore I am waiting, watching, looking, observing, listening to the question. I don't know what to do. Then I ask myself, `What's the state of my brain which says: "I don't know"?' T5: At that point of time, it's not functioning. K: `I don't know'. Or are you waiting for it to know? T5: Waiting for it to know. K: Therefore, you are waiting to know; you will know. Therefore your brain is not saying, `I don't know.' It's all very logical, you know. T3: The brain doesn't say it doesn't know. K: That's it, that's the first thing - the brain never acknowledges or remains in the state `I don't know'. You ask me: `What is Ishvara?' and I promptly answer. You have read, or you believe or you don't believe; Ishvara comes as a symbol to you. But if you ask, `What is the element which created this?' it's a tremendously interesting question: What is the beginning of life? What is the life in the seed that you plant? The life of man - what is the origin of that life, the very cell? I am not going into this now - it leads off somewhere else, it's too complicated. So I don't know how to deal with that boy or with myself. Any action I do, any movement of thought, is still out of fragmentation, right? So I leave it alone. May I proceed? T6: Please, sir. K: What is love? Is it related to hate? If it is related, love then is still fragmentation. Do you understand what I am saying, sir? T6: Love is not the opposite of hate. K: What is love? It has nothing to do with pity, sympathy - all the rest of it. What is love? You don't know. Is that state of not-knowing love? I don't know what to do with that boy or girl; we are both fragmented. I can teach him mathematics, geography, history, biology, chemistry, psychiatry, anything - but that's nothing. This demands much deeper enquiry, very much deeper. So I say, what is it that is completely holistic? Certainly not thought - thought is experience. It's certainly not sympathy, not generosity, not empathy, not saying: `You're a nice chap.' Love has - what? T5: Compassion. K: Love, compassion - that is the only thing that's holistic. I'm just discovering something for myself. I say, love isn't thought, love isn't pleasure. Don't accept this; for god's sake that is the last thing you should do. Love is utterly unrelated to hate, jealousy, anger - all that. Love is completely unbreakable. It's whole and it has its own intelligence. T5: I have heard you say this before in different ways. K: To know. Can you ever say about a person - `I know'? I know my wife? T3: You shut off that person in some way. K: Yes. If I say, `I know you' - what do I know about you? So, to say `I know' is fragmentation, Sir, I asked a question, which is: can I help the student or talk to him? I know I am fragmented, he is fragmented. And I also know, have a feeling, that love is whole, that compassion, love, have their own intelligence. I am going to see if that intelligence can operate. T6: You say that love has its own intelligence; you say that love is holistic, it's not fragmented. Isn't that just an assumption? K: It's not an assumption. Love is not an assumption - my god! T6: Maybe it is, because I don't know. K: Remain there. You don't know. Wait, find out; don't answer. I don't know what the insides of a modern car are like. (I have, as a matter of fact, stripped old cars.) So I want to learn about it. I go to a garage man and he teaches me because I want to know how it works. I take the trouble; I take pains; I pay him, if I have the money, or work with him till I know every part of that car. That means I wish to learn, but I'm not sure you want to learn. T2: But Krishnaji, this very wanting to learn... K: Don't translate into fragmentation. I don't know how those cameras work, and you say, learn about it. I ask him, and I become his apprentice; I watch how he does it; I learn about it. Then I say: I know how to work that camera. But human beings are not like cameras; they are much more complicated. They are like a messy machine; and I want to know how their brain works. Either I become a biologist, a brain specialist, or I study myself, which is much more exciting. So I learn how my brain works - there is nobody to teach me. T2: There may be - I listen to you. K: I don't trust them. All their knowledge is from books or from their little selves. So I say, I am going to investigate this whole way of living, not just parts of it. So let's come back: what am I to do or not do? The question is much deeper than merely the boy and the girl whom I'm educating. It might be that I have not really understood what it means to lead a holistic life; not understood intellectually even. T2: If you mean intellectually, I would say yes. K: No, no, no. Are you sure? T2: I'm sure - intellectually. K: So you have separated the intellect from the whole. Sir, listen; when you say you have understood intellectually, it means just bananas. T2: I don't just say; I've understood intellectually. K: I say, sir, you are not listening. When one says, I understood intellectually, it means absolutely nothing; when you say intellectually', that's another fragment. T2: Yes, sir. K: So, I don't use the words: `I understand intellectually.' That's a crime! What am I, an educator at Rishi Valley, understanding partially, verbally, a holistic way of living and knowing that the student and I are both fragmented - what am I going to do or not do? Are you listening? I'm here, I'm responsible to the parents for that girl or boy. They have sent them here because you have a good reputation, you look after them and all that. He comes along and tells me: It's all right, but what matters is a holistic way of life, not intellectually but the whole psyche, the whole entity which is now fragmented; if that can be made whole, then you have the most extraordinary education. He tells me that and he goes away, and I don't know what to do. I understand the verbal meaning of whole: not fragmented, not broken up, not saying one thing, thinking something and doing quite the opposite - all that is fragmentation of life. And I don't know what to do; I really don't. Deeply, profoundly, gravely, seriously, I don't know what to do. Am I waiting for somebody or some book to tell me, or hoping something will accidentally come along and give me, unfortunately, `insight'? I can't wait for that, because the boy is growing up and kicking around. So, what shall I do? I know one thing absolutely for certain: I don't know. All my inventions, all my thinking have collapsed. I don't know whether you feel that way. I don't know - so the brain is open for reception. The brain has been closed by conclusion, by opinion, by judgement, by my problems; it is a closed thing. When I say, I really don't know, I've broken something; I've broken the bottle - I can drink the champagne. I begin to find out - when the bottle is broken. Then I find out what love is, what compassion is, and that intelligence that's born of compassion. It's nothing to do with the intellect. Sir, we never come to the point when we say: I don't know. Right? You ask me about god, I've an immediate answer. You ask me about chemistry, out comes the answer - the tap is open. You see, I'm one of those idiots, sir; haven't read a thing, except... T2: And doesn't think also. K: The brain is like a drum; it's all tuned up. When you strike it, it gives the right note. THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 9 17TH DECEMBER 1985 3RD DIALOGUE WITH TEACHERS RISHI VALLEY First Teacher (T1): Is a new mind the same as a good mind, a mind that is flowering in goodness? If so, what is goodness? And, in particular, what is the relationship of a new mind to an awareness of the wholeness of life? What is the whole of life? Can we explore this in some depth? KRISHNAMURTI (K): I wonder how you regard life. What do you consider is the origin of life, the beginning of all existence? Not only of human beings, but also the whole world, nature, the heavens and the stars? What is creation? We are not asking what invention is. Invention is based on knowledge. Inventing more and more, is naturally based on knowledge. And what is our life in relation to the whole of it? Not in relation to a particular specialized brain but in relation to the whole world which is a total movement, including ourselves, including humanity? I would like to discuss that with you first. Then, is there a difference between our physical brain - the biological thing which is inside the skull - and the mind? Or does the brain contain the mind, or is the mind totally different from the brain? And the third question, or movement - I would prefer it to be a movement, not a question - What would you call goodness, the flowering in goodness? Not static goodness, but a movement in goodness? T1: What is life? K: Yes, what is life? Not life in a particularised form like the ape, the tiger, the squirrel, the tree, all that. What is the beginning of life? And the other question is: Does the brain contain the mind, or is the mind totally divorced from the brain? If the brain contains the mind, then the mind is part of matter - right? - part of the nervous responses. It is a physical phenomenon. And the mind surely is something totally different. So, if the brain includes the mind, then it is part of our nervous, biological reactions of fear, sorrow, pain, pleasure, the total consciousness. Then it is part of human creation. If the mind is part of an evolutionary process, then it is part of time. T2: May I ask a question? K: Sir, you don't have to ask me. T2: Through logic, suppose we find that the mind is different from the brain; and logic itself is part of the brain? K: Of course logic is part of the brain, and logic can come to a wrong conclusion because it is still part of the brain. So, what is life? What is the source of all this energy? What is the thing that shoots out, making all this - the world, the earth, the mountains, the rivers, the forests, the trees, the bear, the deer, the lion, the ape, the monkey, and us? Is time involved in goodness? If time is involved in goodness, it is not goodness. Please answer me. Do you understand my question? T3: Sir, there doesn't seem at the moment to be a connection between the two. When the scientists talk of the origin of things, I believe, the generally accepted theory is that there was the big bang, an enormous explosion, stemming perhaps from some primal energy, stemming perhaps from some infinitesimal atom. And after this came the whole multiplicity of things, the stars, the planets, the earth. There doesn't seem, at first sight, to be any connection between that scientific explanation and goodness. K: I am asking, sir, is time involved in goodness? T3: Time is certainly involved in the evolution of things. That is obvious. K: Is goodness part of time, cultivated or brought about through time? T3: It doesn't seem, if one looks at the scientific view of the origin of things, as if goodness is involved in that at all. It seems completely neutral - not good, not bad, not anything. K: I understand that, but I am asking you a question - not a scientific question. The question is: If time is involved in the cultivation of goodness, is that goodness at all? T3: Seems to be a different order of question. K: I am asking you a different question. What is goodness? What do you all think is goodness? T3: There seems to be a version of goodness which is usually opposed to badness or evil... K: Yes, the whole duality business. Go on, sir. What is goodness here? What do you think is goodness? T4: Virtue can be practised in time. K: I am not talking about virtue. To me virtue is a cultivation. T5: Sir, when we say he is a good man, we generally mean that he doesn't harm others. He doesn't act always out of self-interest, gain... It is a quality accumulated in time. K: Is it? Is goodness the opposite of badness - if such a word exists? Is good the opposite of bad? T5: Sir, what you mean by this question is, is goodness a reaction to the bad and accumulated over time? K: Yes, all that is implied in the question. One's reaction, one's education, one's culture, environment; all that is tradition - what you read in books and so on. Always the good and the bad. The good fighting the bad, always, from the ancient Egyptians to modern society. There was always the good and the bad, the good god and the bad god, the bad guy and the good guy. I am saying, if I may, that if the good is born out of the bad, then it is not good. T3: It is usually looked at the other way round - that the evil is a fall from the good. K: Sir, I am asking you, is the good related to the bad? Is good the opposite of bad or the reaction which had become the good? Do you understand my question? Or has good nothing to do with, is totally divorced from, bad? T5: Sir, while I would be able to answer the first question, I am not able to answer the second. The first question being, is the good related to the bad? I would say no, because if I try to be good, then automatically the bad continues. K: Sir, are you saying that the ideas of the whole evolutionary process of the good and the bad, from the most ancient times, are totally mistaken? That's what we are saying. Do you understand? Come on, sir. T5: Yes. That's the implication. K: That the good cannot fight the evil. Right? And throughout the history of man, good is always fighting evil. Great paintings, great art, the whole of human existence is based on this principle. And you and I come along and say, `Look, there is something wrong with this. Good is totally different from bad; there is no relationship between them; therefore they cannot fight. Good cannot overcome evil.' T3: There is no progression either. K: Are we saying something totally revolutionary? Or is it some sort of fantasy or imagination of ours? T6: One of the problems we face is that we have grown used to using particular words in a particular way. K: Our whole religious conditioning, our whole religious literature, is full of it. There is always hell and heaven, good and bad. So are we saying something totally revolutionary? And is it true? Something revolutionary may not be true. If it is true, it has nothing to do with the brain. T1: The implication seems to be that goodness exists prior to man. It seems to mean that goodness is inherent in the universe. K: Maybe. T1: It seems to mean that. K: We are asking the question in relation to what is the brain. What is the mind? Can the mind penetrate the brain? T1: Again this will imply that the mind is prior to the brain. K: Of course. Let us call that `intelligence' for the moment. Can that intelligence communicate through the brain? Or can the brain not have any relationship with that intelligence? T7: Is the brain born of that intelligence? K: I'm not prepared yet for that question. I am asking you the question. Don't listen to me, sir. I'm not telling you; you and I are enquiring. T1: I don't want an answer. K: Are you finding out for yourself? Or are you listening to the man? Or is what the speaker says clearing a way for you to see? T1: This question seems to direct our attention to the universe. Or to nature. K: That's what we want to get at. Slowly. Is the universe - our idea of the universe - different from us? It's all one movement - the stars, the heavens, the moon, the sun; one tremendous energy. Our energy is very limited. Can that limitation be broken down and we be part of that enormous movement of life? T1: Would you call this enormous movement `nature'? K: No, I wouldn't call it nature. Nature is part of us. T1: This total movement. K: Is there such a movement? Not `I join the movement' because I am such a small speck. I think I can be very clever; I think I can do this, do that. Can all that be broken down and be part of this enormous movement? I call this goodness. I may be wrong. The window which is so narrow now must be broken down, and then - no window at all. I don't know if I am expressing myself. What then is life? Is it that immense intelligence which is energy, supreme, unconditioned, uneducated - in the sense of the modern term - something that has no beginning and no end? T5: Are you implying that creation does not involve time? K: Invention involves time. Now they are trying to find a cure for cancer. All the books, magazines talk about new methods, to cure cancer. The discovery involves time and knowledge, built on what the previous person has discovered. I learn from you, you learn from him. Creation cannot involve time. I don't know if you see. T8: When you are talking about time, you mean psychological time. K: Of course, psychological time. So goodness is not involved in time, therefore it is part of that intelligence which is universal movement. I'm using words I may withdraw later. Here I am then with a thousand students. As a good educator, I want to see that they understand all this. Not intellectually, not theoretically, not as some fantastic idea, but so that there is real transformation - no, not transformation - so that a real mutation takes place in their lives. T1: When you say `immense intelligence', the word `intelligence' implies some quality of awareness. K: It may not. T1: But then, what is the quality that is intelligent? K: Probably it has no quality. It is intelligence. You see what you are doing. You are giving it a virtue, a significance, so that you can understand it. I may not be capable of understanding it. I don't know. You see, it may be something incredible or it may be nothing at all. I can't approach this with a mind that says, show me your qualifications, show me your degree. So what am I to do after an educational conference? What am I to do, as an educator, to bring about a mutation? Not a transformation; there is a difference. Transformation means from one to another, from this to that. T9: Sir, can we come back to something we skipped over some time ago? We talked about the ending of the limitation we are trapped in; that ending and something else happening. Can we go back to that? For there seems to be something in that we quickly skipped over. K: My brain has been educated, has lived in tradition, whether ancient or modern tradition, my brain has been mauled about, informed, beaten, by all the conditioning that has gone on for centuries. Can that be broken down? Is that your question? Are you sure? T9: Yes. All of those things that make it possible for this brain to have any relationship with goodness. K: Let's break it down to one word: consciousness. Can we? T9: Yes. K: Or `limitation' or `conditioning', Can all that be broken down? Not through time - that is important. If I use time, I am back in the circle. Do you see that? T9: Yes, sir. K: So it must be broken down. Instantly. Not in comparison to, or in relation to, time. T10: Again, you mean psychological time. K: Yes, of course. Psychological time is different from ordinary time. I don't know if you see that. Do you? Time by that clock, time by the sun, time to cover a physical distance. We don't know each other, but if we meet often, we will. Or we may know each other instantly. So there is physical time and psychological time. We are talking of psychological time. It takes time for a seed to grow, for a child to become a man. We apply that kind of time to the psyche. I am this, but I will be that; I am not brave, but give me time and I will be. We are talking of time in the field of the psyche. T1: Can the limitation of consciousness be broken? K: That is the question. Can the limited brain - which is knowledge - break down the whole field of the psyche? Can the brain break it down - the limited brain? However much it has evolved, this brain will always be limited. T1: By it's knowledge. K: It is limited by its physical structure, by its very physical environment, by its tradition, education, knowledge, pain, fear, anxiety. Can that limitation break itself down? T9: Or, can anything else break it down? K: Wait, sir. Stick to the one question. Can the limited brain break down its own limitation? T8: Sir, you said good is not related to bad. K: Don't begin all that. Let's stick to the one question: Can the smallness of the brain break down its own pettiness? Or is there another factor that will break it down? God? Saviour? Vishnu? It can invent god and wait for him to clear it up. Do I make myself clear? Both of you have put that question. After putting that question, what is the state of your brain? After putting that question, what has happened to your brain? The question is important, has weight, has great significance. Tell me, what is the state of your brain after putting that question? It is very important to find out. T11: It is not depending on god. It is not sure. K: Are you listening? You have been asking a question. It may be very important, or it may not have any meaning at all. So, I am asking myself: What is the state of your brain after putting that question? T11: After listening to the question - `Can the petty brain break down its own pettiness?' - what first arose in my brain was: I doubt it, I doubt whether the petty brain can break down its pettiness. K: Your brain is acting. T11: Then it said, `I don't know.' K: But you are still saying something. Your brain is still active, saying, `I don't know, I'm waiting.' T11: Sir, why did you use the words, `You are waiting?' K: Don't bother. Your brain is active. So what is happening?Just watch, sir. One of them puts this question to me. How do I receive this question? How do I interpret the question? If I interpret the question, I'm not listening to it. So, am I actually listening to the question? Or, as the question is put, do I immediately respond to something, in which case I am not listening at all? It's a verbal communication and I pass it by. So, do I listen? That implies a certain quality of quietness - a thoughtless movement, a thoughtless looking. What is the state of your brain when a serious question is put? If your brain is at all active, then the question has no meaning. Am I making myself clear? Someone puts that question to me. What is important is how I receive it, not the answer. I listen very carefully. The question is, `Can the narrow, conditioned brain break down its conditioning?' I'm listening to the question. I'm still listening to the question. Am I actually listening or just saying I'm listening? If I'm actually listening, then there is no movement in the brain at all. Of course, there is a nervous response - hearing through the ear, etc. But, apart from the verbal communication, there is no other movement. I'm still listening - that is the breaking down. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. T. Because the brain is not acting. K: Don't translate it. I don't know if I am making myself clear -that the very state of listening is the state of ending of a certain thing. So, is that happening? If that is happening to you, then how am I, as an educator, to make those students, for whom I'm responsible, listen? How am I to help them to listen to what I have to say? T6: There is a difficulty here. When you explain something in person, it seems clear. But tomorrow morning... K: Then you haven't heard. You've heard the hiss of a cobra, haven't you? I used to hear them very often when I walked alone here. I used to see them. And I know a cobra now. Even tomorrow, I will know a cobra. That is an actual fact. Right? Here some kind of sensitivity, watchfulness, alertness is needed. How am I, as an educator, having heard all this, having absorbed it in my blood - it's not as if I just heard you, therefore I learnt it, it's not just that - but after having heard all that, how am I to see that the students listen to me? You make them listen to you in mathematics, learning a book, biology, history, etc. Suppose I come to a class and I say, `Please sit down and listen.' They're looking out of the window, they are pulling each other's hair. In that state of mind, can they listen? Or, do I say, `Keep quiet for ten minutes'? But these ten minutes are gone in battling; the brain saying, `I must listen, who the hell is he, asking me to listen?' And all the rest of it. So, how do I cajole, bring round these students to listen? Sir, how do you make your - I was going to say `victims' - listen to you? How does a doctor or a psychiatrist make a patient listen to him? The patient is all the time concerned about getting cured. He has a particular disease, mania, etc., he wants to be free of it. Tell him what to do and he will do it. Here it is not like that. We are all equals; there is no doctor, nobody to tell you. We are in a state of listening, of enquiry. How do we persuade one person to listen to another? Answer the question. T5: Either of the two ways, sir. Either I entertain him, or I force him. K: Yes. I don't want to do either - force, fight, or beat him up. T5: Or entertain? K: It is all the same. I want them to listen, so that it is all part of their blood. So, how do we proceed, sir? T8: Must I not listen to them? To what they have to say? K: They have very little to say, sir. They're quarrelling, muttering, saying, `Give me this, that,' etc. So, I am asking you as educators, `How do I bring them round to actually listening to what I have to say?' See how long it has taken us to listen to each other. You are willing to listen, to find out. You think K has something to say, we have invited him here. Therefore, there is communication already taking place. But with those students it is different. They are forced to come here, their parents praise Rishi Valley. They come after swallowing the bitter pill, coated with sugar, of course. And so this goes on. Here, with you, it is different. You don't want to do a thing to persuade them. It is marvellous. Put that question to yourself and see what you can do. T9: Sir, I think it is obvious that we cannot answer this question; and yet this seems to be central to all that we mean to do. That actually is quite a good summary of the conference. K: I understand what you are saying. T1: Perhaps here we come back to the beginning - that it requires an action which is creative. K: Now you've said it. Leave it there. Work it out. That creativity is not born of knowledge or previous experience. Keep that in mind. If it makes use of knowledge, then it becomes invention, just a new way of doing the same thing. We are asking a very, very serious question. I think it may be that we are all so terribly informed - about everything. Maybe we are so educated that there is no space for anything new to take place; full of memories, remembrances. All that may be a hindrance. Now, don't ask, `How am I to get rid of it?' Then we come back to the same thing. Suppose you tell me I'm a liar. And I give you all the reasons why I've lied - which is another lie. I hear the word `lie' and I react. I think I'm an honest man. I may not be, but I think I am. Those are two different things. Or, I think I am a truthful man and an incident takes place which makes me untruthful. That instant of discovery -seeing I'm a liar - changes everything. That is my point. It changes me so that I'm no longer dishonest. I've experimented with this. So it is possible. No, I can't even say that. Can I listen to you when you tell me I'm a liar and not bring up all the reasons? In that act of listening, there is a breakdown. T3: Surely if the statement is true, there is a breakdown. If I'm not a liar, then there isn't. K: No, sir. The word `lie' is good enough for me. You understand? I know the reasons why I've lied: a little bit of cowardice. I lied because I don't want them to discover this or that. And when you call me a liar, then I see the actual fact that it is so. I don't go into all the reasons why I've lied. And you tell me, `You are that.' And I listen to you without saying whether you are right or wrong, not putting up a barrier. In that very instant when I am listening without barriers, the thing goes. Something happens. That is the only action, which is inaction. T3: But the statement itself may be false. K: May be false. But good enough for me to see that there is some truth in it. Now, where are we after four days? Are we together? What have you absorbed? And is that absorption common to us all, or are we trying to unify all the schools - being but parts - trying to put them together? Which means that they will always be apart. Or is there a feeling that we are all one, so that our education is not based on American, Indian or English conditions? So, are we merely a body to supply demands? Or are we to bring about a different human quality, a different human activity of the brain? Are we united in that? Are we together in this? Are we together so that nothing can break us apart? From that, an action which is totally different can take place. THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 10 1ST JANUARY 1986 2ND PUBLIC TALK MADRAS ON A WEEK-DAY, to see so many people seems rather absurd, doesn't it? Last time we met here - it was Saturday - we talked about what is love. You may remember if you were here. We are going to enquire together - and I mean together - into this whole problem; it's very, very complex. If you don't mind, you have to think - not just agree; you have to exercise your brain, thinking it out. So we are going to enquire together into this problem of what is love. Together. You and I are walking up the same street; you are not just following the speaker; you are not saying: `Yes, this sounds good; so do the Upanishads and so does the Geeta,' and all that bilge. First of all, one has to doubt, be sceptical of your experiences, conclusions, thoughts. Doubt. Question - not accepting a thing from any book, including mine; I'm a passer by, not important. And we are going to enquire together to see what is clear, and what is not clear. We are together examining, doubting, never accepting what the speaker has to say. This is not a lecture to guide, to instruct, to help; that would be too stupid. We've had that kind of help for generations upon generations and we are what we are now. We must start from what we are now, not what we have been in the past or what we will be in the future. What we shall be in the future is what we are now. Our greed, our envy, our jealousy, our great superstitions, our desire to worship somebody - this is what we are now. So we are together walking up a very long street - it requires energy - and we are going to go into this question: What is love? To enquire very deeply, very profoundly into it, we must also enquire: What is energy? Every gesture you make is based on energy. While you are listening to the speaker, you are exercising energy. To build a house, to plant a tree, to make a gesture, to talk, all these require energy. The crow calling, the rising and setting sun, all this is energy. The cry of the baby out of the womb is part of energy. To play a violin, to speak, to marry, have sex -everything on earth requires energy. So we start: what is energy? This is one of the questions of the scientists. And they say: Energy is matter. It may be matter, but previous to that, what is primordial energy? What is its origin, the source? Who created this energy? Careful. Don't say `god', and run away with that. I don't accept god; the speaker has no god. Is that all right? So what is energy? We are enquiring, not accepting what the scientists have to say. And, if you can, abandon all that the ancient peoples have said; leave it at the roadside. We'll take a journey together. Your brain, which is matter, is the accumulated experience of a million years, and all that evolution means energy. And so I'm asking myself - you're asking yourself is there an energy which is not contained or stimulated or held within the field of knowledge, that is, within the field of thought? Is there an energy which is not put together by thought? Thought gives you great energy: to go to the office every morning at nine o'clock; to earn money, a better house. Thinking about the past, thinking about the future, planning for the present, gives tremendous energy: you work like blazes to become a rich man. Thought creates this energy. So then we have to enquire into the very nature of thought. Thought has planned this society which has divided this world into communist, socialist, democrat, republican; the army, the navy, the air-force - not only for transportation, but also to kill. So thought is very important in our lives because without thought we can't do anything; everything is contained in the process of thought. So what is thinking? You work it out, don't listen to me. The speaker has talked about this a lot, so don't go back to my books, don't say, I've heard all this before. Here you forget all the books, all the things you have read, for we must approach this each time anew. Thinking is based on knowledge. And we have accumulated tremendous knowledge: how to sell each other, how to exploit each other, how to create gods and temples, and so on. Without experience there is no knowledge. Experience -knowledge stored in the brain as memory - is the beginning of thought. Experience is always limited, because you are adding more and more to it. So experience is limited, knowledge is limited, memory is limited. Therefore, thought is limited. The gods whom thought has created - your gods, your thinking - will always be limited. And from this limitation we try to find the source of energy - you understand? - we try to find the origin, the beginning of creation. Thought has created fear. Right? Aren't you frightened of what may happen later - losing your job, not passing your exams, not climbing the ladder? And you're frightened of not being able to fulfil, of not being able to stand alone, of not being a strength unto yourself. You always depend on somebody, and that breeds tremendous fear. It's one of the daily facts of our life that we are frightened people. And fear arises because we want security. Fear destroys love; love cannot exist where fear is. Fear on its own is a tremendous energy. And love has no relationship to fear; they're totally divorced. So, what is the origin of fear? To question all this is to be alive, to understand the nature of love. Thinking has created fear - thinking about the future, the past, of not being able to adjust quickly to the environment, what might happen: my wife might leave me or might die; I'll be a lonely man; what will I do then? I have several children; so I had better remarry someone or other; at least she'll look after my children - and so on. This is thinking of the future, based upon the past. So thinking and time are involved in this - thinking about the future, the future being tomorrow. And thinking about that causes fear. And so time and thought are the central factors of fear. So time and thought are the principal factors of life. Time is both inward - I am this, I will be that - and outward. And time is thought; they are both movements. Then what place have death, pain, anxiety, suffering, loneliness, despair, all those terrible things I've gone through? - All the travail that man goes through - is that all our life? I'm asking you: Is this all your life? This is your life. Your consciousness, if you examine it very carefully, is made up of its content: what you think, your tradition, your education, your knowledge, your time, your fears, your loneliness. That is what you are. It's a fact that your suffering, your pain, your anxiety, your loneliness, your knowledge, are shared by every human being. Every human being on this earth goes through sorrow, pain, anxiety, quarrels, coaxing, wanting this, not wanting this. So you are not an individual; you are not a separate soul, a separate atman. Your consciousness, which is what you are - not physically, but psychologically, inwardly - is the consciousness of mankind. We are trying to find out, to enquire into, what is life. We're saying that as long as there is fear of any kind, the other cannot exist. If there is attachment of any kind, the other cannot exist - the other being love. So we are going to see what the world is and enquire into what is death. Why are we all so frightened of death? You know what it means to die; haven't you seen dozens of people killed, or hurt? Have you ever enquired very deeply into what is death? It's a very important question, as important as what is life. We said life is all this rot - knowledge, going to the office every day at nine o'clock, etc., battling, not wanting this, wanting that. We know what living is, but we have never enquired seriously into what is dying. What is dying? It must be an extraordinary thing to die. Everything is taken away from you: your attachments, your money, your wife, your children, your country, your superstitions, your gurus, your gods. You may wish to take them into the other world, but you can't. So death says, `Be totally detached.' That's what happens when death comes: you have no person to lean on. Nothing. You can believe that you will be reincarnated. That's a very comfortable idea, but it's not a fact. We are trying to find out what it means to die, while living - not committing suicide; I am not talking about that kind of nonsense. I want to find out for myself what it means to die, which means, can I be totally free from everything that man has created, including myself? What does it mean to die? To give up everything. Death cuts you off with a very, very, very sharp razor from your attachments, from your gods, from your superstitions, from your desire for comfort - next life and so on. I am going to find out what death means because it is as important as living. So how can I find out, actually, not theoretically, what it means to die? I actually want to find out, as you want to find out. I am speaking for you, so don't go to sleep. What does it mean to die? Put that question to yourself. While we are young, or when we are very old, this question is always there. It means to be totally free, to be totally unattached to everything that man has put together, or what you have put together - totally free. No attachments, no gods, no future, no past. You don't see the beauty of it, the greatness of it, the extraordinary strength of it - while living to be dying. You understand what that means? While you are living, every moment you are dying, so that throughout life you are not attached to anything. That is what death means. So living is dying. You understand? Living means that every day you are abandoning everything that you are attached to. Can you do this? A very simple fact, but it has got tremendous implications. So that each day is a new day. Each day you are dying and incarnating. There is tremendous vitality, energy there because there is nothing you are afraid of. There is nothing that can hurt. Being hurt doesn't exist. All the things that man has put together have to be totally abandoned. That's what it means to die. So can you do it? Will you try it? Will you experiment with it? Not for just a day; every day. No, sir, you can't do it; your brains are not trained for this. Your brains have been conditioned so heavily, by your education, by your tradition, by your books, by your professors. It requires finding out what love is. Love and death go together. Death says be free, nonattached, you can carry nothing with you. And love says, love says - there is no word for it. Love can exist only when there is freedom, not from your wife, from a new girl, or a new husband, but the feeling, the enormous strength, the vitality, the energy of complete freedom. THE FUTURE IS NOW CHAPTER 11 4TH JANUARY 1986 3RD PUBLIC TALK MADRAS WILL YOU KINDLY participate in what he's talking about? Will you not only follow it, but together participate in it, not just think about it or casually pay attention to it? One or two things must be made very clear. This is not a personality cult. The speaker has an abomination of all that; everything he is saying is contradicted if you personally worship an individual, or make him into a god. What is important is to listen to what he has to say, share it; not only listen, but actually participate in what he's saying. We have talked about life, the very complexity of life, the beginning of life. What is life? What is the origin of all this - the marvellous earth, the lovely evening and the early morning sun, the rivers, the valleys, the mountains and the glory of the land which is being despoiled? If you say the origin of all this is `god', then it's finished; then you can trot along quite happily because you've solved the problem. But if you begin to question, doubt, as one should, all gods, all gurus - I don't belong to that tribe - if you begin to question all that man has put together through a long evolution down the corridors of history, you find this question asked: What is the beginning? What is the origin? How has all this come about? I hope you're asking this question; don't just listen to the speaker, but share it, tear it to pieces. Don't please, accept anything he says. He's not your guru; he's not your leader; he's not your helper. This is the platform, that is the beginning of this talk. This is a very serious talk, and unless your brain is actually active, one is afraid that you won't be able to follow. It would be useless for you and for the speaker to listen to a lot of words, but if we could together take a very long journey, not in terms of time, not in terms of belief or conclusions or theories, but examine very carefully the way of our lives, fear, uncertainty, insecurity and all the inventions that man has made, including the extraordinary computers - where are we at the end of two million years? Where are we going, not as some theory, not what some wretched book says, however holy it is, but where are we all going? And where have we begun? They're both related to each other: where are we going, where we began. The beginning may be the ending. Don't agree. Find out. There may be no beginning and no ending, and we're going to investigate into that together. From the beginning of time, right down to the present day, man has always thought in terms of religion. What is religion? Man has always sought something more than this world. Men have worshipped the stars, the suns, the moons and their own creations; there has been tremendous endeavour, effort, energy, spent on ancient temples, mosques and the churches, of course. They have spent tremendous energy on this. What is the spirit of man that has sought something beyond the world, beyond the daily agony; the travail, work, going to the factory, to the office, and climbing the ladder of success, making money, trying to impress people, trying to command? Are you agreeing to this? It is a fact whether you agree or not. They're all seeking power in some form; they want to be at the centre of things - in Delhi, or here, or in other places. They want to be there. We're asking: What is religion; what has made man give enormous treasures to a temple; what made him do all this? What was the energy that was given to all this? Was it fear? Was it seeking a reward from heaven, or whatever you like to call it? Was seeking a reward the origin? You want a reward; you want something in exchange; you pray three or five times a day and you hope in return that some entity will give you something, from a refrigerator to a car to a better wife, or better husband, or you wait for grace, something that you can hope for, cling to. This has been the history of all religions. God and money are always together; the Catholic Church has tremendous treasures. You have it here, too, in your various temples, puja and worship and all that triviality; all that is really nonsense. We are trying to find out by enquiring very, very deeply what religion is; it is obviously not all this moneymaking stuff. We are asking: What is that, which is nameless, which is the supreme intelligence, which has no relationship with all our prayers, with all our gods, temples, mosques, churches? That's all man-made. Any intelligent man must put all that aside and not become cynical, not become merely sceptical, but have a brain that's really active, a brain that enquires into everything, not only the outside world. Have we got a brain that is enquiring into its own thoughts, into its own consciousness, into its own pains, sufferings, all the rest of it? Have we got such a brain? Here, we must separate the brain from the mind. The brain is the centre of all our nerves, our knowledge, all our theories, opinions, prejudices; from college, university, all that knowledge is gathered in the skull. All the thoughts, all the fears are there. Is the brain different from the mind? If you seriously pay attention to what the speaker has asked, is there a difference between the brain, your brain, what is inside the skull with all the knowledge you have gathered, not only you, but your forefathers and so on, for two million years, which is all encased in there - is there a difference between that brain and the mind? The brain will always be limited. Don't agree; this is much too serious. And is the mind different from this, from my consciousness, from my daily activities, from my fears, anxieties, uncertainties, sorrow, pain and all the theories which man has gathered about everything? The mind has no relationship with the brain; it can communicate with the brain, but the brain cannot communicate with it. Don't agree, please, that's the last thing to do. The speaker is saying the brain is the keeper of all our consciousness, of our thoughts, of our fears, and so on, and on, and on. All the gods, all the theories about gods and the unbelievers, it's all there. Nobody can dispute that unless he's a little bit odd. This brain, which is conditioned by knowledge, by experience, by tradition, cannot have any communication with the mind which is totally outside the activity of the brain. That mind can communicate with the brain, but the brain cannot communicate with it because the brain can imagine infinitely; the brain can imagine the nameless; the brain can do anything. The mind is too immense because it doesn't belong to you; it's not your mind. We are going to investigate - together, please bear in mind always together - not only the nature of religion, but also the computer. You know what the computer is? It's a machine; it can programme itself. It can bring about its own computer; the father computer has its own son computer which is better than the father. You don't have to accept this; it's public; it's not something secret, so watch it carefully. That computer can do almost anything that man can do. It can make all your gods, all your theories, your rituals; it's even better at it than you will ever be. So, the computer is coming up in the world; it's going to make your brains something different. You've heard of genetic engineering; they're trying, whether you like it or not, to change your whole behaviour. That is genetic engineering. They are trying to change your way of thinking. When genetic engineering and the computer meet, what are you? As a human being what are you? Your brains are going to be altered. Your way of behaviour is going to be changed. They may remove fear altogether, remove sorrow, remove all your gods. They're going to; don't fool yourself. It all ends up either in war or in death. This is what is happening in the world actually. Genetic engineering on the one side and the computer on the other, and when they meet, as they're inevitably going to, what are you as a human being? Actually, your brain now is a machine. You are born in India and say: `I'm an Indian.' You are encased in that. You are a machine. Please don't be insulted. I'm not insulting you. You are a machine which repeats like a computer. Don't imagine there is something divine in you - that would be lovely - something holy that is everlasting. The computer will say that to you too. So, what is becoming of a human being? What's becoming of you? We have also to enquire - this is a very serious subject, don't agree or disagree,just listen - into what is creation. Not the creation of a baby, that's very simple, or the creation of a new something or other. Invention is totally different from creation. Invention is based on knowledge. The engineers can improve the jet; the movement is based on knowledge and the invention is also based on knowledge. So we must separate invention from creation. This requires your total energy, your capacity to penetrate. Invention is essentially based on knowledge. I improve the clock; I have a new gadget. All invention is based on knowledge, on experience; inventions are inevitably limited because they're based on knowledge. Knowledge being ever limited, inventions must always be limited. In the future there may be no jets, but something else that will go from Delhi to Los Angeles in two hours; that's an invention based on previous knowledge which has been improved step by step, but that's not creation. So what is creation? So what is life? Life in the tree, life in the little grass - life, not what the scientists invent, but the beginning of life - life, the thing that lives? You may kill it, but it's still there in the other. Don't agree or disagree, but see that we are enquiring into the origin of life. We are going to enquire into the absolute -something that's really marvellous. It's not a reward; you can't take it home and use it. What is meditation to you? What is meditation? The word, in common language in the dictionary, means: to ponder over, to think over and to concentrate, to learn to concentrate, not let your brain wander all over the place. Is that what you call meditation? Be simple, be honest. That is what? Every day taking a certain period and going to a room and sitting down quietly for ten minutes or half an hour to meditate? Is meditation concentration, thinking about something very noble? Any conscious effort to meditate is part of your discipline of the office, because you say: If I meditate, I'll have a quiet mind, or I'll enter into another state. The word `meditation' also means to measure, which means compare. So your meditation becomes mechanical because you are exercising energy to concentrate on a picture, an image, or an idea, and that concentration divides. Concentration is always divisive; you want to concentrate on something, but thought wanders off; then you say you mustn't wander off, and you come back. You repeat that all day long, or for half an hour. Then you come off it and say you have meditated. This meditation is advocated by all the gurus, by all the lay disciples. The Christian idea is: `I believe in God and I'm sacrificing myself to God; therefore, I pray to save my soul.' Is all this meditation? I know nothing about this kind of meditation; it's like an achievement; if I meditate for half an hour, I feel better. Or is there a totally different kind of meditation? Don't accept anything that the speaker says, at any price. The speaker says that that is not meditation at all. That's merely a process of achievement. If one day you have not been able to concentrate, you take a month and say: `Yes, I've got it.' That's like a clerk becoming a manager. So is there a different kind of meditation which is not effort, which is not measurement, which is not routine, which is not mechanical? Is there a meditation in which there is no sense of comparison, or in which there is no reward and punishment? Is there any meditation which is not based on thought which is measurement, time, and all that? How can one explain a meditation that has no measurement, that has no achievement, that doesn't say: `I'm this, but I'll become that'? `That' being god or superangel. Is there a meditation which has nothing to do with will - an energy that says: `I must meditate'? Is there a meditation which as nothing to do with effort at all? The speaker says there is. You don't have to accept it. He may be talking nonsense, but he sees logically that the ordinary meditation is self-hypnosis, deceiving oneself. And, when you stop deceiving, stop all that mechanical process, is there a different kind of meditation? And unfortunately, the speaker says: Yes. But you can't get at it through effort, through giving all your energy to something. It is something that has to be absolutely silent. First of all, begin very humbly, very, very humbly and, therefore, very gently and, therefore, no pushing, driving, saying: `I must do this.' It requires a tremendous sense not only of aloneness, but a sense of - I mustn't describe it to you. I mustn't describe it because then you'll go off on descriptions. If I describe it, the description is not the real. The description of the moon is not the moon, and a painting of the Himalayas is not the Himalayas. So, we'll stop describing. It's for you to play with it, or not play with it, going your own way with your own peculiar achievements through meditation, reward and all the rest of it. So, in meditation which is absolutely no effort, no achievement, no thinking, the brain is quiet; not made quiet by will, by intention, by conclusion and all that nonsense; it is quiet. And, being quiet, it has infinite space. Are you waiting for me to explore? And you will follow what I explain? What kind of people are you? So, is your brain ever quiet? I'm asking you. Your brain is thinking, fearing, thinking of your office work, of your family, what they will do, your sons, your daughters; thinking, which is time and thought. Is your brain ever quiet? Not made quiet by drugs, whiskey and various forms of drugging yourself. You drug yourself when you believe. You drug yourself and say: `Yes, this is perfectly right, the Buddha has said that, therefore it must be right. You're drugging yourself all the time; therefore, you have no energy of that kind that demands the penetration of something immense. So, we're now going back to find out what creation is. What is creation? It has nothing to do with invention. So what is creation, the origin, the beginning? What is life? Tell me what you think of it. What is life? Not going to the office and all the rest of it, sex and children, or no children but sex and so on and so on and so on. What is life? What gives life to that blade of grass in the cement? What is life in us? Not all the things that we go through - power, position, prestige, fame, or no fame, but shame; that's not life; that's part of our mishandling of life. But, what is life? Why are you listening to me? What makes you, if you are listening at all, listen to the man? What is the motive behind your listening? What do you want? What's your desire? Behind the desire there is a motive. So what is desire? Desire is part of sensation, isn't it? I see this beautiful clock or ugly clock; it's a sensation. The seeing brings about a sensation. From that sensation, thought comes and makes an image of it. That is, I see this clock, rather nice, I would like to have it. The sensation of seeing, then thought coming and making an image of that sensation; at that moment, desire is born. It's very simple. Is there a brain, your brain, which is not muddied up, muddied by environment, by tradition, by society and all the rest of it? So what is the origin of life? Are you waiting for me to answer it? This is much too serious a subject for you to play with, because we are trying to enquire into something that has no name, no end. I can kill that bird; there is another bird. I can't kill all birds; there are too many of them in the world. So, we are enquiring into what makes a bird. What is creation behind all this? Are you waiting for me to describe it, go into it? You want me to go into it? Why (From the audience: To understand what creation is. Why do you ask that? Because I asked? No description can ever describe the origin. The origin is nameless; the origin is absolutely quiet, it's not whirring about making noise. Creation is something that is most holy, that's the most sacred thing in life, and if you have made a mess of your life, change it. Change it today, not tomorrow. If you are uncertain, find out why and be certain. If your thinking is not straight, think straight, logically. Unless all that is prepared, all that is settled, you can't enter into this world, into the world of creation. It ends. (These two words are hardly audible, breathed rather than spoken.) This is the last talk. Do you want to sit together quietly for a while? All right, sirs, sit quietly for a while. RAJGHAT 1ST PUBLIC TALK 18TH NOVEMBER 1985 I hope you can all hear. I wonder why you are all here. If you are asked that question seriously, what would be your answer? Why we are all gathered here on the banks of the Ganga - of course, sacred river - and therefore partially for that reason you are here. And I wonder what other reasons you have to come and listen to this person. Is it merely reputation? Is it merely that you have heard this man talk several times before; therefore you say, let's go and hear him? What is the relationship of what he says to what you do? You understand my question? What is the relationship of what he says and what you do? Are they two separate things? Or, you just listen to what he has to say, and carry on your daily life? You understood our question? So, we two are going to talk over, together, not some abstract theoretical problem, but rather we are going to talk over together, like two old friends, sitting under these trees, our daily life, which is far more important than some theoretical, very knowledgeable abstract problems. We may come to those much later. So, shall we, as two old friends, talk over our problems? We have got so many problems - how to meditate, which guru to follow, if you are a follower, what kind of practice you should do, what kind of daily activity you should go through; and so on, and also what is our relationship to nature - all the trees, the rivers and the mountains, the plains and the valleys - what is our relationship to nature? To a tree, to a flower, to a bird that passes by, and what is our relationship with each other - not with the speaker - but with each other, your wife, your husband, your children and all the environment, as government, neighbour, community and so on? What is our relationship to all this? Or, are we so isolated, so self-concerned, so intensely interested in our own way of life? Please, I am asking - we are asking all these questions as two friends. The speaker means as 'friends', not as a guru. You have had enough gurus in this country (they are really not worth it). And the speaker has no intention whatsoever to impress you, to tell you what to do, or to help you. Please bear this in mind right through the talks: he has no intention whatsoever to help you. I will tell you why - the reason, the logic of it. You have had a great many gurus, thousands of them, a great many helpers, Christian helpers, Hindu, Buddhist, every kind of leader, not only politically, but so-called religiously (I do not know what that word means at the moment, we will go into that word) and you have had leaders of major kind and the minor, and where are you at the end of this long evolution of two million years old? Where are you? Where are we - you, and all of us here? We are supposed to have lived on this earth two and a half million years, and during that long revolution and the evolution, we still remain barbarians. We may be cleaner, quicker communication, better hygiene and so on, transportation - but morally, ethically - if I may use that word - spiritually, we are still barbarians. We kill each other not only in a war, but by words, by a gesture. We are very competitive. Am I talking to myself or are we together in this? We are very ambitious. Each is concerned with himself. Self-interest: that is the dominant note in our life: 'self-interest' that is, concerned with one`s own well-being, security, possession, power and so on. Aren't we concerned with ourselves, spiritually, religiously, business and so on, each one right throughout the world, whether Russians, Americans or Europeans, and so on, we are all concerned with ourselves: that means, isolating ourselves from the rest of humanity. That's a fact. We are not exaggerating. We are not saying something that is not true. Wherever you go - the speaker has been all over the world at a certain time and still goes round. Some of you have come a long way, so has the speaker, a very long way, and when you go around the world and see what is happening - increase of armaments, violence, fanaticism, and the great, deep sense of insecurity, uncertainty and the sense of separateness, 'you and I'. Right? This is the common note of mankind. Please, we are facing facts, not theories, not some kind of distant, theoretical, philosophical statement. We are looking at facts, not my facts opposed to your facts; facts. Every country in the world as you must all know, is gathering armaments - every country, however poor or however rich. Right? Look at your own country - immense poverty, disorder, corruption - you all know that - and gathering of armaments. It used to be a club to kill another, now you can vaporize mankind by millions, with one atom bomb or neutron bomb. We have come from the club, arrow and so on, till we have the atom bomb. And we have progressed, technologically, immensely - revolution is going on, of which we know very little. The technological process is so rapid, overnight is already over -something new! And, ethically we are what we have been for a million years. You understand the contrast? Technologically, like a computer, which will outthink man, it can invent new meditations, new gods, new theories. We were talking the other day with three or four very prominent computer people. The computer can think backwards and forwards which is called 'architecture'. (I am not going into it for the moment). And this fifth or sixth generation of computers is so quick, so extraordinarily capable, it can invent, it can produce, it can change and so on. (I won't go into all that.) And man, that is, you and I - what is going to happen to our brains? You understand something? If the computer can do almost anything - of course except looking at the new moon, it can do almost anything that human beings can - this is not some theory. It is happening now. So, what's going to happen to you? What's going to happen to us, as human beings? We want entertainment, probably this is part of your idea of entertainment: coming here, sitting, listening, and agreeing or disagreeing, and going back home, carry on your own life. This is part of entertainment, as going to church, temple, mosque or football, cricket in this country. Please, this is not an entertainment. You and the speaker must think together. It's not just to sit quietly and absorb some strange atmosphere, some 'Punyam'. Sorry, it is not like that at all. We are going to, sanely, logically, think together, look at the same thing, together. Not how you look and I look, but together, to observe, not only our daily life, which is far more important than any other - our daily living, every minute of our day. So, first, we are going to, together, think, not just merely listen, agree or disagree, which is very easy. One wishes strongly that we could put aside agreement and disagreement. That is very difficult for most people to do. We are too eager to agree or disagree. Our reactions are so quick. We classify everything, as a religious man, irreligious man, mundane and so on and so on. If you could, this morning at least, put aside completely, agreement and disagreement, and merely observe together, think together. Will you do it? Put aside altogether your opinion and my opinion, your way of thinking and the other person's way of thinking. Could we do that? Only for an hour. Don't bother. Don't be too long at it, because agreement and disagreement divides people. It's illogical to say, yes, I agree with you or I don't agree with you, which means you are either projecting, holding to your opinion, your judgement, your evaluation, or you disagree, say 'I am sorry, I don't agree with you'. Another form of personal interest and discarding. Could we do that, for this morning, just for fun? Just for an amusement, or entertainment, if you want: to forget our opinions, or judgements, our saying, agreement or disagreement, just have a good, clear brain, not devotional and emotional or romantic, but a brain that thinks clearly - if it is at all possible. A brain that does not get involved in all the complications of theory, opinion, admission, dismission? Could we do that? Probably you have never done it. So, let us proceed. What is thinking? Every human being in the world, everyone from the most ignorant, most crude, from the very, very small person in a little village to the most highly sophisticated scientist, they have something in common. Haven't you noticed? Thinking. They think. The villager never read anything, never been to a school, college, university, but probably most of you here, are or have been educated. Right? So you think and the villagers think. Right? The man who sits in the Himalayas by himself, he also thinks. So, every human being in the world thinks. Right? And this thinking has been right from the beginning of time. We must ask the first question - as we are going to ask several questions - what is thinking? What is it that you think about? What is thinking? Right? Would you answer this question first, not from books, right? Not from some Gita or the Upanishads or the Bible or the Koran says. What is thinking? Sir, one may go to a college, school, right up to university and be a bureaucrat, or a chief minister or prime minister, or the lowliest of the villagers, they have all something in common, apart from many other things which we will go into, what is thinking? We live by thinking. Our daily action is based on thinking. Unless we question, solve, and hold to it, find out. If you are a physicist, a labourer, or any kind of human being on this earth, we all think. You may think one way, and another may think another way, but it's still thinking. Yes. So, what is that? Can you think if you have no memory? You cannot think backwards and forwards, what you will do tomorrow, or the next hour, or what you have done yesterday, or this morning. You can think forward and backward. That is called technologically, in the computer world, 'architecture', and the computers can do it. So we must find out together, not the Indian way of thinking or the European way of thinking. I do not know if you follow what the speaker is saying; or the oriental way of thinking which is the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian and all the sects. Right? So, what is thinking? Tell me, please. What is thinking? Why do you think? Are you stumped? No answer? You will discuss with me tomorrow or I believe the day after tomorrow, we are going to have a dialogue together. Unless you really understand the process of thinking, unless you really understand it, our life is always going to be very, very limited. So, we must very deeply, seriously, as a physicist, as a scientist, examines, we must examine very, very, very closely this whole process of thinking, which shapes our life. Man has created god by his thinking. God has not created man. It must be a very, very poor god who created these human beings who are fighting each other perpetually. He must be a rather silly old god. So, what is thinking? And why have we made problems of it? Right? We have problems about thinking. So we also must examine closely, why we have problems. Do you understand? Are we together into this a little bit? At least, following each other, or, have you all gone to sleep? So, first, why have we problems in life? What is a problem? We have plenty of them: political problems, financial problems, economic problems, the problems of one religion against the other, the problems of - oh! You understand? Haven't you got problems by the thousand? What is a problem and the meaning of that word 'problem'? What does that mean? The meaning. According to the dictionary it means something thrown at you, a challenge, something you have got to look at, face. That's what a problem means. Right? Are we together in this, or am I talking to myself? So first, the word problem means something thrown at you. You can't dodge it, you can't run away from it, you can't suppress it. It is there, like a sore thumb. Why is it, that all our life from the moment we are born till we die, there is a problem - about death, about fear, about a hundred things? Right? Are you asking this question, or am I merely asking it for you? You don't seem to react to all this. From the moment you are born, after a while, after several years, you go to school. There you have to read, write. That becomes a problem to the child. And later on you have to learn mathematics, and that becomes a problem. And the mother says, 'Don't do this, don't do that', that becomes a problem. Right? So, from childhood we are bred in problems. Right? Am I saying something strange? You all look so damn serious! I am sorry to use that word, but you do look very serious, probably only this morning. So, from childhood, we have cultivated a million problems. Our brain is conditioned in problems. It is never free from problems. As you grow, become adolescent, sex, how to earn money, what to do, to follow society or not, revolt or not, and at the end you yield to society, to environment. So, all this becomes a problem. Every politician in the world solves one problem and thereby creates another problem. Haven't you noticed all this? So, the human brain, what is inside the skull, itself has a problem. Do you understand? So, can the brain ever be free of problems, to solve problems? Do you understand my question? If the brain is not free of problems, then how can it solve any problem? Do you understand? This is logical. Right? So, the brain, your brain, that which is in the skull, which carries memory, (I am not going into details), which has acquired tremendous knowledge, that brain has been nurtured, educated, to have problems. So, we are asking now: can the brain, your brain, can it ever be free of problems first, and then it can solve problems. It's logical. Right? So, can you be free of problems first? Or is that impossible? You understand my question? Our brain is conditioned as Hindu and the various divisions in Hinduism. We are - the brain is conditioned as a Buddhist, as a monk, the brain is conditioned in various narrow religions, the brain is conditioned by specialization. Oh Lord! Aren't you interested in all this? I am asking myself, looking at you - aren't you interested in all this? Or is it the habit of going to a meeting and listening, and saying, yes, quite right, quite right. You are a funny people, all right. So, let us begin. Our brain is conditioned by the environment in which we live, by your education, by your religion, by your poverty or richness, you have taken vows as monks - don't know why, but you have taken them - and it becomes a torture, a problem. So our brain is extraordinarily conditioned, as a business man, as a house-keeper, and so on, and from that narrow point of view, we look at the world. So, we have to go into this question, of not only having problems, but also, what is thinking? Why do you think at all? Is there a different way of action? Is there a different manner of approach to life, to the daily living, that does not require thinking at all? Oh, you don't know all this. So, first we have to look very closely, together - not I am explaining and you accept, that would be silly - but together find out for ourselves and then act, not say, yes, quite right. Act. We are going to go into that. What is thinking? Don't you think? Otherwise you would not be here. You made arrangements to come here at a certain time and you have also made arrangements to go back. That is thinking. Thinking philosophically - philosophy means the love of truth, the love of life, not passing some exam in a university. So, let us find out together what is thinking. If you had no memory of yesterday or what will happen tomorrow - no memory at all, of any kind, will you think? You understand? Oh, come on sirs - would you think and act thereby if you had no memory? Of course not. What are you hesitating about? You can't think if you have no memory. So what is memory? Now you are stumped. What is memory? You did something yesterday and what you did is registered in the brain, which becomes a memory, and according to the memory you think and act. Right? So, what is memory? How does it come about? You remember somebody flattering you, you remember somebody hurting you, saying ugly things about you, or flattering you because you have written a book, so, you remember - memory. That is, the memory is the outcome of knowledge. Right? Oh, Lord! That is, you insulted me; it is registered in the brain as a memory. That insult or flattery or whatever it is, is registered which becomes the memory. That is, the knowledge of that incident becomes memory. I have an accident to a car, that accident is registered in the brain, in the brain cells, and then it says, yes that is memory, I had an accident and I must drive carefully. Right? So, out of knowledge comes memory. Right? Clear? From memory, thought. Now, what is knowledge? This is rather difficult. We all accumulate knowledge, the great scholars, great professors, scientists, acquire tremendous knowledge. Do you understand? What is knowledge? How does it come about you have knowledge? Haven't you thought about all this, looked at all this? Knowledge comes when there is experience. Right? You have an accident in a car, that becomes the act, the accident, that becomes an experience. Right? Right? From that experience you have knowledge and from that knowledge you have memory; from memory, you have thought. Right? Be careful. Don't agree yet or disagree. I am going to pull the rug from under your feet. So, what is experience, which is, that incident, right, or accident in a car, which is registered in the brain as knowledge? Right? And so on -knowledge, experience - knowledge - memory - thought. Clear? This is logical. Not my way of looking at it or your way of looking at it. So, all experience, whether it is god's experience or your experience, is limited. Yes? Right? Would you agree, would you see that? All experience! Because, you look at it, the scientists are adding every day more and more and more. Right? That which is added to, is always limited. Don't agree. Look at it, look at it. I know little, and I must know more, you are adding! Right? That which you add to, must be limited. Oh Lord! Right? Q: Right. K: So, experience is always limited. Your experience of god - I don't know what that means, but it doesn't matter - your experience of something is always limited; there is something more to be added. So, experience is limited, knowledge is limited - for ever, not just future knowledge, it is always limited. Therefore, memory is limited and so thought is limited. Right? Thought is limited. And where there is limitation, there is division. Right? As the Sikh, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Christian, the Democratic party, Republican party, Communist. You understand? They are all based on thought. Therefore all governments are limited. All your activity is limited, whether you think most abstractly or try to be very noble, it is still thinking. Right? So, from that limited quality of thinking - and thinking is always limited - our actions are limited. Right? Now, from that you begin to enquire very carefully: can thought have its right place and have no other place at all? You understand my question? No, no. Don't go to sleep, please. I need thought to come here. I have to get up at a certain time and all the rest of it. You have too. You have to sit there. So, is there an action which is free of limitation? You think it out. Think it out, look at it carefully. That is, thinking being limited, we have reduced the whole universe into a very small affair. You understand? We have made our life into such a small affair. I think, I must be this, I mustn't be that, I must have power, I must not! You follow? We have reduced the enormous quality of life into a very small petty little affair. Right? So, is it possible to be free of thought? That is, I must think to come here. If I am a bureaucrat, I must think in terms of bureaucracy. If I go to the factory and turn the screw, I must have certain knowledge. Why should I have knowledge about myself? You understand my question? The higher self, lower self and all that stuff? Why should I have knowledge about it? It is very simple. I am self-interested. I am only concerned with myself actually. We may pretend to have brotherhood, or may talk about peace, we may do every kind of verbal explaining in many words, but we are always self-centred. Right? So, from that arises the question: can the self-centredness, which is essentially deep selfishness, can there be a change at all? You understand? Can we be utterly selfless? Go on, sir. So, we have to enquire: what is the self? Right, sirs? What are you, apart from your name and profession and your vows and following some guru or leader, what are you? Tell me. Apart from your profession, apart from your name - or put it the other way round: are you your name; are you your profession? Or, are you part of the community, or are you part of the tradition? The Hindu, that is a tradition, a name! So, what are you? Don't repeat what the Gita says, the Upanishads say, or somebody else says. That's futile. Actually, what are you? God! Won't you try to know it? Is this the first time this question is being put to you? What am I? Aren't you fear? Aren't you your name? Aren't you your body? Aren't you what you think you are? The image you have built about yourself -aren't you all that? Aren't you your anger, or do you say 'Anger is separate from me'? Come on, sirs. Aren't you your fears, your ambitions, your greed, your competition, your uncertainty, your confusion, your pain, your sorrow? Aren't you all that? Aren't you the guru that you follow, and all the kind of stuff you put around your neck? So, when you identify yourself with that, that is, your fear, your pleasure, your pain, your sorrow, your affection, your rudeness - all that, aren't you all that? Or are you something high up, super-self, super-consciousness? If you say you are superconsciousness, higher self, that is also part of thinking; therefore what you call the higher self is still very small. So, what am I? Don't go to sleep sir! What's the time, sir? Q: Nine thirty five. K: We have talked for nearly an hour. Q: Yes sir. Yes sir. K: Good. God! I don't know whether it's worthwhile. I am saying, you are a bundle of all that. Right? Put together by thought, I am a Hindu, I am a Brahman, I am not a Brahman, or anti-Brahman, and I want to be prime minister, I want to have a bigger position, I want power, position. Right? Don't say, no. You want all those. You want to be nearer to god, or your guru, and therefore, what he says, you follow, and you are uncertain, confused, lonely, in sorrow, in pain, anxiety. Right? You are all that. Whatever you think, you are. Right? You may invent all kinds of stuff, but that invention too is what you are. Right? So another very, very complicated question I won't go into now, because it is nearly time: who has put all this together? Putting it all together is called me, myself, my ego, my personality, my higher self, my god, you know, atman, I invent all this kind of stuff. Who has put this together? You understand my question? Or is there only one structure? You understand? We have separated all this. One day I am quite certain, second day I am uncertain, third day - I mean third day, it's a long interval - I want, I aspire to be very noble, fifth day I say, I must be fearless and so on. Right? Moving from day to day. What kind of human beings we are! I am a Hindu, Buddhist, and all the rest of it! Who has divided all this? You understand my question? Who has said, 'I am a Hindu', or 'I am a Muslim'? Is it merely propaganda? Division between countries - who created this division? Oh come on, sirs. Q: Socrates. K: Socrates? Q: Thought. K: Thought: Are you sure? Or is it the desire, the longing to be identified, to be safe? Q: These are also thoughts. K: Would you listen before you put that? Of course, thought, but there is something else in it. I am asking you most respectfully, who has created this division? It is thought, of course, but behind that thought there is something else. I am a Russian, or a Muslim and I hold on to that. Right? For the rest of my life I am a Muslim, or a Catholic, or a Hindu, or whatever it is. Who is doing all this, apart from the thought? What is the desire, what is the urge, what is the movement behind it? Q: To become. Q: That's right. K: To become; what do you mean, to become what? Q: Different from what I am sir. Q: It's security. K: That's it. Security. I want to be secure, that is why I follow a guru. I want to be secure in my relationship with you, with my wife: she is mine. Right? Secure. Right, sirs? Secure, protected, safe, some place I must have. At home - it is rather difficult in a factory or in a bureaucratic structure. The desire, the urge, the response, the reaction is 'safety', 'I must be secure'. Right? K, so and so name, B.A. You are a crazy crowd. Or an MP, Member of Parliament! Politics matter very much here, in this country. So, it is a form of security. We all want security, but we never question, is there security at all? Is there anywhere I can say I am safe? You distrust your wife, your wife distrusts you. You distrust your boss, because you want his place. It is all common sense You like to be gurus - for god's sake! So, each human being in this world - you may laugh at it now - each human being in the world wants to have a place where he can be safe, secure, where there is no competition, where he is not pushed around, where he is not harassed. Don't you want all that? If you are honest, for a change, don't you want all that? Yes, but you never ask: is there security at all? We want something - it may be illusory. I want god, but we have created god. So, you want security, and you also must ask: is there security at all? If you want security, you must also ask the other question. You can't say, I want security and hold on. Is there security at all? Then, the question arises: why do you want security? Is there security in your thinking? Is there security in relationship? Not with me, with your wife, your children. Is there security in your job? You may be a professor, carefully protected once you become a professor, but they are hapless. You want to become Vice Chancellor? You know the game. So, where is there security? Or there may be no security at all. Just think about it, sir! See the beauty of that! having no desire for security, having no urge, no feeling of any kind, in which there is security in your vows, in your offices, in your factory, in your parliament and so on. Is there security? Life may not have security. Life is meant to be lived. Not create problems and then try to solve them, not to have sorrow, pain. It is meant to be lived, and it will die. That is one of our fears, to die. Right? We will go into all that. So, for this morning, have we learnt from each other - not helped each other - have we learnt? Have we heard at all what the speaker is talking about? Heard with the ear? Have you seen the facts of the world, which is you, the world is you, have you seen the facts of all that? Or are they all ideas? There is a difference between fact and idea. The idea is never the fact. The microphone, this thing in front of the speaker, the word microphone is not the thing. Right? The word is not the thing, but we have made the word the thing. You understand what I am saying? So, the 'Hindu' is not you. The word is not you. You are the fact, not the word. I wonder if you see all that. So, can we see the word and see that the word is not the thing? The word 'god' is not god. The word is different totally from reality. Right? So, we are most respectfully asking: what have you learnt this morning, actually learnt, so that you act? Not say, yes, quite right, quite right and go home and carry on. So unless we act, the world is in great chaos - I don't know if you realize it. There is great trouble in the world, great misery. And the world is you, because you are in misery, you are confused, you are all this, therefore you are creating the world around you. You understand what I am saying? If you don't alter, the world cannot alter, change. In the world, everywhere you go, every human being in the world goes through the same phenomenon, as you are going through: uncertain, unhappy, fearful, insecure, wanting security, trying to control, trying to say 'that guru is better than my guru' and so on, and so on, creating wars. You understand sirs? The speaker is not an optimist or a pessimist; we are presenting the facts, not newspaper facts. We are talking about facts of our life, not the life of a guru or the emporer or somebody other. We are talking together about your life. Your life is like the rest of the world.They are terribly unhappy, uncertain, miserable, unemployed by the millions. Poverty, hunger, sorrow, pain just like you - you are not different from them. You may call yourself Hindu or Muslims or Christains or what you like but consciously, inwardly you are like rest of the world. You may be dark brown and they may be light brown, different government but every human being shares this terrible world. We have made the world. Do you understand? Not Lenin or Marx, we have made the world. We are society. If you want society to be something different you have to start, you have to bring order to your house. The house is you. Alright sirs? RAJGHAT 2ND PUBLIC TALK 19TH NOVEMBER 1985 May we go on with what we were talking about yesterday morning? As we said, we are taking a long journey together, in a railway, a very long journey, right throughout the world, and that journey began two and a half million years ago. And, during that long interval of time, and distance, we've had a great many experiences. And those experiences are stored in our brain, conscious or deeply unconscious, deep layers of it. And, together, you and the speaker, are going to examine, explore. It's not the speaker alone talks, we're all talking together, only the speaker is putting it into words. And the words have a very significant meaning, not just vocabulary, but the depth of the word, the significance of the word, the meaning of the word. And, as we said yesterday, you and the speaker, are taking the journey together, you can't just go to sleep. You can't just say yes, I agree, or disagree. We went into that. We are not agreeing or disagreeing. We are merely looking out of the window, seeing what extraordinary things man has gone through, what experience, what pain, what sorrow, what unbearable things man has created for himself, and for the world. We are not taking sides, pro and con, please understand this very carefully. We are not taking any side, either left or right or centre. This is not a political meeting, this is not an entertainment, this is a serious gathering. If you want to be entertained, you should go to a cinema, or football, but this is a very serious meeting, as far as the speaker is concerned. He has talked all over the world, unfortunately or fortunately he may have created a reputation, and probably you are coming here because of that reputation, but that's no value at all. So please, together we are going to examine, sitting together in that train, taking an infinitely long journey. We are not trying to impress you. You understand? We are not trying to force you to look at something. We are looking at our daily life, and all the background of a million years, let's keep it to a million years, good enough, and one must listen to all the whispers, hear every movement, see everything as it is, not as you would wish it to be, actually what you see out of the window as the train goes by. And, you have to keep awake to see everything that you're passing, hear every whisper, hear every sound, the beauty of the hills, the rivers, the stretch of water, and all the beauty around you. Shall we talk about beauty for a while? Would it interest you? Yes - don't say yes, yes, it's a very serious subject, like everything in life. So please, probably you've never asked what is beauty - not the beauty of a boy. So to listen, not only to our own inward thoughts, feelings, and our opinions and judgments, but also to hear the sound of what other people are saying, not your gurus, that's all rather childish, but what other people are saying, what your wife is saying, what your neighbour is saying, to listen to the sound of that crow, to feel the beauty of the world, the beauty of nature. So, we're going to, for the moment, to enquire into what is beauty. Right? Because you are passing in that train the most wonderful scenery, the hills, the rivers, the great snowclapped mountains, deep valleys, not only things outside of you, but also the inward structure, the nature of your own being, what you think, what you feel, what your desires are. One has to listen to all this, not just say yes, right, wrong, this is what I think, what I shouldn't think. Or just merely follow some tradition, either modern tradition, with the psychology, physicists, doctors, computer experts, and so on, but also to listen, very quietly, without any reaction, to see the beauty of a tree. So we're going together to talk about beauty. What is beauty? Have you been to museums? In the old middle-ages, or Renaissance, of the great painters, have you seen them, some of you? Probably not. I won't take you around the museum, I'm not a guide. But instead of looking at pictures, paintings, and the statues of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and the moderns, we are looking, asking, enquiring, demanding to find out, what is beauty? Not the form, not a woman or a man, or a small child that's extraordinarily beautiful, all children are. So, what is beauty? I'm asking the question sir, please answer to yourself first, or you've never thought about it. Not the beauty of a face, but the beauty of a green lawn, of a flower, of the great mountains, with the snow covering them, and the deep valleys, and the still tranquil waters of a river. All that is outside of you. And you say how beautiful that is. What does that word beauty mean? Because it is very important to find that out because we have so little beauty in our daily life. If you go through Benares you know all about it. The filthy streets, the dust, the lorries. And you ask yourself, seeing all this, not the mere tenderness of a leaf, or the tender generosity of human beings, but to enquire very deeply, this word that is used by poets, painters, sculptors, and you are asking yourself now, what is this quality of beauty? Do you want me to answer it, or will you answer it? Go on, sir. Q: You answer it. K: Why? Q: Because we don't know. K: The gentleman says, you answer it because we don't know. Why? Why don't you know? Why haven't we enquired into this enormous question? You have your own poets, from the ancient people until now. They write about it, they sing about it, they dance, and you say, I don't know what beauty is. What a strange people we are. But, if you ask who is your guru, who is your god, I believe there are 300,000 gods in India, pretty good, in Europe or America there is only one god. With you there are 300,000 more. You can choose any of them to amuse yourself. So what is beauty? It's the same question sir, put into different words. What are you? What is the nature and the structure of you, apart from the biological factor. What are you? Pass some exams, get a degree, a job, become a physicist, a scientist, a treasurer for a government, what are you? That is very closely related to what is beauty. When you look at a mountain, snowcapped, deep valleys, blue deep hills, what do you feel, what's your real response to all that? Don't you know? Aren't you, for a second, or a few minutes, absolutely shocked by it? The greatness, the immensity, the blue valley, the extraordinary light, and the blue sky against the snowcapped mountains. What happens to you the moment you look at that - the grandeur, the majesty of the mountains, what do you feel? Do you for the moment, or for a few minutes, exist at all? You understand my question? Please don't agree, look at it very closely. At that moment when you look at something grand, immense, majestic, for a second you don't exist, right, you've forgotten your worries, and your wife, and your children, your job, all the messiness of one's life. At that moment you say you are stunned by it, which is, for that second, the grandeur has wiped away all your memory, for a second, then you come back. What happens during that second? Go on sir - what happens when you are not there? That is beauty. You understand? When you are not there. Don't agree sir. Don't shake your head, yes, yes. So, there, the grandeur, the majesty of a mountain, or a lake, or that river early in the morning, making a golden path, for a second you have forgotten everything. That is when the self is not, there is beauty. You understand what I am saying. When you are not, with all your problems and responsibilities, your traditions, and all that rubbish, not your family, then there is beauty. Right? When you are not there, like a child with a toy, as long as the toy is complex and he plays with it, the toy absorbs him, right, takes him over. The moment the toy is broken, he's back to whatever it was he was doing. And we are like that. We are absorbed by the mountain, it's a toy for us for a second, or for a few minutes, and we go back to our world. And we are saying, without a toy, with nothing to absorb you, take you over, you understand what I'm saying - you know how a child behaves when you give him a toy? Or haven't you watched? The toy becomes to the child extraordinary, he's amused, and he plays with it. For a few minutes or a few hours or a few days the toy takes him over. Right? You understand my English? So the mountain has taken you over. Right? And, can you, without being absorbed by something great, be free of yourself? You understand my question? You don't understand this - you're too clever, that's what's the matter with all of you - too much learning. You're not simple enough - if you are very simple, not in clothes -deeply simple in yourself, you will discover something extraordinary. But you are covered over with a lot of knowledge, experience, and so on. So let's move. We are going to talk over together many things. We've talked over beauty for a while, not the poet's beauty, not the poem, the literature, the essays, the beautiful novel, or the good thrillers. Probably you don't read thrillers - do you - oh, you are too holy! So let's look at ourselves. We have created the world. You, the speaker, his forefathers, past thousand years of generations and time. Right? So, what is all this about? You understand? You understand what I'm saying? What is all this noise about? Killing each other, maiming each other, dividing my god, your god. Why is this society so ugly, so brutal, so cruel? Yes sir, why? Who has created this monstrous world? I'm not being pessimistic or optimistic, but look at the world, the thing that's going on outside of you. Poor countries buying armaments. Right? Your country buying armaments, and immense poverty, competition. Right? Who has created all this? Will you say god has created it? He must be a messy god. So who has created this society? You are always talking about society. Who created it, who put it together? Lord you people! Haven't you put it together? Not you only, your fathers, your great grandfathers, the past generations of millions of years, they have created this society, through their avarice, envy. Right? Through their competition, they have divided the world: economically, socially, religiously. Right? Face the facts sir, for god's sake. You and the speaker, and his fathers, and fathers, back, back, back, and your fathers, as far as you can go, we have put this society together, we are responsible for it. Right, or do you deny this fact? So we are responsible for this. Not gods, not some external factors, but we each one of us has created this society. You belong to this group and I belong to another group. You worship one god and I worship another god, you follow one guru, however silly and stupid they are, and I follow another. So we have divided society. Right? And we have divided not only socially, but also religiously. Right? Just look at it sir, for god's sake look at it. Geographically we have divided the world - Europe, America, Russia - we have divided the culture - Western culture and Eastern culture; we have made governments - labour, democratic, republican, communist. You understand sir, how our brain works - divides, divides, divides. Haven't you noticed this factor? And so, out of division comes conflict. Right? You have divided yourself as the good and the bad - I won't go into all that, it's too complex. For god's sake -you probably have never thought about any of these things. So, we have created this society, so you are this society. You understand? You are the society. So, unless you change radically, you'll never change the society. Communists have tried this, forcing, compelling secretly, viciously, destroying millions, to force man, his psychology, his being, to submit to various forms of compulsion. You must know all of this. This is history - daily newspaper. And so where there is division, there must be conflict. Right? That's law. And we like conflict, apparently, so we live in perpetual conflict. So we must go back and find out, what is the cause of this, all this. Is it desire, is it fear, is it pleasure, is this the avoidance of all pain, and therefore guilt? You understand all this, or am I going too fast? So let's begin to find out for ourselves what is desire. Right? That's the basis. Desire to have power, desire to achieve, desire to become somebody. Right? We are not against desire, we are not trying to suppress desire, or transcend desire, like the monks, like most of you, transcend, control, suppress, we're not going into that. We must, together, understand, what is desire. Right? What is desire? Are you working as hard as the speaker? Or you just say, well let's listen to that man, it's a nice day, a nice morning. So, we're asking, what is desire? How does it come about, what is it's source? Not how to suppress it, how to control it, or let it go, but the root of it. Aren't you interested in that? Aren't you interested to find out what is the root of it? Do you want me to explain? As usual. Sir, explanation is not the thing. Right? The word is not this - I may call it a microphone, and you will call it microphone, but the word is not that, therefore explanation is not that, the description is not that. When one describes a marvellous tree, the description is not the tree. So we are going to use words to convey to each other, but the words, the description, is not the fact. Right? So, at least one learns that. The word is not the thing. Right? My wife, the word wife, is not the wife. If we can understand that simple fact, you will treat her better. So what is desire, and why does it dominate us? What is it's place, what is its nature? You understand? What is desire? You understand? All the monks all the world over, suppress desire, or wanting to transcend desire, or desire is identified with certain images, certain symbols, certain rituals. Right? You're all there some of you, the monks and all the rest of it. What is desire? Have you ever asked that question? Or do you yield to desire, whatever the consequences? So we're going together, together, not wait for me, for the speaker to explain, but together we're going to look at it. Right? We live by sensation, don't we? There's a train going across the bridge: you hear it, you identify it. So we live by sensation - better food, better house, better wife. So sensation is life. Right? Part of life - sex is part of life, it's a sensation, pleasure. And we have a great many pleasures. Right? Pleasure of possession, and so on and so on. To us, sensation becomes extraordinarily important, part of life, right, part of our existence. If you have no sensation, you are dead. Right? All your nerves go, your brain withers, and so on. So we live by sensation. Right? Sensation being touch, feel, sensation; like putting a nail suddenly into your finger, that's sensation, pain you call it. When you see something ugly, how can you smile at it, that is part of sensation; tears, laughter, having humour, it's all part of sensation. Then what happens, we have this sensation. You see a beautiful house - which is it you want, more power, more money? The more; the more is part of sensation. Right? Right sirs? You're so hesitant, aren't you? So, what happens when you have a sensation? When you see something very beautiful, a car, a woman, a man, or a lovely house, what happens? You see the house, there is a sensation, then what takes place? Go slowly, you'll understand it. You see that lovely house, clean, with beautiful gardens, flowers, everything kept beautifully, that's sensation when you see it. Then what takes place? Sensation is natural. Right? It is inevitable, it is part of our life. Then I explain, you'll agree and say quite right, quite right, and go home, do the same thing. So then, what takes place? You have seen that house, seen the garden, seen the beauty of the landscape, and how the house is built, with style, grace and sense of dignity, then thought comes along, makes an image of that sensation, and then says, I wish I had that house. You follow this - no, you don't. You see that house there - there is sensation. Just wait a minute, wait a minute before I go further. Sensation, then thought comes along and creates out of that sensation the desire to have that house. Right? Or something else. You see some politician riding in a big car, or cyclist ahead, and all the rest of that business, and you say, by Jove, I wish I had some power. That is, you have seen that, sensation, then thought comes and says, I wish I had that power. Right? At that moment desire is born. When sensation is given a shape, a form, then at that second desire is born. Do you understand what I have said? May I repeat it again, do you want it repeated? Sir, you put a pin in my thumb, that's a sensation of pain. And, every record, every response is part of sensation. Right? Intellectual, theoretical, philosophical - sensation. We live by sensation. Be clear on that. We live by sensations, that is, senses responding, good taste, bad taste, it's bitter, it is sweet, and so on, we live by sensation. And when we see something which we have not got, like a house, like a car, like some, you know, that sensation becomes dominant when thought gives it an image. You understand? When thought comes along and says, I wish I had it. At that moment desire is born. Right? Don't look at me as if I am some crazy nut. You understand the subtlety of it? The depth of it. When thought gives a form, a structure, an image, to sensation, at that second desire is born. Now the question is, can sensation not be caught by thought, which is also another sensation. You understand sir? Sensation, and give it time for thought to give it shape, that is an interval between sensation and thought giving it a contour. Right? Do it. See what is implied in it when you do it, not say yes, yes I agree with you. Q: If you put a pin in my hand there is pain. K: There is pain, then what thought does - no, wait sir, look at it, go slow, don't rush. I have pain in the thumb, in the finger, then, I want that pain to be stopped, so I go to a doctor or whatever I do. Right? Right sir? I want that pain stopped. Are we asleep? Yes. Sir, pain is another form of sensation. Right? Then thought says I must stop it. You don't say, let me look at that pain. Right? Haven't you done all this? If I'm ill, which I've sometimes been, I say, all right, wait until you feel - see what it means, what pain means, what pleasure means. Don't you do that, or is it immediately doctor? What? Immediately a doctor. My god. Q: The whole response of pain - the pain and a doctor. K: Yes sir, give an interval. You understand? Not say but I must go to a doctor, too quick. Give it an interval, a time, and you learn a lot from that. So, I'm saying, when there is time in between sensation and thought, an interval, a long interval, or short interval, you'll understand the nature of desire. In that there is no suppression, no transcending. If you have a car, and when you drive it, not knowing the mechanism of it, the internal combustion of it, the machinery of it, you are always a little nervous that something might go wrong. Right? But if you know, if you have dismantled that car, as the speaker has done, totally dismantled it, don't get nervous, or something or other, when you dismantle it, and put it together very carefully, know all the parts, then you're master of the machinery, of that machine. Right? Then you're not afraid, you can put it together again. You understand? So, if you understand the nature of desire, the way desire begins, then you're not afraid of it, then you know what to do with it. Q: You give yourself a pain... K: I've explained sir. Sir let's move to something else. There's something which you and I, the speaker, should talk over together. We have lived for thousands of years, and we have never understood the nature of fear. Right? What is the source of fear, what is the cause of fear. Right? We apparently have never ended fear, biological fear as well as, certainly much more, psychological fears, inward fears: fear of death, right, fear of not having, not possessing, not being, fear of loneliness. Right? We have so many fears. Don't you know it? Don't you know your fears? No? You're a rummy crowd - not know your own fears. Out of these fears you create gods. Right? Out of these fears you create rituals, spiritual hierarchies, gurus, all the temples of the world are out of fear. Right? And, fear of your wife, fear of your governor, fear of your policeman, you know, we've got thousands of fears. And we're asking, what is fear, not your particular form of fear. You understand, you understand sir? Not my fear and your fear, what is fear? If you understand the machinery of a car, you're not afraid of the car. Right? You know how to run it, when it should be serviced, and looked after and all the rest. So if you know, realize, understand, be with the nature of it, the cause of it, the root of it, then you will transcend fear, the fear is gone. Right? We're going to do that this morning. We're asking what is fear, what's the cause of it, not how to end it, not how to transcend it, control it, depress it, and run away from it, as you're doing. So what is the cause the source of fear? Think it out, sir, go into it for a minute. Take your fear, your particular fear, or fears, what is the root of it? Security, desire for more, it's all, you understand? So, if you haven't found it, you will ask somebody, like the speaker, what is the cause of it? Will you listen, to it, listen, actually listen, as you listen to your boss, who might throw you out, give you less money, you listen? You listen with all your heart, with your fears, with your apprehension, you might lose your job, therefore please tell me what to do. Will you so listen to what he is saying? Or you say, yes. So I'll explain. May I? But you know how to do your job in an office. Right? So I'll explain. It's rather complex, and you like complexity. But, the explanation is not the thing. Right? The word fear is not fear. Right? The word is not the thing. What is fear? What is the cause of it? Is the word fear the cause of fear? You understand? The word fear, does that evoke fear in you? Are you sure? So fear is a fact. And the word is not the fact. Right? Don't look puzzled, sir, it's simple, very simple. The word tree, is not the tree. So the explanation is not a means to end fear. So we have to examine then, what is time, because time is fear -tomorrow something might happen, my house might fall down; my wife might turn to another man; my husband has gone off and I'm in sorrow - fear. You understand? Fear of the past, fear of the future, fear of the present, anything might happen. So the past, the future and the present is caught in the wheel of time. Right? Right? Yesterday, today, and tomorrow is time. Right? I have been that, I won't be that, but I am not that now. Right? I have been, I shall be, but I am not. So the whole process is a movement in time. Movement means time. From here to there is a movement, and that means time to come from this place to that place needs time. So movement is time. All movement is time. Right? By the clock -come nearer sir, if you're in the sun sir, you too come and sit, there's plenty of room for god's sake. Don't be nervous, come close - so the past, the present, and the future is a movement which we call time. I was young once, now I'm ninety - this is time. So what is time? What is time? It took you time to come from Benares to here. It'll take time for you to get back. So, there is time by the clock. Right? There is time to cover a distance, there is time as the past, the present, and the future. Right sir? All this is time. Right? The past shapes the present, right, circumstances and so on. Please, this is very difficult, don't agree or disagree, just listen, find out. The past is now operating. Right? And the future is shaped by the present, modified, circumstances have changed, certain incidents happen, so the past is modified, changed, altered. Right? And the future is what happens now. Right? So all time, the past, the present, and the future, is contained now. Ah, this puzzles you -go slowly, I'm not in a hurry. Sir, this applies to life, not just to theory. You are a Brahmin, oh sorry, you don't like Brahmins here. You were something yesterday, an incident takes place today that changes, modifies slightly, alters the past circumstances, the past, and the future is what you are now. Right? Modified. That's clear, isn't it? Or is this still a puzzle? That is, the past, the present, and the future are now. If there is no mutation now - you understand the word mutation - if there is no mutation now, you'll be exactly the same as you've been before. Right? I think I'm Indian, with all the circus behind it, and I'll be Indian again tomorrow. Right? That's logical, and that being Indian divides me from Muslim. Right? And I'll quarrel with him, not only for his land, increase of population and all the rest of it. So tomorrow is now. I can't go on explaining it to you. You understand this? So what you do now matters, much more than what you will do tomorrow. Right? So what are you going to do? If tomorrow is now, that's a fact, it's not my theory or your theory, it's a fact: I am greedy now, if I don't do anything about it now, I'll be greedy tomorrow, that's all. Can I stop being greedy today? Right? Will you? No, of course not. So you will be what you have been. This is the pattern of humanity, for millions of years. You don't mind killing, be honest, you don't mind killing. You subscribe to it, you want your country to be strong. Right? Don't be ashamed of it, this is a fact. And so you gather armaments, you may not actually do it, you do it through tax, through buying a stamp, you support. Right? So, if you don't stop being an Indian now, you'll be an Indian tomorrow. So what are you going to do now? Oh you people, stop, you stop there. I'm asking what will you do now? Q: Stop being an Indian. K: Will you? You know what the implications are - not the passport, not the paper. Not to be associated with any country, not to be associated with any group, with any religion - they're all phoney anyhow. Is that possible, will you do it? Not you sir. Will you see the importance that if there is no mutation now, today, you'll be exactly the same tomorrow. This is not optimistic or pessimistic, this is a fact. For two and a half million years we have killed people. Right? As Buddhists, as Hindus, as Christians, perhaps Christians have killed more than anybody else. You're not Christian so I can easily say that! I've tackled this question in front of the Christians. So you understand the seriousness of it - don't play with it. If there is no radical mutation now, now, I'll be the same tomorrow. So time is a factor in fear. Right? I'm afraid of what might happen tomorrow. I am afraid of not passing an exam. Right? A girl or a boy, wanting to pass some examination in order to have a better job, more money, a better chance, better this, says I'm going to work, work, work to pass that exam. I might not - fear comes in, and so on. Fear is a common factor of all mankind - it's not you, of all mankind. So can that fear, you understand, fear, not one branch of it, can the root of fear be totally demolished? That is, to have no fear of any kind. The speaker says it is eminently possible. That it can be done so radically. Either you kill the speaker, or you worship him, which are both the same. You understand? And that's what you're doing now. So, that's one of the factors of our life. And we have lived with fear for a million years, or more and we still carry on. So the speaker is saying, fear can be totally ended. Don't say it illumines one, and all that nonsense. You can end it if you put your brain, your heart into it, completely, not partially. And then you will see for yourself what immense beauty there is in it. A sense of utter freedom. Not freedom of a country, or some government, but the sense of enormity of freedom, greatness of freedom. Right? Will you do it, today, now? From today, seeing the cause of fear, end it. It is time. Time means thought, time is a movement, isn't it? We all agree, and thought is also a movement. Don't be dazzled by all this, it's very simple. Time is movement, thought is movement, so time is thought, and thought is time. Thought is based on knowledge, memory, experience, and so on, and time is also very limited in our life. As long as there is fear, biologically, physically, psychologically, it destroys us. So, if one may ask, after listening to this fact, not theory, what are you going to do? Time is the factor of fear and thought, so if you don't change now, you won't ever change, ever again. This constant postponement. Right. RAJGHAT 3RD PUBLIC TALK 22ND NOVEMBER 1985 This is the last talk. We're going to talk over together a great many things today, a great many things, and as we said, we're not the only speaker. You and the speaker are partaking, sharing together, the whole problem, or issues that we are going to discuss, talk over. As we said you are participating in it, not just listening casually or something that you must listen to, but together we are going to talk over many things. We've dealt, in the last two talks and discussion, with many things: fear and all the travails of man, the problems that we have, those problems which we never seem to resolve. We went into that yesterday. The problems exist because our minds are filled with problems because there is no freedom to look at any problem. This is not the time to go into it now - we went into it very carefully. And also we went into the question of thought: why thought has made this life so utterly impossible. Thought has brought about a great deal of conflict. Wars for two and a half million years - that means practically every year we kill each other, in the name of god, in the name of patriotism - my country against your country, my religion against your religion and so on. War after war, not perhaps in Benares - here you're fairly off the real world, but we're facing wars every year. And we also talked about the nature of thought, why thought divides man, or brings them together to do a certain project, like going to the moon. To build that rocket, probably you had to have over 300,000 people, everybody doing their little job perfectly. Either we get together in a crisis like war, which is born of hatred, or we come together for some national issue, or we come together when there is a great crisis like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, natural incidents and so on. Apart from that, we never get together. Now this morning, if I may most respectfully suggest, that we all get together, as we are all sitting together, and gather energy so that we can think out very clearly the various issues we are going to raise. Together. That means you are actively thinking, actively hearing, to activate our brains which are rather sluggish - forgive me for pointing this out - sluggish, slow, monotonous, repetitive and so on. So we together this morning, keeping our brains alert -I'm not insulting you - I'd like to insult you, but I won't. That's only a joke! To keep not only the physical organism active, because that gives energy: different forms of walking, swimming, and different forms of yogic asanas and so on; but also to have a very clear, active brain, not a specialized brain as a philosopher, as a scientist, as a physicist and so on. These specialized brains become very narrow. I know some friends who are scientists here - I hope I'm not insulting them. Or the doctors, or the philosophers who talk about talks - see the joke? - talk about talks, either Plato, Aristotle, various Greek philosophers or your own. Philosophy actually according to the dictionary means 'the love of truth', 'the love of life', 'the love of wisdom'. Not theories - adding more and more theory, or quoting somebody and explaining what they have quoted. All the universities, colleges, schools all over are conditioning the brain. I don't know if you've ever gone into the question of learning, what it is to learn. Now we're going to find out together, what it means to learn. We generally take learning to mean memorizing: go to school, you memorize how to read and write, you memorize mathematics, you memorise.. and so on. All through school, college, university, if you're lucky to reach that level or unlucky to reach that level, you memorize. And that memory can be used actively: to earn a livelihood, to gain power, possessions, prestige, patronage and so on. So what is learning? Is there another kind of learning? We know the ordinary kind of learning - school, college, university, or learning a skill, become an excellent carpenter or a plumber or an excellent cook. There are several friends of mine here who are very good cooks and also very good philosophers, and psychiatrists and physicists - they are all there - here - not in that direction. So, what is learning? Is there another kind of learning that is not merely memorizing? Have you ever thought about it? When you're memorizing your brain is filled with memories. That's simple. So memory multiplies, keeps you somewhat alert, you learn more, more, more. We're asking you - is there another kind of learning, not merely memorizing? As we said, we are together, our brains are active. So the speaker is asking you: is there a different kind of learning altogether? Q: (Inaudible) K: Don't define it yet, think, look at the question. Is there a different sort of learning which is not memorizing? This is a very important question because the brain records everything, every incident, every kind of memory. When you're hurt, it is recorded, but you never enquire who is hurt. We'll come to that presently. So the brain is recording. See the importance of that. It has to record, otherwise you and I wouldn't be here. So the brain is constantly recording, discarding. Now is it necessary to record? You understand my question? You record an incident in a car; an accident. It is instantly recorded, because you have pain, or you are hurt, or your car is hurt. So the brain has the capacity, the energy, not only to record, but also to safeguard itself. Right? We're asking: is it necessary to record everything? Or only record that which is necessary - and nothing else? Have you put this question to yourself, including the psychiatrists, including the physicists and so on. Have you ever considered this question? The brain records for its own security otherwise you and I wouldn't be sitting here. We recorded how long it would take to come here and so on. We're asking, it is necessary to record certain things, and totally unnecessary where the psyche is involved. You understand my question, sir? Is it necessary when you are flattered to record it? Or when you are insulted? Is it necessary to record those things? Because the recording builds up the psyche. Are we talking over together or are you just saying, yes it sounds rather good? This is a very serious question. Because the psyche which is made up of all elements, characteristics, ethos, is contained there in the brain which we call consciousness. In that consciousness, all the activities of memories, fears, etc., are contained. So we're asking again, don't go to sleep, please: is it necessary to build up the psyche? 'Psyche' means the self. The self being all the memories, activities of thought, imagination, fascination, fear, pleasure, sorrow, pain. It's recorded. Which makes up the whole psyche, the 'I', the persona. Is it necessary to record so as to build up the self? You don't think about any of these things. So I'm asking you: have you ever thought about it, looked at it, or investigated as you would into various philosophical matters, gone into this question of recording? If I didn't record how to drive a car - the speaker has driven a car 120 miles an hour two years ago - if there was no recording, I couldn't drive. So it is necessary to record certain things and totally unnecessary to record other things. See the beauty of it - so that the brain is not always conditioned in memory; so the brain becomes totally free, but active. So that's the first question: learning is not to record. We'd like to discuss this with a psychiatrist if one is here. We have discussed this matter in New York. They were fascinated with the idea of not recording. So the brain cells themselves mutate. Do you understand? Oh, no. Our brains are built up of cells and so on - I'm not a professional - and in the brain cells are the memories. And we live on those memories; the past, all the remembrances that one has, and the older you grow, the more you go back further and further till you die. And it's rather an important question to find out, to learn to find out: whether the brain needs to record everything. Not forgetting. The difference between forgetting and not recording are two different things. So when you are hurt - not physically but psychologically, inwardly, what is hurt? You say: I am hurt. Haven't you heard that phrase. Is it new to you? We are all hurt. From childhood till you grow old and die, you are being hurt all the time, till you say, 'I can't stand any more hurt. I've been hurt so much, I'm frightened'. I build a wall around myself, isolate myself, all the consequences of being hurt. Who is being hurt? Answer this, sir. You are all hurt. Every human being on the earth is somewhat hurt, from childhood; the scolding, the slapping, all that goes on with children. All of us have had hurts. Now, who is hurt? Q: It is me. K: Don't just answer me, please. Think it out. You say, 'It's me'. What is 'me'? You just say, me, 'I' - any word that comes. But you don't investigate who is the 'I'. Who is the persona, who is the personality, who are you? A name, a degree, if you are fortunate, or unfortunate enough to have one, a job, a house or a flat - measly little flats like living in boxes - and a title after a name - ISA, MSc., or MAD. You all like MAD. So the image that you have built about yourself, and the images you have built about things which is yourself, so when you say you are hurt, the images are hurt, about yourself. Are you clear? No, please, don't be clear about the explanation. But all those images are you. You're a physicist, you're a doctor, you are a philosopher, you are an MP, or an engineer. Have you ever realized that they always introduce someone as, 'He's the engineer, he's the cuckoo.' Always introduced by his profession. Do you understand, sir, it's all crazy. So the self, the psyche, the persona is the image which you have built about yourself, and the image you have built about your wife and she builds an image about you and these images have relationships. Right? See what is happening. The images have relationships, not the person, but the images. Right? And you live on that. So you never know your wife or your husband or your friend. Or you don't care to know, but you have the image. So the question is: can you live without a single image about the prime minister, about persons like him and me? Can you live without a single image? See the implications of it, the beauty, the freedom of it. There are so many things to talk about. May we go on? Not just say, 'Yes, go on', but you are partaking in it, you are actively thinking together. Right? Not just say, `Yes, let me listen to what you have to say'. Which means you don't really listen at all. So we ought to talk about together - why all this effort in life? Why do we make such an immense effort to do anything? You understand my question? Why make effort? I've been through all this - don't answer quickly. I've been put through the grind by scientists, philosophers, by various forms of religious cuckoos, every kind of person, so don't say anything quickly. Why do we make such an effort in life? You make tremendous effort to meditate - we'll come to that presently - we make a tremendous effort to live, to fight, to battle against one another, opinion against opinion, judgement against judgement, I agree with you, I disagrees with him. Why all this effort? For what? For money? I am asking you sir, keep awake. For money? For your family? Please listen carefully. For your affection, that you must be loved by somebody? Why all this effort? When you ask that question, then you must ask, what is love? That stumps you. Is love effort? I must love you, therefore I am going to make an effort about it. Is love an effort? Then you have to enquire, what is love? Do you mind enquiring into this? Do you know what love is? Apparently you don't, because you are all very silent. What is love? Can there be love when there is ambition? Sir, please, this is serious. This is not for somebody who doesn't care, who just wants his own way. Is love ambition, is it greed, is it self-centredness? Is it ambitious achievement? Is love the opposite of hate? You know, sirs, we are always fighting from the beginning of time. You see this in various caves in France, Greek mythology, the good fighting the bad, all through life. Right? Do you understand what I am saying? The good fighting the bad. You see it in paintings as symbolized the good, as symbolized the Devil. Or as in Greek mythology or other mythologies it is the white bull against the black bull or the good fighting the evil in different shapes and symbols and so on. We still do that, the good fighting the bad. Don't you do it? Is the good separate from the bad? The good guy and the bad guy. Is the good born out of the bad? Don't look suddenly grave, sir - it's all a game to you. If the good is related to the bad, then it's not good. If the good is born of the bad, comes out of the bad, then it's not good. That is simple, isn't it? But if the bad is totally divorced from the good, no relationship between the good and the bad, if there is no relationship with each other, then there is only the bad and the good. Totally divorced from each other, therefore they can't fight. So then we have to enquire, what is the good? Are you interested in all this? Therefore, you have to ask, can love contain hate? Or hate have nothing to do with love? Therefore there is no relationship between the two, therefore they can't fight each other. You understand - this is an important question for you to understand, to delve into, to go into, because you are always saying, I have not been good today, but I will be good tomorrow. Or, I have been angry today, but I will not be angry tomorrow. This is the relative relationship between the good and the bad. So love has nothing whatsoever to do with jealousy. Love has nothing whatsoever to do with hate. Where there is hate, pleasure, anxiety and so on, love cannot exist. Yes, sir. And the speaker questions whether you love anybody at all. And what is love? How does it come about? Don't you ask that question? Do you really ask that question, or am I asking it for you? Q: The question is with us. K: What question? Q: Whether we love. K: Yes. Whether you love. Can love exist where there is sorrow? Careful, sir, don't answer me. Most of us are in sorrow of some kind or another. Failing an exam, failing to be successful in business, or in politics, or in your relationship with your wife or in your relationship with somebody upstairs. You understand -upstairs - which might be your guru or some other imaginative figure. So when you can't succeed, when there is no success in you, you are depressed, you are sorrowful. Or you are sorrowful because you live in a small village and you don't know how to read and write - thank god - and you don't know how to drive a car, or you don't have a hot bath or you wear one dirty cloth. The speaker has been through all that. You're all fairly well-to-do and so on. So he suffers. The man in position, high up the ladder - nobody pulls down the ladder but he is high up. He suffers too, because there are a few more steps to go up. So everyone on this earth, everyone from the richest to the poorest, from the most powerful man to the least powerful, they all suffer. Every woman on earth suffers. Men have pleasure, woman suffer. So suffering is not yours, because everyone around you suffers. It's not my suffering - it's suffering. I wonder if you understand that? My son dies and I get terribly upset. I weep and I say, I've lost my son, and that becomes a perpetual problem. I weep every time I see a little boy or a little girl. And I go through the pain of loneliness, sorrow, all the rest of it. Do we ever consider, sorrow is not mine, it's everybody's, which doesn't minimize sorrow - it's there. And can that sorrow end? As long as I am suffering because I've lost my wife, or I'm not as great as I thought I was, or I've got pain in my joints, or something or other, I'm always suffering. I'm asking, can that sorrow end? If there is sorrow, there is no love. Please realize that. If I suffer, suffer, suffer, it's part of self-pity, part of my concern, it is only I am suffering, nobody else, my sorrow is different from your sorrow, my god is different from your god, my guru is stronger that your guru. It becomes a joke. So is there an end to sorrow? Or mankind must go through this horror all his life? Yes, sir. The speaker says it can end, otherwise there is no love. If I'm shedding tears all the time because I've lost my son and he's the only son I've had, to me the son represents me, my continuity, my property, however small it is, I had hoped he would become prime minister, have a better house, more learned, get more money. You know? We all think the same way, don't play around with this. So I suffer. And you come along and tell me, `Every human being on earth suffers, it's not your suffering old boy, we all share it.' I refuse to accept such a statement because I love my sorrow. I'm happy in my sorrow, and I want to be separate in my sorrow. So it requires a great deal of enquiry, persuasion, talking about it, to say, 'Look, have a little bit of it, but it isn't quite yours.' That means no self-pity and that means you are really sharing the burden of sorrow for all the rest of mankind. Go on, sir. You don't know anything about it. Think about it, look at it. You are part of humanity, you are not separate from humanity. You may have a better position, better degrees, better money, profession, you are part of mankind, your consciousness is part of mankind. That is, your consciousness contains all the things you have thought about, imagined, fears, and so on. Consciousness is that and that is the consciousness of mankind. Mankind has fear, sorrow, pain, anxiety, shedding tears, uncertain, confused, every human being on earth. And you are like the rest. So you are not -listen carefully - so you are not individuals. I know my body is different from your body. You are a woman, I'm a man. But we are in the world as one unit. That relationship when you feel you are the rest of mankind then something totally different takes place. Not just words, imagination, but the feeling of it, the enormity of it. So we've talked a bit about that. Then we ought to talk about death. Sorry, on a lovely morning, sitting under the trees, quiet, no trains crossing the bridge, we are very quiet on a lovely morning. And to talk about death may seem morbid, may seem ugly, may seem something not to be talked about. They are writing books in America on how to die happily, doctors are doing it, telling their patients how to die happily. Now together we're going to examine it, share it. Not just you listen and I talk. That's childish. So, what is death? Why are we so frightened of it? Why do we keep death for ten years later, or twenty years later or a hundred years later? Why living and death? Then you have not only to ask: what is death and what is dying but also what is living? You understand what I am saying? What is living? What is your living? Office from nine to five, as a clerk or a governor or whatever it is, as a factory worker? Nine to five for the rest of your life, except when you retire, a ga-ga old man. And your life is breeding children, sex, pleasure, pain, sorrow, anxiety, problem after problem, illness, doctors, caesarean operation, pain giving birth. This is our life. Do you deny that? No. And you call this living. Don't look at me as if I'm a strange man. This is what we call living. And you support it, you enjoy it. You want more and more of this. Right? So this is what you call living. And you put death far away, as many years away as possible. And in that distance of time you are building up that same pattern, over and over - your children, your grandchildren live in that same pattern which you call living. Don't deceive yourself saying that nature struggles so we must struggle. Monkeys struggle so we are monkeys. There is a very famous author I used to know and he wrote, 'Perhaps we should be behind the bars, not the monkeys'. So this is what we call living. And I say this to myself - we are sharing this together - why no bring that which you call death into living, together. You can't take anything with you, even your guru, even all that he has said, all that you have tried to live up to. You can't take it with you. Your furniture and your wife, your children, all the silver you have collected, all the money in the treasury, none of it can you take with you. That's one thing certain: death, and you can't take anything with you. Except - we won't go into that. So as you cannot take anything with you, why not let the two meet? You understand what I'm saying? Why not death come today? Not suicide - I'm not talking about that. After all, I'm attached to my wife or to my furniture (more like it) or to my... Sorry to laugh, you are a crazy crowd. So I say to myself or you say to yourself, I'm attached to something or other: to my shirt or to my robe, or to some guru or to some fantasy, some symbol, to which I'm attached. Death comes along in ten years and says, 'Old boy, you can't take that with you.' So why not get totally free of attachment now? Which is death. You understand what I'm talking about? Totally detached, today, not tomorrow. Tomorrow is death. So, why can't I be free of my attachment, now? Therefore living and dying are together all the time. I wonder if you see the beauty of it. Not ten years later or forty years later. That gives you an immense sense of freedom - to your profession, to everything about you. So living and dying are together, always. It's not something to be frightened about. So if the brain can do that, then there is a totally different quality to the brain. It has no hooks. It has no sense of the past, the future, the present. It is living. I can't go into it now because it is really an endless way of living; every day is a new day; every morning is a son of the morning. And also we should talk about religion. Don't mistake what I'm talking about - what K is talking about. The future is now. Therefore there is no 'I shall be born next life'. That is an idea to which you're attached, it gives you great comfort, bla bla, all the rest of it. But if you believe in reincarnation then you must act right now, act rightly now, because next life you are going to pay for it or be rewarded. If you believe in reincarnation, as most of you probably do - it's a very comforting idea but meaningless, because if you act rightly now, righteousness has no reward. Righteousness is righteousness, not what you are going to get out of it. That's a merchandise attitude, mechanical attitude. I won't go into all that as there is no time because we have some other things to talk about. What is religion? Sir, this is one of the most important questions about life. There are temples, all over India, mosques all over the world, churches all over the world, and their priests beautifully decorated, beautifully garbed, all medallions and so on. This has been one of the problems from the most ancient of times. The priest and the king. The priest wanted power. The king also wanted power. But the priest was stronger because he wrote, read, and the king had to obey him because he was the wiser man - or he was supposed to be. And gradually the king said, 'This is not good enough' and so there was a war between the priest and the king. This is historical - you'll find it in different ways. And the king won. And said, 'You keep to your place.' But the priest also wanted to have power. You know all this, don't you? It's happening right now. And the popes have three crowns - spiritual, terrestrial and so on. So there was a conflict in parliament between the priest and - I won't go into all that - so the priest was put out. So they had to be religions. Religions has been built. I won't go into the word 'religion'. It had a complicated meaning at one time, but now it has become a symbol, a ritual, a superstition. In this country, it's a superstition, a ritual, worshipping a symbol. This is repeated all over the world, over and over again - a mixture of these three. And is that religion? Parsi, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist - is that religion? Or is religion something entirely different? I'm sorry to upset all of you. But is that religion? Going to the temple three times a day, the Muslim calling five times a day and the Buddhist and so on. Is that religion or is religion something entirely different? It has nothing whatsoever to do with rituals or symbols. Because all this has been invented by man, because the priests wanted power, position, so he put on new hats, new clothes, and grew long beards or shaved their heads. So all that is called religion. To an ordinary thoughtful man, fairly intelligent, he will say, that is rubbish total rubbish. If he discards all that, really discards, totally puts away being a Hindu, with all his superstitions, symbols, worship, prayers, all that stuff. And the Christian does, and the Buddhist, then what is religion? He is a serious man, not just a wordmonger - not warmonger but wordmonger. So what is religion? We're talking over together - the speaker is not laying down the law, no authority, he says, let us talk about it, let's investigate, let's go into it. Our brains are chattering all the time. Never a second when it is quiet. Haven't you noticed it? Chattering, chattering, chattering, or imaging, or perpetually in action. You know that, don't you? There is never a moment of silence. And that silence is also a repetition: 'Ram, Ram' or whatever you repeat. When you repeat, repeat, repeat, your brain becomes very dull. Right, do you agree to this? When you repeat something mechanical and you repeat the word, something or other and gradually the brain through repetition becomes dull and quiet and that quietness is something marvellous to you. Do you understand what I am saying? Are you all asleep? Or are we awake to talk to each other? This repetition either physically, or sexually, constant repeat repeat, makes not only the body, the organism dull but also the brain. And when it becomes dull, you think that's quiet. If you discard all that nonsense - for the speaker it's complete nonsense like going to a circus - for the speaker, not for you. But we're sharing it, talking about it together. I am not persuading you, influencing you to do this or that. So we have to enquire what is meditation, what is silence. Silence allows space. You can't be silent in a tiny space. Right? Space. So we have to go into the question of meditation, space, time and whether there is an end to time. Not, 'Tell me how to meditate.' You understand, sir? We are not telling you how to meditate. Your meditation now is achievement. The meaning of the word 'meditation' is to ponder over - in a dictionary you will find this - to ponder over, think over, weigh, Look at it carefully. Also it means 'measure', 'ma' in Sanskrit. Measure. So meditation as it is now, repetition, making the mind dull, and then saying, 'At last'. Because it is dull, and being dull it becomes quiet. And you think you've achieved some tremendous thing. And you go round repeating this to others. And the poor gullible people say, 'Yes, yes.' So we're going to consider all this now. It is five minutes past ten. Do you want to go on? A: Yes, yes. K: Am I working or are you working? A: Together. K: Are you sure? Meditation as is generally practised is to cultivate this dullness. Right? And therefore gradually make the brain subservient, quiet. And when you feel quiet, you say, 'My God, everything is achieved'. For the speaker that is not meditation at all. Don't ask how to meditate. It is like asking a carpenter how to build a beautiful cabinet. If he is a good carpenter, you don't have to tell him. So we are not asking how to meditate, but we are asking what is meditation? Two different things altogether. Not how, but what is meditation. As is generally practised, it is a series of achievements. Right? And you say 'Buddha is enlightened'. I don't know what that means but that doesn't matter. So, when you compare which is meditation - 'ma' as I said in Sanskrit means to measure. 'I was this today, I'll be better tomorrow'. That is measurement. Measurement has no place in meditation. Measurement has great place from the Greeks onwards; measurement is necessary in all technology - in all technology, whether you build a chair, or the most complicated trajectory to go to the moon. Measurement is necessary. So we are saying, meditation implies total freedom from all comparison and measurement. Now this is difficult. Because meditation is something marvellous if you know what to do - not you, meditation. The meditator is different from meditation. As long as there is a meditator, there is no meditation. You understand all this? Because the meditator is concerned about himself - how he is progressing, what he is doing, 'I hope I will be better tomorrow', anxiety, in meditation there is no meditator. Once you have seen this, sir, for yourself, the beauty, the depth, the subtleties of it. So the practice of meditation is no meditation. Sitting on the banks and looking as you know - making the mind more and more dull, and saying 'Yes, I've spent an hour, marvellous', and you prostrate, touch his feet. By the way, please don't touch my feet. That's most undignified, as a human being. You can hold my hand any amount you like, but not the feet of somebody, it's inhuman, undignified. So meditation is something that cannot be practised, as you practise a violin, a piano. In singing you practise; that means that you want to reach a certain level of perfection. And in meditation there is no level, nothing to be achieved. Therefore it is not a conscious, deliberate meditation. I wonder if you understand all this. There is a meditation that is totally undirected, totally if I can use the word - unconscious. It is not a deliberate process. Let's leave that. We can spend a lot of time on this. An hour, more - a whole day. The whole of your life to find this out. And also we have to talk about space. Because meditation is that. Space - we have no space in the brain - do you realize that Sir? No space. Space there is between two struggles, between two thoughts but still within the sphere of thought and so on. What is space? Does space contain time or time includes all space. We talked about time. May I just briefly go over it, though it's nearly quarter past ten. Don't blame me afterwards for keeping you here. Time, I will put it very briefly - if you don't understand it, I am sorry - time is yesterday, all the memories, all the incidents, all the quarrels, the uncertainties and the long, two and a half million years of memory, all that is yesterday. And the present is the environment, what is happening now. All the past is circumstances, by time, by events, now. And the future is this modified, this reshaped in time as the future. So the past modifying itself in the present becomes the future, right? So all time, the future, the present and the past is contained in the now. This is a tremendously revealing thing, because it demands action, not just agreement, say I'm going home, go on with your life. The whole of time, the future, the present and the past is now. So action changes now, not tomorrow, I will be good tomorrow. So all action, all thought, all time is now. We went into that, I won't go into it further. So, what is space? Don't imagine it, because then it's just thought imagining space is this, the heaven. I must tell a very good joke. May I? Q: Please. K: This happens to be hell and the devil is there in the distance -I am not pointing at anybody. The devil is far in a corner, you know Christian devil with two horns and tail, and there are two people talking together. One says to the other: It's very hot here, hell, very hot. The other fellow says: Yes, very hot, but dry heat. No joke? Funny people. All right sir. I've got lots of jokes. I can't bring any more. So what is space? If space contains time then it's not space. Then it's circumscribed, limited. Right? So can the brain be free of time? Sir, this is such an important, immense question. You don't seem to gather it. If life, all life is contained in the now - you see what it means? All humanity is you - all humanity. Because you suffer, he suffers, anxiety, pain and so on. His consciousness is you. Your consciousness, your being is him. You understand -there is no you and me which limits space. So, is there an end to time - not to the clock which you wind and it stops - to the whole movement of time. Time is movement. A series of incidents, movement. Thought is a series of movements, so time is thought. So we're asking - if space contains time, yesterday, tomorrow and all the rest of it - it's not space. So, is there an end to time which means is there an end to thought, so which means is there an end to knowledge, so is there an end to experience which is total freedom. And this is meditation. Not sitting on the banks and... that is all too childish. This is real, demands great deal of not only the intellect, but an insight - don't use that word again, please - an insight into all this. The physicist, the artist, the painter, the poet have limited insight, limited, small. We are talking about a timeless insight. So this is meditation. RAJGHAT 1ST PUBLIC QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING 21TH NOVEMBER, 1985 This is supposed to be a conversation between us. You are going to question me, question the speaker, we are going to have a discussion, a deliberation, take counsel together, weigh together, consider together, to balance things together, it is not one person answering your questions, or queries, but rather together we are going to have a conversation. Probably you are not used to this, to really talk to somebody openly, frankly. Probably you never do it, even to your wives or husbands, or somebody closely related, you never talk openly, frankly. You put on a mask, pretend. If we could put aside all that this morning and consider what questions we have, what we would like to talk over together, what you are most concerned with, not just some absurd stuff, but rather what you really want to find out. So we are going to have a deliberation. That word means to weigh together, balance, take counsel with each other, to consider with each other. Not the speaker considers and then you agree or disagree, that's rather childish. So can we, this morning, talk over together as though we were really true friends. Not that I am sitting on a platform because a platform indicates somebody high up, it is there for convenience so we can see each other. So before we begin to discuss, how do you approach a question? Do you understand what I am asking? How do you regard a question, a problem, how do you weigh the problem, how do you come very close to the problem? So we are going to consider together whatever the question is, however silly the question is, or how absurd the question is, we are going to talk about it together. Is that clear? Right? You can't expect the speaker to answer your questions, because in the question itself may be the answer. You understand? Not you put a question to me and then I answer it. That's rather meaningless. But how do you regard a question, what is your approach to the question, how do you consider, weigh, take account of the question? Because in the question itself may be the answer; not question and then wait for an answer. So whatever question we are going to discuss this morning, let us examine the question first, not wait for an answer. You understand, sirs? Have you understood this? Or it is too mysterious? I've got a question, a question, I am not going to answer it. Why do you separate life, the living, daily living from your ideas of the spiritual? Why do you divide the two? May I put that question? Right? Why do we separate so-called religious life - all the monks and the robes and all that - and the daily monotonous lonely life; why do we separate them? Please, answer my question. Q: Because it gives us energy. K: So we want energy, is that it? Q: It needs a different kind of energy. The spiritual life and the ordinary, mundane life involve two different kinds of energy. K: That is, two different kinds of energy, one for the so-called spiritual, religious life, and the other, the mundane life, another kind of energy. Now I am not going to answer the question, let's find out if what you are saying is a fact. Right? Is it a fact? You state this, you say, well those people who are religious put on those funny robes, they need quite a different kind of energy than a man who travels around, makes money and all the rest of it, or the poor man in the village. Why do you divide the two? Energy is energy, whether it be the electric energy, or the motor driven energy, or the solar energy, or the energy of the river in flood - energy. You have the energy to come here, energy to go for a walk, energy to do all kinds of funny things you do. So why do you divide energy? Is that, the man with the beard and strange clothes, has he more energy? Or he is trying to concentrate his energy on a particular issue? You understand, sirs? Energy is energy. Hydroelectric energy, piston energy in a car, the dynamo energy, the solar energy, right? They are all energy, aren't they? Q: There are various kinds of energy: one is the energy of thought, which can be stilled; there is another, the energy of insight, which does not get stilled, and there is yet another, the energy of mind, which brings about compassion and other things. K: Sir, would you mind making your statement short? Q: There are various kinds of energy: one is the energy of thought which can be stilled, there is another energy of insight, which does not get stilled, and another energy of mind which brings about compassion. K: Certainly not. We are talking over, I am not laying down the law. Q: The relationship of the three aspects of energy: of thought, of insight and of mind. K: You answer it! Why not? You have a perfect right to answer him. Q: Just because we want to be comfortable, we divide energy into various compartments. I do not think there can be many types of energy. Energy can be only one. K: I should have thought so myself. You see how we divide everything. We divide spiritual energy, mental energy, the energy of insight, the energy of thought. Q: It complicates it. K: I know, it complicates it, doesn't it. Why not be very simple about it. The energy of the body, the energy of sex, the energy of thought, it's all energy, it's one thing, only we divide it. Why? Find out, madam, why do we? Q: We are conditioned to divide it. K: Yes. Now, sir, why are you conditioned? Why do you accept this division? You understand sir? India, Pakistan, Russia, America, why do you divide all this? Tell me. Q: It is a reality. K: Of course it is a reality, you go to war. Why do you make obvious statements, sir? Q: There is a difference between the truth and reality. K: All right. What do you call reality? Q: What we see. K: Therefore you say reality is right in front of you, what you see visually, optically. Is the tree a reality? Q: Yes, sir. K: All right. Is what you think a reality? Q: Sometimes we have to. K: Is your wife a reality? Q: Yes, sir. K: What do you mean by a wife? Q: He says in real life... K: No, no, I am asking him a question. What do you mean by my wife? Q: There is a psychological factor. K: What do you mean psychological? Sir, we haven't finished that question. Q: There is a psychological attitude that I have towards my wife, and there is the reality of that wife who has her own psychology. K: Sir, are you saying, sir, if I may put it in my own words - you will allow me to put it in my own words? The image of your wife, the image which you have built up is different from the wife - is that it? Q: Could be. K: What do you mean 'could be'? Q: It happens sometimes that the image coincides with the reality of my wife is. K: Have you looked at your wife? Have you seen her, enquired into her ambitions, her pain, and anxiety, bearing the pain of children and all the rest of it? Have you considered what the wife is? Or you may have lived with her for ten, or five, or fifty years and built an image about her, haven't you? Right? Right, sir? Q: Not necessarily. K: I do not say necessarily, or unnecessarily. Is it a fact that you have, if you are married, or if you have some friend, you build an image about her, don't you? Not necessarily, but it takes place. Right sir? I am not trying to brow-beat you, sir, but each one has an image about the other. You have an image about me, haven't you? No sir? Otherwise you wouldn't be here. So we create an image about another depending on our temperament, depending on our knowledge, depending on our illusions, depending on our fantasies and so on. We build an image about people. You have an image about the prime minister, you have an image about the person who is speaking to you. So we are asking a much deeper question: can you live a daily life without images? Q: The images that we build up, they are generally in relationship with ourselves. I build up an image around me. K: Yes, you have an image about yourself. Q: And if we can achieve that state about which you have been talking - effacing the centre, the self - then the images would automatically drop. Then one can live without images. K: So when you talk about relationship, what do you mean by that word? Q: By relationship... K: Sir, please just listen quietly for five minutes before you answer, take a little breather. What is your relationship with another? Relationship. You understand the word? Just listen. To be related. I am related to him, he is my father, my brother, my sister, whatever it is, what do you mean by that word relationship? Q: It is.. K: Careful, sir! Don't be so quick. Go slowly, we have plenty of time. You understand the word relationship, to be related, either through blood - he is my father, my brother, you have come out of the same womb, my father and my mother produced us. What do you mean by that word relation? Q: I am not using the word relationship in that sense. K: I am talking in that sense. Q: My care and concern for my friends, for my parents, for my children including hatred - all that is included. K: Do you really care? Or is it just an idea that you should care? Sir, did you understand , if I may politely ask you, what do you mean by the word, the word, to be related? Not what you have given meaning to it, the meaning according to the dictionary, what do you mean by that word relationship? Q: Contact through the actual, not through words or images. K: Sir, I am asking you a question, don't kick it around. I am asking you most respectfully what do you mean by related. I am related to him, what does that mean? Q: I think when I say I am related, I become a part of that. K: Are you a part of your wife? Q: Yes, partially. K: Not total, or partial. I am asking sir, most politely, what do you mean by that word relationship? Q: Sir, being associated with day-to-day life, a network of expectations from each other, duties and obligations. K: You make it so very complex, don't you. If you would kindly listen, I am asking you what do you mean by that word, per se for itself, not what you think it should be. Q: Close touch; getting attached; to have something in common. If I have an image about you, then I have a relationship with you. K: Do I need an interpreter, we are talking in English. I don't know Hindi or any Indian language, I only know several European languages. But the word relation has a great significance. I am asking you, if I may, what do you mean by that word. Q: To have something in common. Q: To have a relationship. K: All right, sir, let him shout. Q: I have an image about you. K: Do you have a relationship with me? In what way? I am asking you seriously, sir, don't throw it aside. Q: When I am looking at you without an image I have relationship with you at that moment. K: You really haven't thought about it. You are just throwing out words. Q: I think we have diverted from the original question. K: I know, I know. I am not so dumb as I look! So, sirs, let's get back, I'll come back to this word, it is a very important word in our life. Why do we divide the spiritual and the mundane? Just listen, sir, please just listen. We divide India against Pakistan, we divide various religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and so on, divide, divide, divide - why? Don't answer, just look at it sir, we are taking counsel together, we are looking at the same problem together. You understand, sir. Why do we divide? Of course there is a division between man and woman, you are tall and I am short, or I am tall and you are thin, whatever it is, but that's natural: you are tall or brown, or white, or pink, or yellow, I happen to be black, all right. But that's according to the sun, according to heritage and so on, genetic issues - I won't go into all that. Why do we divide? Q: Because we have different ideas and different feelings and different interests, and we want to stick to them. K: Why do you want to stick to them? Q: Because we are selfish and we have self-interest. K: No, don't reduce everything to selfishness. Why do we divide, I am asking. Q: There is something most curious. Q: I think we have to divide because when I do not have an image about my wife I am being spiritual, but when she is violent, she is being real, so there is a division between the real and the spiritual. Q: Energy as such is different from scattered energy. When an atom is bombarded by energy, the atom gets scatters, the scattered energy has properties different from that the old energy with which the atom was bombarded. A similar thing happens in the psychological field. K: Which means what? Q: Different kinds of energy manifested in psychological fields are different from each other. K: So who is dividing all this? Who is dividing all these various forms of energy? Q: The mind itself first divides into real perfection, then the outer perfection. K: Is that your experience? Or are you quoting somebody? Q: Half-half. K: Could we please be serious for a while and face these facts: why have we divided the world around us - Pakistan and India, Europe and India, America and Russia and so on, who has done all this division? Q: I think it is the ego, it is thought. K: Are you guessing? Are you guessing? Why don't we look at the fact first? We have different ideologies, different beliefs, one section of the world believes in Jesus, the other section believes in Allah, some other section believes in the Buddha, other sections believe in something else - who has done all these divisions? Q: It is we, mankind. K: That means you. Q: Yes, sir. K: You have divided the world, why? Q: We have inherited it. K: Sir, just listen, please listen. Why have you divided? Q: Fear and security. K: Are you sure, what you are saying? What do you say? Q: We divide ourselves because we derive pleasure from this division. K: If you are also being killed by another party, is that also pleasure? You don't.. Q: Because I want identity. K: You want identity. Identity with what? Q: (Inaudible) K: No, I am asking you, identity with what? No, no, I am asking you a question, lady, you want to be identified, don't you, to have identity. With what? With the earth? Q: Everyone wants to prove that I am better than the other one. K: Quite right. Now, look, would you listen for a few minutes, sir? The world has divided itself, right? Europe, America, Russia, India, Muslims, that's a fact. Who has divided it? Don't make casual remarks, it is not an entertainment. I am not here to be entertained. So if you will kindly listen, I am asking you a question. Who has divided the world into this? Has not man done this? You have done it because you say, I am a Hindu, or a Muslim, or Sikh, or some other sect. Who has done all this? Man, hasn't he? Man. Man wants security, so he says, I belong to Buddhism, that gives me identity, that gives me strength, that gives me a sense of a place where I can stay. So what is the basis of this? You understand my question, sir? Why do we do this? Is it for security? Because if I lived as a Hindu in a world of Muslims, they would kick me around. Right? Or if I lived as a Protestant in Rome I would find it rather difficult, because Rome is the centre of Catholicism. Right? So I am saying to you sir, if I may politely request you, who has done all this? This colossal mess. You understand? You? Right? You have done, he has done it, and she has done it. And what will you do about it? Just talk about it? So we will stop. That's all. You don't want to act, you say, let's carry on. Q: Sir, you have no intention to help us, but when we are here we find that you help us. How does that happen? K: Too bad! I don't want to help anybody. It's wrong to help another, except surgically, food and so on. The speaker is not your leader. Right? He has said it a thousand times all over Europe, America and here. Q: You may not help us, but you make us understand things. K: No, we are having a conversation together, in that conversation we begin to see things clearly for ourselves. Therefore nobody is helping you, it is a conversation. Q: Yes, sir. K: Sir, sir, did you hear what I said? Yes, sir, but did you hear what I said? That the speaker is not here to help you in any way. Right sir? He is not your guru, you are not his follower, all the speaker says is an abomination. Right sir? Q: Why is there so much cruelty in nature that one being has to eat another in order to survive? K: Is that your question, sir? A tiger lives on small things, so the big things eat little things. And you are asking why is nature cruel. Q: Why is there so much of cruelty in nature? K: First of all why is there so much cruelty in human beings? Not in nature, of course, that is natural, perhaps. Why are you so cruel? Not say, there is cruelty in nature, why are human beings cruel? Q: I want to get rid of my pain and sorrow, so if anybody hurts me I also react, or respond in a similar manner. K: Sir, have you ever considered that all human beings suffer? All human beings in the world. Right? Q: I suffer. K: You are a human being, aren't you? So I am saying all human beings suffer whether they live in Russia, America, China, India, Pakistan, wherever, all human beings suffer. Now how do you solve that suffering? Q: I am interested in my own suffering. K: What are you doing about it? Q: I have come here to be enlightened by you. K: What shall we do together, sir? What shall we do together, together, not I help you or you help me, what shall we do together to get rid of sorrow? Q: I don't know. K: Don't you really know? Q: No. K: Are you sure? Q: Yes, sir. K: Be careful answering, sir, this is a very serious question: are you sure you don't know how to be free of fear and sorrow? Q: Yes, sir. K: You don't know. Q: I don't know how to get rid of my sorrow. K: Just a minute, just a minute. Remain in that state. Would you listen sirs? He asked a very serious question, he said, I really don't know how to be free of sorrow. Right? I don't know. When you say, I don't know, is it that you are waiting to know? You understand my question, sir? I don't know but I may be expecting some kind of answer, therefore when I am expecting I step out of 'not knowing'. Q: I don't understand. Q: He says when we are expecting an answer we have moved away from the field of 'not knowing'. And he says, stay with not knowing. Q: What does that mean? K: I will tell you what it means. I am not helping, I am not helping you. Sir, that is a very serious matter when you say you are not helping me because we have been helped for so many thousands of years. When you say, I don't know, what does that mean? I don't know what Mars is - you know Mars, the star - so do I work on that to find out? Q: No, I don't. K: Sir, I don't know what Mars is. He is an astro-physicist, I go to him to find out what Mars is. For god's sake, sir. Q: But I am not interested in Mars. K: I know you are not interested in Mars, sir, nor am I, but I am taking that as an example. I don't know what Mars is, and I go to an astro-physicist and I say, tell me what Mars is, and he tells me Mars is various combinations of gas and all the rest of it. And I say, that is not Mars, your description of Mars is different from Mars. Right? So I ask you, most respectfully, when you say, I don't know, what do you mean by that? I don't know. I am not waiting for an answer, which may be crooked, which may be false, which may be illusory, therefore I am not expecting. Are you in that state? I don't know. Q: We are stunned when we remain in that state. K: Remain in that state. I don't know how to swim the Ganga. Q: I can't do anything about it. K: You can't. When you don't know what is the cause of suffering, how can it be ended when you don't know? Right sir? So remain in that state and find out. Sir, just a minute, sir. When you put a question, you expect an answer, don't you? Be honest, be simple. So you expect an answer from a book, from another person, or from some philosopher. Right? Somebody to tell you the answer. Right? Would you put a question and listen to the question? You understand what I am saying? I put to you a question, I have forgotten what it was. Let me think of another. Why has Karshi become so important? You understand that question? Why has Karshi, which is this place, this land, why do you consider it important? Answer it, sirs. Q: Because of its ancient temples. K: In Jerusalem, in Israel, they have found a building 8,000 years old, would you all worship that? Q: No. K: Why? Q: Because all the gurus, the priests have lived here. K: So have they there, in Israel, priests and things - 8,000 years old, why don't you go there and worship it? Q: There are people there to worship. K: You are not thinking. So when you put a question would you wait for the question to reveal itself? You understand? I am asking you, most politely, I put a question, I know if I can understand the question properly I will find the answer. So the answer may be in the question. You are bored, are you, sir? Q: Not at all. K: Would you experiment with what I am saying? Will you really do it? That is, if I put a question to you, don't try to find an answer but find out if you have understood the question, the depth of the question, or the superficiality of the question, the meaninglessness of the question. Right? Would you look at the question first, take time. Or you are ready to answer. So I am suggesting, sir, if you put a question to the speaker, the speaker says, the question itself has vitality, energy, not the answer, because the answer is in the question. Right? Find out. Sir, did you hear what I have said? Have you understood what I said, sir? Don't be nervous. If you say, go to hell, it's all right. I am asking you a very simple fact: you ask me a question, and I say to you, in that question is the answer. The question contains the answer. Q: (Inaudible) K: Would you listen, sir, please. You can ask your question afterwards. Will you do that? Q: Yes. K: Don't say meekly, yes. It is very important. Q: An intelligent mind can put the right question. I feel I am not intelligent at all so how can I ask the right question? K: You can't! But you can find out why you are not intelligent. I can find out why I am not intelligent. He is intelligent, I am not, why? Is intelligence dependent on comparison? You understand sir? Sir, did you listen to my question? Q: Sir, many times we find an answer to our question, but we require somebody else's approval of that answer. K: So the answer is not important but approval of another is important? Q: A correct answer is important therefore approval of the correct answer is required. K: By whom? By your friends who are equally unintelligent? By whom do you want the approval? Public opinion? The Governor? The Prime Minister? Or the high priests? From whom are you wanting approval? Sir, you don't think at all, you just repeat, repeat, repeat. Q: I want to ask another question. I remain with the statement that I don't know, but it is tiresome. K: Why is it tiresome? Q: I am trying to find out. K: Don't try to find out. Here is a question: why has man, you, why have we made such a mess of the world? A mess of our lives, a mess of other people's lives? You understand, sir, it is a mess, it is a confusion, why? Q: Because.. K: Madam, would you kindly listen for a minute? I am talking to that gentleman. Why have human beings throughout the world made such a mess of the world? You understand, sir? Why? Don't -listen to the question, go into the question. You understand? Have you held ever in your hand a marvellous jewel? A priceless jewel. You look at it, don't you? You look at it, see the intricacies of it, how beautifully it is put together, what extraordinary skill has gone into it, the silversmith must have marvellous hands. That jewel is very important. Right? You look at it, you cherish it, you put it away and you occasionally look at it, don't you? Q: I want to hold it. K: You have it in your hand, sir. For god's sake. I am saying you look at it. If you have a marvellous picture, painted by somebody or other, and you look at it. It's in your room, it's yours, you don't just hang it there you look at it. In the same way, if I ask you a question, look at it, listen to the question. But we are so quick to answer it, so impatient. So I am suggesting, most respectfully, look at it, take time, weigh it, see the beauty of the question - or it may be an utterly unimportant question. Do it, sir. Then you will find the question itself has tremendous energy. Q: Why do we not change? K: Why, sir? Why don't you change? Q: I don't know, but I don't change. K: Are you satisfied where you are? Q: No. K: Then change. Q: I would like to ask a question. There is a teacher in a class in which some boy is naughty, in order to put it right he has to punish him. Should he go through that exercise of punishment, which means violence? K: What do you mean by the word 'violence'? Q: Well... K: Don't be quick, sir. What do you mean by violence? Hitting each other? Would you call that violence? I hit you, you hit me back. That is a form of violence, isn't it? A grown-up person hits his child, that is a form of violence. Killing another is a form of violence. Harassing another - harassing, you know what that word means - that's a form of violence. Trying to imitate another, imitate, is a form of violence. Right? Would you agree to that? Imitate, conform to the pattern of another, that's violence. Right, sir? Are you listening to what I am saying? So I am asking you, psychological violence and physical violence. So how will you stop it? You, don't say the teacher, you, how will you stop it? Have you listened to what I have said? Sir, please have the courtesy, politeness, to listen to somebody else's question. Don't always say, keep everybody out and just your own problems. Q: Why is there a variety in nature? K: Why are you bothered about nature? Why are you concerned with nature? Q: I am seeing the variety. K: Don't you see the variety here? Q: I see it, even outside. K: What are you going to do about it? Q: I want to know why. K: Sir, I request you kindly to study yourself first. You understand? To know yourself first. But you know about everything outside you, but you know nothing about yourself. Sir, this has been an old question, sir. The Greeks have put it in their own way, the Egyptians, the ancient Hindus have said too: Know yourself first. Right? Will you start with that? Q: Sir, I am always putting this question to myself, why am I in the bondage of physical pain. I keep on asking this question but I don't get any answer. K: You may be going to the wrong doctor. Sir, I know people who go from doctor to doctor to doctor, they have plenty of money, so they trot around from one doctor to another; and do you do that? Or is it psychological pain? Q: Physical and psychological. K: Which is important? Q: I beg your pardon? K: Which is the greater pain? Q: When the physical pain is extreme surely it is the physical pain. K: Yes, I know. But I am asking you sir, politely, to what you pain do you give importance? Q: I find myself... K: You haven't answered my question. To what do you give importance? Q: At the moment when I am suffering, I give that importance. K: You haven't answered my question, sir, have you? I am asking you, which is more important the physiological pain or the physical pain? Q: What do you mean by psychological pain? K: I will tell you. Pain of fear, pain of loneliness, pain of anxiety, pain of sorrow and so on, all that is the psyche. Now to what do you give importance? To the psyche or to physical pain? Q: The psyche. K: Do you really? Q: Yes, sir. K: Are you being obstinate, sir? So if you give importance to the psychological pain who is going to be the doctor? Q: I. K: What do you mean 'I'? You are the pain. You are not different from 'I'. The 'I' is made up of pain, anxiety, boredom, loneliness, fear, pleasure - all that is the 'I'. Sir, there is a question here, sorry it is all rather messy. You don't listen to anybody do you, why bother to listen to me. Q: If I have understood that there is urgency to be aware all the time, why is that I remain in that state only for a very short while during the day? K: Because you don't understand what it means to be aware. Sir, here is a question. QUESTION: It's a fact that the various centres of the KFI constantly and continuously stress and spread that they are the centre of K's teaching. So now when we have the Buddha's teaching, Christ's teaching and Krishnamurti's teaching, are these so-called teachings of K going to meet the same fate as those of the Buddha and Christ? You have understood the question? Are you bored with the question? I don't mind. I am bored with it myself. Sir, K has thought a great deal about the word 'teaching'. We thought of using the word 'work' - ironworks, big building works, hydroelectric works, you understand? So I thought work is very, very common. So we though we might use the words 'teaching, but it is not important the word. Right? Your question is, will the teachings of the Buddha, which nobody knows, I have asked them, the original teachings of the Buddha nobody knows; and Christ may exist or may not have existed. It is a tremendous problem whether he existed at all. We have discussed with great scholars about that - I won't go into that. And will K's teaching also disappear like the rest? You have understood the question? Right? Right sir? Q: I have not said it. K: Of course you have not said it; somebody has written it, therefore it is interesting. The questioner says - probably you also think - that when K goes, as he must go, what will happen to the teaching? Will it go like the Buddha's teaching, which is corrupt, you know what is happening, will the same fate await your teaching? You have understood? It depends upon you. Right? Not upon somebody else, it depends upon you: how you live it, how you think about it, what it means to you. If it means nothing except words then it will go the way of the rest. Right? If it means something very deep to you, to you personally, then it won't be corrupted. Right? You understand sir? It won't be corrupted. So it's up to you, not up to the centres and information centres and all the rest of that business. It depends upon you, whether you live the teachings, or not. Q: Has the truth its own power? K: It has, if you let it alone. Q: Sir, that question was put by me. May I clarify the question -what I mean by that? K: Go ahead, what is the question? Q: Now, my question is this: you have so many times repeated for 70 years that you do not convince anybody of anything, you are not a teacher, you do not teach anything to anybody. Now I say that the centres of the KFI - whose president you are, while you are still living - they invite the public, 'Come here, here are the teachings of Krishnamurti; and you study here what he has to say. He has discovered so many things. Please come here and try to study.' You say you work as a mirror, when I use the mirror, does the mirror help me? It does help me, the light is helping me. Are these things not your teachings? So there is no harm if you say you are a teacher because you are teaching something, you are clearing something. You yourself say that you work as a mirror; anything which works as a mirror is definitely helping me. K: Yes, sir. Q: That is my question. K: So, what is the question? Sir, in all his talks K has emphasized the fact that he is merely a mirror. Right sir? That he is merely a mirror reflecting what your life is. Right? And he has also said you can break up that mirror if you have seen yourself very clearly. The mirror is not important. But what has happened throughout the world? They all want to be on the band-wagon. You know what that word means? All want to share in the circus. So I say, please don't bother, just listen to the teaching; if somebody wants to form a little centre in Gujarat, let him do it, but he has no power to say that he represents K, that is a follower. He can say anything he likes, he is free to do what he likes. We are not imposing on anybody that they should do this, do that. Say, for instance, he starts, buys videos and all the rest of it and collects a few friends in his house. That is his affair. We are not saying, 'Don't do this, do that'. If anybody did that, I would say, 'Sorry, do not do it'. But they like to do it, they like to be interpreters, gurus in their little way. You know the game you all play. So if you want to do that, you are perfectly welcome to do it. But the Foundation -unfortunately I happen to belong to it, or fortunately - the Foundation says you are free to do what you like. You understand, sir? But books, read books, burn books of K, do anything you like. It is your hands. If you want to live it, live it; if you don't want to live it, it is all right, it is your business. Is this clear once and for all? That the Foundation has no authority over your life, to tell you what to do, or what not to do. Or to say, this is the centre from which all radiation goes, like a radio station or a television station, we are not that. All that we are saying is, here is something, it may be original, may be not original, here is something for you to look at. Take time to read it, take time to understand it. If you are not interested just throw it away. It doesn't matter. You have wasted 25 rupees, that's all. But if you like to live that way, live it; if you don't, just drop it. Don't make a lot of noise around it. You understand what I am saying, sir? Don't make a circus about it, a song and dance about it, that I have understood and you haven't, I'll tell you all about it. You understand what I say sir? So it is time to stop. Now, if I may ask, what have you got out of this mornings' talk, discussion? Nothing or something? Q: I am looking at the question" I understood the question but the thinking stops. K: Good! I am just asking, sir, what have you all got out of it, what has flowered in you after this morning? Like a flower blooms overnight, what has bloomed in you? What has come out of you? Q: That we should have the habit of thinking together. K: Did you really think together? Q: Yes, I did. K: Together, you and I - or you were talking to yourself? Q: I was talking to myself also. K: Sir, you don't have to tell the speaker anything. I am just asking, politely, if I may: we have met for over an hour, talked together, said many things according to our opinions, at the end of the journey of this morning, where are you? Where we started? Where we ended? Or is there a new flowering? That's all sir. I am not going to say, oh, you haven't, or you have. That would be impudence on my part. Right sir. May we get up presently? Foreword By David Bohm Chapter 1 - 1st Conversation with David Bohm Chapter 2 - 2nd Conversation with David Bohm - Longer, Unedited Versions - Chapter 1 Chapter 2 THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY FOREWORD BY DAVID BOHM The two dialogues which appear in this book took place three years after a series of thirteen similar dialogues between Krishnamurti and myself, which appeared in the book "The Ending of Time." [Harper & Row, 1985.] Therefore they were inevitably profoundly affected by what had been done in these earlier dialogues. In a certain sense, therefore, the two books deal with closely related questions. Of course, "The Ending of Time" can, because of its much greater length, go into these questions in a more thorough and extensive way. Nevertheless, the present book stands by itself; it approaches the problems of human life in its own way, and provides important additional insights into these problems. Moreover, I feel that it is an easier book to follow, and may therefore usefully serve as an introduction to "The Ending of Time." The starting point for our discussions was the question: "What is the future of humanity?" This question is by now of vital concern to everyone, because modern science and technology are clearly seen to have opened up immense possibilities of destruction. It soon became clear as we talked together that the ultimate origin of this situation is in the generally confused mentality of mankind, which has not changed basically in this respect throughout the whole of recorded history and probably for much longer than this. Evidently, it was essential to inquire deeply into the root of this difficulty if there is ever to be a possibility that humanity will be diverted from its present very dangerous course. These dialogues constitute a serious inquiry into this problem, and as they proceeded, many of the basic points of Krishnamurti's teachings emerged. Thus, the question of the future of humanity seems, at first sight, to imply that a solution must involve time in a fundamental way. Yet, as Krishnamurti points out, psychological time, or "becoming," is the very source of the destructive current that is putting the future of humanity at risk. To question time in this way, however, is to question the adequacy of knowledge and thought, as a means of dealing with this problem. But if knowledge and thought are not adequate, what is it that is actually required? This led in turn to the question of whether mind is limited by the brain of mankind, with all the knowledge that it has accumulated over the ages. This knowledge, which now conditions us deeply, has produced what is, in effect, an irrational and self-destructive programme in which the brain seems to be helplessly caught up. If mind is limited by such a state of the brain, then the future of humanity must be very grim indeed. Krishnamurti does not, however, regard these limitations as inevitable. Rather, he emphasizes that mind is essentially free of the distorting bias that is inherent in the conditioning of the brain, and that, through insight arising in proper undirected attention without a centre, it can change the cells of the brain and remove the destructive conditioning. If this is so, then it is crucially important that there be this kind of attention, and that we give to this question the same intensity of energy that we generally give to other activities of life that are really of vital interest to us. At this point, it is worth remarking that modern research into the brain and nervous system actually gives considerable support to Krishnamurti's statement that insight may change the brain cells. Thus, for example, it is now well known that there are important substances in the body, the hormones and the neurotransmitters, that fundamentally affect the entire functioning of the brain and nervous system. These substances respond, from moment to moment, to what a person knows, to what he thinks, and to what all this means to him. it is by now fairly well established that in this way the brain cells and their functioning are profoundly affected by knowledge and thought, especially when these give rise to strong feelings and passions. it is thus quite plausible that insight, which must arise in a state of great mental energy and passion, could change the brain cells in an even more profound way. What has been said here necessarily gives only a brief outline of what is in the dialogues, and cannot show the full scope and depth of the inquiry that takes place within them into the nature of human consciousness and of the problems that have arisen in this consciousness. Indeed, I would say that the result has been a concise and easily readable book, which contains the essential spirit of the whole of Krishnamurti's teachings, and throws an important further light on them. David Bohm. THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY CHAPTER 1 1ST CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 11TH JUNE 1983 DAVID BOHM: There are several problems that we might discuss. One is, when a person is just starting out he has to make a living. There are very few opportunities now, and most of these are in jobs which are extremely limited. J. KRISHNAMURTI: And there is unemployment throughout the world. I wonder what he would do, knowing that the future is grim, very depressing, dangerous, and so uncertain. Where would you begin? DB: Well I think one would have to stand back from all the particular problems of one's own needs and the needs of people around one. JK: Are you saying one should really forget oneself for the time being? DB: Yes. JK: Even if I did forget myself, when I look at this world in which I am going to live, and have some kind of career or profession, what would I do? This is a problem that I think most young people are facing. DB: Yes. That's clear. Well, have you something that you would suggest? JK: You see I don't think in terms of evolution. DB: I understand that. That's the point I was expecting we would discuss. JK: I don't think there is psychological evolution at all. DB: We have discussed this quite often so I think I understand to some extent what you mean. But I think that people who are new to this are not going to understand. JK: Yes, we will discuss this whole question, if you will. Why are we concerned about the future? Surely the whole future is now. DB: In a sense the whole future is now, but we have to make that clear. It goes very much against the whole way of thinking, of the tradition of mankind.... JK: I know. Mankind thinks in terms of evolution, continuance, and so on. DB: Perhaps we could approach it in another way? That is, evolution seems in the present era to be the most natural way to think. So I would like to ask you what objections you have to thinking in terms of evolution. Could I explain a point? This word evolution has many meanings. JK: Of course. We are talking psychologically. DB: Now the first point is, let's dispose of it physically. JK: An acorn will grow into an oak. DB: Also the species have evolved: for example, from the plants to the animals and to man. JK: Yes, we have taken a million years to be what we are. DB: You have no question that that has happened? JK: No, that has happened. DB: It may continue to happen. JK: That is evolution. DB: That is a valid process. JK: Of course. DB: It takes place in time. And, therefore, in that region the past, present, and future are important. JK: Yes obviously. I don't know a certain language, I need time to learn it. DB: Also it takes time to improve the brain. You see, if the brain started out small, and then it got bigger and bigger, that took a million years. JK: And it becomes much more complex, and so on. All that needs time. All that is movement in space and time. DB: Yes. So you will admit physical time and neurophysiological time. JK: Neurophysiological time, absolutely. Of course. Any sane man would. DB: Now most people also admit psychological time, what they call mental time. JK: Yes, that is what we are talking about. Whether there is such a thing as psychological tomorrow, psychological evolution. DB: Or yesterday. Now at first sight I am afraid this will sound strange. It seems I can remember yesterday. And there is tomorrow; I can anticipate. And it has happened many times, you know days have succeeded each other. So I do have the experience of time, from yesterday to today to tomorrow. JK: Of course. That is simple enough. DB: Now what is it that you are denying? JK: I deny that I will be something, become better. DB: I can change... but now there are two ways of looking at that. One approach is, will I intentionally become better because I am trying? Or is evolution a natural, inevitable process, in which we are being swept along as if in a current, and perhaps becoming better, or worse, or finding that something is happening to us. JK: Psychologically. DB: Psychologically, which takes time, which may not be the result of my trying to become better. It may or may not be. Some people think one way, some another. But are you denying also that there is a kind of natural psychological evolution as there was a natural biological evolution? JK: I am denying that, yes. DB: Now why do you deny it? JK: Because, first of all, what is the psyche, the me, the ego, and so on? What is it? DB: The word psyche has many meanings. It may mean the mind, for example. Do you mean that the ego is the same thing? JK: The ego. I am talking of the ego, the me. DB: Yes. Now some people think there will be an evolution in which the me is transcended, that it will rise to a higher level. JK: Yes, will the transition need time? DB: A transcendence, a transition. JK: Yes. That is my whole question. DB: So there are two questions: one is, will the me ever improve? And the other is, even if we suppose we want to get beyond the me, can that be done in time? JK: That cannot be done in time. DB: Now we have to make it clear why not. JK: Yes. I will. We will go into it. What is the me? If the psyche has such different meanings, the me is the whole movement which thought has brought about. DB: Why do you say that? JK: The me is the consciousness, my consciousness: the me is my name, form, and all the experiences, remembrances, and so on that I have had. The whole structure of the me is put together by thought. DB: That again would be something which some people might find it hard to accept. JK: Of course. We are discussing it. DB: Now the first experience, the first feeling I have about the me is that it is there independently and that the me is thinking. JK: Is the me independent of my thinking? DB: Well my own first feeling is that the me is there independent of my thinking. And that it is the me that is thinking, you see. JK: Yes. DB: Just as I am here, and I could move; I could move my arm, I could think, or I could move my head. Now is that an illusion? JK: No. DB: Why? JK: Because when I move my arm there is the intention to grasp something, to take something, which is first the movement of thought. That makes the arm move, and so on. My contention is -and I am ready to accept it as false or true - that thought is the basis of all this. DB: Yes. Your contention is that the whole sense of the me and what it is doing is coming out of thought. Now what you mean by thought is not merely intellectual? JK: No, of course not. Thought is the movement of experience, knowledge, and memory. It is this whole movement. DB: It sounds to me as if you mean the consciousness as a whole. JK: As a whole, that's right. DB: And you are saying that that movement is the me? JK: The whole content of that consciousness is the me. That me is not different from my consciousness. DB: Yes. I think one could say that I am my consciousness, for if I am not conscious I am not here. JK: Of course. DB: Now is consciousness nothing but what you have just described, which includes thought, feeling, intention?.. JK: ...intention, aspirations... DB: ...memories... JK: ...memories, beliefs, dogmas, the rituals that are performed. The whole, like the computer that has been programmed. DB: Yes. Now that certainly is in consciousness. Everybody would agree, but many people would feel that there is more to it than that; that consciousness may go beyond that. JK: Let's go into it. The content of our consciousness makes up the consciousness. DB: Yes, I think that requires some understanding. The ordinary use of the word content is quite different. If you say that the content of a glass is water, the glass is one thing and the water is another. JK: Consciousness is made up of all that it has remembered: beliefs, dogmas, rituals, fears, pleasures, sorrow. DB: Yes. Now if all that were absent, would there be no consciousness? JK: Not as we know it. DB: But there would still be a kind of consciousness? JK: A totally different kind. But consciousness, as we know it, is all that. DB: As we generally know it. JK: Yes. And that is the result of multiple activities of thought. Thought has put all this together, which is my consciousness - the reactions, the responses, the memories - extraordinary, complex intricacies and subtleties. All that makes up consciousness. DB: As we know it. JK: But does that consciousness have a future? DB: Yes. Does it have a past? JK: Of course. Remembrance. DB: Remembrance, yes. Why do you say it has no future then? JK: If it has a future it will be exactly the same kind of thing, moving. The same activities, the same thoughts, modified, but the pattern will be repeated over and over again. DB: Are you saying that thought can only repeat? JK: Yes. DB: But there is a feeling, for example, that thought can develop new ideas. JK: But thought is limited because knowledge is limited. DB: Well, yes, that might require some discussion. JK: Yes, we must discuss it. DB: Why do you say knowledge is always limited? JK: Because you, as a scientist, are experimenting, adding, searching. And after you some other person will add more. So knowledge, which is born of experience, is limited. DB: But some people have said it isn't. They would hope to obtain perfect, or absolute, knowledge of the laws of nature. JK: The laws of nature are not the laws of human beings. DB: Well, do you want to restrict the discussion then to knowledge about the human being? JK: Of course, that's all we can talk about. DB: Even there, it is a question of whether that knowledge of nature is possible too. JK: Yes. We are talking about the future of humanity. DB: So are we saying that man cannot obtain unlimited knowledge of the psyche? JK: That's right. DB: There is always more that is unknown. JK: Yes. There is always more and more unknown. So if once we admit that knowledge is limited, then thought is limited. DB: Yes, thought depends on knowledge, and the knowledge does not cover everything. Therefore thought will not be able to handle everything that happens. JK: That's right. But that is what the politicians and all the other people are doing. They think thought can solve every problem. DB: Yes. You can see in the case of politicians that knowledge is very limited, in fact it is almost nonexistent! And, therefore, when you lack adequate knowledge of what you are dealing with, you create confusion. JK: Yes. So then as thought is limited, our consciousness, which has been put together by thought, is limited. DB: Now can you make that clear? That means we can only stay in the same circle. JK: The same circle. DB: You see, one of the ideas might be, if you compare with science, that people might think, although their knowledge is limited they are constantly discovering, JK: What you discover is added to, but is still limited. DB: It is still limited. That's the point. I can keep on; I think one of the ideas behind a scientific approach is that, though knowledge is limited, I can discover and keep up with the actuality. JK: But that is also limited. DB: My discoveries are limited. And there is always the unknown which I have not discovered. JK: That is what I am saying. The unknown, the limitless, cannot be captured by thought. DB: Yes. JK: Because thought in itself is limited, You and I agree to that; we not only agree but it is a fact. DB: Perhaps we could bring it out still more. That is, thought is limited, even though we might intellectually consider that thought is not limited. There is a very strong predisposition, tendency, to feel that way - that thought can do anything. JK: Anything. It can't. See what it has done in the world. DB: Well, I agree that it has done some terrible things, but that doesn't prove that it is always wrong. You see, perhaps you could blame it on the people who have used it wrongly. JK: I know, that is a good old trick! But thought in itself is limited, therefore whatever it does is limited. DB: Yes, and you are saying that it is limited in a very serious way. JK: That's right. Of course in a very, very serious way. DB: Could we bring that out? Say what that way is? JK: That way is what is happening in the world. DB: All right, let's look at that. JK: The totalitarian ideals are the invention of thought. DB: The very word totalitarian means that people wanted to cover the totality, but they couldn't. JK: They couldn't. DB: The thing collapsed. JK: It is collapsing. DB: But then there are those who say they are not totalitarians. JK: But the democrats, the republicans, the idealists, and so on, all their thinking is limited. DB: Yes, and it is limited in a way that is... JK: ...very destructive. DB: Now, could we bring that out? You see I could say, "All right my thought is limited, but it may not be all that serious." Why is this so important? JK: That is fairly simple: because whatever action is born of limited thought must inevitably breed conflict. DB: Yes. JK: Like dividing humanity religiously, or into nationalities, and so on, has created havoc in the world. DB: Yes, now let's connect that with the limitation thought. My knowledge is limited: how does that lead me to divide the world into... JK: Aren't we seeking security? DB: Yes. JK: And we thought there was security in the family, in the tribe, in nationalism. So we thought there was security in division. DB: Yes. Now it has come out. Take the tribe, for example: one may feel insecure, and one then says "With the tribe I am secure." That is a conclusion. And I think I know enough to be sure that is so - but I don't. Other things happen that I don't know, which make that very insecure. Other tribes come along. JK: No, no! The very division creates insecurity. DB: Yes, it helps to create it, but I am trying to say that I don't know enough to know that. I don't see that. JK: But one doesn't see it because one has not thought about anything, not looked at the world, as a whole. DB: Well the thought which aims at security attempts to know everything important. As soon as it knows everything important it says, "This will bring security." But there are a lot of things it still doesn't know, and one is that this very thought itself is divisive. JK: Yes. In itself it is limited. Anything that is limited must inevitably create conflict. If I say I am an individual, that is limited. DB: Yes. JK: I am concerned with myself, that is very limited. DB: We have to make this clear. If I say this is a table which is limited, it creates no conflict. JK: No, there is no conflict there. DB: But when I say, this is "me," that creates conflict. JK: The "me" is a divisive entity. DB: Let us see more clearly why. JK: Because it is separative; it is concerned with itself. The "me" identifying with the greater nation is still divisive. DB: I define myself in the interest of security so that I know what I am as opposed to what you are, and I protect myself. Now this creates a division between me and you. JK: We and they, and so on. DB: Now that comes from my limited thought, because I don't understand that we are really closely related and connected. JK: We are human beings, and all human beings have more or less the same problems. DB: No, I haven't understood that. My knowledge is limited; I think that we can make a distinction and protect ourselves, and me, and not the others. JK: Yes, that's right. DB: But in the very act of doing that I create instability. JK: That's right, insecurity. So if not merely intellectually or verbally but actually, we feel that we are the rest of humanity, then the responsibility becomes immense. DB: Well, how can you do anything about that responsibility? JK: Then I either contribute to the whole mess, or keep out of it. DB: I think we have touched upon an important point. We say the whole of humanity, of mankind, is one, and therefore to create division is... JK: ...dangerous. DB: Yes. Whereas to create division between me and the table is not dangerous, because in some sense we are not one. JK: Of course. DB: That is, only in some very general sense are we at one. Now mankind doesn't realize that it is all one. JK: Why? DB: Let's go into it. This is a crucial point. There are so many divisions, not only between nations and religions but between one person and another. JK: Why is there this division? DB: The feeling is, at least in the modern era, that every human being is an individual. This may not have been so strong in the past. JK: That is what I question. I question altogether whether we are individuals. DB: That is a big question.... JK: Of course. We said just now that the consciousness which is me is similar to the rest of mankind. They all suffer, all have fears, are insecure; they have their own particular gods and rituals, all put together by thought. DB: I think there are two questions here. One is, not everybody feels that he is similar to others. Most people feel they have some unique distinction.... JK: What do you mean by "unique distinction"? Distinction in doing something? DB: There may be many things. For example, one nation may feel that it is able to do certain things better than another; one person has some special things he does, or a particular quality.... JK: Of course. Somebody else is better in this or that. DB: He may take pride in his own special abilities, or advantages. JK: But when you put away that, basically we are the same. DB: You are saying these things which you have just described are... JK: ...superficial. DB: Yes. Now what are the things that are basic? JK: Fear, sorrow, pain, anxiety, loneliness, and all the human travail. DB: But many people might feel that the basic things are the highest achievements of man. For one thing, people may feel proud of man's achievement in science and art and culture and technology. JK: We have achieved in all those directions, certainly. In technology, communication, travel, medicine, surgery, we have advanced tremendously. DB: Yes, it is really remarkable in many ways. JK: There is no question about it. But what have we psychologically achieved? DB: None of this has affected us psychologically. JK: Yes, that's right. DB: And the psychological question is more important than any of the others, because if the psychological question is not cleared up the rest is dangerous. JK: Yes. If we are psychologically limited, then whatever we do will be limited, and the technology will the be used by our limited... DB: ...yes, the master is this limited psyche, and not the rational structure of technology. And in fact technology then becomes a dangerous instrument. So that is one point, that the psyche is at the core of it all, and if the psyche is not in order then the rest is useless. Then, although we are saying there are certain basic disorders in the psyche common to us all, we may all have a potential for something else. The next point is are we all one really? Even though we are all similar that doesn't mean we are all the same, that we are one. JK: We said, in our consciousness basically we all have the same ground on which we stand. DB: Yes, from the fact that the human body is similar, but that doesn't prove they are all the same. JK: Of course not. Your body is different from mine. DB: Yes, we are in different places, we are different entities, and so on. But I think you are saying that the consciousness is not an entity which is individual.... JK: That's right. DB: The body is an entity which has a certain individuality. JK: That all seems so clear. Your body is different from mine. I have a different name from you. DB: Yes, we are different. Though of similar material we are different. We can't exchange because the proteins in one body may not agree with those in the other. Now many people feel that way about the mind, saying that there is a chemistry between people which may agree or disagree. JK: Yes but actually if you go deeper into the question, consciousness is shared by all human beings. DB: Now the feeling is that the consciousness is individual and that it is communicated.... JK: I think that is an illusion, because we are sticking to something that is not true. DB: Do you want to say that there is one consciousness of mankind? JK: It is all one. DB: That is important, because whether it is many or one is a crucial question. JK: Yes. DB: It could be many, which are then communicating and building up the larger unit. Or are you saying that from the very beginning it is all one? JK: From the very beginning it is all one. DB: And the sense of separateness is an illusion? JK: That is what I am saying, over and over again. That seems so logical, sane. The other is insanity. DB: Yes, but people don't feel, at least not immediately, that the notion of separate existence is insane, because one extrapolates from the body to the mind. One says, it is quite sensible to say my body is separate from yours, and inside my body is my mind. Now are you saying that the mind is not inside the body? JK: That is quite a different question. Let's finish with the other first. Each one of us thinks that we are separate individuals psychically.... What we have done in the world is a colossal mess. DB: Well if we think we are separate when we are not separate, then it will clearly be a colossal mess. JK: That is what is happening. Each one thinks he has to do what he wants to do; fulfil himself. So he is struggling in his separateness to achieve peace, to achieve security, and that security and peace are totally denied. DB: The reason they are denied is because there is no separation. You see, if there were really separation it would be a rational thing to try to do. But if we are trying to separate what is inseparable the result will be chaos. JK: That's right. DB: Now that is clear, but I think that it will not be clear to people immediately that the consciousness of mankind is one inseparable whole. JK: Yes, an inseparable whole. DB: Many questions will arise if we consider the notion, but I don't know if we have gone far enough into this yet. One question is, why do we think we are separate? JK: Why do I think I am separate? That is my conditioning. DB: Yes, but how did we ever adopt such a foolish conditioning? JK: From childhood, it is mine, my toy, not yours. DB: But the first feeling I get of "it is mine" is because I feel I am separate. It isn't clear how the mind, which was one, came to this illusion that it is all broken up into many pieces. JK: I think it is again the activity of thought. Thought in its very nature is divisive, fragmentary, and therefore I am a fragment. DB: Thought will create a sense of fragments. You could see, for example, that once we decide to set up a nation we will think we are separate from other nations, and all sorts of consequences follow which make the whole thing seem independently real, We have separate language, a separate flag, and we set up a boundary. And after a while we see so much evidence of separation that we forget how it started, and say it was there always, and that we are merely proceeding from what was there always. JK: Of course. That's why I feel that if once we grasp the nature and structure of thought, how thought operates, what is the source of thought - and therefore it is always limited - if we really see that, then... DB: Now the source of thought is what? Is it memory? JK: Memory. The remembrance of things past, which is knowledge, and knowledge is the outcome of experience, and experience is always limited. DB: Thought also includes, of course, the attempt to go forward, to use logic, to take into account discoveries and insights. JK: As we were saying some time ago, thought is time. DB: All right. Thought is time. That requires more discussion too, because the first response is to say time is there first, and thought is taking place in time. JK: Ah, no. DB: For example, if movement is taking place, if the body is moving, this requires time. JK: To go from here to there needs time. To learn a language needs time. DB: Yes. To grow a plant needs time. JK: To paint a picture takes time. DB: We also say that to think takes time. JK: So we think in terms of time. DB: Yes, the first point that one would tend to look at is whether just as everything takes time, to think takes time? Are you saying something else, which is that thought is time? JK: Thought is time. DB: That is psychologically speaking. JK: Psychologically, of course. DB: Now how do we understand that? JK: How do we understand what? DB: Thought is time. You see it is not obvious. JK: Oh yes. Would you say thought is movement, and time is movement? DB: That's movement. You see, time is a mysterious thing: people have argued about it. We could say that time requires movement. I could understand that we cannot have time without movement. JK: Time is movement. Time is not separate from movement. DB: I don't say it is separate from movement.... You see, if we said time and movement are one... JK: Yes, we are saying that. DB: They cannot be separated? JK: No. DB: That seems fairly clear. Now there is physical movement, which means physical time. JK: Physical time, hot and cold, and also dark and light... DB: ...the seasons... JK: ...sunset and sunrise. All that. DB: Yes. Now then we have the movement of thought. That brings in the question of the nature of thought. Is thought nothing but a movement in the nervous system, in the brain? Would you say that? JK: Yes. DB: Some people have said it includes the movement of the nervous system, but there might be something beyond. JK: What is time, actually? Time is hope. DB: Psychologically. JK: Psychologically. I am talking entirely psychologically for the moment. Hope is time. Becoming is time. Achieving is time. Now take the question of becoming: I want to become something, psychologically. I want to become nonviolent. Take that, for example. That is altogether a fallacy. DB: We understand it is a fallacy, but the reason it is a fallacy is that there is no time of that kind, is that it? JK: No. Human beings are violent. DB: Yes. JK: And they have been talking a great deal - Tolstoy, and in India - of nonviolence. The fact is we are violent. And the nonviolence is not real. But we want to become that. DB: But it is again an extension of the kind of thought that we have with regard to material things. If you see a desert, the desert is real and you say the garden is not real, but in your mind is the garden which will come when you put the water there. So we say we can plan for the future when the desert will become fertile. Now we have to be careful, we say we are violent but we cannot by similar planning become nonviolent. JK: No. DB: Why is that? JK: Why? Because the nonviolent state cannot exist when there is violence. That's just an ideal. DB: One has to make this more clear, in the same sense the fertile state and the desert don't exist together either. I think you are saying that in the case of the mind, when you are violent, nonviolence has no meaning. JK: Violence is the only state. DB: That is all there is. JK: Yes, not the other. DB: The movement towards the other is illusory. JK: So all ideals are illusory, psychologically. The ideal of building a marvellous bridge is not illusory. You can plan it, but to have psychological ideals... DB: Yes, if you are violent and you continue to be violent while you are trying to be nonviolent, it has no meaning. JK: No meaning, and yet that has become such an important thing. The becoming, which is either becoming "what is" or becoming away from "what is." DB: Yes. "What should be." If you say there can be no sense to becoming in the way of self-improvement, that's... JK: Oh, self-improvement is something so utterly ugly. We are saying that the source of all this is a movement of thought as time. When once we have made time, psychologically, all the other ideals, nonviolence, achieving some super state, and so on, become utterly illusory. DB: Yes. When you talk of the movement of thought as time, it seems to me that that time which comes from the movement of thought is illusory. JK: Yes. DB: We sense it as time, but it is not a real kind of time. JK: That is why we asked, what is time? DB: Yes. JK: I need time to go from here to there. I need time if I want to learn engineering. I must study it; it takes time. That same movement is carried over into the psyche. We say, I need time to be good. I need time to be enlightened. DB: Yes, that will always create a conflict. One part of you and another. So that movement in which you say, I need time, also creates a division in the psyche. Between the observer and the observed. JK: Yes, we are saying the observer is the observed. DB: And therefore there is no time, psychologically. JK: That's right. The experiencer, the thinker, is the thought. There is no thinker separate from thought. DB: All that you are saying seems very reasonable, but I think that it goes so strongly against the tradition we are used to that it will be extraordinarily hard for people, generally speaking, really to understand. JK: Most people just want a comfortable way of living: "Let me carry on as I am, for God's sake, leave me alone!" DB: But that is the result of so much conflict, that people are warned off by it, I think. JK: But conflict exists, whether we like it or not. So, that is the whole point, is it possible to live a life without conflict? DB: Yes, that is all implicit in what has been said. The source of conflict is thought, or knowledge, or the past. JK: So then one asks: is it possible to transcend thought? DB: Yes. JK: Or is it possible to end knowledge? I am putting it psychologically.... DB: Yes. We say that knowledge of material objects and things like that, knowledge of science, will continue. JK: Absolutely. That must continue. DB: But what you call self-knowledge is what you are asking to end, isn't it? JK: Yes. DB: On the other hand people have said - even you have said - that self-knowledge is very important. JK: Self-knowledge is important, but if I take time to understand myself, I will understand myself eventually by examination, analysis, by watching my whole relationship with others and so on - all that involves time. And I say there is another way of looking at the whole thing without time. Which is, when the observer is the observed. DB: Yes. JK: In that observation there is no time. DB: Could we go into that further? I mean, for example, if you say there is no time, but still you feel that you can remember an hour ago you were someone else. Now in what sense can we say that there is no time? JK: Time is division. As thought is division. That is why thought is time. DB: Time is a series of divisions of past, present, future. JK: Thought is divisive. So time is thought. Or thought is time. DB: It doesn't exactly follow from what you said.... JK: Let's go into it. DB: Yes. You see, at first sight one would think that thought makes divisions of all kinds, with the ruler and with all kinds of things, and also divides up intervals of time: past, present and future. Now it doesn't follow, from just that, that thought is time. JK: Look, we said time is movement. DB: Yes. JK: Thought is also a series of movements. So both are movements. DB: Thought is a movement, we suppose, of the nervous system and... JK: You see, it is a movement of becoming. I am talking psychologically. DB: Psychologically. But, whenever you think, something is also moving in the blood, in the nerves, and so on. Now when you talk of a psychological movement, do you mean just a change of content? JK: Change of content? DB: Well what is the movement? What is moving? JK: Look, I am this, and I am attempting to become something else psychologically. DB: So that movement is in the content of your thought? JK: Yes. DB: If you say "I am this and I am attempting to become that," then I am in movement. At least, I feel I am in movement. JK: Say, for instance, that I am greedy. Greed is a movement. DB: What kind of a movement is it? JK: To get what I want, to get more. It is a movement. DB: All right. JK: And I find that movement painful. Then I try not to be greedy. DB: Yes. JK: The attempt not to be greedy is a movement of time, is becoming. DB: Yes, but even the greed was becoming. JK: Of course. So, is the real question, is it possible not to become, psychologically? DB: It seems that would require that you should not be anything psychologically. As soon as you define yourself in any way, then... JK: No, we will define it in a minute or two. DB: I meant, if I define myself as greedy, say that I am greedy, or I am this, or I am that, then either I will want to become something else or to remain what I am. JK: Now can I remain what I am? Can I remain not with non-greed but with greed? Greed is not different from me; greed is me. DB: The ordinary way of thinking is that I am here, and I could either be greedy or not greedy. JK: Of course. DB: As these are attributes which I may or may not have. JK: But the attributes are me. DB: Now that again goes very much against our common language and experience. JK: All the qualities, the attributes, the virtues, the judgments, the conclusions, and opinions are me. DB: It seems to me that this would have to be perceived immediately.... JK: That is the whole question. To perceive the totality of this whole movement, instantly. Then we come to the point - it sounds a little odd, and perhaps a little crazy, but it is not - is it possible to perceive without all the movement of memory? To perceive something directly without the word, without the reaction, without the memories entering into perception. DB: That is a very big question, because memory has constantly entered perception. It would raise the question of what is going to stop memory from entering perception? JK: Nothing can stop it. But if we see the reason, the rationality of the activity of memory which is limited - in the very perception that it is limited, we have moved out of it into another dimension. DB: It seems to me that you have to perceive the whole of the limitation of memory. JK: Yes, not one part. DB: You can see in general that memory is limited, but there are many ways in which this is not obvious. For example, many of our reactions that are not obvious may be memory, but we don't experience them as memory. Suppose I am becoming: I experience greed, and I have the urge to become less greedy. I can remember that I am greedy but think that this `'me" is the one who remembers, not the other way around, not that memory creates "me" - right? JK: All this really comes down to whether humanity can live without conflict. It basically comes to that. Can we have peace on this earth? The activities of thought never bring it about. DB: It seems clear from what has been said that the activity of thought cannot bring about peace: it inherently brings about conflict. JK: Yes, if we once really see that, our whole activity would be totally different. DB: But are you saying then that there is an activity which is not thought? Which is beyond thought? JK: Yes. DB: And which is not only beyond thought but which does not require the cooperation of thought? That it is possible for this to go on when thought is absent? JK: That is the real point. We have often discussed this, whether there is anything beyond thought. Not something holy, sacred - we are not talking of that. We are asking, is there an activity which is not touched by thought? We are saying there is, and that that activity is the highest form of intelligence. DB: Yes, now we have brought in intelligence. JK: I know, I purposively brought it in! So intelligence is not the activity of cunning thought. There is intelligence to build a cable.... DB: Well, intelligence can use thought, as you have often said. That is, thought can be the action of intelligence - would you put it that way? JK: Yes. DB: Or it could be the action of memory? JK: That's it. Either it is the action born of memory and memory being limited, therefore thought is limited, and it has its own activity which then brings about conflict.... DB: I think this would connect with what people are saying about computers. Every computer must eventually depend on some kind of memory which is put in, programmed. And that must be limited. JK: Of course. DB: Therefore when we operate from memory we are not very different from a computer; the other way around perhaps, the computer is not very different from us. JK: I would say a Hindu has been programmed for the last five thousand years to be a Hindu; or, in this country, you have been programmed as British, or as a Catholic or a Protestant. So we are all programmed to a certain extent. DB: Yes, but you are bringing in the notion of an intelligence which is free of the program, which is creative, perhaps.... JK: Yes. That intelligence has nothing to do with memory and knowledge. DB: It may act in memory and knowledge but it is has nothing to do with it.... JK: That's right. I mean, how do you find out whether it has any reality and is not just imagination and romantic nonsense? To come to that, one has to go into the whole question of suffering, whether there is an end to suffering. And as long as suffering and fear and the pursuit of pleasure exist there cannot be love. DB: There are many questions there. Suffering, pleasure, fear, anger, violence, and greed - all of those are the response of memory. JK: Yes. DB: They are nothing to do with intelligence. JK: They are all part of thought and memory. DB: And as long as they are going on it seems that intelligence cannot operate in thought, or through thought. JK: That's right. So there must be freedom from suffering. DB: Well that is a very key point. JK: That is really a very serious and deep question. Whether it is possible to end suffering, which is the ending of me. DB: Yes, it may seem repetitious but the feeling is that I am there, and I either suffer or don't suffer. I either enjoy things or suffer. Now I think you are saying that suffering arises from thought; it is thought. JK: Identification. Attachment. DB: So what is it that suffers? Memory may produce pleasure and then when it doesn't work it produces the opposite of the feeling of pleasure - pain and suffering. JK: Not only that. Suffering is much more complex, isn't it? DB: Yes. JK: What is suffering? The meaning of the word is to have pain, to have grief, to feel utterly lost, lonely. DB: It seems to me that it is not only pain, but a kind of total, very pervasive pain.... JK: But suffering is the loss of someone. DB: Or the loss of something very important. JK: Yes, of course. Loss of my wife, my son, brother, or whatever it is, and the desperate sense of loneliness. DB: Or else just simply the fact that the whole world is going into such a state. JK: Of course.... All the wars. DB: It makes everything meaningless, you see. JK: What a lot of suffering wars have created. And wars have been going on for thousands of years. That is why I am saying we are carrying on with the same pattern of the last five thousand years or more.... DB: One can easily see that the violence and hatred in wars will interfere with intelligence. JK: Obviously. DB: But some people have felt that by going through suffering they become... JK: ...intelligent? DB: ...Purified, like going through the crucible. JK: I know. That through suffering you learn. That through suffering your ego is vanished, dissolved. DB: Yes, dissolved, refined. JK: It is not. People have suffered immensely, how many wars, how many tears, and the destructive nature of governments? And unemployment, ignorance... DB:...ignorance of disease, pain, everything. But what is suffering really? Why does it destroy intelligence, or prevent it? What is going on? JK: Suffering is a shock; I suffer, I have pain, it is the essence of the "me." DB: The difficulty with suffering is that it is the me that is there that is suffering. JK: Yes. DB: And this me is really being sorry for itself in some way. JK: My suffering is different from your suffering. DB: Yes, it isolates itself. It creates an illusion of some kind. JK: We don't see that suffering is shared by all humanity. DB: Yes, but suppose we do see it is shared by all humanity? JK: Then I begin to question what suffering is. It is not my suffering. DB: That is important. In order to understand the nature of suffering I have to get out of this idea that it is my suffering because as long as I believe it is my suffering I have an illusory notion of the whole thing. JK: And I can never end it. DB: If you are dealing with an illusion you can do nothing with it. You see why - we have to come back. Why is suffering the suffering of many? At first it seems that I feel pain in the tooth, or else I have a loss, or something has happened to me, and the other person seems perfectly happy. JK: Happy, yes. But also he is suffering in his own way. DB: Yes. At the moment he doesn't see it, but he has his problems too. JK: Suffering is common to all humanity. DB: But the fact that it is common is not enough to make it all one. JK: It is actual. DB: Are you saying that the suffering of mankind is all one, inseparable? JK: Yes, that is what I have been saying. DB: As is the consciousness of man? JK: Yes, that's right. DB: That when anybody suffers, the whole of mankind is suffering. JK: The whole point is, we have suffered from the beginning of time, and we haven't solved it. We haven't ended suffering. DB: But I think you have said that the reason we haven't solved it is because we are treating it as personal, or as in a small group... and that is an illusion. JK: Yes. DB: Now any attempt to deal with an illusion cannot solve anything. JK: Thought cannot solve anything psychologically. DB: Because you can say that thought itself divides. Thought is limited and is unable to see that this suffering is all one. And in that way divides it up as mine and yours. JK: That's right. DB: And that creates illusion, which can only multiply suffering. Now it seems to me that the statement that the suffering of mankind is one is inseparable from the statement that the consciousness of mankind is one. JK: Suffering is part of our consciousness. DB: But one doesn't get the feeling immediately that this suffering belongs to the whole of mankind, you see. JK: The world is me: I am the world. But we have divided it up into the British earth, and the French earth, and all the rest of it! DB: Do you mean by the world, the physical world, or the world of society? JK: The world of society, primarily the psychological world. DB: So we say the world of society, of human beings, is one, and when I say I am that world, what does it mean? JK: The world is not different from me. DB: The world and I are one. We are inseparable. JK: Yes. And that is real meditation; you must feel this, not just as a verbal statement: it is an actuality. I am my brother's keeper. DB: Many religions have said that. JK: That is just a verbal statement and they don't keep it; they don't do it in their hearts. DB: Perhaps some have done it, but in general it is not being done? JK: I don't know if anybody has done it. We human beings haven't done it. Our religions actually have prevented it. DB: Because of division? Every religion has its own beliefs and its own organization. JK: Of course. Its own gods and its own saviours. DB: Yes. JK: So from that, is that intelligence actual? You understand my question? Or is it some kind of fanciful projection, hoping that it will solve our problems? It is not to me. It is an actuality. Because the ending of suffering means love. DB: Before we go on, let's clear up a point about "me". You see you said it is not to me. Now in some sense it seems that you are still defining an individual. Is that right? JK: Yes. I am using the word "I" as a means of com-communication. DB: But what does it mean? In some way, let's say there may be two people, let's say "A," who is the way you see, and "B" who is not eh? JK: Yes. DB: So "A" says it is not - that seems to create a division between "A" and "B." JK: That's right. But "B" creates the division. DB: Why? JK: What is the relationship between the two? DB: "B" is creating the division by saying, "I am a separate person" but it may confuse "B" further when "A" says "It's not that way to me" - right? JK: That is the whole point, isn't it, in relationship? You feel that you are not separate, and that you really have this sense of love and compassion, and I haven't got it. I haven't even perceived or gone into this question. What is your relationship to me? You have a relationship with me but I haven't any relationship with you. DB: Well I think one could say that the person who hasn't seen is almost living a world of dreams, psychologically, and therefore the world of dreams is not related to the world of being awake. JK: That's right. DB: But the fellow who is awake can at least perhaps awaken the other fellow. JK: You are awake; I am not. Then your relationship with me is very clear. But I have no relationship with you; I cannot have one. I insist on division, and you don't. DB: Yes, we have to say that in some way the consciousness of mankind has divided itself, it is all one but it has divided itself by thought. And that is why we are in this situation. JK: That is why. All the problems that humanity has now, psychologically, as well in other ways, are the result of thought. And we are pursuing the same pattern of thought, and thought will never solve any of these problems. So there is another kind of instrument, which is intelligence. DB: Well that opens up an entirely different subject. And you mentioned love as well. And compassion. JK: Without love and compassion there is no intelligence. And you cannot be compassionate if you are attached to some religion, if you are tied to a post like an animal.... DB: Yes as soon as the self is threatened, then it cannot.... JK: You see, self hides behind... DB: ...other things. I mean, noble ideals. JK: Yes, it has immense capacity to hide itself. So what is the future of humanity? From what one observes it is leading to destruction. DB: That is the way it seems to be going. JK: Very gloomy, grim, and dangerous. If one has children, what is their future? To enter into all this? And go through the misery of it all. So education becomes extraordinarily important. But now education is merely the accumulation of knowledge. DB: Every instrument that man has invented, discovered, or developed has been turned toward destruction. JK: Absolutely. They are destroying nature; there are very few tigers now. DB: They are destroying forests and agricultural land. JK: Nobody seems to care. DB: Well, most people are just immersed in their plans to save themselves, but others have plans to save humanity. I think also there is a tendency toward despair, implicit in what is happening now, in that people don't think anything can be done. JK: Yes. And if they think something can be done they form little groups and little theories. DB: There are those who are very confident in what they are doing.... JK: Most Prime Ministers are very confident. They don't know what they are doing really! DB: Yes but then most people haven't much confidence in what they are doing themselves. JK: I know. And if someone has tremendous confidence I accept that confidence and go with them. What is the future of mankind, the future of humanity? I wonder if anybody is concerned with it? Or whether each person, each group, is only concerned with its own survival? DB: I think the first concern almost always has been with survival in either the individual or the group. That has been the history of mankind. JK: Therefore, perpetual wars, perpetual inse- curity. DB: Yes, but this, as you said, is the result of thought, which makes the mistake on the basis of being incomplete of identifying the self with the group, and so on. JK: You happen to listen to all this. You agree to all this, you see the truth of all this. Those in power will not even listen to you. DB: No. JK: They are creating more and more misery, the world is becoming more and more dangerous. What is the point of our seeing something to be true, and what effect has it? DB: It seems to me that if we think in terms of the effects we are bringing in the very thing which is behind the trouble - time! Then the response would be to get in quickly and do something to change the course of events. JK: And therefore form a society, foundation, organization, and all the rest of it. DB: But you see our mistake is to feel that we must think about something, although that thought is incomplete. We don't really know what is going on, and people have made theories about it, but they don't know. JK: If that is the wrong question, then as a human being, who is mankind, what is my responsibility, apart from effect, and all the rest of it? DB: Yes, we can't look toward effects. But it is the same as with "A" and "B," that "A" sees, and "B" does not. JK: Yes. DB: Now suppose "A" sees something and most of the rest of mankind does not. Then, it seems, one could say mankind is in a sense dreaming, asleep. JK: It is caught in illusion. DB: Illusion. And the point is that, if somebody sees something, his responsibility is to help awaken the others out of the illusions. JK: That is just it. This has been the problem. That is why the Buddhists have projected the idea of the Bodhisattva, who is the essence of all compassion, and is waiting to save humanity. It sounds nice. It is a happy feeling that there is somebody doing this. But in actuality we won't do anything that is not comfortable, satisfying, secure, both psychologically and physically. DB: That is basically the source of the illusion. JK: How does one make others see all this? They haven't time, they haven't the energy, they haven't even the inclination. They want to be amused. How does one make "X" see this whole thing so clearly that he says, "All right, I have got it, I will work. And I see I am responsible," and all the rest of it. I think that is the tragedy of those who see and those who don't. THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY CHAPTER 2 2ND CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BOHM BROCKWOOD PARK 20TH JUNE 1983 J. KRISHNAMURTI: Are all the psychologists, as far as we can understand, really concerned with the future of humanity? Or are they concerned with the human being conforming to the present society? Or going beyond that? DAVID BOHM: I think that most psychologists evidently want the human being to conform to this society, but I think some are thinking of going beyond that, to transform the consciousness of mankind. JK: Can the consciousness of mankind be changed through time? That is one of the questions we should discuss. DB: Yes. We have discussed it already and I think what came out was that with regard to consciousness time is not relevant, that it is a kind of illusion. We discussed the illusion of becoming. JK: We are saying, aren't we, that the evolution of consciousness is a fallacy. DB: As through time, yes. Though physical evolution is not. JK: Can we put it this way, much more simply? There is no psychological evolution, or evolution of the psyche? DB: Yes. And, since the future of humanity depends on the psyche, it seems then that the future of humanity is not going to be determined through actions in time. And then that leaves us the question: what will we do? JK: Now let's proceed from there. Shouldn't we first distinguish between the brain and the mind? DB: Well that distinction has been made, and it is not clear. Now of course there are several views. One that the mind is just a function of the brain - that is the materialists' view. There is another view which says mind and brain are two different things. JK: Yes, I think they are two different things. DB: But there must be... JK: ...a contact between the two. DB: Yes. JK: A relationship between the two. DB: We don't necessarily imply any separation of the two. JK: No. First let's see the brain. I am really not an expert on the structure of the brain and all that kind of thing. But one can see within one, one can observe from one's own activity of the brain, that it is really like a computer which has been programmed, and remembers. DB: Certainly a large part of the activity is that way, but one is not certain that all of it is that way. JK: No. And it is conditioned. DB: Yes. JK: Conditioned by past generations, by the society, by the newspapers, by the magazines, by all the activities and pressures from the outside. It is conditioned. DB: Now what do you mean by this conditioning? JK: The brain is programmed; it is made to conform to a certain pattern; it lives entirely on the past, modifying itself with the present and going on. DB: We have agreed that some of this conditioning is useful and necessary. JK: Of course. DB: But the conditioning which determines the self, you know, which determines the... JK: ...the psyche. Let's call it for the moment the psyche. The self. DB: The self, the psyche, that conditioning is what you are talking about. That may not only be unnecessary but harmful. JK: Yes. The emphasis on the psyche, on giving importance to the self, is creating great damage in the world, because it is separative and therefore it is constantly in conflict, not only within itself but with the society, with the family, and so on. DB: Yes. And it is also in conflict with nature. JK: With nature, with the whole universe. DB: We have said that the conflict arose because... JK: ...of division.... DB: The division arising because thought is limited. Being based on this conditioning, on knowledge and memory, it is limited. JK: Yes. And experience is limited, therefore knowledge is limited; memory and thought. And the very structure and nature of the psyche is the movement of thought. DB: Yes. JK: In time. DB: Yes. Now I would like to ask a question. You discussed the movement of thought but it doesn't seem clear to me what is moving. You see, if I discuss the movement of my hand, that is a real movement. It is clear what is meant. But now, when we discuss the movement of thought, it seems to me we are discussing something which is a kind of illusion, because you have said that becoming is the movement of thought. JK: That is what I mean, the movement is becoming. DB: But you are saying that movement is in some way illusory, aren't you? JK: Yes, of course. DB: It is rather like the movement on the screen which is projected from the camera. We say that there are no objects moving across the screen, but the only real movement is the turning of the projector. Now can we say that there is a real movement in the brain which is projecting all this, which is the conditioning? JK: That is what we want to find out. Let's discuss that a bit. We both agree, or see, that the brain is conditioned. DB: We mean that really it has been impressed physically, and chemically.... JK: And genetically, as well as psychologically. DB: What is the difference between physically and psychologically? JK: Psychologically the brain is centred in the self - right? DB: Yes. JK: And the constant assertion of the self is the movement, the conditioning, an illusion. DB: But there is some real movement happening inside. The brain, for example, is doing something. It has been conditioned physically and chemically. And something is happening physically and chemically when we are thinking of the self. JK: Are you asking whether the brain and the self are two different things? DB: No, I am saying that the self is the result of conditioning the brain. JK: Yes. The self is conditioning the brain. DB: But does the self exist? JK: No. DB: But the conditioning of the brain, as I see it, is the involvement with an illusion which we call the self. JK: That's right. Can that conditioning be dissipated? That's the whole question. DB: It really has to be dissipated in some physical and chemical and neurophysiological sense. JK: Yes. DB: Now the first reaction of any scientific person would be that it looks unlikely that we could dissipate it by the sort of thing we are doing. You see, some scientists might feel that maybe we will discover drugs or new genetic changes or deep knowledge of the structure of the brain. In that way we could perhaps help to do something. I think that idea might be current among some people. JK: Will that change human behaviour? DB: Why not? I think some people believe it might. JK: Wait a minute. That is the whole point. It might, which means in the future. DB: Yes, it would take time to discover all this. JK: In the meantime man is going to destroy himself. DB: They might hope that he will manage to discover it in time. They could also criticize what we are doing, saying what good can it do? You see, it doesn't seem to affect anybody, and certainly not in time to make a big difference. JK: We two are very clear about it. In what way does it affect humanity? DB: Will it really affect mankind in time to save... JK: Obviously not. DB: Then why should we be doing it? JK: Because this is the right thing to do. Independently. It has nothing to do with reward and punishment, DB: Nor with goals. We do the right thing even though we don't know what the outcome will be? JK: That's right. DB: Are you saying there is no other way? JK: We are saying there is no other way; that's right. DB: Well we should make that clear. For example, some psychologists would feel that, by enquiring into this sort of thing, we could bring about an evolutionary transformation of consciousness. JK: We come back to the point that through time we hope to change consciousness. We question that. DB: We have questioned that, and are saying that through time, inevitably we are all caught in becoming and illusion, and we will not know what we are doing. JK: That's right. DB: Now could we say that the same thing would hold even for those scientists who are trying to do it physically and chemically or structurally; that they themselves are still caught in this, and through time they are caught in trying to become better? JK: Yes. The experimentalists and the psychologists and ourselves are all trying to become something. DB: Yes, though it may not seem obvious at first. It may seem that the scientists are really just disinterested, unbiased observers, working on the problem. But underneath one feels there is the desire to become better on the part of the person who is enquiring in that way. JK: To become. Of course. DB: He is not free of that. JK: That is just it. DB: And that desire will give rise to self-deception and illusion, and so on. JK: So where are we now? Any form of becoming is an illusion, and becoming implies time, time for the psyche to change. But we are saying that time is not necessary. DB: Now that ties up with the other question of the mind and the brain. The brain is an activity in time, as a physical, chemical, complex process. JK: I think the mind is separate from the brain. DB: What does separate mean? Are they in contact? JK: Separate in the sense that the brain is conditioned and the mind is not. DB: Let's say the mind has a certain independence of the brain. Even if the brain is conditioned... JK: ...the other is not. DB: It need not be... JK: ...conditioned. DB: On what basis do you say that? JK: Let's not begin on what basis I say that. DB: Well, what makes you say it? JK: As long as the brain is conditioned, it is not free. DB: Yes. JK: And the mind is free. DB: Yes, that is what you are saying. But you see, the brain not being free means that it is not free to enquire in an unbiased way. JK: I will go into it. Let's enquire what is freedom? Freedom to enquire, freedom to investigate. It is only in freedom that there is deep insight. DB: Yes, that's clear, because if you are not free to enquire, or if you are biased, then you are limited, in an arbitrary way. JK: So as long as the brain is conditioned its relationship to the mind is limited. DB: We have the relationship of the brain to the mind, and also the other way round. JK: Yes. But the mind being free has a relationship to the brain. DB: Yes. Now we say the mind is free, in some sense, not subject to the conditioning of the brain. JK: Yes. DB: What is the nature of the mind? Is the mind located inside the body, or is it in the brain? JK: No, it is nothing to do with the body or the brain. DB: Has it to do with space or time? JK: Space - now wait a minute! It has to do with space and silence. These are the two factors of the.., DB: But not time? JK: Not time. Time belongs to the brain. DB: You say space and silence; now what kind of space? It is not the space in which we see life moving. JK: Space. Let's look round at it the other way. Thought can invent space. DB: In addition, we have the space that we see. But thought can invent all kinds of space. JK: And space from here to there. DB: Yes, the space through which we move is that way. JK: Space also between two noises, two sounds. DB: They call that the interval, the interval between two sounds. JK: Yes, the interval between two noises. Two thoughts. Two notes. DB: Yes. JK: Space between two people. DB: Space between the walls. JK: And so on. But that kind of space is not the space of the mind. DB: You say it is not limited? JK: That's right. But I didn't want to use the word limited. DB: But it is implied. That kind of space is not in the nature of being bounded by something. JK: No, it is not bounded by the psyche, DB: But is it bounded by anything? JK: No. So can the brain, with all its cells conditioned, can those cells radically change? DB: We have often discussed this. It is not certain that all the cells are conditioned. For example, some people think that only some or a small part of the cells are being used, and that the others are just inactive, dormant. JK: Hardly used at all, or just touched occasionally. DB: Just touched occasionally. But those cells that are conditioned, whatever they may be, evidently dominate consciousness now. JK: Yes. Can those cells be changed? DB: Yes. JK: We are saying that they can, through insight; insight being out of time, not the result of remembrance, not an intuition, nor desire, nor hope. It is nothing to do with any time and thought. DB: Yes. Now is insight of the mind? Is it of the nature of mind? An activity of mind? JK: Yes. DB: Therefore you are saying that mind can act in the matter of the brain. JK: Yes, we said that earlier. DB: But, you see, this point, how mind is able to act in matter, is difficult. JK: It is able to act on the brain. For instance, take any crisis, or problem. The root meaning of problem is, as you know, "something thrown at you." And we meet it with all the remembrance of the past, with a bias and so on. And therefore the problem multiplies itself. You may solve one problem, but in the very solution of one particular problem, other problems arise, as happens in politics, and so on. Now to approach the problem, or to have perception of it without any past memories and thoughts interfering or projecting... DB: That implies that perception also is of the mind.... JK: Yes, that's right. DB: Are you saying that the brain is a kind of instrument of the mind? JK: An instrument of the mind when the brain is not self- centred. DB: All the conditioning may be thought of as the brain exciting itself, and keeping itself going just from the programme. This occupies all of its capacities. JK: All our days, yes. DB: The brain is rather like a radio receiver which can generate its own noise, but would not pick up a signal. JK: Not quite. Let's go into this a little. Experience is always limited. I may blow up that experience into something fantastic, and then set up a shop to sell my experience, but that experience is limited. And so knowledge is always limited. And this knowledge is operating in the brain. This knowledge is the brain. And thought is also part of the brain, and thought is limited. So the brain is operating in a very, very small area. DB: Yes. What prevents it from operating in a broader area? In an unlimited area? JK: Thought. DB: But it seems to me the brain is running on its own, from its own programme. JK: Yes, like a computer. DB: Essentially, what you are asking is that the brain should really be responding to the mind. JK: It can only respond if it is free from the limited; from thought, which is limited. DB: So the programme does not then dominate it. You see we are still going to need that programme. JK: Of course. We need it for... DB: ...for many things. But is intelligence from the mind? JK: Yes, intelligence is the mind. DB: Is the mind. JK: We must go into something else. Because compassion is related to intelligence, there is no intelligence without compassion. And compassion can only be, when there is love which is completely free from all remembrances, personal jealousies, and so on. DB: Is all that compassion, love, also of the mind? JK: Of the mind. You cannot be compassionate if you are attached to any particular experience, or any particular ideal. DB: Yes, that is again the programme. JK: Yes. For instance, there are those people who go out to various poverty-ridden countries and work, work, work. And they call that compassion. But they are attached, or tied to a particular form of religious belief, and therefore their action is merely pity or sympathy. It is not compassion. DB: Yes, I understand that we have here two things which can be somewhat independent. There is the brain and the mind, though they make contact. Then we say that intelligence and compassion come from beyond the brain. Now I would like to go into the question of how they are making contact. JK: Ah! Contact can only exist between the mind and the brain when the brain is quiet. DB: Yes, that is the requirement for making it. The brain has got to be quiet. JK: Quiet is not a trained quietness. Not a self-conscious, meditative, desire for silence. It is a natural outcome of understanding one's own conditioning. DB: And one can see that if the brain is quiet it could listen to something deeper? JK: That's right. Then if it is quiet it is related to the mind. Then the mind can function through the brain. DB: I think that it would help if we could see with regard to the brain whether it has any activity which is beyond thought. You see, for example, one could ask, is awareness part of the function of the brain? JK: As long as it is awareness in which there is no choice. DB: I think that may cause difficulty. What is wrong with choice? JK: Choice means confusion. DB: That is not obvious.... JK: After all, you have to choose between two things. DB: I could choose whether I will buy one thing or another. JK: Yes, I can choose between this table and that table. DB: I choose the colours when I buy the table. That need not be confused. If I choose which colour I want, I don't see why that has to be confused. JK: There is nothing wrong. There is no confusion there. DB: But it seems to me that the choice about the psyche is where the confusion is. JK: That's all; we are talking of the psyche that chooses. DB: That chooses to become. JK: Yes. Chooses to become. And choice exists where there is confusion. DB: Are you saying that out of confusion the psyche makes a choice to become one thing or another? Being confused, it tries to become something better? JK: And choice implies a duality. DB: But it seems at first sight that we have another duality which you have introduced, which is the mind and the brain. JK: No, that is not a duality. DB: What is the difference? JK: Let's take a very simple example. Human beings are violent, and nonviolence has been projected by thought. That is the duality - the fact, and the non-fact. DB: You are saying there is a duality between a fact, and some mere projection which the mind makes. JK: The ideal and the fact. DB: The ideal is non-real, and the fact is real. JK: That's it. The ideal is not actual. DB: Yes. Now then you say the division of those is duality. Why do you give it that name? JK: Because they are divided. DB: Well at least they appear to be divided. JK: Divided, and we are struggling. For instance, all the totalitarian communist ideals, and the democratic ideals, are the outcome of thought which is limited, and this is creating havoc in the world. DB: So there is a division which has been brought in. But I think we were discussing in terms of dividing something which cannot be divided. Of trying to divide the psyche. JK: That's right. Violence cannot be divided into non-violence. DB: And the psyche cannot be divided into violence and nonviolence. Right? JK: It is what it is. DB: It is what it is; so, if it is violent, it can't be divided into a violent and a nonviolent part. JK: So can we remain with "what is," not with "what should be," "what must be," not invent ideals, and so on? DB: Yes, but could we return to the question of the mind and the brain? Now we are saying that is not a division. JK: Oh no, that is not a division. DB: They are in contact, is that right? JK: We said, there is contact between the mind and the brain when the brain is silent and has space. DB: So we are saying that although they are in contact and not divided at all, the mind can still have a certain independence of the conditioning of the brain. JK: Now let's be careful! Suppose my brain is conditioned, for example, programmed as a Hindu, and my whole life and action are conditioned by the idea that I am a Hindu. Mind obviously has no relationship with that conditioning. DB: You are using the word mind; not "my" mind. JK: Mind. It is not 'mine'. DB: It is universal or general. JK: Yes. And it is not 'my' brain either. DB: No, but there is a particular brain, this brain or that brain. Would you say that there is a particular mind? JK: No. DB: That is an important difference. You are saying mind is really universal. JK: Mind is universal - if you can use that ugly word. DB: Unlimited and undivided. JK: It is unpolluted; not polluted by thought. DB: But I think for most people there will be difficulty in saying how we know anything about this mind. We only know that my mind is the first feeling - right? JK: You cannot call it your mind. You only have your brain, which is conditioned. You can't say, 'It is my mind.' DB: But whatever is going on inside I feel is mine, and it is very different from what is going on inside somebody else. JK: No, I question whether it is different. DB: At least it seems different. JK: Yes. I question whether it is different, what is going on inside me as a human being, and you as another human being. We both go through all kinds of problems: suffering, fear, anxiety, loneliness, and so on. We have our dogmas, beliefs, superstitions. And everybody has this. DB: We can say it is all very similar, but it seems as if each one of us is isolated from the other. JK: By thought. My thought has created the belief that I am different from you, because my body is different from yours, my face is different from yours. We extend that same thing into the psychological area. DB: But now if we said that division is an illusion, perhaps? JK: No, not perhaps! It is. DB: It is an illusion. All right. Although it is not obvious when a person first looks at it. JK: Of course. DB: In reality even brain is not divided, because we are saying that we are all not only basically similar but really connected. And then we say beyond all that is mind, which has no division at all. JK: It is unconditioned. DB: Yes, it would almost seem to imply, then, that in so far as a person feels he is a separate being he has very little contact with mind. JK: Quite right. That is what we said. DB: No mind. JK: That is why it is very important to understand not the mind but our conditioning. And whether our conditioning, human conditioning, can ever be dissolved. That is the real issue. DB: Yes. I think we still want to understand the meaning of what is being said. You see, we have a mind that is universal; that is in some kind of space, you say, or is it its own space? JK: It is not in me or in my brain. DB: But it has a space. JK: It is, it lives in space and silence. DB: It lives in a space and silence, but it is the space of the mind. It is not a space like this space? JK: No. That is why we said space is not invented by thought. DB: Yes, now is it possible then to perceive this space when the mind is silent, to be in contact with it? JK: Not perceive. Let's see. You are asking whether the mind can be perceived by the brain. DB: Or at least the brain somehow be aware... an awareness, a sense. JK: We are saying, yes; through meditation. You may not like to use that word. DB: I don't mind. JK: You see, the difficulty is that when you use the word "meditation" it is generally understood that there is always a meditator meditating. Real meditation is an unconscious process, not a conscious process. DB: How then are you able to say that meditation takes place if it is unconscious? JK: It is taking place when the brain is quiet. DB: You mean by consciousness all the movement of thought? Feeling, desire, will, and all that goes with it? JK: Yes. DB: There is a kind of awareness still, isn't there? JK: Oh yes. It depends what you call awareness. Awareness of what? DB: Possibly awareness of something deeper, I don't know. JK: Again, when you use the word 'deeper,' it is a measurement. I wouldn't use that. DB: Well, let's not use that. But, you see, there is a kind of unconsciousness which we are simply not aware of at all. A person may be unconscious of some of his problems, conflicts. JK: Let's go at it a bit more. If I do something consciously, it is the activity of thought. DB: Yes, it is thought reflecting on itself. JK: Right, it is the activity of thought. Now if I consciously meditate, practise, do all that, which I call nonsense, then I am making the brain conform to another series of patterns. DB: Yes, it is more becoming. JK: More becoming, that's right. DB: You are trying to become better. JK: There is no illumination by becoming. One can't be illumined, if I can use that word, by saying that one is going to be some sort of guru. DB: But it seems very difficult to communicate something which is not conscious. JK: That's it. That's the difficulty. DB: It is not just being knocked out. If a person is unconscious, he is knocked out, but you don't mean that. JK: Of course not! DB: Or under anesthetic or... JK: No, let's put it this way: conscious meditation, conscious activity to control thought, to free oneself from conditioning, is not freedom. DB: Yes, I think that is clear, but it becomes very unclear how to communicate something else. JK: Wait a minute. You want to discuss what lies beyond thought. DB: Or when thought is silent. JK: Quite, silent. What words would you use? DB: Well, I suggested the word awareness. What about the word attention? JK: Attention for me is better. Would you say, in attention there is no centre as the me? DB: Well, not in the kind of attention you are discussing. There is the usual kind, where we pay attention because of what interests us. JK: Attention is not concentration. DB: We are discussing a kind of attention without this 'me' present, which is not the activity of the conditioning. JK: Not the activity of thought. In attention, thought has no place. DB: Yes, but could we say more? What do you mean by attention? Now would the derivation of the word be of any use? It means stretching the mind - would that help? JK: No. Would it help if we say concentration is not attention? Effort is not attention. When I make an effort to attend it is not attention. Attention can only come into being when the self is not. DB: Yes, but that is going to get us in a circle, because usually we are starting when the self is. JK: No, I used the word carefully. Meditation means measure. DB: Yes. JK: As long as there is measurement, which is becoming, there is no meditation. Let's put it that way. DB: Yes. We can discuss when there is not meditation. JK: That's right. Through negation the other is. DB: Because if we succeed in negating the whole activity of what is not meditation, the meditation will be there. JK: That's right. DB: That which is not meditation, but which we think is meditation. JK: Yes, that is very clear. As long as there is measurement, which is the becoming, which is the process of thought, meditation or silence cannot be. DB: Is this undirected attention mind? JK: Attention is of the mind. DB: Well, it contacts the brain, doesn't it? JK: Yes. As long as the brain is silent, the other has contact. DB: That is, this true attention has contact with the brain, when the brain is silent. JK: Silent, and has space. DB: What is space? JK: The brain has no space now, because it is concerned with itself, it is programmed, it is self-centred and it is limited. DB: Yes. The mind is in its space; now does the brain have its space too? Limited space? JK: Of course. Thought has a limited space. DB: But when thought is absent, does the brain have its space? JK: Yes. The brain has space. DB: Unlimited? JK: No. It is only mind that has unlimited space. My brain can be quiet over a problem which I have thought about, and I suddenly say, 'Well I won't think anymore about it,' and there is a certain amount of space. In that space you solve the problem. DB: Now if the brain is silent, if it is not thinking of a problem, then still the space is limited, but it is open to... JK: ...to the other. DB: ...to the attention. Would you say that, through attention, or in attention, the mind is contacting the brain? JK: When the brain is not inattentive. DB: So what happens to the brain? JK: What happens to the brain which is to act? Let's get it clear. We said intelligence is born out of compassion and love. That intelligence operates when the brain is quiet. DB: Yes. Does it operate through attention? JK: Of course. DB: So attention seems to be the contact. JK: Naturally. We said too that attention can only be, when the self is not. DB: Now you say that love and compassion are the ground, and out of this comes the intelligence, through attention. JK: Yes, it functions through the brain. DB: So there are two questions: one is the nature of this intelligence, and the second is, what does it do to the brain? JK: Yes, let's see. We must again approach it negatively. Love is not jealousy, and all that. Love is not personal, but it can be personal. DB: Then it is not what you are talking about. JK: Love is not my country, your country, or 'I love my god.' It is not that. DB: If it is from universal mind.... JK: That is why I say love has no relationship to thought. DB: And it does not start in the particular brain, does not originate in the particular brain. JK: When there is that love, out of it there is compassion and there is intelligence. DB: Is this intelligence able to understand deeply? JK: No, not 'understand.' DB: What does it do? Does it perceive? JK: Through perception it acts. DB: Perception of what? JK: Now let's discuss perception. There can be perception only when it is not tinged by thought. When there is no interference from the movement of thought, there is perception, which is direct insight into a problem, or into human complexities. DB: Now this perception originates in the mind? JK: Does the perception originate in the mind? Yes. When the brain is quiet. DB: But we use the words perception and intelligence, now how are they related, or what is their difference? JK: The difference between perception and intelligence? DB: Yes. JK: None. DB: So we can say intelligence is perception. JK: Yes, that's right. DB: Intelligence is perception of 'what is'? And through attention there is contact. JK: Let's take a problem, then it is easier to understand. Take the problem of suffering. Human beings have suffered endlessly, through wars, through physical disease, and through wrong relationship with each other. Now can that end? DB: I would say the difficulty of ending that is that it is on the programme. We are conditioned to this whole thing. JK: Yes. Now that has been going on for centuries. DB: So it is very deep. JK: Very, very deep. Now can that suffering end? DB: It cannot end by an action of the brain. JK: By thought. DB: Because the brain is caught in suffering, and it cannot take an action to end its own suffering. JK: Of course it cannot. That is why thought cannot end it. Thought has created it. DB: Yes, thought has created it, and anyway it is unable to get hold of it. JK: Thought has created the wars, the misery, the confusion. And thought has become prominent in human relationship. DB: Yes, but I think people might agree with that and still think that just as thought can do bad things, it can do good things. JK: No, thought cannot do good or bad. It is thought, limited. DB: Thought cannot get hold of this suffering. That is, this suffering being in the physical and chemical conditioning of the brain, thought has no way of even knowing what it is. JK: I mean, I lose my son and I am.... DB: Yes, but by thinking, I don't know what is going on inside me. I can't change the suffering inside because thinking will not show me what it is. Now you are saying intelligence is perception. JK: But we are asking, can suffering end? That is the problem. DB: Yes, and it is clear that thinking cannot end it. JK: Thought cannot do it. That is the point. If I have an insight into it... DB: Now this insight will be through the action of the mind; through intelligence and attention. JK: When there is that insight, intelligence wipes away suffering. DB: You are saying, therefore, that there is a contact from mind to matter which removes the whole physical, chemical structure that keeps us going on with suffering. JK: That's right. In that ending there is a mutation in the brain cells. DB: Yes, and that mutation just wipes out the whole structure that makes you suffer. JK: That's right. Therefore it is as if I have been going along a certain tradition; I suddenly change that tradition and there is a change in the whole brain, which has been going North. Now it goes East. DB: Of course this is a radical notion from the point of view of traditional ideas in science, because, if we accept that mind is different from matter, then people would find it hard to say that mind would actually,.. JK: Would you put it that mind is pure energy? DB: Well, we could put it that way, but matter is energy too. JK: But matter is limited; thought is limited. DB: But we are saying that the pure energy of mind is able to reach into the limited energy of matter? JK: Yes, that's right. And change the limitation. DB: Remove some of the limitation. JK: When there is a deep issue, problem, or challenge which you are facing. DB: We could also add that all the traditional ways of trying to do this cannot work.... JK: They haven't worked. DB: Well, that is not enough. We have to say, because people still might hope it could, that it cannot, actually. JK: It cannot. DB: Because thought cannot get at its own physical, chemical basis in the cells, and do anything about those cells. JK: Yes. Thought cannot bring about a change in itself. DB: And yet practically everything that mankind has been trying to do is based on thought. There is a limited area, of course, where that is all right, but we cannot do anything about the future of humanity from that usual approach. JK: When one listens to the politicians, who are so very active in the world, they are creating problem after problem, and to them thought, ideals are the most important things. DB: Generally speaking nobody knows of anything else. JK: Exactly. We are saying that the old instrument which is thought is worn out, except in certain areas. DB: It never was adequate, except in those areas. JK: Of course. DB: And, as far as history goes, man has always been in trouble. JK: Man has always been in trouble, in turmoil, in fear. And facing all the confusion of the world, can there be a solution to all this? DB: That comes back to the question I would like to repeat. It seems there are a few people who are talking about it, and think perhaps they know, or perhaps they meditate, and so on. But how is that going to affect this vast current of mankind? JK: Probably very little. But why will it affect this? It might, or it might not. But then one puts that question: what is the use of it? DB: Yes, that's the point. I think there is an instinctive feeling that makes one put the question. JK: But I think that is the wrong question. DB: You see, the first instinct is to say, 'What can we do to stop this tremendous catastrophe'? JK: Yes. But if each one of us, whoever listens, sees the truth that thought, in its activity both externally and inwardly, has created a terrible mess, great suffering, then one must inevitably ask is there an ending to all this? If thought cannot end it, what will? DB: Yes. JK: What is the new instrument that will put an end to all this misery? You see, there is a new instrument which is the mind, which is intelligence. But the difficulty is also that people won't listen to all this. Both the scientists and the ordinary laymen like us, have come to definite conclusions, and they won't listen. DB: Yes, well, that is what I had in mind when I said that a few people don't seem to have much effect. JK: Of course. I think, after all, few people have changed the world, whether good or bad - but that is not the point. Hitler; and also the communists have changed it, but they have gone to the same pattern again. Physical revolution has never psychologically changed the human state. DB: Do you think it is possible that a certain number of brains coming in contact with mind in this way will be able to have an effect on mankind, which is beyond just the immediate, obvious effect of their communication? JK: Yes, that's right. But how do you convey this subtle and very complex issue to a person who is steeped in tradition, who is conditioned, and won't even take time to listen, to consider? DB: Well, that is the question. You see, you could say that this conditioning cannot be absolute; cannot be an absolute block, or else there would be no way out at all. But the conditioning may be thought to have some sort of permeability. JK: I mean, after all, the Pope won't listen to us, but the Pope has tremendous influence. DB: Is it possible that every person has something he can listen to, if it could be found? JK: If he has a little patience. Who will listen? The politicians won't listen. The idealists won't listen. The totalitarians won't listen. The deeply steeped religious people won't listen. So perhaps a so-called ignorant person, not highly educated or conditioned in his professional career, or by money, the poor man who says, 'I am suffering, please let's end that.'... DB: But he doesn't listen either, you see. He wants to get a job. JK: Of course. He says, 'Feed me first', We have been through all this for the last sixty years. The poor man won't listen, the rich man won't listen, the learned won't listen, and the deeply dogmatic religious believers don't listen. So perhaps it is like a wave in the world; it might catch somebody. I think it is a wrong question to say, does it affect? DB: Yes, all right. We will say that that brings in time, and that is becoming. It brings in the psyche in the process of becoming again. JK: Yes. But if you say... it must affect mankind... DB: Are you proposing that it affects mankind through the mind directly, rather than through... JK: Yes. It may not show immediately in action. DB: You said that the mind is universal, and is not located in our ordinary space, is not separate.... JK: Yes, but there is a danger in saying this, that the mind is universal. That is what some people say of the mind, and it has become a tradition. DB: One can turn it into an idea, of course. JK: That is just the danger of it; that is what I am saying. DB: Yes. But really the question is, we have to come directly in contact with this to make it real, Right? JK: That's it. We can only come into contact with it when the self is not. To put it very simply, when the self is not, there is beauty, silence, space; then that intelligence, which is born of compassion, operates through the brain. It is very simple. DB: Yes. Would it be worth discussing the self, since the self is widely active? JK: I know. That is our long tradition of many, many centuries. DB: Is there some aspect of meditation which can be helpful here when the self is acting? You see, suppose a person says, 'all right, I am caught in the self, but I want to get out. But I want to know what I shall do?' JK: No. DB: I won't use the words 'what shall I do?' But what do you say? JK: That is very simple. Is the observer different from the observed? DB: Well, suppose we say, 'Yes, it appears to be different; then what? JK: Is that an idea or an actuality? DB: What do you mean? JK: Actuality is when there is no division between the thinker and the thought. DB: But suppose I say, ordinarily one feels that the observer is different from the observed. We begin there. JK: We begin there. I'll show you. Look at it. Are you different from your anger, from your envy, from your suffering? You are not. DB: At first sight it appears that I am, that I might try to control it. JK: You are that. DB: Yes, but how will I see that I am that? JK: You are your name. You are your form, your body. You are the reactions and actions. You are the belief, the fear, the suffering and pleasure. You are all that. DB: But the first experience is that I am here first, and that those are properties of me; they are my qualities which I can either have or not have. I might be angry, or not angry, I might have this belief, or that belief. JK: Contradictory. You are all that. DB: But you see, it is not obvious. When you say I am that, do you mean that I am that, and cannot be otherwise? JK: No. At present you are that. It can be totally otherwise. DB: All right. So I am all that. You are telling me that this unbiased observer is the same as the anger he is looking at? JK: Of course. Just as I analyze myself, and the analyzer is the analyzed. DB: Yes. He is biased by what he analyzes. JK: Yes. DB: So, if I watch anger for a while, I can see that I am very biased by the anger, so at some stage I say that I am one with that anger? JK: No, not 'I am one with it; I am it. DB: That anger and I are the same? JK: Yes. The observer is the observed. And when that actuality exists you have really eliminated altogether conflict. Conflict exists when I am separate from my quality. DB: Yes, that is because if I believe myself to be separate, then I can try to change it, but since I am that, it is trying to change itself and remain itself at the same time. JK: Yes, that's right. But when the quality is me, the division has ended. Right? DB: When I see that the quality is me, then there is no point in trying to change. JK: No. When there is division and the quality is not me, in that there is conflict, either suppression or escape, and so on, which is a wastage of energy. When that quality is me, all that energy which has been wasted is there to look, to observe. DB: But why does it make such a difference to have that quality being me? JK: It makes a difference when there is no division between the quality and me. DB: Well then there is no perception of a difference.... JK: That's right. Put it round differently. DB: ...the mind does not try to fight itself. JK: Yes, yes. It is so. DB: If there is an illusion of a difference, the mind must be compelled to fight against itself. JK: The brain. DB: The brain fights against itself. JK: That's right. DB: On the other hand, when there is no illusion of a difference, the brain just stops fighting. JK: And therefore you have tremendous energy. DB: The brain's natural energy is released? JK: Yes. And energy means attention. DB: The energy of the brain allows for attention.... JK: For that thing to dissolve. DB: Yes, but wait a minute. We said before that attention was a contact of the mind and the brain. JK: Yes. DB: The brain must be in a state of high energy to allow that contact. JK: That's right. DB: I mean, a brain which is low energy cannot allow that contact. JK: Of course not. But most of us are low energy because we are so conditioned. DB: Well essentially you are saying that this is the way to start. JK: Yes, start simply. Start with 'what is,' what I am. Self- knowledge is so important. It is not an accumulated process of knowledge, which one then looks at; it is a constant learning about oneself. DB: If you call it self-knowledge, then it is not knowledge of the kind we talked about before, which is conditioning. JK: That's right. Knowledge conditions. DB: But you are saying that self-knowledge of this kind is not conditioning. But why do you call it knowledge? Is it a different kind of knowledge? JK: Yes. Knowledge conditions. DB: Yes, but now you have this self-knowledge. JK: Which is to know and to comprehend oneself. To understand oneself is such a subtle, complex thing. It is living. DB: Essentially knowing yourself in the very moment in which things are happening. JK: Yes, to know what is happening. DB: Rather than store it up in memory. JK: Of course. Through reactions, I begin to discover what I am. BROCKWOOD PARK 1ST CONVERSATION WITH PROF D BOHM 11TH JUNE 1983 THE FUTURE OF MANKIND J.Krishnamurti: I thought we were going to talk about the future of man. Dr.David Bohm: Yes. JK: I mean, really, when we talk about man, were are talking about humanity. DB: The whole of mankind. JK: The whole of mankind. Not the British or the French or the Russian or the American but the whole of human beings. DB: The future is all inter linked anyway. JK: As things are, from what one observes the world has become tremendously dangerous. DB: Yes. JK: Terrorists, wars, and the national divisions and racial divisions, some dictators who want to destroy the world and so on and so on. And also religiously there is tremendous separation. DB: Yes, I think there is the economic crisis and the ecological crisis. JK: Yes. Ecological and economic problems. Problems seem to multiplying more and more. So, what is the future of man? What is the future of not only the present generation but the coming generations? DB: Yes, well, the future looks very grim.. JK: Very grim. If you were quite young and I was quite young, what would we do knowing all this. What would be our reactions? What would be our life, our way of earning a livelihood and so on. DB: Yes, well, I have often thought of that. For example, I have asked myself," Would I go into science again?" JK: Yes. DB: And, I am not at all certain now because science does not seem to be relevant to this crisis. JK: No. No. No. On the contrary they are helping. DB: It makes it worse. Yes. JK: Yes, they are helping. DB: It might help but in fact it isn't. JK: So, what would you do? I think I would stick to what I am doing. DB: Well, that would be easy for you. JK: For me, quite easy. DB: But, several problems - of course I don't know if we want to discuss them - if a person is just starting out, he has to make a living, right? DB: But there are several problems. Of course I don't know the point of this discussion. If a person is just starting out he has to make a living - right? JK: Of course. DB: Now there are very few opportunities now, and most of these are in jobs which are very limited. JK: Limited and unemployment right throughout the world. I wonder what he would do, knowing that the future is grim, very depressing, dangerous and so uncertain. Where would you begin? DB: Yes, well I think one would have to stand back from all these particular problems of my own needs and the needs of other people around me. JK: Are you saying one should really forget oneself for the time being? DB: Yes. JK: Even if I did forget myself and when I look at this world in which I am going to live, and have some kind of career or a profession, and the unemployment. What would I do? This is a problem that I think most young people are facing. DB: Yes. That's clear. Well have you something that you would suggest? JK: Eh? DB: Is there something which you could suggest? JK: You see I don't think in terms of evolution. DB: Yes I understand that. That's the point I was expecting we would discuss. JK: Eh? DB: I was expecting we would discuss that. JK: Yes. I don't think there is psychological evolution at all. DB: Yes. Now we have discussed this quite often so I think I understand to some extent what you mean. But I think that people who are new to this, who are viewing this tape, are not going to understand. JK: Yes, we will discuss it. But I want to discuss this whole question, if you will: Why are we concerned about the future? Only the whole future is now. DB: Yes, in some sense the whole future is now but we have to make that clear. This goes very much against the whole way of thinking of the tradition of mankind and all of us. JK: Yes, I know. It goes - I know. Mankind thinks in terms of evolution, continuance and so on. DB: Maybe we could approach it in another way. That is, evolution seems in the present era to be the most natural way to think. So I would like to ask you what objections do you have to thinking in terms of evolution. Could I explain a point: this has many meanings, this word. JK: Of course, of course. We are talking psychologically. DB: Yes, now the first point is let's dispose of it physically. JK: I mean an acorn will grow into an oak. DB: Yes. Well also the species have evolved for example from the plants to the animals and to man. JK: Yes, we have taken a million years to be what we are. DB: You have no question that that has happened? JK: No, that has happened. DB: It may continue to happen. JK: That is evolution. DB: That is a valid process. JK: Of course. That is a valid natural process. DB: It takes place in time. And therefore in that region the past, present and future are important. JK: Yes obviously. I don't know a certain language, I need time to learn it. DB: Well also it takes time to improve the brain. You see if the brain started out small with this, and then it got bigger and bigger, that took a million years. JK: Yes, and becomes much more complex and so on. All that needs time. All that is movement in space and time. DB: Yes. So you will admit physical time and neurophysiological time. JK: Neurophysiological time, absolutely. Of course. Any sane man would. DB: Yes. Now most people also admit psychological time, what they call mental time. JK: Yes, that is what we are talking about. Whether there is such a thing as psychological tomorrow, psychological evolution. DB: Or yesterday. Yes, now at first sight I am afraid this will sound strange. It seems I can remember yesterday, and there is tomorrow, I can anticipate. And it has happened many times, you know days have succeeded each other. So I do have the experience of time, from yesterday to today to tomorrow - right? JK: Of course. That is simple enough. DB: That is simple enough. Now what is it you are denying? JK: I deny that I will be something, become better. DB: I can change... but now there are two ways of looking at that. You see one way is will I intentionally become better because I am trying? Or, secondly some people feel that evolution is a kind of natural, inevitable process, in which we are being swept along like in a current, and we are perhaps becoming better, worse, or something is happening to us. JK: Psychologically. DB: Psychologically, yes, which takes time which may not be the result of my trying to become better. It may or may not be. Some people may think one way, some another. But are you denying also that there is a kind of natural psychological evolution as there was a natural biological evolution? JK: I am denying that, yes. DB: Yes. Now why do you deny it? JK: Because first of all, what is the psyche? DB: Yes. JK: The me, the ego, and so on, what is it? DB: Yes, now the word psyche has many meanings. It may mean the mind for example. Now do you mean by that the ego is the same thing? JK: The ego. I am talking of the ego, the me. DB: Yes. Now some people who are thinking of evolution are thinking there will be an evolution in which the me is transcended. That is that it will rise to a higher level. JK: Yes, will the transition - does transition need time? DB: A transcendence, a transition. JK: Yes. That is my whole question. DB: Yes. So there are two questions: one is will the me ever improve? That is one argument. And another argument, is even if we suppose we want to get beyond the me, can that be done in time? JK: That cannot be done in time. DB: Yes now we have to make it clear why not. JK: Yes. I will. We will go into it. What is the me? If the psyche has such different meanings, the me is the whole movement which thought has brought about. DB: Now why do you say that? That... JK: The me is the consciousness, my consciousness, the me is my name, form and all the various experiences that I have had, remembrances and so on. The whole structure of the me is put together by thought. DB: Yes, well that again would be something which some people might find it had to accept. JK: Of course, of course. We are discussing it. DB: Yes but I mean also to try to bring it out. Now the first experience, the first feeling I have about the me is that the me is there independently and that the me is thinking. JK: Is the me independent of my thinking? DB: Well my own first feeling is that the me is there independent of my thinking, and is the me that is thinking, you see. JK: Yes, yes. DB: Like I am here and I could move, I could move my arm, I could think, or I could move my head. JK: Yes, yes. DB: Now is that an illusion? JK: No. DB: Why? JK: Because the me - when I move my arm there is the intention to grasp something, to take something, to put something, which is also first it is the movement of thought, and that makes the arm move and so on. My contention is - and I am ready to accept it as false or true - that thought is the basis of all this. DB: Yes. Your contention is that the whole sense of the me and what it is doing is coming out of thought. Now what you mean by thought though is not merely intellectual? JK: No, no, of course not. DB: But what more, you see? JK: Thought is the movement of experience, knowledge, memory and thought. It is this whole movement. DB: It sounds to me as if you mean the consciousness as a whole. JK: As a whole, that's right. DB: And you are saying that that movement is the me - right? JK: The whole content of that consciousness is the me. DB: Yes, well there are quite a few... JK: That me is not different from my consciousness. DB: Yes. Well someone might feel - well I think one could say that I am my consciousness for if I am not conscious I am not here. JK: Of course. DB: Now is consciousness nothing but say what you have just described, which includes thought, feeling, intention... JK:...intention, aspirations... DB:...memories... JK:...memories, beliefs, dogmas, the rituals that are performed, the whole, like the computer that has been programmed. DB: Yes. Now that certainly is in consciousness. Everybody would agree but some people would feel, or many people would feel that there is more to it than that. That consciousness may go beyond that. JK: Let's go into it. Let's go into it. DB: Yes. JK: The content of our consciousness makes up the consciousness, the content. DB: Yes, I think that requires some understanding. The ordinary use of the word content is quite different. If you say that the content of a glass is water - right? JK: Yes. DB: So the glass is one thing and the water is another. JK: No. DB: The glass contains the water, otherwise the word content would suggest that something contains it - right? JK: All right. Consciousness is made up of all what is has remembered, beliefs, dogmas, rituals, the nationalities, fears, pleasures, sorrow. DB: Yes, now if all that were absent would there be no consciousness? JK: Not as we know it. DB: But there would still be a kind of consciousness? JK: A totally different kind. DB: Well then I think you really mean to say that consciousness, as we know it, is made up... JK: I said that. DB: Oh, yes. JK: Consciousness as we know it is all that. DB: As we generally know it. JK: Yes. And that is the result of multiple activities of thought. Thought has put all this together, which is my consciousness - the reactions, the responses, the memories, the remembrances, extraordinary complex intricacies, subtleties, all that is the - makes up consciousness. DB: As we know it. JK: We said that. DB: Yes. JK: As we know it. DB: Yes. Now... JK: Is - whether that consciousness has a future. DB: Yes. Does it has a past? JK: Of course. Remembrance. DB: Remembrance, yes. Why do you say it has no future then? JK: If it has a future it will be exactly the same kind of thing, moving. The same activities, same thoughts, modified but the pattern will be repeated over and over again. DB: Yes. Are you saying that thought can only repeat? JK: Yes. DB: But there is a feeling that thought can develop new ideas for example. JK: But thought being limited because knowledge is limited, if you admit that knowledge will always be limited. DB: Well yes, that again might require some discussion. JK: Of course, we must discuss it. DB: Now why do you say knowledge is always limited? JK: Because you as a scientist, you are experimenting, adding, searching, so you are adding, and after you some other person will add more. So knowledge, which is born of experience, is limited. DB: Yes, well some people have said it isn't. They would hope to obtain perfect knowledge, or absolute knowledge of the laws of nature. JK: The laws of nature is not the laws of human being. DB: Well do you want to restrict the discussion then to knowledge about the human being? JK: Of course, that's all we can talk about. DB: Even there there is the question of whether that knowledge of nature is possible too. JK: Of course. We are talking about the future of man. DB: All right. So we are saying that man cannot obtain unlimited knowledge of the psyche? Is that what you are saying? JK: Yes, that's right. DB: There is always more that is unknown. JK: Yes, that's right. There is always more and more unknown. So if once we admit that knowledge is limited then thought is limited. DB: Yes, knowledge - thought depends on knowledge and the knowledge does not cover everything. JK: That's right. DB: Therefore thought will not be able to handle everything that happens. JK: That's right. That is what the politicians and all the other people are doing. They think thought can solve every problem. DB: Yes. You can see in the case of politicians that knowledge is very limited, in fact it is almost non-existent! But, therefore when you lack the adequate knowledge of what you are dealing with you create confusion. JK: Yes. So then as thought is limited our consciousness, which has been put together by thought, is limited. DB: Yes. Now why does that mean we - can you make that clear? That means we can only stay in the same circle. JK: The same circle. DB: You see one of the ideas might be, if you compare with science, that people might think although my knowledge is limited I am constantly discovering. JK: But what you discover is added to, but is still limited. DB: It is still limited. That's the point. I can keep on - I think one of the ideas behind a scientific approach is that though knowledge is limited I can discover and keep up with the actuality. JK: But that is also limited. DB: My discoveries are limited. And there is always the unknown which I have not discovered. JK: That is what I am saying. The unknown, the limitless, cannot be captured by thought. DB: Yes. JK: Because thought in itself is limited. If you and I agree to that, not only agree but it is a fact. DB: Yes, well perhaps we could bring it out still more. That is thought is limited even though we verbally - one may easily verbally admit thought is not limited, there is a very strong predisposition, feeling, tendency, to feel that way, that thought can do anything. JK: Anything. It can't. See what it has done in the world. DB: Well I agree that is has done some terrible things but that doesn't prove that it is always wrong. You see maybe you could always blame it on the people who have used it wrongly, you see. JK: I know, that is a good old trick! But thought in itself is limited, therefore whatever it does is limited. DB: Yes, and it is limited in a very serious way is what you are saying. JK: That's right. Of course in a very, very serious way. DB: Well could we bring that out, say what that way is I mean? JK: That way is what is happening in the world. DB: All right, let's look at that. JK: The totalitarian ideals, it is the invention of thought. DB: Yes, well we could say that the people - the very word totalitarian, means they wanted to cover the totality but they couldn't. JK: They couldn't. DB: They couldn't, the thing collapsed. JK: It is collapsing. DB: Collapsing. But then there are those who say they are not totalitarians. JK: But the democrats and all the rest of it, the republicans and the democrats, and the idealists and so on, all their thinking is limited. DB: Yes, but it is limited in a way that is... JK:...very destructive. DB:...that is very serious and destructive. Now in what way -could we bring that out? You see I could say, "OK my thought is limited but well it may not be all that serious". You see why is it so important? JK: That is fairly simple: because whatever action is born of limited thought must breed conflict, inevitably. DB: Yes. JK: Like dividing humanity into geographically - into nationalities and so on and so on and so on, religiously, has created havoc in the world. DB: Yes, no let's connect that with the limitation of thought. That is my knowledge is limited - right? JK: We said that. DB: Now how does that lead me to divide the world into... JK: Aren't we seeking security? DB: Yes. JK: And we thought there was security in the family, security in the tribe, security in nationalism. So we thought there is security in division. DB: Yes. That seems now it has come out - take the tribe for example, say one may feel insecure because one then says, "With the tribe I am secure." That is a conclusion. And I think I know enough to be sure that is so but I don't. Other things happen that I don't know which make that very insecure. Other tribes come along. JK: No, no, the very division creates insecurity. DB: Yes it helps to create it but I am trying to say that I don't know enough to know that - right? I don't see that. JK: But one doesn't see it because one has not thought about anything, looked at the world as a whole. DB: Yes, well the thought which attempts to, you see the thought which aims at security attempts to know everything important. As soon as it knows everything important it says, "This will bring security" - not only there are a lot of things it doesn't know but one thing it doesn't know is that this very thought itself is divisive. JK: Divisive, yes. DB: Divisive. It's going to, because I define an area which is secure, divided from another area. JK: Because in itself it is limited. Anything that is limited must inevitably create conflict. DB: Well you mean any thought that is... JK: If I say I am an individual, it is limited. DB: Yes. JK: I am concerned with myself, that is very limited. DB: Yes, we have to get this clear. You see if I say this is a table which is limited, it creates no conflict - right? JK: No, there is no conflict there. DB: Now when I say this is me that creates conflict. JK: The me is a divisive entity. DB: Let's see more clearly why. JK: Because it is separative, it is concerned with itself. The me identifying with the greater nation, is still divisive. DB: Yes, well I define myself in the interest of security so that I know what I am as opposed to what you are and I protect myself -right? Now this creates a division between me and you. JK: We and they and so on. DB: We and they. Now that comes from my limited thought because I don't understand that we are really closely related and connected. JK: We are human beings. DB: Yes we are all human beings. JK: All human beings have more or less the same problems. DB: No, I haven't understood that. My knowledge is limited, I think that we can make a distinction and protect ourselves and me and not the others. JK: Yes, that's right. DB: But in the very act of doing that I create instability. JK: That's right. You create... DB:...insecurity. JK: Insecurity. So if we see that, not merely intellectually, or verbally, but actually feel it, that we are the rest of humanity, then the responsibility becomes immense. DB: Yes, well how can you do anything about that responsibility? JK: Then I either contribute to the whole mess, or keep out of it. That is not to be - to be at peace, to have order in oneself. I will come to that. I am going too fast. DB: You see - now let's come - well I think we have touched upon an important point. We say the whole of humanity, of mankind, is one, and therefore to create division there is... JK:...is dangerous. DB: Yes. Whereas to create division between me and the table is not dangerous because in some sense we are not one. JK: Me and the tree - of course. DB: That is only in some very general sense that we are at one. Now mankind doesn't realize that it is all one. JK: Why? Why? DB: Well let's go into that. This is a crucial point. It is clear it doesn't because there are so many divisions and not only nations and religions but from one person to another. JK: No. Why is there this division? DB: Well the first is, at least in the modern era, that every human being is an individual. This may not have been so strong in the past. JK: That is what I question. I question altogether whether we are individuals. DB: Yes, well that is a big question because... JK: Of course. We said just now the consciousness which is me is similar to the rest of mankind. They all suffer, they all have fears, they are all insecure, they have their own particular gods and rituals, all put together by thought. DB: Yes, well I think this calls for some - you know, it is - there are two questions here. One is, not everybody feels that he is similar - most people feel they have some unique distinction, at least they... JK: What do you mean "unique distinction"? Distinction in doing something? DB: Well there may be many things. For example one nation may feel that it is able to do certain things better than another, one person has some special things he does, a quality, or... JK: Of course. You have better - you are more intellectual than I am. Somebody else is better in this or that. DB: He may take pride in his own special abilities, or advantages. JK: But when you put away that basically we are the same. DB: We have to say what is it then - you are saying these things which you have just described which are... JK:...superficial. DB: Yes. Well now the things that are basic are what? JK: Is fear, sorrow, pain, anxiety, loneliness, and all the human travail. DB: Yes well many people might feel that the basic things are the highest achievements of man. JK: The? DB: The highest achievements of mankind are not these. JK: What has he achieved? DB: Well let's discuss it. JK: Yes, yes. DB: I mean many people - well I understand, we have discussed this often but I think we must bring it out. JK: Yes Sir, let's go into it. DB: Now the... JK: What have we achieved? DB: Well for one thing people may feel proud of the achievement of man in science and art and culture and technology. JK: We have achieved in all those directions, certainly we have. DB: Yes. JK: Vast technology, communication, travel, medicines, surgery... DB: Yes. JK:...have advanced tremendously. DB: Yes, I mean it is really remarkable in many ways. JK: There is no question about it. DB: Yes. Now you are saying... JK: What have we psychologically achieved? DB: One point is to say none of this has affected us psychologically. JK: Yes, that's right. DB: And the psychological question is more important than any of the others because if the psychological question is not cleared up the rest is dangerous. JK: Yes. Quite right. If we psychologically are limited, then whatever we do will be limited, and the technology will then be used by our limited... DB:...yes, the master is this limited psyche and not the rational structure of technology. JK: Sane, rational. DB: And in fact technology then becomes a dangerous... JK:...instrument. DB:...instrument. Now, so that is one point that the psyche is at the core of it all, and if the psyche is not in order then the rest is useless. JK: If the house is in order... DB: Then the second question is: although we are saying there are certain basic disorders in the psyche, or lack of order which is common to us all, we may all have a potential for something else, but the second point is are we all one really, you see? Even though we are all similar that doesn't say we are all the same, we are all one. JK: We said in our consciousness basically we all have the same ground on which we stand. DB: Yes. Well, you see from the fact let's say the human body is similar it doesn't prove they are all the same. JK: Of course not. Your body is different from mine. DB: Yes we are in different places, different entities and so on. But I think you are trying to say that the consciousness is not an entity which is individual... JK: That's right. DB:...the body is an entity which has a certain individuality. JK: That all seems so clear. DB: It may be clear. But I think... JK: Your body is different from mine. I have a different name than you. DB: Yes, well we are different - though similar material it is different, we can't exchange because the proteins in one body may not agree with those in the other. Now many people feel that way about the mind, saying that there is a chemistry between people which may agree or disagree. JK: Yes but actually if you go deeper into the question. Consciousness is shared by all human beings. It may... DB: Yes. Now the feeling is that the consciousness is individual and that it is communicated as it were... JK: I think that is an illusion because we are sticking to something that is not true. DB: Yes, well do you want to say that there is one consciousness of mankind? JK: It is all one. DB: It is all one. That is important because whether it is many or one is a crucial question. JK: Yes, yes. DB: Now it could be many which are then communicating and building up the larger unit. Or you think from the very beginning it is all one? JK: From the very beginning it is all one. DB: And the sense of separateness is an illusion - right? JK: That is what I am saying over and over again. That seems so logical, sane. The other is insanity. DB: Yes, now people don't feel, at least one doesn't immediately feel that the notion of separate existence is insane because one extrapolates from the body to the mind, one says it is quite sensible to say my body is separate from yours, and inside my body is my mind. Now are you saying the mind is not inside the body? JK: That is quite a different question. Now just a minute. Let's finish with the other first. If each one of us thinks that we are separate individuals psychically, we have done - what we have done in the world is a colossal mess. DB: Well if we think we are separate when we are not separate then it will clearly be a colossal mess. JK: That is what is happening. Each one thinks he has to do what he wants to do, fulfil himself. So he is struggling in his separateness to achieve peace, to achieve security, which that security and that peace is totally denied. DB: Well the reason it is denied is because there is no separation. You see if there were really separation it would be a rational thing to try to do. JK: Actual. DB: But if we are trying to separate what is inseparable the result will be chaos. JK: That's right. That's right. DB: Now that is clear but I think that it will not be clear to people immediately that the consciousness of mankind is one inseparable whole. JK: Yes Sir, inseparable whole. absolutely right. DB: Many questions will arise if you once even consider the notion, but I don't know if we have gone far enough into this yet. One question is why do we think we are separate? JK: Why? Why do I think I am separate? That is my conditioning. DB: Yes but how did we ever adopt such a foolish conditioning? JK: From childhood it is mine, my toy, not yours. DB: Yes but the first feeling you get is I say it is mine because I feel I am separate. Now it isn't clear how the mind which was one came to this illusion that it is all broken up into many pieces. JK: I think it is again the activity of thought. Thought in its very nature thought is divisive, fragmentary and therefore I am a fragment. DB: Yes well thought will create a sense of fragments. You could see for example that once we decide to set up a nation we will be separate, think we are separate from the other nation and all sorts of things, consequences follow which make the whole thing seem independently real. You have all sorts of separate language and a separate flag and a separate this and you set up a boundary. And after a while you see so much evidence of separation that you forget how it started and you say that was there always and we are merely proceeding from what was there always. JK: Of course. That's why, Sir, I feel if once we grasp the nature of thought, the structure of thought, how thought operates, what is the source of thought, and therefore it is always limited, if we really see that then... DB: Now the source of thought is what? Is it memory? JK: Memory. Memory is the remembrance of things past, which is knowledge and knowledge is the outcome of experience and experience is always limited. DB: Yes well thought includes, of course, also the attempt to go forward, to use logic, to take into account discoveries and insights, you know. JK: As we were saying some time ago, thought is time. DB: Yes. All right. Thought is time. That requires more discussion too, because you see the first experience is to say time is there first, and thought is taking place in time. JK: Ah, no. DB: For example if we say that movement is taking place, the body is moving, and this requires time. JK: To go from here to there needs time. DB: Yes, yes. JK: To learn a language needs time. DB: Yes. To grow a plant needs time. JK: You know, the whole thing. To paint a picture takes time. DB: We also say to think takes time. JK: So we think in terms of time. DB: Yes. You see the first point that one would tend to look at is to say just as everything takes time, to think takes time - right? Are you saying something else, which is thought is time. JK: Thought is time. DB: That is psychically speaking, psychologically speaking. JK: Psychologically, of course. DB: Now how do we understand that? JK: How do we understand what? DB: Thought is time. You see it is not obvious. JK: Oh yes. Would you say thought is movement and time is movement. DB: That's movement. Now these are... you see time is a mysterious thing, people have argued about it. We could say that time requires movement. I could understand that we cannot have time without movement. JK: Time is movement. DB: Time is movement. Now... JK: Time is not separate from movement. DB: Now I don't say it is separate from movement, but you see to say time is movement, you see if we said time and movement are one. JK: Yes we are saying that. DB: Yes. They cannot be separated - right? JK: No. DB: Because that seems fairly clear. Now there is physical movement which means physical time - right? JK: Physical time, hot and cold, and also dark and light... DB:...the seasons... JK:...sunset and sunrise. All that. DB: Yes. Now then we have the movement of thought. Now that brings in the question of the nature of thought. You see is thought nothing but a movement in the nervous system, in the brain? Would you say that? JK: Yes, yes. DB: Some people have said it includes the movement of the nervous system but there might be something beyond. JK: What is time, Sir, actually? Actually, what is time? Time is hope. DB: Psychologically. JK: Psychologically. I am talking entirely psychologically for the moment. DB: But one tends to keep on thinking... JK: Of course. We have understood that. Time - I mean hope is time. Becoming is time. Achieving is time. Now take the question of becoming: I want to become something, psychologically. I want to become non-violent, take that for example. That is altogether a fallacy. DB: Yes, well we understand it is a fallacy but the reason it is a fallacy is that there is no time of that kind, is that it? JK: No. No Sir. Human beings are violent. DB: Yes. JK: And they have been talking a great deal, Tolstoy in India, of non-violence. The fact is we are violent. DB: Yes, but... JK: Wait a minute, let me. And the non-violence is not real. But we want to become that. DB: Yes but you see it is again an extension of the kind of thought that we have with regard to material things. You see if you see a desert, the desert is real and you say the garden is not real, but in your mind is the garden which will come when you put the water there. So we say we can plan for the future when the desert will become fertile. Now we have to be careful, we say we are violent but we cannot by similar planning become non-violent. JK: No. DB: Now why is that? JK: Why? Because the non-violent state cannot exist when there is violence. DB: Yes. JK: That's an ideal. DB: Well one has to make it more clear because in the same sense the fertile state and the desert don't exist together either. You see I think that you are saying that in the case of the mind when you are violent it has no meaning. JK: That is the only state. DB: That is all there is. JK: Yes, not the other. DB: The movement towards the other is illusory. JK: Illusory. DB: Yes. JK: So all ideals are illusory, psychologically. The ideal of building a marvellous bridge is not illusory. DB: No that... JK: You can plan it but to have psychological ideals... DB: Yes, if you are violent and you continue to be violent while you are trying to be non-violent... JK:...it is so obvious... DB:...it has no meaning. JK: No meaning and yet that has become such an important thing. So the becoming, which is either becoming 'what is' or becoming away from 'what is'. DB: 'What should be', yes. JK: I question both. DB: Yes, well if you say there can be no sense to becoming in the way of self-improvement, that's... JK: Oh, self-improvement is something so utterly ugly. So we are saying, Sir, that the source of all this is a movement of thought as time. When once we made time psychologically all the other ideals, non-violence, achieving some super state and so on and so on become utterly illusory. DB: Yes. Now when you talk of the movement of thought as time, it seems to me that to say that that movement of thought, that time which comes from the movement of thought is illusory, is it? JK: Yes. DB: We sense it as time but it is not a real kind of time. JK: That is why we asked: what is time? DB: Yes. JK: I need time to go from here to there. I need time if I want to learn some engineering, I must study it, it takes time. That same movement is carried over into the psyche. We say I need time to be good. I need time to be enlightened. DB: Yes, that will always create a conflict. JK: Yes. DB: One part of you and another. So that movement in which you say I need time also creates a division in the psyche. JK: Yes, that's right. DB: Say between the observer and the observed. JK: Yes, that's right. We are saying the observer is the observed. DB: And therefore there is no time. JK: That's right. DB: Psychologically. JK: The experience, the thinker, is the thought. There is no thinker separate from thought. DB: All that you are saying, you know, seems very reasonable, but I think that it goes so strongly against the tradition that we are used to... JK: Of course, of course. DB:...that it will be extraordinarily hard for people to really, generally speaking, to... JK: No, most people Sir don't want - they want a comfortable way of living: "Let me carry on as I am, for God's sake leave me alone." DB: Yes but that is the result of so much conflict... JK: So much conflict. DB:...that people are warned off by it I think. JK: But in escaping from conflict, or not resolving conflict, conflict exists, whether you like it or not. So is it, that is the whole point, is it possible to live a life without conflict? DB: Yes, well that is all implicit in what has been said. JK: That's right. DB: The source of conflict is thought or knowledge, or the past. JK: So then one asks: is it possible to transcend thought? DB: Yes. JK: Or is it possible to end knowledge? I am putting it psychologically not... DB: Yes. We say knowledge of objects and material objects and things like that, knowledge of science, will continue. JK: Absolutely. That must continue. DB: But what you call self-knowledge is what you are asking to end, isn't it? JK: Yes. DB: Well on the other hand people have said, even you have said, self-knowledge is very important. JK: Self-knowledge is important but if I take time to understand myself, that is, I will understand myself eventually by examination, analysis and so on and so on and so on, watching my whole relationship with others and so, all that involves time. DB: Yes, well... JK: And I say there is another way of looking at the whole thing without time. Which is, when the observer is the observed. DB: Yes. JK: In that observation there is no time. DB: Could we go into that further? I mean for example if you say there is no time but still you feel that you can remember an hour ago you were someone else. JK: Of course, that would be crazy. DB: Now in what sense can we make it that there is no time? JK: Time is division - right? As thought is division. That is why thought is time. DB: Time is a series of divisions of past, present, future. JK: Thought is also that divisive. So time is thought. Or thought is time. DB: Yes, well I mean it doesn't exactly follow from what you said. I mean we have explained it. JK: Let's go into it. DB: Yes. You see at first sight one would think that thought makes divisions of all kinds, with the ruler and with all kinds of things, and also divides up intervals of time, past, present and future. Now it doesn't follow from just that that thought is time. You see... JK: Look, we said time is movement. DB: Yes. JK: Thought is also a series of movements. DB: Yes, all right. JK: So both are movements. DB: Thought is a movement, right, movement, we suppose, of the nervous system and... JK: You see it is a movement of becoming. I am speaking psychologically, not... DB: Psychologically. But I mean whenever you think something is also moving in the blood, in the nerves and so on. Right. Now when we talk of a psychological movement, do you mean just a change of content? JK: Change of content? DB: Well what is the movement? You see what is moving? JK: Sir, look: I am this, and I am attempting to become something else psychologically. DB: So that movement is in the content of your thought, do you see. JK: Yes. DB: So if you say I am this and I am attempting to become that, then I am in movement - right? JK: Yes. DB: At least I feel I am in movement. JK: Yes. No, but I am, say for instance I am greedy. Greed is a movement. DB: What kind of a movement is it? JK: To get what I want. DB: To get more, yes. JK: To get more, more. It is a movement. DB: All right. JK: And I find that movement painful, suppose. And I try not to be greedy. DB: Yes. JK: The attempt not to be greedy is a movement of time, is becoming. DB: Yes but even the greed was becoming. JK: Of course. So is it possible, that is the real question, is it possible not to become? Psychologically. DB: Well it seems that that would require that you should not be anything psychologically. That is, as soon as you define yourself in any way then... JK: No, we will define it in a minute or two. DB: I meant if I define myself as greedy, or say I am greedy or I am this, or I am that, then either I will want to become something else or to remain what I am - right? JK: Now can I remain what I am? Can I remain not with non-greed but with greed. And greed is not different from me, greed is me. DB: Yes. That will require - the ordinary way of thinking is that I am here and I could either be greedy or not greedy. JK: Of course. DB: As these are attributes which I may or may not have. Now... JK: But the attributes are me. DB: Yes. Now that again goes very much against our common language and experience. JK: Of course Sir. DB: But instead of saying that I am my attributes which suggests that the thought of attribution creates the me, right? The sense of me. You see... JK: All the qualities, the attributes, the virtues, the judgements, the conclusions and opinions, is me. DB: Well it seems to me that this would have to be perceived immediately as obvious. JK: That is the whole question. To perceive the totality of this whole movement instantly. Then we come to the point, perception: whether it is possible to perceive - it sounds a little odd, and perhaps a little crazy, but it is not, is it possible to perceive without all the movement of memory? To perceive something directly without the word, without the reaction, without the memories entering into perception. DB: Yes, well that is a very big question because memory has constantly entered perception. JK: Of course. That is the whole... DB: You see it would raise the question of what is going to stop memory from entering perception? JK: Nothing can stop it. But if I see the reason, the rationality of the activity of memory which is limited, the very perception that it is limited, you have moved out of it into another dimension. DB: Well it seems to me that you have to perceive the whole of the limitation of memory. JK: Yes, not one part. DB: You can see in general that memory is limited but there are many ways in which this is not obvious. For example many of our reactions that are not obvious may be memory but we don't experience them as memory, you see. Like you say I experience me as being there presently and not memory. That is the common experience. Say, suppose I say I am becoming. I want to become less greedy, so I experience greed and I experience the urge to become as an actual... JK:...actuality. DB:...actuality, it may be the result of memory but I say I can remember that I am greedy but this me is the one who remembers, not the other way around, that memory creates me - right? JK: Sir, all this really comes down to: can man live, humanity live without conflict? That really basically comes to that. Can we have peace on this earth? DB: Yes, well... go on. JK: And the activities of thought never bring it about. DB: Yes, well it seems clear from what has been said that the activity of thought cannot bring about peace, it is inherently, psychologically it inherently brings about conflict. JK: Yes, if we once really see or (?) that, our whole activity would be totally different. DB: But are you saying there is an activity which is not thought then? JK: Which is not? DB: Which is beyond thought? JK: Yes. DB: And which is not only beyond thought but which does not require the cooperation of thought? JK: Certainly not. DB: That it is possible for this to go when thought is absent? JK: That is the real point. We have often discussed this, whether there is anything beyond thought. Not something holy, sacred - I am not talking of that. I am talking: is there an activity which is not touched by thought? We are saying there is. And that activity is the highest form of intelligence. DB: Yes, now we have brought in intelligence. JK: I know, I purposively brought it in! So intelligence is not the activity of cunning thought. There is intelligence to build a table. DB: Yes well intelligence can use thought, as you have often said. JK: Intelligence can use thought. DB: Yes, that is thought can be the action of intelligence -would you put it that way? JK: Yes. DB: Or it could be the action of memory? JK: That's it. Either it is the action born of memory and therefore memory is limited, therefore thought is limited and it has its own activity which then brings about conflict. DB: I think this would connect up with what people are saying about computers. You see every computer must eventually depend on some kind of memory, on memory, which is put in, or... JK:...programmed... DB:...programmed. And that must be limited - right? JK: Of course. DB: Because the - therefore when we operate from memory we are not very different from a computer; the other way around perhaps, the computer is not very different from us. JK: I would say once a Hindu has been programmed for the last five thousand years to be a Hindu, or in this country you have been programmed as British, or as a Catholic or as a Protestant. So we are all programmed up to a certain extent. DB: Yes, now then we could say there - you are bringing in the notion of an intelligence which is free of the programme, it is creative perhaps and... JK: Yes, that's right. That intelligence has nothing to do with memory and knowledge. DB: Yes. It may act in memory and knowledge but it is has nothing to do with it... JK: Yes it can act through memory, etc. That's right. I mean how do you find out whether it has any reality, not just imagination and romantic nonsense, how do you find out? To come to that one has to go into the whole question of suffering, whether there is an ending to suffering, and as long as suffering and fear and the pursuit of pleasure exists there cannot be love. DB: Yes, well there are many questions there. Now the first point is say suffering, or including pleasure, fear, suffering and I suppose we could include anger and violence and greed in that. JK: Of course, otherwise... DB: We could say first of all that all those are the response of memory. JK: Yes. DB: They are nothing to do with intelligence. JK: They are all part of thought and memory. DB: And as long as they are going on it seems to me that intelligence cannot operate in thought. JK: That's right. DB: Through thought. JK: So there must be freedom from suffering. DB: Yes, well that is a very key point. Now... JK: That is really a very serious and deep question. Whether it is possible to end suffering, which is the ending of me. DB: Yes again, it may seem repetitious but the feeling is that I am there and I either suffer or don't suffer. I either enjoy things or suffer. JK: Yes I know that. DB: Now I think you are saying that suffering arises from thought, it is thought. JK: Identified. DB: Yes. And that... JK: Attachment. DB: So what is it that suffers? You see there is this feeling - it is really the opposite of the feeling of pleasure, it seems to me, that whatever pleasure, memory may produce pleasure and then when it doesn't work it produces - and when it is suppressed it produces pain and suffering. JK: Not only that. Suffering is much more complex, isn't it? DB: Yes. JK: Suffering - what is suffering? DB: Yes, that is... JK: The meaning of the word is to have pain, to have grief, to feel utterly lost, lonely. DB: Well it seems to me that it is not only pain but a kind of a total pain, a very pervasive... JK: But suffering is the loss of someone. DB: Or the loss of something very important. JK: Yes, of course. Loss of my wife, or loss of my son, brother, or whatever it is, and the desperate sense of loneliness. DB: Or else just simply the fact that the whole world is going into such a state. JK: Of course Sir. I mean all the wars. DB: It makes everything meaningless you see. JK: What a lot of suffering the Falkland wars have created. DB: Well all these wars. JK: And wars have been going on for thousands of years. That is why I am saying we are carrying on with the same pattern of the last five thousands years or more, of wars. DB: Yes now one can easily see that the violence and hatred in wars will interfere with intelligence. JK: Obviously. DB: Now it is not quite so obvious, I think, you see some people have felt that by going through suffering people become... JK:...intelligent?.. DB:...purified, like going through the crucible - right? JK: I know. That through suffering you learn. DB: Or you are purified in some way. JK: You are purified. This is through suffering your ego is vanished, dissolved. DB: Yes dissolved, refined. JK: It doesn't. People have suffered immensely. How many wars, how many tears and the destructive nature of governments? JK: Multiply them - unemployment, ignorance... DB:...ignorance of disease, pain, everything. But you see what is suffering really? Why does it destroy intelligence, or prevent it? Why does suffering prevent intelligence? What is going on really? JK: Suffering is only concerned - is a shock, is - I suffer, I have pain, it is the essence of the me. DB: Yes the difficulty with suffering is that it is the me that is there that is suffering. JK: Yes. DB: And this me is really being sorry for itself in some way. JK: My suffering is different from your suffering. DB: It isolates itself, yes. JK: Yes. DB: It creates an illusion of some kind. JK: We don't see suffering is shared by all humanity. DB: Yes, but suppose we see it is shared by all humanity? JK: Then I begin to question what suffering is. It is not my suffering. DB: Yes, well that is important. In order to understand the nature of suffering I have to get out of this idea that it is my suffering because as long as I believe it is my suffering I have an illusory notion of the whole thing. JK: And I can never end it. DB: If you are dealing with an illusion you can do nothing with it. You see why - we have to come back. Why is suffering the suffering of many? At first it seems that I feel pain in the tooth, or else I have a loss, or something has happened to me, and the other person seems perfectly happy. JK: Happy, yes. But also he is suffering too in his own way. DB: Yes. At the moment he doesn't see it but he has his problems too. JK: Suffering is common to all humanity. DB: Yes but the fact that it is common is not enough to make it all one. JK: It is actual. DB: Yes, but I want to - are you saying that the suffering of mankind is all one, inseparable? JK: Yes Sir. That is what I have been saying. DB: As is the consciousness of man? JK: Yes, that's right. DB: That when anybody suffers the whole of mankind is suffering. JK: If one country kills hundreds and thousands of human beings - no, the whole point is we have suffered from the beginning of time we have suffered, and we haven't solved it. DB: No, it is clear that it hasn't been solved. We haven't solved it. JK: We haven't ended suffering. DB: But I think you have said something, and the thing you said is that the reason we haven't solved it because we are treating it as personal or as in a small group where it cannot - that is an illusion. JK: Yes. DB: Now any attempt to deal with an illusion cannot solve anything. Now the - we would like to make it very clear... JK: Thought cannot solve anything psychologically. DB: Well yes because you can say that the thought itself divides. Thought is limited and is not able to see that this suffering is all one - right? And that way divides it up as mine and yours. JK: That's right. DB: And that creates illusion which can only multiply suffering. Now it seems to me that the statement that suffering of mankind is one, is inseparable from the statement that consciousness of mankind is one. JK: We said that. Suffering is part of our consciousness. DB: But one doesn't get the feeling immediately that this suffering belongs to the whole of mankind, you see. JK: Sir, the world is me, I am the world. DB: You have often said that. JK: Yes. But we have divided it up into the British earth and the French earth and all the rest of it. DB: Do you mean by the world, the physical world, or the world of society, or? JK: The world of society, the world - the psychological world primarily, chiefly. DB: So we say the world of society, of human beings, is one and when I say I am that world, what does it mean? JK: The world is not different from me. DB: The world and I are one - right? We are inseparable. JK: Yes. And that requires - that is real meditation, you must feel this, not just verbal statement, it is an actuality. I am my brother's keeper. DB: Yes, now many religions have said that. JK: That is just a verbal statement and they don't keep it, they don't do it in their hearts. DB: Perhaps some have done it but in general it is not being done - right? I mean there may have been a few. JK: I don't know if anybody has done it - we human beings haven't done it. Our religions actually have prevented it. DB: Because of division, every religion has its own beliefs and its own organization? JK: Of course. Its own gods and its own saviours. DB: Yes. JK: So from that, is that intelligence actual? You understand my question? Or is it some kind of fanciful projection, hoping that it will solve our problems? It is not to me. It is an actuality. Because the ending of suffering means love. DB: Yes now before we go on, let's clear up a point about me. You see you said it is not to me. Now in some sense it seems that you are still defining an individual - is that right? JK: Yes, yes. When I say I am really - I am using the word "I" as a means of communication. DB: Yes but what does it mean? You see in some way let's say there may be two people, let's say 'A' who is the way you see and 'B' who is not, eh? JK: Yes. DB: So 'A' says it is not - that seems to create a division between 'A' and 'B'. JK: That's right. But 'B' creates the division. DB: Why? JK: So what is the relationship between the two? DB: Yes. You see 'B' is creating - yes well 'B' is creating the division by saying, "I am a separate person" but it may confuse 'B' further when 'A' says "It's not that way to me" - right? JK: Yes. Sir, that is the whole point, isn't it, in relationship. You feel that you are not separate and that you really have this sense of love and compassion, and I haven't got it. I haven't even perceived or gone into this question. What is your relationship to me? DB: Yes, well... JK: That's what I am saying: your relationship to me - you have a relationship with me but I haven't any relationship with you. DB: Yes, well I think one could say that the person who hasn't seen is almost living a world of dreams psychologically and therefore the world of dreams is not related to the world of being awake. JK: That's right. DB: But the fellow who is awake can at least perhaps awaken the other fellow. JK: You are awake, I am not. Then your relationship with me is very clear. But I have no relationship with you, I cannot. I insist on division and you don't. DB: Yes, in some way we have to say the consciousness of mankind has divided itself, it is all one but it has divided itself... JK: Of course, of course. DB:...by thought - right? JK: That's is what we have been through. DB: Yes and why we are in this situation. JK: That is why - all the problems that humanity has now, psychologically as well in other ways, is the result of thought. And we are pursuing the same pattern of thought, and thought will never solve any of these problems. So there is another kind of instrument, which is intelligence. DB: Yes, well that opens up an entirely different subject. JK: Yes, I know. DB: And you also mentioned love as well. JK: Yes. DB: And compassion. JK: Without love and compassion there is no intelligence. And you cannot be compassionate if you are attached to some religion, some post, you are tied to a post like an animal tied to a post, and it can think it is compassionate. DB: Yes well as soon as your self is threatened then it cannot -it all vanishes, you see. JK: Of course. But you see, self hides behind... DB:...other things. I mean noble ideals. JK: Yes, yes. It has immense capacity to hide itself. So what is the future of mankind? From what one observes it is leading to destruction. DB: That is the way it seems to be going, yes. JK: Very gloomy, grim, dangerous and if one has children what is their future? To enter into all this? And go through all the misery of it all. So education becomes extraordinarily important. But now education is merely the accumulation of knowledge. DB: Yes well every instrument that man has invented, discovered, or developed has been turned toward destruction. JK: Yes Sir. Absolutely. They are destroying nature, there are very few tigers now. DB: Very few? JK: Tigers. They are destroying everything. DB: They are destroying forests and agricultural land. JK: Over population. Nobody seems to care. DB: I think people - there are two things: one is people are immersed in their own problems - right? JK: They are immersed in their own little plans to save humanity! DB: Well some, most people are just immersed in their plans to save themselves but those others have plans to save humanity, but I think also there is a tendency toward despair implicit in what is happening now in that people don't think anything can be done. JK: Yes. And if they think something can be done they form little groups and little theories. DB: Yes, well there are those who are very confident in what they are doing and those who... JK: Most Prime Ministers are very confident. They don't know what they are doing really. DB: Yes but then most people haven't much confidence in what they are doing. JK: I know, I know. If you have tremendous confidence I accept your confidence and go with you. DB: Yes. Since thought is limited... JK: Ah, then we... No Sir, what is the future of man, mankind, the future of humanity - I wonder if anybody is concerned with it? Or each person, or each group is only concerned with its own survival? DB: Well I think the first concern almost always has been with survival either the individual or the group. You see that has been the history of mankind. JK: Therefore perpetual wars, perpetual insecurity. DB: Yes, but this, as you said, is the result of thought which makes the mistake on the basis of being incomplete to identify the self, you know, with the group and so on. JK: You happen to listen to all this. You agree to all this, you see the truth of all this. Those in power will not even listen to you. DB: No. JK: They are creating more and more misery, more and more -the world becoming dangerous, how do you then - what is the point of you and I agreeing, seeing something true? This is what people are asking: what is the point of you and I seeing something to be true and what effect has it? DB: Yes, well it seems to me if we think in terms of the effects... JK: Yes, also it is a wrong question. DB: We are bringing in the very thing which is behind the trouble, time. That is the first response would be we must quickly get in and do something... JK:...do something. DB:...to change the course of events. JK: Therefore form a society, foundation, organization and all the rest of it. DB: But you see our mistake is to do that we must think about something, and that thought is incomplete. We don't really know what is going on and people have made theories about it but they don't know. JK: No, but come down to it: if that is the wrong question, then as a human being, who is mankind, what is my responsibility? DB: Well I think it is the same... JK: Apart from effect and all the rest of it. DB: Yes, we can't look toward effects. But is the same as with 'A' and 'B', that 'A' sees, and 'B' does not - right? JK: Yes. DB: Now suppose 'A' sees something and most of the rest of mankind does not. Then it seems, one could say mankind is in some way dreaming, asleep. JK: It is caught in illusion. DB: Illusion. And the point is that to somehow, if somebody sees something then his responsibility is to help awake the others up - right? To get out of the illusion. JK: That is just it. I mean this has been the problem. That is why the Buddhists have projected the idea of the Bodhisattva, who is compassionate and is the essence of all compassion, and is waiting to save humanity. It sounds nice. It is a happy feeling that there is somebody doing this. But in actuality we won't do anything that is not comfortable, satisfying, secure, both psychologically and physically. DB: Yes, well that is the source of the illusion, basically. JK: How does one make another see all this? They haven't time, they haven't the energy, they haven't even the inclination. They want to be amused. How does one make 'X' see this whole thing so clearly that he says, "All right, I have got it, I will work. And I see I am responsible, I won't be..." and all the rest of it. I think that is the tragedy of those who see and those who don't. Is that over? Is it over Sir? DB: I think it depends on how far we want to go. JK: We have talked an hour. DB: An hour and a half. JK: We will wait now, sit quietly. Finished Sir? BROCKWOOD PARK 2ND CONVERSATION WITH PROF D BOHM 20TH JUNE 1983 THE FUTURE OF MANKIND J.Krishnamurti: Sir, last time we were talking about the future of man. All the psychologists, as far as I can understand, are they really concerned with the future of man? Or are they concerned with the human being conforming to the present society, or going beyond that? David Bohm: Well I think that most psychologists evidently want the human being to conform to this society, but I think some psychologists, some of whom will be listening to us, are thinking of going beyond that to transform the consciousness of mankind. JK: Can the consciousness of mankind be changed through time? That is one of the questions we should discuss this evening. DB: Yes. We have discussed it actually last time and I think that what came out was that with regard to consciousness time is not relevant, that it is a kind of illusion. We discussed the illusion of becoming. JK: We are saying, aren't we, let's be clear, that the evolution of consciousness is a fallacy. DB: As through time, right. Though physical evolution is not. JK: Can we put it this way, much more simply: there is no psychological evolution, or the evolution of the psyche? DB: Yes. And since the future of mankind depends on the psyche it seems then that the future of mankind is not going to be determined through actions in time. JK: Time, that's right. DB: And then that left us the question: what will we do? JK: Now let's proceed from there. Shouldn't we first distinguish between the brain and the mind? DB: Yes, well that distinction has been made and it is not clear. Now of course there are several views. One view is say that the mind is just a function of the brain - that is the materialists' view. There is another view which says mind and brain are two different things. JK: Yes, I think they are two different things. DB: But there must be... JK: ...a contact between the two. DB: Yes. JK: A relationship between the two. DB: We don't necessarily imply any separation of the two. JK: No, first let's see the brain. I am really not an expert on the structure of the brain and all that kind of thing. But one can see within one, one can observe one's own activity of the brain, that it is really like a computer that has been programmed and remembers. DB: Well certainly a large part of the activity is that way, but one is not certain that all of it is that way. JK: No. And it is conditioned. DB: Yes. JK: Conditioned by past generations, by the society, by the newspapers, by the magazines, by all the activities and pressures from the outside. It is conditioned. DB: Yes, now what do you mean by this conditioning? JK: It is programmed, it is made to conform to a certain pattern, lives entirely on the past, modifying itself with the present and going on. DB: Yes, now we have agreed that some of this conditioning is useful and necessary. JK: Of course. We discussed that last time. DB: Yes and now - but the conditioning which determines the self, you know, which determines the... JK: ...the psyche. DB: ...the psyche - you call it the psyche. JK: Let's call it for the moment the psyche. DB: The psyche. JK: The self. DB: The self, the psyche, that conditioning is what you are talking about. That may not only be unnecessary but harmful. JK: Yes. That's what we were discussing too. DB: Yes. JK: The emphasis as the psyche, as we are doing now, and giving importance to the self, is creating great damage in the world because it is separative and it is - therefore it is constantly in conflict, not only within itself and with the society, with the family and so on and so on. DB: Yes. And it is also in conflict with nature. JK: With nature, with the whole universe - if you can call it. DB: I think we discussed last time that the conflict arose because... JK: ...of division... DB: ...the division arising because thought is limited... JK: ...thought is limited. That's right. DB: Being based on this conditioning, on knowledge and memory, it is limited. JK: Limited, yes. And experience is limited, therefore knowledge is limited, memory and thought. Thought is limited. And the very structure and the nature of the psyche is the movement of thought. DB: Yes. JK: In time. DB: Yes. Now I would like to ask a question. When you discussed the movement of thought, it doesn't seem clear to me what is moving. You see I discussed the movement of my hand, that is a real movement. It is clear what is meant. But now when I discuss the movement of thought it seems to me we are discussing something which is a kind of illusion because you have said becoming is the movement of thought. JK: Becoming is entirely. DB: Therefore if you say... JK: That is what I mean, the movement in becoming. DB: But that movement you are saying is in some way illusory, aren't you? JK: Yes, of course, of course. DB: It is rather like the movement on the screen which is projected from the... JK: ...from the screen, from the camera... DB: ...from the camera. We say that there are no objects moving across the screen but the only real movement is the turning of the projector. Now can we say that there is a real movement in the brain which is projecting all this, which is the conditioning? JK: Sir, that is what I want to find out. Let's discuss that a bit. We both agree, or see, that the brain is conditioned. DB: We mean by that that really it has been impressed physically. JK: Physically as well as... DB: And chemically... JK: ...genetically as well as psychologically. DB: Well what is the difference of physically and psychologically? JK: Psychologically it is centred in the self - right? DB: Yes. JK: And the constant assertion of the self is the movement, is the conditioning. DB: Yes, but in so far as we experience it that is an illusion-right? JK: We said that that is an illusion. DB: But there is some real movement happening inside, say the brain, for example, is doing something. It has been conditioned physically and chemically... JK: ...chemically, yes. DB: And something is happening physically and chemically when we are thinking of the self - right? JK: Are you saying, are you asking rather: the brain and the self are two different things? DB: No, I am saying the self is the result of conditioning the brain. JK: Yes. The self is conditioning the brain. DB: Yes. But does the self exist, you see? JK: No, no. DB: But the conditioning of the brain, as I see it, is involving with an illusion which we call the self. JK: That's right. That's right. Can that conditioning be dissipated? DB: Yes. JK: That's the whole question. DB: It really has to be dissipated in some physical and chemical and neurophysiological sense. JK: Yes. DB: Now the first reaction of any scientific person would be that it looks unlikely that we could dissipate it by the sort of thing we are doing. You see some scientists might feel that maybe we will discover drugs or new genetic changes or deep knowledge of the structure of the brain. In that way we could perhaps help to do something. I think that idea might be current among some people. JK: Will that change the human behaviour? DB: Well why not? You see I think some people believe it might. JK: Wait a minute, that is the whole point. It might, which means in the future. DB: Yes. It would take time to discover all this. JK: To discover all this. In the meantime man is going to destroy himself. DB: Well then they might hope that he will manage to do it in time. You see because they could also criticize what we are doing, the same point saying what good can it do? You see it doesn't seem to affect anybody and certainly not in time to make a big difference. You see that is a question that would arise. Suppose for the sake of argument... JK: ...we two are very clear about it. In what way does it affect humanity? DB: Now will it affect mankind in time to really save... JK: Certainly not. Obviously not. DB: Then why should we be doing it? JK: Because this is the right thing to do. DB: Independently. JK: Independently. It has nothing to do with reward and punishment. DB: Nor with goals. JK: Yes. DB: You do the right thing even though we don't know what the outcome will be - right? JK: That's right. DB: Are you saying there is no other way - right? JK: We are saying there is no other way, that's right. DB: Yes, well we should make that clear. For example some psychologists would feel that by enquiring into this sort of thing we could bring about an evolutionary transformation of consciousness - right? JK: We come back to that point that through time we hope to change consciousness. We question that. DB: We have questioned that and are saying that time will inevitably involve - we are all caught in becoming and illusion and we will not know what we are doing. JK: That's right. That's right. DB: Now could we say the same thing would hold even for those scientists who are trying to do it physically and chemically or some structurally, that they themselves are still caught in this and through time they are caught in trying to become better? JK: Yes, that's right. That's right. DB: They will not know what they are doing really. JK: Both experimentalists and the psychologists and ourselves, they are all trying to become something. DB: Yes, though it may not seem obvious at first. It may seem that they are really just disinterested, or unbiased observers, you know, working on the problem, but underneath you feel there is the desire to become better on the part of the person who is doing it. JK: To become, of course, of course. DB: He is not free of that. JK: That is just it. They are not free of that. DB: And that desire will give rise to self deception and illusion, and so on. JK: So where are we now? That any form of becoming is an illusion, and becoming implies time. Time for the psyche to change, we are saying time is not necessary. DB: Yes, now that ties up with the other question of the mind and the brain. You see the brain clearly to be understood is an activity in time, as a physical chemical complex process. JK: I think the mind is separate from the brain. DB: Well what does it mean separate? That is it is in contact. JK: Separate in the sense the brain is conditioned and the mind is not. DB: Well let's say the mind has a certain independence of the brain is what you are saying. Even if the brain is conditioned... JK: ...the other is not. DB: It need not be... JK: ...conditioned. DB: Now how - on what basis do you say that? JK: No, let's begin not on what basis do I say that. DB: Well what makes you say it, right? JK: As long as one's brain, or the brain is conditioned, it is not free. DB: Yes. JK: And the mind is free. DB: Yes, that is what you are saying. Now you see the brain not being free means it is not free to enquire in an unbiased way. JK: I will go into it. Let's enquire: what is freedom? DB: Yes. JK: Freedom to enquire, as you point out, freedom to investigate, and it is only in freedom there is deep insight. DB: Yes, that's clear because if you are not free to enquire - or if you are biased then you are limited. JK: Limited. DB: In an arbitrary way. JK: So as long as the brain is conditioned its relationship to the mind is limited. DB: Yes, now we have the relationship of the brain to the mind, and also the other way round. JK: Yes, yes. But the mind being free has a relationship to the brain. DB: Yes. Now we say the mind is free in some sense, not subject to the conditioning of the brain. JK: Yes. DB: Now one could ask a question: what is the nature of the mind? For example I could ask is the mind located inside the body, or is it in the brain? JK: No, it is nothing to do with the body or the brain. DB: Has it to do with space or time? JK: Space - just a minute - space - now wait a minute. It has to do with space and silence. These are the two factors of the... DB: But not time, right? JK: Not time. Time belongs to the brain. DB: You say space and silence, now what kind of space? It is not the space in which we see life moving. JK: Space. Let's look round at it the other way. Thought can invent space. DB: Well in addition we have the space that we see and thought can invent all kinds of space. JK: And space from here to there. DB: Yes, the space through which we move is that way. JK: Space also between two noises. DB: Between two sounds. JK: Sounds. DB: Well that is the interval, they call that the interval. That would be called the interval between two sounds. JK: Yes, interval between two noises. DB: Two noises, eh. JK: Two thoughts. DB: Two thoughts. JK: Two notes. DB: Yes. JK: Space between two people. DB: Space between the walls. JK: And so on. But that kind of space is not the space of the mind. DB: You say it is not limited. JK: That's right. I didn't want to use the word limited. DB: But I mean it is implied, it is not in the nature of being bounded by something. JK: No, it is not bounded by the psyche. DB: By the psyche. But is it bounded by anything? JK: No. DB: Now you say the psyche is bounded because we have said it is limited and so on. Right no? JK: So can the brain, that is what I want to find out, discuss rather, talk over, - can the brain, with all its cells conditioned, can those cells radically change? DB: Yes, well we often discussed this, it is not certain that all the cells are conditioned. For example some people think that only some, or a small part of the cells are being used, and the others are just rather being inactive, dormant. JK: Used at all, or just touched occasionally. DB: Just touched occasionally. But those cells that are conditioned, whatever they may be, evidently dominate consciousness now - right? JK: Yes, can those cells be changed? DB: Yes. JK: We are saying that they can through insight. DB: Yes, now... JK: Insight being out of time, it is not the result of remembrance, it is not an intuition, or desire, or hope, it is nothing to do with any time and thought. DB: Yes, now you say insight, is it of the mind, is it of the nature of mind - right? - activity of mind? JK: Yes. DB: Therefore you are saying mind can act in the matter of the brain. JK: Yes, we said that earlier. DB: Yes but we have to... but you see this is a difficult point, you see, how mind is able to act in matter. JK: It is able to act on the brain, say for instance, take any crisis, or any problem. Problem - the root meaning of it is, as you know, is something thrown at you. And we meet it with all the remembrance of the past, with a bias and so on. And therefore the problem multiplies itself. You may solve one problem, in the very solution of one problem, of that particular problem, other problems arise, as they are doing in politics and so on and so on. Right? Now to approach the problem or to have perception of the problem without any past memories and thoughts interfering, or projecting in perception of the problem. DB: Yes. Now that implies that perception also is of the mind, that it is not... JK: Yes, that's right. DB: Are you more or less saying that the brain is a kind of instrument of the mind? Is that what is being said? JK: Instrument of the mind when the brain is not self-centred. DB: Yes, well you see if we think of all this conditioning, the conditioning may be thought of as the brain exciting itself and keeping itself going just from the programme. This occupies all of its capacities. JK: All our days, yes. DB: The whole capacity of the brain. It is rather like a radio receiver which can generate its own noise, it would not pick up a signal. Now would this analogy be at all... JK: Not quite. DB: It is not very good but... JK: Not very. You see Sir, would you go into this a little bit. Experience is always limited - right? I may blow up that experience into a kind of fantastic affair and then set up a shop to sell my experience, but that experience is limited. And so knowledge is always limited. And this knowledge is operating in the brain. This knowledge is the brain. Right? And thought is also part of the brain and that thought is limited. So the brain is operating in a very, very small area. DB: Yes. What prevents it from operating in a broader area? JK: What? DB: What is preventing it from operating in an unlimited area? JK: Thought. DB: Thought. But the brain it seems to me is running on its own, from its own programme. JK: Yes, like a computer that is running on its own programme. DB: Now essentially what you are asking is that the brain should really be responding to the mind. JK: That it can only respond if it is free from the limited - from the thought which is limited. DB: Yes so the programme does not dominate it. You see we are going to still need that programme. JK: Of course. We need it for... DB: ...for many things. Yes but the intelligence - is intelligence from the mind then? JK: Yes, intelligence is the mind. DB: Is the mind. JK: Because now that comes into - we must go into something else. Because compassion is related to intelligence. There is no intelligence without compassion. And compassion can only be when there is love which is completely free from all remembrances, personal jealousies and all that kind of thing. DB: Now is all that compassion, love, also of the mind? JK: Of the mind. Not - and you cannot be compassionate if you are attached to any particular experience, or any particular ideal. DB: Yes, well that is again the programme that is... JK: Yes. Say for instance, there are those people who go out to various poverty ridden countries and work, work, work, and they call that compassion. But they are attached, or tied to a particular form of religious belief and therefore that is merely pity, sympathy but it is not compassion. DB: Yes, well I understand that we have here two things which can be somewhat independent. There is the brain and the mind, though they make contact. Now then intelligence and compassion we say come from beyond the brain. Now then I would like to go into the question of how they are making contact, you see. JK: Ah! Contact can only exist between the mind and the brain when the brain is quiet. DB: Yes, that is the condition for making it, that is the requirement for making it. Now then the brain has got to be quiet. JK: Sir, quiet is not a trained quietness. Not a self-conscious, meditative, desire for silence. It is a natural outcome of understanding one's own conditioning. DB: Yes and one can see that if the brain is quiet then you could almost say it could listen to something deeper - right? JK: Deeper, that's right. Then if is quiet it is related to the brain. No, to the mind. Then the mind can function through the brain. DB: Now I think that it would help if we could see with regard to the brain whether it has any activity which is beyond thought. You see, for example, one could ask is awareness part of the function of the brain? JK: As long as awareness in which there is no choice - I am aware and in that awareness I choose. DB: Yes, well I think that may cause difficulty. You see what is wrong with choice? JK: Choice means confusion. DB: It is not obvious just from the word. You see... JK: After all you have to choose between two things. DB: Now I could choose whether I will buy one thing or another. JK: Yes, I can choose between this table and that table. DB: I choose the colours when I buy the table. JK: This is a better table. DB: Apparently that need not be confused. If I choose which colour I want I don't see why that has to be confused. JK: There is nothing wrong. There is no confusion there. DB: But the choice, the choice about the psyche it seems to me is where the confusion is. JK: That's all, about the psyche. DB: One tends - you now the language tends to carry one away. JK: We are talking of the psyche that chooses. DB: That chooses to become really. JK: Yes. Chooses to become, and also choice exists where there is confusion. DB: Yes. Well you are saying out of confusion the psyche makes a choice to become one thing or another - right? Being confused it tries to become something better. JK: And choice implies a duality. DB: Yes but now it seems at first sight we have another duality which you have introduced, which is the mind and the brain. JK: No, that is not a duality. DB: That is important to get clear. JK: That is not a duality. DB: Yes, what is the difference? JK: All right, let's take a very simple example. Human beings are violent and this has been - non-violence has been projected by thought and that is the duality - the fact and the non-fact. DB: Well you are saying there is a duality between a fact and some mere projection which the mind makes. JK: The ideal and the fact. DB: Yes. The ideal is non-real and the fact is real. JK: That's it. The ideal is non, not actual. DB: Yes, that is it. Not actual. Now then you say the division of those two you call duality. Why do you give it that name? JK: Because they are divided. DB: Well at least they appear to be divided. JK: Divided, and we are struggling as all, say for instance the totalitarian communist ideals and the democratic ideals, they are the outcome of thought and so on, which is limited and this is creating havoc in the world. DB: Yes. So there is a division which has been brought in but I think we were discussing in terms of dividing something which cannot be divided. We are trying to divide the psyche. JK: That's right. Violence cannot be divided into non-violence. DB: Yes. And the psyche cannot be divided into violence and non-violence - right? JK: It is what it is. DB: It is what it is, so if it is violent it can't be divided into a violent and a non-violent part. JK: That's right. So - that is very good! So can we remain with 'what is', not with 'what should be', 'what must be' and invent ideals and all the rest of it? DB: Yes but could we return to the question of the mind and the brain. Now we are saying that is not a division. JK: Oh no, that is not a division. DB: They are in contact, is that right? JK: We said there is contact between the mind and the brain when the brain is silent and has space. DB: Yes, so we are saying that although they are in contact and not divided at all, there can be an independent - the mind can still have a certain independence of the conditioning of the brain. JK: Now careful Sir, careful, careful! Let's see. Suppose my brain is conditioned, being programmed as a Hindu, and I function, act, my whole life is conditioned by the idea that I am a Hindu. Mind obviously has no relationship with that conditioning. DB: You are using the word mind, it means it is not my mind. JK: Oh, mind, it is not mine. DB: Universal or general. JK: Yes. It is not my brain either. DB: No, but there is a particular brain, this brain or that brain. Would you say there is a particular mind? JK: No. DB: That is an important difference. You are saying mind is really universal. JK: Mind is universal - if you can use that word, ugly word. DB: Unlimited and undivided. JK: It is unpolluted, not polluted by thought. DB: But I think for most people there will be a difficulty in saying how do we know anything about this mind. We only know that my mind is the first feeling - right? JK: You cannot call it your mind. You only have your brain which is conditioned. You can't say, "It is my mind". DB: Yes, well whatever is going on inside I feel is mine and it is very different from what is going on inside somebody else. JK: No, I question whether it is different. DB: At least it seems different. JK: Yes. I question whether it is different, what is going on inside me as a human being and you as another human being, we both go through all kinds of problems, suffering, fear, anxiety, loneliness, suffer, and so on and so on. We have our dogmas, beliefs, superstitions, and everybody has this. DB: Well we can say it is all very similar but it seems as if each one of us is isolated from the other. JK: By thought. My thought has created that I am different from you, because my body is different from you, my face is different from you, so we carry that same - we extend that same thing into the psychological area. DB: We have discussed that. But now if we said all right that division is an illusion perhaps. JK: No, not perhaps, it is. DB: It is an illusion, all right. Although it is not obvious when a person first looks at it. JK: Of course, of course. DB: Now then, we say mind - in reality even brain is not divided because we are saying that we are all not only basically similar but really connected - right? And then we say that beyond all that is mind which has no division at all. JK: It is unconditioned. DB: Yes, it would almost seem to imply then that in so far as a person feels he is a separate being he has very little contact with mind - right? JK: Quite right. That is what we said. DB: No mind. JK: That is why it is very important to understand not the mind but my conditioning. Then whether that, my conditioning, human conditioning, can ever be dissolved. That is the real issue. DB: Yes. I think I mean still the mind, we won't call it the mind but a human being considers always what is the meaning. I think we want to understand the meaning of what is being said. You see we have a mind that is universal, that is in some kind of space you say, or is it its own space? JK: It is not in me or in my brain. DB: But it has a space. JK: It is, it lives in space and silence. DB: It lives in a space and silence, but it is the space of the mind. It is not a space like this space? JK: No. That is why we said space is not invented by thought. DB: Yes, now is it possible then to perceive this space when the mind is silent, to be in contact with it? JK: Not perceive. Let's see. DB: When the brain is... JK: Let's see. You are asking a question whether the mind can be perceived by the brain. DB: Or at least somehow be aware, an awareness, a sense. JK: Yes. We are saying yes, through meditation. You may not like to use that word. DB: Well I don't mind. JK: I think it is possible to bring about - you see Sir that is the difficulty. When you use the word meditation it is generally understood there is always a meditator meditating. Meditation is really an unconscious process, it is not a conscious process. DB: How are able to say that meditation takes place then if it is unconscious? JK: It is taking place when the brain is quiet. DB: Well you mean by consciousness all the movement of thought. JK: The movement of thought. DB: Feeling, desire, will and all that goes with it, right? JK: Yes. DB: There is a kind of awareness still, isn't there? JK: Oh yes. Depends what you call awareness. DB: Yes. JK: Awareness of what? DB: Possibly awareness of something deeper, I don't know. JK: You see again, when you use the word deeper it is a measurement - oh no Sir, I wouldn't use that. DB: Well let's not use that. But let's say that some kind of - you see there is a kind of unconsciousness which we are simply not aware of at all. A person may be unconscious of some of his problems, conflicts. JK: Let's go at it. Let's go at it a bit more. If I do something consciously it is the activity of thought. DB: Yes. JK: Right? DB: Yes, it is thought reflecting on itself. JK: Yes, it is the activity of thought. Now if I consciously meditate, practise, do all this kind of what I call nonsense, then you are making the brain conform to another series of patterns. DB: Yes, it is more becoming. JK: More becoming, that's right. DB: Yes, you are trying to become better. JK: There is no - you can't - there is no illumination by becoming. You can't be illumined, if I can use that word, by saying I am going to be a cheap guru. DB: But now it seems very difficult to communicate something which is not conscious, you see. JK: That's it. That's the difficulty. DB: Still it is not just being knocked out, or if a person is unconscious he is knocked out too, but you don't mean that. JK: Of course not, good lord! DB: Or under anaesthetic or... JK: No, let's put it that way: conscious meditation, conscious activity to control thought, to free oneself from conditioning, is not freedom. DB: Yes, I think that is clear, but now it becomes very unclear how to communicate what else. JK: Wait a minute. How can I tell - you want to tell me what lies beyond thought. DB: Or when thought is silent. JK: Quite, silent. What words would you use? DB: Well I suggested the word awareness. What about the word attention? JK: Attention is better for me. DB: Yes. JK: Would you say attention, in attention there is no centre as the me? DB: Well in the kind of attention you are discussing. There is a kind, which is the usual kind, where we pay attention because of what interests us. JK: Attention is not concentration. DB: Yes that is concentration. But we are discussing a kind of attention without this me present which is not the activity of the conditioning. JK: Not the activity of thought. DB: Yes. JK: In attention thought has no place. DB: Yes, but could we say more: what do you mean by attention? Now would the derivation of the word be of any use? It means stretching the mind - would that help? JK: No, no. Would it help if we say concentration is not attention - right? Effort is not attention. When I make effort to attend it is not attention. Attention can only come into being when the self is not. DB: Yes but that is going to get us in a circle because we are starting when the self is. So there is a person who says meditation is necessary, it begins with the self, he says, "I am here". JK: No, I used the word carefully. Meditation means measure. DB: Yes. JK: As long as there is measurement, which is becoming, there is no meditation. Let's put it that way. DB: Yes. We can discuss when there is not meditation. JK: That's right. Through negation the other is. DB: Because if we succeed in negating the whole activity of what is not meditation the meditation will be there. JK: That's right. That's right. DB: That which is not meditation but which we think is meditation. JK: Yes, that's right. That is very clear. As long as there is measurement, which is the becoming, which is the process of thought, meditation or silence cannot be. DB: You see in this undirected attention, this attention is it of the mind, or...? JK: Attention is of the mind. DB: Well it contacts the brain, doesn't it? JK: Yes. We said that. As long as the brain is silent, the other has contact. DB: That is this true attention has contact with the brain when the brain is silent. JK: Silent and has space. DB: What is the space? JK: The brain has no space now because it is concerned with itself, it is programmed, it is self-centred and it is limited. DB: Yes, now would you say the brain in addition, the mind is in its space, now does the brain have its space too? JK: Limited. DB: Limited space? JK: Of course. Thought has a limited space. DB: But still this - but when thought is absent does the brain have its space? JK: That's right. That's right. The brain has space, yes. DB: Unlimited? JK: No. It is only mind that has unlimited. DB: Unlimited. JK: My brain can be quiet over a problem which I have thought about and I suddenly say, "Well I won't think any more about it" and there is a certain amount of space. In that space you solve the problem. DB: Yes, now if the mind is silent, is not thinking of a problem, then still the space is limited, but it is open to... JK: ...to the other. DB: ...to the attention. Would you say that the mind through attention, or in attention, the mind is contacting the brain? JK: When the brain is not inattentive. DB: So what happens to the brain? JK: What happens to the brain? Which is to act. Right? Which is to - wait - let's get it clear. We said intelligence is the - is born out of compassion and love. That intelligence operates when the brain is quiet. DB: Yes, does it operate through attention? JK: Of course, of course. DB: So attention seems to be the contact. JK: Contact, attention naturally. Attention, we said too, can only be when the self is not. DB: Yes. Now you say that love and compassion are sort - the ground, and out of this comes the intelligence through attention. JK: Through, yes, functions through the brain. DB: And this intelligence - so let's say, there are two questions: one is the nature of this intelligence, and the second is what does it do to the brain, you see? JK: Yes. Sir, let's see. That is we must again approach it negatively. Love is not jealousy and all that. Love is not personal, but it can be personal. DB: Then it is not what you are talking about. JK: Yes. Love is not my country, your country, I love my god, it is not that. DB: Well if it is from universal mind... JK: That is why I say love is something not - it has no relationship to thought. DB: Yes and to particular - it does not start in the particular brain, originate in the particular brain. JK: Yes, it is not my love. DB: Yes. JK: When there is that love, out of that there is compassion and there is intelligence. DB: Now this intelligence, the nature of this intelligence, that is - this intelligence is able to, if I could use the word, understand deeply. JK: No, not understand. Let's look at it. DB: What does it do? Does it perceive? JK: Through perception it acts. DB: Yes. Perception of what? JK: Perception - now let's discuss perception. There can be perception only when it is not tinged by thought. DB: When it is not? JK: Tinged or a hint of - when there is no interference from the movement of thought there is perception, which is direct insight into a problem, or into human complex. DB: Yes, now this perception originates in the mind? JK: Does the perception originate in the mind? Let's look at it. Yes. When the brain is quiet. DB: Yes, but we used the words perception and intelligence, now what - how are they related, or what is their difference? JK: Between perception and intelligence? DB: Yes. JK: None. DB: So we can say intelligence is perception. JK: Yes, that's right. DB: Intelligence is perception of 'what is' - right? And through attention there is contact. JK: Sir, let's take a problem, it is probably easier to understand. DB: Yes. JK: Take a problem of suffering. Human beings have suffered endlessly, through wars, through every kind of disease, physical disease, and through wrong relationship with each other. Man has suffered a great deal. Now can that end? DB: Yes. Well I would say that the difficulty of ending that is that it is on the programme. We are conditioned to this whole thing - right? JK: Yes, to this whole thing. DB: And it is physically and chemically... JK: We are conditioned. Now that has been going on for centuries. DB: Yes, so it is very deep, somewhat. JK: Very, very deep. Now can that suffering end? DB: Yes and it cannot end by an action of the brain. JK: By thought. DB: Because the brain is caught in suffering and it cannot take an action to end its own suffering. JK: Of course it cannot. That is why thought cannot end it. Thought has created it. DB: Yes, thought has created it and anyway it is unable to get hold of it. JK: Yes, thought has created the wars, the misery, the confusion, and thought has become prominent in human relationship. DB: Yes, you see I think people might agree with that and still think that thought - that as thought can do bad things, it can do good things. JK: No, thought cannot do good or bad. It is thought, limited. DB: Thought cannot get hold of this suffering. That is this suffering being in the physical conditioning of the brain, and chemical, thought has no way of knowing what it is even. JK: I mean I lose my son and I am... DB: Yes but I mean by thinking I don't know what is going on inside me. I can't change the suffering inside because thinking will not show me what it is. Now you are saying it is intelligence. JK: But after all we are asking can suffering end? That is a problem. DB: Yes, and it is clear that thinking cannot do it. JK: Thought cannot do it. DB: No. All right. Now because... JK: That is the point. If I have an insight into it... DB: Yes, now this insight will be through the action of the mind, intelligence, and attention. JK: When there is that insight intelligence wipes away suffering. DB: Yes, now you are saying therefore there is a contact from mind to matter which removes the whole physical chemical structure which keeps us going on with suffering. JK: That's right. In that ending there is a mutation in the brain cells. We discussed this some years ago. DB: Yes and that mutation just wipes out the whole structure that makes you suffer. JK: Yes. Therefore it is like I have been going along a certain tradition, I suddenly change that tradition there is a change in the whole brain, which has been going North, now it goes East. DB: Of course this is a radical notion from the point of view of traditional ideas in science because if we accept that mind that is different from matter then people would find it hard to say that mind would actually... JK: Mind is after all, Sir... would you put it mind is pure energy? DB: Well we could put it that way, but say matter is energy too. JK: Therefore matter is limited, thought is limited. DB: But we are saying that the pure energy of mind is able to reach into the limited energy of man. JK: Yes, that's right. And change the limitation. DB: Yes to remove some of the limitation. JK: When there is a deep issue, or a problem, or a challenge which you are facing. DB: Yes, so we have thought - we could also add that all the traditional ways of trying doing this cannot work because... JK: It hasn't worked. DB: Well that is not enough. We have to say, because people still might hope it could, it cannot actually. JK: It cannot. DB: Because thought cannot get at the basis of its own physical, its own physical chemical basis in the cells, and do anything about those cells. JK: Yes Sir, we have said that very clearly. Thought cannot bring about a change in itself. DB: And yet practically everything that mankind has been trying to do is based on thought. There is a limited area, of course, where that is all right but we cannot, therefore, as we said, we were discussing before, do anything about the future of mankind from the usual approach. JK: Sir, look that is what - when you listen to the politicians who are so very active in the world, they are creating problem after problem and to them thought is the most important thing, ideals. DB: Well generally speaking nobody knows they can know of anything else. JK: Exactly. We are saying the old instrument which is thought is worn out, except in certain areas. DB: Well it never was adequate except in those areas. JK: Of course, of course. DB: And man has always been in trouble as far as history goes. JK: Yes Sir, man has always been in trouble, in turmoil, fear. We mustn't reduce all this to an intellectual argument. But as human beings, facing all the confusion of the world, can there be a solution to all this? DB: Yes, that comes back to the question I would like to repeat that it seems here there are a few people who are talking about it, and think perhaps they know, and perhaps meditating and so on, but how is that going to affect this vast current of mankind? JK: Probably very little. But why will it affect? It might, or it might not. DB: It might not. It might or it might not. JK: But then one puts that question: then what is the use of it? DB: Yes, that's the point. I think there is an instinctive feeling that makes one put the question. JK: Yes. I think that is the wrong question. DB: But that is the wrong question. You see the first instinct is to say, "What can we do to stop this tremendous catastrophe?" JK: Yes. But if each one of us, whoever listens, sees the truth of this that thought in its activity both externally and inwardly has created a terrible mess, great suffering, then one must inevitably ask is there an ending to all this? If thought cannot end it what will? DB: Yes. JK: What is the new instrument that will put an end to all this misery? You see there is a new instrument which is the mind and so on and so on. DB: Yes. JK: Which is intelligence. But you see the difficulty is also people won't listen to all this. They have come to definite conclusions, both the scientists and the ordinary layman like us, they won't listen. DB: Yes, well that is the sort of point I had in mind when I said a few people don't seem to have much affect. JK: Of course, of course. I think after all few people have changed the world. Hitler was a - whether good or bad, that is not the point. DB: Well he didn't change it fundamentally. JK: No, change the world superficially if you like. The revolution of the Bolsheviks, the communists, has changed, but they have gone to the same pattern again. Physical revolution has never changed psychologically the human state. DB: Well do you think it is possible that say a certain number of brains coming in contact with mind in this way will be able to have an affect on mankind which is beyond just the immediate obvious effect of their communication? JK: Yes, that's right. That's right. DB: I mean obviously whoever does this may communicate in the ordinary way and it will have a small effect but now this is a possibility of something entirely different - right? JK: You see how do you - I have often thought about it - how do you convey to all this rather subtle and very complex issue, how do you convey all this to a person who is steeped in tradition, who is conditioned and won't even take time to listen, to consider? DB: Yes, well that is a question. You see one point you could say is that this conditioning cannot be absolute, you know an absolute block or else there would be no way out at all. But the conditioning may be thought to have some sort of permeability. JK: I mean after all the Pope won't listen to us, but the Pope has tremendous influence. DB: Is it possible that every person has something he can listen to if it could be found? JK: If he takes a little patience. Who will listen? The politicians won't listen. The idealists won't listen. The totalitarians won't listen. The deeply steeped religious people won't listen. So perhaps Sir that is the whole point, a so-called ignorant person, not highly educated and conditioned in his professional career, money, the poor man who says, "I am suffering, please let's end that." DB: Well but he doesn't listen either, you see. He wants to get a job. JK: Of course. He says, "Feed me first". We have been through all this for the last sixty years. The poor man won't listen, the rich man won't listen, the learned won't listen and the deeply dogmatic religious believers don't listen. So perhaps it is like a wave in the world it might catch somebody. I think it is a wrong question to say, does it affect? DB: Yes all right. We will say that that brings in time and that is becoming, it brings in the psyche in the process of becoming again. JK: Yes. But if you say... it must affect mankind. DB: Well are you proposing that it affects mankind through the mind directly rather than through... JK: Yes, yes. DB: We are taking this very seriously this... JK: It may not show immediately in action. DB: Yes. You are taking very seriously what you said that the mind is universal and is not located in our ordinary space, is not separate... JK: Yes. You see Sir there is a danger in saying this, the mind is universal, that is what some people say of the mind, and it has become a tradition. DB: You can turn it into an idea of course. JK: Of course, that is just the danger of it, that is what I am saying. DB: Yes. But what you are saying is - really the question is we have to come directly in contact with this to make it real - right? JK: Of course, that's it. They can only come into contact with it when the self is not. To put it very, very simply, and therefore when the self is not there is beauty, there is silence, space, then that intelligence which is born of compassion operates through the brain. It is very simple. DB: Yes. Would it be worth discussing the self - the question of - you see since the self is active widely... JK: I know, but that is our long tradition of many, many centuries. DB: Now is there some aspect of meditation which can be helpful here when the self is acting. You see suppose a person says, "OK I am caught in the self but I want to get out. But I want to know what shall I do." JK: Ah! You see that is... DB: I won't use the words what shall I do, but what do you say? JK: That is very simple. Is the observer different from the observed? DB: Well suppose we say, "Yes, it appears to be different", then what? JK: Is that an idea or an actuality? DB: What do you mean? JK: Actuality is when there is no division between the thinker and the thought. DB: But suppose I say ordinarily one feels the observer is different from the observed. I say we begin there. JK: We begin there. I'll show you. Look at it. Are you different from your anger, from your envy, from your suffering? You are not. DB: At first sight it appears that I am, you see that I might try to control it. JK: You are that. DB: Yes, how will I see that I am that? JK: You are your name. You are your form, body. You are all the reactions and actions. You are the belief, you are the fear, you are the suffering and pleasure. You are all that. DB: Yes but the first experience is that I am here first and that those are properties of me, they are my qualities which I can either have or not have. I might be angry or not angry, I might have this belief or that belief. JK: Contradictory. You are all that. DB: But you see it is not obvious. When you say I am that, do you mean that I am that and cannot be otherwise? JK: No. At present you are that. It can be totally otherwise. DB: Yes, OK. So I am all that. Rather than saying as I usually do that I am looking at those qualities - at least that I the observer, I admit that I am anger, but I feel that I as the observer, am not angry but an unbiased observer who is looking at anger. JK: Of course. DB: But you are telling me that this unbiased observer is the same as the anger he is looking at? JK: Of course. Like I analyse myself and the analyser is the analysed. DB: Yes. He is biased by what he analyses. JK: Of course. DB: So if I watch anger for a while I can see that I am very biased by the anger, so at some stage I say that I am one with that anger - right? JK: No, not I am one with it, you are it. DB: But that anger and I are the same, right? JK: Yes. The observer is the observed. And when there is that actuality exists you have really eliminated altogether conflict. Conflict exists when I am separate from my quality. DB: Yes that is because if I believe myself to be separate then I can try to change it but since I am that it is not trying to change itself and remain itself at the same time, right? JK: Yes, that's right. But when the quality is me, the division has ended. Right? DB: Yes, well when I see that the quality is me then there is no point to the whole thing. JK: No, no. What happens before the quality is not me, then in that there is conflict, either suppression, escape and all the rest of it, which is a wastage of energy. When that quality is me I am -there is, all that energy which has been wasted is there to look, to observe. DB: But why does it make such a difference to have that quality being me? JK: I am showing it to you. DB: Yes. JK: It makes a difference when there is no division between the quality and me. DB: Yes, well then there is no perception of a difference... JK: That's right. Put it round differently. DB: ...the mind does not try to fight itself. JK: Yes, yes. It is so. DB: If there is an illusion of a difference the mind must be compelled to fight against itself. JK: The brain. DB: The brain fights against itself. JK: Yes, that's right. DB: On the other hand when there is no illusion of a difference the brain just stops fighting. JK: Fighting, and therefore you have tremendous energy. DB: Yes. The brain's natural energy is released, eh? JK: Yes, yes. And which means - energy means attention. DB: Yes. Well you see the energy of the brain allows for attention... JK: For that thing to dissolve. DB: Yes, well wait a minute because we said before attention was a contact of the mind and the brain. JK: Yes Sir. DB: The brain must be in a state of high energy to allow that contact. JK: That's right. DB: I mean a brain which is low energy cannot allow that contact. JK: Of course not. But most of us are low energy because we are so conditioned. DB: Well essentially you are saying that this is the way to start. JK: Yes Sir. Start simply. DB: Yes. JK: Start with 'what is', what I am. That is why self knowledge is so important. Self knowledge is not an accumulated process of knowledge, which then looks at, it is a constant learning about oneself. DB: Yes, well if you call it self knowledge then it is not knowledge of the kind we talked about before, which is conditioning. JK: That's right. Knowledge conditions. DB: But you are saying that self knowledge of this kind is not conditioning. But why do you call it knowledge? Is it a different kind of knowledge? JK: Yes, yes. Knowledge conditions. DB: Yes but now you have this self knowledge. JK: Self knowledge, which is to know and to comprehend oneself, to understand, oneself is such a subtle complex thing, it is living. DB: Essentially knowing yourself in the very moment in which things are happening. JK: Yes, to know what is happening. DB: Rather than store it up in memory. JK: Of course. That can only be in - through reactions I begin to discover what I am, and so on and so on. I think we had better stop. Right? Foreword by Mary Zimbalist 1st Public Talk In the Present Is the Whole of Time 2nd Public Talk To Live With Death - Longer, Unedited Versions - 1st Public Talk 2nd Public Talk WASHINGTON D.C. TALKS 1985 FOREWORD BY MARY ZIMBALIST In spite of his many years of giving public talks in the United States, Krishnamurti had not spoken in Washington, D.C. When he agreed to do so in April 1985, it was in a sense to a new audience, one to which in the compression of only two talks he wished to convey as much of his teaching as possible. On both days the hall was filled with a varied, seriously-interested audience and as Krishnamurti spoke there seemed an intangible response, a quality in which the listeners joined in his communication. Krishnamurti felt it and although there were to be other talks before his death ten months later, on those two days in April 1985, at the age of ninety, Krishnamurti spoke from the summit of his life and teaching. M.Z. WASHINGTON D.C. TALKS 1985 1ST PUBLIC TALK 20TH APRIL 1985 This is not a lecture on any particular subject according to certain disciplines, scientific or philosophical. Lectures are meant to inform on a particular subject or instruct, but we are not going to do that. So this is not a lecture, nor is it a form of entertainment. In this country especially, one is greatly accustomed to being entertained, amused. Rather in these talks, this afternoon and tomorrow morning, we are going to talk together about the whole of our existence from the moment we are born until we die. In that period of time, whether it be fifty years, ninety years or a hundred years, we go through all kinds of problems and difficulties. We have economic, social, religious problems; problems of personal relationship, problems of individual fulfilment, wanting to find one's roots in some place or other; and we have innumerable psychological wounds, fears, pleasures, sensations. There is a great deal of fear in all human beings, a great deal of anxiety, uncertainty, and a pursuit of pleasure, and also all human beings on this beautiful earth suffer a great deal of pain, loneliness. We are going to talk about all that together. And about what place religion has in modern life. We are also going to talk over together the question of death; and what is a religious mind and what is meditation; is there anything that is beyond thought and is there anything sacred in life, or is everything matter so that we lead a materialistic life? So, as we said, this is not a lecture. This is a conversation between you and the speaker a conversation in which there is no implication of conversion, making propaganda that would be too terrible or introducing new theories, ideas and exotic nonsense. We are going to, if you will kindly, talk over together our problems as two friends. Though we don't know each other, we are going to talk, discuss, have a conversation which is much more important than being lectured at or being told what to do, what to believe, what to have faith in, and so on. On the contrary, we are going to observe dispassionately, impersonally, not anchored to any particular problem or theory, what mankind has done to the world and what we have done to each other. We are going to take a very long, complex journey together, for it is your responsibility, as well as that of the speaker, that we walk together, investigate together, look together at the world we have created. The society in which we live is put together by man. Each one of us has contributed to it. And if you are willing, and apparently you must be willing because you are here and I am here, we will take this long complex journey. Life is very complex. We like to look at complexity and get more and more complex. We never look at anything simply with our brains, with our hearts, with our whole being. So let us take the journey together. The speaker is putting into words what is happening, objectively, clearly, and totally dispassionately. We have lived on this earth for many millennia. And during those long periods of time mankind has suffered loneliness, despair, uncertainty, confusion, multiple choices and therefore multiple complexities; and there have been wars not only physical bloody wars but also psychological wars. And mankind has asked if there can be peace on earth. But apparently this has not been possible. There are about forty wars going on at the present time, ideological, theoretical, economic, social. During historical times, perhaps about five thousand to six thousand years, there have been wars practically every year. And also we are preparing for wars now. Two ideologies the Communist and the so-called democratic at war over what kind of implements we should use, control of armaments and all the rest of it. War seems to be the common lot of mankind. One observes all over the world the piling up of armaments, from the tiny little nation or tribe to the highly sophisticated affluent society like yours. How can we have peace on earth? Is it at all possible? It has been said that there is no peace on earth, only in heaven. This is repeated in different ways, both in the East, and the West. Christians have killed more than anybody else on earth. We are observing these facts, these actualities, not taking sides. And then there are the different religions: in Buddhism there is no god; in Hinduism somebody calculated there are about three hundred thousand gods. That's rather fun, you can choose whichever god you like. In Christianity and Islam there is only one god, based on two books the Bible and the Koran. So religions have divided man, just as nationalism, which is a form of glorified tribalism, has divided man nationalism, patriotism, religious ardour. And fundamentalists both in India, here and in Europe, are reviving their religious traditions. I wonder if you have ever looked at the word 'reviving'? You can only revive something that is dead or dying. You can't revive a living thing. Man has always been in conflict, as everyone in this world goes through all kinds of misery, all kinds of sorrow, pain, desperate loneliness; and we long to escape from all that, So we are going to observe together this extraordinary phenomenon: how man, after these thousands of years, still remains a barbarian cruel, vulgar, full of anxiety and hatred. And violence is increasing in the world. So one asks, can there be peace on this earth? Because without peace, inwardly, psychologically first, the brain cannot flower, human beings cannot live completely holistically. So why are we, after this long evolution - during a period in which we have gathered immense experience, knowledge, a great deal of information - why are we as human beings perpetually in conflict? That's the real question. Because when there is no conflict there is naturally peace. And man that includes the woman, please; when I use the word 'man' I am not shutting out the woman don't get excited about it. And, if one may point out, don't get angry, irritated with what we are investigating together. It's your responsibility to enquire, not merely intellectually, verbally, but with your heart, with your brain, with all your being, and find out why we are what we are. We have tried various religions, various economic and social systems, and yet we live in conflict. Can this conflict in each one of us end completely, not partially, not occasionally? It's a very serious question. It demands a serious answer. Not say it's possible or not possible, but enquire very deeply why human beings, including you, and the speaker perhaps, live in perpetual conflict, with problems and divisions why we have divided the world into nationalities, religious groups, social behaviours and all the rest of it? Can we seriously this afternoon enquire whether it's possible to end conflict? First psychologically, inwardly, because if there is a certain quality of freedom inwardly, then we shall produce a society in which there will be no conflict. So it is our responsibility as human beings, as so-called individualities, to seriously put our brains, our energy, our passion into discovering for ourselves, not according to any philosopher, or some psychiatrist, but find out for ourselves whether this conflict between human beings can end. What is conflict? Why have we lived with conflict? Why have we problems? Please enquire with the speaker into these questions. What is a problem? The etymological meaning of that word is 'something thrown at you', a challenge, something you have to answer. When you are a child, you are sent to school; there you have the problems of writing, mathematics, history, science, chemistry, and all the rest of it. So from childhood you are trained to have problems. Please have patience. Look at it carefully. Your brain is conditioned, trained, educated to have problems. Observe it for yourself, and don't please merely listen to the speaker. We are together investigating, looking into the problems that we have. So from childhood we are trained, educated, conditioned to have problems; and when new problems arise, which they inevitably do, our brain, being full of problems, tries to solve another problem and thereby increases them, which is what is happening in the world. The politicians all over the world are increasing problem after problem. And they have found no answer. So is it possible to have a brain that is free so that you can solve problems? Not a cluttered brain full of problems. Is that possible? If you say it is not possible or it is possible, you have stopped investigating. What is important in this enquiry is that one must have a great deal of doubt, scepticism, never accepting anything at its face value or according to your pleasure or gratification. Life is much too serious. So we should enquire not only into the nature of conflict and problems, but also perhaps into something which may be much more important: go all over the world, wherever you will, every human being on this earth, wherever he lives, goes through all kinds of sorrow. Millions have had tears and occasional laughter. Every human being on this earth has had great loneliness, despair, anxiety, been confused, uncertain, like you every human being, black, white, purple or whatever colour you like. Psychologically this is a fact, an actuality, not invented by the speaker. This is observable; you can see it on every face on this earth. And so psychologically you are the rest of mankind. You may be tall, short, black or white, but psychologically you are mankind. Please understand this not intellectually or ideologically or as an hypothesis, but as an actuality,a burning reality, that you psychologically are the rest of mankind. Therefore psychologically you are not individuals. Although religions, except perhaps parts of Hinduism and Buddhism, have entertained, encouraged the sense of individual growth, saving individual souls and all that business, in actuality, your consciousness is not yours. It is the rest of mankind's, because we all go through the same mill, the same endless conflict. When you realize this, not emotionally, not as an intellectual concept but as something actual, real, true, then you will not kill another human being; you will never kill another, either verbally or intellectually, ideologically or physically, because then you are killing yourself. But individuality has been encouraged all over the world. Each one is struggling for himself, his success, his fulfilment, his achievement, pursuing his desires and creating havoc in the world. Please understand this very carefully. We are not saying that each individual is important: on the contrary. If you are concerned with global peace, not just your own little peace in the backyard nations have become the backyard if you are really concerned, as most serious people must be concerned, that you are the rest of humanity that's a great responsibility. So we must go back and find out for ourselves why human beings have reduced the world to what it is now. What is the cause of all this? Why have we made such a mess of everything we touch? Why is there conflict in our personal relationships? Why is there conflict between gods your god and the other's god? So we must enquire together whether it is possible to end conflict. Otherwise we'll never have peace in this world. Long before Christianity they talked about peace on earth. Long before Christianity they worshipped trees, stones, animals, lightning, the sun; there was never any sense of god because they considered the earth as the mother to be worshipped, to be preserved, spared, not destroyed as we are doing now. So let us enquire together into all this please, I mean together, not I enquire and you casually listen, agreeing or disagreeing. Could we this afternoon put aside this whole idea of agreeing or disagreeing? Will you do that so that we can all of us look at things as they are not as you think they are, not your idea or concept of what is, but just look at it? Look at it non-verbally, if that's possible. That's much more difficult. First of all, this is the actual world we live in. You cannot possibly escape from it through monasteries, through religious experiences and one must doubt all one's experiences. Man has done everything on earth possible to run away from the actuality of daily living with all its complexities. Why do we have conflict in relationship between man and woman sexual, sensory division? In this peculiar relationship man is pursuing his own ambition, his own greed, his own desires, his own fulfilment, and the woman is doing the same. I don't know if you have noticed all this for yourself. So there are two ambitious, driving beings, driven by desire, two parallel lines never meeting except perhaps sexually. How can there be a relationship between two people when each one is pursuing his own desires, ambitions, greeds? In this relationship, because there is this division, there is no love. That word 'love' is spoilt, spat upon, degraded; it has become merely sensuous, pleasurable. Love is not pleasure. Love is not something put together by thought; it is not something dependent on sensation. So how can there be right, true relationship between two people when each one considers his own importance? Self-interest is the beginning of corruption, destruction, whether it be in the politician or the religious man; self-interest dominates the world and therefore there is conflict. Where there is duality, separation, as the Jew and the Arab, as the Christian who believes in some saviour and the Hindu who doesn't believe in all this, there is this division: national division, religious division, individual divisions. Where there is division there must be conflict. That's a law. So we live our daily life in a little circumscribed self, a limited self. Self is always limited and that is the cause of conflict. That is the central core of our struggle, pain, anxiety, and all the rest of it. One becomes aware of it, as most people must naturally, not because you're told to or because you read some philosophical book or psychology, but because it's an actual fact. Each one is concerned with himself. He lives in a separate world all to himself. And therefore there is division between you and another, between you and your religion, between you and your god, between you and your ideologies. So is it possible to understand not intellectually but deeply, that you are the rest of mankind? Whatever you do, good or bad, affects the rest of mankind, because you are mankind. Your consciousness is not yours. Your consciousness is made up of its content. Without the content there is no consciousness. Your consciousness like that of the rest of humanity is made up of beliefs, fears, faith, gods, personal ambitions. Your whole consciousness is made up of all this, put together by thought. One hopes that we have taken the journey together, that together we are walking the same road not that you are listening to a series of ideas. We are not pursuing ideas or ideologies, but facing actuality, because in actuality and going beyond that actuality is the truth. And when there is truth it's the most dangerous thing. Truth is very dangerous because it brings a revolution in oneself. It's good to ask questions. But of whom are you asking the question? Are you asking the question of the speaker? That means you are waiting for an answer from the speaker. Then you depend on the speaker. Then you establish gurus. Have you ever gone into the question of why we ask questions? Not that you should not, but we are enquiring. Suppose you ask the speaker a question and he answers it: either you accept it or deny it. If it is satisfactory to you according to your conditioning or your background, then you say, 'Yes, I agree with you entirely.' Or if you don't agree, you say, 'What nonsense.' But if you begin to enquire into the question itself, is the answer separate from the question? Or does the answer lie in the question itself? The perfume of a flower is the flower. The very flower is the essence of that perfume. But we depend on others so much to be helped, to be encouraged, to solve our problems; therefore out of our confusion we create authority, the gurus, the priests. So please, it's good to ask questions. I don't know if you have gone into this. You know, we have lost the art of investigation, discussion: not taking sides but looking at things. It very complex, maybe this is not the right occasion to go into it. You should also enquire why from childhood we are hurt psychologically. Most of us psychologically are wounded, and from that wound, whether one is conscious of it or not, many of our problems arise. The wound to a child is by a scolding, by saying something ugly, brutal, violent. When you say 'I am wounded' who is it that is wounded? Is it the image that you have built about yourself that is wounded the psyche? Please, the speaker has not read any of the psychology books or philosophy or religious books, he's just investigating with you. The psyche is the 'me' and the me is the image I have built about myself. There is nothing spiritual about it. That's another ugly word spiritual. So that image gets hurt and we carry that image right through our life. If one image is not pleasant, we put together another image which is pleasant, encourage it; it is worthwhile, significant, giving intellectual meaning to our life. Is it possible to live on this earth not having a single image, about anybody, including god, if there is such an entity no image about your wife and your children and your husband, and so on? Not to have a single image? Then it is possible never to be hurt. And also, as our time is limited, we ought to enquire carefully whether it is possible to be free of fear. This is really an important question to ask. Not that I am asking for you, but you are asking this of yourself: whether it is possible, living in a modern society with all the brutality, with all the tremendous violence that is on the increase, to have freedom from fear? This is entirely different from analysis. Just to observe without any distortion: to observe this hall, for example, how many tiers there are to observe your neighbour's dress, face, how he talks; just to observe, not to criticize, not to evaluate, judge, but to observe. Observe a tree, observe the moon and the swift-running waters. When you so observe then you ask yourself, what is beauty? They talk a great deal about beauty in the magazines: how you must be beautiful, your face, your hair, your complexion and all the rest of it. So what is beauty? Is beauty in the picture, in the painting, in the strange modern structure? Is beauty in a poem? Is beauty merely in the physical face and body? Have you ever asked this question? If you are an artist or a poet or a literary person, you may describe something very beautiful, paint something that's lovely,write a poem that really stirs your very being. So what is beauty? Have you ever noticed that when you give a nice toy, a complicated toy, to a child who is being naughty, shouting, playing, he gets completely absorbed in it and all his naughtiness stops because he is absorbed? Being absorbed in a poem, in a face, in a picture is that absorption beauty? When you look at a marvellous mountain with a snowcap of eternal snows, the line against the blue sky, for a second the immensity of that mountain drives away the self, the 'me', with all my problems, all my anxiety. In the majesty of the great rocks and the lovely valleys and the rivers, at that moment, that second, the self is not. So the mountain has driven away the self, as the toy quietens the child. That mountain, that river, the depth of the blue valleys, dispel for a second all your problems, all your vanities and anxieties. Then you say, 'How beautiful that is.' But is there beauty without being absorbed by something outside? That is, beauty is where the self is not. Don't go to sleep, please. You might have had a good lunch, I hope you did, but this is not the place to go to sleep. It is your problem, your life, not the speaker's life; it is your life, your vanities, your despairs, your sorrows we are talking about. So keep awake for another twenty or thirty minutes, if you are interested. So beauty is when the self is not. And that requires great meditation, great enquiry, a tremendous sense of discipline. The word 'discipline' means the disciple who is learning from the master. Learning not disciplining as in conforming, imitating, adjusting, but learning. Learning brings its own tremendous discipline, and for an inward sense of austerity discipline is necessary. So we must enquire together into what is fear. And now we must enquire together into what is fear. What is fear? Humanity has put up with fear, has never been able to solve fear. Never. There are various forms of fear; you may have your own particular fear: fear of death, fear of gods, fear of the devil, fear of your wife, fear of your husband, fear of the politicians god knows how many fears humanity has. What is fear? Not the mere experience of fear in its multiple forms, but the reality, the actuality of fear? How is it brought about? Why has humanity, which is each one of us, accepted fear as a way of life violence on the television, violence in our daily life and the ultimate violence of organized killing, which is called war? Is not fear related to violence? We are enquiring into fear the actual truth of fear, not the idea of fear you understand the difference? The idea of fear is different from the actuality of fear; right? So what is fear? How has it come about? What is the relationship of fear to time, to thought? One may be frightened of tomorrow, or of many tomorrows; the fear of death the ultimate fear or fear of what has happened before, in the past; or fear of what is actually going on now. So we must enquire together please, the speaker keeps on repeating, together; it's no fun talking to myself. Is fear brought about by time? Someone has done something in the past to hurt you, and the past is time. The future is time. The present is time. So we are asking, is time a central factor of fear? Fear has many many branches, many leaves, but it's no good trimming the branches; we are asking, what is the root of fear? Not the multiple forms of fear, because fear is fear. Out of fear you have invented gods, saviours. If you have absolutely no fear psychologically, then there is tremendous relief, a great sense of freedom. You have dropped all the burdens of life. So we must enquire very seriously, closely, hesitantly, into this question: is time a factor? Obviously. I have a good job now, I may lose it tomorrow so I'm frightened. When there is fear there is jealousy, anxiety, hatred, violence. So time is a factor of fear. Please listen to the end of this, don't say, how am I to stop time? That's not the problem; that's a rather absurd question to ask. Time is a factor and thought is a factor: thinking about what has happened, what might happen; thinking. Is thinking a factor in fear? Has thinking brought about fear? As one sees, time has brought fear, right? Time: not only time by the clock, but psychological time, the inward time: 'I am going to be; 'I am not good, but I will be; 'I will get rid of my violence', which is again the future. All that implies time. We ought to enquire, what is time? Are you prepared for all this? Do you want to go into all this? Really? I'm rather surprised, because you've all been instructed, you've all been informed, you've been told what to do by the psychologists, by the priests, by your leaders; always seeking help and finding new ways of being helped. So one has become a slave to others. One is never free to enquire, to stand psychologically completely by oneself. So we are now going to enquire into time. What is time? Apart from the clock, apart from the sunrise and the sunset, the beauty of the sunrise, the beauty of the sunset; apart from the light and the dark, what is time? Please, if one really understands the nature of time inwardly, you will find for yourself an extraordinary sense of having no time at all. Time is the past, right? Time is the future and time is the present. The whole cycle is time. The past your background, what you have thought, what you have lived through, your experiences, your conditioning, as Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or all the rest of it: without the past you wouldn't be here. You have been programmed for two thousand years, and the Hindus for three to five thousand years. Like a computer, they repeat, repeat, repeat. So the past is the present; what you are now is the result of the past. And tomorrow, or a thousand tomorrows, is what you are now, so the future is now. In the now all time is contained. This is a fact too, an actuality, not a theory. What you are is the result of the past and what you will be tomorrow is what you are now. If I am violent now" tomorrow I'll be violent. So tomorrow is in the now, in the present, unless I radically, fundamentally bring about a mutation. Otherwise I'll be what I have been. We have had a long evolution, evolving, evolving, evolving to what we are now. And if we carry on that game we will be violent, we will be barbarous next day. So as all time is contained in the now which is a fact, an actuality can there be total mutation now in all our behaviour and our way of living, thinking, feeling? Because if we don't radically, psychologically bring about a mutation then we will be exactly what we have been in the past. So is it possible to bring about this psychological mutation at all? You know, when you have been going north all your life, following a particular direction, or no direction, just wobbling as most people do, if somebody comes along and tells you most seriously that going north leads nowhere, there is nothing at the end of it, you listen seriously, not only with the hearing of the ear but deeply. Go east or south, you are told, and you say, 'I will do it.' At that moment you have taken a new turn and there is a mutation. The speaker is making it very simple. But it is a very complex problem, which is: to realize deeply that we have been going on this way for centuries and we have not changed at all. We are still violent, brutal, and all the rest of it. If we actually perceive that, not intellectually or verbally but deeply, then we turn in another direction. At that second there is the mutation in the very brain cells themselves. The speaker has discussed these matters with some neurologists. Of course they don't agree completely, but they go part of the way. It's always a game, you understand. We treat life as a game: partially right, and partially wrong; you may be right and you may be wrong. But we never ask ourselves: what is the art of living? which is greater than any art in the world. Can you put up with this? We'll finish this question. After that we'll meet again tomorrow if you are willing; I'm not inviting you, it's up to you. We said time is important because we live by time, but we don't live time as a whole, which is the present. In the present all time is contained: the future and the past. If I'm violent today, I'll be violent tomorrow. And can I end that violence today completely, not partially? I can. And also, is fear brought about by thought? Of course it is. Don't accept the speaker's word for it, look at it. I am secure today, but I am frightened of what might happen tomorrow; there might be war, there might be some other catastrophe. So time and thought are the root of fear. Now what is thinking? You understand my question? If time and thought are the root of fear which they are in actuality what is thinking? Why do we live, act, do everything, on the basis of thought? The marvellous cathedrals of Europe, the beauty, the structure, the architecture have been put together by thought. All religions and their paraphernalia, their dress, their mediaeval robes, are put together by thought. All the rituals are contrived, arranged, by thought. And our relationship with each other, man and woman, is based on thought. When you drive a car, it's based on thought. Recognition is thought. So one has to enquire, if you are not too tired and we'll stop after this what is thinking? Probably very few people have asked this question. The speaker has been asking this question for sixty years. What is thought? If you can find out what is the origin, the beginning of thought, why thought has become so extraordinarily important in our life, there may be in that very enquiry a mutation taking place. So we are asking what is thought, what is thinking? Don't wait for me to answer. Look at it, observe it. Thinking is the word; the word is important, the sound of the word, the quality of the word; the depth, the beauty of a word. Especially the sound. I won't go into the question of sound and silence. Thinking is part of memory, isn't it? Investigate it with the speaker, please, don't sit there comfortably, or uncomfortably. Thinking is part of memory, isn't it? If we had no memory at all, would we be able to think? We wouldn't. Our brain is the instrument of memory: memory of things that have happened, experience, and so on, the whole background of memory. Memory arises from knowledge, from experience right? So experience, knowledge, memory, and the response of memory is thought. This whole process of experiencing, recollecting, holding, becomes our knowledge. Experience is always limited, naturally. Is experience different from the experiencer? Give your brains to this, find out! If there is no experiencer, is there an experience? Of course not. So the experience and the experiencer are the same, like the observer and the observed. The thinker is not separate from his thoughts. The thinker is the thought. So experience is limited, as you can observe in the scientific world or any other field. They are adding more and more and more every day to their knowledge through experience, through experiment on animals and all that horror that is going on. And that knowledge is limited because they are adding to it. So memory is limited. And from that memory thought is limited. So thought, being limited, must invariably bring about conflict. Just see the pattern of it not accept what the speaker is saying, that's absurd. He's not an authority, he's not a guru, thank god. But we can observe this fact together, that thought and time are the root of fear. Time and thought are the same, they are not two separate movements. See this fact, this actuality, that time and thought, time-thought, are the root of fear just observe it in yourself. Don't move away from the reality of it, from the truth of it that fear is caused by time and thought. Hold it, remain with it, don't run away from it. It is so. Then it is like holding a precious jewel in your hand. You see all the beauty of that jewel. Then you will see for yourself that fear psychologically completely ends. And when there is no fear you are free. And when there is that total freedom you don't have gods, rituals, you are a free man. I don't know why you clap. Perhaps you are clapping for yourself. You are not encouraging the speaker or discouraging him. He doesn't want a thing from you. When you yourself become both the teacher and the disciple - disciple being a man who is learning, learning, learning, not accumulating knowledge - then you are an extraordinary human being. WASHINGTON D.C. TALKS 1985 2ND PUBLIC TALK 21ST APRIL 1985 May we continue where we left off yesterday? We were talking about fear and the ending of fear. And also we were talking about the responsibility of each one of us facing what is happening in the world, the appalling, frightening mess we are in. We are all responsible, individually, collectively, nationally, religiously, for all we have made of the world. After millennia upon millennia we have remained barbarians, hurting each other, killing each other, destroying each other. We have had freedom to do exactly what we liked and that has created havoc in the world. Freedom is not to do what one likes, but rather it is to be free from all the travail of life, from our problems, from our anxieties, from our fear, from our psychological wounds, from all the conflict that we have put up with for so many millennia. And also we said that this meeting is not a lecture on any particular subject, to inform, to instruct. Rather it is about our responsibility, together, to investigate, to explore into all the problems of our daily life not some speculative concepts or philosophies, but to understand the daily pain, the boredom, the loneliness, the despair, the depression, and the endless conflict with which man has lived. This morning we have to cover a great deal of ground. We pointed out yesterday that this is not a meeting in which the speaker stimulates you intellectually, emotionally, or in any other way. We depend a great deal on stimulation; it's a form of commercialism: drugs, alcohol, and all the various means of sensation. And we want not only sensation but excitement. But this is not that kind of meeting. We are here together to investigate our life, our daily life; that is, to understand oneself, what one is actually, not theoretically, not according to some philosopher or some psychiatrist. If we can put aside all that and observe, look at ourselves, actually as we are, and not get depressed or elated, we will understand the whole psychological structure of our being, of our existence. We said yesterday that one of the things human beings go through all their life is a form of fear. We went into it very carefully: that time and thought are the root of fear. And we went into what time and thought are. Time is not only the past, the present and the future, but in the now. In the present all time is contained because what we are now we will be tomorrow unless there is a great, fundamental mutation in the very psyche itself, in the very brain cells themselves. If one may point out, you and the speaker are taking a journey together, a long, complicated journey. To take that journey one mustn't be attached to any particular form of belief for then that journey is not possible nor to any faith, nor to some conclusion or ideology or concept. It's like climbing Everest or some of the other great, marvellous mountains of the world; one has to leave a great deal behind, not carry all one's burdens up the steep hills. So in taking the journey together and the speaker means together, not that he is talking and you are agreeing or disagreeing if we could put those two words aside completely, then we can take the journey together. Some may want to walk very rapidly and others may lag behind, but it is a journey together. We also ought to talk over together why human beings have always pursued pleasure. We've never investigated what pleasure is, why we want everlasting pleasure in different ways: sexual, sensory, intellectual, the pleasure of possession, the pleasure of acquiring a great skill, the pleasure one derives from having a great deal of information, knowledge, and the ultimate gratification of what we call god. Please don't get angry or irritated or want to throw something at the speaker. This is a violent world. If you don't agree they kill you. This is what is happening. And here we're not trying to kill each other, we're not doing any kind of propaganda or trying to convince you of anything. But we are going to face the truth of things, not live in delusions. With delusions it's very difficult to observe. If you are deluding yourself and not facing actualities, then it becomes impossible to look at oneself as one is. But we like delusions, illusions, every form of deception, because we are frightened to look at ourselves. To look at ourselves very clearly, accurately, precisely, is only possible in a mirror of relationship; that's the only mirror we have. When you look at yourself combing your hair or shaving or doing whatever you are doing to your face that mirror reflects exactly how you look. Psychologically is there such a mirror in which you can see exactly, precisely, actually what you are? As we said, there is such a mirror which is one's relationship, however intimate it be, whether it's with a man, or a woman; in that relationship you see what you are if you allow yourself to see what you are. You see how you get angry, your possessiveness, all the rest of it. Man has pursued pleasure endlessly, in the name of god, in the name of peace, in the name of ideology, and then there is the pleasure of power having power over others, political power. Have you noticed that power is an ugly thing, when one dominates another in any form? Power is one of the evil things in life. And pleasure is the other side of the coin of fear. When one understands deeply, profoundly, seriously the nature of fear we went into that yesterday, so we won't go into it again then pleasure is delight: seeing something beauti- ful, seeing the sunset or the morning light, the dawn, the marvellous colours, the reflection of the sun on the waters; that's delight. But we cultivate that memory as pleasure. And also, I don't know if you have gone into the question of action. What is action? We are all so active from morning till night, not only physically but psychologically, the brain everlastingly chattering, going from one thing to another endlessly. During the day and during the night in dreams the brain is never at rest, it is perpetually in motion. What is action, the doing? The very word 'doing' is in the present, it's not having done or 'I will do'. Action means the doing now, accurately, completely, holistically if I can use that word action that is whole, complete, not partial. When action is based on some ideology, it's not action, is it? It's conformity to a certain pattern which you have established and therefore it's incomplete action, according to some memory, some conclusion. If you act according to a certain ideology, pattern or conclusion, it is still incomplete; there is a contradiction in it. So one has to enquire into this very complex problem of action. Is action related to disorder or to order? You understand? We live in disorder, our life is disorderly, confused, contradictory: saying one thing, doing another; thinking one thing and doing quite the opposite. So what is order and disorder? Perhaps you have not thought about all these matters, so let us think together about this, and please don't let me talk to myself. It's still early in the morning and you have a whole day in front of you; so let us be aware together of this question: what is order and what is disorder and what is the relationship of action to order and disorder? What is disorder? Look at the world if you will; the world is in disorder. Terrible things are happening. Very few of us know actually what is happening in the scientific world, in the world of the art of war, all the terrible things that are going on in other countries; and the poverty in all countries, the rich and the terribly poor, always the threat of war, one political group against another political group. So there is this tremendous disorder. That's an actuality, it's not an invention or an illusion. We have created this disorder, because our very living is disorderly. And we are trying to bring about order through all the social reforms and so on. Without understanding and bringing about the end of disorder, we try to find order. It's like a confused mind trying to find clarity. A confused mind is a confused mind, it can never find clarity. So can there be an end to disorder in our life, our daily life? Not order in heaven or in another place, but in our daily life can there be order? Can there be the end of disorder? When there is the end of disorder there is naturally order. That order is living, it's not according to a certain pattern or mould. So we are investigating, looking at ourselves and learning about ourselves. Learning is different from acquiring knowledge. Please, if you will kindly give your attention to this a little bit that learning is an infinite process, limitless process, whereas knowledge is always limited. And learning implies not only observing visually, optically, but also observing without any distortion, seeing things exactly as they are. That requires the discipline of one who is learning, not the terrible discipline of orthodoxy, tradition, or following certain rules, dictates, and so on. It is learning, learning through clear observation, hearing exactly what the other fellow is saying without any distortion. And learning is not accumulative because you're moving. You understand all this? So in learning what disorder is in ourselves, order comes about very naturally, easily, unexpectedly. And when there is order, order is virtue. There is no other virtue except complete order, that is complete morality, not some imposed or dictated morality. Then we ought also to talk over together this whole question of sorrow. You don't mind? Because men and women and children throughout the world, whether they live behind the Iron Curtain, which is most unfortunate for them, or whether they live in Asia, Europe or here every human being, whether rich or poor, intellectual or just ordinary laymen like us, goes through every form of suffering. Have you ever looked at people that have cried through centuries? Through thousands of wars? There is immense sorrow in the world. Not that there is not also pleasure, joy, and so on, but in understanding and perhaps ending sorrow we'll find something much greater. So we must go into this complex question of sorrow, whether it can ever end or whether man is doomed forever to suffer - suffer not only physically but psychologically. Inwardly we have suffered enormously without perhaps saying a word about it, or crying our heart out. During all this long evolution of man from the beginning of time until now, every human being on this earth has suffered. Suffering is not merely the loss of someone you think you like or love, but also the suffering of the very poor, the illiterate. If you go to India or other parts of the world, you see people walking miles and miles to go to a school, little girls and little boys. They will never be rich, they will never ride in a car, probably never have a hot bath. They have one sari or one dress whatever they wear and that's all. And that is sorrow. And the man who goes by in a car, who looks at this, is in sorrow if he's at all sensitive, aware. And, there is the sorrow of ignorance; not ignorance of writing and literature and all the rest of it, but the sorrow of a man who doesn't know himself. There are multiple ways of sorrow. We are asking, can this sorrow end for each one? There is the sorrow in oneself and the sorrow of the world. Thousands of wars, people maimed, appalling cruelty. Every nation on earth has committed cruelties. It is appalling and we're still perpetuating that cruelty. Cruelty brings enormous sorrow. Seeing all this not from a book, not from a traveller who goes abroad to have a good time but travelling as a human being, just observing, being aware sensitively of all this, sorrow is a terrible thing. And can that sorrow end? Please, ask yourself that question. The speaker is not stimulating you to feel sorrow, the speaker is not telling you what sorrow is; it is right in front of us, right inside you. Nobody needs to point it out if you keep your eyes open, if you are sensitive, aware of what is happening in this monstrous world. So please ask yourself this question: whether sorrow can ever end? Because like hatred, when there is sorrow there is no love. When you are suffering, concerned with your own suffering, how can there be love? So one must ask this question, however difficult it is to find not the answer, but the ending of sorrow. What is sorrow? Not only the physical pain and the enduring pain, a person who is paralysed or maimed or diseased, but also the sorrow of losing someone: death. We'll talk about death presently. Is sorrow self-pity? Please, investigate. We're not saying it is or it is not, we're asking, is sorrow brought about by self-pity, is that one of the factors? Sorrow brought about by loneliness, feeling desperately alone? Not alone the word 'alone' means 'all one' but feeling isolated, having in that isolation no relationship with anything. Is sorrow merely an intellectual affair to be rationalized, explained away? Or can one live with it without any desire for comfort? You understand? To live with sorrow, not escape from it, not rationalize it, not find some illusive or exclusive comfort some religious or illusory romantic escape but live with something that has tremendous significance. Sorrow is not only a physical shock, when one loses one's son or husband, wife or girl, whatever it is; that is a tremendous biological shock; one is almost paralysed with it. Don't you know all this? There is also the sense of desperate loneliness. Can we look at sorrow as it actually is in us, and remain with it, hold it, and not move away from it? Sorrow is not different from the one who suffers. The person who suffers wants to run away, escape, do all kinds of things. But to look at it as you look at a child, a beautiful child, to hold it, never escape from it then you will see for yourself, if you really look deeply, that there is an end to sorrow. And when there is an end to sorrow there is passion; not lust, not sensory stimulation, but passion. Very few have this passion, because we are so consumed with our own griefs, with our own pains, with our own pity and vanity. We have a great deal of energy look what is happening in the world tremendous energy to invent new things, new gadgets, new ways of killing others. To go to the moon needs tremendous energy and concentration, both intellectual and actual. We have tremendous energy, but we dissipate it by conflict, through fear, through endless chattering about nothing. And passion has tremendous energy. That passion is not stimulated, it doesn't seek stimulation, it is there, like a burning fire. It only comes when there is the end of sorrow. When you have the ending of this sorrow, it is not personal, because you are the rest of humanity, as we said yesterday afternoon. We all suffer; we all go through loneliness; every human being on this earth, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, goes through tremendous anxieties, conscious or unconscious. Your consciousness is not yours, it is human consciousness. In the content of that consciousness is all your beliefs, your sorrows, your pities, your vanities, your arrogance, your search for power, position. All that is your consciousness, which is shared by all human beings. Therefore it's not your particular consciousness. And when you really realize that, not verbally or intellectually or theoretically or as a concept, but as an actuality, then you'll not kill another, hurt another, but you'll have some other thing which is totally different, of a different dimension altogether. We ought to talk over together too, this great question of what is love. We use the word 'love' so loosely, it has become merely sensuous, sexual; love is identified with pleasure. And to find that perfume one must go into the question of what is not love. Through negation you come to the positive, not the other way round. Am I making myself clear? Through negation of what is not love, you come to that which is immensely true, which is love. So love is not hate: that's obvious. Love is not vanity, arrogance. Love is not in the hand of power. The people who are in power, wanting power it doesn't matter if it's over a small child or over a whole group of people or a nation that surely is not love. Love is not pleasure, love is not desire. Love is certainly not thought. So can you put aside all that: your vanity, the sense of power however little it is, it's like a worm? And the more power you have, the more ugly and therefore in that there is no love. When you are ambitious, aggressive, as you are all brought up to be to be successful, to be famous, to be known, which is all so utterly childish, from the speaker's point of view how can there be love? So love is something that cannot be invited or cultivated. It comes about naturally, easily, when the other things are not. And in learning about oneself one comes upon this: where there is love, there is compassion; and compassion has its own intelligence. That is the supreme form of intelligence, not the intelligence of thought, intelligence of cunning, deceptions and all the rest of it. It's only when there is complete love and compassion that there is that excellence of intelligence which is not mechanical. Then we ought to talk about death. Shall we? Are you interested in finding out what death is? What is the meaning of that word death the dying, the ending? Not only the ending but what happens after death? Does one carry the memories of one's own life? The whole Asiatic world believes in reincarnation. That is I die, I have led a miserable life, perhaps done a little good here and there, and next life I'll be better, I'll do more good. It's based on reward and punishment, like everything else in life. And in Christianity there is resurrection and so on. So if we can put aside for the moment all that, really put it aside, not cling to one thing or the other, then what is death? What does it mean to die? Not only biologically, physically, but also psychologically: all the accumulation of memories, one's tendencies, the skills, the idiosyncrasies, the things that one has gathered, whether it be money, knowledge, friendship, whatever you will; all you have acquired. And death comes and says, 'Sorry, you can't take anything with you.' So what does it mean to die? Can we go into this question? Or are you frightened? What is death? How do we enquire into it? You understand my question? I am living, I go along every day, it is routine, mechanical, miserable, happy, unhappy, you know the whole business. And death comes, through accident, through disease, through old age, senility what is senility? Is it only for the old? Is not senility when we're just repeating, repeating, repeating when we act mechanically, thoughtlessly? Isn't that also a form of senility? Because we are frightened of death, we never see the greatness of this extraordinary thing. A child is born a new human being comes into being. That's an extraordinary event, and that child grows and becomes whatever you have all become, and then dies. Death is also something most extraordinary; it must be. And you won't see the depth and the greatness of it if you are frightened. So what is death? I want to find out what it means to die while I am living. I'm not senile, I've all my wits about me, I'm capable of thinking very clearly, perhaps I occasionally go off the beam but I'm active, clear. So I'm asking myself I'm not asking you I'm only observing; and will you observe also what is death? Death means surely the ending of everything: the ending of my relationships, the ending of all the things I've put together in my life, all the knowledge, all the experience, the idiotic life I've led, a meaningless life, or trying to find intellectually a meaning to life. Then death comes and says,' That's the end.' But I am frightened, it can't be the end. I've got so much, I've collected so much, not only furniture or pictures. When I identify myself with the furniture or the pictures or the bank account, I am the bank account, I am the pictures, I am the furniture. Right? When you identify with something so completely, you are that. Perhaps you don't like all this, but please, kindly listen. So I've established roots, I've established a great many things round me, and death comes and makes a clean sweep of all that. So I ask myself, is it possible to live with death all the time? Not at the end of ninety or a hundred years the speaker is ninety sorry. Not at the end of my life but with all my energy, vitality, and all the things that go on, can I live with death all the time? Not commit suicide,I don't mean that that's too silly but live with death, which means the ending every day of every thing I've collected; the ending. I do not know if you have gone into the question of what is continuity and what is ending. That which continues can never renew itself, be reborn. It can revive itself. The word 'revive' means something that has withered, is dying and you revive it. There is the religious revival they are shouting about. I don't know if you have noticed but organized religions and the gurus and all the rest of them are tremendously rich people with great property. There is a temple in the south of India: every third day they collect one million dollars. You understand? God is very profitable. This is not cynicism, this is actuality. We are facing actuality, and you can't be cynical or despairing, it is so; be neither optimistic nor pessimistic. You have to look at these things. So can I live with death, which means that everything that I have done and collected ends? Ending is more important than continuity. The ending means the beginning of something new. If you merely continue, it is the same pattern being repeated in a different mould. Have you noticed another strange thing? We have made a tremendous mess in the world, and we organize to clear up that mess, politically, religiously, socially and economically. And when that organization or institution doesn't work, we invent another organization, never clearing up the mess but bringing about new organizations, new institutions and this is called progress. I don't know if you have noticed all this. This is what we are doing making thousands of institutions. The other day we talked at the United Nations. War is going on, they've never stopped it, but they are reorganizing it. You are doing exactly the same thing in this country. We never clear up the mess. We depend on organizations to clear it up; or new leaders, new gurus, new priests, new faiths, and all that rubbish. So can I live with death? That means freedom, complete, total, holistic freedom. And in that freedom there is great love and compassion, and that intelligence which has not an end, which is immense. And we ought also to talk over together what is religion. May we go on? You are not too tired? The speaker is not trying to convince you of anything, please believe me: nothing! He's not trying to force you, through stimulation, through some other means. We are both looking at the world, your personal world and the world about you. You are the world, the world is not different from you. You have created this world and you are responsible for it, completely, totally, whether you are a politician or an ordinary man in the street. So to talk over together what is religion. Man has always sought something beyond all this pain, anxiety and sorrow. Is there something that is sacred, eternal, that is beyond all the reaches of thought? This has been a question from the most ancient of times. What is sacred? What is that which has no time, that which is incorruptible, that which is nameless, that which has no quality, no limitation the timeless, the eternal? Is there such a thing? Man has asked this for thousands and thousands of years. So he has worshipped the sun, the earth, nature, the trees, the birds; everything that's living on this earth man has worshipped since ancient times. The Vedas and the Upanishads never mention god. That which is supreme, they said, is not manifested. So are you asking that question too? Are you asking, is there something sacred? Is there something that is not put together by thought, as all organized religions are, whether Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other? In Buddhism there is no god. Among the Hindus, as I said, there are about three hundred gods. It's great fun to have so many. You can play with them all. And there are the gods of books, the god according to the Bible, the god according to the Koran. I don't know if you have noticed that when religions are based on books, like the Bible or the Koran, you have people who are bigoted, narrow, intolerant, because the book says so. Haven't you noticed all this? This country is having the Fundamentalists who go back to the book. Don't get angry, please, just look at it. So we are asking, what is religion? Not only what is religion, but what is the religious brain, religious mind? To enquire into that deeply, not superficially, there must be total freedom. Not freedom from one thing or the other, but freedom as a whole, per se. So we are asking, when there is that freedom, is it possible, living in this ugly world, to be free from pain, sorrow, anxiety, loneliness? Then you have also to find out what is meditation: contemplation in the Christian sense, and meditation in the Asiatic sense? Probably meditation has been brought to this country by the yogis, gurus and all those superstitious, traditional people, and therefore it's mechanical. So we'll have to find out what is meditation. Do you want to go into it? Does it just amuse you or do you want really to go into it? Is meditation a form of entertainment? First let me learn meditation, and then I'll act properly. You understand the game one plays? But if there is order in one's life, real order, as we explained, then what is meditation? Is it following certain systems, methods: the Zen method, the Buddhist meditation, the Hindu meditation, and the latest gurus with their medi- tation? They are always bearded, full of money, you know all the rest of that. So what is meditation? If it is determined, if it is following a system, a method, practised day after day, what happens to the human brain? It becomes more and more dull. Haven't you noticed this? You repeat, repeat, repeat it may be the wrong note, but you'll repeat it. So is meditation something entirely different? It has nothing whatever to do with method, system, practices, therefore it can never be mechanical. It can never be conscious meditation. Do please understand this. It's like a man consciously wanting money and pursuing money. Consciously you meditate, wanting to achieve peace, silence, and all that. Therefore they are both the same: the man who pursues money, success, power, and the man who pursues so-called spirituality. So is there a meditation which is not determined, practised? There is, but that requires enormous attention. That attention is a flame and that attention is not something that you come to much later; it is attention now to everything, every word, every gesture, every thought: to pay complete attention, not partial. If you are listening partially now, you are not giving complete attention. When you are completely attentive there is no self, there is no limitation. The brain now is full of information, cluttered up, there is no space in it, and one must have space. Space means energy; when there is no space your energy is very, very limited. The brain is now so heavily laden with knowledge, with theories, with power, position, so everlastingly in conflict and cluttered up, that it has no space. And freedom, complete freedom, is to have that limitless space. The brain is extraordinarily capable, has infinite capacity, but we have made it so small and petty. So when there is that space and emptiness and therefore immense energy - energy is passion, love and compassion and intelligence - then there is that truth which is most holy, most sacred; that which man has sought from time immemorial. That truth doesn't lie in any temple, in any mosque, in any church. And it has no path to it except through one's own understanding of oneself, enquiring, studying, learning. Then there is that which is eternal. WASHINGTON D.C. 1ST PUBLIC TALK 20TH APRIL 1985 This is not a lecture on any particular subject according to certain disciplines, scientific or philosophical. Lectures are meant to inform on a particular subject or instruct. But we are not going to do that. This is not a lecture. Nor is it a form of entertainment. Especially in this country, where one is greatly accustomed to being entertained; amused; awaken one's sensations. Rather [in] these talks, today and tomorrow morning, we are going to talk over together in conversation about the whole of our existence from the moment we are born until we die. In that period of time, whether it be 50 years or 90 years or hundred years, we go through all kinds of problems and difficulties. You have problems, economic, social, religious; problems of personal relationship, problems of individual fulfilment; wanting to find one's roots in some place or other. And we have innumerable psychological wounds, fears, pleasures, sensations. And also there is a great deal of fear in all human beings; great deal of anxiety, uncertainty, and a pursuit of pleasure. And also all human beings on this beautiful earth suffer a great deal of pain, loneliness. We are going to talk about all that together. And what place has religion in modern life? And also we are going to talk over together the question of death; what is a religious mind; and what is meditation; and if there is anything that is beyond all thought, there is anything sacred in life, or everything is matter and therefore we lead a materialistic life. We are going to talk over together all these problems this afternoon and tomorrow morning. So, as we said, this is not a lecture. This is a conversation between you and the speaker. A conversation in which there is no implication of conversion, doing propaganda or introducing new theories, ideas and exotic nonsense. We are going to, if you will kindly, talk over together our problems as two friends, though we don't know each other, we are going to talk, discuss, have a conversation. Which is more important than being lectured at or being told what to do, what to believe, or have certain faith, and so on. On the contrary, we are going to observe dispassionately, impersonally, not anchored to any particular problem or theory, but we are going to look together what mankind has done to the world and what we have done to each other. So this is not entertainment, a romantic, sentimental journey. Not only is [it] intellectually important, which is part of our being, but also we must look at all these problems, the thousand issues that mankind has, not from any point of view, not from the particular belief or faith, but rather explore together, investigate together. The speaker is not trying to do any kind of propaganda -that would be too terrible. Or to convert any person to a particular ideation. Or to a particular belief. So we are going to take a very long, complex journey together. It's your responsibility, as well as that of the speaker, that we walk together, investigate together; look at the world we have created. The society in which we live is put together by man, whether it be economic, social, the rich and the poor, and so on. The society in which we live. Each one contributed to it. And if you are willing, and apparently you must be willing because you are here and I am here, to take this long complex journey - because life is very complex. And we like to look at complexity and get more and more complex. But we never look at anything simply. With our brains, with our heart, with our whole being. So let us take the journey together. The speaker may be voicing, putting into words what is happening: objectively, clearly, and totally dispassionately. Mankind has lived on this earth perhaps for a million or 50,000 years. We have lived on this earth for many, many millennia. And during those periods of long time mankind has suffered pleasure, loneliness, despair, uncertainty, confusion, multiple choices, therefore multiple complexities; and there have been wars. Not only physical bloody wars but also psychological wars. And mankind has asked if there can be peace on earth - pacem in terris -the Latin of peace on earth. And apparently this has not been possible. There are about 40 wars going on at the present time. Both ideological, theoretical, economic, social. And during the historical times, perhaps about 5,000 to 6,000 years, there have been wars practically every year. And also we are preparing for wars now. One ideology, that of the Communists, the tyrannical, the brutal world of Russia, and the democratic, so-called democratic world of the West. Two ideologies at war. What kind of implements we should use, control of armament and all the rest of it. War seems to be the common lot of mankind. And also one observes all over the world piling up of armaments; the tiny little nation or tribe to the highly sophisticated affluent society like yours. And how can we have peace on earth? Is that at all possible? And also we have said, there is no peace on earth, only in heaven. This is repeated different ways, both in East, in India, and here. Christians have killed more than anybody else on earth. So we are observing, not taking sides, these are facts, actualities. And there are these religions: Christianity, Islamic world, the Fundamentalists. And Hinduism and Buddhism. And the various sects within organized Christianity, and also in India and Asia; they believe in the Buddha - in Buddhism there is no god; in Hinduism somebody calculated there are about 300,000 gods. That's rather fun, you can choose whichever god you like. And in Christianity and Islam there is only one god, based on two books, the Bible and the Koran. So religions have divided man. As nationalism, which is a form of glorified tribalism, has divided man. Nationalism, patriotism, religious ardour, the fundamentalists both in India, here and in Europe, going back, reviving their religious tradition. I wonder if you have ever looked at the word 'reviving'. You can only revive something that's dead or dying. Nothing living, you can't revive a living thing. And in this country they are reviving religion. Also they are doing the same thing in different parts of the world. And there is division between nationalities, religion, economic, and so on. And man has always been in conflict, as everyone in this world goes through all kinds of misery, all kinds of sorrow: pain, desperate loneliness. And we long to escape from all this. But we are going to look together, observe this extraordinary phenomena: what man has made after these thousands of years, he still remains a barbarian: cruel, vulgar, full of anxiety and hatred. And violence is increasing in the world. And so one asks, can there be peace on this earth? Because without peace, inwardly, psychologically first, the brain cannot flower. Human beings cannot live completely holistically. So why are we, after this long evolution - during that period we have gathered immense experience, knowledge, great deal of information - why are we as human beings perpetually in conflict? That's the real question. Because when there is no conflict there is naturally peace. And man - that includes the woman, please, when I use the word 'man' I am not shutting out the woman. Don't get excited about it. (Laughter) Nor, if one may point out, don't get angry, irritated, with what we are investigating together. It's your responsibility to inquire, not merely intellectually, verbally, but with your heart, with your brain, with all your being. And find out why we are what we are. We have tried various religions, various economic systems, social differences; and yet we live in conflict. Can this conflict in each one of us end? Completely, not partially, not occasionally. It's a very serious question. It demands a serious answer. Not it's possible or not possible, but to inquire into it very deeply, why human beings, including you, the speaker perhaps, live in perpetual conflict, problems, divisions. Why we have divided the world into nationalities, religious groups, social behaviour and all the rest of it. Can we seriously this afternoon inquire whether it's possible to end conflict. First psychologically, inwardly, because if there is [a] certain quality of freedom inwardly, then we shall produce a society in which there will be no conflict. So it's our responsibility as human beings, as so-called individualities, that we seriously put our brains, our energy, our passion into discover[ing] for ourselves, not according to any philosopher, not according to some psychiatrist and so on, but to inquire, observe, find out for oneself whether this conflict between two human beings, whether they be intimate or not, whether it could end. What is conflict? Why have we lived with conflict? Why have we problems? What is a problem? Please inquire with the speaker [into] this question. What is a problem? The etymological meaning of that word means 'something thrown at you'. A problem is a challenge, something you have to answer. But if you begin to inquire into the whole nature of a problem, whether it's most intimate or a world problem - as we said, the meaning of that word etymologically means something propelled, something thrown at you. I wonder if we have noticed from this question of problems, when you are a child, you are sent to school. There you have the problem of writing; problem of mathematics, problem of history, science, chemistry, and all the rest of it. So from childhood we are trained to have problems. Please have patience. Look at it carefully. So our brain is conditioned, trained, educated to have problems. Observe it for yourself. And don't please merely listen to the speaker. We are together investigating, looking into the problems that you have. So from childhood we are trained, educated, conditioned to have problems: and when new problems arise, which they inevitably do, our brain, being full of problems, tries to solve another problem and thereby increase more problems; which is what is happening in the world. The politicians all over the world are increasing, problem after problem. And they have found no answer. So is it possible - please listen if you will - is it possible to have a brain that is free from problems so that you can solve problems. Not a cluttered brain full of problems. Is that possible? And also - if you say it is not possible or it is possible, you have stopped investigating. What is important in this inquiry is that one must have a great deal of doubt; scepticism. Never accepting anything at its face value or according to your pleasure or gratification. Love is much too serious. So we should inquire not only into the nature of conflict, problems, but also - perhaps this may be much more important - go all over the world, wherever you will, every human being on this earth, every human being whether he live in Russia, China, Asia, India, Europe or here, goes through all kinds of sorrow. Thousands and millions have shed tears and occasional laughter. Every human being on this earth has had great loneliness, despair, anxiety, confused, uncertain - like you. Every human being, black, white, purple or whatever colour you like. And psychologically this is a fact, actuality; not invented by the speaker. This is (inaudible; you can see it on every face on this earth. And so psychologically you are the rest of mankind. You may be tall, short, black or white, or what colour you may be, but psychologically you are mankind. Please understand this - not intellectually or ideologically or a hypothesis, but it is an actuality, burning reality, that you psychologically are the rest of mankind. Therefore psychologically you are not individuals. Though religions, [except] perhaps parts of Hinduism and Buddhism, have entertained, encouraged the sense of individual growth, saving individual souls and all that business, but in actuality, in your consciousness, your consciousness is not yours. It's the rest of mankind's. Because we all go through the same mill, the same endless conflict and so on. When one realizes this, not emotionally, not as an intellectual concept but as something actual, real, true, then you will not kill another human being. You will never kill another, either verbally or intellectually, ideologically or physically, because then you are killing yourself. But individuality has been encouraged all over the world. Each one is struggling for himself: his success, his fulfilment, his achievement, pursuing his desires and creating havoc in the world. Please understand this very carefully. We are not saying that each individual is important: on the contrary. If you are concerned with global peace, not just your own little peace in the backyard -nations have become the backyard. [If] You are really concerned, as most serious people must be concerned, that you are the rest of humanity - that's a great responsibility. So we must go back and find out for ourselves why human beings have reduced the world to what it is now. What is the cause of all this? Why have we made such a mess of everything we touch, both in our personal relationship, between man and woman, between each other; why there is conflict between gods: your god and the other's god; so we must inquire together whether it is possible to end conflict. Otherwise we'll never have peace in this world. Long before Christianity they talked about peace on earth. Long before Christianity, in Hinduism, they worshipped trees, stones, animals, nature, lightning, the fire; there was never any sense of god before, because they considered the earth as the mother to be worshipped, to be conserved, preserved, spared, not destroyed as we are doing now. So let's inquire together - please, I mean together, not I inquire and you casually agreeing or disagreeing. Could we this afternoon put aside all this idea of agreeing or disagreeing. Will you do that? So that we can both of us look at things as they are, not what you think they are; not your idea or concept of what is, but just look at it. Look at it non-verbally even, if that's possible. That's much more difficult. (Sigh) First of all, this is the actual world we live in. You cannot possibly escape from it through monasteries, through religious experiences (and one must doubt all one's experiences). Man has done everything on earth possible to run away from the actuality of daily living, with all its complexities. Why do we have conflict in relationship, between man and woman: sexual, sensory division. And in this peculiar relationship man is pursuing his own ambition, his own greed, his own desires, his own fulfilment, and the woman too is doing the same. I don't know if you have noticed all this for yourself. So there are two ambitious, driving - being driven by desire and so on, two parallel lines never meeting except perhaps sexually. So how can there be a relationship between two people when each one is pursuing his own desires, ambitions, needs (?). In this relationship, because there is this division, there is no love. Please, hold to your seats. That word 'love' is polluted, spat upon, degraded; it has become merely sensuous, pleasurable. Love is not pleasure. Love is not something put together by thought, it's not something dependent on sensation; we'll talk about that a little later. So how can there be right, true relationship between two people when each one considers his own importance. Self-interest is the beginning of corruption, destruction, whether it be in a politician, or the religious man, and so on; self-interest dominates the world and therefore there is conflict. Where there is duality, separation, as the Greek and the Muslim, or the Jew and the Arab, as the Christian who believes in some saviour and the Hindu who doesn't believe in all this, there is this division: national division, religious division, individual divisions, where there is division there must be conflict. That's a law. So we live our daily life in a little circumscribed self, a limited self. Not by the higher self, delimited (?; self is always limited; and that's the cause of conflict. That's the central core of our struggle, pain, anxiety, and all the rest of it. If one becomes aware of it, as most people must naturally, not because you're told to or because you read some philosophical book or psychology, but it's an actual fact. Each one is concerned with himself. He lives in a separate world all to himself. And therefore there is division between you and another, between you and your religion, between you and your god, between you and your ideologies. So is it possible to understand - not intellectually but deeply, that you are the rest of mankind. Whatever you do, good or bad, affects the rest of mankind, because you are mankind. Your consciousness is not yours. Your consciousness is made up of its content. Without the content there is no consciousness. Your consciousness like the rest of humanity is made up of beliefs, fears, faith, gods, personal ambitions and all the rest of fears and all that; your whole consciousness is made up of all this, put together by thought. One hopes that you have taken the journey together. Together we are walking the same road, not that you are listening to a series of ideas. We are not pursuing ideas or ideologies, but facing actuality. Because in actuality and going beyond that actuality is the truth. And when you discover, when there is truth it's the most dangerous thing. Truth is very dangerous because it brings a revolution in oneself. WOMAN: Excuse me - would it be possible to turn up the volume? K: Please - sorry, sorry - forgive me, forgive the speaker if he doesn't answer questions. Because then we get too distracted. You know, it's good to ask questions. And whom are you asking the question, to whom? Are you asking the question to the speaker? That means you are waiting for an answer from the speaker. Then you depend on the speaker. Then you establish gurus. Have you ever gone into the question why we ask questions? Not that you should not, but we are inquiring. Suppose you ask the speaker a question and he answers it: either you accept it or deny it. If it is satisfactory to you according to your conditioning or your background, then you say, "Yes, I agree with you entirely." Or if you don't agree, you say, "What nonsense." But if you begin to inquire into the question itself, is the answer separate from the question? Or does the answer lie in the question itself? The perfume of a flower is the flower. The very flower is the essence of that perfume. But we depend on others so much to be helped, to be encouraged, to solve our problems; therefore out of our confusion we create authority, the gurus, the priests. So please, it's good to ask questions. I don't know if you have gone into this. You know, we have lost the art of investigation, discussion: not taking sides but looking at it. It very complex, maybe not the right occasion to go into this. You also should inquire why from childhood we are hurt psychologically, wounded. Most of us psychologically are wounded, and from that wound either one is conscious of it or not, or many of our problems arise. The wound as a child by a scolding, by saying something ugly, brutal, violent, we are wounded. When you say "we are wounded" who is it that is wounded? Is it the image that you have built about yourself that's wounded; the psyche? Please, the speaker has not read any of the psychology books or philosophy or religious books, he's just investigating with you. The psyche, with is the 'me' - and the me is the image I have built about myself, there is nothing spiritual about it (that's another ugly word, spiritual) - that image gets hurt and we carry that image right through our life. If one image is not pleasant, we put together another image which is pleasant, encourage it - worthwhile, significant, giving intellectual meaning to our life. This is the world (?) we have (?) brought about in the image that one has built about oneself. Is it possible to live on this earth not having a single image, about anybody, including god, if there is such an entity, no image about your wife and your children and your husband, and so on. Not to have a single image. Then it is possible never to be hurt. And also, as our time is limited, because we are only - this half-talk in the afternoon and tomorrow morning - we ought to inquire carefully whether it is possible to be free of fear. This is really an important question to ask. Not that I am asking for you, but you are asking this of yourself. Whether it is possible, living in a modern society with all the brutality, with all the tremendous violence that is on the increase, is there freedom from fear? Which is entirely different from analysis. Just to observe without any distortion: to observe this hall, for example, how many tiers there are (five of them, four of them), to observe your neighbour's dress, face, how he talks, just to observe, not to criticize; not evaluate, judge, but to observe a tree; to observe the moon and the swift-running waters. When you so observe then you ask yourself, what is - I'll come back to fear presently - what is beauty? They talk a great deal about beauty in the magazines: how you must be beautiful, your face, your hair, your complexion and all the rest of it. So what is beauty? Is beauty in the picture, in the painting, in the strange modern structure? Is beauty in a poem? Is beauty in merely the physical face and body? Have you ever asked this question? If you are an artist or a poet or a literary person, you may describe something very beautiful, paint something that's lovely, a poem that really stirs your very being. So what is beauty? Because freedom means - etymologically the word 'freedom', in that word 'freedom' there is love. The word 'freedom', in that word there is the etymological meaning also which is love. What is the relationship between love and beauty? When we talk about love, perhaps later on, what is beauty? Is it in the eye of the beholder? Have you ever noticed, give a nice toy, a complicated toy, to a child - he's being naughty, shouting, playing, and when you give him a toy he gets completely absorbed in that and all his playfulness stops, naughtiness, if I can use that word, because he is absorbed. Is being absorbed in a poem, in a face, in a picture, being absorbed in it or attracted by it, is that absorption beauty? When you look at a marvellous mountain with a snowcap, eternal snows, the line against the blue sky, for a second the immensity of that mountain drives away the self, the 'me', with all my problems, all my anxiety; that majesty of the great rocks and the beautiful, lovely valleys and the rivers; at that moment, that second, the self is not. So the mountain has driven away the self, like the toy, with [it] the child is quiet. So that mountain, that river, the depth of the blue valleys, dispels for a second all your problems, all your vanities and anxieties. Then you say, "How beautiful that is." So is there beauty without being absorbed by something outside? That is, is there beauty, or beauty is where the self is not. You understand this? Don't go to sleep, please. (Laughter) You might have had a good lunch, I hope you did, but this is not the place to go to sleep. It's your problem, your life, not the speaker's life, it's your life: your vanities, your despairs, your sorrows we are talking about. So keep awake for another quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, if you are interested. So beauty is when the self is not. And that is requires great meditation, great inquiry, a tremendous sense of discipline. The word 'discipline' means the one disciple who is learning from the master. Learning, not disciplining, conforming, imitating; adjusting, learning. Learning brings its own tremendous discipline. And that inward sense of austerity, discipline is necessary. So we must inquire together into what is fear. What is the time, sir? May we go on? You aren't tired? What is fear? Again, humanity has put up with fear. Has never been able to solve fear. Never. There are various forms of fear; you may have your own particular form of fear: fear of death, fear of gods, fear of your wife, fear of your husband, fear of the politicians, god knows how many fears humanity has, the devil, and so on. What is fear? Not the mere experience of fear in its multiple forms, but actually, the reality, the actuality of fear. How is it brought about? Why has man, woman, why has humanity and each one accepted fear as a way of life? As you accept violence as the way of life; violence in the television, violence of war, violence of your daily life. Why do we accept violence? The ultimate violence is to go into organized killing, which is called war. Is not fear related to violence? So in inquiring into fear, the actual truth of fear, not the idea of fear - you understand the difference? The idea of fear is different from the actuality of fear; right? Right. So what is fear? How has it come about? What is the relationship of fear to time, to thought? Fear - one may be frightened of tomorrow, or many tomorrows; fear of death, the ultimate fear; fear of what has happened before, in the past; fear of what is actually going on now. So we must inquire together - please, the speaker keeps on repeating, together; otherwise it's no fun talking to myself. Is fear brought about by time? Someone has done something in the past, hurt you, and the past is time. The future is time. The present is time. So we are asking, is time a central factor of fear? Fear has many many branches, many leaves, but it's no good trimming the branches; we are asking, what is the root of fear? Not the multiple forms of fear, because fear is fear. Out of fear you have invented gods, saviours. If you have absolutely no fear psychologically, then there is tremendous relief, a great sense of freedom. You have dropped all the burdens of life. So we must inquire very seriously, closely, hesitantly, into this question: is time a factor? Obviously. Have a good job now, I may lose it tomorrow, I'm frightened. And I may be married, I am frightened. When there is fear there is jealousy, anxiety, hatred, violence. So time is a factor of fear. Please listen to the end of it, don't say, how am I to stop time, that's not the problem. That's a rather absurd question to ask. Time is a factor and thought is a factor: thinking about what has happened, what might happen; thinking. Is thinking a factor in fear? Has thinking brought about fear? As one sees time has brought fear, right? Time. Not only time by the clock, but psychological time, the inward time: I am going to be; I am not good, but I will be. I will get rid of my violence, which is again the future. Or, I have been violent, but I won't be. All that implies time. We ought to inquire, what is time? Are you prepared for this? Do you want to go into all this? Really? I'm rather surprised. (Laughter) Because you've all been instructed, you've all been informed, you've been told what to do by the psychologists, by the priests, by your leaders; always seeking help and finding new ways of being helped. So one has become a slave to others. We are never free to inquire, to stand psychologically completely by oneself. So we are going now to inquire into time. What is time? Apart from the clock, apart from the sunrise and the sunset, the beauty of the sunrise, the beauty of the sunset, apart from the light and the dark, what is time? Please, if one really understands this, the nature of time inwardly, you will find for yourself an extraordinary sense of having no time at all. We'll come to that. Time is the past, right? Time is the future, and time is the present. The whole cycle is time. The past - your background, what you have thought, what you have lived through, your experiences, your conditioning, as Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, all the rest of it - or you put aside all that nonsense and say, I'm going to live this way, which is the past. So the past is the present, right? Without the past you wouldn't be here: your background, your conditioning, your brain being programmed as a Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and all the rest of it. We have been programmed for two thousand years. And the Hindus for three to five thousand years. Like a computer, they repeat, repeat, repeat. So the past is the present; what you are now is the result of the past. And tomorrow, or a thousand tomorrows, is the future. So the future is what you are now. Right? You have understood? I mustn't ask you that because that's (inaudible), it's up to you. So the future is now. In the now all time is contained. This is a fact too, actuality, not a theory. What you are is the result of the past and what you will be tomorrow is what you are now. If I am violent now tomorrow I'll be violent. So tomorrow is in the now, in the present, unless I radically, fundamentally bring about a mutation. Otherwise I'll be what I have been. That is, we have had a long evolution, evolving, evolving, evolving. And we have evolved to what we are now. And if you carry on that game you will be violent, you will be barbarous next day. So as all time is contained in the now - which is a fact, actuality - can there be total mutation now in all our behaviour and our way of living, thinking, feeling? Not being an American, Hindu, Buddhist, none of that. Because if you don't radically, psychologically bring about a mutation then you will be exactly what you have been in the past. So is it possible to bring about this psychological mutation at all? You know, when you have been going north all your life, following a particular direction or not having a direction, just wobbling all over the place, as most people do - if you are going north and somebody comes along and tells you most seriously, and you listen to him seriously, not only here with hearing of the ear but also hearing deeply, when you hear [him] say, the way you are pursuing, north, leads you nowhere, there is nothing at the end of it; but go east or west or south. And you listen and you say, I will do it. When the moment you say, you have taken a new turn, there is a mutation. The speaker is making it very simple. But it's a very complex problem, which is: to realize deeply that one has been going on this way for centuries upon centuries and it has not changed that at all. We are still violent, brutal, and all the rest of it. If one really actually perceives that, not intellectually or verbally but deeply, then you turn in another direction. At that second there is the mutation in the very brain cells themselves. Because the speaker has discussed these matters with some neurologists. Of course they don't agree completely, but they go partially, a way. It's always a game, you understand. We treat life as a game: partially right, and partially wrong; partially correct and you may be right and you may be wrong. But we never ask ourselves, what is the way of living, the art of living, which is the greatest art, greater than any art in the world, the art of living. And - quelle heure -MAN: 3:57. K: Have I talked an hour? MAN: A little more than an hour. K: Can you put up with this? AUDIENCE: (Laughter) Yes. K: We'll finish this question. After that we'll meet again tomorrow. If you are willing, I'm not inviting you, it's up to you. (Laughter) We said time is important because we live by time, but we don't live time as a whole, which is the present. In the present all time is contained: the future and the past. If I'm violent today, I'll be violent tomorrow. And can I end that violence today completely, not partially. It can. We'll go into it. And also, is fear brought about by thought? Of course it is. Don't accept the speaker's word for it, look at it. I am this, I am frightened of tomorrow, what might happen. I am secure today, and there might be war, there might be this, there might catastrophe, I am frightened. So time and thought are the root of fear. So what is thinking? You understand my question? If time and thought are the root of fear - which they are [in] actuality - what is thinking? Why do we live, act, do everything, on the basis of thought? The marvellous cathedrals of Europe, the beauty, the structure, the architecture: it has been put together by thought. All religions and their paraphernalia, their dress, all the medieval robes, are put together by thought. All the rituals are connived, arranged, by thought. And in our relationship with each other, man and woman, the relationship is based on thought. When you drive a car, it's based on thought. Recognition, all that, is thought. So one has to inquire, if you are not too tired - and we'll stop at the end after this - what is thinking? Probably nobody has asked this question. Very few people do. We have been asking this question for sixty years. What is thought? Because if you can find out what is the origin, the beginning, why thought has become so extraordinarily important in our life, there may be in that very inquiry a mutation taking place. So we are asking what is thought, what is thinking? Don't wait for me to answer it. Look at it, observe it. Thinking is the word; word is important, the sound of the word, the quality of the word; the depth, the beauty of a word. Especially the sound. I won't go into the question of sound and silence, we'll talk about it perhaps tomorrow. Thinking is part of memory, isn't it? Investigate it with the speaker, please, don't sit there comfortably, or uncomfortably. Thinking is part of memory, isn't it? If you had no memory at all, would you be able to think? You wouldn't. Our brain is the instrument of memory: memory of things that have happened, experience, and so on, the whole background of memory. Memory arises from knowledge, from experience, right? So experience, knowledge, memory, and the response of memory is thought. This whole process of experiencing, recollecting, holding, which becomes our knowledge. Experience is always limited, naturally. Because - it's a complicated question, because - oh, gosh, everything is complicated. (Laughter) Is experience different from the experiencer? Give your brains to this, find out. If there is no experiencer, is there an experience? Of course not. So the experience and the experiencer are the same. Like the observer and the observed, the thinker is not separate from his thoughts. The thinker is the thought. So experience is limited, as you can observe in the scientific world or any other field. They are adding more and more and more every day to their knowledge through experience, through experiment on animals and all that horror that is going on. And that knowledge is limited because they are adding to it. So memory is limited. And from that memory thought is limited. So thought being limited must invariably bring about conflict. Just see the pattern of it. Not accept what the speaker is saying, that's absurd. He's not an authority, he's not a guru, thank god. But if we can observe this fact together, that thought and time are the root of fear. Time and thought are the same, they are not two separate movements. When you see this fact, this actuality, that time and thought are the root of fear, time thought - just to observe it in yourself, not move away from the reality of it, from the truth of it, that fear is caused by this, time and thought; to hold it, remain with it, not run away from it, not rationalize, it is so. And then it's like holding a precious jewel in your hand. You see all the beauty of that jewel. Then you will see for yourself that fear psychologically completely ends. And when there is no fear you are free. And when there is that total freedom you don't have gods, rituals, you are a free man. We'll continue tomorrow if you don't mind. (Applause) I don't know why you clap. (Laughter) Perhaps you are clapping for yourself. (Laughter and applause) You are not encouraging the speaker or discouraging him. He doesn't want a thing from you. When you yourself become both the teacher and the disciple -disciple being a man who is learning, learning, learning, not accumulating knowledge - then you are [an] extraordinary human being. WASHINGTON D.C. 2ND PUBLIC TALK 21ST APRIL 1985 May we continue where we left off yesterday. We were talking about fear and the ending of fear. And also we were talking about the responsibility of each one of us facing what is happening in the world, the appalling, frightening mess we are in. And for that we are all responsible, individually, collectively, nationally, religiously, and all the affairs of the world we have made after millennia upon millennia, long evolution, we have still remained barbarians, hurting each other, killing each other, destroying each other. We have had freedom to do exactly what we liked and that has created havoc in the world. Freedom is not to do what one likes, but rather to be free from all the travail of life, from the problems, which we went into yesterday morning, from our anxieties, from our psychological wounds, from all the conflict that we have put up with for many many many millennia. And also to be free from fear. We talked about all these things yesterday afternoon. And also we said these gatherings, this meeting is not a lecture on any particular subject, to inform, to instruct, to put it into a certain pattern. But rather it is our responsibility, together, to investigate, to explore into all the problems of our life, our daily life. Not some speculative concepts or philosophies, but to understand the daily pain, the boredom, the loneliness, the despair, the depression, and the endless conflict which man has lived with. And this morning we have to cover a great deal of ground. And also we pointed out yesterday this is not a meeting in which the speaker stimulates you intellectually, emotionally, or in any other way. We depend a great deal on stimulation; it's a form of commercialism: drugs, alcohol, and all the various means of sensation. And we want also not only sensation but excitement, stimulation. So this is not that kind of meeting. We are together to investigate our life, our daily life; that is, to understand oneself, what one is actually, not theoretically, not according to some philosopher or some psychiatrist, and so on. If you can put aside all that and look at ourselves actually, what we are, and not get depressed or elated, but to observe, which is to understand the whole psychological structure of our being, of our existence. And we talked about it yesterday as one of the things that human beings go through all their life, is a form of fear. And we went into it very carefully: that time and thought are the root of fear. We went into that, what time and thought is. Time is not only the past, the present and the future, but in the now, in the present, all time is contained. Because what we are now we will be tomorrow unless there is a great, fundamental mutation in the very psyche itself, in the very brain cells themselves. We talked about it. And we also should talk this morning, talk over this morning together - please, one may point out, you and the speaker are taking a journey together, a long, complicated journey. And to take that journey one mustn't be attached to any particular form of belief. Then that journey is not possible. Or to any faith, or to some conclusion or ideology, or concepts. It's like climbing the Everest or some of the great, marvellous mountains of the world; one has to leave a great deal behind, not carry all your burdens up the steep hills, mountains. So in taking the journey together - and the speaker means together, not that he is merely talking and you agreeing or disagreeing; if we could put those two words aside completely, then we can take the journey together. Some may want to walk very rapidly or the others may lag behind, but it is a journey all the same together. We ought also to talk over together why human beings have always pursued pleasure as opposed to fear. We've never investigated what is pleasure, why we want everlasting pleasure in different ways: sexual, sensory, intellectual, the pleasure of possessions, the pleasure of acquiring a great skill, the pleasure that one derives from having a great deal of information, knowledge. And the ultimate gratification is what we call god. As we said, please don't get angry or irritated or want to throw something at the speaker. (Laughter) This is a violent world. If you don't agree they'll kill you. This is what is happening. And here we're not trying to kill each other, we're not doing any kind of propaganda or convinc[ing] you of anything. But we are going to face the truth of things, not live in illusions. And without illusions it's very difficult to observe. If you are deluding yourself and not facing actualities, then it becomes impossible to look at oneself as one is. But we like delusions, illusions, every form of deception, because we are frightened to look at ourselves. As we said, to look at ourselves very clearly, accurately, precisely, it's only possible in a mirror of relationship; that's the only mirror that we have. When you look at yourself when you're combing your hair or shaving or doing whatever you are doing to your face - sorry. (Laughter) You look at your mirror -sorry - (K laughs - more laughter) (K laughs - laughter and applause) - when you are shaving you look at your face or comb your hair; that mirror reflects exactly what you are, your face is, how you look. And psychologically is there such a mirror in which you can see exactly, precisely, actually what you are? As we said, there is such a mirror which is one's relationship, however intimate it be, whether it's man, woman; in that relationship you see what you are if you allow yourself to see what you are. You see how you get angry, your possession, all the rest of it. So pleasure man has pursued endlessly in the name of god, in the name of peace, and in the name of ideology and the pleasure of power, having power over others, political power. Have you noticed power is an ugly thing, when one dominates another, in any form: when a wife dominates the husband or the husband dominates the woman. Power is one of the evil things in life. And pleasure is the other side of the coin of fear. When one understands deeply, profoundly, seriously the nature of fear (as we went into it yesterday we won't go into it again), then pleasure, that is delight, seeing something beautiful, seeing the sunset or the morning light, the dawn, the marvellous colours, the reflection of the sun on the waters, that's a delight. But we make that as a memory and cultivate that memory as pleasure. And also, as we said - but just look at it, not do something about it. I don't know if you have gone into the question of action. What is action? We're all so active from morning 'til night, not only physically but psychologically, the brain everlastingly chattering, going from one thing to another endlessly, during the day and during the night, the dreams, the brain is never at rest, it's perpetually in motion. I do not know if you have gone into that question of action. What is action, the doing? The very word 'doing' is the present, it's not having done or will do. Action means the doing now, correctly, accurately, completely, holistically - if I can use that word - action that is whole, complete, not partial. When action is based on some ideology, it's not action, is it? It's conformity to a certain pattern which you have established and therefore it's incomplete action or according to some memory, some conclusion. If you act according to [a] certain ideology, pattern or conclusion, it is still incomplete; there is a contradiction in all this. So one has to inquire into this very complex problem of action. Is action related to disorder or to order? You understand? We live in disorder, our life is disorderly, confused; contradictory: saying one thing, doing another; thinking one thing and quite the opposite in our actions. So what is order and disorder? Perhaps you have not thought about all these matters, so let us think together about all this, and look, please don't let me talk to myself. It's still early in the morning and you have a whole day in front of you; so let us be aware together of this question: what is order and what is disorder and what is the relationship of action to order and disorder? We more or less explained what is action; the very word 'to act' means the present, acting: you are sitting there. And what is the relationship [to] disorder. What is disorder? Look at the world if you will; the world is in disorder. Terrible things are happening. Very few of us know actually what is happening in the scientific world, in the world of the art of war, and all the terrible things that are happening in Russia; and the poverty in all countries, the rich and the terribly poor; always the threat of war, one political group against another political group. So there is this tremendous disorder. That's an actuality, it's not an invention or an illusion. And we have created this disorder, because our very life, living, is disorderly. And we are trying socially to bring about order, through all the social reforms and so on, so on. Without understanding and bringing about the end of disorder, we try to find order. It's like a confused mind trying to find clarity. A confused mind is a confused mind, it can never find clarity. So can there be an end to disorder in our life, our daily life? Not order in heaven or in another place, but in our daily life can there be order? The end of disorder, and when there is the end of disorder there is naturally order. That order is living, it's not according to a certain pattern or a mould. So we are investigating looking at ourselves and learning about ourselves. Learning is different from acquiring knowledge. Please this is rather - if you will kindly give your attention to this a little bit - that learning is an infinite process, limitless process, whereas knowledge is always limited. And learning implies not only observing visually, optically, but also observing without any distortion, seeing things exactly as they are. That requires that discipline - please, the word 'discipline,' as we said yesterday, means - the word comes from the word 'disciple.' 'Disciple' is one who is learning, not the terrible discipline of orthodoxy, tradition, or following certain rules, dictates, and so on, it's learning; learning through clear observation without distortion. Hearing things exactly what the other fellow is saying without any distortion. And learning is not accumulative because you're moving. You understand all this? So in learning what is disorder in ourselves, then order comes about very naturally, easily, unexpectedly. And when there is order, order is virtue. There is no other virtue except complete order, that is complete morality, not some imposed or dictated morality. Then we ought also [to] talk over together this whole question of sorrow. You don't mind? Because man and woman, children throughout the world, whether they live behind the Iron Curtain (which is most unfortunate for them), whether they live in Asia or India or Europe or here, every human being, whether rich or poor, intellectual or just ordinary layman like us, we all go through every form of suffering. Have you ever looked at people that have cried through centuries? Through thousands of wars? The husband, the wife, the children. There is immense sorrow in the world. Not that there is not also pleasure, joy, and so on, but in understanding and perhaps ending sorrow we'll find something much greater. So we must go into this complex question of sorrow. And whether it can ever end or man is doomed forever to suffer; suffer not only physically, which depends how ordinary [a] life one leads, whether your body is drugged: alcohol, tobacco, nicotine, alcohol, and all that, whether the body has been destroyed. Psychologically, inwardly we have suffered enormously without perhaps not saying a word about it. Or crying your heart out. And during all this long evolution, evolution of man from the beginning of time 'til now, every human being on this earth has suffered. Suffering is not merely the loss of someone you think you like or love, but also the suffering of the very poor, the illiterate. If you go to India or other parts of the world, you see people walking miles and miles to go to a school, little girls and little boys. They'll never be rich, they will never ride [in] a car, probably never have a hot bath. They have one sari or one dress, whatever they wear and that's all they have. And that is sorrow. Not for the man who goes by in a car, but the man in the car looks at this and he's in sorrow if he's at all sensitive, aware. And the sorrow of ignorance; not ignorance of writing, literature, and all the rest of it, but the sorrow of a man who doesn't know himself. There are multiple ways of sorrow. And we are asking, can this sorrow end with each one? There is the sorrow of oneself, in oneself, and the sorrow of the world. Thousands of wars, people maimed, hurt, appalling cruelty: not a particular form of cruelty of which you are talking a great deal, a particular form and you are rebelling against that particular form, but you never ask, is there an end to cruelty. Every nation on earth has (coveted? cultivated?) cruelties, appalling. And we're still perpetuating that cruelty. And cruelty brings enormous sorrow. Seeing all this - not from a book, not from a traveller, not from a tourist (tourists go abroad just to amuse themselves, see sights and having a good time, a holiday), but if you are travelling as a human being, just observe it, being aware sensitively to all this, sorrow is a terrible thing. And can that sorrow end? Please, ask yourself that question. The speaker is not stimulating you to feel sorrow, the speaker is not telling you what sorrow is, it's right in front of us, right inside you. Nobody needs to point it out, if you keep your eyes open, if you are sensitive, aware of what is happening in this monstrous world. So please ask yourself this question: whether sorrow can ever end. Because like hatred, when there is sorrow there is no love. When you are suffering, concerned with your own suffering, how can there be love? So one must ask this question, however difficult it is to find -not the answer, but the ending of sorrow. What is sorrow? Not only the physical pain and the enduring pain, a person who is paralysed or maimed or diseased, but also the sorrow of losing someone: death. We'll talk about death presently. Is sorrow self-pity? Please, investigate. We're not saying it is or it is not, we're asking, is sorrow brought about by self-pity, one of the factors? Sorrow brought about by loneliness? Feeling desperately alone, lonely; Not alone: the word 'alone' means 'all one.' But feeling isolated, having in that loneliness no relationship with anything. Is sorrow merely an intellectual affair? To be rationalized, explained away? Or to live with it without any desire for comfort. You understand? To live with sorrow, not escape from it, not rationalize it, not find some illusive or exclusive comfort: religious or some illusory romantic escapes, but to live with something that has tremendous significance. Sorrow is not only a physical shock, when one loses one's son or husband, wife or girl, whatever it is, it's a tremendous biological shock. One is almost paralysed with it. Don't you know all this? There is also the sense of desperate loneliness. Can one look at sorrow as it is actually in us, and remain with it, hold it, and not move away from it. Sorrow is not different from the one who suffers. The person who suffers wants to run away, escape, all kinds of things. But to look at it as you look at a child, a beautiful child, to hold it, never escape from it. Then you will see for yourself, if you really look deeply, that there is an end to sorrow. And when there is an end to sorrow there is passion; not lust, not sensory stimulation, but passion. Very few have this passion, because we are so consumed with our own griefs, with our own pains, with our own pity and vanity and all the rest of it. We have a great deal of energy - look what is happening in the world - tremendous energy to invent new things, new gadgets, new ways of killing others. To go to the moon needs tremendous energy and concentration, both intellectual and actual. We've got tremendous energy, but we dissipate it by conflict, through fear, through endless chattering about nothing. And passion has tremendous energy. That passion is not stimulated, it doesn't seek stimulation, it's there, like a burning fire. It only comes when there is the end of sorrow. And when you have this sorrow, the ending of it, it's not personal, because you are the rest of humanity, as we said yesterday afternoon. We all suffer. We all go through loneliness, every human being on this earth, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, everybody goes through tremendous anxieties, conscious or unconscious. Our consciousness is not shared, it's not yours, it's human consciousness. In the content of that consciousness is all your beliefs, your sorrows, your pities, your vanities, your arrogance, your search for power, position, and all that. All that is your consciousness, which is shared by all human beings. Therefore it's not your particular consciousness. And when one really realizes that, not verbally or intellectually or theoretically or as a concept, but as an actuality, then you'll not only [not] kill another, hurt another, but you'll have some other thing which is totally different, of a different dimension altogether. We ought to talk over together too what is love. I hope all this is not boring you. (Laughter) If you want to take a breather, it's all right. As the speaker said, we ought to go into this great question of what is love. We use the word 'love' so loosely, it has become merely sensuous, sexual; love is identified with pleasure. And to find that perfume one must go into the question what is not love. Through negation you come to the positive, not the other way around. Am I making myself clear? Through negation of what is not love, then you come to that which is immensely true, which is love. So love is not hate: that's obvious. Love is not vanity, arrogance. Love is not in the hand of power. The people who are in power, wanting power, it doesn't matter [if it's] over a small child or wanting power over a whole group of people or a nation, that surely is not love. Love is not pleasure, love is not desire. I don't know if you have time to go into the question of desire. Perhaps we may. Love is certainly not thought. So can you put aside all that: your vanity, the sense of power - however small, however little it is, it's like a worm. And the more power you have, the more ugly -and therefore in that there is no love. When one is ambitious, aggressive, on which you are all brought up: to be aggressive, to be successful, to be famous, to be known, which is all so utterly childish - from the speaker's point of view. (Laughter) How can there be love? So love is something that cannot be invited or cultivated. It comes about naturally, easily, when the other things are not. And in learning about oneself one comes upon this: where there is love, there is compassion; and compassion has its own intelligence. That is the supreme form of intelligence, not the intelligence of thought, intelligence of cunning, deceptions and all the rest of it. It's only when there is complete love and compassion there is that excellence of intelligence which is not mechanical. Then we ought to talk about death. Shall we? Are you interested in finding out - (Laughter) - what death is? What's the meaning of that word; the dying; death; the ending. Not only the ending, what happens after death? Does one carry the memories of one's own life? The whole Asiatic world believes in reincarnation. That is, I die, I have led a miserable life, perhaps done a little good here and there, and next life I'll be better, I'll do more good. It's based on reward and punishment, like everything else in life. I will do good this life, and I will be better next life. It's based on the word 'karma,' probably you have heard of it. The word 'karma' means in Sanskrit 'action' - I won't go into it. So there is this whole belief that when one has lived this life, next life you have a better chance, depending what kind of life you have led now: the reward and punishment. And in Christianity there is this whole sense (?) of resurrection and so on. So if we can put aside for the moment all that, really put aside, not cling to one thing or the other, then what is death? What does it mean to die? Not only biologically, physically, but also psychologically: all the accumulation of memories, one's tendencies, the skills, the idiosyncrasies, the things that one has gathered, whether it be money, knowledge, friendship, whatever you will; all that you have acquired. And death comes and says, "Sorry, you can't take anything with you." So what does it mean to die? Can we go into this question? Or are you frightened? So what is death? How do we inquire into it? You understand my question? I am living - I'm taking my[self] as an example - I'm living, I go along every day, routine, mechanical, miserable, happy, unhappy, you know the whole business. And death comes, through accident, through disease, through old age, senile - what is senility? Is it only for the old? Is it not senility when we're just repeating, repeating, repeating? When we act mechanically, thoughtlessly? Isn't that also a form of senility? So death - because we are frightened of it, we never see the greatness of it, the extraordinary thing, like a child, baby being born: a new human being has come into being. That's an extraordinary event. And that child grows and becomes whatever you have all become. And then dies. Death is also something, most extraordinary it must be. And you won't see the depth and the greatness of it if one is frightened. So what is death? I want to find out what it means to die while I am living. I'm not senile, I've all my wits about me, I'm capable of thinking very clearly, perhaps occasionally go off the beam -(Laughter) - but I'm active, clear, all the rest of it. So I'm asking myself - I'm not asking you - I'm only observing; if you will observe also what is death. Death means surely the ending of everything: the ending of my relationship, [the] ending of all the things I've put together in my life; all the knowledge, all the experience, idiotic life I've led, a meaningless life, or trying intellectually to life; I've lived that way (not personally, but I'm taking that example). And death comes and says, "That's(?) the end." But I am frightened. It can't be the end. I've got so much, I've collected so much, not only furniture - (Laughter) - or pictures -when I identify myself with the furniture or the pictures or the bank account, I am the bank account, I am the picture, I am the furniture. Right? When you identify with something so completely, you are that. Perhaps you don't like all this, but please, kindly listen. So I've established roots, I've established [a] great many things round me, so death comes and makes a clean sweep of all that. So I ask myself, is it possible to live with death all the time, not at the end of 90 years or 100 years - the speaker is 90 - sorry. (Laughter) Not at the end of one's life but can I, with all my energy, vitality, and all the things that go on, can I live with death all the time? Not commit suicide, don't mean - that's too silly. But live with death, which means ending every day of every thing I've collected; the ending. I do not know if you have gone into the question of what is continuity and what is ending. That which continues can never renew itself, reborn, clear. It can divide itself, that which is continuous - like you are doing in this country (inaudible) of religion. As we said, the word 'revive' means something that has withered, dying and you revive it. Which is happening in this country, religious revival, they are shouting about it. And, I don't know if you have noticed, organized religions and the gurus and all the rest of them are tremendously rich people. (Laughter) Great property. You can do - religious. There is a temple in the south of India: every third day they have one million dollars. You understand? God is very profitable. (Laughter) This is not cynicism, this is actuality. We are facing actuality, and you can't be cynical or despairing, it is so; neither be optimistic or pessimistic. You have to look at these things. So can I live with death, which means every thing that I have done, collected - pain, sorrow - end[s]. Ending is more important than continuity. The ending means the beginning of something new. If you merely continue, it is the same pattern being repeated in a different mould. Have you noticed another strange thing? We have made a great deal of mess in the world - tremendous mess, and we organize to clear up that mess, politically, religiously, socially and economically. And when that organization or institution doesn't work, we invent another organization. And never clearing up the mess but bringing about new organizations, new institutions - and this is called progress. (Laughter) I don't know if you have not noticed all this. This is what we are doing - thousands of institutions. The other day we talked at the United Nations. War is going on, they've never stopped it, but they are reorganizing it. (Laughter) You are also doing exactly the same thing in this country. We never clear up the mess. And we depend on organizations to clear that up; or new leaders, new gurus, new priests, new faiths, and all that rubbish that's going on. So can I live with death - that means freedom, complete, total, holistic freedom. And therefore in that freedom there is great love and compassion, and that intelligence which has not an end, which has immense - And also we ought to talk over together what is religion. May we go on? You are not too tired? The speaker is not trying to convince you of anything, please believe me: nothing! He's not trying to force you through stimulation, through some other means. We are both looking at the world, your personal world and the world about you. You are the world, the world is not different from you. You have created this world and you are responsible for it, completely, totally, whether you are a politician or an ordinary man in the street like us. We also [ought to] talk over together what is religion. Man has always sought something beyond all this pain and anxiety, sorrow. Is there something that is sacred, eternal, that's beyond all the reaches of thought. This has been one of the questions from ancient of times. What is sacred? What is that which has no time, that which is incorruptible, that which nameless; that which has no quality, no limitation, the timeless, the eternal? Is there such a thing? Man has asked this thousands and thousands of years ago. So he has worshipped the sun, the earth, nature, the trees, the birds; everything that's living on this earth man has worshipped [since] ancient times. If you have heard of the Vedas and the Upanishads and so on, they never mention god. That which is supreme, they said, is not manifested, and so on, I won't go into all that. So are you asking that question too. Are you asking the question, is there something sacred? Is there something that is not put together by thought, as all religions are, organized [religion], whether it's Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on. In Buddhism there is no god. Among the Hindus, as I said, there are about 300,000 gods. It's great fun to have so many. (Laughter) You can play with them all. And there are the gods of books, the god according to the Bible, the gods according to the Koran, the Islamic world. I don't know if you have noticed when religions are based on books, like the Bible or the Koran, then you have Fundamentalists, then you have people who are bigoted, narrow, intolerant, because the book says so. Haven't you noticed all this? This country is having the Fundamentalists, go back to the book. Don't get angry please, just look at it. So we are asking, what is religion? Not only what is religion, but the religious brain, religious mind. To inquire into that deeply, not superficially, there must be total freedom, complete freedom. Not freedom from one thing or the other, but freedom as a whole, per se. Then we have to ask also - sorry - the world 'religion' etymologically has no, they can't explain that word. It had different meanings at different times and different ages. So we are asking, when there is that freedom, is it possible, living in this ugly world, is it possible to be so free from pain, sorrow, anxiety, loneliness and all the rest of it. Then you have to find out also what is meditation: contemplation in the Christian world, sense, and meditation in the Asiatic sense. Probably meditation has been brought to this country by the yogis, gurus and all those superstitious people, traditional people; and therefore they're mechanical. So we'll have to find out what is meditation. Do you want to go into it? Does it amuse you, or do you want to do it really? Is it a form of entertainment, meditation? First let me learn meditation, find out, and then I'll act properly. You understand the game one plays? Or, if there is order in one's life, real order, as we explained, then what is meditation? Is it following certain systems, methods: the Zen method, the Buddhist meditation, the Hindu meditation, and the latest guru with his meditation? They are always bearded, full of money, you don't know all the rest of that business. So what is meditation? If it is determined, if it following a system, a method, practising day after day, day after day, what happens to the human brain? It becomes more and more dull. Haven't you noticed this? When you repeat, repeat, repeat - it may be [the] wrong note, but you'll repeat it. Like a pianist, if he repeats by himself and he plays the wrong note, he'll keep on playing the wrong note all the time. So is meditation something entirely different? It's nothing whatever to do with method, system, practices; therefore it can never be mechanical. It can never be conscious meditation. You understand what I am saying? Do please understand this. It's like a man consciously wanting money and pursuing money; what's the difference between the two? Consciously you meditate, wanting to achieve peace, silence, and all that. Therefore they are both the same, the man who pursues money, success, power, and the man who pursues so-called spiritually - So is there a meditation which is not determined, practised? There is, but that requires enormous attention. That attention is a flame and that attention is not something that you come [to] much later, but attention now to everything, every word, every gesture, every thought: to pay complete attention, not partial. If you are listening partially now, you are not giving complete attention. When you are so completely attentive there is no self, there is not limitation. And - briefly, I must stop - the brain now is full of information, cluttered up, there is no space in it, and one must have space, there must be space. Space means energy; when there is no space your energy is very very limited. And the brain - the speaker is not a specialist on the brain, though he has talked about it a great deal with other scientists and so on - not that that's a recommendation -they experiment on animals, on theories, on the accumulation of knowledge; but we are not scientists, we are laymen, ordinary people, humble, wanting to find out. There is a meditation which is not determined, put into a mould - I won't go into it. So the brain, which is now so heavily laden with knowledge, with theories, with power, position, all the rest of it, everlastingly in conflict and (chatter? clutter?), which has no space. And freedom, complete freedom, is to have that limitless space. The brain is extraordinarily capable, infinite capacity, but we have made it so small and petty. So when there is that space and emptiness and therefore immense energy - energy is passion, love and compassion and intelligence -then there is that truth which is most holy, most sacred; that which man [has] sought from time immemorial. And that truth doesn't lie in any temple, any mosque, in any church. And it has no path to it except through one's own understanding of oneself, inquiring, studying, learning. Then there is that which is eternal.